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2008 Goals :

Ok, So I have been a little negligent in my posting here. Sorry, I will plan to do better. Last year I was trying to get to 52 posts, and I failed miserably. The entire year only had 14 articles posted, 11 from me and 3 from my father. So 14/52 = around 27 percent, and every where that I have gone to school, that's an F. This year I will try to do better. Instead of making new years resolutions (which almost always fail) I am setting Goals for 2008, this is a nuanced difference to be sure, but different none the less. So here are my Goals for 2008:

Hello all,

Wow, I have been slacking. It has been almost 2 months since I updated the site. Well that is not really true, I have been working in the photo section and in the family tree area, I just have not posted anything in my Blog section. So much for getting 52 posts in this year, I just don't think that is going to happen.

Earth Day is coming, in fact it is this Sunday, April 22nd. In honor of that fact, Home depot is GIVING AWAY 1 million Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs. This Sunday, all you have to do is show up at the Home Depot and the will give you a CFL bulb. While you are there you might as well pick up a few more. The free bulbs will be N:Vision soft whites, which were the best in a recent Popular Mechanic’s lab Test. In giving away 1 million bulbs Home Depot accomplishes the following :

When I was younger I remember learning a poem that talked about the Evils of “Good Enough”. I had not seen the poem in a long time, and I am not even sure what made me think about it, but it got stuck in my head so I had to find it. With a little searching on Google, (you have to love google, you can find anything with google.) I came across the poem. It was shorter than I remembered, but it still carries the same message. I am posting it in hopes that other will find it useful.

Hello all,

Well it appears that I am falling behind my blogging goal. I was aiming to have 52 posts by the end of the year, and I might still make that, but I was really trying to have a post a week, and by that measure I am 7 posts behind. Whoops. I do intend to get caught up. So stay with me. Thankfully my father has been blogging as well, so there has been some new content added every now and then.

Homogeneity: Why it is a bad thing.

First off what does it mean? It is derived from the word homogeneous. In Latin it breaks down to Homo = the same, and gen = kind/race etc. So basically it means everything is the same. Why is this a bad thing, first off its boring. Why would you want everything to be the same, variety is the spice of life. Secondly it is dangerous. The whole pet food scare is a prime example of how our (and our pets) food supply has become too homogeneous.

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours, or days. All things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else. Your wealth, fame, and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance.

It will not matter what you owned, or what you owed. Your grudges, resentments, frustrations, and jealousies will finally disappear. So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists will expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It won’t matter where you came from, or on what side of the tracks you lived, at the end. It won’t matter whether your beautiful or brilliant. Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.

Happy Pi Day!

Today is 3.14 2007, or Pi day if you are in the know. Pi, is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference (around the circle) of a circle to its diameter (across the circle). Pi is usually calculated to 3 digits, 3.14. Pi is an irrational number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. There is no end to Pi! With the use of computers, Pi has been calculated to over 51 billion decimal places to date.

The number is so long that there are actually contests to see who can recite the most places in Pi. Earlier this year a man from Pennsylvania recited 12,887 digits, to be exact. It took him 3 hours and 40 minutes to do it. When he ended, he became the North American record holder. The previous record holder had recited Pi to 10,980 places.

Consider that the United States Government is the largest single consumer of energy in the United States don’t you think it’s time for them to become a model of energy efficiency? A first step could be to require all federal buildings to use more efficient light bulbs, AND ask our bureaucrats to turn off their computers at night. According to a 1999 report by the Alliance to Save Energy, the federal government consumes about 32% more energy per square foot than the nations building stock at large. This inefficiency does cost all of us taxpayers ( an estimated $1 billion a year ) so lets do our part and lets contact or rep’s and ask them to theirs.

A recent posting in the Wall Street Journal a discussion on the resurgence of the City of Chicago has a quote from Russian writer, Vasily Grossman, “Man never understands that the cities he has built are not an integral part of Nature. If he wants to defend his culture from wolves and snowstorms, if he wants to save it from being strangled by weeds, he must keep his broom,spade, and rifle always at hand. If he goes to sleep, if he thinks about something else for a year or two, then everything is lost. The wolves come out of the forest, the thistles spread and everything is buried under dust and snow”