Good riddance

I'm no innocent when it comes to tastelessness, but then there's this.

Some of you might be aware that Darryl Kile, a star pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, died suddenly this past season.

The Cardinals recovered, won their division and went on to play the Arizona Diamondbacks.

And a DJ in Arizona called the late Mr. Kile's widow and asked her if she had a date for the games.

Now the DJ is out of a job, and the Cardinals won in a sweep.

From those wonderful people who brought you the OJ verdict

A Los Angeles jury Friday ordered tobacco giant Philip Morris Cos. (MO) to pay $28 billion in punitive damages to a 64-year-old woman with lung cancer who sued the company for fraud and negligence.

Does it occur to these juries that if one plaintiff sucks the tobacco companies dry, then many others will go uncompensated for their problems? Would a judge allow a defendant to point this out?

I can't find a link for it, but I thought I saw something once that claimed various health benefits from smoking. Specifically, I thought it somehow suppressed some other lung conditions such as tuberculosis. I'm enough of a contrarian to believe that anything as universally reviled as smoking must have some redeeming features.

Bring back slavery...

It's the obvious solution to our economic problems. Why? Because a Chicago alderman, Dorothy Tillman, says America is rich "because of the free labor of blacks". She wouldn't lie about something like that, would she?

Yeah I know, it's shooting fish in a bucket (which I guess belongs here). But I figured it made a great headline in conjunction with the Civil War stuff below..

Happy 1st anniversary, Mindles Dreck

Congratulations to More than Zero. Find out why it's one of the best blogs around.

If Forrest Gump were a genius...

You remember Forrest Gump, don't you? If not, you have to see it. The younger you are the less of it you'll catch, but there's something for everybody.

In essence for my purposes, Forrest Gump was a dummy who always seemed to be around wherever history was being made. Somehow in the process he became a millionaire (by investments in "fruit companies" like Apple). Yes, he's a fictional character.

But in real life we had a man who was a very successful lawyer, investment banker, scientist, inventor, bureaucrat, and venture capitalist. He made his millions financing our electric utility infrastructure, then turned to his lifelong interest in science, opening up a prominent lab, hiring brilliant scientists to staff it, and performing original research himself. As he saw World War II looming, he used much of his money and influence in support of critical tasks like radar and the Manhattan Project. And I'm betting you've never heard his name.

From his behavior, he would have liked it that way. Alfred L. Loomis didn't seek the spotlight, he just wanted to get things done. And you can read all about it in a recent book called Tuxedo Park.

Yes, Tuxedo Park. Loomis lived in this onetime land of the snobs' snobs and set up his personal laboratory there. There he did some of the first research into brain waves and microwave radiation, and put up with cranky neighbors who didn't want riffraff like Niels Bohr and Ernest Lawrence hanging around.

And his sons were accomplished too. The youngest was still alive this past summer and had this to say.

Take that, Kennedys.

Electric dogsleds

There's a dogsled theory of management that says "if you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes". But for the dogsleds that's completely irrelevant to what follows, but this is my site and you ought to be used to this by now.

Anyway, dogsleds aren't a bad analogy for what you're dealing with when you hook up multiple generators to provide power to the same electric grid. You'll have a lead dog. You want to make sure that all of the dogs are pulling their share of the load rather than just keeping up with the traces, and you sure don't want a dog that is soaking up power from the other dogs.

You can overextend the analogy though. There's never been a band called Three Generator Night, and whipping a turbine or a diesel isn't likely to affect its behavior. Instead, you adjust the governor.

What's a governor? A device to control the speed of a prime mover like a diesel generator or turbine. With the proper feedback, it can also impose a maximum load the prime mover will carry. It does this by monitoring the speed of the device, and if properly equipped, it also monitors the current power level. When it detects a discrepancy between the machine's behavior and its current settings, it manipulates the machine's controls to minimize the discrepancy.

With sophisticated modern controls this can be done in a number of ways. But for backup purposes a lot of them still depend on traditional flyball governors, which are neat little mechanical gizmos.

These mechanical governors are driven by a shaft that rotates at a speed proportional to that of the prime mover itself. This causes some weights to rotate at this speed, and centrifugal forces cause them to want to fly out. As they do, they displace a shaft which ultimately controls the prime mover. A spring resists this displacement, and the setting the speed the governor maintains actually amounts to tightening or loosening this spring's tension.

That shaft that displaces - what does it do? That depends on the prime mover. For a steam turbine, it would manipulate the main steam control valves, controlling the rate at which steam enters the turbine system. This of course affects the boiler, which will respond to the resulting increase or decrease in back pressure from the turbine (and more, in the case of a nuke) to adjust power as needed.

For a diesel generator, it controls the positions of the fuel racks. These control how much fuel is injected into each cylinder at each stroke. In essence it's like the accelerator pedal in a car, but the linkage is a lot more complicated.

OK, you're controlling the speed. But this only works if all of the generators are set for exactly the same speed. The ones set lower will take it easy while the ones set higher might overload.

So how do you whip the dogs, ie how do you make sure all the generators are carrying their share of the load? That's another post. Til then...

It's official - I have no life

You can be that way too. Look up Carrot Top in IMDB. You'll find that that really isn't his name (say it isn't so!). And for a bonus, they have a picture!

That's all. Where are my meds?

Synchronization

Wow, I'm actually delivering on a pledged post within a week. OK, here we go, into the wonderful exciting world of synchronization of electric generators!

Maybe you don't know it, but that juice your electric utility provides you changes direction 60 times a second (assuming you're in the US - Europeans do it slightly differently of course). That's why they call it "alternating current", or AC. There's a diagram on this page with some other stuff too.

Generating electricity that way seems like a lot of trouble, but actually it's easier than producing nonreversing "direct current" (DC). DC requires rectifiers and other impedimenta, and was economically impractical at the time when our electrical distribution network was being built out.

But that alternation creates some problems. For one, it affects the impedance of electrical appliances - vary the rate of alternation and all of a sudden your motorized appliances might overheat. For another, it requires all generators hooked up to feed the system to be exactly in step with the existing rate and amplitude of alternation. That's where synchronization comes in.

They might have better metering stuff nowadays, but many plants synchronize with something called a synchroscope that looks something like a clock with only one hand. The hand rotates at a rate proportional to the difference in speed between the generator being synchronized and the grid it's being synchronized with. The hand position indicates the relative phases of the waves - when it's at 12:00 the waves are exactly in step.

So when you start a prime mover like a diesel generator or a steam turbine, you manipulate its speed with its governor. You set the speed up just a hair higher than that of the grid (as indicated by a slowly moving hand on the synchroscope), let the synchroscope's hand sneak up just short of 12:00, and then you close the breaker to connect it to the grid.

Whoops, you weren't in sync when you closed the breaker? Well, lots of neat stuff can happen then - just don't stand too close. You might fry the windings on your generator. You might jerk your prime mover loose from its mountings, or tear something loose internally. If your generator is big enough relative to the power distribution grid you're supposed to be feeding, you could even bring the whole grid down. That's not a good career move. (And unless you think it's a good idea to redline your car's motor in neutral and then slam it into gear, don't try starting a diesel generator by just connecting it to the grid. That was done at a plant in California back in the 80's, and they managed to break the ~13" crankshaft on a diesel generator).

Well, there's more to it than that yet. You also have to fool with the voltage regulator. This varies current in the exciter to get your generator's voltage at the appropriate value. You want the power to flow out, not in, you want the right power factor (no, not another pledged post!) and you'd better have some reverse power relays ready to knock you offline to protect against idiots and emergencies.

Nowadays more and more of this process is automated. But these functions above still must be carried out in some form or another. And with any luck, if you ever use a backup generator, I hope I've convinced you to read the instructions.

Where are all the German jokes?

I stole this from Gene Expression (which now features Jason Soon and Suman Palit too - check them out).

Anyway, it got me thinking about German jokes. I don't know any. It's not like there aren't plenty of Krauts around, including me (50%). So where are the jokes?

Sillier than a simile

Once in a while I hear an expression that's, uh, memorable. But I daresay I haven't heard them all yet, so I thought I'd try to tap the collective wisdom of The Blogosphere(™ Bill Quick) to see what I've been missing. Here are some examples of the kind of stuff I'm looking for - some of them are, uh, pretty colorful...

For instance, say you want to convey the idea that someone is extremely busy. My two favorite standards are 'a peglegged man in an ass-kicking contest' or 'a one-armed paperhanger with the seven year itch'.

Then there's slipperiness. Most of the ones I've heard are kind of gross. 'Snot on a doorknob' is a worthy entrant, but it can't top this: 'two eels screwing in a bucket of snot'. I about cracked up when I heard that one from an old millwright years ago.

For tightness, there's 'a bull's ass sewn up with a log chain', or 'A gnat's ass stretched over a rainbarrel'.

Confusion? There's 'Father's Day at the trailer park' or '50 blind lesbians at a fish market'.

Human size? I like 'big enough to go bear hunting with a switch'.

Stupidity? 'Too dumb to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel'. I'm thinking the guy who pissed in the boot wasn't so bright either, but maybe some antiquarian can explain the logic to me.

Noisy? 'Like skeletons copulating on a tin roof'. I think I got that from National Review.

I suppose I could go on at great length, as I usually do. But now it's your turn - can you top these?

Uncivil comments

Let's make a deal, Sgt. Stryker. I won't claim that slavery wasn't involved in the secession of the Southern states in the Civil War, and you won't hand me this sanctimonious crap about how the Union side was fighting to free the slaves and stamp out a culture that was "evil and wicked to the core".

You don't like revisionism? Then what do you think about the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation was written halfway through the war, and didn't free the Northern slaves?

You don't like secession? The general rule is that, unless we're talking about the Mafia, we can leave associations if we choose after we join. Tell me what in the Constitution forbade secession. And if nothing forbade it, tell me why the 10th Amendment doesn't make it legal. The Southerners could see clearly that they were going to get a long brutal screwing once they were no longer in a position to block hostile legislation backed by Northerners, so why should they stick around?

One of the things that amazes me about this topic is how people who ordinarily would make fun of religious fanatics become such sanctimonious pricks themselves when expounding on Northern motives. And in fact a bunch of what could fairly be called religious fanatics provided much of the impetus. They were the abolitionists - a bunch of people who would suffer no economic impact from their radical changes, and who were bound and determined to impose their beliefs on everyone else. There's the analogy to Islamofascism Stryker was looking for - he was just looking on the wrong side.

Yankees have been morally masturbating about their role in ending slavery for a long time now, ignoring the fact that they weren't particularly enlightened about race themselves, and that most of the social disruption would happen far from their neighborhoods anyway. People would lose what historically had been considered property and uneducated ex-slaves would be dumped into the economy with even fewer guarantees than they had had under slavery. Yet back in Boston, where the likes of William Lloyd Garrison did their braying, they wouldn't see any of this. We saw just how tolerant Yankees were, especially Bostonians, over 100 years later, once blacks started migrating north in large numbers.

Slavery certainly doesn't meet modern moral standards, but it wasn't so exceptional by the standards of its time. Should it have been eliminated? Yes. At any price? Don't insult my intelligence - would anyone have voted to prosecute a war knowing it would cost 620,000 dead when many alternatives remained unexplored? Lincoln himself favored shipping blacks back to Africa. And if fighting against it was such a moral imperative, surely it is not diminished now - why aren't we sending troops into the Sudan and other places where the practice survives?

Admit it, the Civil War was about brute force politics and nothing more - the subsequent mythology is the whitewash it takes to cover up the incredible toll. The "save the Union" line sounds like the classic from Vietnam - "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". "With malice toward none"? Right - troops would invade others' property, kill them by the thousands and ruin their economies for years to come, but dammit, we draw the line there. To Stryker, people who have a problem with the way Lincoln, Sherman et al handled the war are "obstinate".

And while Stryker sheds crocodile tears for the slaves, let's note his claimed ties to Philip Sheridan. You remember Sheridan, don't you? He's the alleged source of the expression "the only good Indian is a dead Indian". That's the kind of racially enlightened moral paragons who were leading the armies of the North - after slaughtering their brothers who were defending their homes, what's a few redskins?

Coming up to speed

I just got back from Lynne Kiesling's excellent blog, which has a number of good entries related to electric power. Then I remembered that I write about that stuff too. Cool.

Anyway, the post of interest mentioned that it takes time to build more electrical generating capacity. Very true. But even if it's built, you don't get power from a plant immediately. You have to warm it up first.

My observation seems to be that if the temperature is decent, people hop in their cars, start them, and are in gear and moving seconds later. They wouldn't make good power plant operators. Unless you want to risk potentially very costly maintenance problems, you start up slowly.

In particular, steam turbines are touchy about uneven heating. The ones in use at big commercial nuclear power plants are quite large, and the shafts are very long. So long in fact that one of the first things you do when starting up a turbine is to put it on turning gear, so any heat it is exposed to is evenly distributed and you don't make the shaft bow from the weight of all the blades at operating temperature. Even small amounts of bowing of the shaft will cause vibrations which can destroy the turbine.

Piping runs are also very long, and the temperatures in them may vary over several hundred degrees. These factors cause great thermal expansion to occur during startup, accompanied by noises. Heating these pipes too rapidly can cause undue stresses or even failure.

Heat exchangers (see figure 1) like feedwater heaters are also big enough to expand by several inches as they heat up to operating temperatures. The hotter stages will be constructed with one end on wheels to permit the motion required. Meanwhile there are hundreds of interference fits between tubes and the bulkheads they pass through (called 'tube sheets') in these heat exchangers - any of them can leak, lowering the thermal efficiency of the plant.

The part of the plant that produces the steam takes time to warm up too. For nuclear reactors this is further complicated by the need to pull the fuel rods out in special patterns as directed by nuclear engineers to optimize the use of the reactor's power potential. You don't want to do things rapidly with a nuclear reactor unless it's an emergency shutdown (which is called a 'scram').

Once the plant is at operating temperature it becomes more flexible. It can be synchronized to the grid (another post later), and then its load can be varied over a certain range without affecting efficiency and reliability intolerably.

A little consideration of the above tells us something about how electric generation utilities are forced to operate. If they are to be able to pick up loads rapidly and reliably and to accomodate disturbances such as trips, they must always have more generators running than they need to carry the load. And because of the time it takes to heat up, these generators must be running well in advance of the load change. This might force them to run, say, 5 plants at 80% capacity instead of 4 plants at 100% capacity (this of course assumes you have 5 plants of identical capacity using the same fuel, or else there are several other things to consider).

But running 5 plants instead of 4 is expensive - the power to spin the turbine costs money whether it's generating salable electricity or not, and the 4 plant scenario is cheaper than the 5 plant one. So a utility must in a sense act like an insurance company, trying to balance reserves against anticipated demands and still make a profit.

Whoops, I promised another post. Terrific - I can think of about 3 others I've pledged, and one of them is about 2 months old now. The synchronization one will probably come soon though - I'm just getting warmed up.

Alright, just this and nothing more

I got a Google hit for "Madelyne Toogood Playboy". Go ahead, Mr. Hefner, let's see what you can do with that one.

Nothing happening this weekend

I'll be incommunicado, but there's enough blogs and other sources listed here to keep you busy for days. See ya late Sunday night at the earliest.

Blinded by science

I'm getting some feedback that suggests that some of us have a fundamental misunderstanding about science. IMO I'm picking up a heavy load here, but let's see what happens.

Plato famously made a point with his "cave". In this, people were chained facing a wall, unable to turn around. Things were going on behind them, but all they could see were the shadows of them on the wall before them. Whatever Plato's intent was, mine is to get across the idea that our perception of nature is similar - what we can know of the world is distorted because we have distorted information, filtered through our senses and our instruments.

Another example would be the blind men and the elephant. One found its trunk, another its leg, another its side, etc, and each drew an incomplete conclusion about what an elephant was. Here the idea is that our perceptions can be all too narrowly focused on aspects of a phenomenon which are inadequate or even misleading wrt describing its whole.

Are scientists thus "blind"? Yes, like all the rest of us, in certain respects.

Well, there's no denying that science has had smashing success. So let's suppose we ignore those problems and gather data anyway - now what? We have to decide what data to collect. That requires a hypothesis, which introduces yet another source of distortion. What doesn't get hypothesized doesn't get investigated. So if scientists are politically limited, internally or otherwise, they can remain blind to discoveries that are obvious to less constrained investigators.

OK, now you've collected data. It alone isn't so useful. It is given value by being organized into models designed to behave like the phenomena being studied. Then these models can be used to interpolate values where no direct data exists (in 1995 the population of Chicago was X), or to extrapolate beyond the range were data was available (in 2100 the population of Chicago will be Y). I'm showing my bias toward the "hard sciences" here, but corresponding processes exist where the data is less quantitative.

Engineers like myself can testify to the great usefulness of these models in innumerable situations. But these models impose yet another form of blindness or distortion. They might apply to only very limited circumstances. They take into account only the phenomena that appear in the equations. Other yet to be discovered phenomena might be emerge, or be significant under other circumstances. We may improve our mensuration, thus exposing flaws in the model that were not evident or significant previously. And mathematical models necessarily have the same limitations of mathematics itself (you can't divide by zero, for instance).

If you were successful to this point, terrific, but it ain't science yet. Now you must suffer peer reviewers. Peer reviewers are human beings, complete with biases, blind spots, reputations, and political agendas. Woe to you if your discovery is unwelcome. It can take years before the fogeys give way for a new theory, and entire books have been written about this.

You made it this far? Now we get to the interpretation, where entirely different kinds of errors arise. This is especially true in the hands of amateurs like journalists.

One of these errors arises in application. Models ordinarily are limited in applicability to a range of circumstances. For instance, you can use the "ideal gas law" for gases, but not for liquids (you'd think that's intuitive enough, but I've corrected alleged engineers who thought otherwise). Even that law isn't good for all gases under all circumstances. And beware of extrapolations.

Another type of application error which is depressingly common is overgeneralizing. I don't know how many times people have told me seriously that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity shows that "everything's relative", morality and all. Or they start with microevolutionary changes in, say, the distribution of colors of some moths as proof that all life on earth came from some primordial protein molecules coming together by chance - maybe they did, but you'll need more and better evidence than that.

One of the worst interpretation errors is to confuse the model for the phenomenon. Nature doesn't obey our scientific "laws" - it does what it does . We write our "laws" to accomodate what we observe, subject to the limitations of our observations, our mensuration, and our capabilities for mathematical reasoning. Any conflict between what nature does and what scientists predict is always the scientist's fault. And we can't ever be sure but that tomorrow something new might come along and force us to revisit it all.

Despite it all, science produces results which we engineers use to make life better for all of us.

But science does not give us Truth. To that it will remain forever blind.

Packaged cogeneration

< needle>By the grace of God< /needle> Kathy Kinsley has led me to this item about a company that is building rooftop power plants on commercial buildings.

The article doesn't give a lot of detail, but it appears that they are doing something called cogeneration. With cogeneration, you generate electric power, but you also use some of the waste heat from the prime movers (usually gas turbines) for heating rather than rejecting it to a heat sink like a river, lake or atmospheric cooling tower. The result is improved thermal efficiency - more delivered power per unit of gas consumed.

There are other benefits also. There is more diversity of supply for electric power. Capital, operation and maintenance costs can be reduced with standardized designs and training. And as an engineer with a strong IT background, I like technologies that leverage both - such installations require sophisticated control systems.

There is a downside, however. One nice thing about remote powerplants is that any pollution is deposited far from the point of consumption. And the real cost of pollution is a strong function of where it is deposited. I'm not sure places like LA need any more heat or exhaust gases around - other locales such as Ontario may be far better.

The prime movers, which provide the heat and drive the generators, run on natural gas. Presumably any cost savings would result in part by buying natural gas in long-term contracts. I have to wonder if the existing gas distribution infrastructure can handle large-scale application of this. This could require major capital investment in places that are hostile to such development.

Also, although absorption chillers can use waste heat to provide cooling for air conditioning, it's difficult to balance the power and cooling demands. The difference presumably would be made up by buying more power from other utilities. The result will be a system that reduces the base load for power without doing much to reduce the maximum loads. And it's the costs at the maximum loads that cause the grief.

So I'm not sure we'll ever see really wide application of this in places like California, where the initial sites are. Ontario may be different. It will be interesting to watch.

Heroine for the day

You've probably already seen this on Instapundit, but it's worth republishing. Anyway, a Jordanian woman kicked three creeps' butts in front of a bunch of witnesses. Heh heh.

Attention sisters

Researchers trying to find environmental causes of breast cancer--diet, exercise, exposure to chemicals or other factors--will start recruiting 50,000 sisters on Saturday for study.

The government-funded teams will start in Florida, at a fund-raising event in Tampa called the "Race for the Cure."

They hope to sign up 50,000 women nationally, aged 35 to 74, whose sisters have been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Sisters of women with breast cancer have up to twice the breast cancer risk of other women. A few genetic mutations are associated with breast cancer risk, but they account for fewer than 10% of cases.

Much more here.

Stem cell misreporting

Gray Davis has signed a bill to allow embryonic stem cell research in California.

The misreporting is here: "Stem cells, which are found in human embryos, umbilical cords and placentas, can divide and become any kind of cell in the body. " Stem cells are also found in adults.

Why is this important? Because some people want to represent embryonic stem cell research as the only game in town. It does offer advantages for some purposes, but the use of adult stem cells is more advantageous for other purposes.

What has he been smoking?

Rod Blagojevich is a representative from IllinoisChicago, representing disgraced fellow Democrat Dan Rostenkowski's old district.

Now he's running for governor. We have yet to see if he's crooked enough - I think the last two Democrats who governed Illinois wound up in prison like Rosty.

Someone asked him if he had smoked pot, and this is what he said

"I did it twice, and I'm a nonsmoker," Blagojevich said at a Statehouse news conference. "I don't like it; I run. So I don't know if I inhaled or not."

Musta been some good stuff.

Big deal if he did some pot. Good grief, anybody who went to a rock concert in the 70's or 80's did whether they liked it or not - closed venues were like walk-in bongs.

But does he have to insult our intelligence by saying he doesn't know if he inhaled or not?

You deserve better

...so check out The Misanthropyst.

He has some good ideas, but it'll be a cold day when they implement this one.

The bottom line

Don't miss Toren Smith's Ye Olde Quote Corner, especially this one.

Sexist...

Abuse?

I'm gonna have to learn to shut off the TV. I just saw the videotape of the event that led to the hunt for Madelyne Gorman Toogood for child abuse.

Maybe you've seen it - she's leaving a Kohl's department store and puts her 4 year old girl in the back of the vehicle, and from a camera some distance away we see some rapid movements which could be construed as a mother beating her child violently. I understand that the whole thing lasts about 55 seconds.

Nobody is in favor of child abuse. But we saw abuse of The Children™ under the previous administration, and there appears to be some here too.

How? Well, we don't know exactly what happened to the child. We do know that when the mother turned herself in (several days later) the child had no cuts or bruises. We know the child was taken away from her mother and the rest of her family, which IMO is at least as traumatic as anything that happened with bare hands in 55 seconds in the car.

I've seen worse, but I'm not a child abuse professional, so I'll withhold judgment of that. What gets under my skin is this:

Toogood's sister, 31-year-old Margaret Daley, who authorities say was with her at the store, was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor count of failure to report child abuse. Prosecutors later added a charge of assisting a criminal. Daley was released Friday after posting $2,150 bond.

Got that? Now you have to turn in your relatives on suspicion of such events, or get busted yourself. I haven't heard of anything like that even in the drug wars.

Pavlik Morozov would be proud.

September 22 is Bilbo Baggins' birthday

It's also the day he set off to Rivendell ahead of the Black Riders, leaving the ring with Frodo.

Admit it, you wanted to know.

96% of all international terrorists fail to eat a nutritious breakfast

For that and many more, look here.

Anti religious nuts part 2

This started as a reply to a comment made by Robert Spiers on this item. It exceeded the 2500 word YACCS limit, so here it goes.

Religion is based on faith, meaning it is based on mystical visions visible and knowable only to the one who has the visions.

You make it sound like one's religion is determined by what he smokes or what kind of mushrooms he eats.

If religious people have had such visions, so what?

Communism and Fascism are, like religions, based on fictions called "the people" or "die Volk".

You have yet to demonstrate that religions are based on fictions.

Objectivism is based on perception and reason

Look, I like Ayn Rand - anybody who writes books with titles like "The Virtue of Selfishness" can't be all bad, and "Atlas Shrugged" influenced me more than any other book I've read.

But you're leaving something out. Objectivism is based on faith in perception and reason.

It doesn't take much perception to see that you can't perceive everything. And it doesn't take much reasoning to show that reason is ultimately based on some assumptions that cannot be proven within reason's framework.

It is not faith that says free markets work. That statement is based on perception and reason.

And faith. You have to believe that human nature and economic circumstances are such that it works. Fortunately I know of no exceptions.

It is not faith that says religion and other collective delusions kill. That statement is based on history.

You haven't demonstrated that religion is a "collective delusion". This must be an article of faith.

Meanwhile, what was the faith of the Mongols? The Huns? The Cold War Russians? The Red Chinese? The Nazis? Pol Pot?

And who attacked first in the Crusades?

Religion is a problem only when it is harnessed by the state, such as in the Spanish Inquisition. Ferdinand and Isabella, the two who had just united Aragon and Castile to make modern Spain and bankrolled Columbus, wanted money. They resorted to the age-old expedient of screwing Jews out of their property. Ha! - some of the Jews converted to Catholicism. But F and I still wanted their property, so they sent for Grand Inquisitors from the Vatican to pronounce them heretics. Then the state could kill them under their heresy laws and take their property anyway.

It's the state power that's the problem. Keep churches separated from the state and then it's clear what is to blame. That's the whole problem with Islam - state leaders can't be trusted with that kind of power over people's lives.

And it is only faith that says that "God" or "the people" exist at all.

I'm with you on the God part - I haven't had one of those visions you're talking about, and furthermore nothing that I know of in the Bible promises me one. I can't speak for other religions.

This reminds me of a story I heard once. State cops came by a house to warn the resident that a flood was rising and he had to leave, but the resident said "no, the Lord will provide". Later some officials came by in a rowboat to rescue him, but he said "no, the Lord will provide". The waters kept rising, forcing the man to get on the roof of his house. A helicopter came by to rescue him and he said "no, the Lord will provide". Then he was washed away and drowned.

Outraged, he confronted St. Peter, who told him "We sent the cops, a rowboat and a helicopter - what more did you want?" If you're expecting your own personal burning bush, maybe you're just too much trouble.

Several of Kurt Vonnegut's books include improbable religions, such as the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped (followers were always snapping their heads around looking for him) and the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent (I'm working from memory, so cut me some slack). Anyway, the latter group said that there was a God, but it was preposterous to think that He would care about what happened to something so trivial as a human being. Hmm.

The fictions of Heaven and angels, just to name a couple of examples, are so transparent that one can only accept them as a guide to action if one closes one's eyes, falls one's knees and inhales incense. Which is exactly why religions encourage such behavior.

But the arrogance of such a statement is here for all to see. Sheesh. I'm no expert, but I don't recall any of that stuff in Sunday school (although they might have given us some Kool-Aid). And that's the last time I was a regular churchgoer.

Until we can see a God or until our reason otherwise tells us he must exist, he does not. And that statement is NOT based on faith.

Yes it is. You are implicitly claiming that everything that exists can be perceived or deduced. We must be creating the universe as we go then, because germs have thus existed for only the last couple of centuries, and quarks for less time yet.

If I told you that germs didn't exist because I can't see them, you'd rightly think of me as deranged. Has it occurred to you that perhaps the reason why you can't perceive any deities that might exist lies not in them, but in your capacity to perceive and reason?

Old jokes

This past week some of us were talking around the water cooler and sci-fi came up. Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" came up, especially Mike the computer.

Mike was pretty smart, but he had a hard time with jokes. This was a problem because Mike was a joker. Humans had to explain to him that some jokes were funny once, and others could be funny repeatedly. And to this day I haven't heard of any computers that were successful in generating non-formulaic funny material on demand. So work on your jokes folks - comedians may be the last people on the planet that aren't displaced by computers and robots.

Humor certainly doesn't age well. Shakespeare has some great lines, but you have to read a dozen footnotes or be familiar with ancient cultures to appreciate them. Likewise for Chaucer, Boccaccio and innumerable others. I really don't want to work that hard.

Even old joke books can be mystifying. The oldest one I've heard of is Joe Miller's Jests, published in 1739. Here's one killer from the collection:

A Westminster Justice taking Coach in the City, and being set down at Young Man's Coffee-house, Charing-Cross, the Driver demanded Eighteen-Pence as his Fare; the Justice asked him, if he would swear that the Ground came to the Money; the Man said, he would take his Oath on't. The Justice replyed, Friend, I am a Magistrate, and pulling a Book out of his Pocket, administer'd the Oath, and then gave the Fellow Six-pence, saying, he must reserve the Shilling to himself for the Affidavit.

Alright, are you composed yet?

There were idiotarians around before they were so named, and their recent "chickenhawk" slur isn't anything terribly original. It reminds me of a joke popular with Democrats around 1988 when Bush 41 and Dan Quayle were running against a nonentity named Dukakis (who desperately needed to get out of Massachusetts before the impact of his policies set in) and future Clintonoid Lloyd Bentsen. When Dem sympathizers weren't accusing Bush of strafing lifeboats in the Pacific Ocean, they were giving Dan Quayle lip about being in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. (This was before it became convenient for them to act outraged whenever anyone questioned Bill Clinton's dishonest behavior regarding military service). Anyway, the joke was "What do you get when you cross a hawk with a chicken?". "A Quayle".

(You remember Dan Quayle, don't you? He was accused of being stupid by people who later supported Al Gore, who couldn't cut it in divinity school during the Vietnam War. And he didn't have a brother with a history of substance abuse and drowned women, so he was 'no Jack Kennedy').

I don't hear so much from them nowadays, but for a long time there has been a charity called the United Negro College Fund. Anyway, back around the early 80s accidents affected black entertainers Michael Jackson and Peoria, Illinois native Richard Pryor. Jackson's hair caught on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial, and Pryor was badly burned while free-basing some cocaine. About then I heard a joke that the two of them were starting a charity - the "Ignited Negro College Fund".

That's all I can think of for right now. Well, I edited out two that concerned a mass murderer - I have some taste.

When the cheering stops

Bob Hayes died this past week. He's still the only athlete who had an Olympic gold medal and a Super Bowl ring. What a shame he couldn't keep his hands off booze and drugs. Link via Oceanguy.

Anyway, the Hayes thing made me think of several others who were heroes for a while, but ended up in obscurity or worse.

It would have been easy to miss the tragic death of Rod Milburn in 1997. He won a gold medal in the 110m hurdles in the 1972 Olympics.

We'll never really know how good Sammy Drummer could have been with the right guidance. He was a hoops legend in Muncie, IN, a basketball-crazy town in a basketball-crazy state. He went on to play for Austin Peay and Georgia Tech, but somehow he never made the pros. Before he was done he was sweeping the gym back in Muncie when he was killed at age 38 in a crack deal gone bad.

At least Sammy got to play in college - then there's Ben Wilson of Simeon High School in Chicago:

As a junior he led Chicago's Simeon High School to the Illinois State Championship. In the summer of '84, he was selected as the top player at the ABCD Camp in Princeton, NJ., (back when it was known as "Nike/ABCD," before Sonny Vacarro took the camp over to adidas). Wilson finished the summer as the highest rated player, and entered his senior year regarded by most as the top high school senior in the country. Just a few days before the first game of his senior year, Ben Wilson was shot, less than a block from his high school campus. He died in a Chicago hospital less than a day later.

Wilson had committed to the University of Illinois, and so far Nick Anderson and three other Illini players from Simeon have worn #25 in his honor.

I can't stop it here, that's too depressing. One more.

Bob Love played pro basketball with the Bulls, and was their alltime high scorer until eclipsed by a guy named Jordan. Love had always had a stutter, and after an injury ended his basketball career he went downhill to the point of being a busboy. Then a manager took interest in him, got help for his speech problems, and at last notice he was back with the Bulls as Directory of Community Relations.

Charles Austin channels Betsy Ross

...right here.

Anti religious nuts

I used to give religious people a hard time, generally good-naturedly. One woman in particular described the results as "vain babblings". I can't say I was charmed at the time, but she was right.

Claudia Winkler has written an excellent Weekly Standard article here. It appears that Stephen Pinker and Simon Schama have the same problem I grew out of.

You'd think that by the time someone had achieved Pinker's stature you'd be able to draw meaningful distinctions. But he apparently thinks that because some nuts from a particularly poisonous variety of Islam carry out some outrageous atrocities, so all of religion must go.

Inevitably these people talk about reason, as if this were somehow incompatible with religion. It would help if they could do a better job of reasoning themselves. Then they'd realize that reason cannot justify itself, without the use of circular reasoning.

Therefore everything always starts from some core beliefs which must be accepted on faith. Which leaves the most militant evolution uber alles ranter standing on a platform no more solid than that of the religious people he ridicules.

Personally, I'm an agnostic. I find the atheists to be at least as clueless and asinine as they claim religious people are. As for the religious, good luck picking the right door.

But IMO most of those doors lead ultimately to the same place. I'm speaking in worldly terms - mostly it's about getting along with people. It's not asking so much to say "thou shalt not commit murder", or "thou shalt not steal", and as far as I'm aware these are fairly universal.

These ideas are awfully inconvenient for those of the religion that dares not speak its name, the secularists. They want to redistribute your property, abort your children, and euthanize your aged to make their idea of heaven on earth. And we've seen what these heavens look like repeatedly by now.

If the last Wahhabist died tomorrow I wouldn't shed a tear. But given a choice between putting up with them or those who would get rid of religion altogether, I'll take my chances with the Wahhabis.

Yak Pizza to Go

While researching the item below I stumbled upon this book. I haven't read it myself, but it sounds interesting. The author calls himself a "professional vagabond", and spends his time exploring and writing about areas like Vietnam, the Galapagos, Nepal, Madagascar and the Middle East. Here's what Amazon has to say.

African pizza

Some occupations turn out to be more multicultural than others. Working in nuclear power exposed me to people from about every corner of India, and nowadays in IT I run into people from about anywhere you can name. At the moment I have a Turk in the next cube, a Hindu across the aisle, a Jordanian a few cubes down, an Iranian a row over, and by the time you make it out of the building you've run into someone from about everybody else.

Many of them know by now that I'm fairly shameless about introducing myself if necessary, asking where they're from, and maybe even debriefing them about world news. Nobody has screamed yet, but it doesn't always go well.

Today someone had ordered a bunch of pizza for a meeting and the surplus was sitting in a common area. Several people were there, including a Tanzanian woman I know with her Chinese and Filipino-Chinese buddies. Instantly, I had to know - what do they put on pizzas in Africa?

Several people heard me ask this question, and some made noises like it was the dumbest thing they've ever heard. My quarry was amused though, and allowed as to how they didn't have much pizza over there - it was still "Italian food". Ouch - if that's not cultural deprivation, what is?

As for the ones who laughed out loud at the question, well, somebody finally Googled for 'tanzania pizza', and by Jove you find a decent list back. From here we learn that "Zanzibar pizza is the local specialty. These are small dough discs cooked quickly on brazier with onions, egg and chillis added. Totally unlike an Italian pizza, it makes a delicious and different treat. " (They also tell us that local ice cream is flavored with ginger, cloves, and lemon grass. No wonder obesity isn't much of a problem there...)

So that's not a pizza to you? Well, call Debonair's Pizza in Tanzania, and also in Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Ivory Coast and in it's home in South Africa. (Limited delivery area.)

Go ahead - find that on Instapundit...

Busted

Did Buzz Aldrin really punch the individual who said that men never set foot on the Moon?

We'll see if Santa Claus brings him anything this year.

Worst movie of all time?

I'm not exactly a movie buff, but I have fun with the Internet Movie DataBase (now a part of Amazon.com).

A sane person could use it to look for good movies, credits, showtimes, etc. But how can you appreciate what is good without seeing the bad? So I set out to find the worst movies ever, starting with the worst one I could think of.

And that would be "Oversexed Rug-Suckers from Mars". IMDB rates it at 4.6 out of 10 stars. A reviewer says

Vacuum cleaners rape women, and one falls in love with a man. They spend time together, criminals are involved and the film ends with a chase with everyone on shopping trolleys using groceries as weapons. One good scene to look out for is the sequence where the man and his vacuum lover are reunited and run into each others arms over a bridge to the tune of romeo and juliet!

That seemed like an awfully high rating for such a highly awful movie, so I kept looking. How about "The Pom Pom Girls". Actually the movie had a couple of decent moments (and several indecent ones), but how good can a movie be when the leading man is Robert Carradine (who had yet to develop the acting chops we would see in "Revenge of the Nerds")?

IMDB provides links for writers, cast and crew, so I thought maybe these would lead me to worse. Here's Rainbeaux Smith - what else has she been in? "The Swinging Cheerleaders" - that sounds promising. Yes, a 3.2! One reviewer summarizes it with "Hey! We screwed the wrong team".

Then I remembered a movie I had seen at a drive-in around 1979 or so, called "Cemetery Girls". Believe it or not, IMDB lists three distinct movies that have had that title. Yes, here's one from 1979, aka "Vampire Hookers", "Cementary Girls", "Ladies of the Night", "Night of the Bloodsuckers", "Sensuous Vampires", "Twice Bitten". It got a rating of 1.8. Maybe that's why they had to keep changing the name.

Alright, that's low enough - even Joe Bob Briggs didn't rate the last three. But I'm open for suggestions if you think you can top that one.

Credits

If you should catch me at the movies, I'll be the last one to leave. I'm not interested in fighting the crowd, and I read the credits. All of them.

I don't know what most of those people do, but at least I know there are things like a key grip, best boy, etc. This is surely some of the most worthless stuff I know, but I can't help myself - I paid for it, doggone it. And sometimes you'll actually find some good jokes there.

What about TV commercials? No, we don't need to see the credits. But once in a while I get curious about who did what, and I'm not sure where to look. And we can't have that.

Right now there are two commercials in particular I'm curious about. This one is probably easy - who is the guy in the trench coat in the Sprint PCS commercials? (and after years of typecasting like this, will he ever get another job?)

The other one is more obscure. She was the checkout girl in an ad for some gum where they sent us to the "toothpaste aisle", with the short strawberry blonde hair and glasses. And she was a bank teller in an SUV ad, wanting the driver to take her with him.

Sometimes it's the song that bugs me. A few years ago Mitsubishi had a car ad with a song that stuck with me - eventually I found out it was "Ready to Go" by Republica.

Maybe I haven't tried hard enough, but it seems like there would be a systematic way to find out stuff like this. It would seem like marketers and ad agencies would have a way to collect feedback on this - certainly it means that they have caught someone's attention. Maybe they're still blushing at the uh, setback of the Cue Cat.

There goes another - now it's the theme for the trailer for "Monsters, Inc." It's a big-band song - I think it's called "Sing Sing Sing". Arggh!

All original content copyright © 2002 J. Bowen

Last call for breasts

Ah yes, one of my favorite topics. I've written of them at least twice before, so it's not as if I lacked inspiration. But now it's timely, because Susanna Cornett only has a couple more days before her Race for the Cure, and she asked for contributions. So I'm contributing this, in case any of you forgot about breasts.

I probably won't anytime soon. After all, if I don't watch my weight I'll have them myself. But even though men, especially pot smokers, can have them (a condition called gynecomastia), and can even get breast cancer, for some reason women's breasts get most of the attention.

Well, I know the reason, just don't ask me to articulate it. But I've known it for a long time - at least since I was about 5 or so. At the time a relative who drove a truck had parked it nearby, and he had a big Playboy gatefold posted on the back of his sleeper. My parents were looking for me all over (imagine that) and finally found me lying there staring transfixed at the recumbent beauty and the little white dog she was holding up in the air. And you know what - I keep getting Google hits for mentioning DeDe Lind and Sherry Jackson from a 1967 issue - I'll bet somebody out there can tell me who that centerfold was just from my description. Anyway, I can't tell you why I was looking so intently or so long, and I swear that was all I was doing.

Back in those days in Playboy breasts were pretty much the whole show, and what a show it was. This of course led to some really unnatural expectations, tempered somewhat by an occasional glimpse at a National Geographic. These breasts had no veins, stretch marks, scars, sags, pores, dark hairs, blemishes or other things that happen to real women. That was true of other parts of women too, but I had daily experience seeing that to temper expectations.

(Well, I never really got a good candid look at live plumbing until my early teens, thanks to some short shorts and a lack of chairs. Somehow it didn't seem as interesting - but for a coif and some stuff that sounded gross it wasn't that much different from a little girl's, and I had seen those) (and fashion seems to be to lose the coif) (and yes, there has to be a better word than "plumbing" - suggestions?) (Phyllis Levy would have some. If you listened to talk radio in Chicago on Sunday nights in the 1980's, you probably remember Phyllis Levy) (an entire paragraph of parenthetical remarks! Take that, English teachers - you and your breasts too).

So I've looked at breasts from both sides now, from flat to sag and still somehow it's breasts' illusions I recall. I really don't know breasts at all.

Well, I've learned a little. I've learned that there are some things you really can't improve upon (although I like Al Bundy's suggestion for a third breast in the back "for dancing"). Not that people don't try - there are some real butchers out there in the business of breast modifications. And even if they get the esthetics right, other things can happen. If the size of your breasts is a real problem, maybe there's something else you ought to replace instead.

Breast reduction OTOH can be a boon. I know one woman who was carrying a positively bovine rack, but now has had some relief (about 7 lbs worth). The results don't have to leave lots of scars either, unlike the case of the one woman on the documentary Susanna mentioned - the woman mentioned above had to point hers out. Don't take it for granted that insurance will pay though.

I hear that the next best thing to breast reduction is getting a mammogram - they have to mash down pretty hard to get a good shot. But if you do it early and often enough, maybe you can avoid the kind of breast reduction at least three relatives of mine had. A little here, a whole breast there, over years, until they finally died of cancer. And two of their daughters look like their clones...

So in addition to this literary (!?) contribution, I've chipped in toward Susanna's pledges. She has surpassed her original goal and revised it up to $1000 - let's put her over the top!

UPDATE: Last Page has a few words.

Phony issue

I don't expect people at the American Prospect to draw sound conclusions, but I didn't expect them to be this far off base. Of long-distance telephone service, Robert Kuttner writes:

The old regulated system had its problems, but it was reliable, simple, and you didn't have to resort to bargaining every time you tried to fathom your phone bill. Long-distance prices dropped at a rapid rate without competition thanks to technology and regulation.

At times we railed at Ma Bell, but she looks pretty good compared with some of her children.

Has this guy ever paid a phone bill himself? I remember all too well how high long distance rates used to be, and how high my phone bills ran because I've rarely managed to live close to family and friends. Nowadays I spend about a third as much for my wireless phone with free long distance and many other services than I used to pay for long distance alone. Part of that is due to technological advance, but LD rates didn't start falling until companies started bidding aggressively against one another, hoping they could slip it to you on another part of the bill. As it is, for bills of less than about $20 per month, it's hard for an LD telco to make any money.

Would regulation help? Sure - it would help bureaucrats and the phone companies. That's because of a well-known phenomenon known as regulatory capture. We'd still have to deal with huge companies, but the govt would be working on their interests.

"Where's Osama" indeed

If you hang around biology labs long enough, all that formaldehyde might start getting to you. You might even be tempted to post something like this:

Here is my proposal, and I hope some people will take me up on it. Everytime a member of Dubya's administration gets on TV, radio, or gives a speech about going to war in Iraq, someone should start chanting "Where's Osama", and keep it up until they get thrown out of the building. Every columnist in the country should write an op-ed every week, entitled "How close are we to capturing Osama?". NOTHING, with the exception of the very preservation of our country, should be more important than finding that bastard. To do any less is to insult the memory of everyone who died nearly a year ago.

Or agree with it.

For all I know OBL has bathed and shaved and is in a bar in Connecticut hitting on Ann Coulter (wasn't she dating a Middle Eastern guy for awhile?). I don't care. The idea was to make the terrorism stop, not to put someone's head on a pike. Gosh, I guess that means that World War II was a failure because we don't have Hitler stuffed and mounted at the Smithsonian.

Or does a lefty like Paul Orwin suddenly think that a "death penalty" can actually provide a deterrent?

If the Bush administration's conduct of the war is such that his detractors can come up with no worse than this, that's about as good a compliment as he can receive.

I tip my hat

...to Greg Hlatky for this rant on the individual who did as much as anyone non-Muslim to make us remember this day.

Not that Clinton

Clinton Power Station, near Clinton, IL, is the first in the state to hand out potassium iodide (KI) pills. These pills are designed to saturate the body with iodine, to prevent uptake of radioactive iodine that could be present in case of a very severe nuclear accident.

This initiative was taken by the state of Illinois. It might just be a coincidence that the Clinton plant is the one that is closest to Springfield, the capital. In fairness that certainly simplifies the logistics - the next closest plant, LaSalle County Station, is about twice as far from Springfield.

But I'm not interested in being fair. It's more fun to suggest that it's to protect their bureaucratic hides, and that they know which site in the state has had the most regulatory trouble.

The problems came about mostly because it was a very big project taken on by a very small utility, and neither the utility (then Illinois Power) nor the constructor (an ad-hoc assemblage called Baldwin Associates) had built a nuclear power plant before. Extreme financial and time pressure, inexperience, high interest rates, regulatory instability, quality assurance program problems, regulatory intervention, asinine court decisions and management that I'll call "dippy hell" have led to a wild ride, which led what was to be a 2 unit plant costing around $400M to become a one unit plant costing over 10 times as much.

But now the plant is in the very capable hands of Exelon Corporation, which runs several sites well and has very experienced management. And they might even build that second unit.

So I'll start sucking up now - some day I might be working for these guys.

Some telemarketers to observe 9/11

Believe it or not.

"You First - No More Pearl Harbors"

Maybe you've seen this Larry Miller piece before, but I don't care - read it anyway.

Indifference in sexism in blogging.

Last Page doesn't care about this sexism in blogging issue - don't let those 9 links fool you.

And Media Minded butts in with this. Your move, Dawn.

UPDATE: Dawn made her move, with a picture more consistent with the name of her site. I like the old ones better.

Sexism in blogging II

Just for the record I'll address some things posted on Meryl Yourish's blog about my post immediately below.

You'll notice 4 things I asked if she could agree with. I didn't offer any evidence - I figured that they weren't particularly controversial, so I didn't lay everything out as if I were deriving a mathematical proof. But Ms. Yourish took issue with all 4.

I'll plead guilty to sloppiness on 1 and 2, where I should have said political blogs instead of blogs in general. With that qualification I'll stand behind 1 and 2.

An act of faith? Not really. References like this one show the results of investigations showing that men simply show more knowledge of politics than women. This I attribute to interests rather than innate abilities, and it fits most of the women I know.

As originally written 1) is questionable, but based on the reference above I'll stand by it as amended to refer to "political" blogs.

Ms. Yourish says that more women than men are online now as if this addresses 1). But that does not mean that women are reading more blogs than men are. My "sexist" guess is that if her assertion is true, those women are spending most of their time shopping, chatting or swapping email rather than reading or writing blogs. That too is consistent with the behavior of most of the women I know, who don't even suspect the existence of weblogs.

2) also needs the amendment limiting it to political blogs. Check the blogroll to the left - if Ms. Yourish will point out neglected predominantly political female bloggers to whom I'm not already linked and who are politically similar to the ones there now, I'll be happy to check them out. I'm already linked to most of the blogs she has mentioned, and in most cases I have been for months (including, more recently, Ms.Yourish herself). If I'm neglecting any group, it's men - there's just so many good ones I won't even claim to have heard of them all.

3) and 4)? Gimme a break. If statements as mild as "Each sex tends to write about things of interest to their own sex." and "Each sex tends to read about things of interest to their own sex." are found controversial, we have little if any common ground.

What was Ann Coulter doing in there? Ms. Yourish was going off on her a while back, so the devil in me couldn't be denied. I thought Ms. Yourish might admire Ms. Coulter's success in a field dominated by men.

How many of various bloggers' audiences are female? Beats me. If Ms. Yourish know of a way to sex readers via their IP addresses I know some marketers she can sell it to. My best tool for evaluating this distribution is my commenting facility, where I'd say it's at least 3 to 1 in favor of women by distinct names (assuming I know which are which). In total post count it's far more lopsidedly male. That's grossly inadequate as a measure of the sex distribution of traffic, but Ms. Yourish doesn't support even that, so I'd be interested in knowing how she knows the true composition of her audience if in fact she does.

Now, the Diane E. example, comparing her knowledge to that of Steven Den Beste on Middle Eastern issues. OK, suppose Ms. Yourish is right. Diane E. isn't as prolific as SDB. She doesn't cover as many topics. The non-Middle East topics she covers are less interesting to men than are those that SDB covers. And she hasn't been around as long to get the exposure he's had. So why would a reasonable person declare them as somehow equivalent with respect to worthiness for traffic in general?

Then there's this: "Are you trying to say that women don't care about politics? Technology? Sports? That only men are interested in reading warblogs?" No, of course not, and spare me the straw men. I wonder if Ms. Yourish really believes that all of those topics are of equal interest to both men and women - if so, the reference above might help. Again, my experience is consistent with its findings.

Lest my shortcomings as a writer should obscure it, the only emotion that ought to be showing in any of the above is disappointment.

Sexism in blogging?

Meryl Yourish seems to think that there is sexism in blogging. Well, let's quote her:

Take a look at the blogrolls on Scripting News or Doc's place, or even Diane E. and Megan McArdle, and you'll find few women-written weblogs. Again, I'm not saying this is deliberate. But it is a striking fact. It's not just the men. Even women have a low female-to-male blogroll ratio.

So what's to be done about it? That, too, is a tough one. I believe that bloggers would be better off checking a few of the female pundits on a more regular basis

Why should anything be done about it at all? Why is this a problem?

Before I start, let's see if we can agree on a few fundamental things. 1) More males than females read blogs 2) More males than females write blogs 3) Each sex tends to write about things of interest to their own sex. 4) Each sex tends to read about things of interest to their own sex. Anything controversial so far?

From the above it's easy to conclude that it's 100% natural that men would have most of the traffic, and might possibly be tempted to link to men more often because of their *content*. There's nothing sinister about that.

Women as a group, in my experience, tend to write more "diary-style" blogs. You need continuity to appreciate them. That makes them comparatively high-maintenance, like a soap opera - you either tune in everyday or have to be brought up-to-date each time.

Certainly all women aren't like that - among many others, Susanna Cornett and Jane Galt are two major exceptions. Not coincidentally, they are two of my most regular stops.

Meryl's isn't like that either. But I'm there less often because her politics are to the left of mine, and I usually don't go looking for trouble. Meryl has been permalinked here for a while, as has Dawn Olsen who has also written on the topic, and many others.

I could be wrong here, but Dawn seems irritated because she's not linked by Glenn Reynolds or some others. About that, well, Glenn really can't win on this one. I don't remember the particulars, but I know he's been criticized for linking to some women for reasons which supposedly were other than merit. He's interested in certain things, and he reads and links to those, that's all, and doesn't owe anybody any apologies for that.

And Dawn surely wouldn't have forgotten a bunch of crap Steven Den Beste caught for the unspeakable crime of noting a few good looking young women and posting pictures on his blog. Her hubby Eric pounced all over SDB, as did others. There's a huge double standard here, and God help us if he posted a picture of his ass on his blog, jean-clad or otherwise. There are some blogs which I assume are by men that might get by with something like that (maybe wKenshow), but they're exceptional.

With Dawn's blog being like it is with graphics and content, men who read it regularly are put in the position of men who say they read Playboy for the articles - it may be true, but it's a tough sell. Especially at work where Glenn Reynolds believes most of his hits come from.

Traffic is cool to the extent that there is a certain amount of validation, but really - having any traffic at all on something as vast as the web is exceptional. For a site that is sociable like Dawn's, more traffic would be likely to be what I have heard called "pissing in the soup" - you're more likely to pick up creeps like the one she writes of here. (Incidentally, is anyone making any assumptions about the sex of the creep?).

Meryl doesn't have any commenting facility that I can tell, so I'll ask her a few questions here: why is the sex of a blogger important? Are you saying a man can't write like a woman, or vice versa? You don't seem to like Ann Coulter - don't you like the idea that a woman can be as obnoxious as any man? Are you contending that there are no meaningful differences in the sexes that might be relevant to the choice of topics, the tone, the volume, and the overall success (whatever that is) of a blog?

UPDATE: Godless Capitalist of Gene Expression weighs in.

UPDATE 2: Meryl has responded to a number of posters. Somehow I'm portrayed as "really mad". I'll admit to asking fairly pointed questions and to having a certain lack of patience with -ism claims nowadays, but "really mad?"

Triumphs of the First Amendment

I Did Your Mother at the University of Connecticut.

For Hawkgirl

The Portadown News

NLP - for real?

I've had my killer SUV almost long enough to pay it off, and it shows in the way I get into it. In a fluid motion the door is open, I'm in the seat, my key is instantly in the ignition and off we go.

As long as I don't look at the ignition switch that is. It seems odd that looking at the target for my ignition key would make things worse, but it does. I rarely miss. Of all the physical skills to have, this is mine - whoopee.

Alright, I've been in and out of the thing probably a couple of thousand times now, so I have had practice. But how much practice does it take to acquire "muscle memory"? How much should it take? How can we make it faster?

Nowadays I find myself learning American style tango. Slowly. All that attitude, the picture lines, etc - I'm more of a plow horse than a show horse. Maybe my expectations are out of whack, but I seem to be learning it very slowly.

Could the answer lie in phobias?

Some years ago I read a number of books on neuro-linguistic programming. Practitioners study the way people react to external stimuli, and phobias are particularly interesting examples. They can be thought of as the result of effortless, very thorough yet instant visceral learning. Which suggests that learning about how phobias are created and overcome can teach us a lot about learning in general - why can't all learning be done so rapidly and thoroughly? The applications to training, sales, politics and other human interactions are boundless.

Phobias are just one thing that NLP practitioners study. They also study other clues that trigger behaviors, and seek ways to create these triggers and attach reactions to them. I'm not doing it justice by any measure, and its backers have high hopes for it, publishing books with titles like "Using Your Brain - For a Change".

I've never run into anyone who's heard of this, much less who had an opinion about whether it was for real or just so much overpromoted pseudoscience. Any opinions out there?

I'll teach her...

The price of leaving a comment on this site can be severe, as Beth knows now that I've ransacked her website. Well, it wouldn't have been so bad if she had permalinks that I could find.

Anyway, my terminally geeky favorite is the pi trainer (not to be confused with a Baseball Hall of Fame third baseman), from which I found the e-trainer. But now I also know more about "the swollen treasure of her femininity", the heretofore-unappreciated cuteness of wet rats, the aesthetics of long toes, and newt care.

Condoms urged for Male Prisoners

Are condoms a cure for cancer? It can't hurt to try them - they seem to be the answer to so many other problems. Now we should distribute them in prisons.

Yep, a bunch of guys who not only broke the law but managed to get caught and imprisoned for it will suddenly become responsible citizens when it comes to prison sex. Although the article does confide that

The survey found that many of the newly admitted inmates admitted to "high-risk behaviors," such as not using condoms and having anonymous sex with a variety of partners.

Imagine that!

Prisons must not be too awfully restricted if we can't even keep the prisoners from having sex with each other consensually or otherwise. Here as always, abstinence beats condoms. Yet somehow if we took strong measures to prevent prisoner sex, I suspect that the folks who are pushing condoms for prisoners would take issue.

Pebble bed modular reactors

Alright, it's your turn to be an engineer. Suppose you created a toaster, then found out that in service the heating elements burned out. What would you do?

Back to the drawing board. Hmm, what if we put in some kind of heat sensing device and automatically turned on a powerful fan when the heat got too high?

Well, fans are expensive. We could just put in a simple thermostat and set it to short out the toaster if the heat got too high, and depend on the house wiring's fuses or breakers to protect us.

If you chose either of the above, it's back to engineering school with you - both of those ideas really stink out loud. In fact, as millions of people worldwide can tell you, it's possible to design a toaster that will be almost idiotproof day in and day out for years without burning out or otherwise failing electrically, and the whole device can be had for under $10. And if you want to design something that will burn out at a specified current level or higher, those can be had even cheaper - they're called "fuses".

We can design this way because we can calculate the heat generation rates, the rate of heat transfer out of the heating elements, and the temperature at which the heating elements will fail. In essence, the heat generated will equal the heat discharged at some temperature T, and if T is less than the temperature that will significantly impair the performance and life of the heating elements you have a workable product.

It seems pretty obvious that you'd want to design a heating device such that it couldn't destroy itself by overheating if that was at all possible. You might think that that was especially important in something like, say, a nuclear reactor.

It is. But unfortunately there was a big push to get nuclear reactors working in the early days, and the first designs they got to work didn't meet that criterion - they were capable of getting hotter than what they could physically withstand. Lots of training, auxiliaries, testing and emergency planning are used to make up for this design characteristic. And really, these reactors were designed for submarines - all the cooling water you could ask for was right there outside the hull.

But then there was a big push for land-based reactors back in the 1950's, so submarine reactors were scaled up in size to make US commercial nuclear power reactors. The inherent overheating capability problem remained.

Now there's no arguing with experience. The engineered safety features and other measures taken by US commercial nuclear power plants have been very successful and safe by any reasonable standard (don't compare them to Russian designs like the VVERs or the RBMKs - the latter made Chernobyl famous and have far worse design issues than the ones discussed here).

But they make for a more expensive and ultimately less reliable plant than what could be realized with fuel that can't destroy itself or its containment by overheating. And these plant designs exist.

This is a technical reference on the plants.

Of course there are organizations that bitch about nuclear power plants for a living, such as NIRS. This is what they have to say about the design. This post is already long, so I'll Fisk the NIRS link later.

An answer to corruption?

Don Park writes of corruption in Korea and an innovative technological approach to combating it.

Via Scripting News.

Greenpeace opposed to trees?

From Tim Blair

Born gay?

As I mentioned below, we managed to get some of the family together for Labor Day weekend.

If you're a relative, you'd better show up to these things or else we'll talk about you. This time it was mostly about a relative I haven't seen in years. I don't know how to contact him even if I had a mind to, and likewise he hasn't really stayed in touch with anybody to my knowledge. The last I heard was from his mother, and she's dead.

If I had been told that one of us was gay and I had to pick the one, he would have been it, and in fact he is. Apparently he's in Key West with the same partner he's had for a long time, running a tourism-based firm.

That he's gay is his business. It wasn't what his parents had in mind, but I don't know that anybody else in the family has ever given him any flak about it. But it led to a conversation in which one relative claimed that you're born gay.

Hmm. This seems to be almost totally behavioral to me. AFAIK there's no controlling what turns you on, but you can control what you do about it.

Thought experiment time. You're blindfolded and subjected to, uh, mechanical stimulation. Nature takes its course. Then the blindfold is taken off and you see that the agent was of a sex other than your preference. Do you suddenly switch teams or turn bi?

Or maybe it's something visual. Eros raises his ugly head, then you realize it's someone who's off limits like a relative or someone underaged (and I'll bet you 20 years you can't always tell). Can you keep playing by society's rules, or must we change the rules for you?

I find it interesting that many societies have such strictures regarding gays. Is it reasonable to ask people to abstain from exercising certain practices or to keep their hands off certain people? Can such rules be so integral to the success of a society that failure to enforce them will lead to that society's destruction?

Kid stuff

I managed to get together with some relatives this past weekend, including an assortment of rugrats and preteens before whom civilization cowers.

Well, the kids weren't bad, but they certainly were spirited and loud and ornery. And they're learning too fast, particularly the stuff they needn't. (If we could only convince kids that there's something illicit about math and science. Maybe we could inscribe multiplication tables on the bathroom walls or something).

For instance, the oldest was a girl of about 10. She's getting big to ride on my shoulders, but I carried her around for awhile. Then my neck got tired and I put her back down and she told me "that wasn't long enough!". I mumbled something to one of the adults about how a woman shouldn't ever tell a man that, har har. The kid made it clear that she caught the allusion and pronounced me a "perv" or something like that. Well, at least she thought it was off color.

I usually bring something for the kids in hopes that they'll learn something besides stuff like the above. There were some age-appropriate quizzes among the booty, and the little squirts wanted to play. They did better than I had hoped. Hopefully the parents can help them with some of the projects that I don't have time to do with them.

The smallest was 6 months old, and has had her picture posted here before. She just laid there cooing, kicking her feet and getting passed around to everybody. She's not too easily intimidated, even though I kept telling her in baby talk how I was going to bite off her nose and suck out her brains. Hey, if you want something mushier, read Lileks.

Oh yeah, I saw the relative I mentioned a few posts ago about college funding. We got everything straightened out and she's back at the same school for her junior year (We finally got her father out of the way - what a jerk! Everyone but him should have a daughter so bright and beautiful). Many thanks to those of you who offered advice, especially the two of you to whom I wrote directly - that was an outrageous imposition, but I wanted to try something.

Enough - I leave you with Warm Fuzzies.

Another way to reform campaigns...

I've been thinking of proposing something like this for some time, but now someone has actually built a site to do it. Link courtesy of NRO.

E-laundry

IBM and USA Technologies said on Friday they are connecting 9,000 washing machines and dryers at U.S. colleges and universities to the Web in an effort to make doing laundry at school less of a hassle.

Roots of racism?

It appears that lady lions prefer males with darker manes.

Of course, nothing is innocent, you know - there must be a political dimension to this. Does this mean that lions are racist? And if it does, does it mean that females are responsible for causing racism?

Uh, no. But some of us seem to think that animals have a lot to teach us humans, and draw conclusions no less asinine than the above.

Four strikeouts in one inning

Who else but the Cubs?

Incidentally, I wonder if major league baseball attendance has been impacted by the strike threat?

Stem cell question

From here we get

The team of researchers from Keio University School of Medicine in Japan extracted stem cells from a 14 day-old rat fetus. The type of stem cells they extracted are called neural progenitor cells, which are genetically programmed to later develop into various kinds of nervous system cells.

I thought the point of getting stem cells from a fetus was that any such stem cell could form any other type of cell, ie, it wouldn't matter what kind of stem cell you got from a fetus. Otherwise you could use non-fetal stem cells instead, which were more specialized and highly developed at the cost of the flexibility.

Wireless networking available at Starbucks

Via Daniel Pink we have this story. It does require a membership with a particular wireless carrier, but the first 24 hours are free.

Borders, Barnes & Noble, are you listening?

Have a ball

It's too late for the Redneck Olympics, but you can still catch the Turkey Testicle Festival.

And you thought it was just me...

The point to remember is that Environmentalists aren't greens. They are more like watermelons. Green on the outside, but red on the inside. Just about any environmentalist issue, you can track down to being anti-business, or anti-capitalist.

For frustrated baseball fans...

The players really might strike again to advance the cause of proletarians everywhere. And if they do, all you fans who swore you'd never watch again are going to need a new sports fix. Leave it to NWA to guide you to the wonderful world of alternative sports.

How about donkey baseball? mud volleyball? Or for the ladies, jello wrestling (rated PG-work).

I saw something new on Saturday - Slamball. This loosely resembles basketball, but there are four trampolines flush with the court surface at the base of each basket. The result is that everybody can play far above the rim and fouls are spectacular. Just don't bother looking for a court near you.

Here in St. Louis we have "Demolition Ball". It's a trip - two teams in bumper cars catching and throwing a wiffle ball at a goal using a basketlike contraption. The cars are tricky to steer and drive at first, and don't go real fast, so you'd have to try hard to hurt yourself. It can be a lot of fun for a small group, and what can be wrong with a sport that you play sitting down?

Alas, the killjoys of the world are on the march. Animal rights groups are attacking Calaveras County for its frog jumping competitions, and some places have banned dwarf tossing. What's the world coming to?

And who needs baseball anyway? - pro football starts in a week. Go Bears, Chiefs, Colts and Rams!

Sponsor Susanna Cornett today

She'll be running in Manhattan on September 15 in the Race for the Cure for breast cancer.

Of course my engineering mind is constantly pursuing alternate approaches to problems, seeking to leverage knowledge by applying successful practices from other disciplines to new problem domains. So I was thinking...you must have seen these ads for various worldwide save-the-children charities. For donations, they'll send pictures, letters, progress reports, etc, as if your money were supporting a particular kid. Could there be a lesson here?

I'm just trying to help.

Thrills to come

I pledged elsewhere that I would put together some CBO and other figures to compare the budgets and economies of the last several Presidents and Congresses by Tuesday. That's in process, but my schedule has changed and it will probably take until Thursday. The waiting is torture, I know.

Radionuclides in Nature

This PDF has a lot of interesting information on radioactive substances found in nature. I dug it up while researching the previous item.

The most interesting single fact IMO is this "Sea water contains some 4 500 Mtons U". Next to that, Ted Turner's stash (described in the next item down) is trifling. Hmm....

There's also some interesting but highly technical info about radon gas.

In short, if you're trying to rid your life of radiation, you're living on the wrong planet.

Jane Fonda's ex-husband buys highly enriched uranium, sends it to Russians

Glenn Reynolds points us to this interesting article in the Guardian about Ted Turner's latest adventure. It seems that Turner has paid a good chunk of money to buy some enriched uranium from a scientific institute in Serbia to be shipped to the Russians. There it is "to be rendered unusable". (Thank God - the thought of Ted Turner with nuclear weapons is unnerving).

Assuming that Ted isn't really seeking revenge against AOL, the driving idea behind this is that it was "enough uranium to make more than two nuclear bombs", and he wants to deny it to terrorists.

"Stopping terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons boils down to one top priority: stopping them from getting nuclear bomb-making materials," Mr Turner said yesterday as it emerged that his Nuclear Threat Initiative had provided £3.3m to fund the operation.

Clamping down on access to the materials is an important factor, and the claims seem to check out. According to this, "About 50 kilograms of the material is in fresh or unirradiated fuel, and another ten kilograms is in only slightly irradiated fuel. Enrichment of the 60 kilograms of highly enriched uranium remains at 80 percent."

I don't know if you can build a bomb out of 80% enriched uranium or not - this says it takes 90%. So presumably the stuff would require further, very expensive refinement to be useful to terrorists.

Apparently Turner has the 50 kg quantity mentioned earlier, which is consistent with its packaging - "The rods were reportedly stored in their original crates and guarded by only lightly armed civilians." Why not take the rest? - probably because it has been irradiated and may be too hot to transport.

The fuel was transported by plane. I guess Greenpox didn't have time to protest.

Why give it to the Russians? Presumably because it was their uranium in the first place, and because they're probably more flexible in what they're willing to do with it.

Now we get to the really interesting part, where the stuff is to be rendered unusable. Nobody is saying how. Assuming that the Russians aren't going to use it for bombs, the sensible thing to do is to burn it up in reactors as originally intended. Then the consumed uranium is gone forever.

I wonder if Turner violated any federal laws in doing this?

UPDATE: This was in the WaPo on Friday and I missed it (again, via Glenn Reynolds). TT was working in collaboration with the US govt, so one hopes that what he was doing was totally lawful.

GR's nameless source says that 80% was the enrichment of the Hiroshima bomb, so presumably the material could be used as is to make bombs. However, then the quantities required for a bomb are different - according to this, the Hiroshima bomb used 60 kg of U-235, which at 80% concentration would be 75 kg of uranium. Either figure is more than was removed from Vinca.