Yee haw, pardners! It’s Friday night and time for all us science cowboys to wrestle us some prime broncs from the world of discovery and put out brands on them! So strap on your science spurs, grab your six shooter of speculation, and put on your ten gallon hat filled with twelve gallons of curiosity, because we’re heading out to rustle us some news from the Science is OK Corral!

{ The preceding was written by little eight year old Billy Batson of Watusi, Hawaii, who fell into a time warp from the 1950’s and is a little shaken up right now, so the Make a Wish foundation insisted that I let him write the intro to what they assured me is his favorite feature on his favorite blog in the whole wild world. Boy, those celebrities really know how to lay a guilt trip. }

Well, Little Billy, let’s play a fun game. Let’s see if you can figure out what the following scientific device is designed to do before seeing the label at the end of the video.

That’s right, Little Billy….. sperm collection! It seems our ever clever friends in the Orient have harnessed their twin assets of mechanical genius and complete and total sexual perversion and invented a one-stop shopping destination for the millions of guys who would really love to donate some sperm, like right now, but just don’t want to go through all the hassle of waiting in line and filling out forms at the sperm bank. Imagine the efficiency and convenience if there was one of these little suckers on every street corner, next to the ATM!

We would finally achieve mankind’s longest held and most treasure dream : enough sperm for all.

And free blow jobs, obviously.

Moving on to our next story…. ahem. Mi mi mi mi miiii! *fwee!* ah yes. Ahem.

Someday we’ll find it
the Atlantic Wind Connection
The generators, the shoreline, and you!

(to the tune of this, obviously)

The above-linked story talks about a highly exciting and ambitious project to creature a series of ocean-based wind farms connected to (and tethered to) the shore by transmission lines. The story says that wind farming at sea makes sense, because the wind is stronger and steadier out there, and you are less likely to get yobbos and doofi complaining about the noise or the view.

Makes sense to me. I suppose some fishermen or deep-sea tour operators might bitch, but you can always just offer them jobs on the wind farms. One of the aspects of the emerging new energy economy that I hope to see flourish is the possibility of independent entrepreneurs to go out and create their own energy-generating businesses, which would then allow a certain freedom to people to create their own personal lifestyles in a way never seen since the days of the Wild West. I would be quite eager to see what sort of communities sprang up based around offshore wind farming. The system they are talking about could support many small or medium sized energy producers, and I can well imagine that attracting the sort of eclectic mix of dreamers and drifters and misfits that the Gold Rush did.

I imagine small floating towns springing up to service these floating islands of entrepreneurial spirit, and a whole sea-based lifestyle emerging somewhat like the Florida Keys or the Greek Islands. A combination of relaxed atmosphere and ambition could make for a pretty interesting culture.

Heck, I might try it myself. After all, no reason they can’t transmit the Internet along those lines….

Finally, holy crap, now they have made quantum entanglement you can see!

Quantum entanglement is that freaky effect that makes two entangled particles continue to behave in opposite ways even if you separate them by (at last count) hundreds of miles. You do one thing to Particle A, and Particle B does the opposite, and what’s more, does so with absolutely no detectable time delay.

And while the results of the study in question, which replaced the standard mechanical photon detectors with the ones in the eyes of a bunch of scientists, are a trifle iffy (turns out, photo amplification and quantum entanglement don’t play well together for deep mathy reasons), it’s still a pretty exciting development in the world of quantum entanglement.

I am waiting till this stuff is developed enough to make a super expensive geek toy out of it. Imagine having two little boxes, and no matter how far apart you separate them, you can still get tinny audio through them with no delay. They would be the ultimate walkie-talkies!

Yee haw, pardners! It’s Friday night and time for all us science cowboys to wrestle us some prime broncs from the world of discovery and put out brands on them! So strap on your science spurs, grab your six shooter of speculation, and put on your ten gallon hat filled with twelve gallons of curiosity, because we’re heading out to rustle us some news from the Science is OK Corral!

{ The preceding was written by little eight year old Billy Batson of Watusi, Hawaii, who fell into a time warp from the 1950’s and is a little shaken up right now, so the Make a Wish foundation insisted that I let him write the intro to what they assured me is his favorite feature on his favorite blog in the whole wild world. Boy, those celebrities really know how to lay a guilt trip. }

Well, Little Billy, let’s play a fun game. Let’s see if you can figure out what the following scientific device is designed to do before seeing the label at the end of the video.

That’s right, Little Billy….. sperm collection! It seems our ever clever friends in the Orient have harnessed their twin assets of mechanical genius and complete and total sexual perversion and invented a one-stop shopping destination for the millions of guys who would really love to donate some sperm, like right now, but just don’t want to go through all the hassle of waiting in line and filling out forms at the sperm bank. Imagine the efficiency and convenience if there was one of these little suckers on every street corner, next to the ATM!

We would finally achieve mankind’s longest held and most treasure dream : enough sperm for all.

And free blow jobs, obviously.

Moving on to our next story…. ahem. Mi mi mi mi miiii! *fwee!* ah yes. Ahem.

Someday we’ll find it
the Atlantic Wind Connection
The generators, the shoreline, and you!

(to the tune of this, obviously)

The above-linked story talks about a highly exciting and ambitious project to creature a series of ocean-based wind farms connected to (and tethered to) the shore by transmission lines. The story says that wind farming at sea makes sense, because the wind is stronger and steadier out there, and you are less likely to get yobbos and doofi complaining about the noise or the view.

Makes sense to me. I suppose some fishermen or deep-sea tour operators might bitch, but you can always just offer them jobs on the wind farms. One of the aspects of the emerging new energy economy that I hope to see flourish is the possibility of independent entrepreneurs to go out and create their own energy-generating businesses, which would then allow a certain freedom to people to create their own personal lifestyles in a way never seen since the days of the Wild West. I would be quite eager to see what sort of communities sprang up based around offshore wind farming. The system they are talking about could support many small or medium sized energy producers, and I can well imagine that attracting the sort of eclectic mix of dreamers and drifters and misfits that the Gold Rush did.

I imagine small floating towns springing up to service these floating islands of entrepreneurial spirit, and a whole sea-based lifestyle emerging somewhat like the Florida Keys or the Greek Islands. A combination of relaxed atmosphere and ambition could make for a pretty interesting culture.

Heck, I might try it myself. After all, no reason they can’t transmit the Internet along those lines….

Finally, holy crap, now they have made quantum entanglement you can see!

Quantum entanglement is that freaky effect that makes two entangled particles continue to behave in opposite ways even if you separate them by (at last count) hundreds of miles. You do one thing to Particle A, and Particle B does the opposite, and what’s more, does so with absolutely no detectable time delay.

And while the results of the study in question, which replaced the standard mechanical photon detectors with the ones in the eyes of a bunch of scientists, are a trifle iffy (turns out, photo amplification and quantum entanglement don’t play well together for deep mathy reasons), it’s still a pretty exciting development in the world of quantum entanglement.

I am waiting till this stuff is developed enough to make a super expensive geek toy out of it. Imagine having two little boxes, and no matter how far apart you separate them, you can still get tinny audio through them with no delay. They would be the ultimate walkie-talkies!

One of the most persistent and destructive forces in the political life of any nation is anti-intellectualism. As much as every society produces intellectuals of one stripe or another, it also produces a certain amount of anti-intellectual sentiment.

Often, this is directed both at intellectuals as individuals, and at intellectualism as a whole via its products, its establishments, its professions, and its affectations. No matter how enlightened or advanced a society might be, there is always the potential for and possibility of an outbreak of anti-intellectual sentiment.

It is worth noting, at this point, that in the history of the twentieth century, which saw many a bloody uprising of revolution, intellectuals were nearly always one of the first groups scapegoated and neutralized, if not outright killed. This is not just a matter of making life a little rough for quiz kids. At times, it has been quite literally a matter of life and death.

Being an intellectual myself, and having suffered that particular brand of individual anti-intellectualism known as “bullying” as a child, I have spent a great deal of time wondering why this is. What is it about intellectuals that creates such fear and resentment in others? What is it about the presence of a high IQ that makes so many people uncomfortable and unsettled? What do people have against us, anyhow?

And being of a particularly stubborn brand of intellectual known as a “philosopher”, I was not satisfied with the simplistic and dismissive answers I discovered when asking others about the subject.

“Jealousy” was often the first thing people thought of. But that simply doesn’t cut it. There are many reasons to be jealous of someone, but rarely have those ever coalesced into the sort of paranoid resentment that fuels political movements that anti-intellectualism represents as a historical force.

“Fear of the unknown” comes closer. We intellectuals are often nonconformists and come across as strange to the more average population due to the gap our intelligence create between us and others. We see things, understand things, and do things others do not, and this makes us stick out. But mere nonconformity does not quite explain the vehemence and pervasiveness of anti-intellectual sentiment.

No, the answer is simpler, more primal, and in some ways more shocking that the standard ones.

It’s about power.

And not just any kind of power. The power of superior intelligence is unlike any other kind of power, because intellect grants power that renders those with less of it are uniquely helpless against. It is a power advantage that is both hard to defend against and difficult to even understand.

Someone who is a great deal smarter than you can hurt you in ways that nobody else can. They can cheat you, trick you, mock you in ways you don’t even understand, manipulate you to their own ends or just for the hell of it, and the terrible truth is that there is very little you can do about it.

You cannot hope to meet them on their own terms and trust that you will be safe. They say they just want you to be reasonable, but that’s exactly what you cannot afford to be. Reason is their battleground. They have every possible advantage there. Like primitive peoples dealing with those from advanced cultures, average people can only possibly defend themselves by using irrational, unreasonable, broadly defined and perforce poorly thought out tactics that try to compensate for this wizard-like advantage the intellectually gifted have over them through force, suspicion, and mistrust.

It’s hard for us intellectuals to grasp the basic fact of how frightening an advantage that intellectual might gives to them, because most intellectuals have not met someone who has that same level of advantage over them. Individual intellectuals might vary by a notch or two on the IQ scale, but that is nothing compared to the qualitative gulf between those of standard intelligence and the gifted.

It’s not simply a matter of being able to do a little more than others. The power differential is not like the difference between being tall and being of average height, or even being naturally good-looking over having average looks. It’s more like the powerful and mysterious advantage an adult has over a child. To a child, all adults are magic, and they too often resort to unreasonable and irrational tactics in order to try to even the playing field a little.

Viewed from this point of view, the fear and mistrust of intellectuals by the public at large is entirely understandable, and even sensible in its own fashion. We might know that we are sweet and harmless, well-meaning peoples, but all it would take is one bad experience with the wrong kind of intellectual to make a person wary of us for their entire life, and they have no way of telling which one of us are good people and which might do them wrong in ways they can’t even understand.

So as prone as we are, as a group, to think ourselves the victims of an unthinking and jealous population who seem willfully insensate to the wonderful beams of enlightenment we wish to use to illuminate their lives, in reality, we are the ones in the position of power and we should really cut the average folk some slack. Give them some respect and understanding for the impossible position our intellectual gifts put them in. Do what we can to reassure them we are on their side.

After all, it’s the only intelligent thing to do.

Looking over the big bag of news I have gathered from today’s Twitter tide, I can’t help but see that this is a pretty good day for those of us in the reality-based community here on the left.

First up, great news from Japan (for a change) for us in the gay lesbian bisexual trans whatever community : Japan’s first openly gay candidate won his election in Tokyo.

This is the first time in Japanese history that an openly gay candidate has won public office in Japan, making this man, Taiga Ishikawa, sort of Japan’s Harvey Milk.

But hopefully, with a better life span. Watch out for crazy conservatives whacked out on Twinkies, Taiga!

If you are like me, your first reaction to this story might have been “Really? This is their first? In 2011? Really, Japan? I thought you were cooler than that!”.

I mean, this is the country that beats all others hands down (and tied to the bedpost with its own panties) when it comes to freaky, fucked-up pornography of every single possible description and some which defy definition by even the most insane topographers. And they are just getting around to electing their first gay dude to public office now? WTF, Japan?

But I suspect that social progress and reform moves at an entirely different pace, tempo, and trajectory in Asian countries as compared to us in the West, and we can’t judge them by our example.

Moving over to the always rich and satisfying world of conservative follies, we have this marvelous tale of an asshole conservative getting busted for pot.

Now any time a conservative gets nailed for pot possession, it’s fiesta time, but what makes this one a particularly juicy source of schadenfreude delights is that this asshole, Robert A. Watson (R) of Rhode Island, once made himself quite infamous by making the following statement at, of all places, a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Providence :

“I suppose if you’re a gay man from Guatemala who gambles and smokes pot, you probably think that we’re onto some good ideas here.”

He was quickly forced to apologize, according to the KOS story.

But he still said it, so for this yobbo to now get busted for pot on a routine traffic stop is nothing short of magnificent. Well done, Irony! You took down another one of these bastards. That will teach them the harsh lesson that those who ignore their sense of the absurd are doomed to to absurd things.

For his sake, I hope he’s at least a libertarian Republican, because as we all know, libertarian has come to mean “everything that is bad about hippies without their naive charm and good intentions to compensate”. Libertarian types are allowed to be pro-marijuana, although, of course, that means they will never get anywhere in the Party because the major GOP’s libertarianism extends only to taxes for the rich and would never get in the way of their desire to tell everybody else how to live their lives.

But by far the most marvelous news for us on the left here in Canada is that the latest polls show the NDP surging ahead in leaps and bounds.

The story even states that the NDP could take as many as 100 seats in the election next Monday. This, of course, would make me insanely happy, especially if this also means that Steven Harper and his smugly evil fucking Conservatives go down in flames.

I would say that I wished them the biggest electoral defeat in Canadian history, but that honor already went to another group of Conservatives in the glorious year of 1988, when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives (same party minus the redneck) lost every single seat but two.

So that’s the record to beat, Stevie. Come on, do Mulroney proud and lose every seat period, or all but one. After all, that would just prove how right you are, right?

Nothing could make me happier than Harper’s government getting a vigorous shellacking from the forces of good as represented by the Liberals and the New Democratic Party. I have been saying for years that my ideal government would be a Liberal minority government with the NDP holding the trigger. ^[1] The Liberals obviously need extra strong incentive to be, you know, actually liberal, instead of just “marginally to the left of the Conservatives, maybe, sorta, some of the time. ”

This news has given me a fresh enthusiasm for next Monday. Bring it on!