Hey, I’m back! The book is finished and has been sent off to my e-publisher. Yahoooooooo!

Keep an eye on this space for the release date of “Coping With The Cubs: A Life Of Depression, A Year Of Hope.”

Cover Detail, Designed by Karen L. Roszkowski

Nice to see that the forces of ignorance have been as strong as ever during my absence. No, I’m not talking about that big powwow in Minneapolis last week. Actually, this is the first Republican ticket that doesn’t make me want to run screaming for the medicine chest. John McCain seems a decent fellow with his heart in the right place (even though he has to play nice with all the right-wingnuts of the GOP.) And I give him a lot of credit for selecting a woman as a running mate. Here’s to you, old Johnny, for putting the first MILF on a national ticket!

Sarah Palin: The First Hot Veep?

No, the ignoramuses I refer to are those Chicken Littles who’ve been trying to stop the first run of the new Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.

I’m a science nut so I’ve been geeked since 1995 when funding was approved for the facility. The LHC is now the largest particle collider ever built, making the previous record-holder, the Tevatron at Fermilab outside Chicago look like an elementary school running track. The Tevatron has been – and the LHC will be – on the lookout for a little thing called the Higgs Boson, also known as “The God Particle.” The Higgs, if found, would be the most elementary particle yet discovered. It would pretty much explain why there are things in this crazy, mixed-up Universe.

The Bang Gang: CERN Scientists Try To Understand The Big Bang

As always, whenever there’s a huge scientific advancement, the hand-wringers start yelling about how it’s going to kill us all. The scaredy-cats in question fear that the LHC will inadvertantly create a black hole Wednesday when it’s turned on. Some people watch too many sci-fi movies. They envision this black hole popping into existence and sucking everything in the world into itself, rendering the outcome of the 2008 baseball season moot. The LHC already has caused any number of petitions and lawsuits to pop into existence.

There’s an anti-science mood in the world today, particularly here in the USA. Strange, when you consider that we live in the a world where huge strides have been made against disease and hunger, where a person can travel from Colombo, Sri Lanka to Des Moines, Iowa in a matter of hours rather than months, and where every schoolchild can listen to the Jonas Brothers on a miniaturized, portable, self-contained music player even when they’re supposed to be studying polynomials for that big test tomorrow. All thanks to science.

Knowledge Is Good: Don’t You Think? Or Don’t You Think?

Most people in the world (and, again, in the USA in particular) would prefer to be ignorant. And pundits wonder how we could have fallen for George W. Bush’s Iraq war.

Glad to be back. Talk to you next time.

Michael G. Glab here – wit, raconteur, all-around nice guy…, oops, wrong index card. Call me Big Mike. I’m just an ink-stained wretch, pounding on the keyboards, shouting out to the Universe, “Whee, look at me!” Feel free to peruse some of my more creative writing at my other new blog, Big Mike: Thumbing The Keyboard

This blog will deal with the world of science. It’s a world under attack.

Here we are, some 200 years after the Age of Enlightenment, living with instant worldwide communication, routine space travel, a mapped human genome, the ability to see inside the body without cutting it open, and more wonders than can be counted, yet approximately one-third of the American populace believe in ghosts.

What in the imaginary hell is going on around here?

A “Creation Museum” opened last year near Cincinnati. This purported educational institution is devoted to a literalist biblical view that humans and dinosaurs once roamed the Earth at the same time. At least one presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, refuses to believe in Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

A panoply of questionable alternative health care regimens, treatments and disciplines beckons those who imagine they have every ailment under the sun. Medical fads pop up in dizzying succession. From food allergies to autism, everybody’s got ‘em.

Oprah Winfrey and Jenny McCarthy have joined forces to announce that something called a “mommie instinct” is more trustworthy than all the medical research, scientific inquiry, and learned observations humankind has mustered in a few thousand years.

A fellow named John Edward criss-crosses the country and has a popular television program wherein he purports to talk to the dead relatives of audience members.

I could go on but I won’t. It’d be too discouraging. It’s enough to make one think we’re a nation of dopes. Is there any other country on this planet that would take a candidate for the highest office in the land seriously if he or she announced Darwin was wrong?

The current occupant of the White House has spent the last seven years ignoring good science in favor of the views of religious zealots and robber barons.

How much easier is it for a political leader to hoodwink his constituency if they don’t know how to think? If people can’t tell anecdote from analysis, wishes from facts, fiction from reality, they’ll be as docile as lambs. And weren’t we all lamb-y when George W. Bush used fear, innuendo, and fabrication rather than cold hard data to whip up war fever against Iraq?

So what are we gonna do about it? This blog is my start. Science Is My Faith will be a digest of news stories about advances in technology, the contretemps between religious fundamentalists and those who, well, can think, incidents and examples of chuckleheaded thinking, and my own comments on them all.

And really, wouldn’t you rather listen to me spout off than Jenny McCarthy?

Let’s start in the next post (which will follow this one just as soon as I can bang it out) with a story about a bunch of big bombs. Now, they must be around here somewhere…

Till next time,

Big Mike