The Dilbert Blog

Good News!!!

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.

Proof You Don’t Exist

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.

Money or Bombs

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.

CEO Selection

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]

Building Blocks of the Universe

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.”

Minimum Standards for President

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.

Tick Tock

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.

Man Has His Way with Picnic Table

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.]

Doomsday Cult

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.

Minimum Requirement for President

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?