Tami Griffith of the Army Simulation Tech and Training Center is describing the use of current technology for training. Shows a video of interfacing a Wii and balance board with Second Life. Apparently a lot of people are hacking the Wii for things like this. She says that whole-body training is much more effective and memorable than joysticks or cockpit simulators.
Cool.
Some encouraging thoughts.
They can vote with their feet:
We believe there are three unintended consequences from states raising tax rates on the rich. First, some rich residents sell their homes and leave the state; second, those who stay in the state report less taxable income on their tax returns; and third, some rich people choose not to locate in a high-tax state. Since many rich people also tend to be successful business owners, jobs leave with them or they never arrive in the first place. This is why high income-tax states have such a tough time creating net new jobs for low-income residents and college graduates.
One has to be particularly pig headed not to understand this.
[Thursday morning update]
Adios, New York:
Last week I spent 90 minutes doing a couple of simple things — registering to vote, changing my driver’s license, filling out a domicile certificate and signing a homestead certificate — in Florida. Combined with spending 184 days a year outside New York, these simple procedures will save me over $5 million in New York taxes annually.
By moving to Florida, I can spend that $5 million on worthy causes, like better hospitals, improving education or the Clinton Global Initiative. Or maybe I’ll continue to invest it in fighting the status quo in Albany. One thing’s certain: That money won’t continue to fund Albany’s bloated bureaucracy, corrupt politicians and regular special-interest handouts.
I thought it was stupidly amusing the other week when “Governor” Paterson expressed such glee that he was chasing Rush Limbaugh away with his policies. Well, there are a lot of other people who won’t be any more happy than Rush is to continue to fund these parasites.
[Bumped]
[Evening update]
A disgusting but apt metaphor from Mark Steyn:
As Miss McArdle notes, whether you bail out states “too big to fail” or let them go bankrupt, it will cause pain to taxpayers. But the pain of the latter is relatively short-term. Passing Sacramento’s buck to Washington will accelerate the centralizing pull in American politics and eventually eliminate any advantage to voting with your feet.
Not to be too gloomy, but the country feels like it’s seizing up. It’s as if California and New York have burst their bodices like two corpulent gin-soaked trollops and rolled over the fruited plain to rub bellies at the Mississippi. If you’re underneath, it’s not going to be fun.
I hope that a bailout of California and New York will have huge electoral blowback (including from many Californians, like the ones who voted down the continued state tax and spending on Tuesday, and New Yorkers).
And what happened to my space colonies?
Yes, it was never a mass movement, and even with the merger of NSI and L-5, I don’t think that NSS has ever had more than a hundred thousand members. I do think, though, that it is sufficiently appealing to a sufficient number of people that when we break out of the NASA paradigm, and the supply actually responds to demand, some people will live in space in the future.
[Evening update]
Clark Lindsey responds to Dwayne Day’s dyspeptic space colony post:
In the 1970s space had become a niche topic little noticed by the general public. Within that niche area one could search around and find a tiny sub-niche dealing with in-space orbital space colonies. Sure, there were the occasional articles and a handful of books about O’Neill space colonies and a small group of people had a high interest in them. However, you could say the same thing about a million other topics as well. Orbital space colonies never came close to being a topic that most people were aware of, much less considered in any thoughtful way.
If in 1980 you asked a randomly selected group of a thousand people what they thought about space, a thousand would say, probably in the first sentence, that space was wildly expensive. If you asked them if they had read an article about space colonies in the past decade, I doubt even fifty would say yes. And most of those fifty would say such colonies might be a great idea but are impractical while space travel is so wildly expensive.
Yes, as is the case of much of space policy, it’s all about information and perspective. (I’ve added “Media Criticism” to the categories for this post, and bumped it…)
Iain Murray says that there’s never been a better time to reform Air Traffic Control. Though, actually, doing it in the past would have been better. As he notes, though, the politics probably still won’t allow it.
Here’s a car reviewer who is less than impressed with the new Honda Hybrid:
Much has been written about the Insight, Honda’s new low-priced hybrid. We’ve been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you’re easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.
So far, though, you have not been told what it’s like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.
So here goes. It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.
It gets better.
The Age of Failed Dreams. By (who else?) Vernor Vinge.
Here’s another guest post, from “Douglas,” on the subject of carlessness.
Most of my oh-so-enlightened (all of them college drop outs like me) liberal-minded freaks of friends (no, they are freaks, social deviants) are in fact smart people, but they assume an intelligence that isn’t theirs based upon their defiance of social norms.
Most of them live in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago, and don’t own cars any more; they only update their driver’s licences so that they can defer portions of their taxes to Indiana rules rather than Illinois.
One of them, since he got rid of his car, hasn’t visited his mother once in almost ten years. Since then, he’s gotten married, had two kids, filed for bankruptcy, taken “loans” from his mother, who was there to visit her boy, but he has never found his way across the border for any reason other than pretending he’s an Indiana resident.
Same for some of the other friends, but to a lesser degree.
There is a selfishness to this “I don’t need to go anywhere I can’t walk” attitude. I lived in other countries, and was technically poor, but I still visited my mother, I still made my brother’s wedding, and if I was somewhere that there were roads that got me somewhere, I would get in my car and I would make it to important moments for my friends.
I drove from Chicago to Vegas for a one-night trip three times, so that I could be a part of my friends’ getting married. I got in my car and drove to Florida for the same reason, I made it to Kentucky twice for a cousin’s christening, and again for another cousin’s divorce. (the divorce one is a complicated story)
I drove from Chicago to Hammond, Louisiana four times, because I was the only one who could be counted on to help a friend move back to my area, in an escort, since my friend was so possessive of certain possessions, that he didn’t trust the mover.
It took four trips.
If I didn’t have a car, my friend in Louisiana would have been assed out, if I didn’t have a car, I wouldn’t have been able to be a part of those other very cherished (other than the divorce one, though there is a degree of satisfaction that I felt) events. If I hadn’t had a car.
If you don’t have a car, if you don’t have freedom of independent movement, you are a parasite, and must depend on people who DO have cars, or on people who are taxed to pay for inefficient buses and trains to get you where you need to go.
This “walking” society is a lie. They will walk a few blocks, they won’t walk the miles that the working class did at the turn of the century to get to where they needed to go, instead, they parasitically demand that they have a right to go from one place to another, and everyone else that is not them pay for it.
I have commenters who refuse to start their own blogs, so I’ll have to create my own guest-blog posts for them. Here’s Carl Pham:
I wouldn’t say I’m enthusiastic about sequestration, aside from the aesthetic pleasure I get from acres of active sequesterers, particular those in genus Sequoia, but it sure beats the hell out of (1) deindustrialization and refeudalization (I know who wants to be my feudal lord), or (2) flinging irrecoverable resources down the rabbit hole of “alternative energy” sources.
I mean, it amazes me that people think because it’s possible to formulate a sentence like we must search for alternative energy sources that they must exist, whereas a few moments informed thought would tell you this is a sentence like we must search for Atlantis or we must search for a new element with stable isotopes, and coming perilously close to we must search for a perpetual motion machine.
The way I see it, there are four forces. Gravity gives us waterfalls and windpower, tech known since the 8th century, thoroughly exploited. The strong force gives us fission and fusion, also well understood. Fission has been ruled out because we’re stupid. Fusion is tough because of that staggering activation barrier, the size of the match you need to light the fire. The weak force gives us radioactivity, but if you’re going to use that you might as well use fission, so that’s that.
What’s left? The EM force, which gives us solar energy and chemistry. Direct solar power is futile, because the power density at the Earth’s surface is too low, so you’ve got to have some collection and storage system, which inevitably brings us to chemistry, that being the way you store electromagnetic energy (barring the invention of stupendous capacitors).
Problem is, the Earth is a closed system, and it’s had 4 billion years to come to equilibrium. There aren’t many chemical reactions left that (1) have plentiful fuel lying around, but (2) magically enough, have failed to already run sometime over the past million millenia.
Except for one. That would be combustion. And the reason is simple, because we live in a giant photosynthesizing hothouse, a mad biosphere that soaks up gigartons of CO2, reduces it to carbohydrates for storage and transport, and then oxidizes it again for energy and movement. It’s a nice, neat, closed cycle, and has been running stably for millions of years. Humble logic suggests the obvious thing to do is tap into this cycle for our own needs, peel off 0.1% of the carbon for our own purposes.
Which we do — but only on the oxidation side. So logic suggests, once again, that we enlist our chlorophylled neighbors to help us out there by reducing the carbon we so merrily oxidize, balancing the books. And, amazingly enough, just as we’re aware of the problem, we discover the tools necessary: our ability to directly manipulate the genome, so that we can tailor plants and bugs to reduce CO2 just the way we want.
I mean, heck, if only combustion and the carbon cycle had just been discovered, it would be the coolest, most clever, greenest tech, and Obama would be wanting to pour billions into it. But, you know, since the tech is as old as pencils, we sit around thinking No, that can’t make sense. Make marks with a piece of charcoal encased in wood? They did that in the 16th century, back when people were stupid and uneducated. There MUST be a better way.
In many cases, it is. I’m glad I made it through without any student loans, though I was paid fairly well upon graduation as an engineer in the early eighties. But it’s really crazy to spend as much money as a degree costs when the degree has no marketable value.
I think that overrated higher education is the next government-financed bubble to pop.
[Update mid afternoon]
Derb has some more reader emails:
I made the same mistake myself: a BS in Geography is worth nothing on the job market. If I had it to do over again, I’d have taken shop classes in high school (assuming that they existed) and gotten a 2-year blue-collar technical degree. Other than engineering and business degrees, most college BSs and BAs are worthless.
and this:
Higher education is the biggest scam going. I don’t think that’s news to you (or Charles Murray). What’s really disheartening is that the business world plays along — demanding four-year degrees for positions that shouldn’t require them. It’s just a lazy way for them to make their “first cut.”
That is the problem. As Derb says, an aptitude test would do a better job, but it might not provide enough “diversity,” so the degree has become a poor surrogate. And it reminds me of NASA’s astronaut selection policy. It likes to select PhDs, or at least grad degrees, not because they are necessary for the job, but because they have so many more applicants than positions, it makes a handy filter.
But if I were a businessman, and I was just looking for a degree as evidence that the holder at least had the stick-to-it-iveness to get a degree, I’d be just as happy, and perhaps happier, with a technical associates degree than a bachelor’s in French Lit. Or even English.