I’m just askin’, because that seems to be the way this current Administration operates. They "interrogated" two whistleblowers who were trying to stop a company from selling arms to Iraqi insurgents. Y’know, those guys who are killing our guys.

In a previous post, I said Bush "is killing us all". I was taken to task for it.

I guess the commenter has a point; Bush isn’t killing us all. Just 4000 so far, and gagging, demoting, and "interrogating" those who call him out or don’t toe the party line.

But he is certainly spying on us all. I sure feel safer. I’ll be thinking of that next time I take my shoes off in the airport security line, and when I’m forced to dump my water bottle because of the War on Liquids.

Hey, another science dork on YouTube!

Oh wait, that’s me.

Update: Coincidentally, Clifford at Asymptotia was going to blog on this very topic when he saw my post! He added it into what he wrote, which is a good read.

This clip is part of the UK show Cosmos: A Beginner’s Guide; this episode was specifically about life in the Universe. We filmed this in Palo Alto quite some time ago, before I moved away from California. It was fun! Lynn Rothschild and I were at the Stanford theater, a really first-rate old-style theater that I highly recommend. We sat and chatted about aliens for a while, and that was that. I’m glad to see the show finally aired, and I can’t wait to see the whole thing (a friend will be sending me a disk, so maybe someday I’ll write about the show itself).

It’s funny– when I use the phrase "brainwashing" when it comes to creationism, I never hear a peep from the comments, even though I generally get the usual tired (and incorrect) complaint that I am attacking all religion. Why is that? I’m not sure, but maybe, just maybe, it’s because people understand that teaching creationism to young kids is brainwashing.

Case in point: Answers in Genesis, a group that promotes creationism and has been shown to lie when they want to, sponsored an essay contest for kids. The winner got a scholarship to Liberty University (sort of the Bob Jones University of Virginia).

That should be considered torture. But I digress.

Anyway, the essays are online. They’re frightening. I mean, kids wrote this stuff, regurgitating the horrific nonsense dumped into their innocent brains by creationists. It’s sad.

If you want to read more, then Bay of Fundie is a good place to go. He dissects the winning essay in a polite but firm manner, destroying the premise and showing that this young girl is mostly parroting the garbage she’s ingested over the years.

I am filled with sadness when I see things like this. I’ve been around a lot of kids. I helped at a local Boys and Girls Club when I was in NorCal, teaching them about the solar system, astronomy, and science. I’ve used my own telescope to show Saturn to countless kids. I’ve traveled to schools around the country to talk about the joy, the wonder, the awe of astronomy. When you see that spark, that glow, that moment when a child understands what they are seeing, or even just the potential in their faces as they chew over the nature of reality, of the Universe… the joy that fills your heart is impossible to describe. It’s wondrous.

Creationism and fundamentalist dogma destroy that potential. It’s wrong, and it’s evil.

It’s brainwashing.

Meteor showers are very cool. Seeing little bits of dust slam into the Earth’s atmosphere at dozens of kilometers per second, having their kinetic energy almost instantaneously converted into light and heat, leaving a zippy tail and then fading from view… they’re wonderful.

But there’s science to be done! It’s difficult to measure just how high up in the atmosphere a particular meteor burns up, and where it was exactly. But that may be changing, due to an ambitious experiment; one you can help with!

On the early morning of September 1, the rare Aurigids meteor shower will peak. This is debris left over from the 2000-year-period comet Kiess, and the Earth doesn’t pass through the meteor stream very often. It will this year, though, and observers in the right locations may see several dozen meteors per hour. Predictions for the shower indicate it peaks On September 1 at 4:33 a.m. Pacific (US) daylight time, so observers on the west coast of the U.S. and Hawaii are favored. For general instructions on how to watch a meteor shower, read my Perseid article (the Aurigids will come form the same rough direction as the Perseids, so the instructions in that link still apply; note the different time of peak though!).

Where does the science come in? If you have a laptop, just go to the Aurigid Meteor Project website, download a program, and then go out and observe the meteor shower. Whenever you see a meteor, all you have to do is click the mouse. The program will record the time of your click. When you’re done, email the file with the records, and the data you collected will be combined with everyone else’s to make a 3D map (really 4D, including time) of the incoming bits of cosmic fluff!

This is a very cool idea. If it works, it may be possible to learn more about the characteristics of a meteor shower, such as how many meteors are single, or how many are grouped. It will also help nail down the exact peak of the shower, allowing the next one to be more accurately predicted.

If I could, I’d join in, but Colorado is not favored for this; the Sun will be close to rising and the sky will be too bright (plus, I leave for The Amaz!ng Cruise later that day).

If you don’t have a laptop or anything like that, then don’t sweat it! But go out and take a look anyway if you’re in the right locale. It should be cool anyway.

AIIIIIiiiiiiiieeeeeeeee.

He’d be better as Gort.

Well, nuts. I may have been wrong. And while in science being wrong generally leads to new and better insight, in this case it leads to a heightened feeling of doom.

In a recent post (the third in a most likely infinite series) about Texas, I said that several of the members of the State Board of Education were pushing back against the teaching of creationism being propounded by the head of that board, Don McLeroy, a know-nothing creationist.

However, I may have been wrong. Synapostasy points out that McLeroy himself says that that the members of the Board from 2003 wanted to teach "weakness of evolution" (creationist code for creationism). Many of the members of the Board in 2003 are still members now, so one may assume that they still want to use creationist tactics to weaken science.

At this point the battle gets confused. I am in no way inclined to trust anything McLeroy says, since he clearly has no contact with reality. Yet he is the one saying the Board wants to weaken evolution teaching. Do we trust him on this?

Well, no. I would be happier to hear from all the Board members myself on their stance in this issue. Unfortunately, my schedule is a bit swamped; I have deadlines for the book, a cruise to jump on in a few days, and several other projects. I also suspect that my contacting those members may not be met with much progress, since I am not a Texan.

So: are you a Texan, and willing to go the distance? Contact all the members of the State Board of Education, and ask them clear questions, such as these:

1) Do you agree with Don McLeroy that evolution is wrong, and that its weaknesses should be taught?

2) Is evolution science? Is ID?

3) If evolution is shown to have problems, does that strengthen ID?

4) Is ID different than religion? How so?

I’m sure you can think of your own questions too.

So, we must now ask instead of aver:

Texas: Doomed?

I am sad to relate that Jerry Andrus died of cancer yesterday.

Jerry is a little bit hard to describe. Magician, illusionist, thinker… he delighted in making people see things in a different way. It is nearly impossible for any of us to see the world as differently as he did, though. He was a true skeptic. He took nothing for granted; he looked for something different, some new way of observing things which would lead to either improving them or using them as a way of getting others to think outside their normal parameters.

At James Randi’s first Amaz!ng Meeting in Ft. Lauderdale back in 2003, I had the pleasure of sitting next to Jerry at lunch. I had not heard of him before, and I was a bit stupefied at this elderly gentleman who was so sharp and so, well, odd. Everything he said or did was a bit of a jolt, like having someone take the glasses off your face, cleaning the lenses, and letting you see something just a little bit more in focus.

His illusions were delightful. The image above shows one of his favorites, using perspective to throw off your sense of direction. Go to his page with videos of his illusions. You’ll love ‘em.

We’ve lost yet another brilliant mind, and the world is a poorer place because of it.