Is Columbus Day worthy of being celebrated? Like any holiday (Christmas, New Years, 4th of July), it depends on your culture / viewpoint. I'm not too big on celebrations, there are a few holidays that I enjoy, but most of them are just a nuisance because too many organizations use them as excuse to take the day off. It's can be very annoying if you are trying to get anything done.
Columbus Day is worth commemorating however. (Note that commemorate is not the same as celebrate. Some people get them confused and some even use them interchangeably.) The guy managed to talk some rich folks into financing his mad gamble and he set off with a gang of thieves to sail off the edge of the world. Nobody else had ever done this, well, nobody that we know of, mostly because they either outright failed (drowned, starved or died of exposure. Sailing is a dangerous business.) or failed to record their adventure. It's because of Columbus that Western Civilization reached the new world. You could even say that we are here because of him. Yes, the natives of these lands got smashed, but hell, that's the way the world was back then. I hope the morons that wanted the name of this 'holiday' changed are happy.
I don't believe in the Higgs Boson. I suspect all those wackos at CERN have done is to wack some very small bits of matter with a really big hammer and then in the femtosecond after impact they saw a vision and said "God"!. But that's just my personal view of the thing and matters not one whit in the grand scheme of fund allocations.
Anyway, I am reading through the news on Graham Hancock's website and I come across a story that claims the Indian civilization discovered this God particle 18,000 years ago. Of course this runs contrary to current Western thinking about the development of civilization, but just suppose there was an advanced civilization way back then. How much evidence would be left after the glaciers covered most of the Earth? Not much. Okay, the glaciers didn't make it to the tropics, but nothing lasts long down there. Heat, water, sunlight and life pretty much reduce everything to it's constituent particles in short order. So it could be our civilization is not the first one to attain this level of sophistication. It could be that there was another very advanced civilization a long time ago.
A comment led me to Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian Physicist and contemporary of Albert Einstein, who by all accounts was a pretty sharp character. Sharp enough that Bosons, the Higgs-Boson, and Bose-Einstein Condensate were all named after him.
Bose-Einstein Condensate? I just read Spin State, a Science Fiction novel by Chris Moriarty, and Bose-Einstein Condensates play a major role. We have a colony planet where we have discovered some naturally occurring Bose-Einstein Condensate crystals that have enabled us to develop an intersteller transportation system and so an intersteller civilization. These crystals are found embedded in coal, which is being dug and used for fuel, much as we do now, with all the attendant problems of unions, strikes, malevolent coal companies, robber baron bosses and the whole panoply of coal mining troubles. Which reminds me of:
Which reminds me that DEVO did a version of this song, and when I go looking for it, I find this, which is, um, I don't know. Disturbing? Amusing? Scary? Great?
Freedom Of Choice (Original Version)
Freedom from Choice is one of the reasons I like Costco. I don't want to have to sort through 27 different varieties everytime I need something. Socks, butter, tea, whatever, just give me one. Which brings us to this story: Supermarkets Find that Less Inventory Means More Money. It seems DEVO were ahead of their time.
Update April 2015: The Lee Dorsey video had disappeared. I tracked it down by using the YouTube id from the embedded html, which is why I now add the given title under all my YouTube posts.
Update July 2019 replaced the DEVO 2.0 video. Unfortunately the replacement doesn't have any video. You can see the kids in action here.
