The Hanover Collaboration

Michael Moore has a new movie out, and I have no interest in seeing it because no one appreciates the problems with health care as completely as I do, and I get frustrated with suffering through other people’s ignorant diatribes. There is something I’ve got to get off my chest about his last movie though. It isn’t very interesting, but since no one else is producing any content, I’m going to go for it.

Did anyone else notice that there are no parallels whatsoever between Fahrenheit 451, the Ray Bradbury book about a dystopian future in which books are systematically burned, and Fahrenheit 9/11, a movie about how Bush, Cheney, and their friends are really bad? The central themes of Fahrenheit 451 have to do with television, media, and advertising cheapening culture and the human experience. The central themes in Fahrenheit 9/11 are that Moore doesn’t like the Bush administration.

MM: How about Fahrenheit 9/11?
Yes Man: Fahrenheit, like the temperature?
MM: Yeah.
YM: Is that, like, the temperature jet fuel burns at, or steel melts at, or something? Like a comment on how there must have been bombs in the towers?
MM: No, no. It’s a book. Fahrenheit 561 or something.
YM: Oh, cool. About government conspiracies and terrorism and shit?
MM: I think so. And they burn all the books to keep it secret.
YM: That’s perfect.

Maybe it happened like that, but it feels kind of flat to me. I’d guess they just didn’t think about it very hard.

Background: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly called the “Tamil Tigers” in the States, is a seperatist-terrorist organization in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is a West Virginia sized island nation just of the south-east tip of India, with a population of about 20 million. The particulars of the LTTE’s (as I will call them in preference to “Tamil Tigers” so as to seem sophisticated and international) motivation and the righteousness or heinousness of their cause where not discernible in the amount of time I have alloted for this post. Let it be said, however, that the LTTE is not Muslim, and does not seem to discriminate against women. The LTTE wants an independant state in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka, where the Tamil people are in the majority. The Sri Lankan government thinks that “regional autonomy” should be good enough.

Recent news: It appears that the LTTE now have an air force. It is believed they smuggled parts for somewhere between one and five Zlin-143s, a Czech small (one non-turbo prop, two seats) airplane, into the jungle where the planes where reassembled and a secret 650 meter runway constructed. The aircraft were then rigged with makeshift external bomb racks.

The Sri Lankan government has itself a real air force, with supersonic fighters an intercepts made in China, Russia, and Israel. I don’t know how hard it is to shoot down a light aircraft from a supersonic interceptor. It might be easy, it might be hard. I wouldn’t be surprised either way.

Three times in the past month the LTTE air craft have taken off under the cover of night and bombed targets in Sri Lanka. The targets have been the national airport, a fuel storage depot, and a military base. Unlike some other governments, the Sri Lankans were able to respond to the aerial bombardment with anti-aircraft fire. Just like some other governments might, the Sri Lankans also immediately bombarded “rebel targets” somewhere in the jungle that may or may not have had airplanes at them.

I bring this up because I think jungle gorilla fighters with smuggled and re-assembled home made bombers is news more interesting than anything going on in the US right now.

Sometimes, particularly when you have a bad internet connection, iTunes will download only part of the podcast, but then it will act like it downloaded the whole thing. Once this happens, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get a copy of the whole podcast. iTunes keeps track of the podcasts you delete to prevent double downloading. If you delete the partial download, then iTunes will assume you don’t want it anymore, and won’t offer that episode for download again.

Even if you hunt down the mp3 on the internet and download it by hand, you still can’t get it into the podcast section of iTunes. It will have to live forever incongruously in the music section.

So I filed a bug report on the Apple website. And the reply just came back.

option-open of the podcast triangle (above the episode list) forces iTunes to load the full feed, even any episodes that the user has deleted.

There you go.

Robbie’s mailing address is:

CPT ROB DAPICE
A Co. 4-23 IN, 172nd SBCT
APO, AE 09322

Juliana Dapice writes that her husband, our beloved friend and former teammate Robbie, scheduled to return home from Iraq this fall has instead had his service in the 172nd Stryker Brigade extended indefinitely, and will be redeployed to Baghdad in the near future.

Best wishes Robbie and Juliana.

v2alt: Jon, what is the word that Physicists use when Mathematicians are being annoying? 10:47
v2alt: I need to use it 10:47
v2alt: You know, when they need to exclude the possibility of e.g. the continuous but nowhere differentiable function. 10:48
v2alt: It’s not degenerate 10:49
v2alt: but I think it sounds like the function has a disease 10:49
v2alt: But it sort of means “contrived” 10:53
v2alt: not “pedantic” 10:55
v2alt: Oh I’ve got it “pathological” 10:55

John Steinbeck’s heirs have sued Penguin Books for the rights to 10 of his works, which Penguin has printed exclusively for over 70 years, and won in Federal Court. NPR claimed that they planned to release the works to the public. Penguin, or course, plans to sue to get the rights back.

I’m not a stickler on language or gammar, but I do think it is ‘good’ to try to use specific words in preference to general words, and to use particular meanings in preference to general meanings.

Babby-daddy and Babby-moma

Slate has a nice article about baby-daddies and baby-momas (according to the Slate article, these words come from the Jamaican Creole biebifaada and biebimada). Historically, these words only refer to parents who are not currently in a romantic relationship with their co-parent. It is not endearing, but rather has a slightly dismissive connotation.

“Jamiquanna, why are you flirting with that man when your boyfriend is over here?”, Jandron asks.

“Don’t worry, J. I’m not flirting. Devon is no one, he’s just my babby-daddy.”

Ultimate

Ultimate is widely taken to mean “the greatest or best”, but this is not strictly the case. Ultimate has a primary denotation of “last, or final” (from the latin ultimam, ultimare: to come to an end, to finish). While “greatest” is an ok connotation for ultimate carry, you should try to make it fit into the context of being the last. It is the “ultimate”, if it was so great that nothing needed to, or even could, follow it.

Communication with words is a “noisy” process. You can never be sure that the receiver will interpret your words in the way you want them to. When we receive words that only make sense in their secondary and tertiary denotations, we have to generalize their meanings. Then we start to think the general meanings are the particular meanings. It seems to me that, much like a toddler who paints with his hands, eventually this leads to a giant pool of ugly, brown, meaningless words. That will be a sad day.

Apple Computers, which tries to do good for the world by selling useful and innovative products for profit, has long wrestled with Apple Corps, the Beetle’s record label which tries to do bad to the world be preventing people from listening to wonderful music for profit, over which of them had exclusive right to their eponymous fruit.

Today for the first time, good won.

Johnny Knoxville can do anything David Blaine can do and then get punched in the balls. That’s why he’s so much cooler.

From BBC News

“The current record stands at eight minutes, 58 seconds, but freedivers have held their breath for up to 15 minutes by breathing in pure oxygen. That is how the BFA believes Blaine will pull off his stunt.”

Once you know how he’s going to do it, it isn’t even remotely impressive.

From the White House, thanks to Greg Mankiw and Angry Bear.

“it costs the mint well more than a cent to make a penny.”

The solution, in my view, is to get rid of the penny.

Indeed, I would advocate this even if the penny were free to manufacture, as I argued earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal. The purpose of the monetary system is to facilitate exchange. The penny no longer serves that purpose. When people start leaving a monetary unit at the cash register for the next customer, the unit is too small to be useful. It is just wasting peoples’ time—the economy’s most valuable resource. The fact that the penny is costly to make only adds force to the argument.

Maybe we should get rid of the nickel, too. We can then round all prices to one decimal rather than two.

Greg Mankiw teaches econ 10 at Harvard

It’s a good idea. I support. But personally, I don’t see why we still have cash at all. We have the technology to get rid of it. We have for a while.

There’s only one reason people still use cash: so that they can break the law and get away with it.

Men about to play a financial game were shown images of sexy women or lingerie.

The Proceedings of the Royal Society B study found they were more likely to accept unfair offers than men not been exposed to the alluring images.

From BBC News

Interestingly, the study employed a game where one person gets $10, he has to offer some amount of it to the other person. The other person can either accept or reject, and if he rejects then the money gets thrown out and both go home empty handed.

The question I’m interested in is this: Did high testosterone men pull done more cash, on average, in the control group or in the porn group? Does it matter whether they’re offering of accepting? Just curious.

• US Military Spending : Fiscal 2006 $441,600,000,000
• Iran Military Spending Estimated 2003 $4,000,000,000

There are two types of motor oil: normal and synthetic.

Normal oil comes out of the ground and gets refined. A car’s worth of normal oil costs $11 at Walmart, plus $5 for a filter. Tom and Ray say that if you use normal oil, then you should probably change it once ever 5,000 miles. The total do-it-yourself cost of normal oil changes is thus $32 per 10,000 miles.

Synthetic oil is manufactured in a lab. Or a factory. I don’t know what they call it, but it doesn’t come out of the ground. It’s better than normal oil. It doesn’t turn into {not oil} in your car engine as quickly as normal oil does. It costs $22 for a cars worth at Walmart, plus the same filter as above. The boys say it’s ok to wait twice as long on synthetic. 10,000 miles. The diy cost of synthetic oil changes is thus $27 per 10,000.

Jiffylube costs $35 for normal oil, or $65 for synthetic oil. Those of you doing the math in your head have noticed something remarkable at this point. That’s right, you could pay full price for the normal oil change, and give JiffyLube 5 quarts of synthetic oil that you bought yourself at Walmart telling them to use that instead of their own normal oil and you’d still come out on top by $8 from what they would have charged you for synthetic oil, less whatever other way the figure out to rip you off that day.

You can find professional oil changes for $25, but not reliably.

The lesson? If you go to Jiffylube, then get the synthetic. It’s a huge rip-off, but over 10,000 miles you still net $5 over getting two normal oil changes, plus you get 1 {not a trip to Jiffylube} which I’d probably value around $10. It’s win-win. The Jiffylube guys think they’re taking you for a ride with their outrageously priced oil, but you still get the best of them in the long run.

But… now suddenly the Jiffylube versus do-it-yourself calculation has changed. Before when you thought about doing it on your own you were looking at saving $18 (plus manliness points) in return for getting all dirty and scrapping some knuckles. That’s a close call in my book. But now, on the synthetic program, you’re looking at saving $38 (plus manliness points) for doing it yourself. That handily tips the scales for me.

If any does get the Jiffylube synthetic, will you please email how many miles the sticker tells you you can go before you need new oil. I bet it’s still 3,000.

[Discaimer: My favorite tribologist uses normal oil.]