I was upset last night. I caught a blurb from Entertainment Tonight (which is apparently some sort of Hollywood celebrity gossip fest.) The anchor made an extremely disparaging remark. about the Antique Road Show. I don't have the exact quote. It was essentially "The Antique Road Show is popular because people hope to find an extremely valuable antique in their closet."

I was upset because I realized that this is how Hollywood views its audience. It seems to me that Hollywood tends to assign all the world these extremely base ulterior motives to all of their actions then tries to fit the world to their skewed set of base motives such as greed, sex, fear and hate.

Undoubtedly, there are some people who are motivated by these base feelings some of the time, but I suspect the world falls far short of Hollywood's view that all the people are compelled by base motives all the time. Unfortunately, the industry is so powerful, that petty little gossip shows like ET can have a widespread negative impact on our culture.

A case in point is the reality shows like Survivor. I was intrigued by the concept of man pitting himself in nature, and I was interesting in seeing real live people like me on the screen in exotic parts of the world. Unfortunately, the show was really about this absolutely stupid political game. Most of the viewers turned off the show after the first episode or so. The networks polled their readers and found of the people weren't turned off by the political game, that they were intrigued by the political. Hence, Hollywood's polls supported its preconceived notions.

Anyway, back to the popularity of the Antique Road Show. I think when you get down to it, most people are interested in the show because they are interested in learning about history, and to learn about what we as a society value. People enjoy hearing the prices of appraisals because the mathematics of assigning relative values to items is a very interesting process. I remember reading a poll about the nightly news. They discovered that the weather report is the most popular part of news shows in LA, because it involves reporting numbers. Many non investors are enchanted by the DOW Industrial average and employment statistics, because they provided objective numbers that give us information on how the world works.

The problem is that Hollywood's assigning base motives for the popularity of the show might some day affect the format...reducing the quality of one of PBS's most popular creations.

Well, my RHM CD sale was a bust. It only got two bids, and the CD went for $1.25...well below cost. I figured it is worthwhile to run a test or two to work out the selling process, but there has to be a better way to get new music in front of the ears of the public.

The Salt Lake City Dining directory had grown too large; so I split it into categories. I also realized how few restaurants I've actually eaten at.

Yesterday a helicopter crashed into Mount Olympus three miles south of here. I had been intending to climb the mountain this Spring, but have too many projects to complete.

I thought I'd try a penny auction for a Ryan Hiller CD to see if it would bring any traffic to his web site, or to Ryan's MP3 page. The first hours of the auction brought squat. We will stir, wait seven days, and see what it is like in the end. I hope the CD goes for more than a penny. It is always embarassing when a penny auction gets only one bid.

June is busting out all over. My parents will have a party on the 21st, and had decided to tear apart the house to prepare for the occasion. Can they get the house back together in time?

As for me, I finally started uploading my work on the
prime numbers, I hope I have time to complete the project, but people are very good at stealing my time and keeping me from completing the projects I care about to work on their projects. I hope I can get time to work on the project.

Three days after the trip, I am finally getting around to labeling my pictures of Angels Landing and Zion's National Park. (Over Memorial Day, I took a trip to Saint George.

Oddly enough, the people I visited wanted to see Matrix Reloaded. Making Morpheus a cult figure and Neo a prophet took a little bit away from the experience. However, the movie did a good job in capturing the ideal of a system architect. That is a system architect is a self absorbed jerk. The movie fits in well with the image of Plato's Philosopher King. The king works on a higher meta level, has no compunction about killing millions, and really is a source of misery for all concerned.

Anyway, the pictures of Angels landing turned out well, and I need to get more exercise.

We ended up with an unexpected guest in Salt Lake. The guest had a friend she wanted to visit in Hurricane, Utah. So I took an unexpected trip to Saint George and Zion's National Park over Memorial Day week end. I usually try to avoid camping trips on the busiest day of the year. We were lucking and found a camping spot.

If I can find my compact card reader, I will upload the pictures from the trip when I do. The discouraging thing: When I got home I found 1654 spams awaiting deletion (I have multiple domains, I get a great deal of spam for bad addressess.)

Lets see...The message header of one of the spams was about how you can make money through big time spamming. Another had a deck of cards with pictures of 54 people who opposed the Iraq war...so mindless hicks can play the fantasy game of seeking out and killing people who are smarter them and who think independently.

Personally, I still have hopes that the US's good intentions will shine through and that the US is not simply trying its superpower hand at 21st century imperialism. Yet I am more worried about the acts of the US right now than the acts of the Arabs.

The Arabs, after all, are people infected with a bunch of mindless hicks who've been handing out decks of playing cards with the names of all Arabs who want peace.

ctnow.com: Home Page says "By 2000, there was enough space to have a page of data for every 3.5 minutes of each life."

Today we are probably already into being able to have a page per second. This five minutes used to add to this blog didn't even scratch the surface of my allotted time. Of course InfoUSA knows who I am, and that I spent five minutes writing in a blog. that is a bit scary.

I made a few good improvements to Al's Infinite Hotel. The conclusion does a pretty good job of showing that the different approaches either end up doubling up guests in a room or leaving one guest in a hall.

The hardest argument is against the idea of a simultaneous shift between rooms. However a rules based system clearly would prevent such a shift. If the rule is that two people cannot occupy the same room, then you can derive the rule that a person cannot shift to the right unless the room to the right is empty. Since the infinite hotel is full by definition, then no-one can shift to the right.

Despite Hilbert's best efforts, n+1 is still greater than n.

Mill Creek

Last night I had dinner at Log Haven in Millcreek canyon with
Jim Dorn of the Cato Institute. He seems to like Utah's wilderness. I am in line line with the greater part of libertarian thinking, but fall short when it comes to development of the last wilderness in America.

I am not of the opinion that Government needs to control everything, but believe strongly that these last bits of wilderness should be left alone. The wildlands of Utah and Idaho simply do not need to be part of the economy. There is no great rush to put every last asset of the nation into the burner. Some assets should be held for the future.

It was a fun dinner. The total bill was more than my websites make in a month, but I guess that is the way relative values work in an economy. See, my greatest fear is that the deflation that has rocked the tech sector will work its way through the rest of the economy. Mr. Dorn does not think so. As computer engineers take dish washing jobs in restaurants, the economy will just shift.

Inflation and deflation is simply the product of monetary policy.

Being in the tech sector, I still fear that we could get in to a situation where the technology starts to gnaw at wages. If the big drop in employment is accompanied by big drop in wages then we will start seeing millions of people lose their foot hold in the economy and become destitute.