Philibuster

Well yesterday Obama outlined his new plan for NASA. I took a look at it and I have to say that I kind of like it. The Constellation program got the ax but I’m not unhappy about that. Like you probably heard it was over budget and behind schedule and really wasn’t very impressive anyway. I favored the alternative program that was being designed by a group of scientists. I don’t know but don’t think that that has replaced constellation. It looks more like instead of trying to rework and slightly improve the old tech we are going to branch out and try to strike ahead with all new stuff. The alternative program called for a lot more reuse of the shuttle tech.

I think this is a good direction. It breaks NASA out of the hum drum that it has been in. NASA should be making the ground breaking stuff and the rest should start to fall to the private sector. The more people involved in space flight the better and if NASA can lead the way with private enterprise pushing and following up then things will start to take off.

There is also a lot more money in general for science. This makes me happy and the main reason why I like Obama. He understands what science is and why it is so important. These days with technology ruling so much of our lives science is the driving force behind it. The more we understand about the world the more we push our tech to the limit, in space travel, atoms, particles, etc it spawns a host of other possibilities that work their way into our everyday lives. It boggles my mind how people don’t see the connection between these things. “How does smashing atoms together and learning about particles so small they defy logic and reason affect me? What does that have to do with my life. How does making a 100,000 powerdrill to work in a vacuum and wide ranging temps?” These people are small time people they don’t see the big picture. If you push your tech to the limit of what it can do and design things so outrageously complex and crazy it WILL improve anything that has anything to do with it. Magnets, MRI, superconductors, data storage and transmission. Want an ipod that stores even more stuff well that is being pushed not only by the demand of the consumer but also by the scientists that need to store and transfer amounts of data that dwarf even college music libraries.

Politics has for the last 8 years demeaned the expert instead of revered them, they have attacked the person who dares imply they know more than the common man just because they have devoted their lives to pursing and understanding concepts that the average person barely understands. The politics of the last 8 years has been one of the small picture person. The person who can’t see any benefit unless it is explicitly dictated in clear easy terms. Something that you can’t really do much because the benefits are sometimes so far reaching. This is why I support Obama and this is why I like this plan. It’s a big picture plan that aims for the future.

Read this at World of weird things.  It sums up how I feel about it perfectly. I could not have said it better myself. Really.

The years of neglect for teaching critical thinking and curiosity in favor of cramming for standardized tests and blatant anti-intellectualism from partisan pundits and post-modernists alike has come back to bite us and bite us hard. We seem to have jettisoned the idea of experts and authority and replaced it with manufactroversies for ratings and blowhards who generally have no qualifications other than a strong opinion on the matter. We started taking medical advice from Oprah and Jenny McCarthy instead of actual doctors. We see conspiracies everywhere we turn. And we have to be so nice and considerate towards everyone and everything that unless we want to be flooded with complaints about being mean and bitter, we have to give everyone a pass, from a creationist who wants to dismantle science education after having a chat with God, to homeopaths and faith healers who want to force insurance companies to pay for things that don’t work. And perhaps worst of all, the cranks are highly paid professionals in their con artistry while the skeptics and scientists who try to keep them in line can’t even hold a candle to their income.

Click here to read it all.

So just after I got a raise this year Canon decided to implement a 5% pay cut, they have decided to end that reduction due to increased sales of cameras. Huzzah! That will certainly make a difference. I’ll be earning what I should have been earning for the last 6 months. Also they will be giving me a Christmas bonus. WOOT again! Much happiness unto me.

So I haven’t posted this here for some reason yet but I aim to fix that now. On Halloween 2009 I went out to a party with my roommate. I had a bad feeling about going out that night, just a sort of horrible dread. I’m not sure what made me feel like that but I really wasn’t in the mood. I went anyways, because well it was supposed to be an epic party. I had this terrible feeling until the moment I walked in the door. There weren’t very many people there. The feeling suddenly left but was replaced with “Oh wow this is not epic at all.” There were only two girls there and a few guys at this point. I thought to myself well damn I had hoped to practice my game a little and do some flirting tonight. I hope some more show up but I’ll work with what I’ve got for the time being.” I put my beer in the fridge and went back to introduce myself. Turns out that I already knew one of those girls. I had met her at a club awhile back and had flirted a bit with her before I found out she had a boyfriend. Scratch that one off I guess. So I then turned my attention to the other chick. She was sitting on my roommate’s friend’s lap but I knew that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Unknown to me at this point she had called dibs on me as I had walked in the door. And so it began.

In order to get the party started Tommy (my roommate) and I started a beer pong game. We were against Becca (the girl in question) and James (my roommate’s friend) There was of course a fair amount of flirting going back and forth between Becca and I as we played. Then the cops showed up.

It was pretty funny, there weren’t that many people there, more than when I had arrived but it wasn’t much of a party at this point. It was only 8:30 so the cops were way early. Everyone lined up and IDs were checked to my surprise Becca turned out to be 21. I had thought she was about to be busted for underage drinking. The funniest thing about the cops showing up was that they couldn’t get anyone in trouble. Everyone drinking was over 21 and everyone that was showing up were commenting on how awesome the cop’s costumes were. It was a Halloween party you know. There was of course the look of surprise on the new arrival’s faces when suddenly they see the line up against the wall and the laughter of all of us at their shock that they were real cops. The cops stayed for about 15 to 20 mins, then left empty handed with sour looks on their faces. Good riddance. They shouldn’t have been there. The party was neither loud or wild or a haven for underage drinking.

Of course now that I knew Becca was 21 I was a little bit more interested then I had been. I had been treating it as practice and a good night nothing more. We went back and forth at each other and I could tell she liked me. At some point we went outside. I don’t remember how it exactly happened but Becca ended up biting me on the neck. Hard. Left a freaking mark that took days to go away. I was not all that amused with having blood drawn from my neck so I decided I would show her my bite. I bit her back, although much less hard and then walked away. Becca is not a girl used to guys walking away from her, she was not amused by it. However I think it pretty much assured that she wanted to get to know me better.

I don’t need to go into every little detail on what has happened since that night but I will say that Becca has turned out to be an amazing woman.  We started dating on Friday the 13th Nov. A fitting date since we met on Halloween I think. Things are going well. Too well in fact and I don’t mean that fake too well where you don’t have any fights and agree on everything. That’s fake and is bound to crash. Becca and I have had a couple fights but other than that I can’t complain.

In fact I’m doing the opposite. Halloween has been a rather odd holiday for me since a bad Halloween a few years ago, how fitting that the worse day of my life and the start of something brand new and amazing fall on the same date.

Ah I like a good smack down of stupid claims. This one is a pretty good side by side of the 2012 garbage about the world ending. It lays out a few of the many unadvised claims about what will happen in 2012 and on the other side it shows actual information backed by evidence and facts. But you know don’t take my word for that or the chart’s either. Go look it up yourself, and if you go to any quack sites to find your information verify what they say.

Found via BadAstronomy.

The shuttle Atlantis is launching today at 2:28pm and everything looks good for launch. I’m watching at Night Sky Observer because Nasa TV is blocked.

I am sometimes asked why I dislike religion. I am asked why I feel the world would be a better place without it and I’m given all sorts of stupid arguments that say why it is a force for good and that the world would be hell if there wasn’t religion. All of that is easily dismissed. It’s not a good or strong argument. I don’t believe that religion makes a person who they are. I don’t believe for a second that it is the reason why they do good or evil. I think it’s nothing more than an excuse in both cases. Those people out there that were raised to care about others and help others out would do so without the teachings of dogma and old superstitions. They use religion to help justify their actions and give them more meaning. I personally think that gives it less meaning, that it takes away from a selfless action/good deed done by someone and reduces it to a “I’m only doing this because someone (God) told me to and I don’t want to go to hell” instead of the remarkable kindness that is really is.

Also I don’t think that it causes people to evil things. Those that use religion to justify killing is nothing new. Everyone has been doing it since the beginning of religion. Hell, I am willing to bet that it was one of the founding principals. “There’s a tribe over there, we worship this, they worship that, they deserve to die.” I do believe that people will happily use it to justify the things they do so they might have a clear conscious, making whatever repugnant thing they did even worse.

This vile article speaks massive volumes of the person that wrote it. To quickly sum it up it says that you shouldn’t lie, EVER, even if the Nazis were asking you were some jews were it would be best to just tell them the truth because a lie is a lie and god hates that.

It shows that they have compassion and no love. That their strict adherence to their old bull shit dogma has sucked out the life from their bodies. That they have driven their archaic rules into their heads for so long that there is no free thought or reason or even any emotion anymore. Nothing but their unwavering rules. What disgusts me the most is the fact that they will sit back and smugly claim that without god you have no morals and that I am a horrible person who should be avoided because (picks random atheist hating evil out of the hat) I’ll probably eat your babies. Yet with jaw dropping statements like

“But consider for a moment that we are all already sentenced to die because we are sinners (Romans 5:12). It is going to happen regardless. If a lie helps keep someone alive for a matter of moments compared to eternity, was the lie, which is high treason against the Creator, worth it?”

Yes, they are basically saying so what those Jews are going to die anyways so what if I tell the Nazis were they are. god will judge me favorably because I didn’t lie. I’m surprised the article didn’t just state well they’re only Jews you know who cares what happens to them. So what that by my actions human beings will be round up and tortured and beaten and most likely have a miserable, horrific, slow death. But you know maybe it will just be the gas chambers those aren’t that bad.

I really have no words to describe how this makes me feel. My jaw just dropped when I read that. Religious nuts will never cease to surprise me and that honestly scares the shit out of me. Here they are happily removing all personal responsibility from themselves. A common trait and function of religion I’ve found. Probably why it caught on so well and has stayed around as long as it has. You don’t have be a good person or do anything good in order to be sure of your eternal soul just have to follow these rules and we’ll use magic away guilt to remove all the pesky moral problems and paint them the way we want them to be painted.

Bah. Sickening.

The LHC has started up again after the problems last year. Nothing crazy so far and they haven’t really started doing any science in it yet. They’ve just inject beams and then dumped them shortly thereafter. By mid November they hope to have the first full pass of the beams around the whole ring and shortly after that starting collisions. There will be a burn in process where they calibrate the sensors and get used to the various quirks of the equipment but hopefully we’ll get something interesting by the time the shut down next fall.

So yeah I just got wind that a new A-team movie is going to be made. I pity the fool that has to play B.A.

Actually no I don’t because it’s Qinton Rampage Jackson and he would kill me.

Liam Neeson = Hannibal

Sharlto Copley = Murdock

Quinton Rampage Jackson = B.A. Baracus

Bradley Cooper = Face

Yay thank you weather for delaying the test flight to a time that I can watch it.

Today Nasa launches a dummy Ares 1 rocket to test various components. Currently the launch time is marching along the day getting latter every few minutes. I’m watching the broadcast online at Night Sky.

Wait scratch that the launch is scrubbed. I had to take a call (I am at work) and right after that I flipped back to the broadcast and saw dark clouds everywhere and thought to myself hah there’s no way they are launching in that and sure enough that’s the case.