Archive for June, 2004

The world’s first private manned space flight is scheduled to start tomorrow, at 6:30 AM P.D.T. I don’t know about you, but I plan to watch it live on MSNBC.

Do you remember the NASA scramjet test a few months ago? That was model rocketry compared to this. This is history folks, and if a successful flight can tap into the American spirit sufficiently to launch an era of private space exploration, you students might be around to tell your grandkids on Luna 3 about witnessing this event.
The challenge facing space exploration today is not technical – that problem was solved 43 years ago. Today’s challenge is philosophical – a question of whether the spirit that powered the Wright Brothers on a windy day in 1903 has sufficiently resisted creeping statism, collectivism, and mysticism to soar once again.

I recently updated to FireFox .9, the latest and greatest web browser from Mozilla.org

I then installed Bookmarks Synchronizer, a Firefox extension that allows me to synchronize my bookmarks by uploading an XML file to my website every time they are updated.

I wanted to provide a nicely formatted page on my websites, so I found an XSL transform to convert the XML file to HTML on the fly. I then wrote a PHP script which takes an XML file and XSL transform and outputs the processed HTML or XML.
You can view the result of my handiwork here: http://www.rationalmind.net/bookmarks

(That URL actually loads http://www.rationalmind.net/?file=XSLT&xml=david/bookmarks.xml&xsl=david/bookmarks.xsl)

If you would like to try this yourself, the code is below:
(more…)

During my lengthy and extremely boring graduation ceremony last year, I passed the time by snickering at the thesis topics of the liberal arts majors. The topics I saw were typical of the BS that passes for research in the humanities these days: critical (Marxist) theory, obsession with sex, and “ethnic” (anti-Western) studies. I was reminded of them by Mike S. Adams recent column on the bullshit topics academics specialize in. I decided to check out my own Texas A&M’s departments, and found much of the same. The biggest bullshit-generators in academia are the political science (something I have four years of firsthand experience in), philosophy (which has been mostly reduced to nonsense) sociology (which is not even a valid concept), and especially the English department, which tends to be the farthest removed from reality, having little or no training or reliance on scientific rigor, logical thought, or historical lessons.

For you students: have you ever checked your what passes for research in your school’s humanities departments? (more…)

I decided to clean up my bookmarks a few days ago, after accumulating nearly 2000 links over seven years of web surfing. The growth of my bookmark list has dropped drastically lately, because Google makes finding sites so easy that I rarely bother to save them anymore. Anyway, I trimmed the bookmarks to a manageable 600 and uploaded it for my (and your) reference.
You will notice that I have few blogs in the list, because I manage those separately in my RSS reader. You can also get an OPML list of the right-side links on my blog. Also of interest: if you want to speed up your PHP website, I have some tips for you.

According to Bruce Bartlett, the 18th century “dead dinosaur” theory of the origin of oil may be wrong. According to the abiotic theory, used for the last 50 years to successfully find oil reserves, petroleum has an inorganic origin far below the earth’s crust. This would mean that the amount of oil reserves could be far larger that conventional wisdom suggests. If you factor in the potential of technology and economic incentives, the oil supply becomes virtually unlimited.

Here is a list of the top six things the government can, should, and won’t do to greatly reduce gas prices and six things that are likely to either have no effect or raise them, but are frequently done anyway. (The following post comes from a recent reply to an online forum.)

Top six ways to reduce gas prices:
1. Eliminate direct and indirect sales taxes on gas. (Road money has to come from somewhere of course, but taxes on gas do not provide an efficient means of paying for them.)
2. Eliminate state and federal regulations regarding contaminants and fuel mixtures.
3. Break up the OPEC monopoly by forcefully privatizing oil production in the Middle East.
4. Eliminate anti-trust regulations, especially against oil and processing companies.
5. Sell federal lands, especially in Alaska.
6. Eliminate emissions regulations on cars.

Top six things the government is likely to do that will raise or not affect gas prices:
1. Fuel-efficient cars, and especially federal subsidies for them. The impact on worldwide oil use is too small to matter, but car manufacturers must pass on extra production costs to consumers.
2. The war in Iraq. Obviously, this has raised, not reduced oil prices, as expected.
3. Government price controls on gas. Socialists who think that market prices are set at the whim oil companies while government prices are set according to some form of bureaucratic omniscience are deluding themselves.
4. Boycotts on gas buying = total economic ignorance not worth a response.
5. Public transportation and car-pooling. This may reduce the cost of transportation for individuals, but it will have little impact on global oil prices. Meanwhile, public transportation is subsidized by higher gas taxes.
6. Government-mandated “clean” energy and electric cars. Where do you think the energy for electric batteries comes from? Magic? Like recycling, if it’s not chosen by the market, it’s more likely to waste, not save energy costs.

More ideas.