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Showing posts from December, 2011

Quite the instrument

Ok, I didn't get to the epic post. But this is still pretty awesome:

A trip to Belt Salvage

News is a bit light (plus I'm cooking up a whopper of a post for tomorrow, hopefully), so for now here are some pictures I took on a trip down to Belt Salvage with my dad for your consumption. It's a recycling and metal sale place that deals mostly in scrap metal; you can sell them your scrap copper, steel, or aluminum (plus some more, probably). This means they have some truly awesome piles of random scraps. These two pictures are of some complex machine made by Mueller Martini of unknown function. A bit of googling makes me suspect it's a book-binder: Our theory for this one was that it was some kind of reaction vessel for making industrial quantities of some chemical: This crane, presumably functional, was in the "for sale" lot: This looked like an old cannon, but on closer inspection it was really a lawn ornament—the inside of the barrel was made of rubber: Here we have a giant pile of refrigerators. We were looking to scavenge a few of the feet

Sunset over Cholla Bay

The Congo mineral embargo

David Aronson compares it to a hypothetical pharmaceutical : Imagine that your stated goal is to help patients suffering from a terrible, debilitating disease. And imagine that a new drug comes along that promises to alleviate many of the worst symptoms of this disease, and that you launch a blitzkrieg campaign to persuade the relevant decision-makers to put the drug on the fast track for approval. Now imagine that reports start filtering in from clinics where patients are being treated experimentally with the drug. The reports, at best, are mixed. At worst, they suggest that the drug may be truly harmful. What do you do? Do you redouble your efforts to get the drug approved? Mobilize the public to lobby elected officials by emphasizing the horrors of the disease and demanding that the government take action? Blame sensationalist media for playing up negative reports? Dismiss them as "temporary setbacks" or "inevitable side-effects"? Do you hold conferences i

My gift to you

Since I can't afford gifts for all my loyal readers (or anyone, come to think of it), I present to you some pictures. I was going through some of my sister's pictures from back in the day and found some atrocious ones of me circa 2004, back before all my hair fell out. I was a college freshman then. Here's me as a wannabe war photographer with a 10-buck camera. Here's me doing my best "jaunty." This one might be my favorite.  Boy looks into the future! Hard to believe that was seven years ago, and that I have only gotten more embarrassingly hideous since then. This life stuff doesn't let up.

Collected links

1. It's always obnoxious when big-time organizations steal journalism without attribution . 2. Medical science seems to have hit a wall . 3. How big media companies are actually the ones guilty of content theft . 4. Louis CK's internet experiment has gone well . 5. Some technical details on how SOPA breaks the internet .

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone has a good holiday season. Tomorrow I'll be driving back stateside, and assuming we don't get renditioned by the border patrol or something I'll be back in Colorado tomorrow. UPDATE: This reminds me of one of my favorite impersonations:

Please, no more goddamn wars

Larison points to a Chronicles article that makes the case: Instead of plotting a military action against Iran with no clear exit strategy at a prohibitive cost to our core interests, Washington would be well advised to prepare a strategy for dealing with Iran as a nuclear power. Deterring and containing Iran would be easier than deterring and containing the Soviets 50 years ago. The country’s regime, admittedly unpleasant, is neither suicidal nor tainted by the blood of untold millions, as the two communist nuclear powers were. If the Iranian government considers itself threatened by the United States, the solution is to try bilateral diplomacy based on an offer of U.S. security guarantees to Iran in return for a rigorous supervision regime and a formal pledge that Iran refrain from developing nuclear weapons. The Obama administration should make a direct approach to Tehran. A reasonable agreement would also allow Iran to enrich uranium to the extent needed for power generation and

Hitchens and booze

Katha Pollitt, a colleague of his at the Nation , says what I would have suspected: So many people have praised Christopher so effusively, I want to complicate the picture even at the risk of seeming churlish. His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns). Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phras

Portland as a model for the world

Created by: Healthcare Management Degree

Does the new defense bill apply to American citizens?

I said it did earlier, but Adam Serwer at Mother Jones says it doesn't : So it's simply not true, as the Guardian wrote yesterday, that the the bill "allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay." When the New York Times editorial page writes that the bill would "strip the F.B.I., federal prosecutors and federal courts of all or most of their power to arrest and prosecute terrorists and hand it off to the military," or that the "legislation could also give future presidents the authority to throw American citizens into prison for life without charges or a trial," they're simply wrong. Glenn Greenwald disagrees : Myth #3: U.S. citizens are exempted from this new bill This is simply false, at least when expressed so definitively and without caveats. The bill is purposely muddled on this issue which is what is enabling the falsehood. He go

Star scale guide

This is the best demonstration of the scale of astronomical objects I've ever seen. One more example of the difficulty of really grasping the scale of human insignificance.

Eurodoom watch

Tyler Cowen and Kevin Drum join the chorus calling for breakup. Yglesias adds : If I were an elected official, I'd be extremely reluctant to pull the plug on this endeavor even though it was misguided from the start and isn't functioning in practice. But I'd be leaping at the opportunity to be the second prime minister to bail on the whole thing if someone else went first. Who will take that bullet? Anyone want to start a pool? Greece is the obvious choice, but they still seem quite committed, sort of how the smaller, poorer countries are still joining up, despite the obvious sucking chest wound the Euro has inflicted on nearly everyone in it. It might take a bolder, more confident state, or perhaps one with a great history but not-so-great present. Spain? Italy? Bueller?

Hitchens links

The internet is alight with tributes to the cranky bastard. Here are some of my favorites of his: 1. The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas . 2. On the death of Jesse Helms: Farewell to a Provincial Redneck . 3. A savage takedown on the death of Jerry Falwell . 4. A far kinder obituary of Hunter S. Thompson . 5. Mother Teresa: a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud . 6. Perhaps my favorite: against taboos . UPDATE: On the other hand, it's important not to forget even Hitch could be staggeringly full of shit . UPDATE II: Gawker and Greenwald pile on. Also see this amazingly boneheaded article, titled " In Defense of Endless War ." And the man called himself a fan of Orwell??

RIP Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

Here's him talking about George Orwell and writing: And here's a sample of his devastating wit:

The Iraq war is over (not really)

Jonathan Bernstein strains mightily for optimism: And, as it turns out, the decision to leave casts quite a bit of light on how Madisonian democracy works in the US, both for good and for bad. It’s a story in which the ocean liner metaphor people use was absolutely apt. It took a whole lot of pushing, but this certainly appears to be the case in which citizen action, working through a political party, ended a war. I suppose this is basically true, but to me it really emphasizes how much the American system of government sucks. After Bush lied us into war, which ignited a disastrous bloody catastrophe in which thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died to no benefit whatsoever, we finally get to end the damn thing nearly nine years in—three years into a Democratic presidency. Bernstein seems to think this means the system is working. I'd say it means the system is close to failure, and we are increasingly incapable of confronting even the mo

Statistics of the day

From MSNBC : About 97.3 million Americans fall into a low-income category, commonly defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level, based on a new supplemental measure by the Census Bureau that is designed to provide a fuller picture of poverty. Together with the 49.1 million who fall below the poverty line and are counted as poor, they number 146.4 million, or 48 percent of the U.S. population. That's up by 4 million from 2009, the earliest numbers for the newly developed poverty measure. As Atrios says : We're basically in an extraction economy right now, where the real money is in finding points to siphon off all of the income that people generate. Unregulated utility monopolies, rapacious health insurance companies and the medical industry generally, and of course Big Finance, are all devoted to increasing the slice of your life that they can steal from you, fair and square. We're witnessing the return of the robber barons.

"There is no such thing as law, there is only power"

So indefinite detention will become part of US law shortly. Glenn Greenwald provides the background at length here . Andrew sums up : This soon-to-be-legislated power will also apply to American civilians. It is a legal and indefinite abolition of habeas corpus . And you will find every so-called liberty-lover in the GOP (with Ron Paul as the exception) rushing to vote for it Greenwald (video above) made the quite true and and relevant point that this is not quite as horrible as it sounds in that it is not new—Obama, like Bush before him, has been claiming this power for years already. But this is still a new step. Most people do not pay attention to the legal arcana that is Greenwald's bread and butter. This total and codified disintegration of the rule of law in this country is now an agreed-upon fact . Reading up on some Orwell, I came across this passage in " The Lion and the Unicorn ," an essay about English culture: It is not that anyone imagines the law to be

It's a hard world for women, even in the US

Dear god : Nearly one in five women surveyed said they had been raped or had experienced an attempted rape at some point, and one in four reported being beaten by an intimate partner. One in six women have been stalked, according to the report. Easy for most guys to overlook, I suspect. There is a long ways yet to go to civilize men.

Collected links

1. Need a quick way to make $100? I wouldn't do this for $10,000 . And that is saying a lot. 2. The austerity fixation is killing Europe . 3. A crackdown on illegal immigration is snaring American citizens . People are being sent to jail illegally for days (perhaps by illegal police?). Imagine what is happening to the actual undocumented workers. 4. Best space pictures of 2011 . 5. The next Eurozone crisis, coming to an economy near you in time for Christmas .

Lightspeed camera?!

Via Scientific American , some scientists have developed a camera that is so fast it can record the progress of photons. Check it out: Unbelievably cool.

Department of WTF, ex-con bureau

Guess who's started a career as a crusading anti-corruption activist? Jack Abramoff . No, really. He's judging TPM's "Golden Dukes" competition for the worst (or best?) in Washington corruption, and he wrote a book about his life as a corrupt lobbyist. At first I thought, jeez, that's kind of greasy. But then I reconsidered: shoot, the man did his time. That's more than the vast majority of Washington and Wall Street's panoply of criminals. Prison is not fun by any stretch of the imagination. If he wants to make a career profiting on the promotion of a pretty good cause, I say more power to him. I hope he discovers that working for something genuinely worthwhile can bring benefits no pile of cash, no matter how big, can match. Now let's see him come out for prison reform!

A new Tunisian president takes power

A new president was just inaugurated in Tunisia: Rights activist and former opposition leader Moncef Marzouki became Tunisia's first elected president since the revolution. "I am proud to carry the most precious of responsibilities, that of being the guarantor of the people, the state and the revolution," said the 66-year-old Marzouki on Monday, wearing his trademark oversize glasses and his usual grey suit with white shirt and no tie. Marzouki was elected with 153 votes in the 217-member constituent assembly, with three of the 202 deputies present voting against, two abstaining and 44 opposition members casting blank ballots. The election seems to have gone off quite well. Now comes the real challenge. Overthrowing an oppressive regime is often the easy part. While it can be terribly bloody to face down a dictator, it's relatively easy to maintain focus. The goals are easy to understand and widely supported. Let me be clear: I am in no way diminishing the cou

The Gingrich Tax Plan

Yglesias points to the new Tax Policy Center report on Newt's tax plan, and provides some handy graphs. He missed the obvious thing though, which is to give it the treatment CBPP gave to Herman Cain's plan. UPDATE II: The y-axis is dollars of tax cuts under the Gingrich plan. Bad science major! UPDATE: Though I did spend about 12 seconds on Excel making this thing, obviously feel free to spread it far and wide. It did take me far, far longer to figure out how to make the picture appear full resolution. Blogger kept resizing it to an unreadable degree, as did Flickr and Photobucket. Finally Imageshack did the trick. They've got an option there to upload full whack, without any alterations, and then an embed function. Good to remember!

Department of WTF, the GOP id bureau

You can't make this shit up : An anti-gay Alabama Republican was reportedly making secret sperm donations to at least nine New Zealand women he met over the internet, unbeknownst to his wife back in America... Johnson has spent much of the last year in Christchurch, where he moved without his wife and her three kids (from a previous marriage), in order to help the country’s recovery from the February earthquake. All the while Johnson was reportedly trolling the internet under the username “chchbill” for women who needed help getting pregnant. He reportedly had exchanges with at least nine women — among them several lesbians — at least three of whom are now pregnant. I'm reminded of the second panel of this old  Tom Tomorrow : UPDATE: If you like that comic, check out the Daily Kos comics page , and the Tom Tomorrow merchandise site! I imagine it's tough to be a cartoonist these days; they need all the help they can get.

Greenwald bait

The case that established the "state secrets" doctrine was United States vs. Reynolds . After an Air Force plane crashed, the widows of the men who died on the plane sued the government to find out facts about the crash, and the government refused, claiming that those documents would reveal super-important secret information that would compromise national security. The government was lying . It turns out that there was no information that would damage national security. As a cynic might have predicted, the documents did contain a lot of embarrassing details about the crappy condition of the plane. Now fast forward to present day. The background to this story : awhile back the government seized a hip-hop blog and put up a big banner on its site accusing it of being a criminal enterprise: Okay, now some details. First, remember Dajaz1.com ? It was one of the sites seized over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend back in 2010 -- a little over a year ago. Those seizures struck

What is the point of the European Union, anyway?

David Cameron's vetoing a new EU treaty seems to me obviously the right decision, even if he cloaked it in some rather bullshitty reasons about a financial transactions tax. The real reason, as Sullivan points out , is that the British people would have certainly rejected this treaty and his government would have collapsed like a flan in a cupboard. Cameron has been catching hell for this, as it apparently "isolates" Britain. Suppose for the sake of argument that Britain is now isolated from the decision-making powers in Europe. My question: so what? I am increasingly skeptical about the whole rationale for the whole European project. People often talk about a possible "United States of Europe" as if the American version were a self-evidently good thing. America is certainly among the worst-governed countries in the developed world, suffering galloping political decay , and it's not at all obvious to me that it will survive intact even into the medium ter

Weekend links

1. This twisted story on a Vegas real estate scam has to be read to be believed . 2. I didn't know I was psychic ! 3. I might be surviving on Ramen noodles, but it still warms my heart to know that crazy old rich people can still give gigantic fortunes to their pets . 4. How doctors die . Worth considering. 5. The history of the world's most influential operating system . UPDATE: More links! 6. How to beat a tantrum . 7. Another view from the dystopian future . 8. The only way to save the Euro is to destroy the EU . 9. The jet packs are here ! 10. Defeating planned obsolescence: a new product will let you sharpen your disposable razors . 11. The Senate is, unsurprisingly, trying to crush innovation in wireless connectivity . More innovation = more competition = less profits for large, established players.

We don't need no water

The Eurodämmerung seems to be continuing apace : Angela Merkel wants to use the EU institutions to police government budgets and financial rules. David Cameron had the idea of using the fact that Merkel would need his support to get that done as leverage to get her to agree to water down ideas about a financial transaction tax. Merkel didn't back down, and Cameron didn't back down either. So now Merkel's plan seems scuttled, which I think is exactly what I would have done if I were Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. But the rules of British politics seem to be that you must subject the PM to withering criticism any time anything newsworthy happens, so they seem to be going with the line that Cameron erred in letting Britain become "isolated" when defter manoevering would, allegedly, have gotten him a feisty coalition of Swedes and Hungarians to stand at his side. Felix Salmon adds : It all adds up to one of the most disastrous summits imaginable. A continen

The magic of the internet and why media companies want to kill it

Imagine a 16-year-old dude from France loves music and wants to make a career as an electronic musician. Imagine furthermore he remixes a Killers song, posts it on YouTube, and catches the eye of some industry players. He becomes a successful DJ, still only 17. He releases a mashup taking bits from dozens of different songs and weaving them into a new whole. Now imagine someone else uses that song as background for an awesome dance video. Suppose for the sake of argument that someone is a balding math professorish dude with a predilection for backflips: Would that not be the very height of awesome? Who is being harmed in this process? The playing field is more level; music and performance is democratized such that nearly anyone has a reasonable shot of getting their work out there. For all its flaws the internet is sometimes truly amazing. The "anti-piracy" bill before Congress would make nearly all of the above process illegal . That is on purpose. Media companies

Humanity suicide watch

Dave Roberts brings the doom : In my last post, I discussed a new peer-reviewed paper by climate scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows. It paints a grim picture: -The commonly accepted threshold of climate "safety," 2 degrees C [3.6 degrees F] temperature rise over pre-industrial levels, is now properly considered extremely dangerous; -even 2 degrees C is drifting out of reach, absent efforts of a scale and speed beyond anything currently proposed; -our current trajectory is leading us toward 4 or 6 (or 8 or 10) degrees C, which we now know to be a potentially civilization-threatening disaster. Like I said, go ahead and pour yourself a stiff drink. He sets a deadline of 2015 as the point at which rich countries must start decreasing their emissions. I sure hope that we will get our collective act together, but if I had to guess, I'd say that not only are we not going to make that emissions target, we're going to accelerate past it. The only thing that might s

Intern jams

I was doing by far the most difficult fact check I've ever done today, digging around in various corners of the internet looking for facts about Colombia, and stretching my Spanish to the limit. Here's a sample of what I was jamming to: A luxurious but intense feel. UPDATE: This reminded me of a couple articles from the NYT  not long ago, one on Kaskade and one on Deadmau5 and Skrillex . The second is a bit hard on Deadmau5 for being musically dull at his shows; I can't speak to that, having never been to one. I can imagine that this might not play that well at an arena, perhaps more headphones music. But I still think it's great.

The raindrops had it coming

My umbrella bit the big one awhile back, so I picked up one of these online the other day: I get some funny looks on the metro, but it's totally worth it.

Collected links

1. Launching the innovation renaissance ! Working on this now and it's not bad. 2. Should Greece leave the Euro ? My thinking is that it's time to rip off the band-aid. 3. This new Euro deal looks increasingly terrible . 4. Potentially Earth-like planet discovered ! 5. Radley Balko on the militarization of the police . "It is, to put it bluntly, a terror tactic."

Self-promotion watch

I haven't had much time to write recently—it's getting close to issue time and I've been fact checking like a beast. I was pleased to notice Tyler Cowen pulled out a comment of mine, though: Thinking in the short term, obviously the solution involving the least collective misery for everyone is for Germany to bite the bullet and backstop the whole continent’s debt in one way or another. But just past the immediate crisis I don’t see any reason for optimism. If recession really does hit, how are the SPIIG crowd going to get out of the “debt -> austerity -> crap growth -> more debt (or at least not much extra money to pay down the principal) -> more austerity” cycle? It seems like a 1918-style suicide pact. The SPIIG governments have to be weighing the costs of cutting their losses and getting out. (Right?) People seem to agree that would be another devastating financial crisis, and thinking selfishly that would be bad, but if I were Spain and it’s a choice betw

Department of WTF, Batman bureau

Jeb Corliss, "Grinding the Crack:" Best watched in HD.