New keyboard from WASD with Cherry MX green switches. It’s the little pleasures I appreciate.
Info Dump
79 posts
It appears the Syrian government has used chemical weapons, namely Sarin, on its own citizens. It’s only human to feel grief and outrage. Something needs to be done.
The frustrating truth is, we’re not the ones to do it. Sryia poses no direct threat to the United States or its interests. Military action on our part is simply not justified. It would be nice to see the United Nations grow a pair and intervene, but we have no real authority to act on our own. To do so is to engage in exactly the sort of overbearing forced regime changes we so resent Vladimir Putin for doing.
It is also a complete violation of a very significant campaign promise made by Donald Trump, which gives me pause. Trump ran on the idea that we wouldn’t get involved in things like this, that we wouldn’t become the world’s policeman, and that he’d pursue a Wilsonian “America First” sort of isolationism. Continued...
We’ve heard the blame shifting. We’ve seen the finger pointing. By now, you’ve no doubt heard the theory from the Left: Donald Trump won the election because of uneducated white males, which is liberal codespeak for racists. Apparently, there are 60 million or so of them.
When the last shred of an argument one has is a shockingly and unfeasibly large allegation of racism, it’s time to reconsider strategy. They were wrong, so wrong it cost the Democrats everything. Hillary Clinton must be fuming that she not only lost–she lost to Donald Trump.
Just consider that. He’s the most ridiculous and inept Presidential candidate we’ve ever had. Any one of his stupendous blunders or unearthed scandals would have been enough to destroy any other campaign. How did he get this far?
The answer is simple: anger. Not just the kind that makes people throw a vase and feel better, but the kind that gets deferred. Continued...
I recently switched careers, and I’m now training as an over-the-road trucker. So far, it’s been an intense learning experience. Here are a few observations I’d like to pass along.
I’m driving a vehicle that can weigh as much as 80,000 pounds. When that thing is moving at 65mph, it can’t stop on a dime. Physics doesn’t work that way.
If you want to go faster than me, by all means pass me. No, I want you to. I’m travelling as quickly as conditions and the vehicle will allow. If you do choose to pass, please make sure to leave some space before cutting in front of me. See the previous paragraph for an explanation. Your best bet is to wait until you can see the marker lights above my windshield in your mirrors.
If I can, I’ll let you merge in. Sometimes I can’t. I’m not going to slam on my brakes to do so. Continued...
Through most of our history, we’ve assumed we occupy a privileged and unique place in the universe. In the 16th century, Copernicus paved the way for the understanding that we orbit but one star among many. Over the last two centuries, we’ve found that we’re a small part of one galaxy, and that ours is but one galaxy among billions. If we look at those numbers, it seems ridiculous to assume ours is the only planet in that whole universe to host intelligent life.
Until the 1990’s, the main counterargument was that planetary formation appeared to be limited to our sun. That changed in 1995, when radio astronomers were able to infer several extrasolar planets. The Kepler observatory was launched in 2009, and we’ve now verified the existence of nearly 2,000 exoplanets in more than 1,200 solar systems.
In 1960, Frank Drake decided to turn a radio telescope to the sky and listen for signals from possible alien civilizations. Continued...
The Voyager probes were a huge part on my childhood. I was 7 years old when they gave us the best images of Jupiter and its moons we’d ever seen. The following year, we received unprecedented data on Saturn.
Uranus and Neptune remained somewhat mysterious. In the ground-based telescopes of the time, they were just big, white dots. Voyager 2 reached Uranus when I was 14, and it revealed a more colorful, active, and strange world than we’d imagined. Neptune was predicted to be remote, cold, and serene. My senior year of high school, Voyager proved that expectation wrong. Neptune is warmer than we though it would be, and it has storm systems with winds faster than the speed of sound. Its moon Triton is large enough to suggest it had been captured from somewhere else, and it has geysers of liquid nitrogen.
In short, the more we knew, the stranger things became. Continued...
The sunset, seen from the Gale Crater on Mars.
Sunset. On. Mars.
Science fiction is often political. Heinlein’s middle period is praised by libertarian thinkers, Star Trek promoted progressive mores and social justice, and Ursula Le Guin’s work sparked debates about gender roles. This is to be expected in a genre that often looks to the future for hope or cautionary tales.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the awards pageants are also marred by politics. It really shouldn’t. Yet some people are crying foul because Larry Correia and and Brad Torgersen managed to dominate the nomination process for the Hugo awards.
They didn’t cheat. They simply worked the system within its own rules.
What’s more, I really don’t care.
What does concern me is that the Hugos are a sham in the first place. We had some spectacular, thoughtful, and moving fiction last year. Almost none of it got nominated (Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Sword being the exception).
The Kevin J. Anderson book is a generic space-opera mess that reads like it was phoned in. Continued...
Picking up from yesterday, we’re left with vastly differing accounts of the emperor Numerian’s death. Which is correct? The easiest way to solve this is to run down a simple timeline.
Malalas’ Chronographia makes the following claims:
- Saint Babylas (then patriarch of Antioch) refused to admit an emperor to the church
- the emperor executed Babylas
- the emperor went to war with the Persians
- said emperor was captured following a siege at Carrhae
It becomes apparent he’s referencing three distinct emperors, all of whom predate Numerian by a generation.
I recently got around to reading Peter Heather’s Fall of the Roman Empire. It’s an excellent read for the layman, and he poses some interesting debates for the historian. One interesting theory he suggests is that the Huns had an indirect (and earlier than usually assumed) effect on Rome as their migrations forced the Goths to rush the borders and clash with the Empire.
But my area of study is the 3rd Century crisis, and that’s why I noticed an odd and unorthodox account of Numerian’s death.
Everyone remembers the famous emperor Numerian, right? He’s right up there with…well, don’t feel badly. They don’t teach much about the 3rd century in school because it was such a mess. Rome’s borders were crumbling under the weight of Germanic invasions, and the empire was in a state of nearly constant civil war. Dio (as in Cassius, not Ronnie James) remarked that Rome had descended “from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust.” Continued...
The first trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens is live. Here’s what we’ve got:
- John Boyega as a stormtrooper. The armor’s new, and it’s a first to see one of them as person. Rumor has it he’s a protagonist.
- A beachball-shaped R2 unit. It’s less annoying tha Jar-Jar. Then again, so are head lice.
- Menacing stormtroopers being airdropped somewhere. Does this mean some remnant of the Empire is still around?
- Daisy Ridley riding a giant speeder bike. Is that a lightsaber lashed to the side?
- A desert planet, but possibly not Tatooine. Notice the single sun in the final shot.
- X-wings skimming over a lake. The pilots’ uniforms look familiar, but the s-foils are different. Freakin’ x-wings, dude.
- A creepy guy with a red lightsaber. It looks more like a heavy claymore than the agile swords we’re used to seeing. It also looks angry.
- Cue up the John Williams and ermagherd the Falcon.
Continued...
Science fiction is often divided into two main genres: soft and hard. Soft science fiction tends to be more humanistic, with a greater emphasis on traditional story and character development. Ursula Le Guin, Theodore Sturgeon, and Cordwainer Smith are good examples.
Hard science fiction tends to focus on concepts, with more weight given to scientific rigor and speculation. Its lineage stretches from Asimov and Clarke to modern authors like Greg Bear and Alastair Reynolds. It’s not to say these guys can’t write stories, but this is primarily a literature of ideas.
That’s where Watts comes in. His books are defined by pessimism towards the future and a density of scientific detail. He wants to make a point as well as tell a story.
I have to admit: it’s not the loopiest hypothesis I’ve heard. For those concerned about drones, there’s informative, if not misguided, information here.
Politicians didn’t waste any time calling for gun control following the Elliot Rodger shooting. The usual suspects like Dick Blumenthal and Peter King have already made their voices heard. So has Dianne Feinstein, whose renewal of the ineffective Assault Weapons Ban was snubbed last year.
We must ask ourselves if an individual whose family called police with concerns about mental health, who is receiving therapy and who has had several run-ins with police should be allowed to own multiple firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. When anyone, no matter their mental health or history, can so easily obtain any gun they want and as many as they want–we must recognize there is a problem.
You know what? I don’t disagree. Where I do take issue is the idea that more laws would have prevented this. Consider California’s laws for a moment. They are are among the strictest in the country, and they’re a virtual grab-bag of everything the gun-control lobby wants. Continued...
Michael Bloomberg has started a new initiative called “Everytown for Gun Safety.” It’s easily the worst gun safety site I’ve ever seen. There is no information about safe handling, safe storage, safety training, or anything about safety at all. It’s just boilerplate for gun-control advocacy.
That just won’t do. Someone created a pro-gun “Everytown for Gun Safety” Facebook page, but it has been removed. Bloomberg must be a really poor sport.
For an alternative, check out Anytown for Gun Safety. Yes, I’m being snarky and spiteful. If anyone wants the .com or .org domains for a better purpose, let me know.
A dealer in Minnesota shipped us a pistol like this:
That’s 92 stamps, in case anyone’s wondering. The saddest part was that he was still $0.14 short when he got to the post office.
I spent a couple of minutes marveling at how long it must have taken to stick all those on the box. Bonus points for persistence, I suppose.
Christopher Malcom has passed away at the age of 67. He played Zev Senesca in the Empire Strikes Back.
If you don’t know who that is, you can do your penance by watching the original trilogy again tonight.
☠☠☠☠. Really. I mean, ☠☠☠☠.
I guess I’m not going anywhere for awhile. On the bright side, I still have power. Many people in Georgia don’t at the moment. Fortunately, everyone knew enough to get off the roads before the worst hit.
The bird feeder gets pretty popular in this weather, and I’m getting visitors I’ve not seen before.
Here’s hoping something thaws by tomorrow.
It looks like we’re in for a repeat performance of the weather problems we had two weeks ago. As usual, our infrastructure is woefully underprepared. People may be stuck in their houses for several days, and power outages are likely. We can expect a bit of finger-pointing when it’s over, but nothing will change.
In the meantime, make sure you’ve got batteries charged and your 30-caliber magazine clips loaded. For while we sit at home and eat Cheetos, the Draugr are training.
Last night, Bill Nye debated Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis. It didn’t go so well for Nye.
Why? Because Ham has certainty on his side, and certainty isn’t something scientists do. Scientists don’t accept explanations without proof, and they’re smart enough to admit when they don’t know something. Creationists, on the other hand, claim to have all the answers. At the end of the day, the latter approach appeals more to a crowd.
Creationists generally issue a few stock arguments against various theories, most of which are easily debunked by even the layman. Notice the insistence that the second law of thermodynamics (entropy, in short) invalidates the concept of evolution. What they’re missing is that Carnot’s law applies in a closed system, not an open one.
Someone needs to tell the guy in picture #21 that the Big Bang was not the result of an exploding star. Continued...
We’ve got eleven Democrats retiring from Congress this year: four from the Senate and seven from the House. While gun owners will hardly miss Carolyn McCarthy or Henry Waxman, we’re also losing a few allies. For all the facile claims that the Republicans support the 2nd Amendment and the Democrats don’t, this may be of interest.
Tom Harkin of Iowa and Carl Levin of Michigan both co-sponsored the Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act and have F ratings from the NRA, as does Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. On the other hand, consider Max Baucus, who holds a B rating. Despite some weirdness about “smart guns,” he voted against the Manchin-Toomey amendment. You may recall that Manchin and Toomey are both Republicans, not Democrats.
In the house, we bid adieu to McCarthy and Waxman, who were of course rated F by the NRA. Also leaving are Jim Moran of Virginia and George Miller of California, both of whom sponsored the magazine ban (I am not writing that out twice!) Continued...
Advil Cold & Sinus is the bomb for flu symptoms. Unfortunately, its primary ingredient is pseudoephedrine, which means I’ve got to sign an entry in a logbook at the pharmacy. I promised I wasn’t Heisenberg, to which the nice lady responded she was more a fan of the many-worlds interpretation.
Wow. Totally outgeeked at the pharmacy counter.
One of the “executive actions” the President proposed last month has been submitted to the Federal Register as a rules change proposal. It involves changing the way NFA items are registered to trusts.
When paying the tax and registering an NFA weapon, one can register it to himself as an individual. However, if he wants to grant possession to someone else, it has to be transferred again, thus incurring another round of paperwork, delay, and remuneration to the ATF. He also has to secure approval from his local Chief Law Enforcement Officer (CLEO), usually a sheriff or police chief. Such approval is at the discretion of the officer, and many choose not to grant it.
The alternative is to register the weapon to a trust. In that case, local law enforcement need not be involved, and other parties may be granted access to the weapon by simply adding them as trustees. Continued...
Leonard Embody is back on the prowl. So is Art Bell. Coincidence?
I wonder.
Apparently, Mr. Embody was modeling his AR-15 S&M bondage suit by waltzing around Nashville with it. I notice with some chagrin that NewsChannel5 depicted him as a “gun rights advocate.” That is emphatically not the case.
At least Mr. Bell can be entertaining at times.
Mr. Embody has posted a video of his escapade. Contrary to his protestations, the police did have reasonable suspicion to stop him. Tennessee law Section 39-17-1302 prohibits ownership of unregistered NFA items. It is an affirmative defense if the owner can prove the items are legally registered, but that’s a defense made in court, not on the side of the road.
Now he has to go before a judge to prove his innocence. In the process, he’s wasting everyone’s time, he’s squandering the taxpayers’ money, and he’s probably going to try and bring another inane lawsuit.
That’s the Cassini probe looking back at us from behind Saturn. The little dot? Earth.
Our whole planet. Six billion people. Despite all the stuff we think is worth fighting over, we’re all together on that little speck.
We can still send things out there. We can still do things like this. Tell me we can’t afford it, and I have to ask where our priorities really are.
My generation remembers him as Fire Marshall Bill. He’s done a few movies in which he wielded guns, both as a villain and a hero. Most recently, he took a starring role as a bad guy in Kick-Ass 2. On the eve of its release, he claims he can’t support it because of the “level of violence.”
I did Kickass a month b4 Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence. My apologies to e
— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 23, 2013
He’s made his disdain for the gun culture known before. Following the Sandy Hook tragedy, he went on a surreal and extended tirade against the gun culture. He released a truly tactless and insulting video, then claimed that gun owners had “very little left in their heart and soul worth protecting.” At least he’s sticking to a consistent ideology.
Of course, one wonders if those principles of his will prevent him from cashing the checks he gets for his role.
Iain Banks is dying. That’s not supposed to happen, and I’m quite dissatisfied with this turn of events. I would register a grievance to the appropriate authorities, but Special Circumstances won’t answer.
Banks produced a body of work that was deeply engaging and often darkly satirical. Perhaps his greatest achievement was the Culture series, a science-fiction universe of massive scope, grim wit, and oddly self-defeating optimism. The last novel in the series centers around the last days of an advanced civilization that has decided to simply walk away from this universe. I wonder now if that’s not a coincidence.
…and here I am, already talking about the man in the past tense.
He recently completed a book called The Quarry, and his publisher is moving the release date forward so Banks can live to see it on the shelves. At a recent talk, he claimed to have a new Culture novel “ready to go,” though its status is now uncertain. Continued...
I spent the last two days on Long Island. I was reminded of things I didn’t realize I missed, like Carvel and White Castle. I also forgot how noisy houses with baseboard heating could be.
Another thing I miss is simple courtesy. Flying out of Hartsfield in Atlanta, the TSA agents were brusque and downright rude. If their job is to inspire fear in fliers, they are certainly pursing it with no inconsiderable amount of zeal.
Ironically, another passenger was flagged to have her hands tested for some sort of chemical residue. I’ve no idea why she was picked, but if it was for gunpowder, I can only wonder what they’d have thought if they swabbed mine.
Coming back, I flew out of MacArthur Airport. Aside from being cleaner and better organized than Hartsfield, the security checkpoint was nearly pleasant. A piece of metal in my hip showed up on the body scanner, and the agent who flagged me was pleasant and efficient. Continued...
Ron Paul can be a smart man at times. There are times I can really get behind some of his ideas. Then there are times like this:
Chris Kyle's death seems to confirm that "he who lives by the sword dies by the sword." Treating PTSD at a firing range doesn't make sense
— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) February 4, 2013
I’m sure there will be some backpedaling from his supporters about “context” or something, but this is just Ron for you. He’s got his internally consistent ideology, and he sticks with it, even when that means doing some truly cringeworthy things.
I’m sure this is some extension of his disdain for what he sees as foreign adventurism. However, there’s a wide gulf between criticizing a policy and castigating people who’ve put their lives on the line for us. Somebody needs to grab Uncle Ron by the elbow and quietly usher him off the stage at this point.
Well, it’s 12:21 on 12/21/2012, and world didn’t end. Y2K was a bust. Howard Camping let us down in 2011. Even the stupid Mayans can’t even get the end of days right.
Now I guess I have to go to work tomorrow. What a rip. Oh well. I guess we can always look forward to the heat death of the universe, even if that’ll take awhile.
Saturday, a guy killed his girlfriend, then made a show of ending his own life in front of a bunch of folks. It’s horrible and senseless, but because he happened to be a guy who got paid gobs of money to play a game, it became national news. At times like this, we need pretty people to tell us what to think. As we know from such luminaries as Bono and Janeane Garofalo, popular entertainers are the most qualified to do this.
Thing is, they don’t know much about football, so we need a guy who gets paid gobs of money to talk about the people who get paid gobs of money to play the game. Enter Bob Costas. He has a truly epic toupee, but he’s not much of a deep thinker. When he decided he had to say something on the matter, he chose to quote Jason Whitlock, another guy who gets paid gobs of money to blog about…well, you get the drift. Continued...
Iain Banks’ Culture series doesn’t lend itself to easy summations. Entire essays have been written on the world he set up, so I won’t go into much detail.
Essentially, Banks has created a liberal utopia on a galactic scale. Given a limitless supply of easy energy and near-omnipotent manufacturing technology, the citizens of the Culture want for nothing material. Tedious administration is done by artificial intelligence, leaving normal folks to live their lives as they please. In such a society, property is an archaic concept, something that is even reflected in their language. With scarcity removed from the equation, the only real crime is coercion.
Still, every society hits a wall eventually. In Banks’ world, self-destruction or a collapse into barbarism is unlikely, and the end point for civilizations is simple ennui. What do you do when you just feel like you’re going through the motions, with nothing left to contribute? Continued...
So, I just got off a bout of food poisoning. I’m eating again, but if feels like someone’s punched my stomach. That’s unpleasant.
Tamara, fellow gun blogger, high queen of Coal Creek Armory, and lady with a S&W collection that puts mine to shame, has real problems. She’s been diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma and needs to get work done. She doesn’t have insurance, so this is coming out of her own pocket. Tamara’s done a lot for the gun culture, and here’s a chance to give something back in a tangible way.
There are several raffles being held to raise money, but if you want to go right to the source, hit the PayPal button on the sidebar of her page and send a donation directly.
Chris Muir also has an absolutely epic poster he’s raffling off here for five bucks.
The Catholics have guilt, and the Jews have relentless self-examination. What’s left for the modern Protestant stranded in plush suburbia?
The blues? Heck no. White folks (Stevie Ray Vaughn excepted) don’t get that at all. Scientology? Too expensive. Calvinism? Too retro. Those Robert Bly campouts? Really creepy.
If a life of quiet desperation seems a bit too literate and everybody’s tired of hearing about your sundry neuroses, what’s left to do? Turn that desire for self-flagellation inwards and express it in awkward and possibly dangerous ways!
This is not an advisable way to go about it. Pride may goeth before the fall, but it doesn’t make a very good bullseye. Jealosy and selfishness quite literally dodged the bullet, and despite making two appearances, laziness seems to have pretty good survival skills in today’s guilt- and bullet-ridden society. Unfortunately, the glory of God got winged pretty good at the bottom there.
I’m not sure what sort of proselytization was being attempted here, but it’s more than a bit unsettling in both concept and execution. Continued...
President Obama opened himself up for questions on Reddit today. The few answers he gave were safe and uncontroversial human-interest fodder: the White House recipe for beer, who watches the dog, and his favorite Bulls player. The only real question of merit came regarding the space program.
He name-checked Neil Armstrong as “a reminder of the inspiration and wonder that our space program has provided in the past.” What he failed to note was that one of Armstrong’s rare public statements was a letter to the administration castigating the President for gutting the same space program.
With the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, the Constellation project was to be our next means of achieving low-earth orbit. That was cut from the budget, and if we want a ride into space at the moment, we’ve got to book it with the Russians.
That’s right: we have to pay the Russians to get us into space. Continued...
Looking at the pictures coming back from the Gale Crater, I have to remind myself that this is a different world.
When Voyager 2 passed Uranus in 1985, I was old enough to understand the impact. Sure, we got a good look at Saturn and its moons back in 1981, but we already knew what that looked like. Uranus, on the other hand, had never been more than a bright spot on a telescope. I watched with fascination as it resolved into a placid, sea-green planet. It was at once beautiful, yet hopelessly cold and remote.
Voyager reached Neptune in my senior year of high school. At the time, it was the outermost planet, lying 4 billion miles from the sun. As the last images came back, Voyager said farewell to the final outpost of the Solar System and continued its long journey to the Oort Cloud and beyond. It’s still running as we speak. Continued...
An old post of mine suddenly got a great deal of traffic the last couple of days. I’d recorded a piece called Starfish Prime a couple of years back, and in the accompanying blurb, I did a small bit of explanation on the name.
As it turns out, this week was the 50th anniversary of the event for which it was named. A Reddit user linked my article as an informative source, which it really isn’t. For the story of the weird experiment our government did involving detonating nuclear bombs in the upper atmosphere, there’s a good article from Scientific American here.
Sometimes history is stranger than fiction.
Dante was my best friend for fifteen years. This was the last picture I took of him, a day before I had to have him put to sleep. I gave him the best life I could, and he repaid me with unconditional love.
He meant to stick with me, even though he was hurting. I was reluctant to let him go, because I was too afraid to lose him. He was brave while I was selfish.
He’d never have thought that, though. He simply loved me with all his heart, and that’s a gift we all too often take for granted.
I watched him grow from an ebullient and bright puppy to a wise old man, and he was a reassuring constant in my life, no matter what happened. Now it aches to walk through a room that’s all too empty without him.
Dogs love unconditionally, and I do believe they have souls. Continued...
The Supreme Court has refused [pdf] to hear United States v. Masciandaro. That leaves Woollard v. Sheridan, which still has decent odds of making it to the calendar.
There’s been some scuttlebutt that the Court would rather hear a “pure” case in which the petitioner isn’t someone appealing a criminal conviction. Both the Heller and McDonald cases fit this bill, as they were brought by law-abiding citizens appealing unjust laws. In such cases, the Court can address a constitutional issue directly, without having other logistical issues getting in the way. Woollard is a compelling case that gives them that opportunity.
In happier news, that’s the CZ P-01 with a Ka-Bar pistol bayonet at the top. Sure, CZ made one a few years back, but this one is lighter, and it has a really good blade. I don’t know why the world needs more of these, but hey: it looks cool. Continued...
This is one of the most unique works of fiction I’ve read in awhile. A summary doesn’t do it justice, but I’d recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in science fiction or fantasy.
Spoilers ahead. If you don’t want the good bits given away, go read the book, then come back.
On second thought, that would make reading this article pointless. Oh well. Do what you want. Free country and all.