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Tuesday Rapid Fire
- Networks, in Forbes
- Tin Can Stirling Engine – really cool, this would go nicely with the passive solar heating system that I blogged about last week.
- Global warming awareness reaches diminishing marginal returns, aptly explained by Instapundit. I’m still waiting for the Shotgun News green issue.
- Gauss vs Pareto, if you understand bell curves, you should read this.
- Robots, Robots, Robots, in Iraq and elsewhere
- An insightful article on internal migrations in the US. By Michael Barone
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xSQL is a cool Sql Server tool
I’ve been using xSQL for a good while now and I think it’s about time to give it the Moody Loner endorsement. While it does a lot of things, I mostly use it for copying databases between servers where I have different permissions (doing that using the built-in tools is quite problematic) and it’s saved me countless hours of tweaks and cutting and pasting.
It’s run by cool people too. Check it out here http://www.xsqlsoftware.com/
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A telling point in the Boyd biography
I’m currently reading Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War and I read a telling passage that stated (approximately) that autodidacts crave approval from conventionally educated academics and professionals. For those who don’t know fairly obscure word, it’s Google defines the word as
Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) is self-education or self-directed learning. An autodidact is a mostly self-taught person (also known as an automath), or someone who has an enthusiasm for self-education, and usually has a high degree of self-motivation.
(tip, if you type in “Define:Word to be dined” into Google it defines the word for you.
This seems to be a good explanation for a lot of the tensions in the blogsphere. It also seems to be a natural healthy thing. As I put it in a previous post, science advances funeral by funeral. It follows that if left to their own devices, any field of thought or industry will spend it’s time polishing the corpse of some grand new idea that is mutually agreeable to all (think of the US auto industry before the Japanese came along.
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Funny and strange quotes
From this rather odd article about the future of Israel
As Peter O’Toole said as Lawrence of Arabia in the movie of that title, “Nothing is written.” However, it seems clear how to bet. As so often in history, bet on the horrible outcome.
I think the post is flawed as it assumes that the current Israeli situation will not change by several orders of magnitude in qualitative ways as the decades roll by. Of course, there is no reason for the changes to be good, but current trends seldom hold before Bit Rot settles in. Worth reading
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Benchmarks of seriousness
I was taking an advanced economic history class during the Republican “Revolution” of 94. Someone asked the professor if there was any historical precedent for radical change following a big party switch in Congress alone. He cited many near examples I don’t remember but then said “We’ll know if they’re serious about cutting spending if they get rid of farm subsidies.”. It’s now more than twelve years later and farm subsidies are going strong.
I was reading this interview with George Schulz and he, talking about oil dependence, had the line
I won’t believe we’re serious about it until we’re willing to remove the tariff on import of ethanol. And take quotas off sugar and a few things like that.
which is a fine benchmark to tell if anyone really cares about oil dependence. Support for nuclear power is a good one too.
For some technical background; American ethanol production is one of the least efficient efforts in the world, largely because we make it from corn (which we have a lot of) which is a poor source material. Sugar (of which we grow very little) is a far better source material. The American climate is not well suited to grow sugar, but it is well suited to grow corn. Both the corn and sugar lobbies are well organized and powerful and benefit greatly from subsidies and tariffs.
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The Japanese seem to be outdoing us in crazy
Check out the speech below. It takes a certain amount of gravitas to be against majority rule and run for office on the explicit platform of destroying the county, but you just can’t hold back street musicians.
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Friday Rapid Fire
- European Solar Power – with an array of mirrors instead of photo voltaic panels
- CogMap – an online organization chart maker, pretty cool, very Ajax-ey
- SilverLight – Microsoft’s Next Big Thing has it’s first (that I’ve seen) user generated application. And I just learned Ajax…
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The belated Imus post
I’m not sure whether I said this already in a post or an email, but in any case..
Imus said “Nappy Headed Hos”.
The outrage industry sprang into action, because that is their entire job.
The media covered it, because all of the major players were happy to come to them, and news coverage consisted largely of replaying existing footage, or cutting and pasting press releases. This equaled a cheap to produce (in time and dollars) article or news segment, especially compared to the two wars that are going on right now
People liked it because it was widespread and easy to understand. Anyone could shoot his mouth off to anyone else and not get schooled by someone who knew more about the topic. There was also no personal connection to anyone they knew, so no feelings could be hurt.
There is no deep meaning to the “controversy”.
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Notably absent
I haven’t heard of any acts of terrorism in Russia lately. Lots of state repression, yes, but no terrorism. In 2004 there were several plane hijacking and the Beslan mass murder. And then nothing.
Granted, Russia has moved a long way to dictatorship (making terrorism less effective) in that period, and secret policing is something they do well. It’s still odd though. It’s not as if the Chechens would become more peaceful in last three years.
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The mother of all abortion posts
Glen Whitman has pretty much all of the abortion analogies (all five of them) that enter the logical debate about the topic.
It’s an odd thing. I used to debate him quite frequently on a now-defunct website, and he caused me to change my position on what the legality of early-term abortion should be with analogy number five
The Negligent Driver. When you negligently or deliberately cause harm to another person, the law requires you to provide compensation, either with money or some kind of action. If your negligent driving puts a pedestrian in the hospital, you are liable for his medical bills. Likewise, one might argue, your sexual behavior creates the risk of placing a fetus in a very precarious situation. If so, you are liable for the fetus’s care during that time. This analogy emphasizes the responsibility of people for the risks they create, thereby dodging the previous analogy’s “no invitation” problem. The difficulty with this analogy comes from the definition of “harm.” Harm doesn’t mean being in a difficult situation – it means being in a worse situation than you would have been otherwise. Were it not for your reckless driving, the pedestrian would (in all likelihood) still be walking around, safe and sound. Were it not for the act of sex, the fetus would not exist at all. To sustain the claim that the act of sex creates a risk of harm to the fetus, you have to insist that existence in a dependent state is worse than sheer non-existence. If the act of sex constitutes a tort, it is the only tort I can think of that creates the very person it victimizes.
I’m the only person I know of who changes his mind on abortion due to a logical argument.