Sixteen Tons and What Do You Get? Good Abs.

How would you like it if your boss gave you an exercise plan and told you to hit a gym?

Probably not overjoyed. Of course, you do need to hit, or do whatever you do, to the gym or swimming pool or bike path.

It's the idea of your personal Mr. Burns telling you to get off your fat rear end that rankles.

He's not helping you get in shape because he likes you. He cares about your health because the less sick you are the more money he makes. Not that many companies offer real health insurance anymore, but that's a much bigger problem.

We have self-proclaimed "corporate wellness expert" Tom Gilliam trying to sell your employer a book of suggestions for molding a thinner, stronger, workforce.

Incidentally, the secret to getting in shape does not require a book-length exposition. Exercise aerobically and don't gorge. That's it.

We should do this despite the Tom Gilliams of the world, because we want a higher quality of life. And if your chief executive gives you gym privileges, as unlikely as that seems, so much the better.

A Lot of Hot Air

Who would you believe on the topic of global climate change: The Competitive Enterprise Institute or Al Gore?

Trick question. Those aren't your only two choices. You could do some research, read some journals, scan some less formal periodicals, and make up your own mind.

Or you could find out who really is an expert on climate change. Again, there's more than one. Some consider it a critical problem. Others believe the change in temperature measured so far is largely the result of natural cycles. Yet more think that the causes are both artificial and natural.

Al Gore, former vice president and presidential candidate, apparently is convinced that corrective action must be taken immediately.

Then there's the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Al Gore and his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," drives them up a wall. Who is in the CEI? Check it out. No one you've ever heard of, and certainly no scientific experts on climate.

Yet the CEI has prepared point-by-point rebuttals for claims made in the movie.

So here's the decision: Cut greenhouse gases (no down side) and see if the temperature drops, or refuse to do anything and wait to see if the sea level starts to rise (all down side).

Al Gore may not be an expert, but at least you know who he is and where he's coming from. You don't have to accept his movie. Read some books and decide for yourself.

Or don't let facts get in the way and let the CEI make up your mind for you.

Your Child Has A Wolf-Like Muzzle

It is, indeed, a dog's world.

The American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is praising BJ's Wholesale Club Inc. for refraining from selling potentially contaminated"pig ear chew treats."

The pig ears may be tained with Salmonella bacteria. Animals are not as sensitive to Salmonella as humans are (So all of you people who secretly chew on pig ear treats, stop doing it.)

This makes sense because until their relatively recent domestication, dogs and cats ate rodents of various sizes — not the cleanest of victuals.

Anyway, the ASPCA prevailed on BJ's to "voluntarily" take the "pig ear chew treats" off its shelves. The ASPCA goes on to advise "pet parents" to discard any suspicious pig ears.

Pet Parents? Huh?

They used to be called "pet owners." At most they might be considered pet step-parents. But pet parents? The anthropomorphism of dogs has gone too far. Dogs' "parents" are other dogs, you know.

If you consider your pet as much your child as your actual child, you need your head examined.

Do not, of course, feed your pet poisonous food.

That goes for the other members of your family as well.

Does This Water Taste Like Crestor?

Americans are throwing away so many medication that traces of common prescription drugs have been found in 80 percent of the nation's streams.

This is different than the beef problem. Steers and cows are given antibiotics and hormones, we eat and drink, and the drugs end up in the effluent water. Since we're loaded with systems to digest and detoxify everything we eat, and what's left over goes through a tertiary treatment plant and chlorination, it's hard to believe many drugs get into the water this way.

The way prescriptions end up in streams and rivers is by flushing them down the toilet.

AARP recommends that instead of dumping meds into the bowl, render them unusable and put them in the trash.

But why are Americans discarding so much medicine, and particularly, prescription drugs?

People who still pay taxes are giving pharmaceutical and insurance companies money to give them the opportunity to join incomprehensible prescription drug plans. And then they dump the drugs in the toilet?

By this time all of us should know that unless the doctor says otherwise, we are supposed to finish all prescriptions. No one should have a stockpile of outdated capsules and pills.

Perhaps we stock up on aspirin, ibuprofen and cold medicines and then discover that some of the drugs expired before they were used. That's wasteful, but OTC drugs are comparatively cheap.
Not so the prescriptions. Some cost hundreds of dollars.

Not to sound paranoid, but if consumers aren't throwing away perfectly good drugs, who would be? The only beneficiaries of reducing supplies of drugs would be the manufacturers.

But that's goofy. Isn't it?

Confused By Cold

Since it seems as if winter temperatures will finally arrive, a word about wind chill.

Wind chill was developed to describe how wind velocity changes the way temperature feels to exposed skin.

We hear about wind chill so often that many people have become confused. Only warm blooded animals with bare skin, humans basically, are affected. If the temperature is 35 but the wind chill is 16, a container of water placed outside will not freeze.

Wind might make the water freeze more rapidly at an ambient temperature of 32 degrees by carrying away heat.

So fear not. Your car will die equally well at 16 degrees or minus 10 with the wind chill.

How Many Lunar Hectares in a Square Kilometer?

NASA, for reasons known only to NASA, had decided to use the metric system for its future lunar explorations and settlements.
The rest of the world uses the metric system, but not the United States. We've just never seen the point.
Instead, we use miles, feet, yards, inches, pounds and a bunch of other arbitrary units.
The meter, on the other hand, was invented by the French in 18th century.
Christian Huygens suggested that a meter be defined as the length of a pendulum with a period of one second, but that didn't happen.
It was instead defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along a line running between Dunkirk in France and Barcelona in Spain.
So the meter was a removed reflection of Earth, as were the units for volume, and weight. The original meter was a platinum bar kept in Paris. (The bar was 0.2 millimeters short, but what the heck.)
Scientists have since redefined the meter as 1/299,792,458 the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in one second.
Either way, using meters on the moon makes no more sense than miles, yards, and feet. Isn't NASA the agency that confused metric and British units on the $125 million Mars Orbiter, causing it to crash?
Maybe NASA should just use what we're used to.

Time Flies, So Stop Pushing

Steve Miller had it wrong: Time isn't slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.

The future is time and time cannot slip into itself, can it?

Actually, we're the ones who are traveling through time. We all go in the same direction, like a school of fish. No one, as far as we know, can curve around and go backward.

So, here's the question. Space and time are so closely linked that Albert Einstein called them "space time." To move from standing still requires work, that is, force acting over time.

Ignoring planetary and galactic movement, if you want to stay in one spot on Earth, you simply don't stir. Movement in space seems to be under our control.

We're also traveling through time, but what force is doing the work to push us? You can stop movement by sitting at your desk, but there's no equivalent way to stop our motion through time.

Whatever propels us through seconds, minutes, and years, is relentless. What is it? If we could figure that out we could probably stop it. Then we'd be outside time, in eternity.

We would probably be able to see other things moving, but how would we appear? Or would we disappear because we're steadily receding into the past? No, because we wouldn't be moving in relation to time.

Consider packing into Times Square on New Year's Eve. You can't move, but nothing stops the date from changing.

Happy New Year, as you hurtle, unhindered, into the future.