Saturday, May 10, 2014
Ace didn't see it coming...
Ace didn't see it coming... Neither did I. The arrogance, hypocrisy, shamelessness, and boundless ambition of the Clinton family still boggles the minds of the rest of us...
Ancient Egyptian objects...
Ancient Egyptian objects... Three-dimensional, fully interactive versions are being posted online, and access is free...
Saving Feynman's van...
Hadrian's Wall...
Debbie is back in Jamul...
Debbie is back in Jamul... And I'm still “camping” in our new home in Utah. It's lonely up here without Debbie and all our animals...
We had close to an inch of rain yesterday, along with a bit of hail the size of small marbles, and a bout of strong, gusty winds. This morning it's still mostly cloudy and a bit cold (38°F). The birds are all puffed up for warmth :)
We had close to an inch of rain yesterday, along with a bit of hail the size of small marbles, and a bout of strong, gusty winds. This morning it's still mostly cloudy and a bit cold (38°F). The birds are all puffed up for warmth :)
Thursday, May 8, 2014
If this is for real...
If this is for real ... it's a most welcome development! It might be the proverbial “silver bullet” for cancer – or it might be another disappointment...
Leading climate scientist “defects”...
Leading climate scientist “defects” ... and Delingpole has the scoop...
The Black Death wasn't all bad...
The Black Death wasn't all bad... It was a stimulus for human evolution.
This is one of the reasons why I oppose mandatory safety regulations :)
This is one of the reasons why I oppose mandatory safety regulations :)
Cold war calculators...
“It’s gross hypocrisy.”
“It’s gross hypocrisy.” That's from an anonymous former senior U.S. official, talking about Hilary Clinton. Specifically her current bellowing to bring the Boko Haram to justice for kidnapping several hundred young Nigerian women – as compared to her refusal to label Boko Haram a terrorist group when she was Secretary of State.
Gross hypocrisy? Check.
Politically motivated? Check.
Lying politico-weasel? Check.
Typically conflicted progressive ideology (multi-culti vs. women's rights)? Check.
Probability of election? High - current poll front runner matched against any Republican opponent.
Is that a whiff of doom I smell, wafting in on the otherwise lovely morning breeze? I think it is...
Gross hypocrisy? Check.
Politically motivated? Check.
Lying politico-weasel? Check.
Typically conflicted progressive ideology (multi-culti vs. women's rights)? Check.
Probability of election? High - current poll front runner matched against any Republican opponent.
Is that a whiff of doom I smell, wafting in on the otherwise lovely morning breeze? I think it is...
Quote of the day...
Quote of the day...
“At the rate we’re going, we’re going to have so many people with guns everywhere, fully licensed, fully validated, in settings where [one] could be in a movie theater, and they don’t like someone chewing gum loudly or talking on their cell phone and decide they have the perfect right to defend themselves against the gum chewer or cell phone user by shooting.”That's Hilary Clinton, presumptive Democratic nominee for President in 2016. She (along with nearly all other Democrats and a non-trivial percentage of Republicans) would turn us into Euroweenies and ready us for a Hugo Chavez-like thugocratic takeover. Does that sound extreme to you? If so, I suggest you read more recent history – not to mention current events...
Tea Party donor? IRS audit you?
Tea Party donor? IRS audit you? You were in good company: the IRS audited about 10% of the people on the Tea Party donor lists it illegally requested from Tea Party groups submitting non-profit status applications. That's ten times the rate that ordinary citizens are audited.
Rope.
Tree.
Corrupt partisan bureaucrats.
Some assembly required.
Rope.
Tree.
Corrupt partisan bureaucrats.
Some assembly required.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Heidi needs a new home!
Another busy day for us...
Another busy day for us... Yesterday, that is. We spent the morning at a local paint store, where their color expert helped us select paint colors for our new home. If it were up to me, I'd just pick some nice off-white color and paint the whole house with it :) Debbie had other ideas – and we ended up with a total of ten different colors, and I have to admit that I like both the selections and the variety. Most of them are shades of browns and blue-greens, mostly quite light. A couple of rooms will be a fairly bright creamy yellow color. The door casings, baseboards, and crown moldings will be bright white.
The process of choosing the colors was entirely new to me. We visited the store late last week, and they told us to come back with samples of our flooring and pictures of rooms we like the looks of (gleaned from the web). Yesterday we did that, and looked dozens of paint sample chips against both the flooring samples and the photos we'd collected. The fluorescent store lighting threw off my perception of the colors; I had to keep taking them to a sunlit doorway to see what they really looked like (often quite different than under fluorescent lighting, which there will be none of in our home, as I absolutely detest it). To my surprise, Debbie and I converged on each color choice fairly quickly.
We had a lovely evening, going out to dinner with the couple who were our realtors for our new home purchase, and who are becoming good friends. They live just a few miles south of us, outside the town of Avon. Last night they took us to a restaurant we'd never been to before: the Copper Mill, in downtown Logan. Debbie had grilled salmon and asparagus, which she pronounced as excellent (hard for her to say about someone else's grilled salmon, as it's one of her specialties). I had a concoction they call “Burbank”: chicken breast, ham, smoked bacon, tomato, avocado, and mozzarella drizzled with hollandaise sauce – it will make your brains fall out. Both of us had mango lemonade to drink, served with lemon quarters floating in it – delicious! A meal like that, with the good company of our friends, was a real treat.
Today we have two contractors coming out. One will be doing some plumbing work: fixing a drainage issue in the basement, and installing a new water softener. The other will be fixing some major problems with our spring development (our home's water comes from a spring). It's been neglected for many years, is falling apart, and is seriously ugly with a “concentration camp” style barbed-wire topped fence surrounding it (more a problem for our neighbor than for us, but we're embarrassed by it). We're having it fixed up and made into something we hope better disappears into the background.
The process of choosing the colors was entirely new to me. We visited the store late last week, and they told us to come back with samples of our flooring and pictures of rooms we like the looks of (gleaned from the web). Yesterday we did that, and looked dozens of paint sample chips against both the flooring samples and the photos we'd collected. The fluorescent store lighting threw off my perception of the colors; I had to keep taking them to a sunlit doorway to see what they really looked like (often quite different than under fluorescent lighting, which there will be none of in our home, as I absolutely detest it). To my surprise, Debbie and I converged on each color choice fairly quickly.
We had a lovely evening, going out to dinner with the couple who were our realtors for our new home purchase, and who are becoming good friends. They live just a few miles south of us, outside the town of Avon. Last night they took us to a restaurant we'd never been to before: the Copper Mill, in downtown Logan. Debbie had grilled salmon and asparagus, which she pronounced as excellent (hard for her to say about someone else's grilled salmon, as it's one of her specialties). I had a concoction they call “Burbank”: chicken breast, ham, smoked bacon, tomato, avocado, and mozzarella drizzled with hollandaise sauce – it will make your brains fall out. Both of us had mango lemonade to drink, served with lemon quarters floating in it – delicious! A meal like that, with the good company of our friends, was a real treat.
Today we have two contractors coming out. One will be doing some plumbing work: fixing a drainage issue in the basement, and installing a new water softener. The other will be fixing some major problems with our spring development (our home's water comes from a spring). It's been neglected for many years, is falling apart, and is seriously ugly with a “concentration camp” style barbed-wire topped fence surrounding it (more a problem for our neighbor than for us, but we're embarrassed by it). We're having it fixed up and made into something we hope better disappears into the background.
Parody posters appearing in Los Angeles...
a steven spielberg playI don't know who's behind the posters, but clearly they're not happy with That One...
saving barack obama
the mission is a fraud
The birth of a shipping container...
A sea of cherry blossoms...
Our very active local star, aka “The Sun”...
White death...
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
A 94 year old prophecy is fulfilled...
A 94 year old prophecy is fulfilled... Via my card-carrying pissed-off-American mom:
H.L. Mencken (born 1880 - died 1956) was a journalist, satirist, critic, and Democrat. He wrote the editorial below while working for the Baltimore Evening Sun, which appeared in the July 26, 1920 edition.
"As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron."So it was written, and so it has come to pass.
— H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
Someone finally did it...
Someone finally did it... An Internet TV channel that's all cats, nothing but cats, all the time...
Monday, May 5, 2014
Is this why Jay Leno was involuntarily retired by NBC?
Is this why Jay Leno was involuntarily retired by NBC? A collection of his one-liners that just may have contributed to the network's decision, via reader Simi L.:
"I was going to start off tonight with an Obama joke, but I don't want to get audited by the IRS."One can easily imagine a petulant That One phoning Steve Burke: “Dude, stifle that Leno guy, would you?”
On NSA surveillance: "We wanted a president who listens to all Americans - now we have one."
On a new IRS commissioner: "He's called 'acting commissioner' because he has to act like the scandal doesn't involve the White House."
On closing the Guantanamo prison for terrorists: "If he really wants to close it, turn it into a government-funded solar power company. The doors will be shut in a month."
Concerning the Benghazi, Associated Press, and IRS scandals: "Remember in the old days when President Obama's biggest embarrassment was Joe Biden?"
On Obama saying he didn't know about the IRS scandal: "He was too busy not knowing anything about Benghazi to not know anything about the IRS."
"The White House has a new slogan about Benghazi : Hope and change the subject."
"It's casual Friday, which means that at the White House, they're casually going through everybody's phone calls and records."
"It is not looking good for President Obama. Today his teleprompter took the fifth."
"Fox News has changed its slogan from 'Fair and Balanced' to 'See, I told you so!'"
On Obama's commencement address: "He told the young graduates their future is bright unless, of course, they want jobs."
On a Chicago man who set a record for riding a Ferris wheel: "The only other way to go around and around in a circle that many times is to read the official report on Benghazi."
On White House claims of ignorance on the scandals: "They took 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' out of the Pentagon and moved it into the White House."
"These White House scandals are not going away anytime soon. It's gotten so bad that People in Kenya are now saying he's 100 percent American."
Jason and Cici, together again...
California leads the way...
California leads the way ... in Congressional insanity, business unfriendliness, and doom.
Liberal Maryland rejoices – because some other state is so business-hostile that it might drive some to consider relocating to not-quite-so-business-hostile Maryland. More likely, Texas will get the fleeing entrepreneurs, though...
Liberal Maryland rejoices – because some other state is so business-hostile that it might drive some to consider relocating to not-quite-so-business-hostile Maryland. More likely, Texas will get the fleeing entrepreneurs, though...
Have they not eyes to see with?
Have they not eyes to see with? This self-proclaimed progressive does. Perhaps the cruelest aspect of modern progressivism is that its anti-capitalism stance dooms millions of people to short lives and abject poverty. Caleb Rossiter wants nothing to do with that...
The trees are gone...
This changed the appearance of the front of the house considerably. It also opened up several south-facing windows, so the house should be considerably brighter now on a fine day...
Sunday, May 4, 2014
California leads the way...
California leads the way ... in government-mandated employee leaves of absence...
Debbie and I are working hard...
Debbie and I are working hard... Hard physical work, for a change. We have several largish trees planted right next to the house. They are so close that they pose a hazard to the house, and our insurance company (rightly, I think), insists that they be removed. Yesterday Debbie and I took down the first one (a Norway Spruce, my mom thinks); it had a 7 inch trunk. This morning we took down a second Norway Spruce, this one with a 6 inch trunk. Armed with a chain saw, loppers, and a pruning saw we chopped them up into bite-sized pieces, loaded them in the pickup, and carted them off to a brush pile we're accumulating. Now we're sitting and resting up, preparing to take down the largest of the three (a juniper of some kind). This one has a 12 inch trunk, so there will be considerably more wood in it...
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Busy day yesterday for us...
Busy day yesterday for us... Debbie and I were running all over Cache Valley, meeting with our flooring guys, our painters, our cabinet makers, and with some paint color experts. Then we went grocery shopping! We were very tired by the time we finally got home – but then we took a drive up into the Wasatch Mountains, the base of which are just a mile from our new home. We drove through an elk preserve (Hardware Ranch) and beyond into the National Forest. It was our first visit into the Wasatch Mountains after the snow melt, and it was beautiful. Spring is springing: the first grass shoots are emerging, the streams are engorged, and you can see it won't be long before things start blooming...
Friday, May 2, 2014
Weird people...
Weird people... An interesting article that actually is about weird people. No, I'm not the subject of it. Though perhaps I should be :)
SpaceX gets injunction prohibiting ULA from buying Russian rockets...
SpaceX gets injunction prohibiting ULA from buying Russian rockets... I wouldn't have expected them to win this injunction, but they did. SpaceX now has the chance to compete for the deal...
For 20 years now...
For 20 years now ... I've been saying that magnetic tape data storage is going to die, imminently. I've always been wrong. Now this – and I may be even wronger...
Geek: co-routines and state machines do basically the same thing...
Geek: co-routines and state machines do basically the same thing... I've never had occasion to investigate co-routines, as I've never written programs in a language that supports them intrinsically. But as I read this article and thought about it, I realized that my implementations of state machines in languages like Java, C, or assembly were basically indistinguishable from a co-routine implementation in the same language. So ... languages that intrinsically support co-routines are actually also intrinsically supporting state machines.
State machines are one of my favorite programming techniques for dealing with a messy real world with minimum complexity. This makes me want to investigate Ruby – and nothing else I've ever read about Ruby did that :)
State machines are one of my favorite programming techniques for dealing with a messy real world with minimum complexity. This makes me want to investigate Ruby – and nothing else I've ever read about Ruby did that :)
Ukraine: it's on...
Ukraine: it's on... I can't help but be reminded of the run-up to WWII, specifically Hitler's deceptions and subsequent invasion of Poland. I also can't help but worry that the West's non-support of Ukraine will lead to further “explorations” by Putin.
Only time will tell. The choices now are Putin's, as the West has already decided to leave Ukraine to its fate. What will Putin do? Will he back off, worried about the reactions from Obama, Merkle, et al? Or will he sense opportunity and start the troops rolling into eastern Ukraine?
My bet is on the latter. I'd love to be wrong...
Only time will tell. The choices now are Putin's, as the West has already decided to leave Ukraine to its fate. What will Putin do? Will he back off, worried about the reactions from Obama, Merkle, et al? Or will he sense opportunity and start the troops rolling into eastern Ukraine?
My bet is on the latter. I'd love to be wrong...
Thursday, May 1, 2014
You wanted the truth. You'll take abashed silence...
You wanted the truth. You'd take abashed silence... Ace, at his best, on the latest Benghazi wrinkles...
Good advice...
Good advice... Things to do before publishing something on the web. I try to do these things before posting on my blog here, though I don't always succeed...
The absurdity of LinkedIn...
The absurdity of LinkedIn... That site is really starting to tick me off with their aggressive marketing of their premium services. Several times now, after being bombarded with stupid efforts like this one, I've been tempted to simply delete my profile there...
Geek: useful lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions...
Geek: useful lifetimes of cryptographic hash functions... Sobering table for secure systems implementers...
Nazi Germany's Type XXI submarines...
Nazi Germany's Type XXI submarines ... advanced, but too late to have any effect on the war's outcome...
Peaks made of ice...
Estimating the value of π...
Estimating the value of π ... with 200 shots from a Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun!
Many moons ago, when I was much younger and even more inclined to waste my time on something fun, I ran a slightly different Monte Carlo estimate of π. That version used a box of 500 straight pins and a grid of lines drawn on paper. As I recall, the estimate I calculated was less than 1% off the actual value of π...
Many moons ago, when I was much younger and even more inclined to waste my time on something fun, I ran a slightly different Monte Carlo estimate of π. That version used a box of 500 straight pins and a grid of lines drawn on paper. As I recall, the estimate I calculated was less than 1% off the actual value of π...
Actual ObamaCare enrollment data...
Actual ObamaCare enrollment data... And it's not good, just as many of us suspected. Key points:
- 33% of people who signed up have not paid, and therefore aren't actually enrolled. That 8 million you heard about? Not so much...
- 31% of the people who actually enrolled (and paid) are under 35 years old. The target was 50%. This is precisely what the insurance companies were afraid would happen, and it means that the largest goal of ObamaCare – getting young people enrolled – has failed. Why? Because 34% of people under 35 were already insured before ObamaCare. The slight difference is actually a decrease from pre-ObamaCare figures. Epic fail.
“I miss having freedom of speech.”
“I miss having freedom of speech.” That's Scott Adams, who is censoring his own blog posts from fear of online reprisals from (generally left-leaning) web sites. He's vulnerable to this because he's a celebrity; he has good reason to fear economic damage from them (by, for example, managing to get his cartoons dropped from newspapers). He doesn't propose any particular solution, but rather is simply telling his readers what he's doing, while bemoaning the fact that he feels compelled to do it.
It's a classic free speech issue: our Constitution allows us to speak freely, but there is no guarantee that we can do so without negative consequences. I'm glad to see that Scott didn't propose curtailing the free speech of others to allow his own free speech to be free of consequences – that's the traditional stance of the left, with their attraction toward laws preventing offensive speech. Scott implies (though he doesn't directly say it) that he'd like to have a way to sue the trolls who actually lie about him (libel). That's an especially challenging thing in the anonymous world of the Internet, where it may not be possible to know who is saying something – though this sort of thing isn't actually new to the Internet; newspapers have published anonymous letters to the editor for centuries.
I've never heard a good solution for this problem. Every solution I've ever heard proposed is fraught with either free speech issues or legal morass issues...
It's a classic free speech issue: our Constitution allows us to speak freely, but there is no guarantee that we can do so without negative consequences. I'm glad to see that Scott didn't propose curtailing the free speech of others to allow his own free speech to be free of consequences – that's the traditional stance of the left, with their attraction toward laws preventing offensive speech. Scott implies (though he doesn't directly say it) that he'd like to have a way to sue the trolls who actually lie about him (libel). That's an especially challenging thing in the anonymous world of the Internet, where it may not be possible to know who is saying something – though this sort of thing isn't actually new to the Internet; newspapers have published anonymous letters to the editor for centuries.
I've never heard a good solution for this problem. Every solution I've ever heard proposed is fraught with either free speech issues or legal morass issues...
So a progressive starts a business...
So a progressive starts a business ... and promptly discovers the profit motive. Political transformation ensues...
One of the best of our Founding Father's many ideas was the notion of a government comprised of ordinary citizens. Now that didn't last long, unfortunately (and this is something the Founding Fathers also foresaw). But while it did, we had a government full of people who actually understood how the real world operated – and what a tremendous boon that was to the country.
I look at the quality of some of the bozos we have in government today, and I want to cry...
One of the best of our Founding Father's many ideas was the notion of a government comprised of ordinary citizens. Now that didn't last long, unfortunately (and this is something the Founding Fathers also foresaw). But while it did, we had a government full of people who actually understood how the real world operated – and what a tremendous boon that was to the country.
I look at the quality of some of the bozos we have in government today, and I want to cry...
I support the legalization of drugs...
I support the legalization of drugs. That's not because I use illegal drugs myself; I do not (I stick strictly to the legal drugs: alcohol and caffeine). Here are some of the reasons why I support legalization.
Have you no decency, sir?
Have you no decency, sir? That's the title of a recent post by Eric S. Raymond, and I find nothing in it to disagree with. The post is about an example that shows clearly the difference between the political response from both the left and the right to a challenging human problem – and how both responses are deeply problematic. The comments (as usual for one of his posts) are just as fascinating as the post itself...
One thing Eric says particularly resonates with me: I don't want anybody to associate me with either of the major parties. Both of them are instruments of power hungry, corrupt big government folks. There are individuals in both parties who are exceptions to this, but unfortunately they are just that: exceptions...
One thing Eric says particularly resonates with me: I don't want anybody to associate me with either of the major parties. Both of them are instruments of power hungry, corrupt big government folks. There are individuals in both parties who are exceptions to this, but unfortunately they are just that: exceptions...
Not so very long ago, we were all poor...
She starts with a statement of fact that is obvious and completely uncontroversial to anyone with even a smattering of knowledge of human history – that is, perhaps 5% of the American citizenry. That fact? That there has been a constant and spectacularly rapid rise in the wealth of the human race since about 1800, no matter how you measure it. It's very sad to me that this fact is not common knowledge...
She goes on to attribute this growth primarily to the advent of respect for traders, which I think is just a bit silly. It seems pretty clear from my own reading of history that the rise of human wealth can be attributed primarily to the conjunction of these things:
- The advance of organized science, which leads directly to technological innovations. This advance continues at an ever-increasing pace; the process is regenerative and there's no end in sight.
- The rise of capitalism, perhaps especially with the advent of stock corporations which allow vast pools of capital to be raised focused on a single business opportunity.
- The rule of law, applied equally to everyone. This is still far from perfect anywhere on the planet, but nevertheless there's a direct correlation between the rule of law (and the correlated rise of personal honesty) with the wealth of nations. Corruption and thugocracy are major reasons why countries like North Korea, Yemen, Pakistan, etc. are generally much poorer than countries like England, Finland, America, etc.
In conversations with my fellow Americans over the years, I've often been struck by their ignorance of both the temporal and geographical history of wealth. Many Americans have not traveled extensively outside of the United States, and many more have never really paid any attention to history. This leads to a set of assumptions – most likely completely unconscious – about the wealth of people in other places and times. Generally that assumption is that they are (or were) much like the United States today – and of course that's very far from the truth.
I've been fortunate to have traveled to many parts of the world, some of them actually quite obscure :) This travel has been almost entirely because of my military service and on business trips – the only exception is a single (wonderful) trip that Debbie and I once made to Costa Rica.
In those travels I have seen firsthand just how poor certain parts of the world are. The Philippines in the '70s (under the corrupt thug Marcos) was one such place. There I spent some time with people who lived in homes on stilts over their rice paddies, who tilled the earth with wooden plows pulled by water oxen, who defecated through a hole in their floor into the rice paddy below, who owned almost nothing made of metal, and who carried potable water by hand from a spring several miles from their home. Today these same people have tractors and cars, live in decent homes, and have running water. What changed? Their government now embraces capitalism and they have the rule of law.
Even outside my own travels there are some spectacular before-and-after examples. China is the most obvious one. Millions of Chinese died of starvation within my own lifetime. Today they are the fastest growing economy on the planet, home to thousands of millionaires, and soon will be the biggest economy on Earth. What happened? Mainly capitalism and a smattering of the rule of law.
Then there's our own history. It's easy for me to remember that when I was a child, people were not generally as wealthy as they are today. It always amazes me how easily people forget this, and especially how easily they conflate the rising prices (due to inflation) with their own decreasing wealth. It's a good mental exercise to think hard about the state of the world in your childhood, and ask if you really think you're not wealthier today. If you're more than 40 years old or so, it should be easy for you to realize how much better off you are today then when you were a child – unless you grew up in a wealthy family and have today become impoverished.
Consider this now-famous quote:
“I really want to move to a country where the poor people are fat.”That's Dinesh D'Souza, quoting an Indian friend. Two things strike me about that quote. The first is the obvious one: that even the poor people in America today are much better off than many people around the world. The second, though, is one that many Americans don't know (or have forgotten): that poor people in America weren't always fat. In fact, less than 100 years ago – in the Great Depression – we had a great many of our citizens hungry to the point of malnutrition. The adults who grew up in that time, including my own parents, were significantly shorter on average than the generation after them (height is the classic gross measure of nutrition).
Now here's my punchline: I strongly suspect that if most Americans understood just two things: the fact that our average wealth has been rapidly increasing, and why – that progressives would be squashed out of existence.
Further, I think the progressives understand this – and that's why they resist educating people about it. What provoked this thought was listening to Harry Reid (something that should only be done with the assistance of alcohol or psychiatric intervention, or both) blather on about income inequality. He said a great many things that I simply cannot accept he actually believes – for Harry is himself a wealthy man, and hobnobs regularly with capitalist titans. If he doesn't believe it, then why is he babbling about it? That's easy: it provides political advantage (i.e., votes). He doesn't want his constituents to understand that capitalism works, and that even with great inequality in income everyone can be better off. That won't get him votes. Stoking class envy, on the other hand, that's a proven success for progressives all the way back to Karl Marx.
How do we educate people about this? I'm afraid I don't have any good ideas on that count. The progressives have established pretty solid control of the educational system, most especially in our universities – where the students are of an age they're likely first interested in political matters. Every time I think about this, the doom comes upon me...
The Democrats don't like being criticized...
The Democrats don't like being criticized ... and they want to amend the Constitution to allow the banning of political criticism. Really.
I don't believe this attempt has any chance at all of succeeding. As Ed Morrissey points out in the linked post, it probably won't even succeed amongst the Democratic caucus. Personally, I think every supporter of this amendment ought to be removed from office by the voters – though most likely there aren't enough of them paying attention to make that happen.
Just for the record, let me point out that Hugo Chavez actually got an amendment like this passed in Venezuela – and that passage serves as a marker, as good as any other I can think of, of start of that country's disastrous fall into the thugocratic mess they're in today...
I don't believe this attempt has any chance at all of succeeding. As Ed Morrissey points out in the linked post, it probably won't even succeed amongst the Democratic caucus. Personally, I think every supporter of this amendment ought to be removed from office by the voters – though most likely there aren't enough of them paying attention to make that happen.
Just for the record, let me point out that Hugo Chavez actually got an amendment like this passed in Venezuela – and that passage serves as a marker, as good as any other I can think of, of start of that country's disastrous fall into the thugocratic mess they're in today...
Today is a big day in Paradise...
Today is a big day in Paradise... That's Paradise, Utah, where our new home is located. I've been “camping” in our new home (with a bed, a table, and a chair) while getting some remodeling done, and my lovely bride Debbie has been holding down the fort in our Jamul, California home. Today she's winging up to visit with me for a week. She'll see first-hand what it's like to camp in the plaster dust :) She can only do this because of the wonderful Dionecia, a local (to Jamul) lady who takes care of our house and animals when we go on vacation. She was available this week, and Debbie jumped on it. In a couple of hours, I'll be driving down to the Salt Lake City airport (the closest major airport to our new home) to pick her up. Woo hoo!
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Why we put mercury in vaccines...
Why we put mercury in vaccines... A deep dive for a lay audience, which I found very interesting...
Southern cops have a way with words...
Southern cops have a way with words... Via my card-carrying ancient-American mom, this collection of quotes allegedly transcribed from the dashcam videos of South Carolina State Troopers:
"You know, stop lights don't come any redder than the one you just went through."
"Relax, the handcuffs are tight because they're new. They'll stretch after you wear them a while."
"If you take your hands off the car, I'll make your birth certificate a worthless document."
"If you run, you'll only go to jail tired."
"Can you run faster than 1,200 feet per second? Because that's the speed of the bullet that'll be chasing you."
"You don't know how fast you were going? I guess that means I can write anything I want to on the ticket."
"Yes, sir, you can talk to the shift supervisor, but I don't think it will help. Oh, did I mention that I'm the shift supervisor?"
"Warning! You want a warning? O.K, I'm warning you not to do that again or I'll give you another ticket."
"The answer to this last question will determine whether you are drunk or not. Was Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?"
"Fair? You want me to be fair? Listen, fair is a place where you go to ride on rides, eat cotton candy and corn dogs and step in monkey poop."
"Yeah, we have a quota. Two more tickets and my wife gets a toaster oven."
"In God we trust; all others we run through NCIC." (NCIC is the National Crime Information Center)
"Just how big were those 'two beers' you say you had?"
"No sir, we don't have quotas anymore. We used to, but now we're allowed to write as many tickets as we can."
"I'm glad to hear that the Chief is a personal friend of yours. So you know someone who can post your bail."
"You didn't think we gave pretty women tickets? You're right, we don't. Sign here."
Programming sucks...
Programming sucks... I suspect every software developer has trouble explaining to non-developers how challenging it can be to write programs. The intangible nature of software hides its size and complexity to anyone who isn't themselves a programmer, unlike just about any other trade you can imagine. A carpenter, for instance, can point to a cabinet he just built – and anybody can see the heft and quality of his job. Not so with a programmer.
This article attempts to cure that problem, and I think it does a pretty good job. I'd love to hear whether my non-programmer readers think so, too.
There are quite a few passages in the article that I quite enjoyed. Here's just one:
This article attempts to cure that problem, and I think it does a pretty good job. I'd love to hear whether my non-programmer readers think so, too.
There are quite a few passages in the article that I quite enjoyed. Here's just one:
Every programmer occasionally, when nobody's home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It's a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.Yes. Exactly right! Well, except for the Scotch bit...
This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It's concise. It doesn't do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.
Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they're told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers' snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.
Tolls on the Interstate highways?
Tolls on the Interstate highways? The long-standing prohibition has been removed by the Obama administration. The linked article talks mostly about the fact that the gas tax (a fixed rate per gallon) hasn't been raised for over 20 years, and more gas-efficient vehicles use less gas and therefore contribute less gas tax. That's all true, but leaves out another factor which is even larger in financial terms: the federal highway trust fund has been increasingly used for “green” that have nothing to do with highways, including projects like trains and metropolitan bus systems. When the highway trust fund was initially established, it was envisioned as a way to maintain and extend the Interstate U.S. highway system, period. It has since been “raided” for all sorts of stupid (but politically attractive) ideas.
I'd like to see the trust fund restored to its original purpose, and the gas tax switched to a tax based on mileage times weight. I can see people throwing things at me already, as my notion would kill a few sacred cows. However, the current tax system has two enormous distortions in it. The biggest is that trucking is vastly under-taxed – trucks do the majority of wear-and-tear damage to our highways (because of their weight), but they don't pay a proportional share of the highway tax. Second, the fuel-based tax effectively subsidizes alternative fueled cars, especially all-electric cars.
There's a refinement to my weight formula that's worth considering, too: using the load per square inch, rather than the total weight of the vehicle. Such a refinement would encourage trucking companies to use vehicles with more tires (and lower air pressures in those tires), which cause much less wear and tear on the roadways.
But of course none of this will actually happen. The politicians will keep raiding the trust fund, because it gets them votes. The taxes will continue to be levied in an irrational way, because it costs less votes (and gathers more campaign contributions from special interest lobbyists). And I'll continue to wonder whether Winston Churchill was actually correct when he said:
I'd like to see the trust fund restored to its original purpose, and the gas tax switched to a tax based on mileage times weight. I can see people throwing things at me already, as my notion would kill a few sacred cows. However, the current tax system has two enormous distortions in it. The biggest is that trucking is vastly under-taxed – trucks do the majority of wear-and-tear damage to our highways (because of their weight), but they don't pay a proportional share of the highway tax. Second, the fuel-based tax effectively subsidizes alternative fueled cars, especially all-electric cars.
There's a refinement to my weight formula that's worth considering, too: using the load per square inch, rather than the total weight of the vehicle. Such a refinement would encourage trucking companies to use vehicles with more tires (and lower air pressures in those tires), which cause much less wear and tear on the roadways.
But of course none of this will actually happen. The politicians will keep raiding the trust fund, because it gets them votes. The taxes will continue to be levied in an irrational way, because it costs less votes (and gathers more campaign contributions from special interest lobbyists). And I'll continue to wonder whether Winston Churchill was actually correct when he said:
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Putin threatens astronauts...
Putin threatens astronauts... Well, that's the headline on Drudge. Reading the article, I get a slightly different impression: we're imposing sanctions on Russia, and Putin is letting us know that there are consequences to those sanctions to us. That's something that is obvious to anyone who hasn't been hiding under a rock since about 1991 – ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian economy has been more and more tightly integrated with that of the rest of the world.
The rationale behind “smart diplomacy” is, fundamentally, that we have more tools than just military might to change the behavior of other countries. Exercising military force has a heavy price in blood and treasure. Exercising “smart diplomacy” has a heavy price in economic terms, usually very unevenly distributed. That's the case here. For example, western Europe has been buying cheap natural gas and oil from Russia for over 20 years. Cut that source off (because of sanctions), and the price of energy in Europe will spike – and because energy markets are global, we'll feel it here as well. However, if the sanctions are well-chosen the impact on Russia will be far larger, proportionally.
So who would expect Putin to just accept this? The “smart diplomacy” rulebook says that Putin would see what the sanctions are going to do to him, and he would back down. Putin's actual reaction is to strike back, by hitting back at us anywhere he can that would hurt, short of overt military action. One place he can do that is with our manned space program, which is currently utterly dependent on Russian rockets and the capsules that return astronauts to earth. I find his threat here to be completely predictable. I think the right answer is simple: cancel the manned space program. Abandon the ISS. That will save the U.S. taxpayer a boatload of totally wasted money, while simultaneously cutting off a source of revenue that Putin is using to prop up an otherwise failed space program...
The rationale behind “smart diplomacy” is, fundamentally, that we have more tools than just military might to change the behavior of other countries. Exercising military force has a heavy price in blood and treasure. Exercising “smart diplomacy” has a heavy price in economic terms, usually very unevenly distributed. That's the case here. For example, western Europe has been buying cheap natural gas and oil from Russia for over 20 years. Cut that source off (because of sanctions), and the price of energy in Europe will spike – and because energy markets are global, we'll feel it here as well. However, if the sanctions are well-chosen the impact on Russia will be far larger, proportionally.
So who would expect Putin to just accept this? The “smart diplomacy” rulebook says that Putin would see what the sanctions are going to do to him, and he would back down. Putin's actual reaction is to strike back, by hitting back at us anywhere he can that would hurt, short of overt military action. One place he can do that is with our manned space program, which is currently utterly dependent on Russian rockets and the capsules that return astronauts to earth. I find his threat here to be completely predictable. I think the right answer is simple: cancel the manned space program. Abandon the ISS. That will save the U.S. taxpayer a boatload of totally wasted money, while simultaneously cutting off a source of revenue that Putin is using to prop up an otherwise failed space program...
Some branches of science have challenges...
Some branches of science have challenges ... with valid, replicable studies. It's a long, but fascinating piece...
Color me unsurprised...
Color me unsurprised... How the U.S. Post Office killed digital mail – an object lesson in how a government bureaucracy can crush an innovative entrepreneur.
One quote from U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe in this story really caught my eye:
And it occurs to me that one of those “junk mailers” would be the U.S. Congress with their franking privilege (free mail). I see red every time I get one of those in my mail ... my tax dollars paying to help a bozo incumbent stay in office...
One quote from U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe in this story really caught my eye:
“You disrupt my service and we will never work with you. You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.”That's enough reason right there to privatize the U.S. Post Office. A private vendor would very quickly figure out who the real customer is, once that bulk mail subsidy disappeared.
And it occurs to me that one of those “junk mailers” would be the U.S. Congress with their franking privilege (free mail). I see red every time I get one of those in my mail ... my tax dollars paying to help a bozo incumbent stay in office...
You've probably never asked yourself...
You've probably never asked yourself ... where the world's longest conveyor belt was. Recently I read another interesting factoid about conveyor belts (I can't locate the source right now): that around 90% of all the material used by mankind rides on a conveyor belt at some point during its manufacture...
World's deadliest killer...
There was a time, in my youth, when mankind was on the verge of winning the war against mosquitoes. Then Rachel Carson's exaggerated (and sometimes outright false) accusations about DDT led to political action to ban DDT, and that ban indirectly killed more people than all the wars in the 20th century combined. The effects of that ban are still killing hundreds of thousands of people every year...
Oh, my...
While it's not especially surprising that the average American citizen doesn't know much about his or her own country, it's still disappointing and depressing to watch. Even more depressing when you consider that these are the people who elect our federal government (which goes a long way toward explaining how we got the knuckle-headed bunch of evil clowns we have).
Is education the cure? I think not, as I strongly suspect the real issue isn't a lack of opportunity to learn, but rather a lack of interest. Does that make them “bad citizens?” Not necessarily – but maybe it makes them citizens who shouldn't have a say in how this country is run. I know some will think this heretical, but ... the more I watch my fellow citizens, the less appealing “one man, one vote” seems...
Excellent!
Excellent! I was really disappointed when Mia Love lost in 2012 – but now it looks like she's clinched the Republican nomination, and therefore likely the 2016 election for Utah's (conservative) 4th District. She impressed me with her no-nonsense views, excellent communications skills, and a brain that's still working well (a few years in Washington might change that, dang it). The 4th District is an odd-shaped district just south of the Great Salt Lake – not far from our new home in the 1st District. Conservatives are making a big deal of the fact that she's a woman, and black – but I wish they'd make a big deal of her competence and small-government stance...
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
The social sciences...
The social sciences... There's good reason to be suspicious of its results...
Geek: integer overflow checking...
Geek: integer overflow checking... This morning I ran across this short article that describes how to implement integer overflow checking in languages that don't expose the underlying hardware's overflow flag. Java is such a programming language, and CERT has a fine implementation of routines that provide the check.
I've long been surprised that Java doesn't include such checks, at the very least as options. In general Java tries very hard to be “safe” (for example, with array bounds checking and stack overflow checking) – but not on something as common and pernicious as integer overflow. It's a mystery to me.
Probably because of my “upbringing” on computer hardware and assembly language programming, I've always been very conscious of the possibility of integer overflow in my own code. Despite that, I've been burned by it several times, most especially with numeric comparisons (which I've blogged about before).
Just a few weeks ago, a colleague from a job I had almost 15 years ago contacted me out of the blue. This fellow happens to be Russian, and worked with me on Java code back then. He asked me if I'd ever heard of “integer underflow”, and if I could explain it to him. I could, of course, and I did. But once again I was shocked to discover that a well-educated, experienced, and superbly competent software engineer didn't know about something so basic. I engaged him in an email conversation about it, and I think I know now how such a thing happened: his education in computer science assumed the presence of a high-level programming language, and he only learned how computers actually work in broad, abstract brush strokes. Once again, what surprises me the most about this is just how productive a software engineer can be with such a (to me) gaping hole in his knowledge...
I've long been surprised that Java doesn't include such checks, at the very least as options. In general Java tries very hard to be “safe” (for example, with array bounds checking and stack overflow checking) – but not on something as common and pernicious as integer overflow. It's a mystery to me.
Probably because of my “upbringing” on computer hardware and assembly language programming, I've always been very conscious of the possibility of integer overflow in my own code. Despite that, I've been burned by it several times, most especially with numeric comparisons (which I've blogged about before).
Just a few weeks ago, a colleague from a job I had almost 15 years ago contacted me out of the blue. This fellow happens to be Russian, and worked with me on Java code back then. He asked me if I'd ever heard of “integer underflow”, and if I could explain it to him. I could, of course, and I did. But once again I was shocked to discover that a well-educated, experienced, and superbly competent software engineer didn't know about something so basic. I engaged him in an email conversation about it, and I think I know now how such a thing happened: his education in computer science assumed the presence of a high-level programming language, and he only learned how computers actually work in broad, abstract brush strokes. Once again, what surprises me the most about this is just how productive a software engineer can be with such a (to me) gaping hole in his knowledge...
Synaesthesia beneficial?
Synaesthesia beneficial? Ever since I first heard about this condition, some 40 years ago, it's fascinated me. I've met just one person who had it; when he heard certain sounds (especially pure notes), the colors he perceived changed. I'd love to experience it myself, though I'm not at all sure I'd want it permanently :)
“Man posters”
“Man posters” Via my card-carrying ancient-American mom. I couldn't possibly pick a favorite out of these :)
Monday, April 28, 2014
Eight inch floppies still in use...
Eight inch floppies still in use ... in our ICBM silos. They're older than the young men and women stationed there. Does anyone still make those things? All I could find were a few on sale, as rare antiques :)
California leads the way ...
California leads the way ... in attracting businesses to other states! Some big employers are picking up and moving out, often to Texas. What big businesses? Well, how about Toyota America?
Vintage stewardesses...
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Americans who haven't traveled outside this country might not realize that in much of the world, such stewardesses are still the norm. That's especially true in eastern Europe and Asia...
Binary fractions bit Donald Knuth!
Binary fractions bit Donald Knuth! At infrequent intervals, Donald Knuth publishes notes on TeX updates. Even though I haven't used TeX for years, I always read these because, well, Knuth. This one has a passage that tickled my fancy, as it's about one of my own pet peeves: the use of binary fractions (including binary floating point numbers). It seems that Donald Knuth, one of the pantheon of computer science gods, was bitten by them, too:
Companies I worked for have been burned by this issue a surprising number of times. The most memorable case I ran into was a company that implemented an electronic stock and option trading platform that used binary floating point math to hold monetary values. Big, big problems resulted. To fix it, I had to do battle with a dozen or so senior engineers – very experienced and generally competent folks – who had a great deal of trouble accepting the simple fact that binary floating point numbers are incapable of exactly representing a great many decimal fractions...
I made the foolish mistake of using binary fractions internally, while providing approximate decimal equivalents in the user interface. I should have defined a scaled point to be 1/100000 of a printer's point, thereby making internal and external representations coincide. This anomaly, which is discussed further in [5], is the only real regret that I have today about TeX's original design.The gods are fallible, too :)
Companies I worked for have been burned by this issue a surprising number of times. The most memorable case I ran into was a company that implemented an electronic stock and option trading platform that used binary floating point math to hold monetary values. Big, big problems resulted. To fix it, I had to do battle with a dozen or so senior engineers – very experienced and generally competent folks – who had a great deal of trouble accepting the simple fact that binary floating point numbers are incapable of exactly representing a great many decimal fractions...
History of computers in space...
History of computers in space ... NASA's pages. Lots of good stuff for technology history geeks here...
Nutrition “science”...
Nutrition “science” ... is modern, politically-correct snake oil. The more it is seriously examined, the less valid it gets...
The IPCC report is worthless...
The IPCC report is worthless... That's not really news, if you've been listening. The latest revelation just adds to the pile of evidence...
The future of orthopedic casts?
“Sometimes, it makes my blood boil...”
“Sometimes, it makes my blood boil...” I'll say! It's hard to believe this lawsuit could succeed, even in Canada. I sure hope it doesn't...
The first practical RAM...
The first computers I ever worked with (Univac CP-642A) used exactly this kind of magnetic core bit plane memory – 30 planes, each with 32,768 bits. They occupied about one cubic yard of the computer, packed with not only the bit planes themselves, but lots of both analog and digital circuitry. They required constant adjustment (read and write current levels, pulse length and timing, and sense line gain), a tedious and involved procedure that was part art and part science. In the U.S. Navy school that taught me how computers worked, and how to repair them, I also learned about older technologies: storage tubes and mercury delay line memories. Weird stuff, by today's standards – but exotic and bleeding edge stuff back then...
The first microcomputer I built used a 1702 UV-erasable EPROM, with 256 bytes of ROM – more than the biggest mainframe ROM I'd worked on. Those chips, as I recall, cost about $50 then – which seemed dirt cheap to me. My first digital design project was a programmer for those 1702 EPROMs, so that I could enter two hexadecimal digits for each byte on a keypad and automatically program it. Before I built this programmer, the only way I could “burn” code into a 1702 was to mail it off to a friend in San Diego who had a programmer, along with a hand-typed listing of the code I wanted. When my ship was floating around in the Indian Ocean, the round trip could take several months! I had a big incentive to build that programmer :)
Another gray-haired programmer ...
Another gray-haired programmer ... describing what his early days as a programmer were like. Most programmers my age seem to have similar experiences.
My own programming beginnings were much different, primarily because I had no access to programming tools (compilers, assemblers, linkers, debuggers, etc.). In the early '70s I began programming on Univac “mainframe” computers owned by the U.S. Navy. These were in a lab used for training repair technicians. The only way (initially) to load a program was by using the switches and lights on the front panel to load the program's machine code, one 30-bit word at a time. I wrote that code on lined paper, assembly mnemonics on the left, octal machine code (hand-assembled!) on the right. When I modified code, to avoid re-assembling all that by hand, I'd put a jump instruction at the first modified line of code, to jump to a patch that implemented the change, and then jumped back. After a few rounds of debugging, my code could be quite a mess :)
Later, out of sheer desperation, I developed my own software engineering tools. At the time, I had no idea that better tools existed elsewhere; I was just trying to save myself from the tedium of manual machine code entry. I developed tools that were the rough equivalents of monitors, loaders, assemblers, debuggers, and linkers, though I didn't know them by those names.
I went through the same sequence when I first started programming microcomputers, in 1975 – though by then I knew of the existence of commercial tools. However, those tools generally ran on minicomputers (like the PDP-11) that I had no access to and couldn't possibly afford to buy. Even the software tools were out of reach financially. So once again I wrote my own tools, for several microcomputers (especially the Motorola 6800, RCA 1802, Intel 8080, and Zilog Z80).
Today very few people would consider writing their own software development tools. For one thing, excellent tools are readily available on the Internet for free, thus removing all the things that might force one into writing one's own tools. It's also true, though, that the tools have become far more complex as the CPUs have become more and more powerful. In 1975, one could write a functional assembler in a few hundred lines of code over a week or two. A really nice compiler might be three or four times that effort. A nice assembler for today's Intel chips would probably take several years of work.
I've often noted that having had the experience of writing my own tools gives me a much different perspective on programming than many younger programmers have. Mostly this manifests in having a reasonably good understanding of how those tools work, whereas for many perfectly competent programmers, the mechanism by which their (say) Java source code actually gets executed is a complete mystery – and one which seldom needs to be explored...
My own programming beginnings were much different, primarily because I had no access to programming tools (compilers, assemblers, linkers, debuggers, etc.). In the early '70s I began programming on Univac “mainframe” computers owned by the U.S. Navy. These were in a lab used for training repair technicians. The only way (initially) to load a program was by using the switches and lights on the front panel to load the program's machine code, one 30-bit word at a time. I wrote that code on lined paper, assembly mnemonics on the left, octal machine code (hand-assembled!) on the right. When I modified code, to avoid re-assembling all that by hand, I'd put a jump instruction at the first modified line of code, to jump to a patch that implemented the change, and then jumped back. After a few rounds of debugging, my code could be quite a mess :)
Later, out of sheer desperation, I developed my own software engineering tools. At the time, I had no idea that better tools existed elsewhere; I was just trying to save myself from the tedium of manual machine code entry. I developed tools that were the rough equivalents of monitors, loaders, assemblers, debuggers, and linkers, though I didn't know them by those names.
I went through the same sequence when I first started programming microcomputers, in 1975 – though by then I knew of the existence of commercial tools. However, those tools generally ran on minicomputers (like the PDP-11) that I had no access to and couldn't possibly afford to buy. Even the software tools were out of reach financially. So once again I wrote my own tools, for several microcomputers (especially the Motorola 6800, RCA 1802, Intel 8080, and Zilog Z80).
Today very few people would consider writing their own software development tools. For one thing, excellent tools are readily available on the Internet for free, thus removing all the things that might force one into writing one's own tools. It's also true, though, that the tools have become far more complex as the CPUs have become more and more powerful. In 1975, one could write a functional assembler in a few hundred lines of code over a week or two. A really nice compiler might be three or four times that effort. A nice assembler for today's Intel chips would probably take several years of work.
I've often noted that having had the experience of writing my own tools gives me a much different perspective on programming than many younger programmers have. Mostly this manifests in having a reasonably good understanding of how those tools work, whereas for many perfectly competent programmers, the mechanism by which their (say) Java source code actually gets executed is a complete mystery – and one which seldom needs to be explored...
A British foreshadowing...
A British foreshadowing... Many American liberal academics (“liberal” is almost redundant in that phrase) point to Britain's less-than-absolute free speech as a model for the United States. They'd like to enshrine a new right: the right to not be offended. That British way has led to an absurdity that I find appalling, though I'm sure many on the left would beg to differ.
In Winchester, England, a British political candidate stood up to speak. He quoted the great British leader Winston Churchill – and was arrested. Really.
That's where we're headed. Elements of this kind of speech nannyism are already in place on American college campuses, where such a speech would be similarly banned. One more progressive on the Supreme Court and such arrests are likely to become possible here...
In Winchester, England, a British political candidate stood up to speak. He quoted the great British leader Winston Churchill – and was arrested. Really.
That's where we're headed. Elements of this kind of speech nannyism are already in place on American college campuses, where such a speech would be similarly banned. One more progressive on the Supreme Court and such arrests are likely to become possible here...
Cliven Bundy...
Cliven Bundy... I haven't said anything about this incident because I was completely uncertain what the heck was going on. Some time has gone by now, and it looks to me like most of the salient facts are public. They are:
- Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher, ran his cattle on BLM land
- BLM charges a fee for this privilege, which Bundy didn't pay for 10 years
- Bundy refuses to recognize federal ownership of that BLM land
- Bundy claims “ancestral rights” to graze on that land, a privilege non-existent under long-standing U.S. law
- Bundy made (and continues to make) overtly racist comments in a public setting, instantly causing his (mostly libertarian or conservative) supporters to backpedal like mad
- the Desert Tortoise, listed as endangered, is native on that land
- Harry Reid and his relatives have no personal interest in the land Bundy was using, breathless Internet reports and Harry Reid's unsavoriness notwithstanding
- the BLM decided to take action to evict Bundy from its land; the reasons for its timing are unclear
- the BLM used massive, near-military force to seize Bundy's cattle
- the BLM unilaterally suspended ordinary civil rights (such as the freedom of speech) in the process of its eviction
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Economists v. Ecologists...
Economists v. Ecologists... Interesting article by Matt Ridley, who is a generally interesting writer...
Can kittens cure constipation?
Can kittens cure constipation? Uh, no. But that sure would be the most pleasant medical procedure I ever heard of!
BTW, if you haven't read Mary Roach's books, you're missing a treat...
BTW, if you haven't read Mary Roach's books, you're missing a treat...
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Geek: a video on compression and Kolmogorov complexity...
Why are ferns still alive?
Why are ferns still alive? It's an interesting story, involving botany, detective work, an unlikely accident, and DNA analysis...
Holy rotating air foils!
The elephant in the room...
The elephant in the room ... for manned space travel outside the Earth system (such as a trip to Mars) is the effects of cosmic rays on humans: basically the same as any other high doses of energetic ionizing radiation. Think cancer and ugly deaths.
The van Allen belts around the Earth protect our astronauts in Earth orbit, and the trip to the moon is so short that total exposures are small enough to not be life-threatening. None of this is true on long and distant voyages, and nobody knows how to fix that. This is a good backgrounder on the topic, which seems to be studiously ignored in all of NASA's breathless pressers.
Personally, I think all manned space exploration should be stopped until and if a solution for this problem is found. The presence of this problem is enough of a reason all by itself to have NASA (and any other government-funded space program) to focus exclusively on robotic exploration.
Not that either common sense or my opinion counts for anything, of course. I'm just whistling in the wind here...
The van Allen belts around the Earth protect our astronauts in Earth orbit, and the trip to the moon is so short that total exposures are small enough to not be life-threatening. None of this is true on long and distant voyages, and nobody knows how to fix that. This is a good backgrounder on the topic, which seems to be studiously ignored in all of NASA's breathless pressers.
Personally, I think all manned space exploration should be stopped until and if a solution for this problem is found. The presence of this problem is enough of a reason all by itself to have NASA (and any other government-funded space program) to focus exclusively on robotic exploration.
Not that either common sense or my opinion counts for anything, of course. I'm just whistling in the wind here...
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