November 2007 Archives

Got my CycloDS Evolution last night and it's awesome. Now I can watch movies, listen to music, and browse the web from my Nintendo DS. Sweet.

My friends are getting sick of hearing me talk about laser televisions, and now that their release has been delayed until at least January they're going to keep thinking I'm making the whole thing up!

Mitsubishi Digital Electronics, has told the television industry to expect a major laser TV announcement at a US trade show in January. However it will not say how long it will take before the technology goes on sale afterwards.

Either way the first laser TV was supposed to be in the shops in time for this Christmas. ...

The delay appears to be at the production side of the release rather than anything to do with the television technology.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a couple of other key component manufacturers haven't quite ramped up as fast as was expected," Wilkie said.

I'm still waiting and crossing my fingers.

BAE has developed a 32 megajoule railgun and is promising bigger and better:

The device operates similarly to previous railguns, using electric force to propel a nonexplosive solid projectile along a series of magnetic rails. The device requires a staggering 3 million amps of power to fire.

Incredibly, the device is only the initial offering from BAE. It hopes to soon meet the Navy's goal of a 64-megajoule weapon capable of being mounted on a warship. Such a weapon would draw a current of approximately 6 million amps.

With such high power requirements, such a design is technically feasible when placed on a nuclear-powered vessel. Dr. Amir Chaboki, program manager for Electro-Magnetic Rail Guns at BAE Systems, states, "The power is available. The challenge is how you use it."

Chaboki believes the ideal ship platform would be the Navy's electrically propelled DDG 100 Destroyer, which has an operating power of 72 MW, approximately.

Just mount mine on my flying car.

My brother Nick wonders how long it will be before we see Arnold wielding this in Terminator 4.

Despite being a fellow Baptist, I'm not particularly keen on Mike Huckabee. Via Shaun, here's a critical look at Huckabee's record as governor of Arkansas.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Mike Huckabee's presidential rivals are pointing to chinks in his record as Arkansas' governor — from ethics complaints to tax increases to illegal immigration and his support for releasing a rapist who was later convicted of killing a Missouri woman.

The Republican presidential candidate has plenty to champion from his 10 1/2 years as governor — including school improvements and health insurance for the children of the working poor. But his record has rough edges, and Huckabee has a habit of playing fast and loose with it.

Read for the details.

It looks like non-"traditional" Christian churches are making an impact in Europe where state-sponsored Christianity is waning.

The Well doesn't gather as one large group in a church building but rather as a few smaller groups in cafés and restaurants. That's in part because we don't actually own a building. But there's a purpose behind this, too: It's far less intimidating for newcomers to visit a public space with a dozen or so other people than a normal "church" with pews and a steeple and a hundred strange faces. In the course of our gatherings, we also meet people who were just going out for coffee and probably wouldn't have wandered into a sanctuary along the way.

This emphasis on the nontraditional is intentional. For many of the Europeans I've met here, it's not God who is dead to them as much as it is The Church--the official, often state-supported church, be it Catholic, Anglican or Lutheran. Now new life is being infused into these churches by missionaries from America and even Africa.

Some of the elements in The Well--and its sister churches in Madrid, Amsterdam and other European cities--that are deemed unusual here would seem familiar to American Christians: worship songs that sound like rock 'n' roll rather than 18th-century hymns; discussions focusing on a personal relationship with God rather than a list of do's and don'ts. But other elements would seem out of place even in cool U.S. churches. Holding services in a microbrewery is an effective way to hammer home the point that church doesn't have to be the way it always has been.

The message is getting out. A mostly American and British group at first, The Well now regularly attracts people from Belgium, France, Holland, Portugal, Romania, Bulgaria, Ghana and Lebanon. Some wouldn't be attending church if The Well didn't exist.

Interesting developments. I'll be in prayer for these European Christians.

I'm no political genius, but I've been predicting for a long time that Hillary isn't the inevitable 44th president of the United States, or even the inevitable Democrat nominee. Now the wheels are coming off in Iowa and nationally I expect the race to get a lot more interesting.

Too bad the Republicans don't have an awesome candidate and are becoming increasingly demoralized.

Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott's resignation announcement on Monday was the latest in a wave of retirements to hit congressional Republicans, making an already difficult 2008 electoral landscape even more complicated for the minority party.

Party officials insist that the retirements -- 17 members of the House and six senators -- are simply the result of individual decisions and not indicative of a broader negative sentiment within the party.

Frankly I don't mind all these retirements... it's not like many members of Congress of either party are that impressive. We can only hope that the generation that replaces these retirees will be a little more tech savvy and a little less corrupt and self-interested.

As fun as Dwarf Fortress is, it looks like these guys in Italy took it to the extreme.

Here, 100ft down and hidden from public view, lies an astonishing secret - one that has drawn comparisons with the fabled city of Atlantis and has been dubbed 'the Eighth Wonder of the World' by the Italian government.

For weaving their way underneath the hillside are nine ornate temples, on five levels, whose scale and opulence take the breath away.

Constructed like a three-dimensional book, narrating the history of humanity, they are linked by hundreds of metres of richly decorated tunnels and occupy almost 300,000 cubic feet - Big Ben is 15,000 cubic feet. ...

But the 'Temples of Damanhur' are not the great legacy of some long-lost civilisation, they are the work of a 57-year-old former insurance broker from northern Italy who, inspired by a childhood vision, began digging into the rock.

It all began in the early Sixties when Oberto Airaudi was aged ten. From an early age, he claims to have experienced visions of what he believed to be a past life, in which there were amazing temples.

Around these he dreamed there lived a highly evolved community who enjoyed an idyllic existence in which all the people worked for the common good.

Obviously nuts, but extremely cool to see. I'd love to go visit.

Scroll down a little bit to section "[1]" of this page to read a letter from a couple of Harvard law professors telling the RIAA to "take a hike".

This Spring, 1,200 pre-litigation letters arrived unannounced at universities across the country. The RIAA promises more will follow. These letters tell the university which students the RIAA plans on suing, identifying the students only by their IP addresses, the "license plates" of Internet connections. Because the RIAA does not know the names behind the IP addresses, the letters ask the universities to deliver the notices to the proper students, rather than relying upon the ordinary legal mechanisms.

Universities should have no part in this extraordinary process. The RIAA's charter is to promote the financial interests of its corporate members – even if that means preserving an obsolete business model for its members. The university's charter is quite different. Harvard's charter reflects the purposes for which it was founded in 1636: "The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the ... youth of this country...."

The university strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities. The university has no legal obligation to deliver the RIAA's messages. It should do so only if it believes that's consonant with the university's mission.

We believe it is not.

They rightly point out that the RIAA's business model has been outdated by technology and that legal bullying will only extend its lifespan for a limited time. I'm often hard on our "elite" universities, but good for Harvard.

(HT: Recording Industry vs. The People, p2pnet.net, and Instapundit.)

Democrat presidential candidates are acknowledging improvements in Iraq but moving the goalposts so they don't have to actually develop a plan for winning.

Advisers to Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama say that the candidates have watched security conditions improve after the troop escalation in Iraq and concluded that it would be folly not to acknowledge those gains. At the same time, they are arguing that American casualties are still too high, that a quick withdrawal is the only way to end the war [i.e., retreat] and that the so-called surge in additional troops has not paid off in political progress in Iraq.

Well good grief! The "surge" (and more importantly, the change in underlying strategery) has only been in place for a few months! Violence has drastically decreased, but it will take time for the safer environment to culture real political change.

Think about it: American politics has been mired in the Vietnam War for more than 30 years! The Democrats' last presidential candidate was set up and taken down based on his Vietnam-era record, and that's ancient history. Speaking of ancient history, the Sunni and the Shia have been fighting each other for centuries, and Iraq is additionally recovering from a major war on its home soil and a brutal multi-decade dictatorship. Maybe it'll take more than a couple of months of civil peace to iron things out!

I can't and don't believe that the Democrats' candidates are so much dumber than me, a mere blogger, that they don't already know all these things. So why don't they try leading the rest of their party into reality?

I for one am glad that the "rich" are spreading out their political affiliation among both parties. Perhaps this realignment will continue the Democrats' movement towards capitalism and sensible economic principles.

Democrats like to define themselves as the party of poor and middle-income Americans, but a new study says they now represent the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional districts.

In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were represented by Democrats.

He also found that more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats.

"If you take the wealthiest one-third of the 435 congressional districts, we found that the Democrats represent about 58 percent of those jurisdictions," Mr. Franc said.

It would be great to have two parties who were supporters of free markets and individual responsibility. (Ok, or even one.)

(HT: GeekPress.)

I bought a Roomba 4220 a week ago from Woot and it was delivered yesterday. It rules.

Only downside: while cleaning, the roomba can nudge light objects every so slightly out of place, which really throws off my OCD.

Mark Steyn points out that the world should give thanks for America.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only to the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it's not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's or Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent's governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they're so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – communism, fascism, European Union. ...

Three hundred and 14 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.

Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.

Indeed.

It appears that all your have to do is form yourself a "union" and the Democrats will back you up no matter who you hurt. The ongoing exploitation of our children by the various teachers' unions is obviously a prime example, and the recent decision by the Democrat presidential candidates to avoid the upcoming CBS-sponsored debate if the writers strike is a less egregious but more timely.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, all said Wednesday they would not cross a picket line to appear at the CBS debate, with Clinton issuing a statement which said, in part, “It is my hope that both sides will reach an agreement that results in a secure contract for the workers at CBS News, but let me be clear: I will honor the picket line if the workers at CBS News decide to strike.”

Spokesmen for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd also said those candidates would not participate.

This decision is thick with irony. As with much the Democrats do, this makes for good publicity but ultimately hurts a hoard of "working-class" people for the benefit of the wealthy. Striking members of the Writers' Guild of America make a mean of $200,000 per year and should be easily able to survive an extended work stoppage, but what about all the other workers who are put on hold by their strike? The caterers, grips, teamsters, assistants, set designers, lighting engineers, make-up artists... they don't make six-figure salaries, and they're the ones who end up suffering.

And let's not even get into the money this costs the poor middle-class investors who own these entertainment companies. Thanks for looking out for the "little guy", Democrats!

(And yes, the median writer doesn't make $200k, but apparently 50%+ of WGA members don't even work in a given year.)

I'm constantly amazed by supposedly intelligent people who ignorantly connect legal concealed weapons with gun crime. What percentage of gun crimes are committed by people who are carrying legally? In Florida, a concealed weapon permit holder is 300 times less likely to commit a gun crime than a non-holder. Preventing legal concealed carry only disarms the good guys and leaves the bad guys and the lunatics free to run wild.

College campuses are different from other public places where concealed weapons are allowed. Thousands of young adults are living in close quarters, facing heavy academic and social pressure - including experimenting with drugs and alcohol - in their first years away from home.

W. Gerald Massengill, the chairman of the independent panel that investigated the Virginia Tech shootings, said those concerns outweigh the argument that gun-carrying students could have reduced the number of fatalities inflicted by someone like Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho.

"I'm a strong supporter of the Second Amendment," said Massengill, a former head of the Virginia state police. "But our society has changed, and there are some environments where common sense tells us that it's just not a good idea to have guns available."

Except guns are available to anyone willing to break the law! The only people on campus who don't have guns are law-abiding adult citizens. Calling them "young adults" is offensive because the obvious implication is that college students should be denied the rights that the rest of us enjoy despite their adulthood. The justification for that insult is that many college students abuse drugs and alcohol... but such abuse would typically disqualify any adult from lawfully carrying a concealed weapon. The majority of college students who aren't drunken druggies should be free to exercise their Constitutional right to carry a weapon and their natural right to protect themselves from the predators and crazies who surround them.

This isn't rocket science, and I'm basically to the point that I no longer believe in the good intentions of the opponents of concealed-carry. At some point the evidence and logic are so compelling and irrefutable that no intellectually honest and informed individual near the median intelligence can persist in their opposition.

(HT: Michael Silence.)

Update:

Bill Quick thinks Hillary will endorse an individual right to keep and bear arms in the context of the DC handgun ban case the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear. If that happens, the gun prohibition movement will be officially dead.

Donald Luskin explains why the best time to buy is when everyone else is scared.

But that would be giving in to panic, wouldn't it? Yes indeed, which brings me to my next simple solution: Buy everything you can. Go bullish. Sound crazy? Maybe, but there's some sound logic to it. And simple logic, too — logic that has served investors well for centuries. When things are most uncertain, most complex, most opaque, most scary — then you know that you'll be buying at bargain prices.

So even if a lot of bad news really does end up coming true, you'll have paid such low prices that you won't get too hurt. And if after a couple of weeks it turns out things weren't really all that bad, then you'll make out like a bandit.

How can I say that you'd be buying at bargain prices when stocks were at all-time highs just five weeks ago, and have only fallen about 7% from there? Hey — don't act like that 7% drop is nothing. It has you plenty scared, doesn't it? When you think about selling everything just to end your fear, you're thinking how horrible that 7% drop is. But when I suggest buying, you think that 7% is nothing. Am I right?

I've got friends who work in the financial industry and they're practically jumping out of windows. Do they know more about what's going on than I do? Maybe at the micro level... but I think they're missing the forest because of all the trees. Scared investors depress prices below their rational value, which means this is one of the best times to buy.

Walk fast, live longer.

Researchers who followed the health of nearly 500 older people for almost a decade found that those who walked more quickly were less likely to die over the course of the study.

The findings, the researchers said, suggest that gait speed may be a good predictor of long-term survival, even in people who otherwise appear basically healthy. The study was presented at a conference of the Gerontological Society of America. ...

The study presented at the conference reported that nine years after their gait speed was measured, 77 percent of those people described as slow had died, 50 percent of those considered medium and 27 percent of those considered fast.

Which is cause and which is effect? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that I walk "slow".

(HT: Nick.)