Magnetism and Dark Matter

So here is the idea I have been thinking of lately which will no doubt revolutionize the thinking in the field of physics. By which I mean this is a crakpot idea that I can't even begin to prove or back up.

So Dynamo theory says that a magnetic field is generated by circulating electric charges. Now to my knowledge the specifics of dynamo theory are still being worked out but less us assume that it is true. That brings us to the question of planetary magnetics.

There are three possibilities I will then consider here. The first being that various atoms within the earth's mantle have a charge and flow in circulating patterns of some sort and thus create earth's magnetic field. This circulation could be caused by earth's rotation or by convection, I don't know but it isn't important here.

The other possibility I will consider is to view even the mantle as essentially unmoving, a stationary object though still full of atoms with charges. In this view it is earth's rotation that makes the charges act as if they were circulating to generate a magnetic field.

This raises an important question in my mind. So a charge circulates and generates a field. Relative to what does it have to circulate? I know if you run a current through a coil of wire it generates a field, but what if you take something with a charge, tie it to the end of a rope and spin it around really quickly? Will this also generate a field? As essentially this is what I am proposing it does in the second scenario I contemplated.

I am going to skip to the end because I am rather tired now.

So here is the revolutionary bit. What if magnetic fields were generated by the circulation of charges yes. But what if the actual mechanism producing the field is the charges interaction with dark matter? I know I called it antimatter in a recent and rather lengthy post but I meant dark matter. I still mean to go back and correct that.

What if magnetism is the interaction between matter and dark matter? I'll tell you what if: it means that I am a genius. A sleepy, sleepy genius.

Spaghetti

I was listening to this one astronomer type guy, I think it was just a clip on youtube so I don't remember who it was or what the video was called, but he was talking about what would happen if the world fell into a blackhole. He was expounding on his opinion that it would be a fantastically painful experience.

According to him as you near the center of the blackhole you would move progressively faster and faster. That is all well and good, but a black hole being the massive gravitational object that it is, he argued that as you fall closer and closer to the center even tiny differences in distance make a huge difference. Thus it would be that if you were falling feet first your feet would begin traveling faster than your head. Obviously that is not a good thing.

He then theorized that eventually your body would be ripped apart into segments as they were strained to the breaking point by the gravity of the blackhole. He goes further to say that even after your body has begun falling in pieces you still have the moment were the gravity is so strong it begins to snap the bonds holding the atoms of your body together. Literally eating you on the atomic level.

Here is my issue with this: in this talk the speaker seems to assume that you are conscious throughout this entire experience, or at least until the point were you have been atomically disassembled. Let us examine this.

So you're falling feet first. Your body begins to be ripped into segments. Eventually all you are is a falling head as it would be fairly tough to rip a head apart, it being a pretty solid mass. The blood will be sucked down and out, which is assuming the soft brain tissue isn't collapsing under either the force of the super acceleration or the pressure of the every increasing atmosphere, or incinerated by its passage through said atmosphere, or that your brain is sucked out of your skull along with the blood.

No, let us assume the brain stays in the skull and that even with the blood getting sucked out not all of it manages to get out. With some leftovers of blood I suppose thought would still be technically possible, even without a body. And while you wouldn't last long, you really wouldn't need to, at such a rate of fall and with such gravity time would distort and an instant would take a good long while. The thing is, with everything slowed down because of your speed would you be able to perceive it as an instant? Even if it took a lifetime would it pass it you as a mere flicker of time?

My thinking here is that it all comes down to biology. The brain will not function without blood, or at least not for long. So without the blood supplying the brain there is no thought and therefore no pain. The counter point being that in a black hole you don't have to live very long, things are going to be moving along rather briskly. In the end I suppose it comes down to how long it takes for a neuron to fire and transmit the message of pain.

Also in arguing for one not being conscious of their own demise in a black hole, while only one factor need go wrong for the victim to be rendered unconscious, every factor need go right to sustain it, which puts the odds heavily in favor of unconsciousness.

I am vaguely conscious here that I may be injecting myself into a conversation that has been underway for some time and may have already arrived at a consensus. Nevertheless I persist.

The Marathon

And now a few thoughts on the marathon I ran.

I am mystified having run the thing, why anyone in their right mind would do it again. And yet, having said that I may have to do it again.

I had two goals running the marathon. Aim for a 3:40 finishing time and never walk.

I finished with 3:39:34. But was forced to a walk when with two miles left to go there was a particularly cantankerous bridge with an inhumanly steep incline - practically vertical, should be illegal - proved greater. The tragedy of it was that I was so keenly aware in the moment of how much I'd regret it later but I just couldn't make it go.

And now, reflecting on it my own words come back to smack me in the face. "Champions are greater than the sum of all excuses." . I may run some other races between now and then because already as the stiffness goes out of me and all the soreness eases I am hungry for another run. However, other races aside, I still feel the deep bite of losing face to this bridge before my fellow runners, and my city. I was wearing my pink jersey, along with pink bandanna, and pink shorts, I was flying the colors and put my name to it. Every runner I passed knew that I was Cruton and I was defeated. I must regain my honor before Baltimore.

A quick breakdown of the miles:
1-12: all fun and games, everyone has plenty of energy and is in high spirits.
12-20: work, your moving but it isn't as fun anymore now it is just doing it to get it done.
20-26: this sucks, muscles are burning and it is a struggle to keep putting one foot in front of the other, a lapse in willpower will lead to walking (and I should know)

I was walking along the park on Monday and I put on the super bright neon long sleeved under armor shirt they gave the marathon runners because at the time I was just puttering around the house when I decided to go to the bank. So I had this shirt on and I am walking by the park and I see joggers and I was amused because I found myself thinking "Bow before me joggers for I am your God!" and I am not going to lie, I was serious.

Finishing the race my butt hurt like it hasn't since maybe the infamous 400m run back in my track days.

I saw the gummy bear guy and even took some gummies. The problem was it was so late in the race that I put the first one in my mouth and quickly decided that it was far too much energy to chew the damn thing. I ended up spitting it out and dumping the rest of them I had in my hand on the street.

I enjoyed the parts of the course with bands.

I think I made a major mistake in this race not taking any of those calorie gel things. In my post run analysis I think my walking breakdown was due to a utter lack of available calories. Also, I find in amusing in retrospect how at the start of the race and well through it at the water stops I was able to keep going while holding the water fairly steady and drinking it but towards the end of the race I somehow completely lost the ability to hold the cup still and had to just kind of throw the liquid in the direction of my face and hope for the best.

I talked to Mike and Blue at work. Mike who was aiming for under 4 hours came in hot on my heels with a 3:47 if I recall correctly. Blue apparently ran a marathon in New York when he was younger and got a 3:15.

Quite pleased with the medal, it has some serious heft to it. The crab logo thing is still retarded but the medal is awesome.

That is all I can think of to say about the marathon - Wait!

Taking the turn up I don't know what after running through Patterson on Linwood, and along the course they had at various points Under Armour logos and slogans on the pavement, and we were all running along when there was this guy. And for whatever reason this guy was super pumped. Like there is rooting for people and then there is rooting for people like it is the super bowl and you need this drive to work to win it all. Not crazy ecstatic but genuinely, masculinely into it. And he just really got to me, got me really hyped, and I belted out as loudly and in as deep a voice as I could muster "WHO WILL PROTECT THIS HOUSE?!" I even heard a few people call out the answer "I Will!" Anyway that had me feeling awesome for a while. A feeling I sorely missed a little later on.

When I got to the inner harbor, the halfway mark and a spot for some of the bigger crowds one girl came streaking past me and I thought to myself, yeah, you run like a hero, I'ma see you in a little bit. And sure enough, a mile or two later, when she wasn't high on the crowd I passed her.

Also, I am not sure I could run a distance other than the marathon at an event where a marathon was being held. As running the marathon I looked down at all the other, lesser, distances. Way down.

Lastly, other marathons totally have it figured out. Half marathoners should not finish with the full. You are just starting to dig into your trenches, the pack has thinned out and you know the people in front and behind you fairly well when this mass sea of people is dumped on you. They of course are all jazzed up with energy to burn setting paces much too fast. And I wanted them to die. Spontaneously burst into flames.

Ok, this time I am done. For reals.

To the Stars

Today's run I intentionally dedicated to thinking about getting off this planet. Shuttles and rocket fuel are nice and pretty but they are hardly efficient. Consuming massive quantities of fuel and releasing huge quantities of exhaust, each launch it's own trial to say that achieving earth orbit could be stream lined a bit is something of an understatement. So I have taken it upon myself to devise a better way, or at least consider alternate ways it might be done.

So first I started off with the idea as it was presented to me in science fiction. An impossibly long metal cable of indeterminate width that stretched from planet surface to orbit. Along this cable I understood there to be a car shaped like a donut wrapped around the cable riding up it by some sort of magnetic propulsion.

With this start I promptly dismissed the cable idea as not feasible. The weight of the cable of structure at that height/length I felt wouldn't have the tensile strength to keep itself together. Like a mooring line stretched between two oil tankers the line snaps before it becomes perfectly taut because its own weight causes sag.

From there I started thinking in the direction of Ender's Game. What if there were a way to reflect gravity? Well, this makes no real sense whatsoever, but lets play with the idea for a bit.

Saying we could reflect gravity would mean we took the gravity from one place and applied it to another area. So this would mean we could maybe make an area of earth have zero gravity while some other part of it experienced double gravity or something.

In this fanciful universe then achieving orbit would be pretty simple. You'd just have to push off the ground with a fair amount of force and before you know it you'd be in orbit. But let us discard this gravity reflection to pursue gravity to its roots.

For a while I was thinking along the lines of a gravitational tractor to get something into orbit. This will quite clearly not work at all, but it is an avenue I pursued briefly. The root of the problem it lead me to was gravity. Now, perhaps discoveries have been made about gravity since my astronomy text book was written but from what I understand gravity isn't all that well understood.

Gravity simply is the force that all matter exerts attracting other matter. Being fundamental the how and why of gravity is unknown or at least unknown to me. Thus the more matter the greater gravity, which means I can figure out how to increase gravity at a certain launch spot, a mascon, but not decrease it.

However at the heart of all this is one basic material. Matter. What if there was something which didn't abide by these laws of matter and gravity? Something like antimatter.

Now my understanding of antimatter is that I do not understand it at all. Whispers and rumors of something I yet to grasp in any meaningful way. Yet, for the purposes of this discussion let us say it is out there. In my understanding of the stuff antimatter and matter have absolutely no interaction. As in interaction is exactly equal to zero. The leap of faith that I made was to consider the possiblity that this understanding was flawed. What if the interaction between matter and antimatter wasn't zero, just really, really, really small? If the interaction were small then we are in business, just gotta figure out a way to harness the antimatter to our ends and whisto presto we have not only orbit but we have a limitless free energy source.

When I say a small interaction above I do not mean small as in the chances of antimatter and matter interacting is 1/10^X, where X is just shy of infinity. That is no good. What I mean by small interaction is that the two interact all the time but exert an incredibly weak, here-to-for undetected amount of force on one another.

At this point, having decided antimatter was the key, I returned to scoff at the idea I started with of using a very large , very long cable. Then I paused and thought, what the hell, I've got a couple more miles left to go in this run so why not see if I can make it work.

So, we start with a long cable, which likely isn't a cable so much as a tower of some sort. Assuming it can keep it's integrity, how do you keep the damn thing up? Well, the earth is spinning right, so centrifugal motion should rule the day here, all you need to do is attach a weight to the end of it, that'll keep it taut. Alright, tether an asteroid to the end of it.

We're probably going to have to have rocket engines at strategic points on the asteroid so that you can keep a constant orbit that is just right. You are also going to have to keep it well outside its roche limit as you don't want the thing falling apart on you.

The problems with the concept are several but interesting to contemplate and listed here in no particular order.

First while we have assumed the tower will be able to keep it's structural integrity against it's own weight and gravity what about meteorological forces like a strong breeze?

Second essentially adding a long string with a weight on the end to a spinning ball is going to do rather interesting things to that balls rotation and orbit. A possible solution to this problem is build two launch sites at exactly opposite sides of the planet. This will negate or mostly negate the orbit altering effects of the weight, etc.

Third, it occured to me that this tower, which I assume to be metal or metalic would almost certainly have a faint but constant stream of electricity going through it from ground to sky for the same reason lightning occurs. Which posses fascinating images of a land surrounding the launch site which became suddenly devoid of ever having lightning, because the energy simply rode up the man made tower.

Alright, that does it for this installment.

Cyber Amputee Syndrome

As you may have noticed when I get to running I tend to be hit with these awesome world transforming ideas. Today's Awesome Running Idea #2 ( the first one was the terraforming idea) is: Cyber Amputee Syndrome

In the future people are going to be commanding their computers with their mind. Already there are examples of our playing around with this technology of controlling computers with their thought, which I am too lazy to find and link to right now, but take my word for it, it's out there. I'm pretty sure they even demoed it at some big tech gathering for bigwigs like Steve Jobs.

Just think of it, in the future you'll never have to reach for the mouse because mouses will be hopelessly outdated. You'll simply think left and your cursor will move left.

Now I am no techy so I can't tell you exactly how this is going to work or when it is going to come about or anything like that. What I am able to tell you is what it is going to lead to.

In the future children will learn to control the computer with their mind much like today's children learn to ride bikes, something they learn young, master, and never have to really think about again. The noticeable difference here however is that tomorrow's children will likely learn this computer interaction much earlier than modern children learn to ride bikes, ingraining this behavior far deeper in them than bike riding today.

I am going to distinguish this post from those that will follow it and suspend judgment of this eventuality. Good or bad is irrelevant here. However, as a consequence of learning to use computers at a young age much like one moves one's arm, if these children come to be stranded on a desert island they will suffer from Cyber Amputee Syndrome.

Used to constantly controlling machines with their thoughts the absence of machines will have the same effect on these children as losing an arm or a leg.

As an offshoot of this thought I began to contemplate the effect of computers being so pervasive in our lives. I started thinking that mankind, will become increasingly like an ant colony or a beehive or some other colony organism. Individuals will increasingly diminish in importance and give rise to a hive mind or collective.

It is only a small step from controlling computers with our mind to putting computers into our mind, and with technological advances I can only imagine what we now know as internet will only become more widespread to the level that there is virtually nowhere you can't be in constant wireless connection with everyone else.

With these advances how can one really say what one person knows? It would be pointless to ask a student to give a presentation of Oppenheimer because the student will have instant access to the best papers written on Oppenheimer by the best and brightest minds in the world. Indeed they will even have access to the papers Oppenheimer himself wrote (I assume they should be declassified by then). Super smart search programs, Google 5,000, will be able to give the student a summary of the relevant information as it will have been digested and culled by so many others before that it will have been broken down in manageable bits even a grade schooler could understand.

Teraforming

Everybody knows that the first person to discover extraterrestrial life is going to go down in the history books forever. Maybe it is shaking hands with ET or maybe it is simply taking a meteorite fragment and putting it under a microscope and exclaiming "BY JOVE! This bit of something isn't from around here and it's alive!"

This is all well and good and as it should be. But while it is a certainty there is other life forms in the infinite vastness of space none of them seem to be anywhere near here. Thus for the present we've only got ourselves to play with.

That in mind, when we think of space what should we be thinking of?

Funny you should ask because I was contemplating this while jogging the other day (don't ask me how this popped into my head, as I have utterly no idea) and happen to now have the perfect answer.

Terra-forming.

Those familiar with science fiction may be familiar with this term but for those that aren't terraforming is the process of taking an uninhabitable environment, think Venus or Mercury or Mars here, and turning it into a place people and other Earth life can live freely in.

Normally this process is depicted by using huge machines. Picture an air-conditioner the size of a large city, except instead of cooling the air, it would take in available resources from the planet and turn it into air and perhaps water.

Now first of all we must here limit out discussion to planets that are first terrestrial, setting foot on a gas giant just isn't a happening thing, and second of sufficient mass hold an atmosphere of breathable air to it's surface and not simply vent it off into space.

Past these two initial requirements all other considerations are secondary and can be thought through and conquered with human ingenuity. However, back to the original premise of using ultra massive machinery to turn a planet habitable to humanity, I find this idea to have crippling and ultimately insurmountable problems.

The idea is fine for science fiction, but in reality not only do you have to keep all of these machines repaired and in working order but you also have to power them in some way shape of form. In either case this would be not only hugely expensive, but more importantly, on the scale that would be required completley unfeasible.

Honestly, I love to believe that we as people could do it but the fact is it isn't possible, or if we ignore this objection and assume that it could be done it would require such resources of man power, energy, and materials as to beggar the imagination.

Yet behold! The dream of terraforming can still be accomplished. It can even be accomplished by man, we're just going to need a bit of help. From what immensely powerful ally can mankind hope to draw aid you ask?

Bacteria.

Yes, bacteria, those wee little things that make you sick that you can't even see without the help of a microscope. Those things which live in the most severe, the most varied habitats in the world.

In the beginning the planet earth did not have an atmosphere of oxygen. Oxygen is thought to have come as the byproduct of certain elementary life forms which gave rise to progressively more complex life forms until we get to where we are now. The point being that we need to recreat this process on the planets we hope to live on one day, and if we were smart we'd start today.

I don't know how long it took to convert earth's atmosphere to having a significant portion of oxygen and all those other gases which make air but regardless, by human standards it took a very long time. Thus, if we want to take over a planet we need to begin the terraforming today. We need to round us up some hardy bacteria and shove them on a space pod and launch them into space. The pod should be shot at some planet we hope to inhabit one day and upon arrival disperse the bacteria in as wide an area as possible. The hardy bacteria would flourish converting toxic gases into breathable ones and replicating to make more bacteria to do the same without humanity having to lift a finger. Eventually an uninhabitable world becomes a human paradise and all would live happily ever after frolicking in a man/bacteria made Eden.

A sublimely simple solution if I do say so myself, and I do.

Musing on Vampires

Burger King has come out with a series of ads of late that has two hosts of crazed pre-pubescent girls descending on one of their stores, battling for the allegiance of hapless Burger King customers. Both sides fanatically devoted to Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Series, but one side are ardent supporters of Edward, the other, zealous proponents of Jacob. Edward being the vampire and Jacob being the werewolf.

Now, I love this ad. I love this ad because these girls are so clearly out of their minds. Their passion for their side sweeping through any trace of reason in their not yet fully developed brains in a holocaust of unfamiliar hormones. Add to that the general confusion of the customers who have no idea what the hell these squeaky voiced idiots are talking about or why they seem so desperate to make their case and you have commercial gold. Honestly the commercial should win some sort of award for awesomeness.

Anyway, I was watching this commercial and it got me thinking (who knew a commercial could make you think?) What is it about Edward and Jacob that has these girls so out of their heads?

Perhaps it is just clever marketing with untold millions of dollars behind it that has pushed these characters onto the phsyche of every girl between the ages of 10-15, I am not sure that is true. At one point, before it was a movie Twilight was just a book. Albeit not a very well written book, but a book nonetheless. A book of words and no pictures. And at some point previous to this it wasn't even a book. It was just a manuscript looking to be published.

As I am unaware of any publishing company that lets 12 year old girls give the green light for publication (I have yet to see "Why Betsy Thomas who sits in the Third Row of Mrs. Applebuam's 4th period history Doesn't Deserve the Bead Necklace She Got For Christmas" hit the shelves of my local chain bookstore) I am forced to presume that there was a day where some adult read the story and liked it. If events followed the standard chain this adult then passed it on to the next adult in the chain and next thing you know people all over America are reading this damn thing.

Thus, it seems one cannot wholly attribute this phenomenon to a savvy marketing scheme. Nor, more surprisingly to me, can one chalk it up to girls alone, because as previously mentioned adults read this thing and took it to publishing.

Clearly Stephanie Meyers has tapped into something here. Which brings me back around to the part where the commercial got me thinking, what the hell is it about these vampire and werewolf characters that has girls will to descend on unsuspecting Burger King patrons to sway them in the favor of their choosen good looking monster character?

Now, I have only read the first one, which predates Jacobs entrance onto the scene so I really can not speak to that, and I don't actually own the thing so I'm going to do this analysis completely from memory. This excuse I find sufficiently large as to encompass any faults which may be found with my subsequent argument.

Let us start by stripping Edward of his good looks. Honestly, I would think the movie version would be enough to drive women fleeing from vampires like their was set aflame as the whole emaciated hollow cheeked combined with a paleness that is downright painful to look upon image of the on screen Edward comes off to me as sickly. If I saw a guy looking like that on the street I'd think they were doing some seriously hardcore drugs and were maybe three steps away from hospitalization.



But again, let us set all that aside as I think it accounts for relatively little of Edwards appeal. This is not to say that his looks are irrelevant, it helps to be easy on the eyes even if I can't see what they see, but rather that it is not Edward's looks that inspire his fans loyalty but something about him.

When Bella looks on Edwards her thoughts explode into hot shards of chaste puppy love. It is this that women love about Edward, not his appearance per se. His fans make this mistake of conflating his appearance with the effect of looking upon him has on them. They long for the man who will treat them as the focal point of the world, the sole point upon which the universe turns.

Not only that but Meyer's constructs Edward in such a way as to assure her audience that Edward cannot manifest his devotion to Bella in the traditional physical forms most of us are familiar with. This move has two desire intensifying principles to it.

The first of these is that it assures the audience that Edward is not simply captivated by Bella's appearance. Bella is the center of Edward's universe regardless of her looks. She could get acid thrown in her face and it wouldn't matter a bit to Edward. Bella feels truly seen by Edward for what she is, and what she wishes to be, for every facet of her personality. Honestly, who wouldn't be swayed by that kind of attention?

Secondly the chastity of Edward coupled with his metaphorical need and desire to suck the blood out of Bella's veins sets up that sweet tension of lovers parted. Romeo and Juliet wouldn't really be a story were it not for the fact that they were kept separated. The lust to be together present, Meyer's erects seemingly un-scalable walls to keep them apart. After that all Meyer's has to do is sit back and watch the tension and frustration build. Like sealing a lid to the top of a pot of water and then putting it on the stove and cranking up the heat, eventually there is an explosion. In essence it all boils down to we want what we can't have. Edward repeatedly telling Bella how much they can't be together only serves to make Bella want him all the more.

Of course Bella is described by Meyer's so vaguely that she could be anyone and is, in the minds of her readers. Where Meyer's has written Bella, Meyer's readers insert their own name, confused by how the story could be written any other way.

And now the world cup game is about to start so I am going to have to bring this musing to a close for now. Who knows, maybe someday I'll read the other books and be able to contrast Jacob and Edward and their relative merits. Though I wouldn't count on it.

Baltimore Marathon

So one of my roommates is apparently a very serious runner. He is doing some traveling for work right now but soon after he returns from that he is spending something like a month up in Alaska to run a marathon there.

Thus it comes as no real surprise that he would get a pamphlet for the Baltimore Marathon in the mail yesterday. However owing to the fact that he was out of town and apparently so were all my other roommates that day as I was the one to get the mail at 10:30pm. Anyway I saw the Baltimore Marathon pamphlet and was instantly curious.

It said the marathon was being held on October 16th, which isn't so close that it would be full and that I actually had a chance to enter. I had been seeing Baltimore marathon jerseys around in the jogging I've been doing and I readily admit, they are pretty sweet. I was covetous, I wanted one.

Then I went online and looked at the race map. My reaction is more or less the transcript that follows.
Me: Alright, lets just have a look.

HOLY FUCKING JESUS!

A marathon. You literally run forever.

This got me wondering, if, despite my enthusiasm, I was anywhere near in shape to run that kind of distance. So I decided the next day I was going to test out doing some serious distance.

I decided to double the distance I had worked up to on my own thus far 10k in that 20k is roughly half a marathon. A marathon being 26.2 miles and the actual course they have set being 26.7 miles (43.02km) .

I left my house without my customary ipod (the website says music devises are allowed but strongly discouraged) or even shades which I had left in my car and was too lazy to go get which I rationalized as my saving weight at around 6:30am. I returned at exactly 8:00am. Looking up my route I fell a touch short of my goal of a half marathon covering approx. 19.6052 km (12.1821 miles) .

I want to do this. My finish will likely be pretty ugly, but so long as I can manage to keep myself jogging and not walk I think I can do it.

An interesting note aside: Google pedometer from which I am getting the distance estimates that I did today estimates the number of calories I burned based on my weight (170lbs) as 1,566.2

My Promise To You

So while I have somehow become what I would describe as a reasonably rabid follower of politics, which is to say I like to think that I am generally politically aware I find Politicians to be intensely frustrating at times.

Indeed times are when I think I should just run for office and show those assholes how to get things done.

With this in mind I present to you my basic platform.
Premises 1 and 2:
Republicans: Assholish fucks bent on selling America to Big Corporations for personal profit.
Deomcrats: Good intentioned fucks who refuse to accomplish things for fear it would hurt their popularity.

Promises:
In the Event of an affair:
1) I promise that she was either really hot or I was really drunk.
2) I promise that I will not drag my wife and/or kids on the stage to apologize to the nation, and I additionally promise that I shall take full responsiblity for my actions without seeking to mitigate the blame with excuses.

I promise that, owing to my actually doing the work for which I was elected I will be unable to raise enough money to run for a second term and that I will have pissed so many powerful interests off that no one will vote for my second term anyway.

I promise that I will not stop drinking and swearing once in office, nor will I attempt to pretend that I have.

I promise that I will not pretend I am a religious man. Karma is about the extent of my religious beliefs.

Platform:
There are only two primary areas government should be spending real money on.
1) Education
2) Infrastructure

Education: Make our childrens learning. Best books, best teachers, best tools. It'll pay untold rewards in the future.

Infrastructure: In this I blend together several departments under the same heading. Anywhere you go nowadays the roads suck, I want that fixed. Not only do I want high speed rail to every major city in America I want it to be able to travel faster than anywhere else in the world. I want next gen energy, this includes green energy, nuclear, and the long dreamed of and much fabled fusion energy but all of it MUST be Domestic. Dependency on foreign energy is inexcusable.

Naturally there are two secondary funding holes I'd be obliged to pour money into.
1) Deficit reduction
2) Defense

Deficit Reduction: I loathe being in debt so my two pronged primary funding plan should allow the cutting of other programs and free up some cash to pay down debts. We can get more extravagent when we are back to a surplus.

Defense: End the wars, you know the area is going to go to hell as soon as we leave anyway because while the people enjoy their freedom they are unwilling to fight for it and those unwilling to fight for their freedom will always find someone willing to take it away from them. That said the military budget is bloated beyond all recognition and I am going to slash it. We need not be defenseless but we need not wrap the toilet seats on our battle cruisers in gold leaf.

To this I add one personal hobby to fund:
NASA

NASA: It's the final frontier and America is going to be the first one there. I will fund NASA and all its affiliated sciences. America will again see the day when Oppenheimers and Teslas, not Hiltons and Kardashians are celebrities.

Extraneous Philosophies:
-Guns: you have the right to them but unless you are in the military there is no earthly reason you need an assault rifle.
-Abortion: Legal. If you don't like it then don't do it.
-Death Penalty: Legal. Some crimes are beyond forgiving
-Marijuana: Legalize. I am going to tax the shit out of it and you're not going to be allowed to smoke it in public.
-Gay Marriage: Legalize. As if I cared what you did in your bedroom. This is America, so long as you pay your taxes I couldn't care less the gender of the person you go home to.
-Healthcare: For all citizens.
-Tax Code: Simplify. I do not know which model I would pursue at this point but it is so ridiculously cumbersome with so many loopholes for powerful interests not paying their share that it desperately deserves a complete overhaul.
-Money: Modernize. A penny costs two cents to make, a nickle costs six cents. I know it is iconic but it is no longer practical and something must change.

In short, writing this in today's America will ensure that I will never be elected, but I can still dream of an America where I can write my positions honestly and without reservation and still achieve political office.

The Confusing Phone Call

I always believe when I answer the phone after having been woken by that same phone that I do a spectacular job of covering up the fact that I am not operating at full synaptical power. There are however, a number of people I have conversed with in this fashion who beg to differ.

In any event, to understand why the phone call I got was so utterly befuddling one must understand the factors that converged at this moment.

I spent the previous days of this week locked in the windowless basement of a church getting trained as a census worker. In this basement there was a chick who being rather attractive (the shirts she wore were under considerable strain keeping her chest covered) and of a friendly disposition I fancied somewhat. To my detriment, I failed to act and having completed the training who knows if I'll ever see her again.

Last night I got a call from the guy who lead the training class telling me that we were being assigned a leader and that I should expect a call from this person in the next day or so. So I wrote down this persons information, hung up, and continued drinking. Fastforward to this morning where I am happily passed out in bed when I hear my phone go off.

In a flash I am up and leaping like a drunken gazelle across the room to pick up. I notice as I arrive at my phone that I don't know the number. I conclude that this probably the new crew leader calling me.

"Hello?"
A female voice replies "We're meeting at three, can you make that."

Unphased by the abrupt beginning to the conversation my sleep addled mind is on top of this wrinkle in a snap.

"Yes."
"Ok, we're meeting here."
It is somewhere in here that I instantly decided that the woman I am talking to is in fact the hot chick from training.

"...What?"
"We're meeting here."

My brain is forced to confront the fact that maybe I am not as good faking like I am wide awake because there is something going on that I am quite simply failing to understand.

"...What?"
"We're meeting here." she replies slowly.
"The meaning of 'here' changes based on the speaker."
"At my house."

I am blown away by how fast this hot chick is moving though I instantly suspect something is amiss. I talked to the chick a few times but certainly never enough to learn where she lived. Thus knowing that she knows I have no idea where she lives I realize that I am not talking to the hot census chick. By some miracle I mange to instantly figure out that I am in fact talking to my friend Nicole who I am supposed to meet up with later in the day.

Nicole had gotten a new cell phone since last I talked to her and I had forgotten to put the number in my phone. Thus was ended the most confusing phone call in the world.

And just for the record, had it been the hot census chick, you had better believe I would have been at her place in a heartbeat, hang over be damned.

The Things You Find

I wandered into my writing folder and found this. To preempt your questions, no I have no idea why I wrote this or what my point was. In any event you have to concede it is awesome.


Pardon me good sir,
I find your lady friend objectionable,
Might I recommend looking into acquiring another?
Please forgive my forwardness,
But might it be untoward to suggest I might accompany you from here on?
I have seen you[r] amorous glances,
And all of London is atwitter with gossip that we shall soon be engaged.
As for myself I confess I have done nothing to suppress these rumors.

You cut quite a handsome figure,
The heavens have conspired to match us.


Lets review the plot shall we?

So, from what I can gather a man passes another man in what sounds like Victorian England, London specifically, and sees his lady on the am of another man. I guess she is an "escort" if one wishes to put it delicately. After trashing his lady to the other man he takes her aside to have a private conversation about their plans for marriage. He either finishes or I simply stopped writing as he says that shes pretty hot (despite having indicated something to the contrary moments ago to the other guy) and heaven ordained that they should be together.

Apparently my protagonist doesn't realize that most women don't look favorably on their fiances publicly trashing them on the street.

Honestly I don't even know what this is. Is it poetry? I have never had any talent for writing poetry so perhaps it is.

Why Men Like Fast Cars

The question was asked of me: why do men like fast cars?
I explained it thus:
A car is at its most basic level a tool. It is designed to transport a person from point A to point B. As with all tools there are different grades of tool. For example back in the early days of civilization before the metric system had even been dreamed up people used body parts to measure thing. While the specifics of the origin of the imperial system's foot, a foot was used to pace out building sites and all sorts of other things. Villages without standardized measuring tools could still use the loose measure of a man's foot at least enough to get business done. Later when the foot was standardized it is anecdotally believed that the foot came from the shod foot of King Henry I. To use this standardized measure in the modern day one can use of those crappy plastic rulers issued to every public school child, you know the one, it had the three holes in it to fit in a three ring binder which were inevitably used to balance it atop a pencil and spun like a helicopter. A step up from this would be the wooden ruler with the metal band sticking out the top for a truer straight edge. The spectrum progresses until you start getting into serious measuring equipment like laser sights that will measure a distance in millimeters to 32 decimal places.
For most of use however, we really don't need to measure things to 32 decimal places. Clearly then I have proven that I do not need a Ferrari 430, a Hyundai Accent would probably accomplish all of my needs. Yet I still want that fast car, why?
Well, in the first place, while I have no need of a car that makes 483 bhp and has a top speed of 196 mph having an F430 gives me the ability to do so should the need arise. I might not need to measure things to 32 decimal places but with a laser sight I can when I need to and when I don;t I can always round the decimal places off. In perhaps a argument more timely to those of us in the Baltimore area: pick-up trucks aren't the most fuel efficient vehicles, making as they do all that horse power and riding so high they are about as aerodynamic as a brick wall. When the blizzard hits town though, better believe you want to be in the 5.7L Hemi V8 Dodge Ram 2500 when you absolutely have to get somewhere.
Secondly there is a certain beauty to any refined tool. The male frame of mind, I would argue, is very result oriented. Looks certainly play a part but when concerning tools, those things designed to help us accomplish a given task, results are paramount. Thus when presented with a tool that would allow us to accomplish a task very well, in this case moving from point A to point B in the least amount of time possible, men instinctively desire the best tool available. This same principal can be observed when a man walks into an electronics store. He may only need a set of very basic computer speakers but almost invariably he will spend time looking at the 5.1 surround sound system that has speakers that stand as tall as his waist and has a sub woofer that could blow your face off, grin still intact.
This demonstrates that mens' desire for the best is not limited to cars, leaving the question why then is the desire for fast cars so seemingly universal to to all men where as other things are not? To that I would say cars provide the universal element all men need. Not everyman is an audiophil, thus not every man wants awesome speakers, but a car provides something everyman has a need for: transportation.
Even more fundamentally I would argue that cars are motion machines. To be alive is to move. In a sense motion is life. The invigorating, life affirming thrill men get as the command their machine to hurl them at ever increasing speeds toward their final destination is literally a 100 proof shot of life.
In America this feeling is magnified because of cultural values stressing independence. An American man looks at a fast car knowing that not only does it perform its function very well but that it as with most any other car it is a symbol that he can go anywhere he wants anytime he desires.

Objective Self-Description

His lips are thin, and dry despite his constant application of the chap stick in his left pocket. He might have high cheek bones but honestly he has no idea what that means. He surmises it is something good, a trait that conveys majesty, something people look for in models and royalty. If this is the case he has high cheek bones.

His jaw isn't square, more obtuse, giving his face a longer appearance, tapering to a point at his uncleft chin. The overwhelming gratitude he feels at not having a butt chin is indescribable.

Mostly smooth cheeks, or as smooth as one can be reasonably expected to have from a man who, in his formative years, did not have a firm grasp on the causal relationship between greasy foods and acne. At present his cheeks are half hidden beneath a two and a half week old patina of facial hair which is thin and soft. The sideburns sweep down across his cheeks but refuse to join with the hair on his chin, only his mustache, leaves him disappointed with two bare patches on either side of his chin. The hair itself is thin and soft, not thick and wirey like his European heritage might suggest, more Asian.

Ahh the mighty hair styles of yor he would experiment with were he gifted with a full beard. He has already tried mutton chops. Not much of a challenge since that is what he gets automatically when he doesn't shave anything except his chin. The specific design of his facial hair changes on a whim and since he has neither a steady girlfriend or even some cute girl he is trying to impress there was an opportunity to grow his facial hair out. By this point the under chin and neck hair has gotten long enough to become itchy and he has contemplated shaving, an impulse he'd probably resist for a few weeks longer were it not for a wedding he is attending Saturday. A roommate from college.

He supposes that his nose is about as large as most men's noses, though he can recall a time after his grandfather died when he worried it was too large. His eyebrows are--well frankly they're just eyebrows and not something he particularly troubles himself over other than to occasionally think about shaving them off just to see how it looked and felt (a plan some of his friends have discouraged him from undertaking) and to make sure he learned how to raise just one of them like Spock and all subsequent Vulcans used to do on Star Trek whenever they were puzzled or surprised.

His eyes, as of looking in the mirror this morning, he fears may be spaced to close together, ruining his chances of getting a seven figure contract off a modeling company's talent recruiter whom he meets by chance and blinds with his masculine beauty. His eyes are also brown, and convey--he dearly hopes--a sense of great depth.

The hair on his head is also brown (only women are brunette). It is thick and fairly long at this point though a touch coarse from split ends. His hair has been untouched by any cutting or trimming implement since he last shaved his head a week or two before August. You can probably see his blonde spot which he is told will become a distinguished grey spot when he is older, though he refuses to acknowledge its existence.

He has grown his hair out once before, down to his shoulders. Took him a year and a half. He tried again last winter but ended up shaving it all off at the behest of his mother who subtly hinted that it didn't look very good. His hair is not unruly enough to look good when left to its own devices, but too unruly to take directions from a comb. He wanted straight hair but has a type of hair his mother once told him with a slight frown was called wavy, her ruler straight but permed hair falling in a curly cascade over her shoulder as it had for as long as he could remember.

His ears are small, his left adorned by a small hoop of white gold which he worries from time to time, especially during tests. It was silver before, hes never been much for gold, but looking for an appropriately masculine silver earring to replace the one he lost proved way to time consuming so he went with the white gold. He suspects that it was really just a clever marketing trick, a conscious effort to make all the silver earrings ugly so he'd upgrade to the more expensive white gold. Damn wily retailers.