Killing Time

I had a manager one time that kept suggesting that I visit every Winery in Kansas to sell filters. This was something that I knew was a waste of time, wineries do not buy the kind of filters I sell. Every week, he would call and ask me to update him on the efforts, even though I told him it was fruitless. It got on some upper manager's task list somewhere and they couldn't just let it go, someone somewhere expected it to be done and they had a report with a check box on it that they had to check off every week for some worthless meeting where they'd be asked if they checked off all their boxes. I wasn't getting paid to just visit the wineries, I wouldn't get paid unless I ever sold anything to them, and I deemed the effort fruitless, so I didn't do it. Asked pointedly by the manager why I wasn't doing what he suggested, I told him it was too much effort and not worth it. He started lecturing me about how easy it would be for me to do this, which was supposed to convince me to do it.

I realized that it was easy for him. He just had to talk to me for 3 minutes once a week and check a box on a report. He didn't appreciate how difficult it would be for me to do it because I was expending the effort, not him. So I came up with a new axiom in my life, which I refer to constantly now.

It's easy to spend other people's time.

It takes no effort to tell someone to do something. They have to do the actual work, spend the actual time. When it takes no effort, it's easy to lose sight of the value of the time spent making something happen.

"Why don't they just ..." You've heard it a million times. People pontificating on the problems of the world, or of their coworkers, family, or friends. Blithely prescribing simplistic solutions to complex problems with a dismissive wave of the wrist. Ask them to actually roll up their sleeves and expend some effort and you'll see how popular the idea is even with the main proponent of it.

Once you recognize this annoyance, you'll see it everywhere, but the real trick is to not do it yourself. How many times have you visited someone's house and said, "If this was my house, I'd paint the kitchen blue." or carpet the patio, or build on a deck, or make a fish pond, or add on a room. People don't like to hear that about their homes, or their lives, or even the way they open a peanut butter jar. When you start to scale yourself back from doing this, you realize that there is a subtle difference to the approach - a new axiom:

People will take a suggestion much quicker than "direction".

Would you rather be told to do something or have someone make a casual suggestion that you could follow or reject without any offense? Being told to do something brings out a rebellious streak in me anyway. Even if it's something I was planning to do anyway, I don't like someone reaching into my life and pushing buttons and pulling levers as if I was their robot or slave. I have to quell the immediate swell of resentment that flares in me any time someone "orders" me to do something. If I think about it, I realize that true free will is not sacrificed by occasionally doing something at the direction or suggestion of someone else. I still have the choice to do it or not, it's still my decision. I still have to calculate if the result is worth the effort if I'm the one that will be doing it.

If you turn it around, it gets really interesting. If someone comes to you and says, "I want to do this" you have to recognize when you are simply being informed versus when you are being roped in. If they are simply informing you about something they are going to do in their life, why would you want to mount objections? If it doesn't cost you any effort, the best thing you can do for someone is encourage them. What kind of friends would you want? Supportive people that are telling you positive things and giving you encouragement, of course. It's also really simple to be that person. They may want help looking at it and thinking about it, but if they're not asking you to commit money or effort to the cause, then why bother shooting it down for no reason? Just because it's something you personally wouldn't do for yourself doesn't mean you shouldn't let them do it.

Social Isolation

I listened to a podcast of an old radio program from 2004. It was talking about the phenomena of flashmobs that was briefly popular around the time Dean was the front runner for the Democrats. I remember Dean had figured out how to generate campaign contributions from the Internet and there was supposed to be a whole new era of social interactions based on contacts made on the web.

The program was interesting, because these two reporters decided to participate in this website that arranged group meetings between like minded people. Supposedly, if you liked Belgian beer or Dutch impressionists, you could sign up and you would be invited to meet with several of them to discuss your common interests. While the woman kept going to these bars and seeing no one there from the group, the guy kept going and meeting Irish Ex-pats at rowdy pubs and other fun things.

The program then morphed into a discussion of Social Isolation. This is supposedly something that is increasing either despite or because of the Internet. She talked about how people actually interact with less and less people and that they are feeling more and more alone.

Part of our isolation has to do with the polarization of America. The increase in political polarization has spread to personal rejectionism. On a personal level people aren't just polarized one of two ways, but are ready to completely reject others because of any one thing they don't like. In politics, rather than just disagreeing with someone over an issue, people now tend to listen until something is said that they don't agree with, then label their target and reject everything about them. The problem is that everyone is an individual and we will all have some trait that others don't approve of, so it's possible to reject everyone. It also seems easier nowadays to keep away from others than to interact with them. This leads to Singularization, or the isolation of the individual.

This even happens with friends, because everyone changes over time. What is it that makes friends drift away, and why is it so hard to keep in touch once you start to drift? I've been cleaning out my parents' personal mementos, and it is amazing how rich their early lives were of friends and acquaintances. It made me think about my own life, all the people I've known over the years and how so many of them are no longer in touch. Drifting apart is not always from rejection over some trait or offense at some act, sometimes it's just a lifestyle effect. You find yourself not doing the same things or available the same time anymore.

I listened to an essay from the series This I Believe where this guy talked about the assumption of The Basic Decency of People. It was interesting. This guy talked about how he would get mad at people in traffic for costing him half a second. He talked about his parents, who lived in Germany and had found a way to forgive the Germans for the atrocities of WWII. He operated under the assumption that people were basically decent. All his actions followed from this basic assumption. It was an interesting concept to wrap your head around, and really, when you think about it, probably well justified. Most people, if they are not decent, probably think of themselves as decent. There are few hard core criminals, chronically selfish people, or generally thoughtless people. Most people are just working their way through life and would like to be thought of as one of the good people. One woman remarked that when she ran into people in traffic that did something irritating, that she would make up a story about them. They were a doctor and they were rushing to the hospital, or something to make their actions seem reasonable and forgivable.

When it comes right down to it, wouldn't that be a good way to look at everyone in life?

Religion and Rhetoric

I got into a short exchange of emails with a coworker recently. He sent me a link to a report on National Geographic from a Russian scientist (actually, the head of the Russian space program, and not necessarily an expert on solar cycles or climatology) that said that there was no human induced global warming, it was just the sun putting out more heat. The proof was that the Martian polar ice caps were shrinking as observed by new Martian satellites, like Earth's polar ice caps. I quickly found another report from about 6 months later by a panel of climatologists. This report went in more depth and said that the sun did indeed have cycles, but that the current warming was greater than the sun cycle alone could account for. It specifically cited the other report and said that it was wrong. The Russian was only looking at the last 3 years, in any case. I knew that any good experiment or research about a theory would account for baseline conditions (how much solar energy is coming in to the planet) and adjust their findings, so in my mind, the later study had more weight, seemed to be more professional, and seemed more thorough. I copied the link to my coworker with a short comment about how the first study was discredited. My coworker, who must be a global warming skeptic, replied to me that he read the second article and found it to be full of rhetoric and opinion.

My initial reaction was that I now knew that he was a global warming denier, and that any evidence or study supporting global warming would simply be disbelieved by him. The second reaction that I had was an emotional distaste of the word rhetoric. In the battle between science and religion, I like to believe that scientists dispassionately cite facts while religionists emotionally cite beliefs without any proof or support. And here someone was calling a scientific report "rhetoric". My reaction was one of taking offense to the statement.

When I realized how irritated I was about this minor issue, I had to figure out why. First, I looked up rhetoric. There are many meanings to the word. The first one says "the undue use of exaggeration or display; bombast". I think that the connotation he was after. That the content was empty and the language was deceptive. If you read more, you see that rhetoric is also considered to be a highly studied method of speaking, usually to try to persuade, sometimes to deceive.

This reminds me of the Dover Pennsylvania Intelligent Design trial. The trial details were very interesting. They said it was like attending an evolutionary science class. One of my favorite parts was when they discussed scientific theory. Anti-Evolutionists like to say that evolution is only a theory. They are using the layman's definition of theory, as in "harebrained idea". Akin to something you dream up in the middle of the night after drinking too much tequila. Scientific Theory is when you propose an explanation for something many observers have witnessed and studied, and the results are reviewed by peers, tested, and torn apart if found to be weak. A mature scientific theory is something that is generally accepted and is used to help understand the world better. Gravity, electricity, magnetism, and germ behavior are all theories. People aren't going to start floating away and you aren't going to get sick from failing to forward that email your Aunt Nelly sent you just because gravity and germ theory are just theories and therefore not valid. Scientific Theory is like bedrock. You can count on it enough to build something to last on it.

Biblical literalists don't know what else to do. The first big famous crisis between church and science was when Copernicus used science and careful observation to put the sun in the center of the solar system. The church did not like the thought that man was not at the center of all things. There have been many other conflicts since, and when people started using geology to date the age of the earth, and started realizing how old fossils actually were, religious scholars that had been telling everyone that the world was 6,000 years old were seriously threatened by this. Darwin studied under one of the most famous geologists of the day, and was influenced to come up with his theory of evolution by learning about the extreme age of the world through geology.

Religious fundamentalists probably feel threatened by this because they think that if people start finding that things in the bible and things we've been told by religious authorities are not correct, then the whole bible is in question. They fear the house of cards effect.

I don't think all global warming denialists are also religious fundamentalists, but they follow the same pattern. The conservatives are under the influence and sway of religious fundamentalists in this country, and pick up on their attitudes and talking points, even when they don't mean to. Conservatives - with their heavy influence of capitalism and it's basic tenet that glorifies conspicuous consumption, fear what will happen if society peeks behind the curtain and actually starts to understand what is going on and what is at stake. And our divided political climate plays into that fear. Those at the pinnacle of society, in regards to wealth and influence, fear the restless masses. What if they rise up and take away all that is dear and precious to them? Scratch the surface of most denialists, and I believe you'll find someone that shares these fears.

Intellectual Property

I think a lot about what sounds like such a dry subject.

Who owns information?

Can you own information?

Benjamin Franklin, America's first great inventor, believed that no one should own an idea. He thought that inventions should be introduced, and others should be free to take your idea and make immediate improvements on it. This way, society as a whole would get the maximum benefit from innovations.

The "American" Dream (as well as that of many others around the world) is to come up with some creation and get rich quick. It's an attractive dream, and not one to toss aside lightly. It goes against the grain of many to give up individual rights, freedoms, privileges, or prerogatives in order to provide possible benefits to society at large. Some would say that to take away intellectual property protections would kill initiative and take away America's advantage as a technological innovator.

Let's look at another aspect of intellectual property. The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear that phrase is patented inventions. Copyrighted material is also intellectual property. Literature, movies, and songs are copyrighted in order for their creators to make money off of them. We get upset when someone in China makes a copy of a movie and sells it without giving someone in Hollywood any royalty payments. Many people did not get upset when millions of people copied musical tracks and shared them on the internet without compensating the music industry or the performers.

I was looking on YouTube at some outtakes from The Office, one of my favorite shows. Several people had taken their favorite moments and made little highlight films of the series. When looked it up again later, to show my wife, there was a message that said that the content was protected and had been removed from the site. It actually wasn't, I got around the warning and the videos I had watched earlier were still there. It occurred to me that they should want and appreciate that these little videos were being put together. The YouTube people aren't trying to pass off the work as their own, in fact, they are paying tribute to it. NBC probably couldn't sell little highlight films, so it's not like they are taking away from NBC revenue. You could argue that they are adding to it. The more people talk about the show, the more viewers they might get. You could say the same thing about most literature and music, the creators, in their fondest dreams, envision that their work will be enjoyed by the masses, widespread and popular. They also hope to get rich off of it, or at least that someone else won't get rich while they make nothing (ask Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes if he gets any money off all the window stickers of Calvin peeing on something).

So I have very mixed feelings about this. I don't like paying $20 for a music CD, but I don't think musicians should give away their craft for free. I would love to invent something someday and make a fortune off of it. On the other hand, if someone could invent the 100 mile per gallon engine and someone else could buy the patent and sit on it, depriving me of this useful invention, I would not be pleased. And I find it incredibly stupid that people are applying for patents for genes that the find in some organism, as if they invented it themselves. That's crazy - am I supposed to pay a royalty every time my pancreas secretes an enzyme just because some geneticist found it in the lab? More likely, the geneticist would work for some megacorp with a battalion of lawyers that is quickly applying for patents for everything the poor underpaid geek in the lab sees through his spectrograph.

When the U.S. went to war in WWII, they were hailed as out producing their enemies and supplying their allies to such a degree that we overpowered them and won the war. What a lot of people don't understand is that the government adjusted the rules of intellectual property during the course of the war for the good of the country (and world) as a whole. Aircraft designs, particularly engine designs, were freely copied between the various aircraft manufacturers. They were more than willing to do this at the time because there was more than enough work and profits to go along, as well as the fact that they wanted to win the war. This special circumstance would be worth studying to see if any of the lessons might be applicable to the broader issue of intellectual property.

Sometimes government and universities come up with knowledge that is then made available to the general public. Sometimes this is simply because they do not have an immediate commercial application for the new knowledge, but other times it is because the person making the discovery is not a financial person, but a scientific one. There will always be those that love to figure things out, just as there will always be those obsessed with how to make a buck off of it. Scientists tend to publish their discoveries in journals, such as Science and Nature, where the ideas are peer reviewed for validity, but also widespread to like minded individuals. On the world's stage, this has led to an ever widening sphere of shared knowledge that accelerates technology, innovation, and future discoveries.

I love this pure exchange of ideas, the innovation incubator that our universities have become. We have to somehow find a way to make ideas available widespread without having these commercial and financial concerns stifle development.

Mental Mashup

I like a phrase in the latest HP commercial with Gwen Stefani in it.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FhiIV6srJ0

She says that creativity is a mash-up of all these things you collect in your mind. She also says that creativity can't be turned on and off, it just sort of comes out.

I've often wondered about where ideas come from. I used to find that I would come up with revelations at odd times. For a few years there, they always came during gardening, but I've also had bouts of driving and running inspired creative thought.

I like to absorb as much information as I can. I admit, I'm an information junkie. When I was younger, I read books, magazines, and newspapers. Now I also browse the internet and listen to podcasts. Notice I don't list television as a source there. That's probably not entirely justified, but I just don't feel like it has much to offer in feeding the mind. It's more for turning the mind off and relaxing. I listen to so many podcasts now that I can't keep up with the rate they are generated. I find it very odd and gratifying from time to time when two or more podcasts, sometimes of very different genre, discuss similar ideas. Sometimes it's obvious, it's actually the same subject, but often, it's just analogous, which is more interesting.

I was inspired by the movie Good Will Hunting, of all things, when it came to education later in life. This guy is brilliant, and he taunts a Harvard or MIT student that what the student got for $100,000, he got for $1.65 in late fees from the public library. The movie Phenomenon also has a character that expands his mind simply by going to the public library. Actually, Thomas Jefferson had a great love for books, and was a voracious collector. He had a large collection of books that was amassed over his life which he donated to the government and started the Library of Congress. American founding fathers were well read, and wanted others in their nation to enjoy that same privilege. What inspired me about these examples is that the knowledge of the world is available to anyone with the time, desire, and devotion to simply pick up the books and start reading them.

How much information can we hold in the human mind? I've often wondered if the mind can actually get full. I know when my computer hard drive fills up, I have to start saving the stuff I need on other storage mediums and start deleting as much as I can so I'll have room for more. Does your brain work that way in some respect? If it does, I hope it's only deleting the stuff that is least used, and not anything important. I know if it does, it's not a process I'm in control of. I wonder if you do indeed have all the memories that you've ever accumulated locked away in your brain. If this is so, think of what happens if you die, how much knowledge dies with you.

Until that time, I plan on continuing to feed more information into the pile to see what grows out of it.

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman wrote a science fiction classic back in the 70s.

It was originally published as installments in the Science Fiction magazine Analog. Later it was published as a book and went on to win many awards and become quite well known.

My father subscribed to Analog, and I still do. I don't know if I read it originally in the magazine or as a book, but I know I used to have a dogeared copy of the book that I read several times. My brothers read it too, and we used to talk about it.

Recently, the author released an "Author's Preferred Version" of the book, as I heard on NPR from Nancy Pearl, author of the "Book Lust" series. Nancy is a librarian and prolific reader and has nice clean concise summaries of books that seldom fail to make me want to read the book.

So I went out and got the new version. It took me a day to read it.

Granted, I was sick (therefore immobile and not distracted) and it was familiar ground, but it was still impressive how smoothly the material flows in. A truly laminar work.

I did not know or realize until hearing Nancy Pearl's review that Joe Haldeman was a Viet Nam vet. He wrote the novel because of his experiences, which taught him that war is stupid and senseless. The chapters he was asked to remove and rewrite from the original version were deemed too depressing. Haldeman had great difficulty getting a publisher because they all feared that the public did not want another war protest book. Good fiction can divorce itself from the original inspiration and outline basic truths in a way that make you see universal rules that underlie our existence. I believe Haldeman achieved that with this book. I found myself throwing his thought template over the current situation, the Iraq War to see if any truisms emerged from it. There are definitely lessons that apply to all three wars, Viet Nam, Iraq, and Haldeman's fictional Forever War.

Beyond the depth of the work, there are also some very compelling and fun elements to it. I use the word fun even though it is somewhat inappropriate, but being a technophile, I love the gagets in this book.

While the stasis field, grenade launchers, missiles, gigawatt lasers, and immense ships with all their fighters and drones are interesting, the apex of his creation is the fighting suit. Part spacesuit and part exoskeleton, the suits tranform soldiers into their own tanks. They could be camoflagued with the flick of a wrist and enabled the soldier to see at any magnification or illumination he needed. They had unlimited food and recycling capabilities, emergency medical features, high tech communications, and finger lasers. Best of all, they had strength amplification circuits, so a person could leap incredibly high or crush things with their hands. Just this week, there was an item in the news about the military working to develop a soldier exoskeleton - possibly inspired by Haldeman's work? The other coolest thing about the story was that soldiers that lost a limb were taken to a hospital planet called Heaven and had their limbs regrown. Stem cell technology of the future.

Overpopulation, birth control, homosexuality, mind control, time dialation, future shock, and the inherent violence of the human species are all woven together in the story.

And it has possibly the most touching love letter I've read in the last chapter. So I would highly recommend this classic to anyone that enjoys a good action story, a good war story, or a good mirror to society and the human condition.

Stay the Course

At lunch today, my co-worker Nick remarked that he didn't know who he would vote for, since he didn't like anyone that was running. This during a phase in the election, just before the primaries, when we have a maximum number of candidates.

He's right, though. There are no good choices when it comes to elections. The people that make it through the election process are rarely what the country actually needs. And I'm not sure we would recognize what we need or elect a person like that if they actually came along.

When I was first learning to drive, I had a little problem. I tended to veer back and forth on the road. I had a problem that someone figured out and explained to me. I was looking at a point about 10 feet in front of the hood of the car. My focus was so close to the car that I was overreacting to every little bend in the road or movement of the car. Whoever figured out that I was doing this also had a cure for the problem. I remember being told to focus on a point further down the road, to lift my viewpoint up and align myself with where I wanted to be farther out down the road.

And so it is with the country. We elect leaders that are so short sighted that they have the country veering back and forth from the left to the right instead of barrelling forward and taking us where we need to go. Due to the 2 year election cycle, we are always campaigning. Leaders are not rewarded for making tough choices and fixing long term problems. They are rewarded by the public - this IS a democracy - for coming out on top of the most recent news cycle. And the people are to blame because we forget so quickly as a group. We forget the problems and mistakes that people make and re-elect the same bozos year after year to go back to Washington and raise funds for their next election rather than working on what the nation truly needs to have done.

If you were a professional assessor and were hired to make a prioritized list of the biggest and most important problems that the nation has, that list would not reflect what we see on the news. Budget, health care, social security, medicare, national defense, space defense, and education and investment in research and technology. That's the highest priorities I come up with (given just a few minutes reflection). Instead, we argue about immigration. We don't even have honest arguments about any of the subjects. It's like a trial where both sides hire their expert witnesses that come in and give opposite views and everyone that wants their side to win thinks their expert is perfect and the other side's expert is a crackpot.

I was recently asked if I thought that America had seen its high point and if our greatest days were behind us. My answer to that is that if we don't correct course and learn to focus on long term problems, that it certainly could be a downward slope for us. But all we have to do is raise our focus up from the ground right in front of our feet and start looking at where we want to be a bit further down the road.

The Last Veteran's Days

On this Veterans Day, I was thinking this morning about how they have ceremonies for aging veterans each year. I wondered if there are any WWI vets still alive, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia, there are 22 still alive, but of those, only a few actually saw combat. These guys are all 106 years old, more or less.

I read John Keegan's First World War this last year. It was a bear of a book that I had to force myself through. Not only is Keegan a fairly dry writer (don't get me wrong, he's an excellent researcher and the information is thorough, just numbingly so), but the subject of WWI is depressing as hell.

Short Summary: Europe spends 20 or 30 years expecting that there will be another war, and does nothing but plan for it. Some obscure and unimportant duke gets shot, and it turns out to be the trigger that sends a horrible cascade of events into motion. Enormous numbers of people smash into each other in great lines, and due to the efficiency of their modern weapons, are forced to dig in. They fight for almost 3 years in an almost static position, feeding millions of men into the action, to no effect. It reminds me of a great machine that is trying to keep a fire called war going, and human beings are the pieces of wood that it keeps feeding in to be wasted. And the war was a waste. Nothing was proved, nothing was gained. Even the victors were bled white and most of a whole generation of young men were destroyed. The war bled the countries' coffers dry and produced such an unhealthy environment that the worst pandemic to ever hit the world swept through in the months following the war and killed even more people that the war killed. Horrible things like chemical warfare were invented. As if the war wasn't bad enough, economic penalties for the losers were so harsh that a vicious hatred was stoked virtually guaranteeing the next war.

Even after all the evidence of the futility of attacking heavily entrenched positions, generals still ordered it and men still went forward into the teeth of the meat grinder. Can we even understand that thinking anymore?

It occurred to me today that those arrogant generals that kept ordering the fruitless attacks are all dead now and that maybe their way of thinking would die with them. Maybe when the last of them died, the urge to send men off to a fruitless, hopeless, meaningless death would find a final resting place in their cold lifeless corpses.

We already know it's not true. Each generation somehow forgets how horrible war is and starts a new series of wars. Maybe this is something that is hard wired into us, a genetic trait. Lord knows there's not much keeping our population in check. If humans were deer, there'd be an unlimited season on them. "Gotta thin the herd." Maybe war is the price we pay to avoid being hip deep in people. If so, it's damned inefficient.

After WWI came a series of little wars around the globe as people sought to push boundaries around and plant their flag in a piece of turf, or assert their domination over another group of people. Then the big countries went at it again. Hell, they didn't even wait a full generation between WWI and WWII. Some of the guys that fought in I were still there to fight in II. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a veteran of both, as well as Douglas McCarthy. Truman fought in the trenches in the first war and later gave the orders that finished off the next war.

Then there was Korea and Viet Nam as well as Gulf War I and the Iraq War. So we didn't learn anything about the costs and results of war. At any given time, there are dozens of wars going on in the world. The print and the network news don't even report most conflicts unless they get completely out of control. Would you like to venture how many ongoing conflicts there are right now? Wikipedia (see "Ongoing Conflicts") says there are 29. The death toll for these wars is mostly unknown, but it appears to be about three quarters of a million. The average conflict goes about 15 years back. Try typing "War Death Toll" into Wikipedia's search bar and gaze in amazement at the carnage from history. The Rwanda Burundi war didn't even make the list and I remember hearing that 1.5 million people were hacked to death with machetes in that war.

They called WWI the Great War and The War to end all Wars. I wonder if maybe the end of war, which would be great, is something of an oxymoron. They always say that those that fail to pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it. I don't think that's right. It's not that people aren't aware of what happened before, they just don't think it's the same thing when it's happening to them. Look at the Iraq War. Many of the people that worked the hardest to make the war happen came of age in the Viet Nam era. I remember when the Iraq War was going to start, there was this really small fringe of people that said that it was going to be another Viet Nam. I remember the reaction those statements got - mostly scorn. The average citizen thought that this was totally absurd. We would be in and out in no time. The problem with this war is that not many Americans think they are affected by it. I don't know anyone that died over there and only a very few that served. I don't know anyone that has lost a loved one over there. But I know that the world seems like a much more dangerous place because of all the resentment over our actions.

The problem with resentment is that it doesn't die with the people that harbor it. They pass it down to their children, and it gets nurtured and preserved. One of the premises in the Serbian Bosnian Croatian Kosovar conflicts was some massacre that happened hundreds of years ago. I'd never even heard of it. No one alive today was there, much less effected by it. Our continuous chain of wars and atrocities stretching back to antiquity is like some kind of twisted perversion we keep feeding and never try to break free of. It's the serial drug addiction of the human race.

All that gloomy sentiment said, I have to say that overall, life is pretty sweet. You get to see interesting things, have good friends, love your family, and cherish sweet days with beautiful weather and glorious scenes. You get to struggle against disease and hardship, grow and learn, strive and achieve, and see the world change and history take place around you. People are basically decent, if you get to know them. There are few people on Earth that no one loves, that someone can't understand or appreciate. Maybe some of them only have animals for friends, but most people have someone that wants to have them around. And sometimes we send people off to war to stop things from getting worse, to preserve our way of life. Not many soldiers that march off to war think that they are doing something worthless. But in the cauldron of war, watching all the suffering and loss around them, I'm sure they have one thought in their minds - "If I get through this, I'm gonna do something to make life worthwhile."

We need to find a way to teach that lesson without war.

Energy Independence

I did a blog entry on this subject on September 5th. Obviously, I had been thinking about it for some time. Here's another story on the subject that I wrote on 8/18/04:

Energy Independence

It’s been 228 years since America has issued a good Declaration of Independence and I believe we are about 30 years overdue for another one. I think the only thing stopping us from embarking on a program of Complete Energy Independence is a misguided case of group-think. There are many cliches being repeated out there that stand in the way of our independence and I refuse to believe them. I would like to ask everyone’s help in breaking this dangerous cycle of negative group think.

We will never be independent of oil in our lifetime.
The major energy companies will do anything to hold onto their power.
It’s against the capitalist system to tamper with energy markets.
You will have to sacrifice freedom/fun/power/performance in order to save energy.
The average American will not stand for any change from what we now have.
There just aren’t enough alternative energy sources to replace oil.
You can’t expect a wasteful government to help develop new energy technology.
Big companies are in business for profits, not public welfare and won’t be interested in alternative energy.
Americans are too stupid to understand energy and technology issues.
We can’t do it.
It will take to long.
It’s too hard.

Look at these statements. How many are indesputably, undeniably true? How many of them cannot be challenged or refuted? None of them. Each statement is a self fulfilling prophecy of doom. If you believe them, they are certainly all true. Join me in crushing them and declaring to the rest of the nation, to the rest of the world, and in particular the Middle East that we reject all of these ideas.

Do you know what catapulted a young America past the rest of the world? Technological Innovation. In the early 19th century, we changed the way textiles were made. We put the entire process into one building and powered by our streams, we made new machines that cranked out cloth in quantities never before conceived. None of those ideas were new or originated here. They all came from Europe. These grand ideas were conceived in a Europe whose manufacturing guilds and trades were so entrenched that innovations that threatened those groups were simply not allowed. We were too naïve, crazy, young, idealistic, and enthusiastic to let that stop us. We shot past Europe in a generation and never looked back. We developed steam power and criss-crossed the nation with steamboats and railroads in one generation. We developed electricity and communications and knitted a far flung nation into a single unit in the next generation. We pioneered flight. We perfected the assembly line and mass production and developed the best standard of living in the world. We harnessed nuclear energy first. We saw space being exploited by our cold war adversary and passed them on the way to the moon and never looked back. The rest of the world has followed our lead closely.

We Americans can do anything we set our minds to do, our history proves it. As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. We need to use our undeniable and overwhelming technological dominance responsibly. We need to move the world forward to unlimited energy sources not restricted to decidedly unfriendly parts of the globe. We need to develop renewable energy sources based on fusion, hydrogen, ethanol, wind, solar, geothermal, biological, and fuel cell technology. Maybe we’ll find something new with quantum physics that will astonish us all. We need to do it in such a way that we utilize the framework of the existing energy grid to make the transition to these new forms of energy. We need to find a way to use public money to help do this for the public good while also boosting corporate strength and health. This will provide jobs and help clean up the environment, but most importantly, it will put us strongly in control of our own destiny.

Once we have developed these sources and methods, we need to enrich our nation by exporting the technology to the rest of the world, and then push into space and begin the exploration and colonization of space in earnest.

We Americans can do this, I have no doubt in my mind. All we have to do is state our intentions and declare our independence. Do your part to help make it happen. Simply believe in us.

Political Abyss

I get more irritated and depressed every 4 years when the election cycle climaxes. Politics and politicians and watching what they do to get elected makes me sick.

Who gets elected? The person with the most money. Who gets the most money? The candidate that convinces the corporate bigwigs to donate the most money. How do you shake the corporate money tree? That's the question. Everyone says that they wouldn't be throwing that much money around if they weren't getting something for it.

How do you spend this money to maximum effect? Lies and smear seem to always work pretty well. When you're in the primaries, you veer to the far extreme of your party and you pick up the hard core issue voters that are involved in voting only because they are overzealous about their own pet issue. Then, in the general election, you veer toward the center and try to pick up the barely interested people that were leaning toward the other party.

Advisers tell the candidate what to say, which often times has nothing to do with what they actually intend to do once elected. "Third parties", supposedly not connected to, or under the control of a candidate, dig up dirt or manufacture stories to prove that only a mental deficient or a someone that was totally deluding themselves would ever consider voting for that scumbag on the other side.

The average concerned citizen holds their nose and picks the lesser of two evils and prays that the country doesn't go down the tubes. Over half the eligible voters stay home and the pretty looking, pretty talking, moderately intelligent candidate that is only talented at pandering wins! Yea! The country is saddled by yet another unimaginative politician for the next 2 or 4 or 6 years, foisted on us by less than a quarter of the populous by a system that is rigged to virtually guarantee that anyone with real talent or integrity will not be holding any office.

Once elected, they spend most of their time raising more money to get re-elected next time. Decisions are often made for political reasons. What can I do now that I can later point to during the next election to show that I am good and those other guys are bad? Of course, real problems just keep getting swept under the carpet, and false issues, like immigration or gay marriage, are thrown out to make the restless masses get upset and start throwing mud at each other. Meanwhile, the ship of state cruises onward toward the iceberg while the captain is reading polls about how the passengers feel about him and planning the next day's gala ball in such a way to make the passengers love him more.

It doesn't show any sign of getting better any time soon. God help us.

Firesong

10/13/2007 6:59 AM

As I write this, I’m sitting in a cabin in the woods near Big Spring Missouri in the early morning hours, next to the fire I woke up and stoked up this morning. The cabin is unheated except for the fireplace, and although it is not midwinter or horribly cold outside, the fire does make the cabin much more hospitable.

As I woke up cold and decided to rekindle the fire, I knew I had to be quiet to allow my wife and brother to continue to sleep. So it was one of those early morning experiences where the silence magnifies every sound that does occur.

Through careful feeding of small sticks and nursing the reluctant coals back to life, I was able to get the fire going again. By the time I was feeding the big pieces in, I was ready for the warmth the fire would bring.

Then I noticed something. This was at a time when I had moved away from the fire and could not see it. There was a sound just like a geyser erupting. If it had not been for the recent trip to Yellowstone that my wife and I took this summer, I probably would not have made the association, but the sound of a branch violently offgassing was very similar to Old Faithful erupting. More on that later.

I moved closer to the fire and could hear more sounds coming out of it. Little high pitched notes, that I had trouble identifying at first. Morning twilight was starting, and the sun was starting to bring a tinge of light to the curtains. This is usually the time of morningsong, when the birds are waking up and start to sing joyously about how beautiful the new day is - at least that’s what I imagine. Maybe they are sharing sports scores or gossiping about the escapades of the night before. In this case, the fire was making those noises. I had never heard (or maybe just never noticed) such an uncannily duplication of the noise from a fire before. In the next 10 minutes, I noticed that the fire made a noise just like a steady strong wind, then it made a sound like a sail or cloth flexing in the wind. It also makes those really loud snaps, which are distinctly a sound from fire. Something about the early morning silence had focused my hearing and concentrated my imagination.

The geyser noises probably aren’t such a mystery, when you stop to consider them. I learned in Yellowstone, from reading the storyboards at various sights, how geysers work. If you think of the groundwater as a lake that has a surface under the ground, that’s a fair start. Rather than a clear surface of a lake you can see, the surface underground is bounded by rock and earth, so it is not as free to move as the skin of your favorite fishing lake. For a geyser to happen, you have to have the intense heat of the earth’s magma. I imagine a red hot arc of material that looks like a loop of your intestine, but I’m not sure how far away or what shape the magma takes. What is important is that it heats up the rocks below the ground, hotter than boiling water. At the beginning of an eruption cycle, this hot spot is underwater. The rock has some cracks, crevices, or holes that go all the way up to the surface, but the are filled with water. Just like your ears are under intense pressure at the bottom of a swimming pool, the water in contact with the hot spot is under pressure from all the water above it. Water under more pressure takes more heat to boil, so you can have superheated water in this region. At some point, the water gets so hot that it finally boils, and something starts the column of water moving upward. Once it starts to move upward, all the weight of the water above comes off the water below. Under pressure, this water was liquid, but without the pressure, the boiling point is quickly reached and the water turns to steam. Steam takes up much more volume that the water it came from, so it expands. This forces the column of water above, already in motion to shoot out of the mouth of the geyser with explosive force.

The sound is distinct, a prolonged rushing whooshing sound. If you’ve ever watched a fire, you’ve seen logs send out jets and streamers of flame. Something inside the log is suddenly trying to escape explosively. Wood is nothing more than a series of tubes, bundled together in a trunk, log, branch, or twig. In the living wood, the tubes carried water and nutrients from the ground to the leaves and back. The core of the tree is old conduits from earlier years, like a tree skeleton. The surface just below the bark is the active living part of the tree where the sap still flows. You cut a tree down and slice it up and stack it in a pile and all the sap that was in the tree doesn’t just pour out of the cut ends. In pine trees, there is some seepage of evaporated sap, or resin, on the ends, but most wood just magically dries up without leaking all the sap out. What happens? Probably two things. The water in the sap makes its way to the cut end and evaporates. In addition, some of it is probably converted into compounds in the resin. The resin eventually renders itself into a hard substance, like amber. That resin is distributed throughout the wood, and it is flammable. It is trapped in the inside of the wood, but under heat, it liquefies. When it finds an open channel to the surface, it boils from the release of pressure and it jets out of the opening, just like a geyser. Same process.

Discovering the mechanism behind the phenomena does nothing to diminish the lovely sound of the geysering wood.

Continuing Education

They say your mind is like a muscle. If you exercise it, it will get stronger. I believe this is true. We have all heard claims that doing crossword puzzles is good for older people, and may even forestall Alzheimer's.

I heard about a study recently where they determined that lead miners that read every day were less affected by the mentally debilitating effects of lead exposure. The theory was that people that kept mentally active had more neural connections and were able to "work around" the lost functions from damaged areas in the brain.

So there is growing evidence that you can physically improve your mind through mental exercise. It's not hard to believe, and it's not so easy to act on.

I listen to between 1 to 4 hours of podcasting each day. A lot of it is current events, and much of it is science, but I'm also improving my Spanish. I also listen to some college classes and books on tape. It's easier to listen to material than read it. You can exercise or work around the house when you listen to something. It also helps fill driving time rather than listening to the mindless drivel that the airwaves have become.

My grandfather used to talk about the most important thing you can acquire being knowledge. Authorities could always take away your possessions, but no one can take away what is inside your head. The same is true with a job. You can't guarantee that the job will be there next year or even next week, so you owe it to yourself to learn everything you can while on the job, knowing that you'll arrive at your next job more experienced and better prepared.

Why do we go to school, read books, learn subjects, struggle mightily and then just stop when summer comes or when we graduate? That's it? That's all you'll ever learn in life? What do you do from that point, just coast down until you die? I hate to think of 18 or 22 as a mental high water mark.

Two of my favorite movies are Good Will Hunting and Phenomenon. John Travolta's character in Phenomenon suddenly has the capacity to understand everything quickly and easily. What does he do? He reads most of the books in the public library. As a result, he starts figuring out deep secrets of many dissimilar subjects like plant fertilizer and earthquakes. Matt Damon's character is poor and lacked a good home. There wasn't much in the way of opportunity for him, given his upbringing. He was born with intelligence and a thirst for knowledge, and he educated himself simply by reading books on his own. The best line in the movie is when he scoffs at the pretentious Harvard student, saying "You got for $100,000 what I got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."

No one was blocking these people from greater knowledge and understanding of the world. Oftentimes, what blocks a person is their own preconceptions. If you believe a subject is too hard for you, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. You don't try and therefore there is 0% chance that you will ever learn the subject. You were right about not being able to understand, but only by choice. The difference between a genius and anyone else is simply the amount of time and effort you are willing to put into something. School simply concentrates the effort and forces you to progress at a rapid pace.

In one of my favorite books, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, the boy genius Ender shows a natural and immediate aptitude for a competitive game that the children in his school are made to play. When he makes a particularly good move, one of his teammates says, "Packed head, Ender". The characters in the school had their own slang, and some of it was ok, but this phrase in particular resonated with me. Packed head. As in "your head is just packed full of knowledge".

It's what I try to do. I listen to scientists that are trying to understand the human mind, which is fascinating. How does it store knowledge? What happens when part of the brain gets damaged? How do you retrieve information from the brain? What kinds of electrical activity signify what kinds of thoughts or emotions? How much of the brain do we actually use? How much information can we store in the brain? Is there a limit? We try to emulate the human brain with computers. We create storage devices, each year holding more information. Each year our processors are faster. We try to program computers to use artificial intelligence to come up with thoughts independently, or at least recognize patterns and respond to them. But we have no idea what the human brain is capable of.

When I was about 10 or 12, I read an article in the paper about dreams. The article said that we only use 10% of our brains. (Recently, scientists have said this is probably not true.) The subconscious mind supposedly comprises the other 90%. This is supposed to be a part of your own brain that you do not control and do not have easy access to. The article was about dreams. It speculated that the subconscious mind could only communicate with the conscious mind during sleep through dreams. They also said that the subconscious mind did not think in words like the conscious mind, it was almost like an alien within. It communicated using symbolism, and what it communicated was all the things that you were not putting together from the daily activities. The subconscious watched everything you did, and figured out much of the "rest of the story" connections and missed interpretations, as well as clues about things going on around you that you may or may not have noticed. The article's main theme was that your subconscious mind had it all figured out and was trying to tell you all about it through your dreams. So for a few years, I kept a dream journal and interpreted my dreams. I learned many interested things and felt very in charge of my life and connected to my surroundings. That faded over the years, because it takes a lot of time to pay attention to your dreams, but the sense that you can figure it all out never did.

So I consume information as much as I can stand. Television doesn't count. Well, there is some that does, but watching television is a trap because the sexy flashing titillating content will always lure you away from the substance. Movies don't usually count, but some are very good. I'm not saying you should stay away from all the fluff and simplistic stuff, sometimes it's fun to relax and laugh at the simple things in life. I'm suggesting a balanced diet, rich in mental nutrients, protein, and vitamins.

I find that much of what you learn spills over the field you're looking at and crosses over to apply to other fields. Strange principles resonate. Like the fact that we use the word turbulence in fluid mechanics to mean highly disturbed flow, and in psychology to mean a highly disturbed mental state. In fluids, turbulence actually cuts resistance and helps move objects along, and the same is true with your mind. Often times, the things that bother you the most, that get you agitated, are the things you are struggling to figure out and learn. If you learn to ride out the mental turbulence, and not shrink from experiencing it, you will find that you have benefited from it. Often the things in life worth learning, worth doing, are hard. We need to teach that in school. We need to tell students that the horrible feeling they are experiencing is the limiting walls of their mind crumbling. Maybe then they will not fear continuing education.

Yellowstone Inn

My wife and I stayed at the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone this summer while on vacation. It is a rustic historic hotel that is very popular. The Inn is made of logs, and was built in 1903. You have to get reservations 6 to 12 months in advance.

I travel with a laptop, not just for internet or business reasons, but because I can recharge my ipod, download my photographs, and exchange map data with my GPS. I did ask, when checking in, if they had WiFi. The front desk clerk was very enthusiastic about the fact that they did not, in fact, there was no internet access anywhere in the park.

This is not exactly true. They take credit cards, which requires an internet connection nowadays to confirm the transaction. They also have webcams, which we had been checking on for months prior to going, that show Old Faithful erupting (among other things). This did not occur to me at the time.

It didn't matter. Sometimes it's good to get unplugged. We thoroughly enjoyed our time in Yellowstone, and found we could completely relax without all the distractions of the modern world.

The room had only one light across the room from the bed and one outlet in the bathroom. There was also a radiator in the room, which was finicky, at best.

Don't get me wrong, the inn was beautiful and the experience of staying there was well worth it. But for some reason, I couldn't get over how stupid it was that there was no light at the bedside. They had obviously modified the inn to put lights and heat in, but the didn't make it convenient. At the time, I thought of a several clever rants about how stupid this was.

But in preparing for this post, I read the Wiki entry for the Old Faithful Inn, which says that when the inn was opened in 1904, it boasted electrical lights and steam heat. So maybe it's just the way it was when it was built.

If so, I'm a an idiot.

Adventure Index

I was recently talking to a person I just met, and I mentioned that we just took a vacation to Yellowstone. The conversation quickly became an exchange of the trips we had taken, mostly focusing on those that involved hiking or climbing. He said that he found out late in life that he was an explorer or an adventurer.

It was interesting to try to put a finger on the concept. I knew what he was talking about and I couldn't put it into words very well, either. We found that the kind of vacation we enjoyed was one where we were outside of the comforts of civilization, pushing our own limits, and enjoying some of the more beautiful things nature has to offer.

That usually involves hiking at altitude, across a big elevation difference, or in a really remote location. He explained that they had hiked Mount Washington in New Hampshire, the windiest place on the planet. He also talked about the Narrows in Zion National Park, which sounded pretty cool, too.

We had both climbed 14ers (mountains over 14,000 feet) in Colorado and wanted to do more, and we had both hiked from rim to river in the Grand Canyon.

He talked about the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalacian Trail as places he wanted to go, and we had both read Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. I told him about a chalet in Glacier that you can't drive to that I want to go to.

So I started trying to remember what I have done that I consider adventures. I rode around in Helicopters in the military, which was pretty exciting. The best was going along the Panama Canal by helicopter, but the most dangerous was in the mountains of Panama. In western Panama in the Chirique province, I was with two helicopter pilots, just the 3 of us, when we got surprised by some weather that came in. Thick clouds blanketed the mountaintops and we couldn't fly up into these clouds, because we couldn't see or fly back down, then. We were flying through valleys, close to the ground, looking for a way out of the valley we were in and into an adjacent valley which probably had a straight shot back to the camp. While the pilots were looking up side valleys, we almost ran into a high tension power line that was draped across the valley. Talk about a stomach dropping maneuver. It wasn't over yet. The little valleys that radiated off of the main valley we were in were capped in clouds, and we wanted to find one that was low enough that we could fly through it in the clear into the next big valley over. We thought we found one, and we flew up it, in this ever narrowing slot, the clouds coming down from above and constricting us in the valley. The co-pilot watched while the pilot concentrated on flying. The co-pilot's job was to say if he could see through the hole in the end of the valley (below the clouds, but through the canyon walls) to see if it was clear on the other side. We were in a Huey, so we couldn't hover, we had to maintain forward velocity to maintain lift. The ever slowing ascent up the narrowing valley, where the pilot was trading speed for altitude was accompanied by the narrative between the pilots. "Clear?" "Not yet" "Can you see?" "No." "Anything?" "Can't tell." We had to figure it out before we reached the point where there was enough room between the canyon walls to turn around, and enough velocity to make the maneuver. We hit the point of no return and the Pilot started to turn the helicopter on it's side to go back when the copilot yelled "I see it! It's clear!" Too late, the pilot had to fall back. We traded height for speed and rocketed back into the center of the main valley, where we again turned on our side and lined up on the little canyon again. This time we sped into the canyon, aiming for the little clear triangle at the end. We came up and over the hump, with not much room to spare and rocketed in the next valley and made our way home.

I hiked for days in the Oriente, a region in the upper Amazon in Ecuador around the Rio Napa. I climbed a 14er in Bolivia on the 4th of July in 1989, but I don't know the name of it. I hiked through the jungle of Costa Rica along the route that we later put a road through, seeing some of the prettiest birds and trees I've seen in my life.

I hiked in the Grand Canyon with a friend of my from my time in the Army. He thought we could camp in the bottom, hiking down and out the next day. He did not have reservations and was surprised that you needed them at all, and further surprised that this was considered a serious subject by the Park Rangers with severe penalties. After a brief period of gloom, he decided that we would just hike down to the river in one day and back out. We retreated to our hotel room, where I nursed a nasty cold and poured over maps and travel guides, planning the adventure of the next day. I remember reading tidbits from the park brochures that warned that trying to do what we wanted to do was VERY DANGEROUS. The climate was more desert than anything else, dehydration, temperature extremes and a brutal climb were not for most people. In short, we did it. Along the Bright Angel trail, in May when the Yucca and other flowers were in full bloom. It was 39 degrees in the morning when we started and 90 degrees at 2pm when we got back. I got badly dehydrated the last hour returning, which I fixed by quickly guzzling 3 quarts of water, a cure almost as bad as the disease. We could barely walk the next day, but we did it.

I climbed a 14er, Handies Peak, with my brother in 2000, which made us both sick from altitude when we got back. I climbed Mt. Harney with my wife and Mt. Washburn on our recent Yellowstone vacation. We went whitewater rafting on our honeymoon last year, and the year before through the Royal Gorge in Colorado. We hiked from Bear Lake to Fern Lake trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park and saw a bear from about 30' away. I also hiked through parts of the Tahoe Rim trail. Another mini adventure I took some years back was flying to Miami, renting a motorcycle and riding down to Key West, which wasn't physically trying (except for the sunburn on the tops of my feet) but it was adventurous.

This fall, we planned a fall colors hike around the Eleven Point in the Ozarks. The rest of the future adventures are yet to be written, but as my new friend pointed out, once you get the bug, there's no end to it.

American Hubris and the Christian Persecution Complex

What do you call it when someone or some organization that is demonstrably among the most powerful, popular, wealthy, or influential person or group around is constantly sending out alarms and alerts about how things are stacked against them and everyone is trying to drag them down?

I call it a Persecution Complex. This is the conviction that forces much stronger than you are out to get you and take away everything you hold dear. For some Christians, it's demonstrated as fears that those evil schemers at the ACLU are trying to outlaw Christmas or make it illegal to practice your faith. Not all Christians have a Persecution Complex, many are quite secure in their faith. They are able to casually co-exist with others without feeling they are on the verge of losing it all. But there is an appeal by some to tug at Christian heartstrings with the siren song of persecution. It's easier to feel that you are righteous if you have to struggle to maintain that position.

Consider that the central figure in Christianity is most recognized and respected by adherents for being persecuted. Look what it got him in return. If you think of Jesus as someone trying to launch a product, in this case a new religion, being persecuted worked out great for him. I'm deliberately stating this in cynical terms. It's not logical to project a corporate sly manipulation on Jesus' motives, he obviously did all that he did out of belief, faith, and conviction. Ignoring his motivation, look at the effect. Being persecuted tugged at the heartstrings of people everywhere. "Why, Jesus is just like me, powerless and harassed by large and irresistible forces, yet prevailing in the end!" It's one of the big lures of Christianity. I have no doubt that it is a significant factor as to why Christianity is the most popular religion in the world. Christianity is not seriously challenged by any other religion in terms of number of adherents or wealth or influence.

So why do Christians feel under attack? I think it is because this appeals to them. To feel under attack is one way to keep vigilant, stay active, and continue to strive mightily to goals. I just can't help but notice the irony in it. If the biggest, most powerful person around was complaining to you that people were always picking on them, would you have much sympathy? They can still more than take care of themselves, so why are they complaining?

I feel the same way about many of the things you hear from big corporations or wealthy individuals. For someone of modest means, hearing someone that is extremely rich complain about all the taxes they pay is like listening to a fat kid complaining of having to eat too much dessert. You're paying high taxes because you're making boatloads of money! Do you think your complaints make those of lesser means less likely to want to exchange places with you or emulate your success?

This is a little bit like what we do as a nation. We have the world's biggest economy, we have the world's most powerful military, and we have one of the freest and most open societies on the face of the earth. With all of our planes and tanks and ships, we act as if an enemy that would attack us by exploding a bomb is some kind of powerful monster. He's using bombs and booby traps because he is overwhelmed by our power, not because we are weak.

Actually, I think my point is that it's tiring to hear complaints from someone that is winning. For me personally, a great example is Nebraska football fans. I'm sure there are some nice ones out there that are modest and not fanatics, but I've met several that live and die by Cornhusker success or failure. They had an incredibly long winning streak, and in my discussion one time with a coworker, he recounted the time they came to my college and beat our team. He was complaining that their fans were not treated well by our fans. I certainly can't vouch for every person at my college, so it's not unbelievable that some would behave badly. After all, it's football and not a tea party, people's competitive blood gets up, people drink, fans act belligerently - that's really no surprise. What irritated me was that instead of being satisfied with the fact that they won, or even bragging about the fact that they won, he was whining about the way they were treated when they did win. He was accusing my alma mater of being poor sports, but I would say people that win and then whine are sore winners. What do you expect? Beat someone and then they should genuflect and treat you like royalty? Beaten individuals are angry and sullen. Is there any other condition you would expect to see?

This is also a little like the current political situation, or at least before the last election where the Democrats won back Congress. If you tuned into talk radio, you saw that having the executive, congress, and packing the courts still wasn't enough to satisfy conservatives. They were still complaining about taxes, still blaming "liberals" for everything that was wrong with the country, and still raving and whining about the condition of things. It drove me nuts because when you listened to them, it sounded like listening to spoiled children. Actually, the parallel to children is chilling. Children of parents with modest means don't seem to complain as much as rich kids. I guess part of it is that poor children probably feel that no one will care, and it's pointless to complain. But when a spoiled little rich kid, who basically has the world handed to him already, starts bawling about not getting to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, there is no sympathy.

We used to understand this. Look at the way we treated Germany and Japan after World War II. We knew they were utterly defeated and helpless, probably somewhat hopeless. They had every right to expect mistreatment, every reason to brace themselves for arrogance and abuse. Look at Germany and Japan today. World economic powers that are responsible and moral allies, with healthy relationships to their neighbors. By not being a sore winner, we converted former enemies to good friends.

Fear Not

On this sixth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, I am thinking about how our country has transformed and the direction we are headed.

FDR said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself".

George Bush said, "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice ... don't get fooled again."

While many have made fun of W's mashup of an old adage and a song by the Who, it is very telling. For a man that has done more to benefit from and exploit the fears of Americans than anyone could dream, this cyclic ramping up of the fear factor has been a constant theme.

But Americans are increasingly saying to W, "you can't fool us with that again".

The terrorists are a small, highly motivated, and completely insane faction. Wrapping a hatred that makes them desire to kill us in a religious mantle and trying to spread it around the world was something of a hard sell in the days before 9/11. Sure, American policy in the Israeli Palestine conflict was bound to keep a certain portion of the Arab population enraged, but as long as most people could make a decent living and not be assaulted with too many atrocities or outrageous actions (in their minds) by the Americans, they could easily dismiss the terrorist factions.

Not any more. The propaganda of the jihadist that America was something to fear, revile, and resist has been cranked up to a fever pitch by our occupation of Iraq. The recruiting floodgates are open now, despite our intentions.

I resent the fact that every time the administration's influence was slipping, suddenly a new terrorist threat would be trotted out and hyped up. The administration has used these fears to prosecute an unjustified war with little interference by oversight bodies, and has consolidated power including the right to spy on Americans under cover of these fears. For an Administration that is incapable of making any decisions without primarily considering the political impact of them, is it any wonder that the public fears these people being given more power? Given their political track record, does anybody feel that they are incapable of using increased surveillance with no oversight to peep into the private lives of political adversaries?

The terrorists are small in number and usually disunified in action. Their acts seem horrific, but in reality are not that significant. That's right, that is exactly what I said so let me explain. The 9/11 attack was not that significant in itself. Only around 3,000 people died, and we lost the World Trade Center, 4 planes, and damaged the Pentagon. While that is the most successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil, that is not a huge attack. If you lost someone personally in the attacks, it was very important and significant, and I don't mean to minimize that. I'm talking about the impact to the nation as a whole. What was a big impact was the national perception of what happened and the psychological reaction to it. If we had just had a leader that stood up and repeated FDR's assurances to us, explained that the attack was so much more lucky for the terrorists than they had any right to expect, and so easy to thwart in retrospect, people would have understood that they had little to fear personally.

Our society is not too bright about risk assessment and our media is doing nothing to correct these overblown fears and misconceptions. How many people do you know that were afraid that a person was going to wait under their car and cut their achilles tendon in a mall parking lot based on a stupid urban legend? How many people are so fearful that their children are going to be abducted that they don't allow them to play and have a normal childhood anymore? The average American is horrible at assessing risk and seeks to spend an inordinate amount of time defending against or just worrying about events that are so remotely probable as to be virtually impossible.

So looking back on what the terrorists did to us that day, I would say the worst thing that they did was teach us that we have nothing better to do but live in fear. That is the real tragedy of 9/11.

Cosmic Love Story

In 1977, Carl Sagan was working with Annie Druyan to put together the gold records on the Voyager spacecrafts. Annie was the Creative Director of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project, responsible for putting together all the sounds on the gold records.

As she worked with Carl Sagan to compile the sounds, she fell in love with him and they eventually ended up getting married.

The story is amazing and touching and can be found on WNYC's Radio Lab podcast, or look on the website at http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/08/28 and go down to the "Your Brain on Love, in Space"

Annie's brain waves, heart, and other bodily impulses were were recorded and compressed into sounds to be included on the record. These readings were taken 2 days after they fell in love. Later she asked Carl if these impulses could be reconstituted by the aliens that found the record. Carl's response was, "who knows what might be possible?"

Listening to Annie telling the story you imagine that she is able to take comfort in the fact that her love for Carl is travelling out there, waiting to be relived, forever.

Rover Update

I wrote previously about the unbelievable resilience of the Spirit and Opportunity exploration rovers on Mars.

Soon after I wrote that, a huge planetwide dust storm hit Mars. Since the rovers rely on solar power for their life and energy, and the storm was so thick that the sun was blocked out, the rovers were almost killed by the storm.

They had to shut down almost all functions except some heaters to keep the electronics warm. They told the rovers to only report in every three or four days, not to move, and to take or transmit no scientific data.

Previously, dust had accumulated on the solar panels, hampering operations due to decreased power from the sun. Fortuitous little dust devils came by and cleaned off the panels, like some kind of natural Martian car wash.

The dust storms were another matter. I wondered whether the rovers had finally met their match.

Amazingly they survived, again. Although the rovers, by definition of their long life and robust survival, could be considered "perfect", the storm made me think of another device that would have been useful. A little wind generator on an arm.

While I am not suggesting that this should have been included on the mission, it could not have been justified by the weight and given the 90 day planned life of the probe, it could be considered for future Martian operations.

When there is no sun on Mars, there is plenty of wind. Perhaps, if the generator was on a sufficiently versatile arm, it could also be powered, run in reverse as a fan rather than a generator, and used to clean the dust off the solar panels.

I am looking forward to the results from the Phoenix probe that is due to land in the Mars polar region next year to try to find signs of life in the Martian ice.

I wonder if the Spirit and Opportunity rovers will last until then?

The Fountain

Movie Review: The Fountain starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz.

No rating possible. This is a movie about the serial or parallel lives of the characters of Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. Hugh is alternately a conquistador, a doctor, and a semi-mystic guru-like floating man. Rachel is alternately the Queen of Spain, an author, and a ghost. Watch as they try to unravel the secret of life. Literally. They discover the Tree of Life, supposedly a companion to the Biblical Tree of Knowledge from Eden and work to exploit it for personal gain. In the end, following the recurring theme of life sprouting from death, Hugh's character seeks to fly the Tree of Life into a dying star in the nebula in Orion's leg, thereby fulfilling the prophesy of the Mayan Indians that believe that the nebula is the afterlife where all souls go to be reborn. It appears that Guru Hugh was successful, but that is not at all clear. His relentless motivation for this effort was to save the woman he loved, but his quest had become maniacal in the end.

My wife turned to me after the movie ended and said, "Can you explain to me what just happened?" The correct answer to this question is, "No."

Either someone dropped several tabs of acid, ate a bag of psychedelic mushrooms, and mainlined some PCP before writing this movie, or someone is the most brilliant person ever to write a movie. Maybe both.

Not many stories leave me completely wondering what the hell was meant by the movie. I tend to like deep and obscure plotlines. But this one succeeded in keeping its meaning hidden from me.

What do you do when you don't understand something? Enjoy the pretty colors. Rachel is always cute to look at, so the movie had that going for it, and Hugh Jackman is either an amazingly versatile actor or had one heck of a makeup job or both. This movie manages to keep you completely confused and frustrated intellectually without making you want to stop watching and without making you frustrated emotionally. It's unclear to me how it manages this trick. My simple statement would be that I enjoyed the movie.

I'm just not sure why.

Rapture Zones

I heard about the book "The World Without Us" by Allen Wiseman today while I was listening to my Science Friday podcasts.

He talks about a world suddenly without people. What would happen to our works, what would happen to the animals, and what would be notable and interesting.

He was explaining the premise of his book and talked about the fact that humans would disappear suddenly, maybe from a virus. Then he mentioned that some people believe that this will happen in the rapture, the biblical end times for humans.

Later, he talked about zones that were left completely alone with no human maintenance or interference, such as Chernoble, the Korean DMZ, and a Greek Cypriot seaside hotel walled off by the Turks. Typically, many forms of wildlife thrive without people around.

I thought about how this effect could be engineered. You would keep humans out on purpose. Not like a park where you can't kill animals or cut down trees, but a true area that was completely unmolested by people. Nature Preserves in the purest sense, but not like anything we do now. I was imagining how you could get people excited, how you could sell the idea. I tend to believe that most religious people are conservative, and most conservatives think that global warming and conservation of species is some kind of liberal plot, and that they would probably resist efforts to set areas aside to never be developed. I thought these areas could be called "Rapture Zones" in order to get them to understand and accept the concept of leaving some corners of the Earth untouched by human interference.

I wrote a previous post, titled Destined for Destiny. It is the post I most worry about when I imagine lots of people reading my blog (not much chance of that!) and taking offense to what I say. My point was not that religious people do not have a right to participate in politics, or that I am hostile to religion, my point was that people that believe that the end of the world is right around the corner should not go making government policy. You want people that believe and want the world to be around for a good long time making the plans for the Earth. I have thought about what I would say to these hypothetical people, those that believe in the end times and are also politically active. This is one of my first ideas on how to bring them into the fold. What do you think?

My Energy Policy

Sometimes I dream about what I would do as President to try to make things right. I've heard many of the arguments about how the President really doesn't have that much power and can't enact changes unilaterally. I would have agreed with this before, but the recent administration shows that the President has more than enough power to screw things up royally, so I'm proceeding under the assumption that he also has the power to start pointing the country in the right direction.

One thing that I dream about is fixing the energy situation.

Powerful forces are aligned to keep things the way they are now. I believe Exxon Mobile made more profits last year than any company in history, ever (even adjusted for inflation). This in a time where we are paying almost 3 times more for gasoline than at the beginning of the administration. During recent disruptions in production, notably when the refineries and offshore rigs in the Gulf were disrupted during Katrina, but also when we have had refinery problems (such as the flooding of the refinery in Coffeyville Kansas) we have seen fuel prices spike up due to these supply emergencies. Prices never go down to pre-mini-crisis levels, and we are told that we simply don't have the refinery capacity. Yet, with all the oil company record profits, not a single move is being made to increase refinery capacity. Administration apologists and industry advocates tell us that the problem is that we don't drill enough in the Gulf or in Anwar in Alaska, but we don't even have enough capacity to refine the oil that we do get. Who has any doubts or reservations about this administration, with it's tight relationship with the oil companies that environmental regulations won't be eased and permitting processes won't be simplified if the oil industry really wanted to build new refineries?

I'm all for making money and supplying a hungry nation with its needs, but why isn't anybody associated with public policy doing this in a sustainable or logical way? Does anyone think we'll be able to keep using oil without regard to where we get it, how long it will last, or what it is doing to our environment?

I think public policy, and by that I mean Government Policy, has to force the issue. True leaders would be looking ahead and positioning our energy use and production for the future. True leaders would start solving problems early, before they become crises instead of waiting until turmoil and sacrifice are required to get us out of the corner we've painted ourselves into.

True leaders would recognize that those that are supplying us with energy now are in the best position to supply us with the new forms of energy in the future, and therefore are best positioned to benefit from a changing energy profile. By partnering with energy companies while at the same time forcing them to adapt and innovate, we could insure a smooth transition into our energy future. I'm talking about gas stations selling hydrogen, ethanol, and biodiesel. I'm talking about power companies eventually generating with fusion plants, but also helping spread solar and wind energy, connecting individuals to the grid and profiting from financing the capital costs of individuals generating and adding to the grid.

I grew up during the height of the space race, during our moonshot era. That's a big part of why I became an engineer. I miss the days when America looked at technological challenges and only calculated how long it would take and how much it would cost, not whether we were capable or whether we should even try. Please explain to me why the engineers from the country that put men on the moon cannot invent a 100 mile to the gallon car, a rooftop solar array that is affordable, geothermal energy sources, tidal energy systems, or a fuel cell that provides all the energy your house needs without polluting at all? We used to be energized by these challenges, not politically divided over them.

I would advocated a crash program to develop fusion energy, as well as a study to look at the possibility to put a huge solar array in orbit, maybe one that also serves to shield the earth from the sun to counter CO2 induced global warming until we can get our emissions under control.

We need to look at a biologically derived chemical fuel that is equal in value to gasoline that we can produce with very little energy cost. We need to look at capturing motion and sound to generate energy. We need to extract energy from our wastes, whether it's our landfills or our wastewater treatment plants.

We need to plant more trees and manage the ones that we do have so that they don't all burn up in forest fires, contributing nothing to our well being and polluting the atmosphere in the process.

We need to control our weather. We need to learn how to divert atmospheric moisture such that no areas flood and no areas bake. This alone will expand the planet's carrying capacity by a factor of 2 or 3. The skills we learn in doing this, and in solving global warming, could someday be used to cool Venus down and warm Mars up to a habitable state. Imagine humanity with 3 habitable worlds in this solar system.

This is our future. This is not some scary scenario to be feared and resisted, this is where we are going, either voluntarily or involunarily. Why should we not accept this change, embrace it, and plunge headlong into the tasks to make it a reality?