Sage advice?

A fellow in my network is thinking about ditching engineering and going to work in a kitchen.

I started out at Burger King in high school. I did 18 months in fast food. Fry station, counter, drive-though, finally A-line. "Hold the pickles hold the lettuce..." - That was me. I was in the Flow. In the Zone. Hard work with a good team is a helluvalot of fun. ZipZapZoop - I cannot be fazed. I OWN this line.

Until someone yells, "TRUCK!" (That's the 18-wheeler with a week's worthe of supplies.)

I earned my keep in kitchens until about a year after I got my Master's.

In college, a buddy was the Grill God of the local Mickey D's. 80 hours/week, because he *would*. One afternoon (after a morning after the "night before"), he wailed, "The eggs were SMILING at me!!!"

He had a nightmare once: He was all alone in the store. Every beeper in the place was going off - the grill, the fries, the pies, the fish... A tornado passed overhead, ripping off the roof and drenching the lobby. He has to go grab a mop. Then a school bus pulls in...

You will sweat. You will dance. You might sing. You will get cut, burned, and bruised. You may get fired for telling your boss he's violating the health code, and bask in quiet satisfaction later when the place closes. You'll get sick of the smell of teriyaki sauce. You will be able to break four eggs, using two hands, in three seconds.

You will understand the following at a deep level:

1. Customer Service is Job 1.
2. Rotate the stock.
3. Clean as you go.
4. You can get LOT done in thirty seconds.

Finally, whatever you do later in life, you will be able to will look back at your time in the kitchen and say, "I've worked harder for less money."

Recalling the previous generation

My Dad served in the US Navy during WW2. He liked to say, "I served with Nimitz... (pause) ...along with a couple million other guys." He was an Electrician's Mate, tasked with servicing the radars and radar altimiters of the new night fighters such as the F6FN Hellcat and F7F Tigercat. Most of his time in service was spent in Florida. He never saw combat. (His older brothers and in-laws saw their share, though. One was a paratrooper at Normandy and The Bulge, another lost a finger to a Howitzer breech mechanism somewhere in France, another had several ships torpedoed out from under him in the Merchant Marine.) Dad had some good stories, though. Here's one:

Dad was training new F6F pilots (excuse me - Naval Aviators) how to use their radar altimiters.

He explained how the unit shot a radio pulse (traveling at the speed of light) down to the water's surface, and measured the time until the reflected pulse was received. The altimeter automatically converted the travel time of the radio pulse into altitude above the water. (The unit had a toggle switch that would set its sensitivity to +/-50 ft or +/-500 ft. Quite a few pilots died in training until it was realized that they'd left the switch at "+/-500" while flying below 100 feet. They figured it out after fishing a few of the birds out of the drink and noticing the switch position.)

During one training session, one hotshot Naval Aviator was lounging back and clearly not paying much attention. Dad said, "Hey - you don't think this is important?" The flyboy replied, "Man, I'm cruising at three hundred miles per hour. By the time your little ray-di-oh blip bounces off the water, I'm looong gone!"

Hello, Twits!

Thanks, Sue, for flogging my lil' segment of the Long Tail to your Twitter network.

I was astonished to realize that I've passed three years here. If you're curious about the name of the blog, the first post explains it.

I'm sure there's plenty in the archives that's cringe-worthy, looking back, so I won't. (I do like last month's "Geese" post, though.)

Note - many posts (especially from '04) offer up political opinion from the right side of the aisle. You Have Been Warned. :-)

So welcome, have a look around, drop me a comment if you like.

Remember the old Toyota commercial?

Note - this post is 90% content-free. It's not exactly "ad ipso factum moribuni garlactorium ibid" Greekign, but it's close.

I've lately gotten into Twitter, big-time. (I'm rapidy approaching my first KiloTweet.) Being the shameless attention-wh.. uh, self-promoter that I am, I Tweeted the fact that I'd updated SDDC a time or two. One of my TwitFriends (Hi, Sue!) graciously added me to her feed reader, and was then good enough to let me know (via Twit DM) that the feed was broken.

Being the not-nearly-as-technically-savvy-as-some-folk-take-me-to-be lazy person that I am, I took the low road and clicked the happy "Upgrade Now!" button in the Blogger dashboard.

Fortunately, that process broke a lot less than I feared, and gave me more new options than I expected. (A very rare upgrade, I must say!)

So I posted a couple of short notes, thinking that that might demonstrate whether or not the RSS feed was now working.

Note - I have not set up an RSS feed manually. I assume that Blogger has that built in, for those who want to subscribe to Blogger blogs. As I said, I'm lazy. Or maybe I just have a user-centered mindset - the application should do the hard stuff. Yeah, that's the ticket! I'm not lazy, I'm user-centered! w00t!

But apparently, the posts I'd posted weren't long enough to validate whether the RSS feeder was doing its thing. I needed a longer post. Great. It's the beginning of the semester. I'm swamped with faculty coming to me saying, "Hi. Can I have a Blackboard site for my class?" (This is not a Bad Thing, mind you. It just takes a fair amount of time.) And I need to post a long post.

So, for the benefit of Sue and anyone else needing to see if their RSS reader can pick up a freshly-updated Blogger site, here's a long post. You asked for it, you got it. (If I was less lazy, I'd find and link to an old Toyota commercial.)

Hello, Readers!

Wow. I knew that'd been promoted to Adorable Little Rodent from Flappy Bird in the TTLB Ecosystem, but I assumed that was because I'd started posting more. Until I added the FeedJit map, I had NO CLUE that I was getting traffic from anywhere.

I mean, no one hardly ever leaves a comment. hint... hint...

So I've upgraded

A few clicks, and I've blindly accepted whatever new coding schema the Google Overlords have cooked up. I was able to add a map of visitors to the site, though, and massage the layout without hand-coding the template html.

Will this make me a better blogger in 2008? Who knows? I still have to insert br tags by hand, it seems.

Observing the next generation

So the kids got Nintendo DSs for Christmas.

The DS is a handheld game/communication device that can communicate via wireless with any other DS in range, about 100 feet. You can share games, play together, and swap notes that include drawings via "PictoChat." It has two touch-sensitive screens, the usual game-controller buttons, and a microphone and speaker. Games come on cartridges that insert into a slot in the unit. It folds closed.

A few random observations...

When the boys play together, they are running around a futuristic landscape blowing up evil robots and shooting lightning bolts at each other. Sample conversation snippets: "Over there! Get 'im!" "Hey! Why'd you shoot me?!?!"
When the girls play together, they are training puppies. Sample conversation snippets: "Here, Daisy!" "Hey - she's drinking out of my dog's water dish!"
Gender differences? What gender differences?

Four kids in the back of the van, faces illuminated by a soft blue glow. They are racing cartoon go-karts against each other. Conversation snippets: "Hey! Who threw that banana?" "I got a King Mushroom!" "Balloon! I need a balloon!"

Making use of the affordances of the platform....

To train your puppy, you stroke its nose with the stylus, then speak a command and the dog's name. "Sit, Daisy!" After a number of trials, you can just say, "Sit, Daisy" and the little pup plops proudly down on his virtual derriere. Rub his nose vigorously and you can make him sneeze a little puppy sneeze. It's waaay cute.

In another game you face a monster that looks something like a giant yellow rubber rabbit, bouncing all over the place and threatening to squash you. However fearsome it may be, it actually is a very timid creature. If you yell at it, it runs away.

At one point in one of the games, you have acquired a talisman that must be placed into a niche in a door. Problem: The talisman is on one screen. The door is on the other screen. There's no way to drag it from one to the other. Solution: Close the unit, thus pressing the screens together and transferring the talisman to the other screen. (Darned clever, if you ask me.)

Why can't our educational tools be this interesting, inventive, and engaging? Of course, the DS is an educational tool. The kids are learning to solve their own problems, to find solutions from others, to share, to communicate, to figure it out on their own. They are also learning that if you give something away you can sell more of it.

(The preteen noted that the feature that lets you share games will result in more games being sold, since you'll want your own copy so you can save your progress.)

These are all valuable lessons that will serve them well throught their lives. Pity we can't measure them with a Scantron sheet.

I wrotez a poem

Actually, I don't write poems. They grab me by the throat and demand to be set down.

Last night was one such occasion:


Grade Crossing, Prairie, Night
Black box silhouettes hurtle across my path, invisible, from horizon to horizon
A million tons of treasure, trinkets, tabletops, marbles, alarm bells
Made in China (and its suburbs) for purchase in our own
A single light the only warning.

Peggy Noonan on "The Speech"

I love it when someone really smart agrees with me. It gives me hope that I'm not a total dunderhead. Peggy Noonan also thinks Romney did a very good job, and that he missed an opportunity in not reaching out to people of no faith.

"The Speech"

Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech.

Hewitt may be right. As a political event, Romney may have hit a grand slam given the attention given to it. Or not, if you read other's opinions.

IMO The Speech rates a B+, maybe an A-. It was a very good speech (though not quite Peggy Noonan quality), competently delivered. However, it fell short of Reagan's dulcet tones (and was unsettlingly reminiscent of W's choppy delivery - do I want to listen to that or to Rudy for the next eight years?).

He made no mention of non-Abrahamic worldviews. Buddhists and freethinkers may not be a large voting bloc, but the intelligentsia and media elite hold them in high esteem. A couple of sentences could have undercut paragraphs of criticism.

Minor verbal whoops such as "two century laters" show that he's human, at least.

It'll be interesting to watch the polls over the next few days as the spin works its way out to the folks who not only didn't live-blog it, but aren't quite sure who this Mitt Romney fellow is.

Geese

Geese fly in V formations.



This lets each goose (except the lead, of course) surf on the wingtip vortex generated by the goose ahead, reducing the amount of energy needed to stay aloft. The aerodynamics of wingtip vortices is well-understood. It's the reason that most modern airliners have "winglets" - those small vertical blades at the ends of their wings.


The winglets reduce the size of the vortex produced by the wingtip, and therefore reduce the drag.

Of course, geese don't have winglets - they're gonna create vortices. But as a group, they can work together. Like NASCAR drivers "drafting", geese maintain a precise relative position to take maximum aerodynamic advantage.


But did you ever notice that the V is almost always asymmetrical? One side is usually longer than the other. Turns out there's a precise mathematical reason for that, too.



















There's more geese on that side.

Fearfully and wonderfully made

TED | Talks | David Bolinsky: Fantastic voyage inside a cell.

This is all just emergent behavior. It all just arose by chance, by the random combining of molecules over millions of years. It has no purpose. No desgner, no creator, no engineer set it in motion.

It.
Just.
Happened.



Sure. Tell me another funny story.

UPDATED - Open Phone Tests versus Just Knowing It

Will Richardson (Weblogg-ed) starts the day with a thought-provoking post about a student who sends text messages with his phone in his pocket.

---------------------------------- UPDATE Challenged by Barry(16) in the comments thread at Weblogg-ed, I re-read the article. It does not in fact say that Insoo was texting during a test, only that he was texting *in class*. That's the equivalent of passing notes, and hardly a character issue on the level of cheating on an exam. Further, the full article notes that he wants a new phone, the price of which is doing well on his exams. I've edited this post accordingly. Sorry to impugn your character, Insoo. -----------------------------------

This raises all sorts of interesting questions, being battered about in the comments thread and on Twitter. "If they can find the answer on the Net (including their personal learning network of friends and trusted strangers), is the question worth asking?" and so forth.

These are good and valuable questions to batter about. But...

As Charles says in the comments on Will's post, unless the networking is somehow helping Insoo grasp the mathematical concepts, then he isn't learning math. He may be learning something, but it isn't what was assigned. And what was assigned, we may assume, is something that is of value to society. Kids are always whining, "Do I really have to know this?" Cheating - of any form - is that whine put into action. We can argue about the relevancy of the curriculum. And we should listen to our students so we can make it relevant. But they don't get to decide what they need to learn and what they can slough off.

Second, there needs to be a recognition that sometimes you Just Need To Know It. If I'm on an airplane and the engine catches fire, I don't want the pilot texting his Personal Learning Network for a solution. I want him to "Execute the Engine Fire Checklist from memory with no prompting in less than 30 seconds with 100% accuracy." (Thank you, Mr. Mager!)

There's no question that we educators - with help from our madly-connected 21st-century students - need to devise relevant, authentic learning activities that leverage the power of these new communications tools and paradigms.

But it's fair for us to expect that they'll learn what we ask them to.

Black Friday

Game Somethingerother with #1 son. He can not only keep a secret, but feign surprise and delight. Besides, I needed an SME to keep from buying the wrong thing.

Then, across town to meet the wife and younger three at the sports store. A recument bike has been on the watch list, as we both need to reverse the caloric input/output ratio. Sale price expires in ten minutes. Smart clerk sized us up instantly. ("Not in shape, reasons to live, able to pay.") The box was waiting at the door when I walked in. My airplane will have fewer buttons and controls.

The all-you-can-eat pizza place was *right there*, so...



Hey. I had a salad, and only one "seconds" trip on the pizza. Progess, not perfection, right?

Finally, Sears and JCPs with the Daughters looking for a suitable Christmas dress. 12 tried. One settled on, after I said, "Oh, well. Looks like we struck out. No, we're not doing Macy's. Let's go home." It looks FINE. Really.

Then today, "Enchanted" and "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium" followed by take-home pints from Hershey's Ice Cream.

All in all a very expensive weekend. And thank You, Big Guy, for making it possible. Feels okay to blow a bonus check on stuff for the fambly when you've already tithed on it. :-)

Digital Identities

"Glassbeed" has an interesting post about Kids and Digital Identities today.

I originally had several online IDs in order to keep professional, personal, and political commentary separate. I was concerned that prejudice about my personal views might color people's perceptions of my professional capabilities.

I quickly realized that it was far too much work to keep them totally separate. If someone takes a dim view of my professional contributions because they don't like the way I vote or worship, that's their problem.

Revealing comments

CNN.com - CNN Political Ticker Wrestler Ric Flair supporting Mike Huckabee «

Back many months ago I thought Huckabee had a shot at the national ticket. It's clear he's at best a second-tier candidate with regional appeal. (That *could* come in handy to balance Rudy, though.)

That "regional appeal" becomes more clear with his recent endorsements - Chuck Norris, Ted Nugent, and now a famous pro wrestler (whom I've never heard of, since the last time I watched "rasslin'" was when LBJ was President).

What's really revealing, though, is the reaction in the comments section at the CNN ticker site linked above. The hatred and bigotry that is expressed there is truly breathtaking.


But it isn't coming from the fans of Chuck, Ted, and the WWF.

New Technology Makes Aircraft More Crash-Resistant.

"The Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands will demonstrate how the application of Fault Tolerant Control can be used to keep damaged aircraft flying and improve their chances of being successfully recovered. "

It probably would not have helped in this case, though.

Amen, amen, and yea verily I say unto ye again, amen

Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed:

"At some point, I want one of the goals and outcomes for the students at my kids’ school system to be that they will graduate with the ability to build their own learning networks in effective, ethical and safe ways. But that will only happen when enough of the administrators and teachers understand that for themselves. Only then will they be able to help my kids add dots to their world maps in ways that teach them the power of networks in the ways we already know it."

emphasis added

I think we may have turned a corner...

...in the war of Radical Islamism against Western Civilization. Not only is there continued good news from Iraq (a "surge" division is going home) but the the enemy is fodder for ridicule. (Think "In Der Fuhrer's Face") Note - the second link above is NSW, non-PC, and potentially offensive. YHBW, YMMV, etc.

A parable for teachers

From the email inbox:

Once there was a king who decided to set aside a special day to honor his greatest subject. When the big day arrived, a large gathering took place in the palace courtyard and four finalists were brought forward.

The first person was a wealthy philanthropist. This man was deserving of the king's honor because of his great humanitarian efforts. He had given much of his wealth to the poor, building orphanages, schools and hospitals throughout the land. The second was a celebrated physician. This outstanding doctor was deserving of honor for rendering his faithful and dedicated service to the sick for many years and discovering medicines that saved many lives. The third was a distinguished judge. He was noted for his wisdom, his fairness and his many a brilliant decision.

The last person presented before the king was an elderly woman. Her manner was quite humble, as was her dress. She hardly looked the part of someone who would be honored as the greatest subject in the kingdom. What chance could she possibly have, when compared to the other three, who had accomplished so very much?

The king was intrigued, to say the least and was somewhat puzzled by her presence. He asked who she was. Then the answer came: "Well, my king, do you see the philanthropist, the doctor, and the judge over here? She was their teacher!"

A large hmmm factor

What happens when you take public dataset A, merge it with public dataset B, and make the results public - and easy to use?

Betchablog has links and commentary.

A human in the loop

Astronauts fix ripped solar wing

Sometimes, there's just no substitute for real "hands-on" problem-solving.

We have become masters of automation. Since the beginning of the Industrial Age, it's been all about faster and cheaper. Since people are slow and expensive (especially in space) that means getting people out of the loop. The more we can turn the work over to the machines, the more work can get done.

Until something goes worgn.

Machines are far better than people at performing pre-programmed tasks with precision. Star Wars - the 1977 pre-digital-effects original (a purist, I refuse to call it Episode IV) - could not have been made with human camera operators. But when the machines break down (as they always do), people must step in to fix it.

It's the same with learning. We can design all sorts of systems that automatically mold themselves to the student. We can create algorthims to diagnose and adapt to a specific "learning style", or anticipate a learner's probable errors and stand ready with remediation at an atomic level of detail.

But there will always come a point when a student steps off the design document.

It doesn't happen with every student, but a dollar gets you a doughnut it happens with every "automated instruction system" if it has enough users. Eventually, a student comes up with a question the designer didn't anticpate.

As the old pre-PC "Little Rascals"put it, "Now what, Buckwheat?"

But if we can put a human being back into the loop - someone who can interpret the lost look, the six-days-without-logging-in pattern, the forum post that is so clearly off-track - then we don't have to analyze the content to death.

Just build an additional component into the sysem: a teacher, a tutor, a peer mentor. (If you call them "a network of organic, analog feedback devices" you might even be able to get grant money to pay them.)

This is why we have a human in the loop

Doctor to fix space station's torn wing - Yahoo! News

Willow Creek

A Shocking “Confession” from Willow Creek Community Church

Willow Creek has been at the forefront of the "seeker friendly" movement in the Evangelical Christian world. Offer lots of social services, upbeat music, stay away from the fire and brimstone, and you'll pack 'em in. Apparently they decided to do an internal study and found that while the church was growing, the people weren't.

An update on Thunder

Aimlessly looking at back links (it's a slow day), I recalled the Green Pea incident described here. I thought my legions of faithful readers might appreciate an update. Thunder died a couple of months ago. The tank sits empty, the pump stilled.

Useful web 2.0 links

From a Sloan-C workshop (yes, I know it's a mess) Burks'/Ray's 20 Top Web 2.0 Applications for Education Below are links to 20 top, stable Web 2.0 applications that are widely-used in higher education. Please take a look at any of these that you have not previously used. Blog http://blogger.com Wiki http://pbwiki.com Podomatic http://www.podomatic.com Flickr http://www.flickr.com Google Docs http://docs.google.com Google Calendar http://www.google.com/calendar/ GooglePages http://googlepages.com Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us MySpace http://www.myspace.com Citizendium http://www.citizendium.org YouTube http://www.youtube.com Gliffy http://gliffy.com/ Skype http://www.skype.com Kartoo http://www.kartoo.com Elluminate Vroom http://www.elluminate.com/vroom/ Second Life http://www.secondlife.com Odeo http://www.odeo.com Digg http://www.digg.com Xdrive http://www.xdrive.com zoho http://zoho.com/ Webware 100 - "the best 100 Web 2.0 sites" Here are links to many more top Web 2.0 applications identified by CNet as being among the top 100 Web 2.0 sites online. You are encouraged to explore these as well: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100.html Links and brief descriptions of the finalists by category: Browsing finalists: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/browsing_info.html Communication finalists: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/communication_info.html Community finalists: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/community_info.html Data finalists: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/data_info.html Media finalists: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/media_info.html Mobile finalists: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/mobile_info.html Productivity finalists: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/productivity_info.html Publishing finalists: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/publishing_info.html Reference finalists: http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2007/reference_info.html

Now I don't feel so bad about the ALCS

Sox 13, Rockies 1

California is Burning

Hundreds of homes in flames, half a million people evacuated.

How long until someone blames this on George Bush?

Age of Wonders

In the film "Master and Commander," 19th-century British sea captain Jack Aubry is handed a wooden model of a new warship. He examines it carefully, noting its many innovative features. Finally he sets it down, saying, "What an age of wonders we live in."

If he had only known what was just over the horizon.
Since the Renaissance, every age has been an Age of Wonders, it seems. The colonies of the New World had limitless wealth. The Enlightenment promised a new dawn of scientific understanding. Steam would provide inexhaustible power. The telegraph allowed messages to be sent thousands of miles. Bell's telephone transmitted the human voice over a wire. In 1900, the Patent Office concluded that everything that could be invented, had been.

But more wonders were yet to come. As the new century dawned, Thomas Edison was working tirelessly to find a way to produce light with electricity. Henry Ford was realizing that an automobile could be built cheaply if the work was broken down to the smallest task. And in Ohio, two brothers were building a machine that could fly.

Within only fifty years, the electric light, the automobile, and the airplane had totally transformed society. By the end of World War II it was hard to imagine life without them.

Not long afterward, my father went to work for International Business Machines. He was initially set to work repairing price-calculating grocer's scales - the core of the business. Within a few years he was assigned to a new area called "data processing". Engineers had created an experimental calculating machine twice the size of anything previously attempted, with 40,000 characters of memory. It cost millions, and filled a large room.

In the mid-1950's, the most powerful computer in the world had 39k of memory.

Just a few decades later, Seymour Cray was building supercomputers. They were the size of refrigerators and orders of magnitude faster than anything else on the planet. They didn't have cooling fans - they had radiators. Researchers waited for months to get a few seconds of precious time on the mammoth machines.

Today, my kids' Playstation 2 has more processing power than any Cray ever had. For the price of lunch you can put 2 gigabytes of storage on a keychain: 20,000 of the room-sized machines my dad worked on, the size of a pack of gum. For less than $150, you can buy a 500 Gb hard drive. That's 200 billion pages of text - 33,000 college libraries. It's the size of a paperback book.

We're connected in ways Captain Aubrey could never have imagined. You can shoot video with a cell phone, upload it to YouTube, and it can instantly be viewed by millions of people, worldwide. If you have a question - any question - "just Google it" and you will likely get an answer in moments. If you like a song, you can buy it for a buck on iTunes (or steal it elsewhere). You can look up anything at all on Wikipedia, a reference thousands of times larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica - and change it yourself if you spot an error.

Welcome to the 21st century. Everything is different, now, isn't it?

Well, yes and no. True, people today seem to live in a cloud of constant sensory input, resulting in what one writer called, "continuous partial attention." Many of our students can't imagine living without computers, portable music players, game systems, and the like. Others have only heard about these wonders, and worry about what they're missing.

For those of us who teach (and who directly support the teachers), this is a huge challenge. Many of our students know far more than we do about the new tools and toys. Others struggle with basic skills most of us mastered years ago. Every semester faculty come to me and say, "Please get me set up with Blackboard. My students say I need to use it."

But in truth, the technology doesn't matter all that much. Regardless of the tools they use, people are still people. We all have the same basic human needs: for food and shelter, for security, for love and belonging, for esteem, for self-actualization. Under the iPod and Razr, behind the email or discussion board post, is a human being with the same fundamental needs as his or her great-great grandparents.

They just meet those needs in different ways, that's all. iTunes is not so very different than the traveling minstrel of Chaucer's time. It just has a larger repertoire.

A tool is merely a set of affordances and constraints - stuff it lets you do easily, and stuff it makes it hard to do. That applies to tools used for teaching, too. You can teach in the 3D simulated world of Second Life, where people can fly and a student may appear as an alien with an orange mohawk (ok, bad example - that can show up on campus, too). But you also can teach while sitting on a log and using your finger to draw in the dirt (hey - digital interactive multimedia!)

Drawing in the dirt is a quick and easy way to show something - to a person who's there with you. Teaching online lets you bring in all sorts of resources and frees the student from having to be in a certain place at a certain time - but you lose eye contact and facial expressions. Is that good? Is it bad?

Neither. It's just different.

You can't replicate a classroom online. Don't try. You can only work to replicate the results of the classroom. That's the most fun part of my job - helping faculty figure out how to use these new tools to get the same (or sometimes, better) results. Of course, the capabilities of the tools keep changing, and new tools keep appearing. (Some of them are so new we don't know how to really use them well.) We often feel like hamsters on a wheel that's spinning faster than we can run. But we keep up as best we can with what's going on "out there." We try new things. Sometimes they work better than we'd planned. Sometimes they crash and burn. We pick up the pieces, learn from the experience, and try, try again. We have to, if we want to prepare our students for the next Age of Wonders.

It's just over the horizon.

My ride on a B-17

Our little local airshow had never had a website. I made one for this year's show. (www.usaviationmuseum.com) It's gotten a fair amount of traffic, even after the show. (I concocted a photo contest to drive traffic after the show and reinforce the experience.)

During the show I work the flightline. (I get to tell pilots where to go, hee hee.) So Friday midday I'm out on the ramp, sweating and getting sore feet and a sunburn. (Hey, at least I don't have to pay for the priviledge.) Actually, it's a very nice day. A few clouds, a breeze, high 70s and severe clear. VERY nice day.

Around 2:20 the show boss called me over and asked, "What are you doing at 2:45 today?" I replied, "Whatever you want." (Of course.) Pointing to the fully restored B-17 Flying Fortress behind her, she said, "Be on that plane."

I replied, "Yes, ma'am!" (Of course.)

I signed the waiver, got my ID sticker. Went over to the flightline chief and told him that I'd been assigned to "special duty" until the '17 landed. He smiled a bit and nodded. He got a ride last year.

I waited, waited some more, then we were assembled and briefed by the flight engineer. "You have to stay seated until the wheels are up. Then you can move around at will, go up front to the bombardier's station, whatever, except for the tail and ball turret."

We boarded and strapped in. I was in the radio compartment. They opened up the "skylight" so we didn't bake.

There's a very loud, somewhat unpleasant screetchy sound, sort of like what you hear on an Airbus 320 when it's about to start its engines. I assume it's an hydraulic pump.

I'm on the starboard side, with a glimpse out a tiny window. I can see a LOT of rivets on the right wing and the #3 engine (inboard right side) That's the one that starts first. The prop starts turning. 14 blades, then a cough, grumble, roar. #4 turns, starts. #1, #2. All four engines are now idling, each consuming 20 gallons per hour of $5/gal avgas. A penny per second, just to sit there with the motors running.

The whole airframe shakes with suppressed power. This is no Walter Mitty pocketa-pocketa fantasy. This is a serious machine built for a serious purpose - to defeat a serious and determined enemy.

The sound increases and we start to move. The brakes squeal. From my seat I can look forward and see the ground through the open bomb bay doors. More loud sound, and the bomb bay doors close.

We taxi for a long time. The airfield has no parallel taxiway, so you back-taxi down the active runway to a turnaround at the end. No control tower, and the airport is open, so it's up to the pilots in the pattern to talk to each other in order to avoid... unpleasantness. You can imagine the radio calls: "Lost Nation traffic, Cessna Three Four Bravo five miles south, inbound for Two Eight, Lost Nation." "Three Four Bravo, be advised, a B-17 is back-taxiing on Two Eight." "Three Four Bravo, we'll extend."

We complete the slow turn - the taxiway is barely wider than the our gear - and take the active runway. The engines rev up to takeoff power.

The airplane had been quivering at idle and taxiing, like a dog eager for the owner to loose the leash. Now the leash is off, and the animal leaps forward. The acceleration isn't the shove-you-back-in-your-seat thrill of a sports car. It's not the relentless, smooth press of a commercial jet meeting a schedule.

It's more *purposeful* somehow. We have a war to win, I think. Thousands of people back home have labored to build this machine so that we can use it stop Hitler and end this damned war. I don't imagine what it must be like to feel that, I actually feel it. It's a fleeting moment, but a real and powerful one.

We lift off easily at our light weight, and I think of what it must have been like to know you were thousands of pounds over gross, willing the wing to lift, not being able to see forward but knowing that this. takeoff. is. taking. a. really. long. time...

We climb out straight ahead. I can see out the sliver of window a local landmark near my house. We must be nearly directly overhead, at less than a thousand feet. A phone call while waiting to start engines had alerted the home crew. They were outside and waving as we flew overhead, they tell me later. I might have seen them if the bomb bay doors had been open.

The gear is up, and we get the word (ok, a hand wave and a nod) that we can unstrap and move around.

I realize quickly (with much gratitude) that a pudgy out-of-shape 45-year-old has about the same dimensions and flexibility as a skinny nineteen-year old in a sheepskin flight suit. We squeeze past each other, grin madly, take turns at the waist guns. badda-baada-baddabadda! ("Yah, Sven, dere vas Fokkers above, Fokkers below, Fokkers to da left and right. And alla dem fokkers vas Messerschmits!").

Yeah, funny. But holding the waist gun, looking out the window, hunched over peering through a ring sight... I've seen the films. "Dem Messerchmits" are small targets, moving fast, and they are trying to kill you. The '17's skin is thin. The helmet and flak jacket don't cover everthing.

The moment passes.

This was a media flight. A local reporter was on board, with a camera ship flying in formation to get some shots with downtown or the lake in the background.

Also in formation, a pair of P-51 scale replicas. 3/4 the size of the real thing, and 1/20 the cost.

The crew had removed the "sunroof" - the large clear panel over the radio room. We could (carefully) look out this large opening and have a perfectly clear view of the tail and the sky all around.

I take off my hat, hold onto my glasses, and look back at the tail and the lakeshore below. Holding station at five o'clock high and seven o'clock high are a pair of P-51s.

I know it's 2007. I know those are scale replicas, not the real thing. But for some reason, standing in a B-17, looking out at a pair of P-51s, I feel... protected.

We pass over the lakefront downtown airport, LOW, and hit the airshow smoke on #2. Someone downtown calls 911 thinking we're on fire.

We climb and turn, and I have a magnificent view of downtown and the lakeshore out the open hatch. I make my way forward, squeezing through the bomb bay catwalk to the flight deck. The three-man crew is all cool professionalism in their flight suits. There's a GPS moving map attached to the panel. I try to ignore it.

I squeeze down between the pilots' seats to the nose compartment. I imagine peering through those little windows on the side, trying to spot the enemy fighters. I imagine deadly black flowers of flak blossoming outside the big clear bubble at the very front. Nothing you can do but hope they miss. Bombardiers and navigators suffered the highest casualty rates.

I make my way back to the engineer's station - we're minutes from landing, now. But I pop up into the top turret one more time, look towards the shore, and I can see my house. I wave, knowing the kids can't see me.

We take our seats and strap in for landing. I'm wedged into the radio compartment again. A long, low final approach - the airport neighbors who hate airplanes must be LOVING this! - we cross the threshold, three quick screetches and we're rolling.

Taxing in and shutting down is anticlimactic. As the props stop, I once again think of the kids, now old men, who took this airplane into harm's way. They had no idea that their sacrifice would ensure that my kids would grow up in freedom. They just wanted to get the job done.

I look at the guy across from me and say, "Twenty-four more, and we can go home."

The Ratings Always Drop Twice

I'm not normally a big fan of noir, but this satire from Iowqahawk is rich.

Note - if you don't get the inside jokes, you obviously don't read the center-right blogs. He left out a few folks, but the "Jimmy Fargo" and "Dragon Lady" references are classic.

Thunderstruck

Watch this video: Duty In The Desert: "Green Light"

Now consider this: The men who do this, volunteer to do it. Not only that, they compete for the honor of being allowed to do it.

And when they hit the ground, they are armed to the teeth, ready to move out in minutes, and spoiling for a fight.

I'm glad they're on our side.

Blue Löbster Cult

Rare blue lobster avoids the cooker

Or maybe the Lobster Blues?

Gimme twelve bars in A, boys, 1, 2, 3, and...

I'm mindin' my bus'ness, looking for a bit o' food.
Jess mindin' my bus'ness, looking for a bit o' food.
See a funny cave, lawdy boy don' it smell good.

I goes inside, it's crowded as it might be.
I goes inside, it's crowded as it might be.
Tries to leave, done made a fool o' me.


Got dem los' mah freedom, headed fo' da steampot blues....

The new culture of death

More Americans support doctor-precribed poison than not:

The new AP-Ipsos poll asked whether it should be legal for doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to help terminally ill patients end their own lives — a practice currently allowed in Oregon but in no other states. Forty-eight percent said it should be legal; 44 percent said it should be illegal.

The incessant "right to die" drumbeat of the past few decades has been successful, it seems. What's next? one wonders.

Something to ponder over a tasty soylent cracker, eh?

Are you an Information Omnivore?

Pew Research has a new study out on how people use information and communication technology.



You can take an online survey to see where you fit on the spectrum. (FWIW I'm a "Connector", second from the top tier, "Omnivores".)

Here's a direct link to the PDF version of the full report.

"It's quite interesting, and a little disturbing," she said.

If you read the little thin-paper inserts that come with your prescription meds, you'll often find a discussion of "bioavailability." That's the percentage of the drug that actually gets into your bloodstream and does you good.

Ever wonder what happens to the rest?

Apropos of nothing...

Gas

I had to return a library video ("The Matrix") today. I forgot to drop it off on the way to work. I had to work late, so I thought I'd run out after the regular work day and before my evening teaching and drop it off. I HATE being late returning videos, since the library charges a dollar a day.

But first I had to get gas, since the "Fuel It or Push It" light was on.

$3.19 a gallon.

My car gets about 15 mpg. It now costs me about a dollar to drive five miles.

It was cheaper to pay the fine than drive the round-trip to the library.

I dropped the DVD in the after-hours box on the way home.




An early Father's Day tale?

A moment of silence, please. Leo the goldfish has died.

Leo was a good fish, well-loved by my older daughter. He enjoyed blowing bubbles and swimming briskly. He didn't let Thunder, his larger tankmate, bully him out of his share of fish flakes.

We don't know what killed Leo. He turned up missing yesterday morning, and a search of the tank eventually turned up his remains down among the gravel. Thunder, the larger fish belonging to my youngest son, was still swimming. (Note - Thunder is not a suspect in Leo's demise. Goldfish die, and they decay quickly. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

So last night I cleaned the tank, thoroughly. I transferred Thunder to a bowl of freshly-filtered water while I boiled the gravel and scrubbed the tank.

But Thunder wasn't looking so good, himself. He was listless, tending to float tail-up. I don't know much about goldfish, but even I could tell that Something Was Not Right with Thunder.

How did we cope before Google? Thunder very likely had swim bladder disease. The cure: Green peas. Yes, green peas are apparently a miracle food for goldfish. Post after post on fish-fan message boards extoll the life-bestowing, heath-restoring virtues of green peas. Green Peas, the Legume of Life.

Chicken soup for goldfish.

So after I reassembled and refilled the tank, and poured the ailing Thunder out of the bowl back into his home, I searched the freezer for a bag of green peas. No luck. The pantry? Success! But since they were far too large for little Thunder to injest, I peeled them open in the hopes that the listless little fish would ingest some of the green miracle mush inside.

Please bear in mind that Thunder is not a fancy mutant goldfish. He's not a lionhead, koi or waikin. He doesn't have flowing fins three times his body length. His eyes do not pop out like marbles. He's a ten-cent carnival prize. A miniature carp. He lives in a ten-dollar tank and eats cheap fish flakes. A grade-schooler's first pet.

But there I was, peeling canned green peas at two in the morning, trying to save him.


Most folks would call me crazy. But Dads understand.



Oh - this morning Thunder looked much better. Maybe there's something to peas after all.

I wouldn't use 'em , myself

Headline: Freight train with shuttle parts derails.

Reminder to NASA brass considering using those booster segments: Apollo 13's O2 tank was dropped about six inches.

Why I love country music

In case you don't recognize him, the speaker is Jeff "You might be a redneck if..." Foxworthy.

(Disclaimer: I was raised up on both kinds of music: Country, and Western.)

Jesus' Last Parable

"My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?"

It is no accident that Jesus quoted Psalm 22 as he was dying. It gives us an important clue about what really happened on the Cross.

You see, the Crucifixion was Jesus' final parable. While Jesus' agony was horrible, how could a few hours of suffering - even scourging and crucifixion - possibly begin to atone for the sins of billions? The simple answer is, it could not, and it did not.

John tells us, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning." Since before time began, Jesus and the Father had shared the closest possible communication. Their father-son bond is the envy of every parent, every child. When Jesus prayed, he always referred to God as his Father. And he prayed out loud mostly for the benefit of his disciples, because he knew that God the Father already knew his heart and mind.

When Jesus was in anguish in the Garden after the Last Supper, he cried out, "Daddy, is there any other way?"

But there *was* no other way. If there had been, would God have sent his beloved Son to the cross?

But the physical agony of the cross was only a shadow of reality. You see, as Jesus hung there in excruciating pain - beaten, bloody, mocked, reviled, humiliated, and rejected by men, "he who knew no sin *became* sin."

His chest heaving in its final spasms, Jesus looked up to His Father.

And God, the Holy One, eternally, perfectly Just and Righteous, looked down.

He did *not* see his perfect, kind, gentle, loving Son, the one in whom He was well pleased. He did *not* see the obedient child who had scampered about Joseph's workshop. He did *not* see the eager student questioning the teachers in the Temple. He did *not* see the gentle healer who gave sight to the blind, made lepers clean, and made the lame walk.

God looked down at Jesus on the Cross and saw only sin.

He saw every sin I have ever committed. Every sin you have ever committed. Every sin ever committed by every person who has ever - or who will ever - put their faith in Christ. He saw hate and anger and murder and lies and deceit and slander and sloth and lust and gluttony and envy and adultery and covetousness and idolatry.

God looked down at Sin, and turned away in disgust.

And Jesus, for the first time in all eternity, was utterly Alone. As that terrible emptiness, the full weight of God's wrath fell on him, is it any wonder that he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

And then he said, "It is finished," because it *was* finished. There was nothing left to do but die.

So that He could rise again...

White House Involved In New Scandal

White House Involved In New Scandal

This is MY President!

h/t Hugh

Peace of Mind

The Heavenly Chorus just gained a new lead. I've got the vinyl Boston LP I bought with my high school Burger King earnings on the turntable right now. I never could cover Boston. The rhythm parts are pretty easy, and the lead parts aren't all that challenging if you have the Tom Sholtz-designed RockMan (or can dial in a close-enough balance of gain, distortion and chorus). I've even got a decent tenor most days. (With a chest cold, a passable baritone.) But Bradley Delp sang on a completely different plane.

Yum!

New ice cream named for Stephen Colbert

I'm not a Colbert fan, since I don't watch much TV. And I'm not going to get into the liberal bias of the media here. But vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and caramel?

Yum.

And hey - they could have included three kinds of nuts, but didn't. So props to that.





Ok, look. I'm over 40. Vanilla IS a flavor.

Yum!

New ice cream named for Stephen Colbert

I'm not a Colbert fan, since I don't watch much TV. And I'm not going to get into the liberal bias of the media here. But vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and caramel?

Yum.

And hey - they could have included three kinds of nuts, but didn't. So props to that.





Ok, look. I'm over 40. Vanilla IS a flavor.

Gar - this is just getting SO tedious...

The MS Sslams our soldiers. again. I don't want to spend much to much time on this, but, dangit, it's going to get MSM play despite the fact that it warrants zero attention. The article claims that the military is lowering its standards, wasting no time to get in an editorial jab.

"The Army and Marine Corps are letting in more recruits with criminal records, including some with felony convictions, reflecting the increased pressure of five years of war and its mounting casualties. "

Emphasis added. I'll let you read the article and see for yourself how slanted it is, but here's a sample:

"The Army granted more than double the number of waivers for felonies and misdemeanors in 2006 than it did in 2003."

More than double? Double what? Compared to what? Can we have some real numbers, please? In statgeekspeak, "What's the n"? In MSMspeak, "What's the data, Kenneth"?

Ah, but.

Read down TEN paragraphs to see who instigated this kerfuffle. It's Aaron Belkin, director of the Michael D. Palm center, which Google reveals as a "think tank" apparently dedicated to opposing the (Clinton-era) "don't-ask-don't-tell" US military policy on in-the-ranks homosexuality.

I guess that it's a Bad Thing to let kids who've had a brush with the law volunteer to risk getting their butts blown off, while at the same time...

Nope. Not gonna say it.

Wouldn't be prudent.

A day late and a dollar short, as usual

Click the link above and listen.

Oh-ay. Did that?
Good. Now, I know, it's Far Too Late (i.e., > 30 seconds) for me to have any effect on that particular conversation, but...

1. I LIKE Barney, hokay? Barney is Nice (as opposed to Niiice). You grok the difference, eh?
2. I learned some really useful stuff from a wannabe ethnomusicologist. So I got no gripes on dem, yaknow? Hokay.
3. I put a World Music course online, an' it seems t'be doing reasonably well.
4. Zither an'bone flute, hit can work, maann...

But.

Still.

Sometimes music needs to be used as a weapon of mass irritation.

Ask me about Pete and the laundry, hokay?

Da Game... eh, well, da Halftime Show, eh?

SERIOUS PROPS to the behind-the-scenes folks who made it possible for The Nameless One to play LIVE in pouring rain!!
His unspoken yet obviously heartfelt tribute to Dylan and Jimi... Well done.

Next year, and every year until 2010, some fifty-odd Sociology 202 students will write about how at SB41 a black guitarist paid musical tribute to an amazing black guitarist at the halftime show where for the first time two black head coaches squared off...

And in another thirty years kids will come across that and think, "Huh? What's the deal with skin color?"

And in 2047 someone will actually get a Ph.D. based on whether Prince did or did not play a Chuck Berry lick in his halftime show.

The cost of lessons

Hrmphf.

I'm in a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, I thoroughly disagree with folks on the left who want America to lose in Iraq so that we will "learn a lesson."

On the other hand, I agree that the spineless, feckless, craven Senators who put their personal political fortunes above victory need to be taught a lesson.

It seems a bit... inconsistent, non?. But is there a difference?

Yes. It has to do with intentions, consequences and outcomes. If several Senators come up short in their fundraising and therefore lose their races in '08, they will probably lose to pro-victory GOP primary opponents. Depending on whether the electorate at large wants victory, the general election will go to either a pro-victory or pro-retreat candidate. If the electorate wants retreat, then the incumbents will defeat their pro-victory primary opponents anyway.

If, however, these Senators notice The Pledge and grow some backbone, then victory is more likely (though not assured, given the pro-defeat media).

The Pledge signers don't want these Senators to lose per se, we want them to support victory. That's the lesson we want them to learn, and soon.

The "lesson" that the Left wants America to learn requires that we first be defeated and humiliated. In the process, the Middle East will become exponentially more unstable, with a failed-state Iraq becoming a training ground for Iranian-backed terrorists, likely war between Turkey and a new Kurdistan (putting NATO in quite a conundrum), and the Saudis and Israelis perhaps being forced to engage Iran militarily.

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions will die.

Persian Gulf oil production and transport will plummet, sending prices skyrocketing and ushering in a worldwide economic crisis.

But the Left doesn't care about any of those things so long as the US "learns a lesson."

Yes, that's the point.

While buying a stereo system component, James Lileks observed: "A manager had to be called to cancel the transaction, and as the fellow deftly entered in a series of codes I wondered how many skills exist today that cannot be transferred from one job to another. Once upon a time, you made barrels for one guy, you could make barrels for another. But the moment you leave BestBuy, your knowledge of their point-of-sale codes is useless. You can transfer the ability to learn, but not the thing you actually learned. In the end it’s your ability to master the system that’s the skill, I suppose. " (Emphasis added.)

Yes, exactly.

Somebody explain this to me, please

The senate unanimously confirms General Petraus as the new U.S. commander in Iraq. During his confirmation hearings he told them in no uncertain terms that a lack of resolve will only strengthen and encourage the enemy.

And at the same time Senators are scrambling to get on record as opposing the strategy that General Petraus will implement.

The collective cognitive dissonance in the Capitol is astounding.

The Pledge

I say this as one who grew up when Nixon was President. My father supported him. I was skeptical. In college, I opposed Reagan. Later, I volunteered for Paul Wellstone.

The pendulum swings. Read the archives, and you'll know that I these days support a President who is not at all like Carter or Clinton. Read between the lines, and you might guess (correctly) that I support the "surge." In the last election, I held my nose and supported the GOP.

The pendulum swings.

The Pledge.

It's simple.

If you're a Republican Senator running for re-election in '08, and you support the craven, defeatist, dare-I-say-treasonous "Sense of the Senate" resolutions such as the ones proposed by Sens Biden and Warner condemning the President's strategy - and therefore giving aid and comfort to the enemy (hence the "treason" charge) - let this unnoticed post serve to inform you that I will not contribute one dime or one minute of my time to your re-election.

In fact, I just might support your opponent.

Not that you care. I'm just one obscure blogger, right? But take note - there are ten thousand more like me.

for later analysis

Two Hand Tap Guitar Demo - Jon Lukas - Yahoo! Videommm...

Well, THAT was certainly enlightening!

Mystery of world's biggest, yuckiest flower solved

NOT.

"These plants are so bizarre that no matter where you put them with any group of plants, you're going to have a lot of explaining to do," Davis said.

H'lo, Reuters? Anyone?

Tears in my eyes

Holiday travel, late 2006. Oh, man, that HURTS.

Re-fighting the last war

Conscientious Rejector? - Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone From Yahoo! News You'd think it was 1971 all over again. Except it's not.

To the Moon!

YES!!

NASA says it will set up moon outpost by 2024. A quarter-century behind schedule according to Arthur C. Clarke's timetable, but better late than never! Whoo-hoo! As a child of the space age, I'd been starting to get very down lately, thinking that I wouldn't see a moon base in my lifetime.

VERY nice

Unplugged guitar tips - Bammerwiki.

Excellent step-by-step explanation of a complex psychomotor task.

Looming civil war in Mexico?

The Governator was amused by the fisticuffs in the Mexican Congress.

But keep reading. 3,000 dead in a drug war? Oaxaca in ruins because of riots? teh losing presidential candiate leading protest marches, refusing to concede, declaring himself the legitmate leader of the country? Things could get real ugly.

Illegal immigrants are one thing. Waves of refugees are something entirely different.

How about that border fence, eh?

Oh, Sweet Jesus....

In Congo, children are being forced onto the streets.It's beyond heartbreaking.

Dear President Ahmadinejad

I just want you to know that after carefully adjusting my printer to accept special paper worthy of your missive, I took it with me into my reading room to give it the attention it deserved.

Just Too Cool

Whatever your music mood, Musicovery has it covered. Wow.

Works and Days: So Close, so Far

The estimable Victor Davis Hanson once again explains the stakes. Excellent commentary in the comments section, particularly William J. Simmons and the Anonymous comment immediately following.

Find the Cost of Freedom

One of the most powerful and haunting songs by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young is "Find the Cost of Freedom." It's sung acapella; the first time in unision, the second time in soaring CSNY harmony. The lyric is simple:

Find the cost of freedom
buried in the ground
Mother Earth will swallow you
Lay your body down.

We've seen the stickers and t-shirts that read, "Freedom Isn't Free." But what does it cost? Dr. Phil O'Connor, writing at TCS Daily, tells us that from the first shot at Lexington on 1775 up to that sunny September morning in 2001, the average daily military fatality rate was 14.6. This figure of course includes the horrific tolls from the Revolution, the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam.

From the Revolution through the War of 1812, the Civil War and the Spanish-American war, the rate was about 11 per day.

The rate during the Cold War - from the end of WW2 to the collapse of the USSR - was 6.6 military deaths per day. This includes Korea and Vietnam.


Since 9/11, the average military daily fatality rate has been 1.7.

Freedom isn't free. It never has been, and it never will be. But it's been getting steadily less expensive. Are we still willing to pay the price?

ht: Instapundit

Thompson / Huckabee - You heard it here first

Tommy Thompson declares for 2008 race

Midwestern grocer's son, successful governor, welfare reformer who fought AIDS in Africa, plus a young, popular Southern fellow...

Could work.

From the 'This can't be good' dept...

Siberian bears can't get to sleep - it's too warm.

Okay. Let's just accept that global warming is real. Whether or not it's caused by humans is at this point largely irrelevant.

The question now is, what can we do? Not to stop it, but to cope with it?

Happy Veteran's Day, and Thank You!

I'm not a vet. In 1985 (when I tried to join) the USAF had no use for a four-eyed flat-footed asthmatic. Probably still doesn't.

But my dad and all my uncles (along with most men of their generation) are vets. So are some younger folks of my passing acquaintance.

Their sacrifices - and the sacrifices that continue to be made by the young men and women today who voluntarily don the uniform of this nation - are not taken in vain.

If you're a vet, thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. My children sleep peacefully tonight because you stood - and still stand - watch against their enemies. May God bless the men and women of the United States Armed Forces.

Here we go again

Another round of tit-for-tat in Gaza. Palestinians fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli civilians. These are the same guys who blow up falafel stands and restaurants with nail bombs.

So the Israelis lob some shells at the rocket launch site. Unfortunately, the shells go way off-target and kill a dozen or so Palestinian civilians. Predictably, thousands march in the streets and demand revenge.

Why is it called "asymetric warfare" and "resistance" when Palistinians deliberately kill Israeli civilians, but an "outrage" and a "massacre" when Israelis accidently kill Palestinian civilians?

Do the Palestinians not understand that if they want peace, all they have to do is stop killing Jews? Of course they do.

It's just that they don't want peace nearly as much as they want dead Jews.

READ THIS

Lileks. RTWT. Just. Do. It.

And eighteen months hence come back, read it again, and ask if he was right.

Quite the day

As the President just said, individually the races were close, but overall it was a thumpin'. And now Rumsfeld is out, to be replaced by the head of Texas A&M University, my alma mater. Hoo boy, the Aggie jokes are gonna start flying.

There were two things the President said that really impressed me. One was when a reporter quoted some of Nancy Pelosi's very nasty statements and questioned whether he could work with someone who had such distain for him. He replied, "I know when the campaign ends and the governing begins."

The other was in response to a couple of questions about a provate meeting last week with a couple of reporters, in which the President gave no hint that he was considering replacing Rumsfeld. He said, "I don't want our troops to think that I'm making decisions of military policy and leadership based on a political campaign."

Very Presidential.

He's Baa-aack!

Bill Whittle, my favorite atheist, has another long-form essay up at Eject! Eject! Eject!

As Glenn says: RTWT.

snnnxxkkk..?

Hey-yo. It's been a week or so. I've just been busy. Work, family, doing a bit of recording, a bit of GOTV volunteering, that sort of thing. (Plus, the new Google toolbar makes it less convenient to blog news stories. Silly Google.)

The Sunday paper said that our embattled two-term senator has moved to within six points of his far-left challenger. Good news; he'd been writen off. Four points is the usual margin of error, and GOTV has often made up the difference. I suspect we'll lose the governor's race, but in the short-to-medium term it's the House and Senate that matter.

I logged on, walked the streets, knocked on doors, talked to my neighbors. Not as many as I'd like, but I plan to make calls tomorrow to the folks I missed today.

Sweet jumpin' jehosephat, this is funny!

Radio guy Hugh Hewitt had a guest yesterday, Andrew Sullivan, who turned what could / should have been a civil discussion into... something else entirely.

James Lileks is a regular on Hugh's show. The show's producer called Lileks to ask what he'd thought of the exchange. James suggested that he go on the air with Hugh and they talk about the weather, with James channeling Sullivan.

Here's the audio

About eight minutes. Classic.

The kinder, gentler Dark Side

Oh, I don't know, it just doesn't work for me.

Warriors

I sleep easy knowing that men such as these are awake and on watch.

Overstress

How did I get here? Hmm. From Malkin's site to MKH's blog at Townhall to Blackfive to instapinch - and a bunch of clicking around there, to this particular overstress story.

The quote that made me LOL: "I want to make the bad thing stop."

If you're not familiar with Rod Machado's "b-b-b-bad thing!" story, let me know in the comments and I'll post it. It'll take two or three people asking for it.

1984 all over again

Yet more evidence that there are two factions battling for control of the US government.

One group stifles free speech by manipulating the media and Internet and by outright threats of violence against those who publish opinions with which they disagree, srpeads lies and disinformation, and incites racist mobs to violent action.

The other group is the Republican Party.

Ich bin ein Dhimmi

The German Opera has cancelled the production of Mozart's opera Idomeno because the new staging might be offensive to certain religious groups. The production features a scene in which the severed heads of Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed are presented by one of the characters.

The director said that the State Criminal Office stated concluded that "if the Deutsche Oper stages this version of Idomeneo in its originally produced form, it will pose an incalculable security risk to the public and employees."

Golly, I wonder which religious group poses an incalculable security risk when they get offended?

Congratulation, arhabi. You win.

Private rocket fails after N.M. liftoff

Failures are to be expected. It IS, after all, rocket science.

VeggieTales on NBC

So the creators of VeggieTales removed overt religious references in versions of the videos for broadcast on NBC. (BigIdea.com - News: VeggieTales & NBC) Here's how I imagine Bob and Larry might react to the news:

Scene: Bob and Larry on the kitchen sink.

Bob: Larry - we're on network TV! Isn't that great?

Larry: Uh, Bob. We don't have any arms.

Bob (deadpan): We've never had arms, Larry.

Larry: Right! But, uh, they've made us take out the tagline. And Qwerty!

Bob (deadpan): What's your point, Larry.

Larry: But they've taken out those special Bible messages about how you're special and God loves you very much, and Qwerty's Bible verses, and ... and ...

Bob: Larry...

Larry: ...and...

Bob: LArry...

Larry: ...and...

Bob: LARRY!!!

Larry (snapping out of it, brightly): Yes, Bob?

Bob: The videos, Larry. The videos. All those things are in the videos.

Larry: The videos?

Bob: Yes, Larry the videos. Already on store shelves.

Larry (hopefully): Qwerty?

Bob (patiently): That's right, Larry.

Larry: God-made-you-special-and-He-loves-you-very-much?

Bob: Yes, Larry.

Larry: Those special Sunday Morning Values we've known and loved for years are still preserved for years to come in portable electronic media and currently available for purchase at retail outlets nationwide?????

Bob: Larry. StuffMart ordered a train-load of DVDs last week.

Larry: I feel much better. What's for lunch?



cue theme music....

The Looming Tower

If you don't have (or can't take) the time to read Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, then at least read the transcript of Hugh Hewitt's two hour interview with the author.

Read it especially if you think you know somethng about the history of al Quaeda, bin Laden, and Zawahiri.

More Propaganda

I'm guessing that reports that Richard Armitagethreatened a Pakistani official were cooked up by the AQ psych-war/media-ops team. It's a terrific tactic to drive a wedge between uneasy allies, especially when they have been very successful at hunting down AQ operatives. Just look at the timing - right on top of a peace treaty between the pakistani government and tribal leaders in the border region, a treaty that has been presented in some quarters as a pact with the Taliban.

Brilliant move, really.

I hope enough people see through it.

Musharraf says he can't comment because of his upcoming book deal. I wonder if AQ has someone inside his publisher's offices, in a position to squash rebuttal of this well-timed wedge attack?

Nah, probably not. That would be giving them too much credit.

Where to buy gas

Jeff Cohen wants you to buy your gas at Citgo because it's owned by Yugo Chevy, the communist dictator of Venezuela.

Sounds like a good reason to fill up at BP or Speedway to me.

We can only pray

Abbas: Unity gov't will recognize Israel.

Of course, if Syria and Iran follow suit, you'd best get right with God.

UPDATE: The deal fell through. Unity? What unity? We're dealing with a group of people that still can't figure out ow to get the results that Gahndi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr got.

Assuming they want those results.

Friend of the devil...

A third-rate two-bit tinhorn commie dictator calls the leader of the Free World "el diablo" while the assembled UN "diplomats" laugh at his pathetic attempt at stand-up comedy.

Watching the video, I was reminded of nothing so much as the classic film clip of Benito Mussolini standing on a balcony adressing a crowd. He's jutting his chin out, nodding his head in self-approval and gesturing towards himself as if to say, "Yeah, baby, give me the love, I'm so wonderful, hmm, hmm."

Chavez looks a fair bit like Mussolini, don't you think?

You do know what happened to Il Duce, right?

Women Can't Do Math...Or Can They?

Pew Research Center reports on a fascinating study on a way we might reduce the gender gap in math performance. It's deceptively simple - remind women how smart they are. Read the whole thing - it's an ingeneous experimental design.

Godspeed, Guvn'r.

Ex-Texas Gov. Ann Richards dies As a stick-out-like-a-sore-thumb-in-Aggieland liberal and as a stick-out-like-a-sore-thumb-in-Minnesnowta conservative, I always had a great deal of respect for Gov. Richards.

Probably because she reminded me so much of my Aunt Kitty.

As AK said, there are people who wouldn't say, "sh!t" if they had a mouthful of it. Anne Richards was not one of those people.

She would have made a fine President.

I always liked Dr. K. ... and Queen

Kissinger warns of possible "war of civilizations"

Kissinger gets it. He always has, as far back as I can remember. If you could penetrate that thick-as-the-old-Black-Forest accent, the words and ideas always made sense.

Maybe too much sense for some.

It reminds me, somehow, suddenly, of an old song by Queen from their landmark "Night at the Opera" album. A very obscure track, not even B-side single material. I've never heard it on the radio, not even on a "deep tracks" show.

Side B, track 1: "The Prophet's Song."


Look up the lyrics. Buy the CD and have a listen.

Too lazy?

Here it is, in twelve-part overdubbed harmony: "Ahh, ahh, people can you hear me? ... Listen to the wise - Listen to the wise - Listen to the wise man!!"

And as if in reply the chorus sings, "La la, lala la la lah lahh... Listen to the mad - Listen to the mad - Listen to the mad man!!!"

All that's missing is the laughing and jeering of the head-in-the-sand crowd.

But, a note of hope. The narrator pauses a moment and then sings, "But still I fear and still I dare not laugh at the madman"



As the Wise One said, let him who has ears, let him hear.

It is to LOL

North Korea, Iran, and Syria want terrorism redefined.

I'll bet Al Capone wanted tax evasion redefined, too.

Safer but wiser

5 years after 9/11, many angry at U.S. Some people think that US actions since 9/11 have made the world less secure.

Hogwash.

We were not safe and secure on September 10, 2001. We just thought we were. We didn't really understand the nature of the threat.

Now we do.

We are in fact safer now, though we feel less easy.



We are safer because we DO understand the threat. (At least, some of us do. The Denial-Dhimmicrats still live in blissful 9/10/01 ignorance.)

We are safer because we have a President who is committed to fighting Islamist thugs on their turf, with Marines and A-10s, rather than cleaning up after them on our turf with cops and fire trucks.

We are safer because young men and women who understand the threat and who love this country are willing to risk and shed their blood in its defense, despite the shameful calls for surrender from those who once wore the same uniform.

We are safer because the enemy is reduced in number and capability. Under the previous administration, the enemy grew in capability. In 1993, he blew up 1500 lbs of explosives the parking garage under the WTC. In 1996, he killed US servicemen and women at the Khobar towers with 5,000 lbs of explosives. In 2001, he commandeered four jetliners and killed 3000 Americans in the span of an hour.

Then we woke up.

Since then, what as the enemy been able to throw at us? Car bombs. IEDs. Backpack bombs. And doctored photos and planted news stories. We are winning the military war. We may yet lose the propaganda war.

It is up to those of us who recognize the threat to continue to point it out.



When they are in fact out to get you, paranoia has a certain amount of survival value.

9/11 and Goose Aerodynamics

Watched the first part of "United 93" last night with my wife. Then I carried my sleeping daughter to her bed (she'd crawled into ours) and prayed - hard - that if she ever faced murderous thugs shouting "Allahu Akbar" that she'd fight back with every fiber of her being, shouting, "Isa Akbar!"

Today is nearly a sacred day for me. Like July 4th, there's a lot of red, white, and blue out, and I'm glad to see it. But it's not a celebration. It's a solemn acknowledgement that freedom is never free, that there are those who wish to strip it from us, and that they will unless we resist with all we have.

But still, life goes on, and the view out my window prompts me to write this...

Ahh, fall. The trees across the parking lot outside my window are beginning to show their autumn colors. There's a nip in the air. And the young geese are practicing their formation flying skills.

You've probably seen that geese fly in V formations. This is so that each goose except the lead can surf on the vortex generated by the goose ahead, reducing the amount of energy needed to stay aloft. They maintain a precise relative position to take maximum aerodynamic advantage.

But did you ever notice that the V is almost always asymmetrical? One side is usually longer than the other. Turns out there's a precise mathematical reason for that, too.













There's more geese on that side.

James Tubthumping

Lileks with a grand post on honest work and optimism. Great stuff.

Time to re-read Revelation and Daniel...

American appears in new al-Qaida tape

Just read it.

Then go think a while.

Mo' planets!

Proposal would add planets to solar system

I *like* Xena. I do hope they keep it.

Woodworking Methods

Notes & Comments, Woodworking Methods Can't use Furl for some reason, so Blogger is the next best thing.

Everything we know is wrong

Science is a funny thing. Sometimes for every question it ansers it asks three more. And sometimes it turns your whole world on its head.

Universe Might be Bigger and Older than Expected:

A project aiming to create an easier way to measure cosmic distances has instead turned up surprising evidence that our large and ancient universe might be even bigger and older than previously thought. If accurate, the finding would be difficult to mesh with current thinking about how the universe evolved, one scientist said.

Gawrsh.

WAY cool user interface

TED Blog: Jeff Han on TEDTalks
I WANT one of those!

LOL!!!!

Governors bristle at plan to federalize Guard:

Emphasis added:

"'Federalization just for the sake of federalization makes no sense,' said Gov. Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana, a Democrat who had rough relations with the Bush administration after the disaster last year. 'You don't need federalization to get federal troops. ... Just making quick decisions can make things happen.'"

Blanco talking about quick decisions?? ROFL!!!

Paging Mr. Serling, Mr. Rod Serling...

Yaakov Kirschen at Dry Bones Blog: notes the following:

So if we're going to discuss the supernatural I propose that we examine the following weirdness:

The Bible is not a book It is a collection of books. One of the books of the Bible is the book of Psalms. When I went to school we were taught that the book of Psalms is a book of poetry. Actually it's a book of prayers or incantations.

When the war broke out, religious Jews began reciting Psalm 83.

A rabbi, being interviewed on an Israeli TV news show called on viewers to read Psalm 83.

The Chief Rabbinate's governing council in Jerusalem announced that at 6:00 p.m. (Israel time) every day, Psalm 83 is to be recited simultaneously by Jewish communities all over the world.

Turns out that Psalm 83 calls out for Divine help to fight off an attempt to wipe Israel off the map.

Here's the text of Psalm 83.

So what's weird?

Archaeologists have just announced the amazing discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker who was digging in a bog in Ireland two weeks ago. The book, which was buried and lay hidden under centuries of mud, has been dated to the years 800-1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries...



Oh, and the book was found 'frozen open' to Psalm 83... With all other pages stuck shut.

REVEILLE

REVEILLE

Watch the whole thing.

The wash of the penguins

Clean penguins return to sea after spill.

Can't you just see them? Waddling, flapping, honking happily, wearing that fresh-scrubbed shine...