Update II (4:39 PM): While I have no intentions of turning this blog into a "Daily Ragefest" kind of thing (there are tons of those, plus you have Fox News, CNN, and most of MSNBC to provide you with that if you want), I came across something today that is - in my opinion - quite relevant to this post and the situation we're facing. The problem we are dealing with (with great frequency in this country, to some extent everywhere else) is very strongly related to an anti-science faction that has a disturbing amount of clout here.
Consider the survey results: of those who believe in miracles, 84 percent say they happen because of God. About three quarters further identify Jesus and the Holy Spirit as sources of miracles, while lesser numbers attribute them to angels (47 percent), saints (32 percent), deceased relatives or others who have passed on (19 percent), and other spirits (18 percent).Seriously, I mean come on. Believing in miracles problematic because it provides people with an excuse to not understand something. It's the lack of intellectual curiosity that fuels the blanket distrust of science among those who would deny climate change in the same way that people deny the Earth is billions of years old. That doesn't make me anti-religion, it makes me anti-anti-science.
So what’s going on? Wouldn’t the Creator of the universe have better things to tend to than pulling off the occasional miracle? It depends, of course, on whom you ask.
To a scientist, events that many would consider miracles are not only explainable, they’re inevitable—because in a universe of nearly infinite possibilities, outrageously unexpected things have to happen at least occasionally.
“The Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trials has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials,” says Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer, author of Why People Believe Weird Things (W.H. Freeman, revised, 2002). “Events with a million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.”
(via)
As I said in the comments,
[If] all of these people who believe in miracles or creationism or whatever took a fucking moment to look at the science and see how unbelievably complex and perfect (for life) the universe is, I would have a hard time believing they wouldn’t see God in science, too. I doubt any of them have ever heard of the fine structure constant, much less have any understanding about the ramifications of changes to it or other things we know about the universe, but if they did, and if they wanted to tell me that God essentially "programmed" the universe, then I think I could get along with them much better… so long as they don’t think it was "programmed" 6,000 years ago.It's not just that. It's the value of G. It's the rotational bonding possible around carbon. It's 10 gazillion other things that have to be juuuuuuuuust right for us to be here. And if you are inclined, you could easily interpret this as God's work. I can disagree with you, but I can't argue with you. We have no way to disprove that at the moment (we have no way to prove it, either, and without a test that claim resides fully within the realm of philosophy and not science). We may know where life came from, but not why (if there is a "why"). But if you believe in miracles, then you are not concerned with real-world solutions to real-world problems; perhaps something miraculous will happen. I strongly hope that we aren't relying on miracles to get us out of this climate change mess, but my fear is that this crowd won't even believe that there is a problem.
OK, sorry, like I said. This is not indicative of the direction I'll be taking this blog, and I hope that on the basis of the last 50+ posts you can see that (the actual direction is: shitty jokes and lame anecdotes). There was just a confluence of events over the past week that sent the needle on my rage-o-meter to 11 and I had to get this out there. We're all friends here, though.
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Original post:
Following the news on the Australian wildfires? (Click "recent imagery") It's really, really bad. Yes, there are some cases of arson involved, but the root cause is drying. It's climate change.
One of these days the morons who continue to deny climate change are going to come around, but it's going to be too late. Typically, these horrible people (usually the pathological Fox News) offer some kind of anecdotal evidence - like a record snowfall on a particular date in Whitehorse - to say that, "Obviously there is no Global Warming!" even though people who live up there see the changes firsthand, even if it's still cold as all hell. They're doing nothing but taking advantage of an unfortunate moniker. It's climate change, you nitwits, not "Global Warming." But, no. They'll take what they can get now, future of the rest of us be damned. (By the way, how's that working out for you?) Whatever, they don't care. It's mostly just going to be those poor 150M+ Bangladeshis, who don't count. That is, if you completely ignore the loss of the U.S. coastline, which is probably going to be worse than expected if we don't stop what we're doing like rightthisveryinstant. Obviously, we need a carbon tax levied at the point of extraction. Gas taxes won't cut it. If Exxon is calling for it, you know it's bad (although I am wary of every proclamation Exxon makes - somehow they'll find a way around it or something like that). Unfortunately I have no faith in our policy makers. What is needed is too radical to even be proposed by people who are only interested in being reelected, and what we might even get will be too watered down to be effective (as you might predict based on the bizarre machinations of the Republicans and "centrist" Democrats concerning the proposed stimulus). It's too bad we didn't invest in these things while the economy was good, but now that it's bad and everything is cheaper and we could do a lot of these projects we need, we are given trillions of dollars in... tax cuts. Oh, great. Tax cuts, there's your solution. It's so insanely stupid on so many levels.
Either way, it's this kind of thing that has made me decide that I could not work for an oil company (or any subsidiary or vendor or whatnot) or coal company or natgas company, etc. Oil companies come in here to Austin and hire dozens of people away from this very university, and to say they pay handsomely is the mother of all understatements.
Nope. Not going to do it. I wouldn't even work for one of their alternative energy divisions, like BP's. Why? Let's say I am involved in the next great energy supply. What's to stop BP from getting their IP rights and sitting on it? Nothing.
No. If I'm going to feel like I'm going be helping make the world better for my daughter, then I have to play an active role, even if it's just my small part. I can't passively wait and just cast votes. I'd rather roll the dice with a local start-up like Heliovolt, or do advanced materials research for the military, or even work with the TCEQ. All of those would be infinitely more justifiable than working for Exxon.
This just grinds my gears to no end. Build nuclear plants now. Recycle the waste. Use it again. Store it in a salt mine when it's done. Build windmills in the Midwest now. Build tidal power generators now. Build a smartgrid now. I know part of the problem is also a liquid fuels problem, so let's end our stupid corn ethanol mandates and price guarantees and let's put money into hydrogen generation from water and plug-in cars. We're in an insane amount of debt now anyway. It's been going like crazy since Reagan and getting worse under both Bushes with some small headway made under Clinton, although they've all presided over some deficit spending (Clinton being the only one really to eek out a surplus). We're going to have to inflate it away, so what's another trillion? At least we'd have a planet to work with in that scenario. I know that Obama is actually much savvier than any of us ever give him credit for (and I think we're learning to give him a lot of credit already), so I'm just hoping that somehow he'll be able to get all of this done smoothly and still have a smile on his face.
That's not much to ask, is it?
/sarcastic
Protip: there is no longer any such thing as a fiscally conservative politician; government will always be expensive when it's set up like ours is, so let's demand that they at least spend wisely.
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Well, this turned into an incoherent screed somewhere in there. FWIW, this is actually about my daughter, at least tangentially. Somewhere in that rambling, the point is that people are constantly, continually, and knowingly hurting future generations. For some reason they don't care. It's times like these that I lose all faith in people (but not my readers, all two of you of great!). I'm trying to figure out how to financially support her without selling her out. Ain't easy here in Texas.
I guess it's pretty easy to discover the days when I have almost nothing to do at work. I hate when packages take too long to deliver.
tl;dr: We're doomed, so here's something that always makes me laugh.
