Category: culture Page 9 of 11

What the brain does and does not do

On Monday, October 20, 2014

It seems like every time one turns around, another neuroscientist has conflated mind and brain. Michael Egnor at the Discovery Institute blog does a great service by calling out the neuroscientific silliness in a NY Times essay by Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano. Egnor’s post titled “Are We Really Conscious?”: A Reply to Dr. Graziano’s Brain is a follow-up to Wesley Smith’s post titled Big-Brained Scientist Says We Aren’t Conscious on the same subject. Egnor points out the conflation to Graziano with impressive clarity in his post. He is a skilled neurosurgeon who knows that about which he writes. Here is an excerpt:

The brain’s visual system consists of neurons, axons, dendrites, neurotransmitters, and the like. Protoplasm. Protoplasm doesn’t make faulty assumptions, and brains don’t reconstruct anything. People make faulty assumptions, and people reconstruct things. It may well be that there are aspects of the brain’s visual system that contribute to our faulty assumptions and to our reconstructions, just as there are aspects of my computer monitor (a smudge) that may contribute to my misunderstanding a word printed on the screen. But my smudged computer monitor didn’t misunderstand the word. My computer monitor has no psychological attributes at all. I misunderstand words. Only people misunderstand.

An apt analogy is the relation of the stomach to eating. Our stomach plays an important role when we eat, but we eat. Our stomachs don’t eat.

We urinate. Our kidneys don’t urinate.

We dance. Our feet don’t dance.

Dr. Graziano commits the mereological fallacy — he mistakes attributes of the whole for attributes of the parts. Our organs do things appropriate to them — our brain has action potentials and secretions of neurotransmitters and blood flow and the like. But our brain assumes nothing and reconstructs nothing. We — not our brain — assume and reconstruct.

Read the whole thing. I can highly recommend Wesley Smith’s article, too.

Betty Blonde #189 – 04/07/2009

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Kelly’s comic strip apropo for her new home in Seattle

By Dad

On Sunday, October 19, 2014

In Art, culture

I noticed this awesome Betty Blonde comic strip Kelly drew over five years ago. It truly captures the pretentiousness and ambiance of Seattle, Portland, Starbucks and most of the rest of the Pacific Northwest. I just thought I should draw a little attention to it.
Betty Blonde in Seattle

Near death experiences

By Dad

On Friday, October 17, 2014

In Christianity, culture, Health

I am not sure what I think about near death experiences (NDE), but they surely are interesting. An article with the sensational title Have scientists proved there is life after death? Research into ‘near-death’ experiences reveals awareness may continue even after the brain has shut down reminded me of some talks given on NDE’s by Gary Habermas to which Kelly and I listened a couple years back. Although he does not perform scholarly work in that area, as a hobby, Dr. Habermas has been collecting NDE data and stories for many years. The thing I like about Habermas is that he avoids “just-so-stories,” and sticks to stuff that has been documented vetted in a more rigorous fashion. He has a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Religion (Michigan State University, 1976), is a Research Professor at Liberty University, and has many, many refereed journal articles, books, etc. under his belt, so he knows phony stories when he sees them.

I thought it might be good to put up a few links to those stories. Do not ask me what I think about them because, like I said, I am not sure what to think. One thing I do know is that it is surely very interesting. All of the following links comes from Gary Habermas’s website.

What Near-Death Experiences Do and Do Not Reveal
Near Death Experiences – An interview with Dr. Gary Habermas:
— Part I
— Part II
— Part III
Near-Death Experiences: Evidence for an Afterlife?

Betty Blonde #187 – 04/03/2009

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Famous hockey people on the plane

By Dad

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014

In culture

Yesterday was a travel day and a very interesting one. While I was sitting at the airport waiting to get on the plane to Charlotte, a fellow about my age came and set beside me. We struck up a conversation and it turned out that he had had a career as a hockey player in the NHL. He had been in town doing scouting of some kind. As in most of those kinds of conversations, I never got his name. He was a very nice guy and I enjoyed the talk.

When I got on the plane, I sat by another guy about my age who greeted and had a brief conversation with the first guy. When they were done I asked my seat mate if the first guy was a known hockey player.

He gave me a funny look and said “That is Mark Howe” like I should know who he was.

I didn’t, so the guy said, “Gordie Howe’s son. He is an NHL hall of famer, too.”

I know that guy, so I thought that was very cool. Both Mark and Gordie have Wikipedia pages and very impressive careers. It is a short flight to Charlotte, but this other guy and I had a great conversation. It turns out he is a famous Hockey personality, too. His name is Dave Strader and he is currently NBC’s play by play hockey announcer. We spent almost no time talking about hockey. The thing that was totally fascinating about him was that he had three very impressive grown children. Two of his kids were, what we call in the Chapman household, math kids. A math major and a physicist with a strong chemical background, both from very strong universities.

When I heard that, I was very surprised and probably a little ungraciously said, “How did that happen?”

What are the odds a hockey announcer is going to have two kids that did hard math.

He laughed and said, “It had to be their mother” who turns out was a stay at home mom.

All this was very impressive for a guy like me, but then he told me about the third son who got a degree in voice at a school where it is extremely difficult to even get accepted. He is currently in New York working on kick starting his singing career. He told me about a youtube video of his son singing Ave Maria. Judge for yourself:

Betty Blonde #186 – 04/02/2009

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Are you kidding? The decadence of Apple and Facebook

By Dad

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014

In culture

The title of the article says it all: Facebook and Apple now paying for women to put motherhood on ice by freezing their eggs. A sidebar explains how it works:

FERTILITY ON ICE: HOW FREEZING EGGS WORKS

Women inject high levels of hormones for a week in order to ovulate as many eggs as possible. Retrieving them is an outpatient procedure that can cost $10,000 to $15,000, sometimes not including the cost of the medication. Clinics also charge a storage fee, and then women who wind up using their eggs will pay thousands more to undergo in vitro fertilization.

Christian’s boat shoes: Before and After pics

By Dad

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014

In Art, culture

Christian is Internet famous again. I wonder whether I should start worrying about his grades. He had some old, beat up boat shoes that he did not want to throw away so he spent Saturday rehabilitating them and made the front page of the Reddit Male Fashion Advice section. The pictures below are the first and last images in a quite complete how-to that explains and illustrates how he did it. The comments by the readers at the end of the article are hilarious. Here is a link to the article. Here is is a link to the images that go with the article.

My friend and colleague Ann R. said it best, “He wrote that? Well…. i guess he is thrifty….. And who knew that Reddit had a ‘male fashion advice’ section.”

The question I had was “Who knew that anyone actually read the ‘male fashion advice’ section of Reddit?” It is on Reddit! It is kind of horrifying if you think about it.

Before
Christian's boat shoes before he rehabilitated them.

After
Christian's boat shoes after he rehabilitated them

Betty Blonde #185 – 04/01/2009

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Steven Pinker and other Sonlight/Luke stuff

By Dad

On Thursday, October 9, 2014

In culture, Science

Luke, over at the Sonlight blog is on somewhat of a roll, both in what he is writing and what he is linking in his Other posts of note list. He went away for a week on a road trip and now I have several new blog posts that need to be written based on his stuff. Especially surprising was a link to an article on a humanist pop-scientist named Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker regularly says ridiculous things about science and is just as regularly slapped down by people with deeper understanding of the things on which he pontificates. That being said, the last line in the article about Pinker caught my attention and actually makes me want to read his book. It says,

Scholars who argue for the beauty of language over the correctness of it always win my heart.

To my way of thinking, that is high praise. New York Magazine wrote an article about all this titled Steven Pinker on Why It’s Okay to Dangle Your Participle. It is quite a good interview article and I recommend it in spite of the venue. Steven Pinker, amazingly, has a coherent idea or two, at least on the topic of writing.

Maybe Luke should try to go away for a week more often. Week long road trips are awesome for those taking them and, under the right circumstances, very educational for those stuck at home.

We need more professors like UNCW’s Mike Adams

By Dad

On Friday, October 3, 2014

In culture, Education, Politics

I have been a fan of Mike Adams for years. He is an extremely engaging writer and his column over at Townhall is well worth reading whenever he writes. He won teaching awards and has a very high rating on RateMyProfessor.com. He has written some books that were well received titled Feminsts Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts “Womyn” on Campus and Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel: Confessions of a Conservative College Professor.

UNCW denied him tenure because of some conservative personal opinions he expressed while not at work. They denied they had discriminated against him. Over the last couple of month or so he wrote a series of articles on how he beat the administration and faculty at the University of North Carolina Wilmington into submission for their blatant and continued discrimination against him for being a Christian white male. The funny deal is that he was an atheist when he started. They loved him then. He even had the good sense to leave leave UNC Chapel Hill after spending only a year there in law school. So he is a man of conviction and a man after my own heart.

Here are the articles in the series he wrote about the trials:

Article 1: This is Providence
Article 2: Pharisees and Pharaohs
Article 3: Prayers and Preparation
Article 4: Pride and Perjury
Article 5: David French Slays Goliath
Article 6: To Speak the Truth

Read them all!

Betty Blonde #177 – 03/20/2009

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Neil deGrasse Tyson doubles down

By Dad

On Tuesday, September 30, 2014

In culture

I recently wrote about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “selective misremembering” of quotes to support some of the pseudo-facts he regularly tries to foist on an oblivious public. He got called out on it in a couple of articles at the Federalist, but instead of acknowledging his error, he decided it was a good idea to double down with additional foolishness. The latest chapter in this continuing saga is chronicled over at the Christian Post in a great little article explaining that he absolutely remembers hearing the quote and even wrote it down at the time, but there is no record anywhere nor does Tyson produce any evidence. Here is a good quote that describes this particular abuse.

Jonathan Alder, Johan Verheij memorial professor of law and director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation at Case Western University School of Law, has been writing about the controversy for The Washington Post blog The Volokh Conspiracy, and described the situation this way: “What is really so ‘mysterious’ is why Tyson finds it so difficult to confess error and pretends that Bush’s 2003 remarks were only just-now discovered. … Yet if this is the source of the quote, then nearly everything else Tyson claimed about it and its significance is false (as is the account of the quote’s provenance he gave last night).”

He has not apologized yet for this particular offense, but is “looking for a good medium & occasion.” If he ever gets around to it, maybe then he can start on some of the other ones described so helpfully in the Federalist article.

Betty Blonde #174 – 03/17/2009

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Is Information the Fundamental Substance?

By Dad

On Thursday, September 25, 2014

In Christianity, culture, Science

Several years ago, I described a theory to the kids that makes the proposition that the smaller the things we are able to see the more it looks like that matter is really just thought. That is, the closer we look into what makes up electrons, neutrons, protons, and other subatomic particles the more that it looks like there is not substance to the substance of matter. I am not really sure whether that is something I just read in the cheesy science fiction novels that I voraciously read starting back in the late sixties and running into the nineties.

Now, it turns out that there might have been some truth to the speculative stories I told to the kids. In William Dembski’s third scholarly monograph, Being as Communion, he makes a strong case for the idea that the information and not matter is the fundamental substance of reality from which everything is made. Dembski is highly qualified to make this case. He has earned PhD’s in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and Philosophy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has spent his life investigating the role of information and design in God’s creation from the perspectives of both science and philosophy.

His first two books, The Design Inference, and No Free Lunch laid the ground work for this third very important work that makes the case that information that must have come from an intelligent designer is required for all things material and life in particular to exist. From the pre-release reviews, it appears that some of the mathematics in the book are not for the faint of heart, but the book as a whole is tractable in the sense that a layman can get the big picture. That being said, the laymen might be best served to just skim the deep math that gives the minutiae that makes the technical case.

I have ordered the book and plan to review it here after I have taken the time to read through it.

Betty Blonde #171 – 03/12/2009

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An article on the ignorance and evil of Marxist Feminism and Women’s Studies programs

By Dad

On Monday, September 22, 2014

In culture, Politics

There is little doubt that radical aspects of some stripes of feminism have done great damage to American society. There has been some pretty serious push-back against much of this ideology, not only by the likes of constitutional lawyer Phyllis Schlafly, but even by many avowed feminists intellectuals like Camille Paglia and Christiana Hoff Sommers. I ran into an incredible article titled Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives that starkly addresses this. It is on the evils of a particularly insidious variety of feminism called Marxist Feminism. This article is a must read for anyone with school age daughters. It was written by Mallory Millet, the sister of one of a radical feminist “intellectual” named Kate Millet who authored a notorious screed on feminism titled Sexual Politics.

Mallory spent years as an ex-pat in third world countries and it opened her eyes to the frivolity and evil of the Kate’s ideology. She was stunned when she finally returned to the United States and learned what Kate was doing. The following is part of a prayer-like question and response heard by Mallory at a “consciousness-raising” event to which Kate invited her on her return to the United States:

“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?”

Their answer left me dumbstruck, breathless, disbelieving my ears. Was I on planet earth? Who were these people?

“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution and homosexuality!” they resounded.

Mallory thoughts on hearing this mantra are telling:

… I had seen factory workers and sex-slaves chained to walls.

How could they know? Asia is beyond our ken and, as they say, utterly inscrutable, and a kind of hell I never intended to revisit. I lived there, not junketed, not visited like sweet little tourists — I’d conducted households and tried to raise a child. I had outgrown the communism of my university days and was clumsily groping my way back to God.

How could twelve American women who were the most respectable types imaginable — clean and privileged graduates of esteemed institutions: Columbia, Radcliffe, Smith, Wellesley, Vassar; the uncle of one was Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt — plot such a thing? Most had advanced degrees and appeared cogent, bright, reasonable and good. How did these people rationally believe they could succeed with such vicious grandiosity? And why?

This article is a must read for anyone who has daughters heading off to college–especially to Women’s Studies programs. There is much to conclude from Mallory’s observations and she has many observations. One of the scariest one’s is this:

By the time Women’s Studies professors finish with your daughter, she will be a shell of the innocent girl you knew, who’s soon convinced that although she should be flopping down with every boy she fancies, she should not, by any means, get pregnant. And so, as a practitioner of promiscuity, she becomes a wizard of prevention techniques, especially abortion.

The goal of Women’s Liberation is to wear each female down to losing all empathy for boys, men or babies.

Please read the whole article.

Betty Blonde #168 – 03/09/2009

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Feliz Cumpleaños México and Vanesa!

By Dad

On Tuesday, September 16, 2014

In culture

Luis Leonardo y Fanny -- Dia de Independencia 2014 Today is Independence Day in Mexico. Our Luis Leonardo and Fanny (nephew and niece) dressed up to celebrate a school yesterday. Just as important is that Lorena’s best buddy, Vanesa, from our days in Florida celebrates her birthday on the same day. ¡Viva México!

Holy Cow! The kids’ buddy makes the news. NCSU does it again.

By Dad

On Tuesday, August 26, 2014

In culture, Technology

The kid's friend is the second from the left I am starting to believe Kelly’s and Christian’s hyperbole–North Carolina State University might be the best undergraduate institution in the world. Leave to the Chicks on the Right to give it just the right spin in this article on their website. Four guys at NCSU invented a fingernail polish that changes color when it comes into contact with what is commonly known as a “date rape drug.” Kelly and Christian have a good friend with whom they hung out every day in the NCSU undergraduate math lounge. How cool is that, NCSU has an undergraduate math lounge. This buddy’s brother is also a friend of the kids and the second guy from the right in the photo that accompanies this post.

Betty Blonde #158 – 02/23/2009

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Karl on Samos, Greece

By Dad

On Tuesday, August 19, 2014

In Christianity, culture

Karl on Samos, Greece I have an old friend who has recently retired and moved from Oregon to the island of Samos in Greece. He has started a blog that usually includes a lot of pictures. He writes very well on a plethora of topics, too. He has always been a history buff, especially with respect to the ancient near east as well as Greece and Turkey. I have started visiting the site daily. His most recent excursion was to the Isle of Patmos. I stole the picture of a local market on his island from his blog. To suggest that I am a little envious would be a vast understatement.

Betty Blonde #154 – 02/17/2009

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I wish this did not ring true – “Packaged” arrest in Mexico

By Dad

On Wednesday, August 13, 2014

In culture, Politics

Mexico is such a great country with so many great people it is hard to read articles like this. It is about an infamous narco-trafficker who got arrested, not after a long and arduous effort by law enforcement agents to find a bad guy, but because it finally became politically expedient. If it really is true, taking the guy off the street probably does nothing with respect to putting a dent in the drug traffic. It all makes me believe maybe the previous Mexican was a pretty good guy, trying to do the right thing and getting hard push-back from the bad guys. Meanwhile, lots of our friends and family down in Mexico suffer as a result. Everyone is touched by it. Mexico is a beautiful and prosperous place, full of opportunity, with lots of good and friendly people. It could be so much more than the level of corruption currently allows.

Betty Blonde #152 – 02/13/2009

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How to be a great waitress: Is this a great model for how to act in ALL of life or what?

By Dad

On Wednesday, August 13, 2014

In culture

For technical reasons that have to do with the fact that I switched to Opera from Firefox because the people at Firefox are overtly anti-Christian, I missed a great post by the Numbers Guy that came out in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago. The article, Tips for More Tips: Waitresses Who Draw Smiley Faces Make More Money, is about some things that waitresses (notice I did not use the politically correct “waitpersons”) can do to maximize their tips. I read the article and REALLY liked it. It dawned on me that the advice given to waitresses to earn more tips, if done sincerely, can be encapsulated in the advice Jesus gave to “do onto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is not the advice to not do unto others those things you would not want to do unto yourself, but the more active version that requires one to take the initiative to good rather than NOT take action to avoid evil (although that is good, too). Do things that are nice. It is a uniquely Christian admonition. Here are three of my favorites (visit the article to see the rest):

Tell customers that good weather is on the way
Touch customers briefly on the arm or shoulder
Write “Thank You” on the check

Betty Blonde #151 – 02/12/2009

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Everything you learned in government school about the crusades is probably wrong

By Dad

On Monday, August 11, 2014

In culture, Education

The kids’ commie professor had it all wrong about the Crusades and so do many of the people who teach about the crusades in many educational settings. I am currently reading a very good book titled Discovering God by Rodney Stark and I will get to my thoughts on that in a later post, but an article titled The Real History of the Crusades by Thomas F. Madden got me to thinking about another book Stark had written about the Crusades that I liked a lot. It disabused me of many wrong ideas I held about the Crusades. It talks about how the medieval Crusades were a defensive response to attacks by Muslim invaders bent on overrunning Europe rather than an unprovoked invasion of innocent Muslim countries by imperialistic Christians seeking fame and fortune. Stark’s book is titled God’s Battalions, the Case for the Crusades and describes the events with attention to detail, capturing the true nature of the Crusades and the motivations behind them.

In his article, Madden explains the true nature of the Crusades very well. I highly recommend reading the entire article as well as Stark’s book on the subject, but this excerpt captures his thesis quite well:

Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variation on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman’s famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already by said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression — an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity — and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion — has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

Betty Blonde #149 – 02/10/2009

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Why some of the STEM majors are not so hot either

By Dad

On Monday, August 4, 2014

In culture, Education

Over the last several years, I have consistently written that a shortcoming of our higher education system is that many, many students go all the way through a bachelor’s degree without having studied anything difficult such as Calculus, Chemistry, Statistics and Physics. It is my position that the rigor of thinking and hard work required to get through those classes is beneficial in any field of study. That being said, some try to justify sophomoric in areas outside of their area of expertise (e.g. Philosophy, Sociology and Theology) based on their mastery of complex material in totally unrelated hard sciences.

The following is from an article at Scientific American, not often a wildly objective source on subjects like these, but I really liked it. I recommend you read the whole thing. It is a quote from George F. R. Ellis that address the issue of a physicist from Arizona State University known for making buffoonish remarks about Philosophy. Ellis, a “physicist-mathematician-cosmologist” of renown, in responds here to a good question asked by the author of the article, John Horgan.

Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do you agree?

Ellis: Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.

Thus what he is presenting is not tested science. It’s a philosophical speculation, which he apparently believes is so compelling he does not have to give any specification of evidence that would confirm it is true. Well, you can’t get any evidence about what existed before space and time came into being. Above all he believes that these mathematically based speculations solve thousand year old philosophical conundrums, without seriously engaging those philosophical issues. The belief that all of reality can be fully comprehended in terms of physics and the equations of physics is a fantasy. As pointed out so well by Eddington in his Gifford lectures, they are partial and incomplete representations of physical, biological, psychological, and social reality.

And above all Krauss does not address why the laws of physics exist, why they have the form they have, or in what kind of manifestation they existed before the universe existed (which he must believe if he believes they brought the universe into existence). Who or what dreamt up symmetry principles, Lagrangians, specific symmetry groups, gauge theories, and so on? He does not begin to answer these questions.

It’s very ironic when he says philosophy is bunk and then himself engages in this kind of attempt at philosophy. It seems that science education should include some basic modules on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, and the other great philosophers, as well as writings of more recent philosophers such as Tim Maudlin and David Albert.

Betty Blonde #144 – 02/03/2009

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What is wrong with our culture today: Charles Cooke nails it

By Dad

On Wednesday, July 30, 2014

In culture, Education

I have run into some interesting articles and blog sites over the last couple of weeks that I thought were worth a blog post or two. The first is titled Smarter than Thou by Charles C. W. Cooke over at National Review. It is about the true nature of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s pseudo-intellectualism and the role it plays in today’s über-hipster culture. This is one of my pet peeves–liberals who want who want to make arguments on the “progressive” issues of the day masquerade as “nerds” in the hope that people will think they are smart and/or have the background to opine on what they represent as scientific truths. Cooke’s article is absolutely brilliant. Here is just a taste of what he has to say on the subject of nerds, but you should read the whole article.

In this manner has a word with a formerly useful meaning been turned into a transparent humblebrag: Look at me, I’m smart. Or, more important, perhaps, Look at me and let me tell you who I am not, which is southern, politically conservative, culturally traditional, religious in some sense, patriotic, driven by principle rather than the pivot tables of Microsoft Excel, and in any way attached to the past. “Nerd” has become a calling a card — a means of conveying membership of one group and denying affiliation with another. The movement’s king, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has formal scientific training, certainly, as do the handful of others who have become celebrated by the crowd. He is a smart man who has done some important work in popularizing science. But this is not why he is useful. Instead, he is useful because he can be deployed as a cudgel and an emblem in political argument — pointed to as the sort of person who wouldn’t vote for Ted Cruz.

“Ignorance,” a popular Tyson meme holds, “is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.” This rather unspecific message is a call to arms, aimed at those who believe wholeheartedly they are included in the elect “we.” Thus do we see unexceptional liberal-arts students lecturing other people about things they don’t understand themselves and terming the dissenters “flat-earthers.” Thus do we see people who have never in their lives read a single academic paper clinging to the mantle of “science” as might Albert Einstein. Thus do we see residents of Brooklyn who are unable to tell you at what temperature water boils rolling their eyes at Bjørn Lomborg or Roger Pielke Jr. because he disagrees with Harry Reid on climate change. Really, the only thing in these people’s lives that is peer-reviewed are their opinions. Don’t have a Reddit account? Believe in God? Skeptical about the threat of overpopulation? Who are you, Sarah Palin?

Betty Blonde #142 – 01/30/2009

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No job offers for people with no hard science in their degrees

By Dad

On Thursday, May 8, 2014

In culture, Education, Work

I am always amazed when a hard left rag like The Minneapolis Star-Tribune publishes a column like this one written by a medical device company CEO explaining why he is unable to hire liberal arts graduates from the local “Big State U”, in this case University of Minnesota. His company had a need for someone in technical communications. Here is what he wrote about that student:

[He} took college classes in karate, guitar, Latin dance, handball, saber fencing, golf and master gardening. Then, for some of his core curriculum, he took courses in team leadership, Internet tools, visual rhetoric, intimate relationships, proposals and grants, exploring the universe, and technology and self.

So for a degree in scientific and technical communication, this student had no hard science, very little technical learning and only a “visual” communications course on his transcript. Even though we would like to hire an additional apprentice for our medical communications department, we didn’t hire this graduate because, despite the title of his degree, his curriculum failed to develop the ability to learn and communicate any subject even remotely as scientific or technical as a medical device.

And by no means was this student the exception. Other U graduates we interviewed had loaded their schedules with courses in honeybee management, personal leadership in the universe and my personal favorite, “cash or credit,” with the stated goal “to help students decide whether or not they want to apply for a credit card.” One credit awarded.

I am glad he added additional commentary about the fact that he did not expect the University to be a trade school. His company expected them to train people on hard technical stuff, but not on stuff specific to his company and industry. His company just needs people, even liberal arts majors, with a technical base that can only be achieved only through a classical liberal arts education which includes substantive courses in “science, math, literature, composition, and speech.” Come to think of it, I believe we got more of that even in homeschool than many of today’s liberal arts students get during their entire undergraduate degree.