I just tossed 512MB RAM into the garbage. Really, that’s half a gig of RAM. In the garbage. Because really, what on earth I’m I going to do with it. No one would ever upgrade to that these days. And I have it because it’s all that came in my wife’s PC which I just upgraded to 2Gigs of RAM.

It’s really hard to wrap our minds around how fast thing change with electronics. It really hit me when I remembered that just 10 years ago, in 1998, I bought a laptop before going off to college. I had to choose between getting 4 or 8 MEGS or RAM. Really, 8 MEGS was considered a lot. That’s as much as the laptop could handle.

And you know what getting 8 MEGs cost me: a place to live. I spent so much money on the upgrades for my laptop that I didn’t have enough money left to afford an apartment. Instead I slept in a tent, outside of the city, in the National Forest. No joke.

Now, just 10 years later, a stick of RAM that is 64 times larger than all the RAM in my laptop is so worthless I don’t even think twice before throwing it in the garbage.

By that rate in another 10 years I’ll be tossing 128 GIG RAM chips in the garbage. Globber.

photo by William Couch

Since I worked at Space Camp/Space Academy I got to see lots of launches, I’m guessing something like a dozen or so. And by far the best one was my first.

It was a night launch, as all the best ones are. We watched it from the west shore of the Indian River, about 10 miles from the launch pad. But due to some remarkable atmospheric conditions it was louder and more impressive than when I got to see a launch from the 3 mile mark.

What made this night launch so spectacular was a thin layer of clouds, more like a haze really, at low altitude. The clouds acted to reflect the light and sound back down to the ground and amplifying both. As the shuttle rose the brightness grew until it reached the layer of haze. At that point the light went out almost completely, absorbed, for just a flicker.

As the shuttle passed through and above the layer the light expanded out in a cone. From the point that the shuttle pierced the haze the light grew in a circle, very rapidly. It took less than a second for the cone of light to expand and in that moment everyone drew a breath. Light travels far to fast be be observed but the effect gave the illusion that we were watching light travel out to us.

And then came the sound. Low at first. It grew to a loud rumble and then when the solid rockets ignited the sound punched us. One could actually feel the SRBs starting up. And then the rumble, very low in pitch, grew so powerful that clothes shook. If you opened your mouth, which I’m sure everyone did in amazement, you could feel the vibrations in your lungs.

And then it passed. Out of site and sound.

It was a great idea to collect the various youTube videos out there of the reactions to Barack Obama being named the next president.

It’s stunning to see the jubilation. It’s like the ushering in of the new Millennium but for something that really matters.

In a philosophy class I took as a student we were asked how we would break down the relationships of the sciences hierarchically. The class came up with the typical breakdown of in the order: Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology…

This breakdown is typical when considering the relationship between the sciences. Mathematics is pure and requires no input from any of the others. Physics requires mathematics, chemistry requires physics and mathematics and so on. It was widely agreed that as you go down the list the amount of objectivity decreased as subjectivity increased.

The subject of History fell somewhere in the range with Sociology and Psychology. And since we were in a Philosophy class there was obvious sympathies toward the subject but its placement in the pecking order was problematic.

Then I had an idea: since History is the study of the past then every topic other than Mathematics, and maybe Theoretical Physics, becomes a subset of History because they are all things that happened in the past.

What then of Philosophy? To be sure a lot of Philosophy is mixed up with History but strictly speaking much of Philosophy is not temporal. Such as Logic, Epistemology, Ontology - maybe/sorta. Then there are topics such as Ethics that is pretty obviously mixed up with History.

Based on this new pattern we concluded that all of human thought is really a child of the two parents Mathematics and Philosophy.

It’s an interesting and compelling argument to be sure. And it turns the typical breakdown of disciplines on its head.

James Surowiecki recons that the blogosphere came into it’s own with the reporting of the Christmas 2004 tsunami that devastated the regions bordering the Indian Ocean. He makes some good points and on the whole I’d agree with him. Blogging was just catching on and by the nature of this event it could hardly be covered by any of the mainstream media because they couldn’t get there. But people who were caught up in it had the means and knowhow to broadcast their messages and they did so, in a big way.

Looking back on it I don’t recall a single video or interview by anyone other than a local.

His presentation at TED is good. Not the greatest by any means but worth the watch, especially if you’re interested in the social media fad.

What really interests me about this idea that the blogosphere grew up with the Asian tsunami is that another, very similar event, is what first brought the world together for the first time as a collective conscious: the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883.

The eruption of Krakatoa happened just after telegraph lines had spread around the world. For the very first time there was an event that the entire connected world knew about at the same time. Prior to telegraph lines it would have taken weeks for the news to have spread to a place like the Western US. But now someone sitting in Los Angeles could read a news paper report of the calamity and think to themselves, “I know about this and it’s still going on. Fires are still burning half a world away and I know of it. Plus, someone in Moscow is thinking the same thing, and in Paris, and so forth. There are people all around the world, right now, reading the very same reports as myself.”

To the people of that day it was a dawn of a new era. And so it is for us.

I had no idea that people on Wall Street knew so little about what they did. Really, you’d think that people making this much money doing something would understand the basic underpinnings of their industry, but sadly no.

If you want to enjoy a nice long read about the Hydrogen bomb that just fell on Wall Street then give this a read. It’s very well written.

Here’s my favorite quote from the piece:

He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

Oh, and you might want to jump over to the Wikipedia and read up on how short selling works before you get into the article. Honetly, I enjoyed the hell out of this and still only have a fuage understanding of what he’s talking about. But the part where the stock market fell down and went “boom”. That part I got.

Keith Olbermann speaks on the outcome of the votes to ban gay marriage.

If you feel that gay people should not marry then this is the video to watch. If, after watching this video, you still feel that gay people should not be afforded the same rights as heterosexuals then you can put your mind at rest because nothing is going to change it.

If you’re still against gay marriage after watching this and you find yourself in a discussion or argument with someone over this issue then you can just say, “Look, Keith Olbermann’s comments didn’t change my mind. So don’t bother.” If they’ve seen this as well then they’ll know, there’s nothing that’s going to change your mind.

Of course the big news story of the day, make that week, well, millenium, is that Barrack Obama won the presidency. But here in California the Yes vote on proposition 8 to ban gay marriage is a close runner up in the news cycle.

Today I read an article about how Governer Schwarzenegger is urging homosexuals to not give up and that their day would come. In the article there’s a quote from John Kirkpatrick who says:

We’re a democracy and our strength is that the majority wins the vote

It just floors me to hear statements like that. Two things you hear, especially during an election cycle are: “America is the greatest country” and “democracy is good, blah, blah, blah”. Well, I got news for everyone. Democracy is just a pretty sounding word for MOB RULES.

Democracy is not what makes America great. It never has and never will be. News flash, democracy has lead to votes against giving women and African Americans the right to vote, against allowing interracial marriages, against teaching evolution in schools, and most recently homosexual marriage. All of these issues have at one time or another been opposed by a majority of Americans. And they have voted that way many times over.

What makes American great is this forgotten document called the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights. It’s those pieces of paper that guarantee our rights. The will of the people, aka democracy, is the tool that would take them away.

How often have the people voted to add freedoms? Not very. Oh, they may come around eventually. But it’s the courts and the Constitution/Bill of Rights that keeps the majority from violating the rights of the minorites.

I consider it a failing of our schools that more people don’t understand that. And that usually the people who don’t understand it have never had to fight for their rights.