I just sold a story this past week, one of the first ones I ever wrote as an adult — rejected eight times since I started keeping records in 2018. So that was a win.
To celebrate, at the bottom I’m posting for free another reject here on Doctor Eclectic, one that is more topical, given that it’s once again time for our local astronomy festival. It’s always worth spending a Saturday out at GTCC in Jamestown. If you’re skeptical, check out these two previous years.
I was sick last year and didn’t go. This year I seem to be coming down with something a week early, so maybe I’ll recover soon enough to make it. The website hasn’t been updated yet, but here’s the e-mail I got from organizer Tom English, with speaker links added by me.
Join us for another edition of the TriStar regional meeting of amateur astronomers on Saturday, 2 March.
The event will be held at the Koury Hospitality Careers Center on the Jamestown Campus of Guilford Technical Community College, 621 E. Main St., Jamestown, NC 27282.
As usual, there will be several speakers, assorted displays, prizes, an astro-imaging contest, solar viewing (weather permitting), and lots of opportunities to hang out with your astro-colleagues.
Doors open at 8:30 a.m., and the first speaker is at 9:30. The event will wrap up around 5:00 p.m., after the prize drawings.
This year’s speakers are Alicia Aarnio and Anatoly Miroshnichenko from UNCG, Yashashree Jadhav from Elon University, and our favorite meteorite man, John Sinclair. A detailed schedule will be posted at the event website soon.
Note: this year there will NOT be a pre-TriStar Friday night public lecture.
Special Note about our UNCG-heavy speaker program this year: As some of you may know, the administration at UNC-Greensboro has announced program cuts that include the elimination of the physics major. Some of you may have visited their Three College Observatory, or recall past TriStar presentations by TCO founding director Steve Danford. As a show of appreciation and support of the UNCG astronomers, we are featuring them at this year’s edition of TriStar. If you would like to support the department, there is a petition at Change.org.
Note that this great little meeting, which engages amateurs and professionals both inside and outside the academy is held at a community college, not at either of our local regional universities.
Science House
I read something really interesting last week by
.Right now, pretty much everyone doing science is a product of the academic-industrial complex, the kind of person who had to do everything right at every step to make it through the ever-narrowing pipeline into tenured positions at rich universities. But the greatest scientists often don't look like that kind of person at all. They're weird, they spend years working on things that go nowhere, they piss off powerful people, they worship puppets and learn arithmetic by smell. Nobel laureates keep telling us that they would never survive in today's academia; we shrug and soldier on.
It’s a proposal to train scientists outside of universities, in residential settings that remind me of somewhat of Entrepreneur House. I spent a weekend in a similar place in Washington DC a couple of months ago,
and have written a pair of stories about a “co-ed frat house for science,” a place called SMaLL (or SM&LL), the second of which I posted as my entry to the Lunar Awards last Halloween.
The basic idea is that a bunch of brain-boosted teens take over the campus of an abandoned science academy. It’s an updated and slightly more science fiction take on the old Boys’ Life series about The Mad Scientists’ Club, which I read in paperback collected editions in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
I don’t think there was ever a single girl in any of the stories, written in the 50s and 60s, and no minorities, which these days is the kiss of death. My wife (who I refer to as “my wife” because she doesn’t want me mentioning her name in print) just got the first spam call of the day, asking if Mrs. Hayes wanted to sell her property. Her reaction to that phone call was much the same as I imagine the current reaction to an all-white, all-boys science club. If we were talking about the Hardy Boys or the Three Investigators, I think we could expect a retcon, but from looking at the website / shrine, Bertrand R. Brinley’s son Sheridan seems more interested in keeping his father’s legacy just the way it was rather than making money.
Which is fine with me. I’m a lot more interested in cleaning up the future than I am the past. That’s one of the reasons I tell you all when pieces I publish here have been rejected by various editors. I’m not into the fake-it-’til-you-make-it strategy.
The essay below was written for a specific outlet, which liked parts of it (they didn’t say which parts) but passed on paying me for it. This was a shame, because at 10 cents a word they were on the high end of the curve for small-press magazines, and because I couldn’t think of who else to send it to.
Enjoy.
Constructivism as a Cure for Conspiracy Theories
Deliberate disinformation in the form of “conspiracy theories” is currently in the news. The much larger problem of accidental misinformation is a consequence of how humans process information. Social learning, including classroom lectures, is fast but error-prone.
The educational philosophy called constructivism holds that while information can be memorized by rote, like copying a file to a hard drive, true understanding much be actively constructed by the learner. Since no one is a proverbial blank slate, this generally requires deconstructing whatever naive assumptions the learner already holds. Importantly, this must not be seen as an attack on the learner’s personal or cultural identity. The teacher’s job is not to convince the learner or to make demands for acceptance of new information, but to catalyze an “Aha!” moment in the learner.
Flat Earthers are a useful case study for educational purposes in that their misconceptions are extreme and strongly held, despite the literal mountains of evidence accumulated by geology, astronomy, and the other earth sciences. One of their main positions is an insistence on first-hand, naked-eye evidence. In this, they are not unlike students (especially those students who dislike their teachers, or at least mistrust their authority).
For those unfamiliar with Flat Eartherism, it began in the mid-1800s as a defense of the biblical creation story by “a roving lecturer, writer, and quack doctor named Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816-1884), who went by the name ‘Parallax.’” Rowbotham described something not unlike fantasy writer Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, with the North Pole at the center and Antarctica distorted into an immense wall of ice around the circumference, holding in the oceans so that they don’t pour off the edges (as they do, endlessly, in Pratchett’s many novels). Ironically, the Christian Rowbotham’s ice wall may have come from pagan Norse mythology’s Jotunheim, the land of the Frost Giants, which likewise encircles Asgard in some of the stories.
The vividness of Rowbotham’s model allows for some simple and easily falsified hypotheses. For instance, his North Star is located directly above the central North Pole, and never moves. Therefore it should be visible on a clear night from almost anywhere on the Flat Earth, although a viewer at the Pole would have to crane her neck through a much steeper angle to look straight up at it than a viewer near the rim’s ice wall. Retired physicist Bruce Sherwood has built a quantitative computer model predicting the positions of all the sun, moon, planets, and easily visible stars from a Flat Earth, using open-source code that allows anyone to build similar models and share them on the internet to any viewer with a web browser. For those with the patience to measure and record the positions of those celestial bodies, the results should be conclusive.
However, those with short attention spans are not left out. Crucially, Sherwood’s model does not include any of the stars or constellations which are only visible from the southern hemisphere of the real round-ish Earth. There is no room for them in the 180 degrees of the Flat Earth’s sky. Likewise, for residents of those countries more than twenty degrees south of the equator, Polaris (the North Star) is never visible. These are naked-eye observations that require no mathematics to appreciate. Stars that should not exist are obviously present in the night sky to anyone in position to look up and see them.
Again, this article is meant as more than a simple refutation of the Flat Earth model. It is an example of the constructivist method. As an extension, concept inventories are educational tools invented by physics but now used in various STEM disciplines, designed to reveal which specific misconceptions a student holds. Once revealed, those misconceptions can be specifically targeted. When done properly, there is no need to engage in rhetorical argument. Reality reveals itself to the learner through his or her own questions and explorations.
REFERENCES
Gottschall, Jonathan (2021). The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down. Basic Books. New York, NY.
McIntyre, Lee (2021). How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason. The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA.
https://brucesherwood.net/?p=420
https://www.constellation-guide.com/constellation-map/
https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/02_AER_Richardson.pdf
https://ncse.ngo/rim-end-world
OOOOOfficial announcement of the thing I mentioned in the first paragraph above.
"Storyletter XPress Publishing’s first anthology, “Take Me There: A Speculative Anthology of Travel,” is now moving to the next stage of the publication process. After many months of preparation and open calls, the stories have been chosen, and the book is happening!"
https://substack.com/home/post/p-141878782