stardust memories

First of all, I am not a scientist. I am not a theologian. I am not expert of any kind truth be known. My professional educationsuch as it is, is in Art. I choose Art over science in my teens. There have been at times I have regretted my choice and other times been thankful for making the one I did. Most of the time I try to make it from day to day , pay a few bills and come up with reasons to not go buy a shot gun and exit Hemmingway style. My career (If you can so label it) is in the service industry. I cook for a living. I do so very well.

I am an agnostic with strongly atheistic tendency's. I was at one time a person of faith even if it was unorthodox. I do not believe in god or an afterlife but I do accept that I may be wrong and I fully accept the consequences of such a stance. Trust me when I say that I did not come to feel that way lightly. I can not pretend to believe in that which I do not. That last statement should explain why I call myself an agnositic rather than a full fledged atheist. I simply do not know . I can't truely answer the question of whether or not god or gods or godess's exist. I can attempt to not be judgmental about those who have faith so long as I am not disrespected by those same said people. My personal and not to be discussed spirituality (For lack of a better term) is based on the exquisite nature of the scientific method (Which I by no means apply to my own life, Ha, I said I was not an expert I never said I wasn't a wee bit of a hypocrit ), my belief that mankind is essentialy good (If a bit dumb as far as intellegent beings go), we ARE responsable for each other, and the belief that truth is beauty, beautity is truth is ... thus Art. *

Well now on to my little speech. Tonight is actually today. It is 3:25 am January 15, 2006 and I have been up all night to witness the re-entry of the payload of the Stardust probe which for those of you who are not aware has been out and about the local solar neighborhood gathering interstellar particle samples that in all likelihood predate the birth of our little star system. I live on the West Coast and it would have been clearly visable as a -6 magnitude object (That's about the brightness of Venus)similar in appearance to a “shooting star” in the south eastern sky as it made its way to it's target destination in Utah. Well it would have been if were not for the constant rain we get here just south of Seattle. The sky teased me all night alternating between clear and overcast viewing conditions. I basicaly gave up hope for fair weather by midnight and contented my self to the views other people elsewhere enjoyed via web cams and the offerings on Nasa's official web site, http://www.nasa.gov/.

Tonight was like a holiday of sorts here in our secular humble household. I have been watching via the Internet and it's vast resources as well as chatting with other nerds world wide since around 7 pm. I also have been working on dying my hair lite blue but that my friend is another matter altogether.

At 1:15am or so the sky suddenly and unexpextedly cleared. I was overjoyed but catious. I knew not to get my hopes up to high. In the year since I first moved to the Pasific North West I knew better to count on anything other than percipitation from the local enviroment. I do live in a temporal rain-forrest after all. My hesitation to embrace hope proved a wise at 1:40 am the rain returned. It stayed and is with us still. That doesn't mean stand outside like some goob too dumb to come in out of the rain because thats exactly what i did. Veiw-scope in hand and my laptop close at hand. I had linked it to my desktop inside so I wouldn't miss anything no matter what happened but alas I rigged wrong. My scheme to cheat fate of cheating me failed. I stood there wet and cold eyes fixed upon the heavens in what I was pretty sure the right region of the sky until about 2:00am, ten minets past ETA, just to be certain. After that I went back in, changed clothes, and put on some water for tea.

Damn Westport weather. Damn.

All this astronomy has put my mind in a thousand places.
Principly I have thought a great deal about my old friend Mike, a fellow nerd with whom I have shared some of the best moments of my life. You may recall him from my earlier babble on U.F.O,'s . I hope he thought of me tonight.

As I stood in the court yard in front of my purplish townhouse apartment here by the sea in the rain and sleet I cursed the west coast weather and I thought about Mike and I on a dark winter night a number of years ago standing outside of a cow pasture in rural Alabama taking turns peering through an Astro-Scan 2000 at the night sky. The Astro-Scan 2000, by the way, is an excelent little scope that while being a beautiful instrument for amature such as ourselves bares more resemblence to an industrial grade bong than it does to an optical device. I have included a stock photo of one at the top of this entry.

We laughed as we thought of what a police officer might think if he came across two guys alone out in a cow pasture at 3 am with a cooler of beer and what to anyone but another amatuer astronomer would look to be a 2 foot long red bong (The Astroscan). I am glad that remained humorous speculation rather than fact as I am sure Mike does as well.

This wet am I raise a huge thermos of coffee to Mike, those times and many others.

I have also thought a lot about science in general and more specifically the unspoken “War on Science” here in America. Even more specifically I have thought about the moronic subject of creative design and creationism as an alternative to evolution. It has been an inescapable issue in the news here of late. I appologize for what I am about to say to those Christians I personaly know out there (and dearly love) and to those of a spiritual or religious inclination who are not bigoted, narrow minded goofs that make issue of these matters. Believe it or not one can have a positive dialogue transpire between two people with almost diametricaly apposed veiwpoints. This crap really gets under my skin and pisses me off at times. I can not abide psuedoscience and point blank aggressive stupidity. Crwative design is fundamentalist creationism dressed up as science and it simpley is not. I suspect most people who support this ludicrous view that tis is a real "theory don't have a solid understanding of the what the terms nartural selection, evolution and theory mean.

Example...of sorts . Keep in mind it is now 4:01am and I have been awake for a long time.

Evolution does not talk about individual “creatures” or specific animals in most cases, it talks about populations. It certainly never states anywhere that mankind evolved from monkeys only that apes and Homo Sapiens (Us) share a related origin (Origin of the species...does this sound familiar ?) An individual creature does not change, only a population of creatures (or plants, protists, fungi, bacteria, or archea) changes. Second, evolution is, by definition, the change in the relative frequency of different versions of a genes (alleles) or multiple genes in a population. If the frequency of enough genes change, or the frequency of one important gene, then you may get a group that can not interbreed with the original group, and are hence a new species. This is not necessarily the case, however, as even a relatively small change in the frequency of a rather unimportant gene is still evolution. To take the peppered moth case, originally a much larger fraction of the population had the version of the pigmentation gene that resulted in light coloration (I’ll call it the light allele) relative to the those who had the version of the gene that resulted in dark coloration I’ll call it the dark allele). This relative proportion changed, with the dark allele becoming much more common than the light allele. Later, it switched back to having the light allele being much more common than the dark one. This is the fact of evolution. The relative proportion of different versions genes within a population does change over time, this is well-established.

The theory of natural selection, on the other hand, is an explanation for why this occurs. It explains why the fact of evolution is true. It says that competition for resources results in the genetic makeup of a population generally shifting in favor of versions of genes that are most likely to allow an individual with those versions to reproduce. The theory of evolution is more broad, containing a number of separate theories. These theories were all developed to explain the fact of evolution, the fact that the genetic makeup of a population changes. These various theories are similar in nature to traditional natural selection, but do have some important differences. These theories apply under different, specific situations. So although the modern form of natural selection works in a great many situations, there are some where natural selection either does not apply, is not that important important, or is not sufficient. In those cases other theories are applied alongside or in place of traditional natural selection to give a better explanation of what happened. So the theory of evolution includes all the tried-and-true theories that are used to explain the fact of evolution under a variety of circumstances. You could consider it analogous to physics, where under different situation Newtonian physics, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, or some combination thereof gives the best explanation, while in another situation a different one of those or a different combination is superior.

Okay, I am done. I am off to go lay down for a bit with my finacee Shanzi, forget about Westport weather and maybe dream of stars, angels and old friends.
*If truth is beauty then science is gorgeous.
P.S I am not always this crabby.