Year: 2005

Steve sent me a link to an article that discusses the possibility of the existence of aliens, and posits that they must have visited earth at some time, because if we assume they exist, it’s almost certain they would have stumbled across us by now. Although I have a ton of work to do this morning, I couldn’t resist commenting. Here’s my reply:

The existence, or lack thereof, of aliens basically comes down to a matter of belief. We can’t prove one way or another, and there are only two ways to truly answer the question:

1) Meet an alien race.

2) Scour the entire stinkin’ universe and find nothing.

Since #2 is unlikely or impossible, that leaves #1. We either find the aliens, or spend eternity looking for them. We can’t prove they don’t exist, just as we can’t prove God doesn’t exist.

Anyway, Fermi’s Paradox as described in the article doesn’t hold water with me. Just because there are aliens (which I firmly believe) doesn’t mean they must have encountered us by now. The galaxy is bloody huge, and is only one of maybe trillions. Even with “dispersion models” one cannot assume that an alien civilization would have expanded to our little corner.

The dispersion model assumes, for one, that aliens would expand. I think this is a false assumption: they might– but they might not. Perhaps at a certain level of technology, all civilizations end up constructing Dyson spheres and sort of keeping to themselves. Perhaps they reach some higher transcendant state and end up encasing themselves in vast computer networks, lost in their own thoughts. Whatever. There are many scenarios where a civilization would *not* expand, even though they might be continuing to advance.

Moreover, I think theories that aliens have visited (or are visiting) earth are completely bunk. Again, I see two possibilities, both based on the assumption that an alien race capable of interstellar flight is far, far more advanced than we are:

1) They’re malevolent, in which case they’d turn our planet into rubble before we even knew what hit us.

2) They’re benevolent, in which case they’d introduce themselves and share technology or at least ideas.

There’s no way, in my mind, that an advanced civilization would do goofy things like draw crop circles or kidnap hillbillies for medical experiments. It’s just ludicrous.

So all in all, I’m convinced there are aliens out there, and I’m also convinced we simply haven’t found them yet (or they us). We need to keep looking, though, because the discovery of another civilization would radically alter our world-view… for the better, I hope. It would have profound impacts on everything from politics to religion to science.

On a related topic, I imagine that finding life (however you define it) on Mars or Titan or Europa would also be profound, though not quite as earth-shattering since it would likely not be “intelligent”.

Anyway, that’s my treatise. Back to the grind.

I’m back from my jaunt to California, where Lily and I had a great time planning everything for The Fourth Company (name yet to be determined). Some highlights:

On my flight out of Denver, I sat next to a woman who had a big Vitamin Cottage bag, paisley pants, a hookah filled with dry herbs, and a book titled “Analyze Your Dreams”. After takeoff, she sat in the lotus position for the bulk of the flight. Yep, definitely from Boulder!

Friday night we spent a couple of hours hashing out ideas for names, and came up with some pretty hilarious ones. No, we weren’t drunk, but a casual observer at the bar and grill we were at might have thought so. Several times, as we thought of a goofy name (and its associated tag line), I was laughing so hard I was crying.

On Saturday we decided to hang out at the public library, since we basically needed a place to sit for eight hours and lay out plans for the business. We scored big, because that was the day the library was having its annual book sale. Making the executive decision to abandon work temporarily, we loaded up on books (two bucks for a grocery bag full). Now I’ve got about forty new books for a total of four bucks. Sweet.

We were told by our friend Christine that we must be hanging out together too much, because both of us use the word “awesome” a lot. Apparently it went out of vogue in 1984 or so, although I didn’t get that memo and will continue to use it liberally. Also, Lily observed that she finds herself saying “no worries” quite a bit, which she most definitely picked up from me.

All in all, it was a good time (though tiring!) and we made a lot of progress. Soon we’ll launch The Fourth Company and get on the road to fame and riches.

I just finished a fun lunch with one of my newest clients, Izze Beverages. Before I left to come back to the office, they loaded me up with a few cases of their drink and a bunch of schwag. Whee, t-shirts for the whole family!

So here’s Zack, sporting his new shirt (which he loves) and about to pop open a bottle of sparkling Izze juice.

Digital image editing is so cool.

I like to change my computer’s desktop background quite often, just to keep things in flux, and it’s important that whatever I use is either fairly dark, or has large regions of solid color. As the screenshot below shows, when I’m doing programming work (which is much of the time) my text “floats” on the desktop. It’s terribly hard to read against a background that’s bright or noisy.

So I had a nice mountain picture– lots of trees, snow, and blue sky– but there were a lot of clouds that made it hard to read text against it. I just pulled it into the GIMP, selected everything above the mountains, and worked out a nice blue gradient that makes it look like a gorgeous cloudless day. Voila!

When, oh when, will the madness end?

Yesterday was quite a day, and on a whim I counted the number of projects I worked on for clients. Ten. That doesn’t count going to lunch with my pal Steve, nor the emergency server replacement for a client whose hard drive went belly-up.

Today, by comparison, is relatively easy– it’s three in the afternoon, and I’ve only done work for half a dozen clients so far. We’ll see what the rest of the day brings…

I’m on hold with a company out in Arizona, and after I navigated the menu system I found what I needed. Then I had one final option:

“If you would like to hold without music, please press one.”

Sweet! I figured I’d listen to the music anyway, hoping for some Kenny G or whatever. Sadly, in addition to a bit of goofy jazz, I had to endure advertising blurbs. Whee. Next time I’m going for the no-music option.

I taught Alex how to play the old board game Risk the other night. Our first game was interesting, as he didn’t really understand the strategy and I had to conveniently “forget” to guard one of my borders adequately. He rolled into South America and proceeded to wipe out a couple of continents. In the end, after a hot contest, he won.

Last night he wanted to play again, so we set up the board and went to work. He insisted on conquering all of Asia, despite my advice that doing so is difficult and often a waste of resources. Well, he managed to do it– and hold it– much to my chagrin. The dice were simply not on my side, and despite the fact that I held North America, he continued to gain strength in Asia, Australia, and Africa.

In the end, he cashed in some bonus armies and placed his juggernaut army on Kamchatka. A vicious battle across the Bering Strait ensued, and when he finally conquered Alaska it was only a matter of time before he crushed the rest of North America. When the bloody turn was over, I was left with four countries scattered in Europe, and he held the rest of the world.

Ouch. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Next time I’m playing for blood.

From the New York Times:

“Iraq’s rapidly swelling insurgency numbers 200,000 fighters and active supporters and outnumbers the United States-led coalition forces, the head of the country’s intelligence service [General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani] said yesterday.”

We might have better weaponry and better training, but they (might) have numbers, and they certainly have passion.

Is this a war we can “win”?

As a follow-up to Bill Gates’ communism comment (oh, how fun it is to watch the bees’ nest of open-source people get stirred up about this), I saw this hilarious poster. It’s in the spirit of the RIAA warning I posted long ago…

The Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch held a contest to find the strangest consumer warning labels, ostensibly to bring attention to how lawsuit frenzy has forced manufacturers to take measures to make sure even the world’s biggest idiot can’t sue them for failing to inform about possible dangers of using their product.

The winner: a toilet brush with the admonition “Do not use for personal hygiene.”

Second place went to a children’s scooter that warned “This product moves when used”, and third place for a digital thermometer stating, “Once used rectally, this thermometer should not be used orally.”

Whee!