Bad Neurons

Every few nights, sometimes more often, the History Channel, of all outlets, will throw on some tripe about UFOs. That's right kids, flying saucers. After suffering through hours of this material, I've decided that this is a nation of suckers. PT Barnum was right, except in one thing...apparently the suckers are born exclusively in the continental United States. The dumbshit per capita factor here is through the roof. I'm pretty sure that all you need to sell any sizeable minority on the validity of an idea, no matter how half-baked, is some nice graphics and a serious sounding voiceover artist. Have NONE of you halfwits ever seriously tried to apply simple critical thinking? Of course not. This is a nation where the name "skeptic" is supposed to be worn in shame.

I'm not ashamed of it. If you tell me you have a ghost in your house, I'm interested, but yeah, I'm skeptical. Why shouldn't I be? My own brain misfires enough that I couldn't honestly say whether one of the last twenty conversations I had with other people really wasn't with a figment of my imagination. How the hell would I know? You might, instead of having seen an actual ghost, be in the throes of a psychotic break. I know, with a reasonable degree of certainty, that people do indeed have psychotic episodes. I've even been in the room with someone who was having one. Ghosts...well, there just doesn't seem to be any hard evidence, does there? And when some Birkenstock-wearing-crystal-waving-full-trance-channeling person tells me that I have to BELIEVE before I see, pardon me if my skepticism becomes full blown cynicism.

Now there are some people out there who are thinking the dreaded "r" word. You've got it. I'm a reductionist as well, a heretic of the first order against the New Age and all that bullshit. Why? Because seeking holistic answers was how we got the Dark Ages, and because the Enlightenment came when we realized that we weren't as smart as we thought we were. Reductionists, enlightenment thinkers, asked questions of nature with experiments where their forbearers talked of "humors" and tried to solve real problems in pointless logical syllogisms. Medieval thinking kowtows to Authority. Enlightenment thinking is only corrected by Nature itself (and often brutally...if you're famous in one generation, you'll probably be looked on as a dolt by the next...such is life).

Reductionism, and now synthesis, are the lifeblood of science, and because of science, you're looking at this tirade on the Internet. It wasn't faith healing or crystal power that spawned DARPAnet, that little node-creature that has grown into the world wide web. Nope. That was science. Reductionism. Experimentation. All of those things that make the American Simpleton's head hurt. (By the way, how does it feel to be the next slave class, you bunch of mindless fucks?)

OK kids...here's a clever toy from the skeptic's toolkit. It is called Occam's Razor. The chapter and verse is "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything." Very simple, very easy. Basically, the upshot is that the simpler your explanation of a given event is, the better your chances of being right. Keep this in mind, and bear in mind that people lie to you for all kinds of reasons, and you might stand a chance of not kneeling before the new aristocracy. Now let's apply old Occam's rule of thumb to one of those classic cases of the paranormal: the Roswell Incident.

Fact 1: Something crashed in a remote bit of New Mexico desert on or about July 3, 1947.

Fact 2: The military generally bullied civilians and onlookers and gathered up all the bits they could lay hands on.

Fact 3: The government was clearly engaged in some sort of either witting or unwitting cover up of the incident.

Fact 4: World War II had just ended, and the battle lines of the Cold War were being drawn.

Fact 5: The 509th Bomber Wing, from which came the Enola Gay, was stationed in New Mexico.

Fact 6: The United States was flying top secret (and illegal under international law) reconnaissance balloons over the Soviet Union, and Roswell was a primary recovery area for those vehicles.

Fact 7: The United States was also working on high-altitude survival systems for pilots, as a result of bitter experience in WWII. These programs were top secret.

Fact 8: The military's culture of secrecy was (and still is) completely gonzo out of control. In late 1946, the Venona Code, used by Soviet operatives in the United States, has been broken, and red fever is beginning to take root in the upper echelons of the government and military as it is made clear just how compromised many of our programs were in the early to mid 1940's, including the Manhattan Project.

So let's take a look at the hypothesis: An alien spacecraft (presumably interstellar, as no signs of intelligent life exist within our own solar system) crashes, for no readily apparent reason, on a farm in New Mexico. The government seizes it and bullies the civilians into not talking about it. They use this newfound leap in technology to build, among other things, the F-117 stealth fighter and the B-2 stealth bomber (a cause of many UFO sightings itself).

Now for the amusing part, debunking. Both of these "revolutionary" aircraft were actually an evolution of an idea whose roots are in Nazi Germany, of very terrestrial origin. One of the reasons that the British Spitfires had so much success in staving off the Luftwaffe bombers was because of radar. Radar enabled controllers to vector fighters into oncoming bomber formations. To counter this, the Nazis tinkered with all kinds of low-signature shapes, and lo and behold, they came up with, you guessed it, a flying wing.

So no aliens there. We already had jet technology in 1947, as well as computers, of a sort. So what "amazing advances" were made due to this technological boon? Bumpkis. Diddly. Nothing at all. Even the digital computing revolution, probably the most sweeping innovation of our time, came from ideas that can be traced far back in history, at least to Charles Babbage in the time of Queen Victoria. As for aerospace advances, all you have to do is pick up where the Germans and the Japanese left off with their jet technology, and you'll see the heritage of early US jet aircraft. So if the US government nabbed a UFO, they got remarkably little information out of it.

Even assuming such a premise, you would have to admit that the research effort to "crack" the alien technology would span many disciplines. Engineers, metallurgists, biologists, anthropologists, physicists...the list just goes on and on. A truly alien artifact would have profound implications in all these fields. A really professional research effort on such a thing would bring together a collection of scientists at least as big as the Manhattan Project, and that many scientists together are a serious security problem. We're gregarious by nature. Sharing information is one of the ways that breakthroughs are made. Keeping such an effort secret would be nigh impossible, as the US learned during the effort to build the bomb. The Russians weren't the only ones who heard reports of the progress of that development. Nazis also had their ears to the ground, and were well informed of Manhattan's aims, if not its status.

So I have my own thoughts. Posit a B-29, fully loaded and armed with an atomic payload at the ready in case the USSR tried any hanky-panky, or perhaps just on an operational drill. We know these existed in the 509th Bomb Group. The 29 hits a nasty thunderstorm (they get big ones out there in the high desert summer), and has issues. We also know that the safety record of those birds was nowhere near that of the B-52. The bomber goes down.

Now anyone who saw the wreckage of United Flight 93 on 9/11/2001 will admit that a very large aircraft can be reduced to surprisingly little wreckage. The B-29 was tiny compared to a Boeing 757, and of much lighter construction. It isn't any particular surprise that an untrained observer, upon seeing the shattered aluminum of the wreck, would be mystified, particularly if the plane came in at a high angle to the ground. Equally understandable would be the military's need to get every piece of that aircraft back.

Remember, this thing was carrying an atomic bomb. That's a whole chunk of nasty sitting right in the middle of a field. Not only does Uncle Sam not want old Farmer Whatshisname to die of radiation sickess, the kind Uncle would rather nobody knew about this little mishap, especially the Soviets, who could make it tough in the media for our dear Uncle. Third, imagine the lawsuit (not wholly unknown in 1947) that Farmer Whatshisname would have. Now put yourself in the shoes of the public relations officer. When pimply-faced teen Resident X, who spends his days reading Amazing Stories, asks you if it was a flying saucer, what should you do?

Flying saucer mania was all over the country. Fed by stories from WWII pilots and others, they were the ever-present OTHER we could pin our fears on now that the Nazis and the Japanese were gone, and the Soviets weren't quite our enemies yet. As that public information officer, the best thing you could possibly do is to deny, vociferously, that there had been a UFO crash. Deny it loudly in front of as many people as you can scrape together. Better yet, deny it on radio, once and once only, and then deny denying it. The stories will take care of themselves, and like Paul Bunyan, people will eventually remember themselves meeting little green men and sharing tea with them.

Too trite for you? Too farfetched? It sure is simpler than assuming the existence of beings clever enough to cross the void of interstellar space, and then crash in the desert in some misguided Evil Knevil stunt. Or maybe they collided with a weather balloon? My scenario counts on elements we know existed at the time, aircraft, atomic bombs, and human nature.

For the fellow skeptics among you, here are three similar incidents that the US military actually admits. Note that two actually involved bombers in the air. Go team. (This, by the way, for you paranormal investigator Agent Mulder wannabees, is what one could call corroborative evidence, and yes, it is anecdotal, but thank your god or your whatever for that.)

11 APRIL 1950: Shortly after departing Kirtland Air Force Base (AFB) in New Mexico, a U.S. B-29 bomber carrying a nuclear bomb crashed into a mountain. The bomb was destroyed but its nuclear capsule with the fissile materials, which was also on board the aircraft, had not been inserted for safety reasons.

27 JULY 1956: During a routine deployment to England, a U.S. B-47 bomber skidded and slid off a runway at Lakenheath Royal Air Force (RAF) Base. The plane burst into flames and crashed into a nuclear bomb storage igloo in which there were three Mark 6 nuclear bombs. The bombs did not explode.

21 JANUARY 1968: A U.S. B-52G nuclear bomber crashed on the ice seven miles west of Thule Air Base in northern Greenland. The aircraft was on an airborne alert flight and carried four B-28 thermonuclear bombs. Upon impact with the ice the bomber exploded and all four nuclear bombs were destroyed, scattering radioactive materials over a large area.

The Roswell Story isn't discomforting because it is a story about your government lying to you about UFOs. It is frightening because it is a story about your government covering up an incident of a top secret, possibly nuclear nature, so well that the conspiracy nuts are still digging for the wrong thing. UFOs have been a positive boon for Air Force test programs. Keep in mind that when the F-117 stealth fighter was finally unveiled to we the people, the number of UFO sightings near Nellis AFB dropped to near zero, at least until the next prototype started test flights. Doesn't that suggest anything to you?

Get skeptical, America. Get smart. Otherwise you might just elect a president who goes to war under false pretenses without the vaguest clue of how to bring the occupation to a conclusion.

Oh crap...never mind... Keep your crystals and your tarot cards America, and prepare to stretch your necks and bare your backs for the next ruling class. The Dark Ages are back upon us with Jihad and Crusade. I suppose the Inquisition will crank up again soon...oh, wait a minute, Guantanamo Bay, anyone?

HOLY CRAP! I heard yesterday that if a certain volcano explodes in the Canary Islands, a three thousand foot wall of water will snuff out all life on the east coast of the U.S. Or did I?

I know that was the thrust of the report, and I hope that this usually reliable news source (NPR) just misspoke, or that I misheard. It only took me a few minutes with Excel and some very rudimentary knowledge of physics to figure out that the wall of water was going to be considerably smaller than three thousand feet high unless the volcano was dropping from space at several hundred miles per second. In fact, the actual estimates are a hundred and fifty feet, which is still an insanely large tsunami, but a full order of magnitude and then some smaller than the report suggested.

I wrote NPR, fuming over the mistake in their report or in my ears, but as I did, I realized that it was just part of a pattern in the media. Science stories are often distorted and misreported. I can't count the number of times that I've heard fantastic whoppers like the "gene for aggression" found in prisoners. The recent snakehead fish insanity in the Potomac River is another good example.

In case you have missed the story, there are now northern snakehead fish in the river, probably refugees from an aquarium, as they are native to China. Now the Maryland DNR is up in arms about the introduction of a nonnative predator to the ecosystem. The press has followed suit, blathering on about it, but I wonder if one intrepid reporter has worked out that the DNR itself made a few introductions. No, not the snakeheads, but walleye and some damn fish called a tiger muskellunge. Both of these are nonnative predatory fish. The difference is that they are considered tasty gamefish.

So the real story is this; there is a new predatory nonnative fish in the Potomac watershed and DNR expects that it will take hold. While it may present hazards to the balance of the ecosystem that is in place, it is important to realize that the natural ecosystem, as seen by John Smith, is long gone, and that many new species have been introduced, such as the walleye and the muskellunge. These two fish species were, in fact, introduced by DNR (the very people now worried about the snakehead fish) to improve sportfishing.

Kinda takes the wind out the snakehead's sails, doesn't it? But that is the actual, plain, unvarnished, unadulterated truth. The snakehead incursion will probably have an effect on the ecosystem. How large an effect, no one knows...introducing new species is risky for anyone, including the DNR.

The point is this; if the story is political or social, the press does a fair job of trying to ferret out the facts. When it comes to science, they just nod and report what they think they've heard, which can be quite a distance from what the scientist actually said at the press conference. In this increasingly technological age, we need better coverage of the sciences. Stupendous, earth-shaking discoveries require rigorous skepticism, not only from the scientific community, but from the press as well.

Scientists like to say that the more outrageous the claim is, the better the proof supporting it must be. The press must learn a similar mantra, the bigger the story, the more you have to investigate it, even if that means breaking out the high-school physics book.

Talk about noble causes gone awry. I agree with the premise that no creature should be made to suffer needlessly. That's fine and groovy and all. I am firmly opposed to, for instance, using specially bred rabbits for the screening of cosmetics for their potential to irritate human skin. I believe that we all deserve the same thing in the end, humane treatment during life, and a quick, hopefully painless, death. However, I cannot forget some simple facts of life.

FACT 1: No matter what you're eating you are ending life, unless you are a photosynthesizing plankton.

Celery is alive, until one cuts it, and puts it as a rather comical stirrer in one's bloody mary. It is just as alive as a cow, or you, or me. The fact that it is not sensate, in the ordinary understanding of the word, does not make it any less alive. As soon as you cut the celery, you have ended that life. For that matter, every time you breathe, millions of tiny lives are extinguished. I'll only consider the bacterial lives here, because no one is quite sure what to make of viruses yet. Just by being alive, you are a mass murderer.

Don't feel too bad about it. This is the condition of life. When you die, assuming you are not planning to carbonize yourself, the gastric bacteria that you have been slaying by the billions per day will have their collective revenge upon you by consuming your innards and flesh as it decays. Human beings are apex predators.

Does that mean we should gorge ourselves on the flesh of animals 24/7? Hell no. Atkins aside, you're not built for that sort of craziness. If you want to be a vegan, go ahead and be a vegan, what do I care? I know that the human body isn't built for that lifestyle either, but vegans, keep in mind that you're killers too. In the process of eating and surviving, there is no moral high ground.

FACT 2: You can now protest the use of animals in medical research for 50 years longer than you could have in the middle ages.

In a medicine-free society, I would be dead. I have had at least two violent episodes of "strep throat". This disorder is caused by a tiny little bacterium that can and does kill thousands of people every year, even in the presence of antibiotics. Modern antibiotics, even penicillin, have been thoroughly tested on animals before they were put to human use. Very few people over the age of 30 can say that modern medicine has never (at least potentially) saved their life.

There is an unfounded opinion out there that we can now use computer simulations, cell cultures, and other surrogates in place of animal testing. In fact, the medical community uses these all the time. The problem is that we don't know enough to make them particularly applicable, and an animal model is necessary at some point. Animal models do not match 1:1 with human testing, but they are a hell of a lot closer than a few cells in culture, or a heuristic algorithm.

The alternative is clear; going directly to human testing. I'm a biologist, and that idea makes me profoundly nervous, because I know exactly who would be lined up as test subjects. You do too, though you don't want to think about it; the poor, the indigent, the masses of the third world. These would be Merck's new mice. Can you say Tuskeegee? I prefer mice, thanks.

FACT 3: Most human beings in this world do not enjoy basic human rights.

Frankly, I think the animal rights movement is a cop-out on the infinitely more pressing question of human rights. It is simply easier for a pampered people who have never known real hunger and real oppression to get worked up about the state euthanizing a stray puppy than it is for those same people to care about the third-world wage-slaves upon whom they depend for their clothing and their lifestyle.

Trying to change the former is an easy thing. Go down to your local animal shelter, wave signs and chant slogans. To fix the latter, you have to stop wearing Nike shoes, driving Ford cars, and give up a whole range of products that we greedy, self-centered Americans love. Fighting a serious crusade against animal use only demands that you force your particular definitions of morality on your fellow human beings (a favorite Western European pastime anyhow). Doing away with, say, human trafficking and peonage, means ACTUAL PERSONAL SACRIFICE.

Last words

I could go on, but there seems little point. You can't convince the faithful. I used to think of PETA as a sort of odd collection of overly kindhearted but muddle-headed people, until someone brought to my attention that PETA considers chicken farms the moral equivalents of the Nazi concentration camps. That comparison isn't just insulting to the Jews and the Roma, or to the others who bore the brunt of Nazi hatred. It is insulting to all of us.

Oh and by the way PETA people, I don't own my cats. They agree to live with me so long as I feed them, brush them, clean their boxes, and generally do what they tell me to do. Just who is subservient to whom?

OK, all you good Christian children out there KNOW FOR SURE that the Bible tells you that homosexuality is wrong, right? Can anyone point out the specific verse that forbids this act? Anyone but me? I'm constantly amazed at how stunningly unaware most Christians are of their own religion. How is it that an avowed enemy of nonsense like myself ends up knowing more about the Bible than most church-going Christians?

If you didn't know that the first and only overt reference to homosexuality in the entire King James Bible occurs in Leviticus, then you've no business at all discussing the appropriateness of a gay bishop, or any other Christian Orthodoxy vs Homosexuality issue. And I quote that oft misquoted, badly-mangled-by-translation-through-four-languages moldy-ass-old-book:

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:13

Yep, that's right. It's right in there with prohibitions on eating shellfish and pork. Oh, by the way, if you work on a Saturday (that's the actual Sabbath, by the way), you're just asking to be put to death as well, according to Leviticus.

Of course some of you are going to bring up the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. But remember the story. The men of Sodom want to "know" God. Now it's fairly safe to assume that those men meant to bend God (both or more of him, in this case) over and give him a really good knowing from behind. Lot, our hero in this little escapade, tries to placate the nasty crowd by offering up his virgin daughters.

This story isn't about inappropriate sex per se. It's about trying to bang God himself (himselves?). The Big Deity is, as one might expect, more than a little testy about the attempted gang rape. He famously levels Sodom and Gomorrah. Who wouldn't? The sin isn't anything to do with buggery. It's about men trying to take something from God by force. (Here's a test. Do you think it would have made any difference if God showed up as women? Would God have just submitted then?)

Lot comes out smelling like a rose (more or less) even though he just tried to throw his own flesh and blood to that crowd. This, we're told, makes him holy. Why? That's easy: the same reason that we find that it isn't OK to rape someone who is betrothed.

But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die: Deuteronomy 22:25

Focus your attention on the word betrothed. In the traditional parlance of the time (and until very recently) a betrothed woman was someone else's property (as was a married one, by the way) and her virginity was important, a commodity even. The sin of rape is against the owner of the property, her father, according to Deuteronomy, not the property itself. Lot "owned" his daughters as surely as the father owns the bride-to-be in question. Therefore, those virgin daughters were his to give.

Note the other logical possibility here, as well. If there is a damsel in the field, it is OK to rape her, since she doesn't belong to anyone except her father, and he has yet to barter her virginity away. Isn't that a cheery concept? Actually, I think you have to marry her or something to make the whole thing legit, but the point stands. Women, in the Old Testament, are regarded as having the same intrinsic value and rights as cows or sheep or chickens.

What's my point? Times have changed, kids. You can no longer own other human beings. Even in the benighted times of the Puritan invasion of New England, Lot's behavior would have broken social mores, and probably gotten him lynched. What's more, when did you last have shellfish? Bacon? Clams casino (that's a trifecta...meat and butter, shellfish and pork!) We simply don't follow the rules of the Old Testament much anymore. They're a bit too barbaric, what with all the burnt offerings, slavery, rape, and various forms of God-sanctioned murder.

Our social norms and mores have evolved because the ones that shepherds in the wilderness can adhere to do not work very well in city life. You can't go around yanking peoples' teeth and eyes out on a regular basis, and just how does one work out the equivalent value of oxen and automobiles? Trying to mete out frontier justice in a world that is no longer a frontier is senseless and counterproductive. All you'd have in the end is a bunch of one-eyed no-toothed very pissed off people.

You Christians have managed to abandon the nonsensical food restrictions of the Old Testament. You've managed to get past the ideas about tribal genocide, patricide, fratricide, and infanticide. Your supposed Messiah came with a message of universal forgiveness and acceptance, yet you Christians are still stuck on who gets to have sex with whom and in which orifice.

There is a rational choice to be made here. You can either admit that those Old Testament restrictions in Leviticus are outmoded (the adulterers among you may take note that this is also a death penalty offense) relics of a simple and brutal herder-gatherer people, or you can swallow that whole pill and actually try to live up to it. Pick a path, either path, just make up your minds.

Here come the people saying things like "the Devil knows Scripture, too." Big deal. If it helps you make sense of the world to call me the devil, or the devil's agent, go right ahead. Sticks and stones and all that rot. I call you Christians a bunch of medieval barbarians all the time, so I probably have it coming. The truth is you've got some major contradictions you're going to need to work out. Pouting and calling the other kid "faggot" isn't really getting you as far as it used to when your were eight. Grow up. Learn to forgive like your incarnation taught you. Learn to live in the 21st century.

The Shrub Administration is on about radiological weapons again. Radiological weapons? Big freaking deal. I'm a smoker, bub. On my list of fears, radiological weapons are right up there with being mauled by a harp seal pup. I'm already resigned to dying of lung cancer. What's a radiological weapon going to do but up my chances by a few percentage points? So when these cats in their bad blue Republican suits start yammering about radiological weapons, I go from bored to comatose.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an idiot. A real live nuclear weapon, fission or fusion, scares the bejesus out of me. But I have a few brain cells, and a degree in biology, and I understand the concept of dilution, so a conventional explosive wrapped in radioactive material just isn't that scary. Bomb goes foom, and radioactive shit gets scattered all over hell and creation, which is the intrinsic problem with the device to begin with. If it's really effective at scattering crap all over, say, greater DC Metro, then the concentration of the crap is so minute that you could hardly distinguish it from background radiation.

NEWS FLASH: You're surrounded by radioactive materials all the time! A fair chunk of the carbon that is you is Carbon-14, an UNSTABLE RADIOATCTIVE ISOTOPE!!! My GOD, the horror. Every time you aren't in a lead-shielded bomb shelter, the sun is pelting you with visible light (radiation), ultraviolet light (radiation), xrays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays (all radiation) among many other forms of radiation.

The reason, gentle reader, that atomic weapons are so horrifying, apart from their ridiculously huge and intense initial blast, is that they create all kinds of novel forms of radioactive atoms in their wake. Many of these guys have half-lives (the time it takes half of the isotope to decay) of hours or days, and are intensely radioactive (read lethal). As a matter of fact, the more intense the radiation of an isotope, the faster it decays. It's an absolutely linear relationship. Add to that the fact that nukes make tons and tons of radioactive junk, and you have one horrifying weapon.

You COULD build a very scary dirty bomb using such fast-decaying isotopes that are extremely radioactive. There are, however, a few minor drawbacks to this plan. First, if the half-life is in the realm of hours or days, you have very little time to assemble and then use the bomb before it becomes just a regular old nonradioactive bomb surrounded by a bunch of useless crap. Secondly, you'll probably need several shifts of expendable bomb-builders, because you can't be that close to that hot a radiation source for any length of time without croaking. Remember, all the lethal radiation necessary to generate serious casualties for, say, a ten square mile area is packed into that little space of the bomb. Being near the bomb means that you are going to become ill in only a few minutes, and you're going to die in an hour, tops. Finally, you have to be able to produce those fast-decaying isotopes. You can't mine them; because they decay so fast you won't find them in nature. You actually have to bombard common isotopes with neutrons in, say, the blast from a nuclear weapon.

A second, more elegant type of bomb would actually produce those fast-decaying isotopes as it exploded. What do you have there? You guessed it, an actual nuclear bomb, optimized, as it were, for the production of very nasty things. These would indeed be terrifying weapons, but the technical requirements for making such a weapon are very high. Higher than building a simple fission bomb like the Hiroshima bomb.

So to make an effective dirty bomb, you need to have an effective nuclear weapons program. Doesn't sound like Al Quieda, does it? Anything these medieval marvels could scrape together would be a major nuisance, and might mean that some government contractor gets a lucrative cleanup and remediation contract that spans a decade. But it would produce limited, if any, casualties and frankly just isn't that scary.

Our government now recommends creating a "safe room" in your house to protect against chemical, biological and radiological attack. This room is apparently to be created using plastic sheeting and "the Handyman's Secret Weapon" (to quote Red Green), duct tape. A couple of people have asked me, being the resident science guy at work, if this is a good idea. Of course it's a good idea. Working with duct tape is ALWAYS a good idea.

Seriously, the answer is yes and no. Yes, it will provide you with a moderate level of protection against some (but not all) types of chemical attacks. This is, as one of my coworkers pointed out, providing that you're bright enough to also close off the heating/air conditioning ducts into your safe room. If the Grand Union of Freaking Nut-Jobs Everywhere (GUFNJE) mustard gases your hometown, such measures will actually protect you pretty well. Even if they use a nerve agent like sarin, you're much more likely to survive the attack inside your safe room than outside.

It's a simple concentration game, really. There is no way you're going to really make your room airtight. Nor would you really want to do so, unless you have a handy supply of compressed oxygen or a really big room, because you and your family and your cats are going to use up the free oxygen in your living room quite rapidly. Worse, every exhalation releases carbon dioxide. This is not a good thing to breathe in at high levels. Basically in an airtight room, you'll die well before those three days are gone.

If you're in a slowly leaking envelope, you have the advantage of keeping the concentration of chemical or biological or radiological agent relatively low when compared to the outside. The "safe room" limits your exposure. It doesn't prevent exposure. With most chemical or radiological agents, this is enough.

On the other hand, it isn't nearly enough protection from biological agents. Why? Simple. It takes hundreds of billions of molecules of mustard gas to kill you, but it only takes a single anthrax spore. The spore will germinate, and then it will multiply exponentially. You buy yourself time, theoretically, but not any real safety. Worse yet, if GUFNJE dusts your town with weaponized anthrax spores, you won't be able to leave your shelter anyhow without being exposed to the agent. Everyone will eventually (sooner rather than later, hopefully) have to have massive doses of Cipro or the high-test antibiotic of the month.

The more horrible reality, of course, is that you won't even know when you're exposed to anthrax spores or any other biological agent. The concentration of weaponized spores necessary to cause mass infections is too low to see as a "white dust" or powder. GUFNJE will simply dust the town at night from a rented civilian aircraft, and no one will know the difference until people actually start getting sick. At that point, it's too late with anthrax. The bacteria are busy dumping toxins into your body which will kill you, even if antibiotics kill the bacteria. Of course, scientists are frantically working on an antitoxin...

So YES. If it's a chemical or radiological attack, you're in good shape if you have your safe room; provided that your local government or someone has a plan for getting everyone out eventually. And NO, if bioweapons are used, you may as well say screw the safe room and track-ass right down to your local hospital. You really want to be one of the first to get treatment, by the way, because under a mass bioweapon attack, our medical infrastructure will collapse in short order.

I'm not going to do it. The cats would just shred the damn thing anyhow. I refuse to let a bunch of people who don't even study math (the Madrasa - "educated" terrorists, not the Iraqis) frighten me into radically changing my life. If I die, so be it.

It has taken me a good long while to calm down enough to rationally think about this question. I was truly surprised and amazed that the Supreme Court overturned Texas' law concerning sodomy. I counted this as a victory for all who would be free, whether they wish to indulge or not. I was, therefore, appalled when almost immediately following the decision, certain far-right parties began to float the idea of a constitutional ban on gay marriage.

You see, I'm a pretty average straight white guy. I have fairly narrow, traditional tastes when it comes to sexuality. And having been through a divorce, I fail to see why anyone would want to get married at all. Homosexual sex of any kind has a bit of a "Yuck" factor, as far as I'm concerned. I must mention, however, that I just don't understand the hatred so many heterosexual men have for homosexual men. I always figured that the more of them, the better; less competition, you see...and I could use the help.

But that's just it, isn't it? My tastes aren't your tastes, nor should they be. I don't particularly care for Chunky Monkey ice cream either, but who really cares? I'm only one person, only able to judge what I want from life. Why should I want my predilections to rule the masses?

So long as you doing your thing doesn't actively harm me, I shouldn't have anything to say about it. I just plain old don't care what crazy sex acts happen in your bedroom (or on the kitchen table for that matter), so long as everyone involved consents to being involved and it doesn't involve children (because they, by definition cannot consent) or animals(same as kids...that's scary). It is none of my business. As long as I'm not one of the people directly involved, why should I care?

I figure this works for pretty much all behaviors, not just sex, and including in who you decide to marry. I wouldn't want to marry a man, but then again, I wouldn't want to marry another woman either. I only need to be taught a lesson once.

A conglomeration of very strange folk I refer to as the Right have, however, definite opinions on what should go on in your bedroom, preferably in the missionary position. (Sorry, couldn't help but poke fun...they'd be so amusing if they weren't pure evil.) The Right argues from MORALITY, as distinguished from morality. You see, in my mind, as well as in the minds of our Founding Fathers, morality is a code of behavior that is good for society as a whole and for individuals within that society in particular. MORALITY, on the other hand, comes out of one of various ancient religious texts, all of which are, of course, usually at odds with one another on any salient point. To further muddy the waters of MORALITY, it gets to be interpreted by priests, human beings with a political agenda. Witness the Bible's (King James Version) prohibition against homosexuality:

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. - Leviticus 20:13

This is the one and only specific prohibition against homosexuality in the bible, folks. I've searched the whole rambling thing for another, and can't find it.(1) Morever, does it strike anyone else from this passage that lesbians come off scot-free? Note that there has to be at least two men involved in this formulation. If you're a dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist, you're going to have to accept that lesbians are apparently OK in the eyes of your Lord God.

The state, however ineptly, should try to function from morality (the cause of the common good) rather than MORALITY. In fact, in the old Hobbes/Locke formulation that so influenced our Founding Fathers, the state's ONLY purpose is this common good, without which, the social compact (read contract) between Government and Governed, is null and void. The use of heroin isn't illegal just because it is "wrong" or even because of a high "Yuck" factor. It is banned because the social costs of the behavior are demonstrably higher than the costs we as a society are willing to bear. If one makes arguments about legislating essentially moral choices, they must be based either on violation of individual rights, or social cost.

Obviously a gay marriage causes no violation of rights. Only two people are concerned, and they've both consented to what is essentially a civil legal contract. So long as both are over the age of consent, no rights are violated.
So what other "common good" argument could be mustered?

Now it seems disingenuous, to say the least, for the Right to argue that there is a social cost to gay marriage. Aren't these the same people who have been telling us that marriage is the way out of poverty and despair? If marriage is an intrinsically stabilizing force, where is the harm in stabilizing gay couples as well as straight ones? It's not like these people are going to say "Well, I'm gay, but I'd better find a (man/woman) to marry!" Without the recourse of marriage, they're just going to "live in sin."(2)

Passing any law against gay marriage is a serious breach of morality and the public trust. Laws are meant to apply to everyone equally. Denying some couples certain legal standings and protections based only on their sexual orientation (which can no longer be held as criminal, as determined by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003) is a clear violation of that principle.

I guess you could brand me as a liberal. In these dark times, I suppose I am. But this is a largely conservative, fringing on libertarian argument. Its base is that the government shouldn't be making laws that do not serve the public good. The only compelling reason to ban gay marriage is that certain people find it offensive. If our government is to dictate matters of fashion and personal taste, can we have a constitutional ban on Old Navy advertisements too?

Footnotes

1. I know that some of you Christian types are going to whine about Sodom. But here's the hypothetical you should pose about that story. Instead of showing up as (multiple) men, God shows up as (multiple) women. Do you think that God have been OK with being gang-raped? Do you really think the Lord God of Hosts incarnations would spread it for the crowd? If so, did the Lord God incarnations "ask for it"? What, indeed were the Lord God incarnations wearing at the time of the attempted rape?

If your answer to this hypothetical is "yes" then I can't help you. Perhaps a competent psychotherapist can, but I can't. Don't worry about the costs; given your attitudes towards women, you'll probably get a free one during your incarceration for rape.

If you answered "no", or if the hypothetical made you feel slightly nauseous, or say the word "blasphemy" at least once, then this story is about crossing a line that has nothing to do with sexual identity or orientation. It is about the Sodomites wishing to "know" God just a little too well, without God's consent. No wonder He leveled the place. I'd be pissed too.

2. Note, however, that living in sin does not have a legally defensible definition. (I'm sure there are still blue laws against it, but there are blue laws against taking a bath on Sunday in at least one state.) Such laws, however, fall to little pieces when challenged (like the law against consensual sodomy).

Forget for a moment that Noah's Ark, were it built, couldn't carry two of every animal. Just set aside the problems of gathering those animals from seven continents and make the assumption that the thing could have worked, if built. After all, we are talking about a vessel that would be an order of magnitude bigger than anything built in the ancient world. The Bible tells us that the Ark was 450 feet long by 75 feet wide by 45 feet high. Those aren't actually bad dimensions for a relatively stable craft, provided one keeps the elephants down low. God, after all, did say that it should be built of gopher wood, a "lost" term that seems related to cypress, a dimensionally stable softwood used in boat building throughout history, or some even higher-technology lamination process. Sounds like He might have known what He was talking about, or did He?

In the 19th century, truly massive ships were built of wood. The Flying Cloud was 225 feet long with a beam of 41 feet and a depth of hold about 21 feet, and displaced 1781 metric tons. Reaching documented speeds of up to 20 knots, clippers like the Flying Cloud show us that massive, rugged structures can indeed be built out of wood, so what is wrong with Noah's Ark?

Let's take a look at the Ark's scantlings. Using tried and true rules of thumb for wooden boat construction (the same ones used for calculating the Flying Cloud's scantlings in historical fact, by the way), we can figure the following:
Plank Thickness: 6 inches
Transverse Frame Thickness: 8 inches
Transverse Frame Depth: 12 inches
Keel Cross-Sectional Area: 450 square inches
Deck Thickness (load bearing): 4 inches

These dimensions are simply the minimum necessary to keep the Ark from breaking apart. Now figuring that the Ark, for its intended purpose was probably fantastically bluff ended, you can estimate weights from a rounded box of the same size.
Plank Area: 70,000 square feet
Transverse Frame Length (total, 34 frames equally spaced): 5,355
Keel Length: 490
Deck Areas (3 internal, 1 external for 3 stories internally): 121,500

Now it is easy to estimate the volumes of materials necessary for construction.
Skin Structural Planking: 35,000 cubic feet
Transverse Frames: 3570 cubic feet
Keel: 1531 cubic feet
Decks: 40,500 cubic feet

Using a truly excellent nautical wood like mahogany, this structure (unladen) would weigh 2,579,232 pounds, or 1289 tons. If "gopher wood" were more like cedar or cypress, or was a light laminated wood, the structure would ONLY weigh 2,256,828 pounds, 1128 tons.

Clearly, there are some problems here. Noah probably didn't have access to modern epoxies. Therefore, any laminate would have to use mechanical fasteners like screws or nails. The problem with using screws or nails is that the strength of the "laminate" created by such processes is much lower than one would expect (the nails/screws being intrinsic stress points, and the sole progenitors of clamping force, a very inefficient sort of laminate indeed) and therefore the scantlings dimensions would have to be increased drastically (tripled or greater). Just felling the trees, boarding the wood, and moving it to the worksite would have taken Noah and sons several hundred years.

It gets worse, however. It takes around 60 man hours to finish a small, simple stitch and glue plywood boat 18 feet long. This is with pre-cut parts, and pre-finished materials. With cutting and planning necessary for a boat of raw wood, you're looking at more like 200 man hours, four weeks of hard work. The finished structure would weigh on the order of 300-400 pounds. Noah and sons had a much bigger challenge. A good rough estimate would be to simply use the surface area (the finished area) as a guide for man-hours.

In the case of the dinghy, the surface area is around 126 square feet, so if we don't care much what it looks like, we're talking about a man-hour per square foot. That works out to something like 216,000 man hours for the ark, or 4,500 hard 12 hour days for four men (remember, this is without going out to gather materials...felling trees, hauling them, etc). Working flat out at that rate for 12 years would just about do it, if it didn't kill you first.

Of course, actually planking the boat is the easiest part of the venture. First, you have to go out into the forest, and fell trees. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of lacking a chainsaw for tree cutting knows that felling a tree with a good steel axe and the sweat of your brow takes a good long time. We're talking about an hour of hard work just to drop a tree with a three foot girth. Noah and company did not have access to good hard steel axes. Theirs were either stone or bronze, and much less efficient. For every hour of chopping, Noah would have to spend ten minutes sharpening the tool.

Then Noah and sons would have to strip the small branches off, load that log into a cart, and tote it off. Noah and sons will then have to board the tree themselves using hand ripsaws and adzes. They'll then have to hand-plane the boards. Assuming they used traditional planking methods, the tree would result in a maximum of three or four good boards of about 20' length, 2' width and 6" thickness. It would take all day (probably more than a day, but we'll give them holy powers of construction). Even if all four were working like hyperactive mongeese on amphetamines, and they are going to need around 5,400 such boards, not counting waste, which can run as high as 40% in a boat-building project, so realistically, more like 7560 boards. In other words, they're going to spend 2,200 days just cutting trees and making boards. Keep in mind that those boards, as soon as they're dried, are going to start to dry rot...

Clearly, constructing the ark is going to take a long time. In kind of a "best case scenario", we've gotten old Noah and company up to 6,700 days already, over 18 years. With a construction project of this magnitude, things will go wrong. A single plank, properly scarfed to the right length, would be enormously heavy, something like 14,400 pounds. Working by hand with such an object would be purely impossible for four men, no matter how motivated, without mechanical intervention. Cranes, pulleys, levers, etc. all make the impossible possible, but at a cost. Unless Noah just happens to have some really big equipment stashed about his farm, he's going to have to build that too...and then there is the strongback, the jig on which the boat must be laid.

There is a reason that the world did not see massive ships like the Ark (or the Flying Cloud) until the Industrial Revolution. Even the mighty Spanish Galleons topped out at just under 200 feet. Anything else was just too difficult and too costly to build. Such projects take hundreds of men, enormous quantities of materials, and keen logistical planning. These things were simply not available to Noah.

It seems to me that there are two ways of looking at texts like the Bible. The first is as allegory and metaphor, the second is as the literal truth. If you're keen on the latter view, I think you just might be missing the boat on Noah and sons.

All right you Christians, I've had it. If I hear one more of you right wingers whine about how intolerant society is of Christianity, I'm going to have an aneurysm. You claim that society is against you? Bullshit. That's right wing propaganda and nothing else. You've got Christmas and Easter crap blaring on all frequencies for three months out of the year, what the hell else do you want?

The reason you people piss me off so much is because I know exactly what you want. You want a monoculture. You want Christianity to be the only religion followed throughout the world. You want all of the prohibitions you choose to obey in the Bible to be obeyed by everyone else, too. Basically, you want all of us to return to the Middle Ages.

Well I'm not going. See, unlike many agnostics, atheists, and Christians, I've actually read the Bible. I've even studied it. At first, I just wanted to know where you all were coming from. Now, I study it to find the multitude of logical weaknesses, outright falsehoods, and disturbing anecdotes. I study it because I realized somewhere along the line that organized religions in general, and the various branches of Christianity in particular, are my enemy and are the enemy of rationalism. I know your weaknesses.

I'm a biologist, which means that you don't even want to get me going on the so-called debate about evolution. It also means that I'm heavily invested in a particular worldview we like to call secular humanism. Secular humanism's view on religion is that they're all pretty much equal, except to their practitioners, and all founded on untestable hypotheses. We know very well that you can't argue about whether Genesis is the truth or not. The argument itself makes no sense, because the story can clearly be taken as allegory. So for the past sixty odd years, we've kept pretty quiet, out of the way. We've dealt with things that can be proven, and have kept out of the field of name-calling.

No more, suckers. Next time some nice man comes knocking at my door to convert me, I'm going to convert him. I'm going to calmly and rationally explain why his religion is a load of crap. Every chance I get in life, I am going to preach the truth. Not the truth as written in some ancient ass old book, but the truth as can be verified by careful experimentation. And let me tell you Christians something. I'm devoted to the cause.

Why? I figured a few things out. It doesn't really bother me that you are my enemy; everyone worth anything has at least a few enemies. What bothers me is that you and your ilk are dangerous. Don't think so? What about 9/11? Only religious belief can cause depravity on that scale. (Don't go on about the Nazis. They were Christians, for one, and for two Nazism became its own religion with its own loopy mythology. Without that core, the nuttiness would have fallen apart long before such horrors were spawned.) Or more to the point, what about the Oklahoma City bombing? Or perhaps that nice man down in Florida who thought that it was perfectly OK to shoot an abortion doctor? What about the Second Crusade?

You're all depraved and deluded. The symbol of your religion is a primitive electric chair. Doesn't that tell you anything? You worship some invisible guy who lives in the sky (but can't prove it, of course) who supposedly did a bunch of really shitty things to people like nuking Sodom and Gomorrah, flooding the entire world (yeah, right), and demanding that one of his chosen perform human sacrifice (doesn't matter that the sacrifice wasn't made, the demand was issued).

Just ask yourself, what kind of a creator would even care if you ate pork? What sort of being sets the machinery of the cosmos in motion and causes matter to become self aware on the one hand, and then proceeds to micromanage the sexual relations of particular individuals on the other? Even stranger, the being apparently feels the need for everyone to tell him what a great guy he is all the time.

Am I the only one who thinks that this God guy is maybe just a little... well... small? I mean, how petty can you get; sending your only begotten son to some piss ant corner of the Roman Empire to supposedly save all mankind? What about the Americas or Australia? Doesn't it mystify anyone that these guys never got the word? Isn't it telling that they aren't even mentioned? Just how small is this God of yours anyhow?

Your God, the supposed architect of all creation, doesn't even know how it works. Jonah, if swallowed by either a really huge fish or a whale, would have died like any other mortal man. A seed planted in the ground does not die before germinating a new plant. The world is definitely not flat. These are only a few of the amazing errors in the Bible, and don't even hit the high note, which in my opinion is the story of Noah and the Flood.

So here's the shot across your bow. I'm lurking out here. I know your weaknesses and I know your arguments. Just try sending another nice young man to my door, and I'll turn him to secular humanism. My words may take months, even years to work their magic, but they will burrow, they will harrow, and in the end, they will remain unanswerable. The poor victim's only choice will be to reject the teachings of youth out of hand and go find out about the world for himself. In other words, he will become a secular humanist.