Short 2006 best of list

• Best New Movie - The Departed
• Best Book - Truth Imagined by Eric Hoffer
• Best TV Show - The Shield
  
• Best Old Movie Seen For the First Time - Tie - The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman) / The Testament of Dr Mabeuse (Fritz Lang) / The Big Sleep (Bogart/Bacall). Only The Big Sleep is in English, where as the other two are probably much better off being subtitled. All three are from the 30s and 40s.
  
• Best New Gadget - Garmin Street Pilot - I never get lost anymore
• Best New General Interest Site - DamnInteresting.com
• Best Concert - Prince - though to be honest I didn't see that many in 2006
• Best New Band discovered - Freakwater - I have no idea how I managed to not know about them until this year, they're perfect for me.
  
• Biggest physical accomplishment - Biking the entire Silver Comet Trail - 126 miles - in one day with no rest and very few stops for water and such. It did take forever
• Biggest professional accomplishment - staying in business for another year I suppose
• Biggest artistic accomplishment - successfully finishing two whole songs, and actually doing open mic nights
  

Sunday rapid fire

• RFID Digital Door Lock - this looks very cool, a totally key less lock system.
• The RFID Superstore
• MyPhotoPipe.com - a very large format printing service, run by a blast from the past
  
• What would Genghis Khan do in Iraq - an interesting article The Mongols also immediately executed the caliph and his sons on charges that they spent too much money on their palaces and not enough defending their nation.

Quote of the moment

From this post at Jane Galt's

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens --Abraham Lincoln

The commentor was dubbed "Occam's Beard" which is a name I like.

Everyone should read this

Dan Habbot over at TDAXP has the single most informative article on the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam I've ever read.

A vanishing meme

One pleasantly departed meme is "War is good for the economy". While never true (you can't destroy human and physical capital and have a net increase in the economy) I haven't heard it that much in the past few years.

More on the Libertarian Party

A very well written post on the LP over at the Volokh Conspiracy, to wit:

Some LP defenders argue that even if the Party doesn't have any chance of winning, it can at least help educate the public about libertarian ideas. However, there is little if any evidence that the LP has actually had any success in this task over its 35 year history. Those libertarians who have succeeded in spreading libertarian ideas - people like Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and the Cato Institute - have done so without any LP affiliations, and indeed have tried hard to work with the two major parties. Whether fairly or not, the mainstream media and academic world are not going to pay much attention to ideas emanating from a tiny third party that has no chance of winning any elections; therefore, the LP's educative potential is unlikely to be much greater than its electoral potential.

If we had a proportional representation electoral system, like many European countries and Israel, a separate libertarian party would make excellent strategic sense. The party (if better run than the dysfunctional LP) could command 10-15% of the vote, thereby winning roughly that percentage of legislative seats, and would be a potential part of a ruling political coalition. A libertarian party might also make sense if one of the major political parties were on the brink of collapses and the libertarian party stood a chance of taking its place (as the Republican Party displaced the Whig Party in the 1850s). However, in the real world, the US is unlikely to move toward proportional representation and neither major political party is likely to collapse anytime soon. Therefore, the cause of libertarianism will be better off without a separate Libertarian Party.

A good article on the most recent conflict

Time has a nice synopsis of the current war between Ethiopia and Somalia.

Annoyances in the media

It's atheism this time, Sam Harris in particular. He rapes the mirror in 10 myths -- and 10 truths -- about atheism. It's a smarmy read, in particular

2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history. People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok.

How remarkably pointless. Everything good is on his side, and everything bad, even though explicitly and actively atheist, is on the side of religion.

What does it say of people who can't admit that their position on an has an unpleasant side? Libertarianism is unclear on Foreign Policy and weak on the mentally ill. Liberalism is weak on education, conservatism is weak on immigration (pretty much every blend of conservatism). Why not admit these things? Any internally consistent ideology or religious theory will have strong points and weak points by any objective measure,

Day after Christmas rapid fire

As my hard drive is changing itself over, I thought I would share some stuff

• Jetpacks!
• Sin City Photoshop
• Digital Monochrome, absolutely beautiful photos
• Digital Monochrome forums

The night of Christmas trees and pie

This is actually way funnier though.

Hearth, home, etc.

More photos

No gallery yet, but here are two more

More photos taken

A gallery is on the way.

One of the better lines of all time

From the recently seen (by me) Double Indemnity

Keyes: Walter, can I be blunt with you?
Neff: Of course.
Keyes: I'm a great man.

Three good links

• A planned economy fails again
• Cooking with Sartre
• A good photography site
  

As seen on Buford Highway

Apparantly America is at the point

Where we have 3 week long, 24/7, watergun assassination tournaments. Life is interesting.

I got the lights

And they're pretty impressive. The kit is over four feet tall in the case, and 55 pounds or so.

One liners and things that caught my eye

• Good one liner -

  If there is a motto for the Bush Administration’s war policy, it is, “Doing the Right Thing Wrongly.”

  The argument on the neo-right these days resembles the 30s debates between Stalinist and Trotskyist on the nature of communism, i.e. can one separate the theory and practice.
• The nature of motion sickness
• From an article about the Skyhook (sort of a reverse parachute) -

  The first live test was conducted with a pig as the target. Due to some stability issues, the pig spun in the 125 mph wind, and arrived on the plane dizzy and discombobulated. It recovered, however, and promptly attacked the crew.

The end nears

The end to my long upgrade struggle anyway. From three pin adapters that go onto four pin holes, to reformatting hard drives to bizzare RAM voltage, it's been an informative two days. Now to go Christmas shopping. Humbug.

RAM wickedness

I want the 16 hours of my life back. I've been chasing my tail on what I believe are memory problems. The photo is apropos of nothing, but I thought it turned out nicely. It's from my little Canon.

More Iraq

One oft-repeated trope about Iraq is that Iran and Syria don't have any interest in an unstable Iraq. Why? While I'm sure that is not their ideal situation, I'm sure that a vibrant pro-Western democracy would be worse in their opinion.

Also the possible strategy of doubling down (a "troop surge") is doomed to failure. The Iranians and Syrians can trade off lives and money at a very favorable ratio to them for the foreseeable future.

However this is a moot point. Enough highly motivated factions are in Iraq to make the eventual breakup a certainty. What we should be doing is facilitating the breakup instead of denying it.

Surreal

It's four in the morning, I've spent all day fighting with asp.net configuration problems and all night been fighting with a cpu that seems to be DOA. I still don't have my new lens.

Then I smell smoke. The neighborhood behind me is filled with smoke and there is a large fire burning behind them.



The photo is apropos of nothing. The fire is out now. There were two fire trucks and several police cars.

Ajax is a seductive swamp

Specifically the Ajax.net toolkit. It would seem that one can't retrofit an existing site, though who knows why.

A useful axiom

In my first advanced macroeconomics class my professor defined truth as "The consensus of informed opinion". I remembered that for some reason today.

Two cool tech things

• The tale of a family in Vermont that lives totally off the electrical grid, and how they do it.
• Radar Goliath
  

Tuesday rapid fire

• Art of Innovation
• A very good analysis of the ISG report, specifically

  The risk of surging any troops is summed up in the Sixth and Seventh Books of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. I refer to the story of the Sicilian Expedition, in which the Athenians invade Sicily in support of allies there. But as problems mount with the operation, more and more reinforcements are sent, so that the consequences of failure rise from the merely serious to the monumental.

  Which is something to bear in mind.
  
• Ouch
• RentGlass.com - Lenses in this case
  

The two funniest things I've seen today

• The wonderful YouTube Series - "Will It Blend" featuring marbles, cell phones, rake handles, etc
• An edited version of Pulp Fiction that contains only the F-word. Surprisingly long. Not safe for work by any means.
  

It's been a little while

Sorry for the light blogging.

Periodically my mind wonders back to the Mathew Paris essay "Nature Does Not Exist", where he states that there are few meaningful differences in application or effect between religion and science. Then my thoughts turned to Alan Paulk's line "Religion is first century technology" and how that tracks with Robert Kaplan's assertion that Islam is an excellent religion for hard times (paraphrase).

Then I think the original (to me) thought that technology does not replace spirituality, or compete with it either, but merely pushes it back to another level of abstraction. This leads me to think that the modern conception of a distinction between the religious and the secular is probably new and not meaningful.

And that's what has been in the back of my head for the past few days.

Lines of the moment

From Freakwater's song "One Big Union"

Don't the truth look bad up next to a pretty lie?

and

False hope is the seed in the field of greed that we must plow.

We all knew cell phones could spy on you...

Now it seems to be confirmed

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

And if the FBI can do it, talented hackers can do it too. One can be tracked (more or less) by a cell phone too.

Rambling on an Autumn night

I just posted the pictures I took on Thursday night, I dubbed it Rambling on an Autumn Night. The first few are from the Lenox Borders parking lot, and the others are from a bridge overlooking the 75-85 connector. There is a slight shake to all of them due to the slow shutter speed needed and motion of the bridge as cars passed (albeit not many at midnight on a Thursday. For some reason slightly blurry photos look better in my harsh black and white scheme.

Click on the above link or any of the photos below to see more.

Very sad

Tech journalist James Kim and his family are missing. He was one of the main reviewers from the old TechTV days, lately he's been at CNet.

Does anyone want to buy my camera

It's a lovely Olympus C8080, I bought it about 16 months ago and took very good care of it. A detailed review of it is here http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympusc8080wz/

It's got a five time optical zoom, and comes with

• a tripod
• a charger
• wireless remote
• two and a half gigs of memory (two 1-gig cards and one half gig card)
  
• camera bag
• lens polarizer
• instructions/manual (I still have the original packaging)
• Conversion lens adapter (CLA-8)
• 1.4x Tele Conversion Lens (TCon-14D)
  

All that can be yours for the reasonable price of $450. I thought I would offer it here before I put it on Ebay. FYI - the reason it's for sale is because I got a digital SLR. The Olympus still works wonderfully.

Let me know.

Friday rapid fire

• A quick review of video hosting services
• DIY public hotspot
• SQL Refactoring and formatting - a bit pricey, but it seems interesting
  
• Yet another electric car - due sometime next year
• Revealed: Why understanding economics is hard
• What economists agree on