Cuz We Said So

The US Debt in Detailin Real Time

2010-01-30T15:03:37-06:00

This is cool, and yet so very, very uncool at the same time. USDebtClock.org breaks down federal revenue, spending, and debt, and shows it all in real time. In the time it took me to write and post these three sentences, our government spent an additional $6 million it doesn’t have—debt that your children, and their children, will have to try and repay. (Via Jason Calcanis)

UPDATE: next time you are calculating your family’s net worth, factor in an additional $177,598 in debt for each member of your family to see the real number.

Dragon Hears the Truth

2010-01-28T11:30:58-06:00

I am toying with writing up some impressions of the Apple iPad for the site here, and was dictating my notes into the Dragon speech recognition app on my iPhone.

I said, “As someone with terrible vision, I appreciate the idea of being able to run my iPhone apps on a larger screen..."

What Dragon heard was: "As someone with terrible visions, I appreciate..."

In retrospect, that version is better. At least, it’s funnier. “Ah!! I see flames! Terrible, terrible, flames! And is that Steve Jobs, naked, bathed in blood, holding an iPad?? The horror!!!”

Obama Freeze Not So Cool

2010-01-27T11:49:43-06:00

Charles Krauthammer sums up the basic problem:

It's not a hatchet. It's not a scalpel. It's a Q-tip. It's a fraud. This is a miniscule amount. It excludes Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs. It excludes all the entitlements, which are 60 percent of the budget. It excludes stimuli past and future — the two thirds of the near trillion-dollar stimulus that has not been spent. All of that is excluded. It excludes the $1 trillion that would end up being spent on health care if it were passed. What it is, is a $15 billion reduction in a year, 2011, in which the CBO has just announced we are going to have a deficit of $1.35 trillion, which means it is — it's a rounding error, it's lunch money…

This isn't a real cut. It's an appearance of cuts. It's a maneuver as a response to what happened in Massachusetts because he lost the independents… and he knows independents worry about debt and deficits and spending…

And apparently, he think independents are innumerate morons.

I don’t think independents are morons. But just in case, let’s dispense with those confusing word thingies, and look at a pretty picture instead.

Here’s a chart comparing the current US debt ($12.3 trillion), actual Federal outlays in 2009 ($3.5 trillion), and the proposed freeze (using Krauthammer’s $15 billion figure). I apologize in advance for making the chart so tall, but it was the only way I could make the bar that shows the “freeze” tall enough that you can see it.

I'm Guessing This Was a Rhetorical Question...

2010-01-27T09:41:45-06:00

Ann Althouse asks: “what's more exciting about [today]: the State of the Unison Address or the unveiling, presumably, of the Apple Tablet”?

The (admittedly unscientific) results of her online poll are not a surprise.

2009 Movie Wrap Up

2010-01-24T18:43:09-06:00

It occurs to me that I never did my year end list of the movies I saw in 2009 with a relative breakdown of their merits. So, here we go:

Great
Star Trek
Invictus -- The best Eastwood film I've ever seen. Damon and Freeman are both perfect. A surprisingly emotional film for being about racial disharmony, politics and rugby.
Taken
District 9

Very Good
Avatar
Monsters Vs. Aliens -- Cute, funny, inventive. The number of laughs they get just on the topic of scale alone would make this recommendable.
Sherlock Holmes -- This deserves a full review from me, but I'm lazy. Downey is awesome, Law is great. The look and feel of the film is enjoyable.
The Hurt Locker -- This pretty much is the example of a taut thriler. And the hero (played by Jeremy Renner) is someone you can love and hate simultaneously. (But mostly you love him.)
Food, Inc. -- A documentary that will make you question how you eat. And if can do that for me, you know it's good.
2012 -- Loved it. It made no sense, and it was awesome.
The Proposal
Watchmen -- Wasn't quite as chock-full-of-awesome as I would have liked, but I found Billy Crudup's Dr. Manhattan and Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach to be pretty much perfection.
Zombieland
The Informant! -- Based on a non-fiction book about the craziest anti-trust investigation in US history, Matt Damon plays the least heroic character of his career. And (yay!) Scott Bakula is in it!
The Taking of Pelham 123
A Christmas Carol -- After Polar Express and Beowulf, I was getting kind of motion-captured out. Can't Zemeckis direct live actors anymore? But this one is remarkably subtle for great swaths of its running time. I could have done without the crazy chase sequences, but most of the film is remarkable and very true to the original Dickens novel.

Good
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Terminator Salvation
Ingourious Basterds
The Road -- Yes, it's just as bleak as the book (and the trailer) would have you believe. Viggo Mortensen plays the best dad ever.

Okay
Surrogates -- Bruce Willis as a plastic-coated robot! Then Bruce Willis as a broken-down slob of a man! Who wouldn't want to see that? Does a nice job dramatizing a world filled entirely with couch potatoes.
The Men Who Stare at Goats -- There's some really funny stuff, and some really dumb stuff. The performances are good, the story is bad, so it clocks in at okay for me.
The International -- The story is entirely forgettable. (Really. I can't remember it now.) But that gun fight in the Guggenheim is awesome!
Fast and Furious -- Never saw installments 2 or 3, but this was mildly diverting, and had some nifty car chases.
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li -- It's tough to categorize a film that you enjoy thoroughly because it's so terrible. And terrible this one is. Terrible... and awesome! Chris Klein rules!!
Knowing -- Here's what I know about this film. Two great action sequences eclipse a ridiculous story.
The Girlfriend Experience

Okay, But Should Have Been Much Better
Angels & Demons
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
The Twilight Saga: New Moon -- I really want this franchise to be good. It just keeps not doing that. Still, this one's an improvement over Twilight.

Kind of Bad
Whiteout -- One of those "Maybe there's a supernatural component!" films that doesn't deliver. But you get to see Kate Beckinsale in her underwear, so there's that.
Jennifer's Body -- Wasn't funny enough to be a comedy, wasn't scary enough to be horror, wasn't enough skin to be sheer titillation.
Law Abiding Citizen -- Over the top performances followed by over the top plot contrivances. I hoped for better from Butler and Foxx.
My Bloody Valentine 3-D -- Everything you think it'd be, based on the title.

Very, Very Bad
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

IPCC Credibility Could Vanish By 2035

2010-01-24T15:31:29-06:00

Maybe a lot sooner. A brief review of some recent developments in climate ~~science~~ politics is in order:

In 2007, the UN IPCC's fourth assessment report (AR4) published the statement that "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world." It predicted that all of the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could vanish by 2035, and stated its confidence as "very likely"—meaning more than 90 percent certain.
In November a paper published by the Indian government said there are no signs of "abnormal" retreat in Himalayan glaciers, and accused the IPCC of being alarmist.
The IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, responded by denouncing the Indian government report as "voodoo science" lacking peer review.
Last week, it was revealed that the 2035 claim, based on a 2005 report by the World Wildlife Fund... was in turn based on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain... who in turn now says they were based not on peer reviewed science but on “speculation.”
On Tuesday, the IPCC retracted the glacier claim, calling it a mistake.
On Saturday, Dr Murari Lal, who put the claim into the IPCC report to begin with, told the Daily Mail he was aware at the time that the statement did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research, but included it to put political pressure on world leaders. “It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.”
Also yesterday, Pachauri admitted to four more mistakes in the glacier section of the AR4 report. (Seriously, did anybody read this thing until just now?)
Today, the Daily Mail reports that yet another claim in the 4th assessment report—that the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s" was based on an unpublished paper that had not been peer reviewed. That paper's author later withdrew the claim because he felt the evidence was not strong enough, and he has now criticized the IPCC report for being "completely misleading."
Also today, the Sunday Times reported that Pachauri "used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds." More than a half million US dollars, in fact.

So you may want to update your copy of the 4th AR to bring it up to date with recent developments. Simply search and replace the phrases, "this is highly likely" or "this is more than 90 percent likely" with the phrase "this may be speculative nonsense, not science, and might even turn out to be a deliberate fraud calculated to apply political pressure or land a research grant."

What’s important here isn’t the scope of the individual errors so far discovered. It’s that these claims were deliberately included despite their lack of sound foundation for political reasons when they shouldn’t have been, extensively reported, and used to justify the diversion of huge sums of money to climate scientists. Like the CRU data breach from late last year, this incident says a lot about the trustworthiness and integrity of the processes and institutions behind climate politics.

Always remember that while the Earth might actually turn out to be warming due to human activity, the insistence of those who say it is can originate in political and financial interests instead of scientific ones. To paraphrase Voltaire, if manmade global warming did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. Good science is skeptical. Question everything.

Becoming indispensible

2010-01-23T18:37:10-06:00

Josh Bernoff: ”Read Seth Godin's Linchpin. Or be a cog in the machine”:

Seth's premise is that today's organizational structure is a throwback to the days of factories, with interchangeable parts and interchangeable workers. Basically, this means that if you do your job as you're told, then you're easy to replace. Seth wants you to "become indispensable" instead.

…In my mind, one of the most valuable things in this book is a chart on page 181. There are two axes. The x-axis goes from passive to passionate. The y-axis goes from attachment (that is, inflexible dedication to your own world view) to discernment (knowing what to live with and what to seek change in). I would call that y-axis "wisdom". Seth wants you to aim for the upper left, high passion plus high wisdom, the realm of the linchpin.

I haven’t read this one yet, but I’m intrigued by the premise. May have to pick this one up. (It’s not on the Kindle yet, though, which is a shame, or I might already own it.)

Naah, naah, you have cooties and I dont!

2010-01-21T08:06:20-06:00

Actually, it turns out most of your cooties won’t grow in me. I’m catching up on podcasts that are a couple of months old, and a Sci Friday story about our skin bacteria caught my attention. Seems that even on our own bodies the bacteria from area to area varies greatly, and the strains growing on you might not grow on me at all. So you can kiss the girls without getting (many) cooties from her!

"Daybreakers" and "The Book of Eli"

2010-01-20T15:45:12-06:00

It may not make complete sense to review these two films simultaneously, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway, partly because they are both new takes on old tropes... and partly because I'm really lazy.

I saw "Daybreakers" first, and went in with only a one sentence description from some magazine. I hadn't even seen the trailer, but I was intrigued nonetheless. In the film, it's ten years since an unexplained plague began transforming people into vampires. The vampires promptly took over the world, gave everyone the chance to change, and those that didn't were rounded up and put into uber-creepy blood banks. Ethan Hawke plays a vampire hematologist working on a blood substitute, since the supplies of the real article are running low. Worse still, if you don't have a consistent supply of human blood, you basically turn into a feral bat-creature. So, the vampires are nearing their own catastrophe.

Enter Willem Dafoe as a human who managed (through a bizarre coincidence) to become a vampire for about three seconds, and then be cured. He and Hawke work together to come up with a way to replicate the process, to reverse vampirism completely.

I liked the stylized look of the film, and the little details that tell us about vampire life: the houses with retractable windows, the subwalk system under the city, the stand selling coffee "still with 20% blood!" The mechanics of the ending are important, but I won't give them away. Coming up with a satisfying ending when the world is so ridiculously screwed up wasn't easy to do. It's neither easy nor sure-fire, but it's modestly hopeful, while at the same time being about as bloody as any film I've ever seen.

"The Book of Eli" is another film with a very familiar premise: the world was destroyed in some cataclysmic (probably nuclear) war, and Denzel Washington is a mysterious "walker" with a precious book. Gary Oldman is the town boss (somewhere in the extra-blasted southwest) who really, really wants that book.

The ads were somewhat cagey about what the book was, but the film doesn't take long to make it clear that the book in question is The Bible. Washington wants to get it into the hands of someone who will use the book for good. Oldman wants to use it to take over... well, pretty much everything. It's an interesting tightrope the film walks between the positive use of faith, and the horrifying power of religion as a tool of mass control. I suspect that balance is the only reason a film about religion could get made. (Outside the "Christian" media, I mean.)

I enjoyed the film, partly because the story had very few real holes in it. (Could people really have destroyed almost all the Bibles in the world?) Most important, the film looked amazing. The scenes of past destruction were affecting without being maudlin or overdone. And the performances were good. Denzel has rarely been so selflessly heroic. Or so scruffy.

Serious about your data backups?

2010-01-20T11:16:27-06:00

I saw this article today on the new ioSafe SSD devices.

ioSafe makes some pretty nice devices. For people who don’t trust the cloud storage services (got something to backup you REALLY don’t want someone else to see?), or, more likely, need a higher throughput (some users report up to a month for initial backups to internet services), they have some serious devices at pretty remarkable prices.

The regular ioSafe devices are impressive: Fireproof to 1550 F for 30 minutes, waterproof to 10 feet for 3 days, so they will survive your house fire AND the fire department’s hoses. And a 2 TB version is readily available for the low price of less than $375. A bit out of my price range, but the 1 TB version for $220 might not be. It is certainly tempting.

Now you can get the SSD version and have something that most airplanes would be glad to have in their black boxes: It can take a 20 ft drop/1000g for 1 ms, a 5000 lb crushing load (balance your SUV on it no problem), and even better waterproofing for 30 days in 30 ft of water (for those people living on houseboats in Hurricane Alley). The downside is it costs like an aircraft component, listing for $1,250 for a measly 256 GB. That data better be worth some serious bucks.