Undiscovered Land

When you were a little kid, did you ever wonder if there was any undiscovered land left in the world? Perhaps if there was a small island that all the explorers had missed, you could lay claim to it, and be the king of your own little country. You could live by your own laws, and you would never have to pay taxes ever again!

I believe that this is an almost universal childhood fantasy. It was roughly the premise of one of my favorite episodes of Family Guy, where Peter creates his own microstate called Petoria and declares independence from the United States.

But as we slowly grow older and wiser, it dawns on us that there is no undiscovered land left at all. If the police can find a few marijuana plants growing in a cornfield using satellites, then surely no one could have missed a decent-sized island for this long. For most of us, this realization is enough to shut down our Regal ambitions for good. But not for Mr. Oliver. Mr. Oliver had a plan, you see.

According to Wikipedia, Michael Oliver is a Lithuanian immigrant to the United States of Jewish descent. He is also a self-made Las Vegas real-estate millionaire and political activist. Mr. Oliver is a staunch Libertarian, and as such believes in totally unregulated open-market economies, free from the scourge of government intervention. Like Peter Griffin, he was sick and tired of paying taxes, and having the goverment telling him how to run his life. One day in 1971, Michael Oliver decided that he had had enough. He was going to start his own country.

The greatest problem was that there was no undiscovered land left upon which to forge his young nation. However, this did not discourage the resourceful Mr. Oliver. Like I said before, Mr. Oliver had a plan. As our story goes, our boy Michael travelled to Australia with a few million dollars' worth of venture capital. He then rented a large barge. Yes, a large barge. He also bought a metric shitload of sand (roughly 2.54 imperial shitloads). Yes, sand. Mr. Oliver then set sail toward a remote area of the South Pacific Ocean known as the Minerva Reef.

The Minerva Reef is peculiar because it is a very shallow reef. It can be seen from the surface, yet it is not close to any other islands. Michael Oliver's plan was this: if thre was no undiscovered land left, he was going to MAKE some undiscovered land. He would then promptly discover it, and then claim it. And that's exactly what Michael Oliver did. He sailed his large barge out to the Minerva reef, and dumped a metric shitload of sand onto the reef. After a lot of shovelling, Michael Oliver succeeded in dumping enough sand onto the reef that a small island emerged from the sea.

Once he had built an island of a few square meters, Mr. Oliver erected a flagpole and a small tower. This new island he christened the Republic of Minerva. He applied to the United Nations for recognition and a vote in the General Assembly. His calls were never returned. It was when he tried to initiate bilateral relations with the surrounding nations that he finally got a response.

About a month after Michael Oliver mailed his declaration of independence to the surrounding states, Australia, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, Nauru, Western Samoa, and the Cook Islands sent low-level diplomatic representatives to a small meeting to decide what to do about it. President Oliver was not invited. Eventually, it was decided that Tonga would try to invade the island and take it by force. This actually happened. You can't make stuff like this up.

On June 21, 1972, the entire armed forces of Tonga arrived at the newly created island, accompanied by King Tupou and a brass band playing the Tongan national anthem. They took down the Minervan flag and replaced it with the Tongan flag, and pushed over the small tower. Michael Oliver was not present at the time.

So ended any hope for the most successful microstate in the history of the world.

There is an interesting urban legend that the soldiers that took part in the Minerva War were actually a few dozen unarmed convicts from Tonga. During the brief occupation of Minerva, two of these men apparently got into a serious fistfight, resulting in the death of one of the inmates. This would make the Republic of Minerva the only country in the world to have a murder rate higher than its population. However, it is unlikely that this legend is true since Tonga did have a professional armed forces at the time.

Photo Op

Say what you want about the success or failure of the 1993 Oslo accords. Whether you're critical or supportive, one thing is for sure: they did generate a few very inspiring and beautiful photo ops. For example, check out the following photo, taken after the signing ceremony in Washington D.C.,

For the first time in history, here is the Prime Minister of Israel (Yitzhak Rabin) shaking hands with the Chairman of the PLO (Yasser Arafat). What an inspiring image!

Fourteen years later, George W. Bush has come out strongly in support of a renewed push towards peace in Palestine, and has claimed to support the creation of an independent Palestinian state. This is a refreshing change from his usual unconditional support of Israel's policies, good and bad. We will see over the next year whether Bush's words turn into real material and diplomatic support for political moderates within Palestine.

Bush has also made a shameless attempt to reproduce the beautiful photo ops of the Oslo accords. Check out this photo, taken within the last week,

I'm not saying its a bad thing that Bush tried to reproduce the above photo, substituting himself for Clinton. It's just not as inspiring as it was the first time around.

By the way, the man on the right in the second photo, Mahmoud Abbas, is the same man who signed the first Oslo Accords back in 1993 on behalf of Palestine. This is interesting, since most people believe that Arafat signed the accords in 1993. Although I don't defend every one of his policies and decisions, I think that Abbas deserves all the support that we can give him. Since at least the the 1970's, he has worked behind the scenes for peace and moderation. Unfortunately, he is still way ahead of his time.

Interstellar Probes

Today I was thinking about the possibility of an interstellar probe. Is it possible for us to launch a probe that will reach another star within my lifetime, using today's rocket technology?

In order to answer this question, I read a bit about the nearest thing that we have to interstellar probes. So far, we have managed to launch five objects fast enough to escape the Sun's gravity: Pioneer 10 (1972), Pioneer 11 (1973), Voyager 1 (1977), Voyager 2 (1977), and New Horizons (2006). These probes are all moving so fast that once they leave the Solar System, they're never coming back.

New Horizons is currently travelling away from the Sun at just under 20 kilometers per second. Suppose that New Horizons was travelling toward the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, and that it could keep up its current speed the whole way there. The nearest star is 4.37 light-years away. That's roughly 41.3 trillion kilometers away. Under these very ideal circumstances, it would take over 65,000 years for New Horizons to get to Alpha Centauri. Apparently, sending a probe to another star within my lifetime is not as easy as I thought it was going to be.

It turns out that if we want to send a probe to a nearby star anytime soon, a dinky little chemical rocket just isn't going to do it. We need to bring out the big guns. A few groups, including NASA, have created designs for vehicles capable of reaching nearby stars in a reasonable amount of time. The most notable are Project Daedalus and Project Longshot. Both of these designs make use of controlled nuclear explosions to propel the vehicle forward, and would be able to reach a neighboring star within 50 to 100 years.

The neatest thing about the nuclear rocket designs is that they are entirely serious. As far as I can tell, these things would actually work. Some of the relevant concepts have even been tested, with hilarious results. For example, in 1957 some American scientists accidentally launched a huge steel plate straight up into the air at six times escape velocity during a nuclear weapons test. The plate was never found.

I hope against all hope that we will send a probe to another star within my lifetime. More than anything, I would look forward to seeing the pictures that such a probe would take of another star system. Perhaps it would discover some new planets, and then send high-resolution photographs home. To me, that would be a dream come true.

First Post

This is my first post. I have been thinking about starting a blog for a while, so here I am! Whenever I'm thinking about something that I find interesting, I will share it here.

Right now I'm very busy crafting a draft website for my new business, K5 Capital. Check it out here. There is almost no content there at this time. However, if you have any comments about the format, feel free to comment on this post.

As a test, I intend to put up the Dogs of the Dow strategy pretty soon. I have used the Dogs of the Dow strategy before, and it involves a lot of calculations done by hand. Instead of doing all these calculations, you'll be able to look up the strategy on my site. You'll be able to check out the portfolio of the strategy, as well as its past performance. And the best part is that you won't have to do any calculations by hand!