Heaps of Sand

Farewell, Farewell, Fellow Stargazer!

2010-08-21T03:25:00.003-05:00

Jack Horkheimer 1938 - 2010

This guy taught me all I know about being an unapologetic nerd. I wish I'd watched his show more, and learned more of what he had to teach.

Tonight, snowflakes are dancing in the heavens.

Fuck You, Democracy!

2010-08-05T01:49:00.004-05:00

Several friends have hailed today's 9th Circuit ruling against Californias Proposition 8 - banning half the population from marrying Tom Cruise (which is kind of a blessing, but that's beside the point) - as a victory for democracy.

It is, in fact, the exact opposite. It is a victory for those of us who think democracy needs strict limits. Sure, 150,000,001 out of 300,000,000 should be able to get their way on basic stuff that it's really their business. Like, dunno, saying that you can't kill people, or should pay taxes. But in California's case, 7,001,084 out of 13,402,566 decided that they'd allow some people to have a chance to marry Nicole Kidman, but not others. And marriage isn't just about two people who love each other and want to spend the rest of their lives together. Marriage determines tax benefits, inheritance, who gets to make medical decisions, and even who can bring their mate into the country.

It's a big deal. And democracy decided to screw over a bunch of people the voters didn't like.

Fuck you, Democracy, how about a little CONSTITUTION on your ass? That's right, it's the 14th Amendment. Whatcha gonna do about that, bitch?

Seriously, democracy is good. It's way better than autocracy (yeah, fuck you too, Plato). But we need to get over the idea that just because a bunch of us think something's a good idea, that we should be allowed to make that decision for everybody, unless there's a serious group need, and 'God sed gheys is teh suck' is not a serious group need.

Fuck you, Voters!

Everybody do the time warp.

2009-10-16T11:37:00.013-05:00

42 years after Loving v Virginia, Keith Bardwell, a Justice of the Peace in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, has refused to grant a marriage license to a couple because they are not of the same race. "I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," said the racist. Bardwell's objection stemmed from the possibility of such unions producing mixed-race children, such as President Obama and golf legend Tiger Woods. "I think those children suffer and I won't help put them through it."

In a pathetic display of self-delusion, he attempted to whitewash the stain on his soul, saying "I have piles and piles of black friends." Without a trace of irony, dug the hole deeper. "They come to my home, I marry them*, they use my bathroom." (emphasis added)

"I treat them just like everyone else," he lied.

The year 1959 released a statement on the matter, saying that it had misplaced this individual, but didn't want him back.

* to other black people, not to white people.

hat tip, Ali.

One Nation...

2009-10-14T13:42:00.005-05:00

Because the webs love me, and I love you,

On nation, under Cthulhu...

After McNaughtonArt.com

Be sure to check out the mouseover text of every tiny bit of symbolism.

Hat tip to the innominate one (née biologist).

Meditations on Guidos

2009-10-14T13:35:00.003-05:00

The inimitable dhex waxes fascistic on the final solution to the boom-car menace.

Women's suffrage was good for something!

2009-07-20T16:05:00.005-05:00

No, really! When the US mint decided to make a silver dollar commemorating women's suffragist Susan B. Anthony, the result was one of the most sublime statements of duality known to man. The coin is roundly derided as the lamest dollar in US history, and yet on the flip side (literally) it is the awesomest coin ever minted in the United States.

Dig it, yo.

Happy Moon Landing Day, everybody!

Happy Birthday, Tank Guy!

2009-06-02T14:51:00.003-05:00

Hope you made it to see the 20th anniversary of the ballsiest move in civil protest in my short lifetime.

How to f**k over Mexico's violent drug lords

2009-03-30T13:50:00.008-05:00

Mexico is making headlines again, but not the good kind of headlines, like you want. They're not even making headlines because they're taking American jobs (although in this case they kinda are, but more on that later).

No, Mexico is all over the news and the Secretary of State's lips because of violence. And a good portion of that violence is concentrated right up next to our border, and sometimes spills across it.

Secretary Clinton blames this violence on America's insatiable demand for illegal drugs. But it isn't the insatiable demand that causes the violence. America has an insatiable demand for lots of things, but they rarely lead to violence. America's annual demand for illegal drugs has been estimated at $40-$55 billion in recent years. America's demand for legal drugs is ten times that amount or more. America's demand for beer, wine, and liquor also outstrips its demand for illegal drugs. Tobacco, also consistently outperforms the illegal drug industry in annual sales.

I know some people in the pharmaceuticals industry, and none of them worries about a rival from Pfizer planting a bomb in their car. Anheiser-Busch has never tortured anyone to death. So what's different about cocaine, heroin, and marijuana?

The answer, of course, is that Anheiser-Busch and Pfizer are allowed to operate legally. As such, there are tremendous disadvantages to violence. If they were to resort to violence, everything they have would be taken away. But these narco-traffickers are already underground. If the mere existence of their business comes to light, they will be arrested. So a murder to keep that a secret or to maintain their control over a market is not at all unthinkable.

It is not America's demand for drugs that fuels the violence. It is America's attempts to squash all legal attempts to meet that demand. These narco-traffickers would be put quickly out of business by efficient and honest purveyors in a free market. Mexico's best bet is to legalize the production and wholeselling of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin. It would likely lead to a terrible increase in drug addiction in the country, but taxation of drug profits could fund treatment centers. Far more devastating would be America's likely trade reaction, as self-righteous Congressmen attempt to embargo Mexican goods to retaliate for their defiance of American drug policy. But even so, I think it would be good for Mexico. And good for America to see some defiance to our drug-war imperialism.

For more reading, check out this editorial in The Economist, or this one by the late William F. Buckley in National Review. Anti-establishment agitators indeed.

UPDATE: These guys say it better (hat tip, H&R).

This deal is getting worse all the time

2009-02-10T13:34:00.007-06:00

I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.

In a closely watched case involving rendition and torture, a lawyer for the Obama administration seemed to surprise a panel of federal appeals judges on Monday by pressing ahead with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed by the Bush administration.

Dammit. I voted for Obama knowing full well that he'd be terrible on the economy. So I can forgive panicky and poorly thought-out 'stimulus' packages. I don't like them, but I knew what I was getting into. The reason I made this bargain was for a reversal of some of the sickening abuses of government power propagated by the Bush administration. Obama's first steps were positive, but there are some troubling elements.

Several WoT detainees filed suit with a Boeing logistics and airlift subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, charging them with transporting detainees to other countries for the purposes of torture. They allege that Jeppesen Dataplan provided the transport services for the "extraordinary rendition" program. Essentially, Bush lawyers argued that some of the things they did were so secret that we couldn't even begin to discuss them in court without jeopardizing national security. That effectively removes huge swaths of government activity from any form of oversight.

Extraordinary rendition has been one of the blackest spots on America's reputation. If the Obama administration is going to continue to invoke un-reviewable state-secret justifications to prevent investigations of wrongdoing on the part of the government, then he's not living up to the standards he needs to. He'll find his support among civil libertarians waning if he gets up to too much of these kinds of shenanigans.

Hat Tip, Radley Balko.

Today is the Day

2009-01-20T10:05:00.004-06:00

To discuss what I find to be an error in generally accepted spelling practices.

Today's problem, suffixes. Specifically, when to drop trailing 'e's from a word before adding a suffix. The general rule is that if the 'e' is silent, you drop it.

However, there is an exception. If the suffix begins with a consonant, and the 'e' is necessary to the correct pronunciation of the word, it should not be dropped.

For instance, 'judge' + 'ment' should not be 'judgment', since the 'g' cannot be soft without a trailing 'i' or 'e'. The preferred spelling in most dictionaries drops the 'e'. This is, of course, crazy talk.

Checking out my spam folder

2008-09-25T13:49:00.003-05:00

Just got the odd idea to look through my spam folder before zotzing its contents. There are some winners in there.

Best subject lines:

"In Canadian chemists we trust!" - Beauty, eh?
"Wish you act like Herculesus in bed?" - this I want to see on Spamusement.
"Join biggest success of the human successful men"
"Be the only one ladies hunt for" - Also a good spamusement candidate.

Interesting sender names:

"Normal Sexual" is selling viagra.
"con ethelbert" seems to think I can read cyrillic. Any takers on translating "Большие буфера скачать"?

I'll Show You Improper

2008-09-08T14:24:00.004-05:00

I just want to state for the record that whatever jerk it was who gave fractions greater than one the name 'improper fraction' should be kicked square in the nuts.

I was trying to help Jack subtract some compound numbers (compound numbers being things like one-and-three-quarters and seven-and-five-eighths and so forth). If, for example, you are subtracting one and five-eights from two and one-fourth, it's helpful to convert both numbers into fractions before subtracting.

The easiest way to do this is to convert 2 1/4 to 9/4, and 1 5/8 to 13/8, then convert 9/4 to 18/8, then subtract 13/8 from 18/8. The result is 5/8. Simple, right?

However, Jack was very reluctant to do that because he'd been taught, and taught well, that you couldn't write a fraction as nine fourths. That was improper. So every time we got to a point where you'd have a 18/8 or 9/4, he would say that he couldn't do that because that was an improper fraction, and convert it back to a compound number.

This an unfortunate side-effect of elementary education. They wanted to have an easy way to tell kids not to write their fractions upside down, so they called them 'improper'. But there's no fundamental mathematical reason for banning fractions larger than one. Fractions, after all, are just another way of writing a division problem. So rather than teach that, we've generated a rule that's fundamentally incorrect to keep kids from making a simple mistake, and then having to un-learn that rule later.

If y'all could leave me out of your war, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

2008-08-11T11:49:00.003-05:00

About Wednesday of last week, I got a request from a coworker in our Paris office to build a terrain dataset for a trial of our microwave network planning tool. It didn't have any clear labelling, and it wasn't clear where the data was for when I put it together. I finally got it built on Friday morning, as the news was talking about the Russian offensive really heating up, and I was recoginizing some of the terrain in the maps as disturbingly familiar.

This dataset I was working on was for the Russian Caucasus, and includes Chechnya, North Ossetia, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia. There aren't any significant expansions of the data into Azerbaijan or other parts of Georgia. It's kind of creepy. And the cherry on top of this creepy-coincidence-sundae is that the coworker who made this request is named Mikhail.

I really hope somebody is just planning to build a nice, non-violent telecomunications network using this data. 8-(

Hillary and Misogyny

2008-06-13T17:03:00.003-05:00

Over at reason, Kerry Howley makes a pretty convincing case that even though Hillary didn't lose because of sexism (she lost because Obama did a better job of courting the electorate), there was still too damn much sexism aimed at her campaign.

And Malkin et al aren't exactly doing much to allay fears of racism against the Obama campaign, either.

I have faith that America can push through both its sexism and racism and could elect a good candidate of any personal background (although there are still to many anti-gay neanderthals to make me hopeful on that front for a good while). But that doesn't mean we should tolerate either racism or sexism in the meantime.

More fodder for the sex work / exploitation debates

2008-05-20T11:48:00.004-05:00

New commentary over RHRealityCheck.org points out Congress being stupid again.

Law enforcement is having tremendous difficulty finding and prosecuting human trafficking, which, in the US, mostly revolves around sex work. While it is generally believed that tens of thousands of women are trafficked in the sex trade in the US (hard numbers are obviously difficult to come by), few victims have been identified and saved, and few traffickers have been prosecuted. This is a serious problem, and requires a serious response.

The House has a bill that is supposed to do just that, but it looks seriously flawed.

Specifically, the House version of the TVPRA would expand U.S. laws against prostitution by re-defining most prostitution-related activities, regardless of consent, as trafficking. Human trafficking is a complex issue, but there is widespread agreement about its key distinguishing features, namely the use of force, fraud or coercion. HR 3887 throws out these cornerstones and threatens to re-define all prostitution, arguably even all sex work, as trafficking. And it would require the involvement of federal law enforcement through a broad new provision that covers actions "affecting" interstate commerce (rather than actual activities that involve the crossing of state lines, the standard trigger for bringing in the feds). Therefore, most prostitution-related activities defined as sex trafficking would fall under federal law even if no interstate commerce was involved.

The immediate consequences of this definitional sleight-of-hand are bad enough: the use of federal resources to prosecute state-level offenses involving consenting adults who may not see themselves as victims of a crime. But turning the DOJ into the prostitution police is not the worst of it. By shifting the focus of the law from genuine cases of trafficking to prostitution as a whole, the bill threatens to divert resources from those most in need: the real victims of trafficking.

I think that the last thing we need to do is to start prosecuting sex workers at the federal level. But more importantly, we do need to strongly consider whether taking sex work out of the legal shadows would make it any easier to find and prosecute traffickers, and help their victims.

Hat Tip: Kerry Howley at H&R

Obama and the Constant Sore

2008-05-15T15:39:00.006-05:00

There's a moderate amount of furore going around the pundisphere over Barrack Obama's recent comments from an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, in which there is discussion of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. This is quoted by rightish (and presumably Hillaroid) commentators thusly:

JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?
BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy.

Alarming stuff, no?

Commenting at TownHall.com, Tom "Tom & Gerrymander" DeLay found this to be a clear demonstration of Obama's unfitness to lead.

On one level, this is traffic-stoppingly stupid. What’s wrong with this guy? We’re told ad nauseum he’s the greatest political communicator of his generation, and his idea of a balanced and nuanced position is to compare a threatened ally in a crucial region to a festering, open sore?

Rightospheric JV attack dog Doug Ross starts off with a comparison to Ahmadinejad, and quickly goes Godwin on himself.

Obama's remarks seem to parallel those of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "In yet another verbal attack against Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Jewish state a 'filthy bacteria' whose sole purpose was to oppress the other nations of the region"...

Come to think of it, a Mr. A. Hitler had some remarks along these lines. "Against the infection of materialism, against the Jewish pestilence we must hold aloft a flaming ideal."

The GOP House Minority Leader Jim Boehner and Deputy Minority Whip Eric Cantor quickly jumped on the Obama-vs-Israel bandwagon.

"Israel is a critical American ally and a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, not a ‘constant sore’ as Barack Obama claims," Boehner said. "Obama’s latest remark, and his commitment to ‘opening a dialogue’ with sponsors of terrorism, echoes past statements by Jimmy Carter who once called Israel an ‘apartheid state.’"

"It is truly disappointing that Senator Obama called Israel a ‘constant wound,’ ‘constant sore,’ and that it ‘infect[s] all of our foreign policy.’ These sorts of words and characterizations are the words of a politician with a deep misunderstanding of the Middle East and an innate distrust of Israel," Cantor said.

Journalists at The Atlantic and WaPo (along with the bulk of the leftosphere) have of course jumped upon this like White Person on a gramatical error. They point out that the GOP is quoting Barrack out of context, and that he's clearly talking about The Arab-Israeli Conflict, not Israel herself. When you look at the original text, they appear at first glance to be right.

JG: What do you make of Jimmy Carter’s suggestion that Israel resembles an apartheid state?

BO: I strongly reject the characterization. Israel is a vibrant democracy, the only one in the Middle East, and there’s no doubt that Israel and the Palestinians have tough issues to work out to get to the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security, but injecting a term like apartheid into the discussion doesn’t advance that goal. It’s emotionally loaded, historically inaccurate, and it’s not what I believe.
JG: If you become President, will you denounce settlements publicly?
BO: What I will say is what I’ve said previously. Settlements at this juncture are not helpful. Look, my interest is in solving this problem not only for Israel but for the United States.

JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?

BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that, and some of the tensions that might arise between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish community in the United States might stem from the fact that I’m not going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just because that’s the safest ground politically.

I want to solve the problem, and so my job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we’re going to be stuck in the same status quo that we’ve been stuck in for decades now, and that won’t lift that existential dread that David Grossman described in your article.

But, I would like to take this opportunity to call all of the blogosphere wrong. The whole question, of course, is what does he mean when he says 'this problem'? Go back and look at some of Obama's words. "Settlements at this juncture are not helpful. Look, my interest is in solving this problem not only for Israel but for the United States."

I think it's clear that Obama is calling the continuing Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which do provide political cover for those who want to derail the peace process by their continuing acts of inexcusable violence. It might be sloppy rhetoric, but it's clear from my reading.

That Obama is speaking up on this, and not just toeing the Arabs-bad-Israel-good line is heartening. The only hope for peace is for the West Bank to become a Palestinian homeland. This cannot happen if Israel continues to allow new settlements to be built within the occupied territories.

Found sentences that should be shared

2008-05-15T15:04:00.003-05:00

I should point out that in a general discussion of grammar, no one wins. Unless you're dhex.

the serial comma is not only unnecessary it actually went back in time and made the holocaust worst by adding a completely inappropriate ragtime soundtrack.

Bernstein's political story - no, the other Bernstein.

2008-02-29T15:25:00.007-06:00

The Sharks-and-Jets world of the Democratic Primary has finally exploded into gun-controlled violence, as a Clinton supporter stabs his Obamaniac brother-in-law in the gut.

I see the whole thing unfolding thus:

my-boy-friend's-vo-ting-for Ooo-baaa-maaa
my-boy-friend's-vo-ting-for Ooo-baaa-maaa
my-boy-friend's-vo-ting-for Ooo-baaa-maaa
my-boy-friend's-vo-ting-for Ooo-baaa-maaa!

How can you betray us like that? Our people are from Hillary. Hillary runs in our blood! Hillary is our passion!

OMG Obama ttly pwning Hillary. Also I is doing ur sister. LOLZ!
kthxbai

Only blood can satisfy this insult to Hillary! Also, dude, not cool talking that way about my sister.

I thrust my nipples at you while my posse mount invisible bicycles!

OH THAT'S IT!!!
U CAN HAS NIFE WOOND!

Bad News for Science Education in Texas

2007-12-07T10:58:00.001-06:00

My folks, who are active in South Carolinians for Science Education, hipped me to this. Political appointees of Bush and Perry have just given the ouster to the director of science curriculum at the Texas Education Agency.

Chris Comer forwarded an email announcing a speech by Barbara Forrest, one of the expert witnesses at the Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District trial which challenged the teaching of Intelligent Design as an alternative scientific theory to evolutionary theory. Within a hour, she'd been called into her superiors' office to be dressed down for sending an email that "implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker's position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral." The title of this email was 'FYI'. So forwarding information regarding a speech by a person who has been an expert witness at a trial in which a public school system was forced to change science education policy - which should be a subject of concern for anyone in charge of scientific curriculum in American public schools - is somehow inappropriate behavior.

For Christ's sake, let's not have anyone in the TEA actually familiar with the ID/Evolution debate. When even right-leaning BELO's Dallas Morning News comes out unequivocally against this move, you know the TEA is being boneheaded.

A roundup of rated materials:

Texas Citizens for Science
Texas Freedom Network (despite the name, more progressive than libertarian, for the record)
The National Center for Science Education

Thoreau of Unqualified Offerings fame once tipped me off to this excellent article by Bruce Alberts in the journal Cell. The bulk of the article relates to some ideas on reforming science education, especially at the undergraduate level, but he closes with a passage on Intelligent Design that is the most succinct explanation of why ID isn't science that I've ever seen.

What will it take to grab the attention of science faculty at US colleges and universities and make them understand the urgent need for new ways to teach science? We have recently received a wakeup call. A new survey finds that two-thirds of Americans agree with some of our political leaders that “intelligent design theory” should be taught as an alternative scientific explanation of biological evolution. What does this mean? According to intelligent design theory, supernatural forces acting over time have intervened to shape the macromolecules in cells, thereby forming them into the elegant protein machines that drive a cell’s biochemistry (Alberts, 1998). In other words, at least from time to time, living things fail to obey the normal laws of physics and chemistry.

Teaching intelligent design theory in science class would demand nothing less than a complete change in the definition of science. This definition would give those of us who are scientists an “easy out” for the difficult problems we are trying to solve in our research. For example, why spend a lifetime, constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry, trying to obtain a deep understanding of how cells accumulate mutations and become cancerous if one can postulate a supernatural step for part of the process? Yet we can be certain that, without the deep understanding that will eventually come from insisting on natural explanations, many powerful cancer therapies will be missed.

The idea that intelligent design theory could be part of science is preposterous. It is of course only by insisting on finding natural causes for everything observed in nature that science has been able to make such striking advances over the past 500 years. There is absolutely no reason to think that we should give up this fundamental principle of science now. Two-thirds of Americans might seem to have no real idea of what science is, nor why it has been so uniquely successful in unraveling the truth about the natural world. As I write, the Kansas State Board of Education has just changed the definition of science in revisions to the Kansas State Science Standards to one that does not include “natural explanations” for natural phenomena. What more proof do we need for the massive failure of our past teaching of biology, physics, chemistry, and earth sciences at high schools, colleges, and universities throughout the United States?

For all those who teach college biology, the current challenge posed by the intelligent design movement presents an ideal “teachable moment.” I believe that intelligent design should be taught in college science classes but not as the alternative to Darwinism that its advocates demand. It is through the careful analysis of why intelligent design is not science that students can perhaps best come to appreciate the nature of science itself.

The purging of an ID skeptic from the TEA is a grim sign indeed, and not one to be taken lightly.

Green is the Highest Threat Level

2007-12-05T17:28:00.000-06:00

Hide the Harold and put a muzzle on Grygar. Absinthe is now for sale in the United States.

Hat tip: Hit & Run.

Professional courtesy turns deadly

2007-11-30T17:08:00.000-06:00

The guys over at Cops Writing Cops should be proud of their brethren at the Bolingbrook PD. Eighteen times they were called to the home of fellow officer Drew Peterson, and eighteen times they showed great restraint and professional courtesy to their colleague. Sure, they could have been dicks and arrested him, but they recognized that he was one of their own, and they needed to take care of him. Indeed, they took very good care of him, twice arresting his third wife, Kathleen Savio for domestic battery. They recognized that her accusations that Peterson would regularly beat her would be very damaging to his career, and to the police force as a whole, and in many ways to the city of Bolingbrook.

When she was found dead of 'accidental drowning' in the bathtub, I'm sure the whole Bolingbrook PD breathed a sigh of relief, knowing they could rest assured that their friend and coworker was now safe from her domestic abuse.

But now, tragedy has struck. As many of you now know, his fourth wife has gone missing. The villagers are starting to get restless. Apparently they don't understand that cops need to defend themselves against their spouses.

Married to the Sea

2007-11-29T15:29:00.000-06:00

Married to the Sea. It assays out at about 78% win content by volume.

Why didn't he get me off?

2007-09-25T15:46:00.000-05:00

In my continuing efforts to support the law enforcement community, I would like to respond to the following request for assistance from a law enforcement officer. An anonymous LEO posting on the site "CopsWritingCops.com" relates the following:

While traveling through western North Carolina this past week I was stopped by a State Trooper ([name and badge number withheld]) for speeding. According to hin [sic] 70 in a 55. I know I was speeding but I don't think 70, although it is a possibility.

As I always do, I immediately and politely acknowledged the fact that I was driving to [sic] fast, I apologized, and identified myself as a Police Officer. He replied with "your in Law Enforcement?" I answered "yes" and he asked for my license. He went to his patrol car and returned to my vehicle with a traffic citation in hand and said simply "sign here". I signed, he gave me my copy and walked away.

Thank you trooper [name withheld] for the $135.00 ticket.

Please someone explain this mentality to me. No matter how much I try I just don't understand why a brother officer feels so compelled to write another officer a ticket. I can't see any other explanation other than the fact that he is simply a DICK.

His question, what mentality could lead to an NC state trooper giving a ticket to someone doing 70 in a 55 zone, is an important one. Is it just dickery that drives policemen to hand out traffic tickets? Or do they feel that by doing so they are preventing, or at least mimizing, lawlessness and recklessness on the highways? Or is it that they are essentially tax collectors, who roam the roads deriving revenue from motorists in exchange for the privilege of exceeding speed limits or ignoring traffic signals and signs?

There are numerous explanations for the way traffic enforcement is carried out in this country, but one thing is clear. This officer does not wish to be treated the way that he treats you and me.

Hat tip, Jennifer, of Grylliade.org and the Hartford Advocate,

Just under the wire

2007-08-31T23:48:00.000-05:00

Hah! Take that, suckers.

You didn't think I'd post at all this month. Well, if you live on the eastern seaboard then you're right. But here it's still August.

This month has been crazy. I'm married, Jack's in school, Jack's fencing, Holly's in school, Holly quit her temp job, Holly's working for the Catholic Charities refugee services teaching ESL, and we're still not unpacked.

Earlier this month, my friend Pat's uncle Jak passed away. He was one of the most genuinely nice people ever to grace this planet. Pat's immediate family have always made me feel like family, but I figured they had to because I spent so much time at their house. When Aunt Betty and Uncle Jak insisted that I was family, that felt like the real thing, because they had nothing to lose by treating me like an acquaintance, but always made me feel right at home, if a bit guilty for not having come by sooner. I had the unique honor to have shared the title of Godfather to Pat's son Jack with Uncle Jak (although he got namesake, too, so he's one up on me, but he deserves it!). Jak was a great artist and musician, who I will always remember for the valiant attempts that he made to teach Pat and Julie and I to play Dixieland. Only my brother Sandy, who was a trained jazz pianist, could keep up with him. But he was one tough hombre, too. Sunofagun invaded Okinawa with the Marines in '45.

Rest in peace, Jak Smyrl.

Wherein The Lunchstealer finds moving to be teh suck

2007-07-03T08:44:00.000-05:00

Sometimes moving just makes you want to say FUCK! really loud. Really often.

A Brick of Amontillado

2007-06-29T17:35:00.000-05:00

A seven-layer burrito of Awesome, drenched in Win sauce.

By which I mean, "A Cask of Amontillado" illustrated in Lego™

Hat Tip, the perfidious Urkobold™

A Chess Set made out of Win

2007-06-22T14:14:00.000-05:00

Over on myconfinedspace.com, they display a chess set which one of the commentors correctly describes as being 'made out of win.'

Free at last, free at last, with apologies to Mr. King

2007-05-14T12:21:00.000-05:00

H&R pointed me to a blog entry by Wired's John Brownlee that buoyed my spirits considerably.

The Boston Two have been freed, and all charges have been dropped. Berdovsky and Stevens did have to do a combined 140 hours of community service painting a mural for a hospital, which I'd kinda like to see, and did issue an apology regarding the ruckus that surrounded their cute little mooninite installations. But overall the prosecutors seem to have come to their senses. Or at least come to a state of less complete insanity.

Bonus quote: "Incidentally, Peter Berdovsky has to be the most fascinating photogenic specimen in the history of photography. He's one part Belarusian zombie, one part Rastafarian werewolf. I could look at pictures of this guy all day."

But this whole sordid affair brings up another question. Laws based on 'Reasonably Believe' standards. In a previous post, Brownlee goes over the charges against Berdovsky and Stevens, which stem from the following law:

Whoever possesses, transports, uses or places or causes another to knowingly or unknowingly possess, transport, use or place any hoax device or hoax substance with the intent to cause anxiety, unrest, fear or personal discomfort to any person or group of persons shall be punished by imprisonment in a house of correction for not more than two and one-half years or by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than five years or by a fine of not more than $5,000, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

Where

For the purposes of this section, the term “hoax device” shall mean any device that would cause a person reasonably to believe that such device is an infernal machine. For the purposes of this section, the term “infernal machine” shall mean any device for endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both, by fire or explosion, whether or not contrived to ignite or explode automatically.

My problem here is the 'reasonable belief' clause. This requires a person to correctly guess what other people will see with completely different starting conditions. It is entirely possible to look at a lite-brite style sign which is intended to be viewed lit up at night, and see the wires and circuitry as just necessary to make the piece of art work. It is entirely possible to never conceive of the fact idea that it might appear threatening. However, a homeland security cop for whom 'you can't be too careful' might reasonably see it as a potential bomb, with the lite-brites as some sort of taunting figure to the bomb squads sent to defuse it. But you have to be in that place for this to seem reasonable.

It is therefore possible to do something that to your mind seems entirely harmless and completely legal (these signs were not attached in any destructive way, so they do not really qualify as vandalism) that in just the right circumstances, it might reasonably be construed to be a threat. It seems to me that any standard that can take a person who is in good faith acting within the law, and turn them into a major felon looking at a 5 year sentence, must be a flawed law. It is an established theory of law that the results of legal procedings must be predictable and foreseeable. It is not possible for everyone to see everything in the same light as everyone else. We just don't, as human beings, have the breadth of experience to adequately predict every reasonable person's conclusions.

I think a fairer standard would be 'for a person reasonably and predictably to believe'.

This isn't entirely an issue here, because the law also requires that the person placing or causing to be placed these 'hoax devices' to do so for with intent of causing panic, which is clearly the case with Ignignokt and Er. So the prosecutor, mayor, and really most of the government of the city of Boston and state of Massachusetts have pretty much been acting with their heads applied in suppository fashion. Anyway, they're free at last.

Questions you never expected science to answer

2007-05-07T11:25:00.000-05:00

A recent article in Cosmos magazine had a headline that would stump creative genius of even an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters.

Duck genitals locked in arms race

Seriously, would you have written an article on that topic? The topic comes up because ducks, especially mallards, engage in rape at levels far beyond even most fraternities. According to the article, as many as 40% of all mallard matings are the result of males forcing themselves on females.

This also answers a question that Holly posed after spotting a pair of doves gettin' it on. Do birds have penises? The answer is that most do not, but a few still do. Historically they did, but have evolved into a situation where they just have single cloacae on both sexes which they use for waste disposal and sex, the sex being performed by a 'match-the-hole' technique.

Seriously, did you ever want to know all this?

Stupid science.

Hat tip to the guys over at Grylliade.

MIHOP is bigger than URHOP

2007-04-05T17:07:00.000-05:00

I'd been cautiously optimistic about a Barack Obama candidacy. But now, I know that he has no interest in the Truthtm. At his Austin rally in February, he was confronted by one of the courageous activists of the Student Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Given the opportunity to speak on the pressing subject of the 9/11 coverup, what did Obama say? "You know, I think we need to investigate a whole range of options, although I have to be honest, some of the issues you guys have raised I'm not entirely confident are the truth."

So many people don't believe that the destruction of the WTC was brought about by our government. But it's so obvious.

The planning by the US government for perpetrating the 9-11 'attacks' started much earlier than anyone believes. Mathias Rust*, you know, the guy who landed a Cessna 172 in Red Square back in '87, was a plant. As part of a conspiracy between hard-liners in the Kremlin and Pentagon, who both realized that American paranoia was key to sustaining a military industrial complex in both countries (Russian paranoia can pretty much be taken for granted).

Now, the Korean and Vietnam wars were, as everyone knows, carried out with the express purpose of undermining American post-WWII confidence and instilling the appropriate fear of Russia and the Red Menace. However, Vietnam was a miscalculation, which became clear during the Carter administration as American self-confidence sagged so low that Americans were actually begining to lose faith in the cold war, and support for unilateral disarmament - disasterous for both US and Russian military industry - was threatening to break out into the mainstream in the US.

Thus Reagan was brought in, with his "Bear in the Woods" ads and resurrection of the B-1, B-2, M-1, Trident, Minuteman, the 15-carrier navy, and the ultimate military-industrial coup, SDI. Unfortunately, he was too effective, and swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. The cold war became untenable, because America was now clearly too strong. Simultaneously, the Russians began their own misguided adventure in Afghanistan. That campaign was aimed at undermining the confidence in the Big Red Machine, to spur support for subsequent expansions in Soviet military spending. As with Vietnam, this was also too effective.

It was already clear that civilian terrorism was the key to both problems. Military un-fucking-vincible? Easy, introduce 'asymmetrical warfare'. The US/Kremlin power brokers had been tinkering with it in South America for years, as a sort of R&D project, but hadn't figured they'd need to parlay it into a replacement for the traditional cold war.

Now, it is our air force that instills the most confidence in Americans. So a really terrifying attack against America would have to penetrate our air defences. The early experiments in American-soil terrorism, the first WTC bombing and the OKC bombing, had induced yawns in most people. Sure any asshole could drive a bomb up to anything he wanted. It didn't bring the terror.

But they'd already planned for this. A really terrifying attack would have to come from the air. But it could be too clear that they were staged if people didn't already kind of believe that civilian flights could penetrate a really tight air defense. This is where Mathias Rust comes in.

How better to plant the seed of mistrust of air power than by having a some euro-loser land an airplane in Red Square?

It couldn't be an American, because if a plucky American teen had done it, people would have assumed that he'd won through with faith in God, a picture of his sweetheart, and a can-do attitude. It would just reaffirm our faith. But if some German nihilist can put down his collection of Kraftwerk and Autobahn LPs long enough to climb into a Cessna and land in Red Square as some sort of ironic post-modern statement, then maybe - just maybe - even OUR air defenses could be penetrated in such a way.

This was the key to making the American public believe that a bunch of godless Muslims could be responsible for destroying a landmark that we didn't really care about anyway.

*image of Rust from Wikipedia.org, used under the GNU free documentation license.

Fire, Indeed, is the Cleanser

2007-04-03T17:18:00.000-05:00

Say what you will about the state of civil liberties in this country, but some people are just not poster children for personal responsibility. So it is with Robert Daniels, an American who grew up in Russia. At age 26, he found that he had contracted an extremely drug resistant strain of tuberculosis (XDR-TB). Tuberculosis is a very contagious disease, but in the US is generally treatable with antibiotics. Occasionally, strains resistant to general antibiotics pop up, and patients must be treated with so called "second-line" antibiotics. Now in Russia, and a few other places, strains that are resistant to these second-line treatments are turning up. So it is with Mr. Daniels.

So he came back to the US, in hopes of finding better treatment. He started his treatment, and took a job locally in Phoenix. He wasn't healthy. He had lost 50 pounds, and was coughing constantly, and every cough was expelling droplets laden with this extremely resistant and deadly bacterium. Then his doctors found out that he was going out in public without a mask.

“Where I come from, the doctors don’t wear masks,” he said. “Plus, I was 26 years old, you know. Nobody told me how TB works and stuff.”

Public health officials then took the unusual (but not unheardof) step of placing him in involuntary quarantine.

He's upset.

I sympathize, and certainly have mixed emotions about involuntary quarantine. But then again, don't be a moron.

The following is an IM transcript (edited for flow and brevity) wherein Sandy and I make light of his situation.

lunchstealer: Daniels said he realizes now that he endangered the public. But “I thought I’d come to a country where I’d finally be treated like a person, and bam, here I am.”
sandy:{insert he-shoulda-known-about-gitmo joke here}
lunchstealer: Seriously. Couldn't he have just gone to Finland?
lunchstealer: I mean, they'd probably have drop-kicked him into a Fjord, but they'd have been terribly polite about it.
sandy:"hey, no problem, ha ha, but we're gonna put you in de fire-water for cleansing, K? Ha! is Finnish joke. We gonna burn you instead."

Hat tip to Hit&Run for the original link.

Blades of Awesome

2007-04-02T12:13:00.000-05:00

Blades of Glory

Blades of Glory's main premise is that Will Farrell and Napolean Dynamite are ice dancers. Sure, they dress the plot up with some arch-rivals- that-must- band-together- for-a- triumphant-comeback buddy-picture window dressing, but that's secondary. The real point of the movie is to have funny people wear funny costumes and prance around on the ice. This it delivers.

Invariably, this will be compared to Talladega Nights, Farrell's previous sports lampoon. And there's no doubt that there was more exploration of male sexuality, the social contradictions in NASCAR's move from redneck-backwater to mainstream sporting event, and American parenting and family structure in Talladega Nights. Blades of Glory is far less ambitious - aiming almost entirely for slapstick appeal.

But Blades works in one way that Nights does not - pacing. At just over 90 minutes, Blades of Glory has clearly had a lot of padding cut out. There are jokes in the commercials that don't make it to the screen, and that's a good thing. The movie works best on ice, and the directors have just barely enough dialogue and story development in between skating scenes to establish some sense of humanity in the characters. But unlike Nights, which had some long laugh-free spells, this film doesn't get bogged down in it. They give you just enough that you are rooting for the dysfunctional protagonists by the end, but not so much that it distracts from the men prancing in funny ways.

You won't see too many people stretching their wings. Will Farrell, Amy Poehler (of SNL fame), and Will Arnette (GOB on Arrested Development) deliver on their core competencies, but you won't see anything new from them. John Heder (Napolean Dynamite) is again playing a delightfully clueless and socially inept man-child, but brings some freshness to it - he isn't out of ideas yet. Jenna Fischer (The Office) is still playing a Pam-like sweet-girl-all-grown-up but again branches out a little bit. The nice surprise is Craig T. Nelson, who's intentionally lampooning his old "Coach" tv persona.

Filmed in - 2 beers. You don't have to be lit to enjoy this movie, but a couple of beers won't hurt.

Depth Gauge - Big puddle. No one would go to a movie that combined Will Farrell with figure skating and expect social commentary. It's not actually stupid, but highbrow it ain't.

Long-story-short - there were at least two times where I was hoping for something lame so I could rest the muscles in my face - they were starting to hurt. If you're in the mood for laughing at a stupid movie, this is the one for you.

New - From MeNuCo!

2007-03-26T11:32:00.000-05:00

Rock On - Apply Directly to the Rock!
Rock On - Apply Directly to the Rock!
Rock On - Apply Driectly to the Rock!

Sorry, that just broke into my brain, and I had to exorcise the demons somehow. This is how.

KERA - If we don't do it, well, cable already did.

2007-03-01T16:20:00.000-06:00

Seeing El Anadón Ingobernable's post about how wonderful KERA is reminded me of how they can suck.

Going through the next two weeks of programming on my TiVo to see what I wanted to record, there's plenty of:

Suze Orman - I can get that from CNN or MSNBC these days
The Rolling Stones - VH1
Jerry Lee Lewis - Seriously?
Doctor Who - not the kickass old Doctor Who that you can't find anywhere else. No, KERA's got to prove their irrelevance by showing the Christopher Eccleston stuff. Seriously I blew that off on BBCAmerica because I'd already seen every episode on SciFi.

But since it's frakkin' pledge drive, there's narry a Nova or Frontline to be found. They'd better hope their funding doesn't get cut off from the state, because if they can't run what I want during pledge drive, I'm not giving them a dime.

Seriously, I've learned more about food and food science by watching Good Eats on the Food Network than I ever did watching Julia Childs and Yan Cooks Cats on PBS.

Where they still hold up is science and nature programming. Discovery Channel is sometimes doing good work here, but Nova is still the gold standard, with Nature not far behind. And while Frontline is still probably the best current events issue show out there, shows like Anderson Cooper 360 are starting to give it a run for its money.

A smug little treatise on the value of a spontaneous, unplanned economy

2007-02-21T16:33:00.000-06:00

Central planning could never come up with an idea as pure in its post-modern geniusiosity as this.

The iBreath. The Soviet Union created some clever chess players, but there's no way in hell they'd have come up with the idea of an integrated breathalyzer/FM transmitter which attaches seamlessly to your iPod. You can now play you iTunes through your car stereo, and be sure you're legal to drive.

Hat tip to The Agitator.

Free the Boston Two!

2007-02-02T13:52:00.000-06:00

One of these things is not like the others

2007-02-01T23:09:00.000-06:00

Can you tell which one of these is not a bomb? If you picked the one with the lite-brite cartoon character on it, you're qualified to replace Assistant Attourney General John Grossman, who is rumored to be stepping down after discovering that he is, in fact, a moron.

From the AP story on Ignignoktgate:

"This device looks like a bomb."

Some in the gallery snickered.

If you want to kill people you don't make your bomb flip people off. You probably make it look like a massive government transportation and construction project. But I guess that's already been done.

State Attourney General Martha Coakley, Assistant Attourney General John Grossman, and Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke all refer to this as a bomb hoax. Well a hoax is an attempt to make something look like a bomb. This was an attempt to make people see a light that was a funny shape. We've already spent $750,000 shutting down Boston because the police couldn't tell that these weren't fake bombs, but were just funny signs. That is an honest mistake on their part. But once it was clear how the signs worked, and that they were intended to be seen at night, they really should have gained a little perspective. As it is, they're going to waste another $500,000 or more of taxpayer's money prosecuting people with criminal charges for something that is at worst misdemeanor disturbing the peace and maybe vandalism, although it is clear that some care was taken to see that nothing was damaged.

Coakley's already doing a terrible job investigating the malfeasance on the Big Dig project which actually did result in loss of life. Maybe spend a little more time on crimes and less on what is truly an innocent misunderstanding. To do anything else is criminal.

Sometimes this internet shit works

2007-01-04T17:05:00.000-06:00

"It's almost like this Wicca shit doesn't even work"

Hat tip to Hit&Run.

Children of Men (some mild spoilers)

2007-01-02T14:01:00.000-06:00

Holly and I were lounging about on New Year's Day, when she suggested we go see a movie. We narrowed it down to Children of Men and The Good Shepard. The Good Shepard was listed as almost 3 hours long, which seemed more of a movie commitment than we were prepared for that day, so we opted for Children of Men.

I knew that it was set in near-future Britain, and that the basic premise was that worldwide infertility had left mankind childless for 19 years. The 'youngest person alive' has just been the victim of a celebrity murder at age 18. The story follows Theo Farron, a former radical who's turned his back on the revolution to become a disinterested government worker in a Britain which is the last western power to resist total collapse. To support their island paradise, the British government has instituted a massive and brutal campaign to remove all illegal immigrants and non-British refugees. Britain is determined to live out her last days in prosperity, and will not share that with Poles, Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Africans, Americans, or anyone else. If you're not British, you are ruthlessly hunted down, and thrown into concentration camps, where you may be deported if you're lucky.

Then Theo's old underground contacts get in touch with him. They need his goverment contacts to get transit papers for one person to get to the coast. He agrees - for the right sum of cash. Immediately, plans begin to fall apart, and he's got to escort a young girl, secretly pregnant with the first child in two decades, to a rendezvous with a shadowy organization rumored to be working to restore human fertility. They're being sought after by the government and their former comrades in the underground.

The sci-fi elements of the movie are understated, but the pacing and tone are kept up brilliantly. There are some ham-handed allusions to the current Iraq war and to Abu Ghraib, but they are forgivable. The final act of the film is very powerful, and not for the faint of heart. Without giving away too much of the ending, I will say that there are several scenes of brutal violence, and the tension builds right to the very end of the film.

There were several collective gasps from the packed house that I saw it in. While we were waiting in line to get into the film, the previous screening was released, and several people in that group were visibly crying as they left. Our group was no different. One filmgoer who was walking in front of us leaving the theater had been to see A Night at the Museum before coming to this film. His companion remarked, "Wow, that has to be one hellofa contrast." He allowed as how he wished he'd done it in reverse order, as he could do with something light after Children of Men. Holly and I agreed.

Highly recomended.

Little bluebird in my backyard

2006-12-31T18:37:00.000-06:00

My parent's backyard is more or less rife with wildlife. While Holly and I were there over Christmas, there was a large flock of bluebirds that would come and go with some regularity. They were fond of the birdbath on our back deck, and this guy was clearly having a good time. There were often 30-50 bluebirds that would be taking turns at this and other birdbaths in the back yard.

That leeeeettle blob in the middle of the picture...

2006-12-31T18:24:00.000-06:00

To put that previous post in perspective, this is a straight shot at full zoom with my little camera, sans binoculars.

Eagle sez "Meh. You have my leave to go."

2006-12-31T17:36:00.000-06:00

Holly and I went canoing at Goodale State Park last Friday afternoon. We'd gotten out there late, and the park staff were kind enough to take a break from some serious tree-removal work at the entrance to let us into the park and let us rent a canoe. The lake at Goodale is an old (1830s, if our info is correct) mill pond on Big Pine Tree Creek. Much of the lake is now a cypress swamp, which makes for fun paddling in amongst the trees. We'd been paddling for about 10 minutes when I caught a glimpse of a very large bird taking flight a ways off through the trees. I wasn't sure, but I thought it might have been an eagle. It was just too big to be anything but that or an osprey, but my gut was just saying "eagle." Ospreys are rare enough that seeing one would be a treat, but I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've positively seen an adult bald eagle in the wild.

A few more minutes of paddling brought us pretty close to where I thought the bird had been, and we were also close to the edge of a fairly wide expanse of open water with just a few trees scattered through it. In the distance, in a lone cypress, something big was sitting on a bare branch up at the top. When I got the binoculars on it, it was unmistakeably a bald eagle. After passing the binoculars to Holly so she could get a good look, I went about trying to get a photo to record this critter for posterity. Zoomed to the full extent of my little pocket camera's lenses, I got a great shot of the branches of the trees a few feet from the boat, with a nice eagle-shaped smudge in the background.

So I decided to try digiscoping it, which involves taking a picture through hand-held binoculars. I have trouble getting this to work standing on dry land with a clear shot of my target. Sitting in a rocking canoe drifting back and forth among the trees in the middle of a swamp lent the process a level of additional challenge that can only be described as 'maddening'. But about twenty minutes of wailing and gnashing of teeth and about 10 shots of smudges or trees that have just drifted into the field of view later, and I had two blurry-but-marginal shots and the one above.

It would've been nice if the one good shot didn't look quite so much like America was giving us the cold shoulder.

Police want to burrow into your head

2006-12-21T16:55:00.000-06:00

OK, not literally. Well, probably not your head, anyway. The AP reports that police in Beaumont, Texas want to compel 17-year-old Joshua Bush to submit to surgery to retrieve a bullet lodged in his forehead. They suspect that he recieved the gunshot as he participated in an armed robbery of a used car dealer.

Now, the body cavity search is established legal territory. Anything the police can reach with their fingers and some lube, they can get, so long as they have a search warrant. The question becomes, do they have the right to compell you to submit to a medical procedure you do not want, just to retrieve evidence they believe is hidden within your body. We are not talking about pricking with a needle to draw a blood test. This is surgery. Not life-threatening surgery, as this is nowhere near any major organ or blood vessels. However, since it is in his forehead, and bone has started to grow around the bullet, Bush would need to be put into full anaesthesia.

Full anaesthesia surgery is routine, but hardly trivial. The medications can have adverse reactions, and infection is always a risk. Infections in the face, where there are no lymph nodes to filter toxins out before the lymph re-enters the bloodstream, can be quite serious.

So the question becomes, how far does one's right to medical privacy and right to make one's own medical decisions go? Does the police's power to collect evidence (with a properly granted warrant) override one's fundamental right to make medical decisions?

If we look at the history of Supreme Court precedent, I think the balance must lean toward the rights of the individual to control his own medical decision. Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut come to my mind, although they may be too narrowly written to apply directly, what with all the IANAL and so forth.

Anyway, I certainly lean more or less in the direction of the defendant, although if he did sustain the bullet wound in the way the robbery victim says he did, he is a violent criminal, and one hopes that the police will be able to find the evidence they need to prove this one way or another without having to force him to let a doctor slice his head open and chisel out whatever is lodged in his forehead.

Merry Repeal Day, Everyone!

2006-12-05T13:25:00.000-06:00

Happy Repeal Day, folks.

That's right, it's the 73rd anniversary of the repeal of alcohol prohibition in America.

Dewar's celebrates with a full page ad in the New York Times, and has posted a google video of a chilling alternate-history where prohibition never ended. Of course, would it really be that much more chilling than actual history? Prohibition by any other name still smells like shit.

Hat tip to Hit&Run

So Congress wants the words "Freedom" and "French" to be synonymous?

2006-12-02T15:17:00.000-06:00

Your 'Do You Want the Terrorists to Win' Score: 74%

You are a terrorist-loving scoundrel who hates our dear leader and the values he defends. There are few redeeming qualities about you. You most likely celebrated when the evil-doers hit us on 9/11, then opposed the Iraq war when we tried to pay them back. You hurt us at every step and cause troops to die in the field by questioning Bush's decisions. You are most likely a lost cause, doomed to be a brainwashed victim of free thought and liberalism forever. No dose of Ann Coulter's prose can save you now.

Do You Want the Terrorists to Win?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

I don't call them Freedom Fries, but I have been know to freedom kiss, and like to laugh at the freedom ticklers for sale in those bathroom vending machines. The UN is run by euro-sissies and third world dictators, except when it's being our lapdog. I think deep down, the French wouldn't be too unhappy if the terrorists put America in its place. But damn if those surrendermonkeys don't make some tasty cheese, and I'll buy it if I damn well please.

Hat Tip to Sandy.

Historical Blogging II: Faretheewell Johnny Cash

2006-10-04T16:53:00.000-05:00

Part II of my series where I recover various rants from blogs past. Without further ado, from September of '03, my long-distance elegy to The Man in Black.

Johnny Cash, We hardly knew ye
posted by lunchstealer on Fri 12 of Sep, 2003 [13:18]

OK. At least I hardly knew him. Growing up in a small town in South Carolina, I made a decision pretty early on to separate myself from all things redneck-related. Unlike almost all my peers, I didn't watch The Dukes of Hazard. And from an early age, I garnered a strong distaste for country music.

Well, for the most part, I was right. To this day I'm more into Progressive Rock than Country. Actually that's an understatement. I still frickin hate that crap they play on the Wolf.

Now, in accordance with Sturgeon's Law, most genre are mostly crap. But if they're mostly crap, then they're also slightly good. So there are artists and performances out there that kick ass. Johnny Cash was such an artist, and he passed away yesterday at the age of 71.

When Trent Resnor sang 'Hurt' he was angry Avant Garde guy. When Johnny Cash covered it, he was a guy who was 70 years old, and was looking back on a life of drugs, alcohol, and pain.

Here's to you, Johnny. May you be in Heaven half an hour 'fore the Devil knows you're dead.

Congress re-approves $20M to celebrate the flight of pigs

2006-10-04T16:22:00.000-05:00

When at peace, prepare for war. When at war, prepare to party! Apparently, Congress had a little line-item in the 2006 budget to allow the Pentagon to spend $20,000,000 to celebrate victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, that turned out to be a little premature, so they've re-upped that approval, for 2007. And they promise we'll get to spend it this time. For realsies. This isn't like that time they promised to give back that copy of The Big Lebowski they borrowed. Really, we're going to have a victory party. And who doesn't like victory?

Historical Blogging I: Performance Art I Can Get Behind

2006-09-21T12:04:00.000-05:00

This is part one of a series in which I will recover my previous blog entries (at least the ones I deem worth keeping) from the old Virtual Vortex site, along with other various email rants and reviews I may be able to dig out of the hidden recesses of the ether.

Coolest Cow Caper EVAR!!!
posted by lunchstealer on Tue 02 of Sep, 2003

"It's impossible to do something cool without outraging someone. In fact, I usually judge how cool I'm being by how many angry people are following me with signs."

This from Seanbaby, or some such person, regarding reaction to an Austrian performance art thing that incorporated Helicopters, Nudity (of course), Dynamite, and a side of beef.

The link is http://www.seanbaby.com/news/cow.htm.

Discuss.

PS. you can also find this item by doing a google search for the following set of keywords:

exploding cow art dog window animal rights berlin drop food helicopter austria

Who else but The Lunchstealer is going to give you google gems like that?

Non-illogic is non-useless

2006-09-05T13:04:00.000-05:00

Recently perusing The Economist, an article caught my eye, entitled, "The Non-Denial of the Non-Self". In it, I found the following quote:

IN THE 1940s a philosopher called Carl Hempel showed that by manipulating the logical statement “all ravens are black”, you could derive the equivalent “all non-black objects are non-ravens”. Such topsy-turvy transformations might seem reason enough to keep philosophers locked up safely on university campuses, where they cannot do too much damage.

Now, I'm slightly baffled as to how this is a suprising statement. It certainly seems obvious to me. To illustrate why, let's consider a basic syllogism.

If A then B
A, therefore B

In this case, the premise (the if-then statement) is, "All ravens are black," or more formally, "If a bird is a raven, then the bird is black." Therefore any time anyone tells me they're seeing a raven, I can safely assume it is black (neglecting albinos and poor ravens which have been painted blue, or just bumped against Tobias Funke).

The converse is not necessarily true.

If A then B
Not A, therefore perhaps B, perhaps not B.

If a bird is not a raven, that does not necessarily mean that it is not black. It may be a crow, a vulture, a blackbird, or any of a number of other black birds.

The "topsy-turvy transformation" listed above is to turn that around, and suggest the following syllogism:

If A then B.
Not B, therefore not A

This just follows logically. Imagine the following exchange.

"Hey, I see a bird. Is it a raven?"
"Dunno is it black?"
"Nope, it's blue"
"Then it ain't a raven (again neglecting the Blue Man Group's pet raven, Gerald)."

It's just neither topsy nor turvy.

Now, Carl Hempel wasn't just noodling about solving trivial non-problems like the one above. He was attempting to improve the logical rules associated with observational science. So his Raven Paradox is not just assuming that we know that all ravens are black, but looking at the case when we are trying to observe whether all ravens are black, and seeing what implications that has for our logical constructions.

Suppose we are trying to figure out whether all ravens are black. One natural consequence would be that all non-black things are not ravens. However, finding 100 ravens and observing that each is black is helpful. Finding 100 things that aren't black, and observing that none are ravens is useless. When finding non-black non-ravens, you are making observations that are consistent with your theory. After all, if your theory is correct, then non-black objects must not be ravens, as proven above. But these observations of non-black non-ravens do little to confirm the main theory regarding black ravens.

It is unsuprising to find things that aren't black that aren't ravens, because it is unsuprising to find things that aren't ravens. Look out your window. In my case, I see trees and cars and leaves and buildings and clouds and the sky. Of the millions of things I see out there, only a very few, some tires, a few bits of roof racks on trucks, and one Jeep Cherokee, are black. None of the things I see are ravens. So I have seen many non-black non-ravens, and a few black non-ravens, but I saw no black ravens, nor non-black ravens. Fully half of the possible states of combined ravenness and blackness are left with no observations from my experiment. I just can't say much about the correlation of ravenness and blackness.

As a scientist, I see that the problem of observing non-black objects to test the black-raven theory is that it fails to exclude competing theories. I may have a competing theory that Blue Man Group has painted all the world's ravens blue as a performance art piece. Observing many blue things and finding that none of them is a raven woulds still do very little to distinguish between the blue-raven theory and the black raven theory.

The point of the Raven Paradox, then, is to show that observations that fit a theory are only useful if they don't fit other theories just as well. Could be of some use to the current debate on String Theory.

Note, my title in no way implies that all illogical things are useless. It does however, imply that logic is useful.

Phone Taxes Revisited.

2006-07-28T15:24:00.000-05:00

Halelujah! The Spanish have been defeated! Y'know, the Spanish-American War? Remember the Maine? That's how we got Gitmo, and took over the Philipines. And Teddy Roosevelt got to charge up San Juan Hill, while his two lovely aunts poisoned their houseguests? Wait, that's Arsenic and Old Lace. Anyway, it was a war in 1898. To pay for it, the federal government instituted a 3% excise tax on all telephone lines.

In May, recognizing that we can now safely declare the Spanish Menace no longer a threat, Congress repealed the Federal Excise Tax. So one of those little nickel-and-dime line-items has finally gone the way of, well, not too many taxes.

Those Little Phone Taxes

2006-07-27T14:51:00.000-05:00

So as I peruse my cell phone bill, I see this little line-item for the Texas Universal Service Fund. This, for those who don't know, is part of the FCC-mandated Universal Service Fund.

The basic idea was this. Back in the day, there were people living in what we call "The Sticks". To run a phone line to 20 houses on one street was cheap, but to run a phone line to six houses along a 10 mile dirt road was ex-damn-spensive. Those wacky congresscritters thought that this was unfair, so they decided to tax city-folks' phone lines and to give that money to rural phone companies to encourage "Universal Service". And lo, the hills and dales had phones and the rabbits and the squirrels danced their little woodland dances and all was well in the world.

Jump to 2006. Having a cell phone and a landline for DSL, I currently pay around $6/month - that's about $70 a year, to subsidize these rural phone lines. Over at Marginal Revolution, some intrepid soul dares to ask, are they getting my money's worth?

The answer is that this has devolved* into yet another bit of corporate welfare which yeilds dubious results in terms of actual benefit per dollar.

* assuming it was ever anything more than corporate welfare.

Trolling BBC America

2006-07-26T11:58:00.000-05:00

So TiVo's finally started coming up with some really good suggestions. Took maybe a year (the first 8 months of which were devoted almost entirely to trying to catch up on missed episodes of Angel, Stargate, The West Wing, and the Simpsons) for my TV-watching patterns to fill out enough that TiVo could start amassing sensible data on what I watch, but in the past few months it has really started putting some gems in the suggestion box. I now am checking the suggestions as much as my regular season-pass shows. I shall now report on two such suggestions which have caught my fancy.

Green Wing, on BBCA, is sort of like Britain's answer to Scrubs. But like Coupling, their answer to Friends, Green Wing is far less heart-warming and kid friendly than Scrubs. As near as I can tell, no patient ever has a line in Green Wing, and seem to spend a good portion of their time cowering to avoid injury while the staff pursues their aims of alternately screwing or tormenting all the other members of staff. Although theoretically the show centers around Caroline, played by Tamsin Greig (whom most readers of this blog may dimly recall as the nurse in charge of computer-interface implants on Satelite 9) The cast is hugely ensemble, and the narrative cuts dizzyingly between all the characters over the course of an episode (each of which are 1 hour, with commercials - very rare for a sitcom). This dizzying effect is compounded by constant switching between normal speed, slow-motion, and fast motion, designed to highlight the physical comedy. It's a bit like a Guy Ritchie film after one too many bumps of cocaine.

The second gem that TiVo* has picked up for me, also on BBCA, is Black Books. Set in an eponymously named bookshop, it follows Bernard Black, a drunken, chain-smoking, insane used bookseller, his similarly self-destructive neighbor Fran (also played by Tamsin Greig), and his oddly codependent assitant, Manny. Bernard is wholly contemptuous of his customers, to the point of abuse. Somewhat in the tradition of The Young Ones and Bottom, Black Books is a fantastical, impossible voyage into the lives of worthless human beings, and it is invariably hilarious.

*As Renee points out, she may indeed have shown this to me first. All I remember is getting a bunch of grief for drunken enthusiasm for determining that that girl on the teevee was the same one that played the mom in Mirrormask. My enthusiasm turned out to be misplaced because as Holly loudly and insistently pointed out, Tamsin Greig is not in fact Gina McKee. Nonetheless, I was more than one sheet to the wind at the time, so neither my face recognition skills nor my timeline-recollection skills were at the top of their game, although my enthusiasm skills were prodigious. Coincidentally, TiVo picked up Black Books as a suggestion, but it got deleted before I could get a season pass, and there were no upcoming episodes. So I had to wait until TiVo suggestions picked it up AGAIN to successfully add a season pass. Hence my crediting TiVo incorrectly with the introduction. It did successfully introduce me to it, but it did so after Renee's intro.

Indonesia fears 'toons

2006-07-26T11:31:00.000-05:00

Indonesian officials have arrested the web editor of an Indonesian publication for posting the infamous Jyllands-Posten cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohamed.

Here, I tempt the wrath not only of Indonesia, but most of Asia, Europe, North and South America, parts of Africa, Australia, and last but not least Utah, by publishing a scene from South Park's Super Best Friends episode. Here I show not only Mohamed, but also John Smith, Buddha, and Jesus. Theoretically I could also be pissing off Israel, since Jesus is talking to Moses on his two-way wrist communicator watch. They're probably the ones I should worry about the most, although I may be safe in that I am not Lebanese or Palestinian.

Via Hit & Run

A new low in Operation Look-A-Baby-Wolf-ism

2006-06-05T17:36:00.000-05:00

Well, George Bush has once again shaken me out of my blogging complacency.

I applaud him for realizing that the constitution does not currently allow a federal marriage ban.* Unfortunately, he sees this as a bad thing.

First, my view of the constitutional questions. Article I Section 8 enumerates the powers of Congress, and no where in it is marriage mentioned, nor is there any power granted to Congress that could make sense. So Congress doesn't have the right to prohibit states from recognizing gay marriages without an act of Congress. The 14th Amendment pretty much outlaws making sexual distinctions in marriage laws. My argument flows thus. Under current law, Nicole Kidman was allowed to marry Tom Cruise. However, John Travolta would not be allowed to marry Tom Cruise. What makes John Travolta ineligible to marry Tom Cruise when Nicole Kidman is eligible? Nothing but gender. However, Amendment XIV, Section 1 states that no state may abridge the rights of any citizen of that state, nor deny them equal protection under the law. Therefore, if one citizen is allowed to marry Tom Cruise, any citizen must be allowed to do so.

Now, the only reason to propose a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages, is that you believe that the current bans in place are unconstitutional. That and that you're a jerk-off who's terrified that if somehow, somewhere, a gay person is married, and you're married, that must mean that you're gay.

Either way, I'm longing for the days when Clinton was bombing Iraq to distract us from his Oval Office hijinks, rather than introducing stupid Constitutional Amendments to distract everyone from your incompetent elective wars and ballooning deficits and general utter incompetence in office.

* Care to read the rest of the damn Constitution now, assclown?

iTunes - the new tea leaves - but a bit Dada

2006-05-10T00:12:00.000-05:00

Got this little challenge from Holly's blog.

Rules: Turn on your media player of choice, turn on the SHUFFLE option. Answer these questions with the (RANDOM) song titles as they show up.

Now, I'm doing this at work, while waiting for stuff to run. My work files are limited, heavily skewed towards Rush, and contaminated by some of Casey and Jeremy's mp3s. Were I to do this at home, actual mileage would vary.

How does the world see me?
Fugue - Emerson Lake & Palmer

Will i have a happy life?
If My Heart Was A Car - Old 97's

What do my friends really think of me?
Stupid Girl - The Rolling Stones

Do people secretly lust after me?
Up On Cripple Creek - The Band

How can i make myself happy?
Waxie's Dargle - The Pogues

What should i do with my life?
Rockin' Chair - The Band

Why must life be so full of pain?
Anagram (for Mongo) - Rush

Will i ever have children?
Space Monkey - John Prine

Will i die happy?
I Lost My Head - Gentle Giant

What is some good advice for me?
The Lazy Boy - Moxy Fruvous

What is happiness?
The Enemy Within - Rush

What's my favorite fetish?
Syeeda's Song Flute - John Coltrane

How will I be remembered?
Thomas - A Perfect Circle

Wood

2006-04-26T14:24:00.000-05:00

For those of you who recieved Brad's 'Naughty Tree' email, I present to you Dominica's answer. The Penis Tree. This has to be the best-endowed flora ever to erect itself.

This odd sight, found alongside a path at the Rainforest Tram in Laudat, Dominica, is actually two trees. The 'member' is a smaller tree that somehow grew under the buttressed base of the larger tree. I'll update this with more details if I recall them.

I Have New Pariahs

2006-03-28T14:13:00.000-06:00

So the TABC is baffled as to why Texans are upset that they're sending undercover agents into bars to arrest people for being drunk. OK, let's break this down.

Undercover agents
In bars
To arrest people
For being drunk

This may be what folks are upset about. You send the secret police to arrest people in bars to arrest them for something harmless. We all understand that if you're being drunk and disorderly in your neighbor's front yard, you might just spend a night in the pokey. We also understand that if you get shitfaced in a snooty restaurant, they're gonna call the cops. Because those are inappropriate places to be lit up like a christmas tree. If you're drunk behind the wheel of a car, you're obviously going to find yourself at the business end of a gavel, and deservedly so.

If, however, you are in a bar, you don't expect the guy in the hawaiian shirt on the barstool next to you to call in the goon squad and have you thrown in the clink. It's just against the social contract. They defend these arrests by saying that 'that's one less drunk driver'. However, 10% of recent arrests in Irving were of hotel guests in the hotel bar where they were staying. This is the SAFEST form of drinking. Even drinking at home is less safe, since you might be tempted to go get more beer if you run out, or you might want to make that midnight run to Taco Cabana.

These hotel patrons were where at a source of liquor. They were at a source of food. They were going nowhere.

I feel the need to repeat my call for the TABC to be disbanded, and for all current employees thereof to be prohibited from public employment or recourse to public funds in the State of Texas.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Texas defines TABC thusly:
TABC (TEE ay bee see) n. A bunch of mindless jerks who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

I Have New Heros

2006-03-22T12:37:00.000-06:00

It's good to hear the story behind the headlines sometimes. Thus it is with the creator of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Seriously if you haven't checked out what's up with FSMology today, you're missing out.

I do tend to wonder if they're going to co-opt International Talk Like a Pirate Day the way the Christians co-opted pagan holidays aka Yule/Christmas.

Via Hit&Run.

Holly's Happy Birthday

2006-03-20T14:20:00.000-06:00

Holly and myself at Sushi Sake in Austin celebrating her birthday. The photo in the caption contest going on below is from the same event.

Thanks to Sharon for sharing these pix.

First ever Grains of Sand caption contest

2006-03-20T14:00:00.000-06:00

OK, here are the rules. Make a caption for this photo. C'mon, it's begging for it! Post them in the comments below. The winner shall be the first person who shall win.

Wow, when they finally get it right, they get it wrong.

2006-03-10T11:58:00.000-06:00

So the Dubai World Ports deal is dead. The debacle has driven down Bush's approval rating. This was the first time I actively wished for Bill Clinton to be back in the White House.

Now, this administration may be the most inept in generations. So when an ally in the War on Terrah capitolized on its status as a port city state to develop port-management expertise that is rivaled only by that other great port city/state, Singapore, they thought nothing of a deal that would have had them hiring people to run the cranes in American ports.

Senate Republicans and Democrats heard about it, and thought "OH MY GOD! We can't have ARABS in our ports!"

Heh heh, cool.

2006-02-28T16:35:00.000-06:00

I Am 62% Evil

I am very evil. And I'm too evil to care.
Those who love me probably also fear me. A lot.

How Evil Are You?

OK, this is a bit exagerated, because almost all the most evil stuff was borderline, and as a child. For example, I checked the box saying I like to burn things. However, most actual burning events occured in the Boy Scouts, and I've never actually burned anything that wasn't more-or-less harmless to burn, and almost never dangerously. Certainly by Boy Scout standards I'm very non-pyro.

DO YOU CARE?

2006-02-09T14:11:00.000-06:00

Speaking of Crybabies, Holly points me to a CNN article that points up a serious problem in the American psyche.

A youngster was involved in a spelling bee. OK, I get that. Nerds gotta have their sports too. I was in marching band, and we competed. I also competed in some of the statewide music competitions (never well). I even somehow got talked into competing in the South Carolina Latin Olympics (this involved speaking a dead language, not high-jumping over J-Lo), at which I overcame the handicaps of severe apathy and a year and a half of chronic narcolepsy in Latin class (I made sleeping in class a spectator sport, which even earned me an unsolicited cheerleader phone number, which I didn't have the stones to use) to bring home the statewide championship in Latin Derivations.

So anyway, this kid is in a spelling bee at University of Nevada, Reno. She gets a word right, but the judge dings her, because refs suck, and make stupid calls. Seahawks, you know what I'm talkin' about. Unfortunately, there is no attempt made to challenge the call at the time. After the bee, the mom points out the mistake. The organizers appologize (or not, it doesn't say) but point out that there's nothing they can do, since protests must be lodged immediately, not after the conclusion of the bee.

So far, there's nothing for America to be ashamed of here. Nerds are an important part of our culture, and nothing forges a nerd's rejection of society like the humiliation of being forced to compete in a spelling bee.

The mother requested a spell off, to at least allow her daughter the opportunity to qualify for the state bee, and possibly for scholarships. Well, it's a little pushy, but I'll allow it, I mean, the young'n did get the short end of the stick, and there's no harm in asking.

The organizers turn her down. The bee's over, and it's just too late to correct the mistake. Here's where things go off the rails. The mother is now threatening to sue. There's no harm in asking, but there's harm in suing. She describes herself as "a mother bear with her claws out."

Bears get shot for that sort of shit.

In competitions of all kinds, judges/refs/umps/whathaveyou make mistakes. In most circumstances there are explicit rules governing the protest of such mistakes. They are, nonetheless, a part of the sport/game/bee/competition. Just because life has dealt your child a bad call, you do not have the right to go on a rampage about it.

Mrs. Beckman (appologies if that's not your last name, no news story on the subject confirmed this one way or the other), the judge made a mistake. Judges do so, and to expect otherwise is ridiculous. They're not focused on your kid, they're trying to make sure the whole thing runs smoothly. No easy task with a group of bright, often socially awkward, universally nervous tweens dealing with all their fears of public speaking and competitive pressure. You, on the other hand, were watching your child with the focus of her mom. To you, she was the most important thing in the world, and all the other kids were just other kids. She had your focus, but you didn't go ask the judge to review his call. He made one mistake out of hundreds. You made one mistake out of one.

If you take this to court, I guarantee that the school district will spend more money defending itself than your child stands to gain from any scholarship she might win. Little Sara, had the call gone her way, still had to go on to win this podunk local Nevada tourney. Then she had to win state, or at least show, to get a decent chance at any scholarship. And most of those scholarships are going to be modest. We're not talking about a full-ride to Oxford or Harvard here. Probably not even full tuition to an in-state school. I'd be astonished if anyone gave a scholarship over $10k for anything but winning the national spelling bee. But defending a lawsuit could easily cost the local schoolboard 5X that amount.

So you'd be willing to intentionally throw away $50,000 of school funding from your own school district to get your kid a longshot chance at a spelling bee scholarship? And that's assuming you even WIN the case. A judge would have to be an idiot to allow it to go forward. You CLEARLY had a chance to protest the call when it was made, and didn't bother to do so. The tournament officials made a mistake, but you did not make a good-faith effort to protest at the appropriate time.

Raising a kid is hard, but this attitude of "Anything I do for my kid is OK, because I'm a parent, and we should revere parents and children are our most precious resources" crap is getting out of hand. People, your kids are a resource. Like coal, only more likely to commit crime. We don't sacrifice everyone else's coal just because you weren't watching out for your coal. Get over yourselves.

self-absorbed

S E L F hyphen A B S O R B E D

self absorbed

What would Randy and Jason say? Dunno, but it'd probably be funny.

Nobody wants him - They just turn their heads

2006-02-01T14:10:00.000-06:00

I am Iron Man

Iron Man		75%
Spider-Man		75%
Superman		70%
Robin		60%
Hulk		55%
Supergirl		50%
Catwoman		40%
Green Lantern		40%
Batman		35%
Wonder Woman		30%
The Flash		30%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Intelligent Vatican?

2006-01-29T15:54:00.000-06:00

Speaking of ID, Hit & Run recently pointed out an article (via NYT) published in the Vatican newspaper that supported the recent Pennsylvania decision barring ID theory from science classes.

Intelligent Blogging

2006-01-29T15:52:00.000-06:00

So a while back, a poster on Hit&Run pointed to an article in the journal Cell, which had some interesting things to say about intelligent design. The broad stroke of the article has to do with science education, and is worth reading in its entirety. However in one passage, he discusses the Intelligent Design debate as an example of some of the challenges facing science education today. The real kernel of his argument is that ID is errosive to the fundamental assumptions that make science work. If we can just say, "this is too complex to explain, so God must have done it," then we run the risk of taking that easy way out any time we run into a difficult problem.

We have recently received a wakeup call. A new survey finds that two-thirds of Americans agree with some of our political leaders that “intelligent design theory” should be taught as an alternative scientific explanation of biological evolution. What does this mean? According to intelligent design theory, supernatural forces acting over time have intervened to shape the macromolecules in cells, thereby forming them into the elegant protein machines that drive a cell’s biochemistry (Alberts, 1998). In other words, at least from time to time, living things fail to obey the normal laws of physics and chemistry.

Teaching intelligent design theory in science class would demand nothing less than a complete change in the definition of science. This definition would give those of us who are scientists an “easy out” for the difficult problems we are trying to solve in our research. For example, why spend a lifetime, constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry, trying to obtain a deep understanding of how cells accumulate mutations and become cancerous if one can postulate a supernatural step for part of the process? Yet we can be certain that, without the deep understanding that will eventually come from insisting on natural explanations, many powerful cancer therapies will be missed.

The idea that intelligent design theory could be part of science is preposterous. It is of course only by insisting on finding natural causes for everything observed in nature that science has been able to make such striking advances over the past 500 years. There is absolutely no reason to think that we should give up this fundamental principle of science now. Two-thirds of Americans might seem to have no real idea of what science is, nor why it has been so uniquely successful in unraveling the truth about the natural world. As I write, the Kansas State Board of Education has just changed the definition of science in revisions to the Kansas State Science Standards to one that does not include “natural explanations” for natural phenomena. What more proof do we need for the massive failure of our past teaching of biology, physics, chemistry, and earth sciences at high schools, colleges, and universities throughout the United States?

I have to admit that from a philosophical standpoint, I've had a fair amount of sympathy for the Intelligent Design idea. I don't subscribe to it by any stretch of the imagination, but I understand it, and do not find it outside the realm of possibility. This is sort of a 'God as cosmic watchmaker' concept. And at the same time I knew that there was real value to it for making true scientific claims. I had no use for the 'the eye is too complex to evolve by chance' crowd.

Intellectually, I must admit the possibility that God did step down and zap the primordial ooze to create the first cellular life, and that he later interfered to add eyes, legs, lungs ears, and brains to the critters that resulted. I certainly cannot claim to have proof that God does not exist, any more than I can prove there are no flying saucers or no Loch Ness Monster. Science has no position on the matter.

But while I knew the basic reasons why ID wasn't real science, I didn't quite get what was so bad about teaching it in a science classroom. This article solidified that for me. Science, if it is to find answers to difficult questions, must have high standards for what answers are acceptable. And those answers must be natural phenomena. If science can just sit back and ascribe phenomena to magic, miracle, or just ‘space aliens’ doing things that we are too primitive to understand, then we’ll never keep seeking until we find an answer that we can understand.

The cornerstone of science is universality and internal consistency. If a theory applies in one situation, it cannot be contradicted in another. Therefore if ‘then a miracle occurs’ is an acceptable answer in one branch of science, then it must be accepted in all branches. And if that happens, then no scientific theory can be supported. There will always be doubt as to whether to believe observation, because it may be the result not of natural processes, but of supernatural meddling.

For science to be valuable, we've got to explain everything that can be explained. Intelligent Design is the theory that some things cannot be explained. While this might ultimately be true, it defeats the purposes of science, and undermines the scientific understanding that supports medicine, engineering, and most of the other disciplines that create our modern world.

Fauna on the Cabrits

2006-01-29T15:16:00.000-06:00

The Cabrits is a peninsula just north of Portsmouth formed by two small andesite domes. It's on the dry side of the island, and while it's not exactly barren, it's a very different environment than other places on the island. The trail to the top of West Cabrits was a popular place for black land-crabs to die, and for hermit crabs to go scuttling about. This guy is about three feet across, and is perching on the finger of a giant that lives in these parts.

2006-01-29T15:11:00.000-06:00

One grove snake on West Cabrits. Saw a lot of these critters there. Unfortunately I didn't get a shot of the checkered snake a couple of days later at Soufrie Springs. These guys are very good-natured. We caught one at the fort on Cabrits, and while I think he wanted to be kept in the shade, he wasn't too upset about being picked up. Grove snakes are members of the colubrid family, like the black racer and the coachwhip in the US.

Fair fowl.

2006-01-25T22:32:00.000-06:00

This blue-headed hummingbird was wholly indifferent to all the two-legged ape-critters pointing cameras and flashing flashes in its very near vicinity.

Domincan fowl.

2006-01-25T22:24:00.000-06:00

Seriously. Tell me this smooth-billed Ani doesn't look just a little like T. rex.

These guys are part grackle, part crow, and part doin' their own thing, man.

2006-01-23T22:34:00.000-06:00

A stream in the Valley of Desolation on Dominica. The rivulets coming in from the left are full of minerals that deposit black stains on the rocks, while the stream on the right looks like nothing so much as a river of alka-seltzer.

This place stank of rotten eggs and howled like a demon.

First Dominica footage.

2006-01-23T22:22:00.000-06:00

Here's a kick-ass fumerole/steam vent thingy at the Valley of Desolation. You can hear the steam and sulfur-dioxide/hydrogen-sulfide gasses burning out of scores of little holes in the ground around me. Jus' thought y'all would dig this.

Blondes, nature's blondes

2006-01-13T14:31:00.001-06:00

I'm largely skeptical of blonde jokes, but my brother's found a good one.

Lethal Weapon 2, we hardly knew ye

2005-12-01T10:03:00.000-06:00

Sixteen or so years after the release of Lethal Weapon 2, one has to look around the world and wonder if Riggs and Murtaugh would recognize it.

Back in the wacky world that was 1989, South Africa was one of the evil empires of the world. The evils of the South African policies of white supremacy wrapped up in the Apartheid system made America's deep racial problems of the time pale in comparison.

Now, in the arguably wackier world that is 2005, state after state in America are moving to put up roadblocks to any attempts to expand civil rights for homosexuals, especially in the area of the benefits of marriage. As America (on balance) moves to create barriers to the civil rights of homosexuals, South Africa moves in the opposite direction. South Africa has become the fourth country in the world, and the first on the African continent, to legalize all monogamous marriage. South Africa's supreme court has moved by a 'near-unanimous ruling' to strike down a law that limits marriage to intra-sex couples.

Good on ya, South Africa.

Feeling the fafpower

2005-11-29T13:16:00.000-06:00

So I should point out to you gentle reader (or figment of my imagination) some of the stuff that puts me (and most bloggers) to shame.

One such entity is Fafblog. Fafblog is the worlds only source for fafblog. And it is the product of some excellently twisted minds. Read this post on Victory in Iraq which seems to sum up the White House approach to the war.

Also, check out their musings on what may constitute greatness in sandwich accomplishment.

Bad blogger

2005-11-10T11:01:00.000-06:00

Yeah, I'm not really good at actually posting to this thing.

There's been too much craziness. Seriously. Those who know me have probably heard that I'm now managing the lab. However, my previous job of 'the guy who can do all the weird projects that no one else knows how to do" is still empty. So I'm pretty much doing that, and trying to manage the lab at the same time. Now, I've never in my life aspired to management. Being the boss holds no interest for me. Dealing with salescritters is not something I understand. And juggling twelve active projects, keeping track of the details is not my strong suit.

So today I'm getting close to having my head above water, so I'm gonna see if I can blog again some.

Props

2005-09-27T19:13:00.000-05:00

So today my brother has come up with one of his better blog entries.

He explains why you should go see Serenity. His reasons flow thus. Serenity is an awesome movie. You should see it for that reason, and because those who fail to do so may at some point in the future find themselves unexpectedly resurrected, only to be promptly killed.

Slight shift left

2005-09-20T18:06:00.000-05:00

So I've taken Yet Another Political Spectrum test. This one was less ambiguous than some, and might actually be more accurate. Anyway, I came out a little more socially permissive than previous tests of this kind, now scoring farther out of the Centrist zone and into the libertarian zone. I do seem to have slid a little closer to the moderate/liberal democrat zone. Probably just that my constant nay-saying of stupid government policies are now focused on a stupid semi-rightwing government than a split government between stupid semi-rightwing folk and stupid semi-leftwing folk.

On the famous people chart, I came out on Martin Luther King Junior's right temple, sort of in the triangle between him, Adam Sandler (go figure), and some 18th Century guy who's probably either Jefferson or Adam Smith.

Anyway, I'm still libertarian.

You are a
Social Liberal
(80% permissive)

and an...
Economic Conservative
(65% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Libertarian

Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating

Free (Or Preferably Charge) Jose Padilla

2005-09-13T17:43:00.000-05:00

So over at H&R, they're pointing to a piece by Tony Blankley entitled "Needed: Old War Spirit in a New War". His basic premise is that we should invoke the spirit of the time where we defeated Nazism and Fascism and Militarism in the here-and-now to defeat Radical Islamism. You know, the "if in doubt, intern!" spirit. The "no, let's not racially integrate the army, as that would destroy morale" spirit. Even the "let's expel Jehova's Witnesses from school for failing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance" spirit.

Admittedly, only the former and the latter are expounded by Blankley; he has not yet advocated outright segregationism.

He sets out to explain that harassing Arabs and Muslims in this country is probably a good idea, using the precedent of Japanese internment during WWII. To this end, he starts out with some dubious numbers. Quoth he: "A total of 25,655 noncitizens living in the United States were interned or deported during the war years because of their ethnicity or nationality, rather than their words or conduct. They included 11,229 Japanese, 10,905 Germans, 3,278 Italians, 52 Hungarians, 25 Romanians, five Bulgarians and 161 other foreign nationals." So according to Blankley, only 25,655 persons were interned during WWII. Wikipedia contends that over 110,000 'persons of Japanese descent' were interned, over 60% of whom were citizens. Basic math notwithstanding, he's completely ignored the fact that the policy he's espousing deprived thousands of American citizens their freedom on the sole basis of their ethnicity.

"During World War II, the country was faced with the prospect of large numbers of people -- again identifiable by ethnicity, not conduct -- who were real or potential enemies," he says. The key word here being 'potential'. Every human being in this country is a potential enemy. For example, convicted bombers Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Eric Rudolph were all Americans of Scots-Irish descent. Indeed, Scots-Irish (the very ethnicity, it should be pointed out, of your humble blogger) are far more likely to be members of the Klan and other white supremecist groups, or of violent anti-abortion or anti-gay groups. These are all potential enemies of America. They (persons of Scots-Irish descent) were behind the second largest terrorist attack in United States history, the Oklahoma City Bombing. Indeed, that is still among the top five or ten terrorist attacks in the history of the world. By Blankley's logic, the FBI is justified in targeting Scots-Irish Americans based solely on their ethnicity. Fortunately for him, Blankley is a WASP name.

Ultimately, I've never bought the idea that the Bill of Rights wasn't a suicide pact. If it comes to it, I'd just as soon be killed by a terrorist as see fundamental American rights such as habeus corpus ditched in favor of marginal security.

Iraq War - Should We Mend It? Or Can We End It?

2005-08-25T10:09:00.000-05:00

OK, We've been hearing this refrain ever since that "Mission Accomplished" speech. "I opposed the war, and I think it was a bad idea, but we're there now, and we can't pull out!"

Which begs the question, "Could we pull out?"

Do we have to wait until Iraq is a happy democracy to return our troops home? If we pulled out, would that simplify matters for the Iraqis, and let them actually get about setting up a democracy themselves? Or is our conventional wisdom accurate, that competing strongmen would carve the country into warlord fiefdoms, some controlled by radical Islamists, others just by secular thugs?

NARAL to ACLU - "Watch your backs!"

2005-08-12T10:52:00.000-05:00

Just kidding, mostly.

NARAL is understandably opposed to the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. This is perfectly understandable, since it is hardly implausible that he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. However, their enthusiasm has led them a bit astray. Their no-holds-barred approach led them to run an ad that, taken to its logical end, could set them at serious odds with the ACLU.

Here's what happened in 1989: John Roberts, as a solicitor for the GHW Bush administration, wrote an amicus brief stating that a federal law aimed at curbing Klan activities did not, as written, apply to abortion protestors. The law, passed in 1871 makes it a federal crime:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory conspire or go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another, for the purpose of depriving, either directly or indirectly, any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws

Roberts argued that Operation Rescue, in opposing the act of abortion, was not violating this particular law. His reasoning took two parts. The first was that since the original law was aimed at the KKK, it was therefore aimed at racial discrimination, not sex discrimination. This is bogus. Nowhere in the law, or at least the part that I read, does it exclude any class of persons from receiving 'equal privileges and immunities'. His second argument is the one that is, at least legally, defensible. He argued that the abortion protesters were uninterested in who was getting the abortions, but instead were opposed to the practice of abortion overall. Therefore while the effect of their protest might have been discriminatory towards women, their purpose was not depriving 'equal protection and immunities' to any specific group. Any pregnant men who showed up would have been equally protested. By a decision of six to three, the Supreme Court agreed with this second argument.

One of the litigants in this case was a convicted abortion bomber, Michael Bray. NARAL's ad indicates that arguing that a federal law does not apply to a protest amounted to supporting the protestors' violent actions. Specifically, they feature Emily Lyons, a nurse severely injured by one of Eric Rudolph's bombs in 1998. Now let me be the first to say a big "Fuck you!" to abortion bombers. However, stating that one federal law does not apply to an abortion protest is not the same as supporting anti-abortion violence. Indeed, there had been successful litigation against the protestors in state courts under state law in this case. All Roberts was doing was arguing that it wasn't shouldn't have been made a Federal case, under the specific law that they were citing.

It is worth considering what Roe v. Wade actually said, as well. It did not grant the right to get an abortion. It banned the government from the invasion of privacy that would be required to enforce an abortion ban. Therefore abortion protestors are not violating a right, as the right is not to the abortion itself but to not have the government interfere in such a private health decision. It is in this way that a civil-rights law cannot be applied to private protestors. This is not to say that state abortion-clinic access laws are invalid, and the existing state laws at the time were not invalidated by this decision.

Demonizing anyone who argues for the rights of those we oppose politically is shaky ground. Its part of what makes the ACLU's job so thankless. The ACLU has in fact supported Klan chapters' right to protest, and may someday represent anti-abortion groups in similar rights. If so, will NARAL demonize them, too, as supporters of violence and abortion-clinic bombings?

My point here is not that NARAL would actually turn on the ACLU. It is that an impartial lawyer will almost invariably have made a legal argument that benefits someone we don't like. This is the way of things if you're going to defend everyones' freedom. There's more than enough reason for NARAL to argue against Roberts simply based on his ambivalence to Roe v. Wade.

NC Trip Part I - Vegas for Flanderses

2005-08-11T21:34:00.000-05:00

So perhaps a full explanation of the NC trip is in order. My friend Casey is currently in the process of travelling from Dallas, Texas to Hanover, New Hampshire to start the MBA program at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University. Along the way, he's stopping to meet/stay with his various extra-Texas friends. One leg of his journey was to take him from Memphis, Tennessee, to La Grange, North Carolina. My family's got a house in Brevard, NC, which is conveniently halfway in between.

I don't get to Brevard nearly as often as I'd like, so I took the excuse to make a trip that way, and show off one of my favorite places. So I took off Wednesday evening, and headed for Little Rock. I took a room at the somewhat overpriced Travellodge near the Little Rock airport. If I get access to a scanner, I will blog further on their toiletries. The following morning I was up pretty early and headed for Memphis. Coordinating via cell-phone, Casey and I met up at the Old Country Store, a kind of Cracker-Barrel-on-steroids in the 'Casey Jones Village' tourist-trap (more of a tourist-bug-zapper) in Jackson, TN. On the way I got a good overflight by an AH-64 Apache, which seemed to be slinging four FFAR pods (gotta let my techno-geek out and play sometimes, right?).

We cruised on through and made Knoxville by dinner time. (I should also interject that a C-130 came in on final passing low over the I-440 loop road in front of us as we passed Nashville. Still a techno-geek.) Pouring over the atlas at a Wendy's, we decided to ditch the interstate and try some more back-roadsie, uhh, roads. So we decided to take 441, which ran over to the base of the Great Smokies, and then pick up 321 up to where I40 heads into the mountains. The drive along the base of the mountains would be nice in the setting sun, was our thinking. Before heading out, Casey pointed to the town where we'd turn north and asked, "Where have I heard of Gatlinberg?" This was a fateful question, and it was only my poor memory that just said, "Well, there's something like a ski resort thingy there called 'Uber-Gatlinberg', maybe that's what you've heard of..." It wasn't.

Gatlinberg, and the adjacent Pigeon Forge, are home to Dollywood, and the Great Valley metastasism of red-state Branson excess. Now most of my gentle readers (all two of you) will know that I am an elitist and a sort-of conflicted countrified red-state liberal snob. But I want you all to know that I felt more strangely horrified-fascinated than when I first floated past the guy who sits next to the Guadeloupe River in a folding chair with a camera and a cooler, leering out at passing females from under a banner reading "Tits - 4 - JelloShots". Even the gramatical anomalies of his sign are as nothing to the spectacle of mile after mile of Alabama-themed theaters, "Kountry Bears Revue" (or sommat like that), mini-golf, bungie jumps, arcades, and family-themed restaurants. Scurrying between them were a strange assortment. The whole family in matching pink mini-skirts were distracting in a 'did I just see that?' sort of way. I'm assuming that it was just an optical illusion that the dad was also wearing one, but I can't say for certain.

Then we got into Gatlinberg proper. This is not a place for the faint-of-heart. A genuine pedestrian district for the red-state crowd. But for a place with one street through town, navigation is a nightmare. Two professional geographers took atleast 20 minutes to find the place where 321 turned north. Needless to say, if anybody from the Highway Department, or in a position of authority in Gatlinberg, a proper highway intersection sign would not go amiss.

Once we finally got out of the Gatlintrap, we made our way on over the hill(s) to Brevard. Driving into town I called Casey to make sure he rolled down his windows to smell the Kentucky Bluegrass. There's no other smell like it.

Tha Moon Rulez!

2005-08-11T17:47:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty sleepy today. Yesterday I awoke in Brevard, North Carolina, and slept in Dallas, Texas. This required a hefty drive during the intervening time, which meant that I didn't arrive at my bed until well after 2AM. Add to that the lingering effects of too much caffiene consumed in the later stages of the drive, and that sort of weird effect where you get so tired that you're too uncomfortable to sleep, and I didn't get much sleep last night.

The drive across Arkansas took me through the hours between dusk and midnight, and this afforded me an opportunity to observe the moon. As the sunset faded, and the stars began to shine, the waxing moon formed a solid cresent in the western sky. Immediately below its tip was a small star, just bright enough to see through the glow surrounding the moon. Being somewhat bored now, as I was a good ten hours into the drive home, I hit upon an idea for a little astronomical experiment. Stars, of course, are relatively fixed in the sky. They move only with the rotation and revolution of the earth. The moon, however, is in orbit around the earth, so it is moving through the sky in its month-long orbit. Therefore it might be possible to see the motion of the moon relative to the star over the course of the evening.

The moon is approximately 1/2 of one degree in angular width, and the star was approximately 1/4 of the width of the moon away from the tip of the crescent when I first noticed it, along a line through the two horns of the crescent. Over about two hours, the star appeared to lie along a line tangential to the moon's edge, parallel to the line through the two horns of the crescent. (If I could draw a diagram and get it on here easily, I would, but it would be a bit of a pain.) So the moon moved approximately 1/4 of a degree relative to the star. Now, the moon orbits the earth in 28 days, or 672 hours. In doing so it traverses a full 360 degrees. This means that the moon should move approximately 1/2 of a degree per hour. I'm a little disappointed that I couldn't get my observed moon motion to match up with my back-of-a-napkin estimation the lunar orbit. If anyone wants to check my math, feel free. But quantitative results aside, it was really cool to observe the motion of the moon.

In other news, the NC trip was good. I rained pretty much every day I was there, but it was still a welcome change from August in Dallas. And a welcome change from working. I really really hate being left in charge.

Filibuster v. Recess

2005-08-01T17:23:00.000-05:00

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth about Senate obstructionism in the process of confirmation of presidential nominations. This has shifted from one side of the aisle to the other, depending on which way the wind was blowing in the White House.

I am of the opinion that partisan political opposition to a candidate's views are not a good idea. Especially starting with the Bork nomination, this has been a real issue. The Bork nomination process may have kept one conservative off the bench, but it means that now no one will even get nominated if they have opinions. Only the blandest or most inscrutible will survive the nomination process. No one who has shown genuine scholarship could make the bench, because scholarship would require expression, and expression is selected against. Thomas's appointment went forward partly because he was black, but also because his opinions were largely unknown. So I am not a supporter, in general, of political obstructionism by the Senate of presidential nominees.

By contrast, I believe that Senators' opposition to John Bolton's appointment are founded partly in his politics. But there is also a widespread belief that his combativeness with his own subordinates and lack of results as head of the nuclear-weapons-decomissioning program make him unqualified for the job. There is a big difference between saying "I don't like what he would do," and "I don't think he will do the job well." It is clearly the Senate's job to make sure that candidates can at least carry out their duties competently. There is reason to doubt that Bolton could do so in a diplomatic post, and therefore the Senate's opposition is wholly appropriate.

As for the Senate "unfairly" denying Bolton "an up-or-down vote", this is a tactic that the Republicans used often during their long tenure as the opposition party in the legislature. Allowing minority-party disruption of a dominant party's plans seems a sensible balance, in the best tradition of American democracy. Keep the filibuster flying.

Novy Blog

2005-07-31T01:33:00.000-05:00

The venerable Lunchy's Blog on Virtual-Vortex has served me well, but it's time to explore new blogging territory. Specifically, I needed a blog that would serve me a little better in terms of looks and stability. I hope this will do the trick, as I'm far to lazy to build my own website.

Firefly's showing on SciFi right now, and they're showing the Serenity trailer. It looks pretty good, so I'm hoping it'll get some butts in seats. It really is cooler than any other SF movie I've seen recently. Way less sucky than that whiny crapfest that ended with Darth doing the Monster Mash.