Science Friday

Bill Gates wants to make it easier to hire foreign nationals in the U.S. That's fine, some of my best friends are foreign nationals working in the U.S. What's upset a few people is Bill's statement implying that if you're any good in tech, you've got a job.

This morning, on NPR, Bill lamented the lack of science education in America, offering this as an explanation as to why we lack tech workers. Let's, for sake of this argument, take that at face value. We don't do adequate science education in the U.S.

My reaction, since I'm a knee-jerk liberal, is how could we do decent science education when we don't take science seriously?

NPR : Kitchen Equipment Secrets

NPR : Kitchen Equipment Secrets Just a post to remind me to read this later.

MPG

It's a bit hard to read, but my trip odometer is telling me that it's 37.5 miles from Coscto in Folsom. (i.e., my commute is about 36 miles one-way) and that for the past 37.5 miles I've averaged 51.8 miles per gallon.

We do stuff.

We do stuff.:

"huh? is an enclave of new-age e-movers. We use catchy names for our job titles, like Vision Guidance Leader instead of Consultant. Cool names make us sound smarter and more clever.

Our CEO is rarely in his office, and all female team members are expected to sleep with him, or at least pretend like they want to.
Our designers ride Razor scooters around the office, while wearing mail-bag style backpacks to hold their iPods"

Thanks Zeldman.

What if Gladys Kravitz was in charge of homeland security

From Boing Boing:

An airline passenger's MP3 player and three vials harmless herbal remedies led to an emergency landing at O'Hare International Airport, the evacuation of 74 passengers and crew and a search of the plane Tuesday by the Chicago Police bomb squad.
The United Airlines flight was headed from New York to San Francisco when a passenger told a flight attendant he saw another passenger with suspicious materials, United spokesman Jeff Green said.

For the youngsters in the group, Gladys Kravitz was the busybody neighbor in Bewitched. She's not the best metaphor for this post, because she was in fact seeing things that were a bit odd. But I like the imagry of a nosy neighbor. Let me know if you can propose a better metaphor....

iTunes - New (to me) Good Deal

Beach Boys. 30 songs, $12.99 - a great collection.

It was 30 years ago this week.

This week is the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, ending American involvement in the war du jour of my generation.

Don't you just love history.
Vietnam Yesterday & Today: Chronology of U.S. Vietnam Relations, Timeline: "1945: An OSS (Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA) team parachutes into Ho Chi Minh's jungle camp in northern Vietnam and saves Ho Chi Minh who is ill with malaria and other tropical diseases. " Hey, glad we could help.

For the record, I registered for the draft at a time when young men were still being assigned a number. According to this site, people weren't actually drafted after 1973. I came of age in 1974.

The way the draft worked in those days was that every day of the year was randomly selected concurrent with a random number between 1-365/366. So, pick a date, pick a number. Then, the selective service would draw upon those in the top X rank, depending on their needs. If they were calling the top 50, i.e. your birthdate was picked with the numbers 1-50, you'd get called up. If your birthdate was 51 or above, you were safe.

My number was 365. One of the few times the lottery has paid off for me. :-)

Update: My memory of the process was wrong. The process is correctly described (I assume) here.

The Pleasure of My Company

Google Print Search: The Pleasure of My Company

I started reading and didn't really get into it. Greg Shaffer gave me the 'book on tape' version and I listened to it this week. I'm glad I did and I'm glad Shafe gave me the book in this format.

The book starts slow and I wasn't really intending to finish. But listening to it in the car was painless and it wraps up rather sweetly.

All Mac All The Time

I was reading a blog wherein a fellow was lamenting the death of his Windows laptop and was thinking about a Mac and he asked for feedback. Nobody (out of 29 comments) tried to dissuade him from getting a Mac. The last comment is the best.

comments: "Two and half years ago I switched to a Powerbook G4 15' machine after >20 years as a DOS/Windows guy. I know these testimonials always sound like Jonestown transcripts, but I'll tell you this: I've never been more productive or creative in my life, and I think the hardware and software have played a significant role in that assessment.

Don't hesitate; just do it. Which Powerbook you choose is less important than discovering the liberation of OS X and all it enables.
Tom Guarriello - 4/21/05; 9:56:59 PM #"

Free as in Free Beer.

Amazon.com Free Music Downloads: Top Downloads

You can sample Yo La Tengo. Look for Sugarcube. One of my favorites from their new (to me) album.

It's complicated

It's complicated This kid (ok, young man) is vacationing in Iraq. And blogging it. Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Today's Word

is coruscating.

Whey Cool

Even Lilah's cottage cheese is hip.: "The cottage cheese container on the table has a picture of a cow on it, and it's reclining on a bed of grass thinking to itself, 'I did it my whey.'
"

Redneck's Having Triplets!

I'd like it noted in the permanent record, that I have officiated at four weddings. The first was for a co-worker when I was at CTSA, in Placer County. Sherie has kept in touch over the years and about five years ago, organized a reunion up in Auburn, which was fun.

I get jokes from her about once a month. This is the most recent:

Back in the woods, a redneck's wife went into labor in the middle of the night, and the doctor was called out to assist in the delivery. Since there was no electricity, the doctor handed the father-to-be a lantern and said, "Here, you hold this high so I can see what I'm doing." Soon, a baby boy was brought into the world. "Whoa there," said the doctor. "Don't be in a rush to put the lantern down. I think there's yet another one to come."
Sure enough, within minutes he had delivered a baby girl.
"No, no, don't be in a great hurry to be putting down that lantern ... It seems there's yet another one in there!" cried the doctor. The redneck scratched his head in bewilderment, and asked the doctor,

"Do you think it's the light that's attractin' 'em?"

Jimmy Crack Corn and I don't care.

Apple - Mac OS X - New Features

Apple - Mac OS X - New Features: Hundreds of new features. Coming to a store near you April 29.

Take that...

The British medical journal, "Lancet" will report that about 40% of U.S. Prisoners executed were quite possibly aware of and suffered during their execution.

The way it works is that the prisoner first gets a drug to anesthetize him, then a drug to paralyze him and then a drug to kill him. The problem is the anesthetic is sometimes insufficient.

BBC NEWS | Health | Prisoners 'aware' in executions: "They add: 'The absence of training and monitoring, and the remote administration of drugs, coupled with eyewitness reports of muscle responses during execution, suggest that the current practice for lethal injection for execution fails to meet veterinary standards.'"

Or, put another way, we wouldn't treat a dog this way.

Thanks to John for the head's up on the article.

Filiblustering

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town:

"The filibuster allows a minority within a legislative body to thwart the will of a majority. But that is hardly the worst of the Senate's democratic imperfections, most of which spring from the arithmetical disparity among state populations. Fifty-one senators - a majority - can represent states with as little as seventeen per cent of the American people. Sixty senators - enough to stop a filibuster - can represent as little as twenty-four per cent. That's theory. What about reality? Well, if each of every state's two senators is taken to represent half that state's population, then the Senate's fifty-five Republicans represent 131 million people, while its forty-four Democrats represent 161 million. Looked at another way, the present Senate is the product of three elections, those of 2000, 2002, and 2004. In those elections, the total vote for Democratic senatorial candidates, winning and losing, was 99.7 million; for Republicans it was 97.3 million. The forty-four-person Senate Democratic minority, therefore, represents a two-million-plus popular majority - a circumstance that, unless acres trump people, is at variance with common-sense notions of democracy. So Democrats, as democrats, need not feel too terribly guilty about engaging in a spot of filibustering from time to time."

Hendrik Hertzberg is one of my two favorite political writers these days. He goes on, in this article, to point out that the fillibuster has historically been used for fairly non-progressive goals - it slowed down anti-lynching laws and other civil rights legislation, for example.

Google Maps - 2009A Inglis Way,Roseville, CA

This is the first place Lilah and Molly lived.
Notice the proxmity to the rail yards? The Bee just ran an article about the increased cancer risk associated with that proximity. I'm glad we're gone. :-)

Insecticide

Rated: R.

And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty

Quoted in the Washington Post: "Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, 'upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.'"

And he has bad breath too.

But wait, it gets worse:

"Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said."

So, this is clearly the fringe (Phyllis Schlafly is quoted as well.) But the mainstream (and isn't it amazing that Tom Delay is the mainstream) isn't that far behind.

"After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to "engage in violence."

Pity the Poor Prince

Charles is atoning for the sins of rich, middle-aged men everywhere. By June Thomas: "In an age when preposterously coiffed tycoons engage in serial matrimony with ever younger and more beautiful partners, Charles is doing his bit to atone for the sins of rich, middle-aged men everywhere. He's making an honest woman of his age-appropriate partner, a woman with whom he is well-matched in looks, habits, and hobbies, whom he has known and loved for more than 30 years. Charles' mistake was to get his weddings out of order: He married his first wife second and his trophy wife first."

So, today is 'royals' day at the here and now. God bless her for making an honest man of the Prince.

Angels dancing on the head of pins

Princess Caroline's husband is ill.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Monaco royal taken seriously ill: "The prince holds joint British and German nationality.
He is the head of the house of Hanover which ruled the UK from 1714 to 1901, but by marrying Caroline - a Catholic - he removed himself from the line of succession to the British throne.
However, he remains the pretender to the throne of Hanover, which was an independent kingdom till 1866."

Does he put that sort of thing on his resumê?

Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip, uh-huh, uh-huh!

Sesame Street: 25 Of My Favorite Memories - Progressive Boink: "The Martians, oh, how I loved those constantly affirming
Martians. "

The girls were raised on Sesame Street. Unlike Barney, it had something for everyone. I liked Elmo, the early Elmo. (that's a joke to references to the early dylan, young, etc. that may be too obscure. I seem to specialize in obscure these days. But I digress.)

Of course, I'm one of the three adults in the world that thought Barney was ok specifically because it didn't try to pander to adults.

I.E., She's his wife.

According to the BBC, Tom Delay paid his wife and daughter $500,000 for campaign assistance.

""Mrs DeLay provides big picture, long-term strategic guidance and helps with personnel decisions," Mr DeLay's Americans for a Republican Majority committee (Armpac) said in a statement."

Thanks to John for the link.

Comments

I turned off comments. You got something to say? Start your own blog.

Lilah has the man on the run.

"Lilah: 1. : The Man: 84905872938457928347594786902843956759682576."

It's enough to make a father proud(er).

apartness

apartness
Zeldman and I chose the same template for our blogs. I'm soooo in touch with the web Zeitgeist. :-)

La Vida Robot

Wired 13.04: La Vida Robot: "How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship."

An article from Wired that sort of explains why I think everyone should have access to higher education and not just the elites.

That's not much of an issue for most Americans, I think. But to those still appreciative of the benefits of class, it might be.

This week

I'm at the house this week.

Tom "Cash and Carry" Delay

Josh Marshall: "When Democrats go corrupt, they betray their principles. And certainly it's happened enough times. With someone like DeLay, there are no principles to betray. It's just money and power from the git-go. And really that means just power. A cash-and-carry operation."

The iCopulate

Perfect for the iPod family in your life:

Features of the iCopulate™ include:

• Works with any second generation iPod® or later with a dock connector
  (will not work with the iPod Shuffle®)
  
• Transfer audio tracks and files directly, faster than real time
  
• Includes one 1.62 volt watch battery for up to 8 months of sustained iCopulation™
  
• Support for single track and album transfer, entire playlist transfer, or transfer of all songs and files on the device
  
• Unique, ribbed, Latex sleeve surrounding embedded electronics for enhanced iPod® safety and increased user comfort
  
• Includes one 8oz tube of non-toxic strawberry scented iLube™