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. |
Saturday, July 08, 2006
So There Are Books That Amazon Won't Carry... Wendy McElroy writes: Last week, my FOX News/ifeminist column was a review of a delightful and politically incorrect book entitled The Dangerous Book for Boys which is a surprise best seller in the UK. It celebrates old-fashioned boyhood. In the UK, it is the #1 best seller on Amazon. In the column, I included a link to the Amazon U.S. listing where the book is/was starting to catch fire and soar up the sales ranking.But then--suddenly--Amazon (at least in the U.S.) removed the book from their catalog--and the explanation for why this makes no sense: THEIR RESPONSE: Thank you for contacting us at Amazon.com. Unfortunately, our supply of some items is limited and these products sell out quickly. I am very sorry that you were not able to place your order before our supply ran out. We do not know if this item will be available for purchase on our web site in the future. For this reason, the item is currently not listed on our web site.Yet, a few years ago, Amazon refused to remove a pedophilia advocacy book titled Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers. The arguments were freedom of the press, the right to hold unpopular ideas, etc. But now there's a book that apparently crosses the line--while a book promoting sexual abuse of children did not. Is Amazon.com a division of the North American Man-Boy Love Association? You start to wonder. Labels: child sexual abuse Thursday, July 06, 2006
Another Innovative Telescope Mount Design A reader pointed me to this three axis design, not quite as simple as the one I discussed here, but still a reminder that there's a lot of clever people out there working on better mousetraps. Too Many Divorces Glenn Reynolds (who supports gay marriage--he is a law professor) is pointing out that the high divorce rates show that straight marriage is in trouble. There's no question about that, and while it doesn't reduce my resolve that same-sex marriage is a bad idea--and to have the courts impose it on the states would be tyranny--there's also no question in my mind that straights need to get it together about marriage. I've talked to traditional values advocates who insist that the churches are doing a fine job on this--and that the real problem is that the rise of no-fault divorce laws encourages divorce, by making marriage less of a commitment than a car loan or a mortgage. I will agree that no-fault divorce certainly took away some of the discouragement to divorce--but let's not kid ourselves: reasonably happy marriages don't break up because divorce has gone from difficult and expensive to easy and cheap. No-fault divorce may well have encouraged more divorce--but no-fault divorce also came along because there were a lot of marriages in big trouble. Liberals abhor the laws imposing morality--and yet I often see liberal law professors talk about the "educative benefits of the law" with respect to anti-discrimination statutes. The claim is that prohibiting not just segregation, but discrimination in employment and housing "educated" white Americans to see other races as their equals. There's a lot of problems with this theory, of which the most obvious is that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed by Congress and signed into law by President Johnson. They were not imposed by a judicial elite, as is the case for the gay marriage and civil unions laws in Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts that liberals are thinking of when they argue for the "educative benefits of the law." But let's take the claim that laws forcing the masses to go along with something that they don't like really does change popular sentiment. If that's true, then it should also be true for laws prohibiting abortion, and making divorce hard to get--they should also be "educative." I'm less interested in changing divorce laws (which were, after all, not imposed by the tyrants in black, but adopted by legislatures) than in changing attitudes about divorce. When my wife and I married in 1980, our pastor told us that among committed evangelical Christians, only about one marriage in 900 ended in divorce--far better than the national average. Over a period of about ten years, I saw this situation change to the point where divorce among evangelical Christians isn't even surprising anymore--and where we lived in California, it was the norm. Indeed, I understand the divorce among evangelical Christians is now more common than the national average, although at least part of this is because much of the non-evangelical population isn't bothering to get married anymore, so there's no divorces to mess up their stats. There's no point in trying to make Christians who have already divorced feel bad about it. But I am also terribly upset that churches are so reluctant to make an issue of it, and say, "Don't wait until you and your spouse are upset, and aren't sure if your marriage is worth saving. These are concrete steps to take from the day you decide to marry, to avoid the problems that cause so many couples to break apart." Here's a list of specific problems that I have seen destroy marriages: 1. Finances. Learn to distinguish want from need. A car to get back and forth to work may be a need; a BMW is not. My wife gets quite upset at the number of 20something couples she sees where she works full-time, then comes home to take care of the kids, and the house, so that he can indulge his desire for toys. This is probably true for men as well, but it is clearly more true for women: a woman who is drained from a forty hour a week job, and another thirty hours caring for children and a house, is unlikely to have either patience or libido for making love. This often leads to extramarital affairs. You know where that leads. 2. Selfishness. Marriage requires a lot of selflessness. The first few years of marriage are often very stressful, because two people who have had separate lives now must learn to work together. Too often in the past, women were raised to subjugate themselves to their husbands, which didn't mean that there weren't problems--but husbands often didn't see them--until the divorce papers were served. Both husband and wife are going to have to learn to get past selfishness. If you both work at it, this will solve a pile of other problems. 3. Individual pornography--and that includes some of the romance novels. I specified "individual" pornography because I am not convinced that a couple occasionally watching erotic materials together as a stimulus (as many do) is necessarily destructive (although I am not sure that I would encourage it). Queen Victoria and Prince Albert often gave each other erotic fine art, by the way, and not because they were art lovers! What has destroyed more than a few marriages is when a spouse, usually the husband, starts to spend increasing amounts of time with pornography as compensation for a declining sexual relationship with the spouse. The hazards should be obvious: pornography performers aren't hired for their acting skills, but for their often quite artificially enhanced looks, and relatively few real world men or women are going to look good by comparison. Over time, the fantasy world of watching pornography can destroy what may already be a seriously damaged real world sexual relationship with your spouse. Sex isn't the only part of a marriage, but once this collapses, it creates serious problems. It may be an active search for extramartial sexual partners, or it may be an opportunistic fling. I've known too many couples where the net result has been very difficult times, and often it leads to divorce. (Hint: telling your wife that she needs to visit the doctor for an STD check is not one of the better ways to start an open and honest discussion about unmet needs.) 4. In-Law Loyalties. My cousin (once removed) Art Dykeman says that you should only marry an orphan. I don't think he did--perhaps what helped him to realize this. There's a powerful truth contained in Genesis 2:24, which most Americans have heard in the King James Version: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.When you have to choose between making your spouse happy, and making your parents happy, count on having someone upset with you. As a general rule, work on your making your spouse happy. Trying to split the difference doesn't work very well--and your marriage has to take priority. Gay Marriage Decisions The Georgia Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of an initiative that defined marriage as between man and woman, and prohibiting the legislature or courts from recognizing any other form of union between same-sex couples. This isn't too surprising. The ACLU and other gay tyrants involved in the suit were arguing that: 1. The language of the initiative was confusing. 2. It violated the single subject rule of the Georgia Constitution for initiatives. The first argument only makes sense if you think the average Georgia voter is an idiot. The language is pretty clear to me. The second argument is slightly less ridiculous, because one clause defined marriage, and the other clause said that no other form of union between same-sex partners, no matter where recognized, would be recognized in Georgia. Those are clearly the same subject: defining marriage as heterosexual, and preventing judges from calling it a "civil union" to achieve the same legal result. Fortunately, the Georgia Supreme Court recognized this argument for what it was--the sort of intellectually dishonest argument that fanatics come up with rather than admit that they lost. New York Court of Appeals (which in spite of the name, is the highest state court there) has ruled that the state law defining marriage as a man and a woman is constitutional. I was a little surprised by this, since New York is such a flaming liberal place. It was potentially a close call, however. The decision was 4-2, and one of the justices recused himself because his daughter is an outspoken advocate in favor of gay marriage. I presume that had he less ethics, he would have changed it to a 4-3 decision. That's a bit close for something that is obviously constitutional: the legislature defines marriage. Instapundit is pointing out Democratic hypocrisy on this--trying to take both sides on this, depending on what week it is. I Do Not Envy Bush Having To Deal With North Korea There's evil, and then there's crazy evil. Instapundit linked to this disturbing piece about how North Korea treats its only real ally: Meanwhile, North Korean officials engage in even more bizarre behavior. For example, food and fuel supplies sent to North Korea have been halted, not to force North Korea to stop missile tests or participate in peace talks, but to return the Chinese trains the aid was carried in on. In the last few weeks, the North Koreans have just kept the trains, sending the Chinese crews back across the border. North Korea just ignores Chinese demands that the trains be returned, and insists that the trains are part of the aid program. It's no secret that North Korean railroad stock is falling apart, after decades of poor maintenance and not much new equipment. Stealing Chinese trains is a typical loony-tune North Korean solution to the problem. If the North Koreans appear to make no sense, that's because they don't. Put simply, when their unworkable economic policies don't work, the North Koreans just conjure up new, and equally unworkable, plans. The Chinese have tried to talk the North Koreans out of these pointless fantasies, and for their trouble they have their trains stolen. How do you negotiate under these conditions? No one knows.You can imagine how they might respond if we used U.S. ships to provide aid to them as part of some deal to end their nuclear weapons program--because unlike China, we aren't their friends. If North Korea weren't starving their population to the point of mass cannibalism, they wouldn't have enough of a military for us to worry about--we could just walk right in and knock over what is effectively the largest mass suicide cult in history. But North Korea has gobs of artillery aimed at Seoul, South Korea's capital and largest city. The concern is that North Korea could kill a million people in short order. As much as it bugs me, I understand why South Korea keeps hoping the victims will eventually rise up and overthrow the lunatics there. Gun Lock Requirement The federal law requiring that all handguns sold in the U.S. come with a gun lock sounds like a Mom and apple pie sort of statute, doesn't it? Dr. John Lott points out something that those of us who study the gun accident statistics have always known: gun accidents involving small children (the only kind that a gun lock will prevent from firing a gun) are extremely rare. It seems simple enough to require that handguns sold in the United States have gun locks. Yet, last week the House of Representatives voted 230-191 to bar using federal funds to enforce the law that was passed only last year as part of a law to shield gun makers from reckless lawsuits. It is now up to the Senate.Of course, if this federal requirement would save even a couple of those 20 small children from an early death, who could object to this requirement? But as Dr. Lott points out, the people that use gun locks on their handguns aren't the problem. The problem are the people with serious alcohol and drug problems who are so irresponsible that including a gun lock with every handgun is just not going to influence their behavior. I would not have gone out of my way to try and repeal such a law, primarily because it produces bad publicity. But let's not pretend that this law is making much of a difference. Wednesday, July 05, 2006
An Innovative New Telescope Mount Design The biggest expense and weight for most telescopes is the mount--not the optical tube. Building an equatorial mount (one that tracks objects across the sky as the Earth rotates) that is sufficiently rigid to hold a telescope--and not vibrate or shake--is a daunting task. There are a variety of designs: the German equatorial mount (here's a beautiful example at Parallax Instruments); the fork mount (here's a Meade fork mounted Schmidt-Cassegrain); the yoke mount (in this case, the Mount Wilson 100 inch reflector). Here's a description of a new design for an equatorial mount that looks to be very simple, lightweight, and probably quite rigid. I'm getting tempted for Big Bertha... Labels: telescopes The Dog Has Discovered A New Treat Grasshoppers. They are not in short supply up here. They don't really fly, so they can't get away--and Biscuit just loves them! I am reminded of a cookbook that I read many years ago by an entomologist with the catchy title, Butterflies in My Stomach. Limited Blogging Because of Book Writing Adventures in Building is taking almost all my spare time, so I'm blogging relatively little for a few weeks. Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Adventures in Building I am hard at work over this four day weekend assembling all the text and pictures for what I hope will be my seventh book, Adventures in Building: My Wife's Dream Home in the Mountains. I have about 30,000 words so far, and far more pictures than I will really able to use. As is usually the case for me, the difficulty isn't writing enough--the difficulty is editing it down to a readable result. Big Bertha Improvements I mentioned a few days ago that Big Bertha's optical quality problems was at least partly because of non-repeatability--that moving it across the sky would cause the primary mirror to move because of the rather approximate way in which the mirror was held in place. Here's a picture of the gate hasp that the original builder used to hold the "tailgate" in place--and you can see one of the studs that now helps hold it in position.  Click to enlarge This helped a lot; image quality improved, and more importantly, it was repeatable. Since I already had the mirror out of the tube, I decided to remove the diagonal mirror as well, vacuumed out all the spider webs, bugs, and dirt, and applied a fresh coat of flat black spray paint to the interior of the tube, to suppress internal reflections. While I had the diagonal mirror out, I found myself looking at the gadget that was holding the diagonal mirror in place. It was clever, but not exactly right. Traditionally, good diagonal mirror holders use three spring-loaded screws so that you can adjust the diagonal mirror's angle relative to the primary mirror and eyepiece focuser. (Really good diagonal holders have an additional screw that lets you move the entire mirror up and down in the tube.) Here's a picture; it isn't really covered in dust. That's an artifact of trying to adjust the contrast and brightness of the image to bring out detail.  Click to enlarge This adjustment process of part of what is called collimation--and for Newtonian reflectors, it is absolutely critical. I can't count the number of Newtonians that I have looked through that had a serious collimation problem severely impairing the telescope's performance. Anyway, I decided to disassemble the diagonal holder's three screw adjustment scheme to find out why it was so clumsy. It turned out that there were no springs in between the screws and the piece of metal to which the diagonal is glued. This has probably been a contributor to the poor performance of Big Bertha, because without springs between the mirror holder, and the part that screws into the spider, gravity can cause minor movements of the mirror holder against those screws--destroying the collimation. I dug around and found appropriate sized springs--and it certainly makes a difference. Last night was pretty clear, although there was a little turbulence, but I was able to crank Big Bertha up to 400x on the Moon, with the image just starting to get soft. I couldn't decide if this was a limitation of the optics, or because of turbulence. I could certainly see the image quivering a bit. Jupiter was limited to about 222x, but this may have been because a quarter Moon puts out a lot of light. I'll try this again when I don't have tht pesky natural streetlight in the sky. Partly because of all the rearrangement I made to the primary mirror's mounting method when I first bought this telescope, it has always been a bit tail heavy. One solution has to been to hang the bungee cords that hold the dust cover in place off the front of the tube. I decided to relocate the finderscope bracket a little closer to the front end of the tube, partly to rebalance the tube assembly, and partly because where it was before made it clumsy to sight along the bracket to get the finder aimed properly. (Because it is an 8x finderscope, you often have to do a very coarse aiming of the entire telescope to get an object in the finderscope.) You can see the old bracket holes in the picture:  Click to enlarge Labels: telescopes Monday, July 03, 2006
What Are The Limits of Academic Freedom? I am sure that the left, and the ACLU, will be defending this guy's right to teach his nutty theories in the classroom: Patrick Farrell, Wisconsin’s provost, announced last week that he would review everything about the course “Islam: Religion and Culture,” in light of comments made on a radio show by the instructor, Kevin Barrett. In his remarks, Barrett said that the United States planned the 9/11 attacks as a way to start a war in the Middle East. Barrett also indicated that he planned to share his views during the course this fall.Here's a thought for you: if a biology professor announced that he was going to teach that the Earth is 6000 years old, and that all species of life exist as they are were created by God--along with the "official, whitewashed version"--the ACLU would file suit to prevent it. |
