Some Knowledge

There are many times and situations in which a person might not know what to do.  This is why people possess something called judgment.  You have to weigh all the facts and decide for yourself what the best course of action is.  Without enough confidence to make a decision, you will be lost for what to do next.  Just know, that you have spent your entire life preparing for the next moment.  Use your best judgment and make a decision on what to do.

It takes some guts to take action.  You can spend your entire life trying to think what to do.  Until you decide on a course of action, you are lost.  If you want a better job, you will have to look for work.  If you want to make friends, you will have to find people to befriend.  If you want to promote your website, you will have to do things to get it known.  Each day is filled with possible courses of action.  Figuring out what you want to do and following through on your desire should not take too much thought.

If you are concerned about some problem that you may be facing, consider what you need to do to solve this problem.  If you are concerned about some problem the world is facing, figure out how to solve this problem and tell the world what it needs to do.  There is nothing that will waste more time than sitting around thinking the same thoughts over and over.  There are few things as frustrating as doing the same things day after day with no results.

The important thing involved in taking action is to know what is the best action to take.  The problem is that nobody can answer this question.  We can only know what will be the most likely thing to produce some desired result.  If you want to write a novel, you will have to start by writing chapter one.  If you want to bake bread, you will have to get flour, water, and yeast.  Knowing what to do is as simple as knowing what you want to do.  If you don’t know what you want, you will have to make some more decisions.  Maybe a few minutes of brainstorming is what is needed to sort out your thoughts.  Maybe you should ask a friend what you should do.  Maybe you should stop procrastinating and take some action.

If you want to live an effective and rewarding life, you will have to get things done.  It does nobody any good to sit around and wonder what you are going to do next.  It is not rocket science to come up with a plan for your life.  Decide what you want to do and do it.  Consider what implications your actions will have.  Consider what can go wrong with your plans and minimize any negative effects your actions may produce.  You may be focussed on the things you want to get out of life.  This is fine, for a few minutes, but what you should be thinking about is how you are going to get these things.

This blog lacks a niche.  I do not have one restricted topic or type of subject to consider.  I go from one idea to another as fast as my mind changes.  This might put some people off.  I’m just not interested in one particular thing as opposed to any other.  I have never been a specialist.  I like to read and find out about many various things.  Maybe this limits my appeal.  I don’t really know.  There are a lot of blogs that are about one particular topic.  I guess if you want to explore  one topic more than anything else this might be good.  If I only wanted to write about one kind of thing, like cars, maybe this would make for an interesting reading experience, for people who are only interested in cars.

In truth, I do not understand people who limit their experience to one particular field of knowledge.  Yes, it takes time to learn about any subject.  I spent four years learning about physics, and probably only scratched the surface of that subject.  I don’t write a lot about physics.  I lost interest in the subject when everything was all about finding one equation that describes everything.  Perhaps it was my realization that there is no such equation.  The three body problem in classical physics does not even have any deterministic solution.  Chaos creeps into any system once complexity goes above a very low degree.

People like to specialize.  There are many different levels of specialization.  Medicine is a specialized field of knowledge.  There are doctors who specialize in one particular disease.  This is perhaps necessary.  You wouldn’t want a person who hasn’t studied and practiced surgery to do your heart transplant.  There are some things in life that require a high degree of skill.

Blogging does not require tons of skills.  You need to know how to write.  Most children learn this in school.  You need to know something about the world and about how to find information.  That’s what the Internet does best.  Earlier this morning I was looking up analog computers and all kinds of different things about electronics.  Still, there is more to knowledge than just the net.  There are things any person knows that they’ve learned from life.  You don’t really need a subject for a blog entry.  All you need is something to say.

The weather today has been cool.  It has looked like rain all day.  The sky was full of clouds and there is a slight wind.  It’s just a dismal chilly day.

I found some interesting cars online today.  First, I looked for Chevy Vegas, because I used to have a couple of those.  I read a lot about all the problems Chevrolet had with that model.  You’d think a company would design a car that would hold up to some miles.  Apparently, it’s easier to build a car that falls apart after a short time so people come back and buy a new one.

After reading about the Vega, I looked up my Olds 98.  I found a nice shiny maroon ‘73 98 that was listed online as sold.  The car had a pink steering wheel.  It looked like the boat that car was.  If I ever make millions of dollars I might buy another one of those vehicles and fix it up nice.  Nothing like living like an oil tycoon.

The oil tycoons really must have loved the big cars they made in the early 70’s.  A whole fleet of vehicles sucking down refined petroleum as fast as it can be made.  The oil companies are probably making more money today, with more vehicles on the road and the price of oil all going through the roof.  It’s like people can’t seem to use the stuff up fast enough.  Despite new oil fields being discovered off Brazil, we are just about at the peak of oil right now.  With higher consumption, the price will skyrocket and the supplies will run out sooner.

There’s something to be said for living simply.  Using only the resources you need to survive, a person could have a long happy life without all the comforts we take for granted.  I read a story about some people who live in a village in Costa Rica, I think.  It was an interview with a woman who is 100 years old.  She does not drive anywhere.  She lives in a shack and keeps chickens.  Of course, it is a tropical country and climate and a person does not have to fend off the cold of winter.  Still, people need food to live, clean water, and a place to shelter.  You do not need to drive out to the show in a big Cadillac.

Then, for a while, I read about the petrochemical industry.  They make a lot of stuff out of oil.  Plastics, various chemicals used in cars, just about anything you think of has some petroleum in it.  I read a discussion on a forum about how to produce synthetic petroleum from plant oils.  Forums are strange.  One person introduces a topic, and a hundred people all start talking about something else completely.  There was no real answer to this question.  It’s something I’m sure scientists are working on.  Who wouldn’t want an endless supply of renewable plastic?

As I recall, Henry Ford developed a plastic for his cars made from soybeans.  That was a long time ago.  With all that people have learned in the last 100 years, you’d think there would be all kinds of things we could make out of plants.  So, I read about some of this stuff, but soon got bored.  I read about Richard Branson going to fuel a 747 with biodiesel or something similar.  I guess if you have to fly, you may as well fuel your jet with something renewable.  The thing is, this was supposed to be a test flight, and there would be no passengers.  So, the whole flight is just a big waste of fuel.  How environmentally conscious is that?

The price of all forms of energy is increasing.  Well, all forms except the free.  Sunlight still falls on the earth and costs nothing.  Mostly, all it does is heat up the earth.  Some of it is captured by plants, or by solar cells, but for the most part, sunlight doesn’t do much but heat up the planet.  The sun is not even heating up the environment here today.  It’s all bouncing off the thick layer of clouds and speeding back off into space.

Water is the key to why the earth will even support life.  Most of the surface of the earth is covered by water.  Water is the coolant of this planet, along with the atmosphere.  It is a simple feedback system.  The hotter the earth gets, the more water evaporates from the seas.  The more water that evaporates, the more water that condenses into clouds.  The more clouds there are, the less sunlight reaches the earth.  The less sunlight reaching the earth, the less the earth heats up.  A cooler earth means less water evaporates from the seas.  Less evaporation means less clouds, and more sunlight.  It’s a thermal servo circuit that regulates the temperature of earth to within a hundred degrees or so.  How convenient.

I think a lot about what will happen in the future.  I know people are not stupid.  People can be ignorant of some things however.  People ignore most of the stuff they consume.  We live on a planet where we are programmed from birth by business to consume as much as possible.  We are told in endless commercial advertisements that we will only be happy when we can purchase certain things.  We are sold useless things like diamonds as if these things were necessary to our personal relationships.  Shiny carbon is nice, I guess, but it is in no way something that is necessary to form a pair bond with another person.  We need cars to transport ourselves to jobs that we need so we can afford to buy a car to transport us to our jobs.  We need new clothes so that we will be in fashion, which changes several times each year.

All this consumerism leads to senseless waste.  Should you send your old shoes to the landfill just because they are not the latest style?  Do you need to have plastic packaging surrounding your new widget that will just be thrown away?  When you buy that new car, does the old one just get sent to the junk yard as scrap?  In some areas of the world they still repair things that break.  More and more these days, things are not repairable.  It costs less just to get a new radio than it would cost to fix the old one.  There is a lot of room on this planet for recycling old products.

The more things people invent, the more different things people will want.  One new device makes all the old ones obsolete.  More and more, people use something until they replace it with something better.  Things can be made so reliable that they seldom break.  But the lifetime of a product is something that is engineered into it.  Your new computer is only good for as long as it takes for engineers to design something that will make it useless.  Software and hardware work hand in hand to produce this cycle of planned obsolescence.  You buy a new computer.  The software developers design a program that requires a more powerful machine.  If you want to run the new program, you will need to upgrade your hardware.  It’s the way a consumer society works.

Things don’t need to be that way.  With some lack of cutting edge functionality, you can use a computer until it breaks.  There will always be old programs to run.  The advantage to this is that often old software is free.  A person does not need to buy the latest gadget to use a cell phone.  You do not need the latest Blackberry Bold to store your phone numbers.  A pen and pad of paper can do almost the same job.  In the future, when things become more expensive, it may become the style to reuse old equipment.  Then again, we may have a revolution in our social system that allows all the people of the world to be rich.

The resources of the earth are finite.  There is only a certain amount of food that is grown each year.  There are over six billion human beings on the earth that all have to share these resources.  The various governments on the earth were not all founded to be fair systems.  Some people collect far more of the earth’s resources than they can use personally.  Other people have nothing.  Life is in many ways what you make of it, still, there are people who do not have a chance on this planet.  A person needs abilities, and opportunity to use those abilities.  Without knowledge and opportunity, a person is helpless and needs others to take care of him.  There’s really nothing wrong with this.  People like helping each other out, in general, as long as it’s not a huge imposition.

The world runs on money.  This is one of the things that all modern societies have in common, an economic system.  Money is how people apportion goods and services.  Money is how people control other people.  Most people would not want to clean out a sewer system.  The Romans used to force slaves to do this kind of work.  Today, all you have to do is create a job and offer money, and somebody will do this work for you.  The monetary system coexisted with slavery for many years, but has evolved to replace it.  A lot of people with jobs will even think of themselves as slaves to the dollar.  Money is useful for keeping track of transactions for goods and for trading for useful things.  The economic system is also open to the potential abuse of people controlling others for their own gain.  This is what a corporation is, a group of people who control other people for profit.

If I were going to start a company, I’m not sure what I would do.  Living in America is an advantage when it comes to going into business.  This country was founded with the entrepreneur in mind.  Yes, there are taxes.  Yes there are regulations.  Indeed, there are laws that have to be obeyed.  Still, America is the land of opportunity.  All a person needs is a product or service they can sell for a profit and the sky’s the limit.  The government loves business here, because business makes the government a lot of money.  Money is the one thing everybody is taught to want and need.  Without money, a person might not survive.  Business is how people make money.  People survive by selling things to other people for some of their money.  This is the modern world.

Now, look at things from a different perspective, outside of modern society.  The things a person needs to survive are air, water, food, shelter, and heat.  There is no survival value for possessing shiny rocks.  Gold and silver do not sustain life.  What is needed is food and air and water.  Money is an artificial construct that only serves the purpose of trade.  A person can trade without money.  I could trade elk meat for berries.  Modern society is far more complex than primitive culture.  Still, what is necessary for life is the same.  In the old days people did not think of the land as something they owned.  They moved from place to place following the game and the seasons.   People generally live in cities now where they cannot forage for food.  People have houses to maintain and land to tend and things to keep them busy.  It is an easy life in some ways, and a hard life.  You have to play the games of modern man to survive in the big city.

There are still primitive cultures in some places on earth.  Most modern humans would not want to live in these kinds of conditions.  They make TV shows about people who go to live with primitive tribes for a while.  There are many advantages to living in modern society.  Long life is one of these advantages.  Better communications and better diet are other advantages.  Soon, we will have robots to do the truly hard work that people just would rather not do.  The future holds much promise for man.  But the thing that powers all this advancement is energy.  Without energy, the whole thing grinds to a halt and people start dying.

Fusion energy is one of the sources that people have been researching for many years.  Fusion reactors are still off in the future.  There is no reason this technology will not be developed, but there are other ways.  We could derive energy from a fully functional fusion reactor that is 93 million miles away, the sun.  We could do a lot of things with the resources that are available to us.  We could feed all the starving people of the earth with the food that is already available, if only it could be distributed and was not wasted as a source of motor fuel and luxury foods like meat.  We could live in a peaceful world if only governments could find a way to get along.  Wars are very wasteful.  Modern society is very wasteful.  We do not need to throw away our resources just to keep the price of things high.  On the other hand, low prices promote waste.  People need to find a better way of apportioning the resources of earth than a wasteful economic system.  Maybe tomorrow I will think of the answer.

Soylent Green, dystopian fantasy or grim vision of the future?  Made in 1973 and starring Charleton Heston and Edward G Robinson, Soylent Green is one of the classic movies of all time.  The film depicts an overpopulated world filled with pollution, where food is not generally available.  The vast majority of people exist on a diet of processed food products made by the multinational Soylent corporation.

Even though this movie is a darkly-themed piece of cinema, I still like it.  I think the concept is pretty funny actually.  The idea that you could feed people the processed bodies of the dead is pretty ridiculous.  How exactly do you turn meat into a cracker?  They must mix the dead bodies with a lot of filler like corn or soybeans, or as the company claims, plankton.  This kind of recycling just would not work in principle.  A person eats far more than their own weight in a year.  Sure, it might improve the flavor of soybeans, but still, the human flesh in the cracker is not going to be a big proportion of the caloric content.

Perhaps the funniest element in this movie is the way people riot for this great-tasting food product.  They actually used some kind of bucket loader to scoop up rioters looking to get more Soylent Green.  Sure, it’s pretty macabre to think of people fighting over human flesh for food, but at the same time it’s ridiculous and absurd.  If food were really so rare and expensive, people would dig up their lawns and plant potatoes.

The theme of this movie is anything but funny.  What would the world be like if there were ten times as many people as today?  What would everybody eat?  How would a government control crowds of rioting and starving persons?  Reality is different than movies.  There is no physical way for the world to become overpopulated.  The amount of available food limits population.  If there is not enough food to feed people, they die.  This limits population to a sustainable level.  Disease and crime also increase in crowded conditions, further reducing the number of people.  Then there are always the wars various governments foist off on people.

Soylent Green could have been a better movie.  Instead of turning it into a detective story, they could have done the movie from the point of view of the Soylent Corporation.  It might have been funnier to watch busy executives arguing over the laws of supply and demand as they go about grinding up bodies for food.  At the same time, it might have been worse that way.  Money should not grant one person privilege over another person’s life.  But that’s the way the world operates.

I don’t think the world will ever degenerate to the point where we have to recycle dead people into food.  Most people would be revolted by the very idea.  In a world where so many people are without food, what is needed is better management of the resources that we have.  If some company actually started making food products out of algae, we might have an alternative to land-based agriculture.  If I made crackers out of algae, I know what I would want to call them.  If I get anything out of this movie in the way of an idea, it’s that there is always some way to supply what people need.  If people ever want to eat tasty green crackers, or are forced to eat these things by necessity, some company will appear to manufacture the product.

It’s Sunday morning.  There is a wide area of rain sweeping across the nation, bringing storms and destruction to the unlucky few.  I’ve seen it on the news this morning, and know it is on the way here.  The big storms are all to the south, so we should only get some soaking rain.  There should be no tornadoes here this morning, and that is good.

If it were not so expensive, people might build homes that were impervious to storms.  If it were not for flooding, people could live in underground warrens, dug out tunnels below the ground where storms could not harm them.  Underground homes would be easier to heat and cool.  You could grow food crops on top of your house.  People could travel back and forth to their jobs on underground railways.  The surface of the earth could be covered with solar cells and windmills to supply power to the people living underground.  Robots could do the hard labor of farming and manufacturing.

Of course, there are other problems with living underground.  Lack of sunlight does nobody any real good.  There would be the constant threat of cave ins.  Floods could potentially drown people like rats.  It would be quiet, however.  The earth absorbs sound well.  There would be no traffic noise outside your windows.  Storms could just blow by overhead and uproot all the trees without wrecking your house.

Of course, underground cities would be massively expensive to construct.  You would need ventilation equipment to keep the air fresh.  It would take a lot of steel to shore up the roof and walls.  You would probably have to install several flat screen TVs on the walls to show live pictures of the outside so people don’t go stir crazy from being inside all the time.  There would have to be good artificial lightning all the time.  Plumbing might be a problem, as lines would be buried deeply.  Still, it could be done.

I’m not sure if underground cities are the new wave of the future.  Maybe if people built homes by welding together I-beams and setting them in concrete they would not blow down in tornadoes.  Maybe if people set up millions of windmills they would absorb the damaging energy of storms and keep destruction to a minimum.  Who knows.  Perhaps there is some survival value to being lucky.  One thing is for certain.  When the rains come, you will get wet, if you are not under some kind of roof.

I have a 1985 Mazda RX-7.  It’s seen better days.  For the last couple years the car has sat out by the barn.  It made a handy home for little mice and wasps.  Leaves fell on the car and decayed into dirt.  Rust slowly ate through the bottom of the doors, and the battery went dead.  A film of black dirt covered the paint.

The other day some guys came buy to ask if I wanted to sell this vehicle.  “Sure, why not?”  I thought, and led them back to the barn.  “The battery’s dead.  The car has a lot of problems.”  I explained, showing them the derelict.  I gave them my price and they still seemed interested.  I told them I would charge up the battery and try to get the thing started.  I gave them my phone number and they said they’d call me Saturday.

So, the next day I put the battery charger on the car, and pumped air into the tires.  I checked out the radio, and made sure the battery was taking a charge.  After a day on the charger, the engine turned over.  It would not run without a shot of starting fluid, of which I was fresh out.  I stopped by Murray’s Auto and got a can of starting fluid.  After sitting around this morning wasting time on the net and writing in this blog, I decided to see if the car would start.

A good shot of starting fluid down the throat of the carb and a key twist later the engine roared to life.  I let it warm up for a while, but not long enough.  It stalled out and I had to hit it with the fluid again.  This time I let it get good and warm, and it finally idled pretty well.  I closed up the hood and retrieved the can of fluid, and threw the thing into reverse.  The right rear wheel just spun.  In two years the car had sunk into the ground,  Some wheel spinning and back and forth rocking later, and the car was free.  I pulled up to the front driveway and parked the RX on asphalt.

With the car safely parked, I got the shop vac and cleaned out all the leaves that had collected in the various crevices of the vehicle.  I vacuumed out the engine compartment, including a mouse nest by the battery.  Then I mixed up a bucket of soapy water and got a rag and the hose and washed the grime off the car.  A little cosmetic help will not detract from any price offers.

So the car is running and can be transported and is relatively clean.  Now I’m waiting around for this guy to call.  If he doesn’t get back to me this week, I think I’ll make up some nice number signs and park the car by the road and put a price on it.  It never hurts to advertise.  I did a lot of work on that car to keep it running over the couple years I drove it, and I spent a lot of cash on stuff like cool speakers and a stereo and all the other stuff I did to make the car run.  Now I just have to become a used car dealer and sell the thing off.  Shouldn’t be too hard.  I can always sell it to the junkyard for scrap.  In fact, I might make more money taking and selling parts of it online to people looking to rebuild this car.  It’s not a complete pile of junk.

I have spent many days working on cars in my life.  I used to do all kinds of different service to vehicles.  It is a hobby I used to enjoy.  If you can take a piece of junk and make it work to get you around, you have saved some money.  I probably spent more on gas and insurance for that vehicle than I ever did on the price.  Still, it would be nice to get rid of the thing so I don’t have to think about working on it all the time.  I have considered converting it into an electric car, but it’s kind of heavy for that.  It was interesting to study the construction of this contraption and learn how it operates.  Perhaps I will go into the car business and design my own vehicles.  Perhaps I will only need a couple hundred million to start a car company.  That’s what venture capital is for, right?

The price for food is increasing worldwide.  People have been killed in food riots in many countries triggered by the higher cost of food.  There are many factors involved in the higher prices.  The cost of energy necessary to grow and transport food has gone up.  There are diminished supplies of some grains due to bad weather.  Stockpiles of wheat are diminishing.  Even in developed countries like Italy, people have protested the higher prices.

Protests and riots will do nothing to lower the cost of food.  What is needed is more supply of grains and other staples.  To increase production, the world will have to focus more on growing food.  The diversion of food products to the production of biofuels is one of the causes of higher prices.  Any way you look at it, higher energy prices mean higher prices for food.

The market is what determines prices.  People speculate on food commodities.  This is like large scale hoarding, hoping that the price will increase, all to make money.  Speculation is just one of the things that drives market prices.  With supplies diminishing, prices will naturally increase.  This is why diamonds are so expensive.  If there were a lot of diamonds everywhere, they would be worthless.  The same principle applies to food.  The thing is, there is less food available.  The answer to this problem is to grow more food.  The problem with growing more food is that it costs more to grow the food.  The weather is also a factor.  Droughts drive up the price of food because there is less that survives.

Another factor driving up the price of food is the devaluation of currency.  Money tends to lose value over time.  Inflation is a factor in every economy.  It’s not just the dollar that’s losing purchasing power, it’s money in general.  Prices tend to increase over time.  An economic theory for why prices increase might be that they keep making more money, so the supply of money increases, so it has less value.

People need to eat to survive.  In any shortage or price increase, it is the poor people who will suffer first.  Possession of money has a survival value associated with it.  If you are wealthy you can afford the higher prices for things.  If you are broke, you could starve to death.  Whether this is fair or not is a question for philosophers.  The fact is that some people are more privileged than others because they have more money.  You don’t see people rioting over the high price of lobster.  Lobster has been very expensive for years.  You don’t see people protesting the high price of caviar.  Caviar is a luxury food.  If you can afford expensive foods, you are in no danger of starvation when the price of grain doubles, as it has.

What is the answer to the increasing cost of food?  I don’t necessarily think there is an answer.  People will probably have to work harder to survive.  Persons with access to land might want to plant gardens to grow some of their own food.  Even food you grow yourself costs some money.  It might be better to rely on grains and vegetables for your food, as these tend to cost less than meat, both in terms of price and cost of production.  People too poor to afford food will either have to find better lines of work, or will have to rely on government aid or humanitarian programs.  The age of abundance is coming to a close.  Unless some new, cheap energy source is found to drive our society, prices will continue to go up and more people will suffer.

I’ve just been trying to look up how the coffee crop is doing this year.  It seems the production of coffee is up in Colombia and Brazil.  What I learned is that coffee goes in cycles.  There will be a year of short harvests, like last year, then a year of big harvests.  I did not see too many definitive reports on the harvest, though, just short blurbs.

I’m pretty certain that the consumer price of coffee is not going down with the increased yields of this crop.  There are a lot of transportation costs associated with this product, and the cost of transportation is always going up.  There is also packaging and processing costs associated with any commodity.  You have to clean and roast coffee.  You have to grind it up and put it into those cans.  Then there is the markup for the wholesaler and the retailer.  There is a whole chain of command in getting any product to your local store.

I looked at one site that was a breakdown of the commodities market in cocoa, coffee, sugar, and oranges.  This site was designed for people investing in commodities.  They did not seem happy that the price of raw material for the commodities industry was going down.  I don’t know about people who have this outlook.  It seems they would be pleased if the crops had a bad year and the prices went up.  Isn’t that the whole rationale behind investing in commodities?  You buy stocks of something in a year when the prices are low, and hold onto them waiting for a bad year when you can sell your product for a profit.  I’m surprised that people invest in food this way.

When you store food items, they do not necessarily get better with age.  Wine might be an exception to this principle.  Still, you would think there would be more trading in wine if this were the case.  You might buy wine in the year it was produced, and store it in a warehouse waiting for it to age and improve.  Then you would sell it for a profit.  Maybe the wine market is too small for people to trade heavily in it.  Maybe the wineries do this themselves and get the profits.  I don’t even know if wine improves with age.  You’d think the flavor molecules would break down after long enough on the shelf.

In any case, there will be more coffee available in the world this year.  This is probably good for the retailers.  Their costs will go down slightly.  With inflation and the weak dollar, it’s pretty certain that the price of coffee for the consumer will just go up.  What gets me is that the farmers who grow this stuff are not really making more money on their work.  The price they get for their goods is determined by the commodities markets.  When production increases, prices drop.  So, the farmer has to do more work to get basically the same amount of money.  You might think they would be better off with a bad crop and higher prices.  The market sometimes makes no sense.

There were some clouds in the sky this morning.  It rained for a few minutes a little past noon.  Now the clouds have blown away and the sun is shining.  It is a warm, bright, wonderful afternoon.

When I see the sun shining full force down on the earth, I think of all the good things we get from our star.  The light makes the plants grow, and plants give us food.  Our planet is warm and comfortable for life because of the heat that comes from the sun.  Sunlight drives the winds and the rain, and allows us to see what the heck is going on in the environment.

There are many stars in the universe.  Our star the sun is very nice.  It is small enough that it will not burn up too fast.  The sun has a lifetime of about ten billion years.  Half of those years have passed already.  The sun is in the middle of it’s life.  The whole universe is only supposed to be about fifteen billion years old, which makes the sun a third as old as the entire universe.  Earth orbits a second generation star, but it is a star that will shine for many years.

If people would make plans and prepare for the future, we could get all the energy we need from the sun.  We do not need to send space ships to the sun to extract this energy.  All we have to do is grow crops and trees and harvest solar power with solar cells and windmills and hydro-electric dams.  Sunlight is not as concentrated as energy from fossil fuels, but it can easily be made concentrated.  We could grow algae for processing into oil in shallow ponds near the sea.  There are so many ways to harvest solar energy, and humanity will never run out of this power.

A billion years is a long time.  I wonder what the world will be like in a billion years.  Will it all be paved over with concrete, and intelligent self-replicating machines live in underground tunnels?  Who can say.  I think people will eventually find a way to live happy, productive lives without all the time worrying about the amount of money they have and without having things like wars destroy their security.  People are pretty intelligent creatures.  We will find a way to solve our problems.

I just found the most idiotic thing online.  Today, May 2, 2008, the first Friday in May, is supposed to be no pants day.  It seems this stupid holiday was started by some college students at the University of Austin in Texas.  A group called the Knighthood of BUH is supposed to have come up with the idea.  No pants day even has a website (of course) and from the comments I read there, it seems a lot of people are in favor of this nonsense.

I’ve seen some pretty strange things in my life.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen groups of people walking around in public in their underpants.  The very idea of this is just surreal.  I would be afraid of getting a ticket or something for walking around in my underwear.  I would not feel comfortable out in public in just underpants.  It’s like a very common nightmare.  You’re out in public, and suddenly realize you are not wearing your clothes.

Whoever came up with this idea must have been drinking.  I know, people will do any kind of stupid thing if it is culturally approved.  I only hope this idea does not catch on.  I don not want to see thousands of people walking around outside in their underwear.  People wear clothes for a reason.  It’s fashionable.  Walking around in your underwear like you forgot how to put on your clothes is not a great statement of social rebellion.  It’s just some idiots who think they can get people to take off their clothes because they declare it is the holiday for walking around in your underwear.  If you fall for this lunacy and forget to wear pants today, the joke is on you.