That is a really good question, best posed to your local metaphysician or sophist, but I'll do my best to answer it for you. Cogito Eggo Sum! I think, therefore I am a waffle! Sorry. Onward. The navigation bar at the top of the page will take you around this site. You can always link back to this page by clicking on "Mount Pocatello Home". The origins of the Foundation are described below. "Isostasy Experiment" will take you to the pages dedicated to the experiment to directly study the theory of isostasy by burying the city of Pocatello, Idaho under a huge mountain of rocks. In addition to the text of the experiment, there are numerous pictures, comments from crazy readers, and a few other things, too. I have also started presenting videos I find funny, and include one I put together. The videos range from the Muppets Manamana skit, to funny commercials (real and fake), to oddball but funny home-video clips I had the pleasure of blundering across. You can link to the page of videos by clicking on "Funny Videos" in the navigation bar.

I have a number of ideas for additional pages, most of which indicate that I should be under the constant care of a well trained psychiatrist. We'll see where the ideas go.

That is another really good question, and one I am far more qualified to answer. Let's start at the beginning. The Mount Pocatello Foundation came into being around 5096 years after the creation of the universe, going by the Ussherian calendar of events. Using Julian calculus, the Foundation was created on approximately day 2,451,836. Or using the more common Gregorian calendar, the day was October 18, 2000 CE.

My housemate at the time brought me a couple of rocks from New York, her home state. She and I both have rather cracked senses of humor, and we began to imagine what would happen if people brought rocks from all across the country to Pocatello, Idaho, where we were living. This progressed very quickly into a thought experiment in which the top several feet of material (earth and rock; no trees or used cat litter) from everywhere in the country not inside the city limits of Pocatello gets shipped to Pocatello. What would happen? It was at that point that the Mount Pocatello Foundation was officially born. A web site was created, appealing to the citizens of the United States of America, and the world, to send rocks! We received a surprising number of e-mail responses, and so started posting them to the web site. A small number of rocks arrived while I lived in Pocatello, and in fact recently a rather large shipment was received from Arizona, though after I had moved on. In response to the resurgence of interest, I have updated and expanded the web site, and continue to encourage people to send rocks. The experimental methodology is sound, though some of the calculations neglect certain aspects of the probable footprint of the mountain. In English, that means that the mountain is unlikely to take the form of a cylinder that does not extend beyond the city limits of Pocatello. I plan to recalculate using what most would consider to be more realistic physics.

I have since moved from Pocatello to Richland, Washington. People who still wish to send rocks should rest assured that though the rocks will temporarily reside in Richland, they will be transported back to Pocatello when they become collectively too cumbersome to move around, or be supported by my floor. At that time, I will make a trip back to Pocatello to find a safe and secure place to begin the actual mountain building. Ideally, this would be the geographical center of the city, but I'm not sure who owns the geographical center of the city, or whether they would be sympathetic to this experiment--especially if the actual center is in their flower garden. To date (see bottom of page for "current" date), I have received about 30 rocks from people who read about the experiment and wanted to contribute. More and more people are viewing this web site each day, and I am sure that eventually one of them (maybe you!) will send in a new contribution. The current (and in fact, largely original) version of the experiment can be found here, or by clicking on "Isostasy Experiment" in the navigation bar at the top of the screen.

On April 11, 2001 (Gregorian), Alan Pereira published an article for the ISU Bengal (the local University rag) about the Mount Pocatello Foundation. If that link doesn't yield up the article (it might want you to sign up for free to see the archives), you can click here for a transcript of the article, once I get permission to present a transcript. The author did a pretty good job, I thought. It came across as ridiculous, but plausible, which is exactly what it is. He forgot to include the URL in the article, of course, but hey! No one's perfect. I appreciated the interest and amusement just the same.