. . . not that long ago, all the investment articles in the business section of the newspaper, saying that we'd overbuilt our telecommunications infrastructure, and that there was not enough demand to pay for all the bandwidth that was becoming available? That coin has now flipped:
The Internet needs a massive investment to keep up with the demands of YouTube fans, billions of e-mails and wireless access, a university study states.
If the network that carries Internet traffic were a highway, it would be as if every car owner, "rushed out and traded in their cars for massive 20-wheel trucks," stated the report from University of California-San Diego Professor Michael Kleeman, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication.
In the report, titled "Point of Disconnect," Kleeman writes that there needs to be a massive expansion of network capacity in the United States, and even though network operators are making those investments, it still may not be enough to keep up with demand.
Of course, everyone who followed the advice to dump telecommunications stocks took a bath on the transaction, but that's one of the risks of any kind of investing: if you don't know what you're investing in, you'll end up lining the pockets of those who do know.
Chris Taylor discusses why the newest military transport aircraft in the Canadian Forces is a good thing to have:
Each Herc carries a crew of five — 2 pilots, 1 navigator, 1 flight engineer, and 1 loadmaster. That's fifteen people to move these pallets, or a week of duty days for a single aircrew. The Herc would make each 1,568nm trip in 6 hours — that's 12 hours including the return trip. So for a single CC-130H aircraft to move these 13 pallets, it would require three 12-hour trips, or three aircraft making a single 12-hour return flight. Not including ground handling, offload and refueling times.
In contrast, a single CC-177 can fly all 13 pallets to Jamaica in 3 hours, 49 minutes, using a single aircrew of three (2 pilots, 1 loadmaster). And it can carry sufficient fuel for the entire journey. Tack on the return trip and you have the entire mission completed in just under 8 hours, not including ground handling and offload times.
Remind me why the CC-177 isn't the best choice in this scenario?
I do find the formal military designation to be a bit odd: CC-177, rather than the American designation C-17. Even the defence minister calls it a C-17 in public. It looks like somebody stuttered while typing up the original name.
Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."
The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.
These changing viewpoints represent the advances in climate science over the past decade. While today we are even more certain the earth is warming, we are less certain about the root causes. More importantly, research has shown us that — whatever the cause may be — the amount of warming is unlikely to cause any great calamity for mankind or the planet itself.
Michael Asher, "Survey: Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory", Daily Tech, 2007-08-29
An amusing little site, Who Would the World Elect? has Barack Obama leading among Canadian "voters" on the Democratic side, and (of course) Ron Paul leading on the Republican side:
Feel free to cast your vote . . . it's only marginally less effective than a real one. It certainly looks like every active Libertarian in Canada already has voted.
Daniel Rothschild continues from yesterday's article on the enduring myths of Hurricane Katrina:
Rather than deal with the nuances affecting communities in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, the media like to cover New Orleans as if it is synonymous with the entire area affected by Hurricane Katrina. This is similar to the way the media often treats "Africa" as if it were one extremely large, monolithic country.
Many well-researched stories by dedicated reporters have come out of New Orleans in the past two years. But what's largely missing is any coverage of the Louisianan parishes near New Orleans, or of the many counties in Mississippi also hit by Katrina. In the aftermath of Katrina, the Red Cross provided assistance to some 4 million people, although only 450,000 people lived in New Orleans. President Bush's disaster declaration covered 90,000 square miles. New Orleans encompasses only 350 square miles, almost half of it water. Many parts of New Orleans did not flood, but over 99 percent of buildings in neighboring St. Bernard Parish did.
Why, then, does New Orleans receive the majority of the media coverage? Reporters disproportionately focus on New Orleans because it's more interesting, it fits more preconceived narratives, and it is, paradoxically, both a simpler and more complex story than other areas damaged by Katrina.
I forgot to link to the latest Ontario Wine Review yesterday. This issue covers a visit to Pillitteri Estate Winery, Featherstone, and the FEWesta Tomato event at Fielding.
The theme from the original Star Trek meets the theme from The Simpsons.
Jon, my virtual landlord, is on a business trip to Israel. I just got the following email from him:
Is 12:30 am here and there is something going on in the bay. There have been flares over the bay for the last 30 minutes or so; I can hear helicopters. There are loud bangs and clanging noises from the north east, but I've been hearing noises like that all week from the port — that could be a ship being loaded or unloaded. There's also a low rumbling that sounds a little odd — could be distant aircraft or something.
There does not seem to be anything happening in the town itself. The streets look normal.
Not sure if I should be freaked out or not.
Update: It's a maritime accident, not a terrorist attack: details here.
Over at Slashdot, the denizens are having lots of fun mashing the piñata:
HMV Canada Cuts Music CD Prices
umStefa notes a CBC story reporting that the largest music retailer in Canada, HMV, has slashed prices on CDs and is attributing the move to demand by customers for lower prices. The back catalog of popular artists will see price cuts of up to 33%; the cuts average 20% across the board. The Canadian version of the RIAA is spinning the news as being a direct result of music piracy.
The slashdotters have been having lots of fun whacking away at the embedded notions:
PunkOfLinux: Because, as we all know, customers who want CD's at a decent price are OBVIOUSLY pirates...
Otter Escaping North: You know - I'm living in Canada, never used p2p or anything like that to download music...don't consider myself a pirate at all. Happy to pay for the materials I want. Upon hearing HMV is slashing prices - I rejoice and head to the website.
The White Album is still forty-five freakin' dollars!
Piracy causes lower prices then, does it? I guess I just haven't been doing my part.Gr33nNight: So in other words, if people keep pirating, then CDs will be cheaper. Sounds like a win-win to me.
teh loon: Spinning the news as software piracy won't help their agenda - I'm quite sure no consumer is going to feel sympathy for the RIAA's loss of potential profits. If anything, it'll encourage piracy - CDs are already overpriced as it is.
Steve Chapman listens to the politicians bloviate and asks the hard questions:
New Orleans, like Valmeyer, had long been a natural disaster waiting to happen. Most of the city lies below sea level, surrounded by water on three sides, and it's sinking. On top of that, it's steadily grown more exposed to hurricanes, thanks to the loss of coastal wetlands that once served as a buffer. It's a bathtub waiting to be filled.
As one scientist said after Katrina, "A city should never have been built there in the first place." Now that we have a chance to correct the mistake, why repeat it?
Theoretically, it's possible to keep New Orleans dry. All you have to do is surround it with levees designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane. That's what Hillary Clinton urges.
[. . .]
The cost of the levee system envisioned by Sen. Clinton is tabbed at $40 billion. Restoring other infrastructure would increase the cost. The question is whether that's the best use of our resources. For $40 billion, you could give more than $61,000 to every Louisianan displaced by Katrina — nearly a quarter of a million dollars for a family of four.
I have to say that this makes more sense than trying to use the Dutch model and hold back the seas: but I don't live there . . . it's easy for me to take an Olympian viewpoint. I've visited New Orleans, and I was horrified by the damage and loss after the hurricane hit, but I don't have the same stake in the question as those who live there, and those who'll actually foot the bill for reconstruction or relocation
Update: Daniel Rothschild talks about the myths of Katrina:
Myth Number One: The main impediment to rebuilding the Gulf Coast is a lack of federal money.
Talk with people on the Gulf Coast area and you'll soon learn the primary problem they face is not a lack of funding, but the mass confusion created by federal, state, and local governments about the rules of the game when it comes to rebuilding. Confusing and contradictory regulations, showboating by politicians, and stunningly complex bureaucracy have only exacerbated the problems of people who've already been through hell and have kept people from making the decisions they need to make to get on with their lives. This creates what economist Emily Chamlee-Wright calls "signal noise" — the persistent uncertainty created by uncoordinated government at every step of the recovery process.
All levels of government deserve blame for this. On the federal level, Congress and the US Army Corps of Engineers have failed to articulate a clear, credible plan for what types of flood protections will be built and when they'll be completed. And of course, based on the Corps' recent track record, no one could fault Gulf Coast residents for questioning whether those protections will perform as advertised once (and if) they are completed.
Regular commenter "Da Wife" sent me a link to one of the scariest YouTube videos you'll ever see (by way of Wil Wheaton):
I personally believe . . . that . . . we should grieve for the U.S. Americans . . . that our education like such as . . . this poor victim.
Wil wrote:
I initially thought this girl was too stupid to breathe, but then I felt sorry for her, humiliating herself on national television and the Internets like this . . . then I found out that, even though she is as clearly a dumb as a box of and such as, she finished third in the contest. Third! That fourth place contestant must know how Al Gore felt in 2000.
They say you can install Linux on just about any hardware out there. Well, this is certainly out there:
Let's face it: any script kiddie with a pair of pliers can put Red Hat on a Compaq, his mom's toaster, or even the family dog. But nothing earns you geek points like installing Linux on a dead badger. So if you really want to earn your wizard hat, just read the following instructions, and soon your friends will think you're slick as caffeinated soap.
H/T to Scott Raun.
Nick Packwood waxes wroth about the idiocies on display during a recent BBC documentary on the reconstruction of Dubrovnik:
It seems to me there is more going on here than a mere academic propensity to find something to moan about no matter the cost***; even worse than rolling into town and imposing on local hospitality only to make a cretinous dismissal of years of effort in restoration. No, it is that Billings seems to think there is an authentic Dubrovnik to be replaced, a Dubrovnik simultaneously untouched by war and yet somehow ringed by fortress walls subject to hundreds of years of wind and rain. He is English and should know better. Oxford colleges plants small forests to replace roof timbers centuries in advance; two-hundred years sounds like a perfectly reasonable time-frame for some tiles to settle in. Or are we meant to believe some gruesome Disney-esque mock-aging should have been carried out instead?
The logic underlying Billings frankly creepy yearning for an unchanging world strikes me to be the same as that underlying the emotive anti-logic behind claims to anthropogenic global warming.**** Many people seem to believe there is something called Nature which, but for human intervention, would remain pure and unsullied for all time. Yet it should be obvious to any mind that has moved beyond Bronze Age metaphor that we live in a world whose only constant is constant change*****. It is sad that things pass away - glaciers, forests, whole species - but without them nothing new would come into being. This is as true for the ephemeral works of humanity as it is for continents or stars or galactic superclusters. It must have been a nightmare to live in Dubrovnik under siege and an almost hallucinatory strangeness its medieval walls should once again shelter its people in a time of modern mortars, artillery and 24-hour cable news. It is rubbing salt into the wound to be lectured on the subject by a proponent of a vampiric ideology of stasis.
Last night capped off a weekend of sporting disappointments. This was the final regular-season game for the Pirates, a rescheduled game that can't be forgotten fast enough. Whitby Legion came loaded for bear, while the Pirates were barely able to field a team: only eight team members showed up, plus two call-up players who volunteered to join us (Joseph M. and Tyler R.).
The game started off with both teams managing to stage attacks, but Legion's advantage in numbers would soon start to tell. Legion's coach didn't play a full side, matching the Pirates' ten on the field, but substitution was the deciding factor as the game wore on. By half-time, the Pirates were looking ragged, having had several scoring chances but being unable to get the ball anywhere near the net. Whitby Legion didn't have the same problem: sitting atop a 4-0 lead.
Victor volunteered to go in net for the second half, allowing Nick M. to rove at centre-midfield. The Pirates again managed several deep attacks, but only one of them found the back of the net, while Legion kept up the pressure at the other end of the field. The game ended with a 7-1 score, Anthony C. being the lone scorer for the Pirates.
And I almost missed it, too . . . my notional 100,000th visitor must have swung by around 8:00 this morning.
Bruce Schneier is the one who coined the brilliantly apt description of ludicrously ineffective, but highly visible security precautions as "Security Theatre". He was recently, albeit probably inadvertently, honoured for that when the Transportation Security Administration head, Kip Hawley, used the term to explain why it's no longer forbidden to take cigarette lighters on board aircraft:
"There have been exactly two things since 9/11 that have made air travel safer," Schneier said recently over spring rolls at a favorite Vietnamese restaurant on Nicollet Avenue. "Reinforcing the cockpit door and telling people to fight back in the event of an attack." After a brief pause, half-devoured roll in hand, he reconsidered. "Well, maybe three," he said. "I'm on the fence about sky marshals."
One thing Schneier isn't on the fence about is the billions of dollars that the TSA has spent making air travelers pour out their water, take off their shoes, and until recently, throw out their cigarette lighters. All of this, Schneier argues, might make people feel safer, but it does little to actually improve security.
H/T to Jesse Walker.
Update: More on the uses and misuses of security theatre from Wired.
The notion that our lives lack meaning unless the collective unites us all in service of a higher calling and that mass murder can provide that happy occasion is as old and atavistic as the first cave painting. It's also as natural, human, and evil as all the faults to which flesh is heir.
Gene Healy, "The Force That Gives Us Meaning", Punditry by the Pound, 2007-08-17
In part two of the saga of transferring my son's layout to Burlington, I discover that gremlins are real . . .
To recap (or you can read the original post): I took the original 4'x6' section of Victor's HO scale model train layout down to Burlington to install in my sister's basement. Part one went very well, the layout (aside from some scenery) arrived and co-operated when set up in the new space. Nephew's state: very happy. Some time passed, during which I was going to check that the second section, a 2'x4' module containing the turntable, was still operable.
That was delayed an extra couple of weeks, as I couldn't find my multimeter, and there clearly was an electrical issue with the section: no power appeared at track level when applied to the under-table wiring. This is where it got complicated: my nephew had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the turntable section and was very disappointed when it failed to show up on schedule. And I couldn't even diagnose what the problem was without having a meter to find out where the power was going (I had a brief urge to tell him that there was now a puddle of electrons on the floor underneath the layout, but common sense prevailed).
My meter has gone into hiding, and has not yet turned up, so I borrowed a meter from Jon (my virtual landlord, who, by happenstance, had just bought a new one . . . because his original multimeter had gone into hiding a few weeks earlier). Using Jon's new meter, I discovered the following:
The turntable is one of the Atlas 9" models, and the switches controlling power to the stub tracks are all Atlas slide switches. In spite of the abuse they'd received during multiple moves, the turntable still works (manual, not powered), and the slide switches all still work fine. What doesn't add up is that tracks 2, 4, and 6 (counting clockwise) don't run. That is, the multimeter reads the same voltage on tracks 1 through 6, but a locomotive is only able to actually move if it's sitting on the turntable itself or on tracks 1, 3, or 5. There are no breaks in either the wiring or the actual physical rail to account for this. It's the same locomotive (a Kato NW2 — Kato has a very good reputation for product quality), yet it runs happily on 8 volts DC on one track, but refuses to acknowledge the same voltage on the adjacent track.
Gremlins are the only possible explanation.
Still, when my sister's family arrives later today, I'll at least be able to give my nephew a partially working turntable section, which is better than nothing. :-/
Update, two hours later: Apparently, Gremlins have nationality. . .
In first part of this post, I mentioned my frustrations with trying to troubleshoot the wiring. What I forgot to mention, because I'd completely forgotten about it, was that not all the track was Atlas. Some of the track was from one or another of my son's various train sets . . . no brass, but some steel and some nickel silver. It's all been painted and given the beginnings of weathering (but no ballast), so it wasn't immediately obvious which sections were Atlas code 100 (made with nickel silver) and which were Brand X code 96.733333 (made from the bones of imprisoned dissidents).
When I belatedly recalled that, it was a simple matter to swap out the (Japanese-made) Kato locomotive for a (Chinese-made) Bachmann. The original run of the Spectrum GE 44 ton diesel, to be precise. It had no problem running on any of the track . . . in other words the problem wasn't the track or the wiring: it was the frickin' locomotive. Kato NW2's don't condescend to run on mere "trainset quality" track. It has to be brand name or better before the Kato will stop sulking and actually run.
So, in addition to the turntable module, my nephew is also getting an old, noisy, but still serviceable GN 44-tonner. At least I know _that_ will run on the "new" section.
James McWilliams has an epiphany in the New York Times:
As concerned consumers and environmentalists, we must be prepared to seriously entertain these questions. We must also be prepared to accept that buying local is not necessarily beneficial for the environment. As much as this claim violates one of our most sacred assumptions, life cycle assessments offer far more valuable measurements to gauge the environmental impact of eating. While there will always be good reasons to encourage the growth of sustainable local food systems, we must also allow them to develop in tandem with what could be their equally sustainable global counterparts. We must accept the fact, in short, that distance is not the enemy of awareness.
The most eye-opening figures were earlier in the article:
It all depends on how you wield the carbon calculator. Instead of measuring a product’s carbon footprint through food miles alone, the Lincoln University scientists expanded their equations to include other energy-consuming aspects of production — what economists call "factor inputs and externalities" — like water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.
Incorporating these measurements into their assessments, scientists reached surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.
In other words, it not only makes economic sense, but it also makes environmental sense to sometimes ship something from the other side of the world rather than obtain it locally.
H/T to Daimnation.
For those who feel that society hasn't changed . . . consider how recently a headline like this would have been unimaginable:
Unions, especially industrial unions, have always been very socially conservative on issues like this. That one of the more, ah, troglodytic unions has made such a change in their rules is really significant.
Radley Balko has a linkulacious post up at Hit and Run, detailing just a few of the many ways that politicians not only think they're better than their constituents . . . they make it legal:
So I guess once you're elected to Congress, you're immune from drunk driving laws; you can stash the evidence that you've committed a crime in your office, because investigators aren't allowed to search it; if you kill someone because you've got a lead foot and blew a stop sign, the taxpayers will cover your financial liability; and, we learn today, you can commit whatever Internet-related crimes you please, because the police aren't allowed to search your computer.
Meanwhile, the same Congress that has immunized itself from much of the law is also responsible for the ever-expanding federal criminal code, which we can thank for our shamefully enormous and still-soaring prison population, which is by far and away the largest in the world.
Links galore in the quoted section . . . go follow 'em and get depressed. Or, better, get mad.
The vineyards of Germany are terrorized by Nazi Raccoons. Really. Introduced by Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering in 1934 to enrich Germany's fauna, raccoons have no natural predators. Recently, a delinquent gang of them descended on the Brandenburg region, wiping out the entire grape harvest in days.
France suffers wild boars, but don't think they take it lying down. Always a country of action, they have decided to get the boars out of the vineyards by . . . feeding them in the vineyards. Truckloads of corn. If you think they'd understand that basic economic tenet: what you penalize you get less of and what you reward you get more of, then you haven't seen their welfare system.
Jennifer "Chotzi" Rosen, "Animal Delinquents: There's more to wine fauna than cuddly kangaroos", The Cork Jester, 2007-08-24 (link goes to her main website . . . this article will be posted there later)
This is very amusing . . . an auction for a LOT OF POKEMON CARDS THAT MY KIDS TRIED TO SNEAK BY ME.
My thanks to Dick Margulis, who linked to the Impotence of Proofreading.
Adriana Lukas finds some interesting ideas illustrated in the recent HBO series, Rome:
Hierarchical systems and institutions take over people and hollow out anything that is individual to replace it with their own trinkets - position, status, power, money, influence, resources. People are defined by what position they hold, by the family they are born into, by people with greater power than them and finally, if they are lucky, by their decisions. Such systems with centralised or unchecked power attract people who wield it enthusiastically and ruthlessly. Using that power, in exchange for perpetuating the system, they shape others to its rules. Nasty things become possible in the name of the system . . . It’s one of the ways power corrupts.
Institutions and systems go through life cycles, often imploding by themselves or getting overthrown by new, more eager ones. If they survive it is by striking a precarious balance, by giving people just enough freedom to prevent rebellion. Judging from history, it doesn't seem that much is needed. Fortunately, there are always individuals who push for more autonomy and so the struggle continues.
Top down hierarchies are mechanisms for implementing centralised power. Their rules are a shorthand for the power structure and a substitute for knowledge of how things work, understanding of consequences of people's actions and impact of their decisions. How many times have you heard — well, if I let you do this, then everyone would want to do that and where would that lead? This is an admission of suppressed individuality. It is disguised as respect for others, when it fact it is merely 'respect' for the ways things are within the system.
Teller, the shorter half of Penn & Teller, is featured in a New York Times article (registration may be necessary):
Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren't really there.
"In real life if you see something done again and again, you study it and you gradually pick up a pattern," he said as he walked onstage holding a brass bucket in his left hand. "If you do that with a magician, it's sometimes a big mistake."
Pulling one coin after another from the air, he dropped them, thunk, thunk, thunk, into the bucket. Just as the audience was beginning to catch on — somehow he was concealing the coins between his fingers — he flashed his empty palm and, thunk, dropped another coin, and then grabbed another from a gentlemen's white hair. For the climax of the act, Teller deftly removed a spectator's glasses, tipped them over the bucket and, thunk, thunk, two more coins fell.
As he ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.
He left us with his definition of magic: "The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to."
Kim du Toit has a few management guidelines to share:
So I called in the advertising managers and the studio head, and gave them a little speech. From memory, it went like this:
"I don't know how your jobs work, and I'm not going to learn how. I'm not going to ask you for progress reports each day, and I'm never going to ask you 'How's it going?' — I expect you to keep me abreast of things, at times where it seems appropriate for you to do so, or only when you have a problem. Otherwise, I will assume you are all doing your job, and everything's running smoothly.
"Now, about problems: I'm not going to solve them for you, because once again, I don't know how your jobs work. So if you come to me with a problem, I'm going to chase you out of my office and tell you to find the solution. I expect you to come to me with a problem with two or three possible solutions, and you can't decide which one would be the best. (Obviously, if there's only one solution, you don't have to tell me anything.) If we discuss the solutions, and the 'best' solution still doesn't present itself, then I'll make the decision, because that's my job, my responsibility.
"If anyone from another department is giving you any trouble, and you can't resolve it, tell me and I'll take it up with their manager. If it's their manager who's giving you the problem, tell me and I'll try to straighten it out with him; or if I can't, then I'm going to go to my boss, and let him straighten it out after hearing my suggestions — because he too, is going to want options and not complaints.
"Don't send me memos, because I won't read them. Talk to me, and if you feel compelled to put the results of our discussion onto paper, go ahead, and put me on copy. Give the memo to my secretary and tell her to file it wherever.
"The mark of a successful manager is how long he could be dead at his desk before any of his staff notices it. I'm shooting for two weeks."
There were no questions.
[. . .]
None of this is designed to make me look like some kind of superhero manager. But it is intended to make people think about the proper way to manage people:
1. Give them responsibility to go with their accountability.
2. Force them to live up to your expectations of them. Trust them to do a good job.
3. If they make an honest mistake in an otherwise exemplary job, forget about it, and cover for them if the Corner Office starts causing trouble.
4. Don't sweat the little things. If someone needs a little extra time off to look after a sick child or have their hair done, let them go.
5. Eschew paperwork and bureaucracy (other than when mandated like for hourly workers and time cards). Show me a manager who demands constant progress reports from his staff, and I'll show you an insecure manager who doesn't trust them.
I'd have to say that, for the most part, that's the way I try to manage (I hate both giving and receiving status reports . . . just deal with the unexpected developments and deviations from the plan). I've never run an organization as big as Kim, but these guidelines can apply to any organization.
H/T to Jon, for sending me the URL.
This is aneurism-inducingly stupid. No, Arizonans, the candidates are not going to think about Arizona as much as they would have if you held your primary when baby Jesus wanted you to, three weeks later. By the first week of February the two parties' candidates will be recovering from the Florida primary on Jan. 29. They will have exactly one week to campaign in twenty states, most of which they've never really campaigned in because they were concentrating on the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. So the candidates will be in triage mode, giving up one state here or there (Hillary ceding Illinois to Obama, Romney ceding New Jersey to Rudy) and stumping in, probably, California, because no one will be able to continue on without winning there. The rest of the states will become irrelevant, handing their votes to the frontrunners... who might not look so strong after California, but by then it'll be too late.
And all of that assumes that someone talks Michigan out of its tantrum and gets that state not to hold a primary on Jan. 15 like Sen. Carl Levin wants to.
This whole process has been a joke, an Otis-the-Drunk-worthy bender of stupidity by the country's most craven political minds. We could put L. Paul Bremer in charge and still come out with a better system.
David Weigel, "Stop. Please. Just Stop.", Hit and Run, 2007-08-22
So much for getting anything useful done this weekend:
72 Hours of Early Access!
Immerse yourself in three whole days of exclusive action-packed early access to the entire Far Shiverpeaks region. North of the so-called civilized lands lies a region blanketed in snow and ice, rife with adventure. Home to the legendary Eye of the North and the fiercely independent Norn, this mountainous tract hosts untold challenges and riches.
Commenter Lickmuffin apparently bought something at Canadian Tire yesterday. The joy of the new purchase was tempered, though:
It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside to know that my purchase today fed a couple of Chinese soldiers for a month.
Megan McArdle (formerly "Jane Galt") talks about the oddity of heavily Democratic New York City electing a string of Republican mayors:
For most offices, like city council, the Democratic primaries decide the election. That means that there are a lot of extremely powerful interest groups with very powerful electoral machines invested in the primaries. And they are far to the left of both America, and most of New York, which is why City Council meetings tend to sound like the forlorn remnants of a Socialist Worker's Reading Group.
Of course, that last quip applies equally well to a lot of cities . . . Toronto, for example.
Spitzer's abrasive personality has usually been excused with a comparison to Rudy, or Ed Koch, or Nelson Rockefeller, or one of the other family of meglomaniacs who rise up through New York politics like rancid meat chunks up a defective garbage disposal.
David Weigel, "Phone Home, Eliot", Hit and Run, 2007-08-20
Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
Terry Pratchett
In yesterday's Bleat, James Lileks took a gentle shot at the kind of folks who always wax rhapsodic about "the good old days":
Went to a wedding Sunday afternoon here. It was once the home of a dry-goods retailer; he paid $16,000 for the house, which would the cost of the front door today. Apparently it’s made of "old growth oak," as one fellow informed me, and no doubt was hand-rubbed with a mixture of ambergris, veal tears and unicorn semen every day to maintain its finish.
Suddenly prolific commenter "Lickmuffin" went out to find the appropriate modern equivalent (Warning NSFW!):
Last night's game was (I hope) forgettable. We were already short-handed, with Ian S., Anthony C., Ben K., and Kory A. all unable to attend the game, and Brad H. serving the first of a two-game suspension for accumulated yellow cards. We were just barely able to field a minimum team at official kick-off time, but a few more players arrived as the referee was conducting the coin toss, so we started with 10 men available as the whistle blew. Cory R. arrived a few minutes after the game started, and I got him on at the first stoppage.
The first ten minutes went fairly well, as neither team was able to get into striking distance, with a lot of scrappy play near the centre of the field. After that, the advantage shifted steadily to Whitby Blue, who opened the scoring on 12 minutes with a short-range shot just inside the right post. Nick M. got a hand on it, but couldn't push it far enough to take it out of danger.
At the end of the first half, the Pirates faced a 4-0 score line. Nick moved out to centre-mid and captain Zaahir M. took his place in goal. The second half continued as the first half ended, with the Pirates unable to clear their lines and Whitby Blue pushing well up the field. At one point, the Whitby Blue defenders were only a few steps outside the Pirates 18-yard box!
Matt K. helped to rally the Pirates, getting on the end of a pass from call-up player Tyler R. and slamming it home. The score was 6-1, but the Pirates really did seem to wake up at that point, pushing up the field and making Whitby Blue defend frantically. The flurry ended with Kevin J. scoring to bring the Pirates briefly back within range, but after that it was all Whitby Blue.
Next week's game is a make-up for a rained-out game back in July, and after that it'll be the playoffs.
This was the headline on the Rogers news portal a couple of minutes ago:
And media types wonder why they don't get treated with seriousness . . . how unserious do you have to be to write that headline?
Of course the Van Doos will carry on: they're soldiers. That's what soldiers do. The loss of comrades will sadden them, but they'll continue to do the job . . . because that is what soldiers DO.
Frickin' idiot media. The article is here if you want to read it.
To begin with, you must understand clearly that all taxation is regressive. It's all about proportion. Just as, say, a nickel sales tax on hamburger bites deeper into the economic flesh of the poor than into the relative adipose of the rich, so smaller companies are always hit harder by taxes than big companies with a better-padded bottom line.
Moreover (and this is a very important key to understanding what happened and why) big companies can afford bigger, slicker legal and accounting departments to save the corporation tax money or get them out of tax trouble if necessary. If government decides to go after a big corporation, its officers are far likelier to get their backsides forcibly removed and handed to them in court. (Or said officers may just be offered lucrative salaries to leave government and join the corporation.) Simply from an institutional standpoint, then, it's easier and safer to go after Mom and Pop, who are likely to be stuck with their brother-in-law accountant and the lawyer who drew up their wills.
Possibly even more important, all regulation is regressive, too. It costs a small company a much greater fraction of its assets to comply with government's dictates — most of them unconstitutional — than it does a big corporation with its teeming hordes of office drones.
I saw a dramatic display once of a quarter's worth of paperwork that the government required of the 3M corporation. The cardboard boxes it filled formed a sort of meandering garden wall about hip high and fifty or sixty feet long. It was truly horrific, and fundamentally wrong.
But my point here is that 3M could afford the resources (about a third of their overhead, they estimated) to deal with this kind and degree of asininity, whereas similar requirements, loaded onto the already breaking backs of small or even middle-sized companies could easily crush or kill them. At about the same time (the late 1960s), it was noted that four out of five new businesses go belly-up within a year.
And who, we may now ask rhetorically, do we thank for that? The same "progressives" today who shake their little Marxoid fistlets at Wal-Mart and bemoan the passing of the neighborhood grocery store. The same wasters who polluted the economic environment with regulatory toxins until the smaller denizens of the market were unable to survive and the only organisms left were the dinosauroid giants they love to hate.
L. Neil Smith, "'Progressives' or 'Regressives'?", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-08-19
For laughs, I followed a link to The Economist's page of business etiquette tips for visitors to Toronto . . . and found them to be a pretty good guideline for getting along with the aloof and prickly Torontonian:
- Business cards are usually exchanged after meetings, rather than during introductions.
- Once the working week is over, Torontonians value their free time. Important meetings are not typically scheduled for late on Friday afternoons, and you should not try to set up meetings at weekends.
- In this multicultural city, with roughly 80 ethnic groups, language and cultural differences are the norm rather than the exception.
- Understatement and a low-key demeanour are looked upon with favour. Boasting about past achievements or hyping up a product should be avoided in Toronto.
- Unless your host indicates otherwise, stick to sparkling mineral water during a business lunch; midday meals here tend to be dry.
- Ice hockey is a local passion. Toronto's home team, the Maple Leafs, are simultaneously loved and loathed by locals, most of whom support the team despite its failure to win the Stanley Cup, the sport's top prize, since 1967.
If you're visiting Toronto on business, you could do much worse than to read the rest of the list. The final entry is particularly appropriate: "Many Canadians nurture both inferiority and superiority complexes about America. Tread carefully."
Update: Occasional commenter "Lickmuffin" has taken the time to reverse-engineer the original draft of the story in the comments. I do encourage you to read 'em . . .
To my amazement, I got to watch most of this game (pre-season TV coverage is very hit-and-miss). It was an odd game, although the Jets certainly have lots of talent, it didn't really show either team's offensive capabilities. New York QB Pennington must have wished he'd stayed in bed: throwing two picks run back for Viking touchdowns would have to count as a bad day in anyone's books. Minnesota's starting QB didn't do too much: because of the turnovers, he barely saw the ball and only managed 2 completions on 4 attempts for 27 yards.
Adrian Peterson certainly had a good outing: 70 yards on 8 runs, with his first NFL touchdown. If he can do that on a regular basis, then Minnesota's rushing attack will be excellent this year (Chester Taylor is very good, but he wore down toward the end of last season as the feature back). Two high-calibre running backs (plus Mewelde Moore as 3rd down back) equals a very good running game indeed.
The Vikings defence looked pretty good, although there were some breakdowns in run defending, and the Jets running game looked better than I believe it really is: nobody was making those kind of gains up the middle last season against the Vikings. And, as the starters were being replaced by backups and third-stringers, the dreaded open-field arm tackle became the most common mistake by Viking defenders. Lots of opportunities were wasted because the first man to the ball tried to arm-tackle . . . and missed.
The Star Tribune's coverage is here and here.
There's been an amusing discussion on the tech writers' mailing list today about the plethora of badly worded signs. Melissa Nelson posted my top-rated comment so far:
My favorite misleading sign is one they put out in Michigan every summer during construction reminding people that it is against the law to kill construction workers with your car . . . It says "Kill a construction worker $7500 and 15 years in prison." Something about it has a marketing tone and I feel like it is saying "For a mere $7500 and 15 years in prison, you may kill a construction worker." I always get the urge to haggle and see if I can kill two for only $14,000 and 25 years or something. It is very badly written.
Then again . . . my ex was a construction worker . . . so I can never tell if I am just over-editing . . . or if I just need a really good shrink!
Jon sent a link to the Military Motivators site, which is worth a quick look. He especially liked this one.
Less than half the team showed up for photo night. There are 10 players missing from the photo (Anthony C., Ben K., Brad H., Chris V., Jake H., Kevin J., Kory A., Mike H., Nick M., and Sean L.).
An interesting little mini-documentary on how printing used to be. The narration is somewhat soporific, but the topic is quite fascinating to keep me awake . . .
H/T to Jill Tallman.
Milan Davidovic sent a link to Monica's declaration of hatred of software tech writers:
10. A last segue, but really important: Your tech writers writing Help files and software manuals. Those guys suck at it. They haven't a clue. They don't know what the hell they're doing. This is not their skill set. When you have to look in five different places to find the answer to how to do one simple process, something's wrong. It's your tech writers. No, I don't care if you've helpfully given another 5-10 links in a Help topic or a reference in a manual to where one can find more information; that's stupid. It should be in the same spot. Computers are supposed to be about efficiency, remember? Instead, use some of those much-vaunted brains and hire some folks who are professionals at writing manuals and textbooks, like college professors who've done similar and so on, and have them write the manuals. People are going to have to buy a book with actual step-by-step lessons, or take a class in how to do things anyway, and you're idiots who are losing a ton of money by thinking tech writing = normal people learning. No. It doesn't. Even for those of us who've read quite a lot of your crap. It's been 30-odd years now. Don't you think it's time you woke up to this little factoid?
She makes some good points, but I wonder if she'd really be happy with her suggested solution: hiring college professors to write software documentation. I've read at least as many badly written college texts as badly written software docs. And the theoretical advantage college profs have over software tech writers is that they're supposed to be experts in the topic they're writing about: most tech writers are not. Tech writers need to interpret whatever information they get from software developers, project managers, quality assurance technicians, and other SME's. Many tech writers think of themselves as "speaker to geeks" within their workplaces.
The mid-August issue of Ontario Wine Review is now online. This issue talks about something Michael thinks Ontario could learn from New York State, and some Lake Erie North Shore wines he thinks you'll like.
Steve Chapman looks at the joys of air travel (or he would if there were any left):
In a season of crowded planes, long security lines and numerous delays, there are only two kinds of travelers: those who dislike the airlines, and those who loathe and abominate the entire industry with every fiber of their being. So the Department of Transportation is not risking a mass revolt when it entertains the idea of making carriers pay large sums to passengers who, after buying a ticket, find it doesn't come with a seat.
Airlines overbook to assure full flights, but when everyone shows up, not everyone gets to go. Involuntary "bumping" of passengers is an old custom that has gotten more onerous, since it's not as easy to get on the next flight as it used to be. So groups claiming to represent consumers have been demanding that the government force airlines to boost their compensation.
Once upon a time, in the far distant past, air travel was a fairly rare thing for most people, and the experience was often seen as a bit of an adventure (in the positive sense). Nowadays, air travel has become something to avoid if at all possible: I've lost count of the number of people who say they would rather drive eight hours rather than fly for two — of course, a "two-hour flight" is anything but. What used to be something you could do almost as easily as taking a city bus now is likely to consume your whole day . . . or more. And the travel experience often falls somewhere on the spectrum between grinding tedium and the Bataan Death March.
Travel for pleasure? Not frickin' likely.
But how do we get that point across without rending the Sacred Magical Trust of Objectivity? Bias, real and imagined, may rankle many — but equally fatal is the Olympian detachment that informs so many stories. We're duty-bound to pretend that the government of Iran occupies the same moral plane as the government of France, or that the knotty mess in Israel is a matter of competing forces whose theological and historical claims are equally incomprehensible, and hence irrelevant to today's who-shelled-who dispatch. We can't cheer or jeer. We can't imagine why we would.
I'd guess many readers suspect this posture is a cover for something else, for a general unwillingness on the part of the media overclass to confront some unpalatable truths, or admit their own vacillating, tortured relation to their own culture. If they'd call it that. Culture is something everyone else has. The West has sins. And obligations.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-08-16
The news of the day appears to be that "Jane Galt" will be leaving her current day job at The Economist for a position with The Atlantic. The blog tie-in is that her blog Asymmetrical Information is also moving there. Oddly enough, she may be discarding her long-standing nom-de-keyboard, as the current placeholder at The Atlantic uses her real name.
(This entry is more a reminder to me to update my links once the change happens . . . I'm usually a week or two behind on blogroll updates.)
Paul Marks does his bit to balance the historical record on one of the key movers in the Partition of India, Jawaharlal Nehru:
With the 60th anniversary of the end of British rule in the sub continent, there is the normal talk of whether the vast numbers of rapes and murders during partition could have been prevented. The British will, perhaps quite rightly, get the blame for not delaying independence and for not using enough force to try and prevent the violence on partition.
However, it is almost forgotten that Nehru (the leader of the Congress party and first Prime Minister of India) was demanding that the British leave (every day we stayed was a day too many for Nehru), and even claimed that it was mainly where the British were that violence took place.
This was the exact opposite of the truth (and Nehru knew it) — as it was where British forces went in (sadly much too rarely) that the mass rapes and killings were prevented. Nehru had "form" in letting his "get the British out of India" obsession cloud his judgement.
Here's the Wikipedia entry (complete with the always-amusing "weasel words" warning). And the one on the Partition of India.
According to a British survey firm, middle-aged men are the least happy of all:
More than 3,600 people were asked to score their wellbeing on a scale of one to 10 as part of a survey for Defra.
Men, who rated their youthful happiness as 7.3, plunged into an early mid-life crisis with those aged 35-44 reporting satisfaction levels at 6.8.
The overall average satisfaction level for men and women was 7.3 in England, suggesting that individuals are generally fairly content.
Seventy-four per cent of people said they felt generally positive about themselves.
I'd comment on this, but I find the ennui just overwhelming. I mean, what's the point?
Be careful what you add to your Facebook page:
For example: Mike X. is a fat, retarded pimp who likes screwing prostitutes. Mary Y. works in a strip club downtown and owns a vibrator. Joe Z. is a man-whore who hangs out at stranger's houses and drinks rum and coke.
If you searched Spock using the real names of these high school teenagers, those are the kind of tags you'd find.
These kids have a few things in common: They, along with 12,000 other people, recently downloaded a "Mad Libs"-like Facebook application and wrote stories about themselves and their friends, filling the blanks with scandalous terms.
But they didn't realize the application was created by Spock, which debuted last week. And they were horrified to discover that Spock used the terms they supplied to build public profiles on them and other Facebook members. (After being contacted by Wired News, Spock erased the tags from many of these profiles, but some were still visible at press time.)
"Rage Over Cleavage!" was the headline that turned me into a Clinton booster. Other than that typically understated summation from the Times of India, last month's spat over the state of Clinton's décolletage saw wave after peristaltic wave of pious vapidity, followed by the occasional spasm of outright misogyny. In response to Washington Post columnist Robin Givhan's controversial piece on Clinton's decision to bare some breast, almost no one saw fit to recognize the immense challenges Clinton faces as a woman dressing to project authority.
Least of all her supporters. "Frankly, focusing on women's bodies instead of their ideas is insulting," wrote campaign official Ann Lewis in a fundraising letter. Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman excoriated "those media monitors who seek deep meaning in every shoe, sexual clues in every hemline, and psychological insights in every shirt collar." Appearances shouldn't matter, so why acknowledge that they do?
Forget the mountains of studies on cognition, perception, affective priming, the importance of signaling in social interactions, and the disadvantages women are known face due to implicit bias. The radical idea that clothes convey meaning is apparently something Givhan concocted in the corner of the newsroom and sold to credulous readers, every bit as cooked up as little Jimmy's heroin in the embarrassing annals of Post history.
Kerry Howley, "The Pantsuit Paradox: How do women signal power at the boys' club?", Reason, 2007-08-14
I've often wondered about the various charitable organizations who send students to third-world countries to do construction or other "valuable" work. According to a major British charity, the projects are frequently a waste of time, effort, and money:
One of Britain's leading charities has warned students not to take part in gap-year aid projects overseas which cost thousands of pounds and do nothing to help developing countries.
Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) said that gap-year volunteering, highlighted by Princes William and Harry, has spawned a new industry in which students pay thousands of pounds for prepackaged schemes to teach English or help to build wells in developing countries with little evidence that it benefits local communities.
It said that "voluntourism" was often badly planned and spurious projects were springing up across Africa, Asia and Latin America to satisfy the demands of the students rather than the needs of locals. Young people would be better off simply travelling the world and enjoying themselves, it added.
One of Victor's friends was recently on a trip to Africa for this sort of thing, and she came back all fired-up to get all her friends to go and do similar things. It's a shame that that sort of enthusiasm can be wasted — or worse, cause more harm.
H/T to Johnathan Pearce.
That [this] position should be cavalierly propounded and thinly defended is not surprising, because the position is cavalier and indefensible. The notion that the chief executive can clap anyone in prison forever with only nominal court review was one the Founders had something to say about, in a document called the Declaration of Independence. In any case, maximalism has already crumbled in court.
Jonathan Rauch, "The Candidates' Four Detention Camps: What will the next president do about war on terror prisoners?", Reason, 2007-08-14
Last night's game was a nail-biter, going literally right to the final whistle. After going down 2-0 to Whitby Legion in the first half, the Pirates rallied to lead the game 4-3 in the final minute.
What kept the team going through the first half was excellent goalkeeping: Nick M. was the reason the Pirates were still able to mount any threat in the second half. He had a series of excellent saves and was critical to keeping the score in range.
Scoring in the second half opened for the Pirates with Anthony C., and then Kory A. put in the equalizer. The Pirates and Legion traded goals, with Nick M. scoring for the Pirates. The go-ahead goal was a lovely long-range strike from Brad H., from outside the 18-yard box. The last ten minutes of the game gave neither team a clean scoring chance, until just before the final whistle, when Legion were just able to punch in the tying goal. Pirates keeper Sean L. hadn't even pulled the ball out of the netting when the referee blew the final whistle. Legion players were celebrating as though they'd won a championship, and the Pirates were upset at missing out on the full three points.
The game was perhaps the toughest challenge the Pirates have faced this season, as the injury bug was out on the field. We started with a full team plus two substitutes, and ended the game with only nine healthy players: two players were hurt enough that they could not continue, and two others had to spend time on the bench recovering (Brad H. actually came off the bench after his own injury to replace another injured player, and was still able to score).
The hosting account had a surge of file-usage (not related to the blog), which used up all the available disk space over the weekend. Jon moved the excess files off the server, but I had to rebuild the blog to have it come back online. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Ken Holder points us to this little gem of a discovery:
Years of bad data corrected; 1998 no longer the warmest year on record
An example of the Y2K discontinuity in action [. . .] this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. [. . .] While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.
These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.
McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh.
NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.
Links in the original article. Emphasis mine.
Cross-posted from the backup site.
I remember [when I lost faith in government] quite clearly. It was the summer of 1972 (I could probably find the month and day if I did some shovelling). I had already been a libertarian for ten years, but still thought minimal government was the only choice. Then I attended a seminar in Wichita, conducted by Robert LeFevre and underwritten by the Love Box Company and the local Seven-Up bottlers every year.
Bob maintained that "government is a disease masquerading as its own cure", and as evidence, he presented, among other things, Operation Keelhaul. (Warning: the Wikipedia entry on this travesty is woefully inadequate.) Bob said that a drunken FDR and his equally drunken buddy Winston Churchill—deliberately kept that way by Stalin—had agreed at the Yalta conference to use their troops to round up everybody in western Europe who'd found the war a handy way to refugee the hell out of Russia.
The story is also told in George N. Crocker's Roosevelt's Road to Russia.
Also rounded up were Russian expatriates who had left before, during, and after World War I, and others, their children, maybe, who had never even seen Russia. The Wiki piece emphasizes Austria as the place this was done. Bob talked about France and I have since met the son of a US Army officer who helped carry the program out there. He died feeling ashamed of having obeyed those orders.
They were all put in the same kind of cattle cars that had taken Jews to the concentration camps, shipped back to the Motherland (couple of syllables missing in that term, I think), and shot to death within hours. Estimates of their number vary. The governments involved will admit to a couple hundred thousand. A couple hundred thousand! Bob, who was in Europe at the time, said it was more like two million.
That was it for me and government. Any government, all government. And it's why I don't give a rusty fuck, to quote Rod Steiger, what we replace it with. Especially given the events of the past six years, what could be worse?
L. Neil Smith, "Letter from L. Neil Smith", Libertarian Enterprise, 2007-08-12
Cross-posted from the backup site.
At least partially fulfilling an election promise, Stephen Harper has announced a new military training base and a deep-water port in Nanisivik and Resolute Bay:
Canada will build two new military facilities within contested Arctic waters to bolster its sovereign claim over the fabled Northwest Passage, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Friday.
He said the Canadian Forces will install a new army training centre and a deepwater port at distant points of the Arctic archipelago that has been coveted for centuries as a possible trade route to Asia.
"Protecting national sovereignty, the integrity of our borders, is the first and foremost responsibility of a national government, a responsibility which has too often been neglected," Harper said, citing what he called the "first principle of Arctic sovereignty: use it or lose it."
For those of you who've never heard of Nanisivik (which would include me), it's roughly here:
Last night's game started in darkness and ended in frustration. It was a late-night game (9:00 pm scheduled kick-off), so we were playing under the lights at Rossland North field. About five minutes before kickoff, the power went down in our area, so the field was plunged into darkness. Power was not restored for about 20 minutes, so we were more than 15 minutes late kicking off.
The game started well for the Pirates, with Matt L. scoring from the left wing within five minutes. A rough tackle by Brad H. resulted in a yellow card, although what the referee said he'd done didn't match what we saw from the sideline, or what Brad thought had happened when he came off the field at halftime. There is no in-game appeal mechanism, so we just had to carry on.
Matt L. scored his second goal just after Whitby Silver had equalized, again coming in tight to the post from the left side. Both teams had multiple shots on net after this, but the first half ended with the Pirates holding on to a 2-1 lead.
The second half showed the Pirates drop in intensity for the first 10 minutes, allowing Whitby Silver to finally get the equalizing goal. Five minutes later, a dramatic collision just outside the Silver goal area resulted in two yellow cards being shown. Unfortunately, the Pirate player involved in the collision was Brad H., who was then shown the Red card and ejected from the game. The Pirates had to play the rest of the game with only 10 players allowed on the field.
In spite of the numerical disadvantage, Silver still had few good opportunities until five minutes before the end of the game, when they finally found an angle to beat Matt L. (who'd switched from goal-scoring to goal-tending for the second half) for the go-ahead score.
At least, it sure sounded as if everyone was subscribing to headlines from The Onion, based on this thread at Slashdot:
American Red Cross Sued For Using a Red Cross
Swampash sends us a story that even this community may find hard to believe. Johnson & Johnson, the health-products giant that uses a red cross as its trademark, is suing the American Red Cross, demanding the charity halt its use of the red cross symbol on products it sells to the public. It seems J&J began using the trademark in 1887, 6 years after the Red Cross was formed, but 13 years before the charitable organization was chartered by Congress. Lately the ARC has begun licensing the symbol to third parties to use on fund-raising products such as home emergency kits.
Sounds like a pretty clear case of a corporation going crazy to rip off an innocent non-profit, right? Well, not quite:
Pendersempai: If you'd RTFA, the ARC started enforcing its trademark against all kinds of other products, including nail clippers, humidifiers, sanitary hand lotion, and so on. They did this simply to extort money. Now, J&J is doing the same to the ARC. Turnabout is fair play, no? Or are non-profits permitted to engage in whatever obscene rent-seeking behavior they want just because they're non-profits?
Anonymous Coward: Huh. I was seeing it the other way around. The Red Cross is *clearly* in the wrong on this one. Their charter is very clear, and J&J has them dead to rights. So I'll probably only buy J&J products for medical gear from now on. They're willing to call out the Red Cross and stand up for what's right, so I'll back 'em for that.
I realize I'm behind in posting this, but I thought the conclusion to be worth repeating:
What is absent from these comments (and many others like them) is any awareness of things like the Rape of Nanking or the Bataan Death March, or the Holocaust for that matter; or of the fact that America's supposed determination to crush her enemies manifested itself in rebuilding postwar Germany and leaving Japan with a political system that allowed it to become a strong economic rival to America herself. A few commenters suggest that America should have allowed the Soviets to end the war by invading Japan, blithely unaware of the hell on earth that would have awaited the Japanese under Soviet occupation. This isn't mere ignorance; it's a profound conviction that only evil done by the West, and above all by "psychopathic bully" America, truly matters. Meanwhile, posters who point out Japanese atrocities in World War II are rebuffed with accusations of "the implicitly racist overtone [of] recounting the endless 'savagery' of the Japanese."
When anti-Americanism becomes so extreme that it turns the U.S. into the bad guy of World War II, that's truly frightening and depressing. As for whether the bombing was indeed the least evil of all available options: again, I don't know. I'm sure there is room for legitimate debate on this issue. But that debate is almost entirely drowned out by hate and self-righteousness. The insistence on moral purity has turned to moral blindness.
There's a post up at Hit and Run, talking about the problems with high-profile, low-return-on-investment projects like light rail:
A front-page story in yesterday's New York Times noted that politicians' transportation vanity projects drain money away from the sort of maintenance work that apparently was needed on the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis last week. I was pleasantly surprised to see the Times put light rail lines in the same category as boondoggles like Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere [. . .]
The scenario is very common — just about every city larger than 500,000 has probably built, planned to build, or been wined-and-dined by potential bidders for such projects. The projects are almost always economically ludicrous (but not as far-out as publicly funded sports venues for professional teams), basing their revenue projections on literally unattainable levels of use and minimizing or ignoring the crowding-out of other activities.
Light rail projects are very popular with politicians, because every politician wants to leave "a legacy" of their time in office. That means they want to spend as much of your money as possible to ensure their own "immortality". Light rail projects are popular with the public because they appear to offer a way to reduce congestion and speed up transit times . . . for other people . . . in other words, get some of those slowcoach commuters the heck out of my way by making them give up their cars and use a new light rail system instead.
Jon sent me a link which would have been lifted directly from The Onion only a year or so ago, but it's actually from more current times:
First the Rightwing Parody, Then the Leftwing "Reality:" Yes, They're Now Claiming Global Warming *Causes Volcanos, Earthquakes*
The Earth Fights Back, crows this Guardian piece, claiming that the planet has taken all it can take and is now set to go Rambo on us with all the means at its disposal — which includes, somehow, deliberately, willfully inducing earthquakes and volcanoes.
We've parodied this tendency on the left for a while, suggesting — for laughs — that the left would blame any calamity on global warming, even those that obviously could not possibly have any connection to atmospheric warmth, such as earthquakes and volcanoes. Which are of course caused by plate tectonics and pressures beneath the earth's mantle, and couldn't tell if the earth's temperature had increased by 1000 degrees, nevermind 1.
But last year's parody becomes this year's Inconvenient Truth. And the Cult of Mother Gaia, in all its illogical theocratic glory, officially takes the inevitable step towards deistic teleological anthropomorphization.
Jon wrote: "I LOL'd at this comment":
Deism takes a sorta' set-it and forget-it approach to the universe and the "God" of deism isn't anthropomorphic.
Theism is the anthropomorphic (actually it's not that God is man-like, it's that man is God-like, but this just depends on your perspective) and interventionist God.
In both cases they can impose a teleology on their creation.
But anyway, the greens tend to be pantheistic fags. An earth goddess permeating and being one with all her creation and so on and so forth. Real hardcore horse-shit.
They also tend to smell like that too. That would be a "holistic" approach I believe.
Sometimes, it's the little glitches which create the most confusion. Take, for example, this article posted at PC World:
So how big is this IPv6?
Expressed in available addresses, it's so big that only math teachers might care. It is expressed several ways numerically: IPv4, the current one, has about 232 (about 4.3 billion) addresses. In comparison, IPv6 has 2128 (or 3.4 by 1038) addresses or it can be expressed as 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,770,000,000. UNH's InterOperability Lab guru for IPv6, Erica Johnson, said one theory she learned during her research was that Ipv6 has so many addresses that it compares to the number of grains of sand on the Earth. That is certainly more lyrical than the mathematical expression and might actually impress somebody (and is, of course, impossible to disprove). A spokesman at UNH's test lab added that the number of addresses can be expressed as "nearly" 340 undecillion. (Oddly, undecillion is defined as 1 followed by 36 zeros in the U.S., but by 66 zeros in Great Britain, according to Dictionary.com.)
If your eyes normally glaze over as soon as the numbers in the discussion rise above five, the preceding paragraph may not catch your eye as being misleading. Without the careful use of the proper markup (specifically, the superscript <SUP>), you get nonsensical things in your article like "232 (about 4.3 billion) addresses". For most forms of mathematics, 232 does not equal 4.3 billion! 232 might be a bit closer.
I'm not a mathie, so I'll take their word for it that 2128 can be expressed as 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,770,000,000.
On Saturday, Victor and I took his old model train layout down to Burlington, to pass it on to Victor's cousin, who has recently become a model train fanatic. Below the break is the version of the story I sent to one of my model rail mailing lists:
Friday night and Saturday
It sounded like a good idea: my son hadn't really been interested for several years, and he was willing to donate the layout and some of his locomotives and rolling stock. My nephew, who is mildly autistic, is going to be over the moon. At least he will be once we get it transported down to his home and set up for him.
I cleverly anticipated this need when purchasing my current vehicle . . . a 4'x6' layout wouldn't have fit comfortably inside a Honda CR-V. I have a Toyota Tacoma pick-up now. Except . . . and here's where my plan had a critical flaw . . . it only has a 5' bed, so the layout won't be able to travel in relative comfort inside the bed with the cover down. I'll have to drop the tail and wrap the 1' of projecting layout to try to keep the (few remaining) trees, bushes, and clumps of ground foam from decorating a 1:1 scale road.
But before I can do that, I have to find a few key parts: some working locomotives and cars. Which were randomly packed up with my stuff when we moved into this house four years back. I've had to a) find all the boxes, which were not conveniently located in one spot; b) open each box to verify that what the label on the outside says has some relationship to what's actually in there; c) having located some (but not all) of the boxes filled with other boxes of the Athearn, MDC, Accurail, Kadee variety, then d) realize that the labels on the little boxes have no connection with the actual contents.
So I spent much of the afternoon opening all the little boxes inside the big boxes, sorting out my son's collection from my own. I thought it would be pretty easy: his stuff would all have X2F couplers (very unrealistic looking things: View image), while mine were all Kadee or other knuckle-type couplers (which both look more like real couplers, but also work better). That quaint notion was abandoned about the fifth box, when I discovered that I'd started converting some of Victor's collection over to using knuckle couplers round about the time we decided to incorporate his layout into my TH&B layout.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that I'd been generous with the packing material inside each of those little boxes. So it wasn't just a case of opening the lid . . . it then required further unpacking to actually see what was hidden within.
Two hours in, I had a horrible sinking feeling: we couldn't find any of his locomotives. A quick trip to the LHS was suddenly on the agenda.
All of you folks who are continuing to add to your marination stashes will laugh when I say I'd hoped to find a decent quality diesel in HO scale for around Cdn$50 or so. I seem to recall the Proto 1000 line having some models in that price range the last time I checked. The locos in stock started at nearly twice that price. But you guys already know that.
So do I, now.
Okay, so he's now got at least one working locomotive (others came to light . . . all together now . . . after I'd dropped a C-note at the LHS). He's got a variety of rolling stock (about 50/50 X2F and knuckle couplers), including a couple of passenger cars. And of course, he's got the layout. With five years of dust and crud and spider webs and mouse poop and other less easily identified things covering it.
Fortunately, I have an air compressor. Not one of those piddling little airbrush compressors: a real power-tool air compressor (insert Tim-the-Tool-Man-Taylor-style grunting here). Did you know you can peel entire strips of scenery off a model train layout and hurl them across the basement with an ill-judged gust of compressed air?
I do now.
I still have the leg assemblies and plenty of L-girders lying around (see here for what I'm talking about), so that'll be no problem. What I don't seem to have are any of the cross-braces to set between the legs and the girders. Oh, well, Pine 1"x2" is pretty cheap. I also couldn't find the gussets to secure the cross-braces to the legs . . . but I do have some roughly triangular cabinet-grade oak cut-offs which will probably do the trick. I'll just need to remember to take along some 1 1/2" screws instead of the 3/4" screws I'd normally use.
Sunday
Mission accomplished. All parties are satisfied with the relocation, ownership transfer, re-assembly, and initial operations on the layout.
Travel to Burlington was a bit more fraught than I'd expected: the layout was too wide to sit between the wheel wells in the back of the truck, so I had to set it up on a pair of cross-bearers . . . which put the top of the scenery too close to the bed cover for the cover to close. This meant I had to drive with the whole assembly in the open position for 150km . . . at highway speed:
Arriving in Burlington
I expected that the wind would finish off what my compressed air had begun yesterday, but to my surprise, only a few bits of scenery failed to arrive at the end of the journey still connected to the main layout. Even the Woodland Scenics plastic trees withstood the trauma (we had to replant three after setting up the layout, and it looked like another four or five had gotten off before the truck came to a complete stop. Other than that, the layout was in pretty good condition.
Victor helped me to re-assemble the benchwork in a cleared area of my sister's basement, and the layout was back in service within an hour of arriving. My nephew spent the rest of the day running trains and making up stories about the trains and their cargo. (Literally . . . my sister had to pry him away from the layout to come upstairs and say goodbye to us as we left).
All in all, a pretty good result, I think. ;-)
What in the world is a MADD rep doing in an article about free booze on trains?
I believe it was a Hit & Run commenter who wrote a few months ago that MADD is no longer just "mothers" — its current president is a man. Nor is it any longer just about "drunk," they [are] generally opposed to drinking, too. Nor, as this article indicates, are they merely concerned about driving anymore. In the MADD acronym, that leaves only the word "against." Whatever it is, if it's related to alcohol, they're against it. Which sounds about right.
Radley Balko, "Mothers Against Buzzed Trainriding", Hit and Run, 2007-08-02
Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption — yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.
So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America's energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 — twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon — about half of ethanol's wholesale market price.
Jeff Goodell, "Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles", Rolling Stone, 2007-07-24
Some people take Rugby more seriously than anything else.
This 9-year-old's soccer skills are flat-out amazing:
Rhain Davis Joins Manchester United - Click here for more amazing videos
I really felt sorry for the opponents he faced in these clips. How do you stop someone like that?
What is productivity? Simply getting more output from the same or less input. Dahl showed in his talk the institutional context in which productivity improvement flourishes. His findings will gladden the heart of any libertarian, and anyone else who wants a prosperous future for the billions of people on this planet who are mired in poverty. He began by asking why South Asians and Cubans are more prod