From the you’ve-got-to-be-joking division, by way of Boing Boing, comes this story of a man who’s had three amputations (both arms and a leg) and still out-drives police in car chases.
Yes, as in more than one of them.
I triple-checked my calendar, and we’re nowhere near April Fool’s Day.
Great Britain has apparently decided not to switch over to the metric system, or at least not just yet, saying that it would be harder to sell things to the US if they did.
As my friend Don tells it, there’s only one reason why the US isn’t solely using the metric system like almost every other country in the world. Toolmakers realized that if the rest of the world changed but the US didn’t, then every car repair shop and every do-it-yourselfer in the US would have to have two sets of tools, so they lobbied US politicians very hard to stop the US from changing over. I can’t find any evidence for or against it (though I haven’t looked very hard), but from my understanding of business and the political process, it’s highly likely that he’s right.
Since there have apparently been several major and very expensive screwups involving one group using metric and another using Imperial measurements, and presumably millions of smaller ones that never make the news, it would help both Americans and the rest of the world if the US ignored small special interest groups and changed to metric.
Of course, that’s not going to happen. Special interest groups have been part of politics since the beginning, and politicians aren’t at all shy about taking money and advice from them.
If I could think of a workable system of government that would ignore special interest groups in favor of what’s best for everyone, I’d expound on that for a while here. The damnable thing is that I can’t… the democratic system, despite all of it’s many warts, is the only workable system that I know of. And it breaks down when the majority of citizens don’t participate and special interest lobbies are allowed to take over.
The more I learn about people, the more I prefer the company of cats.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. J. K. Galbraith, Letter to Kennedy, 1962
I love laptop computers. My first x86-compatible system, way back in the dim recesses of time, was a 4.77MHz portable from Radio Shack with two 720K 3.5″ floppy drives and a sixteen-grayscale CGA LCD monitor that flickered very visibly. The battery, a huge nickel-cadmium brick that made up a good portion of both the size and the weight of the machine, lasted about an hour and a half with a full charge, if I remember correctly. Continue reading ‘“Manganese electrode could double lithium ion battery capacity”’ »
I saw an interesting article on Boing Boing a little while back, about human violence today and across history. “A deep look at the history of violence seems to reveal that modern culture may be making us less violent over time, not more.” That matches the impression that I’ve gotten from my history readings too, despite the fact that the US seems to get itself involved in a military conflict of some sort every twenty years or so.
There was also a fascinating article I stumbled over a while back about primate violence, which seems to support the theory that humans can learn to interact peacefully.
It’s not likely that people will ever stop fighting completely. As long as there are limited resources of any kind, there will be conflicts concerning their disposition. But as long as our technology continues to provide for our needs, I think we’ll continue to move away from killing one another over them.
Things are getting better.
My company is presently doing consulting work for a company in another country. It’s great… I get the holidays from my country, and the people I work with aren’t at work on the holidays in their country so I get those too. [1]
I’m trying to figure out how I can get holidays from other countries off too. Continue reading ‘Holidays Around the World’ »
One of those little technologies (mentioned in SF novels in passing) that has always fascinated me is self-cooking foods, or food packaging that automatically cooks the food it contains when it’s opened. That’s why I was delighted to see this story on Boing Boing just now. Geek heaven!
Now, if they can just do the same with pizza…
[This is one of the two entries that is attracting tons of comment-spam, so I’m disabling comments for it.]
I stand in awe and amazement at the announcement that CNN will release all of their Presidential debate coverage “without restrictions at the conclusion of each live debate.” As far as I can tell, that means that anyone is allowed to post pieces of it on the ‘net, cut and remix it, publicly broadcast it… all of the things that TV and movie companies always refuse.
There has to be a catch somewhere, but so far, I haven’t seen it. I hesitate to believe that any public company would, or even could, do anything that might possibly prevent them from squeezing every last squealing penny from anything they might be able to claim belongs to them, just because it’s the right thing to do. It goes against everything that Big Business has stood for for the past quarter of a century.
Then again… the Republican Party is in major hot water with the public on all sorts of topics, from the Iraq war to Bush’s totalitarian tactics at home. At this point, they’d probably come off as a poor second in a debate with an Eliza program. Maybe someone left-leaning at CNN thinks that this will help sink them. Or maybe CNN just sees a major bloodbath coming, figuratively speaking, and thinks that this will gain them more in free publicity and public good-will than they’re likely to ever see from the debate clips in revenues… if so, they’re almost certainly correct, since I have no doubt that their logo will be prominently displayed on all of their footage.
Whew! My hard-won cynicism, having repelled the vicious surprise attack, is secure once again. 😉
We had a pair of unusual visitors this morning. Older men, dressed in three-piece summer-weight suits, one gray, one brown. I can usually classify unexpected visitors within a second of opening the door, but these fellows didn’t match any group I’d seen before. One of them remained silent the entire time, standing a little ways away; the other started talking about the plight of the poor, and how some people have to live on less than two dollars a day (in North America? riiiiight). It wasn’t until he started reading verses from a previously-hidden Bible that I realized they were from a church rather than a charity. He spent a lot of time trying to see past me into our house too, maybe out of simple nosiness, maybe looking for signs of blatant prosperity to fuel his arguments (he’s not going to find much here, we live a pretty simple life). Or maybe to estimate how much he could shame or cajole us into giving them.
Cynical? Me? Never! Continue reading ‘Help the Poor Please, Sir?’ »
Okay, I admit it. I broke down and went to see it this afternoon. I knew it would be mobbed this evening and all weekend, and I just didn’t want to wait.
I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just say that the changes (that I could detect, anyway) are few and fairly tolerable, the storyline is excellent, the special effects are even better than the first two, and the movie itself is awesome. The appearance of a few other canonical Spider-Man characters were a welcome surprise, and the completely unexpected cameo by a character of a different sort had me laughing aloud, probably inappropriately for the scene.
I was disappointed in three ways, all pertaining to the character of Venom (who is never actually named in the movie). First, Eddie Brock is always portrayed as physically much larger and stronger than Spider-Man; the actor in the movie was almost exactly his size. Second, he didn’t once mention eating Spider-Man’s spleen. The third I won’t say yet, as it’s a spoiler, but it happens near the end — anyone who knows the Spider-Man comic book stories will recognize it instantly, and probably agree with me.
I’ve heard that a fourth movie has been planned for some time. I’m eagerly awaiting it.
What is it with Bev Oda, the Canadian minister in charge of copyright? Does she really think that people are so stupid that they don’t know that she’s taking cash from the entertainment companies she’s supposed to be regulating, even after it has been trumpeted all over Canadian radio and TV?
On the other hand, she’s still at her post after several such scandals, so maybe people are that stupid.