At least until I get home and have some time to go in and do a script rename, I’ve had to disable trackback. I’d gotten several hundred of them over the last couple days, and don’t have reliable enough connectivity to stay on top of them.
We have to come up with a general solution to comment and trackback spam. The blogosphere thrives on feedback and crosstalk, and will lose much of its value if we can’t allow this due to vandals.
The big news of today, I think (since somehow my invitation to the Executive Summit for the X-Prize Cup got lost in the mail. Or something) is that John Carmack almost has a license to fly tomorrow for his attempt at the Lunar Landing Challenge? The catch?
He must answer these questions three. You know, like what is your favorite color?
Well, not really. Actually, the questions three are three successful flights today, when the crowds aren’t present. I’m informed that if he can do that, then he’ll have permission to fly with folks present. At least that’s what I was told late last night. But Alan Boyle says that they only have to perform a single hover test.
Anyway, I’m heading up to the airport shortly to see how it goes. Or went, if I don’t get there in time.
By the way, I see that Robin Snelson has been doing a good job of keeping up on what’s going on here. Just keep scrolling.
It’s been a disastrous couple of days as far as Internet connectivity goes. My hotel has wireless, but it’s like a slow dialup. I can load static pages, but I get timeouts on getting mail. Worse, anything with a script times times. Which means no blogging. Worse yet (at least for me), it means that I can’t fight the human offal that have been spamming me. I’ve gotten hundreds of spam pings in the last couple days, and I haven’t even been able to blacklist them, let alone delete the offending graffitti. The connectivity at the symposium was flaky as well.
Anyway, I’m at a Barnes and Noble now, paying for an AT&T connection by the hour.
It’s worth it, but I see that I have to get a wireless card, so I’m not dependent on the whims of hotels with false advertising about their Internet capabilities.
Things worked out better than I expected. I managed to get an earlier flight from Dallas to El Paso, and when I got there, Advantage had a car (for the bargain price of only a hundred bucks a day, including all of the outrageous taxes and fees they put on rental cars these days).
I’m in my room now, and the broadband seems to work, sort of, though it seems more like narrow band.
I put up a post over on sci.space.history, in which I had complained about the ancient joke about the Poles sending an expedition to the sun, in which they’d go at night to avoid being burned up.
I pointed out that jokes about ethnic groups that just point out how stupid they are are pointless, since the groups themselves are interchangeable, and have nothing to do with any actual characteristics or history of that ethnic group. In that vein, I provided an example of an appropriate (and I think funny) ethnic joke. I figured that, since I spent the time typing it over on Usenet, I might as well post it here as well:
A guy is walking down the street in Gdansk, and he sees a lamp. He picks it up, brushes the dust off it, and of course, out pops a genie.
“In reward for releasing me from my bondage, I will grant you three wishes. What would you like?”
The guy thinks about it for a while, then he says, “I’d like the Chinese to pillage Warsaw.”
The genie scratches his head at the strange request, then shrugs and says, “OK, here you go.”
The Chinese march in and pillage the Polish capital.
The genie says, “OK, now what’s your second wish? Make it a good one this time.”
The guy thinks about it for a while again, and then he says, “I’d like the Chinese to pillage Warsaw.”
The genie is wondering if he hears him right.
“What do you mean? That was your first wish. They’ve been there, done that. Don’t you want something else?”
The guys says, “No, I want the Chinese to pillage Warsaw.”
The genie throws up his hands, and has the Chinese pillage Warsaw again. This time no woman is left unraped, no one is left alive, many of the buildings have been leveled.
“OK. You get one more wish. Don’t waste it, like you did the others.”
The guy thinks for a long time, and finally, he says, “You know, what I’d really like, is for the Chinese to pillage Warsaw.”
Now the genie is about to have a fit.
“What are you talking about?! There’s nothing left to pillage!”
“I don’t care. I want the Chinese to pillage it anyway.”
Well, the genie has to honor the wish, and this time, when all the festivities are over, the former Polish capital is nothing but a smoldering crater.
The genie says, “You know, we aren’t supposed to ask these things, but I’ve just got to know. Why? Why, three times, you have the Chinese pillage your own country’s capital?”
The guy says, “Look, they did it three times, right?”
The genie says, “Right.”
“So, every time they do that, they cross Russia twice.
I stupidly made air and hotel reservations for this week, but not car rental. No one has anything. Which should have been obvious. I thought about the difficulty of staying in Las Cruces, and got a hotel in El Paso, but it didn’t occur to me (as it should have) that everyone would be flying into El Paso and renting cars there.
Is anyone going there this week, and staying in El Paso, from whom I could bum a ride for five days? Including tomorrow afternoon, when I get in?
I’m flying out to Las Cruces in the morning, and will be there all week. Hope I’ll see some rocketry.
Assuming that my hotel was on the up and up about broadband in the room, I hope I’ll have some updates from the X-Prize Cup festivities.
Unlike (apparently) many who were in Hawaii yesterday, I’ve been through several significant earthquakes. But if our trip to Kona had been one week later, we’d have gone through the closest major quake in our lives, despite decades in southern California. It would have been only ten miles away, off shore. And if our itinerary had been the same, we’d have been in bed, on the fourth floor in a condo, above the beach, so it would have been pretty exciting. But there was never a concern about a tsunami, at least not there. It didn’t have enough distance to build up a big wave, even if it was a big enough displacement to cause one (it wasn’t). But we’d probably be stuck there for a couple more days, at least.
“Fjordman” has some recommendations for the West.
One of the catch phrases of the Simpsons is when Reverend Lovejoy’s wife, in response to some event requiring community action/some new law, is “What about the children! Won’t anyone think of the children?”
Given human nature (particularly the maternal instincts of women, who are more often the target of such political tactics), it’s an effective form of demagoguery. A very effective one.
For instance, it’s often used by gun controllers, by using statistics talking about how many “children” are killed by guns in the inner city. Unfortunately for their case, the “children” killed by guns often turn out to be late teenagers (you know, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen?) and often people even in their early twenties, due to insufficient vetting of the actual ages of those killed in the gangland shootouts (no, tell me that it isn’t so…).
Even more egregious is those who, like potential Nobel laureate (and the fact that she is even being considered for this is at least as devastating an indictment of the uselessness of that award as the actual awarding of it to the likes of Yasser Arafat and Jimmy Carter) Cindy Sheehan, talk about sending our “children” to fight and die in Iraq. This ignores the fact that no one goes into Iraq involuntarily–all who sign up for the all-volunteer military do so under the influence of their own will. (Note: If anyone can find a case in which someone delivered their “child” unto the evil maws of the Bushitler-Cheney-Rumsfeld war machine, with the infant kicking and screaming in protest, let me know pronto, so I can amend this post). Moreover, these “children” are old enough to drive, to vote, and (in many cases) to legally purchase alcohol. But it makes for much better anti-US (not anti-war–many of them are just on the other side) sound bites to bleat about the “children” that we are “sending” off to die.
So now comes the usually reasonable Representative, and aspiring Senator, Harold Ford, who reportedly said yesterday:
I’m just not going to take morality lessons from a party