Misery loves company

The logic board on my iBook is kaput. It's a $300 repair on a machine I paid $300 for. One could say that I've gotten my $300 out of it, but what makes the machine so nice for me is that it's rubberized plastic (e.g., durable) and doesn't fail. I've always said "yeah, if it breaks, I'll just buy a new computer." Spending a few thousand dollars on what your average mortgage lender sees as a toy is not a good way to get your home loan approved. So it would seem I cannot buy a new computer, and I do not have a computer unless I agree to fix the machine in question – which I told myself I'd never do.

This is complicated by the fact that Alienware has not yet updated their 17" SLI notebooks to include the Turion X2 procs. I had decided since my iBook was so reliable that I'd just wait until Alienware bumped the revision on their machines.

Looking around at the replacement logic board parts, I see that I could replace my current logic board with one that was 1.33ghz (21% speed increase). It might be worth it. However, there's no guarantee the new one wouldn't just go bad on its own anyways. And most of what I do slows down not because I've got a 1ghz proc, but rather because I only have 1.25gb of ram (incidentally, I'm also hoping Alienware will have a 4gb+ laptop model, given they're using the Turion).

At least I'm not alone...

Zero tolerance

Please reference metafilter in regards to this post.

An editor at Outdoor Life for nearly 30 years and member of the NRA for 40, Jim Zumbo is a lifelong advocate of outdoorsmanship, hunting and gun ownership in print and on television. Last week, Zumbo left a comment on his Outdoor Life blog commenting on the rising popularity of assault rifles for hunting calling them "terrorist weapons" and suggesting they should be banned from hunting use. Three days later, Zumbo's lifelong career is all but over, having lost all his product sponsorships, was publicly disavowed by the NRA, and his show was canceled. With the 2008 election season starting and a Congress now controlled by the party supporting greater restrictions on assault weapons, Zumbo may be the first sign of a zero-tolerance conservative constituency.

Now, I think it's probably a bit of overreaction, but it's also pretty predictable. But the long list of comments seems to miss the obvious points.

It's very easy to find a .22 plinking rifle that looks just like a big, bad 'terrorist' weapon. Get over the aesthetics. Also, really: Can we drop the whole 'assault rifle' phrasing nonsense already? For a few minutes is it possible to drop the dogma and wonder objectively who started calling rifles assault weapons, and why?

(this is a straw man)

Zumbo may be the first sign of a zero-tolerance conservative constituency.

First sign? Are you high? The entire point of modern conservatism is zero tolerance.

Why? Becuase it works. Because by using it, they keep winning

See, they figure they aren't going to win every battle. At times, gasp, they'll be forced to compromise. So, just in case, they make sure their starting point is as far away from the middle as it possibly can be, so a compromise will be something they can live with (for a while, of course.)

This is one of the many reasons that Liberals have *no* voice in American politics. They start with the compromise position, and the conservatives start with the no tolerance, no compromise, everything or death position. Thus, if a compromised is reached, the comprimise is mostly conservative. On a 1-100 scale, libs start the bidding at 60. Conseratives reply with "minus ten, traitor." In the end? The bid comes in around 25.

(this is tangential)

Personally, I'm all for banning assault weapons, because they're useless for anything but close quarters combat, and I'm all for banning pseudo assault weapons, because that's what idiots buy. I'd much rather have a real rifle and a real pistol, not an AR-15 or some bullshit knockoff with a funky shape and an tube on the end.

(ad hominem)

"Terrorist weapon" is so entirely appropriate a description that it stings.

Really? Tell me more. What is it about assault rifles that makes them intrinsically a terrorist weapon? Remember, we are talking about civilian legal assault rifles here. Is it that they look scary? That you can mount a flashlight on the bottom?

(hey look, two more straw persons)

Zumbo overturned a rock. The most paranoid and insecure males obsess over assault rifles, not hunting rifles. This fits into their end-of-times worldview, which isn't based in reality, but based on the increasing self-awareness that they will never be a successful, happily married male. Regardless of the political betrayal or the psychological basis for this disappointment (and dissonance), the point is that Zumbo basically made them look foolish because they tell themselves, and their friends and spouses that the guns were for hunting. So they went after him. Now they really look like paranoid idiots.

It appears that the NRA has changed their stripes and now represents this fringe. The sportsmen are mostly conservationists these days and have little use for the NRA as a gun lobby, so the NRA went looking for new members it seems.

(more ad hominem)

The inability for the sporting community to allow such discourse without fierce rebuttal reminds me more of Putin's regime than anything American. Of course I must admit, such reactions do serve well to keep the party line in power and the NRA does have an amazing track record of using the political system to serve its purposes. Just because it is effective, however, does not make it right.

(almost; but a false analogy)

The speed and viciousness of this is what is remarkable. The pro-gun lobby is a well oiled machine.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if after he was shot, Ronald Reagan had come out with a strong public statement aimed at banning all handguns. How would the last 25 years of American history played out?

These gun nuts should SCARE THE FUCK OUT OF EVERYONE. Not just because of the obvious fact that they have guns, and lots of them, but because of the political stranglehold they have on this country.

(was on the right track until ad hominem at paragraph three)

Around this point the discussion just wandered off into the weeds. I think what everyone has missed here is the fact that this was entirely predictable. Should Nancy Pelosi or Jim Moran have done the same thing – in their case coming out in favor of the .50 BMG or citizens owning a .338 Lapua rifle – there would have been stern rebuke and deep political repercussions down the line for them.

Calling into question the substance or purpose of the NRA, gun owners, or the validity of the term "assault rifle" is entirely missing the point. What people have missed here is the evil of politics and politicking. It has very little at all to do with guns or people of a conservative political bent.

(begin digression)

Last night I was listening to a political forum on CSPAN radio. The discussion at hand was the Republican contenders for 2008's presidential election. Of much discussion was John McCain. To understand McCain's present situation, they explain, one has to discuss the war in Iraq. Because he originally strongly supported the war, and strongly supported the president, he is in a bit of a political quandary at present. Quoth the pundits, he can't oppose the war now, he can't oppose "The Surge," and he can't break stride with Bush and Cheney. This is really a scary message, and none of them seemed to understand this.

Of course he can change his mind, change his political stance, and call a mistake for what it is. We all make them. I don't know whether it was a mistake to originally invade Iraq or not, but it simply isn't relevant to politics; it's relevant to historians. They are the ones who are going to define how and when and where things went wrong. But going forward, people like McCain very much can change their minds, and one hopes that they do. To insist that somebody must define a political stance and stick to it forever in fear of dire political consequences is to deny the vicissitudes of reality and reason. Saying we should pull out of Iraq today (which is not what I am saying, mind you) is not to say that we should not have invaded Iraq in 2003. It is simply saying that today is a good day to get out. The two concepts are related, but not in the way people seem to be insisting they should be.

(here's where we return to the discussion)

The important thing here, whether regarding McCain or this poor Zumbo guy, is that in politics, somebody is expected to make a decision when they enter office (or more correctly, while campaigning for said office) and stick to it until they leave. I don't especially like Zumbo's stance on things, but I also don't think it's unreasonable for him to dislike AR-15s or other (I object to the term) assault rifles. Much in the same way I'd be surprised, but not incensed, should Jim Moran or Nancy Pelosi (or Barbara Boxer, or Diane Feinstein, or ...) decide to repeal or at least discuss repealing laws governing the .50 BMG or assault rifles.

I won!!

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Dear Amazon,

While I appreciate your sending me a notice that Glasshouse was due to be published 1 March 2007, I already have a copy. In fact, I've read it. I've moved on to Missile Gap, with Scalzi on Writing after that (from Subterranean). It was awful conscientious of you to suggest more Alastair Reynolds to me, although I'm not really sure why you'd do so, given my review of Absolution Gap:

What happened? I don't think anyone but Reynolds can really answer this. As somebody who went to amazon.co.uk to get copies of his books which were unavailable here in the US, I am definitely somebody who is a fan of his. After reading this, however, I'm not sure I'd read another of his books. My hope is that he will realize from the vast majority of reviews of his recent book, that he has taken a turn that was unexpected, and that perhaps he should reconsider.

I recently did read Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, and paid for it new (as opposed to used; I got my trade paperback copy as opposed to mass market or used), and very much enjoyed it. But let's remember that book was written long before Absolution Gap. Don't get me wrong, I like Reynolds a lot. But when I recently read an interview from Mr. Stross (post-Accelerando, pre-Glasshouse), he had this to say:

Schismatrix is one of the unsung classics of SF, probably the greatest space opera of the 1980s, elegiac and dense and coldly brilliant, and surprisingly resistant to the tarnish of age that has dimmed the luster of so much other fiction from the period. Schismatrix was a one-shot novel plus some short stories, and Bruce moved on from it—and the critics of the time simply didn't understand the dish he'd shoved under their noses. Alastair Reynolds has built an entire award-winning career out of Schismatrix, 20 years later!

So, I went out to buy a copy of Schismatrix myself. Lo, Amazon had no copies! I had to buy a copy from a used bookseller (no problem here, mind) which happened to be a leftover from the San Bernadino public library (I guess it's not worthy of their shelves). This should tell you something about the state of Amazon as a bookseller, let alone the be-all end-all of that which is ink on paper.

And so this brings us to the last piece of this joyous email from Amazon. You are recommending Asher's Polity Agent to me. In an e-mail. In an e-mail with otherwise half-reasonable recommendations. Holy shit, Amazon. What cracked kind of algorithm suggested this? I apparently didn't review this book for Amazon. That was an error (I did rate it). Had I done so, it would have included something like "douse the book in goat's blood and kerosene, burn under a full moon, and pray that nothing like it ever surfaces again." I mean, really. Reynolds did not do so great with Absolution Gap, but he can be forgiven as he didn't write a children's book about all the wowtastic DINOSAURS AND OTHER COOL STUFF. I'd be speechless if I wasn't mostly trying to decide whether to be amused or offended.

So, Amazon, let's set some ground rules for our relationship. We've been conducting business for a very long time. You should probably not tell me to go buy books that I already have, because, well, I read things when I get hold of them. Using my previous purchases as a way to gauge what I'll read in the future probably works best for us. I'm admittedly somewhat more interested in books from that other side of the Pacific, and as well from the other side of the Atlantic. Stuff in the middle, well, one day we'll have to talk about those books. People like Banks and Stross are always welcome in my inbox. If you've got something on Subterranean you'd like to remind me about so I can go and buy it from them, that's great too. Don't ever, and I mean ever send me another recommendation for Asher unless it's got a blurb from Stross, Reynolds, Tanizaki, and Oe ON THE FUCKING COVER.

Other than that, we're doing fine!

Yours most affectionately,
Alex

ps. ten year anniversary coming up! you'll never guess what I got you!!

another cold

a minor one, this time around. i am starting to wonder why it is i have been getting sick so much more often the last few years. it seems nominally possible that Sandy is exposed to a lot more of this stuff than i would normally be, and that i get them via her customers. but when i suggest to her that i didn't get sick so often when i was flying all the time for microsoft, she tells me i was just on drugs more frequently (nothing all that interesting, just the rx stuff).

sigh

The Zumwalt's guns

You could say I have something of a passing interest in railguns, coilguns, and other means of electromagnetic propulsion. I've also mentioned the Zumwalt before. The notion is that since we don't have the BB's anymore, we need a way to propel mass (well, specifically, we need a way to deliver energy) from a mobile platform such as, say, a destroyer. The DD(X) is the first to get the gun, and the Freedom is supposed to have one as well.

So here, then, is the Endgadget blurb (via the unwashed masses). The original article gives us these specifications:

The prototype fired at Dahlgren is only an 8-megajoule electromagnetic device, but the one to be used on Navy ships will generate a massive 64 megajoules. Current Navy guns generate about 9 megajoules of muzzle energy.

The railgun's 200 to 250 nautical-mile range will allow Navy ships to strike deep in enemy territory while staying out of reach of hostile forces.

Since a ton of TNT is equivalent to 4.184 gigajoules, and we are imparting up to 64 MJ to the projectile, we are delivering 0.015 tons worth of TNT, or a skosh less than a third the power of your average SDB. This is assuming that it doesn't lose any energy between the DDX and its destination due to atmosphere, etc.

Some of the problems with this weapon, which have not been explained by the article, involve the actual speed and mass of the projectile. I won't go into the details, because I've done it before, but the problem you run into with this sort of energy and mass is your projectile rapidly approaches escape velocity before it delivers any meaningful energy to its destination. They do indeed say that the weapon has a parabolic trajectory, that it

At the peak of its ballistic trajectory, the projectile will reach an altitude of 500,000 feet, or about 95 miles, actually exiting the Earth's atmosphere.

Since it isn't hitting escape velocity, it has to be mostly gravity propelled by the time it hits the ground (and, of course, 15lbs of TNT is not the most stellar weapon; it certainly doesn't hold a candle to the performance of the TLAM).

Of course, nobody's mentioning that this could be a devastating anti-surface weapon, provided the curvature of the Earth didn't get you (so, assume a range less than say 380km, although they're not saying that this weapon can reach further than 250km. This is almost certainly wrong, as with a parabolic trajectory you could hit things much further away).

This whole business gets much better if you start thinking about projectiles which are more on the order of several hundred kilograms, and energies closer to gigajoules.

So, somebody's math is wrong, and this time I don't think it's mine.

Everything old is new again.

(He's cool, but my money's on Ryosuke)

What they didn't tell you in the credits for The Departed. Personally I enjoyed the movie, although I was surprised that it had the typical Hong Kong ending – everybody dies (this is not really a spoiler, I promise). When I went looking into who had written it (it was pretty clearly Scorsese; just see the camera work in the beginning), I discovered what nobody's saying about the movie. It was Infernal Affairs in a past life. Anthony Wong and Andy Lau. Can't get more Hong Kong mafia movie than that. Why didn't they just say it was based on Infernal Affairs? That would have made us even more interested in the movie; now I'm just feeling a little confused about the whole, uh, affair.

What's next? Remakes of Japanese horror films for the US domestic market? An American drifting series?

Oh, and happy new year.

Right whale steaks all around!

American Bride
Originally uploaded by jocieposse.

The last three comments here make it worthwhile.

Me:

Not that I have any problem with the gross characterization of an entire country, but wouldn't an "American Bride" be wielding something more... Remington or Springfield? Hell, even Benelli is produced in the US. But a knock-off of a knock-off of a Russian gun? Seems silly.

The other guy:

There's always some sort of detail stickler, gun nut, historical narwhal bone button and/or pewter spoon collector, that never sees the big picture.

This is one of those Scalziesque moments where all I can do is laugh and put it in the .sig file.

Inconvenient Invisible Pachyderms

Elephant? What elephant?

What we read today:

"Though we have long known that data centers worldwide consume a significant amount of energy, AMD believes Dr. Koomey’s findings are a wake-up call not just for the IT industry, but also for global business, government and policy leaders," explained AMD’s Allen. "This study demonstrates that unchecked demand for data center energy use can constrain growth and present real business challenges. New generations of energy-efficient servers are now able to help provide IT departments with a path to reduce their energy consumption while still achieving the performance they require."

What we didn't read today:

"Though we have long known that internal combustion engines worldwide consume a significant amount of energy, General Motors believes Dr. Koomey’s findings are a wake-up call not just for the transportation industry, but also for global business, government and policy leaders," explained GM's Allen. "This study demonstrates that unchecked demand for transportation can constrain growth and present real business challenges. New generations of energy-efficient vehicles are now able to help provide transportation departments with a path to reduce their energy consumption while still achieving the customer service they require."

Your new ride.

How much power is this? 5,000 MW for a year? A seven-litre GM LS7 produces 377kW (at full throttle, mind you, not just sitting in traffic). That's 2,653 Corvettes, running full throttle, for a year, times five. How many miles would 13,265 Corvettes travel at that power output in a year? How about 24,419,007,900? That seems a bit high, right? Let's think about this in different terms, then, so we can get a grip on it. If my commute to AOL was 44 miles daily, that would make 554,977,452 commutes. Given I only commuted to AOL 240 days a year, that's 2,312,406 years of commuting back and forth at AOL. Or, if we get still more sensible, we can say that the entire population of Washington, DC* could commute every day to AOL, at full throttle, in a 2006 Corvette Z06, for four years (49.5 months) for every single datacenter-year (as of 2005).

This is not to say I have a problem with datacenters. You could say I earn my living working inside them. I am fond of them. Or that I have a problem with the Corvette. It's a fine automobile, and if I could buy everyone in DC a Z06, you bet I would. I even like General Motors. When everyone was telling me what a stupid company they were, and all the youtube lemmings were making videos of Tahoes smashing through forests and whatnot, I was buying the stock. They've done great! So I'm not even saying GM is a problem here.

What I am saying is that the bedwetting Prius jihadis, Gore included, should just fucking shut up already about cars. Cars are getting more efficient, not less. Changes like variable valve timing and ignition, variable intake and exhaust geometries, forced induction, and increased computational power (hey, asshole on the Treo, I don't mean for you to play with, I mean your ECU) lead to cars that are both more powerful and more efficient. When I was in school getting my ASEs, we were just learning about the Northstar engine and the neat technologies GM was using to make that engine work (such as being able to run on fewer cylinders when out of coolant). Now we have Daimler making V8s that can run on four cylinders when they don't need the other four. With E90 and E85, we have cars that can run on flexible fuels, make better mileage, and produce lower emissions.

But we had flexible fuel cars in the mid 90's. We had the EV1 (shut it you fascist ignorant punks, I'm from Southern California and nobody killed our fucking car!). We had buses – back then – running on compressed natural gas. None of this was driven by some has been politician demagogue shrilling about the fragile erf and its inhabitants.

People, like me, and yes like the Priushedeen, are demanding better cars. That is what drives the market, people. Not imposing taxes. The latter hurts consumers, the former gives them what they want. That's what a free market is. If General Motors couldn't sell any Tahoes, we wouldn't be seeing so goddamned many of them on the street, now would we?

(not running on petroleum)

In fact, one of the design parameters I have for my Z is that it be able to run on Ethanol. It turns out this is actually not so hard to do. The main problem is actually corrosion in rubber lines and linings. Ethanol even has a higher octane so I can make more power without reducing the compression ratio (this means BIG power). However, and I suspect most of you people clutching your teddybears and telling me I am a gross polluter because I bought the STI and not the Legacy or Forester and I eat babies and worship the Saudis have no idea that Ethanol actually has less energy in a given litre of fuel. So I'll be burning more Ethanol on a given mile than I will be with petrol.

It would please me greatly if we could have some less politicized discussion on the fuel conundrum. First and foremost, I'd like to see the nuclear option given its fair shake in domestic power. We'll never get Hydrogen without it (hey, did you know that it takes more power to produce hydrogen than the hydrogen actually has available to internal combustion? How do you suppose we'll power the hydrogen generation? Coal?). Second, let's actually have some statistics about where our energy comes from. DC's much-touted metro runs on coal. Coal produces far more oxides of nitrogen (do you know what photochemical smog is?) per combustion than petrol. So if we get more people on the metro in DC, we will be increasing our coal usage. I also have yet to hear an unequivocal answer on what fraction of our gas actually comes from the middle east (as this seems to be the crisis du jour).

Miramar MCAS and surroundings, avec haze.

Let's have a tax on gasoline-consuming cars, not on gasoline. Apply the tax to two places: nuclear power generation (and fusion research such as ITER, as well as heat dissipation technology; read some Hamilton) and transforming our fuel delivery infrastructure from petrol to multifuel (instead of petrol/EXX, make fuel delivery agnostic, so we can shift to Ethanol, Methanol, Hydrogen, etc, without reinventing the entire infrastructure). Taxing the fuel itself hurts consumers as it's a much longer, more expensive tax. And, for crying out loud, reward people with alternative fuel vehicles by letting them have the HOV lanes. If you find that the HOV lanes are overcrowded with hybrids and flex fuel vehicles, this is not a problem: You've Won! At this point, put it to the public: do they want to change HOV to toll? San Diego did this ages ago with the 163/15 toll lanes from Kearny Mesa up through Peñasquitos (nobody talks about the F/A-18's flying over 163 on avgas, do they?), and they're still uncongested.

Petroleum is not a political issue. It's a social issue. It's even a technological issue. There's no question of whether republicans like freeway-going refrigerators or democrats love piddling little shitcans like Priuses. I know a good many people of both political persuasions who own either vehicle. If the respective camps could just stop trying to "change the vote" or bringing demagogues into the discussion (pick a demagogue, any demagogue), we might even solve the problem. Hell, it's not even a defined problem right now.

What are you really trying to solve?

Went to the Haymarket house again

Travel times, for those following the home-buying process:

• Arlington to front door, Haymarket: 65 minutes, moderate traffic
• Front door, Haymarket, to Arlington: 45 minutes, light traffic (snow plows, bad conditions)

It's entirely possible to imagine a 30-minute commute if there were no traffic. Wow. This house is just great.

In other news, I got to play with the Subaru in snow today. Drove Sandy crazy, but I was swinging the rear end out, locking the wheels and sliding, and generally just having fun. The OEM tires are not especially serviceable in snow, but then I wouldn't expect anything other than studded tires to have done well today. Fun fun fun.

Avian influenza

Nearly 90 per cent of the people who've been diagnosed so far with H5N1 avian flu were under age 40, a new analysis from the World Health Organization shows.

CBC is running a story on this today that was posted to ProMED. Whereas with SARS, we could expect the opposite majority: the infirm and the old were more susceptible to the illness. Further, the mobidity of SARS and the 1918 influenza (H1N1) are much lower:

However, there appears to be a trend to an increasing Replikin Count in the Replikin Peak Gene in the H5N1 compared to H1N1 in 1918. In 1918, despite the huge morbidity, the human mortality rate was thought to have been less than 5%; at present, the human mortality rate of H5N1 is 69% (WHO).

If we look at the vectors for H5N1:


(via)

We see that over a third of cases are from migratory birds. Another third still are from the trade of wild birds. In fact, the spread of bird flu from poultry is substantially less than either the bird trade or from migratory birds. Itself, it makes up about a third of the sum of the other two.

The article (link to Google Scholar, PNAS) the above figure and the following quote comes from suggest trade bans to prevent the bird trade from infecting poultry.

In the absence of trade bans, H5N1 may be introduced through poultry to the remaining countries in Europe, throughout much of Af rica, and to the Americas in the near future. However, even if countries with current outbreaks of H5N1 in poultry cease exports, the risk of H5N1 spread continuing through Europe, Af rica, and into the Americas is possible through poultry exports from countries with H5N1 in wild birds (which has repeatedly spilled over into poultry; see above figure). In addition, because few birds regularly migrate bet ween the Americas and areas of the Old World where H5N1 has been reported both poultr y and the trade in wild birds currently represent a larger risk than migratory birds for the spread of H5N1 to the Americas unless all birds are quarantined and tested for inf luenza on import (as they are in the United St ates). However, if H5N1 spreads into northeastern Siberia (including Wrangel Island), then the risk of introduction into the mainland United St ates by migrator y birds will increase subst antially, because several species of ducks, geese, and swans regularly cross the Bering Sea bet ween their breeding and wintering grounds.

(via)

There's National Geographic documentary on the H5N1 vectors but it's a little dated (iTunes says it's 2006, but lots of the information is from 2003-2004, with some pretty old stock footage, too); the information on the vectors is more or less correct. Since the documentary has been made, the proportion of distribution by vector has been quantified. If you'd like to get an idea, visually, of the significance of migration as a vector, see Winged Migration, which is something of an amazing work on its own.

You could look at the vectors like this: the bird trade serves to infect the local population, generally livestock. Because the quantity of birds in the trade is lower, the actual rate of infection from the trade is also lower. However, when the infection "takes," it has a very large pool to build from: the local poultry population. Conversely, migration represents a large potential to spread the disease from continent to continent, in larger amounts. However, migration happens twice a year, and is much more predictable. Notably, infected birds tend to travel much shorter distances during migration (primarily because they die).



So a trade ban is not going to do a whole lot to stop the spread, because it's already been spread to migratory birds which will eventually spread the disease. A trade ban will slow the spread, but the spread seems to be inevitable. A slower spread of the virus will mean two things. First, there is more time to develop a vaccine. Second, there's more time for it to mutate and gain a porcine vector, possibly making a vaccine moot, and possibly also making the virus much more easily transmissible to humans.

In short, there's no real good prevention at hand for the spread of H5N1. It's got a very high morbidity. It's on the entire eurasian supercontinent. With the migration vector, it seems to me there's going to be contamination in Canada, or possibly Mexico. Stopping the bird trade, while nominally a good idea, is not going to prevent much. When it does happen, and it does seem that it will (although the actual infection rate is uncertain), it's not going to affect the old; it's going to affect the young, and with startling morbidity. This isn't a marburg-type virus. It lingers long enough to infect before it becomes readily apparent. It is much more capable of spreading, at least to local communities.

Frankly, I think it would be a good thing if we had north american H5N1 cases this year (as seems likely). This would both convince people that it's a threat (we seem to be kind of jaded here), and possibly give us time to develop a vaccine before we have a mutated porcine virus.

Miss Snark has a column about current novels (or at least manuscript submissions) being overwhelmingly based in current events. To the degree that they all sound alike and are equally silly. So, I'll bet you a nickel that this year there will be zillions of books written about animal → human pathogens, plagues, and the like. Which means by the end of next year, there should be $zillions * .05 novels published. That being said, I may still go read The Andromeda Strain, and The Sheep Look Up.

* A. Marm Kilpatrick, Aleksei A. Chmura, David W. Gibbons, Robert C. Fleischer, Peter P. Marra, Peter Daszak, doi:10.1073/pnas.0609227103

Librarians.

I was never one of the kids who thought the librarians at school were the stuffy sort they seem to be stereotypically portrayed as. Well, there was that one at RBHS with the dual-RSI-wrist-braces (whose password was 'tuna') that always gave me flak about dropping the terminals to DOS and farting around on the school's LAN (entirely unsecured in 1992 – just 'cd' over to, oh, the admin building, etc... ), but I suspect she had her reasons. They, of all the faculty, were the most tolerant of my wanting everything in the library. The science fiction, fantasy (yes, I'll admit I read all of the Mode books), reference, just absolutely everything. Most of the time I was able to find what I wanted, but the times that I was not, they were (except Ms. Tuna) very helpful. Even when I was clearly doing nothing related to any of the entirely mostly abysmal classes I was taking (Mr. Crawford's APEC class was not abysmal, nor was Mme. Girdner's French).

(this is not the main reading room, it's Adams. they forbid photography in there, even though it is gorgeous)

Then there are those ninjas of Library Science who haunt the main reading room in the Library of Congress. One of them has been there the entire time I've lived in the DC area, and has helped me find books on biological weapons, earth penetrating nuclear weapons, concrete formulae, premenstrual syndrome, psychosis, synthetic superopioids, modern (and antique!) rifle design, perl, the other Dr. Avriette's dissertation, and other stuff I'm forgetting from the last seven or so years I've been out here. The same librarian has helped me find all this stuff, and never once complained that I was asking about all these potentially, uh, unpatriotic things, or that I was taking up too much time, or unfamiliar with the call/request system at LoC. Composure, respect, vast knowledgebase and yet still able to identify when the clue is AWOL, and where to go looking for it. Especially in my case.

A good friend of mine is married to a librarian, who also happens to be a very cool person. A person, I might add, who actually understands my stance on education, if not quite my process.




So I'm inclined to believe they're pretty neat people to begin with. I just can't picture uninteresting people wanting to get an MLS. Imagine my horror when I found today a librarian, helping me over on Metafilter. I didn't know she was a librarian, but she is associated with things helpful over at Mefi, so I perused her profile to find that she is behind librarian.net. Ordinarily, this might not seem so interesting, except that I happened to see the wikipedia article as well (which for reasons unrelated to Ms. West, I won't be linking to), which states that she is

... anti-censorship, pro-freedom of speech, pro-porn (for lack of a better way to explain that we don't find the naked body shameful), antiglobalization, anti-outsourcing, anti-Dr. Laura, pro-freak, pro-social responsibility, and just generally pro-information and in favor of profession getting a better image.

And then there's the Wired biography:

She's a "radical librarian" who has embraced the hacker credo that "information wants to be free." As a result, West and many of her colleagues are on the front lines in battling the USA Patriot Act, which a harried Congress passed a month after 9/11 even though most representatives hadn't even read the 300-page bill. It gave the government sweeping powers to pursue the "war on terror" but at a price: the loss of certain types of privacy we have long taken for granted.

So, let me reiterate. A hacker-librarian with many, many admirable political leanings (I'm sure we can agree to disagree on her "anti-capitalist" bent...). If I weren't happily in love, married, way too young, and obviously not bright enough, I might just find myself infatuated. Heh.

The innerwebs have been so very pleasing lately. Cool librarian chicks, rss cleansing software, neat periodicals, nuclear blast simulators, weblogs that don't suck, gosh! What else could I need?

(oh, an agent. right.)

House, again

This house we're looking at (I think we're going to be bidding on it, but I really don't want to get my hopes up this time 'round) is out in Haymarket, which seemed to us (and to some friends of ours, like, oh, Jason) to be a lot further than it is. Here's the lay of things:

(sorry, it's giant, but it gives you an idea of the Metro DC area and where we are. The image is about 100 miles wide)

So House #4 is 36 miles from Clarendon, via 66. If you locate the GW Parkway where it intersects 495, everything on the map is less than half an hour from there. Except maybe Leesburg, which might be 45 minutes. The hike up the Greenway (the northern stretch of 267), that's about 20 minutes, and from the beltway to 28 (the start of the Greenway), that's about 20-25 minutes.

I'm very pleased to see just how close the house is.

And then there's Loudoun County. Loudoun is building 110,000 houses in the next twenty years. They're bringing in 4.1 million jobs. There are lots of people upset about this. I don't understand why the people who presently own farms or large plots of land (like Glascock Field) don't sell them for scads of money in five years, and buy a Delaware-sized plot in Montana. It's prettier, and you'll have fewer neighbors. I'm thrilled because my "starter house" is going to go up in value. It can't not appreciate in that kind of market. And, I just happen to be buying nearish, if not at, the nadir of the market.

Here's crossing fingers against nuclear strikes on DC. (While I respect the FBI's and DHS' opinion that Winchester is "far enough," I'd simply rather we not have to find out. Note, I considered superimposing a 5MT nuclear strike on top of the above map, and re-posting it, but it's effective enough if you just consider the area inside the Beltway to be "smoking-hole-ized", and everything out to Reston to be "crispy", and further out to Gainesville or Dulles as "glowing")

Today's curl(1) recipe

curl http://bombthemusicindustry.com/newsite/{toleave,album}.htm |\
grep mp3 | cut -d\" -f 2 | while read z; do curl -O $z; done

Fear not, this should work in any shell as curl itself will do the brace expansion if your shell does not. The URL, bombthemusicindustry.com, refers to a band by the same name. Miran, a friend of mine from Last.fm, has been listening to them recently, so I had a listen. Unfortunately, they don't have an album on iTMS that I can buy, but as per above, they do have mp3 files available for downloading (this seems odd to me; I wonder how much it actually costs to get your music on the store).

Anyways, I noticed something curious in perusing her myspace profile (Squidlove? Who could resist a peek?): she's 17. Now that in itself isn't especially interesting, and she's a pretty neat person in email. What's curious about this is she was born after the wall came down. After the end of the cold war. I remember a very serious lecture in '89 from our "social studies" teacher about what it meant that the wall had come down. At the time I was mostly concerned with the fact that the world suddenly had a whole hell of a lot more countries than before, and I had to memorize all of them (in hindsight, probably a good idea).

But think about this for a second. If I were to explain Mutually Assured Destruction to her, she would – rightly – think I was entirely insane. Why would anyone need such deterrence? One could argue that it isn't even deterrence so much as abject madness. Wow. Somebody who doesn't remember the world when there was a Reagan president, or MAD, or the Cold War. All of that is just history, and thank god we've gotten past that.

I'm still trying to grasp this. Incidentally I think this may be part of my inability to understand many of the liberal points of view at present ("liberal" in the American sense of the word). If you were to take myself and your average college student from Davis, chances are we have entirely different worldviews, and almost certainly diametrically opposed at that. Huh.

curl http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004836.html | grep mp3 | grep tsdc | \
cut -d\" -f 6  | while read z ; do curl -O $z ; done

That will be all.
(some of us Mac people are not possessed of wget)

Internet: SERIOUS BUSINESS

And today Emily told me that yesterday, at practice, that Emily told Erin that it was obvious that Erin and Stephanie treat me worse than they do her, and Erin said ‘that’s because you’re doing your job’. BULLSHIT. That just pisses me off SOOOOO MUCH. I’m doing my goddamn fucking job. GRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!

Remind me why the fuck I do this again?

*cries*

*deep breath* It's only four months. Then I'll never have to deal with it again; I'll go to college and none of it will matter. It'll be behind me.

God, I can't wait.

It's mean to point and laugh, but I can't help myself. I don't remember being this dumb at eighteen, but I suppose it's possible I was.

Well at least that's over...

I have no idea what possessed people to make an Iraqi soap opera in space, but at least it's over now.