The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

– Albert Bartlett

This is definitely one of the most inspiring talks I’ve seen, and by far the most interesting lecture. Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon university who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, talks about what’s important in life and how to achieve the dreams you had back when life was simpler. It’s lengthy, but I dare you to listen for five minutes and try to stop:

This is one of my favorite passages from Carl Sagan’s book, Pale Blue Dot — the sequel to Cosmos:

We were hunters and foragers.

The frontier was everywhere.

We were bounded only by the Earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls.

Our little terraquious globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds.

We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; Are we to venture out into space?

By the time we’re ready to settle even the nearest of other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We’re… an adaptable species.

It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses. More confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.

What new wonders, undreamed of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation? And another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? And the next millennium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life there may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth.

They will gaze up, and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of raw potential once was. How perilous, our infancy. How humble, our beginnings. How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.

Video by Michael Marantz

From Forbes:

Quantifying happiness isn’t an easy task. Researchers at the Gallup World Poll went about it by surveying thousands of respondents in 155 countries, between 2005 and 2009, in order to measure two types of well-being.

First they asked subjects to reflect on their overall satisfaction with their lives, and ranked their answers using a “life evaluation” score from 1 to 10. Then they asked questions about how each subject had felt the previous day. Those answers allowed researchers to score their “daily experiences”–things like whether they felt well-rested, respected, free of pain and intellectually engaged. Subjects that reported high scores were considered “thriving.” The percentage of thriving individuals in each country determined our rankings.

Table: The World’s Happiest Countries
In-depth: The World’s Happiest Countries

I try to refrain from discussing politics — especially U.S. politics — but I couldn’t resist replying to this chain mail I received from a friend of mine:

From: Michael
To: <Many recipients>
Date: Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 00:43
Subject: Letter to Obama

By Lou Pritchett, Procter & Gamble

A LETTER FROM A PROCTER AND GAMBLE EXECUTIVE TO THE PRESIDENT*

THE LAST SENTENCE IS THE MOST CHILLING

Lou Pritchett is one of corporate America ‘s true living legends- an acclaimed author, dynamic teacher and one of the world’s highest rated speakers. Successful corporate executives everywhere recognize him as the foremost leader in change management.. Lou changed the way America does business by creating an audacious concept that came to be known as “partnering.” Pritchett rose from soap salesman to Vice-President, Sales and Customer Development for Procter and Gamble and over the course of 36 years, made corporate history.

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

Dear President Obama:

You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me.

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don’t understand it at its core.

You scare me because you lack humility and ‘class’, always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail..

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the ‘blame America ‘ crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer ‘wind mills’ to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

You scare me because you have begun to use ‘extortion’ tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals..

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaugh’s, Hannity’s, O’Reillys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

Lou Pritchett
*
This letter was sent to the NY Times but they never acknowledged it. Big surprise. Since it hit the internet, however, it has had over 500,000 hits. Keep it going. All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing. It’s happening right now.*

From: Patrick
To: Michael
Date: Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 02:45
Subject: Re: Letter to Obama

Oh, Michael, you should know better than to send this to me, an atheist, social democrat from Denmark, living in Sweden :-)

A letter from an unintelligent (I find it ironic that he feels forced to try to imply otherwise in the letter), racist, ultra-right wing republican who essentially accuses the President of your country of being a terrorist while glorifying even bigger racists and lunatic nonsense-spouters Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. He represents everything that’s wrong with America now; everything that led it into this recession; everything that has made America lose face to the rest of the world in the last decade. Capitalism can be good, but if you think government healthcare is “scary”, you’re naïve. If you think “socialist” is a loaded, negative word, you’ve been brainwashed. While I’ll agree that the initial implementation of government healthcare in America is lackluster (largely because of the right not being willing to debate on a level above kindergarteners), basic things (which are rights almost everywhere else) that are essential for the development and well-being of every human being, like medical care and education, should not be exclusive to a “free (strongest person wins) market” that lets a select few corporate fat-cats — including the executives at Procter and Gamble — rake in a few extra million dollars in bonuses every year. Every other industrialized country in the world, especially in the West, have realized and applied this, with success, and improved their standing on the world development, education, happiness and welfare indexes. The only two countries in the world that don’t have universal healthcare are the United States and Somalia. It’s not black and white; it’s not either “socialist and government-controlled” (read: Socialist, not Communist, I don’t know why every other American think they’re synonymous) or “free and equal opportunity”. Somalia has a completely free market with “equal opportunity” — where are they on the standards of living index?

If you’re the kind of rightwinger who has the impression that government can’t do anything right, here’s a story you might find positively enlightening:

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock, powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watch this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US Congress, and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door, I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After work, I drive my NHTSA car back home on DOT roads, to a house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

I then log on to the internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and post of FreeRepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.

I’m not trying to change your political view, or stop you from criticizing the government — that’s essential for democracy — but do it for the right reasons. Don’t be the kind of grossly misinformed, racist teabagger who thinks America is still “at war”, is in its critical financial state because of its current administration (how’s that even possible; the crisis began before it was installed), or has a terrorist leader who seeks to destroy it. Or a person whose role models are people who enjoy being part of the economic elite, yet claim to be “average people” with “your problems”.

By the way: The U.S. isn’t anywhere near the top in terms of high standards of living:

Quality of life: http://www.mapsofworld.com/images/world-top-ten-countries/world-top-ten-quality-of-life-map.jpg
Happiness: http://images.forbes.com/media/2007/05/02/MiseryIndexChart.gif
Happiness: http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/05/world-happiest-places-lifestyle-travel-world-happiest_slide_2.html
Development: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index

– Patrick

From: Michael
To: Patrick
Date: Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 23:25
Subject: Re: Re: Letter to Obama

Sorry, didn’t mean to send it to ya.

On the way home from work, I walked past three kids. They all looked about 6-8 years old. One of the kids — a boy — looked at me and said “Hey Mr. Zombie man!”, then smiled widely at me. I kept on walking, confused, when another one of the kids — a girl this time — turned around and said, “Hey, you! Sorry, he’s a little… you know”, circling her finger around the side of her head. “Oh, don’t worry”, I said.

It took a few seconds, but then I realized: He wasn’t anything — but spot-on.

Carpe diem.

No one quite knew how to put things in perspective like Carl Sagan:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

Carl Sagan delivered this speech in a commencement address on May 11th, 1996, commenting on the Pale Blue Dot photograph.

I would have enjoyed knowing him.

For most of human history we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Who are we? What are we? We find that we inhabit an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions, and by the depth of our answers.

A U.S. federal court has established that the FCC can’t enforce net neutrality, effectively allowing internet service providers to filter traffic. From the Associated Press:

A federal court threw the future of Internet regulations and U.S. broadband expansion plans into doubt Tuesday with a far-reaching decision that went against the Federal Communications Commission.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks. That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC’s authority to impose such “network neutrality” obligations on broadband providers.

TIME writer Steven James Snyder notes that there’s no reason why this couldn’t escalate to tiered internet services:

The FCC could appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, though its quite uncertain that the high court would agree to hear the case, nor how they would fall on the Net neutrality issue. (Many Net neutrality advocates actually believe that a 2005 Supreme Court decision, which upheld the FCC’s deregulation of broadband, already gave too much freedom and control to the Internet service providers).

And then there are those who see a tiered Internet culture rapidly approaching on the horizon. Imagine a scenario in which your Internet access paralleled your access to cable television. For your basic fee, you get access to most basic web sites. But now Comcast can restrict which sites you access, and could charge a premium rate for premium access.

I, for one, think this scenario isn’t just possible, but likely. Providers have been fighting for some time to create preferential pricing models, to get the more aggressive Internet users to pay more for unlimited data. And after Tuesday’s decision, if I was in charge of Comcast, I’d already be devising ways to divvy up access, brainstorming how to squeeze more bucks out of more users. You want YouTube? Then order tier 2. Hulu? Tier 3? BitTorrents? Tier 4.

Forget philosophy or ideals; in an unregulated market, it just makes good business sense.

WikiLeaks has just released a classified U.S. military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

This is one of the most disgusting and disappointing things I have seen in my life. What’s even sadder is the fact that this isn’t going to get anywhere near the mass media coverage that it deserves. As you can probably guess, the footage is graphic and not for the faint of heart.

Collateral Murder

For more information, the full version of the video and its transcript, as well as alternate download sources, see CollateralMurder.com.

The HBO television series “The Wire” is so authentic that Harvard sociology students will soon be able to score credits by watching it:

At a panel last night, stars of the HBO hit series joined Harvard professors in discussing the applications of the show—which depicts the struggles of urban life in Baltimore—in understanding and combating real urban social issues.

“‘The Wire’ has done more to enhance our understanding of the systemic urban inequality that constrains the lives of the poor than any published study”, Sociology Professor William J. Wilson said.