Ranting to /dev/null

Window shopping

I know I've got $70 million I'm just waiting to spend.

An idea destroyed by physics and economics

So I'm reading an article about the increase in obesity when something said in passing gives me an idea.

The something said was that the cost of exercise has climbed enormously, switching from something that most people got paid to do, e.g shoveling coal, to something that people pay to do, e.g. go to the gym.

Then it hit me: why not simply harness all of the work people are expending when they exercise for economic purposes, say the generation of electricty, and pay people to go to the gym?

Turns out the answer is really straightforward: electricity costs between 5 and 10 cents per kWh. A kWh is 3.6 million Joules. The average person burns between 6 and 10 million joules per day.

In English, this means that if you hit the treadmill for 18 hours a day, you might earn a quarter by the end of it.

While this may approximate market value for a day's labor in, say, Malawi, even Mickey D's pays more than that around here. A huge gym filled to capacity with exercisers 24 hours a day might be able to generate $20 bucks by the end of the day.

Conclusions: 1) the Wachowski brothers are complete hacks; 2) Even at $70 a barrel, energy is incredibly cheap.

The article as such is worth reading anyway. It talks about the recent suggestion by a group of economists linking increased maternal employment with increased child obesity. Now there's an idea that's going to win the researchers some friends.

This is your brain on drugs

A professor shows up to class completely stoned.

It's this guy. Links to the full lecture are available here, though apparently the above clip is pretty much the best few minutes.

If this guy can get tenure...

(Almost) Unprecedented levels of detail

The world map for a Dwarf Fortress build is a 2572x6168 bitmap. If we assume that each square is one square mile (they aren't exactly square, but whatever), we're looking at a map that's about 15 million square miles. This is larger than Russia.

Each local region is 3256x5760, and I'm pretty sure that every square on the world map can theoretically be zoomed in to a local map. So theoretically we're looking at a map that's 8,374,432x35,527,680.

That's... big.

Unsurprisingly, it takes a while to generate a world. I'd upload the map for your inspection, but it's 45MB.

The only game of which I am aware that had anything near this scope is Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, which had a map that has been estimated at 160,000 square miles. That's a little bigger than, Germany.

Sightings of the king

We've just started talking about Burger King Corp. v. Rudzewicz, 471 U.S. 462 (1985).

My professor, just before he started laying out the facts, put a Burger King cardboard crown on his head.

Awesome.

Kiss your soul goodbye

Some guy has released a program called Dwarf Fortress. It's part Civilization, part Sim City, and part Rogue. It's also got a pretty wicked learning curve.

It's also awesome. Do not download unless you've nothing else to do this afternoon. A detailed description is here.

A wiki is available here. You're gonna need it.

Counterexamples

You know how whenever they show a police chase scene on the news they always show ones where the guy gets nailed?

Not true. Check this out.

The guy on the bike is my hero.

Actually, yeah, it is probably legal

I just finished talking with my law prof about the Wal-Mart situation. He pointed out that unless Wal-Mart is acting in concert with other buyers of DVDs, the unilateral actions of a single merchant are not actionable unless one can show that they are done with the intent to monopolize. As Wal-Mart is far from a monopoly in DVD sales, their actions probably do not fall under anti-competition statutes.

Blockbuster, Netflix, etc. may benefit from Wal-Mart's actions, but unless they work with Wal-Mart to try and keep Apple out of the market, there is no foul.

That can't be legal

Here's a site with every single Simpsons episode.

Get 'em while they're hot. I can't imagine there's anything even remotely legal about this.

Not okay

I'm generally a supporter of Wal-Mart, as I think it's a magnificent achievement in logistics and economics. But that doesn't mean they can do no wrong. According to this report, Wal-Mart has threatened to retaliate against any movie studios that sign deals with Apple to sell movies on iTunes for less than they sell to Wal-Mart.

As Wal-Mart is the single biggest client of Hollywood, this is not an insignificant threat.

Wal-Mart, or any company, is certainly allowed to use its size and volume to extract price concessions from other companies. But retaliation for doing business with third-parties is anti-competitive in that it does not allow the market to set prices.

Monopolies aren't bad because they're the end result of capitalism, they're bad because they obstruct and pervert capitalism. When a single player has substantial control over a segment of the market, the prices in that segment start being affected by things outside natural supply and demand, e.g. retaliatory actions for doing business with competitors.

If the claims of the studios are substantive, Apple may well have an anti-trust action against Wal-Mart. I'll be asking my civil procedure professor, who has literally written the book (an eleven volume set) on anti-trust law, about this on Monday.

Rotten to the core

Frankly, I've heard more eloquent, rational, substantive, mature, estimable dialog on the internet.

What is a civilized international forum to do when members that demand admission by the forum's own rules insist upon acting like undisciplined children? I mean come on now, since when is one head of state calling another the devil anywhere near close to admissible in serious discussion? What are you, twelve?

Chavez has taken the podium at the UN and called President Bush the devil. Excuse me? How did you get in here, young man? That's not the way we talk in adult company. Go to your room until you can speak courteously, and don't even think about watching television.

And if you can walk into the UN and simply lie through your teeth, it somehow seems that you shouldn't be given any creedence or respect.

The fact that not only are these despicable tyrants admitted to discussion but actually applauded is an indication that the forum in question, if not the culture in general, is rotten to the core. The ears of a reasonable, moral person should burn at the words mouthed by these beasts. Here we see horns and crowns and hear the croaking of frogs. The enemy suffered a mortal wound with the collapse of the Evil Empire, but as always, it has risen again. Only this time, instead of attacking the legacy of the Kingdom at its strengths, it attacks at its weaknesses, turning the tolerance that replaced love and the appeasment that replaced fortitute into the weapons of dissipation and dissolution that they are.

Only the church can withstand an assault of this nature. The cultures and governments of this world, even those that oppose these malefactors, are powerless to withstand them, as they are all children of this present evil age. Only those who await the life of the world to come may be equipped to stand their ground.

But the Kingdom does not have political authority. We may serve in and attempt to prop up the governments around us, but the state is not the church, and the church is not the state. The church currently lives under the civil protection from the state and in this country we enjoy great freedoms, but this is not a rarity and not essential to the life of the church.

Sooner or later, things are going to go completely off the rails. There are any number of factors that are conspiring to bring this about. What does this mean? It means that the church will be victorious as Christ is victorious: by dying. Our life is in the age to come. We seek the peace of the city, as its peace is our peace, but we long for the peace that is yet to come and cannot be lost to wars and rumors of wars.

Maranatha.

Advantage: Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart is starting a program whereby 291 generic prescription medications will be available for $4 for a month's supply.

I defy anyone to say that this is a bad thing.

If this is of benefit, why is the reduction of prices across the board a bad thing?

I'm listening...

What is man that you are mindful of him?

Even the pinnacle of human technological and engineering achievement is as a speck of dust on the face of the universe.

You have got to be kidding me

Only at an Ivy League school could the Dean of International and Public Affairs invite Ahmadinejad to speak.

Let's see just how fast we can get a case thrown out

If you were going to come up with some way of seeing exactly how fast you could get a case thrown out of federal court, this wouldn't be a bad way to go about it.

California is suing six car manufacturers for global warming.

That isn't the kind of thing for which you can sue someone unless California has weirder laws than I thought. But it's certainly not something for which federal law has a remedy either.

You can certainly sue someone for violating emissions standards, but not global warming as such. It's just not a cognizable harm. You'd also have to prove that car manufacturers are the primary instruments of whatever harm you are trying to prove. Have fun with that.

Crim law hypotheticals

Here's a hypothetical Professor Dutile offered in crim law this morning.

Say you want to have someone killed. You go to a friend and say, "Here's a gun. Go kill that guy." Your friend, being the loyal type, agrees to.

Unbeknownst to you, your friend/flunky has a legally cognizable claim to self-defense and kills the target in self-defense.

Are you liable for murder?

Two theories:

A purely derivative theory would answer in the negative. As no murder has been committed, it's hard to hold you liable for it. No harm, no foul, as it were.

The majority position is that instead of a principal and an accomplice, you being an accomplice, there is but one actor: a principal acting through an innocent agent. In this case, you're going up river.

I love this stuff.

Constitutional crisis/military coup in Thailand

The Thai military has seized power from the government, revoking the constitution and declaring martial law. This does not seem to be a descent into dictatorship, at least not yet, as the military has declared their loyalty to the highly respected king (American born, oddly enough).

I'm not exactly sure of the immediate reasons/motivations, but it probably has something to do with the annuled election earlier this year. A timeline of events is available here.

The (former?) Prime Minister of Thailand has been accused of abuses of power, related at minimum to the sale of the national Thai telecommunications company to a Singapore outfit for a cool $1.9 billion. Tax-free.

This would go on a list of things-that-piss-people-off, unless I've missed my guess.

Mishra responds to Amis

A week after Martin Amis essay was published in the Guardian, Indian writer Pankaj Mishra had a response published in the same space.

What is most striking to me is that though he assails Amis and those like him - I would venture to include myself in those that tend to share Amis' perspective - for being impractical, short-sighted, moral-snobs, he doesn't actually critique the conclusion that suicide-mass-murder is perhaps the most extreme anti-civilizational act possible. He spends a lot of time saying that Iraq proves we forgot the lessons of Vietnam, and explains why the rise of Venezuela and Iran are so popular in the undeveloped world, but he doesn't do anything with terrorism. This, to me, suggests moral spinelessness, but no matter.

He actually describes radical Islamism as "an ideological chimera of their own making", referring to Western thinking-types. Though "blind force" may not be the correct response to whatever Islamism is, his suggestion that it is the creation of Western paranoiacs is short-sighted at best.

Here is a link to some excerpts from Saudi Arabian children's textbooks. Any culture that deliberately teaches "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as historical fact is not the kind of culture to which the term "reasonable" should be applied. They actually teach that the Rotary and Lions clubs are secretly Masonic and that Freemasonry is secretly Jewish. This is downright bizarre.

Here's a choice bit:

This religion arose through jihad and through jihad was its banner raised high. It is one of the noblest acts, which brings one closer to God, and one of the most magnificent acts of obedience to God.

This, dear reader, is mainstream educational material in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia isn't exactly the most extreme of nations - you have to go to Iran or Pakistan for that - and this is what is taught in the major schools, not smaller, private radical enclaves.

So I'm just being paranoid, am I? 100 million rioting over a speech made in an insignificant German city thousands of miles from the Middle East is just one of those things?

The Iraq war may have been botched and the 'War on Terror' may not be pragmatically useful, but don't tell me that we don't have an enemy here.

2-1

Okay, that didn't go very well. 47-21. And some of the sloppiest football ever. It was 26-7 before our first first-down.

Come on, guys.

Just too funny

I know there are troubling privacy and civil liberty implications of this, but I just find it hilarious. The temptation to abuse those things for personal humor must be unbearable.

"Hey you! Yeah, you in the suit with the hamburger. Put it down. Your ass clearly doesn't need it. That's right, I'm talking to you. Put down the burger. Now walk away. Slowly. Keep going..."

At this point the operator would have his co-worker run outside and grab a free lunch.

Eric Bachmann at Kraftbrau: Kalamazoo, MI

Drove up with some friends to catch the Eric Bachmann show at a brewery in Kalamazoo yesterday. Made for a late night, but it was worth it.

Bachmann has just released a new album, entitled "To the Races". Oddly enough, it's his first solo release, and he apparently wrote it whilst voluntarily living out of the back of his van in the Northwest and recorded it over a six-week period in the Outer Banks. Okay then.

The show included a decent number of the songs from the album, to which I am currently listening, and my first impressions are positive. I've been a fan of Bachmann's work for a while, and I think this is one of his better productions.

The show itself was quite enjoyable. We got to stand right up front, and the stage was only about two feet off the ground. The set consisted of Bachmann, Miranda Brown (who provided vocals for "To the Races") and a female violinist whose name I didn't catch. Some new stuff and a bunch of old Crooked Fingers favorites, ending with "Chumming the Ocean".

The set did seem a bit short though, lasting only an hour, tops. He seemed pretty tired, and as neither the venue nor the crowd was particularly loud, I suppose this is to be expected.

Definitely a good time.

Don't back down, Benedict

As protests continue to sweep the Muslim world in response to the Pope's most recent speech, he faces mounting pressure to recant his views and apologize.

He must not do this. Muslim leaders routinely slander Christians and Jews with impunity, but are so thin-skinned that global riots will be sparked over freaking cartoons.

We're looking at a culture with a collective maturity level of about twelve years old.

How do you send a billion people to bed without dessert?

Won't be doing that again

I went to a lunch session of the Federalist Society this afternoon. Probably won't be going back. The speaker, who maintains a relatively well-known blog to which I will not be linking, seemed to have a clear policy agenda barely concealed by a straw man.

Not the kind of thing on which I really want to spend a lot of time.

A similar thing happened at the ACLU introductory meeting I attended a few weeks ago. The immediate draw was a free lunch, but I thought it was at least listening to. Not really, as it turns out.

I'm sure there are groups around here who are really interested in procedure, but I'm not sure I've found one yet.

Peaceful people...

...don't riot in the streets when a religious figure criticizes them.

Accusing someone of bigotry for criticizing you is, well, bigoted.

Benedict needn't backpedal here. He quoted a seven-hundred year-old religious figure in a historical context. It's not his responsiblity that anyone goes apeshit as a result.

It also doesn't help that the 14th century pontiff may have been right, but...

Upgrades and stability

Last week, my computer started making more noise than usual. No big deal, I've got a few fans in there, one of them must be a bit loose, right?

Then, last weekend, the thing just shuts down by itself while I'm in the middle of something. This is suboptimal. I boot it back up, and it gets to the Windows loading screen before shutting down again.

Huh.

So I go to the BIOS and hey, the CPU temperature is at 59C. It gets to 60C and shuts down.

Great.

Crack the case, bust out a can of air, hope it's just dusty, and leave the case open for more ventilation.

Works for about two days before shutting down on me again.

Time go look into cooling solutions.

I started out with this:

your standard comes-in-the-box AMD CPU fan - note the aluminum construction - which upon removal turns out not to have been making great contact with the CPU due to poor application of thermal paste on the part of the shop I sent it to this spring.

Now I've got one of these:


, a Zalman CNPS7700-Cu.

Freaking thing weighs two pounds and has a 120mm fan. Now my CPU runs at about 30C. It's quieter too.

Much better.

Hobbes was an optimist

I'm currently rereading Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, persuant to what I hope will be a productive interaction with legal theory.

I'm starting to think that Hobbes is in need of a serious update. His description of the state of Nature is still apt (Do you think people are good? Do you lock your doors at night? What does that say about your previous answer?), but the way in which he gets out of there is perhaps a bit vulnerable to the collapse of Reason as a serious epistemic foundation. I really like his discussion of Power and Honor though. And if you want a really good laugh, read his chapter on Sense.

That being said, I think at root that he's really on to something. He certainly has no illusions about the nature of man, and even in the 17th century was insightful enough to assert that things depend more on perception than they do on essence. What I would ultimately like to do is link an essentially Hobbesian theory of the state with a thorough-going Christian perspective, and from there produce a concrete legal theory. I would like to come to many of the same conclusions that Richard Posner does, but I don't think I need to use Darwin to get there.

I'll probably keep throwing random thoughts up here as I go through this and other works foundational to my area of interest. We'll see what I come up with.

The Horror

I just finished Martin Amis' essay "The Age of Horrorism", published in the September 10 edition of Britain's Observer.

This is possibly the single most profound description of the Islamist beast that I have ever read. It should put an utter end to the inexcusable, unforgivable tendency to look at "suicide-mass murder" as in any way explained by the actions of the West in general or the US in particular.

Below are selected quotes from the essay, which should be required reading for all. All emphases are mine.

"Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion... Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason."

So we are not. We are dealing with a foe who spurns all application of reason. Though reason is deeply broken by our fallen state, it is still capable of producing good and useful answers. But more than half of Muslims worldwide do not believe that 9/11 was carried out by Arabs.

"[Quoting Peter Berman's Terror and Liberalism:] 'Ah, yes, the horrendous massacres of civilians caused by the so-called suicide terrorists... Horrendous, yes, doubtless; condemnable, yes, doubtless, but Israel still has a lot to learn if it is not capable of understanding the reasons that can bring a human being to turn himself into a bomb.'

"Palestinian society has channelled a good deal of thought and energy into the solemnisation of suicide-mass murder, a process which begins in kindergarten. Naturally, one would be reluctant to question the cloudless piety of the Palestinian mother who, having raised one suicide-mass murderer, expressed the wish that his younger brother would become a suicide-mass murderer too. But the time has come to cease to respect the quality of her 'rage' - to cease to marvel at the unhingeing rigour of Israeli oppression, and to start to marvel at the power of an entrenched and emulous ideology, and a cult of death. And if oppression is what we're interested in, then we should think of the oppression, not to mention the life-expectancy (and, God, what a life), of the younger brother. There will be much stopping and starting to do. It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog. It is painful to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last for ever.

Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence."

Maximum malevolence indeed. To be met with maximum loathing and maximum force.

"And this, on 25 July, was the considered response of the Mayor of London to the events of 7 July:

"'Given that they don't have jet planes, don't have tanks, they only have their bodies to use as weapons. In an unfair balance, that's what people use.'

"I remember a miserable little drip of a poem, c2002, that made exactly the same case. No, they don't have F-16s. Question: would the Mayor like them to have F-16s? And, no, their bodies are not what 'people' use. They are what Islamists use. And we should weigh, too, the spiritual paltriness of such martyrdoms. 'Martyr' means witness. The suicide-mass murderer witnesses nothing - and sacrifices nothing. He dies for vulgar and delusive gain. And on another level, too, the rationale for 'martyrdom operations' is a theological sophistry of the blackest cynicism. Its aim is simply the procurement of delivery systems."

I even largely agree with his assessment of the botched invasion of Iraq and the reasons behind our current administrations tragic miscalculations and mistakes. What makes this so tragic is not that the war didn't need to be fought but that it desperately needed to be won.

I have said it before, and doubtless I shall say it again: suicide-mass murder is perhaps the most exquisite expression of distilled evil that it is possible to conceive. The animals that do this are not men. They are not to be treated with dignity. They are not to be given any protections reserved for the civilized. They are not to be understood. They are not to be defended. They are not to be excused. They are to be killed as rapidly and as effectively as possible. Their motivations are utterly irrelevant and their actions must be opposed with maximum force and complete moral certitude.

When one hears of a suicide-mass murder one should not stop to evaluate the motivations and oppression that motivated the devil to do his work. The simple commission of the act should lead one to the immediate conclusion that this is a work that flies in the face of anything related to life, virtue, civilization, and humanity. If it does not so, your moral compass is quite possibly irretrievably broken. Any culture that cannot muster this response is dying or dead.

I've been sounding the "factory siren of disgust" for some time now and shall not stop doing so. This is repugnant on a visceral level, and I shall respond viscerally to it.

An attack on civilization

Christopher Hitchens has a phenomenal editorial in today's Wall Street Journal.

Money quote:

"At the moment, anyone who insists on the primacy of September 11, 2001, is very likely to be accused--not just overseas but in this country also--of making or at least of implying a "partisan" point. I debate with the "antiwar" types almost every day, either in print or on the air or on the podium, and I can tell you that they have been "war-weary" ever since the sun first set on the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the noble debris of United Airlines 93. These clever critics are waiting, some of them gleefully, for the moment that is not far off: the moment when the number of American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq will match or exceed the number of civilians of all nationalities who were slaughtered five years ago today. But to the bored, cynical neutrals, it also comes naturally to say that it is "the war" that has taken, and is taking, the lives of tens of thousands of other civilians. In other words, homicidal nihilism is produced only by the resistance to it! If these hacks were honest, and conceded the simple truth that it is the forces of the Taliban and of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that are conducting a Saturnalia of murder and destruction, they would have to hide their faces and admit that they were not "antiwar" at all."

Heroes of the Great War: the Knights of St. John

A bit of history for 9/11/06.

On Tuesday, September 11, 1565, the Knights of St. John, one of the last surviving orders of Crusaders, defeated invading Muslim Turks on the Island of Malta, denying the Turks supremacy over the Mediterranean Sea.

A relatively detailed account of the events can be found here.

2-0

That's better. A comfortable win over Penn State. With almost half of PSU's yardage occurring in the last ten or so minutes of the game, it's clear that either out of a desire to preserve his defense or give his opponant a chance to get some points on the board, Charlie Weis wasn't fielding his A game towards the end. We probably could have kept them to 41 to 3, or possibly 10.

Instead of watching the game I got two-thirds of my homework for the week done. Which is convenient, because Eric Bachmann is playing in Kalamazoo on Friday.

I'm not sure how we got here...

... but we're currently using roof badgers as a hypothetical in Torts.

Just trying to add a little but of surreality to everyone's day.

The EU finally gets the message

The message is that if you create a regulatory environment that is sufficiently hostile, companies will not want to do business with you. Microsoft is warning that the currently regulatory situation, for which they've been fined in excess of half a billion dollars, is likely to delay the introduction of Vista in Europe.

Microsoft says that unclear guidance from the EU on what kind of things they want are making it difficult to release a product. The EU, in one of the most ass-backwards pronouncements they've come to yet, says it isn't their responsibility to tell Microsoft how to be compliant, it's Microsoft's responsibility to be compliant.

Say what?

Apparently you're just supposed to kind of guess, and trust that the EU will tell you when you step out of line.

This does not sound like the kind of environment that I want to do business in, and apparently Microsoft is coming to the same conclusion.

Microsoft asserts, more or less accurately depending on just how excited the rest of the world is about Vista, that a delay or absence of Vista in Europe would put European companies at a global competative disadvantage. "This effectively means that the commission’s actions are endangering the ability of European business to compete globally," said Microsoft in their statement.

Maybe now the Eurocrats will finally understand that while you can't create business with regulations, you can almost certainly end it.

Trifecta complete

Now Mahmoud "I'm-batshit-crazy" Ahmadinejad is saying that we should "follow God's path", meaning convert to Islam.

According to His Lunacy, he threatens no one, but the "whole universe opposes you", meaning, well, us.

See, it's all our fault really. They're just over there having a grand old time, and if we'd just convert to Islam, we'd be okay too.

Right. And maybe pigs will fly out of his butt.

Actually, pigs being ceremonially unclean and all, that'd be pretty cool.

They win

Terrorists are now being granted prisoner-of-war status.

This means that they win. They get to use any tactics they want, but we're not allowed to use reasonable and proportionate force to stop them.

I, for one, welcome our new medieval, reactionary, sociopathic overlords.

Iran claims a cure for AIDS

Say what?

Hey, you. Come 'ere. No, closer. Listen, there's this really great real estate deal I'd like to tell you about. See, I've got this bridge...

1-0

Never really thought I'd be making a post on the subject, but it's kind of hard to avoid. It's pretty much what happens on Saturday nights, regardless of where the team is. Unless you fancy sitting in your room, you're going to be in some way watching the game or with people who are.

Notre Dame beat Georgia Tech in the first game of the season. It was a much closer game than it should have been (ND is #2, GT is unranked).

Next week is a home game versus Penn State. Looking forward to some of that. 80,000 people will descend on campus, briefly rendering it one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. Penn State's alumni program might not have quite the percentage of alumni participants as Notre Dame's, but Penn State has more freshmen than Notre Dame has students.