Stephen Hawking has ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). Did I just blow your mind? Discovering this bit of information was actually somewhat exciting for me, as I have always thought of the disease to be an absolute guarantee of death within a few years. I realize that a lot of people that I know do not like Mr. Hawking, and you don’t have to (no one can make you), but it is probably worth at least learning his story, and what makes him significant (other than the fact that he’s survived having ALS for half of a century). It will probably comfort a lot of my friends at least somewhat to know that Mr. Hawking isn’t as militant an atheist as some. He has actually been quoted saying:
“An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!” – Stephen Hawking
The recent ALS Ice Bucket Challenge campaign has been unbelievably successful. Much of the success of this campaign is probably correlated with the fact that there seemed to be a very simple, and kind of fun activity that tangibly allows people to at least do something, other than give money. The other side of the campaign that is probably responsible for having raised $94.3 million, in less than a month (as opposed to $2.7 million in the same time period the previous year) is the outpouring of personal stories. I recently read the book “You Are Now Less Dumb”, and in this book David McRaney attempts to establish that the most basic of human instincts is to have a narrative – we must make sense of it all. He tries to explain how we tell ourselves simple lies sometimes just to make sense of our environment. It might seem like I’m bringing this up to say that religion is an opiate, but that is not my intent. I simply want to describe the importance in the human condition of relating to others. This is what Stephen looked like before ALS took over his body:
SO, here is my challenge to you: I challenge you to watch this and try to address your prejudices against Mr. Hawking, be they ideological or biological – or simply watch it and enjoy it. I believe there is a God, and that in principle is why I would want to hear as much from someone like Hawking as possible. If you don’t have time for the video I at least urge you to read about some of Mr. Hawking’s discoveries and theories, he is a pretty smart fellow. Now I think I’ll go listen to the audiobook for his record breaking best selling book “A Brief History of Time”.
I always enjoy hearing very smart people simplify things. Mr. Christian in this talk does an exemplary job of just that. I truly appreciate people who consider themselves more so individualistic than most, however I tend to appreciate more the collectivist. I don’t know if it’s my empathy bone, or that I paid attention to what Jesus said when I was in Bible class on Sunday mornings, but I love the idea of people collaborating to make things better. This talk is about history, but of course we talk about history so that we can plan for the future.
I hate to unnecessarily scare people, but this is rather alarming to me. In this report at one point they say that big brother become the private markets. Well, as a social/civic libertarian that is something that i would be afraid of. I have some fear of the government, at all levels, but also of influential industries that change the way that we live. Is there anyway for us to go back? Are we right in our complicity that all technological and social developments are good for us? Watching reports like this really challenge me with how I spend my time and resources. If you are like me and have mistrust for both big government and big business what might you suggest we do about it if we are not supposed to use either against one another?
The picture and the article linked above, as well as the video below, were created by people much smarter than I – so feel free to skip the rambling of this madman if you don’t have too much time. But reading/writing this post is/was fun for me, because it makes me feel enormous, and microscopic at the same time – and suddenly my day is more interesting, and hopefully more meaningful. I hope that this post can challenge/bless you, as these things do me.
I have had this thought for several years now, and as often well intended people try to impress me (not just me) with big gargantuan measurements and calculations about how things are and will be I try to repeatedly remind myself that not only am I not grasping this, but the person “blowing my mind” doesn’t understand what they are saying either. Please don’t take that statement as a condemnation of people trying to know things, I think that trying to know things is wonderful, but actually knowing and understanding many things might be harder than we tend to think. It seems to me that the ideas in our brains reach a critical mass that we don’t seem capable of truly understanding, at least not in the terms in which we tend to think that we can understand them.
The Arabic Numeral System (the one that we use that goes from 0 to 9, and then repeats it’s self) is a brilliant design that allows us to use our nostalgic brains to consider and relate quantities in relation to the number 10. 10 versus 100 is relatively simple for people to understand. One hundred is ten ten’s. Wasn’t it weird that I switched from the numbers to the letters? It was for me. Anyway, the point is that these numbers that we use repeatedly to quantify different things or ideas often to compare to one another can be great for our brains on a relatively small scale. I mean, I can count to 10 and then 100 relatively quickly, and I think that I get the difference in terms of consequence from one rather than the other. Say I have $100, rather than $10, I understand how much stuff I can get for that money. And I’m sorry if this feels silly, I’m trying to get to the point, I just think that it’s important to consider understanding the ACTUAL difference in these amounts.
Ok, now let’s keep with talking about money, because it’s way more interesting than most things that you might try to quantify because you can get stuff with it. I know that I think that I can understand the numbers 1,000,000 and 1,000,000,000, and the scale of both in comparison to one another. However, I’ve come to believe that this is just my ego and some basic comparison skills thanks to the Arabic Numeral System, and that I actually don’t get the comparison (and I don’t think that you probably do either). I am not saying that we can’t use the ideas of these numbers to compute and calculate, i just mean that i believe that our brains cannot full grasp the scale and impact of these kinds of numbers. I don’t mean to offend you if you think that you can and do fully understand these larger numbers, but I’m just being honest. Here are a few little tests to see how you feel about what I’m talking about, and again we’ll stick to money.
In this last Presidential election Sheldon Adelson was in the news for donating $10 million dollars several times to different campaigns. In the end he paid over $100 million to super pacs in the 2012 election. Now, that is simply a lot of money, but lets consider his net wealth really quickly. Mr. Adelson is worth roughly $25 billion, so as a percentage of his wealth his donations were about .4% of what he had to offer. In other words, if Mr. Adelson had $25,000 in the bank he offered $10 ten different times. Having that kind of influence for such a small portion of your wealth is a pretty wild thing, even though all of his candidates eventually lost. Ok, let’s try another example.
How long does it take you to run a mile? And there are 5,280 feet in a mile. Look at something that’s about a foot, and then count to 5,280. Ok, you don’t have to do that, but try to picture how big a mile is to you. Well in 1 second light goes 186,000 miles (imagine getting that many dollars in one second). And don’t forget those are miles, not feet. Light is so fast… I mean, in one second light could go across the united states about 60 times. Are you getting this? Me neither. We are talking about light in one second.
Alright, so as light travels 186,000 miles (not feet!) per second if you do the math light travels about 5.8 trillion miles in a year. I mean, 5,800,000,000,000. Or 5.8 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100. Surely you understand that, I used 100’s. Ok, I’m kidding because you can’t, and I can’t either. But there is the connection, if we try to break things down so that we can understand them then we just use a bunch of 100’s, and thus 5.8 trillion no longer feels so big. I mean, imagine going across the United States in a car. Now imagine doing it sixty times… Now imagine doing that every second of the day for 365 days…. I know, you can’t, neither can I. But that number is about 5.8 trillion…
Our national debt is about $17 trillion. That’s three times as many dollars in our debt as there are miles in a light year. And this isn’t just about debt, it’s about profits that reflect wealthy disparity that we can’t comprehend.
We live in a society with businesses and government which enact policies and creates profits that measure up to this scale – and we are then asked to vote with our ballots and wallets as if we understand what we are doing… I don’t mean to be a glum, but we really can’t… So, with that in mind it might be helpful when listening to people who seem to be trying to sell you a bill of goods so that you can acknowledge your own very necessary skepticism. This doesn’t mean that we can’t compute, test, and challenge ideas (we can), but when the scale is so large you might ask yourself why. Could it be so that those who maybe should be outraged wont know to be? I’m not sure, but it’s hard not to consider all of our worlds inflationary parts without thinking that it might be sick.
This 60 minutes segment seems like it could be a mixed bag for most people, as it is inspiring, but it could also cause someone to think about their own life and skill sets as inadequate. I was very good at math as a little boy, almost exclusively. It was one of the few things that made me feel smart, so I could somewhat relate to Jake’s pride in how he thinks, but obviously I am no math prodigy. If only we could all take such pride in the things that we’re good at in regards to our mental capacities…
If you read my blog with any regularity you by know are aware that I love Steve Rattner… He is a very smart, and also thoughtful person. I think that he nailed with pinpoint accuracy what citizens of this country should have an understand of, so that we can learn how to face common obstacles together.
At the end of this post I am post a video that is a few years old that I think pertains to what he is talking about… The apparent leakage of our nations power is attributed to so much, and identifying the importance of education is but one way that we can maintain growth and influence in the world (which is obviously of great importance to anyone who considers our nation to be founded on outstanding ideals).
Ohio. Ohio. Ohio. As the 2012 presidential election races to a nail-biting conclusion, all eyes are on the Buckeye State. Without it, Mitt Romney almost certainly will not win the White House.
The state’s battleground status should not be a surprise: it has backed the winner in every presidential vote since 1960. What is unusual this time around is the suggestion of opinion polls that President Barack Obama may win a larger slice of the vote in Ohio than he does nationally; in all but one election since 1976, the Democratic presidential candidate’s performance in the state has lagged behind his national showing.
Should the reverse indeed happen this year it could only be attributed to one factor: the president’s decision to rescue the US car industry. That act has led Ohio from a double-digit unemployment rate as recently as October 2010 to a jobless rate of 7 per cent today, below the national rate of 7.8 per cent.
Michigan may be home to General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, but with a concentration of parts suppliers, Ohio’s 150,000 car industry jobs rank it as a not too distant second. More than 20 per cent of new jobs created in Ohio since mid-2009 have been within the sector. Add in the spillover effects for businesses from office suppliers to local bars and by some counts one in eight Ohioans depend on the auto industry for their livelihoods.
As daunting as a rescue of the industry appeared to be in 2009, the next president faces an even greater challenge: reversing the course of US salaries, which are on a downward trajectory. Solutions to this problem may be even more elusive than fixes to the auto industry. Once again they may also start in Ohio.
Often depicted as quintessentially Middle American, Ohio is more diverse than its image suggests. It encompasses industrial metropolises such as Cleveland, smaller cities preserved in 19th-century amber, and farms that seem straight out of a Grant Wood painting.
All told, Ohio is not all that different socio-economically from America as a whole, except for its lack of a significant immigrant or Hispanic population.
But manufacturing remains at the core of Ohio’s economy. Even excluding carmakers and suppliers, companies that make things account for 40 per cent of new employment in Ohio over the past three years.
That strong manufacturing presence means Ohio reflects many of the challenges facing the rest of America, particularly the continuing threat to manufacturing from globalisation.
As strongly as manufacturing is rebounding, it follows a dizzying fall; in 1990 Ohio had 1.1m manufacturing jobs; today, even after the recent recovery, it has 657,000.
Changes in incomes in the state are even more dismaying. A decade ago, a typical Ohio family earned about $53,000, identical to the national median income. Since then the national median household income has fallen to $50,000 (after adjustment for inflation). But in Ohio it has plummeted to $44,650. For Ohio’s sharper fall blame international competition, which has put huge downward pressure on pay.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the car industry. A long-serving worker at one of the big three Detroit carmakers takes home about $28 per hour in cash pay (plus almost the same amount in benefits).
However, in order for the big three to remain globally competitive, new workers – toiling side by side with their longer-standing colleagues – receive about half as much. New hires take home about $30,000 per year, well below the national median income, and hardly the definition of a good middle-class income.
No president will be able to turn back the clock and eliminate global competition. Instead, the focus should be on preparing American workers for higher-skilled jobs that face less intense competition from developing countries. That will mean investing in education and training.
It will be a long process that will involve considerable pain along the way. But realist political leaders will recognise that there is no quick or easy fix to the wage problem and embrace more protracted but efficacious solutions.
In the coming days the old saying, “as goes Ohio, so goes the nation”, will be used often. It is a phrase that could be applied not only to our elections but also to the economic challenges facing America.
3. While we’re at it, here’s some more famous voice actors:
That’s Carlos Alazraqui (Reno 911) and Rocko from Rocko’s Modern Life, Jessica Walter (Arrested Development) and Fran from Dinosaurs, and James Avery (Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince) and Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
19. If you shrunk the Sun down to the size of a white blood cell and shrunk the Milky Way Galaxy down using the same scale, it would be the size of the continental United States:
40. Should we keep going? The difference in time between when Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus lived is greater than the difference in time between Tyrannosaurus Rex and now:
Gradycarter's Blog 
