No comment

Just check out Patent 6055910.

And please don't ask how I found it.

Very funny ads

See the funniest of 2006 right here.

Imponderables

Why would anyone want to be a nurse? Can't they find better jobs? Or do they just like wiping up feces, sticking people with needles, and watching people die?

Why would anyone be a cop? Taking out the social garbage every day at risk of life and limb - there can't possibly be a socially acceptable reason for it. They must all be losers who can't find better jobs. Or maybe they're just sociopaths looking for people to lock up and shoot.

Why would anyone be a fireman? You run *out* of burning buildings, not *in* - obviously they're not very smart. I guess it gives them a chance to loot houses as the evidence crumbles and burns behind them, eh?


After hearing the kind of contemptible crap John Kerry and Charles Rangel have said about our military, why would anyone be a Democrat?

The world as your monitor

Yes, much of my life has been wasted. Part of that has been spent playing computer games like FreeCell. Far too laborious if done with actual playing cards, it's OK if a computer takes care of the scut work.

Stadium sports have always been designed to use a fixed pattern of marks on the field, whether they be boundaries, yard markers, hash marks, base paths, or whatever else. What kinds of new games might develop if the fields could change dynamically during play?

So have I found a new way to waste time? Maybe not - check out this article in Forbes:

Imagine this: you pull in your driveway after a long day at the office, step out of your car, and suddenly your lawn, yes, your lawn, lights up with a "Welcome Home, Honey!" Or how about this: The military has a runway deep in enemy territory that it wants to keep from getting blown up, so it changes the color of the landing turf to brown to blend in with the surrounding desert. When a plane comes in for a landing, two strips of lights appear. After the plane has landed, with a push of a button the strip reverts to camouflage mode.

Sounds cool, right? This technology will be available soon, making its grand entrance as a National Football League field. Mark Nicholls, the founder and chief executive of Sportexe, the number two maker of artificial turf in the NFL, has patented the process of "tufting" fiber optics with blades of plastic grass. "We will be able to turn the football field into a giant Jumbotron," says Nicholls.

A field can display a huge American flag during the national anthem. At halftime a sponsor such as Budweiser could cover the field with its logo. During the game, that virtual first-down marker you see on your TV could now be on the field itself before the ball is snapped. And because sensors beneath the fibers can sense when any given blade's light is obscured, referees can track the footsteps of a player to determine if he was in-bounds or not. Stadium owners would welcome the technology as well, as it would help them get more use out of the field: A few mouse clicks is all it takes to change the field from a gridiron to a soccer pitch. Compare that to the 2.5-hour, $650 process of cleaning and repainting lines on today's artificial fields.

Hmm. Maybe one day we'll be able to, say, sell our roofs to an advertiser, who would assume permanent maintenance responsibilities in return for a billboard he could control from half a world away. Billboards could become big TV monitors. Highways could restripe. Large objects could change color instantly - they could even become invisible. Sheesh, you could redecorate the house ten times a day.

I really need to get some work done.

Home is where the harm is

When a certain family rugrat was small I caught her playing by a toilet. Her mother thought me paranoid when I told her of the kids who died each year from pitching in headfirst and drowning.

In fact, it can even happen in a bucket. The kids are so topheavy that if they go in head first and there's enough water in the bowl, that's it - they're not likely to be able to get themselves out. They won't even be able to scream for help. And Mom would only have to be out of the room for a couple of minutes...

And now we read this. At least it wasn't a toilet, but this would be worse. With a little imagination it becomes Poe-like - slowly getting wedged in a little farther with every exhalation, possibly over hours, until breathing became impossible.

Maybe I've been scarred by my nuclear power days, which I spent mostly looking for things that could go wrong and what could be done about them. Or maybe it's remembering a house that I lived in as a kid - the heater that always made my mother nervous while we lived there eventually started a fire that burned it to the ground. But the fact is that this is the time of year that lots of people die at home in ways they probably never gave a second thought to.

Has OJ found the "real killer" at last?

Could it have been his ghostwriter? Hey, I'm not making this up.

Objectivity AP style

From here:

The bloodshed underlined the impotence of the Iraqi army and police to quell determined sectarian extremists at a time when the Bush administration appears to be considering a move to accelerate the hand-over of security responsibilities.

It must not take too many brains to become a journalist if they needn't be able to distinguish between, say, failing and being a failure. They may ultimately be right in this case, but this article isn't enough to prove it. Did they just screw up this once, or are they incompetent and/or biased?

Do the usual suspects (ACU, ADA..) or anyone else rate newspapers for objectivity? Is lack of objectivity in reporting considered an ethical lapse among journalists?

Crumbs from the table

!@#$! Colby Cosh, the Canuckistani. *Just try* to link to one of his posts. It'd be different if his blog stunk, but it's one of my favorites, and every trip seems to generate a couple of linkworthy items. So let's see how long it takes before this link rots.

Anyway, yes, I know that the great Milton Friedman is dead. I didn't acknowledge it until now only because I had no idea what I could add. But CC came up with a story I hadn't heard before, showing how some people could have made an impressive career out of stuff Milton Friedman probably didn't even include on his CV.

What happens to abandoned blogs

This.

That'll never happen here. I may (have) run out of things to write, but that won't stop me.

Driving a truck isn't what it used to be

There were some truckers in my family, and in younger years I'd ride with them once in a while. If nothing else, I learned that I didn't want to be a trucker.

But it's getting more livable out there. I still don't want to be a trucker, but nowadays it might take a couple more weeks longer before I lost my mind.

An interesting perspective on Iran

Quoth Spengler:

Nothing is more threadbare than the claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood. Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps.

That's just the most eye-catching part - it's all worth a look.

I don't recall where I found this, but a good bet was in the comments on Austin Bay's blog. It's always worth a look anyway.

Time to invest in micro CHP?

Maybe. But first it would be nice to know what it is.

CHP is "combined heat and power". It's really old news in industrial settings that use a lot of heat and power, but the typical implementations require lots of capital, space and skilled attention. And the proportions of heat and power are essentially fixed - one or the other will be either supplemented or wasted to match the actual demands.

Micro-CHP is an prepackaged implementation, like an appliance, designed for residential application. See this for an example.

Why buy it? You can generate your own heat and power for prices comparable to that for heat alone using readily available gas. And although the systems are not available yet, around 2007 they should be available as residential backup power systems.

Drawbacks: capital costs mean you'll wait a while for your full payback. And it still uses fossil fuels.

Electric utilities have mixed emotions about these devices. To understand why it helps to recognize a couple of things about the power business.

It's the peaks in load that are expensive to service - power generating companies must have the capacity to service it yet they can only use this capacity at peaks, which means high costs. Imagine if you could get by with a Beetle 99% of the time, but the rest of the time you might have to drive into a swamp or need to travel over 100 MPH, so you had to have a Land Rover and a Maserati on standby. It might be fun, but it's not something you make money with.

And these higher costs can be exacerbated when power distribution companies are forced to bid against each other for power during the very highest peaks. In severe cases businesses will shut down deliberately to reduce load, which of course is an economic hit to the business and community. At the worst there will be blackouts when utilities find themselves incapable of delivering power.

In short, electric utilities want to mitigate peak demands when they can. Micro-CHP can help if the peak demand is in heating season.

In cooling season? The heat must be rejected somewhere, which both adds capital costs and reduces the usable energy output for a given input. Under exceptional circumstances this might be worthwhile, but I wouldn't expect much of this.

Anyway, this might be the Next Big Thing, if only for the kind of people who like to buy hybrid cars nowadays. And it shows potential to do much more. Check out more here.

Remedial manners training

Jimmy K offers some advice.

As for the creep from the library, I say that as long as he's still lipping off, he could use another zap from the taser. Maybe if he sees enough stars he'll realize the universe doesn't revolve around his sorry butt.

If you like "Dancing with the Stars"....

...why not get a dose of the real thing? One of the premier competitions in the world is in progress right now in Columbus, Ohio - the Ohio Star Ball.

Here you'll see competitive dancing as it's really done. Notice how the women get the short end of the stick on "Dancing with the Stars"? In a real competition, amateur women don't compete against amateur men. And they shouldn't because there are two distinct, not totally commensurable roles.

And of course on DWTS one couple has the entire floor to themselves, with music they've been practicing to. In the real world you don't know what will be played, and you'll have many other couples sharing the floor at the same time. Even among the top pros, collisions and near-misses happen, and how people deal with that ("floorcraft") is an important measure of their talent and composure.

If this sounds interesting, then be ready to go to downtown Columbus on Friday or Saturday. The pros, like local heroes Jesse DeSoto and professional partner Jackie Josephs, will be competing around that time. If Jesse sounds familiar, he's the poor guy who had to carry that heavy load called Shanna Moakler in the most recent DWTS.

Actually there is plenty of competition on other days too - it actually started on Tuesday. Most of this is "pro-am" - a professional teacher with a student. This is the minor leagues where you find guys like me, dancing to shorter passages on smaller floors through countless heats. But somewhere out there you'll find tomorrow's champs.

The pros really earn their money in the pro-am events. Some like Jim Maranto will have many advanced students there doing countless dances and heats. A couple of years ago I asked one particularly busy pro how many times he'd been on the floor and he said it was on the order of 400 times. When you consider that this was with different students doing different routines in different dances at different levels, each with their own unique restrictions, it's quite a feat of stamina and concentration.

Can't make it? You'll get another shot - once again PBS will be there recording, and the show will be broadcast sometime later as "America's Ballroom Challenge" or something like that.

Congratulations

...to the Democrats for their newfound position. Isn't it amazing what happens when the focus shifts from bitching about chads to finding better candidates?

Now let's see if they use this power for the benefit of themselves or for that of the country. With the likes of Conyers, Waxman, Leahy, Rangel and previously impeached judge Alcee Hastings in line for committee chairs, it doesn't look good.

But it could be fun to watch. In particular, I'm waiting for Rangel to call for a draft again. And how long can it be before Conyers starts his impeachment nonsense?

One thing for sure - the tone of the news will change.

Salute

Donald Rumsfeld is a fine man who did an admirable job as Secretary of Defense.

This is a sincere complement, but I can't match that of his opponents, whose rabidity was a constant reminder that he was doing well.

This woman needs to lose her job

Is she saying that the University of Michigan was no good before it started its diversity kick?

Hotel owners busted as identity thieves

This ought to warm the hearts of travelers everywhere, especially if they're using their own credit cards. And although we're talking local owners so far, at least two of the motels busted were Holiday Inns. More here.

Why are liberals so against violence?

Because they so often deserve it, like Larry Elder shows here.

Make your own Stirling engine

Right here. (pdf)

And while you're there, take a look around at other stuff from Make magazine.