Let's take a page from the sports industry, particularly auto racing. The race car drivers, their cars, and their pit crews all display logo patches that advertise their sponsors. It's worth a lot of money to have your company logo on the winner's jacket when the TV cameras roll.

The obvious application to politics: let's require that every elected office holder, at every level - even up to presidents and prime ministers - wear a logo jacket while on duty, with patches denoting the corporations and special interest groups that have put them into office. The bigger the contribution, the bigger the patch.

While we're at it, let's include lobbyists as well. Anyone entering or leaving the office of a member of Congress or Parliament - and let's not forget the Defense Department - would have to wear the patches of the special interests they're lobbying for.

But let's not stop there. Each contributor would have to pay for the advertising space on the jackets. In addition to the campaign contributions, they would pay advertising fees, which would go into the public treasury. The money could be used to pay lobbyists to push the interests of all those people and groups who can't afford to hire them.

Would this work?

PBI #2. More government, less government, better government?

Maybe Will Rogers had it right: "You should be glad you're not getting all the government you're paying for."

Or, maybe we are?

I'm often thankful that government organizations are so ineffective. It's terrifying to think of what they could do if they were really good at it.

PBI #3. Honk if you have something to say

The electronic age has promoted the personalization of almost everything. Each of us has his or her individual signature, screen name, email handle, avatar, or web page. We've become a nation of cyber-narcissists.

We even have to have distinctive ringing sounds in our cell phones.

But there's one electronic aspect of our lives that's been holding out - one important part of our identities that hasn't been personalized yet. It's the automobile horn.

Most car horns only make one sound. It's hard to communicate much meaning when you can only control the number of beeps and the duration of each beep.

We seem to use our horns mostly for one of two purposes: to warn and to punish. A horn greeting could easily be misunderstood: if you honk at your friend who's crossing the street at the corner, the driver ahead of you might very well assume that you're nagging him or her to get moving. If someone cuts you off in traffic, that one long blast is the only way you have of punishing them for their misdeed.

It seems to me we're long overdue for personalized, customized, individualized car horn sounds. Technologically it would be a snap. And consider the possibilities: sound effects (applause, barking dogs, screeching brakes, police sirens), musical tones, your voice, celebrity voices - pick what you like.

If you see your friend on the street, you can offer him or her a ride. You can politely remind the driver ahead of you that the light has changed. You can flirt with that attractive person who catches your fancy.

Now, I realize the pessimists who read this will immediately think of uses that might cause problems. The sound of gunfire, for example, might not be a wise signal in many situations. Offers to street-race might become a problem. Verbal insults could become contagious. Commercial advertising could add to noise pollution. Flirtation could progress to sexual harassment. Then we might have to have car horn obscenity laws...

Oh, well - as they say, every technological advance has its dark side.

PBI #4. Maybe molecules have minds?

Do molecules have minds? How far "down" does intelligence go? Organisms? Organs? Cells? Molecules?

Scientists have shown that stem cells can be "pluripotent," meaning that they can become virtually any kind of cells in the body.

What they haven't figured out so far is: what tells a new cell what kind of cell it's supposed to be? All cells contain exactly the same DNA, and nothing in the DNA codes for any particular kind of cell.

When a new cell develops in the liver, how does it "know" that it's supposed to become a liver cell and not, say, a skin cell? So far, no blueprint mechanism for cell identify has been found.

Some researches posit the existence of a "morphogenic field," which is a hypothetical field of information that permeates all living structures. Supposedly this information field provides the formative data for the development of all new cells and organs. That might explain how a salamander can grow a brand new tail, identical to the original one that was chopped off.

So, where does the cell's knowledge reside?

PBI #5. Do we really want free will?

Maybe we're allowed to think that we have free will, even though we don't?

PBI #6. Is your grandma wearing a bomb?

Airport security screening procedures are as illogical and ineffective as they are inconvenient. Why scan and search hundreds of thousands of innocent people every day, just to identify a very small handful of potential bombers?

There's a simpler way. Turn each security gate into a bomb detection chamber. After being properly warned, each person would step into the chamber and push a button. If he or she were wearing or carrying explosives, or had ingested them, pushing the button would detonate them. No explosives, no explosion - please proceed to the boarding gate.

There would be the obvious issues of disposal, recycling the chamber and getting it ready for the next test, and all that, but nothing technologically difficult. It could even be linked into the airline's seat assignment system. Standby passengers would automatically move up one notch on the waiting list.

Ideologically, it might be less than satisfying for the bomber, but that's not a legitimate security concern. It might even have a deterrent effect: does the bomber still get the 72 virgins when he gets to heaven, even if he hasn't killed anybody else? Or maybe he just gets a dozen. If he's been paid, does his family have to give the money back? Who gets the refund on his ticket?

All solutions have their little details to be worked out, of course.

PBI #7. Smarter kids, or dumber ones?

We're being sold the idea, these days, that our kids are smarter than we are.

The evidence offered for this is that they "multi-task." When your teen-ager has the TV on while listening to her MP3 player, talking with her friend on the cell phone, updating her social-network Web page, surfing the Internet on her laptop, and spilling cookie crumbs on her algebra book, she's said to be multi-tasking. And that's taken as a sign of some kind of high competence. "Tech-savvy," she is.

Bad news: the human brain is incapable of multi-tasking. She's not multi-tasking - she's "time-slicing," which means that her attention hops around from one task to another, but she can only attend to one thing at a time. Each of the "n" tasks gets only one-nth of the attention - minus a deduction for the time spent switching and re-orienting.

Here's a simple test to prove that you and your kids can only do one thing at a time with your conscious minds. Lift your right foot from the floor and begin moving it clockwise, in a circling motion. After about five seconds, continue moving it like that, and at the same time start moving your right hand in a counter-clockwise circling movement. Can't do it, can you? Whichever action you concentrate on forces the brain to run all other actions on "autopilot."