Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Comically corrupt congressman Aaron Schock of Illinois, who has probably done far worse but got nailed for dipping into the wrong set of funds to redecorate his office – the part that made it funny and kept it in the news was that he chose a Downton Abbey motif – has resigned. It won’t change anything. There are 435 members of congress and the Republicans will still have a fairly safe majority – but it’s still funny.

A court in Denmark is going to hear evidence that 9/11 may have been an inside job. It’s like this: Niels Harritt is a scientist who says nano-thermite was found at the scene (which would prove that bombs were pre-planted in the building, hence inside job). He wrote an article about it. A Danish magazine printed another article, saying he was a crackpot. He’s suing them for libel. Brilliant! All I ever do is bitch at people on facebook.

But, a bit more on the Drake Equation and mankinds search for intelligent, extraterrestrial life. What we’re really looking for is life as we know it. That’s why we’re hung up on water based worlds. One of my favorite episodes of Star Trek (original series) was the one with the Horta, the silicon based life form that ate rocks. It will be a long time before we find something like that, because that’s not what we’re looking for.
If we make it to Enceladus in the next couple of decades, and find an ocean, teeming with life, under the ice, science geeks will go crazy. The average person will say “Eh, fish.”

No, we’re looking for oxygen breathing, water drinking life forms with language, fingers or an equivalent, and interesting art forms.
The Drake Equation is basically humanity’s application to a galactic dating site.

The guy who was shooting at the police a few days back in Ferguson, Missouri, has been caught and his defense (rather ingenious, really) is that he wasn’t actually shooting at the police. I don’t think anybody’s buying it, but it’s interesting. Theoretically, philosophically, it shouldn’t make any difference. Shooting at people is shooting at people. However, as somebody famous once said (I’ve seen it attributed to Yogi Berra) “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.”
Police here in Prague caught the guy who stabbed a guy at my local Metro station; a homeless man, just 21, with mental problems. It took a couple of days, but he hadn’t even managed to get out of the neighborhood. Glad that’s over.
Putin has resurfaced, so those of us who were hoping he’d been kidnapped by aliens or fallen into a Siberian sinkhole are a bit disappointed, but we’ll just have to learn to live with it.

What I really want to talk about tonight is the Drake Equation. You know: N=RxfpxnexflxfixfexL, which is the formula for calculating how many different alien, spacefaring civilizations are out there.

L is the bugger. We know there are gazillions of planets out there, we know a fair number of them have water and are in their Suns’ Goldilocks Zones. There’s no reason to assume that life doesn’t evolve pretty much everywhere it can, and judging just by the extremophiles we know, it can evolve in a pretty broad range of environments. So, the universe is teeming with life. There is also no reason to believe that lots of those life forms wouldn’t evolve intelligence. It’s happened more than once right here on Earth. Given intelligence, technology becomes probable. Yet, we haven’t been contacted yet. So, technological life forms who are attempting to contact other intelligent life forms must be rare, and all that’s left is L. This does not bode well. We have to figure out a way to survive electromagnetic pulses, incoming asteroids, super volcanoes, and our own self-destructive tendencies. We have to do it before we go extinct.

It’s been a fairly busy weekend of proofreading and rewriting, but I found time to watch a movie this afternoon, and I’m glad I did. I’m also glad I didn’t see it at the cinema. When I go to the cinema, which I only do once or twice a year, I like to be entertained – jokes, music, dancing, beautiful women, perhaps a suspenseful plot and a bit of well choreographed violence, but those aren’t my favorites.
This was a movie worth seeing, it was in some ways inspiring, in some ways informative, definitely interesting, but it didn’t have a whole lot of big yucks in it. It was ‘The Theory of Everything,’ the Stephen Hawking story.

They say that great artists must suffer – I don’t think it’s quite as universal as that, but there are sure a lot of examples. There’s no shortage in the science community, either. Of course, Troubled Genius Syndrome usually refers to psychological troubles – Newton was an emotional cripple, Tesla talked to himself and fed pigeons, and that guy Russell Crowe played in ‘A Beautiful Mind’ was living in a completely different reality.
There can’t actually be any link between Hawking’s genius and the fact that he’s got motor neuron disease – not a direct link, anyway. But, he became more focused when he lost all physical capacity, when he was reduced to living inside his mind. Up to that point he was an extremely bright, but somewhat lazy, graduate student at Cambridge. Pretty elite stuff, but still just one among many.
Do we owe the knowledge gained by Hawking’s existence to the horrible suffering he has had in his life? That would make him, like, the Jesus Christ of Science. Knowledge gained is knowledge gained forever, but it’s tragic that the giver of that knowledge paid such a high price, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Bristol Palin is engaged to get married, and I wish her and her fiance the best of luck.
It doesn’t matter that she got drunk at a party recently, punched a guy in the face several times, and made a total fool of herself while she left her 6 year old (or was he 5?) in the car. Plenty of girls might have done that.

It doesn’t matter that, when her mother was running for vice president and preaching family values all over the place, she was an unmarried pregnant teenager and practically the poster child for Republican hypocrisy.
It doesn’t matter that her mother’s politics are totally crazy whackadoodle. Her fiance probably isn’t exactly a liberal, either. As long as neither one of them ever goes into politics, it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter that she’s a crappy dancer and a worse actress.
I’m sure she’s a good enough dancer in a social setting, and half of the good actresses have bad marriages, so that might be just as well, actually.
It doesn’t matter that she’s had plastic surgery. I’m not sure if it helped her or hurt her, actually, but it seems new boyfriend is pleased with her appearance, and that’s all that matters.
Of course, we’ll have to wait and see if it actually happens. She was engaged to Levi, twice, and that never worked out.
But this time might likely be different. She’s 24 now, and probably ready.
I wish them long life and happiness. And privacy. Please, please let them have lots and lots of privacy.

p.s. His name is Dakota Meyer, so her name will be Bristol Meyer.

facebook is even worse than a face to face conversation as far as watching what you have to say, both because whatever you say is written down (forget about written in stone; written in cyberspace, recorded in the permanent memory of the hive mind, is far more permanent) and because people get so damned sensitive.
It’s hard being nice all the time. I think there should be one day of the week when everybody can just let fly, be as bitter and nasty and mean spirited as they like. As we have Throwback Thursday, I think we should have Sarcastic Saturday, or maybe Mean Monday. Just a thought.

Weird rumors out of Russia because Putin hasn’t had a public appearance in over a week. Is he ill? Is there some kind of behind the scenes power struggle? Shacked up with a young lover? Kidnapped by aliens? Actually, I doubt if it’s anything. A week is not that long and it’s not a bad thing to give oneself a total vacation, away from the press and all. Kim Jong Un disappeared a couple of months back and everybody thought he was through. That turned out to be nothing and this probably will, too. It would be good for the world, though, if he was suddenly dead or forced from power. Maybe. Who knows who’s waiting in the wings?

Time magazine had Hillary Clinton on its cover recently, but some are claiming the cover was a bit of sabotage. They had her in silhouette and her head was over the M in ‘TIME’, so the little pointy bits at the top looked like devil horns. It might have been accidental. Magazines screw up like that all the time. Or maybe it wasn’t. I don’t think it will affect her chances one way or another. Do people still read magazines?

The Pope said recently that he plans to retire in a couple of years, like the guy before him. I don’t quite get this. Is being Pope like hard work or something? You have people to wait on you hand and foot and you live in a palace. Strikes me that a guy couldn’t ask for a better retirement. If he does step down, though, that Pope for life tradition is pretty much shattered.

Scientists now suspect that Enceladus, a moon of Saturn’s, might not just have an ocean under it’s icy crust, it might be warm, damn near boiling in points. That makes it a seriously possible location for life. It will be about 30 years before we find out, with our current level of technology. So, we’d better get cracking.