Arlen Ward dot com

Sometimes it is hard to get your mind around a number. The numbers that have been thrown around in the bailout and stimulus bills are those kinds of numbers. As Richard Feynman said:

There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Every one has a hard time when we start working with orders of magnitude or log scales. There is the classic “Powers of Ten” movie that has been around for ages.

So here is a great visual representation of what a trillion dollars looks like. Go ahead and click through, it is mind boggling. That’s $1,000,000,000,000.00, a number that has been reached in not only bailout totals, but also in the stimulus bill totals. So we aren’t even talking about just one trillion. I hope nobody thinks this is real money.

And it isn’t just the current federal administration that is spending like drunken sailors, because here is a graphic that compares the bailout money from Bush’s last months in office to other large spending programs, all in adjusted 2008 dollars, so we are comparing apples to apples. And the numbers come from this.

I see that a book based on the Last Lecture of Randy Pausch was released a while ago.

While it something that I would not mind reading some day, I really only mention it so that I can link to the YouTube video of the lecture Pausch gave for the Last Lecture “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. Watch the whole thing, you will be a better person for it. The insights and clarity are not often available like this.

I just have to mention how much I like Google Reader.

It works very well for collecting all the things I have been reading on a daily basis into one spot. The bad thing is that it keeps track of the number of items “read” in a day, to the tune of 300 plus every day. By read I mean most of them are a quick scan for something interesting. The ones that are interesting, I share on a public page, which is summarized and linked to here. It seems to work for a blogroll until I find a decent RSS feed aggregator.

So I am sort of a filtering service, pointing out the interesting things from the internet, or at least from the 41 (and growing!) current subscriptions on my reader page.

A couple weeks ago, while in Barnes and Noble, I picked up a book that I thought would be interesting reading.  The book is by James Watson, who was awarded part of the 1962 Nobel Prize for determining the double helix structure of DNA. In fact, I had just read his book about this discovery, appropriately named “The Double Helix” and enjoyed the tale. So the new book, Avoid Boring People (which if you look closely at the dust jacket, says “Avoid Boring Other People”) looked to be a worthwile investment.

The premise is a book on lessons learned during a life working in science. In fact, at the end of each chapter he has a list of “lessons learned” during that phase of his life.

That was before all this news stories last week, like saying things about intelligence in Africa, having scheduled talks canceled, and resigning his position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

I wonder if there are any lessons learned in the book with regards to saying stupid stuff to reporters?  I’ll let you know when I get to that chapter.