Bill Whittle has a new essay up, on the difference between intellectual and intelligent.
Hypersonics Overhype
My latest TechCentralStation column is up.
A Breath Of Fresh Air
March 31, 2004
MILWAUKEE (APUPI) Fresh from their victories over smoking in California, New York City, and Ireland, activists in the war for clean public air have opened up the next front, demanding that flatulence be outlawed in restaurants and bars.
“The research results are still coming in, but it’s common sense that second-hand methane is a clear public health hazard,” said Chastity Titeass, a spokeswoman for the most prominent anti-flatulence group.
“Odorless my ass,” chimed in one of the other members of the group, holding her nose, under her breath.
“Despite the unscientific recommendations of the bean and broccoli lobby, it clearly wasn’t sufficient to simply set up farting and no-farting sections in the restaurants. The oppressed waitpersons were almost unable to breath when they had to attend to the customers in the designated flatulence zones.”
In response to this public pressure, the city council passed a new law last week, totally banning flatulence in all Milwaukee public eating and drinking establishments, including the restrooms.
The issue wasn’t confined merely to air quality.
Other concerns were raised to the forefront a couple months ago, in the disastrous explosion at the Guaymas Mexican seafood restaurant on the west side of town, which injured dozens of people. A birthday party had been in progress for hours, with ample helpings of frijoles and Monterey Jack, in the hermetically sealed flatulence area.
When the waitress brought in an octogenarian birthday cake, with the requisite number of candles, it resulted in a sudden explosion. It blew out the walls, and expelled many of the diners out into the alley. Repairs are estimated to be in the tens of thousands of dollars.
As a result, the city council decided that a complete ban of enclosed-area emissions was the only solution that would ultimately satisfy public safety concerns.
In a town renowned for its beer and cheese, the new restrictions have hit the bars particularly hard.
“I don’t care what those environmentalist wackos say,” said Joe Peeusky, a local tavern owner for three decades. His business is down by two thirds since the new law has been passed.
“My customers come here to relax. They want to have a brewski, eat some pretzels, let it hang out, relax. Know what I mean? They’re not going to want to go outside when…things happen.”
A patron agrees.
“I know it’s a disgusting habit, but what are you gonna do? I just can’t go that long without it.”
“I’ve been passing gas as long as I can remember. We all did it, ever since we were young. There was a lot of peer pressure when I was a kid–we used to have contests, for decibels and stench, and sometimes, flame length and duration. You get together after school, and the word is, you know, ‘light ’em up.’ Now I’m really hooked.”
He continued, “I tried quitting once. I got really agitated. I was really hard to live with.”
“I also gained a lot of weight. Yeah, I know, you can’t see it on the scales, but I swelled up like the Goodyear blimp on steroids. I just couldn’t kick the habit.”
He’s not alone.
It’s a tragically pitiful and, at the same time, repugnant sight to see groups of customers huddled outside the doors of the city’s bars and restaurants, indulging in their repellent and seemingly unnatural urges. The sounds of their gaseous expellations resonate across the ancient brick fronts of the buildings, and the pungent, almost suffocating aroma slowly drifts down the windless street, a testament to a vile and uncontrollable addiction.
“They don’t have to go through this,” says Ron Blowhardt, the local head of Flatulaholics Anonymous. “A combination of Beano and our twelve-step program can allow them to eat a full meal in a restaurant, without the need to duck outside. The important thing is to acknowledge that you have no power, to submit yourself to a higher authority, which is to say, eensy weensy bacteria in your guts, so small you can barely see them with a microscope.”
In the meantime, Ms. Titeass is excited about the next battles in this new front in the war for public air quality.
“We’re going after the airlines,” she said. “People have to sit in a small confined volume for hours with this. They found out that no smoking sections didn’t work there, and no farting sections won’t either. In fact, I’ll bet that once they see the reduction in maintenance costs on their air filters, they’ll adopt it even without legislation. Sure, people might have to step outside occasionally at thirty-five thousand feet, but that’s their choice. No one’s holding a gun to their head to make them…do this.”
Her ultimate goal?
“I think that it’s outrageous that NASA thinks that astronauts on their way to Mars for many months should have to put up with such disgusting habits. We’ll make sure that they won’t go until they’ve solved the problem. Anyway, from what I hear, there’s already enough methane up there.”
(Copyright 2004, by Rand Simberg)
Who Cut The Cheese?
They seem to have discovered methane on Mars.
I find this much more exciting than water for two reasons. First, while there are abiological means of methane production (e.g., vulcanism), if there’s been any recent (i.e., in the past few hundred years) such activity, this would be the first and only evidence of it, so some form of life is definitely a strong possibility. Water means that life might have once been there. Methane means much more strongly that it might be there now, since it doesn’t persist that long.
It’s also potentially a source of fuel, though it may be too trace to easily collect.
[Hat tip to “cspackler” at Free Republic, from an amusing thread on this topic.]
[Update a couple minutes later]
The best place to go for in-depth and smart blogging on subjects Martian is probably Oliver Morton’s Mainly Martian site. He’s all over this one, and has taken the effort to come up with flatulent cow equivalents. He thinks it’s just a couple thousand for the whole planet.
Goodbye To All That
…What a brilliant point he
Arrivederci
After too brief a tenure, I’ve decided to set aside blogging for the foreseeable future. In part this is due to additional pressures from work, and in part it’s due to reevaluating my priorities, which had skewed rather too far away from family and friends. I’ve enjoyed my stay here, though I wish I’d had more time to post. Fortunately it looks like Rand is back to full speed and in fine form.
Ad Astra,
Andrew
Aldridge Thoughts
Michael Mealing attended last week’s hearings in Atlanta, and has a useful summary. In particular, he has thoughts and concerns about the inputs from organized labor, which I share. I was going to write something about this last week, but hadn’t seen any of the testimony:
It was my determination that this group is one of the main problems with how space is done these days. They are organized and seem to hold a very large amount of political capital because of that. Apparently their members have been a large determining factor behind ISS and Shuttle. They view these programs as purely ways of creating what they view as “high tech jobs”. At one point Paul Spudis threw out a strawman (transcripts aren’t available yet so I can’t quote directly) that asked that, if the goal of our space program was to “keep our technological sharpness” then should all of it belong as part of DoD as simply a national strategic priority? They answered yes! Not only did they agree with the premise but with its conclusion as well.
One of them even went so far as to suggest that the reason the US is loosing [sic] jobs overseas is due to the cultural decay caused by television and the lack of good morality plays like they had during the old radio days! If this is what Big Labor has to offer these days no wonder we’re loosing [sic] jobs overseas…
…Daniel is saying something that Tom Peters is saying in Re-imagine. That the future of America is in its core value: that this land, this system that we’ve developed, is about radical opportunity. Simply ‘earning a living’ isn’t enough. Simply ‘manufacturing’ isn’t enough. Simply doing what we did last century isn’t enough. Every moment has be to worked at the tip of innovation; at the sharp edge of creative distruction. And these labor guys find that to be the worst evil that could be visited on man because it means there is no such thing as job security. It means no such thing as jobs. Period. Every American’s new responsibility is to be his/her own CEO of Me, Inc.
It means things like re-thinking the relationship between ‘labor’ and the processes it supports. It means having a worker in a factory actively spending his/her own time to figure out ways to not just increase his/her production, but to obsolete his own current job. It means things like figuring out how to build dark factories so that where one ‘factory worker’ ran one stop along an assembly line, that same ‘worker’ is the owner of an entire factory that runs itself. It means thinking of space as an opportunity and a market segment and not as a source for government ensured job security.
These are the people who have killed America’s greatness in space. I lay Columbia and Challenger at their door.
This point cannot be emphasized enough. The commission needs to have someone talk to it about wealth creation, instead of job creation, or we’ll remain mired in the failed policy of the past four decades.
Killer Asteroid Detection Breakthrough
It’s a mathematical one. Discovered by a couple high school students.
[via Paul Hsieh]
A Useful Tool
Some folks at Berkeley have put together a web site on teaching evolution as a resource for science teachers under creationist assault in the classroom.
Atlas Shrugging
Herbert Meyer says that one of the reasons that we don’t have as many jobs is that we punish entrepreneurs.