More sights on the ride

I rode by the place I talked about in this post, and found that the wheelchair had been moved and that the Terminator 2 object in the back wasn't a poster at all, but one of several abandoned video game machines. Pictures below.









And I'm going to experiment with allowing anonymous commenting. Is anyone actually reading this?

GMaps at last

As promised yesterday, here is my first experiment with GMaps.

On the whole, I like the technology. It does a lot of the work for you in terms of plotting and it works off on an external xml file. The only real downside is that it does not use actual address information, only latitude and longitude coordinates. There are a number of free lookup services online, I used GeoCoder.us which worked very well, still it's an extra, probably unnecessary step.

I'll look around and see if there is some automated process out there which does automatic conversions and reports back.

On the whole though, a very good and easy proof of concept.

With no further ado, here My Week So Far

North Atlanta Goodness

I went up to Eric's last night to pick a little, we wind up going to Eckerd's to get some cold Medicine for his wife, and of course, I see this



It's for dry, cracked hands evidently.

At long last

Google has just released their API for Google Maps! First Google Earth, now this. Google really is an awe-inspiring company. Look for a week in the life of Steve very soon.

And as I'm writing this, Mike just sent me a link to it.

And for those of you following the screw-you homeowner Kelo Supreme court ruling, check out Hotel Lost Liberty.

Wednesday rapid fire

• A post well worth reading at Asymetrical Information
• Solar Drone New Endurance Champ
• Orwell on Fascism
  

Interesting

Sadly, it seems that PBS will be fully funded, here is what the executives make.

Google Earth is staggering

Google Earth was released today and I'm blown away. Basically it's a free version of their KeyHole software, but with incredible capabilities. Skylines, tilting and foreign cities, it's all just staggering.

The winner for weirdness

From an interview with female Palestinian suicide bomber

According to the Koran, male martyrs are welcomed to Paradise by 72 beautiful virgins. Ayat, as with many of the women she is incarcerated with, believes that a woman martyr "will be the chief of the 72 virgins, the fairest of the fair".

From the Telegraph UK.

Second class even in the afterlife.

More Ajax Links

Google-xjaxslt via the Google Blog.

Oil

I came across an interesting article by Alan Reynolds on the Cato site:

We import nearly 58 percent of all petroleum, yet only 45 percent of each barrel is used to produce gasoline, and a significant portion of that gasoline is used in delivery vans and taxis. Commuter and leisure driving accounts for little more than 40 percent of the oil we consume -- far less than the amount we import. The rest of each barrel of crude is used for heating oil and diesel fuel for trucks, busses, farm machinery and ships (23 percent), petrochemicals (17 percent), jet fuel (9 percent), asphalt (4 percent) and propane (4 percent).

...

The U.S. index of industrial production peaked at 116.4 in June 2000 and then fell to 109.1 by December 2001; the price of West Texas crude simultaneously fell from $32 to $19. U.S. Industrial demand for petrochemicals declined, and so did the related need for fuel used to transport industrial supplies and products.

Similar effects were magnified worldwide. Falling industrial production in any region has the same effect on oil prices, so crude fell from $25 to $12 in the wake of the Asian currency crisis of 1997-98.

and

Nobody in Washington shows the slightest awareness of the global nature of the oil market, of the fact that industrial damage from high oil prices has nothing to do with whether a country imports or exports oil, or even the fact that there is a crucial two-way linkage between worldwide industrial production and worldwide oil prices. When it comes to causes and effects of high oil prices, nobody in Washington shows much interest in logic or facts. It might be sad if it wasn't so pathologically pathetic.

RTWT.

Unexpected to see

I came across this odd site yesterday while biking on my usual route. I don't remember seeing any of this before, either the dumpster or the garbage, thought I think there is usually more underbrush in this area. Behind the wheelchair was a poster for Terminator 2, which came out in the early 90s.

Live Aid / Live Eight

I came across a very interesting article in the Prospect (UK) about the original Live Aid funds. It touches on a corrolary to what I believe is Friedman's Law, to wit the government can't give anything away.

But did the mobilisation of public opinion through celebrity endorsement really play the positive role with which it is now credited? To ask this question is emphatically not to turn hagiography on its head and to demonise either Geldof or Live Aid. There is no smoking-gun evidence demonstrating that Live Aid achieved nothing, or only did harm. But there is ample reason to conclude that Live Aid did harm as well as good. It is also arguable that Live Aid may have done more harm than good.

and

With the exception of MSF, what neither the relief world in general, nor the UN, nor Geldof and his Live Aid team have ever come to terms with is that the Mengistu regime—finally ousted in 1991—also committed mass murder in the resettlement programme in which Live Aid monies were used and in which NGOs that benefited from Live Aid funding were active. The Dergue was in control, and it did with the UN and the NGOs what the Nazis did with the International Committee of the Red Cross: it made them unwilling collaborators.

A very interesting article. I had no ideas of the similarities to the Ukranine in the 30s. RTWT.

Links for future reference

• Gadget Madness
• Project DU
  

The Karl Rove Quote

Interesting commentary from Instapundit, and I agree with him that this was a very well done political trick, which the dems seem to be buying, hook line and sinker. More commentary at Winds of Change.

Michael Totten brings us the quote of the week with "It's like watching a leper challenge a hemophiliac to full contact karate."

Some what prescient is this Andrew Sullivan column about the whole matter. Rove has done a very good job of exploiting the principal-agent problem going on with the Dems right now.

Rapid fire Friday

• Tupac Shakur arts center opens - and so very close to me. Meanwhile the guy who created the first schools for blacks in this state can't even get an elementary school named after him.
  
  
• Poll: In wake of Iraq war, allies prefer China to U.S. - To thine own self be true America. If all of the aid we donated both publicly and privately in the wake of the Tsunami didn't help anything in these countries, then not much will. Immigration is a much better metric than polls anyway.
  
  
• The One Campaign - solve Extreme Poverty and Global Aids (why are they extreme and global?) via nagging and fashionable wristbands. It's so cool, after all Bono and Angelina Jolie are for it. Brought to you by people who don't understand the difference between stock and flow.
  
  
• Palestinian Woman Heading for Treatment at Israeli Hospital Caught Carrying Explosives - really! To Quote:
  

  At the Shikma Prison in Israel's Negev Desert, where the Shin Bet security service allowed Israeli TV reporters to interview her, al-Biss said she was determined to carry out a suicide attack against Israel because of its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

  "My dream was to be a martyr," she said, adding that she was recruited by the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a violent offshoot of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement. "I believe in death."

  Sitting calmly across from an Israeli TV interviewer, the young woman with large brown eyes and curly dark hair pulled back in a ponytail said her decision had nothing to do with her disfigurement, which might make her less desirable as a bride.

  "Don't think that because of how I look I wanted to carry out an attack," said al-Biss. "Since I was a little girl I wanted to carry out an attack."

  RTWT. She takes a bit of it all back, worth reading.
  
  
• The Two Blogospheres - an interesting article by Mathew Yglesias
  
  
• ScriptCenter: ATM for Drugs - much more on this later, but definitely a step in the right direction.
  
  

Toy bought, Toy bought, Toy bought

The Olympus DC 8080 is on it's way.

On this day, I am again a licensed motorist!

And all it took was two days at the DMV. Oh the fun.

I go there at yesterday at 2:40 in the afternoon, and I'm five people away from being called when they close.

I get there at 1:30 today, and walk out at 4:45. The actual process took a mere 3 minutes.

As one might imagine, there was very little of interest happening. I went to the DMV at South DeKalb mall, where the only interesting things were

• The two people behind me debating the terms of a plea bargain
• A minor confrontation between a countrier than thou hipster and a guy in a bad toupee (toupee was trying to cut in line)
  

All in all, a waste of time.

Items of the day

• Funnies one liner - John J. DiIulio for his characterization of the the Bush administration as "the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis"
• This post by the Agitator :
  

  Better people who are well-employed decide for the urban poor that they don't need those jobs. And that they should be shopping at more tasteful stores, anyway.

  I think that maybe -- just maybe -- anti-Wal Mart sentiment has more to do with an aversion to the white, rural ethnology the store sometimes represents than its labor practices. We can't have our Ethiopian restaurants and esoteric bookstores blighted by NASCAR culture.
  

Public piety

I have long believed that people are hard wired to practice religion in some form, and this current article on Cnn.com "So Long to Gas Guzzler Guilt". The article is about a company called "Terrapass" that trades in pollution credits to make up for the auto emissions of environmentalists

The company is a for-profit enterprise, but caps its profits at a maximum of 10 percent of revenues.

Those revenues so far, Arnold says, are "itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny." The company started selling TerraPasses in November and had sold about 620 as of last week.

If you buy a TerraPass, the money will be used to purchase smog allowances on the Chicago Climate Exchange. The Climate Exchange allows polluting companies that produce less than a certain amount of airborne pollutants to sell credits to other companies that then allow them to go over the limit.

The overall limits are reduced over time making it more costly to exceed them. Organizations and companies that buy pollution credits reduce the overall supply of credits and also make it more costly for companies to exceed the limits.

and

Since car drivers are under no legal compulsion to try to compensate for their tailpipe emissions, the TerraPass will only appeal to those who feel some guilt about their driving, and want to do something about it.

Not surprisingly, few SUV drivers have been buying them. Most have gone to owners of fuel-efficient cars that produce relatively few pollutants.

That initially surprised Arnold.

"We fully expected to target SUV drivers with SUV guilt," he said. "It just doesn't exist"

Instead, he's been traveling to environmental fairs pitching the idea to those who, for the most part, drive fuel efficient small cars and gas/electric hybrid vehicles.

"Environmentalists have a very conflicted relationship with their cars," said Arnold.

As for himself, Arnold doesn't own a car. He commutes to work by bicycle.

The need to show piety is deeply ingrained in us.

An interesting blog find

Via Tom Palmer, comes the interesting blog Right Watch, which is dedicated to keeping an eye on the self-styled "Paleo - Libertarian" section of the American political landscape, the Paleo libs being those who identify strongly with the later thought of Murray Rothbard and (improbably) the Confederate States of America. While a small group, they do seem to speak for a somewhat larger group of anti-war right wingers.

I've seen these folks in print for a while, and one thing always jumps out at me. For all their pro-CSA rhetoric, they have no visible connection to the actual South. One does not see any mention of a Southern birthplace or education on their bios. Any actual tie to the South, old or new, is conspicuous by it's absense.

A day behind on the blogging

I'm almost caught up on the blogging, now. I went twice around Stone Mountain yesterday with Mike and Erin (happy birthday Erin!) and afterwards we had German good with Mary and Ed.

Then I fell asleep incredibly early for me (around midnight). When I woke up at 5:50 this morning I thought I'd slept through to the next night.

Saw Batman

Eric and I saw Batman Begins on Saturday night. I have to say I recommend it highly. They stuck close with Frank Miller's "Year One" series and portrayed Bruce Wayne as a dark, angry figure, with none of the campyness that characterized the television series. Christian Bale performs very well as Bruce Wayne and Batman, the other characters did excellent jobs as well.

The Ras Al Gul character was a bit different, in the movie, he plays more of a spiritual leader (to put it nicely) in the comic book he 's more of a genocidal eco-terrorist. The Henri Ducard role is different as well (at least different that the Joe Hamm story I read.) Scarecrow was extremely well done, and Gary Oldman could not have done a better job.

Missing, curiously was any mention of Batman as the world's greatest detective, though one can't have everything.

After the movie Eric and I had dinner at the Rusty Nail, AKA the Smoking Gun (informally named after the barbecue smoker pictured below.


Of no significant import was the waving man outside of Decatur CD. I don't mention it because of any great significance, but mostly because the photo turned out well.


And that was my Saturday.

Shaking my faith in the role of women in society

Whenever I need to feel smugly superior I read the "Woman to Woman" feature in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, where a pretentious left-leaning woman debates a cloying right-leaning woman. Naturally I was interested in this weeks topic Should medical marijuana be legalized?

The left starts out with an irrelevant racial remark, then takes the remark back, taking up about half of her column, and then somehow using up all of her remaining space to issue a strawman attack at religion (why? Who knows), then closes with

While some argue medical marijuana can be addictive, few would contend it has the same dependency risk as the medications hospitals routinely administer for debilitating pain. Conservatives aren't clamoring for hospitals to turn off the morphine drip for dying cancer patients because there?s a heroin problem in the world. But they want to draw a line in the sand over medical marijuana? Please. Show me the logic.

Which is to say..... Well, I'm not sure exactly. Marijuana is being treated differently than heroin, which is not the same thing as marijuana? Is that actually a reason?

And quote frankly, how can she miss the actual strong arguments in favor of legalizing medical marijuana, namely, federalism, wasted government resources, the fact that none of the "dangers" of marijuana apply to say, 60 year old cancer patients, the chilling effect this has on medical research and treatment, the loss of privacy, etc.

That was the logical cesspool that is left-leaning Diane Glass. Then she gets topped by right- leaning Shaunti Feldhahn. She leads with a personal story, then closes with

I suspect that pro-medical marijuana opinions are less about ensuring the availability of treatments unavailable anywhere else, and more about legally getting high.

When I oppose legalizing backyard marijuana, I am not being heartless toward those with chronic conditions who use it to relieve their suffering. By championing other effective, controlled options, I am trying to spare other individuals and the public health the even greater suffering from, yes, that 'slippery slope' that countless of us have experienced firsthand: that marijuana is not a harmless drug and its use can go terribly awry.

To answer her ad hominen attack, I support the legalization of medical marijuana, and I have no interest in getting high, legally or otherwise.

As for her closing paragraph, it so uniformly ridiculous I don't know where to begin. None of the problems associated with marijuana as a "gateway" drug (even if you believe in that as a concept) apply to the people who would take medical marijuana.

What combination of circumstances would have to exist for her statement to be true, accurate and altruistic? You would have to have cancer patients who have no interest in selecting the best treatment for their cancer, who are utterly incapable of differentiating between treatments like Marinol (incidentally, Marinol must be swallowed and kept down for a prolonged period of time, not the easiest thing to do during chemotherapy) and smoked marijuana.

It would also have to be true that outsiders, with no specific knowledge of the medical condition in question would know more about the cancer and the patient than the patient and his/her doctor. They would also have to be more concerned about this patient than the patient himself.

It would also have to be true that the same dangers that exist with marijuana as a "gateway" drug (even if you believe in the concept) apply to a 60 year old woman with breast cancer the same way they apply to 17 year old angst ridden teenagers. And what substance doesn't have the potential to go "terribly awry"?

This turned into quite a little rant.

News of the weird, tragic, sad and evil

Bono Horrified By Attack On Aid Worker - an article about Muslim women in Ethiopia attempting to murder a woman (via stoning) for breast feeding in public. That's bad enough, but notice the headline, it's not "Attack on Aid Worker", it's Bono's reaction to it. Media priorities are nauseating.

PETA employees charged with animal cruelty - an accurate headline, and a very weird story.

Pileing on Europe

Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post joins the chorus of people who think that Europe has some major problems.

A most amusing conversation

Searching Far And Wide For Cycling Companion

It all sounds so innocent doesn't' it? Somehow a conversation about adjectives in classified ads goes from helpful advice to personal threats to 9-11 conspiracy theories in a mere 19 posts. HT: The Agitator

That annoying media of ours

I was reading The Model School, Islamic Style recently and had the thought, does the media only interview histrionic pretentious American Muslims?

The article is about a Muslim school outside of Chicago. To Quote

The second order of business is creating what Universal calls an "Islamic environment." The Koran and the sayings of Muhammad are taught two days a week, Arabic three days a week. Grades 2 to 12 break for prayer once a day. Beyond Scripture, a Muslim approach influences the traditional curriculum as well. When teacher Fuzia Jarad's English class read Romeo and Juliet, the girls wanted to know, "Is it love at first sight?" "Yes," the teacher answered. "As Muslims, we don't do that. The difference is lust versus love; appearance versus knowing. Islam protects you from mistakes." For assistant principal Abdallah, who is in charge of discipline, love is a big issue. "I've had students come to me and say, "So and so are in love. Everyone is gossiping about the girl. Her reputation is ruined.'I tell them, 'If you care, show respect and stop the discussions.' Sometimes a girl or boy will tell me about a love letter they've received. It's always a letter. They can't socialize. They don't want the letter. They don't want to get in trouble. The feelings for each other are natural. Islam gives us a way to approach those feelings. Choose your spouse, but don't give your body or soul to someone until you're married."

What's central to the environment is a sense of Muslim family values. That's why Mohammad (Mo) Suleiman sent his daughter Samia, 18, to Universal. "Family means the older have mercy on the younger," says Suleiman, "and the younger respect the older." The students seem to make an effort, but cultural isolation is impossible. "My dad will hear the word love when I play my music, and he'll say that's against our religion," says freshman Ryan Ahmad. "So I'll stop for a week. But then one of my friends will start singing some lyric, and I start up again." When freshman Gulrana Syed watches TV, she tries to stick with family shows but gives in to the temptation to watch Fear Factor. "If swearing starts," she says, "I turn it off and hope God forgives me."

Though the school and the parents want their kids to be successful in America, the ambivalence of many Islamic parents sends mixed signals. The pull of their home country is a constant distraction from fitting into this one. "They are obsessed with foreign politics," says Steve Landek, who has been mayor of Bridgeview since 1999. "I come to talk to them about better sidewalks. They want to know how to run for Congress so they can change America's Israeli policy." Clearly respectful, however, of the economic and cultural contributions of Muslims to the community, he regrets to say 9/11 has set them back. "I still hear comments. I'm not going to repeat them. I'm not going to perpetuate the negative."

and

The students next door sometimes give voice to the commonplace resentment that can be found among Muslims the world over. Assigned by his English teacher to write an essay about his own American Dream, a 15-year-old wrote that the occupied territories should be returned to the Palestinians and "the Jews should be left to suffer." More often, however, Universal's students feel resentment about being stereotyped, both in the media and on the streets. To senior Ali Fadhli, the Fox TV show 24, which had a plot this season about a Muslim terrorist cell, is "obnoxious," he says. "America has moved on to a new enemy. We're treated now like the Russians were during the Cold War." Being teenagers though, perhaps the worst slight of all is being regarded as outsiders. "The students are aware," says Dalila Benameur, head of the social studies department, "that they are perceived as different." Says freshman Gulrana Syed: "It's kind of impossible to blend in wearing a head scarf." Student Ryan Ahmad, whose dad is his toughest music critic, admits, "Americans seem to have more fun. Muslims try to be American, but we don't know how. The cultures are so different." A sense that U.S. life has its own contradictions provides some perspective. Senior Muna Zughayer, noting the use of women as sex objects, says, "I think it's funny people look at us and say we're oppressed!"

So, in other words, they go to lengths to maintain their own culture and traditions, they voluntarily segragate themselves in education, visibly and publicly remove themselves from American mainstream culture, present a monolithic public face, and have strong loyalties to other countries.

Then they wonder why they don't fit in the with the culture they're rejected. You can't be different without being different.

I guess the question is: Does the media deliberately seek out these people and ignore the rest of American Muslims or do they seek out the media. With the exception of finding out the Dave Chappelle was a Muslim (also in Time magazine), I can't remember any other mention of American Muslims where that was a detail and not the focus. One never reads about, say some dentist who invented a new method of flossing, who got the idea on the way to prayers (or something like that). To put it another way, is the only public Muslim someone who is professionally Muslim?

To justify getting a laptop

OK, I'm trying to justify the expense of getting a laptop and I'm trying to list out all of the ways I would use it.

1. With GPS unit, as a navigation tool on long trips (I have plans to mount it to the car to some degree.
2. To play music while in the car, sort of a massive I-Pod
3. With some sort of internet service, as a way to avoid traffic problems using Traffic.com, Georgia Navigator and such (I'm sure a Google Maps port is on the way soon.)
   
4. Recording the various bluegrass jams I go to, I would have to get an outside device to do it properly.
   
5. For use on trips

Can anyone think of any other uses?

Catch Up Day

As work has finally relented a tad, here are the links I've been meaning to post

• The Moving GMAP, a combination of Google Maps and GPS data, I need to get me one of them.
• The best curved corners code I've seen yet.
• James Lileks is a very good writer.
  

And here is a very grainy photo of the usual Jakes' bluegrass crew. From left to right is Jim (playing Beths's guitar, he usually plays dobro), Beth, and Walter on mandolin.

Quote of the moment

"The smart money is on gravity."

For better one's, check out WikiQuote on H.L. Mencken.

The Pernell Whitaker Post

As I remarked in an earlier post, the defensive boxing style of Pernell Whitaker changed my view of the world.

It is a matter of precision,. Were one to break boxing down four factors it would be speed, power, direction and angle. Whitaker was able to perceive the speed of a fighter, his power from a certain position, his exact balance, and the angle between him and his opponent to a much finer degree than any of his opponents. As Pop would put it, he could measure to three decimal places, while his appoints where stuck at one. This more exact information allowed him to go almost his entire career without taking a punch while delivering perfectly places punches himself.

The lesson I suppose is that an incremental improvement in perception allows a categorical change in the quality of the action.

After many months

The redesign of Deeyah.com is finally posted. Check out the cool skin/appearance changing feature at the top right of the home page.

Interesting reading while uploading

A very interesting post from Austin Bay on US-French anti-terror collaboration. HT Instapundit

Links

Rounder, Sun Expose Archives Digitally

Add Google Maps’ Directions to Your Site

And this thought from Will Wilkinson

My hunch is that these folks aren't really utilitarians after all. They have a prior intuition about the injustice of inequality, and the justice of progressive redistribution. Then, they attempt to undermine resistance to higher tax rates on the wealthy by pointing to research that they interpret to say that this won't make the wealthy any less happy, and so, Why worry? The trouble is, it won't make the poor (in a country like the US where the poor are already rich) much happier either, and won't do anything to change relative position in the distribution. So what's the point? The point is more progressive redistribution, to which many folks are committed to prior to and independent of utilitarianism or their interest in happiness.

The employee of the month

Man Delivers Pizza After Being Shot in Leg

Thomas Stefanelli, 37, said dedication to his job at Hungry Howie's Pizza kept him on the job after a struggle with a robber Saturday night left him bleeding from a bullet wound in his left thigh.

Stefanelli arrived at a home only to realize it was vacant, police said. The masked man approached Stefanelli, pointed a gun and demanded money. Stefanelli said he fought with the man, and two shots were fired. One hit Stefanelli, but he did not immediately notice.

The shooter eventually fled with a second man.

"They figured they were going to make an easy mark by robbing a pizza delivery person," said police spokesman Joe Durkin.

Stefanelli finally noticed his wound. His cell phone wasn't working, so he drove to his next delivery address, dropped off the pie and called his boss to ask him to call the police.

Stefanelli went on to make three more deliveries.

Time to end the Libertarian Party

I just finished watching Jim Lazinski's second appearance on the Daily Show. It is now clear that political Parties are simply NOT something libertarians do well. Throw in the recent Badnarik campaign and the matter is a metaphysical certainty.

What to replace it with? Why not a PAC? There are no signature requirements and much less regulation. Imagine what could be done if all of the money, time and effort spent on just keeping the Libertarian Party going actually was spent on rogue candidates of both parties and ballot initiatives? Something might actually happen.

Visual Studio shortcuts

1. CTRL + SHIFT + SPACE - Displays the methods and overload list of a method or class
2. CTRL + J - Displays all of the members of an object.

From Mark Wagner

More waiting while uploading thoughts

From the CNN article Rights group leader says U.S. has secret jails

"The U.S. is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons, into which people are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite, incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families," Schulz said

No proof was offered on any of these secret prisons, though I would imagine they do exist.

What to draw from this?

1. AI is fond of misusing the word "archipelago", which they use to mean "network", which is not accurate at all.
   
2. Thanks to Campaign Finance Reform there is now a permanent agitation industry in MoveOn, Media Matters, and their ideological brethren like AU. If this is the best they can come up with things arent too bad I suppose.
3. There is at least an attempt to deal with the whole problem humanely, especially since realistically the alternatives are field executions and rendition (personally I think that the problem will be "solved" by deporting all of them to Egypt or Pakistan where foreign governments will dispose of them quietly
   

David Friedman wrote an article some time back which can shed some light on the matter.

And not that much longer until the Patriot Act expires!

For a third time

I pull another chicken bone out of my dog's throat. I got it on the first bite this time. Who is leaving those things everywhere!?!?!

While I'm waiting for files

The Baby Name Generator - a very nice java app that shows where names show up throughout history

Quotes of the Day

"The limit of the possible is the actual."
anonymous internet poster

"There's incredible diversity of religion in the mountains, why we have more than 40 different kinds of Baptist."
from the PBS special, The Appalachians (review coming soon)

Upon further reflection

Upon further consideration, I rename the Chilly Loner the Frozen Loner.

Had dinner with Mike and Erin

At what they called Uncle Julio's, but to me it will always be Casa Grande. It's a lovely little Mexican place on Peachtree that I ate at many times when I worked at Bridge. It would seem the I need to elaborate on why the defensive style of Pernell Whittaker is important.

It was a lovely dinner, someone has torn down the old apartment building next door to the restaurant and left only this gateway.



I wish I had a better camera so I could go back later and take some good shots of it, but I guess that will have to wait until later in the year.

Email Viruses

Is anyone else getting pelted with the MyTob virus? I'm getting about 4 an hour, oddly enough, all to jargondatabase.com email addresses.

Something missing in the news

Amidst all of the current prisoner coverage, one thing missing is any report of chemical interrogations. The technology certainly exists to create all of the "Stress" (usually cited as the goals in interrogations) chemically instead of physically. I wonder if that's only being done in special cases.

My contribution to the American palate

1. Buy bananas
2. Put bananas, unskinned in freezer
3. Freeze until rock solid
4. Remove from freezer
5. Let sit for 5-10 minutes (the banana itself will stay frozen, but the peel will thaw
6. With small paring knife, whittle away peel, leaving a thin layer of peel on the banana itself, it should be mostly brown with patches of white, with no yellow
7. Eat with fork
   

I call it the Chilly Loner, Frozen Loner. It's cheap, simple, healthy, and tastes like a cross between a power bar and ice cream. The layer of skin is essential.

Update, I changed the name.

The Dude Lives!

After being down since Tuesday, I finally have the Dude (my home server) revived, and all it took was a new hard drive, 8 hours of experimentation, three attempts at trying to upgrade everything before doing a clean install, a clean install, a mass name change of database objects, and I didn't even those any data. A corrupted boot sector is just no fun at all.

Ideas to elaborate on later

Here are ideas and historical (no emotional connection to me) events that have fundamentally affected my outlook.

In no particular order

• Pareto Optimality
• Coase Theorem
• Hayek and Sowell on the limits and costs of knowledge
• Gresham's law
• Napoleon's invasion of Russia
• Dominant Strategies
  
• Schelling Points (as elaborated on by David Friedman)
• The seatbelts kill theory of Steven Landsburg (though the theory might actually originate with George Stigler)
  
• The diaries of Eric Hoffer (and his books, they're fairly similar) as they deal with mass movements
  
• Network effects
• Robert Nozick's notion of morality as a time saving device (morality is used very broadly) as explained in the Examined Life
• The defensive boxing style of Pernell Whitaker
  

I'll have more detail on what they are and how they are all used later.

Pesky second wind

Thursday was quite hectic for me, I work 15 and a half hours, then I continue on into Friday morning. I stop drinking caffeine earlier than I usually do with the express intent of being quite sleepy around 2:00 or so at the very latest.

It all goes according to plan; I'm sleepy and about ready to doze off around midnight. And then what happens? I work a bit later than I intend to, and at 2:30 I get a second wind. I'm now quite awake

All that being said, here's what I was going to blog about today:

I got my server working again, sort of. I think a part of the boot sector got corrupted, I wasn't able to do the upgrade around it and had to do a clean install on the new drive. I was able to pull off all of the data and databases off of the original drive, which works fine so long as you don't boot off of it.

However, all of my setting were lost and I can't log into the database with any of my old username and passwords. Hence my intranet is down. Any ideas any of my many technical readers?

The NYT Alpharetta article

I probably won't have time to post on this tonight, but here it is
The Five-Bedroom, Six-Figure Rootless Life

Continental Drift

While at last night's Boo Hoo Rambler's show, my friend Beth said something about "The country getting more conservative" which I wonder about. She was grouping the politics and the society but the general thought can be either true or false. More Republican certainly, but by what measure is the country getting more conservative? I thought I'd make a list:

Top moves to the left

1. Massive Federal Spending
   
2. Wars for Democracy (this has been adopted by the Republicans, but the idea has been on the left for quite some time)
   
3. Gay marriage on horizon
   
4. Government involvement all aspects of the medical system
   
5. Abortion available for minors without parental consent, paid for by the feds in some cases. This is something that has stayed the same, but it's a huge red flag for a lot of the right.
   
6. Central planning for education under the guise of No Child Left Behind.
   
7. The income tax actually becoming more progressive under Bush
8. Campaign Finance "Reform"
   

Top moves to the right

1. A push for Social Security privatization
   
2. A move to end the death tax
   
3. Assault Weapons ban NOT being renewed
   
4. Higher defense spending (Bush was proposing this before 9-11 so I'll include it here)
   
5. Over 55 speed limits remain in effect
   
6. 3 rounds of tax cuts
   

I'm sure I've missed a lot but that is something of a gist. Certainly the Republicans have been doing much of the above (on both sides) but where is the country actually drifting? IMHO the Democrats have not been following an Evolutionary Stable Strategy for quite a while which allows the Republicans play both sides of the street.

From Ben Stein

Actually a Ben Stein article in the American Spectator

Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW's, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel's life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?

Oh, now I remember. He lied. He was a politician who lied. How remarkable. He lied to protect his subordinates who were covering up a ridiculous burglary that no one to this date has any clue about its purpose. He lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going. That was his crime. He was a peacemaker and he wanted to make a world where there was a generation of peace. And he succeeded.

That is his legacy. He was a peacemaker. He was a lying, conniving, covering up peacemaker. He was not a lying, conniving drug addict like JFK, a lying, conniving war starter like LBJ, a lying, conniving seducer like Clinton -- a lying, conniving peacemaker. That is Nixon's kharma.

Ben Stein (before he had his own game show, talk show, movie roles et al) was a Nixon speechwriter. Read the whole thing.

The Boo Hoo Ramblers

I saw the Boo Hoo Ramblers at Blind Willies' last night and they're still my favorite new (to me) band. A very tight trio of guitar (periodically banjo) bass and fiddle the Boo Hoo boys perform a well stuctured and very long show. I highly recommend seeing them.

On a side note, the singer/guitarist is Clark Ashton, who also has Commuter Art Gallery, A.K.A. the house with all the large iron statues in the front yard on North Druid Hills road.