December 2003 Archives

I just got back today from an enjoyable and enlightening trip to Oregon from California. I'm about to run off to a New Year's party now, so I'll make this short. While I really enjoyed the fact that there's no retail sales tax in Oregon, they do have an annoying law prohibiting the self-service dispensing of gasoline at filling stations. On my last fueling stop before leaving the state, I engaged the angry old man in charge of fills in a discussion about the issue. He bluntly admitted that it's a makework scheme for people like himself who've lost their jobs in the timber industry.

If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.

The Dalai Lama
May 15, 2001

He won't fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won't fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation.

Spalding Gray

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

G. K. Chesterton

I saw this in a Portland shop window today... a cheering sight in the cold downtown rain.

I'm on vacation, so don't expect much for the next few days. I may post a bit from the road, if anyone cares, though...

There is ultimately no difference between what's most moral and what's most pragmatic in the long run. Those who sacrifice moral principles in search of short-term gain will only gain Pyrric victories and find that their goals will continually elude them.

Scott Bieser

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Oscar Wilde

If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egotists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature.

Albert Szent-Györgi
(1893-1986)

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Voltaire

My Bujinkan teacher Dale Seago asked me to take some pictures of his new custom dirk last night. This is the first pic I snapped as he was about to place it on the tartan plaid backdrop on the dojo mat on the floor between us. I thought this captured one aspect of Dale so well that I have to share it (the spots on the pic are from the camera lens.)

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.

Mark Twain

It's great to get feedback on one's blog postings, especially when it results in the personal discovery of a great resource. Blog commenter Ricky James runs the compendious and incredibly interesting SciScoop: Exploring Tomorrow, which I strongly recommend telling all your friends about. So much to explore!

One of the big problems with modern [Star] Trek is it's filled with [a] vague sort of techno-socialist leftist politics, but the writers have totally lost sight of the "Good Guy's Code" which TOS [The Original Series] inherited from its Western show predecessors.

One of the things that makes Firefly succeed is that [Malcolm] Reynolds has a good guy's code. It's a stripped down and practical good guy's code, but it's there and he sticks to it.

Jay P. Hailey, from the smith2004-discuss list [edits mine]

A couple of weekends ago, I finally took out my Armalite AR-50 .50 BMG for a spin. I've owned it for quite a while, but I hadn't gotten around to shooting it: I wasn't yet convinced until recently that I wouldn't break the scope I was hoping to mount on it, a Leupold Vari-X III mil-dot model with a Premier Reticle (3.5-10 x 40mm). Once I was convinced, I mounted the scope and took it out for a bit of fun, using some surplus South African ammo I'd ordered a couple of years ago. No intention of serious zeroing, but I figured it would be fun to get at least a rough zero at the longest range I could manage.

The range was only about 300 meters deep, so for fun I set up to shoot at a vertical paper target, figuring I'd try to adjust for about one foot over point of aim. My first shot, with the elevation and windage on the scope set to "0", resulted in a hit right over the target... 4 feet over. It didn't take me long to get the hits down to roughly where I wanted them. Like I said, this was simply a set of warmup shots (also remembering that the first few shots through a new barrel will change point of impact.)

One of the things that amazed me about this weapon is how light the recoil was... and how loud it was! Both aspects make perfect sense given the combination of the weight of the weapon (37lb/16.8kg) and a well-designed muzzle brake (the size of a Coke can.) The muzzle brake, in the course of doing its recoil reduction job, introduces a lot of noise to either side and back of the muzzle. You do not want to be within 10-15 feet on either side of the weapon when it lights off! Interestingly, in the shooter's position behind the gun, it's much more bearable... but less so 6 feet behind the shooter. Interesting acoustics.

I plan to take this lovely piece back out to the range in the next few weeks, under more controlled conditions. I'll write about it at length, and may even have someone do a video of the firing sequence, so you all can see and hear it in action. This thing is fun!

Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign arrangement. But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself.

Daniel C. Dennett
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
pp154-155

I'm on break between school terms, and am catching up on some entertainment. Friends on the smith2004-discuss list had been raving about a short-lived 2002 Fox television series called "Firefly," which had been cancelled due to poor ratings.

I'd actually tried to catch the first episode as it aired in the U.S. last year. I tuned in only to find that some sports event had pre-empted the airing. I tuned away in disgust. It turns out that Fox wasn't airing the pilot ("Serenity") that night; instead, they were airing "The Train Job", which was written hastily over the space of a weekend at Fox's whim... the pilot, which set up the world, the characters, and the arc of the plot, didn't air for weeks later. As a matter of fact, of the 14 episodes that were produced, 10 were aired, and most of those out of sequence.

Fox did nothing to promote the show, and placed it in a suicide slot. The show was pre-empted several more times by sports events. It died a year ago to the protests of a fanatical viewer base spread across continents. In the last year news of the series has spread by word of mouth - the way I found out about it - and seems to have created a larger fan base in its absence.

Less than 2 weeks ago, Amazon.com released the entire, properly sequenced set of Firefly episodes on DVD. As of this writing, the DVD set ranks 17th in sales, with 261 reviews and an average 5-star rating!

Firefly: The Complete Series is also available for rental from Netflix.com. Several weeks ago, I added it to my Netflix rental queue - they allow pre-release reservations - and as soon as it was available to be rented, it was shipped to me. My loved one and I spent several evenings this last week watching the entire set. We are completely enamoured of this series, and now we're wondering how we're going to follow up with anything nearly as good.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

Aristotle

...to grow, it would be any of the cherry tomato varieties. A few years ago, I spent a lot of sweat and money working on an urban garden (suburban, actually) in which I planted a large variety of tomatoes, from cherry to beefsteak. I had far too much produce that year, so I gave much of it away, ate most of the rest, and let the remaining tomatoes rot on the vine.

Well, in the intervening years, the seeds from the cherry tomato plants have continued to produce in various places around the yard. My back yard is a prairie - I don't believe in manicured lawns - so some interesting things pop up from time to time. Looking out my window right now, coming up to January, I see yet more ripe cherry tomatoes ready to pick. At times like this, I'm reminded that the tomato plant is a weed of the Nightshade family.

I think I'll restart the garden again in a couple of months...

I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen year old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I don't think I've seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

Paul Graham
"Why Nerds are Unpopular"

A member of one of my mailing lists de-lurked today to introduce himself. He runs an incredibly cool and useful website, "Technical Video Rental", which advertises a carefully selected library of tapes, DVDs, and books for the independent-operator machinist. This should be of particular interest to those in the Free Arms Project.

In studies, whatsoever a man commandeth upon himself, let him set hours for it.

Francis Bacon
1561-1626

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' pioneering flight. On the same day that a hobbiest at Kill Devil Hills was trying unsuccessfully to replicate that flight, the real news of the day went mostly unnoticed:

Today, a significant milestone was achieved by Scaled Composites: The first manned supersonic flight by an aircraft developed by a small company's private, non-government effort.

Rutan finally did it! This is fantastic news; congratulations to the Scaled Composites team. Images and a related story are available on Space.com.

The Free Arms Project just opened today for business, spun off the smith2004-discuss Yahoo Groups mailing list:

"The Free Arms Project is committed to the development of a patentless, Open Source, Open Engineering personal defense weapon."

It'll be interesting to see where we take this. The Weapon Shops of Isher?

I've been neglecting this blog for several weeks in favor of my school studies and my job search. I'm on a long holiday break now, and will be writing over the next few days on a number of issues.