This I Believe

I have been thinking about what I would write to the "This I Believe" program on NPR for a long time. Listening to the essays on the radio and through podcasts, I've often considered going through the exercise of writing one myself, but what I would write has been an assorted variety of whatever is on my mind at the time.

I believe in a lot of things, but when I started thinking about how I would explain my beliefs to my new son when he gets older, I realized that I could sum it up to say that I believe that nothing is absolute.

I would normally dive into the topic of beliefs by explaining the difference between things we know and those that we just suspect without concrete evidence. In a classical science versus religion debate, you can separate beliefs as ideas you hold to be true in the absense of proof, versus ideas that are supported by observable facts and can often be recreated by an experimenter. Belief in religion, by definition cannot be proven.

Some people believe that religion and science are, by their nature and definition, opposed to one another. They believe they you can't be a scientist of faith or a true member of your religion and also accept science. While there are areas were science and faith directly contradict on another, the vast majority of the ideas that religion deals with and the tenets that make up science do not have anything to do with each other.

While I believe that science holds the best hope of answering questions and solving the great mysteries of life, it does not and cannot answer some of the important questions in life, from the simple to the profound. Should we treat each other nicely, is murder wrong, or is it wrong to benefit at the expense of someone else's suffering.

You can't prove or disprove a moral code.

By my definition, religion is not confined to matters of organized faiths. I've never liked the idea of a group of people persistantly proclaiming that they know the unprovable truth about the deepest mysteries of life and humanity and everyone else is deluded. Because faith has no prove, I believe it has to be approached as a tenative or possible thing. In fact, religion's best power is the ability to have people explore their path in life and make corrections when things are going off track. But beyond major religions, I believe there are many other mysteries in life that are worth exploring. Ghosts, reincarnation, telepathy, human energy, and precognition are all areas that are more like religion than science. That doesn't mean they aren't interesting or important, just that no one has written a book and organized a church around them.

Sometimes science is seen as a way of exploring religion. Experiments have been done to measure the weight of a human soul, for example. Other times, scientific discoveries have threatened religious doctrine, such as when Copernicus described how the earth goes around the sun. Religion and science survived the battle that arose from that new idea, but both were changed.

Not anchoring your beliefs, yet being certain of what you know and not adrift in confusion is a good way to live your life. I believe it's best not to deal in absolutes. Even science rewrites theories from time to time when new evidence arises. Keeping your mind open and not getting stuck in absolutes is the best way to greet the new things that you encounter in life.

New Intellectual Property Model for BioEnergy Tech Development

I sent the following letter to Barack Obama and his Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

I would like to see a new form of technological development applied to bioenergy and alternate energy development. It would borrow elements from the aircraft and ship building during WWII.

During that time, the rules governing the competing goal of intellectual property rights (proprietary ownership of methods and designs) and rapid development through sharing knowledge were re-written. We need to share technological information in order to bring energy source changes to the public quicker.

A wiki style forum to share ideas in particular fields would have the advantage of bringing all the designers and developers abreast of the latest developments, as well as producing a consensus design that will provide standardization (and therefore more rapid diffusion) of the emerging technology.

In order to reward creativity and incentivize design efforts, we need to come up with a hybrid intellectual property rights formula. I propose that we use government money to fund selected pilot plant projects, with the stipulation that all design development will be instantly published and widely disseminated. This allows private individuals, research organizations, and private industry to develop technology without shouldering the huge capital expense of R&D. In exchange, technologies developed will be un-patentable, or patented for free public use. In some situations, we should offer patents that do not allow the patent holder to restrict use of the technology by others, in exchange for some licensing fee.

Using this plan, an example would be development of an algae energy plant. We could set the pilot plant up at some medium sized city's wastewater treatment plant, and start the job of turning the waste stream into clean water and algae based bio-fuels (ethanol and biodiesel, as well as livestock feed). University based researchers could test strains of algae, industry representatives could try equipment to convert the algae to lipids and starches, and engineering or research firms could be brought in to administer the pilot plant (and in the process learn how to plan and sell the plants to future customers).

Please consider the need to alter the current rules of intellectual property in order to speed development of our future alternative energy technologies.

Thank you.

Mike Jones

What Happened

I would add a couple of words in there to make it more salty, but I'll keep it clean.

I read former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's book, What Happened.

I am not impressed.

If you did not like Bush and ran out to buy this book in order to hear all the dirty little secrets about the Bush administration, hoping to hear about how corrupt and incompetent they are, this is not that book.

This is a book where a boot licking weasel tries to have it both ways. He's trying to essentially say that everything we believed was right, but we just botched the execution. I'm not particularly impressed with Scott as a great thinker of the day, especially after listening to his analysis. In the few times where he actually brings up a thorny and interesting subject, rather than taking it on and analyzing it a little, he says "that would take a whole other book to explore that subject." This is code for, "if we looked closer at that, we'd see even more glaring flaws in our ideology, so let's just skirt by the issue." More than anything else, it's a regurgitation of the endless stream of talking points that the Bush Administration is so famously known for, a strange continuation of the endless right wing propaganda, while also trying to somehow point out its flaws and explain why he wasn't responsible for where it went wrong.

Some times, he does incredible reversals. He talks about this horrible contentiousness in Washington, and how Bush wanted to rise above it and play a more honorable game, but the evil media or the evil entrenched politics of Washington sucked him into behaving just like everyone else. Then he starts bashing the Clinton administration. He has the gall to say that all this attack politics got completely out of control in the way that the Republicans continually attacked Clinton, and then to imply that it was Clinton's moral failings that brought it all on, or worst yet, the way Clinton defended himself helped cause the partisanship.

He spends a lot of time talking about what an attack dog Rove was and how he put politics above all other considerations when it came to making decisions. At the same time, this is the guy he strove to impress more than anyone else and he heaps praise on him for what a smart operator he is.

The way he spins the run up to the Iraq war is that Bush never really cared about Weapons of Mass Destruction, that all he really cared about was spreading Democracy and Freedom in the Middle East, but that he did not feel the American people would buy that, so he was a little disingenuous about why he REALLY wanted to go into war.

He gives little glimpses about how the personalities in the White House inter meshed and worked together. He says that Vice President Cheney would never give his opinion to President Bush in front of anyone else, and even within the staff, no one really knew much about what he thought or just how much influence he had.

I hope Scott makes enough money from this book to live on for the rest of his life, or that he has a plan for a career outside of politics, because there's nothing in this book that will endear him to either party. In the end, it's a sad book, of this lonely little man that just wants acceptance for himself and validation of his ideas to a polarized public that is unlikely to give him either.

Genghis by Conn Iggulden Book Review

Sometimes you get an unexpected bonus. I checked out an audiobook, Genghis: Birth of an Empire and started listening to it without reading any background on it.

After a few chapters, I finally thought "what is this story about?" The main character was a guy named Temüjin and he did not seem to be headed for any greatness. Before I spent too much time on a story that might not be anything like what I expected, I looked it up.

I knew the book was fiction, but it's that genre of book that is fiction in the sense that no one could have know the dialogue or minor action. The background or overlay of the story is accurate. I guess you could call it fictionalized history or historical fiction.

Genghis Khan lived around the year 1200. As you can imagine, there are not very good records of this time. However, he apparently dictated his history at some time in his life. All original versions of his history in his native language are lost, but a Chinese translation survived. This is what Conn Iggulden's book was based on.

This is a story that really grips you. You can imagine the harsh conditions and the tough life that the Mongol people endured. Temüjin was betrayed and abandoned with his family when he was 12 and not only managed to live, but went on to unify a group of tribes that had been warring against each other for as long as they could remember. The book takes you up to the betrayal of the Chinese ambassador and the defeat of the Tatars. There is a second book that should take you into some of the other conquests, I am definitely going to listen to it.

It was fortunate to find this book as an audiobook. The problem is that the names mess you up. They don't pronounce their K's, so the tribal leaders were actually called "Han". The images that stick in your mind when you listen to the story are the way they shoot their arrows when all 4 feet of the horse are off the ground, so that they get a steady shot.

It's not hard it imagine a life this harsh, with survival of the fittest making the tribes grow stronger each year, and constant warfare honing the warrior skills to a peak. The only thing that was missing was for someone to come along and unify the tribes into a single unstoppable unit.

It seems like a time long past and no longer able to give us lessons for today, but strength coming out of adversity and failure being a primer for success are two things that could be considered pertinent for today. Also useful, the thought of a unifying leader that can bring everyone together and make for an unstoppable people.

Automaker's Bailout

Here's the letter I sent to my Congressman and Senators:

Automaker Bailouts:

The automakers need a bailout, but apparently, they can afford expensive pop-up ads in AOL asking me to contact my member of Congress to lobby them to help the Automaker Industry.

It motivated me to write to you, but not in support of them. This is the same industry that has spent millions in lobbying the Congress over the last 25 years to keep CAFE standards low so that they could continue to make crappy cheap cars that use fuel like you are flushing it down the toilet. Rather than leading the world with engineering, they dragged their heels and argued that it just couldn't be done. They've been telling us for years that they can't make more fuel efficient cars.

A year ago, I started looking for a car to replace my 20 mpg Jeep Cherokee. I wanted to buy something that got better gas mileage, and had found that most cars now got worse gas mileage. So if I want to buy a car that won't bankrupt me with the fuel charges when gas gets back up to $4 a gallon, there is no smart American choice.

We can put a man on the moon, but we can't make an 80 or 100 mpg car? We can supply the world with trucks, tanks, boats, and planes during WWII, but we can't figure out how to make a plug in hybrid or electric car? We can figure out atomic energy, but we can't figure out a solar car?

Detroit deserves to die on it's own capitalistic rhetoric, if nothing else. In February of this year, Bob Lutz, GM's Chairman, made a very public statement that global warming was a crock. This was probably just after he approved of taking another couple of mpg's off of the efficiency of the latest truck they make. These people are the problem, not part of the solution. They are why we are so addicted to foreign fuel, and why we are having such a hard time with energy consumption in this country. Hard core proud capitalists are the first to invoke "too bad" or "they should have known better" or "survival of the fittest" when someone else falls on hard times, but they see it entirely differently when it's their own bad decisions that endanger their industry.

If we have to bail them out, if everyone is set on doing that, I believe it should come at a high price. I think they should be forced to fast-track develop high mpg cars, as well as electric and alternate energy cars, and prohibited from ever producing another Hummer or Excursion.

In addition, I believe that if they are going to get bailed out, that their top executives, who unarguably have failed at their job of keeping their companies sound and steered in the right direction, should be limited in their compensation. If we bail them out, and then the next week, I see an article talking about how Bob Lutz got his $300 executive bonus, you should expect to get many more letters from constituents.

We've just elected a lot more Democrats to Congress and will finally have an intelligent President we can be proud of, so let's not lay a big rotten egg with the first major decision of the new Congress and President and allow these auto industry jokers to get a fat bailout without a whole lot of conditions. They should almost wish they hadn't asked for the bailout when they see the conditions. The biggest irony is that if you force them to make efficient cars, Americans will start buying their cars again, and they will get healthy due to natural market forces. You almost have to legislate good sense back into them.

2nd Civil War

This is my first Non Book Review.

I checked out the book The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America by Ronald Brownstein.

Then I succeeded in not reading it for 30 days until I had to return it to the library. This Non Book Review is an attempt by me to explain why that was a good thing.

I read the first couple of chapters and felt this sinking feeling. The book’s title pretty much says it all. This is a book about American polarization. If you’ve been alive and aware of current events in this country for the last 16 years, you know how we’ve been divided to the point where we really hate each other.

This book rubs your nose in that.

I wanted to find out why we were in this mess and what it would take to get out of it.

I skipped forward to the later chapters, hoping that by then, the conflict would be solved, everyone would be singing together with their arms around each other, and the author would explain where everything went wrong and how we could make it so it would never happen again.

Unfortunately, there is no happy ending. Fear and hate are two commodities that don’t need a bailout.

It's A Love Story

If you haven't see the video for this new Taylor Swift song, it's at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4xmxb9K8RI on YouTube. I didn't know who Taylor Swift was a short time ago, now I see her in the gossip and entertainment news with increasing frequency.

She broke out on the country music scene two years ago when she was 16. I thought it was Clair Dane when I first saw the Love Story video. Her story is pretty interesting, and I was pleased to find that she writes her own songs.

As I grow older, I keep in mind the infuriating comments of older people I have heard. The comments fall under the category of how stupid young people are, derision about the choices made and the mystifying behavior they display. I had the sense at the time that those comments were being directed at myself and my contemporaries to know that they were wrongheaded, petty in spirit, and lacked insight and understanding. In particular, when whithered old crones with their tiny pursed lips spat distaste and condescension about the music my generation loved, I knew that they had closed their mind to the truth and rejected the best things we loved without opening their heart to knowing and cherishing them with us. I vowed never to fall into their trap, to try to keep my mind and heart open as I aged and try to be one that still remembered and understood the passions of youth.

Listening to Tayor Swift's Love Story reminds me of that vow and makes me realize something else about the age divide. There are things that young people know better than their elders. Passion is a product of youth, something you can forget as you get older. Now that's not absolute, it's not fair to say that you lose all passion as you age, but your passions shift from music and romance to politics, your job, your church, keeping your house nice, and raising your children, among other things.

When you are young, you are really good at romance. I say this even though I remember my own and other's awkwardness, whether by shyness on one extreme or embarrassing yourself on the other extreme. It's true, you may not be as smooth and polished when you are young, the words you come up with may not be worthy of publishing to inspire others, but you are an expert at one thing. When you're young, you open yourself to your loves and throw yourself into them with abandon.

I can rationalize this and say that young people have never been hurt or humiliated yet, and that allows them to leap without reservations. That's true in many circumstances, but not always. Not to get too technical, but scientist have also found that your brain does not easily produce some of the chemicals that it did in youth. I can't find the reference, but it talked about how children love gifts, but older people rarely get as excited about receiving presents when they get older. I've noticed this in myself.

So I think it's fair to say that you lose something as you get older, something besides just innocence. You lose some of the capacity to appreciate the sweeter things in life.

When I see how someone young is finding their passions in life, whether they are creative or romantic, I can't help but get a little wistful. I don't think it's over when you get older, I think this is what the young have to teach the older people, to remember the excitement of discovering the things in life that thrill you. One thrill I know is just seeing that love catch fire for the first time in someone young.

Inexperience is a great thing.

Population Control

I listen to several science podcasts that keep mentioning population control. If the issue is food prices, energy production, urban sprawl, light pollution, species extinction, or global warming, it usually comes down to overpopulation.

I remember the fear of overpopulation back in the 70s prompted some to illustrate the problem with graphs showing how growth takes off. This is the first time I knew and understood about exponential curves. Growth, even a very small percentage, is exponential. This means that it accelerates and eventually the curve gets so steep that it is practically straight up.

In developed nations, the curve is not growing as fast as in less developed nations. Some say it's because undeveloped nations need their children as a source of cheap labor, but there really is not much understanding of the phenomenon.

I came up with an idea about 5 or 6 years ago, when thinking about overpopulation, abortion, teenage pregnancy, and other child raising issues. I sometimes come up with solutions to multiple problems by starting with the statement, "This would never happen, but..." If you throw out the downside of a solution, such as the fact that it may impact on someone's personal freedom, or no one in power would ever agree to it, or the general public would never stand for it, then you can come up with some interesting solutions. Let's try to ignore the fact that China has a sordid history of mandating behaviors that are against the population and sometimes quite scary when you consider personal freedoms.

This idea started as an argument that in this country we always line up on opposite sides of the ideological divide and take diametrically opposed positions on issues, when often there are solutions in the middle that borrow from both ends of the spectrum. Never mind that these bridging crossover ideas never see the light of day. Abortion foes do not believe in killing a fetus. Abortion rights advocates want women to control when they have children, in part so that men cannot enslave them into raising children rather than making their own decisions and choices in life. I've always thought quietly to myself that if people can't control their urges or plan their reproductive schedule any better, that abortion is about the only way to prevent rampant overpopulation. We seem to think that most abundant animal species need us to help "cull" their population, but we never seem to feel that way about people. That's because people are special.

I've always wished we could just take abortion off the table. Find some solution that satisfies both sides. After all, abortion is only chosen because the baby is not wanted. What if we could do something that would guarantee that all children were wanted? How about if we only conceived when we really wanted to? Let's forget for a moment that many of the religious fundamentalists that are most up in arms about abortion are also very against birth control because they think it promotes promiscuity. What you really need is to have everyone that does not want a child to easily and reversibly be made infertile. For this to really have the maximum effect, you need to have this apply to not only women, but men too.

OK, so let's assume that there is some kind of simple procedure developed in the future, maybe some kind of silicone plug that is inserted into your tubes, that can later be removed and full fertility would be restored. It's fiction right now, we need some science to come about to make this possible. Then let's say that all people, as they reach puberty and become able to conceive are given this infertility treatment. What happens then?

Further stipulation would be that these 13 year olds would all be given the treatment and that they would be able to reverse it only after they turned 18, when they had their full rights as adults. No more teen pregnancy, no more babies having babies. The thing I really like about this is that it empowers men in family planning. Men cannot be faked out or blackmailed or lied to in the matter of pregnancy.

You could take it further and say that you only get to reverse the treatment so you could conceive when you were financially secure, in a committed relationship, and drug free (and not a criminal). So not only are all children conceived wanted by their parents, they are also brought into a stable environment. Imagine all the country's children automatically knowing one thing, that they were wanted by both of their parents, and also not having to grow up with a drug abusing, or absent, or criminal parent. Imagine all children having a stable home where hunger or want were not present.

It would solve so many problems. The only thing is that we humans are pretty attached to our problems, and not yet ready to give them up.

How Soon We Forget

I was listening to a This American Life episode where they were travelling in Pennsylvania to document the character of this swing state's campaigning.

This is a state that voted for Kerry in 2004, and for Gore in 2000, not to mention for Clinton in '92 and '96. McCain thinks he can win it and is spending a great deal of time there.

The podcast had a section on Hillary supporters for McCain. They were very fired up, very against Obama, and very involved in campaigning for McCain. I listened to their speeches and reasons for switching the party they support, and I declare them to have no memory of history.

Working in an office with conservative people, and serving industries full of conservatives, and living in a reddish state next to a beet red state, I spent the 1990's listening to right wing rhetoric. For those out there that were either so deep in a blue territory, or who were too young or in a coma, let me remind you what this was like. Conservatives hated the Clintons. You might think that they would focus their hatred on the Clinton actually in power, but you would be wrong. People hated Hillary Clinton. I didn't understand it at the time, and I still don't, I'm just repeating and reporting what I heard. I did not see anything wrong with Hillary Clinton, and used to tell die hard Hillary haters that I thought she was a hottie, just to watch them cringe.

When the 2008 primaries came along and Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy, my primary reaction was weariness. I never realized how tired of all the nonsense, bile, and kooky conspiracy theories I was. I also knew that even though Bush's ratings were low and the political winds were favoring a change to the left, that having Hillary on the ticket would supercharge the right. I figured we had to get ready to listen to an avalanche of hatred, fear, and stupid stories (easily debunked if you spent about ten seconds on Snopes).

These people on the right hated Hillary with a fervor that was not to be believed.

Yet as soon as she was knocked out of the primaries, the first thing they did was to use her speeches in the primaries to try to discredit Obama. I remember at the time thinking, "You don't even like her! Why are you telling us to listen to her?"

So when I hear someone that formerly supported Hillary talk about supporting McCain, I really have to wonder at their sanity and awareness. Why would you help the very people that reviled your candidate? This doesn't make any sense at all. It must be some kind of Stockholm syndrome, because I can't think of any logical explanation for it.

A Uniter, not a Divider

8 years ago, when Bush first publically uttered the title phrase above, it was a calculated ploy to pull voters over to his side.

I was listening to the news on the radio a few mornings ago, and as usual, they were covering the campaign. They had an audio clip from a McCain rally, and the clip started with a derisive comment about his opponent, followed by the booing of the crowd.

They cut to an Obama rally, where you had a stirring comment by the candidate followed by cheers.

What a contrast this provided. On one hand smear, fear, and anger, on the other hope, ideas, and cheers.

This is the politics of division and derision come to roost. I had high hopes for McCain, a person I was firmly behind in 2000, a man I believed had honor, when this election started. I thought that this would finally be an election where the ads weren't all about how "my opponent is the devil". It started out that way, and it felt like about the time McCain seemed to borrow and bring on some of the scummy architects of Bush's victories that the campaign dove down for the mucky bottom.

You get tired of hearing someone spew anger, hate, and fear and smear. It really became apparent when they brought out Sarah Palin, and she turned out to be an Anne Coulter clone. Is that all they've got? Hate & fear?

The problem with the politics of division is when the people you are setting up as "them" become the majority. Since you can't ever tell when that will be, it's best not to rely on it permanently. You have to recognize when pushing the same buttons doesn't have the same old effect it always did.

What you really want and need in leadership is a person that understands the shared threads of many of the people out there and tries to bring them together in common purpose. Someone that can point out the problems, but offer a concrete solution or at least a good attitude of how to respond to the problem.

It feels like the people are choosing hope over despair, action over fear, and coming together over tearing each other apart.

Sabotage by Failure

I was listening to a debate about health care the other day. The subject was whether the government should or should not be responsible for Health Care. The anti panelist was arguing that after the government failed so utterly at Katrina, "you want to turn over health care to the government?"

The next pro panelist immediately responded with the point that having a bad administration screw something up and then using that to justify your position for something that you don't want to do anyway is awfully convenient.

I just tried to find another reference, which escaped me. I was listening to a book review (sorry, can't remember the book) that had some strange and disturbing assertions. The thesis was that conservatives liked to get into government to run it into the ground, thus making it impossible for government to interfere in business. The interview also talked about how President Clinton went into office with plans to provide health care, and the budget deficit was so bad that it was impossible to implement any health care plan. The book that was being reviewed was supposed to show how conservatives like big deficits because it limits the size of government.

This is juvenile. If there is any truth in this assertion, if people either consciously or subconsciously are trashing our government institutions in order to profit more and more easily, this is disheartening. I understand wanting to get ahead, I can even understand greed. But greed that is so short sighted that it's easy to see how it destroys the very society that you hope to live luxuriously in.

Trouble in Sector 34

In our town it's tornado sirens. At 11 a.m. on the first Monday of every month, they test the tornado siren, and it always had the same effect on one of the women in the office. You could almost see her making the calculation of where her son was. There are a few sounds that always make you freeze and consider. Alarms. You hear a huge echoey variety in movies, always there for chilling effect. There are also fire, rescue, and police sirens, going off at random in your neighborhood, making you wonder momentarily if all is not well.

I was listening to a report about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) recently. Parts of these reports up to now have been about how some people think that when they turn this machine on soon that it will spawn black holes and it will be the end of Earth. Physicists say this is absurd, this machine is just supposed to usher in a new golden era of understanding in physics. Detractors are doing everything from lawsuits to death threats in order to stop the collider from being turned on. They hear that alarm signal in their head, the end of the world is near. The most recent report was about how the collider has had a setback during its startup. Apparently a relay blew out and they have to warm it back up from 2° above absolute zero (thats about Fahrenheit 451 below zero) before they can repair it. The atom smashing that will unlock the secrets of the universe will have to wait for a few more months. One of the reporters that is following the LHC closely got a cryptic message that there was "Trouble in Sector 34" at the LHC. Obviously, the 7 mile diameter ring is divided into sectors on the engineering drawings for maintenance purposes, and the relay that blew out is in the 34th sector. The interviewer remarked that "Trouble in Sector 34" sounded like a movie title, some sinister X-Files kind of movie, maybe.

So in this case, with the LHC, we have both figurative and literal alarms going off. This is also going on with the economy and government. For years, people have put out warnings that have gone unheeded. With the financial meltdown, it makes you wonder who keeps reaching over and muting the alarms until things got so out of control that the special effects explosions start happening and the ship starts going down in flames. You always wonder when you see scenes where the pilot is in the distressed cockpit with multiple alarms going off and they are still steadily working toward averting the disaster. You want a cool hand under fire. You want someone that continues to work for solutions while the alarms are bleating in their ears. That's what the siren song teaches us.

BSG

My wife subscribed to Netflix.

We tried it once before and didn't really like it, but we're trying it again.

Since you get a better deal by watching more movies, I didn't want to be limited by making decisions each time we returned some movies. I started filling up the queue and realized that Netflix has many older movies and TV series than you find in a Blockbuster store.

I believe that good TV shows that get popular have the strongest following of people that have watched the series from the beginning. I speculated that pilots are probably the best a series ever is, the first season is probably the best of the seasons of a series. Why not go back and see some of the TV Series that I suspected that I would like, but never got into the first run.

In particular, the remake of Battlestar Galactica sounded like something I would like. I watched a few minutes of the series when flipping channels around, but it didn't make any sense to me. So I rented it and watched the pilot last week.

I like the story much better now.

SPOILER ALERT

The background of the story makes it much more interesting. The Cylons had already had a war with the humans and lost 40 years before. The Galactica was due to be retired and decommissioned. They used the same setup from the original series, but explained it as the fact that no computers could be networked because the Cylons could co-opt networked computers.

The Cylons hack the 12 colony's computers and kill their defenses prior to launching a massive attack. The ancient Galactica barely survives.

Glossing over much of what happened, they barely evade the Cylons and limp off to seek the mythical Earth. Faster than light drive, Cylons that look and feel like humans, a implanted chip that keeps a human traiter under tabs, and a power struggle all stand to make for a very interesting story line.

But I may not watch any more. I like the way it starts, why spoil a good thing.

Capitalism and Terrorism

As always when I get an idea, it's a compilation of several things I've heard recently.

Let's start with minerals. I recently spent a week in Creede Colorado, where a silver boom created the town in 1890 and a silver bust stopped the development of the town cold in 1892. Silver, lead, and zinc were mined steadily, keeping the town alive, but not booming. Now metal prices are such that the mines may be reopened. This would bring jobs and development back to the city. My cousin recently bought a cabin in the area. We visited over Labor Day and hiked in the pristine mountains and fished in the unspoiled streams. While my brother is usually a pro-market, capitalistic minded person, he expressed dread that mining would return to Creede. Why? If development is always good, government should not regulate or restrict businesses, and market forces should always be allowed to dictate public policy, why shouldn't the mountains around Creede be mined for their maximum mineral potential? After all, doesn't America need these minerals? We can't expect the environmental concerns of a small portion of the population to deny resources that happen to be in their area to the rest of the population. Like drilling oil in the gulf, for example.

The U.S., the old colonial powers, and other big or strong nations, have always seen their need for resources to transcend national boundaries or the interests of local governments and native populations. Our history in the Middle East, in connection with our need for oil, has also followed this pattern.

Rather than having morals, ethics, and principles that we hold to be true for all men, we have a history of applying a different standard to people in other countries as well as to people that stand in the way of our progress.

For those situations where Americans were the actors, you often had big U.S. corporations operating in small countries. You did not find large crowds of American citizens standing up in protest when these companies were using heavy handed tactics to get what they wanted. People here for the most part were unaware of how U.S. companies operated overseas. When they were aware, they did not care. Any exploitation, displacement, or disruption was happening to "those other people". After all, we were benefiting with oil, minerals, crops, or other lucrative goods. Why spoil a good thing just because some strange people in some other part of the world with unintelligible languages and incomprehensible cultures were being "inconvenienced"? Shouldn't the market dictate what happens in the world? If they did not want to be dominated, they should have developed their resources themselves and used the money to create a strong military defense. We can't help it if they were weak and disorganized. They were in the way of us getting to their resources. We did not regulate or rein in our rogue capitalists that operated in this fashion. We either encouraged or ignored their actions.

Now we live in an era of terrorism. We wonder what they have against us, because most Americans prefer to remain blissfully ignorant rather than pay attention to the way we have treated other countries. Sometimes mistreatment was a corporate policy while in search of resources. Other times our government committed mischief, crimes, or atrocities in search of an edge or advantage in the Cold War. If you lived in a country that had been exploited or disadvantaged by the U.S., you would see things quite differently. Maybe you would not hate America, maybe you could understand why things were done the way they were done. If you buy into the premise of survival of the strongest, you would also feel that the big guys can take care of themselves.

So when members of a country radicalize, call for jihad, and start taking actions against the western world, we in the western world finally turn our attention to these countries in horror and wonder why they do not rein in their radicals. We can't comprehend why they sometimes actually cheer the efforts of the extremists.

Why should we be surprised at their actions, revolted by their inability to keep those on the fringe under control? For people of the Islamic world, our application of capitalism is terrorism against them. Why does it surprise anyone that they consider turnabout to be justified?

Fanning the Flames of Hatred

We love to hate.

I know this is somewhat in direct opposition to the Symbiosis posting I just made, but something happened today that set off quite a rant in me.

I heard the news that after a month of negative ads by the McCain campaign, Obama's numbers have slid downward to below McCain's.

It's as if the country was asked to believe the worst accusations about a person and they came right out and jumped right on the task.

One thing that I have really despised about the Bush era in general, but some of their biggest supporters in particular, is their constant and persistent call to find something to hate about "the other side". It's somehow even better if it's not true, all it has to do is appeal to what people want to believe, not what they can be convinced of by facts. And just as hordes of people obediently forward emails of stories that are unbelievable at first glance, they usually don't take the time to dive into the stories they hear to determine whether they have any semblance of truth in them.

The sad thing about this is how easy it is for good people to fall prey to the siren song of hating your fellow man. I had a good friend years ago. He was a free spirit, probably lived outside of the law in some respects, had a healthy dose of disrespect for authority, and was fun-loving and funny. The last time I talked to him he told me, "I've been listening to a lot of talk radio lately. I really hate liberals." What I didn't say that day, partly because I was stunned by the statement, and partly out of respect and a desire not to have a fight with my friend was "What do you mean you hate liberals, you ARE liberal." Seriously, this guy was one of the most tolerant and liberal people I've ever known. Where did this sudden blindness to all that he believed in and loved turn into this hatred for "liberals"?

People are not shy to speak up about their hatreds. They feel vindicated and justified in thinking and believing that other people are somehow worthless and reprehensible. I'm talking about the divide in America, not about how Americans feel about other people in the world or how they feel about us. The bad thing about this trend is that I hear many people of faith spewing out this hatred, feeling perfectly justified in doing so, and not at all able to see the hypocrisy of being told by their religion to love one another, but feeling free by their associates to hate any and everything about those "others".

When we see radical Islamic fundamentalists espousing hatred toward America, we feel alarmed and repulsed. How can these supposed men of the cloth preach such tenets that are obviously contradictory to their religion? Yet we are blind to the hatreds we hold ourselves. Why is it so clear to see hatred in others, and so hard to recognize it in ourselves?

This is a trend that has to be recognized and reversed. Everyone hears how those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. I think it's much worse than that. I think that many that are perfectly aware of history are more than willing to repeat it, because they think "This is different." We look back on the 1930's and we dissect the rise of Nazism and smugly say, those Germans were sure stupid to follow Hitler. We even have this parable crafted for children about standing up to oppressive tyrants. You've probably heard variants of "I stood aside, because they weren't coming for me" stories. The punch line was when they came for you, no one was left to stand for you. Hitler had the perfect tool to recruit millions to his cause. He gave them what they wanted: something to hate.

Symbiosis

I've been hearing a lot of cases of symbiosis lately.

The concept is something that is not hard to describe. Two organisms live together and feed off of one another, helping each other to survive. To say that they feed off of each other isn't quite right, it's more like what one casts off, the other needs, so together they make a closed loop where they benefit each other.

Beatrix Potter, the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was one of the first biologists to find a symbiotic relationship in nature. She put forth the theory (and apparently some beautiful drawings) that Lichen are actually a symbiosis of Algae and Fungus. Unfortunately, she forwarded her theory during a time when women were not taken seriously, and she was never recognized for her discovery during her lifetime. Almost 90 years later, Britain's Royal Society finally recognized her work and apologized for ignoring her.

I also heard a story about a slug that ate algae, which continued to live for a while inside the slug, continuing to produce energy through photosynthesis until they were digested.

From the world of basic cellular biology, we also know that most cells have structures in them called mitochondria (also known as the powerhouse of the cell) that some speculate were other primitive organisms that were absorbed and preserved in early bacteria. So the basis of most live might be in itself a symbiotic relationship.

One cool story that I keep hearing references to is that humans are themselves a great example of symbiosis. Apparently, there are 10 times more bacteria than human cells in your body. The bacteria cells are all much smaller than the human cells, so it's not like they are some huge visible lump. Still, the first time you hear that number, it's a very scary and strange thought.

Recently, I heard about a strange three-way symbiosis between this plant and a virus and a bacteria. This combination not only allows all three to live together and benefit each other, but it also allows the plant to survive in geothermal soils (that's hot - think Yellowstone and geysers).

I heard a comment by a microbiologist that was tracking the relationship between a bacteria, pylobacter, and stomach ulcers. Just when they found the relationship and started being able to treat people with chronic ulcers by attacking the bacteria, they found out something else new. They found out that pylobacter, which probably has been with humans for thousands of years, and co-evolved with us, is becoming extinct. They think that its disappearance is responsible for the rise in asthma. This means that they believe that the pylobacter, besides making us more susceptible to ulcers, makes us less susceptible to asthma. A strange symbiosis, to be sure. Along the same lines, they believe that human herpes viruses have historically made humans better able to fight off the plague. Scientists studying this field, where our bacteria that live with us create a benefit call the field probiotics.

These two examples of herpes and pylobacter are less cut and dried from the basic definition of symbiosis. It's not pure benefit and no detriment. It's a payoff. There are some problems that come with the gain.

This morning, I was learning about plant root cellular biology, and the instructor was describing how a plant manages to keep harmful bacteria or other organisms out of the roots while allowing nutrients and water in. First, he described a portion of the cell wall that was an impenetrable barrier and wrapped each cell and the entire root in a protective layer. Within this layer were porous parts that allowed nutrients and water to pass, if they wanted and needed them. So you have two types of membranes, one for keeping things out, and one for letting things in. Completely different functions, yet working together, they make the plant thrive.

It occurred to me that society is like this, in a way. You hear people of certain political persuasions saying that the world (or our country) would be better off without those of the opposite persuasion. However, if you think about it, different groups of people act like the root membrane does. Some are willing to think about new ideas and different ways of doing things. Others resist anything new or different from the way they've always done things or the way they've always understood things. If it weren't for people willing to be open to new ideas, you wouldn't have advances in science and society. If it weren't for people resisting new ideas, you would have every harebrained crazy idea sweeping society like the latest fad. Resistance to change and new things keeps society on an even keel and prevents us from discarding important traditions.

As the biologist said, they think that most species will be found to be symbiotic in one way or another. But the concept is so woven into the basic fabric of our lives, that it's not crazy to expect to see it expressed in how we interact with each other. The trick is to recognize it when it's right in front of your face.

Realistic Malaise versus Irrational Exuberance

I recently listed to a podcast featuring a speech of President Jimmy Carter. The speech was given on July 15th, 1979, where he spoke about the growing energy crisis in the United States and our crisis of confidence that followed. This speech was dubbed the Malaise Speech and was universally derided as being very depressing. Given the energy crisis and the Iran Hostage Crisis of Carter's term in office, it is little wonder that Carter's entire presidency is thought of as a thoroughly depressing time.

Unfortunately, much of what Carter spoke about and focused on turned out to be prophetic.

One of my biggest criticisms of our democracy is that it has become a quick fix style of governance. Given the 2 and 4 year election cycle, our politicians are more focused on immediate concerns rather than long term problems and planning.

This reminds me of learning to drive. When I first got behind the wheel, I had a steering problem. I used to look at a spot right in front of the car. This made me swerve back and forth a lot. Some instructor or family member figured it out. They told me to look at a point down the road a ways and aim for that. This single comment immediately fixed my driving irregularities. I steered smoothly after that, with no jerkiness or shaking of the passengers.

The ship of state has a similar rudder problem. With a classic battle of one side yanking the tiller in one direction and the other yanking it in the opposite direction, as well as panicky naysayers screaming "iceberg!" every few minutes, we are jerking around all over the place.

The problem here is that people with long vision first have to take an objective and realistic look at where we are now, what we are doing, and where we need to be and what it will take. Some of these harsh realities are tough for people to swallow. People tend to plug up their ears and chant "I can't hear you!" when you say something they don't like. It is almost impossible to get elected on harsh realities.

I believe history has proven that leaders with a long view were the best thing for our country. Many people do not know that Abraham Lincoln was very unpopular through much of his presidency. Lincoln had a long term vision which was largely responsible for the eventual success of the Union in the Civil War. He also had a kinder reconstruction plan which was never put into place after his assassination. We'll never know how much racial turmoil may have been forestalled if he had lived through his second term.

Unfortunately, we now seem to be in an era of quick fix, short term, or unsustainable movements. Alan Greenspan called it Irrational Exuberance. He was referring to an unwarranted boom in the market, which eventually reversed and fell. The warning was not to get too excited about the latest economic fad, not to fall prey of schemes to make a quick buck at the expense of rational, safe, or slow plans. I think it's fair to say that the last 12 years have had a fair dose of these economic fads. The dot.com boom and bust, the stock market roller coaster ride, and the highly speculative real estate market are just a few examples. The unfortunate reality is that when people look around and see that someone has figured out a way to make a pile of money, there is a rush of people copying these tactics. Unfortunately, history has proven that most quick rises are followed by devastating falls.

So the person counselling conservation and development of alternate energies (including Nuclear - most people forget that Carter advocated nuclear energy and was himself a navy trained nuclear submariner) gets no credit for having the right ideas at the right time, and those with wild schemes to get rich quick or solve long term problems with short term fixes will never be short of followers.

Visions in the Mind's eye

I was out running a few days ago, on a slightly stormy overcast day, where the clouds took on this very pretty blue gray color. This is midsummer when the blue cornflowers are in bloom in the ditches and on the roadside. I noticed that the cornflowers were the same color as the clouds in the stormy sky.

I remember thinking that I did not have my camera, and it would have made a beautiful picture. Sometimes you have to hold on to the pictures just in your mind. You hope you can remember them well and recall them when you want.

I ran past a foggy cove of a lake the other morning and the air was heavy and still. There was a Blue Heron in the fog across the cove, full of sailboats. I watched his ungainly, gawky form as he struggled to the air and then coasted across the water with an improbable grace that seemed to defy gravity.

So often these quick flashes are not recorded and quickly forgotten. They make up the fabric of life. You wonder what your mind does with so many details.

As I drove across Kansas, I saw long views in the open plain, simple still and silent, yet complete and majestic. I've been caught up in the overlooked details in wood grain or random patterns of shadows.

You wonder if there is meaning in the visions as they flash by. It's easy to say that some things are simply meant to be appreciated. Some things are just beautiful, they have no special meaning. But these things come together to make up your life's experience, even if they aren't recorded or remembered. That gives them meaning.

Liberal Education

Political discourse being what it is in this country (two armed camps volleying shots at each other) it sometimes pays to back up a bit and see how we got into this mess.

One of the things I note most often is the way that the conservatives and Republicans say the word "Liberal". I'm sure if you're alive and aware in America today, you've heard the word slither out of people's mouths, heavy with scorn.

I had a friend about 10 years ago that I've since gotten out of touch with. This guy was a free spirit, a bit of a hippie, funny, fun-loving, and rarely serious. Not a corporate hack type, not a cubicle dweller, a guy that really wanted a job that allowed him freedom and access to the great outdoors. This guy was not at all what you would consider Conservative. The last time I talked to him was when I phoned him at random about 3 years ago. In the course of the conversation, he mentioned that he had been listening to a lot of talk radio and that he "hates Liberals". I remember the feeling I had when I heard this. If you've ever seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or The Stepford Wives, you know about those parts in the stories where the character realizes that their friend is no longer there in the person they used to know. They are now mindlessly serving a new heartless master. This guy didn't have a conservative bone in his body. How did he fall prey to the propaganda?

And it is propaganda. When the dripping with scorn word Liberal comes out of a Conservative's mouth it means a person that is completely deluded, out of touch with reality, and determined to destroy the country. You have to pay attention to this, because there are people making a great deal of money while shovelling this bile out to the public. There are people getting rich and benefitting immensely from working their hardest to divide the people in this country.

What does the word liberal mean? In the Oxford English Dictionary, liberal is an adjective meaning: 1) willing to respect and accept behaviour or opinions different from one’s own. 2) (of a society, law, etc.) favourable to individual rights and freedoms. 3) (in a political context) favouring individual liberty, free trade, and moderate reform. 5) (especially of an interpretation of a law) not strictly literal. 6) given, used, or giving in generous amounts. 7) (of education) concerned with broadening general knowledge and experience.

If you look it up on Etymology online at http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=liberal&searchmode=none, it shows where the word came from: from French circa 1375, "befitting free men, noble, generous," from the Latin word liberalis "noble, generous, pertaining to a free man". The root for liberal and liberty are basically the same, it means "free". Other earlier meanings are "belonging to the people", "people", and "nation, people". Other references speak about liberal arts where man's efforts are directed to intellectual enlargement that was deemed worthy of a free man (as opposed to being servile or mechanical). Other meanings are "free in bestowing", and "free from restraint in speech or action" or "free from prejudice, tolerant". These were not always seen as good things. At the time of the founding of our county, the accepted meaning was "tending in favor of freedom and democracy" and also "favorable to government action to effect social change".

So liberal is a word that has long since evoked a feeling of expanding one's mind, freeing yourself from the constraints of the past, and enjoying liberty in life.

It is also used to mean generous or ample. Who wouldn't want a generous helping of your favorite dessert?

So the next time someone expresses scorn for liberalism, they should be asked, "Are you against a generous helping of freedom?"

The importance of Tobacco

I've always suspected that the plants that humans have always focused on could become more important, that we intuitively have love affairs with certain plants for a deeper reason that has not been revealed yet.

I'm talking mostly about tobacco. When I was a kid in the 70s, they were bringing out all kinds of information about tobacco to get people to be aware and get away from smoking. This is the era that they stopped TV advertising and Surgeon General warnings started showing up on cigarette packs. We started to understand the addictive nature of nicotine, but we also understood that the burning weed was gumming up our lungs with tar. I remember hearing that there were some 300 chemicals in tobacco that we didn't understand. This aspect of the tobacco plant is rarely mentioned. You hear about the handful of chemicals in tobacco that were found to be harmless, but it's not clear to me how harmful these chemicals are if they aren't burned and inhaled. I always wondered if some of those other chemicals weren't things that enhanced health. It seemed likely to me, because you would think that smoking tobacco would kill you a lot faster than it does, unless there is something about the plant that is also helping the body.

I don't know that anybody else is studying this, but you hear about how one of the reasons they didn't outlaw tobacco outright was that there were so many farmers growing it. I thought that it might be a good compromise to force the tobacco companies to look at healthy chemicals in tobacco in order to change the use of the crop from an addictive killer into a beneficial crop.

People have had love affairs with a few other plants, some with no healthy or good use, others with some good and some bad uses. Coca (cocaine), poppies (heroin), marijuana, and coffee come to mind as examples of plants with an addictive use profile. Corn, potatoes, sugar, wheat, and rice are other plant that we've had a long association with.

I tried growing some tobacco for a while. The breeds were available for sale through Seeds of Change (www.seedsofchange.com), a cool seed catalog that touted the benefits of growing tobacco as an insect repellent for other plants in your garden. I bought some seeds and grew the plants next to some of the other vegetables I was trying to grow. They came up very healthy and I was fascinated at how easy they were to grow. One day, when I went down to check on them, I noticed that they looked horrible. They were being devoured by these enormous green worms. While this carnage was going on in my tobacco crop, with me thinking that the advertisements were wrong to say that it repelled insects, I finally noticed the adjacent rows of vegetables were completely bug free. So maybe it was not accurate to say that they repelled insects as much as they attracted them away from other plants.

This isn't the first time that something else was discovered while looking at tobacco. The first virus discovered by man was the tobacco mosaic virus. While concentrating on what was causing problems with tobacco crops, man discovered a whole new kingdom of life.

Recently, I heard a story about scientists using tobacco as a factory for cancer fighting agents. [See Science Friday's 7/28/08 show archives, if you are interested - http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200807253] They did it by infecting the tobacco plant with a virus that then produces the beneficial chemical. While this is another example of a useful symbiotic relationship (see my posting Symbiosis), it is also a good example of our love affair with the tobacco plant yielding a benefit for human health.

We often talk about going bioprospecting in the vanishing rain forests of the Amazon to find new plants with beneficial drugs, but I think we should be looking a little closer at the plants we already have a long relationship with.

Acceptible Risks and Excessive Adventure

I often notice attempts to make the world overly safe. This started when I was a kid and the parents would tell us not to get in the pool until a half an hour after eating. I knew it was a sham when I was little. It was caution taken to a ridiculous extreme. There is practically a whole industry built around the misconception that we must make everything safe.

I had a wonderful rant one Thanksgiving when I was 18 or 19 and it was snowing a little bit outside. We had all the relatives around, and thought it would be fun to go out and rent a movie to entertain everyone. My father got angry and asked us if we were crazy to risk driving in the snow just for a movie. I started a half serious, half comedic rant about taking risks. I remember saying that we would never have colonized the country or flown to the moon if we were afraid of risk. I remember using the line, "This country was built on wild risky behavior!"

I've also noticed that risks sometimes make us stronger. You could argue that you only get ahead by taking risks. But more than that, risk is often fun. The sense of danger is what makes the activity more enjoyable. Personal trials also build experience and character. The efforts to overcome obstacles sharpen our minds and bodies.

There are also non-human examples of trial, ordeals, and collisions that are dangerous, damaging, and destructive, but bring about benefits. Fire often shapes the prairie and the forest: burning away the old things brings new life. I was recently looking at an area on the prairie that had been burned down earlier in the year and teh sand hill plums not only survived the fire, but were thriving. I have also heard planetary scientist speculate that meteor impacts bring life to protoplanets. Sometimes this is from the water that they bring, and sometimes one species can only survive after an impact wipes out a competitor, as we rose after the dinosaurs were wiped out. While this brought death to some, it brought life to others.

I recently had dinner with a British guy that worked for a company with an excessive safety policy. I thought he was railing against the absurdity of the policy, talking about how company members were required to report coworkers over incidents of unsafe practices. He talked about how if you saw someone going down a set of stairs and not using the handrail, you were supposed to write up the incident and hand it in. When I agreed with this and told him that it was absurd and that some risks had to be taken from time to time, he disagreed and started defending the policy. I sited the example of a person going skydiving, and his response was that you alleviate all risk by training and using safe equipment. I countered by saying that man would never have explored or colonized the Pacific if they stayed safe and waited until they had thoroughly tested equipment. He was convinced that enormous efforts to pare down the last percentage point of risk was worth the effort.

I think he ignores the fact that a certain degree of risk has a strengthening effect. Recent studies have shown that continual exposure to certain strains of bacteria can bring disease resistance and may even fend off diabetes. Our society has tried its hardest to keep people away from any bacteria for too long. Antibacterial soaps, antiseptic wipes, and hair trigger disposal of food that is past its expiration date has kept us away from exposure to all bacteria (good and bad). The overuse of antibiotics in people and livestock has done little to protect us, it has simply toughened up the bacteria and made us more vulnerable. Now we have MRSA and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis because we trained these strains to resist everything we could throw at them. See what happens to the bugs when they are under assault? They get stronger. The same thing applies to people.

Granite Siding

We were told that this person wasn't going to be in the office one afternoon because he had to be at home for a person that was coming by to do some work on his house. This person is always getting work done on his house, and I was joking I was joking about how he was going to install granite siding. You hear about people putting granite counter tops in, a very expensive prospect, and the joke was meant to convey that this guy would be willing to spend very generously on his house. Then I realized that the first home men had, caves, had granite siding.

The funny thing about this thought is that it got me thinking. I know that stone is supposed to be a good building material because it slowly heats up during the day, keeping a house cool until the end of the day, where it supposedly re-radiates the heat, keeping the house warm at night. But years ago, when the home was a cave, you were underground. Now people that really want to save money on energy will build what they call an Earth-Contact home. This is a house like a basement with the earth piled up around it to keep it insulated. Basically, these supposedly high-tech homes are caves, just like the most primitive home.

Tribute to discontinued Podcasts

I've subscribed to a lot of podcasts over the last 3 years via iTunes. I feel like I got in on the early stages of the form. There was a time when people were making their own, and it had a very non-commercial individual peer-to-peer feel to it. While I've listened to quite a few podcasts that were not well thought-out, well researched, or well rehearsed, I've also lucked into many that were excellent, and some of those were discontinued. This posting is a review of some of the best of those podcasts.

One of the more notable accomplishments was a high school student named George Hageman. He did a podcast called Military History Podcast. There were 120 episodes in July 2008 when he announced that he graduated High School and would be going to Harvard, so he was discontinuing the podcast. George also posted all of his podcasts on a blog at http://www.militaryhistorypodcast.blogspot.com/. The one cool thing that I learned about George was that his grandfathers fought in WWII on opposite sides, one being Japanese. I wrote to him once and suggested that he do a podcast on General Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Civil War, and he wrote back, but did not do the podcast. I can appreciate it, I know he did scripts that were submitted to him, but even so, he put out about one a week for at least a couple of years through High School, which is quite a feat. You just know this guy is going to pop up as an author one day, with that much energy to burn.

Another favorite podcast was Brain Food by Kyle Butler. Kyle was a Canadian college student, studying engineering. He actually was a guest on the Naked Scientist Podcast, by the Journal Nature in the UK, answering a question about the amount of fuel soccer fans were wasting through extra drag by flying flags on their cars. Kyle had a great way of explaining things, and it would be great if he got his own television show some day, making science and engineering fun for the masses. He had a girlfriend that he popped the question to and they graduated and got married at some point, and the podcast just stopped.

One of the funniest podcasts I ever stumbled on was Logically Critical by some guy that never did give his name. He put out these diatribes for about a year and a half, and then begged off due to time constraints. His website is www.logicallycritical.net, which is still up as of the writing of this posting. He claimed that he would break issues down logically without extensive research. He had hilarious sound effects and lots of spot-on information that sounded off the cuff. Several of his episodes were about religion, which he claimed he wasn't attacking, but that it wasn't very logical. Some of his "Wacky Bible Stories" were hilarious. All he did was paraphrase sections of the Old Testament, and that was funny enough. He did great voices and sound effects. I got the impression that this guy didn't finish college and worked hard, possibly in a blue collar job, but was a lot smarter than he was "on paper". It sounds like he was capable of whatever he put his mind to, but didn't buy into bullshit organizational structures.

Another great podcast was the President's Weekly Radio Address. This was a spot-on parody of the actual President's weekly radio address done by the folks that produce The Onion newspaper and podcasts. The problem with this podcast was that they didn't even have to change Bush's words much, or make up anything to make him look like an idiot. I think they got discouraged and depressed because the podcast was too close to reality. It also wasn't changing anything. Making fun of Bush wasn't causing anyone to rally around the cry of "Our President is an Idiot!" So they shut the podcast down around the time that gas prices maxed out and during the maximum period of hopelessness in Iraq, just before the surge got underway. Whoever read the podcast had Bush's voice down pat.

There was a political podcast called CallBox 7 which was put on by Daniel Brewer out of Florida. He was an IT type guy, so he really had the editing down cold. He spoke openly about being gay and considered himself not a liberal, but a progressive. He was pointing out some very on the mark flaws with politics in this country and I was writing in to him from time to time (I actually got read on his podcast a couple of times, which was pretty fun). The problem was that Daniel did such a professional job that trying to keep up with a weekly podcast was killing his social life. So he took on a co-host, I think with the intention of splitting the load and not having to work as hard, but it ended up still being the same amount of work, but now with this other guy plugged in. Will Radik was from San Francisco, and they did it via a Skype connection, I think. I liked Will, but Daniel & Will had such different styles that it completely changed the character of the podcast. It wasn't better or worse, just less focused. Will was like the lighthearted comic relief to Daniel's laser beam rage at the machine. I left the podcast on iTunes and noticed that Daniel started podcasting again around the time of the conventions. The most recent format involved 3 guests that watched the first Presidential Debate together and then commented on it. It's always fun to listen to a Daniel Brewer podcast in whatever format it's in.

The last podcast I wanted to mention is Strong Bad Email. This is the only video podcast I'm mentioning here, and since I have always had iPod Shuffles (no video), I don't do too many video. Now this is basically a cartoon, but it's pretty creative and funny. My nephews and cousins like it, from ages 8 to 16, so it plays on two levels, funny for kids and funny for adults (similar to Toy Story movies or Bugs Bunny cartoons). This podcast stopped for a long time and recently started back up again, but it doesn't have the feel of something that will last, only because it looks like it would take a lot of effort and time and podcasters typically don't get paid for their efforts.

While many podcasts are produced by the BBC, Slate, NPR, Nature, Scientific American, or Science (big established organizations with large staffs), there is something to be said for individuals making their own podcasts. A definite democratization of broadcasting that gives you all kinds of viewpoints, unfiltered and un(self-)censored by any corporate masters. Long live the free voice of independent podcasters!

The Coming Singularity

There is a concept buzzing around called a Singularity. I've heard of it a couple of times recently, once from an old Science Magazine Podcast from 2/16/08 and more recently from an NPR Science Friday Podcast from 6/6/08.

You may have heard of the term Singularity when applied to Astrophysics. They call the first moment of the big bang a singularity because there is no way to know what comes before it.

In the sense I'm referring to here, it's also describing an explosive change that one cannot see across, but in this case, it's something that's going to happen to humanity in the future.

One of my favorite science fiction authors is Vernor Vinge. He started writing for Analog Magazine in 1966, so I'm sure I've read much of his short story works, since my father was an avid reader of Analog since I was very young. But the book that I really liked was Across Realtime, which was a compilation of short stories built into a novel. In the novel, a technology called a bobble is invented and used as a weapon of war. Big silvery bubbles are generated by this technology, which they later find out are not frozen matter, but bubbles of frozen time. Once they realize what they have, the technology is used to travel (one-way) to the future.

In the story, everyone that goes into their bubbles of stopped time that emerges about a hundred years later emerges to find out that the world is suddenly empty of people. Unsure of whether there was an invasion or some other kind of catastrophe, many of them got back in their bubbles of frozen time and skipped forward far into the future. No one ever could answer what happened to all the people, but they guessed that it happened suddenly. Did they wipe themselves out, experience the religious idea of rapture, or did the "graduate" and evolve into the next form of human, possibly a pure energy form? In Vinge's book, it was this unsolved mystery, but in real life, it's seen as a possible future.

Ray Kurzweil has a book called The Singularity Is Near where he explores this concept. He believes that technology, in particular machine technology, is growing on an exponential growth curve. This means that it accelerates and even the rate of acceleration is speeding up, to the point where it quickly outstrips our ability to comprehend it. The question is whether this is going to be a cause for mourning or celebration. If humans are going to graduate to some new form soon, what will happen to life as we know it? Are we going to forget the simple pleasures of enjoying a cool clear day, walking in the woods, eating a good meal, and laughing with friends? Are we talking about an existence like the Borg in the Star Trek series? I find the whole concept as difficult to grasp as religion.

The start of the fall

I've been listening to the Ancient Roman History podcast. This is a podcast with an accompanying blog, see http://thehistoryofrome.blogspot.com/2008/04/28-taking-stock-history-of-rome.html for the episode that I'm referring to.

This episode is called Taking Stock. The point that it refers to the point in history where Rome finally conquers all major rivals in the Mediterranean basis and begins their reign of uncontested dominance. At this point, economic and political forces set a course of action into motion that eventually transformed the democratic and stable Republic into the era of the Emperors.

There was an interesting progression where the wealth from conquering all the other nations became concentrated in the hands of a few. These few didn't care much for the state or the rules that governed society. Through a complex system of patronage, they purchased the loyalty of enough people to sway elections and get their own way in things. They brought back hundreds of thousands of slaves from the conquered lands and the poor Romans found themselves out of work, replaced by the free labor of slaves. Eventually, they had to find a patronage with a wealthy Roman or join the military in order to survive. Small farms disappeared as poor farmers sold their land and wealthy Romans gobbled up large territories. Eventually, this would lead to the downfall of the Republic and usher in the era or the Roman Emperors. Some would argue that this eventually led to the downfall of Rome itself, but that was 500 years later, so it's hard to point to a specific point in their history and say "this is when it all began".

I found it to be reminiscent of the course of events in U.S. history that we are seeing unfolding right now. Politicians and the wealthy cooperating to divide up their majority share of the wealth and power, and eroding the purity of the democratic idealism that the state was founded on.

I wrote the following comment in their blog:

"After listening to this episode, I thought about how the parallels to modern day America were so clear. I see that has been commented on here. After 9/11, when we perceived a strong external threat, we had a strong degree of unity. The speed with which this unity dissipated and the breadth of the divide that emerged has been stunning, to say the least. I considered it a product of political and economic/capitalistic pressures, and Rome's transition away from the Republic follows a similar course. You mention that individual rich Romans felt that they did not need the state any more, and it reminds me of current stories of astronomical CEO compensation and record profits by Exxon in an era of economic recession. I think the lesson to be learned here is when a small number of people get greedy for wealth and power, it starts a process. They start changing the rules to protect or enhance their ability to increase their already overwhelming advantage in wealth or power. At least when you study Roman history, you don't have to listen to people on the top of the heap whining about taxes and regulations when in reality, the world is their oyster."

We often hear the tired old saying that "those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it". In this case, I think people can be perfectly aware of history and still repeat it, thinking that this time it doesn't apply.

You've probably heard the stories about experiments done on rats involving drugs or the pleasure centers of their brains. The point of these stories is that when an animal is given unlimited access with no limits to the things that give it pleasure, they inevitably pleasure themselves to death. While this is demonstrated as physical pleasures, I believe there is a corollary in the area of wealth and power. Both of these states provide the opportunity to accelerate the acquisition of more wealth or power (or both). It's like some kind of tipping point, where once you get so rich or powerful, there are few limits to the amount of wealth or power you can accumulate. The question is, if wealth and power are somehow part of a finite supply, then the additions to wealth and power have to come at the expense of someone on the other end of the spectrum. This is how a system becomes top heavy and unstable. To exercise power, you have to have strong people below you. To enjoy wealth, you have to have a reasonably secure populace to provide a stable society for you. When wealth and power concentrate too much in the hands of fewer and fewer people, the system has to eventually collapse.

Volcanic Reaction

I have been working backwards through the old "Naked Scientist" podcast. This morning, on the way to work, I was listening to an episode (I think from November of 2005) that was talking about volcanoes.

They have a section called "Kitchen Science" where, usually with the help of elementary or middle school students, they do an experiment that you can do with materials found at home in the kitchen. This week's experiment was to inflate a balloon to about the size of your fist, bury it in a pile of flour with the knot sticking out just below the surface, and to reach in with a pair of scissors and snip the knot off of the balloon. I thought at first it would pop the balloon, but if a balloon isn't filled to the straining point, puncturing it causes it to leak out, not pop. You can try this at home to see what happens, but they caution not to actually do it in the kitchen if you don't like flour all over everything. They did it in the garage (which the Brits pronounce to rhyme with carriage).

Going off subject here - they have another experiment that I'm dying to try where you get a shallow saucer of milk and drip some food coloring carefully on the surface at various points around the saucer. Then you put a drop of liquid soap (the Brits call it "washing up liquid"). It's supposed to be really cool looking.

In the more serious part of the show, they interviewed a vulcanologist (who do NOT study Spock on Star Trek) explained had an excellent point about volcanoes and global warming. In one of Rush Limbaugh's books, he makes the point that volcanoes do much more damage to the environment than humans do. This is an attempt to dispel concerns about Global Warming, the logic of which has always escaped me. It seems to be saying that since we can't match the harm that volcanoes do to the environment that we should just have at it. That's kind of like pointing to the mass murderer and justifying killing a few people yourself because you'll never match his extent. It's like saying, "Why can't I shoot my neighbor? Hitler killed 6 million Jews?"

Well, it turns out that volcanoes only emit about 1% of the CO2 that humans do on a yearly basis. They tend to emit much more SO2, about 10% of what humans do. That's on a normal year, no mega-eruptions. For the large eruptions, the effect of the S02 dominates, and it turns out that S02 reflects heat back into space and actually has a global cooling effect. The scientist concluded by saying that without volcanic activity, human efforts that warm the globe would have been even more severe.

This goes to show that if you want to make a scientific argument, you should consult a scientist, not a right-wing talk show host with an Oxycontin habit that doesn't check his facts. I shouldn't say he doesn't check his facts, he doesn't use facts. He just makes up information, and when called on it, he responds that he's just for entertainment. If he's just for entertainment, then why do so many people repeat his rants as if they are based in reality?

So next time someone throws that silly argument at you around the dinner table or while sitting around the pub, you can tell them that Rush Limbaugh doesn't know the difference between a volcano and another orifice that erupts noxious gas.