Pseudo-Polymath

So. Back to work tomorrow.

1. Carnegie-Mellon puts PV=nRT to the test.
2. No prejudice in the alteration of data.
3. Methane for vehicular fuel, exhibit a and exhibit b.
4. School hi-jinks.
5. Corruption in (a) government noted.
6. Someone on the right praises Ms Obama.
7. With the common practice of security free medical devices, do you think security will be a primary concern for its use. (Update: I hadn’t checked past the headline when I linked this. Apparently it’s a security update that makes this a possibility. I’d still be concerned however, I think if you were installing a hackable device on my heart).
8. Very cool. Wonder what it would be like to play with that on at the same time.
9. 200 million? That seems not very much, it’s likely they lost more than twice that from employees borrowing pencils and office supplies.
10. Unemployment and welfare.
11. Military aid for families takes an ironic turn.

Linky link.

1. Still seems like mental illness to me. The dysphoria <->BIID comparison seems to make that clear. It might be that the best available treatment is to live with it, but that doesn’t make it not a mental illness.
2. Not unrelated, Mark Daniels on addiction.
3. Toyz.
4. Nutt’n better to do I guess than pretend to know about that which you don’t.
5. “Digitally faked”. Now that’s just wrong (and embarrassing to own up to I’d think).
6. An animal with a backpack.
7. A use for old hard drives.
8. “Everywoman” … isn’t.
9. Extra-terrestrial taking a leak.

26 days to (Western) Lent. 31 Days for the Eastern Church (for which there are 10 days to the Triodion … this Sunday is Zacchaeus Sunday).

And nonsense.

1. Heh. A history lesson of sorts.
2. The sooner people figure out that human value is uncorrelated with salary, the better.
3. Conservative vs Liberal Supreme Courts (by a paint by numbers metric) measure with respect to freedom of religion.
4. Seems I grew up in a transition period. I think A grades are exceptional, but that as well, Failing means you were also exceptionally unexceptional.
5. Church and men.
6. Snipers and public perception.
7. Heh.
8. Security and Progressive. In a word, yikes.
9. If Picketty is right (capital trumps salary) then gosh, you’d think the President would be proposing policies that encourage investment in markets. Not the reverse, ah, our moron-in-chief.
10. Great muscular strength helps sometimes.

Links?

1. Ms Warren (is probably not running).
2. Macular degeneration and a possible cause.
3. Bake your own energy bars, with some help.
4. State solvency and some suggestions for the basket case states. (earlier post here)
5. Snail poisons.
6. Almost sounds like the “cafeteria Christianity” heresy is enshrined in American common law.
7. Damned lies and statistics.
8. So. We all try to empathize and understand those on the other side of the aisle (or we should). But I completely strike out here. I have no idea why anyone in their right mind would utter the phrase “That is irrelevant”. Because, no. It! Is! Not! I fail to understand any circumstance in which that would not be the only relevant factor.
9. Somebody else here mistakenly assumes the result of the Habermas/Ratzinger debate. Uhm, the argument isn’t as cut and dried as you pretend.
10. Bang for beginners. (if you have bucks)
11. Backwoods epicurean delight?
12. And .. I bought the book. Haven’t read it yet though.

So, what do we find?

1. Consider the hypothetical …
2. Innocence and loss.
3. Snow.
4. Yikes!
5. Where accuracy is king.
6. Your administration, restricting liberty every which way it can.
7. Of income and nation.
8. Camouflage.
9. It looks like a case of overhype. In which “Potentially leading to a solution” actually means potentially maybe leading to something, but … maybe not.
10. The response by Ferguson police examined.

Hmm, lactic acid abounds from tonight’s workouts.

1. The President pushes wants to persuade/pressure journalists to moderate their criticism of Islam.
2. His supporters in the press apparently fear for their safety.
3. But it would seem one should perhaps instead do something material to discourage this sort of thing and this.
4. Encourage this and this.
5. Technology and impressionism.
6. Biologists and their passions.
7. That is what I’d expect, although those in the wake of Ferguson expect the reverse.
8. Two notes on the European response, here and here.

So.

1. Socialism, the goal of the American left is not what it is cracked up to be. (HT)
2. Also on the left, an odd remark. Let’s see, Picketty recently wrote a book offering that investment trumps salary. The left loved it, but seems to fail to notice that SS is salary, not investment, based. Odd that.
3. Economics for our times.
4. An Advertising suggestion.
5. Apparently the right defends Charlie Hebdo, the left does less so. This is strange for a very left wing satirical mag, the actual publication it is unclear why anyone would buy a copy for any reason with attitudes like this.
6. And the American left, trying to distance themselves from freedom of expression, succeeds.
7. Legal PED? Tylenol?
8. On military service.
9. Here’s a stupid idea fronted by Mr Obama.
10. Here is a less stupid idea that Mr Obama might have said, but didn’t.
11. Hmm. So which study is more worthless this one or this one? Kinda seems a wash to me.

So.

1. Hitting the nail with the noetic hammer.
2. We would be guessing alcohol was involved.
3. Energy weapons, … although the writer misses that one suggestion is that energy weapons are used in space because of the small momentum transfer (low recoil).
4. But those duecedly odd and uncouth chemical weapons can join the “Interwebs of things”. Reprising, I guess, Richard Stallman’s notion that every program grows until it can send email to, every houshold appliance gains intelligence until it can serve a web page.
5. So, Wooly mammoth got the flu?
6. I realize my very smart dietitian once said “cheese isn’t food, it’s a condiment” and that advice is very good for my cholesterol levels, but … cheese!!!! (grommit).
7. Ouch evolved.
8. Now, just apply that indemnity from suit to medicine, nuclear power, and other desirable technologies and we’d have more useful progress in other fields.

Links with remarks?

1. My, uninformed guess, would be that this liberal disaproves. Alas, he’s only half right. “Hate crime” are apparently committed when you do a criminal act and the jury decides you have ideological motives. Seems to me that a crime against police may very well fit into this category. Alas, after all, turnabout is fair play, which in this case means if the ideology is one you approve it still makes it a “hate crime”. And the scare quotes are intentional, for the real way clear out of this mess is to remove all traces of “hate crime” from the books.
2. So. Are you the kind of person to laugh at the misfortune of someone young, inexperienced and clumsy? I certainly am.
3. The west coast liberal anti-vaccine crowd gets a wonderfully apt acronymic sendoff. (HT)
4. Look, when you read some statistical result you have don’t have to google for opposing studies. The first thing to do is the Fermi test, do a back of the envelope estimation of the numbers and figure out if you think it is a reasonable quantity. 1 in 30 homeless. No freaking way.
5. So with Ferguson, the kerfuffle (I don’t recall names) in New York and the movie Selma, much ado has been made about how nothing has changed and things are still horribly racist and wicked in America. Alas, this isn’t actually true. As this post points out, things in the 50s were very very bad, but guess what?  Things are very very very different now. Why does lying about the current state of affairs help? Everybody actually knows they are lying. How does it help to destroy your credibility on the outset.

And … Ant-man? Is it too late to change the name?

Hey. Weekend is done.

1. Meta-linking (linking of links), and I will say, the point on the “trauma” is spot on.
2. So, Christmas and Islam.
3. Teh noodity meets the Constitution.
4. One of those models looks like it’s still tracking the data, although it does it by predicting very little warming.
5. Powder go bang.
6. Obamacare and a twist.
7. Nicknames and history.
8. Danger! Danger! Danger!(Will Robinson?)
9. Snarf.
10. Click through, it’s worth your while.
11. Oddly enough actual leadership involves people following your lead. Doesn’t matter what you say, if you can’t get people to follow your lead … and in fact they resist and go the other way either your a bad leader (and didn’t realize they’d not follow) or you intended the result that was achieved (the not following).

Last full day in Jersey.

1. Of course, what he misses is that those millions would be captive Democrats.
2. PC from the CP. Succinct.
3. In that same vein.
4. A suit that shouldn’t win.
5. A question asked.
6. Origen would not seen a difficulty and that was in the 2nd century.
7. If anyone doubts modern liberals are clueless when it comes to Christian beliefs, doubt no longer.
8. Tech and art working together.
9. A very non-standard interpretation of Shostakovitch’s 7th.
10. Uhm, some Duh Science. Stress impacts the immune system negatively. That isn’t news.

Ok. Back to it, after all, I haven’t stopped reading and saving links, just reporting them. So, what’s in the backlog.

1. Here’s a x-mas suggestion for the old-calendar practitioners who haven’t gotten anything yet. (For those who don’t know, much of the Easter Orthodox are still on the Julian calendar 13 days later than the Gregorian until the end of the century. This is why the Orthodox Easter/Pascha is so wildly different from the West, as both are based on the full moon after the spring equinox, but … when that equinox is changes by 13 days).
2. Mr Degrasse’s 8 “books everyone should read“. Yikes.
3. I haven’t a clue whether Mr Schraub disapproves or approves but, geesh, anyone who holds Israel and ISIS as morally equivalent is ethically blind and should be regarded functionally as a psychopath.
4. Here is another equivalence, possibly slightly less morally suspect.
5. Yet again, repeat ad infintum, the argument against torture is not gotten via consequentialism.
6. I’m not up to speed on hate speech and the legal status of same, but as a layperson one would be lead to suspect that “hate speech” should involve in some way, you know, actual hate or even mild dislike.
7. Speaking of which, there are plenty of liberals who clearly hate conservatives. I wonder if their hate-speech microscope will be turned on themselves in this regard?
8. Union labor and why it sucks so often.
9. Very cool.
10. Graft and equalite, liberte, fraternite (and buckets of blood).
11. A gun (which is sort of on my wish-I-had-one list)

At long last, more links.

1. More CO2.
2. Yikes.
3. I have to say, vis a vis corn, that comparing corn grits and cream of wheat and how hungry I am four hours later in the morning, corn beats wheat hands down.
4. The minority leader and doing self parody right. Man, she has teh stupid in buckets, eh?
5. Some politicians around the globe, however, are make Ms Pelosi look less worse.
6. Neat interior design.
7. Tranadol found in trees, or more precisely, not found in trees. Interesting though.
8. ‘cuse me, any “theory of tattoos” has to include “alcohol was involved in the decision making”.
9. Heh.
10. On banning prayer at games. Reminds me of the Soviet era story of the pols proclaiming to the crowd how religion in the USSR was dead and gone … somebody in the crowd shouted “Christ is Risen” and the whole crowd responded back automatically “He is Risen Indeed”.
11. Looking into the near future crystal ball, optimistically.
12. Relics of the Cross.

Whoo.

1. Ms Bathory was close.
2. Human’s are nothing if not adaptable.
3. Remembering 9/11 and something about it you probably didn’t know.
4. Max-Sec in the deep south.
5. Yikes.
6. More yikes.
7. Constitutional authority … but don’t worry, Mr Yoo is for it.
8. Unintended consequence (but … easily predicted consequences should not be unintentional. So is it an intentional consequence then?)
9. The wrong air force.
10. Mr Kerry, “if you don’t study” … comes back to haunt, eh?
11. Let’s see, it is “regrettable” that a guy who thinks it OK to offer that the Israeli Prime minister would wear the teeth of Palestinian children publicly doesn’t get tenure … Hmmm. What’d that site offer on various conservative remarks that lost people jobs or positions?
12. Incoherence from the left, noted.
13. We’re waiting for the really really cool lightning bolt.
14. Liberal much? Geesh. So, do you think that next week they write an essay comparing Mr Obama to Joseph Kony? ‘Tis about as logical and as outrageous.

Yet another hotel.

1. Some theology.
2. Some things the police has for which they have no reasonable need.
3. Some history if you follow the linked link.
4. Well, TR said (I think) “walk softly and carry a big stick.” Our knucklehead in chief has a variant of that phrase, which alas, is stickless.
5. More here.
6. Some jokes all with the same punch line.
7. Crime and punishment.
8. Global warming.
9. Cool. (probably literally as well)
10. Nature’s beauty (and the beast).

Good, err, day.

1. A post sort of against profiling. Profiling is racist when the criteria chosen are inappropriate. if race is a factor predictive of crime then race is not an inappropriate criteria. In setting a defensive line, you put your forces where the bulk of the attacks are expected. This isn’t “profiling”.
2. Rape culture.
3. Scraping the ugly barnacles from the underside of civilization as a job.
4. The prior reality is why “slower to draw” is a death sentence for many.
5. Fun and snow.
6. Somebody fulfilled their photographic bucket list.
7. Government waste examined.
8. ‘gainst mines and IEDs … a tool.
9. The constitutional right to be an ass. Wonder if the left would be defending that U of I Urbana professor if he wore that in public (and not at work).
10. Apparently 83% of American’s are out of their freaking minds. Or the poll is just another damn cricket race. I’d rather the law went the other way.
11. Embrace your coming disrespectability. There’s even a beatitude about that.

G’day, hump day (of my 15 day workweek) is over.

1. More grist for the Ferguson discussion.
2. Here too.
3. Some silliness. Signs like this are pertinent, when people who accidentally do this roam the earth.
4. Film.
5. I’d go with #10, #9 and #1.
6. Some basic points in theology which everyone should agree, here and here … but a whole lot of people get stuck on them.
7. Piketty points.
8. Confused about the outrage. So ‘splain it for us, eh?
9. Well, you always have the two choices, are they stupid or evil?
10. I don’t see what’s wrong with being liked because you are smart. Do you?
11. Very cool.