Only in Arkansas

I'm sure you knew what I was talking about just from the title.

The Duggar family, those human rabbits, just welcomed their 18th child into the world. A world of blind religious creed and destructive behaviors.

Michelle Duggar, the matriarch, has basically been pregnant for the last twenty years. Twenty years, eighteen children, you do the math. This is disgusting. We have a population problem, and these people feel the need to do nothing, and I mean apparently nothing but breed. To steal a line, we are not rebuilding after the flood.

We have the highly educated among us having fewer and fewer children, and yet these bottom-of-the-totem pole, borderline cro-magnons are pooping out children like they took some industrial strength ovarian laxative. I don't know what to do. Either kill them or force professors and doctors to just start breeding like mad. For pete's sake, the man's name is Jim Bob! JIM BOB! He sounds like a secondary character from the Dukes of Hazzard! His name might as well be Boomhauer!

I've argued before how I think people are foolish who do not seriously consider the philosophy of their religion, because they frequently base life actions on those beliefs. This is a fantastic example of people not doing that. And how conceivably low can the woman's self esteem be to think that the best way through life is being pregnant damn-near 24/7?

The photo above has been circulating about the interpipes for a few years, now, and is the Duggar family with fourteen children. Yep. Add FOUR MORE. The father described the most recent addition as "just absolutely beautiful, like her mom and her sisters." All of whom I sure he's having sex with.

I'm sorry to degrade to sophomoric name-calling and allegations of incest, but this is absurd. I don't consider the attack ad hominim because not only does his action deserve to be attacked, but so does he. He may not look like a hick, but fundamentalist Christians frequently don't. Instead, they look like quasi-RennFest weirdos in flower print dresses and Sunday-best suits. And not only are they fundamentalist, they are what is referred to as Quiverfull, or Full Quiver Christians.

This particular skewing of Christian creed is not only against birth control in any form, but they active try to have as many children as possible. I assume the woman basically breeds until dead. What the hell are you? Rodents?

You want to see how vacuous these people are? Check out the Wikipedia entry on the family and look at the far-reaching ambitions of the children. Or look up the teachings of the preacher they endorse, Bill Gothard. Let's look at some of his winning stances:

• Women must submit to husbands


• Adults must submit to the husband's father


• He protested against Cabbage Patch Dolls and Treasure Trolls.


• Apparently wrote The Secret, because he thinks all of life's problems come from bad character


• That includes mental illness. I'd love to see him and Tom Cruise go at it.


• Thinks that prayer can cure illnesses like cancer and infertility


• Forbids dancing, dating, and exciting music as evil.


• Thinks the "saved" should limit contact with the evil, outside world. How cult-like. Very nice.


• All children should be home-schooled with the Bible alone.


• Oh, and as always, homosexuality is evil and will cause the end-times.

These people are being featured in a Discovery Channel show. They're becoming something of a celebrity. They shouldn't be celebrated, even slightly! To steal another line, Michelle should have her legs tied together and be heavily sedated! They are religious fanatics who, while allowed to do this if they so want, should be mocked, derided, and ostracized. They are vapid, vacuous, ignorant, bigoted, and in all likelihood mean. I'm not just throwing names, there. People in hard-line fundamentalist groups are in those groups because of serious problems. Child abuse and spousal abuse runs rampant, and if they're not soulless shells of a human, they're very frequently petty, vindictive people scared of, and angry at the world. They should be portrayed as such.

I'm sorry, but I do not want them anywhere near me. I don't want them in our society. And, man, if they believe in avoiding contact with evil sinners like me, that is fan-freaking-tastic.

Just get the fuck off of the TV!

I Love Life, I Love Love, I Love Pie!

Much of religion is something I wouldn't want.

Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, the eponymous star of the first Arabic novel, lived in a cave contemplating God. This was portrayed in the story as being the ideal state of a human. He hardly ever ate. He bordered on being a vegetable. I found the imagery ironically similar to Plato's allegory of the cave. Only, in this version, we spend our time in an actual cave. I assume this was intended, since much of Plato's writing was available to Ibn Tufail, the author, and he meant the irony of true illumination actually taking place in a cave. Still, just imagine what that would be like. Long beard, pale skin, emaciated from barely eating. I wouldn't want that!

I would rather be cursed to a life without a connection to God and actually get stuff done. I want to build things, write stories, and paint pictures. I would rather live a life of pain and achievement than ecstasy and inactivity. In the same way as the prospect of falling from Grace rankles me. Who wouldn't WANT to be out of the garden of Eden. I want to grow my food. I want to shepherd my animals. Who is God to say we cannot have knowledge. Our greatest asset is our mind. No knowledge is bad.

If I live in damnation, so be it. I'll be happy for the rest of time knowing that it is not God, but I who defined my life. What a ridiculous God when all of the interesting people are damned. And that's a fact. Janis Joplin? Damned. Oscar Wilde? Damned. Most of our Presidents are likely damned. The entire team behind the Manhattan project? Oh boy are they fucked. I find it mildly insulting to say that I need God for guidance and purpose. That only God could ever be the final goal in life. What an absurd parent to expect His children to return home.
.

Oh, Men. What Will We Do With You?

This game doesn't euphemize at all. You don't even have to know what it's about and you know that it's meant for men. Big, hulking, bald men with big guns and big "guns," and women in battle bikinis with big guns and big "guns." I guess, kudos to them for knowing their market.

The Death of God

I'm a student of philosophy. I like to think I'm a student in the truest sense, in that I seek truth. While I've discussed before that I think truth can never actually be attained, it's the journey that is important, not the destination. Merely being on a quest for truth should steer me rightly.

One conclusion that I keep hitting is that God, practically, doesn't exist. He might exist, but how can we know? The Bible? Other people telling us so? Ha! Literature and testimony are so unreliable we frequently don't allow them in the courts, much less in such an important question about the existence of the divine.

So many great philosophers who set aside their dogma in a philosophical quest run headlong into a wall that they can't seem to climb. Descartes is the most famous one of which I can think. His (in)famous "light of nature" argument was basically a poorly formed attempt to transcend his earlier destruction of truth.

I have always thought of Aristotle as the first atheist. Even though he assumed that "God" was at the foundation of the world's functioning, he eventually distilled him/her/it down to pure activity. When you've done that, it's a small leap to eliminate the assumption of intelligence and get into a force-driven world. I think it's no surprise that so much of Medieval philosophy was focused on discussing the ramifications of the newly-rediscovered Aristotelian thought. Bonaventure, Aquinas, and many others were dedicated to the now-commonplace arguments for separating empirical observation from religious thought, and even if you couldn't separate them, religious thought trumped empiricism.

Most medieval thought was primarily theological and not philosophical. They really didn't get back into philosophical thought in earnest until near the Renaissance. I say theological because, even though there was philosophical thought mixed in with the overarching religious concepts, the assumption of God and his characteristics was at the center of their works. The Islamic thought of the time was much more receptive to contemplation about the nature of God and was, consequently, closer to real philosophy.

Moving into the Renaissance, we finally got more questions about God, and again those that questioned moved dangerously close to either atheism or agnosticism. I always see René Descartes as the most famous. He was a devoutly religious person who managed to so thoroughly destroy confidence in reality that he had to come up with a half-baked theory to explain how we can rest assured that God exists.

Move ahead about a hundred years to Immanuel Kant. Another very devout person who not only was a true philosopher, but actually destroyed, to most people's satisfaction, one of the only real arguments for the existence of God: Anselm's ontological argument. I see in these men a person who believed, but was unable to set aside his intellect for the sake of those beliefs.

So, again, God may or may not exist, but it's the belief in Him that's pointless. As I said earlier, being on a quest for truth can steer me rightly. I have no need for religion, except for maybe bake sales. I am my own cause, and if I am that, what does a God I can never know do for me? Nothing, I say.

God Damnit.

I don't feel commenting on the election is necessary, but the gay marriage ban in California is worth it.

I'm not going to try for eloquence, or subtlety. You people are morons. I've listed this under religion because if you voted for the ban, you're doing it for religious reasons. No rational, non-religious person would care.

I generally dislike religion. I find it rather stupid. I especially dislike it in instances like this. As I mentioned in my post directly preceding this post, anyone who is religious and not an expert on all things philosophical is a raging jackass. And anyone who was philosophical would not have voted for this ban.

This ban is the result of religious, stupid people who should be shot.

The need for philosophy.

One of the most annoying things about philosophy students is their propensity to jerk off their mental meat. To argue for the sake of arguing. To sit in a comfy chair, think really hard, and go to sleep under the impression that they have done something of importance. They rarely think of real applications to their thoughts, because that may require work.

Even professors are guilty of this. They obsess over minutiae that can never have any effect on our life. The subtle arguments for skepticism, or the bizarre details of metaphysics. Philosophers have dug so deeply into arguments as to render many of them arguably semantic and undoubtedly beyond every-day application.

Where can philosophy be used?! It can be, I know it. I apply it to my own life. Especially for those who count themselves religious. A large part of your life is based on a subject that is the explicit purview of philosophy. It certainly applies and you would be an idiot to not dive, headlong, into full study.

Philosophy often gets marginalized. Graduating classes are small, and post-graduate work is limited to jobs at Starbucks with the English majors. I think it should be the focus of philosophy classes to try and find applications for students and force philosophy on the popular view. Integrate philosophy into other endeavors.

We must find applications. Without them, what point is there to whole mess? Even after my previous mocking of English majors, there are obvious applications to understanding the language and its corresponding literature. Books entertain. Words inform. A good English major is a highly valuable resource. But a good philosophy major? What the fuck do they do?

I see philosophy as, ideally, the quest for truth. The search through the fog of reality to achieve enlightenment. But for real applications, I see philosophy as learning how to think as opposed to learning about what to think. Science is learning how to analyze, but how did science decide at what point we know something? Through philosophy. I see it at the root of every intellectual quest we have.

S.O.D.

In an earlier post, I lamented the cost of doing business in the US, and said it has something to do with America's fall from grace in the world of architecture.

I held up Dubai as a good example, but mentioned only briefly that human rights take a back seat in that sort of development. In my plea for a middle ground, I didn't effectively communicate the degree to which human rights goes out the window.

This article for the UK's Guardian, and this one in Mother Jones, really drives home how badly the poor are treated in the pursuit of glimmering palaces and it is something anyone interested in architecture should read. It makes you feel pretty good that, even though we're not as impressive, we get some excellent buildings done while at the same time maintaining a high level of worker's rights.

That's not too bad, I think.

My own adventures with Windows Vista

I have two systems blessed with Windows Vista. A high-end Hewlett-Packard desktop, and a Sony laptop. The Sony is the VGN-SZ670N and the HP is the M9080N. If you look up the specs, you'll see they're both kick-ass machines.

I have had NOTHING but problems with Vista. My laptop Blue Screens on a pretty regular basis. No clue why. I've read multiple threads online from other people discussing how they have had blue screen errors from Vista on my laptop and tons of other laptops, both from Sony and from other companies. I want to document and post my experiences in hope that they will help someone else who is having similar problems.

The laptop. Talk about a pain. First off, Sony's customer service is abysmal. I was directed to do the usuals, and finally directed to the either Microsoft's service, or to use the restore disc to just wipe the computer and start over fresh. Or, as fresh as Sony's bloated, crap-filled initial install could ever be described.

Microsoft was also no help, simply telling me that the likely culprit was a driver. At least Microsoft led me in a some, ANY, direction. They were right, but what they couldn't explain is why Vista seems to suddenly take a disliking to random drivers in my laptop. The last time this happened, I had to install new video drivers. The next time, it was my DVD drive, a matshita dvd-ram uj-852S. If you Google it, you'll find half of the people on Earth are having problems with that drive. It eventually required this fix.

How did I know the DVD was fucked up, because it suddenly was no longer recognized by Windows. Just one day! No real reason. Upped and stopped working. Brilliant.

The next time, the USB host controller. The USB problems required complete uninstalls of drivers and re-installs of the SAME driver. Vista also stopped liking my USB wireless mouse. I think it may have been the thing that caused Vista to suddenly hate its own USB. I have no idea. I bought a new mouse, stripped Vista of any and all remnants of the USB drivers via regedit.exe, then re-installed reference drivers from Intel's website.

I would have installed reference drivers from Nvidia's website, but ohhhh, right, Sony is using some wacky-ass custom hardware for which only they can provide drivers. So I headed over the Sony's update website, which is terrible. It has a BIOS update that seems to think it's already installed, Nvidia drivers that always fail, and an update to some of Sony's crappy software that I uninstalled months ago. Terrible, UTTERLY TERRIBLE.

So, if you are getting repeated Blue Screens, otherwise known as BSOD, it is almost undoubtedly drivers! Head into control panel > system > Device Manager and see if there are any exclamation marks indicating failed driver loads. If so, go to the websites of the manufacturers and desperately seek out the most recent version. Find reference drivers, anywhere you can. Sony's drivers are unstable and damn-near-impossible to install.

My most recent blue screen and one from some time ago happened whenever I tried to open and then maintain a connection over WiFi. Programs such as BitTorrent, World of Warcraft, or even just simple downloads would crash the system. Upgrading the Intel 4965AGN drivers, even though the system crashed a dozen times during the stop/start download process, fixed the problem.

Do not rely on Sony's update site. Do not rely on Windows Update. Search for yourself regularly at the component manufacturer's website and see if you can find the most recent drivers manually.

Vista's catastrophic network problems continue on the HP. Free of critical system instability, Vista laughs at me by just never connecting to wireless networks. The stock A-G-N WiFi card in the PC had this convoluted antenna that snaked a wire throughout the case. After deciding the card needed to be replaced, I bought a D-Link card with three, holy-moly antennas protruding from the back. This fixed the problem only somewhat.

The problems appears to be that Vista finds it damn-near impossible to connect with networks that have multiple access points. My sister has a Vista desktop in her dorm room, from which there are nine access points all accessing the name network. At my house, there are two access points for the same network. At my house, Vista CANNOT communicate with the D-Link access point. It can only communicate with the router directly.

I have to use the D-Link utility that came with the card to force Vista to connect to a particular MAC address, namely the routers MAC. If left to its own devices, it apparently just tries jumping back and forth from the router to the access point, getting nothing done. And even now, Vista has some serious problems dealing with WiFi connections that are weak.

At the dorm, ALL of the access points are just that, access points. As such, even by picking out and forcing Vista to access only certain points, Vista will connect to only two of the nine. No clue why. We eventually gave up and just used a cat-5 cable. One of her roommates, when asked if she had heard anything about network access, laughed that she had a Mac and it "just worked."

Just worked, indeed. Cocky bitch.

So, yes. If you have the stock network card in your computer, download a network utility that allows you to pick out which networks and which MAC addresses to which to connect. Try Download.com. Then you can pick out specific MACs and see if any of them work. If not, try upgrading your network cards driver. If not, buy a new network card. If not, get a cable. If not, get a Mac.

And don't even get me started on the bloat of Vista. It takes up a jaw-dropping amount of system memory. Right now, with Firefox open and nothing else, I'm rocking 1.4 GB's worth of system memory taken up, and a 1.6GB page file. I know this is supposed to be good, because Windows dumps what it can into RAM, so why does it take Vista forever to boot? And why does Vista access the hard drive for the first 20 minutes of operations? And why does the promise of multi-tasking with a dual-core CPU seem like a shallow lie? And most importantly, why is XP noticeable faster for almost every application I have? Tests seem to show no difference between Vista and XP, even showing Vista to be faster, but in my real-world experience, Vista is noticeable slower in Fireworks, Photoshop, Flash, and World of Warcraft?

And why, OH WHY, in World of Warcraft, with Vista, does holding down an arrow for an extended time while running slow the system to a crawl? It bogs down something. Some buffer somewhere is having a seizure.

Vista's instability, wide-spread and extreme network problems, and bloated, inefficient nature mean that XP remains the standard bearer for desktop PC's. Only an idiot would get Vista. I'd ditch it in a heartbeat if my laptop wasn't so fucking optimized for Vista, and Sony has no interest whatsoever in making its Vista laptops, with all their annoying, custom hardware, friendly with XP. So, yeah.

In conclusion, Blue Screen on a Sony VGN-SZ670N is almost always a driver that needs to be upgraded. WiFi connection problems in Vista are because Vista hates access points so you'll need an application to force Vista to connect to certain MAC addresses, and even then it's dodgey. Don't buy Vista, it's a mess of instability. Don't buy from Sony because their customer service is shockingly bad and their software is terrible. Don't get me wrong, the laptop itself is excellent. Well made, sturdy, attractive; it's everything I could want. But Sony insists on using their own software for drivers, music, EVERYTHING, and Sony quite obviously couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag.

Windows XP on a completely off-the-shelf, hand-built desktop PC. Now that's paradise. Or a Mac, if you're a cocky art student who thinks she's just so special.

I Thought We Were Done With This.

Well it's becoming pretty apparent that Sarah Palin is far stupider than first thought.

First off, I'd like to say that in contrast to news reports calling her little-known, I knew about Palin very well. I'm a frequent supporter of Defenders of Wildlife. One of the more level-headed environmental groups who spend most of their time just trying to stop people from killing animals. There are so many people out there who enjoy doing this apparently just for the hell of it that DoW never has a chance to go left-wing-batty and start saying that feeding Yellowstone bears sandwiches is tantamount to genocide.

Recently, DoW was on the losing side of a quest to get aerial hunting of wolves banned in Alaska. Apparently, those aforementioned, animal-killing wackjobs enjoy flying around blowing away wolves, bears, and just about anything that moves. They frequently don't go claim a trophy or anything, they just like shooting things. Guess which side of this debate Palin was on.

Yep. We lost the ballot and the ban never went through. Palin, the companies that supply the helicopters to the small-dicked men who engage in this activity, and a smattering of other groups managed to get the ban knocked down. I feel decent knowing that over 70,000 people supported the ban.

So yes. I was well aware of Palin, but even I had no idea what a terrible person she was. First off, she was a beauty queen. I have problems with anyone who was a beauty queen because it takes a special kind of vapid twit to pursue that. But NOW, if that wasn't bad enough, SHE'S A FUCKING CREATIONIST! What, we wouldn't take Huckabee, so they had to sneak a loonie as second fiddle?

Has John McCain totally abandoned all integrity? He's actually willing to throw his credibility, respect on the international stage (because if you think other countries won't mock a creationist, you're as wrong as they come), and common sense in a bid to get to office? He's willing to cater to the dumbest, most bigoted, horrid parts of our country, and that's sad. McCain was once a truly respectable politician who seemed generally unwilling to play games. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

UPDATE 9/4/2008: An interesting perspective on Palin. Seems to jive with everything else I know about Palin, so I see no reason to not trust it.

http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/9/2/12284/85430

S.O.D.

After posting about Adam Savage's elegy for American science, it got me thinking.

I'm an amateur scientist, but I'm a professional designer and engineer. I think about design all the time and read just about every magazine or book there is on the subject. I can bemoan the same thing about American design and ingenuity.

They were once the very best in the world. While other countries may build amazing things, they would always turn to the American design and engineering firms to actually get the job done. That's no longer the case.

I can pick out any area, any focus, and the number of excellent submissions coming out of America has nearly disappeared. While there are many publications that focus on the American market, the international magazines rarely feature our country. China's new creative class is showing us how it's done, and even Europe has left us behind.

I can't even remember the last time I heard something great about an American architect. Of the 11 Pritzker Prizes for architecture handed out from its inception in 1979 to 1989, a US architect won it 6 times. From 1990 to 2008, and likely 2009, we've won it twice. And one of those years was a win by dark horse candidate Thom Mayne.

And what about American industrial design, or consumer products, or clothing? We were fairly well-represented in the IDEA awards, but those skew American because, duh, they're sponsored by BusinessWeek. And even there, of the seven design schools represented, only one was from the US. We've got Apple, but we know their language. They did the original iPod and then, six years later, the iPhone. The MacBook Air was a breakthrough only to Apple fanatics.

I think one of our major problems is exactly what these major, entrenched companies adore, our draconian and ridiculous patent and copyright system. If a company dares innovate or break new ground, they are undoubtedly sued. Apple has been sued near countless times, and Nintendo with their innovative Wii, has of course been sued. I could go on and on and ON about our patent system basically needing to be shot, but the website TechDirt explains why our system is broken apparently beyond repair in much better fashion. When your reward for breaking ground is a lawsuit, there's not much motivation to do anything.

And yet, the East Asian market (which our American companies do nothing but bitch about as a no-mans-land of piracy, lax IP laws, and terrible, uninventive, outlaws who do nothing but steal our ingenious, American ideas) is exploding on the international scene.

Yep. Oh, and back to that list of design schools: Samsung Design Membership (Korea), Hong Ik University (Korea), Seoul National (Korea), Hanyang University (Korea), Royal College of Art (United Kingdom), University of Wuppertal (Germany). Those sad, wannabe schools of design. Stealing all of our ideas and winning awards with them. Tragic.

Another grand example, and by grand, I mean GRAND. Where are all the new buildings being built? Where are all the limits being pushed? Where do the structures look like they sprang from an imagination unhindered by reality? Oh right. Dubai. And China. And Taiwan. And Russia. Hell, even South America. Just not here.

I think a lot of that has to do with how expensive the US has gotten. It's SO pricey to do anything here, nobody is bothering anymore. We have unionized workers who get paid $40 an hour to lay brick (nothing against bricklayers, it's quite a skill). The other countries may have poor workers' rights laws, but boy do they get stuff done. There has to be a middle ground.

Or insurance costs. It costs more to insure an architecture firm, the construction, and everyone involved in the US than in any other country on Earth. You can be sued because your idea is cool, sued if idea takes off, and sued if your idea fails. Big surprise no one wants to do anything in our fucked-up country, anymore.

S.O.S.

Adam Savage, the more energetic, ADD-addled member of the Mythbusters pair (I don't count their trio of doofuses as real Mythbusters) recently penned a short article for Popular Mechanics about how to save science education.

It's a quick read, so go do that, I'll pee, and when we come back we can talk about it.

Ok. While I support his drive to make science better in American schools, I think he's picking out a bad apple from a bad bushel and focusing on it. Yes, science is taking quite a hit in America, but that's because education on the whole is taking a hit.

He laments that "one of the first things to go when educational budgets get slashed is science supplies." But I think that's a bit like complaining how firefighters don't rescue the pets first when the house is on fire. The real problem is that the house is on fire. I like that he bluntly states "By all means throw money at the problem!" He's totally right. While many aspects of our school system are inefficient, the need for more money is without doubt. Politicians speak a god game about children being our most valuable asset, and education is critical. But when the time comes to actually do something about it, they push through a laughable reform like "No Child Left Behind" and then cut funding across the board because they all know that petroleum is actually more important than our kids.

I also can't complain about my own experiences in science classes. True, my teachers pretty much single-handedly funded the experiments, but experiment we did. It was interesting that surface tension experiments were some of the very first I ever did in High School. Hell, we even built robots out of TI-86 calculators and motors the teacher had ripped out of dead VCR's.

His last point is important, namely, celebrate mistakes. Our schools, and NCLB only exacerbates this problem, are obsessed with the avoidance of mistakes. When education is based entirely on standardized tests, which Adam laments earlier in the article, mistakes are anathema. Because if you make a mistake, you get the answer wrong, you fail, and your school gets its budget cut.

Obviously, though, this only scratches the surface of our country's educational problems. We have so many I am of the mind that it is dead, and is merely decaying. As Adam points out, "by 2010, Asia will have 90 percent of the world’s Ph.D. scientists and engineers." Our schools are dying. Crumbling under the weight of inadequate funding, an antiquated psychosocial design, and a populous that, really, doesn't care. You may say you care, but when was the last time you voted for someone who said they were going to raise taxes.

As always, America will respond when things get really bad, and they're not really bad, yet.

Discworld

Here's something I've thought about quite a bit, and I've never had a chance to pose it to any theoretical physicists I come across.

What would happen if you had a disc, say, 10 million miles across, and you spun it. The further out you go, the faster the disc travels, so what happens at the point where the spin speed would exceed the speed of light?

Would the atoms merely separate? I assume the consistency of the disc would have to be broken in some way.

Any thoughts, oh internet?

Take my Planet, Please.

The great debate about Pluto has, amazingly, remained far hotter than its humble subject ever since it was demoted from full planet status. So, basically, we've had a two year argument about semantics where very intelligent people made fun of other very intelligent people. After which they got blasted at the local pub while arguing how many angels fit on the head of a pin and who had the biggest hands.

I make fun, I know. Now, it must be known that a good definition is a good thing. It would be nice to know what planets, exactly, are. Unfortunately, when you are attempting to define things on a spectrum, as opposed to distinct characteristics, things get squiffy, as we can plainly see.

I was initially opposed to the demotion, and in a sense I still am. Considering the world's astronomers were unable to really define a planet, I saw no reason to eliminate one of the nine we were all taught. I still see little reason for the demotion since a succinct, formal definition of a planet doesn't seem very important to me.

I think it's pretty easy to simply call them planetary bodies and then create arbitrary categories within the spectrum. Say, large bodies are more than five times earth's diameter, etc. The categories themselves are unimportant. I also have a problem with the only aspect of the new definition that is mentioned, namely that a planet is a body large enough to generate a gravity field that squeezes the material into a spherical shape. I have a problem with that because it is physically possible for a planet to be a cube. It's unlikely, but there's nothing specifically preventing that from occurring. So what happens if we discover an object that is the size of earth but more cubic than spherical? It's not a planet?

I like my own definition of a planet. If it is directly orbiting a star and is big enough where we can walk on it without floating off into a very lonely and depressing death, it's a planetary body. If we float off into to space, it's not.


The Great (and Sometimes Serious) Debate About Pluto (LiveScience.com)

You Randy Girl

I was thinking about how Ayn Rand's ideas about government only existing to protect individual rights sounds a lot like my idea that it only exists to protect freedom.

I think Ayn Rand was an idiot, in many ways. First, she supported laissez faire economics. Not some sanitized version, either, REAL laissez faire where you can do just about anything. I can't believe she actually felt this way, considering the consequences of an unregulated economy were apparent during her lifetime, she died in 1982.

Also, she was very interested in the protection of defined rights, such as right to property, transaction, etc. I don't see the right to have shit a fundamental right. If anything, a world of no scarcity would result in no ownership, which would be ideal. All we need is a Star Trek replicator.

I also think that the government's charge is protecting liberty, and that's it. Property doesn't have anything to do with it. If the elimination of property could result in greater freedom in some other way, I'd fully support it. In fact, the idea that government's three important tasks as life, liberty, and our crap just seems odd. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is fine! Three abstract concepts as opposed to two abstract concepts and our crap.

Yes, if your crap is material to maintaining life, liberty and happiness, like it is today, then it's important to protect it. But base an entire government and philosophical system on an idea that could be obsolete in a few years is silly.

Government Who?

I've mentioned this before, but I like to stick on subjects like some kind of tumor.

I don't think government is important, and it gets progressively less important as the population under its purview increases. I know it is important, but not in the way people think. Government is important in the sense that it is the framework in which society functions. Government is not the society itself, but merely a section of the society with controlling functionality. I take the idea that government exists for the people to the extreme by saying that the actual existence of government is almost inconsequential since most of what people would and would not do they would be done in the absence of government.

For example, how often does the average person interact with the Federal government aside from paying income tax? They don't. Maybe join the army, or something, but little else. Our interactions with government increase as you go further down the hierarchy. Eventually, people start interacting frequently, but it becomes more of a group effort to solve problems than a classic idea of government.

It's not the most well-formulated idea, but I can back it up with an argument of absence. What is absent? An efficient, honest government. All governments, everywhere, are corrupt. Obviously, the degree of corruption is unknown, but it's obviously there because every now and then, we lift up the rock a little and are forever surprised at the nasty stuff we find. You'd think we'd get used to it.

But the world is getting better. More people have more money and food, technology is advancing, the environment is better (When's the last time you heard of a river catching on fire?) people are more equal, and we have more channels than ever(!). How is this possible if government sucks? Government is unimportant, that's how. It exists to keep people who feel important entertained. That's why government's subject matter never changes. They argue about the exact same stuff year after year, generation after generation. Government never actually gets anything done.

I know I'm using an odd definition of government, perhaps a better term would be politics, I'm not sure. Government is important, to be sure. The system is needed, but I think the system springs naturally from human nature. It sort of codifies that rule set needed from things like economy to work, but people treat it as much more than that. It becomes ideological, and financial, and all about change and straight talk. It all leads to absolutely nothing, but people harp on about it nonetheless until they die.