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Considering the list of embarrassingly stupid questions ABC asked Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton last night (see also here, here, here, here, and here), one has to wonder why the candidates prefer such unproductive distractions to engaging the positive and enlightening Science Debate 2008.

It was infuriating watching Barack Obama be questioned about his relationship to Reverend Wright for the bazillionth time, an issue that is old news, when he could have been explaining his policies to ensure American competitiveness online, to tackle Climate Change, and to improve our Educational system..

It was an outrage to watch Hillary Clinton confronted with the same old silly questions about her Bosnia story gaff, when she could have spent those precious moments talking about her plans to switch America to alternative energy, to mend our Educational system, and keep America a high-tech leader in the world.

In taking their discussion to ABC, the candidates simply fed the already-obese media gossip machine. No one was enlightened. With a science debate, they could have demonstrated the very job skills we are interviewing them for with this whole political process, the purpose of which is finding the right person to lead America into the future.

Heading to NY for the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the MoMa. Blog will be running on autopilot until Monday. : )

“There was a time when reading wasn’t just for fags. And neither was writing. People wrote books and movies. Movies with stories that made you care about whose ass it was and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!” - Joe Bowers, Idiocracy

Channel-surfing with my siblings during a family visit, I happened to come across Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy right at the opening, a film I would not even know existed if it weren’t for HBO playing it perpetually for several months now. We LOLed through most of it, and when the credits rolled and the laughter subsided. Someone stated what we were all thinking:

“That movie hit a little too close to the mark.”

Quick Synopsis: Joe Bauers is a completely average person, average in every way. He gets put to sleep and wakes up 500 years in the future, where centuries of increasingly inane entertainment, Fox News, and commercialism have brought average IQs down to what we consider mentally challenged today.

The opening clip is totally awesome (language advisory):

Although Fox had a contractual obligation to release this film, they did nothing to promote it. Probably because the film’s critical satire of Costco, Starbucks, Carl’s Jr., Fudruckers, and Fox News wasn’t good for advertising.

Mike Judge has a Bachelors in Physics and his film Office Space was very funny and insightful. While his shows King of the Hill and Beavis and Butthead had mass appeal. This blend of intelligence and accessibility make Judge perfect for making a movie like this.

Judge’s depiction of the culture of stupidity is actually frighteningly realistic. Watching the dittohead assault on academia or spending an hour browsing MySpace profiles confirms that, when a doctor in Idiocracy diagnoses Joe, “Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit’s all retarded,” Judge is taking a page from a segment of today’s society.

Friday night’s at the comic shop, we gamers are subject to endless verbal abuse from drunk people hanging out at the neighboring nightclub. They laugh at us, call us fags, and deride our preference for intellectual stimulation to chemical intoxication.

We laugh at them with films like Idiocracy.

Improved images tracking all the junk in orbit around Earth.

Trackable objects in orbit around Earth

Ha! Ha! Ha! Dittoheads’ new hero in the fight against Global Warming Science? A 16-year-old girl!!! She may be more articulate and mature than me, to which I reply: Nya! Nya! Nya!

By salvaging the raw binary data from the magnetic disks carrying Pioneer’s telemetric data, scientists have been able to model the mystery of why the space craft fell behind course during its 35-year journey.

The placenta is an incredible adaptation, and now Stanford scientists are finding clues about its evolutionary origin, beginning with modified bird and reptile genes, and then specializing into species-specific development.

We were just thinking about the possibility of our galaxy’s black hole waking up to fry us all, well, it appears to have had a flare-up just 300 years ago.

Charel’s Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, a 3-ton mechanical calculator designed in the 1840s, has been constructed at the Computer History Museum in California.

Difference Engine No. 2 Photo by Paul Downey

All the science sites are talking this week about scientists simulating Neanderthal speech with models of their larynx, but none of these sites have sound clips of the simulation.

SICK: The mass diversion of North American grain to make ethanol is starving people across the globe.

Maybe I shouldn’t be ridiculing the 16-year-old climate skeptic, when a 13-year-old boy corrected NASA’s estimates of an asteroid hitting the Earth.

Thunderf00t totally opens a can of intellectual whup-ass on Ben Stein’s ignorant, flunky description of Evolution (or “Darwinism” as he so moronically calls it):