Merit-bound Alley

Sen. Edward Kennedy made an inspiring speech on the first night of the DNC. He looked good, sounded strong, and it made me sad. Kennedy had an operation on June 2nd to remove part of a malignant brain tumor, and was to continue with rounds of radiation and chemo to continue treatment.

My father died of cancer in 1997. Before that, he had radiation and chemo to treat, and it made him weak, pale, skinny, and bald. Sen. Kennedy does not look like a man who is undergoing cancer treatment. He looks like a man who has traded a year or so of life being sick for a few months of life with his health intact.

For those that love A Nightmare Before Christmas, or Invader Zim, or anything that is a little gross, but mega-cute, this exhibit in Basel, Switzerlad that shows the skeletons of cartoon characters.

Thoughts of military action resulting in the loss of life always tends to bring up many strong and conflicting emotions. Because of that, I will simply offer my sincerest thanks for those who have sacrificed everything for what we have.

We in Delaware won’t see it tonight unless these clouds move away, but there are some amazing things in the night sky

Just past the first quarter, the moon casts silver light on the Earth. We were there. Humans threw people out of the atmosphere and we walked on an alien world. People stepped out of a metal ship, watched as dust flew from their footprints in a perfect parabola and settled onto the ground. We planted the Stars and Stripes, and gathering rocks for scientific inquiry, jetted those brave men back home. There are men alive today who walked on another world!

Brilliant orange, Mars creeps it’s way farther and farther from Pollux and Castor on the 2D map of the sky. If you look at that rusty dot, you are seeing robots that men and women hurled across thousands of miles to orbit or land, and send us amazing photos of that alien terrain. Soon, yet another robot will land on the ice caps and send us data about water on Mars!

Look far to the left and you will see Saturn, honey-gold and hanging in Leo, fighting the lion for brilliance and beauty! We sent another robot over one million kilometers away to orbit this ringed giant! This satellite, Cassini, landed a probe on one of the moons of Saturn, a completely different plantary system! We have video of the Huygens probe landing on the Saturnian moon of Titan, a world of thick yellow atmosphere and oceans of ammonia! If you look at that tiny golden dot in the sky, you can know that there is a human artifact out there, gathering data about other planets.

Beyond Saturn, completely out of view, our species, cousin to orangutans and bonobos, have two probes that have sailed out of the solar system and continue to send back data. Voyager has turned its eye back to the Earth from a billion miles away and has shown us who we are, invisible specks on a pale blue dot. Specks that have vicariously traveled the solar system and have seen things that no other species alive today will. A species that will one day, within the lifetime of this writer and you the reader, walk on an alien planet, our boots red with the iron rust of a foreign world.

What other race has had the blatant arrogance to fling a metal pod to another world and succeed? What other race has mined photographs of a world we will never touch? What other species has their handiwork sailing outside of our world, our orbit, our planetary system, our solar system?

You ask me how I can have wonder without a god, then I question your imagination, your sapience. Close your eyes and see the amazing things that humanity has done. See the silver speck, humanity-flung, and moving on other worlds.

That is wonder, my friends.

Yes, I mean the show.

I was channel surfing and happened to come upon a Good Times Marathon. The episode that caught my eye was one in which Michael, the youngest son, gets a job at a hardware store where the owner happens to be an atheist. The owner’s atheist views come into discussion, and Michael being a 15 year old boy, decides he is atheist too because of his repect for his new boss.

When Flo finds out about this, the heads to the hardware shop to tell the owner that Michael quits. They butt heads, with appropriate 70s humor, then the owner decides to fire Michael so that the boy wouldn’t blame his mother for losing the job. That night, at dinner, the owner stops by the Evans household and offers to make peace with Michael, who then finds out Flo caused him to lose the job due to the shop owner’s beliefs.

As happens on sitcoms, everything resolves with everyone the best of friends. The atheist shop owner has dinner with the Christian Evans family and everyone is happy friends.

It just struck me how unlikely that resolution would be in America today. Atheists are finding their voices against the Christian right, and the loudest ones are also the most critical. Christians are seeing these attacks on their faith and pushing back on the atheists with attacks on their morals and ethics. This is not an environment that will nurture togetherness between the faithful and secular.

It’s interesting to me that such an old sitcom is making a point about co-existence and acceptance that would be pretty advanced today.

Just thought I’d share.

You know what pisses me off? People who have a brain in their fucking head and don’t use it. You see that in political debate more than anything else. Idiot partisan would rather play gotcha politics that have a reasoned discussion.

“Oh, no! You disagreed! Wah! Wah! Wah!”

What pisses me off more than that is that I try to get idiot partisans to enter into a reasoned discussion and they’d rather assume that I’m attacking them, or take the most inane comment as an offense rather than having a real discussion.

As a human, it offends me that so many smart people refuse to use the brain that they were lucky enough to be born with. I can’t think of any greater waste.

It seems unlikely that we’ll be able to see the lunar eclipse tonight. Snow is going to continue until 9pm and we’ll have mostly cloudy skies until the wee hours of the morning. I’m hoping those “mostly” cloudy skies will translate to some clear spots. I don’t want to wait until the end of 2010 to see another eclipe.

Anyone who has been around for the past year will know that every once in a while I think of weird shit. Often, I can keep it hidden from the world, but every once in a while, I have to voice it and I lose readers. One of those odd thoughts came to me yesterday, and it made me write the following letter to Dr. Philip Plait, author of the book and website Bad Astronomy:

Phil,

I was thinking about this yesterday while reading your book, and I promise I was sober. The weird thought that occurred to me was this: If space, along with time and matter was created at the big bang, is it possible that the accelerating expansion of the universe is not really the matter of the universe moving away from the other matter at an accelerating rate, but instead of the continuing and increasing rate of the creation of more space separating objects in the universe?

I’m not a scientist, but a scientist fanboy, and I figure if someone is going to demolish this thought, I’d like it to be someone I enjoy reading.

Catch you later!

-Joe     

I’ll let you know if and when I get a response, as I know Phil gets a LOT of emails. In the meantime, I was wondering what you all thought, since I know I have some very smart readers. Comment and let me know how stupid this thought is! 

If you go out and check the southwestern sky just before sunup, you will be treated to the following sight: This is Venus and Jupiter hanging right next to each other. I know my picture is amazing, but go out and see it for yourself. It is a breathtakingly beautiful scene. 

As some of you may be aware, I’ve been dealing with a few health issues that have made it difficult for me to concentrate on M-BA. I apologize for the lack of posts, but I can say that I haven’t been completely complacent and have used some of my better moments of the past two weeks to my advantage to research my first medicine-related post. Check back before too long to catch it.

My sincerest thanks to those of you who have checked in during the current dry spell!