When I come across something I think is particularly well written or well said, or that I admire for the writer’s creative choice of words, effective syntax, and clarity of thought, I like to share it with you.
“With reform measures, support is often a mile wide and an inch deep,” Kousser said.
Field Poll: More California voters prefer spending cuts, not taxes, to close deficit
Sacramento Bee editorial, March 5, 2010
Thad Kousser is a University of California, San Diego, political science professor who worked on the Field Poll.
I like that “mile wide, inch deep” description of voter support for reform measures. Reform is good, in general, until you discover it will affect you as well.
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“The old joke is that General Motors is just a health insurance company that makes cars on the side,”San Luis Obispo County Supervisor Adam Hill said during a pension presentation at a recent board meeting. “My concern is that the county government is becoming a pension provider that provides government services on the side.”
The Public Eye: Pension promises threaten California cities, counties
Sacramento Bee blog
April 11, 2010
This concisely sums up the level to which California’s state and local governments have descended, thanks to the pure greed of government employee unions and the equally culpable politicians who signed off on labor contracts with extravagant pensions and benefits.
More and more of our tax dollars flow to comfortable pensions for public employees while less and less trickles to the government services we all rely on, including education, law enforcement, and repairing our streets and highways.
Our state’s unfunded public pension liability may be as high as half-a-trillion dollars, according to a report done by Stanford University graduate students.
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And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour, we rot and rot:
And thereby hangs a tale.
From Shakespeare’s As You Like It
Ask any aging baby-boomer about this. It’s not how we like it.
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“The law is an ass”
In Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, when the character Mr. Bumble is informed that “the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction,” Mr. Bumble replies, “If the law supposes that … the law is a [sic] ass—a [sic] idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”
Amen to that, Mr. Bumble! I often think of your perceptive remark whenever I come across a ridiculous law completely divorced from reality, that solves nothing and may actually make matters worse.
Bumble is right! Proof the law can be an ass:
- In Virginia, tickling a woman is unlawful
- A North Dakota law says it’s illegal to lie down and fall asleep with your shoes on
- Oklahoma law forbids taking a bite out of another person’s hamburger
- An Oregon law requires dishes to be drip-dried
- You may not bite off another person’s leg, so says a law in Rhode Island
- It is illegal not to drink milk in Utah
- In Nebraska, bar owners may not sell beer unless they brew a kettle of soup simultaneously
- Mispronounce “Arkansas” and you break a law in that state
- And in my state, California, a law forbids eating an orange in your bathtub
See asinine laws for all 50 states in a wonderful article by Annie Tucker Morgan, I’m Under Arrest for What? Fifty Bizarre US Laws, at www.divinecaroline.com
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“I think Apple knows how to teach people about things they don’t yet know they want”
Michael Gartenberg, Altimeter Group (a strategy consulting firm focused on emerging technologies), commenting on iPhone upgrade.
This just about sums up Apple’s marketing brilliance.
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Copyright © The National Human Genome Research Institute
Something we learned from the Human Genome Project is that the entire 6 billion-member human species goes back 7,000 generations to an original population of about 60,000 people. Our species has only a modest amount of genetic variation — the DNA of any two humans is 99.9 percent identical.
Garrison Keillor, The Writer’s Almanac for June 26, 2010
“It was on this date that rival scientific teams completed the first rough map of the human genome. “
What profound information is packed into those two sentences! Only one-tenth of one percent of my DNA makes me a distinct individual; in every other way, down to the smallest detail, I am identical (or at least my DNA is) to any other human being. When I read that, I’m reminded of Matthew Arnold’s “The same heart beats in every human breast.”
And 7,000 generations! Think of all the life stories that have happened as generation after generation unfolds, “struts and frets its hour upon the stage,” and then makes way for a new generation and new stories.
And who were these 60,000 original people?
And, most important, what’s the point? Are we just vehicles for our genes?
Just found this: 
“Researchers at London’s Kew Gardens said Thursday they’d discovered that the Paris japonica has a genetic code 50 times longer than that of a human being. The length of that code easily beats its nearest competitor, a long-bodied muck dweller known as the marbled lungfish.”
Claim: White flower has world’s longest genome
This speaks to the marvelous efficiency of the
human genome. Think of the early computers that would fill a room and weigh several tons, while today you can hold a computer in the palm of your hand that is thousands of times more powerful.
I’m reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. That illustration of a cell with its DNA spilled pulled out? It could represent a normal cell in your body, or one that spells your doom:
“A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism.
“Like the normal cell, the cancer cell relies on growth in the most basic elemental sense: the division of one cell to form two. In normal tissues, this process is exquisitely regulated, such that growth is stimulated by specific signals and arrested by other signals. In cancer, unbridled growth gives rise to generation upon generation of cells.
“Biologists use the term clone to describe cells that share a common genetic ancestor. Cancer, we now know, is a clonal disease. Nearly every known cancer originates from one ancestral cell that, having acquired the capacity of limitless cell division and survival, gives rise to limitless numbers of descendants…
“But cancer is not simply a clonal disease; it is a clonally evolving disease. If growth occurred without evolution, cancer cells would not be imbued with their potent capacity to invade, survive, and metastasize. Every generation of cancer cells creates a small number of cells that is genetically different from its parents.”
Cartoon from an article “What makes you you? Ask your genome”
The cure to cancer, the secret of immortality, may result from unlocking the human genome.
Genesis 3:22
“There is a wonderful reason that explains why human beings have developed two different minds. it is because in the whole world there are really only two problems. I’ve always found that to be a comforting thought, only two problems in the whole world. One problem is, “you know what you want but you don’t know how to get it”, and the only other problem is, “you don’t know what you want.”
Steven Snyder, quoted in a recent Productive Living email from David Allen, author of Getting Things Done.
I thought what Snyder says here is interesting, so I did a little research on him, see what other pearls of wisdom he has. Oh, boy. Lots of hype, “one of world’s foremost experts on Accelerated Learning.” Claims to have read a book a day when he was only three years old.
My interest in what Snyder has to say evaporated with his “Dialogue of Two Minds“, where BrainMind and HeartMind have a little tête-à-tête and decide to collaborate to achieve “success, love, health, and happiness.” BrainMind will FOCUS, be the steering wheel, and HeartMind will contribute PASSION & DRIVE, be the gas pedal.
Have you noticed that the Brits never produce boorishly written claptrap like this? Only in America do you have this how-to-succeed-in-business psycho-babel.
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Steve of Upland 
From the Thursday, April 14, 2011, edition of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/04/14)
It was on this day in 2003 that the Human Genome Project was completed. It was an attempt to map out the DNA structure of humans. Each molecule of DNA contains two strands of material, called nucleotide bases, in some combination of four different chemical units: adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine. The Project aimed to map all 3 billion of those DNA pairings, and determine all human genes. Through mapping out the DNA structure of humans, scientists discovered that humans have between 25,000 and 30,000 genes, fewer than expected — a roundworm, for example, has 19,098 genes, and yeast more than 6,000. The Human Genome Project was a collaboration between scientists in many different countries. It began in 1990 and was expected to take 15 years, but the group actually finished two years ahead of schedule.
In 2000, Bill Clinton said of the Human Genome Project: “Today we are learning the language in which God created life.” The Scottish poet Gillian Ferguson was so struck by that statement that she decided to spend the next four years writing poems about genetics, and that became The Human Genome: Poems on the Book of Life. She wrote: “DNA — or, deoxyribonucleic acid — / a mouthful which should be a poem; / adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine, / which should be the names of angels — / creative bond of adenine with thymine, / cytosine with guanine; A to T, C to G, / which is love, / as chemistry.”