A little bit of creative writing

I haven't been writing much, lately, or at least it hasn't seemed like I have been (I have 2 or 3 unpublished posts because I haven't gone over them) I had a recent opportunity to walk a wolf.  I frequently volunteer at a local animal shelter because it offers (almost) all the benefits of ownership without the responsibilities. I figured I'd write about it a bit.  I got to walk a wolf, and he may have changed my life, regardless of his ability to appreciate this fact.  So, here goes:

The wolf was incredible; his owners moved to the city and couldn’t keep him anymore because of local laws, but what an amazing animal.  I’ve never walked an animal so… strong.  I walk a lot of dogs.  Many of them are large, Rottweilers and German Shepherds, but you can gauge their strength by looking at their size.  I can stop them, if I have to.  This guy was about their size, a little bigger, but if he got it in his head to chase a squirrel, I would have been helplessly bouncing along the ground behind him until he was finished.  You know those stories you here about dogs breaking steel chains at scrap yards?  This is the first canine I can imagine actually doing that.  Frightfully strong.

Speaking of fright, I was kind of nervous walking this guy.  He was docile, but there’s no doubt in my mind that if he wanted to, he could have ripped me to shreds.  I wasn’t worried about it, but there’s that knowledge; most dogs, I could bludgeon into submission if it ever got dangerous (and I use a choke-chain when I’m walking the bigger ones, so I have some leverage), but I only walked this one because they assured me he was friendly.   Honestly, he seemed very… amicable… but not friendly.

When you walk a dog, especially at a shelter, the dog wants to get to know you.  He’ll smell you, or go for some kind of approval.  They don’t usually just take off.  Even the most bad-ass dogs acknowledge the human holding the leash in some way.  In that sense, he was almost like a cat!  The animal shelter worker insisted on putting the leash on himself, but once he handed it to me there was no trade-off to the wolf; just going.  I’m sure he smelled me, but he didn’t dwell on it.  I felt like he just shrugged and thought, “Well, I’m out of the cage now, tied to some meat sack.”  I walked him about 2 miles, and it was just an incredible half-hour for me.

The wolf is one of our principal competitors, millennia before we ever developed much technology, the wolf hunted what we hunted, lived where we lived, and scared the bejeesus out of our ancestors.  I can see why.  This creature, tame as he was, carried with him the grace and lethality of a predator that hasn’t been made stupid by ages of soft living.  This creature’s golden eyes shone with intelligence, echoes of an ancient time when his ancestors made easy pickings of our livestock and outsmarted our best hunters.  His body, though old, carried itself with the lethal grace which brought to life, in me, the countless stories our people tell of the big bad wolf.  He walked beside me, but alone, almost as though he sought his pack.

In my awe, I also felt a sinking realization.

My entire life, I’ve loved wolves, their majesty.  I’ve felt that they were my spirit-animals, in a way, creatures which encapsulate my essence, in some way; alone, dangerous.  Self-sufficient.  Powerful.

I am no wolf.  Those who call themselves wolves in sheep’s clothing are children, playing with power they cannot understand.  Don’t deserve to understand.  They are fools, fancying themselves as something other than cursed to dwell within their own mediocrity.  I was one of them, I see now.  I can think of one man I know who deserves to wear the wolf’s mantle, and even that connection is tenuous.  I may walk alone, but I will never carry myself with the deadly, ruthless efficiency of the wolf.  The indifference to all that is not danger or prey.  It is a terrifying thing, to hold such mystery, such mastery, on a leash, and be cursed only to gaze in awe.  Awe and envy, as this creature was born knowing itself, adept and confident, while I am wracked by insecurity and ineptitude.  Such is the curse of introspection, I suppose.

Anyway, to sum up, wolves are neat.(!).

Naturalistic Fallacy Redux

I've spoken on the naturalistic fallacy before but I recently came across a slightly more insidious variety, which doesn't have the same red flags as the fallacy in the forms it's usually encountered, such as revering nature because it's old, or pure, in ways which have no scientific basis.  There's simply no good reason to believe that killing a wild turkey is healthier, or more nutritional, than a farm-raised turkey simply because the wild turkey is closer to nature.  Perhaps it is, but the data would be found within the nutritional data for the turkey (less fat, perhaps, or more muscle definition) but not simply because the wild turkey is the natural one; it could also be riddled with parasites for the same reason.  Natural becomes a non-issue, because we need to look at the specific traits belonging to that turkey, or that group of turkeys.
That aside, the fallacy I've been running into basically this: Trait X evolved, therefore it's beneficial.  For instance, gender roles.  I heard a brief argument recently that said that we needed to protect gender roles because they had evolved for a reason.  To which my response was a resounding "Maybe."
The idea that something has evolved, therefore it is good, is patently false.  Violence has evolved.  That something has evolved and stuck around is simply a testament to one thing; it makes the bearers of those traits have more babies.  In a world where tendencies toward violence were adaptive, violence was selected for.  That world may or may not still be around.  Evolution doesn't produce the best product; it produces the best compromise between effective and cheap, which is why men have nipples, we still hiccough, and very few of us are 8 feet tall.
Regarding gender roles, evolution almost certainly wasn't a factor, at least as far as strictly genetic evolution.  A desire to wear dresses is not a chromosomal trait; it's a cultural one.  And cultural norms change much more rapidly than genetic ones.  Irrespective of that, though, the premise of the argument belies a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, and is logically incoherent.  Perhaps there are good reasons for gender roles; I doubt it.  I think that as a society we've grown to the point where conformity isn't required, but that's the wrong reason to argue for it.  Just as I mentioned in my blog on Climate Change, the reasons we believe something are important.  It would be false for me to claim that one hot summer is good evidence for Climate Change, even if I'm right and Climate Change is occurring.
Evolution is a pervasive, powerful force, and understanding it is critical to understanding ourselves, biologically and socially.  What it isn't is an excuse for bad behavior.  It may explain an origin (and in the case of gender roles, badly at best), but it doesn't address the concern of whether or not the behavior is something we should encourage, and thus has almost zero weight as evidence for any cultural behavior.  Deifying evolution as a basis for social actions is the naturalistic fallacy pure and simple, only masquerading as enlightened.

Climate Change

Climate change has been coming up in recent weeks, and I figured I'd take a look at it, and just explore a few of the myths/little known facts about it.

Not the climate.

First off, is it Climate Change or Global Warming?  Both, but Climate Change is more accurate.  Global Warming is a concern, but is only one aspect.  Climates can change in a multitude of ways, temperature only being one of them.  Climate Change is a more inclusive, accurate term because it's broader.  Is it real?  Yes.  No serious doubts there (of course, people who still believe, wrongly, that the Big Bang Theory means something came from nothing will probably disagree because evidence will not change a closed mind), and there is some slightly more rational reason to believe that humans may not have caused it.  But, the scientific consensus is Yes, it's real, and yes, humanity is causing it.
OK, so before we begin, what exactly is a climate?  It's the non-biological aspect of the ecosystem.  It thus consists of lots of different variables; amount of precipitation, volatility of weather, moisture in the air, dew point, visibility, wind speed and persistence, in addition to temperature, among other things.  It's extremely broad.  Let's instead be specific about what it is not.  A climate is not the weather.  It's a misconception common enough that meteorologists have weighed in to the debate, not even realizing that they aren't trained for it.  If it's cold and sunny in the morning and snows at noon, and has a thunderstorm in the middle of the night, that's weather.  All these events will contribute slightly to the climate, in the same way that a single driver contributes to traffic averages in a major city.  Even if one guy gets in an accident once, and snarls traffic for the rest of the highway for 45 minutes, he still hasn't done much to slow down the average flow of traffic; not over a year or longer.
It's the same with weather.  Weather is sure to be anomalous, and singular events (even ones that get dubbed ridiculous names by the news media, such as Snowpocalypse) don't influence the climate that much.  And since the climate is naturally cyclical along with the earth's rotation and orbit, looking at the climate over any period less than a decade is bordering on frivolous.
So Climate Science is a very complicated field of study.  Meteorologists are trained to predict future weather based on present movements; climatologists, on the other hand, are in the business of analyzing trends over large periods of time.  It's the difference between an accountant (or sometimes, just a bank teller), describing day to day affairs, and an economist, who studies the monetary system.  Because they have one system in common doesn't mean that they have any business being lumped together.  And it's not that they can't; it's that they haven't necessarily been trained to, and may not even realize it.
Then, what is the degree of Climate Change?  Hard to say, exactly.  Global warming (e.g., the temperature) is about 1 degree Celsius over the past 50 years; that doesn't sound like much, but it can have an alarming and exponential affect on the weather.  Let's think about it; if, on average, the planet is 1 degree warmer, that doesn't mean uniform.  Going back to the traffic analogy, it's like saying that commute times take 1 minute longer due to increased traffic.  Some people (regions) could get to work even faster (be cooler).  Others may take 10-20 minutes longer to get to work (much hotter).  There may be an increase in accidents (severe weather) or higher/lower speeds (more/less rainfall).  All of these statistics would be lumped into a single factor; commute time.

If only Climate Change and Evolution would get along so well...

With Climate Change, to make things worse, is the variability of weather has been increasing.  This phenomenon has been dubbed (by me) Global Increase of Volatility in Weather and Other Climatic Effects Over Large Periods of Time.  Climate Change is much less of a mouthful, and just as descriptive, assuming you know the meaning of climate.  This means patterns are becoming harder to predict, as principles of chaos begin to undermine even well-modeled data.  This is critical; because, while climate scientists can almost unilaterally say bad things will happen, it's virtually impossible to know just how bad.  And at the speed things are changing, slow-and-lumbering evolution may not be able to keep the pace.  As I said above, the climate is the non-biological part of the ecosystem; the biological remainder will have to be able to adapt to the changes, or die trying.
We had a record-hot summer here in Southwestern Oklahoma, but it would be illegitimate for me to say that was caused by Climate Change, or that it was proof of Climate Change; there just isn't enough evidence available! Sometimes, it's just hot outside.  Or cold.  Or dark- but that doesn't mean evidence of Global Dimming.

The Gold Standard

Lately, there's been a lot of talk of returning to the Gold Standard, which implies the Gold And Silver standard.  Not in most conventional circles (to be polite), but it's been popularized by Ron Paul recently.  Before doing research for this blog, I admit to serious reservations (no pun intended) about the credibility of doing it; all the gold ever mined in the world is barely enough to cover half the US GNP[1], in terms of today's prices[2].  In other words, our annual productivity is worth almost twice all gold.  I don't like the idea of limiting our productivity to something anything less than the ingenuity of humanity itself, but before doing explicit research (I have this tendency to just putter around the internet answering questions that come to mind), I wasn't able to articulate why, at least not convincingly enough for blog entries on the subject.  The idea that our coins would be gold (at least partially) and our cash could be redeemed for gold at any bank is an odd one to me, personally, but I can see it as comforting.
Second, what prompted this article, was the claim I heard (not made by Ron Paul, but it wouldn't surprise me much).  "The only way to save ourselves [in the US] from hyperinflation is to go back on the gold standard."  I knew immediately that that was false on its face, but maybe there's something to the whole Gold Standard thing.  We're not even close to hyper-inflation in this country.  Hyperinflation is when the value of the dollar drops by 50% or more each month.  We've actually had mild inflation lately because we (painfully obviously) haven't been expanding much, and inflation is often associated with growth.  Economics are neat.
Before we go any further, we'll have a mini-economics lesson. (Not to be confused with microeconomics).
The biggest thing in favor of gold is that it puts a literal cap on the money supply, which is the amount of actual currency available in the market at any given time.  How does that work if the GNP exceeds the gold supply?  Easily, actually.  In fact, there's only about a trillion USD in currency right now.  Without getting into the details of the different types of money supplies, let's just take the following scenario.
Jake has $100 cash.  He goes to the store and spends every penny on shrubberies.  The shrubber, Kyle, takes the money and pays his only employee, Robin, who goes and buys himself a used Taser.
Throughout these transactions, there was only $100 being used out of the money supply; the $100 shrub, the $100 worth of labor, and the $100 Taser are all individual transactions, there's $300 that gets added to the GNP.  So it's easy to see how the money supply isn't a concern.
In fact, the Gold Standard is really good at doing this!  With the gold standard, if there's ever a shortage of currency, we can't just make more unless the situation is dire (World War 1 Dire).  Without it, we can just make more money to keep things running smoothly in the short term.  In other words, we inflate our own dollar by making more of them.  Going back to gold would virtually stop that in it's tracks!  If you keep $10,000 in your mattress, you lose money every year just by not spending it.  On the gold standard, $10,000 is worth (in today's dollars), about 1/2 pound of gold and it would be in 50 years, more or less (historically, about .1% inflation).  Without the gold standard, in 50 years, at 5% inflation per year, it would be worth about $750.
Inflation sucks, and the Gold Standard kills it.  So, why shouldn't we go back to it?  Well, there are a few things to consider.
First, what if you went to the store today and bought yourself eggs, milk, cheese, potatoes, celery, and bacon for a reasonable amount.  You didn't realize you were out of bread but you'd noticed that it cost $2.39 a loaf.  So you go back the next day, and it costs $6 a loaf, and you have no choice but to buy it or go without sandwiches. [3]
In my previous example (keeping money in your mattress), I used 5% for the inflation figure.  5% inflation is unusually high; in 2011, we only had 3%, and the last time we broke 4% was 1990.  Over the last 100 years, including both World Wars, we've averaged 3.35% inflation.  In fact, at 3.2%, that $10,000 would be worth about $1,900, not $750.
Sounds ludicrous, right?  Well, that's a huge problem with the gold standard.  Short term prices are insanely variable.  So you get long term stability (on average, your $10,000 will be worth $9,512 in 50 years) at the price of obscene volatility in the short term- it could be worth $2000 one year and $8000 the next.  On average, it would retain most of its value, but   The entire market becomes extremely sensitive to factors that affect the gold industry.  If somebody discovers gold in Iowa, or someone sinks a Spanish Galleon, the price of gold, and thus everything else will change.  Favorable for investors, I suppose, who are able to just leave their money in one place for decades at a time.
There are other confounding issues- if we go to the gold standard, what's to stop every other country from just buying our gold?  We'd have to establish cooperation treaties of some sort, and historically, they existed, but functioned poorly.  Also, nobody understood monetary policy (at least at the level we do today) back then, and inflation was a major concern.  But now we have the Federal Reserve, and other countries have their equivalent.  The Fed was established to attempt to control inflation just prior to WWI, and the major way it does that is through managing inflation.  I could do another post on the Fed alone, since understanding it is critical to understanding the current economy.  Ron Paul labelled it as "pure evil", which is just absurd.
I'm not one to argue that something is new, therefore it is better, but let's examine the track record of the Fed.  One of it's primary functions is to manage inflation. Sure, it's not perfect.  It's run by human beings, and that means it will make mistakes.  But honestly, it does a pretty damn good job.  Variation in inflation was wild between 1913 and 1948 (1946 was when the Gold Standard was abandoned[4]).  It was as low as 0 some years, and 17-20% in some.  This was still on the Gold Standard, but we give it a pass, statistically, because the World Wars were going on and they aren't great for the economy, at least in regard to inflation.  I think that's an important point- the world was in crisis, and the economy tanked.  I don't think there's a great deal of difference, qualitatively speaking, nowadays.  Crises are by definition difficult to deal with, and on or off the Gold Standard, the housing bubble still would have occurred, and collapsed- it just would have dragged gold prices down with it.
Governments also leverage inflation to keep unemployment low; before the Fed, unemployment averaged almost 7%- and those were good times.  Since 1946, it's averaged just under 6%, and that's including several financial crises, including our current one.
In the end, additional research didn't do much to change my mind, but it did inform my perspective.  I still feel that our nation, indeed, our world, has simply outgrown ties to any particular quantifiable resource.  I think that advances in science and technology are the reason for this, and that those very advances will continue to inform our monetary policy.  Ron Paul wants to go back to the Gold Standard and do away with the Fed.  I don't think this is suicidal, per se, but I do think it's a bit like gouging off your love handles to fit in your prom dress.  It's still self-harm, and there's no reason to do it- we're beautiful, and productive, just the way we are.  There's absolutely no credible evidence I can find of hyperinflation looming on the horizon; just more fearmongers touting their own paranoia as fact.  So eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow, there will be cake.



[1] 2011 GNP was 15.3 Trillion USD
[2] Gold is worth 1,744 USD per troy ounce, as of 1/31/2012.  165 million kg in existence, 32.15 Troy ounces per kg.  Total = 9.3 Trillion.  2010 GNP: 14.56 Trilion USD
[3] A truly horrifying plight.  This is based on the coefficient of variance between the periods 1946-2003(The Not Gold Standard®) and 1880-1914 (The Classic Gold Standard).
[4] The Classical Gold Standard was abandoned in practice in 1913 because of WWI, essentially ended in 1946 for the Bretton Wood system, then formally abandoned in 1971 (in the US).  I don't have raw data for the Classical Gold Standard.
[5] This is a note.  This is not a note.  The note is real.  The note is a lie.

Ashes from ashes?

I wanted to write something a bit lighter tonight, but I'll be getting back to sexism in the future.
After logging an obscene amount of time playing Skyrim, I came across this game on Steam, it was 5 USD and looked like my style- it's called From Dust, by Ubisoft, and I figured, "Why not?  It's less than lunch at Applebee's."  Of course, I only eat at Applebee's on Veteran's Day because it's free for military (it's not that good), but the logic seems sound.  Last Wednesday, it was on sale for 66% off of 15 dollars, (those guys are great for selling gems at a huge discount, it's worth taking a peak every now and again).  And yes, for clarity's sake, this is on the PC.
It feels like an older game, but it's not.  It was released in July 2011, but it feels like it because it didn't have the budget of Assassin's Creed and other Ubisoft titles), and I had never heard anything about it until a week ago.  Ubisoft is just the publisher, so they fielded this largely as an independent work (I'm sure they provided assistance along the way, too).  And I have to say, it's surprisingly good.  It only took me about 7 hours to beat the story (much of which was spent burning my villagers because they displeased me), and I haven't gotten into the challenges yet, but it has the addictive sandbox-esque quality of the older Sim Cities (not those putrid new attempts at whoring out the name) or Tropico, only set in some time before countries or flags, or even farms, it seems.
It's like a cross between Black and White and Lemmings, only without the combat.  It's a sandbox game that touts the most sophisticated weather simulator found in a game, and it is quite good.  Like B&W, you play a demi-god who has to help your tribe, and as in Lemmings, you have to navigate a series of challenges to advance through the different maps, ultimately attaining the lost power of the ancients (you know, if the ancients were so awesome, you'd think they'd write this stuff down and make schools).  Like B&W, you'll be interacting crudely with the environment- picking up earth/water etc., and dropping it where you want it.  Like Lemmings, there's lots of lava and water to be found, and they're both very likely to kill your poor automatons.
Graphically, From Dust is not awe-inspiring à la Skyrim, but it does have its charms and I only recall one serious glitch throughout the game, and that was during a cut-scene, which occur occasionally.  The environmental effects are very attractive; lava in particular looks enticing and dangerous all at once.  Water on the other hand looks like... water.  It's mostly transparent.  And it flows.  There were some irritating things graphically, and one comes with the territory for this sort of game- there would be little puddles of water which were very difficult to see or target.  The easiest way to deal with them was to dump lots of lava in the area, evaporating it, which is generally fine unless there happened to be all sorts of vegetation in the area- then you'd start a fire, burn down all your villages, and have to start over.  The inverse would also hold, with pockets of lava, and applying a lake-full of water directly to the affected area would fix things (but then you end up with puddles...).  I could move it side to side, zoom in and out, but that third dimension that would have been so useful eluded me (I even... though it shames me to admit... looked in the help).  Not being able to skip cutscenes is an annoyance, but doesn't reduce the experience a great deal.  Slightly restrictive camera controls notwithstanding, the graphics merit a hesitant 7.
Sound is so much easier to get right on a limited budget, and they did marvelously in this regard.  The game is voiced, but in the Bahasa Indonesia language, something that sounds very tribal and generally fits the prehistoric motif (English subtitles mean you won't have to learn another language to figure out what to do, though).  The music is subtle, and does a good job setting the stage and mood.  But the sound effects, particularly the deafening roar of a volcanic eruption, is delightful, window-shaking, and coffee-spill-inducing-spasm-worthy.  In retrospect, it might be a bit too loud, but it is a freakin volcano, right?  The "Help Me!" of tribespeople does get irritating, especially if it's because they can't path to a new totem, but when it's not the AI freaking out it gets your attention; that's the only bad thing I have to say about the sound.  It sets the mood, stays out of the way except when appropriate (the music could stand to be more memorable) and gets a solid 9.
Finally, gameplay.  This is where From Dust shines.  And tanks.  AI is incredibly difficult to write from a programmer's standpoint in a game where the user can essentially literally create their own terrain.  So, taking that into account, from a gamer's standpoint it is incredibly frustrating when the little guy won't step up the 2 foot hump.  Like a cop, an AI programmer's work is often thankless- the only time you get noticed is when something messes up.  If you're doing your job well, your drones do as they're intended and nothing arouses any suspicions.  From that perspective, I think there were only 2 times where I actually had to completely restart due to villagers not executing some precariously timed maneuver, and they were usually because I built the target area up in a peculiar way (lava stacked on lava stacked on explosive trees stacked on lava, filled with dirt and doused with water, repeated until it looks right), which can understandably make mapping the area for a machine extremely tricky, and even then, the vast majority of the time, my villagers would stalwartly make their way to their destination, even if it was unnecessarily circuitous.
Mechanics killed me a lot more than AI.  Especially fire.  Forest fires are obscenely devastating.  They spread like a wildfire through a forest of firecrackers.  To make things worse, plants grow at exactly the same rate as fire burns, so they'll get into loops of perpetual tribesman death (who fearlessly charge to rebuild their burning village, only to have it burn again as soon as it gets built, ad nauseum).  That's my biggest complaint, but on the plus side the controls were incredibly intuitive (aside from the left and right mouse buttons being the opposite of the "natural", but that's an easy fix in the controls menu).  The AI was spectacular, given the load that it was under, and all in all, the environmental effects felt so natural and compelling, it was incredibly easy to just powertrip for a few hours, playing god, and that's the best part about games like these.  Gameplay warrants an 8.5, a hesitant 9.  Far and away one of the best sandbox games I've played since Tropico.  Overall, From Dust is a solid addition to your library, and it's a bargain- a brand new game, for only $15 without a discount at Steam.  Buy it.  You won't regret it, and hopefully you'll encourage more games like it in the future.  Final rating: 8.2.

Cell Phones Cause Cancer!

Maybe.  I mean, they could, right?  The WHO (World Health Organization) said so, after all.  I mean, cancer is a pretty complicated disease, and seemingly trivial things can cause it, right?  I'm going into this blog completely blind, and we'll see where I end up.
Well, reading the WHO's article, I'm not impressed with their classification.  The idea that cell phones cause some radiation is not a new (or wrong) one, and the idea that it can cause tissue temperatures to rise makes perfect sense- that energy that isn't going into the air waves has to go somewhere, after all.  The cell phone produces radio waves, which go off into the air in search of (well, really just blindly toward) a tower, which copies them, and sends them into space, where they are redirected to another local tower, and then transmitted to the receiving phone.  The waves are emitted roughly in a half-sphere (hemisphere, I suppose) around the cell phone, and radiate outwards.  Half (or so) of the waves will hit you in the head, if you are holding the phone near it.  That much, at least, is fact (and even obvious).  In the short term, there don't seem to be any effects, but this isn't always indicative.  Cigarettes and asbestos don't have any immediate (cancerous) effects, either.  Cancer is a pretty nuanced state that cells find themselves in, it's not like a virus or other infection, and it takes years to develop, if it does at all.
Reassuringly, they ("Who?", "WHO." "Who?", "Right.") do set guidelines on how much radiation can be absorbed.  The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is an internationally recognized organization that sets various standards for the creation of electronic devices (among other things), and so items produced after 2005 are likely to be in accordance with them.  This is good, since most users (by which I mean I) change their cell-phones every two or 3 years, any recent phone is likely to maintain this standard.
On the other side, people seem to believe that the WHO went overboard in declaring cell phones potentially carcinogenic.  They say that what the WHO means is simply that it's possible that cell phones cause cancer.  It's possible that Elves are planning an invasion of the dark side of the moon with their thermal technology seized from Under Armour (only after they win the presidency, Come ON Ron Paul, Phase 1, remember?).  Of course, cancer is a bit more plausible, but let's instead look at the mechanism.
First, we need to understand cancer, and even with a medical degree, this is difficult. It's an exceptionally nuanced class of disease all its own, and it doesn't fit generalizations easily.  What is known is that it's a state that otherwise healthy cells get in, where they begin to replicate uncontrollably, creating masses of tissue, called tumors, through many and varied mutations.  They can even transport blood to the tissues, by hijacking veins to irrigate their tumor.  It would be beautiful, if it didn't kill almost everything it touched.  Not all tumors are cancerous, sometimes they are benign growths of normal, if misguided, cells, and won't kill you.
Exactly how cancer happens is somewhat of a mystery, which is not to say that it is misunderstood.  The main takeaway is that minor copying errors increase exponentially (much like evolution itself), protecting the cell from the body's built-in correction mechanisms.  Exactly how these errors occur is the mystery I speak of- by their very nature, they don't happen overnight (at least in the vast majority of cases), and can chug harmlessly along for decades until the "evolution" occurs- there's a random, precipitating event and a horrible arms race begins at the cellular level.  So the bad news is you probably already have pre-cancerous cells in your body, somewhere.  They might get killed off by the regulating systems, but they might lurk in the woods and eventually stage a coup like Communists in Czechoslovakia (I figured I'd go with that metaphor as it's unlikely to offend since they don't make Czechoslovakians anymore).
More to the point, can radiation trigger cancer? Yes.  Can cell phones? As I said above, the WHO says it's possible, but doesn't go much further than that.  I say, what't can't cause it?  With a definition so broad and triggers so delicate in their understanding, I doubt that something as benign (pun intended) as drinking purified water hasn't (or at least, couldn't) caused cancer.  While I quickly concede that cell phones are a relatively modern phenomenon, I don't think we're strangers to radiation or its ill effects, and on that basis I'm thinking no, cell phones aren't likely to cause cancer (after all, ionizing radiation doesn't cause cancer except in extreme doses), and neither are power lines or televisions or microwaves. But the final say, e.g, evidence, is still out.  Check with me in the next 20 years, there may be new developments on that front.
For now, even staying away from proven carcinogens, there's no way to avoid cancer entirely.  The best studies have shown no correlation, and cell phones are far too useful to discard on such ephemeral bits of caution.  So eat, text and be merry, for we all probably already have cancer.

Bronies: Trolling is Magic.

Bronies are a new phenomenon that are currently sweeping through the internet, and I have little doubt that before long they will reach "critical mass", spilling over into popular culture and making their way into the everyday mainstream.  They might never be accepted (ask Star Trek/Wars geeks), but they do seem to be around for a while, and I'm fairly confident they're in for the long haul.  I think it's presumptuous to call it a movement, but for simplicity I will throughout this post.
For those few of you who don't know what Bronies are, they're just adults that enjoy the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  Well, maybe they're adults who enjoy it a little too much.  There are lots of YouTube videos made by these guys- and there's a lot of talent and imagination in the crowd.  It's a very large movement- Anthony Bourdain, Former President Bill Clinton, Stephen Colbert, Rebecca Watson are all either Bronies or have publicly endorsed it.  I have a friend who hated the movement a little bit too much, and before long he realized he had "become" one.  He described the transformation as more like he had a realization- he realized, he didn't want to be one but he was, and he just had to accept it.
I'm not sure I buy it.  I've watched an episode or two, and they're OK, I mean, no different from the Simpsons (except for clearer, lower pitched dialog, no pretense at being a kids show, and generally unambiguous messages about life, the universe, and everything), but nothing I could ever consider throwing myself behind.  Not because it isn't cool, because it just doesn't do anything for me.  Then again, I'm not a big fanboy, period.  I admit to an unfair appreciation of the Final Fantasy series, but mostly because it has deep, emotional ties in my childhood.  I like the Elder Scrolls, but the games are not without their significant flaws, I just enjoy the general freedom in play.  I never made up my mind between Kirk and Picard, Skywalker or Solo.  I just don't invest myself enough in media to change my daily life.  I enjoy Spock and Riker when I see them as much as I enjoy Voldemort or Dexter.  They're all just characters, and whether or not there's new stuff coming out, they're still just that, fictional characters I care next to nothing about.  I don't draw lines, or make judgments, I take them at face value.  As far as that goes, I don't care much for Fluttershy or Twilight Sparkle, but I can appreciate the ideas behind.  I can totally see the movement.  I just can't get behind it, anymore than I could any of the nation's other greatest fads.  I really enjoyed Army of Darkness (and the Evil Dead movies that came first), not enough to stand "behind" them, on any issues.
And those would-be-(if-I-were-talking)-air-quotes are, I think, the crux of this movement.  What are the requirements for entry into this movement?  Is it just an appreciation for MLP:FIM?  Is it just enough to acknowledge they're a good show, much like the Powerpuff Girls or The Adventures of Billy and Mandy or Invader Zim (I think it's evident I could go on)?  Or does it take more?  I'm asking, I don't presume to know the answer, and as I have only one contact in the Broniverse (to my knowledge, that term is copyright by me.  Originality is, after all, undiscovered plagiarism) I can't say with any certainty, but I do suspect  something more is required ("You're not a real Brony!").  An obsession with the culture.  And, as with House, Dexter, American Dad or Castle, I can't say I obsess.  I watch all these shows regularly, but I don't even engage in conversation about them, except for the occasional small-talk.  So I'm not a Brony, but there are a couple of sub-movements my friend has mentioned- maybe there's something .
The Pegasisters are Bronies who object to the idea that the term Brony is masculine.  If you've read my previous posts, you may be aware how pathetic I feel this argument is.  Many of them either feel men either shouldn't watch or should be ashamed of watching MLP.  It probably goes without saying that I find the needlessly sexist behavior off-putting if I'm feeling generous, and discount them without a second thought.  Many Pegasisters just refer to themselves as such because they aren't crazy about the title "Brony", given its obviously male implications.  I have no problem with them.
Then there are the Shippers, they write fanfiction (or sometimes just post/comment publicly, maybe make a Youtube video), usually romantic in nature, between characters in the series.  Consider "Huddy" fans, of House fame, people who publicly postulated that Drs. House and Cuddy should be (or were already) together in some romantic relationship, long before one actually started in the show.  Like the rest of the Brony movement, I have no problem with people writing fanfiction, even if it's of the romantic variety.  Practicing creativity is a good thing, and if some dragon-pony affair tweaks your muse, then so be it.  I won't read it, but I won't begrudge them for doing what they want.
Some mainstream Bronies don't take kindly to it, which is a little odd.  Their argument has to look something like:
Brony: "You wrote a story about Rainbow Dash and Applejack getting together?  That's weird."
Shipper: "That's weird?  I wrote a story about something I enjoy."
B: "Yeah, but they're cartoons.  And ponies."
S: "And?  I'm being creative."
B: "But it's a kids' show, and that weirds me out."
S: "So, you feel about me the way the rest of the world feels about you."
B: "Well played."  >.>
I admittedly haven't watched enough of MLP:FIM to get a good idea of exactly who it applies to, but they exist, and they draw some line there.  Again, I think it's a silly line to draw, but in any cult following, you end up with shippers, and you end up with "normal" members of the obsessive group disliking them.
My Brony friend doesn't think anything analogous to the Brony movement exists.  I don't think it's unique in any way.  Like any cult following of, well, anything (The Rocky Horror Picture Show comes to mind), it's a culture where people can meet each other and have a common ground.  Like 4chan and Reddit, some of the people within the movement are obscenely talented, and they put together technically impressive videos, or sometimes animate their own spin-offs which are nearly identical to the original.
I don't know what to expect from this movement.  Personally, I'm not overly impressed.  My friend seems to think it's a completely unique development, but I think I've shown it's nothing new, just a new object of fandom.  It's another movement, we'll watch it surge, wither and finally discover a sustainable homeostasis, eventually earning a solid position in society.  Or not.
What's the difference between Bronies and Twilight fans? (Team Rainbow Dash or Team Pinkie Pie?) Demographics, I'm guessing, and there's probably considerable overlap.  Being a Brony is just a level of fandom that started, I think, as a troll, and ended up with people legitimately enjoying what is nominally a kids' show, and spreading the magic to others (ie., growing the fan base).  But like most modern kids' shows, there are plenty of adult jokes embedded in the story.  It's clearly a charming, enjoyable show, and I don't think there's anything wrong with enjoying it.  Or obsessing about it.  Whatever dills your pickle.

More on Sexism

Misogyny/Sexism is a huge topic, and plays into many other, and often broader realms of human rights.  In my last post, I talked primarily about Male Privilege and defined my terms for the upcoming discussion.  Like Star Wars, the sequels will be better- I can spend less time focusing on definitions and more on actually discussing.  This time, I'm going to take a look at the sex work industry (prostitution, stripping, phone sex, BDSM, etc.,) and how it plays (or doesn't play) into human trafficking.  There will be milk and cookies later.
Sex Work is an unusual industry.  Partially or completely outlawed by religious moralists centuries ago, it has continued to exist and even thrive till modern times.  Prostitution is often referred to as the first profession, and it may well be the last.  It's interesting that such a storied industry would be so reviled, poorly understood, and discouraged.  The concerns are unsurprising- most of us were raised with them, explicitly or otherwise- and those are morality (it's wrong to visit a stripper!) and human rights (they're forced into their position and by paying for services you are furthering their misery).
As morals are individual values, they're much harder to dispense with, but we'll return to them (maybe not in this post).  First, lets look at human rights, because these are serious concerns.  Now, here I think it's critical to divide them into legitimate concerns and unfounded ones.  The legitimate concerns are human slavery and pedophilia, where the person, usually a woman, is forced into some kind of sexual service against her will (or if she's too young to consent).  The illegitimate are the reasons along the lines of "She hates her work and she can't get a better job."  Sorry, but pity isn't something any whole class of people deserve (except maybe interns).  Fry cooks, accountants, geologists and gaffers may all have shitty jobs they may or may not be able to get away from, but we don't pity them.  And we certainly don't abstain from french fries, tax advice, mineral samples or TV shows in solidarity.  They might hate their jobs, they might love their jobs, or they might be indifferent, but it doesn't automatically follow that they shouldn't be doing their jobs, or that it's any of our business.
Human trafficking is a huge concern.  Lives and families are destroyed every single day by conniving slave traders duping the hopeful into selling themselves, or worse, opportune kidnappers stealing their lives without even the courteous veneer of guile.  This manifests itself in modern times in various ways, but two of the most common signs are a poor command of the local language and exorbitantly low prices for a generally high-quality service or product (so that used-car dealer on the radio...).  The language is important, because they may not be able to explain to their clients, or to the police, just what is happening to them.  They might think it's legitimate- many are told they need to work off their debt of additional expenses incurred- oh, did I mention that many of these people buy themselves into slavery?  They go to a person who is selling, say, a new life in America for a fee.  They scrape and save to put this money together, and then do the deal.  They aren't necessarily trusting saps, either- they're often just desperate, and the scumbags who do it for a living (a nauseatingly lucrative one) are very skilled salesmen.
It seems like there's an exception to everything I've been writing so far, and that is probably the only constant.  The slave labor could be anything from prostitution to car washing, from maid-service to clerical work.  And you'd never know because you don't see them, or you wouldn't be in a situation to talk to them (and even if you were, there would be a language barrier).  To make matters worse, many of the activities they are being forced to do are illegal for the consumers, and make it even less likely that anyone who does spot the problem will actually alert the authorities.
With human trafficking, there are things that you can do without coming off like an arrogant prig.  One is, if you suspect something fishy, call this number (There's also a lot of other info on the site regarding human trafficking).  You can be anonymous if you choose.  Some things to watch for, besides your Creepy sense tingling, are people who work very long hours, act strangely, or owe large debts.  Boarded up windows are also a bad sign.
My biggest piece of advice here, I think, can serve to improve just about any relationship: Care.  Don't pity.  Don't judge.  Care.  Treat each other with respect, and more than just a token.  If someone works for you, whether employee or freelance, waitress or accountant, stripper or landscaper, get to know them on at least a superficially personal level.  Give them the dignity they deserve as a human being.  You'll get better service, and hey, you might just save a life.
More to come.

Sexism

Feminism, and usually soon after, sexism, keep coming up lately in both my personal life and on the interwebs.  I have some strongly held beliefs on the topics, which I find are seldom represented elsewhere, if at all.  I am a feminist, though many feminists I know will disagree with me.  So, let me climb into my asbestos suit before I continue.
First, let me define my terms.  In a nutshell, feminism is the the belief that both all genders are equal.  It is not women-are-superior-to-men-in-every-single-way-ism, which also appears and fits into the broader category of sexism, one gender being better than the others.  Again, I'm simplifying (read: Wikipedia disagrees with me) but these definitions are sufficient for the discussion at hand.
A trickier term to define is privilege.  As the name implies, privilege is always beneficial for the person being described.  Privilege is also usually invisible, in this context, to the person benefiting from it, such that unless I compare myself to someone outside of my group, I won't notice it.  For instance speaking English has many benefits; these benefits could collectively be referred to as the privilege of English Fluency (or something similar).  One benefit  is that it's much easier to find a job in the US.  It may not seem obvious, if you speak English in the US, but try not speaking it, but if you look into many workplaces, even without the confounding factor of discrimination, people who speak English just understand someone who also speaks English better.  They follow directions better- even if they're less intelligent, because they have a common ground. The Tower of Babel myth comes to mind.
Privileges come with all sorts of classes, whether something biological, as good looks, social, as speaking English, or through accomplishment, like being the CEO to a Fortune 500 company, possibly language as well.  All of these things have their privileges, but as a buzzword in discussions regarding feminism, privilege refers to the rights/benefits/entitlements of men, solely based on their gender, generally referred to as Male Privilege.
OK, now that the tiresome work of defining terms is done, lets talk about the debate.  It's a heated topic, with people on both sides making logical mistakes they'd almost never make in other areas of their life.  Ad Hominem attacks are common- "You think women have it easy?  You're just a misogynist."  "You want me to change my behavior?  You're a feminazi." (FemiNazi is also frequently said with a self-satisfied chortle, as though they invented the term themselves). These are brilliant people- but they seem to expect simple solutions to complex situations.  And sexism is a convoluted situation.
Consider for a moment this checklist.  Many items on it are legitimate.  Most are.  If you're a male, I highly encourage you to read through it for a bit- it's quite instructive.  There are a lot of things which are skewed in our favor, simply because of our apparent gender.  But there are some that smack of over-reaching (#23, for instance).  And some that are just outright wrong (#13, 20); they could be pleas for sympathy, attempts to flesh out an otherwise remarkable list, or something somewhere between these two- I wouldn't go so far as to say they are deliberately deceptive, however.
What I find most remarkable about the list is the absence of female privilege. If we're being fair-minded, for instance, #4, (from the point of view of a male) "If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won’t be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities." A significant corollary, indeed one thing that terminates many careers for men, is that there are 20 times as many males in prison as females.  For no reason other than birth, I am 20 times more likely to go to prison than half of the US population.  #22 mentions driving discrimination, but it remains mum on 9% lower insurance. Or #33 "I will never be expected to change my name upon marriage or questioned if I don’t change my name." Changing your name after marriage is viewed askance at the very best or is illegal at worst- if you're male.
My point here isn't to nitpick (though believe me, I want to nitpick, it's sort of my thing), but to gently point these things out.  There are some very good biological reasons for some of the privilege- and some awful social ones.  There are some based in social culture that aren't based in animosity toward women.  Awareness is important, but once that awareness is raised, we need to reasonably recruit the other side to listen to our points of view.  Being a dick (take that, #29) doesn't advance anyone's cause, and for the most part, aside from the most hostile parties on either side, we want some measure of equality, and we're probably willing to listen. That said, fricking listen.  Progress comes much more slowly from a never-ending series of self-destructive collisions.
In large part, sexism is the result of a series of social constructs generally built around the way we have lived for centuries.  Much of them can be dispensed with in a generation or so- the wrongheadedness about women not being able to vote, or marry, or drive, or show their ankles, these have all gone by the wayside.  And, in large part, they needed help from progressively-minded folks.
Chivalry is a favorite point of non-feminists.  They like to talk about holding open doors.  Many of the extreme feminists took this to the other extreme, making a point of opening the door themselves.  What changes?  If you don't want to be pampered, well, it's going to take a lot more than opening your own doors to do it.  (On a sinking ship, I wonder, would the same impulse be as strong to allow whoever was first in line to the lifeboats?) Personally, I hold the door for anyone, because you're (except for the one turtle) a human being.
But this discrimination has a good point, biologically!  The general idea that women's life is more important than male life is true, biologically-speaking.  A population can have its males decimated (literally divided in ten) and continue to survive, reproducing the numbers back to 50/50.  Do the same thing to the female population and it's nearly certain extinction within a couple of generations.  Nature makes us different.  There's nothing wrong with embracing that difference.  And when there are more important battles to be fought out there, the frustrating thing is watching smart people butt heads over it day in and day out with no gains made, when deep down they're both rational and intelligent and want the same (ultimate) thing- a better place to have more arguments.
My advice?  Take care of other people's rights.  There are plenty of places where people love each other and can't marry, where people don't love each other and can't divorce, and brilliant minds that can't get an education.  I'll hold the damn door if I want to.  I'm not doing it to be superior, I'm doing it because I like turtles.  If it offends you, let me know, and I'll let it close in your face the next time- because that wouldn't be rude.  And, for the love of Thor, leave the English language out of it.  But that is a post for another day.

SOPA

I'm not one to talk politics here, I generally try to stick to Science(!) as a topic, but SOPA has me bothered.  It has bi-partisan support and opposition, so I urge you to read this with an open mind, regardless of how wrongheaded you are ;-)

Most of the time, with issues this polarizing, it’s easy to figure out, after a fairly cursory look, which side is just out of their heads.  Then you can kind of find a middle ground, somewhere usually on, or at least towards the opposite side.  Here, it took a lot more work, but only because I remembered how awful the DMCA was for we hobbyist programmers who weren’t interested in pirating movies but, under the new regulations, would be facing a federal crime writing our own DVD playing program for our own personal use.  So, the last time politicians were trying to stop piracy, personal liberty and innovation took a hard blow, and the shrill arguments against this year’s incarnation of Governments Against Rampant Piracy rang truer than they often would.  Reading about the Stop Online Piracy Act wasn’t going to get me any closer to the answers, either.  So I choked down the full text of the SOPA, and I can tell you this: it is chock-a-block full of loopholes and vagaries, which are good for at least two types of people: lawyers and pirates.

On their face, the opposition of SOPA may as well be doomsday prophets, and while I doubt it will go that far personally, it actually could.  Not all the way to doomsday, obviously (Mayans have that covered), but their claims are far from as far-fetched as I'd like.

There are two problems here, and they are, I think, fundamental to understanding the problem SOPA tries to stop.  First, pirates are motivated, and not just by not spending money- many are ideologues who have embraced freedom of speech or something similar as their vanguard, armored in self-righteousness and fighting the good fight, thriving on the persecution layered upon them.  Some are just motivated by the challenge, others by the sheer thrill of breaking the law.  But they all have strong personal reasons (strong, not necessarily good or right) for doing what they do.  And, as mentioned above, they often thrive on their persecution, but more importantly, they survive it; they learn how to strike from the shadows.  They learn how not to get caught.

Legal vagueness (along with plenty of off-shore servers eagerly awaiting paltry sums of American dollars) only helps them evade capture- and while this bill does an admirable job of attempting to ensure quick action, they would be caught up in a legal quagmire as thousands of reports rolled in, many legitimate sites, all of which would have to be sorted through and individually shot down as being illegal.  Then those very sites, particularly the pirate sites, would spring up again, days or even hours later, under a new IP address, and they would have to be rooted out again.  Meanwhile, the legitimate sites would be frozen, and may or may not be agile (or too law-abiding) to simply switch to a new server.  Let’s not even look at the biggest points of concern- places like Youtube and Facebook- where even uploading a 30 second clip of a copyrighted song could get you shut down, because the good senator assures us that those sorts of sites have “have nothing to be concerned about.” If there’s anything we can trust, it’s the assurances of an American politician.  Just like the WMDs in Iraq or Gitmo being closed.

Besides legal vagueness, the biggest problem with SOPA is it violates the Presumption of Innocence (generally considered, if not explicitly stated, as a Constitutional right).  Good intentions are wonderful -there are plenty to see from the hand-basket, I hear- but they don’t substitute for the burden of proof resting with the accuser.  Under SOPA, I could claim your site was peddling illegally reproduced photography, dispatch a series of letters attesting to this “fact” and the ISPs would have to blacklist your site.  Then you would have to demonstrate you weren’t the purveyor of purloined pictures, and in the intervening timeframe, your site would remain blocked.  And by demonstrate, you would have to prove a series of credentials- including signing a letter under threat of perjury- that you were indeed not intentionally doing this activity.  Of course, if I’m wrong, it’s just my bad.  No penalties on my end.  But you, the defender, could inadvertently perjure yourself; you could end up with a heavy fine or even jail time.

On the other hand, common people don’t usually benefit from vagueness either; in my above example, mean-spirited or ideologically opposed individuals could silence entire companies because, well, maybe they didn’t say Christmas enough and they wanted to make baseless accusations of copyright infringement.  With proposed laws like SOPA, it’s not hard to exploit them for selfish reasons.

Another telling fact is that the support consists mostly of RIAA and movie companies, a few video game companies, along with a bunch of politicians (list of companies here).  Opposition consists of almost everyone else (Google, Facebook, Twitter, can't find an exhaustive listing, but here are 40+, and a startling number of musical artists [yes, it is with heavy heart I admit to being in the same camp as Justin Bieber on something]).

I’m not saying that we should give up trying to defeat piracy, but when hare-brained schemes like SOPA come along trying to do it, it seems a good enough option.

Of course, saying something is a bad idea is easy; coming up with options to fix the problem aren’t, and I don’t claim to have all the answers.  On piracy, I would say that games have managed to bounce back well from it- online services like Steam and other systems do very well at limiting a rampant phenomenon.  But they don’t do it by making it any more illegal- they do it by making it less interesting.  They’ve leveraged the social aspect of video games to make an environment where most people want to pay so they can play with their friends without limitation.  Exactly how movies and music could do that, I’m not sure, but unless the RIAA and the movie companies start trying something new instead of lobbying for more and more draconian legislation, nothing is going to change.

I am not a lawyer.  I read the text of the Stop Online Piracy Act here, and you can too.

Radiation

First of all, Happy New Year!  Just think, a year ago, the earth was in the same relative position to the sun as it is today.  (Of course, we could say that any day of the year and be completely accurate; there's nothing remarkable about 1 Jan astronomically speaking, though 22 Dec is pretty neat).
Today I wanted to talk about radiation.  There was a bit of an outcry during the Fukushima disaster, which triggered a lot of conversation and somewhat less thought on the topic, but what prompts this writing is something slightly more personal.  I have a friend who is considering taking a job at Holloman AFB, which is in Alamogordo, NM, and also happens to be the site of multiple atomic and nuclear weapons tests.  He has a child, and the idea of being raised near a potentially hot radioactive site is understandably problematic.
The first thing we should remember about radiation damage is that it's cumulative- it "metabolizes" very, very slowly, and can quickly build to toxic levels (Rads in the Fallout series are fairly accurate, if only in this respect.  In fact, I think I'll use the term).  Being exposed to 100 Rads all at once is only slightly more dangerous than being exposed to 10 Rads a day for 10 days.  And by Rads, I actually mean milli-Sieverts, or mSv.  Rads just sounds more... rad.
At Alamogordo, at the Trinity site, the radiation level at ground zero pings at about 10 times the background rate.  At first, that sounds threatening, but I wasn't sure what the background rate was- and it turns out, on average, the yearly consumption of Rads for anyone just living in our society is about 2.  So, if you camped out on ground zero at Alamogordo for a full year, you'd receive a cumulative dose of 20 Rads.
Still, this doesn't put things in perspective, and for that I came across a handy reference from the World Nuclear Association.  I won't reproduce it here, but there's also a good table here, down towards the bottom.
What I'd like to highlight are specifically the thresholds- after 100 Rads, over the course of a year, there's some increased chance of cancer.  It says it's about 5%.  To get this from Alamogordo, you'd have to camp out at ground zero for an entire year running chest x-rays twice a day, and even then you'd have a 95% chance of walking away with no ill effects (well, besides law enforcement constantly trying to stop you from trespassing, and the owner of the x-ray machine convinced you're trying to void his warranty).
50 Rads per year, for techs that work in the industry, is the legal limit for professional exposure, and there are no discernible effects on health at this level (they are as likely to be beneficial as not).
But that's just at ground zero.  Alamogordo is a healthy distance south, and the interesting thing is the fallout never reached it- the explosion carried north and west.
 
It's almost entirely certain to be safe to live in; as for being a place you'd want to live, well, you'll have to make up your own mind.  It is New Mexico, after all, and it's a small town, not unlike Altus, OK.
Finally, I'd like to end with a quote from the WNA linked to above.  Radiation is dangerous, but even more dangerous is the misunderstanding of radiation.  "In 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear accident caused a few (preventable) deaths from thyroid cancer and massive psycho-social impact due to relocation of over 100,000 people, mostly unnecessarily. (It also caused 28 to 47 deaths among clean-up workers who received high radiation exposure.) For members of the public, fear of radiation was much more devastating than radiation itself."

Overpasses are bad, m'kay?

We are all susceptible to wrong thinking- one could say it’s fundamental to what makes us human- and I’m no exception.  I do pride myself on generally knowing whether an idea is coherent or not (something I’ve worked very hard at), but I make occasional (read: lots of) mistakes.  Last night could have killed me, so I guess it was more than your usual misinformation (whether I believe in Bigfoot is seldom life threatening) or even the more practical knowledge (knowing when a so-called “business deal” is a scam).

The double rainbow I saw.

I suppose I should set the scene.  I live in Altus, a small town in southwestern Oklahoma, and I frequently have medical appointments that the local area can’t field, so I have to drive for about an hour to get to Lawton, a slightly larger small town that manages to pass as a city (no offense, well, not too much offense to my Okie friends).  Yesterday afternoon, there was a warning that there might be hail in the area, and when I looked at the weather radar, there was a heavy storm coming right for us.  I figured if I left immediately, I should be able to stay just ahead of the storm.  On the way, my supervisor called to tell me that a tornado had touched down, just outside of a small town and the highway I was on.  I had literally passed the town 4 or 5 minutes before, but besides the ominously dark clouds behind me, it was clear in front so I pushed on.  I heard one of my favorite songs, Avenged Sevenfold’s Nightmare, on the radio and saw a perfect 180 degree double rainbow (the second in my life!) and escaped the downpour with only a few miles of rain, which would last most of the day for home- it was a great ride.

I arrived at my destination unhindered at about 3:30 PM, but I still knew I’d dodged a bullet earlier.  I don’t believe the tornado did cross the highway, but it could have.  By the time my appointment was over, the weather had passed over, but was still all along the route back home.  So I decided to hang out in town until things looked better outside.  By the time I left, it was 9 o’clock at night.  I felt 5 hours would be plenty of time for the storm to get out of the way, and never bothered checking my weather app.  For those keeping score, this was my third mistake that day.

I am usually a fan of night driving, but this time, it would prove to be a bad idea.  Daylight Savings Time had just ended, making it much darker than I’d planned, such that I can’t tell what the clouds look like.  There’s no rain and very little lightning visible.  So I start the 50 mile drive.  After 10 miles or so, the lightning has steadily been increasing, but I can’t see any bolts or hear thunder, which means it’s far off, and mostly to the North.  As it’s not too threatening, I press on.  I get about 15 miles in, and the clouds start to drizzle- nothing that I even need to put my wipers for, but the lightning continues increasing in frequency, and the wind picks up, still blowing from the south southwest.  It’s perfectly normal to be driving along in Oklahoma and the wind just decides to blow you off the road, so that wasn’t alarming in the slightest.  Then at what had to be about 20 miles in, a wall of water hits my car from the South.  My wipers are on full bore and I still only get glimpses of clarity before they’re filled in by more water.  I slow down, which I almost never do for rain, but I felt myself hydroplaning, and the water on the road looked deep- we’re prone to flash floods, and this could turn into one, though probably not enough to float my car, enough to push it off the road.

So, driving along at 35 Mph, I make it another 5 miles or so.  It could only have been about 10 minutes before the rain abruptly stopped, but in that time the wind changed direction twice, blowing straight back toward me (East), and then switching to blowing towards the south.  That was when I started getting nervous.   Then, lightning bolts, now clearly visible, were in front of me.  For a split second, I see what could have been a funnel cloud highlighted to the northeast- and I start watching the skies.  At least in the day, you have a clear view of what the clouds are doing, and I just have to wait for an opportune lightning bolt to strike behind it.  It didn’t take long- and sadly, I wasn’t disappointed.  It wasn’t a full funnel yet, but it definitely appeared like a semi-triangular cloud formation, pointing down in a horizon that was otherwise featureless.

Now I’m very nervous.  My instinct says to find shelter, to put something between me and it besides my car.  I know the route (and by route, I mean 50 miles of straight, mostly featureless road), and I know that just a few miles on, near the town the tornado touched down, there’s an overpass where another state highway crosses.  I figure if I can just push toward that, I can ride it out.  This is mistake number 4, maybe 5 if you count not turning around when it started getting worse; 6 if you count trying to come back that night at all.  I’ll go with 6.

So, I make it to the overpass uneventfully, but I keep watching that-spot-in-the-sky-where-I-saw-what-might’ve-been-a-funnel-cloud-forming.

And then I just wait.  The rain had returned, the wind had changed directions a few more times, and it was moving fast enough to blow the rain sideways.

I remember thinking, wouldn’t this bridge make a sort of funnel?  I knew tornados were often very wide- larger than the bridge in every dimension- but I figured, at least with cover, I’d have a better shot.  After all, the vacuum is above you, so you should get pulled up, mostly, right?  I waited, hoping things would get better.  They got worse, but I just kept alternately listening to the radio and listening for the sound a tornado makes.  I’ve been told it sounds like a train blasting by, a high pitched roar.  I figured, if I heard it, I’d get out and hide under the car.  I spent some time in the back seat, belted in as well.  I had no idea what to do, and was mostly trying to occupy myself by thinking I was doing something useful.  The bridge was number 7, the bit about the vacuum, while not entirely wrong, was 8.

After an hour, things weren’t getting better, and I was going to risk it.  I wasn’t going to spend all night in the car.  Press on, like I’ve been trained.  So I did.  I was a little more than halfway home, and made it without further incident.

I found out this morning not only is what I did a bad idea, it may well be the worst.  Well, OK, not worst- standing atop the bridge holding a metal golf club aloft after attaching my entire zipper collection to my metal suit while soaking in a vat of lighter fluid and smoking crystal meth would be worse, but a car is a deathtrap in a tornado, and the overpass only makes it worse.  As far as tornado safety goes though, es no bueno.  The Storm Prediction Center of Oklahoma has posted a detailed and fairly complicated analysis of “Tornado Vs Overpass” behavior here, but I’ll simplify it (it’s about 25 pages long, so what follows really is a simplification).

As I mentioned earlier, the instinctive thought is “tornados suck you up”.  This is true- except that it does not only do that.  The funnel cloud, if one is even present, represents the center of a vortex, a low-pressure area, which is causing wind to swirl around it.  The general direction is up, but there is a huge sideways component that can extend “a considerable distance” (when they talk about half mile wide tornados, for instance) from the visible tornado!  The winds may be at their fastest at the edges, in fact.  Think about swinging a rope around in a circle- the tip is moving much faster than the base where you’re holding it.  This isn’t exactly the same of course, as there is no solid lever involved, but the principle is similar.

Second, the debris from a tornado (one might argue the most dangerous component) is likely to get snagged by the bridge, dumping cars or trees or pieces of buildings or rabid prairie dogs on you.

Most overpasses don’t have anything to hang onto if you are getting pulled by the wind, and the one I was under was no exception.

The best response in my case was to stay away from the tornado, of course- I should have driven at right angles away from the thunderstorm.  In my case, that would have meant turning around, and probably sleeping in my car, or a hotel room, in Lawton that night, but it would have been the safest course of action.  Since I insisted in driving into the storm, the next best course of action would have been, assuming I saw a tornado, to stop the car, get out, and run for a ditch somewhere a good distance from my car, and lie face down protecting my head until the tornado passed.  The reason this (very counter-intuitive) option is safer is because tornados lose wind speed as they get closer to the ground- and at the ground level, the wind speeds are zero.  The further you get from the ground, though, the faster the relative speed rises.  This is the reason to stay out of the car- they’re high enough to guarantee they’ll be hit with very high wind speeds, making you even more likely to suffer injury by getting rolled over (by which I mean tumbled like a child’s toy, possibly being picked completely up and slammed into something), showered by broken glass or trapped inside.   Lying face-down in a ditch is safer because debris is less likely to get dropped on you and you aren’t likely to get blown around, but is still a “last ditch stand” that should be your final, desperate option.

I made it home safe, largely because the storm didn’t generate a tornado at that time (as I said, it had earlier, almost at that very spot), but I did make a couple of decent decisions along the way.  Pushing through the storm slowly, until visibility improved, and increasing my speed to something high but safe (the speed limit) until I’d gotten out from under the storm.

Tornados are one of those instances where your “gut” will lead you wrong, and the only remedy is research- at least enough to understand your risks.  I have now (not too late, luckily), and hopefully this helps you if your ever find yourself in one of these situations.

The Power of a Story

As humans, it's often said that we are social creatures, or animals, and like many cliches it's quite true, and fundamentally so.  But we are also more.

L. Buck; Borned; 1871; Died; 1934

Consider this picture.  I came across it while placing flags for Veterans' Day.  It's a simple, cement tombstone, with the captioned words written apparently with a stick.  The way the 'd's were carved, it seemed the person was used to holding a brush, and was probably right handed, pulling the letters toward themself, but by Borned, (which took me a bit to decipher), was probably an artist rather than a writer.  The artist theory seemed made more likely by the uniformity, it seems they took great care making sure it looked right, perhaps from deference, perhaps from lack of practice. It took me a  Puzzled, I find myself wondering, "Who was this L. Buck?"  The grave was half-covered by a bush which was being tended, the   Immediately, what comes to mind is the image of a steelworker, working hard for all 63 years of his life.  He was beloved by his family as a father and husband but was never able to scrape more than a few nickels together, and he died in abject poverty.  His one child was struck down early in life to a fever and his wife, uneducated and heartbroken, wrote what she could to commemorate his life.  She got the important parts.
I thought about it a moment, and realized that, this being Oklahoma, he was probably a farmer rather than a steelworker, and his death probably coincided with the Dust Bowl.  He died, penniless and unable to afford the healthcare necessary to survive.
Then I realized, why did he have to be a good guy?  He could have been a cruel taskmaster, driving his workers to their deaths every day they toiled in his fields (still a farmer), and he died, uncelebrated and unmourned.  His grave was marked only because his wife had sought solace in her faith after years in an abusive marriage from which she could not escape, and it was the Christian thing to do.  She lived off of his fortune comfortably, donating much of it to charity upon her death.
OK, there's some projection here, a fear of living a life without importance, and granted, some elements in my story are more convincing than others- that he was a farmer, for instance, and that whoever "inscribed" the tombstone was uneducated, and his death was related to the Dust Bowl, but none of them are demanded.  The idea that he is even a male is hard to justify.  But I dispense with the second story and return to the first, anyway- I can't help it!  It's a tragic tale, with a lifetime of accomplishment, love, work, pain, summed up in a legacy of 3 words, 2 numbers and a letter, a testament to ignominy.
One more story.  A few months ago, I impulsively stopped in at a garage sale here on base.  The family had clearly just had a baby, and seemed to be trying to make room.  They were a young couple, about my age (27 at the time), and had a bunch of kitsch left out for people to buy.  Perusing it, I was fascinated by these hideous porcelain shell decorations (similar to porcelain angels, but with a poorly executed nautical motif), being sold for 75 cents a piece.  Again, I began concocting a story- the couple, young and in love, take a honeymoon trip to the Carribean- yes, to Trinidad; I felt vindicated, as one of the shells was inscribed with the name.  Moved but deeply uninterested in the shells, I tried very hard to find something else I might actually use, but I felt compelled to buy something, even if it was just a token, to wish this couple best of luck.  I settled on a key chain, which they wanted 10 cents for.  I gave them a dollar and left.
Of course, I could be (and probably am, in all three stories) completely wrong.  That's not the point.
The point is, the desire for a satisfying narrative is very powerful.  We look for patterns.  We want to make sense of things, and narratives often do that better than facts, at least at first (especially as capricious as life can be).  I think it's one reason we sometimes find ourselves believing foolish things.  It's also a way salesmen take advantage of us- playing to our observations and assumptions, like wearing a wedding ring when they aren't married.  We just sort of fill in the gaps as necessary, and don't think too hard on them unless we make an effort.  It's easy to get swept along in the momentum.  Maybe I'll catch myself the next time, but maybe I don't want to.  After all, the poignancy of the stories seems to give homage to the hardships of our own lives, which we can't always make sense of, and make it seem just a little bit easier to handle.
So next time you find yourself filling in the blanks on your own, put in that little bit of effort and see how warranted your final version really is- maybe you shouldn't put too much stock in it, but you should certainly enjoy the story.

2012

For the first time, I'm watching the movie 2012. A friend asked me to and to tell him what I thought. So I thought, I'll tell everyone instead, and then send him the link.
Very quickly, for those who don't know, the gist of 2012 is that neutrinos from the sun heat the core of the Earth which results in extreme tectonic activity. Then the planets line up and electromagnetic fields go crazy and everything explodes. It looks great, but is the science even close to reality? No.
Neutrinos, at least many, do come from the sun. They are weakly interacting, neutrally charged particles. They don't do much, if anything, for us to be concerned about- though they are very interesting to particle physicists for reasons I won't pretend to fully understand. As far as heating up the Earth's core, that's about as laughable as saying that doing push-ups will knock Earth out of its orbit, though at least the push-ups hypothesis is somewhat realistic.
Neutrinos simply don't have the energy necessary to do so, and even if they did, since only about 1 in a 100 million actually collide with some atom in the planet, never mind in the core, it would take a truly astronomical amount to actually heat the planet. Let's explain the terms before we go on, though.
First, lets start with what "weakly interacting" means. There are 4 forces, gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces. Gravity affects objects with mass, electromagnetism affects those with a charge, and the strong forces interact with particles such as protons and neutrons. The Weak Force only interacts with leptons, which includes neutrinos (and a handful of others), but it's extremely weak- it's quite a bit stronger than gravity, but with such tiny range it has been described as contact only.
Contact isn't as common as you might think, though- when we touch solid objects, we are really interacting with the electromagnetic force. Solid to us is actually almost entirely empty space. We "feel" solidity because both we and the objects we're touching are electrically charged- either positive or negative. Because neutrinos are neutrally charged, they can't interact with the electromagnetic force, so they pass right through.
Here goes- tedious (but fascinating, if you're into that sort of thing!) math ahead.
If they do interact, they've got a minuscule amount of energy anyway- between 2.2 eV and 15 or so MeV (Electron Volts and Mega Electron Volts, at 1 million each). An eV is an incredibly small amount of energy- 1 eV is equal to about 3.83 × 10^-20 calories. Even 15 MeV is only enough to make 0.0000000000006 calories. So, if the most energetic neutrinos were to hit the core, it would take 1.7 Trillion of them to raise the temperature 1 degree per cubic cm. However, since only 1 in 100000 actually interact with anything (contact only), we would need 17000 Trillion per cubic cm for 1 degree. To put that number in perspective, if it were in dollars, we could pay a half billion dollars to every US citizen (Man, woman and child) and still have money left over- 20000 Trillion dollars (which is still enough to pay for the country to run for the next 5000 years or more!). And that is just to raise 1 milliliter of the Earth 1 degree Celsius.
We must also realize that the Earth is cooling at the rate of 4.42 * 10^13 W, or about 10 Trillion Calories. Per Second. Which means, that, for the neutrinos just to equal our rate of heat loss, we would need 17 Trillion Trillion. Right- enough to pay every person on earth 200 times our entire national budget and run our country for 3 and a half billion millennia!
So, just to break even we need about 10^24 neutrinos coming at us.
Let's look at planetary alignment, supposed to worsen the neutrinos (already dispatched as an even likely form of trouble). The trouble with planetary alignment is gravity- all the planets line up, somehow magnifying their gravitational pull. While in the room with you (well outside your territorial bubble, at about 1 meter) I have about 0.2 % the gravitational pull of the moon on you. Not much, granted, but the moon is very massive. Jupiter, though, only has 5 times as much pull as me (about 1 percent of the moon)! And besides Venus (at 3 times my pull), none of the other planets can match my gravitational effect on you. And my pull is eclipsed by your car or your office! The point here is that gravity is a very weak force- and that distance matters ALOT. So, Earth and the moon are much closer to the sun than any of the other planets (except for Venus and Mercury), and their pull is negligible in comparison. Regardless of that fact, there's no reason for a planetary alignment to do anything more than cause a high tide on earth (it probably wouldn't, but at best that's all it'd do) and do absolutely nothing to the Sun- much less cause a solar flare, because solar flares are electromagnetic emissions- not gravitic ones!
The only thing in the movie even remotely possible was the solar ejections/flares becoming worse. This is problematic. Potentially, electrical grids could collapse as a massive electromagnetic field induces a current in every wire on Earth. We'd live through the initial hit, but without electricity (and without the possibility to restore it for years) we'd be devastated. That's scary- because it could actually happen. But we could recover. However, that would require an enormous solar flare (which has happened before) and a weakened magnetosphere on Earth's part. Possible, but not too likely.
There was one realistic point: Yellowstone is the site of the worlds largest inactive volcano. A very serious problem, and one we can do nothing about. A meteor coming for us, we can shoot down (or more likely, move out of the way). A gamma ray burst, we'll never see and will fry everything on the planet before we can scream. Besides, I'm handy with a handgun and a baseball bat if my kids or I get hungry (ain't nobody taking my food first), if we get to fight back to survive.
Yellowstone. The volcano- that will be an inevitable experience, worsened by being dragged out. We'll know it's coming and can't stop it. If we get a chance to escape, we'll die in the coming winter, or feast on the misfortune of our fellow men. It will be a terrifying and tormented death, which scares the piss out of me. But what can I do? It would obliterate everything from the Dakotas to the Mississippi river and beyond, crush the Rockies to dust and throw them into the Pacific, taking a chunk out of much of Canada and Mexico as well. The ashes would cover the planet, blocking the sun (and mitigating global warming!) and devastating all life. Cows (hell, cockroaches) would be lucky if they made it, and they'd be luckier than us. There's no way of preparing for such destruction on a global level- we're going to die or dramatically reduce global population, and we're talking 1 in 1000 if they're lucky. It's over, if Yellowstone blows. There's no way to prepare. All terrestrial life could end.
2012 was, as far as the science is concerned, a joke at best, and exploiting the conspiratorial among us at worst, taking advantage of the ones who don't understand the science. It reminds me of the Core, a movie from a few years back which boasted some of the most awful science in all of Hollywood history, actually provoking nightmares in yours truly (which I was still able to logic my way out of). Whenever you watch a movie that makes you question the future of the planet, grab a science geek and ask them what they think. We're usually thinking about the death of human society, when we aren't worried about getting laid (or leveling our D&D characters). My favorite (by which I mean "think most likely") is without a doubt the Yellowstone volcano.
Anyway, if only I had a nickel for every neutrino...

Been a While...

It has been quite a while, but I've been absorbed in a lot of other stuff going on, so I apologize. I have to do that a lot. Maybe I should just label this as a semi-annual blog and congratulate myself when I do better? Lowering expectations till they're already met...
Anyway, what brings me here today is the Cleveland Show. Yeah, I probably comprise 20% of its viewership. It irritated me because in it, Junior admits to not believing in God, and within seconds calls atheism a religion. Of course, as many comedians, Seth McFarlane is a professional (and extremely funny, most of the time) troll, so that doesn't get me in and of itself. It's the sentiment, that atheists are somehow dogmatic members of a unified organization, that I'd like to deal with, and while I know that 90% of the internet has either dealt with (in nauseating detail) this belief or just ignored it and continued screaming "Uh huh! It is so a religion!" at the top of their collective lungs, it is for the other 10% that I write this, in the hopes that they may be open to some form of reason. That said, I will be saying a few things that will be disagreeable to all sides of the discussion, but only for illustrative purposes. So.
The view that Atheism (I'll use a capital A to distinguish it throughout this post, though honestly I think it's both as silly and incorrect as capitalizing Astrology, Pickles, or Clitoris) is a religion is a surprisingly virulent thought. It's ridiculous on its face if you look at the definition of atheism (essentially no belief in a god) but this argument is quickly dispatched by, "But it isn't atheism, it's Atheism." Let's look instead to religion for an answer. I've been reading a book called Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer, an in depth study of the structure of religion and its origins. He lists a few things that are common to religious beliefs across the world, very basic concepts. I'll paraphrase, but it can be found on pages 48 and 49.

1. Religion matters to people.
2. Religion prescribes rituals of some type.
3. Religions have "specialists".
4. Religion provides "Truth".
5. Religions often have institutions such as churches.
6. Religion triggers strong emotions, sometimes even enough to inspire homicide.
7. Religion persists despite seemingly more efficient ways of thinking.

This is, by no means an exhaustive list, but it's enough to work with. For this, we'll replace Religion with Atheism in each sentence.
1. Atheism matters to people. Of course, but any deeply held belief matters to people. The obdurateness of Conservatives, the irreverence of Liberals, the superiority of the Packers to the Dolphins and so forth. All these beliefs matter to us, or we wouldn't bother holding them.
2. Atheism prescribes rituals. Nope. Next question.
3. Atheism has specialists. Not particularly. A few individuals spring to mind, PZ Myers is particularly outspoken regarding his Atheism, but also his liberal political views. He is a biologist who teaches biology. Richard Dawkins, another evolutionary biologist, has been labeled the Atheist Pope, but specializes in his field of study, not in religion, and certainly not civil discourse. Atheism doesn't have specialists, it has hobbyists, no matter how passionate. Religions of course have everything from Shamans to Mullahs to Rabbis to Cardinals, all specializing almost entirely in their world view.
4. Atheism provides "Truth". Atheism might be right, but that doesn't mean it prescribes truth. It doesn't claim to be true so much as it claims other worldviews to be wrong. As for the commonly heated debates such as Creationism vs Evolution, Young vs Old Earth, parthenogenesis or silver tongued minx, on each science is on one side, and religion on the other. If you claim that Atheism requires Science (these capitalizations are bugging me), may I point to Bill Maher, for example, as one of many Atheists who does not maintain a strict adherence to Scientific fact as his reason for disbelief- it's just common sense, but he falls on the opposite side of Science in many of his beliefs, such as his views regarding vaccinations causing autism and the efficacy of herbal medicines, chiropractic, or other alternative medicine modalities. Furthermore, Science itself does not prescribe truth- it represents the best guess based upon all available evidence as evaluated by experts. It could be wrong, as it was about the tectonic plates only 50(ish) years ago, and if it is, it self corrects.
5. Atheism has institutions such as churches etc.. Nope. Nothing comes particularly close, even. We have meet-ups, which are sort of similar to Bible Studies, but then, so are tailgate parties. And even if you'd die for the Long Horns, you (hopefully) wouldn't call them your belief system, or claim to draw your morality from the teachings of their quarterback.
6. Atheism triggers strong emotions, sometimes even enough to incite homicide. Let's look at both sections separately. Yes. Atheism triggers strong emotions. So does being Black, if you're in a minority in that culture. Or being a woman. Lots of shared factors, which create some sort of in-group, will contribute to strongly felt emotions, but that comes from our tribal natures, and is common to numerous traits. As for homicide, I've never heard of a murder committed for Atheism. Plenty for Islam and Christianity, but never Atheism. And of course you'll cite Hitler, Mao Z'Dong, and Stalin. Hitler wasn't an Atheist (he was Catholic) but his genocide was inspired by a lust for power and a syphilitic brain. Same for Mao and Stalin, minus the syphilis. Both of the latter established a state religion, setting themselves up to be worshiped. It was an atheistic religion (like Ayn Rand's cult, only national) but it wasn't Atheism.
7. Atheism persists despite more efficient ways of thinking. The religious will probably agree here, but I don't believe this is so. Really, which is more efficient (not more correct) based solely upon the number of things you must believe? That, say, humans arose by chance through evolution (see count below), or that God created us? If you think the latter is more efficient, consider this: How did He do this(1), specifically by which mechanism did He accomplish this(2), why would He care to do this(3) where did He come from(4) what is God (5) (Being generous here, what is God itself requires more concepts to be learned, incorporeal, all knowing, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc.,) and when did did He do this (6 (Even just "a long time ago, Billy" needs to be distinct from "a month ago" for proper understanding)? Note that this doesn't deal with all the other possible questions, what order we were made in, etc., because they aren't required or inferred. The concept of God itself has complicated (and tricky to define) underpinnings. All of these are dealt with by religion, and are a prerequisite to accepting the initial worldview. As for the opposite view, all that is required is A. Things that survive(1) get to make babies(2). and C. Babies change subtly over time(3). Each of these leads to other fascinating questions, but none are required to accept the initial statement. And, while I use this particular view, it is not necessarily an Atheistic one, more correctly, it is Scientific. I will admit that Atheism often has a view which coincides with but is still distinct from Science; Atheists are free to believe that Lrrr of Omicron Persei 8, a mortal (though ageless) extraterrestrial created humans through magic to guard his harem's egg hatchery. They might be crazy, but they can still be Atheists without batting an eyelash. In this case, believing in God is probably more efficient, even if some might say just as reasonable.
So at least in the number of concepts we require to learn a particular origin story, Atheism (through the Scientific view) is more efficient. On the other hand, the religious may feel that all the questions they don't need to ask outweighs this, in which case it's somewhat open to interpretation. Where the religious may, for instance (and I'm not saying all of them) that a rainbow is God's promise to never flood the world again, a Atheist (via Science, still distinct) would have to understand, at least basically, the entire study of optics to really get a good handle on it, and some minor meteorology doesn't hurt, leading to many more pesky questions. The caveat there is that while there are Atheist Scientists, there are also Scientists who are Christian (not to be confused with Christian Scientists, a particular religious denomination).
This then puts the first paragraph into perspective, rendering it rather invalid. Just because you're a Christian doesn't mean you have to believe that God "magicked" us into existence- He could have leveraged the laws of physics and evolution to bring that about. Likewise, as I pointed out with Lrrr, you could be an Atheist and not adhere to any of the Scientific view. Which means that, once again, Atheism and Science must be divorced for proper comparison. Therefore, assuming common conceptions of evolution, reproduction, and time, or, in other words, eliminating the Scientific factor, Atheism presupposes:(This space intentionally left blank). Religion presupposes: God (1). And again, God is more than just one concept, multiple concepts need to build on one another, and further questions invariably arise for the diligent questioner.
In conclusion, Atheism doesn't give us an origin story. Atheism doesn't give us rules to live by. Atheism doesn't give us ethics. Science does all of that (if you include the meta-physical branches, which I do), but it isn't a prerequisite to Atheism, nor unique to Atheism. There are tens if not hundreds of millions of Christians, Jews, Muslims and other religious folk that have a Scientific world view coexisting with a Religious one (say what you like about duplicity, they do exist). Likewise, there are plenty of Atheists that don't adhere to it.
But, most importantly, Atheism does give us an identity, and that brings us together to fight off "invaders" who would take our identity away, or persecute us for it. It is for this that the "Paladins of the Internet", those that must correct all "wrongness" online, are often met with resistance of a zeal and fervor almost always associated with religion. Atheists have been a repressed minority since the first Shaman shook a stick, and after tens of thousands of years, they won't take it. The ironic thing is, if no one cared, there wouldn't be Atheists, just more people, with all their nuance and foibles. Similarly, it wouldn't be necessary to label someone that dislikes Ramen Noodles and A-Ramen-Noodlist, because no one is affected one way of the other. No one cares. But, not caring isn't just tolerance- you tolerate things you dislike- it's total neutrality. If a Presidential Candidate openly announced his/her Atheism, it would result in a precipitous decline in voters. That is what Atheists want- equality, neutrality.
We aren't a Religion, we just don't believe in one thing you're completely assured of. If you're a Muslim, you say that Mohammad was the Prophet. If you're a Christian, you say that Jesus was the Son of God (just a prominent terrestrial prophet). You can't both be right. Atheists just say, "Who cares?"

Simplified take away : Atheism is not Religion.

PS
The following is only tangentially related to the above.
To those Atheists that decided to protest the cross and Ground Zero, good job. You've made us all look light heartless assholes, more interested in expunging religion than letting people get over a tragedy of historical proportion. It's like taking all the Stars of David away from Holocaust memorials. Thank you. This is exactly what it takes for any movement to go forward- to make horrific caricatures of its members in the cultural norms and then move forward from there. Think I'm wrong? Look at the portrayal of gay people on 90's TV. Next time, lay on a bit more nihilism and maybe eat a baby or two.
So, good job guys. I hate everything you stand for, but you might have done me a favor.