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Friday, March 14, 2003
And now the archives have just disappeared altogether. OK, screw this. You probably don't care about old posts anyway. I'll ask Blogger what the story is. Until then, hope you weren't basing your senior thesis on my January comments. | Thursday, March 13, 2003
Figures. As soon as I post that last post, the archives magically appear again. Oh well, I shouldn't complain. Another thing I've noticed (new tangent) is the ads that Blogspot has been putting at the top of my page recently. It's all fundamentalist Christian BS! A lot of it consists of rather incendiary exhortations that entirely conflict with my views. I'm pretty upset, but I don't want to pay to remove them... maybe this is their new ploy to get paying subscribers? Make the ads so objectionable that people will do anything to get rid of them? | This is really annoying. The whole archive is still on the server, but for some reason only the first page is showing up on the sidebar. And while trying to fix it, I accidentally deleted my whole page template, hence the new design. Well, I kind of like this one better anyway. But naturally, the problem still isn't fixed. | In completely unrelated news, does anyone watch Junkyard Wars? It's a show on TLC where two teams are given some thing to build, from a catapult to a dune buggy, and must complete it within one day using only materials found in a junkyard. Then they compete with their creations in a series of tests (for the catapult episode, they had to knock down a cardboard castle in the minimum number of shots... using grapefruits as ammunitioin). Last night was Mega Junkyard Wars, a 2-day, 3-team competition to build, of all things, an airplane - and it had to be certified by an FAA official or it would be disqualified. Here's the catch, though: since it was in honor on the Wright Flyer, they couldn't use any materials or tools not available in 1903, although they were provided with an FAA-compliant engine. For this episode, they brought in an American team, a Britsh team, and a French team. The Americans built a replica of a 1910 American monoplane design out of steel tubes. The French built a very small, lightweight wooden monoplane based on the French "Antoinette" design. The British, meanwhile, just sort of cobbled together every design they sort of liked to make a giant wood-and-cloth biplane. The American plane didn't get off the ground in either of its trial runs, and ran out of altitude halfway to the finish line in the contest. The French plane got a foot off the ground in its first trial, a little higher in its second, and landed about 10 feet from the target in the contest (they were aiming for a line in the sand.) The Brit plane took of in the trial... and just kept going. Forget caution, the pilot toodled around at about 200 feet for a while before bringing it down. And they did the same thing the second time. And then they landed on the line. So they kind of won. It was cool. | Someone mentioned to me today a rumor that France is so adamantly opposed to war in Iraq because they don't want anyone to find out exactly how much business, especially in the arms sector, they've been doing with Saddam during the embargo. It's certainly possible. France has a history of selling guns to anyone with money, and they have been acting quite suspiciously of late. Rejecting the British proposal before even reading it? That doesn't seem like decisive, measured statesmanship. As I've said before, I'm against war because I think it will get a lot of people killed and make the world a more dangerous place for everyone, especially Americans, but that doesn't mean I think anti-war governments are any less ulteriorly-motivated than our own. | Just talked to Professor John Seinfeld of Caltech on the topic of Air Pollution Abatement Programs (the paper I'm writing for Haverford). Not very often that a college freshman gets access to a "Louis E. Nohl Professor", so I'm pretty happy about that. Sort of wish I hadn't been so bumbling during the interview, but hey, that's what's gonna happen when a college freshman interviews a Louis E. Nohl Professor at Caltech. Unfortunately, being a scientist, he often was looking at things from a level that made my questions look stupid no matter how carefully I'd formulated them. Oh well, what's a guy to do? The most important thing I got out of the interview was a great quote right near the end, on the question of whether NOx and SOx emissions were a serious enough problem to justify putting some companies out of business in the name of cutting them: "If a company has technology so outdated that it has no choice but to grossly violate emission limits, maybe it has no business being in business." That is definitely going in the paper. | Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Now this is great. Remember those tireless public servants who had French Toast changed to Freedom Toast on the congressional cafeteria's menu, to protest the blatant cowardice of the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys in not going to war when we tell them to? Well, as it turns out, French Toast was invented in Albany, New York, by a guy named Samuel French, who meant to call it French's Toast but had a poor grasp of English grammar, specifically use of the possessive "s". So, we've now boycotted an American citizen's name. Great. | I wondered where the Beastie Boys went. Man they were good. They apparently just released a new single, "In a World Gone Mad", after 3 years of... well, not releasing any new singles. And it's political too! Hey, any cause that has the Beatie Boys on its side is bound to win out. | Arianna Huffington has a good article on Salon today about corporate tax shelters: http://salon.com/opinion/huffington/2003/03/12/tax_havens/index.html. Seriously, what's up with this? It's real popular to set up offshore tax havens these days, so why isn't the government doing anyhting about it? At least they could pass the law that would ban tax evaders from government contracts, which apparently has passed several times and subsequently been gutted in committee. Sheesh, we're all supposed to buy duct tape and die in the desert for our country while we have to cut school years by a month because the government doesn't have enough money, and Tyco International gets a Billion dollar tax-free government contract because it "reincorporated" (read: set up a dummy headquarters) in Bermuda? What the heck kind of government of the people is that? | Tuesday, March 11, 2003
Now here's proof our elected representatives are doing their job: http://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/11/sprj.irq.fries/. Apparently, several congressmen have taken upon themselves the noble task of getting "French Fries" and "French Toast" changed to "Freedom Fries" and "Freedom Toast", as a bold rebuke to those disloyal peaceniks in France. How dare they have a different foreign policy than us! *Sigh*... our schools are falling apart, millions are starving, the environment is going up in smoke, and a nutcase in North Korea has a few nuclear weapons he'd love to do something with, and this is what our government is spending its time on? I'm almost too tired of it to be outraged. Not quite yet though. | Monday, March 10, 2003
Was channel surfing and came across the new Dragnet on ABC, starring Ed O'Neill (of Al Bundy fame.) Actually, I thought it was quite good. I'm not sure how much credence I should put in the show's "inspired by real events" claim - "inspired" leaves more than a little room for interpretation. Even so, the story was contorted but still believable. Made me think more of my idea of a real investigation than the CSI "let's pull some bizarre plot twist out of nowhere" formula, as entertaining as that can be. O'Neill is a very convincing Joe Friday. While he's still known for Married With Children (at least that's what I know him for,) he's had a number of roles since then. My favorite was probably a minor but important role in the absolutely amazing suspense-mystery The Spanish Prisoner. Very good. He's got more talent than I gave him credit for. Back to Dragnet though, I wonder how long it will stay on? It's slotted directly after Alias, a very entertaining show (with, coincidentally, one of the most attractive female leads in history,) which ought to feed it some viewers. I hope it will have some life,, but quality isn't usually the deciding factor in what goes ands what stays. We'll see. | I missed 60 minutes tonight. Not that I usually watch it, but I kinda wanted to see Clinton and Dole go at it. I haven't seen any reports on the outcome yet. I wonder what happened? | Sunday, March 09, 2003
Hmm... been about a week since my last post. Sometimes it's hard to keep a regular posting schedule when you're the only one reading. Oh well. The fact that I was in the middle of writing a 13-page paper on pollution abatement programs (which I think I'll put up here some time, becayse hey, why not?), studying for midterms, and packing for a week's trip out-of-state might have had something to do with it, too. But, I am in fact still alive, and would like to note the fact that California is actually significantly warmer than Pennsylvania. I'd also like to note that State webpages need shorter URLs. Now, for the link of the day - www.markfiore.com. Some of the best political satire I've seen anywhere. Really great stuff. | |