6 Billion +, yet still lonely

I'm not going to argue the existance and nature of UFO's here. Everyone knows that they are spacecraft flown by a superior race of extraterrestrials here to administer an ambitious program of rectal probing...the only true way to understand life on Earth. No, I'll save that for another post. Rather, I want to discuss our haphazard eagerness to reach out to anyone and anything in the cosmos that may be listening. Allow me to elaborate. Back in the 1920's it was believed that Mars was home to an intelligent race of beings. A branch of the U.S. military even proposed beaming radio signals to the planet, and maintaining total radio silence world wide for 3 days, in order to listen for any response. In 1963, Arecibo, the world's largest single dish radio telescope was built in Puerto Rico and used extensively in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, whose objectives were to listen for and communicate with intelligent alien life in the universe.

These are but a few examples of major undertakings headed by credible government organizations, dedicating large amounts of resources to the cause. In addition, radio and television broadcasters have inadvertantly been beaming off signals into space since the early 20th century, some of which were strong enough and sent long enough ago to reach distant star systems. Imagine aliens picking up signals of the early Chaplin movies or the Howdy Doody Show, they'd think we're a bunch of retards. And, rest assured there have been countless other private ventures, some more respectable than others, who've built UFO landing pads, welcome signs (making the retard conclusion that much truer) and tried to get ET's attention in all sorts of different ways. My question is this...why do we think it'll be ET or Alf on the other line? Not only does our shameless search for cosmic companionship seem desperate, but it's dangerous too. Who's to say it won't be Predator or Alien, or something even worse, just waiting for an opportunity to invade? If history has taught us anything, it's that resources are finite, and anytime a group with sophisticated technology comes into contact with another possessing less advanced technology, the lesser group is exploited, and often eliminated. Homo Sapiens drove Neandertals to extinction this way. Colonialists exploited Native Americans similarly. The list is endless. What makes our case more extreme is that we are carelessly and actively yelling to the universe, here we are, come and get us! And believe me, nuclear weapons or not, anything possessing technology advanced enough to receive our cosmic messages and find it's way to our planet, has the capability to kick our ass with relative ease. So, maybe we should shut up a minute, eh!?!

I don't mean to sound paranoid. I'm an eager proponent of cosmic exploration. We should go out and explore all we can, but we should do it for our own good and on our own terms, and not get into anything we can't handle just yet. That's why I like NASA's Voyager approach, when it launched unmanned Voyager I and II spacecraft to the outer planets, and then up and out of the known solar system. Today, after flying through space at 40,000 km/h for almost three decades, the Voyager spacecraft are 2 of the most distant* human objects in outer space. With their main mission of planetary exploration successfully completed, they now serve as humanity's ultimate message in a bottle, each carrying a pictographic plate describing us and where we're from, as well as a gold plated record of sounds from earth, complete with encoded instructions on how to get it to play. The message works. Just enough detail to tell our story, but vague enough so that they probably couldn't track us down, because who really wants a long distance relationship anyway?

If I could change one thing about the pictograph though, it would be this...notice that the humans are drawn in front of a representation of the voyager spacecraft's dish, in order to give whoever receives the message a sense of scale. A bit too honest, no? Isn't it customary to embellish a bit? It's not like they'll come and check, and even if they do travel all that way just to meet us, you'd think their feelings would be based on more than looks. Eitherway, never underestime the power of intimidation! They'd be far less likely to mess with us if they though we were giants...or at the very least, better hung! I mean c'mon, the tiny genitals are just embarrassing, gees! Aside from that, the plate is perfect. As for the gold-plated record, WOW, I tell ya, any alien that successfully assembles a record-player from those crazy instuctions can probe me anytime!

*NASA launched Pioneers 10 and 11 a few years before the Voyagers. The Pioneer spacecraft travelled to Jupiter and Saturn then off into outer space, while collectively, the Voyagers travelled to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, before leaving the planetary plain.

Man's best friend indeed!?!

Ever since their domestication, dogs have been there for us. They've captured our hearts with everything from heroic feats of crotch sniffing and disposal of our table scraps, to more practical everyday acts of self-sacrifice, like diving onto live grenades to spare the lives of their human comrades, or saving us from starvation when we find ourselves floating in the Arctic on a patch of ice that broke off from the mainland, waiting to be rescued. Clearly and deservedly, dogs are man's best friends (insert theme from "Psycho" here)...or are they?!?

Lately, there's been a surge of media attention focused on vicious, often unprovoked dog attacks on humans. So much so, that the Ontario government has followed other jurisdictions in passing a bill banning pitbulls. I'm not sure where exactly I stand on this issue just yet. I am not a dog owner, and I do get upset over news of another mauling, but I've also been around all sorts of dogs my whole life, from playing with a friend’s pet to volunteering at a dog shelter. I've seen the good and the bad, so maybe for once I can present an objective, unbiased case, as has always been my intention. Although, I'm pretty sure that by the time I'm done writing this post, I'd have formed a strong opinion favouring one extreme over the other. There's just something about putting arguments in writing, that angries up the blood!

I've had my share of run-ins with aggressive pooches. I had a paper-route once, and there was never any shortage of feisty little pricks desperately trying to justify their existence by rushing to the door barking their brains out at me. Look, princess, they clip your toe nails and make you wear a sweater…you’re a pet, NOT a guard dog, ok, and believe me there’s a difference! Once, on my way home from biking along nearby country roads, and hopping into an adjacent golf courses to play a round of back 9, on the house of course, I found myself unable to recover my bike stashed away in the woods. It was dark by then, and the woodlot surrounded by doberman pinschers (pictured). They didn’t belong to the golf club, but rather a neighbouring property in the middle of nowhere. Picture a house from hell, junk cars all over the lot, not another house for half a mile, and a pack of guard dogs running around unrestrained. This may be an everyday site in the back country, but it wasn't this close to a metropolis. My only option was to walk back onto the golf course, without my bike, and make a run for it. After a quick dash, I thought I'd made it out ok, but then felt the need to go back and get my bike. Home was a long walk, but as soon as I looked back, I noticed one of the dogs in full sprint towards me, so I ran again. He was gaining fast, so I stopped to face him, thinking about ringing his neck or giving him a Chuck Norris-like roundhouse kick to the head. I quickly abandoned that thought at the site of 3 more dogs emerging from the darkness. I owe my salvation to a diagonal leap across a drainage canal running parallel to the golf course and the road. It could be that the dogs either couldn’t match my gazelle-like athleticism, or that their jurisdictional authority didn’t extend past the ditch. Whatever the case, I wasn’t gonna let them win, and returned later that night to retrieve my bike, this time armed with a fine piece of German engineering…my dad’s 1986, 4-door, Audi 5000. I parked it on the road, engine running, ran into the woodlot, got the bike and wedged it into the trunk, just far enough to be able to drive off from there, and secure it later. As I sat back behind the wheel, I noticed the dogs were mere steps from the front of the car, with blood thirsty looks. I revved the engine, and they reluctantly cleared a path, and I was on my way. What became of those dogs, I am not sure, but the house has since been bulldozed to make way for cookie-cutter suburbia.

What's odd about the whole thing is that at no point during the entire encounter did I feel scared. Only adrenaline, excitement, whatever...but no fear. Was I just too young and dumb to realize the potential seriousness of the situation had they caught me? Perhaps. Or maybe it was the fact that dog maulings weren't in the media spotlight at that time. Now, looking back at my encounter, I realize I could have been torn to pieces and with no help in sight, some golfer would have found me the next day as he positioned himself for his 9th shot on a par 4. At least by comparison, he'd be having a good day. Now thinking about being torn to pieces, I become…afraid…very afraid…because the media says I should, and now the law says so too. I can't be around dogs anymore, and although not scarred physically, I've been so emotionally...pfff, whatever! I like dogs just fine, and that incident has not changed that for the worse at all. It's not the dogs' fault, it's the crazy and careless owners that train dogs to hate. And should you be one of those folks that fears dogs to an unreasonable degree due to some isolated incident from the past, my advice to you is, you obviously got away, so get over it! If that doesn’t help calm you, then maybe this will. Dr. Dubernard of France recently performed a successful partial face transplant on a woman severely disfigured by a dog attack. If your fear of dog attacks is more related to loss of function rather than aesthetics, scientists at the University of Tsukuba, Japan can offer you HAL. Hybrid Assistive Limb is a robotic suit that when worn, can assist weak or disabled individuals with walking, lifting and many common, labour-intensive tasks. So as you can see, should your dog encounter turn ugly, science has a variety of ways to "help"you...each leaving you looking even odder that the dog attack itself would.

In closing, the law should focus on dog owners/breeders that train their animals to hurt and hate...that’s the root of the problem. As for all the good dog owners out there, God bless you all, you lovable shit-picker-uppers, for keeping your dogs in check and our streets and parks crap free.

The New King of Pi

Back in high-school I had this calculus class, and although I was always savvy with math and numbers, calculus disinterested me to a degree that can only be expressed as 10 to the power of 1000. Whether it was the anal prof, an almost total lack of hot girls in that class (there were a few exceptions), or the fact that I foresaw no real practical application to calculus outside the classroom...what the point of derivatives is, I will never know...who can say? What bothered me though is, there were a few people in that class that I considered not particularly bright, yet they'd get better test scores simply because they sacrificed every night of their lives to study. When they'd flaunt their grades, I'd defend my own intelligence with mathematical trivia. My go-to play was reciting Pi to the 10th decimal place..."3.1415926535" I'd say, and watch them scurry off to their calculators for confirmation, knowing full well that even their calculators would fall a few digits short due to their limited screen size, thus making my triumph that much sweeter.

Pointless and petty you say? Perhaps. But, before you judge me, consider this: a few days ago at the 2006 Mindsports Australia Festival in Sydney, Chris Lyons, 36, won acclaims for reciting Pi to 4,400 digits without an error, smashing my old self-professed, unsubstantiated record by a whopping 4,389 digits! You see, this kind of pointless crap goes on all the time in mathematics under the disguise of "research". I've already explained about calculus, but there are others. Recently researchers at a Missouri university identified the largest known prime number, by programming 700 computers years ago to get the result. The number is apparently 9.1 million digits long. A prime number by the way is any positive number divisible only by 1 and itself. So, who cares? Those computers could have been put to better use, if not for real scientific reasearch, then as supplies for underfunded schools, libraries, and homeless shelters full of folks who cannot afford to surf for porn on their own budgets.

Back to Pi. I wonder who the real king of Pi recitation is? A quick internet search will yield claims as high as 83,431 digits, by Akira Haraguchi, but the sentimental favourite has got to be Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, who has stated under oath that he can recite Pi to some 40,000 places. Well in light of this substantiating evidence, I think we have our new Pi King! Still, worthy of acknowledgement is the most obvious disadvantage Apu had to overcome...just imagine how many more digits he could cram into his brain if he could just free up all that memory wasted on the spelling of his own last name? So, anyway, as far as I know I'm currently ranked 4th in the World Pi Recitation rankings, behind Akira, Apu and Chris, with 10 decimal points, but still ahead of those knowing only as far as 3.14, which is a 6-billion-way tie for 5th place.