A Short Course in Chaos

Book Review - The Fountainhead

2010-11-04T01:11:00.001-04:00

[This is the first in what will hopefully become a series of book reviews. I have a huge list of things I want to read, and I figure taking notes and writing reviews will be a good way to refine my thoughts. If other folks get something out of the reviews, too... well, that's just bonus!]

Title: The Fountainhead (Amazon) (Wikipedia)
Author: Ayn Rand
First Published: 1943

Summary

Howard Roark, Architect. The book opens with Roark being expelled from the architecture program at the fictitious Stanton Institute of Technology, shortly before he would have graduated. Instead of fighting to stay, he steps away without looking back. This act represents the first of many instances where Roark, with characteristically few words, sails forward on the course he, and he alone, charts – learning that which he needs from those around him and taking advantage of the opportunities presented to him, but otherwise never relying for a moment on the kindness or altruism of others.

It is tempting to say that Roark has to fight the system around him: in a time when duplication of classical architectural styles is held up as the only acceptable mode, his style is strikingly modern. His work always represents a seamless merging of material, landscape, and space that, for those with an eye to see, brooks no modification and admits no possible improvement. Yet, it invariably is panned by reviewers appalled by the departure from the 'accepted' classical forms. Despite this, Roark pays little attention to those who do not appreciate his designs, and refuses to engage them. He cares only for those few who recognize his genius and makes his living off of their occasional commissions.

While much of the book follows Roark's principled pursuit of his creative purpose, the rest addresses other aspects of this idea of individualistic creative integrity as personified by three main characters:

Ellsworth Toohey, the 'nemesis,' whose sole purpose is promulgation of a comprehensively collectivist social order
Dominique Francon, the 'pessimist,' whose values closely mirror Roark's but whose response to the world's collectivist challenge is retreat into cynical frivolity instead of assertive pursuit of her desires
Gail Wynand, the 'inversion,' who shares the core of Roark's values, drive and motivation—but whose chosen purpose is to publicly compromise and corrupt the individualistic integrity of others

Notes

I found the book to be a ringing indictment of collectivism, both via the narrative device and via the interspersed philosophical arguments. The glimpses of what I believe would later be developed into Objectivism, however, are harsh and distastefully un- (or even anti-) sentimental. I note this not to argue that more genuine rationality in public discourse would be undesirable, but to point out that Objectivism's wholesale rejection of emotion and sentimentality in favor of rationality rather tosses the baby out with the bathwater.

As a Christian, it struck me that Rand labeled Christianity as one of the pantheon of collectivist ideologies to be reviled. On the one hand, I agree that many of the historical and modern doctrines/denominations have focused greatly on abasing oneself whilst serving others. On the other hand, I would dispute that these are proper interpretations of the commands of Jesus. In Matthew 22:39 it is written, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself;" not, "You shall love your neighbor, but not yourself." I would characterize this philosophical aspect of Christianity as 'other-conscious individualism.' From this perspective, I disagree with the book's categorical characterization of altruism as vile, though I agree with the disparagement of the idea that worth is only found in serving or thinking only of others.

A few quotes that I found noteworthy, with commentary following each [page references from original Signet paperback edition, 12th printing, (c)1943]:

Ellsworth Toohey, p293 – "Kindness, Peter," said the voice softly, "kindness. That is the first commandment, perhaps the only one. That is why I had to pan that new play, in my column yesterday. That play lacked essential kindness. We must be kind Peter, to everybody around us. We must accept and forgive—there is so much to be forgiven in each one of us. If you learn to love everything, the humblest, the least, the meanest, then the meanest in you will be loved. Then we’ll find the sense of universal equality, the great peace of brotherhood, a new world, Peter, a beautiful new world…."

This philosophy implicitly posits that every sphere contains only different variants of (moral) 'good' - and, by implication, rejects consideration of the 'wrongness' of things. Philosophies that reject a dual-pole (good/evil) morality are toxic in a reality governed by a dual-pole morality—but now's not the time for that discussion.

p491 – Wynand and Dominique sat in the center of the fourth row, not looking at each other, listening to the play. The things being done on the stage were merely trite and crass; but the undercurrent made them frightening. There was an air about the ponderous inanities spoken, which the actors had absorbed like an infection; it was in their smirking faces, in the slyness of their voices; in their untidy gestures. It was an air of inanities uttered as revelations and insolently demanding acceptance as such; an air, not of innocent presumption, but of conscious effrontery; as if the author knew the nature of his work and boasted of his power to make it appear sublime in the minds of his audience and thus destroy the capacity for the sublime within them. The work justified the verdict of its sponsors: it brought laughs, it was amusing; it was an indecent joke, acted out not on the stage but in the audience. It was a pedestal from which a god had been torn, and in his place there stood, not Satan with a sword, but a corner lout sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola.

This reminds me so strongly of most advertising today. In general, commercials pretty much just make me want to retch.

Ellsworth Toohey, p639 – "I have no private purpose. I want power. I want my world of the future. Let all live for all. Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There’s equality in stagnation. All subjugated to the will of all. Universal slavery—without even the dignity of a master. Slavery to slavery. A great circle—and a total equality. The world of the future."

"Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There's equality in stagnation." I was revolted, reading the monologue from which this came.

Howard Roark, p680 – "Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.
"Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer—in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism. The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life. Yet the work of the creators has eliminated one form of disease after another, in man’s body and spirit, and brought more relief from suffering than any altruist could ever conceive."

'Suffering is a disease.' Rand identifies this well, but due to her rejection of God she also implicitly rejects the sin explanation of suffering. In a broken world there will always be some in need of assistance, and provision of that assistance is a worthy endeavor. Ideologies exist, Rand's being one of them, that wish mightily that suffering might be eliminated; the (pre-millenial) Christian worldview argues that these are vain and foolish in the present age. I do agree partly with Rand, in that elevation of altruism to the highest virtue is folly—per my prior argument, though, I do not agree that a proper understanding of Christianity requires one to elevate altruism as such.

AP & Bloomberg Spin The Pre-Election Unemployment Numbers

2010-10-28T15:09:00.001-04:00

The last weekly unemployment application numbers before next week's election are out. The MSM spin machines are firing on all cylinders:

AP:

Unemployment claims drop sharply to 434K

Fewer people applied for unemployment benefits last week, the second drop in a row and a hopeful sign the job market could be improving.

The Labor Department said Thursday that initial claims for jobless benefits dropped by 21,000 to a seasonally adjusted 434,000 in the week that ended Oct. 23.

It was the second-lowest number for claims this year. The only time it was lower was during the July 10 week, and that week was affected by the Independence Day holiday when state unemployment offices were closed.

Bloomberg:

Jobless Claims in U.S. Unexpectedly Drop To Three-Month Low

Claims for jobless benefits unexpectedly dropped last week to a three-month low, a sign the U.S. labor market may be starting to mend.

Initial jobless claims decreased by 21,000 to 434,000 in the week ended Oct. 23, the lowest since early July when fewer auto plants than normal closed for retooling, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The total number of people receiving unemployment insurance dropped to a two-year low, while those getting extended payments also fell.

Well! Sounds like good news! I mean, the second-lowest number of claims of the year! Two weeks in a row with declining new jobless claims! We're on our way!

Enh, not so much. Take a look at the data going back through June of last year, when the recession 'officially' ended:

All data is from the Department of Labor: data up through 2-Oct-2010 is from a report generated from here; data from 9-Oct through 23-Oct is from the press release here (possibly stale).

New jobless claims dropped pretty steadily from June '09 to about the end of the year, and they've stayed basically level since then. The questions at hand, though, are whether the data of the last three weeks heralds a 'sharp drop', presaging an economy resurgent; and if, really, this 'three-month low' really qualifies as an 'unexpected drop.'

In a word: No. All three most recent weeks fall within two standard deviations of the mean of the 2-Jan-2010 to 2-Oct-2010 data set. 'Sharp drop?' If the trend of these last three weeks holds for several weeks more, absolutely! In the context of historical data? It's just noise. Expected. Noise.

In fairness, the AP article does -- squishily -- present a few caveats of this sort:

Claims will need to keep falling to signal a widespread increase in hiring. Claims have fluctuated around 450,000 for most of this year, and have fallen below that level seven times. But they have always rebounded in subsequent weeks, and haven't remained below 450,000 for longer than two weeks.

You wouldn't infer any of that from reading their headline, however.

The Vote Heard 'Round The World

2010-09-16T12:31:00.002-04:00

Rubio. Angle. Miller. Paul. Lee. And now O'Donnell.

The Tea Party seems to slowly be realizing its true strength; that it may in fact be a 'silent majority', and not just a large minority. How is each Tea Party supporter to know, really, how deep and how wide is the support for small-government fiscal conservatism? We are, by nature, averse to shouting loud our opinions, for all to hear.

For decades--most of the twentieth century, in fact--people who have just wanted government out of their lives have had only sporadic representation in government, especially on the national level. The question was not, "Is government too big?" It was, basically, "To what end do we direct the spending?" Goldwater stood no chance in his era; whatever Reagan's underlying goals, he was undercut by the geopolitical necessity of the Cold War arms race; even much of the 'Contract with America' of the GOP Congress of 1994 was more about a particular flavor of government-sourced populism than about actually reducing the intrusion of government into private life.

What if this is about to change?

"What if," Tea Partiers seem to be asking themselves, "there are more of us than I think? What if it's not just me, my family, and those few people I know in the neighborhood? What if ... we can actually do this?" Each of us only sees a small piece of the picture--none of us knows the full scale of the amassed discontent--what if it is enough? What if we are many enough?

* * *

Over the summer, I visited Minuteman National Historical Park, near Lexington, MA, with my wife and in-laws. The park commemorates the entire span of events from the night rides of Paul Revere and his companions, to the march of the British troops out to Concord, the "shot heard 'round the world," and the running firefight most of the way back to Boston from Concord that, looking back, we now mark as the start of the armed portion of the American Revolution.

The American colonists had great discontent over the perceived injustice of British rule - punitive taxation without representation in Parliament and intrusive laws attempting to reduce the possibility of revolt. The British march out to Concord was in support of one of these laws: the soldiers were to locate and destroy a large cache of muskets & ball, gunpowder, cannonballs, tents, and other militia supplies that was suspected (rightly) to be located in Concord. The "shot heard 'round the world" took place at the Old North Bridge, which crosses the Concord River north of the town center, as the British troops were beginning their return march after failing to locate the stockpile.

At the park's visitor center they have a short multimedia presentation (video, animated maps, etc.) that sets the scene vividly. Paul Revere's ride with William Dawes forewarned the colonists that the British 'regulars' were on the march. Tensions were raised even before the troops reached Concord: a tense standoff in (IIRC) Lexington had ended with the regulars firing a musket volley into a group of colonial militia, killing and wounding several, though there was no return fire from the militia. Further, as the regulars were searching the area across the Old North Bridge, a fire had (accidentally, as it happened) started on the roof of one of the buildings in Concord Center. The militia knew that the regulars had demonstrated a willingness to draw blood, and didn't know whether the rising smoke was intentional or accidental.

As this group of regulars moved to re-cross the Old North Bridge and rejoin the main body before beginning the march back to Boston, they were confronted by militiamen. In the midst of the tense standoff that resulted, a British regular fired a shot despite a 'hold fire' order. Haltingly, some of the militia returned fire. More of the regulars fired. In the end, the commander of the militia unit gave the official 'fire' order. The remaining regulars fell back, then broke and ran under the fire of the militia. By this time, thousands of colonial militia had converged from surrounding towns, and the rout of the British regulars continued. By the time the remnants of the force of regulars regrouped with a body of troops sent out from Boston in response to the militia assault, they had suffered grievous casualties at the hands of a tens-of-thousands-strong militia force. The American Revolution had begun.

* * *

One of the most remarkable things about the presentation (and, notably, something that never really sunk in even after years of repetitive presentation in school) was the sense of uncertainty on the part of the colonists. We are able to look back at these events and say, "This is the moment when the American Revolution began." In the moment, though, the tension on the part of the militia in sort of a, "What are we doing? Do we have a chance? Is this, at all, a good idea?" fashion was palpable in the retelling of the events. I seriously doubt that those militiamen making the initial charge across the Old North Bridge had any real sense of the dramatic progression of events that was to follow. The tale of the unfolding battle seems one of people gradually growing in confidence in a cause that to them was, or became, deeply righteous.

Perhaps they were asking themselves this same question as the Tea Party seems to be: "What if ... we are many enough?" Perhaps we are seeing this in, for example, the nearly $1 million donated to the Christine O'Donnell campaign, as of this writing. Perhaps we are seeing a 'second American Revolution.' Perhaps, on November 2nd, we will be amazed to witness "the vote heard 'round the world."

Update, 19-Sep-2010: Forgot to mention Scott Brown, starting things off in January. Also, less than a week after winning the primary, donations to O'Donnell's campaign ~~have now crossed the $2 million mark~~ stand at just shy of $1.9 million. I believe Coons is now either at parity with O'Donnell in cash-on-hand, or at a slight disadvantage.

Most Driver's Licenses Acceptable For New Arizona Law

2010-05-16T19:31:00.003-04:00

One of the fusses going around about the new law in Arizona is that it will place an undue burden on residents to carry documentation at all times. Specifically, the argument is made that a driver's license will not be acceptable documentation of legal presence in the US. The new law does provide for the use of federal-, state-, or locally-issued identification as a means of establishing legal presence, as long as (per the text of the bill, SB 1070 Sec 2, amending ARS 11-1051B(4)) this ID "requires proof of legal presence in the United States before issuance."

So, how many states' driver's licenses require proof of legal presence (PLP) before issuance? All but two, New Mexico and Mississippi. (Technically New Hampshire also does not require PLP, but they also appear only to issue driver's licenses to US citizens - mooting the question.) New Mexico does have a weak form of PLP confirmation, in that a Mexican consular card or an ITIN card are acceptable as part of the identity confirmation process. Mississippi's process seems remarkably incomplete, given the near-universal PLP requirements elsewhere in the country. In the end, New Mexico is likely to be the most problematic jurisdiction in terms of its interaction with Arizona's new law, with the two states sharing a border.

(To note, some states have only very recently enacted laws requiring PLP documentation, potentially complicating the validity of their licenses in the near term. Others, probably most others, have had PLP verification in place for at least several years - California first enforced PLP requirements in 1994, for example. Regardless of the tenure of the PLP requirements, as the renewal cycles of existing licenses turn over, the transient consideration of date of enactment will become irrelevant.)

The following is a list of all forty-eight states whose driver's licenses should be acceptable under AZ SB 1070, linked to their respective webpages describing proof-of-legal-presence documentation requirements for driver's licenses. States with recently-enacted PLP laws are noted separately.

AK AL AR AZ CA CO CT DE FL GA
IA ID IL IN KS KY LA MA ME MI MN
MO MT NC ND NE NJ NV NY OH OK
OR PA RI SC TN TX VT WA WI WV WY
HI - See 'General Requirements' sections (c) & (d)
MD - Current law effective 1 Jun 2009
NH - NH appears not to issue licenses/IDs to immigrants/visitors; a NH license thus indicates citizenship
SD - Current law effective 31 Dec 2009
UT - Current law effective 1 Jan 2010
VA - Follow questionnaire form to see requirements

States with driver's licenses likely without acceptable PLP verification under AZ SB 1070:
MS NM

A Thought On Brown's Appeal

2010-01-18T02:29:00.001-05:00

I'm no political whiz, so take this with a grain of salt.

I've been following Republican Scott Brown's special election campaign here in MA, in which he's competing with Democrat Martha Coakley for the Senate seat opened by the passing of Ted Kennedy last year. It's been quite a thing to see, how he's blazed from near-obscurity, thirty points behind to major political standing (in MA, at least), at the leading edge of the margin of error in the two most recent major polls of the race. There's been speculation all over the blogosphere as to what chord he's struck with the electorate of Massachusetts that's allowed him this (I daresay) historically unprecedented performance in the state.

But I really wonder if anyone's really hit it. Much has been made of Brown's deft riposte to moderator David Gergen during the final debate last week, referring to the open MA Senate seat, in short: "It's the people's seat." Sure, it was a stinging rebuke to Coakley and other Democrats who took it for granted that the seat in which the 'Liberal Lion' had sat for almost five decades would continue to be filled by a Donkey. But I really wonder if the line doesn't tap into something deeper in people's psyches.

A major critique I have of the Democratic party is its inclination toward the increase in government scope and power. (Not that the Republican party has been all that different of late, sadly!) Correspondingly, a major critique I've seen made by more than one person (often in wrangling political discussions on Facebook - hey, guys!) of the Republican party is its tendency toward handing favors and, indirectly or directly, power and (debatably appropriate) freedom of action to corporations, businesses and Wall Street. (And again, not that the Democratic party has been all that different on this count, either!) You may notice a commonality here, in that in both cases power is being handed to large, impersonal entities that often, and in many cases I believe rightly so, are seen to have very little real interest in the well-being of the individual... of the people.

Maybe Scott Brown's appeal stems mainly from his populist stance. Maybe his appeal is part of the same phenomenon that's led to the flourishing of the Tea Party movement. Perhaps it's all part of a broader populist resurgence; perhaps many citizens feel that self-governance is slipping away, with ever more power and freedom being shackled up in the form of endless waits in government office lines and on automated help line calls. Maybe neither mainstream party truly has its finger on the pulse of the nation, a strengthening beat of "Give Us Our Lives Back."

I think I don't neatly fit any major political labels... I'm not a pure populist, I don't think - but neither am I a socialist or a pure capitalist. Much of our current prosperity stems from the logistical and material economies of scale that large companies/corporations provide -- I can't fathom how computers would ever have come about without, among other things, the enormous semiconductor industry to manufacture them. A friend is convinced that it's possible to set up a market system that regulates itself -- I'm highly skeptical, as I think that some government regulation, judiciously balanced, is necessary and inevitable. National defense also (leaving aside please whatever you may think of the current exertions bearing this label) would probably be a nightmare absent the undergirding federal structure. (I'm reading Federalist Papers now, and I found Jay's case in #s 2-5 solidly convincing.) So, I think radically stripping back the government and corporate structures to next to nothing is neither feasible nor wise.

But I think what we're seeing in Massachusetts right now is a symptom of a desire for people to have more of their lives to themselves, and I think that Brown's message to the voters of, 'I'll be an independent voice, and if you elect me this seat will be your seat,' strikes exactly the right note to resonate with that sentiment. When you have 'Progressives Against Coakley' and a Cape Cod paper that "[does] not agree with Brown on everything," including "[his] position on health care reform" but still endorses him anyways, it seems clear to me that he's touching something that transcends the particular hot-button topics being tossed around today.

PelosiCare Bureaucracy Break-out

2009-11-02T19:57:00.002-05:00

Via a conversation in a comment thread on Facebook, I went through all 111 of the new bureaucratic agencies/programs/whatnot that would be created by the House health care bill, as laid out here. I did a quick topical sort on them, based on a variety of keywords that jumped out at me as seeming important. There are some items that would fall under multiple categories; I weakly cross-referenced these with a mention of the number from the original list.

Quoted here is my response comment, roughly tied to the list pasted below. It's lacking some context, regrettably, but I think still makes some useful points:

To the first: Criticism accepted, I trusted the source without double-checking that all 111 were independent. However, I just went through and loosely categorized each of them (will post this as a note here shortly & share it), and I see very few, if any, that are identical duplicates. There are a number that apply to the same general entity/concept/whatever but that are distinct.

To the second: what does it matter if these are independent or not? Independence has no obvious causal link to, and to my mind even an implication of, greater cost. Subordinate, dependent, or corollary, it matters little - they'll still suck down resources. Further, out of the 111 entities listed, only 26 or so contain the word 'grant', and I could find only one contains 'scholarship'. In context, that's hardly 'many'. And, these grant programs, too, will require funding. And, thus, oversight to determine where the funding will go; and, thus, a director or committee to handle this oversight. $$$.

To the third: Do you really expect these few 'transitional' committees for the establishment of whatnot will allow themselves to dissolve out of existence once their nominal function is achieved? Further, I see only two with names implying a transitory function, #10 and #111. The rest are boards, committees, programs, grants, funds, trustees, secretaries and the like.

In short, it's a forest's worth of paper, laden with bureaucratic-job-creating, special-interest-pandering, taxpayer-money-wasting, cost-bloating fail.

And, the list:

---
Simplification and Improvement
4. Program of administrative simplification (Section 115, p. 76)
(#27)
(#28)
58. Center for Quality Improvement (Section 2401, p. 1322)

---
Advisory committees
5. Health Benefits Advisory Committee (Section 223, p. 111)
17. Telehealth Advisory Committee (Section 1191 (b), p. 589)
50. Advisory Committee on Health Workforce Evaluation and Assessment (Section 2261, p. 1275)
92. Personal Care Attendant Workforce Advisory Panel (Section 2589(a)(2), p. 1624)
(#100, Indian matters)

----
Demonstration programs (incl. #55)
18. Demonstration program providing reimbursement for "culturally and linguistically appropriate services" (Section 1222, p. 617)
19. Demonstration program for shared decision making using patient decision aids (Section 1236, p. 648)
23. Independence at home demonstration program (Section 1312, p. 718)
32. Demonstration program for approved teaching health centers with respect to Medicare GME (Section 1502(d), p. 933)
38. Demonstration program for Medicaid coverage to stabilize emergency medical conditions in institutions for mental diseases (Section 1787, p. 1149)
64. "No Child Left Unimmunized Against Influenza" demonstration grant program (Section 2524, p. 1391)
79. Grant program to support demonstration programs that design and implement regionalized emergency care systems (Section 2553, p. 1480)
95. Demonstration program for chronic shortages of health professionals (Section 3101, p. 1717)
96. Demonstration program for substance abuse counselor educational curricula (Section 3101, p. 1719)

Demonstration 'projects'
76. Demonstration project of grants to medical-legal partnerships (Section 2537, p. 1464)
102. Indian Health Service tribal facilities joint venture demonstration projects (Section 3101, p. 1809)
107. Indian youth telemental health demonstration project (Section 3101, p. 1909)
103. Urban youth treatment center demonstration project (Section 3101, p. 1873)

---
Wellness grants
2. Grant program for wellness programs to small employers (Section 112, p. 62)
54. Grant program for community prevention and wellness research (Section 2301, p. 1305)
55. Grant program for research and demonstration projects related to wellness incentives (Section 2301, p. 1305)
56. Grant program for community prevention and wellness services (Section 2301, p. 1308)

---
Women's Health
90. Health Resources and Services Administration Office of Women's Health (Section 2588, p. 1618)
91. Food and Drug Administration Office of Women's Health (Section 2588, p. 1621)
86. Health and Human Services Coordinating Committee on Women's Health (Section 2588, p. 1610)
87. National Women's Health Information Center (Section 2588, p. 1611)
88. Centers for Disease Control Office of Women's Health (Section 2588, p. 1614)
89. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Office of Women's Health and Gender-Based Research (Section 2588, p. 1617)

----
'Choices'
6. Health Choices Administration (Section 241, p. 131)
10. Mechanism for insurance risk pooling to be established by Health Choices Commissioner (Section 306(b), p. 194)

----
'Exchange'
8. Health Insurance Exchange (Section 201, p. 155)
9. Program for technical assistance to employees of small businesses buying Exchange coverage (Section 305(h), p. 191)
11. Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund (Section 307, p. 195)
12. State-based Health Insurance Exchanges (Section 308, p. 197)
34. Special Inspector General for the Health Insurance Exchange (Section 1647, p. 1000)

---
'Public Health Insurance Option'
14. "Public Health Insurance Option" (Section 321, p. 211)
15. Ombudsman for "Public Health Insurance Option" (Section 321(d), p. 213)
16. Account for receipts and disbursements for "Public Health Insurance Option" (Section 322(b), p. 215)
42. Public Health Investment Fund (Section 2002, p. 1214)
46. Public Health Workforce Corps (Section 2231, p. 1253)
47. Public health workforce scholarship program (Section 2231, p. 1254)
48. Public health workforce loan forgiveness program (Section 2231, p. 1258)
57. Grant program for public health infrastructure (Section 2301, p. 1313)

---
'Accountable Care'
20. Accountable Care Organization pilot program under Medicare (Section 1301, p. 653)
36. Accountable Care Organization pilot program under Medicaid (Section 1730A, p. 1073)

---
'Home pilot' programs
21. Independent patient-centered medical home pilot program under Medicare (Section 1302, p. 672)
22. Community-based medical home pilot program under Medicare (Section 1302(d), p. 681)
35. Medical home pilot program under Medicaid (Section 1722, p. 1058)

---
'Comparative Effectiveness'
24. Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research (Section 1401(a), p. 734)
25. Comparative Effectiveness Research Commission (Section 1401(a), p. 738)
26. Patient ombudsman for comparative effectiveness research (Section 1401(a), p. 753)
39. Comparative Effectiveness Research Trust Fund (Section 1802, p. 1162)

---
Nursing facilities (both 'skilled nursing' and 'nursing' - difference in jargon terms?)
27. Quality assurance and performance improvement program for skilled nursing facilities (Section 1412(b)(1), p. 784)
28. Quality assurance and performance improvement program for nursing facilities (Section 1412 (b)(2), p. 786)
29. Special focus facility program for skilled nursing facilities (Section 1413(a)(3), p. 796)
30. Special focus facility program for nursing facilities (Section 1413(b)(3), p. 804)
31. National independent monitor pilot program for skilled nursing facilities and nursing facilities (Section 1422, p. 859)
37. Nursing facility supplemental payment program (Section 1745, p. 1106)

---
Anti-fraud (note: *one* entity)
33. Pilot program to develop anti-fraud compliance systems for Medicare providers (Section 1635, p. 978)

---
Tracking to prevent 'double-dipping' (*ONE* entity)
40. "Identifiable office or program" within CMS to "provide for improved coordination between Medicare and Medicaid in the case of dual eligibles" (Section 1905, p. 1191)

---
'Innovation'
41. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (Section 1907, p. 1198)
49. Grant program for innovations in interdisciplinary care (Section 2252, p. 1272)

---
'Grant programs'
(#2)
3. Grant program for State health access programs (Section 114, p. 72)
13. Grant program for health insurance cooperatives (Section 310, p. 206)
45. Grant program for training in dentistry programs (Section 2215, p. 1240)
(#49)
(#54)
(#55)
(#56)
(#57)
60. Grant program to support the operation of school-based health clinics (Section 2511, p. 1352)
61. Grant program for nurse-managed health centers (Section 2512, p. 1361)
62. Grants for labor-management programs for nursing training (Section 2521, p. 1372)
63. Grant program for interdisciplinary mental and behavioral health training (Section 2522, p. 1382)
65. Healthy Teen Initiative grant program regarding teen pregnancy (Section 2526, p. 1398)
66. Grant program for interdisciplinary training, education, and services for individuals with autism (Section 2527(a), p. 1402)
68. Grant program to implement medication therapy management services (Section 2528, p. 1412)
69. Grant program to promote positive health behaviors in underserved communities (Section 2530, p. 1422)
70. Grant program for State alternative medical liability laws (Section 2531, p. 1431)
71. Grant program to develop infant mortality programs (Section 2532, p. 1433)
72. Grant program to prepare secondary school students for careers in health professions (Section 2533, p. 1437)
73. Grant program for community-based collaborative care (Section 2534, p. 1440)
74. Grant program for community-based overweight and obesity prevention (Section 2535, p. 1457)
75. Grant program for reducing the student-to-school nurse ratio in primary and secondary schools (Section 2536, p. 1462)
80. Grant program to assist veterans who wish to become emergency medical technicians upon discharge (Section 2554, p. 1487)
93. Grant program for national health workforce online training (Section 2591, p. 1629)
94. Grant program to disseminate best practices on implementing health workforce investment programs (Section 2591, p. 1632)
(plus others?)

---
American Indian
97. Program of Indian community education on mental illness (Section 3101, p. 1722)
98. Intergovernmental Task Force on Indian environmental and nuclear hazards (Section 3101, p. 1754)
99. Office of Indian Men's Health (Section 3101, p. 1765)
100. Indian Health facilities appropriation advisory board (Section 3101, p. 1774)
101. Indian Health facilities needs assessment workgroup (Section 3101, p. 1775)
(#102)
104. Grants to Urban Indian Organizations for diabetes prevention (Section 3101, p. 1874)
105. Grants to Urban Indian Organizations for health IT adoption (Section 3101, p. 1877
(#107)
110. Native American Health and Wellness Foundation (Section 3103, p. 1966)
111. Committee for the Establishment of the Native American Health and Wellness Foundation (Section 3103, p. 1968)

---
Trusts
1. Retiree Reserve Trust Fund (Section 111(d), p. 61)
(#11)
(#39)
51. Prevention and Wellness Trust (Section 2301, p. 1286)

---
Scholarships
43. Scholarships for service in health professional needs areas (Section 2211, p. 1224)

---
Boards
52. Clinical Prevention Stakeholders Board (Section 2301, p. 1295)
53. Community Prevention Stakeholders Board (Section 2301, p. 1301)

---
Training programs
44. Program for training medical residents in community-based settings (Section 2214, p. 1236)
106. Mental health technician training program (Section 3101, p. 1898)

---
CLASS Fund
83. CLASS Independence Fund (Section 2581, p. 1597)
84. CLASS Independence Fund Board of Trustees (Section 2581, p. 1598)
85. CLASS Independence Advisory Council (Section 2581, p. 1602)

---
Emergency Care
77. Center for Emergency Care under the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (Section 2552, p. 1478)
78. Council for Emergency Care (Section 2552, p 1479)

---
Treatment programs
108. Program for treatment of child sexual abuse victims and perpetrators (Section 3101, p. 1925)
109. Program for treatment of domestic violence and sexual abuse (Section 3101, p. 1927)

---
Misc
7. Qualified Health Benefits Plan Ombudsman (Section 244, p. 138)
59. Assistant Secretary for Health Information (Section 2402, p. 1330)
67. University centers for excellence in developmental disabilities education (Section 2527(b), p. 1410)
81. Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee (Section 2562, p. 1494)
82. National Medical Device Registry (Section 2571, p. 1501)

Call your representatives and tell them they'll lose your vote next November if they vote for this monstrosity...

Linking Facebook & Blogger

2009-08-31T10:47:00.000-04:00

Soo... Facebook and Twitter integrate well - any tweets I make that aren't direct replies to people are automatically shunted into FB status updates as well. This is nifty.

However, there've been some really good discussions going on in some comment threads of some of my FB posts, and I would really like to open them up to a broader audience, if I could. Does anybody know of a way to tightly integrate comments on a particular blog post on Blogger with the comments on a particular FB link/status update/other entity?

I wouldn't want it to be across-the-board, and the initial link wouldn't necessarily need to be automatic. (That is, I'd be happy to have to establish the initial link between blog post and FB post manually, as long as all the comment integration proceeded automatically from there.)

Anybody have any ideas, or know of anything that would achieve this?

Facebook and Twitter

2009-04-13T12:11:00.003-04:00

To let anyone know who might happen to check this blog regularly, most of my online interactions lately have been on Facebook (find me at brian[dot]skinn[at]gmail[dot]com) and/or Twitter (khemboy). There are a few things I have rattling around that might make it up here eventually, mostly some long-form thoughts and/or social/political/etc. analysis... but for the most part, if you want (for whatever strange reason ;-) an idea of what's rattling around in my head, look for me there.

Mike Judge, Almost FTW

2009-04-08T22:47:00.000-04:00

Just about anyone reading this blog probably has seen Office Space, and as such will nigh-on automatically grin at the mention of 'TPS reports'. Ten years after the original launch of the film, its creator, Mike Judge, revealed that the acronym stands for 'Test Program Set'.

However, the use of TPS is potentially ironic in an entirely different way. Toyota, well known for its manufacturing efficiency, has developed an integrated system and philosophy for its production facilities, called the 'Toyota Production System'... which also fits the 'TPS' acronym. How awesome would it have been if Mike Judge had used as an emblem of corporate bureaucratic drudgery a system that in real life represents one of the most successful examples of streamlined industrial efficiency?

Teh *sigh*...

Incidental Words

2009-02-06T00:06:00.000-05:00

It's remarkable how words that mean one thing in my mind, can mean so many different things in someone else's. How there is so much potential for miscommunication, in virtually every interaction we have with others. How a word, chosen carelessly (or sometimes even carefully), can profoundly alter a situation or a relationship.

How profoundly comforting, then, that though 'man looks at the outward appearance, the Lord looks at the heart.' (1 Samuel 16:7) Regardless of the words (or even non-words) we use, we need never fear God misunderstanding the intent, the heart, that moves our prayers.

Imperceptibles

2009-02-04T01:32:00.000-05:00

I've always been sort of fascinated by other people listening to headphones, or other people reading. I marvel at how this other person is experiencing something ... hearing sounds or reading words - taking in something that I have no knowledge of whatsoever. They could be listening to a song that would become my favorite, if I could but hear it. They could be reading words that would change my life, if I were but to glance at them. Regardless, they are absorbed in a world of their own in which I cannot share.

I guess it really drives home to me our separateness - how each of us is, on some level, truly alone, truly individual. It gives lie to the philosophy that the world around me is just a construction of my mind - how could I conjure up all those words on all those pages, all those sounds heard by a thousand ears other than mine, and yet not know a single one of them? It also touches on a theme discussed by Henri Nouwen and Paula Ripple, that loneliness is a 'constant companion', to use Ripple's words - that no matter how many people with whom we surround ourselves, no matter how close we may get to a spouse or a friend, a measure of loneliness will remain with us. Or, in contemporary musical parlance, there will remain a "God-shaped hole" in us, that only He can fill - and in this life, only incompletely. That we cannot but "groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies¹", looking forward to our being "united with him in his resurrection²".

But... Christians are called to stay in this world that is not our home³, that is passing away⁴, because we are charged as ambassadors of Christ to the world⁵. Were it not for this responsibility, what would keep Christians here? As Paul says, "to live is Christ, to die is gain⁶" - without this calling, this commission⁷, why not speed reunion with God? I suspect this is something that too many believers consider too little, and too lightly... very likely including myself.

What message are we bringing to those around us? Are we, as Nouwen puts it, offering healing to others by "[inviting them] to recognize [their] loneliness on a level where it can be shared⁸"? By experiencing their emptinesses along with them, coming alongside their burdens and pains, and helping them to understand that the only hope of true healing is not to be found in this temporal realm? Or are we simply seeking salves for our own loneliness in others, things, prosperity... too focused on treating our own wounds to minister to those of others?

We are called to a narrow path, and a narrow gate⁹. This is a hard teaching¹⁰, but to whom else shall we go¹¹?

¹ Rom. 8:23
² Rom. 6:5
³ 1 Pet. 2:11
⁴ 1 Cor. 7:31
⁵ 2 Cor. 5:20
⁶ Phil. 1:21
⁷ Matt. 28:16-20
⁸ The Wounded Healer, Ch. IV, Section II.2
⁹ Matt. 7:14
¹⁰ John 6:60
¹¹ John 6:68

Strikingly Pleasant, And Strikingly Unpleasant

2009-01-19T13:02:00.000-05:00

Just now read through the AP/Yahoo piece on the developments in the investigation on the plane that was forced to emergency-land in the Hudson river on Thursday. Pleasant and unpleasant things aside, I heartily applaud the professionalism and cool-headedness of the pilots and crew that prevented the death of anyone on the plane. They deserve whatever commendations they might receive from whatever organizations might offer them.

However, one thing that really struck me positively was this:

The pilot, who has not publicly talked about the crash, canceled what was to be his first interview Monday, on NBC's "Today" show. The show said it would interview Sullenberger in a couple of days.

Stephen Bradford, president of the U.S. Airline Pilots Association, said he asked Sullenberger not to talk to the media to avoid jeoparding the association's "interested party" status with the NTSB, which allows it to participate in the investigation.

"If the NTSB perceives that we are in any way compromising the objectivity of the investigation by innocuously releasing information to the media, our status will be rescinded and we will be unable to help determine the causal factors leading up to this very positive and well-documented outcome," he said.

Also, nowhere in the article did any "anonymous sources" come forth to provide insider information. It bothers me to no end how so often information comes from sources '... who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly ...' on the matter at hand. I have a lot of respect for the crew of this plane, for their respective decisions to refrain from commenting before an appropriate time. Kudos to them!

Contrariwise, strikingly unpleasant to me was this:

Kelsey Higginbotham, a 20-year-old student at East Tennessee State University, looked at the damaged aircraft Sunday from behind police barricades.

She and a friend had been to Times Square, Central Park and the site of the World Trade Center, where nearly 2,800 people were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. She said she was struck by the contrast between one disaster in which so many people died and another in which everyone survived.

"It's a miracle," she said. "I guess New Yorkers can't take any more tragedy."

Attempting to establish a moral equivalency, via calling both simply 'disasters', between a malicious, willful attack and an accidental collision with a flock of birds? Whether it was Ms. Higginbotham herself attempting to draw this equivalency, or the writer of the article (or both): Shame on you!

Returning Solar Energy To The Grid

2009-01-05T13:38:00.000-05:00

Listening to the 29-Oct-2008 entry from NPR's Technology Podcast, where they're talking about residents and businesses who're going for 'energy zero' (or some term like that, I don't remember it exactly) construction: building homes and buildings with modern materials, solar panels, etc. such that their net draw on utilities is essentially zero. One of the points they bring up is how the reimbursement for excess energy generated and returned to the grid (i.e., the energy use of the home/building is "negative") is paltry compared to the cost of 'positive' energy use, matched per kilowatt-hour, or whatever. The rep they talk to from the utility company (or regulatory body or whatever) brings up some of the various breaks they give to people who build green, and talks about how challenging it is to deal well with customers returning their excess energy to the grid.

Firstly, I'm not sure I really follow why it's all that hard. My brother is currently working in a chemical plant where they often generate excess electricity from their on-site generators, and they have an agreement worked out with the utility company where they return their excess generation to the grid, no problem. (Sure, I expect it's more complex than I realize... still, the capability is there.) What's to stop them from broadening this?

Well. Technologically, perhaps nothing... but from both a logistical sense and a market-share sense, no utility company worth its salt would willingly choose to outsource (essentially) its generation to its customers as things sit right now. On the one hand, if this 'networked' power generation from many thousands of individuals were as robust as the Internet has been for data transfer, then maybe there wouldn't be any logistical problems at all. Buuuut... think of the lawsuits that could be brought! Barring legislative changes (I assume, anyways), the utility company would be liable for the actions of its customers, should those actions result in interruption in the supply of electricity (especially in emergency or critical situations). I can't imagine any power company willingly going along with that!

Further, (loosely) in terms of market share, if a critical mass of customers shifted to 'energy-zero', the utility company would be left to maintain all of its power transmission infrastructure... but with severely curtailed revenues! The current billing approach (at least, on my bill) for electricity is to scale both generation and distribution costs by the amount of electricity consumed. So, if I use 200 kWh one month and 300 kWh the next, both the generation and distribution costs on my bill will be half again as large in that second month (assuming no change in their per-unit costs). But, if I convert my house to 'energy-zero' prior to that third month... I could use that same 200 kWh as the first month on the cloudy days, but return 205 kWh to the grid on the sunny days. Boom presto, based on the current usage-indexed billing system, if I got one-for-one credit for electricity returned to the grid, I would get a refund on that extra 5 kWh... but the grid bore the burden of 405 kWh for my total 'positive' and 'negative' usage!

Rejigger billing so that distribution costs are charged both on energy usage and energy return, and restructure laws & regulations to give the utility companies some protections in an environment where customers will morph into customer-suppliers, and I think we'll have a start toward a much more logical and sustainable power grid. Politics aside, thinking green can really make sense... it just has to be done... well, sensibly.

Made Both of Stainless Steel and Awesome

2008-12-28T00:04:00.000-05:00

Folks who know me know I'm a fan of Schlock Mercenary. For Christmas this year, a fan made and gave an awesome gift to the artist/author, Howard Tayler. Check it out here.

Ominous hummmmmmmmmmm...

First Snowfall

2008-12-17T01:48:00.000-05:00

Brilliance of flash on falling snow
(Click for larger version in new window)

First season's snowfall on a hushed world;
Chill wind bites through my sandals' open toes.
The peace of air sift through by glit'ring white
Speaks full of all that God proclaims to us:

"Now cease to strive, and know that I am God¹
I send the snow to all, both right and fell².
But here—sit still, seek me³, my voice⁴, my call⁵;
For have I not to you bequeathed my all⁶?"

¹ Psalm 46:10
² Matt 5:45
³ Luke 11:9-10, Heb 11:6
⁴ 1 Kings 19:11-12, Psalm 29:4
⁵ 1 Cor 1:9, Rom 8:28
⁶ Rev 21:6-7, 1 Pet 1:3-4

Tweet Tweet

2008-12-05T20:07:00.002-05:00

Giving Twitter a shot... find me here.

AP/Yahoo and/or Obama: Schizophrenic

2008-11-25T11:02:00.001-05:00

This has to be one of the most patently absurd things I've seen in a while... on Yahoo, just now, Obama promotes fiscal restraint, big spending (emphasis mine):

President-elect Barack Obama wants to project fiscal restraint even as his economic team assembles a massive recovery package that could cost several hundred billion dollars.

A day after introducing the captains of his economic team and promoting a giant jobs plan, Obama on Tuesday was to lay out his budget belt-tightening vision. The dual images — big spender and disciplined budget watcher — were designed to give both political and economic assurances to the public, the Congress and the financial markets.

Um, 'scuse me? How can any rational person use 'fiscal restraint' and 'big spending' in the same headline and not have their brain abandon ship in protest? How can Obama both be a big spender, and keep a tight rein on the budget?

Oh, well, right... I suppose if he jacked taxes way up, he could balance the budget and still spend big. Silly me.

Hope all you's folks weren't counting on that 'tax cut' he promised any time soon...

Perhaps The First Act Of The 111th Congress?

2008-11-10T18:00:00.002-05:00

Congress has already nationalized Fannie & Freddie, and bailed out all those banks with your tax money.

Aren't you excited that they're all set to absorb everybody's retirement accounts under the oversight of Social Security?

Democrats in the U.S. House have been conducting hearings on proposals to confiscate workers’ personal retirement accounts — including 401(k)s and IRAs — and convert them to accounts managed by the Social Security Administration.

Triggered by the financial crisis the past two months, the hearings reportedly were meant to stem losses incurred by many workers and retirees whose 401(k) and IRA balances have been shrinking rapidly.

This may be the case... however, it would be far better to just let the market and the 401(k)'s and IRA's recover on their own. Later in the article, it's noted that the accounts that would be formed are 'Guaranteed Retirement Accounts,' with a fixed three-percent annualized rate of return. Sure, that may be appealing now - but if all that retirement money were just left in the market, the market would probably recover more quickly. Then, in a year or three, all those 401(k)'s and IRA's would probably be back to making the ~5-10% that I think they were making before. If this GRA conversion/confiscation happens, I foresee a self-fulling prophecy: all the money being pulled out of the market will cause the market to crash - and then the people that made it happen will crow joyously at how they "saved everyone's retirements from the impending market collapse!"

Ugh.

A question to chew on... do you really want the same institutions that manage Social Security to be managing the bulk of your retirement fund?

Blast From The Programming Past

2008-11-05T22:37:00.002-05:00

Whoa! People are still downloading my old TI-82 programs from... yikes, high school? Almost 8000 downloads?

Cool!

Fairborn Grad To Pilot Shuttle!

2008-11-01T22:15:00.000-04:00

SWEET!

In 2005, [Fairborn High School graduate Colonel Greg] Johnson was appointed as a crew representative supporting the design and testing of NASA'S newest spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle. Johnson is assigned as pilot on the STS-123 mission that will deliver the Japanese Logistics Module and the Canadian Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator to the International Space Station.

I guess this Skyhawk took the 'sky' part pretty seriously!

No, No... Obama's Not In Political Limbo, He's Doing The Political Limbo

2008-10-31T18:48:00.000-04:00

On Hot Air:

Obama started at $250K, dropped to $200K, Joe Biden adjusted it to $150K earlier this week, and now it’s dropped another 20% since then.

Can't you hear the tune? "How low, can you go? How low, can you go?" So catchy!

Anybody wanna bet me $20 that, if Obama gets elected, by the time he's sworn in next January the upper cutoff for his "tax cuts" will be at or below $85k/year? (i.e., cutoff<=$85k means I win, and disclaimer: Limit one bettor.)

Obama Donations Page - Security Hole, or Fraud Machine?

2008-10-23T16:58:00.000-04:00

On Power Line this morning, Scott reports the outcome of an experiment that a reader performed on Obama's donation webpage. The reader used his own card to make a $15 donation to the Obama campaign, but in the name of 'John Galt' (Ayn Rand fans will appreciate) at a completely fictitious address. (Note in particular that ZIP code '99999', if it even existed, would be in Alaska, not Colorado!) Obama's site accepted the donation with nary a blip. A similar experiment tried on McCain's site failed; the donation didn't go through.

What does this mean? Of course, it's not out of the question that it's accidental... that there's a number field or a checkbox on a form someplace that was set incorrectly, and it's only just now coming to light. But... it seems highly unlikely to me that rigorous name and address matching would be disabled by default in any shopping cart system off the shelf, meaning that it had to either have been disabled, or specifically programmed into the application. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, though, and granting that it was unintentional... for something as important as this, with as much potential for (patently illegal!) misuse as this, why was this not found and fixed a long time ago?

Please read the whole post, and consider. And, either way you decide, please vote on November 4th! (That is, of course, if you are legally eligible to do so.)

How Do You Get Your Taxes Cut If You Don't Pay Taxes?

2008-10-15T22:14:00.002-04:00

Answer: by cleverly redefining the term 'tax cut'!

WSJ.com:

One of Barack Obama's most potent campaign claims is that he'll cut taxes for no less than 95% of "working families." He's even promising to cut taxes enough that the government's tax share of GDP will be no more than 18.2% -- which is lower than it is today.

It's a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-class tax cutter while disguising that he's also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%. But how does he conjure this miracle, especially since more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all? There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of "tax cut."

Basically, Obama will 'cut' taxes on low-income earners by making their tax burden 'negative' -- that is, by essentially handing them extra money. Reminds me sort of the whole "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is," from the Clinton era. Germane bit from the article:

Here's the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be "refundable," which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer -- a federal check -- from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this "welfare," or in George McGovern's 1972 campaign a "Demogrant." Mr. Obama's genius is to call it a tax cut.

Make sure you read the whole piece, especially the last two paragraphs about how lower-income earners (up to ~$50k/yr) will be taxed at a significantly higher rate on marginal income (income that represents an increase over current income). As such, low-earners have to work that much harder to improve their economic situation... not exactly helping reverse the 'disappearance of the middle class' that the Dems often get so worked up about.

Real-World Schlock

2008-10-13T23:13:00.002-04:00

Been reading Schlock Mercenary for a looong time. As such, this blog post by the writer/artist is, to my mind, made completely of awesome. ;-)

Tough Times for Fiscal Conservatives

2008-10-09T09:19:00.000-04:00

Yahoo/AP:

News that the Bush administration is considering taking ownership stakes in a number of U.S. banks helped restore a relative calm over global financial markets Thursday.

The aim of such a move would be to thaw the lending freeze that threatens to push the world's economy into recession.

All I can say is, they better have a really aggressive sellback plan in mind for when things do start moving again.

New Russian Nukes

2008-10-02T13:18:00.002-04:00

So, we're at the end of history, right? Just a few things to iron out, and then we'll all get to enjoy everlasting world peace, right?

Uh, no:

Russia hopes to deploy a new nuclear missile next year designed to penetrate anti-missile defenses and will build eight submarines to carry it, defense officials said on Thursday.

The latest statements underline Moscow's determination to upgrade its nuclear strike forces on land, sea and air. They are regarded by Russian commanders as the cornerstone of the country's defenses.

Note in the article that these missiles have pretty much been specifically designed to penetrate US-designed anti-missile systems. Interesting, no?

A Challenge

2008-09-19T17:01:00.002-04:00

Most media-aware Americans will know where the quote, "With great power comes great responsibility" comes from. (Interestingly, the actual quote is apparently longer: "With great power there must also come great responsibility.") Those same media-aware Americans may not know that the sentiment behind the quote is hardly original:

From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked. (Luke 12:48, NIV)

From today's Boundless article:

American culture works overtime to keep us as childish as possible for as long as possible. We're supposed to spend far more than we can afford, and to look to others to make everything work out OK, somehow. We're supposed to seek our personal gratification above everything else, to find much it in possessions and entertainment, and to jettison relationships that don't deliver what we want.

I really can't add much to this. (Note that this won't stop me from trying.) Please, grow up: consider that video games and tech toys and TV shows and movies and ... the list continues... are probably not the best and most mature way to invest all of your free time. Budget. Plan your finances. Don't go into debt to get a bunch of fun stuff you can't really afford, because (if nothing else) that rhinoceros on your back won't be too pleasant a few years from now. Consider that maybe life isn't only about getting your way, about making yourself happy, about people doing what you want them to do. Consider that... maybe every so often not getting your way might actually have more intrinsic value that if you'd gotten your way, despite the unmistakable and undeniable pain, frustration, and annoyance it represents.

Tell yourself, "It's not all about me." Observe your reaction. Mull.

We are given freedom in this country. We are entrusted with it. Freedom is power, the power to choose what we do with our time, our lives. How we interact with and influence the people and the world around us. I won't try to deny that making oneself happy has immediate appeal, and immediate payback. But I challenge you, dear reader(s?), to consider that perhaps there's more to life than that.

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:12-13, NIV)

"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' " (Matthew 22:36-39, NIV)

Just In Case There's Dispute About This In Your Circle Of Friends

2008-09-13T22:46:00.002-04:00

The answer is here.

(This is relevant to the cookies I baked today. See? It all makes sense in the end.)

Recessha-what-now?

2008-08-28T14:45:00.000-04:00

John over at Powerline summarizes it way too neatly for me to try to improve on it. Some aspects of the economy may be unpleasant right now, but we are, and to some extent have been, far from recession.

(Arresting) An Inconvenient Reporter

2008-08-28T11:58:00.002-04:00

From Powerline, this is extremely disturbing:

Police in Denver arrested an ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.

...

A police official later told lawyers for ABC News that Eslocker is being charged with trespass, interference, and failure to follow a lawful order. He also said the arrest followed a signed complaint from the Brown Palace Hotel.

...

The sheriff's officer is seen telling Eslocker the sidewalk is owned by the hotel. Later, he is seen pushing Eslocker off the sidewalk into oncoming traffic, forcing him to the other side of the street.

(If possible, watch the video linked from the ABC report and note the five police officers that were apparently needed to arrest a single reporter.)

To be fair, if indeed the hotel (and/or the Democrat bigwigs holding their meetings there) had a valid complaint in that the reporter was shooting video from a privately-owned sidewalk, then the police action taken wasn't completely out of line. A bit extreme, perhaps, but not out of line.

But. I took the liberty of looking up the real estate records for the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. The following is an image (taken directly from the Denver Real Property Records site, here) of the boundaries of the Brown Palace's property lot overlaid with a 2006 aerial photo (click to enlarge to new window):

(Click to enlarge to new window)

For clarity, I also pulled up a satellite image from Google Maps (link here):

(Click to enlarge to new window)

It sure looks to me like the official boundary of the hotel's property does not include the sidewalk. In that case... I don't see that the hotel had any right even to tell the reporter to leave, much less to have him arrested. Possibly if he was harassing the guests, there'd be some charge of, well, harassment or assault or something, but other than that it seems to me a case of suppression of the press.

Or, well, I guess the First Amendment might only apply to people who agree with the Democrats. <shrug> Silly me, thinking it applies to everybody.

Amusing Typo

2008-08-28T11:01:00.000-04:00

Yahoo reports this morning about the concerns and/or non-concerns that some Democrats have expressed about the Grecian-style backdrop that's been prepared for Obama's speech at the DNC in Denver tonight. I have my own opinions about all that, but I don't want to go into that here. I'm simply interested in what was, presumably, a humorous error made near the end of the piece:

[Tennessee Gov. Phil] Bredesen also said that while he has concerns, Obama is a virtuoso performer who cannot be underestimated.

Is Obama able to meet the lowest of my low expectations? :-P

Video Review In Major League Baseball?!?!

2008-08-20T22:19:00.002-04:00

In truth, video review will be implemented in a rather restricted capacity, at least initially:

Baseball umpires and management signed an agreement Wednesday that will allow the sport to start using instant replay to help determine calls on the field.

...

Replays will be limited to boundary calls, such as determining whether fly balls were fair or foul, or whether they went over fences.

Since most MLB games are televised somewhere (with attendant replay capability), and the Jumbotron replays reveal actual ball position to the crowd in the stadium, spectators have been able to re-examine these kinds of calls for a long time now. It seems reasonable on one level to allow the umpires access to the same sort of technology to re-evaluate their calls, in case of dispute.

However. Having done some umpiring myself (local Little League games, while I was in high school), one of the basic tenets of the role, roughly stated, is that the umpire is always right, even if he's wrong. The umpire is the boss of the field, and when it comes down to it, as long as none of the technical rules of the game are violated, the umpire's judgment is the final word. I would argue that errors in judgment by the umpires (which will happen, due to their inevitably imperfect humanity) could almost be considered part of the ground rules. To be sure umpires should strive to call games as accurately as possible, but the occasional error cannot be avoided.

Open one type of call to video review, and I have to imagine that others will follow, in time. <shrug> I think I'd prefer video review never be instituted, but perhaps, ultimately, it will end up being a net positive.

Whence the "Nuke" Card

2008-08-15T11:49:00.017-04:00

Allow me to quote you a story, from the always-eloquent Tycho:

Let me tell you a story about Robert. I have often wondered if Business School transformed him into a monster, or if his psychology simply whirls around an inherently bestial core. This tale may deliver a hint.

Negotiation is a course you can take in these institutions, like Usury or Potions. On the first day, they separated into groups of two to play a highly codified version of Nuclear War. It's mostly discussion, but it does have three game "pieces," written on three-by-five cards:

1. A "Nuke" card, which represents your sleeping arsenal.
2. A "Strike" card, used to wake up the aforementioned.
3. A "Peace" card, which probably doesn't see much use.

As the first round commenced, Robert suggested to his partner/opponent that, you know what, listen. Let's just tear up our nukes right now, in plan sight, and move forward in a spirit of shared purpose and reconciliation. Agreement was instantaneous. Cards were torn. Of course, Robert had torn his peace card. As the silos opened and coordinates were entered, the tenor of the negotiations were altered irrevocably.

Robert found it difficult to make friends.

Awesomely devious, no? :-)

* * *
Now, please check out this post to refresh yourself on what Russia has been doing in Georgia of late. Note especially how Russia has reneged on its own cease fire; I believe this is not the first time it's happened.

There are different opinions as to whose fault this whole thing is. I tend to distrust Russia (Putin, specifically), but whatever. It sounds to me like Russia was jabbing at Georgia via support to separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Then, when Georgia tried to move in to reassert control in the region, Moscow took that as sufficient provocation to pounce. It just now occurs to me - Ossetia and Abhkazia were previously part of Georgia... what other reason than aggression or political manipulation would Russia have for interfering in what, formally, was an internal Georgian matter? Gr.

Anyways... the Bear, to my mind, is rousing from slumber, far from dead or defunct.

* * *
Now to tie the first two parts of this post together... found via Power Line, one of the reasons why I won't be voting for Obama come November (embed revised to include full video clip):

How much are you willing to bet that today's Russia (or Iran, or...) would tear up their "Nuke" card while we shred ours...? Disarmament is a noble goal. It is regrettably also, given this imperfect world, a thoroughly foolhardy one.

* * *
Update: Via Hot Air, on Yahoo News this morning:

A top Russian general said Friday that Poland's agreement to accept a U.S. missile defense battery exposes ex-communist nation to attack, possibly by nuclear weapons, the Interfax news agency reported.

...

"Poland, by deploying (the system) is exposing itself to a strike — 100 percent," Nogovitsyn, the deputy chief of staff, was quoted as saying.

Legislating Common Sense

2008-07-30T22:58:00.000-04:00

From Hot Air:

The latest in nanny-state pioneering comes from Illinois — no surprise — as Democratic state legislator Ken Dunkin has introduced a bill that would make texting while crossing the street a misdemeanor. Why? Dunkin explains that government exists to protect citizens from ... themselves.

The host in the video embed in the blog post is a bit... testy for my taste, I think, but seriously... are tickets and fines really necessary for something like this? Does the government really have a compelling interest here?

... Actually, it might. If we had universal health care. If all health care costs are covered by the government, then I figure that would effectively give the government carte blanche to legislate any and all details of people's lives that might affect health care costs. Smoking? Completely illegal. Alcohol? Rationed, maybe restricted, maybe banned. Highway speed limits? Reduced to 55 mph and laser-/radar-enforced every mile or two. Mandated exercise and fitness regimens. Tightly controlled dietary restrictions. Infeasible? Extreme? Well, probably... but taxes could easily be raised on anybody not toeing the line. It brings to mind the Swiss ski resort that's implemented speed limits on its slopes.

The Illinois state legislator in the video in the Hot Air blog post says at one point, "You can't legislate common sense." Be that as it may, I suspect that there are those who would be willing to give it their best shot, given sufficient leverage and leeway.

Nature's Fury, Indeed

2008-06-18T10:32:00.001-04:00

Via one of Scalzi's recent Whateverettes: Clickity-link

Talk about a mind-blowing picture!

(Incidentally, the picture at the NY Times blog is a touched-up version of the original, posted here by the local news agency.)

Yes, but 'Conservative' in Which Sense?

2008-04-28T17:06:00.000-04:00

Just started a subscription to the Atlantic Monthly... enjoying it, getting some perspectives on things I otherwise wouldn't be. Gets me thinking, if nothing else.

In the May '08 issue, Jonathan Rauch writes about John McCain's conservative credentials. In doing so, he falls prey to what, to me, is one of the more annoying tendencies in the media today: failure to distinguish between the multiple possible meanings of a term, in this case 'conservative'.

'Conservative', to my mind, has two main senses: 'social conservative' and 'fiscal conservative'. Rauch's piece seems to focus exclusively on the former sense, whereas from what I recall most of the main "McCain's not a real conservative" criticism has come from those folks more concerned with the latter sense. Further, Rauch invokes another sense of the word, what I'll call 'temperamental conservatism', wherein one believes that policy change should only occur incrementally, and radical shifts in law or policy are to be avoided. Again, I don't disagree with the concept, just the implementation.

(Incidentally, I have this sort of problem with the usage of a lot of other terms... it's not just conservatism. I'm confident that one of the major problems with political discussion today is a failure to establish common terminology and definitions before engaging in debate. This is hard in the sound-bite news culture we're dealing with today, but I think taking steps toward such clarity would be very much worth the effort, if enough people could be convinced to do so. :-P )

In any event, the piece is admittedly a pretty minor example of this sort of conflation/confusion. But, it brought to mind my frustration with this imprecise use of terminology, and so here we are.

While The Headlines Trumpet "NO LINK!!"

2008-03-14T12:35:00.000-04:00

... I invite you to read the actual Pentagon report on the terrorism-related material collected in Iraq after Iraqi Freedom. While the executive summary does state that there was "no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda," its very first sentence is:

The Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP) review of captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism.

I got to this via Powerline, here... Scott there quotes another blog post, on the Weekly Standard, that goes into a bit more analysis of the report. Quoting it:

And what about this revelation from page 34? "Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda -- as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision." (The example given in the report is the Army of Muhammad in Bahrain, a group the Iraqi Intelligence Service describes as "under the wings of bin Laden.")

And there is this line from page 42: "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives."

From what I've read of the report so far, it does seem that some of the administration's claims about a formal, official connection between Saddam and al Qaeda were not well justified. However, as for informal al-Qaeda ties and broader connections to terrorists on the part of Saddam's Iraq, the report leaves basically no doubt in my mind. (Bear in mind, for example, the financial support of Palestinian Arab suicide bombers which is corroborated by the report.)

Ultimately, I agree with Scott at Powerline: "If you have only learned of the report via [mainstream media coverage], take a look at the report with your own eyes before drawing any conclusions about it."

Windy Weekend -- Or Maybe Not...

2008-03-11T11:50:00.000-04:00

Street sign casualty on Mass Ave yesterday:

The last time I walked past this, which was probably less than a week ago, it was standing firmly upright. It was pretty windy this weekend, but after taking a closer look at the picture & noticing how it's bowed... I dunno, do you think that damage might be too low to be a bumper? If it was wind that took this down... yeeugh!

Does This Count As The Stupid Tax?

2008-03-07T20:15:00.000-05:00

For MA Form 1, Schedule X, Line 4, which reads, "Fees and other 5.3% income", in the instructions it states that:

Embezzled or other income from illegal activities is taxable and should be reported on Schedule X, line 4.

... Yes, right. I'm doing something illegal and I'm going to pay taxes on the income. Uh-huh.

<shakes head> I wonder if the irony here is intentional or not, y'know?

Still Here, Maybe

2008-02-05T11:20:00.000-05:00

Want to get back to this. Not sure exactly when I'll have time, but I've got various things I think I want to say & hopefully I'll be able to get them up here.

In the meantime, if you're upset 'cause I've not posted in a long time, here's what I have to say to that:

Cheezburger

Know Myers-Briggs?

2007-11-08T19:10:00.000-05:00

I'm INTJ.

What're you?

More info at Wik.

(Incidentally, let me tell you what... that INTJ description is spookily accurate for me.)

At Least The PS3 Is Good For Something... ;-)

2007-10-17T14:05:00.000-04:00

In today's Wired:

Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony's PlayStation 3 isn't exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research.

Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the PS3 has awesome capabilities & all. It must, since this researcher's "eight [PS3] consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on." The question is, what level of hardware is needed to make games that fit your target market? It seems to me that Sony (and to some extent Microsoft, with the Xbox 360) overshot on the hardware front in terms of making games that satisfy the broader swath of the playing public. As a friend points out, the Wii has now "gone from release, through two Christmas seasons being a rarity in stores... talk about a win."

Well played, Nintendo, well played.

(Link from By The Way....)

BFitz on Boing-Boing!

2007-09-24T23:07:00.000-04:00

To those of you who know who I mean when I say 'BFitz', you'll find this link to be mightily awesome. :-)

More BFitz-containing photos here, here, here, here, here (original Boing-Boing pic before cropping), here... probably even more in there...

(For those not familiar, Boing-Boing is one of the more heavily trafficked sites on the 'Net. Thus, BFitz is now either famous or infamous, depending on how you look at it. :-)

Headline Gripe

2007-09-21T22:48:00.000-04:00

MIT coed with fake bomb 'art' arrested.

Ok. Firstly, granted: the girl should probably have realized that wearing a circuit board of any kind to the airport while carrying Play-Doh equals BAD IDEA. No doubt there.

But.

The headline? "Fake bomb 'art' "? Come on. Implying that the girl was trying to make some sort of political statement or something by walking into the airport wearing it? I don't buy it, and it's pretty disingenuous for the AP to headline it that way. Odds are, having worked with circuitry so much, it didn't occur to her that most other people wouldn't know the breadboard was innocuous. It's probably similar to the (perhaps apocryphal) story of the chemist going through airport security with his calorimeter: when asked about the nature of the shiny, round metal object he was carrying, he responded, "Oh, that's just my bomb."

So, yeah. Shouldn't have happened in the first place, foolish mistake on her part... but this reporting tack just irks me. :-P

Notable Safety Point

2007-09-11T18:51:00.000-04:00

Last Friday on Slate:

A couple of weeks ago, I was sleeping in the front passenger seat of our car when it slammed into the vehicle in front of us. We were on the highway coming home from a family trip. The other three people in our car weren't hurt. But I'd reclined my seat, and my seat belt, which was riding high, left a long welt around my rib cage and along my stomach. As it turned out, I had internal bleeding from a lacerated spleen and three cracked ribs. I spent the next two days in intensive care.

I've recovered nicely, thank you. But the more I thought about my accident, the more I wondered whether I'd inadvertently done myself in by tilting my car seat back—as I do on just about every long drive....

S'pose it's pretty easy not to think about how catastrophically a seat belt can fail to protect you if you're not sitting upright. Beware!

Also, I personally think it's terrible that the clout of the carmakers keeps anything from being done in terms of regulations for warning labels. I'll freely admit that I never read the manuals of the cars I drove all the way through — odds are I missed a number of things that might've been good for me to know...ah well!

(Linked from By the Way.)

Rational Politics Is Doomed, It Seems

2007-09-04T21:06:00.000-04:00

Research shows that attempting to refute false information can actually reinforce it

From the Washington Post:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

Extend this to politics, and indeed the mantra of 'Who cares about facts or truth, all that matters is what people think' does indeed make good sense. (Not that research is really needed to discover that such an approach works.)

Politics aside, though, it's an interesting thing to consider. I remember from somewhere that if you want someone not to do something, it's better to use a positive sentence with a 'negative' verb, rather than a negative sentence with a 'positive' verb. (Example: 'Leave that cup on the counter' will tend to work better in the long run than 'Don't move that cup off the counter'). <shrug> Makes pretty good sense to me...

Good Thing It's Not Real Anti-Helium

2007-08-10T14:14:00.000-04:00

Hilarious video here.

(And yes, I so totally am trying this if I ever get the chance. :-D )

Incidentally, when I first saw the caption to this, as a chemical engineer I immediately thought it was a mocked-up video of Jay Leno inhaling something and then having his head (and studio, and most of Upper Manhattan) vanish in a huge matter/antimatter annihilation event. Instead, it's live (and thoroughly entertaining) footage of Leno inhaling something that's probably sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆).

<shrug> There are worse things to be mistaken about. :-)

Garden @ Church

2007-07-27T10:33:00.000-04:00

In an effort to get myself back into the habit of posting here, I present a link to a photo diary (of sorts) of the progression of the garden currently growing on the grounds of the Cambridge site of the Boston Vineyard. It's meant to be a team project with the kids I work with on Sundays (4th–6th graders), and seems to be going well. No real clear idea of what we'll do with the produce once we have it, but hey... shouldn't be too hard to find folks to take it off our hands, if worse comes to worst. :-p

View of the garden plot as of ~2 weeks ago:

(Link also goes to PicasaWeb)
Incidentally, one of the administrative folks in the church said that the garden might become a more permanent fixture... the church rents building space on site to a charter school, and I guess the(? a?) biology teacher there is interested in making garden-planting a unit for the end of the spring. So, that would be pretty cool if this turned into an ongoing project!

Food Doesn't Actually Spoil

2007-06-01T11:37:00.000-04:00

Melon survives for >2000 years (AP, via Yahoo News)

Technically speaking, food doesn't spoil... other things in its environment spoil it. It's kind of counter-intuitive, since everyday experience says otherwise: if you leave a hunk of raw meat out on the counter it's gonna get really nasty really fast, through no directly visible means. But, as has been known for some time, it's actually all the bacteria & such on the dust particles floating around that actually are the problem.

Louis Pasteur demonstrated this first, with broth. (His experiment, and others, are described here.) Basically, he put the broth in a glass flask, boiled it to kill the existing (at the time still hypothetical) spoilage-causing 'germs', and then heated & bent the neck to make a trap for the ambient dust particles. He could then leave the broth for days and (in most cases) no fermentation or spoilage was observed.

Same thing with that melon, sounds like... it managed to get holed up in an environment hostile to microorganisms, and just kinda sat there until the archaeologists dug it up. It's kind of an ironic find, though, 'cause now that it's been exposed to open air it'll probably go bad within a couple of days.

Still... 2000-year shelf life? Hard to beat, that... ;-)

Windows XP Won't Return Ping, Otherwise Fine

2007-05-21T00:25:00.000-04:00

I make this post in the hope that it will help some other poor sap who's run into the same head-bangingly frustrating problem with Windows that I did.

(some incidental keywords for Google: windows one-way ping doesn't respond to ping Internet works no ping can't connect)

Here's the situation: A couple of weeks ago, I bought a refurbed Tablet PC (Toshiba Portégé 3500, for anyone who's curious) off of eBay, mainly to allow me more mobility. (The Toshiba weighs 4.1 pounds... the department Dell laptop weighs >10 pounds. Yeah.) However, there are some applications on the Dell that I'd really like to be able to use remotely, so I was trying to set up TightVNC (third-party open-source remote desktopping application) so's I could log into the Dell from anywhere.

Soooo, I installed TightVNC on both computers, set up the server as a service on the Dell (so it automatically loads the server on boot), and tried to connect. Nothing. On further investigation, I found I actually couldn't even ping the Dell (from anywhere); nor could I ping the Toshiba. Even after disabling Windows Firewall and McAfee entirely... nothin'.

So. After trying an interminable number of combinations of settings and plying Google for at least ten hours, I came upon what must be the single forum post that had the answer. Namely, the Cisco VPN client that MIT uses for remote network localization (important for things like Matlab licensing and access to journal subscriptions) itself includes a firewall, which in this case was shutting out both the pinging and the TightVNC connection. Two quick clicks in the menu of the client, and both functions work slick as ice. G'bah!

So. This might not be the magic bullet fix for some people, especially if they don't have Cisco VPN installed. But... check every application you can think of for a firewall setting and make sure it's disabled! (I suppose this seems pretty obvious in retrospect, but... at least nobody else I asked thought of the VPN as the possible culprit, so... I'mma not feel too bad on this one!)

Ain't technology grand? :-p

Pokin' Through xkcd Archives...

2007-05-16T21:53:00.000-04:00

...I ran across this comic. And yep, I laughed pretty much right where it indicated. :-p

Would You Buy A Rock Off Of eBay?

2007-05-15T23:07:00.000-04:00

Proof that you really can buy just about anything on eBay... how about rocks? 800+ hits' worth, no less.

This one actually looks pretty nifty, I think...

Incidentally, I'm sure there's value in this one to someone who knows their geology, but... $175 asking price, wow.

Okey, done rambling now.

Dragons Are Cool

2007-05-04T14:57:00.000-04:00

Most of you probably know who Peter Jackson is. Most of you probably have seen and enjoyed (or not) those couple of movies he made back whenever.

Well, I'm telling you right now, be excited about this upcoming project (article on Guardian.co.uk):

First hobbits then a giant gorilla and now Peter Jackson is turning his hand to an air force of dragons, manned by crews of aviators.

Téméraire, a historical fantasy book series that sees squadrons of dragons fighting in the Napoleonic wars, has captured the imagination of the Lord of the Rings director.

The plot centres on British naval captain Will Laurence, who seizes a French ship and discovers an unhatched dragon egg - a gift from the emperor of China to Napoleon. When the egg hatches, he is forced to become the dragon's keeper. The monster is called Téméraire (meaning "Daring" in French).

A few months ago I was looking around for something to do with the rewards points I had accumulated on my credit card, and I decided I'd try to find myself some new fiction authors to read. I was poking around Amazon, looking at various authors I'd seen recommended around the 'Net, trying to find some stuff that appealed. One book that did appeal was His Majesty's Dragon, the first of the Temeraire trilogy (now a quadrilogy - the fourth book will be out mass-market later this year) by Naomi Novik. I bought it, it came, and I stuck it on my bookshelf along with the five or six other titles I'd gotten.

Then, after reading a couple of other books — I reread Ender's Game and read a mystery-suspense novel by Dick Francis, Risk (Francis's main site here) — I pulled HMD off the shelf. Now, bearing in mind that I have a hard time putting books down anyways, I tore through at least the first half of the book (~160 pages, give or take) in my first sitting (This probably meant a bedtime of about 4AM. :-p), and read the rest of it over the next two days. I liked the book so much, I actually didn't want to read anything else before I could get my hands on Throne of Jade, the 2^nd book in the series. (And, in reality, didn't... I just last week bought the 2^nd & 3^rd books and am about 120 pages into ToJ.)

So.... If Jackson & Co. do as superb a job artistically on this film as the reportedly did on LotR (I haven't actually seen them yet. =8-O) and hew pretty closely to the quality of character development that's in HMD the book... should be something you don't want to miss!

Because It Annoys Me

2007-05-02T10:15:00.000-04:00

An interesting story over on Yahoo, via AP. I really can't imagine (a) how that would actually work well, or (b) how people would think that it's not going to get them fined and/or jail time.

But, that's not why I linked to it. Why I linked to it is in the very first paragraph. Dictionaries, people!! M-W.com, if nothing else!

*sigh*

Painful Commute

2007-04-30T11:54:00.000-04:00

I would so totally not want to be a driver in the Bay Area right now:

OAKLAND, California (AP) -- A gasoline tanker crashed and burst into flames near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Sunday, creating such intense heat that a stretch of highway melted and collapsed.

Officials predicted a traffic nightmare for Bay Area commuters for weeks or months to come.

Flames shot 200 feet in the air, but the truck's driver walked away from the scene with second-degree burns. (Watch I-Reporter Paul Kochli explain his video of the aftermath of the fiery truck crash Video)

No other injuries were reported in the 3:45 a.m. crash, which officials said could have been deadly had it occurred at a busier time.

"I've never seen anything like it," Officer Trent Cross of the California Highway Patrol said of the crumpled interchange. "I'm looking at this thinking, 'Wow, no one died' -- that's amazing. It's just very fortunate."

(CNN.com)

Indeed.

Incisive Dilbert

2007-04-21T12:54:00.000-04:00

I leave it as a psychological exercise for the reader to determine why I felt today's Dilbert was worthy of a link.

Addendum (4/21/07 4:45PM): This post refers to the comic about pay raises, which actually is a replacement for the comic originally scheduled to run, which is about the new product invented by Dilbert. The original comic made an incidental reference to 'serial killing', and was pulled given the recent events at Virginia Tech. For more info on and discussion about the Dilbert comic switch, see the link in the comments.

Too Bad This Is Bio, Not Origami

2007-04-17T12:55:00.000-04:00

Observe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_fold

Let's see... in Japanese, it'd probably be called something like 'shiniori' 「死に折り」... I can picture the scene ... dark room in a seedy bar someplace ... two nervous men look on as the Mafia head man works on an intricate origami design. One says to the other:

"Oh no, Kotaro-san... he just made the death-fold!"

or

'Taihen da, Kotaro-san...shiniori tsukutta!'
「大変だ、小太郎さん...死に折り作った！」

Incidentally, I'm sure my advisor is really glad that I'm putting my language learning to such productive use. :-p

This Is The Kind Of Thing...

2007-04-11T19:35:00.000-04:00

...that Christianity ought to be known for:
Windows Media
Quicktime

Note: these links will probably break around the end of April.

(From site of Joyce Meyer Ministries)

Most Awesome Thing, Like, EVAR

2007-04-01T23:03:00.000-04:00

I knew this day would come: Hardcopy Gmail, and it's even delivered right to your doorstep!

Oh, the infinite versatility of post-consumer soybean sputum...

For Want of a Semicolon

2007-03-28T12:07:00.000-04:00

From today's Dayton Daily News, page B6:

Funds to build the [Dayton Dragons stadium] came from several sources, including Mandalay Sports and Entertainment, which owns the franchise, the city and Montgomery County.

My my, that's a big company! :-p

Yeah, This Makes Sense

2007-03-14T17:38:00.000-04:00

Well, the weather was nice recently... :-p

(Click to enlarge)

Bad Science Joke

2007-02-05T14:39:00.000-05:00

And now we find out how many people are actually still checking this thing after being idle for so long...

Two biology grad students walk into a bar.

"Ok, now remember: if an if/then proposition is true, then its contrapositive is also true," says the first.

"Uhh...contrapositive?"

"Okay, an example: 'If a cell is E. coli, then it must be Gram negative.' The contrapositive would be, 'If a cell is not Gram negative, then it cannot be E. coli.'"

"Ohh, of course," says the second. "Quite obvious. Entirely bacteriological."

:-D

Another One of "Those Questions"

2006-11-13T20:06:00.000-05:00

*poof* <appear>

What in the world is the evolutionary advantage of citrus fruits growing in nice, bite-sized, easily separable internal segments?

*poof*

Interesting Read

2006-10-24T16:28:00.000-04:00

Very busy lately with TA-ing and research and Japanese, so little posty.

Anyways, here's something interesting to read.

An Inconvenient Comparison

2006-09-28T21:10:00.000-04:00

Many are probably aware of Al Gore's movie about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. In all fairness, I've not seen it yet, but I've read a moderate number of the arguments on either side of global warming. I've also been a student in a highly technical field for several (ack) years. It's an unfortunate fact that data can say different things depending on how one interprets it; even statistics can be unreliable, as the conclusions that come out of statistical analysis can change depending on the assumptions one makes going into said analysis.

In addition, a lot of scientific conclusions are drawn not just on interpretation of data already collected, but also on mathematical simulations and models that are constructed to try to describe how the system of interest behaves. These models are intrinsically even more malleable than data analysis...sometimes the constants that go into the equations (gravity, coefficients of friction, viscosities, densities, etc.) aren't known very precisely, and in many cases the equations governing the behavior of the system are nonlinear, which has important ramifications.

One of the first posts I made on this blog was eponymous- I went on for a bit about chaos. Unstable, nonlinear differential equations can lead to chaotic behavior in a variety of systems. One relevant hallmark of chaotic behavior is that small changes in the structure of the system at one point in time can have dramatic effects at some point later in time (e.g., the 'Butterfly Effect').

This dependence on small variations is, in theory, not all that terrible a problem. The difficulty enters, however, when you consider that these equations are nonlinear, and in general nonlinear equations can't be solved analytically - they have to be handled numerically, which means computers. Now... computers work in binary, and they have a limited number of digits that they can store in a given number at one time. So, to the computer, a curve that starts at x=1.001 is the same as one starting from x=1.0010000000000000000001. But, in a chaotic system, even that slight difference could balloon into a dramatic departure as you go forward in time. Thus, our predictive capabilities in chaotic systems are, in general, quite poor.

Weather is a highly nonlinear and chaotic system. One doesn't have to observe the weatherman's (attempts at) predictions for very long to realize that they're not always right. Storms disperse instead of dumping predicted feet of snow (unless you live in Buffalo), cold snaps come instead of balmy spring days, etc. Climate modeling, which is (to my understanding) somewhat easier than weather prediction, has some of the same problems, though by averaging temperatures (and precipitation and etc.) over longer periods of time you smooth out a lot of the jagged variations that you have to deal with in weather prediction. You still have a number of variables that you have to make guesses about—sometimes those guesses are fairly easy to make accurately, other times there's very little information to work from. And, because the system is sooo sensitive to the variations in these values, your results depend heavily on the values you choose.

So. Global warming. I can get behind the idea that a lot of the climate modeling that's being done predicts massive global temperature increases, oceans rising by feet per year, melting of permafrost, glaciers receding, Antarctica evaporating, etc. However, I would posit (with no way of actually demonstrating it) that if you take those exact same climate models and use different, but still reasonable, values of the input parameters, you could also predict a scenario where human CO₂ emissions cause a minor to negligible variation in the natural up-and-down rhythm of global climate conditions.

Basically, don't take either side as gospel. The doomsayers are probably using values at one extreme of the spectrum; the everything-is-finers are probably using those at the other end. I expect the actual impact lies somewhere in the middle: we're affecting things, but not in the apocalyptic fashion that so many people are so hyped up about.

Now, the comparison. I've poked around on the blog of former Harvard geology professor (I think, I couldn't find an actual title on his CV), who recently posted on this same topic, but in regard to the hype twenty years ago about the threat of nuclear winter from hypothesized moderate use of tactical nukes and how it compares to the global warming debate today:

Climate modelers must often rely on educated guesses, but stringing together dozens of ‘what ifs?' as Sagan’s cohort did , runs a fatal risk of the ‘Garbage In, Gospel Out ‘ syndrome In the original ‘nuclear winter’ model this meant glossing over thirty nuclear war ‘scenario’ variables , using ‘worst case ‘ values for the lot of them . In practice, Sagan ended up telling a systems programmer to simply turn off the sun off like a light bulb, and leave it that way for a Biblical forty days and forty nights. Whereupon the temperature of the model’s featureless, ocean-less, 1-dimensional Planet Earth plummeted to forty below zero.

[...]

Climate models are what you make of them- they can serve equally as real scientific tools or political toys.” Nuclear winter” began with a premise uncontroversial as CO2’s ability to trap heat, Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen’s observation that it tends to be cooler in the shade, even of a mushroom cloud. But environmental artists hired by Sagan turned Crutzen’s Ambio article “Twilight at Noon” into a dark vision of a frozen planet. To climatologists who understood the devilish details, Sagan’s model-based-- and biased-- megahype was an unfunny joke, played at the expense of their credibility on the eve of the global warming debate.

So. What it really comes down to is, "[t]he best kept secret of the Science Wars is how little both sides know." Yes, global warming is something worth paying attention to. Whether it's worth imposing emissions restrictions that would make a fair chunk of energy and industrial production totally economically infeasible... that depends on the simulations, and there are as many interpretations of those as there are people to interpret them. Makes it something of a tough call...

I'll Be TA-ing This Semester

2006-09-04T22:02:00.000-04:00

I'm also reading through the archives of PhD Comics.

Ahhh, the funny!

(Tho, I'm TA-ing a grad class, so I won't be able to be that mean... ;-)

Huh

2006-09-02T23:50:00.000-04:00

Posted Friday on QandO Blog.

In all fairness, the pork database blocked by Sen. Stevens's (R-AK) secret hold has a higher public profile (I believe, at least) than the transparency-in-contracting bill blocked by Sen Byrd (D-WV). (Actually, I personally hadn't yet heard of the latter bill.) Still, it's demonstrably inappropriate to politicize the blockage of legislation of this type, seeing as how party affiliation has far less to do with the obstructions than does an apparent desire to keep one's spending under wraps.

"MIT's Inconvenient Scientist"

2006-08-30T11:50:00.000-04:00

In the Boston Globe today:

Speech codes are rare in the industrialized, Western democracies. In Germany and Austria, for instance, it is forbidden to proselytize Nazi ideology or trivialize the Holocaust. Given those countries' recent histories, that is a restraint on free expression we can live with.

More curious are our own taboos on the subject of global warming. I sat in a roomful of journalists 10 years ago while Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider lectured us on a big problem in our profession: soliciting opposing points of view. In the debate over climate change, Schneider said, there simply was no legitimate opposing view to the scientific consensus that man - made carbon emissions drive global warming. To suggest or report otherwise, he said, was irresponsible.

[...]

Here's the kind of information the ``scientific consensus" types don't want you to read. MIT's Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen recently complained about the ``shrill alarmism" of Gore's movie ``An Inconvenient Truth." Lindzen acknowledges that global warming is real, and he acknowledges that increased carbon emissions might be causing the warming -- but they also might not.

Read the whole thing... it won't convince anybody one way or the other on the question of global warming, but if nothing else it might raise some doubts in folks who are fanatically dedicated to one argument or the other. It really supports the idea I've had for quite some time, that CO₂ emissions probably do contribute to climate change, but it's hard to tell the extent of their effect on the environment. Basically, the uncertainty in the climatological measurements is such that at one end of the spectrum, fossil fuels will kill the earth, but at the other, they're all but completely innocuous. Fits right in with the 'one can make statistics say just about anything one wants' idea.

(H/T: Power Line)

A 'Secret Hold,' Eh?

2006-08-29T17:32:00.000-04:00

[Hooh! I'm not dead! :-p]

So. Roundabouts two months ago I posted on a bill being introduced in the Senate that would make publicly available a searchable database of all government spending. I was concerned, though, that those involved in spending that money might not be keen on having people seeing how and on what they're doing that spending. I'll quote myself here, if I may:

I suppose the only problem is that it has to go far in Congress in order to get implemented... :-P Dunno how keen a lot of them are going to be on voting for something that will put a lot of scrutiny on their pet pork projects.

Aaaaand, wouldn't ya know. An as-yet unnamed senator has placed a 'secret hold' on this bill, essentially locking the legislation in the proverbial (or maybe not, I dunno) cabinet for as long as they choose. Shocking! However, the folks at Porkbusters are doing their best to ferret out who it is, here. In conjunction with a couple of other sites, they've contacted as many senators as possible and asked them if they're responsible for the hold. As of this post, there are seven senators who've not denied responsibility for the hold. (Of course, one of the deniers could easily have been lying through his/her teeth, but that would be DUMMMBBB...) Hafta say, it'll be interesting to see what happens when the culprit is finally revealed.

Actually, according to the post on the Corner that linked me over to TPMmuckraker, "within 72 hours the Senate leader reveals who the senator is to the bill's sponsor." While this doesn't mean that the name is automatically released to the public, I expect that the sponsors of the bill will have little reason to keep quiet on the culprit's name, and we'll get to watch the ensuing fireworks.

I'll say it again, I really like the idea of this bill. Here's hoping that this hold gets cleared up and the thing flies through!

Update, 10:30PM: Oop, make that five senators who've not directly denied responsibility. The plot thickens!

Today's Real Life Comic

2006-08-01T10:47:00.000-04:00

Here.

Either you get it, or you don't. Explanation would take far too long.

'Vintage' California Panoramic

2006-07-29T01:02:00.000-04:00

View thusly the first in a hopefully long series of panoramic shots taken by my humble Canon PowerShot A75:

(Half-size version here)

This shot (ok, technically these shots) were taken just outside the store/wine tasting building on the grounds of the Viansa Winery in Sonoma, CA. Presumably the vineyard area in the foreground belongs to Viansa; once you get further out, I have no idea who the land belongs to. Regardless, this was one of three wineries that I visited with Megan Fox whilst wine tasting around Sonoma on 2-July-06. (Incidentally, the other two we visited were Cline Cellars and the Schug Carneros Estate. Also incidentally, the wine tasting excursion was part of my broader summer '06 trip to CA—look for pictures of the trip showing up soon....) I have to say, literally every wine that we tried was excellent... some were better than others, of course, but a couple were outright fantastic! Despite most of them being >$20/bottle, I was still quite sorry that I was flying home, and thus would've had a very hard time lugging a couple of cases back with me. :-p The good(?) news is, apparently Trader Joe's might be a distributor for all of them (I know they are for Cline, at least), and so I could possibly find it here! Probably at a painful markup, but hey... at least I have a good starting point when I'm looking for a really excellent wine!

In terms of the origins of the panorama itself, the A75 has a specific mode on it for taking such panoramic pictures—it actually shows you part of the previous picture to better enable you to line up the current chunk of scenery you're shooting. Then, once all of the pictures are taken, you pull 'em down to the computer (where they're very conveniently named in sequence) and assemble them with an application called, appropriately, "PhotoStitch".

Within PhotoStitch, there are two ways of assembling the images: one is called 'Normal,' which is how this panorama was constructed, which actually 'bends' the pictures slightly to make as horizontal a picture as possible. (You'll notice that the vines running horizontally across the foreground of the image, which in reality fall in a straight line, appear curved in the image.) While this isn't too distracting in a scenery shot like this, if there were objects in view that obviously are supposed to be straight (say, buildings) it would be pretty goofy looking (or possibly very cool looking, dunno). So, there's also a 'Wide' mode, which tries to maintain straight lines in the final panorama. This'll only work if you have only a couple of pictures (~three or fewer), otherwise the distortion on the sides of the final image becomes too nasty to make it worthwhile.

So. <shrug> I think that this is a really sweet feature, now that I've used it properly (I've tried using it before, but dumbly never used the PhotoStitch app... might have to revisit some of the old panorama attempts), and will be seizing every opportunity to use it. 'Cause I mean, really... how cool is it to see a wide expanse of awesomely beautiful countryside like that, huh? :-)

("H/T": Canon)

Dude! Star Dude! 'Sup!

2006-07-28T14:48:00.000-04:00

You will now check out Dude Studios and subsequently be entertained (click 'Cartoons' in the menu bar).

That is all.

Lebanon

2006-07-24T18:16:00.000-04:00

I think this pretty effectively sums up my mindset as to how I think the current conflict in Lebanon and Israel needs to play out. Obviously, the injury, death, and destruction are awful, and it would be better if it weren't happening (or weren't necessary), but if we (the nations of the West) don't put our collective foot down somewhere to stop Islamist aggression, we'll just fold underneath it and be overrun. Not today, not tomorrow... but eventually.... Diplomacy is ineffective as a persuasive tool—unambiguous displays of force and/or power are ultimately the only effective means of deterrence.

(H/T: Big Lizards)

Etching Far More Than A Sketch

2006-07-09T00:11:00.000-04:00

Observe. (Click 'Enter', then 'Gallery.') This is truly amazing artwork... I can't even imagine the precision involved in retracing curved lines 3+ times in order to get sharp, dark lines. I suppose Etch from Toy Story puts this guy to shame in terms of speed, but I think that Etch has nothing on this guy in terms of detail. Guess the guys at Pixar just weren't ambitious enough... ;-)

Incidentally, something of interest to Firefly fans out there: Joss Whedon was one of four writers on the original Toy Story... no wonder it was so freakin' good, eh?

(H/T: By the Way...)

Traceable Political Money Is A Good Thing

2006-07-03T21:55:00.000-04:00

Captain Ed points out an early initiative in Congress that would create a database of a significant portion of total government spending and make that information available online for all to peruse:

WASHINGTON, July 2 — Exasperated by his party's failure to cut government spending, Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, is seeking cyberhelp.

Mr. Coburn wants to create a public database, searchable over the Internet, that would list most government contracts and grants — exposing hundreds of billions in annual spending to instant desktop view.

Type in "Halliburton," the military contractor, or "Sierra Club," the environmental group, for example, and a search engine would show all the federal money they receive. A search for the terms "Alaska" and "bridges" would expose a certain $223 million span to Gravina Island (population 50) that critics call the "Bridge to Nowhere."

While advocating for openness, Mr. Coburn is also placing a philosophical bet that the more the public learns about federal spending, the less it will want.

Personally, I think this is a fantastic idea. While I probably wouldn't use such a tool all that much myself, I expect that those blogs that I read whose proprietors have far more time to dedicate than I would frequently reference information from that database. I would think that both sides of the political aisle would agree that spending is out of control, and I feel that Coburn's contention that "[s]unshine's the best thing we've got to control waste, fraud and abuse" is right on target. The NY Times would be spending their time much more fruitfully if they dug into the way that money is being spent domestically—what programs it's going towards, how much is being wasted in the process, etc.—than exposing efforts to trace terrorism financing, for example.

As Captain Ed describes, there's support for this proposition on both sides of the aisle:

[NY Times writer Jason] DeParle notes the differing motivations of the Right and Left in supporting this initiative. Conservatives see this as a shaming mechanism that will shrink government through public outrage. Liberals see it as a way to demonstrate the good works that government programs perform and to get more funding for them. Both of these are honorable motivations and both represent excellent reasons to have this data at the fingertips of every taxpayer in America. After all, we want to know which dollars work for us and which don't. If we have a program that actually does more good than harm, then we can have those facts established when we debate its funding level. If we see the money disappearing with little or no return on the investment, we can either halt the program or get everyone responsible for it replaced with people who will perform better.

Bipartisan agreement is fairly rare, so hopefully this idea will go far in Congress. I suppose the only problem is that it has to go far in Congress in order to get implemented... :-P Dunno how keen a lot of them are going to be on voting for something that will put a lot of scrutiny on their pet pork projects.

Regardless, I'd also like to see this idea expanded to include donations and other contributions to political campaigns. I'm thoroughly fed up with all of the goofy campaign finance laws that have come on the books in the last however many years, as no matter how many holes Congress tries to plug with laws like McCain-Feingold, candidates and donors will still find ways to work around the system. Modifying Coburn's quote a bit, "[s]unshine's the best thing we've got" to keep campaign financing on the up-and-up. In my mind, rather than trying to strictly limit what kinds of money can be given to a campaign, there should be practically no limits whatsoever on campaign donations, but every campaign should be required to keep and publish a detailed statement of every penny received from every donor, as well as a detailed budget of expenditures. Internal costs like overhead and wages/salaries wouldn't need to be itemized, but anything that goes towards informing the public (TV/radio advertising, trail campaigning, and the like) should be itemized in exquisite detail. One clause I would want to include in the law, though, would be to require that every "informing the public" item would be required to provide, say, the top two or three contributors to that candidate's (or proposition's) campaign, so that those who might not have ready access to (or interest in) the detailed financing information would still be informed as to the source of the funding for the advertising.

This approach obviously has limitations that need to be worked out, and I've not thought everything through carefully. One problem that presents itself immediately is that it would be easy to give money in the guise of a cover corporation or organization, and thus camouflaging the ultimate source. The solution to this would be for each political organization to be required to publish a report describing the contributions and contributors. I guess now that I think about it, perhaps this sort of information already exists and is being collected, but I just don't know about it. <shrug> Still, I think the most effective way of keeping campaign financing honest is to make the sources and destinations of the money as transparent as possible... wrangling around with who can and can't give to what candidate/cause is ultimately useless in trying to control political money.

Strikes Me As Awfully 'Regional'...

2006-07-01T03:34:00.000-04:00

Iranian fighters captured after fighting Iraqi forces near Baghdad (via Reuters):

Iraqi and U.S. troops battled Shi'ite militiamen in a village northeast of Baghdad on Thursday, and witnesses and police said U.S. helicopters bombed orchards to flush out gunmen hiding there.

Iraqi security officials said Iranian fighters had been captured in the fighting, in which a sniper shot dead the commander of an Iraqi quick reaction force and two of his men. They did not say how the Iranians had been identified.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but this rather seems to indicate that the Iraqi insurgency isn't so much a purely domestic concern, notwithstanding the fact that the recently-neutralized Abu Musab al-Zarqawi hailed from Jordan, which is, as far as I'm aware, outside Iraq. Pardon me for saying so, but anybody that tries to claim that other powers in the region aren't meddling within Iraq should really yank their heads back out of the sand... As Sachi at Big Lizards points out:

[T]he Iranian deception is coming unraveled. With every passing month, it becomes clearer that Iran is directly trying to seize control of the Shiite areas of Iraq... and harder for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei to pretend otherwise, even to "impartial" European observers.

Sachi also points out a hole in the Reuters story as pertains to the method(s) used to identify the Iranian fighers:

Uh... perhaps because they spoke Arabic with a Persian accent and were carrying Iranian identification cards? Really, doesn't Reuters suspect that Iraqi Arabs can identify Persians in their midst? They really are very different in language, culture, and even food.

The burgeoning democracy in Iraq poses one of the greatest possible threats to the autocratic/mullahcratic governments (the latter term having been invented, I believe by Michael Ledeen at National Review—dunno if this link is the first instance or not) in the region: a first-hand example to the populations of Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia that it's possible to go from being under the oppressive thumb of a totalitarian government to having the purple thumbs of a democratic vote. Thus, these nations have a huge stake in seeing the Iraqi people fail and are putting (what I presume to be) a huge amount of effort into attempts to destabilize Iraq. In the end, I don't believe they will succeed—I expect Iraq will settle over time into a functional (inasmuch as democracy actually seems to "get things done") nation, making significant material contributions to the world stage, both ideologically and economically.

I don't know that the Iraqi example alone will ultimately result in the exchange of surrounding governments for democracies, but it certainly will have some effect, ostensibly positive (from our perspective). And, whatever the actual consequences and repercussions, a more democratic Middle East, while perhaps never being on swimmingly good terms with us or with Israel, is (I suspect) far less likely to be a breeding ground for violence directed our way.

And that, AFAIC (as far as I'm concerned), is a good thing.

(H/T: Captain's Quarters)

Content Disclaimer, Etc.

2006-06-13T17:23:00.000-04:00

I suppose perhaps I should've put something like this up awhile ago... dunno. Anyways, I'll just state a few things here just in case issues arise:

All viewpoints, opinions, blatherations, angry retorts, etc. posted on this blog are the sole product of my (perhaps swamp-feverish) brain and no one else's, save where noted. Material posted here does not represent the views of any organization with which I might happen to be associated.

Everything stated here is my position, my opinion, my belief, etc. If you don't like it, get your own blog and counterpost. I encourage comments (please, comment!), but reserve the right to halt discussion or delete comments that I find inappropriate or distasteful. Again, if you don't like it, get your own blog.

I welcome comments from folks that disagree with me. If people do start leaving significant numbers of comments, the last thing I want is to only hear from people who agree with me. Healthy, reasoned debate can only increase knowledge and understanding, even if it doesn't end with all parties in agreement. Still, keep the previous point firmly in mind when commenting.

I label myself as conservative, and I am a Christian. However, my views may or may not jive with your expectations of what those two labels mean. Also, I will be arguing from a certain set of assumptions—if something I say doesn't quite make sense, please ask for clarification, I won't mind. A common base of knowledge and assumptions is important in debating stuff.

A couple of points relating to matters of religion and faith:

I don't consider myself a member of a specific denomination ("non-denominational", I call it) and therefore my views probably don't cleave to any particular doctrine. When (not if—it will happen) I post on matters of religion or faith, as above please ask for clarification on stances and assumptions so as to avoid misinterpretation.

I have my views on things. You have yours. I'm not about to try to cram what I think down your throat. If you don't like what I say, please don't take it as me trying to tell all y'all what to do. Anything I say in this area will be my opinions on what I think it would be best for people to do. If you don't want to do it, or think it's best to do it a different way, post a comment saying why. Start discussion. Discussion good.

Also, generally speaking, I would really be pleased if this turned out to be a forum for discussion, even if it never really got beyond my circle of friends and acquaintances. I like hashing out issues, trying to think through things. I invite and welcome any and all readers to participate in discussion. Also, I'll do my best to post more than once a month, but... dunno how well that'll shake out. :-)

Finally, the title of the blog will continue to apply. Expect posts on a variety of random stuff, perhaps entertaining, perhaps interesting, perhaps neither. If nothing else, I'll be amused by it...

Some Light Late-Night Entertainment

2006-05-22T01:53:00.000-04:00

Observe, Sunday's Foxtrot. (Strip from 21 May 2006; online strip expires 4 Jun 2006, if this link leads to an error page)

Observe, a link to a Morse code translator. (Java required)

Observe that the combination of these two leads to one staying awake even further beyond one's ostensible bedtime. Shocking!

April... Er, May Showers

2006-05-14T23:08:00.000-04:00

So... it's been raining for basically two days straight now. Now, aside from the jaunts to and from church this morning, this hasn't really affected me very much. However, there are some people that it's going to affect rather severely. From a weather.com severe weather report:

MAJOR FLOODING AND IN SOME CASES... RECORD FLOODING...IS FORECAST TO OCCUR ON SEVERAL RIVERS IN NORTHEAST MASSACHUSETTS AND SOUTH CENTRAL NEW HAMPSHIRE WITH VERY SLOW RECESSIONS ANTICIPATED AFTER THE CRESTS EARLY THIS COMING WEEK.

ANOTHER 2 TO 5 INCHES OF RAIN IS ANTICIPATED TO FALL BETWEEN 6 PM THIS SUNDAY EVENING AND NOON MONDAY ACROSS ESSEX COUNTY OF NORTHEAST MASSACHUSETTS AND HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY OF SOUTH CENTRAL NEW HAMPSHIRE. THIS WILL RAISE 3 DAY STORM TOTALS IN PARTS OF THESE TWO COUNTIES TO NEARLY 15 INCHES IN AT LEAST A FEW LOCATIONS.

I mean... 15 inches?! That corresponds to something like twelve feet of snow, pound for pound! Even more remarkable than that, from the NOAA's Weather Reports (select "Record Event Report", "Boston Logan", "Most Recent", and hit 'Go'):

RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TAUNTON MA
840 PM EDT SUN MAY 14 2006

...SUCCESSIVE RECORD DAILY MAXIMUM RAINFALLS SET AT BOSTON...

A RECORD RAINFALL OF 3.84 INCHES WAS SET AT BOSTON SATURDAY MAY
13TH. THIS BROKE THE OLD RECORD OF 1.56 SET IN 2002.

A RECORD RAINFALL OF 3.36 INCHES WAS SET AT BOSTON TODAY SUNDAY MAY
14TH. THE PREVIOUS RECORD FOR MAY 14TH WAS 1 INCH SET IN 1882.

I mean... three times the previous rainfall record for May 14^th? And this report is from 8:40 tonight; it's now almost 11, and rain has been falling steadily all evening. I doubt it'll hit four inches here, but still... this is crazy!

Update (5/15/06 3:45PM): Looks like quite a few people further north in New England have been affected by significant flooding and states of emergency have been declared in MA, NH, and ME. For those of you who pray, these folks could definitely use it.

Eat Right, Perhaps Stay Healthy... Shocking!

2006-05-06T22:49:00.000-04:00

From CNN.com, emphasis mine:

A Mediterranean-style diet that appears to cut the risk of heart disease also may help protect against Alzheimer's disease, a new study suggests.

People who followed the diet were up to 40 percent less likely than those who largely avoided it to develop Alzheimer's during the course of the research, scientists reported.

[...]

The diet he tested includes eating lots of vegetables, legumes, fruits, cereals and fish, while limiting intake of meat and dairy products, drinking moderate amounts of alcohol and emphasizing monounsaturated fats, such as in olive oil, over saturated fats. Previous research has suggested that such an approach can reduce the risk of heart disease.

[...]

The idea that a heart-healthy diet could also help fight Alzheimer's fits in with growing evidence that "the kinds of things we associate with being bad for our heart turn out to be bad for our brain," said Dr. Marilyn Albert, a Johns Hopkins neurology professor and spokeswoman for the Alzheimer's Association. The list includes high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, smoking and uncontrolled diabetes, she said.

As I understand it, a food science revolution occurred back in the early-middle part of the 1900's (or whenever it was, I welcome corrections on this) where scientists decided that purifying the known beneficial compounds (starch, vitamins, etc.) and making foods containing only those compounds. While this seemed to make good sense at the time, it seems that whole, unprocessed foods are inevitably better for you than refined ones. Thus, even if one doesn't eat outright unhealthy foods like donuts and fries all the time, avoiding vegetables, fruits, and whole grains likely results in deficiencies in a variety of important compounds, many of which we probably don't even know about yet. "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," indeed.

Just something to 'ruminate' on, as it were... ;-)

How To Vacuum Your Cat

2006-04-28T21:51:00.000-04:00

... the video instructions.

(Linked from comments in this post @Whatever)

Wii Are Very Confident of Our Market Share

2006-04-27T14:53:00.000-04:00

Still not quite sure what I think about this...

(Link via Wired.com)

Hiatus Breaker

2006-04-24T19:52:00.000-04:00

So, I'm back. Maybe. I sorta fasted on current events for Lent, which made for a nice low-stress month (yes, I know the last post was in January, leave me alone ^_^), along with a concurrent break in blog posting. <shrug> So, maybe things will start appearing here again, maybe not. Regardless, here's a link to a site with a lot of cute little games for you to play.

Another Reason To Buy Used

2006-01-31T13:38:00.000-05:00

From CNN.com today:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - A Michigan environmental group is charging that at least part of the so-called "new car smell" is toxic, and that the interior of an automobile has dangerous levels of various chemicals.

The report, "Toxic at any speed," comes from The Ecology Center, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based group. It reports that PBDEs, used as fire retardants, and phthalates, used primarily to soften PVC plastics, are found in dangerous amounts in dust and windshield film samples.

It called for tougher regulations to phase out the use of the chemicals as well as voluntary moves by the auto manufacturers to stop using the products inside of new vehicles.

It also suggested that car owners take steps to reduce the release and breakdown of these chemicals by using solar reflectors, ventilating car interiors, and parking outside of sunlight whenever possible.

The group says that phthalates are partly responsible for the smell associated with new cars.

Drivers and passengers are exposed to these chemicals through inhalation and contact with dust, according to the group's report.

"These groups of chemicals have been linked to birth defects, impaired learning, liver toxicity, premature births and early puberty in laboratory animals, among other serious health problems," according to the report.

This report will be very unsurprising to certain of my friends and family; it may be news to others. Regardless, it's something to consider when shopping for new vs. used wheels. I know that, if nothing else, the smell makes me feel pretty gross...

This is yet another example of various technologies that have hidden risks about which the public is relatively ill-informed. Don't even get me started about the way that the pharmaceutical industry sometimes handles testing (and marketing) of its products!

The Inventor In The Family

2006-01-28T22:26:00.000-05:00

I ran across this while, I'll admit, I was searching Google for my own name. From CNET News.com:

Strings stretch and bind. Fluctuations in humidity and string tension cause instrument necks to bow, arch and twist. Something--it is not always clear what--throws string pitch out of whack. Professional players on stage and in recording sessions find themselves twisting tuner knobs between every song and sometimes in the middle of songs.

"It is maddening that we play instruments that do not stay in tune for very long," Mike Marshall, one of the top mandolin and guitar players on the acoustic-music scene, wrote during a recent online discussion on the topic. "This seems a bit insane, considering the fact that we are surrounded by so much incredible technology."

Technology, it turns out, does offer a remedy for tuning problems--at least for those who play electric guitars. Backers and users of an electronic system called the Performer say it offers a big leap beyond the ubiquitous electronic pitch readers that, while reasonably accurate, still require the player to tune manually. It's also seen as a way to let players use the same instrument for a variety of musical purposes.

Those attributes have helped sell the system to rock icons Graham Nash, Jimmy Page and Joe Perry, along with other concert-stage veterans.

With the touch of a button, The Performer is designed to automatically tune open, unfretted strings to whatever notes the player programs into the system's computer. The retuning can happen any time the player has a moment to strum on open strings, even in the middle of a song.

"Now how," you might wonder, "is this at all related to Brian poking around the Internet for mention of himself?" Well, the connection can be found here (emphasis mine):

As it is currently offered, The Performer is designed to readjust the tension on all six strings simultaneously in about five seconds, with the push of a button. A small LCD screen cut into the guitar body displays the note, octave and "cent value" of each string. (A cent is a unit of relative pitch; there are 1,200 cents in one octave). Neil Skinn, the man who developed the system, says the gadget's tuning is accurate to within 2 cents.

And yep, we're related... Neil is my dad's youngest brother. So, I've got an Uncle Inventor! Is it not nifty?

...

Ok, well, I think it's pretty cool, anyways. :-P

In all seriousness, from what I understand of what's involved in playing a guitar, the ability to automatically retain tuning is powerful enough in and of itself. However, the ability to dynamically retune mid-song seems like something that could lead to all sorts of awesome sounds.

<shrug> I could be wrong. :-)

Regardless, if you or anyone you know plays electric guitar and wants the ability to re-tune automatically, please link 'em to this. I'm sure my uncle wouldn't mind a little word-of-mouth advertising. ;-)

Some additional links:

TransPerformance website – Take a look/listen at the demo video (first link on the left on the "Multimedia" page), it's worth it

Engadget blog post about the Performer, with some comments worth reading

Klein Guitars is working on putting the system into an acoustic guitar

Kelo, Norwood, And Ohio Issue #1

2006-01-11T22:37:00.000-05:00

I'm sure you all remember the Kelo decision last year regarding eminent domain. In the event that you don't, I've got posts about it. Regardless, Kelo has come to Ohio. Michelle Malkin points to this AP story:

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Joy and Carl Gamble say they just wanted to retire peacefully in the dream home where they've lived for more than 35 years, but the Cincinnati suburb of Norwood had other plans for their property.

Using its power of eminent domain, the city planned to take the neighborhood, which it considers to be deteriorating, and allow a $125 million development of offices and shops to rise in its place.

The two sides took their argument to the state Supreme court on Wednesday in the first challenge of property rights laws to reach a state high court since the U.S. Supreme Court last summer allowed municipalities to seize homes for use by a private developer.

As I understand it, the situation here is much the same as in New London (the city involved in the Kelo case): a private developer wants a certain piece of land to develop commercially, but the current private owners don't wish to sell and leave the land. So, the developer asked the city of Norwood to take the land by eminent domain and sell it to them. Per Kelo, increased tax revenues represent the putative 'public benefit' through which the city of Norwood could validly apply eminent domain.

Along with various others, I find it stupefying (and mildly terrifying) that local governments have been given a big SCOTUS thumbs-up to the ability to arbitrarily take property from a private entity and hand it over to another private entity. As I've written before, that capability has a strong whiff of socialism about it, and I'm not at all keen on that idea. I think that transactions like those disputed in Kelo and the various Norwood cases should be handled in an entirely capitalistic fashion: if the company wants the land, then they should have to buy it from the current owners at a price named by the owners. If the developer isn't willing to pay that or the current owners aren't willing to sell, too bad. If the developer wants land that the current owner is really attached to, then they need to factor the (possibly exorbitant) cost of getting that land into their initial cost estimates of the proposed project involving that land. Simple as that.

The previous point aside, the thing that really worries me is this: in the most recent November elections, Ohio voters passed Issue #1, which was an amendment to the Ohio Constitution geared towards spurring industrial, commercial, and research development in Ohio. Now, I'll grant that on the surface this really is a pretty good thing... I mean, developing those things is generally a smart plan. Most of the complaints I heard about Issue #1 centered around the proposed source of funding for this development: the text in sections three through five allows for bonds to be issued to pay for it, which basically means development now, debt later. Definitely a valid concern. However, in a vein more germane to this post, sections two and six speak to issues related to eminent domain (emphasis mine):

This proposed amendment would:

[...]

2. Declare that local government public infrastructure, and financial assistance for research and development and development of sites and facilities in Ohio for and in support of industry, commerce and distribution (all referred to together as “development purposes”) are public purposes.

[...]

6. Authorize the General Assembly to pass laws providing for its implementation, including laws providing procedures for issuing obligations, ensuring the accountability of all state funding provided for development purposes, restricting or limiting the taking by eminent domain of private property for disposition to private sector entities for research and development and the development of sites and facilities, and for the implementation of the research and development purposes to benefit people and businesses otherwise qualified for the receipt of funding in all areas of Ohio, including economically disadvantaged business and individuals in all areas of the state, including by the use Ohio products, materials, services and labor to the extent practicable.

So. The wording in section two is somewhat vague, but it could either mean that development for commercial, industrial, or research purposes is a 'public purpose,' or that funding for such development is a 'public purpose.' In either case, though, it's readily arguable that seizing, for examble, part of East Cleveland by eminent domain and handing it over to, say, Case Western Reserve University or University Hospitals to build, say, a new cancer research center would be perfectly acceptable because, look! It's RESEARCH!! That's a public purpose! Wheee!!!

"But wait!" you say. "Didn't section six restrict such takings?" Nope! Because section six doesn't actually restrict takings by eminent domain, it just gives the Ohio General Assembly the power to make law restricting (or not) the applicability of eminent domain in these sorts of situations. It provides no real protection to Ohio property owners.

So. Private ownership of property in Ohio is protected by the whims of officials at both the local and state level of government. Dunno about you, but I feel safer already.

I Probably Shouldn't Link To This...

2006-01-10T11:04:00.000-05:00

... as I fear that I'm opening a biiiig can of worms (knowing my friends). :-P

So, look here. And read the disclaimer all the way through. And take it seriously I am totally not kidding.

Normal laser pointers are (I believe) Class I; the ones being sold on the site above are Class IIIb, and:

The beam from a class IIIb laser can cause serious or even permanent eye damage and the blink reflex is not quick enough to prevent this damage.

(Laser classes are described here.)

Fun, eh? Now you know why I probably shouldn't have linked to this. :-P

A Trip to Tripoli

2005-12-30T01:24:00.000-05:00

When you visit another country, it’s hard to get a feel for what it’s actually like until you leave your hotel room, go for a walk, take a look around, and hang out while soaking it in. Not so in Libya. All you have to do there is show up. It will impose itself on you at once.

Michael Totten, who blogs on things related to (and I believe lives in) the Middle East, visited Libya shortly after the American government removed the ban on travel there for U.S. citizens, and wrote a piece describing his experiences there. It was recently published online, by LA Weekly. The article makes for a very interesting look into a country that, AFAIK, very few people here in the States know much about. (Warning: the article contains occasional profanity, which is censored below ’cause I’m like that.)

At one point, he addresses what would probably be my first reaction if anyone told me they were going to visit Libya:

Almost everybody I know thought I was crazy to travel to Libya. The unspoken fear was that someone might kill me.

Well, no. Nobody killed me. Nobody even looked at me funny. I knew that’s how it would be before I set out. Still, it’s nice to have the old adage “people are people” proven through experience.

Libyans are fed a steady diet of anti-Americanism, but it comes from a man who has kicked them in the stomach and stomped on their face for more than a third of a century. If they bought it, they sure didn’t act like it.

Another section (among others) highlights inevitable problems that I think would tend to arise in the context of any totalitarian government:

Most apartment buildings were more or less equally dreary, but one did stand out. Architecturally it was just another modernist horror. But a 6-by-8-foot portrait of Qaddafi was bolted to the façade three stories up. It partially blocked the view from two of the balconies. The b****** couldn’t even leave people alone when they were home.

The posters weren’t funny anymore. There were too d*** many of them, for one thing. And, besides, Qaddafi is ugly. He may earn a few charisma points for traveling to Brussels and pitching his Bedouin tent on the Parliament lawn, but he’s no Che Guevara in the guapo department.

I felt ashamed that I first found his portraits even slightly amusing. The novelty wore off in less than a day, and he’s been in power longer than I’ve been alive.

He was an abstraction when I first got there. But after walking around his outdoor laboratory and everywhere seeing his beady eyes and that arrogant jut of his mouth, it suddenly hit me. He isn’t merely Libya’s tyrant. He is a man who would be god.

His Mukhabarat, the secret police, are omniscient. His visage is omnipresent. His power is omnipotent.

And he is deranged. He says he’s the sun of Africa. He threatens to ban money and schools. He vanquished beauty and art. He liquidates those who oppose him. He says he can’t help it if the people of Libya love him so much they plaster his portrait up everywhere. F*** him. I wanted to rip his face from the walls.

But what really struck me was this:

I heard footsteps behind me, turned around, and faced two Arab men wearing coats and ties and carrying briefcases. One wore glasses. The other was bald.

“It has been a long time since I heard that accent,” said the man with the glasses.

I smiled. “It’s been a long time since this accent was here,” I said. Until just a few months ago, any American standing on Libyan soil was committing a felony.

“We went to college together,” he said, and jerked his thumb toward his friend. “In Lawrence, Kansas, during the ’70s.”

“Yes,” his friend said as he rubbed the bald spot on his head. The two were all smiles now as they remembered. “We took a long road trip up to Seattle.”

“We stayed there for two weeks!” said the first. He sighed like a man recalling his first long-lost love. I watched both their faces soften as they recalled the memories of their youth and adventures abroad in America.

“What a wonderful time we had there,” said the second.

They invited me out to dinner, but I was getting ready to leave. I didn’t want to say no. They looked like they wanted to hug me.

We shook hands as we departed. And as I stepped into the elevator, the first man put his hand on his heart. “Give two big kisses to Americans when you get home,” he said. “From two people in Libya who miss you so much.”

The piece is on the long side, but is definitely worth the read. Highly recommend.

(H/T: Scott @ Power Line)

Bush, The NSA, And Phone Taps

2005-12-17T19:02:00.000-05:00

If you pay much attention at all to the news, be it TV, newspaper, radio, etc., odds are you'll be hearing a lot about this in the days to come (from NY Times):

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.

Before forming an iron-clad opinion on the matter, please read what Captain Ed and Michelle Malkin have to say on the matter. Essentially, the illegality and radical nature of this surveillance by the NSA and of the presidential order supporting it seems to be rather highly overblown. For those of you, dear (few) readers, who are particularly sensitive to issues of policy impinging on civil liberties, odds are this whole thing will appall you no matter what arguments are presented. For others, please consider carefully the whole situation before leaping to accuse Bush and his administration. Also, please consider that he (Bush) has consulted with both judges and members of Congress—both Republican and Democrat—over the four-year existence of this program. This is not some wild power-grab excursion on Bush's part.

Also, John over at Power Line raises an interesting point—essentially, if the "outing" of (supposedly) undercover agent Valerie Plame was a breach of national security worthy of legal action against the parties responsible, then those members of the intelligence community that leaked information about this surveillance program to the press should be equally deserving of said legal action. Somehow I don't think either the mainstream media or Patrick Fitzgerald will be jumping right onto this idea...

Lucas: Lucky, or Prescient?

2005-12-14T23:30:00.000-05:00

Observe:

The upper image is, as you probably recognize, the backside of an Imperial Star Destroyer, clearly showing the massive ion engines used for its propulsion¹. The bottom image, which is probably less immediately obvious, is a shot of a lab-scale prototype of a double-layer plasma drive, which might potentially be used on spacecraft at some point in the future. Note that, according to Wikipedia, a 'plasma' is simply "an ionized gas"—therefore, this is actually an ion engine. As in, TIE-Fighter-Twin-Ion-Engine ion engine.

Now, after acknowledging the "rad kewlness" of all of this, notice that while the Star Destroyer plasma is a very pretty sky blue, the one in the earthbound engine is a nice shade of lavender. Now, lavender plasmas are very often air plasmas (79% N₂, 21% O₂), and air is really easy to work with, so the lab plasma is probably an air plasma. However, the blue color of the Star Destroyer engine plasma could be from any number of chemicals, including chlorine and helium. Chlorine plasmas would probably be a poor choice for propulsion, as the energetic chlorine ions would probably rip apart the engine over time. However, helium is a very logical fuel choice, as it's very light on a volumetric basis and, as a noble gas, is quite inert.

So. I ask again: was Lucas lucky, or brilliant? (Please, feel free to comment :-P)

¹This image from here.
(H/T: By The Way)

Points Granted for Ingenuity...

2005-12-05T23:13:00.000-05:00

...but this kid still deserves at least some kind of punishment—to convince him never to try anything like it again, if nothing else. What's really mind-boggling to me is that he went back to the same store to try the same trick. No matter how clever you think you are, you are, you have to figure that once you pull something like that once, someone in security will get suspicious.

I guess he just couldn't handle waiting until Christmas...

(Hat tip: Schlock)

I Think They're Saying Something About The Weather...

2005-11-25T16:57:00.000-05:00

Observe: the Japanese character for sleet is the character for rain stacked on top of the character for England. Now, I've never been to England, but... ;-)

(If the characters come out looking like 'éA' or something comparable, you need to switch on Japanese character coding auto-detect. In Firefox, go to View > Character Encoding > Auto-Detect and select 'Japanese.' If you're using a different browser, there should be a similar option somewhere that you can turn on. If this doesn't work, go into the Control Panel, open up 'Regional Options,' and try to find something with a 'Japanese' checkbox and check it. Hopefully that'll take care of it. :-P)

Let It Never Be Said MIT Students Aren't Creative

2005-11-11T00:57:00.000-05:00

Found this linked off of MIT's main page tonight (it's no longer featured there):

Long ago and far away in Modesto, Calif., two young musical theater fans shared a vision: "Star Wars" with tap-dancing Storm Troopers! Ewoks with chirpy voices raised in song!

The two fans, MIT Theater Guild (MTG) members Rogue Shindler and Jeff Suess, wrote and wrote, grafting snappy Star Wars lyrics onto tunes from such Broadway hits as "Cats," "West Side Story," "Les Miserables" and "Phantom of the Opera."

The delirious result is "Star Wars Trilogy: Musical Edition," the MTG production opening Friday, Nov. 11, with shows Nov. 11-13 and 16-20 in La Sala de Puerto Rico, MIT Student Center.

The production, known as "SWT: ME," retells "Star Wars: A New Hope," "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Return of the Jedi" in a three-act parody of science fiction, musical theater and George Lucas' famous Jedi saga.

I hadn't heard of it until I read about it tonight, but it sounds like it'd be pretty cool. And, barring that, also pretty funny. ;-) I'm way too loaded down this week to try to catch the show this weekend, but I might be able to make it Friday or Saturday of next week. If I go, I'll probably put forth some thoughts here. If not... well, you'll all just have to use your imaginations. Deal. :-P

Sad But True

2005-11-10T13:24:00.000-05:00

Today's Real Life.

Same thing can happen with medical records, too... anybody can get to your files 'cept you. Gotta love them privacy laws!

My Newest Vocabulary Pet Peeve

2005-10-30T23:25:00.000-05:00

From dictionary.com:

lude (lüd)
n.

A pill or tablet that contains the drug methaqualone.

From m-w.com (format adapted to match dictionary.com):

lewd (lüd)
adj.

2 a : sexually unchaste or licentious b : OBSCENE, VULGAR

Therefore, untoward behavior is lewd, not lude. I’ve seen this mistake at least two different places in the past week or so, and for whatever reason, it’s really kinda buggin’ me. :-P

Just thought I’d share...

Quickie Photoblog

2005-10-23T23:40:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the long wait between posts... school’s been a bit hectic. I’m sure y’all’d’ve much preferred something more thought-provoking, but... eh, deal with it. :-P

I do think this shot turned out really well, though:

It’s a view of a small slice of MIT campus that I see on my way into work every day. It has elements that represent parts of my experience here thus far pretty well, actually... the dome visible center-frame is the highly recognizeable Great Dome at MIT and the nearer building on the right with the sun shining full on it is the Chemical Engineering building. This picture doesn’t really show off the impressive triangular profile of the building, but at least it gets part of it in there.

Incidentally, the building on the left with the dark window stripes is the Media Lab, and the angular concrete... er... thing... that frames the Great Dome is a (so far as I’m aware) mostly useless appendage off of building E17.

...<shrug> I just don’t ask about these sorts of things... I mean, take a look at the Stata Center. (Those from CWRU should immediately recognize the main elements of the architecture.)

Can I Claim Spruce Green?

2005-09-21T10:30:00.000-04:00

Longer, more introspective post hopefully to come soon (hah), but I just had to toss this up.

Click on the thumbnail for a larger (actually readable) version:

Are they serious? I’m assuming this has been pointed out before and I’ve just missed it, but... c’mon, one-click ordering, anyone?

Token Vaguely Poetic Moment

2005-09-09T00:32:00.000-04:00

I think I ate too much today;
It is though yet too soon to say.
If come the morn indeed I pay,
Why then at home I might just stay...

That is, if skipping Japanese weren’t such a terribly bad idea. Man, this semester is going to be busy!

(Oh, and I’m really just fine... it was just late, and I guess I was in a rhyming mood... and boom, there ya go. <shrug> So sue me. :-D)

Pray

2005-08-30T11:22:00.000-04:00

WBEN.com:

MARTIAL LAW DECLARED: Situation Deteriorating
CBS News - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 10:37 AM

New Orleans, LA (CBS) - Martial Law has been declared in New Orleans as conditions continued to deteriorate. Water levels in The Big Easy and it's suburbs are rising at dangerous levels and officials stated they don't know where the water is coming from. Residents are being urged to get out of New Orleans in any way they can as officials fear "life will be unsustainable" for days or even weeks.

(H/T: Michelle Malkin)

Foresight?

2005-08-24T12:07:00.000-04:00

My high school US History and World Lit teacher, Mrs. Parsons, was well known in the school for her strongly held political and social ideas. One position she held that has always stuck with me was her assertion that the United States is a declining power, and that China would rise up and take our place as the primary world superpower. I don't know how much I ascribe to that idea myself, given the broad spectrum of arguments on both sides and the unavoidable (and hopefully not entirely unwarranted) hubris that comes from being an American citizen.

Regardless, cf. the Washington Times:

Kazakhstan’s foreign minister yesterday pledged his country’s support for U.S. military operations in Central Asia and said his country worked to water down neighboring countries’ efforts to evict American troops from the region.

Foreign Minister Kasymzhomart Tokayev added that the U.S. military presence since the 2001 Afghanistan war and China’s emergence as a regional and global power were helping revive the 19th-century “Great Game” struggle for influence in the region.

“Yes, to some extent, the ‘Great Game’ is coming back to our region,” Mr. Tokayev told editors and reporters at The Washington Times.

“All of the major countries are expressing their own interest to be present [in Central Asia], which is only natural because this region turned out to be important geopolitically and from a strategic point of view,” he said.

Kazakhstan, a U.S. ally and the only Central Asian nation to contribute troops to the postwar mission in Iraq, startled the Bush administration last month when it endorsed a communique from the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) widely interpreted as demanding a deadline for shutting down U.S. bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, set up to support the Afghan war.

The increasingly influential SCO includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but is dominated by its two largest members—Russia and China. Both Moscow and Beijing have been unnerved by the prospect of permanent U.S. military outposts in their strategic backyard.

Whether or not China is on a crash course for a head-to-head confrontation with us, there are certainly plenty of theaters within which such standoffs might occur, including Hong Kong and the above-mentioned central Asia. And that doesn’t even address the economic grappling that’s likely going to happen in the next decade or so.

Eternal vigilance, the price both of freedom and success.

(Hat tip: Captain's Quarters)