In addition to being cool, this technology will help save lives in a difficult situation:

U.S. Special Operations testing plasma knife in the field
By Andrew Nusca | Oct 16, 2009 |

The U.S. Special Operations Command is field-testing a plasma knife to help medics in the field save more soldiers’ lives.

The plasma knife is intended to be used as a surgical tool that’s safer but as effective as a traditional steel scalpel. The knife’s blade is made of heated, ionized gas that can both incise and cauterize wounded flesh, protecting against infection and stopping bleeding.

That’s an important advancement for troops that find themselves in remote areas without medical help in the area.

The article includes a diagram from a patent on the technology, which is also very interesting.

It’s nice to see technology oriented towards saving lives.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.
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There is an interesting article from the Science section of the New York Times that turns a now-cliche phrase on its head:

The Non-Tragedy of the Commons

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.
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From Refinery29:

October 13, 2009

Take That, Karl! Our Favorite Stylish, Smokin’, Curvaceous Ladies

By Molly Smith & Beverly Fong

Poor Karl Lagerfeld. Everyone knows by now that he’s not exactly into excess body fat (he used to have so much of it, after all), and when it comes to the perennial fray over pin-thin models, he just can’t help but enter foot-in-mouth territory. Telling Focus magazine that “No one wants to see curvy women. You’ve got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly,” Karl’s got a lot of flack coming his way. Of course we think butts, hips, ‘n’ thighs-curves, to those in the industry-are super-hot, both in clothes and out, and we’d love to present some of our favorite bodacious, curvaceous ladies. Maybe the Kaiser wouldn’t have women larger than a size 4 in his kingdom, but we’re just going to chalk that up to boob envy and move on.

Follow the link to see fashion-photography pictures of beautiful women who are not stick-girls.

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There is a person on Twitter who set up an account named “shitmydadsays” which couldn’t be more appropriately named. The tweet for today reads:

Son, people will always try and fuck you. Don’t waste your life planning for a fucking, just be alert when your pants are down.

There’s lots of other profane and profound wisdom in the rest of the feed. I suggest you read them all.

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Recently, I posted about being uneasy with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, specifically regarding the use of composite materials. Today NewScientist has a short article that gives a clue as to why there have been so many delays:

Why large carbon-fibre planes are still grounded

Clearly, composites are a work in progress. The trouble, says aviation engineer Philip Irving at Cranfield University in the UK, is that computer simulations often differ from reality. “Computer models are good at calculating composite displacement and stress levels, but they are not yet good at accurately predicting when they will fail,” he says.

The article ends with a note that extensive testing will ensure that planes made using composite materials will be safe to fly. Any change in design or materials in an application where failure can result in injury or death is risky, and no amount of testing can remove all risk. I’m sure there will eventually be a catastrophic failure and subsequent finger pointing that will ignore the fact that nothing is without risk.

Yes, I’m uneasy about the change to composite materials, in part due to some experiences I’ve had with them, but I won’t refuse to fly on a Dreamliner. We all make risk-benefit decisions every day, whether we recognize it or not.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.
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From The Onion:

Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care

WASHINGTON—After months of committee meetings and hundreds of hours of heated debate, the United States Congress remained deadlocked this week over the best possible way to deny Americans health care.

“Both parties understand that the current system is broken,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Monday. “But what we can’t seem to agree upon is how to best keep it broken, while still ensuring that no elected official takes any political risk whatsoever. It’s a very complicated issue.”
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House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said on Meet The Press that Republicans would never agree to a plan that doesn’t allow citizens the choice to be denied medical care in the private sector.

“Americans don’t need some government official telling them they don’t have the proper coverage to receive treatment,” Boehner said. “What they need is massive insurance companies to become even more rich and powerful by withholding from average citizens the care they so desperately require. We’re talking about people’s health and the obscene profits associated with that, after all.”

Sometimes the truth is so funny it hurts…

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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At The Huffington Post, there is a very unsettling entry titled “Trying to Fix the Broken 401(k) System“. It reveals that as has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt in the past year, those on Wall Street are more than ready to utilize any and every means to exploit their “customers” in the quest for profits.

Sigh…

With pension plans disappearing, the 401(k) was pretty much the only replacement that would aid people in retirement, yet they are being used to enrich those administering the plans, above and beyond what is fair compensation.

While I strive every day to not fall prey to complete cynicism, the task becomes more difficult with each revelation of how the world works.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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Many amazing things were accomplished in the days before computers became ubiquitous and the world wide web became a distraction as well as a tool.

Nazi Germany built the first jet fighter in the world, and was in the process of building a plane that bears a remarkable resemblance to the modern B2 bomber (although I think the stealth aspects of the “Hilter’s Stealth-Fighter” were an accidental byproduct and not the result of considered design). There was no computer modeling available to examine the airflow around the plane, which had no vertical control or stabilization surfaces, yet the plane flew.

The computer in the Apollo 11 capsule Columbia used to navigate to the moon for the first lunar landing, which occurred 50 years ago this July 16, wasn’t as powerful as the engine control unit in your car that moderates the electronic fuel injection and variable valve timing. Yet they made it to the moon, while we use sophisticated GPS systems to travel much shorter distances.

What prompted my thoughts on these amazing accomplishments is the discovery of a web site called The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies, which has photos of many of the drawing instruments undoubtedly used to make the precision plans needed to build the plane or the space capsule. The comments below many of the images are very entertaining, and emphasize how much things have changed.

A lifetime ago, in high school, I took a mechanical drawing course, and again when I was in college. I still have my old drawing instruments.

Now, those skills I developed and techniques I learned are almost useless. Wow, things have changed…

I need to dig up my old slide rules and take some pictures of them, maybe along with some of my film SLR cameras.

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Cross-posted between Random Fate and The Moderate Voice.

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There has been a series of posts at the collective weblog The Huffington Post called “the happiness project” which are very thoughtful and thought provoking. The most recent one is “5 Mistakes I Make In My Marriage” and makes a lot of sense, regardless of your gender. I know I’ve made the same mistakes as she does.

The Final Days

Jewish ‘modesty patrols’ sow fear in Israel

Manufacturing activity falls to 26-year low

Why Obama, Congress must curb CEO pay

Halliburton Tries To Patent Form Of Patent Trolling

Flickr set of behind the scenes photos of Obama watching election results

A relatively brief but compelling prediction of the predilections of the current generation of members of our armed forces by Ray Kimball can be found at The Huffington Post.

Some of the things I’ve been reading lately:

This one is disturbing – UK photographer chased down and detained for taking pix at fun fair

60 essayists analyze future problems and prospects in 50-year forecast

More disturbing reading

Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation’

Manacled, starved, beaten: a rendition victim’s story

Things have changed in the past 7 years, and not for the better…

Stolen from Neil Gaiman’s Journal, clearing out the tabs:

New book: Were Iraqi defectors coached to embellish?

Why your food is costing more money

Paul Krugman, Master Of The Space Lanes

Credit Scores 102: A Crisis, and Some Changes

Obama’s racial problems transcend Wright

Firefox 3 goes on a diet, eats less memory than IE and Opera

Dr. Steven Taylor at Poliblog has a commentary on the comic book logic being used by some who believe the students at Virginia Tech didn’t act enough like “men”.

There are some posts that show why sorting through all the dross in the vast majority of weblogs is worth the time:

   Velociworld – Requiem for the Senator

Although knowing the context underlying the tale told helps, it is not necessary. The fact that “the Senator” is the author’s father becomes apparent when reading, and the full, rich texture of the relationship that has been described in previous posts by the author is hinted at sufficiently to encourage further exploration of that history.

At The Politburo Diktat there is a back of the envelope estimate of troop levels that might be needed in Iraq to achieve what we have been told is the mission there, along with a brief comment on mission-creep.

What is just as interesting as the analysis is the origin of the piece; the author is a right-leaning blogger who started the Raging RINOs (Republicans and Independents Not Overdosed on the party kool-aid) although he has passed administration of that group on to another.

In an overheated partisan atmosphere such as we have now, considering the source of arguments is more important than ever. This case is not one where the author is trying to discredit the party in power for political purposes, and therefore should be regarded as more credible than what has become typical in blogworld.

From Scott Adams’ The Dilbert Blog:

Now, since I know from the comments that many of my readers are – inexplicably – also troglodytes, allow me to include a disclaimer here. I’m way more hawkish than you are. It just doesn’t look that way because my thinking is that if a bully punches you, you should run away. Later, when he’s asleep, put a bullet in his head and leave the gun in his little brother’s crib so it looks like a sibling squabble. In other words (again, for the troglodytes) being tough doesn’t require being stupid. It’s totally optional.

I’m not pro-Iranian or anti-American. I’d pave the rest of the world to save my American cat. The only thing I oppose is muddy thinking. If we need to send Americans into harm’s way, I want reasons and I want a full discussion of the options. Excuuuse the fuck out of me for asking for them.

Adams has captured in two short paragraphs the frustrations that many moderates have felt for the past six years, and his final line shows how far the pendulum has swung towards the extremists and their absolutist demands.

With intentional irony, I call for stamping out intolerance in our politics.

Scott Adams, whose The Dilbert Blog has had many surprises but managed to avoid a schtick that would become tiresome, has written a post on self-criticism in the context of being American citizens that captures exactly what I have tried to convey in my three years of blogging at Random Fate.

From the final paragraph of his post comes a succinct statement of the key idea:

I know this post sounds harsh, but I think self-criticism is always the first step toward a solution.

We as a nation have problems, folks, and we need to find solutions, not knee-jerk. Reacting by saying “My country, right or wrong,” is both idiotic and the shortest path to national oblivion.

Just ask the Romans…

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(There will be more from me on that reference later… but the “barbarians at the gates” are not always uncivilized, they may merely be differently-civilized, and we misunderstand that crucial distinction at our peril)

…go read Velociman’s musings at his weblog, Velociworld. Where else but in blogworld can one run across this description:

Now, the Senator loved himself a good piss when he was in the throes of Canadian whisky, so much so that he would ensconce himself upon the terlit (he sat to pee. How weird is that?) and have a good little nap, Marlboro butt a smoking in his limp fingers. This wasn’t his normal state of nature, of course, he being a rather formidable and erect, stiff-backed sort of man as a rule, but of a weekend he could let the hair down, if a crewcut can do that sort of thing.

The topic and denouement of this short, short tale may strike some as vulgar, but one must understand that vulgarity is and has always been an undercurrent of the Society (capitalization intentional) of the South. Read and learn, because Velociman’s writings about “the Senator” reveal the true nature of the South past, a history we need to learn from, for both its virtues and its faults, and Velociman captures the mood perfectly in a way that is all too rare for me in my attempts.

Technorati Tags: recommended reading, South, Southern gothic, the South

In response to some simple-minded assertions, here is a long list of links, most related, some not:

If You’re Not Doing Something Wrong, You Still Have Something To Worry About

Rumsfeld Reveals Split Over Interrogations

Just War

Talking Points Memo on Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) remarks at the Hayden confirmation hearings

Social Security for Illegal Aliens?

America’s Future…isn’t in America

Illegal Alien!

AT&T Whistle-Blower’s Evidence

Another battlefront

In the hunt for golden buckyballs

Almost Enough to Make me Buy a Mac

Interactive graphic of the flooding of New Orleans because of Katrina

New Presidential Memorandum Permits Intelligence Director To Authorize Telcos To Lie Without Violating Securities Law

The Eternal Value of Privacy from which comes:

Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (“Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies — whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

So, given what has happened in the last six years, what do you think, and what do you want for the future?