UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

And not a moment too soon. A Newsweek article explores the return of intellect and reason to the White House after the shallow anti-intellectualism that has plagued our nation for (at least) eight years.

This may be the number-one reason I supported Obama as vigorously as I did. He is a thinker. He’s curious. He wants to know the truth, and he’s not afraid to question and challenge — or to be questioned and challenged himself. It’s about time!

And now… please… let’s put a few anti-intellectual ideas to bed:

1. Earth is not 6000 years old. We can be reasonably certain through carbon dating and other scientifically validated methods that it is approximately 4.5 billion years old.

2. Evolution is a fact. We can observe it — and we have — at the microscopic level (i.e. antibiotic-resistant bacteria) and in other species with short lifespans (like some insects), and it is a logically consistent explanation for the diversity of life we see on Earth today. Why can’t we witness it happening at the macro level, like in humans? See point number 1. The slice of Earth’s lifespan that your own represents is smaller than the division between Al Franken and Norm Coleman in this year’s Senate race. It’s the same reason we don’t see stalactites grow.

3. Global warming is caused by human activity. Sure, the overall temperature of the planet has fluctuated over the millennia, but the rate of increase in the last 150 years (coinciding with industrialization) is unprecedented.

4. Science is the quest for knowledge and understanding. It is a good thing that everyone should study. It does not preclude religious belief; the two are not mutually exclusive. You do not need to reject science to have faith, and you do not have to reject faith to believe in science. But faith, by definition, cannot be proven, and science can — in fact, that’s what makes it science, and it’s given us just about everything we have in the modern world.

Ahh… it feels good! Brains are back! Now, let’s stop arguing the validity of things we know to be true, and start doing something about them!

Yes, according to the Huffington Post, the vote totals between Norm Coleman and Al Franken are now separated by only 236 (although for some reason the StarTribune says 238), out of 2,860,224 votes cast. That’s a difference of 0.0083%. It’s not razor-thin, it’s atom-thin. I was going to draw a graph representing that slice of the pie, but if the “slice” were only one pixel wide, the chart would have a diameter of 53 inches. You’d need one of the largest commercially available plasma TVs just to look at it (and the top and bottom would still be cut off), and the “slice” would still be only about the thickness of your fingernail.

State law would require a recount even if the difference were as large as 14,301 votes, yet Coleman is still declaring himself the victor and calling on Franken to concede.

No way! I absolutely do not want a protracted 2000-style legal battle, but this is simply too close and it’s not even up to Franken whether or not the recount happens. Cool it, Norm!

It’s not as if, in this age, anyone was left by Wednesday morning not knowing who had won the election, so it was really just a pissing contest between the country’s newspapers to see who could use the largest point size. I think the Minneapolis StarTribune won.

The leaves in my neighborhood have been surprisingly tenacious this year, some not even turning until last week, much less falling off the trees, but the combination of wind and rain over the last 24 hours has finally begun to win the battle. The backyard is a big wet mess of nasty right now. Maybe it’ll snow before it dries up and I can just pretend the leaves don’t exist, instead of having to rake them. (Oh, who am I kidding… I just need to find a way to ensure that I’m not the one doing the raking.)

Update, the next morning: It’s snowing.

I talked on election night about how the electoral college is skewed* towards the less populous states, and I’ve also been talking about how the red state/blue state map doesn’t accurately reflect the will of the people, both because of the winner-takes-all nature of the state-by-state distribution of the electoral votes, and also because most of the population of the country lives in concentrated areas.

Well there’s a great site that takes this a step further and actually proves it with some fancy-pants technology that can distort the map so that area corresponds to population. Here, then, is the site’s ultimate modified red-and-blue map, giving a better sense of just how “blue” or “red” or “purple” the country really is, overall…

*You may notice discrepancies between my numbers and the New York Times. I certainly defer to the “newspaper of record” on this. They are using the number of eligible voters in each state; I was using the total state population. Different numbers, and not in a trivial way, but the point, and the relative state-to-state variations, remain the same.