Spankometer!

I'm not kidding.

The same site offers other products such as a binary clock, "Clone-a-Willie" (if you have to ask, never mind), and other stuff that might not be available at your local Wal-Mart. So go ye forth and stimulate the economy.

The Real Ugly American interviews Mort Kondracke

...right here

Eureka!

Nowadays I'm working a lot with a guy who's about 15 years younger. Also, he's from a reasonably affluent suburban background with a liberal arts degree (with a subsequent MBA and computer science work) while I'm essentially small-town Midwest/Southern blue-collar with an engineering background. Needless to say, we see the world differently.

Usually I can depend on him to say liberal talking points. Not consciously - it's just what you get from the news environment as the implicit default political position. Bush lied, no WMDs, shouldn't have been a war, what honor killings?, Clinton was cool, etc. Whether I'm having any influence or not, I'm exposing him to stuff he's never seen in the news.

Yesterday it was the trope that people volunteer for the military because of a lack of opportunity at home. There was no analysis behind this that I could tell - just something that he'd heard that made sense to him. It certainly hadn't occurred to him to question it.

I pointed out a few things he didn't seem to acknowledge. He wasn't aware that military pay was so low - he seemed to think it was in the $30s or so. Maybe - if you were high enough rank and/or stuck around long enough. I snooped around and found this. Yeah, you get room, board and medical care such as it is too, but I'm thinking that he and I both would have problems with the working conditions, time off, hours and some other issues. You'll never get rich digging a ditch, but you won't in the service either.

He also didn't seem to realize that it wasn't WWII anymore when, as relatives tell me it was later in the war, the physical was "Can you see lightning? Can you hear thunder? You're 1A". He seemed to think that anybody with the gumption to show up at a recruiting center could sign up and see the world. Sorry, but the service doesn't want just anybody and doesn't take just anybody. It didn't take his fine education to join the military for sure, but even economic coercion wouldn't work for a significant number of people.

He seemed stumped. Then WTF would anyone sign up?

Now we finally had it. There couldn't be any non-economic reason to sign up. Patriotism? A sense of obligation? Recognition of need and willingness to stand up? Respect for a grand tradition? Pride in meeting the standards? Whatever the reasons, thank God they exist and for the people who share them, who make it possible for us to have these discussions from the air-conditioned safety of an anonymous suburban office building. (Oh, he's got issues with the God business too).

Not to slam the guy - he's the product of his environment. He was born privileged, that's all. He just doesn't realize that the greatest privilege he was born with was the same as mine - we were born in the USA.

Goodbye Acidman

A year or so ago I almost drove hundreds of miles to the north Georgia mountains to meet Rob Smith at a blogger get-together.

Too late, he's gone. I'm gonna miss the old cuss and I never even met him. Da Goddess *did* meet him, and had this to say.

Best of luck to Samantha and Quinton. I hope Sam posts info about the services and where to send cards and flowers.

Goodbye Acidman

A year or so ago I almost drove hundreds of miles to the north Georgia mountains to meet Rob Smith at a blogger get-together.

Too late, he's gone. I'm gonna miss the old cuss and I never even met him. Da Goddess *did* meet him, and had this to say.

Best of luck to Samantha and Quinton. I hope Sam posts info about the services and where to send cards and flowers.

Silicon gulag

Castro hath determined that Cuba should be a software powerhouse. Without access to the Internet, of course. And if you think Microsoft's Clippy is obnoxious, check this out:

The computers are slow, but the teachers seem competent and the students are serious. When one student tries to get rid of the pesky paper clip figurine that keeps popping up to offer help, he accidentally closes his spreadsheet, and a full-screen photo of a young Castro appears.

And now we have Hugo Chavez creating another workers' paradise in Venezuela.

"Nobody is for a withdrawal, even a timetable"

...quoth Iraq's Foreign Minister in this WSJ post.

The backwards blonde and friends

USA Today recently ran a campaign looking for "Characters". Yes, they found them, and you can see them here.

The winner was the "Backwards Blonde". It appears that if she can spell a word, she can pronounce it backwards. Instantly. Of course it helps that words really don't have accepted pronunciations when spoken backwards, but hey.

The funny thing is that when she dyed her hair another color, the ability went away. No, I made up that part. But it had to be a blonde...

Anyway, she's heading off to chiropractic school soon, where she'll no doubt learn her stuff backwards and forwards.

Spite the power

Our public schools stink. Education majors are typically at the bottom of the heap for SAT and other standardized test scores. Political correctness demands creating students with high self-esteem without negative feedback so that they can be confident about everything yet competent at nothing. And the whole shebang is run by a malevolent gang of parasites masquerading as teachers' unions, supervised by whatever political hacks lurk at the bottom of the talent pool.

Well, I suppose I could have overstated that just a bit. Atlas hasn't shrugged yet -there are still some heroes in our schools (like this one), and they could do even better given the resources. But how can we find them, and how can we get them resources without having them misallocated by the legions of sticky fingered lowlives infesting statehouses and school administrations?

Here's how. Thanks to Tara Smith of Aetiology.

Asymmetrical warfare

Israpundit notes the past idiocy and opportunity for some redemption involving the Presbyterian Church's position on investing in Israel here.

What *I* want is a list of any big corporation that has invested in Gaza since the Israelis left town. Sound investors of *any* creed would dislike the idea of investing where Palestinian leaders (?!) run the show.

This would be another chance for Arabs to show how much they really care for "the plight of the Palestinians". Ha! My bet is that the money that builds Gaza, if it ever happens, will have come from Israel.

No joke

I love oddball expressions, especially with all the of non-native English speakers I work with. A couple of favorites are "busier than a one-armed paperhanger with the seven year itch", or "busier than a peg-legged man in an ass-kicking contest".

And then I saw Discovery Health channel's segment on Barbara Guerra. The segment is "Life with no arms", but that actually understates things - she has kids too.

She's been armless since she was 2 in 1979, when she wandered off and got her hands in an electrical transformer. She was so badly burned that they thought they'd lose her altogether, but instead she just lost both arms. There's not even a joint on her left side, and on the right there's a very short stump.

Think about that the next time things aren't going your way. It has a way of making most problems look like chickenshit.

Desperate measures

11 cousins had their stomachs removed to avoid a fatal stomach cancer.

Thank God it wasn't brain cancer. We don't need any more !@#$ left-wingers.

George Soros, convicted felon

Read all about it here, thanks to Betsy's Page.

George Soros, convicted felon. George Soros, convicted felon. Oh, it sounds so good. In fact, I think George Soros' name ought to show up first on search engines under "convicted felon". Who wants to help?

Yo quiero Geno's

I've never managed to stop in Philadelphia. When I do, I'll have one of this guy's cheesesteaks even if I have to eat it through a straw.

A bust for a bust

An high school art teacher in TX (Austin, of course) has been busted for appearing topless on a website.

Heavens, it must be those Bible-thumpers on the march again, eh? Of course, at least according to some of the more ignorant commenters on the linked page. Never mind that in any case it's an example of very poor judgment. If she can't stand sacrificing some artistic liberty to be a teacher, then she's in the wrong field anyway.

For you artistic freedom über alles types - if it'll make you feel better, pretend that a Muslim objected.

Dancesport! - Chicago's Crystal Ball is this weekend

...at the O'Hare Marriott. Forget "Dancing with the Stars" - this is the real thing, done by amateurs and professionals of all ages.

More here.

Overreaction?

You know, we really don't need anyone idolizing Adolf Hitler. But this is really stupid.

At a HS in NY, seniors were permitted to choose a quote to accompany their pictures. Two of them chose quotes from "Mein Kampf":

The quotes picked by Christopher Koulermos and Philip Compton, both 18, were attributed to Hitler in the yearbook. Koulermos' read "Strength lies not in defense, but in attack." Compton chose "The great masses of people ... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."

Right offhand I'm thinking that someone wasn't paying enough attention - Hitler's name might have been something of a red flag. (Is it possible to graduate from an HS nowadays without knowing his name?)

But really, what harm was done to justify such an abject response from the school district? I'm sure that the creep said "please" and "thank you", etc at various times too, and they're about as relevant to his evil as the quotes chosen. And it would be interesting to see if the same book contained any quotes from, say, Stalin, Chairman Mao or Che Guevara.

The rest of the story

What do you know? - we have ads on TV telling women about how they can get cervical cancer from human papillomavirus (HPV). The one I've seen shows several astonished women swearing to tell everyone.

But why stop there? Why not tell them how they get HPV?

Do they get it from toilet seats? Riding horses? Swimming in public pools? Contaminated tampons? Golly, how do the bugs get up there?

It wouldn't take a genius to figure out that, yes Virginia, it's transmitted by sex. Which means that these ads are opportunities to promote those most sacred of objects, condoms. And sex is never inappropriate in the media nowadays lest we commit the deadly sin of "censorship", so why are they so coy?

Recover waste heat

Now *this* is the kind of technology we can use. A lot of heat goes down residential and commercial drains, and under the right circumstances it can be reused.

Of course the economics have to be right. For example, if a device took more energy or cost more money to fabricate than it could ever recover over its life, it would make no sense.

Anyway, although the article doesn't mention it, this appears to be an application of heat pipes. A heat pipe is a device which can transfer large amounts of heat at small temperature differentials when properly applied - lots of technical background here.

Why is this a big deal? The rate of heat transfer between two objects ordinarily varies increases with increasing differences in temperature between the objects that are exchanging heat, and it decreases as the distance the heat must travel increases. And heat energy is the "leakiest" stuff around - the farther it must go the more of it you will lose even under ideal conditions. So it's terrific if you can exchange a lot of heat at low difference of temperature, because then it "leaks" the least for a given amount of useful transfer.

The bottom line is that you don't want to have to transfer heat very far, and that the less of a temperature difference you have the less useful the heat is. And those two factors account for the fact that you don't see a lot of household waste heat recovery systems.

Put that back!

Little kids want to put everything in their mouths. We adults often tell them things like "spit that out - you don't know where it's been!"

Alas, similar logic applies to flash drives:

according to a recent Secure Network Technologies Inc. audit of a client credit union, 100% of the trojan-laden, password-collecting, network-compromising USB flash drives they planted outside the client's building were unwittingly plugged in, used, and infected their respective host machines.