My Last Question

Well, actually it's Asimov's last question. This compelling short story was by far his favorite. I'd been meaning to share this for a while, and never got around to it. Well, better late than never. The ending is especially thought-provoking, and actually, in a weird sort of way, fits with some of the leading theories about how the universe started.

So without further stalling for time: The Last Question

My Easter Night

3 billion people live on less than two dollars a day. If you could get an accurate count of the number of people who never have and never will set foot in a school, and then said that number out loud, you'd be saying "hundred million" somewhere in there. If you did the same for women (by which I include those as young as 13) who are being forced to work as prostitutes within the boarders of the United States of America, your lips would still have to form the words "hundred thousand." And the majority of them face threats and the possibility of death and beatings on a daily basis. We have schools in such disrepair that sewage backs up into classrooms through broken or exploded pipes. The casualties of wars and armed conflicts around the world includes tens of thousands of children, every day. In certain parts of Africa, the women are sent to get water instead of men, because the women will be raped and allowed to return to their families-in-hiding with the life-saving water afterwards, while the men will just be murdered (imagine a family meeting where you have to decide if it will be your wife, your sister, your mother, or your daughter).

Tonight I'm going to a Flyers game. I'll sit in a luxury suite, eat delicious food, and even have an HDTV in the suite's private bathroom so I don't have to miss a minute of the game. On my way back I'll pass several people sleeping on top of steam vents in the sidewalk to keep warm.

And if I'm sad for any part of tonight, it won't be because of anything I've mentioned yet, but for my own selfish reasons, my own losses which have sent me plummeting to only being better off than 98 or 99% of the world.

And I'm considered to be reasonably good and selfless for a human being.

My Random Bracket

My randomly generated (though slightly weighted probabilities based on seeds) March Madness Bracket is tied for 6th in my Facebook pool of 28 people. Not too shabby. The only conscious decision I made was to have UNC win it all, because in the 10 minutes of college basketball I watched all season, they looked pretty good.

I wonder if March Madness is like stock-picking...especially if you weight it by seeds...for example, if you set up a series of big boards with each matchup on them (and made better-seeded teams larger to increase the probability of them being hit by...well, you'll see in a minute), and then showed the to monkeys who would in turn hurl feces at them...and then generated the bracket based on what the monkeys hit...could you outperform most fans? Monkeys picking stocks can outperform most investors.

Given how little I know about basketball, my slightly weighted random bracket is more or less that (except it smells better). So far so good.

For those of you disappointed in my Pi Day performance, what do you think about this for next year?

I've been getting a lot of hits from college campuses lately, so to cater to this growing segment of my readership, I think I'll show you this: The Many Uses of Vodka. If you ever needed an excuse (for yourself or for some mild authority figure on campus or in your dormitory) for keeping vodka around, here are 19 good ones.

I was going to post this morning, but then there were some fire-related happenings in the building. Anyway, and hour and a half after my pre-wake-up-alarm fire-alarm they let me back into my smoke-filled building. At least I thought to grab my jacket. Also, at least I had a good excuse for being late to work. Not much you can say to 5 fire trucks, 2 small fire SUVs, 2 police cars and an ambulance.

Anyway, I've been having a bit of a week. And the early wake-up, hanging around in the cold in PJs...let's just say Mr. Universe is having a little too much fun at my expense. And it's beginning to disrupt my blogging ability.

For those of you who didn't get enough of Pi on Pi Day, this comes courtesy of Queen Frostine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VLy6iUEeIY

Happy Pi Day, everyone.

I'm afraid I won't be able to go all out this year, but Chuck has suggested Pizza Pi (screw the "e"--well, for now...I suppose it can get its own day...February 71st?). He's a good roommate. His little brothers are coming, and we'll be going to the Star Wars exhibit at the Franklin Institute. So despite my lack of pi celebration this year, I'll still have a pretty nerdy weekend.

My blog was recently visited by someone from Lovely, Kentucky. What a delightful name for a place. Of course, given the way "Greenland" and "Iceland" work, Lovely, Kentucky is probably anything but. There are some snooty northerners who would say that Lovely, Kentucky is an oxymoron, but I hear they serve delicious chicken breasts on buttery biscuits down there.

I'd just like to say that watching hockey from a superbox is awesome. That is all.

My Baller

I'm not usually one to adopt the lingo of Lord Henry, but this guy--brought to my attention by the First Tiger--defies all description except for "baller." And I'm not even sure what "baller" means.

Buster Martin is poised to become the world's oldest marathon runner and the tender age of 101. In addition to holding world records for oldest person to run a 5k and a 10k, he recently became the oldest person to complete a half-marathon--and he did it in just over 5 hours. For starters, I'm pretty sure that's about as well as I would do. And even more impressively, he would have finished sooner but he stopped halfway through for a beer and a cigarette. That's right, Buster is a heavy drinker and smoker. He also was in a rock band whose members had a combined age of over 3,000, and he's fathered 17 (yes, seventeen) children. He likes kids, and wishes he had more.

Speaking of his love for kids, he's running for charity, supporting families with children who have life-threatening diseases.

How else CAN one describe a guy like that? Baller.

My Scattered Updates (March 08)

Apparently blogging can be good for your health! Social health that is. And since this is all based on survey results, it doesn't mean the bloggers are actually socially healthier, it just means they think they are (of course, if they're happier and think they have more friends and are more connected...isn't that just as good for one's mental state of being?). That kind of philosophy is beyond the scope of this blog.

Also, important safety tip I learned this week on a business trip: Harrisburg is not a great place for seafood. If you go out for a nice Italian meal there, the chicken parm's probably a safer bet than anything coming from a body of water. I thought my coworkers were joking about the fish coming from the Susquehanna River (which runs through the city), but now I'm not so sure. I still think they were joking, if only because a local source would have resulted in fresher fish.

Furthermore, Harrisburg would be a nice place to visit if only they had a smoking ban, like every other civilized city in the country. Unfortunately, Harrisburg isn't the kind of place that would pass such a city ordinance. Fortunately, though, the Pennsylvania State Legislature might. The House and the Senate have both passed smoking bans, but they are vastly different with lots of exceptions to the rule. Still, I expect there to be a state-wide smoking ban in place by sometime during 2010. My only fear is that the new one will be both more lenient than the Philadelphia one and include language that would render the Philly one null (though the Republican in me believes the local government should be able to add to the law, if not take away from it--the problem is if the PA smoking ban clearly PERMITS smoking, instead of just not banning it, in certain types of places). Hopefully my local representatives will fight for our beloved right to breathe in a bar.

Finally, the Lindsay Lohan thing worked. Despite having nothing to say on my blog for several days, my hits were about 30% higher than I would have expected. Maybe I should end every post with "Lindsay Lohan Naked" or some other timely reference to popular culture.

My Lindsay Lohan

I won't be blogging for the next few days, so I'm going to run a test. Apparently websites are getting more hits the more they mention Lindsay Lohan, so I'm going to write a post that basically just says "Lindsay Lohan" in it a lot. Basically, the rise in Lindsay's popularity has to do with the nude photographs of her recently published in New York Magazine (or something like that) in which she apparently does a fair imitation of Marilyn Monroe (which always makes me think of the Marilyn Monrobot from Futurama...Lindsay Lobot anyone?).

According to what I read, all I have to do is mention Nude Lindsay Lohan or Lindsay Lohan Nude or naked, and voila! Instant web traffic! So as long as I won't be posting much, I might as well run a little experiment:

Lindsay Lohan. Naked.

My Gun

Every year, around 30,000 Americans are killed by guns. If you add up enough industrialized European countries with gun control laws so that their total population is about that of the United States, you'd be hard pressed to find a collection of countries and a year during which the total number of gun deaths in those nations was even 1% of the US total. One percent. A few laws, a few years, and we could reduce our gun violence and gun deaths by 99%. That's staggering.

Some people are quick to point out that most gun injuries are not fatal--which I know makes me feel better. Sure, 30,000 people die because of a gun-delivered bullet, but that's only a third of the total number of people treated in emergency rooms every year for non-fatal gun injuries.

Our gun control laws are so lax, the FBI has caught terrorists who, in search of weapons for their groups, have come to the United States to buy at gun shows where it's surprisingly easy for an unlicensed vendor to sell weapons without conducting a background check. In 2000, they caught a terrorist who had come to Michigan (where, by the way, being blind doesn't preclude gun ownership or use) to buy weapons for his Lebanese terrorist cell. Turns out in the Middle East, one of the best ways to get guns is buy them here and ship them back.

After September 11th, we went nuts with protective legislation designed to thwart terrorists. We sacrificed privacy, free speech, the right to due process involving a speedy trial by peers and clear accusations, the right not to be tortured, the right to not be held without cause, and even information from our leaders about what they were doing and why. All in the name of national security. But in all our legislative fury, much of which is now regretted by many, we couldn't make a single inroad into gun control? How is this not a major national security issue? Even without terrorists, we're killing each other at around 100 times the rate of every other advanced industrialized nation (more for most, closer to 300 times on average). We're so concerned about the Second Amendment, which provides for well-regulated state militias, that we'll allow terrorists to supply themselves within our own boarders if it means preserving the right to "hunt" with an assault rifle a few hours after placing the order?

And it's escalating. After Virginia Tech and NIU, a Villanova law student is asking for the right to carry a concealed weapon to class, for protection. Imagine if he wins this one. Every kid in class could have a concealed weapon. Ms. Susie Everykid could buy a gun from an illegal vendor (without even knowing about the illegal part), put it in her backpack, take it to class, draw it as the teacher is assigning homework and not be breaking a single law until 6 people were dead. Sure, she might have killed 8 if not for the Glock-toting petitioner in the back. (Though who's to say he wouldn't kill someone in the crossfire himself? His scenario takes place in a crowded and frantic lecture hall.) It's an understandable argument, and a slippery slope, saying he'd rather have 2 guns than 1 in the room.

Me personally? I'd rather have zero.

Max Power informed me that of all the links he's recently shown me, he prefers I blog about this one above all others:
http://www.notmartha.org/archives/2008/02/27/bacon-cups/

That said, there's not much to blog about. They kind of speak for themselves. How about..."delicious"