I can haz a cheez burger and the Pope

moar funny pictures

This photo reminds me of an article I read earlier today: Pope says some science shatters human dignity. I think the title is a little misleading. The Pope appears to just be saying that we need to maintain some principals while developing bio-ethics. I think the title of the article plays up the standard Church-Science conflict thesis, though the text of the article does give a slightly more nuanced rendering of the issues. I’m not an apologist for Ratzinger, I don’t particularly like him, but we need not exaggerate his views to play up the issue. Ratzinger was recently lambasted by the faculty of La Sapienza University in Rome for stating that Galileo was dogmatic in his support of the Copernican system and that the church’s reaction was in some ways understandable. While this is unpopular and perhaps a simplification, the current historiography on the issue would in some ways back up Ratzinger. Galileo was not the victim of blind religious persecution, but rather was involved in a patronage game, political battles, and personal conflicts. Again, I’m not saying Ratzinger is infallible (which I suppose to some is blasphemous), but I think he is attacked whenever he ventures into science which is unfair and counterproductive.

Wedding Registry

We just got done with our first effort at registering (Target), and it’s an interesting experience. You fill in some information on a computer, and then they give you a scanner to go around the store. Both Lisa and I were expecting some sort of 80’s montage to break out where we would run around scanning anything and everything. Bath towels, bed sheets, bald guys, little kids, cokes, chicken wings, everything get scanned as we run giggling around the store. While we had a good time, we somehow never found the button to start up the bad 80’s music or ran into John Hughes. Oh well; we did find like 30 something things that we would be happy to be given. Please visit Target.com or rush out to your local neighborhood Target, where you’ll find low prices everyday.

Bill Clinton comes to town

President Clinton is on campus today campaigning for Hillary. While the senator from New York has yet to make an official appearance in the state, the campus seems much more happy to see the ex-president than the possible-next. There were at least a thousand people waiting in line at 11:00, 15 minutes before the doors opened. Bill won’t even come on stage till at least 12:15.

The whole thing is set to be in the Field House here on campus, but I don’t understand the choice of venue. The seating will be uncomfortable and will fill up extremely quickly, while the much larger basketball stadium goes unused. The same thing happened when Paul Rusesabagina spoke at Catlett about the famous Hotel Rwanda. OU President David Boren is a genius in terms of aggrandizement for the university through press, so I’m sure there’s a plan, but it still seems odd.

Having now spent 5-10 minutes blogging on it, I am not even going to attend the political event of the semester, because I need to do work. I’ve got a response paper due for class tomorrow, a prospectus on my thesis due Friday, I want to prepare presentations for Grad student events over the next couple weeks, and I at some point have to write a conference proposal and presentation. Lisa and I are going to register for gifts soon, get measured for alterations to the dress and tux, figure out music details, rentals, and the list goes on and on. I was up till 12:30 two nights ago working, and I couldn’t get to sleep till 2:30 last night because my mind was going over details of my various projects. I’ve been a perpetual optimist throughout my college career that when I get done with the current batch of things, my life will calm down. However, that is not the way of things. As the universe inescapably drifts into ever increasing entropy, so my life gets forever more chaotic and busy.

Internship

I’m currently working for the Graduate College here at OU, researching their history.  Originally, I had wanted to produce a small book on the history, but after repeatedly being told, “No one will buy it,” and “you can’t write a book in 9 months on something you know nothing about,” I agreed to change the format.

This morning, I presented a rough draft of a very nice looking website with a short narrative history of the College, a time-line, a list of the deans, and an index of important people (first Masters, first PhD, first minority student admitted, etc.)  My boss said that having seen it, this was exactly the right idea for the project and we could finally move on to filling in the details.  I’m pretty happy with the turn of events in that I might actual finish at some point (hopefully May), and this is a more digestible format for people not interested in historical minutia.

I guess the most lasting lesson from the ordeal, is that you can spend months and months just trying to figure out how to present a research project.  I wasted a good bit of time trying to write chapters, when I should have just been building outlines and exploring the history.  Hopefully this lesson will come in handy as I write my thesis and later the dissertation.  Do the research, and organize it; figure out the prose later.

Stuff

Lisa and I spent about 20 minutes last night trying to come up with fruit-animal rhymes.  So far our list consists of only:

grape-ape
antelope-cantaloupe
hare-pear

We have strange and pointless night time conversations.

Rock of Love II

“There’s a lot of things going on in the world, and I’ve learned about a lot of them through My Space.” – Erin

If you haven’t checked out this show, try it out.

Thesis

I talked to my advisor, Peter Barker, today, and I think we got a basic outline for my thesis established.  The thesis is going to be a description of Kirwan’s phlogiston theory and a prospective for the dissertation. I’m also going to include a section on the Salem trip, so it will be nice to get something out of that.  I’m glad to have a line of approach now on the thesis, but as Zach said, it’s “heavy” knowing what I have to do now.

Lisa had suggested, and Peter agreed, that I should also write up the information on Kirwan and Salem for the Midwest Junto.  I think the story of pirates, librarians, and lies will go over fairly well as a refreshingly entertaining narrative amongst the academic papers usually presented.

Pandora’s Breeches by Patricia Fara

So, John insists that I blog about the history of science book I read for my Gender and Science class, because “it’s a history of science blog.” Well, fine.

The book I read is Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment by Patricia Fara. The main argument of the book is that the traditional narrative of the history of science needs to be rewritten to include people other than the ‘great men’ of science. I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. What I disagree with is how she goes about achieving this in her book. Specifically, she always pairs a man with a woman, even if the pairing is unnatural. To me, this says that talking about women in history is only okay when you can prove it helped a man in some way.

Each of the nine main chapters follow the same basic structure: it begins with the discussion of the male scientist in question, followed by a block quote that is supposed to convey the story that is normally written about the scientist by historians, and then the woman connected to the male scientist is discussed in terms of how they aided the male scientist. First, a word about the block quote about the scientist in question. At first glance they appear to be taken from scholarly works, but in fact, they are written by Fara to serve as a counter-point for her argument (Some might say these sections are straw-men, but I would never do such a thing). Though she does cite where she gets the information, I think it does the historian that she cites a disservice by condensing their entire book into a couple paragraphs of information, which she then uses to make her own argument.  

While some of the pairings that she presents in her book (like William and Caroline Herschel) are natural because the people actually worked together, others are a little bit more head-scratching. Take for instance, Anne Conway and Gottfried Leibniz. The connection that Fara makes between these two is that Leibniz read and liked Conway’s philosophy. While that is very significant (for a man to be influenced by a woman’s philosophy, in the seventeenth century), Fara never discusses what Conway’s philosophy is, how it influenced Leibniz’s work, why it is significant, etc. Instead, she gives us a biography of Conway’s life, which is completely disconnected from the biography she gave of Leibniz’s life. 

Caroline Herschel, who I am writing my thesis about, has a whole chapter devoted to her partnership with William. While this is great, because she is getting exposure for her work, it is not so good because of the way that Fara portrays Herschel. Essentially, Fara writes the most simplistic version of Herschel’s life that can actually be based on facts. She portrays Herschel as a woman with no mind of her own, whose only want in life was to serve her brother. I have no problem with Fara making an argument about Herschel that I disagree with. What I have a problem with is the fact that Fara makes Herschel into a caricature of women in science after she explicitly states that she does not want to write women in science as “cardboard cutouts – the selfless helpmate, the source of inspiration, the dedicated assistant who sacrifices everything  for the sake of her man and the cause of science.” (Fara, p. 20). But that is exactly what she does with Herschel!!!  

As you might be able to tell, I am passionate about this stuff. Again, I have no problem with Fara making an argument in her book that I disagree with. I just wish she would be more consistent in her handling of women in science, and at least attempt not to tell simplistic, easy stories.  

Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment

We’re reading Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment this week for Rienk Vermij’s Early Modern Science class.  I was a little skeptical about the book after reading the introduction.  Israel challenges several of my preconceived historiographical expectations: first by identifying the period of 1680-1750 as being the primary period of advancement for the Enlightenment, rather than the later high-Enlightenment; he also emphasizes the conflict between the church and science/philosophy which would seem a step back from the complexity thesis of interaction between religion and science.

While the language and focus of the introduction are bold and enthusiastic, Israel offers impressive evidence in the book to prove his theses.  He appears to be extremely well read in this time period covering an impressively broad swath of European intellectuals.  His writing is succinct, cohesive, and convincing.

Still, I think that Israel is somewhat disingenuous with his choice of evidence and representation of several actors as either a philosopher or a theologian.  Israel cites many philosophers as heretics much feared by the church, although several of his examples were in fact members of the clergy.  None of the churches of the day were monolithic sources of thought but rather had internal disputes and political squabbles between their vast memberships.  His suggestion that the progress of the Enlightenment was completed by 1750 also seems to assume some sort of teleological inevitability of change and to deny the importance of popularizers like Voltaire (Israel explicitly sets out to downplay the importance of Voltaire.  I just disagree with this aim).

Anyway, I would recommend the book in that its aim is bold and the writing is good.  I need to read the whole thing more closely and further digest, but I think it’s worth at least a skim.

Salem Trip Day 4

Having found the answers to my research questions, I decided to spend the last day of my trip sight-seeing in Boston. I resisted the urge to stay in bed, got up early and again ate a tasty breakfast from the B&B. After breakfast though, I made my first mistake of the day, wasting some time playing around on the internet. I should have figured out what I wanted to see in Boston, and I should have gone down to the train station during peak period, but instead I played around on ESPN and Yahoo Sports. By the time I finally did get to the Salem train stop, it was 10:50 and the next train wasn’t coming until 11:40. I got a coffee, caught the train, and made my way down to the North Station. My plan was to see Harvard, go to Boston Commons and then go to the Art Museum. This plan was cast into some doubt when I found myself lost in Boston. I had assumed that the Harvard Avenue stop would be somewhere near the University. 2 hours of wandering around later, I finally arrived at Harvard U. By this point I was tired and hungry and decided that Harvard’s location and history were far more impressive than its architecture.

I stopped by the book store and found a copy of Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge on remainder for only $4 (suckers). How this classic of philosophy made its way to the bargain bin will remain a mystey – Berkeley was one of the most mocked and derided philosophers both within his own time and today for his theory of immaterialism, but he did get a university and town named after him. I read some of my new found treasure while having lunch and then, much refreshed, took in more of Harvard.

Next I made my way over to the Museum of Fine Art. Happily, they happened to be having a special exhibit on the Napoleonic period, my favorite period of history. After roaming around the museum, I would have to recommend it to anyone visiting Boston.

Exhausted from many hours of walking around Boston, I decided to return to Salem and head to bed. This is really when everything went downhill.

1) The subways were packed but only to the point of being a minor irritation.

2) At the North Station I realized that I had left my check card at the restaurant where I had lunch.

3) When I got back to Salem, I checked my email and read that I had inadvertently taken one of the Athenaeum’s books the day before. However the collections were now closed and would not reopen before my morning flight.

4) My flight was at 11 but the morning trains would either get me to Boston at 7:45 or 10:20. Alternatively, I could take a cab, but I barely had enough money for a cab and now had no debit card.

5) I also had not eaten dinner and was now starving.

So, I decided to get dressed – I had already changed into PJ’s – and go back into town. 6) My shoelaces broke when I put my shoes back on.

I walked over to the Athenaeum, but they don’t have a book drop so I put the book in the mailbox. Then I bought some shoelaces which I later found were too short. I saw a Wendy’s across an empty street, but while crossing I slipped on ice and fell twisting my ankle and cutting my hand. The street that was empty when I started to cross magically filled with cars, and two of them literally stopped, rolled down their windows, pointed, and laughed. And the Wendy’s was closed. In fact, every other restaurant in town was closed. I went by the bank to get more cash to cover any expenses in the morning only to remember I didn’t have my debit card and found that none of my other cards would work. Finally I gave up on everything, limped back up to my B&B and went to bed. The day wasn’t a complete waste with the Berkeley book and the museum visit, but I definitely wish that I had just stayed in Salem.