Penicillin and evolution

To those who deny evolution: next time you have pneumonia, why not ask your doctor to prescribe penicillin? It's not as though the resistant bacteria would have survived long ago and perpetuated new strains of drug-resistant germs. That would be evolution.

Yup, penicillin should be fine for you.

What good is space?

One of the big arguments for publicly funded space exploration is that it leads to all kinds of technological advances that are used in other areas.

I'm sorry, but that just is not borne out by the evidence. If the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on space have returned benefits to the tune of millions or even billions, that doesn't exactly seem a good investment. Similarly, the argument that all kinds of riches await us in space seems not to have worked out either. There has yet to be developed a blockbuster money-making enterprise that requires human space travel. Economics just won't make the case for space exploration.

Someday, maybe commercial space travel will be self-sustaining and realistic. In a tiny way, it's already starting. OK, great. But do we really need government-sponsored programs to provide a "boost"? Maybe, assuming we care that they succeed. But why should we care? Do we expect it to make our lives so much better that it's worth all those tax dollars?

If we really wanted to do something for the country or the world, there are many better ways we could be spending those hundreds of billions of dollars. For example, real education reform, reintegrating the inner cities into the mainstream economy and culture, developing and implementing effective ways to impact child abuse and neglect, creating cross-country mass transit systems that actually work...

Now, there is a more effective point about space travel. To argue for space exploration in the name of pure science makes much more sense. There is nowhere else but space to do a lot of the science that gets done there. But let's be clear: again, the cost-benefit ratio would seem to accrue from unmanned missions - think Hubble and the Mars missions of the past 20 years.

Manned spaceflight, as near as I can tell, has been mostly make-work. Build a space station - and do exactly what on it that you couldn't do on a two-week mission? Build a fleet of space shuttles, which can't launch reliably, and send people into orbit to do what? Even if there are a small number of long-term experiments that need a human right there every second, are they worth hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars?

To argue convincingly for the value of manned spaceflight from a fiscal or scientific perspective is very difficult, to say the least. If people are going to go into space, let's be honest - the main reason we want to do it is because it's cool! OK. I won't argue with that. I agree. I might be willing to spend an extra $100 on my income taxes for that. Just don't try and jerk me around with rationalizations.

Driving, trust, egoism, violence

There is a tendency, when driving, to sit inside your 3000 pounds of metal, plastic, glass, and music, and forget that each of those other 3000-pound blobs out there is a person. You have a relationship, of sorts, with the people driving around you.

If you're going the speed limit on a 35-mph road, you are trusting the person coming toward you at a relative 70 mph to act in a very predictable way - with a lot at stake if you are wrong! Yet you don't even know him or her - or even whether it is a him or a her. Would you let a stranger serve you food, without even seeing what he or she looked like first? I'd say the risk is much higher driving on the same road with him, wouldn't you?

While sometimes we trust, at other times we feel so violated, so enraged, at others' behavior. I can't believe he cut me off! How dare he honk at me! Is it simply because we've been frightened by unpredictable and dangerous behavior? Sometimes. But I think another frequent reason is that, somehow, we feel victimized - not physically endangered, but emotionally attacked, taken advantage of. Cars can become a vehicle for expressing something ugly and primitive, that somehow feels OK to let out when we are insulated from the person of that person behind two layers of steel, plastic, glass, and music.

Our relationship with others on the road is really cut down to the basics - there is no language, no negotiation, just simple one-time encounters. And our emotions seem to mirror this simplicity, this primality. Without language to help mediate these relationships, are we stripped of some of our ability to reason, to modulate our responses?

Often, from the "perpetrator's" point of view, I think, pure selfishness and/or obliviousness to the needs of others is behind nasty driving. Why else sit in the right lane at a red light with no one else there and a car behind you with its turn signal on? It doesn't take much effort to change lanes as you come to a stop.

I guess what troubles me about my last observation is the implication for other social situations. I worry that the people who stay in the right lane, or who slow down, glide right, and then suddenly turn left with no signal, are the same ones who, walking behind you, see you drop $10 and pocket it, or take advantage of a very drunk freshman at a frat party.

If so, they are legion. What are the implications for the world? Have they always been there, only now they are more evident because driving puts us into contact with so many more people? Are they really not that bad, and the unique factors involved in automotive relationships bring out the worst? What do you all think?