There's no place like home

My sidecar rig konked out on me during my Minnesota 1000 ride this year. It was acting like it had a bad coil and only running on 2 or 3 cylinders.

I parked it after the Minnesota 1000 and went on vacation for four weeks (to be talked about in a later entry.)

I went out to the garage this evening to see what the deal was. I figured I'd try and start the hack up to see if it was still misbehaving.

Of course the damned thing started right up and ran just fine. Stupid perverse inanimate object.

I'm guessing that there is a crack in one of the coil housings and that it really doesn't like to get soaking wet. It got pretty drenched on the Minnesota 1000.

So I'm going to dip the coils in some of that dip plastic that you coat tool handles with and then just ride the damned thing.

So there.

Here is an excellent article about why scientists put up with the religious bunkum.

So why is it that most scientists avoid criticizing religion even as they decry the supernatural mind-set? For starters, some researchers are themselves traditionally devout, keeping a kosher kitchen or taking Communion each Sunday. I admit I'm surprised whenever I encounter a religious scientist. How can a bench-hazed Ph.D., who might in an afternoon deftly purée a colleague's PowerPoint presentation on the nematode genome into so much fish chow, then go home, read in a two-thousand-year-old chronicle, riddled with internal contradictions, of a meta-Nobel discovery like "Resurrection from the Dead," and say, gee, that sounds convincing? Doesn't the good doctor wonder what the control group looked like?

Scientists, however, are a far less religious lot than the American population, and, the higher you go on the cerebro-magisterium, the greater the proportion of atheists, agnostics, and assorted other paganites. According to a 1998 survey published in Nature, only 7 percent of members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences professed a belief in a "personal God." (Interestingly, a slightly higher number, 7.9 percent, claimed to believe in "personal immortality," which may say as much about the robustness of the scientific ego as about anything else.) In other words, more than 90 percent of our elite scientists are unlikely to pray for divine favoritism, no matter how badly they want to beat a competitor to publication. Yet only a flaskful of the faithless have put their nonbelief on record or publicly criticized religion, the notable and voluble exceptions being Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and
Daniel Dennett of Tufts University. Nor have Dawkins and Dennett earned much good will among their colleagues for their anticlerical views; one astronomer I spoke with said of Dawkins, "He's a really fine parish preacher of the fire-and-brimstone school, isn't he?"

So, what keeps most scientists quiet about religion? It's probably something close to that trusty old limbic reflex called "an instinct for self-preservation." For centuries, science has survived quite nicely by cultivating an image of reserve and objectivity, of being above religion, politics, business, table manners. Scientists want to be left alone to do their work, dazzle their peers, and hire grad students to wash the glassware. When it comes to extramural combat, scientists choose their crusades cautiously. Going after Uri Geller or the Ra‘lians is risk-free entertainment, easier than making fun of the sociology department. Battling the creationist camp has been a much harder and nastier fight, but those scientists who have taken it on feel they have a direct stake in the debate and are entitled to wage it, since the creationists, and more recently the promoters of "intelligent design" theory, claim to be as scientific in their methodology as are the scientists.

It's a long article and it's well worth reading.

The link came from PZ Myer's excellent blog.

I'm writing this from the Comfort Inn in Great Falls, MT, where they have free wireless access.

I've been on vacation for almost four weeks and this is the first time I've plugged into the Internet.

It feels really weird.

Anyway. we should be home on Saturday. Whee.

I checked my email too, I had 681 new messages. About 10 were real, about 50 were spam from things I've opted-in to, and the rest were garbage.

I think updating Spamassassin is going to move up my list when I get home.