Have you ever had one of those moments where an idea hits you at the strangest of moments?  This hap­pened to me recently when my fam­ily and I were enjoy­ing break­fast at one of our favorite break­fast eater­ies.  When our food arrived at the table I asked the wait­ress for extra nap­kins, and it hit me.

Does ask­ing the server for more nap­kins increase the chance that you will need them?  Or is it sim­ply being pre­pared in the event that they are needed?  At what point does pre­cau­tion become self-fulfilling prophecy?

At first, I dis­missed the idea as the silly ram­blings of a man who hasn’t had his cof­fee yet, but it stuck with me.  I began to won­der if hav­ing a safety net would increase the like­li­hood of risky behav­ior or care­less­ness rather than sim­ply pro­vide a level of pro­tec­tion.  Does the safety net make the trapeze artist more bold, more care­less?  Does the seat-belt or airbag act as enablers to the lead foot?  What about gov­ern­ment spend­ing and the lack of account­abil­ity? (more…)

Have you ever heard of the Fair Tax Act?  It is a pro­posed bill which would (with par­al­lel leg­is­la­tion) repeal the 16th Amend­ment to the Con­sti­tu­tion of the United States of Amer­ica, abol­ish­ing the IRS and fed­eral income tax, replac­ing the sys­tem with a national sales tax.  I am still read­ing up on the Fair Tax Act and the orga­ni­za­tion behind the move­ment, so it would be irre­spon­si­ble for me to offer an opin­ion about either at this time.  At first glance, how­ever, it seems like an inter­est­ing idea that deserves some atten­tion. (more…)

Michelle Obama recently launched a new cam­paign to fight child­hood obe­sity and I can’t help but feel frus­trated, angry, and a lit­tle disgusted.

Yes, I know that child­hood obe­sity is a seri­ous issue which faces the youth of Amer­ica, but there is a far more seri­ous issue which needs to be addressed NOW.  There are mil­lions of peo­ple in the United States who do not have enough food.  In 2008 the USDA reported that 17 mil­lion chil­dren lived in house­holds where food was scarce, 1.1 mil­lion of them starv­ing.  Add the adults into the mix, and we’re talk­ing 49 mil­lion peo­ple strug­gling for food.  If you con­sider that the pop­u­la­tion of the United States in 2008 was just over 300 mil­lion peo­ple, that means approx­i­mately 16.3% of all Amer­i­cans strug­gled for food in 2008.

Dur­ing Bar­rack Obama’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, he pledged to elim­i­nate hunger among chil­dren by 2015.  What is being done to bring about the end to child­hood hunger in Amer­ica?  So far, the answer has been to throw more money at exist­ing pro­grams (which are not work­ing) and wait for the econ­omy to recover. (more…)

I recently expe­ri­enced a rather painful injury to my left eye.  My 7 month old man­aged to poke me in the eye while we were play­ing, and I ended up with a 5mm corneal abra­sion.  While not an incred­i­bly seri­ous injury, a 5mm corneal abra­sion (dead cen­ter on the eye, mind you) is very painful and it dras­ti­cally reduces your abil­ity to see.  It hurts to blink, it hurts not to blink.  You end up in a con­stant state of try­ing to find the least painful direc­tion to look, and the dark­est cor­ner of the room in which to do it.  Due to the late­ness of the hour, I had to wait until morn­ing to see an eye doc­tor and by the time morn­ing finally came, I was in agony.  To put it bluntly, the expe­ri­ence totally sucked.

I must admit that I did find some value in the expe­ri­ence, how­ever.  When nearly every aspect of your daily life relies on your abil­ity to see rel­a­tively clearly, los­ing that abil­ity stops you in your tracks.  This might sound a bit obvi­ous, but it is dif­fi­cult to truly under­stand it with­out expe­ri­enc­ing it first hand.  You find your­self rely­ing on your other senses to help you get through the day.  Feel­ing your way around, lis­ten­ing for the dog so you don’t step on the poor thing, hop­ing you remem­ber where the cof­fee table is.  You end up rely­ing more and more on your other senses to get you through the day, espe­cially the sense of touch.

It was the act of feel­ing my way down the hall to find the bath­room that gave me the idea behind this arti­cle.  Dur­ing our nor­mal day to day lives, many of us sim­ply go about our rou­tines.  We have goals that we seek to achieve, and most of us approach our goals with famil­iar and obvi­ous method­ol­ogy.  This may get the job done, but could we be miss­ing some­thing?  I def­i­nitely think so. (more…)

I’ve decided it is time to change the look of “The Burn­man Expe­ri­ence” yet again.  I wasn’t entirely happy with the old design and since I’ve decided to start blog­ging much more reg­u­larly, I fig­ured it was about time to make the switch.  So far, I am pleased with the new theme and will be cus­tomiz­ing it over the next few days.

What do you think of the new theme?

This morn­ing, CNN reported via Twit­ter that a sus­pi­cious boat was in a river near Pres­i­dent Obama with shots fired:

Min­utes later, CNN reported that a the United States Coast Guard attempted to pre­vent a boat from enter­ing a secu­rity zone on the Potomac River near the Pen­ta­gon, where Pres­i­dent Obama was at an event com­mem­o­rat­ing the 9/11 attacks, and again men­tions the police scan­ner reports of shots fired: (more…)