I have no idea what this is about.

Please excuse my dereliction for the past few days. Earlier in the week I got a flu shot and I have been a little under the weather ever since. And I haven't gotten the swineflu shot yet. Somehow it sapped my strength, what little I have. The vapors kept me from my walk on Wednesday and yesterday it rained. I've always been concerned that I am so sweet I might melt in the rain.
Gold is $1060 per ounce, which says more about the value of the dollar than it does about the value of gold.
One of my new books is "The Cosmic Landscape" by Leonard Susskind. It turns out that he was brought up in the Bronx, for the New York connection and worked at SLAC during the 60's, for the Palo Alto connection. But I tell you that to tell you about the Cosmological Constant.
When Einstein did the math for the Special Theory of Relativity, because something was askew he inserted a constant, the Cosmological Constant, to make things work out properly. And the General Theory of Relativity didn't change it. He later called this his greatest mistake. The Cosmological Constant has the following effect on how everything turns out. If it is zero the universe is static, neither growing nor shrinking. If it is positive it as the effect of causing the universe to grow and if it is negative, the universe will shrink. Much like the analogy of spots on a balloon As the balloon is inflated the dots grow apart. If the balloon shrinks the dots grow together. In a sense, the Cosmological Constant measures the rate and direction of the balloon's size (or our universe). Thence the great concern for the exact value of the Cosmological Constant. It might also be a measure of what we call dark energy since it determines the status of our universe. This is because Einsteins equation E=MC^2 tells us that energy and matter are equivalent and therefore energy should influence us in the same manner as mass which dark energy has been shown to do.
Things that confuse me are proof that we're all on this flight together.

Dick