Girl voice from about four feet off the floor:
Mommy, this opened itself by accident.
Overheared at Office Depot
July 28th, 2010QotD: Humility and Hubris
July 28th, 2010Just something I needed to make a note of:
Two things, however, are clear about any religion that might derive from cybernetics and systems theory, ecology and natural history. First, that in the asking of questions, there will be no limit to our hubris; and second, that there shall always be humility in our acceptance of answers. In these two characteristics we shall be in sharp contrast with most of the religions of the world. They show little humility in their espousal of answers but great fear about the questions they will ask.
Gregory Bateson, Angels Fear
Do You Trust The Post Office To Manage This?
July 28th, 2010
As NRO notes:
Texas Republican Rep. Kevin Brady says in a release that committee analysts actually couldn’t fit everything in: “This portrays only about one-third of the complexity of the final bill. It’s actually worse than this.”
I have some quibbles about the graphic itself — primarily, I wish it were interactive, so you could choose which aspects of the tangle to concentrate on — but the reality they represent is horrific.
Things to looks at:
Red circles with dark orange interiors are “Rationing Potentials”.
Orange circles with light blue interiors are “Involvements with the health insurance market”.
Note that the Patient, lower right hand corner, is not directly connected to the Physician, lower left hand corner. I suspect, I hope, I pray, that this is a fault in the chart, not a true representation. If it is true, this means that I, cash in hand, cannot go to my doctor, pay him, and be examined and treated without getting some kind of government approval. [update]OK, close examination of the chart shows that the lines are actually labeled with the section number of the Obamacare act establishing that connection. Unless Obamacare breaks the existing patient-doctor connection, no wonder it does not appear on the chart.
One more charting quibble: I’d like to be able to click on one entity and see all the other entities it connects to, and how.
My title asks if you trust the Post Office. This chart shows that you have to trust several non-health-care related agencies, including the IRS, which has a history of being openly hostile to citizens. Other agencies include Justice, Homeland Security, Labor, and Treasury.
Review: Inception
July 28th, 2010Over at the Volkh Conspiracy, my favorite heavy weight legal blog, Dave Kopel, heavy weight Second Amendment lawyer, posts a very favorable review of Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Inception is a great movie. Perhaps one of the greatest of all time. You should see it without reading reviews, or learning anything about the film beforehand. For those of you who have seen it, some thoughts about various meanings are below the fold.
I don’t know about “one of the greatest [movies] of all time” but it is very fine. I absolutely agree you should go see it, and see it in the big theater.
Comments below the fold.
Read the rest of this entry »
Descendants
July 25th, 2010Gorgeous.
Descendants from Goro Fujita on Vimeo.
I can’t even take an easy moral from this.
via Protein Wisdom.
Heiko van der Scherm . . . Writer, Director, Design, Modeling
Bernhard Haux . . . . . . . . .Character TD Flower main actors
Goro Fujita. . . . . . . . . . . Supervising Animator
Making Of video; this was a surprisingly complex project — and was done on a very tight schedule. I’m extremely impressed by the tools that had to be rolled out for this.
Sacred and Profane
July 25th, 2010Via the Anchoress:
This, written about 155 AD (three digits, not four), strikes me, an unbeliever, with its simplicity and directness. We humans, I think, have a need for worship, and this is surely one of the best directions for doing so.
“The memoirs of the disciples”. “President”. This is the statement of those for whom all this was new, only three or four generations removed. Christ’s presence is not long out of living memory. Terms must be defined, or have not yet been settled on. (For some reason, I read “President” as “Preside-ent”, he who presides. It’s notable that this person is not referred to as a priest.)
Via Ghost of a Flea:
A “balrog” is a fell monster from The Lord of the Rings; one of them fought with the wizard Gandalf, and almost succeeded in killing him.
Blind
July 25th, 2010So, my sister wants new blinds hung in her bedroom. Going by the Big Orange Box instructions, I measure top and bottom width (to check parallelism), diagonals (to check squareness), and height in the middle.
The openings are neither parallel nor square, although they’re not out by much; I’ve seen much worse.
I set about trying to find the widest blind that will fit in each opening. I can’t find an on-line calculator, and when I try to figure out an algorithm myself (while trying to chip the rust off my Python skills), it turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Any given case is straightforward, using Pythagoras, but there seems to be no general solution. And that’s assuming that the top and bottom are parallel and level.
I mention this at the dinner table.
“Why not just measure the old blinds?”
Good question, Mom. Good question.
I’m still piddling about with writing a calculator, just as an exercise. And I’d like to find an online calculator.
Note: the math might be a bit easier if you measure width of the opening top and bottom, length of both sides, true plumb height at both sides, and both diagonals. But I think you can do it with the usual top and bottom width, overall height (assume level), and the diags, and given that those are the measurements most window blinds sites ask for, that would be best.
Inputs and results to the nearest eighth of an inch, please. If you round, round down — a blind that is too large by the height of the drywall texturing, a sixteenth of an inch or less, will not work. Piss off with your sissy millimeters.
A command line calculator is fine by me, but it must work under Windows as well as Unix.
Flash Brindisi
July 24th, 2010Turn your sound up and watch this:
We need more of this.
via Curmudgeonly and Skeptical.
Incidentally, a “brindisi” is a musical “invitation to drink“.
Here’s another performance (with subtitles), Placido Domingo and Teresa Stratas in Zeffirelli’s movie version . I love this production.
And just for fun, one of my favorite incidental opera scenes, from The Music Teacher, featuring, by coinkydink, another piece from La Traviata, “Follie!… Sempre libera”:
It’s an extraordinary movie, and the power of this scene is vastly undercut by being out of context. When I saw it, it was like a thunderbolt.
From the note at YouTube:
An excerpt from the movie by Gerard Corbiau, Le Maitre de Musique (1988) which captures the heart of operatic passion in a cinematic medium, earning it an Oscar nomination. Young love, life and death; a story about integrity, power, and struggle wrapped up with intense beauty, and set in a world in transition. The old world order recedes ungraciously, but its not over until the old man sings.
Anne Roussel plays Sophie Maurier, sung by Dinah Bryant; Jérôme Pruett plays Jean, sung by Philippe Volter.
[This post dedicated to Kathy, in memorium.]
Middle East History
July 24th, 2010Thomas’ McDonald Concurrance, Digested
July 24th, 2010The Richmond Times-Dispatch has done the hard work of editing it down, presenting “The Ugly Racial History of Gun Control”.
Via Arms and the Law.