I applaud science’s efforts to quantify attraction.  Beyond the obvious relationship of quantity of dough being proportional to the raw attractiveness of the dough-holder.  I get that.  But spending alot of time and effort to determine the patently obvious, for its own sake, makes me want to eat my own shoe in sheer frustration.

After a stiff drink and a percodan, and with a little reflection, I realized a greater shortcoming here.  What the study fails to take into account is that different cultures value different gifts, particularly in the awkward cultural judo that courtship can be.  The study really only applies to places where wining and dining is an accepted, or indeed feasible, practice.  Nor does the work draw a distinction between eateries.  At Outback, say, dinner for 2 can be kept under $40; a decent steak dinner in, say, Japan can run around $170,000. 

But why have to deal with exchange rates and kooky foreign currency and decent meats at all if you don’t have to?  Leave it to the Japanese to build their own dates.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Why can’t we all just get along?

Hilary Clinton recently addressed the DLC in Columbus, Ohio (the heart of the heart of it all) calling for party unity in the face of backward time-tunneling Republican trucksuckers.  Predictably, a call for party unity resulted in fratricidal infighting.  Much like the Scots, the Democratic party is locked in mortal combat with its eternal enemy, the Democratic party.

The infamous McQ, over at Q and O, has a thoughful and, uh, infamous post up on that very topic.  After ably and efficiently reviewing the background (go read) he gets to this point:

She walked into an ideological buzzsaw and now is trying to stitch the effort back together. Look, if the Dems are going to have any chance in ‘08, they are going to have to settle their internal dissonance. They are going to have to come up with a unified strategy and a candidate who is capable of carrying it through. The sort of in-fighting being witnessed now is how it will be done. But based on the reaction to Clinton’s speech, she may not be as strong a candidate for that position as many on the left would like to believe.

To be sure, infighting will not help the party gain electoral victory.  We saw infighting on the left last time around, and there is no reason to suppose that it will be better next time.  But look at what the result of that infighting was: the party nominated a Massachusetts liberal.  Sure, they didn’t pick Dean, but Dean removed himself from the running with some ill-considered vocal performances.  It’s as if the Democrats, seeing Bush, thought the Republicans were triple-dog-daring them to prove that, yes, they could pick a worse candidate.  The only sensible Democratic candidate was Lieberman.  But he was as welcome as a red-headed stepchild.  The influence of the DLC and other centrist organizations within the party had never been lower.

Overall, I think McQ’s analysis is spot on.  But he concludes:

I’ll watch with interest how this all lays itself out, but suffice it to say, the more radical left is making its play for the soul of the Democrat party.

And that’s where I’d have to disagree.

The left won the soul of the democratic party back in 1972.  The DLC and similar efforts have been fighting a rear guard action ever since.  They managed to sneak Clinton in, but the left of the left has generally prevailed at all national levels - and the result has been the alienation of the leftish center - the Reagan democrats, the DLC, Blue Dog Democrats or whatever you want to call them. 

Both democratic presidents since that date have been anomalies.  Carter nearly didn’t get elected despite the fact that the incumbent administration was heavily tarred with the watergate scandal.  Clinton would never have won without Perot splitting the center/right vote.  In neither of his victories did he get a majority of the vote.

An incumbent vice president couldn’t quite manage to win, despite the fact that Bush Jr. is arguably one of the weakest candidates the Republicans ever nominated.  And they couldn’t defeat him the second time, despite the quagmire in Iraq and the Bush’s flat-out abysmal job approval ratings.

And, they’ve progressively (sorry) lost ground in both houses of congress, even in off year elections where the opposition usually gains seats.  Even if Hilary wins the nomination singing DLC chops, she won’t have a chance unless the world blows up or the Republicans nominate another W.  She won’t have a sufficiently large base, and she’ll have to do too much to appease the left that is the strongest part of her party.

More gods than you can shake a stick at, plus the stick

Over 2100 gods online!  Your online source for divininty of all shapes, sizes, colors, and ethnicities.  It’s Godchecker.

Merely a taste of the divine tastiness you wil find at godchecker:

FAFNIR: He was the son of HREIDMAR the wizard, together with two brothers, OTR and REGIN. Shape changers all. When OTR was in otter form, LOKI, who fancied a nice bit of otter to go with his fish, killed him by mistake.

This was a big mistake since he turned up at HREIDMAR’s house in the company of HONIR and ODIN bearing a strangely familiar otter skin. The wizard family thought LOKI was a rotter. Now LOKI, HONIR and ODIN were in deep trouble.

LOKI, using all his considerable cunning, suggested a hefty ransom fee to repay his debt. This was agreed and the other two Gods were taken hostage until his return. Knowing where ANDVARI the Dwarf King kept his treasure, LOKI forced the dwarf to hand it all over, even down to a special gold ring he’d just forged. ANDVARI just had time to curse the ring so it would bring doom to whoever owned it.

LOKI never got to own it - in fear of his life and those of his compatriots he took it straight to the wizards, who released the Gods after a quick gloat.

FAFNIR gloated the most and was so inflamed with greed he turned himself into a dragon and stole the hoard, hiding it in a mountain lair where he could carry on gloating. He killed his father and exiled his brother REGIN, who by chance ran into the hero SIGURD.

The curse was now working overtime. SIGURD ambushed and killed FAFNIR, taking the treasure and pocketing the ring to use for a planned engagement to BRYNHILD. Untimely ends followed shortly.

Mythology with an edge, the sacred cut with sarcasm.  It’s crazy, it’s wacky, it’s Godchecker.

Where Art and Commerce Meet, There is Greatness

Country music has a problem. As I opined a while ago writing about a career retrospective of songwriter and singer Rodney Crowell, Nashville tends to eat its dead. At the first sign of weakness, great artists with storied careers eventually find themselves unable to get radio play, press attention, or a cup of coffee on the strength of their good name. Within Nashville society, this means that elders are given lip service but shunned in public. In the larger picture, this means that country oldies radio is at best a niche genre, relegated to a late-night set or the far reaches of the AM dial. Instead, most country radio dedicates itself to whatever’s hot on the Country Top 40 chart, wasting good time on fatuous dreck by Toby Keith (he’s a Ford Truck man!) or the animatronic wonder called Shania Twain.

From time to time, country does return to its roots. After the great Countrypolitan revolution of the 1980s came a revival of classic sounds, boosting the careers of Randy Travis and Clint Black among others. Currently artists like Faith Hill and LeAnn Rimes (talented ladies both) have released albums reasserting their down-home credibility, correctly sensing that actual people in Kentucky, Wyoming and even Maine mostly drive pickups and wear blue jeans, not BMWs and Manolo Blahniks.

But this unfortunately does not mean an actual rediscovery of the past. There are literally dozens of incredible artists who once had massive careers who now languish in semi-obscurity. The living at least have a chance at redemption through a comeback record. The departed are not so lucky, and it falls to dedicated cadres of fans at record labels, radio stations, and in the record-buying public to keep their flame alive.

In a fortunate confluence of purpose and commerce, Sony has been compiling excellent best-ofs from their catalog under the “Legacy Essential” series for several years now. Already country greats like Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Earl Scruggs have gotten their due, and now Legacy have added the great, half-forgotten Marty Robbins to this list.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

UAV Successfully Fires Test Rockets

A couple days ago the RQ-8 Fire Scout fired two Mark 66 unguided rockets, becoming in the process the first autonomous, unmanned helicopter to undergo a successful live weapons fire. 

Northrop Grumman is developing the Fire Scout for both the Army and Navy.  “Today’s test is a big step in the development of future UAVs across the entire industry,” said Doug Fronius, Northrop Grumman’s Fire Scout program director.  NG is a big player in the unmanned autonomous vehicle field - uavs in service, production or development include the U.S. Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk and Army RQ-5 Hunter that are already in service; the BQM-34 and BQM-74 aerial targets; the multi-role Hunter II proposed for the Army’s next-generation, extended-range, multi-purpose UAV program; the X-47 Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Air Force and Navy; and advanced systems like the KillerBee program being developed for low-altitude, long-endurance missions.

This is the future.  Stealth can be defeated.  Spoofing and jamming systems can be defeated.  Any manned combat vehicle is vulnerable.  Given our aversion to avoidable casualties, it will make increasing sense for hazardous missions to be alotted to autonomous combat vehicles.  Instead of sending a billion dollar B-1, and risking the lives of its crewmen, send in a a flock of hundred thousand dollar drones armed with bombs and missiles.  With satellite links back to controllers sitting in front of a monitor hundreds of miles away, you have greater ability to call the shots and ensure the destruction of the target.  Loss of one or two drones doesn’t risk mission failure.  No possiblility of friendly casualties.  The fighter jocks and bomber pilots in all the services will fight this hard, but the logic of redunduncy, accuracy, safety, economy will eventually win no matter what they do.

When all you have is a thesis,

everything looks like an argument. Which is to say, studying something very very closely will sometimes result in surprising insights. Of course, other times you will come to completely insane conclusions that no sane person would find persuasive; say, the theory that gay people threaten my and your marriage. (Okay, that was a misrepresentation. People who say that have not studied the issue closely at all.)

What is this guy talking about, you ask? First he’s on about theses acting like hammes, then something about the gays, and now we’re waist-deep in a thicket of self-referential onanism that would redden the face of David Eggers. If I’da wanted this kind of crazy today I’d have called up the Lyndon LaRouche hotline!

Well, here’s the thing. NDR, also known as Nathaniel of Rhine River is writing his dissertation on, loosely speaking, issues of identity in the Rhine River region, which is neither specifically French nor German.

He finds some parallels between the American project in Iraq and France’s integration of Rhenish peoples into France. To wit: Rhinelanders accepted France for the stability and infrastructure they lent, but still resented them for the supercilious frogs they were, so to speak. And this might be a sign of a healthy people.

Also, one of his bunnies recieved an unintended bris thanks to his other bunny. Weird.

Bridges, horses and frogs; fire trucks and big black trucks

My son is of an age where he is expanding his vocabulary at exponential rates.  In his great rush to add new words to his repertoire, he is sometimes slightly less than scrupulous in assuring that his pronunciation of a new word is correct before jumping to the next bright, shiny new nym.  In most cases, mispronunciations or misstatements are merely cute.  Of course, most anything a two-year-old does short of a full on temper tantrum is cute.

There are exceptions.  For example, there is a set of common words that, translated through the mind and underdeveloped vocal apparatus of a small child that come out not just wrong, but wrong.  We first noticed this phenomenon when Sir John-the-unintentionally-profane began to utter his charming version of the phrase, “fire truck.” Imagine that the second through sixth letters are not there, and you’ll have a solid idea of what came out of my son’s mouth. 

At first, this was amusing.  It was amusing because I have a dirty mind and we were not in the presence of strangers.  As soon as he shouted his adorable riff on “fire truck” in public, I was mortified.  After a kindly grandmotheresque woman at the grocery store informed me that this is, in fact, a common occurrence, I felt better.  I went straight back to amused, though I attempted to act unamused so as not to encourage potty-mouth.

John got a little better at saying fire truck, though when under stress or excitement he would revert to his original model.  Things seemed to be getting better.  Then, on the way home from Ohio, he sort of learned to word, “Bridge.” There are quite a lot of overpasses on the interstates.  For hours, my wife and I were treated to the spectacle of a cute, high pitched voice saying, “Under bitch?” about once every twenty minutes.

Over the next few days, I waited, hoping for that magical moment when I would see a fire truck on a bridge.  My wife was not amused when I pointed it out to my son and then nearly drove off the road when he said, “Fuck!  Bitch!” A little later, the word frog also transmogrified into ‘fuck,’ increasing the likelihood that we would be embarrassed in public.  Whenever John said something that sounded obscene in the presence of others, my wife would be at pains to quickly and loudly say, “I don’t see any frogs, John.”

Shortly thereafter, my wife made the colossal mistake of pointing out that the pickup in front of us was both large and black.  This was unfortunate because, a) John loves trucks and won’t stop talking about them and b) he pronounces the word truck more like “cock.” I was laughing, but in a sick and terrified way, as my son kept repeating that phrase.  Even more so when he added, philosophically, “I like it.”

A friend, who works at a day care center, told of us of a child there who was normally very quiet and reserved.  Unbeknownst to the staff, he harbored a deep and rather possessive love for horses.  He did care for other children playing with the horses, nor did he care to pronounce the first ‘s’ in that word.  So when some other miscreants started playing with his horses, we waded in, fists flying, crying, “My whores!  My Whores!” I didn’t think a two year old could be that advanced on the pimp career track.

Put that kid with mine, and you’ll have a regular def comedy jam, or the vocal track to a decent rap album or porn movie.

So remember, tell all the horses and bridges to shut the frog up, you trucksuckers.

Cartman’s Mom pleads guilty to being a slut

Check it out.  If there was a mom like that at my school, she kept it too well hidden.  A couple moms were really hot, but they certainly weren’t providing me or anyone else with booze, drugs and sex. 

Army Unveils Jihadi Harvester

Nah, not really.  It’s actually a new mine-clearing vehicle.  But it would be cool if it were a jihadi harvester.

Schizophrenic mercenary helicopter pilot Murdoc has the latest.

Monday, July 25, 2005

You’d think a CPA would know better

Speaking of loan repayment calculators, certain acquaintances of mine are dealing with a client who wants an application that calculates loan payments.  This client is a CPA in charge of finances for a large entity.  This individual believes that a loan repayment schedule should look like this:

For a loan of 1000, for ten years, at 5% APR, with yearly payments.

Plugging the loan amount, number of payments and interest into a standard loan calculator, you get something like this:

Given that the stated purpose of using the first formula was to save the loan recipient money, the client’s stubborn refusal to admit that maybe their conception of simple interest loan repayment plans is a bit out of touch with standard accounting practice, general wisdom and in fact reality. 

A few things to consider:  while the second scheme is not exactly intuitive, the total interest paid makes sense when you consider that over the term of the loan, you will owe half of the loan amount, on average.  The decreasing interest/increasing principal as percentages of the payment amount make sense when you realise that at any given moment, you’re paying 5% interest on the remaining balance.  It has to work that way if you want a constant payment over the term of the loan. 

I am not an accountant.  I have software do my taxes, and I haven’t ever thought about this subject in any depth whatsoever until today.  But what is obvious to me is not to the client, who in the interest of protecting his loan recipients is proposing terms that a loan shark would love - especially the 50% interest on the last payment.