The advertising above is just a source of revenue. If the ads get offensive enough, I may drop them.
Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
|
|
Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
Magazines for cheap!
PayPal members: to make a contribution
Email me at blogmail at claytoncramer dot com. Sorry to be so indirect, but all spambots must die! But they haven't died yet! Include the word spamIamnot in your subject line to make sure that my spam blocker lets you through. |
Friday, March 24, 2006
A Town Named For A Saint Doesn't Want To Offend Anyone Different River brought this to my attention. I couldn't make up a story this silly. St. Paul, Minnesota ordered removal of an Easter bunny from city property: ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - A small Easter display was removed from the City Hall lobby on Wednesday out of concern that it would offend non-Christians.As Different River points out: Let me get this straight: The city removes a toy rabbit and some plastic eggs and a “Happy Easter” sign because the mere existence of such objects in a government building might offend non-Christians – but the very name of that city is SAINT PAUL? Thursday, March 23, 2006
Kansas Legislature Overrides Governor's Veto of Concealed Carry Law Yahoo! This is the first override of the governor's veto in Kansas in 12 years! The state House on Thursday overrode Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' veto of a concealed weapons bill, allowing it to become law this summer.It is not a perfect bill, but it is a start--and this in a state that, to my knowledge, has never had even a discretionary issuance concealed carry permit system. As you might expect, packing.org, the authority to go to for information on various state concealed weapon permit laws, is swamped right now! Just Not My Month For Domain Names... I registered the domain name scoperoller.com last year as a subdomain of claytoncramer.com. Apparently it expired, and this time, I was not informed by the registering company about it, so for the moment, scoperoller.com goes to somewhere generic. Groan. Anyway, it should be back in a day or two. I'm still getting orders, in spite of this. Revisionist History--Really Revisionist This is one of those reminders that the only thing more dangerous than a kook writing books is an expert in one field writing books in another field. Oh yes, the same publisher that published Michael Bellesiles' historical fraud Arming America, Knopf, published this bizarre work: Most historians don't believe that Jesus Christ was born 2,005 years ago this month, but they all accept that he lived around two millennia ago, and that his era was preceded by some ancient cultures and followed by others: the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and successive modern eras. Just about everything we think we understand about how we got here from there is based on that sequence.Of course, even first century writers who questioned the Christian accounts pointed out that the three hours of darkness could not have been caused by a solar eclipse, since Passover happens at the Full Moon--and I can guarantee you that a Full Moon and a solar eclipse are incompatible. The only time you can get a solar eclipse is at a New Moon. Yeah, Yeah, I Know, One Bad Example Doesn't Mean Anything About The Whole Community But you would think that someone in such an important and high-profile position within that community would know better than to engage in behavior that reinforces those nasty stereotypes: The state has suspended the medical license of a Seattle physician for five years for placing a graphic escort service advertisement on an Internet Web site.My wife has been reading the play Angels in America of late, in preparation for teaching a class. For all the insistence that gay people are just like you and me, this play--which gets astonishing praise for its frank and honest portrayal of gay life--portrays what can only be called a pretty damaged bunch. One line in particular--which I won't repeat because of how vulgar it is--involves one gay man begging another to sexually use him until he is bleeding. Any straight woman who made a request like that would be correctly recognized as someone with a serious sexual trauma in her past that she had not adequately worked through. The author of the play, Tony Kushner, also describes the relationship between fathers and sons as sadomasochism. Now, I'm sure that there are gay people out there who don't fit these terribly destructive stereotypes. But if they are the vast majority--and if the damaged crowd that this play portrays are atypical--why has Angels in America received such glowing praise? Yeah, it is well-written--but would a well-written play that portrayed Jews as controlling the world's governments be held in such high regard? Would a play that portrayed Muslims as bloodthirsty international terrorists be given this level of praise? I don't think so. I Guess The Moderate Left Is About To Abandon Their Efforts To Call Bush A Liar ABC News is admitting that some of the official documents from Hussein's government show cooperation between Iraq's government and al-Qaeda: A newly released pre-war Iraqi document indicates that an official representative of Saddam Hussein's government met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan on February 19, 1995 after approval by Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden asked that Iraq broadcast the lectures of Suleiman al Ouda, a radical Saudi preacher, and suggested "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. According to the document, Saddam's presidency was informed of the details of the meeting on March 4, 1995 and Saddam agreed to dedicate a program for them on the radio. The document states that further "development of the relationship and cooperation between the two parties to be left according to what's open (in the future) based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of cooperation." The Sudanese were informed about the agreement to dedicate the program on the radio.Here's a Washington Post article that indicates that an Iraqi diplomat was providing information to the CIA immediately before the war started that indicated that Iraq had chemical weapons: Deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's last foreign minister, Naji Sabri, was a paid spy for French intelligence, which later turned him over to the CIA to supply information about Iraq and its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs more than six months before the war began in March 2003, according to former senior intelligence officials.Argue if you want that the pre-war intelligence about WMDs was wrong--but when you have Iraqi diplomats providing information like this, to call Bush a liar, or to suggest that he was shading the truth, simply isn't accurate. Responsibility Instapundit (to my surprise) points to this Jeff Jacoby column about a guy who is asserting a Constitutional right to not be responsible for fathering children: REAL MEN - good men - take responsibility for the children they father. If they get a woman pregnant, they do the right thing: They stand by her. They support their child. They don't try to weasel out of a situation they co-authored. They shoulder the obligations of fatherhood, even if they hadn't planned on becoming a father. Once upon a time, men confronted with news of an unintended pregnancy knew what was expected of them. Often they married the woman who was carrying their child; for those tempted to behave irresponsibly, society devised the shotgun wedding. Women, too, knew what was expected of them. They tended to be very careful about sex. If they didn't always wait until they were married, they waited for a relationship that seemed to be marriage-bound.This brings back some memories. I used to work with a guy I'll call Mike. Mike was living with a gal. She wanted to get married. Mike, like much of his generation (the one now in their 30s and early 40s), grew up in a divorced home, and had some trouble with commitment. Well, one day, this gal announced, "Whoops! I'm pregnant! Let's get married!" Mike didn't want to get married. Eventually, after much wrangling and discussion, she moved out. Mike was now informed that he was going to be making child support payments for 18 years. Mike was not happy about this, and came by my office to complain and look for some emotional support. He was disappointed. If you aren't prepared to wait until marriage, you better plan on either using condoms, or taking the risk that your girlfriend is going to have a birth control failure, or pretend to have a birth control failure as a method of getting you to marry her. This is one of the risks, and you better accept it. This is not new; as near as I can tell, some women have been using pregnancy as a way to rope guys into marriage for centuries. It takes two to make a baby, and if you don't want the responsibilities that go with sex--whether this is child support or using a condom--you need to abstain. A lot of pro-choicers insist that opposition to abortion is just a method by which men control women, by forcing them to choose being sexually active or being mothers. No, this is really about whether there are consequences to your actions--just like the guy who wants to have sex without the nuisance of condoms, but then doesn't want to be responsibility for the life that he creates. Labels: abortion Wednesday, March 22, 2006
C++ The elegance of BASIC; the clarity of APL. Many years ago, when I had my first exposure to C++, I coined the aphorism, "C++ is to C as lung cancer is to lung." The more time I spend trying to debug C++ code, the more I agree with those who think it was a practical joke played on C programmers that got completely out of hand. Java is elegant. C++ is a reminder of what happens when you need to start with a clean sheet of paper designing a language--and you don't. This Qualifies As Social Science? Groan. A UC Berkeley professor has published a longitudinal study that claims that self-confident kids grow up to be liberals, and whiny kids grow up to be conservatives: Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.Berkeley isn't representative of the whole country? It isn't even particularly representative of the very liberal San Francisco Bay Area! I have a relative who grew up in Bezerkeley (or as others in the Bay Area call it, "the unlocked ward"). When he was 12 years old, he made the decision to stop dropping acid, which had severe negative consequences in his peer group. I won't claim that he was an average kid in Bezerkely, but I don't think he was completely out of the ordinary, either. Can you imagine being a conservative kid growing up in Bezerkeley? You would have good reason to be fearful, uptight, and rigid. Using Bezerkeley kids as a representative sample of Americans makes about as much sense as doing a study of violence and aggression in South Central Los Angeles. Or studying attitudes about poverty in Beverly Hills. Or examining skin cancer rates by sampling people on Santa Monica Beach. Or understanding how Jews feel about their place in the world with a survey of Jews in northern Idaho. We would all laugh at anyone that tried to pass off a study of such highly atypical populations as serious science. Killing The Defectives...Where Have We Seen This Before? It seems that there is no evil beyond North Korea. I've previously mentioned the widespread reports of cannibalism, and people reduced to eating grass. Now this flashback to Nazi Germany's program of "euthanizing" those with serious defects: SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has no people with physical disabilities because they are killed almost as soon as they are born, a physician who defected from the communist state said on Wednesday. A Little Behind In Responding To Email It was a busy weekend moving furniture and books, making ScopeRoller products and shipping them out the door, and then struggling to get my domain name operational again. I apologize to those who have emailed me and noticed that I have not been getting back to you. House Project: Moving Bigger Furniture We rented a U-Haul Saturday afternoon to move some of the bigger furniture up to the new house, since the tile guy had come through and repaired all the tiles and grout that cracked because of settling.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge I hate driving trucks this big. This one had more than 158,000 miles on it--and it felt it. Unfortunately, I didn't notice until I was returning it to the U-Haul place that the electric overdrive had been on the entire time, explaining its gutlessness, even with the light load of bookshelves, a bed, and several boxes of books. At least there's a place to sleep if I stay up there observing and I decide it is too late to drive back!  Click to enlarge Bookshelves and books are now invading every room!  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge There are still a few issues. The pressurization pump in the garage is dripping water, so the well pump people need to come back and figure out why. We are still trying to figure out a solution to the pretty serious crack in the back driveway. It is a bit expensive to tear up this much concrete, and then repour it. The builder is thinking that putting in another drain at that part of the driveway might be a way to both disguise it, and make sure that water doesn't pool there. No mailbox yet--so the first two bills from the phone company ended up going...who knows? They didn't bounce back to the phone company. Still waiting on consistently warm enough weather for the builder to finish the exterior trim paint, and grade the rest of the platform and road. The good news is that two different wireless internet providers are now offering me service, the cheaper of which will charge me $200 installation and $70 per month for 800 Kbps upstream and downstream. Citizens Communications, who could not give me DSL when I asked for phone service several months ago, now says that they will be installing more remote terminals in my area "soon" and will be able to offer DSL. If they can do so before I commit to installing a wireless antenna, that would be very nice, but phone companies move glacially. Last house project entry. Labels: house project Spring Spring officially started on Monday, and I can feel the difference. For the last couple weeks, the increased sunlight and warmth has been readily apparent. Still, there was one last heavy snow on Monday morning, and when we reach the dry heat of July, these pictures will help me hang on!  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge Tuesday, March 21, 2006
This Isn't Really About Machining, In Spite of the Pictures It is about how the things you learn as a child stick with you. When I was a child, my father was a tinkerer. He fixed cars, appliances--you name it. When my sister's TR6 needed a transmission rebuild to make it saleable--no problem. It was a major project, but he dropped the transmission, took it apart, and replaced the damaged gears. It was memorable. One gear was missing 40% of its teeth--it became a candlestick holder in our house for many years. The experience of replacing these parts was a learning experience about British automobiles. At one point, he found out that the concept of "interchangeable parts" had apparently not taken hold very well in the British automobile industry. When he took back a transmission part that didn't fit, the auto parts store explained that he had received the right part--but even in the same year, there was considerable variation in parts, and they gladly exchanged it for another supposedly identical part--and this one fit. I never liked being involved in these projects. My father would have me help him, but I always resented it, because I wanted to be reading. Getting your hands dirty making stuff just didn't do anything for me, except bore me silly. Somehow or another, I ended up learning a lot from watching him, especially when he was doing something that mattered to me. For example, by junior high, I needed a bookshelf--a big bookshelf. We built one--and he taught me that you use screws, not nails, for anything you might ever have to repair. You can remove and replace screws without damaging the wood--unlike nails. I still have that bookshelf today--very solid, and in no danger of getting creaky. When I wanted a big telescope, my father knew exactly where to go to find parts intended for that purpose--and parts not intended for that purpose! We built a serviceable mount from plumbing parts and a rolling tripod that we found in a junkyard. Finder scopes too expensive for our limited budget? He found a right angle telescope originally intended for some military application. There were no cross lines on the reticle--only horizontal lines. So we disassembled it, used a glass cutter to scribe a vertical line, and then put it back together again. No illuminated reticle? He drilled a small hole in the side of the tube, and by holding up a very small red light bulb, we achieved the desired result. It looked very retro, but it worked well. I learned a lot from my father about tools and making things (usually against my will), and in recent years, I have been using some of that knowledge. For example, the ScopeRoller manufacturing operation requires me to turn cylinders of plastic to a particular diameter. You can't just put the cylinder in a three-jaw chuck, and then move the cutting tool down the entire length of the cylinder. Where the cylinder sits in the chuck, the jaws get in the way of the cutting tool. You can't turn the cylinder most of its length, and then turn it around, and complete the process--the cylinder doesn't end up in quite the same position, and you get a discontinuity where the turning operation ends. So here's the solution that I made, starting with a round rod of aluminum.  Click to enlarge  Click to enlarge The female end is 3/4"-16 threaded to screw onto the headstock of the lathe. The male end is 3/8"-16 threaded. I face the two ends of the plastic cylinder, and then drill a small hole in the exact center of each end. then I drill and tap a 3/8"-16 hole in one end of the cylinder. This threads onto the 3/8"-16 male end of the adapter. Then I use a live center in the tailstock to suspend the cylinder, and now I can turn the entire length of the cylinder to a precise diameter in one smooth operation. The art of making this adapter was relatively simple. 1. Face the two ends of a piece of aluminum rod so that they are exactly square. 2. Drill a hole in one end with a 1/2" drill bit. 3. Use a boring bit to enlarge the hole to .673" diameter (the size that the 3/4"-16 tap requires). 4. Use a 3/4"-16 tap to thread the hole. 5. Mount this on the headstock, so that it can now be turned exactly on axis. 6. Because tapping a hole often ends up slightly off exactly perpendicular (and this needs to be a very precise part), I then refaced the end of the aluminum, put the part back in the 3-jaw chuck, and refaced the end with the 3/4"-16 hole. 7. Remount the workpiece on the headstock's 3/4"-16 threads. 8. Cut away the unmounted end of the cylinder until you have a .39" diameter by .5" long stem. 9. Use a 3/8"-16 die to thread the stem. 10. Drill three holes perpendicular to the sides of the workpiece, so that if it gets stuck on the headstock threads (which it did, at one point), I can stick metal rods into them to get more leverage for loosening it. 11. Polish everything up nicely. Whenever you start to wonder if the things that you are teaching your children--and not just useful skills, like use of tools, but the important things, like right and wrong, compassion, and justice, think back to the things you learned from your parents--and see how often you are putting those ideas to work today. Labels: house project Monday, March 20, 2006
My Domain Expired A Few Days Ago I never received a renewal notice, so I now scrambling to get it renewed. If you can read this today (March 20), I'm surprised. UPDATE: Actually, I may have received notification from Network Solutions, but when I checked my account, I noticed that the contact information (email, SnailMail, and phone number) were all unchanged from when I first registered the domain claytoncramer.com, when I still lived in California. I never updated them--and not surprisingly, they had a hard time informing of imminent expiration of my domain. (Consider this a word to the wise.) Oddly enough, when I blogged the first part of this entry, I could not get access to anything associated with the domain claytoncramer.com--but Blogger managed to get the entry put in the right place, probably because it was using either the actual IP address (you know, the four numbers separated by periods that are what domain names end up resolving to), or more likely, Blogger's DNS (Domain Name Service) tables had not been updated yet to make claytoncrame.com disappear. It may still be a few hours before everyone in the world can see my web page--and my email is still down--but that's one of the consequences of the distributed nature of DNS. It can take hours to days for all of the DNS servers to get updates with the correct IP address again for claytoncramer.com. |
