This Week on the Net

 

When I'm not writing or farting around, I like to peruse the internet for tidbits of entertainment so you don't have to, but I'm not posting anything with cats /dogs, cute kids, the latest stupid meme or political bullshit of the day (unless it's juicy). I lean to the slightly obscure, sometimes trivial or thought provoking stuff.  Here are a couple of things you may find interesting.

 

How Europeans See Us

Reddit occasionally throws out a good question to ponder, this time it asks Europeans who benefit from a better standard of living, to opine on Americans. It's an eye opening view of our messy, wild and currently divided country. A little humility is good for our cultural psyche.

Step Aside Bureaucrat, this is a Job for the Community

 Government officials like to think they can handle problems and be in charge, but people directly affected by whatever- you know, communities- are much better at bringing about real results. Whether it's disaster management, helping the poor and homeless or just plain getting things done.

We Need This Here Now

 I have been saying this for years, "if you build it they will come" amusement parks, especially roller coasters would be a boon to the Northwest. There is an extreme one in Coeur d'Alene Idaho why can't we have one here in Oregon? There are some really good coasters to chose from and the one at Lake Compounce CT that would be ideal in the hills near Cottage Grove. How about an indoor park to go to on a rainy day? A popular You Tuber gives a good tour of one in Florida that can easily be here.

 Post Update

A project I missed in my last post. Apparently there are other organizations other than SETI looking for ETs. https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home

 

Next week:

Chapter 2 of Shop Talk

The Galileo Moment

 

Galileo

    UFO's now called Unknown Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) have baffled us for a long time. We still look up at the sky and wonder.

     Our ancestors also looked up and wondered, what are those bright stars in the night? When it became clear what they were, it caused a big shift in perspective.

    It didn't happen all at once. When Ptolemy’s old theory didn't hold up to observation, Copernicus crunched the numbers and hypothetically proposed a heliocentric system made more sense. That got the smart people thinking and made the powerful ones nervous. If we aren't the center of everything, what are we?

    The theory was there but it was Galileo who pointed his telescope at the sky and proved it. He got in big trouble with the church that put him under house arrest instead of burning him at the stake like Giordano Bruno, who suggested, among other things that all those stars might be suns like ours. Gasp! The implications were too much to consider.

Copernicus, theorized, Bruno conjectured and Galileo proved that we are just an ordinary solar system among infinite ones. Other scientists had no fear of the church and looked up to see the truth.

    We still want to know are we alone? What we need is another Galileo moment and that may be happening soon.

    Whistleblowers like David Grusch are now stepping forward to inform us what has been an open secret for decades that the US military has crashed UFO's and have been trying to reverse engineer them for years. 

    They are not doing well, according to former government engineer Bob Lazar, because they're doing it ass backwards. Keeping a secret means as few people as possible know as little as possible about each component. The few at the top then gather the pieces of data and try to come to a result like the story of three blind men trying to describe an elephant. That's not how discovery work, it happens with lot of people with different skills getting together to brainstorm by throwing ideas around. If we really want to know how alien crafts work, we need to make the information open.

    Meanwhile, we are still using 80 year old rocket technology to launch humans into orbit. We need the kind of propulsion the military has been holding onto for selfish, super secret, stealthy reasons. No one is getting anywhere with that bullshit.

      Maybe it's just as well, being the paranoid, aggressive species we are, we're not ready to interact with advanced ETs until we learn how to interact honestly with each other- and share.