Half of me wants to laugh and half of me wants to weep. Watch this video and find out why.

I thought I was pretty harsh in my last post about people’s ignorance, but I’m rethinking that. This woman is so mindbogglingly stupid that she thinks rainbows are created by an unnamed toxic sludge dumped into the environment by a government effort to search for new energy sources. I guess her backyard sits at the corner of Paranoid Street and Stupid Lane.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that she is from Northern California. I don’t know if this is a byproduct of 60′s drug culture but this place is dominated by people just like her; totally ignorant of their own ignorance. She recorded this video because, in her mind, she was going to sound the alarm about this environmental abuse. Yet it never occurred to her to take a moment to research what causes rainbows. The thought never crossed her mind that there might be a simple explanation for it. No, she thought this phenomena was weird so immediately she just knew it was something toxic and caused by the government.

I just love that she jumped to this government conspiracy conclusion too because I would bet my paycheck that she is the type that supports a government takeover of the health care industry. She would be completely happy if the very same government that she believes is polluting her backyard with rainbows, controlled her health care.

Maybe there should be an intelligence test for voting.

The world wasn’t destroyed last night, much to the consternation of certain parties I’m sure. Last night the Large Hadron Collider was first powered on and instead of destroying the world with a micro-black hole, nothing special happened.

Unlike the dim bulb masses, I wasn’t worried about having my atoms crushed to infinite density. Thinking about the LHC, I was filled with the disappointment that comes from a missed opportunity. I still remember when Congress canceled the Superconducting Super Collider. That was way back in 1993 when, probably in response to Ross Perot’s unusually strong showing in the ’92 election, Congress was in a budget cutting mood. Killing the SSC became a cause célèbre. Congressmen attacked it and the media piled on. The SSC didn’t help its case when its budget request ballooned from $4 billion to $12 billion though. Somehow a choice between the SSC and the International Space Station, whose budget was also rising, was created. The space station won because it had the kumbaya-spirit of international cooperation as we basked in the post-Cold War afterglow.

America missed the opportunity to make a landmark discovery in particle physics. The SSC would have been nearly three times as powerful as the LHC that was put into operation today. We could have produced the Higgs Boson ten years ago and physicists would have a better understanding of how matter functions. Instead humanity has wasted years, Europe has a bunch of American physicists working there and Texas has a big, empty hole in the ground.

I guess the obvious question is, “Why should we care about particle physics?” We should care for the same reason we have for anything that takes longer than a lifetime to accomplish. We do it for future generations. Any discoveries in particle physics will not affect our daily lives. They probably won’t affect life in twenty years either. But if we don’t do the abstract research today, future scientists can’t take that information and apply it towards something useful. If it weren’t for people “wasting” their time and money building atomic clocks in the 1950s, we wouldn’t have GPS navigation systems in our cars today. If we don’t “waste” our time and money searching for the Higgs Boson, how will we ever build warp engines and transporters?

Not only could we have discovered it years ago, but the US could have reaped the benefits of preventing a physics brain drain. Now Europe gets it. But I’m sure saving that $12 billion saved the US from economic collapse.

Here’s a fascinating bit of science. It seems that women who take contraceptive pills alter the receptors that analyze male pheromones. Normally a woman looking to attract a guy would prefer men whose pheromones indicate the most genetic difference. Specifically, that refers to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a gene family that determines the immune system and reproductive success. Ideally a woman would pick a man who has an MHC that’s very different from her own. Doing so would give her offspring the advantage of an immune system that can recognize a wider variety of threats.

Birth control pills throw a woman’s pheromone receptors into reverse because the pill puts the body into a false pregnancy. When a woman is pregnant she prefers men with similar a MHC, probably because she’s looking for family who will take care of her while she has a baby. So every woman who is on the pill ends up becoming attracted to men they normally wouldn’t. Everything is fine until the day they go off the pill and wonder, ‘What the hell did I see in that guy?‘

This news immediately excited me because it made me wonder if this could have played a significant role in the rise in divorces in the last 40 years. So far we assume it’s caused by a change in our culture. Liberals would probably say we’ve become freer, while conservatives would likely claim we’ve become more self-centered. Perhaps both sides are wrong. Maybe divorce has become more common because more women who are using birth control pills are picking the wrong men. It could be that a significant number of marriages that ended would not normally have happened in the first place.

I love the idea that something we were so certain was completely within our control (who we marry and when we divorce), may actually be controlled by use of a common drug.

The Freakonomics blog tackled the emotional issues raised by locovores. I’ve never heard the word until last week, but I’ve been familiar for years with the concept these people follow. These are people who refuse to eat anything that wasn’t produced locally. “Locally” can vary according to the whim of the locovore. It may include everything within a 100 miles or maybe just 50, or may be as large as only within your state. The point of all this is to lessen the amount of greenhouse gasses produced in industrial agriculture. If food has to travel less to get to you, less fuel was burned.

I can’t completely agree with that Freakonomics post because it mostly skirted the issue. It concentrated on the question of whether it was helpful or not for everyone to produce their own food. That’s not really what locovores are about. However Freakonomics did cite a very interesting statistic. Transportation only accounts for 15% of the greenhouse gas emissions of a unit of food. Eleven percent is spent on transport from the farm to the store, and 4% is spent getting it from the store to your house. So locovores are only fighting a battle against 11% of emissions. Does that really seem worth the effort? It doesn’t to me if it means losing any variety in my diet. Not that I’m completely against this idea. I just don’t think it’s useful in terms of reducing emissions.

However if more people want to buy locally or do some gardening themselves, I’m all for it as long as you’re doing for the right reasons. You’re not going to change the world by gardening, but you may just have some fun and get some exercise. I actually would like to do some myself. I don’t really care for bothering with commonly available vegetables or fruits. Ever since I found that there are different varieties of corn, I’ve been a little obsessed with growing these obscure varieties. Why bother growing the same orange carrots or yellow corn you can buy at the store for a few cents a pound? If you’re going to put the effort in, then grow something special.

With that in mind I cannot get these Moon & Stars watermelons out of my head! Look at the rind – it’s yellow and purple! Who knew this existed?!?! I sure didn’t. For all I knew, watermelons were green on the outside and red inside. Sometimes you could find those freak yellow ones but that’s it. I would love to be able to bring these home. I have been thinking since last weekend about buying some seeds and attempting to grow them. But I don’t have a lot of space on the patio and I really don’t know if Northern California’s climate is any good for growing watermelons. Still though, I can’t stop thinking about it.

Not only would I grow the Moon & Stars watermelon, but on the other side of my patio I’d plant Dragon Carrots! They have this metallic red sheen to them that seems so alien. The Seed Savers Exchange says they have a slightly spicy flavor too.

This is all just so exciting to me. Seed Savers has red potatoes and purple potatoes and apple green eggplants and the True Lemon Cucumber. Where was this years ago when I had a huge backyard in Brooklyn! Seriously I wish I had the Seed Savers catalog when I was a kid. I would have spent a lot more time gardening with my dad. That would have been some nice quality time. Of course now when I want to garden, I’m deprived of soil.

But back to the locovores. You guys obviously care about the environment otherwise you wouldn’t make a fuss over buying local. If you’re going to start a garden too, grow some unique fruits and vegetables. Doing so will preserve biodiversity. Agribusiness will keep the standard vegetables alive. Don’t duplicate their efforts. Keep these varieties alive and make your dinner plate a little more interesting.

Food price inflation pinching your pocket? Infuriated that carbon dioxide emissions aren’t going down? Well there’s something that you can do to help both those issues – eat bugs! Adding them to your diet can save you money and spare agricultural resources. Take that nauseated look off your face and listen!

As it turns out many species of bugs can far exceed the nutritional value of beef, chicken or pork. Eating three crickets would provide you with a full day’s worth of iron for instance. Ounce for ounce, insects are more nutrient packed because they’re drier than meat. The water inside meat cells take up space that is used to store nutrients in insect bodies. Insects are also a fantastic source of proteins “for what is lacking in largely vegetarian diets,” says Dr. Sandra Bukkens a nutrition consultant in Barcelona. Vegetarians, would you really feel all that bad about munching on some grasshoppers or crickets?

Hey and if you want to be a trendsetter, this is a great way to get ahead of our booming green movement. Nothing is more green than adding bugs to your diet. Edible bugs are all vegetarians, and as such, don’t require a great deal of resources to raise. Bonus, these bugs can eat a much more varied vegetarian diet than normal meat animals like cow and pigs. You can feed them organic junk like cacti, bamboo shoots or scrub brush. Double bonus, bugs are even more efficient at turning the food you feed them into their edible body tissues.

Why would you resist eating bugs after reading that!?

Because they’re gross. It’s as simple as that. I don’t care if they’re healthier or if they will save the world. There’s just no way I can chew on a bug. I’d like to think I would be adventurous enough to try some cooked bugs if I ever ventured into the Third World but I am just not sure I could commit to that. Look at that bowl of fried crickets. That doesn’t make you gag? I’m sure gagging now. I’m staring at it and I keep expecting it to become a swarming mass of these scary creatures. The thought of putting one of those bulbous, crunchy bodies into my mouth frightens me.

And don’t lecture me about the link between insects and crustaceans. I don’t eat crab or lobster. Once I found out how closely related lobsters and cockroaches are, my interest in tasting lobster disappeared. I specifically don’t eat those foods because they’re the bugs of the sea. I’ll have to confess to eating fried shrimp though. It took me years to get over my aversion to them but I did eventually. I’ll only eat the fried ones though because, covered in batter, they don’t resemble shrimp. I can pretend they’re something else. Although I do have to chew them fairly quickly. If I eat them slowly, their texture will bother me. Try slowly chewing on a shrimp. That flesh has a snap-back that is far unlike beef, chicken or pork.

Anyway, these scientists that are promoting insect eating are fighting a losing battle. As today’s developing societies grow their economies, people will change their diets to load up on “richer” food. The bugs will drop away in favor of more muscle meats and organ meats. Later on the organ meats will be dismissed. At first the bugs will be stigmatized as food for poor people. A generation or two later will then see eating bugs as filthy.

There’s no way this bug diet advocacy will take off in Europe or the US. Westerners have no history of eating bugs. Even in ancient times, poor people subsisted off of grains and vegetables. Bugs were never part of the meal. That’s a rather interesting divergence. Why were insects shunned in Europe, but eaten everywhere else? Some grad student could probably write an entertaining thesis on that.

Finally there is some exciting space news! There’s talk floating around NASA of a mission to land astronauts on an asteroid. How fantastic is that? No boring robotic mission. No dull orbiter taking pictures. This is an actual challenge.

Ostensibly this mission’s task would be to retrieve asteroid samples for study. We should be able to learn more about the early solar system from that. But if that was the real mission, we would just send another robot. The real point is to test out the new equipment NASA has been building. The lumbering Space Shuttle is going into retirement in 2010. This mission would put the new Ares rocket and Orion crew capsule to the test. Besides the technology, it would give NASA ground crews experience in managing a long distance mission. No one has had to do that since Apollo 17.

I think the most important aspect is that a mission to this asteroid would give NASA practice in a manned rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid. Remember that these are the asteroids likely to hit Earth and doom civilization. If we’re going to try and deflect one in the future, it would be good to have some practice in getting near them.

We do we need to practice that? One thing that jumps to mind is that the surface of most asteroids isn’t solid rock but rather a thick layer of soft, fine dust. It’s impossible to stand on. Now one idea for asteroid deflection is to attach an engine to an asteroid that would push or pull it into a different orbit. Should this become necessary, we would want to feel certain that we could anchor an engine to this dusty surface. Anchoring the Orion capsule in this mission would be our first attempt and could raise some unforeseen issues we’ll need to solve. I’m sure there’s other stuff too that my non-engineer mind can’t think of.

I hope the public gets as excited about this as I am. This is the sort of push-the-envelope thinking NASA should have been doing throughout the 1980s and 1990s. That feels like a lost twenty years. Sure there was some interesting science done, but no great achievements. The 1950s had the advent of rocketry and satellites. The 1960s was the quest for the Moon. The 1970s were a little slow. Apollo was wrapping up, but at least there was Skylab. Then in the 80s and 90s NASA retreated behind robotic probes; practical but boring. No one gets inspired by that. Getting a manned lander on to an asteroid is a step in the right direction. I hope those NASA bureaucrats are feeling a little daring.

I found another one of those future predictions articles from years past. I do really love these because they often have such a distorted view. We always make the mistake of thinking the stuff that’s important today will still be important later. This article comes from the November 1968 issue of Mechanix Illustrated.

You can read the article straight through if you follow that link above. You probably should since it’s more of a narrative than a list. Here, I’ll break these predictions down point by point.

“…sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper—which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.”

This is half ridiculous. I’m sure at the time it sounded crazy. 1968 was solidly inside the giant car era. Why have a roadster? Frankly I find the idea of an air-cushioned car weirder than the national traffic computer. If I understand “air-cushioned” right, this futurist is predicting hovercrafts would replace wheeled automobiles. A centrally controlled traffic computer is an idea that was expected to occur, probably up until the early 1990s. I think the Internet killed that futurist plan though. Before the Internet people didn’t imagine separate computers being networked would be of any great use. Decentralized computing is now the norm. Eventually we will have autonomous cars, but it won’t be because the government is running a giant computer that controls all of them.

“The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road.”

I don’t really understand why, if all cars are controlled by computer, they need to drive slower in the suburbs. Maybe the traffic is denser but so what? The computer controls all the cars. Plastic roads are an interesting idea. I don’t know anything about hovercrafts though, so I guess riding on plastic would make them go faster? But they hover so why would the road surface matter? They shouldn’t be touching it.

“The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart.”

Why keep them apart? The traffic computer should pack as many cars as possible on to the road. It would be more impressive if these cars were traveling 200 mph and were only inches apart. The problem here is that this futurist isn’t thinking this idea through to its end. They are making the mistake of applying the rules of human driving with the ”reality” of computer controlled driving.

“You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round.”

Domed cities on Earth. There are so many things wrong with that. Forget any kind of environmental concerns. I’m looking at this from an economic perspective. Cities will bear the expense of constructing domes over hundreds of square miles. Then they will pay to heat and cool these hundreds of square miles. You know these domes will have to be transparent because otherwise the population will complain about never seeing the sky. The air conditioning equipment would be enormous to cool down these gigantic greenhouses. Perhaps cities with cold winters would luck out and get free solar heating. However since the dome is enclosed, you need to constantly ventilate it. I assume internal combustion engines will be banned so the air shouldn’t be as particulate filled as today. I guess fans would have to be scattered throughout to keep the air circulating and huge filters would be needed to clean it. So each city will pay hundreds of billions just so it can stay 72-degrees all year round. Sure, that’s really worth it.

“Suddenly your TV phone buzzes…”

Again the obsession with video telephones. I’m not sure if this TV phone is attached to your car or not. If not, then we’re there. Cell phones can do video calls if both phones have the front-facing camera and a service provider that supports it.

“A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate’s office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device.”

Done! Buy a Tablet PC and get a wireless network card from your cell phone company, and you can do this right now. Draw on your tablet, email your sketch to your business associate and he can print it out in his office.

“…you slide beneath the dome of your destination city. Your car decelerates and heads for an outer-core office building where you’ll meet your colleagues. After you get out, the vehicle parks itself in a convenient municipal garage to await your return. Private cars are banned inside most city cores. Moving sidewalks and electrams carry the public from one location to another.”

This isn’t an exciting prediction. If your car can drive itself, it can park itself. I brought this section up because I find amount of government control disturbing. The government controls the traffic computer, and by extension, controls where you go. The garage you park in is owned by the government. Are there no private garages in this world? You can’t even take your car into the city. You must rely on government controlled “moving sidewalks and electrams”.

“…U.S. population having soared to 350 million…”

Close. We’re at 303 million on May 2nd.

“Giant transportation hubs called modemixers are located anywhere from 15 to 50 mi. outside all major urban centers. Tube trains, pushed through bores by compressed air, make the trip between modemixer and central city in 10 to 15 minutes.”

Modemixer, what a stupid name. I’m sure the government owns the tube trains. No taxis in this future! Anyway, compressed air trains are not a new idea. Alfred Ely Beech tried to build a compressed air subway in New York City way back in 1870. It didn’t work then and it wouldn’t work now. Sure it’s fine for a short distance. I bet that block long Beech subway was very comfortable, but you can’t scale that up to a 15 mile trip without busting your budget.

“A major feature of most modemixers is the launching pad from which 200-passenger rockets blast off for other continents. For less well-heeled travelers there are SST and hypersonic planes that carry 200 to 300 passengers at speeds up to 4,000 mph. Short trips— between cities less than 1,000 mi. apart—are handled by slower jumbo jets.”

This is an interesting breakdown of future air travel. Intercontinental flights will be done by rockets. The poor people will have to settle for hypersonic planes. I can’t imagine why this guy thought this up. Being blasted into the upper atmosphere by rocket is not comfortable. Rich people aren’t going to pay to experience multiple g-forces, when a hypersonic plane is perfectly comfortable. I don’t care how fast a rocket goes.

“Dwellings for the most part are assembled from prefabricated modules…”

Pfft, no. I think people are still predicting assembly line homes for the future.

“Homes in Mi’s 80th year are practically self-maintaining. Electrostatic precipitators clean the air and climatizers maintain the temperature and humidity at optimum levels. Robots are available to do housework and other simple chores. New materials for siding and interiors are self-cleaning and never peel, chip or crack.”

Is an electrostatic precipitator the same thing as an Ionic Breeze fan from Sharper Image? We have roombas for vacuuming and scoobas for mopping. Okay robots can’t do every household chore but we’re getting there. I have read about self-cleaning building materials but it has always been in the context of skyscraper construction. I never heard of anything like that for a residence.

“The housewife simply determines in advance her menus for the week, then slips prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest. At preset times, each meal slides into the microwave oven and is cooked or thawed. The meal then is served on disposable plastic plates. These plates, as well as knives, forks and spoons of the same material, are so inexpensive they can be discarded after use.”

Ah, blinded by 1960s culture. If housewives are freed from housework by these computers, why didn’t anyone ever figure women would get bored at home and want to get their own careers going? By the way, why do the meals get cooked at preset times? What if I have to stay late at work? The computer is going to cook my dinner and let it get cold? Oh and were disposable plates and utensils expensive in 1968? I thought they had this stuff back then. Why would this futurist assume everyone would switch to disposable stuff because it’s “so inexpensive they can be discarded after one use”?

“The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance.”

Don’t you love that phrase “electronic brains”? We can see more of the obsession with centralization this guy had. Your single household computer would govern everything that goes on in the house. What a relief there’s no government controlled household computer that tells everyone when to eat and when to wake up.

“Not every family has its private computer. Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs. The machine tallies up its own services and submits a bill, just as it does with other utilities.”

Ha! So society can afford to convert cities into arcologies but computers will still be too expensive for everyone to buy. I’m sure they will be so small, they will only fill up one football field.

“Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees’ accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card’s number is fed into the store’s computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.”

This guy can’t even get terminology right. He mentions credit cards, but then goes on to describe a debit card system. It’s not credit if the charge gets deducted from your bank account! By the way, who knew direct deposit was a sign of the bright, modern future. It always seemed too mundane and obvious to me.

“TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center…Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.”

Well we have had the Home Shopping Network for quite some time but I don’t think this guy meant that. I think he would be disappointed by the human operators and your inability to choose what products you want to see. I think similar systems were tried in the 80s but the Internet has replaced all that. The vague idea of shopping at home is there, but the implementation is all wrong.

“The average work day is about four hours.”

No! Why is it futurists always seem to think that productivity means completing the same amount of work in less time? Didn’t anyone ever think we would do more work in the same amount of time?

“The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder’s spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments—on the average, about two hours of home study a day.”

Well this is only marginally correct. I’m not really sure what this guy expects future people to be studying. “Technological advance” is an awfully vague phrase. In a broader sense I think this guy was arguing that people studying to advance their careers would be more common. I don’t know if that’s true. I hope so. I’d like to think people today want to improve their skill set. I don’t know if more people do that than in 1968.

“Most of this study is in the form of programmed TV courses, which can be rented or borrowed from tape libraries. In fact most schooling—from first grade through college—consists of programmed TV courses or lectures via closed circuit.”

I heard of this idea many times and real effort went into trying to make it work. It never caught on though and now distance learning is all done through the Internet.

“TV screens cover an entire wall in most homes…”

If only! Well a 42″ plasma screen would be astonishing to someone from 1968.

“…and show most subjects other than straight text matter in color and three dimensions.”

Not quite. Maybe they wouldn’t be as impressed as I thought.

“In addition to programmed TV and the multiplicity of commercial fare, you can see top Broadway shows, hit movies and current nightclub acts for a nominal charge.”

There’s On Demand service and pay-per-view. This is solved.

“A typical vacation in 2008 is to spend a week at an undersea resort, where your hotel room window looks out on a tropical underwater reef, a sunken ship or an ancient, excavated city. Available to guests are two- and three-person submarines in which you can cruise well-marked underwater trails. Another vacation is a stay on a hotel satellite. The rocket ride to the satellite and back, plus the vistas of earth and moon, make a memorable vacation jaunt.”

This feels like a very tired, common prediction from the mid-20th century. I have to question if people really believed this. I suspect people just parroted this back in any discussion of the future because it was so oft repeated.

“Farmers are business executives running operations as automated as factories. TV scanners monitor tractors and other equipment computer programmed to plow, harrow and harvest. Wires imbedded in the ground send control signals to the machines. Computers also keep track of yields-, fertilization, soil composition and other factors influencing crops. At the beginning of each year, a print-out tells the farmer what to plant where, how much to fertilize and how much yield he can expect.”

This is mostly true. Farmers are less and less the dirty rube of yesteryear. I don’t know what a TV scanner is, but GPS systems control tractors. Farm equipment is getting bigger and more automated. Satellite imagery is used to plan for planting and harvest. No wires are embedded in the soil though.

“Mariculturists have turned areas of the sea into beds of protein-rich seaweed and algae. This raw material is processed into food that looks and tastes like steak and other meats.”

Soylent Green is made out of people!

“Heart disease has virtually been eliminated by drugs and diet.”

I laughed out loud when I read this. The next time you see one of those futurist shows on Discovery or TLC, and they make some crazy prediction about cancer being wiped out and people living to 150, remember this prediction.

All in all, a pretty enjoyable list. I’m glad not to live in this future though. It’s a little too automated for my taste. I’d love a car that drove itself but I’d like to choose where it goes. I don’t want a domed city either. It feels like such a bland, sterile life. This future takes away a lot of interaction. I don’t just mean between humans either but you do lose a lot of that as well. Your car drives itself. Your house cleans itself. The kitchen cooks your meals for you. The convenience is great, but I think I’d be losing out on making decisions for myself. I would be stuck following all these programmed schedules.

The human body really conspires to make you fat. Scientists have found that fat burning enzymes basically stop working when you’re sitting. These enzymes drop to a mere 10% of their capability when you’re in that position.

This is just the craziest thing to me. I’m left with a bunch of questions. How would these enzymes even know when I’m sitting? Is there an optimum angle of recline to burn calories, or is ramrod straight the best way? Do these enzymes quit working if I lean against a wall? Perhaps they can tell if you’re standing or not by the amount of pressure on your feet.

I’m not even sure about how much standing we should be doing. The ABC News article says people stood more 50 years ago. Has standing time been measured year after year? Who would do that? How much more did they stand 50 years ago? Telling me to putter isn’t any help. Is puttering for 15 minutes enough? Does it have to be continuous time to make a difference, or could I stand in 2 minute segments every 10 minutes?

This is just another half-baked health story that will throw people into confusion. How do you add more standing into your day? Should I eat my meals standing? Should I watch TV while standing? Should I read while standing? I guess I should order one of those stand up desks Donald Rumsfeld uses. I thought he was a crazy old man when I read about this, but he knew something we all didn’t. In honor we should refer to them as Rumsfeld Desks.

Hey this is great news for airlines. Now they can ditch seats out of concern for our health and cram more passengers in standing room only.

Pardon me, I’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of decades. Is it true that cars pollute? All this time I thought that exhaust smoke was made from candy canes and sunshine.

Do you find that believable? Do you think there is anyone who is unaware that cars pollute? Apparently bureaucrats in the European Union do because they are proposing that automobile advertisements should all include a warning that cars damage the environment. It would be the sort of thing you see on cigarette packs. The plan, if implemented, would require 20% of the ad space be dedicated to the environmental warning.

In truth I should say I don’t really think these bureaucrats truly believe anyone is unaware of the harm cars can cause. What were seeing here are people saving their jobs. This environmental warning is a way to justify someone’s position, or maybe a group, with a high profile task. If they didn’t show themselves in action, then someone else may start to question why they have a job at all.

This is a beautiful way of doing it too. Automobiles are a hot topic in EU circles because of that new restriction on fleet-wide carbon emissions. Plus with high oil and the buzz around hybrid cars, the auto industry is under worldwide attention. At the same time this proposal mooches off the public good feelings generated by anti-tobacco advocacy by doing something comparable to those popular cigarette package warnings. They are creating an argument that is impossible to refute without looking like a tool. To be against this is to be against providing greater information (or transparency in EU-speak) to the public about a problem. Except that people already know this! Everyone learned years ago that cars pollute. A warning on ads is useless from a transportation policy standpoint, but highly useful to the EU. Not only will these bureaucrats save their EU jobs with this, but the EU will use this to justify its bloated existence. Its budget is always growing and it needs these sort of feel-good public relations exercises to thwart any attempts at shrinking it.

I really never expected this news to come out from Britain. When I think of the British I think of militant environmentalists. I always picture people seething with rage over climate change. So to have a British judge actually point out the flaws in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth simply shocked me.

Here’s the backstory… the British government decided to send a copy of the documentary to all secondary schools (see, militant environmentalists). One school governor (I guess that’s the same as a principal in the US) in Kent refused to show it and sued the government over the mandate. The judge ruled schools could show An Inconvenient Truth but only if the film’s errors were stated to the students.

That seems remarkably fair and I never imagined it would come from British society. I really thought the upper crust, your academics, lawyers, judges, politicians and new money, would feel, when it comes to climate change, the ends justify the means. Show the Al Gore movie and forget about the errors. Just scare the public into submission because it’s for the greater good. Except this judge didn’t live up to my stereotype. I still think most British fit in with my idea, but it’s nice to know not all of them do.

Half of me wishes some conservative think tank in the US would start an education campaign to publicize the nine errors the judge found. I would like Americans to realize that movie isn’t gospel. When An Inconvenient Truth first came out I remember trying to tell my coworker about problems with it, but I couldn’t remember reasons besides the one about Kilimanjaro. There are millions of people out there like my coworker who think that movie is accurate, when it’s just alarmist tripe. It kills me! But at the same time I recognize it’s old news now and maybe there’s little to be gained by resurrecting it.