So a colony of Group A Streptococcus bacteria made landfall on the back of my throat on Thursday evening, and has now erupted into a thriving settlement, planting corn and making friends with the natives. The resulting raw patch on the back of ye olde windpipe makes talking and swallowing difficult, and when a 300-pound man has problems swallowing his food, well, it’s time for a doctor’s visit.

I was in the doctor’s office this morning, the nurse having just swabbed my throat with what felt like Poseidon’s trident, waiting for the results of my strep test to come back in. I was sitting there on the doctor’s bed/table/paper-covered cabinet (or whatever it’s really called), with a few minutes to kill, and I picked up February 2010’s issue of Popular Mechanics. The cover story was titled “Can Robots Be Trusted?“, written by Eric Sofge.

The article describes the author’s touching, emotional, love-filled introduction with some probably outrageously over-priced blinking robot that looks like the Bride of Chucky after a nuclear disaster, named Nexi. The little bugger has starred in its own YouTube video:

The author expounds on his wonder at the newest evolutions of robotic technology, about how he was captivated by that thing’s creepy eyes, and reflections on the future of robot/human interaction. He introduces and describes to the reader a few other robots, goes over robotic evolutionary theory, so on and so forth.

Then this goose laid a golden egg.

Contemplating [futuristic human/robot interactions–MM] is a little like debating the ethical pitfalls of unregulated teleportation. Until someone builds the Enterprise, why worry if Scotty is going to drunk-dial himself into your house?

I laughed and laughed and laughed, much to my immediate dismay as the Strep Colony apparently thought that the End of Days was upon it and decided to stake down everything important to the inner surface of my esophagus with rusty circus tent spikes.

This was a great thought! I had never seriously considered some of the possible ramifications of teleportation, especially as it relates to deviant behavior! When I got home, I saddled up my trusty steed Google, and immediately set out to research the current progress in the realm of teleportation ethics.

Well, first of all, I’m going to advise you not to do so yourself. I spent an hour looking at various websites, but most of what I found resembled this:

You see, what essentially would happen in teleportation is that our atoms would be ripped up, be sent from point A to point B, and then perfectly reassembled. Now, the question you have to answer is this: Is the person that comes out at point B really you, or just a replica of you? You may have the same data — same eyes, weight, memories, skills — but is that stuff just replicated from your former being, which may have been ripped to death at the teleported origin? And for us religious types, where does the soul fit into all of this?

Now, I do love to read philosophy, and the metaphysics of the movement of the soul during teleportation was somewhat interesting for about the first three minutes, but after that, major boring sh**.

I don’t care about what happens to a soul or memories in a world of functioning teleportation devices!!! I wanted to hear people’s thoughts on the effects of teleportation on the realm of practical jokes!

You remember the old cliched joke about tying a string to a dollar, hiding and waiting for some slack-jawed individual to bend over and try to pick it up, just to pull it out of his grasp at the last possible moment? With teleportation, you’re no longer going to be limited to a lame 2D gag! Heck, you won’t even need a string!

As the guy bends over, the dollar will reappear above his head, inside his undies, or half in the blouse of the large chested woman walking by! Great fun will be had by all.

Surprise parties will be soooo much more surprising! The birthday girl will enter into her home, turn on the lights, take off her shoes, walk around the room, then BAMMO! Fifty people and a cake will just appear out of nowhere, screaming “SURPRISE!” at the top of their lungs, and possibly triggering a life-ending heart attack.

There won’t be any need to spend time tediously balancing a bucket full of water on the top of a slightly opened door; now you can just beam the bucket into existence as someone walks through it!

Oh, the possibilities for the writers at National Lampoon will be endless. Imagine the scene:

A girl’s locker room, packed full of sweaty European women, half wrapped in nothing but towels, the other half completely naked, then Poof! Clark Griswold appears.  He looks around sheepishly, holds up his control pad, and says “Uhhh…  Wrong number?”

The possibilities are boundless!

And then the nurse came back into the office with a syringe full of penicillin the size of a Titan IIIC-Centaur rocket, stabbed me in the ass and shot me up, and I immediately thought up the niftiest use for teleportation yet…

I just read an interesting article at The Nation.  It was posted by Johann Hari on April 15th, and is entitled “Climategate Claptrap, II“.

I’m not the world’s biggest supporter of the green movement.  It’s fair to get that out of the way first, full disclosure and what not, because I think this is one of the least informed attacks on Climategate that I’ve seen, and trust me, that’s really saying something.

The author begins by crowing a bit, attempting to link Climategate with the fight against Big Tobacco, but it gets interesting quickly.  In no time at all, the author engages us with visions of “deniers” being destroyed on the world stage…

It is happening again. The tide of global warming denial is now rising as fast as global sea levels–and with as much credibility as Cook Little. Look at the deniers’ greatest moment, Climategate, hailed by them as “the final nail in the coffin” of “the theory of global warming.” A patient study by the British House of Commons has pored over every e-mail from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and interviewed everyone involved. Its findings? The “evidence patently fails to support” the idea of a fraud; the scientists have “no case to answer”; and all their findings “have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified” by other scientists. That’s British for “it was a crock.”

 Man, you know, sometimes I almost hate to do this to people…  Oh well.  Can’t be helped.

A “patient study by the British House of Commons”?

That one caused me to squirt chocolate milk out of my nose and earned me a funny look from the kid.

The real truth:

“Lawmakers stressed that their report which was written after only a single day of oral testimony did not cover all the issues and would not be as in-depth as the two other inquiries into the e-mail scandal that are still spending.  [emphasis mine - MM]

Willis said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish something before Britain’s next national election, which is widely expected in just over a month’s time. 

“Clearly we would have liked to spend more time of this,” he said, before adding jokingly: “We had to get something out before we were sent packing.”

CBSNews (Which, ironically, I just made fun of here.)

The best part about the article?

It fails to mention the fact that a second panel investigating this has also declared Climategate to be 2 legit 2 quit:

“In the second of three investigations of the scandal known as “climate-gate,” a panel of academic experts said Wednesday that several prominent climate scientists did not engage in deliberate malpractice but did not use the best statistical tools available to produce their findings.”

Washington Post

However, if you keep reading, way down there, buried at the bottom of the piece, you’ll find this interesting little tidbit:

“Set up and funded by the University of East Anglia, the review panel was led by Ernest Oxburg — a geologist and former academic who is the honorary president of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association and is involved with the wind-energy company Falck Renewables.” [emphasis mine — MM]

It then gives you another paragraph detailing how each of the members of this panel are associated with cooperating Universities.

It’s getting hilarious by this point.

This is nothing more than a continuation of “This debate is OVER!”…

“YOU’RE LYING ABOUT CLIMATEGATE BECAUSE WE, THE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE HIGHLY INVESTED IN THIS SCAM, SAY SO!”

Well… That doesn’t exactly cut it in the real world people.  I’m gonna need to see something that will get me to lose faith in the laws of mathematics and statistics, and it’s gonna have to be really damned convincing…  Like some form of god or advanced alien culture or something is going to have to part the clouds, single me out, and tell me that humans are causing climate change in no uncertain terms.

That’s how strongly I believe in the truth of equations.

100 years’ worth of scientific data is not a large enough sample from a population of 4 billion years to make any scientifically valid claims about anything.

Some weeks back I mentioned Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Science,” which is a meditation on the development of the atomic bomb. It ends thus:

A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much?

This, of course, is merely a 20th-century gloss on something Alexander Pope said a long time ago: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” It is a sentiment that has done yeoman’s service as the premise of story after story, from Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, and I have no intention of challenging its fundamental wisdom. But I would suggest that there is a corollary question connected to it that has been largely ignored: Just how much knowledge is enough?

Take, for instance, the ongoing debate about climate change (neé global warming), regarding which many insist that the “science is settled.” Of course, since a cache of emails from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s University of East Anglia were posted on the Internet late last year, the science has seemed to many to be noticeably unsettled. According to a memorandum submitted to the British Parliament by the Institute of Physics, “the CRU e-mails as published on the Internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law.”

The real question, of course, has to do with this business of the science being settled. When is the science about anything ever settled? Are there areas that we no longer need to investigate? One encounters a similar sense of dogmatism with regard to evolutionary theory, which is rather odd considering that Darwin’s original formulation has long since been revised to account for genetics.

And, speaking of genetics, it has always seemed to me that the really great 19th-century natural scientist wasn’t Darwin, but Gregor Mendel, whose years of patient and meticulous experiment and observation gave us the knowledge of genetics that in turn gave us that new and improved evolutionary theory. And if Mendel’s discoveries made it necessary to revise Darwin’s original formulation, isn’t it at least possible that some new discovery might necessitate further revision?

On another front, think for a moment about all the things regarding health and diet that have been bandied about in the media over the years. Stay out of the sun, we were told, or else slather on the sun block — except now we are being told to get at least 15 minutes of exposure to the sun every day. Remember the oat bran craze? I always thought that particularly amusing, since all you really needed to do was eat whole oats, which includes the bran — that’s why they call it “whole.” Of course, the craze proved much less amusing to the people who got a grievous bout of constipation eating the bran minus everything else.

There are plenty of other examples besides these. How about all that we’ve heard, back and forth, about fats, supplements, sweeteners, alcohol? It all has one thing in common: the belief that we knew enough to do something, followed by the discovery that, well, maybe we didn’t.

The underlying problem may be that we have come to think of knowledge solely in terms of data and information and of the intellect as simply a passive receptor of same: We take in the facts and figures, process them, and act accordingly. I suspect it is a good deal more complicated than that. To study something in depth is to see the subject of one’s study opening out and getting deeper — like the ocean. Genuine learning is a process of initiation into the mystery that lies at the heart of everything. True knowledge invariably confers a measure of humility, which in turn tends to be prophylactic against undue or hasty action.

“One of these days, Alice…  POW!  Right in the kisser.  Straight to the moon!”

Well, America’s favorite domestic abuser might have been a little more upbeat, were he alive to see these days.  While he never succeeded in putting his his wife on the moon with a killer uppercut, it seems as though the government is finally going to help simplify the process of placing Americans on our closest celestial neighbor.

That’s right!  The days of selective space travel are rapidly coming to an end.  Forget about the prerequisites that have been the norm in the past, the age of space travel for the everyman is about to make a giant leap forward.  No longer will it only be the super-genius scientists, who also moonlight as highly trained fighter pilots, that get a shot at landing on Luna, our turn is coming.

Let’s let El Presidente give us the low down:

If U.S. astronauts land on the moon again before 2020, it won’t be aboard a NASA spacecraft.

The space agency’s 2011 budget, released today, reveals plans to scrap the Constellation program, including the rockets and spacecraft that NASA has been developing over the past four years to replace its aging space shuttle fleet.

Constellation’s demise would mean that NASA will have no plans for manned space flight beyond the final shuttle launch in fall 2010. Instead the U.S. will have to rely on other governments, such as existing Russian craft, to ferry people to the International Space Station.

…

U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to scrap the program is based on Constellation being “over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation due to a failure to invest in critical new technologies,” according to a statement posted on the White House Office of Management and Budget Web site.

This is absolutely awesome!  I predict that we can’t even imagine what is just around the corner in terms of manned space flight now that the government is getting out of the way.  The power of the individual seeking profit is about to be on full display.

Hmmm…  Let me attempt to give you a hand at visualizing what this news means to space-faring.

For many, many, many years, the government endorsed a monopoly.  The name of the organization which benefited was the Bell System, more commonly known as “Ma Bell”.

A quick wiki link for background:

In 1934, the government set AT&T up as a regulated monopoly under the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission, in the Communications Act of 1934.

As a result, by 1940 the Bell System effectively owned most telephone service in the United States, from local and long-distance service to the telephones themselves. This allowed Bell to prohibit their customers from connecting phones not made or sold by Bell to the system without paying fees. For example, if a customer desired a type of phone not leased by the local Bell monopoly, he or she had to purchase the phone at cost, give it to the phone company, then pay a ‘re-wiring’ charge and a monthly lease fee in order to use it. An oft-heard remark at the time was “Ma Bell has you by the calls”.

In 1949, the United States Department of Justice alleged in an antitrust lawsuit that AT&T and the Bell System operating companies were using their near-monopoly in telecommunications to attempt to establish unfair advantage in related technologies, especially the fledgling computer industry. The outcome was a 1956 consent decree limiting AT&T to 85% of the United States’ national telephone network and certain government contracts, and precluding the Bell System from extending its reach into the fledgling computer industry and from continuing to hold interests in Canada and the Caribbean.

 The Bell System was finally put to rest in 1984.

Now, I’d like to examine the results of the government endorsed monopoly.

Beginning in 1927, customers of the Bell System were allowed to become the proud recipients of a black rotary phone. (source)

But boy, oh boy, the Bell System wasn’t done with phone technology after developing that little gem.  A full ten years later, you could get the same phone, in a trendy square model!

Now, that was living, let me tell you…  But, hey, don’t let the complete lack of innovation over a full decade make you think that the Bell System didn’t care about improving their product, or responding to customer needs/wants.  They were hip.  They were with it.  And in 1963, when dial tones came into use, they showed the world that the Bell System still had it, why the Bell System was the undisputed leader in the telecommunications world (aside from the government gun, of course).

Snazzy, huh?

Essentially zero innovation, zero responsiveness to the customer, zero progress.  For more than half a century.

But what happened after 1984?  Didn’t the entire world just cease to communicate after the only organization who had ever supplied their phone needs suddenly disappeared?

Hmmmm…

We went from Mr. Sheen toting this in 1987:

To this, today:

What’s that, about 20 years?  Three cheers for free market capitalism, eh?  We went from “The Brick”, which cost like a gazillion dollars and on which a minute of talking racked up a bill that quadrupled the yearly earnings of an entire poor African village, to an iPhone or Blackberry, and just about everyone has one.

Heck, I’ve got two cell phones and I lead an obscure and unimportant life.  Imagine what it must be like to be rich, eh?

Twenty years.  That’s all it took once competition was introduced.  The former toy of the elites is in every common man’s pocket, and the capabilities of the device are at levels only imagined in the 1960s. 

(Seriously.  The iPhone or Blackberry is essentially the communicator from the original Star Trek.)

Now, back to space flight.

In the 1960s, we had this:

Half a century later, cutting edge technology looks like this:

Depressingly similar to the phone situation, huh?

But now there is going to be competition in space travel.  Back to the original article:

The money saved by halting Constellation would instead be used to fund robotic space missions, to help commercial companies develop manned spacecraft, and to develop new engine technologies that could eventually take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit and into deep space.

“Imagine trips to Mars that take weeks instead of nearly a year, people fanning out across the inner solar system, exploring the moon, asteroids, and Mars nearly simultaneously in a steady stream of firsts, and imagine all of this being done collaboratively with nations around the world,” Bolden [NASA Admin — MM] said.

I am excited.

“The universe,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “is made of stories, not of atoms.” This seems eminently sound to me. After all, what exactly do atoms amount to?

In The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Eddington notes that if you imagine the nucleus of an atom to be a grain of sand suspended halfway between the floor and the apex of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the orbit of the electrons would be circumscribed by the curve of the dome itself. In other words, the distance between the nucleus and the electrons is astronomical. A creature standing on the nucleus would likely be unable to see the electrons spinning about.

Eddington further notes that if one reduced a six-foot-tall man to pure matter by eliminating the spaces between the particles of which he is said to be composed, said man would be a speck barely visible with a powerful magnifying glass. I recently heard that the entire human race currently alive, all six-and-a-half billion of us, if similarly reduced, would amount to something the size of a sugar cube.

The so-called material universe is, in fact, a vast network of electrical impulses. Perhaps we should think of it as a transmission system and focus our attention more on what is being transmitted rather than on the means by which it is transmitted. After all, taking apart your answering machine won’t tell you anything about the message someone left on it.

Message and transmission really do have little in common. No analysis of the telephone signal will tell you anything about what the caller is saying to you. Any more than a study of paper and ink will give you any insight into David Copperfield or an examination of the Globe Theater will help you understand Hamlet. Likewise, the frequency of a sound-stimulus and the electrical response the stimulus evokes in the auditory cortex are entirely dissimilar.

We like to think that early man was more in touch with nature than we are now. Maybe that’s why the earliest attempts to get to the bottom of things took the form of stories and poems. Maybe life is best understood in terms of symbol and drama. The similarity between the theory of the Big Bang and certain ancient creation myths may be more than just coincidence (which may also be why some scientists find the Big Bang to be, in the words of the late John Maddox, one-time editor of the science journal Nature, “philosophically unacceptable”).

I am not, by the way, advancing any either-or proposition. I like my science and technology as much as anyone. But I am suggesting there may be limits to an approach to reality that is purely abstract, strictly deterministic, and merely quantitative. However much such an approach may tell us about the composition of things, it seems quite incapable of telling us anything about their point. And if one regards such an approach as the only authentic avenue to truth, then one is likely to conclude that things in the end have no point. To insist that everything has a cause is, in effect, to deny that anything has a motive. The world we live in, so far as I can tell, is packed with motivation. And it is motivation that drives stories.

I don’t know how many of you caught this piece of horrible news for the ladies in the audience, but scientists have found that there is no evidence of the mythical “G-Spot” in women.

From the Times of London:

A sexual quest that has for years baffled millions of women - and men - may have been in vain. A study by British scientists has found that the mysterious G-spot, the sexual pleasure zone said to be possessed by some women but denied to others, may not exist at all.

For an analysis with more depth:

“Women may argue that having a G-spot is due to diet or exercise, but in fact it is virtually impossible to find real traits,” said Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology, who co-authored the research. “This is by far the biggest study ever carried out and it shows fairly conclusively that the idea of a G-spot is subjective.”

Well…  I guess that sucks.  How many man hours have been wasted in the bedrooms of America trying to find the product of some woman’s flight of fancy about her super-heroine, realistic-karate-chop-like-action orgasmic abilities?  How many times have men been blamed for failing to satisfy their woman when it isn’t their fault, but basic human physiology’s?

An even better question:  How about you ladies just be quiet about unfullfilling sex lives and go get us a beer?  The game is on.

(That was a horrible joke.  I’m sorry.)

Cheer up ladies.  Your salvation is delivered in the article’s last paragraph.

Meanwhile, David Matlock, a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon, is credited with creating an artificial version of the G-spot. In some cases this has resulted in an over-sensitive zone which induces orgasms when, for example, women drive over bumps in the road.

[emphasis is mine — MM]

I don’t know whether to be jealous, or slightly frightened at the thought of women drivers being even more distracted…

(Oooo…  Another bad joke…  Take it with a grain of salt ladies, you know we men love you.  Increasing populations the world over prove that the “war between the sexes” is also a myth.  We’re getting along famously.)

It’s a contentious time in America. Between fighting over health care, over terrorists and TSA regulations, and dealing with standard-issue holiday stress, we all seem to be teetering on our last nerves. So for my debut column at When Falls the Coliseum, I’ve decided to start 2010 on an uncontroversial note and champion a cause we all can get behind.

Take a moment to list some of the greatest problems plaguing the world’s poorest people today. Most people get through “big name” diseases like malaria, TB, and AIDS, lack of technological and physical infrastructure, government corruption, and the like, before reaching (if they even get this far) a slew of ailments, mostly caused by parasitic worms, which can greatly impair individual productivity without being fatal. Such “neglected tropical diseases” are the subject of an article by Peter Jay Hotez in the current (January 2010) edition of Scientific American. The strength of one billion people worldwide is sapped by NTDs, leaving their countries’ economies reeling from the impact.

While NTDs are mostly limited to impoverished nations in the tropics today, the effect of one of these diseases may have shaped the development of the United States, and its example can serve as a model for the havoc caused by these nonfatal conditions. By the early 20^th century, the Civil War and Reconstruction had rolled through the South, but productivity in the region still lagged behind the rest of the country. It was later discovered that around 40% of children in the South suffered from hookworm infections which made them anemic, listless, and unprepared to build an economy which didn’t break the backs of slaves. Starting in 1910, an effort promoted by the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission helped eradicate hookworm infection from the South, with dramatic results depicted in a 1915 report from Virginia (page 7 in linked pdf):

…children who could not study a year ago are not only studying now, but are finding joy in learning. These children were born of anemic parents; were themselves infected in infancy; for the first time in their lives their cheeks show the glow of health.

A century later, one-sixth of the world’s population has suffered in the same way. Just as was the case in the American South, a cure for the scourge of NTDs is at hand, and may even prime a generation of thinkers who can reverse global economic malaise. The Scientific American article names an effort called the Just 50 Cents Campaign; so-called because a 50-cent donation is enough to treat one person for the seven most common NTDs for a year. It’s startling to think that such small change is all that is needed to restore “the glow of health” in people so poor that they’ve never been able to think and work to their full inborn potential.

I don’t know what it is that keeps you up at night worrying, dear reader, but I think I’ve got something more important to bring to your attention. It’s not anything mundane like the economy, airline terrorism, or global climate change-these simply are not the biggest problems facing humanity, and we’ve all got to be on the same page if we’re going to survive. So pull yourself together for this.

In the last week, two news articles caught my eye. Taken separately, they might be merely interesting tidbits of zoological behavior research. But when taken together, they indicate an alarming pattern, and they paint a clear picture of impending doom for our species.

First, chimpanzees have “mastered” the first stage of fire supremacy. That’s right. FIRE. It was once thought that human beings were different from other animals in many ways, including language, tool use, wanton violence, and mastery of fire. One by one these barriers have fallen, presumably because of an attempt by some species to “catch up” with us. These programs for accelerated evolution were most likely initiated in the wake of Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species on 24 November 1859. While we don’t know exactly which species are making a push, we do have evidence that the chimps are gaining ground on us. The last barrier, the proverbial “fire wall”, was the wall of FIRE. It has been breached like a porpoise, my friends.

“No big deal,” you may lie to yourself. Nice try.

The second issue is that chimps have begun arming themselves. Anvils and cleavers may not sound that alarming if you are a naïve rube, but I implore you to consider the obvious implications. What will you say when the apes arrive at your front door with anvils, cleavers, and FIRE?

This isn’t some Woody Harrelson movie, dear reader. This is from MSNBC and BBC. This is real. Our short term plan must be to prepare to defend our homes and persons with extreme force-firearms, one of the few subsets of tool that (to our knowledge) the chimps haven’t yet cracked. (We can only hope they haven’t figured out TCP/IP protocols and are not eavesdropping on this very article.) Having a gun and being prepared to use it confers two advantages. The first is the ability to defend your family from armed, organized, super-evolving arsonist apes. The second is the ability to merge two famous Charlton Heston quotes into one, as you raise your rifle over your head and yell at them, “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands… you damned dirty apes!”

Admit it, that’s going to be hot. Even for the liberals.

But that’s only the short term plan. We must also think long term. Our status as the dominant species on this planet is not secure, and now is not the time internal bickering or snide remarks about our collective transgressions. These two news articles were posted within the last week. A conservative extrapolation predicts that the chimpanzees could have written language by April, silverware and sauces by June, and jet aircrafts by 2012.

Attempts to stop their progress will not be enough. The best defense is a good offense, dear reader. You must evolve. For the sake of the species and without delay, you must do all you can to become more advanced than you currently are. Do some calculus, do some yoga, and read When Falls the Coliseum every single goddamned day. I pray that it will be enough.

I know you’ve all heard about the calamity which is about to descend upon the human race.  The visions of death and destruction are downright Biblical. The seas will rise, the plants will die, the four horsemen of the apocalypse will reap a mighty harvest of flesh and bones. It’s the coming of man-made global warming!

I know that you’ve all seen the temperature graphs showing the steady rise of global temperatures over the last 100 years. If you haven’t, allow me to introduce you to the infamous roller coaster of potential devastation, the rise in global temperature!

(Fig. 1)

The graph shows a rise in average global temperature over the last 100-150 years. The scale of the graph is -.7 degree Celsius up to .7 degree Celsius.  It’s a regular toaster oven here on ye olde Terra!

Now, this is a graph that has been used to hype a religion based on junk science, and there is a serious flaw we all need to understand. The Mainstream Media won’t discuss it, the politicians are too stupid to know anything about it, and the communists the world over ignore it in their haste to destroy progress.

Here’s the dirty little secret: The Earth is 4 billion years old.

In geologic time scales, 100 years isn’t even the bat of an eyelash. It’s certainly not a long enough period of time for us to have gathered enough data to yield statistically significant values for historical averages or the historical standard deviation of temperatures.

Let’s examine this with the promised illustrations. I’ve picked an illustration which, unlike the HAD CRU’s version of climate change, has easily accessible, original data.

This is the graph of the US’s economic growth from 1945 to 2005 (source):

(Fig.2)

This graph shows 60 years worth of economic growth in the US.  See all the peaks and valleys?  The rises and the falls?  The line of best fit (average) is somewhere between 3% and 3.5% growth per year.

Now, imagine that Fig. 2 is the graph for the average global temperature, across all 4 billion years that the Earth has been spinning around the sun.

But this isn’t the graph the man-made global warming communists are showing you. Their graph looks something like this:

(Fig. 3 Data  source)

Based on the graph of 1961’s GDP growth, if that was all you knew about the US economy, it would look as though the US had roughly 105% growth, on average.  Not even close to the truth, is it?

But that’s not even right because they’re only showing you the 100 years worth of data, out of 4 BILLION years worth of climate.

That’s .000000025% of the total graph of global temperatures.

In reality, giving you the year of 1961 as all of the economic data for the US economic growth over that 60 year period gives too much information compared to the hoax that is man-made global warming.

Over 60 years, we have 21,900 days. In each day, there are 1,440 minutes. Thus, in 60 years we have 31,536,000.00 minutes, which would represent .0000000315% of the total time. 

In other words, 1 minute’s worth of economic data would be more information about the US economic growth over that 60-year period than the 100 years worth of climate data gives us about the Earth’s historical global temperature.

Over that 60-year period of economic activity, for this illustration to hold, we would have to look at roughly 3/4 of a single second’s worth of economic data to approach what the man-made global warming crowd is urging you to get upset about.

That would be similar to seeing the stock market ticker now, and 3/4 of a second later, seeing it go up less than a single point, and then advocating the complete destruction of the world’s economic system.

Wake the **** up, people!

The best scientists can determine, the Earth’s temperature in the Cretaceous Period was anywhere from 5 degree C to  8 degrees C warmer than it is today.  During the last Ice Age, the best guess is that the global temperature was about 5 degrees C cooler than it is today.  Thus, a graph of global temperatures that tries to reflect reality would show a range on the Y axis of at least 5 degrees C down to -5 degrees C. 

We have a graph that goes from .7 down to -.7, or 14% of the total variation in temperature we believe the Earth has seen. 

And that graph is based on manipulated data, as everyone who doesn’t live under a rock and has heard about Climategate, knows.

Junk science and fear mongering, all the way around.  Al Gore is like the liberal version of Hal Lindsey.

Al Gore and others declared long ago that the debate over global warming was over — that it was accepted science, and that all those ignorant enough to defy them were “deniers,” akin to those who doubt the existence of the Holocaust. Unfortunately — despite the nifty ad hominems — the flatearthers refuse to adhere to dogma, especially in light of the so-called “Climategate” scandal. Society must deal with these people in the same manner society in the past dealt with those who challenged science: through an inquisition.

Like today, in the early seventeenth century there was an inconvenient truth — the truth of geocentricism — the belief that the earth is the center of the universe. It was accepted science since the days of Ptolemy and was beyond debate. That is, until a denier named Galileo Galilei advanced Copernicus’ heliocentricism — the belief that the sun is actually the center of the universe — through his book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.

This could not stand. Nor did it.

Pope Urban VIII — the Al Gore of his day, whose truths were infallible and irrefutable, and who should also be admired by progressives of today for his ban on smoking — ordered Galileo in front of the Inquisition, where he admitted that the earth can’t move (notwithstanding the rumor that he muttered “And yet it moves” under his breath as he did.)

The same mechanism that shut up the heliocentrics can also shut up their modern-day equivalents.

Man-made global warming is true. In spite of the more than 700 scientists who doubt it, and in spite of Climategate, where the Hadley Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia courageously falsified data, lied, and suppressed facts in the name of truth.

And everyone must believe this truth, or there will never be the consensus necessary to save the world by destroying its economy. That is why those who refuse to accept the truth should forthwith be brought in front of an inquisitional tribunal, comprised of the New York Times editorial board and under the jurisdiction of one of the countless United Nations judicial bodies.

Like with the tribunals of old, trials will be swift, and justice merciful. Those heretics convicted of crimes against environmental thought will be given ample opportunity to recant their errors (with careful monitoring of their testimony to ensure that no one mutters “And yet it cools” under their breath.)

But if anyone persists in denial of what is so obviously true, they must, unfortunately, be consigned to the flames. Of course, such immolation will be conducted in an air tight chamber, so as to not allow any of the miscreants’ carbons to enter the atmosphere. For, even in death, they cannot be allowed to contribute to the earth’s warming.

And then soon the truth of global warming shall prevail. Just as the truth of geocentricism did.

This Christmas, I’m keeping it simple. I desire one item and one item only. No socks, no underwear. No chocolate anus gag gifts either. I want the God Helmet.

In short, I want easy access to the so-called divine, and I don’t want to spend big money on an ayahuasca trek through the backwaters of the Amazon to get it. Nor do I want to spend 48 hours meditating in a sweat lodge. I want divine illumination on-demand.

Enter Dr. Michael Persinger’s God Helmet, a device that supposedly emulates “paranormal” experiences (e.g. angelic encounters, alien abductions) via electromagnetic pulses that fondle the temporal lobe.

Apparently, the degree of success one has with this contraption correlates directly to one’s proclivity for religiosity, fantasy, etc. Thus, for stone-cold secularists like me, the God Helmet might be as anticlimactic as X-ray specs from the Johnson Smith Company. Richard Dawkins once took the God Helmet for a ride and reported no notable effects. His colleague, Michael Shermer, made an attempt too, with only minor success.

I’m anxious to make my own attempt. Sadly, though, the closest retail approximation of the helmet, the “Shiva Neural Technology” kit, sells for a whopping $649.00 U.S. dollars. That ain’t chump change. Moreover, the hefty price tag isn’t the only disincentive for shoppers. The Web site for the Shiva Neural Technology kit — which appears to have some loose affiliation with Persinger — offers “telephone spiritual coaching” and an overriding New Age vibe. Disconcerting.

Notably, skeptics of the helmet exist outside the scientific realm of Dawkins and Shermer. Elements of the lunatic fringe have expressed concern that Persinger (or shall we call him Magneto?) might use his powers of magnetism to hatch a devious mind-control scheme.

Perhaps it’s unfair to mock the conspiracy theorist crowd, though. Persinger’s technology has the potential to pose some challenging ethical questions, provided the science behind it is legit. That’s where things get murky. In 2004, some Swedes unsuccessfully tried to replicate Persinger’s findings and determined that “suggestibility may account for previously reported effects.”

Nevertheless, anyone familiar with the deep-fried dystopia of modern living can fathom other uses for a truly functional God Helmet. “Non-lethal” weaponry is one. In the hands of the U.S. military, the God Helmet could become an ass-kicking Freedom Sombrero. Such a device could transmit “messages from Allah” to War on Terror detainees, programming them to paint loving portraits of Barack Obama and watch the “700 Club.” (It’s not exactly far-fetched; Jon Ronson has shown that the U.S. military will throw anything at a wall to see if it sticks.)

I realize I’m getting ahead of myself. Please forgive the repugnant detour into neoconservative fantasy. The God Helmet technology appears to be in its infancy, at best. Or maybe ineffectual alterations of consciousness are the best it has to offer.

Still…it sits atop my Christmas 2009 wish list. I implore you, in the name of God and Heaven Almighty — make this wish a reality.

Am I the only one getting tired of listening to the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) crowd as they attempt to downplay the significance of Climategate’s leaked e-mails?  They tell us over and over that these e-mails have an alternative interpretation, that this is a move on the part of special interests to impede change, that the researchers involved in passing these e-mails around are merely the victims of a heinous crime.  Enough with the nonsense, people!  %*)#.  Wake up, man!

Can you do me a favor and tell me what else this is supposed to mean, if it is not referring to global warming?  Once again, the most damaging e-mail blurb:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

You know, I’m just a forester, and I don’t have any degrees in English, not even three decades worth of experience speaking the English language yet, but it seems to me that the phrase “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” can’t really mean anything but ‘the Earth isn’t getting warmer, no matter how we look at it’.  To the layman, those of us who are blue collar kinda people, that seems to be pretty straightforward.  I doubt he was talking about his convection oven, or his hot water heater, especially when he goes on to refer to climate data…

The “They’re victims!” tack is pretty snazzy too.  Take this quote from climateprogress.org:

Trenberth says,  “If you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists.  The unfortunate thing about this is that people can cherry pick and take things out of context.”

Of course, he is talking about the people who are calling the CRU on their ethical violations, but what really strikes me as funny is that this guy, the one who authored the above e-mail, is accusing others of cherry picking data?

Hello?

This is getting world wide attention because they have e-mails of you and your cronies talking about cherry picking and manipulating data so you could advance your crusade!  This is what YOU have been doing as a career for years!

But the best one is the claim that this is an attack by “special interests”.  Check out this hack piece from the ever prestigious …  Hold on a second, I’ve got get a paper towel so I can wipe some of this sarcasm off my lips… Huffington Post:

As world attention turns to the climate conference in Copenhagen this December, this email hack acts as a distraction from the huge task at hand of getting world leaders to commit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As professor Richard Somerville says, “We’re facing an effort by special interests who are trying to confuse the public.”

Again, “trying to confuse the public” sounds like exactly the sort of thing the fellows at the CRU were engaged in for years.  Do you know how many billions of dollars have flowed into global warming research by parties which are, shall we say, not exactly impartial?

The CRU is the global warming equivalent of the Council for Tobacco Research. And they have the onions to claim that the people who get upset when they uncover an obvious fraud are the ones serving the special interests?  That’s even more annoying than Nancy Pelosi calling 80 year old WW2 veterans, who fought and defeated Hitler in Europe, Nazis for protesting health care reform last summer.

AGW is such an obvious hoax that I can’t believe that anyone gives it any credence whatsoever.  It takes all of thirty seconds to wipe your arse with this theory.  It’s so bad that I can’t believe Al Gore was able to sell even one copy of his book.

Totally ignoring the fact that 100 years worth of data is not a significant level of trial testing on which to found climate models (The Earth is billions of years old, we’ve got to have hundreds, if not thousands of years’ worth of data for statistically significant findings), everywhere you look, you see evidence that man is not responsible for any warming of the Earth which may, or may not, be going on.

Did you ever get a sun burn?  Might you think that maybe the sun has a direct effect on Earth’s surface temperature?

When reptiles evolved, they evolved a cold blooded circulatory system.  Think that happened over millions of years in response to a much cooler Earth?

How did the ancient people who would become the American Indians get here from Asia?  Didn’t they cross a land bridge?

Where is that land bridge now?  Under water?  You don’t say?  So the oceans have been rising for a bit, eh?

Mind telling us how our cavemen ancestors, armed only with sharp sticks and rocks brought about the end of the last ice age?

Ugh, it could drive you crazy.

Even more disturbing is that you never hear anyone debate the possible benefits of global warming!  What if global warming solved all kinds of problems for mankind?

Let’s start with our most immediate crisis: The world wide water shortage being experienced by 80 countries across the globe.  There’s a lot of water tied up in glaciers, water that isn’t being processed through the Earth’s water cycle to fall as rain, or get stored in reservoirs.  Maybe if the Earth heats up a bit, more people won’t be dying of thirst?

We’re facing massive food shortages around the world, as detailed by TIME magazine.  Well, can someone tell me how a longer growing season, more available water (see above), more arable land (no more glaciers, and we could plant father north), and higher concentrations of CO2 (which plants use like a human uses oxygen) would harm agriculture?  Sounds like we’d be seeing bumper crops the world over.

Let’s face it:  The science is really a religion on this one.  No examination of historical evidence, complete disregard for even basic statistics, and now, finally, written proof of this activity.  All the AGW crazies have is just a reliance on a majority of scientists agreeing on something, which is probably influenced by the amount of grant money available for it these days…

Consensus doth not the truth make.  Just ask the flat earth crowd how much consensus really means, or look up George W. Bush and see what the world wide consensus about there being WMDs in Iraq was worth.

But why, mommy? How many times do you get that question — about any number of topics? Maybe it’s three times a day or maybe it’s three times an hour. To make your life a little easier I’ve given you ten answers to the simple question: Mommy, why is the sky blue?

1) It’s not. You’re drunk. Oh no, wait, I’m drunk.

2) Its blue because of molecules and stuff, I think. I don’t know. I cut science class a lot. Go watch TV.

3) Because God’s favorite color is blue. When he’s mad his favorite color is grey. He’s been mad lately at the Northeast.

4) Google it.

5) Isn’t there a Dora episode that can answer that?

6) Go ask your father (or nanny or grandmother or any other adult in the house).

7) A whole bunch of Smurfs were flying in hot-air balloons when some rich jerk shooting rifles off his yacht hit them and the little blue guys disintegrated into the air (like all mythical figures do when shot) — and that made the sky blue.

8) Because God is a boy and boys like blue. Except for Uncle Steve – he likes pink. It’s a long story, go to your room.

9) The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. What’s Rayleigh? See answer #2.

10) The sky is blue because it’s sad. You know why it’s sad? Because you cry too much.

Special thanks to Going Parental blogger Jaclyn Roth for providing inspiration and some fine answers to this question.

Here’s a puzzle for you: what is it you can hear but cannot hear, creates noise to make you sleep, and is a key feature of some 35 iPhone / iPod Touch applications that represent some of the most high-tech snake oil ever invented?

The answer is Binaural Beats, an aural illusion created when you listen to two different tones, one in each ear, that your brain interprets as something else entirely — a beat.

The closest thing to which I can liken the sound is the wobbly twang of a single key being struck on an out-of-tune piano. It’s a useful comparison in that most piano keys (except in the lowest octaves) make sound by forcing a mallet to simultaneously strike two or three strings tuned to each other – two or three, instead of one, to amplify the volume and add richness to the sound. However, if the strings aren’t tuned closely enough, they generate a resonance between them that we hear as that ‘out-of-tune’ beat.

Now imagine listening to two slightly different electronic tones being played through headphones, but each tone in a different ear. Turn the speaker away from one ear; you only hear only one tone in the other ear. Listen to both, you hear the beat of them resonating with one another. The illusion is that the resonance — the beat — is only in your head. You are hearing what you cannot hear.

Okay, the world is full of cool, odd phenomena and illusions. What makes this one really off-beat is the belief, shared by many in and out of the scientific community, that Binaural Beats wave forms resonate with and influence brainwaves, and are thus capable of affecting our behavior.

A little science stuff: Scientists have determined that, for this beat to be perceived, the two tones must be below 1,000 to 1,500 Hz, and be separated by between 3 and 30 Hz (e.g., if one tone is 500 Hz, the other must be no more than 530 Hz or less than 470 Hz). Among those 3 Hz to 30 Hz frequency differences are the frequencies that scientists, measuring brainwave activity using Electroencephalography (EEG), have associated with certain states of mind (Beta, 12 to 38 Hz, wide awake; Alpha, 8 to 12 Hz, awake but relaxed; Theta, 3 to 8 Hz, light sleep or extreme relaxation; and Delta, .2 to 3 Hz, deep dreamless sleep). Many scientists think this is not a simple coincidence, and that, in fact, listening to Binaural Beats can induce (or “entrain,” as they say) the brain into the corresponding state of mind – in effect, creating an altered state of consciousness.

Until the past couple decades, interest in and access to this phenomenon was more or less academic and confined to the laboratory. What’s changed? Well, if you set out to design the perfect delivery system for providing this electronic drug to the masses – a Binaural Beats Bong, perhaps? — you couldn’t do much better than a portable music device with ear buds onto which you can load any sound that can be turned into an MP3 file.

In fact, if you go onto the Apple iTunes music store and search on “Binaural Beats,” you can find dozens of sound files (you couldn’t call them songs, exactly) that have Binaural Beats layered in with all manner of natural and synthetic sounds that are included to make listening to them more palatable. (A bare bones Binaural Beats sound loop is frankly pretty boring.)

Still, Binaural Beats sound files are not exactly “Top Forty with a bullet” material. The real buzz on Binaural Beats isn’t coming from the iTunes music store, at all, but from that latest iteration of the California Gold Rush, the Apple iPhone & iPod Touch, the Apple App Store, and the tens of thousands of software engineers hoping to discover the killer app that will make them millionaires. Using Binaural Beats as the basis for their applications, developers are adding bells and whistles, such as timers, fade outs, alarms, and layers of murmuring mantras, to target specific, supposedly suggestible states of mind. Where are they supposed to take you?

A search on “Binaural” in the iTunes App Store currently yields 35 apps, ranging from the cheerful “Be Happy” and “Easy Relax” to the more off-the-wall “Brainwave Altered States,” “mind Freek” and “iDoser,” to the pitchman’s plodding “SleepStream,” “Lose Weight” and “Quit Smoking Now,” to my personal favorites “Attractor” and “Zen Bound.”

Under the hood, you’ll find descriptions that promise everything from stress relief and power naps to lucid dreams, astral projection, out-of-body experiences and weightlessness (“mind Freek”).

So…do they work?

The Binaural Beats concept first caught my eye when I was browsing the Apps store on my iPhone and saw several apps, such as “SleepStream,” that said they used these sounds to create a drug-free sleep aid, entraining your brain to the Theta and Delta sleep states by producing sounds with similar frequencies.

Being a night owl in an early-bird world, I often have trouble getting to sleep before 11 pm, and since some of these were free, I thought I’d give them a try. So I downloaded “SleepStream” and “Ambiance,” both of which offer a layer of Binaural Beats against a wide choice of calming, environmental soundscapes, such as “Rain Shower,” “Desert Winds” or “Ocean Waves.” They also include a timer you can set to turn off the app after a spell, as well as the ability to change the volume of the soundscape relative to the Binaural Beats, allowing you to turn the beat up and the soundscape down or vice versa.

I tried a couple of different sounds and found them to be calming and even mesmerizing, but not usually sleep inducing, although I have to admit several times I did wake up in the middle of the night with earplugs still in my ears and did not remember the app turning itself off.

Then I found what seemed to be the ‘Cadillac’ of Binaural Beats apps, “Attractor,” which at $5.99 is targeted at the upmarket consumer. The maker of this app believes that to properly entrain one’s mind to a certain frequency, you have to start off at the waking state (around 20 Hz) and then gradually raise or lower the beat to the desired frequency. Attractor does precisely this, over a period of time you select (10, 20, 30 or 60 minutes). Like the others, it also offers background soundscapes, but is unique also in allowing you to record statements that it will embed in the sound as it is played back to you, thus creating your own, customized hypnotic suggestions.

While I found Attractor more mesmerizing than the other apps, it was no more successful, alas, than any of the other apps at putting me to sleep.

But perhaps I’m not the best candidate for Binaural Beats. Although most anyone should be able to perceive the magical beat, only those capable of clearing their minds and concentrating for extended periods on the sounds are said to be able to achieve the desired results.

It’s unfortunate, really, that I can’t seem to catch the Binaural Beats groove. If I could, I’d really be interested in seeing what would happen if I embedded in “Attractor” such hypnotic suggestions as “Your hair will grow back” or “You will win the lottery, buy a desert island and drink well-chilled Coronas on the beach for the rest of your days.”

No, I’m not talking about the book by that hack Thomas Friedman, which said the world is flat even though it clearly isn’t (it’s roughly spherical, dumbass). I’m talking about Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the odd little science fiction novel by Edwin A. Abbott published in 1884. I finished reading it last night.

Flatland is the story of a Square living in a two-dimensional world. In this world, people are two-dimensional geometrical shapes — triangles, squares, circles (not really circles, but polygons with so many sides that they seem to be circles). Having equal angles is everything in this world — isosceles triangles are looked down upon — and the more sides a person has, the higher up in society he is. I say he because women are not shapes at all. They’re simply lines. Dumb and tempermental lines. Dangerous lines, too, since they are difficult to see when they are facing you and can run right through you with their sharp ends. 

The commentary on and satire of the social hierarchy is less interesting than the way Abbott tries to make sense of how living in Flatland works. When a strange being from Spaceland — a three-dimensional world like ours — visits the Square, the book becomes an entertaining exploration of just how difficult it is to grasp what we cannot engage with our senses or even with our minds. The Square cannot understand what it means to go up. He thinks it means go North. Going up, as in up in the air, is nonsensical to him. He can’t visualize it or see himself in it. How could he? He’s two-dimensional. There is no up.

While some scientists believe there are physical dimensions beyond the three we live in (time being a fourth, intangible dimension), it is really a mathematical belief. It is difficult to imagine what those dimensions might be like — we can’t visualize them or see ourselves in them. How could we? We’re three-dimensional.

The book is available for free as a download but is also only two dollars in the Dover Thrift Edition. It’s a good choice as an add-on when you need to spend just a little more to get free amazon.com shipping.

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” I came upon this remark of G.K. Chesterton’s last week by accident. Someone commenting on a blog had quoted it. I can’t remember now what blog it was, or what the post and comment were in reference to. But I had copied the quote because I thought I might want to write about it. And the more I pondered it, the more disturbing it seemed.

This did not surprise me. Chesterton can be that way. Though often dismissed by critics as the glib deviser of facile paradoxes, there is more weight to his writing than the surface levity suggests. Had Chesterton’s barbs been aimed, as his friend Shaw’s were, at fashionable targets rather than used in defense of what he called orthodoxy, Chesterton would be taken every bit as seriously as Shaw.

In fact, there is often a great deal more depth in Chesterton than there is in Shaw (there is a reason why Shaw is now better remembered for My Fair Lady than for Pygmalion). In Chesterton, as in the paintings of Fragonard, games are being played, but looming clouds are likely to be casting ominous shadows.

Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday, about a group of anarchists who take as aliases the names of weekdays, is a peculiar fiction. Peculiarly disturbing, that is. For all the high spirits and wit that lace it, there is a kind of menacing undertone to it. I was not at all surprised to learn recently that Chesterton wrote it to deal with chronic, well-nigh crippling melancholy.

But back to the quote. I think what attracted me to it was that I saw “going with the stream” as referring to the “current of opinion” and that Chesterton was sending a word of encouragement to contrarians. I soon thought better of that.

I suppose you could, of course, if you were giving a talk about the “climate of opinion,” figure out some way to make use of Chesterton’s quote. But to do so, I now realize, would not only be superficial, but wrong. Chesterton’s epigram is one in which the imagery is inextricably bound to the meaning. The stream connects the clauses, but the subject under discussion is dead things versus living things. To reduce Chesterton’s remark to a commonplace about the dangers of uncritically accepting the conventional wisdom is to miss its point, perhaps even illustrate it. After all, few things can be more deadening than to reduce life to politics.

The image the sentence should bring to mind is that of a salmon struggling against the current of the stream on its way to spawn. The point is that, so long as we live, we are surrounded, like a fish in water, by a medium of being that is pressing always against us, and that to cease struggling against that pressure means to die.

This quote, in fact, is irreducible. Like a poem, it means only what it says precisely as it says it. It cannot be translated into a platitude. It can, however, serve as a trigger to contemplation, reminding us that life runs counter to entropy. The inorganic compounds may be tending toward states of molecular symmetry, but the chemistry of the carbon compounds tells a different story.

In this year of Darwin, we will hear much of what evolution has “done.” But evolution has “done” nothing. Evolution is an abstract noun used to describe what life, from its beginning, has done. It is organisms that live, adapt, and evolve. In Consciousness Reconsidered, neurobiologist Owen Flanagan speculates as to “why Mother Nature would have selected a mind with capacities for robust phenomenological feel in the sensory modalities” and says “the capacity to experience pleasure and pain is a design solution that Mother Nature has often used in different lineages of locomoting organisms.”

This is reification, pure and simple, the “thingification” of an idea. There is no Mother Nature “selecting” anything or arriving at any “design solutions.” Take away the personification, and what is Flanagan talking about?

Life.

So was Chesterton. Only he knew how to keep his metaphors in order, and didn’t confuse the stream with the fish.

Last night I watched The Universe, a series on the History Channel. The episode was about the impending collision between our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and our nearest neighbor galaxy, Andromeda. You read that right — our galaxy is going to collide with another galaxy. Do you have any idea the kind of damage we’re talking about? Your homeowner’s insurance is not going to cover this. I don’t care what your deductible is. 

And it isn’t a controversial subject, with good arguments on both sides, like whether or not we landed on the moon. No, the galaxies are on a collision course and will, without a doubt, slam into each other with a force you haven’t seen since ever. NASA implies that there’s hope for Earth, claiming that the “space between stars is so vast that when galaxies collide, the stars in them usually do not collide.” But it isn’t like scientists have ever observed anything like this up close. And the scientists on the show described all sorts of ways that we could get crushed by stellar matter or irradiated or boiled or sucked into the super black hole at the center of each galaxy. One thing is for sure — our galaxy is going to be eaten by a bigger one. I don’t know what the Milky Way thinks about this, but it can’t be good for us.

So, yeah, it’s got me depressed. I mean, what’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning? It’s all going to be vaporized anyway when the galaxies collide. “Scott, take it easy,” you say, “the galaxies aren’t going to collide for another three billion years. You’ll be long dead, dead for about three billion years already. And it’s likely that humans will have long since been killed off, extinct from some super virus or planet-killer comet or nuclear armageddon or environmental disaster. Three billion years from now, there’ll be no one left on Earth to care about the galaxies colliding.”

It’s nice of you to say. I appreciate your trying to cheer me up. Still, I can’t help but think that humans might survive those viruses and nukes and still be around three billion years from now, with Andromeda getting ready to have its way with our dear, sweet Milky Way. Sure, you and I won’t be around to worry about it, but what about our children? Okay, their children? Maybe my math is off by a few years, but certainly someone’s children will have to deal with this. And do you want to be remembered as the generation that passed the buck on preventing the galaxy-collision to future generations? I don’t.

“Scott, don’t worry,” you say, “three billion years is a long time. Future generations will have really, really good technology. Everything will be in Hi-Def. They’ll just jump on star cruisers and get the hell out of the galaxy before the collision.” Maybe they will. But only if we start working on it right now. It’s true that three billion years is a long time, but transporting the human species out of the galaxy and locating a suitable replacement planet in a different galaxy ain’t like dusting crops, boy. And, as we all know, every year seems to go by faster and faster. Those last billion years will feel like only a hundred million. The time to act is now.

Sadly, I doubt we can turn to our government for action. After all, what did the Bush administration do about the impending collision of not one, but two galaxies? In eight years, precisely nothing. And has Obama even mentioned the path Andromeda is on and his plan to stop it? Not once. There is no plan. Every day the galaxies draw closer and no one in power seems to care at all. They won’t even return my phone calls. It’s enough to make me want to go to bed and wait for the inevitable.