The Right 2.0

Interview with the operator of the TheNextRight website, which is actively seeking to reboot the political right in the US.

Love this photo

And, my city Charlotte made the 10 least walkable list.

MISO – The Big Four

Not the Japanese soybean brown stuff, but a reference here and here and here to Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle – the Big Four in enterprise computing. Apparently the term was coined by Bruce Richardson of AMR Research in 2006. Hasn’t caught on really big,  but since I like miso soup and it’s good for you, maybe the other MISO is good for you too:

Because not only does it taste great, it’s virtuous. Some claim miso neutralizes the effects of smoking and radiation, discourages the growth of cancer, and breaks down cholesterol. Others say it preserves beautiful skin and counteracts the effects of aging. If even a couple of these are true, we should certainly eat more of it.

Makes you appreciate where you live

What can one say about this, incredible

Twenty-five people with albinism have been murdered in Tanzania since March, a BBC investigation has found.

At least 19 albinos have been killed in Tanzania in the past year, victims of a growing trade in albino body parts.

Crackdown on witchdoctors after albinos killed to harvest body parts

 

And apparently you just can’t blame it all on a corrupt government like in Kenya or ZImbabwe. This appears to be based on folk beliefs and a few greedy people.

Learning to talk American

BBC Magazine has an article and a video on speech coaches who attempt to teach Brits an American accent, and vice versa. Obvious customers would be actors from one side of the pond or the other trying to sound credible for their roles.

Which American accent to learn? Californian (to other Americans they don’t have an accent), Texan, MIdwestern, Bostonian, Philly, Ney Joisy, or one of a variety of Southern ones? It would be funny for a foreigner to learn a Southern accent when there are classes in the US that teach Southerners to lose their accents. Many in the US believe that rural Southerners are stupid, so you have to lose at least some of the rougher edges to get by in the big city. Most accent modification courses however are directed toward Asians and Hispanics.

If you are Brit coming to America to flee high taxes among other things, do not reduce your accent, unless of course it’s Cockney. Americans are wild about British accents, thinking they are a sign of intelligence and breeding. Many Brits appreciate American accents too, though not as a sign of intelligence.

The US and the UK are dire threats to each other and the rest of the world

According the British government, the United States can no longer be trusted on its claims of torture and other abuses of human rights. According to the UK Guardian:

Britain can no longer believe what Americans tell us about torture, an MPs’ report to be published today claims. They also call for an immediate investigation into allegations that the UK government has itself ‘outsourced’ the torture of its own nationals to Pakistan.

In a damning criticism of US integrity, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said ministers should no longer take at face value statements from senior politicians, including George Bush, that America does not resort to torture in the light of the CIA admitting it used ‘waterboarding’. The interrogation technique was unreservedly condemned by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who said it amounted to torture.

Thus according to the Brits, the US has thus put the UK in ‘compromising positions’ regarding its behavior, not to mention I guess that US is going around torturing people.

In return, the UK is gravely threatening the free speech rights of Americans and others because of its archaic libel laws:

Perhaps you don’t live in England or Wales, so you think this has nothing to do with you. You’re wrong. English libel law now applies to everyone on earth. Make any accusation, anywhere in the world, and if the subject can demonstrate that a single person in England or Wales has read it, you could be sued here for every penny, cent, rouble, rupee or renmimbi you possess. The internet and the global nature of publishing ensure that these mediaevel laws have become the most powerful extra-territorial legislation ever drafted.

Yesterday two men with whom I seldom agree, the US senators Arlen Specter and Joe Lieberman, launched a new bill, called the Free Speech Protection Act, to defend US citizens against English libel law. Our laws, they argue, threaten the “free-flowing marketplace of ideas” which “enables the ideals of democracy to defeat the totalitarian vision of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.”(3) English libel law is an international menace, a national disgrace, a pre-democratic anachronism. It defends crooks, terrorists and tyrants from investigation. It threatens the free speech of people all over the world and causes untold damage to the reputation of this country. And neither the British government nor the British parliament gives a damn.

With friends like this, are we all enemies?

Funny if not so tragic

I always have some caution when passing trucks. Some of the tales in this wire story would be mildly amusing, if they haven’t been so tragic for innocent people.

Now, who should be responsible, say, if a diabetic truck driver blacks out while hauling ass on a freeway and takes out several other people when he wrecks out his truck. His employer (if he has one, could be an independent, so he would be his own employer) would have obvious responsibility. How about the driver? If the driver drives while knowing he has a condition that could present a danger to himself and others, should he be responsible? According to the courts, probably not.

Lack of judgment regardless of illness kills people too. There was a case in the local area where a trucker pulled over on the side of a freeway offramp, and failed to set the parking brake. The truck rolled backward onto the freeway and killed some people when they ran into it. There’s some responsibility there according to the courts. So what about the case of chronic diseases or afflictions. The truckers need to make a living somehow and will hang onto their job while they can.  The trucking companies, going by the want ads, are constantly hiring truckers. If there is such a shortage of drivers, they’re going to hire who they can get.

C# Oddity article (for Java people) would be a good idea

A lot Java programmers believe C# is just a bastard version of Java. On first appearances, especially looking at C# 1.0, it could look that way. Regardless, the language has evolved through C# 3.5, and it has a number of language features that would be odd to a heads down Java programmer., but may actually be useful. Maybe an article highlighting these would be a good idea (maybe there is a good one, I haven’t searched for it yet).

One article that explains the ?? operator in C# (what the ?? to a Java programmer):

Since C# 2.0, there is new operator called null coalescing operator (??) is available to provide inherent null-checking capabilities. It returns the left-hand operand if it is not null, or else it returns the right operand. For example, the equivelent statement using null coalescing operator (??) for the previous code is:

string employeeName = “Dave Gate”;

Console.WriteLine(employeeName ?? “Employee name not specified”);

The result of the expression is based on whether the first operand is null. If the first operand is not null, it is the result of the expression, otherwise, the result falls to the second operand. In other words, return thefirst value if not null, otherwise the second.

Granted in Java you could code something like this:

String it = “hello”;
String x = it == null ? “not hello” : it;

But the ?? gives you cleaner syntax. It’s up to a programmer if in this case this is valuable or not.

Google QR Codes

I’m a little late to this, as this posted on a Google blog last week. I’ve posted info on QR codes before (QR codes are ubiquitous in Japan).

A commenter on the blog said that the features wasn’t working, so I am trying it now.., and I still get the 400 error. When it’s up and running, it should be a cool feature (at least in Japan)

What’s the matter with the Heartland, or why teaching science can suck

Teaching science is tough business. They pay, awful. The students, worse.

LIBERTY, Mo. – Monday morning, Room 207: First day of a unit on the origins of life. Veteran biology teacher Al Frisby switches on the overhead projector and braces himself.As his students rummage for their notebooks, Frisby introduces his central theme: Every creature on earth has been shaped by random mutation and natural selection – in a word, by evolution.The challenges begin at once.

“Isn’t it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?” sophomore Chris Willett demands. “‘Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they couldn’t.”

Frisby tries to explain that evolution takes millions of years, but the student isn’t listening.

“I feel a tail growing!” he calls to his friends, drawing laughter.

Unruffled, Frisby puts up a transparency tracing the evolution of the whale, from its ancient origins as a hoofed land animal through two lumbering transitional species and finally into the sea. He is about to start on the fossil evidence when sophomore Jeff Paul interrupts: “How are you 100 percent sure that those bones belong to those animals? It could just be some deformed raccoon.”

From the back of the room, sophomore Melissa Brooks chimes in: “Those are real bones that someone actually found? You’re not just making this up?”

“No, I am not just making it up,” Frisby says.

At least half the students in this class of 14 don’t believe him, though, and they aren’t about to let him off.

Two decades of political and legal maneuvering on evolution has spilled over into public schools, and biology teachers are struggling to respond. Loyal to the accounts they have learned in church, students are taking it upon themselves to wedge creationism into the classroom, sometimes with snide comments, but also with sophisticated questions – and a fervent faith.

As sophomore Daniel Read put it: “I’m going to say as much about God as I can in school, even if the teachers can’t.”

Such challenges have become so disruptive that some teachers dread the annual unit on evolution – or skip it altogether.

Science doesn’t have a good repution in America, and I don’t know maybe in not many other places either. Conservatives believe that scientists are another liberal political faction who’s pushing corrupt ideas like climate change and evolution as part of a larger conspiracy to destroy America by getting us to hate God and establish a liberal Reich in Washington that would turn us all into secular humanists and next thing you know everyone will whoring an such, because it’s simply in our biology. Scientists don’t know what they are talking about anyway. And these science teachers are simply the front line soldiers of this consipracy.

Science teachers have to be rabidly involved in the conspiracy. After all, they accept crudy pay when they could use their degree to get another job that pays twice what they are making. They must be true believers, zealots, in what they are preaching in order to do that. Conservative and truly Christian people who try to make as much money as they can. They are the front line to brainwash kids into believing the conspiracy and hating God. Christianity is under siege and Bin Laden is laughing in between his kidney dialysis treatments.

Don’t believe me:? Just grab the latest books from the NYT Bestsellers list from author including LaHaye, Coulter, and O’Reilly.

OK, this is really what I believe. I’m of the opinion that it doesn’t really matter much if kids in Liberty, Missouri or say Sandersville, Georgia or Rawlins, Wyoming to name a few places, don’t learn about evolution. They’re destined to work at Wal-Mart or go into the military to fight the Global War On Terror (copyrighted). They aren’t going to save America. We will continue to import smart people from places like India and China to do the real scientific and engineering like work. Mostly they aren’t Christians, although one could make the effort to get them to convert and become true believers in the faith.

And when these folks don’t want to come here anymore, we’re fucked.