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An interesting interview
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A nice short overview of Kurdistan
From Stephen DeAngelis, who is in Kurdistan right now.
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How to be a better photographer
In video no less, on Digital Photography School.
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Apocolyptic quote of the moment
From Michael Lind
Modernity shot itself in the head in 1914. How much longer ought we expect the body to live?
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Lou Dobbs is the perfect man of the age
By repeating the dumber parts of the conventional wisdom in a solemn tone he continues to be taken seriously. Case in point, his newest CNN.com column (he drags down the whole franchise IMHO) A call to the faithful. It’s an adventure in the non sequitur. While lauding the separation of church and state he points to examples of church based groups having opinions on matters of pure politics, i.e. Iraq and immigration.
Neither of those are religious matters. If they were trying to implement Sharia, force church attendance, establish a state religion or mandate that government personnel had to be of a particular sect, or any sect, that would be one thing. But these are either pro/anti war choices, or pro/anti amnesty choices, which have no inherent religious significance. Religious people may care a lot about them of course, but so can a lot of people. He then quotes Romans 13, with
Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.
In a democracy, the governing authority is the people, and the above verse would seem to encourage public participation in the process. Dobbs would seem to want separation of people and state.
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Tuesday Rapid Fire
- Networks, in Forbes
- Tin Can Stirling Engine – really cool, this would go nicely with the passive solar heating system that I blogged about last week.
- Global warming awareness reaches diminishing marginal returns, aptly explained by Instapundit. I’m still waiting for the Shotgun News green issue.
- Gauss vs Pareto, if you understand bell curves, you should read this.
- Robots, Robots, Robots, in Iraq and elsewhere
- An insightful article on internal migrations in the US. By Michael Barone
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xSQL is a cool Sql Server tool
I’ve been using xSQL for a good while now and I think it’s about time to give it the Moody Loner endorsement. While it does a lot of things, I mostly use it for copying databases between servers where I have different permissions (doing that using the built-in tools is quite problematic) and it’s saved me countless hours of tweaks and cutting and pasting.
It’s run by cool people too. Check it out here http://www.xsqlsoftware.com/
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A telling point in the Boyd biography
I’m currently reading Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War and I read a telling passage that stated (approximately) that autodidacts crave approval from conventionally educated academics and professionals. For those who don’t know fairly obscure word, it’s Google defines the word as
Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) is self-education or self-directed learning. An autodidact is a mostly self-taught person (also known as an automath), or someone who has an enthusiasm for self-education, and usually has a high degree of self-motivation.
(tip, if you type in “Define:Word to be dined” into Google it defines the word for you.
This seems to be a good explanation for a lot of the tensions in the blogsphere. It also seems to be a natural healthy thing. As I put it in a previous post, science advances funeral by funeral. It follows that if left to their own devices, any field of thought or industry will spend it’s time polishing the corpse of some grand new idea that is mutually agreeable to all (think of the US auto industry before the Japanese came along.
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Funny and strange quotes
From this rather odd article about the future of Israel
As Peter O’Toole said as Lawrence of Arabia in the movie of that title, “Nothing is written.” However, it seems clear how to bet. As so often in history, bet on the horrible outcome.
I think the post is flawed as it assumes that the current Israeli situation will not change by several orders of magnitude in qualitative ways as the decades roll by. Of course, there is no reason for the changes to be good, but current trends seldom hold before Bit Rot settles in. Worth reading
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Benchmarks of seriousness
I was taking an advanced economic history class during the Republican “Revolution” of 94. Someone asked the professor if there was any historical precedent for radical change following a big party switch in Congress alone. He cited many near examples I don’t remember but then said “We’ll know if they’re serious about cutting spending if they get rid of farm subsidies.”. It’s now more than twelve years later and farm subsidies are going strong.
I was reading this interview with George Schulz and he, talking about oil dependence, had the line
I won’t believe we’re serious about it until we’re willing to remove the tariff on import of ethanol. And take quotas off sugar and a few things like that.
which is a fine benchmark to tell if anyone really cares about oil dependence. Support for nuclear power is a good one too.
For some technical background; American ethanol production is one of the least efficient efforts in the world, largely because we make it from corn (which we have a lot of) which is a poor source material. Sugar (of which we grow very little) is a far better source material. The American climate is not well suited to grow sugar, but it is well suited to grow corn. Both the corn and sugar lobbies are well organized and powerful and benefit greatly from subsidies and tariffs.