Random Thoughts 4/20/07

• The actor Jon Voight gets it. Do you?
• The next season of Survivor (season 15) will be Survivor: China. Check out Survivor Maps for the latest rumors and detailed info on Survivor locations.
• According to a recent study, the F-22A Raptor is worth its weight in gold (or caviar)… literally. Caviar costs about $6000 per kilogram. At $177 million per plane, the Raptor comes in at more than twice that, over $12,000 per kg. But when you add developmental costs, the Raptor costs $339 million per plane, increasing the cost to over $23,000 per kg, while gold sells at about $18,700 per kg. That means it would be significantly cheaper to buy a block of gold of the same weight, than an F-22A. Of course the block of gold can't shoot down a Mig. It's also noteworthy that the F-22A costs about the same as a C-17 cargo plane, the President's helicopter Marine One, or a Boeing 777 commercial airliner. Aircraft are expensive, the F-22A is just famous for it.
  
• We have a work day at the Church Camp tomorrow, painting one of the buildings inside and out. We need everyone to help if they can; the more the merrier. We leave at 7 in the morning and will return in the early afternoon for the wedding here at church.
  
• One of the greatest difficulties our wounded soldiers and marines endure is bureaucracy. It used to be that wounded troops sent back home were still a part of their deployed unit, which meant paperwork would have to go through a unit still in the combat zone. Then they started transferring the wounded to local active or reserve units and that helped some. Now the Marines are forming two "Wounded Warrior Regiments" to which wounded marines are transferred and all of their administrative needs can be taken care of. Hopefully this solves the problem and doesn't create new ones (like getting transferred back to the original unit).
• The founder of Wikipedia said that the social networking site, MySpace, "hurts my eyes" and predicted its demise in a few years. I'm not a fan of MySpace and I agree that it's kind of choppy and not too user friendly. But I'll bet that if MySpace does go away, that something just like it will take its place. A lot of folks overlook the problems MySpace has because they can't get enough of what it offers them: social networking and the chance to express yourself.
• How in the world is the PlayStation 2 (introduced in 2000) outselling Nintendo's Wii, the XBox 360, and the PlayStation 3? In March the game console sold over a quarter million units, twice as many as the new PS3, and more than any of the seventh generation game consoles. I wouldn't mind buying the boys a video game console but I can't afford the new ones and figured the old ones to be on their way to obsolescence. Maybe not.