Called me just now. Promoting his seminar in Ontario, coming up in a couple weeks. They claim it normally has a $1000 tuition charge, but thanks to my prior participation with them, it’s free.

The name “Robert Allen” doesn’t really sound familiar to me.

All the municipal water systems that bring you tap water in this country are regulated by the EPA and the Department of Health, which both have higher water quality standards than the FDA (the organization that monitors bottled water).

Last weekend, I went to the Google All-Nighter, a 24-hour programming contest organized by UPE and sponsored by Google. UPE is Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the computer science honor society. It was a terrific event, with food, code, and prizes. All entries were hosted on Google Code and tagged uscgan2008. This means they’re all under some kind of open source license. Furthermore, they had a mini-competition to make the best Wiki pages, so most of the entries have fairly interesting descriptions. We didn’t win this contest, but I put effort into putting info up on our Google Code project anyway.

My team, named paleGoldenRod after the CSS color, created a real-time interactive game visualization mashup, along with three new games using Google technologies. I got sick from staying up so late (I slept only 1 hour during the 24 hour contest), but it was worth it: we won Best Overall, which is essentially the 1st place prize. That meant we had first pick at the prize packages. One offered a Google bag with stuff in it, including a 1 GB iPod Shuffle; another was a Google beanbag chair, lava lamp, and $25 to Amazon.com; and the last was a Google laptop bag, beach towel, frisbee, yo-yo, CamelBak, and $50 to Amazon.com.

I chose the last one, which was an obvious best to me. Not only did it include the most cash, but I don’t have any of the stuff in it. From the first pack, I already have an iPhone and thus have no need for an iPod; from the second, I have a Google beanbag chair (although I am still waiting for a computer science common room, so I can donate it there). The last prize pack, though, is simply awesome. Surprisingly (to me), it was the least-sought-after, and there were two extras remaining, even after all the winners had selected their prizes. Pam said they’ll possibly be used at future UPE events.

For most of my life, I’ve been refilling old water bottles and taking them to class, drinking from them throughout the day. They’re disposable ones from companies like Costco (Kirkland Signature) and Arrowhead. Whenever I have a chance to get a fresh bottle, I go for it. But I know that tap water is just as good. It’s just some strange desire for guaranteed pure water that makes me prefer bottled.

Since the prize pack included a Google CamelBak, I decided to look it up online. I learned a lot of things, among which is the fact above. Shocking, isn’t it? In my opinion, there is ample proof against the need, in the vast majority of situations, for bottled water. Consider this:

Fact: 25% of bottled water is just filtered tap water.

Did you know that bottled water cost 1,000 to 10,000 times more than tap water? Really, it’s true. And remember those 8 glasses a day you’re supposed to drink? Well that’ll cost you $1,400 a year in bottled water, but just $0.49 if you drink tap.

That’s from CamelBak’s site, Choose to Reuse. Other sites have other conclusions, also favoring tap water. For instance, this article from ABC News…

“20/20″ took five bottles of national brands of bottled water and a sample of tap water from a drinking fountain in the middle of New York City and sent them to microbiologist Aaron Margolin of the University of New Hampshire to test for bacteria that can make you sick, like e. coli.

“There was actually no difference between the New York City tap water and the bottled waters that we evaluated,” he said.

Many scientists have run tests like that and have consistently found that tap water is as good for you as bottled waters that cost 500 times more.

The labels of the bottled waters do suggest they’re special. Some show mountains or polar bears or glaciers. You have to look at the fine print to find out Everest Water is not from Mount Everest. It’s from Corpus Christi, Texas. Glacier Clear Water is not from a glacier in Alaska. Its source is tap water from Greeneville, Tenn.

Yup… water that costs 500 times more, not any better for you. Water is water. And more from the New York Times…

I suspect many people who buy the fancy waters are getting suckered by the ads or the labels.

Bottom line, if you buy bottled water because you think it’s healthier than tap, test after test shows no evidence of that. And if you buy fancy brands because you think they taste better, you’re probably just buying the hype.

Plus, the environmental benefits of tap…

Water bottles, like other containers, are made from natural gas and petroleum. The Earth Policy Institute in Washington has estimated that it takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil to make the water bottles Americans use each year. That could fuel 100,000 cars a year instead. And, only about 23 percent of those bottles are recycled, in part because water bottles are often not included in local redemption plans that accept beer and soda cans. Add in the substantial amount of fuel used in transporting water, which is extremely heavy, and the impact on the environment is anything but refreshing.

The scariest thing, though, is the idea that tap water might not be this way forever. I don’t know what it costs to maintain this system, but it often surprises me that the US is different from most other countries in the cleanliness and wide availability of drinking water.

Now, I should note that this applies to the United States only. I know I’ve talked with foreigners who are shocked that it’s possible to drink tap water in the US. Your country may differ; but around here, the water’s fine.

Ron Paul, Republican candidate for President, often mentions that he wants to get rid of the DoE in his speeches. Indeed, getting rid of useless (or even harmful) departments such as this one are one of the primary ways of cutting government spending, getting the deficit and debt under control, lowering taxes, and improving the economy.

But many people, myself included, have no idea why the DoE should be abolished. After all, there are indeed many things the government does which we are very thankful for. So what’s wrong with the Department of Education? All he says is that we should abolish it.

Here’s what one person has said about Ron Paul’s position: “problem is he has NEVER explained why and it TURNS viewers off. Not once in a debate has he said that he wants teachers and parents to make decisions locally on what their children should be getting in the way of education.”

Another person replied, “I have heard him talk about this in interviews and speeches. Like the other candidates, Ron Paul gives a lot of ‘Readers Digest’ versions of his answers in the debates. He’s telling the truth and he’s appealing to those who favored abolishing the DOE during Reagan’s time, but that doesn’t seem to matter much to a great number of Republican voters.”

But here’s the kicker: “The problem with a lot of conservatives is that they tend to support existing institutions. If something’s been around a while, the idea of getting rid of it seems kinda nutty to them.“

I can definitely attest to that. When I told them Ron Paul was the only one with a tangible plan to cut government spending, and said that abolishing the Federal Reserve, IRS, Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security, etc. is all part of that, they looked very skeptical. If something’s been around a while, the idea of getting rid of it seems kinda nutty to them.

We need to take a good, discerning look at what our government is spending money on, and cut back when that spending is not working.

Source of quotes

P.S. Who is Ron Paul? Here’s a great video on YouTube about Ron Paul. I’ve watched a lot of Ron Paul on YouTube, but haven’t seen this before. Rate and share.

My provisional vote may or may not have counted, I don’t know because I haven’t yet called to find out. I’ll call tomorrow, but please read this incredible account of what happened to at least a few voters yesterday…

What we have both personally experienced and have been getting tons of calls on is voter disenfranchisement at the polls yesterday. Let me explain; My son came with me to vote. He had changed his registration from American Independent to Republican so he could vote for Ron Paul and he met the deadline requirement by one day but was still shown as an American Independent Party member.

There was also another woman there who had changed her registration to Republican to vote the same way. They were told that they were not on the Republican list and could vote as Republican because they were assigned as another party. My son asked for a provisional ballot and was told no. They just crossed both names off the list of registered voters.

My son said, I won’t vote other than Republican. The other woman said the same. … And they had no idea of what else to do.

So, I came home and called the Registrar’s Office (not the number on the registration forms or in the phone book because they were all experiencing technical difficulties), I called a number I googled and got through 5 min before they were closed for the day.

The person I spoke with had no knowledge to anything. So she looked up my sons name and sure enough he was timely registered as a Republican. We were then told to go back to the poll and that they would make a call to those there as to the situation. Apparently, an updated add-on list was attached to the list of voters of which none of those working the polls knew of. Those running the polls were very incompetent. Why would we want people like this running our election polls? Maybe we should have stepped up to the plate. I think these people had their hearts in the right direction but didn’t know the ins and outs.

Anyway, I find out now that this wasn’t just a clerical error but a fast moving problem across the entire state of California.

And: What does freedom really mean?

Finally: Who would the world elect?

Giuliani got 95,876 votes already, likely from absentee ballots. I can practically guarantee that this is because the mainstream media picked him as the winner at the beginning. Only when everyone started to realize how much he actually sucked, did his support numbers finally start to dwindle. Of course, the people voting for him are far more passionate than he is. He dropped out of the race long ago.

Polls are rigged and idiotic, yet they seem to be accurate because they’re self-fulfilling. Many people I’ve talked with only select from the top 2 candidates. If they prefer #2 over #1, they select #2 even if they really believed in the positions and leadership ability of #4. I don’t necessarily blame them, the problem being that other people do this, too. Thus candidates that the MSM (mainstream media) did not select have no chance, despite the fact that a candidate which did not get media coverage may be a far better leader for our country.

Stock market crash? Housing bubble forming and exploding? It’s your fault for not voting properly. You have to understand basic economics, the importance of sound currency, the ridiculousness of wasting money in government departments that fail at their jobs. Ron Paul is the only one seriously talking about the issues, and nobody even refutes this. Yet the MSM has stacked the odds against him by trumpeting their false poll results.

I overheard a conversation between a student and professor, where the prof basically said that the project the student is working on is hard, impractical, pointless, and doomed. It was a government research project. No surprise there. Even the student admitted that that maybe 1 in 20 government-funded research projects produce anything of value. The rest? Complete failures. And that number might even be optimistic, I don’t know.

That’s why you need private ownership and a free market. In that, no other candidate even comes close.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has proved his popularity in the tech world, far outpacing Sen. John McCain in support from donors. Paul received twice as much money from Microsoft employees as McCain did, and five times as much as McCain from Google employees.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, employees of Google and Microsoft are number three and four in a list of top contributors to the campaign. (First and second on that list are the Army and Navy respectively.)

Congressman Paul has repeatedly said that he doesn’t want to tax or regulate the internet, and internet innovators – who have thrived from the freedom of the internet – support candidates who understand that freedom is key to the success of the e-Economy.

- From the Ron Paul 2008 Blog. Now back to my original post…

For the past few days, reports have been floating around about how well Ron Paul did in the last quarter of 2007 with donations from veterans and current servicemen and women. Many people are concerned that, with his anti-war stance, Ron Paul does not understand our military defense needs. Let these people be reassured. The troops absolutely support Ron Paul.

Patrick Semmens crunched the numbers to get the most accurate figures, and sure enough, Dr. Paul beats all other candidates, Republican or Democrat, in military donations. And by a significant margin, too.

Dr. Paul has worked his entire career working for veterans, and has many awards and endorsements due to his dedication to their cause.

A search of the FEC database by employer reveals that Dr. Paul has received 1160 donations from military donors, nearly triple that of John McCain, and more than McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee combined.

Dr. Paul™s total military donations of $249 thousand are almost as much as the $260 thousand of combined donations received by the other five remaining candidates.

Congressman Paul is no stranger to military support. Former president Ronald Reagan once said, Ron Paul is one of the outstanding leaders fighting for a stronger national defense. As a former Air Force officer, he knows well the needs of our armed forces, and he always puts them first. We need to keep him fighting for our country!

Left to right: Ronald Reagan, Ron Paul
Image Source

According to the FEC reports, these are the total number and amount of military donations for each of the presidential candidates*:

Ron Paul: 1160 $249k
John McCain: 438 $83k
Mike Huckabee: 126 $37k
Mitt Romney: 126 $24k
Barack Obama: 443 $76k
Hillary Clinton: 154 $41k

*Methodology: Searched FEC reports for occupation/employer contains: Army Navy USN USAF Air Force Marine USMC Coast Guard USCG then removed duplicates and non-military occupations (i.e. marine repair)

Now, the important question is: why? My theory is that the military knows the issues, and knows the situation in Iraq. I do not know the real situation in Iraq. I am far more inclined to listen to their money, than any words that can spew out of a candidate’s mouth in a debate.

Oh, and here’s even bigger news: “Ron Paul … is attracting the most individual campaign contributions from employees of major U.S. high-tech companies.” Source

Again, why are technology people supporting Ron Paul? I think “websmith” put it well: “Tech workers are a smarter than average bunch …”

Not really too surprising: I’m a former Google and JPL intern, and now a Ron Paul supporter!

If you’re a Ron Paul supporter: get out and vote!

Grassroots supporters have designated today, Ron and his wife Carol’s 51st wedding anniversary, as a “money bomb” date. That means all Ron Paul supporters should donate as much as they can.

To be clever, it’s been suggested that donors contribute $51, since it’s their 51st anniversary.

Some serious supporters put in their maximum contribution, $2,300. I donated, but far less. Here’s a live graph of today’s donations…

For more info on today’s money bomb, visit FiftyOneYears.com.

What do you think?

P.S. The Nation published an article about Ron Paul yesterday…