This is outrageous. I can’t believe that, with the house passing the Climate Change Bill on Friday, which will seek to curb CO₂ emissions, it has just come out that the EPA crushed a dissenting report on the supposed dangers of “Global Warming.” The report, titled Proposed NCEE Comments on Draft Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act (PDF), contains a full 98 double-spaced, 12-point-font pages minus 13 blank pages of scathing evidence disproving Global Warming. As we can clearly see from this selection of internal e-mails exchanged on the matter, the EPA suppressed this report, which could have extended debate on the Climate Change Bill, and by extension, inaction on Climate Change, just a little bit longer.

From the e-mails we can see the EPA had concerns about the report’s references, which one of the author’s, Alan Carlin, attempted to mitigate:

The authorship is clearly indicated on the last page. Actually, much of the non-observable material (ie. statements that do not involve interpretation of existing data) is actually in peer-reviewed literature somewhere and I have tried to reference everything.

If the fascist overlords at the EPA had only bothered to actually look at the report, they would have found references to the illustrious Friends of Science (FoS), who, thanks to massive funding from our paternal benefactors in the oil industry, is able to provide completely unbiased reporting on how wrong wrong wrong scientists are about Global Warming, especially about any attempt to get people to stop consuming so much oil. Compare this to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who must serve everyone in the world, making them far more biased in their findings. FoS only has to answer to one organization, IPCC has to answer to everyone; if we count the oil industry as one person, as American Corporate law does, then the IPCC is 6.9 Billion times as biased as the FoS.

Additionally, the report references the blog What’s Up With That?, which argues that this is all because of fluctuations in the Sun, and also counts as a peer-reviewed journal, since it is a journaling medium and the commenters are peers because they have the same lack of credentials as the blog’s author. Even more additionally, the author’s reference Theodore Landscheidt, who’s research has attributed the recent warming trend to solar cycles, and whose breakthrough work in the field of Astrology determined that the rise of Hitler and Stalin were also the result of a “fractal pattern in the Sun’s dynamics.” How many astrologers does the IPCC reference? Zero. Zilch. Nada. None. That’s because they are fascists just like Hitler, who, unlike Hitler, don’t consult astrologers, palm and tea leaf readers in making their predictions. Buncha Jerks.

But let’s just deal with facts by themselves, which is the best evidence for why Global Warming is a sham. As we can see in the below graphic, which the report references with an APA citation that reads: “Source?”¹ and is referenced in numerous articles all over the Interwebs (See here, here, and here.), we can see a clear cooling trend over the last decade:

Global Cooling Graph

While many websites refer to this data as “a decade,”² this report exhibits a sophisticated level of scientific scrupulosity by referring to the dataset as “the 2000s,” which, as everyone knows, does not include the year 2000 itself, because we start counting at the number 1, not 0, and does not include the year 2001 just because. Meanwhile, the enviro-psychos try to swamp ordinary Americans with their cherry-picked data, just like how they cherry-picked the data to include the last 150 years of temperature measurements to show a warming trend. You can clearly see just how the enviro-fanatics are trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes by overloading them with data in the below graph:

Warming Trend Based on Cherry-Picked Data

I’ve highlighted the selection of data showing the 2002 to 2008 measurements, which clearly shows a cooling trend. 2000 and 2001 are highlighted blue. Academics and bookworm losers who want us to include those two years are trying to manipulate the data to show a warming trend because they’re so dishonest and stuff:

Global Warming Detail

But you know what? Our data comes from the article Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley in Volume 37, No.3 publication of Physics & Society, July 2008, a peer-reviewed journal. Got that? All you science-focused, enviro-fascists can suck it. Although Alan Carlin wasn’t able to find the peer-reviewed journal sources, I was, and the journal even mentions just how peer-reviewed this article is in bright red text just above its title³:

This article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.

Isn’t that just like the oppressive elitist Academic regime to write something so hurtful? Academia likes to pick on people who are different. That kid who used to beat you up on the playground and kick sand in your face at the beach? He grew up to be a climate scientist. Are we going to let these eggheads dictate American public policy? Or are we going to stand up to them, do what’s right, and base public policy on emotive appeals, logical fallacies, and a complete lack of empirical evidence?

¹ See page 53 of the PDF.

² Some of you may wonder why a decade of global cooling evidence only includes 6.5 years of data. That’s just because some of you don’t understand basic math and the concept of rounding. People who use this graph are applying the technique of rounding to the number of years of data so that it simplifies to the nearest whole number power of ten, and thus, 6.5 years becomes 10 years so that the average American, who doesn’t understand the immense complexity of decimal places one’s places

³ In all fairness, the final version of the publication had much less damning language; although, it said essentially the same thing.

Note: For a legitimate and more mature debunking of this absolute joke of a report, please see RealClimate’s article Bubkes.

Eastern Newt

The Virginia Living Museum, like zoos and other natural history museums, recreates many different ecological niches indoors, where visitors can get up close and admire the biology in detail. There’s a sense of wonder in admiring the uniqueness of life without it being able to run away and hide.

Hermit Crab

As nice as it is taking in these details, there’s still nothing like encountering life outside, in its natural environment. There’s a little jump in your heart when you catch a glimpse of something scurrying away or diving below the surface. Seeing life in a museum or zoo is fascinating, seeing it in the natural world is exciting.

Check out the complete flickr set here and here.

A PDF of this Paper is available here.

Effective communications is the single most important attribute of successful project management. Efficient meetings are crucial to project progress and promoting a sense of membership within a team. At the same time, managing daily communications within the team is also important, as team members can be overwhelmed by dominating or argumentative personality types or simply be overcome by the number of lines of communication existing within the organization. Proper use of technology can mitigate these problems, but the context of the communications and the personal preferences of those using the mediums must be taken into consideration.

Bradbary and Garrett take something of a pessimistic position on meetings. They stress the costliness of meetings, which sums the collective hourly-expense of each employee multiplied by the meeting length. They cite numerous examples of meetings as an inefficient use of time (Bradbary and Garrett, 2005). In the Blue Group, we experienced a brief surge of online collaboration, a form of asynchronous meeting, which dwindled down to barely any contributions at all in the second half of the semester. As the reluctant team leader, I found that much of the content of my posts were completely ignored, which led me to wondering if it was my writing style that evoked apathy or if it was the nature of the bulletin board medium to exaggerate the behaviors of “Meeting Skippers” and “Shy Types,” of which I definitely consider myself one of the latter. In contrast to Bradbary and Garrett, Demarco and Lister, of Peopleware fame, argued that it was important to have daily meetings with no other purpose than to reaffirm the team organization (Demarco and Lister, 1999), and in my organization, several levels of management believe strongly in this exercise, as does the Agile Scrum methodology, where a “Scrum” is a brief, standing meeting for team members to establish their action items for the day (Control Chaos, 2009).

The danger of daily meetings comes when there are “dominators” and argumentative personalities in the personnel mix (Bradbary and Garrett, 2005). I have experienced meetings that have lasted all day, spilling into off-hours because these personalities thrive off conflict and hearing themselves talk. Our team nicknamed one such personality “the curmudgeon” for his uncanny ability to find something to argue about in every meeting, refusing to let us go back to work until his concerns were resolved, which was impossible, because satisfying one concern only led to another, until, eventually, we worked our way back to his original concern, which was somehow unresolved once again. In these cases, it was crucial to have a “loudmouth” present to put direct conversations back into productive territory (Bradbary and Garrett, 2005). This conflict does not confine itself to meetings either, as these extroverted personalities have the propensity to form ad hoc meetings when they go to collaborate with another member of the team, and end up dragging everyone else into a debate. As team size increases, the number of communications channels grows at a nearly exponential rate of n(n-1)/2 (Schwalbe, 2007). This means the damage dominating or argumentative extroverts can do increases along the same growth rate. In my personal experience, in the field of software engineering, I have found that the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern of layering software, which separates the business, user-interface, and control programming into distinct realms (Krasner and Pope, 1988), helps to mitigate the communication channel problem. While the team size remains the same, individuals are limited to collaborating only with programmers working on layers they need to interact with. This is similar to a chain of command principle, which is also about establishing lines of communication (Tanguay, 2006), and insulating members of the chain from being swamped with the lines of communication within the organization.

Another means of diffusing the deleterious effects of too many meetings and overwhelming communication lines is technology. Information distribution benefits from the Information Revolution, but only when used properly. For instance, distributing documents via e-mail creates multiple copies of the same document stored on everyone’s computer (Bradbary and Garrett, 2005), while storing these documents on an intranet provides a central repository and only one source for truth within the organization. At the same time, a bulletin board, blog, or wiki is of no use if no one reads it. Schwalbe cites Tess Galati’s “Media Choice Table” as an outline of what mediums are appropriate for specific communications content. In this table, direct, real-time communications are indispensable when dealing with sensitive subjects such as commitment, resolving misunderstandings, or communicating irony, while e-mail was more efficient at conveying simple information, making simple requests, or maintaining a permanent record (Schwalbe, 2007). There is also the matter of personal preference; luddites will be more prone to use real-time communications methods, while geeks will prefer chat room and forums.

While meetings are costly and, if poorly managed, can damage productivity and organizational morale, a lack of meetings can be even more damaging, grinding a project to a complete halt and damaging team unity. At the other end of the spectrum is the need to prohibit unproductive communication, inhibiting lines of communication and preventing overbearing personalities from damaging overall productivity requires constant vigilance. Using new mediums of communication can also mitigate the negative effects of too much or unproductive communication, but only if employed within the proper context and with consideration to the technological sophistication of the participants. All of these complex dynamics of professional relationships emphasize the importance of effective communications in project management, without which, the project cannot exist.

References:

Bradbary, Dan and Garrett, David (2005), Herding Chickens: Innovative Techniques for Project Management, SYBEX Inc, Alameda, CA.

Control Chaos 2009. What is Scrum? Retrieved from controlchaos.com June 27, 2009 at: http://www.controlchaos.com/

Demarco, Tom and Lister, Timothy (1999). Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Edition.

Krasner, Glen E. and Pope, Stephen T. 1988. A Description of the Model-View-Controller User Interface Paradigm in the Smalltalk-80 System. ParcPlace Systems, Mountain View, CA.

Schwalbe, Kathy, (2007). Information Technology Project Management, Course Technology, Boston, Massachusetts.

Tanguay, Denise Marie 2006. Chain of Command Principle. Encyclopedia of Management. Retrieved from enotes.com June 27, 2009 at: http://www.enotes.com/management-encyclopedia/chain-command-principle

Other assignments from CIS517 IT Project Management:

CIS517 IT Project Management: 20090428Discussion

CIS517 IT Project Management: 20090504Discussion

CIS517 IT Project Management: 20090518Discussion

CIS517 IT Project Management: 20090529Discussion

CIS517 IT Project Management: 20090612Discussion

CIS517 IT Project Management: APA Research Paper

CIS517 IT Project Management: The Project Development Experience

CIS517 IT Project Management: Effective Project Mangement

CIS517 IT Project Management: Final Project

CIS517 IT Project Management: Final Project MPP

The profundity of the film Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has left my mind swirling with deep, philosophical, scientific, and political questions. Maybe someone could help me with them:

What was the sociological explanation for incredibly-advanced extraterrestrials adopting stereotypical “gansta” lingo as their primary means of social discourse, as we saw with the twin robots Skids and Mudflap? Was their emotional immaturity, juvenile taunting, violent behavior, big ears, lips, and gold teeth the result of adopting the “gansta” persona, or are robots with these personality and physical characteristics drawn to humanity’s “thug” lifestyle? One measure of this might be to find out if these twin robots, who dwarf the human race with their awesome technological superiority, were illiterate before or after they started using vulgarities and threatening to “Bust a cap in that ass.”

Skids and Mudflap, Gangsta Robots

Rush Limbaugh has been very fond of bringing science fiction writer Michael Crighton on his show in the past to debunk Global Warming. The author’s chief credential is writing a book about the Sierra Club funding ecoterrorists to build a weather-changing machine to destroy the world. Will Limbaugh have director Michael Bay on his show soon to debunk Obama’s foreign policy, which, in the film, included attempting to appease the evil Decepticons through diplomacy? Will Obama’s “Soft on Decepticons” fictional stance provide fuel for Faux News commentators and his Republican detractors in 2012?

What kind of treaty does the United States have with the Chinese government allowing our soldier to battle evil robots on their territory? Or do the Chinese let American soldiers blow up blocks and blocks worth of their city-streets because they are overwhelmed by our sheer awesomeness? The fact that there were no Chinese officials overseeing combat operations would support the latter hypothesis. Is there any friction resulting from the fact that all transformers turn into American-made cars that could translate into trade restrictions? Or are the Chinese relying on the collapse of the American auto-industry to take care of the Earth’s transformer infestation?

I have many many other questions about the film, like the fact that transformers appear to reproduce asexually, but will hump someone’s leg as a sign of affection. Is that a “When in Rome” sort of thing? As the film was a three-hour long Army commercial, will the American armed forces start giving away transformers toys to further incentivize new recruits? What cultural attributes would a Toyota Prius take on if it was a transformer? Or does the Prius have too much dignity for that?

For better or worse, it is the nature of intellectuals to be independent in thought and action. Since the Enlightenment, when coffee-fueled intellectual discussions kicked off an age of accelerating advances in science and technology, academics and geeks have slowly fragmented from being united under the big tent of rationality into tribes that are less effective as political and cultural influences. While America is seeing the influence of science and rationality wane in general, those who subscribe to scientific thought grow more fractionalized.

It all started with The Enlightenment¹, that period of time around about 1600 to 1900, when reason overcame religion as the dominant authority in public life. America’s founders were scholars of the Enlightenment, as is anyone who believes in science and rationality. Many of America’s founders were also Deists, believing in god(s), but that the supernatural thing(s) did not interfere with human life and that our purpose can be determined purely through the study of the natural world.

This principle of relying strictly on the observable, measurable, and reproducible aspects of the world to define reality comes out most strongly in the philosophy of empiricism, with all scientists being empiricists, asserting that our only source of knowledge in life is experience. This is different from naturalism, which does not appear to rule out other ways of knowing, but also emphasizes understanding through observations of the natural world. At the empirical extreme is scientism², which maintains that the absolute best means of understanding reality is through science.

This shared emphasis on observable reality as the best means to find truth is what gives way to principle of political Secularism, which prohibits factoring supernatural speculations into the reasoning behind public policies. In theological dimensions, scientifically minded people express these values in atheism, the belief that there is no supernatural force behind the natural world or influencing human life, and agnosticism, which takes no stance on religious possibilities at all. More recently has emerged the concept of ionian enchantment, which focuses on the sense of wonder that comes from understanding the unification of the sciences, and spiritual naturalism, which is similar to agnosticism, but takes the position that we should actively rejoice in the natural world.

In the realm of ethics, the loss of religion is seen in traditional thought as leaving us bereft of a reason for moral living. In response, Humanism, the philosophy of being good to one another for its own sake, emerged. Secular Humanism was a response to Humanism, because of the many branches that were emerging specific to different religions, such as Christian or Jewish Humanism. The American Humanist Association represents the secular branch of this philosophy.

There are the many other variations on these themes. Ockhamism, based on Ockham’s Razor, Pastafarianism, from the cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster–a satire on other religious faiths, and Skepticism, which focuses on disproving religious systems of belief and modern-day pseudo-science. This does not take into account the many divisions between realms of scientific inquiry, like biology, chemistry, physics, and others at the top, each with their own highly-specialized sub-domains, like microbiology, organic chemistry, and quantum physics, with terminology so specialized that even the branches of the sciences are having difficulty communicating with each other.

Then there are the myriad organizations attempting to represent these innumerable communities. Originally the Federation of American Scientists was prominent, with the very important primary goal of monitoring the world’s nuclear capabilities. The Union of Concerned Scientists takes a more generalist approach, including many environmental and scientific integrity lobbying efforts. While my new favorite Science Debate 2008 has become a powerful active political force, with the basic goal of bring science into public political discourse.

Despite the differences between all of the above listed organizations, philosophical and ontological schools of thought, and attitudes with which they approach reality, we all subscribe to a testable and rational understanding of the Cosmos. We believe in education, human improvability, and that arguments derived from our shared, observable reality should shape public policy. Because of the complex nature of reality, there will always be quibbles and differing understandings of what opinions we develop from it. These quibbles build walls between the sciences and but also make their members stronger in their specializations and more effective within their domains.

¹ Actually, it all started with Greek philosophy, but all that died out in the Dark Ages.

² Not to be confused with the pejorative Scientific imperialism.

I’ve been a longtime fan of Chet Raymo’s Science Musings blog, a rich, wonderful merging of classical literature references and modern scientific awe I discovered not long after seeing the inspiring film he wrote Frankie Starlight. I’m sorry to say that When God is Gone, Everything is Holy is the first book of his that I have had the pleasure of reading, but it will not be the last.

The feeling I got reading this text is similar to the deep sense of peace I get reading Carl Sagan. Here is someone who echoes the thoughts in my mind, like when he refers to “truth with a lowercase t.” He even shares my fascination with the golden mean, finding a deep spiritual significance in it:

The golden mean is the secret of tolerance, of modesty, of a healthy skepticism–of knowing that every dogmatic definition of God is a pale intimation of the truth and, inevitably it seems, an excuse for jihad, pogrom or crusade.

Raymo was raised Catholic and went to a Catholic school, but reminds us, “The science I learned at Notre Dame was the same science that was taught at University of California at Los Angeles.” This is a sentiment echoed by my friends who attended private Catholic schools as children, that they were taught evolution and appreciation for the sciences that was completely secular.

Religion and science do not have to be at odds, and may, as John Updike notes, share in the wonder, when he wrote, “Ancient religion and modern science agree: We are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention.” Raymo knows exactly how to draw the line:

The religious naturalist foregoes a personal God. God defined in our own image. God invested with human qualities: justice, love, will, desire, jealousy, artifice, and so on–in short, the attributes of human personhood. To the agnostic, a personal God is the ultimate idolatry.

The word “God,” Raymo notes, “is indeed almost irretrievably burdened with personhood. It is our golden calf, our idol.” When I use the word “spiritual” in this sense, I am not referring to anything religious or supernatural, but rather a feeling. It’s the feeling I get when I see a sunset, a satellite photo of Earth, diagram of the solar system’s boundary, hear about some fascinating scientific fact, or anything else that instills a sense of awe at the world around me and inspires a profound appreciation for the simple fact of existing to experience it.

Raymo is a proponent of spiritual naturalism or naturalistic spirituality, and he finely articulates this sense of spiritualism:

So this is my Credo. I am an atheist, if by God one means a transcendent Person who acts willfully within the creation. I am an agnostic in that I believe our knowledge of “what is” is partial and tentative–a tiny flickering flame in the overwhelming shadows of our ignorance. I am a pantheist in that I believe empirical knowledge of the sensate world is the surest revelation of whatever is worth being called divine. I am a Catholic by accident of birth.

“Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.” Chet quotes Charles Darwin, and then Lewis Thomas, “The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.” Raymo stresses the importance of recognizing our ignorance, and remaining humble to the vast realms of knowledge currently beyond us. “Only when a few curious people said “I don’t know” did science begin.”

“The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer,” Charles Darwin wrote. At the core of the Intelligent Design movement, is an urging for us not to tolerate complexity, but rather throw up our hands and give up when faced with it. When Chet Raymo applies gentle scorn to the Intelligent Design movement, it is done with just the right rhetorical tone of persuasion, not mockery:

Gaps have a way of being filled. We no longer see God’s intervening will in the appearance of a comet, or look for divine meaning in the death of a child from disease. I would hate to think that my own faith in God depended upon scientists never figuring out exactly how the blood-clotting protein cascade evolved…

ID and other ideologies, both religious and political, stress humanity’s distinction from the natural world, and argue for our dominance over it. But Raymo argues that thinking ourselves separate from nature denies us total enjoyment of it. It almost sounds like a sin when he talks about it, just as humility about our ignorance sounds like a holy virtue.

This is the strength of Chet Raymo’s worldview, that he can find a spiritual sense of awe at the natural world, without having “imagine fairies beneath it,” to quote Douglas Adams. Enlightenment scholars look pessimistically around at all the churches, one on every other street corner, and despairs at the apparent overwhelming popularity of religion’s fantasy. Chet Raymo sees the opposite. Every school building, university, hospital, research corporation, space mission, car, streetlight, grocery store, museum, and other modern convenience is a monument to science and the natural world. A world we all share, and would all be better off if we simply appreciated it together.

Eastern Snapping Turtle

Swamps, like deserts, are a metaphor for awful things in life. We get bogged down in swamps, monsters come out of swamps, to “swamp” a person is to capture them in a quagmire of responsibilities. But this derision of swamps is very anthropocentric, and I like the old German proverb, “Where there are no swamps there are no frogs.”

Check out the complete flickr set here.

I missed a flash SF, 600-words or less story, I got published to 365Tomorrows. You can check it out here.

Kheen stared out the window of his top-floor corner office, completely oblivious to the hustle and bustle of his city stretching off into the horizon below. Planes, spacecraft, gliders, unicorns, and more were cruising right past his window, citizens enjoying the nightlife of which he was architect, but he was still chained to work.

There was a flash and the tinkling sound of chimes from behind him, and Kheen turned around slowly. This was his personal assistant, Uui, teleporting into the office. Her face was always expressionless, matching her strictly business attitude. So the mere fact of her presence was like a lead weight on his heart.

“New directive from corporate,” Uui said and directed Kheen’s attention to the flat screen always floating at her shoulder. “They want the Xybercorp building inducted into the city by the end of the week.”

“Okay,” Kheen replied with measured patience. “And..?”

“They want residence in the Atomlight district.”

“Okay.”

“There are no plots left in the Atomlight district.”

“Yes.”

“So..?”

Kheen savored the uncertainty in Uui’s otherwise monotonous dialogue a moment longer before answering, “So we’ll boot a lesser client out. Xybercorp is a big name, and we can shuffle some buildings to accommodate them.”

“Everyone in Atomlight is a major client sir–”

“Which means whoever we kick out of there must have their building moved into a district of almost equal prestige, which will require moving a second-tier client out of that district, and a third-tier client out of the district we move the second-tier into, and etcetera and etcetera and etcetera,” Kheen turned his back on Uui. “It will mean overtime for everyone. Make it happen.”

“Yes sir,” Uui vanished in a tinkling of chimes.

Kheen set his world settings to nighttime. The daylight outside his window fell under a canopy of darkness and flowing light streams. Then he turned off the windows completely, substituting the best view in the city with a moonlit nature scene instead.

He thought about lunch breaks, water coolers, and sleep, all the living necessities of which this place was devoid. He thought about his body, in an isolation chamber in some corporate warehouse, aging away.

He thought about his retirement. With the exchange rate the way it was, he might afford it by the time his physical body was in its 80s. Then he could buy his way out of this place, live in a homeless shelter somewhere cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and dirty all the time. This made him smile.
It was going to be wonderful.

Beautiful Science Credit: Bonnie*B

I am thrilled by City Council’s decision to fund the expansion of the Port Discover Science Center over the next five years. This is a wise and prescient use of public funds that will benefit the local community by further beautifying downtown, contributing to Elizabeth City’s growing intellectual character, and offering children a place where they may immerse themselves in self-directed exploration.

Expanding Port Discover Keeps Downtown Beautiful

The recent migration of the Pasquotank Arts Council and the Encore Theater into the Arts of the Albemarle building has had the unfortunate side effect of leaving a huge, prominent empty space in downtown Elizabeth City’s facade. The mere $15k a year necessary to allow Port Discover to expand into this vacancy is a bargain price for preventing another big empty storefront from marring downtown EC. Display windows filled with beautiful science exhibits and smiling children will create a welcoming atmosphere and experience that visitors will take home with them, encouraging others to visit here.

Flight Simulator X

Port Discover Contributes to EC’s Intellectual Character

Downtown EC will have large centers for the sciences and the humanities right across from each other on Main Street, and historical pursuits just a few blocks down the street at the Museum of the Albemarle. Add Elizabeth City State University’s sizeable campus residing just a mile down the road, and you realize there is an incredible amount of academic enlightenment and culture packed into a town with a population of just 20,188 people.

Port Discover Inspires Learning

In Plato’s Republic he argues, “No compulsory learning can remain in the soul… In teaching children, train them by a kind of game, and you will be able to see more clearly the natural bent of each.” Today research shows how true this is, where children will spend hours surfing the web, actively exploring the things that interest them without a clue that they might be learning something in the process. The educational video games, microscopes, and hands-on activities offered at the science center are completely immersive educational experiences. Children will learn more in a few hours of self-directed, hands-on exploration at Port Discover than they would at several days worth of summer school.

A vibrant downtown area is key to bringing visitors and investments into this community. Expanding the Science Center for just $1,250 a month into a vacant building is the perfect use of public funds for keeping EC a place where people will want to visit and maybe even set down roots. Hyper-Mega-Kudos to City Council for their forward thinking in this matter.

On May 7, 1959, Charles Percy Snow delivered The Two Cultures lecture, and academia has been debating it for the half-century following. A review of references to this famous lecture would lead someone who hadn’t read it to think it was purely about the differences between the people educated in the sciences and the humanities, but that debate accounted for only a portion of Snow’s lecture, and it was so poorly argued and narrowly focused that it’s a wonder why it continues to stir feelings today. Unfortunately, this focus on academic stereotypes has masked the much more profound and poignant subject of Snow’s essay and the real two cultures: those who have science and those who do not.

Science publications and public commentators predictably rolled out their analyses of the state of things on this 50th anniversary of the lecture. James Dacey of PhysicsWorld, summarizes Snow’s lecture as the importance of science over snobbery in the humanities. Gary Shu’s opinion in MIT’s The Tech argues for the importance of being educated in both realms of academia. Harvard University’s Gazette covered its two-day symposium on bridging the two cultures. Science Friday did spend a good portion of time on the importance of scientists as popularizers (often alluded to as the “Third Culture”) like Carl Sagan, Chet Raymo, and J.Bronowski, but continued to mull this ignorance academics share of one another’s fields. ABC’s The Science Show celebrated the 50th anniversary with a poem about getting old that didn’t seem to have much to do with science, which it was supposed to merge with the arts. The Editors of The New Atlantis seems to have misunderstood the lecture completely as an argument for prioritizing science over the humanities in order to defeat the Russians, which makes one wonder what they were smoking when they read the Cliff Notes. Seed ran a collection of videos with E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, and other big minds, all blah, blah, blahing their perspectives on the state of the Two Cultures academic divide today.

All of this coverage amounts to one great big academic circle jerk. Academics wonder why they are often accused of living in “Ivory Towers?” It’s because you sit around and debate this utter nonsense.

Snow explains why he “christened” the divide as the Two Cultures:

For constantly I felt I was moving among two groups–comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all…

Of course, what everyone likes to leave out is that Snow was referring to British Academia. He thought American and Russian Academia were rather remarkable for requiring students to be proficient in both the sciences and the humanities. This is true today, where American students must have both science and humanities credits in the core curriculum to graduate from college.

It’s odd that so many Western academics are swept up in Snow’s description of this academic cultural divide, embracing what is basically a false dichotomy. There is science and there is the humanities, but there is also soft science, like psychology, and hard science fiction literature, like Isaac Asimov. There are transhumanists, makers, technical writers, science bloggers, Enlightenment historians, and numerous other academics out there representing the hybridization of the humanities and the sciences to varying degrees. There are two cultures in another sense, those who unthinkingly embrace false dichotomies and those who don’t have their heads up their asses.

Add to this the fact that the portion of Snow’s lecture dealing with the academic cultural split reads like a bad Sinbad act. It’s all “White people dance like this, black people dance like this.” but replace “white” and “black” with sciences and humanities. The sciences are more liberal. The humanities are more snobby. Science embraces the future; humanities wants to live in the past. Humanities laughs at you for not knowing Shakespeare, but do they know the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

Are there two cultures in academia? Sure. During my College days the humanities students put down the science students and vice versa. Just like there are four cultures in the Military: Army, Navy, Airforce, and Marines, and they all put each other down. It’s no wonder I once heard someone at a seminar say, with much exasperation, “The whole two cultures thing is silly and just irritates me.” I agree, let’s get off the playground please.

Snow himself was fed up with the whole debate, and lamented that he did not title the lecture The Rich and the Poor, which was the real subject he was trying to communicate, but is also the two-thirds of the lecture no one ever wants to discuss. Snow lamented the fact that the world was filled with science haves and have nots. Poor countries like India and African nations lacked scientific innovation, and the people in those countries were suffering as a result, while rich nations like America, Europe, the U.S.S.R, and emerging China, through an investment in new Universities to achieve scientific independence, had modern agriculture and medicine.

He quotes J.H. Plumb in arguing this need to bring other countries up to our standard of living:

No one in his senses would choose to have been born in a previous age unless he could be certain that he would have been born into a prosperous family, that he would have enjoyed extremely good health, and that he could have accepted stoically the death of the majority of his children.

Snow acknowledges that it would take an immense outpouring of capital to bring science and innovation to the third world, and was keenly aware of just how politically naive this idea seemed. That was why science needed the help of the humanities, to make the emotional and rhetorically persuasive debate points for bringing first world capital to the third world.

Only two editorials I found online acknowledged this as the core of Snow’s argument, Nature gets to the true essence of Snow’s lecture with Doing good, 50 years on and SciDev’s The real ‘two cultures’ divide. In addition to these academic commentaries, there are hybrid-culture academics working on the issue as well, such as WorldChanging and the OLPC Project, where people are quietly working to solve the true conundrum C.P. Snow illuminated in his lecture and bring the rest of the world up to our standard of living.

Snow wrote a fantastic essay about the importance of bringing science to everyone around the world, and needing the humanities’ eloquence to overcome the political barriers to it. Unfortunately, he alienated half his audience in his opening statements, and neither side has ever forgiven it, but that’s no reason to ignore the message of social responsibility he was trying to stress.

What’s the lesson we should take from the academic Two Cultures debate? Everyone should be aware of their own ignorance.

What’s the lesson we should take from the social two cultures debate? Get out of your head and make a difference.

Note: The Telegraph’s Robert Whelan gets a little bit past the inane Two Cultures debate when he argues that both cultures are united in the defense of education, and Jonathan Jones of the Guardian echoes this fear of declining education in society.