It's Time

I have moved on to Word Press and want to focus on my goal of explaining Information Science to the public.

My major paper in graduate school (not really a thesis - I was not required to write one - but nevertheless submitted for peer review at The American Archivist) argued for this social science to be informed by the natural sciences and by information science. I actually corrected a prominent archivist and past president of the Society of American Archivists on facts of evolution and quantum physics as they touched the archives profession!

This is going to take a lot of developing, and so I shall attempt to do so at my new blog, Archive of Babel. I shall also blog about atheism, of course, and hopefully complete A Galapagos Diary and my posts on The Extended Phenotype.

You are welcome there.

Technical Fiction: A Proposal

It's up at the Triumvirate.

Blogging the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper, Part 5

Good news and bad news at the Triumvirate.

A Note on the Blogging of the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper

Three series on this blog I need to finish: The Galapagos Diary, The Extended Phenotype, and The Blogging of the Writing of the Peer Reviewed Paper. I intend to complete all three, but a note on that last one:

My intent was to blog about my research, while posting, and eventually making available, drafts of my work. To say that the first few drafts were gawd-awful is probably not surprising - and neither is the fact that I have not made the doggerel available yet. (I will, though!)

However, the real issue became for me the rapid succession, once I had my pen passionately inked, of drafts that were successful, and which followed each other so quickly that they almost tripped over themselves. Once I knew where I was going, my writing sprinted - and that, and my rapidly approaching deadline, made the orderly blogging and posting of drafts fall off.

This made me think about the nature of change, and brought me back to that august, time-worn, so-called dichotomy, "gradual" versus "sudden" change. Being that my paper ultimately questioned another false dichotomy - the apparent conflict between preservation and conservation in both the archival and the natural* environments - it is appropriate that my experience reiterated for me that both types of change coexist, and in fact, support each other to the point of being each other.

During my period of rapid revision I was writing as "gradually" as I normally did, one word at a time, yet the ideas were coming more quickly. I was still producing drafts one after another, but the time period in which I produced them had become compressed. Part of this was due to my intention to get my assignment done by the deadline, but most of it was unplanned, because in my effort to find a way to say exactly what I meant, I found that I needed to do more, not less, writing, and more, not less, experimenting. It took me by surprise.

What I ultimately produced was not my magnum opus - I'm going to be working on that - but a trimmed down version of only twenty pages (the assignment's limit). Yet in this period of "punctuated equilibrium," as it were, I did not save every draft and thus what is preserved in my fossil record is, well, a series of gaps.

Much change is not visible. As Antonin Artaud stated, "Inspiration certainly exists." However, he did not view it as the literally sudden flash of knowledge from the blue, and neither do I. During the times when I experienced excruciating "writer's block," which also exists (and which is romanticized and used as an excuse too much by too many writers), I nevertheless knew that my brain was working on the problem the whole time. What religious people often refer to as "giving it to God" or others as "sleeping on it" is something that I call "letting my unconscious do the heavy lifting for a while." Therefore, when the ideas finally came, they were not "sudden" at all, but the product of long, sometimes terrified, wandering and thrashing about that I did - both consciously, and not. Artaud hated it when the Surrealists defined inspiration as the passive receiving of messages from the Marvelous (and as Jean Cocteau, not formally a Surrealist, portrayed it in his film Orpheus) - for him, as for me, the Marvelous was the unseen shaping of an idea, gradual until it reached a boiling point, then constructing itself quickly as if time had sped up.

And yet, this rapid output would not have been possible without the gradual, painstaking assembly that occurred earlier. I suspect that the two cannot exist without each other, because the two actually are each other.
---
*The natural and the human, "artificial" environment being, of course, another false dichotomy.

New Addition to the Blogroll

Leftist Grandpa. Check him out.

Blogging the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper, Part 4

It's up at the Triumvirate.

DaveScot Banned from Uncommon Descent (Again)

Oh, the irony (but not really): Stalinist Behavior at Creationist Blogs. Shimmies to Open Parachute.

We were having a good old time at AtBC - writing poetry to avoid writing our papers - when I remembered that I needed an article out of a book that was not available at my school's library, but was available at another library in the network. So I strapped on my earphones (oh, hush. Those little ear-things don't fit in my ears) and went for a walk.

And meanwhile, all hell breaks loose.

The news breaks here, about halfway down the page.

Barry, pram, toys, throws, out, there of:

Note to UD ContributorsBarry ArringtonThe moderation policy does not apply to you; you are held to a higher standard. I expect your posts to have at least some tangential relationship to Darwinism, ID, or the metaphysical or moral implications of each. The purpose of this site is not to provide a place for you to jump up and rant on one of your pet peeves.

Well. I must say I have mixed feelings. It looks like UD's original moderation policy (delete everything that you don't agree with/makes you look stupid) is being enforced by a new generation upon the old. Ungrateful little punks. (I'm being sarcastic.) But DaveScot was making a point about the racism of the Christian Identity Movement. That gets him banned? I wonder about UD's sympathy for Christian Identity, when they've been trashing Darwin as a "racist" during this entire episode.

(Because trashing the abolitionist Charles Darwin as a "racist" certain seems to have a "relationship to Darwinism, ID, or the metaphysical or moral implications of each" - but pointing out racism elsewhere, such as among creationists, doesn't, you see.)

As another commenter noted, there could be a(nother) resurrection of DaveScot after three days. A testable hypothesis, I'd say.

P.S. - I have been named AtBC Poet Laureate. ;-)

When I consider how his snark was spent,
Ere half his days, in this dark U and D,
And that one poster which is UD marquee
Lodged with them useless, though his pride misspent
To serve therewith their Maker, and present
no true account, lest Dembski chide,
"Doth Design exact day-labor, evidence denied?"
I fondly ask. But Pretense, to prevent
That comment, soon replies: "Designer doth not need
Either man's labs or his own brains; who trains
the credulous to the yoke, they serve him best. His logic
Is ringly: thousands at his fallacies speed,
And post o'er sanity and reason without rest;
They also serve who only bloviate.

Blogging the Writing of the Peer-Reviewed Paper

I'm going to try an experiment.

The Triumvirate has been in mothballs because of me being just too gosh darn busy - and now, as an assignment I must write a paper that is of sufficient quality to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. Naturally, I'm a little stressed out. Also, being that my undergraduate degree was in English, I'm still an English nerd enough to be concerned about the lack of literary drafts and ephemera accessible to scholars who are studying contemporary writers - drafts and notes and diary pages that we have from previous great writers - because of the rise of the personal computer and the internet.

Therefore, I'm going to attempt to solve all three of these concerns at once by blogging the iterative process of writing my paper.

I'm going to journal my process in blog posts at the Triumvirate, along with my questions, false starts, revisions, and frustrations, and attach successive drafts of the paper. However I will not make these drafts visible to anyone but me for the time being. Only after my paper is written, submitted, and judged/graded, will I make the drafts public. This is due to the fact that I don't, at this time, want comments or help. Please, I need to do this alone!

Another reason is that this is really an attempt to archive drafts, and as such, each individual blog post will not really make sense out of context, but only as a part of the whole. Because the whole will be more than the sum of its parts, I considered making the posts private as well, to be unveiled when the drafts are made accessible, but ultimately I decided against that. This is part journal, part archive - and it's also an experiment in a new area of archival theory, the idea that the archivist in our digital age is involved in record-creation, not just in record-keeping, and must manage not only the end of the record's life-cycle, but its beginning.

With personal computers and the internet I hope to recapture what we have largely lost of what the writer creates while working, and hopefully to provide something valuable about the scholarly communication process as well.

Maybe if I get my act together (I want to write another paper for publication, as well as enter as student paper contest through IMLS), I can finish blogging The Extended Phenotype and my Galapagos Diary.

The first post.
The second post.
The third post.

"It's the End of the World...

...As We Know It - and I Feel Fine." Remember that one?

I listened to it long ago when I was in college and employed part-time.

Now I'm in grad school, and - heh - well, listening to this song again.

It feels fine.



So did drinking all that wine while bopping to this song.

Win Ben Stein's Funneh

"I'm With the Banned - The Movie"

Just an idea.

Lots'o'Thoughts analyzes the many errors in Ben Stein's upcoming film "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed":

The text reads:
"ESPITE [sp] A STELLAR RESEARCH RECORD, Iowa state university professor Guillermo Gonzalez is being forced out of his job for the expression - outside the classroom - of an inconvenient personal belief"

"No intelligence allowed" is a nice tagline for a film that can't even spell the word "despite." However, there are many, many things wrong with this.First of all, Gonzalez was never "forced out" of anything at all, whatsoever. Rather, he was denied tenure when he first applied at the University of Iowa.

Second, Gonzalez did not have the "stellar research record" the Discovery Institute and Ben Stein seem to think he did. At least not in a pattern that warrants a grant of tenure.

I agree about the spelling - but not about the solution. They just need to remove the preceding "E."

The Austringer also nets a big, inconvenient fact:

The paranoia-fest that is Ben Stein’s new movie project, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”, has opened the doors to the public to contribute tales of “Darwinist” censorship of “intelligent design”.

Now, they apparently are screening entries, but one has popped up that got past their own flappers.

Expelled from Uncommon Descent recounts “ReligionProf”’s expulsion from William Dembski and Denyse O’Leary’s weblog:

Today I was expelled from the Uncommon Descent blog. All I was trying to do was talk about intelligent design in an intelligent way. I’m a Christian and a religion professor. Can you believe the sort of censorship this site is engaging in?

Um, yes.

Shimmies to Wesley Elsberry and Lots'o'Thoughts.

UPDATED: Ben Stein gives bad financial advice on Fox News, and now the You Tube video of the same exchange has comments disabled so that people can't point out how wrong Ben Stein was (stocks tanked, Euro went gangbusters). Yeah, that's real freedom of speech, all right, Ben. Facts, expelled! I guess all you unbelievers just shouldn't buy financial stocks the next time Ben Stein tells you to, because we are living in a material world.

Busy

I'm in grad school, and leaving soon for Washington, DC, and moving out of my now-former house (and in fact moving to a new town), and in a new relationship, and everything...so don't be worried if your comment doesn't appear right away. It will (unless you're Legion, JAD, or VMartin - these three are banned).

In case you need something to talk about, here's a film that I highly recommend. (I have the book in the original German and will attempt to read it when I have time.)

The Mod Squad

Comment moderation is back on.

Do you know how fucking sick I am of this?

Legion was banned long ago. I let Legion in for laughs. Mistake.

Corrected now. Good-bye, Legion.

UPDATED: It's off. Jump on me, kill each other, what do I care - I'm having a bad week, okay?

SECOND UPDATE: Everything is better. If you want a laugh, check out my eviceration of Legion here. Sorry, Chimpy, but war is war.

Eight More Facts About Amused Muse

I've been tagged again! Pink Prozac got me this time - check out her great blog. I won't post the rules again, they're below. Also, I'm not going to tag more people unless I need to. (UPDATED: Hermagoras wanted to be tagged. Tagged he is.)

Okay, short and sweet:

1. I love triolobites!
2. I love the beautiful voice of Warda!
3. I love belly dance (Raqs al-Sharki)!
4. No, I'm not freaked out by cross-dressing sockpuppetry. Here's one reason why.
5. I love the beautiful poetry of surrealist Robert Desnos, the atheist in a foxhole, the lover, the fighter, the free spirit. O sentimental balances!
6. Whenever I see them I just mentally walk right into the lovely works of Joan Miro.
7. Before I wrote my first novel I detested André Breton and thought that he was an asshole due to his rigidity, his chokehold on the surrealist movement, banning everyone who questioned his authority (remind you of a certain blog moderator in the present day?), and trying to reshape the movement according to his whim. After I wrote my first novel, I adored André Breton – and I still thought he was an asshole. I was even scared to stand at his grave in Paris, such a looming, and powerful, and sexually charged creature he was and is to me.
8. I think this whole thing happening with religion and creationism in America is due to people needing to withdraw from reality to lick their wounds for whatever reason. Okay, heal yourself, then - do what you have to do - but that's not any place to live out your life. Americans, we are an example to the world, we do have a responsibility to export democracy in the right way, we are the keepers of science for the planet, and that means setting an example and acting like adults, which we have not been.

We have no business buying into this bland, commercialized, Designer cookie-cutter, inner-child, unworldly "don't-know-much-about-history," self-righteous, loveable bumpkin view of ourselves, because that's not who we are. Each person is a tower of strength - former social disaster me is proof of that - and nobody is going to collapse upon facing the truth about ourselves and where we came from. Our only hope for the future is acknowledging the past, which is a noble and poetic past. Jesus is not coming to earth to save us. That is a myth people made up out of fear and hope. We must do for ourselves. That's the American way.

Your world is as small or as large as you make it. But whatever happens, the world is not going away.

Eight Facts about Amused Muse

I got tagged by Rev. Chimpy! I love it when he visits.

*We have to post these rules before we give you the facts. So'okay dokey:
* Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
* People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
* Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

The Awful Truth, with Vermouth:

1. My legal name isn’t “Kristine.” (But it’s close enough, and I’m too lazy to change it.)

2. I almost got voted “shyest” for my senior high school class, except that people could not remember my name! Quite frankly, I shocked people by how I've turned out. Well, good for me! The minute someone tells me they’ve figured me out, I start planning how to rock that person’s world again. Because I enjoy jostling people who insist upon being rigid. **See below for a case in point.

3. Friend or foe, if someone tells me a secret I will take it to the grave. Though I blat my brains out at this blog about myself I do not gossip with the ladies, and I make myself unavailable for it (which means that they often gossip about me, but I don't give a shit). Besides, I’d rather think about me! ;-) And I think other people would be a lot happier if they thought more about themselves, their lives, and their goals. I'm not doing anything that anyone else can't do.

4. Other languages I have learned, with varying degrees of success: German, French, Spanish, Somali, and Arabic.

5. Growing up, I wanted to be: an astronaut, a geologist, a dancer, an actress, a rock star, a missionary (that was when I was very, very young – actually, what attracted me was the idea of foreign travel!), an astronomer, a writer, a guru, a librarian, a hermit living in a library, a translator, one of the Greek gods, an archaeologist, and President of the United States.

6. I was involved with Wicca for a few years, but was an agnostic about the whole faith thing. Wicca is a lot of fun. The people are very cool. I remember all the stuff I learned. I am not embarrassed about it.

7. I prefered playing with boys to playing with girls, I am more comfortable around men than women, and I’m pretty darn uncomfortable around children – and I don’t like that, but that’s just how it is. And I suck at small talk. I hate empty yammer. I hate most “girlie” things. I hate to shop, unless it’s for books. I hate to talk on the telephone, so I had the same cell phone for five years until I finally got a new one. However, I do enjoy a lot of the things that JanieBelle enjoys. *Wink*

8. If I were God I would mandate one creature, one vote, and that would include plants. Which probably means I would end up being a one-termer, like Jimmy Carter. :-)

**Okay, my taggees are: Dan, Breakerslion, Rev. Barky, JanieBelle, Whore Church, A.J., Scott Hatfield, and... take a guess... guess again... who has been a real pain, with multiple names'n'such... think hard, now... and he's so prolific at commenting, he'd better not break the chain...

Everyone's favorite troll, LEGION! Also known as "Banned in Kansas"/"Grady"/"Ulyanov"/"Christensen"/"J.C."/"Emmanuel Goldstein", etc. YOU HAVE BEEN TAGGED! Now put together a blog and tell us 8 things about yourself. Don't be shy. We haven't been. No more hiding behind your multiple monikers! TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF!

(And no, that does not mean come here and comment while hiding behind your many clever disguises.)

Don't break the chain, now, Legion! Bwahahahahahaha!

Shit

How embarrassing. (Well, all I can say is, take that, John A. Davison! Heh, heh.)

I'll try harder.

And so should PZ! Hahaha! A "G" rating! Bwahahaha! ;-)

UPDATED: Okay, now I'm up to an "R" rating, so JanieBelle'nKate and I are even.

Obviously it's the boy who's keeping them from an NC-17 rating! Hahaha.

Home Again

I got home around 12:30 a.m. or so last night. I'll post photos when I can.

Of course I have piles of laundry, and I must go back to work tomorrow.

How strange to be home again with my honey and my cats, one splayed out like a sea lion as always and the other, the Daddy's girl, toddling after John with her penguin waddle. They came running and greeted me at the door last night like the sweeties they are.

While I was sick I had strange dreams about the replicators of another, alien organism taking over, like outlaw genes, the Congressional seats and the presidency and the Supreme Court - which is pretty much what has happened over the last decade.

Friday night I had a dream that I was in downtown Minneapolis in my work clothes, clinging to a craggy lava flow while waves crashed around me, and inching my way along trying to get to work, and thinking, "We really need to improve mass transit in this town."

Last night my dream was vaguely of brackish lagoons, but that's all I remember. I know that I've changed; I'll never see the world in quite the same way again.

Coming soon: THE GALAPAGOS DIARY!

P.S.: I did not get much reading done, except in The Extended Phenotype, which gave me that crazy dream.

New Friend

Please welcome Omniscopic to the blogroll!

It's Not Just Me

If I get passionate (alright, that's understating it quite a bit) about the issues of science, science education, and ideology, Pat again explains succinctly why these concerns are so important. This is about the continuation of our republic as a secular, religiously neutral, civil government without religious tests or compulsion.

The problem with this particular response to fundamentalist attacks on evolution is that it fails to grasp the fact that creationism is just one facet of a larger movement. The Discovery Institute, which presents itself to the public as an intelligent design advocacy group, is just one of the black pieces on the fundamentalist chess board -- science and scientists but opposing pawns.

The broad fundamentalist movement of which Discovery is a part is financed by Christian Reconstructionist Howard Ahmanson. The network of far right politicians, think tanks, and advocacy groups Ahmanson finances, work actively, if mostly under the radar, to replace America’s secular democracy with a Christian theocracy. It’s a movement former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges calls American fascism.

In many respects, Ahmanson’s Christian fundamentalism is a mirror image of the Islamic fundamentalism we saw at work in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Islamic fundamentalists fight to impose Sharia law. Their Christian fundamentalist counterparts demand imposition of Mosaic Law. Both dream of exacting the cruel justice of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

This has been in the works for a long, long time. I saw this coming when I was still young and I thought it had ended in late 1980s with the demise of "creation science" and the increasingly faint calls for the death penalty for gays, "rebellious" women and children, etc.

While the aims of Christian Reconstructionists may seem fantastic, they are nevertheless firmly held by adherents who work diligently to achieve them. Ahmanson has invested many millions from his large personal fortune to put these ideas into action.

One of those aims is the destruction of the religious neutrality required by diverse, secular, democratic societies like those found in the United States and Western Europe. Scientists, whether or not they’re conscious of it, are utterly dependent on this framework of religious neutrality to do their work. Serious science is inconceivable under fundamentalism in either of its Islamic or Christian incarnations.

There is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government, says Gary North the son-in-law of Ahmanson’s friend and mentor the Dominionist theologian Rousas Rushdoony.

So the next time I hear someone say, "Well, I'm a Christian and I'm not a fundamentalist," I'm going to ask that person "Well, I'm not a mail-order bride broker or a pedophile, either. Does that mean we should do nothing about these people? Given what the fundamentalists are actually trying to do to all of us, when does 'not being a fundamentalist' become complicity?"

(And to everyone who's worried about my hurt heart, let me tell you, I'm simply more honest and demonstrative and don't give a shit who I shock than the believers burying their hurt hearts deep inside because they think their religion mandates that they have to be joyful all the time.)

Shimmies to RedStateRabble.

Why Do You Blog?

Rev. BigDumbChimp gave me this meme tag: Why do you blog?

Um...

...that reminds me of a story. One that I wrote. An excerpt from my first novel, really - based upon real events. I'll call it Why Do You Write?

I'll take the reason that my protagonist, Geoff, gives for my own. (Yeah, I write a lot from the point of view of men - or try to. I'm so feminine. *sigh*)

The "Red Pill"

Shelley at Retrospectable has added my blogs to her page and is a welcome new friend to my blogroll. Her current post is a short bio on her own journey from small-town religious orthodoxy to making that big scary leap.

Shimmies to Shelley!