A few odds and ends:

Bobby, I have hope that I might yet be able to create those three art works I once described to you. I have no talent, but have been aware of the potential of "printers" which build up a three dimensional object layer by layer. The technology was not mature but was very expensive. Today, a home kit of the device is available. still rather costly at $750, but affordable. it can only create small objects, but it is a start.

I recall reading in the L A Times when I was in high school that there was too little water available to sustain a continually growing Southern California. Today we are suffering for ignoring what was well known to experts 40 years ago. In Monday's Times, an editorial comment on the water problem noted that Wesley Powell publicly declared, "Gentlemen, you are pilling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land." He was shouted down. This happened in 1893.

Today the superstitious, who prefer comforting advertising style sound bites to reality, refuse to believe in global warming. Here we go again.

The July/August issue of Skeptical Inquirer has an article entitled, Blindsided by a Culture of Disinformation by Alan J. Scott. and has, in its follow up section, another article entitled the Twenty Year Effort to Create Doubt about [sic.] Climate Change by John R. Mashey. Interesting articles, anyone who is interested can find the facts quite easily, so I won’t sum them up. the simple fact is that there is no serious scientific doubt about climate change, but more and more Americans are fooled by the noise of the deceivers into doubting reality.

I feel that the situation is well defined by the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. I love the original, and was very worried about a remake, but I found that I liked the new version. The point of the movie was that we humans are shortsighted, even self destructive in our refusal to face reality; but when the crisis becomes undeniable we muster our resources and make astounding efforts to correct the problem. Of course, it would have been cheaper and much easier to avoid it in the first place, but that is not how we function in a large group. To put it another way, we are very gullible and very easily conned, but eventually we manage to figure out what was obvious all along.

This offers hope, but the damage we are doing to the environment on many levels is very dangerous. We cannot simply assume that fixing our errors will be easy, or even possible. Still, hope exists.