Wonderings about the Universe

Another interesting swimming pool conversation this evening, about the recent Supreme Court decision giving corporations the right to essentially buy as many votes as they want, and the relative quiet now that the health care bill has passed.

I got to thinking, why fight the system? And, it’s not really that new that corporations have been buying votes, like even before we had corporations, the traders always had more say on troop deployments, to protect their own interest in getting the goods delivered.

Which is all good. Ideally, there would be no conflict between business’s interests and people’s. But we sometimes segment businesses so there are divergences. Like with the financial industries always discovering ways to escape the intent of the oversight laws. All that’s needed to fix that situation is one simple rule: no one can lay off all the action, the underwriter has to keep 20% of the risk.

That solution works well for the insurance industry in general. Now all that’s needed to make the health care industry work for us instead of for business is to align their interests with our own. This could be done by mandating that health care insurance automatically comes with life insurance which will pay out at least twice what the most recently recommended health care for that person would have cost.

This would have the effect of making sure the insrance companies make more money keeping us alive and paying the insurance premiums. They would suddenly become interested in seeing that we eat healthy. Then that would see the food industry wanting to also keep us alive longer, to eat ultimately more food.

What do you think?

I just helped some new friends launch a new site for their just-published book, How To Know If It’s Time To Go.

It shows how to assess your relationship’s health and/or ill health, and gives good guidance for improving the relationship or moving on in the least painful fashion.

I am finding it fascinating and extremely illumintaing.  Larry is a psychoanalyst and most of the stories are derived from his practice over the years, and Bev is a very talented writer (business communications consultant).

A friend and I were talking about the bailout, and I mentioned an idea I’d heard from a couple of the late night comedians …

Instead of giving the $1.5 Trilliion to Wall Street, the banks, and Detroit, we could have given it to ourselves — it would have been about  $50,000 per citizen.  (My friend suggested $100,000 low interest loans — perhaps even better?)

A lot of this would have saved homes from foreclosure and credit cards from default, going straight back to the banks.  The rest would have made its normal 6-8 times traversal of the economy before it got taxed back out of circulation.  Many new purchases of cars and every other imaginable thing would have spurred us out of the recession smartly.

As it is, we have managed the largest bonus plan in history to the fewest number of the smart thieves, the engineers of the debacle.  And left our, and the world’s,  economy stalled out for  probably  another  ordinary economic cycle  (7-15 years?)

It doesn’t really work at the nickel-and-dime level, like Bush tried.  But it could work like gangbusters with some real money.

What do you think?

It has happened more than once that someone has claimed they can’t find what they’re looking for on the web.  These are some of the strategies I use, by typing directly into the google search box at top right of my browser …

• concept vs
  • This one pulls up the concepts most commonly compared to the concept of interest.
• product vs
  • This one gets the products most commonly compared to the one I think I want.
• product model #
  • To find the best sources of a product, for pricing and drivers.
• how to …(or tutorial)
  • To discover the most useful tutorials about using the concept or tool I want to learn about.

 
More Google tips …

In the pool last night, one of my friends made a comment about reversing entropy.  Which led me to tell him about the article I had just read about Stephen Hawking’s recent efforts.

Hawking made a bet with Kip Thorne, if you recall, against John Preskill of CalTech that information could not leak out of a black hole.  This notion is a direct contradiction of one of the fundamental tenets of quantum mechanics, that information cannot be destroyed.

Well, after reconsidering the matter for some years from the viewpoint of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Hawking finally conceded in 2004 that, indeed, information could leak out of a black hole via the uncertainties surrounding the creation of Hawking radiation.  It seems the black hole’s “event horizon” is not sharply delineated, but fuzzy.

Anyway, the focus of Hawking’s attention lately has been the probability aspects of quantum mechanics leading to the notions of multiple histories of the universe now popular in string theories.  And, surprisingly, there may be a testable concept in here, in that some of the alternate probability waves may have been captured in the microwave background radiation, generated when the universe was about 380,000 years old.

All of which leads me back to some of my own conjecturing that a singularity is prohibited by the Uncertainty Principle, and that simple situation would lead to the supposed singularity spitting out at least one particle (stringlet? — must be at least one-dimensional to avoid itself being a singularity).  But there can’t be only one, so there would then have to be another, and then another, and so on.

My thinking has been so far stopped there, because I have not yet imagined how to assign enough attributes to this string-icle to let it vibrate.  The vibration would presuppose time and space in which it would vibrate.  So I am letting my imagination stew in the very simplistic view of an  infinity of single dimensional stringlets of one attribute — direction, or polarity.

Anyone have any suggestions about a mapping of these into multiple dimensions?

Last Sunday my son Stefan and I went to IKEA in Brooklyn (Red Hook) to get the desk he had picked out after some weeks of shopping online and in the furniture showrooms.  I was puzzled about why we couldn’t order it online or over the phone until we got there and I saw their business plan in operation.  They use the customer to pickup the kit pieces from the warehouse, accomplishing order QA simultaneously.

And, they make you go through as much of the whole store and warehouse as they possibly can, I guess so you don’t forget anything you may have wanted.  But it makes getting in and out with only what you wanted impossible to do efficiently.

Not being able to get checked out reasonably quickly annoyed both of us to the point I doubt we’ll purchase from them again.

Then Stefan had fun putting the two side drawer sets together on Wednesday (no school for Veterans Day), only needing me once to help interpret a quandary.

The desk looks GREAT, he’s got much more room to work, and his mom got his old desk, which pleases her.

All in all, another thing to be grateful for in our lives.

I’ve been having so much fun with my son, Stefan, this summer.  He’s 13 1/2 and just entering high school in two weeks.

He’s been taking swimming lessons, and we go swimming everyday at the Y.  And building a robot from parts we ordered from a project he found online.

He’s also been learning programming  (C++) and mathematics at a pretty good clip.  He’s gone through complex numbers, conic sections, and is just starting calculus!  I’m really proud of him 🙂

And, we’re both taking a Spanish course from CDs.  It’s review for him, and a first real (speaking) second language for me.