Well, actually it’s a poll that Kevin Holtsberry is running to see which country has the best brewski.

I think that, like most polls, it will provide misleading results.

For instance, I’d say the USA, but not because of all the watery swill that comes out of Milwaukee and St. Louis–it’s because we have such a plethora of microbreweries, some of which are superb. If you restrict the question to mass-produced beer, then I’d probably say Germany.

Lots of them this week. Today is the thirty fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Six-Day War.

I remember the jokes at the time. The Israelis had to wrap it up fast because they were renting their tanks from Hertz by the week…

And it showed how pathetic the Russian equipment was against ours and the Israelis’–particularly when operated by Arabs. It wasn’t all that great from the standpoint of marketing Migs.

And tomorrow will be the fifty-eighth anniversary of the Normandy invasion.

Eric Olsen sent me an email about this post of his concerning a group of students participating in research about Mars.

This is just amazing: direct participation in unique research regarding Mars by students as young as 10! Next time I hear a long diatribe against science and technology, I will point the luddite in the direction of this project. This will generate enthusiasim for science, space, and Mars that will last a lifetime. And of course, participation in and management of the project is made possible by the Internet. This is grassroots dynamism in action. Dig it.

I replied to him something like “…I’ve seen things like it. I’ve actually got mixed feelings about it. I’ll put up a post to explain why.”

I’m spurred to get back to it by Ken Layne’s Fox column yesterday about the NBA versus “football” (soccer to Yanks).

I think that the NBA, more than most sports, is contributing to a national tragedy.

There are millions of kids of school age, particularly in the inner cities.

There are a few hundred openings in the NBA.

I weep when I think about the millions of kids who, instead of studying, spend all their time shooting hoops, hoping to win that lottery, and dressing and talking like their NBA heroes.

How many of them won’t beat the odds, but will instead grow up with no skills except shooting baskets and dribbling? It offers a tantalyzing possibility of life out of the ghetto for a few, but a chimera of false hope to the many.

While I would never propose abolishing the sport, I’m convinced that the world would be a better place without it, at least as it’s presently constituted.

But it’s not the only siren call to false dreams–there’s another.

When I was a child, we were preparing to send astronauts to the Moon. I remember sitting in my pajamas, watching John Glenn’s rocket lift off. In school, we were told that in the mid-seventies, we would have lunar bases, and in the mid-eighties, we would send people to Mars. We were told that if we studied our math and science, that we might be one of the ones to go.

It was a scam, worse, in some ways, than the NBA.

There are only a couple of hundred slots available for astronauts, and (particularly given the reduced crew size on the current space station), it’s possible that some of them will never fly, even after selection and training. Based on NASA’s current minimalist plans, the chances of any of those schoolkids getting into space is about one in a hundred thousand. It’s a lottery with very long odds.

Of course, I’m glad that kids are learning science, and it’s exciting to see them actually able to participate in real space science. And at least, unlike the failed NBA contestant, they’ll have a marketable skill from it when they grown up.

But it simultaneously frustrates me that this is the only way we’re teaching them to think about space–as something that’s only about science (thus turning off those who don’t think they’re good at science), and that it’s something that only government agencies like NASA can do for them.

I’d like to see schools have design competitions for space hotels or lunar resorts, or missions to mine asteroids, or divert them, or build solar power satellites out of them.

And I’d like to see private sponsors, like Hilton, or Bechtel sponsor them, so that we can broaden kids’ minds to think about space in a context other than science, and NASA. I’d like to see Space Camps that don’t just (or even) simulate Shuttle missions, but that provide exposure to a variety of activities in space, that might be done privately.

And mostly, I’d like to see policies put in place that will encourage all of these things and others to happen rather than, as is presently the case, to discourage it, so that the space dreams of today’s youth won’t be betrayed, as ours were.

Instantman points out a link to the Voluntary Human Extinction movement.

The funny thing is, that these folks seem to be getting their wish. Current demographic trends indicate that the global human population will peak a little later this century, and then start to shrink. This is because industrialized societies tend to have fewer children–reduced infant and child mortality, and the diminished need of them for subsistence labor, act to reduce optimal family size. This trend will accelerate if we bring the third world into the second and first.

Much of Europe and Japan are already below replacement rate, which is a major problem for their government pension systems.

Of course, it only takes one group, like the Mormons, who decide that it’s their religious duty to procreate, to cause an expansion of that group, whether on world, or off. But the next century could also bring transhumans of various varieties, which may have much longer lifespans, or be effectively immortal.

Neither the UN, or the Voluntary Extincters take this possibility (probability?) into consideration.

Den Beste has a great post on how willing we should be to delude ourselves.

There’s one other point, that he hints at but doesn’t quite make explicitly.

People who say “I never gamble” are also deluding themselves. We all gamble, every day, indeed, every second. The decision to get out of bed, or even take the next breath, is a gamble.

The risk is that there’s some toxic substance in the air. The payoff is oxygen, so you can continue to make new wagers.

The goal is not to figure out how to avoid gambling–that’s not going to happen this side of the grave. The goal should be to make sure that the odds aren’t stacked against you, as they are in almost all explicit “gambling,” as practiced in Indian casinos and Las Vegas.

The story is here. It’s a problem with gopher. Does anyone use gopher any more other than the University of Minnesota?

By the way, that headline ranks right up there with:

Sun Due To Rise Tomorrow

Earth Remains Roughly Spherical

Robert Fisk Writes Odious And Asinine Article

Neil Boortz speaks truth to inanity, as he exposes leftist hijacking of the language, in which “racism” and “hate” simply mean “anything with which I disagree, but don’t have a valid or effective argument against.”

Neil Boortz speaks truth to inanity, as he exposes leftist hijacking of the language, in which “racism” and “hate” simply mean “anything with which I disagree, but don’t have a valid or effective argument against.”

Neil Boortz speaks truth to inanity, as he exposes leftist hijacking of the language, in which “racism” and “hate” simply mean “anything with which I disagree, but don’t have a valid or effective argument against.”

They’ve come up with a virus that can jump back and forth from Windows to Linux. It randomly changes its size to make it harder to identify.

Great.

I’ve been wondering for a couple years what the killer app is for these new high-speed processors. Surfing the net and word processing don’t require a two-gigahertz Pentium. The only thing that I’ve been able to see that a home user might want these new supercomputers for is gaming.

But if virii are getting more sophisticated, and more intensive analysis is required to identify and block them, then it may be that, as they become more complex and sophisticated, much of the CPU time may start to become dedicated to doing nothing but security and defense, so you’ll have to have a lot of processing power just to have enough left over for the actual tasks you’re trying to accomplish.

In fact, if I were the paranoid type, I might wonder if Intel is covertly funding virus development…