Science Fiction, the BC Apple User Group, and 'Biblically Correct' Museum Tours

Did a cou­ple of inter­est­ing things yes­ter­day. Around noon I went down to the Granville Island The­atre, which was host­ing the 18^th Annual Van­cou­ver Inter­na­tional Writer’s Fes­ti­val. Unfor­tu­nately, the fes­ti­val, which was pri­mar­ily geared toward school­child­ren, hap­pened to coin­cide with a Teacher’s Strike, which is hope­fully in its last day or two. There have been some bit­ter bat­tles with the Provin­cial Gov­ern­ment over the strike, which retroac­tively deter­mined that it was ‘ille­gal’ (Far be it from me to take sides on some­thing I know so lit­tle about). The result was spotty atten­dance of events, which is a shame.

Nev­er­the­less, I got to hear read­ings of excerpts of works in progress by world famous sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers William Gib­son (of Neu­ro­mancer, Burn­ing Chrome, Mona Lisa Over­drive, etc.) and Spi­der Robin­son (Telem­path, Mind­killer, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon), as well as get an auto­graph from Gib­son on a copy of his lat­est book, Pat­tern Recog­ni­tion).

It was a laid-back sort of pre­sen­ta­tion, with both authors reclin­ing in their chairs and rem­i­nisc­ing about their youth. Robin­son cited Hein­lein as his biggest inspi­ra­tion and influ­ence. Heinlein’s future his­tory (which the grand mas­ter of sci­ence fic­tion charted out early in his career and then pro­ceeded to write sto­ries set at dif­fer­ent times in that future), included a period that cor­re­sponds roughly to the present day, which he called the Interregnum,“in which a back­woods revival­ist becomes dic­ta­tor of the United States.” (from the Wikipedia). These were to be a new dark ages, dom­i­nated by reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism. Both authors com­mented on how pre­scient Hein­lein had been in this regard, and Gib­son hoped that we were at a point where it was almost over. Gib­son had moved to Canada dur­ing the Viet­nam war, so when we chat­ted after­ward, we talked a lit­tle about what it was like to be an Amer­i­can expat in Van­cou­ver, cur­rent events in the US, and the fact that despite what Neu­ro­mancer had pre­dicted, the Japan­ese didn’t end up run­ning every­thing. “But that makes it fun because it’s inter­est­ing how they f—ed it all up”, he grinned. He rec­om­mended I check out the blog Poor Man’s Insti­tute, which he deemed “hys­ter­i­cal satire”. Most inter­est­ing answer to an audi­ence ques­tion? When one kid asked them “Which Super­hero is bet­ter, Spi­der­man or Bat­man?” Robin­son cited Spi­der­man (“for obvi­ous rea­sons”). Gib­son came back with a more inter­est­ing answer: “Some­one once said that Batman’s super power is money.”

Later in the day, I went to a meet­ing of the BC Apple User Group . It was at the Scot­tish Cul­tural Cen­tre, about 15 min­utes south of our house, just off of Granville Street. The pre­sen­ter was Stu­art DeSpain, project man­ager for Excel at Microsoft. He did a fine job of answer­ing a lot of ques­tions — some rank begin­ner queries, and a few more advanced ones. I went out for a cou­ple of beers with one of the group mem­bers, his pals, and the pre­sen­ter.
Today, I got a very inter­est­ing news clip­ping from Mak­taaq:

Museum tours spark con­tro­versy
Writ­ten by Devon Bar­clay
Tues­day, 18 Octo­ber 2005
While the courts debate the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity of teach­ing intel­li­gent design and cre­ation­ism in pub­lic schools, some pri­vate schools are tak­ing another tack. Through guided field trips to venues like the Den­ver Museum of Nature and Sci­ence and the Den­ver Zoo, tour guides hired by churches, pri­vate schools, and reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions are tak­ing stu­dents on a hands-on “debunk­ing” of evo­lu­tion­ary sci­ence– counter to the mes­sage those same exhibits carry. And while using pub­lic resources to teach cre­ation­ism has been ruled uncon­sti­tu­tional, these tours oper­ate with­out museum sanc­tion or resources, and tour the exhibits as any other guest might.

The tours are led by com­pa­nies like BC (Bib­li­cally Cor­rect) Tours, but are noth­ing new. BC, for exam­ple, has been pro­vid­ing the tours for over 15 years, and has taken around 30,000 peo­ple to major his­toric sites and land­marks through­out the state. With the growth in pri­vate, reli­gious schools, how­ever, demand for the tours seems to be pick­ing up.

Maranatha Chris­t­ian Acad­emy in Arvada has used the tour­ing com­pany for its own field trips. The school’s founder, Pas­tor Don Miller, “evolved into a cre­ation­ist” from an upbring­ing as an athe­ist and after a career in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sci­ence. He started the school as part of his min­istry. “I became a believer through the the­ory of intel­li­gent design,” says Miller. “The sci­en­tific facts just didn’t sup­port evo­lu­tion. I saw the lies of evo­lu­tion in the pub­lic schools, and as a sci­en­tist real­ized that it didn’t qual­ify as a the­ory.“
Now, says Miller, “we have sci­en­tists that teach cre­ation­ism in our high school. We look at evo­lu­tion, and we blow it away.” As for the tour­ing com­pa­nies, Miller says, “they’re doing it based on look­ing at the fos­sil record, and it’s the right perspective.”

Oth­ers in the con­ser­v­a­tive reli­gious com­mu­nity also speak highly of the tours, espe­cially as a stim­u­lus for debate on the evo­lu­tion issue. Often lost in the intel­li­gent design debate are the sheer num­ber of vari­a­tions of the idea within the intel­li­gent design com­mu­nity. “I’ve been a ‘day-age’ cre­ation­ist,” says Pas­tor Roger Funk of Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, describ­ing the view that the days described in Gen­e­sis could have been spaced over mil­len­nia. “But over the years, I’ve become more of a twenty-four hour day cre­ation­ist. Within the Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity, there’s diver­gent views. Obvi­ously we all believe God played a role in what­ever begin­nings of life took place, because that’s being a Chris­t­ian as we under­stand it.” But between evo­lu­tion, intel­li­gent design, and strict cre­ation­ism, Funk says, “chil­dren need to know all three. For maybe 40% of Amer­i­cans, evolution’s a strong belief. Chil­dren need to under­stand the the­ory, and that there are giant holes.”

Richard Stucky was raised as a cre­ation­ist, but says, “my par­ents gave me National Geo­graphic as a child because they wanted me to be a free thinker.” He’s now the Den­ver Museum of Nature and Science’s Vice-President for Research and Col­lec­tions. He believes that “it is anybody’s right to pro­vide their own inter­pre­ta­tion of the mate­r­ial in the museum, but the tours pro­vide a great deal of false infor­ma­tion, more or less attack straw men, and don’t use a sci­en­tific method for under­stand­ing the ori­gins of life.” Still, he says, “the expo­sure of real sci­en­tific infor­ma­tion to all peo­ple is a very pos­i­tive thing.” “In sci­ence,” he says, “you use many of the same stan­dards as you would in a court­room. “You can’t just use tes­ti­mony from a sin­gle source to draw conclusions.”

With or with­out real holes in the the­ory of evo­lu­tion, it seems pretty clear that the tours “debunk­ing” the the­ory will con­tinue. “The tours are tak­ing place but they’re not spon­sored by the museum — we want to be very clear about that,” says Julia Tay­lor, a museum spokesper­son. “There are some free speech issues involved.”

Amer­i­cans United for Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State con­firms that. Says Jeremy Leam­ing, a spokesper­son for the organization’s D.C. office, “as a pri­vate group they have a free speech right to do this, as long as they’re not tak­ing pub­lic school kids or receiv­ing state sup­port. I don’t see a first amend­ment (church-state sep­a­ra­tion) issue.”

What can I say? More proof of the US’s slide into Heinlein’s Theo­cratic Inter­reg­num. Truth is stranger than Sci­ence Fiction.

A New Sweet (to me, at least)

Tonight I made another small step toward assim­i­la­tion into Cana­dian cul­ture. Well, Cana­dian child­hood cul­ture, at least.

Shortly after we arrived here, I saw in the cof­fee shops and the occa­sional restau­rant a dessert called a Nanaimo Bar. This piqued my curios­ity, since I knew of the port of Nanaimo, a city on Van­cou­ver Island, as well as the name of a Street and Sta­tion I often see on the local busses and hear in a some­what taunt­ing tone on the Skytrain’s auto­mated announce­ment system.

Dur­ing the show­ing of “A Sou­venir of Canada”, a movie based on the book by Dou­glas Cou­p­land dur­ing the Van­cou­ver Inter­na­tional Film Fes­ti­val, the image of this box flashed on the screen, and sev­eral in the audi­ence gave gasps of recog­ni­tion and laughed. Here’s the cur­rent def­i­n­i­tion of Nanaimo bar I got from the Wikipedia:

The Nanaimo bar is a Cana­dian dessert. A type of choco­late cake, it receives its name from the city of Nanaimo, British Colum­bia, where it first became known in the 1930s. It con­sists of a crumb-based layer, topped by a light cus­tard which is cov­ered in soft choco­late. Many vari­eties are pos­si­ble by using dif­fer­ent types of crumb, flavours of cus­tard, and types of choco­late.
Accord­ing to his­tor­i­cal leg­end, a group of friends in Nanaimo, who would later found the Hare­wood Ladies’ Aux­il­iary, found the recipe in the Van­cou­ver Sun under the name “choco­late fridge cake,” and pop­u­lar­ized it under the name Nanaimo bar. How­ever, a search through the newspaper’s archives failed to turn up the recipe, so its ulti­mate ori­gin is unknown.
Recipes for sim­i­lar desserts are found in var­i­ous places and under var­i­ous names in North Amer­ica and Europe, but only in Canada is it so widely known, and it is known to Cana­di­ans only as the Nanaimo bar.
The City of Nanaimo takes its Nanaimo bars very seri­ously; the city’s mas­cot is known as Nanaimo Bar­ney and has the shape of a giant Nanaimo bar. The city also has an offi­cial recipe for the bar. In 1985, Mayor Graeme Roberts started a con­test to find the ulti­mate Nanaimo bar recipe; the unan­i­mous win­ner, sub­mit­ted by local res­i­dent Joyce Hard­cas­tle, was declared the offi­cial recipe and is avail­able as a hand­out from the City.

I’ve tried them in some places since then. They have dif­fered slightly, but in gen­eral they are all sweet, have dif­fer­ent ratios of fill­ing to top­ping and crumb bot­tom layer, and some have more coconut in that layer than oth­ers. The choco­late also varies from recipe to recipe. It’s been fun to try dif­fer­ent ver­sions to com­pare them, even though it’s kind of like an adult order­ing a twinkies or marsh­mal­low treats. When I saw the box at the IGA, I decided it was time that I tried mak­ing them first as the aver­age Cana­dian has prob­a­bly tasted them. Then, I’ll try the orig­i­nal recipe.
The instruc­tions (in Eng­lish and French, of course), essen­tially call for the con­tents of bags A, B, and C cor­re­spond­ing to the base, fill­ing and top­ping respec­tively, mixed with but­ter in dif­fer­ent amounts. No bak­ing is involved, as the box says.

The results were achingly sweet and the fill­ing had an unpleas­ant grainy tex­ture. You wouldn’t want to read the ingre­di­ents on the side of the box, and it’s likely more than one case of type 2 dia­betes resulted from ingest­ing too many of these, but I guess that a rite of pas­sage of sorts has been achieved, albeit about 30-odd years too late. I’ll never be a native Cana­dian, nor will I have had a child­hood with these in it, but they are a fun new discovery.

Different Trains: The Vancouver Antique Trolley

We’ve recently been to the Home Show at the Sta­dium, but the event wasn’t very pho­to­genic (although the Glide­house, a mod­ern pre­fab house that is exactly the kind of place we would have built on our land in Ver­mont, had we gone with Plan A — that’s the plan that would have kicked in if Bush and his min­ions had been defeated. Oh well.)
Speak­ing of trains (if the pre­vi­ous entry is still vis­i­ble), on Sat­ur­day around 1 PM we did some­thing that was far more quaint and pho­tograph­able. We took a trip on the last week­end of the year that the Van­cou­ver His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety runs the trol­ley line between Granville Island and Sci­ence World. It’s a short trip in an old (about 80 years or so) trol­ley car, com­plete with com­pletely refur­bished wood pan­el­ing, woven cane seats, and some of the orig­i­nal adver­tis­ing in those cards above the win­dows (Let’s go Square Danc­ing on the Trol­ley! — Another one involved mak­ing pies that were ‘digestible’).

The whole expe­ri­ence was just shy of a Dis­ney­land ride, and the car was full of tourists and par­ents with their chil­dren. The peo­ple who run it also get into the spirit; one of them was clearly wear­ing a han­dle­bar mus­tache, clearly enjoy­ing the chance to play dres­sup each week­end dur­ing the sum­mer and fall. I have more pic­tures of our short trip to the 1920s on Flickr. It was a nice way to spend a sunny fall afternoon.

The trol­ley also had an inter­est­ing link to the future: In it were details of a pro­posal for a street­car that would fol­low some of the same tracks. I would absolutely love it, but as some­one pointed out, the mass tran­sit bud­get (as well as the patience with all of the con­struc­tion and has­sles for it) was pretty much being blown by the RAV line I men­tioned in my last entry. A pity, as it would be an incred­i­bly con­ve­nient way for me to go to the east end of down­town, rather than the cur­rent way, which is a bus up Granville and then con­nect­ing with the Skytrain.

Of course, I never met a mass tran­sit con­veyance I didn’t like. Even one that is not much dif­fer­ent than the Teacup ride.