It’s not often you can boil down complicated abstract ideas of science or culture into simple concepts everyone can understand.  Gems like “for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction” don’t come along every day.   But every time someone asks me what science is like I simply say “You’ve seen The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.  It’s like that” and they nod knowingly.

What?  You haven’t seen it?   Read on my friends.   In a few key phrases you will know everything you need to know.  Science wisdom, as distilled by quotes from one of the greatest science films of all time (and it’s fun for Halloween too) – The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It’s also PG and totally safe for older children, unless your kid is prone to irrational fear of Skeletorama-motion plastic props and utters sentences like …

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I’m usually a pretty patient guy about marketing. Unlike some, I am not educated by it and, unlike others, I don’t look down on it. I know why it it exists and I appreciate its value but at some point in advocacy issues ( in this case the environment ) it invariably crosses a line from being funny to offensive and then it goes completely over the line into being the kind of junk science that needs to be ridiculed.

My latest gripe is the claim that low energy bulbs are a magic panacea for the environment and that they are wonderful in all respects. I don’t use them and there are a few compelling reasons why you should focus on other ways to save the environment also.

The main reason I don’t use them is because I am not smug enough.

You know what I am talking about. Who actually laughed at those Apple television ads where the smug, hipster guy is the Apple user and the buffoon uses a PC? It takes some true marketing incompetence to make Microsoft seem lovable but they did it. The only people who liked those ads were Apple users, who are already smug.

Now we have commercials where a hip CFL bulb guilt trips a traditional light bulb in the same condescending manner – and without about the same level of actual data behind it. It will sell some lightbulbs – and maybe make your cat insane, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s discuss light.

The whole point of light bulbs was to give us daylight at night – at first, anything was better than dark but we later discovered that the closer you can get to natural light, the better off you will be. Here is a chart showing the light spectrum, including daylight, incandescent and fluorescent bulbs.

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I saw a press release about a global warming ‘virtual march’ ( we’ll get back to that ) and a tour being conducted by Laurie David ( married to “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David and thus an expert on climate science, also founder of the website that put out the press release ) and Sheryl Crow called the “Stop Global Warming College Tour” beginning April 9th in Dallas.

I was itching to find more information about it and, other than discovering they were going to show clips from Al Gore’s movie ( yeah, no college student will have seen that ) and Sheryl Crow would sing a few songs at each stop, the only interesting thing I came across was an article in something called the Post Chronicle where the author makes a joking reference to a “girls gone green” tour likely being a better idea. You know, kind of like “Girls Gone Wild” except the beads they get are made of hemp – and they hopefully won’t be chunky sorority sisters on drunken binges.

You mean they haven’t done something like that yet??? No one would ever have heard of PETA if they didn’t go on trial for killing homeless pets and get aging supermodels like Christy Turlington ( perhaps NSFW ) to pose naked in their advertisements.

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Guns, Guitars And Greenpeace

As a younger man, I was a big fan of Greenpeace.

As time went on, I thought they lost their focus by branching out from protesting nuclear weapons to whaling and trees and basically hanging out a shingle that said, “If you send us money, we will protest for you.”

I watched them change from instilling their people with scientific literacy to educating their people on political activism. Then I watched them turn on me because I was a scientist who didn’t much like exaggerated evidence in the name of fundraising and because I was a sportsman and because I was a businessman.

I’ve always believed that sportsmen – hunters, hikers, mountain climbers – are natural allies of the environmental movement.

I watched them turn on hunters because of the gun issue. I watched them turn on businesspeople because of the logging issue. I watched them devolve into silliness … hijacking ships, funnelling money to political groups, ramming a French sailboat competing in the 2003 America’s Cup and finally, in the absolute depths of their Klondike Kop level incompetence, running aground on Tubbataha Reef Marine Park off the coast of Manila last year, which they were supposedly visiting because they were worried about global warming. They paid a $7,000 fine and said it was an accident and the millions of dollars in damage done are still not fixed. I imagine the environmental movement wouldn’t have been so lenient if, after the Exxon Valdez accident, Exxon paid a token fine and left the damage.

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Nothing says funny like X-Ray glasses.

And scientists are nothing if not funny. Take those fun-loving guys at Stanford University’s Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California. They know that Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois will be shut down by 2010 and that scientists are determined to have the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operating in Geneva by 2007. That means the pressure is on if the USA is going to be allowed the privilege of over-paying around $9 billion for the International Linear Collider (ILC), which should begin engineering in 2010.

The guys at SLAC knew they needed to be bold. To quote from the greatest movie ever made; “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”

So what did they do to make a bold splash and get Americans excited about physics again? Did they hire Elisabeth Shue and have her invent cold fusion to solve all of our energy problems?

No.

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Nothing says relaxation and down-home cooking like the smell of crackling electricity through chicken corpses and Liborio Markets, a Latino-based grocery store moving into the region, aims to please. To make sure you get the freshest chicken nuggets possible, they intend to kill about 150 chickens a day by coursing wholesome electrical currents through the feathered critters. Then they cook them. Seems simple enough, and about as humane as you can get, being they are turned into food and all, but some residents are clucking about it.

Claudia Barnes, a local busybody who learned just today that chickens have to die before she can eat them, doesn’t like the idea at all.

“We’re just appalled,” she said. “If they want to do this in the privacy of their home, I don’t care. But we’re just opening up a keg of worms if this happens.”

Keg of worms? What happened to cliches everyone knew and that made sense? She is worried about some kind of slippery slope here, like if chickens are killed humanely we’ll suddenly have dogs hanging in the streets, like in Spain? And they should kill chickens in their homes? Is that some kind of racist thing against Mexicans? Listen up, Claudia, Mexicans may have chickens fight each other in their basements but they don’t kill them. Not on purpose anyway. I am with the Mexicans here. I am okay with dead chickens because they can’t bring me my slippers but I draw the line at hanging dogs.

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“Most people would say if this was anywhere but Marin, people would just shoot him,” Dixie Goldsby said about the rodent that hopped into her Honda Insight in Utah and came back to California with her.

Goldsby is factually incorrect but it doesn’t matter if you’re a Marin resident. Being haughty is what counts. John Kerry will likely get 95% of the vote there. What she doesn’t realize, and most Americans do, is that no one would have bothered to shoot the little critter.

1) Any decent size bullet would obliterate the chipmunk so there would be no way to make a big trophy out of him and put him in the den with the lions and tigers and bears we all have mounted. Marin County people tell their kids scary bedtime stories about the rest of America and they all invariably involve evil people shooting helpless animals while driving SUVs that use all gasoline … and smoking cigarettes in public bars.

2) There’s not much meat on chipmunks … for the $.65 I would waste on a shell I could get three times as much meat in a McDonald’s hamburger.

No, most Marin County voters actually believe that in other places the little thing would be dead. The most telling way you know it’s Marin County? They want to fly the little guy back to Utah … on a private plane … and they want someone else to pay for it.

The chipmunk could not be released in Marin legally or ethically because he is not native and because ecosystem balance is important, according to Melanie Piazza, director of animal care for WildCare: Terwilliger Nature Education and Wildlife Rehabilitation. The trip will require more than $300 for gas, along with food and overnight lodging for the humans. WildCare is hoping animal lovers will donate money to help pay for the mission. Piazza did not mention what wasting all of that gas and electricity would do for ‘ecosystem balance.’

“If we couldn’t get him back he’d be euthanized, so I did have an investment in getting him back,” said Goldsby, a clinical lab scientist.

Huh??? Who was going to euthanize the little guy? Someone in Marin County? Or would they drive him east for that nasty job?
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