The end of print

Last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was printed two years ago, there will be no more. After 244 years, Britannica Inc. is calling it quits in the print encyclopedia business. They sold a couple thousand copies of the 2010 edition to libraries, but that was pretty much it -- nobody else was willing to pay the price for information they can look up online as easily.

I am conflicted. I must admit that I rarely look up things in books nowadays. On the other hand I spent many a lazy summer evening picking up a random encyclopedia at a friend's house and opening it at random to some page about some topic I knew nothing about, and trying to figure out what they were talking about. In a way this gave me an education that the crappy schools of the desegregation-era South, which were all about trying to keep white boys out of the same schools as them uppity nigras and nothing about providing an education, could not have hoped to give.

And now that's gone, forever. There will be no more children on lazy summer evenings picking up an encyclopedia and turning it to a random page. I suppose it was inevitable anyhow, given the plethora of entertainment options that today's children have -- in my childhood there was one television, showing a black-and-white picture, in a large wooden piece of furniture in the living room, and if the grownups were watching a show that was not appropriate for children we were sent elsewhere to entertain ourselves. And we did, because we had no choice. And in homes full of books, naturally we picked up books. Today... that'll never happen again. Books are becoming obsolete. When I needed a new reference book on Microsoft Powershell, for example, I bought an e-book from O'Reilly, not a paper book. I have limited space on my bookshelves, and I save that for reference books I *can't* get as e-books... which is increasingly few nowadays.

-- Badtux the Wistful Penguin

Life in an Indian call center

Mother Jones goes undercover to reveal what's *really* happening when you're talking to "Marty" who happens to be in an Indian call center.

One question I'd like to answer, asked by one of the Indian call center workers: "I have experienced some Americans—please don't mind—they don't like Indians. They act rude as soon as they come to know I am Indian. Why is this?"

Well, it's simple. Until the past 15 years or so, call centers were located in places like Phoenix and San Antonio, places with a low cost of living and a large supply of skilled labor that migrated to them from surrounding regions. Call center jobs provided the first jobs for a lot of folks who didn't graduate from a top-ranked university with the best grades but were more than qualified to talk to other Americans in an understandable and comprehensible way to solve their problems.

So now the call centers have largely moved to India, and where are those workers? Many of them went back home, and they're bitter that their jobs were filled with Indian call center workers. Furthermore, they perceive the Indians as doing a worse job than they did -- Indian call centers rarely have the ability to escalate problems to people who know enough to actually resolve them, and the calls are so scripted that they seem insulting to many Americans. It all boils down to, "that Indian has *MY* job." It's got nothing to do with you, Shail. It's all about the process you represent -- the process of disemploying Americans for the benefit of a powerful elite who care nothing about America and Americans, and everything about extracting as much money as they can from America by any means possible.

-- Badtux the Mercenary Penguin

Cool book

Zero Days, by Barbara Egbert, the story of a mother, a father, and their ten year old daughter who through-hiked the entire Pacific Crest Trail in one season. The weak link in the trio, BTW, turned out to be the mother, who had to drop out a couple hundred miles before the end of the trail because her knees totally disintegrated. The kid was fine -- was by the end of the trail hauling a larger percentage of her weight than the adults were, yet was spending half her time yelling "Come on, slowpokes, keep up!".

I'm not ever going to hike the entire Pacific Crest Trail in a season. I know my limits, and spending that much time away from my beloved books and kittehs isn't happening, not to mention that I like my comfort. The occasional three-or-four-day backpacking trip along portions of the PCT is all I'm interested in, enough to let me see some of the best scenery, but also enough to know that civilization is underrated (especially that part of civilization called HOT SHOWERS). But here's two flippers up for those few brave fools who do this trip. If we had more such fools doing senseless things like through-hiking the PCT, and fewer fools doing senseless things like shooting federal judges, bombing civil rights parades, and disrupting town hall meetings with shouts of "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!", the world would be a much nicer place...

-- Badtux the Appreciative Penguin

Fundamental change

Bryan over at Why Now reminds us that today is the 107th anniversary of the 1st manned flight at Kitty Hawk.

My grandmother was born when the nearest city, 50 miles away, was an all-day trip on muddy roads via horse and wagon, lighting was kerosene lamps, heat and cooking was wood stoves, the bathroom was an outhouse, the running water was what you pulled out of the well with a bucket and a rope, the refrigerator was a large ceramic jug dropped into the well at the end of a rope, dinner was whatever you had harvested, and sausage was what you made in your own smokehouse from slaughtering one of your own pigs. Medical treatments for most diseases read as, “send home with palliative treatment to die” and graveyards were full of tiny little graves that read “Baby Smith” or “Baby Page” or “Baby Taylor”, where starvation was an ever-present threat only one bad harvest away. She went peacefully in her sleep with the Internet, space travel, big-screen TV’s, and modern medicine, where childhood mortality from disease was rare and starvation in America almost unheard of.

I think of what kind of progress children born in the 70′s will see in their time, and I feel sad. They were already born with man having reached the moon, and nothing done in outer space since then has matched that peak. Cars and aircraft are more fuel-efficient, quieter, faster, and more powerful, but those are marginal improvements on already-existing inventions. The Internet, which hit its stride in their mid-20′s, certainly was an innovation, but it’s pretty much the only real innovation of the past forty years (by real innovation, I mean one that changes how people live — by that standard, big-screen tv’s aren’t real innovation, since they’re merely an improvement upon an already-existing technology that doesn’t fundamentally change how people live). And given that things seem to be pretty much winding down, I doubt we’ll see any other real improvement… it’s all downhill from here, bay-bee.

We live in sad times. Our grandparents could exult in the march of progress, even if their own life was hard at times they could be confident that progress would help make their lives easier and more productive over time and that their own children would have an even easier and more productive life, assuming that nobody blew up the planet with nukes. But our own children… it looks like things are going the other way for them.

- Badtux the Reverse Progress Penguin

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4708

Year of the White Tiger Geng Yin, 4708.

The above photo was sent to me by an acquaintance in China. The Chinese tiger is now a very high-tech tiger -- said friend is a master project manager for complex computer software products -- and his imagery matches the modern nature of the tiger.

Yes, China predates Christianity by over 1,700 years...

-- Badtux the HNY Penguin

Elitism

The next time I get accused of elitism, I'm going to ask the accuser, "so you want your brain surgery done by a plumber?" Fuck yeah I'm an elitist -- whether it's brain surgery on me or mine, or running new wiring for my iceberg, or whatever, I want someone who knows what the fuck they're doing on the job. That's elitist as all fuck, and you know what? I don't give a shit that it's elitist. When you want brain surgery you call a brain surgeon, not a McDonald's drive-thru clerk. And when it comes to formulating economics policy, fuck yeah I want that being done by people who, well, know economics -- not by some asshole plumber or snowbilly from Wasilly who don't know shit from shinola. Elitist? You betcha!

-- Badtux the Elitist Penguin

People of Wal-Mart

It's like a million jillion pounds of white trash trashiness in a happy faced shit pail. I especially liked this Sarah Palin look-alike...

-- Badtux the White Trash Penguin

I am a twit

That is all.

-- Badtux the Brief Penguin

eBay insanity

There's something weird going on with eBay. For some reason every auction I've bid on lately has ended up going for some price way above what the item is really worth (as verified by checking for the new price of the item on other sites). Is this just bidding mania on the part of eBay buyers, or have eBay sellers figured out some sort of way to jigger the auctions to basically do the eBay equivalent of a pump-n-dump stock scam? - Badtux the Puzzled Penguin

My development teams are migrating

I bet you thought only penguins migrated, right? Well, software developers migrate too. At least, they do if they are Chinese software developers celebrating the Chinese New Year.

Oh well. At least I'll have a nice peaceful week and actually get to hack some code of my own. I like being Mr. Manager Geek Dude, but I'm still a geek at heart too...

-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin

Sun, sand, and SS

This sounds like a creepy place to go on vacation... a former Nazi resort / hospital / East German military base? Nevermind how fine the sand is... that's just creepy.

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-- Badtux the Creeped-out Penguin

A final goodbye to baseball

Final game played in Yankee Stadium today. Like baseball as a whole, Yankee Stadium has fallen prey to that great American disease -- the desire to always be bigger, newer, shinier, more extravagant, more expensive. Yankee Stadium was simply too dowdy, too "dated", too "old" for baseball anymore. So now it's going to get replaced by some sterile McStadium, and the nation as a whole will be poorer for it. So it goes, in a nation which refuses to appreciate history and refuses to learn its lessons...

I was expecting Tbogg to blog about this. I mean, someone who named his daughter after Casey Stengel surely would have something to say. Alas, I forgot that Stengel ended his career managing the Mets, the hated enemies of the Yankees, and thus of course Tbogg wouldn't blog about it. Which is why I have to do so. Sigh!

-- Badtux the Baseball Penguin

China, Communism, the Soviet Union

I was talking to someone from the former Soviet Union and he was astonished at the way we deal with our teams in Communist China. Something like that would have never happened under Soviet Communism, he explained. Only vetted Party members were allowed to interact with outsiders then, not mere engineers, unless said engineers were top professionals who had been especially vetted. He asked, who is the ideological monitor from the Communist Party making sure nobody says anything that is ideologically incorrect? I replied, maybe the office manager, she's a real dragon lady, but really, they mostly are non-ideological and self-correct. They're just a bunch of nerds / geeks who love working with computers and want to do a good job, just like any other nerds / geeks I've ever worked with in the end. And besides, China is mostly Communist only in name nowdays, they have embraced what they call "market socialism" with a passion and practice free market economics (but still with major government involvement) big time.

He asked then how do they reconcile Communism and free market economics, surely they are getting twisted into ideological pretzels. I said something about Confucianism and respect for elders, but I'm not quite sure that's it. I do know that I get more automatic respect from my Chinese teams than I get from a typical American team (don't get this wrong, I get a lot of respect from my American peers too, but it is a respect I have to earn the hard way by going in there and kicking rear solving problems for the team and showing them where we're going, there's nothing automatic about it). Anyhow, I think basically my suggestion was that Communism was always just a thin veneer upon Confucianism despite Mao's attempt to make it otherwise, and that most Chinese really don't care what ideology their elders espouse but will follow their elders regardless of ideology. If their elders say they are a Communist nation, fine. If their elders say they practice market socialism, fine. They don't question, they just follow, because what is, is, and what will be, will be.

Somehow, though, that seems rather facile. I do think, however, that China is attempting something similar to Singapore. Singapore is majority-Chinese, and basically ruled as a Confucian dictatorship with free market economics. But most Singaporians are quite happy with that. They view the rule of their ruling family as being enlightened, having taken them from being an impoverished fishing village to one of the great city-states of the world. They are proud of their shiny spotless city. They work hard and are prosperous and have an orderly and peaceful city and it is good, as far as most people in Singapore are concerned. The only question is whether the Chinese gerontocracy is going to be able to pull it off -- China is multiple orders of scale larger than Singapore. We shall see, I guess. We shall see...

-- Badtux the Sociology Penguin

Idiots

Boomer: "There's a lot of books talking about how to manage Gen Y/Gen X slackers. That means there's a real problem there."
Me: "There's a lot of books about UFO's too. Does that prove there's UFO's?"

The notion of a Baby Boomer, the original "Me Generation", the generation that elected Ronald Reagan because he promised them more "Me! Me! Me!", talking about how younger people are self-indulgent narcissistic and lazy is just rich. For the record, most Boomers who were in the engineering field are no longer in the engineering field because they were self-indulgent, narcissistic, unwilling to take direction (they view it as a personal insult to their competence), and unwilling to commit the give and take needed to develop consensus in a team environment (it is always their way, or they blow up the project). They view everything as being about them personally. They have no sense of proportion and are unable to compromise. They are unwilling to solicit information from others because they feel that makes them look "weak", they'd rather do things wrong than ask a question. Given that all major engineering designs now are too large to design solo, an unwillingness to work in teams pretty much disqualifies them from modern-day engineering. Or modern-day politics, I might add -- did my description above describe an awful lot about what has happened to Washington politics over the last 18 years as the Boomers took it over?

As for the so-called "slacker" generation, they're happy to work in teams. They've been working in teams since kindergarten and know what it takes. They have a sense of proportion. They don't get their knickers out of whack because their particular pet architectural concept did not get chosen by the rest of the team as the basis of the new product, they know it's just a job, and that the other design might not be as good for some definition of "good" as their design but it's good enough, so they pitch in and make it work. (Most of engineering of complex systems is about "good enough" -- if you try to make a product "perfect", it never gets released, at least not in a timely manner that puts you in the marketplace in a competitive timeframe). They have no problem with asking their elders for suggestions or advice when you ask them to do something, and then they're happy to run with your suggestions in creative ways that result in a better product than you expected. They have exactly the same loyalty to their employer that their employer has toward them -- i.e., none, if someone approaches them with a better offer they'll leave and take it -- but that's just a recognition of reality in the modern workplace, where anybody's job can be outsourced to India or China at any given time so (shrug) gotta take what you can get before that happens. They are "lazy" in that their job is not their life and they're not going to spend 20 hours a day at work if they can avoid it, on the other hand the fact that the job is not their life is also why they have the sense of proportion that allows them to work in teams without blowing the project up. (If you don't know what "blowing the project up" is, it's hard for me to describe it, but I once came into a situation where for two years a particular project important to the company's future was caught up in an endless cycle of criticism, bickering, fault-finding, and accusations. Twelve months after that we had our first prototype of the new product, but I had to "blow up" the team and put it back together again with the proper mentality to get a product out the door to make that happen, starting from scratch with "What do we want to do, and what do we need to do in order to make it happen?" and ruthlessly droning that message over any attempt to fall back into the previous behavior -- and getting rid of people who just didn't "get it").

So what do I make of Boomers who whine about how they can't manage Gen Y types? Well, my first impulse is to hand them a mirror. My second impulse is to tell them that the problem isn't the Gen Y types. The problem is them. They confuse Gen Y types attempting to reach consensus with them as personal insults and argumentation. They view Gen Y types asking for information as whining. Their notion of "criticism" is "That sucks", and then when a Gen Y type attempts to solicit information about what sucks about his design so that he can re-do it correctly, they view it as laziness ("he wants me to do his job for him!") and insubordination ("he refuses to re-do his design correctly!"). The problem is that they're behaving exactly like a Boomer generation politician in Washington D.C., pursuing a politics of egoism that has nothing to do with actually getting a product out the door. The Gen Y types I deal with are team and results oriented. They simply aren't built to put up with bullshit of that type without turning surly and looking for another job. But if you yourself are team and results oriented, they will happily produce some of the best product you've ever seen for you. So for Boomers who whine that Gen Y types are hard to manage -- err, look in the mirror, dude. Because the problem isn't the Gen Y "slacker". The problem is a self-centered egotistical "manager" who sucks.

-- Badtux the Manager Penguin

Cross-cultural communications

As some of you know, I regularly communicate with an engineering team in China. It's easy communicating with them about engineering matters, their textbooks and lectures in college were all in English, but when things turn away from work and turn towards pleasure, the communications can get odd. We simply don't understand each others' cultural referents. They're young, Chinese, just out of college, haven't ever been more than 100 miles from the place they were born, and I'm a penguin. See the problem?

But this week I found something in common between both cultures. See, for Autumn Festival they all went on a field trip. They went... fishing.

How big was the fish that our team lead caught? (Holds hands far apart, with thumb and forefinger about 2 inches apart). Yep, by the time they were through excitedly telling me about catching that fish, that fish was bigger than the smallest member of the team!

So remember: Some things are cultural, and some things seem just built into what makes people human. Fish stories, apparently, are the latter :-).

-- Badtux the Easily-amused Penguin

It's Santa Cruz, dude!

From Craigslist:

Charming one bedroom cottage on acreage, pets OK.

Cozy, artistic, woodsy with beautiful decks and awesome views. Sunny, open, redwoods, garden space. Rural and secluded, yet only 5 minutes to downtown Santa Cruz or Scotts Valley.

Bedroom, living room, bathroom with claw-foot tub, full kitchen – well insulated and well heated with two efficient propane wall heaters. Approx. 600 square feet plus two decks. The space is best suited for a single person or a close couple.

The cottage is a private separate unit next to the main house, which is round. The photo shows the cottage in front of the main round house and some of the views.

We're open to well-behaved dogs and cats, who love it here.

$1,250. per month rent, plus utilities, plus $1,500. security deposit.

Absolutely no tobacco smoking and no marijuana growing, thank you.

That last sentence is just so absolutely necessary when we're talking about Santa Cruz :-).

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Slaves

Let's say you're broken down by the side of the road. You step out and open the hood, then stand by the car looking at it helplessly because the radiator hose has split wide open and let your car's life blood run out. You pull out your cell phone to call AAA, and discover that it has no bars -- there's no cell phone service here. Now what?

Now, let's say that two cars are coming down the road. One is a new BMW. The other is a rusty old pickup truck. You try to flag them down. Which one will stop?

If you said "the rusty old pickup truck", you are absolutely correct. I saw this happen myself. A Chinese guy managed to crash his car into the mountainside, and the guy who stopped to help was your typical redneck-looking guy with a scruffy beard and greasy hair driving an old pickup truck. The redneck finally pulled out a chain from the back of pickup and towed the Chinese guy to the nearest source of food and shelter, a small campground and restaurant about a mile away. But why? Why would someone who doesn't have much be the one to stop, while the person in the expensive new car goes right by? And what does this say about the way liberals stereotype rednecks as a bunch of violent evil misfits who should be exterminated as a menace to society (squeal like a pig, huh)?

Discuss.

-- Badtux the Slavery-observing Penguin
Comment at the Mockingbird's place...

Self Esteem

The notion of "self esteem" is the notion that somehow feeling good about yourself means a damned thing other than that you feel good about yourself.

Back when I was teaching in an inner city school in Houston, the central office sent down one of those damned "self esteem" curriculums. I looked around at my classroom, and threw it in the trash. Because if you wanted those kids to feel good about themselves, what was needed wasn't "self esteem". What was needed was clean, safe housing with enough beds for all the kids so kids didn't have to sleep three to a bed. What was needed was a living wage so that these kids' parents didn't have to work 16 hours a day just to keep a vermin-ridden roof over their head and could, like, actually raise their kids rather than being a distant presence only seen during rare weekend periods when one parent wasn't working. What was needed was competent teachers and adequate schooling rather than newbie teachers right out of teacher colleges who didn't have the foggiest notion how to talk to black kids in the ghetto much less teach them. What they needed was hope for the future, hope that they certainly weren't gonna get from a Texas legislature busily cutting children's health care and raising college tuitions, hope they certainly weren't gonna get from a Republican administration in Washington D.C. that was busily gutting the Pell Grant program for sending poor kids to college. What they saw was a dismal dreary present today and the same dismal, dreary future that their parents had, regardless of what they tried to do with their lives, and justifiably they weren't too happy about that.

But noooo, these kids problems weren't all that. These kids' problems were... low self esteem. So the message we teachers were supposed to impart was: Don't worry, be happy.

Now, the whole notion of "self esteem" is a strange one. I'd say a queer one, but then the gay rights activists would get outraged and stuff, so anyhow. Science is about things that are measurable. But who has ever seen a "self esteem"? So the floggers of the whole "don't worry, be happy" thingy created test instruments full of questions like, "I feel good about myself", and "I feel capable", and then defined "self esteem" as scoring high on that test. The problem then becomes the same damned thing that my professor in Social Sciences Research 501 taught me in grad school: Correlation is not causation.

For example, there is a correlation between umbrellas and rain. If you see a lot of umbrellas, it is likely to either be currently raining, or to start raining shortly. But this doesn't mean that umbrellas cause rain, any more than summer causes drownings. The actual cause of rain is something else entirely.

Similarly, the self esteem gurus with their tests discovered that well-off suburban kids who answered "1" (Agree Strongly)_ on "I feel good about myself" scored higher on academic benchmarks than my inner city kids who answered "5" (Disagree strongly) on that question. Duh. Why the fuck should my inner city kids have felt good about themselves? They were stuck in a horrible mess not of their own making, and every avenue for getting out of that shithole was being systematically taken away from them by Republican assholes whose attitude was "I got mine, and fuck everybody else", why should they have felt good about themselves? But the self esteem gurus then used this test to say, "high self esteem causes better school performance!"

Anyhow, that was the status quo for many years after I left teaching. Teachers were supposed to "foster self esteem" in their students. So finally -- finally --Baumeister et. al. did the research. They actually performed an experiment, as vs. a correlational study. The difference is that an experiment changes something. In this experiment, they taught kids to feel good about themselves (i.e. have high self-esteem). If you teach kids to feel good about themselves ("have high esteem"), do they actually perform better in school? Well, the answer, of course, is NO. In fact, for some kids it actually hurt their performance. After all, if you're already a perfect and wonderful person, what do you need all this schoolwork junk for?

So in the end, science backs up my gut feel from over a decade ago and shows that "self esteem" turns out to be meaningless. Folks feel good about themselves and their lives if they are in a good situation accomplishing things of worth, and feel bad about themselves and their lives if they're in a bad situation accomplishing nothing of worth. Kids who make good grades feel good about themselves because they make good grades, not the other way around. In other words, "self esteem" is effect, not cause. Other than in the special case of "learned helplessness", the whole concept of "self esteem" turns out to have no practical application.

On the other hand, for our rulers, the message "don't worry, be happy!" does make some sense, I suppose. Contented sheep, after all, are easier to fleece. But whether we're talking about low-achieving kids in school or fat people or whatever, "pumping up their self esteem" isn't the path to take in order to get better performance out of them. Rather, taking direct action to provide them better education, better nutritional and exercise choices, etc. while providing incentives to actually engage in those better choices is what needs to be done.

But that's practical advice. And everybody knows that what counts is how happy you are, not whether you are in fact smart or healthy or whatever. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Self Esteem Penguin

Answers

The most endearing, frustrating, and horrifying attribute of the human race is the search for easy answers to complex problems. Whether it is the easy answer of "kill the Jews" for the complex problem of Germany's poor economy in the 1920's, or the easy answer of "kill the abortion doctors" for the complex problem of abortion, or the easy answer of "conquer their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity" for the complex problem of maniacs running airplanes into skyscrapers, Mankind will never stop searching for the winning lottery ticket in the answer sweepstakes.

But sometimes there aren't any easy answers. Sometimes there aren't even any answers at all. Why did my father have so much sorrow in his life, and such a horrifying end? Why do some men turn to lives of violence and hate? What is going to happen to me in the near future? The easy answer, "it was God's will", is just that -- an easy answer. The universe is infinite, and the notion that we meat animals with our limited grey meat brains are capable of comprehending more than the tiniest part of the infinite is so staggering an act of hubris that it is a wonder that the Creator does not just strike us all down with a blazing series of lightning bolts.

Back to thinking bloggers. This is It may be a blog by a sloppy dog lover, but that's okay, this cat lover reads it anyhow. Why Now gives a nice perspective on the news. And then, hmm... ah yes. I suspect I need to narrow down a representative of that mighty supervillain The Gay Agenda for the final candidate, but which one? A distressing number of blogs on my right margin are created by The Gay Agenda with his evil gay ray gun of gayness that, like, shoots out of television screens and TURNS OUR CHILDREN GAY !!! OH THE HORROR!. Shall it be Mustang Bobby? 42? Hmm...

But there are, unfortunately, several bloggers who have fallen prey to the easy answers fallacy who have fallen off the list of thinking bloggers. There is one ornery old coot who goes around snorting "Who cares, it's all monkeys." Yes dear. And you're a monkey too. What's your point? More distressing is a blogger who is a co-blogger of mine at another site who is much more thoughtful person, except he is always falling for easy answers too. Autism on the rise? Easy answer: It's the vaccines! The 9/11 attacks were awefully convenient for the Bush Administration? The towers were brought down by explosives! Early-onset Alzheimer's runs in the family? Here's some magic herbs that'll stop Alzheimers! Sadly, his once-vibrant blog has become almost unreadable as his quest for easy answers to complex reality removes all skepticism and willingness to consider alternative points of view.

Which reminds me of another young man. This youngster has fallen for easy answers also. He spouts the easy answers given to him by his elders, generally in the form of a simple statement that over-simplifies a complex issue and a scattering of Bible verses that "support" that simple statement, yet refuses to consider the wonder that is the Infinite. He, too, has fallen prey to the fallacy that there are easy answers to life. In his case, the easy answer is to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, at which point everything becomes simple and you do not need to consider the complexities of the Infinite any longer, you simply act as a soldier of Christ bringing a scattering of simple statements issued by your elders ("the Truth") to the rest of the population. But the Infinity that is the Creator is far vaster than the contents of any book written in human language. The notion that the bags of water and meat called "humanity" could begin to comprehend more than a tiny portion of the Infinite is such an absurd notion that it doesn't survive the giggle test. One day this young man will find out that reality cannot be encompassed by easy answers. One day this young man will discover that what he thought was "The Truth" is just a small part of the Infinite, and that the faith that he professes encompasses only a small part of the infinity that is the Creator. Then what? I don't know. What, you thought I had easy answers too?

- Badtux the Not-easy Penguin

The myth of the noble savage

One of the more interesting myths to seep into American culture is the myth of the noble savage. In this myth, Native Americans prior to the coming of white people were noble and dignified and lived in harmony with nature. James Finimore Cooper was an early propagator of this myth, and throughout the 19th century it alternated with the myth of the Native American as bloodthirsty savage until finally, after the last Indian was moved to a reservation, it became the predominant myth regarding Native Americans.

Over the past 40 years the Greenies in the environmental movement siezed upon this myth and used it as an anti-technology screed. See, they say. It isn't necessary to have all these nasty dirty machines, you can live a noble life just fine in harmony with nature.

The only problem is: It simply isn't true.

"Native Americans lived in harmony with nature"... bah. What a bunch of drivel. Native Americans drove the proto-horse and mammoths of the Americas into extinction. Using only stone adzes and pottery bowls Native Americans turned the Rio Salado valley into a salt-ridden desert that took hundreds years to recover to the point where agriculture was possible again (the Hohokum culture disintegrated once no longer able to raise enough food for survival). The Anastazi did much the same over in New Mexico. Native American cultures were continually at war against each other, to the point where, when they had a common enemy, they refused to unite and drive said common enemy into the sea, indeed the only way that Spanish could defeat the Aztecs with the few thousand men at their disposal was by enlisting the neighboring tribes to go to war with the Aztecs at the same time. As for technology, the Native Americans eagerly embraced as much technology as they were capable of absorbing given their lack of education, rapidly adopting the horse and stirrup to the point where when American settlers encountered the Plains Indians they assumed that the Plains Indians had always been nomadic tribesmen (they had previously been sedentary agriculturalists), embracing whiskey and wool blankets to the point where they were used to destroy Native American cultures by giving them smallpox-infected blankets and all the whiskey they could drink, and Native Americans could never get enough guns.

All in all, the only difference between the Native Americans and us is that they didn't have a Scientific Revolution. If they'd had the capability, they would have despoiled the Earth just as much as we're doing. If you really believe that nonsense about Native Americans being such "stewards" of the Earth, I suggest you go to any Native American reservation. There's enough trash and junk lying around to make that stereotypical TV Indian cry. The backside of the Hopi mesas has centuries of trash just piled up where they just shove their trash off the edge of the mesa. The Navaho stripped all the grass covering off their reservation by running so many sheep that they turned high plains grassland into utter desolate desert. Some of this is just poverty, of course -- impoverished people generally aren't concerned about making their homes look nice, they're concerned about survival. But the same was true 500 years ago before the "White Man" came on the scene too.

Too many people have bought too much Greenie propaganda. The fact of the matter is that technological civilization is the only civilization, ever, in human history, that has ever given even one thought to ecology and preservation. Technological civilization is the only civilization, ever, in human history, that has ever had any understanding of the impact of human behavior upon the planet, or the luxury in terms of economic resources to actually start reducing some of those impacts. And furthermore, technological civilization is the only civilization, ever, in human history, that has ever made any attempts to restore that which human behavior has despoiled.

The only way we could go back to living the way the pre-contact Native Americans lived would be to kill off 99% of the world's population, none of whom would go lightly and all of whom would swiftly destroy all the trees and topsoil on their way down (see: Haiti). We'd also kill off all technology at the same time, and it'd never come back -- there simply are no longer the easily-exploitable resources that allowed the Industrial Revolution. We'd live as ignorant tribesmen with no knowledge of anything other than what's immediately necessary for survival in our short, nasty, and brutish lives -- forever. No more art. No more science. No more literature. All of that requires resources and leisure time which would no longer exist. All there would be would be survival. Just survival. Forever.

- Badtux the Socio-Technology Penguin