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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, January 29, 2005
Water Witches & Geology I went out today and met some of my neighbors at my new property, as part of my effort to map the location of the existing wells (latitude, longitude, and elevation). One is probably a distant cousin (based on the last name--no, not Cramer). He has the first house after you turn from the old state highway down the subdivision's private road--and he's also the chief of police of one nearby city. That's somewhat comforting. All of my neighbors were more than happy to share their knowledge of local well conditions. It is somewhat comforting to think that such friendly people will be those that I may have to count on if something bad happens with weather, medical emergency, whatever. What was really interesting is that one of the neighbors told me that he agreed that there was no way for water witching to work--but that there was no question in his mind that it did work. He told me of a neighbor out on the old state highway who hired geologists to advise him on location, proceeded to sink three very deep, very expensive, and very dry wells. He hired a watch witch--and the fourth well hit water immediately. Hmmmm. Anyway, I have a stack of data now, and I have noticed some interesting quirks of the soil on my property. One section has markedly better soil--a very rich, organic material filled sandy soil. That is also the section directly adjoining my neighbor who went down eighty feet, and gets sixty gallons per minute. The scenic view parts of my property have a noticeably different soil--something that is much lighter colored, far less biologically active, and with a lot of basaltic rocks scattered in it. Down near the road--across which road a well went through 340 feet of clay and hit effectively no water at all--the soil is distinctly light clay. I think this property may be an ancient landslide--and that it shows no evidence of motion suggests that this chunk doesn't have much water under it. It turns out that the geology of the area is very interesting, both from a scientific standpoint, and from the standpoint of road construction. I found a very useful report by John Peebles, Engineering Geology of the Cartwright Canyon Quadrangle, published by the Idaho Bureau of Mines and Geology in 1962. It turns out that after Idaho built a state highway through this area in 1946, they discovered that some hillsides were constantly sliding--sometimes so fast that they couldn't bring in gravel fast enough to keep the road surface from leaving the scene of the crime. There's a lot of water under this region, and much of the underlying rock is a particular clay, montmorillonite, derived from the decomposition of basalt. It is apparently one of those miracle minerals. It is impermable to water (which may explain some of the local well peculiarities), but when it gets wet, it goes from being reasonably rigid rock to something more like slow motion mud--and expands several times in volume! It also seems that a lot of the geology of the area consists of ancient landslides, many of them largely consisting of montmorillonite holding chunks of basalt and granite. The report has a number of useful bore samples, including one done no more than 800 feet from my property--and many of these bore samples also show where the water line was back in the 1950s. Part of the report also confirms what I suspected from examining the terrain downslope to the north--that there is an aquifer that is probably close enough for me to hit without much effort on the north side of my land. Septic Tanks In response to my discussion of water and septic tanks, a reader (who blogs here) sends me this amusing story of defeating the Canadian bureacracy: This is sort of parenthetical to your post about finding water but I thought you may be amused at the wiles of my late mother who bought a farm in Nova Scotia several years ago. Believers in Magic Certain factions of the left call themselves a "reality-based community" to distinguish themselves from conservatives, who they see as "faith-based." Now, this is amusing in its own right, because the left's confidence that we can work out an accommodation with the Islamofascists who attacked us on 9/11 shows something beyond faith--and very little connection to reality. But you know, there's a lot of leftist allies who are quite partial to belief systems that would seem like more appropriate targets for attack by militant materialist sorts: Angelina Jolie has reportedly given Brad Pitt a vial of gray powder to ward off accidents. Some Ideas Are Apparently Too Dangerous To Be Discussed Or so this news article would suggest. I am always a little skeptical of WorldNetDaily stories, but there are plenty of people being quoted, and specific claims that can be checked for truth or falsity. I don't find these claims terribly surprising, in a politically correct institution like the Smithsonian: The career of a prominent researcher at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington is in jeopardy after he published a peer-reviewed article by a leading proponent of intelligent design, an alternative to evolutionary theory dismissed by the science and education establishment as a tool of religious conservatives.The rest of the article would indicate that a witchhunt is under way: Sternberg is managing editor of a nominally independent journal published at the museum, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. His trouble started when he included in the August issue a review-essay by Stephen Meyer, who holds a Cambridge University doctorate in the philosophy of biology.Sorry, but I don't see that any of these questions should have been asked. This is not the reaction of scientists who have confidence that their position is correct, and that Intelligent Design is nonsense--or even just wrong. UPDATE: A reader tells me that "Chris Mooney has the goods on this guy: http://www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/deja-vu/" Significantly, Mooney compares this case to the dispute over global warming--ignoring that there are many reputable scientists who believe that the global warming claims are not all that clear, and a number of peer-reviewed journals have published papers disputing the orthodoxy of anthropogenic global warming. If anything, Mooney makes me more inclined to think that Sternberg has been wronged for being a heretic. I also notice that Mooney's article appears at the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims Of the Paranormal. A little history: When CSICOP formed in the late 1970s, I was a charter member of their magazine The Skeptical Inquirer. The first year or two I was very pleased with the magazine. It engaged in careful and dispassionate examination of spoon benders, astrology, UFO enthusiasts, etc. Even in an area where I think there were and are some unanswered questions (UFOs, for example), there were and are a vast swarm of cranks, honest errors, and crooks looting fools. Still, The Skeptical Inquirer was pretty careful not to use too broad a brush. By the end of the second year, The Skeptical Inquirer's tone had changed. There was an increasing level of passion involved--it had become something of a crusade, to the point where anything that disagreed with scientific orthodoxy--even ideas that were simply unproven, such as cryptozoology claims about Bigfoot--was treated as equivalent to astrology. I was also disturbed by the dishonesty of some of the people involved--people like Isaac Asimov. Asimove was writing articles that made a point of using a lower case "g" for the title of the Judaeo-Christian God. This was not considered proper English at the time (it still isn't), but it was something that militant atheists did as a childish way of expressing disapproval of theism--rather like consistently misspelling someone's name to try and get a rise out of them. (Yes, I've heard every possible such abuse of the name "Cramer.") At the same time, Asimov published a book that purported to be a dispassionate and neutral examination of Creationist claims--at least, in the first chapter or so, which is as far as I read before I realized that he wasn't telling his readers his true feelings. Now, if you want to be a militant atheist who insists on a non-standard use of "god," fine. It's not even petty, it's just silly. But to be writing a book where you claim to be a neutral and dispassionate observer of the evolution vs. Creation argument at the same time? That's dishonest. It reminds me of those Creationists who told courts that their "young Earth" theories were not religiously based--and then sent me a fundraising letter that insisted that their campaign was part of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I don't have much patience for dishonesty. (And sad to say, there's gobs of it in the academic community, and not all of it by leftists.) Not surprisingly, I stopped subscribing to The Skeptical Inquirer at about this time. Labels: intelligent design Virus Writer Sentenced To Prison Reuters reports: A federal judge sentenced a teenager to a year and half of prison on Friday for releasing a variant of the Blaster worm that was used to attack more than 48,000 computers.Having just spent the last several hours using SpyBot S&D, LaveSoft SE, and then using the Registry Editor in Windows to try and kill the VX2 virus on my son's computer, I am very, very upset. I'm also upset with Microsoft. Look, if anyone knows that there is no such thing as bug-free software, it's me. I've spent most of my life writing software for a living, and supervising other people doing it. If Microsoft were a bunch of kids writing their first serious programs, I could be a little forgiving. But Microsoft is among the most arrogant corporations on Earth about what an innovative company they are, and how they only hire the best. Yet it seems like a week can't go by without someone figuring out another security hole in Microsoft's operating systems and application framework. I really don't want any more innovations out of Microsoft. I would like them to get their software sufficiently stable, reliable, and secure that I don't keep getting tempted to switch entirely to Linux. I used to be pretty sympathetic to Microsoft's plight. Unlike the Macintosh, Microsoft had to write software to support a huge range of devices, device drivers, and configurations. As you increase the number of variables, the more difficult is to imagine every possible configuration, and test even a small fraction of the combinations. My sympathy has gone away. I have an HP Jornada 820. Every significant piece of software in this cute little palmtop is Microsoft. The operating system. The Pocket Internet Explorer. The Pocket versions of Excel, Word, etc. The are no hardware options on this box. Yet, if I leave the computer sitting--doing nothing--for more than a day or two at a time, it starts to freeze. Others have this problem as well, and the solution is the red "soft reset" button. Let me explain. The Jornada 820 has no disk. It runs from solid state memory. If some piece of software fails to release memory when it is done running, the Jornada will eventually run out of RAM in which to execute. This is known as a "memory leak" because that portion of the RAM reserved for dynamic storage keeps losing blocks of memory, until you restart the whole computer. From the Jornada's behavior, and that the soft reset button fixes it, I can say with some confidence that this is a memory leak. Memory leaks are not particularly hard to isolate. Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a wrapper around the memory allocation and release functions for products that I was working on to debug these sort of difficulties. Any company that releases a software product that has such a regular and repeatable memory leak is simply not a serious, professional software company. Of course, that's why people that go to work for them, producing shoddy, unreliable, unprofessional software become fabulously rich, and I'm still having to work for a living at 48. These are among the reasons that I am far less enamored of the virtue and rationality of free markets than I used to be--carelessly written, inadequately tested software makes you rich. Friday, January 28, 2005
Drugs Are Bad For You This article almost reads like it came from The Onion. First, there's the last name of the DA who was arrested. Second, there's his platform when he ran for office in 2000. Third, there's his behavior in recent months: When West Texas District Attorney Rick Roach was arrested at the Gray County courthouse on methamphetamine charges, federal agents found two handguns in his brief case.What makes it not a satire from The Onion is that it isn't funny. Taking the most positive read on what article reports, it sounds like Roach wanted to see why meth freaks use the stuff--and went down the path that meth freaks usually go down. When Reality Meets Leftist Delusion A sad story out of New York City: An aspiring actress and playwright whose work explored life's darker sides was shot and killed as she confronted an armed robber during an early-morning street holdup.You can visit the late Ms. duFresne's website here. Her website is about as Blue State as it gets: a member of Planned Parenthood; Theaters Against War; and Fractured Atlas: Fractured Atlas provides services, resources, and support to liberate a nation of artists. From healthcare to publicity to collaborative production grants, we supply critical tools for independent artists and arts organizations so they can focus on their creative responsibilities. By nurturing today's vital but underrepresented voices, we hope to play a role in fostering a dynamic and diverse cultural landscape of tomorrow.She lists several hard left organizations that she supported, such as the Center for Public Integrity. Reality comes and bites leftists every once in a while. It is unfortunate that some people only learn the hard way. UPDATE: Just to clarify: this leftist didn't deserve what happened to her. Living under leftist delusions ("being poor and a criminal just means you are a victim, too") is very dangerous, because it prevents you from recognizing that predators will indeed kill you for a couple of dollars, and without a moment's hesitation. Thursday, January 27, 2005
Remember When The Shroud of Turin Was Radiocarbon Dated To The Middle Ages? The Christian faith isn't based on artifacts, so the radiocarbon dating that showed that it was medieval--and thus, likely a medieval fraud--although a very, very skilled one, with some details that still can't be adequately explained--well, it didn't impact me any. But now the Discovery Channel is reporting that a peer-reviewed chemistry journal paper is suggesting that it is quite a bit older than medieval: The Shroud of Turin, the piece of linen long believed to have been wrapped around Jesus's body after the crucifixion, is much older than the date suggested by radiocarbon tests, according to new microchemical research.Now, some of this work is by true believers (true believers in the Shroud, that is), so I will be curious to know what others have to say about this paper. I do remember thinking at the time, "How do they know that they have the right date on this?" Remember that radiocarbon dating can be fooled by contamination with more recently biologically active carbon--as might have happened in one of the medieval fires that got the Shroud, either from candle wax or carbon dioxide dissolvd in water used to put out the fire. Now, don't get me wrong. Radiocarbon dating, within its limitations, and the now acknowledged discrepancies because of apparent changes in C14 production, is a trustworthy method. But you do have to think about appropriate materials (don't try to carbon-date a Coke can) and contamination problems. Leftist Justification For 9/11 In this case, the chairman of ethnic studies at Colorado University: A University of Colorado professor has sparked controversy in New York over an essay he wrote that maintains that people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were not innocent victims.Now, this is an interesting claim at several levels. Somehow, it is the fault of the United States that Saddam Hussein, having engaged in an aggressive war against Kuwait, refused to follow internationally agreed upon sanctions--causing great suffering to his own people. But more importantly, this moron is arguing that 9/11 was retaliation for actions against Iraq. Essentially, he is arguing that Iraq was the reason for 9/11--thus justifying invading Iraq as retaliation. Also, as Michael Williams points out, if we accept Professor Churchill's justification that murder of civilians can be justified because they are part of a nation that caused other deaths, then: Even if his position is accurate, we're still justified in crushing our enemies; if their attack on 9/11 was justified as retaliation for our earlier attacks, then our subsequent attacks must likewise be justified.I see that Professor Churchill is: A longtime activist with the American Indian Movement, Churchill was one of eight defendants acquitted last week in Denver County Court on charges of disrupting Denver's Columbus Day parade.I guess that the next time he gets on a high horse about the evils of what happened to the Indians, I guess we can throw his excuse back in his face. There is no question that both whites and Indians engaged in barbarous actions against each other. But by Professor Churchill's justification, every Indian who was minding his or her business that was murdered in retaliation for a criminal attack by another Indian had it coming. Or would Professor Churchill be offended by that? Not A Mad Scientist? I've blogged about this before--and how I am becoming increasingly sympathetic to the peasants with torches storming Dr. Frankenstein's castle: Animal-Human Hybrids Spark ControversySorry, but I do not agree with Weissman. Intentions may be all quite wonderful (Dr. Frankenstein wanted to unlock the secret of life), but proposing to make mice with 100% human brains--enough so that Weissman is going to "look for traces of human cognitive behavior" is "mad scientist" in every worst sense of the word. There's a difference between wisdom and knowledge, and Dr. Weissman sounds like he and Dr. Frankenstein--and Dr. Moreau--have much in common in that respect. Labels: cross-species breeding Doing My Part To Fix The Trade Deficit I just received my first international order. (Well, okay from Canada, but that still affects the trade deficit.) Don't expect the size of the order to affect the headlines, but I'm doing my part! Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Why Can't We Be More Like Europe? That's what this blogger (who describes himself as a "recovering Democrat") asks, when recounting the story of a Dutch bank robber deducting the cost of his gun as a "legitimate business expense" (I presume from his income taxes). Actually, I believe that's all U.S. law. I remember many years discovering, while digging through California and U.S. income tax forms, that the difference between the two with respect to illegal income was that federal law allowed you to deduct all the expenses from your unlawful business, while California law did not. You had to declare your $500,000 income from cocaine sales on both California and federal tax forms. Federal law allowed you to deduct your expenses (hit men, ammunition, purchases from your Colombian wholesaler), while California law did not. Long-Term Interest Rates In spite of this pretty substantial deficit, 30 year Treasury rates continue to slowly sink--not at all what you would expect, if you expect us to continue running big deficits. Part of what is driving rates down, I think, is that bond prices and yields are inversely related. If yields drop, it is because prices are going up. Who is buying up long term bonds? Buying long-term bonds when rates are this low doesn't make a lot of sense as an investment--unless you believe that interest rates aren't going to be rising anytime in the next few years. UPDATE: A reader writer: On a more substantive matter, the most common explanation as to why long term rates (such as fixed rate mortgages) have remained constant this past year despite five Fed rate increases, a sharp rise in commodity prices, and a decline in the dollar (all of which are associated with higher rates) is due to the purchase of hundreds of billions of dollars of Treasuries and other dollar based securities by central banks in East Asia in an effort to keep the value of their own currencies down relative to the dollar. These puchasers, most notably Japan and China, and to a lesser extent, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, have been buying bonds, not because they think they are a good value at current rates, but instead wish to keep their currencies at a low enough rate to continue the export of manufactured goods to the U.S.Obviously, this can't go on forever, and makes a lot more sense than institutional and individual investors buying long-term Treasurys as an investment at these interest rates. This means that eventually, those central banks will either: 1. Run out of money. 2. Stop buying Treasurys, because the dollar starts to rise again. Either way, we could see a pretty dramatic run up in interest rates at that point. Bad for the economy (at least the interest-rate sensitive parts, which is most of them); bad for those who buy long-term bonds right now; good for those with some cash available to take advantage of the situation. Betting on the Iraqi Dinar I ran into this web site that encourages you to bet on Iraq by buying Iraqi Dinars at the current very low exchange rate, on the assumption that if Iraq pulls through this crisis, the currency will rise in value. They point to the example of the Kuwaiti currency, which became briefly worthless after the Iraqi invasion. It's not a completely silly idea. There is a saying that often (and probably apocryphally) ascribed to one of the Rothschilds to "buy when there is blood in the streets." These guys might be right--buying Iraqi Dinars as a very, very speculative activity might be a good idea. But then I started looking at what they charge to sell you Iraqi Dinars, and this looks a bit less plausible. Today's pricing is $175 for 100,000 Iraqi Dinars. This site shows an exchange rate for Iraqi Dinars of 1150 to the dollar--which means $175 would convert to 201,250 dinars. This apparently official UN website shows January 2005 conversion of 1460 Iraqi Dinars to the dollar--so $175 would be worth 255,500 dinars. How are they selling them so cheap? This article from USA Today points out the substantial risks involved--and points out that selling this money later, except in very large quantity, might get you a less than wonderful exchange rate. Bush Pulls Out The Big Guns I've pointed out in the past that the shorter lifespans of blacks means that Social Security disproportionately benefits white women, and disproportionately injures black men. Now President Bush is pulling out the big gun of how Social Security's current retirement scheme produces racially disparate results: Race became a significant factor in the debate over Social Security on Tuesday when President Bush told black leaders that the government retirement program shortchanged blacks, whose relatively shorter life span meant they paid more in payroll taxes than they eventually received in benefits.This is not a trivial issue. Especially for workers at the low end of the wage scale (as is still the case disproportionately for blacks), the regressive nature of the Social Security tax means that black men get taxed heavily for a retirement program that will never benefit them. This is an injustice to individuals, and I also wonder if it plays at least a part in creating the lower average net worth for blacks in America. Think about it: money in a 401k plan or IRA is going to pass to your spouse or kids when you die--in some cases, a very substantial amount of money, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for most retirees. The Social Security retirement plan provides for a small check for the spouse, and for the kids until they turn 18, or 22 if they are in college. I wonder if this is one of the reasons that even at the same income level, black net worth is quite a bit lower than white net worth. What Next? Will The Democrats Decide That They Oppose Gun Bans? Contrary to the saying, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks," it would appear that the Democrats have heard the voice of the voters--and are getting ready to jettison (or at least, pretend to jettison) the most adamant of the pro-choice extremists: Ms. Clinton has been a visible and very public defender of abortion rights, appearing at a huge rally in Washington last spring and denouncing what she called Republican efforts to demonize the abortion rights movement.What? They aren't evil misogynists, trying to keep women barefoot and pregnant? In addition to her description of abortion as a "tragic choice" for many," Mrs. Clinton said that faith and organized religion were the "primary" reasons that teenagers abstain from sexual relations, and reminded the audience that during the 1990's, she promoted "teen celibacy" as a way to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. But everyone knows that abstinence education is just Christians trying to promote their agenda! And it doesn't work! Keep saying that as you stamp your feet on the ground and froth at the mouth! "The fact is, the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place," Mrs. Clinton said.Of course. Even those who oppose providing contraception to minors because they believe that it encourages sex, will agree that a 16 year old who gets pregnant is a bigger tragedy than a 16 year old who is sexually active but avoids pregnancy and STDs. The speech was also notable for a stream of statistics and data that, Mrs. Clinton's aides said afterward, were included to underscore her view that the reduction of "unwanted pregnancies" could be a unifying issue for supporters and opponents of abortion rights.Yup. As with so many other areas, a relatively small number of irresponsible people are a large fraction of the problem. This is something that pro-choice extremists have never been willing to admit. Is this a real change in attitude? Or just chasing after the middle, because they got their tails kicked in the election? I don't know. This article actually makes me laugh: Democratic leaders say their party needs to de-emphasize the issue of abortion rights, concerned that Republicans have hurt the Democratic Party by portraying it as an uncompromising champion of abortion.Gee, and this is obviously some sort of dirty trick by the Republicans. Sorry, but the Democratic Party has portrayed itself as an uncompromising champion of abortion--as the following paragraph shows: In interviews and public appearances since Election Day, Democratic officials have said the party should open its doors to abortion opponents and that candidates should make abortion a less central focus of future campaigns. Party leaders said they were not abandoning their fundamental support for abortion rights, but said Democrats should consider accepting some restrictions that enjoy popular support — like parental notification when teenagers receive abortions.If you want to know why Democrats have this image problem about abortion: “All these issues that put us into the extreme and not the mainstream really hurt us with the heartland of the country,” said Donna Brazile, a Democratic Party leader who managed Al Gore’s campaign in 2000. “Even I have trouble explaining to my family that we are not about killing babies.” Even better: The debate also comes as Democrats are reappraising the party’s positions on gay marriage, another emotional social issue with which Republicans appeared to hurt Democratic candidates in the recent elections. Tuesday, January 25, 2005
It Just Disgusts Me This Effort To Encourage Kids To Smoke Yeah, "It's just a plant," but it's a vile habit, with some unpleasant and destructive results. And now there's a children's book, even. Will those corporate greedheads ever stop? Oh, whoops! It's not tobacco this new children's book teaches kids is okay: The holidays are over, but if you spaced on buying the budding reader in your life a present, Ricardo Cortes’s It’s Just a Plant is available on the Barnes & Noble Website this month. It’s the story of Jackie, a young girl who walks in on her parents smoking marijuana. The rest of the book follows a fact-?nding mission Jackie and her mom take to learn more about pot. They visit Farmer Bob, who grows it, and Dr. Eden, her mom’s groovy physician (who warns the child not to use the drug till she’s an adult). Then they run into some guys passing around a spliff in front of a Chinese takeout joint, who are promptly busted. That’s when she learns that “a small but powerful group decided to make a law against marijuana” from one of the cops, who lets the tokers go with a warning. And Jackie decides she’s going to “vote to make the laws fair” when she grows up.Oh yes. Of course, Cortes, when asked at the end of an interview: And one final question for Cortes: Are you high? “No,” he says. “It’s a little too early in the day for me.”He has the right to produce books like that--and I guess I should be pleased that no publisher was willing to take it on, so it is self-published--but it reminds of one of those unpleasant truths about pot: it seems to make marijuana evangelists who are every bit as tiresome as the guy who you work with who can't ever have a conversation without steering it into, "Are you saved?" San Francisco Is Going To The Dogs Along with putting an unlawful initiative on the ballot, and mandating a tax on shopping bags, the busy-bodies in San Francisco government have now created a very detailed housing code--for doghouses: This week, the supervisors gave preliminary approval to a new law requiring pet owners to provide up-to-code doghouses for dogs kept outside. The ordinance says doghouses must be clean, dry, raised off the ground and big enough for the dog to "lie in a comfortable position.''Look, I have considerable sympathy for laws prohibiting animal cruelty and neglect. They are clearly constitutional, as I am sure this law is. But at a certain point, the level of nannyism involved in something like this makes you wonder if San Francisco has solved the rather more serious problem of homeless mentally ill people living on the streets, because they seem to have time to worry about whether doghouses are big enough, warm enough, comfortable enough, and have tip-proof water dishes. Instapundit Demonstrating His Ignorance Again Instapundit seems to think that the spherical nature and existence of other planets is proven to about the same level as evolution. One involves inference from an incomplete fossil record; the other involves measurement. Now, you may want to argue that evolution is adequately proven, but to claim that the evidence is comparable to that for the sphericity of planets is simply ignorance. Monday, January 24, 2005
Journalist Gets Carry Permit A really, really good article by a journalist in Ohio who, after an unpleasant experience with a bunch of thugs on motorcycles harrassing her, decides to take a concealed weapons class, and get her permit: I was moving away from my hometown to start my first real job in the big city of Dallas. I'd be living on my own for the first time.At least the slow part of the process is out of the way. When Plastic Shopping Bags Are Outlawed... Only Outlaws With Have Plastic Shopping Bags San Francisco, now preparing to vote on an initiative to ban handguns (in violation of state law), has decided to take on the ecological menace of plastic shopping bags: SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - San Francisco may become the first city in the nation to charge shoppers for grocery bags.Just like the gun problem, San Francisco has decided that rather than punish what is certainly a small number of litterers, that it makes more sense to punish all consumers of plastic shopping bags. Do people recycle plastic shopping bags? We do. We also use them to carry lunch to work; when my wife cleans out the cat box, she uses the plastic shopping bags; when we empty bathroom trash cans, often as not, the plastic shopping bags are called into play. I will say that unlike the ban on handguns, there is no constitutional right to own plastic shopping bags, and I can't imagine any way to use one in self-defense, so this is more of a petty nuisance than a serious piece of tyranny. It is so typical of what makes for thinking in Blue State America--punish everyone for the actions of a few. Oh, it gets better: While the goal is reducing plastic bag pollution, paper was added so as not to discriminate.Huh? Was the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Cellulose Products) planning to sue? Why are they not including cloth bags and wooden barrels as well? Isn't that "discrimination"? The Threat of Global Cooling Back in the 1970s, one of the great concerns of climatologists was the danger of a major ice age. I can remember reading books on glaciology back then that expressed concern that the Earth seemed to have entered a cooling trend around 1940, and that we might have to worry about the consequences for the ability to feed a population that had grown dramatically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article from the Irish Examiner indicates that this concern is still there: The findings from a team of American climate experts suggest that were it not for greenhouse gases produced by humans, the world would be well on the way to a frozen Armageddon. Labels: global warming Sunday, January 23, 2005
Building in Rural Areas One of the mildly risky aspects of building in a rural area is finding water. Septic tanks solve the sewer problem, and running a "perc test" is one of the things that you typically have done before agreeing to buy a rural property. In the case of the land I just bought, the test includes a county permit to construct a septic tank, good for one year. This is an incentive to get going on this, at least the septic tank part, this year. I had a vague idea how septic tanks worked--that they took wastewater, and slowly allowed the water to re-enter the water table--slow enough for bacteria to die. I also knew that septic tanks required occasional pumping. Here's a much more detailed description of how septic tanks work. Right now I am confronting the problem of how to get water. It turns out that drilling a well in heavily sloped areas is a bit more complex than drilling on the flats. Some people in our subdivision have drilled 29 feet down, and the well produces 400 gallons per minute. Across the road from us, however, the well drillers went down 345 feet--and found no water at all. It turns out that Idaho requires a license to drill a well, and requires all well drillers to file a report describing it. Some of the information is clearly needed for public safety reasons (to make sure that someone doesn't abandon a well hole that someone falls down later), but other pieces of information are a lot more arguably necessary. They are, however, very useful pieces of information. What types of rock did the driller find, at what level, was there water or not in that layer? Even better, all the reports from 1987 forward are online, here. I am using this information to construct a geological model of the area where my land is located. Now, why would I do this? I'm told that well drillers around here don't pretend to know where to find water. They drill where you tell them to drill, but perhaps to avoid complaints about, "You told me that there would be water here," they tend to leave the positioning to water witches. Yes, water witches. We are living in the twenty-first century--and the high technology for finding water is still a guy waiting for a couple of rods to cross to tell him that there is water underground. My first reaction was complete incredulity, because I am unable to see any way for this work. I must confess, just because scientists don't have an explanation doesn't mean that it can't work--it might simply be that no one really understands the mechanism. (See here for a skeptic's description of the evidence that it doesn't work.) Still, isn't there some more precise way of figuring out where water is underground? So, the next day I go into work, and tell my tale of incredulity--and two different co-workers tell me that they have used dowsing. One of my co-workers, from Tennessee, learned the art from his grandmother, and worked his way through college finding water. When he was in the Air Force, he successfully used the same techniques to find buried cables. Another used water witching to find buried water pipes on his father's ranch. This leads to an interesting possibility: I will have both of them come up to my property in a few months (on different days), and try to find water. It will be interesting to see if they pick the same spots, and even more interesting if that matches up to the geologic model I am building. It appears from examining aerial photographs and topographic maps of the area that there is one rather large erosion-resistant chunk of the mountain, which includes the dry well across the road, and much of the impressive view section of my property, that is rather like a spine sticking up--and which is distinctly different from the surrounding geology. The aerial photograph also shows that the vegetation is distinctly sparser on this spine than on the sides--which ground examination confirms. I suspect that this chunk of rock interferes with the sand layer at 3700-3800 feet that successful wells are hitting, directing water in that layer to the sides (and generally away from my property). I still have a bit more research to do on this. There Is No Free Lunch I like the idea of hydrogen powered vehicles. No carbon dioxide; no nitrogen oxides (depending on whether you burn the hydrogen, or use a fuel cell). No need to deal with pesky parts of the planet to get petroleum. As I observed after President Bush made hydrogen fuel part of one his State of the Union addresses a couple of years back, hydrogen, while effectively limitlessly available from seawater, takes energy to make. This article points out that a hydrogen economy still requires a large energy input: The problem, critics say, is that the technology that makes the fuel of the future generates just as much pollution as the gasoline-powered vehicles we drive right now.One solution is nuclear power. While it hasn't always been done right, I believe that it can be done right--and that might well make hydrogen environmentally friendly. Another possible problem: Scientists call hydrogen a "leaky gas" that easily escapes from any container you put it in, potentially harming the environment.Hydrogen, however, is pretty darn reactive. It turns back to water very quickly. So what's the hazard? Water vapor is a greenhouse gas--and actually plays a larger part in warming the Earth than carbon dioxide. But unless we start unlocking hydrogen from some part of the Earth other than water, I can't see that this would be a net change. Need To Replace Nokia 6160 Cell Antenna I have a couple of older Nokia 6160 cell phones. The one that I used daily has a broken external antenna. It still works, but the range is greatly reduced. The other one has an unreliable keypad, but the external antenna is fine. Perhaps with good reason, perhaps not, Nokia does not provide manuals explaining how to remove and replace the external antenna. If you have experience with this, let me know. It seems silly to replace a cell phone for something this minor--and it doesn't make any sense to pay a repair facility what will probably be more than the cost of a new phone. UPDATE: Never mind! All I needed was a Torx T-7 tool (which is really, really tiny) to disassemble the phone. Amazingly enough, when I to Home Depot, the cute little tool set was made in Taiwan, not the People's Thugocracy of China. In case you need to do surgery on your Nokia 6160: Nokia 6160 Disassembly & Reassembly Instructions 1. Remove the battery. 2. There are four Torx fasteners on the back. Remove them. 3. When the last of the four comes out, the front of the phone comes, followed by a rubber membrane with all the numbers on it, and the speaker falls out. 4. There are two Torx T-7 fasteners at the top of the phone, holding the guts into the case. Unscrew those. The electronics now pop out. 5. I couldn't figure out how to remove the antenna from the case. It appears to be held in with copper rivets. Since I had another 6160 with a bad keypad, I just swapped the cases. Now I have a good antenna and a good phone. 6. Reassembling isn't hard, just put the guts back into the case, and screw in the two Torx T-7 fasteners. 7. One hard part: what about the speaker? You can see that the front of the phone case is round to receive the speaker, but what direction does the speaker go? The two copper contacts are the back of the speaker, and will go against the printed circuit board. What direction, vertical or horizontal? They are off-center, so put them so that they are horizontal, and on the lower side. (Like an expressionless mouth in a cartoon drawing.) 7. Now put the rubber membrane back in place. There are four holes in the membrane where the four fasteners that hold the back of the case to the front pass through. 8. Now snap the front of the case back onto the back. It will require some finger pressure to get everything back together. 9. Now insert the four Torx T-7 fasteners, and screw them down. 10. Reattach battery. Amazing The Slime That Attach Themselves To Profit An article about a new documentary about the cultural impact of the porno movie Deep Throat mentions something that I have read elsewhere: What happened to its supposed $600 million in theatrical revenues is a mystery. Lovelace, Reems and director Damiano never got any of it.I've also seen a quote from director Jerry Damiano that he sold his rights to the film very cheaply because he wanted to keep his legs and arms from being broken. Voter Fraud I have long suspected that the Democratic Party's focus on voter fraud is largely projection. News stories like this are part of why I suspect that: Kelvin Ellis, a top administrator at East St. Louis City Hall, plotted to kill a witness in a federal vote fraud investigation, according to indictments opened Friday, which also accuse Police Chief Ron Matthews of apparently unrelated crimes.The gun charge is unrelated, but it is a reminder that if there is a problem with criminals having access to guns, perhaps the Democrats might want to clean house first: The case against Chief Matthews, 55, of East St. Louis, centers around Qattoum, 40, of Belleville, a convenience store owner who goes by the name of "Dave." As an auxiliary officer for several months last year, Qattoum wore a badge, carried a .38-caliber pistol and participated in drug raids wearing a windbreaker emblazoned with "Police" across the back.Thanks to Gateway Pundit and Michelle Malkin's blogs for the pointer. Just to show you that this isn't just a problem of East Saint Louis Democrats having a certain lack of respect for the electoral process, there's also this set of indictments out of Milwaukee: The investigation into the Great Tire-Slashing Caper will end Monday with felony charges against the adult sons of two prominent Milwaukee politicians - U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore and former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt. M. Night Shyamalan's The Village (No Spoilers) This must have been really intense in the theaters--because it was really intense just watching it at home. Those who went to the theaters hoping for a horror film were probably disappointed; those of us who grew up watching the original Twilight Zone series were not. Think back to the best shows from Rod Serling's powerful series: the unexpected twist of "I Shot An Arrow Into The Air"; the searing insight into the sinfulness of the human condition of "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street"; the torment of modern life and the desire to escape to a simpler time of "A Stop At Willoughby"; the unabashed moralism of "The Rip Van Winkle Caper." Now, imagine a writer with Serling's skill, making a two hour movie that combines all the best features of the best episodes, with some of the best actors available today. We see a late nineteenth century village, settled by a sect that seems to combine some elements of Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and other quietist sects that originally came to America to escape the turmoil and warfare of seventeenth century Europe. We learn early on that they have picked an isolated place, far from the excitements, advancements, and the dangers of the larger American society. They are isolated partly by choice, and at least partly by the creatures that live in the forest around them. As the movie opened, I found myself mildly irritated by very minor inconsistencies in how these people lived. I was not sure if this was Shyamalan not knowing the nineteenth century as well I do, or a conscious decision by Shyamalan to avoid making this sect too exactly an actual quietist sect. There are several very surprising plot twists that explain all these minor problems at the end--and I must confess that I began to suspect the biggest twist only a few seconds before it was exposed. Shyamalan says that this movie is about innocence--but it is really about the loss of innocence, and that there is no real escape from sin. Isolating themselves from the larger world of sin, greed, and hatred diminishes heartache, but it does not eliminate it. As we see, sin is a fundamental part of being human, and so is heartache. Like other Shyamalan films (The Sixth Sense, Signs), it inhabits not the world of Hollywood, but the real world of faith, of hope, and good intentions. For all that, like the real world, it is not a world without pain, sorrow, and regret. The film is rated PG-13, for its intensity--which shows you the brokenness of the ratings system. This is a film with little violence; no sex; no gore; no offensive language. When I compare it to many other PG-13--and even PG films, I am just amazed. |
