Octopodial Chrome

I made coffee ice cream this past weekend. It’s a great recipe, but is a lot of work. If I make it again (and I probably will) I’ll make more than a quart. Man, it was good stuff.

As we all know, assimilation is key to successful immigration: foreigners immigrate, assimilate and their grandchildren are just as American as those whose forebears came over on Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery. Unfortunately, immigrants from Mexico are not assimilating; in fact, assimilation is reverse in some cases. This is hardly healthy.

A disturbing statistic is that one in ten children born today has a mother born in Mexico; of those half never completed high school. This is not at all good for our republic: 10% (at least) of our citizens have roots in a culture which is not at all republican, and half of those come from uneducated families. The survival of our republic and our liberties relies upon an electorate which is cognisant of its history—what will happen when it feels more affinity for the failed policies of a failed state (Mexico is the very definition of a failed state: it has gotten so bad that it openly encourages the emigration of its citizens) than for those principals which made our union great?

Back in 1994 Bruce Bartlett wrote a great essay about the fall of Rome. Basically, Rome’s foolish economic policies (driven by the emperor’s desire to destroy the senatorial class and prop up their armies) destroyed the empire and paved the way for the Dark Ages. Pretty cool stuff, and an object lesson to nations the world over.

Bushman’s Hole in South Africa is the deepest underwater cave in the world. Read the true story of an attempt to rescue the body of a diver who had died there. One of the best pieces I’ve read in a long, long time.

On the 18th of June a young man was arrested by police; he died on Sunday. He certainly deserved to be arrested, but the manner and the results are unacceptable. While celebrating a home-team win, he and some friends passed a cluster of 10–12 police officers; he sarcastically commented, wow, it seems like there’s a lot of crime on this corner. Very dumb, considering that he was breaking the law by drinking in public. Kids, if you’re going to mock the police, don’t do it while breaking the law. But the police—from reports—violently over-reacted: eight officers and a supervisor piled onto him, beating him and driving off his friends. In the struggle, he stopped breathing, was rushed to a hospital and eventually died of his injuries.

As I noted, he deserved to be cited or arrested, for blatant stupidity if nothing else. But the right thing to do would have been for two or three policemen to have approached him and then cited or arrested him. The wrong thing was to pile on. If he had resisted arrest, then it would have been appropriate to subdue him.

We are free citizens in a free republic: the police are our public servants. They should use politeness first, and force only when necessary. They should not see us as cattle to be herded.

This ties in with the abuse of SWAT teams and warrant-serving by force. By default, warrants should be served by a few officers: knock on the door, serve the warrant and get on with life. Sending a SWAT team to arrest an optometrist for a non-violent crime escalates matters unreasonably.

Yes, there are instances (many instances, perhaps) where force is necessary. But when force becomes the default; when law enforcement is held to a lower standard of accountability (note that the eggshell skull rule holds that you’re responsible even for unforeseeable consequences—but it’s not applied to the police), when citizens are routinely slain by their public servants—in that case, something has to change.

Michæl Pollan has some nontraditional advice on how to be healthy: eat food; not too much; mostly plants.

The full article is actually a wonderful examination of how nutritionism has damaged the American diet. Instead of eating healthy food, we flock to unhealthy food with a few extra nutrients added. Believe it or not, removing fat or adding oat bran or fibre does not a healthy product make.

Our own public servants are of no use, for they are to beholden to the producers. Pollan details how back in 1977 the federal government was to have released a recommendation to reduce consumption of meat; due to pressure from the cattle industry, the recommendation was instead choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake, which is not at all the same thing. It’s much like advising choose a method of driving which maximises leg and arm motion instead of just saying exercise more.

Fortunately, Pollan also offers some good advice: eat food; not too much; mostly plants. Eat real food, not manufactured food products. Processed food-like substances trigger our taste sensors, but there’s no there there: they don’t actually contain the substances we need to survive. Avoid them, and you’ll be better off. Don’t eat too much food; gluttony is a sin for a reason (actually, all sins are sins for a reason, but that’s another blog entry). Eat mostly plants: they are chock-full of nutritious goodness. Meat’s good stuff too; you should have meat in your diet. It’s tasty, and it’s a good way of getting certain proteins in a hassle-free manner. Livestock can be an excellent way of eking out subsistence from barren grassland; some animals, pigs in particular, are excellent mechanisms for turning garbage into food. But too much meat is most definitely not what the doctor ordered. If you want my advice, do as the Church teaches and abstain from meat Wednesdays, Fridays, during Lent and Advent (there are several other fasts, but those are the big ones): you’ll cut your meat consumption down considerably, but you’ll still get what you want and what you need. Plus, self-discipline is a virtue.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Today is a great day, a red-letter day, a triumph for sanity and a victory for reason. Today a majority the Supreme Court of the United States decided to actually read their copies of the Constitution (something the justices too-rarely do). Today the Court affirmed that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

As the decision noted, the public-safety impact—whether positive or negative—is none of the Court’s business. All that matters is the constitutionality of a total gun ban. Those of you who hate guns: amend the federal constitution if you wish. I’d oppose your efforts, but I’d also applaud your honesty. If you don’t like what the Constitution says, change the Constitution—don’t pretend it says something else.

We have decades more work ahead of us before things change for the better. The next thing we need to do is to prove that the Second Amendment is incorporated by the Fourteenth and thus binding on the states. After that, we need to prove that onerous and expensive licensing requirements are unconstitutional (under decided law, one cannot license a right—can you imagine having to get a speech license, or a voting license?). Then we will need to demonstrate that machine guns, grenades, bazookas and other military arms are legitimately protected by the Second Amendment.

Only then will Americans once again be free with respect to firearms. If course, there are a lot of other things we need to work on (e.g. the over-expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause). But this is excellent news for almost everyone: excellent for gun owners, who are free to move into Washington, DC; excellent for the poor, who are most subject to violence and can now defend themselves; and excellent for women, who can better defend themselves against assailants. It’s only bad news for criminals, whose victims will now be armed, and for gun control advocates. Personally, I’m quite happy to see members of either or both of those groups have a rotten day.

Sorry for the paucity of blog updates the past few months. I’ve been working an exceedingly time-consuming project at work and have had very little personal time.

Here’s a good read about the decline of American manufacturing. It argues–convincingly IMHO—that the business philosophies of the 1970s destroyed our economic might.

Most of my friends know that I’ve an uncle who is a Catholic priest. Father Uncle Joseph (as I am amused to call him) has spent the last nine years at St. Ann’s in Kaufman, Tx., where he has done a lot of good for his church and his community. His recent transfer has actually made the local paper, no small feat in a Protestant town (some years ago he even got the award for preaching, again a bit of a big deal when it’s awarded by Protestants). I wish him the best of luck in his new posting; I’m sure that he’ll do well there.

James Kunstler argues that Americans are literally driving toward disaster. We think that we can magically wish our way out of the energy and food cost increases.

He may not be correct that we’ve reached Peak Oil; however, I think it’s pretty clear that whether it is in the future or the recent past, we will not have cheap oil forever. There is certainly a speculative boom in oil right now; the price should come down somewhat at some point (of course, speculative bubbles can last for years…). But in the long term, we know that oil will get scarcer, and burning it in order to get around town just won’t be an efficient use thereof.

Arto Bendiken notes that Lively Kernel is a reinvention of the Lisp Machine concept. For those who’ve not heard of them, Lisp Machines were really great pieces of work: at a time when command-lines and static software which crashed were the norm, they provided full GUIs, dynamic software and elegant error recovery. Perhaps Lively Kernel can bring some of that coolness into the 21st century.

Computing really is about continually reinventing the wheel.

An Australian driver in a fit of road-pique (I like that better than road-rage—it conveys the pathetic nature of the emotion better) tried to kill a line of 50 cyclists.

’Tis a pity Australia has done away with the death penalty; the driver is a prime candidate.

Elaine McArdle reports that gender disparity in science and technology may be a result of gender preferences—that is, two different studies show that men and women seek different things (big surprise, huh?). Of course, anyone who actually dealt with men and women would know this, but I guess it has taken science time to move from thinking of women as defective men, to thinking of them as the same as men, and finally to thinking of them as something different from but no less important than men. This is progress.

The details of the studies are interesting: one found that men preferred working with tools and women preferred dealing with people; another found that math-precocious men preferred to work with inorganic stuff while math-precocious women preferred working with living stuff. This led to more men in engineering and more women in medicine and biology.

The Mathematical Association of America have published and insightful condemnation of the methods by which we teach mathematics. A must-read for anyone who has ever learnt math, taught math or who has children who may one day learn math. Really good stuff.

Me, I think math should be taught using rhythmomachia. But I’m a loon.

It turns out that sunblock kills coral reeves (yes, I prefer reeves to reefs). So it looks like the choice is to burn and get cancer, or to kill coral—or to stay in the shade. I choose the shade.

Well, I’ve managed to make it through thirty years of life. I don’t really know how it happened: one day I was in college thinking that the thirty-year-old alumni were ancient, and then one day I was old.

I guess it’s immature to want to be younger, and I don’t actually want to be a twenty-year-old again, as I was kinda a twit at that age. All of us are, probably. OTOH, it sure was nice to be so carefree and sheltered. My greatest worry was that I’d make a bad grade or get caught brewing beer in the dorm. In the grand scheme of things, doing badly in school or getting scolded for breaking the rules are nothing. It was nice.

It’s not too bad being thirty though. I can do things I couldn’t dare to imagine when I was twenty. I can buy things I couldn’t afford. I’m a lot smarter and a lot more experienced.

It is a bit annoying to think how old thirty-year-olds once looked to me, and realise that I look that old now. Oh well…

On Saturday my brother John Richard Uhl graduated from Mesa State College with a degree in that queen of subjects, History. For the first time in over a year, all four of us Uhl brothers were together to celebrate. We went to church, broke bread, drank beer, smoked cigars, saw Prince Caspian (about which more later) and just generally enjoyed one another’s company. It was great spending time with one another; I know that my parents were glad to have all their boys with them again.

I had given John a hard time in the past for taking so long to graduate (he’s twenty-five: at his age I owned a house and Tom was married), but I take it back now. For one thing, he paid his own tuition—it’s not like he was living off of our parents the whole time. And if a guy is paying his own way, who cares how much of his life he spends learning? In fact, that’s exactly what John was doing: he figured that he might as well make the most of the chance to educate himself. I can’t say that I disagree. He’s certainly had some great experiences, not least spending a year in Greece studying archæology.

After church on Sunday mom put on a party for John. She baked and cooked and baked and laid out quite a spread: sandwiches and cookies and cakes and meringues, oh my! It was a very pleasant afternoon.

Now that he has graduated, he’ll be working this summer and then will head off to OCS in hopes of becoming a naval officer. His studies in history should have him well-prepared for that job.

Congratulations to him, and best of luck in his new career!

Today marks eight years since Black Sunday, that sad day when I donned cap and gown and was cast headlong into the working world. I’ve since spent twice as many years out of school as I did in it.

When I look at what I wrote on the fourth anniversary of my graduation, I don’t see that I’m much further along at 29 than I was at 25: making a little more; still ensconced in my condo; still single; still driving the same car; still with very few local friends. But there’s hope: I’m working on a shift in my career to something I find more interesting; I’m renovating my condo; I’ve actually been on some dates. I’m actually pretty happy with my car, though. It’s nice driving an auto that will be old enough to vote next year. And I’ve added a few friends, which is progress. Finally, I’m working on a pretty big change—one which I’ll announce here if everything works out as planned.

So things are looking up. But, today just as four years ago and as eight years ago, I miss school. I miss being surrounded by my friends, guys with interests the same as mine. I miss being surrounded by the highest concentration of attractive women I’ll ever experience. I miss being able to pull three all-nighters in a row. I miss employing some of the best minds in the world to educate me. I miss not having bills to pay every month. I miss getting three months of vacation every year. I miss being young and foolish and unconcerned with the real world.

On the other hand, I quite like having money. I quite like being able to afford the things I ant to own. I like owning my own place, and setting my own rules. I rather enjoy not being a complete and utter git (well, by comparison with by 18- or 19-year-old self anyway).

Still, I miss sharing an apartment with Phil and Darren, brewing beer in the dorm kitchen, sneaking girls in past visitation hours, going to parties, hanging out at the library, cutting class to go golfing, going shooting in Oklahoma on the weekends, walking to class with a pipe clenched in my teeth, wearing a tweed coat every day and otherwise just plain having fun.

Today, as four years ago, as eight years ago, I miss school.

Dr. Lawrence Huntoon has written a great article about health care costs. He says pretty much what I’ve been saying for years, so naturally I think him a genius. Medical insurance is no longer insurance at all, but rather inefficiently pre-paid medical care. Since it is generally obtained through an employer (due to tax laws dating back to the Second World War), it is more inefficient and harder to keep. The uninsured face a nasty tax liability ($19,000,000,000 per year). The way to fix rapidly-escalating health care costs is via a market mechanism using medical savings accounts.

Of course, this applies to just about everything. We’d all be better off if the money we’d spent on Social Security all these years were in a 401(k) or IRA or other investment vehicle.

We’ve all seen those credit-card-entry (and other) forms which ask us to leave out dashes, spaces and other punctuations when entering our numbers. Never mind that credit card numbers are naturally written with spaces, that Social Security numbers use dashes and that phone numbers have a number of different representations involving dashes, parentheses, spaces, periods and plus signs. The really ridiculous thing is that removing extraneous punctuation is dead-simple for a computer to do. But these lazy programmers offload a single line of code’s worth of work onto the thousands or millions of visitors to their sites.

Well, Steve Friedl has decided to shame these morons. His well-intentioned attempt is probably doomed, but I wish him luck.

One week ago early this morning (very early this morning…) my youngest brother returned from his first deployment to Iraq. Thanks be to God, he is healthy and unharmed. It was good to hang out with him, Mom, Tom and Em in San Diego for a few days.

It appears that American soldiers overseas have rediscovered the utility of washboards. America’s last surviving washboard company makes a portable kit consisting of a small washboard (originally designed for travelling salesman), a tin bucket, lye soap, clothesline, clothespins and foot powder. They’re $25 and thousands have been sent to the troops.

I’m thinking of buying a set for myself…

Since the black date of 11 September 2001, many folks have been concerned about nuclear, biological or chemical terrorist attacks on American soil. A retired US Army sergeant dispels many of the myths about NBC warfare. Basically, as long as you don’t die immediately and keep your head, you’ll be okay. A must-read.

Crist aras! Crist soþlice aras!

Today is the greatest of feasts: today we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Today we mark the destruction of death’s power over man, because (while we still die) we know that we will each rise again just as Christ did.

Christus ist auferstanden! Er ist wahrhaftig auferstanden!

There are a few competing theories of the exact mechanism of how Christ’s Passion and Resurrection achieved salvation. Was it His Passion which did it? Was His death a sacrifice to pay for the sins of all? Was it His Resurrection which did it instead? By uniting the human and the divine in Himself and rising, did He make it possible for all men to rise? Was it both together? Was it something else, the Harrowing of Hell perhaps? I’m no theologian—all I know is that Christ died, and rose, and that consequently we all shall.

Christus resurrexit! Vere resurrexit!

Speaking of the Harrowing of Hell: as a boy one of my favourite images was what the scene must have been like after Christ died. In St. John Chrysostom’s famous Paschal sermon (which is worth a read in itself, and is better than anything I can write), he has this to say about what happened therein:

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.
Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hades, where is thy victory?

I always imagined Hell’s receiving-room to be something like a modern-day mailroom, with a legion of demonic clerks taking in, sorting and filing souls. I had this mental image of one of them hiding behind his desk, frantically trying to get ahold of Satan on the phone: Ummm…Boss, we’ve got a problem down here. He’s here. Oh d—— And then the line goes dead, and Satan reflects on the ideaalises that his scheme is rather finally broken. It’s a silly little thought, but I always enjoyed imagining it.

Христос воскрес! Воистину воскрес!

Just to show off Unicode, here’s the Paschal greeting in a few other languages:

Քրիստոս յարեաւ ի մեռելոց՜ Օրհնեալ է Յարութիւնն Քրիստոսի՜

ئەيسا تىرىلدى! ھەقىقەتىنلا تىرىلدى!

ക്രിസ്തു ഉയിര്‍ത്തെഴുന്നേറ്റു! തീര്‍ച്ചയായും ഉയിര്‍ത്തെഴുന്നേറ്റു!

!المسيح قام! حقا قام

ქრისტე აღსდგა! ჭეშმარიტად აღსდგა!

And of course, in the language which made it famous: Χριστός ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!

Christ is risen! Truly He is risen!

Adam Petersen demonstrates how to create a simple polling web app in Common Lisp—in around 70 lines of code! It’s not perfect (as one reddit comment noted, he needs to escape his strings for HTML), but it’s a pretty cool demonstration of how Lisp can serve as a rapid development platform.

Lisp isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the alternatives out there.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a reasonably strict libertarian in both economic and social issues. I tend to think that the State has no business regulating private affairs, and my definition of private is fairly broad. I don’t believe, for example, that marriage should be an institution of the State (it is God’s creation, not man’s). This has led me to oppose the anti-polygamy laws not because I support polygamy (I oppose it) but because I don’t think that punishing polygamy is the proper business of the State any more than punishing the wearing of shorts by grown men (an offensive practise far more common) is the proper business of the State.

Rich Lowry has an article which gives me pause. He points out that polygamy as practised in Islamic and fundamentalist Mormon circles inevitably results in some pretty severe social effects. The most notable is that a few high-status men have many wive, leaving low-status men on the fringes of society, with little hope of marriage and children.

He’s right about the problem, although he doesn’t seem to realise that this is an effect of polygyny (multiple wives) rather than polygamy. A similar effect would probably be seen with polyandry (IIRC that was common in Tibet at one point, with brothers marrying a single wife).

The article provides a good reason for polygyny to be illegal: its negative effects spill over to the population as a whole. It may be that even a few polygynous marriages would be enough to have widespread negative effects.

I wonder though if those effects would hold in a generally polygamous society in which there were group marriages, polygynous marriages, polyandrous marriages and true marriages. And I wonder if polygamy would actually be all that common even were it legal. Certainly the majority of the churches would refuse to perform such marriages (though no doubt the Episcopalians would rush to be the first to allow them). Most women would object to a plural marriage as strenuously as they would to an affair. And I think most men really don’t want the extra bother.

Still, it does demonstrate that private choices can have public consequences.

Those of us who grew up camping and hiking in the 1980s and 1990s were constantly warned of the dangers of giardia lamblia and giardiasis. We were cautioned that if we ever drank water from a stream without first purifying it we risked our health and perhaps our very lives. Giardiasis was reputed to cause six months of uncontrollable diarrhœa; it was supposedly found in almost any stream, river or lake; it was bad juju.

Upon reflection, this didn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Old books are full of ways to find good water—they aren’t full of ways to purify water (although they might recommend boiling when in doubt). It always seemed a bit strange to me that the purported symptoms lasted for six months, a curiously round figure. Wild animals drink wild water, and they rarely seem to be suffering from intestinal trouble. Our ancestors—and many in the uncivilised world—drink wild water all the time. And then there are many of our fellows who do the same. I’m proud to say that I’ve been drinking water from streams for years, and I’ve never had a problem yet.

Well, it turns out that the giardia threat is massively overblown. Back in the 1980s some testing of wild water in the Sierra Nevadas was done: it turns out that the most contaminated water was purer than that found in San Francisco and that all but the two worst sites purer than that in Los Angeles. Even in other parts of the country, at the very worst sites one would need to drink almost 3 gallons of water in order to have a 50% chance of getting consuming enough giardia to have an effect.

Worse, it seems that 1 in 14 people have giardia in them already, and that the most likely path of contamination when camping is by food. Whoops.

All that said, there are plenty of other nasty microörganisms which can be found in water, and one needs to exercise some care. Areas which are commonly used by people are less safe than isolated areas; water that is stagnant is less safe than running water; it’s always safest to purify water one way or another. But really, it’s just not that big a deal.

I don’t really plan on carrying a purification kit. If I need to, I can boil it. And there’s something wonderfully tasty about ice-cold, crystal clear water from a mountain stream which runs through a stream bed lined with leaves. Iodine-tainted, bleached, boiled or filtered water are not the same thing.

Mark Gimein argues that the mortgage crisis will worsen considerably, especially in California. Apparently year-over-year prices have dropped 28%. One might wonder if they’ve bottomed out, but there’s an issue which will result in an even worse drop. It turns out that the fall in prices (due to the sub-prime crisis) means that it will become economically sound for prime mortgagers to simply leave their homes rather than owe (and pay for…) twice their market value.

This in turn will lead to still more foreclosures and abandonments. It could be a real estate perfect storm.

The president of Blue Jeans Cables recently received a cease & desist letter from Monster Cable. His response is a stunning smackdown of them, their claims and their business. The best line is perhaps this: Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it. It’s a long read, but every bit is worth it.

Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network of size n is proportional to n². This follows from a simple observation: that the number of possible connections for each user in a network is n - 1; and since there are n users, then the total number of connections is n × (n - 1), which is roughly n². This all seems reasonable and makes sense.

But it’s wrong. It begs one simple question: what is the value of a connection. Metcalfe’s Law assumes that each connection is equally worthwhile. This doesn’t really make sense: is my connection to a bushman in the Kalahari as useful to me as my connection to my brothers, or to my bank? Not very likely.

It turns out that there’s another law—Zipf’s Law—which addresses all sorts of distributions. The article goes into more detail, but basically the second-most-important item in a list is one half as valuable as the first; the third is one third as valuable; the fourth is one quarter as valuable; and so on an so forth. It turns out that adding up 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4…1/n approximates log n reasonably closely. One might say that the value of a network of size n to any single user is proportional to log n (that is, the sum of the value of his most important link, his second most important link and so on until we get to his link to a squid-fishing boat in the Atlantic).

Thus Briscoe, Odlyzko & Tilly suggest their own network-value law: the value of a network is in proportion to n log n. They present some economic predictions based on this law, which seem to be borne out by the facts.

Anyway, read the article. It’s good and detailed and makes sense.

Joel Spolsky applies a lesson from his infantry days to business. A bit gimmicky, but he has a point.

This article on war pigeons is serious and interesting, but I’m shallow enough to just love the phrase war pigeon. It’s absolutely wonderful, really. Loose the war pigeons! Beware the mighty war pigeons!

I want to have a boat so I can name it the S.S. War Pigeon.

On the shores of Burundi’s Rusizi River lives Gustave the man-eating crocodile. He is quite possibly the world’s largest croc, measuring 20 feet long and weighing a short ton. The article is incredible: it’s amazing how the natives still keep going back to the water, regardless of the fact that hundreds of them are slain by crocodiles.

I think this rather proves my theory that civilisation requires extinction of the megafauna. One cannot have a civilised society in which rampaging elephants or lions or crocodiles can snatch up a child—or a man. It just doesn’t work. My reader will note that all three of those animals are to be found in Africa, and that Africa is, overall, the least civilised of the continents. This is, I think, no coincidence. Australia too has its issues in the Outback—and Australia too is rife with deadly animals.

Here in North America the aboriginal inhabitants killed and ate the majority of the megafauna millennia ago. That worked to their disadvantage (lacking horses, camels or any other domesticable animals they never really got anywhere), but it’s turned out very well for us.

Robert H. Frank offers economic-naturalist explanations for a host of questions: why women wear high heels; why milk comes in rectangular containers but soft drinks in cylindrical ones; why whales are nearly extinct but chickens are not; and quite a bit more. He has a book out soon entitled The Economic Naturalist; I’d like to get a copy of it.

Readers of this blog are no doubt aware of my opposition to most organ donation and transplantation. To be specific, I consider the harvesting of organs from corpses and their subsequent re-use to be morally abhorrent. I don’t think it should be illegal, but I do my best to oppose it and to persuade others not to participate in it.

In that spirit, then, here are some organ donation scandals. Zach Dunlap was pronounced dead by physicians eager to steal his organs: luckily for him, his relatives noticed that he wasn’t actually dead and he recovered and walked out of the hospital. He heard the physicians saying that he was dead. Rather poor medical job there, guys.

Then there’s the disturbing case of Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, who is accused of using drugs to speed the death—in plain English, murdering—a physically & mentally retarded patient in order to take his organs.

Human organ transplantation is wrong, regardless, but even were it right these incidents would argue for much tighter supervision of the system.

For the first time in over twenty years Americans drove less in 2007 than in the previous year. I know I did—I filled my car but seven times the entire year. When my brothers and I visited Chicago, we walked and took the trains or buses; when we visited San Diego we did the same; when I visited Phoenix on business I walked rather than rent a car. It was a lot of fun, to tell the truth.

Encouragingly, public transit ridership is at its highest level in over fifty years.

A purse snatcher robbed the English minister of justice, then tan into a bus full of cops. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

A Denver radio station aired a commercial for a housing development in Castle Rock—roughly an hour from Denver. It advertised a new housing development (in an era when the real estate market is flat). And, to top it all off, it proudly proclaimed that a three-car garage is standard. A three car garage. For a family of four.

A garage is a nicety. A two-car garage is a luxury. A three-car garage is an obscenity.

Here’s a nice takedown of the BOSE Acoustimass system. The short version: save your money and spend less on a better product from a reputable company.

A list of some skills you’ll need if you wish to live off-the-grid:

• Gardening/farming
• Building
• Hunting/fishing
• Canning/smoking/drying
• Sewing/tanning/weaving

I’d add that you definitely need cooking/baking (fairly obviously) and soapmaking (if you want to be clean). Brewing too would not go amiss—after all, man does not live by bread alone.

Granted, a life of subsistence farming wouldn’t be terribly exciting or fun. Well, except for the excitement of droughts and crop failures.

Desmond Warzel applies the Wikipedian ethos to time travel. Hilarious if you’ve ever worked with Wikipedia much; I suspect it’s utterly unintelligible otherwise.

Refactoring is a vital process in the creation of beautiful programs; redrafting is a vital process in the creation of beautiful literature; Basildon Coder suggest adapting P.G. Wodehouse’s redrafting method to refactoring. It makes extremely good sense.

High school students in Rothschild, Wisconsin were upset that their friends had been suspended from sports from drinking. So they threw a root-beer keg party in protest. Which the cops bust. It’s a good thing to know that Rothschild is so crime-free that the police have time to bust root beer parties. Perhaps they can then turn their attention to the angel food cake menace. Fill in your own joke about the white powdery substance known as sugar here…

The video is pretty funny. Watching it, I realised that there’s one lesson the kids didn’t learn: that they could have an amazingly fun party without booze. Honestly, they look & sound as rowdy & happy as we ever did in college, and with nary a drop in them.

Now, if we could somehow get folks to realise that one can have fun with lots of alcohol, and with none of it, and that moderation between those two extremes is a good thing—why, then the world would be a better place. That said, more root beer keg parties would be a great thing.

Charles Hugh Smith points out that the Boomers’ end-of-life expenses will bankrupt the nation. We’re looking at $60 trillion to pay for their declining months. That’s 120 times what the war in Iraq has cost so far. Yes, that works out to six hundred years of Iraq wars.

We can’t do it. We simply can’t do it. There’s just not enough money.

I don’t usually read Mother Jones (I’ve better things to do than read fascist claptrap—I use fascist advisedly), but it has a top-notch history of the anti-slavery movement in Britain. Their achievement was really quite remarkable: in less than 80 years slavery went from being accepted over the entire world to being illegal in the entire civilised sphere. When they started, slavery was just accepted as part of life; by the time they finished it was universally unacceptable.

The story gives hope to those of us who would fight other seemingly impossible battles. The anti-infanticide movement in particular should learn from the fight against slavery. Infanticide is considered a perfectly acceptable practise by much of the world right now, but a lot can change in a few years. Eventually, reason wins.

Ramit Sethi writes about the planning fallacy—the problem that people can’t estimate how long a project will take. Basically, no matter how carefully folks plan and how much they try to pessimistic, they assume that things will go better than they will. It turns out there’s one good way to estimate project length; read the article for what it is.

Someone broke into Ryan Frederick’s home early in January—didn’t take anything, just rifled through his stuff and left. Then later on that same week he was wakened by his dogs barking and someone smashing down his front door. He grabbed his handgun and stumbled to the front of his house and saw an intruder trying to enter through the door’s lower panel, and so he shot him dead.

Not exactly a happy ending, of course (death is an ugly thing), but a good enough one, right? Well, not quite. You see, Ryan Frederick’s home was being invaded by the police. He didn’t know that, of course—they were using a no-knock warrant. It turns out that the burglar was also an informant who mistook the Japanese maple in Frederick’s back yard for marijuana.

Even assuming arguendo that the drug laws should be enforced, the right way to do things would have been to get a normal warrant, knock on the door and search the premises. Had the police done that, then detective Jarrod Shivers would be alive today.

No-knock raids may have a purpose—I wouldn’t rule them out entirely. But they are massively over-used, and lead to loss of life, both to police and to citizens.

Ryan Frederick did nothing wrong. He did not know he was shooting at a detective; he believed that he was stopping a violent criminal. That he is innocent has not stopped that state from charging him with first degree murder.

The stupid word of the week is flexitarian. It means a vegetarian who eats meat. In other words, someone who eats vegetables and meat. In other words, a normal person. It’s possibly the stupidest word I’ve ever heard.

It’s actually not a stupid concept, just a stupid word. The idea is that there’s no need to eat meat at every meal, or even every day. Which is cool. I don’t eat meat on roughly half of the days in the year—this is a Good Thing IMHO. But it’s a dumb word.

Sometimes it makes sense to buy a home; sometimes it makes more sense to rent. If you can’t afford to put 20% down on a fixed rate mortgage; if you can do better investing in the stock market than in the real estate market; if you move often; if you can rent in a better area than you can buy in or if the total cost of ownership just doesn’t make sense—then don’t buy! There is no shame in renting (and if others don’t think so, nuts to them).

For years, I’ve not been a huge fan of Jim Koch (head of Samuel Adams). He’s popularised decent beer, which is good, but IMHO he’s been more marketing than anything else. But now I read that he is selling ten short tons of hops at cost to other craft brewers. This is an amazing act of generosity: on the spot market those hops could fetch many times what he’ll be selling them for.

There are some economic implications, of course. Basically, what he is proposing is a blend of first-come/first-served and rationing, both known inefficient methods. But while the free market is the most efficient mechanism in the long term, right now the hop shortage has a very real chance of destroying many small brewers. Koch’s action is like tossing a life preserver to a dying man: sure, it’s best to teach him how to swim, but right now the important thing is to save his life.

My fellow web programming geeks will have heard a lot of buzz about Representational State Transfer (REST). It’s definitely an improvement on the Ozymandian Web Services stack. But what is it really? How is it used? How does one adapt a design to it? Stefan Tilkov has a top-notch brief introduction to rest. If you write or design web-consumed services, or plan to, or manage those who do, check it out.

Ryan Tomayko has used Tufte’s ideas to remove administrative debris and remodel his blog and articles. Some excellent ideas about how best to present information—I really should look into implementing them for Octopodial Chrome.

Homo faciens is Latin for man the maker (and it’s pronounced with a hard k, not an s); it occurs to me that the term perfectly describes me. Today—while simultaneously performing a very difficult job—I am doing the following:

• Grinding wheat into flour
• Baking shortbread from that flour
• Making coffee from freshly-ground beans
• Baking pumpernickel bread with that coffee
• Making leek, potato and carrot soup
• Grinding barley
• Brewing porter from that barley
• Juicing bananas
• Making banana leather

And yes, I’m performing that rather complex and troublesome job as well (believe it or not, each of the above tasks only takes a few minutes at a time and can easily be squeezed into my breaks).

This weekend a buddy of mine threw an Ides of March party which encouraged one to wear a toga (in green for St. Patrick’s Day). In the space of six hours I researched and recreated a Roman tunic and toga—including going to the fabric store and finding linen. Yes, that’s right: in under one quarter of a single day I managed to entirely reconstruct an ancient pair of garments about which I had no previous knowledge (in fact, until I did the research I did not realise that a toga is really just a sort of stole-like thing worn around a tunic).

I’m so incredibly, unutterably, ineffably cool.

The former ruler of the atheist Soviet Union admitted that he is a Christian. It doesn’t say what sort, although I imagine that since he’s fond of Frances of Assisi that he must be a Roman Catholic. Something I didn’t know is that his wife’s parents were martyrs: executed for having icons in their home.

Interesting that a son-in-law of martyrs rose to the head of the Soviet Union and oversaw its destruction. Although I wager it was due more to incompetence than deliberate action…

Faced with exculpatory evidence in a robbery/carjacking case, prosecutors pressured a forensic technician to change her findings. Even worse, the judge in the trial told the defendant that if he continued to plead innocent and insisted on his right to a jury trial, then he would be sentenced to life. Faced with the choice between life and two years, the defendant plead guilty.

Only problem is, it turns out that he was innocent. He spent 16 months in jail and prison; he was stabbed; he suffered unknown other abuses—and all because the prosecutors and judge had no concern for justice.

It is every prosecutor's duty to provide all possible exculpatory evidence to the defense. It is every prosecutor's duty to ask that charges be dismissed when the defendant appears innocent. It is every defendant's right to a jury trial; no-one should feel pressured to plead guilty in order to avoid the possibility of a harsh sentence. It is every judge's duty to see that the law is followed and that both defense and prosecution enjoy all their rights and fulfil all their duties.

Let their punishment fit their crime: imprison each of them for 16 months. And let the inmate population know that they are prosecutors and a judge. If they survive, then maybe they will not be so quick to railroad suspects in the future.

Eating food that’s in season is definitely cheaper than eating whatever you like (it’s cheaper to ship raspberries from the next state over than from Chile). Some people think that it may even be better for you. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that it’s pleasant to live life according to the cycle of the year and not according to my own whims. There’s an element of anticipation when a food is about to come into season, a rush to pick, enjoy and preserve it once it’s ready, and a spot of sadness when its course has run. I’d even go so far as to argue that there’s a moral dimension to it: God designed the plants in our world to be eaten and enjoyed in a particular order, and we adhere most closely to His plan when we follow that order. Mind, it’s not exactly sinful to eat strawberries in December, but it’s better to eat them in May.

The Food Network has produced a partial lists of fruits & vegetables by season. It’s a good start to living life the way we were meant to.

I suppose it was inevitable: my mother’s on Facebook (and I’ll note that I’m the first of her sons to add her as a friend—Mom, that means ginger cookies, right? And fudge. And perhaps some oatmeal-raisin cookies.). One of her sisters has been on Facebook for some time now; her brother has been on for about a month perhaps and another one of her sisters joined today, so I suppose it was inevitable.

Of course, the first thought that runs through one’s mind is there aren’t any pictures of me in my Take my mother…please T-shirt, are there? But then I realised that I don’t actually have one of those, so I’m safe there. She already reads this humble blog, so she’s already aware of most of what I’m up to these days anyway.

Still, I gotta consider that when my aunts and uncles and parents are discovering an online venue that maybe it’s time to pull stakes and find somewhere a bit younger and hipper.

But then, I’m nearly 30—I’m no longer younger and hipper. When did that happen?

My dad’s uncle, Robert Victor, fell in the fight for Iwo Jima on this day sixty-three years ago. He was only 23; I know this because I’m looking at the pocket watch his parents gave him for his 21st birthday, on the twentieth of October, 1942 (I think his brother my grandfather gave it to my father for his 21st; I know that Dad gave it to me for my 21st).

He received the Silver Star posthumously, but that’s small consolation for the loss of a son and a brother.

At home we have a small metal box which the Marines sent home with his personal effects. There are some letters to his dad (about a car, I think), some religious stuff, I think a ring. And that’s pretty much all that’s left of his life: a small box in a chest in Denver and a large box in the ground in Dallas.

Neither my great-grandfather nor my grandfather ever bought anything Japanese after the war, and I cannot blame them. We ended up giving Iwo Jima back to the Japanese (which was an abominable decision). And now my grandfather is dead, and there probably aren’t too many people left in the world who knew Robert Victor Uhl personally.

For some reason, Kipling’s Grave of the Hundred Head leaps to mind.

John Bloom has an excellent article on jury nullification. Not many people are aware of it, because in the last century it has become illegal to inform juries of this fact.

In the early days of our country it was not uncommon for lawyers to make appeals directly to the jury: my client may have violated the law, but the law is wrong. But nowadays a lawyer is forbidden to do that, and a jury is told that its job is not to judge the law but to apply it.

Nonsense. One of the cornerstones of a democratic republic is the jury system. For the State to punish a man, the legislature must pass a law; the executive must enforce it; the judiciary must allow it and the People must permit it.

John Bloom, incidentally, is also the television and book persona known as Joe Bob Briggs. Even more incidentally, he used to babysit my buddy Phil’s wife Jess when she was a kid. It’s a small world after all, I guess.

The esteemed playwright David Mamet had discovered that he is no longer a brain-dead liberal. Apparently considered thought and careful reading revealed that his leftist tendencies were in part incorrect.

One hopes more leftists will have similar epiphanies.

…screws don’t make much sense.

We’re all familiar with the adage that says when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That’s true enough as far as it goes. We tend to frame problems in terms of what we know. However, there’s an even more pernicious effect: we don’t recognise the utility of solutions outside our experience. If all you have is a hammer, screws seem like a distinctly sub-optimal type of nail: they require more force to hammer in, they damage the wood and they don’t hold as well. Once you have a screwdriver, you realise that screws are actually superior to nails for many tasks.

The article inheritance is evil and must be destroyed is written by someone who only knows about hammers. He uses the example of a class representing a ball; it’s further subclassed into bouncing balls and balls which fade in and out. But what if one wants to have a bouncing, fading ball? He writes using inheritance, the code that handles bouncing and fading is locked up in the BouncingBall and FadingBall classes and can’t be used elsewhere. Well, in a language which only allows single inheritance, sure: you can only inherit from one superclass, and so it’s not possible to have a bouncing fading ball which inherits from both bouncing and fading balls.

Fortunately, we’ve had a well-defined object system since the late 1980s. It allows multiple inheritance, and all one has to do is inherit behaviour from both superclasses and Everything Works. An example:

(defclass ball ()
  ((x
    :accessor x
    :initform 0
    :initarg :x)
   (y
    :accessor y
    :initform 0
    :initarg :y)
   (colour
    :accessor colour
    :initform 'white 
    :initarg :colour)))

(defclass bouncing-ball (ball)
  ((elasticity
    :accessor elasticity
    :initform 1
    :initarg :elasticity)
   vector))

(defclass fading-ball (ball)
  ((fade-rate
    :accessor fade-rate
    :initform 1
    :initarg :fade-rate)))

(defclass fading-bouncing-ball (fading-ball bouncing-ball) ())

(defgeneric draw (ball)
  (:documentation "Draw BALL at its position"))

(defmethod draw ((ball ball))
  "Draw BALL at its position, with the proper colour."
  (draw-circle (x ball) (y ball)) (colour ball))

(defmethod draw :before ((ball bouncing-ball))
  "Move BALL to the next position as it bounces."
  (with-slots (vector x y) ball
    (setf x (bounce-x x vector)
          y (bounce-y y vector))))

(defmethod colour :around ((ball fading-ball))
  "Return BALL’s colour faded for this point in time."
  (fade-colour (call-next-method ball) (fade-rate ball) (get-current-time)))

And yes, everything works exactly as expected. The DRAW method specialised on balls draws a circle wherever it needs to; the DRAW before-method specialised on bouncing balls runs before a bouncing ball is drawn; it updates its current position and then the primary DRAW method is called, drawing the ball at the new position. The COLOUR around-method specialised on fading balls calls the normal COLOUR method, figures out the faded colour and then returns it. Yes, an instance of FADING-BOUNCING-BALL inherits from both FADING-BALL and BOUNCING-BALL, and they both inherit from BALL. It all just works.

You can either keep on trying to hammer in screws, or you can learn how to use a screwdriver, or you can claim that screws are awful fasteners and that nails are always better. One of these is a better solution than the others.

Apparently homeschooling one’s children without a teaching certificate is illegal in California. Naturally, the teachers’ union is happy about this, as it helps cut down competition for their services. Interestingly enough, most of the great men of history were taught by teachers without credentials, and they turned out alright. Moreover, so far as I can see the education of teachers is sadly lacking in any sort of realistic philosophy of education, as can be seen in the end-product of both our public and private schools (and to be fair, many home schools as well).

What’s really sad is that we know how to teach; we just don’t want to teach. Rather, we want to be seen to have taught, which is something very much different.

Lisa Schiffren writes about polygyny in New York City. I’m of two minds about polygyny in particular and polygamy in general. On the one hand I don’t see that it’s any of the State’s