Digital Blue

On one of my very infrequent trips to Toys R Us I spotted some products from a company called Digital Blue. They make high-tech toys, and they claim to be "the antidote to the video game".

They have a number of products. The one that caught my eye was a little movie camera that can make up to 4 minute long movies and download them to a PC with a USB port. It also provides some digital editing software.

Then I saw a problem. Somewhere out there a kid will propose something to his teacher for show and tell, and he'll say he's making digital blue movies with his parents.

Paranoia on the left

Right here. A choice excerpt: "Dick Cheney would have his grandmother tortured to death for a dime, and for a nickle, he'd do the job himself."

There are many, um, remarkable things about this item and the rest of the blog too. But what astounds me is just how effective these various conspiracy theorists think their enemies are. To this guy it's the Republicans, to the al-Qaeda types it's the Mossad, but either way these types attribute a strange combination of omniscience, omnipotence and incompetence to their enemies.

According to this guy, apparently the Republicans decided that the greatest threat to their govt hegemony was Paul Wellstone, and they just took care of business.

But it must be so: "People are always asking why the left is in such disarray, and why the leaders of the left are such buffoons. One reason is that any leaders who have any charisma and any tendency to lead in any sort of progressive direction are simply slaughtered by the right." This guy must live somewhere where there's socialized medicine, or else maybe he'd have a prescription to control this.

I guess the part that amazes me the most is the idea that Republicans are particularly effective. Hardly. IMO most of them are a bunch of wimps. When it comes to nasty street-fighting politics, they're not in the same league with the Dems, with their Terry McAuliffes, James Carvilles and innumerable others. We'll see plenty of examples between now and Election Day.

For Halloween...

I need a monster. So I stole the link to Mike the Headless Chicken from Dr. Weevil.

The text that accompanies the stolen link on Dr. Weevil's site offers further head related material.

Are you sick of pumpkin yet?

You aren't the only one.

Courtesy of none other than Last Page - accept no substitutes, even if her Weather Pixie is kind of slutty.

UPDATE: Alright, I'm changing the link to this. The old one didn't work for some reason, and this way you'll miss LP's not-suitable-for-work beefcake picture. (aside to LP - you can look, but they might not let a woman touch). At least she woke up the Unablogger, who serves the kind of cheesecake you probably can't have at work.

Hot air on climate change

David Appell is a science writer who maintains a blog called Quark Soup. He takes issue with Kim DuToit, Toren Smith and Robert Prather here about global warming.

The bloggers I mentioned are big boys and can take care of themselves. If they saw this post they probably have, but alas despite their permalinks to the left I haven't seen everything they have written. So I'll take a few whacks at this myself.

What got me were passages like this:

You can lead a skeptic to data, but you can't make them think.
Toren Smith repeats the flat-earther's mantra that "the whole global warming scenario scarcely counts as science and is based primarily on computer models that can't even accurately predict past climate, much less that of an unknown future."
Toren, Toren, Toren. Have you looked at the scientific studies? Have you read them? Have you read anything that doesn't agree with your ideology? As I just pointed out to Kim du Toit, many climate models have predicted past climates.

It is possible to disagree with someone without crap like this.

But let's get more substantial. OK, maybe many climate models have predicted past climates. That might be impressive until you realize that there is an infinite number of models that could do this in principle. So the existence of a number of them is not impressive in itself, and in fact makes me wonder why they can't decide among them.

Here's another item:

Let us continue our corrections of du Toit.
He rants , "I also need to see proof that human activity (eg. releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere) has had a more profound effect on climate change than have volcanic eruptions...."
OK.
The global warming effect of volcanoes is not close to that of man:

"Volcanoes contribute about 110 million tons of carbon dioxide per year while man's activities contribute about 10 billion tons per year," according to the Volcano Information Center operated by geologist Ronald Fischer at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

That's 1%, Kim.
However, what volcanoes do do is spew a lot of sulphur aerosols into the atmosphere, but that causes cooling , not warming.

Mr. DuToit said "climate change", not warming. Mr. Appell offered nothing to prove that man's impact is greater than that of volcanoes, and noted that volcanoes had impact on the climate. From this he concluded that "The global warming effect of volcanoes is not close to that of man". If he's right, he hasn't made his case in the post. I propose that he should do so before he resorts to such condescension.

He's not through. Before he gets around to referring to "climate change flat-earthers", he notes the following:

"Several coupled models are able to reproduce the major trend in surface air temperature, when driven by radiative forcing scenarios corresponding to the 20th century. However, in these studies only idealized scenarios of only sulphate radiative forcing have been used.

Many atmospheric models are able to simulate an increase of the African summer monsoon in response to insolation forcing for the Holocene but they all underestimate this increase if vegetation feedbacks are ignored."

Interesting. In both cases he's noting known flaws in the models, yet that's what he uses for his support.

Elsewhere he refers to the period from 1951-1998. I wonder why he chose that period. I will note that aboveground nuclear weapons tests were common in the earlier part of this period. These might have led to abnormal levels of particulates in the atmosphere (a miniature "nuclear winter"). This in turn would have caused the beginning of the period to be cooler than the later part entirely independently of other anthropomorphic influences. I don't know how strong that phenomenon was though, so, unlike Appell, I won't make any claims.

The problems involved with measuring and modeling the relevant parameters would make a long post in itself, but let's assume that these scientists, with their big grants from organizations that want budget increases, are immune from conflicts of interest and are in fact doing everything right. Alright, what would they have to measure or evaluate in the course of developing models?

Atmospheric temperatures. Atmospheric composition. Land temperatures. Ocean temperatures. CO₂ concentrations. Ice sheet/glacier coverage/volume. Depth of permafrost. Albedo (a measure of how much solar radiation is reflected back into space). Insolation (the power from the sun, which is not constant). Large fires, such as forest fires or Saddam's stunt of setting oil wells on fire in Kuwait after the Gulf War. Volcanic activity, both atmospheric and beneath the ocean. Non-anthropomorphic biological influences (cattle, termites, wetlands, forestation...). Economic activity (affects power consumption, thus coal/petroleum burning)...

That's just a few things off the top of my head. Some could be trivial, and I could be omitting major influences. The point is that the scientists who produce climate models are biting off a big chunk, and the pressure to produce results that will keep the grants coming is huge.

Now suppose they have data for all of the relevant phenomena above - now what? They have to model more than just the atmospheric temperature - they basically have to model all of the things I mentioned above too. Why? Because nothing happens in isolation. Heat up the atmosphere, heat up the ocean. Then the ocean absorbs more CO₂, which allegedly lowers the atmospheric heating effect and at least provides negative feedback. More water will evaporate into the atmosphere, lowering ocean temperatures, changing the transport properties of the atmosphere and increasing greenhouse effects. Plants will grow more, soaking up water and CO₂ and changing the transport properties of the land. I'm not convinced we even know all of the interactions and their significance, yet without them how can we model accurately?

Yet the scientists build the models anyway, based on data from a 50 year period which amounts to 0.000001% of the alleged 5 billion year life of the planet. They know full well that we have had a number of major non-anthropomorphic climate changes over that period that to date have not been modeled successfully.

Yet in their vanity and greed they attempt to do their science in the newspapers instead of in the labs, as Eric Lindholm notes here. (Appell doesn't like that post much either).

Enough for now. Let's see if Appell has choice words for me too.

Jimmy the Red

Thanks to John Weidner and Bob Ballard, I found this about our latest Nobel Peace Price winner, ex-president Jimmy Carter.

Would Carter work with the Soviets against the election of Ronald Reagan? IMO there's no doubt about it. He'd tell himself that he was working for world peace, which of course would be a higher goal to him than anything so trivial as national sovereignty. Jimmy knew best.

What would you think if it were shown that Saddam Hussein were giving money to Democrats to oppose the war? IMO bringing up that possibility is no more inflammatory than the recurring chant that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are pawns of the oil companies working against our national interests. The only question is whether Saddam is bright enough to try it - the Dems would take the money in a heartbeat and bury the bodies later.

Another thing I'd like to see investigated is whether French, Russians, Chinese or others are slipping money to the Dems. All do a lot of business with Iraq. It would be worth a lot for them to influence American policy against war, especially if Saddam owes them money. And it's not as if the Chinese don't have a relationship with the Dems.

I'm betting that this guy would have been a Democrat. All he had to do was deliberately weaken his defenses, put on a show of resistance against subsequent threats or attacks, surrender, and take the money and run.

Wireless power?

Well, it's a start. Now you can recharge your small gizmos without wires.

Stolen from Boing Boing

The Atkins Media Diet

Food for thought - just read it.

And scroll down a bit for the dog and cat haikus. Groan.

Attention wannabe hunters

You might want to bag an elephant or a tiger, but it's probably better if you start smaller. How about cats?

The news is telling me about a Feral Cat Initiative.

An alternative to the “trap and remove” method of dealing with the cat over-population problem is TNR (Trap, Neuter, Return). Entire feral colonies are humanely trapped, tested for feline leukemia, vaccinated for rabies, spayed/neutered and ear tipped to identify those altered. Socialized cats and kittens are put up for adoption while healthy feral cats are returned to live out their lives under the watchful eye of neighborhood caretakers. TNR is a non-lethal method of controlling cat population....TNR is making an impact. The Feral Cat Initiative has helped to significantly decrease the number of cats arriving at our shelter. Since the initiative began, more than 1000 cats have been treated, resulting in a 15% decline in euthanasia. Plus, participating neighborhoods have reported fewer problems with cat spraying, noise and number of kittens. Our program has been recognized by Alley Cat Allies, a national feral cat advocacy group.

I hope the feds aren't listening. If volunteers want to do something like this, they can have a ball (so to speak). But if it polls well...

With friends like this...

Glenn Reynolds posts this about reasons why the French and the Russians might be opposing us re Iraq. It's about oil all right - for our opponents.

Dr. Khidhir Hamza's book, "Saddam's Bombmaker", has a number of examples of how Europeans and others cozied up to Saddam for big money. My favorites were the French, in conjunction with the Osirak reactor that the Israelis took out in 1981. Here's a passage from page 130 of the paperback edition:

[Saddam] well knew, however, that we'd fought hard to put the reactor underground, where it would have been safer from attack. But the French would not agree. They were prepared to go along with our bomb deception only to the extend that they could plausibly deny it. And the only reason to put a nuclear reactor underground, considering the huge costs required, was to manufacture plutonium in secret and protect it from a military attack. The French weren't going to take the fall for that.

Another passage from page 129:

...the antiaircraft unit had been taking a dinner break at six every evening, shutting down its radar. Surely it wasn't a coincidence that the strike came at 6:25....The day before the strike, in fact, I'd been walking by the facility with a colleague and noticed a closed van parked next to the tunnel. When I asked what it was, he said it contained radiation detection equipment the French had just delivered. In the aftermath of the bombing, investigators reportedly found a guidance transmitter inside.

And you thought planned obsolescence was bad - these guys are the world's champion cynics.

Hamza doesn't have much good to say about the Russians either - from page 120:

To us, with a few exceptions, the Russians were a joke - badly trained, often drunk, sluggish at work, more interested in buying clothes and electronic goods unavailable in Moscow and sending them home than doing their assignments.

Gosh, do you suppose Susan Sarandon knows about this?

Not the Million Man March

My kind of guy:

H.K. Edgerton is a proud black Southerner who has no grievance with the Confederate battle flag.

And he's willing to march 1,500 miles across the South from Asheville, N.C., to Austin decked out in a gray Civil War uniform and waving the Rebel flag to bring attention to the issue.

Stolen from Chuck at Redneckin.

But what will the clowns think?

Check out the Ville for an excellent candid of Al Gore.

Aside

I guess the Raiders don't like Missouri very much, eh Dodd?

Bush wins again

In Iraq.

Most popular Halloween costumes

It appears that police and firefighter costumes are the winners this year. Challengers are Spider-Man, Josie & the Pussycats, Batman, the Power Rangers, SpongeBob Squarepants and Scooby-Doo.

In Brazil Osama bin Laden is winning over challengers Yassir Arafat and George Bush. Of course he has an unfair advantage, being a ghost too.

It's late in the game, but you can find lots of masks here. This outlet in the UK has a Saddam Hussein mask.

These are scary.

Small town Halloween

Whatever happened to Halloween? Yeah, I got older. But it seems like it's not as much fun for kids nowadays either.

I was in a small town where everybody knew everybody, at least in the neighborhood. You could start a day early and keep going a day late with most houses. For atmosphere, we even had a graveyard nearby stretching for several blocks and a couple of ill-maintained houses that for our money could well have been haunted. Oh yeah, we had the scary old lady who had to talk through a hole cut in her throat.

No parental escorts for us - we just marched up and down the streets, probably covering about a 20 block area of modest single-family homes. Daylight saving time gave us plenty of time after dark, and we'd stay out pretty late for a bunch that usually had to be in bed by 8:30 or so.

For loot there were a lot of popcorn balls and fruit, an occasional grab from a bowl of hard candy, or oddball stuff from those who had forgotten or had been sucked dry already. But most of it was miniature candy bars.

Groups of kids would cross paths once in a while, but there wasn't any trouble that I recall. Until we got older, that is, and that was when you figured the harvesting was over.

But then whole new opportunities arose for mischief bordering on delinquency. We'd go to the neighbors and note that we sure could use some eggs, toilet paper, shaving cream, soap et al, noting how it would be dishonorable to use them on the people who gave them to us (they knew if they didn't supply us, their neighbors would). We figured out about how much of the stuff we could carry without attracting suspicion ("No sir Mr. Officer, we haven't seen anything"), where we could ditch it in a hurry, and where we could stash it along the route. Thus did otherwise dead-end kids learn negotiation, game theory, procurement, logistics and project management (no, this isn't on my resume).

Old-timers (other than our parents) had classic stories of mischief. About all of them told stories of tipping outhouses. Usually this was done with a Model T, which subsequently got stuck in the "honey" (it must have been honey, because the guy who scooped it out and carried it away drove the "honeywagon"). Others told us of filling a paper bag with "honey", putting it on someone's doorstep and setting it on fire, in hopes that the resident would come out and stomp it out. We loved that idea, but never had the nerve to try it.

At some point many of us were dragooned into escorting the youngest kids, who of course would try to escape supervision ASAP. For the rest of us came cars, alcohol and girls - Halloween was for kids.

Alas, Halloween just isn't the same. And probably never was.

Google lust

I haven't mentioned her for months, but I keep packing them in with "Megan Morrone nude". In case you don't know, she's one of the Women of "The Screen Savers" - the darkheaded married one, probably wearing a tight T-shirt that says "got root?"

Listen, I have no problem with lay research of comparative feminine anatomy. But of the cast I'd pick Morgan Webb first, and I don't get anywhere near as many hits for her. Morgan, if you're feeling neglected, my email address is above under "Feedback".

This and that

Someone has hit this site querying Google for "Ann Coulter breasts". Good luck, pal.

Chris Johnson sums up the Chechen crimes in the Moscow theater. Keep going down for more.

My condolences to the Wellstones.

Vain expression

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur C. Clarke

The Gene Expression crowd seems to be incapable of taking any religiosity seriously - a typical reference is to "magical thinking". And of course this would all imply that religious people just aren't too smart. Thus from Razib we get this:

This is a rough measure, but I think my point holds, the further you go up the bell curve the less reliance there is on magical thinking, ergo the variations of Creationism.

An alternate interpretation is that the farther you go right on the bell curve (ie toward higher intelligence), the vainer the thinkers are. They don't want to be told answers or have to accept any divine authority - they figured it out themselves.

What is the point of teaching evolution in schools? It depends on how it is presented. If it is presented as preempting or disproving religious faith, it has overstepped its bounds. Or rather replaced existing religion with one that denies it is a religion - atheism.

Well, what will they teach in biology classes instead? Ecology. Anatomy. Epidemiology. Public health. Agriculture. Genetics. More health-related topics that are directly related to citizenship, as opposed to some intellectual exercise in figuring out which critter allegedly descended from what by blind chance. Just what value does evolution have to offer the average citizen?

Or maybe they can teach some real science. They certainly can show that it evolves. When I took high school biology, the taxonomy of the time had only two kingdoms, the animals and the plants. Nowadays we have the same critters as before, but at last count there were 5 kingdoms.

Here's some more vanity, from the same post:

Now, the fact remains that a large minority continue to accept Biblical literalism, but let's keep going up the bell curve. A 1996 study by Witham & Larson showed that 40% of scientists with doctorates were theists.

I suppose possession of a doctorate is solely a function of intelligence? Hardly. But it does show that they have been hazed by higher-ups in their faculty, and if they deviate too much they won't get their tickets punched.

Want to hear a story about magic? One day there was nothing at all, and then the next there was a universe! It doesn't sound any the less improbable IMO if you throw in deities. But scientists cut out the deities with Occam's Razor and place their faith in things as error-prone as objective observation and reason. They have faith that they'll find the answer eventually, and in the meantime would everyone please renounce their religious faith?

Can't predict the positions and momenta of subatomic particles simultaneously? Don't confess eternal ignorance, postulate an Uncertainty Principle.

You can't predict something's behavior? Don't admit you don't know - call it "random" or "chaotic" to cover the failure.

Your physics theory upon which you built theories of the beginning and the end of the universe is failing? Postulate the existence of new phenomena like "dark matter", hold out your hand for a few $millions more, and buy time to conjure up the next story.

Science has many wonderful achievements. But it will remain useful only so long as it remains humble. Don't let anyone make it into a religion, or displace existing religions.

UPDATE: And don't...well, we'll let Quana tell it.

They all look the same!

I'm lily-white, from a largely lily-white (mostly German, Irish and a little Italian) small town in IL (around 10,000 population). There's a very light sprinkling of nonwhites, but not enough to teach us to recognize one group from another. Without external media coming in and various generations of military veterans, we'd probably do little better than to be able to distinguish blacks from Hispanics from Asians.

I've covered a lot of ground since then and I'm doing better at telling different groups apart. But it looks like I'm not the only one who has a heck of a time distinguishing Chinese, Koreans and Japanese.

Let's see how well you do. Har har - I did better than Razib...

Stolen from Gene Expression.

Wish you were here

...to behold that incredible meeting of the minds that happened in St. Louis this past Thursday. Tim Blair was passing through, and Charles Austin, Juan Gato, Chris Johnson and I were there to help spare him the torments of sobriety. We made short work of the world's problems, but I didn't think to write it all down.

Filling a much needed void

Did you forget to make out your grocery list? No problem - use one of these.

From Dan Pink

Can't they do better than this?

Surely no Bush administration official gets more undeserved flak than John Ashcroft. Such as this from Robert Prather:

Oregon voters passed an assisted suicide law via referendum -- twice -- and John Ashcroft, with no constitutional basis to do so, has tried to revoke the medical licenses of the doctor's who prescribed the lethal doses. The first judge to review the case over-ruled Ashcroft and it's on appeal.

The article in question says this:

The Death With Dignity Act, which allows a physician to prescribe a lethal dose of barbiturates to a terminally ill adult patient, was first approved by the voters of the state of Oregon in 1994. Assisted suicide opponents mounted a vigorous campaign against the law, delaying its implementation until referendum in 1997, when it passed again.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration immediately stepped in and sought to overturn the law on the grounds that it violated the Federal Controlled Substances Act, which prohibits the use of certain drugs except for a "legitimate medical purpose"—which, the DEA said, did not include aid in dying. Then-Attorney General Janet Reno, however, overruled the agency, and the law was allowed to remain in place.

Under Attorney General John Ashcroft, however, all of that changed. In November 2001, the attorney general took time out from cracking down on terrorists to crack down on physicians who prescribe lethal drugs to the terminally ill. He authorized the DEA to revoke their licenses.

There's nothing controversial about the idea that causing death is a "legitimate medical purpose"?

Listen, I'm all for state's rights. IMO people should see the Civil War as a gross abuse of federal power too. But surely there's a better case for dumping on Ashcroft than this.

Prather offers this:

John Ashcroft has stretched every conceivable aspect of the constitution since his term started. The assisted suicide law is presumably being challenged using laws based on the interstate commerce clause. What assisted suicide has to do with interstate commerce is a mystery to me.

The first sentence suggests that we are dealing with something other than objectivity. As for the rest, if the Reason article cited is accurate, it doesn't seem so farfetched that Ashcroft is totally within the bounds of the law. As Prather's cite shows above, the initial DEA determination predates Ashcroft. Can the DEA revoke medical licenses? Does the DEA report to Ashcroft? If so, then what is left to say? IMO the US District Court judge who made the decision (who is based in Portland, Oregon) was the one who overstepped his bounds, and my money says Ashcroft wins in a later round.

Remember all the crap Ashcroft heard during confirmation? How Democrats claimed that he would impose his own views upon the law, especially wrt abortion clinics? It looks to me like he's enforcing the law just as he pledged to do when he was confirmed. If there's something wrong with the law, then let's fix the law.

Prather continues with this:

The 4th amendment means nothing to him as well given his support for the TIPS program. I want the guarantee that I'll be secure in my person, papers and effects. I don't want it compromised for the War On Drugs™ and I don't want it compromised for the war on terror.

The War on Drugs long predates Ashcroft, and it's his job to enforce the law. And he inherited the cowboys at DEA, BATF and whatever you call what we have at the FBI, who have all sorts of institutional and civil service defenses against housecleanings. And given his late confirmation, the unending personal attacks and the subsequent frenzy after 9/11, just when was he going to be able to do that?

Let's hear something positive for a change. Who would have been better than Ashcroft? What should he have done differently that was consistent with the responsibilities of his job? And what is needed to clean up these rogue organizations?

Just for the record...

I'm late to this party, but I offer the following:

idiotarian - n. 1. Anyone who would claim that Charles Johnson's site is racist.

Radioactive litter

Cat litter, that is.

A man who ignored a veterinarian's order to flush his cat's radioactive waste down the toilet was hit with a $2,800 bill. ...Jenness' cat, Mitzi, an 11-year-old shorthair, was treated with an injection of radioiodine after developing hyperthyroidism, which is common in cats her age.

The treatment makes the cat radioactive for weeks, so special care is required, including limiting snuggling time, keeping the cat away from children and pregnant women and using protective gloves when flushing the cat litter......Mitzi's mess was discovered at an incinerator in Rochester when alarms detected radioactivity. Workers traced the waste to Jenness after finding mail with his name on it nearby.

My job is looking better all the time.

Radiocat's Web site says the amount of radiation from a radioiodine shot is probably less than the amount a person receives on a long plane flight or a day at the beach.

But Thomas Burnett, a Whitman public works commissioner, said any radiation in trash is too much.

Radwaste eventually becomes harmless, but stupidity is forever. With sensitive enough instruments, he'll find radiation in all of the trash in town.

The first rule of government

Governments don't collect taxes so they can pay for services. Governments perform services so they can collect taxes.

MisManners

I had an older relative who was fussy about manners. She would visit once in a while and I would be on pins and needles wondering what else I was doing wrong. Little did I know I could have used a dozen more like her.

Hey, we men have always been animals. Some of us believe that whenever civilization happens, it's because some women put their pretty little feet down. But women in particular, outside the South, seem to have lost most of their manners. Some of the younger ones are appalling.

I don't mean which fork goes with the salad - we're talking basics here. For instance, if you're wearing jeans there are still some ways you probably shouldn't sit, unless you want us to think your herpes is in bloom.

And if you're in a short skirt there are fewer options yet, I don't care how much you spent at Victoria's Secret. Or on depilation - I read somewhere that Hillary Clinton once caught an impromptu exhibition and issued a memo instructing White House staff to wear panties at work.

Never mind the conflict of interest - if a man points out such things he's likely to be accused of harassment just for acknowledging it. Where are the women?

Iran: going from the dogs

How will they top this?

Beauty from the Beast

Of the millions of things I'm not qualified to do, giving beauty tips has to be close to the top. But sometimes even I can give a hint or two.

Tip #1 is to smile once in a while. You know, a real honest smile, not one of those reflexive masks we see on politicians and spokesmodels.

Alright, some of us aren't blessed. One minor celebrity I met usually looked sultry, but when I caught her smiling once she looked kind of goofy and rustic. They can be gummy or horsy or otherwise fubar, but there really aren't so many of these.

Another minor celeb had a nice smile because I had seen it on occasion. Then she stopped. When I asked, she told me she didn't smile for cameras because it made lines in her face. Heaven forbid.

One woman who worked in the same office with me was in her early twenties, and I would have sworn she had had a stroke. She would talk or blink, and once in a while she must have eaten, but other than that her face almost never moved. Then again, with the amount of makeup she wore it probably wasn't easy - near as I could tell her skin was fine. All the obvious effort she put into her face, but in a year or two I think I caught her smiling twice.

Another was a girl who must have been about 18 at the time. This one at least would smile, and she was very pretty, but she too wore makeup as if she were on stage. At her age and with her skin, I'd think lots of foundation et al would be more likely to cause problems than to cover them. I have to wonder if it wasn't intended almost like a mask to hide behind.

What do I know about makeup, anyway? Well, I've had to wear it before. But I had to quit - those lights and cameras put weight on you, and I've been trying to lose it ever since.

Shut up and blog

I have a particular blog in mind, but this works in general.

If you are going to be sensitive to nasty things people might say, maybe blogging isn't for you.

And if you're going to come out and say you're gay, well, where have you been living? Fair or not, you're begging for nastiness from the "God hates fags" crowd.

Shrug it off and tell them all to go to hell.

The 5th wheel

Curse that recliner. I have one that points straight at the TV set, and nothing short of drugs puts this historic insomniac to sleep sooner. The result is that at odd times I wake up with the TV on. So hours after the World Series game ended, I got to watch "The 5th Wheel", from the cultural savants who brought us "Blind Date".

At the beginning of the show we're shown two men and two women (Rana and Amanda). They get a chance to talk to each other as a group, then each man is paired with each woman. Of course the voyeuristic camera following along, with goofball editing, and each gets to make comments about each of the others.

Then another woman (Angelina) is introduced, and she is paired with each guy. After this apparently no holds are barred, and at the end all five participants select which partner they'd like to keep. Pairs that pick each other apparently are the winners, and the rest are "5th wheels".

It takes a, uh, special kind of person to perform on these shows. Amanda lost her bikini top with one of the guys. Rana was into biting. Angelina was the hottest. Each guy had a turn with two girls at once, then Angelina and Andrea paired off. Finally all of them met in a small space, and as the door closed on them a graphic appeared warning of "orgy in progress".

Then the finale - the naming of partners. Both guys picked Angelina. So did Amanda. And Angelina picked Amanda. Ha! - three fifth wheels.

Alright, I did sit still to watch an episode. No voyeurism here though, nosirree - purely detached observation and intense contemplation with the intent of adding my profundities to the sum of human wisdom. Yes, this was a study in human relations, evolving social norms, game theory, TV production...

Barf.

Science vs. science

I'm thinking of getting a camcorder in the near future. Then, being me, I'll have to jack around with video editing and production.

Video editing takes lots of computer resources. And that's for a fairly narrow field of view. If you could use it to capture everything your eyes could see in every direction it would be far worse. And your eyes can't see everything.

Conclusion: we're missing most of what is happening around us all of the time. And that goes for the other senses too.

Of course human vision is inherently limited by the properties of our eyes. We can't see the radiation from a hot object until it starts emitting enough red radiation (by which time it's well beyond hot enough to burn us), and it would be nice if we could see predators at night by their body heat. We can't see ultraviolet rays, so we don't know to take cover when they are bad. Likewise our other senses have a limited "bandwidth".

Let's just say we had access to all of the observations made by all the people on the planet. Even then, they don't cover the entire biosphere,
and there's lots more stuff going on within the earth or in outer space. Even if everyone were a well-equipped, talented scientist, we'd still miss all but the tiniest bit of the data that is available.

And who says that we couldn't use more senses? Being capable of detecting radioactivity would be handy, as would detecting pathogens like anthrax or whatever else Saddam has been cooking up. There could be entire undiscovered phenomena out there that even our measuring instruments can't detect and that we don't even know to look for. And the instruments we do use generally work over a narrow range (just as we might use micrometers, rulers, and tapes to measure different length ranges), so you can miss things at each end. The result is that we don't even know all of what we're missing - we can't even place an upper bound on our ignorance of our surroundings.

And this whole process repeats forever, while our oldest quantitative observations might possibly date a millenium or two back out of the alleged 5 billion year age of the earth. I'm easy, let's call it 5000 years of science. That's one millionth of the life of the planet, and even less of the universe.

That tiny sampling of information we do have cannot be dealt with as is though, and it is subject to misinterpretation. We've all seen optical illusions to show how our senses play tricks on us. We invent all sorts of new illusions when we use optical devices like microscopes or even something as simple as a voltmeter. And we use categorical perception, which is a rich source of misunderstandings.

Yet somehow we get by. We learn to prioritize. We use external instruments for their presumed objectivity. We repeat experiments under differing circumstances. We use statistical methods to reduce information into its most useful forms, betting that we haven't found those uncommon but possible situations when the methods will lead to error.

That incredibly tiny, heavily processed sliver that remains from the original perceptions, taken from that absurdly short period of time in the life of the universe, is what is used by scientists to make claims about the beginning and the end of the universe.

One millionth of the life of a 70 year old man is less than 40 minutes. Imagine some alien coming here seeing Earth life forms for the first time, studying a human for 40 minutes, and claiming that he could predict every stage of development that had occured at conception, and what would happen until death. Good luck.

But there are people who find this credible, and scorn creationists.

Creationism is not science. As such it should not be taught in schools as science.

However, science should be taught warts and all. Ignoring its limitations is not scientific, and cosmology like the above makes an excellent example of just how expansive scientific predictions have been relative to actual observations. Believing the resulting predictions is very much an act of faith.

Further, It should be acknowledged that scientific theories are here today and gone tomorrow. For an example, curricula should include the flip-flops such as when global cooling predictings of the 70's gave way to the global warming predictions of the 90's.

It should be noted that science is influenced by personalities and politics, as it was with the theories of Trofim Lysenko.

Finally, it should be noted that science is subject to fraud. A classic example is Piltdown man, but there is much more than that.

Above all, it should be emphasized that science is not antithetical to religious faith. Otherwise we're introducing religion into schools in the form of atheism.

No Watermelons Allowed: the Next Generation

So what is it about this blog that could be improved?

Sorry, nothing I can do about the author - he's the only one who works this cheap. If this is 'free ice cream', I refuse to speculate on the flavor, and it has yet to receive a documented sniff from Silflay Hraka. Hmm - I could put in a redirect to the Bleat...

The name? - by now it's a tradition, like the cranberries I don't eat at Thanksgiving. And the new domain name might be worse... Both resulted from the same process that named Peculiar, MO - the locals got tired of coming up with a unique name to suit the postal service. Incidentally, the 'watermelons' in question are those who pose as environmentalists (green on the outside) while actually serving the left (red on the inside).

The overall esthetics? Well, I'm an engineer/IT guy - it would be like putting lace on a bowling ball. If it all sucks beyond redemption, comfort yourself knowing that I see it more than anybody else.

Getting away from Blogspot? It's on the agenda. The new host, Hosting Matters, has the cojones to carry Instapundit and VodkaPundit, so they'll barely notice me between billings. I already have Movable Type over there too, but I've been so slow about it that they've upgraded in the meantime.

That obnoxious void comment page? I keep telling myself 'it'll go away after I'm on Movable Type'. So far I haven't been quite annoyed enough to fix it yet.

That @#$% hit counter needs improvement too. Apparently Bravenet has decided to cut back on referral logs, from 50 to 25.

And I'm among the world's worst for returning email.

On the plus side, I don't have a cat.

Well, I'm trying to learn from some things that annoy me about other blogs. I have a slow connection most of the time, and I don't want to see something more than once. So I'm starting to put labels on some of the links. That way if your browser permits you can see what it points to, in English.

Enough. Fire at will.

Your research dollars at work

You know, my hands are bigger than average. They're probably bigger than Eddie Van Halen's. All else being equal, you might think that would give me some advantages at playing guitar. But although I do play, you'd better stick with Eddie.

And now we have this, attempting to correlate penis size with index finger length.

You'll note that I already mentioned I have big hands, and I can hold up my end of a locker room bull session. But really, is this observation of any medical value at all?

Where are your kids?

I just saw a TV ad for Wherify Wireless. They sell a GPS wristwatch for kids along with a monitoring service that lets you keep tabs on them. Supposedly it can also tell if the device has been removed. It also has a pager and can call 911 - the latter can be disabled.

They are developing a locator for cars too. This has been around a while for major corporate clients, but now it would be available for the rest of us.

Cuban Missile Crisis 40th anniversary

The History Channel is running a show about the Cuban Missile Crisis, from almost 40 years ago today. This occurred when JFK found out that the Nikita Khrushchev's Russians had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Many options for a response were considered, including a land invasion.

At that time, unknown to US intelligence, the Russians had tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba (including nuclear torpedos). These could have been used to vaporize many if not all of our personnel involved in the invasion. According to Khrushchev's son Sergei, these weapons were likely to have been used in case of an invasion.

Does this sound familiar?

Please tell me he's not joking

Even if it is Scrappleface.

Unreasonable

I typically avoid discussions with people who a) are more involved with an issue than I am, and b) have more time available than I do. But I'll break that little rule today to try to deliver on a post I pledged a few weeks ago.

Arthur Silber publishes an interesting blog called "Light of Reason". A name like that is a heavy load to carry IMO. Mr. Silber does well, but in fact has chosen a burden that cannot be borne. Reason fails him, as it must.

I don't have the time or space to go into this in great detail here. What I would say boils down to "Mr. Silber worships reason". I don't think he would find that offensive per se and it is not intended in that way. What it is intended to convey is that Mr. Silber elevates reason to heights its powers do not justify.

If I am mischaracterizing his position I'm more than willing to be corrected, but it appears that Mr. Silber believes that 1) all that is true can be demonstrated through reason, and 2) reason will never lead to falsity. Without these, he simply has no starting point to build his philosophy.

And I disagree with both statements. I would like to see how Mr. Silber defends them, without resorting to what he would call "arbitrary".

Not a blonde joke

I usually don't bother linking to anything I find in the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web Today because I figure most of you have already seen it. But this is too good.

No Blood for Oil!

You know, intelligent, responsible people have been awfully hard on some of these leftists and their protests about our involvement in the Middle East. But we have to try to appreciate their point of view, you know.

For instance, I've heard them say 'no blood for oil'. Admit it, it's a lousy idea. It can be slippery, but it's a lousy lubricant - after a while it gets all sticky and eventually it dries out. It doesn't keep well. It doesn't burn worth a hoot. It's more edible than petroleum, but it never really caught on in the US. When you cook it, it clumps up like plastic but it's no substitute for petroleum based products. And really, we ought to use it for plasma and transfusions instead.

Well, I suppose that's kind of a stupid interpretation. But what else could they mean? Surely they don't think that we'll accept oil shortages.

Has everyone forgotten about locking gas caps? Surely I'm not the only one who remembers what gasoline tastes like. What will people do if they can't get enough gasoline to get to work or get groceries?

We have some experience from the 70's. Long gas lines. Corruption. Violence. And the economy will go down the tubes.

My conclusion is that in fact there will be blood for oil. Our only choice is whose it will be, and where it will be shed.

Carbon monoxide poisoning

It's getting to be heating season, and we've already had our first local deaths from carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning.

CO results from incomplete combustion combined with poor ventilation. Symptoms are headaches, nausea, sleepiness, dizziness and disorientation. In high concentrations, carbon monoxide can cause loss of consciousness and death. Many victims die in their sleep. It kills over 200 people every year in the US, and is a factor in fire deaths because it incapacitates people when they need to escape.

So if you have a gas or other kind of heater that has a flame, make sure there are no obstructions in the airflow going in or out. In particular, the flue might be blocked by bird nests or otherwise. If you don't feel qualified, call your handyman, heating repairman, apartment manager or whoever.

In any case, spring for a CO monitor and install it as directed. You don't need as many of these as is recommended for smoke alarms, but there should be one near the likely sources.

And if you won't listen, you can just drop dead.

Lewis Grizzard is dead, and I'm not feeling so good myself

But we still have Acidman. So what if he went to the wrong school.

You haven't heard of Lewis Grizzard? @#$% Yankee heathen!

Hands off my Boy Scouts

Stephen Spielberg has disassociated himself from the Boy Scouts of America. He doesn't like the policy of excluding gays.

Whatever the wisdom of this policy, the fact is that they have the right to screen their members and Scoutmasters as they see fit, and they should.

But no - gay groups have to harass the BSA over the policy. Good grief, how many Boy Scout aged boys have decided that they're gay, anyway?

Why don't these crusading groups just start an alternative to the Boy Scouts? Let their new organization practice don't-ask-don't-tell, or explicitly include gays, or be exclusively gay, or include both sexes, or whatever. Then let the parents and the boys decide if they want to join it instead of Boy Scouts.

If the project is a success, fine. But if it isn't, then it suggests that the Boy Scouts are only doing what their market is telling them to do.

So what?

Drudge offers this headline: MAG: If Saddam Disappears, Power Would Pass to His Sons Who Could Be Worse Than Father...

Maybe so. But Saddam isn't immortal - surely the spawn will be taking over sooner or later. So this isn't an argument against going in and cleaning house.

And if the sons take over? My bet is that they'll probably be like scorpions in a bottle until one manages to kill the other.

Cleats

At the moment the Packers are beating the Patriots 14-3, and I just saw a Packer wipe out trying to sack Tom Brady.

Hmm. Has anyone ever tried wrapping cleats partway around the sides of shoes? That might have kept the rusher on his feet. Then again, it might also cause a lot more leg injuries.

De-evolution

Richard Dawkins is a staunch evolutionist, but his existence leads me to question the theory that we're descended from anything as intelligent and gracious as apes:

Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place

That's offensive even to an agnostic like me.

But he's not through yet-this scientist is also an atheist:

The word atheism sounds negative; let me call it rationalism.

Of course he can't prove that there is no god - he must assume that there is not one, just as those who believe in gods must assume that they exist. Good luck getting him to admit that.

Link stolen from Bo Cowgill.

Attack Iraq Now II

Some time back I wrote of the passing of a friend of mine to liver cancer. I've been to a few funerals, but I wasn't prepared for the difference between the 42 year old family man I had last seen at work 3 months earlier and what I saw in the casket. I got out of there fast.

This week's dead-tree Weekly Standard points to this letter in Slate (look for 12:47), about aflatoxin. Saddam has weaponized it.

He might well be the first to do so. Nobody else is fiendish enough to want it. After all, it's useless against soldiers - it doesn't kill fast enough. But it does induce liver cancer, especially in children. And Saddam's record against the Kurds, Iraqi Shiites and Iranians shows that he will use such measures, and enthusiastically.

Saddam has at least 2200 liters of aflatoxin. And according to the letter above, they had loaded aflatoxin into two warheads capable of being fitted on Scud missiles.

Of course you don't need Scuds. You just need some irredeemable mofos willing to spread it strategically in foreign countries. Maybe even in your back yard. Voila - genocide in a bottle.

The usual Hitler/Stalin/Mao/Idi Amin/Pol Pot/Kim Jong-Il epithets simply aren't adequate to describe this man. Take him out. Now.

Attack Iraq Now

This is not a 'warblog' - others like Little Green Footballs do a far better job. But then I just finished reading 'Saddam's Bombmaker' and I'm partway through 'The Threatening Storm'. Brrrr!

Saddam's Bombmaker is a chilling story of Dr. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi who unwittingly made a deal with the devil when he accepted scholarships to study nuclear physics in the US. While he was gone Saddam Hussein took power and demanded that he returned home to avoid reprisals against his family.

From there he wound up involved in the Iraqi program to build nuclear weapons, and he tells how the program got started. It seems that in the early 1970's, some people wanted their budget increased, so they proposed building A-bombs. They figured it would take years to do it, by which time Saddam might be out of power.

Over time Hamza came to know much about other Iraqi weapons programs, and by the time of his nerve-wracking escape from Iraq in 1994 he had an earful for the CIA. Getting them to listen was another story (as Aukai Collins could have told him - Collins has a book of his own called 'My Jihad' that is also on my mile-long reading list). Enough, just read the book.

And when you're through with those, there's Glenn Frazier's Warblogger's Bookshelf

Just in time for Christmas

Someone you know needs this stuff.

No Australian Watermelons Allowed

Greens make Aaron Oakley see red. Check him out.

Be your own Dante

Sasha Castel posted this gem from someone who is offended by obesity. It starts with the guy complaining about the fat guy seated next to him on a plane and overflowing his seat (there's no record if he also blamed his corpulent neighbor for lousy service, bad food, laughable security and poor on-time performance). From there he goes on to tell us The Way Things Ought To Be, with fat taxes et al.

I guess we're lucky more of our vices don't leave such obvious signs behind. You can lie, cheat and steal all you want, but if you overeat and/or don't exercise enough, karma will not be denied.

There ought to be physical manifestations of other vices too. Say, if every time you lied, your tongue forked. Bill Clinton's would look like a French tickler. And according to certain women, he might like it that way.

We don't cut off the hands of thieves like certain other cultures, but it would be OK with me if their hands turned sticky and slimy. Shake hands with them and instantly you know what you're dealing with.

But I guess I'm straying into Dante territory. Which would be a good place to link to something I read recently which updated Dante's Hell, but I can't remember where it is. I don' t know what Dante did with airheads (but then I wouldn't, would I?).

Here's a chance for you to play Cosmic Karmic Enforcer. Give me a vice, and tell me how its practitioners should be labeled or where Dante should put them.

30% of Americans are obese...

...according to this. That's in round figures of course.

No, that's not my line.

Say bye-bye!

From Drudge, here is a story of a woman who got to see her aborted fetus.

She didn't like it.

Small memory devices - which will survive?

I'm only now starting to consider buying some devices that use small memory gizmos like Sony's Memory Sticks. Near as I can tell, there are 3 incompatible types out there. Are there any bets about which ones will survive a shakeout?

For home experimenters

Get your fuel cells here.

Garbage power

From Yahoo and Reuters comes this:

Researchers at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol have developed a microbial fuel cell about the size of a mobile phone that could be powered by organic household waste....The bacteria-driven cell, which would cost about 10 pounds ($15), directly converts biochemical energy into electricity. It uses E.coli bacteria to break down carbohydrates and release hydrogen atoms.

Personal lie detectors

It's cheap, it's 84% accurate, it's the Handy Truster!

Fire safety

Fresh from Google News... rooming house with no fire alarms burned down.

Maybe my years in engineering at nuclear power plants made me paranoid, but I seem to be the only one in the family who is concerned about personal or fire safety. One relative in particular has been known to shingle steep roofs 3 floors up in the rain, with no safety belt, while thunder was in earshot. Others, raised in the country, couldn't conceive of locking doors. Nobody seems very concerned about safety, especially when it comes to fires.

That's amazing. As I type this a bulletin is on TV about a local hall burning down.

Let's see if I can find a link for this one....no luck. Anyway, in the early 1990's the Quad City Times reported about a man who played a clown to entertain kids at a local restaurant.

He had boys of his own. Of course he and his wife took good care of them. They even had something fairly newfangled then - there was an audio monitor in the boys' room.

Then one day the boys were lost to a fire that started in their room. The cause? The transformer on the audio monitor.

In 2000, 85% of fire deaths were from home fires in the US. There were 3420 deaths, which was an increase of 18.1% from the previous year.

How long would it take for you to get everybody out of your place right now?

Medical miscellany

Medpundit doesn't have much use for health insurers. I don't know that I agree - I have a relative who handles health claims for a major insurer and her experience is nothing like this. On the flipside, the Bloviator is worried about financial viability of health insurance providers.

But the best thing I got from the latest visit to Medpundit was this lead to medical professionals who do not deal with health insurance. In so doing, they work at significantly reduced rates. For some people, using such doctors, in conjunction with catastrophic coverage with a high deductible, might be the best way to handle health care.

I suppose it's just a matter of time before you can buy medical care at Sam's Club or Costco.

Cellular piracy?

I just saw an ad for Sprint's new service. It can support using phones that can take and transmit pictures.

So now what - are entertainment and other venues going to frisk people for cellphones before they'll permit entry?

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.