Year: 2006

01/27/2006

It’s amazing, sometimes, to consider the power of music. I listen to it almost every day as I work, and it strongly affects my mood… one day I might have a bunch of hip-hop dance music, the next I’m jamming to some heavy-beat trance music, and then I switch to soothing new age stuff. Soundtracks are a favorite of mine because– like trance– they don’t have words to distract me while I’m programming or writing an e-mail or proposal or whatever. Great background.

And there are certain songs, generally few and far between, that literally give me goosebumps when I listen to them. They either evoke a strong memory from the past, or they convey some sense of grandeur. I just bought the soundtrack for “The Island” (great movie!) and the final track, My Name Is Lincoln, which plays right at the very end of the movie before the credits, does this. It’s fabulous composition, and the scene in the movie is truly great. Before I bought the album I read reviews on Amazon, and everyone seems to agree that it’s a very moving piece of music.

It’s good for the soul.

01/25/2006

If you’re a law student, it’s quite a privilege to have the Attorney General of the United States come to speak at your school, in a room of perhaps fifty fellow students. It happened today for students at Georgetown Law School: Alberto Gonzales arrived and was talking about the justifications of the Bush administration to wiretap American citizens.

As he launched into his speech, the students rose from their seats and turned their backs on him. A few other students then trooped into the room carrying a banner with Benjamin Franklin’s oft-quoted saying:

Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.

Following his (mercifully short) speech, there was a panel discussion where his arguments regarding Bush’s antics were shredded. David Cole, a Georgetown law professor, said:

When you’re a law student, they tell you that if you can’t argue the law, argue the facts. They also tell you that if you can’t argue the facts, argue the law. If you can’t argue either, apparently, the solution is to go on a public relations offensive and make it a political issue… to say over and over again ‘it’s lawful’, and to think that the American people will somehow come to believe this if we say it often enough.

If I ever need a lawyer, I want someone who was in that room today.

01/20/2006

Margaret Elizabeth Taylor was a 98-year-old woman who died last November. Her estate was worth just over a million dollars. Her husband had died twenty-five years ago, and she had no living siblings or children. The big question: who received her estate?

The federal government, of course. In her will, she bequeathed her entire fortune to the government and asked that it be used to pay down the national debt.

Although generous and most certainly original, I suspect that million dollars pays for a few minutes of interest on our $8.1 trillion debt. Shame.

01/19/2006

Laralee and I teach a weekly science class for second-graders, and a few weeks ago we put together a lesson about chemistry– specifically, how mixing different things together has some pretty interesting results. The highlight of the lesson was undoubtably when we mixed polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) with borax solution to make green slime.

We had a bit left over after class, so at home we mixed up a big batch and had some fun with it. Mmm, slime…

01/19/2006

It’s always fun to get goodies from clients as thanks for good work. In today’s mail was a huge envelope from my friends at ATO Records. It was a stack of ten CD’s… all of the latest stuff from the bands they manage. Sweet!

01/12/2006

I just read an interesting article about the oil economy on Kiro5hin. One of the insightful commentators said:

One in seven barrels of oil globally, almost 50% of America’s oil consumption, are used by American passenger vehicles, which travel 2.5 trillion miles per year. Today, the average passenger vehicle gets 23.9 mpg. If that number were 1984’s peak figure of 27.5 mpg, almost 350 million barrels of oil per year would be saved without a scrap of inconvenience. By driving more sensibly, and purchasing more responsible transportation instead of SUVs, muscle cars, and other ridiculously wasteful vehicles, Americans can save at least a billion barrels per year or more with minimal change in lifestyle.

That’s impressive. Although the writer doesn’t offer any evidence to back up these statements, I see no reason to doubt them. It jives with what I see when I drive along the highway and look at the gas-guzzling vehicles surrounding my little plastic Saturn.

It continues:

You can take these actions as individuals. Americans are victims not of governments and oil companies, but of their own addiction to the product. To make change, you don’t need the cooperation of corporations, you don’t need government regulation, and you don’t need new types of cars and energy sources to be designed. They are already available, and the more you buy, the greater the demand, and the more options that will appear. It’s an easy and fun cop-out to debate what others should do and speculate about big problems with big solutions that require retooling the nation. Skip it. Just do something yourself.

Amen! People often discuss alternative fuels (solar power, wind energy, biodiesel, nuclear plants) but all of them have an array of problems. Most notable is the fact that– like it or not– our society is powered by petroleum. It’s not something that’s going to change overnight, and it’s sure easy to say, “Well, when they come out with a hydrogen-powered car I’ll think about buying one after my current Ford Explursion loses its resale value.” It’s harder to look at our own consumer habits and determine how we can make a difference right now.

Go on, get yourself a nice plastic Saturn, work in your basement, and bike everywhere around town like me. You’ll feel better.