Wow, when they finally get it right, they get it wrong.

So the Dubai World Ports deal is dead. The debacle has driven down Bush's approval rating. This was the first time I actively wished for Bill Clinton to be back in the White House.

Now, this administration may be the most inept in generations. So when an ally in the War on Terrah capitolized on its status as a port city state to develop port-management expertise that is rivaled only by that other great port city/state, Singapore, they thought nothing of a deal that would have had them hiring people to run the cranes in American ports.

Senate Republicans and Democrats heard about it, and thought "OH MY GOD! We can't have ARABS in our ports!"

Heh heh, cool.

I Am 62% Evil

I am very evil. And I'm too evil to care. Those who love me probably also fear me. A lot.

How Evil Are You?

OK, this is a bit exagerated, because almost all the most evil stuff was borderline, and as a child. For example, I checked the box saying I like to burn things. However, most actual burning events occured in the Boy Scouts, and I've never actually burned anything that wasn't more-or-less harmless to burn, and almost never dangerously. Certainly by Boy Scout standards I'm very non-pyro.

DO YOU CARE?

Speaking of Crybabies, Holly points me to a CNN article that points up a serious problem in the American psyche.

A youngster was involved in a spelling bee. OK, I get that. Nerds gotta have their sports too. I was in marching band, and we competed. I also competed in some of the statewide music competitions (never well). I even somehow got talked into competing in the South Carolina Latin Olympics (this involved speaking a dead language, not high-jumping over J-Lo), at which I overcame the handicaps of severe apathy and a year and a half of chronic narcolepsy in Latin class (I made sleeping in class a spectator sport, which even earned me an unsolicited cheerleader phone number, which I didn't have the stones to use) to bring home the statewide championship in Latin Derivations.

So anyway, this kid is in a spelling bee at University of Nevada, Reno. She gets a word right, but the judge dings her, because refs suck, and make stupid calls. Seahawks, you know what I'm talkin' about. Unfortunately, there is no attempt made to challenge the call at the time. After the bee, the mom points out the mistake. The organizers appologize (or not, it doesn't say) but point out that there's nothing they can do, since protests must be lodged immediately, not after the conclusion of the bee.

So far, there's nothing for America to be ashamed of here. Nerds are an important part of our culture, and nothing forges a nerd's rejection of society like the humiliation of being forced to compete in a spelling bee.

The mother requested a spell off, to at least allow her daughter the opportunity to qualify for the state bee, and possibly for scholarships. Well, it's a little pushy, but I'll allow it, I mean, the young'n did get the short end of the stick, and there's no harm in asking.

The organizers turn her down. The bee's over, and it's just too late to correct the mistake. Here's where things go off the rails. The mother is now threatening to sue. There's no harm in asking, but there's harm in suing. She describes herself as "a mother bear with her claws out."

Bears get shot for that sort of shit.

In competitions of all kinds, judges/refs/umps/whathaveyou make mistakes. In most circumstances there are explicit rules governing the protest of such mistakes. They are, nonetheless, a part of the sport/game/bee/competition. Just because life has dealt your child a bad call, you do not have the right to go on a rampage about it.

Mrs. Beckman (appologies if that's not your last name, no news story on the subject confirmed this one way or the other), the judge made a mistake. Judges do so, and to expect otherwise is ridiculous. They're not focused on your kid, they're trying to make sure the whole thing runs smoothly. No easy task with a group of bright, often socially awkward, universally nervous tweens dealing with all their fears of public speaking and competitive pressure. You, on the other hand, were watching your child with the focus of her mom. To you, she was the most important thing in the world, and all the other kids were just other kids. She had your focus, but you didn't go ask the judge to review his call. He made one mistake out of hundreds. You made one mistake out of one.

If you take this to court, I guarantee that the school district will spend more money defending itself than your child stands to gain from any scholarship she might win. Little Sara, had the call gone her way, still had to go on to win this podunk local Nevada tourney. Then she had to win state, or at least show, to get a decent chance at any scholarship. And most of those scholarships are going to be modest. We're not talking about a full-ride to Oxford or Harvard here. Probably not even full tuition to an in-state school. I'd be astonished if anyone gave a scholarship over $10k for anything but winning the national spelling bee. But defending a lawsuit could easily cost the local schoolboard 5X that amount.

So you'd be willing to intentionally throw away $50,000 of school funding from your own school district to get your kid a longshot chance at a spelling bee scholarship? And that's assuming you even WIN the case. A judge would have to be an idiot to allow it to go forward. You CLEARLY had a chance to protest the call when it was made, and didn't bother to do so. The tournament officials made a mistake, but you did not make a good-faith effort to protest at the appropriate time.

Raising a kid is hard, but this attitude of "Anything I do for my kid is OK, because I'm a parent, and we should revere parents and children are our most precious resources" crap is getting out of hand. People, your kids are a resource. Like coal, only more likely to commit crime. We don't sacrifice everyone else's coal just because you weren't watching out for your coal. Get over yourselves.

self-absorbed

S E L F hyphen A B S O R B E D

self absorbed

What would Randy and Jason say? Dunno, but it'd probably be funny.

Nobody wants him - They just turn their heads

I am Iron Man

Iron Man 75% Spider-Man 75% Superman 70% Robin 60% Hulk 55% Supergirl 50% Catwoman 40% Green Lantern 40% Batman 35% Wonder Woman 30% The Flash 30%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Intelligent Vatican?

Speaking of ID, Hit & Run recently pointed out an article (via NYT) published in the Vatican newspaper that supported the recent Pennsylvania decision barring ID theory from science classes.

Intelligent Blogging

So a while back, a poster on Hit&Run pointed to an article in the journal Cell, which had some interesting things to say about intelligent design. The broad stroke of the article has to do with science education, and is worth reading in its entirety. However in one passage, he discusses the Intelligent Design debate as an example of some of the challenges facing science education today. The real kernel of his argument is that ID is errosive to the fundamental assumptions that make science work. If we can just say, "this is too complex to explain, so God must have done it," then we run the risk of taking that easy way out any time we run into a difficult problem.

We have recently received a wakeup call. A new survey finds that two-thirds of Americans agree with some of our political leaders that “intelligent design theory” should be taught as an alternative scientific explanation of biological evolution. What does this mean? According to intelligent design theory, supernatural forces acting over time have intervened to shape the macromolecules in cells, thereby forming them into the elegant protein machines that drive a cell’s biochemistry (Alberts, 1998). In other words, at least from time to time, living things fail to obey the normal laws of physics and chemistry.

Teaching intelligent design theory in science class would demand nothing less than a complete change in the definition of science. This definition would give those of us who are scientists an “easy out” for the difficult problems we are trying to solve in our research. For example, why spend a lifetime, constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry, trying to obtain a deep understanding of how cells accumulate mutations and become cancerous if one can postulate a supernatural step for part of the process? Yet we can be certain that, without the deep understanding that will eventually come from insisting on natural explanations, many powerful cancer therapies will be missed.

The idea that intelligent design theory could be part of science is preposterous. It is of course only by insisting on finding natural causes for everything observed in nature that science has been able to make such striking advances over the past 500 years. There is absolutely no reason to think that we should give up this fundamental principle of science now. Two-thirds of Americans might seem to have no real idea of what science is, nor why it has been so uniquely successful in unraveling the truth about the natural world. As I write, the Kansas State Board of Education has just changed the definition of science in revisions to the Kansas State Science Standards to one that does not include “natural explanations” for natural phenomena. What more proof do we need for the massive failure of our past teaching of biology, physics, chemistry, and earth sciences at high schools, colleges, and universities throughout the United States?

I have to admit that from a philosophical standpoint, I've had a fair amount of sympathy for the Intelligent Design idea. I don't subscribe to it by any stretch of the imagination, but I understand it, and do not find it outside the realm of possibility. This is sort of a 'God as cosmic watchmaker' concept. And at the same time I knew that there was real value to it for making true scientific claims. I had no use for the 'the eye is too complex to evolve by chance' crowd.

Intellectually, I must admit the possibility that God did step down and zap the primordial ooze to create the first cellular life, and that he later interfered to add eyes, legs, lungs ears, and brains to the critters that resulted. I certainly cannot claim to have proof that God does not exist, any more than I can prove there are no flying saucers or no Loch Ness Monster. Science has no position on the matter.

But while I knew the basic reasons why ID wasn't real science, I didn't quite get what was so bad about teaching it in a science classroom. This article solidified that for me. Science, if it is to find answers to difficult questions, must have high standards for what answers are acceptable. And those answers must be natural phenomena. If science can just sit back and ascribe phenomena to magic, miracle, or just ‘space aliens’ doing things that we are too primitive to understand, then we’ll never keep seeking until we find an answer that we can understand.

The cornerstone of science is universality and internal consistency. If a theory applies in one situation, it cannot be contradicted in another. Therefore if ‘then a miracle occurs’ is an acceptable answer in one branch of science, then it must be accepted in all branches. And if that happens, then no scientific theory can be supported. There will always be doubt as to whether to believe observation, because it may be the result not of natural processes, but of supernatural meddling.

For science to be valuable, we've got to explain everything that can be explained. Intelligent Design is the theory that some things cannot be explained. While this might ultimately be true, it defeats the purposes of science, and undermines the scientific understanding that supports medicine, engineering, and most of the other disciplines that create our modern world.

Fauna on the Cabrits

The Cabrits is a peninsula just north of Portsmouth formed by two small andesite domes. It's on the dry side of the island, and while it's not exactly barren, it's a very different environment than other places on the island. The trail to the top of West Cabrits was a popular place for black land-crabs to die, and for hermit crabs to go scuttling about. This guy is about three feet across, and is perching on the finger of a giant that lives in these parts. 

One grove snake on West Cabrits. Saw a lot of these critters there. Unfortunately I didn't get a shot of the checkered snake a couple of days later at Soufrie Springs. These guys are very good-natured. We caught one at the fort on Cabrits, and while I think he wanted to be kept in the shade, he wasn't too upset about being picked up. Grove snakes are members of the colubrid family, like the black racer and the coachwhip in the US. 

Fair fowl.

This blue-headed hummingbird was wholly indifferent to all the two-legged ape-critters pointing cameras and flashing flashes in its very near vicinity. 

Domincan fowl.

Seriously. Tell me this smooth-billed Ani doesn't look just a little like T. rex.

These guys are part grackle, part crow, and part doin' their own thing, man. 

A stream in the Valley of Desolation on Dominica. The rivulets coming in from the left are full of minerals that deposit black stains on the rocks, while the stream on the right looks like nothing so much as a river of alka-seltzer.

This place stank of rotten eggs and howled like a demon. 

First Dominica footage.

Here's a kick-ass fumerole/steam vent thingy at the Valley of Desolation. You can hear the steam and sulfur-dioxide/hydrogen-sulfide gasses burning out of scores of little holes in the ground around me. Jus' thought y'all would dig this. 

Blondes, nature's blondes

I'm largely skeptical of blonde jokes, but my brother's found a good one.

Lethal Weapon 2, we hardly knew ye

Sixteen or so years after the release of Lethal Weapon 2, one has to look around the world and wonder if Riggs and Murtaugh would recognize it.

Back in the wacky world that was 1989, South Africa was one of the evil empires of the world. The evils of the South African policies of white supremacy wrapped up in the Apartheid system made America's deep racial problems of the time pale in comparison.

Now, in the arguably wackier world that is 2005, state after state in America are moving to put up roadblocks to any attempts to expand civil rights for homosexuals, especially in the area of the benefits of marriage. As America (on balance) moves to create barriers to the civil rights of homosexuals, South Africa moves in the opposite direction. South Africa has become the fourth country in the world, and the first on the African continent, to legalize all monogamous marriage. South Africa's supreme court has moved by a 'near-unanimous ruling' to strike down a law that limits marriage to intra-sex couples.

Good on ya, South Africa.