It's not rocket science
…that I’m likely to ever post a link to Justin Timberlake’s website. Here’s the account of his date at last weekend’s Marine Corps birthday ball.
Sounds like he had a good time and came away with a healthy respect for the history of my beloved USMC. Hopefully he didn’t get too carried away:
Hat tip: Powerline
NASA joins the ever-growing list of government agencies that just can’t resist the excessive use of police force. From the AP story:
Davis claims Armstrong gave the items to her husband, though the affidavit says the first man on the moon has previously told investigators he never gave or sold lunar material to anyone.
In follow-up phone conversations with a NASA agent, Davis acknowledged the rock was not sellable on the open market and fretted about an agent knocking on her door and taking the material, which she was willing to sell for “big money underground.”
“She must know that this is a questionable transaction because she used the term ‘black market,'” Agent Conley states in the search warrant.
Curiously, though, Davis agreed to sell the sample to NASA for a stellar $1.7 million. She said she wanted to leave her three children an inheritance and take care of her sick son.
NASA investigators then arranged the sting, where Conley met with Davis and her current husband at the Denny’s at Lake Elsinore in Riverside County.
Soon after settling into a booth, Davis said, she pulled out the moon sample and about half a dozen sheriff’s deputies and NASA investigators rushed into the eatery.
When officers in flack vests took a hold of her, the 4-foot-11 woman said she was so scared she lost control of her bladder and was taken outside to a parking lot, where she was questioned and detained for about two hours.
Okay, clearly this lady suspected she was probably sitting on hot Apollo memorabilia. But was it necessary to take her down with a half-dozen Deputy Dawgs in flak jackets? This was an old lady at Denny’s, not some meth dealer in the ‘hood. Were they afraid she was gonna go all ninja, whip out her dentures and kill somebody?
But hey, if the Dept. of Education can use SWAT to serve warrants for unpaid student loans, I guess that’s just the world we live in.
Judging by the results of this survey, I’d say your average single-celled organism might have more brain power.
This whole sorry movement is really just the end result of decades of undermining our education standards. Add to that far too many young people who go on to major in absolutely useless subjects only to end up saddled with massive debt and no job prospects. This quote from a NY Times story is priceless:
In Boston, a hub of colleges and universities, a higher education theme emerged among protesters. “What did I spend the last four years doing…Fluent in Mandarin and French and no one wants to go for that? And it’s like, now what?”
Yes, the economy’s in the tank. But jobs are not non-existent, and you might be more competitive if you’d majored in something useful instead of Medieval French Literature with a minor in Transgender Victim Studies. What stands out in the above piece is how many of them seem to be from the artsy-crafty crowd. Strangely, I don’t see many stories about newly-minted engineers being out of work. Check the websites of Boeing, Lockheed, SpaceX, etc. and you’ll find they’re still hiring in droves.
Look, my degree’s in English. I get it. I likewise didn’t give serious thought to what good it’d actually do for me in the marketplace since I was headed for the military. And that was 25 years ago, when the Reagan Boom was in full swing. When the economy is barely avoiding depression, employers can afford to be a lot more choosy. They have to be.
What’s sad is that this crowd just doesn’t get it. They don’t understand where their anger really needs to be focused because they’ve come up through a system that left them completely unprepared for reality.
I feel sorry for a lot of these people, seriously. This guy, not so much:
If only that were so, but apparently The One felt the need to apologize for dropping the big ones that ended WWII. Fortunately the Japanese saw the folly of it and headed him off at the pass. You’d think they’d have been the first ones to be okay with it, but no dice.
I spent a good deal of time in Japan as a young Marine, and was able to visit Hiroshima. It was an amazing city, and the memorial gardens were sobering. Seeing the remnants of such violent history up close should make anyone with a brain in their heads think about the consequences of war.
In no way does that mean we shouldn’t have done it. Truman’s decision saved millions on both sides. Anyone who says otherwise is willfully ignorant of the realities of the period. Consider we had to nuke them – twice – before they finally surrendered.
It also established the United States as one country you absolutely did not want to screw with. We’ve sadly frittered away that legacy over the intervening decades.
One of the memorial’s main halls held an enormous guestbook for visitors to sign and leave their thoughts. It was full of the predictable twaddle about tolerance and world peace and how-terrible-this-must-never-happen-again-please-forgive-us flapdoodle. It was thoroughly dismaying.
So what was my entry?
“They started it.”
The estimable Charles Krauthammer explains that light-speed thingy much better than I ever could. At National Review Online:
Einstein’s predictions about how time slows and mass increases as one approaches the speed of light have been verified by a mountain of experimental evidence. As velocity increases, mass approaches infinity and time slows to zero, making it progressively and, ultimately, infinitely difficult to achieve light speed. Which is why nothing does. And nothing ever has.
Until two weeks ago Thursday.
That’s when the results were announced. To oversimplify grossly: If the Gran Sasso scientists had a plate to record the arrival of the neutrinos and a super-powerful telescope to peer (through the Alps!) directly into the lab in Geneva from which they were being fired, the Gran Sasso guys would have “heard” the neutrinos clanging against the plate before they observed the Geneva guys squeeze the trigger on the neutrino gun.
Sixty nanoseconds before, to be precise. Wrap your mind around that one.
It’s as if someone told you that yesterday at drive time Topeka was released from Earth’s gravity. These things don’t happen. Natural laws don’t just expire between shifts at McDonald’s.
They certainly don’t at any McDonald’s I’ve ever been to. By all means, read the whole thing. And hold on to your hat.
UPDATE: An opposing view from someone with a bit more direct experience in such matters.
UPDATE THE SECOND: It’s an error, which can be accounted for by special relativity according to MIT. Supposedly they’re pretty good at this physics stuff…
This, for starters.
Kevin Williamson at NRO has a pitch-perfect assessment of the late Steve Jobs’ impact on technology and society. His conclusion is noteworthy:
I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.
And to the kids camped out down on Wall Street: Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the rat-infested subway. Visit the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, then visit a housing project in the South Bronx. Which world do you want to live in?
We love our iPods and would love to have a Mac even more, but they are a tad pricey. Though here’s something to consider: if Microsoft hadn’t dumped Vista for Windows 7, we’d have bitten the bullet and migrated to Apple. A lot of other people apparently felt that way, which is the reason Microsoft rushed out Win7.
That’s why innovation and competition are good things. Even though we may have a humble HP running lowly Win7, I thank Steve Jobs for making our home PCs much better than they would be otherwise.
Because does anyone really think Windows would have improved all that much without Apple leading the way? Would Windows even exist if Apple hadn’t pioneered graphic user interfaces? Imagine still living in a world of MS-DOS. Scary, ain’t it?
Well, crap.
I had prepared an eloquent post comparing Gov. Palin to Ulysses S. Grant. It was pure brilliance, comparing the sorry state of Republican leadership to the sorry state of Union generalship during the Civil War. And as a proud son of the South and graduate of her finest military institution, you’d better believe it killed me to say that.
The historical analogies were pretty clever. Or they would have been, except that she’s just announced that she won’t be running for President.
I won’t begrudge anyone for doing what’s best for their family, but it was really looking like she’d run. I was hoping she would, but that interview on Greta last week planted the first seeds of doubt in my mind. It’s hard to imagine what more the media could do to her and her family but that was certainly a major consideration. No doubt she also has some private polling data that showed her chances would’ve been a real long shot.
There’s much work ahead to bring our country back to its founding principles and restore some semblance of sanity. It’s about so much more than replacing Obama and his band of merry Marxists. Hell, a broken mop with a bucket for a head could do a better job than the current occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
We not only have to defeat the Democrats, we have to continually fight a rear-guard action against the country-club establishment within our own party so we don’t have to endure another Leftist onslaught like this in our lifetimes. She was hands-down the best person for that task, though perhaps too much damage was already done to her reputation. And that’s a crying shame.
So who else is out there? There’s a lot to like about Cain, but maybe not enough. Perry’s too much of a blowhard for my tastes. Bachmann is dead-on right about a lot of things but hasn’t really explained what she’d do so much as what she’d not do. And she definitely jumped the shark on the vaccine issue. Romney would be okay in many ways but is downright terrible in others. Either way, he’s certainly not the man to straighten out the party.
Despite the Governor’s expressed intentions to work for change from outside the political structure, it’s hard to see how she will have the same clout going forward. Now that she’s removed herself as a threat to the other candidates, and especially the party establishment, exactly where is her leverage? The power of ideas and being on the side of truth is sometimes not enough. Although I will say this: if she endorses a particular candidate, I’d be much more inclined to take that person seriously.
The hard work continues.
UPDATE: Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection nails it:
It disgusts me that a candidate of such quality cannot run as a practical matter, and that we are left with second and third choices. But reality is reality, and it would have been a tough road to overcome the past three years.
Palin had the opportunity to be a game-changer in the direction of this country; someone who really understood at a gut level how far down the road we are on the path to a country we will not recognize; someone who understands that the political class holds the country by the throat, and that removing the grip is necessary not just changing who holds the grip.
Precisely.
If Pro is the opposite of Con, then the opposite of Progress must be…?
Congress.
This story is downright scary. I’ve touched on this alarming trend of criminalizing just about everything, for example the outrageous Gibson raids. And it’s being done without consideration of “willful intent”, which used to be the threshold for criminal convictions. And a lot of the things they’ve deemed illegal are just plain stupid, in my opinion.
Here’s an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal’s piece:
“One controversial new law can hold animal-rights activists criminally responsible for protests that cause the target of their attention to be fearful, regardless of the protesters’ intentions. Congress passed the law in 2006 with only about a half-dozen of the 535 members voting on it.”
Emphasis mine.
Now, I’m an omnivore and therefore no big fan of PETA. I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat Purina Rabbit Chow. But that’s just stupid.
And there’s this one:
“…a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, man with an extensive criminal record, was back in school pursuing a high-school diploma and working as a drywall installer. While doing some remodeling work, Mr. Yirkovsky found a .22 caliber bullet underneath a carpet, according to court documents. He put it in a box in his room, the records show.
A few months later, local police found the bullet during a search of his apartment. State officials didn’t charge him with wrongdoing, but federal officials contended that possessing even one bullet violated a federal law prohibiting felons from having firearms.
Mr. Yirkovsky pleaded guilty to having the bullet. He received a congressionally mandated 15-year prison sentence, which a federal appeals court upheld but called “an extreme penalty under the facts as presented to this court.”
I should think so.
Clearly this guy was not one to blindly trust, but it sounds like the court accepted the “I found the bullet” story. I mean, come on. 15 years in Federal Pound-You-In-The-@$$ prison for a lousy .22 Long cartridge? Even a serious round like 9mm or .45 shouldn’t count…because they’re not firearms. What the hell was he gonna do, throw it at somebody? Maybe put it in a slingshot?
It’s as if we’ve reached some kind of crazy lawmaking inflection point, where our representatives are constantly in such a rush to prove they’re “doing something” that pretty soon damned near everything will be illegal. Combine that with the recent trend towards militarizing our police forces, and you’ve got the key ingredients for a very disturbing situation. We may all end up in prison camps, but at least our Congress-critters can sleep well knowing they’ve done something.
Congress should only meet for, say, 60 days a year, so we can limit the damage. And every new law should have a sunset provision. Force them to revisit it in five or ten years and decide if it still makes sense.
And if it doesn’t, maybe we can find a way to put them all in the Big House to commiserate with all the other ne’er-do-wells.
Holy hyperdrive, Batman: Faster-Than-Light Particles Question Einstein’s Theory
One would hope the CERN researchers have thoroughly vetted their results and analyzed them eight ways from Sunday before making it public. Gizmodo also reports on this while not sounding entirely convinced at the same time. The comments probably add more to this debate than I could, in any event. Interestingly, blogger/scientist L.Riofrio has been advocating a light-is-slowing-down theory for some time so one must wonder how this figures into it.
A few years ago, I went back to school to learn all the Calculus that I should’ve studied as an undergrad. But that’s what happens when an English major Forrest-Gumps his way into an Engineering job.
Boy, what a difference 20 years made. What once would’ve sent me screaming into the night was now fascinating. I drank it in. Anyone not majoring in one of the hard sciences or an engineering discipline should at least take Calc 1 and 2. And take it with an open mind, not as some medieval torture that you must endure.
Why? Carl Sagan once said something along these lines: “We have constructed a society that is almost entirely dependent on science and technology, yet have structured our education system so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a recipe for disaster.” While I had serious disagreements with much of his social thinking and general disparagement of religion, this is absolutely correct.
Because Calculus is nature’s Rosetta Stone. It’s the universal language of science and engineering. It’s the method we use to describe and predict the world around us. It’s how we quantify things that are dynamic, constantly changing. Once I began to understand it, the power of Calculus blew my mind. And I developed a much greater appreciation for Sir Isaac Newton. Building upon the work of others (because that’s how it goes), he pretty much invented Calculus in his early twenties while on an extended break from college (“University”, in the Queen’s English). They were closed for an outbreak of Tuberculosis or some other devastating 17th century disease.
And he did it without slide rules or a whiz-bang TI84 Silver Edition calculator.
I also developed a much greater appreciation for God. And let me tell you, it can be a struggle to remain grounded in your Faith while pursuing Science at the same time. The latter frequently challenges our notions of the former. It shouldn’t. Unfortunately, too many with scientific education use that as a convenient excuse for Atheism.
In my case, learning Calc was different. To a much greater degree than Trig or Algebra, it gives us tools to understand nature from the smallest subatomic particle to the farthest galaxy. From modeling the behavior of viruses to figuring out how to measure blood pressure.
More importantly, it’s a tool we can use to mathematically predict things which is the key to scientific discovery. It took centuries for man to figure out the language of nature. God’s rules of the road. And we’re still refining it, four hundred years after Newton first figured it out for himself. But God snaps His fingers, and it just is. Left there hanging, taunting us to try and catch up.
One example: our class once dug into E=MC² as an exercise. It didn’t take long to see that as values of E (energy) got closer to C (speed of light), the value of M (mass) started heading for infinity. Which mass can’t do, despite what my bathroom scale has been telling me for the past several years.
And that’s my layman’s view of why this could really shake up physics. If CERN is correct, it is a Very Big Deal that shows how much we still have to learn.
God is Infinite. Men are puny.
A gruesome crash today at the Reno Air Races. Galloping Ghost (shown here), a modified P-51 Mustang, somehow got out of control and plowed straight into the crowd.
There have been crashes at Reno before, but I don’t think there’s ever been one that involved spectators. Especially one described as a “mass casualty event”.
I’ve always wanted to see the Unlimited class races in person, but this graphically illustrates the risks of being so close to a flock of souped-up WWII fighters (already hot rods in their own right) that are zorching around at 500 knots down in the weeds. When things go wrong, they go wrong fast.
Please pray for the accident victims and their families.
UPDATE: Looking back at this post, I realize “somehow got out of control” was a poor choice of words since there’s no way to isolate a cause this soon. Apparently there was a mayday call, and witnesses this morning say that it looked as if he was steering away from the crowd at the last second. If he’d hit the bleachers, this would have been much, much worse.
The Chiles Files 