How Screwed We Are / Technology — 5 comments
11
Feb 11

Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, and The Moon Titan

This is the only surface picture ever taken in the outer solar system, taken on the same day Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston broke up.

Today I was asked by Florida Atlantic University to speak in front of a group of 300 of Palm Beach County’s bright middle and high school kids in a couple of weeks. My task: to inspire future engineers.

It’s something I’m excited about, can’t wait to do, but I am completely aware that getting people as psyched as I am about science and engineering isn’t easy. As far as math and science is concerned, in my opinion, much of America has its head in its ass. Science is viewed as geeky. Boring. Dry. Uncreative.

When I worked in New York, I had a Chinese friend from Shanghai. She told me that in her high school, the cool kids were the ones that were good at math and science. That’s a hard concept for me to to get my head around. When I think to my high school, the cool kids were usually those who organized keg parties in the woods and lit their farts.

Think about the cool kids from your high school. Can you imagine them engaged in a scientific discussion?

American pop-culture disdain for math and science is thorough and ridiculous, even as we slobber all over our iPhones and Droids.

Consider this: six years ago, a space probe called Huygens landed on Titan, one of the most fascinating objects in the solar system and Saturn’s largest moon (Saturn is a planet).

Engineers launched Huygens in 1997. It slept dormant during its interplanetary journey, just like Jake Sully in Avatar. It woke up on cue, nearly 7 years later, and separated from its rocket. It landed on its target, 1.3 million kilometers away from the launch pad. It took a picture of what’s believed to be an alien shoreline. That’s right. A freaking alien shoreline.

The same day Huygens landed on Titan, Brad Pitt broke up with Jennifer Aniston. Guess which dominated the news for the next year.

Fast forward to March of 2010, when scientists achieved the first planned particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider. The Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator 17 miles in diameter. According to Wikipedia, it “will address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing humanity’s understanding of the deepest laws of nature.” It took engineers 9 billion dollars and 15 years of wizardry to bring this thing to fruition.

The same day particles collided for the first time in the Hadron Collider, Ricky Martin came out of the closet. Those sounds you heard last year on March 30th? That was me weeping. And not because of the lost virility of Mr. Martin.

So that’s why, when the president lectures us about the need to emphasize science and math in this country, I get swept up in the enthusiasm, idealistic as it may be. And I’m going to do everything in my power to bring the mystery, creativity, and downright sexiness of science and engineering to our next generation of professionals.

Media — No comments
22
Oct 10

In Support of NPR

Let’s be clear: I don’t have a problem with what Juan Williams said. Then again, I’ve never been the victim of profiling so who the hell am I to judge.

That said, this whole media circus illustrates why I favor NPR in the first place. Who gives a damn. The reason I listen to NPR is because I don’t like to hear invective, finger pointing, vitriol, or an attempt to discredit people when I’m trying to understand what’s going on in this noisy world.

I like the fact that I get to listen to loonies on both sides of the spectrum (yes, they bring in peeps from the left and right). I like the fact that they get smart people (for the most part) for in depth commentary and analysis that’s missing in the sound-byte. I like the fact that they don’t play to my emotions, notably fear and suspicion, when they report.

If you like your news polarizing, then stay away from NPR. But if you like nuanced reporting that’s not afraid to interview libertarians, liberals, or conservatives, if you don’t like to be shouted at when you consume news, if you can handle hearing what someone else has to say without cringing, then tune in and listen.

And if you’ve been listening for years and have never became a member, make a pledge today. The loonies wanna cut their funding.

Children and Media / Dogs — 1 comment
21
Aug 10

Pluto is no longer a planet. It is now a dog. As explained by a 4-year old….

Pluto is no longer a planet. It is now a dog. You know how they made it? They broke it in half, added a tail and a head, and made it yellow.

Dogs / Having Fun — No comments
27
Jun 10

The Happiness Machine

Last November my wife and I invested in a Happiness Machine. We’re very happy with it. It works quite well.

The Happiness Machine is pleasing to look at. I feel a deep fondness in my heart whenever I set my eyes on it. It’s soft to the touch. The Happiness Machine is fuzzy. Sometimes it can have a foul odor, but that’s another story.

It’s very easy to maintain a Happiness Machine. It requires regular fueling, twice a day. It also produces exhaust, so we must make sure to take it outside regularly. Every once in a while, the Happiness Machine emits exhaust inside our house. On those occasions, we yell at the Happiness Machine.

No matter. The Happiness Machine loves to see us, bouncing up and down when we walk in the house, and soaking us with its kissing device when we wake up in the morning. The Happiness Machine can detect when we’re upset and goes into cheer-me-up mode.

But it’s not all sunshine and roses. All Happiness Machines have their quirks and known malfunctions. Ours runs around the house at 90 miles per hour at eight in the evening. It also destroys, whenever possible, our socks and underwear.

On the whole, I give our Happiness Machine two big thumbs up. I wholly recommend one.

How Screwed We Are / Movies — No comments
26
Apr 10

Cat Food. I Hope You Like It.

At the urging of some of my more hip-to-the-financial-news friends, I watched the movie I.O.U.S.A. last night (available on Netflix on-demand), which explains in an entertaining and informative way what the national debt is, why it matters, and why we’re so incredibly screwed.

I hope you like cat food. Because that’s all you’ll be able to afford to eat when we retire. The baby boomers are gonna clean us out, folks.

You know that Social Security money that gets taken out of your paycheck, Gen X and Gen Yers? You ain’t never gonna see it again. Look up “Ponzi Scheme” in Wikipedia. That’s how Social Security operates.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: the U.S. government spends more than it earns (through taxes). That’s not a problem in the short-term, but it’s a big problem in the long-term. I won’t go into why, but let’s just say that other empires throughout history, among them Rome and England, were undone by their debt.

But you have to watch the movie to see why and just how hard we’re going to get our asses handed to us.

When I owned cats, I always thought that I would prefer Tender Vittles. The dry stuff looked like it would tear your mouth up worse than stale Cap’n Crunch, and the wet stuff was just plain gross. I hope they still make T.V. (I already have slang picked out) in 30 years.

Part of the problem is our government. If you’re an institution for the people by the people, when the people are addicted to debt, you’ve got a tricky situation.

No one wants to hear about cutting Social Security or Medicare, or on the other hand, raising taxes. We expect it all for nothing. We want big government benefits with small government taxes.

And the leaders running the country don’t have either the cojones or mojo to tell it like it is, and complex economic ideas need documentaries, not sound bytes, to be understood.

So what can we do? My suggestion is you invest what little nest egg you have left over from the recession and put it all into Nestlé, parent company of Purina. Because cat food is all you’ll be able to afford to feed yourself, and everyone will be buying it.

And if you live in Florida or New York City, make sure you buy some Ziplock bags. If you recall from Inconvenient Truth, we’ll be underwater and you won’t want your cat food to get wet.

Dogs / Having Fun — No comments
22
Apr 10

My Dog is a Pervert

With apologies to Dan Greenburg’s “My Dog Is a Plumber” poem from Free To Be You And Me.

My dog is a pervert.  He sniffs at my crotch.
When I’m in the shower he’ll sit there and watch.
And on any old day, whether Friday or Monday
His favorite thing is to chew on my undies.
“The stankier, the better,” my dog says to me.
“So don’t buy detergent, I’ll lick ‘em for free.”
His gonads are gone, so I find it amazin’
How he humps at my leg, with his lipstick a-blazin’.
I blush at the thought of the things that he’ll eat
Yet the scariest part is, he isn’t in heat.

Movies — No comments
17
Apr 10

Watching 2012 in the Wake of Earthquakes and Eruptions

Let’s see. We’ve seen major earthquakes in Haiti, Baja Caifornia, Chile, an China in the past few months. Then we have this volcano, dormant for 200 years, erupting in Iceland shutting down travel and cargo in Europe.

What a great time to watch 2012, in which humanity gets nearly wiped out by geologic events.

Last night we popped in 2012 on BluRay. I highly recommend watching this movie, especially with friends who like to make fun absurdities in disaster flicks. 2012 is super-entertaining and hilarious, filled with very realistic-looking megadestruction, nail-biting but predictable escapes, character stereotypes, and a complete lack of subtlety in attempting to send a populist and brotherhood-of-man moral message. It’s perfect.

2012 is very much a new millenium movie, with emerging superpowers like India, Russia, and China having more of a presence than Western European countries. In what’s sure to delight the NAACP and piss off the white supremacists (but then again, what doesn’t annoy them), the ascendancy of African-Americans was reflected by a sympathetic black president and altruistic leading science advisor. There was also an unintentionally funny statement by a geologist, ‘The continent of Africa is rising!’

Particularly amusing were the lengthy, dramatic speeches given by various characters about the nature of our humanity at moments of extreme time-pressure. And even funnier were the moments of tender dialog by survivors of the complete destruction of the human race, including their families and presumably the majority of their Facebook friends.

New York’s destruction was notably absent. Perhaps the filmmakers thought it was okay to blow away Los Angeles and Vegas but seeing buildings fall in NYC would hit too close to home. Probably a good call.

In all, 2012 offers complete entertainment. You will not be bored. I’m not saying its the best movie, but its certainly a good time when watched with the right people.

Thanking People — No comments
16
Apr 10

Thank You, Frau Hugg, Miss Neely, and Dina (Again)

Yesterday I had a stiff deadline.  I had to turn in one-thousand word articles to two separate legal publications (that’s two articles for a total of two thousand words).

Yes, my writing skills were honed a bit in college.  But as a freshman at Northwestern, in some of my initial classes I would get A’s on my essays when other kids from more pedigreed high schools would suffer C’s.

This was because a couple of teachers in high school busted my balls when it came to writing.  Frau Hugg, my AP European History, dished out C’s to my essays until I could write a cogent, forceful argument, and Edna Neely, my English and Journalism teacher, took me to task for everything I did wrong.

It was a bit painful at the time but I truly believe I wouldn’t be able to deliver written content without the training I received from these two educators.

I would also like to take the opportunity to embarrass my wife, Dina Roth Port, once more.  When we lived in New York she edited national magazines and now generously reads my legal technology articles that no one outside of our vertical wants to read.  And she busts my balls all the time for all sorts of gramatical issues which I’ve never even heard of.

So thanks to the three classy ladies who forged a survivable writer out of an utter verbal idiot.

Uncategorized — No comments
13
Apr 10

Very Proud of Dina, My Wife, The Author

My wife, Dina Roth Port, penned her first book, Previvors, which will be published by Penguin in October. It’s a guidebook about women at high risk for breast cancer and profiles the stories of five women who took control over their fate.

Dina spent the past two-and-a-half years writing, researching, interviewing, and revising what’s turned out to be an engaging and important book, and I am so incredibly proud of her. And she’s going to be so embarrassed that I wrote this.

I’ve worked hard on major projects before, pulling 18-hour days for weeks at a time. But her writing effort is like nothing I’ve ever seen: the subject matter is intense, the work took years, she had to track down and interview more that seventy top experts, and extract the stories of the women she interviewed. All on top of shuttling kids back and forth to school, adopting a puppy, and keeping our household running.

So take a look at her newly launched website and blog at dinarothport.com. And you can even pre-order copies of Previvors!

Amazing Consumer Products / Children and Media / Media — 1 comment
08
Apr 10

The iPad May be the Ultimate Family Computer

Let me be clear up front: I buy into this iPad thing hook, line, and sinker. In fact, I’m writing this blog post using Safari on the device’s full keyboard.

In the context of a family, this thing is killer. It’s a killer family app. Each night my kids and I read a chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a free book from the iBook store. Next up is Winnie the Pooh. We fight (myself included) over who gets to turn the pages (turning the pages is very cool).

Then we fire up the Marvel app and read about Spiderman. Unbelievable artwork, if you haven’t seen a comic book in a while you won’t believe how beautiful they are.

Then we fire up Adobe Ideas or eChalkboard and draw pictures (which we can easily email to people). My daughter was at the office the other day and used the iPad to watch Monsters Inc from the streaming Netflix app.

Once this puppy has a video camera, and you can talk to the grandparents with a couple finger swipes, watch out – every family will have one.

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