The Phone Company

President Bush has recently asked for an additional 53.1 billion dollars to help with Katrina. This brings the total up to 63.1 billion dollars...

Lets take another look at that number, 63.1 billion...

Wow... I still can't belive it... maybe it would help if I included the zeros and the commas, but unfortunetly I have larger concerns than to teach a bunch of people, the aesthetic beauty of simplisitic arithmatic.

With this additional 63.1 billion dollars, the total cost of the hurricane would amount to, about, 200 billion dollars. Now, I know your thinking, 'damn thats alot of money, but too bad nothing could be done... after all it is a naturual desaster.'

Well that's true, nothing can be done about what happend in New Orleans, the levies were old... and let's face it... the city was a natural bowl... I mean, who in their right mind would biuld a city surrounded by three bodies of water, that was under sea level?

Let's suppose, for a minute, that hurricane relief was product, such as a phone, and the United States government was a company that had announced that its product would be released on August 20th. Yet at the last minute the company realized that there was a major bug in their phone, that while you could call people, they couldn't hear what you were saying... Wouldn't you expect the compnay to delay the release of the product until the bug was fixed?

What would you say if you were trapped in side your house with water up to your nose, despirately trying to call for help with a cell phone that doesn't work all because your phone company couldn't get it right the first time?

I know what I would say... Time to change the phone company!

Expanding Asian Influence

Surfing the net the other day, I came across a peculiar statement by the US Intelligence Report on the future of the ecconomic world in the next ten years. What they said didn't really surprise me, because I had been suspecting something of the sort sooner or later, but its intersting that the United States finally starts to notice the growing trend.

The report, Mapping the global future, takes place about fifteen years in the future, and projects a completely changed world (yet the united states remains the dominant power) when the Asian countries of India, and China have finally reached their promise and become some of the leading powers in the economic world, along with the oil controling islamic counties.

Twenty five years ago, no one would have suspected anything of the sort. Yet today alot has changed since the begenning of India a little more than 50 years ago. One major factor that seems to be working for it, is its nag for new and emering markets such as the computer industry which, by the way, has given Indians a new steriotype whether they like it or not.

China, India's major competitor in Asia for outsourcing has one major drawback that India may be able to exploit over the coming years. This drawback is that while they control the major manufacturing markets, from shoes to carpets, they have not been able to get their hands on the new markets that have poped up over the last decade. India and China are about equal in the realm of population (india recently beat china with a wooping 1.2 billion!) they both cater to different sectors of the world market.

So, if they are both the same, what is the difference?

India while still new to globalization, has a democratic form of government, which although stil very recent, has proven to me more stable than the Communist goverment in China. But more importantly India also huge literate population with world class instituions such as the IIT's which are the worlds leading technology colleges.

But Indians beware! My gut feeling is that this ecconomic boom that India has been experiancing over the past five years, is only temporary. India's recent prosperity is not equally distributed amoung its population. While the cities speed forward toward the information age at lightning speed, its rural areas are still in the middle ages.

India cannot forget its socialist roots, and forsake democratic socialism for the sake of american capatilism. As India enters the new age, it must keep one hand on its past and its culture, while reaching out with the other to grab its destiny and future place in the globalized world economy.

Scientists and Atheists

A stone's throw from the tall building of the newly constucted Mount Sinai Medical center works a man almost as old as ancient as some of the textbooks that we have in our World History Classes. Although in the geological scale of time, that might be just a blink of an eye, in the rapidly evolving field of evolutionary biolgy, and genetics that time period is equivilent to a few eons. Dr. Levitan, one of the pioneers of his field, is a proffessor of Human Population Genetics at Mount Sinai School of Medacin. Although today his field has left him far behind, at one point his research was considered heretical. Yet still he goes, without fail, to the synagoge each week and never fails to celebrate any Jewish holiday, whether it be one as large as Hawnika or as small and insignificant as the Sabath. What leads him to be so devoted to god, despite his 60 years of expience in a field which teaches an idea completely condradictory to what religion teaches?

Throughout history, most scientists have been belivers in God. But during the past few centuries the scientific trend has been toward atheism. Up until now its had seemed that god's laws were so effective that the universe seemed to run itself. Yet as science makes new leaps and bounds in understanding the universe around us, it seems as if the trend toward atheism may be reversing.

All of the leading scientists of our day from Coperincous to Darwin, have been devote believers in god. Yet after the "darwinian revolution", with the idea of Evolution, our science's preception of nature, and god changed over the past 50 years. Gone where the dictates of the Roman Catholic chruch which forbidded scincists to publish ideas which went against the teachings of the bible. Without fear of retrebution and excomunication from the Chruch, or society, science was allowed to finally take flight, and research all go where it previously would never have dared. It is under these conditions that our understanding of the world was so greately changed. In less than a century we went from beliving that the world formed in seven days, to more like 70 billion, even that is a conservative estimate.

Yet as today science starts to tinker with the basic units of life, to extact its will upon nature. An amazing new trend has emerged amoungst scientists today. The smallest units of life, the cell functions in a stange way. While our textbooks and teachers would have us believe that everything that happens in life is a process, like flipping on a light switch, as you dwelve deeper into science you start to realize that everything that happens in due to chance. "Everything in life, from the basic process of moving you eyes to read this article, to comprehending is due to a random chain of events," said Junior Niel Mehra. "If just one of these events was to take place a different way than it usually does then you would have serious problems. Yet remarkably it always happens the same way. Time, and time again."

"Therecomes a point, in research, as you dwelve deeper and deeper into the mystery of life when you start to realize that there is no way this could have happend without an outside presence, " said Junior Jacob Berv. He continued, "then you come flying back to providence, and god to try and salvage what is left of your soul."