Mammoth in a thong

In an effort to make science even sexier than it already is, Hope Jaren has introduced ‪#‎ThingIStudyInAThong‬ on Twitter. This is my contribution.

Mammoth in a thong. The real reason they went extinct?

Life's little pleasures

I just sharpened the kitchen knives and celebrated by slicing a tomato really thin.

Dear 1962

Fifty years ago, Seattle was the host of the Century 21 World Exposition, better known simply as the Seattle World's Fair. Century 21 was one of those quaint imperial propaganda exercises during which one of the Great Powers tried to dazzle the rest of the world with its technology and vision of the future. When Dad loaded Mom, my sisters, and me into our 1957 Volkswagon Microbus to go to the World's Fair, I didn't care about any of that; all I knew was that John Glenn's space capsule was there and that I was going to see it.

Source.
Unless your name is Jules Verne, predicting the future is a thankless business. Prognosticators almost always expect too much in the short term and not enough in the long term. Whatever else they get right, they never, ever manage to see what's happening to social and cultural mores. Again, like most of these imperial exercises, the Seattle World's Fair depended on its sponsors--civic boosters, corporations, and the government--to create its vision of the future. They made a conscious decision to ignore the people who had spent the most time thinking about the future, science fiction writers. Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were both approached to pitch projects for the fair and both were rejected. Not that they would have done a lot better; despite Bob's most earnest hopes, hot young women still do not cluster around smart guys to form polygamous communities.

Still, the Fair boosters and magazine writers of 1962 did their best at envisioning The Future. It's only fair (get it?) that The Future send back a score card.

Dear 1962,

This is The Future speaking. You spent a lot of time thinking about me lately. I'm touched. Let me tell you what's happened:

We never got jet packs, flying cars, or a four day work week.

Most women have jobs outside the home and they wear pants.

The Cold War ended without a Third World War. Our side won.

Monorails never caught on.

The president is a black man named Barak Hussein Obama. The governor of Louisiana is an East Indian man named Piyush Jindal.

Rock and Roll is still not dead.

You know that disposable future you looked forward to? You know, never wash you clothes. They're paper! Throw them away when they get dirty! Don't wash your dishes. Throw them away and use cheap, attractive, disposable dishes! Ever wonder where all that disposable stuff goes?

We still haven't cured the common cold, cancer, or almost any disease you expected us to. We even have some new diseases.

We say "fuck" a lot.

The last pope was Polish. The current one was a Hitler Youth.

In most cities you can choose between 500 television channels to watch on your pocket sized, color teevee.

It's common for men to wear earings and women to have tatoos.

The Americans were the first to put a man on the moon. We were also the last. It's been almost fifty years since anyone has been further than about two hundred miles from Earth.

If we had another race to the moon, China might win.

The Solid South is solidly Republican.

Turbine engines in cars never worked out.

The most popular cars in America are made by Japanese companies.

Middle aged people still complain about the music of teenagers.

Computers are everywhere and they are like nothing you expected. In many ways, they are far cooler.

Literate adults use phrases like "far cooler."

The air quality in our cities has improved.

House cats wear laser collars that vaporize mice on sight. OK, I made that one up. We could probably do it, but think about what would happen to your apolstery.

Homosexuals--we call them "gay" now--can get married in eight states.

The tallest building in the world is in Arabia in a country you've never heard of.

Americans are still really bad at geography and history.

Atomic energy had some unforseen problems. It's never going to replace other kinds of power.

We finished the Interstate Highway system and now we're letting it fall apart.

We have not made contact with aliens, yet.

The latest generation of Americans is not much taller than you, but they are much fatter.

You know all that talk about the inexhaustable food resources of the ocean? We exhausted it.

My car has more computing power than your Pentagon.

The bald eagle and the California condor did not go extinct, but the rhinoceros and the tiger might.

We have lots of robots, but most of them look more like table-saws than people.

We can't control the weather.

Pills instead of food was a stupid idea. People like food.

The Space Needle is still there. We're quite fond of it.

Life still goes on.

Sincerely,

The Future

No babies yet

Works for me.

Best science headline of the year

This belongs on a top ten list.

Christopher Hitchens is dead

Many of my science blogger / skeptical community friends seem to be sorry that he's gone. If so, I feel for their loss. But I can't forget that, while he was undoubtably one of the greatest critical minds of the last third of a century, brilliant, illuminating to read, and that I usually agreed with him, he was also a drunken lout, a sexist bully, and, as a late convert to neocon-ism, one of the people most responsible for spreading the exceptionally bigoted trope of "Islamo-fascism." To me, Hitchens was always a great mind that disappointed.

More news for your crazy uncle

Taxes are at historically low levels.

The stimulus bill cut taxes for working people.

Obama increased spending for border conrol, increased the number of agents patrolling, and is deporting more people per year than any other president in US history.

The Obama administration has issued over 200 permits for offshore oil drilling

After Reagan cut taxes in 1981, the economy went into a recession.

Inflation is extremly low right now

Obama is not a socialist. He's not even very liberal. Take my word on this one. I'm a socialist.

Ninety seven percent of climate scientists are sure global warming is real and that humans are responsible for it.

The rest of the world respects the US more under Obama that it did when Bush was president.

Dear e-mail forwarder, you have been lied to

This e-mail, obviously, has been floating around since before last Monday, but some are still sending it around. A very sweet friend of ours forwarded it to us in the middle of the week.

Dear Mr. President,

I heard you say you will not guarantee SS checks if the debt ceiling isn't raised. Why is it the scare always has to do with SS, Medicare, & our Soldiers pay? Why not stop your pay, your staff, or Congress and the Senate to save more money for our country? Why use Seniors, Soldiers, & our Needy as examples? Take the money from those who take no risks and reap the benefits!! Instead of threatening to withhold Social Security, VA and disability payments of people who really need the money.... Lets hold the paychecks of all house & senate members, then see how fast they resolve the debt ceiling crisis !!!!!

If you agree re-post this & keep it going across the whole USA.

Thank you

I hate this kind of crap, not just because it's full of lies--as this one is--but also because it's predatory. People who start these letters prey on the emotions and good will of people who are frustrated by news they hear that only reveals half of a story and in only revealing half, distorts the complicated reality beneath. Government is confusing. The rules are obscure and hard to understand even by the primary actors themselves (sometimes especially by them). That's why it's easy to lie to people who don't spend their lives studying these things and who don't have the time or background to educate themselves on the deep background of every story in the news. That's why it's easy to lie to people using common-sense sounding phrases that fit on a bumper sticker. That's why the liars prosper.

Dear e-mail forwarder,

I know you mean well, but you have been tricked and lied to. Our government doesn't work that way. The United States is a country of laws. We have laws that prevent the president from using the Treasury as a political weapon. We have laws that prevent the president and his appointees at the Treasury from deciding which bills they feel like paying and which they don't.

The Treasury is required by law to pay the bill in the order they arrive. The first bill in gets paid first. The last bill in gets paid last. The President does not have the power to say, "move this bill to the front of the line and that bill to the back." If the Treasury doesn't have enough money to pay all the bills, they start at the front of the line and pay until they run out of money and the rest don't get paid. If the payroll bill for the President and Congress arrives first, they get paid. If the bill for the Border Patrol arrives last, we start laying off guards. That's how it works.

President Obama was speaking the truth when he said he couldn't guarantee that Social Security checks would go out on time. Defense Secretary Gates was speaking the truth when he said he couldn't guarantee that military paychecks would go out on time. Anyone who says they could have pushed those bills to the front of the line is lying to you. That's how it works. The United States is a country of laws and the law says the Treasury pays the bill in the order they arrive.

According to the Republican House leader, John Boehner, President Obama and the Democrats gave them 98% of what they wanted. That wasn't enough for the extremists who have taken over the Republican Party. They threatened to crash the government unless they got 100%. Obama gave, and gave, and gave to see that those checks would go out on time. When radical rightists tell you it would have been Obama's fault if the government had crashed and the checks stopped, they are lying to you.

The person who forwarded the lies to to you is probably a good person who cares about the truth. And the person who sent it to them is probably a good person who cares about the truth. But somewhere up the line, that e-mail was born in a nest of lies, confusion, and someone's desire to keep you scared and angry. They're counting on the fact that you're too busy trying to pay your own bills to stop and try to read seventy years worth financial law. They're counting on it.

If you believe that the truth is more important than lies send this back to the person who sent you the lies. They deserve to know. Ask them to keep it going across the whole USA.

Thank you

I know that this kind of push-back is usually a waste of time. Mark Twain wrote, "A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants." While I'm over here helping the truth get it's pants on, six more lies have left the starting gate. But pushing back feel better than wringing my hands and doing nothing and maybe, just maybe, I can help one friend get out of the way of the galloping lies. That would make it worthwhile.

Well, that was fun

If you are younger than fifty, you have never known a time when the United States could not put a person in space.

Until today.

A urgent appeal to Hollywood

This scene:

A body flies through the window (or over a balcony) on an upper story of a tall building.

Cut to the plunging body. The body falls in complete silence either because it is already dead or because the script requires artistic silence. Broken glass sparkles around the body like a personal constellation of icy stars.

Cut to the ground. A parked car. The body slams into the car with a shocking return of sound. Car alarms go off accentuating the contrast with the previous silence. Maybe some surprised passers-by scream further adding to the din.

Cut to an overhead shot of the broken body on the broken car. Onlookers slowly gather around the death tableau.

Fade to black.

Please stop doing this. It has become a painfully predictable cliche. I saw it three times last week. If you are going to keep using it, make it a moving car full of bad guys that promptly explodes in a ridiculouly large fireball. Everyone loves an explosion.

My royal SOTU

I watched all three of the speeches last night. Obama, of course, gave a good speech. He's a great speaker and his major speeches are always well written. I think he did a good job of boxing in the Republicans by sounding reasonable and co-opting some of their themes (not that it will matter by the time another day has passed). I was disappointed, but not surprised, by his caving in to the debt and deficit fear mongers. Paul Ryan turned out to be a good speaker. His speech was long on dog whistles and short on specifics. He repeated some long-since debunked lies, but only hinted at his scary slash and burn approach to the social safety net. Michele Bachmann's speech was amateur night.

Let's play a game. What would you do if you were made total monarch of the United States for one year? I'm not talking about becoming god. You won't have magical powers to make people be nice to each other. But if you had total, autocratic control of the political system for one year, what would you do? What program would you have announced in your SOTU. Major and minor political initiatives, pet peeves, and constitutional amendments are all fair game. After your year, Congress will not be able to undo anything you did for ten years.

Here are some things I would do.

• Provide funding to extend unemployment for another twenty-six weeks for the long-term unemployed (the 99ers).
  
• Create a process for older unemployed workers to start Social Security and Medicare early.
  
• Abolish the death penalty. I would order the states to review the cases of everyone on death row and re-sentence them to life or finite terms.
  
• Institute cap and trade carbon limits with a schedule for the cap to gradually tighten up.
  
• Fill all of the judicial, regulatory, and administrative in the federal government.
  
• Review both the list of positions that can be appointed by a new administration and that are subject to Senate approval with an eye to reducing both and filling more positions with non-political civil servants.
  
• Reinstitute barriers to media conglomeration and break up recent media monsters.
  
• Reinstitute New Deal regulations on the banking and financial industries.
  
• Order a six month moratorium on home foreclosures during which banks will be required to fix their paperwork and prove their ownership of any home they plan to claim after the moratorium is over. Furthermore, banks will be required to take physical possession of homes and maintain them within community standards once the repossess them.
  
• Order the Justice Department to actually enforce laws against fraud in the financial industries. This means indictments and jail time for a lot of people who have committing crimes.
  
• Reinstitute Clinton era tax rates for income over 250k and add a new tax bracket for income over one million.
  
• Raise the tax rate for capital gains to 18 or 20 percent.
  
• Eliminate Cayman style tax loopholes for corporations. All money made in the US will be taxed in the US, regardless of where a company is legally incorporated. Once this loophole is closed, the on-paper tax rate for corporations should be able to be lowered about five percent while still increasing revenue.
  
• Eliminate subsidies for the oil industry and corporate farms. Review all other industry subsidies and tax exemptions to identify and eliminate outright giveaways to healthy industries while preserving incentive programs for new industries (such as clean energy).
  
• Raise the price of grazing and logging leases of public land so that it matches the market price on private land.
  
• Return the estate tax to Clinton era levels (adjusted for inflation).
  
• Reduce the military budget by 25% over the next five years. This will be achieved by getting rid of unnecessary new weapon systems, including star wars and nuclear weapon programs that violate the spirit of our treaty obligations; by eliminating no-bid contracts; by closing some overseas and at home bases; by not replacing some ships as they end their period of service; and by winding down the war in Afghanistan. VA hospitals, mental health, and enlisted personnel pay will not be on the chopping block.
  
• Change the payroll tax (Social Security) so that the rich contribute for their entire income, including capital gains. If that isn't enough to guarantee that the system is fully funded until 2060, raise the payroll tax and cut income tax by an equivalent amount for the middle and working class.
  
• Create a massive investment/jobs program focused on the transportation infrastructure, especially bridge safety and railroad expansion.
  
• Increase the budget for Pell Grants, student loans, and other programs to make college affordable.
  
• Order Congress to create a single payer basic healthcare system to be fully functional in five years. A robust public option must be in place by the end of the year as a transitional step.
  
• Get rid of any restrictions on abortion that are not on any other legal procedure. In effect this means, yes, Medicaid and the new national health insurance will pay for it. Individual pharmacists will not be allowed to refuse to fill legal prescriptions if their pharmacy stocks the drugs. I'm open to suggestions about how to deal with parental notification for minors.
  
• Ban assault rifles and long clips. Make it harder to buy hand guns. Allow states and cities to have tougher laws if they want (there's your 10th Amendment, tea partiers). Close the gun show loophole. However, I would not require registration of all guns or institute a total ban on handguns.
  
• Coordinate with the Mexican government to stop the flow of guns into Mexico and drugs into the US.
  
• Legalize and tax domestically grown pot. This move would hurt the drug cartels in Mexico, reduce the number of Americans in prison, create a new crop for tobacco farmers, provide revenue to the federal government, and make those nice hemp shirts cheaper.
  
• Reduce prison and jail time for drug possession and transfer more people into treatment programs.
  
• Create an easy path to citizenship for adults who came here illegally as children and a process for undocumented adults with clean records to get legal immigrant status without risk of deportation.
  
• Get rid of the enemy combatant concept. POWs are entitled to all of the rights established by the Geneva Accords and other treaty obligations of the United States.
  
• Reinstitute all of the rights guaranteed under the 4th through 8th Amendments. Everyone subject to US jurisdiction is entitled to a Miranda warning, an indictment, and a swift trial under civilian laws. This includes non-citizens and people suspected of terrorist connections.
  
• End Warrantless wire-tapping and internet eves-dropping.
  
• Repeal the Defense of Marriage act and all state laws and constitutional amendments against gay marriage. Legalize gay marriage. Make abundantly clear that legal marriage contracts have nothing to do with religious marriage.
  
• Get rid of the Office of Faith Based Initiatives and wind down all of its contracts.
  
• Order the Pentagon to make sure that the separation of church and state is scrupulously observed in all branches of the military. This means getting rid of the spiritual fitness exam in the Army, punishing religious based harassment, and pensioning off any members of the Chaplin's Corps who do not acknowledge that their mission is to give comfort to enlisted members who seek it, not to carry out some evangelical agenda of their own.
  
• Order the DOJ to enforce laws against electioneering by churches and revoke the tax-exempt status of churches that refuse to obey the law.
  
• Reverse the Citizens United decision and order full funding disclosure by groups engaged in politics.
  
• Hold a statehood vote in DC and abide by their decision.
  
• Revise the Senate rules to get rid of holds--except for the old style two-senator veto on Judaical appointments--and eliminate the filibuster for everything except final floor votes, and then require a single member spoken filibuster.
  
• Increase NASA's budget for unmanned exploration and space based telescopes.
  
• Open trade negotiations with Cuba and get rid of all barriers to travel.

All of these items are matters of policy and law that could be done by the right administration and congress. There is nothing on my list that is petty or personal or that would fall under any of the traditional definitions of tyrannical (if I was going to do that, I would round up most of the Washington pundit class, Fox News talking heads, and talk radio loudmouths, stick them in small apartments in blue cities, and force them to try to get with only non-union, minimum wage work for the year). No changes to the constitution or to our system of government would be required to accomplish any of these things--with the exception of reversing a Supreme Court decision.

I'll leave constitutional and structural changes for another post. What's in your SOTU?

Tokyo is doooomed!!!

Australian scientists discover bizarre prehistoric deep-sea creatures below the Great Barrier Reef

Australian scientists have discovered bizarre prehistoric sea life hundreds of metres below the Great Barrier Reef, in an unprecedented mission to document species under threat from ocean warming. Ancient sharks, giant oil fish, swarms of crustaceans and a primitive shell-dwelling squid species called the Nautilus were among the astonishing life captured by remote controlled cameras at Osprey Reef

Now that they have awakened them, the creatures will do what all bizarre, prehistoric deep-sea creatures do: go do battle with Godzilla while stomping on Tokyo.

Imagine that

I'm watching the British election returns. The ancestral Mackay land was just called for the Liberal Democrats.

Overhyped disasters

Yesterday they fired up the Large Hadron Collider. Being crushed into a black hole isn't as bad as I expected. Then again, neither is living in a Communist, health care dictatorship.

Is this a Southern thing?

I'm heading to the Carolinas next week and want to be up on the local customs.

A South Carolina man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for stealing an $80 slab of meat. ... Prosecutors said the sentence was justified because the Aug. 26 theft from Reid's grocery store in Orangeburg was his ninth offense.

Authorities said when a store manager approached Zachary about the missing New York strip and the big bulk under his shirt, he fled, right into the arms of an off-duty police officer.

[...]

Zachary testified he was "massaging" the meat, not stealing it.

Fun fact

The first Thanksgiving was not followed by a big Christmas sale down at the mall.

Killer robots? KILLER ROBOTS!!

Matthew Yglesias points out this exchange from and interview of Reihan Salam by The Economist.

DIA: What are some areas where you think Republicans can successfully work with Democrats in the future.

Mr Salam: In the far future, I imagine that there will be bipartisan cooperation on space colonisation and efforts to terraform Mars. In the nearer term, I’d like to see Republicans work closely with the Obama White House on education, an area where Jeb Bush and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, agree on everything important. I’d also like to see cooperation on Medicare reform, but that won’t happen.

Yglesias takes eception to part of Salam's response.

On space colonization, I’m afraid I have to strenuously disagree. The problem is that the Spacers will inevitable become politically independent of earth, and then use their command over superior natural resources and robots to oppress us.

I have to question Yglesias' conclusions. Surely, Democrats and Republicans could work together to resist an invasion of killer robots--after they stopped trying to gain points by blaming each other, that is.

Killer chipmunks? KILLER CHIPMUNKS!!

A horde of killer Russian chipmunks, hundreds of thousands strong, is terrorizing the British countryside and the authorities are helpless to stop them. That fine journalistic source The Sun has the story.

VICIOUS killer chipmunks that escaped from a British park four years ago have never been found - and could now have bred into a horde thousands strong, The Sun can reveal.

The news will confirm experts' worst fears that the disease-ridden rodents, which are plaguing northern France, have already established themselves in numbers here.

About 30 of the deadly critters went on the run from Wellington Country Park on the Hampshire/Berkshire border in 2005.

Eighteen died and eight more were found or shot - but disturbingly FOUR remained free.

The BBC has tried to diminish the threat by interviewing "scientists," but the Beeb has ties to government and is clearly trying to drown out those citizens who have sounded the alarm for purposes of the administration.

Russia has a small nuclear arsenal designed for the specific purpose of dealing with threats from Russia. It would be an easy matter to deal with this treat by vaporizing Berkshire. However, that option creates the risk of creating a horde of radioactive, mutant, killer chipmunks which, while totally awesome, would be a bit disconcerting for those living near the former Berkshire.

Fortunately, we're safe. Our swarms of deadly killer bees and escaped pythons would make short work of killer chipmunks.

Theological question

Can a Pastafarian believe in the Great Pumpkin?

Irony

Within hours of Pres. Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, we launched an unprovoked attack on the moon.