Politically correct trash talk

I was wandering through a bookstore and found a book called "In These Girls, Hope Is A Muscle". It's about a girl's high school basketball team from Amherst, MA that suffered repeated frustrations in the postseason. And they had to have been good - they had Jamila Wideman, who starred at Stanford on some excellent teams and played in the WNBA too.

Anyway, I read a few pages in. Amherst is a college town, which of course means political correctness of all stripes runs amok. Which caused some problems for the basketball team - what could they say for trash talk?

The coach came up with several examples: "I'm going to meet you outside the game and refuse to mediate". "You ignore your inner child". And the coup de gras - "So's your co-parent".

This just begs for a contest. Who can come up with the best PC trash talk?

Yes, I'm still alive

Life just got a little too busy there for a while, but I'm back for the time being. Everybody must have been worried. Right?...

Glenn Reynolds tells us that Daniel Taylor of Dreaded Purple Master had a heart attack. He's hospitalized and a full recovery is expected. Hang in there, bud.

For a good cause

I'm trying to assemble a list of songs involving dancing, preferably involving incompetence. Examples I thought of were "Your Mama Don't Dance" by Loggins and Messina, or "Long Tall Glasses" by Leo Sayer ("you know I can't dance, you know I can't dance..."). Any suggestions?

Carbon tax?

I started to address Doug Turnbull's comment on a previous item here, but it got too large (imagine that). So I'll expand on it here. What inspired me was his mention of a carbon tax.

What usually happens when electricity, gasoline, natural gas or other prices rise? The lefties start bitching about cartels, capitalism, exploitation...the same tired BS we've been hearing for years.

Yet they would have us use less of these commodities to minimize our impact on the environment. How to do this? Allocation via rationing or by prices.

Nobody likes rationing, and lefties don't like it in particular because then the govt gets the blame it so richly deserves. So it'll have to be price increases.

Forget the ideology - what needs to be done to reduce pollution? That's too big a topic - what needs to be done to reduce pollution resulting from electric power consumption, or at least to assure that the consumers bear the costs of the environmental impacts of their consumption? And how do we make sure that each watt consumed has the minimum practical impact on the environment?

Reducing the pollution per watt requires capital investment. Reducing the consumption requires increasing prices. Voila - we let electric power prices rise to reflect these costs, using existing regulatory bodies and local pollution standards. An added bonus is that every dime spent on the increased power costs goes back into the industry for further investment and development.

The left can't stand this - it's too simple, too decentralized, and they have too many groups to pander to. Wearing their pro-labor mask, they support coal miners. In the pro-environment mask, they support higher prices on power. In their coal-black hearts, they support more govt power, higher taxes and lower revenues to "capitalists", while trying to deflect the blame to "capitalists". So how do they reconcile these?

A carbon tax! You can still mine the coal. The prices will rise to reduce consumption, furthering green goals. The govt gets more regulatory power and revenue. And because the charges show up on your utility bills, the "capitalists" look like the bad guys.

Who's left out here? The guys who generate the power and have to make the capital improvements to reduce pollution per unit of power. Well, to quote an old Communist sympathizer, to make an omelet you have to break some eggs.

Oh, the generators will be thrown a bone - maybe they'll be able to apply for some grants to install newer technology. That will give the govt still more power, and the left will bitch about it as "corporate welfare". Congress will turn it into a pork program, channelling available funds to their pet utilities. And just as gasoline taxes do more than just maintain our highways, some of this revenue will be redirected far from the power industry.

So there are your choices for simultaneously reducing power consumption and pollution per unit of consumption. You can set standards for the environment and leave utilities free to meet them, and leave existing regulators to keep resulting price increases in line. Or you can set up still another complex bloated govt bureaucracy to redistribute money from your utility bill to pork projects and unrelated govt expenditures while furthering socialization of the power industry. It sounds like a simple choice to me.

What can the left do to help? They can quit yapping about every energy cost increase that doesn't go straight into the govt's pocket.

It sounds easy. But they won't do it. Because given a choice between environmentalism and bigger govt, they'll sell out the environment every time.

Great moments in Ebay

Whoops

Wind power - still not profitable

Wind power is a favorite of green groups because it's renewable and nonpolluting. And in the right applications it's very useful. But when alternatives are readily available, usually the cost of wind power is not competitive.

Some countries are associated with wind power initiatives, such as the Netherlands. Denmark has also been particularly active with wind power - several major wind turbine manufacturers are based there and Danes have subsidized wind power for years.

But they still can't make it pay, according to this item from Tech Central Station. Here's my favorite quote from it:

Just as a footnote to all this, I looked up data on Danish electricity at America's Energy Information Administration website. Almost all Danish electricity, other than the small part deriving from wind, comes from that notoriously environmentally green source -- coal. So the Danes produce more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than the supposedly environmentally-hostile Americans, where only about 55% of electricity comes from coal.

Actually Americans have been using windpower for a long time too. Old Aermotor wind-driven pumps were a common site on isolated farms going back to the 1880's and are still around now. They are good for tasks like pumping water for livestock in isolated areas where steady energy delivery is not essential.

Green activists love to point out that the "true costs" of coal burning and other "non-renewable" power sources are not recognized on our utility bills, and they say that if those costs were recognized that windpower would be cost-competitive.

OK, suppose they're right. Then let them talk the public into paying more for electricity so these costs can be paid. Why don't the greens do this?

Because they're watermelons - they're green on the outside and red on the inside. They're more interested in big govt programs, more regulation, more taxes, and demonization of opponents than they are in real practical solutions to their alleged concerns. And they can't raise money without raising issues, so the bitching will never stop.

Incidentally, I'm a mechanical engineer. Energy is my business, and I can make money off it no matter how we generate it or distribute it. Wind power in particular offers the prospect of all sorts of design, operations, maintenance and other consulting business. Paying more for power is a small price for me to pay - I'll make it back many times over from the rest of you. So all of my personal financial incentives are in favor of wind power.

No, Virginia

I'm a Virginia Postrel fan. She was one of the few Day 1 links on this blog, I have subscribed to Reason over her term, and I've had a copy of "The Future And Its Enemies" from the day it landed on the shelves at the local bookstore.

But on stem cell research she's lost it. We can argue about whether embryonic stem cell research ought to be banned or not. What is unmistakably wrong is that Virginia Postrel's opponents are "criminalizing science" or are supporting "prison terms for biologists".

Unless we are to assume that she believes that anything a biologist might want to do for research is legal and ethical. Which puts her in some select company - do I have to mention who?

I expect better than that from her.

UPDATE: Gary Farber attempts to teach me how to parse English. The post I was referring to was "Ban Stalls", currently at the bottom of her site (her permalinks don't work). I responded on GF's site.

Two story outhouses

I found this looking for something else. Honest.

Worldcom

This article is worth reading before continuing.

What inspires this is Glenn Reynolds' post of an email suggesting that WorldCom was a "stupid company", in part by growing by acquiring "lousy companies".

IMO the only "lousy company" they acquired was MCI. Among other things, MCI's billing problems were incredible, and my sources have told me that there have been times when MCI had buildings full of people calculating bills using Excel. Even without such nonsense, billing costs money, and penny-ante customers are losers for the long-distance companies. (Notice the pricing plans - the phone companies are pushing for largely fixed bills guaranteeing them a minimum amount, and most of us can avoid usage-sensitive charges.) What MCI had that WorldCom wanted was lots of Internet backbone.

Former CEO Bernie Ebbers was able to acquire all those companies primarily with stock. So it was imperative that he keep the stock price high by any means necessary. I heard stories of salary cuts without warning so Bernie could make his numbers. And as long as he did make them, the stock stayed high enough to keep the acquisitions coming.

Of course you don't keep stock prices high by losing money, as WorldCom's books would have shown had their costs been accounted for properly. There must have been tremendous pressure on the CFO to do something to keep the price up. We see what he came up with, and there's no possibility of "mistake". Whether Bernie knew what was going on or not remains to be determined.

The CFO for sure violated the law and investors' trust. But isn't it amazing that something that happened in the back room (not operations) would cause such a change in the stock price so far removed from the time of the offense?

WorldCom has substantial hard assets that would be valuable to healthier competitors, and it might be a ripe target for a foreign telecom firm to take over. I haven't looked at annual reports, but it's hard to believe that WorldCom doesn't have more than enough assets to cover recent quarter per share prices.

It will be interesting to watch the current CEO, John Sidgmore, as he deals with his situation. Laying off 17,000 will surely lower costs, and it's a backdoor way of running off unprofitable customers via poor customer service.

They won't be funding any acquisitions with stock for a while, and the bad PR may sink them. But if they can keep their business customers, the ones they wanted all along, we might yet see them recover.

If they don't recover, well, keep an eye on AT&T for the next couple of years...

If you're considering changing your telecom provider, take a look at One Star Communications of Evansville, IN. They are a small privately held firm that offers a number of telecom services, including local service in limited areas (primarily New England). They also offer a referral program - if you refer people to them as noted on their website, they offer a bonus on your next bill based on the billings of the new account.

A beautiful naked blonde jumps up and down

If you don't remember where that phrase comes from, then you need to read the rest of this item.

Some years ago Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas released "The Memory Book". I should know, I have two copies.

Anyway, they offered any number of ways to help remember otherwise incomprehensible things. For instance, consider the number 91852719521639092112. How long would it take you to memorize it, if you needed to? It didn't take me long at all using the Lorayne/Lucas scheme. Using their system, numbers are translated into consonants, and vowels are inserted as needed to convert the string of consonants to a phrase you can remember. So one way to express that number from earlier is also the title of this post.

I was into this for a while in college. I wound up visiting a house in Atlanta and I remember the street number to this day. The person who brought me there was kind of touchy, and I really didn't have to point out that the street number translated into "mule shit". I don't figure on going back, and it's just as well - I don't remember the name of the street.

Someone blogged on some mnemonic devices a while back. I remember a few from engineering school, such as the color code on resistors. Each color stripe represents a digit or an exponent based on its position, and the colors (black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white) can be remembered by "bad boys rape our young girls, but Violet gives willingly."

Biology wasn't my long suit, but I was able to remember the taxonomical schemes of the day (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) from the lamer but effective "King Philip came over from groovy Spain".

Of course there's the flip side of this, where meaningless numbers stick in your head for some reason. For instance, 1.71E98. That's 69 factorial, the biggest factorial that the old "slide-rule" calculators like my long-retired TI SR-50 could calculate without overflowing. The square root of 69 is easy to remember too - eight something...

This one is arcane: May I have a large container of coffee? There are several others like this, but the trick is that the number of letters in each word is the corresponding digit in pi - 3.1415926.....

This one is timely - to remember the "circle of fifths" in music there is "Father Charles goes down and eats bananas".

Enough. I'll bet you remember at least one of the above.

Bomber miscellany

I wonder how they arm those bombs the homicide (Hamaside?) bombers use, and how the bombers are trained. "Like this?" BOOM!

Here's an idea to spread - that the bombs are made using pork products.

Want to adopt a potential bomber? This guy does.

Who funded this?

Back to that Pledge of Allegiance thing again. Alright you attorneys out there, tell me this - how much does it cost to proceed with something like this to that level? Is any real human being going to spend that much of their own money to make such an asinine point?

Maybe so, but I smell some professional religion-bashers like the ACLU. They'll leave no slimy rock unturned in their quests to find someone with standing to sue for whatever their cause of the moment is, and they like to bully small towns like Hillsboro, IL, or Republic, MO.

For all we hear about threats to liberty by the "War on Drugs", maybe they wouldn't be such a big threat if the ACLU were fighting them, instead of bitching about fish symbols on a town seal. If they see possible violations of the Establishment Clause as a greater threat to our liberties than civil forfeiture and other excesses, it reflects poorly on the judgment of their leadership.

In a related issue, what would concerned citizens have to do to get federal judges off the bench? And if they do, how can they make sure the SOB doesn't end up in Congress?

UPDATE: It looks like our atheist crusader is representing himself. OK, it still takes time, fees and other expenses. How much is he paying?

And let's not hear any crap from Democrat Senators trying to disown this, especially the ones on the Senate Judiciary Committee. If they honestly don't like decisions like this, they can be pretty sure that Bush's nominees will have different ideas, and they can start confirming some of them instead of playing asinine political games.

Strange English usage

Certain English usages strike me as odd.

For instance, do we "discharge" or "release" pollution? No, we "spew" it.

A few years ago National Lampoon published collections of oddball news stories called "True Facts", where they assembled a whole bunch of clippings about buses running off the road. For some reason these all used "plunge". Go ahead and Google "bus plunge" and see how many hits you get. Somebody has even written a song about it.

You might remember Hillary Clinton's "turtle on a fence post" line. The idea is that it didn't get there by itself. This must be the reason for the current vogue for "shredding" the Constitution - somebody must have tested it with focus groups, found it impressive and faxed it to all the Democrats. Or maybe it's just a sign of the times - 20 years ago when a lot of phone bills came out on punched cards, they might have said "fold, spindle or mutilate" (there's even a movie called "Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate")..

The Democrats contrived the mantra that tax cuts would "blow a hole in the deficit". Where on earth did this one come from? Usage apparently started in the 1996 Presidential campaign, and suddenly this improbable expression was heard everywhere.

Got any more examples?

Establishment of stupidity

They have some real live wires on the 9th Circuit. They proved it with the shocking decision that the "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is un-Constitutional.

From the decision:

Newdow does not allege that his daughter’s teacher or school district requires his daughter to participate in reciting the Pledge.3 Rather, he claims that his daughter is injured when she is compelled to “watch and listen as her state employed teacher in her state-run school leads her classmates in a ritual proclaiming that there is a God, and that our’s [sic] is ‘one nation under God.’ ”.....Newdow asks the district court to order the President of the United States (“the President”) to “alter, modify or repeal” the Pledge by removing the words “under God”; and to order the United States Congress (“Congress”) “immediately to act to remove the words ‘under God’ from the Pledge.”

As I understand it, the court did not recognize any injury to the plaintiff.

Children are soooo sensitive, you know:

the mere fact that a pupil is required to listen every day to the statement “one nation under God” has a coercive effect.

But this might backfire - the teaching of evolution must surely be coercive to religious kids, whether done in a science class or not. That's because the Establishment Clause cuts both ways - from the same decision:

The Establishment Clause prohibits government from making adherence to a religion relevant in any way to a person’s standing in the political community. Government can run afoul of that prohibition in two principal ways. One is excessive entanglement with religious institutions . . . . The second and more direct infringement is government endorsement or disapproval of religion.[italics mine]

I am not an attorney by any stretch of the imagination, but I noticed this:

Newdow has standing as a parent to challenge a practice that interferes with his right to direct the religious education of his daughter.

Does this mean that the 9th Circuit is recognizing atheism as a religion? If so, maybe they've finally done something right.

What the world, needs now...

...is this gesture to ask for forgiveness

A modest proposal

I didn't get hit on the head with a big rock, but reading this post was the next best thing. I think it was the line where he said "So the whole debate about the marriage penalty is complete nonsense. It’s a debate over a non-issue; the pretense that there is a financial penalty to getting married is simply wrong".

Then I got this great idea for raising money for the govt. After all, you know they need and deserve the money, and they'll do something really intelligent with it.

So I thought, who is it who has the extra money to be taxed? After all, that's the idea behind progressive taxation, isn't it? - that we can decide that some people ought to have to pay more in taxes than others even though they don't get any more out of the govt for their money?

Ah, a brainstorm -people with roommates! They're saving money on rent, utilities and other things, right? Why shouldn't the feds get a cut of their savings? Sheesh, you'd think those silly taxpayers thought it was their money when they can see it says "United States of America" right on it.

Here's how it works - all we have to do is make everybody report to the feds and their employers every time they move in with someone else, platonic or not. Compliance would be handled with the fairness and efficiency of the IRS. Failure to comply would incur the same penalties that falsification of income taxes would. There would be regular audits where everyone would be forced to produce utility bills and deeds or leases in their own name. Throw in random bedchecks too - tax them extra if they're sharing a bed and thereby saving even more money. And if they're having sex, count the avoided expense of prostitution as taxable income.

What's this? You think it's none of the feds' business whether you room with someone else or not? Actually, neither is your income, but you have to file income tax forms all the same, so what does privacy have to do with anything? Let the feds count the avoided costs as ordinary taxable income - in the words of the post cited, "if you support a graduated tax schedule, you should support this outcome as well."

I guess that was sarcastic enough to last me a few days. Really, what justification is there for considering the incomes of both married partners in their taxation that doesn't also apply to other cohabitants?

History Channel WTC special tonight

It discusses the construction of the World Trade Center, including a discussion with a man who said that the WTC could withstand a direct hit from a Boeing 707 airliner. This gentleman was in the WTC on 9/11 and has not been identified.

Another way to show baseball standings

As many statistics geeks as there are around baseball, I suppose someone has already done this. But I have to ask - what would the standings look like if the teams were ranked by the number of wins per dollar of payroll? Or per ticket sold?

Life expectancy of women athletes?

No, I don't have a study. I just had the TV on as ESPN beat the drum about Title IX and how it supposedly revolutionized women's sports.

Title IX itself is a subject for another post. For now I'll settle for linking this, and I'll note that once upon a time women's sports were discouraged because they supposedly caused all kinds of "female troubles". Undoubtedly that was overblown, but...

Today ESPN did a series of shows on various female athletes. One of them was on Wilma Rudolph, a track star from the 1960 Olympics. She died in 1994 at age 54.

Various other athletes and coaches offered testimonials on the show. One of them was Florence Griffith-Joyner. It struck me that FloJo is dead too. She was only 38 when she died in 1998.

So I thought of some other famous female athletes and looked them up. Mildred 'Babe' Didrikson Zaharias died at 42. Sonja Henie died at 57.

I couldn't think of any more in the right age group (60+), so the above isn't exactly scientific, and the women above are extreme examples even among athletes. But it struck me how young these women were when they died. How politically incorrect it would be if it turned out that woman athletes had lower life expectancies than the rest of us.

SpiderGoat?

From Drudge, scientists have implanted spider genes into goats, and now the goats give milk that can be used to produce fibers with the strength of spiderwebs.

Let the jokes begin: did you hear about the mad scientist who crossed an owl with a rooster?

What's the most illegible website?

I nominate Paul Musgrave. I can stand six feet or more from most people's monitors and spellcheck over their shoulders, but this black on dark red scheme as of 6/22 is more than I can deal with. I shouldn't have to change my browser font size or monitor brightness to read a blog.
UPDATE 7/3: Mr. Musgrave has changed the text background for the main body, so that much is visible without technological intervention. The blogroll is still hard to see. (he must be ashamed of it because it doesn't include No Watermelons Allowed. This, even after I mention Evansville and plug a company from there...)

Right on Next Right

Sean McCray is back and is going deep.

Wandering uranium...

Kathy Kinsley notes the discovery of 2 kg of uranium in Russia in a company car, as reported in the Hindustani Times. Is this a big deal?

IMO somebody wanted something scary to write. For one, why 2000 microRoentgen, instead of 2 milliRoentgen or .002 Roentgen? Physically speaking, if a piece of pure uranium of this mass were in the form of a cube, it would be less than 2" to a side.

Warning - I am not a health physicist. But I worked with them for a few years at commercial nuclear power plants. I was always interested in my exposure for obvious reasons, so I learned some interesting things. And I'll give you links to what I'm talking about, so take it for what you're paying for it.

The first thing to note is that there is energy exposure, and energy absorption. Your microwave oven provides an example. It puts out microwave energy, but this energy isn't absorbed by everything - it's designed to be absorbed by water. Then the water molecules heat up and transfer that heat to the rest of the food. It won't do to try to use a microwave oven to try to heat something without water in it (or some other substance that will soak up microwaves). Similar logic applies to sunscreens - they don't affect the sunlight, just how it interacts with your skin.

Likewise what matters about the radiation is how much of it is absorbed by the body, not how much is there. That's why we have units like roentgens (R) for energy, radiation absorbed dose (Rads), and radiation equivalent in man (rem, also sieverts). The first is about how much energy is there, the second is about how much of it is absorbed, and the third is a measure of the impact.

Measure of the impact? Yes. This is necessary because not all parts of your body are equally sensitive - the quicker the cells grow, the more susceptible they are to radiation. That's why radiation picks on cancer cells, and why federal law requires us to chase pregnant women out of situations where they might get significant radiation dose. Your outer skin surface is already dead, so radiation there means nothing. Your lower extremities have no vital organs, so radiation matters less there. Your bone marrow is very susceptible, so the radiation equivalent is higher than for your lower extremities.

From here, "Rem: (Roentgen Equivalent Man) A unit used to express all types of ionizing radiations on a common scale to indicate relative biological effects. For beta and gamma radiations: Exposure to 1 Roentgen delivers a dose of 1 Rad, which is equivalent to 1 Rem." This is not strictly true in that the same dose to your hands isn't the same as that to your bone marrow (which is why we speak of equivalents), but it's the most comprehensible thing I found on the Web in a few minutes of looking.

But...2000 microRoentgen per hour as cited in KK's post then equates to 2000 microrem per hour or 2 millirem per hour. OK, that's 48 mrem per day. The historical dose rate cited in KK's post is .2R/day, which would convert to 200 mrem per day per the earlier conversion (with caveats as noted). This would imply a permissible yearly dose of 73000 mrem, as compared to a federal maximum of 5000 per year when I last looked. In practice 100 mrem per day is a common daily limit, and we would aim for no more than 1000mrem/year.

Again, but...not all radiation has the same properties. For everyday purposes there is alpha, beta and gamma radiation. With gamma there's nowhere to run and nowhere to hide - it'll penetrate anything. OTOH alpha won't even penetrate your skin, and it doesn't take much to block beta (gloves and glasses mostly). But when it hits something vital alpha will do the most damage, beta less so, and gamma the least. The outside layer of your skin is already dead, and because it repulses the alphas, the real impact of external alpha radiation is almost nil. And uranium is an alpha emitter.

There will be some gamma present for reasons beyond the scope of this post. But the idea is that this occurrence isn't exactly a radiological disaster in itself. I'm awfully interested in what it's doing where it was found though...

Hair of the dog

I see that New Jersey will be passing out potassium iodide pills as a precaution against various types of radiological terror.

The devil in me makes me point out that these pills will be radioactive.

Why? The potassium. About a percent or so of all potassium is a radioactive isotope. Sic a Geiger counter on some salt substitute (potassium chloride) and you'll see what I mean (you have a Geiger counter laying around, don't you?)

Of course potassium is essential to your body, particularly for your heart. So if your body can't handle some radiation, it's a pretty bad design, eh?

UPDATE: The percentage of radioactive potassium found in naturally occurring potassium is significantly smaller than "a percent or so" as mentioned above. According to this PDF it's about .012%. The idea is the same though.

There's other interesting stuff in that PDF, such as this:

Hence, the potassium-40 content in the body is constant, with an adult male having about 0.1 microcurie (µCi). Each year, this isotope delivers doses of about 18 millirem (mrem) to the soft tissues of the body and 14 mrem to bone.

That's just from living, folks - if you're a human being you have no practical way to avoid it. Keep those numbers in mind the next time someone wants to spread radiological terror.

Super pork

Dave Kopel earned his permalink on this blog with stuff like this about "Superfund".

Read it all. But here is the best passage.

If the people of a given state are unwilling to raise their own taxes (or to cut other government services) in order to pay for the ultra-expensive, over-protective remedies favored by Ms. Kriz, the public's unwillingness suggests that spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make abandoned factories as sanitary as day-care centers isn't a good idea.

Doggone right. The fact is that legislators love having money spent in their district, because some of the money is going to wind up in local pockets. This means that well intentioned legislation like this can be turned into pork by inflating claims about toxic sites. If the locals won't raise the money to fix local messes, why should the rest of us?

If you really have an environmental problem which endangers your life and health, or that of your family, you either get out or otherwise start dealing with it immediately. If you have time to wait for lawyers to settle on how it's paid for first, then your problem must not be critical. If the do-gooders want this, let them pay for it themselves instead of funding it through what amounts to random taxation. Otherwise they don't get the negative feedback needed to impose restraint.

PC marches on

Recently we've seen posts about tests using bowdlerized versions of various writings without the authors' knowledge or consent. Kimberly Swygert offers a plausible enough defense of the practice for tests at least, but this Orwellian nonsense has to stop somewhere.

Amy Welborn and Lee Bockhorn point out some PC sanitization of old movies, Tom and Jerry cartoons and others.

Next time you get a chance to watch an old MGM movie, look at the image directly below the lion. What's that? It looks to me like an illustration of a white man in blackface. Uh oh...

Scouting boys

This post is rated R.

From a collection of smutty limericks:

From the depths of the crypt at St Giles

Came a scream that resounded for miles.

Said the vicar, "Good gracious!

Has Father Ignatius

Forgotten the Bishop has piles?"

Yes, people have joked about homosexuality in the priesthood for some time. But we haven't seen anything like the recent scandals, pitting gays against the Roman Catholic Church.

Gays have a formidable lobby and some gay groups have shown themselves to be particularly nasty protesters. They also are strong in the media and have managed to spin many stories in their favor or suppress them entirely. Now we are seeing attempts to present the molestations of boys by priests as something other than homosexuality.

It always seemed plausible to me that closeted gays would head for a seminary - they'd have to hide their sex life anyway, and they wouldn't have to explain not being married. Likewise it always seemed plausible to me that gays would be more likely to prey on the young than straights, if only because by being gay in the first place they had already demonstrated a willingness to buck strong social taboos.

But I had no statistics. I don't know where the following writers got theirs, but it seems I was on the right track. According to Eric Raymond, gays are 3 to 10 times more likely to have sex with children than straights are. Then after a long passage he offers this:

Here is where the question becomes practical: were the Boy Scouts of America so wrong to ban homosexual scoutmasters? And here we are with a crashing thud back in the realm of present politics. After the numbing, horrifying, seemingly never-ending stream of foul crimes revealed in the scandal, even staunch sexual libertarians like your humble author can no longer honestly dismiss this question simply because it's being raised by unpleasant conservatives.

The priestly-abuse scandal forces us to face reality. To the extent that pederasty, pedophilic impulses, and twink fantasies are normal among homosexual men, putting one in charge of adolescent boys may after all be just as bad an idea as waltzing a man with a known predisposition for alcoholism into a room full of booze. One wouldn't have to think homosexuality is evil or a disease to make institutional rules against this, merely notice that it creates temptations best avoided for everyone's sake.

That must have been awful hard on him - his email ought to be a real trip after this. But he takes pains to say that the issue is not pederasty per se, but whether it was consensual.

I don't have a scientific answer. But it's clear that various gays (who might represent the tiniest of fringes) have been moving to make pedophilia acceptable. Some have even succeeded in introducing gay sex education in schools to the point where we're teaching kids "fisting". And they have a history of harassing the Boy Scouts of America for their policies of banning gay Scoutmasters, in terms that suggest that there is a civil right to be a Scoutmaster. And as Raymond notes, less radical gay groups don't attempt to distance themselves from groups such as the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

What makes me laugh are the efforts to represent priestly celibacy as the real problem. Yeah, that's it. And the next time there's a mad dog bomber in Israel, let's blame it on the Bahais. What, you've found evidence of cannibalism? Round up the vegans. You heard a joke? It must have been the feminists. Stop it, we're not all that stupid.

Thomas Sowell sounds off too.

Is this post anti-gay? That's your call. But don't tell me to deny the obvious - there's some things I just can't swallow.

The scientist in the kitchen

I started out engineering school intending to be a chemical engineer. Mercifully I got out of that - it was overcrowded when I was there. The professors were meaner than snakes and made no bones about trying to drive you out of the department. Then when I graduated I saw guys with sterling averages and excellent coop experiences go without jobs because the market had turned south severely. (Aerospace engineers can tell you something about that too).

A big part of ChE is something called unit operations. Here you learn about things like filtration, distillation, and other batch or continuous processes to create such things as bourbon, fudge, gasoline, ketchup, or about anything you can pump or dump. They never did tell us how they put the stripes in the toothpaste, doggone it, but this does.

I got my engineer designation the hard way. But calling traditional housekeepers "domestic engineers" might not be so far off the mark, especially if they can cook. You can read all about it in Robert Wolke's book "What Einstein Told His Cook". Nine stirring chapters cover the stuff you might have learned about cooking in engineering school - topics such as food irradiation, microwave ovens, chemicals like vinegar and cream of tartar, why cooking is different at high altitudes, and everything else you're just dying to know.

And for extra credit, you can measure the speed of light with your microwave oven.

What would you do for a link?

Gary Farber proposes an extension to Nick Denton's Blogallery.

Because it's my blog, that's why

This blog has been too serious lately. So I'll offer this invaluable contribution from "Hee Haw", and a list of Worst Country Song Titles!. The latter I found while researching the lyrics to "If My Nose Were Running Money, Honey, I'd Blow It All On You".

Costs of nuclear power - some details

Now for some harder info about what nuclear plant operating companies pay toward their liability and other costs.

Nuclear power plants are required to carry $200M in liability insurance, and this is provided by a joint underwriting association called the American Nuclear Insurers. It may just be a coincidence that ANI is the plural of "anus", but it gives you an idea about what it's like dealing with these guys - if they have an issue, it gets fixed (and nothing regulates a capitalist like another capitalist).

Above and beyond this, in the event of a severe nuclear accident, existing nuclear power plants' operating companies would be assessed to pay for the losses:

The Act also requires nuclear operators to participate in a secondary retrospective assessment program to meet public damages above the $200 million primary insurance limit. Any damages above a reactor’s $200 million primary insurance coverage are to be assessed equally against all operating reactors, up to a current limit of $83.9 million per reactor, per accident (a 5% surcharge may also be imposed to pay legal costs). These assessments, called “retrospective premiums,” would be paid out at a rate of $10 million per reactor, per year, until the cap is met. Retrospective premiums are adjusted for inflation every five years. The Act currently covers 106 reactors (103 of which are currently operating). As a result, the Price-Anderson Act would provide $9.09 billion in compensation in the event of a nuclear accident. Payment of any damages above this combined primary and secondary cap would require congressional action. Under the Act, only reactor owners and operators are liable for damages in the event of an accident; companies that designed reactors or provided reactor parts or construction services are exempt from liability under the Act.

So nuclear operating companies have a strong incentive toward helping one another as needed to make sure that plants are operated safely, and they have formed organizations such as the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) to spread best practices, maintenance information, parts failure info, and other common information on their own terms without recourse to govt regulators like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

For radwaste, operators have been contributing to the Nuclear Waste Disposal Fund for years now. These contributions come from the ratepayers as noted here:http://www.rw.doe.gov/techrep/feead_98/feead_98.htm

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), referred to as the Department, finds that the current 1.0 mill ($0.001) per kilowatt-hour fee charged on generators of spent nuclear fuel is adequate, and recommends that the fee not be changed.

Note that this assessment dates to 1998, during the Clinton administration. The amounts are not chicken feed -we're talking around $600M per year.

Here is some more information specifically about the funding of Yucca Mountain.

As for security, the costs are borne by the utilities themselves, and violators are subject to heavy fines. It's inappropriate to go into any more detail here.

Questions? Bear in mind that I'm no longer in the industry and I have a day job and a life, so it may take some time to run things down.

Cost of nuclear power - some history

I often hear questions about federal subsidies to nuclear power in one form or another. This might be the wrong question.

I haven't yet found the document that says exactly what I want to demonstrate, if it exists at all. But you must realize that whether there were any commercial nuclear power plants or not, the US govt would still have to pay for mining uranium, transporting it, refining it, reprocessing it, and ultimately disposing of it, because the Manhattan Project and other govt initiatives long predated commercial nuclear power. And the stuff the US govt uses is nastier and more highly refined than what is used in commercial nuclear power plants, so the marginal cost of adding additional consumers is not particularly high.

So under such circumstances, what is the logical thing to do? Apparently President Eisenhower had the right idea when he initiated the "Atoms for Peace" program. With this, the govt loosened its grip upon radioactive material and technology so that private industry could develop new applications or expand the usage of existing ones. And the new consumers could then contribute to the costs of maintaining the nuclear infrastructure without obvious taxes on voters.

One particular concern was labor problems. Some nasty coal miner strikes had occurred in 1946 on Harry Truman's watch, and that liberal Democrat was forced to break them. Nuclear power offered a way to break that stranglehold on our power supplies, and Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act that very year.

But electric utility executives weren't born yesterday, and they were particularly worried about liability in case of accidents. Insurers were not willing to underwrite anything near the costs of postulated accidents. It became clear that no private firms would build nuclear power plants until the govt dealt with this. Thus was born the Price-Anderson Act capping liability in case of accidents at nuclear power plants.

Bear in mind that at this point there were no commercial nuclear power plants. So there is no way that Price Anderson can be considered pork. Rather, it is clearly an inducement for private industry to enter the market in the first place.

Likewise the govt was concerned with control of nuclear material, and electric utilities wanted no part of the new field of radioactive waste disposal. So it was agreeable to everyone that the govt would make fuel available and would handle the waste.

Why would the US govt agree to these things? Was the govt stupid? Was it fear of labor problems? Was this just Cold War politics? Something else?

Or was the real reason the exact opposite of what detractors claim? That is, perhaps the real motive was to get nuclear power plant operators to help in bearing some of the costs of the nuclear infrastructure, through their purchases of fuel and reprocessing services. In this way we can help pay our defense costs without raising taxes.

The short answer is that the commercial and the govt nuclear establishment are tightly linked, and it would be difficult to say what might fairly be called a subsidy or not. But it is clear that the nuclear fuel cycle, with all of the technological and safety problems it entails, long predates commercial nuclear power and might well long outlive it. And that the existence of other consumers of nuclear material extends the usefulness of these facilities as a minimum, and might even help support them.

There's an interesting corollary to this theory. Note that anti-nuclear groups typically are left-wing politically. Why is that? Surely fears of the shortcomings of a technology would cross over traditional political lines. So there would appear to be no rational reason for the left wing orientation of antinukers.

Except for one. Left-wingers historically have been more sympathetic to our Cold War rivals than other groups have. And those rivals were aided by anything that 1) increased costs of our defenses, and 2) reduced the reliability of our energy supplies. Both of these goals could be advanced by attacking nuclear power. So although they might claim that the govt subsidizes nuclear power in their propaganda, their behavior says otherwise.

Liver cancer

A couple of months ago I asked for information about good liver cancer resources on behalf of a friend and coworker of mine. Some of you were very helpful, particularly Derek Lowe.

It's over now - he died Tuesday, on his 42nd birthday, leaving a wife and two preteen kids. It was fast too - I didn't suspect a thing until he started missing work for chemo in February.

The visitation was last night (Friday, 6/14). It had been going on for two and a half hours when I got there and I still had to park two blocks away and wait in line for an hour. The makeup couldn't hide the fact that this man looked like he had aged 40 years in 4 months.

The following clips come from this:

People with a history of cirrhosis, malnutrition, and/or chronic hepatitis B infection are at greater risk than the general population for developing liver cancer.

What are the symptoms?:

Sometimes people have no symptoms at all and are discovered to have a liver tumor during evaluation for some other physical complaint. More often, people complain of feeling tired and many describe a dull aching pain in the upper right side of their abdomen. Other symptoms include a sense of fullness in the abdomen, loss of appetite, loss of weight, fever, nausea, and jaundice.

I don't know if my friend or his doctor missed warning signs. But you had better not.

Expedience?

A murderer here in St. Louis decided to taunt the cops by sending them a map showing them where to find a body. The cops realized that the map was produced by Expedia, and managed to trace the request back to the murderer. Here's the story.

Investigators broke the case after a Post-Dispatch reporter received a letter and computer-generated map May 24. The map showed the intersection of Highway 67 and St. Charles Street in West Alton, and the letter writer said another body could be found at that spot. The skeleton of an African-American woman was discovered at the location by police the next day.

Investigators were able to trace the map to a computer mapping site and then were able to determine that it was Travis who had pulled up the map May 20.

Too bad the creep managed to kill himself.

According to Clayton police, Travis carefully threaded a torn strip of a bed sheet through small holes of a jail wall vent six feet off the floor and looped the other end around his neck.

He placed a pillowcase over his head, stuffed more pieces of cloth into his mouth and somehow managed to tie his hands behind his back.

With a final, fleeting thought known only to him, the 36-year-old waiter, nicknamed "Toby" by his friends and family, apparently stepped from the rim of a toilet and died.

Sounds fishy, but I'm all pitied out.

Capital costs of nuclear power

My interest in nuclear power as a citizen, engineer, and past employee was a factor in establishing this blog, and it's terrific to see people asking about it seriously again. And because I'm an engineer whose resume includes 10+ years onsite at various nuclear power plants, I know a bit more about it than John Q. Public.

What follows is largely from memory. The numbers provided might be a bit off, but not so substantially as to mislead materially. I want to get this out while the iron is hot on this topic, so there will be few if any links. So kindly bear with me as I continue.

To measure cost-efficiency of nuclear power plants, it helps to have a yardstick that can be used to compare the costs of plants of varying sizes and ages. For our purposes, the best measurement is probably cost per kilowatt (kW) of generating capacity. You would expect well-designed plants to have very similar costs per kW, with a slight edge toward the larger plants. Coal, hydro, solar photovoltaic (PV) and windfarms can also be measured this way, so it's a handy concept for energy economics.

In the late 1970's and early 1980's, the costs per kW for nuclear power plants were skewed all over the map. Plants like LaSalle County Station came in for around $1000/kW, while Clinton Power Station (CPS) about 80 miles away in the same state (Illinois) was about $5500/kW. CPS was to have had two 950MW units for $485M, but various problems led to a final installation of one 950MW plant for about $5B. That's a factor of 20 difference. How did this happen?

There were several problems. Some affected the industry at large. Some were peculiar to the Illinois regulatory environment. And some were purely local, the result of bad management.

First the at-large problems. The generation of nuclear power plants built at that time were based on load projections dating back to the 1960s. These were boom times for electric power, and it looked like demand would keep increasing at the same rate indefinitely. So utilities overestimated both how much power they would need in the future, and the cash flow they would have to finance the construction.

Then came the 1970's. The economy headed south, and demand for power fell. Utilities had less income and had to borrow more, while interest rates rose to very high rates. The accident at Browns Ferry gave nuclear power some bad publicity. The federal Atomic Energy Commission split into what became the Department of Energy and what is now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the new NRC was less chummy with the plant operators. Environmentalists got stronger, raised more issues and developed new legal and regulatory intervention strategies. The worst came in 1979, when "The China Syndrome", a movie portraying a hypothetical nuclear power plant accident, was released just weeks before the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident.

TMI lit a fire under the NRC, leading to a huge number of new regulations. Some of this was necessary, but much more was ordered without regard to cost-effectiveness or regard for alternatives. Plants that otherwise were ready for operation had to have entirely new systems installed, or required vast changes in existing systems. Necessary or not, the impact on construction schedules was horrendous, and that in turn sent costs through the roof.

But despite all that, some companies brought in their plants for costs of less than $1000/kW in that time frame. The best performer was probably Duke Power, based in the Carolinas.

Commonwealth Edison (CECo, now Unicom) was probably the next best performer, and like Duke Power had already built and operated other units before LaSalle and the later Byron and Braidwood units. So the availability of experienced hands certainly helped. However, CECo had to deal with the Illinois regulatory environment, which grew harsher over time.

Regulation of the utilities permitted rates based on the capital they had invested in their generating capacity. Regulators were obliged to disallow costs they considered imprudent, because otherwise a utility would earn the same rate of return on capital for poor performance as for good performance. And regulators did not permit any return on the capital until the assets had actually begun generating electricity.

Because of problems like those above however, the capital investment required to build a plant were higher than before, including interest on the funds used for construction. The result was that when the new units were included in the rate base, rates would have to be permitted to rise. But the politics of rate increases in Illinois elsewhere dictated that regulators were especially restrictive compared to the past, disallowing expenses and generally delaying permission for historically lawful rate increases.

Then another wrinkle was added. Illinois legislators subjected CECo and IP to "prudency" audits. This is where the over-optimistic past projections of power demand came in - intervenors like the Citizens Utility Board claimed that the utilities had built excess capacity and were not entitled to a return on the corresponding investments. It amounted to changing the rules in the middle of the game, which is a good way to ruin financial projections.

Anyway, the resulting delays and disallowances hit CECo hard, leading to layoffs in 1993 (including me). But it was especially bad for smaller operators like Illinois Power (IP, now Illinova) downstate. Having less cash flow, they had to finance more of the cost of CPS. Since they had less institutional knowledge about building a plant, they took much longer to build CPS than was warranted. Since they had not worked under such a regulatory environment before, they experienced quality assurance problems so bad that the NRC ordered them to stop some kinds of work entirely until they could prove that they were doing things right. Because of those delays, the interest mounted to the point that it was well over half the cost of building the plant.

But IP hung on and managed to get the plant online and running around 1987. They had no choice - at this time the plant accounted for about 17% of their generating capacity, but about 80% of their assets. Giving up meant writing it off, which would have been corporate suicide - the writeoff would have exceeded their capital. (I'm not an accountant, so take it easy on me with the nomenclature).

So now I hope you have some idea about how costs of nuclear power plants grew out of control for the most recent generation. Regulations changed precipitously and caused costly delays. Interest rates were high. The public grew hostile. And some plants simply were mismanaged.

Is the above relevant to any possible nuclear renaissance? Regulations should be more stable nowadays. Interest rates have calmed down. The public may have mellowed out by now. We have many more people with knowledge of how to manage a nuclear power plant under construction, and one manager in particular did a tremendous job with the St. Lucie plant in Florida. The industry has circled the wagons and shares information very effectively through organizations like the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations (INPO). The technology has matured significantly. And environmentalists have shown by now that they are opposed to virtually any form of power, so there's no point in trying to please them (although some are starting to recognize the benefits of nuclear power vs. alternatives).

What we do know is that power correlates well with human wealth and welfare, and we'll have to get it from somewhere.

Costs of decommissioning nuclear power plants

I won't offer much more than an acknowledgement on this topic tonight for lack of time. The main point to be made is that these costs are a very strong function of our regulations, and our regulations are both incredibly strict and inconsistent.

Opponents of nuclear power often attempt to confuse the issue, acting as if nuclear waste does not already exist. They'll complain that Yucca Mountain is insufficiently analyized or otherwise inadequate without ever acknowledging that it's the best we have. It certainly is easier to secure waste at one site than the dozens and dozens we have now, yet instead of seeking the incremental improvements they would have us remain in a state that is worse. Incidentally, have you read this?

As for decommissioning plants themselves, how clean is clean? That decision alone would raise or lower the costs by entire orders of magnitude. Opponents of nuclear power want the area restored as if no one had ever set foot there, but there simply isn't any logical reason for that. If it was a good site for a nuclear power plant, it's probably a good site for another one - rip out the parts that are past their useful lives and start over. The cooling is there, the power lines are there, the staff is there, the seismic analysis is there, the emergency plan is there - why throw this all away?

Busy....

Posting will be near-nonexistent for a few days as I deal with a nasty deadline. In the meantime, there are plenty of links to bloggers on the left and others on the right. By the time you've checked them all out I might even be back.

Eclipse coming

Some of us will be able to see a partial eclipse of the sun on Monday.

If you go to see it, make sure you protect your eyes. Don't try sunglasses unless you want to join the company of other sunglass wearers like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles. Sunglasses do not filter out the rays that do the harm.

Here's some more info, with pictures of past eclipses.

TechTV offers some tips if you decide to try to photograph an eclipse. And remember, it won't do your eyes much good to put filters over your lens and then point it using the viewfinder...

Be aware that direct sunlight can damage CCD devices like those in your digital optics. So don't try to shoot it unfiltered with anything that uses CCDs, such as your digital camera, EyeModule, and possibly your camcorder.

Or you can view it with your own handmade neato pinhole camera.

Revenge

I really do have a life, but occasionally I catch myself channel surfing. Or worse, actually stopping to watch a show.

At the moment it's F/X, with "When Good Pets Go Bad". I won't doubt that the animals in question were provoked, but I could do without the accompanying purple prose which would imply that animals are more civilized than humans are.

Then we get an assortment of bizarre events. Running with bulls. A woman mauled by a house cat (really - it took 38 stitches to patch her up). Stallions fighting. Disease bearing monkeys loose from a testing lab. A bison throwing a tourist several feet in the air into a tree.

Some of it was perversely entertaining. In one, a bull actually made it into the stands attacking the spectators. One TV personality was attacked by a muzzled bear, and another was attacked by an unmuzzled lion. And guy in a Santa suit was attacked by a reindeer (I'm not kidding) - he survived, but the reindeer had a heart attack and the Santa guy ate him.

But the climax was a videotape from Spain or thereabouts. Somebody pulled off the road in a rural area to answer nature's call and crosses a fence into a field. A friend(?!) of his back at the car decided to videotape him from outside the fence. Our star still has his pants down as he is approached by a curious donkey. With one hand on his trousers he tries to run away and fend off the donkey with the other. Next thing you know he is lying on the ground, the narrator mentions something about the donkey seeking a mate, and...well, they didn't show the rest.

So you thought you were cheap?

Try again.

Blogrolling

I don't have much new content to offer about now, but maybe you've been missing these folks.

Hawspipe has the only clean Marine joke I've ever heard.

Gene Expression is a combo of "A geneticist, a writer, a capitalist, a biochemist, an economist...and a blender." AKA Godless Capitalist, Joel Grus, Elizabeth Spiers, Razib, and Mary C. If you want controversy, this is the place.

Tom Daubert and Swen Swenson keep us up to date on Big Sky country.

The above are mere bloggers, but with Sasha Castel we have "La Blogatrice". Opera, politics, and some of everything else through the eyes of a New York woman. (What ever happened to BJ Thomas, anyway?)

And don't forget the Heritage Daily Briefing.

Taking evolution too far

I'm usually not the first one to an article, and usually unwilling to blog about what everybody else has. But I have to point this one out anyway, from a champion of animal rights:

Steven Wise leans to the lectern. "I don't see a difference between a chimpanzee," he states unequivocally, "and my 4 1/2-year-old son."

I'll bet that a chimpanzee could though.

Maybe it's time for some family services agency to take the boy away from him and replace him with a monkey. @#$% idiot!

Household power problems

Unless you can borrow an ex-spouse's car, here's another thing not to do at home. Wind up the engine in the car while in Neutral, then shift it into Drive (or dump the clutch into high gear) suddenly. Did you notice anything?

Well, people are everlastingly doing the equivalent to our electrical supply system. And your house's wiring feels those sudden changes or "transients", passing them on to your appliances.

Just as some things are more fragile than others, some electrical equipment is more sensitive to transients than others. Big strong dumb things like heaters can take about anything. But devices containing chips are especially sensitive - transients can destroy the physical devices or just the data these devices contain. Even light bulbs are sensitive to transients - have you noticed that they usually fail the instant you turn them on?

Once I was driving in rural Illinois when I saw a very bright flashing in the distance. I was already going that way and I had nose troubles, so I drove toward it. About 15 miles later I found the problem - a power line had broken loose from the welding shop it supplied and was flopping about on the ground. Those flashes were momentary short circuits, and every one of them would have felt like a big impact on the devices downstream. Anyway, a bunch of people were standing there watching it jump and flash and make noises. Fortunately no one was stupid enough to fool with it.

You can protect yourself from the power company and your neighbors in various ways. After frying her PC's motherboard, a relative is going to have the utility install some power conditioning apparatus for a fee of about $6/month. Or there's other equipment available from companies like Smarthome.

The above protect the whole house. But that doesn't mean that you don't generate transients yourself. Bump the garbage disposal. Turn on a light. Turn on a power saw, refrigerator, or air conditioner. Anything with a motor might take as much as 6 or 8 times as much current when it starts as it does when it has come up to speed - maybe you even see the lights dim when some of them kick on. For this reason it is smart to use surge protectors and uninterruptible power supplies.

Surge protectors are easy to find, but realize that they don't last forever - each spike damages them a little until they can no longer help. As for UPSs, I wouldn't be without one. They have the added virtue of alarming if the voltage coming to them from the wall gets low, so you have some warning about impending brownouts.

Transients aren't the only thing that can be wrong with your household electricity. If the voltage is consistently low or high there can be problems. In the US your appliances generally expect the voltage to be 110V, and lesser voltages can cause performance problems.

If the voltage is low something is probably overconsuming. I saw an excellent example of that at a friend's house once, where the lights to their barn were getting progressively dimmer. The power line from the house had been a DIY installation, definitely not in accordance with codes and standards. I told my friend that he probably had a short that was big enough to bleed juice like a fiend but not big enough to trip the breaker. Ah, he remembered a particularly ugly splice in the buried wire and he went to dig it up. A couple of scoops later steam was coming from the ground. He shut it off, respliced it with a better connection and better insulation, turned it back on, and suddenly he had brighter lights and lower power bills.

If the voltage is high, that's probably because the other side of neutral is low. This is bad because it tends to overheat sensitive devices like computer chips. Since computer chips are found in almost anything nowadays, voltage control is more important today than ever before.

Minor variations can make a difference too, because the heat increases approximately with the square of the voltage - a 10% increase in voltage can give you a 21% increase in heat to reject, which forces the operating temperatures up. Even light bulbs won't last as long - if they seem to last longer in some parts of the house rather than others, you might have this problem.

What's "the other side of neutral"? That's too much to explain here, but the cure might be as simple as rearranging the way your breakers are arranged in your distribution panel.

Gosh, I'll bet you wish I had a tip jar now, eh?...

Wake me up!

I know Dave Tepper has that trademarked, but surely he can cut me some slack for contributing so generously to his list of songs a few weeks ago. Now I need a list of my own, of Songs You Can't Possibly Sleep Through.

If I have any circadian rhythms at all, they must not be on a 24 hour cycle. Or maybe I was meant to live on the equator with constant length days. Anyway, it seems like I'm about as likely to be wide awake as dead sleepy at any given time of the day, and it shows in the times of some of my posts. It's not sleep apnea - I already checked (and from what I can tell there's an unseemly haste to prescribe expensive treatments for this - hey, it's just the insurance company's money...).

It wouldn't be so bad if I had been born rich instead of so...otherwise. But having a day job and other remnants of a life beyond blogging besides, well, at least I've learned that once in a while a catnap works wonders. Maybe I need this gadget.

Wanna make a million bucks? Figure out a way to transfer sleep and other bodily functions. There would be no more unemployment - they could all be eating, sleeping, exercising, fornicating, excreting, whatever, for someone else. Why not? - we already have surrogate mothers and "Exercise in a Bottle". And it'd take care of that teen sex thing too - "Can't come tonight - I have to have sex for my folks."

But this morning, despite crashing at a fairly reasonable time last night, I didn't wake up until about 11 AM. I must have slept through an hour of "Bob and Tom" and a metal CD. So now I'm looking to burn the ultimate Can't Sleep Through It CD.

Any suggestions?

World's best public bathrooms

We amateur journalists need a head for news. I knew I was on to something when channel surfing took me to the Travel Channel where I found "The World's Best Public Bathrooms". Here's the poop.

Sloan's ice cream shop somewhere in South Florida was 10th best. They had big windows into the bathroom that became opaque when the door was properly closed. Not all of the patrons close them properly, although we were spared the proof.

If a woman suggests Pasha's in Chicago you might want to reconsider. The women's room has a bar and live entertainment. As if they didn't spend enough time in there already.

The Maximum Salon Day Spa in NYC offers use of a thoroughly modern massaging throne with the latest in cleanliness irrigation technology, although men might do well to avoid some of the settings.

The best bathrooms for flirting were in Club Sugar in Santa Monica, CA. Gosh, why didn't I think of that?

But the best of all was with a jeweler in Hong Kong. A $200 jewelry purchase entitles you to visit a bathroom heavily decorated with gold, including a $3M toilet.

Incidentally...

Where do they find the leather-lunged announcers who shout "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL" for the World Cup matches? Does Guinness keep a record? The longest I've timed so far has been about 10 seconds.

Civic pride

St. Louis' own Anne Wilson is a nominee for the Sexiest Female Blogger. Through some grievous oversight somehow Alison was omitted. Paul?

Voyeur dorm et al

A few years ago I heard a morning DJ hyping something called "Voyeur Dorm". It was a house in Tampa, FL, populated with college aged girls and innumerable webcams. The DJ gave out a temporary password and invited people to go online and check it out. So, in the interests of science...

Yeah, there were a lot of cameras. Some were infrared so they would produce an image after the lights were out, and some were labeled "pee cam". With my dialup line there wasn't much practical perv appeal, especially given the spike in traffic. But if nothing else it was enough to convince me that it wasn't a put on.

I'll say. Now TechTV's CyberCrime show is covering this, complete with blurred images and bleeps. Allegedly this operation has thousands of subscribers and has made $3M since 1998, and the girls make $400 to $700 a week.

The city fathers in Tampa are out to put Voyeur Dorm out of business, on the grounds that a business is being run in a residential neighborhood. This case could be fun to watch.

Ah, next story, on Upskirting.com. Yep, you guessed right. There are websites devoted to various tricks for shooting cameras up women's skirts and showing the relevant pictures. One trick was a low-slung gym bag with a camcorder pointed upward within.

More power stuff

If you don't look at anything else, check out Home Energy.

James Dulley has a regular newspaper column on household energy savings, and this site too.

Do you want to get really serious? Check out Home Power, which shows you how you can generate your own power and get off the grid. Unfortunately they let political nonsense detract from their message somewhat.

Kansas Windpower has been around for a while and I've heard good things about them. And there's Sunelco in Montana.

For a more yuppified approach there's Real Goods Trading from Ukiah, CA. They have a demonstration project described here.

Here are directories for solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind power related businesses.

Then there's straw bale construction, earth sheltered construction, passive solar...I'd dig up more if I had the energy.

Cooler roofing

Alright, I've amused myself at the expense of Californians and their ongoing energy problems. Now I'll point out something that you all and many others can do to save lots of power. In return, all I ask is that you throw Gray Davis out of office, preferably in totally humiliating fashion. Deal?

Last year sometime I read a quote from a scientist who claimed that the energy shortages in CA could have been prevented if all of the roofs there were of white reflecting material. I haven't found a link to that, but here are some others.

The examples here are for commercial or govt facilities such as schools. Zoning or other restrictions might make such roofing impractical for residential use, not to mention that the pitched roofs might reflect the heat off to your neighbors, and the light can be dazzling. But for flat roofed buildings and mobile homes this might be just the ticket.

Kyoto vs. the US

Steven Den Beste is back and has a lot to say about the Kyoto Protocols (which sound like they were written by an Ayn Rand character).

Is Eric Raymond homophobic?

Eric Raymond has the following to say about girls learning how to perform oral sex:

Therefore, a teenage girl teaching herself how to give a good blowjob is not merely learning how to give a blowjob. She is declaring her intention to acquire the (now mainstream) virtue of sexual competence. She is matter-of-factly reaching not just for a particular skill that she knows will be expected of her as an adult, but to learn the attitude and sensitivity that will take her further on the path of sexual ability. She is growing herself up.

Looked at this way, it's hard to see why anyone living in 2002 should find Ms. Krinsky's report of her self-training exceptionable. One might just as well object to her teaching herself how to cook, or drive, or dance.

Now wait a minute. What does Mr. Raymond have against lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders and transsexuals? Surely members of these groups would be offended if she refused to cook or drive for them. If BJs are just another social skill, doesn't our thoroughly modern teenage girl have more to learn yet so as to be more inclusive?

Power alert in California

Heh heh...

May the lights go out in Sacramento first, so Gray-out Davis and his coconspirators in California govt can simmer from their own folly.

Well that's not fair, is it? What about the rest of the town - what did they do to deserve this?

Only this - they had a perfectly good nuclear power plant in Sacramento, and the locals voted to shut it down.

So let them sweat in the dark.

Enron - environmental darling?

Paul Georgia has the story.

Unsupportable claims?

Godless Capitalist and untold others are jumping on Eugene Volokh's acknowledgement that "Nor can one argue that intelligent design is unproven, but evolution is proven.".

Among the complaints is that, as opposed to ID, the theory of evolution has "predictive value". What's more, GC put evolution in the same class as the theory of gravity in terms of predictive value.

OK, let's take GC back to Mesozoic times. We'll give him perfect knowledge of the genomes and distribution of all organisms alive at that time and all technology available today except the historic records (for obvious reasons). We'll warn him about all the earthquakes, Ice Ages, tectonic plate motions, volcanoes, meteorite strikes, or any other large-scale external phenomena from then until today. His challenge is to derive the distribution and genomes of the species of today.

How would you go about that even in principle? And if you can't do it, then where is the predictive value that we're told is "on par with gravity"? Based on what you could have known then, but with today's technology available, would you even have predicted the passing of the dinosaurs?

Now suppose you had made some predictions based on our current knowledge of gravitation. Would you have done better?

One more thing. GC says

Redo history from the Big Bang with a video camera? Impossible - so why is this even asked? It's not asked for ANY other theory.

That's because it's not needed to prove any other theory - that's the load you picked up when you ruled out creationism. You say there was a Big Bang but you can't show us one?

I'm agnostic - I don't claim to know if either of the groups discussed above has the right answers. But for all this talk of science, why don't the atheists ever come out and admit that they can't prove that there is/are no god(s)?

Where is Jane Galt?

Hyper-prolific blogger Jane Galt hasn't posted anything new for over 48 hours. Send out a search party.

There's no such thing as race?

That's the politically correct answer. Then there's this.

Anti-achievement

From the liner notes of John H. McWhorter's Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America: "Is school a "white" thing? If not, then why do African-American students from comfortable middle-class backgrounds perform so badly in the classroom?" The theory is that blacks are held back in academic achievement by other blacks, who disdain excellence in schoolwork as "acting white".

This is an interesting phenomenon, but IMO it's not unique to blacks. Doing exceptionally well in school didn't score us white guys any social points either.

IMO it's not just academic performance that is inhibited by peers. You couldn't be too "arty" either, unless you had some offsetting virtue (probably athletics).

Comments?

Genetics questions free-for-all

Given an arbitrary DNA sequence, can you determine whether there could be a corresponding organism, ie, could it live at all?

Given an arbitrary DNA sequence from existing organisms, can you determine their species?

Given two arbitrary DNA sequences from existing organisms, can you tell whether they can interbreed?

Because I said so

Don't miss Ipse Dixit's Caption of the Day contest.

It's the only possible explanation...

Dawn Olsen is holding the quarterfinals of the Sexiest Male Blogger contest. The winners face Tony Woodlief and me in the semis.

Town Hall has a blog

It's the C-log, and looks to be a terrific resource for conservatives.

How to cheat at Minesweeper

From the ScreenSavers.

Tech TV's Call for Help had an interesting segment on data recovery today. They showed several unfortunate PCs, including laptop that allegedly had been in the Amazon River since 1993. The presenter claimed to have recovered all the data from the laptop's hard drive. They also included some .wav files demonstrating sounds made by failing hard drives.

On Decoration Day

Thank you Andrew Olmsted. Via Hawspipe.

I finally scooped Instapundit...

Jonah Goldberg has a post about blogs in Town Hall today. Unaccountably he failed to mention this one.

He does mention this:

It's horse-and-sparrow journalism. The horse blazes the trail and eats the hay. The sparrows feed on what the horse leaves behind in steamy piles on the road.

UPDATE: I should have known better. I had just received the email from Town Hall mentioning this about 2:30AM, when even Glenn Reynolds sleeps. It looked like it was dated on the 27th. But this originally was published on the 24th in the WashTimes. Maybe next time...

I must say, I like his characterization of what the horses of the media produce. Especially the Horse - take it away, folks.

Hot teen sex!

I have plenty of opinions on this topic, which seems to be going around like wildfire. Particularly with reference to this US News article.

What I found interesting was the part about the girl with gonorrhea in her throat. Where did it come from?

Implicit in the arguments for sex education is that it's the teen boys that are knocking up or infecting the teen girls. Well, kids are generally born "clean" - if one of them gets a dose of clap, there are adults involved somewhere.

Well, of course there are. Older guys have been after young girls forever, and older women aren't innocents either. Why?

Because they're better in bed? How can that be? - they don't know anything.

Ah, that's it - because they don't know anything. They're easier to impress. Buy 'em a burger, tell them they're pretty, pass them a joint and you're in the saddle. You can't stop them, you know - teens will have sex.

Or will they? Is it possible that the real problem is older predators?

So what if it is? If the kid is legal, anything goes. We wouldn't dream of passing any laws against it, and increasingly it seems that we're even losing the will to condemn this.

Maybe we should. We might not want to lock somebody up for robbing the cradle, but we can discourage it. We can treat these people as beneath contempt. We can publicize them.

And if they start suffering misfortunes at the hands of strangers unknown, well...sometimes you just can't stop people from doing things.

For entertainment purposes only

Glenn Reynolds links us to this, about defeating Sony's CD copy protection with a magic marker. I'm all for protection of intellectual property, but I'm having a hard time crying about this one.

That gave me an idea for another way to use your CD burner. Throw away your batteries - just plug the inputs straight into the wall and copy electricity! Then you could play it back any time you needed the power, just like a perpetual motion machine. If you needed more power in the same space, use a DVD burner instead. Right?

I would hope that most people from civilized societies nowadays would find a problem or two with the above scenario, even if they don't know exactly what it is. The ones who try it anyway, well, let's hope a breaker trips before you start a fire or get burned or electrocuted. Nah, we'd better not spread that one - there are enough strange ideas already.

For instance, legend has it that when telephones were new, scamsters would call people to tell them that the phone company was going to blow out the lines, and they should take their phone off the hook and put a pillowcase over it to catch the dust. And this nearly rendered the phone systems inoperable.

Yesterday I got a call from a relative asking about an email she had received. It told her to delete jdbgmgr.exe from her Windows system because it was a virus. This is only the latest in a series of similar scams going around - here is a list.

If they're going to do that, the least they could do is have people delete something really malicious. Like AOL.

A grounding in basic electricity

A while back I posted an item about static electricity. The idea was to lay some basic groundwork leading up to a discussion of power generation and distribution for nontechnical people. In what follows I'll assume that the material in that earlier post is familiar.

Static electricity is comparatively simple to analyze - it's about electric charges that are not moving. Start moving those charges around and entirely new phenomena emerge.

A faucet provides a familiar analogy for these phenomena. It provides a connection to a supply of water that is under pressure, in what for our purposes is a limitless quantity. The electrical analogy for this pressure is the potential, or voltage. And just as water flows from where the pressure is higher to where it is lower, electric current flows from higher voltages to lower voltages.

Alright, go find a sink with a working faucet, and open the drain. You want to make sure that that water has some place to go once you turn it on. The electrical analogy for this is a "ground" - either way you are establishing a place where the flow can go without accumulating or "charging up".

Now turn the water on very slowly. Does water come out immediately? No, it takes some time to fill the spout before the water comes out. In an electric circuit, we have an analogous phenomenon called "capacitance" - you have to charge up the wires before you can deliver any power.

Now turn the faucet more wide open. You get more flow. That's because the faucet internals are positioned to ease the flow of water, which is analogous to electric current. Electric current is measured in units of charge passing through per second - the most commonly used unit is the "ampere" or "amp".

Now turn the faucet wide open. You're delivering as much flow as you can. That's because you have minimized the amount of flow resistance in your water "circuit". In an electric circuit the corresponding phenomenon is called "resistance".

The water flowing through the faucet is at a higher pressure (say 40 pounds per square inch, or psi) on the inlet of your faucet. Where it leaves the faucet it is at the same pressure as the rest of the room, or 0 psi. What happened to the pressure? The relevant energy was consumed by fluid flow friction inside your faucet, or its "resistance". In electric circuits the resistance of a device tells you the ratio of how much your voltage will drop across it to the amount of current that is flowing at the time.

Now shut off the faucet as quickly as you can. Depending on how your plumbing is designed, you might have felt a "water hammer" caused by forcing the water moving in your pipes to come to a sudden stop. There is an analogous phenomenon in electric circuits called "inductance".

Hmm, that's strange. Electricity is a bunch of moving charges which are almost massless, and I never see wires jump when I flip off a switch. So where is this inductance crap coming from?

Well, this post is getting king of long, so I guess I'll cut it off here. So you'll just have to sit on pins and needles for the next thrilling installment...

Post abortion stress syndrome?

Fortunately the closest I have come to an abortion (to my knowledge) was once when I was the designated driver.

I know several women who have had abortions, and I don't know a one who wants to talk about it. And it's not like they're not out there - allegedly 43% of all women in the US have had an abortion by age 45.

So I stumbled upon this site which speaks of "post abortion stress syndrome". It seems consistent with my observations - that this is a bigger deal than militant feminists would have us believe.

Feminists have been quoted as saying that this condition does not exist, and the site acknowledges that there is no formal recognition in medical literature. Maybe it was created by anti-abortion activists, whether by outright fabrication or by establishing an environment where women who get abortions are driven to it by their activities.

I don't think so. IMO abortion has been trivialized medically and psychologically. You can give the kid up for adoption and be through in 9 months. You can raise it and be through in 20 odd years. Or you can abort it and deal with it forever.

Make your money greener

It's been a while since I've heard anything about George Washington Carver. IMO he can't be mentioned often enough.

Why? Because we could use thousands of others like Carver in any color we can find them in. He showed farmers in the South how to rotate their crops with peanuts and sweet potatoes to enrich the land, and then created the products that created the demand for these crops. The resulting bounty to Southern agriculture was incalculable, and it was all from a man born a slave.

Our new Carvers could work on industrial processes that cause pollution, such as burning of fossil fuels, production of chemicals, disposal of solid waste, or handling of vast quantities of livestock waste from factory farming. Today a landfill, tomorrow a mine.

Or they could develop more products from corn or cane sugar, giving us hope of ending the ethanol boondoggle and ridiculous price supports.

The way to deal with pollution is to create new products, processes and markets. That means educating more engineers and managers to create and implement the industrial and other changes needed to make things cleaner.

You'd think Big Green would be right on board with this. But does anyone think we'll ever see the "Greenpeace School of Engineering", or "Sierra Club School of Business", or "Working Assets Venture Capital Fund"?

Hell no. They're too busy buying lunches in Washington, mugging for photographers, blowing smoke for journalists, exploiting cheap labor by college students, cutting trees for fundraising letters or hassling working people trying to make a living.

They're social pollution. And they don't deserve a dime of your money.

Field guide to the North American watermelon

As noted before, the name of this blog is a reference to people who cloak their political goals with environmental initiatives (they look green, but they're really red on the inside. Or else they're what Lenin called "useful idiots"). So how do we know who the watermelons are?

For one, they speak of "anti-environmentalists". No, there's no such thing. We all live on the same planet, drink the same water, breathe the same air, eat the same food...we're all in this together. Everybody wants a good environment - we just disagree about what one is, and how much we'll put up with in exchange for other benefits. And we have these people to thank for the fact that many of us now are conditioned to be suspicious of environmental initiatives - they've created divisions where none need exist.

They want you to give money to professional bitchers like Greenpox Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. Have these groups ever done anything besides pushing for bigger govt to solve problems? Would you rather spend your money on, say, developing a more efficient engine, or on buying enough Congressmen to raise CAFE standards?

They object to capitalism and private property, preferring govt control. There are problems to be addressed with resources subject to "the tragedy of the commons". But they should note that for truly deadly pollution, it's hard to top places with huge govts and/or nonexistent property rights, like Mexico or the former Soviet Union. Obviously neither capitalism nor private property are necessary.

They object to local control. If a community is satisfied with, say, the level of arsenic in their water, then why should anyone butt in? Why should automotive exhaust in Nebraska be regulated the same way as it is in Los Angeles? Why should some New Yorker who wants to see wolves in Yellowstone National Park on his vacation be able to force locals to live with them all year?

They demonize their opposition, presenting issues in terms of good vs. evil rather than your values and interests vs. mine. You cannot oppose them without having your motives questioned, and nothing is more questionable than being wealthy.

And further environmental progress in large measure will depend on kicking these people out of the leadership of environmental groups.