Disconnect in Perceptions

I realize that Cecil's already covered this, but I still have to marvel at how people think that Rogers Park is a lot more dangerous than other places on the North Side. I mean, sure, the area around Howard isn't terribly great, but I don't see stories in the newspaper about that area. Instead, I keep reading about horrible things that happen in Lincoln Park.

Me thinks it's more about who one see's upon stepping off the L, rather than any real crime statistics, that gives the area its reputation.

Safety is in the Eye of the Beholder

There was yet another set of beatings in Lincoln Park last night, but people still think that Edgewater and Rogers Park are less safe because there's more brown skinned people around here.

Go figure.

Healthcare NIMBYs

I apologize for the paucity of posts - I'm busy, which makes it hard to find things to gripe about here. Anyhow, here's a decent one: Children's Memorial Hospital is in the process of building a brand-new facility on the Northwestern Memorial campus in Streeterville, the neighborhood that is home to the Mag Mile. Children's Memorial has long had a heliport at its Lincoln Park location, and wants one at its new place in the Near North. The approval for the helipad is nearing the end of a long process, but is meeting resistance from the local block club, SOAR. Their opposition has triggered a series of hearings by IDOT, the first of which was today. While it is currently unknown whether or not SOAR has a legitimate concern, as their day to offer expert testimony is tomorrow, this quote in a Chicago Daily News piece on today's hearing made it seem to me that something else is going on:

“If there’s an accident in this neighborhood, it could be terrible,” said Streeterville resident Hugh Stevens, who came to hear more about the hospital’s proposal. “I’m in favor of Children’s Memorial Hospital, but I don’t think Children’s thought about this enough before they decided to move.”

What struck me about this resident's statement is that he says it as if Children's did not already have a helipad in a Chicago neighborhood. I mean, I do not actually live in Lincoln Park because it is too expensive and a bit too stuck-up for my tastes, but I am there quite frequently for school and I can assure you that it would be just as terrible to have a helicopter accident in Lincoln Park, the only difference being that the victims would have slightly smaller wallets than those in Streeterville. This, to me, sounds like the neighborhood's using a classic NIMBY tactic of claiming safety concerns as a cover for really just not wanting the potential for helicopter noise at any time of the day or night. Tomorrow may see something different at the hearing, but I do not anticipate being surprised.

Must Be Too Much Real News This Week

How can you tell? CNN.com's dug up a twenty-year-old missing white female story.

Honestly, can we just have more real news? I understand that a certain amount of fluff news is good, but this just serves to highlight modern media fetishes that we're all well aware of now.

GOP State Rep Pisses Off Every Single Academic In Illinois

Out of sheer political grandstanding, State Sen. Larry Bomke (R-Springfield) has introduced a bill with the sole purpose of forcing UIC to fire Bill Ayers.

State Sen. Larry Bomke...wants Ayers removed from his university post under a proposal that says anyone who has committed an act of violence against the governments of the United States or Illinois cannot work at a public university.

Here's a hint: professors and other academics are really touchy about politicians saying what can and cannot go on in academic settings. It has to do with the whole free flow of ideas thing and all. Thankfully, the Dems control the state legislature, so this will go nowhere. Considering that this guy represents the Springfield area, itself home to UIS and to SIU's Medical School, I'm amazed that he thinks that the political calculus for this stunt will end up on his side.

Trying Too Hard

A recent CNN.com story regurgitating GOP hand-wringing over the large size of stimulus package manages to torpedo the one redeeming feature of the piece, the headline "Numb and number: Is trillion the new billion?" by explaining the pun in the text:

" 'Number' itself can be parsed 'number' or 'numb-er.' And maybe in this case, the latter is a better pronunciation," [Temple University Professor John Allen] Paulos said.

The piece does get a bit better in the end by saying that the large numbers are necessary to deal with the large pile of shit that is the U.S. economy, but then flounders with a concluding sentence that makes no grammatical sense. In all, CNN would have been better off not running the story at all.

This Cannot End Well

Via El Reg, Fox has picked up a pilot for an American remake of Ab Fab. Merely thinking about it hurts my brain. Hopefully Fox'll do what it does to any of its shows in the past decade that have even the hint of being successful and cancel it before it finishes its first season.

As If More Important Things Weren't Happening Today

Cnn.com felt the need to bring up a 25-year-old story about a missing white female.

Simple Answers to Simple Questions

A Chicago Tribune headline asks, "Have we set the bar too low for miracles?"

Yes.

This has been an installment of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.

The Sad State of Illinois Politics

I've long said that citizens of Illinois are disappointed, but never surprised, when we find out that yet another of our politicians is corrupt. But still...damn, a sitting governor arrested for trying to sell Barack Obama's former senate seat, among a long list of charges.

I'm not surprised at the corruption, just that the man's that stupid.

At least we'll have an open Democratic primary in 2010.

EDIT: Subject-verb agreement is a good thing.

Attention Forum Posters

Punctuation is a good thing. Ellipses do not properly end a sentence. Paragraphs are also good, especially ones that have logical internal structures.

I mean, for a message board that's geared towards people obtaining or possessing college educations, I have to wonder how so many of you passed high school English.

Creationist Shindig - Postgame Report

I'm not about to document all the atrocities against science and informed thought at the Creationist talk I attended this past Friday. In such a setting, the creationist is nearly always at an advantage - they have their well-honed lies and practiced rhetorical tricks, while any skeptic in the audience is hobbled by not having a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the facts.

The talk itself began by conflating Dawkin's strident atheism with the entire field of evolutionary study. He then proceeded to misrepresent natural selection, classical Darwinism, and the Modern Synthesis, all the while referring to the field as "Darwinism". (When questioned about this, he insisted that this was because the media refers to it as such, when in fact the media does such because that's the term the creationists use.) He brought up Panspermia and some crackpots to muddy the waters further, and disparaged the entire field of Geochronology (which made me wish that I had my geology grad student acquaintance with me...). He then trotted out a long list of "problems" with evolution, most of which are not problems at all, and then listed some bible verses aimed at asserting God's hand in Creation rather than denying evolution, all before wraping up with another reference to Dawkins' atheism by transposing it onto the entire biological community.

In all, the talk served to confuse the issue of what evolution really is about, what it actually says, and its history, as well as to construe it as a threat to theism in general when such is not the case. If I wanted, I could reply to the whole thing with a string of citations of the Index to Creationist Claims.

Following the talk was a question and answer session, and John's experience with such things became readily apparent. Question time was limited, supposedly because he gets tired of talking, but more likely because he is unwilling to deal with critical questions from the audience for an extended period of time. He is not interested in debating. Anyone attempting to question him in the future is advised to have a single good question thought out in advance, and to be a lot less confrontational about it than I was. Also, having a laptop with wifi internet access is also a good idea, so that one can access Google and the Index while the talk is going on. Had I been so prepared, I could have looked up and questioned John about Uranium-Lead dating, which is used to date things older than 1 million years old and which he completely skipped over in his talk.

In future, the best way to undermine him may be philosophical. He divides the "possible" views on the issue into three: Biblical Literalists, those who aren't-quite-so-literal, and those who believe what science says on the subject. In doing so, he supports the false dichotomy between evolution and Christian faith. Pointing out that there is really a continuum between pure atheistic support of science and literal creationism while also noting that Dawkins' views are not representative of science as a whole may do more to limit John Bilello's effectiveness than any nitpicking over details.

On a related note, I have heard that there's a Young Earth Creationist giving a talk tomorrow evening. I did not get the details, though, since I will be unable to attend. (I have a tonsillectomy scheduled for tomorrow and I doubt I will be up for much beyond drinking gatorade.) If anyone decides to go I would be happy to hear about it, though.

Creationist Shindig - Time and Place

Aighty, so I went and found one of the posters again, and was happily surprised to have been wrong in yesterday's post on the days for the Creationist lectures- instead of tonight and tomorrow, the talks will be tomorrow and on Saturday. The speaker will be John C. Bilello, Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan (faculty bio). Friday's talk is entitled "Darwin vs. Genesis", while Saturday's is "Bible and Physics - Atoms". The talks will take place in room 1320 of the Digital Computing Laboratory at the University of Illinois. The event is being hosted by the Christadelphians of Champaign County, who were kind enough to put a color PDF of their flier online.

Now, onto the juicy pregame analysis.

John's faculty bio page, linked to above, lists his research interests as:

Application of high energy (synchrotron radiation) x-ray diffraction imaging, microdiffraction, grazing angle incidence scattering and other associated techniques as a tool for non-destructive materials characterization to study a wide range of problems in metals, alloys and semi-conductors where it is necessary to control the structure-property relationships on both the micro and macro-scale to achieve improved performance or to create new materials.

Current research is focused on surface and interface studies in controlling the fabrication and mechanical properties of thin films, multilayer nanocomposites, and on the role of grain boundaries in fatigue and fracture.

...which isn't even biomedical, let alone related to anything biological. Off the bat, this guy sounds like someone who has no relevant background to the subject matter he is giving a talk on.

Also, it appears that these talks are something of a standard of his: he gave them in Ontario in 2005, when a review of the anti-evolution section was posted on Panda's Thumb. Unless this guy's updated his talk, it might be easy to start picking nits with his arguments and "problems" with evolution. I intend to be taking notes when I'm not demonstrating how he's wrong, so expect a summary here soon-ish afterwards.

UPDATE: Apparently someone at Discussing Discipleship, a blog spawned from a class at a local Methodist church, has also noticed the talk. It should be interesting to read alternate perspectives of the talk afterward, assuming such get posted.

Edwards Wimps Out

So sayeth the N-G. See the post below as to why.

Business Cents

There's no laundry facilities at my current apartment, so I am forced to use the only clean laundromat remotely close to campus. Usually when I go to the laundromat, I don't bring extra quarters - I expect the change machines to be working. This seems a reasonable expectation; most people don't keep $8+ dollars of quarters laying around, and it behooves the owner(s) of the laundromat to make using their machines as easy as possible.

I say all this because when I went to said conveniently-located clean laundromat, there were no quarters to be had. None whatsoever. All three change machines were out, and the person working the desk there had apparently been out of quarters for some time. She said that management had been called, but that it was hard to get someone out on a Sunday. I checked the adjacent former Osco, but they too had long been stripped of their quarters.

So I went to do other errands for a few hours. When I returned to the laundromat, though, there still weren't any quarters. I ended up going across the street to Quiznos to buy dinner and thankfully managed to buy a roll of quarters off of them. It wasn't until halfway through my dryer loads that the laundromat's change machines were restocked.

Now, let's stop and think about this for a bit. A laundromat, like the vast majority of other businesses, exists for one reason - to make money providing a needed service. I, as well as many other people, have a much easier time doing laundry on weekends rather than during the week - in fact, whenever I'm there it's usually quite busy. I have to wonder what owner and/or manager in their right minds would let their business be unusable to most of its customers for hours of peak usage time.

For any business, but laundromats especially, not having quarters on hand makes no cents.

Genius!

I am at my folks' for the holiday.

Trying to be prepared, I plugged my cellphone in to charge a bit before I left.

I then proceeded to forget about the cellphone until I was well north of I-80. The phone is likely sitting on my desk, fully charged, and with a few voicemails waiting for my return.

...

In other news, a very early post on here was visited by a crackpot. If anyone still reads this blog, feel free to have at him.

It's Fairly Simple, People

You get on the bus at the front, and you get off the bus at the back. Unless you need the ramp or need the bus to kneel in order to get off, leaving from the front causes a traffic jam as you keep the people who actually have a clue from getting on the bus.

I Question Your Underlying Assertion

Archpundit recently picked apart an editorial on the Equal Rights Amendment by Fran Eaton (who my readers may remember as the author of an exercise in incoherency that attempted to defend John Bambenek's misreading of Michigan state statues). I'll be the first to admit that I know little about the legal ins and outs of the ERA, but a couple grafs that Archpundit highlighted caught my eye:

But not only will the ERA's passage stir the hackles of little old ladies and helpless widows, 18-year-old college women may be up in arms.

No longer will military registration be required of just males, it also will be required of females - again, no discrimination based on sex. While more and more young women are choosing the military as a career option, if the draft were to be enacted in a stepped-up defense in the war on terror, our 18-year-old women would be forced into service along with our 18-year-old men.

Now, maybe this just comes from my recently having been in the prime age groups to be drafted, but I don't see how subjecting women to the draft would be a bad thing. Our society has made great strides over the past half-century in recognizing that in the vast majority of circumstances, women are just as capable as men, if not more so. To deprive our nation of half its available pool of recruits in a time of national emergency based solely on outdated social ideas is absurd. I don't know why calling upon women to defend with their lives the rights that are due them is the bad thing Fran makes it out to be.

Then again, based on our previous encounter, I get the distinct impression that I would have no idea why Fran thinks most of the things she does.

For the Record

As I am 1/2 Irish and use alcohol responsibly, I take offense to many of the slogans, like "Drink yourself green", used to promote Unofficial St. Patrick's Day, as well as the "holiday" itself. I'm on record elsewhere saying that it's all kinds of stupid, mostly because St. Patrick's Day rarely if ever falls during Spring Break.

Oh, and I take offense to the Fighting Irish too, if any Chief supporters feel like throwing that strawman argument out.

Anyhow, I'm lucky that where I work is a rather unlikely place to see intrusion by drunken students. Others may not be so fortunate.

My Government at Work

I'm figuring my taxes, and this year the IRS put the instruction booklet for the 1040EZ online as an HTML file as well as a PDF. What they did was a straight copy-paste. Thing is, telling me to "go to page 14" doesn't do me a lick of good when there are no page numbers in HTML. One would think they could pay an intern to hyperlink all of those to make the file actually useful.