I’m sure by now everyone has heard about Rick Perry’s comments about Texas seceeding from the United States.  Heck it even made the late night talk show circuit on both Leno and Letterman.  I must say it was a bit unexpected to hear, but what bothered me even more was a poll done afterward that indicates that if a vote were to be held on the matter, 75% of Texans would vote against secession.  And this was held up like a great thing…Texas is still ok.

Now I’m not bothered that the vote would fail, I’m bothered that it indicates that 1 in 4 Texans possibly would vote FOR secession.  If you look at the poll, it indicated that 18% would vote for secession and an additional 7% were unsure.  To put this in round numbers, Texas has about 24 million people living here, of which about 72% are of voting age.  If we do the math, that means there are roughly 4.3 million people that think secession is the right thing to do. That’s a pretty scary number.

Where are all these people? and what are they complaining about?  Is this the same percentage of Texans who watch Fox News?  The one "news" organization that helped promote these so-called Tea Parties where Perry made his comments?  Unfortunately, I can’t find any statistics on that, but it would be an interesting comparison.

I guess their big beef is the enourmous amount of recent spending the government is doing to try to keep the economy from failing.  Sure, none of us are happy about it, but I think what people fail to realize is we’ve been living on borrowed money for way too long and now it’s time to pay up.  Americans love low taxes, heck so do I.  Just look at what happened to the first Bush when he tried to raise taxes after saying he wouldn’t.  The bottom line is we can’t expect to have the level of services we do and not at some point have to pay for them.  But that’s what we’ve collectively been doing for that last few decades.  We expect more and more, but want to pay less and less, just like Wal-Mart.

The US has one of the lowest personal tax rates of any developed country.  If we want to keep it that way, it’s going to mean fewer services or more debt.  Take your pick.

So to all you Tea Party folks out there, which will it be?  What are you willing to give up to keep our future taxes low?  Social Security? Medicare? reducing our military spending?  fewer and less well maintained roads and schools?

The hangover is here and there is no quick remedy.

Every Friday I check out Roger Ebert’s site because that’s when he posts his latest movie reviews.  And in general, I like his movie reviews.  I don’t always agree with him, but I enjoy his perspective and his writing.  Well, along with his reviews, he maintains a blog and a recent post talks about his belief or lack of belief in God and his thoughts on some of the big questions we all sometimes contemplate.  There were a few paragraphs in the middle of his post that succinctly summed up his view on god/religion and in nearly all respects reflects my views on the subject as well.

Let me rule out at once any God who has personally spoken to anyone or issue instructions to men. That some men believe they have been spoken to by God, I am certain. I do not believe Moses came down from the mountain with any tablets he did not go up with. I believe mankind in general evidently has a need to believe in higher powers and lives not limited to the physical duration of the body. But these needs are hopes, and believing them doesn’t make them true. I believe mankind feels a need to gather in churches, whether physical or social.

…

I have no interest in megachurches with jocular millionaire pastors. I think what happens in them is socio-political, not spiritual. I believe the Prosperity Gospel tries to pass through the eye of the needle. I have no patience for churches that evangelize aggressively. No interest in being instructed in what I must do to be saved. I prefer vertical prayer, directed upward toward heaven, rather than horizontal prayer, directed sideways toward me. I believe a worthy church must grow through attraction, not promotion.

Amen.

This bumper sticker goes along well with my recent posts on Dark Matter.  Actually, I saw this on a car at my daughters school during their annual Astonomy night event.

The elementary school she goes to does some great science events, one of which is Astronomy night.  This year they had a blow-up observatory in their gym that the kids could crawl into and see the constellations.  Outside in the soccer field they had a series of telescopes for the kids to use to view the moon, saturn and sirius.  It was really pretty cool and a great thing for kids this age.  They learn about the planets and the solar system in their classes, but to actually see saturns rings through a telescope brings it to life for them.

I thought I would post a few videos I’ve found on the concept of Dark Matter.  If you’ve been following along, I’ve been posting my understanding of the topic based on my some reading I’ve been doing lately.  But I know most probably don’t want to hear my view on this, but would rather hear from real physicists.

The first video is for the ADHD crowd, it’s from TED and it’s only about 16 minutes long.  It provides a really good overview of how gravitational lensing provides evidence for Dark Matter.

This next video is from physicist Kim Griest.  It’s about an hour long and provides a bit more detail about Dark Matter and Dark Energy.  Also, the questions at the end are very informative.

And finally this video from an Authors At Google talk given by Sean Carroll who is also a contributor to the blog CosmicVariance.  It’s the longest at about an hour and 15 minutes and also touches on both Dark Matter and Dark Energy. 

So there you have it.  Enough to keep you busy for a while and hopefully provide some interesting information that at least for me is very awe inspiring.

It’s not my habit to push sites that are selling stuff, but when I saw this, I had to share and I certainly can’t argue with the logic.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy and as I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to educate myself on a topic that interests me…Dark Matter.  In Part 1, I talked at a high level about what Dark matter is and why astronomers think it exists.  In this post I’m going to talk in a bit more detail about the evidence astronomers have gathered that points them toward the existence of Dark Matter.  I’m not an astronomer, I’m an Engineer, so I’m coming at this from a layman’s perspective and as such I’ll be writing at a level that matches that perspective.  I’ve gathered some resources (which I’ll post at the end) that I’m using to educate myself and most of the information in this series is a synopsis from those resources.

In my previous post on Dark Matter I talked about why astronomers think Dark Matter exists and the reason was that the luminous mass of a galaxy does not account for the gravitational mass required to keep the galaxies together.  In fact, they should have flown apart.  But how did astronomers actually measure this motion?  How do they know distant stars are traveling so fast?  To help understand this, I’ll talk about how astronomers actually measure the mass of a galaxy and the velocity of the stars within it.  We’ll also talk about galaxy clusters and what those can tell astronomers about the presence of Dark matter.  Finally, we’ll talk about what these measurements say about the amount of Dark Matter that must exist to keep the galaxies together and where it resides.

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