Octopodial Chrome

Phillip Longman argues quite persuasively that we should increase our use of water transport. It looks like where water travel is possible that it uses less than 20% of the fuel that trucking does; it has less than .7% the fatality rate of trucking. And it can be faster—the Boston to Orlando can legally be made by truck in 54 hours, while it’s only 33 hours by ship.

Why don’t we ship more goods by water? Well, it comes down to perverse incentives: we subsidise high-polluting, road-damaging trucking (e.g. a truck causes 41¢ per mile in damage but only pays 9¢ in tolls & taxes). Another issue is that while trucks are taxed by weight, ships are taxed by cargo value; this means that shipping companies must track the value of all goods they ship, unlike trucking companies. Worse, the tax is extremely high: the example given was of identical loads where the ship pays $625 while the truck pays $3.25.

This is a good example of how the free market is subverted by the state. It’s also an example of how policy can be uncoordinated: on the one hand we’re concerned about congestion and road-building; on the other, we’re encouraging congestion and road damage.

We’ve all heard about Polish cavalry charging German tanks in the Second World War—but it turns out that the story isn’t really true, and the the truth is far more interesting (no surprise to students of history).

I recently came across a really brilliat idea: passiv annual heat store. The gist of it is that you dump all the excess heat your home receives in the summer into the ground, then retrieve it to remedy the heat deficiency in the winter. By so doing, apparently, one can manage a more-or-less constant 70° home temperature. In other words, it could feel like San Diego inside in the middle of a snowstorm outside. More details here.

My brother John married his wife Genevieve a week ago today (sorry for the delay in writing). The wedding itself was held at the glorious Assumption of the Theotokos Cathedral in Denver. Standing there as part of the wedding party it struck me how very appropriate the wedding service is. It’s not the civil law handoff of a woman from father to husband, with accompanying oaths and promises as in the Western service; rather, it’s a sacrament which unites a man and a woman into a married couple. The service is full of prayers, readings and hymns which are chock full of good advice for any couple, newly-wed or not.

The weekend itself was lots of fun, if not at all restful: Friday night all of John’s and all of Gen’s friends got together to throw them a party; then Saturday night was the rehearsal dinner; then on Sunday was the wedding and the reception; then on Monday we had a barbecue for Memorial Day. It was a blast. It’s almost a shame that there are only two more weddings left in our family.

I wish them both the very best.

The New York Times has discovered kombucha (for those who’ve not heard of it, it’s basically fermented tea). Inspired by Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation, I started making it years ago. I have all these tins of excellent but old and dried-out tea—it turns out that it can be put to great use as the base for kombucha.

It’s amusing that I led the way on this for the Times…

My younger friends mock me because I prefer button-down shirts and trousers to T-shirts and shorts; I like to point out that anyone who wears short pants past the age of 13 needs to grow up. It looks like Virginia Postrel agrees with me: children are slobs; adults try to look decent.

Ten years ago today I graduated from Austin College. At the time I considered it a black and sad day. While some of my friends were ready to get out into the real world, I wished that school could last forever. College had been the most fun I’d ever had: I made excellent friends I still have today and had learnt a lot from some world-class teachers. I was surrounded by the greatest concentration of folks my age I’d ever experience in life. How could adult life compare to that?

But you know what? The real world has treated me pretty well. I’ve taken part in mediæval recreation in the Arizona desert and the Missouri countryside; I’ve travelled to England, Germany and India; I bought a home; I mastered all-grain brewing; I’ve learnt how to bake bread, make soap, sew a doublet, knit a sweater, make jam and hunt pheasants; I’ve built my own computer from parts; I’ve learnt numerous new programming languages and technologies; I was commissioned a naval officer. I could only dream of a lot of that when I was 21; some of that wasn’t even on my radar then. It hasn’t been all fun and games—the fact that I graduated with a Computer Science degree in 2000 should say all that needs to be said about that—but on balance my life has been swell.

The young man I was a decade ago wasn’t able to imagine all the good things that lay in store for him; and now I’m looking forward to all the good things that the next decade will bring that I haven’t dreamt of yet.

This one has been floating around forever, but it’s as funny as ever.

1. Buy a dumpster, paint it gray inside and out, and live in it for six months.
1. Submariners: Black outside Pea Green inside
2. Run all the pipes and wires in your house exposed on the walls.
3. Repaint your entire house every month.
4. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of the bathtub and move the shower head to chest level. When you take showers, make sure you turn off the water while you soap down.
5. Put lube oil in your humidifier and set it on high.
6. Once a week, blow air up your chimney, with a leaf blower and let the wind carry the soot onto your neighbor’s house. Ignore his complaints.
7. Once a month, take all major appliances apart and reassemble them.
8. Raise the thresholds and lower the headers of your front and back doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through them.
9. Disassemble and inspect your lawnmower every week.
10. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, turn your water heater temperature up to 200 degrees. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, turn the water heater off. On Saturdays and Sundays tell your family they use too much water, so no bathing will be allowed.
11. Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling, so you can’t turn over without getting out and then getting back in.
12. Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Have your spouse whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you go to sleep, shine a flashlight in your eyes, and say Sorry, wrong rack.
13. Make your family qualify to operate each appliance in your house - dishwasher operator, blender technician, etc. Re-qualify every 6 months.
14. Have your neighbor come over each day at 0500 , blow a whistle so loud Helen Keller could hear it, and shout Reveille, reveille, all hands heave out and trice up.
15. Have your mother-in-law write down everything she’s going to do the following day, then have her make you stand in your back yard at 0600 while she reads it to you.
16. Submit a request chit to your father-in-law requesting permission to leave your house before 1500…In triplicate.
17. Empty all the garbage bins in your house and sweep the driveway three times a day, whether it needs it or not. Now sweepers, sweepers, man your brooms, give the ship a clean sweep down fore and aft, empty all shit cans and butt kits!
18. Have your neighbor collect all your mail for a month, read your magazines, and randomly lose every 5th item before delivering the rest.
19. Watch no TV except for movies played in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch, then show a different one– the same one every night.
20. When your children are in bed, run into their room with a megaphone shouting Now general quarters, general quarters! All hands man your battle stations!
21. Make your family’s menu a week ahead of time without consulting the pantry or refrigerator.
22. Post a menu on the kitchen door informing your family that they are having steak for dinner. Then make them wait in line for an hour. When they finally get to the kitchen, tell them you are out of steak, but they can have dried ham or hot dogs. Repeat daily until they ignore the menu and just ask for hot dogs.
23. Bake a cake. Prop up one side of the pan so the cake bakes unevenly.
Spread icing real thick to level it off.
24. Get up every night around midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread. (mid rats)
25. Set your alarm clock to go off at random during the night. At the alarm, jump up and dress as fast as you can, making sure to button your top shirt button and tuck your pants into your socks. Run out into the backyard and uncoil the garden hose and put out a simulated fire.
26. Every week or so, throw your cat or dog into the pool and shout Man overboard, port side! Rate your family members on how fast they respond.
27. Put the headphones from your stereo on your head, but don’t plug them in. Hang a paper cup around your neck on a string. Stand in front of the stove, and speak into the paper cup, Stove manned and ready. After an hour or so, speak into the cup again Stove secured. Roll up the headphones and paper cup and stow them in a shoe box.
28. Make your family turn out all the lights and go to bed at 10 p.m. Now taps, taps! Lights out! Maintain silence throughout the ship!
1. Then immediately have an 18-wheeler crash into your house. (For aircraft carrier sailors.)
29. Build a fire in a trash can in your garage. Loudly announce to your family, This is a drill, this is a drill! Fire in hangar bay one!
30. Place a podium at the end of your driveway. Have your family stand in front of the podium for 4-hour intervals. (Best done when the weather is worst. January is a good time.)
31. Next time there’s a bad thunderstorm in your area, find the biggest horse you can, put a two-inch mattress on his back, strap yourself to it and turn him loose in a barn for six hours. Then get up and go to work.
32. For former engineers: bring your lawn mower into the living room, and run it all day long.
33. Make coffee using eighteen scoops of budget priced coffee grounds per pot, and let the pot simmer for 5 hours before drinking.
34. Have someone under the age of ten give you a haircut with sheep shears.
35. Sew the back pockets of your jeans onto the front.
36. Add 1/3 cup of diesel fuel to the laundry.
37. Take hourly readings on your electric and water meters.
38. Every couple of weeks, dress up in your best clothes and go to the scummiest part of town. Find the most run down, trashiest bar, and drink beer until you are hammered. Then walk all the way home.
39. Lock yourself and your family in the house for six weeks. Tell them that at the end of the 6th week you’ll take them to Disney World for liberty. At the end of the 6th week, inform them the trip to Disney World has been canceled because they need to get ready for an inspection, and it will be another week before they can leave the house.

Those who’ve heard tales of my childhood know that my old man actually did a bunch of these. If I never hear reveille again it’ll be too soon…wait a second…ಠ_ಠ

Here’s a trig identity visualised nicely. Requires a browser which understands the canvas tag—it works in Firefox, and that’s all I care about.

I just saw a joke that read, Maturity is a high price to pay for getting older. The thing is, that couldn’t be further from the truth: rather, maturity is the reward for getting older.

Before I turned 30 a lot of folks tried to tell me how great their thirties had been—quite frankly, I didn’t believe a word of it. But they were right: getting older is nice. Having a brain that works is nice.

Maturity is the reward for getting older.

I just read a fascinating Brian Reynolds Meyers, author of The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. Very, very interesting stuff. I’d vaguely known that they were racist and nationalist, but had no idea of the extent of the problem. Worth a read.

Robert Kustig (M.D.) discusses the cause of the obesity epidemic: fructose. He’s pretty persuasive, even if his suggested solution of State action is a bit short-sighted. Why not just stop eating and drinking the stuff?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation have a neat tool out: the Panopticlick. Many folks don’t know this, but every time you visit a web page your web browser sends lots of information to the web server you’re talking to—stuff like what web browser you’re using, what sort of pages you can read, which plugins you have installed and so forth. This is necessary in order for the remote web server to answer you appropriately. But it can be used to identify you.

How? Imagine that your web browser is just describing you: it might say that you have brown hair, blue eyes, fair skin, a mole on your left cheek, a slight limp, prefer wearing plaid shirts, never wear a hat, have a birthmark on your left ankle and so forth. None of those data are unique: the world is full of brunettes, full of folks with blue eyes and so forth. But there’re not that many brown-haired, blue-eyed, left-cheek-moled folks out there—and still fewer have fair skin, and fewer still have a slight limp, and fewer still have birthmarks on their left ankles.

Why does this matter? Well, it matters in the same sense that fingerprints matter. Every time you touch something, you’re leaving fingerprints—and every time you visit a website you’re leaving a fingerprint. Pretty nifty, huh?

Forthwith, a rogues’ gallery of unjust beer laws. Florida bans bottles larger than 32 ounces; Iowa beers stronger than 5% ABV; Utah beer over 4%; New York bans beer an liquor in the same business.

When will the madness end?

Here’s an interesting theory from Roger Unger, M.D.: obesity is not the cause of metabolic syndrome but rather a defense against it. Metabolic syndrome is a fancy new name for belly fat and increased risk for heart disease, strokes and diabetes—it’s afflicting more and more Americans these days.

Dr. Unger’s theory is is intriguing, and he may be on to something. I’m not certain, though, what the prognosis is: okay, so fat doesn’t cause the problem but what does? Is it simple lack of exercise? In that case, the answer is simple: raise the gasoline tax to $4/gallon, all proceeds to go toward bicycles for the poor and new bike-only roads. Is it the wrong sort of food? Then start subsidising the right stuff and stop subsidising the wrong stuff (although—what if certain key political states like Iowa can’t meet the nation’s needs for healthy food as they can for maize?). More research is clearly needed.

Little-known fact: during Prohibition the US government poisoned alcohol. Roughly 10,000 people died as a result.

Chris Dixon has a great post examining the perverse incentives which reward executives for mismanagement. Well worth the read.

Cracked.com states that babies lie, racially discriminate, defy authority, get high off of masochism, steal and even murder in the womb. I think we should require registration of all babies and institute a mandatory one-week waiting period before procreation…

Roger Clegg offers up an illuminating parable. It starts:

Suppose you are a lifeguard, and you are presented with studies showing that boys are more likely to drown than girls, probably because they engage in riskier behavior. Now, how does this affect the job you do as a lifeguard?

Well, I hope that one thing you do not do is shrug if you see a girl drowning. You also should not try to rescue boys who are not drowning.

In fact, if this datum doesn’t help you spot drowning people, and it probably doesn’t, then it won’t affect the way you do your job as lifeguard at all. You look for people flailing and screaming, and knowing that most of them will be boys is really irrelevant to you.

Would it prompt you to support “Safety First” swim programs for boys only? Well, so long as there is some percentage of girls who would benefit from such programs, it’s not clear why you would want to exclude girls from them. Maybe the “Safety First” videos you show in the programs would be more likely to depict boys doing typically boy-things, but that’s about it.

And, of course, if further studies showed that it’s not so much sex that matters, but some other factor, then you would care even less about gender, and would be even less supportive of a program for boys and boys alone. For example, if there were some way instead to target risk-seekers for the program—thereby excluding cautious boys (and girls), and including risk-seeking girls (and boys)—then you would be all for it.

Read the whole thing—it’s good.

Chris Illuminati shares some notes his wife has left in his lunch. Very cool, and very sweet too.

Colonel James Moschgat, USAF, relates the story of a janitor and the lessons he learnt from his example. There’s some good stuff here.

Gunnar Ritter, maintainer of the commonly-used mailx program, explains why it’s not available on Windows. It’s an interesting tale of how the kluges deep within that semi-operating psuedo-system mean that even in 2010 design decisions made in the Seventies afflict Windows.

They afflict Unix too, of course, but generally our design mistakes were smarter than Windows’s design mistakes. Even in error we’re better.

Now here’s an excellent idea for young men wanting to serve their communities: start a pallbearer society. The idea is to carry the caskets of those without friends or relatives to do the task. I should talk to my old Scoutmaster—this would be a good thing for my old troop to do.

H/t to John Derbyshire

The Wall Street Journal notes that wool is coming back: it insulates better, it is more attractive and it’s renewable. Frankly, I think it’s a lot more comfortable than synthetics too. A lot of folks disagree, but I think they’ve not taken the time to get used to wool; also, I wonder if they’ve encountered the new non-synthetic blends and varieties which are super-soft.

As for the notion that kids raised on synthetic pseudo-fleece won’t go near wool, I’m sure that kids raised on McDonald’s have trouble with French cuisine. That doesn’t mean I’m burning my Le Central gift card (thanks Dad!).