Blog relocation
Starting today, this blog is moving to http://dilbert.com/blog/.
There you will be able to vote on comments, and the best ones will float to the top.
Scott
Starting today, this blog is moving to http://dilbert.com/blog/.
There you will be able to vote on comments, and the best ones will float to the top.
Scott
My jaw dropped when I heard that presidential candidate Clinton dismissed the unified opinion of every economist on the planet and supported the gas tax rebate. The rebate is John McCain’s proposal. I think that proves both of them are unqualified to be president. Obama isn’t much better when it comes to sorting out economic policy from pandering, although he did avoid that particular landmine.
So I decided to start my own political party. I call it the Economics Party. There’s no paperwork involved, and you don’t even have to stop being a Democrat or Republican or whatever to join. The Economics Party won’t have its own candidates. All we’ll do is agree to vote for the candidate with the best long term economic policy, according to the consensus of leading economists.
The Economics Party would ignore superstition in its decisions. Here are a few things I think would end up on the platform, assuming most leading economists agree:
- Withdraw from Iraq
- More aggressive energy policy (back off on ethanol)
- More sane tax policies
- Limited government
- Legalize doctor assisted suicide
- Keep abortion legal
- Decriminalize marijuana
- Strong education policy
We’d make some exceptions for humanitarian reasons. For example, if a natural disaster hits a poor part of the country, it might be cheaper to let everyone die, but you have to put life ahead of money at some point.
The platform might look Libertarian, but it has differences. For example, a Libertarian might be opposed to the government making people wear motorcycle helmets. The Economics Party would just look at the likely higher cost of insurance in a helmet-free world and decide on that basis. I don’t know which way it would come out.
The Economics Party would be committed to changing its policy recommendation whenever the facts warranted. We’re pro flip-flop when it makes sense. In other words, our brains function properly.
If thirty or forty million people join the Economics Party, all major candidates would have to start paying attention to the consensus of economists. At the very least, voters would become more aware of what the leading economists think makes sense. That seems like a good thing.
Are you in?
I ran into a friend the other day who is a home builder. He had been planning to build several homes that would be extra-green, both because he wants to help the environment, and because he figured buyers would want that. After much research he abandoned the extra-green approach because he was assured by people in the know that no one would pay extra for an extra-green home. Buyers look at the location, square footage, kitchens, and all the usual stuff. No one even asks about the energy efficiency or indoor air quality.
The next time you go to buy an existing home, ask the real estate agent about the energy costs over the prior year. The agent will look at you like you have a giant turd on your head. I know because I asked that question the last time I was looking at houses. The agent can rattle off the homeowner association fees, tell you the school district, and an impressive array of other details, but never the energy costs.
Suppose you want to build your own energy efficient home. I’m trying to do that right now. So I look on the Internet to get the best information I can get on green building techniques. My federal government has a website filled with what seems to be useful tips. But on closer inspection it is just a laundry list of options with no quantitative comparison of the costs or benefits.
http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/water_heating/index.cfm/mytopic=12980
All I learn about insulation from the site is that higher R-values are better, except when they are unnecessary. Other sites appear to be funded by manufacturers, so I don’t trust them.
I met with an engineer whose job is to calculate whether your new California house will meet the minimum energy efficiency standards required by the state. I asked about our choice of insulation. I wondered how much I should spend on cranking up the R-values. He told me the walls weren’t nearly as important as the windows, because windows are the weakest link. Okay, fine, so how do I get the best windows?
That’s not so easy. It looks as if the big name window manufacturers carry only windows of average to good energy efficiency while the super efficient windows are made by someone named Karl in his woodshed. And my builder doesn’t know Karl.
Your home isn’t green because you can’t get there from here. I blame the government. It shouldn’t be so hard to make energy efficiency information available in a useful form so buyers and builders can make informed choices.
[A reader provided this link, that looks pretty cool if it works: http://www.enertia.com/]
Yesterday I was updating my retirement plan through age 110 and wondered if it was long enough. It seems to me that medical science is progressing so quickly I have a good shot at reaching 140.
This got me thinking. What will happen when medical science can keep almost anyone alive indefinitely, albeit looking like a peach that has been left in the sun for a month? Isn’t it inevitable that assisted suicide will be legal?
There’s no way the global economic system can keep several billion people alive over the age of 100. And if we assume most of those people can vote, and most of them will want at least the option of checking out early, then legalized assisted suicide is a near certainty.
The people over a hundred will want it, and the young people who wish the old people were dead so it would free up resources will want it too. There’s your majority right there.
In the short term, assisted suicide only needs to be legal in one country that has a good airport. Just fly in, let the doctor kill you, and go home in an urn.
Is it inevitable?
Regarding my previous post, how much water would a typical home have to pump into its own virtual dam in order to provide energy during a typical night while the water flows back out and through a generator?
Are we talking swimming pool size?
How big a container would you need to store the compressed air for the same purpose? Refrigerator size? Garage size?
I have the smartest readers in the world. Someone can probably answer that question on the back of an envelope.
In yesterday’s post I mentioned two Israeli companies that allegedly made big breakthroughs with solar power. Many of you noted that solar power is limited if you can’t store the energy in a cost-effective way for night use.
I did some Googling to see what’s new in battery storage, and this potential breakthrough popped up. Obviously it must be viewed skeptically until proven viable.
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html
But I got to thinking that there must be a more natural way to store energy, using gravity. It might not surprise you to learn that I found exactly this sort of idea, appropriately, in the halfbakery.com web site:
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/energy_20storage_20gravity
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Windmill_20Compressor_20Home_20Energy_20System#1121567081
I know, I know, you will point out that even if such systems of energy storage existed, they would be inefficient. It takes more energy to move a rock up a hill than you can capture from the return.
But how inefficient can your storage device be and still be viable? There is some theoretical amount of cheap energy production that compensates for almost any degree of inefficient storage. So if, for example, solar panels became 1,000 times more efficient and cost you next to nothing, it might not matter if your storage device could only capture half of what you generated. You’d still have plenty to get you through the night and charge your electric car too. I think it’s entirely plausible that we’ll have home battery systems, whether gravity based or not, that make oil obsolete except for specialty situations such as jets and maybe big trucks.
Some of you noted that oil has so much energy for its weight that solar power can never be expected to replace it for cars. But that too is more of a function of battery storage. Perhaps the nanowire battery or something like it will solve that. I think it will happen. And I think Israeli companies will be in the forefront, for national defense reasons, while the United States argues about flag lapel pins.
Yesterday I had one of those oh-my-God moments, the kind where I thought I could see the future. It started by reading some articles about the lack of a serious energy policy in the United States. The problem is that our politicians believe, probably correctly, that they can’t get elected if they propose an energy policy that could work.
Then I stumbled across an article about two Israeli companies that have allegedly made huge breakthroughs in solar power. As with all of these breakthrough stories, you have to assume they are more hype than substance, but take a look:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/04/solar-power-breakthroughs-sunrgi-7.html
The oh-my-God moment came when I realized that Israel can destroy all of its local enemies by inventing solar technology that makes oil uneconomical. Such an invention would do more harm than any military attack. And it’s all legal and moral. The politicians and business people in Israel have all the right incentives times a thousand. Their very survival is at risk. Israel is one patent away from crushing every oil producing country in the world.
So that’s my prediction. Whether these latest announcements are real or hype, I think Israel will eventually create the technology to make oil irrelevant to energy production.
Let’s stipulate for this conversation that everything the experts say about evolution is true. Creatures that are the most successful at reproducing pass their traits to the next generation, and so on.
But I have another hypothesis that I think is testable. What if there is another influence that also contributes?
I wonder if a creature’s aspirations can somehow have an impact on what her genes pass to the next generation. We know that thoughts are associated with feelings, and feelings are associated with body chemistry. It’s not impossible that wanting something in your lifetime can make it more likely the child achieves it.
Recently I read that certain environmental conditions can increase the odds that women will give birth to boys. So we know that external conditions can influence body chemistry which in turn can influence the genetic makeup of the kid.
So I wonder about the giraffe with its long neck, to pick an easy example. The classic explanation is that giraffes with longer necks could reach leaves higher in trees, and had a survival advantage when food was scarce. That seems reasonable enough. But I wonder if the giraffes that strained and wished they had longer necks experienced some sort of stress, and giraffe-style wishfulness, that released any chemicals that could influence the odds of producing a long-necked child. In other words, do creatures guide their own evolutionary path through their desires?
It seems hugely unlikely that such a complicated and specific system could exist in a creature. But everything about creatures with brains is ridiculously complicated and specific and unlikely. It seems to me entirely plausible that creatures with brains evolved a heretofore undiscovered ability to translate their aspirations in this life to physical traits in their children.
You could test this in female rats. One group is the control, and the other is kept frustratingly a half inch from some delicious cheese. Both rats are fed enough to guarantee equal survival, so the normal mechanism for evolution is turned off. Would the rat who aspired to have a longer snout to reach the cheese produce, on average, longer snouted offspring?
Someone probably tested that already in fruit flies or something.
[Update: Lamark didn't deal with a person's aspirations. He was all about the traits you acquire during life, whether you wanted them or not. -- Scott]
Last night I saw some pundits on the news discussing the results of a poll. When Americans were asked if they would vote for an African-American for president, more than 9 out of 10 people said yes. But when asked if they knew anyone who would not vote for an African-American, about half said they know such a person.
One inference you might make from these results, and the one drawn by the pundits on the show, is that people are secretly racists. They tell pollsters they are not bigots, but once inside the voting booth they are.
The other inference is something I call math. If there are ten friends, and only one is a racist, then it is true that 90 percent are not racists while everyone knows someone who is. It’s that one guy.
Here’s the way I think the election is going to go down. Obama will get nominated, and polls will start to show he will get 95% of the African-American vote. This will frighten all the racists who hadn’t planned to vote, and get them to the polling places, thus handing the election to John McCain, even if he is only being kept alive by machines at that point.
Here’s a little unscientific survey question of my own:
1. Do you personally know anyone who thinks Obama is a Muslim?
2. Do you personally know anyone who suspects Obama might secretly hate America and is running for President to destroy it from within?
I know registered voters in both of those categories. That's why your next president will be named McCain. That's just a prediction, not a preference.
Yesterday I went to a Giants baseball game. It was Little League Day, so there were about ten thousand young boys running wild in the stands. It was also free bat day, courtesy Bank of America.
I will pause while you digest this concept.
Do you know what happens when you hand an 8-year old boy a new bat, sit him behind the exposed heads of several adults, and ask him to sit patiently for four hours while nothing much happens on the big field in front of him? Do you think he fiddles with that bat?
Apparently Bank of America figured there was some theoretical amount of head injuries that would make the public forget that they lent a trillion of your dollars to hobos.
My memory of the afternoon goes something like this: “TREVOR, PUT DOWN THAT BAT! YOU ALREADY HIT THAT LADY ONCE! I SAID, PUT IT DOWN! I MEAN IT! I WILL NOT TELL YOU FOUR HUNDRED MORE TIMES!” This was followed by the sound of wood making solid contact with skull, cursing, repeat.
My wife took a solid blow to the shoulder. Later, one of the tykes kicked some guy’s beer out of the back seat holder, so we sat in a puddle of beer, while the sun cooked us. I was one pinch of salt from being a recipe.
I tried to use the restroom at the stadium. This is no place for the shy. Unlike most public men’s rooms, where there might be a small privacy shield between urinals, this place was designed to handle high volume, shoulder-to-shoulder peeing. I saw an opening where I could poke my penis between a bearded guy and a guy with a fanny pack, just over the left ear of a Little Leaguer, but before I could make my move, someone filled the slot. I decided I could wait another three or four hours.
Conditions were difficult, but at least the game was exciting well into the first half of the first inning when the Reds scored six runs and put it out of reach. Technically, there was still hope, since many of the Giants have batting averages that round to one hundred, and some are able to catch a fly ball nearly half the time. But yesterday was not their day. There were many boos from the stands. I felt bad for the players until I realized they couldn’t hear the boos over the screams of the bat victims.
I wish someone would invent a device that allowed you to watch sporting events from your home. I think that would be popular.
Recently we redesigned the Dilbert.com web site and added a ton of features, such as animation, deeper archives, mash ups, and more. The reaction from readers has been fascinating.
Let me get this out of the way: I realize the Beta version of the web site has lots of issues. It’s overloaded with Flash, slower than it needs to be, and the navigation is confusing. We’re fixing most of that over the next few weeks. I apologize for the inconvenience.
The fascinating thing about the responses is that it revealed three distinct types of Dilbert readers:
The first group is the ultra-techies who have an almost romantic relationship with technology. For them, the new site felt like getting dumped by a lover. Their high-end technology (generally Linux) and security settings made much of the site inconvenient. Moreover, the use of Flash offended them on some deep emotional level.
The second group objected to the new level of color and complexity, and the associated slowness. They like their Dilbert comics simple, fast, and in two colors. Anything more is like putting pants on a cat.
The third group uses technology as nothing more than a tool, and subscribes to the philosophy that more free stuff is better than less free stuff. That group has embraced the new features on the site and spiked the traffic stats.
For you first two groups, if you promise to keep it to yourselves, we created a stripped-down Dilbert page with just the comic, some text navigation, and the archive: www.dilbert.com/fast. This alternate site is a minor secret, mentioned only here and in the text footnote to the regular site as “Linux/Unix.”
The main site will be getting a Flash diet that will make it speedier soon, so check back in a few weeks. That’s where all the fun will be.
Enjoy.
In Congo there is a wave of penis thefts.
http://au.news.yahoo.com/080422/15/16ktt.html
Well, add that to the list of reasons for not visiting Congo.
My first reaction to the story was to dismiss it as a bunch of superstitious simpletons caught in a wave of mass hysteria. Then I realized I’ve worked with a few penis shrinking sorcerers myself. I don’t think they do it intentionally. But anyone who can turn a banana into an acorn in five seconds is obviously a witch.
I assume the victims in Congo don’t have access to the Internet. If they did, they’d get hundreds of offers a day for pills that can cure their problem so thoroughly that photographers would try to affix cameras to their heads. Maybe the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation can get those folks together.
This would be a bad time to be a Congo police officer. The first five or six times you have to evaluate the scene of the crime it might seem amusing. After that, you’re just gay. And not impressed.
And what the hell happens when the police dust for prints? The phrase the police inspectors must hear more than any other is “Never mind.”
Did you hear about the priest who tried to set a record for balloon powered flight? This might come as a huge surprise to you: He’s missing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7360416.stm
When I first heard about the incident I figured it was some sort of fund raising stunt to feed the poor. That would have been noble albeit dangerous. But apparently there was no fund raising involved. The priest just wanted to hold the record for balloon riding.
This got me wondering what sort or world record attempt by a priest would piss off God the most. From The Almighty’s perspective, any diversion from the core mission of saving souls is probably time poorly spent. But some types of record attempts have to be worse than others. For example, you don’t want to see your priest winning any kind of pie eating contest. And you don’t want a man of the cloth to hold any titles involving nudity, tequila, or self-gratification, just to name a few. The best a priest could hope for in those cases is that God is busy and doesn’t notice.
But a balloon ride, way up there next to heaven? That’s total smite bait.
Recently I got tricked into seeing a movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture. It left me feeling confused, anxious, and pissed off. By the closing credits I hated everyone involved with it. I actually paid good money for that experience.
As a rule, the quality of a movie is inversely correlated with how long it takes to explain the entire plot. That’s why I stay away from movies with titles like Volcano, Inferno, Titanic, and Snakes on a Plane. I feel I have a sense of where those plots are heading.
The award-winning film I just watched could be described as “A bad guy chases another bad guy and kills him.” There were other elements of the movie, but I’m pretty sure they were irrelevant. Admittedly, there was great artistry in this movie, on many levels. But I don’t think it is fair that no one warned me how it would make me feel. That’s why I think movie reviews should have more elements.
For example, I want to know if a movie has a happy ending, even at the risk of ruining the surprise. Is the arc of happiness something that starts high, dips for dramatic impact then ends on a high note? Or does it start high and just keep dropping until the movie ends and you want to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills? So I recommend an arc description, such as this example:
Arc: High – Low – High
I also want to know the star power. Recently I watched I Am Legend with Will Smith. I enjoyed it only because Will Smith has star power. Even some unknowns have star power. So show me the star power rating, maybe like this:
Star Power: 9
Next, I need to know the mumbling quotient. How many times do you have to turn to the person next to you and ask “What did he say?”
Mumbling Quotient: 7
And how long is this movie? Can my bladder make it all the way or is this a two-pisser?
Bladder: 8
Artistry is important too. How’s the writing, acting, directing, and so forth?
Artistry: 8
I don’t mind violence per se. I can watch hundreds of zombies or henchman get mowed down and still enjoy my popcorn. What I object to is any scene where someone enjoys torturing someone else.
Sadism: 8
A good story is important. Mostly the story needs to be original and make sense. I don’t care about much else.
Originality: 6
I have a hard time with any movie with a plot so complicated I can’t understand it. I have a right to know ahead of time whether I will be able to decipher the story I am paying to see.
Incomprensibility: 4
You also need rankings for humor, scariness, and suspense.
Humor: 7
Scariness: 8
Suspense: 3
That’s all I want to know. Don’t tell me a movie is some particular actor’s best work yet, or the director is at the peak of his powers. That gives me nothing.
One of the great banking laws in this country is the mandatory APR for loans. That’s a calculation that allows consumers to easily compare loans that have different fees, terms, and rates, making it all apples to apples.
We need the same type of law for home buying. The formula should show the total cost of the home including energy use, water, and maintenance, under some standard set of assumptions.
That sort of number would be a big help to consumers. But more important, it would give home builders an incentive to exceed minimum energy efficiency standards, and make maintenance cheap. At the moment, energy efficiency is somewhat invisible to the buyer. Buyers aren’t willing to pay more for a vague concept. But they might pay more for a home that costs them less in the long run, if they trusted the calculation.
That's my world-saving idea for today. If that doesn't save the world, I will come up with something else tomorrow.
This is a hypothetical question to see if our notions of patriotism have changed since I was a kid.
Suppose the draft is reinstituted because there aren’t enough volunteers to fight a hypothetical unpopular war that doesn’t seem to directly threaten the homeland.
Now suppose an individual gets drafted, and his profile is such that the odds of being in combat on the ground are very high. And imagine that this kid is a sensitive type of person who knows that an experience like that will likely give him mental problems for the rest of his life even if he is not wounded.
Some people think, correctly, that they are mentally strong and could come through a war okay if they don’t get physically injured. But others know with a high degree of certainty that experiencing the horrors of war would mentally cripple them for life.
So here’s the question. If a person is relatively certain that going to war will end his ability to enjoy the rest of his life, one way or another, and the war does not present a plausible threat to the homeland, is such a person unpatriotic for dodging the draft to save himself?
The obvious answer is yes, he is unpatriotic. If your country calls on you, you need to go. End of story.
On the other hand, what is the point of a being patriotic to a country that intends to kill you for its own marginal benefit? Such a country would be your natural enemy, not your friend, so any question of patriotism would be nonsense in this particular situation.
Is the draft dodger in this hypothetical situation unpatriotic or simply sensible?
Let’s say you have a typical life and try to live it in the healthiest way. You might allocate your 24-hour weekday this way:
Sleep: 8 hours
Exercise: 1 hour
Work: 8 hours
Eating: 2 hours (leisurely)
Hygiene: 1 hour
Travel: 1 (Commute, errands)
That leaves you three hours for family time, sex, shopping, food preparation, chores, household repair, volunteering in the school, and so on. If you have a dentist appointment, or your talkative relative calls, or American Idol has a two-hour special, you’re tapped out.
It’s a challenge to live a happy life if you aren’t giving enough attention to all of those categories, yet doing so is nearly impossible.
One time management strategy is to be independently wealthy, freeing up eight hours a day. But that option isn’t available to many. And apparently it isn’t fulfilling because most rich people continue to work full schedules.
Another strategy is to ignore the fact that you are slowly killing yourself by not sleeping and exercising enough. That frees up several hours a day. The only downside is that you get fat and die.
A third path is to work less than you could, live economically, enjoy each day as it comes, and try not to think about living on cat food when you retire.
Which strategy have you picked?
I notice that our presidential elections always seem to boil down to cartoon characterizations of the main candidates. The Republican is generally characterized by the media as the person of principle and character, albeit a bit dim-witted. (Reagan, George Bush junior, McCain)
The Democrat is generally characterized as whip-smart but with a suspect character. (Clinton, Kerry, Clinton again, Obama)
This got me wondering which sort of candidate is a more dangerous leader. Would you prefer a brilliant person with a suspicious character or a dumb person with high character?
If I HAD to choose from among those two bad options, I'd go with the smart person with suspicious character. If that President is lining his pockets and playing nude Twister in the oval office, it doesn't have that much impact on me. But if he does something stupid with the defense or economy, that hurts me.
What's your choice? (Please stick to the hypothetical and don't argue about whether individual candidates fit the stereotype because that would be tedious.)
Have you heard of the famous Monte Hall problem in statistics? It’s freaky. And I believe it offers the best evidence that our reality is subjective.
The set up is this. Game show host Monte Hall offers you three doors. One has a car behind it, which will be your prize if you guess that door. The other two doors have goats. In other words, you have a 1/3 chance of getting the car.
You pick a door, but before it is opened to reveal what is behind it, Monte opens one of the doors you did NOT choose, which he knows has a goat behind it. And he asks if you want to stick with your first choice or move to the other closed door. One of those two doors has a car behind it. Monte knows which one but you don’t.
The trick here is that most people assume it makes no difference if they stick with their original choice or move to the other door. They believe the odds are 50% either way, since there are only two choices and you don’t know anything about either choice. But mathematicians say that is wrong. You substantially increase your odds by switching doors.
That is interesting enough on its own. (I’ll give a link later that explains the math of it.) But here is the freaky part. You only improve your odds by switching doors if Monte Hall knows what is behind each door. If he simply got lucky and opened a door with a goat behind it, your odds are unchanged. In other words, your odds are changed by Monte’s knowledge, and your knowledge that Monte has that knowledge.
If reality were objective, statistics wouldn’t be influenced by knowledge. That means your world is either partly created by your mind, or you are a hologram created by some other mind, and there are a few bugs in the software.
Here’s a link to more than you want to know about the Monte Hall problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
You see the same sort of thing happen in the classic double-slit experiment in physics. The result of the experiment changes if the observer has additional information about what slit a photon passes through. Again, knowledge changes the real world. That can’t happen in the world you imagine you are living in. It has to be a bug in the hologram program. At the very least it shows that your reality is subjective.
Here’s more on the double-slit experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
DMD
Science continues to discover what I have long considered obvious:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_decision
Over the weekend I learned that all of my current and future problems have been solved. For example, I was worried about the cost of energy, but scientists recently figured out how to make gasoline out of plants. Problem solved. http://www.chemistrytimes.com/research/Money_Doesnt_Grow_on_Trees_But_Gasoline_Might.asp With the energy problem solved, America will soon be able to leave the Middle East alone. Cheap domestic energy will heal our aching economy and end any reason for International terrorism. As a nifty side effect, this plant-to-gas technology has no carbon footprint. So say goodbye to global warming. Still, I was worried I might someday die of natural causes. Apparently there was no need to worry, as I learned on 60 Minutes. A guy with some pie tins and hot dogs discovered a cure for every type of cancer. It will take a few years to perfect it, but I think I can hold on until then. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/10/60minutes/main4006951.shtml?source=RSSattr=Health_4006951 Cancer isn’t the only health problem I was worried about. I might need a new heart someday. As luck would have it, I will soon be able to grow a replacement in the lab. http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/01/14/rat.heart.ap/index.html You’re probably thinking you don’t want your body to live a long time if your mind isn’t going to be sharp. No problem. Scientists have an Alzeimers vaccine in the works. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=463811&in_page_id=1770&ct=5 The other potential problem of living a long time is that the planet will get filled up with too many a-holes. Luckily we are only twenty years away from the development of the first Mars colony. I am already packing my bags. http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2005/07/68311 With all of this good news, I am left with only one nagging concern. What if all the good news is either exaggerated or overly optimistic? Nah.
What does it mean to exist? When we talk about a person existing, we are referring to that person being a material object in the universe.
Concepts are also said to exist. For example, patriotism exists, but you can’t hold it in your hand. For this discussion let’s agree that we are only talking about existence in the material sense.
To be material, that generally means an object has mass. But what is mass? According to Einstein, mass has an equivalence with energy. If we understand energy, we might better understand what mass is. But what is energy?
Energy is defined as a “property of objects.” In other words, it is a concept, such as patriotism, velocity, or honesty. You can’t grab a handful of a concept and put it in your pocket.
So there you have it: To exist, you must have mass. Mass is equivalent to energy. Energy is nothing but a concept. Therefore, you are nothing but a concept, probably in a computer program designed by someone else.
Atheists say God doesn’t exist. I say atheists don’t exist.
When was the last time a relatively poor country successfully attacked and conquered a richer country? You history buffs might come up with some examples, but I think they would be strange exceptions.
I think someone smart could develop a theory that a strong economy is as good a national defense as having excellent weapons. Obviously you need a minimum baseline military deterrent. But anything beyond that might be a waste. Your international trading partners would band together to help you out if you are attacked, to protect their own economic interests.
I don’t know how many nukes the United States has pointed toward China, but one would be too many. China isn’t going to attack its biggest customer. And in the unlikely event that some other country attacks China, we’d offer military assistance in a heartbeat. There’s too much money at stake on both sides.
I wonder if you could make all war decisions on a purely economic basis and come out with the answer that protects the most lives as a side effect. For example, the United States had an economic interest in the smaller war in Afghanistan, to prevent more attacks on the homeland. But the war in Iraq was characterized from the start as “you break it, you bought it.” That’s bad economics.
This is another reason I can’t be president. Whenever a military question came up, my first question would be whether it is a positive return on investment. That would be the opposite of good leadership, but it might keep the country safer and richer.
It seems to me the best way to pick a CEO would be by soliciting bids from applicants. That way you get the cheapest one that is fully qualified. And you should repeat the process every two years whether the CEO is doing a good job or not.
You might find someone equally good who works cheaper. That's capitalism. I find it hard to believe that a major company can't get a perfectly functional CEO for a million dollars a year, or that the one who is willing to work for that amount is worse than the one who needs 40 million to do the same job.
Hiring the lowest bidder CEO can't happen of course, because the boards of directors are comprised of CEOs of other companies, and supporting a bidding process would queer their own deals.
I think it would be interesting if someday a union went on strike and demanded a CEO bidding process as one small part of their agreement. They wouldn't get it, but I'll bet the CEO would be willing to settle the strike quicker to get that issue out of the public's attention.
[Update: The prior version of this post was put up during some computer problems, now resolved. -- Scott]
Ever wonder what the universe is made of?
Your first answer probably goes to things such as atoms and photons and maybe even the undiscovered Higgs boson particle. But what the hell are THOSE things made of? Everything is made of something else, right?
So where does the trail end? (If this question seems familiar, it’s because I wrote about it in my book God’s Debris.)
I think if you could answer that question, even at a high conceptual level, you would have the answer to whether God exists, or whether we are a hologram programmed by someone else, or if all of this is just lucky random combinations.
If you keep drilling down to find out what the smallest things are made of, would you eventually find just one thing that everything is made of, guided by some sort of universal rules of physics? That’s my guess, but only a guess. It feels right.
In a longer post I could explain that such rules of physics would qualify as God. Those rules plus the basic particles eventually created the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the Koran and the rest of the universe as we know it, while working in undeniably mysterious ways. If that isn’t the definition of God, what is?
I know some of you will say, “People wrote the Bible.” But that view would be based on the superstition of free will. The “stuff” of the universe and the rules of physics wrote all of our books. People were just an interim step we happened to label.
I can’t imagine that the universe is made of things that are made of other things and so on to infinity. That seems absurd. If it turned out to be true, I would favor the theory that we are a hologram and our creators programmed the truth of our nature to be forever beyond our grasp. I don’t get to that conclusion by logic. I feel this way because if I wrote the program myself, it’s the sort of thing I would do. The hypothetical programmers are presumably like us in some ways, so they might think the way we do. Therefore, if it looks like someone is yanking your chain, maybe someone is. Maybe someone like you, only real.
I’m watching the construction of the Large Hadron Collider with interest. If it works, we’d possibly unlock the secrets of the universe. If we really are a hologram, look for the collider to get stopped by legal action or an earthquake before the truth of our nature is revealed. Either that or the particles they discover will spell “hello.”
I want to know three things about a presidential candidate:
1. Who is going to advise you (including your vice president)?
2. What is your proposed budget?
3. Who would you nominate to the Supreme Court?
The current model of president picking is a lot like buying insurance. An insurance company will only give you details about what is covered in the policy AFTER you buy it. WTF?
Presidential campaigns are like that. Why do I have to wait until AFTER a candidate is nominated to find out what sort of goober he or she would pick as a running mate? Why do I have to wait until AFTER the president is elected to find out that the only way to pay for all of the campaign promises is to eliminate education? Why do I have to wait to find out who is in the cabinet, or who would be nominated to the Supreme Court?
I realize all of these choices need to be carefully vetted. I can live with some imperfection in the system if, for example, a proposed cabinet member turns down the job, or has a skeleton in the closet. But knowing the proposed choices would tell me a lot more than I know now.
As I said in an earlier post, any candidate who supports corn ethanol is unqualified to lead the country. By that standard, we don’t have any qualified candidates for president. But the bar should be higher than that. If we don’t know who will advise them, how they plan to pay the bills, and who they would nominate for the Supreme Court, they haven’t given us the minimum information needed to support them.
Several years ago I bought one of those portable blood pressure monitors. Hypertension runs in the family, so it seemed wise to keep an eye on it. Sure enough, despite my unusually healthy lifestyle, the monitor said I was on the borderline of high blood pressure. Not quite enough to get pills, but enough to keep an eye on it. Damned genetics!
Since then I’ve been feeling like a time bomb. Hypertension is called the “silent killer” and it seemed as if every time I got on the tennis court it could be my last. Whenever I sprinted after a drop shot I would tell myself to enjoy it because I’d be taking a dirt nap by the end of the week. I was dead man walking.
Recently I checked my blood pressure again and was horrified to see that I had shot past the borderline of hypertension and was well within the “prepare your will” category. The end was near. Suddenly food tasted better and I was filled with extra love for others. I put together my bucket list and set up an appointment with my doctor to see how long I had to live.
Yesterday my doctor checked me out and told me that my blood pressure is completely normal and always has been. Those little blood pressure monitors are not accurate. Apparently a vegetarian diet and regular exercise actually works. My cholesterol barely registered.
The news of my perfect health was strangely disappointing. I spent half an hour arguing with my doctor that there must be something pill-worthy about me. But I left empty-handed.
I shared the good news with my parents by e-mail. Mom told me she had once rushed Dad to the hospital on a holiday because their portable blood pressure monitor indicated his blood pressure was off the chart. His turned out to be normal too.
Apparently more than hypertension runs in my family.
My readers know I love a good story about a man getting frisky with an inanimate object. The recent report about a man in Ohio is my favorite so far. I won’t ruin it by giving details. Check out the link, but most important, play the video of the thick-necked policeman describing what happened. It’s a visual you will never get out of your head. Priceless.
http://www.kcci.com/news/15762329/detail.html?rss=des&psp=irresistible
I suppose the reason I like these types of stories is because I like what I call philosophical brevity. This story says more about humanity, and men in particular, than all the books in the Library of Congress.
It even one-ups one of the best and briefest jokes ever conceived:
Q: Why does a dog lick his b*lls.
A: Because he can.
If an alien landed on Earth and said he had two minutes to learn everything about human beings, you could show him the video of the Ohio man, tell the joke about the dog, and still have sixty seconds left to describe women.
People follow their strongest impulses. It’s pure luck of the genetic and environmental draw if your strongest impulses are socially acceptable. The Ohio man’s strongest impulse on several documented occasions involved the hole in the top of his picnic table. I’d call that bad luck. If his table had been stored on the porch BEHIND the house, he could have had the world’s cheapest hobby and everyone would have been happy. And that includes his wife who was tired of dressing up as a picnic table every Saturday night.
[Update: He would have approached the picnic table from the other direction but its stool was in the way.]
A Russian cult emerged from the cave they were hiding in while waiting for the end of the world.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/04/01/doomsday-cult.html?ref=rss
Allow me to give you some advice: If you ever decide to join a cult, the first thing you should ask about is the quality of their doomsday cave. A poorly constructed cave could kill you, and that would take most of the fun out of doomsday.
You should also look for a cult leader who has some specificity about the exact doomsday date. Otherwise you’re just sitting in a cave for an extra month for no good reason. I’d want the comet to strike earth a minute after I wiped my feet on the cave’s welcome mat. That way the people who got all of my worldly possessions wouldn’t have time to enjoy them. I wouldn’t feel so sad for someone who, just prior to being annihilated, was saying something like “HA HA HA!!! THAT IDIOT SCOTT GAVE ME HIS Wii!!!” That guy has it coming.
I think it will be hard for the cult members to explain the gaps on their resumes when they try to reenter the job market. “Well, I spent much of 2008 in a cave waiting for doomsday. It turns out that my infallible leader was more of a drooling nutbag than a prophet. Anyway, my point is that you should hire me because I have excellent judgment.”
The big problem with picking a doomsday date is that it so obvious when you are wrong. For most other decisions, you can generally make a case for why your wrongness was really right. For example, you still hear people say Saddam had WMD but he did a good job of hiding them. There’s no way to disprove that sort of assertion. But when the world doesn’t explode on Tuesday, it’s hard to make a case that it did. You have to go with something like “The comet was heading this way, but we prayed it off course. You’re welcome. Give me back my stuff.”
Reportedly, there are a number of other doomsday cults in Russia. I wonder if they have some sort of convention. I can imagine rows of vendor booths for white robes, hair clippers, and canned food. I suppose there would also be a cave realtor or two.
I wonder if the other doomsday cults were sitting in their own caves, listening to the news on their radios and thinking “Those idiots! They totally got the wrong date!” I imagine the various doomsday cults are highly competitive, always trying to recruit the nuts away from the other cults. “Our cave has a flat screen TV, and every Friday is casual.”
Cults are funny.
According to Time, ethanol is very bad economics and disastrous for the environment.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html?
The major candidates for President of the United States all support ethanol. If Time has correctly reported the consensus of expert opinions on ethanol, it seems to me that any candidate who supports it would be proved incompetent for leadership.
Is Time’s cover story wrong, or will the next leader of the United States be certifiably incompetent on day one, no matter what time the phone rings?
My favorite story recently is about the lawsuit to stop the $8 billion Large Hadron Collider out of fear that it might shrink the universe to the size of a gnat turd. And I don’t mean the plump and juicy kind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/science/29collider.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
One of the reasons I like my job is that the worst mistake I can make is to offend someone, and I enjoy that too. I would never want to be a NASA engineer, for example, knowing that one wrong calculation lands the Space Shuttle on the Sun. And I really, really, really, wouldn’t want to be one of the engineers working on the Large Hadron Collider, no matter how sure I was that it was safe. There’s always that little chance of annihilating the universe, and it’s exactly the sort of mistake I would make.
On the plus side, no one would say, “I told you so.” I guess that would take some of the sting out of it.
I don’t know how you ever get comfortable with any level of risk of destroying the universe. If you were to do an expected value calculation, multiplying the tiny risk times the potential cost, it would still come out infinitely expensive.
And who exactly ran the numbers to decide it wasn’t that risky? After all, the whole point of the Large Hadron Collider is to create conditions that are not predictable. If someone already predicted what would happen using nothing but his laptop and Excel, and determined it was safe, I don’t think we’re getting our $8 billion worth.
I can’t see the management of this project spending $8 billion, realizing it was a huge boner, and then holding a press conference suggesting it be turned into a parking garage. I’ll bet a lot of people in that position would take at least a 5% risk of incinerating the galaxy versus incinerating their own careers. I know I would.
If the lawsuit succeeds, imagine trying to get another job with that project failure on your resume.
Interviewer: “So, you spent $8 billion dollars trying to build a machine that would either discover something cool or destroy the universe. Is it fair to say you are not a people person?”
Today I am going on a two-night trip with the family. The destination promises to be lots of fun. But it takes a lot of research and planning to figure it all out. Then there is the packing and the traveling to and fro, including airports and rental cars and traffic and things that aren’t much fun.
I figure we will sacrifice about three normal days to make two of our other days extra good. Is that worth it?
A month from now I know I will remember the good times and not the sitting at the airport. So the memories will be good. I have a theory that most vacations are about memory upgrades. You become a different person after each trip, literally, as your brain takes on new shapes and chemistry from each experience. I think the selective memory phenomenon is what makes three bad days of planning and travel a worthy trade for two good days of actual vacation.
Clearly there is something wrong with me. But if you are reading this blog, you probably have it too.
Someone needs to invent a Dilbert doll for the office that mirrors your mood during the day as the life force is drained from your body. I imagine the little doll sitting there looking all bright and fresh when you come in to work. Over the course of the day, he starts to slump in his chair and turn pale. Eventually he shrivels up like a dried leaf and rolls into a fetal position. That’s when you know it is time to go home.
Misery loves company, so I think people would like having a little Dilbert doll to share the pain.
I’m not sure how you would engineer a toy like that. Perhaps it would be like one of those little sponge animals that you drop in a glass of water and it expands into a much larger one. You could water the Dilbert at the start of each day, making him plump and happy to begin, and he would shrivel up as he dehydrated, eventually curling into a tight little ball.
Watering the Dilbert every day would be a hassle. A mechanical version would be easier, if you could somehow engineer him to change colors and slump and shrivel and still sell for less than $20.
A number of years ago I worked with design company IDEO to create Dilbert’s Ultimate Cubicle. It had a number of fun features, including a fake flower that sensed motion and reacted when you entered or exited. When you left, it wilted. When you entered, it perked up. Our thinking was that this might be the only time during your workday that your existence was recognized. It would feel good, like being greeted by your dog, but without the drool and fleas. The Dilbert doll could do the same as the flower. He could sleep or slump when you leave, and perk up and start working when you enter. He’d be like a little friend. Wouldn't you want one of those?
Here’s a link to Dilbert’s Ultimate Cubicle. It doesn’t mention the cool flower feature.
Researchers have discovered that people who are incompetent generally lack the knowledge that they are incompetent.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/18/MN73840.DTL
This lack of self-awareness is the glue that holds democracy together. As long as people feel capable of evaluating complex economic and geopolitical policies, they will keep voting. And as long as people vote, they will feel vested in the system and support it.
As regular readers know, voting is one of the few areas where I recognize my incompetence. That’s why I stay home on election day. In my case, voting would be irrational.
One of the ways I recognize my own political incompetence is by observing how my opinions keep changing. That shouldn’t be happening. For example, a month ago I would have said Obama was the best choice for president because he is an inspirational leader, less divisive than Clinton, and he would bring our troops home from Iraq sooner than McCain. Plus McCain is too old for the job. It all seemed so simple.
Then I read an article that explained how much Obama would tax the people in my bracket compared to McCain’s plan. Ouch. And I started thinking that over time, our all-volunteer army results in fighters who know they will end up in Iraq when they volunteer. That wasn’t the case when the war began, but it becomes that way if we stay indefinitely. Who am I to tell another citizen that he or she should not take that risk for some benefit to the country that he or she perceives?
The war is expensive, but at least McCain would take that money from the middle class majority, and being the majority, they are the ones who would need to elect McCain in the first place. Why would I want to deny the majority the option of voting to pay more taxes than they need to so that I can pay less? They should have that freedom.
If I believed that Obama would pull 100% of our troops out of Iraq, and that Al-Qaeda would surrender because of it, then McCain’s plan of perpetual occupation would look foolish. But as long as Al-Qaeda wants to kill me, no matter what my country does, I’m willing to let volunteers try to shoot them first, as long as other people are paying for the bullets.
The war is bad for Iraqi civilians, but no one knows for sure if they would be worse off without the occupation, given the likelihood of greater civil war. As important as that question is, you have to leave it out of the calculation because it is unknowable.
So I ask myself, isn’t the world better off if I just vote for McCain, buy stock in companies that profit from war, and let everyone else exercise their freedom of choice even if makes them poorer and/or dead?
See why I don’t vote?
Imagine a 200-pound human traveling by elevator from the 5th floor to the lobby. That is a lot of energy potential that isn’t getting captured. Your descent should be turning a generator or compressing gas or doing something else to power the grid.
How hard could that be?
I also wonder why homes in California aren’t designed to make better use of the stable temperature ten feet beneath the house. It’s always cooler down there during the hot summer. It’s like sitting on a free air conditioner and not using it.
Suppose you dig a ten foot hole, with a ten foot diameter, and fill the hole with a thermal mass that absorbs the surrounding temperature and bleeds it into the thermal mass of the home’s flooring. Wouldn’t that keep the home a lot cooler?
There might be times you wanted to turn off the effect, so I suppose you could engineer it so an insulating layer is applied when needed.
I realize geothermal heating systems are used in cold climates. They just aren’t economical in California because we don’t have the cold extremes.
I remember going into a house in California years ago on a hot summer day and being surprised that the homeowners didn’t need any air conditioning. They had a large attic fan that was drawing out the hot air. Since then I have noticed in a few places I lived that a fan is unnecessary if you have a window in the top floor open and one on the ground floor. The “chimney effect” brings warm air up and out so efficiently the fan is redundant. The only problem is that you don’t want to go to bed with a downstairs window open. That’s why I invented the Jailer Screen Window. It’s a ground floor window you can open, but still has jailer bars to keep out humans, and a screen to keep out bugs. Open that bad boy before bedtime, along with the windows upstairs, and you won’t need AC in the evening.
Okay, I didn't invent the Jailer Screen Window. But I did give it a cool name.
I often think the energy crisis is a failure of imagination.
[As usual with my posts, I get two types of comments: 1) It will never work, and 2) It is already being done. -- Scott]
A man in Italy is allegedly hypnotizing store and bank clerks to give him all of their money.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7309947.stm
I’m a trained hypnotist myself, so my first reaction was skepticism. You can’t hypnotize someone that quickly and reliably. But then I put on my criminal mastermind hat and tried to figure out how this crime could be committed as described.
The trick is to hypnotize the targets well ahead of the actual day of the robbery, perhaps several times, and weed out the people who don’t instantly return to the so-called trance state upon suggestion. Then on robbing day, a simple suggestion at the store or bank can produce the instant results you need. The subjects have been pre-trained.
The hard part of this scheme is finding a way to get the right people to agree to hypnosis ahead of time. I imagine he advertised in a local publication, offering to help people quit smoking or lose weight. When people called for an appointment he would ask what sounded like standard questions, including age and occupation. If someone had the right sort of job, he set up an appointment and started the process. On any given day, he could hypnotize several new clients while testing for the most susceptible subjects who also handle money.
The next part would be a bit tricky. You can’t get a hypnotized person to do something that would violate his basic sense of right and wrong, or to put himself in danger. The brain has some sort of safety mechanism to prevent that.
In the surveillance video on the web, the hypnotist is seen taking the money from the register himself while the clerk seemed to be watching. This might be part of his workaround. The clerk wasn’t committing the crime so much as observing it. And perhaps the hypnotist said he was borrowing the money, or the manager had asked him to bring it to him in the parking lot, or some other story that obscured the ethical boundaries.
It could work. He’d need to be an excellent hypnotist, but that isn’t so rare.
You readers are sick people. Many of you forwarded me the article about a German woman went to the hospital for a leg operation and got an anus operation instead, as if I would make light of such a thing.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,339270,00.html
When the woman complained to the hospital CEO that she was given a new anus, did the CEO say, “I’ll look into it”?
I think the woman should act as her own attorney. After she gives her closing argument she can sit down and say, “I rest my case.”
Add your own jokes. The ones I already got by e-mail include “She got a bum deal,” and “The doctors tore her a new one.”
I’m no historian, but it seems to me the path to democracy always goes through a warlord stage. The warlords have different names in different places. In the United States we had the robber barons, media barons, unions, and organized crime who effectively controlled the government. In England they had land barons foisting the Magna Carta on the king. In modern Russia it looks as if the billionaire criminals are running the country.
It seems to me that Iraq is right on track. The country is organizing itself around warlords and clerics, and they will eventually work out truces with each other. In the long run, those warlords or their successors will find their own greatest self-interest in supporting some form of national government while maintaining local control.
As the national government grows through taxation, it eventually becomes more powerful than any individual warlord and can start picking them off one at a time, just as the government of the United States targeted the Mafia.
Is Iraq on the only realistic path that can get it to a functional democracy?
As a vegetarian, I often find myself drawn into debates about whether humans are natural meat-eaters. I’d have to say “almost.”
Clearly meat is nutritious for humans, our teeth can handle the job, and most meat-eaters love a well-cooked steak. But to say we are natural meat-eaters, I would think two things would have to be true:
1. Eating lots of meat wouldn’t increase your health risks.
2. Seeing a cow would make you salivate if you were hungry.
For now, I will ignore the first point because experience tells me that meat-eaters will argue to the death (literally) that eating meat has no health risks.
The interesting point, to me, is why so-called natural meat eaters feel the need to disguise their food by cutting it into steaks, cooking it, and covering it with barbecue sauce. If eating meat is natural, you would expect it to make you hungry in its natural condition. Looking at a cow should make you salivate when you are hungry.
Am I wrong?
[Update: To answer your rhetorical questions, yes, I do salivate when seeing raw vegetables and fruit. An orange or banana would make most people salivate if they were hungry. But I also like raw peas in a pod, even raw potatoes.]
The key to happiness is setting achievable goals. For example, I think a bad goal is trying to find enlightenment, or becoming one with the universe. That has hard work written all over it. I was thinking about this recently because of the story in the news about the 35-year old woman who stayed in her bathroom until her skin fused with the molecules in the toilet seat.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/03/13/woman.in.bathroom.ap/index.html
While it might be hard to become one with the universe, apparently it is easier to become one with your own toilet. All you need is a boyfriend who is willing to slip pizzas under the door.
While we’re on the topic of the boyfriend, I also think he did a good job of setting his goals low in terms of girlfriends. If you’ve ever had a high maintenance relationship, I think you can appreciate the subtle beauty of his arrangement. This fellow found a girlfriend who never complained. Can you top that?
I see this woman as a pioneer in the evolution of humankind. Her life might sound boring to you, but imagine if she had a laptop in there, with a wireless Internet connection. Suddenly a bad idea starts to look rather brilliant. For most of us, moving from place to place is usually about seeking food, bathroom breaks, employment, conversation, sexual stimulation, and returning to the computer. That’s a lot of time wasted moving around. A laptop and a toilet can satisfy all of those needs. You can even order food online. I’m not ready to make that sort of commitment yet myself, but I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t give it some serious thought.
This week’s series in Dilbert caused quite a stir. It featured a new guy in the office whose name is pronounced hay-soos and spelled Jesus. I drew those strips a few months ago, and in my typical careless way I didn’t realize they would be running around Easter time. Oops.
You can see the series at www.dilbert.com while they are still in the archive.
As you might imagine, I got a lot of e-mail about this strip. Comments were about evenly divided between people who are deeply offended and people who think it was my best work yet. Interestingly, the people most amused often described themselves as religious, and those offended often noted that they were not especially religious.
My favorite rhetorical question, which I received an alarming number of times, was “Why don’t you mock Mohammed next? Huh? Why not?”
Well, aside from the blindingly obvious reason that I prefer life over death, I didn’t realize I was making fun of Christianity this week. It’s a standard cartoon practice to take well-known historical or fictional stories and put other characters in those roles. I did the same thing with The Wizard of Oz, and no one thought I was insulting Dorothy.
Anyway, I had to answer a lot of angry e-mail. Here’s a typical letter I received, with my pithy answer at the bottom.
In a message dated 3/11/2008 9:54:25 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, (address deleted) writes:
Hello! Mr. Adams,
Mr. Adams I just want to tell you that I don’t really appreciate you making a mockery of my faith. I used to think that your comic strip was funny, now I think it is very disgusting and not funny at all. I have found your last comics strips in reference to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ very offensive. There is a place for everything and there is a place for humor and humor has its limits, especially when it comes to those things and issues that some of us hold as sacred. I will pray for you and that some day you may come to know Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Otherwise you will find Him some day as your judge, and He will justly judge you for your sins and whether or not you believe in Hell that day you will believe and you will repent when you see Him face to face, but then it will be too late. Repent from your wicked ways and stop making fun of my Savior.
Thanks for your time.
Pastor (name deleted).
California
My response…
Thank you for taking time out from feeding the poor to complain about comic strips. I know Jesus would have played it the same way.
Scott
Dr. Kervorkian, the 79-year old doctor who helped 130 people die is running for congress in Michigan.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080312/ap_on_el_ho/kevorkian_congress
Obviously he has no chance of being elected because he believes in personal freedom. And he’s so old he probably carries his own little suicide kit around in a lunch pail just in case he needs it. But I love the fact that he’s running. This should make the race interesting.
My hope is that he gets elected, serves for a few years then runs for president when he’s in his late eighties. That’s the sort of race that makes the choice of vice president extra interesting. All he’d need to do is name Oprah as his vice presidential running mate, whether she agrees or not, and promise to whack himself after a week in office. He’d win in a landslide.
I wonder if Dr. Kervorkian has trouble entertaining guests at home. I can imagine this scene playing itself out a lot:
Dr. Kervorkian: “Carl, you look tired. Can I get you a beverage?”
Carl: “NO! Nothing! I’m good!”
I love hearing about science conspiracy theories. My new favorite, that I stumbled across the other day, is that Earth is increasing in size, and that expansion is the only plausible explanation for what looks like the continental drift.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjgidAICoQI&feature=related
This interests me because years ago I proposed a thought experiment about gravity, where I noted that if all matter in the universe were expanding, you would appear to be attracted to other objects when all that was happening is that those objects were growing and closing the space gaps between them.
Naturally there are many holes in this theory, including the lack of evidence that planets are getting larger. But now I discover this theory that the earth has indeed grown. And it must be true because it is on Youtube!
My theory of gravity held that if you and the earth were the only things in existence, and you both grew at the same time, you wouldn’t notice the growth because all the reference points are growing too.
One of the big criticisms to this theory is that mass would increase if size increased. Originally, I waved my hand at that problem and just said the theory includes an ongoing shift of the laws of physics to keep everything in balance, such as orbits and the relative strength of structures.
But isn’t the mass of earth increasing? People are being born and new trees are growing every day. Perhaps that increase in mass is borrowed from other places, such as dust landing here from space, but clearly some objects are gaining mass, as the expanding matter theory of gravity requires, and the source of that gain is not obvious to the eye.
For the expanding matter theory of gravity to be true, you’d expect some things to expand at different rates than others. That’s consistent with the youtube video on how the earth expanded while the land mass didn’t change much. It’s also consistent with the universe itself expanding, which we observe.
The expanding matter theory of gravity isn’t a serious one. It’s just a fun mental detour. And like all fringe theories, you can always find clues that make it seem as though it all fits together, so long as you don’t know too much about science.
[Question: Photons have mass. What happens when all those photons from the sun hit Earth? Does the mass stay here?]
In the news, a building contractor was caught seducing a shop vacuum. The vacuum has two large cartoon eyes and a hose that represents its nose. The model is called a Henry Hoover.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/03/nhoover103.xml
This story raises many questions. Was this a spontaneous act, or did the contractor see Henry Hoover on day one and think “I’d hit that”?
What disturbs me most is that little Henry’s hose was involved in the sex act. That’s his NOSE, dammit! How is Henry supposed to enjoy nasal sex? That contractor is a selfish lover, and I can’t forgive that.
The contractor’s alibi is that he was using Henry to vacuum his underpants, which he says is common practice back in Poland. The key learning is that maybe you should practice your alibi before getting caught and not say the first thing that springs to mind.
If I were that contractor, I would have claimed I was a member of a cult and I mistakenly thought Henry Hoover was my god. I’d say I cast off all of my possessions and knelt before him to receive his blessing. I’d tell the security guard “If you don’t like how Lord Hoover bestows his blessings, perhaps you should be less of a bigot.” I’d probably take the offensive and say something like “You probably kneel in front of a priest and get a cracker. How’s this different?”
It pays to be prepared.
Let me try a little test with you. I’ll ask you a question, and you answer within 5 seconds. The point is to see how different your first reaction is to the answer you eventually settle on.
Here’s the setup. Imagine a baby born today, who ends up living to the age of 100. Now think about the course of that baby’s hundred years on earth, and answer the following question in five seconds. No cheating. Five seconds.
Question: During that baby’s 100 years of life, how many people will die?
Go.
Don’t read on until you have your answer.
I’ll bet your answer was somewhere in the millions.
There are 6 billion people on earth right now, and virtually all of them will die in the next hundred years. Add to that the several billion who will be born during the baby’s life and not be so lucky to live to old age. I think an estimate of 10 billion deaths is entirely reasonable. And that’s if things go well. The worst case is probably 20 billion people.
Is that mind-boggling?
Are you looking for a gift for a loved one, and want to achieve a high thoughtfulness to cost ratio? I have the solution. I call it the Dilbert Car Kit. For Christmas, I made two for my wife: One for her car and one for mine when she is a passenger in it.
The idea is that you take notice of all the things he or she routinely wishes was in the car on trips. Then you find a generic storage case and fill it with just those items, to keep beneath the seat of the car. It’s nerdily delicious.
Here’s a picture of the one I put together.
My kit has the following items:
Pen
Notepad
Contact lens case
Contact lens liquid
Lint roller
Advil
First aid kit
Tic Tacs
Tissues
Chapstick
As time goes by, I wish I had added a few more things:
Sun block
Sunglasses
Snack (protein bar)
Wet Napkin packet
Your kit will differ, but the key to making it a good gift is picking the items that are customized to the recipient.
Now some of you will say, “That’s what a glove compartment is for,” or “It’s called a purse.” But we all know that glove compartments are nothing but a practical joke involving crap that falls out when you open the door. And you can never find what you need with the front-load design no matter how long you paw around in there.
Women often change purses, or leave them behind. The car kit fills the gaps.
Now go forth and be thoughtful.
A reader sent me a link to a story about a Japanese woman who was accused of kicking a hole in some guy’s door, crawling through the hole, and destroying his property. She was acquitted when the court realized that her breasts were too big to allow her to fit through the hole.