First Blog

One way to understand any topic is to better understand its opposite or an alternative.   For example, to understand the nature of gravity, it is useful to imagine no gravity.   To understand the qualities of a good teacher for example, think first of the qualities of a bad one.   This prescription - too see me, first see me not - gives broad outlines and shapes, while not rendering fine detail. In this first installment of a new sequence of micro-essays, we consider the differences between… Today, we consider the politician and two new breeds, those coming from business accustomed to deals plus things money can buy, and those emerging from the basement mimeograph machine accustomed to running off provocative missives to save the world. Caution . If you lean left or right, you may not like what’s to come. Businessmen think in terms of deals and profit (i.e. money). If dollars are involved all come to their normal levels of wishing for more. Thus, between them understanding

Pig Latin, the language of the future? A. First, you know Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc, reads your email and messages.   Mostly looking for advertising tips, but all is stored. B. All kids learn Pig Latin in school.   Not taught in classes, all pick it up with ease.   Just take a word such at “stuff” and move the first letter to the end and add and “a.”   So, “stuff” -> “tuffsa   (pronounced “tuff-say”). The sentence, “I want to go shopping” becomes “Ia antwa ota oga hoppingsa.” C. Big Question.   Suppose we all started, like today, using Pig Latin in our messaging.   How long will it be before the big boys write a Pig Latin translator so they can once again read your messages?   One week?   One month?   One year?   That you made a guess proves you believe they would do it. ------------- Chinese Checkers – 2019 style They are resisting, but why shouldn’t China open its markets to the US and even Europe?   They do make very good quality stuff.   And if so, will not th

If you dig ditches for a living, and a robot replaces you, what can you do?   Certainly not repair robots. This requires quite a skill level quite beyond the dig.   You’re out. While it’s true automation creates new jobs, it is false those so replaced will qualify.   The diggers of the ditch is not an asset class. ---------------------------------- Heavy stirrings in this world are afoot, and they are out “to convert” you to the “true beliefs.”   Whose true beliefs?   Mine, of course.   These stirrings are in all Western countries, or more generally democratic countries where people can make decisions by vote.   The tools directed against the unbeliever arrive as words in print, social media, and television. There are also placards, T-shirts, and hats of all varieties. They are often profane, sometimes political, frequently delirious, but mostly sum to filth. In fact, human nature is to emphasize, proselytize, and criticize for (you to) change.   Everybody’s doing it, doing

Repair then and now. I recall listening to a lecture by the great physicist Richard Feynman* where he talked about his teen-years, neighborhood repair business (1930’s) for radios and the like.   He said mostly he just looked for a loose wire or burned tube.   Presto, he fixed it.   He could repair because repair was easy and because he was real smart.   I recall the (very) old Maytag washer/dryer commercials on TV featuring a repairman lamenting he never had any work, because Maytag’s never broke down.   Great add. Great reassurance in the beginning age of home machinery.   I recall myself in the 60’s of stripping my TV of its tubes and taking them to the local drugstore where they had a tester.   Burned ones were replaced and the screen glowed again. Beyond that required an an actual TV repairman - expensive! Today, note whenever you buy anything electronic or mechanical, the seller offers to sell you insurance policies against damage and breakage. Sooooo… What do you wa

Robot is a relatively new word to the English language. It was the creation of the playwright, novelist and journalist Karel Čapek, who introduced it in his 1920 hit play,  R.U.R. , or  Rossum's Universal Robots . The first robotic welder what invented in the USA in 1954. Vaccines. Washington state, a leading anti-vaccine state, currently has an outbreak of measles. This was caused partly by the anti-vaccine rage cause by the autism-caused-by-MMR vaccine scare of two decades ago.   Count in also religious objections. Of the 23 confirmed cases, 20 are of those having no previous vaccination. The World Health Organization, WHO, calls the anti-vaccine rage one of the world’s leading health disasters.*  Fingers. Apple reports it is working on finger movement in mixed reality UX (User Experience).   The beat goes on as virtual reality increases in our world.   The time may come when the experiences of virtual reality exceed those in quantity and quality of the real thing. But

South Carolina is proposing that all public school students take a fitness course in personal finance .  A great idea!  Since public schools are teaching so little these days and the colleges have become training schools, it seems a natural that the public school should teach at least one practical skill – beyond reading poorly, writing poorly, and with little ability at math.  At least, our youngsters will begin to understand finance charges, interest rates, and payment costs. Personally, in high school, I took a business math course, and it was among those courses I still remember many years later. It took me years to educate my college educated daughter about the huge cost difference of just one-half a percentage point meant on a house loan.   Kids are not born with this knowledge! In years of teaching math, it is rare that students... Know how to compute interest, or even understand interest. Know how to compute a mortgage payment, have even a clue how much a small chang

Who does what and how many do it?   Probably you have an   idea but haven’t seen just how many people do what. The Bureau of Labor Statistics knows, and they make this information available to everyone. Occupations are divided into 22 categories.   For example, there are the categories of “legal systems” and “management occupations.”   At the website below you can get even the number of elementary school teachers doing special education.   What we give below is the gross numbers for the big categories. Below you will see the category, the number of workers in each category, and the percentage of each category to the whole.   First note that just over 142 million people are included in this 2017 table.  Note that fully 6% of all workers are in the health profession, while another 2.9% are healthcare support workers.   That’s just about 9% of the population.   Education takes up another 6% of all workers.   And so on.  

We love challenges. We hate challenges. Life is simply a sequence of challenges.  Often we take vacations just to leave them behind. Challenges cover the spectrum, all 360 degrees. To play the game. To endure the pain. To just survive. To outlast the opponent. To win at any cost. To let it be. To overcome the loss. To change. To soldier on. To beat the odds. To watch yet another Super Bowl. From the list, success is often more than winning. Many involve strategy. Some challenges come as questions. Will you do it? Why do it? Should you do it? To do or not to do? Today, my challenge is two cups of coffee or three.

Politicians have always been disappointing. Now, despite doing almost nothing, their quality of lies has hit new lows, basically at the high school level. On Stupidity Doing something stupid simply because it’s new does not qualify it as being innovative. The stupid solution and the innovative solution are different, though frequently confused. Stupid is still stupid, even when dressed in silk. She called her unplanned pregnancy a conceptual heir. Beware of false morality offered in the name of humanitarianism. A global world will not work if there remain only a few cheaters. Rich cities and states can survive globalism only because they can afford cheaters. The larger the organism, the easier is the opportunity for disease.

Marbles is/was a sport for kids, where competitors have small round glass beads which target others in a shoot, sometimes within a circle, sometimes into a pot.   (The modern sport of curling is not unlike this.) But the marbles, being small, were easily lost, and thus as when lost, their owner might look frantically for them.   Thus was born the expression “lost his marbles.” I played marbles way back then.   It was a high pressure game, to make an accurate shot when big stakes (your own property) were involved. Big-time matches for a ten-year old, settled on an open field with strategies, skills, spectators, and cheering. In the 20 th century it became a general expression within the language, and was used in two ways, to be angry or to be crazy.   The meaning has expanded, though it isn’t clear kids play marbles any more.   So, what are those marbles that some people lose?   It usually refers to a sudden change in one or more of the following? Social communication

Vaccines are here . At first, and with their inventor Pasteur, vaccines were suspect. Then they were accepted. By 1855, the first required vaccines for school children were instituted in Massachusetts . They had a good run, with public trust almost complete.   Then came the first problem with a vaccine that couldn’t track a tricky disease, influenza. Then came a correlation of a vaccine with a worse condition, autism.   Now vaccines again are suspect once again.     Case A . We see a decline in flu cases as the use of flu vaccines increase.   Too complicated for many is this simple relation. T hey see only the first part, the “decline in flu cases, ” and so getting the flu vaccine is unnecessary and always inconvenient. So, they don’t. So, more flu cases occur. This initiates a cycle via this simple rule: Fewer flu cases this year implies fewer flu shots next year implies more flu cases. Surprised? Case B . In another situation, recall the 1998 (false) report that the MMR (M

Dateline: China Today It may seem a stretch to believe China, the most populous nation on earth having a long history of excellence, has or could have growing pains. But they do, not as in former centuries when the Chinese merely dismissed the outside world as primitive, but now as they have ascended near the top in almost every endeavor.   They want to claim total supremacy, and they’re in a hurry. If you remember the Alberghetti sisters of years ago, you’ll remember them as attractive singers who appeared on TV variety shows.   Anna-Maria was far more attractive, but regardless they sang the wonderful duet from “Annie Get Your Gun,” Anything you can do I can do better .   It is a lovely tune about a gentle sisterly competition. Currently, and for the last decade or so, China and the US have been singing that same duet, and it looks like China is doing very well. This duet, however, is not for fun and is absolutely not gentle.   It is a serious competition to prove which country

Our trust in politicians is shattered. Our trust in business is conditional . Our trust in medical science hangs by a thread. Destroying trust is but a step toward anarchy. It is probable that many of us sometimes hear voices in our head, but it is certain that some of us never hear the voice of reason. Did you know the yo-yo has been around since the times of ancient Greece? Found in my last fortune cookie:   “You will soon buy a fortune cookie company.   Good luck.” It is that great General, master of command and victory, who loves war as being the only way to find personal emotions, a mixture of love and sadness for the fallen?

Political stupidity is suffered by all parties.  It is disappointing the quality of political leaders has declined to such low levels.  We have many leaders pursuing ideology, or money, or power, or all.  At least they know what they want.  USA political plans and results. The vector forward.  A. Goals. Team A. Redistribution of wealth. Team B. Creation of new wealth. B. Action plans for Teams A & B. Spend more money than you take in by borrowing. C. Results for all. Redistribution of not much and collective bankruptcy. Yes, we will all go bankrupt together.   Unless… Our only hope is that the ultra-rich Chinese, Arab, and other foreign bankers, now owning about 30% of our debt, will not allow us to perish. Yes, we are becoming too big to fail . This could be.   Even today, economists are teaching this to our college students - precisely that the national debt will never NEED to be paid off and is thus not a worry.   Factoids: Current deb

Fentanyl is a narcotic and opioid drug. It can be taken in almost any form, patch, pill, liquid, and injection.   A lethal dose of fentanyl is 2 mg (milligrams).   This means that an ounce of fentanyl is equivalent to more than 14,000 fatal doses, or about the weight of a small candy bar. Put only four (4) grains of salt on your burger and in weight you’ve exceeded the fatal dose.   It is 50-100 times more potent than morphine.   The border patrol intercepted 1,357 pounds of fentanyl last year at the USA southern border.   This is equivalent to more than 307,000,000 fatal doses.   And this is enough to kill almost every American citizen.   Many small pickup trucks could transport the entire load. One question is how much of this drug did make it across the border and into the illegal drug distribution system. Nobody knows.   Fentanyl is here.   It is an invasion of many sorts, health, addiction, debilitation, police resources, financial, and crime.   Everyone wants i

The Elephant and the Cabbage. Did you know that farmers fields in Kenya are raided nightly by elephants?  The elephants eat the crops and ruin what’s left. It also ruins the livelihood of the farmers. Solve this problem. Solution 1 . Shoot the elephants?  No. These pachyderms are protected. Solution 2 . Guard your fields at night to scare off the raiders. No. This tires out the farmer, who then sleeps by day, and not farming. Solution 3 . Build a high sturdy wall around the field.  A non starter.  Too, too, too expensive. Factoid. It happens that elephants greatly fear the sound of swarming honey bees, and run from it.  Solution 4. Place a ring of bee hives around the crop fields separated but connected with trip wires to stir up the bees when breached by an elephant. It works!!  Also, this gives the farmers another crop. Honey. Lesson . When the tiniest of things defeats the largest, this is something like a David and Goliath story. Moral . To use inte

You’re in high school or college. You will enter the job market soon. You need to know the new rules.   You look around and see what’s happening.   Puzzled, you ask: "Please tell me what is OK?"    You need morality lessons, freshened for 21 st . It’s OK to be selfish. Most persons of importance and wealth are very selfish. It’s OK to be biased. Our newspapers and other new sources are extremely biased. It’s OK to hate.   It’s OK for our politicians, who show us hate every single day. It’s OK to cheat.   How else can you get ahead – say like graduate? It’s OK to support violence.   But only for your just cause; it’s wrong for other causes. It’s OK to lie.   Lying is justified for correct reasons, and yours are correct. It’s OK to equivocate. You need to make that point you know to be just and correct. It’s OK to be racist. Most targets of racism are themselves racists, and proudly so. It’s OK to be secular. Religion is out. So, to be non secular is ri