Ponderings of a Scientist

So I’m sitting on my couch on Friday night watching PBS and on comes a
program about net neutrality. Guess what big business wants to
allow their cronies a special pass to high speed internet that will
not be available to mere mortals. Essentially, this would give
big companies a competitive edge in just about everything and give the
internet providers the power to decide who gets this advantage and who
doesn’t. Then those with the fast sites get more viewership and
suddenly we are all oil consuming, tobacco smoking republicans.
This is their ad promoting the unfair advantage.

In the ad they say the government shouldn’t regulate the internet,
which at first would seem like something I would agree with, but in
actuality what the government wants to do is take the following
unofficial rule and make it law: Internet providers can control
what happens on the hardware ends (i.e. my computer and yours), but
they cannot control the transfer. I can write anything I want and
it will be transferred to anyone with access just a quickly and with
the same rights as say Bill Gates.
This is the sensibly campaign’s website.

I saw this on NOW on WGBH Boston.

Apparently Eponym likes what I have to say so they have kindly excluded me from the ploy to make everyone pay. I’m only at 4mb so far this month. At that rate I will have 40mb to spare on June 30th! My trick is to write about intelligent topics that bore everyone away from my site, oh and I never post pictures and I barely ever insert links. Apparently having my words speak from themselves, irrelevant of the rest of the internet, may be ignorant, but its keeping my site free!

However, as I consider this further I feel it will only be a matter of time until Eponym brings me down. Think about it Dan was the first with a blog and the first to pay, now doomy and zipy may need to pay. I started after everyone else so I figure I’m safe for approx. 2 1/2 more months.

First off why the hell does committee have some many double letters. I think it is a codex meaning that committees can only be successful when they consist of 1) two people or 2) 3 pairs of twins, however for more clarity I will have to defer to Tom Hanks. ASIDE: Why does commute lack the tt and ee? I hope this isn’t a code meaning only one out of every three cars in the morning commute should be a carpool.

Why the committee talk? I spent Tuesday and Wednesday of this week as an audience member at a committee meeting for which my boss is a member. Now the whole premise behind this committee is to bring together 3 distinct user groups and have them examine the work of colleagues from any or all of these user groups, come to a consensus on the colleagues’ work, and pass the decision on to the larger council. I conferred with Tom Hanks and what this really means is talk a lot and get little accomplished! It got so bad on the first day I actually started blogging in the meeting (on paper, commingled with my notes; I thought typing would be rude), assigning each member a stereotypical title, i.e. The Egotist, The Pessimist, The Placater. However after spending a second day with these people, including a beer at the end of day two, I feel much less like ranting. While I still feel a committee of ten works about as fast as a snail going the wrong way on an escalator, they did make significant progress and gave their colleagues a much fairer (albeit slower) review than if the decision was made by one person alone.

So on the second day the focus of the meeting shifted less to reviewing and more to hearing progress reports from various people. I got to make what turned out to be an hour long presentation. I would talk about something for 5 minutes and then there would be 15 minutes of discussion. That was great as they loved my ideas and came up with all sorts of new projects for me to work on. Tom Hanks says these are great reasons why my boss should try to make my position permanent not a one year term contract. One the other hand, all the discussion sucked because I was standing in the middle of the U shaped committee seating the whole time. It was a bit awkward being the only one standing, at one point I went back to my seat, but for the most part the discussion was just long enough for the awkwardness, but not long enough for me to sit down!

I’m sure the Old Weirdo has something to say about meetings as anyone in his home town can watch him try to stay awake each week on the public assess channel!

Final Words of Wisdom: Democracy is great, but as seen by the lead by committee example, decisions via majority rule are slow. If only I trusted someone to be the monarchy or dictator, she could get so much accomplished. POLITICAL OPINION: Our current federal government is a combination reflecting the worst of both of these systems.

Zipy’s Back!!