Tag Archives: Military

'Culture', Cool Stuff, Science and Edumacation

Late May Linkorama

  • A brief bit of mathematical malpractice, although not a deliberate one. The usually smart Sarah Kliff cites a study that of an ER that showed employees spent nearly 5000 minutes on Facebook. Of course, over 68 computers and 15 days, that works out to about 4 minutes per day per computer which … really isn’t that much.
  • What’s interesting about the Netflix purge is that many of the studios are pulling movies to start their own streaming services. This is idiotic. I’m pretty tech savvy and I have no desire to have 74 apps on my iPad, one for each studio. If I want to watch a movie, I’m going to Netflix or Amazon or iTunes, not a studio app (that I have to pay another subscription fee for). In fact, many days my streaming is defined by opening up the Netflix app and seeing what intrigues me.
  • We go into this on Twitter. The NYT ran an article about how little nutrition our food has. Of course, they have defined “nutritional content” as the amount of pigment which has dubious nutritional value (aside from anti-oxidant value; so, no nutritional value). As Kevin Wilson said according to the graph, the value of blue corn is that it is blue and not yellow.
  • While we’re on the subject of nutrition, it turns out that low sodium intake may not only not be beneficial, it may even be harmful. I’m slowly learning that almost everything we think we know about nutrition is shaky at best.
  • Ultra-conserved words. I am fascinated by language.
  • Wine tasting is bullshit.
  • How the peaceful loving people-friendly Soviet Union tried to militarize space.
  • The most remote places in each state.
  • Porn is not the problem. You are. More on how “sex addiction” is a made up disorder.
  • Meet the coins that could rewrite history. Every time we learn more about the past, we find out that our ancestors were smarter and more adventurous than we thought they were. And some people think they needed aliens to build the pyramids.
    • Cool Stuff, Law and Order, Politics, The Nanny State

    Thursday Linkorama

    Non-political links:

  • Awesome. The navy shoots down on a drone with a laser.
  • OK, semi-political. I wish I’d had this woman as my philosophy professor when we were looking at feminist philosophy.

    • Political links:

  • Crime in Arizona, like the rest of the country, is way down … except in the district patrolled by America’s toughest sheriff. Funny that.
  • I’m forced to agree with a lot of what’s in this video. I wish our leaders would stop trying to pretend that solving global warming is an economic miracle waiting to happen. Not when things like public transportation are such boondoggles. When I hear pie in the sky talk about AGW, it indicates someone who isn’t taking the issue seriously, just using it as an excuse to prop up special interests. And, like the video, I wish global warming weren’t happening. But I can’t convince myself it’s a myth.
  • Ron Bailey links up the worst environmental disasters. You could add Chernobyl and Bhopal to the list if you wanted to get historical.
  • It is absolutely unsurprising that the NHTSA investigation essentially cleared Toyota of most wrongdoing. This is simply a repeat of the sudden acceleration incidents that happened twenty years ago. Ted Frank wades into the comments on the Toyota lawsuits. Worth reading as he is an excellent debater.
  • In the end, the Nanny Staters will press for this, taking kids out of homes that make them fat. Never mind that weight is a difficult issue to pin down (I linked last week to a school bashing the parents of a gymnast because her Bullshit Mass Index was high). Is the biggest problem we need to solve in parenting people feeding their kids too much?
    • Politics, War on Terror

    Perusing CNN

    The Inuits say they deserve money for global warming. Of course, there hasn’t been that much warming yet. Less than a degree. This is what drives me nuts in the global warming debate. Someone taking advantage of it to advance an irrelevant issue.

    Now McCain has to apologize for using “wasted” in reference to our troops. The blog was down when this happened with Obama so I couldn’t defend him. But I don’t see what the issue is here. Saying that our soldiers lives are being “wasted” does not insult the soldiers . . . it insults the people doing the wasting! (Of course, that’s why the Right immediately responds by cowering behind the troops). If you think a military action was stupid, shouldn’t you say that it wastes lives? Many historians think Robert E. Lee wasted lives in Pickett’s Charge, so I guess they hate the Confederate troops. Most people would tell you the Gallipoli Campaign was a waste of life; I guess they hate Australians. And since the Commies eventually conquered South Vietnam, one could argue that 60,000 American lives were wasted there. But then that would mean they hate American troops.

    Update: Having slept on this issue, I should back off slightly. There is a difference between soldiers dying in a losing effort and soldiers lives being wasted in a pointless effort. It’s a subtle distinction but a critical one. I still don’t think that saying our soldiers lives are being wasted in Iraq impugns their sacrifice. It’s impossible to impugn that, no matter what anyone says.

    Honestly, can we reserve the “hating the troops” meme for people who actually, you know, hate the troops?

    Finally, the head of Walter Reed has had his ass fired. If only we’d have this kind of accountability, um, before November 2006.