Hooray for the Losers!

So far this World Cup, just about every team I root for has lost, especially since the Round of 16 started.

Korea lost to Uruguay. USA lost to Ghana. Ghana lost to Uruguay.

Slovakia lost to Netherlands. Chile lost to Brazil. Brazil lost to Netherlands.

Mexico lost to Argentina. England lost to Germany. Argentina lost to Germany.

The only game so far in the single-elimination portion that went as I wanted was Paraguay over Japan. But then Portual lost to Spain and Paraguay lost to Spain.

Based upon this pattern, the final victor will be Netherlands, beating Spain in the final.

Shanghai, part 8: From France to Nepal

At the Shanghai World Expo, I wandered down the giant alley toward the Poland Pavilion, which had intrigued me with its design. Meanwhile, Chunlin rested her feet.

On the way to Poland, I passed the France Pavilion:


Past the Germany Pavilion, I spotted Poland.



It wasn't as interesting in person as in concept. It was hard to see it as folded paper from ground level.

Across the wide alley, Spain was a pleasant surprise.



The Spain Pavilion was a giant wicker basket -- and it smelled like it, too.

Come November 1, the expo will close and these buildings will no longer be good for much of anything. As far as I know, China plans to demolish all the nations' pavilions and create a new neighborhood. Only a few expo structures will survive.

I rejoined Chunlin and we hopped a shuttle bus for the other side of the expo, near the Nepal Pavilion.


At first we thought we'd go in, but then we saw the full extent of the line.



Instead, we climbed the stairs to the pedestrian walkway which runs over the street nearby.




Presumably these walkways will still exist once the expo is gone. Or at least I think they'd make a good addition to the future neighborhood's infrastructure. Separate the foot traffic from the wheeled traffic. Safer that way.

More such photos on flickr.

Shanghai, part 7: Canada and Beyond

At the World Expo, we took a stroll through flashy Canada.



It looked like it had a short line, but half of the zig-zags were hidden inside the building. Tricky folk, those Canadians.



I didn't really pay attention to all the "our country is great" stuff the exhibits were saying. I just took photos.



They had some bicyles that interacted with large screens. I'm not sure what that was about...



In the courtyard, Chinese staff wandered slowly, dressed as a fish, a fisherman, a tree, and butterflies.


Once back outside, we stopped by a restaurant that had an interesting name: Shanghai Old City God Temple Snack Kingdom.

Inside, I realized that all the English translations of the Chinese signs were obviously a collection of the worst translations ever found. They were trying too hard. It wasn't fun anymore.

Chunlin liked the food, though!


We then wandered through Europe again.




Aren't the EU and China flags awfully similar in design? I wonder if they were trying for that...

I wanted to see the UK Pavilion, but the line was very long.


The Netherlands Pavilion was much more accessible and photogenic.



Everybody enjoys sitting on sheep. That's what the World Expo is about: finding the little things that bring the world together, Dutch and Chinese, everybody.

More expo photos on flickr!

Shanghai, part 6: Luxembourg

Shanghai has a lot of people in it.

At our hotel, I picked up a good map of the Expo -- and one of the full subway system. The stand had been empty on Monday and I took the last the last map this time. It's hard to keep the shelves stocked when they're free.

But the map was only in Chinese!

I finally got an English map at the gate.


Massive crowd control measures unnecessary at 1:30 on a weekday afternoon. We walked right through like it was the Spokane airport.



The USA Pavilion had a huge line, so we kept walking.







We headed through the Americas and Europe to Luxembourg. Quick-moving line.



"Is that the color of their country?" Not really.



"Is that the shape of their country?" Well, sort of.



Luxembourg transported this golden statue around the world from its home on a pillar in Luxembourg City. I wonder what's on the the pillar right now...









After hearing about how great the small country of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is, we headed back to Americas Square for a song and dance exhibit from Venezuela.


There are shows every half hour all day long at one square or another. Norway, Mexico, etc. We were very far from the stage, but the speakers were so loud at times it hurt my ears.



Since we were in the Americas (I presume), staff came around with trays of free mini-cups of Starbucks coffee. It was cold, but a taste of home.

I have more photos of these pavilions on flickr.

Happy United Nations Day!

Down with the U.N.!

Down with the Club of Tyrants!

Down with the U.N.!

Down with the Club of Tyrants!

Happy United Nations Day!

Happy United Nations Day!

Earth from Mars

Home:

Taken with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ of Ariz. Click the image for full resolution.

Al Gore Vindicated

. . . in his own mind.

Mr. Cold himself has won the Nobel Peace Prize for . . . being a cult leader? Something like that.

Or maybe it had something to do with all the factual errors in that movie of his.

But let's take a look at other recent Nobel Peace Prize Winners, shall we?

2005 - IAEA, for letting Iran and others build nuclear bombs under their noses.
2002 - Jimmy Carter, for hating Israel so vehemently.
2001 - Kofi Annan and the UN, for being corrupt and a bunch of corrupt thugs.
1994 - Yasser Arafat, for hating Israel so vehemently.

And these are just the names I recognize. . .

Don't Submit!

There are people out there who despise the American way of life. They long for simpler times when life wasn't so complicated. These times never truly existed in history, but that doesn't stop them from fantasizing.

These people fall into two categories: hippies and Islamists.

Hippies, I can deal with. They don't want to kill me.

The Islamists, on the other hand, plan on killing each and every one of us, if we don't meekly obey their every command. They want a world-wide theocracy. It's how they expect to reach salvation. It's for their religion. It's from their religion. And if anyone gets in their way, the Koran tells the Islamists to kill the infidels.

And so they do.

Our only options are to surrender and to fight. Anything half-and-half would be detrimental. Either give up and most of us get to live (in slavery, more or less), or fight and stay free.

Which would you choose?

I say fight. Some will die, true, but at least they'll know in their hearts they sacrificed themselves for the lives and freedom of their loved ones. In our current wishy-washy, half-submit, half-fight scenario, our soldiers don't know if their sacrifices will be worth it. They don't know if our government will surrender before the job is done, and so our soldiers worry for their loved ones, uncertain of the future.

Our future should be clear. We should never retreat. We should never surrender to the Islamists. We should never submit.

I'm a Native American

How many generations does it take, living in one area, before someone can consider himself a native?

This photo was taken by Byron Dazey at Seattle's self-proclaimed illegal (Mexican) immigrant rally on Tuesday:


My answer: Washington. And South Dakota. And Minnesota. Ohio. Quebec. Oh, and one who came over from England as a teenager (by herself, mind you!).

So if you're counting just by great-grandparents, I surely am a native American. Blood of the continent.

And if you want me to go back as far as I can, well then: I have great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents who were born in North America. So there.

And if my uncle's story about my great-grandfather (the Canadian who married the Englishwoman) is correct, I could count back further generations than that in North America. Apparently my great-grandfather checked "native Canadian" (or whatever) on some government form (along with "white"). My uncle has been mistaken for American Indian on occasion, he says.

When in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, we let ourselves be roped into watching a movie trailer and then filling out a survey on it (Underdog = blech). When they asked the ethnicity question, I checked Native American. It's what I am. I'm not "white." I'm not "Caucasian." I'm American, and damn proud of it.

I sympathize with everyone who wants to move to the United States of America, because this is the best country on Earth. But if you do not follow the rule of law, I'm not sure I want you in my country. What other laws will you break?

The people I want as new neighbors are the hard-working, honest, law-abiding citizens of the world who play by the rules and wait in line to get into this great country. True, we could probably let more of these people in, but that doesn't mean we need to completely open the floodgates of our borders.

Perhaps Europe would be a better destination for migrants who don't honor the rule of law. It's already a magnet for handout-hungry migrants. The United States is supposed to be the shining light for those who want to work hard and succeed of their own volition.

If we don't have immigration control, the United States would have a population of two or four billion and several other countries in the world (China!) would be empty. While I belive this land could sustain four billion people, I don't believe we could handle a sudden influx of that magnitude.

So, in summary: increase legal immigration, clamp down hard on illegal immigration, and don't you dare insinuate I'm not a native.

Walk Faster!

To me, it seems like everyone's walking slowly. But apparently that's changing. A new study shows that walking speeds the world over have increased 10% in the past ten years.

Still not fast enough.

Singapore's residents have been found to be walking the fastest, followed by Copenhagen and Madrid.

New York, generally considered one of the world's most frenetic cities, is eighth, while London has come 12th and Tokyo is placed 16th in the British study.

[...]

In Singapore, walking pace has risen by 30 per cent and in Guangzhou, China, the figure is 20 per cent.

The most laid-back places are Blantyre in Malawi and Manama, Bahrain.

The research was carried out by Professor Richard Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire, who measured the average time it took 35 adults in each city to walk 18 metres.

I don't think I'd want to move to Singapore. I'd rather move to someplace where's there are fewer people in my way...

Those Cargo Containers

Did you ever wonder about those cargo containers stacked down at the port, on the back of semis, on car after car of the trains? Well, I did. Just a little. The ultimate in modularization!

Well, they first sailed fifty-one years ago, but didn't get going strong till the Vietnam War, shipping war supplies to Vietnam, sailing empty to Japan, and bringing cheap goods to America.

And now we shall turn to American Heritage for more:

Much of the expense of freight transportation has always lain in breaking bulk, when goods are transferred from one form of transportation, such as a ship, to another, such as a truck, train, or river steamer. Since men first went down to the sea in ships, cargo was loaded on board piecemeal and unloaded the same way. This called for great skill both to ensure that cargo space was used to the utmost and that weight was properly distributed. Modern cargo ships required sometimes hundreds of stevedores to be unloaded quickly, and then the cargo had to be loaded piece by piece onto trucks or trains to get to its final destination. It was a cumbersome and expensive process.

In the early 1950s an American trucking executive named Malcom (that’s how he spelled it) McLean initiated a better idea: Carry the cargo in aluminum and steel containers that could fit directly on flatbed railroad cars or trucks. A few crane operators could then load or unload a ship and have the goods on their way in a matter of hours.

[...]

As the first container ship sailed out of Newark, bound for Houston, an official of the International Longshoremen’s Association, the notoriously corrupt union whose members handled cargo at East Coast ports, was asked what he thought about it. “I’d like to sink that son of a bitch,” he replied.

He was right. Most of the cost of freight handling at ports went to the wages of the many longshoremen needed to load and unload ships in a timely manner. Containerization reduced freight-handling costs from $5.86 to 16 cents a ton, a drop of 97 percent. (Containerization greatly reduced the amount of dockside pilferage as well, which also reduced costs substantially.) Since cargo handling is what economists call a “transaction cost,” a cost of bringing a product to market without adding at all to its value, any reduction in it translates directly into increased profits for manufacturers and—thanks to competition—decreased prices for customers.

hat tip: Tom McMahon

Go, Toyota, Go!

Toyota has surpassed General Motors as the largest car-maker in the world.

Toyota says it sold more than 2.3 million vehicles worldwide in the first three months of the year, about 900,000 more than General Motors.

General Motors and the other big American car companies have been forced to close factories and sack tens of thousands of workers in an attempt to stay competitive with their Japanese rival.

I drive a Toyota. Why don't you?

Best Website Ever

Truly.

Climate, Gods, and Monsters

The snow falling outside my window reminds me of The Year without a Summer, 1816. It also reminds me to pray to Rívorí for some more Global Warming!

But anyway, 1816. In northern Europe and eastern North America, it snowed off and on throughout the year, killing crops and humans and everything in between. Apparently there'd be days where the temperature would switch from the 90s down to freezing in a few hours.

This was at the tail end of the Little Ice Age, when generally the planet was getting warmer. But then a huge volcano erupted in Indonesia and cooled the planet back down with its ash.

A couple interesting tidbits I discovered about the summer of 1816:

Joseph Smith moved his family from Vermont to western New York because his crops died. A few years later, he'd get a visit from an angel and start a religion.

Over in Switzerland, a national emergency was declared by the government. But it didn't really ruin Mary Shelley's vacation in Geneva. She and her friends spent the summer cooped up indoors, hiding from the incessant rain, so they decided to have a contest amongst themselves to write the scariest story. Her finished product? Frankenstein.

Hey!

Did you notice that today's Friday? Yay!

I know it sounds like I'm the last one in the world to realize what day it is, but this week has gone by rather quickly for me. In fact, I know that for most of the planet, it's Saturday already! Ha!

But is it really Friday? I don't have to come to work tomorrow? Yes? Yay!

Polar Bears Just Fine, Thank You

Despite the UN and liberal Environmentalists around the world declaring that polar bears are threatened because of "Global Warming," the truth is that polar bear populations are growing in areas with warmer weather.

In regions such as Baffin Island, which is experiencing colder weather like neighboring Greenland, the polar bear populations are decreasing.

Therefore, if we really want to save the polar bears, we need to heat up the atmosphere world-wide!

If only there were a way for humans to affect the climate. . .

(ht: Moonbattery)

Cut and Run Now!!

I approve of the immediate withdrawl of American forces from Iraq, just so long as we allow the military to topple one or more neighboring dictatorships on their way home.

The two biggest problems with retreating from Iraq are the incredible chaos that will ensue and the worldwide view that the United States is weak.

But, if we destroy the Iranian, Saudi, and Syrian governments (this should only take a week or two, maybe a month), and then bring all the troops back to America, at least the second problem would be alleviated.

The US military isn't made for peacekeeping and nation-building. It's designed for killing and destroying. Do you use a steak knife to feed a cow? No. So let's use the military for its intended purpose.

As for the first problem mentioned above, Iraq is in moderate chaos at the moment because the neighboring dictatorships are jockeying for position to take Iraq as a puppet state. The Saudi royals are fueling the Sunni insurgency and the Iranian mullahs are paying for the Shiite insurgency (counter-insurgency?).

If we give the Saudis and Iranians enough trouble at home, then those countries won't have time or money to waste on their Mesopotamian neighbors. They'll be fighting for their own countries' futures. And thus Iraqi will be free to live peacefully and everybody will agree that the United States is the most powerful and best nation on the planet.

Global Warming Data

Here's why I don't trust scientists: They're human and have agendas and are willing to bend the truth to fit their agenda.

There's an article in the Sunday Telegraph describing just how the scientists and bureaucrats of the UN massacred the global warming data to create a global panic.

You probably are familiar with the hockey-stick graph of worldwide temperatures, where the temperature goes up and down, more or less level, then abruptly shoots up in the twentieth century.



The top graph is from the UN's report of 2001. The bottom graph is from the UN's report of 1996. Notice anything different? Well, here's how they got from one to the other:

• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.

• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".

• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

That all sounds scientifically honest, now doesn't it?

There's more. The sun heats and cools in cycles. It's currently in a very hot period. I won't bore you with the numbers (they're in the link), but here's a summation: "The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it."

And they've also messed with the laws of thermodynamics. Has anyone heard of the Stefan-Boltzmann law? Well, apparently there's a little lambda in that equation that equals hc/ukT. A simple version of the equation is E=(sigma)T^4. The lambda is partially in the sigma, I guess. In any case, T is temperature. If you know the temperature and size of a body, you know how much it's radiating, and lambda to boot.

(In case you cared, Boltzmann is the Austrian who committed suicide because nobody believed him when he said that atoms existed.)

So the centuries-old method of calculating lambda gives you 0.2-0.3 deg C/watt. Guess what the UN's computer models use? 1.0 deg C/watt. Why? Because it fits their agenda better. Some "scientists" have used 1.9 deg C/watt just to scare you better.

And here are the concluding lines from the article, just because I can't say them better:

Removing the UN's solecisms, and using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection.

Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and Herr Professor Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about energy-to-temperature as he was about atoms.

And no matter how much power we give to the UN and how much we destroy our economy with crippling regulations, we are not going to reverse the trends of nature.

IgNobels Announced!

The IgNobels are alternative prizes for scientists whose research isn't deemed serious enough for the Nobel committee, but still is pretty interesting stuff. This year's winners include:

Two Australian researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO) have won an IgNobel for their research on how many photos you need to take to ensure that nobody in a group photo has their eyes closed.

Ivan Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip May, of the University of California Los Angeles, have won the ornithology prize for their pioneering work on the ability of the humble woodpecker to avoid head injury.

Wasmia Al-Houty, of Kuwait University, and Faten Al-Mussalam, of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, have taken home the nutrition prize for showing that dung beetles are in fact finicky eaters.

Francis Fesmire, of the University of Tennessee, has been awarded the medicine Ig for his report Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage.

Physics laureates Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of Paris University are to be honoured for their insights into why dry spaghetti tends to break into more than two pieces.

Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, has been awarded the peace prize for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellent. The device makes an annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults. He later used the same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.

Three US scientists - Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand - have been awarded the acoustics prize for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.

While the conclusions of a group of scientists from Valencia University and the University of Illes Balears in Spain are not immediately clear, the judges have deemed their study Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature worthy of the chemistry prize.

Also honoured for cheese research, Bart Knols from Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands has won the biology award for his part in research showing that female malaria mosquito are equally attracted to limburger cheese and human feet.

The scientists take this award seriously nowadays, with 8 of this year's 10 recipients flying to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the ceremony.