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But I still want my flying car…

Did you ever see the movie The Fifth Element?  Remember the scene where they are reconstructing the Fifth Element from a few living cells?  Remember how the machine created various body parts, including the circulatory system, with all of the veins and arteries and such?

It is now possible, using stem cells and a 3d printer to “print” simple tissues like skin, muscle, or short segments of blood vessels.   The goal is to eventually print organs like kidneys.

Other science-related information:

NOTE TO MY BOSS:  I really, really, need a couch in my office.  I need to schedule a daily nap so I can think better.

Have you recently had the feeling that you have less available time each day?  It’s not your imagination.  The earthquake in Chile is responsible.  (I wonder what that does to the atomic clocks that are supposed to be accurate for several thousand years?)

Stuff that’s not related to anything:

I’m not sure exactly what to think of this.  I’m not sure exactly what caused it to be created.  I am sure that the Gormogon description “Mary Jane Watson gets the Vapors” is as good a title as any.

Simple explanations for political stuff:

Ghettoputer explains the difference between Conservatives and Liberals.

Remember the following, boys and girls, when we’re discussing health care, social security, welfare or any other government run program. Conservatives broadly speaking believe that freedom is man’s possession of right, whether as a gift from God or inherently. Liberals believe that freedom is bestowed on man by government.

And finally, Beer Math (or why tax breaks go to the rich).

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2010 03 05 cziltang Economics
Nanny State
Politics
Science/Technology Comments (0) Permalink

The Day the Dollar Died

John Galt at Shenandoah does a ton of economic analysis.  Some of it is pretty technical, with charts and graphs, referencing technical market trading terms that I, frankly, don’t always follow.  But, if you read it regularly you can pick up a lot of very interesting economic information.  He’s had a number of posts that show how the unemployment numbers the govt. throws out are “seasonally adjusted” and routinely revised after the fact.  For people who think the govt. has and reports the best information on the economy, the seasonal adjustment nonsense may come as something of a shock.  It would also probably be a shock that the govt. routinely “revises” the old numbers (based on “more complete” estimates, one might argue) and that the revised numbers are routinely worse than the ones reported with great fanfare when they were new.  Once the shock has worn off, one could be forgiven for coming to one of two conclusions: 1) the numbers reported are a wild-ass guess, and not a particularly good one at that, or 2) the numbers are being deliberately manipulated for political purposes.  Which conclusion you reach is probably a function of how conspiracy minded you are and/or how evil you believe the folks running the government are.

Anyway, John Galt is worth a read on a regular basis.

The reason I mention this today is that I’ve been meaning to link to a 25 part series he wrote starting in November last year.  It’s a fictional account of what might happen if the powers that be decided to allow the dollar to crash and use the ensuing chaos to create the socialist utopia they seem to want in a matter of days, rather than a piece at a time as they are doing now.  It’s pretty well written, I found it compelling, and it’s also scary as hell to realize that an economic collapse is a tailor-made opportunity to end the United States as we know it and that most of the tools necessary to take advantage of such a situation are already in place.

He calls it a “blovel”, which I assume is short for “blog novel”.  It isn’t a short read, but I really urge you to make the time.  All 25 parts are collected in one place.  It’s called “The Day the Dollar Died.“

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2010 02 27 cziltang Economics
Nanny State
Politics Comments (1) Permalink

The greatest invention since the invention of the invention that was the greatest invention since the invention of inventions (except that it was invented before the invention that was the greatest invention since the invention of inventions)¡

One  of the nice things about the internet is that when you make a statement or take a position that is objectively wrong, any number of helpful individuals will step up, do the right thing, and point out your wrongness.  In the comments to my previous post, such an individual took time out of their busy and no doubt otherwise profoundly rewarding day to point out that I was guilty of such an error.

The folks at OpenSarcasm.org were kind enough to enlighten me as to a pre-existing, cheap, easy, painless, open-source punctuation mark to be used to denote sarcasm in written communication.  The Temherte Slaqî  (¡) is used in written Ethiopian in such a way.  ¡ is an elegant solution to the written sarcasm problem.

Where the Wielgus Mark (:W) is made by holding down the [Shift] key and then striking the [:] and the [w] keys, the Temherte Slaqî is made by holding down the [Alt] key and then striking the [1], the [7], and the [3] keys in succession.  The Weilgus Mark is simplistic, brutish, and crass; an altogether Americanish kludge of the most pedestrian sort.  The Temherte Slaqî, on the other hand, satisfies the need for a smug, exotic, international feel, has both historical precedent and diacritical accuracy in its favor, is currently being used by at least 9 people in an internet café in Addis Ababa, and has the added advantage of requiring an extra keystroke!¡

So, as of today, I will expect all sarcastic comments made here in the Ratlands to be labeled with a ¡, and the use of :W is hereby banned. :W

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2010 02 26 cziltang Errata
No particular point
Personal
blogspeak Comments (1) Permalink

Salvation of Sarcasm, or Sarcastic Salvation, or the greatest invention since the invention of inventions :W

Ponder the veracity of this timeless wisdom:

How many times have you written an e-mail or text or instant message where sarcasm is lost on the recipient? Millions? Billions? The result of the interaction is confusing and potentially devastating: awkward silence, non-response, your friend thinks that you’re seriously into some hard drugs.  The permutations of potential heinous results are infinite.  If this Internet thing is here to stay, it is only a matter of time before the slow erosion of sarcasm as an art form leads to a final fatal slip from social relevance.

The post introduces the Wielgus Mark (:W), a cheap, easy, painless, open-source punctuation mark for use in all electronic communications to denote sarcasm.  The best part?  It’s cheap, easy, painless, and open-source.  That, and it doesn’t confuse your browser like the old fake HTML </sarc> tag does.

After introducing the Wielgus Mark, and explaining it’s use, the post encourages you to spread the word on this most excellent idea:

Go out of your way….go the extra mile to find and accentuate Sarcasm in your everyday life.  If you have friends, tell them.  If you don’t have friends, tell random people.  If you don’t have friends and have agoraphobia use the Internet (see blogging).

I’ll get right on that. :W

2010 02 26 cziltang Media
No particular point
blogspeak Comments (1) Permalink

Steyn on Diversity

In a post about the Ft. Hood massacre:

The fact that a grown man not employed by a U.S. educational institution or media outlet used the word “diversity” in a non-parodic sense should be deeply disturbing. “Diversity” is not a virtue; it’s morally neutral: A group of five white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women is non-diverse; a group of four white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women plus Sudan’s leading clitorectomy practitioner is more diverse but not necessarily the better for it.

I don’t have more to say about this other than that I agree with Steyn: diversity for diversity’s sake is pointless. 

I try to hire as diverse a group of employees as possible, with 1 simple caveat.  The point of my hiring practices is not diversity, but competence:

  1. Every person I hire must be able to do the job.  Inability to do the job endangers the employee, their co-workers, the clients, and the community.  And by “endanger” I don’t mean inconvenience or annoy.  If one of my staff fail to do their job there is potential for actual physical harm to come to a variety of people.  And by “harm”, I explicitly mean “up to and (in a couple of past instances in our area but not, thankfully because of my staff), DEATH.”
  2. Within the set of people who can actually do the job, the more diverse the group of individuals we have working, the greater the chance any given client can find a staff member he or she can connect with.  That connection may make the difference between success or failure.
  3. Within the set of people who can’t do the job, diversity is irrelevant.  (see #1)

And I couldn’t resist quoting the quote.

2010 02 26 cziltang Corrections
Nanny State
Politics Comments (0) Permalink

More geekery

If you have no interest in dual-boot installations of Linux, come back tomorrow.  I promise I’ll be on to something else by then.

I installed Ubuntu Linux 9.10 on my 2nd hard drive a few days ago.  It’s a pretty easy install.  Either that or I’ve done it enough times that it isn’t quite as scary as it used to be.  The first couple of Linux installations I did (the first one was Mandrake and the second was an earlier version of Ubuntu) required partitioning the hard drive you were installing the Linux on and it was kind of daunting.  Ubuntu has automated most of that process, so as long as you don’t put it on your Windows hard drive (thereby wiping everything on your computer) it’s pretty smooth.

I’m just not as impressed with this version of Ubuntu as I have been in the past.  Again, it may be that I’m sort of used to it by now.  I’ve been very disappointed in the boot times and load times.  Waiting 4 minutes for the computer to boot and load isn’t a step forward.  The GRUB2 bootloader seems to take a long time, but it may be that I need to install it on my primary drive instead of the secondary  I did get into the BIOS and change the boot order, so, I’m not sure that would help.  I did do some tweaking and got the load time down quite a bit.

I did it for two reasons.  1)   I just like to be able to say I’m running Linux.  I’m not really a technogeek, but running a dual-boot machine with Linux gives me enough of a peek to that world that I can follow some of the geekery when I read about it.  2)  I’m trying to teach myself to program in Java.  I can run the Netbeans IDE in Windows, but if I do, I’ve got access to all my other regular stuff while I’m doing it.  I tend to get distracted easily.  I thought if I ran Netbeans in Linux, I would have less stuff available on the computer to distract me.  Probably overly simplistic, but I thought it was worth a try.

I’m not sure why I’m sharing all of this, but if anyone out there knows anything about speeding up the GRUB2, drop me a line.

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2010 02 16 cziltang Computers
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Cleaning out the browser tabs again

The organization I work for is on a major “sustainability” kick.  Generally speaking I don’t have a problem with most of the things they want us to do.  Saving paper, turning off computer monitors at night, and a number of the other “suggestions” they make fall generally into the category of not wasting resources.  If they were to package this as a “times are tough, money is tight, here’s some things we can do to save money so we can continue to provide essential services (and you get to keep your job)” campaign I would be all for it.  But instead of pushing the idea that making better use of resources stretches the tax dollars that fund us, they insist on packaging this stuff as some sort of community building/saving the planet from global warming social obligation.

I’m really tempted to send the powers that be a copy of this post about the meaning of the word “sustainability”.

Then there’s the post at The AnarchAngel about different conceptions of “civilized society.”  I don’t think it should be any surprise that I’m in the “nice group” camp.

Along the same lines as my previous post, you know how smoking bans are good because where they have been implemented, heart attack rates have fallen dramatically?  Yeah, not so much.

On a much different note, Gladiator Graveyard + Modern Forensic Science = an analysis of how Gladiators actually died (including an analysis of exactly which weapons were involved.

And, as long as I’m talking about science and death, how cool is this:  a way to kill cancer cell by shaking them to death.

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2010 02 14 cziltang Nanny State
Personal
Science/Technology
Socio-political Comments (0) Permalink

Discovering the premise was wrong won’t stop us from continuing to try to fix the problem by throwing money at it

“Poverty breeds crime” is one of those simple formulations that seems to be pretty much taken for granted.  Everyone knows it’s true, and it is one of the “givens” that we use, either directly or indirectly as a rationale for a variety of social programs.  Having spent 30 years working in corrections, one would think that I would be a true believer.

One would be wrong.  The longer I’m in corrections the more convinced I become that people are people and criminals are criminals and that one’s financial situation has very little to do with one’s criminality.  It does, on the other hand, have quite a bit to do with one’s criminal opportunities.  Poor people don’t have access to the situations that make embezzlement or bank fraud or securities fraud possible.  They have access to situations that make burglaries and theft and drug sales possible.  Burglaries and thefts and drug sales are by far easier to detect and prosecute, hence the preponderance of burglars and thieves and drug dealers in the corrections system.  The complexities of corporate law make it unclear in many instances whether a crime has even been committed, let alone who is responsible and who should be prosecuted.

I mention this only as background to talk about another leftist’s nightmare taking place around us.  If poverty breeds crime, with the economy tanking and 7 million jobs lost in the last 2 years, we should be seeing a spike in the crime rate.

Oops. Maybe wealth redistribution isn’t the answer.

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2010 02 14 cziltang Corrections
Economics
Nanny State
Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Too true

I saw this on a sign company marquee today:

Crime doesn’t pay

as well as Incumbency.

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2010 02 09 cziltang Politics Comments (2) Permalink

Because I’m killing the planet

There’s a woman who lives across the parking lot from me who has one of those little “box-on-wheels, I’m better than you because I’m saving the planet” cars.  I’ve never spoken to her, nor she to me, but when we meet coming or going in the parking lot she always glares up at me.

Personally, I don’t care what she drives or that she looks at me like I clubbed a kitten or drop-kicked a puppy in her front yard .  If she wants to squeeze herself into a crackerjack box so she can convince herself she is stopping global warming and is therefore a good person, that’s her business.  I could do without the hostility, but it really isn’t something I spend any time worrying about.  It’s like I heard Dr. Wayne Dyer say once, “What you think of me is none of my business.”

So, the other night I was taking the trash out to the dumpster and this woman was doing the same.  Now, from her front door to the dumpster is, maybe 100 feet, 75 of which is asphalt.  She comes charging out of her apartment with two trash bags, puts them on top of her “box-on-wheels,” hops in, fires it up and proceeds to drive 75 feet to the dumpster, at which point she jumps out, dumps the trash and drives the 75 feet back to her parking space.

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2010 02 07 cziltang No particular point
Personal
global warming Comments (1) Permalink

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