Some Gunny's Dream Girl

Being happily married, I'm far more interested in the mini-gun than the mini-gunner. Long walks on the beach also get sand in everything.

A Conversion Story

Novelist John C. Wright details his conversion from athiest to panenthiest in a post on his blog. Panenthiesm is one of those philosophies that I've always held, but I've never had a name for until now. Thanks John.

I really like Wright's blog, so much so that I picked up one of his novels from Borders and started reading it while on travel. The first chapter of the Last Guardian of Everness is a bit slow, but things really get going once they get suitably fantastical.

The Wheel of Time Turns and Turns But Never Ends

The cynicism of thousands of fantasy fans was justified on Sunday when James Oliver Rigney, Jr. (aka Robert Jordan) died from complications of cardiac amyloidosis. Jordan was working on the last book in the series at the time of his death. Hopefully it can be finished using his notes.

On a Work Vacation

I spent last week in meetings at Nellis Air Force Base outside of Las Vegas. It was one of the most fun work experiences I've ever had. The meetings themselves were interesting, but they were held about a block from the flight line and next to a the Threat Museum. Which means that I was treated to either a free air show or fun with guns at every break.

Oh and I stayed at the New York New York Hotel and Casino. When the days meetings were over, my coworker and I hit the Strip. Good stuff.

New Obliviousness

With ammunition prices going up, it is now long past time for me to buy a .22 rifle. I can buy a decent .22 and a brick of ammo (~500 rounds) for what it would cost me to buy just the 500 rounds for my M1 or AR. So I'm shopping around.

My first stop of the day was X-Ring Supply in Newark and I was in for a shock. Turns out the owner and FFL holder for the store was caught with crack cocaine in his possession a month ago. His FFL was suspended and all the guns in the shop have been seized. How did I miss that?

The store itself is still open, but it only has muzzle loaders and various firearms accessories in stock. While I couldn't care less about the owner, I hope the sales staff there come through this ok. While I actually prefer the staff at Millers in Newcastle, X-Ring was the real gun games shop in Northern Delaware.

Brainiac

The G4 cable network seems to be running a mini marathon of the BBC show Brainiac: Science Abuse until 4pm EST today. Brainiac is hosted by Richard Hammond of Top Gear fame and features a fair bit more explosions and electrocutions than, say, Mister Wizard or Beakman's World. Why they named it after a Superman villain I'll never know.

Hot Under the Collar

Thanks to a call from DirectTV, I just found out that Verizon fucked up my billing information when we moved. Despite changing our phone service from one location to the other, our billing information stayed the same. So they've sent two months of phone/internet/satellite bills to an empty apartment. Unfortunately our mail forwarding with the post office didn't catch the bills and I didn't notice that we weren't receiving them.

Now I'm going to be paying three months all at once, plus sundry late fees. I actually don't mind the three months of bills, the company deserves its money and I have been using its service. I am pissed about the late fees and any effects this may have on my credit history. Why I am holding the bag when one of their petty functionaries makes the mistake? So I am not happy.

Let's see if a call to the Delaware Public Service Commission can get any of this straightened out.

Zombies Are Jerks

I'd heard the song Code Monkey because it's used as the title theme on G4s show of the same name. However, I hadn't really heard anything else by Jonathan Coulton before. Good stuff. Here's a taste from the show he did at the Penny Arcade Expo:


Warning, there is mild profanity when he misses a chord change. Anyway a google search will turn up a bunch of his songs on mp3. Since he uses the creative commons license, you won't even be stealing them.

Doomed to Repeat It... Badly

National Review and Tamara are both lamenting the demise of Military History as an academic discipline at many top institutions. This is sad. War is one of history's fundamental states, shouldn't we study it?

There is good news. Military history is popular both as a subject for instruction and as a product for public consumption via books or other mass media. So it is unlikely to die and more likely that the "top" institutions will simply stop being "top" any longer. That is fine with me.

Because Giuliani Is Too Hard to Spell

Fred Thompson is officially running, The Corner has the Tonight Show segment where he announced and Chris Byrne has Thompson's own announcement short.

I thought Thompson did well on the Tonight Show. As he should, I mean even the Today Show does more hard hitting journalism than the Tonight Show. More importantly, Thompson's take on modern campaigning sounds correct to me. With modern telecommunications, you shouldn't need to campaign longer. In fact you should be able to get the word out faster and more efficiently while spending less money. Longer campaign seasons generally just annoy the hell out of people and give the news networks something to fill airtime.

Also many pundits don't seem to understand that Thompson is polling well because the other Republican front runners suck. I'll never vote for McCain. Romney and Giuliani aren't much better. While Thompson has his flaws, ultimately he's more conservative and more of a traditional Republican than any of these guys. And Republicans will vote for him because of it.

The Fool Tells the Truth

I love the latest PhD comic that explains the difference between the Social Sciences and the Humanities. The social sciences try to gather actual data and the humanities do "analysis" which generally just involves wild hypothesizing. So very true.

Two weeks ago, John Scalzi brought up a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education about how modern writers do all their work on computer. This will probably leave a massive electron trail of their writing process which can and would be used in later literary analysis. Based on Scalzi's excerpts, I took his column as lament that now literary criticism would soon require Humanities researchers to actually do math and proper analysis. I could just picture Professors Vroomfondel and Majikthise at the head of an angry mob demanding database administrators delete old drafts just so they have clearly delineated areas of doubt and uncertainty to publish papers on.

I was wrong about that take on the column though. In actuality, humanities professor Matthew Kirshenbaum wants to be one of those database administrators. Should be a cushy job many humanities types won't be qualified for. Oops.

Legal Smackdown

Legal debate on the 2nd Amendment, like this one held by the Federalist Society, is definitely lively. Like the Bitch Girls, I'm siding comfortably with the originalists like Bob Levy on this one. How "the right of the people" can be interpreted in a collectivist context in the 2nd Amendment, but as an individual right in every other case strikes me as intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.

Band-aids

Have you ever noticed that whenever you cut yourself, you will be hard pressed to find anything other than finger-tip, knuckle, and shaving cut Band-aids? Yet, should you actually cut your fingertip or knuckle, these specialized strips are nowhere to be found. How annoying...

Environmentalism Meets Physics

Ryan is bringing some division in the Environmentalist movement to light. While old growth forests are sacred ground to most of the environmental movement, Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore points out that young growth is actually far superior at sequestering carbon dioxide. So logging old growth and promptly planting new trees is actually quite good for the environment. Who knew? Turns out Leo DiCaprio didn't.

VP Rendell

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell is being put forward as a possible VP candidate. Great... I'm not a big fan of Rendell and I'm even less of a fan now that he's going to be shutting down all gun sales in Pennsylvania. The state is upgrading their background check system, which will require closing the system down for three days over the Labor Day Weekend. This will essentially close down every gun dealer in the state for that period. Gun dealers aren't happy because Labor Day weekend generally brings out lots of hunters prepping for the start of various seasons. I suppose it could be worse for them, it was going to be down for four days.

The interesting wrinkle in this story is that under state and federal law, you only have to wait 48 hours for a response from the background check system. Any more and you automatically pass. We'll see if the gun shops have the stones to use the loophole or not.

Zombie Languages

Judge Alice Batchelder insists that latin is not a dead language. Unfortunately Latin isn't dead in her court, but frankly it should be. After all how can you write and enforce laws and regulations on a people who are not capable of understanding them? That's just bad documentation.

Should I become God Emperor of the Universe, I intend to make edicts to repair some of the great injustices in the World. My first law will be that laws applying to the general populace shall be written in a manner and language that is easily understandable by the general populace. This isn't hard to do, you just grab a bunch of congressional pages (who generally are in the middle of their college education), give them copies of proposed legislation, and ask them whether they can understand it. If not, you must rewrite it. Exceptions would be made for technical regulations which apply to professionals in a given field and not to the general populace as a whole.

For instance, all citizens should be able to understand most of the tax code and most criminal law. However corporate and business taxes could be more complex as could the criminal code apply to, say, securities fraud. The first apply to the general populace, the latter to professionals.

It is one thing if you break the law because you are ignorant of it. It is another if the law (and by extension the case law) is so obfuscated by technical jargon that it cannot be understood by a non-professional. The first is at least partially the fault of the law breaker, while the second is a fundamental failing of the government itself.

Alien Invasion

You know, I would be really intimidated if I ran across this many Daleks in Britian. Or I would if it didn't look like most of them would be defeated by a stiff breeze.

That's Where I'm a Viking!

Instapundit on not getting enough sleep when you were young:

I hear adults say "I can't go without sleep like I could when I was a teenager," but actually I think they can -- at least, I can -- it's just that we're now smart enough to realize just how bad we'll feel the next day.

Back when I was in high school I probably got the best sleep in my life. My mother liked to make sure I got between 7 and 8 hours every night. I slept in even more on the weekends. Ah those were the days...

It always amazed me how little sleep many of my friends got. And generally it was for stupid reasons like wanting to watch the Late Night comedy shows. One of my friends took the philosophy of getting little sleep and never making it up until it made her so ill she had to take an excused absence. She wasn't a stupid girl, but it seemed like a very stupid way to live. I can't imagine it has gotten any better with Myspace and other things available to today's kids.

I didn't start really short-changing myself until college. Even then I quickly learned that it wasn't worth it. Less than six hours of sleep was just not maintainable, especially with Calculus at eight in the next morning three days a week.

Top Gear

Top Gear, probably the best car show in the world, is on tonight at 8pm and 9pm EST on BBC America. If you have digital cable or satellite TV, you probably get BBC America even if you don't know it yet.

Kilt Day and I Missed It!

Had I known that today is Kilt Day, I would be much more comfortable in my air unconditioned cubicle. Stupid broken AC in stupid buildings built to fight not-so-stupid World War II.