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What's It About, this "A Reluctant God?"

Check out the new "book" website . (That's areluctantgod.blogspot.com) for a summary.  Find out if it's your kind of fiction. And if it is, you can get your very own here . Go on, give it a shot. scooter

WORLD WITHOUT WORK

Lots of Infrastructure Recommendations This morning's (July 22, 2014) the Washington Post has another thought piece on one of my fav topics, When the Robots Do All the Work, What Will We Humans Do?  Check it out here. Naturally I responded with: One point: Infrastructure work, even with the best computer guided gear, still takes many folks. Bury all power and communications lines, upgrade every sewage system to recycle water, rebuild the roads for robocars/trucks, build the space beanstalks, thin and control burn the forests, pipe water from floods to drylands and recharge the aquifers, train a corps of nutrition teachers, make school more compelling - fun even… Oh there's plenty of work to do with our hands and our minds. BUT I go a lot further in me new book A Reluctant god.  Look for 99% of the population living in "The Dream Game," where work is fun, learning is inevitable, creativity is its own reward, and warfare saves our welfare (butts). C...

DUFF'S NEW BOOK

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HERE WE GO! I'm sure you have been wondering whether I died or took vows of silence or forgot how to type… being that this is the first post on this venerable blog since last September. But NO… I've been finishing up a sci-fi novel.  To wit: It's an optimistic look at humanity's future.  OK, I do start by wiping out 99.999% of the population, but after that, it's all uphill. NOTES:  When the final cover comes out of the hash, the "G" will be "g," not to get all theological. The book is available on Amazon.com and Smashwords.com It has its own blog, of course.  The first post is the story of this cover.  Give it a shot here .

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN REDS

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MESSING US UP BIG TIME OK, I'm not all that happy with the Republicans in general. BUT this 'shut down the government' crap because you can't get enough Repubs elected to change the laws the lawful way, is too much. One little, insignificant anecdote:  Dorothy and I have been planning our vacation to the Grand Canyon north rim for over a year.  We arrive on the 1st of October.  If the government shuts down we will be shut out, lose our deposits and be deeply disappointed and angry. We are white, kind of old and once in a while we've voted for a Republican. Until they get their heads screwed back on right, no more.

Grumpy Old Men

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"I've Earned The Right To Be Angry" That was the title of an op-ed in my local daily paper, The Albuquerque Journal.  Back in November, 2012 a guy quoted a bunch of Fox News positions, claimed they were his and got all self-righteous about it.  Part of his babble was that he was an older white guy.  I decided not to reproduce his op-ed here because I don't want that kind of slop on my oh-so-neat blog.  But you can get the drift by my responses. WELL, the honor of  OWGs was on the line, so naturally I whipped out a rebuttal and sent it to the Journal.  A week went by and I was told my letter would be published.  Lo and behold, seven letters from Angry Olds were published, a whole page Op-Ed titled, "Mad as Heck, But at Whom?"  I and six others, not all white or guys BTW, piled on this Fox-ite.  I have to say I was proud of my demographic.  Here's my letter:  (click it for readable size) I hope you don't ...

Desalination Fail (PR wise)

Dang! I've expressed great enthusiasm for desalination as one of the technological end runs we might make on water fickle Mother Nature. YaleGlobal Online (yep, published by Yale) takes a pretty hard anti-desalination position with: Desalination is not a solution to freshwater shortages being reported by many dry regions around the globe, including many sections of the United States. Adam Scow of Food & Water Watch argues that conservation of water is the better strategy and notes that “the technology is being pushed by private interests looking to profit from the sale of water while sticking the public with its high financial and environmental costs.” Desalination has high energy costs, and the leftover salt is a pollutant. He explains that about 80 percent of California’s water, for example, is used for agriculture purposes. Farmers could plan for efficient water use by using more care in selecting crops appropriate for their region’s climate and ecology. The United S...

Defund Wall Street

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Every Little Bit.. . So I got so upset with the banks after the BushCrash that m'Wife and I moved our money from Wells Fargo and BofA to a local credit union (spoiler alert: another post on co-ops of all kinds is coming).  I was so miffed at the banks I even adopted "banksters" as a new perjorative. Granted, my bottom-99% funds will not even tickle the banksters, much less give them a stabbing pain. BUT... every little bit one can do just might do some good.  Every time we repair-reuse-repurpose and recycle we do a tiny little bit. So good old Steven Pearlstein   writes in the Washington Post, "Occupy Wall Street? Just defund it." And it's all about moving your money from wall street to co-ops.  My credit union - yours too, if you have one - is a co-op.  Owned by its customers, as opposed to Wall Street FatCats. And there are all sorts of co-ops out there, just look at this and this . We shop at grower-owned Farmers' Markets, too. O...

GREAT Election Graphics

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The Red/Blue States Map Now Makes Sense You know I'm a Good-Graphics-Make-Good-Communications nut ? This is NOT a good graphic.... ...because it looks like Red States win! And we all know what really happened. So map genius  Mark Newman , using programs he co-invented modified each state to reflect how many electoral College votes it has to come up with this wonder.... Lotsa votes = bigger state on the map. Voila!   Now you see why the blue states called the election. There are lots of other great maps of this ilk on Dr. Newman's site .  Check it out.  Then ask your favorite TV news source why you haven't seen this kind of graphic.

Great Book

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Improve Your Attitude About Everything I  have assigned this book to "transformative" in my personal rating system.  In his recently adopted "dual track" evolutionary idea, E.O. Wilson explains everything.  At least he explains such as why one guy is a hard nosed Republican, another a softy Democrat.  And why there is such intractable polarization.  And so much more.  That's why I say "improve your attitude."  There might be a bit much ant lore in the middle of the book for some folks, but I liked even that.  After all Wilson is a world renowned ant guy too.   He's prolific, original and a fine writer.  This book pulls you along like good narrative fiction, but its ideas are pure science. It goes to my fixation that evolution explains pretty much everything about everything alive.   Strongly recommended.

SCIENCE MARCHES ON - FASTER and FASTER

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The HUGE Three If you're just sit around picking your toes -- or listening to right-wing radio - you might think nothing is happening in scientific progress.   Truth is (ah, truth, facts, actualities!), there is an astonishing acceleration in new discoveries, breakthroughs and invention.  I've picked my fav three, and they are so big I call 'em HUGE. These are going to affect us all.  Big time.  But take any random sample of the population of us U.S.-ers, and you will find darn few aware of even one of them, much less all three.  Why is that?  Simple.  The less simple, the less likely the 'mainstream media' is to cover it.  Methinks: Pix credit:  Duffer's flying pencil [Thus my snide comment about right-wing talk radio, home base for simplistic.  "Nuanced" is their word for anything smacking of complexity.  The huge, complex set of information that spells out "global warming" becomes a "hoax." (Interpretati...

BIG SPACE NEWS

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Never mind the Higgs Boson, the really BIG science news is our growing ability to “see” invisible dark matter. Check this out: My fav science-for-laymen magazine ScienceNews has the article about seeing a huge filament of dark matter connecting two galaxies. SN has been all over this story for a while. This kind of news plucks my awe twanger.  I love it. Pix credit:  July 8, 2012 ScienceNews

READ THIS BOOK, TOO

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Jim Ramsburg and I worked together in L.A. at KLAC in the deep, dark '60s. He was a whiz kid then and is a whiz olde farte now.  If you were conscious during the '30s, '40s and/or the '50s, you will find yourself riding Dorothy's tornado down Alice's rabbit hole of memory and nostalgia reading his book. If you are student looking for a great media paper, there is endless potentially plagiarisable stuff. If the ratings biz interests you, this will be fascinating. Plus there are a bunch of great stories.  You will grin, giggle and grimace.    Gotta get it!  Do the Amazon boogie. [Check out Jim's web site at http://www.jimramsburg.com/]