Quotulatiousness

October 11, 2010

Let’s hope it’s 1975 all over again

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:17

I find it hard to believe it, but that’s the only time the Vikings have ever beaten the Jets:

With WR Randy Moss expected to play, the Vikings now have the vertical outside threat they need to allow Percy Harvin to play the slot, where his versatility is put to better use. And stretching the defense will only make RB Adrian Peterson more explosive as the Jets will have to pick their poison. Moss will likely be shadowed by CB Darrelle Revis (hamstring), who returns after missing a game and last week said Moss didn’t always play 100 percent during their Week 2 matchup against New England.

Jets QB Mark Sanchez has thrown eight touchdown passes over the past three games and gets WR Santonio Holmes back from suspension to add another downfield weapon. Sanchez’s ability to keep moving the offense will be key as the Vikings allow just 3.6 yards per carry and back quarterbacks into consistent third-and-long situations. Minnesota’s pass defense has improved with the returns of CB Cedric Griffin.

[. . .]

– The Vikings’ only victory over the Jets came on Oct. 12, 1975, when they beat New York, 29-21, at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minn.
– The Vikings will be happy to be playing in the New Meadowlands. They never beat the Jets in their former home, going 0-4 at the Meadowlands against them.
– The Vikings have played the second fewest games out of any NFL team against the Jets, only having met them eight times since 1970.

[. . .]

SERIES HISTORY: 9th regular-season meeting. Jets lead series, 7-1. York has won six in a row dating to the 1979 season. The Vikings’ only win in the series was in 1975.

Happy Thanksgiving

Filed under: Administrivia, Cancon — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:45

Any excuse for a long weekend!

Have a drink – it won’t make you fat

Filed under: Health, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:43

In another positive move for wine fans, another study of women’s health shows that wine doesn’t make women fat:

Researchers found that regular moderate female drinkers were less likely to become obese after a 13 year study of more than 19,000 women.

The finding seems to contradict received dietary wisdom which has it that alcohol consumption leads to weight gain.

The body may use calories from alcohol in a different way from other foods which affects weight gain, doctors said.

It is thought that alcohol is broken down by the liver using a different metabolic pathway to create heat, rather than fat.

So don’t feel guilty about that glass of wine with dinner!

October 10, 2010

Electronic solution to the cost of rifle training

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:33

Strategypage reports on an indoor shooting simulator:

The U.S. Marine Corps has saved over half a billion dollars in the last four years, by using indoor electronic firing ranges. IMST (Indoor Simulated Marksmanship Trainer) has cost over $200 million, but the savings in ammo, wear on weapons, and running outdoor ranges were much larger. Nearly 200,000 marines have undergone marksmanship training using IMST. Unlike the similar U.S. Army EST system, IMST is wireless. A special magazine contains gas that provides a realistic recoil and a wireless radio device connects the weapon to the targets displayed on the screen and records how accurate the electronic rounds were fired.

Devices like IMST and EST have boosted the shooting skills of troops, while reducing costs. This gives American riflemen a big battlefield advantage. In most armies, the troops rarely fire their rifles. Ammo is too expensive (given the meager military budget). When there is combat, the troops are issued bullets, which they fire very inaccurately. Against a better trained foe, this leads to quick defeat. Happens all the time. But now cash strapped armies can train their troops to be effective marksmen without spending a lot of money, by using simulators.

Sure beats the “simulation technology” we used in my militia days: we ran around yelling “Bang!” to simulate firing the bullets the military budget couldn’t afford to provide us with. Ah, the joys of Trudeau-era military experience.

Amsterdam failing to protect its gay population from attack

Filed under: Europe, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

Ezra Levant looks at the worsening situation in Amsterdam for gay and lesbian residents:

If you think Amsterdam is the gay capital of Europe, you’re half-right, but 10 years out of date. Today it’s the gay-bashing capital of Europe.

Because Amsterdam isn’t just gay. Now it’s Muslim, too. A million Moroccans and Turks have immigrated to the Netherlands, and sharia law rules the streets.

If you doubt it, then you haven’t been paying attention. Actually, that’s not fair. Gay-bashing is front-page news only when it’s committed by a straight, white male.

The media is terribly uncomfortable writing about gay-bashing by minorities. It’s the same reason why Canadian feminists are so eerily quiet about honour killings of Muslim girls.

According to an “offender study” by the University of Amsterdam, there were 201 reports of anti-gay violence in that city in 2007 and researchers believe for every reported case there are as many as 25 unreported ones. Two thirds of the predators are Muslim youths.

The violence couldn’t be more brazen. It’s not in the back alleys in the dark, it’s in the heart of the city, often in broad daylight. It’s a direct dare to the Dutch government to show who rules the streets.

We’ve already seen how wary the Dutch government has been about protecting freedom of speech (when the speech offended Muslim sensibilities). Now we’re starting to see how little protection from violence the police can offer. The Netherlands have had a reputation for tolerance for decades, but it won’t last much longer if the authorities don’t start cracking down on this kind of flagrant criminality.

Calculate your odds of winning the lottery

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:09

By way of the ever-helpful Roger Henry, here’s a site that lets you simulate your lottery habits to determine how much you’ll win and how much it’ll cost:

Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator!

It is really hard to win the Mega Millions lottery. So hard that it can be difficult to comprehend what long odds confront its players.

Why not try for free on this Mega Millions lottery simulator? You’ll be able to try the same numbers over and over, simulating playing twice a week for a year or 10. You’ll never win.

I ran 1040 simulations. It would have cost me $1040. I would have won $243. Not a good return on investment. I actually “win” more by not buying a ticket at all: I avoid the loss of that $797 in ticket purchases.

October 9, 2010

“Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

James Delingpole posts the most interesting resignation letter you’re likely to see this year:

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.

Anthony Watts describes it thus:

This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.

It’s so utterly damning that I’m going to run it in full without further comment.

Go read the whole thing.

I know what they meant to say

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:19

The original wording:

Then the corrected version:

I always wondered about “Christian Rock”

Filed under: Media, Religion, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:50

If Insane Clown Posse has now outed themselves as Christian rockers, does that mean that Pat Boone was actually recruiting for Satan?

Milwaukee. A bad and quite eerie part of town. This happens to be the very block where the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer murdered and ate 17 people in the 1980s. Now, from all around, thousands of young men and women, wearing scary clown face paint, are descending upon a disused indoor swimming pool that has been transformed into a music venue. They are juggalos, fans of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, the rap duo known as Insane Clown Posse.

At first glance, it might not be obvious why I’m so excited about meeting them. You might dismiss them as just unbelievably misogynist and aggressive, and it is true that their lyrics are indeed incredibly offensive.

[. . .]

ICP have been going for 20 years, always wearing clown make-up, which looks slightly lumpy because it’s painted over their goatees. They’ve been banned from performing in various cities where juggalos have been implicated in murders and gang violence. ICP have a fearsome reputation, fostered by news reports showing teenagers in juggalo T-shirts arrested for stabbing strangers and lyrics like “Barrels in your mouth/bullets to your head/The back of your neck’s all over the shed/Boomshacka boom chop chop bang.”

All of which makes Violent J’s recent announcement really quite astonishing: Insane Clown Posse have this entire time secretly been evangelical Christians. They’ve only been pretending to be brutal and sadistic to trick their fans into believing in God.

Did anyone ever guess that the next Great Awakening would be heralded by ICP?

QotD: The American car

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Liberty, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

In making automobiles more safe and ecologically friendly, we’ve often lost sight of the basic cost benefit factor — I think this is probably more true in the safety than in ecology — and one of the things that is precious about the American automobile industry is that it provided a cheap and reliable means of transportation for practically everyone in society, and then when those vehicles became used vehicles, it gave cheap and mostly reliable transportation to everybody, to the point where the Oakies in the dust bowl were in Model T fords and not on foot. When we undertake to make the automobile this humming, electronic device that provides a perfect egg of safety and closure and creates no adverse externalities (as people like to say these days) we lose sight of the purpose of the damn thing in the first place. And the purpose was to allow freedom — freedom and horizontal mobility to the masses. That’s why cash for clunkers was just sinful. You’re taking a bunch of perfectly good vehicles, inexpensive vehicles that could be used by people without much in the way of material means, and crushing them. If someone took a valuable resource — something that could really be useful to people — and destroyed it, they’d be in jail if they were private citizens.

P.J. O’Rourke, “P.J. O’Rourke Likes Puppies and America, Dislikes Flip Flops at the Airport [Texas Book Festival Interview]”, Austinist.com, 2010-10-08

October 8, 2010

QotD: Green power play

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:23

The Swedish retail giant IKEA announced yesterday it will invest $4.6-million to install 3,790 solar panels on three Toronto area stores, giving IKEA the electric-power-producing capacity of 960,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. According to IKEA, that’s enough electricity to power 100 homes. Amazing development. Even more amazing is the economics of this project. Under the Ontario government’s feed-in-tariff solar power scheme, IKEA will receive 71.3¢ for each kilowatt of power produced, which works out to about $6,800 a year for each of the 100 hypothetical homes. Since the average Toronto home currently pays about $1,200 for the same quantity of electricity, that implies that IKEA is being overpaid by $5,400 per home equivalent.

Welcome to the wonderful world of green economics and the magical business of carbon emission reduction. Each year, IKEA will receive $684,408 under Premier Dalton McGuinty’s green energy monster — for power that today retails for about $115,000. At that rate, IKEA will recoup $4.6-million in less than seven years — not bad for an investment that can be amortized over 20.

No wonder solar power is such a hot industry. No wonder, too, that the province of Ontario is in a headlong rush into a likely economic crisis brought on by skyrocketing electricity prices. To make up the money paid to IKEA to promote itself as a carbon-free zone, Ontario consumers and industries are on their way to experiencing the highest electricity rates in North America, if not most of the world.

Terence Corcoran, “Power Failure”, Financial Post, 2010-10-08

Does SDSR stand for Slashing Damage to Strategic Resources?

Filed under: Britain, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:22

Well, no, it stands for Strategic Defence and Security Review, which is what the British government is conducting right now. Lewis Page (who is a former naval officer, BTW) is still hoping that the Admirals can manage to save the core components of the Royal Navy from the budget cutters:

The Telegraph reports on the matter today, quoting unnamed insider sources at the heart of the ongoing Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR, the new government’s name for the savage cuts that will be necessary to sort out the UK defence budget crisis).

According to the paper’s informants, the navy has proposed cutting its fleet of “escort” warships (submarine-hunting frigates and air-defence destroyers) from the current 23 down to 12 — a couple more than we here on the Reg naval desk suggested under We Want Two. We didn’t think that the navy could preserve its vital amphibious-landing capability without cutting the tremendously costly — and largely useless — escort fleet a little further. It seems that we were on the money, as reportedly the two-carrier, 12-escort plan calls for “all amphibious craft” to be dispensed with.

If the paper’s sources are correct, some version of the escort-slashing, carrier-saving plan will go ahead. Reportedly the ministers of the National Security Council, meeting yesterday, “stopped short of a formal decision”, but “insiders now believe both ships will be built”.

Getting the two carriers through the first skirmish in the budget battle is a good start, but the ships are cheap compared to the proposed aircraft to equip them. The F-35B supersonic VTOL/STOL aircraft will cost a lot more than the ships they’ll be based on.

Although it makes for a fairly cheap carrier, the F-35Bs would be horrifyingly expensive, particularly if bought in time to equip the ships as they are completed. Not only is the F-35B the world’s first ever supersonic stealth jumpjet, it is currently suffering severe delays in flight testing: for quite some few years, until the production line gets into gear and economies of scale kick in, it will be very pricey to buy. It will also be comparatively expensive to own and operate, as perhaps the most or second-most complicated jet in the world today. Worse still, the need to carry a lift fan, swivelling exhaust nozzle and multiple lids and doors to cover these things when not in use means that the F-35B jumpjet will not be as good a combat plane as the F-35A and F-35C versions (runway and catapult respectively).

If we dare to assume that the hulls will be built, then a quick budget fix would be to omit the F-35B and install catapults on the carriers to allow them to use cheaper tail-hook aircraft (the F-18 or perhaps the F-35C). That’ll chop a few billion off the total cost of the package, and the only fly in the ointment is that the carriers are gas-turbine, not steam or nuclear-powered. That means depending on the not-yet-in-service electromagnetic catapult designed for the USS Gerald Ford, the next big American carrier.

The US Navy is committed to the electromagnetic catapult working, or they’ll have to pay a lot of money to re-engineer the Ford to use older technology and accept a multi-year delay in commissioning the ship. The US Navy could buy the entire Royal Navy out of petty cash, so it’s not a huge risk to depend on them getting the bugs worked out of the new mechanism in time.

The Telegraph thinks that the plan will be to convert HMS Prince of Wales, the second carrier, to an amphibious assault ship. Page thinks this is a bad idea on multiple counts:

The Telegraph‘s sources think that this is on the cards, saying that “ministers have discussed reconfiguring the first new carrier as a helicopter platform that would also carry Royal Marine commandos. The carrier would then ultimately replace the existing helicopter ship, HMS Ocean“.

This is a foolish plan, however. HMS Ocean is new: she doesn’t need replacing. Furthermore, having only one proper carrier is much, much worse than having two, almost as bad as having none: an enemy need only wait until the sole proper carrier is in a planned refit before becoming aggressive, happy in the knowledge that the UK can’t even rattle its sabre effectively in response. (One of the main ways that the USA resolves or responds to tense situations around the world day to day or week to week is to move its carriers about.)

In effect, the amphib downgrade plan sacrifices a hugely important and powerful carrier — gives up the critical one-carrier-always-up capability — and throws away the perfectly good HMS Ocean, which was actually quite cheap to have anyway (she cost less than a typical escort and her crew is no larger). The only upside here is that one or two more frigates or destroyers are preserved, a largely meaningless gain: the more so as there would now be fewer capital ships actually requiring escorts.

The problem with any kind of military spending is that you’re trying to make provision for the unforeseen future contingency. The last time the British government was on the verge of scrapping the aircraft carriers, Argentina kindly kicked up a ruckus that required military action — which would not have been possible without the carriers.

This time around, there’s no likely trouble spot to flare up and force the government to reconsider (unless we can prod Argentina to do us a favour again . . .)

The next Charles Stross novel, Rule 34

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

From an interview with CultureLab:

I am putting the finishing touches on Rule 34, as in rule 34 of the internet, which says if you can imagine it, there’s a porn community around it somewhere on the internet. It’s my big gay near-future Scottish police procedural, featuring alarming and innovative business models for organised crime, Gangster 2.0 and iMob. Most business models for organised crime would be familiar to Al Capone, so the California venture capital community is funding criminal start-ups with new models. It’s about 15 years out, and about 90 per cent of it is familiar right now, but the other 10 per cent will be unspeakably weird and strange, and perhaps 1 per cent of that will be beyond your imagination. It will be published next year.

US education reform

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:49

Do you recognize this astronaut?

Filed under: Law, Media, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:32

Apparently, he’s so easily identified in this image that he’s suing the artist, her recording company, and the stock image firm:

An American astronaut is suing Dido, claiming the singer misappropriated his image on her most recent album. Bruce McCandless II was photographed on a spacewalk in 1984; a quarter of a century later, he found himself floating in the centre of Dido’s Safe Trip Home album cover. And he isn’t happy.

McCandless’s complaint, filed last week, names Sony Music, Getty Images and Dido as defendants, using the singer’s full name – Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong. However, because the Nasa astronaut does not own the rights to the photograph, he is not suing for copyright infringement. Instead, he claims his “persona” was used without permission to help sell Dido’s album.

I don’t know what his chances of success might be, but if Sony Music bought the image from Getty, then it’s Getty that should be the only defendant . . . it’s the stock photography company’s responsibility to ensure that all the images they sell are properly licensed and available to sell on. Downstream users shouldn’t be held responsible for the due diligence of the seller.

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