Monday, October 13, 2008

Cosmic thoughts filled the night.

Last night, I felt compelled to watch a bunch of videos about parallel universes and 11 dimensions. It came on the heels of a lot of reviewing a radical insight about how the universe might work that came to me 2 or 3 years ago.

Among other things, it accidentally explains the origin of inertia, gravity, dark matter and dark energy. It also points out how we have many dimensions; parallel, orthogonal, and every angle in between.

Something is welling up inside me that feels like those insights will play a practical part in some upcoming design decisions.

Lynn just pointed out that she has been having cosmic thoughts all night too; portals and light travel. That is interesting because most of my night thoughts were about photons and how light travels.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Imperial empire?

OK, it's bugging the heck out of me so I need to rant a bit.
I was listening to a talk about school lunches; how lousy they are and how much money we don't spend on them. She mentioned that we spend huge amounts of money every day for prisoners, but not for our kids.

I looked up how much money we actually do spend on prisoners and re-learned a bunch of nasty statistics.
: The US has 4.6% of the world's population but we have nearly 50% of the prisoners.
: What's worse...
Department of corrections data show that about a fourth of those initially imprisoned for nonviolent crimes are sentenced for a second time for committing a violent offense. Whatever else it reflects, this pattern highlights the possibility that prison serves to transmit violent habits and values rather than to reduce them."

Add to that the fact that our military budget is substantially larger than the rest of the world combined, and we have to ask...
WHO ARE WE, REALLY?

The war on drugs is one of the major causes of our high prison population. If we could stop our war mentality and focus more on a justice mentality, we would need far fewer drugs, and prisons, and international unrest.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Lesson of the week; Justice

Justice, revenge, punishment, rehabilitation, correction, deterrence equity, fairness


Every once in a while I try to understand justice. What do we mean when we say "justice"?
I think our civilization is confused by the concept of justice.