Moosicles

• Orgasm
• The sound of wind blowing through a forest
• A close group of friends
• A significant other
• Love
• Sitting in the sun
• Being in nature
• Having children

These things may seem random and unrelated but they may be more related than you think. All are approaching what many people would describe as “the meaning of life.” It is easy for us to provide experiences like these that we can put a finger on and say “this definitely makes my life feel meaningful.” All of these tend to put us in awe, or even hurt, because we realize that life is so beautiful and that our time here is limited. So why is it so hard to define the meaning of life then?

While Wikipedia may attempt to address the question by acknowledging all of the historically accepted definitions that have exited throughout human cultures in the past millennia, which is probably the most politically correct way to go about it, I propose a scientific study to address the question. This is perhaps the most unconventional research topic that I have ever thought of or even heard of, but I believe it could be done. Obviously the only way to know the true meaning of life is to find it yourself through introspection, but science should still be able to shed some light on the definition.

First, a researcher would survey a select group of randomly selected participants and ask them to list the top three life experiences or sensations that they would consider to be related to the meaning of life. The wording in this survey would be critical because it could influence their responses, so care must be taken to ask the question neutrally. I foresee much debate and consideration being put into the choice of wording in the question.

Once the survey is completed, researchers would select the responses that reoccurred the most often and make a list. Perhaps a reasonable list would include ten experiences or sensations. From here, ten small psychological experiments would be designed to analyze the experiences or sensations. These experiments would be aimed at looking at what emotions, neurotransmitters, hormones, etc are present during each experience/sensation and which parts of the brain are the most active. The goal would be to find a link that is in common with the experiences.

The results would hopefully break new ground in psychology and potentially find cures for depression and loneliness that do not involve drugs. Psychologists may be able to more accurately help patients solve life problems by helping them find the parts of their lives that are meaningful and the parts that are not meaningful. Lastly, the results may be able to help us design a better society and better cities that place emphasis on making our lives more meaningful and thus increasing overall happiness, health, and life satisfaction. It’s hard to argue with someone who is backing their agenda with the scientifically proven meaning of life.

I have a two part possibility plan for the summer:

1. I will save money by living on a sailboat.

2. I will earn money farming worms and selling them to fishermen and gardeners.

Part 1: Living On A Boat

I found that a boat slip at a nearby marina for a 24′ boat will cost $1756.80 per year, or $146.40 per month. In contrast, a cheap apartment around here will go for $300 a month, and that does not even include utilities. The boat slip comes complete with water and electricity. If I wanted to be truly cheap, I could even anchor the boat away from shore for free, but I would rather spend the $146.40 per month for the water and electricity. With that said, this leaves the problem that boat slips are one-year leases. There are two easy solutions: I can either rent for the summer and then sub-lease to another boater for the remaining nine months or I can simply live there for a full year. Going to school at NC State, it would be easiest to not have to drive 30 minutes each way to school every day – but hey, living on a boat for half the price of an apartment can’t be that bad! Then there is the other possibility that I could have a “boat mate” in which I would split the price of the boat slip with them, making it cost only $73.20 a month. That is dirt cheap for a place to live. While it would be tight, a boat mate is a possibility. A 24′ sailboat can typically sleep 2 people comfortably or 4 people uncomfortably. So lastly, the cost of the boat would have to be factored in, but I plan on purchasing a sailboat anyways. For the sake of the cost analysis, I will assume I spend $3,000 on a used 24′ sailboat, which is a reasonable price to expect to pay. There may be problems with the boat, but for the purposes of living in it, not everything has to work perfectly. $3,000 + $1,756.80 = $4,756.80, divided by 12 months is $396.33, which is not an unreasonable monthly price to pay for a place to live, not to mention this assumes that (1) I will be on the boat alone, and (2) the boat will cost $3,000. In reality, it is possible to find a 24′ used sailboat for as little as $1,000. I think you get the idea: living on a sailboat is not expensive, and it will provide a fun experience that I will be glad to have. Oh yeah, and I should also mention that sailboats don’t require gas. There’s savings in that aspect as well.

Part 2: Selling Worms

Worms are easy to breed and sell. Farming worms is not much more complicated than putting worms in a dark, moist bin and feeding them a little bit of food, like a slice of bread, every once in awhile. Like growing anything, it takes practice to get it right, but I’m confident the task could be conquered in a summer. A bin of worms would be extremely easy to keep on a sailboat and it would be closed, so there would be no risk of having worms get all over the boat. There is no initial investment cost in this endeavor: I loosened the soil in my garden today and collected about 100 worms which I put into an old plastic cat litter bin with some moist dirt. My plan is to get the worm farming down by the time summer comes so that I can raise the worms and sell them. Since I will already be at the lake on a boat, selling worms will be easy. A small container of about 25 worms will sell for about $5 (about 20 cents per worm). This is only slightly more expensive than a gas station near the lake sells the same amount of worms for, but mine will be fresher and I will be already at the lake where I can hand-deliver the worms to the fishermen.

I have two final comments: A summer selling worms allows for a lot of free time. I will purchase a cheap 3G internet device for my laptop so that I get internet access at the lake, and I will do web development from there. I can work on a small buisness that I am working on starting as well as make simple websites for friends at a small cost and blog.

I’ve been following a lot of news stories and researching a lot of political problems that The United States is facing these days, and I’ve noticed that an insane amount of our troubles come from partisan disagreement. Simply put, the country is very polarized. There tends to be a strong Democrat and a strong Republican opinion, yet relatively few moderates and independents speak out for compromise or in-between solutions.

With the passing of the recent health care bill, partisan disagreement is at the worst I have possibly ever witnessed. Republican John McCain flat out said that “there will be no cooperation for the rest of the year.”

The truth is that there is an easy solution to the chaos. The United States citizens should vote on the issues rather than have politicians make all of the decisions. Currently the argument does exist that if you vote for the president, then he can do what he thinks is best, even if unpopular, simply because he was voted for. This philosophy is completely valid, because they were indeed elected for the purpose of making critical decisions. But while this philosophy is valid, it is a very indirect way of taking care of these important issues that affect the lives of every American citizen.

This is the 21st century. Before we know it, it will be the 22nd century, and the 23rd. We have the technology, the organization, and the resources to allow citizens to vote on issues. Why do we still have politicians making all of the decisions? The health care bill that recently passed may very well have been voted in, or it may just as easily be voted against by citizens, had it been voted for at all. If it had been voted for though, at least we wouldn’t have to put up with the bitching and complaining that we are hearing because it would have been directly voted in or out. If you don’t like it, then at least you will know that you are the minority and hopefully you will accept that fact.

I understand that voting is a huge process, but there is no excuse not to allow citizens to vote per-issue rather than per-candidate. We have the internet and we have computers. Stop taking useless online polls and use the computers to vote! I know: you are going to say, “but not everybody has a computer and internet.” The reality is that laziness and lack of time stop more people from voting than the fact that some people have no computers and internet. Additionally, people without computers could still make their way to public places such as a library or fire station that have do have public computers. If America is not ready for computerized web-voting, then there is still the option of absentee voting, which is quite simple: you mail in your vote. Voting on issues does not necessarily have to be done on a single day in the way that voting for candidates is done, so a mail-in absentee system has more potential to succeed. Either way, there are plenty of solutions.

As far as how often to hold these issue-based elections, there are multiple ways to go about letting citizens vote per-issue as opposed to per-candidate. One solution is to have annual or semi-annual voting days in which citizens will vote on the issues that have been brought up in that period. Perhaps citizens will vote against an issue. It might then have to be revised and then voted for three more times before the citizens of the United States accept it. If we have quarterly voting days, the reality is that we would still be creating legislation and solving problems at about the same speed that politicians do the same task today. Another solution would be to only have voting days when a truly important issue is at stake, but this would be more difficult as it is hard to spontaneously schedule a voting day.

After browsing the the internet for awhile, I found a number of websites and webapps that I thought were intriguing:

roundcube.net This is a free, open source web mail client. It looks quite a bit nicer that the webmail client that we have to use in college!

textpattern.com I have no idea how this CMS compares to others, but the website caught my eye. It is well designed.

dailybooth.com This website looks kind of empty – but click on a picture. It’s just like twitter only you use pictures rather than tweets. I can’t help but think this is a really cool idea.

herway.com I still feel like online dating is a little bit weird, but the way this site gets users to sign up is exceptional. It takes boring forms and turns them into a fun game.

speckleapp.com This is a simple app that allows you to create checklists with multiple checkboxes – I feel like it is up against tough competition – paper and pencil, but you have to admit that not too many sites let you create a dummy account if you don’t feel like registering.

townme.com I couldn’t figure out what townme is by looking at this site, but I thought the site was simple and elegant.

iplotz.com This is a really useful idea for web designers! I wish I had something like this when I was creating web designs for some of my past projects. It allows you to draw out the lines for website design concepts before you jump into creating them.

threadless.com The idea is simple: sell cool t-shirts, but their site design and slogan of “Nude No More” makes them stand out. I wish I had the money to buy a t-shirt.

belongsto.me Now this one is just plain classic. I love this idea. Not sure if it will ever catch on, being that people don’t tend to have time to log all of their belongings, but I might find some spare time on a weekend and look into this one.

ziehlke.com I don’t see personal websites too often, maybe just because they don’t come to the surface in search engines, but this guy’s website is well done and gets his message out there well. I like the way he markets himself.

snipt.net This is a pretty classic idea. As a coder, I understand exactly what the founder was thinking when he made it. However, I can’t see it catching on. Google and notepad make too convenient of a pair. I hope it proves me wrong though.

After touring five local companies and hearing about five more local entrepreneurs give speeches about their successes, I’ve drawn some entrepreneurial conclusions. These are very likely existing business concepts, but I have never taken a business class, so bear with me. I’m just making connections from what I have seen and heard.

There are two types of entrepreneurship: precedented and unprecedented. In precedented entrepreneurship, you are simply creating a business based on ideas that already exist and on a business model that has already been proven effective. Precedented entrepreneurship is important as it fills needs that society has – it is purely a reaction to a demand. Any perfectly competitive market, such as web design, web hosting, marketing, restaurants, or accounting fits into this category of precedented entreprenurship. Precdented entrepreenurs start new businesses, but not new ideas. This is not to say that precedented entrepreneurship does not ever fill niches or involve creativity: even businesses within a perfectly competitive market are all slightly different and try not to overlap 100%. With that said, there is a little secret about precedented entrepreneurship that I will let you in on: its easy to get into because it’s based on products of high demand, but it’s also highly competitive and highly standardized. If you start a precedented business, based on an existing model, with an already well-defined market, you better be ready to compete with those standards. You obviously don’t have to be the best at what you do starting off – nobody ever is. But you should at the very least offer a product of comparable quality to your competitors and you should meet the industry standards. Upon starting a precedented business, be prepared not to come up with new, innovative ideas, but rather to try to be the best at what you do and to simply offer a damn good product or service. Don’t expect to get very big.

In unprecedented entrepreneurship, you are trying to create an entirely new idea, or connect existing ideas in an entirely new way. There is no precedent for you. You have to be able to innovate and constantly be open to new ideas and constant change. You will likely be creating a new technology that you might not even know how to apply in an economically feasible way. You may have no idea how to even create a business plan for the product. In fact, the product may simply not be profitable or demanded. With a new idea comes a new market. You will have to define a market that might not exist yet – you will have to even create a demand through advertising and demonstrations. If you are successful, it is very likely that you will get big and have little or no competition. Many huge corporations started, and often continue to be of this nature.

Both types of entrepreneurship are important to society. Precedented entrepreneurship brings prices down, brings quality up, and satisfies our basic demands. Unprecedented entrepreneurship  changes the way that society operates by creating new technologies.

There is a bad kind of entrepreneur. While entrepreneurs are largely credited with taking important risks in moving society into new territory and trying to bring to life risky, new ideas, not all entrepreneurs provide a fairly-priced, quality product. Occasionally there will be the entrepreneur that is impatient and goes after money with no understanding of his market of choice. Here is how I came to these realizations:

Back in February I got to my Entrepreneurship Initiative class one day and we were presented with a guest speaker. Our speaker told us of how he started a huge trucking company and how he had recently dropped out of college with one remaining semester to pursue his new web design firm that he had started. He had no background in web design and he didn’t know how to even go about it at first; but he quickly became motivated, learned a little bit about the industry, and hired a friend of his with a little bit of web design experience. The overall attitude of the teacher and class toward him were praise and respect for having crossed lines into a new industry and starting something new, even though he didn’t know how. This lack of experience and learning how to do something you don’t know how to do based purely on motivation were praised, and I don’t blame the class one bit for praising him. I was one of the people that thought it was very respectable what he had done. In fact, I offered him my resume at the end of class to see if he needed any help given my web design background.

But then I went online and saw his company’s portfolio. I was shocked. I was offended that a company would pay someone thousands of dollars to create such a basic, mediocre, web 1.0 website. I honestly do not mean to be overly critical of the firm: they were good businessmen and they knew how to find their clients well. Perhaps even too well. I could have made websites of far better quality in just a few hours, for far less than $10,000.

A couple months later, the speaker emailed me saying that he needed help and was looking to hire. I thought I might be able to help, though I wasn’t really looking for a job. I rather enjoy the web development job that I have now.  I got there and talked to the speaker and his buddy that did the web design portion of the sites. It turned out that the speaker/firm owner still had no knowledge of even basic web development. From the moment we got into talking about web design, the main guy didn’t really appear to have a clue what I was talking about when I got into the technical skills. The web designer kept claiming to have been in my shoes four years ago, and said he saw himself as me in four years, yet he didn’t seem to understand half of the technical stuff I was talking about. I’m sorry buddy, you may be four years older than me, but you have no idea how to make a high quality website. At this point I realized that their egos had soared high above their levels of skill, and I had no more desire to even help out.

I had discovered that starting a business completely outside of your field of expertise is not always the best thing for society. While people may offer you a lot of money for it, you have to understand that you might not yet be up to the industry standards. You might actually be ripping people off with inferior quality due to your inexperience.

I am a huge supporter of entrepreneurship and I do recognize its importance in society. I recognize that every success did start as nothing more than an idea. Often even a sketch on a napkin. I get that. I know you have to start somewhere. But this guy’s firm was trying to enter into what economists call a perfectly competitive market. In such a market, standards of quality are well defined and there is a certain level of quality that should be kept if you are to provide your customer with the best product that is possible. Other web design firms have proven that a higher quality website is possible to make for far less than $10,000. Your customer may not be aware of this, but it is your duty to inform them. This is not to say that the speaker’s firm was not purposefully ripping off customers. This is only to say that you must be careful, especially in a perfectly competitive market, that you have a good understanding of what the standards are, and you make sure that you are providing your customers with just as good a product as the next guy.

Now I do love that he was trying. I love his entrepreneurial spirit, but he really ought to have surrounded himself with some people that had strong web design backgrounds, knew the market well, and understood the standards of quality.