Random thoughts

It's been too long since I've posted anything, and as usual, I have too much on my mind. I'm not sure I can write about most of it... or rather, I'm not sure anyone wants to read much of it. So I guess I'm writing this as a therapeutic exercise.

I think I'm alone. There are people in my life... but I think I keep them all at a distance. I think I'm also a little bitter that some of those people... well... it feels like they are the ones who created the distance. I think I feel a little abandoned.

But I don't do anything about it really. I just go on being alone. And I intend on continuing to do so... because I don't want to meet new people. I like other people when they leave me alone. I have been told I should find a hobby that gets me out of the house to a place where other people do the same hobby. But I have this strong aversion to meeting new people. I have it in my head that I won't like new people. I think that's partly based on the frequency of annoying people in public (mostly on the road I guess).

I just came up with another idea. I wonder if I don't want to meet new people because I'm pretty sure they will dislike me.

I have no self esteem it seems.

Alright, what I'm more specifically thinking about is how I am romantically alone. I want to find someone. I want to have a lasting reason to smile again. But there are so many obstacles. Many of those obstacles are self wrought. Like my avoidance of meeting people.

I'm also extremely picky. I can't help that. It's just a matter of what I find attractive. So yeah, I might as well say that I require a girl to be physically very attractive for me to have any interest. I tend toward slimmer girls on the spectrum of what's considered beautiful. Keira Knightley, Natalie Portman, Kristen Bell, and Sarah Carter are the kind of women that catch my eye. Yeah yeah... celebrities... but it's a point of reference. I see plenty of women in the real world who appeal to me, so it's not just some make up and a good camera angel. Women that appeal to me do exist.

Anyway, once my interest is piqued by the physical aspects, I have other things I look for. First, she has to have energy and be just a little pushy... I think I need that. I think I need someone to encourage me to get outside my comfort zone a bit. She needs to being willing to laugh... I love laughing... and having someone to share a laugh with is something I really want.

There are a few things I know I want an absence of. Smoking is the most important on that list. I HATE cigarette smoke. That stuff is so nasty... I don't even like being in an elevator with someone who has smoked recently. It stinks. It makes me feel unclean just being near it. And anyone willing to subject themselves to that as a habit... I don't understand them, and don't really want to be around them. I understand that smoking is an addiction... and it's hard to stop... but that doesn't change that it's disgusting and very bad for you. I don't want to be in a relationship with someone who smokes.

Another thing not far behind smoking is religion. I am anti-religion on every level I can think of. On the personal level, I find it to be an illogical thought process to believe in something that no one can prove is there. It's exactly like having an imaginary friend, but for some reason it's the norm for adults to adopt this practice. An individual that believes may have been brain washed as a child by whatever religious institution their family attended, so I can understand the cycle and why religion hasn't died out, but an individual that is willing to believe despite a complete lack of proof, let alone evidence, is of less interest to me than one who has come to a better conclusion. As I think on it... I suppose I'm less opposed to the individual having a belief that something is out there, than I am to someone whole heartedly belonging to a church. Believing in the existence of an all powerful creator is one thing, but believing that any religious organization got it right is just plain silly. Those people scare me... because they seem to outnumber everyone else, and they have a measure of control over my future.

Anyway, I don't like religion, and would prefer to avoid someone who thinks that Adam and Eve is a true story, and that we all came from these two people.

It would be nice if this girl and I had some things in common too. But I'm not making that easy for anyone. I love guns, I enjoy skiing (seems like most women avoid the cold hobbies if they can help it), I'm a sci fi geek (I love Star Wars and Fire Fly for example), and I love watching anime. That's right... japanimation. Top of my list of anime right now is Naruto, though there are many I would say I "love". Several more worth mentioning: Gundam Wing, Cowboy Bebop, Bleach, Irresponsible Captain Tyler, and Martian Successor Nadesico.

Sorry... I'm going off on a tanget I guess. I didn't really mean to talk about what I like. I was supposed to keep paying attention to why it's unlikely I'll meet a girl that fits my criteria. I guess it comes down to me being a weird person. I'm generally aloof from new people if possible, I find overweight women unappealing, I am tremendously opinionated about religion (and a few other things I haven't mentioned yet), I have strange hobbies (like playing video games... forgot to mention that one), and to top it off... I have no confidence that I'm a likeable enough person that any woman I'd be interested in might be interested in me. That right there is a self-perpetuating cycle. I lack the conifdence to approach a woman I might be interested in, so I never meet anyone... which feeds my belief that there's no one who might be interested, which of course means I think something is wrong with me... and I end up not having any confidence.

I guess that's all I wanted to write. I was pretty sure an "answer" wasn't going to present itself.

People should have more sex

This is a repost of "The Economic Case For Promiscuity" by Steven E. Landsburg. I found it when I was bored and found the article through Give Me Something to Read. I'd post the direct link to the article, but I had to sign up (free) and the link leads to a place that seems to require membership. Okay, I'll post the link anyway in case it helps...

http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http://www.gametheory.net/News/Items/019.html&article=46815284

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News stories by field of study

It’s true: AIDS is nature’s awful retribution for our tolerance of immoderate and socially irresponsible sexual behavior. The epidemic is the price of our permissive attitudes toward monogamy, chastity, and other forms of sexual conservatism.

You’ve read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of self-restraint.

Suppose you walk into a bar and find four potential sex partners. Two are highly promiscuous; the others venture out only once a year. The promiscuous ones are, of course, more likely to be HIV-positive. That gives you a 50-50 chance of finding a relatively safe match.

But suppose all once-a-year revelers could be transformed into twice-a-year revelers. Then, on any given night, you’d run into twice as many of them. Those two promiscuous bar patrons would be outnumbered by four of their more cautious rivals. Your odds of a relatively safe match just went up from 50-50 to four out of six.

That’s why increased activity by sexual conservatives can slow down the rate of infection and reduce the prevalence of AIDS. In fact, according to Professor Michael Kremer of MIT’s economics department, the spread of AIDS in England could plausibly be retarded if everyone with fewer than about 2.25 partners per year were to take additional partners more frequently. That covers three-quarters of British heterosexuals between the ages of 18 and 45. (Much of this column is inspired by Professor Kremer’s research.

If multiple partnerships save lives, then monogamy can be deadly. Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those conditions, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease to the men; and the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives was willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might die out along with it.

Or consider Joan, who attended a party where she ought to have met the charming and healthy Martin. Unfortunately Fate, through its agents at the Centers for Disease Control, intervened. The morning of the party, Martin ran across one of those CDC-sponsored subway ads touting the virtues of abstinence. Chastened, he decided to stay home. In Martin’s absence, Joan hooked up with the equally charming but considerably less prudent Maxwell—and Joan got AIDS. Abstinence can be even deadlier than monogamy.

If those subway ads are more effective against the cautious Martins than against the reckless Maxwells, then they are a threat to the hapless Joans. This is especially so when they displace Calvin Klein ads, which might have put Martin in a more socially beneficent mood.

You might object that even if Martin had dallied with Joan, he would only have freed Maxwell to prey on another equally innocent victim. To this there are two replies. First, we don’t know that Maxwell would have found another partner: Without Joan, he might have struck out that night. Second, reducing the rate of HIV transmission is in any event not the only social goal worth pursuing: If it were, we’d outlaw sex entirely. What we really want is to minimize the number of infections resulting from any given number of sexual encounters; the flip side of this observation is that it is desirable to maximize the number of (consensual) sexual encounters leading up to any given number of infections. Even if Martin had failed to deny Maxwell a conquest that evening, and thus failed to slow the epidemic, he could at least have made someone happy.

To an economist, it’s clear why people with limited sexual pasts choose to supply too little sex in the present: Their services are underpriced. If sexual conservatives could effectively advertise their histories, HIV-conscious suitors would compete to lavish them with attention. But that doesn’t happen, because such conservatives are hard to identify. Insufficiently rewarded for relaxing their standards, they relax their standards insufficiently.

So a socially valuable service is under-rewarded and therefore under-supplied. This is a problem we’ve experienced before. We face it whenever a producer fails to safeguard the environment.

Extrapolating from their usual response to environmental issues, I assume that liberals will want to attack the problem of excessive sexual restraint through coercive regulation. As a devotee of the price system, I’d prefer to encourage good behavior through an appropriate system of subsidies.

The question is: How do we subsidize Martin’s sexual awakening without simultaneously subsidizing Maxwell’s ongoing predations? Just paying people to have sex won’t work—not with Maxwell around to reap the bulk of the rewards. The key is to subsidize something that is used in conjunction with sex and that Martin values more than Maxwell.

Quite plausibly, that something is condoms. Maxwell knows that he is more likely than Martin to be infected already, and hence probably values condoms less than Martin does. Subsidized condoms could be just the ticket for luring Martin out of his shell without stirring Maxwell to a new frenzy of activity.

As it happens, there is another reason to subsidize condoms: Condom use itself is under-rewarded. When you use one, you are protecting both yourself and your future partners, but you are rewarded (with a lower chance of infection) only for protecting yourself. Your future partners don’t know about your past condom use and therefore can’t reward it with extravagant courtship. That means you fail to capture the benefits you’re conferring, and as a result, condoms are underused.

It is often argued that subsidized (or free) condoms have an upside and a downside: The upside is that they reduce the risk from a given encounter, and the downside is that they encourage more encounters. But it’s plausible that in reality, that’s not an upside and a downside—it’s two upsides. Without the subsidies, people don’t use enough condoms, and the sort of people who most value condoms don’t have enough sex partners.

All these problems—along with the case for subsidies—would vanish if our sexual pasts could somehow be made visible, so that future partners could reward past prudence and thereby provide appropriate incentives. Perhaps technology can ultimately make that solution feasible. (I envision the pornography of the future: “Her skirt slid to the floor and his gaze came to rest on her thigh, where the imbedded monitor read, ‘This site has been accessed 314 times.’ “) But until then, the best we can do is to make condoms inexpensive—and get rid of those subway ads.

Meandering Thoughts on Life and Dating

I write a lot of negative material on this blog. It's usually argumentative and unfriendly. I'm not happy about it really. The posts are honest, but I seem to like to look at things from an adversarial point of view most of the time. For example, my long post about Valentine's Day being awful. It was honest, and I think it holds value, but it's very negative, and makes me seem an unpleasant person. Maybe I am an unpleasant person.

I read a friend's blog post today which is about what romance is to them. It even mentions Valentine's Day, and it even agrees with me about how if the love is real, it won't need a day each year to prompt the shows of affection. But that friend is much better at conveying the important message than I am. I ended up with a diatribe against a holiday that really only has as much meaning as you allow it to have. I should have written about love instead. Tracy (that friend who wrote the above linked blog post) made me think with her writing. I really appreciate it.

So here I am thinking. What kind of person am I? What have I turned into? Am I really that negative all the time?

I know that I'm lonely.

I joined eHarmony a while back, and have been moderately active in reading profiles and sending messages. Just a short while ago, I got a message from some one named Rebecca. And we seemed to get along well in our messages. And I was really excited about going to have dinner with her. We made plans to meet. And she cancelled them. I was left wondering if something was going on with her or if I had said something that turned her off.

Earlier today, I noticed an article on the eHarmony site called "7 Signs of a Desperate Dater". It lists some things that I'm afraid I might be doing. Regardless of the specifics, I'm sure that I'm coming across as desperate. I'm desperate to find someone. I'd like to find someone that I connect with in a strong way. But I think I might be at the point where I'm not really being myself. Not in the understood social norm of not being yourself entirely when you first meet someone, but in the way where my state of mind is preventing me from being myself. What Rebecca must have seen... and what people see in general is the unappealing desperation. It's a horrible first impression.

Now I wonder how I fix that. I think I need to stop wanting so hard. I need to stop needing that connection. I'm not sure how to do that. I've been told on many occasions that "you'll find what you're looking for when you stop looking". I hate that saying. It basically means that I have no power in the situation. I'm unhappy about situations where I have no power at all. I'm not looking to control everything, but knowing that my fate is in my hands is something I cherish. In this case, my fate is entirely out of my control. At least it seems that way.

And maybe I'm taking the whole thing too seriously. I seem to want to jump straight into a serious relationship. Maybe I should be looking to just date... maybe I should be open to the possibility that things don't have to be serious. It can just be two people enjoying spending some time together, and maybe it won't lead to anything.

This is turning into a negative post again. I wanted to write that I had come to some sort of revelation, but it's not working out that way. I guess I'll wrap it up.

I need to learn how to focus on the positive matters in life. And I need to learn how to relax. I really don't think I've been able to do that before.

Atheism: some more thoughts about it

A friend posted something about how atheism is not a religion. And he's right. It's not. But I immediately thought about how certain levels of atheism can require a level of faith similar to that required by believing what a religion teaches. You can read all about atheism and its meanings on the wiki page. It's a really good read.

I consider myself an "explicit weak atheist" according to the article, and also an agnostic (which is very similar to a "weak atheist" anyway). Just wanted to be clear.

So I said in the first paragraph that certain levels of atheism require faith like religions do. According to the wiki article, this level I'm thinking of would be "strong atheism". It is the specific belief that there is no god or set of gods. This type of atheism requires faith though, because no one can prove that a god or set of gods does not exist. It simply can't be done. Just because we can't perceive something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Of course, on the other hand, it can never be proven that a god or gods does exist either. Even if a powerful being appeared before you, walked on water, transmuted water to wine, brought a dead animal back to life, cured a person of terminal cancer, teleported right in front of you, and/or conceived a human child without touching the woman... it still wouldn't prove the existence of a god or gods. It would just show you that really powerful beings can exist. Or maybe just a REALLY technologically advanced one. Doesn't matter what the explanation is... it's still not proof of a god or set of gods.

What I'm trying to get to I think is that I don't understand how anyone can be anything but a "weak atheist". No event in my life or any event I've ever heard of has even remotely suggested the existence of a god. Sure, I've heard religious folks speak and say there is a god. But what do they know? They don't know anything. They only believe. They have faith. But that faith is based on absolutely nothing. Some coincidence in their life that seemed too good to be true, or too unlikely to have happened without "divine intervention" is still not even evidence of a god, let alone proof. Surviving a crash that should have killed you is not proof of a god. It's a coincidence. Things just happened that way because that's how physics works. The circumstances were such that you survived. That's all.

It's nearly 1 AM, and I'm swiftly losing my focus. I think I just wanted to write about how religious people are wrong, and about how even some atheists are wrong.

If you think I'm wrong... prove that there's a god. Or prove that there isn't one. I'd be mighty impressed either way. In the meantime, I'm going to go on with my lack of belief in any god or set of gods, because I haven't seen anything to suggest their existence. There's no reason to waste time on them.

Why Valentine's Day is Awful

I'm going to start out with the simple assertion that Valentine's Day is awful. A good portion of you reading this (assuming anyone reads this) already agree with me. But I find it's necessary to make a logical case for the "holiday" being a thing of evil. Sure... a logical scientific approach might be hard to support because some of it is ill-defined or a matter of opinion, but I hope my case will be pretty strong anyway.

Next step is to break up the groups of people that endure Valentines's Day (which will hence-forth in this essay be referred to as "VD"... coincidentally the same acronym used for something that I find to be less offensive than Valentine's Day). We have four basic groups of people that I'll use for sweeping generalizations later. We have single males, single females, males as part of a couple, and females as part of a couple. Just keep those in mind as I move on to my next point...

We now look at what VD means. Sure we could look at the origin and history, but that's hardly relevant to how it's celebrated now. Do you get together with family and eat a big hearty meal? Do you throw a party? Do you get the day off work? Not really. You might, but it would be a coincidence. The celebration of VD at this point is about buying VD cards, flowers, chocolate, jewelry, and expensive dinners for your significant other. I'll apply the groups I mentioned above to this. Single men are generally safe from this. Single women are generally depressed about not having a significant other to spend that money on them. Coupled men get abused horribly by the commercial nature of the holiday. Coupled women get mad if their significant other doesn't get abused by the commercial nature of the holiday. I apologize, but I'm leaving homosexual couples out of my "statistics" because I don't really understand the dynamic as it relates to VD.

So what we have is a holiday that has become completely an exercise in spending money. Let's move on.

Now, some may try to say that VD is also about couples coming together, doing something romantic for each other, and then having sex... which are all good things, but just like Christmas being a commercial holiday that forces us to buy gifts for each other, when it would have more meaning every other day of the year... VD is strange day that seems to require couples to do something. Why can't they do those things every other day of the year? Really, VD is a way to make people feel guilty about not buying expensive crap and doing something romantic. It's a forced event... and therefore has less meaning.

Some people (a friend of mine in particular) tried to make me see VD as a day that isn't specific to people in relationships. Apparently there's support for that concept but you have to read pretty far back, and perhaps look at other countries that celebrate VD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine's_Day). So according to this friend, you're supposed to just send flowers and small gifts to friends to show you care. I'm going to point back to the commercial nature of the holiday and mention that this seems like a way to put guilty pressure on single males to spend money on that day too. Wouldn't a friend much rather get a gift given because it was something you wanted to do, and at some unexpected time? VD reduces the meaning of such gifts.

So so far we have that it's generally a holiday celebrated by couples and which seems designed to force people into spending money out of guilt as opposed to out of kindness.

Now comes my favorite part (thick sarcasm intended here). If I happen to be in public during VD (that acronym will not stop being funny), and I see couples gushing over each other, I am subjected to the biggest negative aspect of the day. It's a forceful reminder that I am single, and that they are happy together while I can do nothing but lament my lack of social skill required to find a person who likes me that way. I am admittedly guessing here, but I think a good number of the people in the "single" categories would feel the same way. It's a slap in the face.

So not only is the day a commercial guilt trip extravaganza for couples, but it's a free and fast ticket to depression town (population 1) for single people.

I have more personal evidence I could bring to bear, but I didn't intend to turn this into my personal gripes. I'm trying to point out that as holidays go, VD is probably the worst one of the year.

With any luck, I'll play video games all day, and my contact with people will be minimal (to save me from seeing happy couples anywhere).

Now... one last thing: A different friend gave me a way to look at VD in a better way. If I just think of it as "Singles Awareness Day", it'll be a much more honest name for the day, and it's acronym fits perfectly. :)

More Religious Absurdity

Here's the link to the article I heard the news from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/13/pat-robertson-haiti-curse_n_422099.html

In case it's no longer there when you read this blog, I'll recap the important parts (it's a direct cut and paste, so I take no credit for writing it):

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Televangelist Pat Robertson said Wednesday that earthquake-ravaged Haiti has been "cursed" by a "pact to the devil."

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it," he said on Christian Broadcasting Network's "The 700 Club." "They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal."

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Really? That's what you're going with? You're claiming not only that your concept of an all powerful being and the evil counterpart are real, but that you know what the Haitians were doing when they got their freedom, and that they made a deal with this probably fictional character, and that this somehow resulted in a natural disaster that killed thousands of people who did not make the deal?

Why do people listen to this fucking retard? He's trivializing a lot of people's deaths. He's being an arrogant sack of crap by asserting that his story is true, let alone that his religion is the truth. He's suggesting that due to a lack of religious correctness (and by that I mean the Haitian lack of following his religion), they suffered a horrible fate. So it was their fault a natural disaster struck? And what proof or even evidence is there that can support this? I'm so angry that such incredible stupidity gets national coverage, and though I'm assuming this, I'm angry that there might be people in the world who think he's right.

I'm so tired of faith being used as an excuse to spout off stupid crap. I'm okay with a little faith. I know lots of people who have faith in some religion or another. I understand that having faith can ease a person's mind, and even help with a sense of community, but when morons like that televangelist claim to be right about something like this it just upsets me. He's got absolutely nothing to back up his claim... nothing at all... the arrogance is mind-boggling. I can't prove he's wrong, but every bit of sense in me says he is, and he can't prove he's right either.

Okay... I'm just ranting. But I hope this guy Pat Robertson dies so there's one less public font of stupidity in the world.

Languages of the world and separation of people

I've written before (if I remember correctly) about how I think religion is a horrible influence on human kind in terms of its propensity for dividing us. It's caused more violence and death than good in the world. And the good effects can be achieved without religion... like the charity work that some churches do. You don't need to believe in a magical sky fairy to do good things. But believing in the preposterous notion of an all powerful being that cares about us and whose truth can be described by one of our religions is directly responsible for dividing societies, cultures, and communities. Anyway, I'm going way off topic and it's only the first paragraph.

This morning I woke up thinking about what steps would need to be taken to unite the world. The event I think most likely to successfully unite us would be a common enemy, and since I'm looking to unite the world, I think alien invasion is the best idea for that one. Lots of people would die, I know. Maybe everyone. But let's say for purpose of this exercise that the invasion is not terribly efficient and we manage to survive, and somehow manage to come up with weapons capable of fighting back against this species that's technologically advanced enough to manage interstellar travel. Our chances go way up when everyone in the world works together. On top of that, like I said: lot's of people likely die in the invasion, and that means we'd probably need more people of the world to work together just for sheer numbers.

I guess I could write a whole blog post on that one by itself, but I'd have to start putting together scenarios and doing research on feasibility before I'd be comfortable with that. What I wrote above is just an idea without support. Now, on to the idea I mean to focus on for this blog post...

I woke up thinking about how language is a dividing force in our world. I suppose I'm going to rely on logic for this one too, since I'm not sure where to look for supporting evidence online. I'll start with small scale. My grandmother from Germany is visiting right now. She only speaks German, and my native language is English. I speak a little German, but my skills are diminished from lack of use. I want to talk to my grandmother, but I don't really have to vocabulary to handle all the topics I'd normally cover. When I visit my parents and talk about my day at work, or a television show I like, or something I went and did with friends, or whatever, I can manage to convey the ideas just fine in English. In German, though, I just can't do it. So when I go over there now while my Oma (German word for "grandmother") is visiting, I end up talking about these normal conversational things in English.

I understand more German than I can speak (easier to hear a word and remember what it means than to recall a word when I'd want to use it), and so I can listen to my grandmother speak about her day and what she did, but even still, I don't understand it all. And I'll admit here that it's often about something that I don't really want to listen to. I listen anyway, but listening to her talk about the nifty knick-knack she found at the store is just not that engrossing. Sometimes the conversation gets to something interesting like politics in Germany, but that's often a bit beyond my vocabulary, and my mom has to translate.

So as an example of a dividing force on the small scale, my experience is that I could be much closer to my grandmother if I was better at speaking German. I'm sad at this, and have gotten language learning tracks to listen to while I drive, but haven't made a lot of progress. I think I'd need to go to Germany and stay immersed in the language for a while to really improve my speaking skill.

One more thing I'm going to bring up that I'll use later is humor. My grandmother has made several jokes in the time she's visited this time around, and I tend to have no idea what she's talking about. I'll understand the individual words, but I won't understand the joke, and when my mother explains to me, it turns out that the joke relies on some nuance of the language. So the point I'm trying to get across is that it's not just about knowing the words, but about knowing the idioms and shades of meaning in order to really understand what a native speaker is trying to communicate.

So even on friendly terms, a lack of common language makes communicating difficult at best.

Now I'm going to try to apply that to a larger scale. Imagine two nations without a common language that share a border. Imagine a misunderstanding at the border because of the lack of common language. Imagine hostilities ensuing over that misunderstanding. And consider the possibility that if they had spoken the same language from the beginning, the misunderstanding wouldn't have happened. I'm not trying to say that all hostilities begin from misunderstandings, but I know that they can.

Pick a conflict in the world to think about where the opposing sides don't share a native language. Most likely, each side has people that had to learn the opposing language. If not, maybe they're just ignoring a diplomatic solution as an option. But it's pretty easy to say that if a diplomatic solution is possible, it would be much easier if both sides spoke the same language. And diplomacy would only be possible with communication... which of course is easier with a common language, even if absolute fluency isn't achieved, though without fluency, you run the risk of missing the "humor", and having further misunderstandings.

I guess I'm trying to assert that common language is really important, and I think that one of the steps to bringing the world together is to homogenize language. Maybe that means picking a language that is most robust and everybody agreeing to learn it. Maybe it means everyone trying to learn at least one other language so they are doing something improve their own ability to communicate with more people. Maybe it means the long process of languages using words from other languages, eventually resulting in a language that is an amalgam of all major languages.

With that said, I was curious about what language is most spoken in the word. Thinking that English stood a good chance considering how many other countries are learning English as a second language, I was surprised to find internet data that says Mandarin Chinese is the forerunner by a wide margin: http://www.vistawide.com/languages/top_30_languages.htm

You can find all sorts of websites with lists like that, but most of the ones I found display lists from the same source. The link I provided just has the most recent year I found. Of course, the number one was Mandarin Chinese no matter the year I found. The second, third, and fourth spots were generally occupied by Hindi, Spanish, and English in some order or another.

Another interesting article (thank you wikipedia) is about the languages spoken in the United States of America: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States

The numbers in the article are a decade old, but I find them interesting anyway. It makes me think I should be trying to learn Spanish. So at this point, in order to take responsibility and make myself more able to communicate with the world, I should learn Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and for my own family: German. As an aside... I want to learn American Sign Language too.

The source (http://www.ethnologue.com/) that provides the language by population data says they track more than 7400 languages. Combined with the knowledge of the number of languages just spoken in the United States, and how much of a topic of contention language is here, I'm really beginning to believe that the idea of common language may be tremendously important to making the world a better place. Since we don't have any alien invaders to force us to come together, I think it's something we might need to pay attention to.

Okay... I think I got all the thoughts out of my head from when I woke up. Now I guess I start fixing my German skills...