Dear LBB,
  When the hell will modern science finally find a way to replace my brain’s ability to store and recall the original “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” theme with the ability to, say, learn Mandarin?

Slowly losing my mind,
- Bryan

Dear Bryan ,
  Don’t blame that shit on science. If you’d spent a decade studying Mandarin for half an hour a day, you’d be speaking fluently. Instead, you’re firing up your Livejournal to compare the TMNT movie unfavorably to the original animated series. (No Shredder? The horror!)

  That said, I too am eagerly awaiting the day when I can replace my faulty wetware with some good old fashioned flash memory. I’d gladly Johnny Mnemonic things like the loss of my virginity, the first time I got fired, or high school to make room for my mp3s. Unlike my iPod, I can’t accidentally run my jacket through the wash with my brain in the pocket. The only condition I have is that whatever software runs by new silicon brain can’t be a Microsoft product. That would give “blue screen of death” a literal meaning that I’m not ready to sign on for.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Have you ever thought about politics?
- Will Vote For Food

Dear Will Vote For Food,
  I burn a lot of brain cells fuming about how modern political discourse sounds like an elementary school playground. Contentious issues are debated in a more verbose version of “nuh uh!” “yuh huh!” and there’s a remarkable amount of noise that carries very little information.

  However, I suspect that the thrust of your question is whether or not I’ve ever considered running for office. I have considered it, and pretty much ruled it out. I’m appalled by the the money-driven campaigning process. I find the personalities and people who are attracted to politics irksome. I can’t stomach the necessary pandering to every group and interest that it takes to get elected. Finally, there’s enough questionable conduct in my misspent past that I doubt I’d survive the public vivisection that awaits a candidate for any office higher than dogcatcher.

  But the thing that turns me off most about American politics is the way that anyone who has the temerity to allow their opinions to be influenced by actual events is labeled a “flip-flopper.” Seriously? The whole of scientific and intellectual pursuit is grounded in the proposition that you have to be willing to scrutinize your beliefs. You base your opinions on the best available evidence, but if new evidence undermines those beliefs, you have to be willing to abandon them, no matter how compelling or comfortable they are.

  That’s why science is inherently progressive. You can believe as hard as you want that the Universe revolves around the Earth, until somebody points out that the other planets move in a way that only be explained if they and the Earth are all orbiting the sun. At that point, I want the people in charge* of my country to have the intellectual fortitude to not jam their heads in the sand and insist that the Universe is heliocentric.

  If, to use a purely hypothetical example, you support a military action due in part to evidence that the target is trying to build a nuclear weapon, and latter it turns out that the nuclear weapon bits were incorrect, withdrawing your support for that military action wouldn’t make you indecisive. It would make you a person who values truth over slavish devotion to an erroneous idea.

  And yet, for some unfathomable reason, the American voting public relates to its elected officials like a four-year-old to its father. Daddy knows everything; he can answer every question you pose, and he’s never wrong. Why would he ever need to change his mind?

  All of that is a long way of saying that I don’t think I could get elected to political office. I don’t believe I have a soul to sell, but I do value what’s left of my brain, and I pride myself on a modicum of ability to think critically. Until being a successful politician doesn’t necessitate coating one’s brain in intellectual cement to block out new information, I’ll have to stay on the “despondent voter” side of the political equation.

* For purposes of America, assume these people are old, rich white men.

  You should know that I have a lot of problems with deism/religion. There is the usual complaint about the exclusiveness inherent in any belief system that purports to reveal the one true path to the divine. But when deists look to their patron spirit(s) as the driving force behind natural events, I start foaming at the mouth and gnawing on chair legs.

  The world is, almost completely at random, a stunningly beautiful and unfathomably horrible place. Invoking a supernatural explanation for unpredictable events is a double-edged sword. Also, both edges are coated in battery acid, and they’re aiming for your exposed throat at the same time.

  At best, ascribing events like these to the influence of magical sky beings fosters the belief that natural events occur because of the everyday behavior of the persons affected. (At its logical extreme, of course, is the delusion that these events can be influenced or even controlled by good behavior, dietary restriction, virgin sacrifice, etc.) At worst, a default deistic explanation makes us less safe, by acting as a disincentive to actual productive inquiry.

  Our only hope for minimizing the damage from pandemic illness and natural disasters lies with objective scientific investigation. Better prediction of geological and meteorological events. Structures built from modern materials and designed to survive extreme stresses. Efficient, workable evacuation plans. Vaccines to prevent communicable diseases. These things don’t just happen, no matter how humbly we petition or how hard we pray. They happen as the result of brain work and perseverance, and the underlying assumption that events that kill a lot of people should and can be prevented. If we call it the will of god(s) and trust in the power of prayer to save us, we’re leaving it to chance. Without the will to make our own way in the Universe, and the scientific diligence to learn how it all works, we’re signing on as the future test subjects in an experiment testing the power of fervent prayer to alter the trajectory of a civilization-killing asteroid. In that scenario, my money’s on the giant rock.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  What’s the best thing about being a blind, stupid, bleeding-heart, unrealistic, Satanloving, hellbound, hippie liberal cockface?
- One Nation Under GOD

Dear One Nation,
  I’d say it was the sense of smug superiority, but I suppose there’s plenty of that at every point on the ideological spectrum. Self-righteous boobs of every political bent succumb to the temptation to cocoon themselves in the silky softness of like-minded opinion. Of course, affirmation addiction strikes non-political types as well. Without it, Michael Jackson might still have a nose and the Star Wars would likely have been Jar-Jar free.

  There are a lot of good things about being a liberal/progressive/lefty. Our girls are hotter. Our scientists don’t waste time trying to prove that an invisible sky man made it all from scratch. Our gene pool tends to be broader and more diverse. We’re allowed to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that comes from a living in a country that listed equality as a sacred principle while simultaneously enshrining slavery in its founding document.

  On the whole though, the most awesome thing about being on the ideological left is the inevitable approbation of history. The progress of freedom and justice is a little like the stock market. In the short term, there are ups (Brown v. Board of Education) and downs (the USA PATRIOT Act). In the long term, it’s all upward momentum. Social taboos evaporate and political barriers to individual expression erode. The doomsayers who warned that suffrage for women would ruin us, and that interracial marriage would destroy the American family, are dismissed as misguided fools. The uptight moralists claiming that gay marriage will tie “traditional” marriage to a stake and beat it to death with pink-handled hammers will eventually get the same treatment. Say what you will about self-confidence and the courage of your convictions, but it’s awfully pleasant that history, and hindsight, keep proving us right. Er, correct.

Hey, Philadelphia. If you’d like the presidential candidates to stop yammering about which version of god they like best, and start addressing vital science and technology issues, come on out to the Franklin Institute tomorrow and support Sciencedebate 2008!

Our economy is based almost entirely around science and technology. It’s time for the people who want to be president to show that they can address these topics.

Sciencedebate 2008!

From the email:

Please join us FRIDAY MARCH 14 at a rally & press conference at the Franklin Institute to promote Science Debate 2008 and make some announcements. The media have been invited.

Climate change, America’s declining economic competitiveness in the new global knowledge economy, declining financial support for college and university students, declining research grants, and mounting scientific and engineering challenges (see Bill Gates’ testimony on our web site) unresolved environmental challenges and healthcare challenges directly affect our lives. We need you to come out and support this initiative.

Who: Shawn Otto and Matthew Chapman from Science Debate 2008 will join Dennis Wint, president of the Franklin Institute, and representatives from the National Academies, the Council on Competitiveness, Drexel, U-Penn, The Scientist, and Chemical Heritage Foundation at a rally and press conference. We want you to come!

When: Friday, March 14, 10:30 AM

Where: Franklin Hall, the Franklin Institute, 222 North 20th Street, Philadelphia

What: Rally & press conference

We hope to see you there!

Look at my city, doing something awesome.

With the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, originator of the modern theory of evolution, just months away, the University of Pennsylvania, in conjunction with Penn Museum and joined by major Philadelphia cultural organizations, launches an ambitious YEAR OF EVOLUTION of public programs and events.

I can’t get over how great this is, and I’m especially pleased that it kicks off the day after the release of Expelled. There’s a huge schedule of events already on the agenda, and it’s a WHOLE YEAR, so you can’t say you didn’t have a chance to attend at least part of it.

via Pharyngula

Clumps of a white substance, uncovered by excavations of the Martian surface by the Phoenix lander, have disappeared over the last few days. Observers are confident that these were chunks of water ice, which evaporated after being exposed by the digging.

Best reaction to date comes from a co-worker, who observed that they should probably open a Rita’s up there. Mm, Martian Gelati.

And they might like this new t-shirt, courtesy of the festering brain-giblets of Warren Ellis.

EDIT: NOT available to buy at this time, which it says in Ellis’ post, so don’t give me any crap.

• Bad Science blogger and Guardian science writer Ben Goldacre points out that the social and professional structures of “complimentary” medicine are just as dangerous as the individual practitioner’s quackery. (Pseudohealthcare isn’t harmless, kiddies. It can cause severe dain bramage.)
• The Angry Astronomer reminds us that creationist arguments don’t just attempt to undermine Evolutionary Biology. Astronomy is a target, too. (Also, Cosmology, Paleontology, Archaeology, Geology, Anthropology and History.) [Edit: Make sure to scroll down to the comments on this link, to see how reality-deficient those arguments, and their proponents, really are.]
• Sam Ogden notes that being an astronaut doesn’t make you immune from being wrong in the head. (Unfortunately, being the token male Skepchick doesn’t make you immune from spelling your titles wrong, either. Right, Sam?)
• Discovery News How To: Build your own warp drive. (Step 1: Build device to manipulate 11th dimension. Step 2: Convert the entire mass of Jupiter into energy. Step 3: Profit.)