Creativity Resources

I just read this quote from Russia’s foreign minister:

One can forget about any talk about Georgia’s territorial integrity because, I believe, it is impossible to persuade South Ossetia and Abkhazia to agree with the logic that they can be forced back into the Georgian state

But apparently Chechnya can be forced to be a part of Russia. It is mind-boggling how hypocritical and abusive the Russians can be with parts of the former Soviet Empire.

If this keeps up, the United States will have two major gold repositories: Fort Knox, and Michael Phelps’ living room.

CNN.com has a great article today about how automated systems can sometimes do things you don’t expect. Their first case-in-point: a piece of Yahoo! software called Yahoo Shortcuts, which is responsible for the automatic links you sometimes see in news stories and such on the Yahoo! family of sites. The software parses the text on the page looking for phrases that it should use as links using a set of algorithms that include current events and popular search terms from the Yahoo! search engine.

In the case of a news article several months ago about the Eliot Spitzer scandal, though, the system chose the phrase “underage girls” to use as a link because of its popularity as a search term. And it linked to a set of photos on Flickr that also used “underage girls” as a keyword or tag. Oops.

Software that follows a set of hard rules (which is the case for most software these days) will never be able to prevent all incidents like this. Until the advent of applications that can understand the text on the page, instead of just parsing it and looking for key words and phrases, people better get used to seeing problems like this. (Hopefully the Google ads on this site don’t pull up any ads related to Eliot Spitzer or underage girls!).

So much for transparency in government.

On Monday night, I set my recycling out, like I always do when it’s full and time to be picked up. They usually come pretty early Tuesday morning, so I have to put it out Monday night because they may already be past me by the time I get up on Tuesday.

The last couple of times I’ve put it out, though, they’ve been a little bit later in picking it up, and the bin was still there, waiting, on Tuesday morning when I left the house. And the last couple of times, I’ve noticed that all of the aluminum that I put into the bin was gone by Tuesday morning. It looks like somebody is going around the neighborhood on Monday nights, before the recycling guys come around, and cleaning all of the aluminum out of people’s recycle bins.

Part of me feels like I should be upset about this, but I’m not sure why. All of my goals are still being me. All of my aluminum waste is being recycled, even if its not through the means I planned. Should I be upset that somebody is taking the aluminum out of my recycle bin? Are they really stealing, if it’s set out as trash?

I guess, in a way, they are stealing, but not from me. They’re stealing from Allied Waste, who would otherwise be recycling (and presumably making some money) from that aluminum. But the aluminum is still being recycled, and it does me no harm either way. So why should I be upset? Is it a matter of principle?

Maybe I should bypass the whole argument and start separating out my aluminum. Then, instead of putting it with my recycling on Monday nights, I should take it to a recycling center or scrap yard myself and get some money for it.

Then again, I’m pretty lazy, so I’ll probably just let whoever is stealing from Allied Waste keep doing so.

On my way home after jogging last night, I saw a sign in somebody’s front yard that said, “War is NOT the Answer.” And I immediately thought, “Doesn’t that depend on what the question is?”

There are some who would argue that war is never a good thing, and that I will happily agree with. But there are also those who would argue that war is never a necessary thing and should be avoided at all costs. That is something with which I cannot agree. War is sometimes a necessary evil, and to those who would argue otherwise I ask, what would you have done on December 8, 1941? Would you have said to the Japanese, “Hey, don’t do that!” and just gone about your business? On the day before, we were attacked without provocation by another nation’s military forces resulting in the loss of thousands of American lives. It was obvious that the Japanese were intent to go to war with us. Should we not have defended ourselves?

And if you answer yes, then you have said that war is sometimes necessary, that war is sometimes the answer.

But let’s go a step further. Germany did not attack us, but we went to war in Europe then, too. Should we have left our allies to themselves and not gotten involved? Should we have let Hitler enact his “final solution” with no American resistance? Should we have turned a blind eye to attrocities and said that, no, war is not the answer? I, for one, am proud of the sacrifices made by those in my grandparents’ generation, those who went off to war and risked their lives to help others.

Two hundred thirty-two years ago, a group of people held a meeting to discuss their options and discovered that, for them and at that time, war was the answer. The didn’t want to fight, but they saw no choice. And they risked their lives to attain freedoms that the repressive King refused to give them, liberties that they considered essential. If you would argue that war is never the answer, then you must agree that no freedoms are worth the price in blood spent to secure them. You must apparently argue that slavery and serfdom are preferable to bloodshed. Benjamin Franklin once said, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Fortunately for all of us, our forefathers agreed with Ben.

So war, then, sometimes is the answer. War, sometimes, is necessary. The current wars in the Middle East? Not so much, although I think something should have been done about Saddam Hussein a long time ago… the world should not have sat idly by while he used chemical weapons on his own people. But fighting to secure an American Empire, a pax Americana, by securing Middle Eastern oil fields? In the case of this question, war is not the answer.

Yay! My favorite city, Indianapolis, will be host of the 2012 Super Bowl! I may have to start saving for tickets. Not that I think my Colts will be in it, because they’re already getting a little old in some positions. But it would still be pretty cool to go to the Super Bowl. Even if I don’t go to the game, I’ll have to attend the festivities around downtown.

Assuming, of course, that they actually have a 2011 season and a 2012 Super Bowl. Since the owners opted out of the collective bargaining agreement, the 2011 season could be in serious jeopardy. Hopefully a bunch of millionnaire players and billionnaire owners aren’t so greedy as to make the rest of us ordinary folks miss out on another great NFL season. But who can say?