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Today’s Idiotic Spam Award goes to the lottery notification I just received, informing me that I’ve won the THUNDER-BALL UK INTERNATIONAL CHARITY lottery. Woo hoo! Now all I have to do is give them my bank account information and they’ll deposit my prize. What could be easier?

(How in the world do people really fall for this kind of stuff? Sheesh.)

The best is the guy’s signature:

Michael Foster,
Directors of Operations,
THUNDERBALL UK LTD,
Thunder-Ball House,
221 Albemarle Street,
London W1S 4BS,
United Kingdom

It would totally rock to live at the Thunder-Ball House.

Last night Alex and I attended our first Pinewood Derby race. This is a Boy Scout tradition (no, Alex isn’t in Scouting) where the kids take a block of wood and some wheels and saw, sand, paint, and finish a race car. Then, in the spirit of male competition, the cars are raced.

There were 22 cars entered in the race, and probably 60+ people there. Before the race, while the “officials” were setting up the timers and computer software (!), a bunch of the kids were testing the track with their cars. Alex’s car consistently beat them– every single race he ran, his car zipped ahead of everyone else.

This struck me as pretty funny because according to tradition, when you build your car you’re supposed to file down the axles, sand the wheels with 600-grit sandpaper to remove any “imperfections”, use graphite to improve spin, balance the axles carefully to avoid a tilt, and so on. When I first heard about what other teams were doing, it made it sound like they were preparing for the Gran Prix or something. Alex and I took our block, sawed out a reasonable race-car shape, sanded it, and spray-painted it gold. We hammered the axles in place, glued a little Lego guy into the cockpit, and called it good. Yet our woefully unprepared car was crushing the fancy ones. Hmm.

Anyway, the races began and it was a lot of fun. Every car raced four times (once on each of the four parallel tracks) for fairness, and the computer system recorded times to thousandths of a second. At the end, everyone’s times were averaged so the final winner could be determined. Shockingly, Alex’s car placed third overall– an average of less than a tenth of a second behind the first-place finisher. He was thrilled, not least because he won a Hershey bar.

It was a real hoot, and amusing to watch the fierce competition.

“When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.”

— Thomas Szasz

To hold elections, or not to hold elections… that is the question.

There’s no doubt about it– the Iraqi government is in a bind. If they postpone the January elections because of instability, they’re sending the message that the insurgents can push them around. If they hold the elections anyway, they alienate large sections of the country (who perceive themselves, rightly or no, to be unfairly represented) and risk civil war.

I guess George W met with Ghazi al-Yawar, and together they agreed that the elections will go as planned, regardless of how many people are killed in the next month. Although I offer no opinion on whether this is a good choice or a bad one, there are two comments from these leaders that give me pause.

First, let’s hear from Bush:

“You can never guarantee one hundred percent security. But the Iraqi people have the chance to say to the world, ‘We choose democracy over terrorism.'”

Part of the problem with the elections, from my perspective, is the simple fact that they’re “democratic” at all. Iraq– and the Middle East in general– is a place that hasn’t seen democracy in two millennia. They don’t really understand it, and they don’t necessarily want it. Of course they don’t want some despot running the show, but at the same time they’re accustomed to a theocracy and their very culture is so deeply ingrained with Moslem teachings that to expect them to shift gears to a representative democracy is naive at best.

So I think Bush’s comment is ill-founded. The Iraqi people probably want to say to the world, “Thanks for booting Saddam, and for helping with the terrorist thing, but let us decide how to run ourselves now.”

Then we’ve go al-Yawar:

“These are a mix of people who have one thing in common: Hatred to the Iraqi society and hatred to democracy, people who are trying to stop us from having our first elections.”

I doubt the insurgents got together a few months ago and said, “You know, we hate democracy– let’s blow up everything we can.” I don’t think they care much what the government looks like. It seems clear their true goal is to kill Americans (pronounced “The Great Satan”) and anyone who collaborates with them. A few innocent casualties are okay too, as long as they deliver the real message.

For al-Yawar to think the rebellion on his hands is about democracy shows that he doesn’t understand their purposes. They want America gone for good, and only after that would they be concerned with setting up a government (preferably run by them).

All in all, I’m fine with Bush and al-Yawar agreeing that the elections will happen on schedule. That’s their call (well, it’s not really Bush’s call, but let’s not split hairs). But when the messages they give have such obvious logical fallacies in them, it’s disturbing.

Today I received my driver’s license renewal form in the mail. Part of the form is updating my height, weight, and eye/hair color. The funny thing is, none of this information has changed in the last fifteen years. I weigh the same as I did in high school, I’m not any taller (or shorter) than I was, my hair is still blond (no grey yet!), and my eyes are bluish.

One wonders how long it’ll be before I put on a nice beer gut or go bald or something…

Part of the magic and mystique of science– and the reason I have such a passion for it– is the fact that now and again, you have an opportunity to see something never before seen… and sometimes that thing is beautiful beyond words.

Astrophysics is particularly good at this; perusing images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is a journey down a road of splendor and pictures so amazing, so grand, so awe-inspiring that it can humble you to realize there are such things… and we are but a tiny insignificant part of such a grand cosmos.

Today the Cassini-Huygens mission released some pictures of a Mimas fly-by. This is a small moon of Saturn (and, incidentally, the subject of the very first computer program I ever wrote) and an enigma of sorts because it survived an impact that should’ve splintered it. Although the picture here doesn’t show Mimas very well (it’s on the right side), it does show an amazing display of Saturn’s rings. The planet– or rather the clouds– are in the lower left, with rings at the bottom and top.

Magnificent.

“In every revolution, there’s one man with a vision.”

— Captain James T. Kirk

It occurred to me last night that I often spout and fume about how much America sucks. I find myself agreeing with people who bash Bush (sometimes just for the sake of bashing an easy target), and nodding when I read articles about how our country is going down the drain.

Now, I should be clear about something. Yes, I think America is headed in the wrong direction. Indeed, I think it’s been wrong for quite some time. But it’s ludicrous to pin all the blame on Bush and/or Ashcroft– although the two of them are certainly a tag team for destruction– and I recognize there are more forces at work (Congress, the courts, the general “roll over and take it” attitude of the public).

I suppose the real problem, and the reason I tend to be vocal about America’s woes, is because during my not-so-long life I’ve watched this country change so much for the worse. We’re bullies, we’re egotistic, and we’re self-centered. Oh, and we’re so supremely confident of our own infallibility that we can’t imagine why other countries dislike us so much.

On the other hand, America truly is a fantastic place to live, full of opportunity and promise, and offers to its citizens rights and privileges not found anywhere else on the globe. It’s not hard to see why this country has produced astounding scientific advances, social progress, and a populace that is accustomed to regular (and often heated) debate about its own political system. I think it’s great that we have these opportunities, and without them I certainly wouldn’t write some of the things I do.

It’s the erosion of these rights and opportunities that saddens me. To watch as Bush and his administration stifle scientific research, or fund national defense and “homeland security” (oh, how I’m tired of that phrase) at the expense of education, gives me grief. It’s such a short-sighted view, and it’s supported by so many short-sighted people, that I can only see an acceleration of the decline of this great nation. Again, I can’t say “Bush brought about the destruction of America”, but he’s carrying the banner and playing a big role.

So all in all, three cheers for America and the little remaining goodness herein. But down with Bush and all of the short-sighted lawmakers and corporations and people who think the things we’re doing today are actually going to improve anything.

From a long missive on Kiro5hin by Roger Williams, where he discussed (among other things) the building of the atomic bomb:

Perhaps the biggest myth of the American national character is that we are the Good Guys.

Whenever this atomic subject comes up and my views come out I often get some pretty hostile responses. I think it’s because it’s hard, it takes a real shock to the system, to admit to yourself that your country didn’t just needlessly and horribly kill a few hundred thousand people; your country does stuff like that all the time. To recognize the magnitude of the problem is to realize that we are not, in fact, the Good Guys. And that’s a very traumatic thing to have to accept.

From America’s beginning we have been a nation of high ideals but low values. We’re the kind of nation that can accept the 3/5 compromise on slavery right after ratifying a document that says “all men are created equal.” We can hear something like the Dred Scott decision and most of us are fully capable of saying “sure, that makes perfect sense.” Then we can have a big old knock-down drag-out civil war on the issue that kills a few million people, as we trip over ourselves finding ever newer and cleverer ways to kill each other. Then we can pick silly fights like the Spanish-American war just because we don’t have anything else to do.

In a sense it was an accident that we came out of WWII looking like the Good Guys; it helped that we were sneak-attacked and that the Germans really went out of their way to make us look good by comparison. Under other circumstances the atomic bombings of two inhabited cities would have been roundly and widely criticized. But it seems that Teflon, which was invented for sealing surfaces at the Y-12 diffusion plant (not as popularly believed for the Apollo space program) kept the dirt of our misdeeds from sticking even before we started to apply it to cookware.

We went on after WWII to do a lot of Not Very Good Guy things, from the Cold War missile buildup to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam to Iran/Contra to Iraq. Now there’s a typically American approach to something we don’t understand very well; befriend both sides in a nasty long-standing conflict and then screw them both over! How to win friends and influence people, American style. When you’ve got the world by the tail you can do whatever you want.

Now as interesting things go, building the atomic bomb is one of the most interesting things ever to happen, and the fact that we still argue about it sixty years later is a testament to just how interesting it is. But it also isn’t a very Good Guy thing to have done. And America tends to be cool with things like that, even if we saw too many John Ford movies to admit we’re wearing the black hats in this show.

Tonight was the night… Christmas decorations are going up. Once the outside temperature goes above the teens, I’ll probably get out there and take care of the lights. For now we’ll have to be satisfied with the tree and various holiday decor around the house.