Sunday, April 29, 2007

How’s Our Library Doing? Part 4

............... Chevaux de la grotte Chauvet (31 000 BP) ...............
Man and Neanderthal lived in Europe at the same time.
However, it doesn't seem that Neanderthal painted.
Click on the picture to get a better view.


Comment #2 to my blog of Saturday, April 14, 2007, “Let’s ask Leonardo” was gratifying insofar as Anonymous seemed to agree with the evolutionary point of view. Several of Anonymous’ points call for clarification. Anonymous said, “Many fossils of Homo sapians [sic] have been found all over the earth and researchers can prove the evolution of a neandrothal [sic] through the widening of the skull and the shortening of the mandible.”

Although it is somewhat ambiguous, I take the above statement to say that Homo sapiens (us folks) evolved from Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis). Presently there is scientific consensus that Cro-Magnon man (as Homo sapiens are called during this time frame) lived side by side in Europe with Neanderthal man. The implication is that neither Neanderthal evolved from humankind nor did humankind evolve from Neanderthal. They evolved from a common ancestor at some point in their evolutionary history.

Sadly, even supporters of evolutionary theory in the Evolution fact v. Creationism nonsense often hold very outmoded or incorrect notions. This allows a bit of an unwarranted handhold for Creationists in this ruckus (it certainly can’t be characterized as a debate).

Which brings me to our library. (What a weak segue, eh?) I recently saw a book on the Discard Pile (cost: 2 bits) at the checkout desk, "Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History" by Stephen Jay Gould.

First let us talk about the Discard Pile. Libraries need to constantly cull their collections. There are several reasons: they buy a lot of popular fiction that no one wants to read a few years hence, they have non-fiction material that becomes outmoded, books wear out, books are donated that the librarian doesn’t want in the collection, etc. I certainly agree with the principle, particularly in a small community library.

Now let’s talk about the author, Stephen Jay Gould (died 2002), a long time professor at Harvard, and leading paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. For many, many years Gould wrote a monthly essay for Natural History magazine. These essays have been gathered up and published on a regular basis. "Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History" was one of these collections of essays. Gould was a great scientist, teacher, and writer. Amazon.com gives 268 results for Author: Stephen Jay Gould.

I bought the book from the discard heap and re-read it. (I first read it when it first appeared in our library in 1998.) I would have liked to refer Anonymous to an essay in this book called "Up Against a Wall". There Anonymous could have read a little bit about Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon co-existing in the time of the great cave-paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet. Sadly our library no longer owns this fine book. Happily, now I do. But, again happily, if you want to read this article you can! Thanks to Indiana’s libraries. Go to
http://www.inspire.net/. Get your free Indiana account and Search For “Up against a wall”: Title AND “Gould, Stephen Jay”: Author in the Database: “Academic Search Elite”.

Generally I do not have any big disagreement with the Starke County Library’s discards. In this case, they made a definite mistake. If the library wants "Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History" back, please e-mail me at
knox.indiana@hotmail.com . I’ll drop it in the book return box.

Friday, April 27, 2007

Our very own Aerial Screw

An “Aerial Screw” Designed and Drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, Manuscript B Folio 83v

Ah, beautiful Cranberry Cove. Really the most beautiful spot on an otherwise pretty dreary Bass Lake. There is some rare deep water, shelter from the wind, a nice sunset view, and no public road access. You can’t see the cove from lake-encircling County Highway 210. This is the spot one would expect the wealthy to erect their cottages. It seems that there is a private helipad on a pier on Cranberry Cove. This fact was a surprise to me, but I suppose I should have guessed as much. It seems we live in a time of exceptional excess.

Of course the reason I mention this is that Bass Lake was the scene of a recent helicopter wreck. The story goes that the businessman/ owner of the aircraft was flying in with his secretary and they crashed into the lake a bit shy of the aforementioned helipad. (I’m sorry I inadvertently used the S word in my last sentence.) The unfortunate administrative assistant (Did this happen on Administrative Assistant's Day? That would be ironic, eh?) was found either dead or near dead by would be rescuers. The owner / pilot of the helicopter had not been found as of this writing. Various law enforcement types are cruising about presumably waiting for the inevitable bacteria to inflate the corpse.


I think this is kind of terrible. Terrible that nice, fun-loving people die violently in the prime of life. But also terrible that somebody uses an extremely intrusive helicopter to ruin the quiet beauty of this spot just to have a bit of that fun. Just a few miles away in the next County on Lake Maxinkuckee, either ordinance or committee prevented a similar situation. Evidently the mega-rich owner of the Indianapolis Colts football team wasn’t able to negotiate for a helipad on the end of his pier. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bass Lake neighbors of our missing helicopter pilot were quietly a bit pleased that the raucous beast of a machine had crashed. I certainly would be.

Starke County, the home of Bass Lake and the city Knox, has had a very stand off attitude towards land use regulations or restrictions on property. This is a reflection of many years of rather right wing, definitely conservative rule, by both Democrats and Republicans. I think that this attitude has done much allow the uglification of Bass Lake. Homes have been built that are absurdly excessive. Some are so large that they take up nearly their entire lot, casting a 2 story shadow on their neighbors and shocking the eyes of the passers by. Limits are needed. Sure as hell we don’t want helicopters landing on piers. There needs to be limits: limits on growth, limits on noise, and limits on density. I think that this is called civilization.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Sex In Our City


Pet Peeve Aside: Boring writers that go on about the completely trite, completely worthless details of their personal lives. Why would I care that they are annoyed with the weather or irritated by (for example) the dumb-ass drivers of the Knox 4-lane. Those jounalistic dolts especially cause hot blurry spots in my visual field when they go on about their family. For example, “It is such a great joy, a joyous gift from our Lord, to watch Baby Smellybottom finally learn to walk. And she’s only just turned 35 months! We are so looking forward to Smelly’s 3rd birthday! All her cross-eyed kinfolk will be there. I guess I’m going to have to clean up the crawl space.” This kind of crap is what passes for feature writing in the South Bend Tribune and the local rags (when they even bother).

Begging your pardon for the introductory rant, the Aside, so-called. What I would really like from these byline featured, 2-dimensional personalitied columnists is a good sex column. You know, like the fictional NYC column by the skinny, blond, curly-haired slut on HBO’s Sex in the City. Oh yah, “Sex in Our City”. I’d bet I would get more than 2 or 3 more hits on my strange little blog, that is, if I could produce such heat. Ah, sadly, I am graced with a face like a horse and consequently a sex life of no interest to anybody including yours truly.

So let us talk about the Knox Police Department. It has come repeatedly to my attention that a certain uninteresting Knox police officer has been diddling some equally uninteresting citizen of our fair city. I haven’t reported such going on because of the seriously uninteresting aspect of the whole affair. My God, certainly this qualifies as a Boring Rendezvous, a cop and a bored housewife. Well the interesting part of all this is not the sex. The interesting part is that the cop got fired for this behavior. The cop seems to agree with me that this really isn’t such an exciting deal. So consequently this police officer is suing the city for wrongful dismissal. The defense (rather interesting perhaps if this ever goes to trial) is that many police officers in the past have committed identical or at least similar acts of boring sex and none of them were fired. We hereby proclaim this the boring sex defense. I think it could work!

Oddly, it seems that there was actually good cause for firing this same diddling officer of the law some time ago when in a psychotic state the officer threatened with a drawn gun to kill either self or family or self and family or some such totally equally disturbing scenario. If this is at all true, this enactment of the suicidal / homicidal primal scene seems to be a damn good cause for firing a policeman. Actually it seems odd that the police officer wasn’t locked up at that time.


Your government in action. Brilliant!

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Let’s ask Leonardo


Today's trivia question to prepare you for the “Clash of Civilizations”.
Where was Leonardo da Vinci born?
Click here and Scoll down to "Interests" for the answer.

Leonardo da Vinci had theory about geography. He thought that the earth was a sort of reflection of man (or maybe vice versa). He called the scheme microcosm and macrocosm (or maybe vice versa). The idea went way, way back to 500 BC and was rediscovered by Leonardo, among others, during the Renaissance. This is why I illustrate this little blog entry with Mona Lisa. Leonardo was subtly illustrating the microcosm / macrocosm (hint: look at the hair and the river but if you spend some time with her you will see a lot more). Please, click on Mona to see a big detailed version.

Leonardo was no armchair philosopher. Although he loved the idea of the idea, he needed to examine the evidence. This is not the appropriate place get too lost in the truly amazing mind of Leonardo, so suffice it to say that while studying the Earth to prove his theory he came upon fossils of shellfish in the mountains. At that time there were 2 theories of the origin of shellfish fossils way up above and way far away from the ocean.

One school believed that it was evidence of the great biblical deluge. You know, Noah, the Ark, 40 days and 40 nights. How else could one explain evidence of ocean life on a mountaintop hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean? This school of thought, of course, based this belief on the text of the bible. So we could say that they had a fundamental fish to fry.

The “modern” school thought that the rock spontaneously formed crystalline structures that were the stone version of these shellfish. This school had their own strange fish to fry in that they had their own odd philosophical ideas that this spontaneous generation theory supported.

Leonardo, being the kind of guy that he was, decided to test all three theories against the evidence. He was able to quickly refute the deluge theory on several grounds. One of several pieces of evidence was that the fossil sea life occurred in many layers with a variety of species and that some of the layers were of intact joined shells indicating that these fossils were buried alive over a very long period of time. The spontaneous generation theory was refuted by several pieces of evidence, one bit being that some of the layers were composed of well-worn disjoined shells that would be consistent with a beach with its shell deposits being buried.

Oh, and by the way, he didn’t find much to support his pet microcosm / macrocosm theory either.

Of course this little discussion brings us to the present day in Knox, Indiana. There are a lot of so-called Creationists in and about Knox. They have their theory about fossils also. Coincidentally their theory is the great biblical deluge theory pretty much intact over these many years. One of the pieces of evidence that they find is exactly the same evidence that Leonardo used to disprove the spontaneous generation theory. Some of these layers of fossilized sea life appear as a jumble of disjointed shells just like they had been washed up on the beach, presumably during the great flood. Of course, that explains how these seashells got gathered up hundreds of miles from and thousands of feet above the present ocean. Brilliant!


There are members of our school board that want the creationist theory taught “alongside” evolutionary theory.


I say, “Fine!” Let’s ask Leonardo.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Notice: Repairs on the Green Line. Expect Delays


Knox is solidly on the Bible Belt, not the gilded buckle exactly, but on the belt. There are several characteristics of local Christianity that have a strongly local flavor, such as a strong non-denominational urge. Several local churches even advertise themselves as such. I understand and sympathize with this urge to accept a wider range of religious belief. After all most Christians lay-people don’t get too worked up about the relative merits of the different baptism techniques like sprinkling, pouring (infusion), partial immersion, total submersion, immersion mixed with pouring, etc. These differences, which after all historically have caused and continue to cause schisms, do lend a bit of gravitas to Christian leaders. Without gravitas one wouldn’t be much of a leader, eh?

Anyway, back to the non-denominational urge. There have been many schisms of local churches. Curiously, sometimes even non-denominational churches have breakaway groups that form new churches. Historically, in the wider world, schisms are serious business involving torture and war. More recently major Christian schisms are more about television coverage and who gets the money. Locally these non-denominational schisms are much less serious affairs. What tends to happen is that a group of parishioners become unhappy with some aspect of their leader. It might be a perceived moral shortcoming, a doctrinal difference, or simply management disagreement. It is kind of odd that a doctrinal difference can arise in a non-denominational setting but it certainly does.

Sidetracked again! So let me get back to the non-denominational urge. Most local believers don’t really care about the fine print in their churches by-laws. They like and respect most Christians that believe and act more-or-less about the same as they do. The widespread use of marquee sign is a reflection of the kind of hazy and wispy doctrine with which local folks find comfort. Although the use of cute sayings on marquee signs is probably national in scope, Knox has embraced the practice. There are many interesting, sometimes inspirational, sometimes confusing, examples. If one were to just take photos of the stranger examples, it would be the basis for an amusing calendar.

A theologian or serious scholar of Christianity could have a field day exploring the doctrinaire implications of some of these signs. Several historical heresies have been unwittingly advocated (not, of course, the stranger stuff like Gnosticism). Not being either a theologian or serious scholar of Christianity, I can’t speak with much authority. I would like to ask you to ponder the example below.

You very well may somewhat indignantly ask, “Well, what’s wrong with that?” And my answer is, “I’m not certain, but it bothers me.” The saying, although, without a doubt, cute and quite suitable for innocent youngsters, seems more appropriate to the worship of nature goddesses like Demeter and Persephone, than the God of the Bible.

In any case it certainly isn’t any big deal. Just some of that local color.