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“Scientists’ abilities to control the spin of the electron help determine the properties of the photon, which in turn could have implications for the development of optoelectronics and quantum cryptography. Photons could be encoded with secure information, which could serve as the basis for anti-eavesdropping technology, Warburton said.”

Or it might not.

Really, I know why scientists and reporters feel the need to speculate, but can they at least put a disclaimer at the end of the speculation? Something like “This is only speculation,” or “Who knows what the future may bring?” or “We are almost invariably wrong.”

Yes, it could serve as the basis for anti-eavesdropping technology, but it won’t. Yes, it could lead to safer public drinking water or a miracle cancer drug, but it won’t.

I say this, comfortable that I’ll be right 999 times out of a thousand. I don’t mind being wrong that thousandth time, as long as I get to mock reporters and researchers the other 999 times.

In my speech class that I’m taking, a requirement to get a good grade for a speech is to cite a “wealth of sources.” My informational speech I’ll be giving concerns how to book the best flight when going on vacation. Nice and easy. For the speech, my root source is faa.gov, a division of dot.gov.

Many topics have a variety of sources to mine. This isn’t one of them. There are no other sources; faa.gov is root. Any fact-giving anywhere else is derived from it. Any opinion anywhere else is based on it.

But my instructor will insist that I toss some more sources in there. Sprinkle em right on in.

A speech class is built and exists to treat students like children, which, judging from my fellow students, isn’t always a bad thing. Some of these people are terrifically dull. Oh, the stories I could tell. But a speech class isn’t built to allow for the odd grown-up who wanders in for unfathomable reasons.

The other reason Speech Class exists is to discover and nurture those people who have a knack for speechifying, of course. We’ve got to have a certain amount of people around who like talking to other people, otherwise civilization would crumble. But as an appalling consequence, I have to give two brutally pointless speeches (when all is said and done) to strangers.

I’ve given speeches before for classes and in the military; some of them might have even been worthwhile to one or two people who heard them. But I already know I don’t like giving them. They can cross me off the list; I don’t care for it. This speech class won’t lead me to bigger and better speech classes.

But I’m required to take it.

When the course and the instructor require me to have a wealth of sources, even when there is obviously just one source, they’re telling me that I am not root. They’re in my face about it.

The thing is, in the things I care about, I am root. Root doesn’t mean that I know everything, even on subjects I know a lot about. It means that, if someone asks me a question, and I don’t know the answer, I tell them so. For example, this guy

“If the increased southern temperatures [of Saturn] are solely the result of seasonality, then the temperature should increase gradually with increasing latitude, but it doesn’t,” Orton said. “We see that the temperature increases abruptly by several degrees near 70 degrees south and again at 87 degrees south.

“A really hot thing within a couple degrees of the pole is something I don’t understand at all,” he said.

is my hero.

We should be bugged when an institution’s policy is to deny root to us. That should never be gotten used to.

Here’s a little ditty from yesteryear that I read in a book that I got from my mother-in-law last Christmas, Seeing in the Dark, about stars:

Follow the arc to Arcturus,
and on to Spica go;
Then turn northwest to Regulus,
the foot of the lion, Leo.

It’s just that far to Gemini,
Where Castor and Pollux glow,
Near Rigel, and Capella,
And Sirius, down below.

While I learned about my poor meatball on Mount Smokie, kids in else-time were learning about the stars in the sky. How did we get so street-smart, and so dumb?

The world has a fever, and has had for a long time. I hope it breaks soon.

The Sun and the Moon set astronomy back thousands of years.

As the only two things in the heavens that the ancients could look at and see any detail whatsoever, the fact that the Sun is a brilliant, featureless disk, and the fact that the Moon is a featureful but unchanging disk, kept Ptolemy and the rest of those guys in the dark. It was obvious to everyone that these things up in the sky were two dimensional. They were not spheres, they were heavenly stamps.

This is my example: if the Moon had rotated as it revolved about us, so that it showed a different face, gradually, every night, then it would have been obvious that it was a big ball out there. It is a stupendous coincidence of natural law that it shows us one unchanging surface. This stupendous coincidence allowed people to assume that it was not spherical. And if the Moon wasn’t a sphere, why think that anything else up there was? And if nothing else up there was spherical, why believe that the Earth was round?

There was no obvious reason to think that. It took many different people many lifetimes to convince everyone else that their subtle reasoning that the Earth is a ball, surrounded by other balls, was correct.

I tire myself out right now, just thinking about the inherent difficulty in trying to convince the hoi polloi of thousands of years ago that the earth is round, given the Sun and the Moon.

Here’s something that I would be happy to have but I wouldn’t pay good money for: a device that could tell me exactly where to look to see a thing, if other things weren’t in the way.

An example of the sort of thing I’d like to know is which direction to look to see a friend in California from here. By inputting my exact location and my friend’s exact location, this device that I want would illuminate a spot in the middle distance that, if I could dig a straight and true hole, my friend would be on the other end of it. So this device takes into consideration the curvature of the earth. If I wanted to know where to look in the direction of the Taj Mahal, my device would illuminate a spot in the close foreground. Maybe a spot on my sofa, or the carpet. If I dug a hole straight and true through the ground in a conforming line from my eyes into the ground at that spot, eventually I’d end up in an ornate mausoleum in India.

There’s nothing hard about this desire; all it would take is a few extra lines of code in a handheld GPS device, the ability to input the Taj’s exact coordinates, and some kind of light emitter built into the machine.

What I really want is to be able to answer my son truthfully and precisely when he asks me “Dad, where is Hawaii?” I’d fire up the machine, get a fix, and say, “There, son,” while pointing at a spot on the kitchen floor.