Thursday, December 16, 2004

Merry Christmas

I'm done. Super duper done with "Happy Holidays." I'm so very tired of all of the political correctness now a days. It's completely out of hand, and I have zero desire to live in a country like France that doesn't allow any religous expression.

So I'm officially announcing that "Happy Holidays" has left my vocabulary and will be replaced with "Merry Christmas." If you have a problem with that, I'll give you a cookie to help you over the pain and suffering that you must be feeling.
You Don't Know Jack

We live in a world where seemingly everything is known. That’s how I saw the world until the wonderful audio book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything” entered my life. I’m halfway through the audio book, and I can confidently say that we know jack. That’s being generous.

It’s probably because I’m not as educated as most, but I just didn’t understand the level of guessing that goes on in the sciences that is presented as fact to the general public. Here’s a couple of examples:

* Our attempts to uncover what the Earth is constructed of and how it is constructed are educated guesses at best. If the Earth were an apple, the furthest anyone (Russia) has been able to penetrate is 1/3 of the way through the skin. That leaves a lot of room for guessing errors. Granted, scientists have a really good idea of how it’s constructed from reading various waves that pass through the infrastructure, but then again, those ideas seem to change every 30 years or so.

* Scientists in Switzerland were able to take 2 neutrons from the same atom, separate them by 7 miles (the book didn’t get into how they did that), and then spin one of the neutrons. The other neutron immediately spun in the opposite direction at the same rate. Why? No clue.

Here’s two thoughts rumbling around in my head now:

1. Anytime I hear anything that is from a scientific study, my instant reaction is “riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.”

2. I actually think that there’s a lot of opportunity for those folks that enter the sciences to discover new and interesting things. I didn’t think that previously.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

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