49 years

As I write this, we are a few minutes away from the 49th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik and the dawn of the Space Age. The dreams of a million visionaries burst forth into the outer atmosphere that day, and the futurists predicted great things.
The military, meanwhile, gnashed their teeth at the Russian achievement. Their own satellite exploded on the launch pad a few days later. It wasn't until the Moon landing, over a decade later, that their egos finally settled down.

And now, here we are, sending aging shuttles into orbit to build a space station, the purpose for which they haven't even decided. Moribund, blind, and crippled, the Space Age totters on.

More than a few look upon this fact with satisfaction. Space is a waste of money, they cry. Funny, I've never heard that argument applied to the billion dollar media empires whose sole purpose in life is to keep the American people informed as to who Brad Pitt is dating this week.
The public will grab up every copy of a book on crop circles, the Holy Grail, or Alien visitations, yet cannot be bothered seeing what the two Mars rovers are doing.
(Did you even know they were still running and sending back data?)

I've heard endless examples of the technological benefits created by and for NASA; the current microprocessor industry is just one that would not exist except for a billion dollar government program that needed very small computers.
Less well publicized, but just as important, was the spiritual benefit. APOLLO was about hope. Hope for the future. It was the great adventure, the great task. It brought us together, inspired us. We felt we could do anything. We felt we could change the world.

We need that feeling back. In this day and age, when all we feel is fear of foreigners, hatred of political opponents, and, above all, apathy and disgust at the world as it is, . . . we need that burst of enthusiasm again.

It's time we did something about it. Virgin's commercial spaceships are just a start - we need to do more than send tourists up there. We need to retake the high ground with a project worthy of the Human Race.

The 50th anniversary would be the perfect time to unveil it. Let's get started.

God help us all.

Next time you meet a proponent of Intelligent Design, ask him to prove Allah is not the designer. Non-religious, huh?

The Intelligent Design eople really need to rethink their "faith".
Science is about proof. It is a mental exercise where we look at the evidence of our senses and try to categorize what we perceive.
God is not about proof. Far from it. He could provide us with all the proof that we could ever want - birthmarks in the shape of "God Lives"; a visible heaven, or angels walking visibly beside us. He doesn't.
He wants us to act ethicly and morally WITHOUT proof of rewards.
And, for that matter, without proof of punishment.

Fundamentalists - and these people are fundamentalists - believe that God is going to punish any and all non-fundamentalists. They are absolutely convinced that an omnibenevolent God, whose mercy is neverending, whose forgiveness is infinite and eternal, is still going to throw souls into a firey furness unless they believe a narrow doctrine - one that does not match the teachings of either the Old Testament God or the New Testament Christ, but which does incorporate pagan, Eurocentric, and Reformation ideas. Moreover, they also believe in the damnation of those who believe what they believe, but HAVE NOT JOINED THEIR FELLOWSHIP. In other words, being one of them is not just about your religion.
The Intelligent Design movement is, in part, their attempt to save everybody. They cannot and will not believe that anyone can be saved unless they become a fundamentalist - and you can't do that by learning about the scientific method.
They are trying to save us all.
God help them.
God help us.

When Alexander the Great passed through Turkey to fight the Persians, he stopped at the site of Troy. On the Plains of Illium, Alexander stripped naked in front of his men and ran around a mound called the "Kesik Tepe", where Achilles and his friend Patroclus are supposed to be buried. This was to pay his respects. Other generals have also done this.

I highly recommend this book: http://www.StellaAwards.com/book.html

I also recommend this website: http://jeremystoll.typepad.com/weblog/

Multiculturalism. And comics.

I'm about to start adding a comic strip to this title - if I can get Blogger to accept the downloads.
Bear with me for a while.

Multiculturalism is an oxymoron.
It is the belief that we should take all our cultures - our beliefs, our customs - and merge them into a single system. That single system, however, would be a single culture.
Some of us have different customs, and not all of them are equal. While respecting the rights of a person to live any lifestyle he or she chooses is correct, that right ends at the person's nose. Forcing another to live by your lifestyle, or inflicting pain/damage upon another because of your lifestyle's values - is wrong.

Unfortunately, many people see multiculturalism as relativism - or worse, as just allowing foreign restaurants to open up on main street. It isn't. Multiculturalism is "I live my way, you live yours, and we keep the fence up."
As for me, I like Italian cooking, Japanese art, Navaho jewelry - and freedom of expression.
What do you like?

Every Culture has a trickster figure. Anansi (africa), The Monkey King(china), Coyote(plains indians), Raven(west coast indians), Kokopelli, Maui(polynesia), Hermes(greece), Loki(norse).
Ours is Spider-Man.

Remember

My father fought in the war.
He spent a year in hospital because of it. He nearly died.
He never regretted it.

Travel

Today's trivia: A book called Stray Leaves from Japanese Papers consisted of 400 pieces of antiseptic toilet paper, for use in emergencies while travelling.

Travel broadens the mind.
Feel free to disagree with that statement.

Travel broadens the mind if you try to broaden it. If your idea of travel is to stay in a hotel from a US chain, eat in their restaurant, treat your surroundings as obstacles to the places you want to go, spend all your time shopping, and wish the locals could talk properly, then you might as well have stayed home. The most you got out of your holiday was warmer weather.
When you travel, go out. Learn a few words, and let the locals teach you how to say them properly. Tour the museums and the galleries. Try the local foods. Step a little ways away from the beaten track.
Is it dangerous? Probably. So's your home city. There's lots of safe places to travel to, where you can learn a little. Find one.

Science Lesson

Today's trivia: pH is short for Potential of Hydrogen.

What we all want is to be rich.
Materially rich, first of all. We want to be able to sit around the pool all day, spending the interest our huge bank accounts earn. We also want to be rich in freedoms. We want to do what we want, when we want, and to not have anybody do anything to us.
Finally, we all want to be spiritually rich. We want to be free of guilt, free of worry about the future.
Most of the hate and fear in the world comes from poverty. The black kid on the corner talking about hating the white man, wouldn't give a damn about the white man if he made as much. Certainly the black lawyer don't feel quite as much hate. The hate he does feel is because he doesn't have the same level of freedom that his white colleagues have. If he was invited to the same parties, addressed with the same deference, he wouldn't care what whitey did.
On the other side, the KKK is mostly made up of poorer folk, who think that if blacks weren't taking all the jobs, then THEY would have a shot. Instead of having to live in a trailer park, stretching the welfare check to cover a luxury or two, they would live in a house, with a car and a suit and a proper paycheck.
There are two ways out of this.
First, make everyone richer. Science and The Enlightenment has been trying to do this for centuries. The guy in the trailer park would cringe if he saw how he would have lived four centuries ago - or even two. (Maybe they should make Charles Dickens required reading in public schools again - if only to show people how good they've got it now.)
The second way is to become satisfied with what you've got now. It is very hard to be satisfied with a crust when all around you have cake, but it has been done. You just have to be a saint.
It's easier to make everyone richer, than to make everyone contented. That's why we need more scientists in our society, and more science.

90% of all scientists in TV and movies are portrayed either as nerds or madmen.

Giles

The Hundred Years War lasted 116 years - 1337 to 1453.

I am a big fan of the late British cartoonist Giles.
He contributed a cartoon to the London Daily Mirror nearly every week, starting just after WW2 and ending just before the millennium. Every year the Daily Mirror would publish that year's collection of cartoons in a softcover book, and they are still publishing "best of" collections yearly.
I am still missing several of the earliest books - I think my collection starts with #10 - and I still need a few of the later years. But I've got most of them.
It's not that the cartoons are funny - well, they are, although they are quasi-political cartoons, and cover many now-forgotten topics - but because of what is in the drawings.
The Giles collections are a week by week, year by year LOOK at England - the clothing, the cars, the attitudes, the home decor, the jargon, the customs, everything. I look through the books and see how Christmas shopping has changed over 50 years, how the store layouts have changed, how the products have changed. His cartoons are full of details, to the point that they are the best examination of British life that you could ask for. They should publish the entire set in one huge volume, called The Illustrated History of Britain 1945-2000.