Who's afraid of Nathan Myhrvold?

The most feared man in Silicon Valley is no longer this individual (I've learned to say "individual" sometimes when I really mean "SOB"). But a new candidate may now be Nathan Myhrvold.
If you haven't heard of him, catch up here, then watch him here.

Myrhvold says that most companies have policies that inevitably lead to patent infringement. At one point he says emphatically "I know - I was there!" Which is probably as good a time as any to mention that he made his approximately 9 figure net worth with Microsoft.

In the immortal words of Arte Johnson, "verrry interesting".

Firsthand from Lebanon

Michael J. Totten's blog is covering the action in Lebanon. Starthere and go up.

Or if you have the time, start from the beginning of his blog and keep going. It'll keep you busy for a while, but you'll find stuff you won't find anywhere else about the Middle East from a guy who's been walking around there with a camera on his own dime for quite a while now. And yes, he has a tipjar.

Good news for Iraq?

Suppose you are an Islamist terrorist in Iraq. Who would you rather kill - Iraqis or Jews?

Murderous Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has said "We say a no, a thousand no's to Israel and its terrorism, and everybody should know that we in Iraq will not stay quiet against the rampaging Zionists,"

Does that mean that the creeps will be migrating to Lebanon and Syria?

The Hindu goddess of Montana

How would you like to go on a long tour in Africa with Ashley Judd? Joshua Trevino did and this is what he observed.

If terrorists had blown the Holland Tunnel...

...what would have happened?

Well, as we engineers try to teach plumbers with limited success, "Friday's payday and (sewage) don't run uphill". If the idea was to flood lower Manhattan, it ain't gonna happen anywhere above sea level. Long term, anyway.

But unless you're a Democrat and/or you work for the Congressional Budget Office, you can't ignore dynamic effects. Let that water go whooshing through that tunnel and it will have a lot of momentum by the time it emerges at the ends. I.e. you'll have a mini-tsumami of sorts, which will wash away a lot of stuff and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing or driving around. Of course this depends on how big a hole you have and how suddenly it materializes, but the idea is that there are more ways to make messes than just flooding.

And while there might not be lasting flooding above the level of the Hudson, there are plenty of things in Manhattan that are built below grade. If you want to know what happens when these flood, just ask a Chicagoan. And if you think there aren't tunnels like this under Manhattan, guess again - here's just one example.

The irreplaceable Kate at Small Dead Animals points us to this, which goes into more related topics.

"Tehran is obviously making a bomb."

More here.

Inexcusable

Try as I might, I can't think of any legitimate reason for urinating on a war memorial. On Canada Day, no less.

What's the appropriate punishment for this? How about revoking the creep's citizenship and shipping him off one-way to someplace like Somalia. Let the bastard learn firsthand how hard-won law and order can be, and who wins it.

This takes guts

Being an organ donor is all well and good, under a couple of conditions. One is that the donor should consent. Two is that the donor should already have died.

You'd think it would go without saying that the cause of death would be something other than removal of the organs to be transplanted, but apparently those inscrutable ChiComs see things differently. Especially if you are Falun Gong. Details here.

What the heck, they're just overgrown embryos anyway.

Not your father's diesels

Here Cronaca tells us of a diesel powered vehicle winning at Le Mans, and some people who are powering their diesel cars with cooking oil from Chinese restaurants.

Obnoxious web sites

Attention webmasters - don't send me through a long succession of screens selecting choices and then "prompt me to register" before showing me what I came there for. Do it up front or not at all.

Ooh, that felt good.

And the rest are idiots and illegals

More than 9 in 10 are "proud to be American".

Dear Santa

Yeah, I love electronic toys. But this gizmo, uses your EVDO cellphone or card to create a broadband router with 4 ethernet ports and wifi.

No, they don't give them away, and even I can't talk myself into getting one now. But there are some rave comments here and here.

Spankometer!

I'm not kidding.

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

The Real Ugly American interviews Mort Kondracke

...right here

Eureka!

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

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

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

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

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

He seemed stumped. Then WTF would anyone sign up?

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

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

Goodbye Acidman

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

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

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

Goodbye Acidman

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

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

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

Silicon gulag

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

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

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

"Nobody is for a withdrawal, even a timetable"

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

The backwards blonde and friends

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

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

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

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