One of the Republican candidates runs SETI@home. He’s now being mocked for being an alien hunter.

Seriously? You’re mocking someone for running a program that helps analyze radio signals? This isn’t some guy running around looking for UFOs and touting abduction stories. He’s donating spare computing power to a cause that’s unlikely to succeed, but hardly something to disparage.

Not only that, he’s been doing that since 1999, when the project started. While it hasn’t succeeded in locating an ETI signals, it was a demonstration of a large distributed computing project, the first of its kind. Now we have ones like Folding@home and Einstein@home, which do uncontroversial and useful work using the same or similar architecture as what was developed for SETI@home. They pioneered those kinds of projects, in other words.

I can see thinking SETI is a waste of time, but mocking someone for running SETI@home makes you a moron.

This bugs me for a few reasons:

1. This clearly wasn’t that important of a conversation, so why the hell is it taking place throughout your shopping trip?
2. If what you’re doing is interrupting to the point that you have to explain the mechanics of the object that interrupted you, isn’t that a sign of something?
3. I can’t remember the last time I spent more than 5 minutes on the phone outside of work.

Obviously, cell phone conversations in public places are becoming commonplace, but it was a little unnerving to hear her explain a self-checkout machine. I question the value of any phone conversation where that becomes necessary.

My attempt to research and make a post about each of Democratic primary candidates died pretty quickly, so I never got to Obama. That’s who I’ve been leaning towards since early in the race and who I’m fully supporting at this point.

There’s plenty to like about him and his policies. His stance on different technology issues is excellent: government transparency by putting more information online, a CTO for the government, increased funding for scientific research, improving broadband infrastructure, more funding for clean energy research (rather than just emissions caps), etc. It’s solid stuff all around and his campaign has demonstrated that they understand how to use technology to great effect with the fund raising machine they’ve created. On foreign policy he’s not perfect (no candidate is), but he’s pretty close. This is a good assessment of our current situation:

The President would have us believe that every bomb in Baghdad is part of al Qaeda’s war against us, not an Iraqi civil war. He elevates al Qaeda in Iraq — which didn’t exist before our invasion — and overlooks the people who hit us on 9/11, who are training new recruits in Pakistan. He lumps together groups with very different goals: al Qaeda and Iran, Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents. He confuses our mission.

And worse — he is fighting the war the terrorists want us to fight. Bin Ladin and his allies know they cannot defeat us on the field of battle or in a genuine battle of ideas. But they can provoke the reaction we’ve seen in Iraq: a misguided invasion of a Muslim country that sparks new insurgencies, ties down our military, busts our budgets, increases the pool of terrorist recruits, alienates America, gives democracy a bad name, and prompts the American people to question our engagement in the world.

By refusing to end the war in Iraq, President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want, and what the Congress voted to give them in 2002: a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

What Obama lists as what he’s going to do are all good steps, but I don’t think they address the real root of al Qaeda’s appeal: American troops in the Middle East. However, his approach is progress and will keep us far safer than the McCain/Bush approach of perpetual war.

That’s my quick brief on why I like him. Obviously, he’s a politician and he’s promised more than he can deliver. Some of his stances are annoying or just fluff. But he’s not just the lesser of two evils, either. I think he’s actually a good candidate.

The Hammond Report has always been somewhat unique. We have intelligent conservative bloggers here in Montana. We also have some fairly dumb ones. Same goes for the liberal side. However, Andy’s commentary is unique; the depth and consistency of the stupidity is overwhelming. It has the worst of global warming denialism, abstinence-only idiocy, and the most shallow understanding of Democrats and liberals I’ve seen.

Yes, this post doesn’t have anything more substantive than me calling someone an idiot. But that’s what blogs are for, right?

I have to say, Eteraz’s response is strange. He delves into the technicalities of Sharia law and finds that Obama doesn’t meet the criteria. Sounds like he’s right, but I don’t know. Still, the fact that Islam has these laws and that they’re actually implemented is frightening. Apparently, you can whisper in a child’s ear and then he or she becomes Muslim. After that, he or she could be legally killed for abandoning Islam.

It just makes you want to move to Saudi Arabia and father a bunch of children with a couple slaves (wives, sorry), doesn’t it?

I point this out for a couple of reasons. The first is that not all creationists are created equal. I had one here a few years ago who debated with me for months, first in comments then over email. He was very wrong, but he clearly was pretty smart and had really thought about the whole of modern science in relation to his religion. No such claims about the current one can be made.

The notable feature of this current discussion is how little discussion there is. I didn’t feel like answering the standard creationist points at the beginning, but I changed my mind after some attempts to turn my claims about not responding back on me and after he built up a list of claims. When I answered them, he dropped the majority of them and came up with new ones. New ones to the discussion, that is, since they were all standard creationist points.

This isn’t an uncommon occurrence. There are a list of global warming denialist claims and ones for any pseudoscience. If anything, it’s a defining characteristic of pseudoscience. There’s a list of basic claims that your average believer latches onto and underneath there’s a core of people generating the supporting lies and half-truths that keep it alive. The believers don’t really understand the arguments generated, but if it gives them a quick talking point, it goes on the Internet and never dies.

How long is it going to take until we get to this point with gay marriage? I’m looking forward to the day when we officially recognize that banning gay marriage is nothing but uninformed bigotry. It doesn’t affect me, but we all should be happen when injustices are remedied.

Let’s say the average post takes 15 minutes to compose. That’s 485 hours. 20.2 days. Nearly three weeks. Add in 522 comments at 5 minutes apiece and you have another 43.5 hours. So let’s call it 23 days.

23 days of my life I have spent writing to no one in particular. Occasionally people read what I write, but there’s no guarantee. When those few people make themselves known, half the time I argue with them (often rather impolitely).

Shouldn’t this be a mental disorder or something?

There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

I move we make that the new dictionary definition of Intelligent Design.

WATERBURY, Conn. — A 53-year-old Waterbury woman has pleaded guilty to stealing more than 150 paintings reportedly after God told her the end of the world is near.

Diane Catalani was arrested last year. According to court documents, Catalani told a psychologist that she hoarded what she stole to show God before the Apocalypse that there are still good people in the world.

The prosecutor says it’s clear that Catalani was suffering from mental illness at the time she stole the paintings.

I don’t know, you’d think God would have been able to see the paintings and incorporate their existence into his judgment. Then again, I think it’s obvious that prayer is pointless if God is omniscient, so what do I know?

There seems to be a spectrum for the clarity of your “personal relationship” with God. A feeling that God exists is par for the course, a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is a little weird, receiving various bits of trivia for your TV show is crazy (but not mental hospital crazy), and being commanded to do something is a trip to the psych ward. The fuzzier your signal, the less crazy you are.