[General
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30 November, 2007 11:20
The Clergy Letter Project
I received a very interesting letter recently - especially so given my interest in evolution, and my dismay at seeing ignorant people trashing it in this country (see here). This strikes me as being a very useful project, and one that could unite University folk and civilians and churches and schools, very effectively. Herewith Dr Michael Zimmerman:
Dear Colleague;
I am writing to you on behalf of The Clergy Letter Project, a collection of more than 10,700 Christian clergy members who have signed The Clergy Letter (www.evolutionsunday.org) asserting that Christianity and modern science can comfortably coexist and recognizing the centrality of evolution in modern science. In addition to collecting signatures on this open letter, The Clergy Letter Project has sponsored Evolution Sunday, an opportunity for religious congregations to come together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science. The second annual Evolution Sunday event, held on 11 February 2007, had an increase in participating congregations of more than 32 percent from the first year’s event.
Over the past several years, many clergy members have asked me if I can connect them with a local scientist who might be willing to help them with some aspect of a sermon on which they are working or with some question a parishioner has. They have also wondered if I know of some scientists who might be willing to run an adult education class for their congregation.
As The Clergy Letter Project matures, we are attempting to provide more and better resources to clergy members who understand the importance of science and who do not find science to be a threat to their faith. That’s where you come in.
The Clergy Letter Project has recently created an on-line data base of scientists who are willing to answer questions posed by clergy members and who are excited about the possibility of interacting with clergy members and their parishioners in an attempt to explain the beauty and power of science. In short, our purpose has been to create a data base of scientists who might be willing to provide technical support to clergy members in need of such support. You can view this list at http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/rel_expert_data_base.htm.
If you are willing to be a part of this endeavor, please send me (mz@butler.edu) an e-mail note with the following information:
Name:
Title:
Address:
Areas of Expertise:
e-mail address:
Additionally, please forward this note to any other scientists who you think might want to be listed in our data base and circulate it widely via any list serve to which you might subscribe. Together we can build a vibrant and strong coalition of religious leaders and scientists who are willing to speak out for high quality science instruction.
Please understand that because we are looking for scientists willing to provide scientific expertise on topics in which they are knowledgeable, the religious backgrounds or inclinations of these scientists are absolutely irrelevant.
Thanks very much for your consideration of this request.
Michael
Michael Zimmerman
Professor of Biology and
Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Butler University
Indianapolis, Indiana 46228
and
Founder, The Clergy Letter Project
317.940.6644
[Raving
]
29 November, 2007 14:04
Jammed Shuttle
What, no comments on the new understanding between UCT and the freebooters of Main Road - pardon, the Amalgamated Transport Services - who will (from the 29th Nov Cape Crimes) "contract its services to UCT for an exclusive, scheduled and regular service on the route from 6am to 9am during term time"?
"The agreement will allow UCT to meet the increased demand for campus transport by freeing up buses previously used on the Claremont-Tugwell-Mowbray route and redeploying them on campus, as well as alleviating traffic congestion at peak hours."...
"The service will commence on February 18 and will run for a two-year trial period.
In terms of the agreement, UCT undertakes to provide driver and management training, oversee public liability insurance and provide "Jammie Shuttle" branding to all participating vehicles."
Really...so, in return for intimidation and brandishing firearms, a bunch of taxipersons now get exclusive access to UCT students and staff, with badging, training and insurance paid for by UCT?
What's next - taxifolk taking over staff parking lots at gunpoint, and being rewarded with an exclusive contract to transport them too? I can just see the spin on that one:
"UCT DVC Notmartin East today announced a historic accord between the University and the Main Road Vehicular Transport Collective, which will result in all the staff parking on Main and Health Science campuses being converted into taxi ranks for the exclusive use of the Collective. Under the terms of the agreement, drivers affiliated to the Collective will transport all staff to and from both campuses and park-and-ride facilities still to be identified, between the hours of 6 am and 9 pm. "
"The agreement has been hailed by the UCT executive as "an innovative and transformative advance in the relationship between the University and general society, with significant benefits to both sides". UCT staff were more cautious in their assessment, with one professor wondering how he was going to get his daughter to and from school every day, and another objecting to being forced to take a daily taxi ride with people smoking and rap music being played at ear-splitting volume."
"Taxi drivers were generally enthusiastic, with one operator saying "At last, these people in their old cars will stop getting in our way". There are some rumours of unhappiness among other operators, however, with one caller claiming that there would be trouble if the Collective kept all the business to itself".
Viva, the distribution of transport benefits among the taxi business, viva....
[Raving
]
21 November, 2007 11:12
(regi)St(r)ar Wars: The (Evil) Empire strikes back
I was going to post on latest developments concerning our embattled Deputy Registrar, but others have been there before me and done it better - see Comments to Nasty Whites, Nasty.
So I will give you this instead: enjoy!
[Raving
]
16 November, 2007 10:45
Oh, and...(2)
I must heartily (or gloomily, possibly) recommend www.despair.com and their very useful DIY page (diy.despair.com) for anyone who wants truly beautiful, thoroughly depressing DEmotivational posters. I have great fun sorting through their catalogue, and even more making up my own.
Like this one...
[Raving
]
15 November, 2007 11:44
UCT email disclaimer
If, like me, you are a little bemused at the sudden imposition of a disclaimer notice attached to all outgoing emails from UCT, you may enjoy this. It is also a very simple procedure to replace the real one with this one - if you want to...B-)
____________________________________________________________________________________
UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN This e-mail is supposedly subject to the UCT ICT policies and e-mail disclaimer published on the website at http://www.uct.ac.za/about/policies/emaildisclaimer/legalweaselling.htm or obtainable from +27 21 650 4500. This e-mail is intended only for the person(s) to whom it is addressed. If the e-mail has reached you in error, please smack yourself repeatedly, repeat “I am bad” twenty times, and sit in the corner for an hour. If you are not the intended recipient of the e-mail you may not use, disclose, copy, redirect or print the content, make fun of it, print it out and use as toilet paper, or otherwise debase its intellectual content or lack thereof. If, as is highly likely, this e-mail is not related to the business of UCT, it is sent by the sender in the sender's individual capacity, and remains their inalienable personal property in perpetuity. Or until GroupWise breaks down. Again.
____________________________________________________________________________________
[Raving
]
14 November, 2007 09:46
As it was in the Beginning
As a practicing biological scientist, I must admit to being alarmed over the tenor of arguments advanced by many believers in fundamental religious teachings, who seem to take it as a given that belief in the teachings contained in especially the Christian Bible are incompatible with "evolutionary theory". This is very true here in South Africa
right now, with news that the Department of Education is going to mandate teaching of evolution to senior secondary school learners.
The central tenet is, of course, simple nonsense - unless you believe that everything in the Bible is literally true. And if you believe that, then - as
others have previously pointed out in the context of the Biblical proscription of homosexuality - then you should also believe that slavery is acceptable, that you may kill your neighbour for working on the Sabbath, that you should avoid contact with menstruating women, and that you should not wear glasses when approaching the altar of the Lord, among many other strictures incompatible with modern life. Oh, and that it is perfectly fine to stone your neighbour for wearing clothes made of more than one type of thread. Which doesn't seem that bad an idea if they are wearing those godawful two-tone shirts from Mr Price...but no, no, perish the thought.
Why do people who presumably accept the fact of gravity not accept the fact of evolution? For all the nonsense written and spoken about evolution, like gravity, it IS a fact. We may argue about exactly how both of them work, which is where theory comes in, but the facts of the phenomena cannot be doubted by anyone who understands the evidence. Which, in the case of gravity, means falling on the floor if you lift both legs up. Unfortunately, evolution is a little harder to demonstrate in action - and denial of its existence has fewer immediate consequences.
But consider this: evidence of micro-evolution happening right now is all around you, in the form of flu and HIV and TB, which persist because the agents continually change so as to avoid their hosts' immune systems or the drugs designed to combat them. Ignoring the fact of evolution in the case of these three and other disease agents is tantamount to signing a suicide letter on behalf of our species.
There is in fact, directly contradictory to many assertions, increasing evidence of past macro-evolution in fossil "transitional forms" of especially vertebrates, which for instance illustrate very clearly just how fish became amphibians. There is a very nice Web page associated with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the USA, which graphically demonstrates this and other evolutionary facts. Discover magazine also has a very good short article debunking much of what Michael Behe, a renegade biochemist and ardent intelligent designer, has to say in a new book on the limits of Darwinism.
As for new genetic evidence, just today I read in a recent New Scientist (Oct 27) of genetic evidence from modern lungfish pinpointing just how limbs developed from fins, in extinct lobe-finned fish. All in all, we have evidence of well-established life on this planet from over 3 billion years ago - and a pretty clear idea of how we got here from there. Among people who understand the evidence, then, there is no doubt of evolution as a fact. And the nice thing about evolution is that we can always find more evidence for it, palaeontologically and biologically - so that any "theory" (like intelligent design) which exists only in the cracks of the imposing edifice that is evolutionary fact, will inevitably be squeezed to death.
Which is the evolutionary fate of all unfit theories....B-)
[Raving
]
13 November, 2007 12:53
SAQWA rules, OK
You know, I actually had a student say to me, as I was on my way to invigilate her exam, "I've got R50 000 - let's talk...".
I laughed, and life went on. But what if I'd said "Yes, let's?"
I recall the incident of a few years ago, in our Department, when a Dept Assistant was in fact bribed - and escaped with a warning, as "the bribe was so high". The student disappeared overseas, incidentally.
And why do they bother? I tell everyone in advance what the questions will be, anyway - some believe me, some don't, and the marks end up on the normal distribution curve anyway, because in order to answer the questions, they have to learn pretty much the whole syllabus...which is the point, isn't it?
I must actually state, at this juncture, that I consider exams to be an unconscionable waste of time; examinations at University level are an archaic ritual which is a poor means of assessing the career preparedness or level of training of the people who come here to be taught.
And there's half the problem...being "taught". Students in general, and South African students in particular, seem to need to be taught, whereas what they should be doing is being educated - which is largely a self-driven thing.
But we are still left with the need to "assess" - and there's the other half of the problem. The sooner we can fall back on multiple choice exams administered via the Web, the happier I'll be: if I have to read one more slavish regurgitation of my freely-given course material, in handwriting that emulates a spiky wave-trace on an oscilloscope rather than anything actually legible, I will strip my moer.
You have been warned....
[Raving
]
05 November, 2007 13:30
Oh, and...
Apropos of how nice it is to work at UCT, I forgot to put this one in: demotivation....
[General
]
05 November, 2007 13:17
The New Golden Age
I was most impressed, when I first came to UCT - lo, these 33 years ago and counting - that the English Department (girlfriend's chosen major, not mine) had a recommended reading list that included a significant amount of science fiction. Which is SF, and never Sci Fi, BTW 
.
I have no idea whether or not they still recommend Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" or "The Sirens of Titan" - but if they don't, they should. And they should add to that list some of the truly impressive New Young(ish) British Wave of authors: people like Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod (OK, so they're nationalistically Scottish), Peter F Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds; newer Americans like Dan Simmons, Greg Bear and Gregory Benford. Not to mention OFs like Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K Dick, who seems to have become Hollywood-respectable, Samuel R Delany and especially Roger Zelazny...I have just found my 1973 copy of "Lord of Light", which starts with the immortal lines:
"His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam."
The thing about the new guys, and OFs above, is that they write well: they blend hard science (never a bad thing for non-practitioners), sociology and politics in a way that Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clake never could. I remember being totally bemused by a postgrad with literary pretensions in our Dept about 20 years ago, who said she never read "...that stuff, because it was simply fantastical by definition, and had no literary merit". I rmember making the point that she couldn't say that if she'd never read any, but like most people who put down "The Satanic Verses", she obviously didn't need to to know it was bad. She didn't seem to have the same opinion of "1984", or "That Hideous Strength" or "Brave New World", so obviously SF by mainstream literary authors was OK?
Ah, well. Invincible ignorance is not punished by hellfire in the old Catholic canon, merely by eternal stagnation (aka Limbo).
But back to the New Age: this is an exciting time, much like the mid-1970s, when it seemed that every few months brought a new chapter in the "Dune" saga (40 years old this year!), or from Larry Niven's "Known Space" or "Ringworld" universes. Alastair Reynolds is cranking them out, it seems, as is Charles Stross - who is very funny, as well as being seriously good at his social / scientific predictions. Anyone who wants to blow their mind(s) need only read Stross's "Accelerando", available online: this has to be the single best (well, OK, SF) novel of the last 10 years and possibly even further. Apart from Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which mixes a history of the Age of Enlightenment with some serious mysticism - and cryptography. And U-boats. And gold...but I digress.
And having digressed seriously, given that I should be writing a chapter for a book of reviews, I should share this with you. Enjoy.
[Raving
]
02 November, 2007 14:08
Nasty whites, nasty
This today in the Cape Crimes:
"THE lawyer employed by the University of Cape Town to give it legal advice, Paul Ngobeni - found guilty of misconduct and barred from practising in three American states - says news of his difficulties emerged only after he leapt to the defence of embattled Cape Judge President John Hlophe.
It was a smear campaign by some whites, said Ngobeni."
Really? Not just by people concerned that UCT may be employing someone whose professional reputation is besmirched? Oh, and it gets better:
"Ngobeni said he did not have to inform UCT of the charges and convictions before his appointment, as they were public knowledge and had been published on the internet. "
Riiiiight.... So as long as it is on the internet - somewhere - you are not under any obligation to inform your new employer that there may be some rather large problems looming up on the horizon? And as for the statement that "...the matters before the US court "will be dismissed as frivolous and unfounded", you might take a look at this....
I will be reading further developments with great interest.
[Raving
]
01 November, 2007 15:54
Another day, another...?
So UCT actually HAS a blogging site - albeit not official - and the rave is on...!
Let me qualify that: I have, in other more private correspondence, bemoaned the fact there does not appear to be a legitimate forum at UCT to raise institution-wide grievances. Other than Senate, of course, and you have to (a) be a member, (b) stay awake long enough and (c) be quick enough to make ANY kind of point, let alone (d) get it answered.
So this was a great find - totally accidental; it came up on a Google search I was doing for the Academy of Science of South Africa home page. But who cares; all I have to say is - viva! UCT blog pages, viva!
And just maybe we can get some semi- or quasi-official responses to some of the matters raised here...and if you believe that, you believe that Not the Monday Paper is a serious publication.
Till later.
