LIVE and DANGEROUS

9·15·08
There is no hint that help will come from elsewhere.

"According to US Environmental Protection Agency documents released in late 2002, UXO at 16,000 domestic inactive military ranges within the United States pose an "imminent and substantial" public health risk and could require the largest environmental cleanup ever, at a cost of at least US$14 billion. Some individual ranges cover 500 square miles (1,300 km2), and, taken together, the ranges comprise an area the size of Florida."

Get Curious.

I seem to struggle to do things that are not completely explicitly defined. Or maybe I am just making excuses.


9·16·08
I don't understand why people consider their gods to be so powerful. There isn't a god alive that could prevent me from say, obtaining a gun and blowing their head off. Why such a weak god? Why believe that this all powerful force can succumb to the irrational behavior of one psychotic individual?

It's only illegal if you get caught.


9·17·08
We should really work to clarify what it means for something to be 'illegal' or 'bad'. What I mean is, the reason 'bad things' are 'bad' is because they hurt people, not because they have some inherent sin to them. Blow jobs are not bad, but because they count as sodomy, they inherently fall under sinful acts to religious nuts. Guns themselves, or the words "I'll kill you", "give me all the money", or other frequent phrases for such nefarious activities are not bad either, the use of those phrases with the intent of inflicting harm on other people is the bad part. I'm not being clear, I ought to expand on this A LOT.

Goody gumdrop.
Don't wake me up without a master plan.

This is stupid. Simple solution? Nobody gets 'credit'. Besides, it's not like these people have anything to do with the object's existence, they merely noticed it with their expensive equipment, their expensive educations, and some patience and hard work. Their reward ought to be the satisfaction of having seen one more minor puzzle piece in the relatively complete large-objects-of-the-solar-system puzzle.

One of the 'yourmorals.org'


9·18·08
Beyond the fact that creationism (equivalent to 'intelligent design') is not science, grade school science classrooms are environments in which we expect to 'do real science'. That is, science classes for children are a place to learn about the most widely accepted scientific ideas of the time, and about the methods and processes used to find and verify those widely accepted scientific ideas. 'Doing real science' involves making the decisions of what the most viable theory is, based on evidence, experimentation, and often consensus among a great many experts. Students may learn about this process, but they have no place in it, as they have no place as experts. If a subject is so poorly understood that there are still two 'sides' to it within the scientific community (that is, a subject lacking scientific consensus), then it should probably not be taught in a scientific class, (beyond being mentioned in passing as a currently debated scientific topic).

Science class is a place to learn about science, not to do actual science. This can be seen by realizing that any experimentation or scientific sort of processes undertaken in a science class should not be expected to produce real scientific discovery or carry real scientific influence. There are rare instances in which high school students make true scientific progress, but that is not the goal of high school science class.

When people say that Darwinian evolution is 'just a theory', what do they think is more verifiable than a theory? Do they seriously believe that facts are somehow more well confirmed? As if the Newton's laws were carved in stone somewhere, rather than established through repeated observation measurement and experimentation?

And thereby create misery.
I know what to do, I just can't make it exciting.
Breathtaking inanity.

Lies are lies, regardless of size; the creationists see reduced sized lies fly more frequently by more ears and eyes like you and me. The potency of a lie is not a linear function of word count—I have a 3 word statement, which these intelligent design advocates would most likely claim is a lie, and most likely find as offensive as I find their lack of understanding science: god is imaginary.

Ha ha ha fag enabler. This guy is so gay. Ha ha ha ha, this is hilarious. "You will eat your children" what??? Luckily I think these people are so ridiculous, I don't really find them threatening to the general good of society in a significant way.

Al Gore said it best: there is a policy of dominance, and dominance just cannot work. There simply is no way to dominate a group of humans for any reasonable amount of time.

This is awesome.
And this too.
and also this one
Ha ha ha.

I see that on youtube, and really all over the place, people argue this and that way for and against the bible, for and against it's histocrisy, for and against it's importance. People getting bent out of shape at the suggestion that humans evolved from monkeys.
In this video there is a summarizing frame that really does a good job of explaining the current state of human behavior: "In human societies, the male's secondary selfish reproductive strategy (rape) is strongly repressed through cultural and moral codes and a punishment system.
Males and Females natural 'nasty' strategy of adultery is repressed as well (though less in modern societies but still severely in muslim countries).
The 'nasty' human female strategy of 'gold-digging' is relatively unrepressed."
It goes on to point out: "However, obviously, just because evolution created 'nasty' instincts, it does not mean that we should give 'free ride' to them."
It really is an excellently informative video.

I've seen a lot of girls lately wearing boots, and I was thinking of that old insult, "your mother wore combat boots", and I thought that a good response might be, "I know, just don't let her hear you say that, she might curb-stomp both our ugly-ass heads into the ground".


9·19·08
Reminder: my inability to change a non-definite belief is exactly the same reason it would be inappropriate to call myself an agnostic, even though strict logical analysis says I am.

"Given a U.S. population of about 250 million people, every billion dollars in the federal budget translates into $4 f or every American. Thus, an annual Defense Department budget of almost a third of a tr illion dollars amounts to approximately $5,000 per year for a family of four. What have all these expenditures (ours and theirs) bought over the years? The TNT equivalent of all the nuclear weapons in the world amounts to 25,000 megatons, or 50 trillion pounds, or 10,000 pounds for every man, woman, and child on earth. (One pound in a car, incidentally, demolishes the car and kills ever yone in it.) "
I say we cash in. I want my 10,000 pounds of TNT; I think I could do some interesting stuff with it.

Ha ha ha, okay, the scaling factor between you, and a proton, is roughly the scaling factor between you and the distance to Alpha Centuri.
People have asked me a lot about the LHC and whether I think it will destroy the world. My first response is always to ask how reckless to physicists seem to be? Do I strike you as a reckless person? If it were a motorcycle gang operating the LHC, maybe we should double check their numbers. But physicists? These are scientists who dedicate vast swaths of their lives to pouring over unimaginably large data sets looking for incomprehensible clues as to how the universe works. They probably don't go play Russian roulette afterwards. But Beyond that, now I try to describe the situation in which these particles are colliding. The idea behind a black hole is that you force so much matter into such a small space, that the force of gravity pulling on all the matter takes over and crunches it down into one infinitely small point, or something. At that point, it doesn't really mean much to talk about the 'size' of the object anymore, so instead we use a slightly indirect method to discuss their size. Once the matter has been sufficiently crunched to form the black hole, it is surrounded by a very strong gravitational field, but the strength of the field depends on the distance to the black hole. Black hole size is really measured by event horizon, which could be described as the radius from the black hole in which the gravitational field becomes so strong as to prevent any matter, or even energy (?) from escaping the black hole. (This is of course all more complicated, but I am not qualified and do not have the time to express the full sentiment.)
Where I am going with all this, in my usual, wandering, ranting manner, is that the event horizon for a black hole with the entire Earth's mass is about 9 mm, and the black hole that would be formed by a few protons smashing into one another would be considerably smaller. To help you understand how much smaller protons are, I have the above statement, though I should clarify that the distance to Alpha Centuri is about 4.3 light years, and that a light year is about 5,879,000,000,000 miles. Driving at 100 miles per hour, and assuming you have a new generation of children every 30 years, then a road trip to Alpha Centuri would result in your great-great-great-great + (223,700 greats) grand children reaching the star. Well, that was too much of a ramble, I'll figure out how return to this topic another time.


9·20·08
From Inherit the Wind
"Wake up Copernicus"
"Why? Because I know the sunrise is just an elusion. My teacher told me so."
"Walking down the street, listening to the sound of your own footsteps."
"...everyplace else."
"He said man created a vengeful god out of his own bigotry, and the devil out of his own hell."
"A giant once lived in that body. But he got lost because he looked for god too high up and too far away."

"You poor slob, you're all alone. When you go to your grave, there won't be anybody to pull the grass up over your head. Nobody to mourn you, nobody to give a damn. You're all alone.
—You're wrong... you'll be there. You're the type. Who else would defend my right to be lonely."

Why do they say, "descended from a lower order of animals"? Shouldn't we rather say we "ascended from a lower order of animals"? Shouldn't every creature that evolves from a less successful form be taken to have ascended?
When creationists take offense to the suggestion that man is related to apes, is it because they have failed to inherit the distinguishing feature of humanity (i.e. intelligence)? If they were to recognize the uniquely human trait of intelligence, it would no longer be so offensive to believe we had, in the cosmically distant past, shared an ancestor, with our unfortunately inferior neighboring species.

Maybe we should just have a test on voting day, that measures your awareness of candidate policies. Really I think we should vote for policies, not candidates or parties.


DON'T POSTPONE JOY.