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:
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:
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
. Apparently
considered thought and careful reading revealed that his leftist
tendencies were in part incorrect.brain-dead liberal
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 business who sleeps with whom, or who lives with whom, or any of that. But on the other hand it’s clearly unacceptable for women to be brought over illegally and kept in subjugation to autocratic husbands; moreover given that the modern State in its limited wisdom sees fit to award funds to pretty much anyone, it’s inappropriate for the rest of us to have to pay for the kids produced thereby.
David Binder writes compellingly about the Kosovo crisis. Back in the 1990s the world swallowed a story about lily-white Croatians and Albanians and pitch-blacks Serbs; the few (like Binder) who stood up for the truth saw their careers destroyed. And now Kosovo itself is being destroyed, being turned into a Mohammedan state in the middle of Europe. Christians are being murdered; monasteries are being sacked.
Of course, we’ve been here before: the Iberian and Balkan Peninsulas were once both ruled by Mohammedans. Christian sons were stolen from their families to be forcibly converted and turned into janissaries. New churches were forbidden to be built; old churches were forbidden to be repaired. Christians had to pay a special tax and were treated as second-class citizens in the courts of law.
We’ve been here before, and we’ve recovered before. Will we recover again?
The Art of Manliness suggests bringing back men’s hats. Not a bad idea if you ask me.
Hat-tip to Maj. D.
Over the past year food prices have skyrocketed: pizza flour went from $3–7/bushel to $25/bushel; hops have gone from $1/lb. to $40/lb. and barley has almost doubled in price. This should be the single most important political issue, but no-one seems to care.
In Sydney, Australia, a pair of armed robbers attempted to rob a motorcycle club. A burly biker club. They were beaten up with tables and chairs, one was thrown through a plate-glass door and another was hogtied with electrical wire for the police.
Maybe the robbers were actually attempting suicide? Or perhaps they were just really, really dumb.
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