Tuesday, February 21, 2006

A Bit of Reason from AAAS

It appears that good reason is beginning to break out in the natural selection-intelligent design controversy. Reports from both Reuters (CNN) and the BBC yesterday carried the story of AAAS President Gilbert Omenn saying, "It's time to recognize that science and religion should never be pitted against one another. They can and do co-exist in the context of most people's lives. Just not in science classrooms, lest we confuse our children."

Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, "said many people held the 'toxic' idea that 'you are either a Christian creationist or you are a bad-guy atheist.'"

"Gerry Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association said some teachers feared losing their jobs if they taught evolution."

While I'm sure some of the more "over-the-top" comments made at the recent AAAS annual convention in St. Louis may actually stir things up a bit, it's time folks began to speak out and say that one can support natural selection, even be a bleeding-heart liberal Democrat, and still be a Christian. Many science teachers of faith have been placed in nearly untenable positions by their scientific knowledge and beliefs and the rhetoric promoting intelligent design as science from the pulpit.

Tech Support Gone Awry

One of our grad students at Rose-Hulman showed up at my office just before quitting time last Thursday with his iBook. His CD-ROM drive wouldn't work, and he needed it to run a critical application, Matlab, that requires the installation CD be inserted for the application to run. Between 5 and 7 P.M. we managed to establish that the drive was the problem and also hose one of the partitions on the iBook! Over the next few days, we managed to restore his main partition and create a workable disk image of the CD that allowed him to run the critical software (during finals week) until he can buy a replacement drive. It always aggravates me when software companies establish hurdles for legitimate paid users of their product to overcome when something goes wrong.

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