Weird

“You’ll Put Your Eye Out”

A failed attempt at the Darwin Award:

A 66-year-old man shot himself in both his legs Saturday afternoon while trying to loosen a stubborn lug nut with a 12-gauge shotgun.

The deputies described the man’s legs as “peppered” from his feet to his mid-abdomen with pellets, pieces of the wheel and other debris. Some injuries went as far up as his chin.

Surprisingly, no alcohol was involved. Wonder how he adjusts his distributor timing–with a Glock?

Anyway, I think he was just using the wrong tool. He should have used a slug instead of double-ought shot.

“He’s bound and determined to get that lug nut off,” Wilson said, who did not know how long the man had been trying to free the lug nut.

Apparently.

I suppose now the lawyers at the shotgun manufacturers are going to insist on warning labels on the stock: “Do not use as lug wrench.”

Technology and Society

Send In The Clones?

Looks like they’ve figured out how to clone primates.

There’s long been some sort of quasi-religious belief for some that there is something more fundamentally difficult about cloning humans that means it will never happen, or not for decades. (“OK, you can clone a mouse, but you can’t clone a larger animal. OK, you can clone a sheep, but not a monkey.”) Well, it seems to me that the cloning of humans is inevitable, and now not very far off.

Of course, unlike conservatives (and one of the many ways in which I’m not one, “neo” or otherwise, despite confusion on the part of some apparent simpletons who comment here), I don’t have any intrinsic problems with cloning. It’s just a technology, and one (like all technologies) that can be used for good or ill. I in particular have no problem with cloning that provides directed organ generation, such as a liver, and think that the notion that such a growth would be a human being in its own right, and entitled to personhood status, nonsensical.

I also don’t have any intrinsic problem with cloning people and raising them to adulthood (despite the “yuck factor” issue that many seem to have with it). It just seems to me that it’s taking gene selection (something that we’ve been doing with offspring, consciously or otherwise, since the beginning of the race) to a new level. I don’t think that so many are going to do it that we become a monoculture, and that there will remain plenty of genetic mixing, as long as we consider it necessary as humans.

In any event, I welcome the development, and if it causes problems, then we’ll deal with them as they arise, but I certainly don’t want opposition to it to prevent the beneficial effects. If I have to go to Thailand or South Korea to grow myself a new liver, I’ll certainly have no moral compunction restraining me from doing so.

[Update in the afternoon]

Here’s a Reuters story that’s kind of a mess.

I wish that we could come up with some other word for growing stem cells and organs from your own cells than “cloning” because it creates the kind of confusion expressed in both the UN resolution and in the article. It strikes me that this is mainly a “feel good” resolution, since it’s non-binding, and everyone realizes that there’s no enforcement mechanism even if there were. This technology is going to happen, regardless of debates in Turtle Bay.

And this sentence makes no sense to me at all:

The authors said laws should grant clones full human rights to protect from discrimination.

Otherwise, opponents of clones in an inheritance dispute, for instance, might say that a clone and the person from whom their cells were grown should only get a half share each.

Huh? What is the legal scenario here? Who was cloned here, and what is their purported relationship with the person from whose cells they were cloned? If a couple, after reading my blog, and despite my physical appearance (or vice versa) decided that they wanted to create and raise a clone of me, there would be no legal relationship between me and him (or her). I’d like to think that they would need my permission, but as far as I know, there’s no clear law against stealing a lock of my hair and doing so. That person would be a legal child of that couple, with nothing to do with me, unless some prior arrangement were made for it. We are completely separate legal persons. If I were to inherit something from someone, that clone would have no claim on the inheritance simply because (s)he shared my genome.

On the other hand, if I were to create and raise such a clone, it would be my legal child, and no more or less entitled to my inheritance from (say) my father than any other child of mine would be.

But granting (assuming that this is the line of thinking here) that a clone is somehow a second instantiation of the same person, with the same legal rights, it makes no sense to complain about both being entitled to only a “half share each” of an inheritance. How much more could it, or should they get? If there is a whole inheritance that must be split evenly (and thus “fairly”) between two inheritors, how could each get any more than half? Do these people want to defy the laws of mathematics, or did they go to the Leo Blum school of accounting, in which he sold several thousand percent of a Broadway musical? Did the Reuters reporter give this statement any thought at all when writing it?

Expect a lot more confused argumentation, and reporting, as these technologies get closer to fruition. I think that it also points up the fact that people who were raised reading a lot of science fiction are both more familiar, and more comfortable with these concepts.

History

Remember The Doughboys

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

Note that the number of WW I vets has dwindled down to a tiny few (my maternal grandfather was one, who died in the early sixties). Barring some miracle medical breakthroughs, in another decade they will all lie (at least metaphorically) in Flanders fields. Honor today the few who are still with us, and their compatriots who no longer are. And thank, silently or otherwise, those in harm’s way today overseas.

[Note: this is a repost from two years ago. I may update later if I have any further thoughts in context, but you might want to read this related post from yesterday, if you haven’t already. I’ll be keeping this post at the top of the blog all day.]

[Update a few minutes later]

Google (uncharacteristically) remembers. I don’t think they observed Memorial Day.

Glenn also has some additional related links.

[Update a few minutes later]

Even the BBC has figured out that things are going pretty well in Iraq. How long will it take the Gray Lady and the networks to figure it out?

[Evening update on Veteran’s Day]

I had a post a few days ago about overaged adolescents who want to “make a difference.” Well, here are people who want to make a difference, and really do:

All of us are volunteers. We’re in Iraq because we want to serve. We are well educated and physically fit and could have pursued a variety of other life options. But, to paraphrase Defense Secretary Robert Gates, we are driven by the romantic and optimistic ideal that we can improve the world. We are seeing real progress on the ground, and we are helping Iraq to change.

Idealism, however, does not diminish our longing for home or the pain of missing family. It does not dispel all fear and doubt, and it does not heal our wounded or fallen friends. So when we are feeling disheartened, we open the care packages and read the letters.

And I don’t see any whining about their pay or benefits.

Send them some more.

Media Criticism

More On The Media And War

Shannon Love has a useful comment in yesterday’s post (that I’ve slightly edited here for typos) about war reporting (and public perceptions):

I find it very odd that most lay people, like journalists, have no intuitive feel for the ebb and flow of war. I think this lack of intuitive feel arises because the vast majority of the population never study the history of warfare in any detail and therefore develop their intuitive understanding of “feel” of flow of war purely from its representation in popular fiction and media.

The common narrative structure of the common fictional war story bears little relation to the actual tempo and evolution of real wars. A literature professor of mine once observed that no author would have written a fictional WWII that unfolded in the same way as the actual conflict. The opening of the war with sweeping unexpected victories makes for a good story but the slow grinding down of the Fascist states by overwhelming force in the last two years of the conflict is emotionally unsatisfying. In a fictional WWII, Fascist victory would look all but certain until Americans created the atomic bomb in last great gasp of desperation and saved the day.

The other problem with fictional war is that people can experience it in its entirety from start to finish in a matter of days or weeks. I think this causes people to intuitively feel that real world wars run far to0 long and are thus failures.

In short, persistence and determination make for boring narratives. Wars won by time don’t make good stories. Most of the significant battles of the pre-industrial era were sieges won by the side with the most patience and the best logistical management. How many popular depictions of sieges have you ever seen in the fiction or even in histories of the era? If you have seen a siege depicted you see it at its dramatic end, not the months or years of siege itself.

Law enforcement often complains that the time frames depicted on crime shows, in which cops solve murders in a matter of days, severally distorts the expectations of crime victims and even juries when they evaluate how competently the justice system acts.

I think the same effect cripples the electorate’s popular understanding of how we fight real wars.

This no doubt a factor, though the fact that very few of today’s journalists have any military experience or training is a problem as well.

Space

Learning The Wrong Lessons

Jon Goff has a must-read post on what we know and don’t know about reusable launchers, based on some insightful commentary by Jorge Frank.

The real mistake of the space shuttle was not that of attempting a reusable vehicle, nor a winged vehicle, nor a parallel-staged vehicle. The real mistake is that we attempted to build an “operational” vehicle before we had any real idea of what “operability” means in a space vehicle. The alternative – the real “road not taken” – would have been to build small experimental vehicles, starting from suborbital and working our way up, that explore all the different “corners” of the design trade space resulting from this multi-variable problem, and learning, one painful step at a time, what works and what doesn’t. Since these experimental vehicles would neither have carried payloads nor flown operational missions, there would be no attachment to them; they would have flown for a few years each and then retired and replaced with the next X-vehicle, just as happened with all the previous X-vehicles up to and including the X-15.

That approach may or may not have resulted in a truly economical launch vehicle by 2007, but it would surely by now have given us a better picture of what works and what doesn’t than the road we chose. By attempting an “operational” reusable vehicle that by definition would have to replace all the existing “operational” expendable vehicles, we locked ourselves into a path that was difficult to reverse and was expensive enough that we could not afford to replace it in parallel with flying it, necessitating another long and painful gap in our experience base.

And because that one vehicle represents the whole of our operational experience for the last generation, its failure has led many to overgeneralize. The space shuttle is a (partially) reusable, winged vehicle with parallel staging using a cryogenic propellant tank. And it failed to meet its cost, schedule, and reliability goals. Therefore, the reasoning goes, all reusable vehicles are bad, all winged vehicles are bad, all parallel-staged vehicles are bad, all cryogenically fueled vehicles are bad. This is nonsense. Were the emotionally charged names to be replaced with faceless variable names, any competent mathematics professor would reject this logic as faulty, and rightly so.

The latter is a point that I make often in response to the clueless and logic-challenged who think that Shuttle (or X-33) teach us that reusable vehicles aren’t possible.

Jorge’s comments are also a useful insight into what a kludgy compromise the Shuttle design was, and how many of the design choices were driven by other design choices, which were in turn driven by unrealistic requirements, both in terms of performance, and development budget.

As Clark Lindsey points out, we are going to be learning a lot of lessons from the suborbital business and rocket racing that will be directly applicable to orbital vehicles down the road. It’s a tragedy that it’s taken us so long to start this long process. But as long as the process might seem, at least we’re now going in the right direction (that is, to try a lot of different directions, and finally find out what works, and what doesn’t).

Media Criticism

Completely Missing The Point

The idiotic media explanations for the poor box-office performance of the anti-American films on the Iraq war are cluelessly hilarious. But the many commenters are happy to explain it to them.

It would be quite gratifying to see a pro-American Iraq war movie made, and have it clean up at the box office. I’d pop some popcorn to see into what kinds of logical pretzels the media types would contort themselves in a pathetic attempt to explain it.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!