Thoughts: Inconsequential and Not

Random tidbits that are on my mind right now:

1. Where are our priorities as a nation? As of this posting, the United States has spent roughly US $227,722,790,000 on the war in Iraq over the past 3 years. I’ll be the first to say that removing a terrible dictator from power is a good thing. All persons, everywhere on the Earth, have a duty to make the lives of other people better. A people who live in fear from a despotic leader’s death camps and secret police are a people who should have been helped a long time ago.

But simply saying something is good is not the same as saying it is a top priority. Like every decision that expends resources, choices have to be made and questions answered when deciding to go to war or stay home. How many resources will be spent? What is the expected benefit for the resource expenditure? Are there any hidden costs? Are there other ways to spend the same resources which would create a greater net benefit?

Here, it seems that much greater good could have been done with the almost $230 billion dollars.

Without leaving the United States, that money could have provided for 30,162,086 children to attend a year of Headstart. The money could have provided a salary for 3,946,482 public school teachers for a year. 11,039,554 students could have had full-tuition scholarships to 4-year public universities. 2,050,440 new houses and housing units could have been built for homeless individuals.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of simply having benefits stay at home, in the United States. We ALL have a duty to ALL humans, whether they live in Kansas, Tennessee, Florida, or Azerbaijan. On a global scale, we could have fully funded the world-wide AIDS program for a complete 22 years. If that wasn’t amazing enough, we could have fully-fed every person in the world who starves to death or is malnourished (~816 million people) for a bit more than a decade. Finally, with that money, we could have ensured that every single child born in the world received basic immunizations for 75 years.

Making a nation of people free is a good thing. (If it works...) Feeding the world for a decade or immunizing children for three-quarters of a century is better.

2. Americans are very woefully under-prepared to understand basic science. Science is the only viable means of social progress humanity has ever discovered. Without the fruits of science, the world would be a very different place. No immunizations. No antibiotics. No refrigeration. No microwaves. No metal alloys which require complex smelting. No computers... The middle ages doesn’t appeal to me, and hopefully it shouldn’t appeal to you.

The survival of the world gets incrementally better the more humans understand about the world around us and how the universe functions. For all of the laughter you’ll get if you admit to being a Star-Trek fan, as a general rule, people wish that we had the kinds of technology that the people on television sometimes do. The ability to heal wounds with nanotechnology and the power to step into a transporter at home and appear in the office seconds later sound pretty good to me.

Unfortunately, as a country, we do not appear to be raising a generation of scientifically literate people. Only 40 percent of Americans believe in biological evolution, despite a widespread scientific consensus on that matter for a bit more than a century. A professor at Northwestern University Medical School, Jon M iller, has tracked Western nations' acceptance of biological evolution, and states that only Turkey has a lower percentage of people who accept the only scientific explanation of biology available to us. Fewer than 3 in 20 people know what a molecule actually is. Only about half of Americans know that humans and dinosaurs never lived on the Earth at the same time.

In the realm of the entirely too scary, I’ll put: 1 in 5 Americans does not know whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or whether the Sun travels around the Earth.

It looks like I may be waiting a lot longer for my flying car and bubble cities, at least in the United States.

3. I’m now thoroughly addicted to "World of Warcraft." A friend introduced me to the game a day after my last final, and I’ve barely stopped playing it since. The graphics are astounding. Some of the scenery is positively breathtaking, and the game remains reasonably faithful to the Warcraft universe as I have come to know it through the first three games in the Warcraft series. The game is so entertaining that on the first day I played it by myself, I started at 11:00 am and didn’t look up from my screen until dinner-time. And what’s more, even though I’d played for almost 8 hours, I wouldn’t have guessed that it had been more than an hour or two.

One complaint: Too many monsters. My character (a Tauren Druid) can’t run through the plains without running into a few dozen wolves and mountain lions. I would just run past them, but the game makes them hostile toward me, so when I get near, they automatically start to chase me and attack me. When I was at a low level, it was a pain because they were tough battles and made getting anywhere a major hassle. Now that I’m at a higher level than they are, the battles are easy, but still make getting anywhere a major pain because I have to stop and kill the little critters just to keep moving. There are so many of the little buggers that it is hard to thread a path through the monsters such that you don’t alert them. Recommendation to W.O.W. people: How ‘bout just a couple fewer monsters per area? Or at the least make the game such that monsters which are of substantially lower level than you stop attacking you on sight.

4. Another friend of mine just bought a 60 inch plasma screen television with a fantastic surround sound system for the new house he also just bought. I’m so jealous. I know it would be wrong of me to buy something like that when there are starving people, but I'm still jealous and don't know whether I would be strong enough to resist buying fun toys like those if I had money and an income like his.