Misc. Ramblings

There's a letter to the editor (Sorry, the link to the letter dies at the end of the day. When will these people learn?), lamenting the loss of her laptop. There is a hard lesson here for her and others like her working on important projects.

Actually, what she's missing the most is the three-years worth of data she gathered for her PhD. From her request for the data, I assume she did not make a backup copy.

The lesson here, of course, is to make backup copies. I say copies because you need to have more than one copy and each copy should be in a distant geographic area - the more distant the better.

To begin with, if you have no copies, you place yourself in a single point of failure situation. As in this case, having her laptop stolen means everything is lost.

If you have at least one copy you have a chance of continuing on. But that chance is lowered if the copy is in the same location as the original. As an extreme example, if the copy was on the same laptop, having the copy wouldn't be of any use. Having the copy on a disk next to the laptop might not be much better if the thief takes the disk or if the problem is a fire that burns the laptop and the backup disk. If the copy is kept in the same house as the laptop, you should at least invest in a fire resistant safe.

But having a safe doesn't do you much good if the problem is a tornado, flood, or earthquake and everything is destroyed. Hence, my recommendation to keep copies in as distant a location as possible. For example, you can use Google's Gmail system with its 1GB storage as one place to backup a copy. Or if you have an ISP that allows a certain amount of network storage you might use that. You could even just snail mail a copy to a friend that lives at least several hundred (if not several thousand) miles away.

As a personal example, when I was working on my masters a couple of years ago, our work group had at least eight copies of our project at any point in time. One of the copies was stored on my host server in Pennsylvania. A second was stored on Hotmail as an email attachment. A third was on a CD at work. Four and five at my house (one on my PCs hard drive and the other on CD) and the other three with the other members of our group on their PCs.

The point is, as the data becomes more irreplaceable, the number of copies and locations should increase. I feel for this student but also wonder why her advisor didn't tell her to make backup copies (one of my undergraduate professors, bless his departed soul, told everyone to make backup copies of important projects. This was back in the late 1970s so this advice is not something new.), or why she didn't see the need to make them on her own. I can only hope she kept hard copies of the data somewhere or can otherwise replicate the missing information. If not, this will indeed be a hard lesson to have to learn.

Aloha!

If you think it can't happen here, it already has.

A couple of days ago I wrote about how some Republicans, tired of having their anti-everything laws ruled as unconstitutional are trying to shift power from the courts to themselves. Some of my eleven readers probably thought I was exaggerating or spinning things to my slanted left-leaning views.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Before I say more, keep in mind that I am an employee of the Judiciary (insert disclaimer here) and therefore may be biased. Note that these, as always, are my personal views and not those of the Judiciary.

That said, Republican John Hostettler, of Indiana, said:

When the courts make unconstitutional [according to Rep. Hostettler] decisions, we should not enforce them. Federal courts have no army or navy... The court can opine, decide, talk about, sing, whatever it wants to do. We're not saying they can't do that. At the end of the day, we're saying the court can't enforce its opinions."

Rep. Hostettler reportedly plans to introduce a bill that would deny federal courts the right to hear cases challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, which bans same-sex marriage. In other words, make it illegal for the courts to try this Act so that no one can say it is unconstitutional and strike it down.

A second example, Congressman Robert Aderholdt (R-Alabama), "was quoted as advocating court stripping as a means to protect state-sponsored Ten Commandment displays, such as the one erected by former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore." In other words, keep the courts from ruling on such displays and all will be well with the world.

Essentially, what these Republicans are sayings is: Sleep. Sleeeeep. We are the government. We will take care of you. Don't worry about thorny questions like whether something is unconstitutional. Let us do our work without anyone reviewing it. It's for your own good. It's what God wants (or at least it's what we want you to believe/have faith God wants). Now just go to sleep knowing that the 10 Commandments are safe (even as they break all of them -ed.).

This article from the Palm Beach Post gives other examples of Republicans supporting measures to eliminate judicial review and, by doing so, rip the Constitution to shreds. Tyranny, here we come.

Aloha!

I have some more training on the new information management system that the Judiciary is working on. The training runs all day, every day next week so posts may be short, if not sweet. Thanks in advance for your understanding.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

I did a short post earlier about the increasingly personal body gropings being done at US airports masquerading as security checks. In it, I half jokingly said the next would be body cavity searches. But I guess this TV report says I'm wrong. Their already doing such searches. Of course, the government says they will investigate and let you know what they find. Maybe. Someday. If it's not classified as double top secret. Tyranny is already here.

I don't know that I agree with everything the Cato Institute does but I do agree with one short article on the "war" on drugs. Like the "war" on terrorism, the war on drugs will never end. One hopes the outcome of the war on terrorism will be better than the outcome, so far, of the war on drugs but I am not optimistic.

In any case, some of the points the articles makes:

Today, federal and state governments spend between $40 and $60 billion per year to fight the war on drugs, about ten times the amount spent in 1980 -- and billions more to keep drug felons in jail. The U.S. now has more than 318,000 people behind bars for drug-related offenses, more than the total prison populations of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain combined.

Our prison population has increased by 400 percent since 1980, while the general population has increased just 20 percent. America also now has the highest incarceration rate in the world -- 732 of every 100,000 citizens are behind bars.

The drug war has wrought the zero tolerance mindset, asset forfeiture laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and countless exceptions to criminal defense and civil liberties protections. Some sociologists blame it for much of the plight of America's inner cities. Others point out that it has corrupted law enforcement, just as alcohol prohibition did in the 1920s.

On peripheral issues like medicinal marijuana and prescription painkillers, the drug war has treated chronically and terminally ill patients as junkies, and the doctors who treat them as common pushers. Drug war accoutrements, such as "no-knock" raids and searches, border patrols, black market turf wars and crossfire, and international interdiction efforts, have claimed untold numbers of innocent lives.

With the sacrificing of our freedoms and criminalization of untold numbers of terminally ill patients the bottom-line question is: Are things better now than they were before? In other words, are we "winning" the "war" on drugs? The answer, according to the Cato Institute, is no:

Even by the government's own standards for success, the answer is unquestionably "no." The illicit drug trade is estimated to be worth $50 billion today ($400 billion worldwide), up from $1 billion 25 years ago. Annual surveys of high school seniors show heroin and marijuana are as available today than they were in 1975. Deaths from drug overdoses have doubled in the last 20 years.

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the price of for a gram of heroin has dropped by about 38 percent since 1981, while the purity of that gram has increased six-fold. The price of cocaine has dropped by 50 percent, while its purity has increased by 70 percent. Just recently, the ONDCP waged a public relations campaign against increasingly pure forms of marijuana coming in from Canada.

The Mozilla team announced Wednesday that the Thunderbird RC1 is now available. You can read the announcement here and follow the link in the post to the download. From what I can see in the Mozilla support forums, the Thunderbird e-mail client is set to go gold sometime next week (barring unforeseen problems with the RC1).

With such a short time before then, I would say it's best to wait until next week before downloading unless, of course, you want to help the Moz Squad test the RC1.

Speaking of Moz, columnist Brian Livingston's latest newsletter has a couple of tips on tweaking Firefox to run faster. He also has a link to a guy who has created optimized builds of Firefox based on your CPU. YMMV. Professional driver on a closed course. Don't do this at home (go to a friend's house and try it there).

Perfection is a difficult standard to live one's life. But, though incredible struggle, if reached, perhaps people don't have enough left to maintain that level for very long.

Iris Sun-Ru Chang, at one time or another, was a best selling author (three books), award winning writer (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek), and reporter (Associated Press and Chicago Tribune).

From what I can find out about her, she was also a perfectionist. Perhaps this came from her parents, who were second-wave Chinese immigrants. Not to blame her parents but the Chinese revere perfection. This is reflected in, among other things, their art - including their writings.

As with many things, being a perfectionist, if that's what she was, has both good and bad points. One of the good points is that she wrote with a clarity polished so finely that it brought understanding to complex issues. For example, she talked about racism, its roots, and how it seems to occur in cycles. That is, racism, according to Chang, is not an issue that is dealt with and then is never again a problem. She talked about how it occurs in cycles, perhaps related to the economy, and that how, sometimes, things don't occur in a linear fashion. How sometimes, things don't get better. That's it's possible to regress and return to a lower state then society was before and to stay there.

The bad is that through her writings she uncovered the worst of who we are and it seemed to create a rage within her soul that burned like a meteor blazing across the night sky. Her books illuminated acts of unspeakable atrocities that can only be described as inhuman. And yet, they were done by humans against other humans.

Perhaps, as the fire within her consumed her will for life, her physical and mental health began to decline. Until one day last month, on a country road in California, she stopped trying to be perfect.

Aloha!

There's a group of radio controlled aircraft enthusiasts who attach cameras to their planes. A bunch of photos have been posted at this site. Some of the pictures are quite good. Take a look if you are interested and have a broadband connection (or a lot of patience).

I've talked before about the contradictions between what the Red conservative states say is important and what the citizens of these states actually do in their personal lives. Andrew Sullivan has a recent post that says the same thing.

But it's important to remember that this isn't new. Studies done in the 1950's, a time known for its fear of external threats (e.g., Godless communism) and supposedly conservative values, indicated that people said they were more moral that they actually were. Way more moral than they actually were.

Namely, they would tell survey takers what they (the people taking the survey) thought was the moral thing. But if there was any correlation, it was an inverse relationship. That is, the more moral the person said they were, the less they actually were (as measured by various behaviors).

So it shouldn't be a surprise that rates of divorce, adultery, or any of the sins noted in the Bible are highest in the states who say they are the most moral while lowest in states considered to be Godless communist/socialists.

What I've said before and will say again now is watch what people do, not what they say.

Aloha!

Remember Pearl Harbor. The lessons of this act of war are many. Know your enemy. Know his intentions and capabilities. Think through various scenarios and have plans to deal with the most likely. These lessons have relevance today. Unfortunately, they have yet to be learned by those in command.

Fast Company has an interesting article on creativity and six myths that have become associated with the topic. According to a study done at the Harvard Business School, the six myths are:

1. Creativity comes from Creative Types

2. Money is a Creativity Motivator

3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity

4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs

5. Competition Beats Collaboration

6. A Streamlined Organization is a Creative Organization

I have a few comments that are perhaps addressed in the original study but isn't in the Fast Company article.

Creative Types. I agree that creativity isn't confined to only one type of person. So I think the lesson here is to be open to creative suggestions from whichever the source may be. That said, creativity, like many, if not all, other human traits is probably distributed on a normal bell curve. That is, some people have more of it than others. If true, it should follow that if you need creative types, you would want people with an abundance of that trait.

Practically speaking, that is easier said than done. Hence, the lesson truly is to be open to creative suggestions from all of your employees.

Money as Motivator. There's an old joke that says: "Money isn't everything, it's the only thing." But, I think, what the study is saying is while money certainly is a motivator, once a certain level of need is met, more money doesn't lead to more creativity. Rather, other higher needs ( as Maslow would say) come into play. Needs such as social, esteem, and self-actualization. The lesson for the good manager then is to match people up with what is motivating to them at the time, not just throwing money at people (feel free to send some my way though - ed.).

Time. Another human trait that seems to be described by the normal bell curve is productivity. While people in the study indicated they worked best when under time pressures, the study seems to indicate just the opposite. In other studies I've seen, productivity when plotted on the y-axis versus anxiety on the x-axis indicates if there is no anxiety, that is no pressure, there is no productivity. Conversely, where there is a lot of anxiety, there is also no productivity. The lesson here is that while there needs to be some anxiety to have productivity, too much anxiety will actually decrease productivity. Hence, if people really are under the gun, the trick is to remove as many other distractions as possible so that people can focus on the one most important task.

Fear. While there is a popular myth that creativity comes from the depths of depression, this study found that people are most creative when they are happy. The lesson is, fear is certainly a motivator, but the best motivator seems to be happiness.

Competition. There is a place for competition. But the article says internal competition stifles communication (since sharing information, without receiving something of value in return, is a competitive disadvantage). And since no one person can know everything, isolating that person will usually not lead to creative ideas. The lesson is internal collaboration can lead to synergistic effects. These effects can then lead to creativity.

Streamlined. If streamlining your organization is a euphemism for downsizing. And if downsizing is a result of bad management decisions, then creativity will suffer. The article indicates that creativity seemed to suffer the most prior to the announcement of the downsizing because people knew something was coming, but didn't know what. Hence, they felt helpless and spent more time preparing for the worst then being creative. The lesson is, if you will be firing people, give people accurate, timely information as soon as possible. Employees can see whether an organization is running well. If it isn't, they know people will be layed off. The lesson for management is to deal openly with the problem as soon as possible rather than draw it out and go into denial.

Aloha!

Sorry, no post today. Things are really busy as we get ready for the Legislature to startup (our first hearing is on December 22nd!).

Aloha!

"You go to war with the Army you have, not the one you might want..." - US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

This is the latest slap at the US Army by the Secretary of Defense. Does his statement provide aid and comfort to the enemy? Does this statement rise to the level of treason? Perhaps not, I'll leave that to others to decide. But I believe his statement is just one more indication of his war against the Army and his supreme arrogance.

Even some neo-cons are demanding his resignation. The story quotes a former Lt. Colonel as saying "He is an extremely talented man but he has the tragic flaw of hubris. His arrogance is unbearable." In a Salon article, retired Colonel David Hackworth describes Rumsfeld as "an arrogant assh*le" who went into Iraq thinking it would be "Mission Accomplished" in a few days and then the Iraqis would be throwing parades and showering our troops with flowers.

Leaving aside whether he is or is not arrogant, the more important question is whether Secretary Rumsfeld is a good leader. Do his actions aid the war effort or make it more dangerous for our troops on the ground? Do his policies facilitate the efforts of the troops or do they make it more difficult? Does the man understand, in the words of Ellen Glasgow, that "All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward."

In any case, with people like Secretary Rumsfeld in the Bush administration, who needs enemies?

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

It's that time of the year. What time is that? It's Christmas tree decorating hints with Iris and Fern. They're the Katz and they know how to setup a tree until it's purrrfect.

Okay, so it's not a deep political examination of the underlying problems of the Bush administration and how they thought once Saddam was captured all hostilities would cease since the Iraqi resistance was clearly so hierarchical and unable to act as autonomous units, unlike ours which were so well equipped and trained (is that a run-on sentence or what? -ed.). In fact, more U.S. soldiers have died in the year since the capture of Saddam then the year before. In fact fighting has intensified in the year since Saddam has been captured than the year before. In fact, all the Neocon *pundits were wrong. They were wrong about the weapons of mass destruction (remember those?). They were wrong about "Mission Accomplished." They were were wrong about how to conduct the war. They are wrong about how to end the war. They are wrong about Abu Ghurayb prison. They were wrong about the break down in society that occurs when a political power vacuum exists. Dead wrong.

And yet, he got re-elected. Well, all I can say is don't blame me, I voted for Kerry.

Posting will, through the end of the year, remain light and spotty. Some of this is because things are so busy at work and partly it's I will be on vacation later this month.

Aloha!

Sorry, no post today. Things to do, places to go..., wash, rinse, repeat.

Okay, so I lied. Here's something for fellow Daynoter John Dominik and family:

Aloha!

What if you had your own atomic clock? How big would it be and what would you do with it? According to this article here, atomic clocks the size of a grain of rice are coming, if not in your cell phone tower or GPS already.

The clocks are still in development but are accurate to within one second every 300 HUNDRED YEARS. If they can be made reliable enough and cheaply enough you could find one in your alarm clock in a couple of years. Or not. Depending on if you want to sleep in another 15.00000000000000000001 minutes.

Aloha!

Here's another idea that perhaps should have been re-thought (or at least moved to a different part of the store). Gillette is announcing a new shaver for women. A vibrating shaver. Now, if you think about it, this could have several problems (and at least one unintended use...). Since this is a family friendly site, I'll only talk about the problem of trying to shave sensitive areas while the sharp implement you are using is vibrating. Is this a good thing? Does this make sense to anyone? I dunno.

Aloha!

Here's another idea that perhaps should have been re-thought (or at least moved to a different part of the store). Gillette is announcing a new shaver for women. A vibrating shaver. Now, if you think about it, this could have several problems (and at least one unintended use...). Since this is a family friendly site, I'll only talk about the problem of trying to shave sensitive areas while the sharp implement you are using is vibrating. Is this a good thing? Does this make sense to anyone? I dunno.

Aloha!

C|Net is reporting that Wal*Mart stores are selling a house brand of electronics called, *cough*, iLo. I'm not making this up. iLo. As in iLo quality. I'm no marketing maven but is this really the best brand name? In Hawai'i, the word for someone who is crazy is lolo. Perhaps they should have called it uLoLo.

I've been out of school for a year or so but I could have used this catapult watch. That's right, a small catapult is attached to the watch and reportedly has a range of about eight feet (~2.4m). Professional drivers on a closed course. Don't try this at home (go to school and do it there). YMMV.

I'll be doing my semi-annual computer deep cleaning today and Monday. This entails reformatting the drive and reloading the applications. During this time, I will be off-line until I can get the security updates re-installed.

On Tuesday, December 21, I start my Christmas vacation and will not return until the New Year. Hence, posting will be light and late. That is, there may be a day or two (or three) with no post and when there is one, it will later in the day (I usually get up at 4:45 in the morning during the week but when I go on vacation I like to sleep in until 6:00.).

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!

The good news is that I'm back online. This has been the smoothest deep cleaning I've ever done. Usually, I have problems with the Novell client and/or Lotus Notes but each behaved themselves.

The bad news is that I'm still really busy as I get ready to go on vacation tomorrow.

One short note. Christmas tree prices here soared past $250 yesterday. The majority of trees are brought in via ships and sell for less than $60 but when supplies ran out last week, some importers decided to fly some in from the West coast.

The cost of the freight, short supplies, and people gouging setting prices at what the market will bear, led to the high prices.

Just another price of living in paradise. By the way, the high temperature today will be in the 80s (~30°C) and the low in the 70s (~25°C).

Well, I couldn't let this go by without linking to it. Hint: The author calls herself the "Cat Pee Vigilante." No, she does not go around squirting cat urine on deserving bad guys. Follow the link to Amazon to see what she is up to.

Okay, so it's not the greatest. But hey, I'm doing the best I can while on vacation...

I see that OpenOffice 2.0 is slowly making its way towards a March release date. There are some daily builds for those who are fool hardy adventurous and would like to test the latest, greatest OOdom has to offer.

I am eagerly awaiting the day I no longer need to use MS Office. Once that barrier is gone, the only one left is getting access to our Lotus Notes mail server via IPX running on Novell. I haven't taken a look at connecting to a Novell server via Linux lately and I don't know if I want to (getting IPX under Linux used to mean re-compiling the kernel. While that isn't something that difficult to do, it isn't something, in my opinion, I should have to do).

But it might be interesting to see if I could do it (I've done it before years ago but that was when there was a Linux-based client from Novell) and then run the Notes client under CrossOver. Hmmm. Something to think about for the New Year. If that was successful, I could switch to Xandros 3.0 and be done with it.

In doing some research for this post, I noticed that Novell may be working on releasing a Novell Client for Linux. You can read a little about it here from NetworkWorldFusion. Apparently, the client will be released early next year. Unfortunately, it looks like both the client and server must have some software installed. Since this would take time, I don't think our IT people will be spending that much time doing this on every server we have. Hence, this might not be a solution for us.

But if we can get this software working, it would clear the final barrier keeping me from switching to Linux.

Aloha!

This is a story about two families. Malia had a large, high energy family. It included her husband and six animated but well-behaved children. As is the case with most Hawaii families, both parents worked. In fact, to make ends meet, both Malia and her husband each worked two jobs. His was two full-time jobs and hers was one full-time and one half-time serving food at a restaurant.

As you can probably guess, the family was not rich. At least, not in the common sense of the word. Yet, what the family had was worth more than all the money some of their rich neighbors had. What Malia's family had was love. Love for each other and love for their neighbors (even the rich ones), friends, and God.

Each year, as it came close to Christmas, Malia's husband would start planning the house decorations for their humble abode. Where he found the time to do this no one ever could say but it seemed he would out do himself each year. Year after year he would add more lights and figures. He would sing to himself as he strung the lights around the windows, up the side of the house, over the roof and to the tree limbs. With so many lights, you could see his house from miles away due to the glow in the sky. Guided by that light in the dark sky, thousands would come to marvel at the sight.

But one bright summer morning, as Malia's husband was driving the kids to summer school, a speeding drunk driver slammed his car into their van, slicing the van into pieces and killing everyone except the drunk driver himself.

When the police reached Malia at work to tell her of the sad news, she could not believe that her entire family had been taken from her. It was a very dark time for her. Malia fell into a deep depression. A depression so deep she began to question God and how He could have allowed this. Her depression lasted for over a year. Then another year. And yet another as she struggled to find meaning in what had happened.

Towards the end of the third year, when the cool winter breezes began to flow down from the mountains a change came over her. While her heart was still filled with darkness a small flame of hope began to sputter. Day by day, it grew bringing light to her life and with it a plan began to form in her heart.

Malia decided she would continue on where he husband had left off. She would once again decorate the house as a memorial to his spirit and the life she once had.

She began by pulling out the lights that had laid collecting dust for lo these many years. While doing so, Malia was surprised to find something that her husband had been working on before he had died. She carefully checked to make sure everything was still in working order and then began to install what her husband had been working on. It took her almost a week to get everything set just right, but by December 24th, she was done. All there was yet to do was to throw the switch that would once again light the way to her house.

During this time, our other family, neighbors across the street headed by a man named Iokepa, was having their own problems. It seems Iokepa liked to drink. Sometimes too much. And when he got drunk, he would become full of rage. A rage he took out on his wife and two children. It got to a point in which his wife, fearing for her and her children's lives, took the children and fled to the mainland.

Iokepa too became depressed. But rather than feeling the healing hands of time, he spiraled ever downward. The days became just a blur until early one evening, he decided he would end what passed for his poor existence.

He dragged himself to the bedroom closet where he kept his gun and ammunition. By then, it had gotten dark and what with the electrify long since turned off for non-payment, he carried the gun and ammunition to the living room facing the street. He collapsed onto the worn out couch and with what little light there was from the street light a block away, he began to slowly, methodically, load the pistol that would finally take his misery away from him.

Just as Iokepa raised the gun to his head, he was startled by a bright light that suddenly appeared across the street. A light that made him close his eyes and put the gun down so he could shield his bloodshot eyes. A light that came from thousands of little bulbs strung by Malia and brought to life by a throw of a switch.

Iokepa staggered to the window and as tears streamed down his face, Iokepa gazed at the beautiful scene. It was of a manger, filled with straw and a baby wrapped against the cold in a blanket. And around the manger were His earthly parents and visitors from far away. But what drew his gaze the most was the huge star, glittering in the dark night. A star created by Malia's husband years ago and now showing the way to life.

It's Christmas Eve and from the Seto household we wish you Peace, Love, and Light.

Have a Merry Christmas, Everyone - Aloha!

Firefox allows you to tune its performance in many ways. As time goes on, more and more peformance tuning tips are coming out. One of those is found here.

The tip enables multiple simultaneous HTML requests. This can reduce the time needed to display a webpage. Note, the change is intended for broadband users only. YMMV. Use at your own risk.

Aloha!

The reports of death in Asia are truly horrifying. But some early reports of the damage caused by the tsunami indicated that there was no warning. I think this will turn out to be untrue.

First, if you are near bodies of water and feel an earthquake, immediately move to higher ground. The earthquake that created the waves was of such magnitude that everyone would have felt it and the waves created would take several minutes to arrive.

Second, if you are near a body of water and the water rapidly drains from the shore, run immediately to higher ground as the waves will be arriving in a matter of seconds to a few minutes. Note that a tsunami is typically a series of waves and the first may not be the largest. Further, there may be gaps of several minutes or even hours between the waves.

Unfortunately, this part of Asia is not covered by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) located in Ewa Beach, O'ahu, Hawaii.

The PTWC, using a series of water-level gauges placed around the Pacific Basin can track and predict the path of a Pacific-wide tsunami minutes after it is generated. Even though there were no such sensors in the part of Asia hit by the recent tsunami, the PTWC sent warnings, based on the magnitude of the earthquake, to Asian countries telling them of the possibility of immediate tsunami damage. Apparently, the warnings were not heeded.

For more information, see this site here.

And now, the 2004 Office Attachments Awards.

Aloha!

As the year comes to a close, it is sometimes instructive to reflect back on where we've been, where we are, and where we may be going.

The New Yorker magazine has a book review of Pulitzer Prize winning author Jared Diamond's "Collapse".

The old saying that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it seems to be the basis for this book. Diamond analyzes how cultures fail. That is, looking back at the Vikings in Greenland, Easter Islanders, the Anasazi of the American Southwest, the Mayans, and the modern-day Rwandans, Diamond finds some similarities. Namely: soil, trees, and water.

According to the review, Diamond seems to be saying societies fail when they mismanage these specific environmental factors.

Diamond indicates the Norse settlers in Greenland practised a Northern European brand of dealing with the environment. While this may have worked in Europe (and there is a debate about that), it was, according to the review, a disaster to the ecology of Greenland that eventually led to death by starvation.

Likewise, Easter Island is now completely devoid of trees where forrests once stood. Each of those trees was felled by a human. Without trees, the land died and when the land died, so did the inhabitants (Someting similar may have occured on the Hawaiian island of Ni'ihau. Archeological finds have discoverd what once was a thriving culture. Now, the island is essentially devoid of trees and ground cover leaving a wind swept, barren landscape used only, up until a few years ago, for target bombing by the military).

The review is rather lengthly but if you have the time, it may be helpful in understanding some of the lessons from the past.

Speaking of lessons from the past, the U.K. Guardian Unlimited has an article looing back at empires from Constantine to Bush.

In this time of Christmas, the article goes back to when the Church first celebrated Christmas. How the date of December 25th was chosen and how the Church focuses on Christ's birth and death but shies away from many of his teachings. Teachings that upset people and if followed, would mean having to change behaviors that people don't want to change.

Both articles, whether right or wrong, should lead you to thinking about who we are and what roles we play in life because if we don't, there may not be a role to play.

Aloha!

It's doubtful I will be doing a post tomorrow (New Year's Eve). Not only because I'm too lazy, but also because a big storm is coming and the forecast is for winds of 60 mph (about 97 km/h, 52 knots, or 27 metres/sec). What with our electrical grid going down with seemingly the softest whisper of wind, it is likely we will be without power for awhile. Already there have been scattered reports of power outages and this is just the beginning of a long, windy weekend. Sigh.

So, from the Seto Shack here in the Pacific Ocean, we wish you and yours a Happy New Year!

Aloha!