Nostalgia

I was musing on the concept of nostalgia today, and I had the unsettling realization that memories tend to become idealized after a certain point in time. We tend to pine for the past because we're discontent with the present. Compounding that is the fact that we tend to gloss over the blemishes of past experiences and emphasize the brighter spots. This isn't a malevolent tendency; it's subconscious and part of being human. As a personal example I remember every last vivid detail of my first real kiss, but I only have vague recollections of a horrific car accident I was in that involved the vehicle hitting a telephone pole (which snapped into three pieces), flipping upside down, and then only being able to get out by kicking out shards of window glass and rolling out the window upside down (I wasn't driving, by the way). That said, one of the things that drives the point of an idealized past home is that for the most part, things that I thought were great and enjoyed in my past, tend to not interest me anymore to put it mildly. In fact, one of the best ways to preserve pleasant memories of the past is to not revisit the original source material.

One of the most powerful examples of nostalgia for many people, myself included, is in music. I shake my head sometimes when I think of the kinds of music and bands I used to love in my more formative years. Part of this is out of our control - I mean, our tastes and interests naturally evolve over time. I remember getting pulled into the one-hit-wonder "band" Ace of Base in the early nineties through my best friend. I was 13. It's forgivable. Sometimes we find gold by accident, and carry it with us into the future, such as discovering The Cure, Depeche Mode, and Mozart around 1996 (I still listen to all three to this day).

I kind of got left behind with the rise of alternative rock in the 1990s. Never was a huge fan of punk either, and I never even tried to get into ska (I think the name alone made me resist). Occasionally you come across a band, or at least an album, of a genre that you typically avoid, that strikes a chord with you for some unexplainable reason. For me the prime example of this is the band The Offspring, and more significantly, the album Americana. Seriously, this is a fantastic album. There's something about The Offspring that sets it outside its pseudo-punk genre. Their songs range from melodrama on one end, to hilarity and satire on the other, with most occupying a sensible middle ground. I think one of the reasons why I'm taken by them is they don't take themselves that seriously, and have a talent for social commentary and satire. Of course, I'm of the feeling that Americana was their best, and only "true" album. Seriously, if you've never listened to it, give it a try. It's worth it.

We have an incredibly powerful ability to lodge memories into music. Songs contain vivid memories of summers with friends, past relationships, friendships, school years, and random moments in time. It always amazes me when I listen to a song I haven't heard in years and all of a sudden memories and emotions from that time come rushing in all at once. It's almost like how smells are linked to memory. Of course, often enough if we dare to scratch the surface and really, honestly explore those memories, we find a familiar pattern: As great as those memories are, we're using rose-colored glasses when viewing them. More often than not, at that point in time we were lamenting for the nostalgia of a prior past, and considering the present to be inadequate or lacking in comparison. I guess the lesson is to enjoy the present. It's all you've got.

Day 1 as a Student Senator

So today I went to my orientation as a new student senator. Wow. What the fuck did I sign up for? Basically, here's how student government at my university breaks down. We oversee about half a million dollars each semester in the form of "student activity fees," or extra cash that each student attending my university has to pay. From that half a million, the student senate allocates resources to fund essential services on campus, the school paper and radio station, and other projects that promote student success. We also have discretionary funds that student groups can apply for to help go to conferences, host events, etc. In other words, compared to most universities, student government actually performs a useful function at my school. That's the "neat" part. The not-so-neat part boils down to the usual cause of problems in life: Other people.

Parliamentary procedure is used for each meeting to make sure that things don't get wildly out of hand, that people don't talk over each other, and that some veneer of professionalism is maintained. This is a good thing - but the sheer amount of bureaucracy, or more importantly, a lack of understanding of how the bureaucracy works by most of the participants makes attending one of these meetings feel like getting beaten with lead pipes. Beyond people, beyond student senators who should know what they're doing not having done their homework, there's the other "people problem."

There is a very special type of person that goes to and truly enjoys meetings of these types - I call them "meetings whores." These are people with little to contribute other than a love of hearing their own voice; people who will take every opportunity to criticize a motion or proposal, who make mountains out of molehills to create the illusion that they're performing important work, and who are self-aggrandizing to the extreme. I hate these people, and I've already identified those who are going to be my prime nemesis' for the following school year. If someone would load these people into helicopters and toss them out into the bay, we could turn a four hour meeting into an hour long meeting. To compound the difficulty, these people tend to be the ones with the most motivation to attend each meeting.

This entire problem could be minimized if the Chair actually did his job: stopping nonsense, and making sure the proceedings go smoothly. I wasn't impressed by what I saw today. Granted, I'm a freshman senator - what the fuck do I know, right? But in reality, you could get rid of half of the senate seats, combine some committees, run meetings with a no-nonsense Chair, and the only people who would suffer would be the ones who love to raise objections over the barest minutia.

Next week? A budget meeting. The last budget meeting ran for eight hours. I'm packing a bag lunch.

Intelligent [sic] Design?

Even if you've been living under a rock for the past decade, it's likely you've caught wind of the "intelligent design" movement. Essentially ID is a Christian strategy that originated in the '80s with the goal of discrediting Darwinian evolution and pushing the concept of an "intelligent designer" (code for God) into high school and college classrooms (on our dime). The clash between religion and science has been around far before taxpayer money ever got wasted on Scopes, and in reaction to the Scopes trial (the good guys lost that one) biology, or more specifically, the scientific theory (more on this later) of evolution, was glossed over or outright ignored in U.S. schools until the mid-60s. Thanks to a 1987 court ruling, "Creationism," or the story that God created the earth about 6000 years ago, put lots of stuff in it, and then took a nap on Sunday, was legally barred from being taught in public classrooms. Hence, the ID movement. ID is creationism repackaged to hide the overt Jaaaaayzus-factor and has been presented as a scientific theory in its own right, which would mean that it carries the same weight as real, substantive scientific theories.

Unfortunately we now have to delve into semantics and parse some language. What is a theory? I know of a man on the street who's homeless and makes tinfoil sculptures of animals. He says that he can do this because he's been given a gift from God. That's a theory, of sorts. But in the context of science, a theory is a subject that's rigorously studied over many years by a body of people who work to understand the mysteries of the universe. Scientists aren't interested in what's already known - that's boring, and more importantly, uninteresting. Some aspects of a theory lead to dead ends, and those are discarded, while more promising aspects lead to new understands and sometimes groundbreaking discoveries (genetics, for example). To help put this into perspective, gravitation is a scientific theory.

ID proponents (in public) will state that they just want to expose students to a broad range of ideas and let them make up their own minds. Sounds good, right? But the standard that they set for their pseudo-science is so low, that by that definition, by that standard, the tinfoil man would have an argument for equal time in the classroom as well - that children should be exposed to his "theories" and then make up their own minds about what they believe. Of course, all you have to do is follow the money trail to see that the backers of ID hail from enlightened and agenda-free organizations such as the Discovery Institute. But going beyond the agenda to not just Christianize, but fundamentally Christianize (the Bible is the literal word of God) the United States, the amusing, tragic, and pathetic fact is that ID has no scientific conclusions or results. It's negative-science, and you can't prove a negative. I can't prove that God doesn't exist, but the burden of proof is on those that make the claim that God does exist. In short, it's simply a cover - wrapping religion in pseudo-science. It's the equivalent of defecating into a box that's then carefully wrapped in ornate paper, tied with a bow, and given as a gift.

This came to a head in 2004 in the small town of Dover Pennsylvania when the board of the town's high school ruled that science teachers be mandated to to read a disclaimer that, paraphrasing, states that the theory of evolution is imperfect, there are gaps in the science, and that there were alternative viewpoints. This was coupled with a "gift" to the school of 60 "textbooks" that trumpeted creationism as the origins of life on Earth. This resulted in a lawsuit and a fascinating trial. NOVA did a fantastic documentary on the ordeal, and I highly recommend it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/

What inspired this post was the discovery of a pro-ID "documentary" that's being released this month called "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," from the production company that was behind the Passion of the Christ. To add even more hilarity, it's narrated by Ben Stein, a man that I found amusing and fun to watch when all I knew of him was his role as a game show host. The guy's brilliant, and a completely fucking crazy right-wing nutjob. I was intrigued by this documentary, and started investigating reviews from screenings that had started to pop up throughout the webs, and I came across some blogs that I truly recommend - they're well written, witty, and intelligent. Both are worth your time.

One is by PZ Myers who is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/

The other is by Kristine, a graduate student and science geek (I mean that in a good way): http://amused-muse.blogspot.com/

If there's anything I want to leave you with, it's the realization that there is a small group of highly motivated individuals out there who have an agenda they want to force on the rest of us while we're sleeping. There isn't a lot of them, but they're loud, incredibly committed, and dangerous. Thankfully, they're also relatively incompetent.