June 2006 Archives

Tonight is The Night of the Long Blog for me, and I'm catching up on a lot of work I'd been meaning to do, such as publishing my friend Mark Quon's (lower right in photo below) review of a course he attended in January. - Russell

Tactical Response's High Risk Civilian Contractor Course (Shooting Package) 16-20 Jan. 2006, a review by Mark Quon

I had first became aware of Tactical Response back in April of last year when TR's head instructor/founder
James Yeager had posted a thread at Warrior Talk advertising the release of his new High Risk Civilian Contractor DVD.

As someone who is interested in the possibility of getting into this line of work I sent off for a copy ASAP.  Since Yeager (who's a highly regarded tactical firearms trainer as well as a LEO  with over a decade of experience -often in a SRT capacity) had just returned from a contractor gig in Iraq's combat zones prior to filming this DVD I figured it would have lots of current and up to date information for someone who is completely new to this stuff.

Ironically, a week later - before the DVD had arrived - while attending Gabe Suarez's Close Range Gunfighting 2 class in L.A., I ended up meeting Yancey Harrington who as luck would have it, turned out to be an instructor for Tactical Response. By the end of that course, we had become fast friends and were keeping in touch on a more or less regular basis.

Fast forward to December while in the midst of making plans with Yancey to buddy up for a Two Man Team Tactics Course, he mentions to my surprise that their HRCC was going to be held in SoCal. Yancey had attended this course back in late June and had nothing but unqualified praise for it and had even written a comprehensive review of it on quite a few message boards. However, since to date all of the HRCC had been held in Camden (TN) I had resigned myself to the fact that it would probably be awhile before I would ever be able to take this (or any other) TR course since the distances involved made it financially and logistically problematic for me to attend.

After getting off the phone with Yancey I immediately emailed Yeager and a down payment later I was all set for Tactical Response's first HRCC here on the West Coast.

I like this one:

More, from our recent weekend sailing, in the shipping lanes outside the Golden Gate Bridge:

This quarter's physics lab is my favorite, covering topics in classical electrodynamics. Here's a characteristic curve for the charge/discharge of a capacitor:

Seen on an office window in a walk through San Francisco, Dr. Baldwin Louie's "dental warrior" mascot:

...yesterday at Vertical Challenge 2006 at San Carlos Airport, California, a car hoisted down the length of a runway, then dropped it:

I'm very happy I had my Olympus E-1 kit in the trunk of my car, since my friend and I stumbled on this airshow quite by accident, seeing all the helicopter activity from the highway whilst driving north intending to watch the jumbos landing at SFO, from the shoreline at Burlingame.

Scott Beiser and L. Neil Smith's Roswell, Texas is now online, serialized in webcomic fashion. I believe that my dear, recently deceased friend Chris Tame has a cameo somewhere in the comic's future.

Taken a few minutes ago, on Castro Street in downtown Mountain View, California:

The person in the shot - whom I don't know - ran up to the vehicle when I was composing this shot, and jumped into frame without a care. She is of The Billion Monkey Legion of people with digicams caught by other Monkeys with digicams. One Of Us. The vehicle in the shot is a T-Rex 3-wheel superbike.

L. Neil Smith finally does a real blog, "L. Neil Smith at Random", with comments enabled. I've long thought that Neil's writing would fit the format, and now I'm sure of it.

One of the pleasures of having a Netflix subsription is being able to add oddball titles to my queue, click-and-forget, and receive it later as a "surprise." One such title is a short wine documentary, "John Cleese's Wine for the Confused":

Wine snobs, beware: Monty Python's witty John Cleese aims to educate the masses with this enlightening, snoot-free wine guide. Cleese guides wine novices through the basics -- finding wines you like, getting the best value, and serving and storing wine at home. His vintner's tour includes lessons in wine vocabulary and identifying subtle flavors. Not a fan of snobbery in the least, Cleese also reveals how to cork up condescending sommeliers.

Cleese has a house on the Central California coast, and decided - on a shoestring budget, which he freely admits on camera - to visit a few of the local wineries, surveying products of the handful of "great grapes" (e.g. Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir). I found the tips about finding bargains in a wine seller's shop particularly useful.

Unlike a commentator in the IMDB entry, I'm not surprised Cleese would do such a documentary: in the early 90's, working for a company in London, I found the tedium of mandatory training videos greatly lessened with Cleese as presenter. He has an impressive resume of this type of stuff.

OK, made-up word time: "casinarcology", from "casino" and "arcology". If you've been to Las Vegas, you've seen them, mostly Steve Wynn's properties, e.g. The Bellagio, The Venetian, etc. And unlike Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti (which I've visited), a never-to-be-finished boondoggle staffed by grad students suckered into paying for the experience of "finishing" his vision, a casinarcology works.

As far as I know, I made this word up recently. It's a bit cumbersome, but it's mine.

The same U.S. Federal Government that expects us to "trust" them with personal data extracted by threat of prosecution - the "American Community Survey" - recently announced the theft of sensitive personal data of 26.5 million of us former military who've been discharged since 1976. My friend Dave alerted me to the story a few weeks ago, and yesterday I received a letter from the Department of Veteran Affairs cautioning me to carefully scrutinize activity on bank accounts and credit cards. Way to go, FedGov... you unaccountable fuckups.

Dear Veteran: The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has recently learned that an employee took home electronic data from the VA, which he was not authorized to do and was in violation of established policies. The employee’s home was burglarized and this data was stolen. The data contained identifying information including names, social security numbers, and dates of birth for up to 26.5 million veterans and some spouses, as well as some disability ratings. As a result of this incident, information identifiable with you was potentially exposed to others. It is important to note that the affected data did not include any of VA’s electronic health records or any financial information.

I'd suggest to you that instead of taking the ACS head on, that we ought to insist on a "mandatory" statement on the ACS form and in all conversations started by Census workers such as,

"Although the ACS is 'mandatory':

1.) This has never been tested in any court. And we aren't interested in having it tested before any court because we very well might lose.

2.) The Census Bureau has no enforcement powers and the Department of Justice has its hands full doing lots of other more important things. They'd probably laugh in our faces if we referred cases to them asking them to try and collect $100 fines.

3.) No one in the history of the US has ever been fined or prosecuted for refusing to complete the Census. So the probability of your being eaten by a man eating tiger that escapes from the zoo is greater than your being fined for not competing this survey."

suinmd

The software company where I work has a number of free restaurants on campus. Today, I had barracuda! Nothing spectacular - it was good enough - but that's a checklist item on my To Do list that I hadn't considered. Added and checked off, all in one operation!

I'm not used to sitting back seat in a small plane. Tonight I did sit backseat, during someone else's instrument training (missed approaches, VOR/RNAV/GPS approaches, etc.) and found I learned an incredible amount about instrument flying that is sometimes hard to absorb when you are in the hot seat (as I usually am).

I took the opportunity in the back seat to watch the plane's altimeter over the PIC's shoulder as I correllated it with altitude readings I was taking with the SU-1 barometer modification on my Yaesu VX-5R handheld HT. At 4000 and 5000 feet altitudes in the San Francisco Bay area, over 2 hours of flying with reported surface barometric pressures of between 29.94 and 29.98 inches of mercury, without calibration, I was getting agreement ranging from 0 to 200 feet. It'll be interesting to see how much better the agreement is after I RTFM and do a pre-flight calibration.

Two nights ago, in physics lab, we replicated a version of the famous "e over m" experiment of J.J. Thompson, to experimentally determine the ratio of the charge of an electron to its mass, using a Helmholtz coil apparatus:

I took this grainy shot in relative dark with my Treo 650 cellphone, since the flash on my Sony would have been disruptive. This is a transfixing sight: a beam of electrons fluorescing in a rarified Helium tube, produced by a thermionic emission apparatus, made circular by a nearly uniform B-field.

I am fortunate to have a lab partner - an earnest young Japanese guy - who doesn't mind that we deliberately stick around to the bitter end doing these experiments, while many of our classmates try to finish early and leave. These experiments are things of grace and beauty, and should be savored and appreciated. Oh, and it helps that we generally get very good agreement with theory in our experiments by doing so: we were within 3.12% of the theoretical electron charge to mass ratio. On nights like this, I walk home from lab feeling more content than I can describe.

K. Eric Drexler informs me that his book "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology" has a new home on his website (migrated from its previous hosting at the Foresight Institute).

Check out the attribution on the entry page... I did the work 10 years ago, but I deeply appreciate the continuing credit.

There is no such thing as a nature/nurture debate. It’s something that caught on in the media because it rhymes. You can’t have one without the other. A gene can only work in an environment that triggers it to turn on. An environment can only express its influence through an animal by turning genes on and off. You can’t impose a culture on a rock. You can only impose culture on an animal designed by genes to learn from culture.

Joe Quirk

There's nothing like hauling your ass out of bed, making the trip to the airport or marina, and just getting out:

This was a few miles out on the ocean side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Bright sun, great swells. I slept very, very well last night.

I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way.

John Paul Jones