THIS IS WHY YOU NEED TO PAY ATTENTION IN HISTORY CLASS: Jeremy Scott Adidas Shackle Face-Palm. “Sadly, people in the fashion industry–-fashion designers, promoters, and publicists–are not known for their keen knowledge of history, and thus this sort of thing seems to happen with depressing regularity.” And even if it weren’t for that, the shoes are ridiculous.
Archive for 2012
June 18, 2012
YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY: Two women busted for ‘exposing their sexual organs’ on golf course.
ROBERT SAMUELSON: The Folly of ObamaCare. “We pay our presidents for judgment, and President Obama committed a colossal error of judgment in making health-care ‘reform’ a centerpiece of his first term.”
First John Edwards. Now Roger Clemens.
Perhaps someone should investigate the investigators. But not the investigators.
Related: 10 FBI Agents Assigned To Investigate George Zimmerman’s Racial Views.
These are the priorities of our government.
USING STATISTICS to unmask phony online reviews.
HOW GOVERNMENT WORKS: “Amtrak is sending emails to inform customers that they will get a discount on their train tickets if they donate money to organizations that will then lobby for more Amtrak subsidies.” More from Gary Leff. “Whatever you think of government funding for train travel in the United States, is it problematic that a government corporation will give people discounts if they pay to join an organization that will lobby the government for more subsidies? Put another way, Americans who pay to support more subsidies get charged less to travel on subsidized trains than those who oppose the subsidies.”
PENTAGON EYES A DRONE APP STORE:
The US military has dozens of different types of drones in its arsenal. Each one has its own unique controller. And each of those various controllers flies a single robot. There’s no system that controls multiple drones at once. One Pentagon office thinks that’s an archaic way of doing business.
Inside the Pentagon’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics directorate, a team is working on ways to operate different types of drones with a single controller. It’s a big technical challenge — one that’s failed in the past — since the different manufacturers of different drones each have proprietary control software. But the official in charge of the effort envisions a new drone software architecture that’s agnostic about what kind of drone it controls; and allows human controllers to think in terms of drone fleets rather than individual robots, including fleets comprising different kinds of drones. That would enable a dramatic expansion of the possibilities of drone warfare.
Step one is to get a kind of universal remote for the drones — that is, a controller that can operate, say, an armed Predator and a jumbo Global Hawk spy. It’s a major challenge.
There would be a big training payoff to standardization, I imagine.
PHOTO GALLERY: The Most Amazing Science Images Of The Week.
AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Geoscientist claims to have found mystery volcano that caused mighty 13th century blast.
“SMART DIPLOMACY” UPDATE: Brett McGurk, Obama’s pick for Ambassador to Iraq, withdraws over ‘questionable conduct.’
CAN WE JOIN THE GALACTIC FEDERATION NOW? Humanity escapes the solar system: Voyager 1 signals that it has reached the edge of interstellar space. “With absolutely no attempt at hyperbole at all, it is fair to say that this is one of – if not the – biggest achievement of the human race.”
AT AMAZON, warehouse deals in Kitchen & Dining.
IT’S SAD THAT THIS IS NEWS: No Consumer Debt & Living A Dream.
U.S. GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP REQUESTS SKYROCKET:
In the last half of 2011, U.S. agencies asked Google to remove 6,192 individual pieces of content from its search results, blog posts or archives of online videos, according to the report. That’s up 718% compared with the 757 such items that U.S. agencies asked Google to remove in the six months prior.
How’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?
THINKING ABOUT when Iceland’s next big volcanic eruption hits. “Among the problems: dangerous gases in air flight corridors. But crop failures strike me as a bigger concern. . . . In my view the human race has been lucky in terms of the severity of geological phenomena since the late 19th century. During the 19th century many more severe natural events occurred than was the case in the 20th. We might be overdue.”
That’s right — whether you’re talking solar megaflares, volcano eruptions, little ice ages, or whatever, the 20th Century was unusually benign compared to the 19th. That’s affected our perception of what’s “normal” — and, hence, worth preparing for — and probably in an unfortunate way.
ANOTHER WRONG-HOUSE RAID: Ninth Circuit to DEA: Putting a Gun to an 11-Year-Old’s Head Is Not OK. No, but it’s standard operating procedure, apparently.
There should be no official immunity for no-knock raids.
Plus: “While this raid was conducted under President George W. Bush, the deputy administrator of the DEA at that time was Michele Leonhart. She is now the administrator of the DEA, thanks to an appointment by President Barack Obama. Furthermore, the Obama Administration could have declined to defend the DEA in this case. Instead, Obama’s Justice Department has decided to make the case that federal agents should be allowed to hold guns to the heads of children.” (Emphasis added.)
And why aren’t the names of all the agents published? They should be publicly shamed for their error, and their behavior. From the opinion: “At the time the warrant was issued, DEA Agents believed that a vehicle belonging to suspected drug trafficker Luis Alvarez was registered at the Avina residence. After executing the search warrant on January 20, 2007, the agents discovered they had inadvertently written down a license number of a vehicle belonging to Thomas Avina instead of a vehicle belonging to Luis Alvarez.”
No ordinary citizen who made such an error, and then threatened children with guns, would enjoy anonymity.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A Professor’s Cri de Coeur. “Deans, provosts, and presidents come and go. Many such individuals are building their careers and are often looking to go on to the next, better job. That’s their prerogative. But faculty members tend to stay put. . . . My college has had five deans in the last 10 years. They want to make their mark. . . . Every time there is turnover, there is a new initiative. There is a new strategic plan. So many faculty are just at the point where they say ‘just leave us alone.'”
DEREK LOWE: We Don’t Need More Scientists, We Need Better Ones.
In R&D, the rate-limiting step (to use a term from my chemical background) is usually not the number of people working on a problem. Not after a certain point, at any rate. Automation and miniaturization have been changing that, as in so many other industries. We can test more compounds and generate even bigger server-choking piles of data faster than ever before. The problem is figuring out what all of those numbers mean and what they’re telling us to do next. The failure rate for new drug candidates going into human trials is well over 90 percent. That’s my industry’s problem, right there, and throwing more people at it won’t help much. What we’re short of is great ideas that will help us stop doing things this way.
And those ideas, needless to say, are probably not going to be supplied by Plotz’s Army of Mediocrity. I think that many other areas of science have the same problem. What worries me the most about the future of R&D in this country is whether we’re still attracting the smartest and most capable people to do it. I keep having dark thoughts about the next Claude Shannon—one of the leading mathematicians of the 20th century— refining risk models for derivatives trading, rather than changing the world.
I was talking with someone the other day who advanced the proposition that there are probably only 50 really first-rate scientific minds produced in the United States every year. And then came the question: Does the current system of training and funding scientists encourage those 50 to stay in the game, or to find something else to do?
HOW TO self-publish on Kindle.
SAYING GOODBYE TO THE DOLTISH DAD? It’ll take more than a few movies.
However, with the number of stay-at-home dads doubling over the last decade, their purchasing power will influence advertisers. When women did all the shopping, it was easy to diss men.
THE SECRET OF A SUCCESSFUL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE? A Really Great Beard.
RICHARD VEDDER: 12 Reasons College Costs Keep Rising. Key bit: “In reality a majority of college costs today are not for instruction–the number of administrators, broadly defined, often exceeds the number of faculty.”