So in today's mail came a little flyer from my Conservative MP (I live in Calgary, would he be any other kind). Not a big deal as he sends them all the time. This one however caught my eye as there was an online poll listed to respond to...

On Sunday Mrs. Evil was a torch bearer for the 2010 Olympic Torch relay. She was selected by her company the CPR, to carry the torch in Lethbridge. Photos below the cut.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is an amazing instrument. Though only a 2m telescope, it's vantage point above the atmosphere allows it to take amazing pictures that larger ground based instruments are only now beginning to provide thanks to adaptive optics. The image below was taken by Hubble in August. It is an ultra-deep field image, that is one where the Hubble was told to basically stare at a small chunk of the sky for a long, long time. This allowed it to take images of very, very faint objects, in this case galaxies deep into space. In fact, the faintest red galaxies in the image are only about 600 million years older than the universe itself. That puts them between 12 and 13 billion light years away!

There are times I wonder if Western society is going to collapse under the weight of it's own collective ignorance. I glanced over an article in the Calgary Herald the other day which had the statistic that over half of people surveyed in the US and UK believe that creationism is the way that humans came into existence. Since I didn't write down the date of the article, I found other data, from National Geographic that has, as of 2005, only 40% or so of Americans espousing some confidence in evolution. The same data set has roughtly 70% of Britons having some confidence in evolution, making me wonder where the Herald got it's information, but thats not the point of this post. Thankfully, a 2007 Angus-Reid poll still has Canadians over the halfway mark at 59%. Unfortunately for us here in Alberta, the Herald released another poll in 2008 which confirms the national numbers, but finds that only 37% of Albertans have confidence in evolution whereas 40% feel that humans, and the Earth were created by a god about 10 000 years ago. This is a reversal of the Angus-Reid numbers which had the numbers being 58%-28% in favour of evolution.

The other day I was perusing Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog when I happened upon this article on global warming. Naturally the denier myths were flying fast and furious. So as a public service a little of the science of climate change.

Canada's Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Natynczyk has now twice caused embarrassment to the Harper Conservatives. First by stating that the Forces will be pulled completely out of Afghanistan by the 2011 deadline imposed by parliament causing the Harper Tories to go into full out spin mode in order to save face for their non-pullout pullout. Then this week the CDS provided further fodder for the opposition by basically backing one part of Richard Colvin's testimony that prisoner transfers were halted on several occasions due to concerns about treatment, again sending the Harper Tories into full on damage control.

NASA's LCROSS probe has confirmed the presence of water on the Moon! This is a very important discovery in many respects. First, it means that water is very common in the universe, though we knew this from observations of Mars and clouds in deep space. It also means that permanent manned bases on the moon are possible.

What the new citizenship study package will really look like.

H/T to myblagh.

So there I am having breakfast with Mrs. Evil and some friends in a restaurant before going to ceremonies today when perchance I overheard a conversation at another table. It would seem that a bunch of Tories were also having breakfast, one of whom was either an MLA or worked for one (would anyone recognized their Tory MLA in Alberta?). The conversation was a bit scary.

NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image of the Apollo 11 landing site.
Images located here