Non-Breaking Shoelaces

For years I’ve be plagued with a stupid problem: I break the shoelaces on my hiking boots (which is basically the only kind of shoe I wear outdoors) with distressing regularity. Typically they last just two or three days before the first break occurs, and then I live with knotted repairs for weeks until I remember to buy a new pair. The most recent pair I replaced had six knots in them — and they’d been on my shoes for less than a week.

A couple of weeks ago, I got good and fed up with this situation. I’m tired of being a one-man subsidy for the shoelace industry! So I looked all over the web, trying to find shoelaces with a steel-cable core, figuring that they would stand up to my abuse. I failed in that effort, but I found something even better: Kevlar shoelaces, available from Gempler’s. I’ve had them now for a week, and I am delighted to report that they are so strong that I cannot even purposefully break them — much less accidentally.

I bought three pairs, but I suspect it’s going to be a long while before I need the second…

Orientation Ponder

This morning I prepared four envelopes for mailing out checks. I did it production-line stye: first I put stamps on all the envelopes, then return address labels, then stuffed the letters. But when I went to stuff the letters in, I discovered that I’d managed to affix the return address label and stamp on what we normally think of as the “bottom” of the envelope. It gave me a start, and for a moment I was even thinking that I’d have to throw them away and start over — until I realized that the notion of “bottom” was wholly an artificial construct, and that having the postage and address on “upside-down” wouldn’t make any difference at all to the function of the letter.

But my instinctive reaction got the ponder going, and reminded me of a couple of other more interesting examples I’ve heard over the years.

The first one I heard from a comedian (Bill Cosby?). It concerns the way we all eat a slice of pie. This comedian observed that everybody will turn their pie plate until the pointy end of the pie faces them. Why on earth do we do this? I’ve experimented with this, folks (it’s the kind of guy I am, and besides, it was a good excuse to eat more pie!). It makes no difference how the pie is facing, it’s equally easy to eat in all of them. Somewhere deep inside us, there is an “correct orientation” sensor — and it gets unhappy if we have our pie turned the “wrong” way.

The second one I read in a science journal. It was a report on an older piece of research, from the 1930s as I recall. An anthropologist visiting with the Eskimos of northern Canada noted something interesting: all but a few of the Eskimos, when viewing a photograph, would hold the photo in whatever orientation it had when it was handed to them. If they were looking at the photo sideways, or even upside-down, it didn’t make any difference to them at all. Those few Eskimos who did care about the orientation all had something in common: they had learned to read. This anthropologist leapt to the conclusion that visual orientation was irrelevant to humankind until reading was invented — at which time it became crucial. Interesting theory, but most anthropologists and biologists do not believe it’s correct. Gravity on the earth’s surface, just to present one example, definitely has a direction — and orientation to gravity matters a great deal, whether you can read or not. Still, the anthropologist made the observation (and it was subsequently repeated) — and the question remains: why don’t non-reading Eskimos care how a photo is oriented, when the rest of us seem to care a great deal?

I sure don’t have any answers — do you?

Referral of the Day

Someone found my blog this morning by typing this search term into Ask.com:

we have just moved to a rural area what is the red flag on the mailbox for?

As usual, they found my blog because all those words appeared in unrelated posts on the same day — not because I actually answered this question.

I am at a complete loss to explain how someone could live in the U.S. long enough to learn English, and yet not know what the red flag on a mailbox is for.

Or is this just the “country boy” in me? Is this really an obscure fact, only known to gun-toting hayseeds?

Global Warming

Just a few days ago, the Denver Post published an unusually balanced report on global warming. In it they quote meterologist Bill Gray. Dr. Gray is not a household name, but everybody knows his work — he is the preeminent hurricane forecaster, with a far better track record than anyone else in the world. He’s the forecaster the media quotes every year when they talk about the expected number of hurricanes.

Dr. Gray is a skeptic on global warming:

Gray is among the most strident critics, quick to use words like “fraud” or “gang” to describe the modelers.

Instead of model projections, Gray looks at the history and patterns of weather to find trends.

And befitting his 76 years, Gray has a long view. His first report on climate - on the return of the dust bowl - was in the early 1940s when he was in junior high school.

"We’d gone through a warming trend in the '40s, and everybody was saying we were going to win World War II but face terrible droughts,” Gray said.

Soon after, temperatures went into a cooling trend and by 1975, Gray points out, there was talk of a coming ice age.

The Earth does have natural cycles of cooling and warming - during the past 740,000 years there have been eight cycles with four ice ages.

The cycles appear to be tied to slight variations in the tilt of the Earth toward the sun.

During the last ice age - which ended about 10,000 years ago - Earth was on average about 4 degrees Fahrenheit cooler, and what is now Manhattan was buried under ice.

At some point the Earth will wobble on its axis again, setting the stage for an ice age.

There are other phenomena affecting global temperatures over time, such as El Niño, a Pacific Ocean warm-water mass that appears in roughly five-year cycles and changes world weather patterns.

And there is the Atlantic thermohaline current, a conveyor belt moving heat north on the surface and then dropping it to the ocean floor and heading back to the equator - a 1,200-year trip.

Changes in the current lead to changes in temperature. Somehow the models have to account for these natural variations too.

Gray believes that the warmer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are linked to a natural slowing in the thermohaline current, not the carbon dioxide.

Some of the models also show the current is slowing and that, along with warming oceans, adds to hurricane risks.

Dr. Gray is as skeptical of the model-based global warming forecasts as I am — but his weather forecasting credentials are impeccable, whereas mine are non-existant.

I’ll add one point this report didn’t cover: follow the money. Billions of research dollars each year are going to the global warming wing of meterology. Zippity-doo-dah is going to the skeptics. If you were an ambitious meterologist, what would attract you more? Hmmm???

Just one more reason why public funding of science is a mess…

Quote of the Day

In today’s edition of the Liberal Lickspittle Los Angeles Times, Max Boot writes with this conclusion:

The real enemy we face is not Islam per se but a violent offshoot known as Islamism, which is rooted, to be sure, in the Koran but which also finds inspiration in such modern Western ideologies as fascism, Nazism and communism. Its most successful exponents — from Hassan Banna and Sayyid Qutb to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden — are hardly orthodox interpreters of Islam. They are power-mad intellectuals in the mold of a Lenin or a Hitler. The problem is that the rest of the Muslim world, by not doing more to curb the radicals — whether out of fear or sympathy — lends credence to the most objectionable caricatures of their faith.

Read the entire thing.

Then marvel at its appearance in the bird cage liner of choice in Southern California. Quite likely, some editor there is being fired as I write — for surely it’s a firing offence there to publish a piece that doesn’t adhere to the blame-America-first crowd’s spin, and even worse, smacks of red state commonsense…

Shocked

I went “down the hill” today to run some errands, and as my gas tank was low, I filled up at the Jamul 7/11. I didn’t even look at the price, as past experience suggested that would be depressing.

So when my tank was full and the total was “only” $44, I was shocked, pleasantly so. Actually, at first I thought the valve had shut off prematurely and my tank wasn’t really full — but it was. The price was down to $2.55/gallon for regular, a level we haven’t seen in a long while.

Of course, this only sounds good because just a few weeks ago we were paying almost $4/gallon. It’s that old expectations game again — if you expect a price higher than the actual, why then you feel good about it. If, on the other hand, prices had been under $2 for the past few months, I’d have been shocked in a completely opposite way.

I think humans must be wired this way in general. There’s a simple experiment you can do to prove this to yourself in a dramatic way. Draw a bowl of lukewarm water and put it on the counter. Then draw a bowl of cold water, throw a few ice cubes in it, and put it on the counter. Then run the tap as hot as you can stand to have your hand in it. Put one hand in the cold water, and the other hand in the hot tap water, and leave them both there for a minute or so. You’re setting expectations: one hand will now “expect” to be cold, the other hot. After the minute is up, put both hands in the luke warm water — it’s a very surprising feeling! The hand that was in the cold water will perceive the lukewarm water as warm (or even hot!); the other hand will perceive it is cool (or even cold!). The same water, you’re own two hands, at the same instant, and they won’t be in agreement at all…

Quote of the Day

Charles Krauthammer, on the Muslim world charging the Pope with insulting Islam:

"How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I’ll kill you for it” is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge.

Read the whole thing.

Fowler Adventures

I recently acquired this Fowler’s Long Scale Calculator through an eBay auction. The right-hand photo is a front view, the left-hand photo a rear view. This clever little gadget works on the same principle as a slide rule, using logarithmic scales — but by using six circles to hold one scale, they managed to pack a 30-inch long scale into an instrument that’s less than 3 inches in diameter! You can read more about how to use one here if you’re interested.

When I examined it upon its arrival (from Scotland!), I discovered that it was not actually in working order — the black cursor on the front did not rotate when I turned the right-hand knob. Functionally, everything else was ok. Aesthetically there were several issues: corrosion at various places on the metal parts, some “junk” floating around on the inside, a badly scratched cursor disk (more on that in a moment), and various marks and splotches all over the scales on both sides. It wasn’t quite a disaster, but it certainly wasn’t the nice, shiny calculating instrument I was hoping for.

I decided to fix it, and to try to clean it up a bit. The first challenge was how to open the darned thing up — it wasn’t obvious at all. I asked on the sliderule newsgroup if anyone had ever opened up a Fowler’s, but got no response. I turned that thing every which way and could see no screws or fasteners at all — it looked like the two sides were simply pressed onto the “chassis” and held there by tension. So I took a block of hardwood, wedged it against the exposed edge of the front half (which fit tightly over the back half), and pushed. Hard. And it gave just the tiniest bit. I worked my wood block around the circumference, and after about 20 little pushes, the whole front just fell right off. The back half came off the chassis in a similar way. Whew!

When the front fell off, the reason for the black hairline not moving became obvious: the black hairline was etched into a clear plastic (celluloid?) disk (the aforementioned cursor disk), and that disk had come unglued from the brass post in the center (you can see this post on the photo). This is why the cursor disk didn’t rotate. I set that aside for later repair, and took a close look at the scales. To my surprise, the scales are simply printed on thick paper, which is then glued to a metal disk. The markings and dirt that I saw on those disks would not be as easy to clean as an ordinary slide rule, where I could use soapy water — sure don’t want to do that with paper! I’d read that a soft art or drafting eraser was a good way to clean paper scales, but I didn’t happen to have one of them around. But…I did have some Micro-Mesh polishing clothes — basically very fine abrasive (in several grits) embedded into a rubbery compound with a cloth backing. I tried the finest grit I had (12,000), and discovered that it worked very well indeed. In just a few minutes I had nearly all of the marks off the paper scales.

The next challenge was the cursor disk. The old glue was still stuck to both the disk and the post — the first job was to get all that off. I used dental picks to get the big chunks off, then used a small flat jeweler’s screwdriver as a chisel to scrape the rest off. I had to be very careful when scraping the post not to lose control of the screwdriver and tear the paper scale — and equally careful on the disk so as not to poke a hole in it. This was tedious! The cursor disk was very badly scratched, with circular scratchs from the motion of the cursor disk moving over the scale. This Fowler’s must have been used a lot to cause all that scratching! I’ve had some previous success with Novus plastic polishing compound, so I tried that — and got terrific results, albeit with a good deal of elbow grease required. I had to take great care here not to fold up the cursor disk as I bore down hard while polishing. It is very thin and flexible, and threatened to fold up (and almost certainly break) on several occasions. In the end, though, it was well worth while — that cursor disk is now as smooth and shiny as the day it was made. Not a scratch on it. I used Duco cement to glue the disk back onto the post, being very careful with the glue — I didn’t want to get glue on the scales, where it would have been impossible to clean up. So I squeezed glue onto a jeweler’s screwdriver, and then used the screwdriver to carefully “paint” the brass post with glue. This worked well, and now the Fowler’s was back in working order.

I was hoping to find a way to lubricate the gear mechanism, which is in the innards of the chassis. But I could not find any way to gain access to that area. The scales are mounted on metal disks that block all access, and those disks appear to be permanently fastened on. So I gave up on that part.

I used some Nevr-Dull metal polishing cotton to get all the corrosion off the exposed metal parts. While I was handling the back half, the glass fell right out — the glue holding it in had long ago dried completely up and given up on any adhesion. When I discovered that, I pressed gently on the front half’s glass, and it came right out as well. So then I cleaned up all that old glue, thoroughly cleaned both pieces of glass, and reinstalled the glass with Duco cement. That worked great.

After the glue set, I squeezed the back side back onto the chassis, and then the front side onto the back side. And I had a much nicer Fowler’s Long Scale Calculator than I started out with, not the least because now it worked!

Title

This morning’s Wall Street Journal features essays by both the Republican (Melman) and the Democratic (Dean) chairmen of their respective parties. Here’s Howard Dean’s conclusion:

Democrats offer America a new direction in fiscal policy, for the middle class, and in the war in Iraq. We believe that America should work for everyone:

We will restore honesty in government, starting with the pay-as-you-go discipline in Congress that served Mr. Clinton so well. Balancing the Federal budget will be a high priority with concurrent limitation of spending. We will ease the burdens on middle class Americans and reverse Republican cuts in college tuition aid and health care. We will ensure that a retirement with dignity is the right and expectation of every single American, including pension reform, and preventing the privatization of social security.

We will dramatically expand support of energy independence in order to generate large numbers of new American jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. We will have a jobs agenda that includes good jobs that stay in America, a higher minimum wage and trade policies that benefit the global labor force, not just multinational corporations.

We will have a defense policy that is tough and smart, starting with phased redeployment of our troops in Iraq, and shore up our efforts to attack al Qaeda and fight the war on terror. We also will close the gaps in our security here at home by implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations.

We are ready to lead with a thoughtful, fiscally responsible long-term vision. We will reach out to all Americans who value hope over fear and begin moving the country forward again.

Let’s take these one at a time, shall we?

We will restore honesty in government. Uh, right. The party of Clinton ("I never had sex with that woman!"), Nagin ("Chocolate City"), Daley ("I never met a man who couldn’t be bribed"), La Guardia ("The machine is greased with green"), McGreevey ("I confess!"), and Jefferson ("Doesn’t everybody keep $100K in their freezer?") is going to restore honesty. Sure. I’ll buy that one, right about the same time the sun stops rising in the morning…

We will dramatically expand support of energy independence in order to generate large numbers of new American jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Nice sentiment, hard to disagree with. But … this is from the party that consistently opposes expanding the exploitation of American sources of energy. Drilling in ANWAR, wind generation off Cape Cod, more oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico or off the Florida coast or off the California coast, oil extraction from shale and tar sands, coal mining, advanced nuclear power generation — you name the domestic energy program, and the Democratic party has long stood against it. And they still stand against it. So far as I can tell, the only domestic energy programs supported by the Democrats are those that don’t actually exist, or those that generate campaign financing from rich constituents (think Tom Daschle and his support for alcohol from corn). So now the Democrats are taking a completely opposing position? Nope, they still oppose all those programs I listed, and more. All they’re for is the warm sentiment, which I guess they hope will fool a bunch of voters into thinking they actually support a program that might, er, work. But no such luck, folks.

We will have a defense policy that is tough and smart, starting with phased redeployment of our troops in Iraq, and shore up our efforts to attack al Qaeda and fight the war on terror. “Phased redeployment” is Democratic doublespeak for cut-and-run from Iraq — Pelosi, Kerry, Kennedy, Dean, and Reid have made this very clear by declaring, over and over, that our “redeployment” should be unconditional. Unconditional on winning the war, that is. They want us to leave, tails tucked firmly between our legs, and let Al Qaeda and Iran have Iraq. I wonder how they believe that’s “tough and smart", or even “tough or smart”. Sounds more like “wimpy and idiotic” to me, like we’d be joining the likes of their heroes, the Chiracian cheese-eating surrender-monkeys. And what, you may ask, do they mean by shoring up the efforts to attack Al Qaeda? Well, the only concrete proposals I’ve seen from the Democrats are to stop any productive intelligence efforts, to treat terrorists as common criminals rather than as an enemy in wartime, and to run (quickly) from anything that resembles armed confrontation. Closer to the truth would be to say that the Democrats have been for shoring up Al Qaeda’s capability to attack us!

About half of adult Americans believe the Democratic party best represents their political positions. Presumably those folks would be nodding their heads in agreement as they read Dean’s piece. That simple fact sums up my concerns about the future of America pretty well…

UN Futility

Just a couple of months ago, after Iran had made it crystal-clear to the entire world that it had no intention of stopping its nuclear weapons development, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 1696. As the Wall Street Journal summarizes in a commentary piece ($) this morning:

In July, the Council adopted Resolution 1696, which noted “with serious concern that . . . Iran has not taken the steps required of it by the [International Atomic Energy Agency] Board of Governors.” The Council went on to express “its intention . . . to adopt appropriate measures under Article 41 of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations to persuade Iran to comply with this resolution. . . .” Article 41 refers to all legally binding measures short of war — sanctions, that is — to bring states into compliance with U.N. resolutions. The Resolution said Iran must cease enriching uranium by August 31, a deadline Tehran has openly flouted.

So, serious consequences? Not quite. Chinese Middle East envoy Sun Bigan has rejected sanctions on Iran as “detrimental not only to the region but also to ourselves” — the latter a reference to China’s oil imports from Iran, up 56% from last year. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov — who is selling Iran a $700 million air-defense system — also says sanctions won’t work. That sentiment was echoed earlier this week by France’s Jacques Chirac, whom the Bush Administration has claimed is a stalwart ally in stopping Iran. “I am never favorable to sanctions,” said the French President, adding that, if they are unavoidable, they should be “moderate and adapted."

In other words, it has taken less than a month for the deadline set by Resolution 1696 to prove to be absolutely meaningless, something Mr. Ahmadinejad predicted in April. Why then would the Permanent Five risk their credibility as an institution by setting a deadline in the first place? Why threaten sanctions if they have no intention of imposing them?

A very good question.

The WSJ’s editors go on to theorize that this is all part of a deliberate effort to persuade America that we can just “live with” an Iranian nuclear weapons capability. In other words, they speculate that the U.N. is actually the manifestation of a vast anti-American conspiracy — and they’re serious.

I think they’re wrong about that, just as most conspiracy theories are wrong. Much more likely, as always, is to find a way to explain the observations with some good old human stupidity. And I don’t think that’s difficult in this case, as the U.N.'s ineffective posturing and drawing lines on parchment is strongly reminiscent of the European’s “handling” of Hitler just prior to his commencing hostilities. Read about the period, and you’ll find that organized groups of liberal-minded fellows who were very adverse to open confrontation with Hitler made agreements with him, over and over. And over and over, Hitler ignored them, using bombast and propaganda to “explain” his actions. The world took a depressingly long time to finally wake up and realize what a monster Hitler really was. Before this moment of clarity (which came when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939), the historical record is full of events that look distressingly similar to the way the world is dealing with Iran today.

I have little doubt that if Iran actually manages to obtain a nuclear weapon, the world will have another such moment of clarity. And it will be even more clarifying than Hitler’s invasion of Poland, as it will likely involve the demise of an entire city. Tel Aviv or another Israeli city would be most likely, but I wouldn’t rule out a European or even American target, as Iran has quite sophisticated delivery systems, including very quiet diesel-electric submarines. My fond hope (which keeps getting dashed) is that the world will somehow come to a consensus before such an awful event, but I’m getting less optimistic about this as each day passes…

Tomcats Retired

When I first went out to sea in the U.S. Navy (in 1973), we were at war in Vietnam. The Navy’s primary mission was to support the war with its airpower, and the workhorse fighter/bomber was the F-4 Phantom. A year or two later, the radical new “super plane” was introduced to the fleet: the F-14 Tomcat, with amazing new capabilities. I remember watching the very first squadron of Tomcat’s operating off the USS Enterprise, which was in the same task force as my ship (the USS Long Beach).

This morning I read that the last F-14 Tomcats are being retired this week, replaced by newer and even more sophisticated aircraft. The Tomcat is now a museum piece.

What does that make me?

Chavez Ponder

Just in case you missed Hugo Chavez' completely loony speech at the U.N. yesterday, here’s a link to a decent news story about it.

Claudia Rosette said that the Chavez speech did more to demonstrate what’s wrong with the U.N. than years of gumshoe reporting ever did. She was mostly referring to the enthusiastic applause Chavez received as he made each of his deranged points.

TigerHawk said “What a maroon!", because Chavez expressed regret that he couldn’t meet Noam Chomsky, as he was dead. This was news to Mr. Chomsky, who is still plaguing the planet at 77.

Neo-neocon said (in Spanish): psychological help, quickly, please!

And I say this: that speech demonstrates what happens when a corrupt (and have no doubt, Chavez is profoundly corrupt) moonbat attains a position of effectively unlimited power. It ain’t purty…

Kofi

Automatic read.

That’s my reaction to seeing Claudia Rosett’s name on the byline. And this morning I read:

In a switch — sort of — Kofi Annan has finally agreed to fill out one of the financial disclosure forms now required of UN senior staff. But before anyone gets too excited about finally learning, as Roger Simon neatly put it, “How Rich is Kofi?” — or how, when, or if the Secretary-General might have parted ways with the Mystery Mercedes bought by his son in his name — remember that the UN is home to some of the world’s biggest veracity gaps.

Oh, you know that anything starting like this is going to be good! Go read the whole thing.

The more I learn about the United Nations, the more I realize how profoundly corrupt it is. This sordid little story is just one example of this, and isn’t so important for its own sake. Rather, it’s important because it’s evidence of the institutionalized corruption at the U.N., which I’ve concluded is at this point intractable — no amount of “reform” (which this disclosure requirement was part of!) is going to fix what’s wrong there. We need to start over.

Faster, please. I’m tired of having my face rubbed in U.N. shit. Even if it is Claudia Rosett doing the rubbing…

Political Science

The lamestream media is full of this story today:

Science group backs NASA lunar plans

A panel of scientists strongly endorsed NASA’s plans to return to the moon, saying in a report Tuesday that lunar exploration will open the way toward broader studies of the Earth and solar system.

"The moon is priceless to planetary scientists,” declared the special National Research Council panel of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists were asked to evaluate and give guidance to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s plans for robotic and human exploration of the moon over the next two decades.

President Bush two years ago vowed to return astronauts to the moon and establish an “extended presence there” in preparation for exploring Mars. He called on NASA to devote $12 billion over five years for the beginning of the program with a goal of landing on the moon between 2015 and 2020, and eventually landing on Mars.

For years I’ve been reading about planetary scientists having their funding slashed again and again, because manned space programs sucked up all the money at NASA. Time after time, real science programs that would have delivered real science at a bargain-basement price (compared with manned space programs) have been canceled, eviscerated, or “delayed” (as in “forever"). And now all of a sudden there’s a consensus amongst planetary scientists to support President Bush’s new $12B lunar boondoggle?

Not bloody likely! The National Academy of Science (and it’s mongrel offspring, the National Research Council) are, more than anything else, bureaucratic instituitions devoted to controlling the distribution of federal science funding. In other words, it’s a political animal, with anything a real scientist would recognize as “science” being very far down on their agenda. Gold dust is what gets these folks excited, not discovery, knowledge, and understanding. The panel so excitedly described above was formed for the sole purpose of providing this headline — because President Bush has almost zero support from the scientific community for his lunar and Martian windmill-tilting.

Here’s all you need to know to understand the truth of my analysis above: the majority of the panel members come from space industries. Doh! Of course they support the $12B manned space program boondoggle! Did I mention the $12B? Sure, they tossed in a journalist whose living comes from the manned space program, and a few scientists whose funding is related to the manned space program, just to give it a little credibility. If you don’t dig down more than a micron or two.

Big (as in big dollars) science is inevitably political. And all the more disgusting because of it. Hear the science pigs oink as they snuffle in their trough!

Iran

Well. And oh, my.

Just last night I posted about a joke, seeing it as a harbinger of a change in American thinking on the threat from Iran. This morning, as I made my rounds of news and blog sites, I see lots more evidence of this change.

In a commentary piece in the Wall Street Journal ($), Michael Rubin leads us through an analysis of the unserious Iranian approach to the nuclear “negotiations”. He concludes this way:

While diplomacy necessarily involves talking to adversaries, Washington should not assume that the ayatollahs operate from the same set of ground rules. During his long exile in Najaf, Khomeini endorsed taqiya, religiously sanctioned dissembling. From his perspective and that of his followers, the ends justify the means. Hence, Khomeini saw nothing wrong when he told the Guardian newspaper, just months before his return to Iran, “I don’t want to have the power of government in my hand; I am not interested in personal power.” Tehran may still conduct diplomacy to fish for incentive and reward but, at its core, Iranian diplomacy is insincere. The Iranian leadership will say anything and do anything to buy the time necessary to acquire nuclear capability. That Foggy Bottom still advises against any strategy that might undercut the possibility of some illusionary breakthrough signals triumph not of realism but of negligence. Diplomacy cannot succeed if one side is playing for real and the other only for time.

Translated into street English: the Iranian “negotiators” are lying through their teeth and their only objective is to buy their nuclear scientists and engineers more time to build nuclear weapons. Diplomatic efforts with Iran are worse than useless — they’re playing straight into the enemy’s hand.

Then yesterday at the U.N., President Bush gave an excellent speech that included this piece, where he spoke directly to the Iranian people:

To the people of Iran: The United States respects you; we respect your country. We admire your rich history, your vibrant culture, and your many contributions to civilization. You deserve an opportunity to determine your own future, an economy that rewards your intelligence and your talents, and a society that allows you to fulfill your tremendous potential. The greatest obstacle to this future is that your rulers have chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation’s resources to fund terrorism, and fuel extremism, and pursue nuclear weapons. The United Nations has passed a clear resolution requiring that the regime in Tehran meet its international obligations. Iran must abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions. Despite what the regime tells you, we have no objection to Iran’s pursuit of a truly peaceful nuclear power program. We’re working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis. And as we do, we look to the day when you can live in freedom — and America and Iran can be good friends and close partners in the cause of peace.

I interpret this not as diplomacy, but as an effort to win the hearts and minds of the 70% of the Iranian population that is under 30 and largely secular. I hope (and believe, based on the little bits and pieces and hints that have emerged over the past couple of years) it’s true that this public part is but a tiny piece of a much larger and more vigorous covert effort.

And then after the Pope started speaking frankly about the need to apply reason to the clash between fundamentalist Islam and the rest of the world, the former Archbishop of Canterbury gets into the act in a classy way:

THE former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton has issued his own challenge to “violent” Islam in a lecture in which he defends the Pope’s “extraordinarily effective and lucid” speech.

Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.

“We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times,” he said. “There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths.” …

Lord Carey, who as Archbishop of Canterbury became a pioneer in Christian-Muslim dialogue, himself quoted a contemporary political scientist, Samuel Huntington, who has said the world is witnessing a “clash of civilisations”.

Arguing that Huntington’s thesis has some “validity”, Lord Carey quoted him as saying: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

Which gets right to the heart of the Iranian regime’s motivations for acquiring nuclear weapons. That last bit is particularly interesting — Lord Carey believes there is no practical distinction between fundamentalist Islam and mainstream Islam on this question. I hope he’s very wrong about that last bit, as mainstream Islam is a lot bigger foe than the fundamentalists.

And then I read in der Spiegel that other Arab countries are starting to talk about an “Arab bomb” (again). It seems they’re worried about Iran’s nuclear weapons development program will upset the balance of power in the Middle East — the Persians of Iran are historically enemies of the Arabs. And it’s also very clear that the Arabs aren’t buying the Iranian’s posturing about their “peaceful” nuclear program.

Is the world suddenly waking up to the Iranian and fundamentalist Islamic threats, and starting to treat them seriously? Oh, I hope so — it would be so comforting (for me, and the West) if that is true…

Beware Americans Bearing Jokes

This joke is making the rounds on email lists:

The Iranian Ambassador to the UN had just finished giving a speech, and walked out into the lobby where he met President Bush. They shook hands, and as they walked the Iranian said, “You know, I have just one question about what I have seen in America.

President Bush said, “Well, anything I can do to help you, I will."

The Iranian whispered “My son watches this show 'Star Trek' and in it there is Chekhov who is Russian, Scotty who is Scottish, and Sulu who is Chinese, but no Arabs. My son is very upset and does not understand why there are no Iranians on Star Trek."

President Bush laughed, leaned toward the Iranian ambassador, and whispered back, “Because it takes place in the future."

I would council the mad mullahs of Iran that when Americans start making jokes like this, that means they’re thinking about the context the joke was made in.

We’re thinking about Iran and the threat it represents.

One way to eliminate the Iranian threat is to eliminate Iranians. This isn’t very likely, of course. But if we’re making jokes about that, the fact is that less, er, complete measures are becoming thinkable — when just a few months ago, for most Americans, they were not.

Watch your back, President Ammabammapajamahead…

Misplaced Concerns

These past few weeks have seen a lot of debate about how we will treat the prisoners we take in the war on terror. On one side we have those concerned that we’re torturing prisoners, with the concern stemming from moral issues or worry that it will endanger prisoners our enemy takes, or both. On the other side we have those concerned that we are endangering ourselves by not aggressively interrogating prisoners who may have valuable information.

This whole debate seems fundamentally crazy to me. I’m having trouble believing that the first side is even serious in their position…

The argument that Americans captured by the enemy would be endangered is easily dispatched: those Americans are quite likely to have their throats slashed or their heads cut off right now. Exactly how would they be more endangered? The concern expressed is that if we violate the Geneva conventions, then the bad guys will, too. But…the bad guys are already completely ignoring the Geneva conventions — how could they ignore them any more completely? And then there’s the pesky little detail that the lamestream media seems to totally ignore: the Geneva conventions explicitly do not apply to a non-uniformed enemy, or to an enemy that themselves ignores the conventions. What a dumb argument, McCain!

The moral issues are less amenable to logical dismemberment, as in the end they rest on the beliefs that individuals have. For me, this is very straightforward: my belief is that if an enemy vows to kill my country’s citizens, and uses any method at his disposal to do so, then we are morally obligated (not merely permitted) to fight back with any means at our disposal. So … if an enemy attacks us by flying airplanes into buildings, torturing and beheading our soldiers and citizens, using their clergy to whip up mindless and unfounded hatred amongst their faithful, then … I believe that we are morally obligated to fight back by any means we can. So I have absolutely no problem with using any interrogation method to extract useful information from prisoners we take from this enemy, and I don’t much care whether they survive the interrogation. I was furious at the recent reports that we refrained from killing over 100 Taliban and Al Qaeda because they happened to be at a cemetary — to me, that’s political correctness gone completely amok. Again, I think we are morally obligated to attack our enemy no matter where he happens to be — and that includes cemetaries, mosques, museums, and apartment buildings.

Can any of my readers make a cogent argument on the other side? Can you explain to me why we should show any mercy at all to our merciless enemy?

Dring & Fage

Recently I managed to acquire an old slide rule, made in England by the firm of Dring & Fage sometime around 1820 or 1830. Its construction is interesting — it’s made of boxwood, with brass fittings to hold it all together. The scales on the slide rule are hand-engraved; it must have taken dozens and dozens of hours to make them all. The one I bought is still in great condition, and works just fine.

But what has proven to be the most interesting aspect of this slide rule is its purpose. Most (though not all) modern slide rules are purely mathematical instruments — you can use them to multiply, divide, obtain logarithms, make trigonometric calculations, etc. The Dring & Fage slide rule can be used to multiply and divide, but its real purpose is to compute taxes and duties on alcoholic beverages stored in barrels. It was used by people who worked in ports, warehouses, and other facilities where barrels of booze were bought and sold.

The taxes were based on the amount of alcohol, which is a function of the total volume of liquid in the barrel (they were often only partially full) and the “proof", or percentage of alcohol in the liquor. So the tax assessors carried around a little kit, with a long ruler to measure the depth of the liquid in the barrel, a hygrometer (a set of glass balls of calibrated specific gravity) to measure the percentage of alcohol in the liquid, and a slide rule like the one I have. The slide rule was used to compute the volume of liquid in the barrel, then multiply that times the percentage of alcohol to get the total alcohol content — which gave you the tax basis for the barrel. These kits were called “proofing kits", and the slide rules in them were called “proofing rules”.

Calculating the volume of liquid in a partially full barrel is a non-trivial exercise in three-dimensional geometry. The barrels are not cylinders (that would be easy!) as their sides are curved outwards. It turns out that the barrels used back then all had sides that were, in cross-section, shaped like a small section of a circle. There were only a few basic shapes of barrels used, and they could all be characterized by the radius of these circularly shaped sides and the diameter of the barrel’s top and bottom. With a proofing rule, you could calculate the volume of liquid in a barrel with just a few quick movements of the slides, so long as you knew the diameter of the barrel’s top, the height of the barrel, the radius of curvature of its sides, and the height of the liquid in the barrel. The only challenging thing there is the radius of curvature, and this was handled by the barrel industry standardizing on just a few (about four or five) “varieties” of barrels, known as “Variety A", “Variety B", and so on. Each variety had a fixed radius of curvature. And the proofing rule has a separate scale on it for each curvature.

I was surprised how widespread such a sophisticated tax basis calculation was, so very long ago. So far as I know, the tax folks today don’t have to deal with things like this (though this could just be my ignorance)…

New Restaurant

A gang of us went out to a late lunch today at a new restaurant in Jamul: the Venetia. It’s an Italian restaurant, though their menu has a number of things on it that are not Italian at all (e.g., jambalaya and chicken noodle soup). The restaurant is located in the little strip mall just behind the 7/11 at the intersection of Campo Road (94) and Steele Canyon Road.

We had a great meal, with dishes that uniformly surprised us with their excellent quality. Between the four of us we had salad, minestrone soup, clam chowder (excellent!), garlic bread (it will make your brains fall out!), lobster ravioli (very good!), mozzarella/sausage/mushroom pizza (yum — watch out, Filippi’s!), fettucini with sun-dried tomatoes, artichokes, and chicken (great!), and tira misu (mmmm!). Even the iced tea was very good, and that’s something that’s often mediocre even at nice restaurants. Including a nice tip (because the service was very good), we ended up spending about $23 per person. We thought that represented a very good value for what we got.

After the meal, we introduced ourselves to the proprietor (Sam), who told us things were going well — and expected to go even better soon, after they get their liquor license. I suspect he’s right about that!

We’ll be back to the Venetia regularly, I suspect. Next time you’re in the mood for a nice Italian meal, give it a try — I don’t think you’re likely to be disappointed…

Misbehaving Tree

Last night it got down to 47F here — a harbinger of autumn. And as a direct result, the morning here was just lovely, in the 60s and low 70s. So I thought I’d tackle one of my many queued-up outdoors jobs, queued up because the summer heat makes working outdoors just unbearable.

I decided to work on pruning our pine trees. This is something we have to do every two or three years. The Italian Stone Pines (pinus pinea) that line our driveway have the rather stupid habit of growing their branches straight outwards until the weight of the branch causes it to droop to the ground, or snap, whichever comes first (it’s about 50/50). These longer branches are always the bottom branches, since they’re the oldest. So over time, I’ve been pruning off the branches higher and higher up the tree trunk. On some of my biggest pine trees, the lowest branches are now erupting from the trunk at 12 or 13 feet off the ground. Sometimes I don’t cut the branches at the trunk, but rather at some distance out. When I do that, I’m usually aiming to keep the branches at least 8 feet high, so we can see clearly under the trees.

So this morning I had my biggest step-ladder out. It’s not really very big — only six feet tall — but when I stand on the next-to-top step I can reach branches about 12 feet off the ground, so it works out pretty well. As I’ve often done before, I was standing on the next-to-top step, sawing away at a branch. This one was about 3 inches in diameter, and the end I was cutting off was about 18 feet long, drooping down to almost ground level. When I saw over my head like this, I’m always careful to put the ladder toward the side that’s NOT falling, even though that means I have to cut sideways (which is quite difficult, physically). This is because for some silly reason I’ve always believed it would be a bad idea to have the branch fall on me (or the ladder).

Something very odd happened when I cut this branch: somehow it snapped and the cut end moved up, hesitated for a moment, and then moved straight toward my face, quickly. This was, to say the least, quite disconcerting! So I did what came very naturally — I dodged it, moving my upper body to the right. But remember where I was standing — my feet almost six feet in the air at the top of a stepladder. Of course when I dodged right, my feet and the top of the ladder went to the left — Newton’s principle of action and reaction demonstrated. The end result was that my whole body rotated clockwise (from my perspective) until I was horizontal in mid-air, and my feet left the ladder (which then continued to fall over).

That’s what you call an “Oh, shit!” moment. There I was, holding a very sharp saw, about 8 feet above the ground with nothing but air under me.

I knew that I didn’t want my head, a hand, or a foot to be what hit the ground first, as I might actually hurt something badly that way. So I pitched the saw away, and tucked my hands and feet in. That had the disconcerting effect of making me spin faster, and I could see that I’d be doing a half-somersault and landing on my back. I remembered reading somewhere that if you’re going to fall, you should try to hit on your back, but off to one side of your spine — that’s where your ribs have the strongest resistance to impact. Somehow I managed to squirm around so that I’d hit a little bit on one side. This all happened in a fraction of a second, but it sure seemed like a lot longer!

When I hit the ground, it was just below my right shoulder, slightly head down. What happened next made me feel a little bit like an acrobat or a gymnast — and anyone who knows me knows that this is a most unlikely thing! When I hit the ground, I rolled from my shoulder down my side to my hip, and the momentum popped me right back up on my feet. I stood there in complete astonshiment for a minute or two — I had just fallen off a rather tall ladder fully expecting to end up in a pile of broken bones and mangled flesh — and not only was I completely unhurt, I ended up on my feet!

I’ll bet I couldn’t do that again if I tried a thousand times…

The biggest problem ended up being finding my saw — I threw it a good 75 feet away, and it ended up about 5 feet high in a manzanita…

Terrorist Moms

Tip of the hat to Rick P. for the first terrorist pun I’ve heard yet:

Two Muslim mothers are sitting in a cafe chatting over a pint of goat’s milk. The older of the mothers pulls her bag out and starts flipping through photos and they start reminiscing.

"This is my oldest son, Mohammed. He’s 24 years old now."

"Yes, I remember him as a baby,” says the other mother, cheerfully.

"He’s a martyr now, though,” mum confides.

"Oh, so sad dear,” says the other.

"And this is my second son, Kalid. He’s 21."

"Oh, I remember him,” says the other, happily. “He had such curly hair when he was born."

"He’s a martyr, too,” says mum, quietly.

"Oh gracious me,” says the other.

"And this is my third son. My baby. My beautiful Ahmed. He’s 18,” she whispers.

"Yes,” says the friend enthusiastically, “I remember when he first started school."

"He is a martyr, also,” says mum, with tears in her eyes.

After a pause and a deep sigh, the second Muslim mother looks wistfully at the photographs and says:

"They blow up so fast, don’t they?"

Groan…

But this leads to a ponder… I’ve noted on quite a few occasions the proud comments of the parents of a jihadist 'martyr' who has blown himself up. These parents sound like an American parent whose kid made the winning run in a Little League baseball game. But their kid is dead, and in a violent and gruesome manner — killing innocent people in the process. Is there any more crystal-clear example of the differences between the culture of radical Islam and the culture of the West? Such a thing would be utterly unimaginable in our culture…

The liberals would (and do) argue that all cultures are morally equivalent; they urge us to make no judgment about other cultures based on our own mores.

To which I say “Bullshit!” I refuse to grant even the possibility of moral equivalence to a culture that celebrates the death of innocents, that takes joy in the 'martyrdom' of its children, and which believes that it is their duty and obligation to kill me and the people I love. Nope, radical Islam is a culture that is distinctly inferior and primitive by comparison with ours. And if they insist on maintaining jihad against the West, then I believe we (in the West) have no choice but to grind their sorry asses into camel feed.

And if that’s not politically correct, well then that’s just too damned bad.

Inevitable In Iran

Some time ago I concluded that there was only going to be one way to stop the threat of nuclear weapons in Iranian hands: direct military action. Diplomacy has been a complete failure; Iran is 'playing' the West with the greatest of ease.

Charles Krauthammer agrees with this, and has written an interesting piece about the calculus. His conclusion: yes, military action will be costly, both in blood and in treasure — but it must be done. His conclusion:

... These are the costs. There is no denying them. However, equally undeniable is the cost of doing nothing.

In the region, Persian Iran will immediately become the hegemonic power in the Arab Middle East. Today it is deterred from overt aggression against its neighbors by the threat of conventional retaliation. Against a nuclear Iran, such deterrence becomes far less credible. As its weak, nonnuclear Persian Gulf neighbors accommodate to it, jihadist Iran will gain control of the most strategic region on the globe.

Then there is the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days. The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age. Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini’s ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map.

Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?

These are the questions. These are the calculations. The decision is no more than a year away.

Yup, he’s got it.

I just hope we can muster the courage (are you listening, Mr. Bush?) to take action — unilaterally if necessary — before the mad mullahs demonstrate their new power by vaporizing London, Munich, Paris, or New York…

Scary Referrals

My blog, like all blogs I know, keeps track of “referrals” — the web pages with links to my blog that someone clicked on to visit my blog. The vast majority of these referrals to my blog come from search engines, and sometimes they’re quite funny or surprising.

But check out this referral I got about two hours ago:

Google referral: “structural evaluation” collies “naked women” gerbils “oil price"

WTF?

What kind of a mind would ask this question? And what is the question, anyway?

Sometimes I think it might be better not to know something. This just might be one of those times…

On the Ground

A friend (thanks, Jim M.!) forwarded this email, sent to the father of an Army Captain (Rangers, Special Ops) on the ground in Afghanistan. Read it:

Dear Dad,

Tell people that doubt the US should be here to travel over here, particularly women and liberals. The only women here that advocate the Taliban or al-Qaeda are those that know nothing else, and are effectively brain washed. But they dare not say or do anything with another Afghan around that might tell the woman’s husband, father or brother, who would probably beat them to death for speaking to an infidel without a tribal elder or father as chaperone, even when seeing a medical team, which we try to get them to regularly. They can see medics and doctors only when in a large group and even then only with a father or older brother there.

The way women are treated here is that they are property and nothing more. The livestock is treated better because they have monetary value and women don’t. Just two days ago I saw a grown man strike a little girl in the head with a rock because he could. They work morning till dusk like slaves while the men sit around and do largely nothing. They do all of the work over here while the men busy themselves with killing each other, or other trivial things. The way women are treated is so bad that about 70% of the men, even in the cities, prefer to have sex with boys because they view women as not worth having sex with. There is a saying here that “Women are for babies, boys are for sexual fun.” Such a sad culture. The Koran says homosexuality is wrong, but to these people if a man is married to a woman and has sex with another man, that’s not being a homosexual. If two single men have sex, they are executed. I thought a homosexual act is a homosexual act, whether married or not.

Hard to accept, but boy sex slaves are kept in the man’s house and treated as their own child by the wife, otherwise she is beaten. When the boy reaches puberty, he is released to go back home, but most don’t and join a Wahadi group which are Taliban or al-Qaeda.

Remember the tribal battle I told you about that started when a father and uncle of a 10 year old boy were killed because they objected to his being taken as a sex slave by the leader of another clan. Such is life in this part of the world.

Oh yeah, another custom the outside world ignores, especially the UN, NATO and EU authorities. If a girl or woman is raped, she is the guilty one and is put to death, usually by stoning with her father and brothers casting the first stones. I have sadly come across the aftermath of this several times when traveling through villages. The family will leave the girl where she died for days, which means she can’t go to heaven in their belief. The first time I wanted to stop and bury the young girl we were told was 15, but both interpreters said if we did there would be an instant gun battle as infidels interfering with a Muslim.

The civilized world has two choices, either change it by being here or stay home and allow it to spread, because they live only to kill the infidels so they can spread their beliefs and customs. When in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, my Muslim counterparts often told me the militant and fundamentalist Muslims are growing stronger and will some day rule the Middle East. As far back as 1989 some of the CIA men I know told me that someday Muslim’s will rule the world because of their fanatical battle against the “infidels” is growing stronger and the Western countries are in denial and think they can be negotiated with.

Irma and I are looking into adopting some kids from here, to get them away from this hell-hole. Tell those people that said Afghan women don’t want change to get out of their comfortable living room, and travel some before they come to conclusions.

Kevin Boyd

CPT, IN

I have never been able to figure out how American liberals could reconcile their anti-war views with the facts outlined above. Just to pick on one example, I would have expected American feminists to whole-heartedly support the military efforts to eliminate the oppression of their Afghan sisters. Instead we get platitudes about the stylishness of burqas.

Reading Captain Boyd’s description of conditions in the areas he’s operating in reminds me, once again, of this strangeness. I think there’s a deep message somewhere in here about the mindlessness and hypocrisy rampant in modern American liberalism, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. Part of it, I’m sure, is that two irreconcilable liberal viewpoints are in tension here: equality of all people vs. equality of all cultures. To the modern liberal, both of these are a given — but in Afghanistan (and everywhere else fundamentalist Islam prevails), the culture says that women and children are not equal at all. If you have a liberal mindset, how do you reconcile these two issues? How can you be simultaneously supportive of the equality of women and the equality of the Islamic culture? Tilt!

For me, this is not a quandary at all — I reject the notion that all cultures are equally valid, equally worthy, or equally good. I have no conflict here at all.

But what does a liberal do when confronted with this? From the evidence at hand, it appears they just avert their eyes from the plight of women in Afghanistan — while (in some cases) supporting the likes of Khatami, Chavez, Nasarallah, and so on. Their actions, if not their words, indicates that in their minds cultural equality trumps human equality. Let the women of Afghanistan and other Islamic regimes suffer, so we can proclaim the cultural equality of fundamentalist Islam.

What crap.

Cop Comebacks

But who knew they collected 'em? Seen out in the wild, on the web:

The following 15 Police Comments were taken off actual police car videos around the country.

#15 “Relax, the handcuffs are tight because they’re new. They’ll stretch after you wear them a while."

# 14 “If you take your hands off the car, I’ll make your birth certificate a worthless document."

#13 “If you run, you’ll only go to jail tired."

#12 “Can you run faster than 1,200 feet per second? Because that’s the speed of the bullet that’ll be chasing you."

#11 “You don’t know how fast you were going? I guess that means I can write anything I want to on the ticket, huh?"

#10 “Yes, sir, you can talk to the shift supervisor, but I don’t think it will help. Oh, did I mention that I’m the shift supervisor?"

#9 “Warning! You want a warning? O. K., I’m warning you not to do that again or I’ll give you another ticket."

#8 “The answer to this last question will determine whether you are drunk or not. Was Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?"

#7 “Fair? You want me to be fair? Listen, fair is a place where you go to ride on rides, eat cotton candy and corn dogs, and step in monkey poop."

#6 “Yeah, we have a quota. Two more tickets and my wife gets a toaster oven."

#5 “In God we trust, all others we run through NCIC."

#4 “How big were those 'Just two beers' you say you had?"

#3 “No sir, we don’t have quotas anymore. We used to, but now we’re allowed to write as many tickets as we can."

#2 “I’m glad to hear that Chief (of Police) Hawker is a personal friend of yours. So you know someone who can post your bail."

AND THE WINNER IS....

#1 “You didn’t think we give pretty women tickets? You’re right, we don’t. Sign here."

Puppy Time

Miki is now seven months old, which is kind of “early adolescence” on the doggie time scale. Think 13, 14 year old kid and you’d be about right. Daily we see him turning from a puppy into an adult dog.

Yesterday, on a short walk down to our mailbox and back, he did two very new things.

First, on the way back up the hill from the mailbox, he suddenly stood stock-still and stared intently into the sky. I was watching him, not the sky, so I didn’t see at first what he was looking at. I noticed that whatever he was looking at seemed to be standing still, and that it had his complete attention. My guess at that point is that he was watching a bird preening on the telephone pole, or something along those lines. Then he abruptly sat down, threw his head straight up, closed his eyes, and commenced a full-throated howling that would have made any coyote proud. I looked up to see what he was looking at — and of course it was the moon. In broad daylight the moon (about half full) wasn’t very conspicuous, but it had Miki’s full attention. He howled for several minutes, while I laughed at him. It was very cute, but … after a minute or so, tiresome. Plus I worried that our neighbors a mile or so away might not think this 400 decibel howling was cute. Finally I got him distracted, and we continued toward home.

Where we had our second adventure and new experience for the day.

In our fenced yard, I took Miki off his leash to play fetch with him. I used an unopened pine cone, rolling it down our driveway for Miki to chase and catch, and proudly bring it back to me so I could throw it for him again. If only people were so easy to please! On what I was planning to be the last toss, perhaps the 20th of the day, Miki took off after the bouncing pine cone as ususal, running straight down the driveway. But then he started curving off to the left, and he sped up until he was going startlingly fast — and ahead of him was a rabbit, running for its life. Miki caught the rabbit and dispatched it within seconds in a very … professional … way, very matter-of-factly. Then he ran back after the pine cone and returned it to me, ready for me to toss it again.

We have two adult field spaniels (Mo’i and Lea) who have been trying to catch rabbits for years. It’s their favorite sport, and sometimes with think the rabbits enjoy teasing our dogs by staying safely out of reach. Mo’i has been spotted with a couple of dead rabbits, but we suspect those were either already dead when he found them, or there was something wrong with them, as we’ve watched Mo’i easily outpaced and fooled by the rabbits many, many times. Miki, on the other hand, ran down a perfectly healthy adult rabbit running at full tilt. The little guy is fast.

This gets the ponder going… Will he keep that speed on the agility course? If he does, he’s going to be a formidable competitor…

PO Ponder

As some of you know, I have a slightly odd hobby: I collect calculating machines, especially slide rules. The majority of these slide rules are purchased through eBay or some other online source, and then they’re shipped to me. The slide rules come from all over the world, including from places that used to be considered quite exotic: Belarus, Bulgaria, Paraguay, Thailand, and Russia, to name just a few. And of course a lot of them come from the U.S.

Many of the U.S. shippers use a standard box available from the Post Office. This box is roughly 15” x 12” x 3", which is a good fit for a lot of the 12” slide rules (this was a common size). Over time, I’ve received well over a hundred of these boxes.

Which leads to the ponder. These boxes all have, on one end, a little pull tab whose purpose is to give the recipient an easy way to open the box. And such an easy way would be much appreciated. But…on every single one of these boxes I’ve ever received, this pull tab has failed. Usually it’s because the plastic strip you’re pulling is broken or missing somewhere along the line. Sometimes it just breaks. Whatever the reason, the think always fails. It’s become a kind of game with me — each time I get one of these boxes, I try a new way of yanking that strip. I’ve tried slow yanking, fast yanking, and 50 speeds in between. I’ve tried yanking straight up, yanking sideways, wiggling as I yank. All to no avail. Today I tried whistling and standing on one foot while yanking — it broke right in the middle.

What is it with the Post Office (a quasi-government “corporation")? How can they go for years and years buying a faulty product? Well, that’s an easy one — it’s a government agency, and there are no consequences for screwing up. Probably the company who makes these inferior boxes makes the appropriate bribes political contributions, and magically they get the contract each time.

BTW, FedEx and UPS both have a similar box. They work first time, every time. I’ve never had one of theirs fail. I can’t make them fail!

Capitalism works.

Government executes poorly, on a small scale or a large scale.

Where Has This Been?

In yesterday’s New York Post, I found this remarkable bit of commentary, excerpted below. The problem is that it is remarkable, whereas it should be commonplace:

September 12, 2006 — WELL, here it is, five years late, but here just the same: an apology from an Arab-American for 9/11. No, I didn’t help organize the killers or contribute in any way to their terrible cause. However, I was one of millions of Arab-Americans who did the unspeakable on 9/11: nothing.

The only time I raised my voice in protest against these men who killed thousands of innocents in the name of Allah was behind closed doors, among the safety of friends and family. I did at one point write a very vitriolic essay condemning their actions, but fear of becoming another Salman Rushdie kept me from ever trying to publish it.

Well, I’m sick of saying the truth only in private - that Arabs around the world, including Arab-Americans like myself, need to start holding our own culture accountable for the insane, violent actions that our extremists have perpetrated on the world at large.

Yes, our extremists and our culture.

Every single 9/11 hijacker was Arab and a Muslim. The apologists (including President Bush) tried to reassure us that 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam, but was a twisting of a great and noble religion. With all due respect, read the Koran, Mr. President. There’s enough there for someone of extreme tendencies to find their way to a global jihad.

We need much more of this from the Islamic world. Faster, please.

I suspect that this sort of awakening in the Islamic community is the only thing that stands a chance of avoiding a horrible, prolonged, and very costly war that will inevitably result in the defeat of the Islamic world. The course the world is on now (think of Iran) will see escalating provocations from the radical Islamic fundamentalists, which eventually will awaken even the French surrender-monkeys from their mindless slumber. That is, if the high birthrate amongst Muslim immigrants doesn’t hand them France earlier in a more, er, entertaining sort of war. Once the Western world is united against radical Islam — and this will happen if enough Europeans are killed — then a much more conventional war will be fought. It will be costly to both sides, but much more so to the Islamic world. I cannot imagine any action of the United Nations (in its current form) preventing this outcome, nor can I imagine any action on America’s part — though I think George W. Bush’s foreign policies are about as good as we’re likely to get in that direction (and I shudder to think what 2008 might bring us in the way of a replacement). But recognition within the broader Islamic community that their brothers are the problem just might provide the path to a less violent solution.

Trouble is, I don’t think there’s much of a chance of that happening. But I can always hope…

SMASH vs. Code Pink

Lt. SMASH (an outstanding milblogger who should be on your daily reading list, and not just because he’s from San Diego) confronted a Code Pink group in front of Walter Reed Hospital recently. He also interviewed a couple of soldiers — wounded Iraq war veterans — who had done a little confronting of their own. “P.D.” and “Mason” are the vets in this excerpt (but don’t neglect to read the whole thing:

P.D.: We tried to explain to them that we were fighting for freedom. They said “no."

Mason: And then they basically told us that if we weren’t there, the terrorists wouldn’t be there. And that the terrorists, you know, even though the terrorists murder civilians, and children, that if we left it would all… stop. And I… I literally saw, with my own eyes, families be executed by ‘em. And I don’t think it would matter if we were there or not. The terrorists are terrorists. That’s what they do.

P.D.: It’d be a lot more people getting executed if we weren’t there.

SMASH: Did you try to express any of that to the folks down there?

Both: Yes, sir.

SMASH: And how was it received?

P.D.: It was received negatively. They were closed-minded. They have their beliefs, and they won’t even open their minds to what we believe.

SMASH: They weren’t interested in dialogue?

P.D.: Exactly.

Mason: The majority of ‘em, ninety-nine percent of ‘em, didn’t even look us in the eye. Wouldn’t even turn and acknowledge our presence.

P.D.: Yeah, they wouldn’t even turn around and look at us.

SMASH: Do you feel that they’re being sincere when they say they support the troops? Or do they think they’re sincere?

P.D.: I don’t feel they are.

Mason: One or two, maybe. But the majority, no. Not at all. I mean, if you really support the troops, as we said before, you’d turn around and talk to us. Acknowledge us. You know, all these people here (indicates the pro-troops rally), we walked out, and they said “thank you,” you know, “how are you feeling?” Those guys (indicates Code Pink) say, “Don’t talk to them.” That guy literally came out and said, “Don’t talk to them."

Lt. SMASH wonders if this is what Code Pink means by “supporting the troops.” Indeed. But then, we all know that the lying bastards are not, and never were, all about “supporting the troops"…

Columbian Justice

Can you even imagine an American politician dealing with this situation? The only pol I can imagine handling it well is, well, Arnold:

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - They are calling it the “crossed legs” strike.

Fretting over crime and violence, girlfriends and wives of gang members in the Colombian city of Pereira have called a ban on sex to persuade their menfolk to give up the gun.

After meeting with the mayor’s office to discuss a disarmament program, a group of women decided to deny their partners their conjugal rights and recorded a song for local radio to urge others to follow their example.

If this actually works, I wonder if it could be used here?

Ikea Threat

This weekend, the last remaning American who hadn’t shopped at Ikea (me) took the plunge. America’s assimilation into the Ikeain empire is now complete.

And I’m very worried.

It all started when I researched bookcases on the web, and discovered that there were really only three choices: (1) outrageously expensive solid wood bookcases, worth more than the books I’d be putting on their shelves, (2) surprisingly inexpensive particle-board bookcases whose shelves deflected approximately six inches for each sheet of paper you put on them, and (3) Ikea bookcases made of particle-board, veneer, and some reinforcements that were modestly priced and quite strong.

So (with a friend to lean on) down the hill I drove, on Saturday, to the “local” Ikea store in Mission Valley. I was expecting it to be a nightmare, but it was far worse than I imagined. This store was designed by a sadist to trap you in turbulent traffic, I believe to force you to look at their wares as you try to get around the mom with three squalling babies who decided to change a diaper in the middle of the narrow path. This so-call “show room” was absolutely packed with people who uniformly (and unaccountably) seemed to be having fun. I suspect they were all Ikea employees with the explicit job of keeping me in the showroom as long as possible. I didn’t try this, but I’ll bet if I offered to buy something — anything — the horde would have parted to let me through to it.

Eventually, and with a newly acquired headache, I managed to figure out that you can’t buy anything in the “showroom”. Instead, you have to find your way to the “self service” section on the first floor. This place is almost impossible to find unless you follow the signs, and if you do that you end up meandering (very slowly) through the entire “show room” (which is about 250 acres in extent). But my friend and I eventually made it to the self-service area, located the bookcases I wanted, paid for them, and made our escape from Ikea.

I thought that was the end of it, but in fact the nightmare was just beginning.

I’ve purchased many pieces of factory-made particle-board furniture over the years. Every business I’ve had, and all my home offices, have been furnished with such pieces. Every piece I’ve ever purchased in the past, no matter whether it was the cheapest crap at the bargain store, or the top-of-the-line crap at Office Depot, shared some common traits. So I knew that I could look forward to an interesting and challenging experience putting my new bookcases together, as they were of the same ilk.

And this is where I discovered the real Ikea threat: they are out to destroy the manhood of America. Ordinarily it takes a real tool-bearing, foul-swearing man to put together a piece of particle-board furniture. The man (it always seems to be a man!) assembling the furniture must face head-on and conquer one threat after another. Usually it starts with missing parts, which the man must synthesize from whatever is lying about the home and yard. If it takes gnawing a branch off a tree, that’s what you do. Then there’s the extra parts, which forces the man to exercise extreme creativity to find a place for. Then there’s the particle-board parts that don’t fit right, which requires the man to break out the heavy tools (sometimes including jackhammers and chain saws) to force them into place. The aesthetics of the furniture usually suffer in the process. But when the process is finished, the man knows he’s accomplished something, well, manly — he’s taken the random collection of parts sold to him as a piece of furniture, and constructed something with them that’s usable, if not pretty.

Ikea has ruined this.

I bought five bookcases from Ikea. There wasn’t a single extra part. There wasn’t a single missing part. There wasn’t a single part that didn’t fit perfectly. The instructions were all pictures — I didn’t even have to read them. There was no manly challenge at all. My dogs could easily have built these bookcases and got it right.

Ikea is destroying the manhood of America.

Nicholas P. Rossomando

Nick Rossomando — “Nicky Love” to his many friends — was one of the 2,996 Americans killed on 9/11. He was a fireman, a member of the elite Rescue Company 5. Though he was off-duty when the planes hit the World Trade Center, he responded to those first calls with the rest of his company. He jumped on the truck with them, and ran into the World Trade center with them.

Nick Rossomando was an American. He was a hero. And he was killed by Islamic terrorists when the World Trade Center collapsed.

My tribute to Nick Rossomando is here.

We must never forget Nick Rossomando, or any of the 2,996 Americans killed by terrorists on that day. Please take a few moments to read more about Nick Rossomando.

Never forget.

(This post will remain at the top for a while; new posts will appear below it)

Big Oil

Most of the lamestream media accounts of this find that I’ve read have spun it as something minor and unimportant. I first read of the find in business news, where they tend to be more concerned with facts (imagine that!) than ideology. So I knew it was a big — make that huge — deal. It took quite a search for me to find even one newspaper article that got it right:

And it could increase U.S. domestic reserves by 50 per cent. Only part of that overall total, however, could be attributed to the Jack prospect, which some analysts said Tuesday is likely to amount to 500 million barrels.

Whatever the ultimate size of Jack, its true importance lies in when it was discovered — earlier this decade, rather than in the 1960s or 1970s, said Mr. Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research Inc. It is proof positive that higher commodity prices and improvements in exploration technology can result in major new discoveries, he said.

And of course that was in their business section.

The best indicator of the import of this find is this: worldwide crude oil prices dropped 2% within minutes of the announcement, and they’re continuing to drop.

Business runs on facts, and business seems to have assessed this discovery as a major event (a 2% drop in oil prices is many millions of dollars each and every day). So why is the lamestream media spinning it as nearly irrelevant? The only reason I can think of is that a major oil find undermines their ideology-driven agenda to have governments force a switch from fossil fuels. If major amounts of fossil fuel are found, it…detracts…from the urgency of making that switch.

This is, I suspect, why you also won’t read about another inconvenient fact: if you measure “oil reserves” by what’s actually in the ground and economically extractable at current oil prices (rather than at an arbitrary price, as is the standard used today), then for each of the past 12 years, proven reserves have increased. Yup, we’re finding more oil than we’re using. We aren’t going to run out of oil next week, or the week after. In fact, the way things are looking at the moment, we’re not going to run out of oil for something like 80 or 100 years…

Why?

Internet Impact

A friend emailed me today, mentioning how profoundly communications have changed, even in her lifetime. And that got the ponder going…

I suspect that a few decades from now, historians will look back at the phenomenon we call “the Internet” and note that its biggest impact was on the ways that people communicate with each other. Sure, all that other stuff like online shopping, information at hand, etc. is really cool — but just think about how much we’ve changed the way we talk with each other!

It wasn’t all that long ago — about 150 years ago — that the only way (other than face-to-face) people could communicate was via a letter in the mail, or through a printed publication of some kind. These things took days at their very fastest, months or even years (for a large book, for example) at their slowest. Conversations with someone far away were long drawn-out affairs. I have a good example of this in my family: my uncle saved the letters he exchanged with his mother (my grandmother) in World War II; hundreds of them in all. I’ve read them, and it’s fascinating to see how a conversation evolves over a period of months — dealing with letters gone missing, letters arriving out-of-sequence, and censors blacking or cutting out sections. One particular conversation (about managing apple trees) went on for 8 months. On a telephone call or email exchange, that would have taken maybe two minutes. That sloooooowness gives these conversations an entirely different “feel” from what we’re used to today…

I have a little exposure to the “letter” modality myself. As a child (about 10, I think) I had a “pen pal” for a while. Do you remember pen pals? Talk about an obsolete concept! But back then, they were rather a big deal. My pen pal was a little boy in Perth, Australia, by the name of Perry. That’s just about all I remember about him — but I do remember how awkward it was to keep up a conversation when the medium took so long to deliver messages (a few weeks each way). Today, of course, we’d just send email back and forth, or use one of the instant messenger applications — or even Skype an Internet phone call. Wait for a letter? I don’t think so!

Think about all the ways that the Internet has given us to communicate: email, instant messenger, voice-over-IP (phone calls), web sites, blogs (like this one!), podcasts, Internet radio, and…I’m sure I missed a few others. And more ways will pop up, because that’s what people really seem to want on the Internet. It’s instructive, I think, to see how explosively sites like YouTube (video sharing), Flickr (photo sharing), and MySpace (sharing…anything) have grown. There’s a common theme, of course — they are all ways for us to communicate, using this enabling technology called the Internet.

My crystal ball long ago bit the dust. I’ve been spectacularly bad at predicting future technology trends. But one prediction I think is pretty safe: the Internet will continue to become more and more available, more and more ubiquitous. For example, the FAA is on the verge of allowing cell phones to be used in-flight. There are very good Internet connections available via cell phones these days — so I’m sure a lot of people will use this new privilege to remain connected to the Internet while in flight (which is, of course, one of the few places where today you can’t easily connect). WiFi is getting more and more widespread. Broadband technologies are reaching into even very remote places — where I live, for example, satellite Internet access just recently became available at an attractive price. I don’t think the day when we can be on the Internet, at broadband speeds, no matter where in the world we are. What will that do to the way we communicate? Why have a cell phone, for instance, when you could simply Skype over your remote Internet connection? Why carry around storage media for your camera or video camera, when you could simply send the photos or video over the Internet — no matter where you are — to some storage facility available there (straight to Flickr or YouTube, for instance)? Think about it — if you knew that no matter where you were, you’re connected to the Internet — what things would be different? I’ll wager it would be a lot of them, starting with all the ways we communicate.

On a personal level, the Internet’s communications tools have radically changed this guy’s life. I now routinely “talk” with friends all over the world, in places that not so many years ago would have seemed very exotic: Bulgaria, Thailand, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Estonia, and many others. Through my work, my hobbies, and my blog, I’ve “met” so many nice people (and really very few not-so-nice). I have extensive conversations (generally by email) with a few dozen of them. Some I’ve even met face-to-face — and I have standing invitations in cities all around the world. I think it’s safe to say that none of this would have happened without the Internet.

Now of course the Internet does many things for me. It’s an essential tool in my work (software engineering). But if I think about the single most profound impact the Internet has had on me, it’s clearly communications. Not all that other stuff, however pleasant and convenient it is…

BOLO

Just got word from my mother that they don’t know where my father is. He was supposed to travel from Philadelphia to Halifax, Nova Scotia today (through Boston). My brother dropped him off at the airport, and they haven’t heard from him since. What they have heard is that both segments of his flight have been canceled.

So…

If you happen to see a balding botanist wandering around with a confused look on his face, drop me a line, would ya? He could be anywhere by now — he’s hard of hearing, and he could easily have wandered somehwere he shouldn’t have. Like, say, a shipping crate bound for Botswana, or a hotel in the wrong part of Philadelphia…

Sigh…

Update:

The wandering botanist has been spotted in Boston. Apparently the airline managed to get him that far, and then put him up in a hotel for the night. For reasons known only to himself (and possibly not even that), he didn’t bother to call either my mother or the people who were supposed to meet him in Halifax.

Then, to top it off, he discovered that he can’t get into Canada these days with just his good looks — he needs a passport or a birth certificate. Which, of course, he doesn’t have with him in Boston. So…with a bit of scrambling and telephone help, I talked my mom through scanning his birth certificate to a file, emailing it to me, and then I faxed it to the airport. Sheesh!

I think my dad’s in big, big trouble when he gets home. And maybe when he gets to Halifax, too — worried people on both ends are ready to strangle him. Perhaps he should consider moving to somewhere out of the way … Madagascar comes to mind…

Update 2:

My dad finally made it to Halifax. He’s apparently not happy about the experience. No word on whether he understands just how much he perturbed the equinamity of his family and friends…