Sometimes it becomes necessary to state the obvious: being a soldier is a dangerous thing. This is why we honor our service members’ courage. For a soldier, sailor or Marine, “courage” isn’t an easily-abused abstraction–”it took a lot of courage to vote against the farm bill”–it’s a requirement of the job.
Even in peacetime. The media’s breathless tabulation of casualties in Iraq–now, over 1,800 deaths–is generally devoid of context. Here’s some context: between 1983 and 1996, 18,006 American military personnel died accidentally in the service of their country. That death rate of 1,286 per year exceeds the rate of combat deaths in Iraq by a ratio of nearly two to one.
That’s right: all through the years when hardly anyone was paying attention, soldiers, sailors and Marines were dying in accidents, training and otherwise, at nearly twice the rate of combat deaths in Iraq from the start of the war in 2003 to the present. Somehow, though, when there was no political hay to be made, I don’t recall any great outcry, or gleeful reporting, or erecting of crosses in the President’s home town
August 24, 2005
… and Statistics
What Biased Media?
It’s time for newspapers, many of which helped get us into this war, to consider using their editorial pages as platforms to help get us out of it. So far, few have done much more than wring their hands, or simply criticize the conduct of the war, or the lack of body armor for our troops. Not many months ago, in fact, some papers, including The New York Times, were calling for more U.S. troops for Iraq.
Now it’s literally do-or-die time
Because we’re the newspapers. We’re impartial and all.
We The People…
We the people of Iraq, newly arisen from our disasters and looking with confidence to the future through a democratic, federal, republican system, are determined — men and women, old and young — to respect the rule of law, reject the policy of aggression, pay attention to women and their rights, the elderly and their cares, the children and their affairs, spread the culture of diversity and defuse terrorism.
We are the people of Iraq, who in all our forms and groupings undertake to establish our union freely and by choice, to learn yesterday’s lessons for tomorrow, and to write down this permanent constitution from the high values and ideals of the heavenly messages and the developments of science and human civilization, and to adhere to this constitution, which shall preserve for Iraq its free union of people, land and sovereignty.
When I read this on this site, I thought it was fake. A hopeful but pie-in-the-sky attempt at what the blog author hoped could maybe, possibly be in the Iraq constitution before the lawyers and terrorist sympathizers got ahold of it.
Imagine my wonder when it turns out….. this is the real preamble to the Iraq constitution. Seriously, this document just takes my breath away. Simple and to the point, it speaks no less clearly than our own “We the People”. Full of hope and the desire to change.
I’m sure we’ll see much discussion, nitpicking, and snide insinuations from our jaded intelligentsia in the next few days, but in the mean time, let us welcome the New Iraq to the table of Democracy.
August 23, 2005
Sitemeter Reversal
Woo hoo! Looks like the fixes Giles made to the server have been bearing fruit. My Sitemeter stats are on the upswing.
I don’t know why it’s so addictive to keep track, but I go there a few times a week. I guess that, next to comments, page hits are the next best evidence that somebody out there is reading.
Confessional
Robert links today to a very good article about a “reverse-confessional” at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
“They may very well burn it down,” Nadine said.
“I will build a trapdoor,” Mitch said
“I don’t want anything to do with it,” Penny said.
“Neither do I,” I told her.
“Okay, you guys.” Tony gathered everybody’s attention. “Here’s the catch.” He leaned in a little. “We are not actually going to accept confessions.” We all looked at him in confusion.
He continued, “We are going to confess to them. We are going to confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter, and for that we are sorry. We will apologize for the Crusades, we will apologize for televangelists, we will apologize for neglecting the poor and the lonely, we will ask them to forgive us, and we will tell them that in our selfishness, we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus. We will tell people who come into the booth that Jesus loves them.”
And I would have to add apologizing for people like Pat Robertson.
and in an interview following the story, the reverse-confessional author says:
“I attended the Dove Awards recently and was brokenhearted. I saw all these beautiful Christians, wonderful people, with this wonderful, revolutionary message of Jesus, who, instead of saying, “Look, fashion doesn’t matter, hip doesn’t matter,” were saying “World, please accept us, we can be just as hip as you, just as fashionable, only in a religious way.”
Groovy
Don’t miss engadget’s “gadgets of 1985 page“. It’s hilariously done up like a repost of an original page circa 85.
Pat’s New Homepage
Ben’s Bargains is an incredible roundup of current deals and coupons. Lots of stuff.
iPod Envy
This is why I’d love to get an iPod. It’d be great to be able to listen to podcasts on the road.
August 22, 2005
Jerry’s Rant
Famed Science Fiction author, and all-around Smart Guy Jerry Pournelle has a fantastic rant against NASA and how to really get the human race into space.
For the record, I’ve been thinking along these lines for years. Announce a government-sponsored “X-prize” award. Make it big. Say, a billion dollars for a reusable solution to get humans into orbit cheaply (pin the price at, say $100/lb and the turnaround time to one week or so. Then sit back and watch the free market take over.
A billion dollars is too much money, you say? Well, considering how NASA just spent a cool B on a failed redesign of the shuttle external fuel tank foam, I say it’s money well spent. And the worse-case scenario is that private industry tries and fails and the money isn’t awarded… no skin off the back of taxpayers, eh? Of course, if somebody actually achieves the goal and gets humans into orbit, private industry would have achieved something that NASA and the big aerospace companies haven’t been able to do and would have done it for less than NASA spends every year on coffee and doughnuts. The X-Prize money was cheaper than the cost of ONE custom made NASA spacesuit. It just ridiculous that there aren’t more incentives like this available.
Many private companies were able to make an economic case for X-prize competition, even though the prize was a measly 10 million dollars. Just imagine what would happen if there was some real money involved. And it would cost taxpayers less than half the cost of a single stealth bomber.
Makes me crazy to see so much money and time wasted under the current NASA (jobs) program while a viable, no-risk solution just sits there unused.
LOTR MMORPG
Beautiful screen shots of the upcoming Lord of the Rings Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. Check out this one and this one.
Bob Moog
Bob Moog, legendary pioneer of electronic music, died yesterday from brain cancer at his Ashland, N.C. home. He was 71.
I spent a few semesters in college manually programming sounds on a Moog-era Arp 2600. To get a sound out of these old boxes you’d take an electrical (DC-line level) signal from one output (say, and oscillator), and use those old telephone switchboard patch cables to physically route it to an input (envelope generator, cutoff filter, whatever) somewhere on the face of the box (see the link for a picture). From there you’d continue to route the signal around until you had successfully manipulated the 60hz electrical signal into the sound that you wanted. Then you’d trigger the sound on and off via the keys on the keyboard. Very arcane and byzantine way to create noise by modern standards, but strangely satisfying to spend a few hours developing a specific order in your tangled mass of cables.
Once you had your patch cable layout you’d preserve the specific in-out and knob settings in a book somewhere. You’d refer to your book whenever you wanted to recreate a specific “patch”. This is why sounds on an electronic keyboard are still called patches today. Cool, no?
Musicians would protect the specific layout of their patches by covering the patch board or throwing in fake cables just to confuse onlookers. Hey, you had to protect your intellectual property! It’s similar to the way some Hammond B-3 organ players would cover the slider box so onlookers couldn’t see the specific layout of their sliders.
Light Cycle
Tim has some interesting comments about the use of super-light materials in bike frames (scroll down). Thanks, Tim!
August 20, 2005
Breaking the Law
On the screen, a small pulse shifts back and forth – just a little bit. But this seemingly unremarkable phenomenon could have profound technological consequences. It represents the success of Luc Thévenaz and his fellow researchers in the Nanophotonics and Metrology laboratory at EPFL in controlling the speed of light in a simple optical fiber. They were able not only to slow light down by a factor of three from its well – established speed c of 300 million meters per second in a vacuum, but they’ve also accomplished the considerable feat of speeding it up – making light go faster than the speed of light.
Read more
August 19, 2005
Current Reading
Finished the 700 page book I posted about below (verdict: meh). Went to the personal library in the next room to wade through the TBR stack. My eye fell on the Pulitzer winning epic Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
Cover me, I’m going in…
This thing is a huge, far-reaching traipse back and forth between the ol’ cranial hemispheres. Sat up until 1:30 or so plowing through the preface, introduction, and forward. Looks like I’ll be at it for awhile. Kinda feel like I feel before a long road trip. I love driving long distances, but I definitely have to get myself into the zone.
95
Katherine points to an interesting and thoughtful article about the differences between Catholicism and Mennonism (I also include Luther’s Reformation offspring). An excerpt:
I understand the priesthood of all believers to be…the notion that we all administer, embody and mediate the presence of God to one another. The great mystical privilege and responsibility of the priestly role is decentralized. The gatekeeper function is eliminated. It is church of the people, for the people and by the people…
…Many Catholics I’m sure would find the practice of this decentralized priesthood somewhat mundane and devoid of reverence or ritual. Some non-Catholics would agree. Yet the trappings of the Vatican—which make it look too much like an enclave of power—increase my sympathies for my forebears [who left the Catholic church], many of whom had been priests…
…sometimes I wish the Reformers wouldn’t have thrown the proverbial baby out with the hierarchical bathwater. But so swings the reactionary pendulum of history; not unlike the vacillation in my personal navigation of ecumenism. One week I’m discovering new respect for an old Pope, the next week I can’t believe the “Princes of the Church” are sequestered in ancient opulence when they might do better to couch their decisions in a Central American slum.
read the whole article here.
Nano Sheets
Carbon nanotubes, basically carbon buckyballs stretched into microscopic long hollow tubes, we discovered about ten years ago. They were heralded as the solution to technological problems from increasing the speed of computer chips to building a space elevator. Problem is, they were really hard to produce in significant numbers.
Today a group of scientists have announced the discovery of a way to produce sheets of carbon nanotubes at an incredible rate. This marks a major discovery on the scale of the mass production of transistors. Exciting times ahead.
Go here for the full story and cool video.
August 18, 2005
Recycling
According to estripes, ten tons of steel from the collapsed Twin Towers is being used to build a new Navy ship: the S.S. New York.