Someone had too much time on his hands (you don’t need to understand French to appreciate this video).

It’s a classic movie, and Lileks reviews it, so you don’t have to watch it.

I’m a faithful Wolverine, but I think that the response from Lloyd Carr and the others to Jim Harbaugh’s accurate comments is ridiculous. Note that none of them actually deny the allegations (because they know they’re true). They’re just upset because he’s perceived as being “disloyal.” I think that Michigan does as well to uphold academic standards as any program with their kind of record, but the notion that they don’t coddle the athletes academically is ridiculous. It’s unfortunate that this perception carries over to the athletes that are true scholars (and Michigan has many of those as well–I attended engineering classes with some football stars during my time there), but sometimes life isn’t fair.

They would have been better off not responding at all, since he certainly didn’t intend it as a specific slam at his own school, so much as the system in general. He was merely using Michigan as an example with which he was intimately familiar. In fact, you could replace the word “Michigan” in his comments with almost any other program, except perhaps Stanford, but then, they don’t win nearly as many football games.

Just in case you somehow imagined that Elton John wasn’t an idiot, this should lay the matter to rest:

OK, I love my feline overlord (or in this case, overlady), but unless you’re Bill Gates, $11,000 is a bit much. I spent less than a tenth of that a few years ago, and it was more than I probably should have.

Discuss.

Starbucks is increasing their prices.

I don’t think that I’ve ever given them a dime of business. If I did, I was purchasing something for someone else. I don’t even drink coffee. As I’ve noted in the past, if I were the market, there would be no Starbucks (and the economies of several tropical countries would be devastated).

A lot of Freepers seem to agree. Even the coffee drinkers. I like this proposal:

We need a $10 federal excise tax on Starbucks

Starbucks is increasing their prices.

I don’t think that I’ve ever given them a dime of business. If I did, I was purchasing something for someone else. I don’t even drink coffee. As I’ve noted in the past, if I were the market, there would be no Starbucks (and the economies of several tropical countries would be devastated).

A lot of Freepers seem to agree. Even the coffee drinkers. I like this proposal:

We need a $10 federal excise tax on Starbucks

Starbucks is increasing their prices.

I don’t think that I’ve ever given them a dime of business. If I did, I was purchasing something for someone else. I don’t even drink coffee. As I’ve noted in the past, if I were the market, there would be no Starbucks (and the economies of several tropical countries would be devastated).

A lot of Freepers seem to agree. Even the coffee drinkers. I like this proposal:

We need a $10 federal excise tax on Starbucks

Top ten things to hate about Star Trek.

[Note: I originally wrote this back on March 7th, but in going through old posts, I noticed that I never published it. The movie has been out a sufficient amount of time now that there are no spoilers…]

OK, so we went and saw the Astronaut Farmer this past weekend (I should add, parenthetically, that it’s the second movie I’ve seen in a theatre since I moved down here, two and a half years ago.

Forget about “suspension of disbelief.” Think complete abandonment of disbelief. On rocketry, on combustion, on radio communications, on basic physics, on how the government works, on how people work, on…almost anything correlating to reality that you want to imagine.

But I’m not panning the movie. As long as you follow my advice, and empty your head of the notion that this is a movie about how a private citizen might actually get into space, it’s an enjoyable flick, and entertaining for the whole family (well, other than a couple naughty words).

Yes, I could spend the evening disquisiting on all the things they got wrong in the flick–the notion that one could launch from a barn without it being a smoldering crater afterward; the notion that a rocket could propel itself a few feet off the ground horizontally for miles, with gravity having no effect; the notion that a Mercury capsule could survive the end of that trip, after being launched off a cliff and roll amidst the desert scrub, intact with its occupant alive; the notion that the government would assemble a team from every conceivable (and several unconceivable) government entities in a high-school gym to determine whether or not he could fly; the notion that a man and his fifteen-year-old son could single (OK, dual) handedly assemble an Atlas-Mercury from antique spare parts scrounged from NASA junkyards and have it work, and not only work, but magically have it land where it took off (even though the original landed in the ocean, and not the desert southwest) after a power failure that was fixed (as all things are fixed in movies, by banging on the equipment with a closed fist). Forget all that.

With a little consulting from people who actually understand this stuff, it could have been made a little more realistic, but realism didn’t seen ti be the film makers’ goal–magic was. It’s a movie about dreams, and governments, and the intrinsic conflict between the two. Forget the physics and politics, and focus on the metaphor.

In fact, the movie hit very close to home for me, because I and my family have sacrificed a great deal for a similar dream for many years, with success still eluding us (though perhaps that situation is improving). But nowhere to the same extent as Charles Farmer, and I’d like to think that (despite his movie success) I understand a little more about how politics, business and even rockets work than he seemed to.

In a sense, the way that the development of space will eventually play out is somewhere in between the two cartoonish extremes depicted in the movie. It won’t be done by a big-govenment program, and it won’t be done by a determined man in his garage. It will be done by private entities that are already formed and forming, that will take the smart things that NASA has learned over the years (like range safety, and not launching your rocket next to the house), and try to shed a lot of the unproductive ones that are driven by pork-driven politics and institutional inertia. The minimal hope for from government, for both terrestrial and extraterrestrial endeavors, is to facilitate their dreams, rather than hinder them.