So, my wife alas, had little fender bender with my dearly beloved high mileage Honda Insight (2000) and I’m in the market for a new car. I’d made the promise to myself to continue to upgrade mileage … but that isn’t going to be possible ’cause nobody makes a higher mileage US car than the manual transmission 2000-2006 Honda Insight (with or without MIMA). I’m thinking of going for a slightly elderly used gas sipper as a stop gap in the hopes that in 4-5 years I’ll be able to get the car I really want, i.e., that can get better than 150mpg (or 2/3 gallons per 100 miles if you prefer) on dry summer roads. Oh, don’t worry, no real damage was done, my wife is uninjured (and nobody else was involved).

Looking around this morning, it seems a 5 speed manual Toyota Yaris, Kia Rio, VW TDI, or Ford Focus look like the best bet. What do y’all think? Any other suggestions? It’s replacing a two seater so it doesn’t have to be large and likely when I turn it over it will be handed down to one of my girls, who are fast (gasp) approaching collegiate age.

Suggestions?

In a somewhat unlikely Star Trek NG episode the crew encounters a race which speaks, unfortunately, entirely through cipher that is coded references to historical events. Blog, well, neighbor Eli is in a huff because some philosopher of science (Signorelli) offers that the “language of maths” isn’t sufficient for human experience. He offers as counter example not a cipher but a number substitution code and suggests that if you encode ordinary language with numbers you’ve translated text into the domain of maths. Well, sorry. That doesn’t it, the medium is not the message. That you are viewing this short essay which is encoded in ASCII and transmitted via HTTP protocols over 802.1 specified media, i.e., numbers. The message is not maths. Read the rest of this entry

Good morning.

1. This is in cartoon form, but a serious point is made. What do you suggest to fix this educational gap?
2. Yes, premise 1 seems false.
3. Tebow furor, an extreme example.
4. Undercurrents in Iran, a film noted.
5. What to eat while doing LSD on bike (LSD -> Long Steady Distance, not the hallucinogen).
6. Memories … .
7. ePaper and the better nightlight.
8. Not the normal headline.
9. Tea Party/OWS totalitarian version … noted here and here.
10. Cuteness.
11. This will have dire consequences.
12. Right after you ban talking in cars too.
13. Sleaze to the end.
14. Government spending and a study.
15. Porn must be very popular in Egypt … or something like that.
16. Never beaten athletic team.

Good morning.

1. Panacea? Nope. “Sucks less” might be a better term.
2. A PSA for today.
3. Of Jane Austen and the Russian novel(s).
4. Very very very slow motion photography.
5. So is that it? The OWS sees the fundamental problem that if the “1%” have some money then there is less for them?
6. Mr Tebow terrifying? Really? I’m missing out on the Tebow hoopla I think.
7. Altered pronunciation.
8. How not to get excited about math (and how to miss the point).
9. And on the other hand, this is how to make the argument that one can indeed get impassioned about numbers (or the argument that should have been made above).
10. Zoom (and boom?).
11. Forecasting and honesty.

Good morning.

1. Predators@Home … more here.
2. A book unrecommended.
3. Money and the (illegal) drug pipeline.
4. I have no idea what right wing/left wing means in this context.
5. Shocking, err, well what is sort of shocking is the gourmet fare the “1%ers” get for school lunches.
6. Pointing out the “bizarro econ” world the President inhabits.
7. Reverse smuggling anyone?
8. A Groseclose collaborator gets noticed for his work.
9. Grousing about Ms Clinton.
10. The left wants national health care, I guess that’s because the figure the way to help the bottom 10% is to make sure the bottom 90% have the health care poorer than the bottom 10% have now. That will somehow be “better” because it will  be “fairer.” Riiight.
11. Don’t worry, he’s just a teacher.
12. Music.
13. Toodles then.

Good, well, afternoon.

1. If you tie salary to actual performance, surprise … actual performance begins to track salary. Or perhaps the surprise is how it doesn’t track as well as it might even now.
2. Another book noted.
3. One more.
4. Marcus Aurelius growing in popularity?
5. An appreciative word for the NyTimes?
6. An appreciable part of the 1% and how their protest might look.
7. Economists bicker.
8. Another economist, so … do you agree or not?
9. I’m not really on board with Mr Martin’s corpus of fiction, but GURPS … on that we’ll agree. GURPS was the way to go (back in my RPG playing days).
10. The EU and the growth solution.
11. What they say and what they do.
12. Hello! And this is not unrelated.
13. So … what’s next? Othello? I think the “Othello syndrome” is likely more often seen in our public arena, i.e., a guy moving to take out an opponent at the cost of his own career.

Good morning.

1. Oooh, a book list, with remarks.
2. The methods of Mr Corzine.
3. Well, OK then … Silent Night indeed.
4. What free market was “never meant to be” … apparently “what the market will bear” has nothing to do with the free market.
5. America!
6. So … will/has the admin tendered a “what we were trying to do” explanation?
7. Publish or perish … perish the thought?
8. What the fans of porn ignore.
9. While one might consider the plans of mice and men, sometimes men’s plans are disturbing.
10. What is the reason for special protections for one profession in that regard? I’m not seeing it.
11. Empathy and the rodent?
12. A loophole to widen.

Busy busy.

1. SCOTUS recusal talk here.
2. Continuing with legal stuff, how about campaign law and Mr Bolton/Mr Gingrich.
3. The American response to insult that theme continues here.
4. Now that we’ve mentioned Pearl Harbor … look at this post. I hadn’t realized the technical hurdles required to attack Pearl Harbor. How about you?
5. OWS … day care for adults.
6. The friendly neighborhood utilitarianism defender not ready to acknowledge his criticism of virtue ethics is shared by his utilitarianism (his crit of v/e was that one needed to have a prior definitions of virtue, which holds for utilitarianism which needs a prior definition of “the good” or “happiness”, the latter oddly enough Aristotle defined in terms of virtue).
7. Salvation not about “keeping out of Hell.”
8. Art from the depths of depravity and deprivation.
9. Demographics.
10. I guess I’m not a “typical Republican” as described (and I’m not sure I have every met one). That of course doesn’t mean the typical tag isn’t right, but it casts (for me) some doubt on the assertion.
11. Labels and the left.
12. Stupid green tricks.
13. Hayek and macro more here.
14. Church and a boomer.
15. That must have been a blast to drive.

Good morning.

1. Are these ideas past their expiration?
2. The IPCC and a contributor.
3. Apparently to be on the left, you need to check your sense of humor at the door.
4. What to do about Burma.
5. Interesting video sequence.
6. A book recommended, I got it and started reading it.
7. Another book.
8. And one more book, which I haven’t read, but is now in my inbox.
9. Stupid school administration tricks.
10. A translation of “too big to fail.”
11. Innocent until proven guilty … so how do y’all feel about Mr Cain in that context?
12. The primary case against Mr Gingrich.
13. Unprepared for (the extend of the inroads of) moral relativism.
14. Cool tech.
15. Prison and imprisonment … here and here.
16. Searching for Diogenes … or the  candidate furthest from the amazingly dishonest norm (such as Mr Obama)?

Well, I was busy this morning … and have an early flight back to the windy city (from the temporarily windy SouthWest) and won’t have time then. So, here’s what I found out in the wide world today and yesterday.

1. A little grist for the Habermas/Ratzinger can secular society survive question.
2. Our happy regulatory state, who needs freedom when you can ban happy meals?
3. Education as signaling.
4. GOP speechwriters bread and butter for the summer campaign.
5. Hypercard? Heck, how about AREX? Now, that was completely cool.
6. Grunt! I’ll allow here that in college I began lifting and went from a completely skinny prototypical pencil necked geek to a bench press of 225 while at a weight of 155. I’m lifting again, and Wednesday before Thanksgiving managed a one rep max of 195. Woo hoo.
7. National debt by nation, how about consumer debt? Howzzat figure in?
8. To solve a problem, using the tools at hand.
9. Biz taxes.
10. Somebody hasn’t read much Solzhenitsyn on the subject of suffering. I’d recommend beginning with the First Circle. Or read this, which I read (most of) on the plane ride west.
11. Those emails don’t come of as from seekers but salesmen.
12. A book recommended.
13. Lawyers might defend it, but when you have to “go carefully through the rhetoric” to figure out if he really made the promises that the speech(es) seem to imply, the rest of the world calls that lying.
14. Kind like all them California individualists all dressing and speaking identically.
15. “Famous historian” … whom I’ll admit of whom I’ve never heard. But then again apparently his field, to judge from wiki, is contemporary American history … a topic on which I have read little if anything.
16. Getting closer to an actual viable commercial replacement that meets the “gets better mileage” than my current car.
17. Security and the world, part one and part two.
18. Obama and the sociopath connection.
19. Meritocracy and misunderstanding.
20. One serious can of RAID, wonder what the bug looks like now.
21. Modern science and the totalitarian state.
22. Our failings highlighted too.
23. And some advice for putting Church and life together.

Good morning.

1. Two from Mr Christie, here and here.
2. Exactly! A good resource book from a secular philosophical perspective is from Mary Midgely in Wickedness.
3. So, good idea or not?
4. I suspect the reason revelations of misconduct have not affected the true believers.
5. A huge roundup of alternative history fiction involving Mr Hitler.
6. So, is that what the OWS is about?
7. OK then.
8. Taxes and income disparity.
9. We kill them. The point is not the killing, I’d think, but killing them humanely.
10. Impromptu improv.
11. Even considering this requires such a radical readjustment to my notions of justice that I’m still not seeing how this might be a good idea.
12. A book considered.

Good morning.

1. Almost $8Trillion and … no oversight.
2. What is bought by economic overstretch and causing global catastrophe, yet still praised. Head in sand much?
3. Charting an industry’s journey into la la land.
4. A lesson in self-organization or professorial petulance? Whaddya think?
5. The part supposedly “for the working class” eschews the working class.   Surprising nobody.
6. A movie plug.
7. Iran targets EA.
8. Ryan and the OWS.
9. A talented short film.
10. So racism and a discussion, are the scare quotes warranted?
11. Climategate 2.0 … I missed it.
12. ID and evolution an atheist supporter in academia?

Well, I’m back on the West coast (Pacific time).

1. Robots in prison.
2. A Defense toy … which at the very least has a cool name.
3. A book recommended.
4. A movie recommended as well.
5. A plug for being race blind.
6. Heh.
7. Tech and translation.
8. Time and US vs not-US covers.
9. Oppose aff action. Perhaps the Admin wants to foster resentment for vets.
10. An assertion. Is it supportable?
11. Choosing who you will be, is important.
12. Ms Stein as feminist.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

1. Open book exams in the information age.
2. So, guilty today? It hadn’t occurred to me, so I guess I’m not.
3. So, was the left sold out?
4. And the best comic short on Thanksgiving ever.
5. Bumbling American grand strategy … or not.
6. The EU and the ECB.
7. Which is perhaps the advantage of the tradition of the Nativity fast instead of the Advent cycle.
8. Cold kills.

Good morning to y’all.

1. An idea … seems not so good to me. Whaddya all think?
2. American cryptography done right, a last survivor passes on.
3. So, what in the FDA is being done to cut this time to market down. If the answer is “nothing” as I suspect it is, then the FDA is failing its primary function.
4. Mr Obama on OWS, Chicago hasn’t to my knowledge had a big OWS presence compared to other cities, but the smell of human waste was quite noticeable last weekend.
5. While I’d agree that continued employment and bonus should be tied to performance, I’m not convinced “standardized tests” are a good metric.
6. Mr Wright noted approvingly.
7. Perhaps not the expected reaction given the litany of events?
8. A closeup of an unusual missile launch, and I have to say this is a (welcome) contrast to the Vietnam era drug abuse means of dealing with stress and boredom.