Octopodial Chrome

I like to write my 1s with a little tail, as is common in Europe, Mexico and various other places; the only problem is that it can be confused for a 7 (which I write with a stroke, to differentiate it). Back in 2001 I was very happy because every cheque I wrote had the 1 in 2001 on it, thus preventing confusion. At the end of 2001 I was so dejected because the next year with a 1 or 7 would be 2007, which was so very far away. Now 2007 is almost over, and it seems like just yesterday it was 2001.

I’m headed downtown to celebrate the new year—until 2008, I remain your host, Bob Uhl.

A Florida man bit down on a rare purple pearl which was in a plate of clams he was eating. It turns out that it could be wroth a few thousand dollars. Not too shabby for a $10 meal!

Way back in 1994, Rob Horn gave an excellent tip: randomly restore one file from backup every week. If you have data which you care about (and you do, whether you know it or not), it needs to be backed up. And if it’s being backed up, you need to test that backup system regularly to ensure that you’ve not forgotten something or been bitten somehow. Restoring one random file per week is a good practise to follow.

Dr. Atul Gawande explores the history of childbirth. It turns out that there’s a very good reason for the prevalence of C-sections: the outcomes are better when average over the population of physicians (that is, the alternative methods are better with a highly-skilled obstetrician but worse with normal ones, so on average a C-section is safer). Reading the article, I am intensely glad that I am a man.

Slate points out that Starbucks actually helps mom-and-pop coffeeshops. It turns out that Starbucks creates a market for coffee consumption, and that this generates a spill-over effect for other (better) coffeeshops. One guy in Los Angeles actually opens new coffeehouses near existing Starbucks locations! It’s pretty cool how economics can be counter-intuitive sometime—and a good warning who’d like to interfere with the market.

The Los Angeles Times reports on the growing prevalence of upside-down car loans. One couple bought five vehicles in three years (trading in as they went), owing $43,000 on two trucks worth no more than $29,000. The problem boils down to this:

1. People want cars they cannot afford
2. Lenders offer them longer payback periods so that the monthly payments are more reasonable
3. The cars depreciate faster than the loan is paid off, leaving the owners owing more than their cars are worth
4. The owners trade their cars in for larger, more expensive cars—and tack the old debt onto the new loan, perpetuating the cycle

This is similar to the sub-prime loan crisis, with a key difference: there’s a chance that a home will appreciate but no chance that a car will.

It’s getting to the point that I wonder why I save. These people and the sub-prime morons did stupid things and will no doubt be bailed out, with the money I’ve been saving. So why don’t I just go spend, spend, spend my way to a happy tomorrow, and let someone else pay for my mistakes?

From reason comes a great article, Hooded Progressivism: the secret reformist history of the KKK. It reinforces the thesis of Liberal Fascism—that progressivism is inherently anti-liberty.

It turns out that the KKK of the 1920s was racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic—and politically progressive, pushing for such progressive ideas as eugenics, compulsory public-funded education and alcohol prohibition.

A Chicago lawyer keyed a Marine’s car and is resorting to shenanigans to get out of it. On the first of this month, Jay R. Grodner (a Chicago-area lawyer) keyed the car of a Marine due to return to Iraq on the 2nd of January. He was arrested and issued a citation; when the bill for the damage came it totalled $2,400 which makes the charge a felony; the lawyer offered to settle for paying the Marine’s deductible and letting the insurance company pay the rest; the Marine refused; Illinois is refusing to pursue the felony charge.

The next court date is today, the 31st; the lawyer plans to file for a continuance because in two days the Marine is headed back to Iraq. Publicise this, and let anyone you know in the Chicago area about what’s happening.

There’s a disturbing trend in popular Christianity: the infantilisation of Jesus Christ. Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said, and I quote, it’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people. Ummm, it wasn’t a little boy who fed five thousand: it was a grown man.

The film Talladega Nights made reference to this absurd phenomenon when the hero (a stereotype of a redneck) is always praying to sweet baby Jesus.. It did this so much I was almost offended—but then I realised that there are people who do perceive the Lord, God and Saviour as a perpetual child. Yes, Jesus was born as a child; He then proceeded to grow up, preach, teach, suffer, die, conquer death and rise from the dead. The Pre-eternal Word may have been born into this world as a baby, but He left it as a man.

I think this is related to the change in understanding of the angels. In the Bible and the Fathers, angels appear as young men; they are wise and powerful creatures. Angels are not pretty young women; in fact, calling a girl or a baby an angel shows a very deficient understanding of the word. The cherubim are the second-highest rank of the angelic powers; they have four wings and many eyes; one’s reaction to seeing one would be fear and awe. A cherub is not a cute little baby with wings; it’s pretty much the opposite in terms of majesty and dignity.

Patrick Smith writes about the absurdity of our airport security measures. They are intrusive, they are ineffective, they are simply an exercise in theatre: the TSA pretend to do things that will protect us; we pretend that we are protected.

Here’s a cool video of how a man turned his 5.3 mpg gas guzzler into a 36 mpg truck. Now that’s impressive!

Former representative Pat Schroeder (embarrassingly, from my own state) hates libraries. To quote her, we [meaning publishers] have a very serious issue with librarians. Good to see yet another Democrat standing up for civil liberties. You can always rely on a Democrat, whether it’s freedom of speech, freedom to read, freedom to bear arms or the simple freedom to live: they’re on your side. Not.

I also like how she says, Technology people never gave their stuff away. I’m writing this blog entry in emacs, a text editor written by Richard Stallman, using the HTML-editing mode written by James Clark; it’s running on Linux, a kernel written by Linus Torvalds; that’s bundled together with GNU and many other pieces of software to form Fedora. I’m reading Mrs. Schroeder’s nonsense in Firefox, a web browser originally written by Netscape engineers.

Every last piece of software I’m using was given away. I do have a single piece of proprietary software on my computer: JungleDisk, to handle remote backups. I’ll get around to rewriting it one of these days (and giving my own code away for free), but for now I’m fine using it.

So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Pat Schroeder!

Slate recently turned me on to the smartest article on the drug war you’ll read all year. It’s really good, examining how we spent thirty-five years and $500,000,000,000 on losing the War on Some Drugs. Mark Kleiman has a similarly excellent article in American Interest, which you also need to read.

We shouldn’t be fighting drugs: we should be fighting the crimes which surround drugs. Exxon and British Petroleum station owners don’t shoot one another on the street; rival liquor stores don’t hire thugs to intimidate customers of their competitors; pharmacists don’t attack one another—neither need drug dealers. We can eliminate drug-dealer violence completely.

Despite that car owners are more addicted to gasoline than a heroin addict, they don’t kill to get their gas; the rate of theft due to alcoholics stealing to buy booze is fairly low; the number of people who mug in order to afford their Prozac is minimal. We can reduce drug-user violence a great deal.

We’ve used the War on Some Drugs to prop up failed states who promise to stamp out drug production; we’ve used the War on Some Drugs to knock the feet from under the War on Terrorism (we are starting to fail, badly, in Afghanistan because this administration is so blinded by anti-drug hatred that it is willing to lose its only Middle East success story); we’ve used the War on Some Drugs to drastically alter the balance of power between citizen and state (take a look at the civil asset forfeiture statistics some time); we’ve used the War on Some Drugs to deprive those in pain of recourse; we’ve used the War on Some Drugs to attack what is a basic human right: the right to determine what does or does not enter your body.

When will you step up, do what is right and oppose it?

The Daily Mail reports that playing with guns is a vital part of boys’ development. The response from nannies and teachers? To stick their fingers in their ears and pretend that little boys are little girls instead.

Todd Seavey has a top-notch review of Jonah Goldberg’s new book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. It covers the connexion between progressivism and statist authoritarianism, detailing the fundamental similarity between Wilson, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. It sounds like an absolutely fascinating book.

The DEA proudly announces that they have made their first arrest for buying cold medicine.

It’s fairly probably that Mr. Fousse did actually intend to produce methamphetamine from the cold medicine. I’m puzzled, however, as to which provision of the federal constitution gives Congress the right to forbid said manufacture, or to forbid the purchase of more than a certain amount of cold medicine in a month.

Messrs. Gilbride and Flynn should be ashamed of themselves. I wonder how they sleep at night.

We’ve all heard of the exploits of criminal profilers—the psychologists who take a look at a crime scene and provide a profile of the criminal responsible. It’s pretty common now for a whodunit television series to feature a profiler; Criminal Minds is about an entire team of profilers.

I’ve always been a little suspicious of their utility, since a lot of their guesses seem like no-brainers. It’s pretty much a given that a criminal is a man (not that women aren’t criminals too—just that female criminals are much rarer, and so absent pretty convincing evidence to the contrary it’s best to focus on guys); it’s pretty much a given that he’s twenty to forty (less than twenty and he’s a kid; more than forty and there are good odds that a criminal is incarcerated or dead); even predicting race isn’t too difficult, given the distribution of crime-committing across the races.

It turns out that I was right: criminal profiling is essentially cold reading (the technique used by sham psychics): it uses techniques such as the Vanishing Negative, the Fuzzy Fact and so forth to form a profile. After the fact, when the villain is apprehended, people think that the profile matches the villain—but in fact the profile is vague enough to appear to match pretty much anyone!

Half of the world’s population—three billion souls—host a parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii; this parasite is known to change behaviour in rats (it makes them lose their fear of cats), and it appears to do the same in man. Is half of the world’s population being controlled by a microbe? This would possibly explain the popularity of football.

A fool of a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has led her students in a frivolous, self-important mock constitutional convention, complete which over-serious theatricality and rights which aren’t rights at all, e.g. a right to affordable housing, a right to sports and the other such addled products of juvenile minds and a yet more juvenile professor.

It’s truly pathetic what has become of our educational system. We no longer produce free citizens of a free republic; we now produce thugs who would gladly use the State to take from some and give to others, and expect to be thanked for their efforts.

Back in 2005 Steve Kellmeyer wrote a pretty good indictment of the modern holiday season in two parts. He points out some stuff I didn’t really know (but have since confirmed), the most interesting of which is that the Christmas season didn’t stretch from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve but from Christmas to Candlemas. This accords with my own sense of the seasons as an Orthodox Christian (Mr. Kellmeyer is a Roman Catholic): every feast is preceded by a fast, and followed by a festal season; thus it’s appropriate that Advent (or Christmas Lent, as we are wont to call it) be a penitential season of preparation and that Christmastide be a festal season.

It also makes sense from a social point of view (remember that for centuries Christianity was the backbone of society): give people a season of fasting immediately after the last harvests so that they don’t run through their winter food supplies too quickly, then when winter is half over relax the restriction so that they might have a little fun as spring approaches.

Kellmeyer also notes that Michælmas (the twenty-ninth of Septemeber) had become the day to settle rents and collect accounts. At first I wondered if this is why the government fiscal year starts in October, but it turns out that until 1976 it began in July. The Wikipedia entry on fiscal years does not that the tax year in the United Kingdom is based on the ecclesiastical calendar (in that instance, taxes are due on the Gregorian conversion of the Julian Annunciation).

Courtesy of the New York Times comes this list of a few medical myths that even physicians believe: that one should drink eight glasses of water a day; that we use but 10% of our brains; that hair and fingernails continue to grow after death; that shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, dark or coarser; that reading in dim light ruins one’s eyesight; that eating turkey makes one especially drowsy; and the cellphones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals. Just goes to show that even a degree is no guarantee of correctness.

Economist Stephen Rose bursts five myths about the suffering middle class with some facts—something generally in short supply.

Back in 1989 Alan Kay (the creator of SmallTalk) gave a talk on predicting the future to the 20th anniversary meeting of the Stanford Computer Forum. It has many insights, but my favourite is that we predict evolutionary changes, not revolutionary ones.

Cluster ballooning is tying oneself to large numbers of helium balloons and flying therewith. This looks so fun.

This past September’s Vanity Fair had a great article about the legacy of the Little Rock school integration as seen through the life of Elizabeth Eckford. Reading all that now, it’s hard to imagine that people cared that much about something as stupid as preserving segregation.

A Florida man defended his apartment against burglars; the police arrested him and let the burglars go. Why exactly are we paying for police forces which isn’t legally required to protect us, which doesn’t protect us and which stops us from protecting ourselves?

From the Joy of Tech, Christmas past and present.

Mark Bauerlein reviews Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, a memoir written by an English professor at the United States Military Academy. The book sound interesting; the review is certainly worth reading in its own right. Its conclusion? Literature, history, and philosophy matter, and they do so less to students and teachers in the cozy quads of the college campus, ensconced in libraries and symposia, than they do to bedraggled, bored, and anxious officers sweating it out in the desert.

Hat-tip to Maj. D——.

Here’s an interesting fact: you save more gasoline going from 15 to 18 miles per gallon than from 50 to 100 mpg. This doesn’t seem to make sense at first—100 mpg is twice 50 mpg—but it’s actually true. The problem is that miles per gallon isn’t a linear measure. This is why in Europe they use litres per 100 kilometres (a somewhat ugly measurement, but that’s the Europeans for you); here we could use fluid ounces per mile.

Thus my car would get 3 ounces per mile, while a Toyota Prius gets 2.7 ounces per mile, a Honda Civic gets 4 ounces/mile, a Toyota Tacoma gets 5.6 oz/mi and a Dodge Durango gets a whopping 8 ounces per mile. Yes, that’s right: every mile you drive in a Durango burns an entire cup of gasoline!

A car which gets 15 mpg burns 8.5 ounces per mile; a car which gets 18 mpg burns 7.1—the switch saves 1.4 ounces/mile. A car which gets 100 mpg burns 1.3 ounces/mile, while one which gets 50 mpg burns 2.6—that switch only saves 1.3 ounces per mile.

This shows why averaging fuel economy figures just doesn’t work. Imagine a fleet with a dozen cars getting 14 mpg and one car which gets 48 mpg: the average fuel economy is 16.6 mpg which leads one to think that the fleet as a whole would burn 7.7 oz/mi. But convert those numbers to ounceage: 12 @ 9.1 oz/mi and 1 @ 2.7 oz/mi averages to 8.6 oz/mi—the fleet’s average mileage is really 14.9 mpg, not 16.6 mpg!

Miles-per-gallon is simply a deceptive unit.

We’re all familiar with Christmas (= Christ’s Mass), but do we recall the other old names for holy days? Here’s a brief list:

Childermas

The Feast of the Holy Innocents

Celebrated on the twenty-ninth of December, it commemorates the murder of children by Herod the Great in his attempt to kill Jesus.

Candlemas

The Feast of the Presentation of Christ

Celebrated on the second of February, it celebrates Christ’s presentation at the temple. In the West, it marks the end of the forty-day Christmas season.

Hallowmas

The Feast of All Saints (All Hallows)

Celebrated on the first Sunday after Pentecost (on the first of November in the West), this feast commemorates all the saints.

Lammas Day

Celebrated on the first of August, Loaf-mass Day is a harvest festival celebrating the first-fruits of the wheat crop; it’s traditional to bring a loaf of bread made from the new wheat to church on that day. It’s possibly a pagan survival, but I think it’s a commendable feast.

Michælmas

The Feast of Saint Michæl and All Angels

Celebrated on the eighth of November (on the 29th of September in the West), it commemorates archangels Michæl, Gabriel, Raphæl, Uriel, Selaphiel, Jehudiel, Barachiel and Jeremiel.

Martinmas

The Feast of St. Martin

This is celebrated on the eleventh of November. Interestingly, St. Martin was a Roman soldier and is considered a patron saint of soldiers, and his feast day is more widely known as Veterans’ or Armistice Day.

Those were all I could find. Anyone else have others?

Joy to the world—the Lord has come. Let Earth receive her king. Today Christians across the world (well, those on the Gregorian calendar anyway) celebrate the birth roughly 2,000 years ago of God. Think about that for a minute: we’re celebrating the birth of God. How is that even possible? How can God who predates time itself be born? How can He who is larger than the universe be held in a womb, or in His mother’s arms? And yet that is exactly what we believe: that the eternal God entered time, incarnated Himself in the virgin Mary and was born, and that His becoming a man is what enables Θεωσις.

Christmas is one of the twelve great feasts of the church. What it is not is a day of giving, or sharing, or charity, or family or any other such claptrap. Those things are good and proper in their place, but they are not what Christmas is about. Christmas is most definitely not about materialist consumer spending. It’s God’s birthday, period. Certainly, it’s appropriate to celebrate that birthday by giving gifts to loved ones and strangers—but that gift-giving is not the reason for celebrating, and the celebration is not its own reason for being: the Nativity of Jesus Christ is the reason for celebration, and what more reason do you need?

Merry Christmas!

I just found an article which details how Unix took a lot of difficult computer science stuff and made it easy for an end-user. Even in 1979, Unix had a lot of great capabilities. There are two problems: first, Unix hasn’t progressed very much since then; second, no-one else has even gotten this far (or at least, hasn’t gotten this far and succeeded). By now we should all be using Lisp machines; instead we’re all using technology that’s older than I am.

Jacob Gabrielson wrote a nice blog post giving some tips for effective use of emacs. I’ve managed to reduce my emacs start-up time from six seconds to one, which ain’t too shabby.

Steven Dutch writes about Thar, the world’s most toxic value system. A good examination of a major source of the world’s problems.

It turns out that secretly modified versions of Monopoly contained escape kits during World War II. Very cool stuff: they hid compasses, metal files, silk maps and so forth in the boxes, then had the Red Cross deliver them to POWs. The Germans didn’t examine the board games very closely, and so the stuff made it through.

I wonder if the Red Cross colludes to help all POWs escape, though. That might not be the best long-term idea, as it’d discourage states from allowing Red Cross care packages to prisoners of war…

Hat-tip to my brother Tom.

A lot of people don’t really understand why Lisp’s macros are so useful. I spent some free time this past week rewriting my beer tasting notes site, and here’s an example of an instance where Common Lisp’s object system and macros really came in handy.

A common need when writing CRUD web apps is to display one of a given class: information about a particular model of car, or an employee—or in my case, a particular brewer, beer, bar, style or whatever. After writing my first function I had something that looked like this:

(defun display-brewer (name)
  (let ((brewer (select 'brewer :where [= [name] name] :flatp t)))
    (if brewer
        (with-template (format nil "~a @ Tasting Notes" (name brewer))
            (modification-date object)
          (:table
           (:tr (:th "Average rating")
                (:td (str (if (rating brewer)
                              (make-sequence 'string 
                                             (rating brewer) 
                                             :initial-element #\*)
                              (htm (:em "No beers"))))))
           (when (plusp (length (notes brewer)))
             (htm (:tr (:th "Notes") (:td (str (notes brewer))))))
           (when (plusp (length (address brewer)))
             (htm (:tr (:th "Address") (:td (str (address brewer))))))
           (when (plusp (length (url brewer)))
             (htm (:tr (:th "Website")
                       (:td (:a :href (url brewer) (str (url brewer))))))))
          (when (beers brewer)
            (htm (:h2 "Beers") (:ul (list-objects (beers brewer))))))
        (progn
          (setf (return-code) +http-not-found+)
          (with-template (format nil "Error: Brewer ~a not found" name)
              nil
            (:p (fmt "Could not find a brewer named ~a." name)))))))

This looks pretty ugly if you don’t understand Lisp, but basically I just defined a function DISPLAY-BREWER which displays some brewer identified by a name. It does this by looking up (selecting) the brewer in a database; if it finds the brewer, then it’s displayed, else an error message is displayed instead.

The thing is, every single display function will look similar, indeed almost identical: to display a bar (also identified by a name), I’ll look it up by name, then if it is found I’ll display it, otherwise I’ll display an error message. DISPLAY-BAR would be:

(defun display-bar (name)
  (let ((bar (select 'bar :where [= [name] name] :flatp t)))
    (if bar
	(with-template (format nil "~a @ Tasting Notes" (name bar))
	    (modification-date object)
	  (:table
	   (when (food-rating bar)
	     (htm (:tr (:th "Food rating")
		       (:td (str (make-sequence 'string 
                                                (round (food-rating bar))
                                                :initial-element #\*))))))
	   (when (owner bar) (htm (:tr (:th "Owner")
				       (:td (:a :href (link (owner bar)) 
                                                (str (name (owner bar))))))))
	   (when
	       (beer-rating bar)
	     (htm (:tr (:th "Drink rating")
		       (:td (str (make-sequence 'string
                                                (round (beer-rating bar))
						:initial-element #\*))))))
	   (when (address bar)
	     (htm (:tr (:th "Address")
		       (:td (str (address bar))))))
	   (when (notes bar)
	     (htm (:tr (:th "Notes")
		       (:td (str (notes bar))))))
	   (when (url bar)
	     (htm (:tr (:th "Website")
		       (:td (:a :href (url bar)))))))
	  (when (beers bar)
	    (htm (:h2 "Beers")
		 (str (list-objects (beers bar)))))
	  (when (foods bar)
	    (htm (:h2 "Foods")
		 (str (list-objects (foods bar))))))
	(progn
	  (setf (return-code) +http-not-found+)
	  (with-template (format nil "Error: Bar ~a not found" name)
	      nil
	    (:p (fmt "Could not find a bar named ~a." bar name)))))))

You notice something? There’s an awful lot of repeated code. For example, over the two functions I call (make-sequence ’string SOMETHING :initial-element #\*) three different times. What this is actually doing is taking a number and turning it into the same number of stars, e.g. turning 4 into ****. The obvious thing to do is to define a function STAR-RATING which does that, so I do (and I change it to use MAKE-STRING instead of MAKE-SEQUENCE, and to always call ROUND, which does nothing to integers but will turning real numbers into integers):

(defun star-rating (number)
  "Return a string consisting of NUMBER stars.  If NUMBER is a float,
  returns that number rounded off."
  (make-string (round number) :initial-element #\*))

This turns (make-sequence ’string (rating brewer) :initial-element #\*) into (star-rating (rating brewer)); (make-sequence ’string (round (food-rating bar)) :initial-element #\*) into (star-rating (food-rating bar)); and (make-sequence ’string (round (beer-rating bar)) :initial-element #\*) into (star-rating (beer-rating bar)). This is a nice savings on typing, and makes the code more readable, although it could be better (STAR-RATING isn’t the best name in the world, but it’ll do for now). Just about every programming language out there can refactor commonly-used code patterns into functions like this; indeed, it’s a major use for functions.

How about the rest of the code? There’s another pattern there: looking up an object, then either displaying it or an error message which refers to the type of the object being displayed. There are a number of ways to handle this, but the cleanest is to write a macro DEFINE-DISPLAY (which uses a function GET-OBJECT I’ve defined elsewhere; its use looks like (get-object ’bar "Falling Rock")):

(defmacro define-display (class function &body body)
  `(defun ,function (name)
     (let ((,class (get-object ',class name)))
       (if ,class
	   (with-template (format nil "~a @ Tasting Notes" (name ,class))
	       (modification-date ,class)
	     ,@body)
	   (progn
	     (setf (return-code) +http-not-found+)
	     (with-template (format nil "Error: ~a ~a not found" ',class name)
		 nil
	       (:p (fmt "Could not find a ~a named ~a."  
                        ',class name))))))))

This takes that pattern and turns it into a macro; I can then re-use the pattern like this:

(define-display brewer display-brewer
  (:table
   (:tr (:th "Average rating")
	(:td (str (if (rating brewer)
		      (make-sequence 'string 
				     (rating brewer) 
				     :initial-element #\*)
		      (htm (:em "No beers"))))))
   (when (plusp (length (notes brewer)))
     (htm (:tr (:th "Notes") (:td (str (notes brewer))))))
   (when (plusp (length (address brewer)))
     (htm (:tr (:th "Address") (:td (str (address brewer))))))
   (when (plusp (length (url brewer)))
     (htm (:tr (:th "Website")
	       (:td (:a :href (url brewer) (str (url brewer))))))))
  (when (beers brewer)
    (htm (:h2 "Beers") (:ul (list-objects (beers brewer))))))

That’s obviously a lot more readable than the first DISPLAY-BREWER I created. What’s more, when I define DISPLAY-BAR, I just have to do this:

(define-display bar display-bar
  (:table
   (when (food-rating bar)
     (htm (:tr (:th "Food rating")
	       (:td (str (make-sequence 'string 
					(round (food-rating bar))
					:initial-element #\*))))))
   (when (owner bar) (htm (:tr (:th "Owner")
			       (:td (:a :href (link (owner bar)) 
					(str (name (owner bar))))))))
   (when
       (beer-rating bar)
     (htm (:tr (:th "Drink rating")
	       (:td (str (make-sequence 'string
					(round (beer-rating bar))
					:initial-element #\*))))))
   (when (address bar)
     (htm (:tr (:th "Address")
	       (:td (str (address bar))))))
   (when (notes bar)
     (htm (:tr (:th "Notes")
	       (:td (str (notes bar))))))
   (when (url bar)
     (htm (:tr (:th "Website")
	       (:td (:a :href (url bar)))))))
	  (when (beers bar)
	    (htm (:h2 "Beers")
		 (str (list-objects (beers bar)))))
	  (when (foods bar)
	    (htm (:h2 "Foods")
		 (str (list-objects (foods bar))))))

The display functions are reduced down to their essential core and I don’t have to keep re-typing (and possibly mis-typing) the fiddly bits which don’t change. There’s still a lot of work which I could still re-do (e.g. one common pattern seems to be (when THING (htm (DO-SOMETHING THING))); another is (:tr (:th HEADING) (:td DATA))), but this is a good first start.

And it’s why Lisp rocks: other languages have functions which let one re-arrange functional abstractions; what they lack are macros, which let one re-arrange syntactical abstractions. In Lisp I can take the actual body which changes and plug it into the unchanging skeleton; I can take the name of the class and plug it in so that I can refer to it in the body. It makes life very easy and simple.

Late this summer I purchased Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food.

Bittman first gives one a tour of the various cooking techniques (e.g. roasting, frying, boiling &c.) and details how they affect food; he covers essential equipment (there’s really not that much); he covers the basic theory of cooking meats & vegetables. That done, he proceeds to give lots and lots of recipes, many with a number of variations.

His recipe for fruit jam is simplicity itself, but it works wonderfully. His recipe for pheasant braised with apricots and prunes is delicious. His procedure for pre-cooking grains is simple yet tasty.

This could very well be the only cookbook you’ll ever need. If you don’t have a copy, get one. If you know someone who’s just started living on his own, get him a copy. It’s a good book.

Typical cryptographic software provides assurances that a message was sent by a specific sender; this is generally what one wants. But what if one prefers plausible deniability? Off-the-record messaging provides encryption and authentication for the duration of a conversation, but after the conversation is completed anyone can forge messages within that conversation, thus one can deny that one ever said anything.

This could be useful for whistleblowers, those living in oppressive regimes and so forth.

I've updated Tasting Notes, my database of beer, brewery & bar notes, once again. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

Well, I finally got around to seeing 2004’s Meet the Fockers, a sequel to the amusing Meet the Parents. My verdict? Absolutely atrocious.

What’s right with this film? Certainly not the Mr. & Doctor Focker played by Hoffman & Streisand: they are abominable people. Not Stiller’s Gaylord Focker: he’s a brainless twit, a simpleton along for the ride. Not Teri Polo’s nonentity of a fiancée (so forgettable I cannot remember her character’s name). There’s something wrong when De Niro’s paranoid, controlling CIA retiree is the most fully-realised and sympathetic character in the movie.

I think that we’re meant to like the Fockers—but they’re unlikable. Bernie Focker is a moron who has a shrine consisting of his son’s ninth- and tenth-place ribbons; he’s the sort of annoying putz who desperately needs to be punched in the face for at least half an hour. Roz Focker is, frankly, a disaster. She, along with her husband, has no concept of appropriateness, nor of boundaries, nor of discretion, nor of decorum, nor indeed of anything befitting civilisation whatsoever. They live in the present, ignoring the past and pretending there’s no future. The two of them have no wit, no learning; indeed, the only thing separating them from voiceless beasts is their incessant speaking. My world would have been a better place had I never been introduced to them.

Indeed, I would have been a happier man had I never seen this film. If it were possible to induce amnesia, I would. I am poorer and dumber for having seen it. May God have mercy upon my soul.

Mark Steyn suggests some incremental improvements to the American legal system. Here are my own thoughts:

Elimination of plea bargains

Plea bargains do encourage defendants to plead guilty to lesser charges rather exercising their rights to jury trials and that is a miscarriage of justice. Plea bargains are often used at a prosecutor’s discretion for first-time or middle-class offenders; a better system would simply have straightforward first-time penalties. They are also used to encourage guilty pleas on lesser charges in order to get testimony on greater charges against some other defendant. This is pretty wrong, essentially paying one defendant to testify against another. A jury would look askance at a witness paid $500,000 by the prosecution; they should be as sceptical of a witness given a six-month plea bargain instead of a six-year sentence.

Elimination of technical charges

Steyn’s example is mail or wire fraud: the crime is not the crime itself but the crime of send a letter or authorising a bank transfer in the course of a crime. If there was a crime, let the jury convict on that charge. This to me is similar to convicting Martha Stewart not for insider trading but for lying to investigators (IMHO lying to investigators shouldn’t be a crime; it’s not sworn testimony, just talking): she didn’t actually commit the crime being investigated, but was sent to jail anyway—essentially for annoying agents of the state.

Elimination of prosecutorial advantage

Yes, yes, yes! One of the great features of the Anglo-American justice system is that the defense is advantaged: the defendant is presumed innocent; the prosecution presents a case first, and a defendant can simply move that no case was made; if a case was made, the defendant can respond. Steyn indicates that assets can be frozen by the prosecution, making it impossible for a defendant to pay for a good lawyer—that’s obscene. He also notes that unlike the rest of the trial (where the prosecution goes first and the defense always answers), closing arguments are ended by the prosecution. I remember how surprised I was by that when first I served on a jury: here was a trial where every benefit of the doubt and advantage was given to the defendant, and suddenly at the end all that was upturned. As Steyn notes, every civilised legal system allows the defendant the last word.

Elimination of massive indictments

Apparently prosecutors tend to charge as many crimes as possible in hopes that a jury will be psychologically persuaded to give some to the prosecution and some to the defense. This is quite possible, and if it is in fact true needs to be changed. On the one hand it would be very expensive to mount a defense against a dozen charges one at a time (with jury selections for each and so forth); OTOH it seems very wrong to set up a system that takes advantage of psychological weaknesses on the part of jurors to convict defendants.

Elimination of statute creep

Yes, yes, yes! This is seen all the time: unreasonably harsh laws are proposed, but we are assured that they will only be used against the worst of the worst (e.g. terrorists or drug dealers or mafiosi); then we get used to them and they start being used against other criminals; then they start being used against innocent people who have committed no crime but are annoying the State (e.g. the use of RICO against non-violent, non-criminal pro-life groups).

Elimination of double jeopardy

Yes, yes, yes! This is even in the Constitution, and yet it’s a common feature of the current legal system. It’s bad enough when a man can be found not guilty of criminal charges but found civilly guilty of the exact same crime (this is a miscarriage of justice); it’s even worse when the State convicts a man twice by using two separate arms (in the case Steyn mentions, the US Attorney and the Securities and Exchange Commission).

Be sure to read the entire article yourself; it’s worth it.

Mil Millington (of the profoundly popular Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About) has released his forty-fourth web vignette. Reading his stuff makes me rather glad to be single—and when you read it, you’ll see why. The green? They don’t sell them in green.

The Lakota Indians claim to have withdrawn from all treaties with the United States.

The United States Cavalry have no comment, but have put in a requisition for a weekend’s target practise, 700 tons of ammunition but—oddly—have not ordered any paper targets.

The Economist reports on the distressing American beer shortage. Hop and barley fields are being ploughed under to grow corn for ethanol (ironically, itself the product of grain fermentation just like beer).

Somebody please stop the madness! Save the beers!

Given a coupon for any drink free, Billy Chasen set about building the most expensive drink possible at Starbucks. He ended up with a 13 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel for $13.76.

…or have one hell of a personality.

Yes! Take a look at a Suburban with a built-in pop-out machine gun position. I want three.

Steve Yegge blogs about size being code’s worst enemy. He mentions how more advanced languages offer mechanisms to compress code size and announces what he believes the Next Big Language will be: JavaScript running atop the Java Virtual Machine.

I’ve just recently been learning some JavaScript; it’s a cool language with some neat features. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it Lisp in sheep’s clothing as some have done, but it is definitely nicer than a lot of languages. I’ve not used it enough to tell if it’s more powerful than Python or not, but I am led to believe by others that it is.

I sure don’t like going back to braces-and-semicolons code again; Pythons whitespace and Lisp’s parentheses are much nicer IMHO.

Those of you who are observant may notice that this site now resides at octopodial-chrome.com. The old hostname latakia.dyndns.org should continue to work for the foreseeable future (i.e. for at least another year or so), but it automatically redirects to the new hostname. I’ve also replaced my old boring front page with this blog.

Why yes, I do rock—thanks for noticing!

Traveller 5 is almost out, and a CD-ROM is now available with rulebooks and data. Looks to be pretty cool.

Raymond Ibrahim tears apart the new anti-Christian Beowulf film. I’ve no desire to see this latest mishandling of the classic.

A British physician claims that mediæval men had better diets than their modern descendants. This isn’t exactly surprising, to tell the truth, but it is nice to have confirmed. If you’re interested in details of mediæval cooking, I can recommend the following books:

Pleyn Delit

Pleyn Delit is the first mediæval cookbook I bought, and it’s an excellent one. All recipes are presented in two versions: the exact original (in Middle English, vulgar Latin, Old French or whatever) and a modern redaction. Having the original there enables one to do one’s own redaction if the modern one is unsatisfactory, or if one suspects it makes some unwarranted assumptions.

Take a Thousand Eggs or More

Another very good one in two volumes. The first volume consists of original recipes and redactions, the second of original recipes only, the assumption being that the reader will have gained enough skill with Volume I to do his own work with Volume II; this is a great scheme and one which I heartily approve of. This makes the perfect gift for the mediæval cooking enthusiast on your list.

The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy

My mother gave me The Mediæval Kitchen (for Christmas, I believe) and before I opened it I was afraid that it’d be something execrable like Fabulous Feasts (which has set back living history a generation with its recipes full of New World ingredients); I was pleased to discover instead that my mother had done her research and found a book whose authors had done the same. It’s really good, with lots of recipes and historical notes. I’ve it sitting on my coffee table right now.

Hat-tip to my brother Tom.

The Comptroller General of the Unites States has released a scathing video about America’s financial system. The numbers are bad, very bad. We’re looking at $156,000 per man, woman and child in liabilities. Apparently the Medicare increase incurred more expense in one blow than the entire United States have since the founding of the republic. We’re in bad trouble—and not a single politician seems to care. Except maybe for Ron Paul.

Watch this video. If we don’t solve this problem, we are going to have massive problems. Watch this video.

It sounds disgusting, but it could work: bacon chocolate chip cookies. Sounds like one of Hervé This’s ideas.

Wouldn’t it be cool to fly without a parachute? It’s starting to become a reality, although the technology isn’t quite there yet. Here’s a video of a flying man. It’s a new extreme sport!

Justin Etheredge has even more crazy-looking programmers. You see, it’s imperative that I have long hair and a beard; it’s the norm for my culture and profession.

GetGNULinux.org corrects some misunderstandings about free software and demonstrates why it’s so important for you as a user to demand your freedom.

Those of us who read a lot accumulate a great deal of books (according to LibraryThing I have 438); how does one categorise and shelve them? My own system is rather esoteric (deliberately so); one man and his wife had 3,500 books and came up with a cool solution to the problem utilising off-the-shelf software, a barcode scanner, new shelving and other nifty stuff.

A collection of Second World War pics—the difference? They’re in colour!

The Free Software Foundation has a guided tour of emacs up. Emacs, of course, is the absolute best text editor ever written.

Chuck at nothing happens writes that the dynamic/static computer language controversy is more than a little artificial. I gotta be honest—I think that dynamic languages are more useful for exploring code before one knows what one needs to do (kinda like an artist’s pencils). But I understand that some of the new static-ish languages offer some features like type-inferencing which give one a lot more latitude to experiment; perhaps they’d be good in that case.

Then of course there’s the whole issue of what one means by dynamic and static…

The Army of the United States has kindly provided us with a study guide to common failure modes of the M16 (or AR-15, as the civilian-legal version is know). Useful knowledge no matter what sort of weapon you shoot.

Hat-tip to my buddy Capt. V——.

Blog Sober has a record of making homemade bacon. I really, really, really want to do this. Bacon may not be good for one, but it tastes oh so good.

A few years back Mike Judge released an excellent film called Idiocracy with Fox; Fox didn’t support it and it died. But now Fox are supporting Brawndo, a joke from the film. A satire of energy drinks. So what is this product based on a satire of energy drinks? It’s…an energy drink.

From Esquire comes this list of sixty oh-so-fun-to-do but oh-so-bad-for-you things.

Atul Gawande writes about a revolutionary development in medicine, one which reduces ICU stays by half and which increases patient survival rate. The development? A simple checklist. Yes, it turns out that having physicians follow a checklist and giving nurses the power to keep them to script is a sure-fire way to improve treatment.

An incredibly good article.

In New South Wales, police assaulted a woman, searched her bra and underwear in public and, finding nothing, charged her with resisting arrest. Because, of course, a little 64-year-old is capable of resisting anything.

Daniel Weinreb—one of the early luminaries of the Common Lisp community—has conducted a survey of Common Lisp implementations. Pretty good stuff; worth reading if you’re a Lispnik.

I wish I’d a dog so that I could get him a set of dog armour for him to wear. Then I’d take him boar-hunting. It’d be a blast.

Also, just walking down the street with an armoured dog would be cool. I’d have to name him Panzerkrieghund, of course…

Unsurprisingly, Star Drek is guilty of almost every single one. Roddenberry set sci-fi entertainment back a century.

Wil Wheaton reviews Start Trek: The Next Generation episodes. What makes this notable is that Wheaton was a regular actor on Star Trek. He’s not afraid to point out how absurd the writing could be, but is also willing to give the show what (little, IMHO) credit it deserves in places. Really cool stuff.

The Economist has an article about rising food prices. What I found most remarkable is that the corn which provides a single fill-up of ethanol to an SUV could instead feed a man for a year. A year! Our addiction to driving is as immoral as it is absurd: to feed it we are willing to burn up the last of the Midwestern topsoil in our engines; to feed it we are willing to take food from the mouths of the poor; to feed it we are willing to suck the life from our cities and the safety from our streets.

The first trailer for Prince Caspian has been released. My only quibbles are that Caspian has a goofy accent and looks too old for the part, and that I am getting sick and tired of mask helmets. People, you want a helmet to deflect blows, not grab them.

From dirtSimple, an article about a Java programmer’s reflexes and instincts lead to errors in writing Python. If you come from the big-and-ugly world of Java (or heaven forbid, C++), read this before writing a line of Python.

Apparently wounded veterans must return their signing bonuses because they cannot serve out their commitments. That just doesn’t seem right to me. Granted, their contracts may have said that—but they shouldn’t say that.

Radley Balko points out how excessive regulations are killing small businesses and helping big business. I see the same thing in the brewing industry: the law is designed to aid Coors and Budweiser at the expense of the start-up brewery.

A Swiss study has found that dope-smoking students do as well as non-using students; they are also more likely to have strong friendships and are no more likely to be depressed. The Boston Herald has more. The only response from a politician: to attack the study for being inconveniently true. Typical prohibitionist.

Justin Etheredge points out the sartorial splendour of the technical class.

We really do look like a bunch of vagrants.

In the we-knew-that-already department, a has demonstrated that men prefer young women due to their high fertility while women prefer older men due to their wealth and high social status, which make them good providers for the offspring. Well, duh.

Absinthe is legal once more! Hip-hip-hooray!

The Larimer County Drug Task Force illegally seized 39 marijuana plants, along with bongs and equipment; a judge ordered them to return the items, by which time the plants were rotten goo and the bongs were shattered. Unfortunately for the police, the Colorado Constitution orders police not to harm, neglect, injure or destroy medical marijuana and paraphernalia. So the couple are asking for restitution.

Wouldn’t it be funny if police stations end up having grow rooms in order to meet the requirements of the law?

John Derbyshire reviews the strangest travel book ever written: the account of an African tribesman who became enamoured of Eskimos and so went to Greenland in the 1960s.

Charles Bork reviews the history of Western civilisation itself, as reflected in the martini. He’s wrong, though, about the ideal proportions: the very best martini is composed of: 2 oz. dry gin;½ oz. dry vermouth; 2 dashes orange bitters; 1 lemon twist. It should be stirred with lots of ice, not shaken. Any less vermouth and it’s not a martin, but an alcoholic’s cry for help.

Christopher Hitchens points out that Mitt Romney must talk about Mormonism and its influence upon him.

Ripple is an interesting attempt to create an open, decentralised monetary system. The idea is to route payment from Alice to Bob (who don’t actually know one another) via any number of intermediaries whom they know, or who know one another. E.g. Alice might pay Charlie (whom she knows) $20, who then pays Bob (whom Charlie knows). It’s based on credit: each person grants people he knows a certain amount of credit, and thus a payment can move through the system. Essentially, it’s the international banking system made available to anyone. A really cool idea.

If you live on Earth, then you should be familiar with the rules of gunfighting. No, you’re not likely to ever need them; you’re also unlikely to ever need your fire, flood or earthquake insurance.

The new York Times published a surprisingly positive article about getting a concealed-carry license in Texas. Not perfect, but a good first step.

A nifty little explanation about why a deeply-layered programming language can save time and money in the long run.

Newsweek had a wonderful article on how killing germs is hazardous to one’s health a month ago. I’m all about pro-biotics: yeast converts unhealthy sugar into alcohol; lactobacillus converts cabbage into sauerkraut; a plethora of organisms sour milk and enable me to turn it into cheese. Yea, verily, germs are cool.

It’s kinda funny when one reads of the revulsion of those who discovered that bugs live in our bloodstreams; to their crazy Enlightenment-addled minds it was a problem calling for a solution. What they didn’t realise is that it is the solution: our bodies are less than 10% human and are over 90% bacteria.

A study has found that men enjoy retribution. Men and women saw both innocent and guilty parties receive mild shocks; both were empathetic to the innocent parties, but the case of the guilty parties was far more interesting: men weren’t empathetic at all, but enjoyed the spectacle while women remained empathetic.

This indicates why men are better suited for dealing justice and waging war than women: we are dispassionate, doing what needs to be done. Heck, we actually enjoy watching the guilty get their just desserts; women pity them!

Which is really, really strange, come to think of it.

Almost three years ago I went pheasant hunting and had a good time; this year I went again, twice.

The first time was a day’s hunt in Burlington, Colo. two weekends ago. One of my fellow parishioners, Bill B——, has a political acquaintance with some farmland out there, and so seven of us set out to see what we might scare up. Bill’s brother Charlie was there, as was a fellow parishioner of ours, Maj. D——; Rick W——, a friend of Bill’s; Bruce J——, another friend of Bill’s; and a friend of Rick whose name I forget. We also brought along two hunting dogs: one of some experience belonging to Rick and another belonging to a friend of Charlie which had reputedly been quite successful last summer.

There are a few different ways to hunt pheasants. The party might be hunting a harvest crop-field in hopes of flushing birds as they feed. In this case the best procedure seems to be to position a few fellows at one end to block; the rest of the party then line up on the far end and walk across the field to the blockers. Once they quarry notice the hunters, they have two options: to run or fly. If they run one mayn’t shoot them, and will very probably not see them (pheasants are very stealthy creatures); if they fly within range then hopefully one can shoot them. For whatever reason or reasons, they seem to prefer to run (maybe they’re scared of hawks or falcons?); thus the blockers serve a very valuable purpose: any birds running away from the hunting line will see the blockers and flush, hopefully giving either the walking or the blocking hunters a decent shot. In a way, this method uses the walking line as armed beaters.

Thus we hunted our first field that day: two men posted at one end to block and the rest of us walking against the rows of dryland maize. We flushed a good-sized bouquet of pheasants (that’s apparently the appropriate term of venery), but the angle and distance weren’t quite right for any shots; the blockers also saw some running off. Still, we all took this as an auspicious sign for the start of the hunt.

Another way to hunt is on wild land (generally returned to nature via the Conservation Reserve Programme). In this case the land is covered with thick grass and shrubs; the hope is to flush the birds from the cover there (they alternate between eating and hiding; their lives are kinda sad really). This is where dogs shine: they will hit the scent of a bird, track it to where it’s covering, wait until the hunting line gets close, then flush the birds. One could use blockers too, but I think they’re less effective with thick cover than with the relatively sparse crop-fields.

After walking a few more maize fields and some fields of wheat stubble (the grass-straw left over after wheat is harvested) and seeing not a single thing other than a pair of jackrabbits, we decided that the birds had probably finished eating for the morning and had headed back into cover, so we followed them into CRP land. We were no luckier there.

In fact, the only shots of the day were walking back from the far sides of fields we’d already hunted—in each case, one guy spooked a single bird and fired two shots (semi-auto shotguns are nice…); in each case, the flush was so sudden and unexpected that he wasn’t really ready (one might ask why he wasn’t ready; one might try being at full alert with a several-pound-gun in one’s hands for hours on end) and consequently missed.

It was still a lot of fun, though.

The USMC has noticed that synthetic fabrics are horrid, in this case because they can melt to the skin. Natural fabrics like wool, linen and cotton simply singe. Natural fabrics also breathe better. Wool is warm when it’s cold, cool when it’s hot and wicks away moisture. Linen is sturdy an cool. Cotton’s a bit useless (typically hot when it’s hot out and freezing when it’s cold), but has the advantage of being cheap. Natural fibres are renewable and sustainable; synthetics are produced by using oil.

Remind me again why anyone would ever use a synthetic fibre? Oh yeah: brain damage.

My good friend Martin’s father Mark recently passed away; On Monday the Denver Postran an obituary detailing his fascinating life. I never got the chance to meet him, but heard a lot of stories about him from Martin; he sounded like an incredible fellow. May his memory be eternal.

The Onion staff have apparently met me. Except that I kinda like New Mexico’s flag. But I hate hazelnut coffee and I believe that I’ve actually said that the only decent [state flag] is Maryland.

Frank Buckles is the last American veteran of the First World War; there’s a good chance that this was his final Veteran’s Day. A neat story.

Ever wonder why Warren Buffet loves the estate tax? It turns out that he personally profits from the estate tax regime.

Michael Lopp writes about Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder---not our inability to pay attention, but our need to pay attention to multiple data sources at one time.

The science-fiction Jerry Pournelle (generally considered fairly right-wing) has an excellent article on drug laws and federalism.

Robert Farley believes that we should abolish the Air Force. I’m roughly inclined to agree, although there could perhaps be unanticipated pitfalls. The in-depth discussion is highly interesting.

Arguments against the Air Force

• The Air Force is not well-suited to fighting counterinsurgency wars
• Every armed service has its own air wing already
• Air power does not win wars the way sea and ground power do; strategic bombing did not win World War II, Korea or Vietnam
• The Air Force is most effective when supporting the Army, yet hates that role
• An Air Force co-equal with the Army and Navy tends to argue for an air power solution to every problem
• Most nations have Air Forces

Arguments for the Air Force

• It’s hubris to think that we’ll only be fighting counterinsurgency wars in the future
• Air power won in Kosovo
• The Air Force can correct its course without being rolled back into the Army
• The Air Force has excellent satellite and technical capabilities
• Eliminating the Air Force would be a hassle

All in all, it makes sense to me to bring the Air Force back into the Army and perhaps consider a Space Force to control satellites, ICBMs and the weaponisation of space (orbital artillery: God’s own smite button). But I don’t know that it’s really that big of a deal, so long as the Army is allowed to operate fixed-wing aircraft for close-air support.

Apparently our ultra-paranoid anti-tourism measures are having an effect: we have had a 17% decline in tourist travel, costing us $94 billion in lost revenue and losing 200,000 jobs. Gosh, thanks guys.

Here’s Mark Shuttleworth’s nightmare account. Due to once travelling on a plane whose operator hadn’t signed the visa-waiver treaty, he was questioned, fingerprinted, physically examined and had his visa waiver access terminated forever. From now on he must fill out the visa form for those with a criminal record, despite not actually doing anything wrong.

People, this is twisted.

The recently-released realtor sales figures are deliberately misleading; housing sales fell 22.7% year-over-year and prices fell 4.2%. Housing is crashing; the media and the realtors’ association want to conceal that fact—but the numbers speak for themselves.

How much road space is required for transport by car, bus and bicycle? The results are unsurprising, but once again indicate why public or human-powered transport is so very much more reasonable than private automobiles. Not too that this is a picture in Münster, German, so the cars pictured are rinky-dinky Euro-cars, not real American cars.

Chris Kavanaugh and an archæology team were stranded on an island within view of a metropolis without water or supplies; with luck and skill they managed to survive.

During the recently-passed Halloween holiday I received a flier advertising costumes for children, men and women. I found it really quite remarkable what it revealed:

• The vast majority of boys’ costumes obscure their faces
• All but one girls’ costume doesn’t obscure the face
• There is apparently a market for dressing one’s sons up as serial killers, murders, demons and criminals
• There is apparently a market for dressing one’s four-year-old daughter as a harem-dweller with an exposed midriff, and one’s eight-year-old daughter as a French maid
• There is apparently a market for mid-thigh skirts for two-year-old girlsThere are infants’, toddler boys’, toddler girls’, boys’, girls’, teens’, mens’ and womens’ costumes; teen means teen girl; apparently boys directly become men, but girls become teens, and then women
• Out of 64 womens’ costumes, all but 5 are sexy something costumes, where something could be a police officer, or a vampire, or a pirate, or a cavewoman, or a stewardess, or a referee (who buys this?) or a lady bug (huh?!?); that is, the costumes consist of stockings and a tunic which covers just enough to not violate any local ordinances; teen costumes are much the same, but slightly smaller
• Mens’ costumes are fairly lame: a few monsters and so forth

Boys shouldn’t be dressed as monsters and evildoers; they should be dressed as those who slay monsters and evildoers; little girls shouldn’t be dressed as sex objects. That this is even an issue is an indicator of how diseased our society has become. Boys and men shouldn’t be valued for how terrible they are; girls and women shouldn’t be valued for how sexy they are–it’s sick. I can understand boys wanting to be fearsome, but let them be fearsome in a good way: Beowulf and Grendel were both feared, but one fought for good and one for evil. I can understand young men & women wanting to be sexy (it’s in their hormones), but children don’t even think of that sort of thing: it’s parents and culture which introduce the idea to them. It’s simply wrong to sexualise prepubescents—once again, that I even have to point this out indicates how low our culture has gotten. It’s one thing for a 24-year-old to dress for the opposite sex; heck, it’s understandable for a 16-year-old to do so (although that should be restrained by parents); it’s another, entirely unacceptable, thing for a child to be dressed thus.

If I had children, I think I’d send them to be raised in Siberia or some other inaccessible place…

Many cities and states unconstitutionally infringe upon their citizens’ right to carry and/or own knives and swords; Knife Rights is working to reverse these laws. They’re worthy of support.

Many of us have seen the gold and silver coins minted by the US government: they are almost pure (99.whatever percent) metal and have a metal value very much greater than their face value. The American Eagle 1 ounce gold coin has a face value of $50 and a metal value of around $806; the American Eagle 1 ounce silver coin has a face value of $1 and a metal value of $14.53. So what if one’s boss paid one’s wages in gold or silver coins? I mean, one’s only making $3,101.50 (with gold coins) or $3,441.15 (with silver coins)!

It turns out that the IRS believes that despite the coins being legal tender for $1 or $50, despite being currency minted by the United States of America—despite all this, the IRS tried to argue that the coins aren’t worth what their faces clearly state. The judge in the trial disallowed the that’s what they’re worth defense based on some specious reasoning involving the old outlawed American double eagles, but the juries hung or acquitted on all charges.

Me, I wonder if I can get paid in American Eagles…

Hat-tip to Maj. D.

Today’s the birthday of the United States Marine Corps. Semper Fi!

Yet another example of how crazy daylight savings time is: the return of real time has caused the younger twin to be legally older, and the older twin to be legally younger. If we were just on the same time, all the time, this wouldn’t happen.

The Canadian dollar is now worth $1.10; it had reached $1.00 just recently. The collapse of the US dollar continueth unabated.

Here’s a cool visualisation of US flight data for a single day. Massively neat.

Finally, a reason to visit New York City. A reason to visit New England, even.

What I want to know is when we started, and when we stopped, giving good names to our ships. Intrepid is a good name. City of Corpus Christi is not. Dauntless is a good name; Philadelphia is not. Dreadnaught is an excellent name; USS Senator William P. Whiteman really isn’t.

Lieutenant Colonel James Lacey argues that it’s not Islamic civilisation which is falling to pieces, but Arab civilisation. He points out that Arab civilisation hasn’t made any contributions to the world since 1406 and that the Arab nations spend next to nothing on research or on science. It’s a good read, and as valid now as it was in 2005.

It’s a fundamental principle that if something is priced more cheaply then it’s used more, and if it’s priced more expensively then it’s used less. It’s also a fundamental principle of a free market that a commodity’s price should accurately reflect its cost to produce: a carrot’s price should include the farmer’s time; the alternative uses to which he could put his land (e.g. building condos instead of planting carrots); the cost of extracting the steel for his tractor (including the cost of the mine it was pulled from, the smelter which produced it, the employees which removed it from the ground &c.); the cost of designing said tractor, and so forth and so forth ad infinitum. It should be clear to see that if, for some reason, farmers got free land for carrots then they would produce more carrots, and that carrots would be cheaper, and thus more carrots would be eaten.

It’s less clear to realise that those extra carrots aren’t really free. That free land could have been put to another use—a more productive use (how did it become free anyway; did we all pay taxes to buy it from Peter and sell it to Farmer Paul?). But we see the cheaper carrots in the store and don’t see the park our kids could have enjoyed, or the housing we could have lived in, or the university whose researchers would have discovered a cure for cancer.

Fortunately, most products do more-or-less reflect their cost to produce. One notable exception is food: due to subsidies, some of the worst foods are cheaper than some of the better ones—and Americans are fatter than ever before as a result. Another instance is gasoline. A report on the real cost of gasoline examined all of the costs which go into gasoline production and found that gasoline should cost between $5.60 and $15.14 per gallon. Last I checked, its actual price is around $3 per gallon.

To put it another way: you're already paying between five and fifteen dollars a gallon; you're just not paying it at the pump. If you cut back your gasoline consumption by four gallons a month, you'll save about twelve dollars but will still be paying eight to forty-eight dollars in taxes for those four gallons you didn't use. You can see why it doesn't make sense to cut back on gas usage.

This would explain why the United States uses more gasoline per day than the next twenty nations.

PaperBack is free software which enables you to print data onto paper and read it back in via a scanner. With a 600 dpi printer and a 900 dpi scanner it is possible to store ½ gigiabyte of data per letter page; with compression, it’s possible to store about 3 megabytes per page (depending on the source data, of course—his example uses C code).

This is actually kinda cool: you could print out a few hundred pages and replicate the data on a CD; esp. with some oppressive regimes it may be easier to move physical objects that appear to be books than those which appear to contain data…

I was reading an interview with Grady Booch when I noticed that he graduated from the US Air Force Academy in 1977. Take a look at his pic: hardly the sort of fellow one would think graduated from a service academy. He works for Big Blue and lives nearby, too. Amusing.

Révènce writes that if a piece of code is not simple, it is wrong. He’s a bit emphatic, but in large part he’s correct. Programming languages that make complex things simple lead to code which has fewer errors. This is a major factor behind the high-level-language revolution: programmers are discovering that it doesn’t make sense to manage memory manually; that it doesn’t make sense to have to manually write out the components of a for loop; it doesn’t make sense to manually write the same boilerplate time after time. Each of these approaches leave the possibility of mistakes, and mistakes lead to bugs; a higher-level language abstracts away the niggling details and prevents bugs thereby.

David Harsanyi (the best man the Denver Post ever hired) writes on the return of Prohibition. From people getting arrested for a BAC of .03% (a single glass of wine, well below even the strictest legal limit), to revoking the license of a man who drinks heavily but never drives after drinking, to arresting bar patrons for drinking (without ever entering cars), states (egged on by MADD—whose own founder regrets the organisation’s neo-Prohibitionist slant) are outlawing alcohol in all but name. To quote a Virginia police chief, you can drink at home. Or at someone else’s home. And stay there until you’re not drunk.

Alcohol has certainly caused a lot of evil and suffering. It has also caused a lot of good. Banning its consumption is not the way forward.

Jonathan Foreman asks why the Pentagon is damaging the war effort. From leaving poorly-performing commanders in place, to mismanaging the media, to simply not getting the right equipment together, Foreman believes that the Department of Defense (aside: which really, really should be renamed the Department of War) has fallen down on the job.

Tim Wu examines areas of American life in which lawbreaking is accepted, even expected. An interesting investigation of some cultural blindspots.

In 1924 Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men was written. It’s pretty persuasive, actually.

…and kill it. Way to go guys—ruin it for the rest of us.

Thank to my buddy Rob, I had found the best beer commercial ever.

Theodore Dalrymple (himself an atheist) writes on the mistakes and errors of the neo-atheists. Although not himself a believer, he is mature enough to see that there is much to respect about religion, particularly that to regret religion is to regret civilisation itself.

The Straight Dope has a great bit on the original versions of fairy tales. Snow White is…altogether unexpected.

A friend pointed me to Sudden Debt, a finance & economics blog. It has an intriguing article about income vs. debt. That chart is frightening: the massive increase in debt vs. the modest increase in income is bad, bad, bad. Because it’s a differential over the course of years, that means that debt is exponentially worse than it was.

There are two types of computerised image: bit-mapped images are composed of thousands or millions of small pixels while vector images are composed of lines, circles, curves, whatever. The two types have differing pros and cons: each of a bitmap’s pixels can be a different colour, meaning that a bitmap typically approximates a photograph better—but that same pixelation means that if you zoom in too much a bitmap is useless; a vector image can be zoomed in forever (at least theoretically) and its resolution never suffers—but it’s very difficult to use a vector image to represent a real view.

Enter VectorMagic. Given a JPEG of a photo or logo, it will produce a vector image. This is actually very cool stuff—it appears to do an excellent job with the test images I’ve submitted.

Seriously, there’s a hop shortage which threatens to increase the cost of beer drastically. Maybe I should go into the hop farming business?

Hugo Restall, an old China hand, has taken up smoking. I can’t say that it’s a very good idea, as cigarettes really are bad for one’s health (and the frequency with which they’re smoked is distressing). OTOH, it’s refreshing to read someone write so well about tobacco in a mainstream publication: woody and nutty, with hints of pine shavings and hickory; the bouquet of preserved plums.

He should smoke a pipe, not cigarettes…

College students across the country are protesting their disarmament at the hands of an imperious State by wearing empty holsters. The response from the Brady Centre to Prevent Gun Violence? You don’t like the fact that you can’t have a gun on your college campus? Drop out of school.. One does wish that Peter Hamm might someday find himself in need of protection from a fellow-citizen. I don’t know which would be better: to defend him—thereby possibly changing his mind—or to walk away. The latter is more poetically just, the former is certainly more morally just.

A free man is an armed man, period. Being armed is a necessary but not sufficient condition for freedom: one may be armed but not free (e.g. a conscript or armed slave), but it is impossible to be free and unarmed.

I received a phone call from my kid brother today; apparently he is able to read this blog in Iraq. He says that it is the crankiest, most cynical thing he knows of. Given that he’s in the middle of a war zone, that says something.

So, now for the all-new Octopodial Chrome! It’ll be non-stop happiness and joy! There will be puppy dogs and butterflies! There may even be tea parties in the morning and ice cream parties in the afternoons!

Well, actually I’ll continue in my curmudgeonly ways. One must be true to oneself.

Take care and kick ass, Stephen.

Sixty-five years ago, one Marine and one ship changed the course of history. On this very day, Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige stopped an entire Japanese regiment singlehandedly; a few weeks later Rear Admiral Willis Lee’s fleet was reduced to a single ship—and it sank the Japanese battleship, pushing back the remainder of their fleet. Less than a year after Pearl Harbour, we had managed to turn from defense to offense—and a few years further, American boots stood in Tokyo.

And of course, it was America’s navy and marines which did the job.

Apparently UNICEF funds Palestinian suicide-bomber camps; discourages Guatemalan adoptions; praises North Korea and funds the gun-prohibition lobby. Quit giving them money until they reform.

Peggy Noonan points out that the Scott Thomas Beauchamp affair was inevitable given journalists whose only experience of the military comes from movies. To them, his fiction seemed realistic and believable at the same time as it seemed absurd to those of us who know anything about anything at all.

In Unix there is a convention that filenames beginning with a dot (.) are not normally displayed unless one asks for them to be; they are thus usually hidden. A further convention holds that programs will look for settings files within a user’s home directory (his personal folder, if you will) and that these files will be hidden (i.e. have names starting with a dot). An example might be .bashrc (containing run commands for bash) or .emacs (settings for emacs) or .firefox (settings for firefox).

These files are almost always simple text files (or folders full of simple text files), which is another nicety of Unix: if I like another user’s settings I can just grab them for myself. Some folks call all these hidden application settings files & folders dotfiles, since the names are pronounced dot-bash-r-c, dot-e-macs, dot-fire-fox and so forth.

Now there’s a website called dotfiles.org which collects lots of dotfiles from Unix users all over the world. Pretty neat reference for us geeks.

Hat-tip to Maj. D.

Fred Reed points out that America is not a free country. Another of his essays, The Suicide of Marlboro Man, is a must-read for anyone wondering how a nation of free men can turn into what we’ve got now: the short answer is it’s inevitable; freedom leads to its own end.

Bill Burney has created an excellent guide to pipe shapes. This doesn’t cover all of them—there are a lot and I’ve never seen one reference with all the variations—but it covers the major ones and most of the minor ones. It’s an invaluable reference, and cool just to look at too.

Ron Paul on why it can happen here, and has already begun to. My visit to Washington, D.C. this summer really brought matters home: we are become a less and less free country, and that’s wrong. I don’t agree with Paul on everything, but I believe he is the least incorrect of our modern political figures.

Our Marines, Navy and Coast Guard have released a new combined maritime strategy document; I believe it’s the first time that all three have produced such a thing. It’s extremely high-level and doesn’t have much in the way of juicy bits, but it’s still a necessary read. I like how it mentions the growing threat of submarines. It’s my personal belief that carriers in the next major war will be like battleships in the last one: easy targets. Carriers were very useful in their time because they could stay out of battleship range and bring attack aircraft (each much cheaper than a capital ship and its crew, and correspondingly more expendable) to bear; I fear that modern technology has created the carrier-killers the carrier itself was the battleship-killer. Sure, a battleship even today can throw an impressive amount of lead into the air at a target; sure, a carrier can throw an impressive number of aircraft into the air. But just as lead-on-target is not really relevant now, I wonder for how much longer aircraft-on-target will be the goal…

Of course, I’m no naval strategist. It would appear that the professionals have the same concerns though.

Robert Kaplan has more, and better, commentary.

The American West will be facing a nasty drought soon, not so much from drought itself but from massively increased water usage. Of course, if we lived in built-up housing instead of in McMansions with yards, our water usage would be lower. If our agriculture used better methods of production, we would require less irrigation.

One good sign is that we’re actually using less water across the United States than 25 years ago. Now if only the West will figure that out, soon. I vote we turn the water off to Las Vegas first…

I found this reference to military designation systems. The current American aircraft system is very systematic, but it’s often ignored in practise. The previous naval aircraft system was, not to put too fine a point on it, baroque—the current system is a step up. My favourite, though, is the British system of 1918: single-seater land-based fighters were named after insects, birds and reptiles; two-seater land-based fighters after mammals; single-seater sea-based bombers were named after Italian towns; two-seater sea-based bombers after British towns and so forth. There were categories taking names from Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Babylonian and Germanic mythology; there were names taken from trees and metals (although why one would have a six-seater fighter aircraft is beyond me—bomber sure, but a fighter?!?). Unless one is in the US Air Force, and calls everything a fighter because that’s sexier than a bomber or an attack plane…

A later British system named training planes after places of education. I want to fly an Oxford-11, I really do.

Cracked.com have hit it out of the park with their list of inspirational 80s songs. It’s amazing how those songs can make anything seem powerful and profound; I was eating an apple when I started listening to Europe’s The Final Countdown, and now I’ve rescued by mentor from a North Korean prison, Mia Sara’s wearing my letter jacket and my dad just bought me a Corvette. Cool dude!

A bit off-colour, but absolutely hilarious.

Over ten years, more people were arrested on marijuana charges than the populations of Alaska, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming combined. I wonder what the equivalent number for Alcohol Prohibition was?

A recent study concludes that leaded gasoline may have been responsible for the crime of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Even small amounts of lead can affect negatively behaviour, and post-ban blood levels of lead have plummeted. Examining crime rates by state and comparing them to lead levels supports the hypothesis. Extremely interesting work.

Scott Hackett thanks the TI-99/4A for setting him on his path towards geekdom. We had the same machine (although ours had a different case); I still remember when Dad brought it home from the store. I was very small, but I knew that this was an interesting device. Tunnels of Doom and Hunt the Wumpus were about the coolest thing ever; I remember my brother Tom & I lugging the huge disk drive down the stairs to the den so we could play there. I can lift the thing with one hand as an adult, but as small boys it took one of us on each end, sweating all the way down the stairs (I’m dropping it! It’s falling!).

Later, I would laboriously copy BASIC programmes from the Slipped Disk Show section of 3-2-1 Contact. It featured a wise-cracking disc jockey character and reader-submitted BASIC games. By that point in time, the TI wasn’t really popular, and all the programmes were in IBM or Apple BASIC, so I had to translate. I didn’t really know what I was doing at all, but I tried anyway. We didn’t have any floppies (the old large, actually floppy sort), so I would hook up my Dad’s tape recorder to the computer and record my programs on cassette tapes. This worked most of the time, but sometimes a record would just fail.

Man, those days were fun.

Recently NASA commissioned a massive survey of airline pilots, but has deep-sixed the report and ordered the survey contractor to wipe all the results from the computers. Why? Because they fear that the results, if made public, would cause the public to be concerned for the safety of flight.

So much for the truth setting us free.

Reason has an article about Frank Melton, mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Some amazing stuff: stopping a bus to hug kids, tearing down homes with sledgehammers, filling his house with young criminals. He appears to be a strange and perverse man.

A common complaint with some on the left runs roughly thus: why is it okay to show children scenes of graphic violence but not the act of love? Phrased this way, it sounds like they have a very good point: you can show men dying left and right and keep a PG-13 but if you show even a breast nowadays (not back in the 80s…) you’ll get an instant R. The thing is, the violence in children’s movies is generally of two types: that committed to establish the perpetrator as evil; or that committed to avenge or prevent evil. The film shows that some men are evil, and that others must step up and fight them: this is a valuable and uplifting lesson.

Film sex, on the other hand, is not of the uplifting variety; indeed, it’s not even really the act of love but really the act of lust. When’s the last sex scene which depicted a loving husband and wife in one another’s arms? When’s the last sex scene which depicted the loving couple producing a child? Instead, film sex is one night stands, extramarital, about power plays: it is the sexual equivalent of the evil violence in a film. And indeed films which celebrate inappropriate violence (e.g. horror films) are typically rated R, just like films which celebrate inappropriate sex.

I’d argue that a film which had nudity or even (implied) sex in an appropriate context shouldn’t automatically get an R—but when was the last film which would meet that standard?

I also think it’s wrong for swear words or smoking to automatically earn a film an R rating. The R rating should be restricted to those films which teach something contrary to that which is right, not for those which portray something which is immaterial.

Peter Hartlaub argues against the wussification of American children. Let ’em live a little; let ’em take some risks.

At least, pharmaceuticals are the only thing which can explain how residents of Dallas/Ft. Worth are considered more unattractive than those of San Diego. I’ve spent enough time in both places: San Diego doesn’t have attractive women. Texas girls, OTOH, can be very pretty. I don’t know about Miami (the other top-attractive city), but I can’t imagine it’s very nice: sun is the enemy of beauty, and Miami has lots of sun. I’ll grant that the federal capital and Philadelphia are the pits though. Just DFW doesn’t deserve to be ranked so lowly. There is, after all, San Diego. And New York City. And the entirety of New Jersey.

Yesterday, Sunday the twenty-first of October, we’d our first snowfall here in Denver. After many long months of waiting, winter is finally upon us. The heat and sunlight of summer have passed to be replaced by the cold and grey of the chief of the seasons. No more short-sleeves; good-bye t-shirts: now is the time for scarves and coats, gloves & hats. I for one am glad.

In all seriousness, I’ve been longing for winter for months now, and I’m glad that the weather has turned civilised once more. Any time I can wear a long wool coat is a good time of year.

A dispatch from Michæl Yon in which the reporter gets caught in a firefight. Good reading—starts slow, but gets really interesting further down.

The great-great-great-grandson of Prince Otto von Bismarck was found dead of a massive cocaine overdose. Sad how low the house has fallen since its glory days.

Today’s stupid phrase is undocumented immigrants, a replacement for the earlier illegal immigrants, itself a replacement for the earlier illegal aliens. The original phrase is the proper one: the people in question are aliens (i.e. citizens of one state in another state) and they are illegal. The phrase which followed tried to soften the blow by calling them immigrants; it’s not an altogether bad phrase. The most recent, though, is asinine. Their problem is not that they have lost their documents or failed to procure them: the problem is that they are illegal. To ignore that fact is asinine and obtuse.

Philosophically, I tend toward the open-borders argument (although there are some very strong practical arguments against it); however, playing word-games and inventing stupid phrases is just, well, stupid.

Apparently American men are no longer taller than European men. What’s point of being American if we can’t tower over the rest of the world?!?

About two-and-a-half billion years ago, bacteria almost completely destroyed all life on Earth. They started producing oxygen, poisoning everything else and destroying the methane atmosphere which kept the planet warm. At its worst, the equator was covered in a mile of ice. Eventually, carbon dioxide-producers evolved which managed to create the greenhouse which now keeps us all alive.

Slate asks why moonshine is against the law. The reasons given are distinctly unsatisfying. The first is that the US government makes a lot of money on distilled liquor taxes—$27 on every gallon of pure ethanol. This isn’t that big a deal. Homebrewers and home vintners already are allowed to make 100 (if single) or 200 gallons (per household) of fermented alcohol tax-free each year, and so far as anyone can tell federal taxes are not negatively impacted to any significant degree ($116.12 max per year for beer; $680 max per year for wine). Why not allow us to distill the alcohol we’re already allowed to make? Heck, don’t even remove the federal tax: allow us to distill the stuff, but require us to pay taxes. Give me a downloadable PDF form and a postage-paid envelope and I’d quite cheerfully mail in $13.50 per proof-gallon. Yes, some people wouldn’t comply: some people are already not complying. I own my home; I have a full-time job; losing those and my freedom are simply not worth a thousand dollars in federal taxes.

The second reason given is that moonshine can be dangerous if improperly made. This is highly disingenuous of the government: if home distillation were legal, then stills sold to the home market would be regulated so as not to contain any lead solder or similar stuff. The health dangers are precisely the result of being illegal, of moonshine being made in secret from stills manufactured in hiding.

I should note that the federal alcohol tax was created by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton in order to pay off our debt to France after the Revolutionary War: proof that a tax once instituted never goes away. I’m not even all that highly opposed to retaining it; I would like the regulations surrounding alcohol production to be loosened such that it’s easier to get into the business. I would dearly love to start my own microbrewery: there’s no practical reason why I couldn’t buy a $4,000 half-barrel brewery and make one keg of beer per day; I could then sell that beer for $50-$60, paying $3.50 in taxes and about $30 in materials and energy, realising a profit of roughly $25/keg. After about six months I could purchase another half-barrel brewery and make one barrel a day; after another three months I could expand to two barrels a day; six months to a year after that I would have the capital to rent premises in an industrial park and start a proper brewery. There’s no practical reason I cannot do that; instead, due to the regulations surrounding brewing I need to get together $300,000–500,000 in capital. This is rather more difficult than getting together $4,000.

This ties in to a lot of stuff: in general, going into business in this country is very difficult and expensive due to massive regulation, licensing, zoning and so forth. The marginal cost of complying with a new regulation is negligible for an existing corporation, but a steep barrier to entry for a new business; thus existing corporations support an awful lot of regulation and licensing as it costs them next to nothing and prevents competition. Our entire system is geared around huge corporations, not around individuals. You see the same thing with health care, where if one works for a large corporation one has excellent, cheap health insurance; if one works for a mom-and-pop operation one probably has nothing, or poor-quality, expensive health insurance at best.

Anyway, there’s no reason for home distillation to be illegal. I would dearly love to distill (if nothing else, it gives me something to do with disappointing batches of beer); I am willing to pay taxes on it. Please, change the law and let me distill!

This year, as in every year since 2000, I attended the Great American Beer Festival, one of the great perks of living in the Denver metroplex. The problem with going just one night is that the temptation is to try to drink as much beer as one can from 1730 to 2145; I’m getting older though and I really can’t drink 8–10 bottles of beer in a night—three’s about my limit these days. So I decided to go to all four sessions; unfortunately I delayed getting tickets so I was only able to get to three of the four. Bummer, but that’s life.

Thursday night I went with a buddy of mine from work. We had some excellent beers—the most memorable was Short’s Black Licorice Lager, which doesn’t actually have licorice in it (the flavour of licorice candy is licorice root, star anise and brown sugar; the beer had a quantity of anise), but I also had several excellent fruit beers and a surprisingly good beer from Anheuser-Busch of all brewers. I feel sorry for them: they have proven that they can brew excellent beer, but they are stuck. Beer geeks won’t buy their beers because they are Anheuser-Busch; beer twits won’t buy them because they love Budweiser or Coors. It’s kinda sad. Over the course of the night I tried twenty beers; at one ounce apiece, that’s less than two bottles of beer (granted, some were much stronger than normal beer). Definitely an improvement over the drink-drink-drink pace of a normal GABF evening.

Friday night I went on my own and had a further 26 beer samples. There were several top-notch sour beers I had that evening. My favourite beer that evening had to have been the Raspberry Tart from new Glarus. After I left the festival, I headed down to the Falling Rock Taphouse for the Dogfish Head tapping party. The beers were amazing and excellent, particularly the vintage bottles of the no-longer-brewed Festina Lente, although the Chateau Jiahu was pretty good too. I enjoyed some excellent beer-geek conversation and discovered that this year’s American Homebrewers’ Association conference had been in Boulder—and I’d missed it! Oh well.

Saturday night I went with my brother John. It was his first GABF, and I think he enjoyed it. We’d some very good beers, although by this point many had run out. I did have an excellent cassis (lambic black-currant beer) from a brewer whose name escapes me. All told, I had an even two dozen 1-ounce beers. Afterwards we went to the Falling Rock where New Belgium were having a tapping party. There were beers there which one cannot even get at the brewery itself, chosen just for that night. They were…wonderful.

All in all, I think that going to three sessions is better and more enjoyable than just one. I did notice that the crowd seemed much rowdier this year, although that could just have been because I was less rowdy—no real way to tell. I imagine that the price of a ticket will increase next year in order to keep out the riff-raff; they’ll still sell out, and have a higher-class event to boot.

It turns out that what you eat doesn’t matter. An eight-year study of almost 50,000 post-menopausal women found that there was no difference in the rates of cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, colorectal cancer or weight between women who ate healthy diets and those who ate whatever.

Well, I’m gonna scarf down a bag a chips then!

A decade ago today I was a contestant in a mock male beauty pageant put on by the Thetas (a sorority with which I had a slight connection). The girl I’d been chasing was good friends with many of the Thetas as well, and persuaded me that it’d be a good idea to enter; thus I did.

It was actually pretty fun. There was a J. Crew bit, where one was supposed to look as though one had stepped out of a J. Crew catalogue; I think I just wore khakis and a white shirt with a coat slung over my shoulder. There was the stupid human trick; for mine I lit & smoked a pipe (I even had a cool little Zippo pipe lighter). Then there was the underwear bit; I wore silk long-johns over boxers & an undershirt.

My favourite was the lip-syncing contest. There were a lot of funny songs I thought of doing, but I eventually settled on Monty Python’s Bruce’s Philosophers Song. I strode on stage in the remnants of a three piece suit: bow tie unstrung, vest undone, one shirt cuff opened, hair mussed and a Pilsener glass full of non-beer in my hand, and proceeded to sing:

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya ’bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, on half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away—half a crate of whisky every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle. Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And René Descartes was a drunken fart. I drink, therefore I am.
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed.

It was a hit; the entire audience was rolling in the aisles. The judges (two or perhaps all three were professors) loved it (although they did send for my glass to assure themselves that it wasn’t real beer). It was perfect, perhaps my greatest moment on campus.

The finale was an evening dress competition—really, all of us were supposed to be in drag. Well, I’ve never worn women’s clothing in my life and don’t plan ever to, so I was in a bind. I finally hit on a clever solution: I had the MC do a special intro:

When the occasion calls for jeans & a t-shirt he shows up in a coat and tie; when the occasion calls for a swimsuit he shows up in a coat and tie; when the occasion calls for evening wear he shows up in…a coat and tie!

And then I came out wearing a coat and tie. It at least got a laugh out of the audience, and managed to preserve at least a portion of my dignity.

I didn’t win, but I believe I placed. Given the reception of my song, I think I could have won had I done the drag bit, but some things aren’t worth winning. As it was, it was a blast. Even backstage it was fun.

The one annoying thing was that the girl who’d suggested I compete didn’t show up. I’d thought she’d be there, so was more than a little pissed. But all my friends who did attend had a great time.

Apparently swearing improves morale and boosts team spirit in the workplace. I think anyone who’s ever been in the military, or worked in an all-male office, or has a lick of sense, could have told one this. It’s the bluestockings who are uptight about a little mild swearing in the office, not the productive folks.

The entire Beaver Village, Ohio police department beat up a woman and her husband. They illegally entered the woman’s home; they tackled her; when her husband entered the room he was clubbed; when the woman’s father (summoned by cell phone) arrived, he was threatened with arrest for being present. Pro Libertate thinks they should be suspended at a minimum; I’d go rather further than that.

A six-year-old girl has been threatened with a $300 fine for chalking her sidewalk. Seriously, this is bleeding insane: there’s nothing wrong with kids scrawling on sidewalks. I’ll even further: with the property owner’s permission, there’s nothing wrong with anyone scrawling on sidewalks.

On the same day that he stepped down as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace honoured his men who fell in Vietnam.

A cool bunch of pics of a van converted into a mobile home. The only problem IMHO are the toilet/bathing arrangements; other than that it’s sweet.

A Navy SEAL is to be posthumously given the first Congressional Medal of Honor in the Afghan campaign.

Jason Lewis has completed a thirteen-year trip around the world under his own steam. He has visited five continents, two oceans and a sea in order to become the first man to circumnavigate the globe using only his own muscles.

Well, that’s one less way to get into the Guinness Book of World Records…

Here’s video of a police officer who shoots a man, handcuffs him, then while the man is lying cuffed and wounded stomp on his head and pistol-whips him. The policeman was never punished.

Kelly Pless went from 220 pounds to 125 (from very fat to really rather hot) via a simple formula: eating less and exercising more. One key approach she took was to look at portions and to listen to when she was actually hungry, as opposed to eating because she wanted to or was expected to.

Dr. Kent Sepkowitz, a physician from New York, argues that the recent E. coli outbreaks argue for more contaminated food. His thesis is this: that our food (and environment) is too clean, which means that when we do end up encountering a pathogen our crippled immune systems can’t handle it, and we get nastily sick.

I dunno if he’s correct: if there were more dirt in our food, mightn’t we just be exposed to nastier pathogens more often?

In this modern world of telecommuting, of moving wherever one’s job takes one, of families and friends scattered across the continent, we lose track of the people we know. In a world of suburbs, automobiles and freeways we lose track of people unlike us. Noonhat aims to fix that. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer examines the idea: set 2–4 random people up for lunch together and see what happens. It’s an opportunity to get to know one’s fellow man and to network. Also, it beats eating alone.

Right now you can sign up anywhere in the US, but it appears to be most heavily used around Seattle; perhaps my blog readers can evangelise it somewhat.

Well, it had to happen eventually: the first of my friends has turned 30. My frequent beer touring (2005; 2006; and 2007, which I neglected to write about) and college buddy Darren Antoniello is thirty today.

I don’t know how it happened; it seems just yesterday that we graduated college; it’s hard to believe that we started college over a decade ago. I remember how much we teased Darren when he turned 20 months before the rest of us; back then age was welcomed but now it doesn’t seem nearly as funny.

This year Darren & I have crossed paths incredibly often. First he was in town late in the spring or early in the summer on a business meeting; then I saw him in Chicago. Shortly after that we went to the Oregon Brewers’ Festival, which was a blast: we hiked from downtown to the rose garden and zoo up in the mountains; we drank lots of good beer; we ate some fine food; we drank lots of good beer; we saw the Simpsons premier—oh, and before I forget, we drank lots of good beer. The very next weekend he and our fellow college pal Phil came into town. We went and saw a concert at Red Rocks (wish I’d blogged about that; ’twas an experience) and the next day went on a beer tour with my brother John. It was very cool for the three of us college roommates to be sleeping under the same roof and hanging out together again after so long.

And now Darren is 30, and soon enough I’ll be, and Phil will be; in time even Phil’s wife (who’s younger than us all, and whom we teased for being 17 when we were freshmen together) will be. Time flies.

I’ve said it before, and will say it again: the only thing worse than getting older is the alternative.

The New York Times covers how the incorrect fat–heart-attack thesis became so widely accepted. In short, it was due to a cascade of wrong information and misled experts.

How are the most popular sites of 2001 doing now? Surprisingly, the vast majority have lost market share. So much for the theory that they could manage to lock users in…

A man in Maryland guided firemen to his burning townhouse; in return the police beat him. To serve and protect, indeed.

The US Congress is considering using toxic fungi to kill off drugs. This idea is so bad that even the Drug Czar disagrees with it. Among the problems is the fact that fungi are non-discriminate: they will kill marijuana, poppies, wheat, corn, cows and people alike. Another is that mycotoxins are considered biological warfare agents: applying them to crops in other countries would be quite literally an act of war.

Oh, but who cares? It’s better than thousands of people die than that a single person achieve an altered mental state. Unless that mental state is altered with alcohol, caffeine or nicotine: those are cool.

Sheriff’s deputy and part-time police officer Tyler Peterson killed six people with a police-style AR-15 (probably a Bushmaster Patrolman’s Carbine). Why? Because someone called him a worthless pig. So how did someone with such obvious lack of self-control manage to become a member of law enforcement? I wonder how he treated his fellow citizens on a day-to-day basis.

Apparently, physicians are now using children to spy on their parents. Among the questions: they ask if either parent owns a gun. Never mind that guns are legal. Never mind that it’s not a physician’s place to care.

I wonder if some form of legal action could be taken. If not, a burlap bag full of apples would do wonders on a nosey physician…

Like many of us, Christopher Hitchens supported the Iraq War from the start; like many of us, he has his doubts about its current progress. Unlike many of us, his words inspired Mark Daily to seek a commission in the Army. Lieutenant Daily was killed, and Hitchens has to come to grips with that. It’s a deeply moving article, well worth the read.

Who knew that feeding the hungry—one of the corporal works of mercy (thanks Catholic school!)—would be against the law? How can it be? Certainly, the homeless can be a nuisance. They are, however, our fellow men—and if some of us wish to feed them, that is our and their business, not the State’s.

As someone who went to college, I can appreciate these.

1. Save all manner of bacon grease. You will be instructed later how to use it.
2. Just because you can drive on snow and ice does not mean we can. Just stay home the two days of the year it snows.
3. If you do run your car into a ditch, don’t panic. Four men in the cab of a four wheel drive with a 12-pack of beer and a tow chain will be along shortly. Don’t try to help them. Just stay out of their way. This is what they live for.
4. Don’t be surprised to find movie rentals & bait in the same store.
5. Remember: Y’all is singular. All y’all is plural. All y’all’s is plural possessive.
6. Get used to hearing, You ain’t from around here, are you?
7. If you are yelling at the person driving 15 mph in a 55 mph zone, directly in the middle of the road, remember, many folks learned to drive on a model of vehicle known as John Deere, and this is the proper speed and lane position for that vehicle.
8. If you hear a redneck exclaim, Hey, y’all, watch this! Stay out of his way. These are likely the last words he will ever say.
9. Get used to the phrase It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. And the collateral phrase You call this hot? Wait’ll August.
10. There are no delis. Don’t ask.
11. In conversation, never put your hand on a man’s shoulder when making a point, especially in a bar.
12. Chili does NOT have beans in it.
13. Brisket is not ’cooked’ in an oven
14. Don’t tell us how you did it up there. Nobody cares.
15. If you think it’s too hot, don’t worry. It’ll cool down—in December.
16. We do too have 4 Seasons: December, January, February, and Summer!
17. A Mercedes-Benz is not a status symbol. A Ford F-150 is.
18. If someone tells you Don’t worry, those peppers aren’t hot you can be certain they are.
19. If you fail to heed my warning in #18 above, be sure to have a bowl of guacamole handy. Water won’t do it.
20. Rocky Mountain oysters are not oysters. Don’t ask.
21. If someone says they’re fixin’ to do something, that doesn’t mean anything’s broken.
22. Don’t even think of ordering a strawberry daiquiri. What you really mean to say is Margarita.
23. If you don’t understand our passion for college and high school football just keep your mouth shut.
24. The value of a parking space is not determined by the distance to the door, but the availability of shade.
25. If you see a slower moving vehicle on a two lane road pull onto the shoulder that is called courtesy.
26. BBQ is a food group. It does not mean grilling burgers and hot dogs outdoors.
27. No matter what you’ve seen on TV, line dancing is not a popular weekend pastime.
28. Tea means Iced Tea. There is no other kind.
29. Everything goes better with Ranch dressing.

Found at http://downhereintexas.com/text/AdviceTX.txt.

We keep hearing about the Dow Jones reaching historic highs. The trouble is that it’s value in dollars, and the dollar is reaching historic lows. When you look at the price of the Dow Jones valued in actual commodities such as oil, natural gas, gold, silver, corn or wheat then the real picture emerges: the market is less than half its 2000 value.

One of the big reasons that people play the lottery (and probably gamble in general) is the stream of small windfalls along the way: one wins $10 here and $100 there and feels like one’s ahead of the game even when behind. Philip Brewer suggests an artificial windfall generator. Instead of paying money into a lottery and getting 50% back (or 99%, as in some countries), why not budget away a certain amount of money per week, and roll the dice to determine whether or not you pull all the money out? He suggests actual dice; I’d be tempted to use a computerised random number generator, since I could more finally tune the odds. For example, say I wanted to throw a $200 party three times a year; that would mean $600/year or $11.54/week. So let’s say I put aside $12 a week for my parties; each week I also generate a random number between 1 and 18 inclusive (or roll a twenty-sided die…); if it’s 18 then I pull all the money out of the account and spend it on some sort of party; if it’s been two weeks since the last party then I’d have $24; if it’s been six months then I’d have $432 plus interest to spend.

Some people might like this approach because it changes things up from simple budgeting, in which one would have a $200 party every four months and that’s it. It’s an interesting approach, and certainly better than a lottery.

There’s new evidence that the USS Liberty was deliberately sunk by the Isrælis in 1967. If Isræl (quite properly) hunted down Eichmann and hanged him for his crimes, can we expect them to hand over those responsible for the decision to sink and the pilots who did the actual shooting? I rather doubt it.

While visiting with Stephen we took the Pacific Surfliner from San Diego to Oceanside; it’s a cheap $13 ticket and a 50 minute ride (shorter than the drive would be in realistic traffic). The train is much nicer than a plane: they have real food and beer (e.g.Stone Pale Ale); the seats are larger; there’s more space to move; there are even tables at which one can play cards and so forth. All in all, it was an excellent experience.

So why don’t we use the train more often? Well, there are a plethora of reasons, but the three biggest would be: cost, time and inconvenience.

I took a quick look at a train leaving the thirtieth of October from Denver to Fort Worth, returning on the fifteenth of November (I chose the dates to be far in the future and didn’t specify morning or evening trains—just give me the cheapest option, please). There’s a train from Denver to Galesburg, Illinois (fifteen hours) with a five-hour layover, then from Galesburg to Kansas City (four-and-a-quarter hours) with a two-hour layover, then a bus from Kansas City to Oklahoma City (eight hours) with a twenty-minute layover, then finally from Oklahoma City to Fort Worth (four-and-a-quarter hours). All told, I would leave Denver on the evening of the thirtieth of October and arrive in Fort Worth the morning of the first of November.

The return trip would be slightly better: Fort Worth to Springfield, Illinois (twenty hours) with a two-hour layover; then a bus from Springfield to Galesburg (two-and-a-quarter hours) with a two-hour layover; then finally a train from Galesburg to Denver (sixteen hours). I would leave early the afternoon of the fourteenth and arrive early in the morning of the sixteenth.

The cost of this trip? The southbound journey would cost $234; the northbound $196; booked together it comes to $323. An airplane ticket would cost $204. Amtrak is $119 more expensive.

One of the $204 flights I found leaves Denver at 1340 and arrives in Dallas/Fort Worth at 1630—a two-hour flight (remember there’s a time zone change); the return trip leaves at 1400 and arrives at 1500—again, a two-hour flight. Granted, one should arrive at an airport two hours ahead of time, and it takes about half an hour to collect one’s baggage: so each flight is really four-and-a-half hours long. Taken together, the flights would be nine hours; Amtrak would take four days longer.

So the train would cost half again as much as flying and would take six and a half times as long. But it’s more pleasant than flying? Well, not actually. It could be, but none of those trains have sleeper cars. So I’d be spending almost five days living in a train seat. This is not my idea of fun. And there’s no checked baggage on at least a few of the routes, so I’d have to be managing my baggage and keeping an eye on it the entire time. Also, although I don’t smoke often (maybe two or three pipes a week), I do enjoy it, particularly when bored (as I would be on a train). Amtrak used to have smoking cars, but no longer. One can smoke on the platform when waiting for a train, but only if the local state or city permits it. So that’s one less thing to do during the mind-numbing five-day journey. Also, I like to travel with a firearm, as is my right: airlines allow me to check a gun, but Amtrak forbids both checked and carry-on weapons (they don’t seem to search, but it is against the rules). Last but by no means least, the schedules given above are ideal: passenger trains have lower priority than freight trains, and so Amtrak trains are constantly delayed. There’s a reasonable chance a trip which takes nine hours by plane takes a week by train.

So let’s review: the train costs one-and-a-half times as much as the plane; it takes at least six to seven times longer; and it’s less convenient and more irksome. I’d have to be insane to take the train!

Which is a true pity: if there were a high-speed train from Denver to Dallas/Fort Worth (two large metroplexes separated by plains and which should be connected), there’s no reason it couldn’t make the trip in about nine hours each direction; it could be more spacious than a plane; it could offer nicer amenities than a plane; it could be cheaper and more efficient than a plane. As it is, Amtrak is a miserable failure.

Almost two years ago my brother Stephen & I travelled to Berlin and had a fine time; we’d hoped that our brother John could join us, but he was lame and obeyed the visa laws. Shortly thereafter he enlisted in the Marine Corps; quite awhile after that he was graduated from boot camp (he broke some bones therein, so it took awhile). This summer John, Stephen & I went on a trans-American vacation which was really quite wonderful.

This last week John, Stephen & I had one last trip together. Stephen had a long pre-deployment weekend and we three resolved to make the most of it—and did we!

I arrived on Friday and caught a bus to our brother Tom’s house on Coronado Island (he was himself deployed, but a friend was renting it and could let us in). One of Stephen’s platoon-mates had given him a ride down, so the three of us grabbed beers and food at the Coronado Brewery and then at Little Club (which is basically a time-capsule from the 1970s; I can imagine our dad drinking beer there back when the Soviets were the threat du jour).

Saturday we went on a run early and then headed into San Diego. We’d a bit of a mix-up with the bus and ended up all the way in Imperial Beach; never fear, we took a trolley into downtown and arrived in one piece. We’d lunch, then caught a flick, then had some coffee at a great new coffee/gelatto/hookah joint called Tabac, then back to Coronado where we baked a loaf of bread and had a superb dinner of steaks and saltzkartoffeln (all made with ingredients from Boney’s Bayside Markey, which is a very short walk from Tom’s house. Then I picked up John and we sat around watching Forrest Gump.

Sunday we got up early and took the bus to St. Spyridon’s for church. Afterwards Father said a brief prayer for Stephen and then we headed to the zoo. Our enjoyment was hampered by the fact that the Fascisti in charge have outlawed smoking on the premises since the beginning of this month. I’ve no doubt that the mothers of those who made the decision have no recollection of their fathers. Still, we’d an enjoyable time, particularly our pleasant meal at Albert’s in the treehouse. I understand that Stephen used to spend quite a lot of his liberties hanging at the zoo, people-watching and enjoying life.

That evening we had a few beers and then visited Fumari where we had an incredible guava hookah and took lots and lots of goofy photos. Then it was back to bed fairly early (we’re not always the night-owls our last name would indicate).

On Monday we slept in a bit, then headed up to Camp Pendleton to help Stephen’s corpsman & his wife pack up all their stuff for storage. That took pretty much the entire day, but we did have some excellent Thai restaurant which has been in business at least since Stephen was two years old. They had larb, an incredible Thai/Laotian dish which has been a family favourite since we were kids and ate at Thai Taste (I don’t know if that Thai restaurant is related to the one we frequented; they’re in the same rough area though). As an aside, back when he was a newborn the owner of Thai Taste took Stephen back to the kitchen to parade him, so well-known was our family there (or at least, that was an eight-year-old’s perception; no doubt our parents could correct it). We also got to see Stephen’s barracks at Camp Pendleton and experience the awe-inspiring stench therein. I’m serious about that: I have never in my life smelt something as foul as what I smelt in his room. The nose becomes acclimated to the very worst smells known to man in a few minutes, three or four or maybe a very little more; half an hour later and that room still stank. It was truly incredible, in the original sense of the word.

Tuesday morning Stephen & I went for a run again (John being a wimp and claiming he hadn’t the shoes). We ran all the way into the Pacific, then turned around, stopped off at the video store and then headed home. The three of us bickered, went to the store, bickered, bought some meat, bickered, bought some vegetables, bickered, bought some beer, bickered, bought some cheese—it was wonderful! We headed home and prepared steaks (garlic, black pepper, enough salt to hide the meat, rest one hour, wash with water, grill), green beans and twice-baked potatoes; Stephen baked a load of bread (his first ever!) for the meal. Afterwards we watched Hot Fuzz, which Stephen hadn’t seen yet.

We’d thought that he’d have to take the train or bus back to Camp Pendleton—thus having to leave early—but Tom’s renter (himself a Naval doctor) was kind enough to offer us his services, and was adamant that we could stay out late if we wished. And so we headed back to the Coronado Brewery and the Little Club and engaged in some late-night brother-bonding. Finally we headed back home, were driven back to Pendleton and said our good-byes.

It was an excellent long weekend; the only thing which would have improved it would have been if Tom and/or Emily could have been there. Had they been, I think it would been just about perfect; as it was, it was almost perfect. Which ain’t too bad when you think about it.

Well, yesterday my youngest brother—Lance Corporal Stephen Peter Uhl of the Third Battalion of the Fifth Marine Regiment—deployed for Iraq, there to do battle with our nation’s foes. By this time I imagine they will have deplaned and either are now or will soon be in their new quarters.

Our relationship is rather complex: due to the difference in our ages (almost eight years; he was born after the Challenger explosion!), in some ways I regard him more as a father or uncle than as a brother. I saw him born; I cut his umbilical cord; I changed his diapers (probably not that often if you asked Mom or Dad, but it seemed all the time to me). He visited me almost a decade ago, when he was only eleven and I was in college. He was still a cute little kid, so I dressed him in a coat & tie, gave him a snifter of orange soda and took him around all my friends trolling for girls. It was absolutely hilarious. As adults I’ve tried to be something of a wise uncle to him, moderating his vices and encouraging his virtues. I’ve not always been successful, but I like to imagine that I’ve helped moderate his excesses to some extent.

I very much hope he’s safe for the next seven months, but there’s nothing I can do now but pray. I bid you, my readers, to keep him in your daily prayers.

Colorado is the number one beer-producing state in the United States! I knew my long years of homebrewing would pay off; I like to think that I single-handedly pushed us over the mark.

It’d be cool to build a boat from a single sheet of plywood. Maybe my dad & I could do it sometime?

All my life we’ve mocked Canadian money (this candy bar costs 50 cents, or $485 Canadian); well, now it’s time for the Canadians to mock us: the Canadian dollar is worth more than the American dollar. This is why apparently-high investment returns are illusory: our dollar is cratering, and while an investment might appear to pay, say, 4% it’s really losing a few percent in constant dollars.

I wrote a long entry about this woman’s discovery that the US Naval Academy is martial, but really you just need to read it for yourself. I can speak to having siblings in the military; I even have a brother who went to the Naval Academy too (rather than shock and grief, my sentiments are more concernpride and respect). Let me just say that she and her mother are complete and utter fools. Gosh, the military owns you after you join—who knew? The comments after the article are priceless.

I feel sorry for her brother. It’s his plebe year, which is bad enough—but now every single midshipman and officer at the academy knows he comes from a family of congenital idiots. He’s going to have an utterly miserable fall. Of course, that’ll only make him stronger if he makes it through it. Still…

Incidentally, she doesn’t actually go to Columbia as she pretends; she goes to Barnard College, an affiliated women’s college.

USA Today reports that we Americans are too heavy for our cars: cars are rated for passengers weighing 150 pounds apiece while the average American man is 190 lbs. and the average woman is a mind-boggling 163 lbs. (aren’t women supposed to be in the 112-140 range?). Whoops.

A Swedish study has found that full-fat dairy products are less fattening than low-fat foods. Eating real food is better than eating processed foods. Who knew?

I spent the last two days ripping my entire music collection to Ogg Vorbis for my kid brother. You see, he recently bought a Toshiba Gigabeat F40 to take with him to Iraq and since he has no computer he was a bit stuck for tunes. Well, he now has 14½ gigabytes of music, which works out to 3,170 songs or 8 days, 10 hours and 34 minutes of solid music. I’m pretty sure he’ll end up deleting about half of it, but it should be a good start on his own collection.

I installed Rockbox on the Gigabeat. Rockbox is free cross-platform firmware which supports several iPods, Archos players, Cowon products, iriver players, SanDisk Sansa and the Toshiba Gigabeat X and F. It offers a lot more features than vendor firmwares do (e.g. Ogg Vorbis playback, crossfade, loads of games and so forth). In fact, I like the Gigabeat so much that I really, really, really want to buy one for myself. Of course, I already have an iAudio, which is very nice, cost three-fifths as much and has one twentieth the capacity.

Maybe I can break it…

David Pogue asks a cogent question: why do people buy ringtones? It’s an amazingly stupid thing to do. Almost any song one buys for use as a ringtone one already has as in Ogg Vorbis, MP3, AAC or some other format; why pay an extra $3 a year or $2.50 a month or whatever insanely expensive rate your phone company charges? You’re just paying for the privilege of playing something you already own!

Further proof that mobile phones cause brain damage, as though more were needed.

It’s legal to carry a gun openly in Arlington, Virginia. Why then would the police stop, detain, question and attempt to photograph someone legally carrying a gun? Would they do the same if he were to carry a 2x4? If he were to carry a briefcase? If he were to stand on a soapbox discussing politics? If he were to go to the church of his choosing?

Just finished watching the hilarious Hot Fuzz. It’s an excellent parody buddy-cop films. The first bit’s kinda slow, but really it’s a prolonged setup for the final half hour actionfest. The trailer promises that the guys who made it watched every action film ever; I don’t know about that, but they sure managed to fit in just about every action movie trope: the jump-from-a-great-height; the hero-henchman fight; the hero-villain fight; the sword-fight; the vengeance vendetta; the exploding building; the spring-loaded sleeve-pistols; the massive, monumental, absolutely incredible expenditure of ammunition (I’m pretty certain more shots were fired making Hot Fuzz than in the Second World War).

It rocked.

Well, Boy Scouting (now called Scouting to appease girls) celebrated its centennial in disgraceful style. The event is co-ed; there is no campfire; there are no meat dishes at all, only vegetarian fare such as veggie chili, salads and potatoes. Baden-Powell is spinning in his grave. Our modern Scouters should be ashamed of themselves.

Orson Scott Card has a comprehensive proposal for weaning America off of the automobile. He correctly points out that we currently subsidise cars and big-box retailers to a remarkable extent and that we penalise pleasant neighbourhoods. I don’t agree with all of his suggestions (I’d rather get rid of all regulations than replace anti-neighbourhood ones with pro-neighbourhood ones), but they are not a bad start at all.

If we simply start building nice, mixed-use (retail & residential), mixed-income neighbourhoods composed of a higher-speed commercial street, then some streets of houses and on the periphery a few apartment buildings; if we’d allow commercial streets to have garrets and other residences; if we’d quit mandating huge parking lots (thereby wasting space and forcing driving); if we’d instead build sidewalks oriented towards pedestrians: if we did those things, we’d have a safer, healthier, more pleasant America.

The evening of 25 December 2001 Cory Maye was asleep at home with his 18-month-old daughter when his door was smashed in, waking him. He ran, got his gun and shot one of the intruders dead. It turns out that the intruders were police serving a no-knock warrant on his next-door neighbour. Despite the fact that he stopped shooting the instant the police identified themselves; despite the fact that Mississippi allows the killing of another in self-defense; despite the fact that Mississippi does not consider it capital murder to kill a police officer when one does not know he is a police officer—despite all these things, Cory Maye was sentenced to death. His death sentence was overturned a year ago, but he still sits on death row, a victim and not a killer. And pretty much no-one cares.

This is the inevitable result of laws that favour the police (why should it be capital murder to kill a cop, but not a grandmother?); of laws that violate our centuries-old liberties (why are no-knock raids permitted?); of policies which encourage citizens to believe themselves under attack (why use a SWAT team to smash a door when a simple knock would do as well?); of laws which penalise victimless crimes (why is it legal to drink alcohol but not smoke dope?).

Cory Maye defended his daughter from what he thought were criminals, and yet he rots in prison, treated like one.

Back in 1964 Richard Feynman (you may have heard of him—he was a remarkably well-known scientist) served on the California Curriculum Commission. These are his thoughts on the corruption of the whole process.

We’re all familiar with anthropological expeditions, in which academics go and live amongst primitive groups to study their lifestyles. But what if it were done in reverse? What if a group of Pacific Islanders visited England? That’s actually a lot cooler.

An Austrian physician recommends nose-picking and eating mucus. According to him, a finger will get the nasal passages cleaner than a handkerchief, and the bugs trapped in the mucus will increase the body’s immune defenses.

I hope he’s already married, because he is never going to get another date in his life…

Back in 1999 William Dowling (of the Rutgers English department) wrote Why America Needs the SAT, an examination of what the SAT actually is, what it actually measures and whether or not it’s a good predictor of academic success. Turns out, it measures scholastic aptitude and predicts success in college—and that universities and colleges with low average SAT scores are not much more than glorified high schools.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have to mow the lawn ¼ as often? Wouldn’t it be cool to stop watering the lawn? Wouldn’t it be cool not to have to fertilise the lawn? Well, Eco-lawn does exactly that! It’s a breed of fescue which is slow-growing with very deep roots. The deep roots pull out all the water the grass needs; the slow growth means it doesn’t need to be cut often. As a bonus, it’s so fine that it bends over at four inches long, so one doesn’t really have to ever cut it unless one wishes.

Thanks to Ecototality for pointing it out.

Every guy’s thought of it at one point or another. Wouldn’t it be great to have a urinal in your home?

In Temecula, California, a gang of armed, brutal men burst into a home, cuffed the entire family and generally behaved like jerks (e.g. when the mother asked if her 15-month old was alright, she was told that if she moved he’d put a bullet in her head). It’s known who did it—so why aren’t the culprits in prison?

Because they’re police, that’s why. They got the wrong address, but that’s almost beyond the point. Even if they had gotten the correct address, would it be appropriate to issue a no-knock raid? Almost certainly not, although I’ll grant the rather slim possibility. Even if it were the correct house, and even were it one of the extremely rare situations in which a no-knock raid is appropriate, is there any reason to treat people unkindly? To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, when you have a gun to someone’s head it costs nothing to be polite.

That said, no-knock raids have led to quite a few deaths of innocents in recent years. Their use should be severely curtailed or eliminated altogether. I’m not particularly worried that someone could flush a bag of drugs down the toilet given 30 seconds’ notice. First of all, it’s not that likely. Second, our entire judicial system is based on giving the accused the benefit of the doubt. Third, I don’t really care if someone has a bag of drugs in the first place.

No matter what our system of keeping order, there will be innocent deaths; that’s just the nature of force. But surely we can act to minimise those deaths?

In 2003 Virginia farmer Joel Salatin wrote the essay Everything I Want to Do is Illegal about the stifling bureaucracy which afflicts agriculture. A farmer can’t operate his own slaughterhouse; instead, he has to ship the animals elsewhere. He can’t sell his own meat. He can’t charge for farm tours. If he wants to sell a single item a neighbour produces, he must become a full-fledged retail outlet: business license, business taxes, parking lot, public restrooms—the works. He can’t build his own house to his own specifications (interesting, in Virginia it’s illegal to build a home as small as my condo).

Whatever happened to the Land of the Free?

The world-renowned beer and whiskey writer Michæl Jackson has died. He was one of the moving forces behind the craft beer revolution on both sides of the Atlantic; his work was excellent. He will be missed.

I still remember where I was when I heard that Princess Diana had died in a car accident. I was at a start-of-school party at the Tri-Gam house, sitting on the front porch enjoying a beer and smoking my pipe when Kevin Craig ran out shouting Princess Diana just died! My response? Good riddance to bad rubbish.

She was an adultress and an accomplice to treason (sleeping with the Princess of Wales has been high treason since 1351). That wouldn’t have been so bad, but she was indiscreet, which is worse. After her divorce, she entertained New Age gurus and was thoroughly unrespectable, finally ending up involved with a department store owner’s son.

The massive maudlin display of grief on her death is yet another indication that England has fallen quite far from the nation which ruled the waves and on whose empire the sun never set.

A decade (and a few months…) ago I finished my freshman year of college and got a summer job at what was then called ResNet. I figured it’d give me a chance to save some money and hopefully gain a little independence from my folks—as I recall my goal was to by all my books for the ’97–’98 year.

After getting the job, I had to find a place to live. I don’t remember now if I checked the classified ads or not, but I do know that I spent several afternoons walking around the neighbourhoods near AC looking for places to rent. I was actually getting quite panicky when a friend mentioned that his girlfriend was looking for a housemate for the summer, and so I ended up moving into 820 N. Crockett St. in Sherman, Texas. My parents were pretty upset; they thought I was shacking up with the girl. Which is pretty funny in hindsight: how could they be so clueless as to not notice that I simply don’t understand girls enough to have any success with them? But they sure were convinced I was going off to live in a den of iniquity. Sigh—I haven’t the luck!

It was a wonderful summer. I had no money to speak of ($4.75/hour, IIRC) and managed to spend, so I spent but $7/week on food. Back then Lipton Noodles ’n’ Sauce were 85¢ apiece; I’d buy 7 of them, leaving me $1.05 to splurge on a bag of pork rinds, or some sodas or whatever. I’d no car, so I couldn’t go anywhere my bike or feet couldn’t take me—and there’s nothing to in Sherman anyway. So I’d go to work, ride home at lunchtime to grab a granola bar or just relax, ride back to work, ride back home, make dinner, then relax on the back porch reading a book of philosophy, smoking a pipe and drinking a snifter of brandy.

I had to sit on the back porch, you see, because we didn’t run the air conditioner, as it was too expensive. The house baked like an oven; it was miserable inside. So I’d sit out back watching the sun set—it was a very nice time, actually.

Sometimes I’d walk to Sherman’s downtown: motley collection of lawyers, land agents and furniture stores. But that summer a great little coffeehouse opened up, and the owner & I would smoke cigars and discuss the world. Sometimes I’d walk by the storefront black church, with the people interjecting amen, ah-huh, hallelujah &c. as the preacher spoke. Or, if I had a little bit of extra money, I’d get an ice cream cone at the Braum’s.

I had two housemates: Lara & Alicia. Alicia was pretty unhappy to share a house with a guy, and a week or two after I moved in she moved out; we were fortunate enough to pick up another renter instead, a fellow named James. He was 24 or 26, in the master’s programme and was engaged: he seemed a very old man to us. After all, he’d actually worked after college!

Lara’s boyfriend—my buddy—was away in Mexico for the summer, and the girl I’d been pining after was home on vacation, so the two of us spent a good time moping. One time it got so hot inside that we walked downtown, then back home, and for some reason decided that starting a fire would be neat. So we did, on the sidewalk in front of the house. Not, perhaps, the best idea ever. She ended up marrying her boyfriend, and is now rather an accomplished photographer.

James had worked at a video store, so he had a huge library of old display videos (they scroll THIS VIDEO NOT FOR RESALE every five minutes or so, but are otherwise great); he even had the uncut version of Branagh’s Hamlet, which was a treat. He had also been an actor, and had a tape of perhaps the worst film ever, Gay TV, in which he played a part. It was so bad that Lara & I pretended to be asleep halfway through it. He’s now married and has a few daughters, and teaches and directs.

Sherman in the summer was something else; I actually grew to appreciate it. The city hosted concerts on the lawn of high school; a good chunk of the townsfolk would attend, and since many of them were faculty, staff or students one was sure to spot someone one knew. The few students in town bonded more than during the school year; parties which in term would have been quite exclusive were much more inviting. It was really nice; I’ve often wished that I’d spent the next two summers there. But of course, the internships I pursued instead led to the job I work now, which is what affords me the opulent lifestyle I enjoy, so I guess it all works out in the end.

All in all, that was an excellent summer. At the end of it, I was 140 pounds and in excellent shape from the combination of too little food and all my cycling. It was grand!

A man was arrested in Norfolk, Virginia for carrying a gun openly. Only one problem: it’s legal to do so, and the city ordinance against it is illegal. So over hundred gun owners showed up with guns on their hips to protest peacefully. Amusingly, I think that the city more-or-less got the message. Except for the councilman who walked out to protest the protest: he should be impeached. An elected official has a responsibility to do his duty.

Whilst peeling peaches for jam this evening, I’d a frightening realisation: I’m as close to 40 as I am to 18. How the hell did that happen? I really don’t feel that old!

The Atlantic has a survey of American military memoirs of Vietnam. Very different stuff from what most Americans remember; very different stuff from what Hollywood depicts; very different stuff from what the newspapers reported. This, y’see, is true, unlike that other drivel.

A brother & sister pair of runners were arrested and charged with a felony for marking a running trail with flour in the parking lot of a New Haven, Connecticut, Ikea. Police freaked out, evacuated & shut down the store. Quoth the mayor's trained monkey, one Jessica Mayorga, You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know, it could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We're thankful it wasn't, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.

Or, y'know, you could just figure it's 99.999999% likely to be perfectly harmless. Grow up. It's almost certainly not a threat. Grow up. It's not someone else's fault that the city over-reacted (c.f. Boston's insanely idiotic response to the Lite Brites). Grow the f—— up.

An Austin police officer was fired because his Christian beliefs do not permit him to abuse people. While dealing with a domestic disturbance, one of the folks involved tried to walk to his car; a senior police officer tackled the man without warning, then demanding that his junior tase the man; he refused, believing that the situation didn’t warrant it. Afterwards, a psychologist stated that his Christianity impairs him such that he is incapable of taking in and processing information.

In other words, the Austin Police Department apparently believes that Christianity is incompatible with being a police officer. They also apparently believe that unlawful, unconstitutional and excessive force is just peachy.

Steve Tucker returned to society a year ago, after ten years in federal prison. His crime? Selling lightbulbs. He, his brother and his sister-in-law had owned & operated a hydroponics store, and some of their customers used the systems to grow dope. Despite the fact that they would eject any customer who mentioned marijuana; despite the fact that they returned any merchandise bearing a hemp leaf; despite the fact that they refused to sell High Times, rolling papers or anything else to do with the weed culture; despite the fact that they were a legitimate business selling a legal product, they were thrown in prison for 10, 16 and 10 years respectively.

Their real crime? Not allowing the DEA to install surveillance cameras in their store. Yes, in return for not co-operating with America’s Stasi they were thrown into prison.

Here’s a startling set of three pictures: Park Avenue before 1922, when cars weren’t allowed; after the 1922 changes; and today. Who could possibly think it an improvement?

Here are some pictures of the same locations in San Jose in 1975 and 2006. Apparently, people in the 1970s hated trees with a passion, drove everywhere and hated pedestrians. Also, they considered parking lots the height of urban design.

It’s hard to express the strength of my emotions on reading Tim Page’s account of his life. I feel like I’m reading my own autobiography, in broad strokes as well as in many particulars. Like him, I was marked as bright by the same people who gave me failing marks; like him, I read the World Book Encyclopædia for fun. He writes of assembling a personality, piece by piece, almost robotically, from models we admire; that’s almost an exact description of me. His words on the ease of empathy for the inanimate and the difficulty of connecting with people strike far too close to home. His many monomanias reflect my own; one that stands out in particular is his high school decision to wear a rabbit’s foot in each buttonhole of his shirt and button it at the neck, which reminds me rather painfully of my own sweater-vest and tweed-coat stage in college. I needn’t even go into his—and my—general cluelessness with girls, or the horrors of the grade school PE field (and yes, I heartily concur with his plans for PE teachers).

The quote which best describes it all is this:

My efforts have been only partly successful: after fifty-two years, I am left with the melancholy sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity.

That’s the matter in a nutshell.

This summer, Roy Baumeister gave a deeply insightful speech entitled Is There Anything Good About Men?. His essential points are these: that a culture—any culture—is a system which uses men and women in order to survive against other cultures; that most cultures use men and women differently; that while most winners are men, so too are most losers; that men tend towards the extremes (most genius and retards are men); that men are social too, but instead of being individually social, we are social in the great community; that we are as concerned with fairness as women, but rather than equality we seek equity. You need to read it now.

An interesting item is this: about 2/3 of your ancestors are women; only 1/3 are men. That means that a few men were very successful—and many more were utter failures. In fact, of all the men who ever existed perhaps 40% actually have descendants now living today; the majority of men have died without heirs. For women, the number is 80%. That single difference can explain a whole host of behaviours among men and women.

Another item: the survival rate on the Titanic was worse for upper-class men than for lower-class women. You won’t hear too many leftists mention that one…

I’m pretty good at doing things myself: I brew beer, sew historical clothing, grind wheat into flour, bake bread from the same flour, make various pickles (including sauerkraut), cook my own food, make my own soap; paint my cabinets; replace my plumbing and so forth. I’d never made jam, for some reason thinking that it’s some difficult task. Inspired by a cookbook I’ve been reading, I decided to make a batch.

Egad, it’s easy. As in, I don’t know why I haven’t been making it all my life. I don’t know why my mother ever bought jam. I don’t know why anyone would buy jam.

Here’s how to do it. First get six cups’ worth of washed, peeled, cored, roughly chopped &c. fruit, berries or what-have-you, three cups of sugar and the juice of a lime or lemon. Mix these together in a pot over medium-high heat until the fruit starts to give up its water and the sugar is completely dissolved. Turn the heat down to medium-low and let cook for at least half an hour. Every fifteen minutes thereafter, pour a bit of the cooking liquid onto an ice-cold plate and refrigerate for two minutes: once it’s gelled, the jam is ready. If it hasn’t gelled at the half-hour point, add in another cup of sugar and cook down for at least another 15 minutes, maybe longer. Seal up in self-sealing jars, invert for at least fifteen minutes, then turn upright, make sure the seals are tight and stow. As long as the jar dimples are sucked in, they’re sealed.

Yes, it’s really that easy. It’s insanely easy. The hardest part is peeling the fruit (which can be helped along by parboiling for a minute, then rinsing in cold water). There’s no reason one shouldn’t have one’s own fresh & pure preserves. My first batch was peach and the second was apricot-pear (I had to add some pear because I didn’t buy enough apricots). They are both stunning.

I looked up the difference between jam, jelly & preserves. It turns out that a jelly is made with fruit juice and sugar; a jam is made with crushed or pulped fruit and sugar; preserves are made with chunks of fruit and sugar syrup. Now you know—and as G.I. Joe taught as, knowing is half the battle.

The leftist Guardian has an article about a British journalist’s nightmarish experience in the United States. She did not properly fill out her immigration form, and for this was cruelly mistreated.

While she was in the wrong, the Department of Homeland Security (egad, I loathe that name!) was also in the wrong—and IMHO far worse. There’s no excuse to treat an innocent human being that way.

This evening I watched It Happened One Night, a Frank Capra film featuring Clark Gable & Claudette Colbert. The plotline is fairly simple: girl (involved with a fellow) falls in with a guy while headed to New York to meet her fellow; they hate each other; they have transportation trouble; zany adventures ensue; they fall in love. I was thinking how cool it’d be to remake it in a modern vein, and was amusing myself with how to update it when I realised something: I’ve already seen it remade. Three times in fact. Forces of Nature: guy (engaged) falls in with a gal while headed to his wedding; they hate each other; they have transportation trouble; zany adventures ensue; they fall in love. The Sure Thing: girl (with a boyfriend) falls in with a guy while headed to visit the boyfriend (and the guy’s sure thing); they hate each other; they have transportation trouble; zany adventures ensue; they fall in love. Planes, Trains & Automobiles: guy falls in with another guy while headed to his family; guys hate each other; they have transportation trouble; zany adventures ensue; they become friends. Heck, one could even argue that 48 Hours and Lethal Weapon play with the same sort of ideas.

I don’t know that It Happened One Night originated such plots—perhaps Aristophanes played with ’em—but it was very cool to watch the inspiration for so much latter cinema. It’s not a terribly great film in itself (despite sweeping the Academy Awards for 1934), but it’s highly enjoyable fluff.

Seventy years ago today, marijuana (then spelt Marihuana) was made semi-illegal. The federal government not having the right to outlaw it (note the Constitutional amendment required to outlaw alcohol; note too that there is no amendment giving the Congress the ability to outlaw it even today), they instead levied a modest tax ($1), and imposed gargantuan fines ($2,000—a large sum in 1937—and five years of prison) for violations of any provisions of the labyrinthine regulations imposed.

I don’t think marijuana is a particularly good thing—but it should be a legal thing. I don’t think that Congregationalism is a particularly good thing either, but it too should be legal. Lots of folks don’t think alcohol is a good thing—it is, for the moment, legal.

An Assistant Director of the FBI thinks it’s more important to prosecute drug crimes than murder. The FBI would rather that innocent men rot in prison in order to protect drug informants. Hurray for Prohibition, Version 2!

When I got home Saturday evening I discovered a message waiting from one of my school friends. She’d called to let me know that Professor Jim Knowlton had died. He was my boss my first year at Austin College, while I was working at the Department of Foreign Languages. Although he’d given up pipe-smoking years before, he gave me my first high-quality pipe, an Italian Talamona, which I am smoking as I write these words. He was a cool fellow (taught a bridge class which I took), and not terribly old (just a decade older than my own parents). It was great to see him again when I went to my reunion; I had been looking forward to doing the same at the next. Instead, I've sent a sum to the scholarship has been established in his memory at Austin College.

Here’s another obituary, this one from his hometown paper in New Hampshire.

Do you have feelings of inadequacy? Do you suffer from shyness? Do you sometimes wish you were more assertive? If you answered yes to any of these questions, ask your doctor or pharmacist about tequila.

Hilarious video…