Fahrenheit 451 meets the constitution

I couldn't resist blogging about Just a Goddamned Piece of Paper which proves Bush's public and private attitudes to the Constitution and Democracy reek with irony and contradiction. We've been told he prefers his Supreme Court Judges to support a literal interpretation of the constitution, none of that interpretive nonsense liberals are fond of. Well I suppose you can't get more literal about interpreting the constitution than "It's just a goddamned piece of paper" can you?

So if Bush is adamant the constitution is just a piece of paper than its clear Bush has just reached fahrenheit 451 and something's about to go up in flames. Question is, will American soon be facing a burning Bush or a flaming constitution?

Your intellectual property rights or your life

In these Times has an interesting post about how the only know defense against Asian Bird Flu is Tamiflu that is patentend by Swiss manufacturer Roche. This apparently is preventing the US from embarking on a massive stockpiling exericse - they simply couldn't afford to - much like many African nations simply couldn't afford American patented antiviral drugs to protect against AIDS. How about that for getting some of your own back?

As the article points out, some nations are deciding to just do it (ignore patents) - especially those outside of the WTO like Taiwan. When Americans are drowning in their own blood because they chose to defend intellectual property rights over life they'll be the ones laughing all the way to the bank.

On this matter I have to say that significant investment to develop new drugs is one of those things I believe should be adequately rewarded - in the absence of government funded research to the same effect. But also defence of IPR for corporations is a privilege granted by the governments and society as a whole, therefore no IPR holder should expect to profiteer excessively from a monopoly, especially if they prove unable to produce sufficient quantities of the good they developed, or at fair market prices. In such cases they should forfeit their rights or be forced to license production to others. After all, lets face it, in the case of protecting against a global pandemic its in a company's best interests to keep as many consumers alive. Product demand for Roche's Tamiful will drop off rapidly if 50% of the planet is dead within a few months...

Bushism is the new McCarthyism?

Good night and good luck is a good post from the Angry Bear that relates the 50's communist witch hunt era of American politics to modern day vilification of those who oppose the war, US foreign policy (or lack thereof), fight to defend for civil liberties, defend the environment, oppose big corporations, or oppose pretty anything the Republicans do.

Many of us are aware how the Republican spin machine that labels everything bad it does with name that seems to indicate its good. So legislation that will permit an increase in air pollution is called "The Clear Skies Act" and those that permit massive increases in logging of wilderness forest are dubbed "Healthy Forests Initiative". Similarly they have taken to branding everything they do as patriotic, American or in the name of "Freedom" and "Democracy" implying that if we do anything to oppose them it means we are unpatriotic, un-American, un-democratic and against freedom. As the article points out this vilification of dissent is in an of itself as un-American and vile as the country's brief experiment with McCarthyism was.

But hey, you'll have to admit, defocusing the entire nation on a witch hunt is a wonderful and huge distraction, furthermore it gives us some great movies opportunities later on. I wonder will they label this current witch hunting era Bushism, Dubyaism, Republicanism, or NeoConism?

Babies not on board

Babies Not on Board is an Alternet article for all the child free readers. It a lament by a man who desperately wants children but leaves his wife because she wont have them and then starts another relationship with a woman who doesn't want them either. Doh!

The comments on the article are pretty entertaining, especially the woman who writes "Come on out to San Francisco and have babies with me!", or another who writes "I have pretty much had to cut off one friend who used to be a vivacious, interesting woman with a worldview. Now all she talks about is her baby, baby, baby..."

Borrowed itself to death

Roger Waters (he of Pink Floyd fame) release a solo album called "Amused to death", it happens to be one of my favourites. I don't play it very often because it is a monumental downer but once in a while I'll find a spare hour, crank it up and tune out. The recurring theme is "This species has amused itself to death" and you really can't get more direct, and I believe, accurate than that. As living standards have increased the focus of humanity, at least in this country, has increasingly been on amusing ourselves and everything connected with that goal. Now I don't really have a problem with being amused - but as the be all and end all of existence? No way. It sounds far too much like plug in, tune out, f**k reality. In fact one of the definitions of amused is "diverted" which matches perfectly my perception of America's with obsession with amusement over actual living.

Anyway, that's all a long digression to eplain the title of this blog entry "Borrowed itself to death" which came to me after reading The Straight Truth about the Bush Economy". As I read it I started hearing the words "This country has borrowed itself to death". Actually the article starts off sounding like its supportive of Bush, but quickly segways to explaining pretty much all the economic good stuff is as a result of bad stuff. That is declining real wages, increasing poverty, a shrinking pool of people in the workforce, and massive increases in government borrowing and massive and historic decrease in personal saving (now at -2%).

The bottom line is the US is borrowing $3 billion dollars a day to sustain its current "recovery" and one can only wonder how long it will be before we are back on the nose dive trajectory again. If we are lucky it will be before the end of the reign of Emporer Bush II - if its after he's out of office we risk the shit hitting the fan during a democratic presidential term and then having to endure endless finger pointing from Republicans claiming it was the Democrats who screwed things up.

Separation of church and consumerism

There has been a lot of publicity about churches getting upset first with the White House keeping "Christmas" off its holiday greetings cards, but now it seems they area also upset about stores keeping Christmas out of the holiday shopping experience. Well it was news to me. Coming from the United Kingdom it took me a while not to talk about Christmas all the time and get used to receiving "Happy Holidays" cards, that simply doesn't happen in the UK and you know, no one gets upset about it. Or at least they didn't when I was last living there which admitedly was a while ago now.

But I have to say I always thought the reason America did the "Happy Holidays" thing was out of deference to the large number of non-Christians in the country. As recent surveys show more than half of the adults in the country consider themselves only somewhat religious, or less than somewhat religious, and a full third consider themselves not religious at all. If you're looking not to ram some message from a specific religious order down the throats of people not fully or not at all interested in it, let alone actually offended by it - well "Happy Holidays" seems like a reasonable compromise. However America seems to be full of people celebrating minority holidays who have no inherent interest in them (say St. Patrick's Day), and full of people celebrating holidays that could be construed as being downright offensive (I'm thinking of turkey day).

So I suppose I can see why Christmas gets a few people really upset, I mean why target that particular holiday for secularization?

But really when you look at it, Christmas is really an annomally, its a last remaining vestige of a long history of not celebrating religious holidays. Americans don't really celebrate Easter and as best I can tell never have done - that's pretty much relegated to a Hallmark holiday. There's no fasting for lent, nothing special for Whit Sunday, mother's day doesn't have any religious significance, heck you guys don't even do pancake day (Shrove Tuesday)! All these holidays are celebrated widely to varying extents in my home country with the result that I, a non-Christian can roll them off my tongue a full decade after living there.

So my point is, if you don't widely celebrate all the other ceremonies in this country, then why make a big deal over Christmas? And if you're going to celebrate Christmas then why not all the other religious holidays - from all the religions? That's exactly the point of those aiming to secularize this holiday - either celebrate them all (but even imagine we'll take a public holiday for them all) or not at all. The later is far more consistent with the constitution and, if you're not going to get a public holidy for it, then you are free, completely free, to celebrate these holidays in your homes and your churches as you feel fit.

I personally think the de-secularization of Christmas is a battle that will not be one that will not be won. The mega-corporations that are the mainstays of US consumerism serve the community as a whole and stand a lot to lose by taking the "side" of one religion or the other when marketing their seasonal sales campaigns (which lets face it, is all Christmas is to them - a sales opportunity). For them its far easier to just put "Happy Holidays" than Happy Hannukah, Happy Kwanza and Happy everything else than risk some equality class action suit from one religious (or non-religious) group or another.

Tabloid truth exposes Shots of Mass Destruction

Thanks to The Binary Circumstance for revealing how tabloids may have uncovered the truth of Bush's return to the bottle. Noting how tabloids recently got it right about Brad Pitt leaving Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie, Binary Circumstanc postulates they may also be bang on with the rumours of Bush being caught knocking back "Texas sized" shots after Katrina flattened and flooded New Orleans.

I don't think this is anything that would shock most people - but if it did come out it would be the kind of salacious revelation that would sink Bush for good. Fortunately for him he's only got three more years to keep it under wraps (or two if you discount the final year of electioneering for his successor). I like to think of the existance of those "Texas sized shots" reported in the Enquirer to be like the existance of those weapons of mass distruction that supposedly existed in Iraq. They are something a good number of people would like to believe exist - something some preemptive strikes could be done based on because if they did exist the consequences could be really bad (or good depending on your point of view). But they may or may not exist and in this case we don't have any inspectors probing the White House or the Shrub-in-Chief's bloodstream to look for them.

Personally I don't give a hoot whether the President consumes a healthy amount of alcohol, just like the rest of us, so long as he's not incapacitated when it comes to making major decisions. I'm sure those Presidents that have openly consumed alcohol (which is most of them) have, at one time or the other, been in a situation where they are incapacitated and not able to make a Presidential decision. So I would hope there is a protocol to keep at least one of the President or Vice President stone cold sober.

But... if the President goes on record as saying he never drinks, and uses that has a campaigning tool, and then it turns out he was lying all along. Well, in that case I'd say it was a pretty darned serious problem. Indeed we should probably have random spot checks of the Presidents blood stream because if he was lying about booze who knows what else he's lying about.

Torture the President unless its well, you know - bad

No, I didn't say "kill the President", just torture him, just a little bit, see how he likes it. Maybe some waterboarding, maybe standing up naked for a few days, throw in some retro Japanese water torture, a fake execution or two. Afterwards maybe he'll have a bit more clarity over whether its good to torture prisioners, and who knows, he might confess a thing or two. But of course afterwards he'd probably tell us he didn't do anything he confessed to - that he would have confessed to anything under torture.

Precisely. Under torture people confess to anything. Its a well know fact, even the CIA knows it. And that's quite apart from torture being morally bankrupt and a license for all your enemies to torture your citizens. Plus you'll probably have quite a few more enemies after you're done detaining and torturing citizens from across the world. I mean America loves to pick on countries that pick on its citizens, so why shouldn't everyone else act the same way as Team USA? Just who is this country that wants to unilaterally give itself favoured nation status to do whatever the f**k it wants.

Yes I'm pissed about this. Torturing people is not ethical, not decent, not productive, not a good example, completely non-Christian, and definitely not something I want happening in any country I live in. Yes, its one of those things that makes me think, maybe I don't belong in the United States? Maybe I should take my stuff and run for the border? When I find myself thinking like that I also start thinking why should I run from the country, can't the country change? It's changed so many times before so it can do it again. Maybe this Iraq War is to America as the Civil War was to slavery (if you ignore the protestations that the Civil War wasn't about slavery at all, but corporate power).

Maybe when the US troops are out of Iraq, the various factions there are back to fighting each other in the usual fashion, various commissions are done counting the hundreds of billions wasted, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the historians are totalling the damage to America's credibility, safety and integrity caused by the war. Maybe then, and only then will we all be able to look back and say, South Park style - you know, we learned something in Iraq: preemptive war is bad, unilateral "peace actions" are bad, falsifying evidence is bad and yes, finally, torture is bad.

Sex-Ed

This is so dumb, the federal government is offering money for sex-ed teaching only if it teaches abstinance as the only means for birth control. To be honest I must be behind because I wasn't aware it had gotten that bad - I thought they were only doing this for funding of overseas aid. But now their policies have come home to roost its good to see at least some states have their heads screwed on. Basically if the people in this country can't agree on what to teach kids then the federal government should just teach nothing about sex-ed as opposed to teaching stuff that's clearly of no practical use.

The name "sex-ed" tells all, sex-ed is about sex stupid and regardless of what you want to believe - sex happens. Every study of countries that try to teach abstinance only show its ineffective and leads to more pregnancies. If some religious schools want to teach no-sex-ed and some religious people want to send their kids there that's fine and dandy. Its a free country. But no, the government wants to bury its head up its collective ass and deny the truth along with all the other things they now seem to want to deny and saddle the rest of us with the burden of teen pregnancies and more unwanted and unplanned children.

Not to mention the fact that we can't even seem to teach all our people how to raise the children they wanted to have, let alone the ones they didn't want in the first place. Hello, aren't there enough people on the planet as it is? Why make Americans even more a part of the problem, and no, invading countries and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis doesn't give us free reign to go hog wild with producing unwanted babies either.

Airline Security

Bruce Schneier has written a nice article for Wired on why Airline Security [is] a Waste of Cash. In his Op Ed piece IDs and the Illusion of Security Schneier goes further, he points out that ID checks and profiling are basically un-American.

Frankly I buy his arguments hook-line and sinker. I don't fly much - I probably average a half dozen flights a year. But that's enough to witness a number of glaring security SNAFUs since 9/11. That's quite apart from all the exploitable flaws in the system I've thought about but of course did nothing about. If it helps think of each plane as a home computer, and all the airline companies as computer network companies. Like any non-trivial system, no matter how hard you try there will be security flaws, and no matter how many patches and anti-this and anti-that add ons you layer over them there will still be flaws not covered, and new flaws in the cover-ups.

Mostly I think all the security checks have probably served to do one thing - reduce the likelyhood of some idiot having a weapon on board and killing someone in a fit of air-rage due to the lack of chicken or beef. Shudder the thought they might actually get pissed off about something real - like non-functioning headphones, snoring or yacking neighbors, elbow wars, reclining seat invasions, poison gas attacks from the restrooms, and insurgent babies running amuck in the aisles.

A Schneier points out, the single most important thing they've done (they being the government) for airline security since 9/11 was reinforcing and locking the cockpit door. Arguably you could say the single dumbest thing they did was allow a gun inside the cockpit. That provides an excuse for hijackers to take hostages and kill passengers by non-firearm, pocket knife and nail-clipper based means (everyone knows special forces around the world are trained to kill with a rolled up newpaper or slight of hand), and then wait for a gung-ho Captain to charge out thinking he can save the day Rambo style (which is unfair to Rambo because he actually seemed to know what he was doing). After that its all over.

Finally Schneir points out the thing most likely to improve security was caused by the 9/11 hijackers themselves - alerting passengers to the fact that being on a hijacked plane may well turn into something more than an inconvenient detour to an different airport from where you wanted to go. But this fact seems to be the one that the government seems least interested in exploiting (for obvious financial reasons). They'll warn you about the hazards of alcohol contained within the plane as you board you US carrier's aircraft, but might fail to mention the hazards of in-flight hijacking by your flying companions. Why don't the pre-flight safety briefings include safe and effective ways to incapacitate a hijacker, where to find a blunt instrument under you seat, how to remove and use the seat tray as shield against knife attacks, and what to do with the tazer gun that will drop from the ceiling in case of hijacking?

Supreme Court crumbles but no one shouts "It's a sign!"

You know I can't help but think that if a couple of left of conservative judges had been appointed to the Supreme Court and bits of the building came falling down then there would be a huge outcry that it was a sign from above that the court and the very core of our country was falling appart. As it happens it seems like it was just an architectural event.

Not that I believe in such things, but hey, in the interests of the Democrats "getting down with religion" maybe they could start seeing signs too. After all, from my recolections of the bible the man upstairs is an equal opportunity provider of signs and visions - it doesn't matter if you're good or bad he'll drop some big hints from the sky to steer homo-dubious in the right direction whenever necessary. This time it just happened to be 170 lbs of Vermont marble....

Urban street climbing

Don't ask me how I found it, but the Urban Street Climbing website reminds me that somewhere there is a photo of me up a very tall lamp post out side my college in Oxford. Although I was somewhat drunk, I do recall it quite vividly and I really don't know how I managed it as lamp posts are tricky buggers to shin up at the best of times. Even worse I seem to recall that having climbed it my erstwhile companion decided that I should do it again and take a bottle of wine with me to swig from for his photo. Sigh, of the joys of a misspent youth.

More recent evidence (see right) shows that I still haven't lost the urge to climb...

Space aliens eh?

Well stone the crows, turns out Bush is secretly building a base on the moon to fight the aliens. Well, according to a former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau he is. Either that or Paul Hellyer has been watching too many re-runs of UFO in his retirement.

Not that I don't believe UFOs could exist. Just that if they did and they were not being benevolant to us then we would surely have heard about it a lot sooner and there wouldn't be a damn thing Bush or anyone could do about it with a moon base or sweet talking diplomacy. Furthermore unlike in "The War of the Worlds" or "Signs" neither E. Coli or a super soaker will help us fight them off. I rather side with the Douglas Adams theory of alien life - if its out there and peaceful then it is politely and deliberately leaving us semi-evolved simians well alone until we evolve into something more worthwhile talking too, if its out there and not then it'll turn up on our door (or in our sky) and zap us to oblivion Vogon style. In fact you could probably make a good argument that Vogon diplomacy would be a close relative of Bush diplomacy, itself a close relative of Gunboat Diplomacy and shoot first, ask questions later.

Socksmas

I'm getting a kick reading the blog of Alex Tew who started a web site called Million Dollar Homepage. It's an interesting story, this guy is British, 21, just heading off to university and has an idea of how to make some money. He starts a web site with a 1,000 by 1,000 image and sells pixel space at $1 per pixel as advertising. The image is sold off in 10x10 pixel blocks at $1 per pixel so $100 per block. Do the math, he's got to sell 10,000 blocks to sell all of the image space, but when he has that's a cool $1,000,000 he's made.

This was all back in August - he launched the site on August 26th. To date he's sold 683,400 pixels and his web site is getting 200,000 unique visitors per week. His site is listed in Alexa's top 1,000 web sites on the net and Alex has been interviewed across the world and written up by the BBC, the Guardian, The Times (UK), and now the Wall Street Journal. More to the point his advertisers actually seem very happy with their investments - they are getting lots of hits.

But if you do the math something doesn't quite ad up. If he's sold 600,000+ pixels and there's 200,000 unique vistors per week that means only 33 unique vistors per 100 pixel block per week. Sure visitors will click on more than one ad per visit (I clicked on about a half dozen out of curiosity) but that doesn't really amount to thousands of hits per week, let alone per day. So either some ads are getting much more traffic than the average (which given the variation and size and prominence may be quite try) or things are not quite as they seem.

Interestingly this is an idea where execution wasn't really that important - his site works and is simple but its not very automated and took him and his friends a lot of effort to maintain - some of its many immitators are far more automated. This idea was all about being the first and getting publicity as the first. Its also probably going to spawn many studies of how a simple idea grows and explodes on the Internet. From its early stage with word of mouth publicity to mass press coverage.

I'm sure he will eventually sell all 1,000,000 pixels. After that then what? Well Alex says the site will be alive for 5 years minimum. I'll be interested to see how his web site traffic holds up, and just what new ideas he comes up with. Personally when the site is full he should start letting people trade the pixels and take a percentage of each trade. Even if people are selling out for a lower price he'll still make money. But perhaps he wants to keep the million dollar homepage the same, as a monument to his idea and phenomenally good timing and good fortune (pun intended).

Oh, and the title of this blog entry - well if you read Alex's blog you'll see he is more than a little obsessed with socks. He keeps on talking about how many socks he'll be able to buy with all that cash. Mmmmm socks. Sounds rather like Baldrick and his turnip obsession.

For the love of amateurs

Via Napsterization I am reminded that the latin root of "amateur" is "love" and that bascially the modern interpretation of amateur is more often a denegration of work or a person compared to the supposed exalted status of "professional". The assumption is that an amateur is unpaid and hence no good at what they do, and that a profesison is paid and hence must be good at what they do. The original meaning was of course that an amateur toils away for the love of what they do, not for the money.

This reminds me of my basic problem with sports these days - "professionals". Commercialization of everything from major league to the Olympics has created a generation of sports people who are anything but professional and primarily driven by the money versus love of the sport. Do you think an amateur sports person would be inclinded to take steroids for the love of their choosen sport?

But this is not about sport, its about everything we do. For many a job is just an means to an end - money and money is survival. To be paid to do something we love is a luxury not enjoyed by the vast majority of workers, and to be paid to do something has no guarantee we are good at it - hence the modern problem with liability insurance in America. Maybe if more people were actually doing what they loved, taking pride in what they do and getting paid for it there would be less need for expensive liability insurance in the first place. So ask yourself this, in the spirit of the definition, wouldn't it be better to be an amateur who happens to get paid for doing what they love, vs. a professional who just loves the money but not what they do?

Some anti-peak oil arguments

The Alternet peak oil article by Matthew Simmons I cited in the last post got some comments that peak oil theory is basically baloney. It turns out there is an active community that believes Simmons is a fraud, a stooge for Bush, and a lackey for the oil industry helping to driving up oil prices by allowing them to keep prices high. Remember the Enron scam in California? Who doesn't (don't worry, it'll probably happen all over again once we've forgotten). All created by a huge artificial shortage.

Most of the arguments say that there are vast new discoveries of new reserves being made all the time - specifically 54 billion barrels under the Gulf of Mexico - and that there are vast largely untapped (but expensive to extract) reserves in Venzuela and Canada. As prices get higher its a sure thing that even more of those reserves will come on line. In fact I've recently seen the evidence of the oil boom in Calgary first hand - its started already.

For some counter-spin and counter-counter-spin on the peak oil theory read: Does "Peak Oil" Spell Death for the Suburbs? by Randal O'Toole (himself a member of the Cato Institute), "The Myth of Peak Oil", Free Market News Network editorial, "Oil Is NOT A Fossil Fuel - It Is Abiotic, Is 'Peak Oil' A Put On?", "Abiotic Oil: Science or Politics?"and almost anything that shows up when you Google Peak Oil Scam.

If anyone can sort it all out let me know - or just add your own comments below.

Step right up! Oil 10¢ a cup!

Wow, only 10¢ a cup! I'll have some of that - in fact gallons and gallons of it!

Yes put like that oil does seem cheap, in fact way cheaper than bottled water, or soda or pretty much anything else you buy by the cup. But oil is way more expensive than that... right? Actually no. A barrel contains 42 gallons which is 336 pints or 672 cups. So when oil at $67.2 dollars a barrel (which is actually more than it is right now) that's just 10¢ per cup! Of that about 50% is refinable to gasoline for your vehicles, but even so, you can see why in many respects oil could be condsidered cheap, real cheap at current prices. Even a US pump price of $3 a gallon of gas is still only 18.75¢ a cup which considering that 50% figure for gas per barrel means really Americans are actually getting a very reasonable deal.

So when pundits like Matthew Simmons start on about peak oil and tell you "Oil will be $200 a gallon by 2010" you should actually stop and think what that is per cup - still less than 30¢ a cup, or 59¢ per pint. Never mind that by that time your gas at the pump will most likely be $9.50 a gallon, considering the utility of gasoline you're still getting a fantastic deal.

However there's part of the story that even Simmons usually ommits - the intagible costs of our current oil habit, all those externalities that the oil companies force on us and our government. To name a few:

• the subsidy of a road infrastructure
• the direct subsidies to oil companies in the form of tax breaks
• the cost of fighting wars to defend our oil and our oil producing friends
• the cost of over 40,000 dead in car wrecks (a million per year worldwide)
• the cost of pollution and CO2 emissions caused by burning oil
• the intangible cost of irrevocable plunding of resources that once gone are gone forever (or at least until we all rot down to oil - if you believe oil is produced that way).

I haven't seen a figure for these but my guess is that even conservatively they at least double the actual price of oil. But you know its still cheap at twice the price.

Maybe there is hope after all

I have to say the news of the pro-intelligent design school board being ousted, or should I say routed, in Pennsylvania is some of the first good news I've heard in a while (that and the failure of most of Arnold's propositions)

Don't get me wrong, I actually think its valid to educate people about potential weaknesses or gaps in the evolutionary theory, or indeed any theory. Budding scientists do need to be taught that not everything we know today is based on incontrovertable evidence, and even that which appears to be such, say the Newtonian theory of everything, might suddenly be invalidated over night. Of course Newtonian theory is still an extremely good approximation for most day to day calculations where quantum effects rear their head, but it does show that reality is not always as it seems.

But if you postulate "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolutionary theory then it deserves the same scientific rigour in its critique, i.e. that there is not one iota of scientific evidence for ID. While ID might be useful to some as a day to day approximation of reality - the explanation for our existance has no bearing on day to day life for many (although it should) - it has no scientific utility and shouldn't be taught in a science class as a scientific theory.

It's the stupid people stupid

Sigh

As Ripley once said, "Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?". Now I know the answer, yes they did. According to a recent study in my home country, the United Kingdom, one in three kids didn't know chips (fries) are made from potatoes. Bless the little crackers, some of them even thought chips (that's fries to you American's) were from eggs, flour or apples, some even some thought they were made "mosty of fat". Well I guess that last one isn't exactly far from the truth since your average grease laden chip probably isn't far off being mostly fat.

As loyal reader Charlster would point out, what hope is there for us now, if kids don't even know what fries are made from? If the human race continues at this rate in a few generations we'll all end up being out smarted by just a slightly above average IQ pigeon (if the bird flue doesn't get them all first).

Memories #1

I remember standing on our porch in the depths of winter and my father pointing out a "falling star" in the sky. I was very young and as I watched it move through the sky it really bothered me, "What happens if it falls on us?" I wondered.

All grown up I now know it wasn't a "falling" or "shooting" star which are caused by meteorites burning up (hopefully) in the upper atmosphere. It was almost certainly satellite since meteorites, even slow moving ones, don't stay up in the sky long enough for someone to call you to the outside and show it to you. In fact on reflection I wonder if I remember this event clearly - my father clearly new the difference between a satellite and a meteorite in the sky. Perhaps he told me it was a satellite and explained it wasn't a "falling star" and I later fretted about the existence of falling stars until I knew better myself.

Of course the reality is that while meteorites are not stars, sometimes they do reach the earth, and as such might fall on us. While most of the earth's surface is ocean, and most of the ground is uninhabited there have been many cases of property damage by meteorites reaching terra firma. So far I haven't heard of anyone being killed by a meteorite though I'll be willing to bet it has happened.

So in a twisted kind of way, as a bright and starry eyed kid, I was right to worry about falling stars landing on me!