This is not to say that I believe all religious people are readily capable of murder. Rather, I claim that once you structure your life around ideas that you are not permitted to test, but which you accept as beyond testing (that is, on "faith"), you've abandoned your most important survival tool, namely reason.
Introduce a bad axiom into a mathematical formal system, you can prove anything. Similarly, if you abandon reason for "faith", you lose your only tool with which to distinguish the truth. This could leave you helpless to escape the idea that "God" demands that you kill, and from there it is a short step to shooting abortion doctors or flying planes into skyscrapers.
I've noticed an interesting phenomenon in my math classes over the last couple of years, which has become more pronounced as the subject matter becomes (to some people) more difficult: the Desperate Calculator Jockey. This is the guy who never studies, is too lazy to do his homework, but somehow manages to struggle his way from one class to the next. He can usually be seen furiously punching formulae into a top-of-the-line TI-89 or its near-equivalent, expecting some magical insight into the problem from the resulting graph. While this approach may actually work in some instances, such as with a simple "differentiate this function" problem, the approach is an utter - and deserved - failure when the student is confronted with the dreaded applications problem (the so-called "word problem.")
Oh, my... this is where thinking skills are really tested, and where numerical prosthesis is nearly worthless. I love these problems: exercises in aircraft fuel vs range optimization, predictions of least-time photon transit through a non-vacuum medium (Snell's Law, an application of the Brachistochrone curve), calculations of marginal cost & maximization of profit, how to make the largest rectangular horse corral with a fixed length of expensive fencing... the good stuff. The Calculator Jockeys rarely know where to start decomposing a problem to its tractable constituents, instead, as usual, attempting to invoke an answer from the aether by keypunch.
I can pretty much tell from looking around a room who's faking it and who's getting it: those who are actually learning the calculus are learning with their pencils, which are constantly moving on paper. The fakers, on the other hand, are constantly pushing buttons. The joke's on the latter group: with the exception of actual symbolic manipulation packages such as Wolfram's Mathematica, hand calculators - to date - depend entirely on methods such as linear approximation. This means that the calculator jockey can actually get the wrong answer for a derivative of a function at a point on a curve, since the curve may not actually be differentiable at that point, but the linear approximation around that point of a secant line connecting points on either side of the original point may exist. Suckers.
The concept of luck is also an insult to those who have truly earned what they have. It's an easy way for others to write off hard work and perseverance as merely a kiss on the forehead from the fates.
You see, I find it invariably true that 'luck' strikes those that are well prepared to receive its bounty. By preparedness I mean that they have educated themselves, unerringly pointed themselves in the direction of choice and put themselves forward again and again as a person who desires the chosen end result. I'm as unsurprised by these kinds of people being struck by ‘luck’ as I am by the tallest grounded antenna being struck by lightning.
Brian Smith passes on this fantastic link to a placed call eMachineShop. Their blurb:
eMachineShop is the remarkable new way to get the custom parts you need. Download our free software, draw your part, and click to order - it's that easy! Your part will be machined and delivered. Even better, your cost is low due to the Internet, software, and automated machines.
Why waste time traveling, calling, faxing or emailing to conventional machine shops? Reduce your total time up to 90% and open doors to new products and projects. Intelligent design software gives instant exact pricing, expert feedback, and unrivaled convenience.
Perry Metzger recommends the open source encyclopedia Wikipedia, and I concur. I've found myself referring here to entries there on occasion the last couple of years, and have been impressed at the tendancy to improvement of the content over time. You see, at one time I hadn't been sure that allowing (pretty much) anyone to edit entries would result in better content, but it has.
I only very recently actually registered as an editorial user with the service, after having been a consumer of it. Registration gives you a number of benefits, such as the privilege of watchlists, where if interesting entries are modified by others, you're notified of those changes. Also, since the history of all entries is maintained in CVS-like changelogs (preserving history) and is recorded against some evidence of identity (discouraging vandalism), registration means that your chosen name is made public rather than your IP address. This is a good thing, if you don't already know. Check it out.
I meant to publish this a couple of days ago, but since I've been busy with work and school, I simply made some quick notes on an index card, which I'm posting here now.
On Tuesday of this week, while wrapping up some work and getting ready to head out to my night class, I had the TV in the background tuned to the Fox News Channel, and was about to turn it off, since the segment that was starting to air was that of Bill O'Reilly, a rude, populist jerk whom I can't stand, broadcasting from the Democratic national convention in Boston. I decided to leave the tuner alone and watch a very short segment (1701-1710 Pacific time) of an impromptu, live interview with Ben Affleck, who was attending the convention.
Unscripted, Affleck actually acquitted himself well; he's not quite the empty shell the press makes him out to be. I was particularly interested to hear him make the following assertion, when questioned by O'Reilly about his political leanings, after calling himself a "moderate liberal" and emphasizing that he doesn't necessarily hew to a party line:
I believe in all the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment.
That's a direct quote from Ben Affleck, which I'm preserving here, without editorially correcting "all the" to read "all of the." I'm not sure why I'm preserving this, but it's not inconceivable that the guy might run for some public office eventually, as his career (continues to) wane.
Robert LeFevre taught us that capitalism is simply the postponment of consumption today, so that resources may accumulate, allowing us to much greater things in the future.
I think he quoted von Mises, who pointed out that taking the time and making the effort to prepare a stick so that you can knock down fruit that's higher up on the tree, instead of simply plucking and eating the fruit you can reach by hand, is the fundamental act of capitalism.
That being the case, in any conflict that ever existed between capitalism and anything else, capitalism won several hundred years ago. The real struggle is whether we will practice private capitalism, or some other form that will seize your stick for the community, or "merely" license it, and either claim your future fruit production for "all mankind" or limit how much you can take at any given moment, idiotically "saving" it for future generations (by which time it shall have rotted or be eaten by birds).
Me, I'm a private capitalist, as much as I can be in this nation of fourflushers and cheeseheads.
If you have the opportunity to do so, visit Hog Island Oyster Company in San Francisco's Ferry Building and eat a dozen or so of their excellent Tomales Bay oysters (including Kumamotos, one of my favorite varieties.) I normally don't dip good oysters in any sauces, but I was converted recently by their version (which has rice wine vinegar as its base) of a Mignonette which was superb. Their clam chowder is also fantastic - expensive, but worth every penny - and made unlike any you've ever had elsewhere. If you prefer your seafood with a good beer, they've got North Coast Old No. 38 Stout on tap.
If you're using a unix-like system, open a shell and type this command:
cal 1752
Hint: pay particular attention to September.
...to fix the "market failure", the government must somehow actually act to supply the missing good, either directly or via government contracts. Because there is no market discipline enforcing the efficient delivery of government services, these services are often supplied in a stunningly bad manner. You can't go to the competing DMV — there is none — so you wait on line for hours to get your drivers license. Why should we expect that the efficiency with which, say, national defense or other purported "public goods" will be supplied would be any greater?
So, here is the crux of the problem with the "let the government supply the public goods" argument: there is no evidence the government can supply putative "public goods" with any greater efficiency than the market that has "failed". Indeed, one might even get less efficiency than one started with. Why, then, is government intervention any better than the "market failure" we started with?
A few weeks ago, on a mailing list I run, it was reported to me by a good friend that the present management of the Extropy Institute disavows free-market libertarianism as its politico-economic root. As a matter of fact, we're told, extropianism was never about liberty and its deepest ramifications. To those people, I have a large number of examples from the early history of the extropian movement which contradict that claim, such as this reprint of a short declaration by law professor Tom Bell, writing in 1988 as "T.O. Morrow," a piece called "Economics and Politics" (words in brackets below added by me for clarification):
As information processing systems, good economic and political systems must meet the same standards that apply to any of their kind; they must achieve their ends efficiently. Researchers such as Friedrich Hayek have demonstrated that the most efficient economic and political systems are those that exert a minimum of control, allowing spontaneous orders to flourish. Economic and political systems must furthermore advance (trans)human ends. Extropy [magazine] takes the [editorial] point of view that these two qualifications are entirely compatible; the most efficient economic and political systems are those that maximize human liberty. Thus the best economic systems are free market, and the best political systems libertarian. (Libertarians assert that the state, if one is neccessary, should permit all acts except assault, theft and fraud.) Extropy [magazine] will pursue such free market and libertarian analyses of economic and political systems, working toward the day when economic and political systems serve us, rather than we them.
(T.0. Morrow, '88-'98. All Rights Reserved. Please attach this paragraph to all copies. Fully attributed noncommercial use of this document hereby permitted.)
This was, as mentioned, published in the paper version of Extropy magazine (a copy of which I own), and is notated "online version, edited Nov. '96." I plan to publish many more such examples as I run across them, at my convenience. Why? Well, while I do acknowledge that the term "extropian" has been diluted to the extent it's indistinguishable from standard socialist transhumanism - and this is a tragic thing - I will not stand for the historical revisionism being pushed by some of those in the existing "extropian" movement... especially since I've been around that movement from the very beginning, and will not drink the Kool-Aid.
An excellent essay by Eric Raymond, "Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun: What Bearing Weapons Teaches About the Good Life." (Thanks to Steve Pegram.)
To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is... to live in corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from the dignity of a free man would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising this demon, of reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal arms, is, ultimately, most important.
This is the final ethical lesson of bearing arms: that right choices are possible, and the ordinary judgement of ordinary (wo)men is sufficient to make them.
Mr. O'Dowd also misses one of the most important aspects of security -- he fails to discuss the economic tradeoffs (if any) being made in a given security decision. He mentions only the possible problems of using an open source operating system, but he ignores the price associated with not using one. Against the weak claim of decreased security, we have to balance the loss of functionality and increased cost that using a proprietary operating system might cause. Developers do not select open source software at random. They adopt it because it gives them better functionality and has a lower cost.
Indeed, the cost savings and productivity benefits of open source systems might easily make it possible to devote more effort to security in a design, and the improved tools available can make security far easier to implement. Open source operating system users take features like packet filters, MMU based memory protection for multiple processes, logging facilities, etc., for granted, but these features not available in many conventional embedded operating systems. Even the ones that do have any particular feature rarely provide the breadth of functionality of the open source systems.
Chris Goodwin passes on this fascinating account of the Oklo natural nuclear reactors in Gabon, equatorial Africa:
In 1972 the very well preserved remains of several ancient natural nuclear reactors were discovered in the middle of the Oklo Uranium ore deposit.
As I mentioned earlier, I saw "I, Robot" last night. Right before the movie began, I saw a spectacular trailer for an alternate universe fantasy, "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie. It looks like a great deal of fun, and I'm looking forward to its September release.
I mentioned this on a mailing list last night, adding that Zeppelins were featured prominently in the trailer, to which listmember Chris Claypoole offered this observation:
...[this phenomenon falls] under the purview of Hite's Law: "All change points, from Xerxes to the last presidential election, create worlds with clean, efficient Zeppelin traffic."
Every alternate history can be differentiated from our own by the presence of airships. *Every* one. So, if you're ever not sure whether you're in an alternate universe, look up.
Armalite announces how they'll deal with the AWB sunset (thanks to Steve Pegram): "the ArmaLite® Post-PostBan ™ Rifle Program."
I'd mentioned yesterday I'd be seeing this film, and I did. I also mentioned in a short comment followup that I'd seen a few old friends leaving the cinema, who confirmed my suspicions that the film was very loosely based on Asimov's work of the same name, so I went into the cinema not expecting a film realization of the original story.
There were tips of the hat all over the film to Asimov's original work, mostly in the naming of characters (Sonny, Dr. Susan Calvin) and in partial buzzword compliance (e.g. "positronic"), but as the credits honestly acknowledged, it's "based on a work of" Isaac Asimov. With that in mind, I determined to enjoy the film on its own merits, and was not disappointed. I was particularly impressed with Alan Tudyk's portrayal of Sonny (as an aside, I hope whatever name recognition this earns him - as a greenscreen actor - helps in the success of the forthcoming Firefly movie "Serenity".)
It's interesting to see that the movie treated Asimov's 3 Laws as sacrosanct, considering that Asimov himself later saw flaws in that approach to robot safety, working in a hack he called the "Zeroth Law." See this interesting commentary for a summary of the Laws... which might have prevented the disaster dramatized in the movie (that's the closest I'll come to a spoiler), or might not, given the rationalizations employed by the villain, which were the same as almost every tinpot dictator of the 20th century or before.
Here's a related amusement: the Singularity Institute apparently saw fit to ride the wave of the movie's popularity by launching a website called "3 Laws Unsafe".
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
Isaac Asimov
Watching "I, Robot" today, I noticed product placement for:
I found this place, off the beaten path in San Francisco's Chinatown, on a visit several weeks ago with a friend: Hang Ah Team Room, which apparently has been a feature there since around 1920. The food is fantastic, service is friendly and personal, and the prices are half what I expectecd them to be, an opinion shared elsewhere in this SJ Mercury News article: "Eating Cheap in SF."
I'll be seeing "I, Robot" later this afternoon, after hitting the gym... both to see Alan Tudyk playing a robot and to see how badly Asimov's original formulation gets mangled by Hollywood.
It just occurred to me now, playing with my cats, that successful cat toys (durability aside) are a lot like the lures of fly fisherman: certain shapes, colors, and noises work better than others... and the lure or toy is simply dead to the fish or cat unless you can play it properly. When you have the action down pat, both fish and cats go bugnutty.
Kristopher Barrett passes along this amusing photolog of colorful AR-15 furniture. Someone should inform the Pink Pistols.
So, there are folks in Washington who must go in to the office every day and think they are involved with keeping our networks secure, when in fact nothing they do has any impact on the problem at all. This kind of thing appears to be a common feature of large bureaucracies. I've been struggling to come up with a pithy word or metaphor for it without much success. The only thing that pops into mind for me today is the Aztec priesthood. Those where the folks who thought that if they didn't cut out someone's heart every day, the sun would stop rising.
It is sort of the inverse of a "Cargo Cult." Instead of your actions bringing about no results even though you think you're doing everything right, the results you want keep happening even though your actions have nothing to do with it at all, and you are convinced you are the cause.
My old friend Perry Metzger gave in today and finally started a blog. Now to convince him to add a comment mechanism...
Anton Sherwood has found an interesting advocacy of the right to keep and bear arms... as a campaign issue by liberal Democratic editorial cartoonist Ted Rall, "Democrats for Guns: Why Kerry Should Stand Up for the Second Amendment":
The best argument for coming out as a pro-gun nut relates to the need for an adjustment to the long-term strategy of the Democratic Party. For too long, both parties have treated the Constitution like a Chinese menu. Republicans whittle away at the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and smear opponents who exercise their First Amendment right to free speech. Democrats rail against the states rights expressed by the Tenth Amendment and absurdly argue that the placement of a comma reflects the founders' original intent to limit gun ownership to members of 18th century militias. Aside from its fundamental intellectual dishonesty, our politicians' take-some-leave-others attitude deviates from most citizens' belief that every section of the Constitution holds equal weight.
Just a few short days after the 35th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's historic moonwalk, we learn the unalloyed truth about what he really said on that occasion:
In 1969, Neil Armstrong made history by becoming the first man to walk on the moon, uttering the immortal phrase, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Or did he? Previously suppressed footage discovered by blogjam shows that Armstrong's reaction was a great deal more uninhibited than history suggests, and that a hasty editing job was needed to prepare the astronaut's moment of glory for broadcast.
First of all, the Founding Fathers loathed a democracy, calling it a tyranny of the majority. The United States is not a democracy. The United States is a constitutional Republic based on private party and individual rights. In the 1860s we passed the 13th amendment, which presumably eliminated slavery and it took well over 100 years to erase the racial hatred between the whites and the blacks. How does the American government think that they can go into another country and
override thousands of years of culture? It is not our job to export anything except products and services.
Security is an important aspect of a good life, but if you live in a society where a government potentate can nullify your citizenship and completely strip you of your rights just because he doesn't like your looks, with no real accountability for his actions, then you are not secure at all.
Self-defense is as basic a bodily function as eating and defecating, and cannot truly be delegated -- unless you want to live life as an effective cripple, or as someone else's property.
Scott Bieser
Personally, while I like [L.] Neil [Smith]'s idea in Hope of a "Bill of Rights Party", I think a better idea would be a "Mind your own damned business party":
Don't like guns? Don't own one, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like homosexuals? Don't associate with them, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like pagans? Don't associate with them, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like nuclear power? Don't use it, and mind your own damned business!
Don't like hunting? Don't hunt, and mind your own damned business!
See how easy it is? All the individual has to do is live and let live, follow the basic precepts of ALL major religions, as far as love, tolerance and respect, and mind their own damned business!
Ron Beatty
There is, however, one advantage to government: it keeps society's worst criminals out in the open where we know where they are and what they're doing. That they manage to fool some people into thinking they're saints instead of devils is simply a learning experience for those fools.
Bill St. Clair
I'm amazed at the number of Brazilians coming on line in forums I frequent who think that Portuguese is the lingua franca of the Internet.
One of the then new private co-location facilities I had in mind when I mentioned them yesterday was PAIX in Palo Alto, California. This was one of the .com boom beautiful creations. By Cromm, what a facility! I've never seen expensive track lighting in a raised-floor facility before, or since. The Cisco campus in San Jose, or @Home in Redwood City, those were beautiful and fun because people worked there. Beauty in a co-location facility is a pointless expense better spent on infrastructure, in my not so humble opinion, but I may be the only person who cares. Isn't beauty for its own sake, even if no one sees it, important too?
A well designed network isn't fancy, it doesn't embody the latest and greatest. That's for marketing droids. A beautiful network is embodied in its simplicity of design, in as minimal a number of different protocols as possible, in its invisibility. Much like traditional Japanese architecture, I think. Like air, it should just be there as needed. If the users know it's there, it's because it has affected them in some way they didn't expect, and that is bad.
Curt Howland
Has anyone else here noticed just how remarkably easy it is to destroy cat toys?
My friend Anton complains about the lack of comments on his blog:
In two months and a bit since opening comments, this blog received just eight, of which half were mere applause; and Blogger makes handling comments a bit of a nuisance. So I've turned commenting back off; and incorporated the four substantive comments as addenda to the original posts, which is what I do anyway when someone bothers to write to me.
It's because Blogger makes handling comments a pain in the ass that most of us don't bother, Anton, and nobody I know will submit comments by a separate channel (email in another software client) for possible posting at your convenience later. That's not how users expect the mechanism of a blog to work. You can continue to bitch about what other people will or won't do, complaining publicly about it, or you can take the actions necessary to actually induce people to leave comments: set yourself up using a genuine blogging system.
Walking through the city in a skirt so short that it’s possible to see what you’ve had for breakfast may be asking for a couple of raised eyebrows, but certainly doesn’t sanction assault or rape. If another human decides to harm you in some way, it was still an independent decision, irrespective of the triggering events.
Another I’ve heard is that women choose to wear the hijab in order to prevent objectification in a sexist world. This implies to me that the male form is the norm - the standard to which women must aspire - and the only way to do that is to completely hide any physical differentiation with the aid of several yards of material. I completely reject the idea that one gender should hide its attributes from another in the attempt to receive equal rights.
Reed's Sporting Goods in San Jose, California is having its 46th Annual Firearms, Ammo, and Reloading Sale, which started yesterday and runs through this Sunday, 18 July 2004. They generally have excellent deals on a very healthy selection (for California) of goods. Every year, too, Winchester shows up with at least a semi-tractor load of their high-quality ammunition. I'm going to try to make it today or tomorrow. Any of my local friends are welcome to join me.
First, we see that "public goods" are rare things. There's a great collection of essays by economists called "The Theory of Market Failure" edited by Tyler Cowan, which includes descriptions of the way private organizations historically built lighthouses, and the market for honeybee pollination (lighthouses and pollination are both classic examples of public goods in econ texts which are in the real world not public goods.)
Second, even if we are confronted with a public good, given the general incompetence of a non-market signaled monopoly organization with an unchecked budget at accomplishing anything, why would we imagine the organization would be able to figure out the "true" demand for the public good and supply it at the economically efficient level? Also, why do we imagine that the extraction of funds from all sorts of weird tax sources in any way properly reflects the "true" consumption of the good by the populace? "Solving" the public goods problem with government is like searching for your car keys under a street light 500m away from where you dropped them because the light is better there. Sure, it makes you feel as though you are doing something, but does it actually get you any nearer to your goal?
Perry Metzger
Duncan Frissell just today posted a jaw-dropping bit of what he claims is history, the 1953 testing of an atomic cannon, "Shot Grable 10" at Frenchman's Flat, Nevada:
When I was looking for a nuclear weapons photo for a previous post, I immediately thought of the only live firing of an atomic cannon (in the US, that is). So I hunted up the famous photo of Shot Grable 10 (isn't the Net convenient?) and found that most of the images were poor scans. Finally I "borrowed" a good one and thought I'd actually post so you don't have to follow a link to see it. This is an actual photo of an actual atomic cannon firing an actual atomic shell. No editing or fakery involved.
Whoa. There's more here and also here.
Jackie D at Samizdata reprints a recent article by Hollywood screenwriter Robert J. Avrech, "Jews and Guns":
Ariel [Avrech's recently deceased son] was always amazed at how many Jews - Shomer Shabbos Jews - aligned themselves with the advocates of gun control, in reality a movement to banish the private ownership of guns by lawful citizens. During the Los Angeles riots of 1992, Karen and I, Ariel and Leda were inside a film theatre. Abruptly, an angry mob congregated outside; soon they were trying to break down the doors. Trapped inside, we were all terrified. I held Leda in my arms; she shivered like a frightened rabbit. Karen held Ariel's hand.
"Don't worry," I said with false confidence, "the police will be here soon."
But the police did not arrive that night, nor did they protect the city from arson and widespread looting. In fact, we watched in disbelief as news cameras captured images of police officers standing idly by while looters gleefully committed their crimes.
A few days later, I bought a gun.
I bought a gun because I realized that the day might come again when the people who were sworn to protect us would once again choose not to.
Courtesy of Perry Metzger today: "New Technique for Imaging May Improve Study of Proteins" and its related story direct from IBM, "IBM Scientists Make Breakthrough in Nanoscale Imaging."
IBM scientists have achieved a breakthrough in nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) by directly detecting the faint magnetic signal from a single electron buried inside a solid sample.
Anyone who thinks Objectivists are lacking in humor haven't met some guy named Steve. Heck, I just noticed that an acquaintance of mine (and friend of my friend Alan Weiss), Amanda Phillips, is featured on this page, "Hot Objectivist on Objectivist Action" (or, for those of us steeped in Monty Python, "The Society for putting Objectivists on top of other Objectivists".)
Courtesy of a smith2004-discuss listmember, proof that resistance from privacy advocates can be effective: "Plan to collect flier data canceled."
A controversial government plan to collect personal information from airline passengers and rank travelers according to terrorist risk level is being dismantled because of concerns over privacy and effectiveness, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Wednesday.
Ridge said security leaders have all but scrapped plans for the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, known as CAPPS II. The program was never officially begun, even though the government has spent more than $100 million on its planning.
Once touted as a key tool for keeping U.S. skies safe from terrorists, the system has been under relentless criticism from privacy advocates and some members of Congress who called it an unwarranted intrusion into passengers' privacy.
Asked Wednesday whether the program could be considered dead, Ridge jokingly gestured as if he were driving a stake through its heart and said, "Yes."
If you've ever been exposed to this question, you'll consider it trivial, but I'm wondering which of my readers will get this first:
What is the only function in all of calculus that is its own derivative?
...the first highways were in fact privately funded, and, it can be argued that Xerox's networking protocols were better than TCP/IP at the time, but that's all another story. The general point is, sure the government does some good sometimes, just as even that crazy neighbor who no one suspected would go off and kill 50 peoples always seemed so quiet and did great things for the community playground project. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. I can
point at dozens of things the government has done reasonably well, but there is no feedback mechanism that rewards the bureaucrats who did the good things and punishes the idiots who run the DMV for doing bad things, so there is no likelihood those seeds will sprout into oaks.
Meanwhile, though, dumb companies that piss off customers go under all the time, and good ones make people rich. It isn't that the same sort of idiots who run government agencies can't get their hands on companies for a while -- it is that they can't keep running things that way for long before the well runs dry.
Perry Metzger
Bob Tipton has a less than stellar experience with a Savage Scout.
I was told of this by a poster to the smith2004-discuss list, an incredibly meticulous comparison of the performances of a number of common ammunition types: "Terminal Ballistics Comparison in Water Media", a compilation of many years of data generated by 84 year old Carmon Crapson (published by Stephen Ricciardelli.)
We find that the sexual instinct, when disappointed and unappeased, frequently seeks and finds a substitute in religion.
Baron Richard von Kraft-Ebing
A biophysicist talks physics to the biologists and biology to the physicists, but when he meets another biophysicist, they just discuss women.
Unknown
I just found a cool and useful site for software testers (which I include to mean all developers, who should write their own test cases): Opensourcetesting.org, "Open source tools for software testing professionals".
Texas congressman Ron Paul, in today's "Texas Straight Talk", reports on an incredibly intrusive expansion of the American census, the "American Community Survey":
You may not have heard of the American Community Survey, but you will. The national census, which historically is taken every ten years, has expanded to quench the federal bureaucracy’s ever-growing thirst to govern every aspect of American life. The new survey, unlike the traditional census, is taken each and every year at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. And it’s not brief. It contains 24 pages of intrusive questions concerning matters that simply are none of the government’s business, including your job, your income, your physical and emotional heath, your family status, your dwelling, and your intimate personal habits.
The questions are both ludicrous and insulting. The survey asks, for instance, how many bathrooms you have in your house, how many miles you drive to work, how many days you were sick last year, and whether you have trouble getting up stairs. It goes on and on, mixing inane questions with highly detailed inquiries about your financial affairs. One can only imagine the countless malevolent ways our federal bureaucrats could use this information. At the very least the survey will be used to dole out pork, which is reason enough to oppose it.
Keep in mind the survey is not voluntary, nor is the Census Bureau asking politely. Americans are legally obligated to answer, and can be fined up to $1,000 per question if they refuse!
Thanks to my London friend Monica White for alerting me to the Quent Cordair Fine Art gallery in Burlingame, California, a haven for (apparently very good) representionalist art, which is billed as "Contemporary Romantic Realism." I suspect very much that Quent Cordair was heavily influenced by Ayn Rand's "Romantic Manifesto":
Romantic Realism, the movement which renews the high esthetic standards and techniques of pre-20th century ateliers, brings a rebirth of comprehensibility, beauty, romanticism and stylization to contemporary subject matter. The gallery's collection emphasizes themes which celebrate the moments of happiness, joy and success possible to Man on earth.
Well, isn't this this grand: national concealed carry for cops has become a reality, but the rest of us have to go state-by-state for our "permits" to exercise our fundamental civil right.
A big thanks to James and Steph for their gift of the Springer title Name Reactions by Jie Jack Li, a compact atlas of 331 reactions in organic chemistry, from "Abnormal Claisen rearrangement" to "Zenin benzine rearrangement." This should be truly useful from the fall term onwards; thanks guys!
This is very much like the arguments I've been having with those who believe only government is capable of "real" science, of "pure" research. Yes, indeed it did take 43 years for private efforts to repeat the sub-orbital flight of [Alan] Shepherd.
But Rutan['s ship] returned to earth with everything he left with except his fuel, a feat that Government has never achieved.
Curt Howland
Now, I am no climate scientist, but I harbor a suspicion that maybe, just maybe, one factor impacting on the Earth's climate just might be - now, I'm just throwing this out - the sun. I find discussion of the sun's impact on global weather to be oddly absent from the reams of paper speculating on how minute variations in various gases here on earth may affect climate, rather like speculating on how adjusting the air pressure in your tires a few ounces might affect fuel efficiency without ever considering the, well, fuel you are putting in the tank.
