The First Presidential Debate: Barack Obama v. John McCain (Live Blog!)

Here we go - the debate party has started at my house; there’s about 15 or so Obama supporters gathered at my apartment and squeezed into my living room watching PBS and waiting for the debate to start. Beer is plentiful, the mood is excited and hopeful, and we’re having a great time. The debate should start in 5 minutes if it happens on time.

———

The debate is underway - some good questions from Jim Lehrer, and the candidates’ responses have been rather low key thus far. Lehrer is trying to inject a note of levity and get the candidates to address each other directly. Obama has been directing his responses toward McCain. McCain on the other hand, seems like he’s not willing to look Obama in the eye even while addressing him. He keeps looking at Jim Lehrer. So far it’s all been about the economy. No real foreign policy questions yet. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when it goes there…

———

We’re on to actual foreign policy so far. And, at this point, we’re all very pleased with how well Obama is doing. He’s scoring some direct hits and coming off as passionate, clear-headed, and perceptive. He just threw a really good punch directly at McCain, referencing the “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” song that McCain once sang (paraphrasing the Beach Boys). Awesome. Now McCain is on to some sad war stories. Oh, brother - cry me a river.

———-

Wrap-up: I didn’t post any more updates to this live blog during the actual debate, but now that the party’s wrapped up and I’ve had time to clean my apartment, I can say this much: Obama won the debate. And that’s more than just my opinon. Now I’m looking forward to Thursday night’s debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, which is sure to be a circus of laughs. And don’t fret, Survival Machine readers, because I intend to get back to making relatively regular posts this week, and I’ll lay off the politics (unless something spectacular happens). Stay tuned…

Live-blogging the Presidential Debate Tonight

I realize I’ve been missing in action for a while, and I have reasons (some good, some lame) for that. I’ll cover what’s been happening in science in the next few days. But first, tonight is the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. I realize it may be cancelled or postponed, but I am hosting a debate watch party at my apartment and I intend to live-blog the debate on Survival Machine tonight. Watch for a new post followed by live updates to that post starting at around 8:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time tonight. This should be interesting, to say the least! See you tonight…

Atheist Soldier Sues The DoD, and The Evolution of Compassion

This April, The New York Times reported the case of U.S. Army Specialist Jeremy Hall, a soldier who started a chapter of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers and subsequently had to be removed from Iraq due to numerous threats from his fellow soldiers.  Now, I’m not exactly surprised by this.  I’d expect the military to be drooling with evangelicals, of course.  And I could probably cynically overlook verbal harassment of an atheist in the armed forces, just because I expect that sort of bullshit from indoctrinated meat-heads.  But physical threats?  That really is beyond the pale.  Now, Spc. Hall is suing the Department of Defense and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for failing to protect his freedom from religious persecution as protected by the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution.  You go boy.

Seriously, this is not the sort of reputation the military should want, given that non-religious Americans are the largest (non) religious group after Christians.  They have enough trouble recruiting as it is!  This is just another example, sadly, of Christians thinking the world revolves around them.  It’s bad enough that brave men and women who are devoted to the service of their country were blithely thrown into harm’s way in Iraq by a callous and evangelically-motivated administration… but non-religious soldiers’ lives are threatened by their loving, Christian comrades-in-arms as well?  What a disgusting blemish on our armed forces.  I hope Spc. Hall wins his lawsuit and the DoD cracks down on prosyletizing by officers.

I haven’t posted anything in a while, have I?  Still, life marches on.  I got some paperwork done that’s been taking forever (to put it mildly).  I also was inspired by the news I wrote about in my previous post, and decided to read Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Compassion.  This book tells the story of his experiment: a computer tournament in the early 1980s that pitted programs submitted by game theorists from various academic disciplines (as well as an 11 year old computer prodigy) in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game (a classic thought experiment).  It’s quite interesting, and you can expect me to write a more in-depth review when I’ve finished it.

P.S. - I would love to get some comments on my posts.  If you’re reading this, any feedback will be appreciated.  It’s hard to talk myself into posting when it feels like no one is reading! I’d really like to get this blog fired up.

What would a Barack Obama administration do for science?

So I was (again) reading over Barack Obama’s campaign press release about his plans to promote scientific research and education, and there’s a lot to like in there. Obama is aggressively in support of expanding federally funded embryonic stem cell research. So much has been said about that topic that I am not going to go into it right now, but to be clear: that’s a 180 degree reversal from the Bush administration policy on stem cell research. I also had not been aware already that Obama helped write and was an original cosponsor of the Minority Health Improvement and Health Disparity Elimination Act, which hopefully will become law after the current criminal administration is sent packing. The whole text of the bill is in the last link, but the Obama press release describes it thus:

The bill puts new emphasis on disparity research by reporting health care data by race and ethnicity, as well as socioeconomic status and health literacy. The legislation outlines mechanisms to conduct educational outreach to minorities, increase diversity among health care professionals, and improve the delivery of health care to minorities.

If we’re going to have national health care, this sort of thing is critical and taxpayers should actually be demanding it! Preventative medicine is always cheaper than treating ailments and disease, and the potential benefits of a healthy population go far beyond the lower cost of health care (increased economic productivity, decreased poverty, decreased crime, decreased drug abuse, the list is endless).

What really turns me on the most about Obama’s priorities, though, was this part of the document:

Improve and Prioritize Science Assessments: Assessments should reflect the range of knowledge and skills students should acquire. Science assessments need to do more than test facts and concepts. They need to use a range of measures to test inquiry and higher order thinking skills including inference, logic, data analysis and interpretation, forming questions, and communication. High-performing states like Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, use an assessment that calls for students to design and conduct investigations, analyze and present data, write up and defend results. Barack Obama will work with governors and educators to ensure that state assessments measure these skills.

I cannot overemphasize how crucial that is! American science education is fast becoming a joke on the international level. With rare exceptions, I was not taught how to use inference, logic, or data analysis in the public high school system, and I went to a half-decent public high school—ten years ago! Most inner-city and some rural schools are far worse. Prioritizing how to think over what to think is the key to producing bright, engaged, and enthusiastic students who actually get what science is all about and are well prepared to hit the ground running when they find the field of science that really inspires them. After I finish graduate school, to the extent possible, I’d like to be involved in changing American science education. One dream I have is to work for Eugenie Scott and the National Center For Science Education, which does great work defending public school curricula against religious zealots who try to force intelligent design into the science classroom. I donated $10 to them to offset the damage done when I bought a ticket to Ben Stein’s disgusting crock-umentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. If you ever doubt the sniveling academic dishonesty of I.D. proponents, watch that film (download a pirated copy off the internet, please) and read how well the good people who made ExpelledExposed.com eviscerate just about every claim the film makes.

So, having veered just a bit off topic for a moment there, I’ll try to bring this back to the Obama science plan and wrap it up. From what I’ve read, I am cautiously optimistic that a Barack Obama administration would be a very science-friendly one. I think he doesn’t go quite far enough in emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary physical, chemical, and biological systems research. He also needs to use that generic science document better to tie into other large issues that are addressed elsewhere on the campaign website, and which I haven’t yet had time to peruse. I hope to post in the near future my thoughts on Obama’s proposed energy and environmental policies, and his position on NASA (as well as contrasting these with those of John McCain). For the rest of tonight, though, I would be glad just to get enough sleep so as not to be a total zombie at work tomorrow. I haven’t quit my day job yet; the blogging doesn’t have me rolling in benjamins yet like I hoped it would

For now, I’ll leave you with this video from a few weeks ago when my favorite artist and role model Dr. Greg Graffin was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism by the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy. It’s got him playing a few acoustic Bad Religion songs as well as talking about the award and why he prefers the label “naturalist” versus “atheist.” Wish I could have been there for this!

Geology, Wizardry, Astronomy, Obamanation.

I’m back, and I apologize for the recent lack of posts. Shall we get started?

First, the astonishing. The Chaitén volcano in the Andes in southern Chile erupted on May 2 for the first time in about nine millenia! You can read about it in National Geographic News. The powerful eruption is dramatic enough by itself, but the next day a huge dirty thunderstorm gave us this show. Sweet Flying Spaghetti Monster, I wish I were there to witness it (click on the picture for a slightly larger version)!

Second, the bizzarre. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomy blogger, drew my attention to this article: Magic trick costs teacher job. If you aren’t going to read it, here’s the short version: a substitute middle school teacher at a Florida public school was fired for… wait for it… wizardry. The guy did a 30 second magic trick in front of his class, making a toothpick disappear and then reappear, and then was dismissed for wizardry. In an attempt to cover his ignorant ass, a school official tacked on a few other accusations (e.g. “not following lesson plans”), and then claimed, “it wasn’t just the wizardry” — I can’t make this stuff up, folks. Anyone from Land’O'Lakes, Florida should be sobbing with shame right now.

And third, I finished my astronomy class! Unfortunately, buying a telescope is on hold until I finish paying for the class itself, but I learned some really cool stuff and have reinvigorated interests in things like the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is the world’s largest and highest-powered particle accelerator/collider. It was just completed and will begin operating this month to search for things like the Higgs boson, the only particle theorized by the Standard Model of physics that has not yet been observed. Confirmation of the Higgs boson and other new subatomic particles could lead toward the development of a Theory of Everything (also known as the Grand Unified Theory) of physics, incorporating the strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitation forces. Creationists everywhere, hold your breath: will we discover proof of god? Literally, hold your breath.

Finally, tonight was a big one for Barack Obama. I don’t see how Clinton can continue her campaign beyond the next day or two without being ridiculed by the press. That’s pretty great news. I find it fishy that cable news (CNN, FOX, MSNBC) led in calling the race “too close to call” into early this morning when the Obama campaign had conceded earlier, and when CBS news (with no late-night cable news program ratings to worry about) had called it for Clinton earlier as well. I think the numbers were there to call the race, and they lied about it to keep viewers in suspense and thus glued to their tvs. Seems like a pretty simple scam for a news director to justify with mere plausible deniability about the race’s outcome.

That’s it for now, I’m sleepy. But I’ll say more, and say it more coherently, soon.

An Update

Here’s a quick update, since I’ve been so damn busy lately. I realize I broke one of my new years resolutions; I let more than 7 days pass since my last blog post. A lot has gone on during the last few weeks. The democratic presidential nomination contest has continued, with Clinton nabbing three states but barely denting Obama’s delegate lead. I’ll have more to say about that later.

There have also been some science topics I’ve wanted to ponder aloud in this blog, some of which were raised by the astronomy course I’m taking, which has proved to be very interesting so far. I effin love special relativity.

In other news, yesterday I became the proud new owner of a 2008 Toyota Prius. It has neat gadgets like bluetooth connectivity for hands-free phone calls with voice activated dialing. It is super-duper cool. You can expect a giddy post with pretty pictures soon. And all it cost me was five years of financial servitude to SunTrust bank!

A Lame Excuse to Rattle the Sabres

Bush administration officials announced yesterday that they are going to shoot down a disabled military spy satellite, and that the sole reason for this is “to avoid a spread of toxic fuel in an inhabited area.” Bullshit alert! The odds of this satellite crashing down near anywhere inhabited by people are so low, it’s not worth sweating over. The odds are far better that you’ll be struck by lightning. And besides, the “toxic fuel” they’re referring to is hydrazine, which isn’t all that dangerous. If a populated area were contaminated with hydrazine gas, at worst you’d have some people with symptoms similar to chlorine gas poisoning. This satellite shoot-down attempt is just a way for the U.S. military to test their high tech anti-satellite defenses; the toxicity risk is a lame excuse. The political implications of this action are ugly, especially considering that America got on China’s case for doing the same thing last year. And for pete’s sake, this plan poses a risk to other orbiting objects, such as the International Space Station! Granted, it’s not a very big risk, but it’s still higher than the odds that any of us would be wiped out by a single school bus-sized gas tank dropping out of orbit.

For the record, I am adamantly opposed to any combat occurring in space. If you can shoot at a satellite, it won’t be long before the satellites can shoot back.

The Power of the Potomac

We here in the Potomac states are not all the silver spoon-fed liberal literati that the press make us out to be; still, we know how to pick a winner.

And it was on our shoulders, tonight, that Barack Obama stepped ahead of Hillary Clinton in his rise to what might become the presidency of our generation.

Maryland, take a bow.

Obama beats Clinton for Grammy award!

That is not even a joke.  To be fair, he beat Bill Clinton and not Hillary Clinton, but it’s true.  This is Barack Obama’s second Grammy award for Best Spoken Word Album.  Had Bill Clinton won, it would have been his third Grammy award.  I don’t know how the rest of you feel, but this is hilarious news — in a twisted, allegorical, symbolic way.  Allegory to what, you ask?

Barack Obama wins Maine caucus, defeating rival Hillary Clinton in 4 out of 4 weekend contests.

That is a phenomenal performance.  And, Clinton’s campaign manager stepped down today.  Big ups, Barack.  Tomorrow I’m volunteering at his “Stand For Change” rally at the 1st Mariner Arena in Baltimore.  The rally is free to the public, and the doors open at 2:45 PM.  With luck, I may get to have my picture taken with him.  Then a few years down the road, after he’s turned our country over to a North American Union police state, microchipped everyone, and invaded Iran, I can have something to be embarrassed by! Ha, ha, ha.  Anyway, keep an eye out for pictures and/or video from the rally tomorrow.

By the way,  my astronomy class has started.  It looks like it’ll be a lot of fun.  While browsing astronomy sites, I discovered that the Space Telescope Science Institute is practically in my backyard!  The STSI is, among other things, the public outreach program for the Hubble Space Telescope.  I will definitely pay them a visit sometime this semester.  I’m hoping they’ll have a really nice ’scope on site that I can peek through for free.

Super Tuesday, How Grandiloquent Is Thy Hype…

     Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’re here.  It’s Super Tuesday, and it’s a big milestone in American political history on the democratic side.  I’m pretty swamped at work so I don’t have time to comment in depth, but I’ll say that the most recent polls have been very encouraging and I hope Obama does very well today.  Watch the news, my friends!  I’m sure I’ll have words for you on the early returns tonight.  On one hand, I’m looking forward to Maryland having a chance to really influence the delegate count in next Tuesday’s primary, but I’d much rather see Obama pull ahead today and have some breathing room by then.

Either way, this is exciting.