Sad

egvick asks "Does this photo speak to you, as it does to me, about the importance of human exploration?"





It would if the spacecraft on the pad was going somewhere.

Putting replicas of three ships that did go somewhere in front of a ship that just goes up and then round and round for a few days - that's just sad.

The Story So Far

In Last Week's Episode ..

Congress wrote into a bill that allowed AIG to pay bonus money. President Obama signed the bill into law.

Congress and the President got on their moral high-horse and said how awful it was that AIG followed the letter of the law.

Congress is passing a bill that taxes those bonus monies at 90%.

Which is prohibited by the Constitution.


Regardless of how you feel about the specific matter - does anyone think that de-facto changing our tax policy from progressive to confiscatory is a good idea?

Links ..

They told me that when Bush was President ..

Dodd Fesses Up: Admits AIG Bonus Amendment Added at Behest of Obama Administration

RSpec Soliloquy - By Mr. Steve Eley

RSpec Soliloquy - By Mr. Steve Eley


should be || should_not be: that is the expectation:
Whether 'tis nobler in the parser to interpret
The outputs and side effects of outrageous duck typing,
Or to inherit against a sea of matchers
And by declaration extend them? To fail: to raise;
No more; and by a raise to say we throw
The exception and the thousand natural returns
The code is heir to, 'tis a specification
Devoutly to be wished. To fail: to raise;
To raise, perchance to rescue: ay, there's the rub,
For in that state of exception what tests may fail
When we have injected in this matcher code
Must give us pause: there's the RSpec
That makes calamity of such long backtraces;
For who would bear the Flogs and Heckles,
The oppressor's Reek, the proud man's Cucumber,
The pangs of despised Rcov, the spec_server's Drb,
The insolence of Autotest and the spurns
That patient merit of the occasional Rakes,
When he himself might his validation make
With a bare assertion? .....


Ballmer and Torvalds - BFF

He's about the last guy you'd think would argue for Linux ...

"Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction. The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be."

Indeed. Why pay an extra for a logo

when you can just get an operating system for the exact same piece of hardware?

Poor Pluto

Next they'll rotate and shun him ...

Dear Unilever

Haw.

I send out application after application, looking for work in the marketing departments of big companies, and I don’t have the right degree. I don’t have enough experience. And then I sit in front of the TV and holy shit every commercial is so bland and toothless and ineffective. If these commercials are the product of those degrees and that experience, then I hope to fuck I never acquire them.

Clay Pigeons in Blackburn

I am the 3,453 person to write something about this today.

The Chawners, haven't worked in 11 years, claim their weight is a hereditary condition and the money they receive is insufficient to live on. ... The family claim to spend £50 a week on food and consume 3,000 calories each a day.

The 478th to say something about this.

Emma, said: "I'm a student and don't have time to exercise" she said "We all want to lose weight to stop the abuse we get in the street, but we don't know how."

Jesus wept, lady.  This is not hard: you are eating too much and not exercising enough.


1. Stop putting food in your pie-hole.

2. Get off your ass and stroll around the block. Take the stairs. Get off the bus a stop or two before yours and walk the rest of the way.  You don't gotta have special equipment or a gym membership to exercise. 

3. I refuse to believe that your day is so jam-packed that you are running around like a hyper-active monkey from 'get up' to 'lay me down'.  If you were you would not have a weight problem.


Yeah, I'm mean.  But criminy, some people's children.

Hey, Wesley Clark!

Hey, Wesley Clark?

If people want machine guns, let them join the military. We got em! But for public and personal use, absolutely not.

Fuck. You. [1]

1. You are retired. Your rank is 'civilian'. What is this 'we' shit?

2. Join the Army and you get to use automatic weapons. Sometimes. But not whenever you want. You don't get to shoot at whatever you want - sergeants get irate when you try. You do not own whatever weapon they tell you to use, you operate it.

3. You might as well say 'You want freedom of speech - go to work for the New York Times'.

4. The point is this America and the ability to own and use firearms is written into the charter.

So eat shit. Sir.


That said, I'm not real hip on owning machine guns. But my personal feelings have nothing to do with the matter, nor does the opinion of Civilian Clark: it's written down that we can own and operate firearms and until that very basic Right is repealed, opinions to the contrary are moonshine and sunbeams.

[1] You too, Geraldo.

Toy Pink Poodle

She's a German Shepherd. Big for a female. She looks like a police dog when she sits in the picture window, gazing at the street. She radiates 'grr' and 'don't mess with me' all over the place.

Unless she's carrying her toy pink poodle around. Or her teddy squirrel. Then she looks a little goofy.

Hurry up, Spring

- clonk - clonk - clonk -

Older Monkey, why are you hitting the driveway with a shovel?

I'm not hitting the driveway.

Um ...

I'm moving the ice.

Okay ...

Into the sun.

Because ..

So it will melt faster.


We are so ready for spring.

Generation Kill - Some Issues

I picked up a copy of 'Generation Kill' at the thrift store the other day.

Generation Kill is a 2004 book written by Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright chronicling his experience as an embedded reporter with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion‎ of the United States Marine Corps during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His account of life with the Marines was originally published as a three-part series in Rolling Stone in the fall of 2003. "The Killer Elite", the first of these articles, went on to win a National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting in 2004. ^[1]

Problem - because he focuses on the Lance Corporal war he misses the grand sweep - even when he spends a few paragraphs setting the action in context it's from the Lance Corporal point of view.  This is a waste, in my opinion and the book suffers for it.   Heck, forget the grand sweep of the campaign - more than a few paragraphs on the how and the why of just I MEF's operations would have been fine.

Maybe he could have channeled the ghost of Cornelius Ryan for the job: if he had he would have avoided a lot of what irks me about the book.

Like this: Reporting that FLIR stands for Forward Looking Infrared Radar.  Or that Second Marine Division is based on South Carolina.  Calling an AK-47 a machine-gun.  Describing mortars as bombs launched with rockets.  That a bit of blown-up tank flew hundreds of kilometers and clonked a guy on the head.

I could not go for more than a few pages without finding something like that.  And everytime I did a little voice asked me if I could really trust the rest of what he was reporting on.

An A for effort: driving in HMMWV in Iraq with those guys took a lot of balls.  C- for execution.

Finish the job

Four Seasons by Pasty Dunbar - acrylic on canvas

She wrote

What's wonderful is that even though things get messy, in the end you have knowledge, memories, or a lesson that you've learned. Sometimes the strokes you make may be all wrong and you have to cover over it and start again. But the end result is worth it when you actually stick with it and finish the job. You learn that when something doesn't work you just don't try it again, or at least you would hope that you wouldn't try it again.

ThruYOU

ThruYOU.

Guy mixes unrelated YouTube videos, creates brand-new music.

And it is really, very awfully good.

The internets let artists collaborate online. And across time and space.

Mercenaries and Military Virtue

MERCENARIES AND MILITARY VIRTUE by Jerry Pournelle

After all, it should be fairly clear that no one fights purely for money; that anyone who does is probably not worth hiring. As Montesquieu put it, “a rational army would run away.” To stand on the firing parapet and expose yourself to danger; to stand and fight a thousand miles from home when you’re all alone and outnumbered and probably beaten; to spit on your hands and lower the pike, to stand fast over the body of Leonidas the King, to be rear guard at Kunu-ri; to stand and be still to the Birkenhead drill; these are not rational acts.

They are often merely necessary.

More at the link.

A Matter for Men

President Obama wants more college graduates.  I'm not sure what is needed is 'more college' . . .

"Your work is valuable only when it's needed. And you're only valuable when your particular skill is scarce. It takes time to train a biological engineer or a quantum mechanic or even a competent AI hacker - but if we had a hundred thousand of them, how much do you think a single one would be worth

She didn't answer.

"The only reason we haven't trained that many of them is that we don't need them. If we did, our society could produce them in two to four years. We've proven that time and again. Your grandfathers proved it when they needed computer programmers and engineers and aerospace technicians and a thousand other specialites to put the first man on the moon - and most of those specialites had to be invented as the needs arose. By the end of the decade it seemed as if they were as plentiful as sweat-pushers; in fact some of them actually had to start pushing sweat to survive when the space program was cut back."

"But that was .. just economics," she insisted. "It's the education that makes a person valuable, isn't it?"

"Is it?" Whitlaw looked at her blandly. "How do you define value? Can you fell a tree? Or milk a cow? Do you know how to operate a bulldozer? Can you lay bricks?"

"Of course not - "

"Then by some standards you're not valuable at all.

From 'A Matter for Men' by David Gerrold.

Who can take as much time as he wants to deliver books 5, 6, and 7. But I am madly curious to see What Happens Next and how it All Gets Resolved.

Misunderstood Great Represssion

A few days ago I linked to this article by Niall Ferguson.

scifiben responded

Are you actually implying agreement with the four paragraphs cited above with no commentary?

I believe that Niall Ferguson is one of the smarter guys in his field. I know that I've yet to read anything by him that put me to sleep - he can write. 

Also, he's got that UK 'learned' accent going on, which does not hurt.

I do agree with main thrust of his article:

The delusion that a crisis of excess debt can be solved by creating more debt is at the heart of the Great Repression. Yet that is precisely what most governments propose to do.

Ben continues ..

Or are you counting on your readership remembering that "what is needed is state intervention" is always the wrong answer,

When have I ever written this?

Like this: The state serves a useful function by establishing a playing field with a set of rules that allow the citizenry to prosper. It is proper that the State expend capital doing this. It is on occasion needful for the state to intervene more directly to preserve the market.

My problem with our government intervening is that the people who run it seldom do the right thing. Noble ideals are a cover for doing favors for the well-connected.  They seek office is not to serve the country but to serve themselves.

Self-serving hacks looking out for number-one will not do the right thing for the public, only themselves.

My problem is not with intervention by the State but with the people doing the intervening.

Every day a holiday, every meal a feast

And at work? Ah, it was a good day at work.

I was able to get down deep and spend some quality time with a problem that's been waiting for my attention for a few weeks.  I started with this

require 'dbi'
db = DBI.connect('dbi:ODBC:servername', 'loginid', 'password')
select= db.prepare('SELECT field1 FROM table')
select.execute
while rec = select.fetch do
puts rec.to_s
end


And things clicked and much progress was made and it was good.

Stop helping before you kill us all

Jo Egelhoff attended a 'Meet Your Legislator' meeting recently.  The topic of the $850B Recovery and Reinvestment Act came up ..

One of the small business owners (a health insurance broker) in the audience asked the aides a very specific question about the COBRA assistance measure in the bill. Something like this:

Certain employees who have been laid off can, if they so opt, continue paying health care premiums through the business’s group health plan. Under the “stimulus bill,” those employees can have 65% of their COBRA premium paid by the federal government. At $300, $400 and $500 a month, that 65% subsidy can mean a great deal.

The problem is the employer must pay the subsidy and wait to get “paid” by the federal government until he files his payroll taxes, when he takes a tax credit… And that’s only if the employer has enough employees left to have enough payroll taxes owed to get credit for all the premium(s) he paid.

So you see, it’s a cash flow problem for the employer – and believe me, I see small businesses that are struggling with this.

Well, that was a bit complex and difficult to follow, so there were a few questions back and forth. One of the aides, experienced, helpful and certainly well-intentioned, but in this case very perplexed, figuratively threw up her hands and said:

“But the stimulus package is supposed to help small business.”

Laid off employees get help with COBRA.  The business that laid them off eats the cost.


Dear Government: you've done enough, you can stop helping now.

Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate

Ladies and Gentlemen - the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate.

More than one out of every five dollars of the $126 million Massachusetts is receiving in earmarks from a $410 billion federal spending package is going to help preserve the legacy of the Kennedys. The bill includes $5.8 million for the planning and design of a building to house a new Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate.  The funding may also help support an endowment for the institute.

Yep - that's a fine use of our money in these times of fiscally perilous peril.

Ouch - ahh- oooh

The dirty bomb that stung ...

According to the FBI report, Cummings had four lots of one gallon containers of bomb-grade hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium (also radioactive), lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium (radiation booster), boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon.

I'll bet bomb-grade hydrogen peroxide fizzs and stings like nobodies business.

The Kiss

Francesco Hayez - The Kiss




Used to daydream in that small town,
Another boring Romantic, that's me.

Relentlessly Resourceful

http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html

If I were running a startup, this would be the phrase I'd tape to the mirror. "Make something people want" is the destination, but "Be relentlessly resourceful" is how you get there.

Hmm ...

Pretty in pigtails

My Bestest Friend in the Whole Wide World said ..

I think that we should always remember to be somewhat youthful so that we can actually enjoy the life we are given. So, today I am supporting pigtails.

Maybe I will look funny if I go out grocery shopping because someone will think I'm a bit old for wearing them. After all, who beyond age 12 really looks good in pigtails? Well I do!  Because how I feel is important, much more important than some random strangers who have no affect on my life at all unless I let them.

I'll second that emotion!  I've known the lady for more than a decade and she gets cuter and more adorable as the years pass.

Abby Something - Redux

Would you be willing to:

Attend a church service with your entire family knowing that the fellow parishioner sitting next to you has a handgun tucked in his belt?

I'd rather shoot an armed thug from 10 yards away than run over there and tackle his ass.

Perhaps I'm just lazy.


Our thoughts and prayers are with Dr. Fred Winters, his family and the congregation of First Baptist.


Original post.

509 Caskets by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

509 Caskets
by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

"blame Blagoevich...Barack's Obama's blessing...
burst basement pipes...murder vigil candelight."

i make these tongue twisters of my old reports (even
my student ones) to get my speed, my agility faster.

i'm at the point where i have to
decide whether i want to go national
or stay local. they're two totally
different tracks you know. i went to
journalism school at northwestern and
unlike a lot of my classmates i started
working right away. i'm still living
with my parents in deerfield, but i'm
going to move to the city as soon as i can.

it is honestly a lot of work.

i got this lavender suit over at bloomie's,
and i can't remember the last time i left
the house without concealer on. you know,
you always have to be camera-ready.

it'll be nice one day, when i can finally
sit behind that newsdesk and read from
a teleprompter. lucky me, i'll probably
have to wait for linda yu or nesita kwan
to die off. can't have too many of them
telling the news all at once you know. in
rotation, in succession, you have to wait your
turn, you know.

i never wanted to be a newscaster.

what i really wanted to be was a veterinarian instead,
giving heartworm pills to dogs, sticking iv's into dead cats.
to be able to go home, since there really
are no major emergencies with golden retrievers.

but as they say, the news never stops. and i'm
getting better on-camera, more confident.
i kept slurring my s's and l's when i first
started. "There have been six slayings on the
the South...like last losing season of the White Sox...
Bulls leap large...scaffolding swings off skyscrapers."

always have to keep smiling, in a serious way though.

most of my assignments now are shootings, it's really
depressing. sometimes, i get there fast enough to see
the body. sometimes, it's just cops, family, friends, people
on the block who want to get on camera. englewood.
little village. garfield.

if i told you what i see on an average week, it'd probably
make you want to throw up right here on the spot.

even it's a cold summer or a hot summer, a freezing winter
or a mild one, i will still be there in my pantyhose, like
the postal service, through rain, sleet, or snow, with my hair
done, make-up, ready to report for you.

in a way that you can handle it: face smashed down in asphalt,
boys killed execution-style and thrown in a garbage can, mother
and child offed by an ex-ex boyfriend.

509 caskets in Chicago this year, and i feel like i saw them all.
limp, waiting to be carried off. the cops who don't know anything,
don't find anything. everyone on the street: curious, but close-lipped.
until i and the cameras are gone. lucky for you, you get to watch it
from your living room. that is, if it's not outside your window.

oop, gotta run -- duty calls.

What's Not To Like?

She tweeted

Snow makes me cranky. For some reason it makes my husband cheery. I think he's been invaded by body snatchers.

As snow storms go, this is a pretty good one. Fat, fluffy flakes. Looks like God took a giant bucket of snow and inverted it over Wisconsin: the stuff has been coming down like no one's business since early Sunday.

It's March, this should be the last good snow we'll get.

Plus I don't have to go out.

What's not to like?

Something's just not right

Islanded in a Stream of Stars

To: Admiral William Adama, Galactica (BS 75), Commanding.
From: The Audience
Subject: Islanded in a Stream of Stars - 4.18
Classification: Unclassified
Special Handling: Personal message.  Text contains no spoilers.

Bill,

Ignoring skills are a minor, but essential ability for an officer to cultivate. Ignoring reality while it slaps you in the face is not.

r/s

The Audience

A wish for portal guns that work

Daughter is describing a bad dream that involved the worse parts of an abortion clinic, abattoir and horror movie ...

Older Monkey: I dreamed I had a Portal gun!


Lunch time conversation around here is so interesting.

Work Bird

Nixie on her new bed

Nixie on her new dog bed ...

10 Rainy Day Activities to Do With Kids

10 Rainy Day Activities to Do With Kids

I love having kids. Being with my children brings me some of the most vibrant and fantastic times in my entire life. They are funny, witty, and charming characters that make life brighter. Kids are very active too. They constantly want to do and try new things. So, as a parent you have to be prepared for those times when they need help keeping entertained.

Some activities that have worked well with my kids include:

You'll have to click the link to see what they are.  Maybe I should play hooky from work once in a while.

I hope she got a gift receipt

Attention: Will the adults at the Obama White House please report for duty?

Dude visits from the UK and brings for housewarming gifts ...

• An ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of HMS Gannet. [1]
• A framed commission for HMS Resolute.
  
• First edition of a seven-volume biography of Churchill by Sir Martin Gilbert.
• Clothes and not-yet-available on this side of the Atlantic books for the kids.

And in return?

• A box set of movies on DVD.
• Model helicopters for their kids.

It's like the Browns blew in from out of town unexpectedly and the Missus, while she was at Wal-Mart picking up steaks and potatoes, zipped over to Electronics for last-minute no-thought gifts.

Movies, she thought, everyone likes to plonk their butt down and watch movies.


[1] I'm wondering if they keep stuff like that in a back room, for just in case?

Niall Ferguson: The Great Repression

Niall Ferguson: The Great Repression

There is something desperate about the way people on both sides of the Atlantic are clinging to their dog-eared copies of Keynes's General Theory. Uneasily aware that their discipline almost entirely failed to anticipate the crisis, economists seem to be regressing to macro-economic childhood, clutching the multiplier like an old teddy bear.

The harsh reality that is being repressed is this: the Western world is suffering a crisis of excessive indebtedness. Many governments are too highly leveraged, as are many corporations. More important, households are groaning under unprecedented debt burdens.

...The solution to the debt crisis is not more debt but less debt. Two things must happen. First, banks that are de facto insolvent need to be restructured, a word that is preferable to the old-fashioned nationalisation. Existing shareholders will have to face that they have lost their money. Too bad; they should have kept a more vigilant eye on the people running their banks. Government will take control in return for a substantial recapitalisation after losses have meaningfully been written down. Bondholders may have to accept either a debt-for-equity swap or a 20 per cent "haircut" - a disappointment, no doubt, but nothing compared with the losses suffered when Lehman Brothers went under.

... The second step we need to take is a generalised conversion of American mortgages to lower interest rates and longer maturities. About 2.3 million US households face foreclosure and that number is certain to rise. For example, $US97 billion of $US200 billion of option adjustable-rate mortgages will reset in the next two years. The average monthly payment will increase by more than 60 per cent. As a result, up to eight million households could be driven into foreclosure, driving down home prices even further. Few of those affected have any realistic prospect of refinancing at more affordable rates. So, once again, what is needed is state intervention.

More.

Eden - the proper ends of a society

Select quotes from 'A Canticle for Leibowitz', from Maggie's Farm.

"To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law -- a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security."


"...children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever buiding Edens--and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn't the same."

Blondes, oats and rain

Ken MacLeod is a Trot, he's Scottish, and he writes those weird SF stories.  But he can write.

Blue-eyed blondes are a further twist in this tale: Northwest Europe, because of the Gulf Stream, is the only region where grain crops can be grown that far north. Grain crops are not only lacking in Vitamin D - eating their food products actually removes Vitamin D from the blood. This confers an advantage on skin types even more light-sensitive and melanin-deficient than the European norm. Natural blondes, sadly enough, are just people who can live on oats in the rain.

Haw!  I am not blond but most of my genes come from that part of the world.  And I do like my oatmeal.

Sadly, the lecture he describes seems to have been a real-world thing - no media at the provided link. Dang.

Awwwwww

Via.

Seven Percent

One of the reasons we were given (hi, Chris!) for the stimulus bill was infrastructure.  The money would build stuff.  And people would get paid.  And Lo! the economy would perk up and get happy.

I demonstrated a while back from the CBO report that less than 7% of the 2009-2010 spending was infrastructure in the stimulus bill.  In fact, this percentage barely increases past 2010.  Below is a piece of a Washington Post graphic (whole chart here).  I have colored orange the areas that include infrastructure.

I have generously included all of the highway, transportation, interior, energy, water, Corps of Engineers, school renovation and parks spending, though my bet is that a bunch of that never turns into steel and concrete.  I have also included some of the rural and urban development money.  I have excluded facilities that are by bureaucrats for bureaucrats, such as improvements in federal office buildings.  I have tried to keep things proportional, but note, as always, actual spending does not match the rhetoric.  For example, you might think that the school spending, from Obama’s speeches, was all infrastructure, but in fact only $20 out of over $90 billion is for school renovation.  The rest is for  … something or other.

Click the link for the graph.

Seven percent.

A reason to blog

Why does Dwayne Day read Sci-Fi?

I have an interest in near-future science fiction because the space program that we’re currently stuck with is not the space program that I want, and therefore I have to satisfy my unfulfilled dreams with fiction. Others turn to alcohol, or blogging.

Some of us manage reading, booze and blogging.

Rush Limbaugh at the CPAC

The core Rush Limbaugh's speech at the CPAC seems to be this.

I want everyone in this room and every one of you around the country to succeed. I want anyone who believes in life, liberty, pursuit of happiness to succeed. And I want any force, any person, any element of an overarching Big Government that would stop your success, I want that organization, that element or that person to fail.

I don't find a lot to argue with in that sentiment.

Landing Page

Brian Dunbar: Minder of dogs, cats and wayward computer systems. Husband and father. I don't know if I'm a good guy, but I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard.[1]


I like things that work and loathe zealots.

My wife claims that I am "all that and two bags of chips". Which is pretty good, when you think about it.


Work in Progress: Geidus

Blog: Space For Commerce [2]

Email: brian.dunbar@gmail.com or brian.dunbar@geidus.com

Twitter: bdunbar

Email replies can take up to 24 hours.



[1] Yes, Pulp Fiction.
[2] Also cross-posted to Live Journal, here, if you swing that way.