Take a few minutes out of your day and go over to the Appleseed Project page and read about what they’re trying to do. It’s a noble goal: to help reinvigorate the American tradition of the individual rifleman. To sum up, one of the main reasons why America has such a tradition of liberty is due to their tradition of great rifle marksmanship; or at least, that was a prime reason in the 1800’s. Today, not so much. This is a loose-knit group of riflemen passing on their skills to the next generation.
What made me want to post this today is the founder posted on his blog (a bit infrequent), and it reminded me that I need to get going on reserving a place for me and mine at an upcoming shoot. We’re not talking about some crazy boot camp thing here — most people use a .22 rifle to train with (much cheaper and easier to handle for beginners). Here’s bit of his blog post from today, explaining why this is so important:
In 20th century America, full of souls raised to have a high opinion of themselves – the so-called “high self-esteem” PC-dictatorship of the public educational system – well-meaning people who don’t have a clue, but no inhibitions about making everyone and everything jump to their confused thoughts – I mean, when did “humility” get banned as a positive human virtue? In the 20th century, I say, it didn’t have a chance.
Every gunowner knows he can shoot well – and if he can’t, his major concern is not to learn, but to stick his head in the sand. (It helps to shoot well, if you’ll find a bench to sit at, and a sandbag…)
Over at the Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez writes:
Congressman Paul Ryan has had considerable success lately explaining the main problem with health care — and with “social democracy” — in general: it’s unsustainable. It’s an old message which has until recently taken a back seat to the idea that the welfare state was the wave of the future. OpenLeft argued that the hidden message of Star Trek was that in the future humanity would establish a socialist paradise. “The most familiar utopian socialist society would be that of the United Federation of Planets in the popular television series Star Trek – particularly that depicted in The Next Generation. There is no money, no want, no poverty, no crime, no disease or ignorance in human society; everyone works for the advancement of all humanity — as well as the rest of the Federation.”
One correction: Star Trek isn’t a socialist paradise. Do you ever about taxes? I believe the idea is that through amazing (TECH THE TECH) advances, goods such as food, clothes, housing, transportation, and even advanced tech like those cool iPads they all carry have prices approaching zero. So, the only reason one would work are 1) for personal satisfaction of some sort, or 2) to acquire whatever scarce goods are still available, such as collector’s items of something or services that require human contact. I can think of all sorts of ways a person may get those still-scarce items without “money”. But it’s not socialist per se, but just a hyper abundant society. Government doesn’t tax (no money!) and doesn’t own the means to production, as I’ve seen episodes where people have their own replicators. That’s about as individual of means of production as you’re going to get.
Wow. Yes, I know I’m probably the last person to scream about this video, but I’m impressed. This is probably the most impressive Rube Goldberg machine that I’ve ever seen. It’s… pretty wonderful. If you haven’t seen it, sit down and watch. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never heard of OK Go before this. I like the song, too, actually.
I know I’m late to the boat on this web comic, but damn, there’s some good stuff in xkcd. It’s a very science and math geek heavy web comic, which I found by looking at Cory Doctorow’s Wiki page. (Looking for his bibliography — Wikipedia is a fantastic source for those.). I’ve started from the beginning. Here’s where I left off. Click and read.
…
Yeah, it’s amazing what moving punctuation can do. Heh.
Eric S. Raymond had a post a bit ago about where he thinks the future of client computing is going in the near term (4 or 5 years). It’s not necessarily that original, but still, I believe it to be mostly spot on. Read the whole thing (How smartphones will disrupt PCs), but the thrust is that handsets — mobiles, cell phones, smart phones, whatever you want to call them — will continue to cannibalize every area they touch, including the mighty PC and laptop market. The only quibble I have with him is the idea that all these coffee shops will have full size monitors and keyboards ready to go for their customers to connect their handsets to. Err, no, excepting the really high end ones in expensive neighborhoods, perhaps.
I’ve given this a lot of thought, actually, just because I’m so excited about the future. I am, after all, a tech geek. I don’t think people will give up their full power laptops and desktops — with the accompanying CPU power, storage, and easy input/output mechanisms — until decent analogues are created in the mobile space.
Sure, you can plug your iPhone v5 into a full size keyboard and monitor setup at home, but will it be powerful enough to work on iMovie and rip Blu-Ray discs by then? Nope. How about where you put those ripped movies or that raw footage off that HD camcorder you’ve been playing with? With the current curves, your iPhone will NOT have the space or the processing power for that.
And input/output? If you’re working on a complicated spreadsheet, watching a high quality movie, or working on that aforementioned home movie, you’re not going to want a small display, and you’re not going to want a tiny keyboard. Touch can only go so far with this. It’s great for manipulating objects, but for long form writing and number manipulation? Not so much. I think in 4-5 years, we’ll just start to see real alternatives hit the market for these dilemmas. Glasses that project an HD display that doesn’t makes you look like a dork and give you a headache to boot, some sort of a gesture based input or projected keyboards, that sort of thing. There are a lot of very smart people working on these problems right now, but it’s just hard stuff to solve.
But yeah, I think it’ll displace the netbook in 4-5 years, definitely. And in 10 years? Maybe — just maybe — the desktop/full sized laptop will become as obsolete as the land line phone.
When I stay at hotel rooms, I always keep the little shampoos that they give you. It’s a weird frugal thing I have, and always have had. Still, I know that a lot of people leave them half used in the hotel showers.
A couple weeks ago, I was at a meeting at my church, and there was a discussion going on about getting goods and supplies together for a sister parish we have in Shiprock, New Mexico. Some of the items they need there are soap and shampoo, and I wondered aloud were all the unused portions of shampoo at hotels goes when the room’s cleaned. It was assumed that, well, it gets thrown away. That makes sense, right? The hotel would be liable if they gave the unused portion to some charity, and it turned out it was contaminated with something. Not a fun thought.
Walt Disney World has agreed to work with Clean the World, a charitable organization committed to the prevention of illness and death caused by acute respiratory infection and diarrheal disease in countries across the globe. Disney resorts will work with Clean the World to recycle all partially used amenities from all resort hotel rooms. Clean the World sanitizes those partially used soaps and shampoos to remove them from the trash stream and to distribute them to people in need around the world. By providing these soaps and shampoos to countries including Haiti, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uganda, Mali, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Mongolia, and Romania, the organization hopes to keep people worldwide from dying from diseases that can be prevented with proper handwashing. In 2009, Clean the World processed and delivered over 230 tons of soap and other bathroom amenities worldwide.
I wonder how it’s “sanitized”? Is it just the biologicals that are removed? If someone put in a chemical pollutant into the bottle, would that be caught? I hope so.
It’s Friday, so I’m going to hold off posting anything that requires thought. Well, deep thought, anyway. After 14+ years of reading The Onion (America’s Finest News Source), this remains my favorite article: Immigration Officials Beef Up U.S.-Mexican Border With Pure Beef. And this was over a decade before President Bush tried to push comprehensive immigration reform! The Onion had it solved — all they had to do is look in the right place.
As usual, read the whole thing. Believe me, it’s worth it:
EL PASO, TX—In an effort to beef up security measures along the U.S.-Mexican border, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service announced Monday that the border will soon be fortified with 1,200 miles of pure beef.
Find yourself 4 minutes and watch the video below, from Stargate Studios. My jaw was dropping watching this. It was found via The Anchoress, that remarked that “this video made her sad”. Don’t worry, though — even though I get where’s she’s coming from, I think it causes surprise more than sadness.
So here’s the sadness part: in the past, I thought I could tell what was “real” and what was not on TV shows. It was either stuff that didn’t look real (Shrek) or stuff that was obviously too expensive to do in real life (scenes of major natural disaster). Now? Not so much. So, when do you think they’ll start doing this with people? 10 years? 15?
This story plays into every new Dad’s nightmares: how can I prove this kid is really mine? Well, maybe not every new Dad has this thought, but I remember reading about it when Daughter the Younger was just born. You think about being out with just your kid, and something comes up (that part’s never filled in), and suddenly you’re expected to prove the kid is yours. Not easy. It’s not like I carry around her birth certificate everywhere I go!
So this poor guy takes a snapshot of his son on a mall ride, and boom, he’s being accused of being a perv. I’m glad the guy stood up for himself, and I hope the security guard — at least — gets a good teachin’ about how taking pictures of your kid isn’t weird or dangerous. There’s a difference between some guy sitting all by himself in the park for extended periods of time taking photos of kids that obviously aren’t his and taking a snapshot of one particular kid you’re interacting with. Common sense should be a pretty easy indicator for right and wrong here.
Authority figures in both the United States and Great Britain — but especially Britain — has been progressively been getting more and more touchy with photo taking during this past decade. I think it’s part due to terrorist threats and the stress of living in a creeping panopticon type society that’s tweaking people out. Probably the worst trend in the States has been police trying to stop citizens from taking photographs of them doing their job in public. Instapundit has done a good job of tracking this trend. It’s flat out dangerous. (Who watches the watchers, and all that.) In a creeping surveillance society, it’s actually MORE important that authority itself gets surveilled more aggressively by the public.
