The above comic is created and licensed by Cectic.com.
The above comment was from Cectic.com. If you don’t get it, you really need to read this account of a run-in between an evolutionary biologist and the creators of a creationist propaganda film.
On a side note, that Cectic.com site looks pretty good. I’ll have to feature more of their stuff here in the future.
I finally finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon last week. It was over 1.1k pages long, making it one of the longest I’ve read. You can read an excerpt of my review here. The full thing is on my review page. Also, don’t miss Bunnies4Buddha’s newest review on her page.
In addition to many of the characters of Cryptonomicon being inter-related, they are the descendants of Characters from The Baroque Cycle. The similarities and differences between the related characters and their situations are interesting and often surprising.
These books share other similarities with one another. First, not all the mysteries and plot lines are fully resolved by the end of the book. While this may leave some readers dissatisfied, I believe it adds an element of realism. Real life is never as tidy as our stories would have us believe. Second, Stephenson doesn’t shy away from science, technology, and history in his books. He includes specifics about cryptographic techniques, German U-boat technology, Pacific arena battle sites, and even use of the Zeta function as a pseudo random number generator. In previous books, he delved into metallurgy, Sumerian religious practices, pre-Reformation European politics, Philosophy, and the calculus. This makes them a joy to read for geeks like myself.
Now I’ve picked up Paine: Collected Writings only do discover it is over 800 pages (the rice paper made it deceptively thin). I’m not sure I can take that many pamphlets, letters, and essays by one person all in a row. I’ll probably read this intermittently while I take breaks to read other books. Currently I’m reading Common Sense and will offer a review of each piece as I complete it.
Finally, here is the final part of The Issues According to McCain’s Website. Indeed, this is my final The Issues According to a Candidate’s Website that I am doing for the US Presidential Primary race. If you missed Part I or Part II, simply follow the links.
Education: After the obligatory mentioning of the importance of education, McCain lists no specific accomplishments or goals in education reform. The language of his thoughts on this issue are very non-specific, but seems to give support to school vouchers and subtle condemnation of teachers’ unions.
School vouchers have the potential to kill public eduction. Private schools are under no obligation to accept students. Naturally, private schools will choose students they believe will perform the best, thus enhancing the prestige of the school. They will also choose students who are low cost, such as students without special needs. Thus the students left in the public system will be disproportionately less qualified and/or have disabilities and/or discipline problems. This would cause public schools to have worse performance records and worse discipline problems. So instead of solving these issues already present in many schools, school vouchers promise to concentrate and amplify these problems. It’s a solution for select children which fails to provide the “equal opportunity” for all children that McCain supposedly champions on this issue.
Did I mention that most private schools are religious and government funding for them is in violation of the First Amendment?
National Security: The subtitle for this issue on McCain’s website is “A Strong Military in a Dangerous World”. Anytime I see someone claiming something is ‘dangerous’, it gets my skeptic sense tingling. Too many times has danger been exaggerated or made up wholesale in order to motivate people to buy certain products, tune-in to certain news shows, or vote certain ways. Sure enough, when listing the threats to America, he puts global terrorism and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the top of his list. As I’ve written about elsewhere, these problems pose relatively minor security risks to United States. He also lists Iran and North Korea is potential threats. Seeing as North Korea is openly hostile to the US and has nuclear technology (albeit primitive), I would agree with him. Iran isn’t far behind North Korea both in terms of hostility and technology.
I’m actually posting this weeks TITMT ‘on time’ this week. Janet usually posts the question sometime Tuesday evening (EST), and I see it for the first time Wednesday morning. So for us, it’s really (Re)Tell It To Me Wednesday, but that’s not as catchy. I think I’ll stick with Janet’s clever name.
What’s the strangest food(s) you’ve ever eaten?
I’m not sure. ‘Strange’ is a relative term. It’s one that has been used to describe me often throughout my life, so I associate ’strange’ with ‘good’. As far as collections ingredients go, the strangest, I’m sure, is one of the many Doritos variants. The ingredients lists on those things are daunting. Onions are a bit strange too. They make you cry when you cut it!
In general, I’m willing to try most any food. I’ve had everything from raw fish to chocolate covered ants. I’ve had fruits that I didn’t even know the name to, and even some unidentified meat at a Buddhist temple. But I really can’t point to any one thing I’ve ingested and say, “No that, was a strange thing to eat.”
Here is part II of my review of John McCain’s issues as published on his website. Part I can be found here.
Human Dignity & the Sanctity of Life: Uh-oh! With a title like that, you know McCain is going to talk about regressive policies that will put woman’s rights back 40 years and sexual rights back to the Victorian Era. It will, of course, be dressed up in holier-than-thou language meant to appeal to people who want everyone else to obey their narrow interpretation of Christianity. Let’s see if I’m right…
Yep. First order of business for McCain is to appoint judges based on one criteria: whether or not they will overturn Roe v. Wade. These judges are his idea of judges that won’t “legislating from the bench”. Bullshit. His only criteria for appointing judges is to change one law! How is that not legislating from the bench? Worse yet, his desire to overturn that precedent is based on nothing more than his religious beliefs (or at least the religious beliefs of the people’s whose votes he wants). I could innumerate all the reasons why McCain is wrong on this issue, but I’ve already done that in part.
His next topic on this ‘issue’ is quite reasonable: promote adoption. This is a laudable goal and I support it as well, unless his idea of promoting adoption is legally removing choice from women. But adoption can be promoted in such a way that it becomes an additional choice for women.
McCain also wants to ‘protect marriage’. This means denying same-sex couples equal protection under the law. (”Screw the gays! Er, not literally, of course”) He tries to make this sound noble by describing the ‘traditional’ family as “the foundation of Western Civilization and civil society”. The obvious implication is that if homosexuals marry, Western Civilization will crumble into chaos. That’s quite a claim Senator, care to back that up with some facts? What’s that? This is based on one verse from the Old Testament? Thought so. Sorry, “Congress shall pass no laws regarding an establishment of religion”.
Here’s the belated TITMT from The Art of Getting By.
What are your thoughts on life outside of Earth? Do you believe in aliens? If so, what do you think when you think about them? I am purposely being vague here in the hopes you’ll expand upon your own.
Life almost certainly exists outside of Earth. I wouldn’t even be surprised if we found evidence of bacterium that once lived in our own solar system. Furthermore, given these facts:
I would guess that intelligent life has evolved somewhere else in the universe. And if it hasn’t, it will eventually.
For the fun of it, let’s do a little speculative math. Let’s say the number of stars in the universe to be 10^22 (100 billion stars per galaxy times 100 billion galaxies). It took less than 5 billion years to evolve intelligent life on this planet, but lets suppose we were lucky and it usually takes about 10 billion. Finally, this is the biggest speculation of all is how long can the universe continue to support life. The few numbers I could find on this topic but the number between 24 billion (in the event of an early Big Crunch) and 3.65 trillion (the universe expands without end). I’ll just pick a convenient number in that range: 100 billion. This means that there are about 10 billion (100 billion years of universe divided by 10 billion years required for evolution) intelligent life creating opportunities at a given location.
A state legislator in Oklahoma has just learned a lesson about the new media. Sally Kern (R, of course) thought she was speaking to an audience of 50, but her speech was recorded and then distributed via the internet. You can see a video of her talk here. If you don’t want to listen to the whole thing, here are some choice quotes:
“The homosexual agenda is destroying this nation.”
“I honestly think [homosexuality is] the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat.”
“I’m not anti-, I’m not gay-bashing but according to God’s word that is not the right kind of lifestyle.”
“The very fact that I’m talking to you like this here today puts me in jeopardy.”
Damn straight, Mrs. Kern. Your political career just crashed and burned. And, of course, her hateful talk is based on what she learned from “God’s word”. Religion is just about the only place where such blatant stupidity can ever gain popular support. Even amongst her fellow Christians, she has been condemned!
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe she, or anyone, should be forbidden from saying such things. I believe strongly in the freedom of speech. But saying certain things should result in severe social consequences. Anti-homosexual speech should create as strong a negative reaction as a racial slur does. Thankfully, as reaction to this story seems to indicate, our society seems to be heading in that direction.
I learned of this story by way of my Human Rights Campaign action alert that I received via email. I became a member of this group last month precisely because idiots like representative Kern still hold power. I encourage my readers to do the same. I will also provide a link to their website on my sidebar as well.
