Quote of the Day

Skippy (of Enjoy Every Sandwich) clearly understands New Jersey very well (and that's an escaped New Jerseyite's assessment):

New Jersey is the kind of place where the average obituary ends with the sentence "Authorities do not expect to find the deceased's remains." It is one of the very few places on Earth where the centers of power controlled by the Mafia are more honest and dependable than those that are not. And that, my friends, is pretty much all that makes New Jersey even remotely interesting.

If you're unoffended by outrageously crude, rude, and sexually explicit commentary, then go read the rest of it.

Barking Mad Englishwomen...

Rod Liddle's latest piece (in the London Times) is a great example of British humor at its finest. He skewers the BBC over recent events, and tackles a few other subjects as well – such as the new Mrs. bin Laden:

Another important blow struck in the war against terror. A rather dippy English lady called Jane Felix-Browne has married Osama Bin Laden’s son Omar and intends to live with him in Saudi Arabia. Felix-Browne, 51, who also uses the name Zaina Mohamad al-Sabah and is plainly as mad as a snake, says Omar, 26, loves his dad very much and misses him dreadfully but they “disagree about tactics”.

According to Felix-Browne, Omar hasn’t spoken to Osama since - er, when was it? - 2001. Well, we’ve all had a bit of a problem getting hold of him since then, haven’t we. Maybe he didn’t pay his phone bill in Tora Bora, who knows.

The two lovers met, incidentally, while Felix-Browne, a grandmother who has been married five times before, was having a look around the pyramids: it was love at first sight, for her. The name Bin Laden gave her no qualms at all, she said. Any more than if it had been Crippen or Gadaffi, I suppose.

This is the way forward, though. Never mind the cluster bombs and Challenger tanks, the way to defeat Al-Qaeda is to dispatch legions of barking mad Englishwomen to mate with them, thus seriously compromising the jihadist gene pool and perhaps destroying the terrorists’ resolve and even their will to live.

Ah, yes. Barking mad Englishwomen, that's the ticket. You're doomed, doomed I say, Islamofascists!

Fortress Update

Last October – nine months ago, I engaged a contractor to build a “safe house” on our property. This would be an all-concrete and completely fireproof building to protect us and our irreplaceable possessions in the event of a wildfire. I dubbed this building the “fortress”, and I posted about it and my difficulties with the contractor several times.

I've been soldiering on with this project the entire time, though I haven't posted much about it. But today we are celebrating a major milestone: we finally obtained a permit to build the fortress. It's all signed off, with dozens of approvals from so many bureaucrats with functions that you just wouldn't believe. It's the nanny state gone wild, with twisted, power-crazed bureaucrats running amok in every nook and cranny, torturing permit applicants until they scream satisfactorily. The final irony, of course, is that one must pay for the privilege of being tortured.

So now I have some paper that is plastered all over with stamps of approval. My wallet is several thousand dollars lighter than it was. And exactly what was the point of all this? They have given me permission to build the exact same 16’ x 16’ building that I planned to build in the first place. No changes were required at all. The process took eight months, untold hours of my time and my contractor's time, cost thousands of dollars, and added zero value.

And I'll bet you the planning department has no idea why I would be unhappy about this...

Brotherly News

My brother Scott was in the news today. He planted a “century plant” (agave americana) in Virginia Beach several years ago, and it has thrived there. So much so that this year it is blooming – which century plants do just once and then die.

These plants are native to our area (southern California), but certainly not to Virginia. Scott had to get creative to make the right sort of home for it there:

Not so for the Oceanfront agave. Landscaper Scott Dilatush planted the hearty specimen about seven years ago. He credits an anchoring of concrete and rocks and a special soil mix with "super-aged cow manure " for aiding the plant's growth.

"It's acting like it's in Florida instead of Virginia," he said.

There you have it. Ancient cow manure, that's the ticket!

The original article is here, and more information on agave americana can be found here and here.

Poll

Google just added a new feature to its blogs: polling. Just as an experiment, yesterday I put up a poll about a simple science question: why is our sky blue? I'll be putting up more polls, on whatever subject I feel like – please keep an eye out for them...

And vote!

Cognitive Bias

Cognitive bias is just a fancy term for a readily observable phenomenon: we humans aren't necessarily logical in our thinking. Often these cognitive biases can be traced back to some evolutionary advantage they conveyed (which may or may not still be an advantage in our modern world).

For example, we humans have a special horror for risks of death by unusual means. Around these parts, many people are quite frightened by our abundant rattlesnakes – and it is possible for a rattlesnake to kill you. Last year, in fact, seven people in the U.S did die from a rattlesnake bite (two of these were small children; four were adults who did not get treatment for various reasons, and one was an elderly man who apparently had a heart attack just before being bitten).

The same people who are frightened by rattlesnakes will climb into their car for a trip without the slightest care – despite knowing that over 100 people die every day in traffic “accidents” (39,189 in 2005, the most recent year for which data is available)! By any logical analysis, we should all be much more frightened by driving to the grocery store than we should be rattlesnakes...

A similar cognitive bias affects the lamestream media's reporting on the war on terror, and most people's perceptions of it. I've noted this in quite a few conversations – in general, people seem to very badly overestimate our war casualties. Of course this affects their perception of the war and how it's progressing; they see the war on terror as being unreasonably costly compared to it's benefits. The sad thing is that this perception doesn't stand up to any rational analysis, much like our fear of rattlesnakes versus our fear of driving.

For starters, ponder this: in over four years of our war on terror, the total military casualties are about the same as the traffic fatalities from a single month. Even that is an overestimate, because it neglects something rather important: our military personnel are at risk even when they're not at war. From 1980 to 1999 (a relatively quiet period), our military suffered (on average) about 1,600 deaths per year from non-hostile causes. Adjusting for changes in the size of our military and for the fraction of our military directly engaged in the war on terror, a reasonable estimate is that those forces would have suffered about 2,400 deaths in the same four years, even if the war on terror had never occurred. So the incremental casualties directly caused by the war are more like 1,500 – about the same as the number of traffic fatalities in just 10 days.

Ponder that.

The men and women of our military engaged in the war on terror are heroes to me, and I mean that in the most literal sense. I think about them and admire them often; I read everything I can get my hands on about them. I mourn those who have been killed or injured. But I am also very conscious of something else: that our military's competence, combined with the amazing technology we possess, has lowered the human cost (to us) of warfare to levels far below many other risks that face us – and at the same time has increased the lethality to our enemies. By any rational measure, our military heroes are kicking al Qaeda's ass, hard; they are dying in large numbers. That's not a pretty fact, or a politically correct fact – but it is a fact. It's also the objective in a war, as General Patton famously said:

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

The only way that al Qaeda is going to win this war is if we give up. Their poor dumb bastards are dying in droves (especially in Iraq), while our astonishingly expert military is suffering very light war casualties. Partly because of this cognitive bias, a significant fraction of Americans (and virtually the entire Democratic party, except Joe Lieberman) are ready to give up, and hand al Qaeda a tremendous victory. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid make almost daily calls for withdrawal from Iraq – they want us to unilaterally surrender.

Such “leaders” shouldn't be allowed outside to play without adult supervision...

Fun Project

It's a rare and special treat when I can combine my hobby with my professional skills and experience. Over the past few weeks I've been spending some of my spare time doing exactly that – creating a web site to display slide rule information. The information is a compendium of all the models of slide rules ever made by Hemmi, who was the world's largest slide rule manufacturer. The data on this site was collected by Paul Ross, with help from several other slide rule collectors. It is now the “gold standard” reference for everything Hemmi.

The original web site was created (by Paul Ross) using Microsoft Excel. This was a tool familiar to Paul, and therefore very easy for him to use. But the resulting web site only works well with Internet Exploder (Microsoft pays little attention to compatibility), is very slow to download (because the HTML file is huge), and is a purely static page (you can't interact with the web page in any way). Paul is a slide rule god, not a geek. I'm a geek. I volunteered to help, and Paul eagerly accepted.

Last night I posted the first beta test version of the new site, and sent a message to slide rule collectors to have them start banging on it. I got my first bug report this morning, and I'm sure I'll get more. The new site “understands” the Hemmi slide rule data – you can do things like sort the slide rules in various ways, and limit the slide rules that you're looking at. From a technical perspective, one of the most challenging things was figuring out how to display the large amount of data in a way that was both compact and easy to read. This depends on the way the web browsers lay out tables, which is a very tricky thing. To help with this problem, I made many of the user interface details changeable on the fly – something not often seen on web sites.

Bottom line: it was lots of fun!

Thinking Blogger

Last year I had the privilege of working with Dale Roe on the 2,996 Project that honored the victims of 9/11. I wrote some software that helped manage the sign-up process for the several thousand bloggers who volunteered to make a post in tribute to one of the victims. We got to know each other a little bit from that work, but haven't had much contact since last September.

Out of the blue yesterday, Dale wrote me an email. It seems that he's chosen me (and two others) for a "Thinking Blogger" award. In the parlance of the blog memes, he “tagged” me. Other than accusing me of being a “staunch Republican”, he had only nice things to say. The gist of his comments is that while he often doesn't agree with my point of view, my posts challenge him, and make him think. What more could I ask?

The local Republicans (think Duncan Hunter) would probably have some sort of heart palpitations if I joined – there aren't very many Republicans in favor of open legal immigration, or decriminalizing drugs and prostitution. Some Republicans (e.g. Bush, McCain, Thompson) have a perspective on the war on terror that I largely share, and many share my fiscal conservatism. About the only political party I could imagine joining would be the “Tom Party”, which has just one member...

But I do appreciate the fact that Dale reads my blog, and even more that my posts challenge him to think about his positions (whatever they are!). And of course it's cool to get an award.

Under the rules of this award (see below), I now have to choose five other bloggers to get a “Thinking Blogger” award. Here are my choices:

1. Dilbert Blog: Scott Adams (the cartoonist behind Dilbert) has a way of looking at the world that is very different that most people. His observations and insights are often quite funny, but they are always thought-provoking and often challenge assumptions you normally think of as unassailable.
   
   
2. Schneier on Security: Bruce Schneier is one of the most sober and level-headed thinkers about security. He's an authority on cryptography algorithms and systems, but immersion in this led him to an even more interesting set of problems: security in the real world. While his focus is more-or-less on computer security, he also delves into other kinds of security (terrorism, burglary, etc.) – with his same trademark clear thinking and focus on the results rather than the process.
   
   
3. The Bleat: James Lileks weaves together a sort of diary of his life and pungent observations on the events of the day. He has a special talent for distilling the essence of a very complex issue or event into a one or two sentence comment that will cause you to rock back and say “whoa!” – and quite possibly laugh out loud at the same time.
   
   
4. CoyoteBlog: Warren Meyer is a libertarian business owner who is completely unintimidated by big, complex issues – and is particularly good at analysis and challenging assumptions. Most recently he's tackled the global warming hypothesis, writing (and posting) a small book.
   
   
5. Enjoy Every Sandwich: You can count on “Skippy” to make you think in different ways about familiar issues. You can also depend on him to be rude, offensive, and outrageous – if you're offended by completely uninhibited sexual imagery (and imagination!), don't read Skippy – but your prudery will keep you from an often interesting perspective.
   

Here are the rules for this award:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote .

The Bet

Scott Armstrong is a noted expert on long-range forecasting – he quite literally wrote the book on the subject. He's recently written a paper (available here, PDF) that examines the methods used by climate scientists to forecast global warming. I was struck by the way in which Armstrong attacks this from a method I wasn't familiar with: examining the forecasting methodology itself. Here is a snippet from the paper's conclusions:

Our paper is concerned with rational assessments of public policy, not with public opinions. People will continue to believe that serious manmade global warming exists as they will continue to believe other things that have no scientific support (e.g., the biblical creation story, astrology, minimum wages to help poor people, and so on), and public opinion can be intense on such issues. Public policy makers should, however, be concerned with how to move away from emotions and towards rational scientific analysis.

One might say that it is important to consider steps to prevent global warming, but we have the same level of confidence in saying that we should take steps to prevent global cooling. The more important question is “what is the best way to invest our resources for the benefit of mankind?” This would lead to such trade-offs as asking whether it is better to spend a dollar on reducing AIDS or air pollution or malaria or breast cancer, where we know what policies will work, or to spend it on controlling future climate, where uncertainty about the situation is high. Given the large uncertainties of climate change science, government polices on climate control are unwarranted and will reduce the well-being of the great majority of people who are not the beneficiaries of the wealth redistribution that will occur as a result of such policies. Advocates owe it to the people who would be affected by the policies they recommend to base their advocacy on scientific forecasts that address all four of the key areas that are necessary for a rational analysis of the problem. We hope that before committing resources, decision makers will insist on scientific forecasts rather than accept the opinions of some scientists.

In comments Armstrong has made to reporters, he makes an interesting point: that scientists aren't generally very good at making forecasts, even when they are experts in the science of the field. He makes the case – and he's eminently qualified to do so – that the data and skills needed for forecasting are completely different than those needed for the science. Fascinating stuff, and I recommend reading the entire paper (it's not very long).

To help publicize the paper, Armstrong has offered to bet Al Gore $10,000 that our climate will not change. More on the bet is available here and here. At this writing, the Goracle has not responded...

Completely Unreasonable

Via Simon M., on the completely unreasonable expectations bloggers have of the lamestream media...

Cox & Forkum are a constant source of excellent political commentary in cartoon form – check 'em out!

Deficit Falls

This morning comes the news that the budget deficit for this fiscal year looks like it will be around $205B – less than predicted just a few months ago, and less than half the level of three years ago. Once again, real incomes (meaning average incomes, adjusted for inflation) have set record highs. Americans can, on average, purchase more now than ever before. Not just the wealthy, either – our poorest fellow Americans can purchase more today than they ever could before, too.

These are facts that are relatively easy to verify. The fairest metric I know of is one that compares the cost of common goods measured not in dollars, but in how much time one had to work to earn it. By this metric, our incomes have been rising steadily for well over 100 years. Yet our liberal politicians and their lap-dogs (the lamestream media) continue to pontificate about how the "poor are becoming poorer" and Edwards' famous "two Americas."

It's balderdash. But it's very convenient politically, where one theory says you latch onto a grievance (doesn't have to be true!) and play it. The liberals have managed to turn an American dream – wealth – into something that has negative connotations. Shame on them.

But shame on us if we choose to listen to their blatherings...

John Smeaton

Not familiar with John Smeaton? You may know him better as the man who kicked a burning terrorist in the balls, during the recent failed terrorist attack at the Glasgow airport (in Glasgow, Scotland).

Mr. Smeaton has become a bit of a phenomenon. The details are discussed in this OpinionJournal article, and a good example of it can be found on this John Smeaton appreciation web site. I'll cite just one example – a poem:

Twas doon by the inch o' Abbots
Oor Johnny walked one day
When he saw a sicht that
troubled him
Far more than he could say...
Now that's no richt wur
Johnny cried
And sallied tae the fray
A left hook and a heid butt
Required tae save the day.
Now listen up Bin Laden
Yir sort's nae wanted here
For imported English radicals
Us Scoatsman huv nae fear

I confess to being a bit surprised that in the politically-correct nanny state that is today's U.K., anything like this outpouring of support, appreciation, and (truly!) hero worship could occur.

But I'm glad to see it...

Solar Screen

Update and bump:

As promised, the folks at North Solar Screen supplied my replacement parts. They were exactly right, and the installation took just a few minutes. Our screen is now complete!

With a month's experience (including quite a few 100°+ days), I can tell you that the screen makes a large difference in the perceived temperature of the room it shields. I haven't measured it, but my guess would be that the room used to be about 3° warmer than the rest of the house. Now it is about 2° cooler! Even more dramatic is the difference it makes to viewing our television – the screen is now bright, clear, and high-contrast even when the sun is at its brightest.

Original Post (6/17/07):

One window in our home has caused us problems ever since we moved in ten years ago. It's a south-facing window into our living-room, and it's big (8 feet wide, 4 feet high). The sunlight just pours into that room -- which is sometimes nice, as in the winter when you'd really like the extra light and heat. But most of the time, that light is annoying and expensive -- annoying because it's so bright it interferes with the television and gets in your eyes, and expensive because it's like having a 3,500 watt heater in a room you're trying to air condition.

Well, today I installed the cure: an exterior sun shade that blocks 100% of the light coming through that window. Because it's exterior, that means the 3,500 watts never enters our house, so our air conditioning bill should go down substantially. It raises and lowers electrically, using a radio remote control that works great from inside the house. Problem solved!

I bought the unit from North Solar Screen and installed it myself. Because the outside of our home is stucco, which is very rough, I decided to build a wooden frame around our window to protect the shade's fabric (you can see this peeking around the edges of the shade in the first photo above). I got a version that uses a 110 volt "Smart Motor" that fits inside the curtain roller, a remote control, 100% blocking Soltis fabric, and a cable hold-down system to better handle wind. The remote control receiver is built into the motor. The Smart Motor and the radio remote control are both made by Somfy, which is a French company (I knew this beforehand and bought it anyway <smile>). I'm quite happy with the unit, which generally is well crafted. Two little exceptions, both just annoying: First, the aluminum bar across the bottom was cut about 1/8" shorter than the fabric, and this prevented the black plastic end caps from inserting flush with the metal. Five minutes of work with a sharp knife cured that problem very nicely. Second, the fabric is folded over a plastic rod and welded at the bottom before the aluminum bar is slid over it. You can't see it in the photo, but this leaves an untidy-looking unhemmed fabric edge sticking up from the bottom on the inside, visible through the window. I've recommended to the folks at North Solar Screen that they find a way to improve this. The Somfy remote control was missing one piece of special hardware for its hanger, but I'm sure the North Solar Screen folks will replace that for me.

The installation process went smoothly with one notable exception and one ouch. The photo at right is a detail view of the motor end of the roller and the top of cable hold-down system (and my frame!).

The exception came when I tried to follow the instructions for programming the motor and resetting to factory mode. These instructions appear to be the first thing you're supposed to do, so I did as instructed -- applied power to the motor for ten seconds, removed it for two seconds, then re-applied power and waited for the motor to jog up-and-down. It didn't. The instructions tell you to repeat these steps until it does. I repeated, many times; still no jog. Thinking that maybe my counting off of seconds was imprecise, I located a clock (I don't wear a watch) and tried again. And again, and again, and always to no avail. This was very frustrating, as it appeared that my motor was completely non-functional. Just for the heck of it, I turned the sheet of instructions over to page two, and started the instructions for programming. The first step was to press and hold the "up" and "down" buttons simultaneously until the motor jogs. "Right," I thought to myself, "Like this is going to work after a bazillion failed attempts with the motor power." Wouldn't you know it? The damned thing worked on the first try, and all the rest of the programming worked as the instructions said! I'm not sure what happened here, but it sure made for a confusing and frustrating hour or so. But all is well in the end; it all works as it is supposed to work.

The ouch? As I was working, I laid down a socket wrench and didn't use it for perhaps 30 minutes. When I picked it up, it was hot enough to give me a nice red burn mark right across my fingers and palm. I measured the temperature later, as I was curious: 265 F! Yowee! Things get hot in our San Diego sunshine!!

Jimmy's Killer Rabbit

For no particular reason that I can think of, the story of Jimmy Carter and the Killer Rabbit popped into my head this morning. It seems, somehow, like a condensed version of this most incompetent President – and downright dangerous ex-President.

A quick search on the Internet turned up both the photo I remembered and a nice write-up of the incident and a Wikipedia entry. Here's the gist:

Dubbed the "killer rabbit" attack by the media, the Jimmy Carter rabbit incident involved a swamp rabbit that caught press imagination after trying furiously to board then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter's fishing boat on April 20, 1979.

Carter had gone on a solo fishing expedition in his hometown of Plains, Georgia when the rabbit approached his boat, "hissing menacingly, its teeth flashing and nostrils flared and making straight for the president"^[1], trying desperately to enter the boat, causing Carter to flail at the swimming creature with the oars from his boat.

I was paying very little attention to politics at the time, being busy starting a business – but this incident was just too funny to ignore!

Photo is courtesy the Jimmy Carter Library.

Quite Elevated Indeed

IowaHawk is one of my favorite places to go for a good laugh – his parodies are consistently good. His most recent piece is titled UK Warning: Look Out For People Doing Things, and it is a spot-on ribbing of the U.K.'s obsession with multi-culti political correctness. There's no way to excerpt this work of art; you'll just have to read the whole darned thing. Don't miss it!

Quote of the Day

Senator Joseph Lieberman:

The threat posed by Iran to our soldiers' lives, our security as a nation and our allies in the Middle East is a truth that cannot be wished or waved away. It must be confronted head-on. The regime in Iran is betting that our political disunity in Washington will constrain us in responding to its attacks. For the sake of our nation's security, we must unite and prove them wrong.

He may be the only sane Democrat, unfortunately.

This quote is the conclusion of a great piece about the dangers posed by Iran and what our response should be. Read the whole thing here.

Again, Good News and Horrors...

Michael Yon has filed yet another extraordinary dispatch from Iraq. He's still in Baqubah, and has considerable good news to report:

The big news on the streets today is that the people of Baqubah are generally ecstatic, although many hold in reserve a serious concern that we will abandon them again. For many Iraqis, we have morphed from being invaders to occupiers to members of a tribe. I call it the “al Ameriki tribe,” or “tribe America.”

I’ve seen this kind of progression in Mosul, out in Anbar and other places, and when I ask our military leaders if they have sensed any shift, many have said, yes, they too sense that Iraqis view us differently. In the context of sectarian and tribal strife, we are the tribe that people can—more or less and with giant caveats—rely on.

Most Iraqis I talk with acknowledge that if it was ever about the oil, it’s not now. Not mostly anyway. It clearly would have been cheaper just to buy the oil or invade somewhere easier that has more. Similarly, most Iraqis seem now to realize that we really don’t want to stay here, and that many of us can’t wait to get back home. They realize that we are not resolved to stay, but are impatient to drive down to Kuwait and sail away. And when they consider the Americans who actually deal with Iraqis every day, the Iraqis can no longer deny that we really do want them to succeed. But we want them to succeed without us. We want to see their streets are clean and safe, their grass is green, and their birds are singing. We want to see that on television. Not in person. We don’t want to be here. We tell them that every day. It finally has settled in that we are telling the truth.

And also some fresh horrors:

At first, he said, they would only target Shia, but over time the new al Qaeda directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought differently. The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11-years-old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.

As always, you just don't want to miss his reports (or photography). Read the whole thing here. Please consider hitting his tip jar while you're there – he depends on contributions to finance his work there, and we can't afford to lose his efforts...

One Breath

In as little as a single inhalation, humans can become addicted:

A new study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine shows that 10 percent of youth who become hooked on cigarettes are addicted within two days of first inhaling from a cigarette, and 25 percent are addicted within a month.

To tobacco.

This jibes with the results of several studies over the years. The plain fact is that nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known to man – more addictive than heroin or crack cocaine.

It seems to me that the entirely arbitrary way that our society has legalized (and failed to stigmatize the use of) alcohol and tobacco, as opposed to the way it treats drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, is entirely indefensible on any logical basis. We've simply declared, as a society, that alcohol and tobacco are ok, and marijuana (for example) is not – with no rational basis at all. There are two scenarios that one could lay a rational foundation for: make all such addictive and psychoactive drugs illegal, or make none of them illegal.

The former approach suffers badly from a slippery-slope problem – surely caffeine (which is both addictive and psychoactive) wouldn't be far behind, then chocolate, and eventually ... basic foods like sugar. If you think I"M being ridiculous, consider the recent nanny-state actions in New York (trans-fats, paté, etc.).

The latter approach (legalize all such substances) has my vote, consistent with my libertarian leanings. So long as one doesn't harm anyone else, I think people should be free to ingest whatever they want – whether it harms them or not. If their choice sends them to their reward sooner, I'll call that evolution at work...

Oh, My...

We have a house guest with us at the moment, and she (who shall remain unnamed) has a favorite television show: Fox's Are You Smarter Than A 5th-Grader? Our guest asked me to watch this show with her, and because I love her dearly, I agreed to subject myself to 60 minutes of commercial television – something I haven't done for about 10 or 12 years.

The premise of this show is that an adult contestant is asked a series of up to 11 questions that are at (or below!) a fifth grade educational level. Each time they answer a question correctly, they win the next level of prize – up to one million dollars if they get all the questions right. There are some additional rules, all of which serve to help the contestant – basically, all ways to cheat with the help of a fifth grade “helper” kid. In addition, the contestant can bail out at any time and keep whatever prize they've won so far. In other words, the whole thing is rigged in favor of the contestant.

In the show that I watched, there were two contestants. Both of them bailed out at some point – the money that they'd won apparently wasn't worth risking on these terribly difficult questions:

How many months have 31 days in them?

If y=3x and 3x=12, then what is y equal to?

What U.S. President's face appears on the nickel?

What was President Taylor's first name?

If the diameter of a circle is 4 inches, what is its radius?

True or false: the U.S. is in the Eastern Hemisphere?

What continent is the only one that is also a country?

The above are just a representative sample of the questions asked on the show; I didn't try to transcribe them all. The contestants appeared to find these questions challenging, and on several occasions they relied on the rules to allow their helper kid to answer for them (correctly , in each case). The last question above caused one contestant to bail out – after she correctly enumerated all the continents out loud, but then said that each one of them was a country!

Oh, my.

Part of me is unsurprised by this. Over the years I have seen many examples of profound ignorance of nearly everything, mainly in co-workers at places I worked. Let me hasten to add that certainly not everybody I worked with fell into that category – just that there were more than a few of them.

But part of me is surprised – I have trouble believing that apparently functioning adults can't answer certain questions easily (like that simple algebra question), and I'm especially surprised that people who find such questions challenging themselves (like my house guest) are entertained by watching other challenged people. I'd be slinking around in shame, and doing some immediate remedial studying...

And then the ponder: I wonder what would happen if the adult contestants for this show were taken from other countries – China, India, England, or even Estonia? The pattern of results would be most interesting. Based on my personal knowledge of their educational systems, my guess would be that the countries of the former Soviet Union and most of Asia (including India) would produce contestants that would make the U.S. contestants look like chumps...

Headline of the Day

About a million other bloggers have picked this up as well, but it's just too good to not be on my blog:

I KICKED BURNING TERRORIST SO HARD IN BALLS THAT I TORE A TENDON

As the Instapundit said, this may be the headline of the year, or maybe even of the decade!