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'm running for Idaho state senate I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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, August 26, 2006
Air Marshals Finally Allowed To Dress Appropriately Of all the incredibly dumb things that I have ever seen, this had to be among the dumbest--the requirement that air marshals wear suits and ties: Yup. Wearing suits and ties when you are young and in good shape was tantamount to having them wear T-shirts that said, "Undercover Air Marshall." If The Internet Made Us A Global Village... Then you expect there to be a global neighborhood watch, right?
Bread It used to be that the choice was healthy bread (whole wheat, seven grain, twelve grain, four hundred hundred sixty-five grain) or Wonder bread--which had much of the texture and character of unsweetened cake. There's a place for both: a turkey and Swiss cheese sandwich on twelve grain bread is very nice--but if I'm making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I really don't want the bread to have so much character. In the last year or two, I've noticed that some of the regional brands available here in Boise were describing themselves as "old-fashioned white bread." By that, they meant that they weren't quite as fluffy as Wonder bread. Now, I see that Wonder offers a whole grain white bread. You won't mistake it for traditional Wonder bread--it isn't quite that like and fluffy--but it works for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich really well--and from the effect that it has on my gastrointestinal tract, I can be pretty confident that it is, as the label says, whole grain. Ditto for hamburger buns: I can now get those white whole grain. Sometimes, Everything Comes Together in a Single Newspaper Article As you are perhaps aware, San Francisco banned handguns, as well as all sales of firearms and ammunition, by initiative a while back, and our side is still fighting with the courts about it. As you are doubtless also aware, California has a very, very strict law concerning "assault weapons," with mandatory registration of all assault weapons, a ban on sales (except to the small number of movie studios that have licenses for them), and very severe penalties for criminal misuse of them. So someone forwarded me this sad article, and all I could think: did the resident use a handgun to defend himself? This Melvin Brown III is clearly a very bad guy. Contrary to the gun control advocate characterization of gun violence as nice ordinary people who lose their temper and misuse a gun, this gun was clearly a career criminal. He's 28 years old--and since the ban on assault weapon transfers took effect in 1990 (I remember it), when this guy was 12 years old, he clearly committed a felony to obtain it. He apparently planned to murder someone, and it appears that he forced entry. Yes, there are nice ordinary people with no previous criminal history who misuse guns--but precious few. Overwhelmingly, murderers are minors (typically about 1/3 of murders in the U.S.) who can't legally buy a gun; people with previous felony convictions (about 40-50% of murderers); or people with mental illness that are not taking their medications (about 5% of murderers). These are not particularly ordinary people--and they have generally shown an unwillingness or inability to obey laws. Yet idiots such as the majority of the voters of San Francisco decide that the solution to criminals who already break laws that prohibit them from owning guns or breaking into someone's home...is to try and disarm their victims. Friday, August 25, 2006
Elegant Solution to an Engineering Problem There is one aspect of the ScopeRoller product line that has always bothered me because it wasn't very elegant. The caster sets for the Losmandy G-11, because the tripod leg inserts are round, and the tripod legs into which they slide are round, tend to rotate a bit. I encourage my customers to solve this problem by using some black silicone sealant to prevent rotation. That's not beautiful. I believe that I have identified a solution--spring-loaded dowel pins that grab the inside of the leg. I've done this with a single spring-loaded dowel pin, and it provides enough friction that normal motion won't rotate the leg insert. Three of them solve the problem. The customer just has to press in the dowel pins against the springs while inserting the caster assembly into the leg. At the same time, the surfaces are smooth enough that with a vigorous pull, you can remove the caster assembly again. This also means that instead of getting all twitterpated about the manufacturing tolerances of Losmandy legs, I don't have to worry so much. UPDATE: There is a saying often attributed to H. L. Mencken: For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong.That seems to be case here. The solution is simple and elegant--but it isn't working quite as well as it should. I tried this experiment out with three pins per insert on some inserts that were way too small (like .01" too small), and they worked pretty well. I tried one pin per insert, and they still worked well. I tried one pin per insert on a set that was exactly the right size, and it didn't work well. Perhaps I need three pins per leg insert, so that there are three different locations of tension and friction. Someone Needs To Open Some Newspapers, I Think I'm not entirely thrilled with Wal-Mart, and I can at least understand some of the leftist criticisms of its power. (You might think, from the left's criticisms of Wal-Mart's power, influence, and destructive effects on others, that it was a government of some sort.) There are also some serious criticisms that conservative have of it, as well, such as being the marketing arm of China. But this is the sort of opening to an essay in The American Prospect that immediately discredits both the author's ability to see reality, and that of the magazine as well: WHY WAL-MART MATTERS. I'm of the opinion that how to handle Wal-Mart is among the two or three most important issues facing the country. The conversation hasn't caught up to it, and the arguments being had mostly miss the mark and collapse in their own short-sightedness, but the mega-retailer's impact on the economy, ubiquity across the country, and aggressiveness in using its size will eventually force a reckoning proportionate to its power.Let's see, can we come up with a list of at least four more important issues facing the country? 1. The War on Iraq. 2. The War on Terror. 3. Is global warming happening? Is it partially or largely anthropogenic? If so, what should we do about it? If it is completely natural, are there steps that we should be taking anyway? 4. AIDS, especially globally. 5. The proliferation of nuclear weapons. There, I've come up with five items that the sort of raving leftists that read The American Prospect would have to agree are far more important than Wal-Mart. What's really funny is that the article goes on to mention Jonah Goldberg's calling the left's focus on this issue "Wal-Mart Derangement Syndrome"--and unintentionally proves Goldberg's point with that absurd opening. Someone With Way Too Much Time On His Hands Sasha Volokh points to this rather astonishing list of the first 800 or so people in line for the British throne (excluding those who are either Catholics, or married to Catholics, and are thus ineligible). You understand, I can see why the first dozen or so might be worth worrying about, but short of an electrical accident such as that in the beginning of the movie King Ralph, I really can't see the urgency of having the list all put together. "Who Are You Going to Believe? Me, or Your Lyin' Eyes?" This is one of the great Groucho Marx lines--I can't remember from which movie. There's a new survey of Iraqis that while it shows that there are some very serious problems in Iraq--the Iraqis seem to be more optimistic about the future there than Americans are. Here's the press release that tries to put the most positive spin on it the data:
When you go read the PowerPoint presentation of the data here, it does make it clear that Iraqis, while not happy with the situation, have some optimism about the future. They appear to be more optimistic about the future of Iraq than Americans are optimistic about the future of Iraq. Of course, the Iraqis have the advantage that they live there, and aren't relying on the leftist American news media for their knowledge of Iraq. More On Tesla Motors Batteries don't last forever. A reader in California with a BMW M3 and a Honda Accord has done the math, and he thinks that this is going to make little sense economically: It's not clear whether the limiting factor on battery life will be total usage, usage pattern, calendar time, or some function of all of these. Chess Is Originally A Persian Game, As The Current Events Make Clear Even many of our terms for chess--for example, "checkmate" comes from shah mat, Persian for "your king is dead." (Ancient Persia, of course, is now Iran.) I was a member of the chess club in high school, but I'm afraid that I lacked the patience to look twenty possible moves ahead to be really good at it. The question is whether the West has the patience for this much more consequential chess game we are playing now. It is obvious to anyone wth half a brain that Hezbollah's attacks on Israel were an attempt to distract the West from Iran's nuclear program. While we were blocking a feint by pawns and knights, Iran was positioning the queeen on the other side of the board. Israel's response has been to acquire two fuel cell submarines from Germany with the capacity to fire nuclear-tipped missles. I saw an interview with the Jerusalem Post's editor-in-chief last night on one of the Fox News shows, and he discussed how the goal was to give Israel a capacity to pre-emptively destroy Iranian nuclear capability. I would expect that this is also a Mutally Assured Destruction ploy. Sure, Iran could drop a few dozen nuclear weapons on Israel, and for practical purposes, end the state of Israel--but those submarines would launch enough nuclear missles to make Iran a 14th century power again. I'm not sure what the targets would be--destroying the leadership would be obvious, destroying all of Iran's ability to produce and export oil would cause the Iranian people far more suffering in the long run. If the Iranian leadership is rational (a very arguable point right now), they will respond to Israel's positioning of her queen on the board. But how will they respond? If Israel launches a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear weapons development program, this is terribily damaging. There will be collateral damage--and Iran will certainly do its best to exaggerate the amount of it. It would give Iran and Syria an excuse to attack Israel, and even many moderate Muslim states would feel pressured to publicly back Iran (while privately breathing a sigh of relief about destruction of the Iranian nuclear program). The left, which is already fiercely hostile to Israel, will be successful in persuading even more of the hopelessly brain-damaged liberals into joining their crypto-anti-Semitic campaign. If Israel does not launch a pre-emptive strike, than those missles become a threat of massive retaliation for any Iranian use of nuclear weapons. That's all fine and good--we lived for decades in that balance of terror with the Soviet Union--but it is encourages Iran to arrange for those weapons to be used in a way that allows them to deny involvement. I've already mentioned my concern that Iran's uranium enrichment program appears to be intended to make terrorist bombs, not strategic weapons. If a small U-235 bomb went off in Tel Aviv, or New York City (pretty much the same thing, as far as Iran is concerned), it would cause hundreds of thousands of deaths. It would be difficult to prove that Iran was the source of the weapon--and Israel (or the U.S.) would have a choice: nuke Iran, and suffer Iranian retaliation as well as the negative judgment of history, or wait for another terrorist nuclear weapon to go off. Both of these are very bad choices. A pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear weapons program makes more sense--and this is going to still be a very bad result. It Reminds Me Of The Pigs in the Cadillac Story A reader in California writes: This indicates something ...My first guess is that someone bought an Escalade as a "business vehicle"--which really means that he wanted one anyway, and decided to take advantage of the IRS's old rules about 6001 pounds GVWR--and the economy has slowed enough that he actually has to use it for that purpose! The pigs in the Cadillac story: perhaps urban legend, but apparently some years back, a Iowa Highway Patrol officer pulls over a brand new Cadillac Sedan de Ville for speeding. As he approaches the driver's door, he notices that the back seat of this otherwise immaculate car has several filthy pigs--and the whole back seat is covered in mud. "Sir, why would you put pigs in the back seat of this beautiful car?" "If it wasn't for those pigs, I couldn't drive a beautiful car like this." There are moments when you can intuitively see that there's a logic problem there, but it is just more work to figure out what the problem is than it is worth. Thursday, August 24, 2006
Civil Forfeiture I am pretty hostile to civil forfeiture of property--where the government seizes something, and claims that it was used in a criminal act. Unlike a criminal prosecution, where the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt to a moral certainty that a person has committed a crime, with civil forfeiture, the government grabs the property, and says, "We only need a preponderance of evidence. If you disagree, you are welcome to file suit and try and prove us wrong." In many California counties, if the police seize a gun--even if they later realize that there was no crime involved--they simply will not return a gun to the owner. You want a $400 gun back? Go hire a lawyer, and spend thousands of dollars trying to get it back. In Oregon, I've seen episodes of Cops where the vice squad used civil forfeiture to seize cars from customers of prostitutes. Much of the time, they are seizing cars that are barely saleable to a junkyard, but sometimes they get fairly valuable vehicles--and that's got to hurt a lot more than the usually trivial fine for soliciting prostitution. It's also a bit more difficult to explain to the wife if you come home the next morning, looking like hell--but without a car. Even worse, if you still owe money on the car, guess what! You still get to keep making payments on the car the police have seized! I remember that episode of Cops scored big when they did a civil forfeiture on a semi, worth about $70,000 (some years ago) that was being driven by a trucker who decided to hire a working girl. If getting arrested while working didn't lose him his job, having the police confiscate his employer's truck certainly did. Civil forfeiture is commonly used in drug cases to seize cars, land, houses, and most important of all, cash. This allows the police department to fund its drug interdiction operations without having to go hat in hand to the legislature for more money. It's clever, you have to admit--the better they get at seizing the assets of drug dealers, especially big drug dealers, the more money they have to continue the operation. There's a little problem, however: what if the police are wrong? I remember seeing a disturbing news show some years ago in which they interviewed a lot of people who had money taken from them by the police under civil forfeiture who were clearly not criminals. One of them was an orchid grower. It is a cash business. He had no criminal history. He broke no laws. The government didn't even make a small attempt at charging him with any crime--and he was out $9,000. They had a bunch of cases like this, where there was simply no reason to assume that this person was criminal. Even worse, the civil forfeiture thing often leads to raids that make no sense--and get people killed. One of them was Donald Scott, shot to death in his Malibu home some years ago because the National Park Service wanted his land--and those accommodating sorts at the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department flew over his land, decided that he was growing marijuana there, and did a (depending on who you believe) no-knock raid--and shot him to death. (By the way, there's gobs of documentation on this case--I picked that particular account, but I read many of the news stories at the time about it. The only thing that made this one special is that Mr. Scott was rich--usually the victims of these crimes are poor or middle class.) Anyway, a lot of opening discussion to get to today's case. The news story is here: Federal Appeals Court: Driving With Money is a CrimeBoy, that's bad! But I went and read the actual decision, here. I still agree that there was a plausible explanation for why Gonzolez had $124,700 in cash without a drug transaction involved, and I would have agreed with the district judge who ordered the money returned. But after reading the details, I wouldn't say that there was no evidence. There are certainly a lot of details here that either don't ring entirely true, or that at least would make a sensible person suspicion:
As I said, I don't think this should be sufficient reason for civil forfeiture--but I can't say for sure that the government's belief about the purpose and origin of this money were wrong. Oxygen Production on Early Earth This is an interesting report: Rocks older than 2.4 billion years contain abnormal ratios of sulfur isotopes compared with younger rocks. The only way known to generate these abnormal ratios are reactions between sunlight and sulfurous volcanic gas in the absence of an ozone shield that would normally help screen out ultraviolet rays.The article goes on to explain that there is going to be a lot of howling from other scientists about this--and I'm not surprised. They better be howling--because if it is correct, it creates a very serious problem. There are all sorts of interesting implications to this. The scientific consensus is that an oxygen-rich atmosphere is a sign of photosynthesis. Planets start out with a lot of methane, water vapor, and ammonia. Even small amounts of free oxygen (as is released by sunlight hitting water vapor and disassociating it) rapidly converts methane to carbon dioxide, hydrogen to water vapor, and ammonia to nitrogen and water vapor. Eventually, much of the hydrogen caused by photodisassociation of water vapor leaves the Earth as a continuous trail. In the exosphere, at the top of the atmosphere, hydrogen molecules are excited to the point that they reach escape velocity. The only hope for getting any hydrogen back is from comet collisions. Eventually, you end up with an atmosphere that is mostly carbon dioxide and nitrogen--either thick and unpleasant (like Venus) or thin and unpleasant (like Mars). If enough free oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere, it forms an ozone layer that protects plants and animals from ultraviolet light. But it is generally believed that the quantity of free oxygen required for an ozone layer is only going to form as a result of photosynthesis, as plants convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and glucose. No problem so far--except for the date. If we had an oxygen atmosphere at 3.8 billion years ago, it means that in less than 700 million years, we went from a dead chunk of stone into a place where some inanimate chemicals made the leap to photosynthesis. Young Earth Creationists are absolutely insistent that the Earth is only a few thousand years old because they know that if the Earth is that young (possible, but so unlikely in my mind as not to be worth thinking much about), then evolution is impossible. Evolutionists have their version of this problem: if there are billions of years between formation of Earth and the first life, then there is at least the possibility that blind, random processes could eventually turn random chemicals into something as complex as life. But 700 million years from a crust too hot for complex organic chemicals to photosynthesis so widespread that the atmosphere has gone oxygen? That's a very short time--especially for a blind, random process. By the way, don't think that life is the same as photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is a fiendishly complex process (at least at the level that I learned it in biology at Sonoma State University). Here's a nice simple explanation. The leap from cells that can control transport of nutrients and waste products across their exterior membrane and can reproduce to cells with chloroplasts, stroma, electron transport systems, thylakoids, enzymes that do ATP synthesis, light-dependent reactions, light-independent reactions--there's a heck of a lot going on there. Most of these chemical reactions (perhaps all?) require an enzyme to make it move forward, and every enzyme requires protein coding to create it. Every physical structure (thylakoids, stroma, chloroplasts) requires a substantial amount of protein coding to manufacture it. I am prepared to believe (at least for sake of argument) that all of these complex mechanisms could have developed as a result of blind, random chance. But what are the chances that all of these complex mechanisms managed to develop in less than 700 million years? More importantly, what are the chances that cells that blindly, randomly developed one of these structures or enzymes were the ancestors of cells that blindly, randomly developed all the rest of these useful mutations? I'm hard pressed to see how chlorophyll (which is a porphyrin ring with a magnesium atom in the middle and some interesting side chains) is going to do a lot of good to a cell without some method of taking that energy and passing it through the rest of the process. By itself, it doesn't do much. Ditto for a lot of the other structures and enzymes that make up the process. Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Where Did Liberalism Lose Its Way? My wife and I was visiting some friends near Reno a couple weekends ago, and he played the soundtrack from Chris Guest's 2003 movie A Mighty Wind. I haven't seen it, but I'm tempted. Guest is responsible for This is Spinal Tap, one of the greatest mockumentaries (that's a "mock documentary") imaginable. (Unfortunately, too many people who saw This is Spinal Tap must have done too many drugs in the 1960s--when the movie came out, a lot of people didn't realize it was satire, and wanted to know when Spinal Tap was going to be touring again.) A Mighty Wind is a satire about the American folk music culture, and as I listened to these achingly well done parodies, it brought back a lot of memories of a time when "liberal" wasn't a dirty word--and when I suppose that I qualified as a liberal by the standards of the time. It got me to thinking about this matter. First of all, let's be very clear about this: much of what calls itself "conservative" today is not so far from a liberal of say, 1965. As Ronald Reagan observed about his departure from the Democratic Party, he didn't leave them--they left him. Much of the conservative opposition to the Great Society was that liberals seemed reluctant to admit that much of American poverty was self-imposed. Yes, there were people who were getting lousy primary and secondary educations, and had no chance of going to college because of it--and it wasn't all associated with segregated schools. But there was a lot of poverty that was and is a result of substance abuse and laziness. In some cases, you had families growing up in subcultures that knew nothing else--and you could and can find such examples not just in black inner cities, but also among rural whites. I still can't figure out if liberals back then--and especially now--are too blind to understand this, or if they purposely blurred the lines. A socialist would have a strong reason to pretend that every poor person was a victim, because the doctrine of "from everyone according to his ability, to everyone according to his need" makes the individual's laziness irrelevant. Liberalism, however, was traditionally not tied to this idea. I wonder if liberals blurred the distinctions out of fear that admitting that there were "deserving poor" and "undeserving poor" might reduce the scale of the programs. Let's get one idea completely out of people's heads: the idea that the government has a moral obligation to provide for those who are poor through no fault of their own is not new. It was not invented by Franklin Roosevelt. Since at least Elizabeth I, and depending on who you believe, since Henry VIII, English law provided for secular authorities to care for members of the community who could not care for themselves. Blackstone's Commentaries makes the point that along with the right to life, one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen: The law not only regards life and member, and protects every man in the enjoyment of them, but also furnishes him with every thing necessary for their support. For there is no man so indigent or wretched, but he may demand a supply sufficient for all the necessities of life, from the more opulent part of the community, by means of several statutes enacted for the relief of the poor, of which in their proper places.As I discuss in this paper about the English Poor Law of 1834, it was not just stinginess that caused English welfare laws to be so cramped in how they treated the poor; it was recognition that welfare must provide "less-eligible conditions" than working. In short, welfare had to be more miserable than working, to encourage those in need to work if at all possible. The resources of any society are necessarily limited; you have to make sure that those who are taking advantage of assistance genuinely need it, to make sure that those resources are available to those who have no other choice. I think this is where liberalism lost its way--a reluctance to admit that "less-eligible conditions" necessarily means that there is some shame associated with being on the dole. The emphasis of too much of 1970s liberalism was that there was absolutely nothing wrong about being dependent on the government--and that was one of the components that eventually drove some many people like myself with liberal sensibilities away. Tesla Motors I mentioned yesterday my concern that building an electric sports car first isn't the fastest way to impoverish the lunatics that run Iran and fund bin Laden. A reader pointed me to the Tesla Motors blog, where the chairman, Elon Musk, unveils their strategy--which is to use the profits from the sports car to build "a sporty four door family car at roughly half the $89k price point of the Tesla Roadster...." This sounds like a good plan, but it needs to happen very, very quickly. He has a rather long discussion there about CO2 output, and claims that the Tesla Roadster produces far less CO2, even if the electricity comes from natural gas, than gasoline powered vehicles, even very high efficiency ones. To reach those numbers, however, Musk is pointing to a very high efficiency General Electric natural gas generator--something that I'm sure is not as good as the vast majority of natural gas burning generators actually in service. Musk is obviously not Green, since he points out that nuclear power and hydropower are other potential sources of electricity for the Tesla--and those produce no CO2. He also indicates that they are going to have a joint marketing effort with a maker of solar panels that he says should be capable of producing about 50 miles per day of electricity. I'm not sure if he is talking "50 miles per day for those of you in live in California" or for people who live where it gets dark and cloudy for three months of the year. By the way, as tempting as it is to imagine an America where we all zoom around in electric cars, and the Arabs go back to riding camels, because they can't afford to buy cars anymore--let's not lose touch with reality. Battery technology limits electric vehicles to urban use. You can't recharge a battery fast enough to make it practical for cross-country jaunts, like the one I recently did from Horseshoe Bend to Reno. Well, I suppose if there were places that you could drop your battery, and pop in a fresh one--something like a very, very big electric screwdriver--this might be possible. I think that gasoline or diesel vehicles, at least for long haul use, are going to be with us for a very long time. Still, for most Americans, an electric vehicle with a range of 200 to 250 miles, with an overnight recharge, would be quite sufficient for their daily use. I would expect that a lot of families would have an electric car, and a gasoline vehicle for long trips. Some might have two electrics, and rent a gasoline vehicle for long trips. Even that might knock our petroleum consumption down enough to start impacting the price of oil, and starving out those whose turbans are wound too tight. Where Would I Find 1/4" Diameter Metal or Hard Plastic Cylinders, 1/2" to 3/4" Long? I'm sure that I can find an industrial supplier, somewhere, but right now, I need two or three of them for a ScopeRoller experiment, and I don't want to spend a silly amount of money on Next Day or 2nd Day Air shipping. What sort of business that I would find in Boise might have something that fits this description? These need to be 0.25" +- .01", and not very long. In theory, I could make these with my machine tools, but I don't have a parting tool (yet) for the lathe, and cutting stock this short on the power miter saw is a bit risky. UPDATE: Thanks to all for the helpful suggestions on sources and methods of substituting a hacksaw blade for a parting tool on the lathe. I knew that dowel pins would be a useful solution once I started production--I just needed a local source for a couple of them for experiments. An Amusing Example of Uniformitarianism Carried Too Far! As you may be aware, one of the first causes of scientific skepticism of Bishop Ussher's famous calculation that God made the Earth on the evening October 23, 4004 BC, was the replacement of catastrophism (the belief that just about every significant geological feature that we see was the result of the Flood and similar atypical events) with uniformitarianism (the belief that just about every significant geological feature that we see is the result of slow, continuous processes). This is largely the work of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, two British geologists in the late 18th and early 19th century. It seems pretty clear to me that uniformitarianism is the most accurate paradigm for explaining geology--but it is also the case that geologists became rather dogmatic about this by the 20th century--to the point where they simply refused to seriously consider that such structures as the coulees of eastern Washington could have been produced over a period of months, when one of the great Ice Age lakes drained to the Pacific. A friend of mine who was working on his MS in Martian Geology (okay, okay, it's called Areology) told me that even though catastrophism made the most sense for understanding Mars, even in the early 1980s, this prejudice against catastrophism was still in force. I am amused to find this very entertaining example from Mark Twain, in which he shows what happens when you take this uniformitarian geological idea a bit too far: In his book Life on the Mississippi (1884), Mark Twain suggests, with tongue in cheek, that some day the river might even vanish! Here is a passage that shows us some of the pitfalls in using rates to predict the future and the past.In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-pole. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo [Illinois] and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. Overpaid Actors Michael Williams, regarding Paramount's decision to cut Tom Cruise loose for his bizarre behavior: Everyone knows that Tom Cruise is insane, and combined with his exorbitant salary it shouldn't be a surprise that he's the latest in the line of huge stars dumped by major studios. But don't be deceived, it wasn't just Tom's bizarre behavior that did him in: movie star salaries have been dropping for years due to plummeting earnings. (Compare to stars' earnings in 2000.) Tom Cruise is just the low-hanging fruit, and now that he's been picked off the tree just wait for others to follow. What's more, advancing CG technology may eventually render (heh) actors entirely obsolete. Imagine our kids swooning over digital babes and hunks that only exist on a hard drive.It isn't necessary to go to digital actors. One of the big lessons of independent filmmakers--or for that matter, M. Night Shyamalan's hopelessly flawed Lady in the Water--is that there are an enormous number of very, very skilled actors out there, most of whom are usually described as "character actors" because they resemble real people, and are every bit as skilled--often much more skilled--than "stars." I did not immediately recognize any actors in Lady in the Water except Paul Giamatti and Shyamalan--and it took a while to realize that I had seen Giamatti in other movies. Lady in the Water was hopelessly flawed--but the skill of the actors, along with the comedic moments, were the only aspects of the film that saved it from being a complete disaster. Let me make a suggestion: spend some time watching a few dozen movies, "little" movies, and big ones--and notice how few really, really bad actors there are. If you see a bad actor in a movie, it is usually one of the stars, who for reasons that I do not understand, is considered a major draw. Just like musicians, there is no shortage of highly skilled actors out there--more than there's market demand for, which is why so many actors actually do something else. Hence, a line from "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" that is still fairly true: And all the stars there never were a parkin' cars and pumpin' gas. Conflict of Interest For Federal Judge In Wiretap Case? Stop the ACLU brought this to my attention, although Judicial Watch is who found it: (Washington, DC) Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and judicial abuse, announced today that Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who last week ruled the government's warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional, serves as a Secretary and Trustee for a foundation that donated funds to the ACLU of Michigan, a plaintiff in the case (ACLU et. al v. National Security Agency). Judicial Watch discovered the potential conflict of interest after reviewing Judge Diggs Taylor’s financial disclosure statements.I don't know what the official rules are on this. If judges having contributed to the ACLU (especially in an indirect way such as this) were grounds for requiring judges to recuse themselves from cases in which the ACLU represented someone, then I would expect that many judges would have to recuse themselves frequently. Still, it is a reminder that the judge is hardly a dispassionate participant in the process. Amazing the Rationalizations for Ignoring Corruption That Exist From this UPI article in the Washington Times about the Oil for Food corruption scandal: A Swedish Foreign Ministry report says Norwegian officials knew Iraq was demanding kickbacks from the U.N. "Oil for Food" program.Oh yeah, that's a good reason to turn a blind eye! Popular Mechanics Drives the Tesla Electric Sports Car You can read their brief description here. Instapundit says that he wants one. Well, so do I. But at $80,000, it's a bit pricey, unless you were planning to buy a Corvette or Porsche, anyway. I understand that this is not the only vehicle Tesla Motors intends to build--but I think it would have made more sense to have started out building a vehicle that would be a mass market vehicle. Instead of a sports car that can go 0-60 in four seconds or less--for $80,000--how about a commuter car that can go 0-60 in eight or nine seconds, with a price tag closer to $35,000? The Tesla roadster uses a carbon-fiber body (to get the weight down, but at much higher cost than a conventional body), they could have started with some existing fairly light small sedan, such as a Honda Civic. At $80,000, they are going to be selling these cars primarily to the Hollywood greens, and a few to the multimillionaires. That's fine for image, but there are economies of scale when you sell hundreds of thousands of cars a year, instead of thousands. I'm upset, not just because I would prefer to commute in an electric car, but because I would like electric cars to become so common that we can starve out all forms of Islamofascism, by dramatically reducing imports of oil from the Middle East. Boutique automobiles (as an $80,000 roadster has to be) aren't going to do this; a $35,000 car that uses no gas will. UPDATE: A reader suggests that the crowd that can buy an $80,000 plaything will be more tolerant of the inevitable problems that come with a new design like this. Probably. On the other hand, if you can amortize the design and development costs across 200,000 cars, instead of 2,000, you can afford to do a much more thorough job of solving those problems before they end up on the street. Some of the Italian exotic sports cars have a reputation for unreliability, at least partly because they are made in very small quantities, and the maker really can't afford to put a team of five or six engineers onto figuring out a proper solution. Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Non-Computer Geeks May Want To Skip This One I haven't written any Java in a year or so, and it seems like something that I should remain competent at, so I downloaded the latest version of Java from Sun. I have never been terribly impressed with the various Integrated Development Environments that I have used over the years, and especially those for Java. Perhaps because I was trying to learn object-oriented programming at the time, the various Java IDEs seemed to put too many layers of abstraction between me and the code. If something didn't work, I was utterly lost. As a result, all of my Java programming has been done at as low a level as I could manage. At one job interview I went on a few years ago (before I ended up in Boise), an interviewer asked me which Java IDE I had used to develop an DSL access multiplexer test system. I responded, "Emacs, the JDK, JDB, and a DOS shell." His reaction was rather like I had told him that I hadn't bothered with a keyboard--just held a battery to the end of the keyboard cable, and entered a series of binary flashes for each letter. Really, it wasn't so hard. Anyway, the latest JDK from Sun includes NetBeans 5.0 IDE--which is actually not so bad. To write a very simple Java program, this is a bit excessive, but after a little bit of fighting it (and hurting myself), I am able to use it to compile and build programs that I wrote a long time ago. Inevitably, there are some surprises. It used to be that you could just do this, to add an element to a Vector: public Vector rightDiff;J2SE 1.5 complains: /home/clayton/javatemp/Diff/Diff.java:287: warning: [unchecked] unchecked call to add(E) as a member of the raw type java.util.VectorApparently, because of the potential for type mismatches (since Vector has no intrinsic type), you are encouraged to use the Map interface now. I haven't read enough of the details (or rather, they are written in terms that are a bit too computer science for me to immediately grasp) to understand it completely--but at least these are only warning messages, and I can continue onward using this dangerously "unchecked" call. UPDATE: Thanks to those readers who are up on the latest Java changes! This link describes the J2SE 5.0 changes. J2SE 5.0 implements through an interface called Collections something that looks rather like C++'s templates. All I had to do to get my code compiling without warnings was: public Vector<object> rightDiff; Animal Rights Terrorism This is another sad article from Inside Higher Ed: The constant calls, the people frightening his children, and the demonstrations in front of his home apparently became a little too much.I'm not happy about unnecessary suffering of animals. I have a very hard time with the horrible stuff that is done to animals to test cosmetics. Cosmetics are, at best, a luxury item. But I have long known that the animal liberation crowd are deranged. "A boy is a pig is a rat is a dog" is their motto--a complete moral equivalence of all species. Looking at the research that Ringach has published in the last few years shows that he is engaged in very basic research about vision, such as this, and this, and this. Is Ringach's research going to lead immediately to cures? I'm pretty sure that it won't. But it is the sort of research that I could see leading to vision for blind people? Yup. Some of the research that he is doing involves basic questions about how the brain processes information from the eyes. This is the type of basic research that allows the more practical "How can we help someone who can't see?" research to move forward. Monday, August 21, 2006
That Pardon Again I mentioned a few days ago that Bush had pardoned a nobody--and that I was imagining how the left was going to spin this against him. A reader responds: How will the left spin this? Global Warming: A New Study of Greenland's Glaciers What makes this interesting is that the melt was well under way in the 1880s: Greenland's glaciers have been shrinking for the past century, according to a Danish study, suggesting that the ice melt is not a recent phenomenon caused by global warming.Now, there's no question that humans have been burning fossil fuels for a very long time--but most of the claims about global warming are based on a dramatic increase in the last few decades--not more than a century back. Remember that Greenland was sufficiently warm in AD 1000 for Vikings to give it the name "Green"--and this was apparently not a real estate marketing strategy. This was a time known as the Medieval Warm Period. The place froze solidly during the Little Ice Age, and Europeans lost contact with the Viking colonies as a result of the dramatic increase in pack ice. We are now returning to what is really the norm for recent temperatures--some people have gotten a bit spoiled by the air conditioning being left on from AD 1250 to 1850. Labels: global warming Another Success In Fighting AIDS That You Won't Be Hearing About From the Boston Globe: FIVE YEARS AGO, in Jos, Nigeria, a city on the country's central plateau, Dr. John Idoko regularly made rounds in a hospital packed with people dying from AIDS because they couldn't pay for the antiretroviral drugs necessary to keep them alive. Three years ago, as the price of the drugs plummeted, the Nigerian doctor was able to deliver the life-extending medication to 700 patients-until his government's supply ran out for several months.Is it possible that the biggest obstacle to saving the lives of Africans infected with AIDS are AIDS activists whose hatred of abstinence and faithfulness blinds them to the fact that the most effective way to stop the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases is self-restraint? Sunday, August 20, 2006
Should I Rename This The Breathe Right Strip Blog? From yet another reader: First, thanks for the Breathe Right tips. I always though they were a gimmick, tried them for sleeping this past week based on your experience. Darn things work. I've slept better the past two weeks than I have in a long time. And, that has made a difference in my energy levels and allowed me to get in more exercise.UPDATE: Another reader writes: Four or five nights now. No congestion. Post-nasal drip all but gone, constant nagging cough likewise.Gee, if I had a readership as large as Instapundit, I could make a measureable impact on the productivity and health of America! I neglected to thoroughly scrub my nose last night, and as a result, the Breathe Right strip let go a bit at the edges, reducing the "opening" effect a bit. As a result, I woke up a couple of times in the night, and my sinus congestion was definitely worse this morning. Labels: sinuses Humor? A young man was walking the streets of Paris. Suddenly, he saw a Rottweiler attacking a young girl. He jumped on the dog, struggled with him, and strangled it. Both he and the girl escaped with minor scratches. Immediately, excited journalists surrounded him and said: What is your name? All Paris will hear of you, and the headlines will be: A Parisian hero saved a little girl from a savage dog. Said the man: I am not Parisian. The journalists: OK, so all France will hear of you, and the headlines will be: A French hero saved a little girl from a savage dog. The man: But I am not French. Journalists: OK, so all Europe will hear of you, and the headlines will read: A European hero saved a little girl from a savage dog. The man: But I am not from Europe. Journalists: So where are you from? The man: I am from Israel. Journalists: OK, so all the world will hear of you, and the headlines in all of tomorrow's papers will read: Israeli killed a little girl's dog. Labels: humor |
