Friday round up

• A look at where the I-Pod is made, it's pretty much all of East Asia
• A nice look at Electronic Medical Records
• Coming Anarchy does math
• Get your postal mail over the internet! This would solve a lot of problems for me actually.
• 72 year old Marine beats crap out of 27 year old pickpocket.
  

Quote of the moment

From this BloggingHeads episode:

The world is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.

An odd sight

A couple of hours ago I made a caffeine run to a gas station I don't often frequent. There were four old men playing some kind of video poker. They all stared silently at the machines, much the same way my age cohort plays Halo or Guitar Hero.

Doesn't anyone ever outgrow video games? It would be nice if someone actually grew up. Granted, I don't seem to be, but other people should.

Local drug war update

Today's newspaper brought mixed results. The Atlanta Police Department does seem to be cleaning itself up, indeed, much more than I expected. However, I haven't read anything about any sort of judicial accountability; they're the ones who approve the warrants, seemingly without even looking at them.

Rant Starts
Meanwhile, people like this guy send exactly the wrong message with his "How not to get busted" DVD series. The point of drug legalization is not to evade the law or get high, it's to live in a free society where people can make their own mistakes and take responsibility for them. Instead we revive the notion of demonic possession in the form of "addiction" which is a "disease", which is at the same time pitiful and criminal and a reason to treat us all like children in the hands of an all-knowing state.

The end result of protecting people from the consequences of their actions is to fill the world with fools, and that seems to be what we've done.
Rant Ends

John Edwards sinks to the challenge

It reminds me of the adage "he came to do good and wound up doing very well indeed."

From this NYT article

John Edwards ended 2004 with a problem: how to keep alive his public profile without the benefit of a presidential campaign that could finance his travels and pay for his political staff.

Mr. Edwards, who reported this year that he had assets of nearly $30 million, came up with a novel solution, creating a nonprofit organization with the stated mission of fighting poverty. The organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, raised $1.3 million in 2005, and — unlike a sister charity he created to raise scholarship money for poor students — the main beneficiary of the center’s fund-raising was Mr. Edwards himself, tax filings show.
...
The money paid Mr. Edwards’s expenses while he walked picket lines and met with Wall Street executives. He gave speeches, hired consultants, attacked the Bush administration and developed an online following. He led minimum-wage initiatives in five states, went frequently to Iowa, and appeared on television programs. He traveled to China, India, Brussels, Uganda and Russia, and met with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his likely successor, Gordon Brown, at 10 Downing Street.

I suppose helping the poor isn't worth spending one's own money. Happily the Democrats seem to be preferring the more honest hacks of Clinton and Obama.

Immigration solved!

It would seem that Mexican women are having fewer babies. I'm always skeptical about stats from poor counties, but it is interesting. Immigration is one area where the demographic argument is compelling and probably correct. I've come to find the "Western Civilization is doomed due to low birth rates" argument viable.

Line of the moment

From this page
Q: How do unitarians get someone to leave town?
A: They burn a question mark on their lawn

Last night's open mic

It was a decent performance, the crowd was withdrawn, but not rude.

Starting somewhere

I came across an interesting article on AJC.com about a couple in Grant Park trying to erect a windmill on their own property. For those who don't know, Grant Park is a tony neighborhood near the center of Atlanta that prides itself on diversity. Like most areas that pride themselves on diversity, it's composed largely of childless college-educated types who overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic party.

Needless to say the neighbors are contesting the windmill. While they're organized enough to put together a website, they don't seem to be organized enough to utilize the Coase Theorem. Needless to say, I'm for them erecting the windmill on their own property.

Before anyone asks, wind power is usually much more efficient (per dollar) than solar energy, and also has a much lower starting price. Also, modern windmills are geared to prevent fast rotation which protects birds.

Why must everything involving hard drives take forever?

I've been running a checkdisk for the past six hours. No fun at all. And I find out last night that my hard drive doesn't work with Vista. Totally funless.

SkyNet

An interesting vision of what it might look like.

IQ and birth order

An interesting story on IQ and birth order appeared in the New York Times recently. It makes sense, and jibes with my experience. Money grafs:

The average difference in I.Q. was slight — three points higher in the eldest child than in the closest sibling — but significant, the researchers said. And they said the results made it clear that it was due to family dynamics, not to biological factors like prenatal environment.
...

“Like Darwin’s finches, they are eking out alternative ways of deriving the maximum benefit out of the environment, and not directly competing for the same resources as the eldest,” Dr. Sulloway said. “They are developing diverse interests and expertise that the I.Q. tests do not measure.”

This kind of experimentation might explain evidence that younger siblings often live more adventurous lives than their older brother or sister. They are more likely to participate in dangerous sports than eldest children, and more likely to travel to exotic places, studies find. They tend to be less conventional than firstborns, and some of the most provocative and influential figures in science spent their childhoods in the shadow of an older brother or sister (or two or three or four).

Interesting stuff. The older sibling is the best situated to take advantage of the existing structure, so they take advantage of that, and the younger sibling is shielded from the consequences of risk taking, so they consume more of it.

Yet another FireFox tip

Type about:config in the address bar, filter by cache, and change the value of browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl to true. It speeds up the browing experience by quite a bit on ssl sites, particularly if they use Ajax.

An interview with Charles Koch

A blogger was kind enough to post his transcription of this interview with Charles Koch of Koch Industries (the biggest company you've never heard of). Of particular liking to me

Studying business in school is way overrated. There seems to be absolutely no evidence suggesting that people with a business degree excel more than those without one. As you go to college, you don't want specifics on how to run a business; you will learn this as you go along in real life. You need to have fundamental tools, such as reading, writing, doing math and science, understanding reality, and having good values that enable you to work with people and create real value.

That has always been my gripe with the MBA's I've met. They're certainly more confident (which is important) but of the three main tasks of a business (moving it, making it, and selling it) they're not any more capable than they they would be without the MBA.

Much thanks to C.S. Hayden for posting the interview.

Another round of the fiddler series

A full gallery to come, when I have time to go through them all.

Saturday night reading

• CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry - I'm sure they have some sort of ulterior motive in this but it seems like a positive development.
• A private citizen owns part of a Georgia highway - He's not putting up toll booths, which is something I would do. Evidently the state tried to condemn it a while back but didn't do all of the paperwork.
• Robotic farm workers!
• While there is a GTD Outlook plugin, there is not a Vista compatible one, which is a bit ironic.
• Americans still don't trust the government. Wherefore art thou Barry Goldwater? Oh yes, we call you Ron Paul now...
  

Two firefox tips

While doing some reseach, I discovered that the "leak" is acually a costly feature (aren't they all). It has something to do with cacheing closed tabs.

Anyway, to fix it, just follow the instructions on this LifeHacker page. Also, I've heard good things about about Tab Mix Plus.

Videotaping police

Radley Balco, in a column on FoxNews.com has an interesting and scary article video taping police at work. Basically there have been a string of incidents recently where people videotaping police at work (in uniform, in public, performing their duties) have been charged with crimes.

It's ridiculous. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy for a private citizen in public view, which is why traffic cameras and the legion of private security cameras are legal (recording audio is considered different by the law). Why on earth would public servants (who are supposed to work for us mind you) be immune from this?

All this would change if we made all government agencies were funded from the public treasury and weren't self-supporting, but that's a topic for another time I suppose.

Quick Friday roundup while uploading

• Cool new wind turbines
• A good article on insanity and Angela Yates
• Oil from Algae!
• 15 year old performs surgery in India
• The art of the doable to do list
• The greatest sidewalk artist ever
  

Bashing the education system

Reading the AJC's education articles are always a source of malicious fun for me. The articles can be tedious, but the forums are always fun. For some reason people like to pretend that if only we could crack down on some group (the parents, the taxpayer, the students) the problem would solve itself. Grammar and spelling tend to leave quickly as well. This one was my favorite

I'm a career educator with more graduate degrees that the detractors of public education.

Let's put it in a sports analogy so the neo-luddites can understand, break the legs of the starting offense of the GA Bulldogs and complain about why thy can't win a championship.

He starts off with a misspelling, and then misuses "Luddite". Luddite is a proper name, and has no sports meaning.

When one thinks about it, it's amazing public education works as well as it does. When you have a system where the producer, the consumer and the financier are all different people, why should it work at all?

One other thing that annoys me is the pejorative refrain of "teaching to the test". Of course, teachers should teach to the test the same way drivers should "drive to the road" and cops should "enforce to the law". That's their job after all.

As I'm in rant mode, I suppose I'll share the other annoying shibboleth of the teaching establishment, which is saying someone is a good student "but doesn't test well" which is like saying someone is very tall, "but doesn't measure well".

The view from my window

I think the metering was a bit off, but it's hard to get it right when you shoot into the sun. Anyway, the coloring turned out well. The shot below is PhotoShopped very little. I have no idea why the blimp was there.

Life, satire engage in passionate embrace

Via NRO comes this article

I am both Muslim and Christian
Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on a black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group on First Hill.

On Sunday mornings, Redding puts on the white collar of an Episcopal priest.

She does both, she says, because she's Christian and Muslim.

Redding, who until recently was director of faith formation at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, has been a priest for more than 20 years. Now she's ready to tell people that, for the last 15 months, she's also been a Muslim — drawn to the faith after an introduction to Islamic prayers left her profoundly moved.

I suppose she's a vegetarian that eats veal as well. If an atheist is some who believes in no God, then what do you call someone who believes in all available Gods? Judaism and Zoroasterism await I suppose.

Department of horrible statistics

Case in point today, Jay Bookman of the AJC

the influx of good-paying, high-tech jobs has had an enormous impact. Twenty years ago, per capita income in Ireland was 60 percent of the average in the European Union. Today, on a per capita basis, Ireland is the second-richest nation in the EU.

Think of how meaningless that is. Were they already the second richest country per capita? Did they have a meager rate of growth and the rest of Europe went down? Who can tell?

Bookman goes on cite things he approves of (of course) but doesn't anyone edit these things?

Quote of the moment

From this page,

"That's the problem with religion: you beat your way past the clerics, fight your way through the demons, stand before the holy of holies, and when you rip away the veil, there's nothing there but a mirror."

-- Owen Rowley

The first meaningful, non scandalous news from the Catholic church in a while

From Time.com

Joe Kennedy's First Marriage: Still On
The most controversial "marriage that never was" in recent U.S. political history is back. Sources tell TIME that the Vatican has reversed the annulment of Joseph P. Kennedy II's marriage to Sheila Rauch. The annulment had been granted in secrecy by the Catholic Church after the couple's 1991 no-fault civil divorce. Rauch found out about the de-sanctification of their marriage only in 1996, after Kennedy had been wedded to his former Congressional aide, Beth Kelly, for three years.

The annulment was the subject of Rauch's 1997 book Shattered Faith, which lambasted her ex-husband and was severely critical of the Catholic Church's proceedings, which made the marriage (which had produced twin boys) null and void in the eyes of the church. Rauch argued that Kennedy was able to unilaterally "cancel" nearly 12 years of marriage because of his clan's influence in the church. Kennedy argued at the time that the annulment was the right thing to do in religious terms.

Now that I think about it, it's been a couple of years since any Catholic priest molestation revelations have come to light.

Quick roundup while uploading

• A nice article on the Golden Section in design
• China and Demography from Coming Anarchy
• Making engines more efficient - using steam of all things - very cool
• Cutting Edge Designers
• Prediction Markets - nice graphics
  
• Woman jailed for testicle attack

  Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.
  
  She pulled off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out. A friend handed it back to Mr Jones saying: "That's yours."

  
  

An interesting article from Zakaria

It meanders a bit, but Fareed Zakaria makes a good case for optimism in this Newsweek article. One bit that caught my eye was

To recover its place in the world, America first needs to recover its confidence. For those who look at the future and see challenges, competition and threats, keep in mind that this new world has been forming over the last 20 years, and the United States has forged ahead amid all the turmoil. In 1980, the U.S. share of global GDP was 20 percent. Today it is 29 percent.

It's a staggering thought. 20% is a huge chunk relative to population, and for that to increase is massive. It's an interesting tidbit.

We should be more confident; America has never been strong because of political leadership, but the average person here has room to excel. 15 million illegal immigrants can't be wrong!

The headstone is in

I got back yesterday from the headstone commemoration ceremony. It was good to see everyone, and the headstone is very nice. The stone from the military (featured below) was a pleasant surprise.

Sad reminders of things gone.

Random photo

From the recent trip.

Back from the old country

I'm back, photos to come.

I blog from the old country

I finally make it up to Kentucky, after a detour into the ugly side of Chattanooga. Surprisingly there was very little Bonaroo traffic.

Stigmergy and signalling

Stigmergy is defined as a method of communication in emergent systems in which the individual parts of the system communicate with one another by modifying their local environment. My Digital Tool Factory project has been evolving in that direction lately and it occurred to me that the internet is evolving that way too.

In the political blogsphere one can draw conclusions about an author from the use of the phrases "The fall of the Soviet Union" vs. "The fall of Communism". In the corporate realm the use of feathered graphics is a good indicator of the age of the designer and the focus of the company.


Food for thought.

A new addition to the Blogroll

Everyone welcome Pacific Empire, from way over in New Zealand.

Wednesday link roundup

• An interesting post on autism and vaccines
  
• This post from EconLog

  Back in 1980, State correctional facilities had 9 violent criminals for every drug offender. By 2003, that ratio was 2.6:1.

• DOD Braces for a fight with Pelosi

  Pentagon officials are bracing for a fight with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) over her desire to allow lawmakers’ adult children to tag along on taxpayer-funded travel for free.
  
  Pelosi wants them to be able to fill the role of lawmakers’ spouses when the latter are unable to make a trip because of health issues or work commitments.

  The shameful part is that they can say all that with a straight face. "Fill the role of Lawmaker's spouses", ridiculous.

Ever more Ron Paul

A good performance by Dr Paul on the Colbert Report - Colbert did raise some of his less popular positions, which Paul endorsed with some gusto. Curiously no one has mentioned that he was the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988.

Ron Paul on the Colbert Report tonight

It should be an interesting matchup. We'll see if they touch on any of the unpopular things Paul adamantly believes in like abortion, the Gold Standard and his thoughts on the United Nations.

Affirmation

Yesterday I went to the lovely and prestigious offices of Green Media Works and got a lovely jolt of purpose and enthusiasm.

Working at home there's no good way to tell if you're a heroic entrepreneur writing your name upon history or some loser typing frantically in a messy office. To go out and mingle like minded people in a tremendous psychic push for the former.

A good crowd

As usual, I did the open mic last night. Unusually, there was a good and enthusiastic crowd, probably the best I've ever had. I happened to be in fine voice last night too, which helped. A good time was had by all.

Signs of progress

In policing Atlanta anyway

Atlanta police have virtually stopped seeking search warrants for drugs following the November shooting of an elderly woman and dropped — at least temporarily — the forced-entry tactics that led to her death, court records show.

In the six months since Kathryn Johnston died in a botched police raid, Atlanta narcotics officers have not sought a single "no-knock" search warrant, court records show. They served at least 25 no-knock warrants during a comparable six-month period a year earlier.

Reason has prevailed, at least temporarily.

Cool site of the day

The Strange Maps blog - check out this one which juxtaposes foreign counties with US states in terms of GDP. The Tennessee-Saudi Arabia bit is surprising.

Monday link roundup

• Popular Science has a predictions market
• Global Warming makes you fat! Really! Or so say the environmentalists. For some reason we treat a virgin birth as a matter of faith, but the weather in thirty years is a scientific fact.
• Safari is now available on Windows, I'm not sure why.
• An-arrgh-chy - The economics of Pirates. HT: ZenPundit
  

Ajax

Two things: Microsoft recently came out with an update to their Ajax Toolkit, and I was told today that my Digital Tool Factory application is the sort of thing that Microsoft likes to spotlight as a case study. Happy day.

The weirdest thing I read last week

From Jim Thompson's novel, Pop. 1280 after the protagonist almost get hanged by an angry mob for rape

I figure sometimes that maybe that's why we don't make as much progress as other parts of the nation. People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they spend so much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered up in advance, and other essentials, that there ain't an awful lot of money or man-hours left for practical purposes.

The high score that will last one thousand years!

From Zen Pundit

The good side of ethanol

It would seem that the viability of ethanol is finally being questioned in the environmental movement. About time too.

Too insulated

While lately I've become a follower of next-generation warfare theory (there's lots of them) the tenor lately has become similar to discussions Ayn Rand followers have.

No larger point here, just a minor observation as I think over my Brave New War review.

The food chain takes surprising turns

Watch the whole thing, there's several twists and turns in this.

A second Israel

I've been in favor of moving American troops to Kuwait and Kurdistan and letting the various Iraqi factions settle itself, with American troops playing Spoiler for our own interests. Upon further thought I'm not so sure.

Kuwait isn't really a factor, but Kurdistan is. Assuming that the Kurds do secede (which seems likely) we would be the guarantor of last resort for an ethnically homogeneous enclave, much like we are with Israel. While supporting the Israelis is perhaps the right thing to do, it's doubtful that the relationship is worthwhile on a cost benefit basis. That raises the question, do we really need another exposed ally with little to offer surrounded by hostile countries? Supporting the Kurds would alienate the surrounding countries and be a considerable financial and troop expense.

Then again, it does put another outpost of democracy and freedom (for the region) in the area and the second Israel isn't the same as the first.

Decisions, decisions.

SQL Server Errata

As everyone should learn from my 3 hours of Sql server frustration... Sql Server returns different values when you run a CheckSum on the same text for varchar and nvarchar data types.

The above probably isn't interesting to any of my readers, but should I forget it later I can find it again.

A good post on immigration

From Kerry Howley in Reason

The greatest distortion for Chadian farmers is not American cotton subsidies, writes Pritchett, but that “farmers from Chad have to farm in Chad—and not farm in France, Poland, or Canada.”

Wellput from Julian Sanchez

In this post about full brains

Efficient brains need to know what they can afford to forget—probably quite a bit, now that it's so easy to outsource our recollections to rapidly-searched digital media. The interesting question for me is: When almost anything you might need to recall can be offloaded in this way, what's worth keeping in wetware memory? My first instinct is that you need to remember exactly enough to (1) make interesting connections, and (2) actually find the full information from the signpost you've remembered.

Funny thing I heard on the History Channel

I'm slowly working my way through the History Channel documentary on the Spanish American war. The black cavalry soldiers, known commonly as "Buffalo Soldiers" were known by the Spanish as "Smoked Yankees".

It's interesting to be reminded that America had a low-level conflict with the Indians for years up to that point.

Monday link roundup

• An in-depth examination on how to build an energy efficient house
• Robot snipers in Israel
• Strobist begins Lighting 102
• No one thinks seriously about alternative energy. Check out this post from TreeHugger "New Battery Pushed Prius to 125 MPG". It's a great idea and invention, but it's a plug-in hybrid. The motion is coming from the power grid. Granted electricity is usually more efficient than gasoline, but that's like saying that a diesel engine gets infinite mileage because it doesn't burn any gasoline at all.
  

Thoughts on Ron Paul on the Daily Show

He came across better than usual for his usual presentation. They talked a little about domestic policy, nothing about drug legalization or gun control, mostly spending. Not bad though.

A nifty photoshop video tutorial

It has some great stuff on color correction and sharpening. Check it out at Digital Photography School.

Ron Paul on the Daily Show tonight

Republican presidential candidate, former Libertarian Party nominee, current Texas representative, temporary darling of the trendy left and overall interesting guy will be on the Daily Show tonight. We'll see if they go into his foreign policy stance (popular to the Daily Show audience, so long as it's kept vague) and away from his views on abortion and national health care.

Two for Monday

• Sandy Berger gives up his law license, which makes me thing that there is some serious hiding going on.
• More on the rogue Atlanta narcotics squad. Unmentioned is any mention of the judges and magistrates who rubber stamp all this crap. Ideally they would be help liable for any fraudulent warrants they sign, but that will never happen.
  

Performance anxiety

So, at long last, I have my first gig as a solo performer in one month, opening for the A-Sides. And I need a full hour of material.

It's good to have goals. And deadlines and stress I suppose.

Three on Iraq

First, there is this depressing report on civilian casualties in Iraq. The numbers are all going the wrong way.

Second is this post from Ross Douthat about the long term impact of Iraq, and how similar wars have affected the US and the British.

Last is this post from the Belmont Club. I haven't read that site in quite some time (it's a weird combination of gloom and optimism), but Wretchard does do sweeping phrases well. To wit:

Al-Qaeda, like all the evil vapors of the world through history, inevitably comes to resemble its predecessors. Soldiers of the dark eventually find themselves wearing the same livery. Flowers bloom in myriad ways, but evil, like pornography, is repetitive. It marches to same dull beat that all the Lost of the ages have heard call. Poor men, these al-Qaeda, they who would remake the world in their ostensibly new vision only to find it had been templated long ago by some sad and ancient corruption.

Sunday link round up

• A creepy collection of suicide notes
• Google used this camera to create their new "Street View" feature (which is not in Atlanta, yet).
• Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin explains why the lessening of racial majorities is a bad thing for diversity. Really.
• There's a new, free version of Refactor! specifically for ASP.net. It's pretty cool. When I installed it it deleted all of my toolbox snippets in Visual Studio, so be careful about that.
  

Flying Squads

Unbeknowst to me, before now, the Justice Department sends out teams to fight street level crime in cities around the country. The Yahoo News article lists it's failures, which are to be expected. It's hard to see how it could be successful when all of it's efforts and managements are so insulated from feedback. Sending out federal people to deal exclusively with local crime is a troubling trend.

Application wanted

Some time ago I read that Bill Clinton (starting in his younger days) would try to meet as many people as possible in a day, and then at night write down the particulars of everyone he met. It would be nice to have some sort of visual web app to do that. It would allow the user to note all of the relevant details about a person, and also visually show his connections to existing contacts, companies and concepts/entities. It can be done manually in Visio, but that's hardly a workable solution. Does anyone know of any products that do this?

If not, then it goes on the list of stuff to build.

I bash John Edwards

Everyone should check out this Bob Schrum piece in Time Magazine (h.t. TDAXP).

Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else—that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before—and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else.

It's always sad when people are actually worse than you think they are. Then again, the Edwards' (sp) have run for president twice while they have young children, which should disqualify them in the first place.