Darling, a true lady takes off her dignity with her clothes and does her
whorish best. At other times you can be as modest and dignified as your
persona requires.
Lazarus Long
A character in Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein.
[This works for me.–Joe]
Some people from work followed me back to Idaho on Friday night.
Saturday morning we had breakfast at the Breakfast Club in Moscow with Tim, Barron, and Janelle.
Hiep and Priyanka walking into the restaurant. Photo by Sharath.
We drove to the Boomershoot site and I told them the history, told lots of stories and gave them a tour. They found some .50 BMG bullets and seemed quite thrilled. The picture below is from on top of the berm where the 700 yard targets are placed looking back at the hay field to the shooting line.
Janelle, Barron, Tim (just barely visible behind the grass), Hiep, Sharath, and Priyanka.
I gave them a safety briefing on the chemicals (which consists mostly of telling them not to eat, drink, or snort anything) I had the people from Microsoft weigh the chemicals and my staff mix the explosives and package it into targets:
Sharath, Priyanka, Hiep.
We ate lunch then placed the targets in front of the large berm at the tree line.
Sharath, Priyanka, and Hiep putting stakes in the ground for the targets.
One of the targets had something special on it (see also here).
I gave safety and basic firearm instructions while Tim, Barron, and Janelle placed the targets on the stakes. Sharath had never shot a gun before. Hiep had only shot one once and that was after he had three years of military instruction in Vietnam. Priyanka shot a gun for the first time last September and then in March took her parents (visiting from India) to the range on her own and taught them to shoot.
Targets ready for engagement. Photo by Sharath.
We then got back a few feet and let the visitors shoot the targets. There were many smiles and much exaltation.
Joe and Hiep. Photo by Sharath.
Hiep once told me he didn’t think private citizens should possess firearms. Only the police and the military should have access. I should ask if he still thinks that.
Boomershoot is a tool for teaching people from all over the world the joys of guns and explosives–the joy of freedom.
The NRA has never proposed any such thing.
The data shows the woman’s claim is wrong.
Guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill people.
30,000 is the approximate number of people who die of gunshot wounds every year. This includes suicides, justified, and even praiseworthy homicide as well as murders.
Except for the number of people murdered at VA Tech, everything expressed as fact in the cartoon is either false or extremely misleading.
But it’s not about data. Or as more accurately, as one anti-gun person once told me, “I don’t believe your facts.”
“What facts do you have that you do believe?”, I asked. His response of, “I just don’t believe yours” ended the conversation but not for the reason he probably believed. Had I only slightly less restraint I would have had a momentary pleasure but would have gotten myself talked about.
I can eat cake any day. This is the only time I can blow one up.
Priyanka
July 17, 2010
She said this a few minutes before blowing up, instead of blowing out, her birthday cake.
[The white cardboard box contains two pounds of Boomerite.
In the original of second picture (taken by Sharath) you can see bits of the cake high in the air. We were unable to find any of it later.
I expect Barron and Janelle will have video before long. I was playing range safety officer and didn’t take any pictures while the rifles were out of their cases.–Joe]
Is there any evidence the rate of first time criminal use of guns is any higher among NRA members than the general population? I know that for concealed carry permit holders the murder rate is lower than for the general population.
It would appear this is just more prejudice against the NRA.
I once received an award for best tonal quality in a belching contest.
Janelle Barnett
July 17, 2010
[Even though this was at the Boomershoot site we weren’t wearing any hearing protection at the time.
I don’t think there is anything more I should say about incident or the conversation.–Joe]
“Access to guns” is a human right. And that is what they view as the problem. There is no common ground between the rapist, or any other rights violator, and their victims. They can either stop proposing to violate our rights or not.
Boom!
I think I got it now.
Boom!
Yeah. I got it.
Priyanka
Shooting boomers at a private Boomershoot party.
July 17, 2010
[She was having trouble at first. Lots of misses and almost no booms. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. She did fine with dry fire. The gun stayed steady enough for the range we were at (almost entertainingly close). I think there was a problem with her sight picture even though I went over it several times with her. And it wasn’t like was the first time she had shot a gun either. She did pretty well the first time so I was perplexed why she was having trouble this time. She is a smart woman and she eventually figured it out on her own.
I’ll ask her more about it when I see her at the office on Monday.
Update: Priyanka reports she was concentrating on properly placing the post (front sight) of the AR-15 on the target and was neglecting to center the post in the rear peep sight. I’ll have another QOTD from Priyanka and pictures from the event on Monday.–Joe]
I’ve been meaning to explain my black hole hypothesis for some time now but there is always something more important to do. But David and Say Uncle posted about it so it’s time I elaborated.
I tried to leave a comment on David’s post last night but the blog software rejected it as spam. David posted my comment in a separate post a few minutes ago. Here is the comment:
Actually my hypothesis was formed almost exactly 1.5 years ago.
See here and here.
I did a little bit of math on the topic but to say my cosmological math is weak would be a gross understatement. What results I did come up with seemed plausible though. That is–the “background radiation left over from the big bang” appears to have a similar temperature to that of the event horizon of a black hole composed of all the matter of our known universe.
I recently listened to the book Parallel Worlds and was surprised and pleased to hear that others had explored the same hypothesis–at least part of it anyway. No mention was made of the direction the black hole being on the time axis. This is a critical component and the easiest thing to prove as being consistent with the known facts.
I will now elaborate further.
My first “Ah hah!” moment was back in February of 2009 and I posted a couple of Tweets about it:
I’m listening to The Black Hole War. This inspired me to explore the hypothesis that our universe is a black hole.
We are rushing toward the singularity at the speed on light on the time axis.
Since then I have made casual references to my hypothesis on my blog (here, and here) and I think a comment or two on other people’s blogs.
Our experience with time dilation and length contraction is the best support for this hypothesis. Starting with the equation for time dilation we can rearrange it as follows (brother Doug pointed this out to me a couple decades ago, I have not read or heard it expressed this way before or since so a great deal of credit, or blame, for inspiring this hypothesis goes to Doug):
DeltaT’ = DeltaT/(SQRT(1 – v2/c2)) Where DeltaT’ is the elapsed time for the moving, at velocity ‘v’, object and DeltaT is the elapsed time for the stationary observer. ‘c’ is the speed of light.
SQRT(1 – v2/c2) = DeltaT/DeltaT’
1 – v2/c2 = (DeltaT/DeltaT’)2
1 = (DeltaT/DeltaT’)2 + v2/c2
c2 = c2 (DeltaT/DeltaT’)2 + v2c2 (DeltaT/DeltaT’)2 is the square of a velocity. Hence we could substitute a symbol for this expression. Let’s let ‘t’ = c (DeltaT/DeltaT’).
c2 = t2 + v2
What this says is that as a moving objects velocity, ‘v’, increases the velocity ‘t’ must decrease such that the sum of t2 + v2 remains constant. This gives us time dilation. But what is the less obvious observation is that as ‘v’ goes to zero our velocity in the ‘t’ direction becomes the speed of light. Hence stationary objects in our frame of reference are actually traveling in the ‘t’ direction at the speed of light.
Inside the event horizon of a black hole all objects travel at the speed of light. If they move off of the straight line toward the center of the black hole the sum of their velocity components still must be precisely equal to the speed of light. Hence if they take on a velocity vector perpendicular to the straight line to the singularity they move slower in the direction of the singularity. This is exactly our experience with time. Our time “velocity” decreases when we increase our velocity in any other direction. Hence, I hypothesize that, we are inside the event horizon of a black hole moving toward the singularity which happens to be in the direction of the axis we call ‘time’.
Further support for this hypothesis is length contraction. We know that as the velocity of a moving object increases the observable length (it doesn’t actually contract, only observations of it’s length decrease) of an object decreases. At the speed of light the length of an object is zero (I suspect it actually becomes the Planck length, but this is just a guess on my part). Since we (according to my hypothesis) are traveling at the speed of light on the time axis we can only observe a single instant of time.
Of course the first question that comes to mind is, “When do we get ripped apart by tidal forces and our subatomic components get sucked into the singularity?”
I don’t know the answer to that, but it is something to think about isn’t it?
Have a nice day.
The artist’s familiarity with the facts is, at best, tenuous.
First off all of the NRA-ILA P.R. people I have dealt with have been beautiful young women, not overweight men. Second, those people just as horrified as anyone else about the tragic deaths of innocent people. And third, nearly all mass shooting happen in “gun free” areas with attempted mass shootings being stopped in the areas where people were allowed to defend themselves.
If the NRA had it’s way there would be far fewer “gun free” areas and far fewer mass shootings.
I just have to shake my head at the person that wrote this headline.
Apparently my definition of sin (I’m with Heinlein on this one) is far different from theirs. What other specific enumerated right is considered a sin by this person? Would the taxing of churches of a different persuasion be considered a sin tax in their eyes? What about taxing writing letters to the editor? Or taxing your right to remain silent? After all, they know they can’t ban your silence so maybe they can just tax it. How does the rate of a dollar a minute sound? That is the way the got NFA34 through. They didn’t ban short barreled shotguns and machine guns–they just taxed them at a rate of $200 per transfer (in 1934 dollars!).
Of course using Heinlein’s definition of sin results in their entire set of taxes being unrelated to sin–except in the sense that the collections of taxes in itself tends to follow under the definition of sin. And I find Heinlein’s caution in regards to “strong drink” and tax collectors illuminating in this case as well.
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other
“sins” are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful–just stupid.)
Robert Heinlein
[I’m reminded of this quote by this article.
H/T to Sebastian. Say Uncle also has a post up about it. I will have more to say in a few minutes.–Joe]
Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign reports some people thought the testimony of a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting was “the most compelling he had ever heard”. The victim detailed the 10 minutes of horror as he and many others were shot multiple times.
I found this rather odd for two reasons:
Sebastian has a different response to this testimony.
I heard two different stories on the “health care reform” yesterday. I had lunch with an old friend. He has his own small business and with the downturn in the economy he is slowing sinking. He is looking for a contract job writing software and may end up leaving the Seattle area for a few weeks to “go do some coding in Iowa”. The new health care regulations aren’t helping him any either. He pulled out his Group Health identification card and told me, “I was paying $1000/month for this until they passed the bill. Almost immediately it went to $1500/month.”
That evening I had dinner with some other friends. One of them told me about explaining to one of his employees just yesterday that he is now required to offer her health insurance. He told her, “I’m required to offer you health insurance. So I’m doing that now. But if you accept I’m going to have to cut your hours back to 20 per week. At that point I no longer have to pay your insurance. If you sign this other piece of paper saying you don’t want the coverage you can continue to work 40 hours per week.
She clarified, “So I could work 20 hours per week and not have health insurance or I could continue to work 40 hours per week and not have health insurance, right?” “That’s right”, he said. “Unless you can talk Ruth out of her raise. We just don’t have the budget for any additional expenses.”
As Sebastian rhetorically asks on a slightly different topic, “Who could have predicted this?”
The human brain is amazing. I sometimes look at the things people can do and I have difficulty believing it is possible. I even look at the things I can do and am amazed.
Here is a USPSA stage I shot in April. You have to draw from the surrender position and put 10 rounds on 8 different targets with a mandatory reload in the middle of the string of fire. How long should that take?
Here is my score:
| Stage | Name | A | B | C | D | M | NS | P | LS | XS | XH | AP | Time | Total Points | Hit Factor | Stg Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2P | Paper Poppers | 7 | 3 | 6.90 | 47 | 6.8116 | 50.0000 |
6.9 seconds. Right off that bat you can say the average was less than one second per shot. Then you start figuring in the time it takes to draw and reload the gun. Even being generous (I don’t think I am this fast) on my draw and reload by subtracting out 1.25 and 2.25 seconds yields 3.4 seconds for the remaining 8 shots or and average of 0.425 seconds per shot. How can someone even move the gun from target to target that fast? At that speed acquiring a sight picture and squeezing the trigger happens someplace far away from conscious thought.
What is even more interesting is that my score is only 68.6611% of the score by the best shooters. Assuming they get all ‘A’ zone hits (this maximizes the time) they had to do it in a total of 5.04 seconds. Subtracting out 1.0 and 1.5 seconds for the draw and reload and we have 0.3175 seconds per shot.
The ATF tried to make the agent who infiltrated the Branch Davidians into a scapegoat. He sued and was awarded near $2.3 million in damages. This was a surprise to me.
It appears the ATF is ethically challenged even when dealing with it’s own people and not just gun owners.
I guess that makes sense. It’s a simple extension of the adage of there being no honor among thieves.
Suppose the gun references were replaced with Jewish symbols and organizations. What would be the future of this artist then? The right to keep and bear arms is a specific enumerated right. Politicians who advocate the infringement of that right violate their oath of office and do not deserve to hold public office. They should be prosecuted under 18 USC 242. Being kicked out of office is being far too kind and sets a poor example.
And, yes, the ejection port is on the wrong side of the pistol.
It’s logical. Greater opportunity to obtain a firearm increases risk for women. Additionally, not every abuser has a misdemeanor conviction that will prevent them from acquiring a firearm.
Jennifer White
July 15, 2010
Why Gun Control Laws Are a Feminist Issue — The recent Supreme Court decision that expanded Second Amendment rights has
left feminist groups silent, even though women are more likely to die of gun
violence at the hands of domestic abusers.
[Somehow she completely overlooks the benefits of enabling women to defend themselves with firearms. As usual, people in the comments are explaining things to the writer.
Update: Jeff has some comments too.–Joe]
If you do a search on either Google or Bing for “no coloreds allowed” my blog post is number one on the list. It’s number eight on Yahoo!
Entire human genome sequencing for $100.
My estimate is that the potential for GATTACA is only another decade away.
