Micalef is back!

The title says it all.

S.O.A.P.

I know this may be the last post of mine that anybody reads, but this morning I watched Snakes on a Plane. I was originally only going to hire out Star Trek IV, V, and VI (so not nerdy at all then) , but between the 5 movies for $7 deal they had going, and the nudity warning on the front cover, I decided to go for it. Afterwards, I went here. In homage to the original reason I went to the video store, I wrote this post with a stilted, "William Shatner" style accent in mind. Out of respect for the brave men and women of the USS Enterprise I would appreciate it if the reader were to read aloud in just such a fashion.
For those of you who can't infer the plot from the title, hundreds of pheromone enhanced venomous snakes are set loose on a plane with the intention of murdering a witness to a gangland killing. This being a science student's blog, I have to show everyone how smart I am by criticizing the film's plot holes, of which I see two. The first is not too interesting; but if the mob could do this, surely they could plant a bomb on the plane and have done with it? The second though is the failure of our protagonists to utilize what is both a snake's natural enemy and an abundant resource at 40 000 ft, extreme cold. Outside the fuselage, air temperature hovers around -60 C. Being reptiles, exposure to any sub-freezing environment would render these slippery ophidians completely inactive- pheromones or no pheromones, and at around -20 C ( a temperature still survivable by humans who all huddled together with blankets) you can be pretty sure most of them would succumb. In short, if I was king of the world, my hero and namesake might well have shouted, "Lets start chillin' the motherfuckin' air on this motherfuckin' plane!"

Atheism

Sorry John Safran, but I'm not too stupid to be an atheist. It's true I haven't read "A Brief History of Time," I've been too busy writing a thesis on relativistic quantum mechanics, so yes, I think I could give a pretty good explanation on why the Big Bang is better than genesis as an explanation of cosmic origins. More to the point though, Christians are stupid not because we just now have scientific explanations of nature which are better than biblical ones, but because we've always had competing religious explanations which are at least no worse.

Thank you India

Suppose you were a juror at a murder trial. In his opening address, the defence lawyer says, "My client is not guilty of this crime. Certainly he pulled the trigger on a gun he knew to be working properly, loaded, chambered, and off safety. Yes, the gun was pointing directly at the victim at point blank range, but my client did not kill this man. The bullet did. In fact, it wasn't even the bullet, but rather a hole opening in the victim's head allowing his brains to dribble out onto the carpet. It is this hole-in-the-head who is the real perpetrator here, as such, the hole should be on trial."
This argument is of course completely nonsensical. If a person knows that effect Z will very very likely succeed cause A, and then proceeds with A, that person is morally responsible for Z, irrespective of how many other letters in the alphabet are involved in between. Why am I using this first blog entry to lecture on a simple and non-controversial point of basic morality?
Well, if the reader grows tired of hypothetical and abstract examples of this concept consider this. Suppose there was a country with vast uranium reserves, and a conviction that they should only be used for peaceful purposes. Let's for the sake of argument call this country "Australia." Suppose further there was another country with very limited reserves, and both an active nuclear weapons program, and a civil nuclear power program. Let us call this country "India." Now suppose India had publicly stated, on many occasions, that they would like to devote all of their domestic reserves to bomb making and rely on imported uranium for their civil program, in effect using the extra material to displace more of their original into military applications. Economists by the way, call this well studied process of resource displacement fungibility. Enter Australia's foreign minister (let's call him "Dame Edna"). Dame Edna says that Australia has decided to sell its uranium to India, on the condition that not one Australian atom becomes part of an Indian bomb, or even becomes involved in fission reactors on military warships. I assume that Dame Edna is aware of fungibility, and is not an idiot (actually not a foregone conclusion), but his justification of the new policy makes as much sense as the defence lawyer's "not guilty" plea. Any way you look at it, Australia is now actively supplying India with uranium for bombs.
Now, helping India acquire weapons of mass destruction is perhaps a defensible position. After all, India is a stable, liberal democracy, which has never been caught proliferating. It has justifiable concerns about its nuclear armed neighbor and semi-enemy Pakistan. Perhaps we should be having a debate about preferentially arming our good friends against our not-so-good friends, with weapons so terrible neither side dares to use them. I, like many before me, believe there is a reason this doctrine had the acronym MAD, but at least there is an argument to be made. What isn't acceptable however is the debate poisoning bile that passes for politics in this country, where our leaders try to convince us that 2 and 2 isn't 4, just because they add then subtract a 3 in the middle of the calculation.