Politics

People have a faith in or against government that tends to be as fervent as their faith in religion. As an atheist, I do not understand this. Monotheists say that one 'God' is enough and yet they treat their favored politicians as if they were prophets. Last time I checked, anyone claiming to be a prophet wasn't democratically elected. In fact, most didn't even gain popularity until well after they were dead. And yet people follow politicians and political parties with more fervor than they expend on whatever day they choose to be religious. It's mind boggling.

As more unit knowledge becomes available, unit demand should decrease. Seeing this, greedy people are trying to artificially inflate unit demand. They will fail. They have to.

There are no micro-transactions. There can never be micro-transactions - or in 20 years we will be talking about nano-transactions. And 20 years from there, something else. Why not just say, "increasingly small transactions"?

Solar energy actually comes as alternating current - we just trap half a cycle and block that half from getting away.

I have to start this off by saying that Barack Obama's win has cleared some dust from my soul. The last time I was so proud of the country of my birth was between 17 and 20 years ago, perhaps because I was looking at a nation I had longed for through my teenage years. The years in uniform and afterward did not have that feel; surrounded by a sea of fellow young people 'on the college program' did little to maintain that feeling.

Tonight, that changed in a very fundamental way. It changed in a way that astounded me. And really, it has very little to do with Barack Obama himself as much as a new trust in the democratic system which I have been revisiting through Alexis de Tocqueville. Where I once was jaded by my former understanding that the United States ran on lobbyists and fickle voting procedures and machines, I became even more jaded over the last 8 years. I could not explain to myself, I could not rationalize, I could make no sense of why my former brothers-in-arms not only risked life and limb but lost them. I could not explain how I could have worked with navigation systems that should have been accurate and how there was so much 'collateral damage'. It made no sense, unless one connects the dots in a way that makes locking one's tapioca pudding in a refrigerator sensible.

And that's uncomfortable.

Via ThinkProgress, it seems that Sarah Palin doesn't recognize the importance of some forms of research.

Richard Feynman's The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist springs to mind in an odd sort of way; while Feynman spoke of the need for scientists to be guided by the conscience of a larger society it seems that politicians should also be implicitly doing the same while being better informed. The quick dismissal of research on the fruit fly demonstrates a distinct lack of knowledge when it comes to science: fruit flies are one of the cornerstones of biological research.

There is epic danger when people in the public eye belittle research without being knowledgeable on the topic. Funding pulled from projects on the say so of the ignorant public can work to the detriment of society... and in the realm of politics, one has to wonder how much social responsibility is sacrificed for votes.