I was going to vote for Barack Obama anyway, but this video, released today, has really sealed my vote. Barack Obama is really good at speaking plain English — having conversations with his audience rather than politician rhetoric. I feel like he’s read the first set of theses from the Cluetrain Manifesto, a hallmark of my beliefs in communication and marketing.

Check it out for yourself. He isn’t really saying anything new, but he’s doing it so forwardly — no sitrring music, no overlays of American flags, no shots of him with his sleeves rolled up, working hard for his country. Just his face, a camera, and some words. The only evidence of it being a video production and not a face-to-face conversation is a slight zoom-in as he taked about the war in Iraq, and his web address at the bottom of the screen.

This is the kind of honesty and simplicity our country needs right now.

Here’s why I love walking by the riverside on campus:

Common wildlife on the St. Joe. Click to enlarge the preview, or click here for a hi-res version with no captions.

This is on the bank of the St. Joseph River at IPFW, looking west. On the near side is a little parkland with a few ornamental trees; on the far side is a bit of forest on a little peninsula that, situated behind the soccer fields, has been allowed to remain wild. I thought the avian diversity here was worth noting, especially since the symmetry with which they organized themselves was nice. That egret has been hanging around the last few weeks; I’d seen egrets here only once before, about a year ago.

The birds pictured are, left to right, Canada Goose (Branta canadensis), Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodius), Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos), and Great Egret (Ardea alba).

Tags: Birds, Campus wildlife

(NOTE: This was originally published for Freethought Fort Wayne’s blog. I think it is totally appropriate and fun to re-post here. – Andy)

My friend Dave is an outspoken atheist and lived in Indy. He out this hilarious email last night to a bunch of friends, and gave me permission to share it with you:

About 2am last night I heard two guys arguing vehemently outside one of the buildings of my apartment complex.

Obviously I walked outside and became belligerent with them.

I ridiculed one for wearing a snow cap and asked them why they couldn’t have their big discussion inside. One said it was about God, and his girlfriend will get upset. So instead of getting angry I offered to join in. If I wasn’t going to be sleeping I might as well be arguing. Ten minutes later my neighbor comes outside and asks us to keep it down—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The guy with the snow cap left pretty quick after my opening shots, and I was left with a nut. It started out simple enough; he claimed the Big Bang Theory was too new to be believed, I said I don’t know or care at the moment whether it’s true, and asked for a positive reason to believe in his god. He gave me the ole’ deer-in-headlights, obviously expecting to get me tangled up as only two drunks who know nothing about science can get when trying to talk about science.

We moved on and he brought out the tired “but you can’t refute God” and I shot back “can you refute unicorns?” He paused for a second, understandably since I did just bring unicorns into the argument and I don’t think he’s taken a philosophy class or ever heard of William of Ockham.

Eventually we made it to evolution, and I did my best with what I know. Of course, it wasn’t too difficult; all I had to explain to him was that exhibiting two dead pieces of bark, which were laying conveniently at his side, and yelling to me that they couldn’t reproduce did not actually refute the theory of evolution.

He then claimed “they” found pyramids in Bosnia, made well before the Egyptian pyramids, and that that somehow disproved evolution as well. This was a couple of breaths after he laughed at carbon dating.

We treaded back a bit when I asked him why I should believe in his god over anyone else’s, and he said polytheism was silly—well, once I explained to him what it was and brought up Greek mythology—and he said it was stupid to believe in a god like Zeus and a 2,000 year-old myth. I recoiled and waited for him to correct himself. He said nothing and I waited another few beats (deer, headlights, go!) and said “wasn’t 2,000 years ago the birth of your savior?”

He changed it to 5,000 and moved on.

We visited materialism next and I told him desire for a higher being, no matter how much it made your life complete or kept your grandmother smiling and in the kitchen and she makes really good pie—it meant nothing in relation to what was or wasn’t the truth, and I brought up the 9/11 conspiracy almost by accident; a casual throw-up to an example of crazy people who disregard truth because they want a certain outcome…

FAIL. He was a 9/11 truther. I spent the next few minutes defending Bush (lemme tell you I loved that) and the government against conspiracy theory. I really don’t know the temperature at which steel bends or breaks, ergo I failed. But not so much as I finally got him off his do-it-yourself-home-course-in-structural-engineering for a bit to get him to admit that he cares more about what makes people happy—which Jesus does—than he cares about the truth.

I said: “So you’re accusing Americans of plotting and executing the worst terrorist attack our generation has seen more because it makes you happy rather than it’s the truth?”

Yeah, I admit that one wasn’t too fair. And anyway that’s when the belligerence came. He accused me of science and I accused him of being willfully ignorant, and as I was walking away, doing that thing where you’re trying to get the last, petty little remark off before your commence the angry storming, and he said this, which caused me pause:

“I hope you’re happy with your new body in seven years, because that’s what science says you’ll have!”

“Huh? What…What the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] are you talking about?” I said.

“Your new body. Seven years. I hope you’re happy with it!”

“Is it thin and sexy?”

He rolled his head and guffawed a little—like how dare I make fun of his final blow that should’ve surely set my reality to crumble—and he said:

“Yeah…I hope you’re happy because you’ll…science says you’ll have a new body so explain that!”

I walked away, finally. Just kidding, we exchanged obscenities for a few minutes before I did make it back to my stoop. I found a friend sitting and smoking a cigarette. The new-body-creationist did come over at one point to say “hey, man, we should talk when we’re sober. I really think we should have a conversation when we’re sober” and I said sure, fine, call me. He left and I recounted much of the story to my friend, who is a biology major and pre-med. I got to the 9/11 truth stuff and he stopped me:

“Yeah, that guy’s an idiot, but do you know the temperature at which steel melts? It just didn’t add up when…”

I sighed.

There was more conversation but apparently I’m the only person up at 2 AM in my apartment complex who doesn’t believe the government was behind 9/11. Fail lined the streets tonight, gentlemen, in places both expected and unexpected.

So for Waffles’s next achievement, I know he’s been talking about learning some more advanced video editing techniques. Well, here’s an example of something homemade (from YouTube user dwlieu) that ought to serve as a motivational example of, um, that:
 

 
Shot by shot, it’s perfect; it demonstrates an appreciation of discipline and precision in choosing shots, and an understanding of how to correlate logically with the music. And there’s an irreverent wink or two in there, like Quark clinking the latinum together.

And there’s always this one:
 

 
Though this person cheated a bit by using shots from Voyager (Voyager crashing into the time ship from “Year of Hell”) and DS9 (the big fleet from one of the Dominion battles). Still perfectly plotted, though.

Tags: Video editing, WIN

Congrats to Waffles for becoming a celeb in the blogosphere today. He’s achieved the most popular thread to date at the Freethought Fort Wayne blog by getting a positive endorsement from PZ on Pharyngula. Waffles’s atheist coming-out story is honest and moving, and reveals the real perils of religious education. If you haven’t already, read it.

Tags: Freethought

This is absolutely adorable — a fan video featuring some pretty good homebrew special effects, with kindergartners running around as the Doctor, Captain Jack, Davros, and a dalek. It’s great.

For my grump du jour about superfluous technology in the classroom, I need to talk about the actual consequences of that value-added bullcrap they shrink-wrap with textbooks. This semester I bought about half of my books from the Amazon marketplace, whose sellers often have new copies for the price the campus bookstore charges for used. Now, my chemistry textbook that I ordered from there did indeed come shrink-wrapped with a little cardboard “Student Access Kit” with a password that gives you access to additional features from the book publisher on the web, and I thought that was what I needed for access to the premium content on the prof’s site that’s the only way you’re allowed to submit homework.

But now I find out that the campus bookstore sells the book shrink-wrapped with two Access Kits: the one I have for the publisher’s website, and another one for the supplemental materials that form an extension of WebCT (the school’s own online work space). The latter is the one I need to do my homework, costs an extra twenty bucks to order separately, and, now that I’ve done so, will get to me a couple days after the first assignment is due. (I was actually going to stop by my prof’s office yesterday and show him the problems I was having logging in, as he’d invited me to, but I figured it would be pointless, since yesterday WebCT was…down.) Granted I should have resolved the problem earlier, but I didn’t understand that the resolution of the problem was ordering another product; to wax Rumsfeldian, the little yellow kit, instead of the blue kit I already had, was an “unknown unknown.”

I think it’s reasonable to speculate that these packaged Cracker-Jack treats are, at least in part, an effort on the part of the publishers to fight resales. It would be nice, though, if professors would stop encouraging them by requiring the damn things to pass the class, and if the publishers wouldn’t tempt them with products and packages that lend themselves to this use.

Anyway, a skein of geese just flew past the window, so I’m happy again.

Tags: Classes

I’m not a particularly big fan of heavy metal, or zombies, but this video is really fascinating. It’s a music video for a song by ANJ, a Russian metal band. It’s a tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev, which includes big-breasted women and zombies, and Gorbachev as some sort of Conan the Barbarian hero, cranial bird-poop-shaped birthmark and all.

The stylization is really amazing — part of it is done in that old Soviet-grandeur feeling with dark colors, lots of depth, and kind of a stiff, sweeping movement of various events in a really big, epic magnitude. It reminds me of the TV commercials for the new Stolichnaya vodka branding (see examples here and, my favorite, here).

Anyway, it’s bizarre, and strange, but it really draws you in:

GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO – BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.

From the sharp-witted people over at cectic.com. Click to enlarge.

I’m going to bitch again about misuse of technology in the classroom. In one of my classes today we were dismissed a few minutes after arriving because the prof couldn’t get the desktop PC that projects the Powerpoint slides to boot. This despite the fact that almost all of the students had printouts of the presentation sitting in front of them, and the classroom has a perfectly good blackboard, and the professor possesses a larynx. And, for that matter, the fact that a few students probably had laptops with them with Powerpoint that could have been plugged into the projection system.

I had a film class canceled once for a similar reason, which I can almost forgive, what with the presentation being the point of that class (although the prof’s lack of preparedness or skill with the required equipment I can’t). But for lack of outline slides is a stretch. Fortunatley, most of my profs haven’t been so Eloi, and anyway, I’ve noticed that I learn and remember better in classes where the professor eschews slides entirely and writes on the board or on an overhead instead.

Tags: Classes