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Older people can’t remember who they’ve told what, study suggests

It’s just one useless study after another. It’s the same goddamn stuff rehashed decade after decade.

To investigate the effects of aging on destination and source memory, researchers recruited 40 college students between the ages of 18 to 30, and 40 older adults between the ages of 60 to 83. In one experiment, participants read 50 facts aloud to the images of 50 celebrities on a computer screen. Next, they were asked to remember which fact they told to which person. For example, they might have told a picture of Oprah Winfrey that “A dime has 118 ridges around it.” This experiment measured destination memory: Whom did you tell what?

I don’t even care. The researchers who set up this experiment, the people who published it, and the peers who reviewed it should all be flogged. Of what possible use can this information be? Never mind the short term, where its uselessness is painfully obvious; of what possible use can this information ever be?

“It’s part of a big jigsaw puzzle. We’ll see how it fits eventually.” Fucking bullshit. Whatever puzzle it’s a part of will have long ago been thrown out by real scientists doing real science before it could conceivably have any use.

Psychology, bluntly, should be transferred to university communication departments so it can better fulfill its sole remaining reason for existence: how to build a better propaganda machine. As a science, it’s an embarrassing disaster.

I swear I wish I could get into a time machine, go back to 1983, and shoot myself to keep me from deciding to major in this worthless, backward, gap-toothed relative of the real sciences.

Or have I already told you that?

When I was a kid I wondered whether I’d turn in to one of the guys I read about, guys who ordered hot toddies in cherry-paneled rooms. Guys who smoked meerschaum pipes or large cigars while waiting for the butler to bring them the toddies warmed to the proper degree. It was a possibility, like being a race-car driver or an astronaut was a possibility. It was a possibility the way anything’s a possibility to a boy who reads and imagines.

Just today, years later, I decided, even though I never did turn into that kind of guy (‘Huh.’), that I wanted a hot toddy. Or at least an Irish coffee, which always sounded, well, pretty good. Real things get done and real decisions get made over hot toddies. Or days of yore get affably re-imagined through warm, moist prisms. I just had a hankering.

So I stopped off on the way home at a Slidell convenience store I’ve been to that I know sells the crucial hot toddy and Irish coffee ingredients, and what’s more, sells them in the aisles so you don’t have to stare at the proprietor for any length of time while trying to make what is for me an out-of-the-ordinary decision, one I was put up to by the likes of meerschaum-smoking detectives from books I read long ago. I’m talking about Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, of course; they put me up to this, put me up to it very specifically.

So I’m looking at all the whiskeys and whiskys and gins and rums in large bottles sitting in the aisle shelves, thinking, “My, that’s a lot of alcohol. Far too much for a toddy.” I pulled something called Old #7 off the shelf (which I could tell was superior toddy-makings because of the price), then put it back. It was too much of a commitment, especially for a beer drinker such as myself. I started toward the coolers, deflated, when I saw another whole row of toddy-makings behind the counter, over the proprietor’s head. These were much smaller than what I’d been looking at; I guessed about a fifth the size. Yes, pretty close to a fifth.

So I confidently told him I wanted a fifth of Old #7, there behind you my good man. And chop-chop! Hot toddies await the successful conclusion of this transaction!

He looked at me with fairly well-disguised contempt (at war with himself over whether he wanted more to make money from an imminent economic transaction or to delight in belittling the man who obviously fell off a turnip truck, then got hit by another turnip truck passing the other way) and directed my view back whence I’d come; “Those are the fifths over there.”

Needless to say, I was caught. Red-handed! My ignorance flopping around on the floor like some sort of half-hearted flopping thing. And the raft of liquor drinkers milling through the stacks suddenly stopped to look at me more closely. There was Skinny Pete and Smoking Joe, cornering the gin market. Delilah carting her wine out to her Impala, who missed a step but kept going since she didn’t want any trouble. Franklin Forsythe; Ed; Wall-eyed Sam, the baker man; they were all there.

In short, the ruse that I was a spirits drinker from way back, like everyone else in the store, of course I was, it went without saying, was exposed by my lack of knowing the first thing—the first thing—about the ethnography of the liquor people. And I think I truly dumbfounded them. Here was this, what, forties? fifties? …old guy who had somehow gotten old without knowing what a fifth of liquor looked like. How could this be? Where is he from? Why is he here? Who had put him up to this?

I fully understood how freakish I must have looked to them. Like the Elephant Man, if the Elephant Man didn’t know how to buy booze. But did I leave the store, tail between my legs, trunk swinging like all get-out, with no toddy ingredients, never to be seen there again? I certainly could have. That would’ve been pretty easy. It almost happened.

Here’s what really happened: “That’s a fifth over there? I don’t want that. it’s too venti. Venti! I’m looking for grande, the middle one over there, no, not the tall one, I know it’s tall; the tall one to the left. Grande is that one in th-, yes, that one. That’s the one! Whew! Thank you. And a pack of Marlboros in the box. No, not the 25’s, the, the, yes those. How much is it all? Here you are and a good day to you.”

Was I triumphant? No. No I wasn’t. I was the Elephant Man. But in the end, I did have a hot toddy of my own creation this evening. And I’m fully confident I can return to the same store and speak Starbucks to them and they will at least eventually give me what I want, with more a vague sense of unease than bald contempt. So call it a draw.

Consider the classic hypothetical scenario: Your house is on fire and you can take only three things with you before the entire structure becomes engulfed in flames. What would you take?

This one’s pretty easy for me. There’s not a chance in hell that my brain would know what to do beforehand. I don’t have a mental rolodex of things ranked in any kind of way–importance, expensiveness, color, anything–that I can get to fast enough to affect my decision of what to take from my burning house and what to leave behind, once I get past the people and the animals. I’d have to think about it, and the scenario is set up, obviously, in such a way that I can’t think about it.

So in the end, when the firemen arrive, they’ll probably find me sitting on the curb in my smoking clothing holding a banana and a spoon.

When I have a bad day, I try to remember to keep things in perspective.  “At least I wasn’t raped and murdered by Mongols” is a reminder that I give myself that appears to help. I urge you to try it out next time some kind of clusterfuck happens to you, see how it feels.

PS: People of Massachusetts? Go fuck yourselves.

You know how it’s said that a hybrid gets better city mileage than highway mileage because 1) the gas engine shuts off when the car is stopped, and 2) because of regenerative braking? That’s gotta be bullshit, and here’s why:  an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton, law-giver.

For example: say you’ve got your Prius cruising along at 40 mph. You see the light up ahead turning yellow, so you slow to a stop. Yes, the regenerative braking is recovering some percentage of the energy the car put into accelerating to 40 mph, but it’s not recovering 100% of that energy. In fact, a website I went to today (since navigated away from and lost) rates regenerative braking as delivering between 5 and 10% of a hybrid’s fuel economy (which translates into some unknown but less than 100% efficient energy conservation). In other words, if the stoplight hadn’t been there, the Prius would’ve continued merrily along at 40 mph without losing any energy to braking.

Second, at the stoplight, the Prius’ engine shuts down for the wait. Yes, no fuel is being used at the stop, but on the other hand, no mileage is being run up either. It’s a wash. But, you say, when the light turns green and the Prius accelerates back up, most of that acceleration is accomplished by the electric motor before the engine kicks back on; there’s your savings!

Im gegenteil mein freund!  The electric motor is solely charged via the gasoline-powered engine. Yes, in the several seconds after the stoplight, the energy is taken from the electric motor, but at some point down the road, that energy has to be replaced by transferring it from the gasoline engine back to the electric motor’s battery, with some concomitant loss of energy during the transference. Newton.

So why are hybrids touted to be so much more efficient in the city than on the highway? It just don’t add up. It just don’t add up. My guess (and it’s just a guess, albeit an incredibly educated and insightful one) is that it has everything to do with average speed and wind resistance. My guess–educated, insightful, and of an overall incredible nature–is that if a Prius were tested on the highway (meaning no starting and stopping) at an identical average mph as that achieved in city driving, its mileage would be significantly better than what it could achieve in the city, owing to reduction in wind resistance (from that at normal highway cruising speed to that at 40mph) and Isaac Newton. Because speed increases linearly, while the amount of energy necessary to overcome wind resistance increases exponentially (several of my brain cells swear this is a true statement based on graphs they remember seeing long ago, and that’s good enough for me).

Insightful, you say? Incredibly educated? Darn tootin’.

In sum: it’s obvious and goes without saying that a hybrid gets better gas mileage in city driving than a non-hybrid because of its ability to shut down its gas engine from time-to-time, as well as its being equipped with regenerative braking. But given the same average speeds (admittedly not going to happen) in highway vs city driving, a hybrid does not magically pull energy out of a hat to become somehow more efficient in the city than it is on the highway; the only reason that a hybrid achieves “better fuel economy” in the city is that, at average city-driving speeds, wind resistance is much less of a factor than at average real-world highway speeds. Therefore, the commonly-understood, commonly cited, but wrong, assumption that a hybrid’s better city mileage versus highway mileage arises from some laws-of-physics-defying aspect of stop-and-go driving is an often-parroted but chowder-headed massive misunderstanding of what is really going on.

And that’s the way it is, this eleventh of January, 2010. Courage.

In a recent commercial for Allstate, Dennis Haysbert intones that drivers who switched from Geico to Allstate saved an average of $396 per year on their auto insurance. He then intones “Surprised?”*

Not really, Dennis, and here’s why:  My guess is that most (if not all) drivers who switched insurance companies switched because the switch saved them money. But there are all these other drivers who didn’t switch, and they didn’t switch because they found out the switch wouldn’t save them money.

So for the purposes of disingenuousness, Allstate selected out all the people who came to the conclusion that switching companies was expensive and stupid before they averaged anything. Those left over–90% of everyone? 3.5% of everyone? Allstate doesn’t tell us–those left over saved some average amount of money. Allstate tells us that average was $396. Allstate doesn’t tell us how much money the other 10% or 96.5% of drivers saved, on average, by sticking with Geico. They left that up to Geico to do in some caveman or googly-eyed money-wad commercial somewhere down the road.

And they knowingly left us to mis-translate their carefully-crafted copy in our heads, so we’d be left thinking that the average driver would save $396 by switching to Allstate, instead of what they really said, which was merely that the average driver who discovered a reason to switch saved $396 by doing so. Crafty!

It’s a pretty disingenuous commercial, but you have to be suspicious and cranky to realize it. That’s where I come in. You’re welcome.

How’s Dennis feel about the commercial?

Haysbert… is happy to be in the Allstate ads. He says it’s the first ad work he’s done in about 15 years, because “most commercials are not very dignified.” But, he says, Allstate is different: “These had integrity. They have a team of lawyers that hover over each word I say. It might be a little frustrating, but it works. I can have the confidence and knowledge that what I’m saying is true.”

I conclude that Haysbert is neither suspicious nor cranky enough for his own good. And he has lawyers hovering over each word he says, like angels.

You know how scientists and historians are liable to liken the total time civilization has existed versus the total time the earth has existed to “the blink of an eye?” At the drop of a hat? I’ve always taken their word for that. I mean, why would scientists and historians lie to me, or be so sloppy that they screwed up on such a common comparison? They’re not typically liars and slobs. But I, for no other reason than I’m here in Miami with time to waste, decided to actually check that comparison. You lucky, lucky people!

First, I want to make it clear that I believe I’m the first one to check this comparison ever, in the history of the world. I realize that’s a powerful statement, but a 50 second Google investigation leads me to believe it’s true, and that’s good enough for me.

Second, to even make sense of the “blink of an eye” statement as a comparison, I realized I needed to know what unit of time the blink was being compared to. I mean, you can’t just say “civilization is to blink of an eye” as “age of the earth is to blank” without providing options for “blank.” That would be thoughtless and cruel. That would also get you a vicious, well-earned beating at an SAT exam if you were proctoring the test.  So I had to apply a little common sense to this. What biological process would a scientist or historian pair with “the blink of an eye” when trying to stun the reader with how really big the time difference is  between  the lifespan of civilization and the lifespan of the world? What biological process could they use? It’s, of course, a gigantic differential, a geological one; no one’s disputing that. At least no one near enough for me to reach out and slap some sense into. In the end, the only thing that seems reasonable to put up against that huge disparity is the human lifespan. And I think that’s a reasonable conclusion for any non-slappable person, especially when I can now word it like this: “civilization is to blink of an eye as earth’s lifespan is to human’s lifespan.” See how pleasing and SAT-ish that looks?

Third, now that I’ve identified my terms, the only thing I have to do prior to figuring out if I’m being lied to is to rigorously define these terms, viz: 1)time-length of civilization, 2)time-length of eye-blink, 3)time-length of earth’s existence, and 4)time-length of human life:

1. The length of time civilization’s been around depends on your definition of civilization. That doesn’t really apply here, of course; I don’t personally care what your definition is. My definition depends only on googling “when did civilization begin?”, clicking through to 2 or 3 different sites that appear the least bit relevant, grabbing some numbers, adding those numbers up, then dividing by the number of numbers added. Civilization’s been around for 7,000 years.

2. Wiki-answers answers “How long does it take to blink an eye” as if the question were about how much time humans go between eyeblinks. That definition had never occurred to me. It seemed, in fact, like bullshit. On the other hand, it also seemed like one of those things that was obvious to everybody else in the world, yet I had somehow managed to get wrong for decades. Luckily for my sanity, searchengineguide.com timed an eyeblink at about a tenth of a second, which conformed to my previous thinking, so wiki-answers is indeed a-bursting with bullshit.

3. If I’d approached the age of the earth in the same way as I approached the age of civilization (1 above), I would’ve had to arrange for some mechanism with which to throw out the Jesus-freak estimates. Instead I relied on high school and college textbook memories of this amount of time that are so ingrained in me that I could probably access those brain cells before I access the ones that tell me how many legs a tripod has. And then I arbitrarily added 500 million to come up with the answer: 5 billion years.

4. 75 years, because I’m all agreed that that’s about what it is.

That settled, I was able to mathematically describe the comparison:

(time-span of civilization)/(age of earth) = (time to blink an eye)/(human lifespan)

or, filling in those statements with the rigorous numbers from above,

7,000yrs/5 billion years = 0.1 second/2.36682 billion seconds

(where 75yrs = 75yrs x 365.25days/1yr x 24hrs/1day x 60min/1hr x 60sec/1min = 2.36682 billion sec).

So, canceling out the units and typing out the zeroes to make my work look more impressive, we have 7,000/5,000,000,000 = 0.1/2,300,000,000, or

7/5,000,000 = 1/23,000,000,000, or even

1/714,286 = 1/23,000,000,000

which we can finally see is utter bullshit.

Therefore (or, if we spent an extra 2 minutes googling it up, and we did, ” ∴ “), the entire span of human civilization is 5 orders of magnitude larger than the blink of an eye, if by “orders of magnitude” I mean what I think I mean.  In other words, my friends, the metaphor is a lie.

To be accurate–and scientists and historians are nothing if not accuracy fetishists–they pride themselves on it, they live for that shit–the metaphor should really be phrased something like this: “Civilization began 7,000 years ago, which, in geological terms, is around 32,000 blinks of an eye” (computation available upon request). Or if that doesn’t float their boat, “Civilization began 7,000 years ago, which is like everybody in Tupelo, MS, blinking at once, provided 4,000 of them are on vacation at the time.”  Granted, the phrase has become kind of verbose and pitiful, but I didn’t make this bed, and I’m not the one who has to sleep in it.

In conclusion, “Beeyatch.”

Could Twitter’s Realtime World Blur Our Moral Compass?

Emotions linked to our moral sense such as admiration and compassion- awaken slowly in the mind, according to a new study from a neuroscience group show that emotions linked to our sense of morality are aroused slowly. The study was led by Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.

This makes three different ways I’ve seen people try to make a cautionary tale out of this study. And this is one of the more subtle consequences of growing older: since I’ve seen this process several times before (the ‘new study of a particular process is abstracted to give a potential overall insight into why we’re fucked up’ process), and I’ve seen the process almost without exception sputter toward final inconsequence, I have become, if not scornful, at least indifferent to it. Is that wisdom? If it is, wisdom blows.

I miss the days when this sort of thing fired my imagination.

This meme is very similar (if not identical) to the one in which a fairly technical discovery in some particular scientific field is immediately seized upon by the media and extrapolated to construct a probable future in which wild, weird, new things become as common and important as the car or air travel or the cellphone. The media delight in telling us these things to the point that they will make one up if a ‘real’ one hasn’t come along for awhile.

Obviously, the fact of cars, air travel and cellphones indicates that, sometimes, the “probable future” actually happens. I’m aware of that. But by the same token, the fact that there are no personal submarines, no cures for cancer, no cold fusion, no teleporters, no huge starships trolling the asteroids for uranium and gold, no robot salad makers squatting inside kitchen cupboards, no cheap solar panels on every home, no healthy cigarettes, no fat pills, no telepathic communication–it makes it hard to pay attention when tidings of “the next greatest thing” worm their way into the popular consciousness.

Another similar if not identical media process is the one in which a particular thing happens (eg: USAir’s plane ditching in the Hudson after a birdstrike) which is so exciting that they are compelled, for awhile, to over-report other happenings that have even the slightest chance of producing the same outcome (eg: any birdstrike on any plane that forces the plane to return to the airport for a landing). Because I’m a pilot (and so through professional channels heard about many birdstrikes that required emergency landings that weren’t considered worthy of mainstream reporting until after the USAir incident) I know that these things happen all the time.

This new study shows that there is a difference in the speed that more and less visceral displays of tragedy matter to people.  That’s interesting: there are differences in the speed at which things matter. For example, seeing someone break an ankle elicits a response of compassion more quickly than seeing someone being told that her mother died. It’s an interesting study. But interesting psychological studies happen all the time. And because I was a psych major (and also because I’m a human being that pays a certain amount of attention to things that may impact my human being-ness), I know this new study should be interpreted narrowly until proven to matter more generally. That’s just the way it is. You can’t go from this study to a pronouncement on the moral effect of Twitter in one go and not sound like a shrieking ass, at least to experts. That’s just the way it isn’t.

The tricky part is knowing the difference between a carefully constructed hypothesis and the shrieking of an ass when the subject is not one you know well.  Years of being led to believe things were important that in the end turned out not to be very important have taught me to delay judgment on anything that isn’t already completely obvious. While that may be wise, it’s hard on optimism.

I know when things that happen in my areas of expertise are being stretched to fill a news vacuum. Birdstrikes and psychological studies happen all the time. They happen all the time. So where was CNN the thousand other times these things happened? I’ll tell you where CNN was: CNN was busy over-reporting some other goddamn thing that, since I’m not a professional sailor or bond-trader, I had no idea that they were over-reporting. So because I’m not an expert on everything, I am potentially duped by the media, day in and day out, to believe things are more consequential than they really are.

I know the media don’t do this on purpose. They don’t get up in the morning and say “Let’s over-report tsunamis today.” I know it’s just the lousy way things work. I know one of the functions of the media is to find whatever excitement there is in the daily crush of happenings in the world and offer it to the public, so that they can make money and continue existing. Or if there’s nothing really inherently exciting that day, to find the hook into something else that was exciting before and offer that. To blur potential and real if real doesn’t look like it will sell. I know all that.

Knowing that doesn’t make me happier. And one of the cardinal attributes of wisdom, I think, is that once you become wise to something, it’s very hard to become un-wise to it. In other words, I can’t go back to being optimistic about such things even if I wanted to. Wisdom is a jealous god.

I used to think that, given the choice, I would choose wisdom over innocence every time. Every time. I used to think that, given the choice, accurate knowledge of the probability that something is true is always preferable to ignorance of it. Do I still think that? It’s hard to say.

I guess I just wish wisdom wouldn’t trash optimism quite as thoroughly as it seems it has to do.

And the sign said anybody caught trespassing would be shot on sight
So I jumped on the fence and yelled at the house, Hey! what gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in
If God was here, he’d tell you to your face, man you’re some kinda sinner!

Ecto, 12 years old: “Yeah! There’s way too many signs! And I hate people telling me what to do all the time, too!”

Ecto, 45 years old: “Just keep off the man’s fucking lawn, a-ight?”

I just realized that if I do this long enough, eventually I’ll blog the exact same thing I blogged previously without even knowing it. It’ll be like noticing that today’s Beetle Bailey is a slight re-working of a Beetle Bailey from 1977. Except that instead of being disgusted with Mort Walker’s cynical or senile recycle of an old strip,  I’ll be the senile old guy recycling old ideas. In fact, it might have already happened. There’s really no way to know for sure.

(as far as I know, today’s Beetle Bailey is not recycled from 1977)

In the Sun Herald there’s a page, usually not far past the editorials page, which I call the ‘fluff’ page. It may even have a name, but I don’t know it. It’s the page that contains a smattering of celebrity gossip, a ‘this day in history’ section, and a ‘birthdays’ section. Maybe a crossword puzzle or sudoku too. I at least glance through most of the page, but I find myself actually analyzing the ‘birthdays’ section. It’s a 2-column list, usually of 20 or 23 or so famous living people, why they’re famous, and how old they are today. The two things I particularly notice are 1) why exactly each person is famous, and 2) how many people are older and younger than I am. The first is to be moderately outraged that it’s a list of ‘famous’ people, not ‘important’ people. So it’s very heavy on actors, very light on, say, physicists and philosophers. The second is to be disturbed when the bottom person in the first column is younger than I am. Which, of course, means that more than half the famous living people born that day were born after me.

I find that I’m not disturbed very often. Yet. But the bottom of the first column can only become more disturbing as time passes.

I do this to myself every day.

Whenever I watch The Colbert Report, I find my eyes drawn to Stephen’s hands and the way he moves them. He has extremely graceful hands, fascinating to watch; like two nervous birds attached way out there on the ends of his arms. He appears to know exactly where each one of his fingers is at all times, and exactly where it’s going to go next.

On the other hand, Nick Cave in the video down below has hands that often appear to be controlled by two entirely different brains. They’re like two people learning to dance together to this one song they both kind of know. And sometimes they’re like one person reading the newspaper and the other person eating a ham sandwich, in two different houses on opposite sides of the planet.

And this is also graceful.

Bellamy salute – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Bellamy salute is the hand gesture described by Francis Bellamy 1855-1931 to accompany the American Pledge of Allegiance, which he had authored. The gesture was derived from the Roman salute.

This was originally what American kids did at school when pledging allegiance. They’d still be doing it if Hitler and Mussolini hadn’t happened. Here’s Bellamy’s directions for a proper pledge:

At a signal from the Principal the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute — right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” At the words, “to my Flag,” the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side.

In my heaven I get to ask Francis Bellamy and dicks of his ilk just exactly what did they think they were doing. Then it’s back to the beer and dancing girls.

114-year-old U.S. woman to be world’s oldest – CNN.com
Baines will not officially be given the title until after Guinness World Records completes an investigation, the organization said.

On the one hand I think it’s great that the governments of the world don’t keep any particular track of who is older than who. Apparently Global Overlord, Inc could not care less that a little old lady in the states has outlived all the other little old ladies and little old men from her time. On the other hand, who the hell gave Guinness Book the authority to say who’s ‘officially’ older than somebody else? “Sorry, ma’am, you’re not how old you are until we officially say so.”

This is one of the very few times where a registered trademark symbol thrown in there somewhere would make me happier. I mean, the woman already is the world’s oldest person; she’s just not The World’s Oldest Person®.

When I was 11 I had a teacher at Green Acres called Mrs Thornhill. Mrs. Thornhill had some sort of malady and went away for a couple months. Or maybe Mr. Thornhill had the malady and Mrs. Thornhill had to be home to take care of him; as I recall from 7th or 8th grade Mississippi History, Mr. Thornhill was older than dirt and spent half the class sleeping sitting up on the edge of his desk. Anyway: Mrs. Thornhill went away for a couple months, leaving us with a substitute teacher. Before she left, she assigned us all to do one book report a week. A week into her absence, I noticed that the substitute wasn’t demanding any book reports from us kids, so I did the only sensible thing a kid could do, which was to not write any more of them.

Two months later, at the end of the school year, Mrs Thornhill returned and handed out our report cards. I remember getting all ‘E’s and ‘S+’s, except for her class, for which I received a ‘U.’ “How could this be?” I asked her. “Well, you didn’t do 8 book reports,” she told me. “Yes I did,” I lied to her; “I just didn’t turn them in to the substitute because she didn’t ask for them. I can bring them in tomorrow if you want.” Tomorrow was the last day of school. “Okay,” she said. “Bring them in tomorrow.”

That night I wrote 8 book reports. The next day Mrs. Thornhill changed my ‘U’ to an ‘E.’

The moral of this story, my friends, is that kids today are simply too lazy to properly get away with things that we knew how to get away with in days of yore. My kids would no sooner write 8 book reports in a night than they would stuff live electric eels down their pants.

I weep for the younger generation.

I believe that in the future we’ll come together, liberals and conservatives alike under President Obama, and work toward making the country’s future a bright one. But in the meantime, all y’all Old Man Blinky/Sarah Palin voters can suck my dick.

I’m not for penalizing genius, and I’m not for penalizing hard work. Genius and hard work deserve to be recognized by money. I am for managing luck. I believe the unlucky should be made less unlucky. The only way to do that is by taking money from the lucky and giving it to those without it.

Take Bill Gates: a hard-working genius. And a very, very lucky man. What is he worth, 18 billion dollars? Some absurd number that I refuse to look up. I’ll allow a billion dollars to him on merit. Maybe he deserves a billion dollars. The other 17 billion should be ripped out of his hands and given to the people who got sick, or shot, or made astute bets on the wrong horses. Because when lucky gets out of hand, society gets a little closer to revolution.

Remember how a few years ago artists were employed to draw pastels of court scenes because cameras weren’t permitted in? I don’t know, I guess to protect the innocent, on the very off-chance that the accused were somehow found innocent? I think the same technique ought to be used in pictures inside the stock market exchanges. Because there’s bound to be one or two innocents among the perpetrators.

They’re always trying to make it relevant, or hip, or something. As far as I’m concerned, the idea of creation, godhood, underlying meaning of it all should be the bastion of the unhip. It’s painfully embarrassing to watch televangelists/charismatic preachers doing their thing, as if the idea is the kind that has to be sold, branded, or advertised. Part of its greatness is that it is a thing that does not need to be dressed up; it’s a thing that can only be diminished by doing that. People become more worldly, more sophisticated, more cynical with each passing minute and hour living in our world, paying attention to the things society makes us pay attention to.

The beginning idea is the one thing that can’t be touched by that. One should never become blasé or smug about the meaning of existence, like it’s a hula hoop or something. I won’t stand for it. That is why I race past the channels on the television that are passing out the Word. That is why the TV preachers outrage me. Don’t treat the final root idea like it’s a goddamn soft drink whose market share needs to be increased. How unbearably cynical. Don’t fuck with what should be an inviolable refuge against hype and cynicism.

Large Hadron Collider Down Until 2009 | Wired Science from Wired.com

On Sept. 18, the news from CERN, the organization that runs the LHC, was that an electrical problem involved with a cooling system caused a helium leak that would keep the mammoth particle accelerator out of commission for a day or so. A couple days later, days stretched into two months: The machine would need to be warmed back up, which will take three to four weeks, before a full investigation could be done.

Now the outlook is even more bleak for eager physicists who have already waited decades for the giant collider to come to fruition, after a week of tantilizingly successful beam operations.

The warm-up period and ensuing investigations will bump up against the LHC’s “obligatory winter maintenance period,” according to a statement today from CERN. This brings us into early spring before commissioning can restart.

Do I have to say that this is also exactly what we’d be told if something super-freaky had happened when they first turned this thing on, something so super-freaky that they’re afraid to turn it on again? “Obligatory winter maintenance period.” Good one.