Extending the rule of Law

Here’s a modest proposal.  Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld should be kidnapped by Spanish commandos and transported to an unnamed location.  This is perfectly legal according to the Obama administration.  (at least it would be legal if we did it.)

Once in this unnamed location, they should be waterboarded until they admit that they are being tortured.

At which point they can be resurfaced in a Spanish court to plea guilty to crimes against humanity.

When the internet crashes

.. no one will be able to tell you why.  This didn’t make it into my adventures in hell page, but it’s typical.  A few days ago, logging into my web site’s shell account suddenly acquired a 2 minute lag between password and prompt.   As this was extremely annoying, I started collecting relevant data and  complaining to the site’s technical staff.   No one had any explanation, or infomation about why there was suddenly a delay, but the curious fact I turned up was that only some points of origin were affected.    After about 12 hours, the problem, whatever it was, went away.

This kind of network glitch seems to happen to me every year or so. It’s never the same strangeness twice, and threre’s never any explanation.  No doubt, something, somewhere was broken, and someone who was affected by the broken hardware or software eventually noticed, and fixed it.   Meantime, at least one of the victims is left with no information, no tools, and no recourse.

This general pattern is common to essentially all software driven activity.  If it works, great.  If it doesn’t, you’re pretty much up a creek without a paddle.   So one day if you wake up and find every channel dark, you’ll know why.  I just told you.

Going Digital

I’ve been a semi-serious photographer since I was in high school, and I’ve always shot slides for the most part. I was an early adopter of digital photography; initially I carried three instead of my usual two cameras, and captured key scenes with both film and electrons. After the first few years, as digital cameras improved, the film cameras started being used less and less. Eventually, on a couple of trips, film just went along for the ride.

So now the time has come, I have 20,000 slides in boxes; most carefully cataloged, and most have never been seen since the last post-vacation slide show. While the full glory of a perfectly projected slide is hard to match, the practical considerations are that anything not in digital form is just not going to be used. Years ago I had a few slides converted, and more recently I’ve bought and used a slide scanner to scan a few hundred; but it’s just too slow and tedious.

… so, I’ve gone whole hog; I bought an expensive slide scanner with a feeder, and can feed it a box at a time. 1000 slides scanned, 19,000 to go. I figure about a year at a leisurely pace ought to do it. Who knows, I may dispose of my darkroom too!

Notes on converting slides
Notes on converting lp records

Things God forgot to mention

My take on the creationist nonsense is this: Completely independent of any theological argument, just as a practical matter, where should you look for advice about the world we live in? The self described omniscient God, or to modern Science. Consider that God forgot to mention a few pretty important things.

• Geography: The existence of 4 entire continents, with people on 3 of them.
• Cosmology: The existence of a billion billion additional stars in the universe, in addition to the few thousand you can see.
• Medicine: the existence of living things too small to see, but which can kill you.
• Natural History: Dinosaurs, and almost everything else.
• Engineering: Anything beyond muscle power.

You get the idea.

The problem with getting rid of hypocrital politicians

.. is essentially the same as the problem with getting rid of drug dealers.

No matter how many you shoot or imprison, there’s always another one just as bad ready to take his place.

Spam as an economic indicator?

I’ve noticed a distinct shift in my spam box, from

get a great loan in 5 minutes

to

part time job you can do at home.

I’m sure some future PHD will be based on using spam as a metric to study social and policial trends.

What if…

The chairman of General Motors was chosen by having a bunch of executives from other companies spend a year touring the country, promising faster new cars with great gas mileage for lower prices. Attending monster truck rallies and Nascar races one day, solar scooter competitions the next. The current lower level GM executives would be touring too, but they would be campaigning on a platform of continuing to build the same great cars for another four years.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the skills needed to run GM. Oh well.

A Brief History of Animal Club Gaming

It all started with bingo. Local Elks clubs and Moose lodges have been running bingo games since revolutionary times. It all seemed innocent enough, and no one seemed to mind if an occasional church group poached on the franchise.

Then the Elks started getting greedy, and for reasons that remain somewhat obscure, the supreme court ruled that as a sovereign species, the Elks were entitled to play any game that Humans anywhere on the planet were also permitted to play. Soon, Elks and Moose were upgrading dusty lodges to fully fledged casinos, and started raking in huge sums. “All for good works” they maintained, and massive campaign contributions assured that the sums actually contributed to public works were considered to be enough.

Meanwhile, Elks and Moose were paying out huge sums to their members as “charity consultants” and “public needs researchers”. “We’ve never had the resources to properly pursue our objectives. Funding the club properly is a good thing”. Rotarians sought, and failed to receive, a wavier to join the animal club club; no one could find a species called a Rotary. A scandal erupted when some Elks lodges ousted most of their members as “inactive, or not Elkish enough” despite testimony by doctors and DNA experts that the ousted members are alive and 100% Elk. This vastly increased the payments to the remaining members. Club leadership claimed this would make their good work even more effective.

Rotarians aside, other animal groups are destined to break into the franchise. It’s rumored that politicians will assert their right as Horses Asses (both species in good standing) to be allowed to fund their campaigns directly by opening casinos; And voters, as Sheep, should open their own cooperative gaming venues so they can fleece themselves. It remains to be seen how these initiatives will be resolved.