Intelligently resigned

Strange things can happen in this world of science, where boundaries between scientific rigor and individual perception are constantly blurred. So, I was sitting at my desk this morning thinking about some way to skip this afternoon's meeting with my boss (an effort which as you might expect finally proved fruitless), when Tyler brought me one of this little pieces of paper every egotistic scientist loves to receive. A reprint request of one of his papers. To be honest it looked a bit a strange for a guy in the US (and not some backward country where internet access is still non-existent) to be asking for prints of two papers published in free access journals. And by surface mail no less.

That was a just hint, that there was something interesting in this request and the name of the institution ("Liberty" University of Lynchburg Virginia) made me curious to find out more about this. Soon I came up with details about his controversial founder, Jerry Lamon Falwell, pastor and tele-evangelist, the guy to whom the famous quote "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them" is attributed. It was then that I let out my first "oh no!".

I carried on with the Liberty University itself, an educational institution whose 9600 students have to pay fines for attending dances, viewing R-rated movies or drinking, should restrict intercourse with the opposite (check that! strictly the opposite) sex to holding hands and abiding by a dress code which prohibits hair covering the ears or eyebrows for guys, piercing in any place else than the ears for girls and shorts for both sexes. Being just a bit prepared I thought "hmmmm..."

But then I went on to check the Biology Department. After all that was what interested me the most since the request was coming from there. I was a bit prepared from noticing certificate programs such as "Liberty Bible Program" but when I saw the list of classes being taught, I could not say neither "oh no!" nor "hmmmmm...". Looking at courses such as "Evangelism and Christian Life" (3rd year) or "New Testament Survey" (4th year) just left me speechless. So, apart from having to miss all that constitutes college life or being obliged to remain sexually inactive until they reach the age of 22 (unless they get married before they graduate) the biology students of this institution have to read the Bible not as leisure reading but as part of the process of getting their degree...Oh, and by the way. They 'll probably be informed about something called evolution as an alternative theory to God creating everything within 7 days!

I now had serious doubts about where I was sending the reprints of my papers (which by the way were juuuuuuuust a little bit more in favour of neo-darwinian evolution against creationism and intelligent or un-intelligent design). Nonetheless I thought that dialogue and interchange of opinion is the only way for the progress of science and in this case perhaps my sending the reprints could contribute, only slightly but still contribute to this dialogue, whose outmost goal should be redefining the borderline between provable scientific hypotheses and hand-waving-argumented, emotionally-charged perceptions, that are seeking not to comfort or relieve but to oppose and infuriate. Because deep down I think that people preaching intelligent design maybe should be intelligent enough to resign...

Or then perhaps, maybe if we don't get to have this dialogue after all, maybe WE should resign from trying.

Damnatio memoriae

Last weekend has been as interesting as it has been tiring. A three-day excursion to Donostia in the Basque country left me with the usual lack of sleep and slight excess of alcohol levels. It seems I am old enough to have noticed the first of the side effects of such abuses. My otherwise strong long-term memory attenuates. I am not talking about memory lapses regarding the previous night but slight long-term memory failures, resembling more a "slow disk access" (to speak like the geak I am supposed to be). To cut a long story short I cannot remember things, names of songs or writers, books or films or dates I would normally remember. The whole things is a bit disturbing but gets resolved with a bit of sleep and a little bigger effort to keep the disks running.

Some names though, cannot be easilly forgotten. Augusto Pinochet's is one of these names. It is funny that my trip with its consequent memory lapses and the dictator's death coincided. And although my initial thought was "at last!" I think it would be better for me and probably for the rest of the world if Pinochet's name did not ring any bell anymore, if it had retreated at the back rooms of our collective memory, condemned by history to utter oblivion. The Romans used to force this oblivion as the worst punishment for men of state having failed them. The process involved taking their names out of the archives of history, bringing down their statues and destroying all road signs that carried a reference to them.

They called that Damnatio memoriae and it was considered the ultimate humiliation.

On the other hand, maybe what worked for the Romans, is not fit for our case. Probably because the Romans did not entirely lack the sense of duty as opposed to their people, as dear Augusto or his friends like Maggy Thatcher did and still do. I sincerely doubt that the fear of oblivion, the fact that he might not be remembered, would have been able to stop Pinochet from "dissapearing" thousands of his people or sending to swiss banks the millions he stole from the country he had sworn to protect and was supposed to be saving from the "communists". In that sense maybe it is better for us to vividly remember him than punishing him through forgetting his crimes, because even if history does not spontaneoulsy repeat itself it is actually us that let our errors repat themselves.
And in this case it will be probably wiser never to get any tired so that we forget the life and works of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.

A world gone crazy

All right it is December and I am walking around in my T-shirt! Whatever people may tell me, this cannot be normal, not for this hemisphere at least. Global warming is a fact and there are multiple proofs besides my sweat.

You see, from a proper point of view -proper to the proper people that is- everything is as normal as usually. The sun keeps shining over their heads even in December, maybe even during the evening. The perpetual antitheses of the city could not be making more sense to them. Almost homeless lonely people are there to feed the pidgeons, pidgeons are there to fly over the heads of the almost lonely homeless people sleeping on the benches. Over there a streetcleaner is throwing up, disgusted from the smell of the alley, two blocks away a hooker gets nauseous from the memories of last night. Or maybe it's the other way round. But the sun is still shining and unless you are an ever-wining, over-reacting, so-lazy-that-looks-all-around-instead-of-rushing-to-work kind of guy, everything is business as usual.

In the meanwhile, hundred-year-old dictators refuse to die, or death refuses to have anything to do with them and in Hong-Kong some hot-shot NOKIA executives talk about cellphones that will be able to capture smells. They may be missing the point here, ever since there's only music so that's there are new ringtones. Odours may be a bit more difficult to download but hey! we 'll make n-th generation computers to do that. In the meanwhile, hookers will still throw up on the streets of Barcelona, but the worst thing is that they will still be willing to die crossing the Atlantic all the way from Senegal to the Canary islands just to have the right to vomit somewhere in the Barrio Gotico. And in the exact same meanwhile, new dictators will spring up to take the place of the old-vampired ones in Fiji, Afghanistan or wherever else our "democracy exports" have not yet reached, this democracy that will presumably come from above like sacred rain, although it should be rising up from below, but then again, it's too darn hot to be thinking about such complicated things.

The world has gone crazy and it makes no sense. We have faster cars but spend more time going anyplace than actually being there, we have super-fast computers but somehow manage to work more than our fathers, we spent our days and nights reading crap (like this one) on the internet but have no time to read a book, we are healthier and wealthier than our parents, we 're sure to live longer than them but still pop up more Prozac that are kids swallow M & Ms. While the sun's still shining, migrating birds have no idea which way to go to and I am afraid neither do we.

Even time has gone crazy. It looks as if it's running backwards all the way to the times, when people were beeing persecuted because of what they would think, read or draw, we talk more religion than politics, we have slaves of a new kind but with the same, old colours. It feels as if we're back in the times of Shakespeare when "the rain it raineth everyday", only unfortunately Shakespeare is nowhere to be found and neither is the rain. It's only a matter of persistence of this madness until the clock makes the whole turn backwards, then we are back in the ice age, and then perhaps things cool down a bit.

After all maybe then, the absolute necessity of humankind for smell-capturing cellphones is not that absolute anymore.