Quotationizing

I have come to the conclusion that the following 10 individuals are credited with 80% of the quotations on the Internet:*

1. Winston Churchill
2. Mark Twain
3. Shakespeare
4. Gandhi
5. Steve Jobs
6. Warren Buffett
7. Oscar Wilde
8. Peter Drucker
9. Albert Einstein
10. Abraham Lincoln

I don't question the intellectual credentials of any of the above. But they couldn't possibly have said all of those clever things, could they? All it takes is one person to misattribute something, out of laziness or carelessness, and Mark Twain is eternally credited with another quote.

Occasionally I try to think of something clever to say. Thus far, nothing I've said has caught on to become part of the popular parlance. So I'd like to try again, this time sharing the credit.

 "Some people are always looking for others' mistakes that they can criticize, like a dog sniffing the ground for a place to pee."
 --Albert Einstein

Let's see how that goes.

 *The following appear to have fallen out of fashion and no longer get much attribution, even though they were all eminently quotable: Benjamin Franklin, George Patton, Helen Keller, Franklin Roosevelt, George Burns, John Wooden, Jack Welch, Henry David Thoreau, Socrates, Albert Schweitzer and Thomas Edison.

The Day After Thanksgiving

One in Phoenix.
One in Arkansas.
One in Austin.
One in his room.

One in China.
One in Palo Alto.
One in Logan.
Hence the gloom.

Technology and Resources

I don't think we have enough faith in technology to solve the earth's resource problems. Personally, I'm not very worried about the future of non-renewable resources, such as energy and fresh water. I think we'll find a way.

The problem is that we're convinced we know everything. So we evaluate our prospects for the future based on the present. But the future never turns out that way, and technology inevitably makes old paradigms obsolete while introducing game-changing solutions.

These solutions are almost always driven by economics. As resource supply is outpaced by demand, prices increase and investment in new technologies increases. Eventually, there's a breakthrough.

A few years ago natural gas sold at $9 a cubic thousand foot, and the experts believed it was a dwindling resource. A few smart companies started investing in horizontal drilling, which proved overwhelmingly successful. As a result, supply is way up and the price is down to $4. The same kind of thing may happen to oil, to a lesser degree, if we continue to improve the environmental safety of fracking in shale.

Fresh water is in the midst of a similar revolution. Besides continually improved water recycling methods--a number of US cities now use primarily recycled water--ocean water desalination is also progressing rapidly. There are over 15,000 desalination plants worldwide, producing 16 billion gallons of clean water daily.

All of these new technologies must be managed carefully. Most importantly, there are inevitable environmental issues that must be dealt with, and lessons are often learned at great cost. But the solutions will come. And society would be better served to spend its time developing these solutions than fretting that the sky is falling.

I would instead fret about preserving resources that are difficult or impossible to replace, such as clean air and waterways, or undeveloped wilderness. Unfortunately, these objectives are often in conflict with the aforementioned new technologies. Managing the one without sacrificing the other should be the object of society's, and government's, attention.

Heartbeats

I recently read (in Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From) about Kleiber's Law, which is that as things get bigger, they tend to slow down. Among the many applications of this theory is the heart-rates of larger animals are slower than smaller ones. Further, larger animals live longer than smaller ones--a fly might live for a day, while an elephant lives for 50 years. But neither of these relationships is linear, unless you combine them. Then you find that if you plot mass vs. metabolism on a logarithmic grid you get a straight line from sparrows to whales.

An interesting corollary is, as science writer George Johnson observed, that the number of heartbeats per lifetime tends to be stable from species to species, it's just that some species use them up more quickly than others. I think there's something very elegant in this, and almost poetic.

(I'm reminded of a similar theory about caloric intake--that the body is meant to process only so many calories, whether consumed in forty years or a hundred.)

I would like to live longer and well, but not at any price. I don't intend to slow my pulse so I can live more years. I'd prefer to sprint to the finish line, where I collapse flushed with exertion and sustained by adrenaline. I would rather my heart beat wildly than keep a dirge-like time from a dusty metronome. I hope I go with a white-knuckle grip on the handlebars of adventure, and not resting comfortably in the armchair of caution.

"Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Dylan Thomas

Weekend in Duluth

We spent a wonderful weekend in Duluth and I was reminded of how much richer our lives are with family. When I was younger I didn't consider this as important, and now, with more perspective, it has become paramount in my life. We spent many wonderful hours talking, reminiscing and hiking (and eating!) with Tim, Kathy, Sue, Brad, Tom, Jamie and Jeffrey, and Rebecca was able to have breakfast with Lindsay in Minneapolis. It makes me wish all the more that my children all develop close relationships with one another as they get older.

And then coming home on my birthday to a custom-selected meal and an office full of balloons, each with a heart-warming message or memory from family--was wonderful. What a thoughtful and terrific gift.

One small observation on the impact of Facebook. We walked into the Duluth Ward on Sunday morning and both Darnell Nelson and Jamie (formerly Milbridge) came up to me and wished me a happy birthday. Darnell is an old friend, but other than on Facebook we've hardly stayed in touch, and Jamie friended me even though I hardly know her. So their greetings seemed very strange to me, although certainly welcome.

Go Bulldogs

Tonight I watched the UMD Bulldogs defeat Michigan for the NCAA Division I Hockey Championship. Hockey is UMD's only Division I sport and this was their first ever men's national title. The 3-2 game was won in overtime and the Bulldogs played extremely well.

I was the Sports Editor for the UMD Statesman during my senior year, and I personally covered the hockey team, including travelling to some road games. (I also had a sports column, called On The Line, which was a lot of fun.) While I was there, the team's star player got drunk one night, drove his car onto someone's front lawn and was pounding on their door at 2:00 a.m. Turns out he had the wrong house. The police were called, but because of his star status it was all hushed up.

Well, we got wind of it and decided to break the story, scooping the Duluth News Tribune (which later, grudgingly, picked it up). I recall our meeting to discuss whether to publish or not. There were many factors, and it felt like something out of the movies. Even the university administration weighed in, but they weren't about to quash our freedom of the press, however slight in the vast scheme of things.

As you might expect, the article didn't sit well with the hockey team. Their coach wouldn't talk to me all season long, and some players threatened me. Occasionally I'd get obscene calls at home at night. It was an interesting experience and a little unsettling.

The hockey team wasn't very good back then anyway. But it was still the best game in town, by far. And it's personally very exciting for me to see them win on a national stage, despite the potholes in my memory lane. Go Bulldogs!

Father Knows Best?

There is an interesting case before the Massachusetts courts. A mother is being tried for discontinuing chemotherapy treatments for her nine-year-old son, who later died. There are a million subtleties to this case, including the mother's character and a messy divorce, but the underlying philosophical issue is profound. What rights should parents have to raise children as they please?

According to one report, in the current case the prosecutors simply have to prove that "the mother was so wanton and reckless in her actions that any reasonable person in the same situation would have known that what she was doing — failing to give him his chemotherapy for at least five months — could kill the child."

Similar cases have arisen in the past, including a number involving the right of Jehovah's Witness parents to withhold generally accepted medical treatment from their children on religious grounds.

It is difficult to decide how much rein to give parents. I can't find many arguments, other than emotional and cultural ones, that suggest parents should have anything resembling ownership rights over their children. (This could easily drift into an abortion debate.) On the other hand, government is both unfit and ill-equipped to handle the responsibility.

I do know this: All parents are sadly imperfect. The vast majority teach their children (by example, permission and sometimes precept) habits, practices and principles that will damage their health, shorten their lives and make it difficult for them to develop healthy family and social relationships in the future. The question is, how much of this should society allow. Who could and would do a better job? And which of us has the proper credentials to cast the first stone?

There's No Theory to Relativity

For every organism that has been studied (dogs, cats, insects, monkeys, even yeast) if you reduce the caloric intake by 30% you extend the lifespan by 30%. Seems like our cells are only programmed to process a certain amount of calories before they wear out.

So let's take this as a given. Less calories, more years. How many of us would actually cut back dramatically on calories? I'm not sure I would. In fact, I suspect more people would be motivated by how they look in a swimsuit than their lifespan. That is, right up until they face the end. Then they will wish they'd passed up the french fries and the chocolate malts.

That's called perspective. Or maybe relativity.

Patent a Kidney?

A fascinating patent case is being heard in the appellate courts in Utah. Myriad Genetics is fighting for its right to patent isolated strings of DNA, a right the USPTO has granted for some time, but which is now being challenged. Consider these two analogies:

On the one hand: You cannot patent a string of DNA, which occurs in nature, any more than you can patent a kidney, or an electron.

On the other: Extracting a string of DNA is no different than patenting a baseball bat that has been carved out of a tree.

Having no sophistication in patent law (even though I've paid attorneys millions of dollars for patent litigation!), I'd offer up two general layman principles: First, if the extracted DNA was the result of a unique design then perhaps it is justifiably patentable. Second, since DNA codes are essentially two-dimensional strands, the notion of a unique design becomes far reaching--it is less a baseball bat that we are extracting and more a center slice from the tree trunk.

It will be interesting to see where this case goes.

The Real China Competition

We regularly read about the threat of the U.S. losings its status as the #1 economy to China. That could very well happen. However, the real threat that should concern us is more fundamental--China is laying the foundation for long-term dominance in science and technology. Consider these:

1. In 1994, China's secondary school enrollment rate was 48%. Now it's 76%.
2. In 1995, China was 14th in the word in publication of science and engineering papers. Now it is 2nd.
3. This year China is expected to overtake the U.S. in number of patent applications.
4. Test scores for 15-year-olds in Shanghai far exceed those in the U.S. in reading (556 vs. 500) and math (600 vs. 487).

China's combination of size, targeted investment and performance culture make our second-place status not only inevitable, but imminent. If we can't restore interest in the sciences and reform our educational system, then the gap will only get larger and, ultimately, impassable.

More or Less Hungry

The U.S. spends 7% of household consumption on food. I think that is the lowest in the world. For perspective, China spends 33%, Russia 28%, Egypt 38% and Mexico 24%. This has a dramatic impact on our world view. The necessities of existence are assumed by most of us (although plenty of homeless would disagree, I am sure). We don't have to scrape for food.

So it is perhaps not a coincidence that worldwide rising commodity pricing is accompanied by political unrest in countries throughout the world (see Egypt, Yemen, Libya, etc.). I recall the historian Will Durrant asking an Eskimo what he was thinking, and the reply was something like this: "My belly is full. I do not need to think."

There is an underlying fear in our country's political debate, that most of us don't worry about going hungry, but if things go badly, we could be there quickly.

Busy Bee

Josie is busy as busy can be
And needs to discover the things she can’t see.
She finds every cabinet, cupboard and drawer
And dumps all the contents onto the floor.

She scribbles her thoughts with the big black pen
And pounds on the stapler again and again.
She pokes with the pin and examines the screw
And takes off the cap and pours out the glue.

She checks every item one by one
And doesn’t slow down until she’s done
Tasting the buttons and sticking the tape
And bending the hanger into a new shape.

Josie I wish I were more like you,
With nothing more interesting to do
Than empty out every unknown drawer
To find new worlds I could explore.