Octopodial Chrome

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 pla