All men are created equal?

I wondered why flags around town have been at half-staff for so long. I thought that they would be at full-staff about a week or so after ex-President Gerald Ford's funeral.

Checking a couple of web sites, including Wikipedia, I found that by federal law U.S. flags are to be flown at half-staff "[for] thirty days after the death of a current or former President." The length is less and less for other federal officials down to "[on] the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress".

Why not fly the flag at half-staff on the day of a funeral for the death in the line of duty of any military personnel, law enforcement officer, or firefighter?

Watch your language!

Recently I have seen two signs that a word prankster like me loves to give a different meaning than the posters of the signs intend.

CLEAN SHOES BEYOND THIS POINT

is by the coatrack in the men's locker room of a fitness center. Does it mean that one should clean one's shoes beyond the coatrack area? One of the housekeeping staff said it was job security for him as he swept grit up from around the lockers.

EMPLOYEES ONLY DO NOT ENTER

Does it mean that employees are the only ones who should not enter?

An analogy to evolution

Today was one of those days where walking out the door seemed to be a big chore.

Even though I was going to use my truck instead of my wife's car, I looked for the key to her car. It was not where I usually put it by the back door and it wasn't in my pocket with my truck and house keys. I gathered up my backpack and coffee mug, got the garage door key between my fingers and headed out.

Next bad thing: the key wouldn't go in the lock. It was frozen again from a recent rain. Back to the house to get hot water. Decisions: heat water on the stove in the tea kettle or a bit in a cup in the microwave. I started both and took the cup.

Pour water on door handle and set cup down. Key goes in slot and turns. Hurray! Set keys on hood of truck and put pack behind seat. Check car for my key. No luck. Take cup back to house and turn off stove. Back to truck, pick up keys off hood, open overhead door, back out, and get on my way.

Fret all morning about where key to my wife's car is. Could it be at friends' house where we went to a party yesterday afternoon? My wife got to the car first when we left, started it, and then sat on passenger side. Could I have dropped the key in the friends' drive?

We next went to a drugstore to buy a few items. Could I have set the key down on the counter? I've done that many times. My wife stayed in the car and listened to the radio. Did I drop my keys when I automatically reached for them before getting in the car with her keys already in the ignition?

After I came back from this morning's trip, I spent many odd minutes looking in various pockets and under things in the bedroom. The key could have fallen out of my pocket when I took my pants off last night or this morning as I put them on. No luck.

Mid-afternoon I decided to start a fire. After I had it going, I went out to get another load of wood. But as I did so, I carefully looked along the sidewalk to the garage. When we came home yesterday, my wife was first to the back door but hadn't got her keys out. I had reached in my pocket to get mine. Could I have dropped the key to her car when I did so? What do you know, there it was two-thirds the way to the garage, about two inches from the sidewalk and in the grass.

Think of all the things that could have gone "better" or "worse", relative to the loss of the key. If we had gone earlier to the party or not at all, other events might not have happened. Same for going to the drugstore. If my wife hadn't started the car or had come into the drugstore. If we had had more snow and the key was covered. If I had drunk or eaten more or less at the party.

Now think of the poor DNA replicating itself. All those molecules strung in that double helix. What if some necessary chemical is not present? What if some contaminant is present? What if the radiation level or temperature is higher or lower? DNA is replicated not in a "clean lab" but in an uncontrolled environment, an environment that varies widely as the carrier of the DNA goes about its business. Just think of the varying stress levels of my morning, stress causing the chemical composition of my body to change to compensate for my stress.

As these various "random" events could have a larger impact on my life, like just writing about it, so could "random" events change how DNA was replicated. Some of the changes could lead to failure of the organism, others could lead to a even better fit into the general environment of the organism.

Julbord or Christmas Smörgåsbord

I just posted my latest two Reader Weekly articles at my website: Not what I intended and Julbord or Christmas Smörgåsbord. The latter is a quick overview of one American family's adoption of a Swedish tradition.

If you think a smörgåsbord is a pile-it-all-on-your-plate buffet, be sure to read this article.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smörgåsbord. If you read Swedish, see also .http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smörgåsbord.

Why Minnesota has no snow

The wind farms in eastern Colorado and eastern Montana aren't really for generating electricity. They are to blow all the snow back west so that the ski resorts have plenty of snow.

Once you do with less, you can't take more

Irregular Blog
I just went down to the kitchen to fill my water bottle. I took a big swig and spat it out right away. It tasted like swimming pool water! I had forgotten to fill my bottle with filtered water and used water direct from the tap. When one is used to the chlorine taste, it is not so bothersome. Once one gets used to almost no chlorine taste, the chlorine taste can be overwhelming.

Something similar happened to us with salt after living in Europe for six years. Most American cooking, especially restaurant cooking tasted really salty to us. This is still true after over thirty years.

I like to say excess salt belongs on only two "foods" - pretzels and the rims of Margarita glasses.

A church by any other name

Or political correctness raises its head again.

The church I attend is going to have a vote next week on whether "church" should be continue to be part of its name. One member gave an impassioned argument for dropping "church" from the name in favor of "congregation".

Her argument was that there are people who are put off by the word church because of past abuses of Christianity. I wonder if these people would even attend if the name is changed. I also wonder if by trying to be all things to all people an organization becomes nothing to everybody.

She also brought up the old saw about replacing "mankind" in hymnals and elsewhere with "humankind". But the words have essentially the same historic meaning. Various sources attribute "human" as coming from the latin "hominus" - "man". On the other hand, "man" originally meant "person" and came from a word meaning "mind". Does this mean if we don't want to use "mankind" for people in general that they have no minds?

Once the males were called "werman" and the females "weibman". Rather than corrupt other people's writings to make them politically correct, why not revert to calling males "wermen"?

See my article on Bowdler.

Why can't men sing?

Or a better title might by "Why don't men sing?

This seems to be a hard question to answer. There are very few references on the web to either phrase. The only references I could find were to my article of February 2005 and a discussion in England in 2004.

Besides all the other reasons like not a guy thing, changing voices, and lack of encouragement of those who don't do well, I've been pondering another aspect - matching resonance. Men may have a difficult time singing because they have more resonance in their voices than women. When they try to match the resonance of the dominant singers, they tend to try to sing too high and thus are way off pitch.

I tried an experiment with a song I'm trying to learn. I put the melody in my computer using the treble clef. Singing the melody was a big strain. I dropped the melody an octave and did much better. Once I had a feel for the melody, I went back to the higher octave accompaniment. I did much better. Even my severest critic, my experienced soprano wife, said so.

Fruitful or spiteful

Christians, Jews, and Muslims state they are guided by the words of the Old Testament, but many of them often seem to choose the words that tell them to smite their enemies. They seem to prefer "Be spiteful and destroy" rather than "Be fruitful and multiply."

Question for those using violence for political gain

What would be the long-range effect if lots of people started asking those who use violence to achieve political ends, whether they drop 500-lb. bombs on houses, lob mortars indiscriminately, or plant roadside bombs, what they are doing to achieve three important parts of a civil society:

Are you making it safe for children to play outside and to go to school?
Do the children have clean water and effective sewage?
Is electricity available 24 hours a day?

Those who use violence in the name of some idealistic goal should be embarrassed at the harm they are causing to achieve their goals.

True believers

Many true believers are quite willing to accept the artifacts of modern times, but they are unwilling to shed the world view "facts" of long gone times.

But a better analysis than this little sentence is expressed by the man who wrote

...[The true believer is] the mortal enemy of things-as-they-are and he insists on sacrificing himself for a dream that is impossible to attain....He is today everywhere on the march."

The author is Eric Hoffer and the quote is from his 1951 "The True Believer".

What is patriotism?

I have some notes at the bottom of "Who masterminded 'political' correctness?" by Dick Palmer and forgot to include them in "PC or PC?"

What is patriotism? I don't think it is shooting off fireworks on the Fourth of July, the wearing of red, white, and blue, or pledging allegiance to the flag. These are all rituals that anybody can follow no matter how they really feel about our history, our society, or our government. Look at a picture of all the little kids waving little U.S. flags as the President's motorcade whizzes past in some foreign country.

I think patriotism is basically three things:

Respecting the U.S. Constitution
Voting
Speaking our minds

When we don't do these, no matter how much we watch fireworks or pledge allegiance to the flag, we bring our country closer to a dictatorship, either of mob rule or a self-selected elite.

PC or PC?

Dick Palmer, a regular columnist for the Budgeteer News of Duluth, this week wrote, "Who masterminded 'political' correctness?" a diatribe against all the silly groupthink about what is appropriate speech.

I wanted to write a letter to the editor, "Who masterminded 'patriotic' correctness?" but I dithered too long to make the deadline for this week's issue.

Patriotic correctness in one of its guises is unquestioning obeisance to the federal government, especially in military matters. It also considers anyone who questions certain phrases as being against "our freedoms". I thought one of "our freedoms" was freedom of speech. I think the climate of patriotic correctness is more dangerous than political correctness because it stifles critical thought about our government's actions.

The whole flag worship issue is one; somehow the U.S. Flag has become more important than the U.S. Constitution. I don't care if some misguided person somewhere sometime burns a flag; they should be prosecuted for burning books, trash, or any other objects outside of approved containers. But we don't seem to be concerned about anybody burning the Constitution, especially the many symbolic "burnings" of the Constitution by Presidents and Congresses.

"Defense" became a patriotically correct word with the reorganization of the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into the Department of Defense. This aids in the cover of calling any military action, no matter how questionable, as "Defense". How many places do you think you can get in a serious discussion with a diverse group of people that a President's decision to go to war had nothing to do with the "defense of our freedoms"?

Interestingly, those who argue for patriotic correctness in matters of symbols and wars are most often those who can think government can do nothing right in almost every other matter - whether it's running a weather service, designing highways, managing the economy, or just providing for the "General Welfare". How does government magically and correctly decide that a war is a good thing?

Years ago I borrowed from some library "PCPC: Political Correctness and Patriotic Correctness". It took on both of these stiflers of free thought. I have tried to find it with many different searches including WorldCat without result.

I did find something similar: Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America by Robert Hughes. A copy is at the University of Minnesota, Duluth library.

Two interesting online reviews are by Scott London and John P. Sisk.

I could go on all day on references to these two silly ideas, but I'll leave you the The Coffee Place's Joke Stack.

No wonder nobody reads this blog

My user count is about one a day for this blog, but no wonder. I have been remiss in adding anything interesting to it.

I would like to say I'll do better but then I look at my to-do list. I have to start making fruitcake this week, both for a church bake sale Sunday and for shipping to friends and relatives.

We just bought a new printer/scanner which can scan slides, and we have hundreds, if not thousands, of slides to archive. So far the results are not encouraging, but that is a topic for another blog.

Then I have all the accounting, filing, and other paper work to clear off my desk.

Finally, there is all the email to answer. I'm doing my best to keep the "unread" list to under 20.

This is retirement? Why do we keep thinking of more and more things to do, and only half-finishing most of what we actually start?

Ain't standardization wonderful?

I'm sitting in "Brewed Awakening", a coffee shop in Grand Rapids, Minnesota with a free hotspot. However, I can't seem to upload the latest updates to my website. I'm using Fetch to move the pages to my website and the little doggie keeps running and running but never stops. It should only take a few seconds to upload three small files. I'll see if Blogger accepts this entry.

I'm visiting my daughter's "cabin" in Cohasset, about 15 or so miles west of Grand Rapids. They have no phone other than cell, and so I came here to check up on things.

One of the interesting things I did this morning is show my youngest grandson how to sharpen an ax. He gets the side-to-side motion but not the down motion. Its the down motion that really does the sharpening.

I'm trying to post my latest Reader Weekly column, "Forgetting". The forgetting goes on. I forgot to put my reading glasses in my pack, and now that I'm set up here, I don't want to go back to my truck to get the glasses in the console. Squint! Squint!

Do squirrels really bury nuts?

I was watching a gray squirrel in my yard this afternoon scurrying this way and that. I didn't think he was burying nuts and seeds so much as getting food. In fact, he went to a garden timber, sat on it and ate for quite awhile. I wondered if it was just a myth that squirrels buried nuts.

A quick search for "squirrel" and "bury nuts" turned up over 700 hits. One interesting one is "Squirrel hoarding". Gray squirrels favor deciduous forests and red squirrels favor coniferous forests and stash their nuts differently. This is leading to an imbalance in forest propagation. See the article for how humans can help shift this imbalance.

The robots are coming!

"The robot economy" by Arnold Brown is an excerpt from his book of the same name. It was published in the October 2006 issue of Current History.

"The South Korean government intends to roboticize that country, based on a vision of robot-centered intelligent society."

The U.S. military is working on robotic units for battlefield surgery and would eventually like to have autonomous robot soldiers. Congress, quick cut the funds for this! Do we want the berserkers of science fiction whose mission is to destroy all that they come across? Who is to say who will have control of these robots?

The article quotes Neil MacDonald of Gartner, "Over the next 10 years, the rate of IT job loss that can be attributed to automation will be about double what we think will be outsourcing." Arnold Brown calls this "othersourcing".

As I read the article, I pondered how much we've seen this othersourcing with software programs that have become everyday tools for many people and have become increasingly sophisticated.

The word processor has replaced the secretary in many offices, including highly-skilled secretaries. I remember that I tried to direct my memos to secretaries who would give clean uncorrected copy on the first try without any weird right margins. Now the average office worker can produce a clean, nicely margined memo at any time. And with a few minutes more work, have the grammar and spelling checked and corrected.

Spreadsheet programs have replaced many specialists who worked with special paper, sharp pencils, and calculators. Now anyone who can organize numerical data can produce a spreadsheet using some very complex functions.

Brown sees a trend from humankind to mindkind. Communication technology is causing a shift in how people are utilized. Companies can reach out to a network of creative types, some even volunteers, such as customers, for ideas instead of hiring people.

The shift is from managing people to project management, "putting together all the varied resources and components, wherever available and in whatever form, to accomplish the desired task or vision."

Worst to cursed

Robert Baer was quoted in this morning's Star Tribune as saying, "The drift in the entire Middle East is going from worst to cursed."

He is a former CIA operative and the author of See no Evil and Sleeping with the Devil which were the basis of the movie Syriana, starring George Clooney.

He went on to say, "Lebanon is going down the drain, and everybody is looking to the Iraq Study Group for the answer. The answer, it seems to me, at least in the long run, is for the United States to develop alternative sources of energy."

Pity the poor fly

Imagine you're outside and it's getting dark and cold. You look off in the distance and see a small light. You move toward the light and find it's coming from a cave. As you draw nearer you feel warmth coming from the cave. You enter and discover that you're in a huge cavern with food all over. You gorge yourself and find a resting place. Then the light goes out!

Eventually the cavern is bright again, but the light is different. Instead of coming from the roof of the cavern, the light is coming from the sides. There are big holes in the sides of the cavern, and you see sunlight coming in from these holes. You go over to one of the holes and find your way blocked by a solid, invisible substance. You feel all over the surface of this substance, but can find no way past it to the outside which you can see so plainly.

You make louder and louder noises of frustration. Suddenly, you see a large flat object coming right at you. You quickly dodge it and go to another opening. Again you are blocked by an invisible substance. Where, oh where is the hole you came in? Again, you make noises of...

What's performance?

Many want to pay teachers for performance, but what's performance? Do you measure performance as year-to-year progress in reading or as the instillation of a life-long love of reading? And not all teachers teach reading.

I don't remember much about my first music teacher in high school. I just have some vague visual memory of the classroom. I certainly don't think I was a better musician at the end of the semester than I was at the beginning.

However, I do remember him saying, "Anyone with intelligence can sing." Almost fifty years later I started voice lessons and have improved in fits and starts over a five-year period. If that high school music teacher is still alive, should the school district give him a bonus for performance now?