The Fry Side

A guest poster at the Daily Dish believes Sarah Palin’s tale of her youngest child’s birth.

Another blogger responds to the guest post.

I fall into the latter camp, personally. I feel she puts forth such a false persona that regularly varies from ill-informed to bald-faced lying, often with a healthy smattering of damn near illiteracy thrown in. I will not take Palin at her word without significant evidence.

Since no journalists are remotely close to being allowed to investigate (or, frankly, slightly question) her, and she wasn’t that far from being leader of the world’s superpower, this is one conspiracy that I’m willing to give some weight.

This all leads me back to a point I have been making about Palin and her Tea Party movement supporters: it’s not even a matter of relative fact or truth, it is a matter of blatant absence and denial of fact or truth. And when there is no allowance for simple, proven fact, there can be no conversation, let alone compromise.

(Found via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

This was a really great debate between the two camps of whether or not to add nuclear power to our arsenal of energy sources sans fossil fuels. The big piece wrong is that they are talking about two different sets of numbers. The pro side is talking about overall current energy needs, whereas the anti side was speaking about replacing transportation energy costs. Once you see that, it undercuts the anti side quite a bit.

Still, it is great to hear those points out. It does seem that with our knowledge, wind can and ought to be a strong power source, and solar ought to be on all suburban and rural rooftops. Hell, you can farm underneath wind turbines, so you might as well plug your tractor in and remove even more of the black energy required to generate our food.

Both points, though, miss a big step: transportation of energy. We lose tons of electricity over our power lines. Superconductors aren’t viable for mass production. Battery power keeps getting better so long as we keep wanting Internet access in our pockets. But how do you think all the electricity is going to get from 10,000 wind turbines to a town?

The first speaker was right that we can hold onto our nuclear waste materials while fourth-generation generators (waste burners, essentially) are developed further. And who wouldn’t love the idea of burning our kill-Earth-ten-times stockpile down to a simple kill-Earth-twice stockpile? That right there should be the front retort of any anti-nuclear energy argument.

So the future is nuclear for base load, wind for topping off that base and for sale (windy in one place, calm in another), and solar for the extra daytime use? Sounds reasonable for me. Now if we can either quit burning fossils for creating and moving our foods (oh yeah, and packaging them), we may do better. Plastics aren’t going anywhere, but I wouldn’t mind going back to a world of mostly wood, metal, stone, and glass.

It would help us all out if we made our food more short-range, for certain. And if I could take a train to anywhere in the region. But if we can at least kick the black energy for using our computers and lights and toasters, we’re at least going to be in a better place.

I finally got out to mow my lawn this evening. It’s been storming off and on for over a week and the grass was as high as a pygmy elephant’s eye. M was home and lots of sunlight was left so I set to work.

As I began my first round around my property (easy to find since the neighbors had already mowed this week), a neighbor kid and his friend came and played basketball using my hoop in my yard. The previous owner of my house had athlete daughters, so he installed a professional, adjustable hoop that hangs over into the cul de sac. Neighbor kids regularly come out and use it, especially this teenager, so I thought nothing of it. He waved hello at me while I passed by.

Once I started making passes under the branches of my crabapple, the basketball rolled onto my driveway. I could see the kid coming up to get it out of the corner of my eye and continued to concentrate on not nailing my head on the one low-hanging limb of the tree. After emerging from this big tree’s low canopy, I saw the kid had walked up to me and wanted to ask me something.

“It’s okay if we use your hoop, right?”

“Yeah, totally. As long as you don’t make tons of noise after dark when my kids are sleeping I don’t mind.”

“I never use it after dark anyway.”

“So yeah, no problem.” I said.

“Well the guy from that house came up and said we weren’t allowed. I said you’d let me do it before, but he said it wasn’t your choice, it’s just for kids in the neighborhood.”

“It’s in my yard, I’ve known you for years, and you still live just around the corner. I’d say that qualifies you as a neighbor, don’t worry about it.”

So the kid went back to his friend and game. I put my earbuds back in and proceeded to start another pass.

Soon as I had got myself into a groove, the guy two doors down stomps across my lawn to me. Not the next-door neighbor who would’ve had a reasonable issue, since it’s feet from his driveway too. No, it’s the old guy, my height but twice the width, ragged t-shirt and a bent cigarette dangling from his mouth.

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Chad Orzel and Neil DeGrasse Tyson nail something ridiculously important. (Watch the whole clip, and definitely read Orzel’s old post):

A great clip from his World Science Festival appearance the other night, especially the bit toward the end:

“One thing I think that as a nation we should be embarrassed by is that the scientists– you can do this experiment yourself, I’ve done the experiment– the scientists, by and large, know more liberal arts than the science that is known by liberal artists.”

Or you can read my longer, less funny version from a couple of years ago. Either way, it’s an important message: It should be exactly as embarrassing in educated company to say “I’m no good at math” as it would be to say “I’m no good at reading.” The fact that it isn’t– that it’s ok to laugh off innumeracy– is a major problem for us as a society.

Read the comments on this post…

This is actually a point I had never really thought about, and even I’m guilty of it. Of course in my family the line was closer to, “Oh, I could do any Algebra or Trig, but hit the wall at Calculus.” And of course, my family is an odd duck. I’m going to go ahead and claim I am not one of those liberal artsy folks who chuckle about being bad at math. But I’ve never called anyone out for laughing at being bad at math. Maybe it didn’t come up as much, because I grew up within music circles and music and math have a very strong relationship.

Back to their point: Orzel and Tyson are precisely right. Math should be a function like literacy. And it’s not even complex math. Arithmetic and basic Algebra should be proudly ingrained in all American brains. We don’t all need to be calculators. My wife regularly comments about how quickly I can multiply through things, but I attribute that to being quickly able to tear down problems (23 x 5 is actually (20×5)+(3×5) in my head) and having being the loot roller for more Dungeons & Dragons games than anyone else I know.

These guys don’t expect that either. They expect that it doesn’t matter what speed you can figure out a problem, they care that you can figure out the problem at all. Tyson properly goes into this with science as well. Organic Chemistry? Nuts to that. Asking how exactly something works, where it comes from, what are its limitations? Reasonable. Even if you can’t understand the specifics, you should at least be able to cut through the bullshit and see if the claim someone is making could actually be valid.

Actually, that ties into what I try to explain to my son. He’s following what advertisements are and it’s easy to see him get tripped up. He’s a knowledge hound, a precise knowledge hound, and I love him endlessly for it. So when some commercial makes a claim that its product does some amazing feat, I have to methodically walk him back and explain that ads, while not fully lying (usually), are shiny exaggerations of what something is actually capable of.

My favorite example: a box of Kix cereal. Right on the front, it claims to be a good source of Calcium and Vitamin D. Know what milk is chock-full of? Calcium and Vitamin D. So what does the Kix give you? Briefly crunchy filler. And yes, it tastes good and is easy to snack on so we still give it to the kids anyway.

To wrap up, I again agree: if someone makes the claim of being ‘bad at math’ and proud of it, remind them that it’s not okay to be illiterate in the basics of our civilization. We depend on it. I know I’m not touching on the fact math is probably not taught in the ways to reach all learners, but that’s a separate fault. I am sick of people being proud of being ignorant.

My dad is a brilliant man, double mastered in science and engineering. Knows something about everything. He’s why I’m abnormally adept at so much. But he’s a bad speller. He got screwed by an experimental method of teaching phonetics when he was a kid. He’s not proud, it’s just something he has to cope with. Doesn’t mean he can’t string a clear paragraph together or talk to someone about music or literature. So even if you’re bad at math, that’s no excuse for not being able to calculate my change at a coffee shop.

George Orwell’s diary is starting to heat up. Is there any better notion why he is as cynical as he is than this?

Huge advert on the side of a bus: “FIRST AID IN WARTIME. FOR HEALTH, STRENGTH AND FORTITUDE. WRIGLEY’S CHEWING GUM.”

I’m reading Orwell’s Why I Write right now. He is our grandfather’s generation’s Jon Stewart. I’m working more on this concept as it goes.

It’s amazing to read things from a decade or two ago and still have it be completely relevant.

It’s like that boring old history stuff is, like, worth learning or we’re doomed to something. Or whatever.

You betcha.

Once again, Richard Thompson says lots in a small space.

James Fallows praising New York’s Response to the failed Times Square bombing:

There is one other crucial element in the Times Square case, and it can’t be stressed often enough. So far we have seen a New York-style rather than a Washington-style response to the threat. And while New York is the least “American” of U.S. cities, its emotional and social response is just what America’s should be. Let me explain: 

The point of terrorism is not to “destroy.” It is to terrify. And for eight and a half years now, the dominant federal government response to terrorist threats and attacks has been to magnify their harm by increasing a mood of fear and intimidation. That is the real case against the ludicrous “orange threat level” announcements we hear every three minutes at the airport. It’s not just that they’re pointless, uninformative, and insulting to our collective intelligence; it’s that their larger effect is to make people feel frightened rather than brave.

I won’t go into the arguments about whether creation of an ever-threatened public mood is deliberate, or what interests it serves. I’ll just say: it works against larger American interests (as argued here), and New York in these past two days has shown the alternative. That is nothing more than: being alert, but living your life and not skulking around terrified. I hate to say that when people act fearful, “the terrorists win,” but it’s true.

It reminds me of the bombing of the London Underground back in July of 2005, which also brought back readings about IRA bombings and WWII bombings. Keep that stiff upper lip and carry on, chaps! We won’t let them beat us into losing our heads. It’s not to say it doesn’t hurt, but damn it all we won’t let our pain be their victory.

It also brings back one of the first words to pop into your head when describing New Yorkers: tough.

(Found via A plain blog about politics.)

What I’ve had stuck in my head since Arizona lost its damn mind.

Namely it’s Moe’s line I keep hearing: “Immigants! I knew it was them. Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!” I find that hilarious.

But this is The Simpsons circa 1996. Yet it has quite a bit to say about the politics of ignorance and fear that we’ve lived under for a while now. This brilliant piece of satire almost makes me sad that we’ve only gotten worse in the past fourteen years.

A reply to my ranting from JZeller:

Is it really patriotism to buy a flag because everyone else is? Does it really show that you support our troops just because you have a bumper sticker on your gas guzzling truck or SUV? To me the answer is a clear, No.

I responded in his comments, so feel free to click over and visit. I may steal his WordPress theme. I like the tabs.