Author Archives: chet

Dept. of Automotive Genetic Testing Gone Wonderfully Awry

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Singer Vehicle Design makes 911s.

The Singer Concept 911 attempts to channel the spirit of the delicate 1960s original, the race-bred chic of the ’70s longhoods, the ’80s bombproof solidity and the power and sophistication of the 964/993 series [in a] single jewel-like form that represents the golden era of the world’s most important sports car.

The body is a lovely bespoke carbon fiber throwback, the chassis from the 964-era, but significantly strengthened, and the powerplant is a souped-up version of the air-cooled (duh) 3.6L from the Heathenmobile-era 993s. I’m not sure exactly what they’ve done to take it from 275 ponies to 410, but then again I’m not the target market.

They’re hand-built, so it’s no surprise that buying a new 997 instead would represent the “cheap” option by comparison: entry level here is $175K, according to a Robb Report article in their press kit. Even so: Gorgeous, enough so that I’m forgiving them for the utter bullshit of their Flash-heavy, music-playing web site.

Weird fact: ex-Catherine Wheel singer Rob Dickinson appears to be a Singer principal, at least according to this Excellence article.

Dept. of Interesting Wedding Writeups

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Today’s Times includes this writeup of a little wedding in Austin:

“WE said 4:44, and we meant 4:44,” Michael Nesmith, the wedding officiant, said with mock insistence before about 125 guests on March 4 in Butler Park, which looks out at the Austin, Tex., skyline.

There was no processional. The couple about to be joined, Carolyn Wonderland, a blues singer and guitarist, and A. Whitney Brown, a writer and comedian, were already standing on their marks. There was nothing else to wait for except the string of fours that had been specified in the wedding invitation.

Yes, that Mike Nesmith, with whom I share a church, apparently.

Yes, that A. Whitney Brown.

And yes, obviously, that Carolyn Wonderland.

The Monkey, at Night

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Dominic is small, but he wonders what his special soft friend Bity the Monkey does at night. Dominic’s father obliges, in a lovely and hilarious video.

Dominic loves his monkey toy. So i made a short film to show him what he does at night while he’s sleeping.This is what Bity the Monkey does from 2am to 6am.

Why does NPR keep giving up?

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So the jackasses on the right have another pelt on their wall this week, thanks to NPR showing their belly like giant pussies. Jon Stewart nailed this last time, ink the dustup about Juan Williams: they keep bringing tote bags to knife fights.

Where are my two-fisted liberals, dammit? Is Rahm the only one made in LBJ’s image?

Dept. of Disappointing Corrections

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It turns out that whole thing about space germs in meteorites?

Yeah, crap. P.Z. Myers explains:

[The Journal of Cosmology] isn’t a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth. It doesn’t exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: “Northern California”), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific “publications” on this web site.

Of the paper itself, Myers notes:

It’s a dump of miscellaneous facts about carbonaceous chondrites, not well-honed arguments edited to promote concision or cogency. The figures are annoying; when you skim through them, several will jump out at you as very provocative and looking an awful lot like real bacteria, but then without exception they all turn out to be photos of terrestrial organisms thrown in for reference. The extraterrestrial ‘bacteria’ all look like random mineral squiggles and bumps on a field full of random squiggles and bumps, and apparently, the authors thought some particular squiggle looked sort of like some photo of a bug.

Dept. of HOLY CRAP

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This has the potential to be a bit earth-shaking:

The buzz is building over a paper by Richard Hoover, an award-winning astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, concluding that filaments and other features found in the interior of three specimens of a rare class of meteorite appear to be fossils of a life form strongly resembling cyanobacteria. Chemical analysis, Hoover argues, shows no evidence that the fossils are of organisms that infiltrated the meteorites after they arrived on Earth.

Oh, Sharepoint, you fucking jackass

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So I’m standing up a new Sharepoint 2010 server, and I get this when I point it to one of our database servers:

Screen shot 2011-03-03 at 2.20.15 PM.png

There’s so much wrong with this it’s not even funny.

  • BigSQL is running the latest major version of SQL Server.
  • The dialog helpfully tells me what specific build I’m using, but does not tell me what version I need.
  • The dialog box does not include any meaningful information in and of itself, and instead redirects me to a URL.
  • The URL is neither selectable nor clickable.

Fuck whoever did this. I mean, seriously. This right here? This is why people hate you.

Compare and Contrast, or, satire is dead

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MeFi pointed this out, but the key posts to view are this Volokh Conspiracy post, wherein he notes that

I think there’s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, while within Congress’s powers, is an illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective. I think it’s O.K. to violate people’s rights (e.g. through taxation) if the result is that you protect people’s rights to some greater extent (e.g. through police, courts, the military). But it’s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone’s rights; if that’s so, then I’m not sure I can justify preventing it through taxation.

Our counterpoint is the Onion story with the following headline: Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For Earth

A bit:

“The voters sent us to Washington to stand up for individual liberty, not big government,” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said at a press conference. “Obama’s plan would take away citizens’ fundamental freedoms, forcing each of us into hastily built concrete bunkers and empowering the federal government to ration our access to food, water, and potassium iodide tablets while underground.”

“We believe that the decisions of how to deal with the massive asteroid are best left to the individual,” King added.

Don’t miss the sidebar summarizing either side’s arguments.

What I Learned Today

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Just because you could get both kittens in the carrier 18 months ago when you first took ’em to the goddamn vet doesn’t mean you can do it today with two full-grown cats, Dr Doolittle. It’s been 25 years since you had to deal with genuinely unhappy felines, and having had a vet for a dad doesn’t impart to you permanent amounts of Dog Whisperer-level animal husbandry skills, you doofus.

Now go bandage your hand, reschedule the appointment, and buy a second fucking carrier.

If you’re one of those doofuses who thinks the TSA makes us safer, read this

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In a test in Dallas, a TSA agent concealed a handgun in her underwear and repeatedly made it through the checkpoint without a problem. Despite repeating the test several times, the gun was never detected.

The persons responsible for screening at the time have been neither disciplined nor placed on alternate duty. But thank god we’ve got $500 million worth of body scanners, right?

The TSA is a monstrous waste of time, money, and resources. It’s a huge boondoggle for earmarks and spending, and produces no measurable benefits and significant measurable problems. And it’s not just the TSA; it’s huge chunks of the DHS, too — they’ve not stopped any plot yet. We have either passengers (think Reid) or conventional law enforcement (London) to thank.

Tablets: A Contrary View

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This mild rejection of the current tablet landscape is worth your time:

In general, it’s less optimal to have an output area that also doubles as an input area. This is why the mouse and keyboard will be with us for decades hence—because they let you keep your hands away from what you’re trying to focus on.

Your Monday morning treat

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Sigourney Weaver went on Graham Norton, and the discussion wandered to Alien and that horrific and iconic scene wherein John Hurt meets his grisly end. They speak briefly of the effects involved — it came out i 1979, so it’s all puppets and angles with no computer help — and Norton comments that they’ve set up a side stage for a re-enactment.

Madcap hilarity does, of course, ensue:

People need to shut this shit down NOW

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The ongoing efforts of Wisconsin GOP governor Walker’s administration to kill unions are just another part of the obnoxiously retrograde GOP agenda — attacking Planned Parenthood, attacking women, and attacking labor are all part and parcel of their worldview. It’s not about budget problems; hell, they created the budget problems.

It should come as no surprise, then, to realize that mining magnates like the Koch brothers are funding and backing the union-killing effort that has at its root the notion of ending collective bargaining for everyone.

Maybe nobody in your family is in a union, and maybe you’ve forgotten what labor relations were like before there were unions, but if you enjoy things like a 40-hour week, insurance, and safe working conditions, you have unions to thank. Support the Wisconsin union folks, and make sure your reps know that unionbusting won’t fly.