why I majored in English but didn't pursue an English PhD

Pseudonymous "Thomas H. Benton" sums it up.

The problem is you can't get to where I am now without going through a decade or more of immersion in a highly politicized and anti-literary academic culture. You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don't know why you became an English major in the first place. You might even have contempt for your seemingly naïve students, who represent the self that you had to repress in order to be a professional.

It is not that I want to privilege some form of literary dilettantism as a substitute for professionalism. I simply want to demonstrate that the reasons most people get into English are different from the motives that will make them successful in graduate school and in professional life beyond that. They must, ultimately, purge themselves of the romantic motives that drew them to English in the first place — or pretend to do so.

An influential teacher in my high school experience, Dr. Jeffrey Dunn, shared the laborious, politicized process of attaining a graduate diploma in English. Though it would take me another year to decide to major in English, and another four to finish my B.A., as I neared graduation, Dr. Dunn's words echoed in my memory, and I knew right then I couldn't continue studying English.

At that point, it was lawyering or teaching. I figured teaching would best satisfy my intellect without bruising my conscience. Turned out to be the right choice.

Radley Balko for sainthood

Via Ed Brayton, Radley Balko's long-awaited report on the sorry state of SWAT raids across the country. Equally instructive is the Google Map of incidents over the past decade. The no-knock decision looks like an absurdity in the light of these findings.

beach balls at graduation: that was then, this is now

Today's letter to the editor from Daniel Walters is well-intentioned but a little late.

A July 1 letter to the editor titled "Activities director tried to spoil fun" by Janet Stewart needs perspective. After attending a Timberline High School graduation ceremony, Stewart encouraged graduates to continue their clever bouncing of beach balls during their graduation ceremony and denounced the beach-ball-confiscating high school activities director, stating the director should "get a life."

The Capital High School graduation I attended a couple years ago also had beach balls bouncing and flying around during the ceremony. Only I had a very different reaction. I felt totally embarrassed and ashamed of the beach ball students as they were disrespectful to keynote speakers, school board members and students addressing the formal assembly. The speakers were interrupted several times and struggled through their deliveries as the audience was shamefully distracted by the rude students.

Speakers at graduation assemblies and formal events have important messages to share, and it is paramount they have the attention and respect of the audience - period. Believe it or not, there may be people in the audience that actually would like to listen to the speakers without being distracted.

There is certainly a time and place for the use of beach balls and for having fun, but not during formal graduation ceremonies and especially not while there is a speaker at the podium.

Parents and teachers need to be mentors, set good examples and promote respectful behavior among others. I can sum up my point in two simple, gracious words - common courtesy.

I was at the same graduation Walters sat through a couple years ago, and I remember the annoyance of the beach balls. I wondered if I'd have to deal with them as I gave my speech--and even had a quip at the ready.

What Walters doesn't realize is a simple fact of human nature, though: if you take a ham-fisted zero-tolerance approach, you worsen a situation. The reverse is true as well.

This year was much different. Beach balls reappeared at Capital's commencement, but instead of marching through the facility and shaking down the student body, the administrators and speakers laughed it off. Superintendent Lahmann even joked about CHS's future as a volleyball powerhouse.

The result? The beach balls surfaced only in between speakers and activities, and, within moments, fell back to the floor, waiting for the next break in the action. As students began to receive diplomas, three gave their deflated beach balls to the three CHS administrators, who smiled and shook their hands. At the end of the ceremony, when students tossed their caps roofward, the administrators batted those suddenly-inflated beach balls back at them, a great show of lightheartedness and a spirit of joy appropriate to the day.

Like humans and fish, courtesy and fun can coexist peacefully.

a clarification

The article on area districts' attempts to better serve gifted students is interesting for a few reasons. First, it details some programs I wasn't aware of, like the "Challenge Academy" at Chinook Middle School. Second, though, are a couple important errors, caught only because I've been part of reorganizing the CHS English curriculum.

According to the article,

The elimination of the ninth-grade honors English track has raised concerns among some parents who worry that their highly capable children won't be challenged. District officials said teachers will have a variety of reading options for each class and will put students in reading groups according to their ability.

First, the variety of reading options is just one change out of many. Individuated projects, greater emphasis on grammar, targeted vocabulary, interactive technology... the curriculum has been gutted and revamped. Second, the last phrase makes it sound like teachers will still sort students into reading groups. Not exactly. It is the student, who, with input from the folks at home, will choose a book off the curriculum that will challenge them. (They'll also get to choose their own "outside reading," while certain essays and texts--Romeo and Juliet, for example--will be shared by all 9th-graders.) The aim is a curriculum structured so that students can rise to the challenge, not so that teachers can keep them in their place.

intelligent design still ain't all that

Mark wrote this, so I wrote this, so Mark wrote this. The upshot: Olson is still wrong about the role and function of Intelligent Design in biology. Let's find out why.

1. My first point, that sexual reproduction is not the be-all end-all of evolutionary theory, is indeed tangential, but still important, because it illuminates how misunderstandings crop up in these discussions. In fact, for over one billion years, sexual reproduction didn't exist. It is mutation, not sex, that is the engine of variation, according to the Neo-Darwinian view.

2. Olson repeats the idea that neither ID nor evolutionary biology discusses or predicts the time it would take to evolve organisms or features. Olson has raised this argument before, yet has ignored research into those very questions. (See here and here for examples. For others, simply Google the phrase "rate of evolution.")

3. Olson does not refute my contention that merely saying "that doesn't work" is no substitute for a theory, and, to mirror his language, the sets of "Darwin was wrong" and "ID is right" are not automatically joint. Much healthy disagreement occurs within the camp of those who do not see a guiding hand in the development of life on earth, and are busily hashing out the empirical and theoretical implications of their clashing scenarios. Eve Jablonka and Lynn Margulis, for example, question whether the rate of RM+NS is adequate to compass the range of biodiversity, yet neither is remotely close to the position that classical or Neo-Darwinian explanatory lackings are thus evidence of design. As you can see, the ID hypothesis and the lack-of-time hypothesis are anything but "isomorphic."

If my reasoning isn't already clear enough, consider an anecdote. Suppose a scientist is the first to discover the Mima Mounds, a seemingly organized and vast cluster of bumps on the landscape that, to some, bespeaks design. Let us also suppose that the scientist comes up with a theory: their origin is glacial. "Ah," says an onlooker, "but the last ice age was too long ago, and those bumps would have eroded to mere nubbins in the time since then." The scientist nods, until the onlooker says, "And, therefore, the mounds were created by divine agency. In fact, those statements are isomorphic."

Is the non sequitur now clear?

(I might add that mostly, ID isn't about time. It's about Irreducible Complexity, the idea that organisms can't evolve in principle. So Olson is even more wrong than he thinks.)

man's dominion once again breaks nature's social union

A few days after the pesticide, I was left to sweep up the carnage. There was no sign of their coming. In fact, if Melissa hadn't looked up at our apartment after an evening stroll on the Chehalis Western Trail, we might never have known that our apian friends were constructing a condo just above the balcony.

there's no place like home

A family emergency means our Chicago trip has been canceled. I'm still reading the same books, though, and will have comments up when I'm through.

Meanwhile, for middle class folks trying to find a house in Seattle, there's no place for a home.

King County's median household income in 2003 was $57,857, which allowed buyers easy accessibility to 28 areas — seven within Seattle city limits — whose median home prices were $256,000 or less, a Seattle Times home-price analysis showed. Median means half are more; half are less.

Fast forward to last year: House prices shot up, but incomes barely rose, so median-income buyers found even fewer neighborhoods where they could afford the median-priced home — just nine in the county, including one in the city.

Read it all to see how the housing market is squeezing the middle class. Our area, with its blooming developments, might not be far behind.

evolution means a silver lining from a copper lake

Update: Now, with photos taken during a recent road trip. It cost $2 for the privilege, so you're welcome. The lake, an accidental laboratory, is massive, more than a mile in each direction, and 1800 feet deep.

Berkeley Pit Lake, also in Butte, filled with groundwater after the copper mine closed in 1982. Dissolved metal compounds such as iron pyrites give the lake a pH of 2.5 that makes it impossible for most aquatic life to survive. In 1995 Stierle discovered novel forms of fungi and bacteria in the lake. More recently her team has found a strain of the pithomyces fungi producing a compound that binds to a receptor that causes migraines and could block headaches, while a strain of penicillium fungi makes a different compound that inhibits the growth of lung cancer cells.

Not much more at the original article. I'll see what I can dredge up elsewhere. (Yes, the pun is intended.)

Added: There's much more out there, especially at this 1999 WaPo article. The research began seven years ago and is just now starting to bear fruit.

the totalitarian hermeneutic

"A picture must be painted in such a way that the viewer can understand its meaning. If the people who see a picture cannot grasp its meaning, no matter what a talented artist may have painted it, they cannot say it is a good picture."

Kim Jong Il, quoted in Jane Portal's "Art under control in North Korea"

like a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead

My wife has agreed to publicly announce that she will allow her once-luscious tresses to return, if her husband allows her to receive one last haircut as of today, July 16th, 2006. As her hair returns to its former glory, she will be allowed to have maintenance trims as the need arises.

In return, her husband promises to not grow a beard, and to not complain about the cost of haircuts.

This is the formal, binding agreement, all parties named below consenting.

Jim Anderson
Melissa Anderson

Update: The new 'do is done. It's a good thing I made her sign the contract before she had a chance to melt my will to goo.

Mr. Ramtha, tear down this wall!

After twenty years, the public is given a (limited) look into the mysterious confines of the Ramtha "School" of "Enlightenment," chaired by one JZ Knight. Why did it take two decades? Probably because its kooky New Age claptrap wouldn't have been as controversial without all the artificially injected bubbles of what's-behind-the-wall.

Kudos to JZ for her decades-old BS operation which has netted her millions. (She goes to the bank every time she channels Ramtha, a crusty old spirit guide from Lemuria or whatever. Like it really matters.) That kind of entrepreneurial spirit is one I'd gladly channel.

Added: This follow-up article ought to be retitled "Striving for cash."

Then Knight takes the stage. She's slight and feminine - students say she seems like a completely different person when she channels Ramtha.

After some introductions, she asks people to turn to their partner and ask, "Why would you want to be wealthy?" and "If you don't want to be wealthy now, then when?"

Sometimes, people feel unworthy of wealth, but they shouldn't, Knight said.

"The idea of fabulous wealth is not bad," she added. "It's not evil. It's what we're supposed to do...."

During the exercise, people walk up and down a field, and quietly chant aloud their goals and dreams.

Klein said it's designed to help the brain become more open to the idea of concepts such as fabulous wealth so that people can make their dreams happen.

Consider it the New Age version of the "prosperity gospel."

there's no place like home

Due to a family emergency, the road trip to Chicago has been canceled. We may scale back and take a smaller trip sometime next week, but it's all up in the air at the moment while we wait for the final good news to provide closure to the situation.

The short: I'm back, and you'll just have to deal with me.

adieu, adieu, to you and you and you-u

Tonight, around 7:00, my wife and I will join her family in Tacoma and depart from there to the sunny shores of Sheridan, Wyoming, caravanning all night and much of the day. Sheridan's just the first stop en route to Chicago and even more in-laws, many of whom I've never met.

Consequently, blogging will be light to nonexistent for the next two weeks. I'll try to squeeze in a trip report whenever I can find internet access. In the meantime, enjoy the archives, or look at that list of fine blogs to the right. I especially recommend Peter Wall's Res Ipsa Loquitur. His posts are insightful and well-written, and he deserves a wider hearing.

So long, readers. Revel in the hiatus.

what a world, what a world

In Nebraska, Judicial activism falls flat again.

In the Nebraska case, U.S. District Judge Joseph Bataillon had ruled that the ban was too broad and deprived gays and lesbians of participation in the political process, among other things.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, saying in its ruling Friday that the amendment "and other laws limiting the state-recognized institution of marriage to heterosexual couples are rationally related to legitimate state interests and therefore do not violate the Constitution of the United States."

Legitimate state interests indeed. In the absence of any other empirical harms, we must assume that gay marriage is delaying the new theater on the west side of Olympia, and thus deserves legal prohibition because of its deleterious effect on revenue gathering. In a post-Kelo legal climate, we can expect more rulings along these lines.

What, you think my legal analysis stinks? It's okay. At least I'm not a senator.

head out on the highway

For two weeks I'm gonna hit the road with my wife and her kin. We're headed to Chicago, City of the Big Shoulders and the second-best team in the American League Central. When I'm not driving, I'll be reading, writing, and, if I can hook up at crucial junctures, blogging. On the list:

Education Myths (not impressed so far)
Mind Hacks (impressed so far)
Does Measurement Measure Up? (oughtta be good)
Teachers Under Siege ("already acclaimed by leading educators")

I'll write 'em up as I chew 'em up and spit 'em out. Now, though, I have a date with a Hog Butcher and a Stacker of Wheat.

oh, so that's all Intelligent Design is

Mark Olson on ID:

ID at the heart is a claim against the current mechanisms (sexual exchange of genetic material and environmental selection) as the primary and sufficient driver for the evolutionary development observed. Simply stated, ID questions that assumption and that’s it. Furthermore my assertion is that without a theory from which to test the assumed mechanisms this debate is meaningless. More precisely that is given a set of mechanisms {X} is it reasonable for feature “Y” to develop in time T or not? Or does the set {X} of mechanisms need to be expanded? That, in my view, is the crux of the ID question and to say it “isn’t science” is just wrong [edited for typos].

It is Olson, rather, who is wrong, on many points.

1. Sexual exchange is but one of many options on the table. After all, most organisms aren't sexual. (In fact, sexual reproduction is theorized to reduce mutations.)

2. ID doesn't simply question the core assumption of Neo-Darwinism, otherwise, it's indistinguishable from Margulis's symbiotic theorizing, Jabolonka's neo-Lamarckianism, and classic creationism. (In fact, perversely, creationism is more scientific than ID, at least offering testable hypotheses about the age of the universe, the age of the earth, rates of mutation, rates of radioactive decay, etc. Spectacularly bad hypotheses, mind you, and overwhelmingly rejected by the scientific community, even by IDers, but at least they're trying.)

3. In other words, merely contradicting RM+NS does not a theory make, or a testable hypothesis produce.

4. ID is at its core a critique of materialism, a philosophical position that says that material laws are inadequate to fully explain the origin of life and the existence of intelligence. That is why IDers would also have to discount the role of symbiosis, viruses, developmental pathways, neo-Lamarckian concepts, and any other unguided mechanisms of change. (Or not. After all, some IDers want to include theistic evolutionists and young-earth creationists in the ID "big tent." A theory has to be pretty vacuous to include mutually exclusive positions.)

5. Charitably, ID has done a bit of good: it has driven scientists to assemble and articulate the evidence for evolution, evidence that is even more overwhelming than when ID first entered the scene.

cookie monster bandit

For once, the title isn't a crazy search term.

Just seen on KOMO News, the "Cookie Monster Bandit" wears blue jeans, a royal blue jacket, and, at times, a royal blue cap, leading Renton police to give him the nickname of note. He's fond of robbing Renton convenience stores at gunpoint. If you know anything worth reporting, call (425) 430-7500.

The King County Journal has more:

The suspect is described as a black male in his 30s, 5 feet 8 inches to 6 feet tall, medium to stocky build, with a small amount of facial hair. He typically wears a dark blue jacket and a blue fishing hat or a white baseball cap.

The suspect has targeted sandwich shops, pizza parlors and espresso stands. He is armed with a handgun and approaches lone employees, either showing them the gun or pointing it at them and demanding cash, according to Cline.

This suspect should be considered armed and dangerous, and the public is cautioned not to approach or contact him, according to Cline.

Anyone with information about the suspect should call 911, their local police department or the Renton Police Department at 425-430-7500.

from smashed to sober in two minutes

A pill to eradicate the hangover is already out there, available at Albertsons, Wal-Mart, and other fine stores. But what about a pill to eradicate drunkenness? Too far-fetched? Perhaps not. [subs. req.]

What if you could have all that is good about alcohol, with none of the bad? What if you could enjoy a night of frivolous fun, then simply pop a pill for instant revival? Your sobriety restored, home you'd ride - or even drive - to a good night's sleep (or better) with no risk of a hangover. Or what if, before imbibing, you could swallow a tablet that would block the negative effects, such as memory loss? Better yet, imagine there was a substitute that could deliver relaxation and merriment without the nausea, disorientation or aggression. In fact, what if one day this dream drink could be so well-tailored that even a lifetime of indulgence would leave the liver, brain and heart unharmed?

It may sound too good to be true, but that day may not be as far off as you think. There's already a drug that can sober up a drunken rat in 2 minutes flat, and researchers are busy searching for compounds to do the same in humans. The memory preservative is not fantasy either, nor is the notion that with a little tinkering, pharmacologists could come up with a faux alcohol able to mimic the charms of booze with less of the sordidness.

The article goes on to explain two competing methodologies: modifying or supplementing alcohol so it has a different or shorter-lasting effect on the brain, or building a new kind of guilt-free, pleasurable drug from the chemical up. It doesn't matter which route is fastest. You can pretty much guarantee that someone, somehow will succeed.

And, when that happens, ironically, a lot of people will be very, very unhappy, and will fight hard to keep it unavailable.

Nutt suspects that only an intervention by government - announcing that it supports the making of safer alcohol, that they will tax it preferentially, or regulate it differently - is likely to make the difference. There are reasons for optimism on this front. New Scientist has learned that the UK government has asked the Academy of Medical Sciences to look at the case for safer alcohol and make recommendations.

Even with government backing, drug companies will be cautious. "The pharmaceutical industry does not position itself to be going into the recreational market," says Ragan. There are always risks when you take a drug, he points out. When you're treating a life-threatening disease such as alcohol addiction, they may be risks you are willing to take. But those risks are harder to justify in the merely sozzled.

Add to that the moral indignation that attaches to any suggestion that boozers should be allowed to drink more safely, and it looks like an uphill battle for safer alcohol. Many people in the alcohol addiction recovery field believe fervently that the only solution is outright abstention, and any drug of the type Nutt suggests would meet with stiff opposition. As an example, Room points to a drug called propylthiouracil. Normally prescribed for an overactive thyroid, it has also been shown to protect against cirrhosis of the liver in alcoholics, but is not widely used for that purpose. "My theory of why [it] has not become better established as a medication for reducing the harm to an alcoholic's liver," he says, "is the fear that it will allow the alcoholic to continue drinking."

There's no glee so obnoxious as glee without guilt.

can a curmudgeon have a happy anniversary?

If he's the Comics Curmudgeon, he can. Happy second to the blogger who reads Pluggers and Mark Trail and Apartment 3-G so you don't have to.

Autoreply: The Muse is out indefinitely

I'm not a poet, but I know the feeling.

It doesn't bother me that I don't feel compelled to write poetry anymore. I'm being creative in other ways, and it's not a big deal.

But then again...

I do feel like I write good poetry...hell, I'm right next to Jim Daniels now! Twice!...so I want to get something on paper. I don't want just former versions of me to be in the magazines...I'd like current versions as well. I want my stuff to keep my fairly slim dream of publishing a book of poems alive.

I have a novel sitting in the back of my brain, tossing darts at the cerebral cortex and singing "Edelweiss" with the hippocampus (both tenors). As I've been reading books for the ninth grade curriculum, all I can think is, I can do this, when the story strikes. But something's in the way.

As TRP writes, "Quality follows quantity." I have a road trip to Chicago coming up this weekend. When I'm not driving, I'll be writing.