From Surprising Corners

I was listening to someone a couple weeks ago.  This person is a hard core anti-socialist, pro-freedom individual.  They mildly chastised me once for suggesting that corporations should not be considered the legal equivalent of a person.

They were observing that some of the Occupy protesters were making a few fair points about their respective situations.  His concern was that the Occupy movement would be subverted by the minority that wants to impose socialism on the country.

The point?  This is someone that I would not expect to be giving any credence to any of the OWS arguments.

I have some further thoughts that I am working on and hope to have posted soon.  Given that I am writing this post a couple weeks in advance, you might have seen them by now!

Incremental Improvements

Oil dependency.  Pollution...the legitimate kind.  Transportation problems. We need solutions. 

I do not have much faith in electric cars.  We would need a new electric distribution system and hundreds of new power plants if every car on the road today was to magically convert into a 100% electric vehicle.  The only thing that changes is that the pollution would be generated at a central power plant instead of at 100 million locations where ever a car or truck might be running.

There are many good ideas out there that would make small steps at improving fuel efficiency rather than a wholesale restructuring of society.  One such good idea would be to switch to diesel engines.  That change would create a 15-20% boost to fuel efficiency

Couple that with the use of a flywheel and we could get a further 20% improvement.  Used together and we could cut our fuel consumption by up to one third.

Care to see what happens to the price of fuel when consumption falls that far?  Care to see what America's economy does when fuel prices fall that far?

Boost Your WiFi With A Can Of Beer

Or perhaps with a lowly can of Coke.  I am betting that this does not work with Pepsi.

I love a good hack, especially one that requires me to throw back a cold one before hand (or during). This simple wifi boost has actually been shown to increase signal strength by at least 2 to 4 bars. And, well, I will drink to that.

Religious Mathematics - "Jewish" Problems

Anti-Semitism from a likely source.

Back in the seventies, the mathematics department at the Soviet Union's Moscow State University (one of the most prestigious departments in the USSR at the time) used a special collection of math problems, informally referred to as "Jewish" problems or "coffins" ("coffin" problems translating roughly to "killer" problems in English), to keep Jewish students and other so-called "undesirables" out of the department.

Predictable Outcome Only Because It Has Been Predicted

Fans of "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand are doubtlessly familiar with the process that led to a government that would attempt such a thing.  They are also familiar with the most likely result.

This week alone has seen a ratings downgrade for Spain as well as a threat by agencies to review France's AAA status -- and the markets have taken notice. Once again, it would seem, ratings agencies are making things difficult for European countries.

Now, the European Union is considering doing something about it.


European Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier is considering a move to ban the agencies from publishing outlook reports on EU countries entangled in a crisis, according to a report in Thursday's issue of the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper.

Of course, that isn't good enough.  The EU also wants to put ratings agencies in a "no-win" position by:

The internal market commissioner appears to be taking a tough stance against the agencies. He is also pushing the 27 EU member states to take steps to ensure that investors can pursue civil action against agencies for "deficient ratings." He is also calling for addition ratings requirements for complexly structured financial products and steps that would create greater competition among ratings agencies.

Investors will find a place to invest.  If they cannot rely on ratings information for EU governments, then they will simply take their money elsewhere.  Given the need for financing and re-financing of government debt, this lack of cash will have predictable results.

Either the governments will start printing fiat Euros and thus begin a cycle of high inflation.  Or the governments will discover that dog catchers do not require 42 levels of supervision and a 1300 page handbook to catch dogs and cut their budgets accordingly.  Historically, the latter option has been the most effective solution as well as the most difficult to implement.

Ms. Rand provided the blueprint for the result of the former option.

An Unusual Source For Terrorism

Saturday Night Live writers??

h/t to the Blogfather....

Karma Doesn't Always Work That Way

Courtesy of television impresario and executive producer, Chuck Lorre.

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #329

I exercise regularly. I eat moderate amounts of healthy food. I make sure to get plenty of rest. I see my doctor once a year and my dentist twice a year. I floss every night. I've had chest x–rays, cardio stress tests, EKG's and colonoscopies. I see a psychologist and have a variety of hobbies to reduce stress. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't do drugs. I don't have crazy, reckless sex with strangers.

If Charlie Sheen outlives me, I'm gonna be really pissed.

Punishing The Guilty

As I hope I have noted in the past, there are many reasons for the fiscal meltdown of 2008.  Some bankers, financiers, mortgage brokers, and other unscrupulous actors within the home buying industry clearly acting in bad faith to push people with marginal credit into accepting marginal loan terms.  The 'Occupy' folks are correct to note that the government has not done enough to pursue those private sector bad actors.

But what about the unscrupulous public sector actors?

Your Color Comrade?

It works in other parts of Michigan as well.  Our burst of color is about done now.  But it was beautiful while it lasted.

Update:  Dang.  I hate sites that won't let the images be referred by another webpage.  I'm even giving them some link love!

Whell Met My Friends

Motorcycle helmets come in many shapes and colors.  The folks from Hatari Helmets may have come up with the most interesting helmet of all.  These helmets display video loops on the back surface.

Supposedly.  I am a bit skeptical.  The video shown on the helmets does not look like they have a working model.  Their websites are via a couple of 'free' website builders.  Something does not smell right. 

I hope I am wrong as wearing one of those would be very cool.

Link via the Discovery Channel.

Classic Movie As Propaganda?

A curiosity in the history of film; the CIA funded the animated movie adaptation of George Orwell's "Animal Farm".  I am certain that some folks will find this situation to be dripping with irony under the believe that the CIA is a fountain of propaganda that should never be trusted.

Trusting the government is always risky business.  The CIA certainly has a track record that should urge caution.

However, CIA funding should not be enough in an of itself to undermine Mr. Orwell's central theme; that tyranny, oppression, communism and socialism are synonymous and denigrate the human condition.  They are a creeping, poisonous vine revealed at the moment whenever a "committee" is formed to "run things".

Drudge - THE American Editor

This is a story from last month.  Matt Drudge's website on 9/11 led with a banner showing various police agencies and the quote “These past 10 years have shown that America does not give in to fear.”

He presents precisely that sort of insightful juxtaposition on a routine basis.  It is the sort of thing that makes his website the 'go to' resource for news and current events.

I do have to agree with one commenter that voices some frustration with following links from Drudge only to find that the story did not mesh well with the catch phrase shown on Drudge's website.  It is a frustrating form of misdirection.

Rotten Applies

How does one describe a situation were a person works for the government, pledges to not get involved in negotiations between his department and applicants, is married to someone that is a partner in a law firm working for an applicant, writes emails to other government agencies with oversight responsibilities to push for release of funds that will ultimately go to that applicant, and who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on behalf of a Presidential election campaign?

Do you suppose that there is some corruption in there somewhere?

“Any word from OMB?” Spinner wrote to a DOE staffer in reference to the Solyndra loan, which was awaiting approval from the Office of Management and Budget. “I have the OVP [Office of the Vice President] and WH [White House] breathing down my neck on this.”

Spinner was one of several department officials pushing to get a final decision on Solyndra in August 2009, ahead of a scheduled press event at which Vice President Joe Biden praised the company as “exactly what the Recovery Act [stimulus package] is all about.”

“How f***ing hard is this?” he wrote to another department official on Aug. 28, 2009. “What is he waiting for? Will we have it by the end of the day?”

Disappointing....to say the least.   Given the many allegations of corruption against the Bush administration, why on earth is Mr. Obama's administration making the Bush administration look like amateurs?

And if you have not heard of Solyndra, then perhaps you ought to ask the somnolent "main steam media" what sort of watch dog they really are.

Ever See A Real Flying Carpet?

I have.  Sort of.

Watch the video.

Accurate...Now

This David Horsey political cartoon was premature when it was created back in 2009.

Not any more.

Just......Stop.....Please

This story is from a couple weeks ago.  Hank Williams Jr. decided that he would make the comparison between President Obama and....

A Leak For Science

They haven't perfected it yet, but it looks like we may someday be able to turn urine into rocket fuel.

Scientists on Sunday said they had gained insights into a remarkable bacterium that lives without oxygen and transforms ammonium, the ingredient of urine, into hydrazine, a rocket fuel.

 

So-called anammox -- for anaerobic ammonium oxidation -- germs caused a sensation when they were first identified in the 1990s, but uncovering their secrets is taking time.

In a letter published by the British science journal Nature, researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands reported they had identified the molecular mechanism by which the bugs do their fuel-trick.

Sort of makes renting your beer on Friday night seem as if it is almost worthwhile!

Sort Of Like A Matryoshka Doll

So we invented the PN junction.  In turn we invented transistors.  We figured out that transistors made great electronic switches.  They can be included in circuits so they are either on...or "1"...or off...or "0".  A basic, stable, two-state electronic circuit.  We miniaturized transistors until we had very complex circuits all present on a very small computer chip.

And thus the computer was born.  A computer is nothing more than a sequential command reader that looks at a row of data (1110010110001010) and seeing some positions on and others off, then changes holding locations known as registers.  Those registers can then do other interesting things.

Say for example, one register can identify a single pixel on your screen.  It can also determine the color of that tiny pixel.  In the beginning, pixels didn't have color.  They were either on, or they were off.  And they were HUGE!! By changing pixels, you could create the world's first video game. Pong!

After a couple decades, pixels had gotten a lot smaller and they had gained the ability to be any one of 64 colors.  And we developed cool games like Duke Nukem.

Then we took Duke into 3D land so you became Duke instead of walking him around on the screen.  That led to a bunch of other "first person shooters" like Quake, Halo, and on and on and on.  Surfaces became more detailed, and more granulated.  Colors shot up from 64 to millions of colors. 16 to 32nd power or some such thing.  A lot of colors!  And the pixels were getting pretty tiny, too!

But all that variation, all the attempts to mimic reality, are just too much for some folks.  Which is why the good folks at Mojang Studios came up with Minecraft.

In Minecraft, every element is a perfect square that is 64 x 64 x 64.  You can look up close and see Pong sized pixels.  Or you can back away and each dot on the face of a block becomes as small as a pixel on your screen.

Like Halo and other first person shooters, you can play Minecraft as the guy, or you can look over his shoulder as you make him run around and do his/your thing.

Now Minecraft has this stuff called Redstone.  Redstone is a magical sort of substance as it responds to input to cause other things to move, or light up, or darken, or close, or open, or.....you get the point.

It wasn't long before someone had figured out how to create a circuit to pass either a "1" or a "0".  Now it is possible to transmit one bit of information with your stable two-state circuit.  And if you have enough stable two-state circuits, you have the beginnings of the modern video game.

Redstone Television!

Now that isn't really a video game.  But I'm sure that someone, somewhere is working on assembling enough Redstone circuits so that two people can play a Redstone video game while playing inside the Minecraft video game.

Now THAT is entertainment!

Why Can You Roll Eighteen Double Ought For Strength....

... but not for Intelligence?

Link love for The Order Of The Stick.  And yes, those of us that enjoy Dungeons and Dragons are an odd lot.

Excessively....odd...sadly.

Who Is A Racist?

After being subjected to two year's worth of slurs suggesting that the Tea Party is based in racism, the news of this weeks "Occupy" protest in Atlanta is spreading quickly.  The group that is/was protesting there refused to let John Lewis, civil rights stalwart and legend, speak.

Congressman Lewis (D, GA) was ready to talk to the group, but they didn't give him a chance to speak.
"I was going to say, I stand with you. I support you, what you're down," said Lewis to the media.

He said he wasn't disappointed he wasn't able to address the crowd. Several people CBS Atlanta spoke to were upset.

Michelle Williams was excited to attend the event and no longer wanted to be associated with the movement, citing how Lewis was treated.

"I am angry because this is not what democracy is all about. This is Marxist more Stalin like. Your movement, you're just riff-raff. You're an organized mob," said Williams.

I am prepared to be a bit kinder....one might suggest more civil...than many left leaning polemicists by suggesting that the decision to not let Mr. Lewis speak was probably made by whatever passes for "leadership" in this movement and does not reflect the thoughts of the many participants.

I disagree with Mr. Lewis on a long list of issues.  But even I would be interested in what he had to say.

A side note to Ms. Williams.  The "leadership".  This "movement".  Marxist.  Stalinist.

This isn't particularly new.

As Dr. Wes suggests, this group isn't particularly gifted with "clue".