A Few Billion Dollars More

My granddaughter just had her 2nd birthday recently, which is a milestone for her -- a baby with a birth defect. She needed an operation to repair her abdomen immediately after she was born by C section in an emergency room. My daughter and her new baby were both kept in the hospital for a couple weeks after that, and it was hard on everyone involved to maintain jobs and lives amidst that emotional time.

We just recently learned that the entire cost of that treatment was some $250,000.

Both of them are worth far more than that to us, of course. How many babies are born in the world without the benefit of such miraculous medicine? And how many people could afford that cost, in any case? Certainly not us. That cost was picked up by the government, simply because my daughter was no longer covered by our insurance, and neither she nor the father had a job at the time. Of course, I mean the taxpayers when I say government -- that is us, too.

If this had happened a few years earlier, while she was still younger than the cutoff age for dependent children with our health insurance, then my wife and I would have had to pay some portion of that money -- probably around $80,000. We would have had trouble making such a payment in addition to mortgages, cars, food and even our normal healthcare costs. But we would have unquestionably undergone any hardship to keep our child and grandchild alive, no matter what the cost.

There is another cost to the government, and us taxpayers -- the cost of killing people. So far the wars we are currently fighting, including the "war on terror" have cost around a half trillion dollars, rounding off a little.

We might have killed around 100,000 people so far, but of course nobody really knows. But lets just say it was only 50,000. That is about $10 million per dead body. Now, how many more people do we have to kill before the wars are "won"? Another "50,000"? Can we afford to kill very many more at this rate? What if we kill a million more and still lose, like in Vietnam?

I wish we didn't have to kill anybody. It seems kind of a waste of money to kill people. Everyone is going to die anyway, no matter what. Death is free to everyone, except the insurance companies (sometimes) and whoever pays for the funerals.

You may say that those war deaths were necessary -- to keep America "safe". Even so, I think the $250,000 to keep my granddaughter alive was a far better bargain. At least she smiles that million dollar smile and makes a lot of other people happy. Can you say the same for any corpse?

Ink

There seems to be a certain chemical in the ink just before elections. Although it is as black as the kettle that the pot claims it is, it is also quite similar to another color: bullshit.

It is difficult to go through life without an opinion, just as it is without the other end of the body. But there is certainly a limit to what I can listen to without making my own comments.

There is little use in declaring what I believe and what I don't believe, since the factual basis of belief means very little to any "true believer". On the other hand, it is also cowardice to remain sitting on a fence. My life was never lived according to fear, and usually I lived on the edge of chaos. Wherever I might work or live, no matter what the penalty, I usually spoke my mind.

Sinclair Lewis' famous quote: "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

In the US Navy this led to a tortuous stint in a Marine Brig. That is where 2+2=5 and pigs can fly -- because they say so. But I was not one to believe such crap. To me, crap = crap, and that = that. This eventually resulted in my discharge from the Navy, whereupon I danced as if on a near-zero-gravity asteroid - my feet could barely touch the ground I was so happy to get out of there.

They warned me that my life would be miserable forever after. But that was just more crap. My life may have had its ups and downs, but nearly everything was better than being in a Marine brig.

Which brings up the latest pile of bullshit colored ink, the best that big-money can buy. I am not a D and I am not an R. That supposedly means that I am an I. But I really don't belong to any letter club whatsoever. I don't care who is on the ticket -- if they're full of crap I'm voting against them. So can you guess who is the most full of crap this time around?

Here's a clue -- who can afford to buy more bullshit colored ink? Here's another clue -- who is destroying the future of our children? Who claims that science knows nothing, and that religion knows everything and that global warming makes nicer golf courses? I don't give a damn who screws who or what or why. That just doesn't matter.

Of course, it doesn't really matter who we vote for. The religious nuts will always be nuts, the warmongers will always make wars and the oil and coal companies will always pollute the world. And science is no better than religion if such knowledge only gives us bigger populations, which consume more food and produce more crap.

That's just the way it is. If you are a politician, no matter how much bullshit colored ink you got -- I'm voting against you.

A Bit of Knowledge with No Bit of Grace

There have always been those who never passed up a chance to do the wrong thing. Most of us, as children, probably did nearly every wrong thing possible. But if we are still alive it is because we didn't do everything wrong.

Given a brain much more capable than most animals means we have more power to destroy than most animals. In some animals it is difficult to do too many bad things because their brains cannot hold the slightest idea about them. No fish has ever lit a match to a stick of dynamite, and no fish knows the slightest thing about either matches or dynamite. However, a pack of pirrahnas can strip bones very quickly, reducing a victim to nearly the same state of disintegration.

This does not mean that we are somehow superior to all animals, only that we are able to conceive and implement the tools of our own destruction. Ants are probably far more successful as an organism, and it is much more likely that ants will be around in a million years and much less likely that humans will. But ants do not seem a brilliant equal to us in terms of accomplishment. Ants probably do make up a much greater biomass, but only human footprints are found on the moon.

Then there is the level of civilization. Ants are probably an extreme version of a totalitarian society, but all ant evolution exists in the interactions between thousands of specialized simpletons rather than the general efforts of relatively few complex individuals. It is difficult to judge just whether one ant colony is able to view another ant colony as an entity even vaguely similar to how one human views another human. Humans are able to empathize with another human, however, and it is doubtful than any ant or ant colony feels anything of the sort.

Every time I read the news it is about the horrible deeds of deranged humans that seem to lack this feeling of empathy. Those people act much like reptiles or fish except that they can operate higher brain functions.

Sometimes there are only horrible deeds of nature on the news, such as diseases, storms or other disasters. But every disaster is an idea for another purposeful act of terror. It gives those demented, angry zealots another weapon.

Many accidents happen, of course, and most are random -- the mistakes of men are like violent acts of nature. Meteors can impact the Earth any moment, which is a disaster, but a missle is another, less random impacter.

But a group of people, driven by organized hatred and inventiveness, could spread many fires over a wide area, cut vital services of energy or consumables, cause disruptions in economies and spread pollution and diseases. There seems to be as many examples of improvisable weapons as there are technologies, so that as technology increases then so does terrorism.

Whenever people in the past have obtained a new technology which has any use as a weapon, then it is usually first used as a weapon. We made atomic bombs before we made any atomic power stations, even though both were being designed simultaneously. Much like teeth serving as both tool and weapon in a shark, technology is usually utilized in equal amounts by good and evil.

There is a good reason, though, that no personal nuclear power devices exist, so there are no nuclear cars or home electricity generators. No one in their right mind could trust us with such things. It is bad enough to have dental X-ray equipment in the hands of door-to-door salespersons.

Cross Eyed Computer

For the last 30 years or so I have been using several computer operating systems, mostly Unix and MS based now, and I have noticed a definite tendancy to mix all of them together in my mind. I'm not sure this is bad or good, but it is becoming more and more complex.

I would stick to one of them just fine, but even using Web tools, there are Unix-like interfaces and PC-like interfaces so that to understand any small item, one has to know the overall differences between all systems. This was more apparent in earlier times when PCs didn't quite speak TCP/IP as well as Unix systems, so that there were many competing network protocols (not to mention the higher level protocols such as FTP, HTTP, SSL and so forth.) PCs still use MS specific protocols for network file systems.

I used commandline interfaces for a lot of things, as in Dos Windows, Unix terminals, shells, interpreters, scripting languages, etc. Since I have written so many programs that either emulate Unix on Windows or emulate Windows on Unix, wherever I wind up, I am using all of the mixed programs all at once. I don't really notice the problems until I try to use someone else's computer. Suddenly there is a complete vacuum of tools, or just the minimal toolset unique to whichever OS.

This is also a problem with programming languages as well. I use C for most things, not because it is better than something else, but because it is the most portable. If I try to write in C++, then the horrible mind-bending to encompass GNU on one extreme or .NET on the other extreme causes more trouble than the "benefits" of C++ are worth. Mainly I don't see any benefit to C++. Why? Because it is foolish to swim upstream against the reality of the underlying hardware. The hardware is always procedural, or verb-oriented, as in Von Neuman architecture, and C++ is completely object or noun oriented.

There are hardware CPU instructions that operate on registers or memory, such as ADD R1,R2 or MOV mem1,r2 and so on. Machines do not have such a thing (yet) as R1.ADD(R2) or other object-oriented-isms. There is good reason for that, since one cannot use a graphics controller as a disk drive, as in GC.seek(1000) or vise versa as in DD.drawline(x,y). It seems silly to try to pretend that objects and methods can universally intertwine in glorious polymorphic splendor.

I go ahead and play the game as the rules demand, that's my job. But the irony does not escape me.

For commandline issues, Dos batch commands are very different from Unix shell commmands, although there are some similarities or at least equivalences. One problem with Unix is that there are so many shells, sh, bsh, csh, tcsh, tclsh, xsh, rsh, ksh, etc, and that is just a few. I haven't even gotten into the scripting languages. There is python, perl, ruby, C#, javascript, html, xml, php, and others.

Most of the time I am trying to solve a scientific problem that just happens to use computers. One such problem involves video cameras for area security. I really don't want to write more tools for the computer so much as solve the fundamental problem, but due to the glut of issues pertaining to the computerization of video (e. g. using heavy mathematics to simulate some physical system versus GUI interfaces to display results) that I can't just isolate myself to some single mindset.

Anyway, I now navigate through about a dozen scripts, languages, compilers, shells and computer hardware types, and they have all become a mish-mash in my head, much like the half-English half-Spanish half-Porteguese half-Indian that someone has to speak in the jungles of South America.

It is my job, yes, but it still seems like a computer scientist must now be a master of all trades AND speak in tongues. And I see a sea monster up ahead. Its name is Vista. It has the MS trademark on all its teeth. Oh, well. Another mish-mash of gluttonously object-oriented verbage to chew.

Another Day Another Decade

So. All in all, this really just states the obvious, and, of course, nothing WILL be done, ever.

“I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer than a decade, at the most,” Hansen said Wednesday at the Climate Change Research Conference in California’s state capital.

If the world continues with a "business as usual" scenario, Hansen said temperatures will rise by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 7.2 degrees F) and "we will be producing a different planet."

Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has made waves before by saying that President Bush’s administration tried to silence him and heavily edited his and other scientists’ findings on a warmer world. -- MSNBC

What Are We Thinking?

The answer is: Not Much. In fact we are more driven by our emotions than by logic. And the reason for that is pretty simple. Emotion is what makes us able to survive in a violent world full of other creatures that are more driven by emotion than by logic.

Science has a reputation of being the habitat of dull, boring, monotonous Dweebs. That is the bane of every girl "who just wants to have fun!" Emotions in males are heavily weighted toward obtaining sex-crazed girls, and the emotions in girls are heavily weighted toward highly testosteronized guys. Thus we have a preponderance of X-games, dance clubs and football hooligans (both the US kind and the UK kind).

My life has been a kind of mixture of everything. I was less inclined toward muscles than brains, however, so the last half of my life, so far, has been almost entirely devoted to science. Dweeb-land. But the first half was a strange, stumbling walk through wild emotions and cold logic. I was not a robot, certainly -- I wanted the "sex-crazed girls" no less than any other normal male.

By age 30 I mostly had my fill of fast women and fast cars, but I can't really expect young people to ignore their emotions and pursue something more sedate. Yet, eventually they will have children of their own and their children will have children and they will not be so attracted to dance clubs. They will wonder about the survival of their offspring. That is what I am now most concerned about.

I don't care whether someone votes with a D or an R or even an I. Politics is just about propaganda and emotions. Few people are thinking about mathematics when they vote. Ask the experts like "Boy Genius Rove" whether people "think" at the ballot box. No. That is why politicians use hate, fear, anger, or "nice hair" to appeal voters' decisions. Voters don't use chemistry or physics. The masses don't calculate the probabilities or find the standard deviations of anything. That is for Dweebs.

I am old enough now that I will not have to experience very much of the consequences of our runaway addiction to destructive technologies. Burning oil, burning forests, burning people who get in our way -- all the "old guys" who profit from those things will just leave the cinders of the biosphere for our descendents to worry about.

Some people dispense with logic altogether and let "God do their thinking". OK. Well, there is no use trying to argue with them. Logic cannot penetrate the stone walls of Religion. If the world becomes chemically polluted and covered with death seeking holy warriors and radioactive clouds -- it's merely God's will.

I am not satisfied with that. Most people would not be alive today if it were not for science. Modern medicine, farming machines, refrigerators and other technologies allow the huge populations of humans to exist on Earth. That is the paradox -- that the very science that keeps us alive will be what kills us. It is like flying straight up in an airplane. Everything is fine until it runs out of air or out of gas and then the fun ride in the sky results in a harrowing spiral to death.

The USA is a country of extremes. We have some of the highest technology on Earth, and we have some of the most ignorant fools on Earth. We have vast expanses of huge houses and we have wandering hordes of homeless people. We have every science and every religion and every kind of saint and sinner. We are the envy of the world and the most hated enemy of the world.

And we are willing to let a bunch of greedy, ignorant toads burn all of our children's futures in an orgy of stupidity and chemical expediency. Why? Because we are only apes. Emotional apes with nuclear weapons and "Gods" that do most of our thinking. We are the pinnacle of evolution -- or the inexplicably dim witted creation of God -- and willing to sacrifice all life on this planet to satisfy our basest emotions.

Arctic Ice Melting A Teensy Bit Too Fast

So what? says the prez. Who cares about bears. After all it's just ice. We'll send up some freezers and BP can supply the oil to burn. Well, maybe Exxon.. uh, well, get Senator Burns to "earmark" some of that Federal Pork.

"For more than 25 years Arctic sea ice has slowly diminished in winter by about 1.5 percent per decade. But in the past two years the melting has occurred at rates 10 to 15 times faster. From 2004 to 2005, the amount of ice dropped 2.3 percent; and over the past year, it's declined by another 1.9 percent..." according to NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso.

It's all so pious to kill the planet for the sake of a bunch of BORN AGAIN ASSHOLES.

Tightening the Noose

Another nail in the coffin. Hurricanes are nothing, however, compared to the future that fidgets and huffs and puffs, biding time until the climate is inhospitable for animals like us and our descendants.

Humans are very likely to blame for at least 67 percent that warming, the report said

The report provides further evidence, said scientists, that people are changing the way Earth's climate responds to an ever-increasing amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases put there by the burning of fossil fuels.

Methane Melting

I know, I know. I harp on this subject a lot. But don't say scientists didn't warn you when Hell is all there is on Earth.

You can pray all you want, you can belittle "alarmists" all you want, you can ignore everything you want.

But your children and grandchildren don't want to live in Hell. That is what methane will do to the atmosphere -- convert it into Hell.

On the other hand, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. I think the turning point for doing anything about it was about 1980 or so, and that would have been somewhat optimistic. Go ahead, buy that Hummer. It doesn't matter what you do now.

Speaking of the Devil

Holy Crap, Batman! By golly, this article doesn't give me hope. Mankind is a dope.

But I don't think we should be too worried by this. I think it would be much worse to live life as a kind of computer. Magical thinking may be wrong, but it is better than ones and zeros. Ask any computer what it thinks of the color pink.

On the other hand, I am STILL not going to convert to Islam.

Religion

I am not a very religious person. Anyone who knows me and who ever tried to convert me to a religion can vouch for that. And it is not because I am a scientist. There are plenty of religious scientists, and even those who think science is a religion in itself.

The recent "Video From AQ" featured an American born person of Jewish heritage who, now a convert to Islam and propagandist for AQ, suggested that we all convert to Islam, "before it is too late".

It has always been too late for me. The last time I really believed in any kind of religion was when I still believed in Santa Claus. Sometimes I tried to understand people who are religious, from their point of view at least. But, all in all, I never really swallowed the hook.

There was also a time when I wondered about UFOs and aliens. Could such things be true? Sometimes it seemed like there might really be aliens, but that feeling has passed. I have never seen anything for myself, and I can't look through the eyes of other people who claim to have experienced such things. Perhaps my brain is not "advanced enough", and I am unable to perceive such things.

Now, science or not, I cannot prove anything about religion. People who believe in such things are not swayed by logic. Even though the precepts of religious belief run contrary to logic and reason, the idea that God should be bound by silly notions that 2+2 always equals 4 is seen to be blasphemy. If anyone can look at the billion year history of animal evolution that has been chiseled into the stones of Earth and still believe in the evangelical version of reality instead, then they might as well believe that pigs can fly, too.

But the last thing I would ever do after watching some brainwashed guy with a beard on TV warning me to "convert to Islam -- or else" is convert to Islam. It is far more likely that I would convert myself into an armadillo.