Wall-E

Daughter & I watched Wall-E yesterday evening. An entertaining little show. Silly anthropomorphic robots. I like Disney movies. I like all the stereotypes.

Web Site of the Day

Atomic Rocketships of the Space Patrol

Vandals

Report from Kinnaman Elementary School in Aloha, Oregon:

Last night at about 4:20 Amanda came to the office to say her car had been keyed. It had been parked in the north parking lot. We called Washington county and asked if a report should be filed, and the officer said "absolutely, there have been a lot of cars being vandalized in the Aloha area recently." Later in the evening, I noticed that my car had been keyed as well! It was parked on the street yesterday; someone had cut a deep (to the metal), gash in the passenger door. This means the perpetrator was on the sidewalk. I filed a report as well. The officer told me there have been over 60 (!!) crimes like this reported in the area - either keying or tires being slashed. He said the area is from about 175th to 198th and from Shaw street to Madeline. He felt it was "just a matter of time" before this person (people?) were caught, simply because the crimes have been "prolific".

I suspect keys are not the weapon of choice for these kind of things. Most keys have nicely rounded edges, and the paint on modern cars is pretty dang tough. Our criminals are probably using something like a screwdriver or a chisel, or a knife, something which would also be suitable for slashing tires.

A professional body shop would probably have to sand and repaint the entire panel to get rid of a deep scratch like this, which means big bucks. You could paint the scratch with touch up paint, but that would be some tedious work, and it would still be detectable.

What do you do with a case like this, when you catch him (or her)? What a nuisance.

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Day 36

Oil is still pouring out of the hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Lots of people are working to try and stop the leak, and lots more are trying to clean up the mess. It may be weeks or even months before they manage to stop the leak. It might be never. This could end up being a worse environmental disaster than Chernobyl. Then again, they might plug the leak this afternoon, or it might stop spewing oil all by itself. Who knows? The future is cloudy, I cannot see.

Meanwhile, if we can't stop the leak, we might be able to do something to mitigate the damage being done by the oil. Here's my big idea.

Offer a bounty for each barrel of oil recovered. With the amount of oil being spilled, it should be easy to scoop up some fraction of it. Each barrel recovered is that much less environmental damage and that much less clean up required. Also, it might be possible to separate out the water from the recovered oil and use the resulting oil as oil.

We would need some place to receive the collected oil. Possibly a tanker on site along with a floating dock, pumps and lines to transfer the collected oil from the collector to the tanker. And then we would need a method to separate the oil from the water.

The only question is how much of a bounty would it take to make a difference? I think a thousand dollars a barrel would probably pull every boat within a hundred miles of the Gulf Coast into this operation. A dollar a barrel? Well, maybe a couple of guys in a Greenpeace skiff. Somewhere in between there I think we could get measurable results for less than the national defense budget.

Ein Parachute Problem Numer Zwei!

Tam posted the video clip of South Park's Blame Canada song, which led to some wandering around on the web, which eventually led to this entertaining story about parachutes, Canada and South Park: Ein Parachute Problem Numer Zwei!

I also figured out why I don't watch South Park: the squeaky high pitched voices are too hard to decipher. I like my entertainment to be easily consumed. I don't want to have to work for it.

Update June 2026 corrected the link to Tam's post. The link to the story has died, Cloudflare returns a 525 error. Used to be you could press on regardless, but it looks like Cloudflare has put a stop to that. The story link: 

http://rhinoden.rangerup.com/ein-parachute-problem-numer-zwei/

Preference Cascades

This is an excerpt from a longer article written in 2005 by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, aka Instapundit. Mostly I don't care too much for what he says, he says too much about too much stuff, but then I suppose that's what a modern day pundit does. But this is pretty good.

Three years ago, I looked at the phenomenon of "preference cascades" -- in which people who have been obliged to conceal their true beliefs by social pressure or sheer force suddenly discover that a lot of other people feel the same way -- and wrote:

"This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. (Click here for a more complex analysis of this and related issues). Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don't realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it - but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

"This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers - or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they're also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

"One interesting question is whether a lot of the hardline Arab states are like this. Places like Iraq, Syria, or Saudi Arabia spend a lot of time telling their citizens that everyone feels a particular way, and punishing those who dare to differ, which has the effect of encouraging people to falsify their preferences. But who knows? Given the right trigger, those brittle authoritarian regimes might collapse overnight, with most of the population swearing - with all apparent sincerity - that it had never supported them, or their anti-Western policies, at all.

"Perhaps we should think about how to make it so."

Coal, the other Oil

St. Louis based Peabody Energy (NYSE: BTU) is the world's largest private-sector coal company, with 2008 sales of 255 million tons and $6.6 billion in revenues. Its coal products fuel 10 percent of all U.S. electricity generation and 2 percent of worldwide electricity. - From a Peabody fact sheet.

That works out to about $26 a ton. My friend Jack just got back from a week in the American Southwest. While plotting the places he visited on Google Maps, I stumbled across a tear drop shaped road. What's up with that, I wonder? Then I realize it's not a road, it's a railroad, and it looks a whole lot like the rail lines serving the coal mines in Wyoming. Except there is no sign of anything else at this location, just the railroad turn around. Following the rail line, I find another turn around and there is something going on at this one, but on Google Maps, there are no labels to tell you just what it is.

On Wikimapia however, someone has labeled it as the Lee Ranch Coal Mine, and Googling that gets all the information in the world. I suspect the unused turnaround is for a coal mine that is going to be started sometime after the picture was taken, which means it could be in operation now.

Update April 2015. Corrected typo.