So You Think You Can Govern? Reality Show.

GOP Dumps Presidential Candidates, Launches So You Think You Can Govern? Reality Show. Story here. You know this just might work better than anyone could think.

How to teach politics and government

Uh oh! Some of the fine citizens and the upstanding high school principal in Ronald Reagan’s college home town of Eureka have decided that the Daily Show’s coverage of politics is not appropriate material for a high school politics and government class, so after parent and student complaints, a 1st year teacher has been suspended, at least for now. For those of you who do not known Lincolnland, our state consists of one great big city, a handful of small cities, and a whole big bunch of small rural towns nestled in the maize and soybean agricultural desert. The Phactor can certainly sympathize with these people. You certainly don’t want your children to ever encounter any different opinions, any discomforting ideas, or any material that might make them uncomfortable. Proper schoolin’ should help them to remain smugly assured that their views, values, and ideas will never be subjected to any criticism particularly when that education is paid for by taxes. Any first year teacher of politics and government should know that the correct way to teach is to drone on about the 3 parts of government and how it was an OK idea until the presidency got too big for its britches especially when the office is not occupied by the party of choice in these parts like back in the good ol’ days of Reagan. Bringing in current events and popular culture to stir up interest is terrible teaching. No teacher should openly disparage political candidates. They should use clips and quotes from news sources, perhaps even the Daily Show, so that students can actually hear what the candidates actually say, you know, all those historical, geographical, political, and constitutional gaffs, which of course is exactly what the Daily Show does. What teaching moments they provide! No teacher disparagement required; just let students listen to and evaluate what politicians actually say. But rather than suggesting to their children that they figure out how to respond appropriately, how to defend their positions intellectually, how to make a case for their support of a political position, these parents whine to the principal who suspends the teacher. If people want to know why the educational system in this country is not what it used to be, parents and principals like these are the reason. They don’t want education; they want indoctrination, oh, and their children admitted to our state colleges and universities.

Rainforest diversity

It's hard to describe rainforest diversity to people who have not seen it, but it's even harder to visualize. This is a false-color image of a rainforest where each color represents a certain degree of tree diversity, different species, different genera, or maybe different families. The ability to image diversity this way based on reflective differences in species chemistry will allow many studies of rainforests that simply aren't possible from the ground, or if they are possible, then in much shorter amounts of time. But you wonder what it means when what appears to be the crown of a single tree is a collage of a dozen or more colors. Lots of epiphytes? But this just looks cool and you really need the big box of crayollas to do this kind of work. You only need a box of 8 to handle most temperate zone forests. Of course, seen in real life it's just all green. Too bad it's not really all these colors, not even in Oz.

How do you explain a lotus?

A flower lover does not like the Phactor's "analytical" approach to fabulous flowers. How sad.
A lotus flowers in my garden pond, and no lovelier flower exists on Earth. No wonder the lotus has figured so prominently in Eastern art and religions. In addition to its beauty a great many things are known about this flower. The lotus is very distinct from and not even closely related to the water lilies that bloomed in the same pond earlier in the summer. The lotus flower functions to interact with pollinators producing a most unusual fruit containing its seeds. The 135 million year history of flowers and their evolution into a myriad of forms is a marvelous story, and waterlilies, not lotuses, are a remnant of that very ancient stock from which today’s diversity of flowers sprang forth.
This flower lover wants to know why botanists such as the Phactor cannot just appreciate flowers like the lotus for what it is without dissecting it and taking it apart. Can’t we just look at it and say it’s beautiful and leave well enough alone? Well, no. That just isn’t good enough. For one thing, curiosity demands looking deeper. Although the lotus and waterlily look much alike in a very general way, they have many obvious differences, and botanists want to know why both similarities and differences exist. While both lotus and waterlily flowers are very pretty that information doesn’t answer any questions, and even that leaves the Phactor wondering why the aesthetic senses of humans are tuned to interpret some flowers as pretty when they are adapted by natural selection to attract certain insect or bird pollinators. The failure to appreciate the aesthetics of flowers is a symptom of clinical depression, so certainly looking beyond the shallow it’s-a-pretty-flower-and-you-don’t-need-to-know-anything-else perspective is warranted on both sides of the human-flower equation.
This brings the Phactor to a last point, a very important point, detailed knowledge of and an in depth understanding of a flower, of a lotus, in no way diminishes my aesthetic appreciation of the flower. And why would it? Do Civil War historians have a diminished appreciation of the valor of the soldiers because they know of the impact of many mistakes, miscommunications, and chance events had on the outcome of events? Does a painting have any less impact on art historians because they know about the palette, brushes, and personal woes of the painter? Ah, but historians are students of the subject they love and admire, and the unidimensional flower lover is not.
In return the Phactor wants to know what kind of mind, what kind of intellect is it that doesn’t want to know any more or isn’t curious about natural things? What is such a mind afraid of? What kind of intellect settles for the simplest and most banal of explanations (it was created that way)? In most cases in my experience they are worried that a quest for knowledge will gore a very sacred cow, their religion. How truly sad. Especially in biology where literally each and every time biologists have pursued a detailed course of study, the results, the understanding acquired, are quite at odds with religion. But a lotus, which isn’t even mentioned in the Bible, by any other name, would still grow from the navel of Narayana, and its leaf would still carry Kamadwa down the Ganges. And the saddest thing of all is a wasted intellect.

Day-Date Disconnect

So many years of academic life have resulted in the Phactor having a terrible day-date disconnect. It's not that dates for events are unknown to myself, it's that the date is not connected to my daily/weekly world. That an event is happening on the 14nd is known, but that the 14nd is today is not. This has evolved because my life has always revolved around scheduling on a MWF or TR basis upon which a sequence of lectures and labs is superimposed, so dates are little needed. Perhaps some of the problem is the carefully cultivated and nuanced forgetfulness of a senior academic so preoccupied with weightier thoughts that some lapses can easily be understood and forgiven. Department secretaries remind me when classes start and students bug me about finals, and it all works, mostly. A weekly desk planner has been in service for years and the transition to computer scheduling, weakly attempted, has always seemed more trouble than it is worth. But trouble began when flipping forward a couple of weeks and then back, one extra page was turned and lo and behold, 30 days hath September, April, June, but November has 37, or so it appeared having done the same week twice, and no, lectures and labs were not repeated; the Phactor is absent minded, not senile. So now there are 3 weeks left in the semester, not 4, and rather than congratulating myself for being more or less on schedule, things are rather a bit behind, and therefore quite normal. And so the world turns, and we return to the regularly scheduled calendar of events, and the professor gets to announce an exam, on a Monday. This is certain to help the teaching evaluations.

Tree House

The Phactor is going to start growing his tree house right now because clearly this tree house is going to take awhile. This is a pretty nifty idea, but why use cherry trees? The designers think it will take 100 years to get cherry trees to do this, but you can probably do this with willows in no more than 20 years except you won't get those pretty flowers. Some time back the Phactor showed a less aesthetic example, but one grown in far less time. And the best bet might be a fig, but of course you'd need a tropical climate to grow a fig treehouse. Actually saw a similar structure once, but memory fails me where, a patio room whose "roof" was constructed of wisteria ribs that originally were trained to a frame but now had become self supporting.

Globalization & international diversity on campus

It's always nice to get new dean-lets and new provostettes; they are like a breath of fresh air. Our new assistant provost is interested in globalization, and she looks nice dressed in our school's colors. “As the world becomes smaller through globalization, we want to be prepared, and we need to continue to internationalize the campus.”
Dear AP, Although personally unaware the globe was shrinking, the Phactor can only say, "It's about time the rest of the campus caught up to biology!" Although you may be unaware of this, international boundaries are human constructs that have little meaning to biological organisms or biologists except as they serve to restrict our activities. Biology is a global field, so when next a legislator wishes to know what benefit is it to the people of Lincolnland that some of us study rain forest, at what they imagine to be state expense (doesn't the Phactor wish they were picking up the tab!) you will be there to say biology was the first field to be truly global and what happens in the tropics actually can have quite an impact here. Rather than taking students on European tours, ours actually go on field trips where they go, and stay, and study rainforest biology learning about dozens and dozens of species. Please understand, the Phactor is not a tour guide. You go on to say the campus needs more international diversity. Great! Biology could not agree more and we already study more species than you can imagine. Why there are probably more than 500 exotic species of plants in our glasshouse alone, and they could use more space. All by his little old self the Phactor has studied and published on more species than the whole rest of the non-biological campus, who more or less total 1, humans. Perhaps yours truly could be considered for the next diversity award for which a species list will be provided demonstrating his committment to diversity. While humans and their institutions have dithered, embracing or fearing, globalization, biologists have been whole heartedly global for at least a century. So should you need any assistance, any advice, any suggestions from people who are leading the way, feel free to call. Oh, and given that biology is achieving our stated goals so well, might you not put in a good word with your boss that letting biology dwindle through loss of positions is counterproductive to globalization and diversity? Good luck with the new position. It's sure to broaden your horizons. All the best, TPP.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Not so much

Our glasshouse is home to a great many species that are used mostly in teaching for a great variety of reasons. Today's flower (see if you can guess what it is) is fabulous only because the plant seldom flowers, especially in captivity, and at about 1 cm diameter even then the flowers often go unnoticed. As can be readily seen, this is a staminate flower of rather simple construction consisting as it does of 9 stamens and 3 petalloid perianth parts. Quite likely our glasshouse resident is a single clone, and therefore a single "male", so pistillate flowers are not going to appear.

Filling a hole with money

Yes, when you take a big hole and fill it with money it can look a lot better. Nearly 100 years ago a pond was constructed in our garden by the first owner of this property. By the time the Phactors purchased the pond, it was basically a concrete and rubber lined tub, albeit a large one, ~18 x 28 feet, filled with leafy muck and annually covered with duckweed. Fortunately our sacred lotus hid most of the ugliness and was quite happy to take over the entire pond. To help stimulate the economy, the decision was made to throw money at the problem and renovate the pond and install a water circulation/filtering system, and a nice cascade. The lotus is now confined to a submerged tank to prevent future conquest of the entire pond. It took the entire summer of intermittent work to finish the project, but the results were quite nice, nice enough to help you forget the cost. Of course now the landscaping has to be done, and nothing like three new Japanese maples to economically start the project. Here's a look, although from this angle only the bottom of the 4 foot tall, 10 foot long cascade can be seen. And it sounds nice too.

Coffee fruit

Oh, look at this! The coffee crop is ripening, so it won't be long and the Phactor will have to bring in a bus load of students to pick the crop. Hopefully there will be enough for my class to harvest, process, and roast their own. These are coffee "cherries", a two-seeded berry. Each of the two seeds is a coffee "bean", which is not a legume no matter what they are called. The leaves are dark green and glossy, and the fruits so bright, so why don't we have some nice seasonal decorations fashioned after coffee? This is the first really decent coffee crop since some moron broke into the glass house and stole a coffee tree if full fruit in freezing weather. The trail of leaves and berries could even be followed by one of our campus police, but the tree did not survive it's winter outing. The replacement trees were small and have taken awhile to mature, so this is pretty exciting. Or maybe it's just the caffeine talking.