The things I go through to see my folks on the Holidays

It's one of the little ironies of life that Airports are among the least pleasant places on earth to be stranded, and the places where you're most likely to actually be stranded.

I flew into Denver, intent upon flying from there to Durango, Colorado; where my family was waiting for me. My flight into Denver was delayed by three hours, which in and of itself was not a problem, except that my flight to Durango had left an hour before my flight to Denver landed.

The fact that I arrived at the gate almost two hours after my flight was supposed to leave, and it still hadn't left, should tell you something.

Of the six flights to leave for Durango, three had failed to depart, three more remained to leave, the first of which was four hours behind schedule (and counting) and two hundred very angry people were waiting by the gate. Combined, all three flights to Durango could carry approximately 75 passengers. They were in the process of booting people off of the three remaining flights to make room for the three flights which had failed to depart. And I was arriving late in the game.

This did not look promising. I had a confirmed ticket, but as I was rapidly learning, that wasn't in any way, form, or fashion a guarantee that I would be leaving Denver within the week. The next confirmed flight to Durango was on the 28th. April was planning to meet me in Durango after Christmas, and at the rate I was moving, she'd beat me there.

Don't worry; this story does become more positive. You know me; I'm Mr. Positive himself.

But at that moment, things were looking a little bleak. I called ahead and told my folks to start a pool on whether or not I was going to make it to Durango in time for Christmas, and to put my money on the 27th.

Life has this nasty habit of taking you in directions you never expect it to. If you had told me on the morning of the 23rd, that I'd be renting a car with three complete strangers to take an unplanned seven-hour road trip through the wolf creek pass to spend Christmas with my family, I'd probably have said that you were fricking nuts. But lo and behold, in the midst of the chaos that was Gate B61 at the Denver International Airport, four complete strangers finally said, "screw this, we're gettin' home for Christmas."

But I digress.

My brother happened to travelling on the same day, and he had a confirmed ticket to Cortez. So he was gonna make it home in time (lucky bastard). At the moment, it didn't look like I was. He asked me what my plan was. I was on standby for the next two flights; I was also on standby for the flight to Cortez. Plan C was to rent a car and drive.

That's when I met Carla.

Carla was a 38-year-old writer from San Francisco who had been waiting at the gate since about 11:00 that morning. She was flying to Durango to spend Christmas with the closest thing she had to family; a friend who lived in Pagosa Springs; a town about an hour out of Durango. She couldn't help but overhear me mentioning to my elder brother that driving to Durango may end up being my only viable option, and offered on the spot to split the cost of a car with me. I think we were both hanging onto the desperate hope that maybe, just maybe we could get out of there before the week was over.

That hope seemed only slightly less desperate when we found out that they were finally going to get a plane which could potentially fly to Durango.

That hope was dashed when the pilot grounded the plane. Normally, I suppose I'd be happy about that; but normally, I haven't just spent four hours trying to get onto a plane that I already had a ticket to get onto, at least in theory. But at 6:00 pm, three and a half hours after the plane theoretically should've left, thirteen hours more than some of the people waiting at the gate should've been waiting, we were informed that the absolute earliest that we'd get out of the airport was 8:55 pm; and even then, the odds were that we would be waiting at least until tomorrow. Maybe later.

Carla and I took one look at each other and pretty much decided on the spot that we were driving.

We decided to divide our efforts. Carla made sure that our bags got on the plane (ironically, they were going to reach Durango before we did), I was going to get a car.

First, though, I was going to try one last hail mary pass.

I walked to the gate for the last flight to Cortez to see if I could get my butt onto the last flight, leaving at 9:05 pm.

No dice.

I was walking back from the concourse that time forgot, Carla called me to let me know that she'd got another passenger for the car.

That's how I met Jeremy. Jeremy was a 22-year-old undergrad in commerce at Colorado State University, just trying to get home in time for Christmas. He'd been seeing a young woman for almost six years and was planning to upgrade that status to "Fiancee" in the near future.

So the three of us (happily) left the airport, and one by one, checked each of the car rental counters to see who would rent us a car for a one-way transit to Durango.

The fact that this was a seven-hour drive we were signing up for (it was now approaching 8:00 pm) was not lost on us; but at least it beat waiting at the gate for a plane to show up.

And that's when I met Sydney. Sydney had been trying to get out of New York for three days, and had found that to be somewhat difficult with the transit strike. She'd arrived at the airport at 8:00 that morning. She was coming upon hour twelve in the airport. The way she put it, she'd run into Jeremy in front of the gate, who'd mentioned that we were renting a car. She'd basically said that she was still going to try to get onto the next plane.

That was around about the same time that the pilot announced that he was going to ground the plane. Faced with the prospect of having to wait until at least 8:55 before she even had the remotest chance to get out of the airport exclaimed to the young woman behind the desk "Oh (expletive deleted), I'm such an idiot! What's that guy's name!?"

The woman behind the desk, understandably, didn't understand what the hell she was talking about. Her confusion deepened when Sydney leaned across the desk, and, fueled by the frustration of getting the hell out of New York; followed by twelve hours waiting to get on a plane; demanded to know where we would most likely go in the airport if we wanted to rent a car. That's when she met us and asked us, pleaded, really, if there was still room for one more in the car.

Sydney had had a rough day.

She high-tailed it out of the building to meet the three of us, just as we managed, for the bargain price of $200 US, to rent a car to get to Durango. Split four ways, and seen as an investment in our future sanity, we decided that it was a bargain.

So we piled the four of us into a Ford Five Hundred; and headed south.

It was a rather impressive encounter by anybody's standards. We took turns driving; which means that each of us would drive for about two hours at the most. Two of us could sleep; and the other would stay awake to keep the driver alert.

That was the theory, but it didn't end up working out that way. All of us were pretty wired; well, except for Sydney, who was just bushed. The rest of us were up basically trading life stories.

Consider this for a moment. The four of us had met barely hours ago, and now we were embarking on an intense, seven-hour drive to Durango. Four complete strangers unified by a desire to spend the holidays somewhere other than the Denver International Airport. And here we were, trading pretty much the stories of our respective lives.

I mentioned earlier that Carla was a writer. From her perspective, this was gravy. This was the kind of material that makes books. So fueled by her insatiable hunger for information, the four of us learned more about each other than some people who have known each other for years.

So as midnight rolled around; as the 23rd turned to Christmas eve, we were weaving our way through the Wolf Creek Pass and talking as if we were life-long friends.

I spent four hours flying, I spent another four in the airport. I spent seven hours driving from Denver to Durango.

And I found out in hindsight, there was room on the flight from Denver to Cortez.

I'm glad I didn't get on that plane.

Happy Holidays everyone.

Quick Question:

This is gonna be a short post, but I'm wondering; am I the only one who sees Stephen Harper on the news and thinks to himself: "So that's what happens when you don't let gay guys touch your hair?"

When did "liberal" become a dirty word; Part II

I feel the need to clarify that I don't consider myself to be liberal. Actually, I call myself apolitical. I vote for the person who I believe best represents me (even if that happens to be nobody). In fact; I don't even vote for parties in federal elections; I try to remain as ignorant as possible of what a given party platform is, and focus upon the individual I'm voting for. That's probably part of the reason why I'd vote for my current MP, if I were actually planning to vote in the next Canadian Federal Election (which I'm not). Not because he's a member of the Conservative party; but because he's doing a decent job as MP.

For my Canadian readers, I also feel the need to specify that when I mention liberals and conservatives, I mean lower-case "l" and "c" respectively; I'm talking about the political view, and not the political party.

And finally, I feel the need to quote someone smarter than me; so I will:

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "liberal?" If by "liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "liberal." But if by a "liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "liberal."

John F. Kennedy said this in what was arguably a more enlightened time; when being labeled as a "liberal" wasn't the political kiss of death that it apparently is today.

But seriously; why is being labeled as a "liberal" such a bad thing? It's such a bad thing, apparently, that they've had to come up with a whole new name for themselves: "progressives." Liberals ended slavery in America; got women the right to vote; got African-Americans the right to vote; they gave same-sex couples the right to marry in Canada and in Massachusetts (and hopefully, coming soon to a neighborhood near you); they created medicare; they passed the Civil Rights act and the Voter's Rights act; they ended segregation.

Now, I feel the need to again clarify, I'm not a liberal; but frankly, many who eargerly label themselves as such have accomplished some pretty decent things. All of those things I listed above: they were actively blocked by conservatives.

In the interest of fairness, conservatives have also accomplished great things. Nixon ended the Vietnam war, Reagan ended the cold war, Bush (Sr.) ended Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and then did something that Bush Jr. hasn't yet figured out how to do: he went the hell home. Nobody likes to send their country to war, but at least Bush Sr. had a decent excuse for doing it.

I've had some people ask me what my political views are: my answer is pretty simple: I do what makes sense. I don't believe that "because it's always been done this way" is a good reason to keep doing it. Sometimes "the way it's always been done" is still a good way of doing things; sometimes it isn't. Either way, I don't belive that we can make decisions based upon tradition. Saying that we need to keep doing something in one particular way because that's worked in the past is, frankly, stupid. For example: I support government-sponsored daycare; something which is viewed as a typically-liberal position, provided that there is a requirement that those using the service have a job while they're using it. Frankly, I'm not gonna pay taxes so that someone out there can unload his or her kid, then sit at home and watch Oprah. But, if provide daycare service to people who are not working because they have to stay home and take care of the kids; we now have people who are making taxable revenue; thereby increasing government income, allowing the government to provide more services like government-sponsored daycare.

I like to call myself a "reasonist." I do what's reasonable; no more, no less.

This space for Rent

April and I went to catch the movie version of Rent on Saturday night.

Broadway musicals are a hard thing to translate from the stage to the screen. Something is always lost in the translation; it's not the director's fault, or any of the actors', but there's just something about that interaction between the audience and the performers that you just don't get with a movie; so it should be mentioned that Columbus had the deck stacked against him from the moment that he decided to put this musical on the big screen.

I don't mean to sound as if I didn't like the movie; because I did. The music was well-performed, the actors were comfortable in their roles, and if you like musicals, this was a good one. But having experienced the show when it came to Calgary, then seeing the movie, there's really no comparison.

This is another of the better films I've seen this year, and like the last one, this one will be a hard sell to audiences everywhere. Those who don't like musicals won't like this, and those who have seen it on stage will probably be overly critical of the movie version; whether it's deserved or not. I'm apparently one of those very rare guys (according to April) who a) likes The Sound of Music and b) isn't gay.

All that notwithstanding, if you go to it with an open mind, you'll enjoy it. It's a raucus, energetic film, and if you're at all musically inclined, your toes will be tapping by the time the first song has played its final chords.

Okay; shutting up now.

Compassionate Conservatives

Am I the only one who's starting to think that one of the identifying characteristics of people who identify themselves as "compassionate conservatives" is a complete and total lack of compassion?

Recently, the Family Research council has denounced the possibility of vaccinating teenagers against two different strains of Human Papilloma Virus; which, combined, could prevent approximately 70% of all cervical cancer. This vaccine has the potential of saving the lives of 3700 women in the United States alone every single year; and the FRC has gone on record claiming that they don't want it offered to teenagers with their standard set of immunizations.

Why? Because HPV is sexually-transmitted. The FRC and Focus on the Family have both released statements voicing concerns that vaccinating teenagers could be the equivalent of telling them that it's okay to have sex. Neither have openly denounced it just yet, but neither wants the vaccine given to adolescents around 13 years of age; which happens to be exactly when it's most needed.

In a telephone interview with the Washington Post, Reginald Finger, a former medical analyst for Focus on the Family said: "There are people who sense that it could cause people to feel like sexual behaviors are safer if they are vaccinated and may lead to more sexual behavior because they feel safe."

Now, maybe I'm a little nuts, but isn't that like saying "we should only sell bicycle helmets to people who are planning on riding their bikes into a brick wall?"

Now, interestingly enough, both Focus on the Family and the FRC have been very vocal in the Pro-Life end of the spectrum. Again, I stay out of that particular debate simply because I don't believe that it can be boiled down to a black/white, pro-life/pro-choice debate, but suffice it to say that they seem to think that allowing abortion under any circumstances whatsoever is tantamount to murder.

So why is potentially allowing thousands of women to face the possibility of death or infertility suddenly okay?

If you want to reduce the number of abortions, the way to deal with it isn't to make abortion illegal, it's to educate the people who may potentially have them. Teach them about birth control; abstinence; teach them to be responsible for themselves sexually; and if they choose to have sex, make sure that they're safe about it.

But as far as they're concerned, that's no good, 'cause it still allows for the possibility that (gasp) people might actually have sex! So, they oppose just about anything that could make sex less risky: birth control pills; condoms; morning-after pills; HPV vaccines; I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that if you looked for it, they probably opposed use of Hepatitis vaccines too. As far as they're concerned, abstinence is the only option; which means that they're either seriously delusional, or they have their kids under 24-hour surveillance. The point is that if this vaccine is sending the "wrong message" - that we expect that they'll have sex - what's the "right message?" That we care more about their maidenhead than their lives? Why are those who are so adamant that abstinence is the only way to go so convinced that fear is the only way to promote abstinence? If not gettin' it before marriage is such a wonderful thing, it seems to me that the last thing you'll have to do is terrorize teenagers into not doin' it.

See, I really didn't get the reason why the far right wing have this unhealthy obsession with sex. They don't seem to want anybody havin' it. They oppose homosexuality; not because being attracted to someone of the same sex is wrong, but because they might actually have sex with someone of the same sex. They preach abstinence, rather than promoting the teaching of responsible sexuality. The overwhelming message: SEX CAN RUIN YOUR LIFE! While flatly rejecting just about any medical advancement that goes even partway to ensuring that sex doesn't ruin their lives.

It wasn't until a friend of mine provided me with a rather brilliant hypothesis. It's so simple, so elegant, and rather beautiful in its simplicity.

They're not gettin' any; and what they're gettin', they're not enjoyin'.

I have to admit, I don't have any data to back this up. For all I know, they could spend their evenings banging the hell out of the local college football team; but you have to admit that there does seem to be a fair amout of sexual frustration inherent to the far-right. Seriously: what issue have they been more vocal about than sex? They're against homosexuality, but not against the idea that someone could be attracted to the opposite sex; they tend to focus on the act itself. They're not against people dating, they're just against the idea that the daters may be having sex in the process. They're not against sex after marriage; but they object to any kind of birth control being used. And they've gone to the point where they are so adamant that nobody have sex before marriage that they've endorsed so-called abstinence-only programs; tax-funded programs which promote abstinence, and only abstinence. How do they do it? You guessed it: fear mongering; even if that fear is completely unfounded. For example, contrary to research, these programs insist that "touching another person's genitals can lead to pregnancy," that "there's no such thing as 'safe' or safer' sex," and (this is my personal favorite) "loneliness, embarrassment, substance abuse, and personal disappointment can be eliminated by being abstinent until marriage." I hope I don't actually have to say this, but for the record, not one of these are supported in the least by any empirical data.

In short, the only reason why sex is really an issue is because the far right sees a need to make it one. Why, I'll never know. Guess there are a few things that even I don't get.

Pat Robertson to Dover Pennsylvania: "Don't turn to God if you Need Help"

You really couldn't make this kind of stuff up. Seriously. You don't need to really look to hard these days to find complete crackpots.

Pat Robertson; famous for calling for the assasination of president Hugo Chavez; for blaming 9/11 upon pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU and the People for the American Way;" for claiming to have directed the course of Hurricane Gloria which caused millions of dollars of destruction along the US' east coast in 1986; and made similar claims about Hurricane Felix in 1995; and my personal favorite: describing femanism as "a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians;" has again issued one of his PatWas.

No, I'm not making this stuff up.

"I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover," Robertson announced in a November 10th airing of The 700 club, "If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there."

There's compassionate conservativism for you. Apparently, feeling bad about his comments, Robertson later clarified: "God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever. If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them."

Now, what's deliciously ironic about all this is that those who have been pushing the Intelligent Design Curriculum have been very careful to avoid any mention of the word "God" in any of their publications (although that sorta fell apart in the courts in Dover, when one of the witnesses on the stand admitted that he felt that the Intelligent Designer was the Christian God). The reason for this is pretty obvious: Intelligent Design, designed (no pun intended) to undermine the scientifically-sound theory of Evolution is basically just creationism made more politically correct. If you look at the Intelligent Design Network's Homepage, they offer the following:

We believe objectivity in the institutions of science, government and the media will lead not only to good origins science, but also to constitutional neutrality in this subjective, historical science that unavoidably impacts religion. We promote the scientific evidence of intelligent design because proper consideration of that evidence is necessary to achieve not only scientific objectivity but also constitutional neutrality.

On paper, that sounds pretty good. No mention of any of the standard biblical creation beliefs which would make Intelligent Design a violation of the establishment clause of the American Constitution.

Then Patty baby decides to go and blow all that hard work the ID proponents have been doing out of the water. According to them, Intelligent Design is merely the science of detecting evidence of design in nature; having nothing whatsoever to do with Pat Robertson's God. If we go by Robertson's reaction, it would seem that they were mistaken.

The logic (or rather the absence thereof) in Intelligent Design

Let's ask ourselves perhaps the most pertinent question in Intelligent Design theory; one that nobody seems to be able to answer: What is the scientific theory of Intelligent Design, and how may it be empirically tested?

Not one person yet has been able to answer this one simple question, and I openly challenge anyone who is within the sound of my electronic voice to provide an answer.

Evolution has been tested time and time again. It has been the prevaliling scientific theory to explain the diversity of life on earth for over 150 years; ever since Darwin was tromping around the Galapogos Islands. The fossil record supports it; modern genetics supports it... In fact, to date, not one study has been performed which contradicts evolution.

But let's suppose, hypothetically, that one had. One day a scientist stumbles upon irrefutable evidence that evolution simply cannot be the mechanism by which life on earth arose and diversified. Let's presume, just for the sake of argument, that tomorrow, we find out that the theory of evolution is wrong.

Guess what? The theory of Intelligent Design still wouldn't be a scientific theory.

See, according to the IDiots out there (although they don't explicitly say so, their strategy so far makes it quite clear) hacking holes (whether real or perceived) in the theory of evolution equates to proving Intelligent Design.

This is, of course, bullshit. No scientific theory is accepted until they at least have a solid falsifiable hypthesis and have either supported or disproven it. Frankly, where Intelligent design is concerned, it is very possibly impossible to falsify an act of God; and since She isn't coming forward to tell us how She dun it, Intelligent design will have to be viewed as it is by the scientific community: pseudo-intellectual crap.

Now, I know that the tone of this posting is a little harsher than I usually use, and I apologize, but the simple truth is that I see Intelligent Design as a slap in the face to everything I've decided to dedicate my professional life to. To take religion, specifically the book of Genesis, cloak it in pseudoscience, then try to force-feed it to high school students as if it were an accepted scientific theory; that is something I simply cannot accept. As a scientist, I simply cannot look upon Intelligent design with anything less than utmost contempt.

More On Wei Ch'i.

Granted it's been a while since I've played, and I'm fairly certain that I'm not as good as I once was, but I still pick up a chess board every so often just to keep myself sharp. I'm still pretty good. I've played at the national level, and did quite well; I finished in 143rd place out of over 3000 competitors.

So when I tell you that Go makes chess seem like the strategic equivalent of tiddlywinks by comparison, I want you to understand my full meaning.

Let's take your average chess game of, say, 120 moves (60 per player). On any one move, the largest possible number of available configurations is 121, broken down as follows; not counting the squares the pieces are sitting on at this moment:

pawns: 2 possible squares each (a total of 16 new possible configurations, at the absolute most).
King: 8 possible squares (eight new possible configurations)
Queen: 27
Bishops: 13 each (for a total of 26)
Rooks: 14 each (for a total of 28)
Knights: 8 each (for a total of 16)

Add 'em together and you should come up with 121. And the vast majority of the time, you will have far fewer than 121 available. For the first move, for example, there are only twenty possible moves, period. Not twenty-one, not nineteen. Twenty, exactly.

But since this is all very rough, that means that in a 120-move chess game, the configuration of the board is approximately 121^120; which gives you something on the order of 8.6x10^249.

On the first move playing Go on a 19x19 board, black has 361 possible moves; white, 360, and so on. Now, this is all approximate, but since I was generous enough to use the absolute best-case scenario for Chess, I'll do the same for Go. Your average Go game on a 19x19 board lasts about 300 moves. So the number of possible board configurations that are available looks something like this:

N=361!/61!; which gives you something on the order of 2.82x10^684 possible board configurations.

That's a really big number:

2820000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Give or take a zero or two

How many of these are actual legal board configurations is anyone's guess. I've seen estimates between 5 and 20%. Which, when you're talking about numbers this big, doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference.

So I'm beginning to understand why nobody's ever written a computer program that plays a decent game of Go. The numbers are just too big.

Here we Wei Ch'i

So I'm teaching myself to play Wei Ch'i. Well, that's the Chinese name. Around here, it's called Go. It's described as the most difficult game ever devised; a title it's held for somewhere between three and four thousand years, it's also a contender for the title of oldest game still played in its original form. The only possible exception to the latter is backgammon (although it's arguable that the romans played it in the same way that it's played today).

The game is played on a 7x7, 13x13 or 19x19 board, depending on how long you want the game to last and how good you are. Supposedly the masters can play games on a 19x19 board that can last for days before anyone wins.

I'm not that good.

The rules of the game are actually remarkably simple, the strategy is exceedingly complex. It makes Chess look like Tic-Tac-Toe. Legend has it that the Chinese emperors would make their generals learn to play to improve their strategies. I can see why.

But I gotta say, it's a lot of fun.

On Evolution, and God.

So I was chatting with a fundamentalist Christian friend of mine about evolution. It should be mentioned, critically, that my friend, while strongly Christian, does not ascribe to the dogma of the Intelligent Design proponents. He accepts evolution as having occurred; however, in his words, "that doesn't necessarily mean that God wasn't in there somewhere." He sees the book of Genesis as, and this is too good a quote for me not to use directly: "God simplifying natural history down to a level that a bunch of illiterate goatherds standing on a hill could understand and remember," which is basically what I've been saying since I found out about the whole Evolution/Intelligent Design debate; albeit somewhat more eloquently.

The thing, he said, that bothered him was the fact that Evolution required you to start with the assumption that God doesn't exist.

That was the epiphany moment for me. Ever since I learned about this so-called Intelligent Design theory, it confused the hell out of me why some people, many of whom are actually relatively intelligent, would deny the findings of just about every single branch of the natural sciences just to maintain that the Earth is only a few thousand years old; and that all animals in existence were magically created in their current form. At that moment, I finally understood: here's a perception that Evolution somehow denies the existence of God; and God's a really tough chick to argue with.

Okay, first off, I don't want this to be an essay on the existence/non-existence of God. That's a question best left to philosophers, theologeans, and people who are a lot smarter than me.

What I do want to get into is whether or not evolution theory actually denies the existence of God.

The short answer is "no."

Evolution theory, in all the forms it has taken since Darwin, and its application as far as abiogenesis and the origins of life on earth says nothing whatsoever about whether or not God exists. It says notning about the existence or functioning of any god or gods. It's basically orthogonal to the question; roughtly as orthogonal to the question as how your microwave oven works.

Is it possible that radioactive decay rates spontaneously change as soon as we're not looking at them? Maybe; but until we have some observable data to support that premise, the scientific approach demands that we avoid speculation and work from solid data. Is it possible that God made the world to "look" old to every experiment we could possibly perform? Again, yes, it's possible, but following that logic through to its natural conclusion, it could be argued that we have no solid proof that all five of our senses are not illusory, so therefore, we know absolutely nothing about the world around us.

The point is that if no observations exist, and no observations can be expected to be made, speculation is pointless, from a scientific standpoint. Sure, speculation can be fun, and it can also draw you in new and interesting directions that you may not have previously considered; but as far as actually understanding a phenomenon, it often reflects far more upon the experimentor's personal baises than it does upon the actual nature of things.

The point is that science works upon what can be observed. Practically by definition, God is an unobservable entity; whether She exists or not. So science simply ignores the question. It's irrelevant to whether or not the theory of evolution is correct or not. We can speculate all we want as to whether God exists, and whether or not She was involved in the creation of life on earth, but all this would be beside the point. Evolution is possibly the single most-supported theory in the biological sciences. While I object to the term "unifying theory" on principle (largely because a lot of people think that it sounds too much like "God"), if the biological sciences have a unifying theory, then evolution would be it. From the gross anatomy of complex animals, to the smallest molecular pathway in our individual cells, there's a certain elegance about the system; and the only scientific explanation which simultaneously explains the magnificent diversity as well as the shocking similarities between the various organisms is Evolution.

Whether or not God was involved is a separate issue.

Knock, Knock; Who's there?

So, I've created a new blog to collect stories of people who have knocked on our doors, phoned us in the middle of dinner, or otherwise harrassed us to sell us something, convert us to some strange religion, or get us to donate to some cause that we've never heard of.

To find out more, please go to http://knockingatmydoor.blogspot.com.

This is a community project, and will only work by word of mouth, so if you have any friends, family or loved ones who have a story to tell, please send them my way.

Tell your friends. Have them tell their friends. Have them tell their friends' friends.

Something which, for some reason didn't occur to me before

So I was thinking about the recent presidential election and I recalled one particular interview that was held just outside one of the polling stations on CNN. The woman who was about to vote announced, proudly, that she was going to vote for Bush.

When asked why, she immediately responded: "because I believe that the lord wants him to be President."

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the Lord, in fact, wants a smirking alcoholic, C-student, chimpanzee cheerleader to be president. Has anybody considered the possibility that maybe this wasn't a blessing?

Reading your bible, you'll find that the Old Testament God was pretty keen on the whole concept of smiting. He comes off a little nicer in the New Testament and the Koran, but my point stands. The Flood; the plagues of Egypt; the Tsunami; Bush.

If we postulate for the sake of argument that the Lord, in fact, wants Bush to be president; doesn't it make far more sense that this is much more a punishment than it is a blessing?

Maybe that's just me.

Make it STOP!

So, Terri Schiavo.

I know, this all happened months ago, but for some reason there are people out there who just don't want to let it end.

Why is it that this one case got so many people in an uproar? Why, even to this day, do we have people invoking her name to rise against (gasp)... Actually, what, exactly, are these people against? Seriously, let's think about this long and hard. What, exactly, went on in the case of Terri Schiavo? This wasn't an abortion (in most states, including Florida, abortion is illegal in the 174th trimester), this wasn't a case of euthanasia. This was merely a case where the doctors, and the next of kin decided that the best course of action was to terminate all life-continuing measures.

Something which has gone interestingly unmentioned in this particular case is that every doctor who attended to Ms. Shiavo agreed that removal of the feeding tube was the best course of action. The doctors, clearly, were willing to end treatment if the patient if the next-of-kin decided to do so (he did not, incidentally, decide to do so until about eight years after she went into a persistent vegitative state); and it's the assessment of every court-appointed physician who saw her that she was in an irrecoverable state. Granted, the Schiavo's parents hired their own physician who announced that with proper therapy, she could recover; a finding which is directly contradicted by the post-mortem; so I frankly question the doctor in question's qualifications.

Moreover, something which was curiously unmentioned either in the media circus which surrounded this unfortunate woman, or in the aftermath, was the fact that every single judge agreed that Michael Shiavo, her husband, had established conclusively that his wife would not wish to be kept alive under these circumstances. Instead, what did they focus on as Mr. Schiavo fought to let his wife die? The fact that he had a new girlfriend (a huge deal was made of the fact that it was out of wedlock) and a couple of kids.

Give the man a fricking break! His wife had been in a coma for fifteen years!

The question nobody seemed to bother asking was why Michael Schiavo didn't just divorce his wife and walk away from the whole situation, in spite of not one, but two multi-million dollar offers to do so. When they found that he couldn't be bought off, they suddenly started playing the PR game; going to enormous lengths to make it seem as if he was a horrible, abusive, borderline murderous human being who would have taken immense pleasure from the idea of torturing his wife to death. And no, I'm not exaggerating in the least.

So why, in spite of offers totaling over eleven million dollars, media pressure, and outright slander from the far-right wing did Mr. Schiavo not just walk away and let it end? Why didn't he just let her family decide what was best for their daughter? Hell, in his position, I gotta admit that's probably what I would have done; and I would have been wrong.

Well, I think we can probably pretty much reject the idea that he's an evil, abusive, murderous human being who wants to torture his wife to death; as the far right wing contends. And, after fifteen years, I don't think anybody would likely hold it against him if he decided to divorce his wife and walk away. So what stopped him? Why did he fight so hard and for so long to let his wife die?

The only answer that makes any sense at all is that he truly felt that he was doing the right thing. In spite of the, shall we say, uncharitable image that was painted of him on the news, he held steadfastly to his belief that he was doing the right thing. It would have been easy for him to respond to slander with slander; to descend to their level; but he didn't. Instead he fought the only way he knew how; he worked his way through the courts. In fact, of all the people involved in this; from the family, to the doctors, to the special interest groups to the president; he's the one person involved who actually acted with any human decency whatsoever. I truly believe that for the level of slander he experienced in the final months of his wife's life, Mr. Schiavo deserves a formal apology. I don't, however, expect that he'll get one. The far (extreme) right is kinda funky that way. They don't like to admit that they're wrong... ever.

The real tragedy of this is that an event which should have been private; the death of a loved one, became so brutally public. One man's reputation was dragged through the mud, congress got involved; for naught, really, since when they decided that federal courts could rule in this one particular case, the federal court promptly decided that they wouldn't. Kudos. And realistically, this was all over a woman whose life was, by any reasonable measure, over. I'm sorry, this is truly a tragedy for her family, but it's true. So while the media announced that congress was "acting to save Terri Shiavo's life" (and as an aside, I ask you: what liberal media?), congress was really acting against what no fewer than three court judges in various courts had decided were Terri Schiavo's wishes.

This has been a tragedy, not only for the Schiavo and her family, but for America as a whole. I wish for both sides of this dispute comfort and peace now that this is all over. As for those now trying to invoke her name to paint a new face on "compassionate conservativism;" well, I'm not sure whether I believe in heaven and hell or not, but if I did, I do believe that this level of false compassion exhibited by the far right in the United States would be enough to determine which direction they're headed.

New Baby.

So I spent the last couple of days building myself a new computer; a skill I acquired whilst working for my former mentor at UBish. I was long overdue for a new machine, and finally decided to get one when my ex-computer started literally screaming for mercy when I tried to run this program I've written on it. My now-ex machine harkens from the days when 128 Mb was a gargantuan quantity of RAM, and a 4 Gb hard drive was huge.

So, since I was lucky enough to get a rather large tax refund this year, I decided to spend a chunk of it on this new beast of a computer.

This computer is basically a symbolic representation of the sum of all of my bad expriences with computers in the past and my attempts to remedy them. I've been plagued by hard drives that suffer complete failure for no discernible reason, and end up being unrecoverable (oddly enough, this always seems to occur within days of my next planned backup; so I usually end up losing at least a week's worth of data; something which, believe me, can be rather annoying). To prevent this, I've taken two steps: 1) the two hard drives I have installed in this computer are within two inches of four (count 'em, four) 80 mm fans, since I'm fairly certain that it's overheating that caused my previous hard drives to fail (in hindsight, putting the hard drives right next to a very hot power source may not have been the wisest decision on my part); and 2) the hard drives are RAIDed. RAID, for the non-computer savvy among you stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent, depending on who you ask) Disks. I have the two drives I've installed are set for RAID1; mirroring. In other words, everything that goes onto one hard drive get's "mirrored" onto the other. So you end up with two disk drives which are completely identical. So in order to actually lose the data on my hard drive, both of these hard drives would have to fail simultaneously. Something which, I hope, is not likely to occur. Among my other bad experiences, I lost my first processor in my old computer because it overheated. It wasn't that the fan died or that the heat sink wasn't flush with the processor, or any of the common causes. It just wasn't effective. To remedy this particular fault, I now have a heat sink the approximate size and shape of a dinner plate dominating the motherboard of my computer; and by fortuitous circumstances, the only case I could find that has the power source I need has a huge honking window on the side, so I can actually just look inside to make sure that it's working. I've also gone to a lot of trouble to make sure I have as much airflow through the case as possible. I have a total of seven fans at various locations around this computer case. According to my rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, the air in the case is replaced approximately once every three seconds.

Let's take a minute to talk about the case. Why is it that just about every computer case on the market requires lights and windows and all these funky doohickies hanging off of it? I'd frankly much rather have just the old fashioned beige computer case which holds everything I need. This one comes with all sorts of funky-ass lights all over it; which is rather annoying, frankly, but what can you do? Although, I confess, this does have the previously-mentioned benefit that I can take a look through the big-ass window on the side to make sure that the CPU cooler is working properly; so it's not all bad, I guess.

There were some parts I was able to salvage from my old computer; my CD burner, a floppy drive (which I needed to get the RAID drivers onto the computer, then decided, "what the hell, I might as well keep it"), my network card... My brother wants to get his hands on my old machine (what's left of it) to turn it into a file server. I told him that would be just fine. I'll even give him a heavily-used 13 Gb hard drive, absolutely free.

When did "liberal" become a dirty word?

Before I begin, want to make very clear that I don't consider myself to be a liberal. I don't consider myself to be conservative. I do, however, consider myself to be a free thinker. The simplest way I can think of to put my beliefs is that I don't believe that "because it's always been done this way" is a good enough reason to keep doing it. Which, I suppose, makes me nonconservative, by definition. On the other hand, I also believe in smaller, responsible government; I believe in spending what we have, not what we want to have; all of which are traditionally conservative views. I believe that we need to be careful with our funds, but progressive in the social arena. I believe in a woman's right to choose; but that the husband should be allowed some say in the matter. I believe that government should be small, but not so small that it can fit into its citizen's bedrooms. As I understand it, that puts me pretty much smack-dab in the middle of the political spectrum.

Next, I want to point out that I personally reject the whole concept of labels. I'm Drew MacCannell; I'm not "Straight, White, Male, Biophysicist." Although all those things apply to me, they aren't who I am.

But a lot of people in the political arena, particularly in the US, have been demonizing their opponents by slapping the label "Liberal" on them; but for some reason that I cannot fully ascertain, slapping the exact opposite label carries no such stigma.

One of the worst things that can happen in any political campaign is to be painted as an extremist at either end of the political spectrum; and with good reason: extremists of all political slants are kinda scary. What worries me, is what, exactly, is labeled as "extremist."

The US is currently in the midst of a political quagmire as they try to decide who will step into Sandra Day-O'conner's seat on the Supreme court. Bush has nominated Harriet Miers; which is actually a far more reasonable choice than I'd dared to expect from our illustrious president; her lack of judicial experience notwithstanding. Her political views seem to be largely middle-groundish. She's in favor of gay rights (although she hasn't voiced any opinion on same-sex marriage yet); she's danced around the issue of abortion; she seems to favor separation of church and state. Although, I hasten to add, she's got no judicial experience; ergo it is nearly impossible to determine her views on many issues simply because we have no rulings to base such an assessment upon.

Far more interesting that Miers' actual views on the issues is the reaction of Bush's conservative base. Somewhat surprisingly, a number of Conservative groups; not the least of which being Focus on the Family, have been absolutely adamant that Miers is not what they're looking for. They went on to invoke current sitting justice Antonin Scalia by name, announcing that they wanted another justice with his views installed.

Now, I'm scared.

Antonin Scalia is quite possibly the single most terrifying Supreme Court Justice currently sitting on America's highest court. To describe him as conservative is a massive understatement of his actual views. He has repeatedly voted against Roe v. Wade, and has risen several times against the separation of church and state, the rights of minorities (including gay and lesbian couples). He was one of only two who voted against the supreme court decision that a gay man could not be arrested for sexual activity within his own home.

And what really scares me is that asking for another Scalia on the supreme court seems to strike much of the political clout in the US as perfectly reasonable.

How did it happen that being even marginally liberal somehow meant that you hated everything that America stands for; but being radically conservative didn't? How did it happen that being slapped with the label "liberal" was the ultimate kiss of death for your political future, but being slapped with the label "conservative" wasn't?

As previously mentioned; my political views sit, as I understand them, pretty much in the middle; but in the US, I may as well be a radical left-winger. There's a view which is becoming scarily prevalent, that you're either conservative or you're not. It seems as if it's suddenly becoming acceptable to shift to the extreme right wing, to the level of extreme protectionism, homophobia, and barely-veiled racism, but if you shift to the left of Alan Keyes, you're a radical leftist.

Suffice it to say, my trip down to the states this christmas will be interesting.

On Serenity

I can't, by any definition of the term, be described as a science fiction or fantasy nut. I'm one of a very select few people (apparently) who didn't care much for the Lord of the Rings (the books or the movie). I didn't care much for any of the three Star Wars prequels (although I did watch them; who didn't?). I never cared much for any one of the Star Trek franchises. What can I say? None of them really captivated my imagination. I figure that there are enough stories to tell about human nature without bringing aliens, elves, dwarves, and what-have-yous into the equation.

It was Christmas of last year when my little brother, being the slightly neurotic kid that he is, bought me the box set of Firefly for chritmas. My automatic first reaction, it pains me to admit, was "Don, I'm not a Trekkie."

This is more or less true. Although around about twelve, I did watch the Next Generation incarnation of Star Trek relatively faithfully. Not from any particular love of the series, mind you, but because it was what was on. Even at the naive age of 12, I found something rather annoying about Star Trek: everyone was just too damn happy. Don't get me wrong, I admire Gene Roddenberry's utopian vision of the future; but frankly, it was just a little bit too utopian. You had a crew of people of different races, different ethnicities, hell, from different planets, all working side by side. Hell, I can't live with my brother for any extended period of time without wanting to kill him. Basically, it was a LSD-laced vision of what human beings could do if given the absolute best of all possibilities.

Frankly, it just seemed unlikely to me. Just once, I wanted to see one of the captains of one of the series of this franchise go on a completely inappropriate, totally undeserved, and vulgarly profanity-laden rant about the incompetence of his or her crew.

Just once, I wanted to hear this dialogue on the bridge:

Captain: Set course heading 214 mark six and engage at warp eight.

Crewman: But, sir...

Captain: Move your ass, you fucking, douchelapping dickslatherer! Goddammit, how many fucking times do I have to get you tired assholes to do what I ask? You shitbrained apebuggering asspluggers! I'm the fucking Captain! Jesus Christ, you are fucking pathetic! My whole goddamn crew is made up of goddamned motherfucking rimjobbing anusmonkeys!

Believe it or not, it's actually funnier if you imagine it being said by William Shatner; as if.... EVERY. WORD. Is ITS. Own. SenTENCE.

Now, admittedly, this kind of thing wasn't likely to happen on Firefly either; but at least with Firefly, you got the impression that the only reason it wasn't going to happen was because that kind of dialogue wouldn't get past the network censors; not because it was completely out of character for any one of the characters. In short, what Firefly brought to the science fiction genre, that had been lacking pretty much since the original Star Wars trilogy was characters who actually aren't perfect. You have characters in this series who don't have a fricking clue what they're going to do, or even if what they're going to do is right or moral. You have a captain who won't hesitate to deck one of his crewmembers if he wants to. You have genuine personality conflicts.

Which brings me to Serenity. I want to take a moment to comment on something you don't see many people commenting on with this movie: the script. This was, in my humble opinion, one of the most intelligently-written films I have seen in a long time. The dialogue was clever, the plot was intricately thought out. Unlike so much of Science Fiction and Fantasy making it to the big screen these days, I didn't actually feel dumber walking out of the movie theatre.

In short, this was one of the better movies I've seen this year.

If you haven't seen it, see it now.

If you have seen it, see it again.

And that's my input for today.

Arguing with God.

Alberta's an interesting province. Our population is somewhere to the right of Alan Keyes; we routinely vote Conservative in every riding whenever we have a federal election; and the scariest conservative MPs tend to run, and win in Alberta.

Yet, at the same time, we have a substantial younger population that has either moved in or has grown up here and is starting to actually vote.

The reason I bring this up is that Stephen Harper has vowed to revisit the Gay Marriage issue if he's elected prime minister. His logic, he claims, is that the majority of Canadians do not want Gay marriage, ergo, it should not be law.

Mr. Harper, apparently, has failed to understand the concept of Tyrrany of the Majority.

But that's really not what I wanted to address. The point I want to get across is that if he's elected, it means that he's going to be elected, at least in part, based on the promise of being the first Prime Minister in the History of Canada to use the Notwithstanding clause. For the non-Canucks of you out there; this means that he could get elected, at least in part, based on a promise to suspend the civil liberties assured by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

This is a very scary precedent.

What I don't get, completely, is why this is an issue. The law is very specific that no religious institution will be forced to perform any marriage which is outside their belief system; ergo the Churches have exactly the same leeway as far as marriage is concerned that they did a year ago. All this law means is that the rest of us aren't necessarily required to fall in line with their doctrine.

I recall I was wandering around downtown around about the time that Bill C-38, the Gay Marriage law, was being voted upon in the House of Commons. I don't think anyone seriously believed that the bill would be defeated; but nevertheless you had people out there waving signs, and screaming that allowing people that they did not know and had never met (and, I imagine that it's reasonably safe to assume, had no desire to associate with) to marry would somehow cause society as we understand it to crumble.

This is, clearly, ridiculous; but this is apparently what they believed. Among these people was one woman who was waving a sign which read, simply Leviticus 18:22. First off; if you don't have at least a passing understanding of the bible, you hadn't the faintest clue what the sign meant (incidentally, that passage of the King James' version of the bible reads: "Thou shalt not lie with Mankind as with Womankind; it is an abomination"). Second, as far as this woman was concerned, that one passage of the bible; one line among thousands; ended the debate.

One line of one volume of one book written by people who have been dead for hundreds of years in a different country was the final word on the subject, as far as she was concerned.

Call me crazy, but maybe, just maybe, that might not be the best way of running a country.

That, and, let's face it, it's kinda hard to argue with God.

Faith is one thing; blind faith is something completely different. Belief in something that may not be scientifically observable is fine. I have absolutely no problem with that. I personally believe that there are a number of phenomena which cannot now, and may never be empirically observable. But to blindly take one set of rules and assume that that is the final word on any given subject basically creates a system where you're not allowed to think for yourself. We see that happening far too often in the states, and to a lesser degree in Canada.

The problem with politics is that it's seen too much as a factor of us against them; without much of a well-defined position on who we or they are. The US is divided into "Red States" and "Blue States." In Canada we have our "Liberal Provinces" and our "Conservative Provinces."

Just once, at least in the US, I'd like to see a running team for president throw that whole concept out the window. I'd like to see a third party team stand a solid chance in a run for president. I'd like to see a pair of independent candidates; people with no strong ties to either party... or even better: a bipartisan running team; one former Democrat, one former Republican running for a third party... I'd like to see them run, and I'd like to see them win.

I'd like to see us lose this concept of "Swing States." I'd like to see so-called "Red States" get a little Bluer, and "Blue States" get a little redder.

In short, just once, I'd like to see partisanship become secondary to what's best for the country.

On Intelligent Design, and the Scientific Method

This occurred to me last night: assuming that the state of Kentucky makes Intelligent Design a part of its science curriculum in the coming year (which is seeming increasingly inevitable), can Intelligent Design be taught concurrently with Scientific Method?

The Scientific Method is the basis for all scientific theory. A falsifiable hypothesis is generated, that hypothesis is subjected to a series of experiments which either validate or disprove it; and from that a theory is created which explains the experimental results. Then the process begins all over again.

Intelligent design has never been subjected to scientific scrutiny. No falsifiable hypothesis has been created; no experimentation performed; ergo no theory has been advanced.

So that raises the obvious question of how can we, out of one side of our virtual mouths, tell high school students that the scientific method is the manner in which postulate becomes theory; while out of the other side we promote Intelligent Design as a valid scientific theory? If you can tell me how that is not fundamentally hypocritical, you're smarter than I am.

Now, if someone wants to study Intelligent Design in, for example, a comparative religion course; or a social studies course (the sociology of Intelligent Design proponents is actually quite fascinating), I have absolutely no issue with that. But to present it as a scientific theory is a slap in the face to those of us who do genuine science. Frankly, it's insulting.

I've decided to devote my professional life to the pursuit of scientific knowledge; to understand, through scientific methodology the world around me. To have a small group of people present barely-veiled religion, calling it theory, and teaching it to students as valid science is an affront to everything I have tried to learn in the last ten years.

Not only that, but as far as I can tell, if they want any student to actually believe Intelligent Design; they're going to have to stop teaching the scientific method. In other words, they will be teaching science class, without actually teaching them how to do science.

Now, someone has to have thought about this before me; since I'm not smart enough to have been the first. So why isn't this issue getting far more mention than it is?

Payin' a visit to Hazzard County

April and I went out to catch a movie last night. For some reason, I've had a bizarre urge to see The Dukes of Hazzard. Don't ask me to explain it; it might have something to do with my having been heartily exposed to the television series in my youth. Maybe I just needed some dumb entertainment. Maybe I was fascinated by the fact that they got Wonder Woman and Willie Nelson to play a role in it; or that Jay Chandrasekhar (who happens to share a last name with one of the more brilliant physicists in recent history), who directed Super Troopers directed it. Whatever the reason, I had the strange urge to see it.

If you're going to this movie expecting a masterpiece, you're likely to be disappointed.

Scratch that; you're going to be disappointed.

If, on the other hand, you're going to the movie in the mood for blatant escapism; if you want nothing but mindless entertainment for two hours, this is actually a pretty good movie. I was even, believe it or not, able to overlook the fact that it co-stars Jessica Simpson. Apparently wearing low-cut bodices and acting slutty is something she can do pretty well.

Willie Nelson playing a drunken hillbilly... definitely one of his more tailor-made roles....

In short, this is not a good movie, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Still breathing....

Well, April and I made it back from our little jaunt along the West Coast Trail. 75 kilometers of rough terrain designed, I'm confident, to utterly drain those hikers brave (or foolhardy) enough to attempt it.

Suffice it to say, we had a blast.

We hiked all 75 km in about six days (the last day was a real push; we had to go 12 km before 1:00 pm), hiking an average of 12 and a half kilometers a day. That becomes a little more impressive when you realize that there were some days in there that we only managed to hike about 6 km.

Once you get past the first 22 kilometers, though, the trail gets a lot easier... except for the fact that there are still 53 kilometers to hike. We averaged about 1 km/hour for the first 22 km. We averaged well over 3 for the last 53; just to give some perspective.

Suffice it to say that we had a wonderful week, and I firmly believe that the West Coast Trail is something everyone should do at least once before they die.

April and I are already starting to toy with the idea of doing it again in the not-too-terribly-distant future. Probably next year. We figured we'd pack lighter (there were a lot of things in our packs this time that we simply didn't need), and take more time (there were a few days that were more than a little rushed; we figured we'd take nine days instead of six next time).

Still, it was an adventure, and one I'd really like to repeat someday.

Activist Judges

There's been a lot of talk lately, both in Canada and the US about what people call Activist Judges. People of all political and social slants seem pretty much in agreement that Activist Judges are a bad thing. Where they're somewhat less certain is exactly what an Activist Judge is.

To the best of my ability to determine, an Activist Judge is defined as "any Judge who makes a judgment that you, personally, disagree with." More precisely, an Activist Judge is any judge who makes a decision contrary to the personal opinion of those with the loudest voices.

Nowadays, you barely hear of any court case where someone wasn't accusing the judge who made the ruling of "judicial activism," or "legislating from the bench."

Let's consider this for a moment. Webster's defines "legislate" as: "To make or enact laws."

Okay. That officially makes "legislating from the bench" impossible. No court in the United States (or Canada, for that matter), including the supreme court, has the power to create laws. They can overturn laws, based upon the facts presented before them, but they cannot create them.

To me, a good legal decision is defined as one where, upon reading it, you cannot tell what the judge's political leanings are. If you can read a judgment, and you have no idea upon reading it whether the judge is a conservative or a liberal, democrat or rebublican; that's a sign of a well-crafted judgment.

Take the Canadian Supreme Court decision which led to Bill C-38 for example. That, in my view, was a good judgment. They made very clear that Bill C-38 could be passed by the federal government, provided that freedom of religion was protected.

Take the recent idiocy of the Terri Schiavo affair in the United States. A Florida Judge announced that it was the right of the husband to make decsions regarding the health of his spouse. Congress didn't much care for that decision (particularly since it would piss off the Republicans' Pro-Life base), and immediately passed a bill of attainder such that the federal courts could act, if they so chose, in this one specific instance, for this one specific person. Ignoring, for the moment, that bills of attainder aimed at one specific person are specifically prohibited by the American constitution; the federal courts basically said: "it's not our affair," and sent it back to the state level. Nice to know my tax dollars are being well spent by congress.

In both cases, the judgments were, in my view, sound. And in both cases, someone rose up to scream that Activist Judges were "legislating from the bench."

Well, in the interest of historical perspective, I offer here a few other cases where judges have been accused of Judicial Activism:

Roe v. Wade
Loving v. State of Virginia
Brown v. Board of Education

I'll let you look those up yourself; but when you do, consider the fact that these, cases, too, brought forth accusations of judicial activism. The unelected judges are legislating from the bench, people insisted. The Supreme Court is filled, they insisted, with Activist Judges.

If we define "progress" to be equivalent to "activism," maybe they're right. If and if we can agree that progress really isn't a bad thing, maybe we can agree that judicial activism maybe isn't such a bad thing after all.

What trumps equality?

Okay, I gotta admit that this is a new one.

Now, I admit that they have a point here. I suppose that, technically, insisting that the girls on a co-ed hokey team change separately is discriminatory; but at the end of the day, even equality is trumped by safety.

We are talking about 14-year-old males here. Kids right at the age when girls stop having cooties. Right when girls start getting all curvy and cuddleable. Let's face it, you show a 14-year old male a linoleum tile, and they'll think about sex. Now you want to show them an athletic young woman around their age changing into and out of hockey gear? Maybe I'm being a little paranoid, but that strikes me as a perfect recipe for disaster.

Bill C-38.

To a few people's surprise, I've been somewhat quiet on this issue for the last little while, even after the bill passed, I didn't write anything; largely because I considered that the end of the issue.

This happens to be an issue I believe in quite passionately; which, for some reason I can't really explain, seems to come as a surprise to a lot of people. Especially when they find out that a) I'm not gay (which, frankly, some people find a little too surprising), and b) I'm not married.

But, for the moment, let's consider the fact that very shortly same-sex marriage will be the law of the land in Canada.

For the bulk of Canadians, this will have absolutely no effect; in eight provinces and one territory, it's already legal. Of the remaining provinces, PEI was planning on making it legal anyway, and Nunavut already recognizes same-sex marriages performed outside its own borders; even if they're not performed there.

So, the only stronghold against same-sex marriage in Canada is the good ol' redneck province of Alberta. Our premier has promised to fight Bill C-38 tooth and nail to keep this "nonsensical bill" (his words, for the record) from becoming law in Alberta. Stephen Harper, who was elected overwhelmingly in a riding in Calgary, has sworn to make this an election issue in december; which means that he's basically planning on getting elected at least in part based upon the promise to be the first Prime Minister in history to use the Notwithstanding clause.

And in the middle of this huge maelstrom; which really shouldn't be an issue at all; we have my MP, Jim Prentice, a high-ranking member of the Conservative party who voted in favor of Bill C-38.

My interest in this bill is rather deeply personal, but not for the reasons one would expect.

It was with grave disappointment that I watched the US Federal election last November. While it was deeply saddening to see 51% of voters decide that a bible-thumping redneck moron was fit to run the country for another four years; much more disappointing was the fact that eleven states voted overwhelmingly to ban same-sex marriage within their respective borders.

I have yet to hear someone give a secular reason why same-sex couples should be denied the right to marry. The closest anyone has ever come is that same-sex couples cannot have kids. What they fail to observe is that we do not force married couples to have a fertility test; we do not deny marriage certificates to sterile couples; and we do not declare any marriages which fail to produce offspring to be invalid. In short, from a legal perspective, getting married in no way requires the couple to bear children.

In other words, in a country which has written into its constitution the Separation of Church and State; a country which is supposed to have a secular government; a laws for which nobody has yet provided a secular basis were passed in eleven different states.

That is rather disappointing. More disappointing is the fact that in a country which announces itself to be the "land of the free" passed laws in eleven different states, whose only purpose was to limit the freedoms of a specific minority.

Canada didn't do that. Canada made same-sex marriage seem natural and healthy and logical. Granted, immediately after the bill passed, you had people in the streets screaming that the sky was going to fall and that civilization as we knew it was about to crumble; all because a single freedom had been extended to a small minority. A freedom which will affect nobody except for that minority in any measurable way. Ignoring, for the moment, that the sky has not yet fallen, the fact of the matter is that the extending on freedom to one's fellow man isn't something to be lamented. This is something to be celebrated.

While the US has been trying for years to get a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, Canada legalized it in the political equivalent of overnight. While the US bowed down to pressure from the Religious Right Wing; Canada found a way to allow religious freedom and marital equality to exist side-by-side.

The US could learn a lesson or two from Canada.

I'm an American, and I approve this message.

Human Beings are Assholes

Not all Human beings are assholes, admittedly; but I'm starting to think that at the very least a sizeable majority are.

I spent this weekend feeling rather sick. A stomach flu of some kind; but that's not what I want to talk about.

I finally recovered from the aforementioned sickness on Tuesday morning, and as I got to my car, I realised that there was a lot of broken glass filling the two front seats; that the front windshield was broken, and sitting in the back seat was a large rock.

I was not pleased to see this.

So, a day that I would have spent working was instead spent contacting my insurance broker, contacting various shops to get it repaired, arranging to have it towed to be repaired, since I couldn't legally drive the thing with it's window missing; and calling the police to report the incident.

I have access to another car, fortunately. So I go out this morning to said car, and I realize that the rear driver's side window had been rocked on this car as well.

Suffice it to say, I'm not exactly happy about all this.

Dammit!

April and I went to see War of the Worlds last night. And again, I enjoyed it.

Dammit.

So now, I've gone to two movies this summer which could have been ridiculed quite nicely, but neither one was ridicule-worthy.

Dont' get me wrong, this movie isn't Spielberg's best work, and he seemed to be borrowing substantially from his own past works (Jurrasic Park, Minority Report, ET, AI, Close Encounters of a Third Kind, Schindler's List, to name a few), and borrowed from others as well (Signs immediately comes to mind), but overall, I must admit that this was a quite enjoyable movie; and eerily realistic to just how screwed we would be if ever an alien intelligence decided that they wanted to rid themselves of us.

Without giving away the ending, the movie was relatively true to the spirit (if not the content) of Wells' original work.

A quick note on Dakota Fanning, who plays Tom Cruise's daughter. Wow. She was easily the most talented actress in the entire movie, and I don't mean that in my usual fascetious/sarcastic way. To say that I was awestruck at the acting talent she displayed in this movie would be a gigantic understatement.

Tom Cruise actually can act, surprisingly enough. Not particularly well, mind you, but he does manage to pull of his role in this movie rather convincingly.

The ending falls a little flat and isn't quite tragic enouch, but all in all, I rather enjoyed it.

Damn.

Acupuncture

So... Acupuncture.

I consider myself sceptical of just about anything. I guess that's why I got into science; where being a sceptical sonuvabitch is actually a good thing. Science still hasn't fully worked out how, exactly, acupuncture works; it could be just an advanced placebo effect, or there's a theory coming through the pipes called "gate theory" which suggests that by probing specific parts of the body; you can open "gates" which increase blood flow, circulation, and basically reinforce the body's own healing mechanism. The short answer is that we don't know.

And, let's face it, relieving pain by shoving needles in various parts of your body seems somewhat contradictory just on its own.

So, after we did our Kung Fu demonstration on Friday (which went well, by the way, but I was pretty dead at the end of it), our Daai Si Ying invited a few of us over to his place for what he calls quality control. Which is a nice way of saying "run a select few students through the wringer and see if they can still walk at the end of the day." The good thing is that you learn an enormous amount in a relatively short period of time. The down side is that you can't move the next morning. Usually because you've got such a buildup of lactic acid in your muscles that even rolling over in bed makes you wince in pain.

Then there are the bruises.

Most frequently, they're the natural result of some rough sparring sessions. I had a black eye for a while from the last no-holds-barred sparring session. Made an interesting conversation topic.

Then, there are the self-inflicted ones. These tend to be far worse because they're generally inflicted when you're in the process of breaking something that doesn't want to be broken.

A rock, for instance.

Now, as a quick primer: when a rock breaks, you don't feel anything. It's practically as if you sliced your hand through air.

When it doesn't break, it hurts like a sonuvabitch.

And at the moment, unfortunately, I'm at the point in my training where the rock breaks a lot less frequently than it doesn't.

In a rock-break attempt last night, I hit the rock exactly wrong, but with enough force to break it; and it hurt. A lot. For a second I was sure that I'd shattered at least a couple of bones in my hand. Turns out I was wrong on that one. But I'd definitely hit it hard enough to bruise it badly. Very badly.

So one of the seniormost students, who happened to witness the event in question sat me down and informed me that I had a bad deep-tissue bruise. Something I already knew, but it was nice to have some confirmation. I figured I was just gonna have to suck it up and deal with the fact that my hand was going to swell to roughly the size of a small canteloupe, and turn a nice, deep purple. I've had bruises like that before; they always take about three or four days until they're back to something resembling "normal," but they do heal.

He calmly grabs my hand and asks me how I am with needles. Then goes on to ask if I've ever had acupuncture. I replied, honestly, that I was somewhat sceptical about acupuncture. He replied that was okay; it would work regardless of whether I believed it.

That, I admit, threw me for a loop. One of the defining characteristics of a placebo effect is that whoever's receiving treatment has to believe that the treatment could conceivably help them. If he was right, Placebo was looking less likely. I shrugged it off and said I was willing to try.

So, he proceeds to stick me with a few needles. One in the tip of my pinky finger, two more just distal and proximal to the injury respectively, a third in my wrist, a fourth in just on the inside of my elbow, and a fifth in my leg, just distal to the knee. He left them in for a few minutes, then carefully removed them.

Suffice it to say that I woke up the following morning far less sceptical about acupuncture. It wasn't a cure-all, certainly. My hand is still a little sore; but swelling is practically nonexistent, and it's not purple. None of the typical morning-after results of this kind of injury are there.

Admittedly, one sample isn't exactly representative; but it definitely shows more promise than I'd previously thought.

Neat stuff, that acupuncture.

Sometimes I wonder if your average turnip could outsmart me.

I'm not dumb. At least I don't think I am. I'd like to think I have at least average intellect. I'm not saying I'm a genius either, because let's face it, I'm not.

What I do have is a complete lack of anything that could even remotely be described as common sense.

My Kung Fu school is giving a huge Bak Mei demonstration on Friday in Medicine Hat. Being the enthusiastic martial artist that I happen to be, I decided that I'd do a few demonstrations. Four of them, in fact. Two empty hand fist forms, a staff form, and a two-man fighting staff demo. This doesn't sound like much, but the two fist forms are the longest in the style (and at full-force, they're somewhat exhausting); I hate staff forms with a passion; and the two-man fighting staff demo involves having a huge guy named Tom try to beat me to death with a stick. And that one's going to be performed last, so I'm gonna be exhaused, and Tom's still gonna be trying to beat me to death with a stick.

And all that doesn't include the Lion dance I'm doing before the Kung Fu demo.

No, I take it back, I am dumb.

Note to self: obtain defibrilator before demo on Friday....

Geek sex appeal

This actually might explain a lot.

I'm an enormous geek. I admit it. You don't get through a degree in physics, minoring in biology and mathematics without being something of a geek. You don't then go on to do a PhD. in physiology and biophysics without developing a further layer of geekdom.

And yet, I'm now rapidly approaching the two-year mark on a relationship with a young woman who, two years ago, I would have described as "waaaaaaay the hell out of my league; no, scratch that, playing a different sport."

Suffice it to say, I'm in pretty deep smit. But that's pretty understandable from my end of things. Women who are funny, intelligent, beautiful, and will voluntarily hike 75 kilometers with 50 lbs on their backs are rather hard to come by for some reason. Drews, on the other hand, are pretty dime-a-douzen-y. I think a buddy of mine from my Kung Fu class phrased it best: "You're never gonna find another woman like her, so don't screw it up."

Batman

April and I went to see Batman Begins yesterday, and I feel the sudden urge to comment on this small facet of my childhood.

I enjoy ridiculing Batman. The old-school Batman, anyway. I mean, let's face it, he's a character who practically demands ridicule. He's an untouchable icon. He can figure out exactly what his enemies are thinking; he can look at a poison and figure out an antidote for it; he can leap across rooftops; can figure out the most convoluted, twisted scheme of whatever over-the-top villain he's facing; he has a car which is armed with every toy, weapon, and device imaginable; and he can beat the snot out of an army of evil henchmen without breaking a sweat.

And let's face it, he dresses like a giant bat, and doesn't think that's weird.

This was not that Batman.

I went into this movie prepared to ridicule it. Instead, I saw a superbly-made movie that dissected his motivations, and made him a human being, instead of a guy in a suit.

So I'm totally bummed.

Maybe Fantastic 4 or War of the Worlds will provide me with more ridiculing opportunities.

Be Water.

Bruce Lee, in an interview not long before his untimely death, offered the following dictum:

Empty your mind: be like water. Put water in the cup, it becomes the cup; put water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle; put water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash; it is formless, so it assumes all forms. It's simple, direct, and free.

Be water, my friend.

And that is the sum of my available wisdom for today.

75 kilometer Torture Tests

You know, there are some out there who would tell you that dragging your girlfriend on a 7-day, 75 kilometer jaunt around Vancouver island is somewhat unwise; or at the very least, an act which is ill-advised to strengthen the relationship. And, I confess, there is likely some validity to that viewpoint.

April and I hit the West Coast Trail on the 12th of August, and hike for 7 days from Port Renfrew to Bamfield.

My Dad's describing this as the Make or Break trip. I'm not sure if that kind of pressure is really warranted, but there may be some truth to that. We're going to be hiking for seven days. Just the two of us; alone, over rough terrain, sharing the trail with a bunch of slugs.

Lots of fun, that will be.

And yes, I'm really looking forward to it.

The difference between.....

There's a fundamental difference, I realized last night, between showing an art, and marketing it.

And make no mistake about this one, there's a reason why they're called the martial arts. How someone can watch our SiFu go through one of his weapons forms and not describe it as an art form is beyond me. It's like a dance. Poetry in motion.

But that's not what I want to talk about, really.

We did a Kung Fu demonstration last night at the Devonian Gardens in Calgary. Lots and lots of fun was had, and we had a great opportunity to show the art.

We were not, however, the only martial arts group there. One of the local Hap Ki Do schools was also doing a demonstration, so we got to see a little bit of their show.

Now, don't get me wrong, these people (a lot of young kids in their group, by the way; they looked to have an average age of about 16) were remarkable athletes; but somewhere along the line they'd lost the art, and were basically trying to sell it to the people watching. Flashy music, staged fight sequences, kicking demonstrations; all very impressive looking, but at the end of the day, that's not what the art is about.

Now, granted, when we demonstrate our forms, we do have Chinese drums, gongs, and cymbals playing; but that's because that's how it's traditionally done. I think it has something to do with the idea that if you can focus enough to do your form with a really loud racket distracting you (and believe me, those drums can be pretty damned distracting), you can use these skills when you need them. Or at least, that's the explanation that makes the most sense to me; I mean there has to be some reason it's been done that way for 500 years. The bottom line is that we were showing what the art is. We weren't trying to sell it. If people approached us afterwards, we had some business cards to offer them, whereas the other school had pamphlets that they handed out to every one in attendance. We took this opportunity to show our skills, they took it to sell their school.

Of course, I commented to my Daai Si Ying that I felt horribly undisciplined as I watched these 16-year-olds going through their warmup in perfect unison. We, by contrast, were sitting on the bench he was about to use to break some rocks, leaning casually against the railing behind us. Some of our school was out there doing some situps, doing an impromptu warmup, or running through a form. Every once in a while one of our school members would smack another and they'd start sparring; but really, there was no real rhyme or reason to it. They had sixteen students there, standing in a perfect 4 x 4 square, throwing a series of punches in perfect unison; doing a series of push-ups and sit-ups on one count, throwing a series of kicks right together.

Yeah, we don't do that.

But it works just fine for us.

A world of hurt.

I've been taking Kung Fu now for about two years; and that's a pretty hefty workout regimen. Three nights a week, I spend three hours working out with the school; on nights when I'm not in the school, I spend an hour working out alone (beating the snot out of a heavy bag, practicing forms, etc.); and as if all that wasn't enough, a buddy of mine comes over once a week and we spar for about an hour.

Suffice it to say that until this weekend, I thought I had a reasonable idea of what pain is.

My mistake.

My Daai Si Ying brought some of his best and brightest (and me) in for a private lesson on Sunday wherein we learned some of the deeper secrets of Kung Fu; and believe me, there is quite a bit of depth there. The great thing about this is you learn so much by doing it; the unfortunate thing is that you come to realize just how much you don't know.

Suffice it to say that in terms of workout intensity, this we're sitting in an entirely new ballpark.

In hindsight, it probably wasn't the smartest idea for me to do a long day hike (a little over 13 km) the day before, followed by a three-hour Kung Fu class that night, followed by a three-hour private session the following morning.

In short, I hurt. A lot.

Dances with Lions

So, we did another lion dance this weekend.

One of my office mates was gettin' hitched. I wasn't actually invited to the wedding, but I ended up crashing it 'cause my Kung Fu Studio was hired to do a lion dance at the reception.

So, as of right now, I'm officially the only bachelor in my office. Kinda scary considering that one of the people I share an office with looks about 16. I think he's mormon; although in fairness, I don't actually know exactly how old he is.

I do know that there's no way in hell he's over 20, though.

An old high school pal of mine is about to pop out her first kid, another just announced his engagement, another former acquaintance of mine (I don't really talk to her much 'cause, frankly, she's a bitch) had twins a few months back, and now I have an office mate who just got himself Ball-and-chained.

Wow.

When the hell did I get all grownupy!?

It kinda sneaked up on me. I'm thinking career, home, life, family. What happened to the day when the biggest concern I had was when the latest Transformers toy would be on sale? And, yes, I am aware of how much that dates me.

Not that I'm feeling any particular pressure to change my current marital/familial status. Things are going very well (amazingly well, considering the jackass April has to put up with) right now, and at the moment, as far as I can tell, neither of us really feels the need to change anything. Granted, things may change in the next few years, but for the moment, what's the rush?

On the subject of not wanting to grow up, April and I went out to see the latest (and, I'm hoping, the last) installation of the Star Wars franchise. Actually, this one wasn't so bad. The first two "prequels" were, let's face it, lousy in a way matched only by the Lord of the Rings trilogy (although, I must confess that watching Yoda hop around like a green monkey on speed almost makes Episode II worth watching in and of itself... almost.); so I walked into this one with my expectations low. Maybe it's because my expectations were so low that I enjoyed it, I dunno. That's a philosophical debate for another time.

Episode III will likely not go down in history as a masterpiece of cinematographic work. It's well-done to be sure, the special effects are spectacular and very nearly make up for the (many) shotcomings in the script; frankly, a lot of the dialogue needed some work. Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman; both very talented actors; were noticeably struggling with this movie, and many of their lines came off as forced and/or hoaky. Not through any fault of theirs, the script was just a litle weak in some places. And Hayden Christensen spent most of the movie pretending to act. But, one could forgive his stony, semi-emotionless exterior in this film; he's turning evil, after all. He almost managed to pull off cold, obsessed and emotionless in this film. Of course, that's not too different from his performance in Episode II when cold, obsessed and emotionless wasn't quite called for, but here, it actually worked.

So, without spoiling the movie, I suppose I can offer the following critiques:

Ian McDiarmid plays "creepy" better than any actor in the universe.

Natalie Portman: easily the most talented performer in the entire movie, pity the script wasn't good enough for her.

Ewan McGregor: Manages to accomplish what can only be described as a miracle, considering the aforementioned weakness of the script

Hayden Christensen: One day, he will learn to act, I just know it.

Samuel L. Jackson: Who's the black private dick That's a sex machine to all the chicks? Shaft!

Yoda: Easily the best-acted character in the entire film, and he's entirely computer-animated.

Okay, that's me signin' off for now.

Smooth, Drew, real smooth.

On the subject of Gravity, let's deal with something I learned the hard way today.

Gravity+absentmindedness+flight of stairs=ouch.

I took a bit of a tumble down the stairs today. Long flight of stairs too, the height difference between the first and ground floors is about 25-30 feet on that particular stairwell (the U of C med school was basically made of three buildings patched together, and sometimes they don't quite fit perfectly, so in some places, the stairwells have more stairs than others), but fortunately, I only had to drop half that distance.

'Course, it probably would have been a little easier if I had just dropped, instead of having to roll my way down the stairs, slamming rather undignified into the brick wall on the opposite end of the first landing.

So, just so you know, the next time you watch a movie where one of stuntmen has to roll down a flight of stairs; that hurts.

Would've been nice if they had carpeted stairwells, but nooooo, they had to have these hard linoleum tiles. 'Course, you can't have carpeting in a hospital. That's bad. But still....

Did I mention ouch?