February 2008 Archives

Based on this piece about Barack Obama and Tony Rezko by Rick Moran I was about to post about how well the two knew each other, but it looks like Moran got some otherwise juicy information wrong. He writes:

If you listened to Obama, you would think that he barely knows Rezko. He has told the press he had lunch with him “a couple of times a year” and that he and his wife socialized with the Rezkos “2 to 4 times a year.”

That sounds like a lot of socializing! Obama has been active in Chicago politics for some 17 years, which would mean he, his wife, and the Rezkos went to dinner together up to 68 times! That's no casual acquaintance... how many couples have you and your wife gone to dinner with 68 times? However, the NYT story actually says this:

When Mr. Obama first fielded questions about Mr. Rezko last fall, he said they had had lunch once or twice a year and had socialized with their wives “two to four times.”

That's "two to four times" in total, not per year. Big difference. Did the NYT change its story after Moran wrote his? Or did Moran not read his source material closely enough? Heck, I've done that before myself, which is why it's great that Moran posted a link to his source. If the MSM did the same I bet we'd catch a lot more of their mistakes too.

Boeing loses the Air Force tanker program to a European consortium and Northrop Grumman. Wow, this is huge, and not good news for Boeing who was widely expected to win. Our future mid-air refueling tankers will be built by a foreign company an ocean away.

Boeing will protest the decision and probably lose. Here's the local take on the news.

The loss is a blow for Boeing's St. Louis-based defense unit, which was widely favored to win the contract by analysts and industry insiders and has a long history of building tankers.

But the EADS/Northrop proposal was deemed superior on four out of five criteria, according to Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute who's noted for his close ties to the Pentagon.

Basically, Thompson said, he was told the Northrop/EADS KC-30 won because it could carry more fuel and cargo. ...

Analysts say the loser is likely to file a protest with the Government Accountability Office, an increasingly common third act in major defense contracts. Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire has said she'd push for a formal inquiry if Boeing does not win.

Top Air Force officials and some in Congress have been hoping to avoid a protest, which could drag the acquisition process out by another two years. That would mean another two years of flying old and expensive-to-maintain KC-135s.

“Gosh, I hope there is not a protest,” Air Force chief of staff T. Michael Mosely told reporters Thursday, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “I would ask (the losing bidder) to think about the country and think about the people that are flying the airplanes.”

Here's a retirement calculator that's a lot slicker and simpler than many I've seen. I also like it because it shows that Jessica and I are in pretty good shape.... Gotta remember that our ultimate security comes from God though, not our jobs or assets.

Anyone have any leap day rituals?

Crazy episode. My thoughts:

Ben is the captain of the ship. Future-Ben. That's why Ben isn't afraid of dying on the Island, because he knows he survives into the future. Ben is his own spy on the ship. Awesome. That's how Ben knows everything about everyone.

Time on the Island moves at the same rate as the outside world, but there's some sort of discontinuity. Crossing from the Island to the outside or vice versa causes weird time effects, but time on both sides of the discontinuity passes at the same rate. Otherwise voices on the radio phones would be change pitch or have other distortions.

Faraday can see flashes into the future as a result of not protecting his head during his experiments. That's why he could identify some of the cards Charlotte had upside-down on the table.

Miles' backwards-talking is communication with ghosts, and he'll be able to talk to the Whispers that everyone hears in the jungle.

The site On The Issues has great summaries of the positions of John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama on various issues, supported by their own words and links to the quotes. What a great resource.

A Missouri man was threatened with jail for not paying a red-light camera ticket, but when he got a lawyer the city of Arnold dropped the ticket.

The lawsuit by Fenton residents James and Kara Hoekstra alleges that the ticketing process is illegal and unconstitutional, collecting fines through fraud and extortion to benefit the city and its red-light camera contractor. It seeks unspecified damages from the city, several city officials, and the contractor, American Traffic Solutions Inc.

The couple received a ticket in the mail from Arnold on Aug. 15, accusing them of running a red light in a 2005 Jeep on July 29. It demanded a payment of $94.50. City records show it was one of 13,921 citations issued between October 2005 and Jan. 24, 2008.

The lawsuit said James Hoekstra was threatened with arrest when he refused to pay, but that the city dropped the ticket after he got a lawyer.

There's a possibility that the red-light cameras violate state law, and the allegation is that the city dropped the ticket so it wouldn't have to defend its cameras in court and risk losing the system entirely.

Chris Anderson writes about the economics of "free". Everyone who's reading this blog has to know that everything the internet touches gets cheaper, and anything that exists entirely as bytes will eventually be free. This article describes how it happened and where it may be taking us.

(HT: GeekPress.)

A fun mental experiment called Newcomb's paradox:

The player of the game is presented with two opaque boxes, labeled A and B. The player is permitted to take the contents of both boxes, or just of box B. (The option of taking only box A is ignored, for reasons soon to be obvious.) Box A contains $1,000. The contents of box B, however, are determined as follows: At some point before the start of the game, the [infallible] Predictor makes a prediction as to whether the player of the game will take just box B, or both boxes. If the Predictor predicts that both boxes will be taken, then box B will contain nothing. If the Predictor predicts that only box B will be taken, then box B will contain $1,000,000.

By the time the game begins, and the player is called upon to choose which boxes to take, the prediction has already been made, and the contents of box B have already been determined. That is, box B contains either $0 or $1,000,000 before the game begins, and once the game begins even the Predictor is powerless to change the contents of the boxes. Before the game begins, the player is aware of all the rules of the game, including the two possible contents of box B, the fact that its contents are based on the Predictor's prediction, and knowledge of the Predictor's infallibility. The only information withheld from the player is what prediction the Predictor made, and thus what the contents of box B are.

The problem is called a paradox because two strategies that both sound intuitively logical give conflicting answers to the question of what choice maximizes the player's payout. The first strategy argues that, regardless of what prediction the Predictor has made, taking both boxes yields more money. That is, if the prediction is for both A and B to be taken, then the player's decision becomes a matter of choosing between $1,000 (by taking A and B) and $0 (by taking just B), in which case taking both boxes is obviously preferable. But, even if the prediction is for the player to take only B, then taking both boxes yields $1,001,000, and taking only B yields only $1,000,000—the difference is comparatively slight in the latter case, but taking both boxes is still better, regardless of which prediction has been made.

The second strategy suggests taking only B. By this strategy, we can ignore the possibilities that return $0 and $1,001,000, as they both require that the Predictor has made an incorrect prediction, and the problem states that the Predictor cannot be wrong. Thus, the choice becomes whether to receive $1,000 (both boxes) or to receive $1,000,000 (only box B)—so taking only box B is better.

In his 1969 article, Nozick noted that "To almost everyone, it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly."

So which half are you in?

Tangential to the evolution debate:

Pick an encoding... the message is in there somewhere.

About a year ago I wrote about a compressed air car prototype, and it looks like plans are moving towards production in 2009 or 2010.

Zero Pollution Motors (ZPM) confirmed to PopularMechanics.com on Thursday that it expects to produce the world’s first air-powered car for the United States by late 2009 or early 2010. As the U.S. licensee for Luxembourg-based MDI, which developed the Air Car as a compression-based alternative to the internal combustion engine, ZPM has attained rights to build the first of several modular plants, which are likely to begin manufacturing in the Northeast and grow for regional production around the country, at a clip of up to 10,000 Air Cars per year.

And while ZPM is also licensed to build MDI’s two-seater OneCAT economy model (the one headed for India) and three-seat MiniCAT (like a SmartForTwo without the gas), the New Paltz, N.Y., startup is aiming bigger: Company officials want to make the first air-powered car to hit U.S. roads a $17,800, 75-hp equivalent, six-seat modified version of MDI’s CityCAT (pictured above) that, thanks to an even more radical engine, is said to travel as far as 1000 miles at up to 96 mph with each tiny fill-up.

Still not sure how they're going to deal with the danger of carrying highly-compressed air around with you. As I mentioned last year: gasoline-powered cars rarely explode, but compressed gas containers can easily explode if punctured in an accident.

Here's a slideshow that explains the subprime mortgage debacle using stick figures. I guess it's a little last-year, but still amusing.

(HT: My Money Blog.)

In addition to driving Hummers instead of Priuses, real environmentalists drive short distances instead of walking.

I ask because I came across an interesting challenge to the notion that taking short trips in a car is bad for the planet. This challenge comes from Chris Goodall, the author of “How to Live A Low-Carbon Life.” Mr. Goodall is a member of the Green Party in Britain and a devout environmentalist — he says he has ceased air travel because of its emissions. But he also questions how much good is being done by eliminating short trips by car. In fact, he says that in some circumstances it’s better to drive than to walk. ...

If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.

And yes, that includes the amortized carbon "footprint" of the car manufacturing and food production processes.

Presumably this implies that walking across the country produces far more carbon dioxide than flying across the country.

(HT: Megan McArdle.)

Billed as a "citizenship" test, here's a decently hard-but-short American history test. I got 26/30, and a couple of the ones I missed were easy in hindsight.

Looks like Congress recently changed some pension laws in a way that makes it extremely important for anyone who has the option to take a lump-sum from their pension to do it ASAP:

Are you now or have you ever been covered by a defined benefit pension, the kind that pays so many dollars per month? Would you prefer to take your benefits in a lump sum?

Then pay attention: The lump sum benefit you've already earned is likely to shrink over the next five years. In 2006, in response to complaints from corporations that the old method for calculating minimum lump sums was too generous, Congress created a new, less generous one. It's being phased in over five years, beginning in 2008. Younger workers take the biggest hit; by 2012 lump sums for today's 35-year-olds are projected to be 44% lower than they would have been under the old law. And since this was Congress' doing, the Internal Revenue Service has ruled that employers don't even need to warn employees about the change.

Not me, more than 11 million Americans will be affected by this change in law.

In the epic tradition of pirate vs. ninja, the US Government presents missile vs. satellite:

The explosion is pretty cool. I hope they release the high definition video that General Cartwright mentions.

I rarely use Internet Explorer, but I'm forced to at this hotel and I see that two of the columns on the front page of the site appear to be overlapping. Does anyone else see this, or is it just a visual artifact caused by the hotel browser/connection/whatever?

Based on the timeline, I don't think there's going to be much substance to the charge of plagiarism that Hillary Clinton is leveling at Barack Obama.

Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson, during a conference call with reporters, pointed to a speech Obama delivered at a Democratic Party dinner in Wisconsin Saturday that lifted lines from an address given last year by his friend, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

The Associated Press reported in January that Obama had borrowed ideas and speech points from Patrick, often without attribution. But with Obama now leading in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton's campaign is using this example in an attempt to chip away at the premise of his candidacy.

If this information has been out there since January, then there's only one reason why the Clinton camp has held it for so long: they've done the research and couldn't find any more examples of plagiarism by Obama. If they had more than one arrow in their quiver they would have been shooting them for weeks, not saving it up for the news cycle before the March 4 primaries in Texas and Ohio.

That said, Obama's mis-step highlights once again his inexperience and naivity. Will this plagiarism swing enough votes to let Hillary win in Texas and Ohio, as she needs to do to save her candidacy? Who knows. It won't swing any black voters, but it might dampen enthusiam among his supporters. I'll be very surprised though if further research at this point turns up more instances of stolen words.

Former CIA case officer Marc Gerecht explains that Sunni extremism is in retreat all around the world thanks to our ongoing success in Iraq. This is the best news I've heard since 2001; it must make the Democrats nervous about their electoral chances in November, despite their obvious pleasure at America's victory.

Throughout the Arab world, fundamentalism today is much stronger on the ground than it was in the 1980s. Yet the fundamentalist commitment to the Iraqi Sunni Arab insurgency pales in comparison with that made to Sunni Afghans.

A second striking fact about Islamism and the Iraq war is that the arrival of foreign holy warriors is deradicalizing the local population -- the exact opposite of what happened in Afghanistan. In the Soviet war, the "Arab Afghans" arrived white-hot -- their radicalization had occurred at home in the 1960s and 1970s, when Islamic fundamentalism replaced secular Arab nationalism as the driving intellectual force. On the subcontinent, Arab holy warriors accelerated extreme Islamism among both Afghans and Pakistanis. We are still living with the results.

In Iraq, as we have seen with the anti-al-Qaeda, Sunni Arab "Awakenings," Sunni extremism is now in retreat. More important, the gruesome anti-Shiite tactics of extremist groups, combined with the much-quoted statements made by former Sunni insurgents about the positive actions of the United States in Iraq, have caused a great deal of intellectual turbulence in the Arab world.

That final emphasized phrase is the key. "Intellectual turbulence" is what President Bush and other invasion-supporters intended back in 2003, and that sort of radical rethinking in the Muslim world is what will ultimately win the War on Terror. (A radical rethinking on our part is what will lose the war.) It's either that, or a fight to the death between Islam and the West -- for the sake of Muslims around the world I hope it doesn't come to that.

(HT: Iraq Pundit, who is an Iraqi in Iraq and endorses Gerecht's perspective; and Instapundit.)

Update:

Oooo, instalanche, keen! [insert obligatory "look around, you might find something you like" promo here]

Former LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman is at it again, this time trying to frame The Juice for beating up on his girlfriend.

O.J. Simpson's girlfriend, Christie Prody, was hospitalized with head injuries this week and those injuries are consistent with assault, not a fall, the National Enquirer is reporting. They were the ones that first broke the news of the hospitalization.

Simpson contends that Prody was drunk and fell, causing her injuries, but cops aren't convinced and insiders are saying otherwise.

Christie may be facing brain surgery.

The cops "aren't convinced" because they're trying to set OJ up again! They'll never be happy as long as The Juice is loose.

(HT: The Wife.)

Ever wonder what happened after