Sometimes I go with a less prominent or popular method of doing things. I like doing things my way and most commercial products tend to over simplify. For instance, when I moved to Austin back in 1997, I decided to quit my mother.com ISP from California because phone modems were still the norm and the long distance modem charge back to Sacramento would have been prohibitively expensive. I looked for a local ISP and found realtime.net. I liked them because they were one of the few out there that let me play in the UNIX shell and do TELNET. I was able to check my personal email from work or from any computer capable of accessing the internet long before browser based email was available. I was also able to do other UNIX tricks.
Realtime has been bought and sold and there have been some very minor challenges as the server I was hosted on aged and the new company made some changes in migrating me to a new server, but over all I have been very pleased with my ISP. I don't touch any UNIX stuff anymore, but I still like my small ISP. It had the nice feature of not being noticed for a long time by DoD network nannies and I was able to check my email from military computers while overseas when anyone using hotmail or AOL was SOL.
So sometimes backing the dark horse works out well.
But sometimes it doesn't. Years ago when my blog started getting bigger and I learned that they made a name for what I was doing on my website (blogging) I found iBlog. It was designed for a mac and at the time it was state of the art. I could use my own ISP to host the blog, giving me complete control over what I was doing. It also had some java scripts and other theme scripts that I was able to massively customize to my own liking. I enjoyed the scripting challenges and iBlog served me quite well.
Until they created version 2, that is. Right before completing version 2, it appears the company has either folded or just stopped doing anything. Version 2 had a lot of promise and is still better than version 1, and the migration to version 2 was exceedingly painful. But I kept at it and finally figured it out.
Now, I have a new problem. I have a new computer. I want to transfer my blog files to the new computer, but there seems to be something keeping the new computer from seeing the files. Maybe I can figure it out eventually but so far I don't even see a possibility of figuring it out. I can either migrate to a new piece of software or just run the blog from my old computer.
Either way, I'm quite discouraged. It took a lot of work to customize my blog to look the way I like it. It could stand for some improvements, but generally I'm pleased. I am not looking forward to a painful migration to another software solution. Most seem to recommend WordPress, though I don't know anything about it. In any event, I'm looking at a massive investment in time to switch. Perhaps just keeping running off of the old computer will be the best solution.
So, sometimes going with the off beat answer is not so good. It looks like I've backed a loser with iBlog. What a pity. It had a lot of promise.
A few people have commented on the Oscars as having been rewarding to almost right-wing political view points this year, noting that "The Hurt Locker" is a war movie and "Blind Side" is a movie about a southern Christian family.
I'm not sure I agree and I'm not sure that this means much at all. First of all, the makers of "The Hurt Locker" regard their own film as anti Iraq War, which hardly makes it a candidate for a right wing political view point. Also, I don't think it's entirely uplifting to portray people in the military as being effective or efficient only if they are off their rocker. I confess I haven't see "The Hurt Locker" but the reviews give me that impression. I don't think there has been many good war movies made since the 1940's. You don't see many that give a good impression of men at arms. They're usually portrayed as idiots or as craven cowards. This isn't much new. "The Red Badge of Courage" pretty much has the same theme of the clueless soldier who at first is considered heroic but only because he doesn't yet understand what he's doing, and upon gaining that understanding tries to shirk his duties. Or just think of Kurt Vonnegut and "Slaughterhouse-Five" where the brave men in the unit are derided as mindless automatons and the insipid coward is the hero. "The Hurt Locker may not be as blatant as these, but the EOD technician as a dysfunctional man at home who can only exist in the most dangerous conditions - and dragging his men into foolhardy risks - is along the same lines.
As for "Blind Side," I watched that one with my wife and enjoyed it. I've always had a crush on Sandra Bullock and hoped to run into her while she lived here in Austin, and I think she did a good job in a decent movie. I'm very happy for her.
But let's not kid ourselves. "Blind Side" is a movie that should have been an after school special, not an Oscar nominated or Oscar winning movie. The success of "Blind Side" says less about the rise of Southern Christian values (did they ever go away?) and more about how bad movies have become in general. In the world of movies there have always been good years and not so good years, but never has the dearth of decent movies been so pronounced.
The alternative to "The Hurt Locker" was "Avatar." If I'm not impressed by "The Hurt Locker," at least I'm glad that "Avatar" didn't win. Sure, it was a pretty movie, but it was devoid of any substance of merit. It was one big, unoriginal cliche. And it was neither a cartoon, nor real acting. Movies should not be rewarded just for having big production costs. It seems that the least expensive part of a movie and the part that can be done with the least technology, is the writing of the script. I get very discouraged at seeing so much money lavished on special effects, yet the acting and the script are no better than I could have written while in high school.
I think that the conclusion that this year shows the rise of non-liberal/progressive values in movie making is incorrect. This is not a sign of the rise of conservative ideas, because the ideas were neither conservative nor very good. This is a sign of the end of the power and glamor of Hollywood. Their lack of ideas and their vacant ideology has sucked the life and imagination from the art. In fact it is no longer an art form and resembles more a factory or industrial process than it does an art form. At least in the 1930's and 1940's when studios were little more than movie factories, the bad movies weren't so expensive and lifeless. Now all we have left are B-movies, and they are incredibly expensive.
I have two favorite birthdays that I remember. The rest are all a blur. One was when I was in my mid thirties and a bunch of guys I hung around with at work, Jamie, Jason, Randall, and others, all came over to my place, completely unannounced, and took me tubing down in San Marcos. It was a nice surprise and I still don't know how they knew it was my birthday.
But to this day, my most memorable birthday was in August of 1975. My dad had been transferred by the navy to Keflavik, Iceland. He had been living there the past couple months alone while waiting for housing to become available for us. We arrived just a few days before my birthday.
I remember it for two reasons. First, I was so relieved to not see molten lava flowing down the streets. I had read too many National Geographic articles and news stories about the volcano eruptions in the early seventies. I fully expected that we would die a horrible death shortly after arriving and until that happened we would be running from the lava flows every moment.
When we arrived and I saw that the skies were clear and sunny, I couldn't have been happier. That the buildings looked older than a few weeks was quite reassuring.
We arrived a few days before my birthday, so my parents had too many things to take care of to be too concerned about my birthday. When the day came, I was still pretty out of sorts from adjusting to the time change, the continuous daylight, and the alien surroundings.
Usually on birthdays in my family, we had a nice party, cake, ice cream, and each sibling was expected to buy a present for the birthday kid. This time was different. My mom and dad took us all to the nearby hobby store extension of the base exchange. It was in walking distance and had all the typical hobby stuff of the day: tube testers for televisions (does anyone even know what these are anymore?), radios, arts and crafts, and most importantly to me, model ships and air planes.
Mom and Dad probably felt bad that the day wasn't set up to be more "special" but I still cherish that day more than just about any in my life. I picked out the nicest model in the store, a three foot long USS Enterprise CVN-65, and they didn't say no, they didn't tell me to find something else, and I got to pick it. My brothers and sister were so nice to me, too. They all stood by and patiently watched as I picked it out. They didn't ask for anything for themselves and they all said such nice things to me. Sibling rivalry was on hold, if only for the few minutes in the store. I was so happy, and being re-united with my dad made it special too.
Of course, I don't have that model anymore, but I have a grainy picture of it in my files somewhere.
Okay, it may seem silly to anybody else, but that's probably one of the happiest days of my life. I got a nice birthday present AND I wasn't running away from lava.
Feudalism is, "A political and economic system of Europe from the 9th to about the 15th century, based on the holding of all land in fief or fee and the resulting relation of lord to vassal and characterized by homage, legal and military service of tenants, and forfeiture," according to Answers.com.
What part of this definition isn't becoming more of a reality today?
With the healthcare reforms being shoved down our throats now, we will have completed the transition to a modern feudalism.
Medical insurance must be had by every person according to just about any politician, they only quibble on who pays for it. But most of the methods proposed force your employer to pay for it. Anyone getting a non-employer provided insurance will pay exorbitant taxes. The days of being self-employed are ending, except for a few rich people.
Now everyone will be employed by someone else.
Isn't it strange that the party that traditionally is against "big business" is destroying the ability of individuals to work for themselves? Tax laws, regulations, and social security laws have long made it hard to do, now it will be virtually impossible.
For most of human history, if a person needed to earn money, he or she could just do work for people and get paid for it. My grandmother cleaned houses her entire life. She sought clients and kept them happy by keeping their homes clean. It was a hard life but she raised a very happy family as a widow for decades. I know people who mow grass for a living and start their own companies doing that. How many jobs out there are still available without licenses? You can't cut hair without a license. You can't clean houses. You can't even babysit -- not even for your next door neighbor in Michigan.
Homes are owned by people, but almost always with a mortgage. This means that the idea that an individual owns his home is largely a fiction. Banks own most homes. Who owns the banks? The government? Feudalism is when the government owns the land.
Student loans, mortgages, and professional licenses (in a society where even babysitting your next door neighbor's kids requires a license in many jurisdictions) are all available to the government to exact fealty and homage to the political class.
So few Americans today work for themselves that it's almost quaint to suggest that people should be free to choose their own medical insurance. Almost everyone gets their insurance from their feudal lord, the corporation that is allowed to exist and operate only through the good blessings of the politicians.
We no longer really understand what freedom is in this country. It's a dead idea. We think freedom means being able to listen to rock and roll music. We think freedom means being able to choose which of 700 government controlled television channels we want to watch. We think freedom means being able to get free medical care. We have no idea what freedom is.
Whether the economy recovers soon or not is of little direct concern to me. That is such a petty issue compared to the horror of seeing the increasingly government controlled life that my daughter will live through. If I can't pay for private schools, then she will be allowed only speech approved by government schools, she will be subject to searches without warrants in those schools, and her life will be spent in fealty to the government through the tentacles of student loans, mortgages, and medical insurance.
We used to have an intellectual class that understood that communism was bad, not simply because Joe Stalin, Mao, Castro, and the others were murderers, but because people have a right to be free. Even the most benevolent tyranny is evil. A cage, even a gilded cage, is anathema to the spirit of man.
I bought a telescope a few years ago because I've always wanted to be able to see the exciting things happening in space when they occur. But every time something has happened that would be visible through a telescope, Austin has been socked in by clouds.
Today, we're bombing the moon and we're having a terrible thunderstorm. You couldn't see the moon with the best telescope known to man. Drat.
I mean, what are the odds? We go months on end without any clouds at all and on the rare day that matters it's pouring rain.
P.S. What a complete dud of a show that was. I wish I stayed in bed.
Scientists appear to have cured red-green color blindness in squirrel monkeys by injecting a virus into their eyes. The otherwise benign virus creates L-opsin which stimulates the retinas to manufactures the cones that perceive red and green.
It's absolutely fascinating. It appears that adult monkeys are not prevented from properly using these new cones because their brain pathways are already wired. Instead, the adult monkeys now appear to see the new colors properly.
This is fascinating. As one who suffers from a fairly mild form of red-green color deficiency, I'd love to know what I'm missing, and since I appear to have some, but not many, of the correct cones in my retina, my brain should surely be able to use them.
There are even more fascinating uses of this gene therapy, many are beyond my imagination. But what comes immediately to mind are that some women have the ability to perceive more than the normal colors. Why shouldn't everyone want such an ability?
The scientists in the article even hypothesize that this type of therapy might enhance night vision as well. I'm sure the military would love that.
This opens the door to other fascinating possibilities beyond vision. We already know that frogs can be made transparent. Maybe there will be other gene therapies that can be exploited to cure any number of diseases or increase muscles for the sick or even the healthy.
Science fiction often shows the future dominated by beings so intelligent that they no longer need or have robust physiques. I think gene therapy will make the opposite the case. In the future we will all be tall and beautiful, not to mention intelligent, whether we are born that way or not. We needn't wait for evolution to do this, we can take care of it ourselves. I find this hopeful and wish the best to my great grandchildren.
Added: I just learned that this philosophy is known as "transhumanism" or H+. I'm surprised I'd never much noticed the term before.
It's getting easier and easier to imagine how robots may one day replace us after seeing this laboratory model of a high speed robot hand. It's a lot of specialized programming now, but soon the "dribbling" or "pen spinning" ability will be a standard programming routine in every robot's library, much as every electronic device has a clock and a calculator now.
Or why I'm in law school instead of getting an MBA.
It's because I don't have a lot of respect for the MBA degree, per se. There are plenty of smart people with an MBA, to be sure, but they would have been smart with or without that degree. Mostly what an MBA does is create an artificial barrier to promotion and promote the success of people with more self-interest than is good for a company.
When I worked at Apple, the best job I ever had or will have, a truly stupid decision caused a factory to shut down a year after opening. Apple was having plenty of other problems, Gil Amelio was the CEO and did a terrible job of leading. (hmm a quick look at wikipedia shows he works on the board for Vanguard, which I just noted in my last rant lost me 37% of my 401k last year. Coincidence? Probably not.) I could go on all day about the things Gil and Apple did wrong as a company. But here's what I'll point out from a manufacturing standpoint. Production quotas were to be met exactly: Don't make one computer more or one computer less. If you miss that target by one, it was the same as missing it by a thousand. Of course, this meant that at the end of every month and quarter, we built a couple dozen extra computers and hid them. In computer manufacturing, about 10% can be expected to fail test the first time, so we had to build this secret buffer to make our goals. Stupid. Then, the goals were set by someone somewhere without any rational reason. In October of 1995 we cranked up the factory and built record numbers of computers against all expectations. A month later they realized that no one was buying those computers. To avoid flooding the market, they ended up destroying the computers instead of selling them for less or donating them somewhere.
But those were all mistakes controlled outside of our factory. The mistake I'm more interested in now is the one made when they opened building D in Sacramento. Building D was where they decided to make their own circuit boards on site. It was scheduled to open up shortly after my arrival and was in fact my biggest interest in working at Apple. I was very interested in moving eventually over to the board factory and break into that high potential field. Gary Souza was to be the manager for that place, and he was the man that hired me. I like Gary a lot. But Gary decided to take his sabbatical shortly before start up. At that time Apple granted a six week sabbatical to all employees every six years or so, and if you didn't take it, you lost it forever. While Gary was out, the quality manager, the villian in this tale (but otherwise a very likeable guy) ingratiated himself to someone and snagged Gary's new job.
Putting a quality manager in charge of operations is a really dumb idea. It's like putting putting a safety manager in charge of a battlefield. The new factory got its ISO 9000 certification in record time. I'm sure everyone was very proud of that. But they never made many boards. Someone calculated that they needed to have, I think, three or four production lines to break even on costs. So, naturally they decided to only install 2 lines initially. Sure enough, around the same time that the computer factory next door in building B was destroying excess product (see above), it was very easy for Apple to decide that the board factory wasn't making money and should be closed down.
So, why do businesses fail? Usually it's because someone makes really stupid decisions that turn out to be fatal. I never got to work in that board factory because I was on Gary's team and because the board factory, with its vaunted ISO stamp, shut down exactly a year after starting up. Besides, everytime I walked over to visit, no one was working. If I asked a question about how it worked, they would turn it on, workers would drift over and they would start working again, but mostly out of boredom.
Then I moved to Dell. Dell hasn't failed as spectacularly, but they have hired a layer of managers that all have MBA/Engineering degrees from either MIT or Michigan. The management cliques created were quite powerful and competitive – and cared less for the company than they did for their own displays of brilliance. I had just moved from Dimension to Work Stations while the Optiplex engineers started to expand their staff significantly. The Optiplex leaders decided that they needed a new factory. For some reason, I was asked to attend their engineering planning meeting. Maybe I was supposed to be a spy, but if so, that was lost on me at the time. The Optiplex engineers were justifying a new factory by showing that the new factory could build more of the new computers per labor hour than the old factory could build the old computers for the same labor hours. I pointed out the very obvious fact that both still used two people to build a computer from start to finish, and the only reason the numbers were better is that the newly designed computer was used in the new factory and the old design in the old factory. If the new product were built in the old factory, they'd get the same numbers as the new factory. I was told I was to be just an observer and not invited back. Since that first day of opening up that factory, they have never been able to meet the production capacity that was promised in the beginning, even though millions were spent every year to upgrade it. It took several years, but they finally gave up and shut it down.
After leaving Dell, I went to work for a very small, but successful company in San Marcos, Marshall Gas Controls. They had garnered about 80% to 90% of the US market in propane grill regulators. They had invested heavily in an entirely automated robotic factory to make their product which they intentionally designed to not be easily built by hand, to discourage copy cat manufacturers that had plagued it in the past. I was hired to help them realize the full potential of their factory, they couldn't seem to consistently get above about 50-60% capacity, and often much less than that. By the time I left, the factory was starting to regularly attain 90% capacity. Most of this was due to my colleague, Reese, who was brilliant at measuring and controlling incoming component quality but his work was possible only from the data collection systems that I helped improve and make usable. The factory was really beginning to hum. But then a snag occurred. One of the machines kept jamming and our experience told us that a component was out of spec. Sure enough, the seat disks, perhaps the most important part of a regulator, and in our case too small to be readily seen well by eye, were misshapen. Reese inspected and under the microscope the flaws were obvious.
And now comes the part of this tale that causes me to include this story. My boss, Mark, the cowardly, hypocritical, bible thumping, holier than thou, bigoted smart aleck, made the decision to build the product anyway because he theorized that the testing equipment should stop any bad regulators from getting shipped. Even though we knew of the problem, even though we had enough clout with our suppliers to get a new batch within a day or two, he decided to not tell anyone above him and just send our customers junk. Dangerous, flamethrowing junk. How would you like to be barbecuing some chicken and suddenly get fire balls coming out of your propane regulator?
And that's still not the worst of it. When the customer complained, Mark and his boss tried to hide what happened to the owners of the company. They blamed everything under the sun. They tried to blame me. In fact, another engineer warned me that they would. (I had never worked with such complete red necks before, and the social division in the factory between hispanic engineers and white engineers was pretty dramatic. This was one of the very competent hispanic engineers offering me this pointer, he saved my butt. For a short time anyway.) I redoubled my efforts and was able to prove exactly what happened that caused the problems in testing, problems that I was able to prove existed before I was ever hired and told was perfect. In fact Mark was very clear he didn't want me wasting time on it when he hired me.
But none of that mattered. The biggest customer, Charbroil, dropped our product. The company shut down and moved its operations to Mexico where they made their old style regulator by hand again. I and almost everyone else was let go, including poor Don, one of the three readers of this blog, who had only been with the company for a month after relocating his family from out of town.
In all these cases, these factories were shut down, not because the product was inherently bad, not because business had soured, but because people who were supposed to be smart, people paid to make sound decisions, made dumb ones either through misfeasance or malfeasance. In most cases those people are still employed as managers. No one puts on their resume that they worked at Apple as a director and it was their stupid decision that shut down a potentially profitable factory.
Even Gil Amelio, a man who failed spectacularly as Apple's CEO, is still earning millions of dollars to this day. Once someone is in the club of making that kind of money, they never really leave it. But the disaster left in their wake causes devastation to the lives of people not in that club. These are the people who caused the financial melt down with subprime mortgages. These are the people who thought merging a failing Hewlett Packard with a failing Compaq would make, not one big failing company, but somehow a miraculous and successful company.
I want no part of that anymore. I do not wish to rely on someone else's control of a business. I've seen what the so called smart MBA people do, and I fail to be impressed. I will run my own business soon, and I will fail or succeed based on my own talents and abilities.
I just got the annual report from the single remaining 401K fund I've still got a piece of. The important quote to remember is "One rocky decade does not diminish the fund's long-term outlook."
Yeah. The fund has existed since 1990 and it's only had one bad decade. Sheesh.
I wonder if I could have said something like that to my prior bosses. It's only been one bad decade, boss. My long term outlook is still pretty good.
I'd have taken my money out of it a decade ago were it not for the huge government imposed penalties. This was my last, most reputable 401K/IRA and it's now worth less than when I first got it in the mid 90's. If I could have put this money in a mattress, I'd be better off now.
This is why I decided long ago to never again invest in a 401k/IRA. If I were to need my own money, I would have to pay tax on withdrawing it from the 401k, and then pay a 10% penalty, and on my IRA accounts I already paid taxes on the money before putting it in the IRA. Furthermore, I don't trust the government to not take this account from me. There has been talk in congress of changing the rules on 401k plans. I suspect this talk won't go anywhere yet, but this is the type of talk that eventually gets taken seriously.
I no longer believe any claims about investing. The only investments worth having involve the bank or the mattress. One rocky decade. Yeah, right.
A lot of people think that it's impossible to keep a secret, that the more people that know of something, the less possible it is to keep secret.
But that's not always true. Throughout history, entire nations have kept secrets. Yesterday I learned, via Cronaca, that an Elizabethan warship has recently been discovered and analyzed. (The video at this link is nice.) They recovered its guns and learned that the English were ahead of their time using standardized guns and cannonballs. All the other navies of the day were using cannon built one off, with nonstandard ammo.
How could we not know this? Clearly, standardized weapons were critical for England's military success against the Spanish Armada. Keeping that a secret gave them quite an edge against their enemies. With standard guns, the English could have consistent training, gun tables, etc. Other navies had to have more specialized training on each gun. The Brits took a huge part of the art out and made it more scientific.
And no one else knew, until now.
"It is known that during Elizabeth's reign, English sailors and gunners became greatly feared. For example, at the beginning of Henry VIII's reign, the English fleet was forced to retreat from heavily armed French galleys.
"By the time of Elizabeth, even Phillip of Spain was warning of the deadly English artillery. But no-one has ever been able to clearly show why this was."
The Byzantine Empire used a weapon called "Greek Fire." No one knows what it is, the leading theory is that it was a naphtha-like flame thrower. Supposedly, the Byzantines killed those that knew how to make it, to prevent the secret from getting out.
The ancient Greeks had their entire religion kept a mystery. Only those initiated into the higher levels of priesthood were taught the Eleusian mysteries. Those in the know died off after thousands of years of dominating Mediterranean culture.
Clearly, secrets are capable of being kept for quite a long time. It makes you wonder what have been kept, and are still being kept, that we don't know about.
Although the look isn't especially different, the mechanics behind the blog have been substantially revamped since late last year. I started using the latest version of iBlog late last year. Because I have highly customized the interface instead of using a standard interface, the upgrade was quite painful. The most recent improvements were quite painful to install, too.
This website began around 1997, long before blogs existed. As it gradually resembled a blog and I learned that what I was doing was blogging, I've been adding standard blog features.
I have now added categories to my rants. I've put an icon that you now see at the beginning of each rant to vaguely symbolize the category. It's a gimmick, I guess, but it serves me for now. The categories can be found in the archives link at the bottom of the main page. If you click on a category, you'll see all the rants that reasonably fit therein. Any rant that doesn't fit in any other category is simply labeled as a rant. I suspect I'll find reason to add more categories in the future, but they'll be much easier to add now that the structure is in place. For now the categories are
Bad Law: Very opinionated comments on law.
Education: Criticisms of the government's involvement in institutionalized behavior modification.
Environmental Fascism: Reasoned observations on irrational use of fuzzy animals to effect political change.
Guns: Yeah, guns. Mostly politics about guns, but it could possibly include observations on the skills of shooting.
Iraq: Mostly my experience in Iraq, but also the part of the war on Islam as it applies exclusively to Iraq.
Journalism: Mockery of those that think that commenting on current events requires a special, protected caste.
Military: Miliatary topics not related to politics, the war on Islam, or Iraq.
Politics: Yeah, politics.
Rants: Anything not already in another category.
Religion: Commentary on irrational belief systems, excepting environmentalism.
War on Islam: Discussion of how to eradicate this inhuman belief system from our world.
Only the ten most recent rants will show on the main page now. To see others you'll have to click on the archives link at the bottom. Also, you no longer have to go to click to see the entire rant, the entire piece of drivel is shown on the main page and on every page where it is displayed. This should make it easier to read and I'm glad I'm finally getting rid of that unnecessary extra step for people to read the whole thing.
There are more changes I'd like to make, but I really can't justify taking time from my studies needed to put them in. There are also at least two bugs (titles are displayed twice on category pages, and the right margin tends to march to the right for each entry on the category and archive pages) but I'm not willing to spend another night working on it. I'm pretty sure I know how to fix the first one, but the tweaking requires a lengthy process of testing that is quite inconvenient and buggy. I have to manipulate the code which uses a lot of java scripts. Unfortunately, the scripts in place aren't well documented and don't seem to be internally consistent in different parts of the code. I'm not very proficient with javascript and there seem to be some iBlog peculiarities that I can't access. I know I can get it how I want it, but it will have to wait until after the semester is done.
I've relented on my decision to back out my blog. I have decided that I just had to contribute to the global conversation, and whatever the merits of my opinions, they are mine and worth it to me to publicize.
The site has been revamped. I expect to do more fine tuning shortly.
I see that several other bloggers have been announcing that they are at an anniversary for their blogs, five years for Ann Althouse, seven for the Vodka Pundit.
I've recently deleted more than 70% of my blog entries, but I started this stuff more than nine years ago, at least in November of 1999. That was before the word "blog" was even invented, I think.
Of course, my blog isn't as well known as these others, so my blog's age is a meaningless bragging point.
I got a spam email today telling me that my
credit score may have
changed.
Seriously folks. If you need
some bizarre third party group to make some kind of "score" to help someone
decide if you're a good credit risk, then you're trying to get too much credit.
People like you are the ones who contributed to the latest "emergency" used by
politicians to take more money and buy out the financial industry.
If you really are so extended that
someone has to ask what your "credit score" is, then you're already hopelessly
looking at the wrong thing to do. Go re-evaluate your life and learn to live
with less. I'm tired of losers screwing it up for the rest of us.
Okay, I've been bugged by a silly question for
some years now and I don't know the answer to
it.
If you read most any book about the
Pyramids of Giza and how they were built you'll get any number of theories of
how they dragged those blocks of granite to the top of the heap as it was being
built. There is any number of theories and there is evidence that there was a
ramp or causeway leading from a canal to the pyramids themselves. That's all
well and good. I don't have much problem imagining how they could manually drag
even the largest of blocks up a
ramp.
But what they never seem to
explain is how the heck did they get these massive stones on and off of a boat?
No one has explained it yet that I've seen. To me, this is a much more
difficult question to answer than simply dragging the stone along the ground.
On a boat you have to lift the stone over the gunwhale, lower it onto a boat
large enough to displace more water than the weight of these stones, and have
enough structure in the boat to support this concentrated weight.
I don't know what kind of boat the
Egyptians had four thousand years ago that could hold that much tonnage, but I
imagine that they had such a boat, for holding grain or wine jugs, etc. What I
don't understand is how they could move this stone onto the boat without
crushing it, swamping it, or toppling it over.
And even more crazy, once it was on
the boat, how did they get it back out
again?
I don't have any educated theories to offer, I'm
not one who can claim any expertise in the matter. I imagine that they might
have built the boat around the stone and then flooded the area around the boat
to float it. At the destination they could run aground and dismantle the boat
again.
But here's my question. If you
could get a stone onto a boat and float it with relative ease to any place with
water, why wouldn't you keep that stone in the boat as long as you could? Why
remove it from the boat when still a few miles from the pyramids? Or even a few
feet? I'd be running that canal right to the inch of where I needed
it.
In fact, if I could get it on a
boat and could move it anywhere there was water, I'd be sorely tempted to lift
the stone in its place using the boat. It can't be that hard to build a series
of locks to lift the stone all the way to the top of the pyramid. The locks
could even be moving. That is, imagine a ramp in place that rises to the
necessary level of construction: couldn't you have three locks always in place?
One for where the stone just left, one for where it is, and one for the next
level. Once it moves to the middle level they dismantle the lower lock and move
it above the third lock.
I would
think it's a lot easier to move an empty lock and pump water into it than it is
to drag a stone up a ramp so dangerously. If I were there and already knew how
to put a stone that large into a boat, that would surely be my method of lifting
it to where it needed to be. And if it's at the level needed, why not release
the water and lower the stone onto the exact position at the same time. I mean,
if it's already floating, why not use that in your favor to the
utmost?
But I still just can't
understand how they got the stones into the
boats.
Addendum 14 July, 2008: I found
an explanation
of how the stones were transported by boat. I still think it makes sense to use
locks to lift them to their final height.
Just a few miles from the world's most extreme
type of poverty is the Tamale stadium. Here's a few pictures of
it:
This
last picture appears to have been taken while it was under construction, but
it's a pretty accurate depiction of how it appears now. The construction fence
has been replaced by a more permanent fence. At least one gate was hanging by
only one hinge when I saw it, which affirmed that we were indeed still in Ghana.
Otherwise, it's a beautiful building.
I'm told the place is regularly filled to
capacity. Ghanaians love their football.
In Ghana, in the remote regions to the north the
ubiquitous trash along the sides of the road and everywhere else disappears. At
first I thought this was because these remote people were more tidy, but I
quickly realized that they were so poor that they didn't even have
trash.
They
may not have trash, but they do have cell phone towers. And malaria. And
worms. And witch doctors for dentists.
My battalion went to Ghana to train
with the Ghanaian army and to provide security for medical, dental, and
veterinary assistance to these poor people. Essentially, we gave these people
fish, while a few peace corps volunteers there taught them to fish, and their
chief controlled those who were allowed to
fish.
The
only other possessions these people had were the clothes on their backs and
scrawny chickens and pygmy goats. That's it. They live exactly how people
lived 100,000 years ago. Except for the cell phone towers.
They
were very friendly, and seemed happy. I suppose they were happy to be alive
since a huge percent of their children die from malaria or other diseases.
The
nearby city of Deboya has a population of about 30,000 I'm told, though I find
it hard to believe. These people had a water tower that looked new, and tv
antennas from every major home. And very cute children in the most deplorable
state of cleanliness.
Deboya
has a little bit of industry, making clothes in ways not changed for thousands
of years. Except not as
well.
The
poverty of this region is due to the tribal system that is empowered by the
constitution of Ghana. Tribal chiefs have absolute power over their domain.
They say who lives in which hut and farms which piece of land. They are the
system of justice and authority. They are sure to get cell phone towers to
their region because this is good for keeping them powerful. Providing
sanitation is not so high a priority. In fact the Overlord, yes that's his
official title, was more interested in us coming to his side of the river, not
to help the people there, but because he owns four horses and he wanted our
veterinarian to give them a check up. His sickly horses were the only horses I
saw in the country.
The Overlord was
quite impressed with himself. In a meeting with our battalion commander he
appointed him a chief for the nearby military camp, but was careful to include
that our battalion commander was to be subservient to himself. He gave the
lieutenant colonel --now Ghanaian chief -- a traditional smock and walking
stick. The rule is that any chief not carrying his stick would be fined. I
suggested that the battalion commander should name the Overlord his Officer in
Charge of Deboya, but that little return jab would be contrary to our diplomatic
role.
Back
at the new chief's domain of Deboya Camp, the Ghanaian army proved to be very
disciplined, well trained, generally well equipped and a lot of fun to work
with. Ghanaians are great people. Being a soldier is very prestigious in their
country. When one learned that we were reservists and not full time soldiers,
he was shocked. Learning that we had regular jobs he asked, then how will
others know you're a Marine. We explained that there was never any
doubt.
The Ghanaian soldiers sold us
beer every night and with the traditional African singing combined with British
influenced army songs, most nights became like a typical drum circle you'd find
at most any Greatful Dead reunion or Austin hippy
gathering.
About
an hour and a half away was a large city of Tamale (pronounced Tom'-ah-lay) and
I was shocked to see a huge state of the art Soccer stadium in the midst of
their typical squalor. This stadium was much nicer than the one in most
American's home towns, it was a world class arena. I asked my counter part, the
Ghanaian officer I worked with, how such a building came to be. His answer,
that is the reason why we Americans were there. The Chinese government had
built six such stadiums throughout the country for free. The Ghanaians were
afraid that their politicians would be corrupted by this Chinese largess. The
Ghanaians are rightly proud of being one of the few stable and relatively
prosperous countries in Africa. They have a military that stays out of politics
and a government highly influenced by being part of the British Commonwealth.
I think that perhaps the Chinese have
the right idea for helping the Ghanaians. Peace Corps assistance is fleeting
and tends to make the recipient subservient. Making soccer stadiums allows the
country a place to gather and have fun. The organization, markets, and
infrastructure to use the stadium will probably have more impact improving lives
than a few visits from doctors will and it puts Ghanaians on the same footing as
other nations instead of making them feel like
beggars.
I urge people who are tempted
to give money to those typical starving children charities to instead contribute
to a soccer stadium. Your 25 cents per day is wasted and won't stop the
children from dying of worms or malaria, but a soccer stadium gives them
something to aspire to, and focus on, and will do more in the long run than a
few bags of rice.
I enjoyed my visit to
Ghana, but I'd be lying if I told you I would like to visit there again.
Addendum: Nov 3, 2009, Videos removed for space on the server.
One of the annoying things about some political
issues is that both sides are wrong, but no one ever seems to notice because
they're too tied up in partisan finger pointing that bears little resemblance to
truth. That's why it's so satisfying to see an argument reduced to zero after a
predictable but not assured development
happens.
I'm talking about stem cells.
The theory is that stem cells, which may be exploited for their property of
being able to transform into any type of differentiated cell, would be the cure
for cancer and any number of diseases. Three cheers for stem cells! The only
problem is that stem cells were only available from embryos. Thus is the
genesis of the political argument.
Some say that it's murder to do
research involving stem cells, and wanted to stop all research. Others said
that we must grow embryos to create more stem cells. Those are the two extreme
sides. Most mainstream arguments divided on federal funding of stem cells,
except that each side misrepresented the arguments in order to make political
points.
What was most annoying is that even otherwise
rational people, such as the Instapundit, have bought into the distorted
arguments, allowing those against the federal funding to be portrayed as being
against science.
Then there were
those of us who supported science, yet don't support government funding of
science. I was sure that absent government funding, the scientific
breakthroughs would occur even faster than with the government funding. That's
because the government only funds while one is looking for the breakthrough.
Private funding is much more interested in exploiting breakthroughs. It's human
nature that bureaucracies and institutions that operate by lobbying for
government support will not be so focused on results as they are focused on
doing enough to get more funding. The difference is subtle but can be dramatic,
especially the longer it takes to find the
breakthrough.
To me, both the sides of
the political argument were obviously wrong. And events have proven me right.
Absent government funding, it now appears that scientists have found a way to
make stem cells from adult skin cells. No embryos needed. I'm sure much more
research is needed to make this useful, but the possibilities are proven and
this ends the stem cell debate.
Will we
learn from this happy result? Will we learn to keep politics out of science?
Will the earth stop rotating? Of course
not.
Science will continue to be
politicized more and more, in geometric proportion to the amount of funding
provided.
The fires in California have devastated thousands
of people's lives and damaged a lot of property and land. I feel very bad for
the people affected, even more than I felt bad for the people of New Orleans. I
wish them well, my sympathy to them all, especially to those who lost loved ones
to the flames. A horrible
situation.
The Iraqis feel terrible
too, but who let them donate
money to California?
Their
hearts are in the right place, but realistically, this is hurting them more than
it helps anyone in California.
These wonderful people, and Iraqis that aren't in
the murdering business can be wonderful people, collected $1000.00 to help the
people of California. In Iraq, a thousand dollars is a big deal. It's probably
a year's pay for most Iraqis, or at least a good chunk of a
year.
In California, you can't buy
anything for that money. A thousand dollars, for most Californians, is a few
days of pay. Most of the houses are in the range of a half million dollars.
The labor costs to distribute this donated money would probably exceed the
donation itself.
The people of
California do not need our help. It is the single most wealthy spot on this
Earth. The people all have, or should have fire insurance. The laws in
California have forbidden shake shingles for quite some time and there are
numerous other laws to mitigate fire risk and damage. These fires were much
worse than expected, but there was an awareness of fire danger and anyone who
did not buy insurance has no right to
pity.
That won't stop FEMA from
rewarding those who buy million dollar homes but don't pay for insurance. The
rest of us are required to subsidize their folly. So there is even less reason
for us to feel a personal obligation to contribute to their recovery.
The officers working with those Iraqis
were terribly irresponsible to encourage or abet these poor men giving their
money to such a terrible cause. It's not even very good propaganda because it's
not making it much in the news. It is little more than a futile gesture that
will make their lives harder, and their lives are already too hard. Most Iraqis
can't even dream of the luxury that the poorest in California live
in.
