In Alaska:

In Alaska, they define the natural resources as belonging to the people of Alaska. The government of Alaska leases these mineral and oil rights out to corporations, who pay the State for the right to use those resources. From that fund, every Alaskan gets a check.

In Alaska, the People collectively own the means of production, and the State administers it for the benefits of the People.

And Palin has the chutzpah to call Obama a socialist? Alaska isn't socialist -- it's communist. At least partially. While Alaska doesn't have a centrally controlled economy, as one would in a fully communist setting, collective ownership of the means of production, administered by the State for the benefit of the People is one of the fundamental communist concepts.

It's a concept which, in general, I agree with. I believe that there are many things which are in "the commons", and things in the public domain belong to the public. And that one of the things for which we create governments is to control and regulate the commons so that no one entity manages to deny other people access to them. Things like "the electromagnetic spectrum", "public domain intellectual works and inventions", and, yes, "natural resources" belong in "the commons", and so I don't have a problem with how Alaska handles their mineral wealth, particularly. But it seems downright hypocritical for Palin to be throwing around words like "socialist", "communist", and "Marxist", and using them with a pejorative tone, when Palin fits those definitions better than Obama.

Lis is an excellent cook, even if she makes me do the "cooking" part

A couple days ago, I wanted butterscotch pudding, so I made some. Except I don't use recipes, and I'm not actually THAT good at pudding, so what I ended up with was a butterscotch/caramel sauce, more than a pudding. It was pretty good, but kind of too sweet to eat on its own. Lis has been dipping apple slices in it, and that works pretty well, although we've got Gala apples right now, and it really needs a tart apple, like a Granny Smith, to balance.

Anyway, this evening, Lis said, "I'm peckish. Go to the store, buy a bag of bread dough, and make caramel rolls."

See, the grocery store right by us sells bread/pizza dough, in one-pound bags. They've got a bakery, and grocery store bakeries around here assume that you might want to bake your own stuff sometimes, but not want to bother making the dough, and it's very convenient. You can make pizzas, calzones, flat breads, or loaf breads with the stuff -- it's just a basic, generic, versatile dough.

I've never made anything jelly-roll-like, but what Lis wants, Lis gets. I bought a pound of dough, rolled it out into a rectangle, spread a cup of butterscotch/caramel sauce on it, rolled it up, let it rise/rest for a couple minutes, sliced it into eight pieces, and put them into muffin tins. Sideways-ish -- so that the round part matched the roundness of the muffin tin, if that makes sense. I let it rest/rise for a couple more minutes while the oven heated to 350 degrees (175 C), then baked it for half an hour.

They're darned good.

And it's all Lis's idea. Yeah, I did the actual COOKING, but the entire concept is Lis's.

Talking to my father tonight, he brought up an interesting concept

Okay. So, apparently, a black hole does not actually need to be super-dense. It's just, the less dense it is, the bigger its radius has to be in order for it to be a black hole.

A solar-system-sized black hole would only need to be about as dense as air. If you made a big sphere the size of the orbit of Neptune, and filled it with air -- that'd be a black hole.

Here's the weird thought. Um. Not that that previous thing ISN'T a weird thought. But here's a weirder one:

The density of the intergalactic medium is probably something like one hydrogen atom per cubic meter. Not very dense.

But nonetheless, a density.

That means that there exists a radius such that the entire universe is a black hole. And it's calculable.

Which puts an upper bound on the size of the universe. And leaves the possibility that our entire universe is, in fact, on the black hole side of an event horizon.