But one day things began to change.  The Reds began by chiding the Greens, and eventually the Yellows as well, for not being Red enough.  Some, compelled by the pressure, began to change their hue.  They shifted red over time and melded with the Red crayon causing it to grow.  But this left a spectral void.  So the Greens and Blues began to divide and shift their own hues until eventually, the group that used to span from Violet to Blue- Green, now encompassed all the Green and the Yellow as well.  Each crayon was smaller, but the void was comfortably filled such that the world could retain its full color.

The Reds, still confident they represented half the spectrum, even if only by weight, decided the new middle must be somewhere in the neighborhood of light Orange.  This made even a nice shade of Aqua seem distant and radical.

Before long, the Reds became so emboldened by their uniformity and enormity they started advocating that the world exist only in shades of Red.  Their followers, even those whose world depended on tints of all types, began to paint only in Reds and eschew other colors as evil.  They mocked the other colors for failing to agree on a single shade.  They relished their monochromatic view of the world.

For awhile, the Reds seemed an unstoppable force.  Their unity, their single mindedness, their size made them formidable.  Over time, the sun, the skies, the grasses, the seas all became Red.  But red suns burn cooler, and red chlorophyll doesn’t photosynthesize as well.  The world cooled and the air became foul.  The vibrant spectrum of life dwindled until eventually the world was, as the Reds had envisioned, a uniform color.  But not red.  Rather, an amalgam of all colors… lifeless brown.

And as you think about this parable, ask yourself, “Are your politicians playing with a full box of crayons?”

Ray Comfort was the runner-up after producing the hilarious “Atheist’s Nightmare” video staring Kirk Cameron where the dynamic duo explain how the banana is incontrovertible proof of God’s detailed design of the universe.

But the winner… Don McLeroy, former head of the Texas State Board of Education.  McLeroy’s tireless work to defend the children from messages incongruous with his conservative Christian rewrite of reality are legend.  He is famously quoted as saying, “Someone needs to stand up to the experts!”  That’s our Don.  Because the last people we want involved in educating our children are experts.

While McLeroy has most famously been a thorn in the side of science education, he’s now lending his warped reality to Social Studies as well.   Last October McLeroy spouted to the Washington Monthly,  “We are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan — he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

Fortunately, McLeroy lost his GOP primary to retain his seat in the upcoming election.  The good news is that he will no longer be a member of the Texas State School Board.  The bad news is that he has the rest of 2010 to work his twisted worldview into curricula.  Moreover, Don is but the most visible face of the board whose makeup is heavily slanted toward Christian Conservatism.  So we aren’t out of the woods yet.

President Obama has proposed a 1.4% pay increase for active duty military in 2011. This is THE LOWEST SINCE 1973! Nice to know that during a time of rampant inflation, while war is fought in 2 theatres, our men and women in uniform get A LOWER PAY INCREASE THAN WELFARE RECIPIENTS!!! Please repost if you support our troops.

Let’s start with the easy stuff. Obama did propose a 1.4% increase.  It is also the lowest increase proposal since 1973.  Those points are true.  Now hold on tight because the accuracy drops off steeply right after that.

“Rampant inflation”?  Average inflation for all of 2009 was -0.34%.  Note, that is a negative sign!  It was less than zero.  Technically that’s deflation, which is an economic concern in its own right, but still means that your dollar buys more now than it did a year ago.  There is debate about whether inflation will pick up again in 2010, but the debate is over whether it will be tiny or negative.  Nobody (except perhaps the author) is worried about it being rampant.

On another point, it’s impossible to compare military pay to welfare.  Military pay is set at the federal level where the states individually set their own Welfare payment schedules.    The most analogous comparison might be to Social Security benefits.  They are set federally, and are similarly subject to annual revision.  However, there was no cost of living increase for Social Security in 2010.  ZERO.  Note that there has been a SS COLA increase in every year since 1975 except 2010.  The rationale is essentially the same.  The Consumer Price Index and inflation were basically flat, so no increase is needed to maintain the same standard of living.  The military is doing better than our seniors.  Further, the 1.4% proposal is actually pretty reasonable.  Most corporate payrolls won’t go up by that much in 2010.  Just look at your own paycheck.  How big of a base pay raise did you get this year?

But let’s not declare victory just yet.  If we go back to the original announcement of this proposal and read past the first paragraph, there is another interesting tidbit.  “Housing allowance increases, new retention bonuses and specialty pays will drive troops’ actual compensation up about 4.2 percent next year.”

However, the dumbest implication of the post is that somehow this is a plot by Obama to malign the troops.  In actuality, Obama recommended the largest possible increase allowed under current law.  The law specifies that the President may not make a recommendation for a military pay increase that is larger than the Employment Cost Index, which just happens to be at… 1.4%.  Congress can opt to enact a larger number, but the President has no control over that.

Unfortunately, I suspect most of the people inclined to update their Facebook status with such blather aren’t going to be troubled with a few contradictory facts.  But for those interested in the truth, I’m happy to help.

The recovery was bad enough, but about six months later I had to go back in and have the hardware removed.  Frankly, that was way worse (probably because it was only done under a local anesthetic), and the hole left behind took the better part of two years to heal.

That’s why I think this new development is very cool.  They’ve now developed a screw made of polylactic acid and hydroxylapatite, a ceramic that  is the main constituent of bone material.  That means that once the screw is inserted it is absorbed by the body as bone grows into it.  This should mean faster and better bone healing as well as no one having to suffer through having Home Depot reclaim its inventory from inside their body.

Conservative media darlings James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles made and posed in the videos allegedly showing how ACORN was advising them in ways to hide money from the IRS as a hooker and her pimp.  This was quite the salacious news story blanketing the news media at the end of this summer.  It fueled paranoia that somehow ACORN was this malevolent shadow force for liberal America.

It turns out that O’Keefe and Giles are also adept at editing video.  The DA determined that the unedited tapes he reviewed were not nearly so clear cut in terms of ACORN giving illegal advice.  Granted, he didn’t go so far as to say ACORN did a great job.  But no charges are forthcoming.

Curiously, but not surprisingly, this development is not front page news.  The media was essentially duped into their feeding frenzy over this story, and it’s highly unlikely we’ll see any of them issue a mea culpa for their erroneous coverage.  It’s also interesting to note that not even Fox News is outraged over the DA’s decision.  No one seems to be trying to portray this decision as a cover-up or other scandal in its own right.  That rather tells me that everyone realizes they were pwned by these two wanna-be celebrities, and would rather we all just moved on to the next bit of juicy gossip they want to sell as news.

I often advocate for people to speak out when their own side goes off the rails.  If the Democrats are out of line, it’s easy and expected for the GOP to call them on it, but it carries much more weight if the offender’s own party cries foul.  Similarly, I’ve called for Christians and Muslims to advocate against ridiculous behavior from within their own camps.  It’s my turn to walk that talk.

While I firmly hold that the “Smut for Smut” program is legal, it’s minimally in poor taste.  It’s not only offensive to Christians, but as an atheist I find it offensive myself.  Moreover, it’s not helping.  As a minority struggling for tolerance and acceptance, it doesn’t further the cause to disrespect the majority to whom you’re trying to appeal. Further, atheists already suffer from preconceived stereotypes of being amoral hedonists.  Associating us with porn really doesn’t do much to dissuade people from that mindset.

There is no greater good to be achieved here.  This is a publicity stunt, pure and simple.  And no, any publicity is not good publicity.  To the members of the ironically named Atheist Agenda at UTSA, cut it out.  Your parents’ are ashamed of you, and so am I.

The article goes on to explain the arrest of an arsonist and his accomplice who torched a church in Texas that they attended as children.  Further, they are using DNA evidence to try and link the criminals to several other fires.  Yet the core theme of this story is the existence of a book on atheism in the guy’s house.

They don’t even try to explicitly claim the guy is or became an atheist, or that his unalleged atheism was responsible for his actions.  But the title clearly leads the reader to make that link.  They mention in passing the finding of another book titled “Demon Possession,” but there isn’t even the remote hint that the Devil made him do the crime.  I’m guessing there were probably more than two books in the house, but the others (whatever they were) didn’t make the article.  Although I have a feeling that even if a copy of “Arson for Dummies” was found, it wouldn’t have made the headline.

What’s more, the book in question is “The Atheist’s Way: Living Well Without Gods.”  Book reviewer Dan Barker says of the book, “Millions of people lead happy, moral, loving, meaningful lives without believing in a god, and Eric Maisel explains in exquisite rational and compassionate detail how we do it.”  Sounds like pretty subversive stuff, doesn’t it?  The kind of radical godless hedonism that would lead you to burn down a church.

Atheists are not evil and amoral any more than Mexicans are lazy, women are frail, or Jews are good with money.  It’s bad enough that atheist stereotypes exist in society.  We don’t need to tolerate them in the press.

Kim and I all dressed up for our virtual wedding.

It was over three years ago that I took the plunge into virtual worlds.  There was a lot of momentum building in the gaming and social networking arenas and a lot of money and energy being spent to build and draw people into these virtual environments. The predictions at that time, including mine, were that VWs (virtual worlds, not Volkswagens) would continue to mature and eventually become the next generation of the web.  People eventually wouldn’t logon to a website or service anymore as much as they would step into it.

However, as CNet’s Daniel Terdiman observes in a recent column, the wind is out of the VW sails.  Much of the energy lately has gone into social gaming like Farmville and Mafia Wars or into the kid-friendly 2.5D worlds of Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel.  Meanwhile, worlds like Second Life and even the more game oriented World of Warcraft have been technically stagnant.  So are VWs dead?  In short, no.  They’re just taking a more circuitous route than anticipated.

Several factors are at work here.  A key one being that the economy has seriously slowed the flow of cash into funding new development of any sort.  Lots of industries have gone technically fallow over the last 18 months or so.  Flash based games and Facebook games are dirt cheap to produce by comparison.  So it’s not surprising that this is where the effort is going.  Still, in many respects, the social nature of gaming and online activity has continued to grow apace.  The growth of Facebook, Twitter, the interactive commentary on most every blog and news service, networked game consoles with multiplayer games, and other similar applications continue to point to consumers being ever more comfortable connecting, interacting, and sharing online.  Virtual Worlds remain the next logical step.  An immersive experience where the user is projected into the social interaction rather than typing and reading at its periphery.

The advent of mainstream 3D movies, like Avatar, and games, like Call of Duty have made great strides in acclimating people to the idea that realistic environments can be manufactured.   Meanwhile, 3D televisions and computer monitors are poised to bring 3D content into our homes over the next few years.  Very high bandwidth symmetrical Internet connections are also moving into the home.  (More slowly in the USA than elsewhere, but that’s a different topic.)  And new interface technologies such as Wii controllers and Microsoft’s Project Natal will free people from cumbersome keyboards and gaming handsets and allow them to interact with the VWs in natural and intuitive ways.  All the trends continue to point a future where a virtual world based web is as common and accepted as having a Facebook page is today.  All we really quibble about is the timing.

Yet even with all the technological and sociological convergence toward a VW based future, there remains an enormous hurdle.  Second Life founder Philip Rosedale said, “The deeper, fully immersive virtual worlds, as Second Life has shown, it’s just a huge amount of work.”  Chris Sherman, lead organizer of the Virtual Worlds conference added that the cost of building 3D worlds and “the return on investment is simply not there.”

VWs, even fantastical ones, are fundamentally built from objects in our real world.  The trees may be purple and the people blue with tails, but these are all elemental structures we are familiar with.  Moreover, in the same way that most people’s Facebook pages are pretty reflective of their real selves, it’s reasonable to assume that most VWs will also be reality-based.  Currently, the process of turning objects in the real world into 3D models is painful and expensive.  It’s well within the grasp of Hollywood, but remains outside the capability of the average consumer to perform or to pay for.  This is the nut that remains uncracked.

Not to fear though.  Eventually, somebody will devise a process to affordably capture snippets of the real world and make them available for you and I to share and use.  In principle, it’s much like photography.  Once an arcane art, but simplified by George Eastman and made accessible to everyone so that their world, their memories, their lives might be tangibly shared.  Same idea, different century.  If only George were around today… this seems like the sort of opportunity he’d be all over.

Not content with just messing with science class, the Texas Board is now futzing with Social Studies.  Students are required to learn about key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 90s.  These include the Moral Majority and the NRA.  However, requirements to cover Edward Kennedy, Sonya Sotomayor, Thurgood Marshall, and Hillary Clinton were voted down.  Students will also learn there was a factual basis for Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s contention the U.S. government was infiltrated with Communists in the 1950s.  On the plus side, efforts to remove Hip Hop music and the Scopes Monkey Trial failed.  Still, the bottom line is, even if you’re not a science junkie you should be worried about what’s going on down there.

In a possibly related story, a recent poll of Texans showed that 41% of them believe that humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.  The remainder were apparently overly influenced by Alley Oop, The Flintstones, the Raquel Welch epic One Million Years BC, or other multimedia documentaries of their youth.

I suppose this means we shouldn’t really be expecting too much from Texas.  Maybe it’s okay that they don’t know so much about science or history.  After all, there’s a lot of brush down there to clear.  And I’m sure Houston can import the necessary rocket scientists from other states.  We just need to figure out how to make sure they don’t drag the rest of us down with them.