Another double dose - 22-23 April 2010
Apr. 24th, 2010 02:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGood morning, people for whom many things are interesting. Today, be fascinated by the legend that suggests the Ark of the Covenant is buried in Japan.
For those looking for pictures instead, we have lots from various cameras capturing space things - a matter-antimatter supernova, for example, or the Solar Dynamics Observatory opening the doors and powering up, giving us some very nice pictures of Sol and its activity.
If space isn’t your thing, try the armoire that opens up into a secret room.
And for those looking for the heart-tugging story, read well the graduation ceremony held for a single student fighting cancer.
Winning a Best People in the World for just trying it, the government of India has introduced a bill that would strip the ability of cabals to hide behind copyright and intellectual property laws to retard progress and fair use by writing the copyright law as it should be, including exempting DRM-breaking that does not have an associated copyright infringement (so if you bought it legally, it’s not illegal for you to crack the DRM so you can transfer it to another device you own, for example). To peruse the bill, here you are, in a PDF form.
On the other side of the tech-savviness is The United States Supreme Court, with a head-deskingly awful sequence indicating just how little they understand about telecommunications. Maybe Barack Obama should nominate someone who’s got clear tech-savvy so they can ask intelligent questions about those kinds of cases before them. If he did, I would expect the media cabals to join in the opposition, and that would be fun.
Out in the world today, the leader of Bolivia declared that eating chicken made men less manly, because chicken is apparently now filled with female hormones.
The Hezbollah group in Syria may have obtained ballistic missiles, according to the chair of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee. Other officials could not confirm such a transaction, and the Syrian government denied transfering technology to the group, accusing it of being a plot from Israel to raise tensions.
Members of the United States House of Representatives pressured the president to confront the government of Egypt on the manner of Coptic Christian women allegedly forced into marriages with Muslim men that leave them open to rape and abuse.
Domestically, we begin with what will be a massive facepalm across the LGBT community - bisexual softball players are suing the organization of the Gay Softball World Series after officials questioned their sexuality, decided that bisexual was not homosexual, declared the players nongay, and disqualified the team because they then violated the rules that restricted the number of nongay players to two. One of the spokespeople added insult to injury and called the bisexual men “straight” and wondered what the ruckus was about. If this were a situation where the three players were deemed gay and thus the team was ineligible because it had too many gay players, imagine the ruckus caused. More evidence for the idea that even people of a marginalized group want to have someone to marginalize.
On the other side of the fence, a Wyoming city said they could not force a man to remove his anti-homosexual message from the fence of his house, citing correctly that the painting was an expression of constitutionally protected speech. It also looks like the community and school around is using the sign as an introduction and discussion of free speech issues, means of protest, and other useful lessons. Bravo to them for making it a teachable moment.
In response to Republican Challenger Sue Lowden’s suggestion that the barter system be used as an alternative to provide medical care for the poor, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee created a page entitled "Chickens For Checkups", encouraging the web at large to send letters to the candidate offering to pay barters for 18th and 19th century diseases, if she will find them a doctor that will accept. When confronted with the silliness of the idea, the candidate chose to stick to her position. I can see both the validity and the silly in her argument - for routine things, it would seem to make sense that one could barter labor or products for medical services. Assuming they didn’t cost an arm and a leg, that is. But for more expensive things, or involving big pharmaceutical companies, the system just doesn’t work it out - you’d be paying it off in labor for a very long time. As usual, the General has the best idea on how to support the candidate.
The White House pointed out a year after their bailouts, the domestic auto industry is doing much better and has repaid their TARP obligations.
As for health care, an estimated three million Americans will suffer the penalty for not carrying insurance rather than purchase coverage, suggesting the real solution to the problem would be in a system where nobody has to worry about insurance costs, because they’ve already paid them in taxation.
Finally, under the last administrator, several regulators at the SEC were watching porn on work computers, leading to the concept of “the SEC wanked while the economy burned”.
In technology and the sciences, the motion of our bodies influences our emotions, and vice versa. Uplifting takes on a whole new meaning, apparently. Combined with other research indicating large amounts of boredom in your life increases the chances that you will die, because bored people take risks and do behaviors that lead to unhealthy lifestyle or premature death. Speaking of aleviating boredom, a different study suggests that taking a nap will help you with processing the information - assuming you sleep long enough to induce the dreaming state. That doesn’t necessarily mean REM, but however long it takes for you to dream. (I wonder if it still works on people who don’t recall their dreams, if they have them.)
The United States military has field-tested a protoype weapon system that would be launched from a rocket and then cruise at hypersonic speeds to its destination, possibly delivering a warhead to target.
An RC buggy chassis was modded to carry a camera and two flashes so as to take pictures of wildlife without risking oneself. The wildlife had mixed reactions to the camera, from “What the...?” to “Plaything!”
More interestingly, a method that stops cancer from metastasizing in mice - the agent doesn’t kill cancer, but it does stop the spread. If such a thing could be applied to humans, we could at least achieve “we got the tumors out, and with this drug, you won’t have to worry about it reappearing.”, which would be an improvement.
Most impressively, however, is a probe and sample collector that should have gone dead a very long time ago looks like it might manage to return and touch down on Terra, having survived solar flares, losing chemical thrust, ion engines failing, and, for all we know, the sample-grabber might have malfunctioned. That said, if things go right for the next two months, the craft will re-enter and deposit its capsule in the Woomera desert, several years after the planned return of the device. Props to JAXA for engineering the hell out of the thing and for managing to keep it alive over all the disaster strikes.
And finally, Gizmodo got a scoop on the next version of the Apple iPhone by paying for a prototype that an employee had mistakenly left in a bar.
Getting into opinions, Mr. Dershowitz opines both about the ineffectiveness of settling for "containment" on a nuclear Iran and the right Israel has to glass the country before Iran gets a chance to use any nuclear weapon they might develop. Speaking of Israel, Mr. Hanson can't fathom why Barack Obama would abandon Israel and all its wonderfully Western virtues, like democracy, when the historical result is that when Israel is abandoned, its neighbors make war against it. And then, of Iran, Mr. Hallowell expects a plan to deal with Iran to appear because the government realizes how unprepared it is.
Nonie Darwish's goes from reasonable to insane in one column, starting with the position that Barack Obama should have been more forceful about the rights of women not to wear Islamic dress instead of the right for women to choose to wear it, going through how the dress is actually repressive and a sign of dictators and tyrants, to accusing the President’s advisor on such matters of being a jihadist and subservient to the Evul Sharia because she wears a head covering. By extension, then, Mr. Obama must support radical Islam (he’s a secret Muslim!), easily explaining why he’s weak on Iran, in favor of covering up women, and throwing Israel to the wolves, instead of being the stalwart defender of Freedom he’s supposed to be. Mr. Mauro checks off before the insane department by just mentinoing that the dress seems to be more of a cultural tradition than anything explicitly laid out in the scriptures.
That said, at least Ms. Darwish isn’t insisting that Christian America be allied with Jewish Israel because Genesis commands that those who stand with the Jews are blessed and those that stand against them are cursed. Using the Arab world, with all the Muslims as his example of the cursed people, of course, because they’re the easy and obvious infidels to use, despite worshiping the same God.
On more domestic matters, Mr. Henninger thinks the current low trust in government is not because the Democrats took control during a recession, but because the people finally know what the costs of increased government are and they don't want that kind of spending and debt. I’d like to believe that, but I think Occam has a better solution for us - those that don’t understand what’s going on have been convinced by their preferred media personalities that Barack Obama and the Democrats are out to turn America into a Marxist/Muslim nation and that they should oppose him to “stand up for liberty and freedom”. Of those that do understand what’s going on, a significant portion of them stand to gain mightily by stoking those fears in the uninformed, another significant portion of them elected a centrist and expect him to behave like a liberal, and the rest are actually happy with how things have gone so far. That makes for bad approval numbers.
On the case of economics, Mr. Du Pont says adding a value-added tax would doom America's economy, because VATs result in higher taxes and higher spending, including income taxes, instead of higher taxes and reductions of spending. Elsewhere, the WSJ wiggles their finger at the current administrator for calling out Republicans as appearing to be bank and Wall Street friendly before settling down and offering places where Republicans can oppose the Democratic financial reform bill, mostly in the realm of “Don’t let those Democrats give the agencies regulatory powers of discretion! They’ll just kill small businesses while letting Wall Street people run amok again!”
Heritage's Nicolas Loris says that Americans should be proud of their improvements in greening the planet, and resist government attempts to impose regulations to protect the environment, because Government Can’t Do Anything Right and Thinks They Know Better Than You, which will only result in lots of spending for no results at all. Instead, The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) can save the planet through economic freedom and minimally regulated capitalism, because when it becomes economically sound to be green, private industry and investment will rapidly improve our ability to do so. The danger with that is that if we wait until it becomes economically sound to be green, it will be far too late for those efforts to do anything.
Putting up the third front in today’s economic opinions, Mr. Williams wants to analyze what kind of incentives come out of a system where almost half of eligible taxpayers end up paying no taxes, and comes to his foreordained conclusion that those greedy freeloaders will vote themselves ever more stuff to keep themselves from having to pay tax and burden the rich even more. His solution? Everyone gets one vote, and anyone who pays more than $20,000 in federal taxes gets an extra vote, so that those people who are financing the operation of the government are able to influence more where that money gets spent. If that seems unfair, then all you have to do to remove the vote disparity is lower the taxes of the rich so that everyone pays the same amount in taxes and thus has equal voting power. And there’s a nice knock-on effect I’m sure he realizes - the lower taxes would naturally rein in government spending and prevent the “socialist” tekeover of our lives, returning the government back to what they mythically believe the Constitution ordained.
Otherwise, corporations and the rich get to cast extra votes, so they can elect politicians sympathetic to them openly, have them craft laws that will favor them and strip away power from the individual that isn’t as rich. We’ve been there before, and most people recoil in horror when they learn about all the various cruelties inflicted on the poor, such a debtor’s prisons, child labor, insufficient wages, and the rest.
Mr. Moran is convinced that right-wing rhetoric is utterly useless in convincing unhinged individuals to attack, or assassinate, or commit terror, and that any attempt to link that rhetoric to terror attacks is dirty pool. Oh, and that the liberal media never said anything about all the unhinged and deranged individuals on the left that were saying all those nasty things about President Bush and are jumping on any opportunity they can get to demonize conservatives.
Getting out of opinions, the Slacktivist points out the obvious - the National Day of Prayer is pretty much an establishment of religion - on his way to the bigger point - those that seek to demolish separation of church and state must eventually come to an answer to the question, "Which sect will be in charge?" After establishing a religion, whose religion becomes official? Protestants? Catholics? Baptists? Mormons? Cultists? Some form of inoffensive but required religion? And how will they manage to keep their power once they’ve beocome the people in charge? As one might guess, much like the game of Thermonuclear War, the only way to win is not to play. Which makes the hucksters who encourage their followers to try and start the game because they receive lots of money to do so significantly more despicable than they are otherwise. In the end, the hucksters will slink away as the followers fight, encouraging all the sides to continue fighting by seeding them with the idea that their enemies are close to victory. In the end, they will profit and then run from the carnage they create, while insisting that they did nothing of the sort, because all they did was talk. (There’s also a quick bit about how Mitt Romney should not be encouraging this sort of thing, because he’s going to lose the fight based on how the religious right treat Mormons now. The Protestant-Catholic alliance would tear apart the Latter-Day Saints.)
Last for tonight, more town flags and logos that incorporate kanji, some of which I would probably be more able to see if I recognized the kanji in question. That, and meat arranged in the form of the original Starship Enterprise.
For those looking for pictures instead, we have lots from various cameras capturing space things - a matter-antimatter supernova, for example, or the Solar Dynamics Observatory opening the doors and powering up, giving us some very nice pictures of Sol and its activity.
If space isn’t your thing, try the armoire that opens up into a secret room.
And for those looking for the heart-tugging story, read well the graduation ceremony held for a single student fighting cancer.
Winning a Best People in the World for just trying it, the government of India has introduced a bill that would strip the ability of cabals to hide behind copyright and intellectual property laws to retard progress and fair use by writing the copyright law as it should be, including exempting DRM-breaking that does not have an associated copyright infringement (so if you bought it legally, it’s not illegal for you to crack the DRM so you can transfer it to another device you own, for example). To peruse the bill, here you are, in a PDF form.
On the other side of the tech-savviness is The United States Supreme Court, with a head-deskingly awful sequence indicating just how little they understand about telecommunications. Maybe Barack Obama should nominate someone who’s got clear tech-savvy so they can ask intelligent questions about those kinds of cases before them. If he did, I would expect the media cabals to join in the opposition, and that would be fun.
Out in the world today, the leader of Bolivia declared that eating chicken made men less manly, because chicken is apparently now filled with female hormones.
The Hezbollah group in Syria may have obtained ballistic missiles, according to the chair of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee. Other officials could not confirm such a transaction, and the Syrian government denied transfering technology to the group, accusing it of being a plot from Israel to raise tensions.
Members of the United States House of Representatives pressured the president to confront the government of Egypt on the manner of Coptic Christian women allegedly forced into marriages with Muslim men that leave them open to rape and abuse.
Domestically, we begin with what will be a massive facepalm across the LGBT community - bisexual softball players are suing the organization of the Gay Softball World Series after officials questioned their sexuality, decided that bisexual was not homosexual, declared the players nongay, and disqualified the team because they then violated the rules that restricted the number of nongay players to two. One of the spokespeople added insult to injury and called the bisexual men “straight” and wondered what the ruckus was about. If this were a situation where the three players were deemed gay and thus the team was ineligible because it had too many gay players, imagine the ruckus caused. More evidence for the idea that even people of a marginalized group want to have someone to marginalize.
On the other side of the fence, a Wyoming city said they could not force a man to remove his anti-homosexual message from the fence of his house, citing correctly that the painting was an expression of constitutionally protected speech. It also looks like the community and school around is using the sign as an introduction and discussion of free speech issues, means of protest, and other useful lessons. Bravo to them for making it a teachable moment.
In response to Republican Challenger Sue Lowden’s suggestion that the barter system be used as an alternative to provide medical care for the poor, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee created a page entitled "Chickens For Checkups", encouraging the web at large to send letters to the candidate offering to pay barters for 18th and 19th century diseases, if she will find them a doctor that will accept. When confronted with the silliness of the idea, the candidate chose to stick to her position. I can see both the validity and the silly in her argument - for routine things, it would seem to make sense that one could barter labor or products for medical services. Assuming they didn’t cost an arm and a leg, that is. But for more expensive things, or involving big pharmaceutical companies, the system just doesn’t work it out - you’d be paying it off in labor for a very long time. As usual, the General has the best idea on how to support the candidate.
The White House pointed out a year after their bailouts, the domestic auto industry is doing much better and has repaid their TARP obligations.
As for health care, an estimated three million Americans will suffer the penalty for not carrying insurance rather than purchase coverage, suggesting the real solution to the problem would be in a system where nobody has to worry about insurance costs, because they’ve already paid them in taxation.
Finally, under the last administrator, several regulators at the SEC were watching porn on work computers, leading to the concept of “the SEC wanked while the economy burned”.
In technology and the sciences, the motion of our bodies influences our emotions, and vice versa. Uplifting takes on a whole new meaning, apparently. Combined with other research indicating large amounts of boredom in your life increases the chances that you will die, because bored people take risks and do behaviors that lead to unhealthy lifestyle or premature death. Speaking of aleviating boredom, a different study suggests that taking a nap will help you with processing the information - assuming you sleep long enough to induce the dreaming state. That doesn’t necessarily mean REM, but however long it takes for you to dream. (I wonder if it still works on people who don’t recall their dreams, if they have them.)
The United States military has field-tested a protoype weapon system that would be launched from a rocket and then cruise at hypersonic speeds to its destination, possibly delivering a warhead to target.
An RC buggy chassis was modded to carry a camera and two flashes so as to take pictures of wildlife without risking oneself. The wildlife had mixed reactions to the camera, from “What the...?” to “Plaything!”
More interestingly, a method that stops cancer from metastasizing in mice - the agent doesn’t kill cancer, but it does stop the spread. If such a thing could be applied to humans, we could at least achieve “we got the tumors out, and with this drug, you won’t have to worry about it reappearing.”, which would be an improvement.
Most impressively, however, is a probe and sample collector that should have gone dead a very long time ago looks like it might manage to return and touch down on Terra, having survived solar flares, losing chemical thrust, ion engines failing, and, for all we know, the sample-grabber might have malfunctioned. That said, if things go right for the next two months, the craft will re-enter and deposit its capsule in the Woomera desert, several years after the planned return of the device. Props to JAXA for engineering the hell out of the thing and for managing to keep it alive over all the disaster strikes.
And finally, Gizmodo got a scoop on the next version of the Apple iPhone by paying for a prototype that an employee had mistakenly left in a bar.
Getting into opinions, Mr. Dershowitz opines both about the ineffectiveness of settling for "containment" on a nuclear Iran and the right Israel has to glass the country before Iran gets a chance to use any nuclear weapon they might develop. Speaking of Israel, Mr. Hanson can't fathom why Barack Obama would abandon Israel and all its wonderfully Western virtues, like democracy, when the historical result is that when Israel is abandoned, its neighbors make war against it. And then, of Iran, Mr. Hallowell expects a plan to deal with Iran to appear because the government realizes how unprepared it is.
Nonie Darwish's goes from reasonable to insane in one column, starting with the position that Barack Obama should have been more forceful about the rights of women not to wear Islamic dress instead of the right for women to choose to wear it, going through how the dress is actually repressive and a sign of dictators and tyrants, to accusing the President’s advisor on such matters of being a jihadist and subservient to the Evul Sharia because she wears a head covering. By extension, then, Mr. Obama must support radical Islam (he’s a secret Muslim!), easily explaining why he’s weak on Iran, in favor of covering up women, and throwing Israel to the wolves, instead of being the stalwart defender of Freedom he’s supposed to be. Mr. Mauro checks off before the insane department by just mentinoing that the dress seems to be more of a cultural tradition than anything explicitly laid out in the scriptures.
That said, at least Ms. Darwish isn’t insisting that Christian America be allied with Jewish Israel because Genesis commands that those who stand with the Jews are blessed and those that stand against them are cursed. Using the Arab world, with all the Muslims as his example of the cursed people, of course, because they’re the easy and obvious infidels to use, despite worshiping the same God.
On more domestic matters, Mr. Henninger thinks the current low trust in government is not because the Democrats took control during a recession, but because the people finally know what the costs of increased government are and they don't want that kind of spending and debt. I’d like to believe that, but I think Occam has a better solution for us - those that don’t understand what’s going on have been convinced by their preferred media personalities that Barack Obama and the Democrats are out to turn America into a Marxist/Muslim nation and that they should oppose him to “stand up for liberty and freedom”. Of those that do understand what’s going on, a significant portion of them stand to gain mightily by stoking those fears in the uninformed, another significant portion of them elected a centrist and expect him to behave like a liberal, and the rest are actually happy with how things have gone so far. That makes for bad approval numbers.
On the case of economics, Mr. Du Pont says adding a value-added tax would doom America's economy, because VATs result in higher taxes and higher spending, including income taxes, instead of higher taxes and reductions of spending. Elsewhere, the WSJ wiggles their finger at the current administrator for calling out Republicans as appearing to be bank and Wall Street friendly before settling down and offering places where Republicans can oppose the Democratic financial reform bill, mostly in the realm of “Don’t let those Democrats give the agencies regulatory powers of discretion! They’ll just kill small businesses while letting Wall Street people run amok again!”
Heritage's Nicolas Loris says that Americans should be proud of their improvements in greening the planet, and resist government attempts to impose regulations to protect the environment, because Government Can’t Do Anything Right and Thinks They Know Better Than You, which will only result in lots of spending for no results at all. Instead, The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) can save the planet through economic freedom and minimally regulated capitalism, because when it becomes economically sound to be green, private industry and investment will rapidly improve our ability to do so. The danger with that is that if we wait until it becomes economically sound to be green, it will be far too late for those efforts to do anything.
Putting up the third front in today’s economic opinions, Mr. Williams wants to analyze what kind of incentives come out of a system where almost half of eligible taxpayers end up paying no taxes, and comes to his foreordained conclusion that those greedy freeloaders will vote themselves ever more stuff to keep themselves from having to pay tax and burden the rich even more. His solution? Everyone gets one vote, and anyone who pays more than $20,000 in federal taxes gets an extra vote, so that those people who are financing the operation of the government are able to influence more where that money gets spent. If that seems unfair, then all you have to do to remove the vote disparity is lower the taxes of the rich so that everyone pays the same amount in taxes and thus has equal voting power. And there’s a nice knock-on effect I’m sure he realizes - the lower taxes would naturally rein in government spending and prevent the “socialist” tekeover of our lives, returning the government back to what they mythically believe the Constitution ordained.
Otherwise, corporations and the rich get to cast extra votes, so they can elect politicians sympathetic to them openly, have them craft laws that will favor them and strip away power from the individual that isn’t as rich. We’ve been there before, and most people recoil in horror when they learn about all the various cruelties inflicted on the poor, such a debtor’s prisons, child labor, insufficient wages, and the rest.
Mr. Moran is convinced that right-wing rhetoric is utterly useless in convincing unhinged individuals to attack, or assassinate, or commit terror, and that any attempt to link that rhetoric to terror attacks is dirty pool. Oh, and that the liberal media never said anything about all the unhinged and deranged individuals on the left that were saying all those nasty things about President Bush and are jumping on any opportunity they can get to demonize conservatives.
Getting out of opinions, the Slacktivist points out the obvious - the National Day of Prayer is pretty much an establishment of religion - on his way to the bigger point - those that seek to demolish separation of church and state must eventually come to an answer to the question, "Which sect will be in charge?" After establishing a religion, whose religion becomes official? Protestants? Catholics? Baptists? Mormons? Cultists? Some form of inoffensive but required religion? And how will they manage to keep their power once they’ve beocome the people in charge? As one might guess, much like the game of Thermonuclear War, the only way to win is not to play. Which makes the hucksters who encourage their followers to try and start the game because they receive lots of money to do so significantly more despicable than they are otherwise. In the end, the hucksters will slink away as the followers fight, encouraging all the sides to continue fighting by seeding them with the idea that their enemies are close to victory. In the end, they will profit and then run from the carnage they create, while insisting that they did nothing of the sort, because all they did was talk. (There’s also a quick bit about how Mitt Romney should not be encouraging this sort of thing, because he’s going to lose the fight based on how the religious right treat Mormons now. The Protestant-Catholic alliance would tear apart the Latter-Day Saints.)
Last for tonight, more town flags and logos that incorporate kanji, some of which I would probably be more able to see if I recognized the kanji in question. That, and meat arranged in the form of the original Starship Enterprise.
