So if the quake and such in Japan affected the whole Earth, its tilt and thus its path through the solar system, has anyone re-ran the calculations for our interstellar near-misses and other trajectories?
I've said to several people now that I imagine there are interns deep inside some institution somewhere running these numbers. None of them report to me, of course. I wonder about it and then guess that I think too much, and try to put it out of my head.
I have a topical juggernaut as-yet-unwritten but warming up in the mental/intellectual bullpen, wreaking bloggish and opinional about how Rachel Maddow is quantitatively different than the television commentators she gets compared to regularly.
Guess you could say that I've been politely witness to right-wing friends of family and distant relations waxing goofily partisan about how Ms. Maddow is no different than their favorites, the Sean Hannitys and Michelle Bachmanns - bottom dwellers in the shallow end of the gene pool.
I keep feeling a strange flavor of silent horror when seeing the huge zombie fandom surrounding Sarah Palin. Intellectual lightweights making their logic-free views a choice that they think everyone, everywhere should have a right to hear about everyday.
Bearing any shred of critical thinking skills in such anti-intellectual times gives anyone with half a mind, aware of how little they know in the scheme of everything that their brief time at college had to offer, shivers of a somehow hopeless, mentally disturbing kind.
Oh mankind, humanity, everything sacred in the great landscape of truth and light, I bear the science-fiction gene that lets me imagine better tomorrows. But there are times when you all do not make it very easy.
