Skelamingos

I've never understood why anyone would want to put plastic pink flamingos in their yard. But I could go for these.

Seen at Seventh Avenue.

Force

Flash movies are fun to make at Toufee.com

Special thanks to Armed and Safe for plenty of link references and the Tench Coxe quote. Also thanks to The War On Guns for the slideshow idea. I didn't use slide.com because there didn't appear to be a way to upload custom music for the slideshow, but I'll take another look and see if I missed something.

I'm seeing a minor problem with this slideshow. I get a white screen that flashes very briefly between each slide. I don't know if this is because I'm on dial-up or what--in any case, I can't figure out how to fix it. If anyone else sees it too let me know. I might try making this slideshow again with off-line software that I recently downloaded.

url

UPDATE: On 15 November this post was noticed by several other blogs, and the hits are just pouring in. I just want to say thank you to everyone who has linked to it.

Technorati Tags: Ladd+Everitt, force, rkba, second+amendment, violence

Hunting safety concerns in Wisconsin

Brian Dorrington, spokesman for Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital (Milwaukee) says:

This year is no exception, and the need for practicing hunting safety cannot be over-emphasized.

So he's talking about hunters negligently shooting themselves or each other, right?

No. Apparently their primary concern for hunter safety is that hunters keep falling out of trees.

In one sense, this amuses me a little. In another sense, I realize it is deadly serious. I spent more than my share of time (in my opinion) in rickety tree stands when I was younger. As I grew older and came to suspect that I was not as immortal as I had previously thought, I swore off tree stands. Fortunately, I never fell out of a tree, but there were times when every creak of the wind made my stomach churn a little bit.

Send Conoco a message

Conoco-Phillips "Pleased" to Have Federal Judge Disarm YOU at the War On Guns.

In the "property rights vs. civil rights" argument, I realize some people are torn. Some people think property rights trump all other rights.

They are wrong.

The ultimate right is the right to life. If the right to preserve your own life is taken from you, nothing else matters. Many libertarians say that eventually, if enough people refuse to be employed at such a workplace, the problem will work itself out. The employer will have to change his discriminatory policies to continue to exist.

In other words, if the best job you can get--or the only job in your small town--prohibits you from defending yourself, and you work there anyway, then you deserve to have your rights stripped from you.

Employers should not have legal authority to strip their employees of a fundamental right.

2007 Ig Nobel Awards are out

The BBC has a list of this year's Ig Nobel Award winners.

FYI, this award was created by a science humor magazine called The Annals of Improbable Research to "celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative - and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology."

Among this year's award-winners are chemist Mayu Yamamoto for developing a method to extract vanilla fragrance and flavoring from cow dung, a team of linguists from the University of Barcelona for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards, and a team of...somethings or others...from the National University of Quilmes, Argentina, for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag.

Note to the authorized journalists at BBC: AIR is a science humor magazine, not a science magazine. I think there's a big difference.

Full details at AIR.

Been working

Did a little more fence work this morning.

But mostly I've been using an online service called toufee.com to create a Flash slide show.

I didn't want to say anything much about this project in case I decided it was too much work and gave it up. But it looks like I've done about as much with it as I can and I'll be posting it pretty soon. Seeing something like this come to fruition is exciting, and I'll be trying to think of topics for further such projects in the future.

Blog evolution meme

So Hammer tagged me for this meme. I guess he assumed (correctly) that I this is a meme I would enjoy being tagged for. I'm supposed to pick out 5 posts that chart the evolution of this blog.

When I first began this blog, I had no idea what to do with it. At the time I thought I'd just do a clip-blog of things that I thought were interesting or important. An all-linky-no-thinky kind of blog. For the first little while I did pretty well, making 52 posts in about a month and a half.

In looking back at the old archives, I have surprised myself. I was doing then about what I'm doing now. For example, here's one about NASA doing some apparently under-handed data mining, followed by a post linking to the Michael Moore debunking site Bowling for Truth and another about how guns are mis-portrayed in movies.

But then I ran out of steam. I was languishing in obscurity and it was no fun just writing for myself. The rest of 2004 saw sporadic and sparse posting. I did continue to read other blogs the whole time and my blogroll was constantly growing. I just didn't say anything myself. Sometime during this hiatus I discovered the gunbloggersphere. Wow. People were using their blogs to advocate the right to keep and bear arms. Why hadn't I thought of that? Suddenly I had a focus and a reason for doing this.

This post definitely marked an evolution in my blogging, because it was the first time a post of mine was noticed and linked to by another blogger: Lest Darkness Fall. This was also the first time I saw myself on someone else's blogroll. I had arrived. By the way, LDF has been silent for a long time now. I hope you're doing okay.

(This is a two pipe post). I just noticed that in June 2005 I posted twice about anti-self-defense stuff going on at Virginia Tech, here and here. They are not pertinent to the evolution of this blog. I just thought I'd mention them.

Somewhere in here I started contributing to the Carnival of Cordite (RIP). I think this was the first such post.

Things kept plugging along pretty much the same for some time. I moved over to Eponym. And then...

The Guns of Hellsing. I could not then, and still can't believe the traffic this single post generated. It was part of the Carnival of Cordite. Several other bloggers and discussion forums linked to it. Numerous anime websites linked to it. Every single person in the whole world who Googled anything having to do with Hellsing checked it out. Since I had limited bandwidth at Eponym (5 gigs per month), it was wiping me out. I went through two weeks worth of bandwidth in about 3 days. I got a huge rush from all the traffic, but it was going to take me offline for weeks if it didn't stop. I finally resorted to deleting the post from Eponym and reposting it over here. This is still the king of all my posts. Nothing else has ever even come close to touching it.

The next notable evolution in this blog came with my first photoshop. This kind of thing is, for me, the most fun I have with this blog. I wish the muse would visit me more often so I could do this kind of thing more frequently. My p-shopping skills are not that great, but I have a lot of fun with it.

So that's four posts. I should do one more to fit the meme. Uh...well, sometime in there I started trying to do more humorous/satirical stuff like this. I also started recounting some personal experiences, like this.

And then I had to come back to Blogspot. It seems that everyone bailed out at Eponym, and left the lights on. Occasionally a bulb burns out, but there's no one there to replace it. So it seems that I've not changed all that much since I started this thing. Blogging about things that I think are interesting, important, or just plain weird, to include RKBA and other fundamental rights, strange stuff, humor, H.P. Lovecraft and pipe smoking.

So what does the future hold? Probably more of the same, but I do have a couple of new things in mind. Just this week I started on something that will be new for this blog, but it could be several days or even weeks before I finish it because it involves another learning curve.

I never tag anyone for these memes but if anyone reads this and wants to join in, leave a comment and I'll link to you.

I was sure it would be the middle finger...

You Are the Thumb

You're unique and flexible. And you defy any category. Mentally strong and agile, you do things your own way. And you do them well. You are a natural leader... but also truly a loner. You inspire many but connect with few. You get along well with: The Middle Finger Stay away from: The Pinky

What Finger Are You?

That's actually so right it's spooky. The "natural leader" part is a weird thing. I seem to somehow keep getting myself into leadership positions even though I don't want to, and I think I'm terrible at it.

Seen at Tall Cool Drink of Water.

Digital Forensics

Here's an interesting interview with Hany Farid, Proving That Seeing Shouldn't Always Be Believing:

Q. Why do scientists need to know about this?

A. Because not long ago, researchers from South Korea had to retract papers published in Science because the photographs used to prove that human stem cells had been cloned were effectively Photoshop-cloned, and not laboratory-cloned. There have been other recent cases, too. And today, in science, more and more, photographs are the data. The Federal Office of Research Integrity has said that in 1990, less than 3 percent of allegations of fraud they investigated involved contested images. By 2001, that number was 26 percent. And last year, it was 44.1 percent.

Mike Rossner of The Journal of Cell Biology estimates that 20 percent of the manuscripts he accepts contain at least one figure that has to be remade because of inappropriate image manipulation. He means that the images are not accurate reflections of the original data. Rossner estimates that about 1 percent of the papers have some piece of image data that is downright fraudulent.

Doom, I say

JPFO's Innocents Betrayed is part of a college course

A letter from a teacher at JPFO:

This fall all classes have seen the film in its entirety. One student who believed people should not own guns is now challenging that notion. She was amazed that genocide and defenseless citizens = murder and oppression. When juxtaposed with Susanna Gratia’s tale in that tragic day in Killeen, Texas- this student saw the light that people have the right to defend themselves. She is not comfortable with wholesale gun ownership, but she is now at least listening.

What has amazed me are the numbers of students who see me at the end of class who are comfortable with the message that self-defense is a right. Further, women seem to get it. Two young ladies (18 years old) in class this week believed they had the right to protect themselves. One young man thanked me for showing a film that didn’t malign gun ownership. The rest of the class commented about the somber tone and how it made them think about our government in comparison with other nations.

The letter was written by a college professor who has made the DVD part of the Global Issues course at Georgia College and State University.

Another unexpected search hit

Someone Googled the entire subject of this post.

FYI, it's from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.

In the convoluted pathways of my mind, it seemed appropriate for the post.

Computer ignorance from Hollywood

CRACKED has a hilarious list of 5 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do:

The aliens in Independence Day were not only thousands of years ahead of us technologically, but also were an entirely different species. Therefore, Goldblum’s feat was the equivalent of colony of baboons in the Congo hacking into CitiBank using tree bark and clumps of their own feces.

And they're dead-on about Sandra Bullock.

The not-so-noble savage

Child mummies 'fattened up' before Inca sacrifice:

Their deaths were terrifying, and Dr Wilson believes they were meant to be. "The logistics of getting the children there needed imperial organisation," he said. "We believe there was some measure of the Incas demonstrating their power to the colonised: obey, or this is what will happen to you."

No revolver, though

JPFO is marketing Goody Guns, a cookie cutter shaped like a semi-auto pistol.

Each one comes along with a few other goodies. I think I'll have to order one of these.

Taser Registration

As far as I'm concerned, since the Taser is a self-defense device, it is an "arm," and therefore should be protected as an arm under the Second Amendment.

Apparently the Taser company doesn't think so. This page can't be linked to directly. To discover this fine print, you have to go to the Taser website, click on the appropriate page to go to the C2 (the "civilian" model, since "civilians" don't deserve the same level of protection as "law enforcement"), click on "buy now," and then click on the text description. Here's the screen shot of what turns up. Look toward the bottom for the bad news.


So, not only are you forced to register it before it can be activated, you have to pay another $9.95 for it. After registering, the customer is given an activation code which will enable the device.

No, I'm not planning on buying a Taser. But this is something people should know.

And if you think this registration information isn't going into a permanent database, you're fooling yourself.

P.S. I've been instructed that this is an "extreme right viewpoint." I don't see it, myself. I thought it was more of an "extreme ability to defend oneself without ending up in a database" viewpoint.

It's funny because it's true

I don't know how many times I've done this very thing.

Summer of Lovecraft

A website to help generate interest in a geek Lovecraft movie at Summer of Lovecraft:

This site is dedicated to the feasibility of developing, financing, producing and distributing a feature film aimed at the "geek" market. The themes of H.P. Lovecraft are echoed in “Summer of Lovecraft”, a feature-length sci-fi/horror film that explores (and satirizes) rebellion, rural dystopia, intolerance, atavistic guilt, the inevitability of fate and the arrogance of humanity. The screenplay is based in part on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and in part on the lives of its authors. The intent is to produce an feature film and series of comics based on the characters and situations in the screenplay. This website is here to prove to the people with the money that project has 'legs'. "Summer of Lovecraft" has been shopped around to several different studios, investors & distribution companies, all of whom have shown interest... but none has ponied up the cash so far. Problem is, none of them seem to think there's a market out there for a film like this. We're here to prove them wrong. If we prove there's a market, they'll invest, plain & simple.

Well, I would watch it.

"If Erlenmeyer flasks are outlawed, only outlaws will have Erlenmeyer flasks"

Wulf of Atlas Blogged has accidentally found a really stupid Texas law.

Psychedelic Crick

Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.

Crick, who died ten days ago [2004-07-28], aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD, then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy, to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.

Full story here. Old news, but I just discovered it. Interesting, if true.