Evolve!
November 10th, 2009
The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon
November 1st, 2009
Well, that was ten minutes of my life I’ll never get back, but somehow I don’t mind!
SPOOOOOOON!
Drown them in flames!
October 31st, 2009
I never got around to posting a picture of one of my favorite scratch-built Ork vehicles, my Skorcha Skidoo. This little demon can routinely murder dozens of Imperial Guardsmen and Tyranids with its beautiful flamey goodness. I actually finished it about a year ago, but you know what they say: if it isn’t on the internet, it doesn’t exist! So allow me to bring it into the world once and for all:
On Engineering and Law
October 31st, 2009
Sebastian is absolutely right:
I think law is something that comes rather easily to engineers, since it’s basically just [a] boolean logic system, but written in plain English. If (A || B || C) && !D && !E is true, you’re violating the statute. There is a system to it, and legal structures are less complicated than even simple microprocessors. Law also has obscure exceptions to generally given rules, which is something you also come across a lot in computer engineering. Computer engineers deal with bugs, just as judges must deal with poorly drafted legislation that yields absurd, clearly unintended results.
To a thought process that’s heavily oriented towards systems and logical structure, law provides, in many ways, much more interesting puzzles and conundrums. Unlike with circuits, where there’s just a right way and a wrong way to do things, law provides much more opportunity for philosophical exploration.
It’s certainly been true for me. I also think that one of the reasons that logical engineery people get frustrated with politicians easily is that unlike engineers, they often seem to have no interest in fixing the “bugs” in laws, and flawed laws often remain on the books for years or decades despite widespread knowledge of their existence. It’s the job of a good engineer to fix the bugs in his code or his spec, but the job of a politician entails so much wheeling-and-dealing and the need to please diverse constituencies that a lot of the kinks will never get ironed out. Imagine if corporate engineers were also their own managers — just think of how shoddy most products would be! That’s basically how politics works.
Interestingly enough, this is why early 20th-century social theorist and economist Thorstein Veblen believed that the ideal society would be run by engineers, creating what would be known as the the Technocracy movement. Veblen was sort of a crackpot, and despised athletes, priests, soldiers, and others who he viewed as merely predatorily looting what the creative engineers had produced. His ideas never made it very far because, as you can imagine, priests, athletes, and soldiers remain some of the most popular kinds of people.
Mini-review: Boxee
October 30th, 2009
I’m really digging Boxee, a free, open-source media center program. Basically, it’s a piece of software that turns your computer into a TV by aggregating online videos and such from places like YouTube, the Onion Online (which is hilarious, by the way), ComedyCentral.com, and other places that have lots of awesome free content. It also plays your own local videos, no matter what format they happen to have been encoded in. All you have to do it hook up the computer to a TV, and you’ve got a pretty compelling living room entertainment center.
I have it on my media center/gaming PC and it’s pretty wonderful. It loads at boot, so I only have to look at Windows XP’s ugly mug for a second or two before it opens. I have access to my ripped DVDs and quite a few intertubes worth of content, and the user interface is quite nice too. Alas, it has a pretty silly logo:
Well, it is open-source! [rimshot] In all seriousness, there are some quirks and things you have to do for yourself, such as figure out a way to control it from your couch. That was actually one of the biggest issues I had with it for a while. I would lug over my big ol’ 104-key keyboard, which sort of breaks you out of the illusion that you’re not actually sitting in front of a Windows box. Luckily, there’s a free Boxee app that basically turns your iPhone into a remote control! Problem solved.
Beyond that, I really only have only good things to say. It’s obviously not for your grandparents as it requires creating on online account and manually installing and configuring it, but anyone who can use a web browser and Word can accomplish it all easily enough. And did I mention it’s free?
Soon: Toshiba to be sued over excessive TV-watching causing poor academic performance
October 30th, 2009
Next up on the gravy-train of ridiculous comes an actual thing that actually happened and was actually brought about by actual people: baseball bat manufacturer Louisville Slugger has just lost a lawsuit brought by the mother of a boy who was killed in a tragic baseball accident. Their crime? Manufacturing aluminum baseball bats, which the grieving family argued “are dangerous because they cause the ball to travel faster than those hit off wooden bats.”
No lie.
No joke.
To quote the post I found this in:
I guess the jury believes that had warning labels been placed on the bats, Patch would have read the label, refused to play and be alive today.
(the comments over there are pretty great, too.)
Clearly we need to do this universally. Imagine now many lives would be saved if everything were labeled or banned! Like maybe this:
Or this. It’s for the children. Obviously.
No, really
October 29th, 2009
This is probably the coolest thing you’ll see today!
Arianna Huffington has it right!
October 28th, 2009
I don’t know what her proposed solutions are going to be like, but she’s absolutely nailed the problem:
“I plan to make the point that what we have right now is not actually capitalism — it’s corporatism. It’s welfare for the rich. It’s the government picking winners and losers. It’s Wall Street having their taxpayer-funded cake and eating it too. It’s socialized losses and privatized gains.”
Hear, hear.
Blast from the past: Jesus Christ SuperCop!
October 27th, 2009
I was rummaging around on my computer and I came upon a poster-thingy I made for a college project I was working on inspired by Jesus Christ SuperCop. It’s primitive and silly, but I have fond memories! Here it is:
Range report: Mossberg 500 12 gauge shotgun
October 27th, 2009
I finally got around to firing my shotgun for the first time over the weekend. It’s pretty embarrassing, but for about four months I owned it, the thing had just been sitting in my closet. For all I knew it wouldn’t even fire! The story of why involves a legal interlude. Skip the next section if you don’t care about New York and California’s oppressive gun laws and just want to hear about what it’s like to shoot a shotgun.
That’s some real public safety for ya there
I bought this shotgun in New York sort of on a whim while I was sending my other guns across the country for my move to California. The reason is because these states, among a few others, require that you send your guns from gun store to gun store rather than just through the mail.
In any event, I had known for a while that I wanted a nice 12 gauge shotgun, and when I got to the store, there was an unbelievable combo deal for a beautiful Mossberg 500, so I bought it then and there. The side effect of this was that I only got to fondle it for about five minutes before I added it to the other stuff being sent across the country, and I didn’t see it until I arrived in California.
On maybe the second day I was here, I went to the gun store in California to pick up my guns. But they wouldn’t let me because state law required that I show ID, and my New York ID wasn’t valid for some reason. Balls. I couldn’t get a new one because I didn’t have a permanent address yet, so I waited a month, got a California ID (which cost me three times what it did in New York), waited two weeks for it to arrive (I got a valid temporary one instantly in New York), headed back to the gun store. I showed them my ID, and paid another $125 (WTF?), but California makes you wait, and so I left again and came back ten days later.1 I finally got the guns home about three months after I arrived, and the whole process made me about $300 poorer for no good reason.
I can’t think of a single aspect of public safety that was increased by making me go through such a rigamarole. But of course, public safety isn’t really the point. The aim is to make gun ownership difficult, costly, bureaucracy-laden, and filled with legal minefields in the hope that more and more people will lack the motivation to do it, so that eventually the shrinking and demoralized gun-owning population can just be crushed entirely with a blanket ban or something as close to that as possible (see: Chicago, New York City, San Francisco). Well, I’m not gonna let that be me, so screw you New York and screw you California.
Just about the one thing these laws accomplished was to force me to spend several hundred dollars at gun stores, rather than the maybe 15 or 20 it would have been if I could have just boxed them up and sent ‘em through the mail. Thanks a lot, New York and California, for subsidizing gun stores’ profits. Boy, I bet that was what these states’ cockamamie legislatures had in mind!
</rant>
After I got the gun home, I played around with it for a little while, loading and unloading some 12 gauge snap caps and practicing working the action to get the feel of how it operated. But I just didn’t have time to go to the range, and so there it sat in my closet for another month or so, loaded with five rounds of buckshot but without my even knowing if the darn thing would even go bang!
I rectified this last weekend. Unlike rifle or pistol shooting, you can’t really fire a shotgun with marksmanship in mind since it throws a cloud of pellets rather than a single bullet. Before this, only other shooting experience I’d really had was a .22 at pieces of paper, while shotgun games are all about hitting moving targets.
I paid for a round of trap, one of the more basic games. After receiving some instruction, I got into position, chambered a round, brought the stock to my cheek, pulled the trigger, and…
- I was not knocked on my butt
- I was not deafened
- A 50-foot area I was pointing the gun at did not break into fragments
Well, so much for what I was taught by online folklore, video games, and Hollywood! After being told that shotguns were the ultimate death cannons, that a 12 gauge will break your shoulder or knock you backwards a foot and blow out your eardrums and annihilate the target area all at the same time!, it was actually pretty moderate. I was even so focused on the target that I barely heard the bang, and the recoil was more of a hard push than a kick. Not at all what I was expecting.
The one thing that video games and Hollywood actually did correctly teach me about shotguns is that they sound totally badass when you rack the slide. That schikk-chikk sound is every bit as awesome and intimidating in real life as it is in the movies.
Of course, I didn’t hit the orange clay sailing through the air either, but I wasn’t really expecting to. But I did break the second one, and man oh man was it satisfying! A big shit-eating grin spread across my face as I thought Man, I hit that flying object 60 feet away! Out of the 25 shots I took, I hit 8 clays, which is generally a pretty miserable score, but not terrible for a beginner. And in the next round I hit 11 — progress!
All in all, it was a great deal of fun, and it makes me want to practice and improve so I’m not such an obvious n00b!
- Then I discovered that my car was locked in a parking lot, but that’s another story. Some higher power really didn’t want to see my reunited with my firearms! [↩]