Tea Party Politeness

Comments like this:

Fresno had over 7,500 attend the most polite protest I have ever witnessed.

are both a blessing and a curse, really.
You see readers email Glenn Reynolds saying this all the time about protests all across the country: People are so nice, so polite, everyone was very cool, everyone was so calm, no one got violent, smiles were all over the place.
That's neat, and all, I really am glad people can behave like adults.

But this is a protest. This is a protest movement, or at least some would like it to be. Someone needs to get angry and show it. Someone needs to shout something at a cop and get the ball rolling. Politely asking Congress "if you please would you mind not raising taxes? And could you pretty please impeach Mr. Obama?" is kind of like standing in front of a beehive and saying "Bees, would you please let me have your honey? I won't stick my hand in there, honest, but I'd like that honey so I need you to bring the honey out to me."

Of course, I don't condone violence, or riots. But I do believe that a protest movement, if it wants to be effective, needs to have some bullhorns, and the occasional arrest. If you look at the length of American history you see radical change coming not from petitions and sit-ins, but from arrests, angry protesters, and from government taking action when the protest is on the verge of becoming an uprising.

Of course, you have to actually be focused on an issue in order to effectively protest it. People at the Tea Parties really don't have a unifying cause. They are all just sort of there with their own pet complain against liberal government.

I guess I'd really like to turn on CNN and see someone chain themselves to Obama's front steps in Chicago.


_

Read More

Unmanned Aerial Helicopter

I can understand someone arguing that an unmanned helicopter with guns strapped to it could slip into urban areas and takeout insurgents with less collateral damage than human soldiers...

...but what I don't understand is why they call it the "Vigilante"? A vigilante is someone who gets tired of the actual police force not doing anything and goes on a violent killing spree against criminals. Maybe because DOD checkwriters are a lot more hynotized by the word vigilante than they are by the phrase "soldier saver".

_

Read More

Iron Man Suits, the neverending thread

Another day, another Japanese robot maker releases some bionic device with the loud disclaimer that it doesn't imbue superhuman strength.

Here, you can read about the new Honda exoskeleton, designed to assist the elderly move around by relieving joint pressure.

Once again I ask myself "Why are scientists using servos?" Linear actuators are way more powerful. I think I have come around to the answer: batteries.

Servos use less power to produce less power. They are about the only feasible option for portable power assist suits, in which I have no interest. I am quite content to require my suit wearers to stay safely plugged (via a long cord) into the wall, for now. Let the chemical engineers invent batteries to accomodate my suit, not the other way around.

In any case, hopefully my suit, or the parts I am working on, will not break during press junkits, as the Honda unit does in the second video on the above link.

_

Read More

A riddle

On the work bulletin board someone has posted the following riddle:

What is greater than God, more evil than the devil, the poor have it, the rich need it, and if you eat it you'll die?

Now the obvious answer is "nothing", and I am sure that is the intended answer to the riddle. But there are a few other answers I could suggest that might make this more entertaining. Does anyone else have any suggestions?


_

Read More

Obama Agenda vs. Civil Liberties

This is not something that can be asked and answered in a single post, but in response to my post TPI asked me "in what way is Obama's agenda destructive of civil liberties?"

I'm not going to get into a huge argument about this, but here's my very rudimentary and basic answer: Bush massively reduced the right to privacy via the Patriot Act. He violated our right to be free by torturing suspected terrorists. He violated our right to fair trial by holding detainees for years without a hearing. He violated our right to success by promoting discrimination against arab-appearing Americans.

Obama has not had 8 years to violate our rights, so his list is obviously shorter and less heinous. But what I was getting at with my loaded "but no less invasive to civil liberty" is Obama's two-fold attack on our right to bear arms and our right to prosper. I am not defending the Bush Administration's bungling of the economy, and I did not support their spending spree. But Bush's econ policies seemed...I dunno...like a snowball to Obama's avalanche of money. I'm not one of those hypocrites who says "$300 billion is okay, but $1.2 trillion is too much." I ranted against bailouts from the beginning. Bailouts rob people of the right to fail, of the rights of other intrepid people to establish efficient businesses in the wake of a bad business' colossal failure. Bailouts rob people of the right to spend their money at places they wish to, by forcing it into the hands of businesses that do not necessarily deserve it. Bush, and then Obama, used (and continue to use) "bailout or else armageddon" fearmongering to push upon the American people debts that we will eventually have to pay.
And you have to be either completely in Obama's pocket or have no access to the internet to know that about 15 seconds after Obama was elected, his website dropped their pro-gun talk and took up the liberal, anti-gun mantle. I know, I know, TPI, you don't think Obama is anti-gun. But the problem is that Obama isn't going to stand in the way of the people who are vengefully trying to remove guns from the hands of those of us who have the Constitutionally established right to them.
Obama might not be the bad guy in the anti-gun surge that is building steam in the Democratic party, but I don't see him telling Nancy Pelosi to sit down and shut up.

Anyway, we are looking at the sum total of Bush's legacy...Katrina, Patriot Act, Guantanimo, Iraq, etc. and we get the opportunity to go "wow, what a jerk." But with Obama, we're looking at it the ski slope from the top, and we really don't know what the ride will be like. But so far, Obama hasn't really seemed like "the ultimate defender of liberty" but more like "the ultimate enactor of progressive agenda".


_

Read More

The Difference

From XKCD.

Read More

Dog The Pirate Hunter

Here, Ben Domenech argues that what the United States needs is to follow Ron Paul's advice from 2007: dispatch private mercenaries with letters of marque to dispense low-collateral-damage, low-cost justice on Somali pirates.

Deploying the New Privateers as a blunt instrument against the Somali pirates has some downsides. But I’m unconvinced that these enemies can be negotiated with or stopped without the deployment of an innovative solution — in this case, one that’s a throwback to the era these thieves come from. The cost, difficulty, and risk of a dozen more Maersk standoffs has to be weighed. We shouldn’t be satisfied with better protections for ships, hoping that the pirates will grow bored of their revenge streak, and reorienting our naval force in the region to combat this enemy will take time. Instead, President Obama and the Congress might consider encouraging those individuals who can to solve the problem in their own way — as messy as it may be — so that these seaborne brigands wake up on a morning soon to find their sands are run.

Most people have at least toyed with this idea in their minds. Most of us, deep down, have this idea that people we don't like just need some "Texas justice, Chuck Norris style" and they'll behave themselves.

But as I am sure avid fans are aware, Dog the Bounty Hunter continues to have plenty of work filling bounties. As much as I'd like to send a bunch of vengeful, well-armed American privateers to the Somali coast to take on the pirates, I don't really think that would be a long-term solution. If these pirates can be considered a different sort of land-based terrorist, then the use of force tends to not effectively squash their efforts. Instead they seem to just get wilier. Iraq (and especially Afghanistan) has shown that there is not a quick fix to the problems of terrorism. I suggest the same is true of pirates.

If you want to stop flies from getting in you shut the window, you don't let a bunch of spiders loose and expect the flies to stop coming in out of fear.

_

Read More

Final (yeah right) thought on Tea Parties

The largest Tea Party in Kansas City was organized and spearheaded by conservative radio personality Chris Stigall, who yells at Democrats like a good little Rushling every morning on some AM station in Kansas City.

This really, really bothers me, because it proves that the liberals are right: THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT HAS BEEN HIJACKED BY HYPOCRITICAL REPUBLICANS.

You see, it was Stigall and his peers who were for the War in Iraq at any cost, and never once piped up that Bush's spending surges were a bad idea. Never did Stigall say "the $600 dollar rebate checks won't help the economy." Stigall recently went after Robert Gates for "cutting" the defense budget, even though it went up, and argued that we still need F-22 fighter planes to protect us.

All of these things cost money, and the people who started the Tea Party movement were the ones against all of the above, not just against all of the above after Jan 21, 2009. But the Republican party has become like...well...

If you have seen the movie "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" you know at one scene near the end of the movie the 3 protagonists sing for a crowd. Gubernatorial candidate Homer Stokes stops the singing, and the crowd turns wildly against him. Incumbent Governer "Pappy" O'Daniel smells blood, and turns the crowd's anger at Homer Stokes into his campaign, pretending to be a Soggy Bottom Boys fan and winning the crowd (and the home crowd on the radio).

I believe this is what Republican leadership is doing. The Tea Party movement started as pure argument for fiscal responsibility, but the Republican leadership (with a hefty dose of coverage from FoxNews) is trying to re-align that growing energy into anti-Democratic sentiment.

"You hate fiscal waste? Well, forget what we did for the last 8 years! The Republican Party officially hates waste too!"


_

Read More

The Left and Right of (and right to) Tea Parties

TPI has some good thoughts here on Tea Parties (despite his support of Yglesias, who confounds all by calling tax protestors stupid).

Conversely, Douthat also does a good job of fleshing out thoughts from a less-than-extremist conservative on what the Tea Parties represent.

Personally, I think what liberals like Yglesias are forgetting is that in 2002-2003 when they were all boldly marching against (and chaining themselves to the Bush Ranch in opposition to) the War in Iraq and liberal extremists talked of planted explosives in the Twin Towers and of missiles shooting down planes, the Right collectively called the protesters stupid, and said the conspiracy extremists who were extolling government's hand in the terrorist attacks were undermining the self-confidence of the country and helping the terrorists win. Then, when it became slowly clear that the War in Iraq was...ill advised to say the least...the Left "grassroots organized" and collectively gathered to themselves the ever increasing masses of people who disliked the Republican Party and elected Barack Obama.

So there's this potential parallel going on here. You had 9/11 early in Bush's term when he was uber-popular and then things didn't go well and protesters were all over the place, then he slowly lost the country and became a laughingstock and the lamest duck in 30 years. Now you have Obama as the uber-popular one, preaching and enacting major change (of a different kind than Bush but no less invasive to civil liberty) and protests and rallies are breaking out (three different Tea Parties in Kansas City drew an estimated 10,000 people between them), you have people using stronger anti-leftist rhetoric than ever, and you have Obama's approval rating standing strong...but starting to wane towards the median. Could it be we will all face collosal tax increases in 4-6 years to pay for the uptick in debt from the current Administration's agenda, and the whole thing will blow up into another "I told you so" swing, this time massively to the Right?

I find it highly possible.

_

Read More

Cloned Goats Yes, Nukes No.

International peace organization called for the immediate halt of all Iranian goat enrichment facilities, claiming they may be used to create cloned "goat bombs." This admission came late this afternoon after Iranian scientists announced the first successful goat cloned in their country. When asked to comment, U.S. security officials said: "Iran must not have cloned goats. Our experts tell us that Iran has definite plans to use their cloned goat herds against Israel. The current Iranian regime has openly admitted its hatred of Israel, and has clearly defined its goal to wipe out all Israeli born goats by 2012."
When asked for comment, Israeli officials said: "If the Iranians do not immediately cease goat cloning operations we will initiate bombing strikes on any Iranian science facility we believe involved in cloning of goats."

Iranian officials were surprised and outraged by the foreign leaders response. "We simply want to develop cutting edge science facilities for the economic benefit of our country." When asked about possible use of cloned goats against Israel, the Iranian official said: "Israel has cloned goats. The United States has been cloning goats since the Clone War. Many other countries have cloned goats. What is the problem with Iran obtaining harmless cloned for the benefit of Iran?"

The U.N. has proposed sanctions against Iran if goat cloning continues.


_

Read More

Britain's Got (editing) Talent

In England, American Idol is called "Britain's Got Talent" and it is actually a quality program. Gone is the fake, stupid dialogue between Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell.

Instead you get amazing editing and uplifting moments.

Absolutely worth the 7 minutes. If you can't view youtube at work like I can't, just search for "Susan Boyle" on google video.


_

Read More

Stinky Pee Post

During Easter dinner I had some delicious ham, potato salad and asparagus. Later that afternoon, I noticed the tell-tale odor in my pee that I always smell after eating asparagus. Don't hide it, many of you know of what I speak. That sort of fruity, rich smell that comes 15 minutes -12 hours after eating asparagus, cabbage, or drinking some varieties of wine or champagne.

This is caused by your body breaking down a molecule found only in certain foods and drinks into a small group of highly aromatic molecules that your kidneys send directly (and very quickly) to your liver.

Here's the kicker: only 22% of people report that smell. Scientists (including myself) jumped to the conclusion that the metabolic pathway for turning asparagus into funny smells was genetic, and only 1 in 5 of us were able to create the smelly compounds. But a smart-thinking scientist tried a test: he took pee containing the smelly compounds and held it under people's noses. Turns out everyone makes the compounds, but only 1 in 5 of us can smell them! The genetic difference is in your nose, not in your intestines.

So the next time you eat asparagus and smell that funky smell, count yourself a part of the minority who still have prehistoric scent glands in their noses. Or if you don't smell anything strange in particular, consider yourself lucky; you're a higher organism than I. You've proudly evolved a less sensitive nose!


_

Read More

Don't Judge A Racist By His Statistics

Here at work, the repairman has spent the morning dissecting the $45,000 copy machine we have in the plot room, trying to fix its consistent tendency to paperjam during large print jobs. I just overheard him telling a coworker of mine that part of his difficulty is that the innards of the copier are very small, and the space he has in which to move his hands is very small. "The Japanese design these things around their smaller hands," he argued.

My first reaction was "what a racist chucklehead." But as I sat there, pondering it, I wondered if this is truly racist. And I realized racism is a question of statistics, and the interpretation of those statistics.

If there are statistics that support that as a race, the Japanese have smaller hands than Americans, then it is possible the copy repairman is not racist, but rather just well read in biological literature. However, this must be coupled with evidence that the Japanese have designed copy machines (and presumably other machines) around Japanese anatomical averages, and not the anatomical averages of middle-aged, overweight American copy repairmen.
So the racism in this case is a question of statistics.

However, if I were to say "Black men are more violent than white men," I'd clearly be a racist. Or would I? Statistics show that nationally, crime is perpetrated much more commonly by black men than by white men. But statistics are always open to interpretation. Although statistically black men are evidently more prone to violence than white men, statistics also show that areas of crime have a higher population of blacks. Statistics also show that these areas are low income areas. So it could be heuristically argued that poor people are more prone to crime, and it's simply coincidence that those poor people committing crimes are predominantly black. Or you could as easily argue that certain areas (like the urban core of cities) encourage crime, and the people living there are simply following social cues. Racism, in this case, is a question of interpretation of the statistics.

So what of our copy repairman, who called out Japanese as small-handed? Personally, I chalk that one up to racism. I have my doubts that he actually has studied statistical comparisons of American versus Japanese hand size (my quick internet search returned zero results). I also doubt the copy manufacturer neglected to think of the American market (and ease of repair) when designing their $45,000 copier.


_

Read More

How to increase blog readership

I was highly pleased this morning when I discovered that my daily page views had topped 100. That means that people who visit this site (around 70/day) are clicking to other, older articles that were missed back when I was my only blog reader.

Now I don't harbor ambitions of being the next Ross Douthat; mostly I just enjoy writing, and practicing my sarcastic, conservative-bent analysis of mostly technology, sometimes politics, sometimes God, and sometimes whatever else. But now that I have crept into the triple digits, I feel like I should really take it up a notch.
I've deduced that the best method to this end is by writing articles that pertain to issues about which many people want to read, they find me on google, and come here. Like my circumcision thread, or my charity thread, both popular, according to my sitemeter. By having the right keywords in my posts, people invariably wander here and hopefully get hooked.
So I came up with a foolproof set of keywords today that will absolutely boost my blog readership into the thousands:

"Lindsay Lohan lesbian nude sex video with Megan Fox and Angelina Jolie."



Don't judge me.
_

Read More

One Step Closer To The Dyson Sphere

.














I have discussed before on this blog that a massive amount of energy could be harnessed by space-based solar panels. In science fiction, a massive sphere of solar panels located around a star is known as a Dyson Sphere.

Now, Earth is making its first leap in that direction. California's Pacific Gas & Electric has tentatively signed a deal with Solaren, a start-up that promises to launch and maintain an orbital solar collector, capable of sending 200 Megawatts of energy to earth over 15 years.

Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while can imagine my ten paragraph diatribe about insurmountable technological hurdles being ignored for the sake of politicians who appear to be "doing something dammit!" The can imagine me complaining about space dust blocking the mirror arrays, or about trying to get the mirror arrays stable enough for precision transmission of sunlight, or about the photocells degrading quickly because of the massive amount of energy being generated by them. The regular reader can imagine my face when I think about the engineers who claim this is feasible, and how irresponsible it is to do things like this when environmentally friendly energy is readily available on the terrestrial surface, if people would just have the wherewithal to build it. You can imagine me thinking about how much this will cost taxpayers. You can imagine my sarcastic comment about the debris from the collided satellites could easily destroy this solar array, and if California was depending on that power, brownouts could occur for months until terrestrial backup power could be acquired. You can imagine me not being a fan. Then you can imagine my final words being something like "although this technology is cool and futuristic, I think we should be solving our terrestrial problems first, then working on space-based problems later." You can imagine me linking to my previous eviscerations of pointless, expensive Mars missions and mega-telescopes used to find exoplanets we'll never reach and how against another manned moon trip I am.

I guess I'll believe it when I look up in the sky and see it.


_

Read More

Easter

Is there a more noble act than human sacrifice for the survival of others? Christian teaching tells us there is not. The Supreme Being appeared in flesh, and then sacrificed himself for the saving of all believers. This tells me that although Jesus said the first commandment is to "Love your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, and the second is to "Love your neighber as your self," that the act of sacrificing your life so that others may live supercedes all other behaviors. No amount of charitable donation, no amount of goodwill towards others, no amount of responsible behavior or penitence can compare to the simple act of giving up your life that someone else may live.

Easter always remind me of 9/11. I always think about (and mourn) the firefighters who climbed up into the Towers to bring people down, and how although they did not know they were doomed, the accepted their own demise as a very real possibility, and climbed the stairs anyway. Self-sacrifice is one of the only things I can argue is truly a "human" trait, you do not find animals (outside of hive-collective groups where there is not technically an individual) were self-sacrifice is a wide-spread and noticeable trait. Parent animals will often viciously and self-destructively defend their young, but this is simple Darwinism; it is easily argued the parents are not protecting their young out of love, they are doing so out of love of their own DNA. Humans, and as far as I know humans alone, will sacrifice their life for a complete stranger.

So the philosophical question doesn't become "what separates humans from animals?" but instead becomes "what connects humans, and humans alone, to the Divine?" The answer, I believe, is self-sacrifice. The answer is Jesus.


_

Read More

Zaphod Beeblebrox reference of the year!

Woman has developed imaginary third arm.

_

Read More

Tea Party Protests

Yglesias:

I haven’t said a great deal about the burgeoning “tea party” “movement” because (a) it’s incredibly stupid, and (b) I knew some colleagues were working on some more in-depth efforts in this regard than I could possible stomach.

Boy he sure sounds like William Rutledge all of a sudden, doesn't he?

Having attended a "Tea Party" tax protest myself, I have to feel a little incensed when someone tells me that something I had done was incredibly stupid. I felt neither stupid nor incredible when I was at the protest. All I felt was a sense of belonging to a large (and growing) group that felt tax increases, even for the most altruistic reasons, would not aid me or the economy.

People like Barack Obama. Not everyone! 30 percent or so of the people say they disapprove. And in a country of 300 million, that means it’s easy to get together a big meeting of people who really hate Obama. But it’s clearly a relatively modest minority of the population, comparable in size—and probably largely overlapping with—the group of people who approved of the job George W. Bush was doing all the way ’till the end.

Believe me, there are not a lot of Bush supporters at the tax protests. If anything, independents and hard line conservatives are the rule there. Many tax party protesters felt Bush was as fiscally irresponsible as Obama will probably be. Many at tax party protests are Ron Paul supporters.

I like James Robertson's comment to Yglesias' post:

Hmm. So it’s absurd because you don’t approve. As opposed to the anti-war protests (which have magically fizzled out - makes me wonder about the principles of those people), of which you approved.
Right….
Bear in mind that the original tea party in Boston was in favor of a policy that very few colonials approved. But then again, I’ve seen Matt yearn for an alternate reality with no revolution, so I guess it all makes sense.

_

Read More

Earthicidal Starbursts May Have Caused Dinosaurs to "Cease Existing"

I had never heard the term "Earthicide" until about ten minutes ago, when I read this uplifting piece of writing.

When a binary system collapses into a black hole, which astronomers call 'coalescence' (a euphemism which makes 'heated debate' a valid description of World War II), it can release a gigantic burst of gamma rays. Gamma rays are the ultimate high energy electromagnetic radiation, and while the burst lasts less than two minutes it can contain more energy than the entire mass of the sun converted into energy by E = m c^2. You'll notice that the mass of the sun and the speed of light, c, are extremely large numbers

Basically, all that garbage Newt was saying about EMP blasts in space causing the electrical grid to be disabled, or all that stuff I said about solar flares washing the Earth in gamma rays...imagine that multiplied by about a factor of...infinity.

On the upside we'll never see it coming. The EM-burst travels the speed of light so the only warning we'd have is dying - which most people will accept is a little too late.

The idea here is that a star 100,000 light years away could have exploded and sent out a wave of gamma radiation at us 100,000 years ago and we won't have a clue until it gets here and wipes us out.

"Here that sound, Mr. Anderson? That's the sound of inevitability." - Agent Smith, The Matrix


_

Read More

Spinning the Numbers Helps Obamaniacs

Am I the only one who thinks that when 53% of people find capitalism better than socialism, and 20% of people find socialism better than capitalism, that means that nearly 3 capitalists exist in America per socialist? How are we not cutting this as a massive majority of capitalists?
Further, it is mentioned that

Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.

I once heard a quote: "If you're old and liberal, you have no money. If you are young and conservative you have no heart."
Young people have always been more liberal (read: socialistic, idealistic) than their older counterparts. This is exactly what the trends in the Rasmussen poll show!
So when Yglesias says:

The generational change here is interesting.

I have to ask what exactly he means by change? 20-somethings are more socialist than old people? Seems like business as usual to me!

If there has been a shift towards acceptance of socialism, it is because the Democratic party has done a great job of making people believe the following equation: economic collapse + greed + George Bush + AIG execs / your 401k = capitalism. When really, it should be like this: hard work + sound investment + freemarket capitalism = comfortable retirement.

And while I am doing math equations to describe policy, here's socialism:
your tax dollars/everyone else - your hard work - your personal freedom + government inefficiency + bureaucracy*infinity - happiness = future

That's right. bureaucracy*infinity. Happy Friday!

_

Read More

Newt's scared of EMP's.

.




















Really? EMP's? I think we've been watching too much Ocean's 11.

Here's the core of his statement:

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is a byproduct of detonating an atomic bomb above the Earth’s atmosphere. When a nuclear weapon is detonated in space, the gamma rays emitted trigger a massive electrical disturbance in the upper atmosphere. Moving at the speed of light, this overload will short out all electrical equipment, power grids and delicate electronics on the Earth’s surface. In fact, it would take only one to three weapons exploding above the continental United States to wipe out our entire grid and transportation network. It might take years to recover from, if ever.

That's true, and not true. The way to recover would be to go trip your circuit breaker back to "on", as your fuses would have tripped. If you had a surge protector on your computer, it will power back up as well. If you have a cell phone, you'll need a new one. Utility companies will need to re-fuse their facilities, but the power in a massive EMP is not sufficient to actually destroy anything. Since this idea has been unclassified knowledge since the cold war, most utilities have taken steps to prevent damage during a power surge...like from a solar storm.

Newt goes into fearmongering mode here:

Within weeks after such an attack, tens of millions of Americans would perish. The impact has been likened to a nationwide Hurricane Katrina. Some studies estimate that 90 percent of all Americans might very well die in the year after such an attack as our transportation, food distribution, communications, public safety, law enforcement, and medical infrastructures collapse.

Really, Mr. Gingrich, does this kind of language really help the situation? Gingrich goes on to suggest that missile defense is our only solution to the threat of hostile nations EMP'ing us back into the Bronze Age.

The idea of shooting missiles at missiles is not only impractical and expensive, but pseudoscience at best. Can we really expect a U.S. missile to catch up to a Korean missile launched half a world away, traveling at ballistic speed into space? Doubtful, dubious, and wasteful of taxpayer dollars.

As far as I can see, the best solution to stopping hostile tyrants from firing weapons of mass destruction at the U.S. and its allies is simply to invade the country pre-emptively and depose the leader. Say what you want about the invasion of Iraq, but I don't see them planning nuclear attacks on Israel right now.

Or perhaps we should detonate one of our nukes above North Korea? Take out their electrical systems? I bet Newt'd love that plan!


_

Read More

HAL 5, design issues, continued

I have often wondered how much potential myoelectric relays really have. In the case of the HAL suit the idea is this: The sensors on the skin detect the electrical charge in your skin caused by the nerve sending a signal to your leg muscle to move your leg. The HAL suit then move its leg, and your leg moves with it.

That's pretty amazing.

But the human skin is a complicated organ. Let me give you an example. If you were (go with me here) to plug in an oscilloscope, and plug a wire into the input jack, then hold the other end of the wire, the oscilloscope would be flat. But if you then turned on the flourescent lights in the ceiling, the oscilloscope would immediately detect a 60 Hz frequency signal, somehow coming from your skin. The reason for this is that your skin acts as a signal receiver for the 60 Hz signal being emitted by the electrical current that powers the lights, the same way a radio antenna detects the FM or AM radio station signal traveling through the air.

So how does the HAL suit discern what is a nerve signal and what is background noise? If your skin is getting constantly bombarded with thousands of signals at different radio frequencies, all of which it picks up and amplifies, how does the HAL suit cut that out? And what about static charge? If you scrape your feet across the floor, does it build a static charge which is absorbed by the sensors, causing a false positive? What happens when you get sweaty, and your body becomes covered in a glistening layer of conductive liquid, spreading and dissipating signals from your nerves? And what about when you just flex your muscle, but don't move your leg? I'm sitting here and I can flex my thigh muscles. Would the HAL suit try to move my leg, or does it somehow know better?

Over at the RIC, a similar method is being used to control artificial limbs for amputees. Electrical sensors are placed on the pectoral muscle of the amputee, who then learns, slowly but surely, to control a simple mechanical arm using careful muscle activation in his/her pectoral.
However, this signal is highly degraded. Direct nerve-to-wire connections would be more advantageous, could they be devised.


_

Read More

A suit called "HAL" produced by a company called "Cyberdyne"

What could possibly go wrong when the suit is named after a murderous computer and the company is named after a company that created Skynet, an AI program that wipes out humanity...?

Now I'll attempt to write this without at shred of jealousy and purely as an objective observer that has somewhat specialized knowledge in the field of human performance robotics.

This major problem I have with this suit is that it does not enhance a normal human upward towards superhuman. This video details the suit in action. It looks pretty cool. However, when they want to show the strength allowed by the suit, they load the user with three 20-lb bags of rice. Wow, 60 lbs. that is so much weight... Now the other problem I have is that if you watch the video carefully you realize the only thing the arms are capable of doing is holding things in that cradled, bicep-curled position. The suit does not appear to be able to articulate more than a few forces. It can walk, stand up from a sqaut, and bend the arm in a bicep curl. Forgive my underwhelming sense of awe.

Overblown Iron Man analogies aside, this suit is a huge step forward in terms of medical rehabilitation. Imagine someone who had lost most of their nervous system activity, and their leg muscles had atrophied as a result. Put them in this suit, and they might walk again. That's an amazing, wonderful thing. But what I want to impress upon all of you is that this suit is not capable of picking up a grand piano and hurling it a half-mile. In terms of raw mechanical strength, this suit is probably no stronger than your average American. In a lot of ways it is much weaker. You cannot do a pushup in this suit.
The other important thing we should all notice is the same problem I had with the Sarcos suit: no hands. The HAL suit requires the user to rely on their own hand strength. Any athlete will tell you that there is no point in having the arm strength to dead lift 900 lbs. if you don't have the grip strength to hold the barbell!

Anyway, if you really take a look past the cool blue circular lights and nifty paint scheme, you realize this suit is not a technological leap into the future. The video tells us that a suit will cost $20,000 US dollars once they get done with it, and they'll only be able to make ~500 a year. So it won't exactly be selling like the iPhone.

Why the strength limitation? Joint-located servos. The legs have servos at the knee, which is nearly the worst design plan you could do. It works great for 12 lb. Asimo robots, because they don't require a lot of force to move. But what the Japanese seem unable to give up is the idea that a servo can power a robotic joint as powerfully as human muscle can. A servo works by rotation two discs in relationship to each other. The problem with this is not that a servo cannot generate enough force to move the joint. The problem is that the torque is directly proportional to the current draw of the servo. In order for a servo to rotate with the torque and speed of a human leg, it quickly draws a huge amount of power and overheats. Cyberdyne has solved circumvented this problem with large, high-torque servos that are one directional. However, I must repeat that Cyberdyne's suit does not appear to render the wearer any strength beyond what a normal human would have. Despite all our grandiose schemes, Nature has evolved the most efficient, strongest method for moving your bones. Muscles attached to ligaments, attached at points along your bones to create lever arms. Servos, though simpler in function, simply cannot produce the force per unit energy expended that muscle can. A possible solution is a linear actuator, which can mimic the movement of a muscle.

A personal issue I have with the suit is that the anchors, that is, the parts of the suit that attach to the body, are not efficient. Application of force is tied to the body using double straps wrapped around the muscles. A properly built suit should only strain itself, almost like a person wrapped around you. Ideally, designers should want the suit to dynamically balance itself, the same way the body does, so that the wearer carries a load like normal, and then the suit carries an additional load with no effect on the lifter. The Sarcos suit has achieved this design, the wearer really doesn't feel any strain on their body even though they could be lifting 400 pounds.

One thing the HAL suit does right is that the amount of augmentation power is modular. It can be set to assist the wearer 50/50 with loads, or for severely handicapped users, it can be upped as high as 90/10. This is a good idea.
My powered arm design is a slight departure from this. The arm's force actuators are pre-calibrated to move from 0-100% of their force curve as the wearer goes from ~30-100% of their muscle force. Squeeze a can of vegetable soup as hard as you can, you can't break it. Squeeze a can of vegetable soup as hard as you can while wearing the powered arm, the can is crushed. However, squeeze a can only hard enough to lift it, and the suit doesn't kick in and crush the can, it simply lets the wearer do their thing. Under normal circumstances, like the act of holding a can of soup, there is no need for the augmented strength, so the suit has an input threshold, i.e. a minimum amount of muscle tension required before the suit says "I ought to help out here." The basic premise here is that you don't need the suit to help you all the time, but when you do, you don't want it to lag behind. So the suit has a shorter force curve than you do.

It's all very simple, in my head.

Anyway, cheers to Cyberdyne for their suit, it looks neat. But let's not all jump on the "wow, Iron Man lives!" bandwagon just yet.


_

Read More

Math FAIL

Here, a reader claims that CFL's aren't as energy friendly as promised. The claim is that CFL's only require 13 watts of electricity, but actually need 28 VA from the utility company. So you save money because your meter only draws 13 watts per bulb, but stress is put on the utility company because they have to send more than that to your house.

Until the fix these issues, I'll hold on to my incandescents and carbon arc lamps, thanks."

Unfortunately, the reader fails to do the simple math required to realize that CFLs are still superior:

Normal bulb = 60 VA
CFL = 28 VA

Energy saved = 53%

Did I miss something here?


_

Read More

Cheap Fun

Here. It's as simple as it looks. Entertaining though.


_

Read More

Girls Rule

All-girls robotics team crushes male-dominated competition.

Male competitors respond "those chicks are so hot!"


_

Read More

Super Strength Suit

So I've been thinking about these cool weight vests they've got on sale at Dick's Sporting Goods, and I got to thinking, as I always do, "I can do this better if I make one myself."
Key points:
1. Use lead. Its cheap, and very dense, which means a lot of weight in small space. We don't want to look like an puffed up idiot now, do we? Also, lead is quite ductile, so if we needed to bend it to the contours of the body, it wouldn't be difficult to do so.
2. Must be modular. We want to start with a little bit of weight and then work our way up to an enormous load that requires a huge amount of strength.
3. Must be evenly distributed throughout the body. Although a vest is a good start, an accurate suit designed to simulate a heavier body load should have weights in various places. Weights on your thighs, upper and lower arms, possibly the head, middle and lower back, along the crown of the shoulders, and elsewhere. Avoid the lower leg, as excess weight down their does not lead to greater muscle development, only to knee damage.

4. Possibly make rubber connectors between appendages to resist movement. This would help build muscles strength for activities that didn't necessary require vertical loading. An example would be a rubber connector between your tricep and midriff, resisting the motion of raising your arm.

Anyway, it'd be a fun project, and quite a bit more doable than that powered suit I'm trying to design. Probably a lot cheaper too, which would make Mrs. TAE happy. I mentioned that a single actuator for a fingers would cost $119.00, and then told her I'd need 10 per hand, plus another three for the forearm (pronation/supination), and she kinda nixed that one...for now.


_

Read More

Speaking of airplanes

When will people stop trying to make this crap? Maybe around the time Wired magazine stops running press about them.


_

Read More

F-22...no. F-35...yes. UPDATED

The award for coolest senator name goes to: Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss (R). Chambliss has argued that if Robert Gates kills the F-22 program, 95,000 Americans will lose their jobs.

My question is this: It takes 95,000 people to build an airplane? Really?

Probably, Saxby was including businesses like restaurants that support the workers on the F-22 assembly line.

However, here's a thought. The JSF (F-35) costs a paltry $83 million, as compared to the F-22's $140 million. So for each JSF built, the U.S. saves $57 million dollars. That would pay a lot of unemployment benefits. Meanwhile we're still getting deadly airplanes in our Air Force.

Fast fighters are cool, faster fighter jets are cooler, but in the current international and economic situation, I think the cheaper jet is the right pick here, so I agree with Gates' decision.

Update: In a bizarre twist, Yglesias and I agree.


_

Read More

Fixing Education One Bad Idea At A Time.

.



















Matt Bartle, (R) Missouri state senator from Lee's Summit, has these words to offer in the Kansas City Star:

In Missouri, the graduation rate is around 85 percent. This means 15 percent of students do not finish high school on average each year.

Obviously, Bartle majored in mathematics in college.

I kid. Seriously, though, Bartle wrote his four point plan for turning Missouri schools into the model for nationwide change:

The first two changes involve our teachers. First, we must eliminate the bottom 15 percent based on poor performance and replace them with people who will get the job done. Such a move will have to be coupled with a second proposal—exchanging tenure for a merit-pay system that rewards excellent teachers with dramatically increased salaries. I’ll discuss both of these ideas in further detail next week.
The third and fourth adjustments involve the way we teach our kids. We must consider changing to a year-round school schedule with at least two different start times. Our traditional, nine months on, three months off school year—which is based on the agrarian calendar—undermines learning.

What Bartle is arguing is that summer pool time means lost algebra lessons. It means that when you spend three months playing baseball and camping with dad and the cub scouts you forget what the plot of My Antonia was.

The Abstracted Mother taught elementary school for many, many years and let me tell you, Bartle is right. TAM often lamented that the first few weeks of school are spent relearning everything that is forgotten over the summer.

However, I got lucky on my drive home from work and caught the local radio show interviewing Bartle. He claimed that teachers can be easily "tested" to determine if they were in the bottom 15%. "Tons of methods exist" he argued, and said that teachers should be tested for competence "on whatever subjects they teach." This all is beginning to seem a little grandiose to me. He suggested that teachers give up the tenure system (you know, the one put in place because the teacher drop out rate is very high and incentives were needed to keep teachers in the profession long enough for them to be good at their jobs) and instead a merit based system should be put in place.

The major problem I have with this scenario is that although it might weed out certain individuals who were completely unqualified to teach, it instead places public schools into the "professor paradox." Anyone who has attended college knows that the drowsy PhD's that are required to teach classes alongside their research are not necessarily good teachers, nor interested in teaching. However, they are brilliant geniuses who might be curing cancer or discovering new exoplanets. But part of their salary at the university comes from their teaching of courses. The same could quickly happen in Missouri under Bartles plan. If merit-based pay (and teacher survival) were based on the command an individual had over the curriculum, and not on their teaching effectiveness, students could find themselves being taught extremely poorly by extremely smart individuals.

Going back to the summer vacation issue, Bartle made it clear that he didn't think Missourians needed longer class days or more class days. He just thought by spacing them out and not having a massive summer break, students would have higher retention. However, Bartle apparently doesn't read the same paper to which he wrote, because also in the pages of the Kansas City Star is this report from the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, arguing that school years should be extended to 11 months in length, 6 days a week.

When exactly, Mr. Duncan, are kids supposed to be kids? Perhaps Bartle is right, school years should be adjusted and dispersed to increase knowledge retention while still giving kids the free time they need to grow and play and open their minds, but extending the school year from 180 to 313 days represents a massive overhaul of American society and a massive fiscal nightmare for state governments, who currently carry the burden of most of the countries' education costs.

Consider this: during the off times, schools run on less lighting, less air conditioning/heating and a barebones janitorial staff. Summer months off represent a massive savings for schools in warm parts of the country, who don't have to keep classrooms as cool. By dispersing the students' schedule, as Bartle suggests, this would increase, but possibly could be offset by longer breaks in winter (less heating cost). Teachers in most states are paid for a full year of teaching, based on the amount of days they are in work (inservice + student days). The time off is pro-rated and given to them either as a lump sum or in regular payments, depending on the teacher's preference and the state's plan. You better believe that if you increased the teacher's required number of work days by 30%, the teachers would expect at least that much of a salary increase.
Many students in the public school system receive free breakfast and reduced/free lunch as part of a widespread system to make sure underpriveledged students get proper nutrition. Obviously on days the students aren't in school, they don't get that food. Increase the number of school days by 133, as Duncan suggest, and you almost double the cost to the taxpayer for these reduced lunch programs.

I don't really think that Duncan has thought this through; perhaps he just wanted to sound bold and decisive, like he's "doing something, dammit!" And increasing the number of school days doesn't really translate all that well to better performance, if you look at international data, or read the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. Redistribution of school days, as Bartle suggests, does markedly improve student test scores and the increased costs from the redistribution is minor.

On a side note: Senator Matt Bartle was home schooled. Arne Duncan went to private school. Neither man has been a teacher for a single day.


_

Read More

Read the whole post.

Despite my best efforts:

And in case I didn't make it clear above, spare me your linkspam for or against vaccines and circumcision. I know what both sides of the argument are.

I got a linkspam in the comments. Rather than being upset that people only read part of my posts, or being irritated that they ignored half of what I said, I'm going to point out that the commenters actually prove my point, though they mean well.

The links commenter Mark listed in his response to my entry are dated 2004, 2006, 1996, and 2006. Forgive me for thinking this is a new trend. Did you know circumcision is over 5,000 years old? Drawings in Egypt depict Egyptians and Jews getting circumcised. Cave paintings that date to 9,000 years ago show what many appear to be a circumcision. Independently rising cultures, in Africa, Europe, South America, Central and North America, Australia, and India all adopted circumcision practices.
Now, whether they did that because the trimmed boys didn't get have smegma to give them phimosis, or because just by chance every culture on the planet independently developed the cultural practice of trimming boys, I cannot argue. I am not an archeologist, I am a scientist.
But the point here is that for 5,000 years circ has been a widespread, good idea, and this idea that "there is no medical benefit" is, relatively speaking, a snap of the fingers in the long history of humanity.
In developed countries, where hygiene and cleanliness are more widespread, perhaps circumcision isn't totally necessary. Most of the ailments caused by an untrimmed foreskin can be prevented through thorough washing and care. But in developing countries, where hygiene is deplorable, circumcision is, as it was for the last 5,000 years, obviously beneficial.
Wouldn't even anti-circ people agree that the evidence is overwhelming that AIDS and many other diseases could be prevented in sub-saharan Africa through (if hygiene isn't available) circumcision?
The point I was trying (and succeeding, if you ask me) to make was that natural law compels us to make medical decisions based on the species as a whole, regardless of personal preference. Maybe there will be a day, far in the future, where all humans will have clean water, access to soap and shower facilities, at which time we can reevaluate the necessity of circumcision. But until that day comes, we owe it to our species to perform the voluntary medical procedures like circ and vaccinations that although might not help our children directly, may help children worldwide.


_

Read More

Rebuttal

A concept with which I have been struggling is that I am living the self-deception of thinking I am a walking contradiction. I have asked myself many times how I can be so liberal inside while so conservative outside...i.e. my social views appear to me very liberal, but my economic policy and constitutional interpretation is very, very conservative.
Here's an example: I feel very strongly that we all should be solving international hunger crises immediately, but I feel equally strongly that increased taxation is the exact opposite way to do it. Better, I think, for people to feel the moral compulsion to help their fellow humans but have the fiscal freedom to do so on their own volition. Forced charity is not charity at all.

But it has dawned on me that (unfortunately for some) I am not liberal at all. The idea of social change is not alien to conservatives, and the idea of national (and international) prosperity is as much a part of the conservative agenda as it is the liberal. What I had been doing was trying to characterize my own beliefs and policies based on the liberal definition of conservatives: "conservatives are greedy, selfish bastards." I was forced to pin myself as a greedy jerk when it came to economic freedoms and lower taxes, but I couldn't think of myself as heartless when it came to the poor and under-represented.
But really, conservatives (and by conservatives I mean mostly the ones you don't hear loudmouthing on the EIB radio network or FoxNews television channel) are deeply committed to improving the human condition, they just prefer a hands-off attitude from government while they do it.

Anyway, I got a lot of flak from my posts about vaccinations and circumcision. Weirdly, the flak has been from both sides of the aisle. Some of my conservative relatives send me regular links from anti-vax websites and news stories. Many of these stories come from sites that don't hide their conservative agendas. Similarly, some of my liberal relatives and friends have "opted out" of vaccines for their kids, based on their own judgement.
As for circumcision, I got a weirdly opposite response. I got tons of anti-circ linklists from liberals with lots of liberal sites and the conservatives I know that have chosen to skip circ for their boys simply claimed they were opting out for personal reasons.
So I have to wonder why my proposal for mandatory vaccinations for kids and possibly the same for circumcision (sans religious belief, remember I'm a conservative) have fallen on such deaf ears. No one wants to hear it. Is this because it is nonsense? Or are the people against vaccines and circ being nonsensical themselves?

Out of pure egotism I have to suggest the latter is the truth. Vaccines, though possibly containing tiny inherent risks, also can lay claim to saving countless lives. Since the advent of modern vaccinations, the human population has exploded, and the average life expectancy in developed countries (where vaccinations are available and use is widespread) has gone through the roof. There are few other explanations for this, as health conditions otherwise have not improved. Countries that have decreased vaccination use have seen a marked rise in disease outbreaks. Humans in developed countries are not living healthier lives than they were a hundred years ago, nay, now we live on fast food, alcohol, and cigarettes. The obesity rate has risen as fast if not faster than the life expectancy rate. Cultural traits, wars, and technology have enabled us to be fatter and less healthy and die more easily than ever before. But we live on, thanks mostly in part to modern medicine and the vaccines we get as kids. But a couple kids somewhere may have gotten autism so now we're all conveniently ignoring the millions of children who survived becuase they never got polio or smallpox or the flu.

And in case I didn't make it clear above, spare me your linkspam for or against vaccines and circumcision. I know what both sides of the argument are.

The point is that vaccinations and other optional health procedures that you can have performed on your children should not be scary. Nobody is "out to get you" and no sane person really, truly wants your child to have nerve damage in their penis.
No one bats an eyelash when the doctor wants to put tubes in a kid who gets lots of ear infections, or to have the tonsils taken out of a kid who has tonsilitis. Nobody seems upset that babies get a shot of vitamin K when they are born, or that silver nitrate is often put into their eyes to protect them from gonorrhea.
The acceptability of some forms of voluntary treatment with castigation of others is entirely societal driven. These treatments have been around for decades or longer, only recently have fears arisen against them.

But the problem I have with people that opt out is that they are not doing so for the sake of the human species. Many acknowledge that vaccines have made the world a better place. Many admit that circumcision prevents or helps prevent or probably helps prevent many terrible diseases. But they exclude themselves from the group of people who actually practice those acts. They seem to think that what is good for everyone else is good for everyone else...but they have their own way. They choose to make a free choice, as is their right, and go against the grain, to go against the time-tested regimens of science and medicine.
That is their choice, or so they think. But isn't, through herd immunity, as I have written before, the whole of the world stronger for each vaccinated child in it? Doesn't my daughters vaccination prevent her not only from getting the flu, but from passing it to another weaker child?
Don't we have a societal obligation to have our kids vaccinated in every way possible, for the sake of society? People will tell you yes until your ears fall off. Or until they have kids of their own and they decide not to have their kid vaccinated, because it might cause autism.

But if I said "the United States is stronger because we all pay taxes, but I choose not to. I find that occasionally taxes don't benefit the taxpayer, and so I choose not to pay them." I would be quickly fined or imprisoned by the IRS (or not). Because taxpaying is a law, you might say, while vaccinating your child is not.
I disagree. While paying your taxes is in fact required by the IRS, the act of giving up your own earnings or time or labor for the betterment of society is not law, it is Hobbesian' natural law. It is the moralistic fiber that Darwin argued in Chapter 5 of "The Descent of Man" that makes one tribe conquer another. He wrote:

"... When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other."

It is, Darwin and Hobbes both argued, our natural purpose and law to perform acts that benefit our species as a superceding obligation to our own personal inhibitions against those acts. To behave as an individual in ways that best allow our species to succeed and to thrive and to evolve.

So we come to this conclusion that we are bound by natural law to fight for the survival of our species, and to do so we must get our kids vaccinated. I'm not going to pretend like I believe even a tiny fraction of children get autism directly from vaccinations. But even if they do, though my heart goes out to their parents, the rest of us must continue to vaccinate our kids. Even though a few doctors argue that circumcision is unnecessary, the overwhelming majority of scientists and doctors for the last thousand odd years argue that it is not only a good idea in terms of societal pressures to fit in, but a good idea for the health of the human species.

I look to my own hypocrisies every day. Do you look for your own?

_

Read More

Israel nuking Iran, cont'd.

.



















It seems to me, looking at the above map of the Middle East, that Iraq and Iran are awfully close, and that Iraq stands right between Israel and Iran.

It thereby goes by logic that U.S. interests in Iraq might not want nuclear missiles traveling overhead from point A to point B while American soldiers are there.

Further, although trade winds in the middle east are complex, winds commonly blow out of the North or Northeast into Iran, down into the Persian Gulf. So the nuclear fallout from an Israeli strike on Iran would travel towards Iraq and Saudi Arabia, blanketing Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and UAE in radiation.

The point is, I highly doubt U.S. intelligence wouldn't know when an Israel-Iran conflict is about to start, and I think it would be in the U.S. best interest to pull our troops safely out of harm's way. So if you hear about major troop movements in Iraq, there's a chance it's just us getting out of harm's way.


_

Read More

Car Safety

U.S. highway deaths at lowest level since 1961. Of course they would be even lower if we automated cars.


_

Read More

Doldrums/

Normally I subject my readership to my internal thoughts about external events. Today I'll subject you to internal thoughts about internal thoughts.

It wasn't that long ago I chuckled to myself at Freddie deBoer for quitting his blog. In a funk, he complained, and needed a break.

I enjoyed reading Freddie, though a bloody liberal and not ashamed of it, he wrote like I would write, and his criticisms and witicisms made me smile and think. But Freddie wrote some things that made some people mad and got a lot of flak. And so he quit, for a while. Which is a shame, because if loudmouth bullies can silence a voice, we live in an awful world.

Lately, my job (don't think for a minute that this backwoods blog of mine supports me, I'm forced to work a regular job) has been wearing on me. The economy has made the senior management at my company make tough decisions, and they've shown. When I was hired, I was considered sort of a "wonder boy," so much so that people at work teased me about it.

But the work we do has felt the heat of the construction industry, and I've had to adapt and take on some less interesting projects to keep my nose clean until things look up. Believe me, a combination of the construction industry collapsing and the banking credit industry pulling back (more aggressively than the Great Depression, I might add) has rocked the MEP engineering business pretty hard. We mostly do domestic work at my compnay, but other companies than ours who have a larger international market have been hit much harder. Here in America, as bad as things are, we're comparatively doing pretty well.

So I am listing back and forth in this internal conflict: grateful to be at a job, but malcontent because the projects I am doing are really crappy and don't stretch my abilities. At some point, during my younger days, I had great, ambitious, naive plans to change the world. The part of me that had those plans is crying out from within me each and every day and I won't lie; I'm suffering. And every day I feel like that voice within me is a little bit softer.

Now I know I run the risk of sounding whiny and emo, and we all have our problems (why should you read about mine?), but this is my blog and I am sure there are readers who can relate. Freddie knew he would sound like a wimp when he said "I need a break from this" and I couldn't relate at the time because I was so inspired by my own writing, by my own fledgling development of this blog and my thoughts on many things. But it's amazing how things can change in four months.

It's just that I got a master's degree in biomechanical engineering, wrote and defended an expansive and over-long thesis, ran my own research lab, have published articles in major science magazines, given lectures to peers at large bioengineering conferences in San Diego and Vale, and I didn't think once during all that time that I'd be near-depressed in a cube farm two years later. Part of the reason I cling to this blog is because my brain is suffering from workplace underutilization.

I am not ungrateful to my bosses, there have been layoffs and I have fortunately not been included. But the work I am doing does not challenge me and I am the type that thrives upon difficulty (and rots without it). I like the phrase "I dare you to tell me something is impossible."
I see it in myself, in my list of hobbies, in my actions, and in my behavior at work. I get excited when I think about any topic to blog, but let's be honest: if you've seen my blog topics the last two weeks, they haven't been amazing. I get excited when I can do something...anything...not at work. Rather than working at a frenetic pace, I've gone to keeping one eye on the clock, excited to leave work and go home and play with my daughter (a happy, cherubic light in my dim world).

Anyway, this all makes me think about the harsh realities of others. One of my defense mechanisms is to write off my own suffering and think about those that have it worse. "Can you imagine," I think to myself, "how must it feel to stand in the unemployment line? How many proud, tall men have been cowed by that fate? Can you imagine not knowing how you'd feed your kids? Can you imagine losing your car, losing your home, losing the shirt off your back, because you couldn't find work?" I think about Jurgis Rudkus, working in the fertilizer factory, shoveling cattle feces for fourteen hours straight, grateful to have a job, and I wonder why I'm such a whiny little prig. And then that little voice within me squeaks "because you were meant for more."


_

Read More

Adventures in Linguistics

Something that bugs me is when people make up their own antithesis to a word. For example, a guy on the radio just said "unexplainable."

Something is explainable, and if it isn't, then it is inexplicable. There is no such thing as the word unexplainable.


_

Read More

The Science of Nukes

Last night on Savage I was listening to someone espouse their belief that Iran's government is stoically committed to annihilating Israel, and vice versa. He believed Iran is committed to obtaining nukes, and Israel is committed to preventing that, to the point that he was reasonably certain that the whole region could quickly be drawn into a large-scale conflict.
Now, after researching this topic I have found belief in an Iran-Israel war to be ranging from doubtful to definite.

One thing that is for certain is that neither Israel nor Iran believe in the "mutually assured destruction" doctrine that has kept the U.S. and Russian nukes safely underground since their advent.

So how does a nuke work? Your run of the mill nuclear warhead is about the size of a small car, and fits snugly on top of a large missile. Each warhead contains 8-10 nuclear devices, which will separate and enable the single missile to strike multiple locations...making defense more difficult.
The two main ingredients in a nuclear warhead are uranium-235 and plutonium.

Think of the warhead inside a nuclear weapon as a propane tank, like the one on your gas grill. The inside wall of the tank is lined with explosives, and the core of the tank is filled with enriched uranium with a plutonium center. When the warhead detonates, the explosives along the outside edge of the device explode, which provides intense pressure inward on the uranium core. This compression triggers the nuclear reaction.
The nuclear reaction is caused basically by the fact that the uranium hates being close to itself, so much so that when pushed together, it will decay into smaller atoms that are less "claustrophobic", as well as a couple neutrons. This is the key to the chain reaction. The uranium decays into smaller pieces and ejects a couple neutrons...and these two neutrons travel to other uranium atoms and cause their decay...which releases four neutrons...etc. etc.
The reason that this is such a massive explosion is that the release of neutrons gives of a huge amount of heat energy.


_

Read More

I'm taking it easy until the sun irradiates us all.

My horoscope told me to "concentrate on the leisure angle" and "take it easy; enjoy a long lunch with friends" so here's a leisurely-written science entry for you.

First off, Happy Birthday to Alec Baldwin! Talk about an epic actor.

In honor of another movie that uses science to create fiction then removes the science from it, here's an explanation of a solar flare-based armageddon.

Solar flares are...well, let's pretend like a sunspot is a zit on the face of the sun. A solar flare is the pus that shoots out when the zit is popped. The intense magnetic fields formed by the sunspot cause a violent explosion(s) of plasma from the sun, which can travel nearly the speed of light. This plasma leaves the sun in the form of a wide band of radiation, from gamma rays all the way down to long-band radio waves. When they hit the earth, they can cause all sorts of problems.

So imagine, if you will, that a massive once-in-1,000-years solar flare comes speeding towards earth. The first thing you'll notice is that your Garmin GPS has stopped working. This is because a massive burst of ionizing electrons has fried every satellite in orbit. The three astronauts in the International Space Station will also stop transmitting...for the worst reason. In fact, it's likely the energy will be sufficient to vaporize the entirety of the ISS, so anyone looking into the right part of the sky will see a tiny explosion as the ISS fragments and burns.
Then the sky will be bathed in ionization, which will look like the Northern Lights times one million. At that point, don't panic, you still have time to hug your kids.
Most of the harmful radiation from the sun will be absorbed in the earth's magnetosphere, and will superheat the atmosphere, destroying the ozone layer. However, all life on earth's surface will still be bathed in a massive dose of gamma rays. Of course, no one will immediately notice. We'll all just look up at the sky and watch the fireworks, then turn on the TV to see the news about what happened.
Unfortunately your TV won't turn on. The EMP will have fried all electronic devices on earth, and even if you did have a working TV because you happened to have had it in a Faraday cage during the solar flare, the broadcast satellites have burned up in the atmosphere, so there is nothing transmitting to your TV anyway.
Our cell phones won't work, the radio won't work, electrical transmission wires won't work, so by that evening you'll be sitting by candlelight in your dark, cold home wondering "just what the government is doing about this."
Unfortunately, the government won't be able to do anything. By the next morning, most of us will be throwing up blood as our internal organs dissolve. That massive dose of radiation we engorged yesterday will have killed the DNA in most, if not all, of our cells, so our bodies are dying off at a rapid pace. Cells that reproduce rapidly, like skin cells and the cells that line our stomachs and intestines, will be the first to go, so watch for your skin to start sloughing off like you have massive burns and you'll start leaking fluid. You'll also probably go blind, and your senses of smell and taste will disappear. Within another 24 hours, any organs that remain, like your kidneys and liver, have shut down both from an overload of work, and the fact that your body has no ability to absorb water. By 48 hours after the solar flare, you and every other living creature on Earth's surface, will be dead or nearly so.

The lucky ones, who happened to be deep underground or underwater during the event, will emerge to find the world a desolate place. All surface life is dead or dying, so food production will be difficult. It will also be hard to grow new food, as all seeds that were splashed with radiation are no longer viable. You cannot eat the dead, they are so strongly dosed with radiation that going near them will give you cancer. Your best bet is to eat fish, which were largely protected from the radiation by the water.
Of course, that's only a temporary solution, as the complete collapse of the planet's ecosystem will soon carry over into a massive dump of phosphorous and nitrogen into the world's oceans. Algae (assuming some survived the flare) will bloom like never before, de-oxygenating the world's oceans, killing all the fish.

The world really probably would never recover, or at least not for thousands of years. The massive burn up of ozone from the flare would open the world to being constantly splashed with cosmic radiation, which would consistently wipe out any DNA-based life forms that tried to leave the deep sea. Eventually, in thousands and thousands of years, the atmosphere might recover enough for earth to support life. Maybe.


_

Read More

Op-Ed by Congressman Ryan (updated)

One thing I noticed as I skimmed Ryan's budget/tax proposal was that it bordered on "hyperlogic," i.e. his suggestions sounded reasonable...but strangely too reasonable to be practical.
A good example of hyperlogic is this: the easiest way to cure AIDS would be to test everyone on earth and round up all the people who test positive and kill them. You'd eliminate the HIV virus from the human population forever. And it'd be cheaper than developing a cure. But it's not practical, nor humane. Nor legal.

Ryan's tax/budget proposal seems to follow the same route. It's incredibly simple, with cute tax brackets and an "opt out" option for people who don't like the standard taxation method. But it's really not practical, or realistic. I don't really think he intends it to be, however.
What he wants is to propose something that people say "yeah, that makes sense" because it does, but they don't analyze it enough to realize the impracticality of expecting decreased revenue to somehow magically increase revenue. Then the Republicans hope people will say "why don't the Democrats do what Ryan proposed? It makes sense..." and they have then undermined the Democrats larger, more realistic budget proposal.

If all goes well, the Republicans hope, in 4 years the economy won't be doing much better, and they can parade around the op-ed piece, saying "le sigh, if only you people had done it our way, things would be so much better..."

See Ezra Klein's comments here, I basically agree.
_

Read More

Oil as an economic thermostat

Okay, this and one more post about politics, then I promise to get back to science and engineering.

Back in October 2008, when the price of oil was falling faster than a bowling ball thrown from an airplane, various oil producing nations barked what their ideal price of a barrel of oil was, i.e. their "sustainable price." Venezuela and Iran led the charge with estimates around $100/barrel. The low-ball number came from Saudi Arabia, whose Oil Minister claimed $45-55/barrel was the lowest profitable number.

Basic economics states that all things being equal, consumers will buy the cheapest available product, and so the guy who is selling cheapest sets the market price for the product. So it makes sense that after the initial mega-dip to ~$30 oil, it has stabilized and now is oscillating between $45 and $55/barrel.

Although the ideal case would be that the U.S. economy would start growing, and grow as fast as possible, if I have learned anything in the last year is that unabated, explosive growth is usually fake, or at least unsustainable. Slow, steady growth, like a Burr oak tree, seems to be the best way to produce the longest, strongest economic growth period possible.

What I am suggesting is that we use the price of oil as a thermostat for U.S. economic growth. If the price of oil escapes two standard deviations above $55, then we need to increase interest rates and take other actions to slow U.S. economic growth. If the price of oil drops two standard deviations below $45, then we need to decrease the nominal interest rate and provide economic incentives to push the economy forward. This price, $55, could gradually increase at the rate of dollar inflation, in order to keep things on track.


_

Read More

Tax Protests, Cont'd (2)

Here, you can find a map of upcoming tax protests around the country. Visit one, they're fun!


_

Read More

Hush, don't tell anyone...

Bailout working; banks are paying back their TARP bailout money, with interest.


_

Read More

The TAE Tax Plan

I heard the Republicans came out with their budget plan, including radical changes to income tax.

The TAE income tax plan:
For the first $100,000 of adjusted gross income, the citizen pays 10% Federal income tax.
For dollars $100,001-350,000, the citizen pays 25% tax.
For dollars $350,000-1 million, the citizen pays 35% tax.
For the dollars $1 million - infinity, the citizen pays 75% Federal income tax.

If you make less than $15,000 a year, you must pay the full 10%, because you drive on highways and visit parks just like the rest of us.

If you make $750,000 and don't like paying 75% tax on $400,000 of it and 25% tax on $250,000 of it, you can deposit as much as you want to reduce your income to your preferred level into 25-year government EE notes, or some similar long-term note, and not claim it as gross income on your 1040. If you want to withdraw that money before the 25 or 30 year note has maturated, then you must claim that money at that time on your 1040 as part of your gross income. If you let the money maturate for the full term of the government note, then you do not have to claim the money in your adjusted gross income.

Under my plan, everyone wins. People are not limited in their income potential by cruel taxation...they just have to responsibly save it or pay the higher tax rate. The rich don't get to complain about free loaders at the bottom of the income pool because they too are obligated to pay taxes...but at a lower rate than the current lowest rate for tax-qualified individuals.
The government wins because it keeps its fiscal strength through strong tax measures...plus gains the bonus of incentivizing investment in government bonds, increasing government's capital and liquidity.

Like all my plans, this one seems pretty fool-proof...


_

Read More