Parking Lot Mafia

Valet parking, when the driver takes your car to a location where you never would have parked on your own is fine, but when shopping malls block off half of their normal parking and then charge you to let someone else park your car in the same spot you would normally use is not!

Space Time

Assuming the human race will eventually migrate to space, how should we measure time in the future? Our current method of counting how many times the earth rotates and the time it takes to orbit the sun may not make much sense once we abandon our home planet and eventually colonize other planets and or pockets of space far removed from mother earth. It seems to me we should measure the time it takes for something with a constant speed to pass between 2 non-variable points. I believe light is a good object to measure since I believe it’s present in all habitable areas of space and has a constant speed. I’m not quite sure what the start and end points of its travel should be used to signify the passing of one unit of time. One suggestion from a friend was the distance between peaks of radio waves. It would have to be a significant number of radio waves measured by the speed of light to create a unit useful to time every day events like boiling an egg.

Black Thursday

The last couple of years Black Friday "door buster" sales have been starting earlier and earlier. This year many stores will actually begin the sales on Thursday, and early in the evening! In fact Wal-Mart has announced it will start at 6:00pm Thanksgiving night! Many people have expressed displeasure with Wal-Mart’s decision to kick off Black Friday so early on Thanksgiving day because people want to have the option to participate in the sales, but they don't want to feel rushed to get Thanksgiving dinner over with so they can abandon their family for the deals. I'm pretty sure most of the Wal-Mart employees would like to spend thanksgiving with their family rather than at the register. If you think about it the deals we get aren’t really that great anyway. Usually there are a very limited number of exciting items used for the advertising which get sold to people who have been camping in front of the store for many hours if not days! The rest of the sale items are for outdated items that the store wants to unload to make room for the new stuff you will wish you waited for. Another concern is safety. There have actually been rioting and deaths in recent years at Black Friday events. Personally I feel the standard of living and feeling of desperation has been getting worse of late each year and this year is no exception. The likelihood of violence this year is high in my estimation. How much money would you trade to abandon your family on Thanksgiving Day? Would you put your family and or yourself in a potentially deadly situation in order to get those Black Friday savings? I hope people will do the right thing and stay home with their family all day on Thanksgiving, If we do, Wal-Mart won't see huge profits and will stop encroaching on one of our most sacred family traditions.

Halloween Waikiki 2013

For those that don’t know, Halloween at Waikiki Beach is awesome!

After the children have collected all the candy, the adults come out to play! We arrived about 9:00pm and there were already tens of thousands of people dressed in wild costumes partying in the streets! The time goes by quickly and the crowd thins considerably by 1:00am at 2:00am the bars are closed and most of the civilized participants have abandoned the streets.

Some tips to make your trip more enjoyable:

1. Arrive early – we finished the rounds at home with our children first and encountered heavy traffic on the way in. Plan on being on site by 8:00pm if not earlier.

2. Stay in a Waikiki Hotel. You don’t want to worry about designated drivers or traffic.

3. Eat before you arrive and bring snacks and drinks. The place will be crowded if you stop to eat, drink, or even use a bathroom you will lose more time than you bargained for.

4. Have your alcoholic beverages in advance or be prepared to spend a fair amount of time fighting the crowd and waiting on drinks in a club.

5. Wear comfortable shoes if possible. The main attraction is walking up and down the street admiring all the creative costumes.

6. Don't be naked? - Many of the participants are scantily dressed if not wearing in part only tape or paint. There are many police mostly posted at the traffic intersections. Presumably the police might respond negatively to full out public nudity.

Surprise delivery!

I watched a video today about privacy, rather the lack of it, and how technology and publicly available information can be used to learn a lot about a person, in fact the presenter predicted someday Google or Amazon will know so much about our likes and needs that they will know what we want before we do! He even suggested Amazon might actually purchase goods in advance based on this information. I think they probably already do. I’ll even take this a step further and predict Amazon will someday purchase goods and ship them to us because they are so sure we will accept them, and we will accept them because they will be right!

Non-traditional invasion

The way I understand it our politicians create laws largely, if not completely, based on the influence of tens of thousands of registered lobbyists. It seems like any other country that wanted to gain control of our country could simply funnel money through some of those lobbyists to shape our country to their will without the expense and inconvenience of sending troops to stage a traditional invasion. Perhaps a good strategy would include disarming the citizens and creating a massive debt to enslave the population.

Horrific crash - Yay!

I remember as a child going to the racetrack with my family and watching eagerly for a horrific accident! I didn’t actually wish for anyone to become injured or take pleasure in the idea of damage or suffering that would be caused by such destruction, but I watched for it with anticipation that was eventually deflated by a safe orderly conclusion.

As I got older that memory crossed my mind briefly sometimes and I thought it was odd that I had wished for such a thing.

While watching the news today I see a crash took place in the Grand Prix. The car was wrecked; the driver and many spectators were injured. And now I realize this story will be repeated over and over on the news.

I think this is the explanation for my confusion as a child. The media had shown me that a crash is spectacular and worthy of viewing over and over. Races that end without devastation get about ten seconds mention if anything.

I wonder if the news could be delivered another, more responsible way, that doesn’t glamorize disaster, loss, and suffering. I think it could, but not with our current system where shock = money!

We need to find a way to motivate our behaviors based on what is ethically and morally right rather than just what is most profitable otherwise we're doomed to a spectacular conclusion!

Partial Government Shutdown

I'm frustrated by what I'm hearing in the media about the government shutdown. Some think its a good thing that those evil government workers should be punished for the poor job our government has been doing, the problem is those people are still being paid. The workers who are being sent home without pay are normal laborers like yourself who also have no voice in big government and no say in the laws imposed on us.

Another misconception is that only state parks and non-essential fluff will be sacrificed which is good for the country. Actually there are plenty of workers like myself who provide support jobs to the military although the exact nature and level if support will can't be reported publicly it goes without saying that removing that support would lessen our defensive state of readiness and effectiveness. These sacrifices won't be readily felt by the average American unless something goes terribly wrong. Let's hope you don't find out what sacrifices you are actually making.

Tomlins theory of infinity

Let’s start this blog off with something big, literally! I may have solved the mystery of infinity!

On my lunch break today I watched The Science Channel and they had some nut job explaining how there was no such thing as infinity, he claims there must be a largest number and when you add one to it, the result is zero, at which point the number begins counting all over again, like the odometer in an old car. He went on to explain that the largest number was very very large! We could never even begin to comprehend it, but there must be a largest number. I think he may be on to something…

Another scholar on the program pointed out a problem with the idea of infinity where it could be shown mathematically that the infinity of a fractional number is actually larger than the infinity of whole numbers! Doesn’t this show that there is in fact a problem with the concept of infinity?

I didn’t see the end of the program and I don’t know if this idea is new, but I propose this answer. The universe is a huge spark of something that is actively growing from nothing. To find the largest number in existence we would need to know the smallest item we could use for measurement I believe at the moment science has demonstrated that protons and neutrons are made of three quarks each, so I guess a quark may be the smallest thing in the universe. Measure the entire universe in quarks and THAT is the largest finite number, the end, there is nothing bigger, until a moment later when the universe expands and the number changes!

Now of course you may say what about that number plus 1? How about that number times two? NO! There is no method of counting any higher and no place to store even one more quark. That number will not actually exist until there are enough things in existence to measure it.

I suppose I should name this number since I just discovered it… Did I discover something? No, I think I came up with a new theory for the definition of infinity.

INTJ

I recently discovered that I can count myself among those with the myer briggs personality type of “Introvert” it doesn’t mean shy, in a simplistic sense; it means I recharge privately and get drained easily in more public settings. In fact my personality type (INTJ) is the rarest of the 16 types, Einstein was also considered to have been INTJ type. Does it mean I’m a genius like Einstein? Not necessarily, it implies I may be inclined to spend a great deal of time thinking about stuff even when it appears I’m not doing anything, and I do. You can check your personality type here: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp if you don’t already know your personality type I hope you will take the free short test and let me know what you find out. I realized a lot about myself that I already knew but didn’t understand.