Blackmoor Vituperative

“One-off bailouts and rushed rescue packages are not the answer to our financial woes. See why the FairTax — which solves the root problem of current economic crisis not just the effect on Wall Street — is the answer that America needs now more than ever.”

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President Obama went on national television this evening to urge Congress to set aside “petty differences” and vote his “recovery package” into law. Bold words: it makes President Obama sound like the brave visionary, and those who oppose him as “same old, same old” politicians. But what if his bold plan is tantamount to steering the Titanic straight at the iceberg? What if pouring trillions of dollars down a hole is not the way to restore fiscal responsibility in this country?

What if the economists against Obama are right?

Call me crazy, but I think that when one is in difficult financial straights, spending money like it’s going out of style is the exact wrong thing to do.

According to the CDC, roughly 440,000 deaths each year are associated with smoking.

Also according to the CDC, roughly 400,000 deaths each year are associated with obesity.

Many more people die each year in the USA from motor vehicle accidents (roughly 40,000) than in airplane crashes (fewer than 1,000). But people spend a lot more time in cars than in airplanes. The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying is about equal.

And according to the NIH, roughly 12,000 deaths (excluding suicides) each year are associated with firearms.

The leading causes of death in 2000 were tobacco (435 000 deaths; 18.1% of total US deaths), poor diet and physical inactivity (400 000 deaths; 16.6%), and alcohol consumption (85 000 deaths; 3.5%). Other actual causes of death were microbial agents (75 000), toxic agents (55 000), motor vehicle crashes (43 000), incidents involving firearms (29 000), sexual behaviors (20 000), and illicit use of drugs (17 000).

(from CDC: Obesity approaching tobacco as top preventable cause of death, DoctorsLounge)

So “sexual behavior” is just behind “firearms” in terms of the raw number of people killed — and is far ahead of firearms when the roughly 17,000 suicides who used firearms are excluded (as they should be, for obvious reasons).

Interesting.

PointClickHome has a slideshow of unusual architectural projects that is pretty fun to look at.

Michael Widenius, the original creator of the MySQL database system, announced in a blog entry on Thursday that he has left Sun Microsystems and is launching his own company. He is unsatisfied with the direction of MySQL development and believes that he will be able to make more meaningful contribution to the software from outside of the company.

[…]

It’s unclear how this move will ultimately impact the MySQL community, but it seems likely that the outcome will be positive. Widenius clearly wants MySQL to have a stronger community focus and is also still committed to making technical contributions. The departure of the project’s two cofounders in the aftermath of the acquisition doesn’t reflect particularly well on Sun, but it probably won’t have any direct impact on the company’s business interests or MySQL development efforts.

(from Unsatisfied with direction, MySQL creator leaves Sun, Ars Technica)

This chic, tree-lined California town might seem an unlikely place to begin the colonization of Earth’s oceans. Palo Alto is known for expensive modernism, Stanford University, al fresco dining, and land prices so high a modest cottage still sells for well over $1 million.

If Patri Friedman gets his way, the area will also be remembered for birthing a political movement called seasteading. The concept is as simple to explain as it will be difficult to achieve: erecting permanent dwellings on the high seas outside the territorial waters claimed by the world’s governments.

“Innovation in society and serving marginalized groups has always happened on the frontier,” Friedman said in an interview last week. “We don’t have a frontier anymore. The reason our political system doesn’t innovate anymore is that there’s no place to try out new things. We want to provide that place.”

(from The next frontier: ‘Seasteading’ the oceans, CNet

Whether you are interested in the politics of a new sovereign nation, or the technology behind what might make it possible, this is interesting reading.

I happened to stumble across this article vilifying so-called Daylight Saving Time. The article itself doesn’t really say much that I have not said before, but it does have quite a few links that you may find interesting, as well as this public service announcement against the costly and absurd practice of setting clocks “forward and backward and upside down”.

Another piece of science fiction is on its way to being science fact. “Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated quantum holographic storage, shattering long-held assumptions about the information limits of matter. Moving into the sub-atomic realm, they permanently stored 35 bits in the quantum space surrounding a single electron.” (from ZDNet)

As a friend whom I know by the name “Eridah” recently said (speaking on behalf of Apple), “We can’t simply use iTunes as a file manager for a device, oh no. That’s too complicated for our userbase. No we have to only allow syncing. And only with one computer. And if you plug it into another computer IT WILL DELETE YOUR SONGS.”

iTunes sucks. So, if you have an iPod (as I do), what do you use instead?

First, replace the firmware in the iPod with Rockbox. And make sure you get some fonts and themes for it.

Then, use MP3 files, the most widely supported format for digital music. Everything under the sun supports MP3. It’s not that I think MP3 is the best format for digital music (there are formats with better compression, or better music fidelity, or both). But it is widely supported, and at 192 or more kbps, I can very rarely hear any difference between the original CD and an MP3.

Finally, use MediaMonkey to organize your MP3 files.

Over the past 20 years, huge swaths of the sky have been searched for slowly moving bodies, and well over 1000 KBOs found. But these wide-area surveys can spot only large, bright objects; longer-exposure surveys that can find smaller, dimmer objects cover only small areas of the sky. A Mars-sized object at a distance of, say, 100 AU would be so faint that it could easily have escaped detection.

That could soon change. In December 2008, the first prototype of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) was brought into service at the Haleakala observatory on Maui, Hawaii. Soon, four telescopes – equipped with the world’s largest digital cameras, at 1.4 billion pixels apiece – will search the skies for anything that blinks or moves. Its main purpose is to look out for potentially hazardous asteroids bound for Earth, but inhabitants of the outer solar system will not escape its all-seeing eyes.

(from Is there a Planet X?, New Scientist)