I would love a day to stop the noise.

I'm always amazed, during those brief bits of time when the power goes off, how much background noise is in our lives all the time. The furnace, the dishwasher, the computer, the faint hum of fluorescent lights. Traffic. Even worse in an office, where there are a hundred or so computer fans going at once.

Yes please. Sign me up. Save me from CNN, top 40, incessant Christmas carols.

I remember years ago listening to a blind man on the bus talk to his seat-mate about snow. He could always tell when it snowed in the night, because of the sound. Or the lack of it.

Mmmm. Snow.

It is, and it shouldn't be. What the Europeans have shown, is that when people are educated, and when they have cheap and easy access to contraception, the birth rates fall. For teens, for married people, for unmarried adults.

I would dearly love to see an army of public health nurses descend upon the world with education. Pamphlets, books, videos, pills, condoms, with up to date, accurate information about fertility, about sex, about STDs. Not religion, not cultural beliefs. Just plain old medicine and biology. For all. How about you can't have foreign aid UNLESS you let in our public health nurses to teach you the best of what we know.

When women and men, adults and teens, can control their own fertility, they generally do. I'd love to see it on the sides of buses, on billboards, painted on the side of airplanes.

Not long ago, riding the subway in NYC, Planned Parenthood had a great ad campaign. Showed various couples (I saw the ad in several variations), eating in restaurants, walking on the beach, doing "date" type things. The caption was a variation on "We think we'll be great parents some day, but for now, we're using contraception."

Another flavor of it showed a range of people (teens, twenties, thirties, and forties), of all races, men and women, looking very serious and sad. The caption was something like "50% of all pregnancies are unintended. It can happen to you. It happened to me. Use contraception."

Imaginary draconian methods are not necessary. Provide the means, make it easy, cheap, and available, and people will do the right thing.

Is not about laser beams and space ships, but about cultural disconnect. One side says one thing, the other side interprets it entirely differently, and a war is born. Or someone is killed. Or an entire race of people think they're under attack when they're not.

Yes, anthropology and at least one foreign language should be required for every American.

Obama is growing on me too. Anyone who can see the nuanced need for anthropology at a national and foreign relations level is someone who has my vote.

I'm that voracious reader who plows through 3-4 books a week. My buying habits are like this:

1. Read about a new book somewhere (paper, net, whatever).

2. Put it on reserve at the library (online).

3. Read a whole bunch of other stuff in the interim that isn't new and popular.

4. New cool book comes in, usually 6-8 weeks after I read about it.

5. Read it, and decide then if I really need to own it.

Some times I do buy based on my library readings. Most of the time I don't. My house is already stuffed to the gills with books. But the advantage of my dead tree books is that I can donate them to the library when I'm done, I can loan them to friends, and I can pick them up at a moment's notice and find my favorite dog-eared pages.

When libraries get on-board with Kindle, or Kindle's 2.0 or 3.0 versions, when I can check out e-books (maybe they have a self-destruct on the files or something), then we'll talk. My library is pretty good about keeping up with technology. I can now download audio books over their web site. I can rent "Leapfrog" books and cartridges for my kids. When this technology settles out and moves mainstream, I'll be there. But not until then.