Man, I’m tired. I got in my car yesterday at 11 am, got to the observatory, stepped into the dome and observed all night until 8 am. That 21 hours of work in a row for someone being paid for 20 a week. And the weather forecast is that I’ve got seven more clear 14 hour nights ahead of me.
So, yeah, I may not be updating this page very much for the next week. I’m still posting at Right-Thinking, though.
Have a Happy Halloween, everyone.
I don’t want to get into the details, so I will rely on vague generalizations:
Plagiarism sucks.
I have never been plagiarized before but it recently happened on another website (a non-political, non-science one where my contribution is anonymous). An article I posted several years ago was recently reposted by someone else with modest changes. Fortunately, the webmaster cottoned on and deleted it.
Words can not describe what I felt. I had never given plagiarism a second thought before now. I knew it was bad and avoided it myself. In my professional life, plagiarism is a career-killer and I am very thorough in sourcing my papers, almost to the point of absurdity (my bibliographies tend to be very long). But I was never that moved when I heard about it, even in prominent cases like Doris Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose or Ward Churchill.
But being the victim of it has wrenched my perspective entirely. This was just an article on some free website maybe eight people have heard of. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who get words stolen out of books and papers and see someone else make money off of it.
Plagiarism is not just stealing someone’s words. It is stealing their mind. It is a cruel violation. The hard work and original thought of one person is stolen by a second. The people who have lost their careers because of plagiarism have deserved everything they’ve gotten and I am now determined, more than ever, to make sure I quote people properly and always give credit where it’s due.
One of the reasons I started this blog was precisely because of this sort of thing. It wasn’t plagiarism, exactly, but I had e-mailed pundits and writers only to see my ideas turn up in their articles — never with any credit, often with my exact wording. Now I always post my thoughts here first and addend my e-mails with “posted at”.
Because if I don’t look out for my intellectual property, who will?
It’s Yom Kippur tonight, so I’ll be observing radio silence on all my blogs. Having woken up late (sloth), publicly expressed both anger and lust, gone to a department meeting so I could feel like a big lasagna (vanity) and on the verge of gorging myself pre-fast (gluttony), I just need to work in some envy and avarice over dinner and I’ll be set for repentance.
Maybe I’ll stiff the waiter on the tip and covet the guy at the next table’s girlfriend.
Most of my political blogging will probably now be at Right-Thinking. Today’s post is another diatribe on ethanol.
Lee at Right Thinking from the Left Coast has asked me to be one of four bloggers taking over while he’s in China for a year. My first post, on Iraq, is up.
I will probably be doing a lot of my political blogging over there under the Hal_10000 pseudonym. But I will still post most of my stuff here and virtually all of my sports, news and cultural crap.
I suppose I’m supposed to say something about 9/11. But everything that needs to be said has been said better elsewhere. I refuse to use the occasion to either a) write a self-important “reflective” piece; b) use the occasion to bash Democrats for wanting to “surrender” in Iraq; c) use the occasion to bash Bush for not killing Osama yet. Every other day of the year is fine for that.
Today, I honored the dead by working, spending time with friends and playing with my daughter, the kind of things the victims would still be doing if they hadn’t been murdered. I spent some time remembering on my long drive to and from Austin and would have put my flag up if it hadn’t been pouring rain. I think that’s a more appropriate remembrance than playing politics with the dead.
I”m just too lazy to care. It’s just easier to go with the idiots.
I had to renew my subscription to Norton Internet Security today. So far, I’ve been happy with it over three years. I haven’t had any virus or malware problems on my PC since a a few years ago when I erased the hard drive and reinstalled everything. I do wonder if it’s slowing down my machine, as many have alleged and the “will you allow this” pop-ups are annoying as hell. But I use my PC mostly for games anyway. Granted all my financial records are on there, but they are backed up on the mac (This is also intertia since I started keeping financial records on MS Money back in ’97 and am too lazy to move everything to Quicken). Most of my serious computing is reserved for the powerbook on which I am typing this.
So I tried to renew today and the software key I was given when I subscribed two years ago doesn’t work. I have to go online and download new software. There I discover that once I purchase it, I will not be able to redownload after 60 says unless I pay an extra $9.
I’d uninstall and go with something else … except that both Norton and McAfree install malware that prevents you from using a competitor’s product. I have neither the time nor the will to extract NAV from my system and find another product. So I’ll renew it for one more year. Next year, I’ll probably get a new PC anyway and not bother with these guys anymore.
I was up. And Sue was up because it was her milking time. So we did get to see the lunar eclipse last night. It was perfectly clear as the last slivers of moon vanished into a red-black haze. Then it clouded up at once.
One of the good things about my job being in jeopardy is that I’m appreciating it more.
What a day. My throat is still sore after ten days — sneezing is agony. I went up to Austin for a defense party and took 2.5 hours to drive home thanks to the Department of Transportation.
All I can do is like to Balko’s diatribe on our imperial congress.
Nice to have exchanged one monarch in Britain for 535 in Washington.
I apologize for the light blogging — all two of you who are reading this. But it’s been crazy time in the Siegel household lately. To wit:
Anyway, so I’m not exactly in a blogging mood.
After two years, we have someone living in the lot next to ours. Everytime I see them, I have to bury the temptation to say, “Hiddely-ho, neighborinos!”.
They’re from Canada, so I assume they all talk like that.
A friend who rarely visits the blog did so yesterday to see what my take was on the Minnesota disaster since we both used to live there. She commented that my posting these days seems angry, almost to the point of tinfoil hattery.
Fair enough. I guess when it comes to politics, I am a bit on the angry side. The last six years have been a revelation. I wish I could be like a Democrat and just be happy that the man in the White House has my favorite letter after his name, no matter what policies he engages in. But I just can’t.
It’s a simple fact that I, like most conservative libertarians, am a man without a party. The two parties are fighting over whether we will have big government or really big government. I give you the SCHIP Helen Lovejoy program expansion.
But I’m not an angry person. Most people who know me and talk to me on a daily basis would probably describe me as easy-going. The reason is that politics, while a large part of my blogging, is a very tiny part of my life. So for Friday, I’ll go through seven things that occupy lots of my time about which I am not angry at all.
And football, college and pro, is just a month away, which means Sue will become a football widow on weekends (as well as baseball playoff widow on weekdays). I can’t wait
We often don’t see this. Progress is invisible; problems looms large. We always see the present through blood-colored glasses. But just to focus on one issue, look at the environment. Yes, global warming is a concern. But when I was born, you couldn’t breath the air of LA, Lake Erie was dead, acid rain was growing and cars and industry were spewing filth. Today, lead is banned, rivers are cleaner, Lake Erie is palatable, the population bomb failed to explode, food is so plentiful obesity is becoming a global problem, cars run clean, trees are more numerous in America than in recorded history, acid rain has declined.
Global warming is just about the only environmental concern left. Well, there are worries about overfishing and rain forests. But a lot of these are overblown or will be handled.
I have immense faith in humanity. I know that we will solve the problems that are presented to us and move forward. Obstructive, interfering, ideology-addled government can only slow things down. Human progress is a force far too powerful for the idiots to hold back. Even if our civilization were to collapse, we would pick up the pieces and be back on our feet in a scant few centuries.
I know that humans will ony day stretch out to the stars (notice, I didn’t say Americans), that AIDS will be cured, disease conquered, poverty eradicated. We’ve already come so far – the lifestyle we enjoy is something that could not have been imagined 100 years ago. And a hundred years from now people will forget about the problems we solved and get bent out of shape because nuclear fusion is making all our voices squeak and those aliens from Alpha Centauri are taking our jobs.
So there it is, my Friday dose of optimism. Tomorrow I’ll be back to my comfortable curmudgeonly ways.
Two thoughts on yesterday’s bridge collapse.
I lived in Minnesota for four years and took 35W back and forth to school. I know the Minnesotans. They’ll mourn, buckle down, rebuild the damn bridge and move forward. They won’t get into the morass of, say, Ground Zero and never rebuild anything.