William Grant

William Grant was born on September 17th, 2006 at 3:13 PM! He weighed 7.0 lbs and was 20.75 inches long. Both Annette and William are doing great! William was born on his great-grandmother Irene's birth and she loved her birthday present.

Born that way

I was reading When a Dog Says "Moo"’ by Chuck Colson and it really bothers me when someone uses the logic that just because someone was born a certain way makes it ok for them to act that way. i.e. If someone is "born" gay, then it is inherently ok for them to practice homosexual activities. If there is a gene that predisposes someone to murder, rape, or lying that doesn't make it ok to do those things, is just means we should help them overcome those things. Here is a news flash: All humans were born with a sin nature! (excepting of course Jesus Christ!)

Compressed Air Cooler

Since expanding gas cools, could that be used to cool a normal cooler?
It could either have a build-in air tank or accept air cartridges.
Advantages:

• It could use a thermostat to maintain a constant temperature.
• No water mess.
• Not excessively cold like dry ice.
• If it had a tank it could be recharged at most gas stations.
• The "charge" would remain good for quite a while when not used.
  

Disadvantages:

• After refilling the tank it would have to sit for a while to cool off.
• The tank may have to be too heavy or bulky to be useful (Does anyone know the numbers to do the math for this?)

What do you think?

Candidates or Issues

It seems most political campaigns focus on the candidates instead of the issues. Why are the candidates sold instead of the issues? Why don't the campaigns say "... is the way to handle issue ... because ... and candidate ... is the best person to achieve that" instead of "Vote for candidate ..., he supports ..., .., and ..." If you sell the issues then during the next election you can build off of the last election by expounding on the right way to handle issues and still mention which candidate will best achieve those results. Each election could build off of the previous election better and the voting population would be better informed.

I have the opportunity to vote in a primary election next Tuesday. If you have a similiar opportunity to vote then I urge you take take the oppotunity!

Distributed Internet backup

Consider a distributed computer program like the following.
1. You download the program an install it.
2. During install it asks you how much space you want to share for others to use and which folders you want to backup.
3. It then starts sending your data (encrypted) to other users on the network (the client would probably have to send the data to multiple places and keep track of where it is).
4. It also starts accepting backup data from other users.
If you need more space than you can provide then you can pay extra. If you provide more space than you need then you can get paid.

Then your backup data is distributed across the internet. I think it would be useful to many people!

Would this work well? Does it already exist?