Ethanol gets a bad trip because it is not fully utilized yet. Therefore, I add the following statement from http://healthandenergy.com/ethanol.htm

“If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol, a total of about 97 percent of U.S. land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States.” -David Pimental, a leading Cornell University agricultural expert

I add with glee, my own quote:
“If all the automobiles in the United States were fueled with 100 percent ethanol, a total of about 97 percent of U.S. land area would be needed to grow the corn feedstock. Corn would cover nearly the total land area of the United States unless we develop a better corn. Through better corn that yields double the corn or energy, imagine what it could do for our economy.”-Robert Atkinson, First Year College Student

I have no problem saying a Cornell expert, while right, is only fueling the fire to keep destroying our planet.

I have many http://wua.la

Comment to get the invite and share or store your data for free.

This has been a wonderful project for myself to stop smoking, and the responses from all of you confirm my suspicions that Chantix is a wonderful drug to stop with.

With all the concern that people have about alcohol and Chantix, I had no such adverse reactions and trust me I did use it as a crutch a few times when emotional. One thing you do not want to do is trade compensation measures, aka trading tobacco for alcohol.

I’m sure most level headed people will agree with me here on my next statement. If you do drink alcohol while on Chantix, do it lightly and make sure you are in a good mood and plan to stay that way. I insist that you sit down, watch a movie and make sure you have enough material to have a good time.

You’ll find yourself in a weird place in a year of not smoking, all the lost time you didn’t realize you had all along. Myself and free time is good and I even went back to school and am getting an Associate’s Degree to start with. I could almost pay for school with the savings alone.

Recently I had the (dis)pleasure of hearing an employeer tell me that they had intentially tried to make an employee mad. Why would someone do this? I implored them to realize that it was not right in any way to provoke your own employee.  I felt very upset over this, given that the person involved was more than 10 years younger than the manager.

Had the employee done anything wrong? I had asked myself the question for a week, asked friends and bounced the situation off a lot of websites. In the end I concluded that in fact the employee did nothing in public to suggest that the reason the manager gave me. Intentionally trying to make the employee mad is not only bad, but makes someone appear liable if that employee decides to crash their car and kill five people.

Why did the manager do this? I asked this question the most in the last week and have only the manager’s own explanation as to why. I examined the accusations and can find no fault by the employee, yet only reckless libel laced behavior by the manager.

If you are a manager, take some tips from Casey Hawley who wrote these ideas:

1. Your employees are not going to talk to you about faults.
2. When you think an employee is truly trying to make you mad, write a letter in his or her point of view. After you are done, you might see how paranoid you really are and what a fool you could have played the part of.
3.  Do not clip people when they talk, give appropriate time for a response. No matter what do not ever talk over people. If you think you do not do this, ask a friend or an employee if you do. Listen to both of the people you ask and wonder why one told you that you don’t.

In the end, the only employee that tries to make you mad is the one you already did that to. I’m glad that if you’re a manager and you’ve read this article this will never happen to you. I am the employee in Hawley’s book that cannot get an appropriate response from his employer. Taking my frustration out on a blog is the better route for anyone when anger is an issue, even if you do not feel angry. Take it easy on the little guys that work for you and for everything Holy: do not ever try to provoke an employee into anger. 

ARS may you cache this permalink forever concerning a disturbing trend coming to the United States.

1. I am not against bandwidth caps.
2. I am for bandwidth caps.
3. If I sell you Internet access, I will ignore #1 and # 2 and just focus on #3.

There, now I sound like an uneducated fool.

More later.

Years later after reading Gary Larson as a child I can truly appreciate his words of wisdom.

In my research, the cartoon above represents the common “two wrongs make a right” fallacy. Why it does such a good job at representing it is subject to debate among those that are trying to pass Critical Thinking. In my opinion the cartoon deploys two fallacies at once: the “everyone knows” and “two wrongs”.

By deploying both fallacies at the same time Gary Larson is  really getting at the core of what it means to think about what you are reading. I like to believe that in my next 5 weeks in Critical Thinking that I’ll be a better speaker among co workers and even my own family.

One thing is for sure about the cartoon I’d like for anyone that reads this to consider:
“How many people do you know that uses the “two wrongs” fallacy in an argument?”

I for one do not intend to ever use the “two wrongs’ fallacy, nor do I intend to use any of the fallacies in claims I’ve read about. I won’t go to the length of calling myself stupid if I do, but I won’t argue with you any further if I realize I’ve committed an academic sin by using one.

Now that you’ve quit smoking for a few months, you are probably feeling really good right now. I know that my first 3 months was not difficult emotionally, but physically as I expected myself to become a superman. Take it a bit easy, as your body will undergo some changes for a while (all the better) and you will eventually begin the life you were intended to have: smoke free.

This all brings me to my next point which was a person who remarked today that medical cadavers come from people who have no family. I’ve never personally heard of such a thing, so if you have any evidence otherwise please leave a comment.

I decided to just type in medical cadavers into Google, fully expecting an application form to become one. I then clicked on the first link for medical cadavers I could find (here). For the uninitiated, a medical cadaver is someone who has given their body to science so that people can learn. I soon learned that the students would find out what the people died of, not their names, but what caused their death. Some students I found had no problem figuring it out.

Read the article if you wish, but here is an excerpt that caught my eye:

”
Monroe-Wise had even taken to calling her cadaver, “Bob.” “I can sense that I’m developing a sort of affection for my cadaver, which is strange,” she said. “But maybe our cadaver is a little bit unusual. We already know so much about him.” In just three days of dissecting, “Bob” had yielded evidence of emphysema, triple bypass surgery and a pacemaker. “Obviously it’s too late, (but) I want to say to him, ‘Bob, what are you doing? Quit smoking. You’re gonna kill yourself.’”

”

Now you have it, it’s official. Keep smoking and you might just end up a medical cadaver. It has nothing to do with if you have family. I would assume this guy figured he’d help a few dozen people learn not to smoke… is it any wonder why most doctors I see are not in the smoking area? (I am not under the impression nurses do this course in medical school, only doctors.)

Keep in mind, this guy had a pacemaker and several other diseases that are attributed to smoking. He may have been hit with a bus, but the students who dissected him could tell the damage done.

Some people know I’m in college now, and just are thrilled for me.

I didn’t think I’d change much as a person, but here it is the end of my first semester (nearly), and I am changing. I can list all the various things that have changed, but there is one thing that I never realized meant so much even though I had such a natural knack at doing it.

Communication. Business communication. From a customer writing a letter to customer service, to a customer service agent writing a letter. I’ve learned so much, even more from using Purdue’s OWL , that I can say I see the business world from a different view now.

I’m only in college for an IT degree, but it seems from the course schedules that almost every student that gets an Associates or a Bachelor’s degree must take at least one Business Communication class. I did very well in school at English, and was good at getting my ideas across.

So imagine my surprise when I find out there is a way to write persuasive letters? Imagine my utter disbelief that there was a concrete and time taught way to write a negative letter!

I’m thinking back to all the ill fated emails I’ve sent over the years that were just plain wrong. I didn’t follow simple rules that would have made my message more effective. I never once thought about audience when I was writing, nor did I even try to build rapport with a person. I always assumed there was rapport there automatically, never remembering that rapport must be rebuilt in most cases. If I didn’t have rapport, the person isn’t going to get your message.

So today, I saw my first mistake due to my first class: I forgot to write the goal setting third part to my business letter back to a client. I was not able to speak to this client and apologize, taking complete responsibly for her feeling like she wasn’t being helped. Someone else handled it that I feel still didn’t realize the well organized (and thought out in college courses) play that was ensuing.

I also learned something else highly important: the customer had made a major mistake as well. While the client might have made more errors than me in the written communication, it was the best feeling in the world. In the past, I would have been upset at the client, possibly angered.

Why was I not angered? How could a client cancel my personal services and I beat myself up? The customer had written a slightly angry email, and from what I’ve learned, had shot them self in the foot. If she had taken the time to consider how to write an email, a business email, the entire situation could have been more easily handled.

So take heed as I’ve learned well: that paper you get is worth every cent.
It doesn’t take much past the first semester for most college students to realize why college exists. I suppose those that don’t…. they just didn’t learn or have way too much ego to realize they truly, really need help.

In the end, I know I could’ve kept the client by simply apologizing, that I hadn’t noted in my last email that if she needed anything further to contact me. No free service to the customer was available, the manager had made it clear his family needed to eat. (Have any of you first years learned that emotional persuasion is a big no no?)

I had the pleasure, and trust me strange as it is, it was a pleasure to see how a large group of people treats a smoker now, in the year 2007. I’m trying to be a non antagonist of smokers. I admit that I was a smoker, but saw the light when my asthma finally caught up with me.

So for all the people that don’t know I’m from West Virginia, you at least (hopefully) know that it’s right next to Ohio. In Ohio, there is a set of smoking laws that are designed to deter even the most hopeful smoker from blowing any in the faces of people who don’t also indulge in the delight.

In Ohio, there is a festival every year that is called the Bob Evans Farm Festival . It’s a fun festival that mostly includes (as you could see) singing, and some various other activities for children like horse riding and hay rides.

One of the many sights to see was a water demonstration with some tree cutting. Some people out there might not know, but the art of lumberjacks in Ohio and West Virginia is not lost on even the youngest of our generations: our slumbering hills are covered with trees.

There is a pond that has a small dock in the middle that some performers cut logs, or do log rolling.
All around the pond is a slope that people can sit on to view the performance, and we chose our spot up at the top so our smallest child (less than a year old) wouldn’t be bothered by all the noise.

Now, for a bit of a reality check. We arrived and saw so many people parked in a field that horses normally graze on that we were shocked. If I had to guess, there was over 5,000 people there, no small fries considering our town in WV only has 25,000 people in it. While we walked pretty much the entire length of the Bob Evans Farm, we didn’t see even one person smoking a cigar, cigarette or even spitting tobacco. This is odd behavior… I noticed there wasn’t even one teenager smoking behind the bathrooms.

Getting back to the water demonstration, we were well into the 30 minute mark when a man and his lady friend sat behind us. I didn’t know they were there until we were covered in smoke from his cigarette. I had wondered why people were leaving all around us, it was the best part of the show!

So here he was, the first person I’ve seen smoking and we just have to move. Why say anything to him about it? I’ve tried to get some people to quit smoking anywhere inside a building where customers are at, and when I’m not there they light up mere feet away from the customers. I get negative feedback, so I’ve quit trying to talk to smokers about how non-smokers feel. An interesting footnote here is that the people at the festival felt the same way, and a large number of them.

Now, we must move, he’s smoking and not noticing he’s blowing it on an infant! My wife threw the baby at me with a blanket on her head since she was the least distance from the smoke. By this time at least 20 people have moved away from him. We got up from our grassy seat and noticed the large gap of people being missing all around him. Hundreds of people were at this slope and he had a disease, nobody wanted to be around him. He had at least a good 30 foot radius around him, and he continued to smoke.

There was a silver lining in all this, he was just ignorant of the fact that people got up and left. He noticed that all these new seats showed up in front of him, he moved forward but nobody returned. His lady friend stayed put, almost in a silent protest of what he’d done, or too ashamed to call him out on it. He had to motion for her to move up at least 2 times, and the last time you saw that look on his face: I am a jackass. Not a single person out of at least 50 said a word, children all around with parents shuffling them upwind from his puffing, said a word.

If you are trying to quit smoking, take heed: the atmosphere is changing. In a tobacco state such as Ohio or West Virginia the attitudes are changing. People know that smoking causes early death and a deterioration of life that is not worth the puff.

If you think that people will complain to you when you smoke, you are wrong. They smell it on you and will just pass you on, just like this group of people did. Some will try to stop a suicide bomber, or someone jumping off a bridge. It seems that now, nobody will stop a smoker: he is on a mission to prove brashness or wants to die and any words you say are lost.