I’ve been wanting to write about the Presidential candidates’ stand on science for a while now. In some cases it’s pretty clear: under Huckabee, for example, there’s little doubt that after a few weeks we’d be longing for the devastation wrought by Bush. For others, like Obama, it’s not as clear. He once said he wanted to take NASA’s money and give it to education (not understanding what NASA does for education), but he seems to have relented somewhat on that.

It’s now a wee bit easier to see what’s what, because Physics Today has a site with links to the Presidential candidates’ thoughts on science.

However, after looking through it, I don’t think their pages are all that reliable, since they depend on what the candidates have said in press releases, and not what they’ve said and done on the actual campaign trail. For example, on evolution, it just quotes what Huckabee said in an interview:

“If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I’ll accept that….I believe there was a creative process.”

Huckabee said he has no problem with teaching evolution as a theory in the public schools and he doesn’t expect schools to teach creationism.

“We shouldn’t indoctrinate kids in school,” he said. “I wouldn’t want them teaching creationism as if it’s the only thing that they should teach.”

However, in 2004, Huckabee was a bit clearer about this:

But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that’s why it’s called the theory of evolution.

Huckabee is scary dangerous. He repeats the really bad creationist talking point about fact and theory like it makes any sense at all… but at least his position, to rational people, is crystal clear. I think it’s remiss of the Physics Today folks, whom I generally highly respect, to leave such an important topic so badly incomplete. A little digging would have been very helpful here.

As we have seen repeatedly, what candidates say and what they do are, in general, vastly different things. Relying simply on their press releases to gauge their stand on science is at best hopelessly naive, and at worst very dangerous.

Over the next week or two I will look into this issue more. With Romney and Huckabee it’s pretty clear. Of all the candidates, as far as I know, only Clinton has made a clear stand on science, and was clear about evolution, too:

“I believe in evolution, and I am shocked at some of the things that people in public life have been saying,” Mrs. Clinton said in the interview. “I believe that our founders had faith in reason and they also had faith in God, and one of our gifts from God is the ability to reason.”

“I am grateful that I have the ability to look at dinosaur bones and draw my own conclusions,” she added, saying, too, that antibiotic-resistant bacteria is evidence that “evolution is going on as we speak.

Evolution is not the be-all and end-all of science, of course, but these days it’s a pretty good canary-in-the-mineshaft for it.

McCain is at best hazy, having said after that one infamous Republican debate — where three out of ten candidates humiliated the US by showing that they didn’t think evolution was true — that evolution is supported by science, but that we should "expose students to other theories". Thing is, there are no other theories. There’s evolution, and there’s fantasy. So I’m not so thrilled with McCain either.

Mind you, the President does have influence here. The President can appoint judges, for example, and can influence Congress. And (s)he can set the national direction on many issues.

I’m not so naive myself as to be a one-issue voter, at least, not on this one issue. The past seven years have pushed this country to the thin hairy edge of disaster, and in many cases well beyond that edge. You will have your own opinions on the war, on the economy, on warrentless wiretapping, on torture, on purging attorney generals, on outing covert agents, and so on. Go ahead and vote your conscience on those. But on this blog I tend to lean heavily (though obviously not exclusively) on science. As I find out more, I’ll post more.

We’re coming down to the wire here, folks, and I am not being hyperbolic when I say the very future of our nation hangs on the balance here. Please, do due diligence on this. Find the information that concerns you, and vote accordingly. If science is that important to you, then by all means, let it guide you as well.

Did you know that the James Randi Educational Foundation has a Facebook page? So does TAM 6.

I’m not completely sure what use the Facebook group pages are; Randi already has a discussion board, though I would guess some Facebook users who are fans of Randi may not know about his board.

And somehow, without my knowledge, I became an officer of the group! Calloo callay! Where are my epaulets?

Over the years, I’ve seen lots of people trying to give examples of how we know the Earth is round. You’ve seen ‘em: ships sailing over the horizon disappear from the keel up (which is actually a good one), or shadows cast at different parts of the Earth have different angles (which is how the Greek Eratosthenes determined the size of the Earth to excellent accuracy).

Those are fine, but to me unsatisfying. I haven’t observed the Sun shining straight down a well at noon in Egypt, for one, and who has the patience to watch a ship sail away?

Ah, but here I sit in my mom’s sunroom in Sarasota, Florida. The temperature is peaking near 80 F, while at home I believe the high will be closer to 35. That’s certainly an indirect indication that the Earth is not only round, but also tilted!

But even that won’t do it. After all, a clever (if there is one) geocentrist might say, maybe the climate is simply different on different parts of the disk-shaped Earth.

But in this day of jet travel, direct evidence of a globular Earth is trivial. The night before I left Boulder, I got a good look at Orion hanging in the sky over my southern horizon. Last night, after US Airways had spent an entire day bending me over, I went outside to stretch, and saw my old friend the Mighty Hunter once again. Orion was noticeably higher off the horizon.

Boulder is at a latitude of 40 degrees north. Sarasota is at 27^*, a difference of 13 degrees south. From Boulder, the belt of Orion is about 40 50 degrees off the horizon when it reaches its highest point in the sky in the south (called the culmination), so a change of 13 degrees is pretty obvious. Orion is about 15 degrees high, so that puts Rigel (Orion’s knee) where I’m used to seeing Betelgeuse (his armpit). Any amateur astronomer worth their salt would notice that!

This is pretty conclusive that we live on a round planet. Unless we live on the edge of a geocentrist’s disk, that means the Earth is a sphere. Or close enough, anyway.

^*I’ll add that the first time I ever saw Canopus was from Sarasota. It never gets above the horizon for people living north of about 38 north latitude, and from Florida it gets just high enough to see. Canopus is the second brightest nighttime star (after Sirius), so that’s a pretty cool thing to see. Took me a few minutes to figure out the first time I saw it, too.

So I had to go to a end-of-the-semester party being held by Mrs. BA’s office. The dress code was suit and tie, which always elicits a grimace from me. I’m more of shrts-and-a-t-shirt kinda guy. I hate wearing a tie.

Furthermore, I don’t know how to tie a tie. I’m a scientist (and now a stay-at-home writer/blogger/rabble-rouser), and I rarely wear one. I realized my one black tie was hanging in the closet, pathetically untied, Mrs. BA was at work, and I was on my own.

I fretted, then suddenly remembered once upon a time seeing a website with instructions on tie tying. Searching my bookmarks (always think ahead, folks, and bookmark early) I found it. It was Mahalo.com.

I had first heard of this site through its founder, web guru Jason Calacanis, who appeared at Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex conference, and I keep up (well, I try to keep up) with Pirillo’s comings and goings. Anyway, I liked what Jason had to say, and added him to my Twitter friends. That’s when I found his stuff about Mahalo.

Mahalo is a human-driven search engine. They actually vet the sites submitted, and then pick the ones they think are best. I initially thought it was the dumbest idea I ever heard of: there are billions of web pages. How would they do it?

Shows what I know. In fact, it’s a good search engine. They’re responsive, too. They didn’t have my humble site listed when I checked their listing for astronomy. So I submitted it, and they added it very quickly; as I recall, in less than a day. Other search terms yield good results too, with no spam, no sites that bought their way to the top, and all arranged into neat categories.

The important thing, of course, was that I was able to tie my tie in just a few minutes, on the first try, by watching the video they supplied with the instructions on their results page. Nice!

So I’m plugging Mahalo. It’s a good tool, and they literally saved my neck. Thanks, Jason.