My quick take on the president’s address. 1) Nice to see that we are pushing for more math and science in the classrooms. Of course, this is coming from a man who is on the record for believing in intelligent design over evolution. So, we’ll teach the kids science, it just won’t be good science. 2) And what is this about banning human-animal hybrids? I’ve put in decades of work towards creating the first Mog (half man half dog). It’s been my dream ever since that wonderful night nearly twenty years ago when I first saw Spaceballs. They are just trying to legislate away my dreams now. 3) For the record, the only part of the U.S. economy that has seen job gains in the Bush administration is the federal government. It’s been the exact opposite of small government. This isn’t just my liberal complaint, I heard that stat from Joe Scarborough who leans so far to the right that he needs a crutch to stand up straight.
However, I am all for trying to gain energy independence. If you believe what George Soros is saying, $200 a barrel oil is in the future, which would not cripple the American economy as much as reshape American society. It would result in a lot less cars, a lot more public transportation and a return to the concept of the neighborhood. While I am for all of those things I would much rather have a society where we just naturally move towards using less energy. It doesn’t take much to look at the weather and the air and figure out that we have had a major impact on the planet and that it just simply isn’t sustainable. To think that we can go forward at this pace and bring the rest of the world along with us will just lead us to disaster. (Years ago, back when I was in high school, I heard this point and it has always stuck with me. Imagine a billion Chinese all with freon in their refrigerators and gas guzzling cars. Think that won’t change the world’s weather?) At some point, we have to admit that we need renewable energy and yes, nuclear power.
(Ok, maybe that last point is only because I did my time in the nuclear reactor and don’t know why anyone else should be deprived of such a character building experience.)
But maybe I should be hopeful about all of this. Maybe we will be building a generation of well qualified engineers. I would hope to see that but even I wonder since I left that career path to enter the world of high finance and that is a really non-trivial point. I am in no way unusual in that I gave up a really good engineering job mainly because I realized that if I didn’t I would be destined to spend the next twenty years stuck in a cubicle. (Of course, I’m still in a cubicle but ignore that point for the time being.) It’s not enough to train people for these careers, I would like there to be an actual shift in the culture to that scientists are actually respected again. I grew up in the end days of NASA’s glory years and watching and learning about the space program is what brought me into the field. I saw what they did and thought that it was incredible. I don’t know if there is any modern equivalent. And when intelligent design is pushed as a valid idea, I know that we have a long way to go to change things.
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