What's That Noise?

Surprise! I went to open the patio door earlier this morning and I was greeted by the sound of heavy rainfall on the patio cover and the mewing of a wet cat. ‘Let me in!’ OK, the forecast did say that we had a 40% chance of rain for today, but I was skeptical.

This will help the garden of course. And the orchard. And since today is orchard irrigation day; it might seem a little odd to be trudging up to the canal to open the flood gates in the rain.

Here’s something I read yesterday;

“Nearly a quarter of Americans are offline, with no experience of the internet, a survey has found.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project studied the ever-shifting internet population in one of the world’s most wired nations. It found that the digital divide is likely to remain in place as the number of people dropping offline equals the number of new users adopting net technology. The share of the US population on the internet has hovered around the 60% mark since October 2001 and is likely to remain around that level, the researchers said. According to the US Government’s National Adult Literacy Survey, up to 23% of the population struggle so much with literacy that they have difficulty completing everyday tasks. This is likely to be a major barrier to net take-up.” (Those facts are brought to you by the same government that brought you “No Child Left Behind”…odd?)

23%! That’s a whole bunch of people. We interact with those people on a daily basis. Sometimes, they make decisions that affect us. And they aren’t playing with the same number of cards in the deck that you and I have. They’re guessing when they should be dealing with written facts. They’re using their ‘gut’ feelings. Shouldn’t we be doing something to change those statistics?

And, speaking of reading…

The saying "Getting there is half the fun" became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines. - Henry J. Tillman

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree. - Charles Baudelaire

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy. - Charles Peters

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. - Max Beerbohm

I especially like the last quote. So true!