A dear friend for­warded me this story about mar­bles, which I’ll share in its entirety. The gist is that each of us gen­er­ally starts with about 3900 of them.

The older I get, the more I enjoy Sat­ur­day morn­ings. Per­haps it’s the quiet soli­tude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not hav­ing to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Sat­ur­day morn­ing are most enjoyable.

A few weeks ago, I was shuf­fling toward the garage with a steam­ing cup of cof­fee in one hand and the morn­ing paper in the other. What began as a typ­i­cal Sat­ur­day morn­ing turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:

I turned the dial up into the phone por­tion of the band on my ham radio in order to lis­ten to a Sat­ur­day morn­ing swap net. Along the way, I came across an older sound­ing chap, with a tremen­dous sig­nal and a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broad­cast­ing busi­ness. He was telling whom-ever he was talk­ing with some­thing about “a thou­sand mar­bles.” I was intrigued and stopped to lis­ten to what he had to say–

“Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your fam­ily so much. Hard to believe a young fel­low should have to work sixty or sev­enty hours a week to make ends meet. It’s too bad you missed your daughter’s “dance recital” he continued.”Let me tell you some­thing that has helped me keep my own pri­or­i­ties.” And that’s when he began to explain his the­ory of a “thou­sand marbles.“

“You see, I sat down one day and did a lit­tle arith­metic. The aver­age per­son lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on aver­age, folks live about seventy-five years.“

“Now then, I mul­ti­plied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is the num­ber of Sat­ur­days that the aver­age per­son has in their entire life­time. Now, stick with me, Tom, I’m get­ting to the impor­tant part.It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail”, he went on, “and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hun­dred Saturdays.“

“I got to think­ing that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thou­sand of them left to enjoy. So I went to a toy store and bought every sin­gle mar­ble they had. I ended up hav­ing to visit three toy stores to round up 1000 mar­bles. I took them home and put them inside a large, clear plas­tic con­tainer right here in the shack next to my gear.“

“Every Sat­ur­day since then, I have taken one mar­ble out and thrown it away. I found that by watch­ing the mar­bles dimin­ish, I focused more on the really impor­tant things in life. There is noth­ing like watch­ing your time here on this earth run out to help get your pri­or­i­ties straight .“

“Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take my lovely wife out for break­fast. This morn­ing, I took the very last mar­ble out of the con­tainer. I fig­ure that if I make it until next Sat­ur­day then I have been given a lit­tle extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a lit­tle more time.“

“It was nice to meet you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your fam­ily, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75 Year old Man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!“

You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fel­low signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morn­ing, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next club newsletter.

Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. “

C’mon honey, I’m tak­ing you and the kids to breakfast.”“What brought this on?” she asked with a smile.

“Oh, noth­ing spe­cial, it’s just been a long time since we spent a Sat­ur­day together with the kids. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some mar­bles.“

Posted on August 4th, 2010 by Sky
Filed under: Spirituality | No Comments »

Sit­ting U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Joe Bar­ton (R-TX) today apol­o­gized to BP, appar­ently on behalf of him­self, for the $20 bil­lion dol­lar escrow account that the Admin­is­tra­tion has just set up for Gulf Coast dam­ages and recov­ery. In a con­gres­sional tes­ti­mony with BP exec­u­tives he said:

I’m not speak­ing for any­body in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives but myself. But I’m ashamed of what hap­pened in the White House yes­ter­day. I think it is a tragedy of the first pro­por­tion that a pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion can be sub­jected to what I would char­ac­ter­ize as a shake­down, in this case a $20 bil­lion shake­down… what amounts to a $20 bil­lion slush fund that is unprece­dented in our nation’s his­tory, that’s got no legal stand­ing, which I think sets a ter­ri­ble prece­dent for the future. [1]

Really? Joe, you’re apol­o­giz­ing to BP?? On behalf of your­self? As an elected politi­cian? When­ever you open your mouth Joe, you speak for your con­stituency whether you try to sugar coat it or not. You do not speak for me, nor do you speak for thou­sands of your fel­low Tex­ans whose liveli­hoods may now be ruined, espe­cially if one of those under­wa­ter plumes that don’t really exist [2] heads your way.

Okay, so while I am not thrilled with Pres­i­dent Obama’s over­all han­dling of this dis­as­ter, at least he’s respond­ing to a very dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion. And the escrow account is cer­tainly appro­pri­ate under the cir­cum­stances, regard­less of your ques­tion­able loy­al­ties Joe.

I’ll give John Boehner (R-OH) some credit for hav­ing the decency to pub­licly dis­tance him­self from your ridicu­lous com­ments. [3] But oth­ers — Bar­ton (R-TX), Price (R-GA), Bach­mann (R-MN) and any­one else who is try­ing to frame the escrow account as a shake­down? Shame. On. You.

Dear reader, before vot­ing this fall, I hope you’ll do some research and remem­ber those who either vote against escrow leg­is­la­tion or worse, pub­licly smear it. Those peo­ple are not act­ing in your inter­est, and they do not deserve to hold title as your representatives.

Ref­er­ences

1. Rep. Bar­ton apol­o­gizes to BP for Obama ‘shakedown’
2. BP CEO: There aren’t any oil plumes
3. Boehner refuses to endorse Barton’s claim that BP’s escrow fund is a ’shakedown.’

Posted on June 17th, 2010 by Sky
Filed under: Politics | No Comments »

Here is how the grass­roots works. In Maine yes­ter­day, an orga­nized bloc of tea-bagger del­e­gates to their state repub­li­can con­ven­tion over­whelm­ingly voted to scrap the pro­posed GOP party plat­form and replace it with their own version[1], writ­ten by a group called the Maine Refounders.

The new plat­form raises many dis­turb­ing issues. Rather than tear into it line-by-line, I encour­age you to read it for yourselves.[2] I’ll focus instead on three espe­cially trou­bling clauses.

First, global warming:

Defeat Cap and Trade, inves­ti­gate col­lu­sion between gov­ern­ment and indus­try in the global warm­ing myth, and pros­e­cute any ille­gal collusion.

The new plat­form pro­poses crim­i­nal­iz­ing efforts between gov­ern­ment and indus­try to under­stand the human causes, effects and cures for cli­mate change. While global warm­ing could arguably be any­where from valid con­tro­versy to proven fact, cer­tainly it is no myth. Fur­ther­more, what the tea-baggers call col­lu­sion, I call coop­er­a­tion. We need only look back to McCarthy to under­stand how eas­ily this dis­tinc­tion can be blurred.

What if I blog about global warm­ing and link to research con­ducted by peers? Is that con­sid­ered col­lu­sion and if so, must I fear state law enforce­ment haul­ing me down­town for a lively inter­ro­ga­tion? Remem­ber, this is brought to you by the same party that claims to “adhere to the restric­tions out­lined in the Con­sti­tu­tion to pro­tect the indi­vid­ual from intru­sive government”.[2]

Sec­ond, reli­gious freedom:

Reassert the prin­ci­ple that “Free­dom of Reli­gion” does not mean “free­dom from religion”.

This is a direct endorse­ment for allow­ing reli­gion to walk the halls of gov­ern­ment to inform the work of hon­or­able law­mak­ers. Um okay, whose reli­gion? Do Chris­tians in the new-and-improved Maine GOP really accept that they may be sub­ject to other, non-Christian expres­sions of faith? I recall one big right-wing stink when a judge ordered the removal of a Ten Com­mand­ments mon­u­ment from Alabama’s state judi­cial building[3], then another when a newly elected Mus­lim con­gress­man from Min­nesota car­ried a Koran to his swearing-in ceremony.[4]

On the slip­pery slope of neo-fascist pol­i­tics, when will this prin­ci­ple be re-written as “Free­dom of my Reli­gion does not mean your free­dom from my religion”?

Finally, Aus­trian Economics:

Return to the prin­ci­ples of Aus­trian Eco­nom­ics, and redi­rect the econ­omy back to one of incen­tives to save and invest.[2]

What exactly does this mean? For starters, its roots lie in 15th cen­tury eco­nomic law as espoused by dis­ci­ples of St. Thomas Aquinas. So you guessed it, the tea-baggers are advo­cat­ing strong moral the­ol­ogy and nat­ural law — in other words god — to guide eco­nomic policy.

Lud­wig von Mises’s rule says: “the first job of an econ­o­mist is to tell gov­ern­ments what they can­not do.“[5]

Does this stance by the Aus­trian School make econ­o­mists and the pri­vate sec­tor effec­tively god?

• If so, it would explain why, in the face of America’s crush­ing eco­nomic melt­down, con­gres­sional repub­li­cans do not sup­port mean­ing­ful finan­cial reform to reign in cor­rupt busi­ness practices.
• It would explain why, as oil from the equiv­a­lent of mul­ti­ple Exxon Valdezes floats omi­nously below the sur­face of the Gulf of Mex­ico, BP execs con­tinue to play the shell game with dam­age esti­mates and delayed video footage from the seabed.[6]
• It would explain why, in the face of this likely worst-ever envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter, the revised Maine GOP plat­form nonethe­less pro­motes “energy inde­pen­dence aggres­sively by remov­ing the obsta­cles cre­ated by gov­ern­ment to allow pri­vate devel­op­ment of our resources; nat­ural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear power.“[2]

Note the delib­er­ate exclu­sion of inno­v­a­tive, clean, future-thinking, job-creating energy sources like wind, solar or even sim­ple con­ser­va­tion? The new Maine GOP plat­form is not a ratio­nal doc­u­ment. It is jihad — based on one group’s own nar­row inter­pre­ta­tion of nat­ural law.

Maine, I want to scream at the top of my lungs that “you’re all out of your bleep­ing minds!” But I don’t believe that. I’m con­fi­dent that nearly every mod­er­ate, demo­c­ra­tic and inde­pen­dent Maine cit­i­zen who’s wit­nessed this trav­esty is pretty ticked off, and hope­fully mobi­lized come November.

But yes, I am sad­dened once again by how good repub­li­cans through apa­thy have enabled a rel­a­tive few truly mis­guided peo­ple to hijack your party. In Maine, the tea-baggers have just stolen your brand. Maybe it’s time for you to either fight back with trade­mark lawyers or start over with a fresh iden­tity. Either way, I hope you’ll do what’s best for our nation and world.

Ref­er­ences

1. Maine Repub­li­cans Adopt Tea Party Plat­form | Maine Politics
2. 2010 Maine GOP Plat­form — Maine Refounders / Tea Party
3. On Ten Com­mand­ments bill, Chris­t­ian Right has it wrong — CSMonitor.com
4. At swear­ing in, con­gress­man wants to carry Koran — CSMonitor.com
5. What is Aus­trian Eco­nom­ics — Free clas­sics from the Mises Institute
6. Oil Flow Rate Ques­tioned as BP Tries 2nd Fix — CBS News

Posted on May 15th, 2010 by Sky
Filed under: Politics | 3 Comments »

With all this talk about old news out­lets giv­ing way to social media, here is a story to consider.

This morn­ing I dialed into 5–0 Radio Pro, an iPhone app that’s a quite capa­ble police-fire-emergency radio scan­ner. After mak­ing the rounds of my reg­u­lar chan­nels, I checked out the cur­rent Top 100 and noted Nashville Fire and EMS in the #1 slot with 257 peo­ple lis­ten­ing. That’s odd because peren­nial #1, Los Ange­les Police Depart­ment, was in the #2 spot with 81 lis­ten­ers. “Some­thing is going on in Nashville”, I thought.

I openeded the Thom­son Reuters news app and scanned the head­lines. Bomb scare in Man­hat­tan… oil slick… Ken­tucky Derby results on a sloppy day… and noth­ing about Nashville. Per­haps Nashville in nearby Ten­nessee was hav­ing a sloppy day of its own? I checked the AP app, and sure enough found one story about foul weather and a few deaths in Ten­nessee and Mississippi.

So on to Twit­ter. A quick search of trend­ing top­ics yielded “Nashville”. Upon select­ing this, I was bom­barded by real­time reports from count­less peo­ple on the ground of an unfold­ing dis­as­ter. If you con­sider every 140-character tweet to be a head­line, here are just a few of the headlines:

“Wow. Nashville is under­wa­ter right now. My prayers go out to all the fam­i­lies in need.”

“If you have dis­as­ter needs, plz call 6152504300. The Red Cross has shel­ters set up across Mid­dle TN.”

“So flight from Tampa to Nashville is now can­celed. We are get­ting on a flight to Birm­ing­ham, going to attempt dri­ving home from there.”

“http://twitvid.com/RZMZM — Our back­yard Nashville, TN Flood, West Meade Nashville | just wow!”

“#nashville­flood Slideshow: Heavy Rains Douse Tenn. — Vol. 9: Click inside to look at some of the (cont) http://tl.gd/14dddu”

RT @StormTrack9: A large amount of flights are can­celed to and form Nashville. Please call ahead for your flights

This is what jour­nal­ism in 2010 looks like, and it is us. My heart goes out to every­one in the Ten­nessee / Mis­sis­sippi region.

Posted on May 2nd, 2010 by Sky
Filed under: Communication, Society, Technology | 1 Comment »

One acci­dent. 11 miss­ing (now pre­sumed dead). More crit­i­cally injured. 600 square miles and grow­ing. 210,000 gal­lons a day. Four state coast­lines. Crab, oys­ters, shrimp and other fish­eries at risk. Thou­sands fac­ing eco­nomic ruin. Hun­dreds of species threat­ened. How will the accoun­tants tally all that as part of the true cost of oil extraction?

Ref­er­ences

• State of emer­gency declared as oil spill nears Louisiana — CNN.com
• Oil spill could be dis­as­ter for ani­mals, experts say — CNN.com
• Gulf Coast braces for an oily mess — CNN.com

Posted on April 29th, 2010 by Sky
Filed under: Energy, Greenology | No Comments »

Appar­ently the U.S. Trea­sury invest­ment in Cit­i­group has gen­er­ated $8 bil­lion in profit for us tax­pay­ers: [1]

This kind of reframes the dis­cus­sion about the cost of bail­ing out the banks, no? I still have mixed feel­ings about this, but at least in this case it’s no longer a cost issue. [2]

Ref­er­ences

1. Gov­ern­ment could net $8 bil­lion on Citigroup
2. Bachmann’s Lat­est Whop­per: ‘The Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment Lit­er­ally Owns Banks’

Posted on April 16th, 2010 by Sky
Filed under: Economy, Politics | No Comments »

On Craigslist, in the for sale / wanted / musi­cal instru­ments sec­tion, some­one posts the fol­low­ing plea:

Do not buy any­thing being made in China… Do not buy any equip­ment made in for­eign coun­tries. Sup­port the coun­try and only buy amer­i­can. All of those amps made over­seas are crap. Save your money and buy either amer­i­can or eng­land. Here is the list of 5 amps that you should get or save up for.

The writer rec­om­mends a hand­ful of bou­tique and vin­tage elec­tric gui­tar amps of appar­ent US / UK origin.

I appre­ci­ate the sen­ti­ment, but unfor­tu­nately it’s a bit more com­pli­cated than that. Here’s an exam­ple. I can buy a Chinese-made Epi­phone hollow-body elec­tric gui­tar for around $350 (give or take), or the same gen­uine Gib­son gui­tar for around $3500. The Chi­nese ver­sion looks gor­geous and plays rea­son­ably well, plus for a few hun­dred dol­lars I can hot-rod it and still have a sub-$1000 gui­tar that rivals its Nashville-built counterpart.

That’s an obvi­ous eco­nomic ratio­nale for buy­ing from China. But now on top of this, con­sider that in 2009, Gib­son was voted by its own employ­ees as the #1 worst employer in Amer­ica. It takes a lot of ques­tion­able prac­tices to achieve a result like this, and gives pause to which actu­ally is more un-American — giv­ing money to China or sup­port­ing a domes­tic com­pany whose employ­ees seem to deeply dislike.

I don’t have an answer to this, except to note that as fast as Amer­i­can com­pa­nies race to the bot­tom in how they out­source, com­pen­sate and oth­er­wise treat their staff, they are dou­bling down on why it’s so easy to buy imported prod­ucts these days.

I will fiercely sup­port any busi­ness that cares for its employ­ees and cus­tomers; and offers full-time salaries, health­care and oppor­tu­ni­ties for advance­ment. But when a domes­tic com­pany behaves more like its over­seas coun­ter­part at ten times the price, my pur­chase deci­sion becomes a bit blurry.

Ref­er­ences

Gib­son atop worst-places-to-work list (NashvillePost.com)

Posted on April 14th, 2010 by Sky
Filed under: Economy, Society | No Comments »

Photo: dinosaur foot­prints in
Goseong, South Korea ©2006

287 is a lot of miles
if you’re not going any­where
$21.60 tops the gas tank
a liq­uid dinosaur in the gas tank
a dinosaur exhausted
an exhausted dinosaur
going up in smoke
abstracted from its own imprint
below concrete

surf punk imprints the pedal
abstracted from his essence
as blonde as nau­gahyde
and a fair surfer
and a punk

manta ray traces the synapse
between dinosaurs and punks
cuts a par­al­lel swath
above a wave
a dinosaur exhausted
a punk
below a wave
a manta ray
a dinosaur’s imprint

$41.60 tops the gas tank
1029 is a lot of miles
if you’re going nowhere

Ran­dom Sparks
10 April 2000
(from the archives)

Ref­er­ences

Goseong Dinosaur Museum, South Korea

Posted on March 30th, 2010 by Sky
Filed under: Greenology, Prose, Travel | No Comments »

I first caught the geodesic-dome bug back in the 1970s, for no rea­son other than my ongo­ing fas­ci­na­tion with unique dwellings.

While there are many alter­na­tives, domes in par­tic­u­lar have some impor­tant and prac­ti­cal advan­tages over the rec­tan­gu­lar boxes that most of us live in. From the Tiny House Blog: [1]

• The sphere is nature’s most effi­cient shape, and a dome cov­ers the most liv­ing area with the least amount of sur­face area. When com­pared with a similar-sized rectangular-shaped house, a dome home will have 30% less sur­face area and use at least 1/3 less lumber.
• As domes have less sur­face area, they reduce the amount of energy required to heat or cool the inte­rior space; less heat is trans­ferred to and from its surroundings.
• Though a dome uses less mate­r­ial, it is unques­tion­ably stronger than a rectangular-shaped house using stick-frame man­u­fac­tur­ing. Dome struc­tures have unpar­al­leled strength and a nat­ural abil­ity to with­stand immense earth­quake, hur­ri­cane and snow load forces.
• A dome’s more com­pact foot­print saves perime­ter shell and foun­da­tion materials.

One can infer that domes are rel­a­tively inex­pen­sive to build and main­tain, and more planet friendly. Quakes, hur­ri­canes and nasty bliz­zards? No problem.

Prob­a­bly the biggest threat to the dome is from Home­own­ers and Builders Asso­ci­a­tions who for var­i­ous rea­sons lobby in favor of the sta­tus quo. If you’re fully invested in a McMan­sion, I sup­pose hav­ing an upstart, com­mie geo­desic dome pop up next door like some mush­room can be disconcerting.

But curved walls and sur­faces can be aes­thet­i­cally beau­ti­ful, which I think is among its strongest advantages.

Ref­er­ences

1. Curved by Design | Tiny House Blog
2. Curved by Design, Inc.

Posted on March 15th, 2010 by Sky
Filed under: Design, Greenology | No Comments »

I found this while shop­ping for task light­ing online. No fur­ther com­men­tary necessary:

Too funny — thanks Lunch­breath!

Posted on March 13th, 2010 by Sky
Filed under: Humor | No Comments »