'Nuff Said on Rudy

[update]
Scary Guiliani cite from one of the articles, quoting a 1994 speach of his:

Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

Tom Tomorrow does it again

from Salon's comic pages:



Put that way, no wonder the Republicans are so anxious to run against her.

Porn for Girls, by Girls

Someone finally cracked the code at Porn for Girls, by Girls. Has to be seen to be believed.

(very safe for work)

'Nuff Said on Scary Movies

I wish I could claim credit for finding this, but it all goes to Mike Eason. If only more women were willing to take the high road like this lady does....

Fruit Flies in the Castro

The boffins at University of Illinois at Chicago have figured out how to make fruit-flies gay, and how to turn them back again. It's very interesting to me because the human gay population for years argued that being gay wasn't genetic, because they didn't want to suffer Mengele-esque attempts to be cured. I always thought this was an unfortunate policy, since the argument "hey, this's how we are, and that's just the way it is" is a much better argument for acceptance vis-a-vis natural rights, &c. than "hey, it's a valid lifestyle choice" (since anything that's a choice is subject to slippery-slope arguments such as whether polygamy/polyandry, consensual teacher-student relationships, &c. should also be allowed). Ammunition for the "that's nature, get over it" crowd has just come through with variably, tunably gay fruit-flies -- if the mechanisms that determine sexual orientation become sufficiently widely understood, then those who feel that things should be otherwise can take it up with their creator, whereas the rest of us can move on and start making the appropriate societal decisions.

Magnetic Energy Storage

So the other day I said to myself, "Self, magnets attract and repel each other. That sounds like work." Then I started thinking: the act of magnetizing NdFeB could be viewed as an act of energy storage. If you take a screw and crank a bunch of very strong magnets together, they should resist that arrangement until they're demagnetized. The question would be: how could this resistance be harvested? One possible way might be to compress a gas, but it'd probably be a lot easier to just compress a gas itself. With magnets, you don't have to worry about gas canisters exploding, but I'm kinda baffled as to how one can extract the energy. Maybe just a stupidly high amount of mechanical advantage?

reforming the Fed

You hear a lot of griping regarding Ron Paul's stand on getting rid of the Federal Reserve bank, calling him an out & out loonie for wanting to go back to the gold standard and the stringency of 100-percent-reserve banking. I don't know, honestly, what's best. In a world where central bankers are doing their damnedest to weaken their currencies, simply keeping one's true money-supply constant would send the value of one's currency through the roof. Good thing? Bad thing? I dunno.

But I do know one thing: there are actually several different Fed rates out there, and no-one talks about the important one -- the discount rate. The DR is what's used to reflect the true, instant cost of money. When you make a net-present-value calculation using anything other than the discount rate, you're including some sort of premium (usually a risk or duration adjustment). The Funds rate is a different matter: what rate banks are allowed to lend to each other at. I propose keeping the Fed -- we've already got it, and quarter-annually pandering to the credit markets is certainly better than the banana republic we'd inhabit if we trusted Congress to manage our money supply.

But why should the Fed regulate the inter-bank rate? Why not let our banks decide among themselves at what rate they are willing to loan money? By letting the rate float, then banks can increase or decrease the their rates in real-time according to market pressures, instead of having to wait for the Fed to make its pronouncements. If you want guaranteed borrowing, use the discount window or repos. If you want market-adjusted funding with varying risk spectra, then talk to the other banks. This still ensures that banks aren't destroyed during market panics, but takes "policy" out of an equation that by definition must constantly change.

A credit crisis is a shortfall in the supply of credit, no different than a gasoline crisis or a doughnut crisis, and is almost always the result of price controls. President Carter did untold damage to our economy fixing our gas prices, and Mugabe's nearly destroyed Zimbabwe with his own price controls. We don't want to find ourselves in the same boat with money. If we want to avoid long-term disaster in the credit markets, we need to get out of the price-fixing business and let the day-in/day-out players make their moves according to the daily realities they face.

the American fatso

Recent studies showing that a "few extra pounds" do not contribute to increased mortality were not talking about obesity. If this trend continues, the Social Security and Medicare crises will fix themselves.

Sons of Gods

A brief snippet of a W.H. Auden poem I admire:

 The sons of Hermes love to play
 And only do their best when they
      Are told they oughtn’t;
 Apollo’s children never shrink
 From boring jobs but have to think
      Their work important.

Hermes or Apollo? I know from which I come....

Global Incident Map

On the link bar to the left you'll see a new addition entitled "Global Incident Map", which shows security-related issues around the globe (mostly terrorism related). Today's pretty quiet compared to normal; generally there's at least half again as much stuff going on.

200 Lashes

I've met some pretty disgusting flavors of Christianity in my time, growing up near CBN in Pat Robertson's stronghold of Virginia Beach, but even at the nastiest "kicking heathen ass" (this is a real quote) flavor of Christianity, even the most idiotic Old Testament Pseudo-Christians who haven't clued in that Jesus's message wasn't "an eye for an eye", wouldn't sentence a rape victim to six months in prison & two hundred lashes. Even the most moronic "she was asking for it" dim-wit would consider that her offense, riding in a car with someone she wasn't married to, had already been amply punished by the rape that ensued.

The center of Saudi Arabia isn't some backwater where no-one knows what Islam is supposed to mean; this's the center of the freakin' religion. Imagine the Pope or the Ecumenical Patriarch calling such a thing just -- it just boggles the mind. My mind has now been made up -- I was ready for all manner of arguments in favor of "moderate" Islam, but upon seeing this, while I don't know what justice is, it's obvious that Islam is far removed from anything remotely just.

Honestly, if it weren't for all the innocents who'd suffer, I'd say just nuke Mecca and wipe Islam off the face of the Earth. It's a disease.

Poor getting Richer, Rich getting Poorer

I know that a bunch of folks are apopleptic(sp?) about Bush Jr.'s affect on the economy, how he's ruining lives, etc., but the latest treasury data shows just the opposite affect during the last 9 years (an implied nod to Clinton too). "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" isn't born out by the tax data. It's more like "the poor get richer, the middle gets richer, some of the rich get richer, and the really rich get poorer", as shown in the chart below.

If you were to ask my opinion, I'd guess that it's because the rich make their money via investment, aka putting their dollars at risk, rather than labor. Anyway, here's the chart -- note that this's median income, not mean income, which is much better news than if it were the converse.



UPDATE: should have checked the data better, the originating article isn't substantiated.

uncivilized

I know the Texan contingent is going to jump down my throat with swords and axes, but it's the week before Thanksgiving and it's 82 degrees outside. That's just not civilized -- this should be baking weather!

mrrr

UPDATE: it's now a very civilized 59 degrees!

New House

Moving to Livermore, CA. Two major terrain features from San Francisco, and a blue-******* ***** of a commute, but a very nice area in general: one of the few affordable places in the region that isn't completely covered over with foundations.

Not a fan of the landscaping, but otherwise it's a nice place with plenty of room to be ensconced for the forseeable future, which, at California real-estate prices, really means the foreseeable forever....


View Larger Map

Walter Williams Smacks It Outta The Park (again)

Congressional Constitutional Contempt

Here's the oath of office administered to members of the House and Senate: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God." A similar oath is sworn to by the president and federal judges.

In each new Congress since 1995, Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., has introduced the Enumerated Powers Act (HR 1359). The Act, which has yet to be enacted into law, reads: "Each Act of Congress shall contain a concise and definite statement of the constitutional authority relied upon for the enactment of each portion of that Act. The failure to comply with this section shall give rise to a point of order in either House of Congress. The availability of this point of order does not affect any other available relief."

Simply put, if enacted, the Enumerated Powers Act would require Congress to specify the basis of authority in the U.S. Constitution for the enactment of laws and other congressional actions. HR 1359 has 28 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives.

When Shadegg introduced the Enumerated Powers Act, he explained that the Constitution gives the federal government great, but limited, powers. Its framers granted Congress, as the central mechanism for protecting liberty, specific rather than general powers. The Constitution gives Congress 18 specific enumerated powers, spelled out mostly in Article 1, Section 8. The framers reinforced that enumeration by the 10th Amendment, which reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people."

Just a few of the numerous statements by our founders demonstrate that their vision and the vision of Shadegg's Enumerated Powers Act are one and the same. James Madison, in explaining the Constitution in Federalist Paper No. 45, said, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce."

Regarding the "general welfare" clause so often used as a justification for bigger government, Thomas Jefferson said, "Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated." James Madison said, "If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions."

Congressmen, openly refusing to live up to their oath of office, exhibit their deep contempt for our Constitution. The question I've not been able to answer satisfactorily is whether that contempt simply mirrors a similar contempt held by most of the American people. I'm sure that if founders such as James Madison, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson were campaigning for the 2008 presidential elections, expressing their vision of the federal government's role, today's Americans would run them out of town on a rail. Does that hostility reflect constitutional ignorance whereby the average American thinks the Constitution authorizes Congress to do anything upon which they can get a majority vote or anything that's a good idea? Or, are Americans contemptuous of the constitutional limitations placed on the federal government?

I salute the bravery of Rep. Shadegg and the 28 co-sponsors of the Enumerated Powers Act. They have a monumental struggle. Congress is not alone in its constitutional contempt, but is joined by the White House and particularly the constitutionally derelict U.S. Supreme Court.

Nuff Said: Stock Mania on Bernanke

Hillary Clinton, Keeping It Real in 08

Dallas Symphony Orchestra Strikes Out

So all the Halloween candy has been disbursed (and we've yet to stock up on Decemberween weevils yet), and so Maddie and I settled back to listen to WRR play their Halloween special, which's a panoply of pieces that they adjudged appropriate -- first up, was the Toccata from Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor. That's kinda cool, although I've always thought the fugue was the cool part, I can see the "evil-scary" purpose of putting the 1st part in. But this was something of the conductor's own arranging: a mixture of Bach's version for organ and Leopold Stokowski's rendition for symphony orchestra.

And it sucked. Chuped. Choked on the big one. I mean, lemme ask one sovereign question to put it in perspective: how does anyone who has half a clue as to what they're doing arrange Bach to be sluggish and leaden?

It was almost as bad as the Bolshoi's rendition of Khatchaturian's Masquerade Waltz, aka, to quote Maddie, "You'd think the Russians could conduct a Russian". It nearly stood up to the vicious Chicken of Bristol. It was almost enough for me to want "MTT" back. Almost.

W not convincing many

For all that many left-wing people think that the Economist should be renamed World Fascist Daily (oh Irony...), if even the Brits think he's off his twig, then perhaps the NeoCons will finally get shovelled into the shallow roadside graves they deserve.

Sadly, given the lack of conservatives among the Republican "front-runners", I won't be holding my breath....

(hat tip to The Mess That Greenspan Made for linking to the Economist cartoon)

New Burglar in Town

I know a guy who says that criminals are stupid, and that's why they chose to be criminals -- I'm not sure I completely agree with that across all spectra of crime, but surely if you are a burglar, in order not to be seen or heard at 3am, wouldn't you choose to walk in all the fallen leaves and to fiddle with all the jingly things on your keyring? And when you ducked behind a shed when someone flips on the backdoor light, would you leave the tip of your boot hanging outside of the shadowed zone?

After hearing the slide on my .270 racked, at least he was smart enough to bug out in the provided time-frame before Buster, Mr. Mag-light and I did our sweep. Given the rapidity with which the seemingly random pickup-truck blasted out of our neighborhood at 3:30 during said sweep, I assume he'll be looking for greener pastures....

Supporting Ron Paul

As everyone knows, I rather like Ron Paul, since he's the only libertarian running right now (the Libertarians, as in the Libertarian party, are a sad joke and look like they'll remain so for decades to come).

If you want to support Paul, but don't want to throw away your cash too soon, there's a new online Pledge you can sign up for that states:

"I will donate $100 but only if 1,000,000 other people will do the same."

If you're interested in signing up, the link is here.

Cthulhu Fhtagn Cheezburger

From CJ Kucera & his friends at Isometric Forums ....

Mitt Romney is Toast

Just wait until the fundies see this old flyer:

Why I like Obama

Barak Obama just came out and said that if he's elected president, he'll withdraw all our troops out of Iraq by the end of 2008. I rather disagree with this approach: we should either stay til it's fixed or else let them cut each others' throats & be done with it. Not sure which one's right, though.... But I'm digressing.

You'll notice a clamoring lack of predictive declarations being made by the triangulating sons of bitches currently being squeezed from the bowels of our two major factions onto the national stage, except for Obama. He may be wrong on many counts, but he makes straight-up statements; he puts his candidacy on the line with highly quotable and therefore attackable statements.

Compared to the soulless pandering jackasses competing with Obama, I'll gladly vote for someone I can trust to do the wrong thing: it's predicatable & manageable. When you can trust someone to do the wrong thing, you can probably trust his reasons for doing so. Kind of a Ron Paul vote of despair (at the fact that I won't get a chance to vote for Paul): as long as we can't have someone good in office, let's at least have someone we can count on.

The Economist on the Yuan/Dollar

Why Socialized Medicine Sucks

This's from a Canadian think-tank called the Fraser institute; there's enough methodology info to make one's eyes glaze over, so it's not just rhetoric. It's no wonder so many Canadians bring their money southwards to get health-care from here instead.

Myers-Briggs for the New Millenium (Falcon)

There's a new, more accurate* rubrick for interpreting the Myers-Briggs personality test for those of us in the post-Woz**, Bennifer & Shrub world we live in today. I wholeheartedly endorse it, even if it is slightly rough on the ego.





* and by more accurate, I mean potentially less imprecise.
** and if you don't know who Woz is, then 20 FD 1B while I tell you....

Driving and Texas

Friday night Maddie had a weird request: she said something on the order of "I know this's irrational, and I know that Mildred (my motorcycle) needs to be turned over, but would you take the minivan to the Zen center tomorrow instead? I've just got a really bad feeling about it." This might seem like a weird request, and it seemed to me at the time. But, if there's one thing I've learned since moving to the DFW metroplex, it's who this country's worse drivers are. I've driven everywhere from New England to California, and I can say, hands down, that while Texas drivers are extremely courteous and polite, that they're finely counter-balanced en-masse by Dallas drivers, who are the most selfish, disrespectful, "I'm getting mine now" drivers I've ever encountered anywhere. Sure, Boston drivers are rude and reckless. Granted. Yeah, D.C. drivers will cut you off in a red-hot minute. Absolutely. It's true that Rhode-Island drivers think stop-signs are optional. And Los Angeles drivers pass from the right and never account for a less-than-perfect road surface. All true. But I've never seen the sheer numbers of people literally aiming their cars right at other cars, running them off the road, just so they can shift lanes on an access road. And Dallas drivers are even worse on the freeways. There aren't many places I've been where the quality of freeway engineering is so bad, with uneven surfaces, inconsistent inter-lane heights, multiply-decreasing-radius off-ramps, etc., but in most other areas where the roadway engineering & inspection was as clearly bribery-managed as Dallas's must surely be, the drivers are more cautious, not less. Here, instead, it's as if they collectively said "in for a penny, in for a pound".
So it was no surprise whatsoever when the teenager driving a big F-150 on Highway 30 Saturday in the passing lane wasn't phased in the least when, minding his own business in heavy stop-and-go construction traffic, driving perfectly normally, I clipped his rear-end with Mildred and went down next to him. And you know what's nice about Texas? In California, the driver would have not only had my driver's license#, phone number, insurance, etc., but would have asked for a DNA-sample and copy of my family lineage just to be safe; this kid, though, after his friend picked the broken bits out of his rear-right tail-lens assembly, was much more concerned with whether my bike was going to run and if I was OK than the fact that I'd damaged his truck, and, in fact, wouldn't let me give him my phone number, etc., in spite of the fact that I'd done $70-100 damage to his truck at no fault of his own. While Texas seems to hold its own with California on the availability of cluelessly myopic jerks who don't realize they're being offensive-it never occurring to them that your terms and theirs might not coincide (the hate-filled, homophobic "y'all seemed so grounded I just assumed you had to be from Texas--how could you be from California?" nitwit couple we met last night, of the sort who give Texas such a bad reputation in California, included), Texas is way out in the lead on the amount of just plain nice people.
Now if they'd just fix their uneven, wobble-inducing inter-lanes so you can ride around the stripe instead of having to duck into the lanes while splitting....

trading, programming, and math

I've been out of the spot forex market for a while now, but have finally finished modelling a trading system that, while not as "fish in a barrel" profitable as my previous dip-buying system, doesn't hemorrhage when the market turns sideways (reversals were just fine). The downside is that this system, unlike the last one, requires very active participation to work, more active than I can do while I keep my day job, and much more active than I can manage while asleep, so I need to automate the darn thing. Given the particularities of the bucket shopmarket maker I use, though, this means learning C#. The language doesn't bother me, and, in fact there are a few aspects of it that I like, like namespaces and partial-class declarations. But it also means learning an entirely new vast set of libraries.... ugh!

And I can't get back in the market without it.... But I did learn something nifty though: if you're simulating random walks of equal probability, which is what time-independent price-movements do when there's nothing significant going on, an easy way to add up the various path-dependent outcomes is simply to compute out the nth level of Pascal's Triangle! It gives you the summed-up potentials for free, rather than having to write a monte-carlo simulator just to do 50/50 probabilities. Pretty neat, and very labor-saving.

Killing Yoga

Almost ten years ago I started studying a martial art called Yi Quan, which was created by the Xing Yi Quan master Wang Xiangzhai in the 1920's, to alleviate what he perceived at the time to be incorrect teaching of XingYi. Xing Yi Quan is one of the three main "internal" martial arts originating in China, the other two being Tai Qi Quan and Baguazhang, and thus Yi Quan is as well.

I started studying under Sifu Cheuk Fung, and had a terrible time of it. I saw other students progressing, but never managed to get anywhere myself. After a bit of time, I started wondering if there were things he wasn't telling me, and made the egregious mistake of attempting to force my body to do what it wasn't prepared to do naturally. This showed superficial progress at first, but eventually let to a number of subtle injuries that took me out of training altogether. It didn't help that I started with a bad knee, but the soft-tissue injuries I added completely screwed me up in ways that the knee wouldn't have. I quit Yi Quan for a while, but eventually came back and started taking classes again. This time my eyes were more open to what was going on (serious Zen training helps you see all kinds of things), and I realized that far from holding out on us beginning students, Sifu Fung was handing us the proverbial "keys to the kingdom" on the even more proverbial "golden platter". Within a month of being in class, any beginning student had been shown all that he needed to know to engage in years of successful training -- boy did I feel like an idiot! As Sifu always said, "those with eyes will see". Yet I was still unable to progress.

I've been frustrated for a number of years to understand the basics of how Yi Quan works, yet be able to make no progress whatsoever in terms of practice. Based on conversations with my brother, who's studying a Imperial-era form of Xing Yi, I've decided that just like Xing Yi, Yi Quan should be considered an advanced martial art, suitable for study by those who are already proficient in another martial art and whose bodies therefore already enjoy a certain level of conditioning. My body is not suitably conditioned, however, and experiment after experiment as to how to get my body to make itself amenable to Yi Quan has either failed, injured me, or both.

After ten years, though, I now believe I'm on the right track, and that the key to the whole mess is what Russ (my brother) refers to as "paying the price of admission". For tubby, ill-conditioned computer programmers such as myself, any plausible method of Yi Quan practice must concentrate on preparing the body to be able to do what is being asked of it, and to this extent I've formulated a slower, more rudimentary program of Yi Quan training that I believe will allow me to regain what ability I did have, but in a correct and natural way that will also allow me to progress further. It's not theoretically any different from Yi Quan as Sifu Fung taught it, but should be much easier for the beginning student such as myself to handle.

Without fully connected strength, none of rest of Yi Quan is worth a damn, but acquiring this body characteristic is the equivalent of jumping over a four-foot wall from a stand-still -- hard for most to do. My new regime is much more akin to jumping over several one-foot walls instead -- much easier. After all this time, I'm finally optimistic that I may finally start to achieve some proficiency with Yi Quan, and I'm going to start practicing again with regularity, albeit at the snail's pace that my new regime requires. I won't get into details here on the blog, but will note success or failure when either surfaces.

Heartache

(to protect the interests of some friends of mine, this will be a read-only posting)

I've had to let a friend go today, and the situation leading up to it has been one of great sadness for me. It's a terrible thing to have to do, but sometimes there simply is no alternative. Someone I know and respect is delusional. Not in the general, easily diagnosable "my wife has been replaced by a demon" kind of delusion, but another more insidious kind, wherein the person involved avoids reality by inventing delusions and hopping from one to the next like so many lily-pads. These people are not just pathological liars who invent random untruths aimlessly, nor are they social predators who manipulate the truth for their own gain. It's worse than that: these people simply do not access reality directly, but only through their own personal and continuous mythologizing. This is twice in my life now that I've been involved with someone who suffers from this kind of condition. One I am divorced from (luckily). Although I never anticipating meeting another one (one per lifetime is already excessive), the other has been a wonderful and interesting friend for several years.

Sadly, though, people with this sickness, being unable to accommodate reality for themselves (for whatever reasons I can't begin to guess), cause massive pain and disruption to other people's lives. You see, our lizard brains are wired to share information as much as possible -- it's one of our greatest survival mechanisms. It's no accident that professional liars learn to internalized their inventions, because once they've done so, they can use our human minds against us. Everyone knows how this works, so we do our best to recognize motivated deception. Other times, when it's just the case of someone who's a little warped (and who isn't, at least a little?), you can always say "ok, well Bill said X, but knowing Bill, it probably went down more like Y".

But when the person is neither conceiving advantageous schemes nor acting from the sort of consistent personal biases that we like to call "personality", but is simply selecting the next bearable delusion, there is no way to protect oneself. Stay in proximity long enough, and your own lizard-brain will internalize the person's new version of reality, regardless of what you know or do, even if you already recognize the delusion as false. As Homo Sapiens, we simply cannot help it.

There is no DSM-IV for these people, no intervention, no cognitive therapy, no regime of drugs. Being estranged from reality at the hardware level, with no differentiation between recognizing the truth and selecting it, there is literally nothing that can be done to help them. These people are like falling knives -- there's just nothing you can do but step backwards and help to clean up the mess that gets made on the way down.

This is twice now that I've lost someone to this, first a spouse, and now a friend. And it sucks.

Temporary Work Visas -- A Modest Proposal

There's a lot of bluster in the media regarding immigration "reform", whether one operates from Ron Paul's "lets make only US-born children of citizens automatic citizens" approach (absolute anathema to the La Raza racists), or from La Raza's "borders are inherently racist" belief (I think we all know where I stand on that one). One thing that keeps getting offered as a compromize position is the ability to have temporary workers come into the country. Temporary workers are a mixed bag, economically -- US Companies can exploit income inequities between the US & Mexico in their perennial drive to minimize costs: this results in cheaper goods for US consumers and a total dearth of low-end jobs that pay enough to let anyone climb out of poverty. Let's just say for purposes of argument that temporary workers are a good idea, even if only as an optimization or compromize position. The next big question becomes: how to ensure that temporary workers are really temporary? Why won't they just stay in-country? If Visa-allocation works anything like most programs do today, then a temporary work-visa is dead on arrival: there's nothing to keep workers from staying.

However, (drum roll, please)

The temporary work Visa (workable version):

• Temporary work Visas are issued by US'ian embassies in the countries of origin of the candidate workers, with full attention paid to criminal history, &c. .
• Temporary Work Visas each carry a unique, trackable ID number, distinct from Social Security Numbers or other IDs.
• Candidate workers, upon receipt of their Visa, may back and forth to the US freely just as any legally resident alien may do.
• Once the Visa is expired, there is a fixed period of time during which the worker must register at the US'ian embassy in his/her own country, in person. This deallocates the Visa ID#, allowing it to be re-issued to another worker. (like checking in a library book)
• At any point of time, only a fixed number of Temporary Visa IDs are allowed to exist; if a worker fails to re-appear at the US'ian embassy, the temporary Visa is not re-established.
• If the worker fails to de-register at the US'ian embassy, an ICE arrest warrant is automatically issued for the offender.
• If an offending temporary worker if forcibly removed to his/her country of origin, the temporary Visa ID is once again made available for use by other workers.
• To incent desired behavior on the part of temporary workers, workers who have already completed used temporary Visas without incident receive added priority for re-issue of another temporary Visa.
• US'ian embassies will routinely publish lists of temporary workers holding up Visas that could be issued to their fellow citizens in the foreign country.
• Visas are re-issued should the temporary worker die while in the US, &c.
  

If we were to follow this program, then we gain three benefits:

1. If temporary workers attempt to use the program for illicit entry into the US on a permanent basis, the system automatically corrects for their presence, affecting the offending workers' countries of origin without penalizing others.
2. It would allow the actual population of foreign workers to be directly managed, rather than attempting to manage a "rate of infow"-type metric with "Visas per year" as we have now.
3. By killing off a mechanism for illicit "sneak in the back door" immigration, it would allow the US to welcome more immigrants in through the "front door" with full support, dignity, &c.
   

Republican '08 Explained

Passing the Baton

There comes a point in every man's life when you simply have to pass the baton on to the next generation and retire. Apparently, two days ago Alexander Solzhenitsyn did just that, accepting a well deserved humanitarian achievement award from Russia's latest tyrant. Some might feel mad that he didn't say anything in protest against Putin, but he really did deserve the award, and at 88 years old, I think he deserves the rest.

Geeks Only

Professor Peter Bird, a plate techtonics specialist, has an alternate map of Tolkien's Middle Earth that he's posited in the "Dessert" section of his web-page. Click for the larger version.

Things that Suck: Reliant Energy

I've never lived anywhere before where I thought about getting a "No Solicitors" sign before, but here in Irving there's some knucklehead trying to sell you something every week or so, and if you're a work-from-home type, it's kinda vexing. Not a lot vexing, just the "please don't waste my time" vexing.

So some idiot wearing a white Reliant Energy polo shirt and two different kinds of officious looking ID cards comes up to my door, introduces himself, shakes hands and says....

(drumroll, please)

I'm here in the area because the energy market has been deregulated; do you know what that means?

Needless to say, I wasn't interested in the rest of his spiel. Never take an offer from a company (Reliant Energy, in this case) that believes its customers are stupid.

RFC on Teen Employment

From The Mess That Greenspan Made (see linkbar), the following graph:



Now, I have just as much loathing of Gen-Y as does the average Gen-X loathing Gen-X'er, but even I don't have a good explanation. Is it really possible that teenagers are really this spoiled nowadays, or with so many illegal immigrants working low-end jobs is there some new "those jobs are for poor people" meme out there, or ... ?

Please speculate, or, even better, opine.

Nuff Said Dept: Inflation and the "Record" Stock Market

'Nuff Said on Putin's Russia

In Texas

Between work and all the myriad things going on to turn this place into a home, there's been no time for nice things like blog-posts, work on my programming language, etc., but we are in Texas and maybe close to 2/3rds of the way moved in.

I for one welcome our new Saturnian masters.

Does this picture of Saturn's pole look a little, um, hexagonal to anyone?

This Modern World finally gets something right

I don't know if everyone's familiar with This Modern World or not, but in the land of Socialists of Convenience (who this very day have a neo-Marxist professor being fellated on the local talk-radio, sigh), This Modern World is very popular. Generally wrong-headed even when not overtly incorrect, but rarely worth the time it takes to scan. Except for this entry over at Salon, wherein the cartoonist finally gets one right. Pay attention to the very last frame, too -- it's important (check out the link to ML Implode on my side-bar for details).

Muppets in Trouble

XKCD smacks it outta the park

James Cameron and the Bones of Jesus

So there's a big brouhaha going on about James Cameron's Discovery-Channel thing-o about the bones of Jesus potentially having been found in an ossuary in Jerusalem. The filmmaker basically took a hypothesis that would be much too politically radioactive to get addressed by the academic community, and put together a docu-drama that will interest enough people that the scientific community will eventually have to address the question, and will be able to investigate it under the aegis of "debunking".

What's really important to note, however, is that even should every ounce of the hypothesis turn out to be true, it in no way invalidates Christianity. Given that the new bodies promised of the resurrection are not the flesh of this world and that nor is the resurrection only promised to those buried recently enough not to have mouldered, there's no reason to conclude that Jesus of Nazareth's actual remains being found implies that either the Resurrection or the Ascension didn't occur.

The Two Faces of Atheism

Our society is generally egalitarian in nature, but it gets there in fits and starts. If it's true that Blacks are the new Jews (generally respected publicly but commonly discriminated against in private when the bigot can get away with it) and Gays are the new Blacks (supposedly respected but often publicly held to be invalid persons without shame on the part of the speaker), then Atheists are the new Gays (publicly viewed anywhere between invalid persons or just mentally ill, depending on the charity of the speaker). In fact, a new USA/Gallop Poll found that not only would the vast majority of the U.S. public not elect an otherwise well-qualified atheist that their own party nominated, but that among the most die-hard Homophobic Evangelical Bigots (my terminology), they'd rather see the very same homosexuals they hate so much (irony, anyone?) in office before they let an atheist in.

This general low-esteem has led to the expected "hey, there's nothing wrong with us" reaction, and now there's a lot of pro/anti-atheism rhetoric sloshing around. Some of the more vigorous proponents of atheism (Richard Dawkins especially) are doing a good job of simultaneously rallying the like-minded and infuriating the religious, but, speaking as an ex-seminarian, ex-Christian Buddhist atheist, I feel they're doing the wider body of atheists, myself included, a rather large disservice. The reason for the problem is simply that there is no one such thing as atheism -- there are in fact two such things.

Type-1 atheism, peopled by folks like Dawkins, are folks that look at religion, especially the three semitic religions, and see a bunch of bronze-age myths that have served the powerful well through the centuries, but are otherwise total nonsense. Atheists of this sort feel active incredulity at the idea of a God; to them, you might as well believe in Santa Claus or the Headless Horseman. These people's atheism is stridently (pardon my psuedo-greek) anti-theos. They argue that God doesn't exist, not on evidence that there is no God, which they know can't be found, but on the basis that there is no solid evidence for God's existence that doesn't also have other "credible" explanations, and that since the prime characteristic of religion seems mostly to be to protect belief regardless of the facts surrounding said belief, including finding any and all wiggle-room possible to reinterpret facts so as to preserve the belief (e.g. the "Process Theology" escape-hatch for the fact that evolution just isn't going to go away), that religion is really just a general cutural artifact we'll surely outgrow.

One day while discussing religion on my blog (which I do often, it being sometimes a bit of a "sore tooth" for me) someone remarked that my perspective was understandible for someone who is "the kind of person who assumes there's no metaphysical reality". This statement is key to the second kind of Atheism. The second kind of atheism doesn't claim that there is no God! The second kind of atheism honestly could care less if there's a God or if there isn't one. This atheism's face, to the extend that it could be said that it's aimed at anything, is aimed at anti-theism. Really, though, it isn't aimed at anything at all, and is based on a negative assumption. The type-2 atheist assumes that there is no God, or, if not that, assumes that there's no God whose existence could possibly be relevent to himself or herself. To a person conditioned to religion, this's vastly weird; but it's really not that different mentally than the assumption that there isn't a condor upon one's rooftop. One doesn't say "today I shall go about all my duties and pleasures as if there were no condor on my rooftop". Not seeing a condor upon one's roof when returning at night, this "belief" is repeated the next morning and every day thereafter without much batting an eye. Likewise for God. If, given the absolutely incontrovertible evidence for the existence of condors and, at least here in California, the fact that we're within their territorial ranges, one just blindly assumes there's no condor upon one's roof, then what should one say about a God whose existence is unproven and about whom people throughout the world have contradictory and seemingly impossible claims? A sceptic might say "well, sure, that's easy, because there are no consequences to having a condor upon one's roof, but there are should God exist". Unlike the type-1 atheist who just shakes his head and calls the religious person an idiot, the type-2 atheist says "yeah, the consequence is that I should be obliged to swear sovereignty to a dead man, never to eat meat, to refrain from eating meat sometimes, to cut the tip off my dick, to smack my head on the ground five times per day, to spin around in circles some afternoons, or to stay up all night reciting sutras, but without any solid evidence as to which one of these won't get me tortured for all eternity by an all-loving God?" The type-2 atheist just isn't going to bother until the religious people themselves agree on an answer. If that comes to pass, he or she will probably chose to go along with it under Mr. Izzard's "not getting killed with sticks" plan, but, short of any evidence that it really matters, will believe in God no more than he or she believes in the local speed limit.

Both faces of atheism are in their own ways religions. Type-1 atheist are positivists; there is no prevailing evidence their positivist outlook is actually true, but type-1 atheists put their faith in their positivism (irony, anyone?) and dismiss everything outside of the Court of Evidence as equally unpriviledged conjectures, dismising any unprovables as paradoxical or false. The type-2 atheist is also religious, but the type-2 atheist follows the religion of realism, the belief that there is an objective and at least partially knowable physical reality ("proved" by the fact that we stub our toes) and that, while one may have to adjust or abandon facts from time to time, sees no point in attempting to go beyond the realm of plausible facts into a realm of priviledged truths.

I think we'd all be better served if, when we call ourselves or others "atheists", we were to distinguish between Positivist Atheists and Realist Atheists. Maybe Janus-headed atheism will remain personae non-grata by most of the USA, but at least among the open-minded, distinguishing between Positivists and Realists might prevent much misunderstanding and invective.

Don't Mess With George Takei

A lemurly formula for square roots

I did some math! And it works!

I've been researching continued fractions, aka fractions whose denominators are fractions whose denominators are fractions whose denominators are.... You get the picture. I'm slowly making progress with my programming language, and I want it to have a good math library, so, like I said, I've been researching these funny things called continued fractions, reading up on some freakin' genius by the name of Gosper who's probably long dead by now. Based on his method of converting continued fractions into matrix multiplications (using something he calls "homographic functions" but which Mr. Google calls "Mobius Transforms"), I've managed to actually come up with something useful. I highly doubt it's original (it's simple enough to be a math student's homework problem), but I did arrive at it on my own, so I'm kinda proud of it.

Below is my lunchtime derivation of a square-root formula, done on a napkin no less! This will give you the square-root of a (positive) number to any degree of precision you like: just stop multiplying matrices when you get tired or when your answer's good enough.

Solar Furnace Barbecue Challenge

Public Challenge:

Russ has a solar-furnace design with lots of little mirrors. I have a cooker design involving a sheet of copper. This summer, may the best Mitchell win!

Please Opine on Saudi Arabia and Iran

Ok, this might be a stupid question, but....

So I was thinking the other day about all the assinine rumors that're flying out here that Bush's going to invade Iran, and the argument that he'll do it to "guarantee stability" in the middle-east because otherwise Iran will have nukes. This got me to thinking, I don't know what the Iranians would do with nuclear weapons if they had them, but I doubt they'd use them offensively (no-one wants to be seen as the first "nuclear aggressor" since the diplomatic position would be so weak). Without the nuke issue, people still seem rather nervous about Iran thanks to their funding of nasty groups, but what I was wondering was, if stability is really the goal, why not let Iran get stronger? From what I've read, apparently the Saudi's and the Iranians see each other as mortal enemies; do we have anything to lose by letting them have at each-other?

My first thought was "yeah, Israel". But since neither side could ever admit to propping up Israel, that means that there's no way for a proxy war there, so....

My second thought was "yeah, oil", but the last thing either regime can afford to do is to destabize the oil market, because their cash-cows are then toast....

My last thought was, "yeah, but what about all the work in Iraq". My assumption has been that once a sufficiently strong party in Iraq emerges, the other Iraqis will say "oh well, what're ya gonna do". Maybe Iraq could end up being a proxy-war location, or maybe such support would simply lead to a faster federalization there.

I've had this largely half-formed thought in my head for a week, but my only conclusion is that I really don't know jack about how to weigh these kinds of situations out.

Opinions anyone?

How "Good Christians" Look to Atheists

(I was going to entitle the article "How Fundamentalists...", but, honestly, this seems to hold true of pretty much all the folks I've met who label themselves "Christian" without further qualification. This post doesn't apply to Christians with a more specific designation unless they agree with the likes of Le Haye, the 700 Club, &c.)

EDIT: My wording of this post last night was not good, and I've offended at least one person already (which wasn't my intention). I've asked a "language" question in the comments, but wanted to put right up front that I'm sorry to have offended folks.

Sara Teasdale

For those who idolize Dorothy Parker, I give you the muse of my youth, Sara Teasdale. Following tradition she swallowed a bullet, but before she did she created treasures for those of like mind. A decent archive is available at wikisource (donations welcome). Much of her work is filled with languid, pining, sopping love-poems of exactly the sort that I can't identify with at all, but there are gems nestled here and there.

The Inn of Earth

I CAME to the crowded Inn of Earth,
And called for a cup of wine,
But the Host went by with averted eye
From a thirst as keen as mine.

Then I sat down with weariness
And asked a bit of bread,
But the Host went by with averted eye
And never a word he said.

While always from the outer night
The waiting souls came in
With stifled cries of sharp surprise
At all the light and din.

"Then give me a bed to sleep," I said,
"For midnight comes apace"--
But the Host went by with averted eye
And I never saw his face.

"Since there is neither food nor rest,
I go where I fared before"--
But the Host went by with averted eye
And barred the outer door.

Doctors

EVERY night I lie awake
And every day I lie abed
And hear the doctors, Pain and Death,
Conferring at my head.

They speak in scientific tones,
Professional and low--
One argues for a speedy cure,
The other, sure and slow.

To one so humble as myself
It should be matter for some pride
To have such noted fellows here,
Conferring at my side.

Wisdom

When I have ceased to break my wings
Against the faultiness of things,
And learned that compromises wait
Behind each hardly opened gate,
When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange -- my youth.

Mastery

I would not have a god come in
To shield me suddenly from sin,
And set my house of life to rights;
Nor angels with bright burning wings
Ordering my earthly thoughts and things;
Rather my own frail guttering lights
Wind blown and nearly beaten out;
Rather the terror of the nights
And long, sick groping after doubt;
Rather be lost than let my soul
Slip vaguely from my own control --
Of my own spirit let me be
In sole though feeble mastery.

And finally, for the writers out there, Thoughts

WHEN I can make my thoughts come forth
To walk like ladies up and down,
Each one puts on before the glass
Her most becoming hat and gown.

But oh, the shy and eager thoughts
That hide and will not get them dressed,
Why is it that they always seem
So much more lovely than the rest?

Nuff said: consumer price index (un-modified)

Day by Day smacks it outta the park

You've come a long way, baby!

So, apparently Oracle is holding an Oracle Women's Leadership Conference. About as useful to me as well, anything else designed for the benefit of non-men(Apparently it's always ok to discriminate against the majority -- subject of another post one day.) But I noticed something; look at the tag-line picture:




Notice how none of the women are the scowling, "ain't I tough" ball-breaking bitches that were lauded as "successful business women" when I was growing up. These women look, well, nice! Like maybe the kind of women that one might actually want to work with, or for. Most importantly, the models are portraying women leaders who're being themselves. Like the coffin-nail says, "you've come a long way, baby!"

Living with a Writer

me: "isn't deconstructing your own work cheating?"
her: "well, if I don't deconstruct it, how will I write anything worth deconstructing?"

Nuff said.

May I buy a vowel?

Um, is it just me, or did we just have one of those "breaking news, just buried on Page A23!" things happen? We just blasted the f- out of an Iranian Embassy, yes?

Isn't that one of the classic definitions of Cassus Belli, or is there some point of international law that states that embassies in occupied territory don't enjoy their normal sovereignty? Shouldn't this be headline news f-ing everywhere??

Evolution Doesn't Explain Life

Quick thought I had. People seem to talk as if evolution explains life, and especially to argue pro/con (mostly con) as if it did so. I wonder if [fundamentalist] religious folks would be more comfortable with evolution if someone were to stop and explain that Darwin meant his title quite literally, that "The Origin of Species" isn't about the origins of life, but, particularly, how speciation occurs once life is active. Maybe not, since religions with creation myths don't generally start with, "In the beginning, there was a stochastic biochemical process....", but one never knows. :-)

Feasting

So I read today (as part of an article on a vaguely related subject) that 30% of USian women are obese. If the salad-eating sex is that overweight, one can only imagine what the current status for men is, but it probably isn't pretty. As someone who's been fighting with his weight for a year or so, I've been paying a lot of attention to this subject for awhile (especially during the Holidays), and we did a lot of eating this December. I remind myself often of the Arab saying "a man who eats when full digs a grave with his teeth", and it came into my head when the article I was reading mentioned that the Japanese say one should eat until about 80% full. Given that it seems every culture has a "leave a little on your plate" saying, I'm thinking that maybe what we need to help with our eating is to bring back the verb-form of "feast". Perhaps we should call feasting "eating until full or stuffed", as opposed to just normal eating, and use that as a self-calibration measure. Especially since "eating until full" leaves an error range from "less than full" to "more than full", and whenever we eat to "more than full", our stomachs attempt to expand to accommodate -- this could be a slippery slope. Regular, "normal" eating, would then be eating such that one's error range doesn't exceed full.

Not terribly important in the grand scheme of things, but I rather like memes and I'm still overweight, so there ya go....

Donner Pass