1. The first is something we’ve already discussed in this forum. The Texas Board of Education Chairman. If you’ll hark back a couple months, you may recall that the Texas Senate got rid of the Chairman bc he was a religious nut whose main goal was to ban the teaching of evolution in the school curriculum, which would have been ironically a form of devolution, ie. the rest of the world progresses while Texas remains primitive.

Well, The Great Governor Rick Perry, who nominated the first chode to begin with, needs to elect another.

Instead of getting someone who most Texans wouldn’t object to (read: moderate conservative who doesn’t ruffle feathers) he went as far right as he could without pulling someone out of a pulpit.

I’d never heard of her before, but Cynthia Dunbar is my new least favorite person.

Houston Chronicle

Texas Freedom Network

Bad Astronomy

How people like this exist, much less get voted into public office is beyond me. Their “faith” blinds them into believing that their ways are error free, and there is but one path through this world.

Ahh, Texas how I love thee, why must we be plagued by a pestilence worse than any locust???

2. Next is a story of wrongful accusation. Is there anything worse than that? When I was a kid, I used to get so upset by characters being wrongly accused on television/film that I would have to leave the room or change the channel. It was so painfully obvious from my enlightened spectator’s point of view, that I couldn’t believe the accusers could behave in such a way. I’d probably cry somewhere in there, because I was a weiner.

This story is strange in that the institutions set up to measure justice seemed so ready to drop the hammer after a mere glance at the ruler.

Some of the more infuriating facts of the case:

a) Girl had BAC of  % .29 which is about as much as you can possibly have (her testimony of the night was still taken on record, that makes sense) without dying.

b) The girl’s admittedly jealous ex-boyfriend’s semen was found on the underwear she was wearing that night. An explanation for this fact was never provided because both the girl and the ex-boyfriend could not corraborate on the last time they had been together before this, but were both sure it had been in the past couple of weeks. WTF??

c) This event occurred around the same time as the Duke LaCrosse scandal. Regardless of their innocence them Duke boys are now painted as victims of reverse racism in a racially divided area. Well Frimpong wasn’t in a divided area, he was completely submerged, and the story didn’t see the 1/10,000th the coverage that Duke LAX got. (BTW, much of the “victim’s” testimony in the LAX case was disregarded because she had been drinking. HA. As the french say:  Standehrd Duble’!)

These 2 stories just make me want to do one thing:

I’m here to tell you that doing so is baseless, irresponsible, and ignorant. This is not a mere opinion I have. This is fact.

There has never been a single shred of non-anecdotal evidence that vaccines cause autism, the heaviest charge levied against them. There have been many large scale studies proving the lack of a tie in with autism. 

“Save me your jargon science boy! Anecdotes are quick and go down easy. Not to mention I can get them from my favorite day time television, the true source of American knowledge!”

That’s fine shit-for-brains. But get ready, because with the growing number of unvaccinated disease troves walking around, epidemics are beginning to break out for diseases we haven’t had in developed countries for 100+ years. When 4 year olds start dropping like flies in white bread America from preventable, nay- eliminated diseases, you’ll get plenty of anecdotes. 

Actually, it seems Australia, where anti-vax fever already has a firm grip in many communities, has provided us with a far more gut wrenching story than Jenny McCarthy (that’s your spokes person? really?) could ever drool out.

So, you have doctor’s, scientist’s and epidemiologists saying that vaccines are good and necessary, and you’ve got Jenny McCarthy, daytime television hosts, and herbal remedy crackpots telling you that they are bad…….

I know if you are reading this you probably don’t have kids, but you know someone who does, inform them, please don’t let people die from preventable diseases.

Need convincing? Read this.  Or just go to bad astronomy and search for “vaccine”. He will link you to a million places where vaccines are shown to be ok, and anti-vax bad.

Cleaning time!

Welcome to a new regular feature here on HBH:  weekly suggestions, techniques, and applications to enhance your interactions with computers, the internet, and other electronic media.

This week we’re focusing on how to get your computer into tip-top shape (assuming you don’t have the time/patience for a complete reformat/reinstall).

1. SpaceMonger – Get an intuitive understanding of where all that hard drive space has gone.  Then delete those episodes of American Dad you thought would be funny because Seth MacFarlane was the guy behind Family Guy.
2. Run AdAware & Spybot – Run both for best results.
3. CCleaner – The Leatherman of PC maintenance tools, start out by using the Uninstall tool to remove applications you don’t use or need anymore.  Followup by checking the Startup section for applications that are launching themselves invisibly and sneaking around your RAMs.  Finally, use the Cleanup tools to take care of your registry and temp files.
4. UltimateDefrag – After deleting and removing all that stuff, that hard drive is a mess.  Clean it up, and take this opportunity to place your most commonly used files and applications on the fastest portions of your disk, reducing seek and boot times across the board.
5. Comodo Firewall – An excellent and free firewall application.  Yes, it will annoy you incessantly during the first few days as it learns your applications, but stick with it.
6. Avast! Antivirus – Free, consistently top-rated antivirus suite to keep you safe, even off the coast of Somalia.

Next week we’ll follow up with some less PC-centric webapps and services, but feel free to comment with any Mac-friendly alternatives.  Oh wait, Steve Jobs, much like Santa, logs into every Mac each night and makes sure they are behaving admirably.  Please limit your mocking to three lines or less.

I mean, really Texas? Joe Barton is so proud of himself.  He thinks he’s stumped Steven Chu with the simple question: “How did all the oil and gas get to Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean?” His youtube page proudly proclaims that he has stumped Chu.  The video speaks for itself.

Barton: “So it just drifted up there”

Chu: “uhhh…That’s certainly what happened.”

Oh, what is it?

From Bad Astronomy:

In 1995, the Republican Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, dismantled the Office of Technology Assessment, a bipartisan consultant to the government on matters scientific. For over two decades the OTA had provided extensive expert advice to the President and Congress, but was defunded and shut its doors… a sign of things to come.

No matter who you are, or what you believe, having experts weigh in on decisions pertaining to their field is fundamentally intelligent.

Longer Explanation

Facebook Group

Wikipedia

These 3 states are very different; they are in different climates, are about as spaced as possible within the contiguous 48, and represent all sorts of different demographics.

The similarities derived from their power are many also; they set certain standards that the surrounding states and the rest of the country tries to live up to: from California emissions standards to New York Fashion.

Texas as drawn by Tim Clark, It is screwed.

Believe it or not, Texas is a hub for science and technology. After the Golden Bear state, once again, more high tech devices are coming from Texas than any where else in the country. NASA (despite it’s recent inadequacies, mostly due to bureaucracy) is a shining monument to the triumph of the human mind. The two most efficient nuclear reactors in the WORLD are in Texas, and West Texas (along with southern California….yawn) is leading the way in Wind Power production.  The list of world wide notables in the realm of science goes on and on.

All of this despite being the giant western bookend of the Bible belt. Somehow knowledge and science have triumphed for a long time here. It is what has kept Texas head and shoulders above the neighboring states as far as low test scores and all the other modern scourges of stupidity go. This fact can be directly attributed to the oil boom. Oil brought money, money brought smart people, smart people brought universities and innovation, and more money, and more smart people….. Lo and behold we have the great cities and industries of Texas that currently exist.

Well the skeletons in the closet of ignorance are rattling their bones. Apparently they take for granted all the notoriety and wonderful things that science and technology has brought Texas. They wish to plunge it backwards to those good old days of frontierism when a good rancher lived in fear of his God and begged everyday for rain so that his family wouldn’t starve.

Somehow, through the wonders of local politics, the Head of the Texas School Board is an unabashed Young Earth Creationist. Well he’s been spearheading a campaign to pass a bill that encourages “science” teachers to give the pros and cons of certain “theories”. His bill doesn’t specify which ones.

Hmmmm……

You think he wants to science teachers to play Ptolemy and give evidence for the Sun going around the Earth? Maybe.

How about those who don’t believe in germs because they aren’t sensible to the Human body? Will the pros/cons of their views be discussed? Highly unlikely.

What about the fact that despite everything that genetics and logic have shown, not to mention geology, archeology and anthropology, evolution of lifeforms over the course of billions of years is a conspiracy? Yea, that might be touched on.

Well there was a vote today, and by the grace of GOD this did not make it through. The vote was deadlocked at 7-7. Wowowowow. What a reluctant sense of joy 7-7 brings.

For everything else you need to know, i send you to the bad astronomer, Phil Plaitt, one of my 5 favorite scientists.

Check with him regularly for updates on world wide stupidity, and when there is time, some cool astronomy in between.

Other Links:

Ars Technica

Wired