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I first heard about Dreadnoughtus Schrani, the dinosaur that has broken the scale of relative dinosaur sizes, the dinosaur that makes Brontosaurus look like a Babysaurus, the dinosaur that is about the same size as a Boeing 747 and as heavy as a whole  pack of elephants, a few days ago so I was worried that maybe I’m a bit late to the party, blogging after all the good blogging’s been done, but then I read the article and realized that this thing actually got dug up in 2005 and it’s just hitting the media now, so I don’t feel so bad.

Dreadnoughtus

They just keep finding new stuff.  When I was a kid, everybody know the names of seven or eight species of dinosaurs and, as far as we knew, that’s all there were.  My kids watch a show now called T-Rex Express and there’s an ABC song with dinosaurs for every letter of the alphabet, and there are plenty to spare.

Of course, the dinosaurs all were wiped out 65 million years ago, at least 63 million years before any  animals vaguely resembling human beings came into existence, by a huge meteor.  Without that meteor, mammals would not have come to dominate the earth, and human beings would never have evolved.

Which brings me to my theory du jour.  Of all the possible survival mechanisms which species have developed to get along in this savage world of predator and prey – the swiftness and stealth of the big cats, the ability to blend in of the chameleon, the toxins of the snakes, the vicious smell of the skunks, the social organization of bees and wolves, the quick birth rate of rabbits or sheep, or, in fact, the intelligence of humans, perhaps the one to naturally arise first is size.

Perhaps it is natural for nature to follow that as the easiest course, just as water always flows along the path of the least resistance.   Perhaps single celled creatures became double celled creatures, and quadricelled, and octocelled, and so on, long before any of the more exotic mutations happened.

Perhaps this is the way of evolution throughout the universe.  Perhaps we need to add one more element to Drake’s famous equation, and let (m)  equal those planets where a meteor has destroyed that planet’s giant creatures, and maybe (m) is really rare.  Perhaps, of all the billions of planets out there capable of supporting life, 90% are dominated by very large,  dumb creatures who are millions of years of evolution away from developing space travel, and always will be.

It would mean that intelligent extraterrestrial life is seriously rare, and that would explain why we haven’t made contact yet.  On the other hand, it means when human beings eventually arrive on other, inhabitable worlds, many millenia in the future, they will be inhabited by dinosaurs.  Dangerous environments, but meat and nutrient rich.

Boy genius Mark Zuckerberg, the half-man, half-computer who invented facebook, has made a dramatic announcement.  It is his goal to bring internet access to everybody on the planet.

I salute this.  It is a bold goal, and one worthy of achieving.  It’s similar to Kennedy’s speech in 1961 (or ’62?) about putting a man on the moon by the  end of the decade, except the Z man didn’t put a time limit on it.

He said he’d do it even if he had to spend ‘billions of dollars.’  Well, that’s kind of a given.  It couldn’t be done for thousands.  It’s probably going to cost even more billions than he has.  That’s O.K.  I’m sure he  has plenty of other investors ready to jump on board.  I’m also fairly convinced that he doesn’t intend to do it without making a profit.

Still, fair enough.  He’s a businessman.  That’s what he does.  He’s spreading internet access.  That’s a good thing.  It’s not like facebook is Nestle, or Monsanto, or Halliburton, or BP, or Weyerhauser, who are making huge profits from their deliberate and mindful attempts to destroy the planet.  He will make money, and  poor, disenfranchised people around the world will become a little bit closer to franchised and maybe, in a few cases, slightly less poor.

Mark Zuckerberg

I would rather see a project to bring fresh drinking water to all of the people of the world, but that’s not his field.  Also, bringing facebook to everybody in the world doesn’t interfere with that goal.  I’d rather see a project that gave every homeless person in the world a home, that ended hunger, or even one that brought literacy to the entire world, but internet access will actually help quite a bit on that last one, and it would dovetail nicely with the other projects as well.

There are many things which need to be done to bring us into a future which will be better than the present.  We need people working on all of them.

Good for Zuckerberg.

Here’s an interesting development in science.  Scientists have managed to send a message  directly from one person’s brain into another person’s brain, which is kind of awesome, and kind of scary, too.  It was just one word, Ciao, sent from India to France, via electrodes attached to people’s heads.  Actually, the message went from one person’s mind to a computer, which sent the message to a computer in France, which then sent it into the waiting brains of 3 people, but it’s still impressive.

Pain! Pain!

It means doctors may be able to communicate with people in a coma.  It means that couples may soon put each other to the ultimate test – tell me you love me with the electrodes in your brain.  It means that we will control our house servant robots of the future just with the power of our thoughts.  If you want a beer, it will bring you a beer.  It means police will use this method to interrogate people and in the future, trials will be obsolete – the suspect will just be questioned with electrodes in his head.  That’s the scary part.  That and the ‘do you really love me’ bit.

The biggest problem that I foresee with this technology, though, is miscommunication.  We  often get things wrong when we speak.  Sometimes we use the wrong word in a foreign language, sometimes we slur our words when we are drunk, some people are a little bit deaf.  We get things wrong sometimes when we write, too.  We misread what someone wrote, and send them a blisteringly angry  reply, even though we actually agree with them.

Who’s to say that won’t happen with mind-to-mind conversations?  Maybe your interpretation of ‘meet me for a drink’ is very different from mine?

I welcome the new technology.  I think it will, ultimately, make it possible for people to know each other much better than they do now.  But maybe, just maybe, not understanding each other perfectly is the only thing that keeps us sane.  It gives us plausible deniability.

It’s been a really good day, I’d say an 8.5, maybe even a 9 of a day.  I only taught the one class, my two Iranian kids, and we only have another week or two to go because they are going back to Iran.  The girl, the older one, who is 12, is brilliant.  She is one of the most receptive students I’ve ever had, and it

disturbs me that, as a female in Iran, she will not have the opportunities in life that she deserves.  It’s such a waste.  This is to her detriment, this is to Iran’s detriment, this is to the world’s detriment, and this is to nobody’s benefit whatsoever.  We were talking about Disney movies and she suddenly burst into the ‘Let it Go’ song from ‘Frozen.’  She knew the whole thing.  I almost cried.

After that class, I had about an hour and a half to kill before I picked up Isabel from school.  Prague Castle, and its gardens, just happens to be right on the way.  I am so lucky to live in this town.  I found a bench and read a bit of a John Grisham book.  ‘The Broker.’  Not his best, I feel he’s just going through the motions on this one.  He has scenes, whole chapters, where the guy is living incognito in Italy and taking intensive Italian lessons and, for pages at a time, every phrase is written in Italian and English.  Thus upping the page count.

Picked up Isabel, went home, had lunch, took a nap, made a whole bunch of snarky comments on facebook, worked a bit on the book, then took the kids to meet Helena at 5:30 and we rented a rowboat for an hour.  It was a beautiful day for it, warm and still but not too hot.  So many boats out it was a bit of a traffic jam.  Everybody rowed a bit.  Kids didn’t argue TOO much.  I enjoyed just letting them row, you’re not going to get very far anyway,  and watching the human experience play out on the banks.  People dressed formally for some kind of concert at Zofin, groups of  young people, couples, families.

Went to KFC afterwards for dinner.

A facebook friend who’s been incommunicado for several months put in an appearance.

Watching ‘Alien Abductions.’  Yeah, I’d rate today about a 9.

Joan Rivers, RIP

Bob McDonnell Have fun in jail, asshole

Fast food strikers good luck!

And, to the asteroid which is going to pass only 22,000 miles from the Earth, which sounds like a lot but it’s really not at all, please just keep moving.  But that’s about all we can say.  We don’t really have any defense if a meteor was to be on course for the Earth, and we just discovered the existence of this one a few days ago.

It’s the cosmic equivalent of standing on the freeway, just chillin’, and suddenly looking up and there’s a big rig headed straight for you, inches away and barreling along at full speed.

And, we have no more plan for dealing with it than we have a plan for weaning ourselves of dirty energy, giving everybody in the world clean water, providing homes for the homeless, forcing Putin to respect international borders, getting the Israelis to stop killing people, or saving the honey bee.

The technology to rid ourselves of dirty energy, provide homes for the homeless, give everybody clean water, and save the honey bees exists.  Ukraine and Gaza are stickier situations, because we do not yet have the technology to force human beings to be decent people.

But meteorite defense falls into the honey bee category.  We have the technology, or at any rate we’re real close to it.  We need to start focusing on space, and the sooner the better.