By the Time I get to Venus...

From: Provo, Utah, USA, Sixth planet in from the Oort cloud.

To: All carbon-based sentient beings residing at least one light year from me

If you are reading this, you must be a civilized, self-aware life form of some kind. You live close to us, at least in astronomical terms... 1 to 120 light years away. You have been getting a lot of accidental electromagnetic signals from us in the 500 kHz to 1600 MHz range. We call this stuff "spam." Most of the stuff you have received from our planet has probably been confusing for you, to say the least. To be honest, most of us can't make much sense out of it either.

Please ignore any images you have received in which any orafice is moving and making noise. Some of those sounds are called "speech," but the vast majority are what we call "idiotic nonsense." I apologize on behalf of all of us here. It was all accidental, I assure you.

You have probably been sending out signals also, but we have not been making much effort to receive them. The big reason for that is: our smartest science guy (he rides around in a wheeled chair) said you would probably destroy us if you ever got here. The idea is that if we don't know about you, we won't be worried.

I'm not a big-time science guy, but I think we should take a different approach. You have already picked up the really bad signals we sent out accidentally. If you have deciphered this message, you are smart enough to know that all those images of us meeting with beings from other planets are fake -- even that really cool "ET" movie. We call our planet by lots of names: Earth, Terra, Gaia, Home, El Mundo, or Third Rock. So we call beings from other planets "Extra Terrestrial," also known as "ET."

Maybe you ET's have decided to come here for an extended visit. Believe me, that would be a really dumb idea. Here is why: We have thousands of nuclear weapons. Probably not much by your standards, but way more than enough to fatally irradiate and destroy all the good stuff on the surface of our planet, along with any of you who happen to be here. Think we won't use our bombs and missles? Hey, we're so messed up we have even used a few of them on ourselves! I don't know why, but we love to kill things, and annoying ET's are at the top of the list.

Travel can be really expensive, especially between parsecs. Maybe you have some "frequent traveller" points you can use to take a free trip. Ok, yeah that sentence is what we call a "joke." Seriously though, it would cost you way more to get here than anything we have is worth -- unless you have lost all of your own stuff. In that case, you would be coming here to establish a new home.

Sorry, but if you want El Mundo, we will fight you and destroy everything here before we would let you have it. As a matter of fact, by the time you arrive we will probably be just a smoking cinder anyway. So your whole vastly expensive journey would have been for nothing, unless you have need for a relatively worthless lump of melted iron and silicon. All may not be lost, however. We have several unoccupied planets here in our little group that might work you if you can invest some "sweat equity" and a boatload of ice.

Here are some directions you might find useful: About half a light year from us, there are a whole bunch of icy rocks called "The Oort Cloud." If you see any of those you want, feel free to take them. Where you're going, you will need a lot of ice. Oh, one of those icy rocks actually orbits around our star, and we call it "Pluto." Don't take that one -- it has some sentimental value and we have already named some stuff after it. We would also be interested in your opinion about Pluto's potential to become a real planet.

Pick up as much hydrogen as you can haul. You will need that too. Keep traveling and soon you will see a 5 huge gas balls. The one that's on fire is our star, called "The Sun." The other 4 are called Uranus, Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter. Incidentally, there are some great moons orbiting around Saturn (the big planet with lots of rings) and Jupiter (the one with the big red spot and whispy rings). You could also pick up a bunch of hydrogen and ice there.

Next, watch for flying rocks. Lots of chunks that may have once been a planet. We call them Asteroids. Yeah, strange name I know. Then you will see a little red planet called "Mars." It might look interesting, but take my advice, it has no real potential, and if you want to see what it's all about, we can email you zillions of pictures. Kinda boring.

Ok, the blue, white, and green ball you see next is us. As I said before, don't come anywhere near us. And leave our moon alone too. It doesn't look like much, but we think it's pretty and we need it for stirring up our oceans. Also, there is a flag and a couple of golf carts there that we're kinda proud of. Yeah, that is the closest humans will ever get to "outer space." Hey, at least we boldly went camping in our own backyard. Don't laugh... nobody on our sister planets ever went anywhere.

Speaking of sister planets, ours is just up ahead. It's the white ball the same size as Earth. This is where you can use the hydrogen, water, oxygen, and anything else you brought with you. This planet is called Venus, and it looks gorgeous from here, but it wants nothing to do with humans.

Yes, that thick atmosphere is carbon dioxide. Yup, no hydrogen anywhere. You will have to turn pump in a bunch of it to create water. Throw in all the ice you can get, and then create a giant umbrella to shield the planet from the sun. Throw all the big rocks you can grab to get the planet rotating about 10 times faster than it is now, and you will soon have a really nice new home!

Oh… uh one more thing. That little planet that is closest to The Sun is loaded with valuable heavy elements like gold and uranium. You can have all of it on one condition: After we destroy our own planet, we will need to camp out on your new planet for awhile. Don't worry. There will only be a few of us.

Sincerely,

Jay McDougall Johnson

Football Friends with Benefits

I grew up as an only child and a severe asthmatic. Often, my parents wouldn't let me out of the house. I make friends kind of easily, and I have always loved to hang out with them. In the age
before video games, my strategy to becoming a gregarious shut-in was to get every board game
I could, learn how to play them all, and make up a bunch of new games involving hundreds of
plastic soldiers plus all my mom's hair curlers, wooden blocks, and a boatload of rubber bands.
All of this, plus my stand-up comedy routines and the home-made goodies my mom provided
made my house a popular after-school hangout.

Although I was an expert in most indoor games, and made up the rules for some of my own, I knew my friends would not keep coming back if I won all the time, or even most of the time. I was careful to win just enough to keep the competition interesting, but not enough to discourage anyone from playing. Thus, I intentionally failed at unimportant things to gain friendships. This was much better than paying cash for people to like me.

Now let's look at BYU football. The well-understood but seldom articulated goal for the program is to make friends for The Church. We want to save people from heck by not beating the heck out of them. Even an unobservant person can see this strategy at work. We like Florda State, and want to recruit Floridians. Yes, I admit, we COULD have made the game more interesting,
but I know from experience intentionally not quite winning is a razor's edge challenge, not an exact science.

Notice also that we let the Air Force Academy and University of Washington win every few years or so by way of intermittent reinforcement. Most of us know how amazingly effective that strategy is (think Vegas slot machines), and I think we need to get going on that kind of program with Florida State, Notre Dame, UCLA, and at least one of the SEC schools.

From: Provo, Utah, USA, Sixth planet in from the Oort cloud.

To: All carbon-based sentient beings residing at least one light year from me

If you are reading this, you must be a civilized, self-aware life form of some kind. You live close to us, at least in astronomical terms... 1 to 120 light years away. You have been getting a lot of accidental electromagnetic signals from us in the 500 kHz to 1600 MHz range. We call this stuff "spam." Most of the stuff you have received from our planet has probably been confusing for you, to say the least. To be honest, most of us can't make much sense out of it either.

Please ignore any images you have received in which any orafice is moving and making noise. Some of those sounds are called "speech," but the vast majority are what we call "idiotic nonsense." I apologize on behalf of all of us here. It was all accidental, I assure you.

You have probably been sending out signals also, but we have not been making much effort to receive them. The big reason for that is: our smartest science guy (he rides around in a wheeled chair) said you would probably destroy us if you ever got here. The idea is that if we don't know about you, we won't be worried.

I'm not a big-time science guy, but I think we should take a different approach. You have already picked up the really bad signals we sent out accidentally. If you have deciphered this message, you are smart enough to know that all those images of us meeting with beings from other planets are fake -- even that really cool "ET" movie. We call our planet by lots of names: Earth, Terra, Gaia, Home, El Mundo, or Third Rock. So we call beings from other planets "Extra Terrestrial," also known as "ET."

Maybe you ET's have decided to come my planet for an extended visit. Believe me, that would be a really dumb idea. Here is why: We have thousands of nuclear weapons. Probably not much by your standards, but way more than enough to fatally irradiate and destroy all the good stuff on the surface of our planet, along with any of you who happen to be here.

Think we won't use our bombs and missles? Hey, we're so messed up we have even used a few of them on ourselves! I don't know why, but we "humans" love to kill things, and annoying ET's are at the top of the list.

Travel can be really expensive, especially between parsecs. Maybe you have some "frequent traveller" points you can use to take a free trip. Ok, yeah that sentence is what we call a "joke." Seriously though, it would cost you way more to get here than anything we have is worth -- unless you have lost all of your own stuff. In that case, you would be coming here to establish a new home. Sorry, but if you want El Mundo, we will fight you and destroy everything here before we would let you have it. As a matter of fact, by the time you arrive we will probably be just a smoking cinder anyway.

So your whole vastly expensive journey would have been for nothing, unless you have need for a relatively worthless lump of melted iron and silicon. All may not be lost, however. We have several unoccupied planets here in our little group that might work you if you can invest some "sweat equity" and a boatload of ice.

Here are some directions you might find useful: About half a light year from us, there are a whole bunch of icy rocks called "The Oort Cloud." If you see any of those you want, feel free to take them. Where you're going, you will need a lot of ice. Oh, one of those icy rocks actually orbits around our star, and we call it "Pluto." Please don't take that one -- it has some sentimental value and we have already named stuff after it. We would also be interested in your opinion about Pluto's potential to become a real planet.

Pick up as much hydrogen as you can haul. You will need that too. Keep traveling and soon you will see 5 huge gas balls. The one that's on fire is our star, called "The Sun." The other 4 are called Uranus, Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter. Incidentally, there are some great moons orbiting around Saturn (the big planet with lots of rings) and Jupiter (the one with the big red spot and whispy rings). You could also pick up a bunch of ice and maybe frozen oxygen from there.

Next, watch for flying rocks. Lots of chunks that may have once been a planet. We call them Asteroids. Yeah, strange name I know. Then you will see a little red planet called "Mars." It might look interesting, but take my advice, it has no real potential, and if you want to see what it's all about, we can email you zillions of pictures. Kinda boring.

Ok, the blue, white, and green ball you see next is us. As I said before, don't come anywhere near us. And leave our moon alone too. It doesn't look like much, but we think it's pretty and we need it for stirring up our oceans. Also, there is a flag and a couple of golf carts there that we're kinda proud of. Yeah, that is the closest humans will ever get to "outer space." Hey, at least we boldly went camping in our own backyard. Don't laugh... nobody on our sister planets ever went anywhere.

Speaking of sister planets, ours is just up ahead. It's the white ball the same size as Earth. This is where you can use the hydrogen, water, oxygen, and anything else you brought with you. This planet is called Venus, and it looks gorgeous from here, but it wants nothing to do with humans.

Yes, that thick atmosphere is carbon dioxide, and yup, no hydrogen anywhere. You will have to mix in a bunch of it to create water from the CO2. Throw in all the ice you can get, and then create a giant umbrella to shield the planet from the sun. Throw all the big rocks you can grab to get the planet rotating about 10 times faster than it is now, and you will soon have a really nice new home!

Oh… uh one more thing. That little planet that is closest to The Sun is loaded with valuable heavy elements like gold and uranium. You can have all of it on one condition: After we destroy our own planet, we will need to camp out on your new planet for awhile. Don't worry. There will only be a few of us.

Sincerely,

Jay McDougall Johnson

gifts for dad's birthday

See http://slas.us/ This is what I want for my birthday.

http://slas.us/images/MAPS/SPOC_Map.gif

a wall charger for my iPod
Shake Weight (19.95 online)
razor blades for my Norelco or a new rechargable Norelco
earbud covers
some itunes
Wii with guitar hero or rock band. Is there a keyboard available?
Anyway, we should get a new Wii
noise-cancelling headphones
paper jamz guitar, if it is not too dorky
a new logitech Marble Mouse
a lightweight long-sleeve shirt
An electric bicycle, or an electric motor/battery that will work with my Bike-E. Yeah, this is
way too expensive and not worth it at this point.

Boomers: drugged out before they were born.

The greatest generation was mostly born to mothers who practiced "natural" childbirth. The GG, however, almost universally gave birth to their children while the moms were drugged into comas. The general anesthesia drugs pumped into mom had effects on the babies.

Karen... a new kind of job: "hyper-local blogging"

The NY Times and other newspapers have hired people who are expert bloggers on greater NYC stuff. All they do is search and blog on what is happening in the local area. It's an actual job!

Stealth remake?

"Night and Day" is a pretty good movie. Am I the only one who noticed that it is a remake of "The In Laws" from 1979? The Peter Falk role is reprised by Tom Cruise, and Alan Arkin's by Cameron Diaz.

fun family activity when snowed in...

Watch all 6 Star Wars episodes and count the number of times any character says "I've got a bad feeling about this."

Life's Coincidences

The acceleration due to gravity near the surface of the Earth is 10 meters per second/per second. A nice round number. 10 meters. A meter is based on the length of the average human arm. All humans live near the surface of the Earth.

The sun and the moon appear to be the same size from near the surface of the Earth. The moon can appear to block out the sun because the moon is about 400 times closer to Earth than the sun, and sun is about 400 times larger than the moon.

Free?

I really hate this sales tactic...
"The poster is free. You pay only $5.95 for postage and handling costs. " We know that nothing good in life is actually free. Somebody has to pay, even if only postage and handling costs. It was bad enough when you only heard this kind of stuff on TV and radio ads, not to mention print ads and coupons. Now, it's pretty hard to do much on the Internet without getting blasted with fake give-aways. Loans are offered as interest free (if you pay them off in the first year. If not, you pay ALL interest). "Free" stuff falls into categories:

• Payment by another name. For example, the item is free if you pay shipping and handling. S and H is jacked up to cover the cost of the item plus a profit.
• Free now, pay later. This one is obvious. A free cell phone? Hardly. The cost is added to your monthly service fee. The fee structure for cell phones, automobiles, houses, etc is so complex the cost of "free" items can be noiselessly added in, plus a profit. If you buy your house on a 30-year mortgage, you will pay at least 3 times the cost of the house, so watch out for "FREE" stuff there. It could be the most expensive patio furniture you ever bought. A typical insurance scam is that the insurer will give you some of your premium money back... after it sits in the bank for 6 months earning interest for the insurance company.
  
• Free for some, others pay extra. If you have cash, you can get a discount on big-ticket stuff. This means interest is a little higher for credit purchasers. You get airline miles, hotel or rent-a-car points, or even "cash back." If you pay interest or fees on your credit card to get these "rewards," your rewards are expensive. If you don't smoke, drink, or gamble there are perks in life that appear to be free -- especially in Vegas. Of course, those who DO indulge pay for your free stuff. And, you can end up paying extra for soft drinks. BTW, it costs restaurants almost nothing for fountain drinks. Most of the price you pay is profit. Therefore, it is easy to offer a "Free" drink and add a pittance to the cost of a hamburger and fries and still break even. Two haircuts for the price of one... only if you can convince someone to go with you. Even if it is totally free, that only means that someone else has paid the freight. Think about the free money you might win gambling. Someone else had to lose. Next time, it may be your turn to lose or pay extra.
  
• YOU work for free. You unofficially work for a company by selling your friends on a product or service, filling out endless surveys, providing personal information on yourself and others, becoming a walking billboard, looking at endless ads online, wading through email advertisements... Open source software is free, but you can end up paying for it in many hours you work trying to use it... wait, probably no more than if you bought it from Microsoft.
  
• The Barbie/GI Joe strategy. You get a free plastic doll, but the clothes, cars, houses, etc. are only available at jacked-up prices. BOGO... you get a second pair of shoes free, but only from a special "selection" of shoes the store was going to dump anyway. And look at how they jacked up the price of socks and shoe polish... not to mention the matching accessories you may need (scarf, belt, purse, dress, sash, suit, jewelry...)
  

Slow News Day

In rural America, radio personality Paul Harvey was once the most trusted news source around. For decades, his "Paul Harvey News and Comment" was the most popular feature on countryside radio stations everywhere. I remember once reading a blurb about him in a Sunday supplement. One of his fans wrote in and asked how he could possibly report on all that world news without a huge reporting staff. He replied that he, his wife, and his son worked with neighbors and friends to get all the news every day, even weekends.

The truth was, of course, that he was a day behind on what he reported! In those days, rural America did not notice stale news since everything else also arrived a day late. All Paul Harver did to "get the news" was read a city newspaper, select a few stories and tell them on the air. He then added some commentary in his inimitable style, and he eventually became a millionaire many times over.

There's a lesson in here somewhere...

civil war observation...

During the first couple of years of the civil war, Northern troops were not nearly as motivated to fight as Southerners. In addition, the union generals were primarily interested in NOT fighting. Instead, they tried to scare the South into submission by creating a massive army and making threatening gestures. Somehow, the Northern guys in charge of the army thought there were twice as many rebels under arms as there actually were. MacLellan usually thought he was outnumbered and failed to attack even when he actually had an overwhelming advantage. Back to troop motivation, the rebels felt they were protecting their homes and families, as well as their fellow troops. Meanwhile, the Union troops only knew they were trying not to get killed.

Things changed after the fallout settled from a few battles, like Antietam and Fredericksburg. Northern troops got really ticked off that the Rebels had killed and maimed so many of their brothers in arms. And, Lincoln signed the emancipation proclaimation, giving the North another reason to fight. By the time Grant took over the army, motivation had shifted significantly North. He still deserves a lot of credit, but the fact is he got a more experienced and more motivated bunch of troops than MacLellan had.

MacLellan made a bloody 12-month conflict into the full-blown Civil War we all know and hate. By constantly refusing to attack the rebels when he had an overwhelming advantage, he allowed the South to outfit itself with boots, guns, and ammo at the expense of dead and retreating Northern troops. The South won consistently in the first year, thus collecting tens of thousands of troops who would otherwise have run for the hills or wrapped themselves in the Stars and Stripes.

weeds...

Weeds can sometimes look very similar to the garden vegetables and flowers we attempt to grow. One of the ways you can tell is that the plants you want are, if you did it right, kind of in a predictable geometric arrangement. Weeds probably aren't. So, maybe it's like some ideas. They may look good, but if they don't fit into the pattern...

The spirit of the law?

the second amendment. wow. Carol brought this first point: Every fit person should be compelled to undergo military training for 6 months at a specific age, perhaps 19. No exceptions -- not obesity, depression, nor most disabilities. One of the main things people should learn is how to safely use and care for firearms, including armored vehicles and artillery. Yes, we should have a draft so people understand the cost of war, and anyone who gets a paycheck from the federal government should see his or her sons and daughters drafted first, to serve at the front of the conflict.
OK... something to think about... the arms the founding fathers were talking about in the second amendment included only flintlock rifles, muskets, and single-shot pistols. We could also include swords, knives, cannons, clubs, rocks... At least in some ways, the founding fathers were visionaries, but they could not have envisioned the powerful handguns we have now. These guns shoot cartridges that conveniently package slug, shell, cap, and powder. Cartridge-shooting guns were relatively unknown until after the Civil War.

It is statistically proven that the hot-blooded murder rate was lower before cartridge-based repeating weapons became common. Of course people shot each other, but the time it took to load a black powder single shot weapon was prohibitive to killing anyone in the heat of anger.

Why We Don't Compromise.

I see the root of most of the problems in the world as a struggle between villages. Imagine that you live in one of two villages that must share land and water. There are three main options in this case:
1) Let the other village have everything, while your village starves or moves far away.
2)Take, by force if necessary, all the resources. Let the other village starve. (This could backfire, sending your village back to option 1)
3) Compromise and share resources.

That pretty much covers the options. When starvation is the option, people are forced to cooperate with each and share. This is done by compromise, sometimes called "mutual amputation." Neither side will EVER end up with everything it wants. But, if they try sometime, they just might find, they get what they need.

In the case of the villages, people will end up negotiating face to face and coming to an agreement or they probably won't survive long. This means that social evolution will automatically select people who can compromise and share. Well, not quite, because the genes that survive are determined almost entirely by who has resistence to a plague, or who can stay isolated from those who have the plague. Meaning that in time of plague, being selfish might keep you alive.

Like metamorphic rock subject to the forces of famine and plague, our civilization was formed. Hunter gatherers seldom suffered from famine and plague. The total population and the extremely low density of population kept the demand synchronized with the resources via small, incremental adjustments. Disease of any kind was hard to spread when small bands roamed the Earth, seldom interacting with others.

Hunter gatherers may have benefitted from cooperation with other groups, but they just as easily could have been seriously hurt in the process, since hunter-gatherer bands never viewed each other as equals. My tribe is "the people," yours is something less than that.

Modern civilization has changed the available options, at least in first-world countries or among the wealthy. In many cases, these people are so far removed from hunting or growing their own food that there seldom appears to be any survival-based need for compromise, and certainly not face-to-face.

Too Poor to be Sick?

25 years ago, it was a huge deal that hospital costs were so high. Astronomically higher than common sense could explain. Aspirin cost $10 each. An IV drip was $200. Basic non-private room was $800 per day. Why? Now, we understand that hospitals need to charge massive fees partially to pay legal costs, but mostly to pay for the care of people who have no money (ie no health insurance). Somehow, we learned to live with this system, even though it was largely ineffective and cost twice as much as single-payer health insurance that would have covered everyone in the country. Many, if not most hospitals operate as non-profit entities. They shuffle tons of money around, but pay no investors. Oh well, it may be a bad system, but at least it's a system.

More On ic Oil

It would be funny if it were not so pathetic... all the TPers etc. who deny that our trillion-dollar futile involvement in middle-east peace creation/keeping has nothing to do with Oil, and that the thousands of lives lost in Iraq are justified by some reason other than our disastrous addiction to oil. Imagine if we had not been complete morons, and had invested those lives and dollars into developing alternative energy, even if it was only getting all fuel stations to add a pump for natural gas and giving incentives for buying and building natural gas powered vehicles. We could drill out our natural gas and use it up over the next 50-100 years. Then we could carefully drill our oil reserves to supply all the stuff we can't make from natural gas: jet fuel, plastics, fertilizer, medicine, fabric.... Eventually, we could make many of those things by renewable means, such as using vegetable oil. We could run trucks and trains on bio-diesel. Eventually, we can generate all our electricity using nuclear plants, wind power, solar, hydro, and geothermal (that will take over 20 years...). In the meantime we would need to use coal and whatever else we have. Anyway, we have wasted a staggering amount of blood and treasure for the sake of our foreign oil addiction with no end in sight. A trillion dollars would have put us in good shape for alternate energy sources, and we could have the advised the Middle East and Venezuela to take a flying leap.

Enough to make you Run around naked...

Total cost, in USD, of a tee shirt or a pair of shorts including door-to-door shipping purchased from a factory in Cambodia: 1.75-2.00. Each can sell in the US for $20-$50. This is way oversimplifying the situation, but when I hear that any US clothing retailers are having financial problems, I am shocked. These companies must be run by either the completely corrupt or the completely incompetent. Yes, I am sure it is tough to run a company on a 1,000% to 2,000% percent gross profit margin, but I think a small troupe of well-trained chimps could handle it.

It has long been that case that jewelry stores have a scandalous markup of 100-300 percent on pieces that they got cheaply, but they had to work for their profits. Expensive pieces could sit unsold in inventory for many months. Repairs, customizations, adjustments, cleanings etc. had to fill in the gaps when the people couldn't afford to buy the new stuff.

In the clothing biz, unsold stuff could be marked down to a mere 200 percent profit and sold in a sidewalk sale. Or, in the worst of cases, clothes could be donated by the bale as a tax write-off totaling more than the company paid for it.

The 'kings

A thousand years ago, the galactic betting pool on which civilization would dominate the Earth would have been heavily in favor of the Chinese Empire, or possibly another Asian power. Certainly, Scandinavia would not have been in the running. Short growing season, small population, high superstition and low literacy rate ranked the vikings somewhere near the bottom. They had no concept of public health through cleanliness, but practiced Spartan-style eugenics. Although lacking in scientific knowledge, they somehow figured out how to build durable ships and navigate by the stars. It seems a nearly endless supply of cod did the rest. The vikings fished cod all the way from Russia to Newfoundland. They lived on fish in the summer and dried fish in the winter, conquering coasts as they went until their ancestors controlled Western Europe.

The British, French, and Dutch continued and improved ship building, farming (based on new-world crops), fishing, and coastal attacks using high-tech weapons. They let the warm continental states of Europe find and explore the new world, then, after the risk was lowered, they moved in and took control of North America. From that base, their decedents won two world wars and got control of almost the whole world. Meanwhile the Chinese, who had burned their massive fleet to ashes and given up on exploration (they didn't have cod), faded into a technological backwater. Wow. Who could have predicted it? The vikings' original lack of academic prowess and personal hygiene didn't seem to be an impediment to their progress.

The vikings who stayed in Scandinavia may not have conquered new lands, but have built tightly-knit modern civilizations that are the envy of the world. From Finland to the ends of the British empire, the Vikings triumphed. Did they deserve to rule the world? Hmmm. Maybe not, but someone was bound to do it sooner or later, and for some reason, the Chinese took themselves out of the running.

Today, it looks like the Chinese, backed by Asia's little dragons will move into first place among world powers within at most 60 years. Oh well. At least we vikings had our age of glory, but in the end, the Mandarins will triumph as they should have originally.

Durables

It is a shame that civilization seems to rise and fall based immunity to random disease outbreaks. Plague has had more influence on civilization than anything except perhaps drought/famine. Which humans end up in charge of civilization depends almost entirely which ones are lucky enough to get a reliable supply of food AND have the right kind of immunity. All the other traits we find so useful, i.e. intelligence, beauty, strength, compassion, musical talent, analytical ability, etc. mean nothing unless you win the immunity lottery. In short, we are selected not for how good we are, but how durable our immune system happens to be.

Compromise

The compromise between a lizard and a fish is an amphibian. Despite our congressional representatives, compromises can obviously be successful -- especially if you like toads, frogs, and salamanders.

Evil Lotion

Conservative evangelical institutions of higher education get kind of a bad rap. While their curriculum trashes Darwinism, it acknowledges that adaptation within a type (limited evolution) is a proven fact. Evangelicals seldom express this fact outside of academia. Indisputable, empirical facts in evidence trump what may look like biblical evidence to the contrary (see Genesis 30-31).

That which God has created is the ultimate scientific evidence. God created living things to adapt and survive. Bacteria that is destroyed by antibiotics or thwarted by immunity will be replaced by different bacteria. The replacement may have resulted from a genetic mutation. This process occurs among all living things: Survival of the fittest. This is not strictly Darwinism, however.

I am absolutely not an expert on taxonomy, but everyone knows Darwinism asserts that one kind (family?) of animals or plants can change into another over many thousands, perhaps millions of years. This theory may or may not be true. HOWEVER it can never be proven scientifically. Scientists cannot conduct laboratory experiments to show it, or observe it happening in nature. We just don't live long enough, or even if we did there is not much chance we would see it occur. Certainly, no laboratory experiment could ever prove it. Yes, I am fully aware that Darwin never intimated that man evolved from apes. He asserted that we have a common ancestor with apes. Hmmm. Try proving THAT using a controlled, repeatable laboratory experiment!

Darwinism has another problem. To completely follow Darwin, we need to believe that a self replicating cell arose (and thrived) on Earth from inanimate chemicals over a matter of a few million years. Then, within another billion years or so the cell became a complex multi-billion-cell organism. The odds against this are impossibly long, nonetheless it could be true. Now let's see you prove it in a lab. If it cannot be proven, it can never be scientific fact.

On the other side of the issue, evangelical religious belief cannot disprove Darwinism scientifically, and does not even propose an alternate scientific theory. Yes historical geology is fascinating, and offers proof of general concepts (age of the earth, extinction) but the presence or absence of fossil evidence cannot prove or disprove Darwinism, creationism, or "intelligent design."

The two sides of the Darwin debate attack each other blindly. Darwinists claim that creationists/IDers reject the concept of adaptation or survival of the fittest. This is misleading. Equally specious is the religionists' assertion that the lack of an accurate fossil record disproves Darwinism.

Does it really matter whether or not Darwinism is true? One would almost have to wonder in light of the fact that the majority of the people in The Greatest Generation rejected Darwinism.

Stream of Semi Consciousness... the end of BYU football

Wow. I love football... even college football, even BYU football. But it has to go. BYU will very soon be left out of the merging super-conferences, and cut off from the money needed to run a major college program successfully. The Cougs can stay in their own little conference, going to their own little bowl game (maybe). Most of the other teams in the MWC will never be invited to go to a bowl coalition/big money conference. They will be stuck with BYU forever, fading ever farther into obscurity.

We should give up on trying to run a major college football program and spend the money on academics. Like perhaps endowed chairs in science or the humanities. Or focusing on doing what it takes to become a major research university, or improving our grad schools. Of course we can still have sports. We do wonderfully in Volleyball and Rugby!

You can't have everything. The great academic universities can't run major college sports programs. Well, there are a few exceptions... Cal, Stanford, Northwestern, Air Force, maybe Duke. Hey, those schools should always play for the championship. In all the calculations used to determine the college football championsip, academics should be 50%. That way one of the few universities that can be first tier in education AND sports would probably win.

One question remains... when the football program fades away, what will we do with Lavell Edwards stadium... maybe use it for Rugby?

Capital Punishment

I am against capital punishment, simply because executing people makes some of us feel like we have done something to deter crime. We have not.

Yet it costs more to execute someone than to keep him or her in prison for life. We could spend the money on schools instead if our goal is to deter crime.

The point is not that executing people does not deter crime, but that many people have the illusion that it does. This is simply bad for society

By the way, if executions deter crime... can anyone tell me the names of the last three people executed in the US? No? Then there is no possibility it would change anyone's behaviour, unless you have Ted Bundy's disease and WANT to be executed. Then you would keep killing until you got the injection you wanted.

Libertarianism, a Pure, Apocalyptic Philosophy

Only angels or demi-gods could be pure libertarians. The rest of us have to settle for something less. The libertarian point of view dictates that person A can do whatever he/she wants, provided that action does not infringe on the rights of persons B-Z to do whatever each of them wants.

Libertarians point out that the founding fathers were essentially libertarians, and that their philosophy is in our country's DNA. We didn't want the government of England to tell us what to do. OK. No federal government, or one so limited that it can barely keep a small navy at sea. For that matter, libertarians think we should have little if any state, county, or local government. Fine. So do I. I also think the season should always be early autumn, we should be able to retire at 22 and live on our own country estates with thoroughbred horses.

Unfortunately, most of us don't have the luxury of critcizing the human anthill from an ivory tower. People could afford to think like this when (if ever) we all lived in small villages, and each of us lived by taking care of a tiny farm. We breathed the same air, drank the same water, relied on the same rain to grow our food, and worked together as best we could to help those hit by disaster.

Each of us provided our own security, food, medical care (such as it was), sewage processing, transportation (walking), old-age pension, childcare, and education (such as it was). As long as God provided the right amounts of rain and sunshine, things were tolerable. Each of would have had to go out of his or her own way to interfere with anyone else's right to do whatever he/she wanted to do. This was, and can be, the only environment in which libertarianism can exist.

Let me add here that much of the world still lives in this kind of environment, such as it is. Small villages where people practice semi-sustainable agriculture in an attempt to keep from starving. Unfortunately, all of the farm land with rich soil and plenty of rain and sunshine has been paved over and/or is controlled by wealthy non-farmers. Too bad. That means most of the world has to survive on the edge of starvation, or find a non-agricultural job. That means everything complicated. So complicated, in fact, that libertarianism is pragmatically useless.

The second I go off the farm to herd sheep and cattle, I potentially hurt others by using up the grass and leaving the land open to erosion. I could end up contaminating the water others drink. However, if my herding provides enough benefit, i.e. I slaughter enough animals every year to make it easier for everyone effected by my negative impact to get thorough the winter, maybe it all balances out. Maybe. But who decides if it balances? Everyone has to vote on it, and then someone has to enforce it... wait a minute, now we have government. Our Libertarian index just dropped by 10%. (Yes, this is the tragedy of the commons)

Next, some people will (justifiably) make the argument that they suffer more than others due to the effects of animals getting herded around, and/or do not get benefits equal to what others do from the slaughtered animals. Now the government we created will have to take from some and give to others in an attempt to make it fair. Otherwise, they will get voted out of power, and someone else who seems more fair minded will take over. Woah. Now our index has dropped another 20 percent. We are only 70% libertarian, and civilization has barely even started.

Of course, in a properly disabled post-apocalyptic world, libertarians could flourish in the tiny survivalist communities.

Cats And Dogs

Take house cats for example. Perfectly formed predators. Created and/or evolved to be the ultimate solo hunters. Quiet, odorless, stealthy, high-speed, retractable-clawed, land-on-their feet killers. Senses of smell, hearing, and vision finely tuned to find prey before prey detects danger.

Yet housecats thrive today as companion animals, using few if any of the previously-stated skills.
Just by being cute, cuddly, furry, and acting crazy to entertain humans. Theoretically, they can also help rid a house of vermin thus protecting their companion humans from rodent-borne plagues. This ability helps genetically select for cat-loving humans.

Potential Gifts For Dad

High-tech Noise-Canceling headphones

A gizmo to clean out the raingutters.

Audible gift Certificate

Not So Super Freak

After reading SuperFreakonomics, I both love and hate the book. As with most entertaining nonfiction I've read, complexities are far oversimplified. Any book that praises Alan Kay and Object-Orient Programming in a way anyone can understand is worth picking up from the 2.99 discount book table.

However, the authors also claim we may not need to worry because geoengineering will solve global warming. That may be true. However, global warming is not what we need to solve, and geoengineering only treats the symptoms anyway. Our climate is screwed up, (we probably did it to ourselves) and enough the resulting crazy, unpredictable weather could destroy civilization.

The increasing climate problems on our little planet are like a house on fire, with the residents arguing that we need to find out who is at fault before we can try to put it out.

The whole climate change thing will be moot when the Yellowstone Caldera blows, unless we get a couple of centuries grace period and can figure out how to safely relieve hot-magma pressure before it blows a hole in the crust.

Tres Compbelleros

Comparing the three wise techguys... Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs....

Larry has had 4 wives and has purchased 4 application servers: Glassfish, WebLogic, Peoplesoft, and the ever-popular OC4J. A lame bunch of servers, but now he owns all Java EE technology except JBOSS and WebSphere. Hmm. Could be a good idea to learn C# or even VB.

I was thrilled to hear today that Steve Jobs has soundly defeated Bill Gates... Apple is more valuable than Microsoft, for the first time in 20 years or so. There was a time, long ago, when Apple had the lead.

Bill Gates then committed a series of white-collar almost-crimes. He robbed Gary Kildall, IBM, Xerox (PARC), Sybase, and Intel. After this crime spree, he quickly became a multi-billionaire. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs had only robbed Doug Englebarger and Xerox (PARC), so he and Apple fell far behind.

Bill is a true genius, however. Remember that he put something like 15 million into Apple stock about 16 years ago, when the company was struggling? What an investment!

Repel the Invaders

If the British petroleum guys had invaded Rhode Island and sprayed billions of gallons of oil all over the Rhode Islanders, we could have blamed that state for not defending itself against England and its empire. Instead, the British invaded "The Gulf of Mexico." Which state is responsible for the British successfully stealing our oil and spraying it all over? Who claims the Gulf of Mexico? What county's name is on it?

Blame Mexico!

Just look at any map. It's their stupid gulf. Named after them. :)

More On Oil

The TP, which has notably supported a libertarian agenda (no federal government intervention except in cases of force or fraud), has also been an exponent of "drill baby drill!" Where will the oversight come from to ensure our oil, our fishing grounds, our air, and our drinking water are not destroyed by greedy foreign invaders ( British Petroleum, Shell Oil, Exxon... ) if not from the federal government, supported by the nation's taxes?

The TP chants mantras such as "States' Rights First," and "No Federal Taxes," yet we wonder which state should have been in charge of BP's oil drilling out in the "gulf stream waters?" Louisiana? Mississippi? Texas? Florida? Alabama? Maybe a Confederacy of Southern states should form a separate government and take charge... oh, wait a minute. We tried that about 7 score and ten years ago. I was only a lad back then, but it didn't work out too well from what I remember... we ended up with a million or so dead American youth and little or no resolution of the seething conflict; A festering conflict that may be at the root of the incredible violence in modern America.

The Cost of Gasoline in your state.

It's wonderful that many of the people I really wonder about have joined together and given themselves a name I can use without resorting to a long description: "The Tea Party." Wow. This is so cool. As a liberal conservative, it has been a challenge to chide "The narrow-minded far-right ultra conservative evangelical fundamentalist semi-bigoted gun nuts." Now all I have to say is "Tea Party," or just TP for short.

With apologies to Merideth Willson:
Yes, I am a Republican. Always proud to say, I'm always mighty proud to say it. I consider the years I spent following Reagan were surely golden. The man had horse sense. A cool head, a keen eye. Why, who else do you think could have won the highest-stakes war ever fought without even ordering the firing of a shot (well, yes, there were those covert operations, Iran-Contra, proxy invasions...)? But just as I say, it takes judgement, brains, and maturity to be a real Republican, I say any fool can take and blindly wave an idealogy around "No Regulation," "No Federal Government." Never mind fair markets, decent health care, or the oil we burn, or the pollution we spread, or the debt we're in.

Competition

We know a little about the universe, and from what we can see, life exists only on our planet. We look at the life around us, and notice that every living thing is locked in an often brutal life-or-death competition to obtain the resources needed for each hour of survival. If there is life in the universe beyond our planet, it makes sense that this struggle goes on wherever life exists.

If, therefore, an extra-terrestrial civilization spent the resources needed to send "ships" into orbit around our planet, there is no chance they would have "Come in Peace, For all Mankind." Indeed, a civilization with what it took to arrive here from elsewhere would be so advanced they would see us as no more than a scrabbling hill of ants.

All the other civilizations in the universe would know what we know: that staying on a single planet means that a single extinction-level event would be the end of life as we know it. Our only insurance is to find other planets to colonize. It is as if we are fish in a cosmic ocean: We have to keep moving and finding resources in the universe or a bigger fish will eat us.

Shower thought

The chain of near-miraculous events that would need to occur in perfect order to generate a sentient being from basic elements qualifies as a miracle. Such a miracle, in fact, that other sentient beings in the universe would (as postulated by Vonnegut) be extremely interested in preserving some of us forever as curiosities or as objects to be scientifically examined.

While we may not be much compared to other intelligent life in the universe, our civilization landed a dozen men on the moon, and returned them safely to earth. Those 12 were the elite of the greatest generation of humans we will ever produce. We will never again send humans out beyond low-Earth orbit, at least not with the expectation that they will return safely to Earth. Those precious hours men spent on the moon were the high-water mark of our 7000-year attempt at civilization:
July 20, 1969—Apollo 11
Neil Armstrong
Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin
Nov. 19, 1969—Apollo 12
Charles (Pete) Conrad
Alan Bean
Feb. 5, 1971—Apollo 14
Alan Shepard
Edgar Mitchell
July 30, 1971—Apollo 15
James Irwin
David Scott
Apr. 21-23, 1972—Apollo 16
Charles Duke
John Young
Dec. 11-13, 1972—Apollo 17
Eugene Cernan
Harrison Schmitt

The universe will eventually shake, burn, freeze, and scrape the human infestation off the surface of this obscure planet, but out in the frozen reaches of deep space our tiny monument will sail: small steps in the moondust that amounted to one "Giant Leap."

The Greatest

The generation that gave birth to the baby-boomers is often touted as "The Greatest" ever born on Earth. If you look at what The Greatest Generation (TGG) accomplished, one would almost immediately agree with the moniker. Born in the 20's and early 30’s, TGG learned to work on family farms, shops, and factories during the Great Depression. Then they made the sacrifices, including their lives, to save the world from tyranny. TGG became educated and worked hard after WW II, creating the greatest economic boom ever known. Through their efforts, science and technology took off, eventually landing them on the moon. Born after 1945, no baby-boomer ever went to the moon. All those footprints were left in the moon dust by TGG.

It took another decade or two for them to finally defeat Stalinist and Maoist tyranny, but they won the cold war without firing a shot (unless you count Viet Nam, Korea, Afghanistan...) They not only made the world safe for capitalism, but converted much of the world to it. TGG gave birth to most of the technology that pervades modern civilization, including the computer chip and the Internet.

If we stack up the meager achievements of the baby boomers, it looks like a field of termite mounds against the alabaster cities the TGG created. Indeed, the boomers and their children reversed some of the good done by their parents. TGG created antibiotics, boomers feed antibiotics by the ton to cattle and pigs, reducing their effectiveness against human disease. TGG created automobiles and the interstate highway system, boomers use these to kill and maim each other, waste precious resources, and carbonize the atmosphere. TGG invented the birth control pill, boomers use it to support lives of promiscuity. TGG = greatest generation,
boomers = greatest degeneration.

Our first three baby-boomer presidents seem to have worked together with boomer legislators and bureaucrats to get blindsided by terrorists, spend a trillion dollars and precious young lives to invade the wrong country in retaliation. Then they quintupled the national debt to an amount we can never repay, even if the Chinese foreclose on our real estate.

It could very well be that no other generation will ever walk on the moon. But for a moment, let’s look at where TGG fell short. First of all, TGG parented/reared the baby boom generation: a qualified failure, at best. No success in life can compensate for failure in the home.
Second, TGG left a lot unfinished when it came to providing equal opportunity and justice for all, as Leonard Steinhorn explains in his book about the boomer generation.

How to suck seed in yardwork without really trying

In our backyard, we have hundreds of dandelions. Each dandelion plant has several flowers, which immediately turned into open seed pods after I sprayed poison on them. Within one day, half the yard was completely covered by ping-pong ball sized spheres of dandelion seeds. There was no wind. Not even a breeze. I got an idea. I have a leaf-blower/sucker I use in the fall... it does a good job moderate-sized leaves, sucking them up off the ground, grinding them up a bit, and blowing them into an attached bag. Would this work for dandelions? Hmmm. So I tried it. It sucked up the seeds, and soon a corner of the bag was full. I kept moving and sucking seeds up until I had covered the whole back yard. Now the evil weeds would not be able to spread their seeds as they died from poison. An hour later, however, I noticed more puff-balls were popping up. OK, so I missed a few. I'll get them tomorrow. The next day, half the back yard was covered with dandelion-created ping-pong puff balls. The moral is, I think, that you cannot stop a force of nature, no matter how innovative your approach is. It would not surprise me if, at the end of civilization, WALL-E finds a thriving dandelion population.