There have been a rash of ads about “Adult Attention Deficit Disorder”, which turns out to be yet another reason for Americans to take some drugs. The TV ads show people in boring business meetings, having a hard time paying attention. That’s a real big surprise. It’s just another opportunity for the drug companies to push some drugs on us.

The drug companies even have some quizzes on their website to see if you have Adult ADD: “Do you have problems wrapping up projects or starting them? Or remembering appointments? Do you put things off? Do you feel overactive? Do you fidget if you must sit for a long time?”

I was really impressed by the rookie Julius Jones on the Monday Night Game last night. I even stayed up for the whole game and was rewarded by an unbelievable comeback by Dallas.

He will help the offense a bunch by finally providing a credible running threat.

Some notes on the Monday night coverage by Michaels:

• He kept going on about the receiver (Keyshawn) being out of the endzone on the touchdown that got Dallas back in the game with a couple of minutes left. They kept playing the replay over and over to analyze whether his elbow hit out of bounds before his foot was in. They missed the obvious fact that he was pushed out which made the elbow position a moot point.
• He kept saying that somebody on Seattle should have called a fair catch on the onside kick. The problem with that is that the ball had bounced right after the kick and as far as I know you can’t call fair catch once the ball hits the ground (great kick by the Dallas kicker by the way). The better commentary would have been about how poor the Seattle special team was in covering the kick. Whitten recovered it in the air and wasn’t even challenged.

Overall it was a great game. First NFL game I’ve watched all the way through in a long time.

I was thinking about Harry Chapin the other day. It was because Diane said something about Dayton, Ohio and it made me think about Harry’s Mr. Tanner song (Mr. Tanner was a clothes cleaner from Dayton who aspired to be a singer). Harry was quite a guy and I had the pleasure of seeing him give a concert a few years before he died. He had a strong spirit for life and worked tirelessly to improve the plight of others. Unfortunately he died in 1981 in a fiery car accident.

An interesting question came up as I thought about Dave Wannstedt quitting as head coach of the Miami Dolphins in the middle of the season and read the Page 2 article by Skip Bayless. When a team wins a Super Bowl, everyone is trying to hire the assistants, hoping to catch the magic. The question is “What makes a great coach?”. Is it a fiery dictator, like a Ditka or a Lombardi, or is it an architect of offenses or defenses, like a Walsh or a Belicheck? “That and a pair of testicles,” as The Dude would say.

We had an interesting occurrence over Halloween. We saw these striking orange-colored mushrooms growing out of the stump of a dead tree. They probably came out as a result of all of the rain we’d gotten in October. I took the picture of them and then read more about them on the Internet.

The interesting thing is that they supposedly glow in the dark. The area under the gills is supposed to glow a faint green. I took a piece of one into the closet and after allowing our eyes to adjust didn’t see it glow. Evidently you need to get them when they are fresher. It did seem kind of silly looking at a mushroom in the closet.

It was probably inevitable, but the Dallas Cowboys stadium initiative passed in Arlington last week. This corporate welfare will be paid by the taxpayer and the majority of the benefit will go to Jerry Jones and associates. To the credit of the opposition, they put up a good campaign against it and kept the voting close.

The stadium will be paid for by an increase in the local sales tax and the other usual suspects (rental car and hotel taxes). These taxes are well known to anyone that travels to Houston and takes a look at their hotel or rental car bill. Hopefully in the long run it will keep conventions and other type business out of these cities.

We’ve been watching some of those old Twilight Zone classics and have been amused by some of the ways in which space travel was envisioned back in the early 60′s. There seems to have been an assumption that we would be traveling around in flying saucers. This was likely brought on by the fascination with flying saucers around that time and in the 1950′s classics (e.g. “The Day the Earth Stood Still“).

Last week Dad sent an email question to make us think and to get away from the usual email arguments about politics and religion. The question was, “What invention in the last 500 years has changed the world more than any other?”.

My reply was the following inventions have had the biggest impact:

1. Internal Combustion Engine
2. Silicon Chip
3. Mass Generation and Transmission of Electricity Via Alternating Current
4. Splitting of the atom

The internal combustion engine has changed the way people travel, conduct warfare, transport goods, and farm (mechanized farming). The silicon chip has had the biggest impact in the last 30 years. Most of the conveniences that we take for granted (like air conditioning) would not be possible without Westinghouse’s contribution of electrical generation and transmission. Finally, the nuclear age has brought both benefits and problems, and certainly changed the world.

Extending on the theme of value from the web (Wikipedia post), I checked out the Project Gutenberg website, and found that they have a great quantity of classic books that you can download for free to your computer or Palm Pilot.

Most people don’t like to read books from the computer and it’s difficult to “curl up to your computer” in bed. However, the new Palm Pilots with the higher resolution screens have changed that. The eReader application makes it possible to read from the screen in a package smaller than a “pocket book”. Plus they come with their own backlight so you can “curl up to your Pilot” without turning the lights on. They’ve also come down in price and probably could be acquired at a great price used.

The Open Source Movement

The open source movement has been a transforming phenomena in the area of computing. Mainly it’s about people working on free and open software in their spare time (and some full time and paid), with multiple people working on parts of the problem at the same time to solve big problems. It’s brought innovations such as entire free operating systems (Linux), great browsers (Mozilla FireFox), and the most popular web server (Apache). One of the pleasant surprises I’ve run into is one that probably hadn’t occurred to many people – a free and open source encyclopedia.