Ken's Blog

Have you noticed that the larger the distance you need to travel, the more annoying is the process?

Walking is easy. Bicycling is a little more difficult. Driving a car is more of a hassle, as well as being more expensive and more dangerous.

And don’t even get me started on airplane flights.

I read today that Americans on the political right are going after anyone who is glorifying the murder of Charlie Kirk. They are publicly shaming such people on social media and encouraging their employers to fire them.

There are many parts of these events that I don’t understand. But to me, the greatest mystery of all is why anyone would think of murder as something to be celebrated, let alone say so publicly.

Sure, I and many others did not agree with things that Kirk said. But when someone is murdered in cold blood because they have said something that you disagree with, free speech itself is also being murdered.

Today, like every September 11, is a day of mourning for Americans. But mourning should be accompanied by reflection.

I am reflecting on the assassination yesterday of Charlie Kirk. Of course that was an evil and tragic act. But there are other deaths to consider as well on this day of mourning, and other tragic acts.

The recent gutting of USAID is projected, by one careful study, to result in nearly three million preventable deaths per year over the next five years. That figure includes about one million preventable deaths of children under five every year.

Is it not fair to ask whether that is also tragic?

As I understand it, the blowing up of a ship by the U.S. military when it was thousands of miles out at sea was justified by saying that those eleven people on board might have been transporting drugs to America, and were therefore attacking the United States. That was the reason given, even though the ship was actually trying to flee at the time.

One takeaway here is that if you invoke the rules of war in any situation, then you have no need to worry about niceties such as due process. Therefore you never need to think about the possibility that you may have just sent 11 innocent people to the bottom of the sea.

A certain U.S. president once said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”. Now I realize that under the current rules of engagement, this might actually happen.

He could simply shoot you, and claim that he did it because you were running drugs, and were therefore a wartime enemy of the United States. Afterward, who would people believe? The president of the United States, or a dead person who is no longer around to defend themself.

From now on I would like a heads up whenever that man is scheduled to visit New York City. Just so I know to stay away from Fifth Avenue.

There is something both terrifying and wonderful about a looming proposal deadline. Terrifying because the stakes are high, and because the possibility of failure is quite large. Wonderful for those very same reasons.

As the deadline approaches, all thoughts of procrastination go out the window. You no longer have the convenient excuse of trying to make it perfect.

As Montesquieu wrote: “Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien.” And he was right.

If you’ll excuse me, now I need to get back to my deadline.

If you were given the option to be able to read peoples’ minds, would you say yes? To me, it’s a difficult question.

Of course it would be an enormous superpower. You would be assured of great success, both social and financial

And yet, you would also be able to look into the souls of everyone you meet. You would know them not from what they say, but from how they truly feel.

Would you really want to spend the rest of your life living with that?

I had thought there was a rule on Wikipedia that they only report the birthdays of real people. But today one of the birthdays listed was of Walter White, the fictional protagonist of the TV show Breaking Bad.

For the record, the fictional Walter White was born on September 7, 1958. And the fact that his birthday was duly reported alongside the birthdays of real people opens a door to strange possibilities.

I suppose this is only to be expected in our current age of A.I. After all, some virtual on-line influencers these days have more followers than real influencers do.

But are we going down a slippery slope? Will we soon come to a time when the line between a real person and a fictional person becomes increasingly blurred, and eventually disappears altogether?

Maybe at some point fictional people will win the right to vote. I’m not sure I want to be around when that happens.

I noticed a while ago that software to support on-line communication is named ironically. An app to support greater productivity is called “Slack”. An app to help collaborators work in harmony is call “Discord”.

It looks as though the U.S. government is taking a page out of this playbook. As any child knows, the primary purpose of a nation’s Department of Defense is to prevent wars.

And now the U.S. is about to change that name to the “Department of War”. Obviously this is meant ironically, since nobody actually wants a war, unless they are a complete idiot. Or unless they derive some sort of sick pleasure from watching large numbers of people die.

Why stop there? In the spirit of irony, let’s change the name of the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Disease and Dying.

Oh wait, that’s not ironic at all. That creepy half-dead RFK Jr guy is indeed turning it into the Department of Disease and Dying.

In a rather impressive effort to kill off as many Americans as possible, he is proposing to get rid of vaccines, and therefore to bring back such old favorites as smallpox, polio, diphtheria, measles, and tetanus.

I’m sure there is irony to be found here somewhere.

Last month the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employment was down. The president took immediate and decisive action: He fired the person in charge of the bureau.

This month the BLS again reported that employment was down. There is, of course, only one sensible course of action: The president needs to immediately fire the person he just appointed last month.

And he will need to keep doing this until the numbers go the way he wants them to. I wonder how many months in a row he will need to keep firing people until those pesky numbers finally get it right.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the discovery of my favorite molecule — buckminsterfullerene. It will come as no surprise to anyone that this esteemed molecule is named for the famous architect, due to its geodesic dome-like structure.

Buckminsterfullerene is a beautiful molecule in many ways, and that fact that it occurs in nature has makes me very happy. It consists of 60 carbon atoms, arranged in a semi-regular polyhedron.

That 32 sided polyhedron is called a truncated icosahedron, which also happens to be my favorite polyhedron. Which is one reason that I love buckminsterfullerene.

As it happens, the locations of the carbon atoms are identical to the locations of the 60 corners of the panels of a soccer ball. So if you look at a soccer ball (which consists of 20 hexagons plus 12 pentagons), you are basically looking at a buckminsterfullerene molecule.

Except that the soccer ball is bigger. A soccer ball is about 22.5 centimeters in diameter, whereas a buckminsterfullerene molecule is about one nanometer in diameter.

Which makes the soccer ball more than 200 million times bigger. Also, you cannot kick a molecule of buckminsterfullerene.