The Kepler Telescope Has Some Busted Wheels

I'm pretty sure that if your space telescope can't be moved, it's pretty much down and out. This is what I mean by the phrase "shining a turd."

When You Get Too Good at Your Job, It Can Have a Down Side

Quite a few things are made out of limestone. This story makes me wonder if existing structures are going to suffer this same fate or if certain climates are going to be spared the wholesale shifting and collapse of limestone structures.

What the article explains, and rather well at that, is that the skill of the Egyptians undermined their efforts to build things that would last. Older, poorly constructed monuments are able to expand and contract and not suffer the fate of the newer, more precise structures that cannot absorb the expansion and contraction of the limestone blocks.

Republicans Have a Tribal Hatred of Science

Let's parse this information and put it in the proper context.

Religion, being part of, but not all of, the makeup of the Republican Party's mindset should be understood as being the linking of like-minded people with varying religious beliefs (Baptists, assorted Protestants, Catholics, people of the Jewish faith, etc.) who self-identify as Republicans and have banded together to form a tribe dedicated to anti-intellectualism. The combination of these religious groups, and that's not to say that ALL Republicans have a single religion, into a political party creates a body that agitates for an agenda that flies in the face of scientific progress. This is led by the Catholics in the Republican Party who are against reproductive rights for women and they are joined by Baptists who share a virulent anti-abortion concern. When you wander in among the Northeastern Protestants, you find that they are usually less militant on abortion issues; when you get them in a room and discuss whether or not any of them would support an abortion for their teenage daughter, they tend to become more "liberal" than you would think.

There is also a Red State/Blue State divide here. Red states typically support oil and gas interests which believe they are unfairly targeted by climate change advocates. If everyone started driving electric or solar cars, these industries believe they would suffer; what Republicans really fear, as a tribe, is anything that forces them to adapt to a reality they have never been able to imagine. Blue States are populated largely with urban dwellers who see the effects of global warming, especially in the Northeast.

Politically, these states are aligned against each other, each of them sending two Senators to the Congress to maintain gridlock. This is Federalism, and it is a unique feature of our Democracy, not a bug. When this gridlock is finally broken, we will either roll back or advance; this is just the way it is with our system. Changing it would destroy the unique features of America. Winning on the issue of science should be at the forefront of anyone who understands that anti-intellectualism will ruin us all.

This is why they keep coming back, time and again, to nostalgia and their memories of how they think America used to be. They reject science, facts, and empirical data and go with their emotional, gut feelings above all else. They refuse to lean forward into a world that is changing because it is so much easier to stand in the doorway and scream "no!" at everything that walks by.

What this article should have detailed was the fact that the rest of the world is paralyzed with religious issues as well--China's state religion is the state itself, India and Pakistan fight over their own religious beliefs, and Brazil is the largest Catholic nation on the face of the Earth. Religion is a social factor in the development of those countries, and the ways that if affects them should teach Americans about exactly what to avoid.

Overcoming religious beliefs in favor of policies that keep America competitive is the race we are losing.

Who Loves the Surface?

This is the sort of thing that people automatically associate with Windows and with Microsoft--a clunky, unhappy piece of equipment that runs poorly conceived software. Is it a laptop or is it a tablet? And why is it automatically incapable of storing a lot of things to read?

The whole reason why there even is a Microsoft Surface is because human beings like to read things electronically. Laptops have been around for years and people who want a laptop can just go get one. People want tablets, but Microsoft built a laptop, called it a tablet, and put software on it renders it useless if you have a sizable library of books.