LifeItself

I just arrived in Saudi Arabia after 17 hours of flights from the U.S.  My wife and I attended our son's beautiful wedding in Sonoma, California, bonded with our children, students and many friends, and I attended the largest Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) conference in Houston, where I realized that I knew most people over fifty.  Kind of scary, but what can one expect after being an SPE member for 33 years? The Patzek family in Sonoma, California, just before the latest enlargement. You may ask what are my impressions from America after a nine-month absence?  There are many positive impressions and some are mixed.  First, we miss America. I loved the lush green trees in Texas, and the beautiful live oaks everywhere I looked in my Austin neighborhood.  I loved being with my children, friends and neighbors.  I did not like the rampant inflation of the cost of food and most living necessities.  This inflation has been at least 10% per year ...

I want to write about many things that deeply disturb me. But if I did, most readers would not bother to read my sermons and others would be shaken and annoyed by their implications. So I'll limit myself to commenting briefly on the growing chasm between complexity of a modern society and inability of most everyone living in this society to grasp and follow its complexity. Converse is also true: Since we do not understand the complicated world around us, we resort to the simplistic, narrow, and random snippets we call "our opinions". Most of these snippets have little to do with reality, thus the gap between what is and how we perceive it keeps on widening. Let's start from something light and uplifting. I keep on hearing good news about the various new sources of energy that will totally displace the existing fuel mix: "Genetically modified bacteria or viruses that produce enough liquid fuels to make crude oil production obsolete." Or "North Dakota i...

Here is a nice followup to my January 6, 2011, post on patents as a measure of U.S. productivity and creativity.  Now Big Pharma is getting ready to throw their towel into the ring and call it quits of sorts.  It seems to me that they were pursuing a wrong paradigm in their research and their colossal blunder was called by the unforgiving Mother Nature.  The mistake they seem to have made is a simplistic belief that one or few unique genes are responsible for each major illness.  Identify the genes and, voila, appropriate therapy presents itself.  Well, hundreds of billions of dollars later, they seem to have discovered that gene expression is context-dependent, and the environmental influences (epigenetics) are stronger than genetics.  This may be the best example of a seriously misguided huge research effort that essentially broke a whole industry.  So now federal government is stepping in with another corporate bailout plan, this time an $1 billion...