Nuclear Email

This morning I received an email from a friend with a video clip about a tame Canadian goose who has made friends with a man and his dog. The video has some amazing sections showing the goose flying along side a speeding motorboat, so close that the man can reach out and touch it. My friend knew I would enjoy this video, and so he passed it along to me.

Another friend had done the same thing, with the same video, just a couple of days before. That sort of thing has happened to me many times; sometimes I’ve received the same joke, photos, sound clip, or video dozens of times. What’s going on here?

As I was trying to word a response to my friend, trying to find a way to say “Thanks! But I’ve already seen this…” I got to pondering this phenomenon. Why does this happen so often? And why are the contents of these emails quite often genuinely entertaining or interesting (or both!)?

So I started with my own behavior. When I get one of these emails, what do I do? Sometimes I post it on my blog, where it will be seen (and often passed along) by somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred people (the number of people reading my blog varies tremendously from day-to-day). Sometimes I forward the email, and when I do, I usually forward it to 10 or 12 people I think might enjoy it. The majority of these emails I read, enjoy, and delete. I would guess that I delete 80% or so of them. But the 20% that I don’t delete get seen by something like 20 people (averaging between the blog and the forwarded emails). So…if 20% of the emails I receive are seen by 20 people each, that means that on average, every email I receive is then seen by 4 other people.

Am I typical? I don’t know. But just to be conservative, let’s say my behavior is double the average person’s forwarding behavior. If that were true, that means that every email sent out is see by 2 additional people, on average. This process is self-selective on the quality of the email’s contents, too — because of course the more entertaining or interesting contents will be forwarded more often…

Now lets see what this implies. Imagine that you created a short video of the earthworm you laboriously trained to do backflips on verbal command. This is something most people would consider both interesting and entertaining. Now you send this video to your two friends — and three people will have seen it. If, on average, they send it to two people, that means four more — a total of seven — will have seen it. If those four now each send it to two people, then eight more — fifteen in total will have seen it. And so on. We can reduce this to a simple formula: V = A^G - 1, where V is the number of people who have viewed the email, A is the average number of unique new viewers that each viewer sends it on to, and G is the number of “generations” including the original sender. So…if A = 2 and G = 10 (meaning that the email has been forwarded 10 times) then V = 2^10-1 = 1023 people will have seen it. But if G = 20, then A = 2^20-1 = 1,048,575 people will have seen it — and twice that many on the very next generation! How long does it take for an email to be forwarded 20 times? I would guess just five or six days, maybe ten at the most. And if this went on for 33 generations — then every single person on the planet will have seen the email!

The analysis above is not rigorous by any means. For starters, it’s almost certain that A varies from generation to generation, especially in the early generations. But it does illustrate just how quickly one of this email can propagate. It also shows just how likely it is that multiple people would send it to you at nearly the same time — if a million people have seen an email, what’s the chances that you know two of them? Or if 100 million people have seen an email? Pretty good, I think…

In fact, the process reminds me of another phenomenon of quick propagation: a self-sustaining nuclear reaction, as you’d find in a nuclear bomb. In these reactions, each decaying atom throws out two (or more) high-energy particles — each of which can then cause another atom to split and decay. The nuclear reaction proceeds much faster than email, as the energetic particles are moving at near the speed of light, and they only have to move an inch or two at most. But the underlying math is very similar…

Email and nuclear weapons are related!

Beautiful Jupiter

The New Horizons robotic spacecraft recently passed Jupiter on its way to Pluto and the outer Solar System. On its way around Jupiter, it took many photos of the planet and its moons, including this montage showing the Big Red Spot, the Little Red Spot, and their respective whirl-filled wakes.

I sure wish we’d invest more in these robotic explorers. The science done by any one of them exceeds the total science done in the current manned space program, at a tiny fraction of the cost…

Blooper of the Day

From a church circular:

This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.

Chuckle brought to you courtesy of GeorgeK…

Word of the Day

Giraffiti, n: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

Old Goats

Forwarded by SimiL (one of my tiny-but-loyal group of regular readers):

A group of Americans were traveling by tour bus through Holland. As they stopped at a cheese farm, a young guide led them through the process of cheese making, explaining that goat’s milk was used. She showed the group a lovely hillside where many goats were grazing. “These” she explained “are the older goats put out to pasture when they no longer produce.” She then asked, “What do you do in America with your old goats?” A spry old gentleman answered, “They send us on bus tours!"

Hah!

But here in San Diego, old goats have a different fate: they are rented out to eat chaparral. Seriously! Brush-clearing-by-goat has become quite popular here, both with local governments and landowners. And from what I can see on the couple of occasions that I’ve seen the old goats in action, they seem to like it as well…

Word of the Day

Sarchasm, n: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

What's Right?

Read about Megumi Yokota (from the Wall Street Journal$):

Megumi, who was abducted in 1977, has become the symbol of the movement to free the abductees. She was 13 years old and on her way home from school when she was snatched off the streets of the western Japanese city of Niigata by North Korean agents. Imprisoned in the hold of a ship and taken to Pyongyang, she was forced to teach spies how to pass as Japanese. In 2002, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il admitted to kidnapping Megumi and 11 other Japanese citizens.

Their stories are equally heart-rending: A young couple disappear in Kagoshima Prefecture while on a date at a beach, where they had gone to watch the sunset. A 23-year-old woman vanishes in Europe; the last her parents hear from her is a postcard from Copenhagen. A mother and daughter go missing during a shopping trip in Niigata Prefecture. At the time, police who investigated these and other disappearances had no notion of North Korean involvement. In recent years, Japan has reopened many of the missing-persons files from the era but the scent has grown cold. There are only 17 people on the official list of abductees — the most recent was added in November — but officials say privately that the victims may number in the “hundreds.” South Korea, whose appeasement-minded government prefers not to talk about the kidnappings of its citizens, has 485 people on its list of abductees.

Pyongyang allowed five of the Japanese abductees to return home in 2002. (They were required to leave behind their Korean spouses and children as guarantees that they wouldn’t badmouth their captors.) It claimed the rest of the abductees had all died, but the causes of death they cited were so absurd as to be unbelievable — a 20-something young woman who dropped dead of a heart attack; a man who drowned while swimming in the ocean during a typhoon; and so forth. Megumi was reported to have hanged herself. But the DNA evidence provided by Pyongyang in her case and others proved to be fraudulent.

Can you imagine being the victim of such a kidnapping? Or the relative of one?

To my mind, this behavior all by itself is sufficient and compelling cause for the world to use all means necessary to remove crazy Kim and dismantle his evil government. At the very least, North Korea should be sealed off from the rest of the world until it collapses under its own incompetence — though certainly the effects of this would be awful for the North Korean people. An alternative would be a military effort from all directions: China, Russia, Japan, and the West — though certainly that would incur a substantial number of casualties amongst the military and civilians. In other words, of course this effort would be messy and would have consequences. But I can’t imagine how we (the world outside North Korea) can stand by and let this happen.

But that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for over 50 years. And it’s not like we just figured out that Kim (and his father before him) was evil — this has been perfectly clear since the early 1950s.

As I ponder that reality — the world’s inaction against unambiguous, clear evil — the one piece of clarity that emerges is this: that the United Nations is completely useless as a way to control rogue governments. The UN wouldn’t stop another Hitler; in fact, it would probably send him aid.

Ain’t that a comfortable thought to start your day?

Strange Statues

Now here are some things that you just don’t see every day. Clearly there are quite a few sculptors with well-developed senses of humor and whimsy.

Most of these are sculptures that I would love to see in the public spaces of San Diego (the nearest large city to me). Instead, with just a couple of notable exceptions, we have sculptures that I just don’t understand. The epitome of this class of sculpture is the … whatever it is … monster sculpture of what looks sort of like the prow of a ship, hanging from a bizarre arrangement of steel beams, at the corner of Laurel and Harbor Drive, near the airport. I cannot imagine why anyone would want such an ugly and uninteresting thing in their city.

But a piece of sculpture that puts a smile on people’s faces? That’s something to aspire to!

Don’t miss the rest of them.

Book Recommendation

I just finished reading an excellent overview of American involvement in the Middle East: Power, Faith, and Fantasy by Michael Oren. Though I’m a bit of a student of history, this book taught me a lot about America’s involvement in the Middle East, especially our involvement prior to the 20th century. I was especially surprised to learn just how big a role the Middle East actually played in the earliest days of our country.

For anyone interested in our current involvement in the Middle East, I highly recommend this book for background. You can get it on Amazon.

The Reminder

Tip o’the hat to SimiL for this little story:

An elderly gentleman of 83 arrived in Paris by plane. At the French customs desk, the man took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry-on bag. “You have been to France before, monsieur?” the customs officer asked, sarcastically. The elderly gentleman admitted he had been to France previously. “Then you should know enough to have your passport ready.” The American said, “The last time I was here, I didn’t have to show it.” “Impossible. Americans always have to show their passports on arrival in France!” The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly explained. “Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944 to help liberate this country, I couldn’t find any Frenchmen to show it to."

Having visited France a few times on business, I can tell you that the premise of this story — the sneering French official — rings very true. Especially in the big cities, Americans are frequently “treated” to condescension and insult from French citizens. To any American with even the slightest knowledge of history (ok, I know, that’s only 2% or so of Americans) this is galling, to say the least. To someone who was actually there on D-Day, surely it’s much worse…

I’m reminded of an article I read a few days ago concerning the NATO troops in Afghanistan. I’m not sure why this surprised me, but it did… While it is absolutely true that NATO is supplying the foreign armed forces in Afghanistan, and that virtually all NATO members have troops there — it turns out that most members have placed significant conditions on the use of those troops. In fact, with the exception of Britain, the U.S., and a few new NATO members with tiny forces there (because their countries are tiny!), all the NATO “partners” have forbidden their troops from participating in combat! Huh? What, exactly, is their purpose, then? Well, it turns out they’re engaged in logistics, training, and police work.

The French troops are amongst those that are not allowed in combat roles. Thanks a lot, “partners” — which must be French for “cheese-eating surrender monkeys"…

Word of the Day

Inoculatte, v: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

Casino Update

The Voice of San Diego — a refreshing change from the Pulitzer Prize winning San Diego Union-Buffoon — has an informative, well-written article today on the Jamul Casino. In this one article, they’ve got more information than the Union-Buffoon has managed to get into the sum of all their articles on the subject. A sample:

At the same time, for Toggery and Rosales, it is an intensely personal quest. They are reluctant dissidents, convinced of their cause but hesitant to embrace the hero label bestowed by fellow, non-tribal opponents. The two protest that the casino would destroy burial sites they consider sacred.

But they also worry that their battle may end soon. Eviction notices were taped to their doors Feb. 24, promising they’d be removed from their homes within five days. The Jamul tribal chairman says the two dissidents will be gone in 90 days. The casino, he says, will be built by 2009, the latest promised construction date.

This is why Toggery and Rosales talk about human fences and their plans to stand in front of bulldozers. This is why a neighbor hired security so the two could sleep soundly at night. This is why Toggery says she is afraid to leave her home for more than an hour, fearful she won’t have a house when she returns.

Still, they have fought the casino, despite the alienation, the threats, the severance of longstanding familial relations.

"What we have here, and what’s in the ground, it should stay,” Toggery says. “As long as you have one person who believes, that’s all that really matters."

As they say, go read the whole thing.

One very useful thing I discovered while reading this article is that the Jamul Indian Casino web site has finally put the environmental impact report (EIR) online. They did it in a quite awkward fashion however, so I’ve downloaded all the individual Word document files they provided and put them in a single ZIP file, which you can download and save yourself.

I haven’t had a chance to read the entire report myself yet (but I will, as it’s not that long). However, a quick sampling of a couple of sections shows that (as usual for such things) it’s more a public relations piece than it is an objective, factual report. It’s what I was expecting, but not what I was hoping for. The EIR was commissioned by the tribe and Lakes Entertainment (their backers), and it sounds like it. If Jamulians Against the Casino were to make an EIR, I suspect that darned near every issue listed would have a completely different conclusion. An awful lot of time and money is spent on EIRs, which are required by law in many circumstances, but I really can’t see the point when the result is so obviously biased…

Grocery Shopping on the Web

This Thursday — yesterday — we received a flyer in the mail from Von’s (a western chain of grocery stores that’s part of the Safeway grocery conglomerate). The flyer spoke glowingly of Von’s new web store, and how one could order anything you’d like from the grocery store and have it delivered to your home even that same day.

Do you remember PeaPod and WebVan from the dot-com days? This was their premise as well, and after squandering vast quantities of venture capital, these fine companies went out of business. They never did deliver to rural areas, either — you had to live quite close to their distribution warehouses to be eligible to use their services. We live in a veryrural// area, about 20 miles from the nearest Von’s — and probably a lot further from their warehouse, where I suspect these delivery vans are being dispatched from.

But the Von’s flyer said they covered San Diego County (amongst many other areas). Not “the popular parts” of the county, not “selected areas” — the inference was that they covered all of San Diego County. So I decided to put it to the test. On Thursday afternoon I went to their web site, created an account, and was pleasantly surprised when no apologetic “Sorry, but we don’t serve your area” page popped up when I entered my address. The web site just accepted it as though I lived in some normal area, and invited me to enter my grocery list. Which I did — some $220 worth of groceries of all kinds, which is most of a month’s groceries for my wife and myself.

During the checkout phase, I discovered that I had a choice of delivery times — and for $9.95 I could have a two hour delivery window, as opposed to $7.95 for a four hour delivery window. Actually, both of those sounded good to me — living out here in the boonies, we’re used to delivery windows expressed in days, not hours! For any order over $150, they knock off $5 from the delivery charge — and for the first order, as a promotion, the delivery was free. So I signed up for a Friday delivery (the next day) with a two hour window from 10 AM to 12 PM.

This morning, I fully expected to get either an email or a telephone call telling me that I was outside the service area and I could just forget about it. So sorry, but if you’re so dumb as to live 20 miles from a grocery store then surely you can’t expect us to deliver to you!

And sure enough, at 11:30 AM I got a call from Von’s. But it wasn’t the call I was expecting. Instead, it was the driver of the delivery van, telling me that (a) he was running about 20 or 30 minutes late, and (b) he had no frickin' idea where I lived, and could I please give him so directions. This had me thoroughly flustered, as I really didn’t believe there was much chance they’d really deliver my groceries. But here I had a real, live (and very polite) driver telling me that yes indeedy he’d be out here in less than an hour.

And at 12:20 the delivery van pulled into my driveway. The driver was every bit as polite in person as he was on the phone, and he proceeded to show me how it the delivery part all worked. My order was in five blue plastic bins: three in the unrefrigerated section, one in the refrigerator, and one in the freezer. He stacked them all up on a cart, wheeled them to my front door, and then helped me bring them all into the house. All my groceries were in the same shopping bags they’d have been in had I done the shopping myself. In just a couple of minutes, all my groceries were in the house and I said goodbye to my delivery guy.

Then I checked out my order, which was actually fairly complicated. I had a dozen or so items (produce, meat, etc.) where I had entered specific directions to my “personal shopper” on the web site. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that with one exception, everything was exactly as I had ordered. The exception: they had substituted ordinary Kosher bologna for the Lebanon bologna that I ordered. If you know anything about Lebanon bologna, you know it is nothing whatsoever like ordinary bologna — but this was such a small and really insignificant mistake that I am not disappointed at all.

Think about it. I live about 30 minutes from the nearest grocery store. To buy these groceries, I’d normally have driven for an hour — using about $10 in gas — and spent another hour or so in the grocery store. Two hours of my life, and $10 in gas. With this service, I spent less than 30 minutes online, and zero time or dollars driving. This privilege cost me zero this time, and in the future will cost me $2.95 (the $7.95 charge for a four hour window, less the $5 they knock off for orders over $150), as we’ll most likely order only once every three or four weeks, and that order will easily exceed $150. This is a complete no-brainer for us, unless the service deteriorates very badly.

I hope to never visit the grocery store again!

Oops II

Bruce Hall, on his blog Hall of Record, has done a very interesting piece of analysis that takes several posts over the past week. It’s a great example of one of my favorite kinds of analysis: the “sniff” test, or a quick test to see whether a hypothesis correctly predicts something.

The hypothesis in Bruce’s case was global warming. Not what’s causing global warming, but the simple hypothesis that there is global warming. Bruce thought that if our globe was really getting warmer, then we should be able to see evidence of that in climate records. And it just so happens that the United States has been keeping widespread and very accurate temperature records for over 100 years.

So Bruce had this interesting — and testable — thought. If global warming is a real phenomenon, then surely it should be true that we’re setting more record high temperatures in recent years than we have in past years. It turns out that this data is readily available. Bruce got the data, did the analysis, and (in his words):

Sorry, but I just don’t see “global warming” in these extremes. It must be happening on some other part of the globe. CO2 is just not doing its job.

Go read the whole thing (and check out his very useful graphs).

Word of the Day

Hipatitis, n: Terminal coolness.

Oops!

Some interesting news from, of all places, Mars. Data from NASA satellites around Mars indicates that Mars is also experiencing a “global warming” of its own. NASA’s satellites gathered information for the past several years on the polar ice caps of Mars (which in its case, are carbon dioxide ice, not water ice). That data indicates that Mars has experienced a warming trend that matches the one seen on Earth — and, like the one on Earth, correlates quite nicely with the increase in the output of the sun.

In other words, on Mars as on the Earth, a brighter sun produces a hotter climate.

The oops? This is a pretty solid indication that mankind’s activities — especially the increased carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere — aren’t the only explanation for global warming. In fact, it’s pretty good evidence that even if mankind weren’t here at all, we’d still have global warming. After all, there are darn few gas-guzzling SUVs on Mars. As in zero. And there’s not even a Hypocrite’s Mansion on Mars, as there is in Nashville.

What say ye to this, oh Goreacle?

Read all about it in the National Geographic magazine. It’s quite amusing how those scientists who are on the global warming funding teat quickly find ways to discredit this…

Word of the Day

Osteopornosis, n: A degenerate disease.

Religion of Peace

Shortly after 9/11, I first read about a poll of Muslim countries (at that time, primarily Arabic countries). This poll was designed to find out what sort of support there was for Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and their terrorist activities amongst the ordinary citizens of Muslim nations. Since then, dozens of such polls have been conducted, in a broader range of Muslim countries, with some of them seeking to further clarify the initial findings by sampling not only whether a citizen was Muslim or not, but also what branch of Islam the citizen believed in (Shia, Sunni, Wahabi, etc.).

The results of these polls have been remarkably consistent.

Support for Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and terrorist activity directed at America is always between 80% and 95% of those sampled in the poll.

Some of these polls went further: they sought to understand why this support existed. Their results are also remarkably consistent.

The overwhelming majority of supporters of terrorism directed at America cite one reason for their support. It can be summarized — fairly, I believe — like this:

The Quran (Koran) says that infidels must be coerced to either convert or die, and that it is the duty of all faithful Muslims to coerce them. America is the leader of the infidel nations. America must be coerced. The best weapon the Muslims have to fulfill their religious duty (at least, until Iran gets nuclear weapons) is terrorism. There is no stricture in Islam against killing infidels (in fact, quite the opposite), so engaging in terrorism is completely consistent with their religious beliefs.

These poll results are consistent with another piece of evidence, one not often spoken of in our lamestream media: Al Qaeda and its ilk are quite well funded. They are spending many millions of dollars annually on training, weapons, ammunition, logistics, and so on. Where does this money come from? Well, actually, that’s well known (if little discussed): an interesting fraction comes from terrorist-supporting governments (Iran, Libya, etc.) — but the majority comes from individual donations. The money is solicited from Muslims much as a Christian minister or priest, or a Jewish rabbi, might solicit money from their flock for charity. The Muslim imams — both directly and by endorsement — overtly raise money to help the terrorists kill infidels. Overwhelmingly the target of their rhetoric is American and Jewish (e.g., Israeli) infidels.

So here’s the ponder…

Does anything short of eliminating Islam remove the threat to America?

The contention of the lamestream media, propaganda outlets like CAIR, and most other defenders of Islam — including the imams of many mosques in the U.S. — is that Islamic terrorists are a tiny minority of Muslims, and that most Muslims condemn their actions. These polls show that contention to be false.

If we could somehow wave a magic wand and round up every single Al Qaeda member this instant, what do you suppose would happen next?

If I believe these poll results (and I know of no reason why I shouldn’t), then surely another Al Qaeda would arise very quickly. It would have no trouble either recruiting or obtaining financing. So long as their remained a Muslim base with the beliefs indicated by those polls, this would be true.

So…

Logically, it seems to me, there are only two ways to eliminate the threat to America.

One way would be to change the beliefs of Muslims. How on earth could we do that? Even attempting to induce such a change would be confirmation of our infidel status, and further “proof” of the need to convert or kill us.

The other would be to eliminate Muslims (or better, only the Muslims who believed they had a duty to kill infidels).

Would anyone care to point out the error in my logic?

Word of the Day

Karmageddon, n: It’s like, when everybody is, like, sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s, like, a serious bummer.

Word of the Day

Glibido, n.: All talk and no action.