The frayed knot
May 25, 2007
As the divorce rate plummets at the top of American society and rises at the bottom, the widening “marriage gap” is breeding inequality, says this interesting article from The Economist.
Marriage in America | The frayed knot | Economist.com
THE students at West Virginia University don’t want you to think they take life too seriously. It is the third-best “party school” in America, according to the Princeton Review’s annual ranking of such things, and comes a creditable fifth in the “lots of beer” category. Booze sometimes causes students’ clothes to fall off. Those who wake up garmentless after a hook-up endure the “walk of shame”, trudging back to their own dormitories in an obviously borrowed football shirt, stirring up gossip with every step.
And yet, for all their protestations of wildness, the students are a serious-minded bunch. Yes, they have pre-marital sex. “I don’t see how it’s a bad thing,” says Ashley, an 18-year-old studying criminology. But they are careful not to fall pregnant. It would be “a major disaster,” says Ashley. She has plans. She wants to finish her degree, go to the FBI academy in Virginia and then start a career as a “profiler” helping to catch dangerous criminals. She wants to get married when she is about 24, and have children perhaps at 26. She thinks having children out of wedlock is not wrong, but unwise.
The idea that differing views on the sanctity of marriage is creating a growing “caste system” in American society is new to me. It’s alarming that God’s opinion and the role of the church on all this is nowhere mentioned in the article, which may also say something about the world view of the media. And our increasingly pagan society.
Dave, quick to point out that “pagan” is not being used here pejoratively, just factually.
The Many Myths of Ethanol
May 24, 2007
Since you most likely already know what I think about Ethanol, I won’t further belabor the point. You can read the article for yourself.
RealClearPolitics - Articles - The Many Myths of Ethanol
I’ll give you a hand with the priceless final paragraph, though.
And it’s good for vote-hungry presidential hopefuls. Iowa is a key state in the presidential-nomination sweepstakes, and we all know what they grow in Iowa [http://www.iowacorn.org/]. Sen. Clinton voted against ethanol 17 times until she started running for president. Coincidence?
“It’s no mystery that people who want to be president support the corn ethanol program,” Taylor says. “If you’re not willing to sacrifice children to the corn god, you will not get out of the Iowa primary with more than one percent of the vote, Right now the closest thing we have to a state religion in the United States isn’t Christianity. It’s corn.”
Dave, loving the entertainment of the presidential race.
Killer bass!
May 18, 2007
Some of you may remember the possibly apocryphal story about former President Jimmy Carter’s canoe paddle battle with a killer rabbit. I recently endured a similar attack from a very upset Largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides). No national press coverage, please.
Last Sunday morning, about 8 o’clock, I was standing on the deck of my Ranger bass boat casting a chugging topwater lure toward the end of a boat dock near our Lake of the Ozarks condo. Suspended under the dock floats was a school of excited bass, mostly one- or two-pounders with an occasional larger one. It was one of those very rare mornings where there was a splash and a hook-up on almost every cast. In fact, a pair of bass fought over my lure on one cast and both of them got hooked - one on the front treble hook and the other on the rear hook. Now that was fun!
The fun ended when I reached down to lip one of the larger bass. Lipping a bass with a mouthful of treble hooks isn’t a very smart thing to do. In a flash and with a quick twist, that killer bass stapled my right thumb and forefinger together with a treble hook, a barb buried deep in each digit. How awkward.
The bass was fairly cooperative as I moved back to the end of the boat to get a pliers out of the tackle box. I clumsily unhooked the bass and clipped the line at the lure. That helped a bit. I swear that that bass had a smirk on his face as I returned him to the deep.
I idled the boat left-handed back to the slip and wrestled it onto the lift, the lure still dangling from my right hand, I made my self-conscious way up to the condo, hopped in the car and drove six miles to the Emergency Room of Lake Regional Hospital, where it turned out they were well prepared for such casualties of the piscatorial wars. They quickly freed me from those nasty barbs, patted me on the back, and sent me on my way. On the way out I noticed a large wall display with dozens of lures mounted on it, mute testimony to the carelessness of my fellow fisher-folk.
Moral: Don’t go fishing when you should be in church.
Dave, which he repented and caught a fat five-pounder on Monday.
Al Qaeda Strikes Back
May 17, 2007
Here is an antidote for all the smoke, nonsense, and obfuscation emanating from the band of presidential hopefuls. If they just knew how silly they are making themselves look as they pontificate on geo-politics! Unfortunately, the antidote requires a larger investment in time and thought that most of us are willing or able to make, but here it is, anyway.
Foreign Affairs - Al Qaeda Strikes Back - Bruce Riedel
Decisively defeating al Qaeda will be more difficult now than it would have been a few years ago. But it can still be done, if Washington and its partners implement a comprehensive strategy over several years, one focused on both attacking al Qaeda’s leaders and ideas and altering the local conditions that allow them to thrive. Otherwise, it will only be a matter of time before al Qaeda strikes the U.S. homeland again.
I’m willing to grant that the U.S. went to war in Iraq for all the wrong reasons, based on a naive understanding of the politics of the region, but the principle of sunk costs says that we cut the recriminations and go on from here, whether we like our options at this point or not.
Al Qaeda today is a global operation — with a well-oiled propaganda machine based in Pakistan, a secondary but independent base in Iraq, and an expanding reach in Europe. Its leadership is intact. Its decentralized command-and-control structure has allowed it to survive the loss of key operatives such as Zarqawi. Its Taliban allies are making a comeback in Afghanistan, and it is certain to get a big boost there if NATO pulls out. It will also claim a victory when U.S. forces start withdrawing from Iraq. “The waves of the fierce crusader campaign against the Islamic world have broken on the rock of the mujahideen and have reached a dead end in Iraq and Afghanistan,” a spokesperson for the newly proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq said on November 29, 2006. “For the first time since the fall of the Ottoman caliphate in the past century, the region is witnessing the revival of Islamic caliphates.”
Looking at the presidential wannabes, I wonder where among them is the potential leader who is able and willing to acquire the grasp of the Middle East realities to the degree than Reidel apparently does. Human frailty and egotism being what they are, this may be a forlorn hope, but history does provide examples of such insight, I optimiatically think.
My cynical self whispers to me that Reidel may be just blowing smoke and that, in fact, reconciling our national interest with Mid-East realities is impossible. May be.
In Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, the governments have strengthened the secret police and given them carte blanche to strike al Qaeda and its sympathizers. The United States and its allies in Europe have also provided additional counterterrorism assistance to the targeted regimes and stepped up cooperation with their security forces. The lesson is clear: al Qaeda is still too weak to overthrow established governments equipped with effective security services; it needs failed states to thrive.
What a complicated situation this is, and what an unpleasant legacy to leave for future generations!
Dave, who ought to know better than trying to understand such things.
The craze for maize
May 12, 2007
An Orlop hat tip to Michael Kruse for finding this article. The local hype about the ethanol plants that seem to be rising out of every cornfield proclaims a pot at the end of the rainbow for the local economy. It’s much more likely a momentary pop for our farmer friends (some of them) and the ag industry. Doesn’t anyone understand fundamental economics? I suspect this article pretty much has the right of it.
Iowa’s ethanol economy | The craze for maize | Economist.com
Corn-based ethanol is neither cheap nor especially green: it requires a lot of energy to produce. Production has been boosted by economically-questionable help from state and federal governments, including subsidies, the promotion of mixing petrol with renewable fuels and a high tariff that keeps out foreign ethanol. The federal government offers ethanol producers a subsidy of 51 cents per gallon (13.5 cents per litre); and a growing number of states are pushing for wider use of E85, a fuel blend that is 85% ethanol and only 15% petrol. Since oil prices rose above $30 a barrel in 2004 (they are more than double that now), ethanol capacity has grown especially rapidly. And although the country is experimenting with other renewable plant-based fuels of varying feasibility, from biodiesel to (much greener) ethanol derived from trees, the biggest boom has been in corn-based ethanol.
It’s hard to be objective about agricultural matters, living where I do in the middle of corn and pig country. I just haven’t been there and done that. Nevertheless, the little I’ve learned from my time at Cow College in Kansas has embued at least some sympathy for my farm friends, and I suspect that more than a few of them fully understand what the article is saying. Like the rest of us, they just want theirs, now.
Instead of worrying about the murky future, the state’s farmers are planting as much corn as they can—and hoping that oil prices stay nice and high.
Dave, a genertion removed from the farm.
Silicon skyscrapers
May 5, 2007
To one who grew up in the age of vacuum tubes, microelectronics still seems like science fiction. But then, I’m the guy whose education finally ground to a halt in the super-abstract world of quantum physics. I guess everyone has a mental boundary beyond which one can’t travel. So articles like this fill me with a lot of wonder but little comprehension.
Microelectronics | Growing up | Economist.com
That is the thinking behind making transistors out of nanowires. The wires in question—strands of silicon—are but a few tens of nanometres thick. Though they make up for that in height (they are 2,000 nanometres tall). Their slight diameters mean that zillions of them could be crowded on to a single chip.
Nanowires forsooth! I challenge you to try to visualize nano-anything. A nano-inch is .000000001″ (or somethng like that - my math hasn’t survived the decades very well, either.) Maybe this is a religious thing. Lacking (and not missing) an electron microscope, I must take the existence of a nanowire on faith.
And there is another thing that makes these transistors radically different from others. Microelectronic components are produced by etching. A silicon chip is coated with layers of the chemicals needed to make the components in question. Those components are then carved out of these layers by chemical solvents that remove unwanted areas and leave the components as islands on the surface of the chip. Dr Riess’s nanowires, by contrast, are grown from scratch by exposing the chip to a silicon-rich gas. The desired pattern of nanowires has previously been picked out on the chip’s surface with spots of a catalyst that cause silicon from the gas to be deposited. The wires thus sprout only where the catalyst fertilises them.
I confess no comprehension at all of the foregoing. It’s a strange and marvelous world we live in.
Dave, still adding to his list of things he doesn’t understand.
