Disease Free and Full of Wonder
The air was thick with excitement and scientific inquiry as Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the nation’s premiere astrophysicists and the host of PBS’s show, NOVA, took the stage.
He came to Evergreen to be the speaker at a seminar held annually in honor of one of Evergreen’s founding faculty members, Willi Unsoeld. Tyson is a great speaker, very comfortable on stage and always backing up his points with a joke. In fact, I first heard of him on the Colbert Report during the whole Pluto scandal. During his speech he used his sharp wit to poke a message into the minds of the audience members. The goal of his presentation was to show how terribly under funded and under respected in the USA.
For example, he told how shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center, President Bush said, “Our God is the God that named the stars”, loosely quoting Genesis. He said this as a warning to the Arab terrorist groups that were responsible for the attacks. However, Tyson pointed out that of the known stars in the universe, 2/3 of them have Arabic names, and that he could have hooked Bush up with a better line if he had been on his Rolodex at the time. Tyson ended the night saying that if we think we are so much smarter than chimps, and we have only a 2.5% difference in our DNA, think about how much smarter a being that was 2.5% genetically different than us would be, and how with that perspective, how little we actually know about the universe.
He was awesome.
You know what slightly less awesome? My Hepatitis A and Polio vaccination shots. But I got a great deal on them at the Student Health Center, which is a great resource for students here on campus. And they really didn’t hurt that much… But at least that’s over with. Now I just have typhoid pills to take, malaria pills to take, and maybe a yellow fever shot to get. But it’s not like Yellow fever is that bad! Oh wait…
In other news, it’s true; the Black Front Gallery is in its last month. I went to check out their last exhibit and it was amazing. There were three local artists showcasing their work, and they were all awesome. The Black Front was a great venue in Downtown Oly, and I hope whatever takes its place will be as cool.
This week our class actually got to work with an artist who has had some of her work in the Black Front. Her name is Diane Kurtzyna, and she helped us all make dolls of ourselves out of trash and found objects. We also had a guest speaker come to our class who was a Maori artist from New Zealand named June Grant.
Overall, this was a very colorful, artistic, and slightly painful week for me, but probably one of the most memorable here at Evergreen.