America

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Deciding the Fate of North America

August 29, 2009 in Books / Novels / Writing, History by Ezra S F | No comments

The French and Indian: War Deciding the Fate of North America

In high school and college the French and Indian War was this long amorphous event in between settling the colonies and the American Revolution. It took a movie, The Patriot (not even in my top 500 movies), to give some color to the story in colonists fought in that war, found it brutal, and took tactics learned there into the fight against the British. In [book:His Excellency: George Washington|6462] this was confirmed as many of Washington’s officers earned their British commissions by fighting in this war.

The American Revolution owes much to this war. These points are all my own combining information from several books I’ve recently read.

  1. The colonists agreed to fight in this war in order to secure lands on which to settle west of the Appalachian mountains. So to set the lands aside as Indian territory (the same tribes who killed so many colonists) angered the colonists. Then to reset the lands aside for British lords was even worse.
  2. Allowing the colonists to fight trained thousands of soldiers who went unpaid for months (the regular soldiers were paid) and fractions of what was promised. The worst people to anger are the ones you have armed.
  3. England increased taxes to improve the coffers after nearly bankrupting the country to fight the French and Indian War. The taxes which the Boston Tea Party was to protest.
  4. The French lost most of their navy in fighting the French and Indian War. By the time of the American Revolution, the French navy was somewhat recovered. To throw it at an internal British conflict would have been reckless. So the French delayed supporting us until they had an idea we might actually be able to win.

Not too dry. Brings up too much rumor and legend. I got what I wanted, clearer idea of the missing decades prior to the American Revolution.

P.S. I liked the British strategy of choking the supply lines and seizing production. This is my usual approach to war games. Maybe I would be speaking British today if William Pitt had remained in power through the American Revolution?

Cognitive Load

August 21, 2009 in Personal / Relationships by Ezra S F | 2 comments

My parents taught me as a child lying is harder than telling the truth. I am way too lazy to bother with anything other than using a tangent to change the subject. Simplicity also helps keep track of my life. I like understanding what is happening and why.

Skills involved in deception also teach problem-solving, project management, and social context management. My favorite friends were the brilliant liars. They always had a new entertaining story.

For a host of reasons, their theory goes, lying is more mentally taxing than telling the truth. Performing an extra task while lying or telling the truth should therefore affect the liars more. The Load of Lying: Testing for Truth

As evidenced by Dunbar’s Number, our brains are wired for both determining honesty in others and being the cheat.

Americans Are Hindus?

August 17, 2009 in Religion / Baha'i Faith by Ezra S F | No comments

Perhaps I don’t understand a Newsweek article advocating Americans have more in common with Hinduism than Christianity?

First, the numbers of Americans who agree with the sentiments are 65%, 30%, and 24% respectively for each argument. We’d use numbers as strong as 30% and 24% to illustrate people are opposed to something. Of course, we’d use “only” to precede the terribly small number.

Second, the one decent argument, that Americans are accepting there are many paths to God can be found in many of the world’s religions. The Baha’i Faith takes it a step further. God started each of the major religions to bring all of humanity together in moral maturity. Yes, there are differences. However, distilling the teachings down to what they teach about morality, there is far more in common than distinct.

Hinduism is more than respect for people choosing their own path to God, being spiritual, or cremation. Americans are much more complex than these ideas as well.

Dune

August 3, 2009 in Photography by from Flickr | No comments

St. Joseph Peninsula State Park in Florida was the 2002 Dr. Beach America’s Best Beach winner. It is the only beach on the list I have actually visited. I just wish I’d brought the right camera lens.

Dune

The A-Team

Visiting here in 2003 made me appreciate photography. This was my first trip back. Photos from the 2003 trip:

St. Joseph's Dunes Boat in Bay

I’m blogging this.

July 5, 2009 in Athens GA, Photography by Ezra S F | 3 comments

Elizabeth For about eight months I have participated in a group called the Brunch Bunch here in Athens. We get together to eat and talk. Many conversations drift into the nerdy (my forté?). The locations vary so I have gotten to try new (to me) restaurants. Elizabeth (pictured right) vouched that I am a great guy. Well, these are great people.
:)

Elizabeth also brought a friend of hers from out of town, Claudia. Claudia, smartly has a newer version of my Canon Rebel. I have the XT. She has the XSi (two models newer). The newest is the T1i.

Downtown Athens is a great place to shoot photos. So, we walked around for an hour or so looking in stores to get out of the heat. This is the hat Elizabeth bought from Helix who also had some cool stone candle holders. Native American Gallery had some interesting petroglyph jewelry and gray flower pottery. I’ve got some ideas for gifts to give for upcoming birthdays, holidays, etc.

One of the employees at Helix and Claudia both asked if I had a blog. I’m sure it was because of my shirt! I only admitted to this one and blogging about Blackboard. Though, I guess I have diversified somewhat here. I probably should blog more about local stuff as well. That would mean getting out more as well.

I'm blogging this.For years, I have been collecting teeshirts from thinkgeek.com. At present the collection consists of:

Some others are on my wishlist. I do have some shirts from other places. By far the most popular is the xkcd sudo comic. I’ve added a few others from xkcd to my wishlist as well.

Voting Rights Act

June 25, 2009 in Gov't / Law / Politics by Ezra S F | No comments

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 protects people from malicious actions by state and local governments to prevent people from voting. Yes, we have a president of African-American descent. Yes, the United States Supreme Court took no action. However, the majority opinion statement that, “We are a very different nation,” suggests it could be repealed. The argument against maintaining the law seems to be since governments are behaving now no law is needed.

Are they? The DOJ disallowed a Georgia program to cull voters from the databases who might not be citizens. This strikes me as just like the Florida Central Voter File program in 1998-2006 to cull ex-felons from voter lists. Since they just used names, it was highly inaccurate and wrongly disenfranchised thousands in 2000… in Florida… the state which made international headlines as the place unable to count ballots. When Congress renewed it in 2006, “It held extensive hearings and produced voluminous evidence that minority voters continue to face significant obstacles.” [NYT] I may have to go looking for this in the Congressional Record.

With the protests happening in Iran right now about voter irregularities, is this the time to repeal one of the few deterrents against future abuses to erode the significant improvements over the past 40 years?

TED Talks: Liz Coleman’s call to reinvent liberal arts education

June 1, 2009 in Education by Ezra S F | No comments

About this talk from the TED site:

Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education — one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day.

She goes further than this blurb would indicate. She claims the drive towards professional degrees, aka “learning more and more about less and less”, results in a toxic brew dismantling Liberal Arts education. Losing this cross-disciplinary approach results in an inability to tackle the country’s and world’s problems which often require more than one discipline to understand them.

Focus on higher education as a means to a profession ignores these questions:

  • What kind of a world are we making?
  • What kind of a world should we be making?
  • What kind of a world can we be making?

Parents are sending their children to college to get a good job. Solving the world’s problems isn’t part of the American dream. Well… outside of academia.
:)

Torchwood Returns

May 29, 2009 in Movies / Films / TV by Ezra S F | No comments

This is a test of the George blog watching system. If George in facts reads my blog, then he will see this trailer for a show he likes. If George actually had read my blog, then he would have made comments on previous posts. Thank you.

Athensdating.org

April 11, 2009 in Interweb, Photography by Ezra S F | 3 comments

Writing a Blog Post About This Scam I noticed a little black and white sign: “Single? athensdating.org” a while ago. A couple weeks ago it came up in conversation. Today I saw it again. So I visited the site.

First impression: A local site should have images to represent something about the locality. Generic stock photography doesn’t cut it for me. The signup for wanted my home and cell phone numbers.

That sounded phishy to me.

Domaintools.com is a great site for looking up who runs a site. If the owner has selected privacy options with their registrar, then that would be a snag. Fortunately for us, the owner of athensdating.org isn’t hiding.

Owner: NuStar Solutions

The note “Email address is associated with about 4,690 domains” caught my eye. So I looked up NuStar and found this article about these popping up everywhere. (At least DomainTools gave me the info in one shot without having to do the same extensive research.) Lots of stuff online about these signs, who is placing them, and whether or not this is a scam.

I’m just going to assume it is a scam.

Picture info: Writing a Blog Post About This Scam on Flickr from sneezypb

Frustrations

October 13, 2008 in Personal / Relationships by Ezra S F | 1 comment

American politics frustrates me. Little of it is genuine. People are being tricked into believing obvious lies. Positions are veiled in marketing speak to make them sound better than the reality. Maybe there is an honest candidate? I just don’t have faith in the integrity in the American political system. In any case, I have already voted. I recommend that if you can, then get it done ASAP and prior to the actual election day.

Apparently there are lots of car accidents on Election Day? I’ll hopefully be teleworking that day.

I turned down an offer to work a web site called Real World Painting. The kid doing the web site let it get suspended (back up now). So the owner wanted my advice. He really needs the most help with search engine optimization. He’s interested in reading up on it. Anyone have suggestions?

A friend has turned up with lymphoma. So I will probably set up a web site to accept donations to help this family with the expenses.

Been talking with Mom about the economy. I did a quick calculation. Add $700 billion to the $10.3 trillion national debt to get $11 trillion. The employed U.S. work force is about 145,255,000. That puts the burden of this debt at 75,728.89 per worker. Add in those on employment or not in the labor force to get 234 million people. We share a $46,936.33 burden. Last I did this calculation it was only around $30 thousand.

That is enough for now.

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