The solution to repeat offenders

In my previous entry I mentioned that we have a 60% repeat offender rate here in the good ole U.S. of A. Here are some solutions:

1. Rehabilitation! Wouldn't that be super if we could have a system where we could successfully rehabilitate criminals to be productive members of society? If we could have a less than 10% repeat offender rate? Sure you don't want prison time to look too much like a free ride...
2. Lifetime sentences. Never let them out. Sure that'd be costly, but maybe we can combine #1 and #2 so we can be sure the ones we do let go would behave themselves.
3. Capital punishment for all felonies. Obviously you shouldn't be put to death for say, running a red light (or should you?) but for sure at least cases where there is irrefutable evidence the suspect killed one or more people intentionally. I would say there has to be intent (other than drunk driving. Other countries punish DUIs with death, and we should too.). This whole less than life for murder thing is ridiculous.

Sure, #3 is a bit harsh, but theoretically it would lower the initial crime rates. Maybe people would think over their options before stealing a TV.


On a completely unrelated topic, tonight is a peak viewing period for the meteor shower. I forget the name of this one, but apparently this one is known for some spectacular fireballs. The only problem this year is that we've got a full moon, so the peak is between sunset and moonrise, about 1.5 hours.

I came home yesterday to find an envelope from Norweigan Cruise Lines on the counter. The conversation went something like this:
Me: What? You guys are going on a cruise? When were you gonna tell me?
Mom: I dunno.
Me: You'd tell me like a week before. "Hey, we're going on a cruise. Can you take care of Daisy?" Man, you never take me anywhere cool.
Mom: What you wanna go on a cruise? I didn't think you would.
Me: Its a CRUISE! (looks at the brochure) To MEXICO!
Mom: Yeah, but you don't like family vacations.
Me: Our vacations are like, the Dells, or Memphis. Not a cruise to mexico!
Mom: Well, do you want me to look into it?
Me: Yeah.. could you?
Mom: Yeah. You'll probably have to share a room with Doug.
Me: .. Hm. When is it?
Mom: February, for ten days. Actually, you could probably take Wes.
Me: Wow, ten days. I've got five classes. I don't know if I wanna miss that much. Hey when is that insurance thing due? I get like five or ten days to drop classes for a full refund! heh, kidding.
Mom: What?
Me: For insurance.. Enrollment. I could fill out the form and drop the classes.
Mom: What? You're dropping your classes??
Me: No, I said I was kidding.
Mom: Well do you want me to check into it for you or no?
Me: (looks at brochure again) Yeah, would you please?

Wooooooo cruise to Mexico! Possibly! Mayan ruins OMG!!!

Bush? Bush who?

As Obama prepares to take office, Bush may as well be on vacation. The spotlight is almost COMPLETELY off him, and it's all about what BHO's planning on doing.

But whatever, life's more about drugs and alcohol and conspicuous consumption than the health and welfare of the middle and lower classes, not to mention that of our economy. Oh and about locking up dangerous criminals and treating them like shit. Don't we have like an 60% repeat offender rate?

Oh, and I think I have Asperger Syndrome. Wheee! Thats like saying I'm more socially adept than an Autistic kid, but less mathematically inclined. What really tipped me off was the part about speech patterns:

Although individuals with Asperger syndrome acquire language skills without significant general delay and their speech typically lacks significant abnormalities, language acquisition and use is often atypical. Abnormalities include verbosity, abrupt transitions, literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance, use of metaphor meaningful only to the speaker, auditory perception deficits, unusually pedantic, formal or idiosyncratic speech, and oddities in loudness, pitch, intonation, prosody, and rhythm.

Three aspects of communication patterns are of clinical interest: poor prosody, tangential and circumstantial speech, and marked verbosity. Although inflection and intonation may be less rigid or monotonic than in autism, people with AS often have a limited range of intonation: speech may be unusually fast, jerky or loud. Speech may convey a sense of incoherence; the conversational style often includes monologues about topics that bore the listener, fails to provide context for comments, or fails to suppress internal thoughts.

Children with AS may have an unusually sophisticated vocabulary at a young age and have been colloquially called "little professors", but have difficulty understanding figurative language and tend to use language literally. Children with AS appear to have particular weaknesses in areas of nonliteral language that include humor, irony, and teasing. Although individuals with AS usually understand the cognitive basis of humor they seem to lack understanding of the intent of humor to share enjoyment with others. Despite strong evidence of impaired humor appreciation, there are anecdotal reports of humor in individuals with AS, which challenge theories of humor in AS.

This along with social troubles, and an extensive but narrow range of interests (ie. Space, Politics (with a limited understanding of motives), deep focus on 1 or 2 video games at a time) lead me to belive that it's not ADD I have, but AS. Awesome.

headdesk

I hate america. "Ooooh, the economy's getting worse! Pull our stocks out of the market! AAHHHH!" fucking idiots. raarararararraraarraararar.

Take THAT creationists!

One premise of creationism is that life is simply too complex to have just happened- there must be some intelligent designer behind it all. However, the miracle of evolution is known to produce vestigial limbs- body parts that are now useless but still hang around. Meet flightless birds, wales with hind legs, and humans- with our tailbones, appendices, and useless body hair.

*cough*Itoldyouso

A select few people know, since freshman year, that I do not believe in DNA. That is, I didn't believe the current theory on genes was correct, primarily because of "junk DNA." This was not a christian thing. Evolution would not allow for "junk DNA." This is merely me deciding, that given science's record for being wrong at first, that we were missing something.

AND SO. Now. They are rethinking the way genes work.

And honestly, genetics reinforce the idea that everything came from the same place, and is essentially the same thing. All life on this planet have DNA that tells their cells how to grow. The same string of DNA makes all the different type of cells. Is DNA just some kind of programming language, as binary is?

oh snap

on wikipedia today, i read that jsut recently we discovered that a star in Pegasus has at least 3 planets orbiting it!

As below, so above...

I think we can learn alot about the universe by studying our own solar system. Everything came from the same clump of junk in the very beginning, right? So everything is esentially made of the same stuff, at the very least at the atomic level. We're a somewhat average sized planet orbiting an average sized sun. We possibly have a sister star, which we have seen examples of through our telescopes. We have comets and meteors in our solar system that sometimes collide with the planets. At least one of our 8.5 planets currently harbors life. We think it could be possible for a moon to harbor life as well. In addition to the main planets, we have at least 3 "dwarf planets."

We can see other stars with planets around them, (relatively) not too far from our own solar system. But really, we can only see the large gaseous planets, because those reflect more light, and are generally easier to detect.

Pluto, formerly the smallest planet in our solar system, now merely a Dwarf planet, has a moon larger than itself. Some scientists want to call it a binary planet, since neither object lies in the center of its orbital trajectory.

So what we have is a young to middle aged yellow star with a multitude of planets and rocks and dust orbiting it, including possibly a sister star. and this faintly glowing clump of dust has one tiiiiiny barely visible planet harboring life. And we dare think we're alone?