The Senate Attacks the NSF--again.

Senator's Criticism of Science Foundation Draws Fire

Senator Proxmire used to choose the studies that were "wasted" based upon how silly they could be made to appear.

One was a study on why people fall in love--~$16,000. Which sounds a little silly until you consider this: How much power changes hands each day around the world based upon who is currently in love with whom?

Vast portions of the economy depend upon this and the majority are largely invisible--marriage & divorce alone transfer huge lots of resources&power.

One of the points of "pure research" is that you don't know the answers. The same is true of applied research. Much biological systems research uses odd little cheap subjects--for a number of different reasons. Heck, the last supercomputer I saw was build of video games hooked together....

Senators are not chosen for intelligence...or governing ability...or practical experience.

Senators USED to be chosen by State Legislators, which at least keep them from directly being selected upon popularity.

Now they're chosen entirely upon recognition--just like school class presidents were...and that always worked so well.

There's no requirement that anyone in the legislative or executive branches have any constitutional knowledge. But we let them pass legislation and sign it into effect as law without any validation that it is a legal law.

This permits unconstitutional laws to be passed upon what has become a continual basis--fighting such miscarriages is expensive in time and money as well as affecting a possibly huge number of citizens through the prosecution for 'violating' something that, being unconstitutional, never was a law in the first place.

The mere risk of such violations is too high to permit laws to become effective until AFTER judicial review.

Even if no law had ever been passed that was unconstitutional--the risk of violating the rights of the people (the protection of which is the entire FUNCTION of government,) is far too high when such a simple step of review by the third branch of government could, if not eliminate, vastly reduce th chances of illegal laws being enforced.

But the truth is that it HAS happened. Repeatedly. And it has taken GENERATIONS for some of these illegal laws to be found illegal. None of those wronged by such law will or can be restored to the position which they would have acquired had they not been illegally prosecuted.

Enact judicial review of laws before they take effect and protect our rights.

As a side effect, we get an accurate count of how many offenses against the Constitution each legislator an  executive makes...a hard number which defines how well they are doing their job.

The Future Past Present - is Time Relevant?

Spider Robinson conjectured in a story sometime back (Time Pressure)that our descendants might develop time-travel capabilities and go back through time implanting recorders into every infant's skull throughout our species history, for the sole purpose of capturing everyone's experiences which would then be stored in cyberspace.

My rather shaky understanding of current physics is that time may very well be a construct of our own thought. Makes me a bit dizzy to think too much about it.

We all know that time is relative--unpleasant events last orders of magnitude longer than pleasant events. And it's possible to simply not record a period--blackouts can be induced in many different ways. History is mutable as is the present. I know a man who rewrite much of his life for 2 decades and then reacquired the older version.

Men in Blackput it quite well: "There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!" 

We do not know, and perhaps cannot know, what is of vital importance even to ourselves!

Humanity runs briskly along a razor's edge trail--a single error from certain destruction.

And at any time any one of millions of events in the universe could wipe us out, elevate us to godhood or ???

Is it any wonder that we invented gods? So that at least things might have some purpose even if we don't know what it might be? Religion exists primarily in order that we might retain hope that we actually matter beyond our own boundaries. It has been a valuable tool in our arsenal against the universe.... But there need be no truth behind it in order for the value to have existed, and it's basic premise is that humans are important, if not the single most important, part of the universe. We b spcl.

If time is an illusion--as an increasingly large part of what we comprehend appears to be--then cause|effect become one. Where is free will? Do we in fact matter?

We've conjectured that the entire universe is naught but a dream--God having split into many parts so as to assuage loneliness. Perhaps it is.

But is a dream of less import than the dream we call reality? Major events in our history have turned on no more than a dream or interpretation of an omen....

And in dreams there is no linearity of time either...you may control your present...you may control your dreams.

Or you may let others direct them for you.