Aaron Adams’s Lame-ass Blog

I’m not someone who likes kids much. I can’t remember a meal in a restaurant without a screaming kid, and every misbehaved kid in town always seems to be at the grocery. However, I do like Halloween and trick-or-treat, and I’m happy to give away candy (the good stuff, not the crap) to kids when they come to my door.

I remember, as a kid in the mid-80s, waiting in line at some houses to get candy. I remember seeing a parade of other kids on the sidewalk on either side of the street, and having to walk around some of them to get to the next house. I remember houses really done up with great, creative decorations. Some houses ran out of candy because there were so many kids. Beggar’s night was an event that I tried to participate in even after it was obvious I was too old for it.

Tonight was beggar’s night here in Bellbrook, Ohio. My neighborhood was practically empty, with the exception of some groups of three or four kids that would occasionally stop by. I know there are kids in this neighborhood because I hear their noise outside the rest of the year, and I’ve caught a few of them playing in the mud pile the city left in my yard. I get the distinct impression, not only from my own admittedly anecdotal experience, but from the anecdotal experience of others, that beggar’s night isn’t as popular as it once was.

This morning on the way to work, as a news item, I heard that the local sheriff had a website set up where you could check to see where the sex offenders are in your neighborhood in preparation for taking the kids out to trick-or-treat. I’m suspicious of the presumption that these sex offenders are just itching to drag the kids at their door into the house and rape the bejesus out of them. I realize that some convicted sex offenders are still dangerous (Why are they out of jail?), but are there any recorded incidences in this area of those offenders using beggar’s night as a harvesting opportunity for their perverse desires? I remember, as a kid, the fire department setting up an x-ray machine where parents could take collected candy to search for razor blades and needles. Was any incident of booby-trapped candy ever recorded? I remember persistent stories of people injecting detrimental substances into treats. Was any child here ever poisoned by tainted treats? Over the past several years, I’ve heard the assertion that allowing children to participate in beggar’s night was implicit approval of Satanism of some kind. Are they serious?

In all of these cases, none of these crimes occurred anywhere near here. In fact, in all reported cases of candy tampering nationwide, the offense was committed by a kid’s family member, not a stranger. And I’m completely unaware of any trick-or-treater being sexually abused in this area. It’s logical to assume that, if such a thing occurred, the news media here would go crazy with the story.

So what happened to Halloween? Has sex predator paranoia caused parents to keep the kids inside? Has the thought of deadly candy kept the kids at home? Do some people really think that Halloween is approval of evil and they forbid their children to participate? Or is it that kids have simply changed, and they’re not as interested as they were two decades ago?

I don’t know the answer. I hope that maybe I just live in a place where the child density isn’t enough to make beggar’s night worthwhile. But I have to wonder if some element of media-fueled sensationalism and paranoia has ruined what used to be a fun holiday.

From this article at Fox News:

Health officials in New York City are stepping up to the plate to remove trans fats from the menus at local restaurants.

The Board of Health will hold its first public hearing today on a proposal to make New York the first U.S. city to ban restaurants from serving food containing artificial trans fats …

If approved, New York’s ban would only affect restaurants, not grocery stores, and wouldn’t extend beyond the city limits.

But experts said the city’s food service industry, with 24,600 establishments, is so large that any rule change is likely to ripple nationwide.

You gave government the power to tell you where you can smoke. Now they’re going to tell you what you can eat. Give government an inch, and it takes a mile. Those of you on the Centerville city council, those of you who are members of anti-smoking groups, and those of you in Ohio thinking of voting in favor of either issue 4 or 5, are paving the way for increased government micromanagement of your day-to-day life, the culmination of the liberal nanny state. You’re taking power out of the hands of individuals and the free market and placing it in the hands of lawyers, bureaucrats, and the self-proclaimed elite.

I take special delight in pointing this out because several people I’ve spoken with have scoffed at me when I predicted that government would soon expand its tentacles into the “safe food” business, based on the mandate people like the anti-smoking crowd have given them. I ask you to think very, very hard when considering issues 4 and 5 in Ohio, and the power it would give people you wouldn’t voluntarily associate with to decide what’s best for your body, the most important and intimate thing you own.

I just wanted to note that my friend Tim Miller and I saw Comet SWAN last night at Spring Valley Nature Reserve right after sunset in the location shown in this chart. It wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but it was a decent binocular object. Our 10″ Newtonian Dob gave a better view of the nucleus, which was very bright in the center with a haze around it, but no noticeable tail. The tail also was not apparent in binoculars either. The sky wasn’t as dark as it should have been if we expected to see a tail because cities, and hence, light pollution, from the northeast and northwest are growing. I’m glad we got our chance to see it because the next several nights are supposed to be rainy and the comet is expected to dim by the time that’s over. If you have access to a dark sky tonight or tomorrow night and you can follow the chart, I recommend seeing the comet.

All this reminds me, Comet Hale-Bopp was almost 10 years ago - spring of 1997. Wow! That’s hard to believe. I still have pictures I took of that comet, which were not bad for a first effort. I gave a bunch away at the time and they were very popular. I was surprised at how many people wanted to give photos of the comet to others as a gift, and even though I didn’t charge for the pictures, I broke even because some people insisted that they pay me. An astronomical rule of thumb is that a good naked eye comet comes along every decade or so, and it seems like we’re due. Hopefully when the next comet comes around, I’ll have the experience and equipment to get some really good pictures.

SkyTonight.com blogger Robert Naeye wrote an interesting article explaining his hypothesis that intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy are few and far between. I’m not sure I agree with that, so I wrote a comment to his post which was subsequently featured on the article page with Bob’s reply. Since my reply may not be featured as part of the article in the future, I want to reproduce my comment and his reply here.

The example I always like to fall back on is ants. Humans are obviously aware of ants, and we see ants in a bunch of places. We observe them and their way of doing things and try to understand their ant world, but in the end, what is it we have to say to them? What conversation is it possible to have with ants? What can humans and ants do collaboratively? They’re obviously not stupid, but they’re not on the same intelligence level as we are, and it’s extremely unlikely they’ll catch up any time soon, so we don’t make the attempt. They go about their ant lives and we go about ours. We don’t even know that the ants are aware of who or what we are when we put our faces right next to them.

Perhaps the human-alien relationship is similar. Regardless of any reasonable value for L, a few centuries or millennia difference in development between technological civilizations would likely make them unrecognizable to each other unless the more advanced cares to reach out. As the article stated, think how far we’ve come in 100 years. Now imagine 10,000 years (small, in astronomical terms) difference between two civilizations at a similar development acceleration curve.
Aaron Adams

Bob’s reply:

Aaron’s comments are very interesting and insightful. What I’m about to write could be totally wrong. But my gut feeling is that humanity has passed some kind of threshold that would make us interesting to at least some aliens (those with an interest in science and technology). No matter how advanced they are, we have developed mathematics, science, and technology to a level where they probably could talk to us at our level, in a way we can’t talk to ants. ‘We share something in common with aliens — the language of mathematics — and our ability to generate electromagnetic (EM) waves and use them to send information across interstellar distances probably gives us a framework for exchanging information. After all, we and they would see stars and other objects that emit EM waves, so we would both be familiar with the EM spectrum, and would be able to distinguish artificial EM signals from natural EM signals.

As a blogger myself, I’m smart enough to know that at SkyTonight, Bob gets the last word. But here, I get the last word.

It’s true enough that we certainly have the foundations necessary to communicate at least rudimentarily with another technologically-oriented civilization. I won’t argue that because I know it to be true. But I don’t think Bob has addressed the thrust of my point which is, what would we talk about? Do we have anything to say or do that a more advanced (even slightly so) civilization would find of any interest? Could it be that more advanced civilizations are so busy doing their own thing they don’t have time or motivation to deal with us right now? Perhaps there is some kind of upper limit as to how advanced a civilization can be, and they’re busy talking to their equally advanced buddies while they’re waiting for us to catch up. Maybe the 10,000 years or so that modern man has existed on Earth hasn’t been long enough for them to notice us.

If we take a step back, we have to question how many civilizations that are intelligent take the path of science and technology. Perhaps creatures in other parts of the galaxy are indeed intelligent, but they’re preoccupied with religion, music, literature, weather forecasting, avoiding predators, curing disease, or whatever self-involved issues they consider most important. Maybe they don’t care about other beings, or maybe the thought that we’re out here hasn’t crossed their mind. None of these situations makes aliens any less intelligent, it just means they have different priorities than we do. Maybe only one civilization in 50 takes the science and technology route. And maybe there’s something inherently self-limiting about that course of action. Or maybe space really is so vast and interstellar travel really is so hard that technological races rarely or never meet.

Obviously, we just don’t know. Absence of evidence of alien races is not evidence of their absence. We simply don’t have enough data to even know what questions to ask. The best we can do is listen intently and hope someone else, purposely or accidentally, gives us a clue. Until then, it’s all guesswork. I’m not ready to dismiss the possibility of a densely populated universe until more data is available.

Here’s a comment from LKM over at the Macalope:

>It’s really more the idea of the iPhone - an
>elegant cell phone that doesn’t suck - and
>the movement of the market toward music
>phones that make a compelling business case.

I don’t think so. Let’s look at the facts here:

1) Cell phones are extremely diverse. There’s no single model that could satisfy even 10% of all cell phone owners. Some people want simple, some want music, some want a PDA, some want a good camera, some want a keyboard to write SMS, some want something as small as possible… The fact that there is no single ruling cell phone is not due to cell phones being crap (although that may play a role, too), but due to people having very different needs.

2) Cell phones aren’t sold to consumers. They’re sold to telcoms. That means that most cell phones are sold with almost no profit. Telcoms then sell them at a loss and make it up with the subscriptions to their service. Basically, this means that there is not a lot of money in the cell phone business. The money is in the subscriptions.

So, tell me again:
1) What exactly can Apple offer to this market?
2) Why exactly should Apple enter that market?

An iPhone only seems like a “compelling business case” if you don’t like the current situation. It’s not that it would make a compelling business case *to Apple,* it’s just that *you* want Apple to improve *your* situation, so it’s a compelling business case *from your standpoint.* That’s probably not due to sucky hardware, but due to sucky American telcoms. Apple can’t fix that problem. Go to Japan or even Europe, and you get a different picture.

I agree with the sentiment that people wish for an iPhone not because they think it’s a compelling business case for Apple, but because they think it’s a compelling business case for themselves. It should go without saying, but Apple doesn’t sell products because it gets a warm fuzzy by pleasing you. It sells products to make money for stockholders, period. Plus, this commenter raises some good points that come sequentially before any of mine. Apple has to get telecom companies to buy the phones (LKM’s points) before the telecoms sell the phones and services to consumers (my points). There seems to be a whole lot of things that have to happen perfectly, in order, before Apple can sell the first phone to what would likely be a very small segment of a market where the needs of individual users are widely diverse. It’s a money losing proposition.