October 2003 Archives

Homer: Listen, Flanders, you still have that store?
Ned: For two more days. [sniff] It becomes Libertarian Party headquarters. I hope they have better luck than I did.

"When Flanders Failed"

I was working on a flat tax proposal and I accidentally proved there's no god.

Homer Simpson

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to go to the forest to gather wood, saw it, and nail the planks together. Instead, teach them the desire for the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Right wing socialists hate privacy as much as left wing socialists hate guns.

Stephen Carville

The Concorde SST was finally retired by British Airways today, after years of running at a loss. As much of an Anglo-French boondoggle as it turned out to be, I've always been a bit fond of the plane: the idea of a supersonic transport has always been, um, sound; someone will do it right someday.

Years ago when I lived in London, I had the occasional pleasure of seeing a Concorde crossing over London on its way to or from Heathrow Airport, in climb or descent configuration, far enough away from the airport that its spindly landing gear were retracted and its nosecone was pulled up in its sleek inline (unbent) cruise configuration.

I even got to visit one of the birds, and step inside, ten years ago this autumn. I was part of a small group of people who toured catering operations for British Airways at Heathrow (long story) with a side trip to the Concorde hangar. I have a ton of pics from that trip, and even a couple of cool ones of myself in the Captain's seat in the narrow cockpit of the one plane we were allowed to enter. If I have time soon, I'll dig those out and scan a few to this site.

I really wish that BA would cave in to Richard Branson's attempts to buy a Concorde off its hands: a Virgin Atlantic Concorde might actually make money, as well as keep alive a fabulous piece of aviation history.

There are three reasons to own a gun: to protect yourself and your family, to hunt dangerous and delicious animals, and to keep the King of England out of your face.

Krusty the Clown

Prohibition was introduced as a fraud; it has been nursed as a fraud. It is wrapped in the livery of Heaven, but it comes to serve the devil. It comes to regulate by law our appetites and our daily lives. It comes to tear down liberty and build up fanaticism, hypocrisy, and intolerance. It comes to confiscate by legislative decree the property of many of our fellow citizens. It comes to send spies, detectives, and informers into our homes; to have us arrested and carried before courts and condemned to fines and imprisonments. It comes to dissipate the sunlight of happiness, peace, and prosperity in which we are now living and to fill our land with alienations, estrangements, and bitterness.

It comes to bring us evil - only evil - and that continually. Let us rise in our might as one and overwhelm it with such indignation that we shall never hear of it again as long as grass grows and water runs.

Roger Q. Mills of Texas, 1887

That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression.

Section 35, Alabama Constitution of 1901

You can't keep from growing old, but you can be immature as long as you want to.

Will Rogers

Novelist Victor Koman was dead right, when he said (in his great work, Kings of the High Frontier) that the actual mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — its not-so-hidden agenda, having nothing to do with the development of space travel and exploration — is to keep scum like you and me from ever getting into space.

At the same time (as Victor also points out), NASA mouthpieces have been telling the public since the 1960s that our being able to visit space, perhaps even vacationing on the Moon, or in zero gravity at a space station, was "only about thirty years away". That's what they said in the 60s, that's what they said in the 70s, that's what they said in the 80s, that's what they said in the 90s, and that's what they're still saying today. It's always just about thirty years away.

L. Neil Smith

Last spring I wrote up a short review of a great Ealing comedy from 1957, "All at Sea", with Alec Guinness. Just last night I finished watching another great British comedy, this one from 1959 by John Boulting, "I'm All Right Jack". It's a great little satire on the dirty politics between postwar British industry and trade unions. Peter Sellers' depiction of a power-mad, USSR-worshipping shop steward alone is worth the viewing. You'll find it on Netflix.

Don't take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, to the next county, to a foreign country, but NOT to where the guilt is.

George Carlin

Survival Arts welcomes back old friend and contributor from the early days of this blog, Eric Cartman. - Russell

In September 1999 I had the opportunity to attend the 20th Annual SOF Convention. Part of my reason for going was to take advantage of the various training seminars offered which included jump, medical and underwater airframe escape. As it turned out most of the classes were canceled for various reasons, but the underwater airframe escape, given by Learn to Return Training Systems of Anchorage Alaska was not. Being a pilot, I this would be an interesting opportunity to expose myself to something new. Even though I had been flying for some time, I had never considered such training on my own, even though I regularly attend various training courses. The thought of what might happen if I ditched a plane or helicopter into water seemed simple enough. Emergency checklist, radio calls, open the doors or windows to keep water pressure from sealing you in, crash and exit the craft when/if you can. Seemed simple enough. Well, not really, as I was about to find out.

The Class

Training consisted of 4 hours of classroom time followed by hands-on simulator training in the hotel swimming pool. Although large facilities exist with mechanical “dunkers” which include complete sections of various airframes, LTR has also designed man-portable devices that they can bring to any facility that has a reasonably sized swimming pool.

The class consisted of about 8 people from various backgrounds from the military, law enforcement and civilian worlds. Everyone was treated pretty much the same. The class was taught by Brian Horner, the President of LTR, and John Evans. Both have extensive military and rescue experience as well as numerous other credentials. Their rescue experience became immediately evident during the initial slide show, which included a large number of photos from actual rescues. The slide presentation included some great images of helicopter ditches in progress, as well as some “rescue faux pas” such as a rescue boat getting caught up in the rotor of a sinking Sikorsky helicopter!

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it, and stop there.

Mark Twain

Inside every alienated hacker who thinks he stands for the "good things that don't ultimately matter to most businesses" there is a tycoon struggling to get out. It's not the system that he hates. His gripe is with the price the system initially offers him to collaborate.

Michael Lewis
Next, p136

If the gun-banners are so fond of compromise, may I propose one?

They shut up and go away and never bother me again, and for my part, I will restrain myself from kicking their genitalia up into their throats.

Eric Oppen

This is just simply embarrassing. In the spirit of Chinese Communist Party Self Criticism, this being the day the Soviets - er, the Chinese - launch their first cosmonaut into space on a 40 year old Soyuz design, I'll criticize this blunder of mine:

About a week ago, I mentioned a scuba diving trip I made to Monterey, California. If you look closely at the picture in that article, you'll see attached to the left side (my left side, as pictured) on the BCD (bouyancy control device [vest]) a Cold Steel Recon Tanto in its Kydex/Concealex sheath. Well, I was so knackered from the surf zone re-entry that I didn't immediately clean off my gear with fresh water and dry it. I did that the next day, forgetting completely that I'd clipped several caribiners (which survived unharmed) and one nice high carbon steel tanto (which suffered) to my technical BCD.

If you look closely at the snapshot above, you'll see rust spots on the exposed cutting edge of the blade. I took that photo as a record, before I cleaned up the edge. It took me an hour of careful work, but I was able to stone out and hone the rust spots. If you ever have anything like this happen to your blades, fix it thoroughly: one oxide spot will catalyze a larger oxide surface. I can say, however, that I'm really pleased at how the rest of the knife held up: flawlessly. The black epoxy powder coat finish protects the body of the blade extremely well.

I'm still going to try to dive this knife again, but next time I will 1.) pre-treat the entire blade surface with oil and 2.) immediately clean and dry the blade as soon as I doff my diving gear. Also, I'll use the same Nonox rust cleaner/preventative I use on my swords as an additional level of prevention in the cleanup.

Almost 10 months ago to the day, I wrote a short blurb on this blog about Shenzhou V, which was supposed to have carried 2 taikonauts. That launch happened today, in the same type of communist secrecy which surrounded Yuri Gagarin's launch so long ago, and featured only one taikonaut, Yang Liwei. CNN reports:

Quoted by Chinese media just before he blasted off into space, Yang said he would "gain honor for the People's Liberation Army and for the Chinese nation."

All hail the "motherland": another ersatz superpower dedicated to making space its military summit. Yet another incident which compels me to recommend Victor Koman's Kings of the High Frontier.

As for Christianity's alleged concern with truth, Christian faith is to free inquiry what the Mafia is to free enterprise. Christianity may be represented as a competitor in the realm of ideas to be considered on the basis of its merits, but this is mere disguise. Like the Mafia, if Christianity fails to defeat its competition by legitimate means (which is a forgone conclusion), it resorts to strong-arm tactics. Have faith or be damned -- this biblical doctrine alone is enough to exclude Christianity from the domain of reason.

George H. Smith
Atheism: The Case Against God, p169

The old courthouse in Riverside, California had statues of women with bare breasts around on the sides up near the top of the building.

I always wondered what that meant. "This is a whore house!" seemed likely. "Come in here and get screwed!" pretty much summed it up.

Ken Holder

I saw "Kill Bill: Volume I" today, and it was utterly, fucking astonishing. I was prepared to be impressed - and I was - but I wasn't prepared for all the little surprises along the way, e.g. Sonny Chiba as "Hattori Hanzo", a wonderful name for his character, if you're at all familiar with both actual Warring States samurai history as well as some of the outrageous fictionalizations of Hanzo in Japanese cimema. Lucy Liu warms to her role very well. I won't spoil the scene for you, but she really gets to go over the top in a scene involving a convocation of Yakuza bosses. It's obvious that she worked hard with a dialect coach over the course of shooting, because her Japanese gets dramatically better as the film goes on... which says something about the sequence in which the scenes were shot. By the way, Lucy Liu fanboys, I do know she majored in Asian studies in college. Her pronunciation and conversational fluency was noticably slightly off (to these former expat gaijin's ears) in the beginning, but rapidly improved.

Be warned: while this film is a complete fantasy, and a very good one at that, it is an extremely violent fantasy. There's more gut-wrenching brutality in this flick than I've seen in recent years.

I'm looking forward to Volume II.

Resist aging and death with every resource available to you. Nurture skills of self-defense. Learn how to survive under difficult conditions; this may shield you in sudden misfortune. Distinguish between illusion and reality, between emotion and fact. Avoid making important decisions on too little sleep.

Kick your own ass. The universe neither cares about you nor recognizes any obligation to you. It is fixed and blind, a mad robot programmed to kill. You are free and seeing; you must outwit it at every poor turn.

Whatever your labors & aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, you must create your own sanity, prosperity, and peace.

The world is so gorgeous it hurts. Be careful. Strive to be happy.

Romana Machado

I couldn't resist this: phenol.

G'nite.

I'm playing with RasMol, a molecular visualization tool. I'm starting with small inorganic molecules right now; since I was talking sulfites today, here's sulfur dioxide (SO₂) for you, in the standard space-filling model:

I'll be playing with RalMol some more. Visualization of macromolecules should be interesting in this tool...

I've been meaning to write up a culture piece on the state of Big Animation, but it's been a low priority nowadays. However, Michael Jennings has written a solid piece which I very highly recommend.

Yesterday, I published an article by John Sebastian on the amusing topic of homemade wines done on the cheap. John made some assertions about "sulfates" (actually "sulfites") which generated some informative response from James Rogers in refutation. As a chemistry student with a burgeoning personal library on the science and some of its applications, I happened to have a copy of the proceedings of the 12-13 April 1973 "symposium sponsored by the Division of Agricultural and Food Chemistry at the 165th Meeting of the American Chemical Society" held in Dallas, Texas: "Chemistry of Winemaking", A. Dinsmoor Webb, editor (published 1974 by the ACS, Advances in Chemistry Series #137).

I've scanned in several pages of this out-of-print book, pp280-285, from the Webb article "Home Winemaking", which mention sulfite production and supplementation. I've included the section entitled "The Course of Fermentation" below simply because my OCR program flawlessly reproduced it... why waste the material by not including it? I have reproduced "Table I" manually with the published values, and placed it inline, after the first reference to it in the original text.

Those with a chemistry background will also note that this was written 30 years ago, before IUPAC nomenclature standarization.

- Russell

Excerpt follows:

Addition of Sulfur Dioxide

Certain fruits and some of the white varieties of vinifera have a tendency to brown during crushing and other early processing operations because of oxidation. This oxidation may be promoted by enzymes in the fruit, or it may be a direct reaction between phenolic material of the fruit and oxygen from air. Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) is a strong enough reducing agent that it is oxidized in preference to the phenolics of the fruit juice. Sulfur dioxide may also function by denaturing the oxidizing enzymes. Therefore, to prevent browning, add 25-200 ppm SO₂ to the fruit immediately after crushing. The quantity of SO₂ is governed by the ease of browning of the particular Juice being vinified. SO₂ in addition to preventing oxidative browning in juices, inhibits growth of bacteria and wild yeasts. Thus it provides a more nearly sterile field for the action of the desirable yeast starter added by the enologist. The quantity of SO₂ to be added to the juice is varied according to the condition of the fruit-clear, cool, sound fruit fresh from the vineyard requires very little while fruit that is in poor condition and warm needs more. The amounts of SO₂ to be added to a juice can be estimated from Table I.

SO₂ is a pungent and unpleasant smelling, dense gas at normal temperature and pressure. Under moderate pressure it condenses to a liquid which can be stored in steel cylinders. The large winery usually adds SO₂ to the crushed grapes by carefully metering a small stream of the liquid from a cylinder to the inlet line of the pump that transfers the must from the crusher to the fermenting tanks; this ensures that SO₂ is uniformly mixed into the mass of crushed fruit. For the small winery and the home winegrower, however, the relatively small amounts of SO₂ required are difficult to measure and transfer as liquid, so either water saturated with SO₂ or a SO₂-liberating salt is used.

You cannot truly appreciate Atlas Shrugged until you have read it in the original Klingon.

Sea Wasp

The following long article was submitted to me a few days ago by John Sebastian, a member of the Smith2004 discussion list. He had originally written it up as a response to someone joking about homebrew, a discussion which was itself spun off a thread about the benefits of resveratrol, a constituent of some red wines.

Here follows the version John mailed me for publication here, which I have editted only for grammar and spelling, not content. Enjoy at your own risk! By the way, it seems that there's not much in the way of actual cost savings in this technique, given the reported cost of the grape juice concentrate alone. "Two-Buck Chuck" is a perfectly adequate "10 dollar wine with a 2 dollar price tag", for those who have access to a Trader Joe's, but John's technique should still appeal to the Basement Chemist in some of us.

- Russell, editor

Sober Up and Die
or
Mom's Prison Wine
or
How to Make a Simple Cheap Wine that is Untaxed (Well, Mostly)

By John Sebastian

Yeah, yeah, I know: "loving spoonfuls" and all that. What makes it worse is that I'm often told that I'm a dead ringer for Jerry Garcia. No, I'm not that "the John Sebastian", I am this "the John Sebastian".

Well, it was the damn driver's license, it was also the cost, and - oh yeah - it was also the sulfates and other crap. Come to think of it, it was also just plain stubborn independence. It was also my wedding.

Huh?

Okay I'll make myself clear, or I'll try.

You see, I live in Tennessee, so every time I purchased beer or wine I had to show my ID. For a while I got away with showing my PADI Divers Card, but eventually all they would take was the old ball-and-chain driver's license. Call me sensitive, but at age forty-seven, I sort of figured it's my business whether I purchase beer and wine.

Eventually after tiring of trying to give civics lessons to the clerks at the grocery stores, I started brewing beer - Sebastian's All Malt - but that is another story. This story is about how to make a dirt cheap wine that is as tasty as anything you could want, indeed, a wine that you don't have to humble yourself by producing the state's slave ID to purchase, and a wine that is largely untaxed... thus even tastier.

Taxes, hidden and otherwise will rise, government programs will multiply and expand. Stripped of pretensions, that's the whole reason government exists. Every government that ever existed, that exists now, or that will ever exist, is a kleptocracy. California -- Californians -- will mysteriously be no better off. Now is the moment when you'd have advised Jews to get out of Germany.

L. Neil Smith

I'd not heard of this guy before today, but a number of friends whom I deeply respect are throwing their support for Michael Badnarik, who is working to become the Libertarian Party's 2004 candidate for the U.S. presidency. See his blog too, in order to make up your own mind.

Not receiving enough email? Looking for yet another mailing list to consume? If you're a libertarian, and aren't familiar with the incredibly prolific pamphleteering of the UK Libertarian Alliance, I recommend joining the Yahoo mailing list libertarian-alliance-forum, if for no other reason than to witness the astounding post rate of my longtime good friend Dr. Chris R. Tame.

The only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed.

William Henry Harrison
Inaugural Address, 1841

...as if to make my point for me, when I arrived at that part of the speech, three or four angry individuals -- out of approximately three hundred, undoubtedly Nerf libertarians themselves -- got up and walked out. I was gratified, of course. Any speech that fails to offend at least one percent of your audience is a poor, pale thing, hardly worth making.

L. Neil Smith

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

I'm doing homework for my only online college class (the rest are on campus), and I have the TV on in the background for noise. It's the Sci-Fi Channel, and one of the first Stargate SG-1 episodes, "Emancipation", is playing. I had to look up when the Daniel character says the people they're meeting are descendants of Mongols. As soon as I did, I saw one bowman nock and draw an arrow in the Western tradition, with the first two fingers (3 is also sometimes used in the West)! You see, Mongol bowmen never used that string draw technique: they used a very distinctive thumb draw instead.

Back to work now.

I spent the weekend with friends in Monterey Bay, California scuba spearfishing. More on this later, but I figured I'd put up this picture right away. This was taken on Saturday when suiting up before a surf entry into the Bay from Del Monte Beach:

My good friend Franklin (AKA "The Big C.I.G.A.R.") is the one without his hood on. I'm the sweaty one on the right with all gear ready for entry (diving 34.9 percent enriched air/Nitrox, by the way). I could not wait to hit the 57 Fahrenheit degree water... I was boiling! More on this trip later.

They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?

Paul Harvey

There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore looking like an idiot.

Steven Wright

Hunting is not simple. It is the only absolute rediscovery mechanism available to human beings; the mind-body fusion of all meditative, spiritual experiences is derived form its pasturage... the hunt is a universe of emotion that overwhelms, scatters all notions of other preoccupations and delivers the persona complete. Hunting is a love affair; turbulent, glaring, and all possessing... hunting is an immersion; a drowning in connectedness... hunting knows why the senses were made! Hunting is a cataclysm of inward progress. We hunt for spiritual reserve...to understand the world (and for)... the knowledge of self.

Shane Mahoney

Someone on the smith2004-discuss list said he'd like me to post a picture I had taken last year of an MBA Gyrojet 13mm rocket carbine. Here it is. The owner had it on display at a gun show in San Jose, and was kind enough to allow me to have a couple of photos taken.

"warren_et" on the same list calls the projectile a - get ready for this - "Single-Stage-To-Obit rocket".

Bob Schulz just went on Fox's Your World with Neil Cavuto show and said that he has stopped filing his yearly income tax. He comes across on camera as a rational man who seems to know exactly what he's doing.

I've not yet read this book, but when I have some time off from my studies, I plan to. My friend Perry Metzger has given me permission to reprint this recommendation he sent a few minutes ago to a mailing list I own:

So I finally finished the book. My verdict is still not in - the book is very obviously just 1/3 of the overall story. However, I'll say that I rather enjoyed the first 1000 pages of the story that Quicksilver represents. It isn't quite at the level of my favorite Neal Stephenson books ("The Diamond Age" is at the top of my list), but it is a very interesting read.

It also has the interesting feature, which a history book would not, of giving you a much wider view of what was going on in the 17th century than you could otherwise get. Usually history is taught or read in narrow vertical slices - you learn about Louis XIV, but not that Robert Hooke was off in London discovering that all living things are made up of cells at the same time, and that all that while the Turks were attacking Vienna. The irony is, in spite of being a work of fiction, it gives you a wider and better lens on the birth of the modern age than a non-fiction book would have...

Looks like I'll be ordering my copy soon.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

George Carlin

The Free State Project picked New Hampshire today, using an innovative voting technique called Condorcet's Method. It's interesting to see that the FSP people have done a good job getting the word out: on the same day of the announcment, the UK Guardian, a major daily paper (and leftist at that), writes its own coverage of the announcement: "'Free staters' pick New Hampshire to liberate for sex, guns and drugs."

Sounds like a fine recommendation to me.

I have not found a better test for the solution of a case than in its articulation in writing, which is thinking at its hardest [emphasis his].

Roger Traynor
Former Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court