Dreaded Memes

Geek wall art

2009-12-22T21:42:00.000-08:00

So I received my EMF poster from ThinkGeek today! Yes of all the things I could use geek points on this is what I chose.

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Another long day of training

2009-12-17T10:15:00.000-08:00

I'm in Scrum/Agile training. Sitting in the world's least comfortable chair. This is day two. Will it never end?

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The Side-Hug: Youth Group Puts Down Sinful "Front-Hugs" With Rap (VIDEO)

2009-11-24T16:12:00.001-08:00

Eye bleach please! I want to un-see it!!!!

Oh sweet and sour Jesus that was, perhaps, the cheesiest thing I've seen since I watched Plan 9 From Outer Space 25 years ago. One can only wonder if these "rappers" realize how completely and utterly pathetic they look.

Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Large Hadron Collider Smashes Its First Protons

2009-11-24T11:58:00.001-08:00

One cannot help but note that, all the hype that was going on here a year ago on the day of the Great On-Turning (sorry couldn't help the Douglas Adams reference) not-with-standing about the LHC creating a mini-black hole and destroying the Earth, the planet is still here.

Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Large Hadron Collider Smashes Its First Protons

2009-11-24T11:13:00.001-08:00

What, precisely, do you want to know?

Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Dems To Vitter: Denounce Glenn Beck's Landrieu-Prostitute Analogies

2009-11-24T11:06:00.001-08:00

While I understand the offense (and am offended by it) I think that the Democrats are making yet another tactical error. It's a well-worn one for Democrats and it is this: they are showing that language like this bothers them. While the Dems are *correct* that the comments are out-of-line and offensive, they make the twinned mistakes of a) believing that the conservatives will *care* (they won't) and b) that this makes the conservatives look bad.

What it does is make Democrats look *weak* and one thing we should all have learned on the playground is that you never, ever, show weakness to the bully. Never. Should Vitter apologize? Of course he should! Will he? Of course he won't! And every request for apology will simply make Limbaugh, Beck, et. al. gleeful at the perceived distress which will only spur them on.

Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Kirk Cameron Confronted Over Evolution (VIDEO)

2009-11-24T09:46:00.001-08:00

Who are these evolutionists who dismiss evolution? There's debate in the biology community on how powerful of an engine natural selection is as opposed to, say, sexual selection (which was also first articulated by Darwin) or what (if any) role group selection plays but I know of not a single evolutionary biologist who doubts that evolution *happened*. Names, please. I want to know who these evolutionary biologists are who deny evolution happened.

Cheers

Lf
About Evolution
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Kirk Cameron Confronted Over Evolution (VIDEO)

2009-11-24T09:42:00.001-08:00

Watched it. The movie is simply riddled with errors. In fact, I'm surprised that they managed to avoid getting Ben Stein's name wrong.

Cheers

LF
About Evolution
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Richard Tisei, Openly Gay Republican, Picked As GOP Gubernatorial Candidate's Running Mate

2009-11-23T09:42:00.001-08:00

This will be interesting. Will the GOP base actually *support* someone who has an openly gay running mate OR will this person be put in the same category as the rest of us who are 'threats to traditional families'. The man, by the accounts I've read so far, is pro-gay--meaning that he's in favor of gays and lesbians having full and equal civil rights in this country (and not in that cheeky sense of "well, no heterosexual can marry someone of the same gender either so it's fair" or "well, people can lose their jobs for any number of reasons, losing your job because you are gay is the same as losing your job because you are incompetent").

This means that the GOP base has to make a choice now. How much do they REALLY mean their anti-gay rhetoric? If they mean it, then they cannot want and will not tolerate this man being a heartbeat away from the governorship. If they don't mean and can support him, then that means that they don't actually *mean* what they say about gays. If it's the latter case, then the Democratic party could find itself in serious trouble because if the GOP does *not* mean the anti-gay rhetoric, then it would behoove gays and lesbians to split their allegiances and try to move the GOP in a more inclusive direction. If, of course, they mean their rhetoric then it's the status quo ante.

Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

The things we do for love and science

2009-11-21T12:13:00.000-08:00

I’m writing a paper on how New Agers misuse scientific language to bolster their claims of quantum flapdoodle. To do so, I am going to focus on What the Bleep Do We Know. I saw this at the Bagdad Theatre when it was first released in 2006. Not knowing what it was going to be, I thought it would be a very high-produc tion value version of “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene. I was wrong. I almost walked out of the movie but had to stay through the trainwreck.

Now I am watching it again. If I have to do this--then I’m sharing this with the rest of the world. Others have, I know. These are mine.

So Fred Alan Wolf has just proclaimed that even though his idiosyncratic view of quantum physics doesn’t allow for changing chairs into trucks but you can change how you feel about things. What a revelation!

So they just made the specious (and racist) claim that coastal Native Americans could not see the European’s ships because they had no idea what they were.

Interestingly they never identify their experts. I’m listening to some guy, with a guy who ‘looks like a scientist’ in a very ‘scientific looking’ environment.

Okay, so now we have Fred Alan Wolf as his super-hero Dr. Quantum alter-ego.

And Wolf butchers the double-slit experiment and he’d been doing so well!

There is liberal use of the word ‘super-position’ and very little on the value of h-bar. (the planck constant)

Intention imprinted electrical devices?

And now the Secret DVD

The first invocation of physics is how we can send rockets to the moon.

The second invocation of physics

Thoughts become things.

‘Thoughts have a frequency’

Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal. (Joe Vitale)

Most people are thinking about what they don’t want. (John Assaraf)

Fred Alan Wolf, you can’t have a universe without the mind shaping it.

No one knows what electricity is. Bob Proctor.

“It has been proven scientifically that positive thoughts are more powerful than negative thoughts.” (Bob Proctor) Oh really Bob?

“Researchers tell us that we have 60,000 thoughts a day.” (Which researchers.)

Trust your feelings above and beyond all else.

Poor gets poorer. (Bob Proctor) Really? So the poor really are at fault for their own poverty.

Palin Booed By Book Tour Crowd

2009-11-20T16:16:00.001-08:00

I fear Sarah, not because she says what she feels (although I would prefer she say what she thinks) but because of WHAT she espouses.

In Sarah Palin's America, gays and lesbians would be fired for being gay or lesbian and there would be no legal recourse.

In Sarah Palin's America, being a Muslim would be prima facie cause for profiling.

In Sarah Palin's America, pagans would be considered 'witches' and witches would not be tolerated.

In Sarah Palin's America, science would take a back seat to religion.

In Sarah Palin's America, educators would be beholden to the most radical religious beliefs.

These are based NOT upon some paranoia, simply upon her *own* statements.

She is in favor of profiling Muslims because they are Muslims.

She belongs to a church that engages in 'spiritual warfare' against 'witches'.

She believes the Earth has been around less than 10,000 years

She believes that research on fruit flies is a waste of time.

She believes that we can drill our way out of an energy crunch.

She believes that creationism should be taught in schools.

Yes, that scares me. There are conservatives I disagree with but they dont' scare me (John McWhorter and Shelby Steele leap to mind). Then there are Sarah Palin and her supporters--they scare me and that fear is justified.

Cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Chaz Bono On GMA: Gender Is Between Your Ears, Not Between Your Legs (VIDEO)

2009-11-19T10:08:00.001-08:00

I *really* wish HuffPo would stop running these articles about Chaz. He has, at no small amount of struggle, come to peace with himself. His chosen path to that inner-peace harms no one and, in fact, effects no one here directly. Yet, there are people here who see fit to dehumanize him (calling him 'it' is dehumanizing---humans, no matter WHAT you might think of them, are never, ever 'it') because they think that they know better what it is to be Chaz Bono than Chaz does himself.

It reminds me, a great deal, of the flack I get as a butch lesbian. Some feel that my being butch is license for them to ask me "why do you want to be a man", when that is not what being butch is. Some feel free to erase my relationship with my wife by calling her my 'friend' or my 'roommate'. This is why, whenever there is an article about transgender folks, I go into the thread to defend these queer brothers and sisters.

For those of you using the wrong pronoun--it is not for you to say what Chaz's gender is, it is for HIM to say. For those who are stating that transgendered people don't exist, again this is not for you to say.

Just because you cannot empathize with someone does not mean that they are unworthy of empathy.

Cheers

LF
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Jon Stewart, Lou Dobbs Discuss CNN, Argue Over Health Care Reform (VIDEO)

2009-11-19T09:16:00.001-08:00

Okay, so, let's say that we were going to get rid of all of the people here without documentation. How would you go about it? Should they be rounded up? If so, how would you go about that? Who should we be looking for? (These are very practical questions which, I'm sure, you have given great thought to)

Should there be checkpoints in the U.S. where some guy in a uniform and mirrored sunglasses asks "papers please"? If so, should they be checking EVERYONE's papers or just SOME people's papers? If the latter, what characteristics should they use to determine if that person is suspicious?

Your honest answers are, of course, appreciated.

Cheers

LF
About Daily Show
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

2009-11-18T16:06:00.001-08:00

Let me also suggest that you go to your local library and find a Nova program on the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board decision. You might find it very enlightening. If Kitzmiller were an isolated incident, then you might have a point but it isn't isolated. Kansas perennially has a move by the state education authorities to insert the teaching of creationism in public schools. A Texas university offers a graduate degree in Creation Science. Texas schools are constantly trying to teach creationism in school.

I worry because there's a large number of people who *would* have creationism taught in public school and a lot of other folks, whom I otherwise politically agree with, who in the name of 'fairness' dismiss the creationists as nothing more than a few hundred people scattered throughout the country.

cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Gay Married Couples Suing The Government Over DOMA

2009-11-18T13:46:00.001-08:00

As I said to someone else on this thread. When we weren't talking about same-sex marriage but just domestic partnership, the SAME people (perhaps even you yourself) were opposed to domestic partnership because it would grant "special rights" to homosexuals and was a "threat to the traditional family". When it was civil unions the SAME people were opposed to CUs because they would (sing it with me, you all know the chorus) "grant special rights" to homosexuals and was a "threat to the traditional family". It doesn't matter WHAT we call it, if it grants legal standing to same-sex couples conservatives will oppose it as being a threat to the traditional family.

Cheers

LF
About Marriage
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

2009-11-18T06:08:00.001-08:00

Well, see, Jesus LIKES Creationism and he *hates* Marxism. Or something like that.

It's interesting that if someone suggested that we teach, say, the Hindu creation myth alongside evolution ('teach the controversy, right?') that would also go over like a lead balloon and yet we're supposed to believe there's no religious motivation behind wanting to see creationism taught in a science class.

Cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

2009-11-17T10:23:00.001-08:00

So you think the ICR and the Discovery Institute are just a couple of fringe figures sitting in a basement someplace? No. Not even wrong.

Cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

2009-11-17T10:22:00.001-08:00

No, Timny. Based upon the sincere comments of people here--yourself included---I genuinely believe that people who reject evolution ACTUALLY believe that, for instance, we should be seeing crockoducks (a la Kirk Cameron) or that fish one day became humans.

I'm sorry but if you read through these comments--or anyplace else where creationists are commenting upon that which they know nothing about--you realize that they aren't making jokes, this is what they ACTUALLY believe evolutionary biology teaches. That one day there were monkeys and the next day, in a one-step mutation, there were humans.

This, of course, is not what the theory teaches.

Cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

2009-11-17T10:13:00.001-08:00

Evolutionary biology is NOT a theory of the origins of life. That is abiogenesis which is a subset of organic chemistry. Evolutionary biology is a theory about the *diversity* of life forms.

Also, natural selection is a non-random process.

Cheers

LF

(who is amazed that people who seem to know next to nothing about evolutionary biology seem to feel competent to reject that which they know nothing about)
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Palin Suggests Evolution Not Real In "Going Rogue"

2009-11-17T10:09:00.001-08:00

There is NEVER such a thing as "stick a fork in it" proof in science. There are things that have not been falsified and things that have been falsified. That's it. That's ALL you can do. Creationism is not falsifiable even in principle and so does not deserve to be considered in the same class as evolutionary biology which *is* falsifiable.

Cheers

LF
About Bestsellers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

NASA on a crusade to debunk 2012 apocalypse myths

2009-11-10T08:42:00.000-08:00

I don’t know what is worse, that our tax dollars are going to this kind of thing or that we need our tax dollars going to this sort of thing.
NASA has a page dedicated to debunking the various myths surrounding the Mayan ‘prophecy’ that the world will end (or change, or be transformed, or turned into a jelly donut) on 21 Dec 2012. Some of the more interesting bits are below.

The doomsday scenario revolves claims that the end of time will come as an obscure Planet X -- or Nibiru -- heads toward or collides into Earth.
The mysterious planet was supposedly discovered by the Sumerians, according to claims by pseudo-scientists, paranormal activity enthusiasts and Internet theorists.

“There is no factual basis for these claims,” NASA said in a question-and-answer posting on its website.
If such a collision were real “astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye,” it added. “Obviously, it does not exist.”

“Credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012,” NASA insisted.
Initial theories set the disaster for May 2003, but when nothing happened the date was moved forward to the winter solstice in 2012 to coincide with the end of a cycle of the ancient Mayan calendar.

Nibiru is a name in Babylonian astrology sometimes associated with the god Marduk. Nibiru appears as a minor character in the Babylonian creation poem Enuma Elish as recorded in the library of Assurbanipal, King of Assyria (668-627 BCE). Sumer flourished much earlier, from about the 23rd century to the 17th century BCE. The claims that Nibiru is a planet and was known to the Sumerians are contradicted by scholars who (unlike Zecharia Sitchin) study and translate the written records of ancient Mesopotamia. Sumer was indeed a great civilization, important for the development of agriculture, water management, urban life, and especially writing. However, they left very few records dealing with astronomy. Certainly they did not know about the existence of Uranus, Neptune or Pluto. They also had no understanding that the planets orbited the Sun, an idea that first developed in ancient Greece two millennia after the end of Sumer. Claims that Sumerians had a sophisticated astronomy, or that they even had a god named Nibiru, are the product of Sitchin’s imagination.

“Planet X” is an oxymoron when applied to a real object. The term has been used by astronomers over the past century for a possible or suspected object. Once the object is found, it is given a real name, as was done with Pluto and Eris, both of which were at some time referred to as Planet X. If a new object turns out to be not real, or not a planet, then you won’t hear about it again. If it is real, it is not called Planet X.
Eris is one of several dwarf planets recently found by astronomers in the outer solar system, all of them on normal orbits that will never bring them near Earth. Like Pluto, Eris is smaller than our Moon. It is very far away, and its orbit never brings it closer than about 4 billion miles. There is no secret about Eris and its orbit, as you can easily verify by googling it or looking it up in Wikipedia.

There is a telescope at the South Pole, but it was not built by NASA and not used to study Nibiru. The South Pole Telescope was supported by the National Science Foundation, and it is a radio telescope, not an optical instrument. It cannot take images or photos. You can look it up on Wikipedia. The Antarctic is a great place for astronomical infrared and short-wave-radio observations, and it also has the advantage that objects can be observed continuously without the interference of the day-night cycle.
I should add that it is impossible to imagine a geometry in which an object can be seen only from the South Pole. Even if it were due south of the Earth, it could be seen from the entire southern hemisphere.

Calendars exist for keeping track of the passage of time, not for predicting the future. The Mayan astronomers were clever, and they developed a very complex calendar. Ancient calendars are interesting to historians, but of they cannot match the ability we have today to keep track of time, or the precision of the calendars currently in use. The main point, however, is that calendars, whether contemporary or ancient, cannot predict the future of our planet or warn of things to happen on a specific date such as 2012.
I note that my desk calendar ends much sooner, on December 31 2009, but I do not interpret this as a prediction of Armageddon. It is just the beginning of a new year.

10. What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours? Does this have something to do to do with our solar system dipping beneath the galactic equator?
A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. It has never happened and never will. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-shift to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. A magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia, anyway. But they falsely claim that a magnetic reversal is coming soon (in 2012) and that this is the same as, or will trigger, a reversal of rotational poles. The bottom line is: (a) Rotation direction and magnetic polarity are not related. (b) There is no reason to expect a reversal of magnetic polarity any time soon, or to anticipate any bad effects on life when it does eventually happen. © A sudden shift in rotational pole with disastrous consequences is impossible. Also, none of this has anything to do with the galactic equator or any of the other nonsense about alignments that appears on many of the conspiracy theory websites.

11. When most of the planets align in 2012 and planet Earth is in the center of the Milky Way, what will the effects of this be on planet Earth? Could it cause a pole shift, and if so what could we expect?
There is no planet alignment in 2012 or any other time in the next several decades. As to the Earth being in the center of the Milky Way, I don’t know what this phrase means. If you are referring to the Milky Way Galaxy, we are rather far toward the edge of this spiral galaxy, some 30,000 light years from the center. We circle the galactic center in a period of 225-250 million years, always keeping approximately the same distance. Concerning a pole shift, I also don’t know what this means. If it means some sudden change in the position of the pole (that is, the rotation axis of the Earth), then that is impossible, as noted in the answer to Question 10. What many websites do discuss is the alignment of the Earth and Sun with the center of the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius. This happens every December, with no bad consequences, and there is no reason to expect 2012 to be different from any other year.

12. When the sun and the Earth line up on the galactic plane at the same time with the black whole being in the center couldn’t that cause something to happen, due to the fact that the black hole has such a strong gravitational pull.
There is a giant black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and like any concentration of mass it exerts gravitational force on the rest of the Galaxy. However, the galactic center is very far away, approximately 30,000 light years, so it has negligible effects on the solar system or the Earth. There are no special forces from the galactic plane or the galactic center. The only important force that acts on the Earth is the gravitation of the Sun and Moon. As far as the influence of the galactic plane, there is nothing special about this location. The last time the Earth was in the galactic plane was several million years ago. Claims that we are about to cross the galactic plane are untrue.

13. I am scared about the fact that the Earth will enter the Dark Rift in the Milky Way. What will this do? Will the Earth be swallowed up?
The “dark rift” is a popular name for the broad and diffuse dust clouds in the inner arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, which block our view of the galactic center. The entire “galactic alignment” scare is pretty crazy. Late in December the Sun is always approximately in the direction of the center of the Galaxy as seen from the Earth, but so what? Apparently the con-men who are trying to scare you have decided to use these meaningless phrases about “alignments” and the “dark rift” and “photon belt” precisely because they are not understood by the public. It is too bad, but there is no law against lying on the Internet or anywhere else except in a court of law. As far as the safety of the Earth is concerned, the important threats are from global warming and loss of biological diversity, and perhaps someday from collision with an asteroid or comet, not the pseudoscientific claims about 2012.

16. All my school friends are telling me that we are all going to die in the year 2012 due to a meteor hitting earth. Is this true?
Your friends are wrong. The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA NEO Program Office website (neo.jpl.nasa.gov), so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.

17. If Nibiru is a hoax, why doesn’t issue a denial? How can you permit these stores to circulate and frighten people? Why doesn’t the U.S. government do something about it!
If you go to the NASA home page, nasa.gov, you will see many stories that expose the Nibiru-2012 hoax. Try searching nasa.com under “Nibiru” or “2012”. There is not much more that NASA can do. These hoaxes have nothing to do with NASA and are not based on NASA data, so we as an agency are not directly involved. But scientists, both within NASA and outside, recognize that this hoax with its effort to frighten people is a distraction from more important science concerns, such as global warming and loss of biological diversity. We live in a country where there is freedom of speech, and that includes freedom to lie. You should be glad there are no censors. But if you will just use common sense I am sure you can recognize the lies. As we approach 2012, the lies will be come even more obvious.

The Butch Crew

2009-11-09T15:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went to the first meet-up for The Butch Crew at the Flying Cat coffeehouse in SE. It was fantastic! I feel like I’m watching a butch renaissance happening right before my very eyes. We had butches from all walks of life and covering two or three decades.

I could use more of that.

I am NOT a nice woman

2009-11-05T09:18:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, the following was posted on the Pharyngula blog. It features a homeopathic “doctor” named Charlene Warner giving a talk about light therapy. The level of stupid indulged in was painful.

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I posted the following email to her after my eyes stopped bleeding from the dumb:

Dr. Werner:

You don't know me, but I saw a video of you giving a talk about homeopathy and light therapy. In it, you made a number of factual errors that I assume were well-meaning and unintended and so I thought that perhaps, I would write you privately to point them out.

1> You cannot remove mass from Einstein's special relativity. The amount of mass in the Universe is entirely irrelevant for the implications of this equations. The reason, for instance, that you can move a one-ton car 300+ miles on just 50 lbs of gasoline is because the burning of that small amount of mass releases a huge amount of energy.

2> Stephen Hawking did not create string theory. In point of fact, he has been largely hostile to string theory (for fairly good reasons). The Steven you are thinking of is Weinberg.

3> String theory, if it is true (and there are very good reasons to doubt that it is) has none of the implications that you state it does. The 'vibrations' of strings are, if they exist, a probabilistic quantum mechanical affect and should not be taken to mean something actually vibrating. Rather it is a fluctuation of energy within a defined range of probable states.

4> Even if string theory is true, it would have absolutely no implications that we would directly experience since a single string would still be smaller than the smallest particle and in the same way that you are not affected by individual Z-bosons, for instance, you would not be affected by any single string.

5> String theory is a mathematical description that seeks to explain certain interesting features of the Universe at the sub-atomic scale and in particularly intense gravitational fields. Neither circumstance is something you will ever experience.

6> While it is true, in a very limited and technical sense, we are mostly energy it is true only because E=mc2 actually does hold with mass intact. E=c2 is actually a non-sensical statement on its face sense if E=c2 then the value of E would be E-squared but that is NOT the value of E. This gets necessarily mathematical so bear with me:

If A=B then B = A. If A is squared then B is squared if the preceding is true. Therefore, if A=2 then B must also be equal 2. If A is 2 then A-squared is 4. This means that if A=B then B is ALSO equal to two and four respectively. This is a necessary and inescapable conclusion for the math. So your statement that E=c2 is non-sensical because that would mean that E is equal to the speed of light squared *directly* but that is manifestly not the case.

7> Your statement that 'nothing is really mass' is incorrect. The reason you are not floating away right now (and you aren't) is because the mass of the Earth warps space-time around it and creates gravity. The reason why everything in the solar system orbits the Sun is because the Sun is hugely massive and warps space-time around it. If what you said was true then gravity would not work since Einstein showed that gravity is the warping of space-time by mass.

I think that's pretty much it. Btw. I am not a physicist by training. Rather, I'm a graduate student in biomedical informatics but I read a great deal in physics (well, when I'm not in school) which is why the mistakes in your talk caught my eye.

Have a great day. I hope that you will take this email in the spirit in which it is given. As you are a medical doctor, I'm certain that the last thing you want to do is provide erroneous information to the public.

Like I said, I’m not a nice woman!

Interracial Couple Denied Marriage License By Louisiana Justice Of The Peace...

2009-10-16T06:16:00.000-07:00

...but he’s not a racist, apparently.

(AP) NEW ORLEANS A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.
"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else." [Emphasis mine]
Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.
Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.
"There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage," Bardwell said. "I think those children suffer and I won't help put them through it."
If he did an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.
"I try to treat everyone equally," he said. [Emphasis mine]
I thought that the passages in red deserved particular attention in light of some other musings I have been percolating on the subject of race.
Most germane to this discussion is the following passage from another blogger’s musings on race.
Many people would label a person as a racist for using the n-word, yet I have known many that use it, that have many black friends and hire black people and them well [sic]. Conversely, I know many, mostly liberal whites, who would ostracize people that would ever use the n-word, but who never hire blacks and have no close black friends.

I wonder if the author of the post would consider the justice of the piece a racist, given that he has “piles and piles of black friends” who he generously consents to let “use my bathroom”. This brings up the question of what is actually meant by racism?

My dictionary program (based on Webster’s) defines racism as: the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

Perhaps Mr. Bardwell should go back to school.

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize! Conservatives bust a gasket...

2009-10-09T17:34:00.000-07:00

...and some liberals discover, suddenly, that they don’t like the Nobel Peace Prize.

Okay, so I think that the Nobel Committee made an interesting choice in choosing President Obama. It might even be fair to say that they made a premature and, from a domestic political point of view, bad choice (because of the downstream political implications not because of some inherent unworthiness of Obama). However, as I think about this award I begin to think that, perhaps, it is more understandable than it might seem at first blush. Now, I admit, my first blush thought was “why?” but then I thought a little more deeply about it as the day went on. Looking at America from the outside, which the Nobel Committee is doing, Barack Obama has already accomplished a couple of measures of astounding courage. Firstly, he went to Egypt and gave a speech where he claimed, right out front, that America was not the enemy of Islam. Let’s be real about current-day American politics, that took serious cast-iron cajones to do. Sure, sitting here in Portland, OR it seems like an everyday thing to say “members of my own family practice Islam” but while Portland is an American city, America is not Portland. There are places, many of them only a minutes drive from Portland, where saying “members of my own family practice Islam” is tantamount to saying “and I cheered as the planes crashed into the WTC and the Pentagon”. That alone took courage. Barack Obama has, in something less than a year, begun the rehabilitation of America’s image abroad. Secondly, Barack Obama’s election is a singular event in world history. It may not have occurred to people here but this is the first time in world history that a majority white nation (meaning European or its spin-offs) has ever been headed by a non-white person.

Now, I will admit that some of the critique of Obama--that he has not spun-down the Iraq or Afghanistan wars in six months is somewhat justified but only just barely. I recognize that, as liberals and progressives, we are not used to thinking about military matters beyond the knee-jerk, reflexive “military = bad” mantra. However, it may well be that, in fact, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars cannot be spun down too much faster than they are and I am not entirely convinced that spinning down the Afghanistan war is the right thing to do. Certainly we cannot spin down the Iraq war tomorrow. Or next week. I would be pleased if our forces were largely out of that country by the Summer of 2011. Wars are complicated endeavors and, as much as we might not like to think in these terms as liberals, there are both tactical and strategic considerations that our war-planners must take into account. They must do so. It’s what we pay them for.

The Afghanistan war is a bit more complicated. On the one hand, I know enough history to recognize that Afghanistan is proof of Vincini’s (from the Princess Bride) Dictum: Never get involved in a land-war in Asia! It is the place where empires go to learn humility. On the other hand, whether we like it or not, we now do have a strategic interest in the region. That strategic interest is, Pakistan. It is not in our strategic interests for Pakistan to go the way of Afghanistan circa 1999. It simply isn’t. Iraq doesn’t have nuclear weapons. Iran probably doesn’t have them. Pakistan definitely does. We know this. The Taliban know this. Al Qaeda knows this and, most sobering, India knows this. India, by the way, also has nuclear weapons so it is in the best interest of all parties concerned for there to be a very stable region between Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. So we are torn in two different directions. On the one hand, we don’t want to occupy Afghanistan. The Afghanis don’t want us there. And we know, because we watched the Soviets learn humility in these same mountains, that this is a lesson we would just as soon learn vicariously than by the blood of young men and women.

I have to take a moment to criticize my own political faction for a moment here. It is inexcusable for so many progressives who are on the right side of the cause of peace to be so dangerously naive about geopolitics and war. Yes, dangerously naive. We are reflexive in our opposition without thought. We do not, in the main, bother ourselves with considerations like strategic interests or tactical necessity. If we are going to oppose war, we should bother ourselves to understand, at some level, that which we oppose. I think, however, that some of our opposition is, again, merely reflexive and not necessarily principled. By this I mean that we are opposed to America making war. We are opposed to the West making war. We are opposed to Israel making war. But we are not opposed to, say, Palestine making war. I wonder how many progressives would howl and scream if China, say, invaded Taiwan (not Tibet) without provocation. How many would protest if China invaded, say, Iran? Why do I think that any outcry would be muted if present at all? Before you flame me, gentle reader, ask yourself why you are opposed to the Afghanistan war? (The Iraq war is a different situation because it was clearly not justified by any strategic or tactical imperative and so opposition to it is entirely justified.)

All of this to say that while I’m not sure that Obama is doing the right thing in Afghanistan, I’m willing to admit that he might not be doing the wrong thing. What if he is? Would we, as progressives, know? Would we care? One commentator I read on HuffPo observed that Obama didn’t deserve the Nobel prize because the United States maintains a large nuclear arsenal. Let us say, for sake of argument that we could destroy our nuclear arsenal in less than a year (we couldn’t) would it even be an intelligent thing to do? I would argue that it might not be. I would like to see us seriously draw down our nuclear arsenal and I would like to see the rest of the world agree to go to a zero-nuke state in my lifetime. I doubt that is going to happen. (And even if we did, the same people who are upset that we have them would become instantly upset at any plan conceived to dispose of them because of the wastes--at which point you have to make a choice. This is, by the way, what I mean when I talk about reflexive anti-Americanism.)

So, does Obama deserve a Nobel? Yes and no. As I said at the beginning of this essay, I think it is premature and that it creates a domestic headache that I’m willing to bet that David Axelrod would just as soon not have to bother with. On the other hand, I hope that this creates more pressure on Obama to rise to the occasion. He has been bestowed with the laurels of greatness. It is now up to him to live up to the great vote of confidence he has been given in the form of this honor.

Now, having said enough about progressive reaction to this news, let me express my utter joy and glee that conservatives are busting a gut over this. Every time the conservatives think “okay, now we’ve got him!” events intervene and change the dynamics on them. Last week conservatives were glorying in “world rejects Obama” because Rio got the 2016 Olympics. But now, they can’t argue that the world shares their view of Obama. In fact, the two groups they find themselves in bed with are two groups that they loathe---international peace activists (some) and Al Qaeda. You just can’t buy that kind of entertainment! As they usually do with all things Obama, conservatives are over-reacting and, once again, overreaching. Our President just won the most prestigious award you can be given and they hate it. It’s the little things that make life sweet.