UNTITLED ON PURPOSE

Amazon.com : Entertainment : They Might Be Giants - "Science is Real"

Man, I wish I could embed the video for this great They Might Be Giants song so you wouldn't have to click a link and visit another page. I know, it's terribly bothersome to have to do something like that.

Regardless, DO IT!

GET SMART, PEOPLE!

A recent broadcast I just hear on NPR tells the story of Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man who was executed for an arson that killed his family. The thing is, recent evidence shows that he was most probably innocent. In fact, he was convicted solely on the testimony of a forensic investigator which was shown to be full of junk science and false assumptions. This information was submitted to the governor while he was still on death row yet was not investigated.

At best this can be seen as an extremely unfortunate occurrence but one that cannot justify the abolition of capital punishment as an effective means of delivering justice and preventing future crimes. Or, one may say, that this is a horrible miscarriage of justice carried out by the Texas judicial system and a thorough investigation should take place on this isolated case and bring the negligible parties to justice.

But the thing is, this isn't a freak occurrence.

According to an article published by The American Bar Association states that in the past four years alone 17 death row inmates have been found innocent and released. If there are that many that are fortunate enough to have outside assistance in finding new evidence that vindicates their false convictions, exonerates them and saves their lives then how many more didn't get that treatment and ended up being executed for crimes they did not commit.

How many innocent people have to be murdered by the government in order to abolish capital punishment nationwide? In my opinion, the possibility of a single person suffering this fate is enough to ban this barbaric practice. I'm not saying that there aren't people who commit crimes great enough that I would want them dead. Surely if someone tortured and killed my family I would personally want them to suffer for a long time and know they they will be killed by my own hands. That being said, we cannot go through with these urges whether they be administered by vigilantes or state sanctioned executioners. There is just no way to know for sure that the people we are prosecuting, convicting and sentencing to death are actually guilty. Every American has the "right" to a "fair" trial but, there are no agents within the judicial system that actually try to find out the truth of what happened. There is the defense attorney who tries to get defendant off the hook and the prosecutor who tries to convict them. Neither of them is trying to find out what actually happened.

Fortunately for Cameron Todd Willingham, there were people outside the trial that tried to find out the truth but, unfortunately they were a little too late.

GET SMART, PEOPLE!

I found this little map that shows how states are graded according to the standards imposed on science education in our public schools. I am not surprised at all that my home state of Louisiana got an F. What really surprises me is when the same study was done back in 2000 we got a C!
We were about average in science education in 2000 which is still pretty piss-poor but now we've slipped all way down to an F! WTF is going on?!?

I will start out by saying that this administration's proposed health-care reforms are NOT everything I want from our country. However, I am flabbergasted and enraged at the amount of bullshit that is coming from a lot of other people who are opposed. There are so many incredibly false and inflammatory claims about what this bill does that are easily refuted and clearly false. The outrageous thing is that when someone opposes this bill based on points that are irrefutably shown to be false, the opposition still stands. This makes me think that the opposition comes not from a disagreement about issues and methodology but, rather, from partisan differences and in some cases, possibly, racist motivations.
Try it yourself.

1. Find someone who is opposed to the healthcare plan.
2. Ask them WHY.
3. If they answer with anything like "DEATH PANELS" or "The government will provide health coverage to illegal aliens." or "I don't want the government deciding what doctor I can see and what treatments I can have." or "I don't want government plans forced on me." simply show them the facts.

4. Be astonished when they still oppose the plan despite the fact that every reason they have to be against it is patently false.

You may find some people who oppose the plan because they favor something that is even more radical: Completely Universal Government Run Health Care.
Those are few and far between depending on your social circles.
I have often used the analogy of the fire department and the police force to illustrate why the current way of doing things is utterly ridiculous. Suppose your house has caught fire. The first thing you do is call 911 and get the fire department there to put the fire out. You would not worry if this particular fire is covered by your insurance or, worse yet, freak out because you don't have fire fighter insurance. Same goes for the police department. If you get attacked and harassed and you call the police and they swoop in like magic heroes and catch the bad guy, making you safe and sound once again, you do not expect to receive a bill in the mail for thousands of dollars because you don't have police insurance. This is because both of those vital services are provided by the government automatically, no questions asked. These services are expensive and they are paid for by the government using your tax dollars. The same should go for healthcare. Your body and well being are vastly more important than your home and all your precious stuff in it so, to not have that covered by the same provider that catches your bad guys and puts out your fires is freaking STUPID.
Then just this morning I find a video made by the guys at Earthly Comics that uses the exact same analogy but explains everything in video form so people don't have to use their looking balls to read stupid wordz, ugh! It's a pretty great video and here it is.


GET SMART PEOPLE.

The Book of Genesis
Illustrated by R. Crumb

Book of Genesis illustrated by R. Crumb from Mark Frauenfelder on Vimeo.

I recently had someone try to get all smart on me by asking the old paradoxical question "What happens if an unstoppable force meets and immovable object."
My answer was rushed and not completely articulate but was as follows;

The real and practical answer is that there are no unstoppable forces OR immovable objects so it's obviously not a rumination on physical possibilities. It's just a logic exercise with no real answer. That's just a paradox. They're cool but it just shows our imaginations ability to create situations that could not possibly exist. Like, "Can God create a stone so heavy that not even He can lift it?" The paradox is a challenge to those who believe in god and that he is all powerful. He obviously can't be all powerful because he either can't make a stone that heavy or he can and therefore can't lift it.
Back to the physical possibilities of the original paradox though. As I said there are no unstoppable forces or immovable objects. All objects with mass have inertia. An object at rest has inertia that keeps it at rest and will stay that way until acted upon by an outside force. It's "amount" of inertia comes from it's mass. So, if an object could not be moved that means it has infinite inertia and therefore infinite mass. We're not being crushed by it, therefore it doesn't exist.
Also, an unstoppable force would require infinite energy and we won't even go into the problems with that concept right now.
Now, assuming in some hypothetical universe that there were an immovable object and it was met with an unstoppable force. Energy cannot be created or destroyed it can only be transferred from one form to another, right? We all learned that one early on in high school at the latest. So if an unstoppable force with infinite energy were to meet and immovable object with infinite mass the energy would be transferred from kinetic energy that would normally move the object to other forms like heat, light and radiation. So, the immovable object would immediately begin to glow with infinite brightness and would create the most intense heat for infinity and this light and heat would radiate from everywhere since the object has infinite mass.
So, basically, hell would form. LOL

Don't you just miss Charlton Heston's paranoid rants about Big Government supposedly trying to take his precious rifle?

Well, fret no more. Enter Jon Voight. America has gained a new inflammatory right wing extremist in Hollywood to counter the "liberal elite." He's falsely claiming that the new health care reform will "force" government plans on the American people. At a recent GOP fundraiser he called the president a "false prophet" and called for an end to "Obama oppression."

This guy is a joke but the fact that he represents an alarmingly large portion of the American people is no joke at all.

 


At the free clinic, for hepatitis.
I kicked ass too. I got an A, two B's and a C. 

It's 3:11am.
My teeth hurt like bastards so I can't sleep. I need to sleep because I have to go to work in the morning. But these teeth!
How could anyone sleep with the feeling of having half your face chewed off by a bulldog?
I've smoked some pot and now have some mixture of Sprite and Rum preceeded by a Rum and Mint Tea.
I don't smoke pot or drink so I got a strange urge for blogger.
An urge that passed as soon as I began typing.

Today I woke up and did activities with my girlfriend.
Then I went to the bank and deposited three $5 checks from Pincone Research.
Then I walked to the MAX station at Pioneer Square.
I had a few minutes before the train came to take me to work so I went into the Rite Aid and bought a 20oz Diet Coca-Cola and four boxes of Hot Pockets.
I boarded the train headed for Beaverton and arrived at my stop at 1:50pm and walked to work.
I work at Stream International.
After arriving at work I have been sitting here at my desk doing nothing important.
I've just been looking at shit on YTMND and listening to my Les Savy Fav mix CD.

I can't really document my entire day yet because it is only a quarter till 8pm but, I'm fairly certain it will turn out like any other day before and countless days to come.

Here's a picture to distract us.




Seacrest Out

Before you start getting pissed off or comparing me to Steve Buscemi let me say that I have been a server a few times. I know how hard it is and I know how appreciated tips are.
But you know what? I was a server in Louisiana where the wages earned are $2.13 per hour.
Now I live in Oregon where servers make minimum wage, which happens to be $7.50 per hour. If you're a server in Oregon then you will bring home, on a bad day, $60 in wages and $20 tips for a total of $80. While I, on the other hand, am making only $76 a day.
$80 is a very conservative figure. That assumes they only made $20 tips that day. A server can bring home upwards of $300 in tips in one night in certain restaurants.
But we'll take the meagerest of estimates and go with $80.

My next step involves a mathematical equation so I'll try to go slow.

$80 > $76

I'M NOT TIPPING YOUR RICH ASS

So, I think I've figured out the secret plan.
In my job we are supposed to be reviewing text advertisements and approving or rejecting them but, there are very few ads. In the past week I've only done six ads and that is not a whole lot at all! (You can do one ad in like 3 minutes tops sometimes. It's actually more accurate to count how many keywords i've gone over since some ads have thousands of them and some ads have like one but whatever this thing is going on too long and I don't think you're allowed to have over a certain character limit inside parenthesis.)
Anyway, they let us surf the internet when we don't have ads, which is usually all damn day. The trick is they don't allow certain things; porn is forbidden because we are at work (duh) and they don't allow streaming audio or video because they say it takes up too much bandwidth. I can understand these two but the other things are a bit more fishy. We can't check Myspace (not that I'm crying about it, it's just a rule) and we can't play flash games or chat or even write in blogs. I am breaking that last rule right now, sshhhh.
So, basically my hypothesis is this.
This is all an experiment. The ideas is that the internet has a much grander use than what it is most commonly being used for so, they take away the biggest distractions (porn, audio, video, MySpace, flash games, chatting) to find out what we do with this wonderful tool.
I think the outcome of our work will be very important but, I'll never contribute to the answer if I keep breaking the rules and writing in this blog and chatting with my friends on my Gmail account.
Back to work!

OUR FATHER WHO ART IN HEAEVN HALOW3D B THY NMA!!!1! OMG WTF LOL THY KNGDOM COME11!111 LOL THY WIL B DON3 ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HAAEVN!!!!!!! OMG WTF GIEV US THIS DAY OUR DALEY BREAD1!1!! AND FORGIEV US OUR TR3SPASES AS WE FORGIEV THOSA WHO TR3SPAS AGANEST US11!!11! OMG WTF AND LAAD US NOT IN2 TEMPTATION BUT DELIEVR US FROM AVIL11!11!1! FOR THIEN IS DA KNGDOM AND TEH POW3R AND DA GLORY FOR EVAR AND EVAR!111!1 OMG LOL MEN!11! OMG WTF

That's my oldest little brother and his pregnant wife and his very pregnant beard.

In the near future people will have the option to choose certain small characteristics for their children based on our knowledge of the human genome.

Our techniques will improve with time because we will have more experience in the field.

Only rich people can afford this for their children.

Then the next generation of genetic manipulators will improve intelligence, possibly by figuring out a way to increase the size and surface area of the neocortex without having to be hindered by the birth canal of the mother.

Rich people will have awesome children.

Kinda like some shitty movie by friend saw and said was "okay". Sounds like Galaga. Gattica?

Over time, methods will improve but will still be expensive. A whole group of people will be enhanced, hyper-evolved through artificial selection and almost a completely different species from your average everyday middle class population.

The technology now isn't that hard or expensive, but we keep the lower class species of human around for menial labor and entertainment.

People like you are funny looking now, like monkeys riding bicycles and smoking cigarettes.

There are a couple of the advanced guys who recognize the injustice and want to help the lower class attain everything that they have now.

So they go and steal a time machine, which was invented about a decade prior but outlawed by the world legislature because time machines would totally fuck with everything, especially those in power.

Or something like that, shutup.

They go back in time and try to implant genetic boosters in people of the lower to middle class. The ancestors of the ones they are trying to help.

That's why backwoods hicks and lower class rednecks of today always report being abducted by aliens and probed.



Time Machine




Future Dude




Redneck





Wakka Wakka Wakka

That's when it hit me.

"I'll make a pointless blog post! That will dispel my boredom for almost 15 seconds!"

For the real instigator, check out this dude.