The Obama Checklist

[Note: This is a first draft, and will be added to and formatting refined over time. I'll not remove anything though]

The Right’s list:

1. Obama swears into office on the Koran
2. Obama has a meeting makes part of the cabinet or meets with in the oval office with any of the following:
   • Bin-Laden
   • Ayers
   • Louis Farrakhan 
3. Obama uses the second amendment to clean up the new puppy’s “mistakes”
   • Requires all guns to be registered
   • Raises taxes by at least three orders of magnitude on ammo or guns
   • National ban on automatic rifles
   • National ban on handguns
   • National ban on standard hunting rifles or shotguns
   • National ban on all guns
4. We become a communist country, abandoning the free-market
5. We pull out of Iraq with our tails between our legs looking like little babies
6. Abortions rates will increase exponentially durning his term
7. Obama will meet with Putin and pee down his leg, and give back Alaska
8. Obama will meet with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, and Syria in the oval office, pee down his leg, allow them to gain nuclear weapons, and Israel will be destroyed
9. Obama outlaws Christianity, turning the US into either an Atheist or Islamic nation
10. Obama turns out to be the antichrist

Okay, now for the left’s list:

1. Many of the expanded powers of the Patriot Act will be allowed to expire
2. Bin-Laden is caught and/or killed
3. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are successful and our men and women can finally start coming home
4. Torture is no longer the official policy of the US
5. The US begins to develop its own sources of energy, many green jobs are created, reliance on middle-eastern oil is reduced, and actual action is taken on global warming
6. There is a net increase of gun ownership during his term and gun violence goes down
7. Healthcare is reformed. More people get it and costs go down
8. Educational reform is implemented with more resources for teacher along with more accountability
9. The national debt goes down
10. Policies will change based on evidence

I’m not into electronics in the sense that I solder or build circuit boards. I vaguely remember being in an “electronics” course when I was in grade school in 4H, for all of about a month. I’ve also done some wiring on my house, putting in circuit breakers and whatnot. Beyond that, I’m completely ignorant of circuits, how they work, or what the hell this is. But when they start talking about the problems that it solves, I have some idea of how important this could be. Heat/energy have become more and more significant problems as microprocessors have gotten smaller/faster. Storing more information in smaller and smaller spaces is getting more difficult. Apparently, the memristor has applications in these spaces, as well as many many others. Apparently, its like we just found out about a new force of nature, a new fundamental particle, or a new driver for evolution. 

First, its just amazing to read through the process the kid went through to test the idea that there are such buggers, isolate the microbe and then optimize the process. If only science teachers in the U.S. understood science this well. Second, while it may be surprising that what we generally consider something that is completely unnatural (plastic bags) can be broken down by natural bugs, its nothing new. Guys like Craig Venter have been not only identifying microbes like this for  a while now, they are actually identifying the genes that enable the work. Human chemists can’t even come close to holding a candle to what the smallest living things on earth can accomplish. Understanding this, and getting a grasp on the scope of the capabilities here (Munching CO2 or nuclear waste? Pooping medicine or fuel? ), should be at the top of our list for tasks this century. 

But synthetic biologists are also planning to scale up from the simplest organisms to the most complex: human beings. The first bacterial genome was sequenced in 1995 and was followed by the landmark sequencing of the human genome in 2001. Based on that trajectory, Voigt estimated that a synthetic human genome — which could be used in human cloning research — could be created by 2014.

Well that would be something. Certainly would cause some heated discussions.

• Refrigerants (CFCs) made the modern world possible, let us store blood for donations, air condition office buildings, and have access to foods we would have never dreamed of (great Nova recently on this)
• GM foods have the potential to feed more people (grains that can grow in deserts, might perhaps be useful as global warming kicks in and effects the poorest humans the most), or even be resistant to pests, potentially reducing our dependency on chemicals
• Cloned beef? Well, not so sure on that one. I’m assuming the cows haven’t stopped screwing all the sudden, but it is simply an extension of breeding practices we already use

What about the scientists mucking around with the ebola virus? Shouldn’t we not messing around with things we don’t understand? Honestly, I don’t understand that question. It seems to me, if we don’t get inside and figure things out we never learn. What they are working on here, if I understand, is creating a version of Ebola that we can actually learn from, understand, and maybe produce a vaccine. Potentially avoiding a really scary situation where Ebola gets out into the general population in an airborne form and starts killing. If we never try and learn, we’ll never be able to protect ourselves. To me, it seems similar to saying humans aren’t meant to fly; so we shouldn’t try and create machines that can help us do it.The “natural balance” is most humans dying within the first years of their life, then scraping a living and starving just long enough to reproduce before we die at age 20 or so from things a lot more common than Ebola. The “natural balance” doesn’t give a shit about us, its driven 99% of all species to extinction.  I’m not saying we should run willy-nilly into dangerous experiments or exploit the planet. Its just that the evidence doesn’t support some kind of warm and fuzzy “mother nature” that is looking out for her children.

There is a class of ideas that fall into “Perfect World”. If they pan out and actually are implemented, they solve major problems, they help make a better world (okay, maybe not quite perfect). I put things like Democracy, economically viable sustainable ag, the Enlightenment, Wikipedia, and full on behaviorally target advertising in this category. We’ll add energy independence through grass to the list.