Why we put mercury in vaccines...

Why we put mercury in vaccines...  A deep dive for a lay audience, which I found very interesting...

Southern cops have a way with words...

Southern cops have a way with words...  Via my card-carrying ancient-American mom, this collection of quotes allegedly transcribed from the dashcam videos of South Carolina State Troopers:

"You know, stop lights don't come any redder than the one you just went through."

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

"If you take your hands off the car, I'll make your birth certificate a worthless document."

"If you run, you'll only go to jail tired."

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

"You don't know how fast you were going? I guess that means I can write anything I want to on the ticket."

"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?"

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

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

"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."

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

"In God we trust; all others we run through NCIC."  (NCIC is the National Crime Information Center)

"Just how big were those 'two beers' you say you had?"

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

"I'm glad to hear that the Chief is a personal friend of yours. So you know someone who can post your bail."

"You didn't think we gave pretty women tickets? You're right, we don't. Sign here."

Programming sucks...

Programming sucks...  I suspect every software developer has trouble explaining to non-developers how challenging it can be to write programs.  The intangible nature of software hides its size and complexity to anyone who isn't themselves a programmer, unlike just about any other trade you can imagine.  A carpenter, for instance, can point to a cabinet he just built – and anybody can see the heft and quality of his job.  Not so with a programmer.

This article attempts to cure that problem, and I think it does a pretty good job.  I'd love to hear whether my non-programmer readers think so, too.

There are quite a few passages in the article that I quite enjoyed.  Here's just one:

Every programmer occasionally, when nobody's home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It's a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It's concise. It doesn't do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.

Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they're told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers' snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.

Yes.  Exactly right! Well, except for the Scotch bit...

Tolls on the Interstate highways?

Tolls on the Interstate highways?  The long-standing prohibition has been removed by the Obama administration.  The linked article talks mostly about the fact that the gas tax (a fixed rate per gallon) hasn't been raised for over 20 years, and more gas-efficient vehicles use less gas and therefore contribute less gas tax.  That's all true, but leaves out another factor which is even larger in financial terms: the federal highway trust fund has been increasingly used for “green” that have nothing to do with highways, including projects like trains and metropolitan bus systems.  When the highway trust fund was initially established, it was envisioned as a way to maintain and extend the Interstate U.S. highway system, period.  It has since been “raided” for all sorts of stupid (but politically attractive) ideas.

I'd like to see the trust fund restored to its original purpose, and the gas tax switched to a tax based on mileage times weight.  I can see people throwing things at me already, as my notion would kill a few sacred cows.  However, the current tax system has two enormous distortions in it.  The biggest is that trucking is vastly under-taxed – trucks do the majority of wear-and-tear damage to our highways (because of their weight), but they don't pay a proportional share of the highway tax.  Second, the fuel-based tax effectively subsidizes alternative fueled cars, especially all-electric cars.

There's a refinement to my weight formula that's worth considering, too: using the load per square inch, rather than the total weight of the vehicle.  Such a refinement would encourage trucking companies to use vehicles with more tires (and lower air pressures in those tires), which cause much less wear and tear on the roadways.

But of course none of this will actually happen.  The politicians will keep raiding the trust fund, because it gets them votes.  The taxes will continue to be levied in an irrational way, because it costs less votes (and gathers more campaign contributions from special interest lobbyists).  And I'll continue to wonder whether Winston Churchill was actually correct when he said:

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Putin threatens astronauts...

Putin threatens astronauts...  Well, that's the headline on Drudge.  Reading the article, I get a slightly different impression: we're imposing sanctions on Russia, and Putin is letting us know that there are consequences to those sanctions to us.  That's something that is obvious to anyone who hasn't been hiding under a rock since about 1991 – ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian economy has been more and more tightly integrated with that of the rest of the world.

The rationale behind “smart diplomacy” is, fundamentally, that we have more tools than just military might to change the behavior of other countries.  Exercising military force has a heavy price in blood and treasure.  Exercising “smart diplomacy” has a heavy price in economic terms, usually very unevenly distributed.  That's the case here.  For example, western Europe has been buying cheap natural gas and oil from Russia for over 20 years.  Cut that source off (because of sanctions), and the price of energy in Europe will spike – and because energy markets are global, we'll feel it here as well.  However, if the sanctions are well-chosen the impact on Russia will be far larger, proportionally.

So who would expect Putin to just accept this?  The “smart diplomacy” rulebook says that Putin would see what the sanctions are going to do to him, and he would back down.  Putin's actual reaction is to strike back, by hitting back at us anywhere he can that would hurt, short of overt military action.  One place he can do that is with our manned space program, which is currently utterly dependent on Russian rockets and the capsules that return astronauts to earth.  I find his threat here to be completely predictable.  I think the right answer is simple: cancel the manned space program.  Abandon the ISS.  That will save the U.S. taxpayer a boatload of totally wasted money, while simultaneously cutting off a source of revenue that Putin is using to prop up an otherwise failed space program...

Some branches of science have challenges...

Some branches of science have challenges ... with valid, replicable studies.  It's a long, but fascinating piece...

Color me unsurprised...

Color me unsurprised...  How the U.S. Post Office killed digital mail – an object lesson in how a government bureaucracy can crush an innovative entrepreneur.

One quote from U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe in this story really caught my eye:

“You disrupt my service and we will never work with you.  You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers.  Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.”

That's enough reason right there to privatize the U.S. Post Office.  A private vendor would very quickly figure out who the real customer is, once that bulk mail subsidy disappeared.

And it occurs to me that one of those “junk mailers” would be the U.S. Congress with their franking privilege (free mail).  I see red every time I get one of those in my mail ... my tax dollars paying to help a bozo incumbent  stay in office...

You've probably never asked yourself...

You've probably never asked yourself ... where the world's longest conveyor belt was.  Recently I read another interesting factoid about conveyor belts (I can't locate the source right now): that around 90% of all the material used by mankind rides on a conveyor belt at some point during its manufacture...

World's deadliest killer...

World's deadliest killer...  It's not our fellow man (though he runs a close second): it's the mosquito.

There was a time, in my youth, when mankind was on the verge of winning the war against mosquitoes.  Then Rachel Carson's exaggerated (and sometimes outright false) accusations about DDT led to political action to ban DDT, and that ban indirectly killed more people than all the wars in the 20th century combined.  The effects of that ban are still killing hundreds of thousands of people every year...

Pro tip:

Pro tip: don't mess with Jerry Mitchell...

Oh, my...

Oh, my...  This raises all sorts of emotions and reactions in me...

While it's not especially surprising that the average American citizen doesn't know much about his or her own country, it's still disappointing and depressing to watch.  Even more depressing when you consider that these are the people who elect our federal government (which goes a long way toward explaining how we got the knuckle-headed bunch of evil clowns we have).

Is education the cure?  I think not, as I strongly suspect the real issue isn't a lack of opportunity to learn, but rather a lack of interest.  Does that make them “bad citizens?”  Not necessarily – but maybe it makes them citizens who shouldn't have a say in how this country is run.  I know some will think this heretical, but ... the more I watch my fellow citizens, the less appealing “one man, one vote” seems...

Excellent!

Excellent!  I was really disappointed when Mia Love lost in 2012 – but now it looks like she's clinched the Republican nomination, and therefore likely the 2016 election for Utah's (conservative) 4th District.  She impressed me with her no-nonsense views, excellent communications skills, and a brain that's still working well (a few years in Washington might change that, dang it).  The 4th District is an odd-shaped district just south of the Great Salt Lake – not far from our new home in the 1st District.  Conservatives are making a big deal of the fact that she's a woman, and black – but I wish they'd make a big deal of her competence and small-government stance...