I have an owie

I can boil my life down to this - I have an owie and nobody to kiss it to make it better.

Being single stinks. There is nobody to share your troubles with, which makes them even worse.

Being the proud parent of a 17 year old mildly autistic child doesn't help much either, he only cares about sports and stops listening to me after the fifth word. I am not sure if that is the teenager part or the mildly autistic part. Either way it means he isn't any help.

Being single stinks. It has been 10 years now and not one woman has asked me to marry her. Or even asked me out.

Goodbye Roger

My oldest living brother passed away this week. Since he was 11 years older than me I didn't really know him as well as I should have. He was a quiet person who listened more than he spoke, and our age difference meant he was almost out of the house by the time I was grown enough to have any sort of meaningful discussion with him.

His death this close to my mom's has been depressing. As you get older death of a friend or relative becomes more commonplace, but never easy to deal with.

Meeting aliens

In the movies and on TV all of the aliens we meet somehow speak English and look remarkably like us. If we ever meet an alien species things won't be this simple.

Will aliens even be able to breath the same air as us? Could we breath theirs? It seems unlikely that the air mixture of Earth is the only breathable one. It is possible that our air would be fatal to aliens, or theirs to us. Allergens and microbes in the air would further complicate this problem.

Would aliens be able to eat our food? It seems unlikely that aliens would be able to digest our food. It may in fact be deadly for them to even try. Some element common in our food may be poisonous to them.

Would we be able to communicate? We communicate mainly be vibrating the air but also with visual signals. Aliens might communicate with radio waves, generated light pulses, or chemical signals. They may not even use the linear pattern we use and instead communicate by using multiple channels at once.

Would we even recognize them as intelligent? If an alien landed a spaceship we would probably guess that it was intelligent. But if we landed on another planet would we even be able to recognize which creatures were intelligent and which weren't?

Meeting an alien species isn't as simple as they show on TV. I wonder how bad we will mess it up when we have the chance?

Coed bathrooms

I recently watched a TV show that mentioned in passing the concept of co-ed bathrooms at colleges. A few colleges are trying it at their co-ed dorms and with mixed success. So this post is my thoughts on co-ed bathrooms. Lucky you.

Currently most bathrooms are divided into men and women because men and women are sexually attracted to each other. This division totally ignores gays, lesbians, transgenders, and intergenders.

Instead of dividing bathrooms into men and women I would much prefer we redesign the bathrooms for personal privacy and make them work for everyone. Make the stall door and walls run from floor to ceiling. Add fans and noise cancellation. That would be my ideal, but if I can't get privacy then making the bathrooms work for everybody at least acknowledges the existence of the groups that have been ignored for so long. They may be a small percentage of the population, but they exist and we should acknowledge that fact.