Prayer

Are you religious? What do you usually pray for? "Oh god, please let me win the lottery." "God, please let the bank approve my mortgage." "Please god, please let my son come back alive from Iraq."

Assuming there is a god, how can we be so vain as individuals and imagine a superior intelligence would care in the least about our prayers? If there is a master plan, your desires, hopes, fears, they all make no difference. You are a small, insignificant, disposable gear in an immense machine that has plenty of redundancy built in. Why would a god listen to your prayers?

My new favorite quote

When I was growing up, my parents told me, "Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving." I tell my daughters, "Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job."

Thomas Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times
(read the full interview here)

Terrorist Targets

There was an accident on I-95 this morning, blocking all south-bound traffic. It generated a mess of course, traffic in that direction is a huge problem each morning to begin with. I can't even begin to imagine how many people must have been late for work, how many thousands of dollars in lost productivity must have been wasted.

Road transportation has become so quintesential to America we should really pay more attention to it. Every day countles man-hours are wasted unnecessarily on the roads because of traffic congestion. This mess could easily be cleaned up with just a bit of urban planning and a shift in corporate culture, but that's the subject of a different post.

Far more critical is the fact that unwieldly amounts of merchandise, some of it (such as food and fuel) vital to us is being transported on the roads, most of it on a handful of main arteries such as I-95. Forget the World Trade Center or the Washington Bridge. All it takes to bring most of our economy to a standstill is a handful of carefully parked, fertilizer-packed vans. Virtually no highway underpass is guarded, patrolled, or even monitored.

When a fuel truck burned on an I-95 bridge last year (so hot it actually melted the roadway) it took more than 2 weeks of intense repairs to fix it. If multiple sections of multiple important highways were taken out of service, that would create havoc with serious economic consequences.

(Don't bother to write me about how I give terrorists new ideas. They are smart enough to hurt us a lot worse than this.)