I've been terribly swamped with work the last week, and when I wasn't working, I was loudly defending gun rights. Subsequently, the lack of actual content on this site has been lacking. Here's some links to make it up to you, dear readers.This is a great technology.Telemedicine is the future, especially when the phone in your pocket is a fully-functional computer.Google's Ingress game would be a lot more fun with this.A great read about bionics and neural interfaces.I know I promised a statistical comparison of engineering unemployment rates and...
Monday, 24 December 2012
Wednesday, 19 December 2012
I started digging up statistics. For the following graph, I used data from the FBI and CDC's Vital Statistics Report. All numbers represent 2011. 2012 data is not yet fully available obviously.Figure 1. Number of Americans Killed in 2011 By Major CauseYou'll notice that cigarettes cause 44,300 deaths for every one person killed by an assault weapon. Will the President announce a "cigarette control task force"?And then this:Figure 2. Gun-related deaths...
Monday, 17 December 2012
For $10, these and many other deaths from guns could be completely prevented. It's called a "gun lock" and it completely neutralizes a gun. Many guns come with them for free.People are talking about guns with RFID, guns with biometrics, gun bans, gun regulations...and on and on but I haven't heard one person mention that if Adam Lanza's mom had put a gun lock on her AR...not one of those kids would be dea...
Since the finger-pointing is in full effect, here's why I think this issue is a teensy bit complicated.So back in 1996 then-nobody Barack Obama urged a statewide ban on assault weapons in Illinois. Then, in 2004 while debating Alan Keyes he argued President Bush erred to not renew the assault weapons ban. Then in 2008 while running for President he suggested that reinstating the assault weapons ban was extremely important.Then he got elected. And when actually could reinstate the assault weapons ban...he deferred. I don't care whether you are pro-ban...
Friday, 14 December 2012
I read with some mirth this article by Dan Lyons reporting on the retraction of Series A financing in Silicon Valley to software and app startups:PandoDaily is reporting on the “Series A crunch” in which companies that have raised seed funding now are discovering (presumably to their utter amazement) that actual venture capitalists aren’t as stupid as the angels who gave them their first bag of cash, and, given the opportunity to invest in their pointless companies, the VCs have decided to politely decline. Thus, now we are facing a “nuclear winter"...
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
So a "small British company" claims to have built a jet engine that is going to make jet engines look like propellor engines [relevant]. All they need is $400 million to build a bigger prototype.Once in a while, we hear about these sorts of scenarios. A good example was Bussard's Polywell Fusion Reactor, which promises unlimited, clean, terrorist-proof, electrical power generation at low cost. They had a small prototype and just needed one Godzillion dollars to build a bigger prototype and move towards commercialization.Yours truly is a big fan...
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
So it's a tragedy if African Lions are being massively depopulated, and "there has to be a political commitment to protect wildlife," but trust me, no one in Kansas is super eager to return roving packs of wolves and a sizable population of cougars to our area. Lions are an apex predator. So are humans. One per area is a pretty safe bet."But there should be lions in Africa - for tourism," one might counter-argue. Fine. Then (for tourism) there should be wild packs of wolves on the Plains, widespread black bears east of the Mississippi, Grizzlies...
Monday, 3 December 2012
Jason Whitlock suggests that guns are to blame for Jevon Belcher's murder/suicide Saturday morning: Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. In the coming days, Belcher’s actions will be analyzed through the lens of concussions and head injuries. Who knows? Maybe brain damage triggered his violent overreaction to a fight with his girlfriend. What...
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