I got a kick out of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAHrHd2lcw
Of course, at the same time it makes me kind of uneasy. I don't know exactly what they're saying, but it looks almost like a glorification of military might. When I watch war movies like Ghettysburg, it's to remind myself of the horrors of war as well as to honor our "honored dead." In the words of a great man, "You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out." (William T. Sherman.) We remember the wars of the past so we can appreciate the peace we have today, and take up arms only to fight an evil greater than the one we embrace by fighting. As has often been observed, "Armies break things and kill people. It's what they're trained to do and it's what they do do. If you don't want that to happen, don't send in the army, send in the police or stay out of it." War is not a thing to begin lightly.
-M.
P.S. More Sherman:
You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better. I repeat then that, by the original compact of government, the United States had certain rights in Georgia, which have never been relinquished and never will be; that the South began the war by seizing forts, arsenals, mints, custom-houses, etc., etc., long before Mr. Lincoln was installed, and before the South had one jot or tittle of provocation. I myself have seen in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hundreds and thousands of women and children fleeing from your armies and desperadoes, hungry and with bleeding feet. In Memphis, Vicksburg, and Mississippi, we fed thousands and thousands of the families of rebel soldiers left on our hands, and whom we could not see starve. Now that war comes to you, you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance. But these comparisons are idle. I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect an early success.
But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Element-122
Element-122 discovered (found in the wild, no less). Probably. http://arxivblog.com/?p=385
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Nuclear power
What the nuclear power industry (in Britain) wants, as incentives to build more nuclear power plants. Much of this would probably apply in the U.S., too. I would rather live without the long-term fixed carbon prices (it would increase the average cost of energy) but the others seem potentially doable, if someone (McCain? Obama? Congress?) made it a priority. I especially think long-term supply contracts and licensing/regulatory streamlinging are good ideas. Of course, if we don't do it, someone else will. That someone will also probably be the dominant power of the majority of the 21st century.
Long-term fixed carbon prices
One of the key reasons nuclear power has made a comeback is because of its near-zero carbon emissions. As carbon trading takes off, there has been very little development of the market beyond a few years and the price has tended to be on the low side as well as volatile. Some in the nuclear industry would like to see carbon price out into the future as much as 40 years
and for there to be a fixed floor price, perhaps as high as €40 per tonne.
A permanent underground solution for the long-term storage of nuclear waste
During the mid 1980s, four sites were identified as possible repositories of nuclear waste and then, after a major political row, all were rejected. Since then the interim waste solution has been focused on largely uneconomic reprocessing and high security storage above ground pending an agreed site for geological disposal, 200 to 1,000m below ground.
An easing of planning and consultation constraints
Sizewell B's planning enquiry took a record 340 days. The public enquiry, nearly four years from 1983 - 1985. More recently, in 2007, Greenpeace took the government at its word and successfully challenged the absence of consultation on new nuclear build meaning that the government has to spend even more time consulting as wide as possible. All of this is very expensive and off-putting to nuclear investors, especially by international comparison.
A streamlined licensing approval from the nuclear installations inspectorate of the five available designs
These are: The Framatome ANP EPR, the Evolutionary Power Reactor; The Westinghouse AP1000; The Atomic Energy of Canada ACR-1000; The General Electric Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR); The Eskom Pebble Bed Modular Reactor.
The NII is just too small to approve and license all of the nuclear designs in good time and this could delay nuclear a year and a half. To its credit, the government has recognised this, and the January 2008 white paper spoke of a prioritisation exercise. But it should go further. Realistically, the Framatome and Westinghouse are the leading contenders, so it might be a good idea to just to focus on those two first rather than try and approve them all simultaneously. Nevertheless, the 'Generic Design Assessment' is expected to take over three years to complete. So there's plenty of room for improvement there.
The government must issue a long-term financial indemnity for new build
Network Rail, is able to afford an enormous £40bn of investment in the railways over the next few years because the government has backed it with a financial indeminity. This much lowers the cost of debt raised for Network Rail, allowing it to do more with less. A similar scheme for nuclear power stations, which will cost a great deal less at £1.5bn each would dramatically lower the cost of capital and thus entice nuclear investors.
Long-term supply contracts
As the up-front, overnight capital costs are so great for nuclear, investors need to know that there will be customers a long way down the road, as much as 40 years, if they are to recoup their funds with some profits. This principle is clearly accepted in the field of Renewables – the Renewable Obligation currently goes out as far as 2027.
The government may have therefore to oblige public electricity suppliers via Ofgem to – as part of their licence conditions – to buy a certain percentage of their electricity requirements from nuclear generators. That would be a Nuclear Purchasing Obligation, very like the Renewables Obligation.
Interesting reading. Recommended.
-Max
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Long-term fixed carbon prices
One of the key reasons nuclear power has made a comeback is because of its near-zero carbon emissions. As carbon trading takes off, there has been very little development of the market beyond a few years and the price has tended to be on the low side as well as volatile. Some in the nuclear industry would like to see carbon price out into the future as much as 40 years
and for there to be a fixed floor price, perhaps as high as €40 per tonne.
A permanent underground solution for the long-term storage of nuclear waste
During the mid 1980s, four sites were identified as possible repositories of nuclear waste and then, after a major political row, all were rejected. Since then the interim waste solution has been focused on largely uneconomic reprocessing and high security storage above ground pending an agreed site for geological disposal, 200 to 1,000m below ground.
An easing of planning and consultation constraints
Sizewell B's planning enquiry took a record 340 days. The public enquiry, nearly four years from 1983 - 1985. More recently, in 2007, Greenpeace took the government at its word and successfully challenged the absence of consultation on new nuclear build meaning that the government has to spend even more time consulting as wide as possible. All of this is very expensive and off-putting to nuclear investors, especially by international comparison.
A streamlined licensing approval from the nuclear installations inspectorate of the five available designs
These are: The Framatome ANP EPR, the Evolutionary Power Reactor; The Westinghouse AP1000; The Atomic Energy of Canada ACR-1000; The General Electric Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR); The Eskom Pebble Bed Modular Reactor.
The NII is just too small to approve and license all of the nuclear designs in good time and this could delay nuclear a year and a half. To its credit, the government has recognised this, and the January 2008 white paper spoke of a prioritisation exercise. But it should go further. Realistically, the Framatome and Westinghouse are the leading contenders, so it might be a good idea to just to focus on those two first rather than try and approve them all simultaneously. Nevertheless, the 'Generic Design Assessment' is expected to take over three years to complete. So there's plenty of room for improvement there.
The government must issue a long-term financial indemnity for new build
Network Rail, is able to afford an enormous £40bn of investment in the railways over the next few years because the government has backed it with a financial indeminity. This much lowers the cost of debt raised for Network Rail, allowing it to do more with less. A similar scheme for nuclear power stations, which will cost a great deal less at £1.5bn each would dramatically lower the cost of capital and thus entice nuclear investors.
Long-term supply contracts
As the up-front, overnight capital costs are so great for nuclear, investors need to know that there will be customers a long way down the road, as much as 40 years, if they are to recoup their funds with some profits. This principle is clearly accepted in the field of Renewables – the Renewable Obligation currently goes out as far as 2027.
The government may have therefore to oblige public electricity suppliers via Ofgem to – as part of their licence conditions – to buy a certain percentage of their electricity requirements from nuclear generators. That would be a Nuclear Purchasing Obligation, very like the Renewables Obligation.
Interesting reading. Recommended.
-Max
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Graph: U.S. Tariffs
Y.A.,
May come in handy:
http://pw1.netcom.com/~rdavis2/tariffs.html
~B.C.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
May come in handy:
http://pw1.netcom.com/~rdavis2/tariffs.html
~B.C.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Roots of the subprime situation
Moody's did not have access to the individual loan files, much less did it communicate with the borrowers or try to verify the information they provided in their loan applications. "We aren't loan officers," Claire Robinson, a 20-year veteran who is in charge of asset-backed finance for Moody's, told me. "Our expertise is as statisticians on an aggregate basis. We want to know, of 1,000 individuals, based on historical performance, what percent will pay their loans?"
Emphasis added. The article is much deeper than this point, though, and I'm still digesting.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Emphasis added. The article is much deeper than this point, though, and I'm still digesting.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Bill Cosby
I like him.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Wealth inequality
Hypothesis: Technology and Education are opposed factors. Education is losing.
http://aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.27837/pub_detail.asp
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
http://aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.27837/pub_detail.asp
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
21st century tech
Sorry for yet another post on politics:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/cs_20080416_3324.php
If the Democrats can pull this one off and elect Obama (Clinton has zero chance at this point, and I don't think Democrats are going to nominate a dark horse), it will be due to two factors: 1.) The country is sick of Republicans, and 2.) They're doing a better job at exploiting technology (cell phones and the Internet).
The impact of #1 is lessened because a lot of the Republicans who were sick of Republicans in 2006 were upset about fiscal discipline. They weren't sorry that the GOP got whipped in 2006, but they'll largely come back to the fold this year to vote for McCain if not necessarily their local Congressman. If I had to guess I'd say, quantitately, that this alleviates about half the Republican image vulnerability. The other half is about appeal to independents, and I don't know whether Obama or McCain is going to wind up with the advantage there--McCain has a strategic advantage (America is a center-right nation, and independents probably share more opinions with McCain than Obama) but Obama will have the tactical advantage (more funding, more volunteers). Hang on for a wild ride!
Remember that a key ingredient for a functional democracy is that you can handle losing an election. If the stakes rise so high that you can't afford to lose, there's no incentive to play fair or to concede defeat once you lose (see Alma 2:7-10). At this point I prefer McCain's platform to Obama's, but the definition of an extreme optimist is "someone who believes that civilization will probably survive, even if it doesn't take his advice." If Obama takes it, so be it, and I'll hope for the best.
-Max
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/cs_20080416_3324.php
If the Democrats can pull this one off and elect Obama (Clinton has zero chance at this point, and I don't think Democrats are going to nominate a dark horse), it will be due to two factors: 1.) The country is sick of Republicans, and 2.) They're doing a better job at exploiting technology (cell phones and the Internet).
The impact of #1 is lessened because a lot of the Republicans who were sick of Republicans in 2006 were upset about fiscal discipline. They weren't sorry that the GOP got whipped in 2006, but they'll largely come back to the fold this year to vote for McCain if not necessarily their local Congressman. If I had to guess I'd say, quantitately, that this alleviates about half the Republican image vulnerability. The other half is about appeal to independents, and I don't know whether Obama or McCain is going to wind up with the advantage there--McCain has a strategic advantage (America is a center-right nation, and independents probably share more opinions with McCain than Obama) but Obama will have the tactical advantage (more funding, more volunteers). Hang on for a wild ride!
Remember that a key ingredient for a functional democracy is that you can handle losing an election. If the stakes rise so high that you can't afford to lose, there's no incentive to play fair or to concede defeat once you lose (see Alma 2:7-10). At this point I prefer McCain's platform to Obama's, but the definition of an extreme optimist is "someone who believes that civilization will probably survive, even if it doesn't take his advice." If Obama takes it, so be it, and I'll hope for the best.
-Max
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Lambda functions (C++)
C++0x has voted in lambda functions! Yay!!! With type inferencing, template concepts, and lambda functions, C++ may very well reclaim its place in my heart as my favorite programming language.
http://herbsutter.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/trip-report-februarymarch-2008-iso-c-standards-meeting/
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
http://herbsutter.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/trip-report-februarymarch-2008-iso-c-standards-meeting/
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Regulation
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=293323242465620
Regulation has costs — both monetary and through the inhibition of innovation — which must be weighed against benefits. [snip]
Then there is a proposed Department of Transportation rule that would force infants to occupy their own seats on commercial flights, which would yield an expected savings of one life per two years — but would produce a significant net increase in risk, as studies show that parents choose to drive rather than purchase additional tickets.
Some of the worst regulatory excesses occur when the government is exercising its "gatekeeper" role, in which it must grant permission before a product can be marketed, as is the case for pharmaceuticals and pesticides.
Regulators of these products are highly risk-averse, often discounting or ignoring the costs of life-saving products that are delayed or abandoned. As a result of pharmaceutical regulators constantly raising the bar for approval, bringing a new drug to market now requires 12 to 15 years and costs more than $1 billion (in direct and indirect costs).
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Regulation has costs — both monetary and through the inhibition of innovation — which must be weighed against benefits. [snip]
Then there is a proposed Department of Transportation rule that would force infants to occupy their own seats on commercial flights, which would yield an expected savings of one life per two years — but would produce a significant net increase in risk, as studies show that parents choose to drive rather than purchase additional tickets.
Some of the worst regulatory excesses occur when the government is exercising its "gatekeeper" role, in which it must grant permission before a product can be marketed, as is the case for pharmaceuticals and pesticides.
Regulators of these products are highly risk-averse, often discounting or ignoring the costs of life-saving products that are delayed or abandoned. As a result of pharmaceutical regulators constantly raising the bar for approval, bringing a new drug to market now requires 12 to 15 years and costs more than $1 billion (in direct and indirect costs).
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Republicans & the U.S. Economy
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/how_will_mccain_handle_are_you.html
In a debate at The George Washington University on Feb. 25, a team of four Democratic Congressmen led by Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) demolished a team of Republicans led by Rep. Adam Putnam (Fla.) by citing all the evidence that Americans are not better off than they were when George W. Bush became president.
Such as: Median household income in the United States rose $6,000 in the eight years of Bill Clinton's administration, to $49,163, but fell to $48,023 during Bush's first six years in office. Certainly, it's still falling.
Also, the economy grew by an average of 4 percent during the Clinton years and created an average 1.8 million jobs a year. Under Bush, gross domestic product has grown just 2.7 percent a year and created 369,000 jobs a year - and a recession is probably under way to cut even those numbers...
In the GW debate, Emanuel and fellow Democrats Steve Israel (N.Y.), Artur Davis (Ala.) and Robert Andrews (N.J.) pummeled Republicans Putnam, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), Paul Ryan (Wis.) and Eric Cantor (Va.) with the numbers, and the Republicans had no refutation to make.
Democrats will do the same to McCain, and he'd better get ready with answers.
Anyone who's interested should probably start by examing GDP growth trends:
http://www.data360.org/graph_group.aspx?Graph_Group_Id=149
Real growth rates have declined sharply over the last 30 years. In some ways that's not surprising because growth has an asymptotic component (growth rates are highest in underdeveloped countries: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_rea_gro_rat-economy-gdp-real-growth-rate) but that's not really a satisfactory answer. What makes economic growth happen, what have we been doing wrong lately, and what should we be doing now? Worthwhile questions.
~B.C.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
In a debate at The George Washington University on Feb. 25, a team of four Democratic Congressmen led by Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) demolished a team of Republicans led by Rep. Adam Putnam (Fla.) by citing all the evidence that Americans are not better off than they were when George W. Bush became president.
Such as: Median household income in the United States rose $6,000 in the eight years of Bill Clinton's administration, to $49,163, but fell to $48,023 during Bush's first six years in office. Certainly, it's still falling.
Also, the economy grew by an average of 4 percent during the Clinton years and created an average 1.8 million jobs a year. Under Bush, gross domestic product has grown just 2.7 percent a year and created 369,000 jobs a year - and a recession is probably under way to cut even those numbers...
In the GW debate, Emanuel and fellow Democrats Steve Israel (N.Y.), Artur Davis (Ala.) and Robert Andrews (N.J.) pummeled Republicans Putnam, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), Paul Ryan (Wis.) and Eric Cantor (Va.) with the numbers, and the Republicans had no refutation to make.
Democrats will do the same to McCain, and he'd better get ready with answers.
Anyone who's interested should probably start by examing GDP growth trends:
http://www.data360.org/graph_group.aspx?Graph_Group_Id=149
Real growth rates have declined sharply over the last 30 years. In some ways that's not surprising because growth has an asymptotic component (growth rates are highest in underdeveloped countries: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_rea_gro_rat-economy-gdp-real-growth-rate) but that's not really a satisfactory answer. What makes economic growth happen, what have we been doing wrong lately, and what should we be doing now? Worthwhile questions.
~B.C.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Heads-up: the Future of America
It looks pretty likely at this point that John McCain is going to be our next President. (I know, I'm surprised too. Three months ago I thought Obama was going to take it.) With that in mind, you may want to check out his agenda for the American economy. If you don't have time to read the speech, take five minutes and watch the video.
If you're short on time, skip the rest of my message and watch the video. Okay?
...
Okay.
It's a pretty good plan, actually. I'm impressed. He has good advisors--and the principles he's advocating (pro-growth, transparency) are correct. Obama is preaching governmental transparency too, and I'll comment some other time on the other interesting part of the presidential campaign: since the campaign is a job interview with the American people, it's a pretty fair bet that any idea that catches on with most or all of the American electorate will be adopted by any candidate who makes it through the primaries (or else they won't make it through the primaries). That's why some people vote for third parties--a successful third party usually has its platform absorbed by the major parties, so a vote for a third party isn't necessarily "throwing away your vote" so much as voting for a platform. Anyway, the fact that McCain and Obama are both pushing for governmental transparency[1] indicates to me that it's probably going to happen. That's 21st century government for you, apparently.
Interesting times.
-Max
[1] McCain says, "We're going to make every aspect of government purchases and performance transparent. Information on every step of contracts and grants will be posted on the Internet in plain and simple English. We're going to post an agency's performance evaluation as well." How would you like to know the efficiency rating of the IRS? How about the Department of Education? Knowing how well things are going is a necessary precondition to voting for productive reforms; it also serves to give government programs performance incentives resembling those in the private sector--produce results or perish.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
If you're short on time, skip the rest of my message and watch the video. Okay?
...
Okay.
It's a pretty good plan, actually. I'm impressed. He has good advisors--and the principles he's advocating (pro-growth, transparency) are correct. Obama is preaching governmental transparency too, and I'll comment some other time on the other interesting part of the presidential campaign: since the campaign is a job interview with the American people, it's a pretty fair bet that any idea that catches on with most or all of the American electorate will be adopted by any candidate who makes it through the primaries (or else they won't make it through the primaries). That's why some people vote for third parties--a successful third party usually has its platform absorbed by the major parties, so a vote for a third party isn't necessarily "throwing away your vote" so much as voting for a platform. Anyway, the fact that McCain and Obama are both pushing for governmental transparency[1] indicates to me that it's probably going to happen. That's 21st century government for you, apparently.
Interesting times.
-Max
[1] McCain says, "We're going to make every aspect of government purchases and performance transparent. Information on every step of contracts and grants will be posted on the Internet in plain and simple English. We're going to post an agency's performance evaluation as well." How would you like to know the efficiency rating of the IRS? How about the Department of Education? Knowing how well things are going is a necessary precondition to voting for productive reforms; it also serves to give government programs performance incentives resembling those in the private sector--produce results or perish.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Bypass surgery may cause brain damage? (Bill Clinton)
This is interesting in a medical more than a political sense, but the political background (Bill Clinton's erratic performance during this year's presidential campaign) may put the medical into perspective. On the other hand, while the phenomenon alleged is interesting, I would want more data before I put too much stock in it as the reason for Bill Clinton's performance. All of this is just a long-winded way of saying, "I thought this was interesting."
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2008other/080412clinton.htm
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2008other/080412clinton.htm
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Politics (McCain interview)
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/john_mccain_on_kudlow_company.html
I'm impressed by some points he makes about CEO performance and gasoline prices for poor people.
The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
I'm impressed by some points he makes about CEO performance and gasoline prices for poor people.
The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Friday, April 11, 2008
High school story (Valentine's Day)
My roommates are watching Sneakers right now, and the part with the computer dating reminds me of a story from high school. For Valentine's Day the student body offered a computerized "compatibility rating" service--you fill out your answers to a set of questions (music tastes, hobbies, etc.), and they tell you the top 10 other students of the appropriate sex matching your answers, on the grounds that that this constitutes "compatibility." They also told you your two least-compatible matches. Well, for fun, I signed up and filled out a questionnaire. My #1 compatibility rating was, IIRC, 63%. I asked around among my friends and found that for most of them, the top match was usually 75-80% and all ten of the top matches were rated higher than my #1 match. Even more amusingly, I showed up as the "least compatible" match on something like 25% of the readouts I checked.
It doesn't mean anything in particular, since the questionnaire was a bunch of trivial personality-level stuff that doesn't, IMHO, measure the traits I actually look for in girls. Perhaps it measures what girls look for, though--I suppose the student body officers probably knew girls better than I do.
Then there was the time I took a job aptitude test as a sophomore and they told me I didn't fit the profile of any known profession--I told everyone they basically advised me to become a bum...
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
It doesn't mean anything in particular, since the questionnaire was a bunch of trivial personality-level stuff that doesn't, IMHO, measure the traits I actually look for in girls. Perhaps it measures what girls look for, though--I suppose the student body officers probably knew girls better than I do.
Then there was the time I took a job aptitude test as a sophomore and they told me I didn't fit the profile of any known profession--I told everyone they basically advised me to become a bum...
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Obama. Lobbyists?
Obama has been running ads lately boasting that he's the only candidate who doesn't take money from "lobbyists." Is that true? Not really. There's a small group of people categorized as "federal lobbyists" who appear to be generic lobbyists-for-hire in Washington (not attached to any particular company or industry). They and their close associates have given $800,000 to Clinton, $400,000 to McCain, and $86,000 to Obama, and Obama's campaign says it rejects these contributions when it notices them. That's peanuts. Obama's campaign is perfectly willing to accept lobbyists as campaign advisors (Broderick Johnson) or fund-raising "bundlers" (Frank Clark), and to accept money from lobbyists outside this group (he accepted $100,000 from a law firm called Sidley Austin LLP which lobbies in Washington to the tune of $4.5 million a year).
More data here from the Clinton campaign. This is going to bite Obama, even though the other candidates also accept lobbyist money, because he's the one trying to make it part of his primary message. You can't hide facts in the Internet age. :)
~B.C.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
More data here from the Clinton campaign. This is going to bite Obama, even though the other candidates also accept lobbyist money, because he's the one trying to make it part of his primary message. You can't hide facts in the Internet age. :)
~B.C.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Afghanistan/Pakistan
Some interesting reading. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/962sandw.asp
To begin with, numerous senators spoke of the Afghan-Pakistan border area as though there were no border--forces poured into Afghanistan would somehow directly affect what was going on in Pakistan or, alternatively, the real al Qaeda was on the Afghan side where U.S. troops could get at them. Speaking ethnographically, of course, there is no border--the Durand
Line that separates Afghanistan from Pakistan cuts the Pashtun nation just about in half, and the porous border has seen decades of happy smuggling. But the border is very real both to our forces and to their enemies. Our troops know that they cannot cross into Pakistan, and the enemy knows it too. That's why the bases of the "real" al Qaeda are not in Afghanistan--American troops in Afghanistan report very few al Qaeda fighters and those they do come across are mostly operating out of Pakistani bases. The al Qaeda bases that harbor Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and the other al Qaeda leaders plotting the attacks against which the Intelligence Community warns are in Pakistan--principally Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Chitral in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP).
This supplies some context around McCain's criticism of Obama's proposal to strike inside Afghanistan. Here's a link to Obama's side of the story: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/367/. From reading the above article, my reading of the situation--and I'm obviously no military expert--is that when Obama advocates "taking action" against Pakistan, he means minimalist strikes with special forces and Predator drones against specific Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan. McCain is more aware of the scope of the problem and assumes Obama means something big enough to actually dent Al Qaeda (which would probably entail ground troops moreso than bombing, a literal invasion, but being a pilot McCain speaks in terms of bombing first) and simultaneously threaten Pakistan's sovereignty. Obama's camp accuses McCain of twisting Obama's words, but in actuality McCain is simply overestimating Obama's military competency: Obama may be right that special forces operations and Predator strikes would be diplomatically feasible, but they simply wouldn't be effective. Obama is showing his inexperience.
Another interesting quote from the Pakistan article:
To the question, "Is there really nothing we can do unless we send more troops?" the answer is unequivocally that there is something we can do. Congress can do it, in fact, and very quickly. Pass the supplemental defense appropriation that would allow development money to flow reliably to our soldiers in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. The advantage of Afghanistan's poverty (for us) is that a little money goes a long way. American soldiers have increasingly been leveraging development funds to starve the insurgency of recruits in a way similar to what has worked in Iraq (but tailored appropriately to conditions in Afghanistan).
Apparently some of the institutional competency gained in Iraq is transferring to other regions. [Blog readers, if you exist: please take a moment to peruse http://www.spiritofamerica.net/.] That's good news.
-B.C.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
To begin with, numerous senators spoke of the Afghan-Pakistan border area as though there were no border--forces poured into Afghanistan would somehow directly affect what was going on in Pakistan or, alternatively, the real al Qaeda was on the Afghan side where U.S. troops could get at them. Speaking ethnographically, of course, there is no border--the Durand
Line that separates Afghanistan from Pakistan cuts the Pashtun nation just about in half, and the porous border has seen decades of happy smuggling. But the border is very real both to our forces and to their enemies. Our troops know that they cannot cross into Pakistan, and the enemy knows it too. That's why the bases of the "real" al Qaeda are not in Afghanistan--American troops in Afghanistan report very few al Qaeda fighters and those they do come across are mostly operating out of Pakistani bases. The al Qaeda bases that harbor Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and the other al Qaeda leaders plotting the attacks against which the Intelligence Community warns are in Pakistan--principally Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Chitral in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP).
This supplies some context around McCain's criticism of Obama's proposal to strike inside Afghanistan. Here's a link to Obama's side of the story: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/367/. From reading the above article, my reading of the situation--and I'm obviously no military expert--is that when Obama advocates "taking action" against Pakistan, he means minimalist strikes with special forces and Predator drones against specific Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan. McCain is more aware of the scope of the problem and assumes Obama means something big enough to actually dent Al Qaeda (which would probably entail ground troops moreso than bombing, a literal invasion, but being a pilot McCain speaks in terms of bombing first) and simultaneously threaten Pakistan's sovereignty. Obama's camp accuses McCain of twisting Obama's words, but in actuality McCain is simply overestimating Obama's military competency: Obama may be right that special forces operations and Predator strikes would be diplomatically feasible, but they simply wouldn't be effective. Obama is showing his inexperience.
Another interesting quote from the Pakistan article:
To the question, "Is there really nothing we can do unless we send more troops?" the answer is unequivocally that there is something we can do. Congress can do it, in fact, and very quickly. Pass the supplemental defense appropriation that would allow development money to flow reliably to our soldiers in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. The advantage of Afghanistan's poverty (for us) is that a little money goes a long way. American soldiers have increasingly been leveraging development funds to starve the insurgency of recruits in a way similar to what has worked in Iraq (but tailored appropriately to conditions in Afghanistan).
Apparently some of the institutional competency gained in Iraq is transferring to other regions. [Blog readers, if you exist: please take a moment to peruse http://www.spiritofamerica.net/.] That's good news.
-B.C.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
On subprime mortgages
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/04/predatory_lending_or_mortgage.html
One measure of the possible extent of the fraud: BasePoint Analytics took a look at millions of subprime loans and found that in 70 percent of cases where mortgages go bad quickly (exactly the kinds of mortgages that account for a chunk of today's rising default rates), there was some misrepresentation by the borrower, broker or appraiser, or some combination of the three. Those loans were five times more likely to default quickly than mortgages without falsifications.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
One measure of the possible extent of the fraud: BasePoint Analytics took a look at millions of subprime loans and found that in 70 percent of cases where mortgages go bad quickly (exactly the kinds of mortgages that account for a chunk of today's rising default rates), there was some misrepresentation by the borrower, broker or appraiser, or some combination of the three. Those loans were five times more likely to default quickly than mortgages without falsifications.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Useful websites
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/03/30/sv_101websites.xml&page=3
Interesting browsing.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Interesting browsing.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Olympic Torch
I always wondered what they would do if this happened:
Passing through Paris under armed guard, the torch was extinguished several times, and police officers moved it aboard a bus to protect it as demonstrators swarmed the security detail.
I'm kind of sad that the response was so pedestrian. I always sort of hoped that they would go back to Athens to get a new flame. I mean, what's the point of running the torch round the world if it's not even the same flame you got from Athens? [Max pointedly ignores the ghost of Heraclitus hovering over his left shoulder.]
-Max
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Passing through Paris under armed guard, the torch was extinguished several times, and police officers moved it aboard a bus to protect it as demonstrators swarmed the security detail.
I'm kind of sad that the response was so pedestrian. I always sort of hoped that they would go back to Athens to get a new flame. I mean, what's the point of running the torch round the world if it's not even the same flame you got from Athens? [Max pointedly ignores the ghost of Heraclitus hovering over his left shoulder.]
-Max
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Alzheimer's
J.,
Here's a thought: what would you say if you found out that you were eighty years old, with Alzheimer's? You may think this is a silly question, except that if you ever do become eighty years old with Alzheimer's you may have forgotten the fifty-five years in between, so now is your one opportunity to prepare an answer.
So far, I've considered and rejected, "That's interesting. Might as well put me to sleep, since I'm not really here any more." It's probably a little too depressing for those on the receiving end, and besides, I'm not sure about the morality of requesting a lethal injection for yourself. Still, the point remains--if I'm perpetually my twenty-five-year-old self, over and over again, between age eighty and ninety-five, then when I'm eighty-one I'm not really there--I'm back here in the early 21st century--so no one is there. There is no eighty-six-year-old Max in that case, and since I'm not there anyway, why bother keeping the body?
The best alternate answer I've come up with is, "Oh. I'm very sorry for all the fuss and bother. How have you been recently? Anything on your mind? There must be some reason you stopped by to chat." Obviously I won't have the foggiest idea who it is that's come by to talk, and I may have to ask clarifying questions like, "I gather that Millie is your wife? And you're my son?" But if ELIZA[1] could do it, why not me?
-Max
[1] ELIZA, of course, was the original computer therapist. As I recall the history, Joseph Weisenbaum in 1966 was working on natural language processing. He wrote a program which would take your statements ("I'm mad at my girlfriend") and playing around with the grammar to spit the same information back out as a question ("How do you feel about the fact that you're mad at your girlfriend?" or "How long have you been mad at your girlfriend?"). The program had no real understanding of what "I am mad" meant, but it it recognized that "mad" was a verb and that the opposite of "I" was "you," so it was able to play around with the sentence structure and insert the conventional Rogerian couch-therapist words in the right places ("Tell me about..."). To Weisenbaum's surprise, some people really took to the program, insisting that it had helped them with their problems and was actually intelligent. Most people, of course, would have quickly realized that ELIZA was monumentally stupid, but I guess some people really did just want to talk about their feelings and ELIZA did a good job for them, thus demonstrating that you don't necessarily have to have any understanding of what people are talking about to help them with certain kinds of problems. You see how this relates to Alzheimer's?
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Here's a thought: what would you say if you found out that you were eighty years old, with Alzheimer's? You may think this is a silly question, except that if you ever do become eighty years old with Alzheimer's you may have forgotten the fifty-five years in between, so now is your one opportunity to prepare an answer.
So far, I've considered and rejected, "That's interesting. Might as well put me to sleep, since I'm not really here any more." It's probably a little too depressing for those on the receiving end, and besides, I'm not sure about the morality of requesting a lethal injection for yourself. Still, the point remains--if I'm perpetually my twenty-five-year-old self, over and over again, between age eighty and ninety-five, then when I'm eighty-one I'm not really there--I'm back here in the early 21st century--so no one is there. There is no eighty-six-year-old Max in that case, and since I'm not there anyway, why bother keeping the body?
The best alternate answer I've come up with is, "Oh. I'm very sorry for all the fuss and bother. How have you been recently? Anything on your mind? There must be some reason you stopped by to chat." Obviously I won't have the foggiest idea who it is that's come by to talk, and I may have to ask clarifying questions like, "I gather that Millie is your wife? And you're my son?" But if ELIZA[1] could do it, why not me?
-Max
[1] ELIZA, of course, was the original computer therapist. As I recall the history, Joseph Weisenbaum in 1966 was working on natural language processing. He wrote a program which would take your statements ("I'm mad at my girlfriend") and playing around with the grammar to spit the same information back out as a question ("How do you feel about the fact that you're mad at your girlfriend?" or "How long have you been mad at your girlfriend?"). The program had no real understanding of what "I am mad" meant, but it it recognized that "mad" was a verb and that the opposite of "I" was "you," so it was able to play around with the sentence structure and insert the conventional Rogerian couch-therapist words in the right places ("Tell me about..."). To Weisenbaum's surprise, some people really took to the program, insisting that it had helped them with their problems and was actually intelligent. Most people, of course, would have quickly realized that ELIZA was monumentally stupid, but I guess some people really did just want to talk about their feelings and ELIZA did a good job for them, thus demonstrating that you don't necessarily have to have any understanding of what people are talking about to help them with certain kinds of problems. You see how this relates to Alzheimer's?
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Saturday, April 5, 2008
GURPS: Mad inventions
Here are a couple of ideas I have for Artificer technology in Dungeon Fantasy, although it's obviously applicable to any GURPS fantasy campaign where Quick Gadgeteering is a legal trait. I'm trying to explore what's possible with TL 3 tech, not necessarily what's easy, so I haven't assigned Concept penalties or anything.
Improved crossbows
Energy storage at TL 3 exists in the form of mechanical tension and gravitational potential energy. Repeating crossbows are TL 2 and do thr+1 damage. Slings do sw or sw+1 damage, but of course they're much harder to use and not as accurate because you impart energy at the same time you're firing, whereas with crossbows you cock, aim, and then pull the trigger when you're ready. There's no fundamental reason you couldn't have a crossbow that does sw damage--you'd have to work out a way to cock it by banging it hard on something, and you still have to load the quarrel, but both of those are solveable problems. The best available regular crossbow (composite crossbow from MA) does thr+5 damage and takes four Readies to reload. Thus, it's not impossible that you could get a sw+5 imp crossbow that takes one Ready maneuver to reload, all at TL 3. (The repeating crossbow requires that you take your Ready to work the lever immediately before firing, but a Gadgeteer should be able to solve that problem.) It would be madly expensive and quite difficult to make, but hey, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" Right?
GURPS: Martial Arts p. 232 also suggests barbed arrows that inflict half their damage again when pulled out. Why not spring-loaded expanding barbed arrowheads that inflict 1-2 points of damage on a succesful hit as a follow-up attack (i.e. ignores DR if the main attack penetrated) and increases pull-out damage by a like amount? They'll be heavy and not cost-effective, but sometimes more damage is, well, more damage. And sometimes mad inventors just like to play with their toys.
Improved armor
Armor is basically about putting big slabs of material between yourself and an attack. Fundamentally, armor is TL 0 (sandbags are DR 3 per inch and I believe sacks are TL 0), but the trick is getting personal armor that's light enough and flexible enough to still leave you mobile while protecting all your important bits. (If you ignore mobility requirements, burying yourself six feet deep in dirt with a snorkel up to the surface offers dandy protection, at least DR 36 to your whole body by my reckoning--interpolating from B559, I figure that dirt will protect less than sand but at least as much as the softest wood, which is 0.5 DR/inch.)
Therefore, you're really going to be limited chiefly by materials technology and by your ability to form joints with that material. DR in GURPS scales linearly with material thickness. A human male has a surface area of about three thousand square inches. Rolled steel weighs 0.2865 pounds per cubic inch, aluminum weighs 0.0955 pounds per cubic inch, and titanium is 0.1628 pounds per cubic inch. This implies that you could give a human male DR 10 over his whole body for about 120 pounds of weight using steel (maximum of 70 DR per inch of thickness) or 95 pounds of aluminum (maximum of 30 DR per inch), or 81 pounds of titanium (my sources indicate that titanium is about twice as "strong" as aluminum by volume and comparable to steel, although "strong" is a complex concept when it comes to armor, so I'm willing to defer to those with greater knowledge). Anyway, this sets an upper bound on the effectiveness/weight ratio of any low-tech armor, and no amount of clever inventions is going to exceed those bounds. However, Gadgeteering may be essential to actually letting you approach those bounds without losing mobility. One suggestion: GURPS allows you to layer two types of armor at the cost of a DX -1 penalty. A Quick Gadgeteer can invent a suit of armor which combines the weight, cost, and DR of both types of armor with no DX penalty. He can find a way to make the joints still more freely: as much a matter of ergonomics as metallurgy.
A pixie, on the other hand, has a surface area of about 21 square inches. You could theoretically layer him in 1 inch thick steel armor (increasing his surface area to 28 square inches in the process) with 10 pounds of steel. A hefty weight for a small creature, but pixies are strong for their size, and we're talking DR 70 here. On the other hand, it would take a ferociously gifted Gadgeteer to actually invent and build such armor.
Both!
So what about a suit of DR 10 plate armor with built-in repeating crossbows on both arms, firing spring-loaded barbed quarrels? Clench your fists to fire two quarrels, then slap your hands (hard) on your thighs to re-cock the crossbows and drop in fresh quarrels. (With the right Fast-draw/Heroic Archer abilities maybe you could even do it as a free action.) When the enemy gets close or you run out of ammo, just draw your greatsword and go to work, like a TL 3 Hatchetman (unfortunately without any Triple-Strength Myomer).
So, that's what I've got so far for TL 3: spring energy and personal armor. Open to more bright ideas.
-Max
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Improved crossbows
Energy storage at TL 3 exists in the form of mechanical tension and gravitational potential energy. Repeating crossbows are TL 2 and do thr+1 damage. Slings do sw or sw+1 damage, but of course they're much harder to use and not as accurate because you impart energy at the same time you're firing, whereas with crossbows you cock, aim, and then pull the trigger when you're ready. There's no fundamental reason you couldn't have a crossbow that does sw damage--you'd have to work out a way to cock it by banging it hard on something, and you still have to load the quarrel, but both of those are solveable problems. The best available regular crossbow (composite crossbow from MA) does thr+5 damage and takes four Readies to reload. Thus, it's not impossible that you could get a sw+5 imp crossbow that takes one Ready maneuver to reload, all at TL 3. (The repeating crossbow requires that you take your Ready to work the lever immediately before firing, but a Gadgeteer should be able to solve that problem.) It would be madly expensive and quite difficult to make, but hey, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" Right?
GURPS: Martial Arts p. 232 also suggests barbed arrows that inflict half their damage again when pulled out. Why not spring-loaded expanding barbed arrowheads that inflict 1-2 points of damage on a succesful hit as a follow-up attack (i.e. ignores DR if the main attack penetrated) and increases pull-out damage by a like amount? They'll be heavy and not cost-effective, but sometimes more damage is, well, more damage. And sometimes mad inventors just like to play with their toys.
Improved armor
Armor is basically about putting big slabs of material between yourself and an attack. Fundamentally, armor is TL 0 (sandbags are DR 3 per inch and I believe sacks are TL 0), but the trick is getting personal armor that's light enough and flexible enough to still leave you mobile while protecting all your important bits. (If you ignore mobility requirements, burying yourself six feet deep in dirt with a snorkel up to the surface offers dandy protection, at least DR 36 to your whole body by my reckoning--interpolating from B559, I figure that dirt will protect less than sand but at least as much as the softest wood, which is 0.5 DR/inch.)
Therefore, you're really going to be limited chiefly by materials technology and by your ability to form joints with that material. DR in GURPS scales linearly with material thickness. A human male has a surface area of about three thousand square inches. Rolled steel weighs 0.2865 pounds per cubic inch, aluminum weighs 0.0955 pounds per cubic inch, and titanium is 0.1628 pounds per cubic inch. This implies that you could give a human male DR 10 over his whole body for about 120 pounds of weight using steel (maximum of 70 DR per inch of thickness) or 95 pounds of aluminum (maximum of 30 DR per inch), or 81 pounds of titanium (my sources indicate that titanium is about twice as "strong" as aluminum by volume and comparable to steel, although "strong" is a complex concept when it comes to armor, so I'm willing to defer to those with greater knowledge). Anyway, this sets an upper bound on the effectiveness/weight ratio of any low-tech armor, and no amount of clever inventions is going to exceed those bounds. However, Gadgeteering may be essential to actually letting you approach those bounds without losing mobility. One suggestion: GURPS allows you to layer two types of armor at the cost of a DX -1 penalty. A Quick Gadgeteer can invent a suit of armor which combines the weight, cost, and DR of both types of armor with no DX penalty. He can find a way to make the joints still more freely: as much a matter of ergonomics as metallurgy.
A pixie, on the other hand, has a surface area of about 21 square inches. You could theoretically layer him in 1 inch thick steel armor (increasing his surface area to 28 square inches in the process) with 10 pounds of steel. A hefty weight for a small creature, but pixies are strong for their size, and we're talking DR 70 here. On the other hand, it would take a ferociously gifted Gadgeteer to actually invent and build such armor.
Both!
So what about a suit of DR 10 plate armor with built-in repeating crossbows on both arms, firing spring-loaded barbed quarrels? Clench your fists to fire two quarrels, then slap your hands (hard) on your thighs to re-cock the crossbows and drop in fresh quarrels. (With the right Fast-draw/Heroic Archer abilities maybe you could even do it as a free action.) When the enemy gets close or you run out of ammo, just draw your greatsword and go to work, like a TL 3 Hatchetman (unfortunately without any Triple-Strength Myomer).
So, that's what I've got so far for TL 3: spring energy and personal armor. Open to more bright ideas.
-Max
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Economics of Print-on-demand books
J.,
A case study of the economics of POD books: http://www.fonerbooks.com/pod.htm
Article Summary: POD books cost slightly more to print, but this is made back in a couple of ways. One obvious one is to cut out the middleman and sell direct to the customer though the author's web site or something. However, in the case study direct sales accounted for only 20% of sales. The rest of the POD business model derives from the fact that apparently POD books qualify for "short discounts" from distributors, which means in this case that they (Ingram, the distributor) charge the publisher (Foner) only 35% of the cover price to distribute the book to Amazon, B&N, etc., instead of the traditional 55%. I haven't been able to understand why Ingram would do this, but it must be that POD books are somehow cheaper for Ingram to distribute, possibly because of higher throughput (since POD books are, by definition, in demand and therefore a quick sell). That lets the publisher absorb the higher printing costs of POD books and still retain the normal 45% of cover price as net revenue. The publisher in turn spends less on overhead (less warehouse space required, less cash tied up in inventory) and is potentially able to pass on a larger royalty to the author. (Paperback royalties typically average 4% to 7.5%.)
Max's inference: if authors get a larger share of the revenue, that means they need fewer readers to support their writing habit. If you require ten million fans buying your books to make a decent living because you get a one-cent royalty per book, you pretty much have to write pulp and appeal to the lowest common denominator. If you get a $2.00 royalty per book, on the other hand, 5000 loyal fans can support you, and of course it's many, many orders of magnitude easier to acquire 5000 loyal fans than ten million. (Fan distributions are logarithmic.) That lets "niche" authors exist. It don't matter none if almost nobody wants to read my retro-tech adventure stories about coal-miners-turned-steampunk-inventors, as long as somebody does and I can connect with those somebodies. That's probably good for the future of literature, if you're willing to wade through the piles of offal produced as a byproduct (per Sturgeon's Law) or at least wait a century for the good stuff to rise mostly to the top. It's also good for me as a reader, because if I like a certain author it turns out that my buying habits can have a non-negligible influence on his desire to keep writing the kinds of stories I want to read.
-M.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
A case study of the economics of POD books: http://www.fonerbooks.com/pod.htm
Article Summary: POD books cost slightly more to print, but this is made back in a couple of ways. One obvious one is to cut out the middleman and sell direct to the customer though the author's web site or something. However, in the case study direct sales accounted for only 20% of sales. The rest of the POD business model derives from the fact that apparently POD books qualify for "short discounts" from distributors, which means in this case that they (Ingram, the distributor) charge the publisher (Foner) only 35% of the cover price to distribute the book to Amazon, B&N, etc., instead of the traditional 55%. I haven't been able to understand why Ingram would do this, but it must be that POD books are somehow cheaper for Ingram to distribute, possibly because of higher throughput (since POD books are, by definition, in demand and therefore a quick sell). That lets the publisher absorb the higher printing costs of POD books and still retain the normal 45% of cover price as net revenue. The publisher in turn spends less on overhead (less warehouse space required, less cash tied up in inventory) and is potentially able to pass on a larger royalty to the author. (Paperback royalties typically average 4% to 7.5%.)
Max's inference: if authors get a larger share of the revenue, that means they need fewer readers to support their writing habit. If you require ten million fans buying your books to make a decent living because you get a one-cent royalty per book, you pretty much have to write pulp and appeal to the lowest common denominator. If you get a $2.00 royalty per book, on the other hand, 5000 loyal fans can support you, and of course it's many, many orders of magnitude easier to acquire 5000 loyal fans than ten million. (Fan distributions are logarithmic.) That lets "niche" authors exist. It don't matter none if almost nobody wants to read my retro-tech adventure stories about coal-miners-turned-steampunk-inventors, as long as somebody does and I can connect with those somebodies. That's probably good for the future of literature, if you're willing to wade through the piles of offal produced as a byproduct (per Sturgeon's Law) or at least wait a century for the good stuff to rise mostly to the top. It's also good for me as a reader, because if I like a certain author it turns out that my buying habits can have a non-negligible influence on his desire to keep writing the kinds of stories I want to read.
-M.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Stabbing people to death (fencing)
For future reference, since this came up recently and I had to spend some time looking for it, I give you:
The Myth of the Quick Kill (a.k.a. Stabbing People To Death)
Take for example the case of the duel fought in 1613 between the Earl of Dorset and Lord Edward Bruce. According to the Earl's account, he received a rapier-thrust in the right nipple which passed "level through my body, and almost to my back." Seemingly unaffected, the Earl remained engaged in the combat for some time. The duel continued with Dorset going on to lose a finger while attempting to disarm his adversary manually. Locked in close quarters, the two struggling combatants ultimately ran out of breath. According to Dorset's account, they paused briefly to recover, and while catching their wind, considered proposals to release each other's blades. Failing to reach an agreement on exactly how this might be done, the seriously wounded Dorset finally managed to free his blade from his opponent's grasp and ultimately ran Lord Bruce through with two separate thrusts. Although Dorset had received what appears to have been a grievous wound that, in those days, ought to have been mortal, he not only remained active long enough to dispatch his adversary, but without the aid of antibiotics and emergency surgery, also managed to live another thirty-nine years.
-Max
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
The Myth of the Quick Kill (a.k.a. Stabbing People To Death)
Take for example the case of the duel fought in 1613 between the Earl of Dorset and Lord Edward Bruce. According to the Earl's account, he received a rapier-thrust in the right nipple which passed "level through my body, and almost to my back." Seemingly unaffected, the Earl remained engaged in the combat for some time. The duel continued with Dorset going on to lose a finger while attempting to disarm his adversary manually. Locked in close quarters, the two struggling combatants ultimately ran out of breath. According to Dorset's account, they paused briefly to recover, and while catching their wind, considered proposals to release each other's blades. Failing to reach an agreement on exactly how this might be done, the seriously wounded Dorset finally managed to free his blade from his opponent's grasp and ultimately ran Lord Bruce through with two separate thrusts. Although Dorset had received what appears to have been a grievous wound that, in those days, ought to have been mortal, he not only remained active long enough to dispatch his adversary, but without the aid of antibiotics and emergency surgery, also managed to live another thirty-nine years.
-Max
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
On warfare (the future)
[Cc'ed J.]
D.,
A paper. I'm sure you're already stuffed to the gills with this stuff, but there's this interesting quote you may enjoy:
The concept of effects-based operations (EBO) is rooted in the notion that societies are "systems of systems," and that if we can understand the interrelationships among these systems, we may be able to focus our attention on attacking the nodes that offer the greatest possible payoffs in terms of collapsing the system. EBO is the Air Force's contribution to the RMA. At its core it is a modern version of the traditional airman's view that "strategic bombardment" can bring swift victory by directly attacking critical nodes of the enemy's war-making capabilities, albeit enabled by advances in technology.
In effect, we can "short circuit" the enemy's ability to make war, not so much for the purpose of destroying him but in pursuit of "the ultimate purpose of war—to compel a positive political outcome." In the past, the technologies available to us limited our ability to achieve this "short circuiting." To interfere in the enemy's ability to make war, we had to engage the enemy's force directly with equivalent force. Because a "political entity can be thought of as a system consisting of a number of subsystems . . . a system of systems," EBO is thus the use of special technologies that permit us "to achieve specific effects against portions of a system that render the entire system ineffective."
There's also a bunch of interesting stuff on Roman and European military history. I enjoyed the tale of the Roman navy.
-Max
P.S. A hilarious quote:
We even possess handbooks of stratagems and information operations from ancient times, as well as numberless incidents and examples from the history of war, politics, and diplomacy across the ages. Ramses, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler all engaged in propaganda and deception operations. Each understood how to use information as a weapon. Ramses II (1301-1234 B.C.) was so good at it that it was some thirty centuries before most of the world realized he hadn't won the Battle of Kadesh (1288 B.C.).
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
D.,
A paper. I'm sure you're already stuffed to the gills with this stuff, but there's this interesting quote you may enjoy:
The concept of effects-based operations (EBO) is rooted in the notion that societies are "systems of systems," and that if we can understand the interrelationships among these systems, we may be able to focus our attention on attacking the nodes that offer the greatest possible payoffs in terms of collapsing the system. EBO is the Air Force's contribution to the RMA. At its core it is a modern version of the traditional airman's view that "strategic bombardment" can bring swift victory by directly attacking critical nodes of the enemy's war-making capabilities, albeit enabled by advances in technology.
In effect, we can "short circuit" the enemy's ability to make war, not so much for the purpose of destroying him but in pursuit of "the ultimate purpose of war—to compel a positive political outcome." In the past, the technologies available to us limited our ability to achieve this "short circuiting." To interfere in the enemy's ability to make war, we had to engage the enemy's force directly with equivalent force. Because a "political entity can be thought of as a system consisting of a number of subsystems . . . a system of systems," EBO is thus the use of special technologies that permit us "to achieve specific effects against portions of a system that render the entire system ineffective."
There's also a bunch of interesting stuff on Roman and European military history. I enjoyed the tale of the Roman navy.
-Max
P.S. A hilarious quote:
We even possess handbooks of stratagems and information operations from ancient times, as well as numberless incidents and examples from the history of war, politics, and diplomacy across the ages. Ramses, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler all engaged in propaganda and deception operations. Each understood how to use information as a weapon. Ramses II (1301-1234 B.C.) was so good at it that it was some thirty centuries before most of the world realized he hadn't won the Battle of Kadesh (1288 B.C.).
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Education (Presidential Election)
McCain quote http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/service_to_america_episcopal_h.html:
We should reward the best of them with merit pay, and encourage teachers who have lost their focus on the children they teach to find another line of work. Schools should compete to be innovative, flexible and student-centered institutions, not safe havens for the uninspired and unaccountable. They should be able to compete for dedicated, effective, character-building teachers, hire them and reward them. I believe we should encourage military veterans to enter the teaching profession, and I've advocated the Troops-to-Teachers Act. The sense of heightened responsibility and duty to a cause greater than themselves that veterans were taught in the discipline and code of conduct of the armed forces make many of them excellent candidates to impart those virtues to our children, and help them see the value of learning as a means to self-improvement and much nobler ends. There is no reason on earth that this great country should not possess the best education system in the world. We have let fear of uncertainty, and a view that education's primary purpose is to protect jobs for teachers and administrators degrade our sense of the possible in America. There is no excuse for it.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
We should reward the best of them with merit pay, and encourage teachers who have lost their focus on the children they teach to find another line of work. Schools should compete to be innovative, flexible and student-centered institutions, not safe havens for the uninspired and unaccountable. They should be able to compete for dedicated, effective, character-building teachers, hire them and reward them. I believe we should encourage military veterans to enter the teaching profession, and I've advocated the Troops-to-Teachers Act. The sense of heightened responsibility and duty to a cause greater than themselves that veterans were taught in the discipline and code of conduct of the armed forces make many of them excellent candidates to impart those virtues to our children, and help them see the value of learning as a means to self-improvement and much nobler ends. There is no reason on earth that this great country should not possess the best education system in the world. We have let fear of uncertainty, and a view that education's primary purpose is to protect jobs for teachers and administrators degrade our sense of the possible in America. There is no excuse for it.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Political ad: "It's 3 a.m."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=14&entry_id=25409
Watch the Clinton ad. Then watch the McCain ad. Isn't that hilarious? I don't know how they got this response out so quickly but somebody's a genius. (By the way, it doesn't appear to be a McCain campaign ad because it's missing the candidate's voiceover at the end. Is this the Youtube/mashup culture with real money mixed in? [It turns out that it is done by the campaign, but it's only been emailed so far, not aired on TV. Still hilarious.])
-Max
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and
desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Film: "God's Army" and kindred spirits
Dear Y.A.,
I still check out K.'s blog occasionally, for no particularly good reason except that I like to read. (I mean, I read my OWN blog sometimes when I'm looking for reading material.) Bearing in mind that I genuinely do like K. as a person, it's interesting to me that I find these films that she loves so much to be so, well, tedious. She just wrote a glowing post (quoted below) about Dutcher's film God's Army.
I didn't connect with God's Army at all. As I recall, I thought the missionaries portrayed in the movie were a bunch of dungol punks (there's this crude scene about photographing someone in the W.C.) and their dilemmas implausible. Look, I realize that some people really do have testimony issues, but I couldn't take a movie about resolving those issues WHILE ON A MISSION seriously because frankly, a mission is not the place to resolve those doubts. Not that it may not sometimes happen, but it's not Church policy or practice, it's an aberration if it does happen, and that made the movie less about my religion than about a bunch of, I dunno, American religious people who happened to believe they were LDS. I don't remember a single character who impressed me as believing in true principles. I remember being distinctly un-shocked when I found out that Richard Dutcher had left the Church and decided to quit making films for Mormon audiences--because from seeing God's Army and reading about Brigham City, it didn't seem like Dutcher appreciated the Latter-day Saint perspective in the first place. Maybe he appreciated the "Mormon" perspective that K. likes to talk about, but the culture is not the doctrine.
Anyway, it was quite interesting to hear K. say of this movie that it was, for her, "something that I've always felt very deeply but haven't found the words or medium to express myself." Datum. I wonder if my siblings (e.g. T. & T.) would dislike this movie too, or if it's just me. My gut feel says that anyone with our value system is going to find the movie less than thrilling, although those with more empathy than I may enjoy it on another level as a human interest story. Remind me some time to ask T. and T. their opinions of the movie some time. But honestly, it gives me the creeps to hear K. say stuff like this and it makes me think she's well shut of me. So. Alien.
-Max
On Thursday last we watched God's Army in my Mormons and film class. The only other Richard Dutcher film I've seen is States of Grace. As much as I liked States of Grace, I liked God's Army even more. I was so impressed. My experience watching God's Army was similar to my experience watching New York Doll for the first time. I think I've mentioned in past posts that New York Doll was what got me interested in Mormon letters to begin with. Watching Arthur Kane's story unfold on screen in all of its beautiful complexity, shaped and crafted by deft hands, but not filtered or molded into something it wasn't made me realize how important Mormon stories are--how they need to be told and told well. I had a nearly identical experience watching God's Army.
I like that in the Fifth Wave of Mormon cinema, several filmmakers working independently from the Church and other institutions have captured the Mormon experience more authentically. For example, in God's Army we have Elder Banks, an African American missionary who during one scene is treated patronizingly by African American investigators because they think he's been duped by the Church. I remember witnessing something similar when I went on splits with sister missionaries during a Stake missionary day activity back home in Sacramento. The sister missionary I was assigned to go tracting with was African American. At one of the homes we visited, we chatted with a couple who were also African American. They weren't interested, but it was pleasant enough, and I didn't think much about it until my sister missionary companion, eyebrows knit together, told me the couple had been laughing at her--that they were thinking essentially the same thing that the investigator couple in God's Army had thought about Elder Banks. Along with this issue, Richard Dutcher brings up several others: a young missionary having doubts because of the anti-Mormon material he's been reading, the protagonist questioning his faith because his step-father who brought him and his mother the Gospel had been jailed for molesting children, a sister missionary gaining a testimony of the Gospel only to lose an important relationship in the process, missionaries becoming frustrated because there's only so much they can do to help their investigators. These are the kinds of things that Mormons experience, and it was refreshing to see it portrayed on film--to see missionaries get angry and frustrated in once scene but humbly give blessings of healing and comfort in another scene. These may seem incongruous, but these scenes certainly reflect my own experience quite well--those paradoxes of Mormonism that Terryl Givens has discussed in articles and in his recent book, People of Paradox.
Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for God's Army was somewhat quenched by the fact that there will never be another one because Richard Dutcher is no longer interested in working in Mormon cinema. To me this is tragic in a very personal way because when art touches me the most, it's when it speaks something that I've always felt very deeply but haven't found the words or medium to express myself. When the Mormon community lost Richard Dutcher, we lost a voice that was successfully speaking the Mormon experience. Like being struck dumb just after we'd learned to speak. I only hope that future Mormon filmmakers will take up where Dutcher left off.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
I still check out K.'s blog occasionally, for no particularly good reason except that I like to read. (I mean, I read my OWN blog sometimes when I'm looking for reading material.) Bearing in mind that I genuinely do like K. as a person, it's interesting to me that I find these films that she loves so much to be so, well, tedious. She just wrote a glowing post (quoted below) about Dutcher's film God's Army.
I didn't connect with God's Army at all. As I recall, I thought the missionaries portrayed in the movie were a bunch of dungol punks (there's this crude scene about photographing someone in the W.C.) and their dilemmas implausible. Look, I realize that some people really do have testimony issues, but I couldn't take a movie about resolving those issues WHILE ON A MISSION seriously because frankly, a mission is not the place to resolve those doubts. Not that it may not sometimes happen, but it's not Church policy or practice, it's an aberration if it does happen, and that made the movie less about my religion than about a bunch of, I dunno, American religious people who happened to believe they were LDS. I don't remember a single character who impressed me as believing in true principles. I remember being distinctly un-shocked when I found out that Richard Dutcher had left the Church and decided to quit making films for Mormon audiences--because from seeing God's Army and reading about Brigham City, it didn't seem like Dutcher appreciated the Latter-day Saint perspective in the first place. Maybe he appreciated the "Mormon" perspective that K. likes to talk about, but the culture is not the doctrine.
Anyway, it was quite interesting to hear K. say of this movie that it was, for her, "something that I've always felt very deeply but haven't found the words or medium to express myself." Datum. I wonder if my siblings (e.g. T. & T.) would dislike this movie too, or if it's just me. My gut feel says that anyone with our value system is going to find the movie less than thrilling, although those with more empathy than I may enjoy it on another level as a human interest story. Remind me some time to ask T. and T. their opinions of the movie some time. But honestly, it gives me the creeps to hear K. say stuff like this and it makes me think she's well shut of me. So. Alien.
-Max
On Thursday last we watched God's Army in my Mormons and film class. The only other Richard Dutcher film I've seen is States of Grace. As much as I liked States of Grace, I liked God's Army even more. I was so impressed. My experience watching God's Army was similar to my experience watching New York Doll for the first time. I think I've mentioned in past posts that New York Doll was what got me interested in Mormon letters to begin with. Watching Arthur Kane's story unfold on screen in all of its beautiful complexity, shaped and crafted by deft hands, but not filtered or molded into something it wasn't made me realize how important Mormon stories are--how they need to be told and told well. I had a nearly identical experience watching God's Army.
I like that in the Fifth Wave of Mormon cinema, several filmmakers working independently from the Church and other institutions have captured the Mormon experience more authentically. For example, in God's Army we have Elder Banks, an African American missionary who during one scene is treated patronizingly by African American investigators because they think he's been duped by the Church. I remember witnessing something similar when I went on splits with sister missionaries during a Stake missionary day activity back home in Sacramento. The sister missionary I was assigned to go tracting with was African American. At one of the homes we visited, we chatted with a couple who were also African American. They weren't interested, but it was pleasant enough, and I didn't think much about it until my sister missionary companion, eyebrows knit together, told me the couple had been laughing at her--that they were thinking essentially the same thing that the investigator couple in God's Army had thought about Elder Banks. Along with this issue, Richard Dutcher brings up several others: a young missionary having doubts because of the anti-Mormon material he's been reading, the protagonist questioning his faith because his step-father who brought him and his mother the Gospel had been jailed for molesting children, a sister missionary gaining a testimony of the Gospel only to lose an important relationship in the process, missionaries becoming frustrated because there's only so much they can do to help their investigators. These are the kinds of things that Mormons experience, and it was refreshing to see it portrayed on film--to see missionaries get angry and frustrated in once scene but humbly give blessings of healing and comfort in another scene. These may seem incongruous, but these scenes certainly reflect my own experience quite well--those paradoxes of Mormonism that Terryl Givens has discussed in articles and in his recent book, People of Paradox.
Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for God's Army was somewhat quenched by the fact that there will never be another one because Richard Dutcher is no longer interested in working in Mormon cinema. To me this is tragic in a very personal way because when art touches me the most, it's when it speaks something that I've always felt very deeply but haven't found the words or medium to express myself. When the Mormon community lost Richard Dutcher, we lost a voice that was successfully speaking the Mormon experience. Like being struck dumb just after we'd learned to speak. I only hope that future Mormon filmmakers will take up where Dutcher left off.
--
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
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