Geeky Bob

A friend of mine posted the following image from Twitter (with the actual names removed to protect the innocent):

I responded that I like to mess with people who are that scientifically illiterate by saying things like, "You realize that when you compare a woman's XX chromosomes to a man's XY chromosomes, there are 8 branches in a woman's DNA and only 7 for a man, which means that women have 12.5% more DNA than men, and that extra branch is where DNA stores all the building blocks for intelligence and logic, which is why most women are smarter than you."

Yeah, sure - that statement about DNA isn't scientifically accurate, but it doesn't matter - because whoever the illiterate idiot is, they've already proven that they're too dumb to know better.

Today my wife and I celebrate our 40th anniversary, which is no small feat by any stretch of the imagination. Together she and I have faced more than our share of triumphs and tragedies, prosperity and poverty, happiness and heartbreak. This year we joyfully greeted our fourth grandchild, while bidding a tearful goodbye to my wife's brother and aunt and my father. When my wife and I both said "I do" all those years ago, we were mere children ourselves, blissfully blinded by the stars in our eyes from the realities that lay before us. Side by side we survived eight years of Cold War deprivations during my time in uniform, followed by almost 30 years of my wife's career as a nurse and my never-ending adventures and misadventures with Microsoft. Through it all, however, she and I have trod the path before us hand-in-hand, and words cannot do justice to how much my wife makes everything better in life.

Perhaps the great Irish poet, Thomas Moore, expressed it best when he penned the following verses:

I saw this image and it reminded me of an actual advertisement that I saw on a bulletin board back in the early 1980s in Tucson's Guitars Etc:

"Drummer wanted for band.
NO RUSH TYPES!!!
Drummer must be able to keep a straight beat."

IYKYK

My heart has been shattered into a million tiny pieces, and I have wept more tears than I thought I could carry; my keeper, my mentor, my father, and my friend has left this life, and the world is a profoundly poorer place in his absence.

Please forgive my brief rambling... I'm just a fatherless son who's aimlessly adrift between the "bargaining" and "depression" stages of grief.

Oh, and f*ck cancer.

I've noticed that people who hate Electric Vehicles (EVs) absolutely love to share videos of EVs that have caught fire. For example:

While this video certainly illustrates an EV fire, it is also overshared by people who selfishly want to promote a story that EVs are more dangerous than gasoline powered vehicles, even though the actual data tells the opposite. Many articles have been written and several studies have been conducted about this subject, but most of these articles and studies are ignored by people who want to "do their own research," which is really just a sad excuse for looking for something that supports their preconceived biases.

So if you have an open mind, I'd suggest reading the following articles:

• MotorTrend: You're Wrong About EV Fires
• Popular Science: A new study has some surprising findings on car fires
• CleanTechnica: Actually, EVs Don't Catch On Fire As Frequently As Gas-Powered Cars Do

In the end, most people want to paint a picture that EVs are unsafe because they're angry about the government trying to force EVs on the general public when EVs still do not have feature parity with gasoline cars, and I get that. But sharing false or misrepresentative data isn't the answer.

Although having said that, I thought the following video was hilarious.

I stumbled across the following post from an antivaxxer on social media, which I thought warranted a response:

"90% of the 'food' in grocery stores today didn't exist 90 years ago. Guess what else? 90% of the diseases we face today didn't either. Think about that."

If this antivaxxer was only referring to food allergies, then I think - in a few situations - that they might have have a point. However, with regard to diseases, those numbers aren't just wrong, and they're not just dishonest, they're a complete fabrication.

Over the past century the combined scientific efforts from every corner of the globe have managed to completely eradicate or significantly reduce the impact of Smallpox, Measles, Polio, Rinderpest, Dracunculiasis, Tetanus, Yellow Fever, Helminthiasis, Schistosomiasis, Malaria, Hookworm, Rubella, Onchocerciasis, Typhoid Fever, Trypanosomiasis, Leprosy, Lymphatic Filariasis, Chagas Disease, Chicken Pox, Diphtheria, Haemophilus Influenza, Whooping Cough (Pertussis), Pneumococcal Disease (Streptococcus Pneumoniae), Yaws, etc.

Look, I get it - some people distrust science because they don't bother to learn about it. For most antivaxxers, "science" is what goes on behind closed doors and makes billionaires out of some truly awful people. But the majority of virologists, immunologists, and biologists are obsessed with making the world a better place, and as a result less babies are dying in infancy, more children are living to adulthood, and more people are living longer lives than at any point in human history. To infer otherwise does a tremendous injustice to the thousands of people in the scientific community who sacrificed their lives and talents to ensure that humanity is alive and well today so that antivaxxers can berate and belittle science from their ivory towers of unearned and undeserved health.

UPDATE: This post is one of several that I had written that I later discovered had never been set to "public."

Several years ago my wife and I were in Venice, Italy, when the 58th International Art Exhibition (which was aptly titled "May You Live In Interesting Times") was about to open. Many of the richest people from around the globe had descended on this tiny, northern Italian city via their expensive megayachts and private jets, and their respective attendances were somewhat assured because the world's wealthy simply MUST be seen at events like these, lest they be perceived as "uncultured" by their peers.

As my wife and I caught sight of myriad jet setting millionaires and billionaires who were strolling along the canals of Venice wearing the latest fashions from Milan, Paris, and London, I made the following observation: when you're poor and you're weird, you're viewed as crazy; but if you're rich and you're weird, you're viewed as eccentric. When applying this revelation to the crowds that had gathered in Venice, this meant that everyone who wasn't an eccentric elite witnessed a never ending parade of unusual apparel adorning the ranks of affluent art show attendees, which was like watching a comedy show in which each performer was trying to outdo the last for having the most outlandish costume.

As one prosperous pair passed us wearing clothes that a clown wouldn't wear to a circus, I leaned over to my wife and remarked, "Some people are so fashionable that they don't realize how stupid they look." My playful observation cannot be overstated; I saw several nouveau riche who looked utterly ridiculous, even though in some circles they might be considered fashionable. The super rich who were visiting Venice during our tenure there were living out a textbook manifestation of The Emperor's New Clothes; and like the gullible saps in the fairy tale, they didn't realize that the joke was on them. I didn't take any photos - because that would be rude - but if you've seen the films in the "The Hunger Games" series, just imagine the crowds from "The Capital" walking around in real life; that's pretty much what we saw.

PS - to their credit, the affluent couple in absurd garments that I mentioned earlier were walking an exquisitely groomed Afghan Hound through the streets of Venice. I would imagine that poor animal was probably embarrassed to be seen in public with its owners.

Here's an excerpt from one of today's meetings:

Me:	Your writer created this content incorrectly.
Them:	Our writer has created this type of content before, and they followed the same pattern as last time.
Me:	Let me put this as delicately as I can - if you did something wrong the first time and you continue to do it wrong every time after that, then telling me you did it the same way as last time doesn't mean anything to me.
Them: