I Used To Live Next Door...

The News-Gazette's reporting a working fire at a campus apartment building next door to where I used to live. Thankfully that didn't happen to my building, which was identical, while I was living there.

UPDATE: The N-G took down their blurb story, breaking the previous link. The new, longer story on the fire is here. My old building's the one next door, though my apartment itself if out of the shot.

Read It and Weep

Chancellor Herman writes to the DI to say that, try as hard as they can, Students for Chief Illiniwek's antics won't bring back the Chief:

I want to clarify and add background to a recent announcement by the Registered Student Organization (RSO) "Students for Chief Illiniwek." The RSO plans to rent the Assembly Hall on November 15 to promote its cause at an event called, "Students for Chief Illiniwek Presents: The Next Dance."

The campus does not support and is not sponsoring this rally and, as long as the group does not exclude any fellow students from participating, the organization is free to express within the law the beliefs and perspectives of its members.

On February 21, 2007, the University at Urbana-Champaign retired the Chief Illiniwek tradition. The campus also ended the production of Chief merchandise, except through the Collegiate Licensing Company's "Vault" program, which is used for retired logos.

We will not reinstate the Chief Illiniwek tradition.

However, we will never prevent people from expressing themselves on our campus. The RSO system at the University allows groups of students to create organizations that represent many different viewpoints. While the University will not always condone those views, we will allow students to form a RSO, as long as they meet clear and existing guidelines. Those guidelines include adhering to all federal and state nondiscrimination and equal opportunity laws, orders, and regulations.

All RSOs have certain rights, including the right to reserve/rent certain campus spaces for their events. The Assembly Hall is one of the venues available for such events.

The University works very hard to create an inclusive campus community. Free speech and the ability to express ideas is a core value of this great institution. Without this freedom, students do not have exposure to ideas nor the ability to test the veracity of those ideas.

This is a tradition we will always honor.

Richard Herman,
Chancellor

As I've said many times before, retiring the Chief was an irreversible decision by the Board of Trustees. The nature of our former "symbol"/mascot is so toxic that, were the board to reinstate it, the university's reputation as an enlightened institution of higher learning would be shot. That's why it's best not to have these big displays, and best not to cling on to things like yelling "Chief" during the Three-in-One at Halftime (two-thirds of which I'd also like to go see the way of our well-maligned mascot). The more people keep deluding themselves that it will come back, the longer it will take for the community as a whole to move on.

Late Election Roundup

Hi there, paltry readership.

I spent my afternoon and evening as a Poll Watcher at Cunningham 5 at PAR, and then watched the returns come in at Matt's place. And, though it's been said many times already - Yay Obama!

So far, it looks like the Constitutional Convention is losing, as is the School Sales Tax - both "yay"s for me. Sadly, the City of Champaign referendum to fund general assistance did not pass.

I'm gonna vegetate for a bit, then head to bed. I may have something more profound to say later. If not, Yay!

Election Day is Tomorrow!

In case any of my seven readers are first-time voters, you need to bring a government-issued ID (like your I-card) and a piece of mail, i.e. a bill, listing your current address. Even if you're not a first-time voter, having these along to smack down the Republican poll watcher with is never a bad idea.

Myself, I plan to vote early, and maybe end up as a poll watcher myself at some point tomorrow. We'll see how things go.

Also, if you live in Champaign County, go find and print out your specimen ballot before you go to the polls. If you fill that out ahead of time, all you need do once you hit the polling booth is copy your ovals to the official ballot. If lots of people do that, voting will go a lot smoother.

For Your Edification

Here's the notice I received about a candidate forum for the 15th IL Congressional District on campus:

There will be a debate/forum Tuesday on the UIUC campus for the candidates for the 15th U.S. Congressional District and the 103d Illinois State Representative District. This campaign forum, co-sponsored with the Daily Illini and the Association of Academic Professionals, will take place on:

Tuesday, October 14, from 7:30-9:00 p.m. on the 2nd floor of Levis Faculty Center (919 W. Illinois St., Urbana)

Questions asked will deal directly with university issues. Come hear what their positions are.

I won't be able to attend due to prior commitments, but I'd appreciate any reader feedback (from the 6 or so people who regularly read this blog...).

Will the Real Challenger Please Stand Up?

So it's one month and a day before the election, and the Democratic Candidate for the 15th Congressional District in Illinois is still a big question-mark. I have heard precisely nothing out of Steve Cox's campaign, and the campaign "news' page is still blank. He doesn't even have a position statement about the economy, which is the issue of the election. As best I can tell, he intends to ride Obama's coattails into office which, in a gerrymandered GOP-friendly district like the 15th, seems like a daft thing to do.

That said, here's some oppo research I offer up to the Cox campaign (not that either one will see it, as next-to-no-one reads my blog). Rep. Tim Johnson (R-IL15) said of the recent bailout bill:

"I remain highly suspicious of this request and frankly resentful of the presumption that taxpayers should be put on the hook for irresponsible decisions by Wall Street money changers."

Accordingly, he voted against the bill both times. However, this is a reversal of his previous position - remember the Bankruptcy Bill of 2005? The one that was supposed to "prevent bankruptcy abuse" but really was the credit card companies whining that they were getting screwed over for giving every schmo and his dog a credit card but came crying to the government when people who should never have been given more than $50 of credit had their debts forgiven by the bankruptcy courts? The entire point of that bill was to put people - ya know, taxpayers - "on the hook for irresponsible decisions by Wall Street money changers," and guess how Tim Johnson voted on that bill? He voted for it.

Let me type it again slowly, for those who did not read it the first time: Tim Johnson was for putting taxpayers on the hook for the bad decisions of financial executives before he was against it.

And yes, anyone who clicks through and reads the full text of Rep. Johnson's statement knows that I took him about 80% out of context. However, it would make a great political attack ad, and we all know that Cox needs all the help he can get right now.

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.

Nearly Forgot

Some wingnut creationist is giving talks on campus tomorrow and on Friday. If I remember and can find one of the sparse fliers, I'll try to post a summary of who/what/where sometime tomorrow (I'd go look now, but I'm sure the buildings with the fliers are locked). Also, if I end up going, I'll summarize the atrocities committed against science and sense.

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.

I Name It... Lake Campus

The City of Champaign really needs to do a better job of maintaining its storm sewers to keep stuff like this from happening. I thought the entire point of the Healey Street Detention Basin was that there wouldn't be things like a stream with a current running North along Locust Street.

Blueberries and Cherries

On my way out this evening I noticed a metric buttload of squad cars around the intersection of Green and Locust, all but one of them with lights flashing. Two hours later, some of them were still there (or had been replaced) and the lights were still going.

Whatever was up, I fully expect to read about it in the Daily Illini tomorrow, and will be disappointed if I can't. The DI is a morning paper, it should be scooping the News-Gazette on a lot more stuff than it does. The DI's craptacular local coverage makes it really hard to defend when people I know from other schools make fun of it.

Getting What's Coming To Them

While I was out and about tonight I noticed that the police were conducting Bar Raids on the Campus bars. During UofI's Moms weekend. I'm not sure what amuses me more, the idea of Champaign getting loads of cash from Suburban parents buying alcohol for their underage progeny, or of some parents seeing direct consequences for indulging their overprivileged kids. I applaud whoever came up with the idea of running a raid tonight.

Why All The School Closings?

I was in Subway for lunch today and caught a laundry list of school closings due to weather. Maybe I'm still acclimated to Chicagoland weather, but I'm kinda confused as to why a bunch of school districts closed for the day. There wasn't even two inches of accumulation on the ground at the time, and all the arterial streets were being kept clear by plows and salt.

Yet Another Reason to Dislike Unofficial

I'm currently sitting up at 5:13AM waiting for a tow truck to come and remove someone from my parking spot. If you and umpteen-thousand of your closest friends are all going to descend upon Champaign-Urbana, a community known for its craptacular parking situation, for its annual Bacchanalia, I'd appreciate it if a lot more of you would take the train, bus, or other means besides a car to get here. There aren't enough parking spots to handle the crowd, so plan ahead: just because I'm out doing something that doesn't involve ethanol does not give you the right to take my parking spot. When your car ends up in the impound lot, you'll get no sympathy from my bleary-eyed self.

Note: Edited to correct early-morning grammar.

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.

PSA: Avoid the Kirby Underpass

As I was driving along Neil this evening, I noticed that the police have blocked off the Kirby underpass where the road crosses under the Canadian National railroad tracks, as there was at least a foot of standing water. If you drive that way to work in the morning, it might be wise to use an alternate route. I had seen a cop car blocking the St. Mary's Road underpass, but going back the other way the road had been cleared, so I dunno what happened there. Windsor road was completely clear, and Stadium Drive had water gushing out of the manhole covers but was not flooded much beyond that.

Go Vote

Go directly to Vote
Do not pass Go, Do not collect $200 (because that would be illegal)

Today is Super-Duper, Gee-Williker, Ain't-it-swell? Tuesday. One or both parties may, may end up with a candidate. Maybe. I'm merely happy that my primary vote this time around actually means something. However, it's still important to go out and vote, since, even though the state is foregone for Obama, Democratic primaries award delegates proportionately. That means that Clinton can, and probably will, snag a few Illinois delegates, though probably very few of the state's superdelegates.

If you don't know where your polling place is, and you live and are registered to vote in beautiful Champaign County, IL, you can go to the Champaign County Clerk's office website and check your registration status. Polls open bright and early at 6 AM and close 7 PM. As always, the wait is generally shorter the earlier in the day you go. If you are in line when the polls close, you are still entitled to vote, but you must remain in line to do so. (This isn't as big an issue in the primary as it is in the general.) While you're there, pick up your little "I Voted" sticker so you can guilt trip your friends into going into the polls as well. Again, this skill is of increased utility in the general election, though it doesn't hurt to practice now.

Also, while I was looking at my specimen ballot, I noticed that the Democratic party in the 15th District has managed to dig up a new challenger to Rep. Tim Johnson (Bush Lackey-IL15). His name's Steve Cox, and I have no clue who this guy is. He doesn't have a website up yet, which doesn't bode well, but at least it's better than things were a couple months ago when the Dems weren't even fielding a candidate.

UPDATE: I should hone my Google-Fu a bit more, as I turned up a bio of Steve Cox on the Champaign County Democrats website. Would be nice if this could be the first hit on a Steve Cox IL search. Oh well, I guess this link is the start...

UPDATE, Part Deux: If you have moved since you last registered to vote, but are still in the area, you should be able to go to the polls and request a "Federal Ballot," which includes only the races for President, Senator, and Representative. Still, if you didn't update your registration, it's better than not voting at all. I'm not sure quite what the rules are on it - whether you can go to any precinct, or just your old and/or new one. If you have a question, I'd suggest contacting the county clerk's office.

Oh My, That's a Lot of Dandruff

So the snow's falling and we've had at least an inch already, and the News-Gazette's meteorologist is calling for 8-10 inches of total accumulation from the storm, not counting the blowing and drifting that's sure to occur afterwards. The University sent out a massmail on how it was planning to deal with the snow, including pretreating streets and sidewalks before the snow started to fall in earnest. On my way home I could definitely see a difference between the sidewalks controlled by campus and by private owners. Even so, whether or not we see a repeat closing of the school will probably depend on the rate of snowfall, and whether or not the cities and the universities can keep up with it overnight. Myself, I doubt that the Chancellor will call off classes, but I guess we'll see in the morning.

Also, this'll probably be the first real test of the Champaign ordinance requiring private property owners in Campustown to clear snow from their sidewalks within a few days of the end of the storm, or face a fee when the city does it for them. Hopefully the frats will get their acts together and get it done, rather than let the snow pile up until the city comes around.

For those who wish to check it every 30 seconds,here's a link to the News-Gazette's closings page.

UPDATE: The News-Gazette reports that Uni High is closed tomorrow, though the University is still open. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason Uni High is closed is because some/all of its feeder district busses will not be running. I'd also like to make clear that I'd really like it if the University were closed tomorrow, as I've been accused in the comments of not thinking Positive University Closing Thoughts.

UPDATE, Part Deux: The University of Illinois is open for classes Friday, 1 February 2008.

An Exercize in Cognitive Dissonance

To continue the transportation theme from earlier: does anyone else find it amusing that the recently renamed 22N Illini heads South on Goodwin, and that the 22S Illini heads North on Goodwin?

Myself, I never had a problem figuring out where the 22 Illini Engineering and the 22 Illini VetMed/PAR-FAR via First went.