More rants of a dead man

You guys heard about the worm fossil looking thing they found on mars? They say it looks like a tortellini or some other italian noodle. At first I was skeptical, they just want something to
get excited about, but after some thought I realized they’re really off their knocker.
Life on this planet started out with plants. There were forests of green thousands if not millions of years before the first slug crawled the earth. Plants are far simpler forms of life.
So why they hell would anybody even suggest that there might be some animal-type life on mars when there’s no evidence there was ever plant life. Let alone a fossil near the surface.
Please.

In the future we will forget the details of what happened, but 6 months ago, the price of gas at the pump was over $4.00 and heating oil was over $5.00

It is now December 2008 and gas is $2.10 and heating oil around $2.90.

Oh and the markets are all tanking.

So if you ever thought for a moment that the price of oil isn’t set by a cartel of some kind, this should give you food for thought.

In the good old days of writing software we used to reorganize it, now we ‘refactor’ it.

I just heard that gas is $1.71 in Edison new jersey.
And it occurred to me that the gas price fixing is the tool the government uses to help or hinder the
economy.
When the housing bubble was ramping up, they wanted to slow down the economy so they raised the price
of gas, didn’t work so well, the bubble popped, and now we’re in the dumps. So to spur consumer spending,
they’re lowering the price of gas to help the economy out.
It’s not working either, but at least there’s cheap gas.
Not bad for a conspiracy, eh?

“The market is down today.”

Have you ever really thought about what they’re saying? When they say “the market” they (you know, they, the people who fix the roads… ‘they’) are really just generalizing, and are really referring to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This is a phrase referring to a number that represents a sum of the trading value of some particular companies selected to be representative of the market as a whole.

But it’s not.  Every once in a while a company is removed or added to the list of what is used in the index calculation. On that day, the value of “the market” changes, not because anything went up or down in value, but because somebody decided some company was more or less good at representing the market on that day.

Then there’s the fact that the companies listed as part of the DJIA index are not weighted, so if a $1.00 company gains a dollar and a $100 company gains a dollar, it amounts to the same thing in the index.

Take into account that it’s all perception (I hope we all know that by now) and not actual value of companies that make up their stock price that goes into the index calculation and it’s hard to imagine how anybody can take “The market is down today” at all seriously. But people do and it affects their mood and their likelihood to spend.

Here’s another example: “Prices haven’t been this low since 1984.” That’s another brainless comment. If something costs $5.00 today,  and it cost $5.00 in 1984 are you going to tell me it was the same price and has the same value? Having the same price is a meaningless comparison because it doesn’t take into account inflation. But what you hear is that the price now has dropped to the same numerical dollar value as it was in 1984. Well, in 1984 $5.00 was worth a lot more than it is now. So in fact if the price now drops to 1984 values you gotta think we’re much worse off than in 1984. But they’re not saying that. It’s part of the farce of finance.

It’s all a big uncontrollable farce.

Crichton has a silly rant about global warming here: http://www.s8int.com/crichton.html but it starts off with a rant on SETI.

Which reminds me of something that always seemed pretty obvious to me.

We know the universe is pretty damn big. Some of us think we evolved through the wonders of chaos starting somewhere near the cellular level. If that’s so, it stands to reason that this evolution could happen elsewhere. Given the size of the universe (bigger than we can imagine) it’s not too big a reach to imagine it happening elsewhere and at some point in time, past present or future, there is likely to be another intelligent species of some kind living on some kind of planet.

But given what science has also told us about time and space travel, and given what a uninteresting part of an uninteresting galaxy we live in, it is unlikely that anybody will ever find us. Or we them.

Which is probably a good thing.

Now that the fiasco is over (although I have to say, without TV, it’s not all that noticable) it’s pretty evident that mccain lost through no fault of his own. The worst president in my lifetime sets a pretty poor stage for any follow up act. I don’t think it was possible for any republican to win, unless maybe George Bush ran as a democrat.

Let bush go down in history as he deserves, the most incompetent, government leader in living memory.

From the la times:

As Americans are turning out to the polls in record numbers, Bush’s approval rating, according to the latest CBS News tracking poll, has dipped to 20%, the lowest ever recorded for a president. His disapproval rating of 72% matches his all-time high, reached last month.

I found a bug in Web 2.0 and will be releasing a patch for 2.01 shortly.

A few weeks ago I had this idea that the way to get elected was to do something really loud media big and
noisy 3 days before the election. This is about the attention span of the average tv-watching american I figure.

I figure that’s also about how long it takes the media to ramp up to full steam over something really juicy.

McCain’s not doing too well, from what I hear, but I just figured out what he could do 3 days before election day to possibly stick it to obama (aside from blowing up a US building somewhere in the 50 states).

He could dump palin for somebody known to be competent.
That would get a lot of people to swing back right quick, just in time to vote before they had a chance to
rethink it.

I accept paypal payments for my brilliant ideas. Thank you.

It seems to me that if our evolutionary ancestors were lazy sacks of shit like we are nowadays, we’d be a lot better off.

You exercise to stay in shape and keep healthy, because humans evolved doing exercise (hunting and whatnot). If we had evolved on a couch, our bodies would be most adept at staying on couches because we would have evolved that way and we’d be a lot better off now.