If you don’t understand why watch this video. If you still don’t get it watch it a couple of times.
Don't set off explosives in a room with a dropped ceiling……
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Author Archives: the editor
Poem of the Week: 5/5/07-5/12/07
This week’s poem of the week is East Coker. With this week’s essay and rant as well as other things I have been reading this week, it just seemed appropriate to continue working through Eliot’s Four Quartets.
Rant of the Week: 5/5/07-5/12/07
This week’s rant of the week comes from my favorite British police officer who calls himself Inspector Gadget. He captures the feelings that I have when my path crosses with those lost souls that I can’t really do anything to help.
Essay of the Week: 5/5/07-5/12/07
It is a shame that the works and life of Vaclav Havel are not better known. We are so use to what politicians are that we are unprepared for Havel. A politician who can actually think and has principles seems like something out of a fairy tale. We find it hard to believe even as we are face to face with the evidence.
This week’s essay of the week is short speech that Havel gave on what he thought were the deficiencies in the modern western political consensus. I don’t agree with him in every respect (you can see some of my thoughts on the same issue here and here) but I have to admire the evident thought he put into the problem.
If you want an idea of how well Havel’s philosophical thought translated into his politics you can read this piece from Reason Magazine.
Is interval training is the best way to lose weight?
The New York Times has an article that suggests that interval training is the best way to lose weight.
After interval training, the amount of fat burned in an hour of continuous moderate cycling increased by 36 percent, said Jason L. Talanian, the lead author of the study and an exercise scientist at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Cardiovascular fitness — the ability of the heart and lungs to supply oxygen to working muscles — improved by 13 percent.
It didn’t matter how fit the subjects were before. Borderline sedentary subjects and the college athletes had similar increases in fitness and fat burning. “Even when interval training was added on top of other exercise they were doing, they still saw a significant improvement,” Mr. Talanian said.
The study is hardly definitive, but it makes intuitive sense to me. After all, interval training is just mimicking the natural way we work.
How to teach a Cowboy that llama's spit
The fellow who wrote this has to learn things the hard way….
Did you know that if a cowboy falls just right a full grown bull dog can pull a full grown cowboy down a clinic hallway at approximately 20 mph? It’s true.
Did you know that that a full grown ostrich can kick a full grown cowboy approximately 20 yards through the air? It’s true.
Did you know that if your vet asks you to assist him in semen testing a bull that your life will be in danger if you say yes? It’s true.
Did you know that llamas spit? Well I sure wish you had said something about it before Frank got to teach me that!
Unfortunately, this post is only about how he learned that Llamas spit. I look forward to reading about how he learned the other lessons. I should warn you though, that this guy’s formatting is awful.
The Dutch have gone mad
First off, the Dutch are basically going to do away with prison sentences…
Most criminals in the Netherlands should be able to serve their sentence at home in the future. Justice Minister Hirsch Ballin is to introduce house arrest as a new main punishment. Criminals can then also visit friends or a mosque for two hours a day.
Now I am not a big fan of prison sentences. I think there are lot better ways of handling criminals. But letting people sit at home and paying them welfare checks does not strike me as being better then prison. This from the same article…
Those under house arrest will receive welfare payments. Only if they run a company from their living-room or do other work that yields sufficient money will they receive no financial support from the minister. They can also do a home course.
“House arrest is experienced as a real punishment,” according to a spokesman for Hirsch Ballin. “At the same time, social networks remain in place.”
But the Dutch have their priorities straight at least. They fined a dude for calling an animal rights group terrorists….
Leeuwarden appeal court has sentenced a vet, J. Plantema, to pay damages of 200,000 euros to animal rights group WakkerDier. He called them terrorists. It is unique for abuse of freedom of speech to lead to such a high fine.
And who runs WakkerDier?
Wakker Dier is headed by Sjoerd van de Wouw. At another action group, VMO, he was the right-hand man of Volkert van der Graaf, who assassinated politician Pim Fortuyn with gunshots in 2002. Currently, Van de Wouw is assistant to the Party for Animals (PvdD), which has two seats in the Lower House.
Is the Melamine in my Chicken Feed?
There is a certain amount of irony in the fact that people in this world are burning perfectly good corn for heat and putting coal products into feed. From a New York times article….
For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.
“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”
All I can say is that I hope none of my chicken feed comes from China.
Car loans: the next sub prime crises?
This is taken from a Washington Post article…
Car valuations matter because an increasing number of consumers are “upside down” on their auto loans, meaning they owe more than the car is worth. In the first quarter of 2007, 29 percent of consumers were upside down on their vehicles, Kelley Blue Book reports. Additionally, on average, people traded in cars on which they still owed more than $3,600. And what do many of these buyers do with that loan balance when they want another car?
They roll that negative equity — the $3,600 and often much more — into yet another vehicle loan.
A lot of this insanity stems from the Big Three pushing their product. As the Washington Post article says in another place….
Increased pressure on automakers and dealerships to sell vehicles over the past few years has led to more car loans being made to riskier borrowers. Auto dealerships originated $50 billion in new-vehicle loans to subprime borrowers last year, according to retail data from the Power Information Network (PIN), a division of J.D. Power and Associates, a marketing research firm.
To make the loans work for many of these subprime borrowers, who typically have shaky credit, the lenders are offering longer payment periods. New car loans lasting more than five years in 2006 accounted for nearly 55 percent of loan originations, according to the Consumer Bankers Association.
Subprime vehicle buyers, those with credit scores below 650, have loans that last an average of 61 months, compared with 56 months for more creditworthy consumers, PIN found. Higher-risk buyers also tend to make lower down payments as a percentage of the purchase price, paying about 11.6 percent compared with 17.4 percent for other buyers.
Poem of the Week: 4/29/07-5/5/07
This week’s rant of the week has inspired me to choose T.S Eliot’s poem Buirnt Norton as poem of the week.