Would you like to play a game? Y’day I dropped into Jimbo’s to move my equipment out of the way, so the “Blue Crows” can play tomorrow. There was a new guy there who heard I was the musician. Therefore he stated, I was the singer. No. Well then, I play guitar. No. Then it must be keyboards. No. His conclusion was if I did none of those things, I could not possibly be the entertainer and there was no fooling him. Here is the one rule of this game: guess what nationality he was. (Hint, it starts with a “C”.)FinePrint 2000, the software, does not make the grade. The trial version shows that it has few capabilities beyond printing one style of booklet. Possibly the full version can do more, but this would not be the first time a “full-featured” trial version was nothing of the kind. Again, I turn to ClickPrint. They have the user manual on-line. The software is still hard to use and full of jargon, but it has 170 print modes and, apparently, adjustable margins. The price is $60.
Was I right? Further investigation shows an upsurge in the number of disability claims. Both factors I predicted have become the major cause. First, all of us have seen just too many obviously healthy people on disability (which removes any stigma of being on “welfare”). Second, the current depression makes disability an admirably attractive alternative to low paying work.
Most people can sit around the house all day for a quarter of the money required to have a job. According to at least one doctor, the system is seeing swarms of new disability applicants. Earning minimum wage grosses you less than $1,200 per month. Who wants to get up every morning for that and listen to a grouchy boss all day? No wonder people would prefer to lounge around home for half that amount and repair lawn mowers on the side.
Before I give you today’s trivia, I read a short article on lies you can tell your kids. For instance, if they name a hurricane with your name, you have to pay for all the damages. My favorite was telling your kid the reason executive class flies at the front of the airplane is because they get where they are going one minute faster. Ha, that should mess him up till he starts noticing girls. Yes, now the trivia. America’s Internet system has 4 billion addresses. When China installs their system, they will have 340 trillion trillion trillion.
The same source also stated the one worthwhile thing I think Stephen Hawking ever said about life. I finished reading Jastrow, and was thinking about his theories on life arising from inanimate materials. (Technically, it happens all the time, for sperm and egg are not living objects.) I meant mutation, in the strictest sense, defined as a characteristic that one generation can pass to offspring. My hypothesis is that all living things are mutations of some sort. Darwin seems to have gotten this one right in surprising detail but he carefully avoids describing what constitutes the fittest. Does nature favor intelligence? It doesn’t according to Hawkins, who said, “It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.” Harsh.
My hypothesis is that nature does, in fact, highly prefer intelligence. But it is mankind’s contortions of sex, religion and politics that prevent a complete upheaval of the mate selection process. We have laws and systems that block innovative intelligence at every turn. A good example is monogamous marriage. Most people who do it have been inculcated from a very early age that it is “right”. Do you know anybody like that?
In that sense, intelligence is highly regulated in our society. It is not allowed to take its course, rather it is treated more like a controllable malady. By ensuring intelligence alone is not enough to succeed, we create the artificial environment whereby unimaginative and ordinary people are likely to rise just as surely as they would fail if intelligence was unbridled. Think Bill Gates (who bought the competition whenever he couldn’t defeat them) and Steve Fossett (the twerp who kept the coast guard busy with his idiotic attempts to balloon around the world). In any arrangement that favored brains, those two couldn’t get a date for Saturday night.
Oh, and if any of you think Gates got rich because he is smart, you are woefully short on facts. If that hurt your feelings, here, have some maple syrup. And don’t worry about the cost. We’ll put it on your credit card.
