I am sure that if I looked back in history, I would find a political party that did everything within their power to make a law they didn’t like fail miserably, but this is the first time in my memory that I have seen this. Many Republican Congresscritters have decided to not answer even the most basic constituent questions about Obamacare. Instead, they direct people to the White House or Health and Human Services. It is a basic function of a Congressional office to answer constituent questions about laws, but some hate Obamacare so much they refuse to perform this service. Even worse, states like Missouri have implemented a gag rule allowing State employees to be sued if they talk about Obamacare. You would think that Tea Partiers in the state would be all over this gross infringement of First Amendment rights, but no. Defeating Obamacare by any means necessary is more important than real unconstitutional activities.
Author Archives: Jean-Paul
Two Big Wins For Criminal Justice
It’s been a good week for minorities in particular and criminal justice in general so far. Minorities are being attacked on so many sides these days, it’s good to get a few wins in.
First, a judge has put an end to the abhorrently racist Stop And Frisk laws that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has imposed on the city. What purports to allow police to frisk anyone they stop unshockingly ended up being a reason to harass mostly law abiding black people. I’m sure Bloomberg will appeal, but I’m guessing Stop And Frisk is gone for good. Good riddance!
Second, Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced that they will greatly restrict their pursuit of non-violent Mandatory Minimum drug cases. This one’s a bit more mealy mouthed, but still important. Basically, the way I understand it is they will still prosecute offenders (which is bad in many cases) but will not present evidence that would require judges to enact Mandatory Minimum sentences on those convicted. As with Stop And Frisk, Mandatory Minimum laws are blatantly racist. They impose harsher minimums for smaller quantities of drugs more likely to be used by minorities while allowing lighter minimums for larger quantities of drugs more likely to be used by non-minorities. This is more a step in the right direction than a win. Mandatory sentencing laws are ridiculous and will still be law. What Holder is proposing is kind of a trap door work around than a solution. I’ll take it, though.
Hyperloop, Emphasis On Hype
Elon Musk is at it again, inventing futuristic modes of transportation. The billionaire PayPal creator is most famous for SpaceX, which promises to revolutionize space travel, and Tesla, which promises to revolutionize the electric car. This time it’s the Hyperloop, a relatively cheap train-like system to shuttle people at hyper-speeds between cities. The basic idea is that you create a sealed tube and you push a vehicle inside it using the air pressure in the tube or make it a vacuum tube and magnetically push the vehicle through the tube.
It really is a great idea, but it seems to me to be hopelessly impractical. Elon Musk actually seems to think so to, which is good to hear, but he seems to be coming from a politically impractical standpoint where I’m more of a, yeah, well this is great for rich people, but not really a practical public transportation method. Of course, that’s what Elon Musk does, create better modes of transportation for rich people, and more power to him, but this is his first foray into public transportation.
I haven’t read the details of the specs, but it worries me that there’s no mention in anything I’ve read about what kind of volume of people the Hyperloop would be able to move in a day. The cars themselves appear to be much smaller than a normal train so each individual trip would be much smaller than a train’s capacity. And how many cars can travel in the tube at any given time? At the speeds they’re talking across the distances they’re talking, I can’t see it being more than six in either direction at optimal conditions. At 600 mph, since the cars are only supposed to hold 28 people, we’re talking about a 6 billion dollar system that can shuttle less than 200 people per hour.
Since Elon Musk is undoubtedly smarter than me and he says the system should be able to handle 7.4 million passengers per year, I’m assuming there’s something that I’m missing. Maybe each car holds 28 people but multiple cars can be strung together. Of course, he also says that this system is incapable of crashing and will need no external power source and will not need to purchase more than 1 billion dollars in land rights so he may be assuming much more than I am.
The world needs billionaire futurists like Elon Musk. Looking to the future is important and efforts to make our ideas reality should always be at the forefront of our minds. But where are the billionaire presentists? Where are the Andrey Carnegies who believed that their riches should be spent now for the common good? The incredibly solvable problems of today requires more Bill Gateses than Elon Musks.
Do you know what’s creepy? Mosquitoes!
Ever wonder what happens when a mosquito bites you? Well wonder no further! The thing that you think of as the mosquito’s needle is actually a sheath and these tiny filaments are hidden inside and they are what go searching for a blood vessel. It reminds me somewhat of an anteater sticking his tongue down an ant hole. Something I didn’t know, mosquitoes actually fail to draw blood more often than they succeed. In the last video, you can actually see a mosquito hitting a blood vessel and sucking blood out. He sucks so hard you can see the blood vessel contracting! There is also some talk about how malarial mosquitoes behave differently than non-malarial mosquitoes. They’re not sure why but they think it may have to do with the parasite actually controlling the mosquito’s actions. Wild stuff!
Ride The Wave, Baby!
Calculated Risk is one of my favorite blogs. Why? Because while economics can be pretty boring, the applications of economics are absolutely fascinating. Oh, and because of things like this:
That’s the age distribution of the population of the United States from 1900 to 2060. Check out that Baby Boomer wave! Another cool thing is you can witness medical progress in this graph as well. Notice how it goes from a max of 75+ to 85+ to 100+ as the brackets become statistically significant. Also, look at how normalized the graph becomes after the wave. This signifies the mostly flat birth rate in the U.S. that we currently have.
I’m trying to come up with an explanation as to why the Baby Boom wave kind of peters out near the end like a wave getting eaten away by an undertow. The only thing that I can think of is general mortality slowly eats away at it. That doesn’t seem like it could be the whole story though. There has to be some other sort of statistical meaning behind it that I can not fathom. Anyone care to explain?
Whatever You Do, Don’t Move To Arizona
Or New Mexico. Or Utah. Or southern California. Why? Water. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, two of the largest man-made reservoirs of potable water are getting smaller. These two lakes are basically responsible for the vast tracts of land surrounding them being habitable by humans.
They’re probably overpopulated as it is if you assume that this is just your normal 100 year drought. If you think man-made climate change is here and happening, the Southwest is in for a world of hurt.
The history of the Colorado River is absolutely fascinating. If this kind of thing interests you, I highly recommend you follow the link above and the links contained therein. For instance, did you know that the Colorado River Compact that relegates usage of the river’s waters is 90 years old and is still the basis of law for most other river sharing agreements?
Water management is one of the obvious areas where Federal oversight is mandatory. It is a limited resource and doesn’t care about arbitrary borders. This is basic government. If you don’t understand this, you shouldn’t be in government. I’m talking about you, Ron and Rand Paul!
Movie Review: Elysium
Jean-Paul’s Rating: 1/5 stars
Science fiction in the wrong hands is a dangerous weapon.
“Elysium” tells the story of Max (Matt Damon), a man with a checkered criminal past who is trying to make things right. He has traded in his car thieving ways for a job with a legitimate company. He is one of the few Earthlings who has a job. The rest live in squalor and do everything they can to eke out a living. The uber-wealthy live on an orbital space station in obnoxious luxury. The two worlds will obviously collide in Matt Damonish style.
“Elysium” is to the Gilded Age what “District 9” was to Apartheid. That they were both written by the same author, Neil Blomkamp, is obvious. They are practically the same movie. You have a person somewhat on the inside of a horrible system. You have the person being betrayed by the system. You have the person undergoing a transformation. You have the person fighting to make things right. “District 9” was a far superior undertaking, though.
All the complaints that I had with “District 9” were present in “Elysium” only supersized. You start out with a pretty interesting social justice premise and then you go off the rails with a convoluted action movie. “District 9” worked despite its faults because the premise was believable and the main character was sympathetic. “Elysium” is the opposite. Max is kind of an ass, he is surrounded by friends that are kind of asses, and the super rich are complete douches.
To add to the general trashiness of the movie, you have the same tired “save the girl” trope. This time, it’s supersizes just like everything else. So you have the “save the girl and the girl’s girl” trope. Ugh. This is the kind of trashy one-dimensional sympathy card that gets played when you really don’t have any ideas.
And the technology! Don’t even get me started on the technology! Instead of Elysium being a pin prick in the sky, it’s the size of the moon. That would mean that it was either enormous beyond comprehension or that it was stationed in the Earth’s atmosphere. Given the closer shots of Elysium, it is not that big so it must be in the Earth’s atmosphere which means it would have crashed and burned to the ground before they could even build it. Then there’s the fact that Elysium is not enclosed and it’s atmosphere is held in by centripetal force. So they can accomplish that but they can’t geoengineer Earth’s atmosphere to be better quality? And the robots! Why have human workers when you have robots that are stronger and better equipped to perform the work? And what sense does it make to expose those robots to high levels of radiation when they are being made?
There is also a lot of pointless violence in this movie. Some of it is kind of cool, but most is just gratuitous. Blow one person up in a cool way, fine. Do it a bunch more times and show some graphic results, really? Why?
Jodie Foster is also in this movie. She plays Dick Cheney.
This is a movie that should be skipped. It’s a mess. If you haven’t seen “District 9”, I’d recommend you just rent that. Otherwise, just sit at home and read a good sci-fi book.
Sometimes You Lose A Cat
So I wake up this morning and my cat, Lindy isn’t on the bed. “That’s strange”, I think, “Lindy never doesn’t sleep on the bed at home.” But I think no big deal, she’s probably just changing her habits as she is wont to do from time to time being a cat and all. I go through my daily morning routine and Lindy doesn’t show up throughout. Now I’m starting to get worried. Maybe she’s sick. I look in all of her usual hiding spaces and can’t find her anywhere. Then I think, “Did I even see her last night when I got home?” No, no I hadn’t. Uh oh.
I’ve lost Lindy in the house before. There are not many places to hide, but there have been a few occasions when I’d go looking for her and not find her anywhere. I’d check the hallway and she wouldn’t be there either. This could go on for tens of minutes, me looking for Lindy, only to have her walk out of a hiding place that I swear I’ve checked a dozen times already. I don’t know how she does it. But I had checked all the usual spaces and not found her. It was time for me to check the hallway.
Now, there’s something you should know about Lindy. I have had her for five years now and she has always shown absolutely zero interest in exploring the hallway. None. I will come home and she will be sitting right next to the door waiting for me and she will kind of just stare out into the hallway a little and then scamper back to the counter for her welcome home petting. This doesn’t happen all the time because she’s a cat, but it happens frequently enough that it’s almost habit. So when I got home from volleyball and lugged my bike into the apartment I gave zero thought to Lindy even considering escaping into the hallway. I was tired from volleyball and I had a bit to drink so I took a shower and fell almost immediately to sleep.
I walk out into the hallway and search around for her and she’s nowhere to be found. But what I do find is a note taped up next to the elevator:
I am a horrible father. The little frowny cat face is absolutely priceless.
So, yeah, Lindy escaped out into the hallway for the first time in forever. She’s back home safe and sound and doesn’t seem at all traumatized. Right now, she’s sitting in her usual spot where I will have the most likelihood of tripping over her. The upstanding gentleman who found her said that he was taking out the garbage and just saw her in the hallway. It turns out that this happened not very long after I had gotten home so she didn’t spend much time in the hallway. He said that she didn’t cause any trouble and refused any remuneration even though he gave me some cans of cat food. I didn’t think of it at the time but maybe he once owned a cat because they were three different types of food.
Hurray for cool people that look out for neighbors! Here’s Lindy attempting to imitate the frowny cat face:
CSI: Space
Science is always pretty cool, but sometimes it’s WAY cool. Remember the Chelyabinsk meteor that went streaking through the sky and exploded with the force of half a million tons of TNT earlier this year? It was caught on video from many different angles thanks to the prevalence of Russian dash cams. All those videos allowed scientists to triangulate it’s trajectory back into space and find out which larger chunk of rock hurled this warning shot across our bow. The likely culprit? The notorious 2011 EO40! Dun dun DUUUUUNNNNN!
Yeah, I’ve never heard of it either. It’s just one of many large chunks of space rock screaming through space and happens to cross Earth’s orbit. But how cool is it that we were able to use the tools of science to track the origins of a fireball that exploded in our atmosphere and sprinkled to the ground?
Phil Plait’s article that I linked to above also pointed out something that is obvious once it’s pointed out, but I had never really thought about it before. Many asteroids travel in packs, following very similar orbits to each other. Scientists believe that the pack mentality of asteroids is the result of them all being part of a larger asteroid that had broken up. This makes sense because many asteroids aren’t really all that solid. They’re just giant balls of rock and dust loosely glommed together by their own gravity. Strike them hard enough with another streaking rock and a new asteroid family is born! Awww, how cute, he has your chemical composition!
DOOOOOOOOMMMM!
Scientists have stated that the Sun’s magnetic poles are only months away from reversing polarity. The apocalypse is nigh. This is going to be like every Star Trek episode where Geordi or Dax or whoever attempts to reverse the polarity of some gewgaw and science runs amok only supersized. I fully expect the entire solar system to be transported into another universe as a result of this occasion.
We are, of course, ignoring the fact that the Sun does this every 11 years or so and I have already lived through 3 of these polarity switches. That’s boring, though. It’s much better to imagine massive upheavals and global chaos as a result of events that are long enough apart that our memories fade from the last event. I’m pretty sure I just rehashed the formula for every trend known to man.
Really, though, all this means is the magnetic sphere that surrounds the solar system out well past Pluto gets all wibbly-wobbly forming lower period, higher frequency waves during the event. This wibbly-wobblyness is actually good news for Earth and astronauts as it tends to protect us better from the high energy particles from outside the solar system that cause bad things to happen to astronauts and electronics. It also can cause space weather to act up which means a greater likelihood of aurorae and other coronal mass ejection related phenomena. This is bad for astronauts and electronics. So I’m just going to call this whole event a wash. Unless I’m missing something…