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“I can easily understand why it should puzzle you that a person of my intelligence, I.Q. 207 super genius, should devote his valuable time chasing this ridiculous road runner . . .” – Road Runner

Besides, her last test came back negative.

When I was growing up I recall reading a short story that was, to me, particularly horrifying.  In the story, a group of colonists arrives at a planet light years from Earth.  All is going well – the planet is habitable but not inhabited.  The colonists set the ship down and begin to prepare the planet for people.  And they begin making babies to inhabit the planet, but in the usual way, not using space robot wombs or anything.

But, there is something wrong with the babies.  They are ugly.  And stupid.  And grow quickly, hitting puberty at about age four.  The scientists work frantically trying to figure out what is causing the problem.  Is it some alien virus?  Something to do with the journey itself?  They come up with no good answers, but in their searches determine that the children really look more like a human ancestor from millions of years in the past than modern humans.

Uh-oh.

Then they get the bad news.  Earth sends them a message (from six years in the past) that all human babies on Earth are now being born ugly and stupid, too.  Earth thinks that the colony is the last hope for smart humans, so they have to make it succeed.

Oops.

One of the colonists gets a bit philosophical, and compares humanity to locusts, who often stay in a less aggressive form for decades, and then burst out in the big, hoppy flying plague across thousands of square miles, devouring everything in their wake.  Humanity’s true form, reckons the colonist, is the fuzzy stupid pre-humans, and once humans spread among the stars, it made sense to get stupid again so that we didn’t destroy ourselves.  In the end, all that’s left on the new planet are the pre-humans.  And the wolves.  The colonists released the wolves so that the pre-humans would have something to select off the stupid pre-humans, so they could get smart again millions of years in the future.

Depressing.

The name of the story is The Locusts by Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes, and it was published in 1979 and was nominated for a Hugo® award.  This story has bounced around my mind since I first read it, though I had forgotten even the author until I was assisted by some fine folks on Twitter®.  It is available in Larry Niven’s anthology N-Space, which is probably where I read it for the first time.

The story got me thinking about the concept of how civilization influences intelligence.  And other questions:  how important is intelligence?  Is it better to be intelligent or not?  Would my I.Q. be higher if I did it in metric?

But maybe the most basic of all of these questions is:  what is intelligence?

Intelligence is the ability to process information quickly with sufficient working capacity to create useful connections with previous information.  Intelligence really is measurable by I.Q. tests, and, oddly, is predicted by reaction times – the smarter you are (in general) the quicker your reaction times.  It’s as if the brain pathways move faster for smarter people.  Sadly for those that like to make fun of smart people, the reality is that they’re generally healthier and have a pretty good ability to communicate if they want to.  Generally.

Subliminal advertising is illegal, but what about subcranial?

The way to think of intelligence is that it’s like your height.  Your DNA at the moment of birth determines what your maximum height will be, unless your environment screws it up.  You can’t study yourself taller.  You can’t “think and grow tall.”  No matter how much you stretch every day, your maximum height is your maximum height.

Intelligence is like that, too.  Studying doesn’t help your I.Q., but it does increase your capacity within that maximum intelligence.  No matter how bright the puppy and how often you work to teach it to talk, it’s never going to read quote any Shakespeare except for Romeo and Juliet.  Your dog is a philistine.  But just as environmental factors can stunt your height, environmental factors can make you . . . not as smart, which is why Doritos® took most of the lead out of their Nacho Cheese and Lead© flavored chips.  Most of it.  How can you have lead-flavored chips without any lead?

It also turns out that intelligence is very, very important if you’re considering wealth.  Here is a graph showing the relationship between GDP and the I.Q. of various countries.   It’s based on 1998 data from Lynn and Vanhanen, but I doubt that 2019 data would be much different, except for China, which has quite a high I.Q. but a low 1998 income.  I’ll let you wander around the Internet for more information if you’d like, I’m not planning on writing about it here – I have to get to sleep tonight sometime.  I will admit I was as utterly shocked as anyone could be the first time I saw this data – my preconceived notion was that the average I.Q. of the world was more or less 100, which is clearly refuted by the following graph.

What’s the difference between getting into USC™ and being a wealthy nation?  To be a wealthy nation you have to have a good I.Q.

So at least one question appears to be answered – although you might end up being smart and poor, you’re never going to be dumb and rich.  Poor countries are poor because they’re not smart.  This answers my first question – is intelligence important?  Yes.  Intelligence in nations has been shown to be correlated strongly with lots of good things:  economic freedom, savings, self-employment, education, literacy, interpersonal trust, and long lives.  Low national I.Q. has been correlated with lots of things we don’t like:  corruption, murder, and big government.

I’ll throw out that high I.Q. nations also have more suicide and lower birthrates – the only two negatives that I saw in my (brief) review of the literature I could find.

The original starred Einstein® and Hawking™, but they argued after Einstein© said a radioactive cat had 18 half-lives and had to find new actors.

Next Monday I anticipate reviewing a new book on the subject of intelligence, At Our Wits’ End by Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie.  Dutton and Woodley have worked on a disturbing theory . . . that you’ll have to wait until next week to hear more about.  But don’t expect any hairy pre-human babies.  Because nobody expects hairy pre-human babies.

“I thought maybe we could make ginger bread houses, and eat cookie dough, and go ice skating, and maybe even hold hands.” – Elf

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls.  The Toll House tolls for you!

Normally when I do a health post I put my weasel words saying “I’m not a doctor” at the end of the post.  I mean, if you’re at this website the last thing you are is stupid.  You KNOW I’m not a doctor and I don’t prescribe drugs except on an amateur basis, and then it’s generally, “Pipe down about Ariana Grande masterminding the fake moon landing and have another beer.  Everyone knows that an Ariana Grande is actually a yeasty pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks©.”

However, in this case I’m not talking about yeasty, mediocre pop singers, I’m telling you that the Centers for Disease Control® (CDC™) is staffed by (at least some) idiots who really are doctors, well, the disclaimer should come up front.  So, here it is:  I’m not a doctor, this isn’t medical advice, and take some damn responsibility for your own life and everybody knows that it was Katy Perry was the mediocre pop singer that masterminded the fake moon landing.

So hardcore she killed that Muppet® herself, just to show the other Muppets© how fearless she was.  Or was that G. Katy Perry?

Okay.  Now for the actual rant.

In its continual bid to be the ugly, smelly kid in class who stares at you just a little too long with the charisma of a damp goat, the Creepy Disaster Chumps© (CDC™) issued its annual holiday pronouncement of, “Hey, it’s Christmas, America.  Have a good time and we’ll talk after the New Year.  Sound good?”

No.  This is government, so of course you’re being warned against the civilization-ending threat of (I’m not kidding) raw cookie dough the by the Centers for Disease Control Cookie Dough Committee® (CDCCDC™).  Yes.  Raw cookie dough, that scourge of humanity that brought down the Incan Empire, the Ming Dynasty, and Johnny Depp’s career.

Of course raw cookie dough is bad for you, but not in the way the Citizen Drama Creators© (CDC™) thinks.  Raw cookie dough is bad for you since it’s loaded with carbs and sugar and tastes the way that I can only imagine heroin feels.  But cookies are tasty, and, even if you’re a low-carb cultist (I am), a cookie at Christmas is okay for you unless you inject the dough.  Protip:  if a syringe is large enough to inject a chocolate chip, it’s not gonna make it through airport security no matter what story you tell.

It does, however, appear that raw cookie dough can make you ill in rare circumstances.  You see, in the United States, one in 20,000 eggs is contaminated with salmonella.  20,000 eggs?  It would take 64 years at 6 eggs a week to get to 20,000.  Cooking, thankfully, kills salmonella – so it’s 64 years of raw or undercooked eggs.  Clearly, this is an unacceptable risk.  Your eggs should all be cooked to the consistency of a leather thong.

You were thinking something else!  So was I.  There are places you just don’t want to go on Google®.

But wait!  The Chowder Disco Cowgirls® (CDC™) reminds us that cookies contain raw flour, too.  Raw flour?  Is that a thing?  Yes!  In fact, 63 people in the United States were made ill by raw flour in 2016.  63!  It’s an epidemic!  Soon these people will become raw flour zombies and the streets (okay, one really small one lane street) will be filled with them and their insatiable desire for raw flour.

Thankfully, I’m betting that Grandmothers everywhere will still be handing the rich, doughy beaters covered with cookie dough off to the greedy fat hands of toddlers (it’s really the only way to get their iPhones© away from them) for a sticky, sugary treat.  From there, the cookie dough/saliva mix creates a compound stronger than diamond plated steel that instantly bonds itself at the molecular level to any surface, which explains why it is still stuck to the bottom of the Wilder kitchen table after fifteen years.

If I were him, I’d hide.  Katy Perry is looking for something to wear to the Oscars®.  And it’s between Cookie Monster© and Oscar the Grouch™.

But as a society, what does that say about us if we’re that afraid of . . . cookies?  According to one study I read, the lifetime odds of being killed by an asteroid are 1 in 250,000, which is still higher than your odds of meeting someone who works for the Department of Motor Vehicles that has a sense of humor.

The number of verified deaths from eating raw cookie dough that I found was . . . one.  Out of 300,000,000, people, this equates to a risk of 1 in 3.8 million over a 78 year lifetime.  But let’s pretend that one person a decade dies from eating raw cookie dough.  You’re still 4,500 times more likely to die falling out of bed.  But the Chronic Doom Cherubs® (CDC™) have yet to weigh in against the scourge of pillow-topped mattresses ravaging our land.

I then went against all of my better instincts and did the one thing a blogger should never do:  I researched.  The origin of the Centers for Dingo Carnage© (CDC™) is actually a noble one.  During World War II, the United States decided that we wanted to kill the enemy and not let malaria spoil all the fun, and got pretty good at killing the mosquitos that carried malaria.  Fun fact:  the atomic bomb was originally designed to kill mosquitos but was abandoned because it couldn’t be made to fit into a spray can.

Modern Mosquito Hunting Techniques.

But all good wars end, and here were a bunch of bona fide mosquito-killing ninjas who were good at killing the mosquitos that carried malaria.  The government decided that we could use those guys to stop malaria in the United States.  They went straight to work, and malaria was all but eradicated by 1951, only four years later – in 2018 the paperwork alone for starting the project would take a decade as the Friends of Malaria sued in federal court to stop the eradication of the endangered mosquito.  But living in a less enlightened era, they eradicated malaria and everyone was pretty okay with that.  So, they disbanded the agency, and put people to work doing other productive things.

No, I’m kidding!  Once government builds a hammer, after they run out of nails they keep using it on the dishes and drywall.  It worked great on the nails, right?  Maybe we need a committee to develop stronger dishes?

The newly named Communicable Disease Center (this name is real, and is the original word salad that gave us the CDC™ initials) became a solution in search of a problem.  We expected the Koreans or Chinese (or someone) to spray us with biological agents.  So, the CDC® said, “Hey, we can fix that problem that we just made up.”  Thankfully, they’ve never had to do anything significant on that front.

Eventually, the CDC™ also got bored and distracted enough sometime during the 1960’s that they led the effort eradicate smallpox, and even someone as cynical as I am about government agencies have to give them a golf clap for that one.  To this day the CDC™ and the Russians have the last two samples of smallpox in the world, and the CDC™’s is stored in the fridge next to the guacamole and that Wal-Mart® chicken salad that Carol left in there last Thursday.

Don’t get me wrong:  The CDC™ has a legitimate role as a coordination center for communicable diseases, and protecting the United States from diseases originating all around the world – 70% of the tuberculosis cases in the United States are from people that weren’t born in the United States.  And Ebola or its yet-undiscovered cousin lurking in the rainforest (hopefully they get that pesky jungle cut down soon) has the potential to be devastating in our high mobility society complete with populations concentrated in megacities across the planet.  Like an asteroid strike, this is a very high consequence event that will impact us in the future.  World War One killed as many as 20 million people.  The Spanish Flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, or between 3% and 5% of the world’s population, in 1918 and 1919.

Yikes.  Yeah.  Somebody needs to be working on that.

And somebody should also be working on protecting us from bioterrorism, but I strongly doubt it’s the CDC™.  The CDC™ is the only agency I know of that’s managed to misplace smallpox in their other pants, along with the keys to the CDC™ golf cart.  Oh, and the CDC™ also exposed their own employees to anthrax, and not just the heavy metal band.  Since these things really happened, we need to make sure an adult is at the wheel.  And, please Comic Distribution Clowns® (CDC™), no more comic books about zombies.  If there is anything with less soul than a comic book about zombies by a government health agency, it might be a government health agency warning us about eating cookie dough.

Readers of this blog know I’m all for people being prepared.  But the CDC®?  Zombies™?  Please leave the misleading and incomplete preparedness information to FEMA™.    

So, by all means, please have the charisma of a wet goat the CDC™, avoid the consequence of minimal personal responsibility involving infinitesimal risk, and just tell your grandchildren “no” when they want to lick the beater after you make sugar cookies.  I’m not sure that kids of today would even notice – recess at school nowadays consists of “competitive sitting quietly,” “standing quietly and motionlessly near the wall,” and “counting the days until a government-based Christian theocracy turns women into harems for Trump supporters.”  That sounds so much more fun than playing tackle football in the fifth grade on a rock covered field and having snowball fights.  And actual fights.  I sure missed out as a kid.

Yes, it’s a retread.  But it’s a sexy theocratic retread. 

This certainly isn’t the case of a government agency that’s looking for publicity by making outlandish claims to scare people about risks that are less likely than being killed by lighting?  Nah.  Government is here because it loves you!  Or because government needs something to do between drinking yeasty Ariana Grande lattes and faking moon landings.

Not mine, but funny.

“So you listen to me and you listen well.  Are you behind on your credit card bills?  Good, pick up the phone and start dialing!  Is your landlord ready to evict you?  Good!  Pick up the phone and start dialing!” – The Wolf of Wall Street

So, this is how I viewed the world when I was in college.  Free money!  What could go wrong???

It started as an innocent dinner conversation.  One thing about our dinner conversations – they’re not normal.  We might discuss topics as diverse as financial impacts of currency devaluation on the Roman Empire, or what food makes Pugsley toot the most.  It turns out its pretty much any food, he claims, except for ice cream from Dairy Queen® and Cheetos® and whatever else he’s eating at the time.

But this night The Boy piped up.  “Hey, Dad, I was thinking about getting a credit card.”

Being that he’s 18, he’s and adult and that’s his right.

“What credit card were you thinking of getting?”

“Well, one company sent me an application . . .”

“So, if you were going to buy a car, would you just drive down the street and just buy the first one you saw?”

Long pause.  My dad logic was a laser-guided missile.

“Well,” he replied, “I really don’t know much about credit cards.  Can you help?”

I can.  And I promised I would.

So here it is:

The first thing a young person should know about credit cards is that they are evil.  Not evil in the sense of being a direct minion in the service of Satan® that slowly creates global warming just so it can barbeque endangered species over oil from the tar sands in Canada™.  No, credit cards are worse.  Besides, have you ever eaten slow-cooked panda with bald eagle sauce?  Or fried whale?

This may be the first time this sentence has been written in English:  “You haven’t eaten until you’ve eaten panda.”  Goes great with ketchup.  Tastes like chicken.

Wait, where were we?  Oh yeah, why are credit cards evil?

Mark Twain had the answer:  “Willpower lasts about two weeks, and is soluble in alcohol.”

Yeah, the credit card company was pretty excited when I bought that original picture of Cats Playing Poker.  Who knew there would be no market for that??

Let’s conduct an experiment that shows how 18 year olds feel about money.  Pretend you’re 18.  For the average adult, one fifth of scotch should do to start the simulation.  Now, let’s pretend your net worth is, oh, some paperback books, t-shirts you got in high school for band camp, and empty tubes of acne medication you planned on turning into an attractive art piece.  Now, stare at your phone a lot.

Now, some nice person has offered to allow you an amazing opportunity.  He sounds nice, but he’ll let you to spend money you don’t have.  He’ll even give it to you in advance.  You’re a good guy.  You deserve this, right?

And for every second that you carry that credit card in your wallet, well, your struggle is to not spend money.  You have it, it’s available.  But you’re 18, and at the peak of hormonal activity in your body.

So, after you’ve spent a Friday night on a crazed PEZ®, pantyhose and elephant ride binge, well, now you have a bill staring at your face for all of that crazed fun.  But, hey, elephant rides, right?  And the bill is approximately every cent that you would make in the next year of your life, if you didn’t have to spend money on stuff like rent, food, gas, and, well, more elephant rides.

The second thing an 18 year old should know about credit cards is that you can’t really have one:

You’re 18.  With no job.  You’re in luck!

In 2009, Congress passed a law that says you can’t have a credit card unless you can pay for it.  Yes.  Banks were giving 18 year olds credit lines even though they had no income.

But after 2009?  Congratulations!  You’re a winner!  You can’t have a credit card.

In what could be seen as the barest hint of morality coming out of Washington, this bill passed with the support of both Republican’ts and DemocRATs.  Yay!  But is it just me that worries that the stuff that gets support of both parties is the scariest?

Anyway, The Boy can get a credit card limit that matches his documented income.  Both of which are zero.

Unless . . . I cosign.

What is a cosigner?

Robert Mueller would call a cosigner an unindicted co-conspirator.  You sign your name to the credit card so your kid can buy pantyhose, PEZ® and elephant rides, but you get no pantyhose, PEZ™, or elephant rides.  And if your kid can’t pay for the cool party?  You pay.

Queue a sad trombone playing.

Note that a co-signed credit card does nothing to help your credit rating.  What’s a credit rating?  It’s a mathematical formula that computes the ability of the banks to squeeze you between two blocks of concrete and extract gold.  The bigger the number?  The more gold they can squeeze out of you, if you start talking back to them.

So, human sacrifice is really in the terms and conditions of every credit card company and on a cosigner they make you live without a kidney or liver.  Just letting you know.

The third thing to know is that you don’t have to worry, the second you turn 21, the banks will be glad to lend you all the money you want that you can’t afford to pay back:

Yes.  When I was in college, there were hot chicks in scanty clothing that attempted to convince you to sign up for a credit card, with the insinuation that, you know, they’d ignore you later after you spent all of your cool credit cash on them.  Party!

And this will happen to you when you turn 21.

Why?

That temptation that I talked about, that constantly burning credit card in your pocket, whispering in your ear “buy me now”?  It is a tool.  It’s a tool with a purpose.

This is why credit cards are awesome . . . for those you have to pay money to.

I was talking with a friend who is a zillionaire.  He had hundreds of apartments in Dallas.  He looked at me and said, “You know, John, it’s like I have an army of slaves working for me every month.  I own the apartments.  They were paid for on the first day they were constructed through me selling government tax credits to third parties.  Then people move in.  And they have to work every day to pay me.”

I was stunned.  Here was a zillionaire, telling me that his tenants were . . . his slaves.  And he is right.  Any time a man is obligated to pay a debt, to work for another is a slave.

The fourth thing you need to know is that debt is enslavement, but enslavement on steroids:

A lease, like a credit card, is a debt.  But a credit card allows you to buy pleasure now for future labor.  But it’s not an even trade.  Every month, the debt gets more added to it.  That debt is interest.  That means that for every elephant ride you charge to your credit card, you have to pay an elephant ride, 25,000 PEZ™, and two pairs of pantyhose.

You have to pay your purchase back, plus more.

When you buy a house, if you can’t afford to pay in cash, you get a loan that’s called a mortgage.  Mortgage is from the Latin root, meaning “Morty” and “Gauge” – so it’s a gauge of how many people named Morty that can live in your house.

Not to get heavy, but, you know, sometimes it’s worth it?  Oh, not really?

Just kidding.  It the Latin root for “mort” is death.  And “gage” is pledge.  Yeah.  A death pledge.  Happy thought, right?  Back in the day you were pledging your life to pay back the loan.  At least they were honest, then – you would die rather than not pay this money back.  But at least you have a pool, right?

The fifth thing you need to know is that credit cards can be a weapon to fight back:

I have in many years, paid for every single Christmas present with rewards from my Visa© card.  Yay!  Credit cards give cash back bonuses for spending with them.  The idea is that you spend money on the card.  They make money when you spend it via extortion fees from the people who sell you stuff.  Buy PEZ® online?  Get cash back.  Buy 25 Macanudo™ cigars online?  Burn the enemy’s crops.  Heck, Mark Twain used to smoke 300 cigars a month.

But what did that guy ever accomplish?

The sixth thing you need to know is that credit cards only make sense when they make sense:

I was married before I met The Mrs.  It was a mixed marriage.  I was human, she was Klingon®.

Just sayin’

How much would you pay to be rid of a Klingon™?  Well, as Henny Youngman asked . . . “Why are divorces so expensive?”

His response:  “They’re worth it.”

After my divorce from She Who Will Not Be Named, I was in debt.  My student loans.  My death pledge mortgage.  The debts from the marriage.  I consolidated them into four credit cards.  The total was enough to allow me to have gone to the Super Bowl® on a private jet with 2/5ths of the Spice Girls® as companions.  But all I had was a bill.

Well, maybe I’d pass on all of the Spice Girls®.  (Shudder)

It was paid off three years later.  Thankfully, I didn’t have to wash Spice Girl© off of me.

The seventh and final point is this:

Credit cards are like fire:  helpful when you are in control, but like ice cream and Cheetos®, a fearful master.

And, for extra credit:

I hate to ask this question, but I must:  how much could we achieve as a civilization if we abandoned debt.  Paid it off.  Bought houses with cash.  Paid up front?

What if interest was illegal?

What if no one was a slave to debt?  What if our country paid our bills, in full, every month?

Everyone who reads this blog knows I’m a fan of capitalism.  Of freedom.  Of Western Civilization.  I’m not sure that interest is required for any of these.

Discuss.  A Macanudo® to the best response . . . or some PEZ®.  Your call.

“Yes.  I’ve left everything to the Flat Earth Society.  But don’t worry about it.  I’m forted up here with plenty of firepower.” – Hopscotch

A trip flying from Seattle at night to Fairbanks in the summertime.  You leave in darkness, and then arrive at 2AM in a perfect daylight.  Proof of a flat Earth!

I really enjoy a good conspiracy theory.  The very best ones make claims that are entirely consistent with agreed-upon facts, and that you can’t disprove.  The JFK assassination theories are an amazing treasure trove of paranoia, and so are a thousand others – from ancient aliens to “we knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor,” to the theory that your Mom is bigfoot (that would explain her back hair).

The conspiracy theory that’s currently ascendant is “Flat Earth Theory.”

Yes.

Flat Earth theory says the Earth is, well, flat.  And this theory has been gaining followers globally.

Did you see that, globally?  Heh.  I crack myself up.

Anyway.

And here I thought that Bugs Bunny® had solved the issue once and for all.

The idea is that the North Pole is center of a disk – and the Sun is only 32 miles in diameter, and 1,500 miles away.  Likewise, the Moon is only 32 miles in diameter and 1,500 miles away.  Seems legit!  What about the South Pole?  The South Pole isn’t.  It’s the edge of a pancake, with a 150’ ice wall that surrounds the disk of the flat Earth.  And, while vague, it sounds like there’s a dome about 700 miles up.

So how do we explain the International Space Station (ISS)?  The ISS is either a secret NASA spy plane, or maybe a secret NASA hologram projection to make us think there’s an ISS.  And satellites?  Totally fake.  There’s no way that your DirecTV© technician could possibly aim at a spot 22,000 miles away moving at 7,000 miles per hour!

Of course, that means the Moon landings were fake (its own conspiracy theory by itself).  And O.J. Simpson had to go to prison for starring in Capricorn One® (a movie that showed a fake Mars landing) because that would totally have stopped NASA.

Like I said – these theories are fascinating.  Most of them are hard to refute, but Flat Earthers are so very easy to refute, it’s like placing a kitten in a room full of velociraptors.  Not really sporting.

I’m not going to get into the energy flux that would have to be created by a 32 mile diameter Sun to warm the Earth, even if only 1500 miles away.  But we’ve been sending people to Antarctica for over 100 years.  The first people to reach it was Roald Amundsen back in 1911.

To believe in the Flat Earth, one would have to believe in a conspiracy heading back over 100 years.  To add further problems for the Flat Earthers – the differing constellations south of the equator should be visible from a flat Earth (which I can personally attest to), Polaris being at different positions in the sky based on latitude (personally verified by me during my Alaska days), and Johnny Depp having a career.  Johnny Depp would never have a career on a Flat Earth.

But NASA would also have had to flawlessly fake all of the Moon Landings, all of the satellite launches, a shuttle program, and Elon Musk’s ego.  Not possible for a group that wanted to inject water into the Yellowstone Caldera to cool the magma chamber and (probably) trigger a volcano – I wish I were making this up, but I wrote about it here (LINK).  Large swaths of NASA are hopelessly inept and stupid.  They couldn’t keep an afternoon nap secret.

Oh, and sending O.J. to prison for murder to keep him quiet about “faking the Moon landing”?  Capricorn One was a movie that had been out 18 years by the time O.J. was arrested.  If so, their punishment of James Brolin was even worse – they made him marry Barbra Streisand.

And as for a technician being able to point a dish at a satellite that’s moving at thousands of miles per hour?  Well, it has to move at thousands of miles per hour, since it’s in stationary orbit around the Earth.  It’s easy to point an antenna at something that’s not moving (relative to you).

See, they are moving fast to stay stationary!  If they want to go anywhere, they’d have to move faster still.

Francisco Esquembre, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia

The question isn’t if the Flat Earth theory is correct.  It obviously isn’t.  But the question is why would someone believe in something (and I believe that the believers in the Flat Earth are sincere) that is observably disprovable?  In today’s world, you’d have to really make an effort to ignore/come up with complicated alternative answers to data clearly visible around you daily.

(By my count, there can’t be more than a few thousand of these believers in the Western world, but they make a lot of YouTube videos.)

So, why?  In some cases faith.  The idea of a flat Earth is based on (some) interpretations of Biblical passages.  In some cases reasoning.  The main proponent of the Flat Earth Society® for decades mentioned that he felt that way from when he was young – and that his teacher in second grade was lying to him.  He reasoned that the simplest thing was a flat Earth.  Other writings (some guy who named himself Koresh – not from Waco but this time from Illinois) explicitly called for a flat Earth, such that teaching normal geography was banned in the local schools around Zion, Illinois until the 1920’s when they disbanded.

But the rumor is that bigfoot your Mom scared them away.

“The year is 1987, and NASA launches the last of America’s deep space probes. In a freak mishap, Ranger 3 and its pilot, Captain William “Buck” Rogers, are blown out of their trajectory into an orbit which freezes his life support systems, and returns Buck Rogers to Earth.  500 years later.” – Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century

No comment required.

There is a theme in legend, called “The King in the Mountain.”  In this theme, a hero from history awaits.  The hero, though wounded, or old, or with a bad case of the sniffles, waits.  Generally the hero is awaiting a future time when he will be needed to save the nation he is associated with.  One example of this is the legend of King Arthur.  Arthur is said not to have died, but to be resting in Avalon for when he is needed by Britain, and then he will emerge from his sleep, his sword Excalibur in his hand, to save Britain.  One would assume he has a good mattress for a sleep this long.  Whenever I go longer than about 8 hours my back lets me know about it . . .

Since Britain has now outlawed all weapons, up to and including dull butter knives, I’m thinking Arthur would face this fate upon his return.  The Royal Navy now has fewer ships than at any point in the last 370 years, so if he avoids arrest he might have his work cut out for him if a group of toddlers decide to take over the UK.

Arthur’s legend dates back at least to 600 A.D., but other regions have similar tales, such as the legend of Holger Danske, a big Danish guy who sleeps and will come to the aid of Denmark when it’s in peril.  Like Arthur, he’s asleep in Avalon, and also like Arthur, he’s spent some time (wink-wink) with Morgan le Fey.

Here’s Holger.  He looks like he’s pretty buff.  I bet he deadlifts like 500 pounds, bro.   CC BY SA 3.0, from Wikimedia.

So the concept of suspended animation has been with us for centuries, and most of the time the “suspended animation” has been just your garden variety of time-stopping sleep which lasts centuries and is susceptible to interruption only by current events.  Buck Rogers (who went from the 1920’s to the 2400’s fell asleep due to radioactive gas in a mine (in the original story published in 1928).

But I think that Clarence Birdseye® was the real inspiration for those that spend time dreaming about suspended animation.  Birdseye™ invented a way to quickly freeze food (in about 1924) so that it retained flavor, texture, and nutrition better.  Soon enough, the first frozen dinner was in stores.  And in 1931 a young boy named Robert Ettinger read the short story, “Jameson’s Brain” about a gentleman named Jameson that was frozen in orbit.  Jameson was frozen for about a million years, and some robots put his thawed brain into a robot.  As attractive as the whole “human brain in a robot body” goes, I mean, who wouldn’t be attracted to that?

Ettinger from that moment was fixated on a science he dubbed Cryonics.  He even wrote about it in a short science fiction story that was published in Startling Stories in 1948 (it’s pretty rough, but it’s also pretty short).  In 1962 Ettinger wrote a book called The Prospect of Immortality.  You can find it for free online.  His book was pivotal in getting attention to Cryonics, and in 1967 the first corpse patient was frozen.  That was one of Ettinger’s ideas – death should be looked at not as a final state (in some cases).  Where there was sufficient medical equipment and know-how, he reasoned, death could be considered to be a temporary condition, a setback that could be cured.  Die in the Amazon (not Jeff Bezo’s place, the actual jungle) and you’re dead.  Die in a modern city near modern medical equipment?  Maybe you and Buck Rogers can swap stories about Wilma Deering.

The basic theory is that your brain stores information in such a manner that it’s retrievable after you die.  It retains your personality and memory.  The basis for this (according to Ettinger’s book) is that rats, nearly frozen, no circulation for hours, were revived.  The rats had been taught tricks, like how to vote on a bill in Congress.  After being thawed out, the rats remembered the tricks they had been taught.  It might be a stretch to say that the personality and memory would be the same, but at least Ettinger had some evidence that it might work.

So, after thawing you might get a new cloned body to put your brain into.  That would be cool if we knew how to do any of that.  Or we could scan the brain and put your memories and personality into a computer.  If we did either of these, we wouldn’t need to store the whole body – we could just store the head.  And storing the head is one option if you’re on a budget and not wedded to the “I need my body” thought process.

Or we could fix the original body, if we had a cure for whatever killed you and you weren’t a cheapskate.

Hey, maybe you could have a robot body, too.

How could this possibly go wrong?  Peter Weller is our friend, right?

So death goes from being the end to being a temporary stop along the way to the future.  But the problem is that people really don’t like being frozen.  And their organs like it even less.  Freezing cells dehydrate.  I had thought that ice crystals formed inside the cells, but my research for this post says that the cells dehydrate, ice crystals form outside the cell walls, and then the resulting salty sludge left in the cell couldn’t support life.  Freezing is pretty destructive.  Frostbite seems to come to mind . . . .

In the 1980’s, a scientist had an idea:  inject antifreeze into the cells and cool them down in such a fashion that ice crystals don’t form and the frozen body becomes like glass:

Don’t dwell on it . . . (I think this image was originated from Alcor, a cryonics firm)

The problem is the “antifreeze” that gets pumped into the organ/body is . . . toxic, which implies that in order to freeze the organs, you have to poison them.  And getting the antifreeze into and around the brain (which is pretty dense) is rough – there’s some speculation that the amount of pumping and pressure required to get the antifreeze into the brain might just damage it to the point that it’s useless.

The bet for the future is that we’ll have “new technology” (Nanotechnology?  Better beer bongs? High Definition rubber bands?) that will solve the problems associated with freezing the corpses patients in the first place.  Also, I give Ettinger credit:  he’s frozen at -140˚C (room temperature in Canada) along with both his first wife and his second wife, which might cause all sorts of complications upon thawing.

I first learned about cryonics through science fiction.  The noted fiction author Larry Niven referred to frozen people as corpsicles, and his novel A World Out of Time is based upon a thawed corpsicle working as a slave to a totalitarian future government.  Which gives him a space ship, for some reason.  They gave the corpsicles jobs that Future Serfs won’t do.  Maybe they can give corpsicles the job that future people won’t do . . . like . . . saving Britain?

“Her actual name is:  Penelope Mountbatten Hapsburg Hohenzollern Mulan-Pocahontas.” – The Simpsons

So, if your European Dynasty is the subject of Internet memes in 2010’s?  You know you were inbred.

Last week on Monday’s post I wrote about how a massive amount of wealth that wasn’t tied to any production (New World gold) weakened Spain in every conceivable way (LINK).  A comment on that post indicated that wealth alone wasn’t the whole story.  The Hapsburgs were horrible leaders because they were rendered idiots by centuries of inbreeding and watching reality television.

That’s where we get to the Hapsburgs and genetics.

The House of Hapsburg started with the unlikely named Count Radbot.  If ever there was an argument that Europe was run by time travelling robots or the writers of the game Fallout, well, the fact that a major European dynasty was started by a person named Radbot is probably the best evidence to date.  Radbot built Hapsburg Castle in around 1020.  His grandson, Otto, took the name of the Castle and became Otto Von Hapsburg.  Eventually the family moved to Austria, and took over the country in 1276.  They only ruled Austria until 1918.

Count Radbot was also a fixture in the Sunday comics for thirty years – often he would chase a cartoon cat and fight comically with him over hamburgers.

Besides the whole, “ruling huge chunks of Europe for 650 years” thing, the other thing that the Hapsburg dynasty was really known for was . . . serious inbreeding.

For being a bunch on inbred sometime-morons, they seemed to do okay.  CC by SA 3.0, Original by Wikipedia User Alphathon

The Hapsburg family kept breeding cousins because that was a great way to not share power with outside families.  Unfortunately, cousins that have been breeding only with each other limit the gene pool pretty severely.  Charles II of Spain (shown below) had comparable genetics to a child born of a brother and sister.  He was reportedly:  “ . . . short, lame, epileptic, senile and completely bald before 35, always on the verge of death but repeatedly baffling Christendom by continuing to live.”  Charles reigned between 1665 and 1700, and when he died it plunged Europe into the War of Spanish Succession as the Hapsburgs attempted to control who would become the next King of Spain.

Charles II of Spain.  What a catch!  I think he was featured in several of the “Hills Have Eyes” movies . . . keep in mind that painters tried to make their subjects look better in their portraits than they did in real life . . . .

Evidence is fairly clear at this point that genetic difficulties led to the final problems of Spain that led to the fall of the Spanish Empire.

This is an example of genetics that are too close . . . there is no variation because there is far too small a gene pool to contend with.

A modern city is the opposite.  People are mobile, and cities are growing – there’s a great deal of movement from the countryside to the cities.  A Yale® study indicated (LINK) that by 2030, 10% of the land surface of the Earth will be covered by cities.  To get to that number, the equivalent of 20,000 football fields are being paved.

Daily.

Major cities perhaps are the opposite of diversity – they may be the greatest homogeneity.  Unique cultures and traditions are moving to the cities and destroying diversity – even within groups that are remaining distinct.  In order to avoid arguments that are outside of the point I’m making today, the metropolitan area that I’m picking to make my point is . . . Beijing, China (as opposed to Beijing, Oklahoma, population 6).

Beijing is interesting in that the ethnic makeup change appears to be zero – so I can happily avoid (at least for this blog) those questions.  But what’s changing?  The city has had a tremendous influx of people from 2000 to 2010, over eight million.  But Beijing remains a Chinese city, specifically Han Chinese.  So what’s the argument about diversity here, John Wilder?

China is a pretty big country, and there are about a million villages in China.  The average, medium sized village has about 500 people, and 7 to 10 clans.  Some of these villages have histories spanning thousands of years, with customs and families reaching far into the past.  Over time, there is genetic drift – a village in Northern China doesn’t look nearly the same as one in Southern China.  Both are Han Chinese, but differing diseases, climates, history, original genetic stock, and, well, luck play a part in allowing a diversity to flourish among the villages.  China has a history of amazing innovation.  How much a part of this does the village structure explain?  How much genius sprang up because of the stability of those villages?

From Freeman Dyson (LINK):

West does not mention another scaling law that works in the opposite direction. That is the law of genetic drift, mentioned earlier as a crucial factor in the evolution of small populations. If a small population is inbreeding, the rate of drift of the average measure of any human capability scales with the inverse square root of the population. Big fluctuations of the average happen in isolated villages far more often than in cities. On the average, people in villages are not more capable than people in cities. But if ten million people are divided into a thousand genetically isolated villages, there is a good chance that one lucky village will have a population with outstandingly high average capability, and there is a good chance that an inbreeding population with high average capability produces an occasional bunch of geniuses in a short time. The effect of genetic isolation is even stronger if the population of the village is divided by barriers of rank or caste or religion. Social snobbery can be as effective as geography in keeping people from spreading their genes widely.

A substantial fraction of the population of Europe and the Middle East in the time between 1000 BC and 1800 AD lived in genetically isolated villages, so that genetic drift may have been the most important factor making intellectual revolutions possible. Places where intellectual revolutions happened include, among many others, Jerusalem around 800 BC (the invention of monotheistic religion), Athens around 500 BC (the invention of drama and philosophy and the beginnings of science), Venice around 1300 AD (the invention of modern commerce), Florence around 1600 (the invention of modern science), and Manchester around 1750 (the invention of modern industry).

These places were all villages, with populations of a few tens of thousands, divided into tribes and social classes with even smaller populations. In each case, a small starburst of geniuses emerged from a small inbred population within a few centuries, and changed our ways of thinking irreversibly. These eruptions have many historical causes. Cultural and political accidents may provide unusual opportunities for young geniuses to exploit. But the appearance of a starburst must be to some extent a consequence of genetic drift. The examples that I mentioned all belong to Western cultures. No doubt similar starbursts of genius occurred in other cultures, but I am ignorant of the details of their history.

I suggest you read the whole thing – it’s fascinating.  And Dyson dates things properly – BC, AD.  If you’re not familiar with Dyson, he’s a physicist and scientist of renown, the Dyson sphere – an artificial sphere built around a planet – is one of his most known ideas.

From this, one could surmise that the “end of diversity” even among ethnically homogeneous societies will rob us of genetic variation that will advance the human race, perhaps even greatly.  Would places like Stanford® or Harvard® provide a place where this (intellectual) genetic diversity could flourish?  I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.  The time and relative isolation required for drift appear to be missing.

Genetics may be like water – when frozen through inbreeding, no progress is possible.  When boiling in a city, no usefully differential structures form in the chaos.  When in the right size populace for a period of time?  The lukewarm water of interesting change, complexity can form.  Like Goldilocks:  too hot, too cold, and then just right.

What do we lose if we don’t have that drift, if we don’t have those periodic bursts of genius arising out of that properly complex world?  Is it odd to think that cities, which we think of as engines of diversity are really just engines of future homogeneity?

Thankfully we don’t have to worry about that, because our new robotic overlord, Count Radbot, will come from the future to save us all!

“Now can you believe it?  After only five years of playing football, I got a college degree.  Mama was so proud.” – Forrest Gump

This bridge is based on one I sketched one day.  Oh, wait, it was built before I ever sketched it.  Nevermind.

The easiest way to determine a lie is to see what everyone believes in.

Almost always they’re wrong.

The delusions of crowds are nearly legendary.  Teenage girls are suddenly transformed into witches in colonial Salem, rather than in Middle School, like normally happens.  Stock prices always go up.  Until they collapse in a pile of hope-flavored rubble.  Housing prices always go up, until they don’t and cause the government to throw piles of money into the air hoping that it will hit someone on the way down.

“Everybody should go to college” is another one of those things that “everybody knows”.  And it’s just as wrong as the examples listed above, and a lot more damaging.  And I firmly used to believe this, as well – I was a part of “everyone believes”.  The idea that everyone (well, most people) should go to college was just ingrained.

Why would I believe that?

Well, in my mind, college was a useful experience that helped people to be prepared to be of value to society (and themselves!) through education and progressive exposure to responsibility.

To a certain extent, that was true.  But most people I know and work with have at least a bachelor’s degree.  And most of my friends from high school have at least one if not multiple degrees from college.  And I have a masters.  And The Mrs. has a masters.  The odds of that randomly happening?  1 in 17,232,000.  Okay.  I made that number up.  But the odds are pretty low, given random selection.  In reality?  It happens a lot.

Before 1980, about half of the guys who graduated from high school (which is not everyone – only 70% or so people graduate) went to college.

So, if you simplify a bit – 50% of 70% is 35%.  The top third (or so) of your group went to college.  Historically, about a third would drop out.  That left 20% or so of the population with college degrees, which made them relatively more valuable.  It meant that you could work at a goal for four or five years and accomplish it.

Now, however, about 70% of high school graduates go to college, and women outnumber men (which we may or may not get into on this post).  Now, 70% of people (still) graduate from high school.  So, roughly 50% go to college.  That’s a huge increase (40%+!) in just a few decades!

And the college graduation rate is going up – now about 35% (total) of the younger generation has a college degree.  That’s a whopping 75% increase in the number of people with degrees.

Great news, right?

Oh, heavens, no.

Part of the problem is that the population isn’t really getting smarter.

If you look at the average SAT verbal score, it’s going downhill.  I would guess that at least part of that is there are more people taking the SAT than before – it’s not just the top 35%, it’s now the top 50%, so the data implies that we’re regressing to the mean with people going to college.  There is even evidence that the population is getting (overall) dumber on a worldwide basis.

SAT scores peaked about the time that Nacho Cheese Doritos™ were introduced.  Coincidence?  I think not.  Graph via Zero Hedge

I’d suggest that most college degrees today are . . . not particularly worthwhile.

Previously, even a degree in a subject without a lot of economic demand, say, Anthropology, would indicate that you were in the top fifth of the population as far as the ability to commit to a goal for four years or more.  Now it’s more than a third of the population that has a degree.  For your degree to mean something today in 2018, the degree has to be in something useful.  Medieval French Art History Studies won’t really cut it for, well, almost any job outside of a museum where Ben Stiller works as a plucky night watchman.

I could keep going, but if your degree ends in the word “studies” then you don’t have a real degree.  You just spent five years and either family money or college debt (which is the worst possible debt) getting a degree that qualifies you for exactly the same number and type of job that you could have gotten without that degree, namely positions in the food services or housekeeping industries.

And that’s why this is a Wealthy Wednesday post – you want your degree to be of value to you.  Of course you want to go to college to have fun.  But the purpose of college isn’t to have fun – it’s to get a credential that allows you to 1. get a job where you can be of value to mankind, and 2. to make connections with people that can help your career down the line so you can be of value to mankind.  Since I was too dumb and not enough of a weasel to try to be friends with someone just to create an advantage for me, if you’re my friend and you’re reading this . . . it’s because you’re my friend.  I really suck at Machiavelli.

But if your goal is to find a job where you can be of value to mankind (and using the scorekeeper as dollars, which is a pretty relevant scorekeeper) – people are generally (though not always) paid more when they impact more human lives.  If, as an engineer, you can help everyone in the world save a nickel a day?  Wow.  You’ve managed to change the world – and you get more money.  Hence the people (like Bill Gates) who have saved literally billions of hours of mankind’s time?  Yeah, he’s got the cash from that, plus the khakis.  And a manservant who can kill you in 347 different ways with a hotel coffee machine.

The current list of top college majors to make good money (LINK from salary.com – it’s a slow-loading slideshow, so I don’t recommend it) is:

1. IT – yes, they are the wizards that support our FaceBorg® addiction. Thankfully, they have no idea of the power they wield – the power of the Search History.  Yikes!
2. Economics – this was a bit skewed – all the job titles were successful economists, managers and stuff, not the economics majors you see working at Starbucks® or playing no holds barred ping pong in Ding Dang with their lives on the line.
3. Engineer – Also skewed, but downward. They picked next to entry level positions.  The average is much higher, and this should be number one or two.  Why?  You can live without aluminum, baby, but not without engineers.
4. Math – I met a math graduate when I was in college. He was working at a bookstore.  Selling me books.  Call me dubious.
5. Marketing – Again, skewed – these were all “Marketing Director” type positions, of which there might be one in a company, and not all the marketing drones that end up giving free shots of Jägermeister® to drunken college girls on spring break in Florida.   Maybe they figured in the perks.
6. HR – It’s always good to be the group that figures out what everyone in the company should be paid. And to know where all the bodies are buried.  In some cases literally.  Career tip:  remember HR works for the company, and NOT the employees.  They will bury your career for another 0.1% annual raise.
7. English – I call bogus. I speak English.  They don’t give a degree in the language that you speak.
8. Biology – Seems legit. But they have squishy things that are made of slime in their labs.  No thanks.

And that’s the job market today.

That’s the rub – the job market today doesn’t look like the job market from forty years ago, and none of it resembles the job market from 100 years ago.  Forty years ago, to put up a bridge a group of engineers would spend thousands of hours working calculate the forces, stresses and angles required for the bridge to be safe.  And a good bridge can last thousands of years – Roman bridges are still in use today.

Now?  A software program analyzes the forces and stresses and optimizes the sizes of beams and trusses to make the bridge as safe an economical as possible.  The thousands of hours of engineering time that previously went into the bridge is now compressed into a (complex) software package that designs and specifies all the components of the bridge.  Now when the engineers using the software don’t know how to build a bridge, well, that bridge won’t last 1,000 years.

The point, however, is that engineering hours are being replaced by programs.  This is new.  What else is being changed in our job market?

• Attorneys: Legal research is farmed out to places like India, which sleep during the day and only come out at night to do legal research.  This research is done at a fraction of the cost of the average new law school graduate.  What will the new law school grads do?  I vote that they move to Iran and mess that place up with lawsuits.  You can’t even find a place to put nukes if they have an environmental review.
• Teachers: Why do we need one per classroom?  Why not have a group of lectures by the Tiger Woods® of lecturers supplemented by people who can answer student questions?  Also, we would give the classroom people Tasers®, because, as noted above, we ain’t getting any smarter.
• Accounting: This could be done by people in foreign countries if we trusted them with our bank account numbers.  Yeah, that always ends well.  Regardless, we can assume that this will be increasingly automated and globalized, like your mother.  (That’s not a great “your momma” joke, but I have a quota to fill, and I’m behind.)
• IT: Eventually the systems we use will be self-healing.  And we will need to bring them fresh electricity or whatever they need.  Since they’ll be self-sufficient, and also have our credit card numbers.  Expect random deliveries from Amazon to self-assemble a replacement for that bearded guy who fixes your hard drive.  He’ll still make the same jokes that involve Japanese anime that you haven’t seen.  Anime:  proving the Japanese are way more twisted than the Germans about sex things.
• HR: Will be replaced after at with HR-Bot 2000™.  Because HR still thinks “2000” sounds really cool and futuristic.  Actually, I’ve seen several HR software platforms that make it so HR can be eliminated.  Guess that will decrease the load on the company Internet.

Anime isn’t this disturbing.  It’s this disturbing times 186,000.  Just say no to Anime!

Automation will go after the higher (and lower) salaries first.  Burger floppers and attorneys and engineers.  Computers can do most of what you do already, except for the coffee drinking and peeing.  But they suck at welding.  Oh, wait!  They’re better at that than people.

I kid.  A little.

If you’re going to college and not majoring in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math?  You’re just burning your dollars.  Or your Dad’s dollars.  And if your dad has that much money to burn, I’d like to do some networking with him on selling Amway®.  Or just writing me a check if he’s that gullible.

Hey, maybe I could turn your school into an unpaid internship.  Yeah.  Your dad only has to kick in half as much.

That will teach you two a lesson.

Because degrees are always worth it, right?  Even your degree in Sociology?  I hate to burst your bubble, but a really good STEM person will make what you make in your career in five years.  Maybe two if those stock options take off.

Wow.  I still have about five things to talk about relating to college and wealth, and I can see that maybe I’ll have to wait until next week.

Don’t worry – I can bully you then, too.