The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

~Carl Sagan

It was either in preschool or kindergarten that I first learned that the earth was spinning while constantly revolving around the sun. I remember being absolutely fascinated by this. The earth was spinning? It seemed so counter-intuitive. But I had been presented with the facts so convincingly that I never once doubted it to be true. The fact that is also made sense with how night and day, and then seasons, occur iced it for me.

I gleefully took this information home with me. I had a friend living next door and I really couldn’t wait to convey this new information. I had long had a children’s Bible, complete with fun animations, that showed lions and deer and elephants and dogs on an Ark, but that had never excited me. This was different. This was true. I was too young to sift many facts from fiction at that age, but someone had least made a case for a spinning earth; they showed how what they were saying was consistent with real world observations. No one ever bothered to do this for the Ark. Pretty pictures can only go so far.

I finally got home and started telling my friend David all about how earth was spinning and how it rotated around the sun, not the other way around. He was a year younger than I was, so he had apparently yet to come to this lesson. He found my story too incredible to be true. He disputed my account, astutely asking, “If the earth is spinning, why are all the trees standing still? Why aren’t they spinning too?”

I really had no response to this. I had basically been told some facts which were consistent with observation. I didn’t have a full grasp (nay, nary a tenuous grasp) on gravity or anything that would have helped me explain to David why he was wrong. I was only able to repeat what I was convinced was true. This was the first time I had been frustrated by someone taking an anti-science stance. I didn’t know his position was in opposition to science since I was about 5 or 6, but that’s what it was. Fortunately, his position can be excused since he was about the same age. But this raises an interesting question.

What is everyone else’s excuse?

Here Neil DeGrasse Tyson gives an excellent account of why science is so personally important to him. For those too lazy to watch, load the video and go to around 6:55.

I posted this not too long ago. It’s still good.

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has its own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

Time Warner is to TV as FairPoint is to phones.

Today is Carl Sagan Day. That means you should appreciate science and have a Cosmos marathon. Also, watch this video. It’s hilarious.

There was an election day recap article in the local paper for 11/5. One part of it was very striking.

“It just makes me very, very sad,” said Diane Sammer, 49, of Harpswell.

Her partner of 28 years died last year. For many years they wanted to be married in Maine, and their hopes had risen since same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2004.

When Sammer’s partner died, Sammer was not allowed to claim the body, and she was excluded from the arrangement process at the funeral home.

“They didn’t want to deal with me. They just wanted her parents to come and sign documents,” Sammer said. “Because we weren’t married, they didn’t acknowledge me as a legal participant in her life.”

Twenty-eight years. Does anyone for a moment believe that Diane’s partner didn’t want her wife-in-everything-but-legalities to take care of her final arrangements? Who in his right mind believes it is okay to do this to people. What in the fuck did Diane Sammer and her partner ever do to anyone?

I wonder. When these on-par-with-racists bigots read things like this, are they proud? Do they dance and cheer? Do they really think they’ve done any family a service? Do they believe that gay couples all of a sudden have just gone away?

And just to cap off the inanity in this article, lead bigot Bob Emrich tells this lie.

“No on 1 (supporters) were much more organized,” he said. “They had that down to a science. They had a remarkable strategy of early identification of voters.”

Yes on 1 bigots had the ENTIRE FUCKING CATHOLIC CHURCH on its side. You don’t get more organized than that. Or ignorant.

Religion has not merit. It is undeserving of this absurd respect demanded of it. It is something to be fully and robustly disdained. Worst yet, it’s untrue. I mean, come on. Virgin birth? Reincarnation? Shut the hell up, you crazy kooks

The First Amendment reads, in part, as follows.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

This necessarily entails freedom from religion. There’s a growing number of morons who have absolutely no concept of grammar or how to interpret texts with historical and logical context.

Here’s the jist: the religidiots believe that ‘freedom of religion’ means that the constitution was intended to allow people to worship without government interference, but that that concept only goes one way; they think religious interference in government is okay, just not the other way around. There’s an unspeakable poverty in this sort of infantile thinking.

It is not possible for a government to be subject to religious interference while simultaneously allowing its people to worship (or not worship) as they see fit. If one group instills its religious beliefs into law (as just happened here in Maine), then that belief is obviously placed upon all people of all religions. It shouldn’t be hard to make the connections now, but I will do it just in case any “Yes on 1″ supporters are reading this: my religious choices (or lack thereof) cannot be freely made because one group has told me, based upon religion, that I cannot behave, act, think, or otherwise do as I personally see fit in accordance with my own beliefs. That means that I no longer have any freedom of religion because, through interference in our secular government, I am not free from religion.

It’s that fucking simple.

I just submitted a letter to the local paper concerning another letter they recently published. Here it is.

On 10/29 “Dr.” Christopher Maloney wrote a letter praising Naturopathic medicine. As is so common with charlatans, he was dangerously misleading.

Maloney begins by telling us that the regular flu vaccine has no effect on H1N1. He intentionally mentions this piece of irrelevant pedantry because he is setting up his punch-line: flu vaccines only provide 6 to 15 percent protection. This is a lie. Healthy adults face upwards of a 90% reduction in their chance of becoming infected with the flu (CDC). Beyond that, vaccines also dull the intensity of the flu should an individual actually face infection.

For his next dangerous joke, Maloney claims vaccines have no effect on deadly complications in any group. The non-mountebank truth is that they reduce hospitalization in the elderly by 50-60% (CDC). Death rate falls by 80% (CDC).

Next this quack recommends black elderberry for those waiting for a flu shot. PubMed features two peer-reviewed studies to the efficacy of this treatment (and not for the H1N1 virus specifically). It has some positive results, but the researchers note (correctly) that larger studies are needed. It does not, however, “block” the H1N1 virus, as Maloney claims.

Finally, Maloney brings out some false, unsupported statistics about stress. This is nothing more than the usual mantra for alternative medicine supporters.

The most interesting thing about this “doctor” is that he doesn’t mention that Naturopathic “medicine” is actually illegal in two states. Another 30 do not acknowledge it.

His recommendations are borrowed from basic nutritional information at best (and it’s far better to get that from someone with a proper education) and are downright dangerous at worst.

Go to your regular doctor.

On the upside, Maloney is not the swindler Andreas Moritz is. He is a charlatan and a mountebank for all this bunk misleading, but his concern seems to be more genuine and less about money. But he’s still wrong.

In the interest of not making a big, ugly blog post, I will include Maloney’s letter in the comment section.