"Is our children learning?"

Cripes. Where to begin? In a talk with reporters yesterday, Bush gave his opinion that intelligent design should be taught in science classes alongside evolution. This is apparently in direct contradiction once again with the comments from his own science advisor. I'd hate to be that guy today.

My two cents: Evolution (once defined for me as simply the gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form) is a fairly solid idea in science. It's mostly the theory of natural selection that has a few holes. It's still the best we have right now, and while we can't go back in time and observe millions of years of speciation, there is compelling evidence.

A population genetics lecture in the genetics class that I did the teaching assistant thing for this past Fall included a short discussion of research the professor did on fruit flies and starvation time. Typical lab flies will live 20 hours without food. For this experiment, they isolated the flies that lived the longest without a foodsource and mated those to form the next generation. After 60 generations, the flies would live an average of 240 hours. Regardless of the natural process that caused this change, this is evolution in action.

Intelligent design is really just creationism dressed up to make it seem more scientific. There's less actual biblical speech and talk of a designer rather than "God," but this still ultimately is a supernatural explanation for things. It's not science. I just finished reading a book by the physicist Michio Kaku where he points out that miracles are by definition not repeatable and therefore completely untestable.

Analogous SCIENTIFIC debate shows that quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory. Should we teach the competing theory of tiny ghosts that carry our electrons around on their backs in high school physics?

I'm glad to see that there's an uproar in response, but considering that he's on record as having this opinion since at least his governor days in 1999, I can't shake the feeling that this is yet another ploy to turn the media and national debate away from Karl "Icky Pants" Rove and the utter mess in Iraq.

I am confused

A question for the lady in the black jump suit on the bus this morning:

If you are going to wear latex gloves in public, presumably because of an aversion to germs and diseases, why do you go from holding the vertical bar in the bus to opening your water bottle with the same gloved hand? And why do you wipe your nose and mouth with the same tissue?

It's not like bacteria are absorbed through the fingertips...

Garlic, raccoons, and traffic

Jen and I did a little road tripping up north to the Gilroy Garlic Festival. We drove north Friday up the 5 to Gilroy, just south of San Jose. There was a wildfire on the way up, thankfully on the other side of the highway. We camped at Henry W. Coe State Park. Owen joined us camping Friday night and Saturday at the festival. Despite the heavy heat, and signs warning against campfires during the summer, some idiots did burn fires at their campsites on both nights.

Wildlife encounters:

• ground squirrels (many scurrying around the park, as well as the one that peeked out of a burrow hole at our campsite)
• no discernible frogs at Frog Lake
• one garter snake (crossing our path on a short Saturday morning hike)
• one jackrabbit
• a deer on the side of the twisty park road on our way to the festival
• 10,000 raccoons (all trying to eat my food)

Yep, this otherwise serene hillside state park has a bit of an "aggressive" raccoon problem. There were signs up on the pit toilets warning campers to store food in their cars and such. We didn't think too much of it, but did move open bags of chips and jerky to the trunk on Friday night. Owen heard at least one protracted (and failed) attempt to open our borrowed cooler that night. On Saturday, not long after returning from the day's garlic and local cheer, Jen and I walked up to the modern toilets at the vistor's center that promised lights and fewer spiders. On our way there, a guy who I assume was a native northern Californian (scruffy beard, no shirt, ponytail) was trying to dispose of trash and was spooked by a raccoon that popped out of the nearby plastic recycling container. Jen and I were discussing this event when we returned to our campsite. I playfully shined the flashlight around looking for raccoons, and... Hey! There's one! On our picnic table. It jumped down, but then spent some time sizing us up before finally slinking off into the grass. I was a dummy and had left the jerky out. I am convinced that this same thief tried to come back for more later in the evening. I guess we were an easy mark at that point. We spotted a mama 'coon and three coonlings browsing around our car before we huddled in the tent for protection/sleep. I was woken a few times by the sounds of coon fighting in the pitchblack night. Fun.

But, we were there for garlic and weird food. There was plenty of both Saturday, once we fought the traffic in to the parking lot and entered the festival. After starting off with garlic bread and scampi, we moved on to the goodies. The three of us went to a cajun kiosk and shared the fried gator tail, frogs legs, and rattlesnake. I am embarrassed to point out that I liked the garlic ice cream, especially because it was a free sample. Much garlic all around.

Owen had to get back home, so Jen and I roamed the town of Gilroy for a little while. We crashed a local watering hole and found a friendly bartender. It's good to know that locals go to the garlic festival, too, although not every year. This year's temperatures were close to 90 °F, but that was considered better than recent years. He also used to work for Budweiser in the beer tents, and told stories of how the alcohol content in event kegs is lower than normal and the one year that they emptied close to 700 kegs over 3 days.

Sunday, we took the time for a drive down the 101, stopping in San Luis Obispo for a late lunch. This little college town was fun, and deserves another visit. They had a version of the public art animal theme with trout. One memorable example was both obviously and really painted by an elementary school class. Jen pointed out that we can turn anything into beer tourism, and indeed, we visited the local brewpub for SLO Brewing. Sadly, they are closing operations at the end of this month...

Traffic on the 101 from Santa Barbara on south reminded me why we don't take that route very often. Stop and go crawling for hours, man. This was not helped by not one, not two, but three multiple car accidents on the way home.

When we finally plan a trip to the avocado festival in Carpenteria, also north of LA on the 101, we're taking Amtrak.