Month: September 2012

  • Today’s Bit Of Self-Congratulatory Snark

    (Excerpted from another comment, so, some people may see it twice. And for free! You should thank me, you really should.)

    The existence of “Honey Boo Boo” allows me to watch virtually any other reality show, no matter how sleazy, degrading, objectifying, or dehumanizing, without guilt, so long as I don’t watch Honey Boo Boo. It provides a nadir that every other program is above. I could watch “Who Wants To Marry An Amish Transexual Conjoined Twin Trucker?”, and still feel I was morally superior to people who watch “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo”.

  • Sex with underage women is illegal? Since when?

    So. Let me get this straight. A pastor in one of the most legalistic, “thou shalt not” obsessed, hair-splitting, absolutist sects of Christianity was “unaware” that it’s not legal to have sex with 16 year old girls if you’re 54.

    Oh, sure, he knew it was “unprofessional”. Yeah. Rape generally *is* unprofessional. (Unless you’re a pro athlete, a rock star, or a Catholic priest. Yeah. I went there.)

    And he knew it was “a sin”, but, you know, he’ll be forgiven.

    But illegal? Hold on, there are laws that say there are things men aren’t allowed to do to women? Wait, what? When did that happen? Is this something Obama did, that darned secret communist Muslim? I’ll bet it is. I mean, women have *rights*? Even *young* women? What’s up with that?

    I can only assume this is some sort of legal ploy, an attempt to reduce his sentence by claiming he would not have knowingly violated the law. Violating a 16 year old girl who trusted him, and whom he had a position of extreme authority over? Yeah, that he’d do, but he wouldn’t have violated the law, if only he (a man who has spent most of his life running a school and working with adolescents in children) had been aware of the law. I mean, it’s not like his job and career would, in any way, require him to be familiar with the laws governing the rights of children and the responsibilities of adults who are placed in authority over children, right?

    Ultimately, though, the legal issue is subordinate to the moral issue when it comes to passing judgment — and I judge, and I am prepared to be judged, by the same standards I judge others. Even if one is foolish enough to believe his claim that he didn’t know it was illegal, he did know it was immoral, and that’s really what matters. Many moral things are illegal; many legal things are immoral. It is the mark of the depraved man, who, when caught committing immoral acts, whether a corrupt preacher, politician, or businessman, defends himself by claiming the acts weren’t illegal. The law does not define right and wrong; the law only defines what society has decided is sufficiently wrong that we’re willing to shoot you for doing it. (All laws are backed by lethal force, if pushed to the extreme. Otherwise, they’re not laws, they’re declarations from the UN.)

     

  • Today’s Exercise In Comprehending Your Insignificance

    Here’s the latest ultra extreme awesome deep field scan from the Hubble.

    Remember, folks. Each of those tiny little blurs and dots is a *galaxy* containing hundreds of billions of stars, or more — some may contain trillions of stars. There’s 5500 galaxies in that image, more or less.

    From what we’ve discovered in the last decade the vast majority of those stars have planets orbiting them.

    And this is only a tiny section of the sky, a thin sliver. Best current estimates are ~350 billion large galaxies (hundreds of billions of stars or more, each) and 7 trillion “dwarf” galaxies, with “only” a few billion stars. That’s the estimate of the “visible universe”. There’s evidence that up to 90% of the universe could be beyond our ability to see, or, in other words, we might want to be adding a ’0′ to all those numbers.

    It’s fortunate that we are neurologically incapable of comprehending this, except in the most abstract way.

     

  • Step 1: Find a unicorn.

    OK, I’m as likely as anyone to get excited over wonky new technology, but, isn’t saying “We now only need 500 KG of exotic matter” about the same as saying “We thought we’d need a trillion unicorns, but now, we only need 100 unicorns!”. IOW, isn’t the real stickler that exotic matter has not been shown to exist, and that (as far as I know) there’s not even a theoretical way to test if it does or can exist, and, even if it can somehow be shown to exist, we have no clue how to create any, or if it can be created?

    If antimatter could be produced in bulk, devising a drive that could reach a useful fraction of C is relatively easy, so given the choice between improving the fuel efficiency of a drive that requires a substance which may or may not even exist, and trying to find ways to improve the creation of a substance that very definitely exists, the latter seems like a better bet. Radical life extension (either biological or brain uploading) and near-C drives can get us to the stars without requiring revolutions in physics, just engineering.

    (Of course, the real answer to Fermi’s Paradox is that any society which can solve the problems of sub-C interstellar travel might have also eliminated any of the reasons for wanting to travel, at least in physical form. The likelihood that an advanced society exists purely in data form is pretty high. Once everyone’s got a near-infinity of virtual space to explore, why bother with the real thing? If curiosity is a universal trait, you can satisfy it via swarms of probes situated pretty far out from the target world — consider that our incredibly primitive technology can already read newspapers from orbit, what could a race with a few million years head start manage? You could probably toss a few thousand marble-sized, or smaller, probes a light year or more from Earth and be able to get images down to the cellular level or beyond. “Any sufficiently advanced technology….”) What else? Resources? Earth’s got nothing that’s not available in abundance elsewhere. Conquest? For what purpose? They wouldn’t need slaves, and conquering humans would provide as much ego gratification as conquering an anthill. I doubt there’s anything particularly special or unique about humans that would cause any species which had the technology to reach us to have any *desire* to reach us. So it goes.)

    Of course, there’s also my theory that the dominant life form in the universe is self-aware planet minds, and organic creatures are simply the means by which the planet is transformed into a consciousness communicating with other planet minds. We may be about as aware of our role in things as an individual neuron in your brain is aware of the gestalt entity called “you”.

     

  • Today’s Misplaced Modifier

    From a Slashdot article:

    Invisible nano QR codes have been proposed as a way to stop forgery of U.S currency by students of Michigan University.

    Damn those U. Mich students and their counterfeiting ring!

  • Sort Of A Backtrack

    Update: The State Dept. now claims the press release was not “authorized”, and has attempted to backtrack, but in such a mealy-mouthed way that it’s hard to give them any kind of credit. They have not grown a spine; at best, they’re working towards a proto-notochord. It seems obvious to me that the “unauthorized” reply followed the first instinct of the professional politician: Abandon all principle whenever the mob demands you do so.

     

  • Dear Ms. Clinton…

    Using freedom of speech to criticize, condemn, mock, or belittle the religious faith of violent, ignorant, illiterate morons, whether in Cairo or Kentucky, is not an “abuse” of free speech. It is one of the most, if you will pardon the term, sacred purposes of it. When you apologized for Americans having the audacity to say something a bunch of imbecilic third-world peasants couldn’t fit their uneducated pseudo-brains around, you disgraced your office. There is no need for apology, no need for excuses, no need for politeness. There is no need to claim to “understand” the mindless violence of the howling mob, no need to “see their point of view”, no need to offer them a hint of sympathy or respect. If they can’t deal with the fact they are living in a global community where they will be constantly exposed to ideas they do not like, let them crawl back into their caves. Your role as the spokesperson for American foreign policy is to tell them that if they continue to unleash violence against American citizens, we will create the caves for them. Well, craters, really, but you get the idea.

    I have many strong and continued disagreements with the policies of the Obama administration, but, unlike many of its critics, I have never considered it to be unamerican or anti-American. Until now. Your craven apology to those who would respond to ideas with violence shames your office. Resign.

    EDIT: OK, somehow, I’d gotten it into my mind when I read this nonsense late last night that it came directly from the State Dept, not the Cairo Embassy. That changes the focus of my anger; I can’t and don’t expect a huge government bureaucracy to monitor every one of its countless flunkies. I do expect, though, not just a half-hearted semi-retraction to come from official channels. I expect whoever wrote and took responsibility for this piece of unamerican drivel to be cast into the outer darkness, his/her career completely over. And I do expect the official State Dept. response to be “We have free speech, assholes. Deal with it.”

     

  • Signs I Spend Too Much Time On The Internet

    Headline:”Obama tops Mitt Romney”

    My immediate thought:”Now, there’s an image I’m going to need some serious brain bleach to erase.”

  • Last Night’s Sweet And Sour Sauce

    So, I cooked S&S chicken last night, and I basically grabbed a sweet and sour recipe off the web, then, based on some comments people had posted in reply to said recipe, modified it a little bit. Here’s my best recollection of how the final recipe ended up. It got high praise from the panel of judges. It’s not going to look like restaurant sauce — it’s going to be brownish, not radioactive neon red/orange, and it’s less cloyingly sweet.

    • 1/2 cup brown sugar
    • 1/3 cup white vinegar
    • 2/3 cup water
    • 2 tablespoons soy sauce
    • 2 tablespoons ketchup
    • 2 tablespoons cornstarch
    • Squirt or two of honey (I didn’t measure, I’d guess 1 tablespoon?)

    Directions

    Place all ingredients in a saucepan and whisk/stir until blended. Cook on medium heat and bring to a low boil. Stir continuously until the mixture has thickened. Use a wooden spoon and constantly scrape the bottom while stirring, as the ketchup/cornstarch/honey will otherwise thicken and coagulate.

    The sugar/vinegar ratio controls the sweet/sour. Adjust up or down to taste.

     

  • Sending Shipping Containers To Mars

    So, here’s what I posted in reply to a Slashdot article:

    Why not send a vehicle every six months?

    Seriously. Wouldn’t it make sense to launch several unmanned “shipping containers” of food and supplies well ahead of the manned craft, set to land near the proposed landing site, and to continue to send such craft during the mission timeline? (I’m aware that Earth and Mars are both in motion and travel times vary, but given the long run-up to a manned mission, there would be a lot of viable windows to launch such “advance craft”.) Make plans for at least one, if not more, such launches during the on-ground mission time period. (Also, include the most advanced 3-D printers of the time on the main craft, and backups on the “shipping containers”, along with plenty of raw material to feed them. The odds of needing to create a spare part, or a custom tool, to deal with unexpected events are pretty darn good, and it’s better to send “tools to make tools” than to try to guess what parts you’re most likely to need a spare of.)

    (Hell, while we’re dreaming…. why not send some kind of self-assembling farm? I’m serious. Robot craft lands. It release a greenhouse-like structure that unfolds and assembles itself. It begins drawing water from the atmosphere — there’s not a LOT, but there’s some — or from the frozen ground (am I wrong, or is there evidence of lots of sub-surface ice locked in the soil? No time to check now…). When enough is gathered, it starts off a hydroponic process. As the plants produce oxygen, it’s drawn off and stored, and CO2 is drawn from the surrounding Martian environment. Yes, I know sunlight is much dimmer on Mars. I do not think it’s unreasonable that some plants can be found on Earth which can survive on lower levels of sunlight, or at least genetically engineered to do so. Even very simple plants can be processed into something edible, if not necessarily gourmet.)

    I’m not claiming this technology exists off-the-shelf today, but nothing strikes me as beyond 10 years or so of focused development efforts. It shouldn’t require breaking any laws of physics or lifter/booster technologies orders of magnitude beyond what we currently have. (Regular, incremental improvements in lightweight materials, genetic engineering, and robotics are safe predictions, as such things go. Expecting significant breakthroughs in the cost of getting anything into orbit is probably not a safe prediction, so it’s best, to my mind, to think about “What’s kind of stuff could we put in a payload in 10 years?” than “How can we lift a bigger payload in 10 years?”)

     

    Comments and criticism from my friends who actually understand physics and engineering on a level beyond that which can be explained my Carl Sagan or Burke?