Grungy Saturday Links

Here's a few things that caught my eye this week...

So I saw this review of CREE light bulbs which are a LED based light rather than CFC and found it intriguing. 10 year life, duplicating incandescent without the performance and environmental aspects of CFC make them tempting to give a try. We bought some CFCs a while back and I was disgusted by them and eventually got rid of them. With the intrusive and colossally stupid congressional mandated demise of the incandescent, this seems like a good replacement.

BeagleBoard now has come out with a contender for the RasberryPi in the $45 range. This looks interesting. My company uses BeagleBoards for their Linux device driver class so they are fairly bulletproof. This board is definitely on my list of things to get and play with.

So this study of 'roundabouts' shows that they are a good alternative to stop lights. Well duh! My objections are twofold. First, it's a 'traffic circle' not a roundabout! We are in America not the UK. The first time I saw them called 'roundabout' was on my TomTom GPS. It irritated me then and it irritates me now. That aside, I think it's just funny they call a trunk a 'boot' and a car hood a 'bonnet'. The second issue is while they are generally smoother to go through, redesigning and rebuilding intersections to use them is prohibitively expensive, so this is of no real practical use for 99.99% of the roads in the US.


Finally, this stands on its own (men reacting like, well men - no apology necessary):

Feel Good Story of the Week

Via Instapundit, Female sailor beats up drunk <religion not specified> Dubai bus driver that tried to rape her. He was charged with 'drinking illegally'...

Blastoff!

Yea! Orbital finally got Antares off and Wallops Island actually working! Course, the part that I spent the last year testing and verifying was 'simulated', but still it's good to know they are finally moving tangibly in a forward direction.

Biased Nothings

www.summithut.com

So I had some time on my hands this morning, so I saw a blurb on Instapundit about an article about a HuffPost article about a kid who ended up in the hospital because of an allergy to the AXE body spray. For the record, what this is really about is a school principal asking parents to not let their kids wear deodorant to school.  Go Goth! the irony writes itself...

What adds another dimension of mirth to this nonsense is the feminist take on this by the article linked by Instapundit. Let's deconstruct that a bit. First there is the title:

Axe Body Spray Is Destroying Lives, Not Helping Men Get Laid

I am thinking that going to the hospital for a allergic reaction is hardly 'Destroying Lives'. As for 'not helping men get laid', i'd say that is a pretty subjective observation since there is nothing in any of this article, the HuffPost article, or even the root article that addresses that particular aspect. I suspect the esteemed author failed to interview even one teenage male at in the PA school as to the efficacy of AXE body spray and getting laid. After a misleading and inaccurate attempt to establish a factual basis for that title, there was this:

If this were five years ago, I’d exclaim, “Oh snap!”

Huh? I got kinda tired of the 'Oh Snap' thing quite a while back. 'House' is a dead series - get over it. That being said, I honestly did not understand how the preceding paragraphs were worth of a 'Snap'. Reading on, I came to an understanding of the writers point (the only <almost> clearly written sentence in the article):

a company that prides itself on such overt sexuality has created something that actually put someone in the hospital

 Ah - I see now. Since they sell their product in, what I must admit, is a slightly amusing nod to women being attracted to men, it is only right and just that they now will be pilloried for the faulty product sending some poor teen to the hospital, because, you know, acknowledging sexy is just bad. Thank God they are going to be sued out of existence.  Er. except they are not. There is no legal action pending, there is no condemnation of the specific product from anyone noted in the originating article, and the company is noted as responsibly 'looking into' the allergic reaction.

The article ends with this missive:

It’s totally going to fly off the shelves

 I am thinking the incident, the HuffPost article, and this one will have an effect on the product sales in the same way that M&M sales plummeted when reliable sources indicated that 'green M&Ms make you pregnant'.

Well good...

So they shot and killed one of the guys that did the Boston bombing, and are hunting down the the other one. I woke up way too early this morning and listened to the over-hyped reporters taking about the happenings at MIT and Watertown MA. From the last time I listened (around 6:30am) it was clear that a campus cop was killed in his car either before or during the time the two were trying to rob a 7-11, then they car jacked a guy (who was safely kicked out of the car after riding with them for 30 minutes), then finally, they were apparently cornered and got in a firefight with all the cops that were around, which included a transit cop who got critically injured. Somehow in this firefight, the second guy got away. The reaction to this was for the cops to shut the whole Boston area down and start busing people out of the immediate area because, this being MA and a Boston suburb, none of the citizens have the ability to defend themselves against this mad dog. Literally a wolf among sheep.

Just a couple of impressions here. The first thing that bugged me is how the reporters kept saying the Boston bombing is SOLVED! I would say that even if both suspects were on a coroner's table, this bombing is far from solved. The more interesting and vital question is who they were, who helped them, and what other 'cells' may be out there if they are not just a 'isolated' pair of sickos? There is almost nothing 'solved' here. The second thing that got to me is the almost anticipatory media reaction to their capture / killing. If there are any other players out there, this will only spur them on. What is more worrisome is if there were many more incidents like this one, there is a real potential for law enforcement being overwhelmed. Couple that with the media's over-hyped reporting quickly overwhelming their ability to perform their basic public safety role, and you have a recipe for chaos.

On a personal note, it now seems I have averted my person crisis for at least a few months. I will use that time to attempt to get my head out of my posterior and put some contingency planning in effect to avoid getting blind sided this way again. No - I still am not ready to talk about it here...

Even more hiatus

While I deal with a personal crisis - that I will talk about here in due time... Just one of those things that people face from time to time, just this time it reached out and kicked me in the teeth... I hope to be back on an even keel by the weekend..

Thirsty Thursdays...

First up in the modern angle to the old Baretta quote "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time". In this case, it's "Don't do the crime if you can't spell". It is really a sad state of affairs if your average bank robber is not literate enough to to write a simple note saying ''This is a robbery". Right.. I know these guys are probably some tweakers looking for money for their next fix, but it is really sad to think that the worst of society is that bad off.

So the post office is not going to stop Saturday deliveries (In August) after all due to sequestration. The interesting take on this is that the USPS is claiming that they are going to be insolvent, but Congress explicitly kept them from addressing that insolvency by cutting hours. At the end of the statement they said they would go back to their unions and ask for some relief. good luck with that. So what will happen when they run out of money? Will they be allowed to declare bankruptcy and get legal relief from their unions? Nope. I am guessing congress will just pass another 'temporary' bill and life will go on... at least for a while. I am thinking that I would be better off just taking the mailbox down and picking up my mail from the post office as there is very little I get in the mail anymore that matters.

So NASA and the current administration have put forth a plan to capture an asteroid.  I have always been a fan of NASA doing the heavy lifting on the theory of space flight. There is much that that they do in that realm that is invaluable and necessary. However, I am thinking that their structure has moved to the point that they are bureaucratically incapable of pulling off something this technically challenging. To capture a asteroid, you need dynamic, adaptable management structure. The kind you find in commercial world. Perhaps if they contract out the meat of this and get out of the way (they way they did with CRS and SpaceX) maybe it will work. Otherwise, it's just another hole to throw taxpayer money into.

It was bound to come to this. With budget being cut, real cops overburdened by regulations and unions, the only thing left is for communities to band together and hire their own cops. I don't see this happening where I am yet, or in rural communities, but there's a reason that 'gated communities' are becoming the rule in that sweet spot between the burnt out urban and traditional suburban domiciles.