Sunday, June 15, 2008

Words of Wisdom

If you know me at all, you know that I deeply lament this country's treatment of the Native Americans. Here are some sage words from of of their most famous leaders.

I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man, he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in His sight. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.

- Sitting Bull

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

What If?

Last night, while washing dishes, I had a thought. Not a very bright thought, not a very courageous one, but a thought none the less. And it was this:

What if, in the year 12 000 B.C, by the light of a guttering fire in a sooty and ramshackle cave, a Neanderthal man conceptualized the theory of relativity. "Ah ha!" he would have shouted in the guttural equivalent of his still nascent speech mechanisms. "Eureka! Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared!"

Lacking a durable method of communicating such concepts, however, and the theory of relativity having very little practical impact on skinning a woolly mammoth, it was simply lost to the mists of time for another 13 945 years. What if.