Let’s do it for the children. Better yet, let’s eliminate it.
P. J. O’Rourke At XCOR
Click on it. You know you want to.
And yes, before anyone complains, there are many inaccuracies. It’s entertaining nonetheless.
Chaos Manor
I’m there as I type this. Stopped by to give Jerry a book.
Margaritaville
Abstinence From Alcohol
That proof that it shortens life is irrefutable.
Well, guess I won’t die of that.
Outer Space Is Trying To Kill You
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but this looks like an interesting master’s thesis.
Stick Shifts
If and when we ever sell our (silver) 2000 BMW, I suspect we’ll be happy that it’s got a clutch in it.
Which is another peeve. Almost every car now (including our new RAV-4) comes with a “manual” option for the transmission, but there’s no shift pattern. It’s like a motorcycle — you have to go through the gears sequentially. And the lack of clutch really defeats most of the purpose.
One other related gripe:
Since dealers are ninety-nine percent of the customer base at an auction, dealer preferences dictate what sells for good money. Fast-turning automobiles in high demand sell for good money, period point blank. No dealer wants to take a risk on an odd color or an unusual equipment group (think: Sebring convertibles with the expensive folding hardtop, stripped-out Explorer XL trims from the Nineties, loaded short-wheelbase S-Classes) or manual transmissions. They’d rather buy what sells easily and go home. Therefore, auction prices reflect dealer desires, not customer desires.
This disconnect between dealer and customer desires punishes the customer at every turn. It’s why Honda and Acura make you take a non-color with a stick-shift Accord or TSX: the dealers don’t want to stock a brown Accord V6 six-speed even if there’s a guy (YO!) willing to buy it. It’s why you see interesting combinations of colors and options in the order brochure but never at the dealers. It’s why the flotilla of individual options that marked the Detroit era of new cars has become a maze of packages and mandatory tie-ins, even when the car in question is manufactured in the same state as the selling dealers.
The dealers want the stuff that turns quickly. That means silver Camrys and red Ferraris and automatic convertible Corvettes and all-wheel-drive S-Classes. Your desires have nothing to do with it. They aren’t listening to you. They don’t care. While you’re busy displaying your autism spectrum disorder by lecturing the salesman about the actual cam lobe profile on a car you’re thinking about buying two jobs from now and for which you expect to pay invoice minus holdback, three families in used SUVs have come in and bought new SUVs and the store has grossed them front, back, used, and F&I. You mean nothing to a dealer. Period.
It drives me nuts that I can’t get a clutch in a car with horsepower, at least with the Japanese. For example, Honda won’t give you a manual transmission unless it’s mated to a four cylinder engine. If you want it on the six you’re out of luck. The only reason I can think of for them to do this is that they don’t want to have to have a beefy enough gearbox to handle the extra power, but I’m not sure that’s the reason.
The “97%” Nonsensus
As I noted on Twitter:
Anyone who continues to push "97%" nonsense is either pig ignorant or a lying demagogue. No other options. http://t.co/BVKTYuC3Tw
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) September 5, 2014
Judith Curry explains:
I think we need to declare the idea of a 97% consensus among climate scientists on the issue of climate change attribution to be dead. Verheggen’s 82-90% number is more defensible, but I’ve argued that this analysis needs to be refined.
Climate science needs to be evaluated by people outside the climate community, and this is one reason why I found Kahan’s analysis to be interesting of people who scored high on the science intelligence test. And why the perspectives of scientists and engineers from other fields are important.
As I’ve argued in my paper No consensus on consensus, a manufactured consensus serves no scientific purpose and can in fact torque the science in unfortunate ways.
And José Duarte is appropriately brutal:
The Problem With “Fierce Minimalism”
Thoughts on crises, and urgency:
One of the implicit assumptions of “fierce minimalism” is that action fuels the flames. Obama argued as much at an American Legion speech. He said, ”the answer is not to send in large scale military deployments that over stretch our military, and lead for us occupying countries for a long period of time and end up feeding extremism.” An alternative point of view using almost an identical metaphor was articulated by Franklin Roosevelt. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire.”
The difference in the two presidential fire examples is the element of urgency. Roosevelt was aware that the fireman’s enemy is time and one of the points of the hose story, which everyone in that era understood, was the importance of dousing the fire while it was still small. Obama, by contrast, lacks the dimension of time. His approach implicitly assumes he has the leisure to add an ounce here and an ounce there to achieve a nuanced outcome. Roosevelt understood that a crisis was urgent. In the current case, Obama is busy calibrating, thinking and golfing like he had all the time in the world.
What happens when a fierce minimalist meets a fierce fire?
Things can get out of control very quickly.
And then there’s this additional comment:
Any return to the Middle East will be as a salvage party re-entering the smoking hulk of a ship looking for survivors. And whoever reboards that derelict in the future had better be alert. In the glare of their flashlights they’ll glimpse strange, furtive forms.
“Was that a man I saw Captain?”, one boarder will ask. “It looked funny but I only saw it for an instant.”
“That’s because he was carrying a head.”
“Oh. What’s through this door Captain?”
“It used to be Lebanon. Ok men, form a stack. On my count …”
There is no way back to the status quo ante. The Iraq legacy, for good or ill, is gone. The Cold War victory of 1989 is gone. What Kissinger called “a brief moment in human history when one could speak of an incipient global world order” is gone. Maybe for the best.
Obama will be remembered as an extremely consequential president. He did “fundamentally change” the world but not in the way he can understand. I almost wish he did by design. But I have a feeling the verdict of history will be that he pushed the wrong buttons by accident, simply because they had bright colors and made beeping sounds.
Frighteningly true.
Another Close Approach
An asteroid will pass us on Sunday at about a tenth of the distance to the moon.
There are a lot of natural disasters we won’t be able to prevent (e.g., supervolcano explosions, or a nearby gamma-ray burst). But this is something that we could, if we were willing to devote more resources to it. And it wouldn’t take a lot more. In fact, it could be done for a lot less than we’re wasting on SLS/Orion.