Old Cars

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People are like cars – when we get old we start to break down. Here are ten ways that our aging bodies resemble old cars:

  1. They require increased maintenance and replacement parts.
  2. Their speed and carrying capacity is diminished.
  3. The valves and seals begin to leak.
  4. Some of their parts no longer function.
  5. The exterior is dull and dated.
  6. Businesses replace them with the newer generation.
  7. They are not compatible with modern electronic devices.
  8. They emit strange noises and odors.
  9. They won’t attract any potential mates.
  10. Their last years are spent decaying near others of their kind.

Animal Value

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When the last whale washes up on shore,
When the last elephant is poached for its tusks,
When the last eagle flies over the last crumbling mountain,
We will mourn.

But who will mourn the snail, the spider, the mouse?
The mole, the gnat, the tick, the grouse?
The fly on our windshield, the ant beneath our feet?
Or the swarms of rodents infesting our streets?

People hold many different views on the role and value of animals in our society, but one thing that they all agree on, whether they would admit it or not, is that some animals are more valuable than others.

Every species has a value, and that value is based its intelligence, size and majesty. We will now look at each of these features in order to better understand how to rank an animal’s value. Let’s start with the least important feature, intelligence.

When animals show intelligence, we see something of ourselves in them, and a kinship is created. When we watch a raven solve a puzzle, a dolphin swim along side a vessel or a dog wag its tail with glee, we can’t help but project our emotions onto those creatures and treat them as a fellow member of the elite league of intelligent creatures. Conversely, when we watch an animal do something stupid, like when a bird flies in front of a car, a fish jumps out of its aquarium or an insect flies into our mouth, we can’t help but feel estranged from such creatures. We just can’t imagine what, if anything, they were thinking, and so we treat them with disdain.

Because humans are both the most important and the most intelligent animal, we might think that intelligence is the most important feature, but there are many animals that show high intelligence that are not valued very highly, most notably pigeons and rats.

The second most important feature is size. When an animal is small, we tend not to care about it. When was the last time we shed a tear for a bee or a louse? It can’t be a coincidence that all of the creatures adored by animal activists are relatively large. As an example, if we were to rank the importance of a rabbit, a snail, a cow, a whale and a salamander, the result would be as follows:

  1. Whale
  2. Cow
  3. Rabbit
  4. Salamanter
  5. Snail

The reason why size is important is not exactly clear. Part of the reason could be that we cannot relate to tiny creatures because we cannot easily see them, which makes it difficult to understand them and observe their complexities. Another reason could be that smaller animals tend to exist in large numbers, which makes them seem expendable. It could also be that small creatures do not have much, if any, blood, so their deaths are not gruesome and traumatic. Size matters, but sometimes small animals can have big value, as is the case with seahorses, hummingbirds and most infant animals.

The final and most important feature in animal value is majesty. Majesty is why we prefer parrots over possums and bears over barracuda. The majesty of an animal has many facets, including age, adorability, ferocity, beauty, rarity, strength, fragility and peculiarity, but it is hard to define concretely. There are, however, some general guidelines that majestic animals tend to follow. Here are a few of them:

  • Don’t carry diseases.
  • Don’t sting or bite humans.
  • Don’t have small, soulless eyes.
  • Don’t be belligerent and numerous.
  • Don’t eat human food.
  • Don’t suck blood.
  • Don’t screech or buzz.
  • Don’t have more than four legs.
  • Don’t crawl or slither.
  • Don’t secrete anything.

Majestic animals don’t do these things; they soar, roar, gallop, glide, splash and sing. Animals that don’t follow these guidelines are subject to hatred and revulsion. One creature that is currently experiencing the negative effects of having a low animal value is the mosquito.

Bill Gates, a well-known wealthy person, has declared war on the mosquito because it spreads malaria, a disease that is responsible for hundreds of thousands of human deaths every year. Gates is bent on the eradication of these helpless insects, which are not defended by animal rights groups simply because they have little value.

So be careful, little creatures, what you do.

Terminal Velocity

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In the year 2000 there were over six million motor vehicle accidents in the United States, resulting in 41,945 human fatalities. In that same year an estimated 247,000 deer were maimed or killed in motor vehicle collisions, and it’s likely that other species, such as birds, suffered even greater losses. Driving is undeniably dangerous.

Many of these accidents were likely caused by intoxication or carelessness, but piloting a 1,000 kg metal box at speeds exceeding 100 km/h is inherently hazardous. In an effort to mitigate the number of vehicle collisions, some groups are lobbying for reduced speed limits, especially in residential and high-traffic areas. Their premise that slower vehicles will produce fewer collisions couldn’t be less inaccurate.

It’s obvious to most that slower vehicles are safer, since the force of impact is diminished and the window for driver reaction is expanded. Objects with no velocity are the easiest to avoid since they rarely crash into things. Unfortunately, getting motorists to slow down is not as simple as a mere adjustment in signage.

A report by the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center concluded that neither lowering nor raising speed limits by up to 24 km/h had a significant effect on motorist speed. The report’s conclusion states, “…motorists do not alter their speed to conform to speed limits they perceive as unreasonable for prevailing conditions.” But even if drivers did obey the new speed limits, a more challenging question must be answered: how many lives are we willing to sacrifice?

Most groups advocating lower speed limits are requesting that they be reduced by 10 or 20 km/h, but slower vehicles would still produce some collisions, injuries and deaths. So how many fatalities are we willing to accept as a natural consequence? This is a very difficult question to answer, and it applies to many areas beyond that of motor vehicles.

In every industry there are deaths, injuries or accidents of some kind. Rules are created, precautions are taken and laws are passed to reduce these incidents, but they aren’t really aimed at reducing the number of incidents to zero. This is because safety is inversely proportional to efficiency.

Imposing health and safety practices on an industry will inevitably make it less efficient. Conversely, an industry operating without any concern for safety would likely be very efficient, that is, until its workforce is deceased or debilitated.

Some concerned individuals feel a moral obligation to avoid purchasing products from companies that exploit people, animals or the environment, but again, how much is too much? Let’s look at some examples of absolute positions often taken on subjects that are not absolute.

Many people hold a negative view of oil companies because of the environmental damage they inflict, so they ride a bicycle or take public transit. But almost all the products they buy are transported by fuel-burning freight and constructed with oil-based synthetic materials.

Some individuals choose not to eat meat so that animals might be spared unnatural suffering and an early death, but many animals are killed by farming machinery during the harvest of crops and even more are displaced by agricultural properties. And, of course, they are not concerned with the number of insects that are crushed beneath their feet every day, since bugs do not hold a high animal value.

The idea that moral issues are not as dry and cut as we might like can make us feel overwhelmed and impotent. When we realize that no person, organization or action is purely good or evil, we can succumb to what is known as the grey escape – an apathetic exit to a moral predicament. The grey escape is the perception that when an issue is complex or its answer is not easily reached, the solution must be either nonexistent or unworthy of investigation. People who subscribe to this line of thinking are often too concerned with entertainment, success and pleasure to bother the moral and abstract. “Because the matter is grey,” they say, “it deserves not the time of day.”

Grey things are the most important.

Inflammation

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Back in the mid 2000s the housing market in the United States was swelling at an unprecedented rate, which ultimately proved unsustainable. The bubble ruptured in 2007, gushing its toxic muck into the sea of the global economy, poisoning the shore of every industry with the pestilent surge of recession. As industries restructured to survive the fiscal famine, governments were forced to make difficult and unpopular choices, including the bail out of some companies that were deemed, “too big to fail.”

There is a tendency for humans to be careless with plenty, prudent with little. The more we have, the less we appreciate it – this is who we are. Wealth and waste go hand in hand, for as we acquire more things their value must diminish, which makes us less cautious. In economics this phenomenon is known as supply and demand. No one understands this concept more poorly than special interest groups.

When times are tough we are confined to contentment and obliged to be grateful, but not these special interest groups. While many are satisfied with mere survival, they continue to relentlessly pound the doors of government offices, demanding ever more, ever more. Because of their narrow field of vision, special interest groups care not for the plight of others, but, like ravenous beasts ravaging a kill, they strive to plunge their jaws into the bloody carcass of public funds. One can’t help but wonder how much money these groups would take if given a blank check, since they seem to have no problem forcing the government into deficit. What they fail to realize is that the money they receive comes at the expense of other programs, even at the expense of their own future funding.

Governments are constantly tangled up in labor disputes and collective bargaining, attempting to satisfy those persistent pests without compromising their budget. It seems like every time we turn on the news there’s some new program aimed at washing stray cats or launching elderly citizens into space. As great as those ideas are, government funds do have a limit and at some point they must decline such programs. Fortunately for special interest groups, public support can often sway the government into coughing up the cash. By using ad campaigns, job action and strikes, these groups can rally weak-minded citizens to their cause. But even after an agreement is reached, there’s no doubt that they will be back at the table, begging for more money to cover the increase in cost of living and inflation.

So how can this cycle be broken? There must be a way to permanently stave off the endless demands and protect future generations from enduring the consequences of our fiscal frailty. The answer is by assigning funding based on a percentage of GDP, tax revenue and/or inflation.

Public programs and wages would receive funding as a percentage of projected tax revenue every year. By dividing up the pie in percentages, the size of the slice is based on the size of the pie, so there would be no quarrel over the portion received. By agreeing to a percentage of the total budget, public programs and wages increase with inflation and economic growth, requiring no renegotiation for increased compensation.

The private sector is more complicated, but there are models which allow employees to share in the profit of their company. Private sector wages should, at minimum, be tied to inflation. Minimum wage, however, is dictated by the government and would be set to a rate based inflation, as well as the economic performance of the nation, state or province.

The idea is simple: instead of constantly renegotiating wages and funding, tie those things to the same thing that dictates the available funds. Anything else would be neither consistent, Norfair.

Noun

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noun. [noun] -noun.

1. any word that describes a person, place, thing or idea. Alright, students, please circle the noun in this sentence.

Using language to describe language can be difficult, but the common definition of a noun as, “a person, place, thing or idea” is downright foolish. People, places and ideas are things.

Sore Spot

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Truth be told, we all endure scrapes, cuts, bruises, burns and rashes during our lifetime, and most of the time it’s our own fault.

Often times these wounds are only a minor inconvenience, causing slight discomfort for a short time.

Pain can be a serious problem, however, for it can vary in intensity and duration, but the true measure of pain is the product of both its intensity and duration.

One small laceration could cause a fleeting wince, but a pulled muscle, though not as intense as the sensation of torn skin, projects pulses of pain for much longer and would be deemed by most to be the worse of the two.

Fleeting pain can be very intense, but because it lasts for such a short time we usually aren’t concerned about it.

However, when we experience extended periods of low-level pain, we are often driven to search for aid.

Experiencing a small abrasion, scrape or cut can become a more serious and prolonged matter if it is complicated by infection, but there is another factor which can extend the pain.

A wound can occur anywhere on the body, and if it occurs in a high-use region, such as the palm of the hand or bottom of the foot, the pain can be drawn out as the sore is scratched, rubbed and reopened repeatedly.

Deciding where the wound would be on our body would be interesting, for we would have to examine which part of our body is least contacted – the answer could be anything from under our chin to the back of our hand.

Descent

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If you’ve ever watched a science fiction show, such as Star Trek or Babylon 5, then you likely find the idea of space travel very intriguing. Imagine stars streaking past your solar windshield as your ship comfortably cruises from world to world in a matter of hours. But aside from the technological and physical impossibilities of such travel, there is another limitation which ensures that we will never command a Galaxy-class starship: our dimensional perception.

In the world of Star Trek, whenever two ships encountered one another, they would always be aligned to the same axis. This makes sense to us because in classical flight, which takes place on Earth, all soaring vessels are tethered to the ground by gravity, requiring that they be oriented in a unified manner to combat this force. In space, however, there is no gravity or pole to which we can reference our orientation, so there’s no reason why two ships should be aligned the same way when they meet. But we aren’t here to poke black holes in classic works of science fiction, however entertaining that might be, we’re here to find out why we aren’t fit for duty in the Federation.

We live in a three dimensional world, but we do not interact with all three dimensions equally. The prime dimensions of our experience are the x and z axes because they are the ones in which we move the most freely. We scarcely travel up or down, except to reach another horizontal plane on which we can interact. Even fish and birds, though they move up and down freely, experience the world in the same way we do, for their bodies must remain aligned in relation to the Earth.

Our bodily systems of digestion and circulation are also intended to function most effectively when our bodies are properly oriented with the ground beneath our feet. In addition, our eyes are engineered to take in a wider range of horizontal information than vertical, converting that information into a two-dimensional mental image. Likely because of our upbringing in a world dominated by two dimensions, and the nature of vision itself, our imagination is conditioned to perceive the world in this way. When we imagine a location, we do not imagine a three-dimensional rendering of that place, but merely a two-dimensional picture. This is why maps are drawn from a top-down view – the y-axis just isn’t as relevant to our experience. Another reason could be that we have traditionally used use two-dimensional means of communicating images, such as drawing on paper, which only allow us to effectively portray two dimensions at a time.

To illustrate the difficulty in interpreting space this way, let’s take a look at some grids plotting three three-dimensional points.

Here’s what it would look like if we combine these grids into one three-dimensional chart:

Try to solve for the position of the three points in the final grid of the image below.

Our two-dimensional approach to spacial interpretation makes us totally unfit for life in space, where free movement and rotation is available in all three dimensions. This has been proven by the limited success of video games which feature six degrees of freedom, such as Star Luster and the Wing Commander series. Though many of these titles are ingenious in concept and design, gamers found themselves both astonished and confounded by total planar liberation. Many developers have abandoned such design in favor of a two-dimensional interpretation of space travel, where vessels maintain a consistent, unified orientation.

Behold, the Earth from a perfectly legitimate perspective:

Whether engaging in a starship dogfight, navigating an asteroid field or simply plotting a leisurely interstellar cruise, those of us raised on the surface of a planet are dangerously unqualified for such tasks. It is possible that we could be conditioned through the use of holograms and flight simulators, to interpret our surroundings in a manner consistent with the demands of space travel. If that didn’t work, raising children in space could enable them to comprehend and navigate three dimensions quite easily, but there’s only one way to find out, NASA.

Lex Talionis

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Crime is an inevitable part of our world. No matter how much freedom and plenty are available inside the fence, some people will inevitably climb that fence, either due to boredom, curiosity, selfishness or mental impairment. Though we may be able to reduce crime through social programs and education, the question remains: what do we do with those who break the law?

Throughout history this question has been answered in many different ways, including fines, hard labor, torture, mutilation, exile, execution and incarceration. Imprisoning convicts has become the established method of administering punishment in the developed world, where physical discipline is considered barbaric. Of course, it is likely that a society which used beatings and public shaming to punish its criminals might consider the idea of removing people from their belongings, friends and family for decades to be much more brutal.

Incarceration is a luxury that many societies have not been able to afford, and many questions have been raised about the how correctional the facilities actually are. British Politician Douglas Hurd, regarding the effectiveness of incarceration, stated that, “prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse.”

Each society has its own view of law and criminal justice which defines what behavior is considered criminal, which crimes are, in general, grievous and the aim of punitive action. No matter what the method of punishment, the intent behind criminal justice is to satisfy one or more of four major objectives:

  1. Retribution: To exact punishment on the person who committed the crime.
  2. Deterrent:  To set an example to the rest of society in the hopes of discouraging others from similar activity.
  3. Protection: To keep the citizens safe from criminals.
  4. Correction: To ensure that criminals do not continue to offend.

Different methods of punishment accomplish these four objectives in different ways, as illustrated by this chart:

Objective Punishment
Pain Mutilation Fines Exile Incarceration Execution
 Retribution Strong Strong Strong Strong Strong Unknown
 Deterrent Fair Strong Fair Strong Fair Strong
 Protection Weak Strong Weak Strong Strong Very Strong
 Correction Weak Strong Weak Weak Fair Very Weak

Obviously the level to which each type of punishment achieves its aim depends on implementation. Incarceration, for example, provides a great opportunity for corrective programs as well as negative influence from fellow criminals, while mutilation, which may prevent future crime, can render recipients permanently debilitated. The method of punishment which consistently generates the most controversy is execution.

The death penalty holds the most absolute consequences of any punishment, which is what makes it so attractive to its supporters and so unbearable to its detractors. Although execution grants permanent protection from further crime, critics argue that because death is irreversible we cannot offer compensation to the wrongfully convicted. This argument is based on several unprovable presumptions. First, that every wrongfully convicted individual will be exonerated, second, that those who are exonerated are, in fact, innocent and finally, that we can adequately compensate for incarceration. It’s true that we cannot revive the dead, but neither can we travel back in time to restore lost years to these whose lives we have ruined.

There is much debate over whether increased punishment leads to increased deterrence. As we have already discussed, there is at least a meaningful relationship between punishment and deterrence, which means that the death penalty would offer the greatest deterrence of any form of punishment. So capital punishment offers impenetrable protection, tenacious deterrence and non-existent correction, but how does it fair at dispensing retribution? Death penalty supporters often tout its retributive power, but we can’t actually be certain how effective it is.

By incarcerating an individual we can control almost all aspects of their lives, but when we kill someone we relinquish control of their fate to the icy coils of death. Sure, there’s the fear and mental anguish endured by those poor souls on death row, but what happens after they die and how can we be sure that it’s bad?

There are many theories and beliefs about what awaits us beyond the grave, including heaven, hell, Blisstonia, non-existence, parallel realities and reincarnation, but ultimately we don’t know what exactly happens in the afterlife because scientists stubbornly refuse to die and study it.

If the criminal were to go to heaven or a parallel world after death, then there wouldn’t be much of a punishment. Non-existence seems frightening, but we all had no problem not existing before we were born, so it can’t be that bad. If we only had some evidence that there was, in fact, eternal torture awaiting the victim, then capital punishment might be viable. But as it stands, there’s a chance that they could end up in paradise, and death shall have no dominion.