Channel Mike

Today was basically another travel day, but gave us more time and less distance so we were able to explore and have a little fun.

As we left our hotel, we swung by a local South San Francisco yacht club just to see the boats and the sights. There was a Miata owners club barbecue going on. The kids thought it was funny to see all the same model cars all parked in a row. The sight of the masts all reaching into the air with the San Francisco Bay in the background was nice.

It's better than it used to be traveling with kids. It still gets pretty miserable by evening, though. We left Jackson at 2:00pm CDT, spent a couple of hours in Dallas, then flew from Dallas to San Francisco from 5:30pm CDT to 7:00pm PDT. It's now 10:30, past midnight for the kids' internal clocks, and they've been ready to crash (though they wouldn't admit it verbally) for several hours, now.

We're staying in the Radisson near the airport. It's nice, seems comfortable. The indoor pool's open 'til 11.

Douglas Hofstadter wrote a book a few years ago entitled, "I Am a Strange Loop." I've been reading and enjoying it. He suggests that consciousness is a strange loop existing a level up from the physical reality of the brain. I'm wondering, however, if strange loops, as a mathematical construct, can explain everything in the universe that we have troubled ourselves over with beginnings and ends and finity. What would it mean to physics if all of our experience was exhaust from an underlying strange loop. Could we use the signature of the exhaust to explore the underlying reality?

In the spirit of helping Google save those searching for help with cancer, I'm linking to the following blog entries that explain in more detail how Andreas Moritz is a quack. He's also probably an outright liar and exploiter; if not a liar, a well-meaning fool. Perhaps this is the difference between murder and manslaughter.

See more at:
Andreas Moritz at Respectful Insolence
Andreas Moritz at Pharyngula.

Post your own links to support truth and to prevent victims of cancer from being victims of Andreas Moritz.

I had a thought the other day that struck me as containing a lot of depth and wisdom. I've had the same thought many times before, and I'm certain that many others have had it before I have, but perhaps it struck me in a different context this time around.

Imagine winning a billion dollar lottery today and retiring tomorrow. Where would you live? What would you do with your time? Can you live there now? Can you be doing that now?

Several months ago, I was spending a lot of time taking practice tests for the MCAT. When I took tests online, all was good. But when I was going through tests in books, things slowed down. I'm now studying for the GRE and finding that I spend half my time logging my answers to paper and marking down times so I know how long each question is taking me. I decided to spend a day building a simple little app that will log the times and answers for me. I call it Test Timer. It doesn't have the functionality to be a commercial application, but as a simple little utility, it does a fantastic job.

I have not even taken the time to find out what "Unscientific America" refers to, specifically. But I read this post on Pharyngula last night and was, again, impressed by PZ Myers' ability to lay it out.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/unscientific_america_and_thos...

Enjoy!

This is a recent email support conversation with Sprint. I understand that this isn't a huge deal. My question isn't terribly important. But the dialog really speaks for itself, here, so I'll hold my rant until the end.

I went on a field trip with my daughter, who's in second grade, and got the opportunity to listen in to some of their conversations. I did not campaign at all, of course, but I did answer one child when asking for whom I would vote. This second grade perspective is indicative, I think, of parental influences more than any media coverage.

The one person who asked me to disclose my vote was surprised when I told her Barack Obama. Her response: "But he's not a Christian!" I responded, "of course he is. He's attended the same Christian church for 20 years. But, of course, it wouldn't matter to me if he was a Christian or not."

Another friend of my daughter told me that she had been told twice at school that Obama made mothers kill their children.

A boy we ate lunch with told us that Obama's dad is a terrorist. One of McCain's adult supporters helped me to correct this misperception.

My daughter passed on the comment from her friend on the bus that "Obama hates white people." and that he's going to take away all of our guns so we can't fight the war.

For the record, none of the second graders were talking about John McCain.