Weighty Subject

I’m up early and inhaling the coffee. It’s time to irrigate the orchard again. At 6 AM and in the dark. I’ve been lucky so far this season and haven’t run into too many spider webs. You ought to see me dance when I walk into one of those! The other hazards are the numerous gopher holes that lie in the path among the weeds and the unexpected dog.

I was noticing the number of walnuts already on the ground as I ran the mower around the orchard yesterday and I would guess that I will be raking nuts before I irrigate again in two weeks. A couple of the neighbors use their walnut crop to help pay property taxes and they will soon be telling me that irrigating is over for them. When the nuts are on the ground, you need to avoid water.

On a different subject; the power of computers. The Economist has their quarterly technology issue out this week and it has some great stories about the ‘geoweb’ or the use of satellite imagery in programs of all sorts. Some facts I didn’t know; Microsoft has 14 petabytes worth of images on 900 servers for the use of their Virtual Earth project. (1petabyte = 1million gigabytes) Before today, I was stuck with terabytes as being the largest numbers in computing.

Anyway, as I read all of the articles I was struck by the fact that we have all of this potential available; this power to spread and share information all around the world. Information is better than gold! Yet we only want to kill each other because we don’t like how someone dresses or talks or looks… What is the matter with us? Enough with worrying about the weight loss gene, let's concentrate on finding the idiot gene and turning it off.