No money for tiger chow

Is there some contest among GnOPe governors to see who will be the "REAL" fiscal conservative as determined by who can make the most drastic cuts?  Now there are cuts, and then there are cuts, but the GnOPe always takes aim at the same two things, social programs for the poor and public education. Until recently, the USA could look to public education as one of its great achievements, institutions that allowed kids like TPP from blue collar backgrounds to become college professors, of course in the process, of becoming educated and gettting ahead, it makes many of us into liberals.  Gasp! Being able to think has never been good for ideologies, so when your party's policy is to create, maintain, and reinforce a wealthy elite, to which us college professors while comfortable, are not a part. So little Bobbie Jindal who once said the GnOPe has to stop being the party of stupid, is proposing a whopping 82% cut to LSU's budget! No institution can absorb such cuts in the short term, so this is designed to be damaging to the state's premier institution of higher learning. In truth, illiterate and uneducated is different from being stupid, so clearly the LA governor is aiming for the former not the latter. Does it ever occur to these fiscal conservatives that higher education pays back for its cost in spades?

An outing in Louisiana - Fontainebleu and Abita Springs

TPP can only stand being in a big city for so long, like maybe five days.  Today's outing required us to cross the 25 mile causeway across Lake Pontchartrain. Quite near the north end of the causeway is a state park that occupies the grounds of the old Fontainebleau plantation; the double row of live oaks that must have lined the road in are still present, but strangely they aren't labeled as such.  The idea was to do a bit of birding/botanizing on a not very long hike, and we liked the sound of their marsh board walk.  However it appears that it wasn't just damaged by Katrina, the boardwalk was wiped out.  A piece of boardwalk was spotted in debris under some live oaks at least 400 yards from the marsh.  Although a hot, humid, near oppressive day, our nature walk was fine.  Glad to have had a dew rag.  The drive over and the walk consumed the AM so drove a bit further to Abita Springs and had lunch at the Abita Springs Brew-pub and visited the Abita Brewery.  If you haven't yet discovered their beers, well, you be missing some very good beer.  TPP is especially fond of their Turbodog Abita Beer (once voted the best dark beer in the USA) and their Amber Ale (image shows four glasses of Amber).  You can tell this is Louisiana by the condiments to the right: hot sauce, ketchup, and mayo.  If you visit their web page you can download an app for your iphone or ipad that will tell you how to get to the nearest place that sells their beer.  Hope it isn't more than a state or country or two away.  However, judging by the brewery expansion underway, a lot more Abita beer will be coming our way.  No bad news there.

Botany confernence symposium generating more PR for Louisiana

Oh, gosh!  OK, it's just the Huffington Post, but it's more real good PR for Louisiana and its Governor Bobby Jindal.  Here's the link to what the HuffPo had to say about the symposium "Yes, Bobby, Evolution is True".  Quite a few highly complementary comments follow the article.  But what else is there to say?  Oh, yes, one commenter brought up the old "it's only a theory, not a fact" objection to evolution.  Well, many, many parts of the theory of evolution are facts, i.e., natural selection, and so on, and evolution works.  We use evolution in agriculture and medicine; stop and think about why you need a new flu shot each year.  There is no creationist/ID medicine or agriculture because it's a useless idea.  So we have a scientific explanation that works supported by lots of evidence, and a religiously based explanation with no supporting evidence that doesn't work, and then we get politicians that want us to spend time on the latter at the expense of the former.  How great is that for science education?  TPP is having some fun here at the meetings with all his colleagues.

Uh,oh! Botanists laugh at LA legislators who don't like evolution

Well, it just couldn't be helped.  For no particular reasons that TPP can see, a symposium entitled, "Yes, Bobby, Evolution is true" at our annual ongoing botanical meetings in New Orleans attracted some attention:  Now why would evolution be controversial?  Bobby got an invitation, to attend although his spokesperson said they didn't know about that.  But hey, a governor at a botanical meeting - aint' gunna happen.  Here's what the Times Picayune had to say.  Well, the college student presenter Zach Kopplin, just put up videos of LA legislators in action: defending witch doctors, carping about people with all those little letters after their names (like PhD) telling you what to do, and the like, and yep, a national audience of scientists laughed.  Now of course, this is quite unfair.  Similar videos of our own state (and federal) legislators in action would also elicit laughter, and are there any that wouldn't?  Now what all this was about is a LA law that basically permits teachers to introduce creationism and intelligent design into science classes.  The code phrases are "academic freedom" and "critical thinking".  In and of themselves these are good things, but when used as a smoke screen for pseudoscience, us professional science educators just can't be quiet.  So, yes, Bobby, people from across the nation laughed at you.  How's that work for your aspirations on a national level?  Still want the GnOPe to stop being the party of stupid?  Well, you signed the bill. 

Misunderstanding science in Louisiana

In a recent hearing on science education, Louisiana state Sen. Mike Walsworth was questioning a science teacher about the teaching of evolution. He asked if there was an experiment that would prove the theory of evolution “without a shadow of a doubt.” 
How do you answer such a moronic, ignorant question?  TPP would be tempted to respond, “Wow, I don’t know how to respond to someone who understands so little about science that  they would ask that question.”  Actually, the Senator probably knew the answer, and this is the sort of gotcha question lawyers like to use, so attempting to answer it is playing his game, and he’s picking on a high school teacher not an evolutionary biologist.  You’d be tempted to say, “Senator, given that more than enough evidence exists to convince virtually all biologists of the factual nature of evolution, and yet you remain unconvinced, clearly one experiment of any kind, on any subject with any result isn’t going to convince you of anything.”  And when the teacher told the Senator of Richard Linski’s quite amazing experiment in bacterial evolution, a good example for a single experiment, the Senator asks if any of the bacteria evolved into a person.  Yes, and they became a state legislator.  Any biologist who claimed or suggested such a thing would be a certified loonie, so again the Senator is playing games to try to get a proponent of evolution to admit that the experiment didn’t show bacteria could evolve into people even though the theory of evolution never would predict such an event.  What the experiment does show amply is that natural selection can generate surprising amounts of genetic modifications in a very short period of time.  What evolution does say is that much, much earlier in Earth history both humans and bacteria shared a common ancestor. 
It would probably be useless to try to explain to this fellow that science doesn’t try to prove anything; science falsifies the alternatives.  Over 150 years ago Darwin said that evolution was descent with modification and he proposed that natural selection, differential reproduction of genetic variants, was the mechanism by which this modification occurred.  So ever since then, biologists of all sorts have been trying to falsify the idea of descent with modification, and they have failed.  Along the way a lot of hypotheses about specific descents have been falsified, but nothing has shaken this hypothesis at all.  And biologists have been examining natural selection in the lab and in the field such that now thousands of examples of how selection works are well documented, and not only that but biologists have found additional mechanisms that also generate modifications.  So Senator, once you know about all of this mountain of evidence, biologists are quite justified in saying that evolution is true “without a shadow of a doubt.” 
TPP will be in Louisiana this summer and we'll have a special symposium on evolution for people like the Senator where we'll ask the question, "Can people like this demonstrate any ability to learn science, and if they can't, can they just learn to leave the teaching of science to the people who can?"

Planning a symposium in Louisiana

Next summer the botanical meetings will be held in New Orleans, and TPP is looking forward to the food and music, oh, and the botany.  Good planning, go to Louisiana in the summer, but probably that's when academic types, especially students, can better afford it with off-season rates.  So some of us been thinking, how about a symposium on evolution titled "Yes, Bobby (Jindal), evolution is real".  It's hard to believe Jindal falls for the "it's just a theory" line; it's easier to believe he that he would play religious conservatives for political reasons, but why not take him to task?  So we can have some fun with this.  Maybe we invite Dr. Donald Aguillard to speak.  He's the superintendent of the St. Mary Parish School District, but if his name sounds familiar it's because he was the lead plaintiff in the Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court Case in 1987 that ruled the teaching of creationism in public school science classes is unconstitutional.  Jindal has made news by giving vouchers, public money, to private religious schools who are under no such prohibition.  They can teach all the anti-science stuff they want.  So maybe the botanists get a bit uppity for a change.  If you want to know what botanists think about all this, here's the link to the Botanical Society's statement on evolution, which is pretty good even if TPP was the primary author.