Here we are again
It’s astronomically still spring, but the spring semester is over, which means it’s time for my various summer teaching gigs. Last week I went to Texas for a grant-funded workshop on green entrepreneurship. In June I have a new Introduction to Permaculture class for Science & Math, and in July a reprise of last summer’s Experiential Neuroscience, which I wrote about soon after.
As in past summers, while I’m busy teaching these more intense courses, which meet 6 hours a day rather than 3 hours per week, I’ll be posting episodes from my first podcast, VSI: Variation Selection Inheritance. This was funded by the National Science Foundation through the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. All the audio disappeared from the Web several years ago when I moved the site to the Internet Archive. I am very happy to be bringing them back.
Original Blog Blurb from December 2012
Orson Scott Card is a science fiction writer who lives here in Greensboro. I’ve written him a couple of times over the past two years, inviting him to do an interview about how he reconciles his socially conservative Mormon faith with science in general and evolution in particular on the show (according to my previous guest, fellow SF writer Nancy Fulda, the LDS Church doesn’t care much about that particular issue). No luck so far.
Mr. Card also writes a column for a local conservative newspaper, The Rhinoceros Times, called Uncle Orson Reviews Everything. I like the column, because he’s even more eclectic than I am in his choices of what to read, watch, and listen to. I’m parodying his title for this particular episode, because it’s similarly about a pile of stuff I just happened to read and watch this week, kinda-sorta tied together by a theme. Loosely coupled, as the physicists might say.
Reviewed this episode:
Holy Motors
Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite
Assholes: a Theory
Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos
Updates from 2022
After I stopped doing this podcast, I got a neat little side gig writing about science for an online science fiction magazine called Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. I never mentioned this episode, because I never got the chance. I spent almost four years cashing the man’s checks without ever meeting him. His wife Kristine signed said checks, but almost all of my interactions were with editors Ed Schubert or, after he left the magazine, the managing editor Cyndie Swindlehurst.
This only matters because occasionally someone will try to call me out online for “being associated” with Card, because he holds some very unpopular opinions. For the record, I do not share those opinions. Beyond demanding a roughly PG-13 rating on everything I wrote there, I don’t recall any censorship.
One of those columns was about sex and gender determination in humans.
I live in North Carolina, where the small-government legislature has (with no apparent irony) decided to regulate where people go to the bathroom, supposedly to prevent cross-dressing sexual predators from molesting unguarded females. Clearly, this has more to do with scaring people to the polls than it does with actually preventing any real abuse, since relatives and “family friends” molest so many more children than strangers do. Here we have an example of a classic finding from psychology, that humans under-react to common dangers and over-react to uncommon ones.
If anything was going to trigger a publishorial backlash, some kind of J. Jonah Jameson-like outburst, that seems the most likely candidate. And there was nothing. Maybe that’s because Card never even saw it; I have no idea. I do know he paid me for it, on time and in full. Which I deserved, because it was good work.
Again, this is in no way a defense of the publisher’s personal opinions. I got no time for that. I have plenty of my own unpopular opinions to defend.
Or not, depending on the circumstances. They’re just opinions.
VSI Episode 53