When Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters
At an entirely different time in the past, well, a few times, I was almost eaten by a lion or killed by drunk renegade soldiers and so on and so forth and, as I’ve noted elsewhere, discovered that there is not a strong correlation between being truly threatened with death and being scared of what was going on.
Apropos these things:
Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that’s only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).
Donald Trump, Orly Tate, others are “side show carnival barkers” and questions by birthers, others “silliness” according to Obama, in a press conference moments ago.
Following a down-and-dirty live statement to the press asking everyone to just shut. up. and get down to business on the important issues facing the nation, the press vowed to provide intensive, irrelevant and annoying coverage of the birth certificate issue all day and for the rest of the week. Presumably the story will be interleaved with coverage of some wedding going on in England.
Here’s a statement from the White House:
Continue reading Obama calls for rational, fact based debate on important issues
Kids who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in conventional measures of success in life: academic achievement, economic success, even greater health, and longevity. Is that because they are more intelligent? Not necessarily. New research concludes that IQ scores are partly a measure of how motivated a child is to do well on the test. And harnessing that motivation might be as important to later success as so-called native intelligence.
I’ve hardly ever played video games, and Julia, growing up, never did either. Then a couple of years ago we got a Wii and now we play it regularly but responsibly. Amanda joins us now and then.
After the filing of our 1040s, we realized we could afford to buy a new TV to replace our old energy-hogging tube model, so we did. Now we will be able to see what we are doing when using the Wii. As an indicator of how much we are NOT addicted to game play, I’ll note that other than testing that the connection works, We’ve not used it since installing the TV on Friday.
The Wii is great, but it is oddly quirky in its design. A key feature of the Wii is the Wii remote, an oblong object with numerous buttons and a wrist strap. There is a gel-substance cover that protects the remote, but that the user must fit over it, that must be removed to change batteries, or to add an “extra sensitivity” device.
The remote senses its own movement, but not sensitively enough for some games, so those games require the addition of an extra sensitivity device which mus be added to the oblong remote.
The extra sensitivity device must be removed to get the remote into the charger one normally would keep it in while not in use. The gel cover must be partly removed and the safety strap must be pulled awkwardly to one side, in order to get the remote into its charging cradle. Its like having sex while wearing an elaborate Halloween costume. Or maybe its like this. In any event, the safety strap, extra sensitivity, gel cover and ability to charge all seem to have been afterthoughts of each other.
But when the thing is all put together right, its fun and cool. People who use other gaming systems may disagree, but what do they know?1
Just the other day Julia expressed this concern: “I wonder when the next version of the Wii is going to come out?” … And, Nintendo responded with this:
To whom it may concern:
Re: Wii’s successor system
Nintendo Co., Ltd. has decided to launch in 2012 a system to succeed Wii, which the company has sold 86.01 million units on a consolidated shipment basis between its launch in 2006 and the end of March 2011.
We will show a playable model of the new system and announce more specifications at the E3 Expo, which will be held June 7-9, 2011, in Los Angeles.
Sales of this new system have not been included in the financial forecasts announced today for the fiscal term ending March 2012.
Tiere is a claim that it will spit cappuccino into your face. How cool is that?
By the way, if you need a new TV here’s how to get one.
1Probably a lot more than I do, because I’ve never used them and don’t even know what they are called or what they do.
The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine). It is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and it is the only one classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
But it’s OK, because all that really happened is a few dozen people died in the explosion and fire, several thousand children had their thyroids cut out, and farmers across much of eastern Europe got an extended vacation.
Pioneering surgeon Susan Lim performed the first liver transplant in Asia. But a moral concern with transplants (where do donor livers come from …) led her to look further, and to ask: Could we be transplanting cells, not whole organs? At the INK Conference, she talks through her new research, discovering healing cells in some surprising places.
From 2000 through 2007, inclusively, approximately 780 thousand people in the United States took a bullet. Most of them were wounded by another person in an act of violence. A fairly large number were wounded by accident, killed by a bad guy, or killed themselves. A small number died in a shooting accident, tried to kill themselves but messed up, or were wounded or shot by a cop. Here’s the data culled form the CDC databases on injuries and deaths in the US, in crude rate per 100,000:
Continue reading Accidental v. Intentional, Fatal v. Non-Fatal, Gunshots, 2000-2007 in the USA
Because you wanted to know:
First observation: Far more men are killed in this manner than women. Boys with their toys. Presumably, women are being killed by something else. Second observation: There may be a trend towards decreasing rates of death by accident involving firearms. This could be a simple increase in the effectiveness of medial intervention, or perhaps it is something else.
Since this came up I thought you might like to see the data.
NOTES: It would be interesting to look at the ratio of fatal to non fatal over long time spans (before/during/after transition to high quality trauma treatment in the US); I would like to see good data breaking down suicide by age that tracks along with the CDC surveys; Most importantly would be information of similar quality and sources indicating attempted suicide and successful suicide with means other than guns. From the numbers we do have, we can say that there is a bias towards minors in the suicide category, and non-gun attempts are successful less than half the time but gun-attempts are successful a large percentage of the time (which you can see on this table); What is key the current discussion is the nearly 24,000 people shot in this sample year by a gun by accident; The phrase “shot by cop” is probably an oversimplification.
Yet the 11-year old girl lies in a coma, the bullet removed from her brain on Friday, with a poor prognosis.
Continue reading “We’ve grown up around firearms. We know the safety and we practice it.”
Placed in orbit by the Shuttle Discovery, launched with this payload in 1990. Stop by and say hey.
By leading the Americans in his audience at TEDxPSU step by step through the thought process, sociologist Sam Richards sets an extraordinary challenge: can they understand — not approve of, but understand — the motivations of an Iraqi insurgent? And by extension, can anyone truly understand and empathize with another?
I’m not sure what I think of Gnome 3’s Shell Interface. Imma try it out but I think they may have fallen into the trap of making the desktop the point rather than, well, emacs and a web browser the point (the only two pieces of software I use every day and both days). Either way, Fedora 15 looks interesting, and it does use Gnome 3 Shell.
Linux in Exile has a review. The LIE author is really into Fedora, and seems to know a lot about it, so this is rather useful. Here.
In this interview with Karen Stollznow, Josh presents the “Three Pillars of Creationism”, the beliefs and claims of creationists. He describes their rhetoric and propaganda, and the setbacks they cause for science, from legal cases to creationist theme parks.