Friday, August 27, 2010

History of Everything - Thoughts on Aliens of lack thereof / law school reading / necessary breaks and I love GPS tracking

Many times I think about outer space and “out there” and I feel that we can’t be alone.  I feel that there has to be some life outside of this planet.  After finishing “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson I am not so sure about that feeling.  My argument was always that it was selfish to consider that we are it, that there may be at least some lesser life out there somewhere.  The fact that we are even here is so amazing and unique that it would have been impossible to just conceive.  The probabilities of humans even being here is based on a series of catastrophes for other species and blind luck for us.  I am not going to go into the science of it, but we really lucked out because our ancestors were not even the fastest, strongest or even smartest.  (Neanderthals had bigger brains that Homo erectus).  The point is that fortune, providence, fate….whatever helped us get here.  And we are able to contemplate it and appreciate it if we simply took the time.  Forgetting the alien question; what if we are it?  What if all life in the universe is our little planet?  We really treat it terribly.  We dirty the oceans, Google: “great pacific garbage patch” and the resulting info of a trash vortex the size estimates ranging from the size of Texas to the Continental US.  This should shock you, and moreover the fact you probably have never heard of it should shock you even more!  I think if we all took time to consider that we may be all life remaining we could get perspective and treat each other and the planet with dignity and respect.  Don’t go the way of the Dodo bird, funny thing is, we have more info on prehistoric dinosaurs than we have of the Dodo.  (Look it up it’s a fact)  We effectively whipped out a species and only have a few stuffed parts and a few bones and only hypothetical knowledge of a bird we knew existed and very easily we could have saved.  I wonder what, if anything left of each one of us?

I have been keeping up on my reading schedule for law school.  I am also going to start outlining now for the finals.  Unfortunately I am going to be doing a lot of re-reading this weekend.  What sucks about law is that you read it once, and you think you understand it completely, until you get to class and the professors blow your perception to smithereens.  They have such a different more complete insight that you can’t avoid re-reading material to see or at least try to make the connections that they made.  All of my current classes are interesting thus far, but I feel like the nuances and small differences are going to be essential to success in them.  I received my grade from the summer school class I took, it went ok.  I do feel a little more pressure this year as opposed to last year because the “I am new” excuse does not fly anymore and the truth is that it should not. 

I ran well this week and took last night off.  I have a pretty full schedule so I took a break.  I grabbed Del Taco and headed over to the local spot to share a beer with a friend I had not seen in a few weeks.  But I do love my Garmin GPS watch.  It is helping me keep honest with my running and the stats this thing spits out are amazing.  Mind you, I got the simple newb version, the Forerunner 110 - with heart rate monitor.  It is an amazing piece of equipment and will now be essential to my training.  I love the simple controls.  I know that older versions of the forerunner offer more options and buttons for a nerd like me, even cycling stats.  For my level I really just need avg. speed, time, heart rate and distance…exactly what the 110 does.  The satellite reception is good, the first time it took a few minutes and now before I go on a run I turn it on in advance to make sure it’s good to go.  It takes about 15-30 seconds to lock in position.  I really like it. And will be writing a detailed review later. 

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