Mystery Dietzgen

Yesterday I received a package with two slide rules in it. They were from an auction I’d won on eBay. One of the slide rules was a Keuffel & Esser model that I wanted to add to my collection; the other was one that the seller could not identify (not even the maker), and from the lousy photo in the listing didn’t look very interesting.

So I was very surprised when I opened the package to find that the unidentified rule was actually the more interesting of the pair. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the Keuffel & Esser, mind you — it’s just that the other one was a real prize. It was extremely grubby, and I wish now that I had taken a “before” picture so I could show you what a good cleaning can do. But even when it was dirty I could see that it was something special: a very old Dietzgen, almost certainly from the first decade of the 20th century.

The first thing I did was to search through all my reference books, and on the web, to try to positively identify the model. I failed; the closest thing was a Dietzgen slide rule scan I found at Mike Konshak’s wonderful online slide rule museum. Mike has this identified through the “3746A” that is stamped into the bottom of the rule. If that identification is correct, then the rule I have is most likely a “259A", as my rule has that number stamped in the same place as the rule Mike shows with the “3746A”. However, I’m suspicious that those stamps are actually serial numbers, and not model numbers — as I could find no references anywhere to a model 259A (or 3746A, for that matter).

So, I’m left wondering just what I’ve got. And I’d appreciate any help, or even wild speculations, that anyone might have (please use the comments here). At right are thumbnails of 300 dpi scans of the slide rule (after cleaning!); click on any of them to view them (warning: they’re big!). Worth noting is that the wood this Dietzgen is made from isn’t the usual mahogany; it is distinctly lighter in color, a sort of honey colored wood. I have a couple of other slide rules made from pearwood, and this looks exactly like them. The scan on Mike’s site looks like mahogany — but looking at my scans, the color didn’t come across very well, and perhaps it didn’t on Mike’s scan, either.

Boring notes on cleaning:

Most of the cleaning I did in a very low-tech fashion — I used very a dilute dishsoap solution, lint-free Kimwipes, and lots of elbow grease. A century’s worth of crud (whose components I really don’t want to know) had accumulated in every nook and cranny on the rule, even in the engravings. The slide’s motion was very difficult before cleaning, and I was worried it was in need of sanding; afterwards it was smooth as silk. Crud, and lots of it, was the only culprit.

I used a soft-bristled toothbrush to clean the engravings — tedious, but the result was crisp, black markings instead of the slightly vaguely defined, grayish markings it started out with. The biggest crud-removal challenge turned out to be the cursor — the inside of the slides had a millimeter or so built up. I soaked it for an hour in the soap solution, and then the toothbrush did the trick.

I always worry that the water in the soap solution will soak into these old wooden rules. My standard procedure with them is to use a very sparing amount of the soap solution, and to wipe it off immediately. This time, however, the crud was so thick — and the wood was clearly not being affected — that I felt safe using much more soapy solution (though still drying if off very quickly). There were no ill effects at all.

After this cleaning, there were still some yellow spots on the face of the rule. Rubbing my finger over them very lightly, I felt (or imagined that I felt) a slight bump, as though there were some substance on the surface. These spots were quite unsightly, and detracted a lot from the appearance of this otherwise very fine old slide rule. I decided to try abrasion, and I chose the finest grit abrasive I have: some 12,000 grit Micro-Mesh. I used some of the soap solution for lubricant, and my finger instead of the foam pad they give you (as I wanted to be able to apply more pressure). In about 10 seconds, those yellow spots were history — and better yet, there was no telltale texture difference on the spots I cleaned. Hooray for Micro-Mesh!

Quote of the Day

Justice Scalia (one of our Supreme Court Justices, for all you public school graduates) gave a very interesting talk yesterday. He commented extensively on the historically very recent intervention by federal judiciary in social questions, via the “discovery” of new, heretofore unsuspected, Constitutional rights — and trampling on democracy in the process. Abortion and suicide rights featured in his talk as social issues that the Supreme Court really didn’t have much business deciding (in other words, he believes these social issues are properly matters for the states to decide).

Near the end of his talk, Justice Scalia let fly with this sweet and succinct verbal dart:

It so happens that everything that is stupid is not unconstitutional.

That one-liner quite beautifully sums up what’s wrong with judicial activism. The courts have become too powerful compared with the other branches of the federal government. Justice Scalia knows it, and knows the only way to stop it is to appoint more strict constructionist judges.

We need more justices like Mr. Scalia, at every level of the federal judiciary.

Faster, please.

Bumper Sticker

On a car absolutely plastered with “Kerry/Edwards” stickers:

If you want to see hate, disagree with a liberal.

What is this? Did some conservative spot the car, and think it needed a new sticker? Or is this liberal so blinded by his ideology that he actually thought that was a positive statement about liberals?

I don’t know the answer to that.

But I want one of those bumper stickers!

Quote of the Day

From Omar Fadil of the IraqTheModel blog:

"All they want is to prove that our struggle for freedom was the wrong thing to do. This fake research is an insult to every man, woman and child who lost their lives."

Said in response to the recent propaganda in the guise of a “scientific” study published in the Lancet — and promptly debunked by a host of real scientists. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a piece ($) that excoriates the Lancet, saying in part:

So read a story in last week’s Washington Post on the new John Hopkins-led study — published in the British medical journal Lancet — purporting to document “excess deaths” in Iraq. “We have no reason to question the findings,” the Post quoted a Human Rights Watch official as saying. The article was fairly typical of reporting on the Lancet study, which has also been all over television and radio, as well as Internet sites such as Google and Yahoo! news.

All of which leaves us wondering if reporters and editors have enough sense anymore to ask basic questions about such enormous numbers, or whether they are simply too biased against the Bush Administration and its Iraq policy to do so. The 655,000 figure is more than 10 times higher than previous estimates of violent deaths in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, and it is larger than the number of Germans killed by allied bombing during all of World War II and larger than the number of Americans who died during our own Civil War.

Others have noted elsewhere that the Lancet’s estimate would require that over 1,000 Iraqis were killed every single day in 2006 — that nobody bothered to report to any police, hospitals, or other authorities. This seems unlikely in the extreme, as many Iraqis on the ground have observed.

Omar has it right: the Lancet has a political agenda in opposition to the war in Iraq. And it seems clear that their report was timed to influence the upcoming American elections. Shame on this “science” journal, both for publishing such a piece of rubbish, and for sullying the once-good reputation of a once-fine scientific journal…

Lovely Morning

Yesterday, as a measure of atonement for our absolutely decadent meal on Saturday (lobster l’americaine, garlic/cheese French bread, Caesar salad, and chocolate Grand Marnier cheesecake, all homemade and washed down with generous quantities of good wine), Debbie made a lovely Mexican chicken soup (tlapeno). Slightly more down-to-earth than Saturday’s meal, but awfully good. Anyone who knows Debbie is aware of her inability to make less than enormous quantities of soup — so now we have (yum!) gallons of leftover tlapeno. You all should envy me!

Now, making tlapeno involves large quantities of chicken processing — you have to roast the chicken, then strip the meat, and boil things down to get the broth. For our three field spaniels, life doesn’t get much better than a kitchen with unwanted chicken parts flying around. We had the full and undivided attention of all three dogs while we were processing the chicken — and we didn’t have to dispose of anything other than the totally stripped skeletons. Happy, happy dogs, they were.

Until 1:30 this morning, that is. Because at that moment, Lea decided (rather abruptly) that vomiting was the appropriate thing to do. On the bed. On Debbie. In large quantities. Full of delightfully greasy, fragrant chicken parts. Lovely.

Not.

So… Up we got. First, Debbie (in her vomit-dripping pajamas) took Lea outside, hoping that any further spewing would occur in the great outdoors. But Lea was terrified by the howling of bazillions of coyotes, some pretty close, so Debbie brought her back in — and got my sorry butt up, so I could take the poor girl out for a walk (on a leash), hoping to encourage whatever foul humors remained to disgorge. But nothing more was forthcoming. Debbie, meanwhile, took a shower and did something to her pajamas. We gave up on sleep; stripped the bed, applied various chemicals, and parked Lea in the office (which has an easily cleaned linoleum floor) in her favorite doggie bed. We had coffee. Then, a couple of hours later, Lea casually stands up in her doggie bed and vomits again, in the same style as previously. Right into her doggie bed, not the easily cleaned floor, naturally. The disaster response team swung into action again, with practiced moves. Large quantities of paper towels were consumed. The doggie bed, washable, fortunately, went into the washer with appropriate chemicals. Now Lea is lying beside me in the office, on naught but an old towel — which is also easily cleaned.

So far she has vomited approximately 30 gallons of partially digested chicken. We’re pretty sure that’s more than went into her. We’re hoping there’s nothing more to come out.

Pray for us.

Update: It gets better. We have one of those Tempurpedic foam matresses, and after stripping all the bedding earlier, it is exposed to the air (awaiting appropriate chemical treatment, once we find out what that is). I just went into the bedroom a moment ago, and discovered a trio of our cats all looking at one part of the mattress (not where the dog vomited, but rather down by where our feet would be). I looked to see what they were all interested in — and discovered that they had eaten a few cubic inches of the foam!

Oh, my. One wonders what memory foam will do to a cat’s innards…

Rain!

Last night, just before we went to bed, we had a light shower. I woke up several times during the night to the delightful sound of raindrops hitting all the dry leaves and grasses — a bit like rain on a distant, muted tin roof. And this morning, I ran in to look at the weather system first thing — and miracle of miracles, we got over a half inch!

You non-desert folks might scoff at this. I can just hear some of my friends now, mocking our half inch as “just barely damp”. But for us, this is an extremely welcome wetting of the tinder we’re surrounded with; it means a significant reduction in the fire danger.

And we like that!

Update:

I took a run into town to do some errands, and once again had the experience of seeing the sudden greening that comes to the desert very quickly after a rain. As always, the most dramatic greening is with our mosses — they’ve been black all summer, tricking our expectations into thinking that flat black is their normal state. But within minutes after a rain, they start turning green — and by this morning they are all bright emerald green, very different than yesterday. Slightly subtler is the greening of the other plants — a combination of happy chlorophyll and the dust getting washed off. I’m not sure which effect is predominant. Another change, not so subtle, is that everything got darker when it got wet — rocks, tree trunks and branches, even the pavement — so the greens are more dramatically contrasted…

Quote of the Day

This is a long quote, I know — the conclusion to her very fine column yesterday:

What is most missing from the left in America is an element of grace — of civic grace, democratic grace, the kind that assumes disagreements are part of the fabric, but we can make the fabric hold together. The Democratic Party hasn’t had enough of this kind of thing since Bobby Kennedy died. What also seems missing is the courage to ask a question. Conservatives these days are asking themselves very many questions, but I wonder if the left could tolerate asking itself even a few. Such as: Why are we producing so many adherents who defy the old liberal virtues of free and open inquiry, free and open speech? Why are we producing so many bullies? And dim dullard ones, at that.

Go read the whole thing. Now.

Dang, she’s good! What a talent she has for distilling the essence of things…

Title

Neo-neocon is one of my favorite bloggers, always interesting. Today she starts with this:

North Korea is a country formed by a war that never ended.

Pacifists are fond of saying that war never solves anything. I beg to differ — war, for example, solved the problem of Adolf Hitler and German expansionist aggressiveness, although at great cost.

But that war was fought to the bitter end, unlike many subsequent ones. Revulsion at war — which I share, by the way, although my critics won’t credit that — has led to a series of unfinished, prematurely truncated wars. And like most unfinished business, there’s a tendency for these conflicts to come back to bite us.

Read the whole thing.

War can be the least awful of the alternatives available. Looking at the current situation in North Korea, one can’t help but think it would have been better to have finished the job back fifty years ago…

Straw Poll

A GOP straw poll...

...with some interesting results...

Quote of the Day

From today’s Wall Street Journal comment page:

Majority Leader-in-waiting Harry Reid insisted the Administration appoint a “senior official to conduct a full review of [its] failed North Korea policy.” Mr. Reid performed the rare feat of making Nancy Pelosi sound statesmanlike. Ms. Pelosi at least acknowledged that countries such as China might have played a negative role here.

Emphasis mine.

Ha! …and “indeed”.

Washington Politicians: rope, tree, pol; some assembly required.

I’d vote for an iguana if it would keep one of these sorry excuses for an American out of office. Hear that, lizards? Lots of lizard chow down there in D.C…

Seriously

Thomas Sowell is a columnist you should always take seriously. In an excellent column at Townhall, Mr. Sowell accuses our media of the obivous — being unserious:

In these grim and foreboding times, our media have this year spent incredible amounts of time on a hunting accident involving Vice President Cheney, a bogus claim that the administration revealed Valerie Plame’s identity as a C.I.A. “agent” — actually a desk job in Virginia — and is now going ballistic over a Congressman who sent raunchy e-mails to Congressional pages.

This is the frivolous media — and the biased media. Republican Congressman Foley was wrong and is out on his ear. But Democrats in both Congress and the White House have gone far beyond words with a page and an intern. Yet the Democrats did not resign and Bill Clinton’s perjury, obstruction of justice, and suborning of perjury by others were treated as if these were irrelevant private matters.

Even when serious issues are addressed, they can be addressed either seriously or frivolously. If you are content to see life and death issues of war and peace addressed with catch phrases like “chicken hawk” or to see a coalition of nations around the world fighting terrorism referred to as “unilateral” U.S. action because France does not go along, then you are content with frivolity.

This is exactly why I don’t rely on the lamestream media, the Wall Street Journal excepted, for my news. What Mr. Sowell doesn’t mention, but what worries me deeply for its implications to the future of America, is why the lamestream media is unserious: because unserious news reporting makes money, and serious news reporting doesn’t. Yes, Virginia, it really is that simple. Most Americans will gladly spend money to read about celebrities, or sports, or left-wing rants — but they won’t spend money for serious reporting that requires one to think. There are niche exceptions, of course — the Wall Street Journal, various specialty journals, and so on — but the sum of their revenues is miniscule compared with the rest of the unserious media. Ponder the long term implications for America of this preference for the unserious. It’s not a happy thought…

Mr. Sowell concludes his piece with this observation about the war in Iraq:

Those who discuss the current war in terms of frivolous talking points make a big deal out of the fact we have been in this war longer than in World War II. But, if we are serious, we would know that it is not the duration of a war that is crucial. It is how many lives it costs. More than twice as many Marines were killed taking one island in the Pacific during World War II than all the Americans killed in the four years of the Iraq war. More Americans were killed in one day during the Civil War. If we are going to discuss war, the least we can do is be serious.

Exactly right. But most Americans don’t seem to understand this, and I’ve been surprised about why at least some of them don’t. During the runup to the Iraq war, and for the first year or two of it, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with quite a few people who were opposed to the war. A few of these people — depressingly few — had fairly well developed positions, based on reality and their own opinions. I disagreed with these folks, but was cheered by their seriousness. However, most of the people I talked with who opposed the war did so for a variety of absurd “reasons", impossible to respect. Some were of the tinfoil hat, Michael Moore school of reflexive Bush-bashing: never mind if he’s right, he said it, so I hate it. But what brought these folks to mind today was another pattern I saw, which Mr. Sowell’s conclusion reminded me of: a significant proportion — perhaps half — possessed a context so warped, so divergent from reality, that it prevented them from analyzing the war in Iraq in anything like a rational manner. One recurring example of this was exactly the point Mr. Sowell raised about relative casualties. I talked with dozens of Americans — almost all of them college graduates, and most considerably younger than I — who really believed that the casualties we experienced in the first year of the war in Iraq were numerically comparable to, or even exceeded, the casualties America suffered in Vietnam, the two world wars, or the American Civil War. In a dozen or so cases, when I shared the actual casualties of those past conflicts with the person I was conversing with, I was frankly disbelieved. In more than a few cases, we repaired to a reference work to ascertain the truth of my assertions — and in one memorable case, even then I was disbelieved!

Some of you may be surprised at this. Myself, I’ve become quite cynical about the general American understanding of history. Mind you, I’m no history expert myself; my small knowledge of history comes mostly from reading I’ve done on my own. But my default assumption about other Americans' knowledge of history — especially those much younger than myself — is now approximately zero. And I’m right far more often than I’m wrong.

What does this portend for America? I don’t pretend to know the answer to that, but it’s very hard to see how the result of such profound ignorance could be good…

Seriously Loony

Isn’t it amazing that someone as overtly insane as Kim Jong-il could be the leader of anything, much less an entire country? Now this maroon has gone and tested a nuclear weapon, or at least claimed that they did — the official North Korean press release:

The field of scientific research in the DPRK successfully conducted an underground nuclear test under secure conditions on October 9, 2006, at a stirring time when all the people of the country are making a great leap forward in the building of a great, prosperous, powerful socialist nation.

It has been confirmed that there was no such danger as radioactive emission in the course of the nuclear test as it was carried out under scientific consideration and careful calculation.

The nuclear test was conducted with indigenous wisdom and technology 100 percent. It marks a historic event as it greatly encouraged and pleased the KPA and people that have wished to have powerful self-reliant defense capability.

It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it.

This press release is so bad (as are virtually all of them from North Korea) that it’s hard to take seriously. They need a new PR agency, badly…

Initial reports said that seismic activity consistent with magnitude 3.58 earthquake on the surface was detected. The USGS has an automated earthquake reporting system that publishes to the web (see map at right); they are reporting a 4.2 earthquake, on the surface. These reports indicate that a large explosion took place — the equivalent of between 550 and 4500 tons of TNT. So North Korea either set off an amazingly small nuclear explosion (perhaps a failed weapon), or a very large conventional explosion. The lamestream media is reporting it as if it was a confirmed nuclear explosion, though no evidence other than seismic has been presented, and the seismic evidence is ambiguous. I suspect that stupidity, sensationalism, and political expediency are combining to make this happen — after all, a nutjob with a nuke is far more sensational than a pathetic loser with a fake nuke or a fizzled nuke.

But other sources are much less confident that fearless leader Kim actually pulled off a nuke. The speculation seems pretty evenly divided between a nuke that fizzled and an outright piece of fakery. Supporters of the first notion point to similar fizzles with the Kimster’s ICBM tests; supporters of the second notion point to the careful mention (in the press release) that there was no radiation leak — as atmospheric radiation is normally how nuke tests are confirmed.

Who knows what the truth is? And it may not actually matter, because the test — whether faked, fizzled, or factual — has got everybody in the neighborhood in a tizzy. Japan and China are talking about their mutual security, a circumstance not quite as likely as pigs suddenly starting to fly around. Japan and South Korea are integrating their intelligence and defense efforts — another unlikely pair. About the only unexcited neighbor is Russia, and I’m not sure why that is. Maybe they just like the idea of a destabilizing influence on their border.

As others have noted, it’s really hard to deal with a lunatic — whether you’re talking about people or countries. You can’t negotiate, you can’t make agreements. About the only choices we have are (a) ignore them, or (b) conquer them. The first choice gets less attractive every day…

Hawk Blogging

Over the past few days, we’ve seen this small hawk flitting about in and near our front yard, executing spectacular aerobatics as it darts through our shrubbery, always very near the ground. For some reason it decided to perch in a fig tree that’s just 15 feet from our windows, and I managed to grab these photos by standing in the shadows inside the house, and taking the pictures right through our (very dirty!) window panes.

I love it’s expression in the left-most picture, when it spotted my motion and was trying to figure out if I was edible! Moments after I snapped this one, it took off for parts unknown…

Hawks are notoriously hard to identify, and this one was no exception. From its size and behavior, it was easy to identify it as an accipiter — small, agile hawks that prey on other birds. But two nearly identical accipiters are common here (the Sharp-Shinned Hawk and Cooper’s Hawk), making positive identification challenging. I’m calling this one a juvenile Sharp-Shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus), based on the paintings in Sibley’s Guide to Birds (an absolutely wonderful book!).

As always, click on the small photos to get a larger version.

Quote of the Day

James Lileks:

It comes down to this: Islam is being defined in the popular mind by three forces: the radicals who kill, the PR-savvy activists who protest, and the officials who cave. The aggregate effect does not produce good will.

Yes, that’s exactly right. The barbaric and outrageous actions (whatever their motivation) of the fundamentalist Islamic radicals are seen by most Americans (and portrayed by the lamestream media) as something much more benign than they actually are. And somehow the spectacular (by any historical standard) successes of our military are almost unknown to the populace. This dangerously warped perception is, I’m afraid, on the verge of controlling how we prosecute the war on terror. Even more frightening: it seems plausible that the only thing that will change this is another successful attack by the enemy. In this age of short attention spans, a deadly enemy seems to be perceived as such only if they kill, say, a few thousand Americans each year. And in this age of shallow, sound-bite “thinking,” the analysis of a disturbingly large segment of America seems to be limited to the latest pronouncement from their favorite promise-spouting, feel-good pol.

Read the whole thing.

Masturgate

Several of my readers have (unaccountably) wondered why I haven’t blogged about Masturgate (the Foley affair), and have generally slowed way down on the political blogging.

The reaction of the politicians to Masturgate has completely disgusted me. On both sides of the aisle the worthless scum we elected have invented new ways to sink to new lows. The hypocritical, posturing Democrats (I give you Pelosi as a prime example) apparently believe that all of America has no memory at all — that we can’t remember Stubbs, Frank, Kennedy(s), Clinton and the seemingly endless demonstrations by Democrats of just how depraved and shameful humans can be. They want us to believe that the Republicans have a monopoly on perversion. And the Republican “leadership", trying so hard not to see, to be politically correct, and then running like the rats they are when they see the political winds blowing against them — they’re no better than the Democrats.

So I’ve lost my motivation. I’ll get it back, I’m sure, one of these fine days. But meanwhile, this refrain, invented by another blogger, keeps running through my head:

Washington politicians

Tree

Rope

(some assembly required)

Internet Troubles

Warning: techno-geek content follows:

Just after 2 am this morning, we lost our connection to the Internet. I know this not because I was up and watching it, but because the last email my computer picked up was at 2:08 AM, which I discovered when I logged in at my normal time (around 4:30 AM). The symptoms were familiar, and frustrating as all get out: if I connected my WildBlue satellite modem directly to my laptop, it worked fine — but just for the laptop, of course. If I connected the modem to my Cisco 806 firewall/router, it didn’t work. We’ve seen this movie before.

But hopefully, never again — as I managed to troubleshoot the issue, and (I think!) fix it, with an electronic version of a Rube Goldberg device…

I knew from troubleshooting that I had done on previous occurrences of this problem that the basic issue was that the Cisco router wasn’t getting provisioned by DHCP via the satellite modem. For some reason, DHCP was working fine with the laptop, but not with the router.

Today I discovered why the router wasn’t being provisioned, through much googling for help on the web and correllating that with what I was observing. The problem was that the DHCP server (back in WildBlue-land somewhere) was taking so long to respond (as much as two minutes) that the router just silently timed out and tried again, which restarted the timer. It did this in an endless cycle of failures. The laptop (running Windows XP, of course), on the other hand, just stupidly sent out a single DHCP request, and waited forever for a response — which eventually WildBlue coughed up. The intermittent nature of the problem turns out to be caused by the varying speed of the Wildblue DHCP server — when it’s fast (presumably because of a light load), the Cisco worked fine because it didn’t time out. But when the DHCP server was slow (most likely due to a heavy load), the Cisco would time out and never get provisioned. And we’d be sawed off from the Internet, except for one pathetic connection on the laptop.

Once I figured out the why, the next problem was how to fix it. There’s gotta be a way! is my motto. Somewhere along the line I had an idea, a grotesque and perverted idea, one that will make every elegance-loving network engineer cringe and wince: to buy a cheap, simple, stupid broadband router and put it in between the Cisco router and the satellite modem. My thinking was that an el crappo especiale would quite likely use the same brainless algorithm to get provisioned as Windows does on the laptop — and then the Cisco would in turn get provisioned from the broadband router, quickly.

So off I went down the hill, thinking I’d go to Frye’s (about an hour away). But as I was passing the shopping center closest to our house (a mere half hour away), it occurred to me to see if Target might carry such a thing. And those fine folks, it turns out, carry exactly the kind of router that before today had been banned from my home: the D-Link EBR-2310, for a mere $49. I snarfed it and headed home, figuring I had about a 20% chance of this gambit succeeding.

On arriving home, I unpacked the little-bitty router (about the size of a small paperback book), followed the very simple directions — and in about two minutes, I had it installed and running. The D-Link was able to get provisioned from WildBlue without a problem, even though the DHCP server took 78 seconds to respond. And the Cisco router very happily provisioned itself from the D-Link, and now everything is working.

But following the tortured course of a packet coming into our home from the Internet (or leaving to the Internet) will definitely make your head hurt. There are 3 NATs (one each in the satellite modem, the D-Link, and the Cisco) before you get onto my LAN’s DMZ, and yet one more NAT before you land on one of my workstations. There are two firewalls those packets must traverse, plus whatever is going on inside the D-Link. Not to mention the physical path, which resembles a magnet winding more than it does a network.

But it works. The brain-dead little D-Link router works just fine, where the vastly more sophisticated Cisco fails in an obscure and frustratingly symptomless fashion. There’s a lesson in here somewhere, if only I was clever enough to suss it out…

Quote of the Day

Josh Treviño, at the Claremont Institute:

The Cato Institute today runs a piece by Markos Moulitsas on the rise of the “libertarian Democrat.” It is a real phenomenon, which is not to say it’s an intellectually coherent one: but then, Moulitsas and intellectual coherency have never been intimate companions.

Ouch.

And well said!

Hope?

Arthur Brooks (a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Affairs) has a commentary piece in today’s Wall Street Journal ($), that discusses conservative parental fears that their children will be brainwashed into liberalism when they send them off to school. An excerpt:

The most recent evidence on this subject comes from the mid-1990s, in the University of Michigan’s National Election Studies. These survey data uncover two facts. First, people who go to college are more likely to vote Republican than those who don’t go to college. Adults 25 and under from Republican homes are, for example, 11 percentage points more likely to vote Republican if they attended college than if they didn’t. And young adults from Democratic households are 11 percentage points less likely to vote Democrat if they’ve gone to college than if not.

Second, nearly everybody grows more likely to vote Republican as they age — but especially college graduates. It is no shock that the vast majority of people of all educational backgrounds from Republican homes vote Republican by age 40. It may come as more of a surprise that 40-year-olds with Democrat parents are far less likely to vote Democrat if they’ve gone to college than if they haven’t. In fact, while three-quarters of the uneducated group still vote Democrat, the odds are only about 50-50 that the college graduates vote this way. And they’ve not all become skeptical political independents: Fully a third are registered Republicans.

This is an old study, but the conclusions are news to me. And somewhat hopeful. I don’t know of any reason to believe things have changed (in terms of brainwashing success) in the past ten years…

I find it very interesting — and a little surprising, in light of my personal experiences — that both age and education correlate negatively with liberalism. But hopeful, because we’re all going to get older, and because the American population’s average age is increasing. A wisp of hope to hang onto…

Non-Breaking Shoelaces

For years I’ve be plagued with a stupid problem: I break the shoelaces on my hiking boots (which is basically the only kind of shoe I wear outdoors) with distressing regularity. Typically they last just two or three days before the first break occurs, and then I live with knotted repairs for weeks until I remember to buy a new pair. The most recent pair I replaced had six knots in them — and they’d been on my shoes for less than a week.

A couple of weeks ago, I got good and fed up with this situation. I’m tired of being a one-man subsidy for the shoelace industry! So I looked all over the web, trying to find shoelaces with a steel-cable core, figuring that they would stand up to my abuse. I failed in that effort, but I found something even better: Kevlar shoelaces, available from Gempler’s. I’ve had them now for a week, and I am delighted to report that they are so strong that I cannot even purposefully break them — much less accidentally.

I bought three pairs, but I suspect it’s going to be a long while before I need the second…

Orientation Ponder

This morning I prepared four envelopes for mailing out checks. I did it production-line stye: first I put stamps on all the envelopes, then return address labels, then stuffed the letters. But when I went to stuff the letters in, I discovered that I’d managed to affix the return address label and stamp on what we normally think of as the “bottom” of the envelope. It gave me a start, and for a moment I was even thinking that I’d have to throw them away and start over — until I realized that the notion of “bottom” was wholly an artificial construct, and that having the postage and address on “upside-down” wouldn’t make any difference at all to the function of the letter.

But my instinctive reaction got the ponder going, and reminded me of a couple of other more interesting examples I’ve heard over the years.

The first one I heard from a comedian (Bill Cosby?). It concerns the way we all eat a slice of pie. This comedian observed that everybody will turn their pie plate until the pointy end of the pie faces them. Why on earth do we do this? I’ve experimented with this, folks (it’s the kind of guy I am, and besides, it was a good excuse to eat more pie!). It makes no difference how the pie is facing, it’s equally easy to eat in all of them. Somewhere deep inside us, there is an “correct orientation” sensor — and it gets unhappy if we have our pie turned the “wrong” way.

The second one I read in a science journal. It was a report on an older piece of research, from the 1930s as I recall. An anthropologist visiting with the Eskimos of northern Canada noted something interesting: all but a few of the Eskimos, when viewing a photograph, would hold the photo in whatever orientation it had when it was handed to them. If they were looking at the photo sideways, or even upside-down, it didn’t make any difference to them at all. Those few Eskimos who did care about the orientation all had something in common: they had learned to read. This anthropologist leapt to the conclusion that visual orientation was irrelevant to humankind until reading was invented — at which time it became crucial. Interesting theory, but most anthropologists and biologists do not believe it’s correct. Gravity on the earth’s surface, just to present one example, definitely has a direction — and orientation to gravity matters a great deal, whether you can read or not. Still, the anthropologist made the observation (and it was subsequently repeated) — and the question remains: why don’t non-reading Eskimos care how a photo is oriented, when the rest of us seem to care a great deal?

I sure don’t have any answers — do you?

Referral of the Day

Someone found my blog this morning by typing this search term into Ask.com:

we have just moved to a rural area what is the red flag on the mailbox for?

As usual, they found my blog because all those words appeared in unrelated posts on the same day — not because I actually answered this question.

I am at a complete loss to explain how someone could live in the U.S. long enough to learn English, and yet not know what the red flag on a mailbox is for.

Or is this just the “country boy” in me? Is this really an obscure fact, only known to gun-toting hayseeds?

Global Warming

Just a few days ago, the Denver Post published an unusually balanced report on global warming. In it they quote meterologist Bill Gray. Dr. Gray is not a household name, but everybody knows his work — he is the preeminent hurricane forecaster, with a far better track record than anyone else in the world. He’s the forecaster the media quotes every year when they talk about the expected number of hurricanes.

Dr. Gray is a skeptic on global warming:

Gray is among the most strident critics, quick to use words like “fraud” or “gang” to describe the modelers.

Instead of model projections, Gray looks at the history and patterns of weather to find trends.

And befitting his 76 years, Gray has a long view. His first report on climate - on the return of the dust bowl - was in the early 1940s when he was in junior high school.

"We’d gone through a warming trend in the '40s, and everybody was saying we were going to win World War II but face terrible droughts,” Gray said.

Soon after, temperatures went into a cooling trend and by 1975, Gray points out, there was talk of a coming ice age.

The Earth does have natural cycles of cooling and warming - during the past 740,000 years there have been eight cycles with four ice ages.

The cycles appear to be tied to slight variations in the tilt of the Earth toward the sun.

During the last ice age - which ended about 10,000 years ago - Earth was on average about 4 degrees Fahrenheit cooler, and what is now Manhattan was buried under ice.

At some point the Earth will wobble on its axis again, setting the stage for an ice age.

There are other phenomena affecting global temperatures over time, such as El Niño, a Pacific Ocean warm-water mass that appears in roughly five-year cycles and changes world weather patterns.

And there is the Atlantic thermohaline current, a conveyor belt moving heat north on the surface and then dropping it to the ocean floor and heading back to the equator - a 1,200-year trip.

Changes in the current lead to changes in temperature. Somehow the models have to account for these natural variations too.

Gray believes that the warmer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are linked to a natural slowing in the thermohaline current, not the carbon dioxide.

Some of the models also show the current is slowing and that, along with warming oceans, adds to hurricane risks.

Dr. Gray is as skeptical of the model-based global warming forecasts as I am — but his weather forecasting credentials are impeccable, whereas mine are non-existant.

I’ll add one point this report didn’t cover: follow the money. Billions of research dollars each year are going to the global warming wing of meterology. Zippity-doo-dah is going to the skeptics. If you were an ambitious meterologist, what would attract you more? Hmmm???

Just one more reason why public funding of science is a mess…

Quote of the Day

In today’s edition of the Liberal Lickspittle Los Angeles Times, Max Boot writes with this conclusion:

The real enemy we face is not Islam per se but a violent offshoot known as Islamism, which is rooted, to be sure, in the Koran but which also finds inspiration in such modern Western ideologies as fascism, Nazism and communism. Its most successful exponents — from Hassan Banna and Sayyid Qutb to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden — are hardly orthodox interpreters of Islam. They are power-mad intellectuals in the mold of a Lenin or a Hitler. The problem is that the rest of the Muslim world, by not doing more to curb the radicals — whether out of fear or sympathy — lends credence to the most objectionable caricatures of their faith.

Read the entire thing.

Then marvel at its appearance in the bird cage liner of choice in Southern California. Quite likely, some editor there is being fired as I write — for surely it’s a firing offence there to publish a piece that doesn’t adhere to the blame-America-first crowd’s spin, and even worse, smacks of red state commonsense…

Shocked

I went “down the hill” today to run some errands, and as my gas tank was low, I filled up at the Jamul 7/11. I didn’t even look at the price, as past experience suggested that would be depressing.

So when my tank was full and the total was “only” $44, I was shocked, pleasantly so. Actually, at first I thought the valve had shut off prematurely and my tank wasn’t really full — but it was. The price was down to $2.55/gallon for regular, a level we haven’t seen in a long while.

Of course, this only sounds good because just a few weeks ago we were paying almost $4/gallon. It’s that old expectations game again — if you expect a price higher than the actual, why then you feel good about it. If, on the other hand, prices had been under $2 for the past few months, I’d have been shocked in a completely opposite way.

I think humans must be wired this way in general. There’s a simple experiment you can do to prove this to yourself in a dramatic way. Draw a bowl of lukewarm water and put it on the counter. Then draw a bowl of cold water, throw a few ice cubes in it, and put it on the counter. Then run the tap as hot as you can stand to have your hand in it. Put one hand in the cold water, and the other hand in the hot tap water, and leave them both there for a minute or so. You’re setting expectations: one hand will now “expect” to be cold, the other hot. After the minute is up, put both hands in the luke warm water — it’s a very surprising feeling! The hand that was in the cold water will perceive the lukewarm water as warm (or even hot!); the other hand will perceive it is cool (or even cold!). The same water, you’re own two hands, at the same instant, and they won’t be in agreement at all…

Quote of the Day

Charles Krauthammer, on the Muslim world charging the Pope with insulting Islam:

"How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I’ll kill you for it” is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge.

Read the whole thing.

Fowler Adventures

I recently acquired this Fowler’s Long Scale Calculator through an eBay auction. The right-hand photo is a front view, the left-hand photo a rear view. This clever little gadget works on the same principle as a slide rule, using logarithmic scales — but by using six circles to hold one scale, they managed to pack a 30-inch long scale into an instrument that’s less than 3 inches in diameter! You can read more about how to use one here if you’re interested.

When I examined it upon its arrival (from Scotland!), I discovered that it was not actually in working order — the black cursor on the front did not rotate when I turned the right-hand knob. Functionally, everything else was ok. Aesthetically there were several issues: corrosion at various places on the metal parts, some “junk” floating around on the inside, a badly scratched cursor disk (more on that in a moment), and various marks and splotches all over the scales on both sides. It wasn’t quite a disaster, but it certainly wasn’t the nice, shiny calculating instrument I was hoping for.

I decided to fix it, and to try to clean it up a bit. The first challenge was how to open the darned thing up — it wasn’t obvious at all. I asked on the sliderule newsgroup if anyone had ever opened up a Fowler’s, but got no response. I turned that thing every which way and could see no screws or fasteners at all — it looked like the two sides were simply pressed onto the “chassis” and held there by tension. So I took a block of hardwood, wedged it against the exposed edge of the front half (which fit tightly over the back half), and pushed. Hard. And it gave just the tiniest bit. I worked my wood block around the circumference, and after about 20 little pushes, the whole front just fell right off. The back half came off the chassis in a similar way. Whew!

When the front fell off, the reason for the black hairline not moving became obvious: the black hairline was etched into a clear plastic (celluloid?) disk (the aforementioned cursor disk), and that disk had come unglued from the brass post in the center (you can see this post on the photo). This is why the cursor disk didn’t rotate. I set that aside for later repair, and took a close look at the scales. To my surprise, the scales are simply printed on thick paper, which is then glued to a metal disk. The markings and dirt that I saw on those disks would not be as easy to clean as an ordinary slide rule, where I could use soapy water — sure don’t want to do that with paper! I’d read that a soft art or drafting eraser was a good way to clean paper scales, but I didn’t happen to have one of them around. But…I did have some Micro-Mesh polishing clothes — basically very fine abrasive (in several grits) embedded into a rubbery compound with a cloth backing. I tried the finest grit I had (12,000), and discovered that it worked very well indeed. In just a few minutes I had nearly all of the marks off the paper scales.

The next challenge was the cursor disk. The old glue was still stuck to both the disk and the post — the first job was to get all that off. I used dental picks to get the big chunks off, then used a small flat jeweler’s screwdriver as a chisel to scrape the rest off. I had to be very careful when scraping the post not to lose control of the screwdriver and tear the paper scale — and equally careful on the disk so as not to poke a hole in it. This was tedious! The cursor disk was very badly scratched, with circular scratchs from the motion of the cursor disk moving over the scale. This Fowler’s must have been used a lot to cause all that scratching! I’ve had some previous success with Novus plastic polishing compound, so I tried that — and got terrific results, albeit with a good deal of elbow grease required. I had to take great care here not to fold up the cursor disk as I bore down hard while polishing. It is very thin and flexible, and threatened to fold up (and almost certainly break) on several occasions. In the end, though, it was well worth while — that cursor disk is now as smooth and shiny as the day it was made. Not a scratch on it. I used Duco cement to glue the disk back onto the post, being very careful with the glue — I didn’t want to get glue on the scales, where it would have been impossible to clean up. So I squeezed glue onto a jeweler’s screwdriver, and then used the screwdriver to carefully “paint” the brass post with glue. This worked well, and now the Fowler’s was back in working order.

I was hoping to find a way to lubricate the gear mechanism, which is in the innards of the chassis. But I could not find any way to gain access to that area. The scales are mounted on metal disks that block all access, and those disks appear to be permanently fastened on. So I gave up on that part.

I used some Nevr-Dull metal polishing cotton to get all the corrosion off the exposed metal parts. While I was handling the back half, the glass fell right out — the glue holding it in had long ago dried completely up and given up on any adhesion. When I discovered that, I pressed gently on the front half’s glass, and it came right out as well. So then I cleaned up all that old glue, thoroughly cleaned both pieces of glass, and reinstalled the glass with Duco cement. That worked great.

After the glue set, I squeezed the back side back onto the chassis, and then the front side onto the back side. And I had a much nicer Fowler’s Long Scale Calculator than I started out with, not the least because now it worked!

Title

This morning’s Wall Street Journal features essays by both the Republican (Melman) and the Democratic (Dean) chairmen of their respective parties. Here’s Howard Dean’s conclusion:

Democrats offer America a new direction in fiscal policy, for the middle class, and in the war in Iraq. We believe that America should work for everyone:

We will restore honesty in government, starting with the pay-as-you-go discipline in Congress that served Mr. Clinton so well. Balancing the Federal budget will be a high priority with concurrent limitation of spending. We will ease the burdens on middle class Americans and reverse Republican cuts in college tuition aid and health care. We will ensure that a retirement with dignity is the right and expectation of every single American, including pension reform, and preventing the privatization of social security.

We will dramatically expand support of energy independence in order to generate large numbers of new American jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. We will have a jobs agenda that includes good jobs that stay in America, a higher minimum wage and trade policies that benefit the global labor force, not just multinational corporations.

We will have a defense policy that is tough and smart, starting with phased redeployment of our troops in Iraq, and shore up our efforts to attack al Qaeda and fight the war on terror. We also will close the gaps in our security here at home by implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations.

We are ready to lead with a thoughtful, fiscally responsible long-term vision. We will reach out to all Americans who value hope over fear and begin moving the country forward again.

Let’s take these one at a time, shall we?

We will restore honesty in government. Uh, right. The party of Clinton ("I never had sex with that woman!"), Nagin ("Chocolate City"), Daley ("I never met a man who couldn’t be bribed"), La Guardia ("The machine is greased with green"), McGreevey ("I confess!"), and Jefferson ("Doesn’t everybody keep $100K in their freezer?") is going to restore honesty. Sure. I’ll buy that one, right about the same time the sun stops rising in the morning…

We will dramatically expand support of energy independence in order to generate large numbers of new American jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Nice sentiment, hard to disagree with. But … this is from the party that consistently opposes expanding the exploitation of American sources of energy. Drilling in ANWAR, wind generation off Cape Cod, more oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico or off the Florida coast or off the California coast, oil extraction from shale and tar sands, coal mining, advanced nuclear power generation — you name the domestic energy program, and the Democratic party has long stood against it. And they still stand against it. So far as I can tell, the only domestic energy programs supported by the Democrats are those that don’t actually exist, or those that generate campaign financing from rich constituents (think Tom Daschle and his support for alcohol from corn). So now the Democrats are taking a completely opposing position? Nope, they still oppose all those programs I listed, and more. All they’re for is the warm sentiment, which I guess they hope will fool a bunch of voters into thinking they actually support a program that might, er, work. But no such luck, folks.

We will have a defense policy that is tough and smart, starting with phased redeployment of our troops in Iraq, and shore up our efforts to attack al Qaeda and fight the war on terror. “Phased redeployment” is Democratic doublespeak for cut-and-run from Iraq — Pelosi, Kerry, Kennedy, Dean, and Reid have made this very clear by declaring, over and over, that our “redeployment” should be unconditional. Unconditional on winning the war, that is. They want us to leave, tails tucked firmly between our legs, and let Al Qaeda and Iran have Iraq. I wonder how they believe that’s “tough and smart", or even “tough or smart”. Sounds more like “wimpy and idiotic” to me, like we’d be joining the likes of their heroes, the Chiracian cheese-eating surrender-monkeys. And what, you may ask, do they mean by shoring up the efforts to attack Al Qaeda? Well, the only concrete proposals I’ve seen from the Democrats are to stop any productive intelligence efforts, to treat terrorists as common criminals rather than as an enemy in wartime, and to run (quickly) from anything that resembles armed confrontation. Closer to the truth would be to say that the Democrats have been for shoring up Al Qaeda’s capability to attack us!

About half of adult Americans believe the Democratic party best represents their political positions. Presumably those folks would be nodding their heads in agreement as they read Dean’s piece. That simple fact sums up my concerns about the future of America pretty well…

UN Futility

Just a couple of months ago, after Iran had made it crystal-clear to the entire world that it had no intention of stopping its nuclear weapons development, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 1696. As the Wall Street Journal summarizes in a commentary piece ($) this morning:

In July, the Council adopted Resolution 1696, which noted “with serious concern that . . . Iran has not taken the steps required of it by the [International Atomic Energy Agency] Board of Governors.” The Council went on to express “its intention . . . to adopt appropriate measures under Article 41 of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations to persuade Iran to comply with this resolution. . . .” Article 41 refers to all legally binding measures short of war — sanctions, that is — to bring states into compliance with U.N. resolutions. The Resolution said Iran must cease enriching uranium by August 31, a deadline Tehran has openly flouted.

So, serious consequences? Not quite. Chinese Middle East envoy Sun Bigan has rejected sanctions on Iran as “detrimental not only to the region but also to ourselves” — the latter a reference to China’s oil imports from Iran, up 56% from last year. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov — who is selling Iran a $700 million air-defense system — also says sanctions won’t work. That sentiment was echoed earlier this week by France’s Jacques Chirac, whom the Bush Administration has claimed is a stalwart ally in stopping Iran. “I am never favorable to sanctions,” said the French President, adding that, if they are unavoidable, they should be “moderate and adapted."

In other words, it has taken less than a month for the deadline set by Resolution 1696 to prove to be absolutely meaningless, something Mr. Ahmadinejad predicted in April. Why then would the Permanent Five risk their credibility as an institution by setting a deadline in the first place? Why threaten sanctions if they have no intention of imposing them?

A very good question.

The WSJ’s editors go on to theorize that this is all part of a deliberate effort to persuade America that we can just “live with” an Iranian nuclear weapons capability. In other words, they speculate that the U.N. is actually the manifestation of a vast anti-American conspiracy — and they’re serious.

I think they’re wrong about that, just as most conspiracy theories are wrong. Much more likely, as always, is to find a way to explain the observations with some good old human stupidity. And I don’t think that’s difficult in this case, as the U.N.'s ineffective posturing and drawing lines on parchment is strongly reminiscent of the European’s “handling” of Hitler just prior to his commencing hostilities. Read about the period, and you’ll find that organized groups of liberal-minded fellows who were very adverse to open confrontation with Hitler made agreements with him, over and over. And over and over, Hitler ignored them, using bombast and propaganda to “explain” his actions. The world took a depressingly long time to finally wake up and realize what a monster Hitler really was. Before this moment of clarity (which came when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939), the historical record is full of events that look distressingly similar to the way the world is dealing with Iran today.

I have little doubt that if Iran actually manages to obtain a nuclear weapon, the world will have another such moment of clarity. And it will be even more clarifying than Hitler’s invasion of Poland, as it will likely involve the demise of an entire city. Tel Aviv or another Israeli city would be most likely, but I wouldn’t rule out a European or even American target, as Iran has quite sophisticated delivery systems, including very quiet diesel-electric submarines. My fond hope (which keeps getting dashed) is that the world will somehow come to a consensus before such an awful event, but I’m getting less optimistic about this as each day passes…

Tomcats Retired

When I first went out to sea in the U.S. Navy (in 1973), we were at war in Vietnam. The Navy’s primary mission was to support the war with its airpower, and the workhorse fighter/bomber was the F-4 Phantom. A year or two later, the radical new “super plane” was introduced to the fleet: the F-14 Tomcat, with amazing new capabilities. I remember watching the very first squadron of Tomcat’s operating off the USS Enterprise, which was in the same task force as my ship (the USS Long Beach).

This morning I read that the last F-14 Tomcats are being retired this week, replaced by newer and even more sophisticated aircraft. The Tomcat is now a museum piece.

What does that make me?

Chavez Ponder

Just in case you missed Hugo Chavez' completely loony speech at the U.N. yesterday, here’s a link to a decent news story about it.

Claudia Rosette said that the Chavez speech did more to demonstrate what’s wrong with the U.N. than years of gumshoe reporting ever did. She was mostly referring to the enthusiastic applause Chavez received as he made each of his deranged points.

TigerHawk said “What a maroon!", because Chavez expressed regret that he couldn’t meet Noam Chomsky, as he was dead. This was news to Mr. Chomsky, who is still plaguing the planet at 77.

Neo-neocon said (in Spanish): psychological help, quickly, please!

And I say this: that speech demonstrates what happens when a corrupt (and have no doubt, Chavez is profoundly corrupt) moonbat attains a position of effectively unlimited power. It ain’t purty…

Kofi

Automatic read.

That’s my reaction to seeing Claudia Rosett’s name on the byline. And this morning I read:

In a switch — sort of — Kofi Annan has finally agreed to fill out one of the financial disclosure forms now required of UN senior staff. But before anyone gets too excited about finally learning, as Roger Simon neatly put it, “How Rich is Kofi?” — or how, when, or if the Secretary-General might have parted ways with the Mystery Mercedes bought by his son in his name — remember that the UN is home to some of the world’s biggest veracity gaps.

Oh, you know that anything starting like this is going to be good! Go read the whole thing.

The more I learn about the United Nations, the more I realize how profoundly corrupt it is. This sordid little story is just one example of this, and isn’t so important for its own sake. Rather, it’s important because it’s evidence of the institutionalized corruption at the U.N., which I’ve concluded is at this point intractable — no amount of “reform” (which this disclosure requirement was part of!) is going to fix what’s wrong there. We need to start over.

Faster, please. I’m tired of having my face rubbed in U.N. shit. Even if it is Claudia Rosett doing the rubbing…

Political Science

The lamestream media is full of this story today:

Science group backs NASA lunar plans

A panel of scientists strongly endorsed NASA’s plans to return to the moon, saying in a report Tuesday that lunar exploration will open the way toward broader studies of the Earth and solar system.

"The moon is priceless to planetary scientists,” declared the special National Research Council panel of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists were asked to evaluate and give guidance to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s plans for robotic and human exploration of the moon over the next two decades.

President Bush two years ago vowed to return astronauts to the moon and establish an “extended presence there” in preparation for exploring Mars. He called on NASA to devote $12 billion over five years for the beginning of the program with a goal of landing on the moon between 2015 and 2020, and eventually landing on Mars.

For years I’ve been reading about planetary scientists having their funding slashed again and again, because manned space programs sucked up all the money at NASA. Time after time, real science programs that would have delivered real science at a bargain-basement price (compared with manned space programs) have been canceled, eviscerated, or “delayed” (as in “forever"). And now all of a sudden there’s a consensus amongst planetary scientists to support President Bush’s new $12B lunar boondoggle?

Not bloody likely! The National Academy of Science (and it’s mongrel offspring, the National Research Council) are, more than anything else, bureaucratic instituitions devoted to controlling the distribution of federal science funding. In other words, it’s a political animal, with anything a real scientist would recognize as “science” being very far down on their agenda. Gold dust is what gets these folks excited, not discovery, knowledge, and understanding. The panel so excitedly described above was formed for the sole purpose of providing this headline — because President Bush has almost zero support from the scientific community for his lunar and Martian windmill-tilting.

Here’s all you need to know to understand the truth of my analysis above: the majority of the panel members come from space industries. Doh! Of course they support the $12B manned space program boondoggle! Did I mention the $12B? Sure, they tossed in a journalist whose living comes from the manned space program, and a few scientists whose funding is related to the manned space program, just to give it a little credibility. If you don’t dig down more than a micron or two.

Big (as in big dollars) science is inevitably political. And all the more disgusting because of it. Hear the science pigs oink as they snuffle in their trough!

Iran

Well. And oh, my.

Just last night I posted about a joke, seeing it as a harbinger of a change in American thinking on the threat from Iran. This morning, as I made my rounds of news and blog sites, I see lots more evidence of this change.

In a commentary piece in the Wall Street Journal ($), Michael Rubin leads us through an analysis of the unserious Iranian approach to the nuclear “negotiations”. He concludes this way:

While diplomacy necessarily involves talking to adversaries, Washington should not assume that the ayatollahs operate from the same set of ground rules. During his long exile in Najaf, Khomeini endorsed taqiya, religiously sanctioned dissembling. From his perspective and that of his followers, the ends justify the means. Hence, Khomeini saw nothing wrong when he told the Guardian newspaper, just months before his return to Iran, “I don’t want to have the power of government in my hand; I am not interested in personal power.” Tehran may still conduct diplomacy to fish for incentive and reward but, at its core, Iranian diplomacy is insincere. The Iranian leadership will say anything and do anything to buy the time necessary to acquire nuclear capability. That Foggy Bottom still advises against any strategy that might undercut the possibility of some illusionary breakthrough signals triumph not of realism but of negligence. Diplomacy cannot succeed if one side is playing for real and the other only for time.

Translated into street English: the Iranian “negotiators” are lying through their teeth and their only objective is to buy their nuclear scientists and engineers more time to build nuclear weapons. Diplomatic efforts with Iran are worse than useless — they’re playing straight into the enemy’s hand.

Then yesterday at the U.N., President Bush gave an excellent speech that included this piece, where he spoke directly to the Iranian people:

To the people of Iran: The United States respects you; we respect your country. We admire your rich history, your vibrant culture, and your many contributions to civilization. You deserve an opportunity to determine your own future, an economy that rewards your intelligence and your talents, and a society that allows you to fulfill your tremendous potential. The greatest obstacle to this future is that your rulers have chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation’s resources to fund terrorism, and fuel extremism, and pursue nuclear weapons. The United Nations has passed a clear resolution requiring that the regime in Tehran meet its international obligations. Iran must abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions. Despite what the regime tells you, we have no objection to Iran’s pursuit of a truly peaceful nuclear power program. We’re working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis. And as we do, we look to the day when you can live in freedom — and America and Iran can be good friends and close partners in the cause of peace.

I interpret this not as diplomacy, but as an effort to win the hearts and minds of the 70% of the Iranian population that is under 30 and largely secular. I hope (and believe, based on the little bits and pieces and hints that have emerged over the past couple of years) it’s true that this public part is but a tiny piece of a much larger and more vigorous covert effort.

And then after the Pope started speaking frankly about the need to apply reason to the clash between fundamentalist Islam and the rest of the world, the former Archbishop of Canterbury gets into the act in a classy way:

THE former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton has issued his own challenge to “violent” Islam in a lecture in which he defends the Pope’s “extraordinarily effective and lucid” speech.

Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.

“We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times,” he said. “There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths.” …

Lord Carey, who as Archbishop of Canterbury became a pioneer in Christian-Muslim dialogue, himself quoted a contemporary political scientist, Samuel Huntington, who has said the world is witnessing a “clash of civilisations”.

Arguing that Huntington’s thesis has some “validity”, Lord Carey quoted him as saying: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

Which gets right to the heart of the Iranian regime’s motivations for acquiring nuclear weapons. That last bit is particularly interesting — Lord Carey believes there is no practical distinction between fundamentalist Islam and mainstream Islam on this question. I hope he’s very wrong about that last bit, as mainstream Islam is a lot bigger foe than the fundamentalists.

And then I read in der Spiegel that other Arab countries are starting to talk about an “Arab bomb” (again). It seems they’re worried about Iran’s nuclear weapons development program will upset the balance of power in the Middle East — the Persians of Iran are historically enemies of the Arabs. And it’s also very clear that the Arabs aren’t buying the Iranian’s posturing about their “peaceful” nuclear program.

Is the world suddenly waking up to the Iranian and fundamentalist Islamic threats, and starting to treat them seriously? Oh, I hope so — it would be so comforting (for me, and the West) if that is true…

Beware Americans Bearing Jokes

This joke is making the rounds on email lists:

The Iranian Ambassador to the UN had just finished giving a speech, and walked out into the lobby where he met President Bush. They shook hands, and as they walked the Iranian said, “You know, I have just one question about what I have seen in America.

President Bush said, “Well, anything I can do to help you, I will."

The Iranian whispered “My son watches this show 'Star Trek' and in it there is Chekhov who is Russian, Scotty who is Scottish, and Sulu who is Chinese, but no Arabs. My son is very upset and does not understand why there are no Iranians on Star Trek."

President Bush laughed, leaned toward the Iranian ambassador, and whispered back, “Because it takes place in the future."

I would council the mad mullahs of Iran that when Americans start making jokes like this, that means they’re thinking about the context the joke was made in.

We’re thinking about Iran and the threat it represents.

One way to eliminate the Iranian threat is to eliminate Iranians. This isn’t very likely, of course. But if we’re making jokes about that, the fact is that less, er, complete measures are becoming thinkable — when just a few months ago, for most Americans, they were not.

Watch your back, President Ammabammapajamahead…

Misplaced Concerns

These past few weeks have seen a lot of debate about how we will treat the prisoners we take in the war on terror. On one side we have those concerned that we’re torturing prisoners, with the concern stemming from moral issues or worry that it will endanger prisoners our enemy takes, or both. On the other side we have those concerned that we are endangering ourselves by not aggressively interrogating prisoners who may have valuable information.

This whole debate seems fundamentally crazy to me. I’m having trouble believing that the first side is even serious in their position…

The argument that Americans captured by the enemy would be endangered is easily dispatched: those Americans are quite likely to have their throats slashed or their heads cut off right now. Exactly how would they be more endangered? The concern expressed is that if we violate the Geneva conventions, then the bad guys will, too. But…the bad guys are already completely ignoring the Geneva conventions — how could they ignore them any more completely? And then there’s the pesky little detail that the lamestream media seems to totally ignore: the Geneva conventions explicitly do not apply to a non-uniformed enemy, or to an enemy that themselves ignores the conventions. What a dumb argument, McCain!

The moral issues are less amenable to logical dismemberment, as in the end they rest on the beliefs that individuals have. For me, this is very straightforward: my belief is that if an enemy vows to kill my country’s citizens, and uses any method at his disposal to do so, then we are morally obligated (not merely permitted) to fight back with any means at our disposal. So … if an enemy attacks us by flying airplanes into buildings, torturing and beheading our soldiers and citizens, using their clergy to whip up mindless and unfounded hatred amongst their faithful, then … I believe that we are morally obligated to fight back by any means we can. So I have absolutely no problem with using any interrogation method to extract useful information from prisoners we take from this enemy, and I don’t much care whether they survive the interrogation. I was furious at the recent reports that we refrained from killing over 100 Taliban and Al Qaeda because they happened to be at a cemetary — to me, that’s political correctness gone completely amok. Again, I think we are morally obligated to attack our enemy no matter where he happens to be — and that includes cemetaries, mosques, museums, and apartment buildings.

Can any of my readers make a cogent argument on the other side? Can you explain to me why we should show any mercy at all to our merciless enemy?

Dring & Fage

Recently I managed to acquire an old slide rule, made in England by the firm of Dring & Fage sometime around 1820 or 1830. Its construction is interesting — it’s made of boxwood, with brass fittings to hold it all together. The scales on the slide rule are hand-engraved; it must have taken dozens and dozens of hours to make them all. The one I bought is still in great condition, and works just fine.

But what has proven to be the most interesting aspect of this slide rule is its purpose. Most (though not all) modern slide rules are purely mathematical instruments — you can use them to multiply, divide, obtain logarithms, make trigonometric calculations, etc. The Dring & Fage slide rule can be used to multiply and divide, but its real purpose is to compute taxes and duties on alcoholic beverages stored in barrels. It was used by people who worked in ports, warehouses, and other facilities where barrels of booze were bought and sold.

The taxes were based on the amount of alcohol, which is a function of the total volume of liquid in the barrel (they were often only partially full) and the “proof", or percentage of alcohol in the liquor. So the tax assessors carried around a little kit, with a long ruler to measure the depth of the liquid in the barrel, a hygrometer (a set of glass balls of calibrated specific gravity) to measure the percentage of alcohol in the liquid, and a slide rule like the one I have. The slide rule was used to compute the volume of liquid in the barrel, then multiply that times the percentage of alcohol to get the total alcohol content — which gave you the tax basis for the barrel. These kits were called “proofing kits", and the slide rules in them were called “proofing rules”.

Calculating the volume of liquid in a partially full barrel is a non-trivial exercise in three-dimensional geometry. The barrels are not cylinders (that would be easy!) as their sides are curved outwards. It turns out that the barrels used back then all had sides that were, in cross-section, shaped like a small section of a circle. There were only a few basic shapes of barrels used, and they could all be characterized by the radius of these circularly shaped sides and the diameter of the barrel’s top and bottom. With a proofing rule, you could calculate the volume of liquid in a barrel with just a few quick movements of the slides, so long as you knew the diameter of the barrel’s top, the height of the barrel, the radius of curvature of its sides, and the height of the liquid in the barrel. The only challenging thing there is the radius of curvature, and this was handled by the barrel industry standardizing on just a few (about four or five) “varieties” of barrels, known as “Variety A", “Variety B", and so on. Each variety had a fixed radius of curvature. And the proofing rule has a separate scale on it for each curvature.

I was surprised how widespread such a sophisticated tax basis calculation was, so very long ago. So far as I know, the tax folks today don’t have to deal with things like this (though this could just be my ignorance)…

New Restaurant

A gang of us went out to a late lunch today at a new restaurant in Jamul: the Venetia. It’s an Italian restaurant, though their menu has a number of things on it that are not Italian at all (e.g., jambalaya and chicken noodle soup). The restaurant is located in the little strip mall just behind the 7/11 at the intersection of Campo Road (94) and Steele Canyon Road.

We had a great meal, with dishes that uniformly surprised us with their excellent quality. Between the four of us we had salad, minestrone soup, clam chowder (excellent!), garlic bread (it will make your brains fall out!), lobster ravioli (very good!), mozzarella/sausage/mushroom pizza (yum — watch out, Filippi’s!), fettucini with sun-dried tomatoes, artichokes, and chicken (great!), and tira misu (mmmm!). Even the iced tea was very good, and that’s something that’s often mediocre even at nice restaurants. Including a nice tip (because the service was very good), we ended up spending about $23 per person. We thought that represented a very good value for what we got.

After the meal, we introduced ourselves to the proprietor (Sam), who told us things were going well — and expected to go even better soon, after they get their liquor license. I suspect he’s right about that!

We’ll be back to the Venetia regularly, I suspect. Next time you’re in the mood for a nice Italian meal, give it a try — I don’t think you’re likely to be disappointed…

Misbehaving Tree

Last night it got down to 47F here — a harbinger of autumn. And as a direct result, the morning here was just lovely, in the 60s and low 70s. So I thought I’d tackle one of my many queued-up outdoors jobs, queued up because the summer heat makes working outdoors just unbearable.

I decided to work on pruning our pine trees. This is something we have to do every two or three years. The Italian Stone Pines (pinus pinea) that line our driveway have the rather stupid habit of growing their branches straight outwards until the weight of the branch causes it to droop to the ground, or snap, whichever comes first (it’s about 50/50). These longer branches are always the bottom branches, since they’re the oldest. So over time, I’ve been pruning off the branches higher and higher up the tree trunk. On some of my biggest pine trees, the lowest branches are now erupting from the trunk at 12 or 13 feet off the ground. Sometimes I don’t cut the branches at the trunk, but rather at some distance out. When I do that, I’m usually aiming to keep the branches at least 8 feet high, so we can see clearly under the trees.

So this morning I had my biggest step-ladder out. It’s not really very big — only six feet tall — but when I stand on the next-to-top step I can reach branches about 12 feet off the ground, so it works out pretty well. As I’ve often done before, I was standing on the next-to-top step, sawing away at a branch. This one was about 3 inches in diameter, and the end I was cutting off was about 18 feet long, drooping down to almost ground level. When I saw over my head like this, I’m always careful to put the ladder toward the side that’s NOT falling, even though that means I have to cut sideways (which is quite difficult, physically). This is because for some silly reason I’ve always believed it would be a bad idea to have the branch fall on me (or the ladder).

Something very odd happened when I cut this branch: somehow it snapped and the cut end moved up, hesitated for a moment, and then moved straight toward my face, quickly. This was, to say the least, quite disconcerting! So I did what came very naturally — I dodged it, moving my upper body to the right. But remember where I was standing — my feet almost six feet in the air at the top of a stepladder. Of course when I dodged right, my feet and the top of the ladder went to the left — Newton’s principle of action and reaction demonstrated. The end result was that my whole body rotated clockwise (from my perspective) until I was horizontal in mid-air, and my feet left the ladder (which then continued to fall over).

That’s what you call an “Oh, shit!” moment. There I was, holding a very sharp saw, about 8 feet above the ground with nothing but air under me.

I knew that I didn’t want my head, a hand, or a foot to be what hit the ground first, as I might actually hurt something badly that way. So I pitched the saw away, and tucked my hands and feet in. That had the disconcerting effect of making me spin faster, and I could see that I’d be doing a half-somersault and landing on my back. I remembered reading somewhere that if you’re going to fall, you should try to hit on your back, but off to one side of your spine — that’s where your ribs have the strongest resistance to impact. Somehow I managed to squirm around so that I’d hit a little bit on one side. This all happened in a fraction of a second, but it sure seemed like a lot longer!

When I hit the ground, it was just below my right shoulder, slightly head down. What happened next made me feel a little bit like an acrobat or a gymnast — and anyone who knows me knows that this is a most unlikely thing! When I hit the ground, I rolled from my shoulder down my side to my hip, and the momentum popped me right back up on my feet. I stood there in complete astonshiment for a minute or two — I had just fallen off a rather tall ladder fully expecting to end up in a pile of broken bones and mangled flesh — and not only was I completely unhurt, I ended up on my feet!

I’ll bet I couldn’t do that again if I tried a thousand times…

The biggest problem ended up being finding my saw — I threw it a good 75 feet away, and it ended up about 5 feet high in a manzanita…

Terrorist Moms

Tip of the hat to Rick P. for the first terrorist pun I’ve heard yet:

Two Muslim mothers are sitting in a cafe chatting over a pint of goat’s milk. The older of the mothers pulls her bag out and starts flipping through photos and they start reminiscing.

"This is my oldest son, Mohammed. He’s 24 years old now."

"Yes, I remember him as a baby,” says the other mother, cheerfully.

"He’s a martyr now, though,” mum confides.

"Oh, so sad dear,” says the other.

"And this is my second son, Kalid. He’s 21."

"Oh, I remember him,” says the other, happily. “He had such curly hair when he was born."

"He’s a martyr, too,” says mum, quietly.

"Oh gracious me,” says the other.

"And this is my third son. My baby. My beautiful Ahmed. He’s 18,” she whispers.

"Yes,” says the friend enthusiastically, “I remember when he first started school."

"He is a martyr, also,” says mum, with tears in her eyes.

After a pause and a deep sigh, the second Muslim mother looks wistfully at the photographs and says:

"They blow up so fast, don’t they?"

Groan…

But this leads to a ponder… I’ve noted on quite a few occasions the proud comments of the parents of a jihadist 'martyr' who has blown himself up. These parents sound like an American parent whose kid made the winning run in a Little League baseball game. But their kid is dead, and in a violent and gruesome manner — killing innocent people in the process. Is there any more crystal-clear example of the differences between the culture of radical Islam and the culture of the West? Such a thing would be utterly unimaginable in our culture…

The liberals would (and do) argue that all cultures are morally equivalent; they urge us to make no judgment about other cultures based on our own mores.

To which I say “Bullshit!” I refuse to grant even the possibility of moral equivalence to a culture that celebrates the death of innocents, that takes joy in the 'martyrdom' of its children, and which believes that it is their duty and obligation to kill me and the people I love. Nope, radical Islam is a culture that is distinctly inferior and primitive by comparison with ours. And if they insist on maintaining jihad against the West, then I believe we (in the West) have no choice but to grind their sorry asses into camel feed.

And if that’s not politically correct, well then that’s just too damned bad.

Inevitable In Iran

Some time ago I concluded that there was only going to be one way to stop the threat of nuclear weapons in Iranian hands: direct military action. Diplomacy has been a complete failure; Iran is 'playing' the West with the greatest of ease.

Charles Krauthammer agrees with this, and has written an interesting piece about the calculus. His conclusion: yes, military action will be costly, both in blood and in treasure — but it must be done. His conclusion:

... These are the costs. There is no denying them. However, equally undeniable is the cost of doing nothing.

In the region, Persian Iran will immediately become the hegemonic power in the Arab Middle East. Today it is deterred from overt aggression against its neighbors by the threat of conventional retaliation. Against a nuclear Iran, such deterrence becomes far less credible. As its weak, nonnuclear Persian Gulf neighbors accommodate to it, jihadist Iran will gain control of the most strategic region on the globe.

Then there is the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days. The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age. Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map.

Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?

These are the questions. These are the calculations. The decision is no more than a year away.

Yup, he’s got it.

I just hope we can muster the courage (are you listening, Mr. Bush?) to take action — unilaterally if necessary — before the mad mullahs demonstrate their new power by vaporizing London, Munich, Paris, or New York…