Hero #3: Bill Gates. In your FACE, Typhoid Jenny!

As much as we all love, love, LOVE to hate Bill Gates, damning his name during the ritual of reinstalling various Windows versions and all our stuff, the Redmond Baron has done something damn cool.

He's made a $10 billion-with-a-b vaccine pledge via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The plan is to come up with new vaccine research and make them available to the poorest countries.

The Foundation's been putting more than $4.5 billion into vaccine research each year.

It'd be nice if some of that money could go into aggressively combating the anti-vax loons of the world, but I won't bitch as long as lives are being saved and virii are dying.

Hero #02: Carl Sagan

It's been nearly 13 years since he died, and nearly 30 since I sat glued to the TV watching "Cosmos."

The man did everything, it seems, from advising Apollo astronauts to working on the gold records the Voyager craft are carrying beyond the solar system even now.

I wish I could say that Mr. Sagan inspired me to excel in science or some such, but it wasn't until after his death in 1996 that I started thinking skeptically about things. It was only a few months ago that I even started thinking about who I would even consider a "hero." I think I've got a good idea, now. He was a strong advocate for the sciences, for skeptical and critical thought.

I wish I'd listened to him when I was that kid in 1980.

John Boswell's Symphony of Science features some well-done nods to Mr. Sagan--if you don't like AutoTune songs, you'll still like this, because the "singer" is Sagan himself, in clips from "Cosmos."

Hero #01: Derek Bartholomaus (JennyMcCarthyBodyCount.com)

Wanna keep track of the preventable illnesses and the preventable deaths that can be laid at Typhoid Jenny's feet?

Here!

Jenny McCarthy Body Count

Don't want to go to a Web site? Okay. There's video, too!



Derek Bartholomaus becomes the first Hero on the Kook Clearinghouse!