Climbing Mountains

There have been a number of stories in the news these days about a man who died on Mount Everest, while quite a few people walked by. A few stopped, but nobody stayed for long.

Mostly the stories have been about the ethics of the situation. Of course they don't all agree. Ethics are a personal matter, after all. One thing they all say is that it wasn't the first time and won't be the last time, and mountain-climbing is dangerous. I can't argue with those facts. They say the man was dying and nobody could have saved him in that situation. They also say the man probably saw as many as 40 people walk away and leave him to freeze to death. That's the part I am having trouble with.

The expedition to climb Mt. Everest is for most people a once-in-a-lifetime event. It costs a lot of money, time, and effort. There's got to be a huge sense of pride and accomplishment in being able to say "I climbed Mount Everest." I don't thtink I could follow that with "And I walked away from a dying man that I could have comforted or at least sat with, so I could finish my climb." Is it really that important to stand on top of a really big hill?

Phones and Social Networks

Now we all know that several major phone service providers have given all their records to the NSA for social network analysis. They say that they removed any personally identifying information, which I doubt since personal telephone numbers are often considered precisely that in medical record context. But whatever.

I don't think this will yield any useful results. The NSA can find out who knows who and calls who, but it's useless without names, addresses, all that identifying information that they don't have. And these are records from the past. Now that all the terrorists that read US news sources know about it, the smart ones will be sure to use prepaid cell phones which are rather more difficult to trace. Maybe the really smart ones may have been doing this for years.

The idea still bothers me, whether or not it will work. So I have a plan to render the whole thing useless. If the NSA wants my phone records, they're going to get them. All I can do is make those records meaningless. I always have extra minutes for my cell phone and my land line's long distance, and unlimited local calls. I intend from now on to use those resources to make random calls all over the country. Random numbers, times, lengths of call (to the extent that I can convince a stranger not to hang up on me). If enough people do that, the NSA will have a lot of useless information, and will hopefully stop collecting it.

I bet this gets me on a list somewhere. That's ok. At least that means someone's reading this.

Magic

What is magic? For the most part, something along the lines of sleight of hand or illusion. Something that involves some skill. Not sitting in a plastic box or a bubble of water for days on end. Unless of course you're David Blaine.

I doubt I have anything new to say. I'm hardly the only person to find his stunts silly, annoying and stupid. OK, so he can hold his breath until he turns blue. That's the dream of many a 4-year-old brat, but who else cares? He can stand still and sit still for long periods of time. There's a useful skill. But mostly, be can do pointless life-threatening things and depend on someone else to save him.

Aside: the guy that saved him from his breath-holding - his name is Kirk Krack. If that's his real name, what were his parents thinking?

I just hope that he's paying his medical expenses out of his own pocket. I will be very unhappy if my health insurance premiums go up because some company has to pay for his antics. Well, I also kind of hope that someday soon he'll be a candidate for a darwin award. I believe in natural consequences.

Spammers are Weird

Yesterday I got spam from Satan. Satan had a last name. I don't see the point. Was someone really thinking "She's not dumb enough to open email from Satan. We ought to make her feel safe. Let's try Satan ... Alexander. " No, not the guy from Seinfeld. But really, since when does Satan need a last name.

Which of course pales before the real question. Why would anyone take stock advice from Satan? Let's assume Satan's telling the truth and giving me a legitimate stock tip, which frankly I'm not so sure is a valid assumption. Even so, Satan has this reputation for not giving something for nothing, and only rarely coming out on the bad end of a deal. The stock market's risky enough without taking investment advice from Satan.

Trivia

I went to a conference today. I noticed that when presenters want the audience to generate a list to illustrate a point, they only write down the list items that fit. I also noticed that presenters ask the audience to raise their hands to respond to a relatively rhetorical question. It's subtle peer pressure - nobody's going to be the one person in 300 to raise their hand and be the oddball. That's not what the conference was actually about.

TV trivia. This week's New Adventures of Old Christine (not sure why I'm watching this one, actually) was out of sequence. It as annoying, because they built the whole show around an issue that we have already seen the resolution of in previous episodes. What was the network thinking?

Why are cooking competitions on TV worth watching? You can't taste or smell or feel the food, so how can you form your own opinion? There's plenty on TV already if I want to know what to think about pretty much anything. Yet I still watch. Inertia is a powerful force.