Tom McGee's Blog

A cou­ple of blogs I ran across are worth not­ing. Kung Fu Mon­key com­bines a left-wing polit­i­cal point of view I favor, along with var­ied sen­tence struc­ture and a smat­ter­ing of obscen­ity, into the kind of mix I favor. The author is a stand-up come­dian as well as a screen­writer, and has a physics degree (this is the com­mon thread between the two blogs).

Wait, Aren’t You Scared? is a per­fect decon­struc­tion of the polit­i­cal atmos­phere in which Amer­i­cans are being urged to cower in abject fear and vote Repub­li­can, urg­ing us to “not hop like the trained mon­keys” every time there’s a new alert. Also check out his trash­ing of the elec­toral col­lege sys­tem, and the won­der­fully cre­ative “FISA in One Syl­la­ble Words,” in which he explains the whole issue of Bush and the FISA laws in, yes, easy-to-understand one syl­la­ble words.

Physi­cist Sean Carroll’s Cos­mic Vari­ance spoofs the high state of ter­ror alert presently being accorded to liq­uids. Rapped on the Head by Cre­ation­ists is a dev­as­tat­ing and hilar­i­ous indict­ment of the whole “intel­li­gent design” move­ment, worth quoting:

The true tragedy of “cre­ation sci­ence” is that it is an invi­ta­tion to stop think­ing. Instead of tak­ing puz­zling aspects of Nature as clues to some­thing deeper, and mulling over the pos­si­ble lessons we can learn from them in our quest to under­tand the uni­verse bet­ter and bet­ter, the cre­ation­ist atti­tude just wants to say “God did it!” and declare vic­tory. It’s a form of giving-up that could have been invoked thou­sands of times in the his­tory of sci­ence, but thank­fully was not. Instead, stub­born nat­u­ral­is­tic inves­ti­ga­tors took seri­ously the clues they had, and used them to grad­u­ally uncover mar­velous new fea­tures of the real world. And that’s what we’ll con­tinue to do.

He also cov­ers the chem­istry of cof­fee, the World Series of Poker, proofs of the exis­tence of Santa, and some cool physics stuff. When I took physics in high school, cal­cu­lat­ing the orbits of three bod­ies together was con­sid­ered impos­si­ble. Now they knock it out in Flash ani­ma­tions. Such is progress!