The Dichotomous Trekkie 2.0

A simple screenshot for now:

Taken on Liz this evening.

Well, since my blog is being weird with comments, here's a comment John sent me:

I was gonna leave a comment, but your blog won't let me... ;(
Anywho, I was mildly surprised not by your opinion of Gov. Palin, but by your how strong it was. I haven't had the chance to read the links at your blog, but I have a general understanding of the Governor's view on science (your main source of opposition, I presume). Although she doesn't share all the views you and I do on climate change, creationism, and the like, I'm not convinced that somehow she could be worse than an Obama adminsitration - especially one backed up by a Pelosi House and a fillibuster-proof Harry Reid Senate.
Creationism makez ZERO sense. "Climate change" will potentially kill all of us (I'm a skeptic,remember) [Well, humans as animals would be fine. But the whole farming thing, and if something happened to a critical food web element .... wolves in Yellowstone decreased erosion, remember!]. Embryonic stem-cell research will cure all problems. I get all of those, and I get that Palin doesn't support any/all of those as much as you like. But compared to a nuclear Iran, a loss in Iraq, tax incerases, runaway spending, and a lack of development of nuclear power, how is voting for McCain/Palin worse than Obama/Biden - espeically since Palin's at the bottom of the ticket?
Or has Berkeley finally corrupted you? ;)

I think this merits a blog response ... one that will hopefully allow comments this time!
Basically, John brings up some good points. On paper, McCain is better for tax reasons & spending, and indisputably better for nuclear power. Every metric says that he has had a longer and wider breadth of foreign policy experience. However, there are reasons to be skeptical, and reasons to be cautious with the vote.

His tax policies and Obama's are comparable for the tax bracket we are in (at least the one I am in), and both of their (proposed) policies have numerous increases in government and spending measures in a period of recession. While I strongly doubt either will balance or surplus the budget, admittedly the money must come from somewhere. This would be a moot point if I thought there was a snowball's chance in hell of McCain's proposed spending freeze went through, but I doubt it will actually happen. So what we actually have are two different large spending policies from two different candidates, and one has a realistic way to pay for it and one doesn't. Trust me, I've been burned by taxes, but I think for the overall economy it might be burned by it. Sadly, the fiscally conservative Republican simply does not exist in politics anymore. So that is why I ignore his tax and spending credentials. Also got to admit, it irritated me he didn't research the "projector" he was talking about.Planetaria star projectors are exceedingly expensive pieces of equipment.

I think that both candidates' wish to be completely independant of foreign oil within ten years is a very smart foreign policy decision, which may retard the growth of nuclear powers in the region (I do think Obama's essentially only non-nuclear renewables is shortsighted, and both endorsements of clean coal is somewhat foolish. And I wish one of them would bring up breeder reactors ...). In a way, I wish both had a stronger stance on ME nuclear developments -- something like a kick in the pants. Perhaps complete trade embargo until they remove all their centrifuges through the UN or something, and encourage our allies to do the same. I am, however, concerned about the overextension of our military from McCain (leading to a loss in Iraq) and an over-reliance on diplomacy to the exclusion of stronger effects like economic sanctions and possible military action from Obama. I think in the long run, however, a few years of over-reliance on diplomacy may garner enough international favor that more strict economic sanctions can be placed from larger arrays of nations as a nuclear development deterrent. So this is a bit of long-term strict-policy thinking on my part that doesn't put me strongly in favor of either candidate.

Obama's biggest turn-off for me is his criminally shortsighted weak endorsement of nuclear power. I would love to see 45 new reactors commissioned. Its a fools hope to think that congress with push it through without presidential backing. However, Obama has an overall better science policy. Furthermore, McCain last night implied that he suscribed to the debunked link between vaccines and autism. But, Palin one (lack of a) heartbeat from the Oval Office, and given a spot of incumbency in the 2012/2016 election is unacceptable.

Remember, as the LA Times published, Palin believes humans and dinosaurs coexisted. That level of incompetence should be relegated to a waitress or sales, not to any level of government.

Palin told him that “dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time,” Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said “she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks,” recalled Munger. [See: Paluxy trackway]

Newsweek has a superb article on Sarah Palin, which I think everyone should read. She is grossly incompetant, and as I have alluded to in other places, my vote this November will not be for or against any other candidate; my vote will only be against Sarah Palin.

I strongly encourage everyone who reads this blog to take a look at Sciencedebate 2008 and Nature's science interview (John McCain declined; his previous stances are listed, however).

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

Argh, its not letting the comments page be viewed on this one, either ... what the hell

Quick post for testing new permalinks. I've also fixed the weird blog redirection issue, so the URL should properly be blog.revealedsingularity.net now.

OK, I'm playing around with the permalinks .... some stuff may be broken for a while ...

Edit: Seems to be fixed, except for this post ... follow up posts seem to work, so I have no idea what's going on with this oddball.

I think that all those chance-trumpteting, crowing creationsists (aka "fundamentals" and "anti-scienctals") that can't get it through their head that evolution is not chance need to read just two sentences from On the Origin of Species:

I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if the variations — so common and multiform in organic beings under domestication, and in a lesser degree in those in a state of nature — had been due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression [...]^*

Evolution is not due to chance, folks. It has discrete forces acting on it. The variations arise in certain individuals through chance, but it is not chance that shapes evolution. There is a difference.

^*Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species (A Facsimile of the First Edition). President and Fellows of Harvard College. 1964. ISBN 0-674-63752-6.  pp131.

Since I've not managed to post anything in about three weeks, I'll start with another minor computer type post -- some browser benchmarks. They weren't conducted the most rigorously, but it definitely gets the idea across. Test machine was Athena, the "Weighted" benchmark is Sunspider/V8 (so it approximately squares the mean of the difference), and you can download Chrome here.

So I was going to make a post about how the world hasn't ended, but you know, this time around, doomsayers can't even doomsay correctly.

That is to say, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, turned on today at 10:33 CET, and we're all still here. The test beam went in one direction (not the two necessary you know, for a collision) at less than full power, so doomsayers can't possibly have been correct. However, I think it might be worth listing off a few reasons why the LHC couldn't destroy the Earth:

• You've got protons. Accelerated really fast. So if you make a black hole, its going to have a really tiny Schwarzschild radius, or the radius of the event horizon (R_s). Like, GMc^-2 (to first order). Which is to say, at the speed these guys are traveling, a completely tangential approach would only decay into the black hole at < 1.5R_s. How big is R_s? Ballparking, we have
  (10^-11)(10^-26)/(10¹⁶)=10^-43 m. That's really really tiny. And since black holes evaporate roughly as ħm^-2, really small things evaporate really really really really fast — in this case, 10²⁰ kg/s. This little mini black hole will need to get within 10^-43 m of particles faster than it evaporates, which even at a hairs breadth below the speed of light it doesn't cut it. Really roughly, it'll last:
  10^-17m³ s = 10^-98 s, Which translates to a distance of under 10^-90 m — virtually no distance at all, and an infinitesimal fraction of a nucleus. In fact, being a very small fraction of a Planck length, its virtually meaningless to say it traveled at all.
• This is a bit more complicated by the fact that black holes have no hair but retain charge, so this will be a charged nearly light-speed traveling black hole. Very small correction, but there.
• The strangelet hypothesis also won't happen. Sure, colliding strangelets with normal matter can convert normal matter into strange matter. But, cross-sections are again really tiny, and statistics ensures that the reaction would die out by decaying of the strangel

So, Google Chrome is out, and I must say, its a very attractive browser.

It also doubles FF3's Sunspider javascript benchmark speed, nearly triples Opera 9.52's, and nearly quadruples IE8's. Very slim browser with an installation routine that is under 500 kb and the whole install takes well under a minute, and installs cleanly -- doesn't ask for admin privledges.

On a technical basis, it has uses a tweaked WebKit renderer (after Safari) but doesn't do Safari's horrible proprietary font-smoothing; copies IE8's tab process isolation (thus, if one tab crashes only that tab crashes, not the browser); has a startup page very similar to Opera's speed dial (but lacking Opera's wand feature and speed-dial shortcuts); largely matches Vista's UI conventions in Vista (big plus); renders SVGs like Opera (see if this will render in your browser, and see what happens when you zoom).

Gotta say, I really like it. We'll see if it becomes browser of choice over Opera for speed, or if Opera will end up winning with its extra keyboard and mouse shortcuts.

So, I actually will post the interesting sci-tech tidbit in a bit (I've been behind in reading papers this week -- the camp was a blast, but it ate up time like no tomorrow), but I thought I'd post a breifish update on why developers hate IE. I think it is best encapsulated in these two photos:

IE 8 rendering http://beta.revealedsingularity.net

Opera on the same

As is evident, Opera and Firefox and Safari will all render it one way, and IE another. To be perfectly fair, the utter mutilation in the image above is IE8; IE7 just does a hack job on places that images are supposed to blend into backgrounds. Unfortunately, this is something I'll have to look up to fix.

I'll try to post the promised science tidbit sometime in the next few days, along with a rundown of Adapt or Die. Till then, by popular demand from the students, here's a link to the Evolution Game (best played with more than four players).

So, budget cuts have finally caught up with me, and I am now working for Kepler on a solely volunteer basis. In the ensuing job search, I turned to Dr. Padian who hooked me up with one poetential website job, and in adddition hooked me up directly with a job which involves creant a k-12 teacher / publisher site for demonstrations and examples of how to teah "macroevolution" to (particularly) high-school students. This promises to be quite intersting -- and I encourage my readers to keep periodic tabs on the beta site. I will update as the site progresses and I get more information on the objectives. Now, more prep-work on LHS stuff and website work. Of course, after watching Heisenberg eat.

Having just returned from a trip to Hawai'i, I would very strongly recommend it to anyone who is thinking about going -- O'ahu in particular is a beautiful island, and the ocean is beautiful. I've uploaded many photos to my Flickr page, should anyone be curious.

Tomorrow I return to Berkeley via Amtrak. Thankfully, there are power cords -- I fully intend on working more on sauropods and doing some course outlining for the LHS Adapt or Die camp. Later this month, I will talk with Jim, Kevin, and Gibor about recommendations; and, around August, if things go well, I will talk to Erica about recommendations as well.

What will be irritating about the next few days is lack of internet -- its not getting activated until the 12^th, which, needless to say, is painfully long from now. I suspect much of my days will be spent setting up the new place, but if I have down time, I will see about working on the stellar models from the UGAstro room in Campbell. I have a few colortable ideas, and in addition I will probably rewrite some of the interface when I get it done in my head. No use having so many programs to call and save files when you can do it better internal to one program or by passage of variables. Relying on saving of structures almost obviates their use.

It really is strking how internet dependant everything is nowadays -- my work with Kepler is strictly network based, and I rely on the internet to keep copies and synchronized versions of my biomechanics work across multiple computers. No internet will be hard, indeed.

As I've been working on the sauropod paper (aside from feeling a bit neglectful of Kepler), I've definitely felt the wish to "feature creep". For those unfamiliar with the term, its one I borrowed from computer program development; its the wish to include ever more "new" stuff into a program that you're writing, often to the detriment of timeliness. Aside from finding ever more species to want to add to my analysis, I find that I am having a difficult time finding the line where I say "enough -- I've explained this to my satisfaction." There are some legitimate holes that are left over from its "essay" form, such as comparisons on different ways of getting the taper constant, ways of extrapolating neck length and accuracy, and even I can't remember what I did to find the trunk length.

I also was a bit lax about my citing in the initial essay (oh, the usefullness of BibTeX -- I wish I knew it sooner. Kudos to Kit for helping me out there), I also really want it to look nice.

So, with its current state of revisions, it is being looked at by Sara W, Sarah W, Sarah K, and Andrew. Hopefully, it will be ready for submission by the end of June, July at the latest. Sarah (K) brought up a good point though -- where to submit it? Its hardly Nature or Science quality, but that still leaves:

1) Journal of Paleontology
2) Paleontology
3) Historical Biology

As the prime candidates at the moment. Hm. I'm leaning towards Historical Biology, but we'll see.

Hopefully this will be out of my system by the time Hawaii is over -- then I can do some solid astronomy. Helps that that's the one I get paid for, too.

So, as my housemate Kit very properly asked: why am I starting this blog?

 Its true!  I have (two) defunct Blogger addresses, and I regularly stick to my Livejournal -- so why this one now?

 Well, this is an OSS expandable platform with by own domain name, which is nice.  But, more to the point, I think this is where my sciency posts will live.  Posts with more quality input than discussion of girls, homework, the latest movie ... if this blog starts to become substantial, I may end up migrating over from LJ, but we shall see about that.  This is to be used for something else.

 And, well, I need to work out the kinks still.  I am still not sure if timestamps are working right, and I'm wrestling with remote Atom posting.

So we'll see.