I've decided to—instead of putting this blog in a window on one of my website's pages—make this blog the home page of my website. This may mean I update more often. May mean, we'll try it.

To show you how far behind I am in my reading, I just finished reading an excellent article in the November 2007 issue of Guns Magazine. It’s the gun rights column called “A Fair Question” by David Codrea. Here’s an excerpt:

“Would banning firearms reduce murder and suicide?”

What with all the calls to do just that, and all the laws building up to it, that sounds like a fair question.

It’s posed by Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser in the Spring 2007 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

Kates is an American criminologist, lawyer and constitutional scholar. Mauser is a Canadian criminologist and university professor. Both are published authors of numerous articles and books. Both are well recognized as top experts in their fields. You don’t earn their reputations in academic and legal circles by being demonstrably wrong, so people on both sides of the gun control debate would do well to consider their findings…

You can find the rest in the Guns Magazine online archives here: http://www.gunsmagazine.com/Rights11.html

The writer, David Codrea, has a blog at http://waronguns.blogspot.com/

I’ve decide I need to use key words for better searching of these articles. I realize not many read this blog, but I’ve often searched my own work and have had considerable trouble finding what I wanted. “Did I post that? Where did I read it? Etc.” so tentatively I’m going to use the labels that follow”

Political

Freedom

Guns

Gun rights

Science

Energy

Space

Global warming/ climate change

Cutting edge science

Science fiction

Wow I didn’t think I’d come up with so many! Let’s try them for now

Richard's main page

Labels: gun rights, guns, political

  ¶ 10:37 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Mutiny at the American Physical Society (APS)! Although the society (in this case physical refers to physics) has accepted the notion that man-made gases are affecting our climate, some of their member aren't buying it. The following article excerpted from the APS Physics site uses extensive analysis to show that the models used to prove global warming are flawed and in fact exaggerate the affect of CO2 as much as 500 to 1000%, there has been no warming since 1998 and in fact a cooling trend is indicated for the last six years

Here's an excerpt:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review, since that is not normal procedure for American Physical Society newsletters. The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007: "Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate."

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) concluded that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions probably caused more than half of the “global warming” of the past 50 years and would cause further rapid warming. However, global mean surface temperature has not risen since 1998 and may have fallen since late 2001. The present analysis suggests that the failure of the IPCC’s models to predict this and many other climatic phenomena arises from defects in its evaluation of the three factors whose product is climate sensitivity:

1. Radiative forcing ΔF;
2. The no-feedbacks climate sensitivity parameter κ; and
3. The feedback multiplier ƒ.

Some reasons why the IPCC’s estimates may be excessive and unsafe are explained. More importantly, the conclusion is that, perhaps, there is no “climate crisis”, and that currently-fashionable efforts by governments to reduce anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are pointless, may be ill-conceived, and could even be harmful.

See the entire article here: http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm
Warning! There's a lot of math, this is not light reading!

Richard's main page  ¶ 5:06 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Ann Coulter has nailed it with another great column. She says, I think correctly, that George Bush will go down in history as one of our greatest presidents. She says, "Produce one person who believed, on Sept. 12, 2001, that there would not be another attack for seven years, and I'll consider downgrading Bush from 'Great' to 'Really Good.'" She goes on to point out that Al Quaida is nearly defeated and that our fine troops have killed nearly 20,000 of them in Iraq. A fine accomplishment, I think.

You can read Ann's column here: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26979




Richard's main page  ¶ 7:21 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  http://www.fusor.net/ displays the efforts of amateur fusion researchers who are experimenting with low cost fusion. Anyone with a little ambition and some technical expertise can build and test a demonstration "fuser" that achieves some fantastic effects without achieving actual fusion (which would require shielding from the neutrons produced). Once a demo machine is perfected one can introduce a little deuterium and achieve actual fusion (while using the proper safety procedures to contain the neutrons of course).


Then there's "Rods from God" that shows Thor is not dead. Thor is a "smart rock" concept suggested by Dr. Jerry Pournelle waaaaay back in the sixties.
I think this is something we should be working very hard on. Dropping "rocks" on the bad guys heads from space has a certain appeal!








Richard's main page  ¶ 7:01 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

 

I'm glad that more and more music services are moving to DRM (Digital Rights Management) free music, but the change is slow in coming.

I subscribe to Rhapsody Music Service and have for years. Rhapsody is a streaming service. For a monthly fee I can stream nearly anything I like. If I want to own it I can download it for $0.89. This is 10 cents cheaper than Amazon and iTunes, two other services I use. Those two are strictly download services, though you can listen to a sample.

I’ve just started using Amazon, having just discovered it because of Pepsi points. All their music is DRM free and in MP3 format. Even at $0.99 I often download from them because Rhapsody does not have all its titles in DRM free MP3 format, though more and more of their music is. The music that isn’t is in RAX format.

In order to get it as an MP3 I have to burn it to CD and then rip it. This works but it takes a lot of work for Windows Media Player to recognize it and download the album art. Then it thinks it’s smarter than me so it tries to name the song using the album name. It’s a pain. If it’s in RAX I don’t buy there anymore.

iTunes also uses its own format. Usually all I get from them is their free songs of the week, since I mostly use the service with my iPod Shuffle (screen? I don’t need no stinking screen!). When I want to turn one of theirs to an MP3 it’s easy to burn it to CD and turn around and rip it to MP3 and iTunes remembers what it is—200% better than Windows Media Player!

So why download from Rhapsody at all? Coke points! I use my Coke points to download Rhapsody music that’s in MP3 and I use Pepsi points at Amazon for everything else. As you can see from above, a lot of my music is free. I love free, don’t you? I know, I know, I’m cheap.

Richard's main page  ¶ 2:06 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  Sign the "Drill here, drill now, pay less" petition to ask congress to allow drilling our own oil reserves. Click here: http://www.americansolutions.com/actioncenter/petitions/?Guid=54ec6e43-75a8-445b-aa7b-346a1e096659

Richard's main page  ¶ 8:19 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

  I've mentioned before in this blog that I'm searching for the perfect phone. I've related my problems with the Palm Treo and with my current phone. Out of all the phones out there, my son's LG EnV remains the best all around phone. Good music player, stereo BlueTooth support, decent camera, and a QWERTY keyboard. It also supports custom ringtones, wallpaper, etc.

Well LG has just announced the LG EnV2! It has all the above in a smaller package! "Great," I said. There's just one problem, they took out the flash!. What's the point in having a camera if there's no flash? Thus they took a great phone, made it better, then blew the whole thing by taking out the flash.

Why can't I have the phone I want? Music with stereo BlueTooth, ringtones, wallpaper, camera (with flash!), QWERTY keyboard, (and no, I seldom text, but a QWERTY keyboard is still nice when you're entering addresses and so forth) removable memory card, and a calendar that supports weekly, biweekly, and triweekly appointments? (And no, the EnV doesn't have that either, (Apparently that's a Palm thing) but it should!)

Richard's main page

Labels: cell phones

  ¶ 7:46 PM 0 Comments Links to this post