Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the “Max Kaehn” journal:| ⇐ Previous 20 entries |
19:53 ※ It's the R'lyeh thing!
Katrina was pondering why a mystical conspiracy would be carbonating the ocean...
Current Mood:  amused |
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| Tags: demented visions ⁎, random thoughts ⁎ | |
14:26 ※ Escaped gaming meme: interstellar chase scenes?
Normally, the escape-to-hyperspace is a point at which a chase scene breaks off in a science fiction game. NASA has found that neutron stars that are in a close binary with a regular sun can slurp down hydrogen and helium and then explode the surface layer like a pipsqueak Type Ia supernova. And they do it at a regular interval. I can just see the light freighter full of player characters, pissed-off capital ship in hot pursuit, taking advantage of their knowledge of the local astrography to drop out of hyperspace and dive toward a neutron star, with the intention of making the capital ship take the brunt of the next upcoming explosion... (Discovered via io9.)Current Mood:  creative |
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| Tags: escaped gaming meme ⁎ | |
20:14 ※ Escaped gaming meme: urban droids
( These are the droids that are looking for you )| Current Mood: creative |
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| Tags: escaped gaming meme ⁎, star wars ⁎ | |
21:30 ※ I had to do it
I’ve had this theory for years, and now proof! The Dalai Lama caught with one of the secret feline masters!
| Current Mood: amused |
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| Tags: demented visions ⁎, random thoughts ⁎ | |
23:00 ※ Since it came up a couple of times recently...
While I do keep up on politics, I don’t find it an enjoyable experience. I would much rather write up some machine-readable document explaining my own predilections and receive some sort of notification any time I need me to clarify a position, and get back to doing something more interesting. Sadly, both parties have demonstrated impressive degrees of corruption and incompetence, and the only way out of that (short of revolution) is for people of good sense to get engaged in the political process. So I attempt to stay informed, and to serve as a source of useful information for my friends who lack the time or stomach to deal with the mire of politics, but it’s a matter of conscience, not enjoyment. Following politics is like cleaning the litterbox, paying the bills, or scrubbing the toilets: someone needs to do it. I hope I’ve been able to save a few sanity points for you folks with my research posts.Current Mood:  sleepy |
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| Tags: hold your nose and vote ⁎ | |
17:30 ※ The march of progress?
For the first time in my life, I have had to reboot my desktop phone.(It’s a voice-over-IP system.)
| Current Mood: amused |
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| Tags: random thoughts ⁎ | |
23:16 ※ Another good read
A segment on Bill Moyers’ Journal sufficiently intrigued me that I picked up a copy of David Cay Johnston’s Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest American Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill).Johnston packs a lot of eye-opening data into this book, taking on major league sports, eminent domain abuse, health care, the laws touted to taxpayers as “deregulation”, and more. He calls upon both Adam Smith and the Bible to damn both Democrats and Republicans that have forsaken their duty to the people. There are many surprises— for instance, I had no idea that baseball was exempt from antitrust law and that big-league sports were not, overall, profitable without subsidies and tax breaks.
I had thought that I had accumulated enough cynicism in the past 8 years that I was pretty much tapped out on moral outrage, but this book managed to blow oxygen on the few embers I have left. This book makes it abundantly clear that for all the talk in Washington of the glories of the free market, we have nothing resembling one here in the United States.
| Current Mood: impressed |
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| Tags: hold your nose and vote ⁎ | |
22:04 ※ A couple of discoveries from Bill Moyers’ Journal
I’ve been enjoying Bill Moyers’ Journal lately, and thought I’d share a couple of good discoveries I found there.Kathleen Hall Jamieson, of Annenberg Political Fact Check (factcheck.org), has showed up on the show a number of times, and I particularly liked the segment on political advertising. She’s a coauthor of unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation, which I found to be a very good discussion of the way politicians use spin, distortion, and outright lies in their campaigns. The book is targeted at the layman, not academics or politics junkies. Fans of factcheck.org should also check out PolitiFact.
The Debt Dilemma features an interview with Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson of Public Agenda. They spoke sufficiently well that I picked up a copy of their book, Where Does the Money Go?: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis, and found it to be a very lucid explanation of the ramifications of our national debt, deflating myths from both ends of the partisan spectrum. Interested folk may also want to visit Facing Up.
| Current Mood: pleased |
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| Tags: hold your nose and vote ⁎ | |
10:19 ※ Escaped gaming meme: The Church of the Eternal Profits
A deranged notion that occurred to me as I was clambering toward consciousness this morning:The Church of the Eternal Profits treats the following theological tenets as revealed truth:
If the church gets any larger than street-corner preaching, they incorporate for tax-exempt status, provide free financial planning services for the poor, and eventually begin creating financial instruments that allow people to profit from virtue.
If I had the time and energy, it would be fun to put this together as performance art (put together a web site, put some sermons on YouTube, go stand in front of major banking skyscrapers and sermonize publicly), but I’m just turning this notion loose instead. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
exoterica, please feel free to pass it to anyone you know who would enjoy taking the idea and running with it.
| Current Mood: creative |
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| Tags: escaped gaming meme ⁎ | |
13:01 ※ No, he isn’t hiding bodies
After watching this segment on Bill Moyers’ Journal, it suddenly occurred to me what Dick Cheney is keeping in those huge, man-sized safes in his office:Presidential pardons. That many of them.
Current Mood:  cynical |
(My 2¢) |
| Tags: hold your nose and vote ⁎ | |
21:53 ※ Hold your nose and vote on Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Note that in California, even if you’re an independent, you can influence the Democratic election.
| Current Mood: amused |
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| Tags: demented visions ⁎, hold your nose and vote ⁎ | |
10:07 ※ Made another lap ’round the wheel of the year
Age 37:
Marriage: happy.
Friends: lots.
Cats: adorable.
Books: lots and lots.
Job: good.
Still not King. But really, why would I want the stress of a job like “monarch” anyway?
| Current Mood: pleased |
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| Tags: time ⁎ | |
18:44 ※ Election research: Primary candidates
This a perfect example of why we should have instant-runoff voting: we have to choose between more than one candidate, and need to worry about gaming our votes. Do we vote for the candidate we like the best, even if they’re unlikely to win, or do we just try to maximize both “electable” and “least bad”? If you’re unhappy with the current state of affairs that has given us a crop of right-wing authoritarians from both parties, there is an alternative. I commend your attention to the Center for Voting and Democracy, Californians for Electoral Reform, Public Campaign, and the California Clean Money Campaign. We need to start pressuring our cities and counties to show that these techniques work, then our states, then the country; in the long run, I think it’s the only way out of this mess.
Since I’m going to hold my nose and game my vote, I’m only giving my impressions of the front-runners.
( Hold your nose and vote on Tuesday, February 5, 2008 )| Current Mood: annoyed |
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| Tags: election research ⁎, hold your nose and vote ⁎ | |
18:26 ※ Election research: CA Propositions
( Hold your nose and vote on Tuesday, February 5, 2008 )Current Mood:  tired |
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| Tags: election research ⁎, hold your nose and vote ⁎ | |
17:49 ※ I can has cloneburger?
The recent FDA approval of cloned meat has been in the news lately. I reached for the bag of rock salt I keep handy for anything that originates from a government and claims to possess scientific rigor and took a look at their risk assessment.
In principle, there’s nothing wrong with cloned meat— a true clone would be identical to its original and pose identical risks. The problem is that cloning is error-prone, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about cellular biology. Even if they’re getting all the chromosomes duplicated properly, what about DNA methylation and microRNA? The FDA release has a Risk Assessment section that does discuss the risks of epigenetic changes, which mentions methylation but not microRNA; their conclusion is that “Progeny of animal clones, on the other hand, are not anticipated to pose food safety concerns, as natural mating resulting from the production of new gametes by the clones is expected to reset even those residual epigenetic reprogramming errors that could persist in healthy, reproducing clones. Thus any anomalies present in clones are not expected to be transmitted to their progeny.”
So what I see here is a lot of informed expectation and a few animal trials that have promising initial results. Since we’re still learning about these subtleties of genetics, I’d rather hold off on cloned meat for a few years while it gets further scrutiny. Once we have the science down, I will be delighted to enjoy tasty, tasty filet mignon that was created on a tissue printer from cell lines cloned from a cow you can feed in a petting zoo, along with fresh sourdough made from grain grown in a vertical farm. I’d rather have cloned meat labeled as such; as The Economist suggests, if it’s that good, being cloned should be a badge of quality.
Current Mood:  futuristic |
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| Tags: future trends ⁎, science! ⁎ | |
13:06 ※ The joy of weather
As inconvenient as the weather may get, I have resolved not to complain about it until our reservoirs are full.
We did get enough rainfall very early Friday morning that the overflow catcher on our pond engaged for the first time, waking obsessivewoman and the fluffs to investigate the unusual sound.
| Current Mood: chipper |
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| Tags: better moat and castle ⁎ | |
19:49 ※ A chance to speak up for LJ’s direction
Got a notification in![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
feedback that pointed out that there’s a poll in suggestions for features to add to LJ in 2008. My #1 was killfiles, #2 was journal searching, #3 was distinct icons for specially protected posts.
Current Mood:  curious |
13:27 ※ Yule dinner: success!
Covering an 8.7 pound ribeye roast in Montreal steak seasoning, letting it sit overnight in the refrigerator, and then giving it a couple of hours in the microwave/convection oven on HIGH MIX had very tasty results, medium at the edges and medium rare at the center. (The last ten minutes made a huge difference on the internal temperature.) Fed a dozen people and still had a little left for sandwiches the next day.| Current Mood: pleased |
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| Tags: culinary adventures ⁎ | |
14:07 ※ Social networking or creepy Internet stalkerbot?
I just got invited to a social network called Spock, which is a Web 2.0-ish thing where you can establish links to people and tag them with various qualities, which people can vote on as relevant or not. In addition to doing this in a participatory manner, it also happens automatically as their search engine trawls the Net— even if you didn’t create a profile there already. You folks might want to check there and see what the “Spock Robot” has tagged you with...| Current Mood: cautious |
Current Music: Deep Forest | |
| Tags: tech ⁎ | ||
10:10 ※ New commute
So Electric Cloud outgrew its old digs in Mountain View and moved... to a spot in Sunnyvale about a mile from Maine Coon Manor. I’m commuting on foot these days.| Current Location: 37.39005,-122.03295 | Current Mood:  awake |
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| Tags: day job ⁎ | ||
| ⇐ Previous 20 entries |
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