Sunday, November 25, 2007

Originally appeared 2/28/06

A second chance to make a first impression

     I have no idea how this will turn out as compared to my last entry which I did yesterday.  I had put a good 45 minutes into yesterday's entry before yahoo swallowed the entry, leaving me blogless.  And I was being so witty too, at least I thought I was.

    Today is Fat Tuesday, which is part of Mardi Gras, though what it really means I have no idea nor do i much care to look it up.  It is just another reason to get drunk for the most part.  You would think that, given most of the repair work in New Orleans isn't done and the fact there are still more than 2000 people missing, and one would think that there are more important things to do than invite a bunch of drunks into the city to mess up one of the few sections of the town that is operational.

     The change meter is up to $2.40, as I have found another 5 cents since my last entry in this regard.  Just a penny here or there, no big piles of change to mention, which doesn't help my retirement in the least.  The other number worth mentioning is that I am up to 46,715th place in golf.  Slowly I climb up the ranks, though I did pass one of the yahoo "experts" this week, I am still way behind the people who actually pay attention to this thing. 

    Tried watching the closing ceremonies to the Olympics the other nite, but too much song and dance leaves me wanting to watch something else pretty quickly, and Sundays are always good for a few episodes of Charmed on the WB.  Hmmm, an Eskimo on a stationary snow mobile doing a handstand while wearing snow shoes, or Rose McGowan and Alyssa Milano?  Not a real tough choice in my household.  I did click back a few times just to see what was happening.  Piece of advice for Canada, don't let Avril Lavigne anywhere near a microphone for the opening ceremonies in Vancouver.  Certainly you can find someone who can carry a tune.  Then there was the Ricky Martin song and dance segment, where it looked like they hired every streetwalker in Turin to dance behind him.   And what was up with that group of people below the stage that were dressed in all white?  I swear, when I first saw them, in their all white outfits, complete with hats, I thought it was a Klan rally.

     I got to have a unique conversation the other day with Phil Marcus.  Phil used to do a real estate show on the station on Saturdays, and they asked him to fill in for Lynn Cullen yesterday since Lynn is on vacation all week.  He and I ended up going to lunch yesterday after the show and global warming came up, because he mentioned it during the show.  I didn't say anything at the time, because it doesn't sound good if the producer and the host are disagreeing on the air, but I am not a huge proponent of global warming.  Not saying that it isn't occurring, just saying that I don't know, and science has done nothing to convince me one way or the other.  The problem for me is that in order for it to be science, you have to be able to test it, which is the same argument that shoots down teaching Intelligent Design as science.  Since there is no way to test global warming, and the basis for science is to come up with a hypothesis and then be able to test the hypothesis to either prove or disprove it, then I have a hard time treating global warming as science.  That doesn't mean that it isn't occurring, I just find the lack of measurable data troubling.  Rather than a scientific approach, now everything regarding weather that isn't a picturesque day is treated as a direct result of global warming.  The problem is, we went through this very same thing in the 70s, a complaint about the CO2 emmissions and how those emmissions were affecting the enviroment.  The problem was that it was called global cooling.  It was the answer science gave us for the fact that the surface temperature of the earth decreased in the span between the 1940s and the 1970s. 

     It is not the first time science has gotten it wrong mind you.  You can look at the field of computer science and less than a decade ago and the whole Y2K scenario, that if you believed the most radical predictors of it, we would be relegated back to the Stone Age because of our reliance on computers.  Even the more optimistic believers in Y2K thought we would see failings on a large scale of computers, leading to security problems for gov'ts and possible collapse of financial institutions.   Of course the reality was much different than the science.  Or we can look at the horror that was science before the second World war that was called eugenics, a science that suggested we could improve the quality of persons on the planet if we just kept those inferior races from reproducing.  A horror if ever there was one, and all in the name of science, as this crackpot theory was even backed by the American Medical Association among many other fine institutions.

     So before I go embracing all that is global warming, I think I am going to need some serious scientific testing where we get measurable results and can repeat the experiment getting similar results, rather than a global panacea for all things enviromental.

     I don't rant much, do I?

     Well, I better get running.  Not sure how close I was to the last blog, but is seemed kinda close.

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