In the event that we should become multi-millionaires in the future, we want to make sure we know what we’re going to do with the money.  The following is an ongoing list of major things on our list:

Establish a Commune

And by commune, you have to understand my interpretation of the word.  The usual ideas just don’t cut it – my idea of a modern commune is little more than a community of friends living in close proximity, each generally having some arcane talent.  Other than that, everybody maintains their own job.  The added benefit is that you have a community of actual friends in close proximity to help with things.  Think about some of these nicer neighborhoods going up that include parks and community facilities like a club house or picnic area.  That’s where the millions of dollars come in – someone has to pony up the money to put it together.

Establish an Olde World Arts and Crafts Guild

Look into America’s early years after the Declaration of Independence.  As was popular in Europe, guilds popped up all over the place.  Funny thing was, they never seemed to last.  The guilds cranked out some epic-level work, but rarely made the profit needed to keep the their doors open.  The Industrial Revolution was what put them out completely.  Mechanized art, while not for the purists, was the way of the future and a clear winner in the end.  Revival after revival, it was only when the the passion was washed out by insufficient funds that the guilds closed their doors.  An arts and crafts guild would work today, but only if I could poor money into it endlessly.

Create an Elderly Care Facility that Cares

Most elderly care facilities – the ones that the average senior citizen could afford – are clever facades on the same old song and dance.  There are too many horror stories to count as you look across the gamut and research their “customer appreciation.”  A big reason for this is funding.  The hired help is majority volunteer, public service workers, or minimum wage.  When you’re not paying well, it’s hard to attract good help, but that’s just what you need.

My wife is the one with real passion for this one.  She would love to pour many into a retirement home that is treated more like a spa than assisted living.  It would have to be a non-profit venture with backing.  The key is to rally support within the area communities, government, and of course, mad money.

Build the Lake Lanier Boardwalk District

How cool would it be to have a boardwalk district on Lake Lanier?  I envision long wooden decking, boat slips, a beach, and fantastic night life and retail shopping.  There should be bars with karaoke, an outdoor stage, a gallery, and much more.  Normally, this kind of thing wouldn’t need so much money to keep it up, but I think I’d have to pay off the Corps. of Engineers a hefty sum to allow it!

Create a Seafood/Freshwater Fish Restaurant on the Lake

Along with that whole boardwalk idea, you have to have some big foundations.  I purpose a fish restaurant out on the water.  It would be awesome to have its center piece being a large circle of the lake with underwater lights and sub-level glass for viewing.  Above that, have two to three stories encircling the “aquarium” for diners to look down upon.  There is some real opportunity to make a case for the environmental concerns surrounding the lake in a venue like this.

Build an Irish Pub

Another permanent resident of the boardwalk should be a good old-fashioned Irish pub.  If you know of McGuire’s in Pensacola, then your thinking along the same lines.  Good food (or bad, but traditional!) and drinks.  These relics of America’s past have always been places of fun and festivity.

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Prof Sato says animals heavier than 40kg would not be able to flap fast enough to stay aloft. This would explain why the wandering albatross weighs only 22 kg (46lbs).

I don’t think that Sato’s 40kg hypothesis is the reason the albatross weighs 22kg. I doubt Sato was consulted on the matter of albatross evolution when it came to weight considerations.

It’s just a wild scientific hypothesis, but it irritates me for some reason. Perhaps because the pterodactyl has always been somewhat of a hero to me – it’s the biggest creature ever to have ruled the skies and the idea of it amazes and frightens me simultaneously. Don’t go messing with my heroes, it’s just not cool!

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I have noticed over the past several years that home-schooling seems to have risen in popularity. Initially, I was impressed at the number of people involved in the home school method. I later learned that many of these home school students actually get together on some routine frequency to develop socially, as well as to share the responsibility of teaching across multiple parents. I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing this is a bit of a regression. Didn’t school systems start this way? Finally,there seemed to be an ulterior motive to home schooling. There have been a rash of parent vs. government cases over the last decade regarding the use of faith-based programs in school systems. Of late, Darwinian Evolution and Intelligent Design are the major contention points. Home schooling seems to be the concerned parents’ answer. A parent that disagrees with the educational system – perhaps also disagreeing with private systems, or unable to afford them – can pull their child back into the home where teaching is at the discretion of the family. From a Little House on the Prairie ideal, this seems like a charming social shift in America. However, I see it as a disaster for our future. If children are taught through home school primarily to reinforce religious perspectives on science, then our legacy’s potential for critical thinking is severely limited. The views of the parents will extend through to their children, and while not obviously as detrimental as racism, will inevitably give rise to ostracism.

See: Twin Cities Creation Science Association Sponsors Home School Science Fair

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I originally got into blogging because it was a spreading phenomenon that involved technologies I knew and loved. As secondary incentives; I have always enjoyed writing, it’s a great creative outlet for web development and design, and blogging may very well give my descendants a familial history that will not otherwise be recorded in any books. A personal Wikipedia, if you will.

So here I am, more than three years later, assessing my blogging passions.

Of particular importance is my interest in a legacy. I am passionate about telling my story. Above all else, I trust that my musings will pass along a message that I cannot reach into my own ancestry for. That message will be a referential perspective to those in need of familial comfort. If we are to know the answer to life, the universe, and everything, we are to know our history.

It won’t be elegant nor abundantly enlightening, but the importance of having these recorded scraps of memory will one day prove to be some of the most cherished objects of a future generation. My own son will grow up in a revolutionary time when his every move is captured in startling fidelity – he will undoubtedly take for granted the provisions I aim to establish. But in his times of personal discovery, he will be able to look back on his own thoughts in perfect clarity; as well as those of his father. Perhaps he will see it. Perhaps it will be his children, or his children’s children…the estate of the future is a collection of intellectual capital, and there can be no greater treasure than knowledge.

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You see, the folks at Read/Write Web are right. The Search is “game-over.” Google has won. But there is still a search for the Google-killer.  Problem is, everybody is going after the wrong features. from Read/Write Web: From Search to (Re)Search…

• Cool new features – user interface, alerts, visualization or whatever. The problem is that no single feature is enough for users to switch from Google and most people don’t have the time or motivation to use multiple search engines.
• Natural Language. There is big money riding on this one. It feels wrong to me. This is too much heavy science to crack problems that are totally simple for humans; and Web 2.0 is getting pretty good at aggregating the expanding global pool of knowledge workers.
• Vertical Search and Human Search. I put the two together. Human Search works best in well-defined domains. There are lots of Vertical Search engines that already work well and plenty more will come.

The article cites some good ideas for what this mythical Web 2.0 app should be, but that’s where my idea diverges.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of “concept searching” in my mind as of late. The problem with today’s search engines is that they’re still related strictly to my search terms. The problem is exposed when I need to do a search for terms that may not appear exactly as I type them, but together form more of a characteristic or conceptual pattern of something else. For instance, if I search for red, orange, and yellow, I will get a wide diversity of sites which have these words prominently displayed in HTML content. But maybe what I’m really after is artistic impressions of warm color use. Or perhaps I’m looking for images of fire…

The point is, the terms I specified are related in ways beyond just their placement on a web site. Flickr does a very nice job of demonstrating the power of tagging, categorizing, and respectively searching. By combining definitions of the words we’re searching for, they’re able to build what are called “clusters.” Clusters are groups of tags that seem related and Flickr allows you to pick a cluster to further identify the concept you’re searching on. It’s not perfect yet, but it demonstrates my point very well.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/red/clusters/:

This is the next revolution in search engines. It’s a combination of Natural Language and research search types. By analyzing the words’ meanings and allowing the user to refine their particular definition, Conceptual Searching can be made possible.

*UPDATE:
I haven’t read into this much yet, but it looks like Microsoft is already entering into discussions based upon what I’ve said. I like to think they’re reading my blog and getting their best innovations here!

Microsoft Research

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A reader in Taiwan, Danny Bee, left a comment on an article I wrote (“Emily Yoffe Learns The Secret“). I had first assumed that the comment was spam, though the suspect spam did not follow my preconceived notions of spam. It had no sales pitch, no links, and no inappropriate words. However, it didn’t exactly fit the article on which it was submitted:

Yoffe captures my concerns about the modern inception of philosophical teachings. Not by coming out and saying it, but by a simple inference from her experiences. I’ll remind my readers that I’m not bashing these teachings, only the glossy cover and Cliff’s Notes by which so many establish their adoption.

…and Mr. Bee’s response:

Polar cities in the far distant future to house remnants of humankind
who survive the apocalypse of devastating global warming? The casual
reader might think I am an alarmist or a mere scare-monger, but I am
neither. I am a visionary.

So like a good blogger, I engaged Danny in some email communications (to verify he was a real person) and tossed out the idea that I write something up on my opinion of his comment. I did check into Polar Cities a bit. Wikipedia has a very brief explanation of them.

Polar cities are proposed sustainable polar retreats designed to house human beings in the future, in the event that global warming causes the central and middle regions of the Earth to become uninhabitable for a long period of time. Although they have not been built yet, some futurists have been giving considerable thought to the concepts involved.

High-population-density cities, to be built near the Arctic Rim with sustainable energy and transportation infrastructure, will require substantial nearby agriculture. Boreal soils are largely poor in key nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, but nitrogen-fixing plants (such as thevarious alders) with the proper symbiotic microbes and mycorrhizal fungi can likely remedy such poverty without the need for petroleum-derived fertilizers. Regional probiotic soil improvement should perhaps rank high on any polar cities priority list. James Lovelock’s notion of a widely distributed almanac of science knowledge and post-industrial survival skills also appears to have value.

As Danny says it, he’s not an alarmist nor a scare-monger, just a visionary. He didn’t rule out cuckoo, though to be fair, zealous may be more apt.

The idea of Polar Cities is in response to doomsday concepts from global warming. Should the ecosystem collapse as a result of a massive build-up of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, then this idea has only rhetorical value. As for the development and planning of Polar Cities for this foreseen eventuality, I think it either a bad plan or at least very pessimistic.

The estimated surface area of our polar land masses seems pretty high – almost 30 million km². Our population is over 6.7 billion at the moment. If you do the math on just those numbers, you get population density of around 224 persons/km². But I think that argument is far too simple. If we assume that 3/4 of the earth’s population dies due to the volatility of the environment, you’re left with 1.675 billion people looking for ocean-front property. I was also being nice by saying that we had nearly 30 million square kilometers of land mass between our two polar regions. If you look at what happens after the ice sheets melt, land rises from a release in pressure, and volcanoes blow, you’re looking at a lot less inhabitable land after all. I’ll cut it in half to 15 million km² because I’m skeptical about our building too close to volcanoes, fault lines, and other natural disasters. I also have to account for the plethora of lake and rivers that would undoubtedly remain on Antarctica – not to mention its steep mountain sides and craggy peaks. Now you’re looking at a population density of around 112 persons per square kilometer. That’s actually not that bad. There are far worse places in the world as far as population density goes.

Now that we have a workable number of people, we can start analyzing what this new homestead would be like.

I imagine a world metropolis at each pole (technically, the Arctic surrounds the pole). All nations and all diversity of people have centralized in two locations of the planet. The central lands of Earth have become desolate and hostile. You can venture out onto them, but survivability is contingent upon resources and exposure. The populations live in high-rise hotels methodically placed in a grid over the available land masses. The fringe area of decent land would be more barren of people than the central, cooler parts. Unfortunately, most people would need to be in Antarctica because of its concentration of land at the pole. Each hotel would be surrounded by land necessary to grow food and raise livestock. Everyone in the square kilometer living unit would be required to do their share of work to earn their food and living quarters. I’m not entirely sure how waste would be dealt with – perhaps pumping it into magma faults would suffice, but it may also be problematic in maintaining such a system. A refinery would probably take up too much valuable land area.

There would certainly be a militant government in place at both polar regions. I doubt anything more than a form of Feudalism would be adopted. With so many different people from different backgrounds, humans would probably resort to brute strength. With anarchy-like crime abound and tough living conditions, citizens would surely profess an allegiance to a “king” for support.

A glimpse into what living in Polar Cities might be like seems more like a good idea for a Science Fiction novel than any reality we should plan for. I can almost see an adaptation of “Firefly” applying to Earth’s new living conditions. While interesting to contemplate, I think time is better spent learning what exactly is happening to the environment, and reducing our adverse impact to it. Then again, if the environmental changes are a natural evolution in planetary cycle, then we humans are going to go through some hard times. I don’t think Darwin’s theory of natural selection comes without its pain. A species must suffer untold losses to survive with its fittest.

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The bright side is that there are schools out there that cater to exactly this kind of thinking. In fact, even in my [nearly] local district changes have been implemented to allow for various focuses to receive extra attention and guidance. There are a host of specialized school systems such as the Progressive systems; Magnet, Montessori, or the diverse array of private schools. While not available to everyone, they at least stand as practical examples of the application of non-standard or non-traditional educational means.

TED.com: “Do schools kill creativity?”

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Every sperm is sacred,
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate
– The Meaning of Life, Monty Python

It was an Alaskan cousin that first introduced me to this newsworthy little tidbit while vacationing on the sandy, white beaches of Pensacola Beach, Florida. The topic piqued my interests, so I went right to the source on the communiqué. What the Vatican had to say about it was spread over many a scrollbar’s length upon my millions of light-emitting liquid crystals.

For the past couple of decades or so, the Vatican has been mulling over the question of unbaptized babies’ fates. Back in the day, and I mean waay back in the day, Augustine conveyed in a not-so vague way that unbaptized infants go to Hell.

We do not pray for those who are damned.

However, in the 12th century the Pope accepted limbo as being a good place to put unbaptized babies. There, they would be without pain.

They did not deserve Paradise therefore they did not have happiness either

As recently as 1992, the Catechism of the Catholic Church is referenced as a position for the possibility of hope for the world’s pagan babies.

with regard to children who die without having received Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God

Additional references from the Bible show further suspicions of an omnipotence that supersedes our own pettiness.

Let the children come to me, do not hinder them [Mk 10:14]

With historical debates waging almost two millennium, it was high time that this tirade come to an end.

Our conclusion is that the many factors that we have considered above give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptised infants who die will be saved and enjoy the Beatific Vision. We emphasise that these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge.

Okay…so it’s not exactly as clearcut as my fantastic vision of a golden school bus loaded with gilded car seats and babies all headed to the Pearly Gates. They must have installed a massive day care facility. It may very well be a particular kind of Hell for some. But it stands to reason that even more important than the meager position of hope for babies is the Catholic Church’s updates to the Catechism for the times. A natural, albeit doubtful prospect for the future evolution of this doctrine is the inclusion of other modern day paradoxes to Catholicism such as gay marriage and heathen salvation. Stranger things have certainly happened, but is this the latest sign that the Catholic Church is changing to a newer, hipper reflection of itself?

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Article on the same: Nature.com

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