What a difference a year makes!
Author: geoff
Read PZ's talk at the KosFest
Imagine being an electrical engineer and hearing that a third of the country doesn’t believe all that stuff about electricity and radio waves, but thinks there actually are little people moving about inside their televisions. That’s how biologists feel about the state of knowledge about biology here; we’ve got a lot of people with medieval attitudes about the subject.
Back to the rain (with a bonus)
I’ve just arrived back in the (very wet) Boston area after a remarkably tedious trip from Seattle. The SEA-DEN flight was OK, but for some reason air traffic control imposed a draconian flow control policy into Boston, and the DEN-BOS flight was a couple of hours late. Boring.
The bonus was visual. After taking off from SEA, our 757 had to climb through a fairly thick layer of dense cloud. When we emerged, the top of Mount Ranier was right in front of me. Since I had my camera handy….
Seattle views (with buses)
I’ve got an hour to kill at the Red Carpet Club at SeaTac airport before I fly back to Boston, so I decided to upload a few photos that I took yesterday. I was staying at the Hotel Max; as you can see, it’s very elegant (original art everywhere), but I’m not sure I’d recommend it. The bathrooms are tiny, my shower only had two water temperature settings (painfully hot, and scalding), and they charge extra for WiFi. (This is particularly galling in a city that has more free hotspots than you can count.)
Despite the fact that I’ve visited Seattle many times before, I’d never been up the Space Needle. I decided to rectify this, and took the opportunity to visit Paul Allen’s SciFi Museum (tiny, but promising) and Experience Music Project. EMP was pretty good: lots of stuff about musicians from the Pacific Northwest, from Heart to Nirvana to Pearl Jam. And, of course, Jimi Hendrix. It’s a veritable shrine to the greatest guitarist of all time. (Yes, I’m a believer. I’m not sure why they downplayed his masterpiece “Electric Ladyland”, but never mind.)
The shots from the Space Needle are a bit subdued: while Tuesday and Wedenesday were sunny, Thursday was overcast and showery. I tried to get a good shot of St. Mark’s Cathedral for Chris, but at maximum zoom all my efforts look a bit hazy.
And finally there are some shots of various Seattle buses for Paul.
In the evening, I took the ferry over to Bainbridge Island to have dinner with old friends. I’ll add those photos later. [Done]
Celebrating 30 years of "The Selfish Gene"
The NYT has just published a short review of Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. I’ve just finished reading it myself, and was planning to blog an enthusiastic review of this collection of essays, edited by Alan Grafen and Matt Ridley. The NYT has now saved me the trouble. Highly recommended.
Beautiful weather
I’m blogging this from a Starbucks in Seattle (on Stewart between 6th and 7th). The weather is just about perfect. And every time I look up, there’s another bendi-bus going by….
Slipping out of town
I’m off to Seattle tomorrow, just for a couple of days. I’m looking forward to seeing several old friends, including a former colleague from SunLabs.
Random 10
A really nice collection this week. See what you think.
- “After The Fall” by October Project (from Falling Farther In)
- “Easy” by Groove Armada (from The Best Of….)
- “Gleaming Auction” by Snow Patrol (from Final Straw)
- “Hey Jude” by the Beatles (from 1967-1970)
- “Juanita/Kiteless” by Underworld (from Underworld Live: Everything, Everything)
- “Lady With The Braid” by Dory Previn (from In Search Of Mythical Kings)
- “Messiahs Die Young” by Men Without Hats (from Rhythm Of Youth/Folk Of The 80s)
- “Telegraph Road” by Dire Straits (from Love Over Gold)
- “What Time Is Love? (Techno Scam Mix)” by the KLF (from Ultra Rare Trax)
- “The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores” by Morrissey (from You Are The Quarry)
(N.b. I’m going to start annotating my particular favourites with this little GIF: Hope this isn’t too distracting. Feel free to suggest an alternative graphic…)
PSB: Fundamental
Is it really 22 years since the Pet Shop Boys released “West End Girls”? Wow. Anyway, I’ve just been reading an interesting interview with Neil Tennant about their new album Fundamental. I just picked up an imported copy (made in Argentina), and it’s both great music and politically provocative. The title reflects the theme of the album: the rise of religious fundamentalism.
“I’m against fundamentalism of any sort; I think we all are, aren’t we? We don’t want to go back to the seventh century, thank you. I think we take religion too seriously,” Neil explains.
“As a society, here in the UK, we don’t really respect our state religion as it is, whether it’s the Church Of England or Christianity, sure we pay a bit of lip service, for example, we might like the music and the incense and all the rest of it, but we can laugh at it nowadays and we can mock it pretty much with no threat,” he continues.
“So I resent the fact that we are meant to take other religions so seriously and I think we have a right to mock other religions but that unfortunately is a dangerous thing to say nowadays, though it shouldn’t be.”
Not unexpectedly, the flash-point is the intersection of politics, religion, and sexuality.
“‘Fundamental’ is deliberately provocative. The album is dedicated to those two Iranian teenagers who were hung recently for being homosexual.”
And you’ve got to fight for what you believe in. It’s easy to get complacent, to assume that things will work out over time:
“[…] I find the whole gay issue a bore really, I’ve always said it is a political issue. The whole idea of gays was created in the 1970s as a political reaction against oppression and as the oppression fades away, so the idea of ‘gay’ will fade away and we will lose our obsession with someone’s sexuality[…]
Then suddenly religion comes along and you suddenly realize, I think we all have to realize, that liberal rights, dear old dreary liberal rights, have got to be continually fought for. It’s like anything else in life, you don’t climb up to a plateau where the sun always shines, you are always marching on relentlessly. Nothing stands still and liberal rights, which are the easiest thing in the world to sneer at, have in fact taken a long time to create, particularly in the United Kingdom. We really have to fight to make sure we keep them.”
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[Via Sully]
"In transition" – status update
It’s been a month since I last wrote about my “transition”, so I thought it might be time for an update. Why the diffidence? Mostly it’s because one obviously(?) doesn’t want to reveal all of the gory details (“met X for lunch”, “phone interview with Y”, “brush-off email from Z”). The fastest way to end a discussion about a prospective job is probably to blurt it out all over the blogosphere.
Nevertheless, I think I can safely say that I’m having a pretty good time. I’ve been talking to people from a wide range of organizations about a diverse collection of jobs, and I’m really enjoying the various conversations. They’re all moving at different speeds, from glacial to torrid. In some cases, I’m pushing to get things moving, while in others I’ve found myself getting swept along. Mixed in with all this are the cold calls from people who have found my details from LinkedIn, Dice, my blog, wherever; most of these are wildly inappropriate, but at least one has turned into a serious exchange.
LinkedIn is proving to be an invaluable resource in various ways. For example: suppose that I’m interested in company P, and start talking with a former colleague, X ,who’s working there. He or she passes my resume to a colleague of theirs, Y, who is the (potential) hiring manager. How do I find out what kind of person Y is? I check corporate bio and other resources, find out that Y used to work at company Q. Then I can search LinkedIn for people in my network who were at Q when Y was there; usually there’s someone that I know well enough to ask about what Y was like to work with/for. Etcetera.
And I’ve (mostly) stopped referring to Sun in the first person plural….