| Beer |
[Nov. 29th, 2009|04:39 pm] |
Today I bought beer for myself for the first time in my life. This also means that today is the first time I've tasted beer. My inability to consume alcohol means that this is not something I commonly engage in. After the first taste (wine-style, take a sip, swirl it around in the mouth, spit it out, wash it out), I'm not entirely sure what all the fuss is about, but I was never very good with wine either, so maybe I'm just bad with alcoholic beverages. |
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| Benedict? |
[Nov. 22nd, 2009|03:41 pm] |
Ever seen one of those ad campaigns that just manages to give completely the wrong message? Like somebody just has no idea what they're actually saying?
I ran across one of those today, not a campaign but a slogan under the sign for Villa St. Benedict, on the outskirts of town which said, if I wasn't misreading it: Senior Living in the Benedictine Style.
Senior living in the style of the Benedictines? What's not to love? The long litany of required prayers? The prohibition on consuming meat? The absolute obedience required to the abbot? The paranoid anti-clericalism? The mandatory hard labor? I mean, who wouldn't want to live in the Benedictine way after retirement?
I'm sure that's not what they meant, but in case they do I have something new to threaten my father with in his old age. |
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| Beam Injection Tonight? |
[Nov. 20th, 2009|11:44 am] |
Rolf Heuer has now stated that the LHC could have beam injection tonight. Beam run should be an injection probe at 450 GeV, magnets are ready, detectors are standing by. Hopefully they'll pass this test with flying colors and get to collisions within the month (I think the betting pool is centered on Thanksgiving).
ETA: Beam has passed Point 5. |
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| Confession time |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|04:20 pm] |
Can I confess something here? Something that will undoubtedly make the housekeepers of the world point at me and laugh like I'm some sort of freak and say things like "Ha! Those bachelors don't know anything about running a home!".
I can't tell the difference between laundry detergents.
Every time I get close to running out, I go to the store and stand in the aisle and look at the racks of dozens of types from a dozen brands, and absolutely cannot figure out what the difference is between them. I can never tell whether my current detergent is making my clothes smell like bottled sunshine (whatever that smells like), or mountain breeze, or fresh water, or even a flowered panorama that was probably stolen from a U-Haul truck. I can't tell that it was bottled high in the Alps by singing, dancing Austrian nuns. I just can't tell. All I care about is whether or not my clothes are clean, and I seriously can't tell one clean, stainless shirt from another. Is there something wrong with me?
Am I the only one who has this problem? |
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| Holding the Law Hostage |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|03:16 pm] |
For your Friday WTF, if you thought your country had problems with its legal system, you don't have anything on Liberia, which may now be the most lawless country in the world. As in, it doesn't have any laws.
This is because, as Foreign Policy reports, Philip Banks, who has been head of the country's Justice department, has copyrighted them. Having served as head of the team who gathered and codified all laws passed in the twenty years of conflict following 1978 into a code in sync with the previous laws, Banks took the unusual step of copyrighting his work, claiming that the law of Liberia, or at least the physical version, is his intellectual property, and is refusing to let the government to which they pertain print any copies. Emails reveal that he and the team of lawyers who codified the property are willing to relinquish their copyright for a sum of money to pay their costs, somewhere between $150,000 and $360,000. The government of Liberia, at the moment, isn't paying (and may not even know if it's legal to pay). In the meantime, God only knows who's recording their current laws.
Regardless of whether he gets paid or not, Banks might want to make sure that there's a law in the set protecting him before he gives them up. Otherwise he may find his own book thrown at him. |
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| Avoiding False Prophets |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|02:37 pm] |
So, I've been watching a bit of the History Channel, and right now they seem to be a bit attached to the idea of the end of the world (which is strange considering that you would think that the History Channel would be thinking about, well, you know, things that have already happened and stuff), of course completely independently of the way that ads for 2012 keep cropping up in between shows. The other day I caught a bit of them talking about the Christian end of the world, which involves the forces of Satan rising to bring anarchy, chaos, disaster, long lines at the checkout stand, boy bands, all that kind of stuff that normally comes with the end of the world.
According to the History Channel, Satan will be assisted by two men, the Antichrist, who will seize power and dominion over all nations, and the False Prophet, who will serve to turn men away from God. Now, the Antichrist is sort of a well-known factor, but it seems to me that Christians who believe that they are in the End Times should really be worrying about the False Prophet. After all, nobody trusts politicians anymore, but how do you find the False Prophet? He's not going to tell you he's false, he's going to preach like a good Christian preacher, building up a following with his charismatic sermons, while slowly and carefully twisting his teaching, confusing you until you no longer know which way is the right way. If biblical prophecy is the only way you can make it through the End Times safely, then the False Prophet is the most dangerous of them all, because he is the one who will be twisting the message of the Bible, who will be slowly darkening your path and poisoning your way. And he could be anywhere, he could be that young charismatic preacher whose sermons you watch on Sundays on TV, he could be the guest speaker who you went to see last summer, he could even be in your own church, and you will never know until you feel the tip of the knife in your back.
So how do you protect yourself from the False Prophet? Well, think of what we know about him; a man who is a great preacher, who can draw the attention and adoration of crowds, and even call down fire from heaven.
Obviously the solution is that you should only listen to churches and sermons delivered and written solely by women. After all, this excludes the False Prophet completely, if there are no men in positions of authority, he can't even begin to spread his diabolical teachings.
This solution is so obvious, yet so ignored that there must be something wrong with it. Can somebody tell me what that is? |
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| Oh Joy, Another One |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|11:14 am] |
Another news item of interest: Saudi Arabia has finally started bombing Yemen.
If you haven't been keeping up with the convoluted mess of Middle Eastern politics, an over-simplified explanation is this: Saudi Arabia (a rich country largely populated by and supportive of Sunni Muslims), and Iran (a large country mostly populated by and supportive of Shi'a Muslims) are the two largest powers in the "central" Middle East, and each of them is trying to make themselves the only power in the region. Yemen, a small country bordering Saudi Arabia, has a government dominated by Sunnis currently being challenged by a tribal rebellion, from Shi'a tribes, and makes a convenient battleground. There have long been rumors that Iran was backing the Shi'a groups, and that Saudi Arabia was backing the government, and with their proxies in Iraq temporarily busy rearming, it appears that the Saudi-Iranian feud has erupted here instead. Hopefully Saudi Arabia will content themselves with the occasional airstrike, but if not we may have a repeat of Israel vs. Hezbollah to look forward to in the Yemeni desert, with the Saudis starring as the Israelis, and Yemen playing the unfortunate role of Lebanon.
(I don't know why I post so many news things, I don't think anyone reads them). |
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| Pseudoscience Strikes Again |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|10:10 am] |
I am a firm believer in the right of individual self-determination. This includes your right to believe what you want, even to the point of self-delusion, and even to the point where it causes you to ignore more rational advice and threaten your health and your livelihood.
( But there are limits ) |
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| The Tribe of Karzai |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|09:33 am] |
And so, after eight long years, we have come to this inglorious pass. When we first went to Afghanistan, that distant land where Empires go to find their limits, we were going for vengeance and protection, our own. It was easy to explain that we were going after those who had hurt us, to avenge our losses and ensure that they could never do so again (the word "never" is far too easy to use). Then, as time passed, we were going as liberators, to save the women forced to wear burkhas, the people trapped in an ideological prison so constrictive that it choked the life out of their ancient cultures. And now, at the end, we are going for Karzai. The President of Afghanistan has too much of a hold on the government and on the electoral process to be replaced, too much for him to be challenged in a fair election. Those elements that should be fighting him on the floor of Parliament are instead fighting him in the hills and mountains.
Karzai is not the leader Afghanistan needs. He has not demonstrated the ability to inspire his people, to weld them together. He has adamantly refused to fight the corruption that is slowly rotting away his country from within, and barely even stops to wipe up the occasional eruption of maggots from still-living skin. He is impotent, the leader of an army of a hundred thousand men, whom analysts believe will be swept out of office by less then ten thousand Taliban without the help of thousands of foreign troops.
We entered, as we are wont to do, into a civil war without realizing it. We blundered into the confused relations of the Pashtuns, the Tajiks, the Hazaras, and the thousands of other racial, religious, and historical groups whose intertwined cultures and patchwork lands make up the quilt that we attempt to quantify by calling it Afghanistan, and attempted to weave from it a cloth of a single color. Instead we have simply created a new tribe, the tribe of Karzai, for which we are sending men and women to fight and die for. We have grown better at fighting the enemy, but we are increasingly fighting for the benefit of a government that has shown no ability to serve the people who elected it, or even to hang on to the hard won gains.
The tribe of Karzai doesn't deserve wealth and triumph on the back of our soldiers. We need to either curb his excesses, get out, or prepare for a long, hard slog to a distant uncertain victory. |
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| Conakry |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|09:26 am] |
Most cities, if you look at pictures of them from space, look sort of circular or oblong, like paint dripped on the natural landscape, oozing out from a central point until it forms an untidy blotch on the face of the Earth. It's a side effect of how transportation works, even though some cities are twisted by geography; San Diego for instance looks more like an amorphous blob, and sometimes I think Chicago looks a bit like a bird dropping. But most cities have a shape that, with enough squinting and imagination, could be interpreted as a circle.
And then there are oddities. Like Conakry. It reminds me of something. I just can't quite think of what.
(If you're SJMA and you're wondering why I'm wasting time commenting on Conakry's geography, I don't advise attempting to invade it without two more LCACs and another pair of CH-53s) |
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| Computer problems |
[Oct. 24th, 2009|09:57 am] |
Having some problems with my desktop, which seems to have caught a fairly nasty virus. It's disabled TaskManager, RegEdit, all scanning programs, all anti-virus software, and safe mode. I've retaliated by manually re-enabling TaskManager, restoring RedEdit, cleaning my registry by hand, and then manually cleaning out all the infected .dll, .exe, and .sys files from the Windows folder. Right now we're in a staring match; the program that disables my anti-virus software is still functioning, safe mode is still disabled, but none of the other viruses are still there, and the current one is impotent, besides setting an amusing warning as my desktop background (it loads an .html file, which I've already found and altered). So right now we're at an impasse.
Unfortunately, in the process, the two of us together have managed to damage and disable my TCPIP.sys file, which means that the internet is temporarily down. So now there is no internet gaming for me (not that I actually do it anyway), and all my internet access at home has to be done through the auspices of Ubuntu.
I'm going to have to get a bigger nuke for this I fear. |
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| Oops, sorry |
[Oct. 16th, 2009|09:16 am] |
There's been a theory in the physics community, the high-energy physics community in particular, for the last year, a feeling of guilt, that comes from one central suspicion that we, quants in general, but ex-high energy physicists in particular, caused the Great Recession. For many years, those of us who couldn't cut it in HEP jumped ship from Academia and went on to work for ridiculous salaries as quants at Wall Street firms; it was sort of the escape hatch for a lot of us who either didn't want to deal with Academia, or couldn't cut it. And if you look at the mathematical models backing Credit Derivative Swaps, well, that has HEP theorist written all over it, it's the sort of convoluted math that we do prefer. The kind of person who thinks that the Standard Model could be simplified by adding five extra dimensions, one of them large, isn't going to have any trouble reshuffling and reshaping financial instruments to make the profits appear larger, and the risk magically disappear through a mathematical loophole. What regulator, or middle manager, who struggled through Calculus I, is going to be able to keep up with a financial wizard who diagonalizes infinite-dimensional matrices for fun, and when asked for his risk assessments turns in five pages of hand-scrawled equations with all the key steps missing?
Well Calvin Trillin agrees with us at the NY Times.
So, we come to the US public today asking for help in preventing the next crash. Spend money on financial regulation if you must, but the interests of the US might be better served by increasing the number of post-doc and researcher positions in High Energy Physics. By creating new jobs for these sad people, we can keep them safely and happily employed, and off of Wall Street. And believe me, you don't want them there. |
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| Huh? |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|07:28 am] |
Wait, what? Seriously?
I mean, why? He hasn't done anything yet.
Let me make a point. Barack Obama has made great strides in returning the world to some sort of diplomatic normalacy. He's done this by re-opening diplomatic channels, and by striving to reconnect the world's strongest military power to the world that it threatens. He has made several statements about human rights, specifically in Africa, where of all the first world leaders he has special clout, that are commendable and deserve praise. He has made steps both in nuclear disarmament and in promoting peace that are laudable, and in the fullness of time may bear spectacular fruit. And he is reforging the kind of alliances that we hope will see the world through the rocky times ahead as the political landscape of the world changes.
But all this, all the uncertainties in that paragraph, underline a very serious flaw. None of his accomplishments, none of his speeches, none of his initiatives, and none of his overtures, have yet yielded serious results. He's being praised for getting Iran back to the bargaining table against a united front, for essentially pulling the plug on Chavez's South American block, for re-normalizing our relations with an internally unstable Russia, and for the message that he's sent to Africa. But none of these efforts have yet produced anything substantial. Maybe in a year or two we'll be celebrating a victory on the diplomatic front, but right now we just don't know. We don't know whether he has the skill, the persistence, or that all-important trait, the luck to pull it off. And to hand the prize out based on expectations, on good intentions instead of results, seems to me against what the prize should stand for. We reward people for what they've done, not for what they say they're going to do.
It was a lousy year for the peace prize, and I don't think there were many stand-out contenders for it, but to award it to someone in their first year on the global stage, without any real significant accomplishments under his belt, cheapens both the prize and the recipient more then they deserve.
(I may be the only disgruntled person on my F-list, but since when has that stopped me from making an ass of myself?) |
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| SUV Question |
[Oct. 6th, 2009|08:30 am] |
So, I'm looking for a reliable, tough, and fairly no-frills (and hopefully low-cost) SUV or light truck with significant off-road capability. This is not for me to buy (more for personal knowledge), but I'm trying to find a cheaper alternative to a Humvee. Do any of you have any sort of vehicle to recommend? |
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| Grumble, grumble, Amazon |
[Oct. 1st, 2009|05:09 pm] |
Just bought some books on Amazon.
Now they're recommending books by Glenn Beck to me.
Apparently I have to be more careful about what I buy. |
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| Empty Threats in Guinea |
[Sep. 29th, 2009|12:49 pm] |
So there's a lot of fighting in Guinea, and a bunch of people are being massacred for protesting against what looks like an attempt to turn a "temporary" coup into a permanent dictatorship. This is, broadly, not a good thing.
ECOWAS, the Economic COmmunity of West African States, who wields enormous economic influence over Guinea simply by being her neighbors, says that the violence should stop. The African Union, a large, pan-African organization formed in part to preserve stability and the rights of the citizens of Africa, which has on occasion deployed thousands of troops to combat zones to preserve certain peoples (albeit in a half-assed fashion), says that the violence should stop. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, the leader of the pre-eminent international organization, which not only speaks with the authority of all recognized nations in the world, but also has the right, in its charter, and the sacred and solemn duty to intervene in cases where rights are horribly abused, a duty they have seen fit to exercise in the past, and who has thousands of soldiers deployed to keep the peace throughout the world, says that the violence should stop. And the European Union, a fairly well-organized group of individual nations wielding tremendous economic and political influence, backed by the second most powerful military block in the world, who contain not one, not two, but a dozen nations with the raw ability to reign in a runaway regime, says that the violence should stop.
This is basically the same list of organizations that condemned the original coup in 2008. They didn't do anything then, and they're not going to do anything now. It's too expensive, too unpopular, and at root, too inconvenient for them to bother doing anything. Everyone knows it. Everyone's in on the game. It's like watching a bunch of baseball fielders chasing a runner after the ball has already been smacked over the back fence, as if they can frighten him into believing they can tag him out with their empty gloves.
Either we should do something about this, or not, but all this empty posturing by people who can do better is annoying, pointless, and it's wasting our time. |
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| Undeservedly 5-1 |
[Sep. 28th, 2009|02:37 pm] |
I went to a Go tournament on Saturday, and came out with 5 wins and 1 loss, which I think is mostly due to my low rank, which makes me feel awfully embarrassed. To tell you why though I'll have to explain a bit about both Go and ranks.
( Ramblings on a board game ) |
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| Harder to die in Japan |
[Sep. 18th, 2009|08:59 am] |
In Japan, in order to be executed apparently, you have to have your execution order signed by the Justice Minister. The new justice minister, Keiko Chiba, has spent twenty years of her life campaigning against the death penalty. Therefore it's unlikely that any execution orders will be signed in the immediate future.
This leaves the US as the only "developed" nation who regularly applies the death penalty to ordinary (read non-treasonous) crimes. Makes you wonder sometimes.
(The chances of this moratorium in Japan sticking may be low. Japan, for reasons I don't understand; apparently has no concept of life imprisonment; which could be a big sticking point in the abolition of the death penalty. But temporary moratoriums happen a lot; especially when the Justice Minister changes.) |
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| Hunting for Abel |
[Sep. 16th, 2009|07:50 pm] |
Just an idea that popped in my head not long ago. I didn't have anything better to do with it, so I wrote it down here. I don't know if I'll do anything with it (I doubt it), but would anyone bother reading a novel that started like this?
( Hunting for Abel ) |
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