Ronyak News

Hey hey. It's April. There was an Easter in there, and a birthday on April 5th for Cori, and her grandmother in Idaho Falls died the same day. There is a baby due in two weeks, and the circle of life goes on. Queen Elizabeth of England had her birthday today, and we received chocolate, bagels and bouquets of flowers at work for Administrative Professionals Day. I have the bus for sale on craigslist, the landlord wants it out of the driveway in two weeks. The weeding and mowing has been my exercise lately and we saw 2012 and A Serious Man on DVD this week. I got to read David Livingston's edit to a screenplay I sold him and am so happy to see what a great comedy he has made out of this property. The Gameshow screenplay that Lisa Hepner and I are writing together is coming together nicely and we'll start marketing it next week hopefully. Here's a copy of my latest blog post at work. People are responding with comments about the shrinking of things.

Ronyak: From the Large Hadron Collider to Lilliput

Daniel Ronyak, a senior accounting technician in Comparative Medicine, has agreed to post his offbeat observations and often tongue-in-cheek ideas here as they occur.

The Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is stirring up the physics world in a big way—ironically, with tiny particles building up speed and leaping toward unprecedented collisions. (Is there a connection to the “Portland Boom”? “Enquiring” minds want to know.)
Speaking of leaps and collisions, March Madness is over and the tournament is complete—and over the last few weeks you’ve likely seen the best leaping ability that humans have to offer. But why do we lack the hops of even a tiny flea, which can sky seventy times its own height? Is there some gain in buoyancy at that size, with respect to air mass?
It’s a weird thing, the size of a species: What would happen if a species such as a frog were able to be bred down to the size of a flea? (Some frogs are very tiny as it is.) Would it increase its leaping ability? And if you bred a dog to a size smaller than the frog, what would stop the frog from sizing up that meal? What would it mean for an amphibian to change its diet from insects to mammals?
This bizarre discussion is where physics meets evolutionary biology. As genetics branch out, where will the discussion go? Is there an optimum ratio at which humans could choose to live more efficiently in the future? Is Gulliver’s Travels more forward-looking than we realize? (“Going Lilliputian” would save planetary resources, would it not?) What an arcane world our huge skyscrapers will be, if in the future we are the size of the flea.

Alone or All One?

The universe is a vast sea of life, but we're here, in our youth, not aware of any of that other sea life. Are we alone? Most likely not, if our oceans are any example. There are certainly depths of those oceans that are vast, cold and empty. A tiny creature at the bottom of all that empty would probably think, I'm alone. But, no, it's just the beginning. We're going to find, that we're part of family some day. We're all one. Our angst is unfounded. Our current hesitant, earthly brotherhood should be rethought, from the perspective of this eventual family. What will another person from your world mean to you when you're awash in the sea of life out there? A resident of earth, any resident that you meet, will make your heart cry for joy at the meeting of a brother. Let's put on this face now and take up our universal brotherhood here in our youth.

Tide pool

The rocky ocean shore of Oregon has features called Tide Pools where life finds a crucible. The evening hours, the tide returning to the deep, a shallow hole in the rock along the shore holds the leftover vigor that stirred, and stirred again, in the roaring waves who swept their salty forces here and again only moments only hours ago. This quiet leaving is life. The hermit crab settles in next to the anemone, along with a minnow, trapped in a tub of isolation from their source for the next distance the moon will travel. There in the silence of the dark, flipping their claws on the pocket of sand at the bottom, inching their tendrils over the black, grainy rock chimney, life awaits the return of the tide to stir them from their solitary confinement. So it is I await the next wave of this life to roll forward to greet me in its terrible and liberating way, bankruptcy, bills, birthing classes, and baby. Somewhere in all of it there is a great joy regardless of the tumult, or isolation or the raised salt content in the tide pool.

Song sung true

The best teacher of a melody is the key in which it is sung.

Import/Export the How We Do It of World Economies

You buy from me I buy from you. We're all part of the huge fractal that is world economy. Small and large, exact same functions. A function of buy and sell. This fractal flowers sometimes, and other times, it's bound up in tight eddies and curls. Right now, we're bound up. (I think there's another metaphor in there.) The thing we need to do now, as is act like a "United" States. That is, our individual ways of buying and selling, state-by-state, need to be coordinated, so that as a Nation we buy and sell from other nations. If France has wine we like to buy, let's get 50 states together and agree what price we'll buy at. If we don't, the effect is counter productive. Because someone is buying from France's competition instead of buying from France. Then we're spreading the effective productivity too thin. Someone else will buy from France's competition anyway, so it isn't like we're leaving them without a market. The effect of acting united, with regard to foreign markets gives us much more buying power, it outlines a relationship between states, and it fosters continued cooperation between countries. The markets will stabilize. Then we can tackle the fact that State by State we don't all buy and sell with the same frequency. Thus highlighting the need for a policy of "currency exchange between US regions". Then I don't have to buy French Wine at New York City prices, I can buy a bottle of French Wine with my Portland, Oregon dollar, which I'm sad to say, isn't very powerful on the world market all on it's onesy. Savvy?

One quick note with an idea on “Jobs”. Obama has presented Jobs as the next big thing on the agenda. Do we understand the power of a diploma? We have millions of people in the US who already have bachelors degrees, but, for whatever reason, have never used them. They are working check stand registers and driving buses... The place that we push for Jobs needs to focus on our greatest untapped asset, the education that these folks already bought and paid for, not on those who are currently unemployed, who may or may not have a degree. We have an educated pool of people already, they’re just in the wrong roles. This question of “Jobs” is actually a question of rearranging the pieces of the puzzle.

Step One: Start a job placement service where people can file their willingness to participate in a newly created job within their degree field. This simple act will bring the education asset into crystal clarity.

Step Two: Then the Obama Administration can begin the work of creating jobs. Putting that money into jobs where someone holds a bachelors degree in that field is a much better “working scenario” to coin a pun, so that the jobs that are created will be sustainable, good paying, and most importantly rewarding for the people. Those jobs that are vacated by degree holders will then be available to the masses of unemployed people, and we’re now holding an educated workforce just by rearranging the workforce.

Do unto others as you would have done unto you. That's the crux of Christianity. The US, and ironically, the Tea Party, are mostly Christian folks. They're proud to claim that the US has "In God we Trust" stamped on every dollar, and they would rather have prayer put back in public schools so they can pray to Christ their God. When living up to the Christian tenet of do unto others as you would have done unto you, why is capitalism any stronger of a model for your behavior toward your neighbor, than what Tea Party folks are calling "socialism? What I'm saying is that Tea Party peoples are forgetting the fact that any amount of socialism that has crept into America is not because of Socialist Ideals, it's simply because people here in the US by-and-large attempt to do unto others as they would have done to them, and those types of changes happen socially, enmasse. As a society, they want their neighbor to have the same things, the same opportunities, the same health care, the same medical coverge, that they have. They don't want a company, or a corporation, or a capitalist, or a business to get in the way of their first and foremost rule... the Golden Rule. Do not take up the flag of liberty with guns and bullets against a population of people who are attempting to follow the Golden Rule. There are other, relatively strong methods of doing the type of revolt that will simmer down the socialism to the "common decency" levels that Tea Party members consider the outer limit of how socialism should be allowed to regulate business in a free market. The cry havoc is an extreme that let's slip the dogs of war, and once uncaged it is terribly more difficult to recapture the do unto others philosophy.