Octopodial Chrome

…that the current Bishop of Rome had a cousin his age who was killed by the Nazis for having Down’s Syndrome. Nowadays, of course, we’re not nearly so coarse as to euthanise 14-year-olds; instead we quietly tear apart or poison about 60,000 children a year.

I went pheasant hunting the last few days in Kansas with Bill B—— and Rick ——. It was ab-so-lutely amazing: there were more birds out there than I’d ever seen. Even my seasoned party-members commented that it was as good as any hunting they’d ever had. In one particular spot, we flushed so many birds that it sounded like a firing line at an English hunt: one shot thundered out after another, with birds flying in every direction.

We all did pretty well. On Thursday we each shot two birds, making it halfway to the limit. Friday wasn’t too great; one of us bagged three but the other two got none. Today I managed to pick up the only bird of the day, which made me pretty happy. Since my friend had already hunted this year and was under an absolute directive from his wife to return with no pheasants, we split the bag two ways and I now have two birds in my freezer, one in my fridge and two hanging on my balcony.

I’ve been thinking a lot about hanging game recently. Darina Allen’s cookbook Forgotten Skills of Cooking praises hung game extremely highly---so highly that I figure it’s worth a shot. Supposedly the aging process really brings out the flavours of the animals, taking them from not-much-more-than-chicken to something altogether different. Hank Shaw and others seem to agree. So I didn’t skin or draw my birds from Thursday at all, but simply put them on top of the cooler and tried not to get them too wet. They stayed in the truck overnight in the freezing Kansas weather, which I’m pretty sure didn’t hurt them, and now they’re on my balcony. If my research is right, they should be ready to eat in a week or two. We’ll see if it’s astounding or if I just ruined 40% of my first hunt in two years.

Hunting really is great fun. It’s hard work: one walks probably something like two or three miles for every bird, and while some walks are across grass-like winter wheat, others are across rough and irregular corn and wheat stubble, and still others are in prairie grasses over one’s head. It’s expensive work: last time I totted up the numbers it worked out to something like $20 an ounce. But it’s also rewarding work. There’s something about being in the great outdoors. There’s something about walking the farmer’s fields which produce the food we all eat. There’s something about seeing one’s food in its natural habitat. There’s something about actually having to work for one’s supper, not just buy it on a plate, where the animal actually has a fighting chance (literally, in the case of pheasants: the roosters have nasty spurs on their ankles). There’s something about seeing all the old farmsteads, abandoned now that farmers live in small towns and drive to work like the rest of us.

I would never have gotten to see a herd of mule deer prancing in the grass if I’d stayed at home. I’d never have seen Greg W——’s old barn, hand-built and likely older than my parents, unused now but still straight out of an old picture. I’d never have seen the fresh deer leg or the old deer jawbone, remnants of four-legged hunters who work that land every day. I’d never have seen a herd of cows feeding in a corn circle, every head turned to watch us approach a tailwater pit. I’d never have gotten to spend time with Greg & Dave M——, two of the nicest, finest fellows I know.

$20 an ounce is cheap.

Former United States Attorney General Ed Meese argues that we have too many federal crimes and that more oversight is needed. I think it says something when someone who dedicated his life to enforcing the laws calls for fewer of them.

The state of Colorado has made $2.2 million from medical mariajuana sales taxes, and the city of Denver has made the same amount.

What’s interesting to me is how much money that implies the average Coloradan or Denverite spends on marijuana. Crazy stuff!

Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education Richard Vedder notes that 60 percent of the increase in college grads from 1992 to 2008 work in low-skilled jobs that only really require a high-school diploma or less. Fascinating stuff.

We need to ask ourselves why jobs that don’t require much more than an eighth-grade education are being filled by folks who have studied. What’s awry with our employment economy?

Dennis Prager notes some recent results in criminology and psychology to ask if high self-esteem might not be detrimental to good character. It wouldn’t be suprising if true: it would explain why those who really are that good at what they do (e.g. Tiger Woods or Frank Sinatra) are so unpleasant in the rest of their lives.

And of course it accords with traditional religion, which notes that pride is the chief of the sins. Gosh, it’s almost as though religion knows what it’s talking about!

It turns out that Colorado restaurants and bars are allowed to sell high-alchohol beer, not the weak stuff. The law had never really been enforced, but due to some political manoeuvering (grocery and convenience stores are only permitted to sell the weak stuff; they want to be able to sell it all; so they got the law enforced in order to annoy people) it is now.

So right now in Colorado one can buy weak beer at a grocery or convenience store to take home, or can sit in a restaurant or bar and drink a strong beer. How is one supposed to get home safely—levitation?

As he and his party of polar explorers slowed and died, Robert F. Scott wrote a letter to his wife. And what a doozy!

’Scuse me, I think I must have a speck of something in mine eye…

Some time ago I discovered a log of the first winter-over at Concordia in the Antarctic. For someone like me with an interest in subsistence and survival, the feats involved in sustaining a small community alone in the dark are deeply intriguing.

Particularly amusing is how much they tried to live well (the group was European). The author’s birthday dinner consisted of pickled gizzard and smoked duck breast, farfalle with smoked salmon, génépi sorbet (a tasty herb from high up in the Alps), frog legs, orange duck, chocolate fondant in mint sauce with raspberry sorbet. I’m pretty sure that an American equivalent would be chocolate cake from a box, and an ordinary USDA Quality-Free carb-loaded, factory-ranched dinner.

Back in September 2009 Washington Monthly, a centre-left publication, had an article about how state healthcare is a giveaway to proprietary software vendors. This isn’t really a surprise: Big Business loves Big Government, and vice versa. It’s much easier to deal with a single customer spending other people’s money than many customers spending their own; it’s much simpler to deal with a few suppliers than with many.

That it leads to poorer outcomes really doesn’t matter. The goal of business is not quality but money; the goal of government is not quality but survival.

Stephen J. Heaney has an intelligent article about that women’s basketball player who claims to be a man. He opens with a bit from Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

In one scene, we encounter the People’s Front of Judea, one of many tiny radical groups bent on the overthrow of the oppressor Romans. As the four conspirators struggle to articulate their group beliefs, one fellow named Stan admits that he wants to be a woman, and that it his right as a man to be called Loretta. He wants this because he wants to have babies. When Reg points out that he can’t have babies, Stan cries, Don’t you oppress me! Reg protests, I’m not oppressing you, Stan. You haven’t got a womb. Where’s the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box? The other three agree that it is Stan’s right to have babies, if he could, and that they will fight for this right. Says Francis, It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression! Retorts Reg, Symbolic of his struggle against reality.

It’s an apt comparison. We are not what we wish to be but what we in fact are. And that poor woman (who clearly could benefit from counselling) is not, no matter how much she or other might wish it, a man, any more than another lunatic is Napoleon Bonaparte.

A new phenomenon in restaurants is the idea of paying what one can. The idea is that those of us who are relatively well off can pay a bit extra, and those who are worse off can pay just a little, or volunteer to wash dishes in the back.

There are only ten such restaurants in the country, but Denver has three of them. I’d really like to eat at one and thus do well by doing good.

Generals Scales and van Riper have an article in the Washington Post asking a provocative question: why are our soldiers still in fair fights? They make some interesting points about how the infantry bears the brunt of the fighting (although only 4% of the military, they suffer 81% of the combat deaths), and they appear to have some interesting ideas about how we could use our technical superiority to tilt the balance in our favour.

I think that some of this was part of the transformation the Secretary Rumsfeld wanted to achieve, although Lt. General van Riper has been critical of those efforts and their results. Some may remember his public criticism of Millennium Challenge 02…

One of my brothers recently linked to this hilarious list of things one must believe to believe in gun control, written by Michæl Z. Williamson. Some of these are a bit hit-or-miss, but others are just brilliant. Among the better ones:

• That a mugger will kill you in the half-second it takes to draw from the holster, but won’t harm you while you dial 911 on your cell phone, talk to the dispatcher and wait half an hour for the cops to arrive.
• That the Second Amendment only applies to flintlocks, just as the First Amendment only applies to quills and lead type.
• That 1 firearm owner in 10,000 will commit an act of violence in his or her lifetime, and this is far more frightening than the 25% of drivers who will cause a serious or fatal accident.
• That families with children should not be allowed to own guns for safety reasons, just as they aren’t allowed to own dogs, power tools, or toxic chemicals.
• That one can sue a store for having a slick floor, falling ceilings, and sharp corners, but if they refuse to let you bring a gun in and you get shot by a criminal, they aren’t liable for enforcing that rule with others.
• That Charlton Heston as president of the NRA is a shill who should be ignored, but Michæl Douglas as a representative of Handgun Control, Inc. is an ambassador for peace who is entitled to an audience at the UN arms control summit.
• That the New England Journal of Medicine is filled with expert advice about guns, just as Guns and Ammo has some excellent treatises on heart surgery.
• That the right of the people peaceably to assemble, the right of the people to be secure in their homes, the enumeration herein of certain rights shall not be construed to disparage others retained by the people, The powers not delegated herein are reserved to the states respectively, and to the people, refer to individuals, but the right of the people to keep and bear arms refers to the states.
• That women are just as intelligent and capable as men, but gunmaker’s advertisements aimed at women are preying on their fears.
• That a handgun, with up to 4 switches and controls, is far too complex for the typical adult to learn to use, as opposed to an automobile which only has 20.
• That rifles with pistol grips are assault weapons, just like vehicles with racing stripes are sports cars.
• That people who own guns out of a fear of crime are paranoid, but people who don’t want other people to own guns in case it causes them to commit crimes are rational.
• That we should ban Saturday Night Specials and other inexpensive guns because it’s not fair that poor people have access to guns too.
• That teaching abstinence exclusively rather than use of condoms is doomed to fail, but encouraging absolute bans on guns rather than education in safe use is the only acceptable method of reducing crime.
• That it is outrageous that civilians have rifles that were designed for the military for their own self defense, but perfectly okay to have polluting, potentially unstable, heavy vehicles that were designed for the military simply as status symbols.
• That people are too stupid to handle guns, but are intelligent enough to vote.
• That the NRA, with over 4 million members, is out of touch with America, and HCI, with 50 thousand members, has a mandate from the people.
• That private citizens making private sales of private property is a loophole.
• That the existence of weapons not banned by previous laws is a loophole.
• That it’s safer to do nothing than resist with a gun, which is why the military wins so many wars by not fighting.
• That we must close shooting ranges because of the noise, but ban silencers because they are quiet.
• That owning a gun for self-defense indicates an intent to kill, just like owning a first aid kit indicates an intent to impersonate a physician.
• That suggesting teachers be armed is an outrageous suggestion for a civilized society, which is why the Swiss and Isrælis do it.
• That making it harder and harder for even cops to have guns on school property will somehow make it harder for lunatics to kill the utterly helpless students.
• That the 14th Amendment requires states to accept each other’s drivers licenses, even with age or vision requirement differences, marriage licenses even with age or relationship differences or if it’s a gay marriage, but somehow doesn’t apply to licenses to carry weapons.
• That banning rifles with bayonet lugs will cut down on all the drive-by bayonetings.
• That shooting at an intruder who smashes your door and enters with knife in hand will somehow escalate the violence.
• That it’s safer with less guns, which is why lunatics shoot up schools instead of gun shows or police stations.
• That it’s outrageous to count 18 and 19 year-old parents as children for statistical purposes, but perfectly acceptable to count them as children for purposes of exaggerating gun deaths among children.
• That the few people who can’t use martial arts or other non-lethal means of self-defense–the young, the old, the infirm, the disabled, the weak, the small, and the pregnant–are simply the necessary sacrifice we must make to criminals to avoid the risks of letting people be armed.
• That the dangers of guns outweigh their recreational uses, unlike alcohol and motorcycles.
• That getting rid of guns reduces violence, so the military should be armed with bouquets of flowers.
• That only people over 21 are allowed to defend themselves.
• That if a group of anti-gun protesters feels threatened, they should ask police with guns to protect them while they tell everyone how worthless guns are for protection.
• That the 1939 US vs Miller case, is established law that endorses gun control and the matter is closed, just like Plessy vs Ferguson endorsed separate but equal schools and the matter is closed.
• That when the government promises that they won’t confiscate our weapons after we register them, we can believe them, just like the Commanche, the Sioux, the Apache, the Kaw, the Cree, the Blackfoot, the Italians in NYC, the Jews in Germany, the Zulu in South Africa…and the Americans at Lexington and Concord.
• That Charlton Heston, as president of the NRA, must be a racist, despite his marches with Dr. King in the 1960s. After all, all gun owners are racist, and that theory isn’t bigoted.
• That allowing the poor and minorities to defend themselves is Fascist.
• That small arms can’t win wars, as all the Viet Cong bombing, air superiority, and naval missions prove.
• That hate is not a family value, but all gun owners are tobacco-chawin’, beer-swillin’, racist, redneck bubbas.
• That there’s no contradiction in the same liberals who said in the 60s that 18 year olds who could fight should be able to vote, now saying that 18 year olds can vote but shouldn’t own guns.

Read the whole list—it’s quite funny. Completely unpersuasive to the unconvinced, of course (I imagine by hoplophobic friends are sputtering right now), but funny nonetheless.

Over in England two drunken thugs picked a fight with the wrong victims: a Victoria-Cross-winning SAS soldier, a George-Cross-winning British Army captain and a George-Cross-winning Royal Marine. For their next trick, they’re going to punch a lion.

I really want to visit some of these unusual hotels. My first choice would be one of the Finnish glass igloos; second is definitely the underwater room and third would probably be that tree hotel. But man-oh-man would the igloo be sweet.

Researchers at the Universaity of California have determined that harmful bacteria are less of a problem with wooden cutting boards than with the plastic variety. Turns out that brand-new wooden & plastic boards are similar, but that knife cuts in plastic harbour bacteria whilst similar cuts in wood don’t.

One more piece of evidence dmeonstrating that nature can be better than engineering.

The United States is rare—perhaps unique—in that we have two military holidays: Memorial Day, for those slain in our nation’s service; and Veterans Day, for all those who have served. It’s appropriate to remember the many sacrifices that soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen have made, are making and will continue to make; not just the large sacrifices of life and limb but all the small ones too. As just one example, in the civilian world it’s expected that a father will see his children born; in the military world it’s not at all unusual that he will be deployed. In the civilian world it’s normal to be in constant telephone and computer contact with loved ones; in the military world it’s common to have none of that. There are a thousand things big and small about military life that are just different from civilian life, and we should honour veterans for making those sacrifices. We should take a moment to remember all those deployed in harm’s way, or safely home in port making less than minimum wage (on an hourly basis), or studying hard while their friends are enjoying their youth, or just putting up with the minor indignities of military life.

This morning I was thinking of how I used to call up various members of my family and wish them a happy Veterans Day, and how now one has to call up the entire family, when I was struck by a thought. If we’re going to recognise veterans for the many small and large sacrifices we make, then shouldn’t we also be recognising those other veterans today: the wives, the husbands, the sons and the daughters? The ones who didn’t have a husband to hold their hands; who didn’t have a dad at the ball game; who had to drive half-a-dozen kids around town; who ate dinner on Valentine’s Day alone but not unloved; the ones who had to up and move every two or four years to a new school, a new neighbourhood, a new home and a new job; the ones who always knew that they had to take second place, because America took the first. We had a choice—as one popular article making the rounds today notes, a veteran is someone who at some point chose to hand Uncle Sam a blank cheque—but in many cases our families didn’t have a choice. So let’s take a moment and remember them too.

Happy Veterans Day, Mom!

So this is another one of those fun things wandering the Interwebs.

Age

32

Bed size

Double

Chore I hate

If I don’t hate it, it’s not a chore.

Dog’s name

Mu

Essential start-my-day items

Oxygen, food digesting from previous night’s meal. In winter, shelter.

Favourite colour

Purple

Gold or silver

As a metal? Gold. As a decorative colour? Silver.

Height

5’10"

Instruments I play

I sometimes hit guitar strings with a pick, but play is probably too kind a word.

Job

Three

Kids

None yet.

Living arrangement

A condo

Music I love

The stuff that sounds good—which means no country or rap.

Nicknames

Bob

Overnight hospital stay other than birth

Once on warranty

Pet peeve

Improper pronunciation and grammar (and yes, my idiosyncratic punctuation in this list is both intentional and systematic).

Quote from a movie

I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

Right- or left-handed

I am dextrous, not sinister.

Siblings

Only the three finest young men I—or anyone else—knows. Well, Tom ain’t that young anymore…

Time I wake up

0515

Underwear

Boxers, of course.

Vegetable I dislike

Avocados, bell peppers, cucumbers, delicata squash, eggplant…let’s stop at eggplant, the worst of the vegetables, the foulest stain upon the planet.

Workout style

Alternate a day of running with a day of situps, pushups and pullups. Skip Sundays.

X-rays I’ve had

Hand

Yummy food I make

I’m a culinary Midas; everything I touch turns to gold. Except that one time…well, and that other time.

Zoo, the best place to visit at

I have no particular and enduring favourite.

If you don’t post this same list on your blog, hyenas will eat you.

Today I learnt that the Romans invented the multitool. Not the Swiss Army, not Gerber, not the Leatherman company—the Romans! Pretty sweet.

This story is disgusting: an inmate in an Arizonan prison was caged in the desert until she died of dehydration—and no-one will be punished for it. When she died her body temperature was 108°; her body was thoroughly burned and blistered.

I’m sure she was a rotten person in many ways; I’m sure she was a discipline problem; I’m sure she well-deserved punishment. None of that excuses treating a human being that way, none of it. I’m sure she made life very difficult for her guards; some people are simply not great people. But that doesn’t matter. If a father treated his wayward child that way, he’d be executed. And none of those responsible for this is even going to jail.

It’s very sad. For all her faults, Marcia Powell was a human being. God loved her just as much as He does any of us; she had exactly as much inherent worth as any of us. And she didn’t deserve have her life baked out of her in the desert sun.

A lot of Orthodox women I know have been passing this article on Facebook recently. While imperfect (and a few years old), it’s a good read.

I think that it’s better to ask why Orthodox men and women love the Church; many of the answers are the same. Sheer physicality, for example: our worship involves sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. And while an Orthodox man is free to be a man, so too is an Orthodox woman free to be a woman.

And, of course, beards. You just can’t respect a man with a boy’s chin…

I recently shared an image on Facebook which stated 84,999,987 firearm owners killed no one yesterday; this caused a huge storm of comments from my left-leaning friends (and a few from the right-leaners; curiously, I appear to have more of the former than the latter). I figured that rather than munge something in the comments, I’d post in my blog.

First off, I don’t know where the image gets its statistics, and frankly they sound a bit fishy. It sounds a bit like whoever made it figured that there are 85 million gun owners and 13 of them commit murder (or suicide?) daily. I can’t easily find the number of gun owners in the US, although one person suggested 80 million—with no backup. For another thing, there are more than 13 gun deaths per day; the CDC estimated about 207 in 2000. Of course, roughly half (some sources indicate more; others less) of those are suicides, which can’t really count (although highly regrettable, suicidal folks would still kill themselves by strangulation, suffocation, poisoning, drowning or leaping from heights). So let’s say 100 murders or accidental gun deaths per day (by comparison, there were 115 automobile deaths per day in the same year, runs roughly as many cars as guns in the country). That’s still an order of magnitude larger than 13. Maybe the author was only counting legally-owned guns or something. Still: fishy.

And of course statistics and significant digits don’t work that way. All you can really say given 85 million gun owners and 207, 100 or 13 deaths per day is that zero percent of gun owners kill anyone on a daily basis (well, a statistically insignificant number, which is indistinguishable from zero).

Anyway, enough with the problematic original statement—on to the comments. One asked, So exactly how many gun-related deaths would it take to no longer be okay? Of course, no death is okay: every human life is worth saving. Unfortunately, any measure taken to prevent death has its own costs, and my general stance is that I’d prefer to pay the costs associated with too much liberty than the costs associated with too much authority.

The same commentor (hey Leah!) notes that we license automobile drivers. That’s true. Of course, driving isn’t a civil right; it’s a privilege. There is a civil right to free movement throughout the country, and we don’t demand travel permits (as they did in the Soviet bloc). Nor do we demand any sort of education or require a test before voting. In principle, assuming a government that would never ever infringe on the right to bear arms, I’d support mandatory training—in much the same way that assuming a government that would never ever infringe on the right to vote, I’d support mandatory education and a test before voting.

As a side note, semi-automatic just means a gun that shoots one bullet every time the trigger is pulled. I think people are scared of the word because of its syncopation: SEH-mee-OT-oh-MA-tic. It’s 19th century technology, and it’s boring. I think folks think it means what automatic means. An automatic weapon shoots bullets as long as the trigger is held down and it has bullets to shoot.

Another asked about unregistered vice registered firearms. Beats me—I live in a state without gun registration. Again in principle, assuming a government that would never ever infringe on the right to bear arms, I’d support gun registration: it doesn’t keep anyone from exercising his right, and it might help in solving cases. However, given any realistic government one simply can’t assume that it could restrain itself.

Another voiced concerns about folks who stockpile weapons. I actually kinda agree there, or at least understand. One does wonder about the motivations of the sort of person with more firearms than cookpans. OTOH, the folks I do personally know who do have large collections really have more in common with any other type of collector—stamp, doll, velvet-oil-painting—than with the sort of lunatic gun nut one sees on TV shows and movies. And of course in a free country we don’t care too much when someone exercises his rights in a silly way; we just care if he infringes upon our rights.Another commentor hoped for world peace. This is, of course, a noble wish, and one I share. The problem though is that good people being peaceful doesn’t lead to peace; it leads to evil people waging war and good people losing it. Back during the Vietnam War there was a slogan What if you threw a war and nobody came? The problem is that with war and violence it doesn’t take two to tango; it takes one. We could get rid of all firearms and all weapons, and there would still be violent people—but having gotten rid of weapons, the only thing to stop those violent people would be brute force. That doesn’t seem like it’s very equal or progressive to me: might makes right is no way to run a society.

I think the root of the issue is that some folks honestly enjoy guns and shooting, and honestly don’t understand why anyone would fear guns, while others are honestly afraid of guns and honestly don’t understand how anyone could enjoy them. What’s remarkable is how hot emotions get. I understand why the pro-gun side gets hot under the collar: no-one likes to be told what to do. I guess the anti-gun side get so angry because they blame guns and gun owners for violence.

Anyway, I’ll make this offer: I will gladly take any of my anti-gun friends or acquaintances shooting; I’ll provide the guns, the ammunition and pay the range fees. We can shoot pistol, rifle or shotgun. If you’re going to dislike something, you ought to at least understand it, no? This way you can educate yourself and find out exactly what a firearm is and how it operates, know what all those words mean, and see what sort of people own guns.

And I’ll be more careful with posting badly-sourced images on Facebook in the future…

This one’s been going around a bit.

The rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Twelve videogames you’ve played that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what games my friends choose.

Tunnels of Doom

We played this on our old TI-99/4A, the first computer I ever used. It supported four characters, and there were three of us brothers at the time—with our father, it was perfect. Then later there were four of us who could play (really, the baby sat and gurgled while we played for him…).

Dark Castle

Dad got us a copy of this game for our old Macintosh Plus and we played and played and played it, no doubt to his infinite chagrin. A few years back my brother Stephen spent Christmas vacation playing a reissue for modern Macs—it was very cool to hear the old noises again that we’d had imprinted on our brains nearly thirty years ago.

Gato

This was another black-and-white Mac game Dad got for us. You got to play a Second World War sub skipper in the Pacific, sinking Japs and trying not to get sunk by them—and not to sink your own ships. It was great fun!

Cap’n Magneto

This was an odd shareware game I could never win because of the nag screens and bugs. It taught me the virtues of free software and bugfixing.

Moria

This was the first inkling I had that games didn’t need flashy graphics; that a simple character-cell roguelike could be complex and tough. It began a quarter-century love/hate relationship with roguelikes: love because they’re fun; hate because I have never actually beaten one.

Bolo

This…this was a great game. Chris—my best friend in Virginia—and I would play this all day long. My brothers and I would play it. My cousins and I would play it. One could play it across the internet.

It rocked.

Crossfire

Ah, Crossfire, my old nemesis. It’s the first game (and really last) which majorly hurt my grades. It was just too addictive, too fun. It was massively multiplayer before the term had even been invented. It was full-color. It ran on Sun workstations. It was wonderful.

Doom

This was the first first-person-shooter I ever saw, and it blew me away. I spent many happy hours playing it in the engineering lab at DU.

Descent

And then there was Descent, which knocked Doom into a cocked hat. Doom was flat 2D; Descent was in full, glorious 3D. Doom aimed on one axis; Descent in all three. It was a revelation.

Command and Conquer

This was one that we played and played my freshman year of college. I didn’t have a Windows box, so I didn’t play it all that much—but it was still definitely the social high point of that year.

Marathon

And then there was Marathon, proving that Macs could out-do Windows once again. They had Doom; we had Marathon. Doom was a mindless shoot-em-up; Marathon had a plot, even a story. It didn’t have the full 3D maps of Descent, but it had more depth than Doom. And the graphics and gameplay were better.

Dragon Age: Origins

This was fun because it was basically first-person interactive fiction. That is, while it still had the fighting actual of a normal FPS, it also had some plot—and that plot was affected by the character’s actions. Also, I got to spend time with a good friend playing it.

An honorable mention goes to Pac-Man, which may have been the first video game I was ever aware of, but which wasn’t really a life-changing video game.

I found this great table of taxes on common items. I don’t mind taxes—we need them for a functioning state, and we need a functioning state—but 37.6% (soda) to 86.71% (cigarettes) is extortionate.

I think most of us have experienced flamewars online. People adopt silly names on Usenet and in Web forums; they get peeved and blow stuff out of proportion.

Our ancestors were no different: in the winter of 1872 the Letters page of the New York Times hosted a nineteenth century flamewar. The topic? That dish loved by some and hated by others: scrapple. And yes, the letter-writers had pseudonyms, and cast invective, and were generally indistinguishable from anyone today.

People are people, no matter their era. I wonder if educated Sumerians ranted about Ninkasi.

My acquaintances know that I work in computers; my friends may know that I’m a Unix sysadmin; my close friends might actually know that Unix is a computer operating system. What few if any of them know is why I use Unix, why I love using it and why I will not own a computing device without it. It boils down to the fact that I do not merely use computers; I wield them to some end—and there has not been an OS which has combined mainstream success and wieldability like Unix has.

Way back in the Dark Ages when I was in college, Thomas Scoville noted that Unix afficianados are a different sort; I think this is why. We don’t just use some code someone else wrote to make the computer do something he thought of; we write our own, to make the computer do something no-one ever thought of before. We don’t react to some foreseeable problem in some predetermined manner; we prevent the foreseeable problems from occurring in the first place, and discover new ways of resolving the unforeseeable.

A computer which doesn’t empower me in that way is merely a device. I might use it as I do a toaster, a screwdriver or a phone, but I will never live in it as I do on a command line.

Avik Roy makes an excellent point: most health care is not life-or-death—and thus it can be dealt with in a market manner. He also argues for consumer-driven health plans, which I think would be a great idea: let the market efficiently allocate resources to routine health issues, and insure against catastrophic medical events.

I think we all agree that something’s wrong when a single disease or accident can lead to financial ruin, and that the situation should be fixed. But does society as a whole need to pay for Brooke Shields’s eyelash medicine or Bob Dole’s Viagra?

Has anyone tried this root beer recipe? I like that it includes sassafras root, which is the secret ingredient to all root beers. Let me know—I’d like to give it a shot, but would also like to have a good feeling before I invest in some birch bark…

I just watched this great video about a retailer/wholesaler of unique sodas. He carries rose soda, cucumber soda, brewed cola, weird Caribbean sodas, sassafras root beer and more. Really fascinating guy too.

It’d almost be worth the trip to Los Angeles to see his shop, but fortunately he sells onlines.

Lou Dolinar writes eloquently about the real Gulf of Mexico disaster: the complete betrayal of trust by public institutions such as the media and academia, which resorted to hyped scaremongering rather than sober judgement. What’s particularly sad is that the vast majority of it was most likely sincere.

Cracked.com has a so-true-it-hurts comic illustrating the lifespan of a TV show. It is, as noted, so true that it hurts. Hear that Highlander? Battlestar Galactica? Scrubs?

Phillip Longman argues quite persuasively that we should increase our use of water transport. It looks like where water travel is possible that it uses less than 20% of the fuel that trucking does; it has less than .7% the fatality rate of trucking. And it can be faster—the Boston to Orlando can legally be made by truck in 54 hours, while it’s only 33 hours by ship.

Why don’t we ship more goods by water? Well, it comes down to perverse incentives: we subsidise high-polluting, road-damaging trucking (e.g. a truck causes 41¢ per mile in damage but only pays 9¢ in tolls & taxes). Another issue is that while trucks are taxed by weight, ships are taxed by cargo value; this means that shipping companies must track the value of all goods they ship, unlike trucking companies. Worse, the tax is extremely high: the example given was of identical loads where the ship pays $625 while the truck pays $3.25.

This is a good example of how the free market is subverted by the state. It’s also an example of how policy can be uncoordinated: on the one hand we’re concerned about congestion and road-building; on the other, we’re encouraging congestion and road damage.

We’ve all heard about Polish cavalry charging German tanks in the Second World War—but it turns out that the story isn’t really true, and the the truth is far more interesting (no surprise to students of history).

I recently came across a really brilliat idea: passiv annual heat store. The gist of it is that you dump all the excess heat your home receives in the summer into the ground, then retrieve it to remedy the heat deficiency in the winter. By so doing, apparently, one can manage a more-or-less constant 70° home temperature. In other words, it could feel like San Diego inside in the middle of a snowstorm outside. More details here.

My brother John married his wife Genevieve a week ago today (sorry for the delay in writing). The wedding itself was held at the glorious Assumption of the Theotokos Cathedral in Denver. Standing there as part of the wedding party it struck me how very appropriate the wedding service is. It’s not the civil law handoff of a woman from father to husband, with accompanying oaths and promises as in the Western service; rather, it’s a sacrament which unites a man and a woman into a married couple. The service is full of prayers, readings and hymns which are chock full of good advice for any couple, newly-wed or not.

The weekend itself was lots of fun, if not at all restful: Friday night all of John’s and all of Gen’s friends got together to throw them a party; then Saturday night was the rehearsal dinner; then on Sunday was the wedding and the reception; then on Monday we had a barbecue for Memorial Day. It was a blast. It’s almost a shame that there are only two more weddings left in our family.

I wish them both the very best.

The New York Times has discovered kombucha (for those who’ve not heard of it, it’s basically fermented tea). Inspired by Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation, I started making it years ago. I have all these tins of excellent but old and dried-out tea—it turns out that it can be put to great use as the base for kombucha.

It’s amusing that I led the way on this for the Times…

My younger friends mock me because I prefer button-down shirts and trousers to T-shirts and shorts; I like to point out that anyone who wears short pants past the age of 13 needs to grow up. It looks like Virginia Postrel agrees with me: children are slobs; adults try to look decent.

Ten years ago today I graduated from Austin College. At the time I considered it a black and sad day. While some of my friends were ready to get out into the real world, I wished that school could last forever. College had been the most fun I’d ever had: I made excellent friends I still have today and had learnt a lot from some world-class teachers. I was surrounded by the greatest concentration of folks my age I’d ever experience in life. How could adult life compare to that?

But you know what? The real world has treated me pretty well. I’ve taken part in mediæval recreation in the Arizona desert and the Missouri countryside; I’ve travelled to England, Germany and India; I bought a home; I mastered all-grain brewing; I’ve learnt how to bake bread, make soap, sew a doublet, knit a sweater, make jam and hunt pheasants; I’ve built my own computer from parts; I’ve learnt numerous new programming languages and technologies; I was commissioned a naval officer. I could only dream of a lot of that when I was 21; some of that wasn’t even on my radar then. It hasn’t been all fun and games—the fact that I graduated with a Computer Science degree in 2000 should say all that needs to be said about that—but on balance my life has been swell.

The young man I was a decade ago wasn’t able to imagine all the good things that lay in store for him; and now I’m looking forward to all the good things that the next decade will bring that I haven’t dreamt of yet.

This one has been floating around forever, but it’s as funny as ever.

1. Buy a dumpster, paint it gray inside and out, and live in it for six months.
1. Submariners: Black outside Pea Green inside
2. Run all the pipes and wires in your house exposed on the walls.
3. Repaint your entire house every month.
4. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of the bathtub and move the shower head to chest level. When you take showers, make sure you turn off the water while you soap down.
5. Put lube oil in your humidifier and set it on high.
6. Once a week, blow air up your chimney, with a leaf blower and let the wind carry the soot onto your neighbor’s house. Ignore his complaints.
7. Once a month, take all major appliances apart and reassemble them.
8. Raise the thresholds and lower the headers of your front and back doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through them.
9. Disassemble and inspect your lawnmower every week.
10. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, turn your water heater temperature up to 200 degrees. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, turn the water heater off. On Saturdays and Sundays tell your family they use too much water, so no bathing will be allowed.
11. Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling, so you can’t turn over without getting out and then getting back in.
12. Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Have your spouse whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you go to sleep, shine a flashlight in your eyes, and say Sorry, wrong rack.
13. Make your family qualify to operate each appliance in your house - dishwasher operator, blender technician, etc. Re-qualify every 6 months.
14. Have your neighbor come over each day at 0500 , blow a whistle so loud Helen Keller could hear it, and shout Reveille, reveille, all hands heave out and trice up.
15. Have your mother-in-law write down everything she’s going to do the following day, then have her make you stand in your back yard at 0600 while she reads it to you.
16. Submit a request chit to your father-in-law requesting permission to leave your house before 1500…In triplicate.
17. Empty all the garbage bins in your house and sweep the driveway three times a day, whether it needs it or not. Now sweepers, sweepers, man your brooms, give the ship a clean sweep down fore and aft, empty all shit cans and butt kits!
18. Have your neighbor collect all your mail for a month, read your magazines, and randomly lose every 5th item before delivering the rest.
19. Watch no TV except for movies played in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch, then show a different one– the same one every night.
20. When your children are in bed, run into their room with a megaphone shouting Now general quarters, general quarters! All hands man your battle stations!
21. Make your family’s menu a week ahead of time without consulting the pantry or refrigerator.
22. Post a menu on the kitchen door informing your family that they are having steak for dinner. Then make them wait in line for an hour. When they finally get to the kitchen, tell them you are out of steak, but they can have dried ham or hot dogs. Repeat daily until they ignore the menu and just ask for hot dogs.
23. Bake a cake. Prop up one side of the pan so the cake bakes unevenly.
Spread icing real thick to level it off.
24. Get up every night around midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread. (mid rats)
25. Set your alarm clock to go off at random during the night. At the alarm, jump up and dress as fast as you can, making sure to button your top shirt button and tuck your pants into your socks. Run out into the backyard and uncoil the garden hose and put out a simulated fire.
26. Every week or so, throw your cat or dog into the pool and shout Man overboard, port side! Rate your family members on how fast they respond.
27. Put the headphones from your stereo on your head, but don’t plug them in. Hang a paper cup around your neck on a string. Stand in front of the stove, and speak into the paper cup, Stove manned and ready. After an hour or so, speak into the cup again Stove secured. Roll up the headphones and paper cup and stow them in a shoe box.
28. Make your family turn out all the lights and go to bed at 10 p.m. Now taps, taps! Lights out! Maintain silence throughout the ship!
1. Then immediately have an 18-wheeler crash into your house. (For aircraft carrier sailors.)
29. Build a fire in a trash can in your garage. Loudly announce to your family, This is a drill, this is a drill! Fire in hangar bay one!
30. Place a podium at the end of your driveway. Have your family stand in front of the podium for 4-hour intervals. (Best done when the weather is worst. January is a good time.)
31. Next time there’s a bad thunderstorm in your area, find the biggest horse you can, put a two-inch mattress on his back, strap yourself to it and turn him loose in a barn for six hours. Then get up and go to work.
32. For former engineers: bring your lawn mower into the living room, and run it all day long.
33. Make coffee using eighteen scoops of budget priced coffee grounds per pot, and let the pot simmer for 5 hours before drinking.
34. Have someone under the age of ten give you a haircut with sheep shears.
35. Sew the back pockets of your jeans onto the front.
36. Add 1/3 cup of diesel fuel to the laundry.
37. Take hourly readings on your electric and water meters.
38. Every couple of weeks, dress up in your best clothes and go to the scummiest part of town. Find the most run down, trashiest bar, and drink beer until you are hammered. Then walk all the way home.
39. Lock yourself and your family in the house for six weeks. Tell them that at the end of the 6th week you’ll take them to Disney World for liberty. At the end of the 6th week, inform them the trip to Disney World has been canceled because they need to get ready for an inspection, and it will be another week before they can leave the house.

Those who’ve heard tales of my childhood know that my old man actually did a bunch of these. If I never hear reveille again it’ll be too soon…wait a second…ಠ_ಠ

Here’s a trig identity visualised nicely. Requires a browser which understands the canvas tag—it works in Firefox, and that’s all I care about.

I just saw a joke that read, Maturity is a high price to pay for getting older. The thing is, that couldn’t be further from the truth: rather, maturity is the reward for getting older.

Before I turned 30 a lot of folks tried to tell me how great their thirties had been—quite frankly, I didn’t believe a word of it. But they were right: getting older is nice. Having a brain that works is nice.

Maturity is the reward for getting older.

I just read a fascinating Brian Reynolds Meyers, author of The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. Very, very interesting stuff. I’d vaguely known that they were racist and nationalist, but had no idea of the extent of the problem. Worth a read.

Robert Kustig (M.D.) discusses the cause of the obesity epidemic: fructose. He’s pretty persuasive, even if his suggested solution of State action is a bit short-sighted. Why not just stop eating and drinking the stuff?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation have a neat tool out: the Panopticlick. Many folks don’t know this, but every time you visit a web page your web browser sends lots of information to the web server you’re talking to—stuff like what web browser you’re using, what sort of pages you can read, which plugins you have installed and so forth. This is necessary in order for the remote web server to answer you appropriately. But it can be used to identify you.

How? Imagine that your web browser is just describing you: it might say that you have brown hair, blue eyes, fair skin, a mole on your left cheek, a slight limp, prefer wearing plaid shirts, never wear a hat, have a birthmark on your left ankle and so forth. None of those data are unique: the world is full of brunettes, full of folks with blue eyes and so forth. But there’re not that many brown-haired, blue-eyed, left-cheek-moled folks out there—and still fewer have fair skin, and fewer still have a slight limp, and fewer still have birthmarks on their left ankles.

Why does this matter? Well, it matters in the same sense that fingerprints matter. Every time you touch something, you’re leaving fingerprints—and every time you visit a website you’re leaving a fingerprint. Pretty nifty, huh?

Forthwith, a rogues’ gallery of unjust beer laws. Florida bans bottles larger than 32 ounces; Iowa beers stronger than 5% ABV; Utah beer over 4%; New York bans beer an liquor in the same business.

When will the madness end?

Here’s an interesting theory from Roger Unger, M.D.: obesity is not the cause of metabolic syndrome but rather a defense against it. Metabolic syndrome is a fancy new name for belly fat and increased risk for heart disease, strokes and diabetes—it’s afflicting more and more Americans these days.

Dr. Unger’s theory is is intriguing, and he may be on to something. I’m not certain, though, what the prognosis is: okay, so fat doesn’t cause the problem but what does? Is it simple lack of exercise? In that case, the answer is simple: raise the gasoline tax to $4/gallon, all proceeds to go toward bicycles for the poor and new bike-only roads. Is it the wrong sort of food? Then start subsidising the right stuff and stop subsidising the wrong stuff (although—what if certain key political states like Iowa can’t meet the nation’s needs for healthy food as they can for maize?). More research is clearly needed.

Little-known fact: during Prohibition the US government poisoned alcohol. Roughly 10,000 people died as a result.

Chris Dixon has a great post examining the perverse incentives which reward executives for mismanagement. Well worth the read.

Cracked.com states that babies lie, racially discriminate, defy authority, get high off of masochism, steal and even murder in the womb. I think we should require registration of all babies and institute a mandatory one-week waiting period before procreation…

Roger Clegg offers up an illuminating parable. It starts:

Suppose you are a lifeguard, and you are presented with studies showing that boys are more likely to drown than girls, probably because they engage in riskier behavior. Now, how does this affect the job you do as a lifeguard?

Well, I hope that one thing you do not do is shrug if you see a girl drowning. You also should not try to rescue boys who are not drowning.

In fact, if this datum doesn’t help you spot drowning people, and it probably doesn’t, then it won’t affect the way you do your job as lifeguard at all. You look for people flailing and screaming, and knowing that most of them will be boys is really irrelevant to you.

Would it prompt you to support “Safety First” swim programs for boys only? Well, so long as there is some percentage of girls who would benefit from such programs, it’s not clear why you would want to exclude girls from them. Maybe the “Safety First” videos you show in the programs would be more likely to depict boys doing typically boy-things, but that’s about it.

And, of course, if further studies showed that it’s not so much sex that matters, but some other factor, then you would care even less about gender, and would be even less supportive of a program for boys and boys alone. For example, if there were some way instead to target risk-seekers for the program—thereby excluding cautious boys (and girls), and including risk-seeking girls (and boys)—then you would be all for it.

Read the whole thing—it’s good.

Chris Illuminati shares some notes his wife has left in his lunch. Very cool, and very sweet too.

Colonel James Moschgat, USAF, relates the story of a janitor and the lessons he learnt from his example. There’s some good stuff here.

Gunnar Ritter, maintainer of the commonly-used mailx program, explains why it’s not available on Windows. It’s an interesting tale of how the kluges deep within that semi-operating psuedo-system mean that even in 2010 design decisions made in the Seventies afflict Windows.

They afflict Unix too, of course, but generally our design mistakes were smarter than Windows’s design mistakes. Even in error we’re better.

Now here’s an excellent idea for young men wanting to serve their communities: start a pallbearer society. The idea is to carry the caskets of those without friends or relatives to do the task. I should talk to my old Scoutmaster—this would be a good thing for my old troop to do.

H/t to John Derbyshire