This is precisely why online activation is a really crappy idea.

I don’t find it terribly difficult to understand exactly why Jesus decided to change the water into wine. According to one author’s thoughts on About.com, it’s because running out of wine would have been terribly embarrassing to the bride and groom. So Jesus helped them out, no problem.

But what puzzled me the most is how he addresses his mother when she says (paraphrased), “Look, son, they’ve run out of wine.”

His response, which we find in the fourth verse, is “Dear woman…” and in some translations the more brusque “Woman…” I imagine that there are some of you who bristle (moms) or cringe (sons) at this mode of address. It is peculiar, no doubt, and it’s what caught my eye and imagination, especially since today is Mother’s Day here in the U.S.

Why did he address her like this? And why did he answer with (again, paraphrased), “Look, it’s not our problem,” but then do something about it anyway?

I think, again based on looking at others’ sensible conclusions, that the answer to the second question is somewhat easy. He is, in essence, saying that this is a trifle—a problem of little significance—but demonstrates that nothing is too small for him to care about and solve. And solve he does! Not only does he change the water to wine, but he changes lots of water (120-180 gallons!) into wine and the master of ceremonies says it’s really, really good stuff! In short, God is aware of even the most insignificant of problems and able to solve them beyond our wildest dreams. Have faith, and ask.

But the answer to the first question? I’ve yet to find an explanation, much less one that agrees with what I propose, namely that Jesus is in the transition from “son” to “Son.” No, not that he was any less our savior before this time than he was after, but that this was when he chose to “go big,” put the pedal to the metal and really announce his presence as the Messiah. I believe that the importance of Mary to him was less significant to him than the importance of his Heavenly Father, God. After all, though he doesn’t address Mary anywhere else (that I know of, anyway) in the Bible by name, he references God the Father by several names, all of which are familiar in nature and show a closeness which he is denying Mary in this passage.

I don’t think this is an accidental slighting of Mary—nor is it a slighting of Mary at all. She reacts as if nothing had changed and tells the servants to do whatever it is he says to do. It is instead, in my opinion, a demonstration of his changing the focus of his life from his Earthly family to his Heavenly family.

Do I have any groundbreaking or Earth-shattering conclusion to this homily of mine? No, though I wish I did. But I do have this piece of advice: You are not the Messiah, and addressing your mother, especially today, as “woman” is a sure-fired way to land yourself in a heap of trouble.

What, that hasn’t happened to you?

Funny thing, it hasn’t happened to me, either. Maybe our office parties are more tame than most, but I’d bet that these incidents are rare and usually occur only between two people who just don’t quite “get” decorum.

And yet that’s what happens on on an alarmingly frequent basis on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. For some reason, that’s an acceptable use of these sites. We accept that your Facebook newsfeed, chock full of pleasantries surrounding your neighbors, friends, acquaintances, co-workers and so forth, may be suddenly interrupted by the most vile or insulting or controversial posting, something you’d never say at the office Christmas party. People who wouldn’t even think about approaching these topics face-to-face suddenly find their voice in front of their 400 closest friends.

I’ve done it before, but I’m done with that. It’s annoying to me, and it was probably annoying to you, too.

So I propose a new protocol called the Office Christmas Party Protocol (or the Office Holiday Party Protocol if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing). It is simply this:

If you wouldn’t say it to your boss at the Office Christmas Party, don’t say it on Facebook or Twitter.

Use this as a guide in your posting.

If you still must air these thoughts, please do so on a blog where people will seek to read your thoughts on these matters. You can set up a free blog at blogger.com.

For myself, I’m going to go one step further. If you’re a frequent OCPP offender, I’m going to hide your posts because, quite frankly, I don’t need more controversy in my life; the mainstream media of all flavors takes care of that already. I don’t need more of your liberal/libertarian/conservative bull(crap) in my newsfeed.

So I’m going to institute a three-strikes policy. You won’t know it, of course, but after three posts which break the OCPP, I’ll hide your posts. I won’t unfriend you, because that breaks all ties, which I’m unwilling to do.

I still know you, after all, and I’d like to still be friends… civil friends, that is, who wouldn’t insult each others’ ideologies face to face and shouldn’t do it in a virtual world, either.

On a somewhat-related note, if you start a blog whose focus is one topic but veer off into OCPP-voilating territory, I’ll stop reading your blog and I’ll be vocal about it. And you won’t care, I’m sure—but I’ll be all the happier for it.

Strike one.

That’s right: they outright turn down patients whose insurance is not private. Why? Quite simply, it’s not worth the pitiful reimbursements the government programs pay. Some of the government-run plans which have zero copay encourage abuse of the system: patients who go to the emergency room simply to get Tylenol—the regular, over-the-counter kind—so they don’t have to spend anything to relieve their headache. And the private practices don’t want to have to deal with the same level of abuse. My wife’s pediatrics office has frequent flyers who do the same thing, but in the poverty-ridden area she serves, it’s all about children and not the almighty buck; so she sees them anyway.

I am not exaggerating.

Unfortunately, instead of privatizing the bloated bureaucracy which is Medicare, our government is intent on regulating private insurance down to the mediocrity of Medicare.

Sigh.

Please stay away from me.

Sincerely yours, Bill

“It’s so much money we could give every Apple employee about $6 million and close the company down. Ha! That’s a good one. Still just kidding.

“It’s so much money that we have decided to move all of our manufacturing capacity back into the United States. We intend to slowly transition the manufacturing from manual workers to robots where possible and intend to form a new school specifically for the training of the workers who will program and maintain them. We will also be teaching engineers at this school how to design for manufacturability using domestic labor, skillsets and robots.

And any company can send students to our school. This step will help them move their production back to the United States, too.

“We expect that this dividend will be far more substantial in value than a one-time cash gift to our already-on-paper-richer-than-God shareholders.

“Thank you, and have a nice day.”

The day is coming when we have to have one box for iTunes content, one box for Amazon content, one box for Vudu content, one for Hulu, one for…

It’s time for this madness to stop.

Especially if it makes up for lost sleep.

Today, I unsubscribed from DaringFireball.net, John Gruber’s platform for superb Apple analysis which he, alas, unabashedly hijacks too often for support of non-tech, political ideals.

Instead, I’m throwing my support behind an Apple-centric tech blog by Shawn Blanc by subscribing with an annual membership. Whether I may agree with Shawn’s ideals or not, I appreciate that he works just as hard as Gruber, produces commentary just as insightful as Gruber’s, has made no attempt at promoting his not-related-to-tech ideals on his tech blog, and has a first name. He has even gone so far as to separate his largely non-tech Tools and Toys blog from his main blog as it doesn’t really pertain to the main themes of ShawnBlanc.net.

My hat’s off to Shawn for this level of professionalism and self-restraint. God knows it’s only too easy to (ahem) start a blog for one purpose and (ahem) use it for all kinds of other stuff (ahem). (At least I’m obvious about it. It says it right there in the header, “A curious mix of conservative values and liberal computing.”)

I’ve read Gruber’s writings for a long time and he made no promises to me not to push unrelated garbage out with the good stuff. But like others, I’ve gotten tired of the non-tech content of DaringFireball.net. Granted, having paid nothing to Gruber for his content, I got a pretty good deal. But the feeling like he’s joined the Hollywood bimbos and blowhards who use the gift of fame for promotion of their own ideologies leaves me feeling just a bit more disappointed each time a new ad for Obama appears on DF.net.

And yes, it would bother me just as much if he suddenly promoted conservative ideals, too. The same goes for Shawn.

That having been said:

If you want superb Apple analysis with a touch of Kubrick worship, font snobbery (in a good way), and unabashed support of liberal ideals, John Gruber’s your guy.

But if you want superb Apple analysis with a side helping of insightful tech observations and a dash of (yes, I’ll admit it: unrelated) cute baby pictures, go visit ShawnBlanc.net, and throw the guy a few bucks.

And if you want random commentary on random things interspersed with random rants on… anything, keep reading this blog, and spread the word.

In yesterday’s Linked List, John Gruber quotes the New York Times which makes this nonsense comparison:

If Apple’s share price grew even 20 percent a year for the next decade, which is far below its current blistering pace, its $500 billion market capitalization would be more than $3 trillion by 2022. That is bigger than the 2011 gross domestic product of France or Brazil.

Put another way, to increase its revenue by 20 percent, Apple has to generate additional sales of more than $9 billion in its next fourth quarter. A company with only $1 billion in sales has to come up with just another $200 million.

It is clear that neither the original author, James B. Stewart in an op-ed piece under the subhead of “Common Sense,” nor John Gruber understands what the three distinct and separate numbers referenced (share price/market capitalization, GDP, and revenue) have to do with each other: nothing.

Market value is merely share price times the number of outstanding shares, so the market value and share price are one number as far as I’m concerned. Share price is based solely on investor emotion. Even those who make decisions based on numbers eventually have to get to some point where their opinion determines what they will buy or sell a share for. After initial issue of that share, there is no real anything which determines share price; its value is based totally on emotion. And so market share is a big but totally meaningless number.¹

Gross domestic product, on the other hand, is “the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period.”² It, unlike market value, is a very real and meaningful number. It’s what people are paying each and every day with their hard-earned money to buy the stuff that a country makes. Real transactions occur to produce a GDP. Real money changes hands to give products value, whereas market share is merely emotion times the number of outstanding shares.

Yes, these numbers are very big numbers and so it seems appropriate to compare big numbers to other big numbers. But I may as well compare Apple’s market value to the weight of Stone Mountain, Georgia, in tons.³ It’s a meaningless comparison.

Finally, revenue, though it seems to be coupled to share price, is not in actuality tied to share price at all. And that’s because one is driven by emotion of investors and the other is driven by real sales. Again, we have imagination vs. reality. A good example of this inexplicable relationship is in Ford’s share price vs. its earnings per share. For several quarters in the past few years, it lost money or just barely broke even, and yet the share price soared. Now it’s on the upswing, and the share price is languishing in mediocre territory.⁴ Clearly we are comparing emotion versus reality.

Linking share price to revenue with the comparison of a for-example-only 20% share price growth to 20% revenue growth is useless. Again, it’s a nonsense comparison, and you’d be just as well off comparing Apple’s annual share price growth to the annual rate of growth of a teenager. It just doesn’t make any sense.

In the overall context off the rest of the article, the comparison still doesn’t make any sense, but at least there are other reasonable numbers to think about. But Gruber does the rest of the world a disservice by highlighting the most irrelevant and useless portion of the article.

¹ And why, if it’s such an amazingly arbitrary system, do I participate? Because in general, investors have tended to be about 10% happier per year for the last 100 years or so.

² Wikipedia. Is using Wikipedia as a reference good or bad? I don’t know, but it is a concise definition, and I liked the wording of it.

³ Wikipedia again.

⁴ YCharts.

The number of Christians, and specifically, Catholics, is on the decline in New England.

Interestingly, no Christian bands are touring in New England, either.

Not the Newsboys.

Not Winter Jam 2012.

Not Rock and Worship.

Not Casting Crowns.

Not Jeremy Camp.

Not REDvolution.

Not Veggietales. (There go your future Christians…)

To their credit, both The Devil Wears Prada and Michael W. Smith have dates in Connecticut. You go, guys!

The rest of you are preaching to the choir…

• It will confuse people.

Useless argument. People can be taught, and they’ll learn that tablets are PCs as soon as you guys agree that they are.

• Smartfridges will be classified as PCs, as will digital watches, smartphones, etc.

No, they won’t. The primary purpose of the PC is… nothing in particular. That’s why the Xbox and Nintendo DS are also not PCs. And neither is a smartphone.

• Tablets are used only for a limited set of uses which look a lot like a portal to the Internet.

OK, but what do most people use their definitively-classified-as-PCs PCs for?

The iPad—and all other tablets—are PCs. Now, can we get on to something more useful, like arguing about how well Madonna did last night?

However, the numbers indicate that SGK’s funding of PP’s clinical breast exams might be resulting in more cancer deaths than if SGK were funding mammograms directly.

Assume that PP used all of SGK’s money for breast cancer screenings and mammograms over the past five years. Also assume that PP got an average of $650,000 per year for those five years. (I cannot find actual figures.)

Now let’s do the math.

• $650,000*5 = $3,250,000.

• Mammograms funded by SGK through PP in those five years: 6,400.¹

• Total SGK funding used for mammograms (via pass-through grants to PP) at a high-end cost of $125 per mammogram²: 6,400*$125 = $800,000

• Remaining funds used for clinical breast exams (CBEs) at PP: $3,250,000-$800,000 = $2,450,000

• Breast cancer screenings performed by PP in the past five years: 170,000¹

• Cost per CBE performed by PP: $2,450,000/170,000 = about $15.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) can’t find evidence that the CBE is effective. Only mammograms have been proven to be effective.³ About CBE’s, PP says this:

Dr. Vanessa Cullins, a vice president with Planned Parenthood Federation of America, defended its use of clinical breast exams. The exam, in which a doctor feels the breast for lumps, is “a good tool” when followed with mammograms and other tests as needed, she said.¹ (emphasis added)

Clearly, funding of CBEs is diverting resources from more effective exams, but how many?

More math:

• Amount of money spent on CBEs performed by PP: $2,450,000.

• Number of mammograms which could have been performed with that money (at a higher-than-average cost of $125 per mammogram): $2,450,000/$125 = 19,600.

If the SGK money had been used for mammograms in the last five years:

• Number of women per year, ages 39-49, whose lives might have been saved: 19,600/1,904/5 = 2.⁴

• Number of women per year, ages 50-59, whose lives might have been saved: 19,600/1,339/5 = 3.

• Number of women per year, ages 60-69, whose lives might have been saved: 19,600/377/5 = 10.

So if you were in the driver’s seat at SGK, which would you choose, an unproven use of your money, or an effective use which is proven to save lives? Would you choose to defund PP, too?

The Interwebs disagree with you.

One final note: Outside of these numbers, it’s entirely possible that the backlash against SGK could have cost SGK more funding than the funding lost (and subsequently made up) by PP. The effect of SGK’s loss is also calculable in human terms. But until SGK pulls funding from PP and we can see the cost to SGK’s fundraising, we won’t know that effect.

¹ Surprises in Komen-Planned Parenthood dustup: How cancer screening is done and who pays for it, ChicagoTribune.com

² How Much Does a Mammogram Cost?, CostHelper.com

³ Screening for Breast Cancer, U.S. Preventive Services Task Force

⁴ Screening for Breast Cancer An Update for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, Table 1, U.S. Preventive Services Task Force