I’ve written before about how the Texas State Board of Education has been hijacked by ideologue fundamentalist Christians, and how this has repercussions for the entire country. (See here and here.) There is currently a project on Kickstarter to fund the editing of a documentary about creationist Don McLeroy, longtime chair of the TSBOE. In the trailer on the Kickstarter page there are several shots of people speaking in front of a group holding up pro-science signs. As it happens, I was in that group and am out of frame to the left of several of those shots. The project has almost reached its funding goal; I’d encourage anyone interested in this subject to help it along.
Author: Eugene Fischer
Director Terri Timely’s short film of blurred sensory boundaries.
Remember how I wrote a haiku last week for a contest to have my name given to a character in John Scalzi’s next novel?
That’ll do, haiku. That’ll do.
Work is consuming my days and rehearsal for the sketch show I’m going to be in come February is consuming my nights, leaving me largely offline. To kill some time, please enjoy a favorite cartoon from my childhood, “The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics.” It’s a collaboration between Chuck Jones (of Looney Tunes fame) and Norton Juster (most famously the author of The Phantom Tollbooth).
This is not my first blog. There have been others, some euthanized and some abandoned. The ruins of my former blogs are filled with rotten links and gutted by expired hosting. There is, though, an occasional post worth saving. This was originally posted on May 14, 2008.
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Some time in 2005 I was studying for my Differential Equations final exam, thinking to myself, “I can have a computer solve all of these problems for me. I will never do this again.” I had thought this in frustration many times throughout my mathematical education, and to be honest it was getting less and less true as the math got more advanced. This time, though, I followed that thought up with another one that hadn’t previously occurred to me: if computers can be given explicit instructions that allow them to solve differential equations, I should be able to write down similarly explicit instructions for myself. Verbalizing the specific steps necessary to solve the problems I was working on seemed like a good study activity. Additionally, I was allowed a page of notes to use on the exam, so if I could organize the steps so that they all fit on a page I could actually use this work during the test. I ended up spending a couple of hours in a study room with my textbook and a pad of graph paper, creating a flowchart for solving second order linear differential equations with constant coefficients. I tied with one other student for the highest grade on the final.
Recently I’ve been playing with Ubuntu, and as a way of gaining some familiarity with the OpenOffice suite of productivity apps I decided to create a digital version of my SOLDE flowchart. It is sized to fit on a sheet of 8.5×11 paper, and I am releasing it under creative commons license. If you think it would be of use to you, or know others who might like to use it, feel free to email it, print it out, pass it around. I think it might make a good handout for differential equations students. (It’s under a share-alike license, so you can make derivative works as well, provided they are also creative commons licensed. One possible improvement might be to create a flowchart for variation of parameters, which gets glossed over on this one.)
(Click to enlarge.)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Remember Rhawn Joseph, the misogynist creationist crackpot who runs with the wolves? His paper on concubine husbandry for Our Men in Space has just been given a highly credulous writeup by the science and tech news aggregator, Slashdot. Shame on you, Slashdot. I’d encourage others who typically enjoy the site to comment against it being turned into a forum for fringe science and sexism.
Cristóbal Vila (www.etereaestudios.com) has created a gorgeous short film exploring natural structures that exhibit the golden ratio.
This is not common practice for me, but I have been drawn out of my poetry-opaque shell. You see, John Scalzi is currently running a contest the winner of which will be Tuckerized in his next book. The challenge:
For the contest, write a haiku from the point of view of some who is either about to die or has just died, from one (or more!) of the following:
1. A spider monkey or monkeys;
2. LASERS
3. Poor GPS directions
4. And, of course, Spontaneous Human Combustion.
The most popular choice appears to be a death that combines all of these elements, but I chose to focus on just one. You can see my contribution in the comments at #16.
So it seems clear at this point that the fires of Jared Loughner’s insanity were not directly stoked by the language of violence that the Tea Party uses to excite its base. (Its use of such language is still wrong, and should still be decried, but it has yet to motivate an actual instance of political violence.) Rather, he found his legitimizing ideology in the “sovereign-citizen movement,” which posits that the constitution is actually a kind of word game designed to secretly strip people of their rights. See Mother Jones’s article on the subject for details.
Meanwhile, discussion of violent rhetoric is still the order of the day. Scott Eric Kaufmann laments that the term is being used seemingly detached from it’s meaning, and has provided a thorough definition.
Finally, Sarah Palin is an idiot. Having the opportunity to validly criticize those who are attempting to directly tie her to Jared Loughner, she instead hands everyone something new and completely legitimate to lambaste her for. She has described the things being said about her as “blood libel.” Because being told that you use inflammatory speech is a lot like being accused of secretly murdering babies. My favorite commentary on this so far comes from Patton Oswalt, who tweets, “There’s a veritable Holocaust of cream cheese on this bagel. #palin” and by John Scalzi who explores other applications of the Palin Equivalence Filter.
- 18 people were shot, 6 killed. The dead: John Roll, 63, a conservative federal judge. Dorothy Morris, 76. Dorwin Stoddard, 76. Phyllis Schneck, 79. Gabrielle Zimmerman, 30. Christina Greene, 9 years old and, in a meaningless but poignant bit of coincidence, born on 9/11.
- Gabrielle Giffords is still in critical condition, but considered to have as good a prognosis as is possible for someone who has had a bullet pass through the left hemisphere of her brain. Her surgeon continues to be highly optimistic for her recovery.
- The shooter was a man named Jared Lee Loughner. He is 22, and has a YouTube channel which reveals him to be plainly insane. His videos include claims that the US government engages in brainwashing and mind control by “controlling grammar,” rants that his former community college is “unconstitutional,” long strings of numbers that he uses to conclude some years “can never begin,” and self-congratulatory identification as one of a small group of “consciousness dreamers.” The videos also contain references to currency and the gold standard that will likely be the basis of any immediate claims of Tea Party affiliation, but to my eyes these screeds are the work of a mind too deranged to be meaningfully placed on a political spectrum. Transcripts here.
- Sarah Palin has, rather predictably, chosen to deny that she has ever engaged in violent rhetoric. She has scrubbed her Twitter feed of her oft-repeated catchphrase “Don’t retreat–RELOAD!” The party line among her supporters to explain the gunsight map is that the crosshairs are and were always intended to be surveyor’s symbols. Utterly shameless and insulting, that.
I don’t have further commentary of my own at this time, and as this is the top story in everyone’s mind there are editorials and articles and analysis in all the usual places. We all know where those are and I’m not going to rehash them. But there are some other people who I think are saying worthwhile things that I want to link to.
- First, commentary from Scott Eric Kaufmann, a professor of rhetoric, back in February of 2010, after the murder of George Tiller. “Rhetoric amounts to more than what you advocate.“
- Christopher Bird’s balanced analysis, drawing a line through this and several other recent violent events. “On The Shooting of Gabrielle Giffords.”
- Abi Sutherland has a deeply pessimistic but interestingly distanced view of the current climate of political discourse, which he equates to the tragedy of the commons. “I’ll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep.“
Finally, there’s a small weird personal thing I want to point to, though I don’t really like it. Yesterday I got an automated congratulatory message for being a “trend setter.” This turns out to be because I was the first person in my geographical area to tweet about Gabrielle Giffords. I find something about this impersonal message, and the contrast between the content and the context, fairly unsettling. There’s probably some interesting nuance here, but I don’t really care to try to unpack it right now. So I’m just going to note it in case I want to return to it later.