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I never did get around to embedding this video, did I?

I took my bike to Miami with me over the holidays and rode in their Critical Mass ride the day after Christmas. It starts downtown at a roughly equivalent location in the city to Atlanta’s Woodruff Park, but the Midtown, VaHi, L5P and Cabbagetown equivalents in Miami are a bit more spread apart, so it took us 14.5 miles (by GPS) to cover a little less population, it seemed. There were 40-ish riders, which I got the impression was close to typical.

I’m actually surprised that many have survived, because the responses I was able to solicit whilst dodging cars also gave me the impression that the general riding tactics employed that night were fairly typical as well. The notion of “corking” as we know it exists only vaguely down there; it’s more of a “just go, go, go no matter what and don’t die.” The Atlanta CM corks to retain its contiguity and integrity; the Miami CM lacks significant contiguity and is more of a fluid mass than a solid. Lights that are red on approach warrant a pause, not a stop, and any phalanx of cars encountered is just an obstacle course, not a boundary. If we tried any of that up here, APD would be breaking us up every month (and someone in a tricked out Hummer would kill five or six in a clip). (I will concede that CM Miami is kind enough to give up one of the lanes to cars when they have two or three to choose from, an idea that might make sense here on Peachtree, Ponce and the like.)

Critical Mass Miami - December 2008 from Shelby Highsmith on Vimeo.

Certainly was a lot more exhilarating, though!

(Disclaimer: this was my first and hopefully last video whipped up on the cheap with the new iMovie ‘08, a piece of software so bizarre it’s no surprise people are going back and downloading the old iMovie HD 6, so forgive the lame edits and audio ducking.)

I hate a bad internet meme, but I love a good one, and Amber and Rusty have a good one. I was hoping to pick one picture per month and hit all twelve, but with 4 minutes left in the year, I’m going to just be a bit haphazard, especially since some of the pics I wanted to use aren’t on Flickr (and are trapped on a computer 600 miles north of my current location).

January

A trip I’ll never forget to the Iowa Caucus — last meal before the big day with some of Team Biden.

From Iowa almost directly to New York to join fellow YouTuber Erica America at MTV and become part of Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08, for what it was worth.

February

Super Tuesday — most special to me for getting my first taste of the Nokia N95, but enhanced by its coincidence with Fat Tuesday and one rather drunk McCain voter at the Vortex.

Prom photo — Broken Hearts & Bicycle Parts bike ride for SoPo Bike Collective.

March

Got Hope? Vine City gets mauled by an in-town tornado. Crazy times.

April

Cracked! Two years later than expected, I finally start generating mixed-mode fatigue cracks. Fat lot of good that did. Please kill me.

May

Hook up with New Media Strategies to cover ISEF ‘08.

July

I got older. And people came out for beers. And my mom didn’t even have to pay them this year.

August

Reconnected with a couple former summer camp-mates in Highlands, NC after, like, 20 years.

October

“Go big or go home,” as they say; I completely FUBAR my hair trying to achieve Greg House, M.D.’s mousey brown. Lauren buys a lab coat.

November

There’s like this historical election thing. I try to enjoy the moment as much as possible while pseudo-working.

December

My mom (right) gets me to march in the King Mango Strut Parade, our last as Miami residents.

We pop a little champagne in my dad’s chambers for one last Christmas amid burn barrels of confidential documents and moving boxes. The judge retires at 80 in January.

Alright. It’s 2009. Yeehaw. It’s also bedtime.

Still too brain-fried to write, but at least I have that spiffy camera-phone. Here’s just a bit of my Thanksgiving dinner. (Next year, I hope to be shooting widescreen video of Thanksgiving on the new OMGEATITiPhone Nokia N97. But for now, nice pictures.)

No time for words; must go get more coffee and put any words I can spare into the thesis. For now, you get my final Georgia video for that thing we called Street Team ‘08.

Just a few of the moments from last night; I gotta go get my Flixwagon footage off the server.

My phone will not be broadcasting to my usual Flixwagon account today; for ease of production I’ll be publishing to a parallel server for MTV, and clips will show up in the player below (UPDATED/FIXED):
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It’s true; most scientists agree science is hard. I know this all too well first hand.

But that doesn’t mean you can mock and ignore it and still lead the free world. There are too many important decisions that rely on a healthy appreciate for and understanding of man’s ability to shape the world with intellect, without just waiting for Jesus to come scoop you up before the Apocalypse.

I’ve been meaning to rant about this ever since McCain decided to make planetarium-bashing a regular part of his debate and stump speech talking points. He keeps referring dismissively to an “overhead projector” as if people want to spend millions to show decaying transparencies of lecture notes, and not excite thousands of school children about studying the heavens. And to think I was once warned that a Clinton administration would be the end of NASA as we know it.

But I’m a little busy doing some science now, so I’ll just excerpt heavily from this article in Slate by Christopher Hitchens, who’s almost as pissed at the GOP’s anti-intellectualism as I am.

Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly.

Anyone who escaped high school without learning about the fruit fly eye color experiments should stay in Alaska. Come on.

Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as “unbelievable.” As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers…[and the] cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species…. [But] all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a “paternity” or “criminal” issue….

Haw haw! Geddit?! Scientists are so stupid, I already saw this one on Law & Order!

[Palin] is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools…and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God.

Don’t forget throwing all those frozen, unused in vitro-fertilized eggs in the dumpster rather than use them to cure disease! Or maybe we don’t have to throw all those potential lives away; I’m sure Sarah Palin will take them in once she’s done with her doomed campaign.

Gov. Palin also says that she doesn’t think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a “premillenial dispensationalist”—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Eschatological arguments aside, right-wing refusal to even think that maybe we had something to do with it — and even if we did, why should be bother starting to fix it before we convince China and India to do it first (there’s American greatness for ya) — has always infuriated me. It’s tantamount to pointing a gun at my head without checking to see if it’s loaded first (something I’ve experienced as well), and it’s doubly painful coming from people who care about their children and their children’s future in every other respect. If there was a chance that maybe their supermarket got a shipment of the scary Chinese milk and eggs with melamine in it, every Republican mom I know would drive across town to another store for a week. But when it comes to global warming, the “speculative” and “hypothetical” consequences — though orders of magnitude more devastating than a Publix full of melamine — do not warrant the cost to the businesses because commerce is our way of life. That’s just the entrenched culture of a party that is 20 years too late to the climate change wake-up call: the status quo of industry (in the generic sense) was more important than the consensus of eggheads in lab coats, so clearly there was some ulterior agenda here. And for the love of God don’t bring those CFL bulbs around here, Rush Limbaugh told me they cause EPA-level toxic spills.

I could go on, but just go read the book.

All of this comes from folksy folks that accuse liberals of being “elitists” over lobster dinners at exclusive country club enclaves — so I can only assume the “elitism” charge is a derisive mockery of our reliance on book larnin’.

The Dude cannot abide that kind of abuse of science. Whatever the downside of Democratic policies and their “wasteful tax-and-spend” practices, so long as any politician enjoys dancing on the grave of intellectual curiosity, I’ll have a hard time taking any of their arguments at face value.

Last weekend I was feeling election fatigued — even partisanship fatigued. I was nauseated by most of the things I saw going on at McCain-Palin rallies, from their lunatic fringe of bigots to their core message that people like me aren’t “pro-American” enough. But I also knew there was plenty of hate coming from the left against the right, particularly against Sarah Palin, easy target though she may be. So this is what I whipped up for my Street Team video commentary:

I’m not so sure I’m feeling that warm and fuzzy anymore, but since the other side does have most of the guns, I guess I’ll keep an open mind to playing nice.

Of course, you know the nutty xenophobes out there will just insist on using Joe the Plumber’s middle name constantly to stoke the “The” fears.

McCainPlumber08.com