Category Archives: Idiots

Fetch me a Ten-Story Fork

Idiots

The Space Shuttle Discovery made it down safely. This is a good thing for many reasons, the very least of which is that I won’t look like a ghoulish little shit for writing what follows.

Immediately after Discovery‘s launch, NASA announced that it was grounding the fleet until such time as it could be assured that the falling-foam problem, already thought to be fixed, really was fixed. Make no mistake: I applaud the administrators who made the doubtless-difficult decision to give astronaut safety a higher priority than public relations, and I don’t mean to kick them while they’re down.

But this seems like a good time to cast a critical and unforgiving eye upon the Shuttle program as a whole. I mean, we’re talking about a launch vehicle that was designed more than a quarter-century ago, and has killed an appreciable fraction of its highly-trained passengers. It never worked that well to begin with: it can only get up to Low Earth Orbit, for one thing, and therefore needs an additional booster to launch most satellites and probes.

As ‘reusable’ launch vehicles go, it winds up throwing a goodly amount of material away. The main fuel tank — source of the falling foam that doomed Columbia — burns up the atmosphere and is thus a complete write-off. The solid-rocket boosters are nominally recoverable, but at such expense that it wouldn’t be significantly more expense to build new ones every time. (They disassemble into segments for transport after recovery; the gap between segments is supposed to be sealed by O-rings — the infamous O-rings that hardened in the cold and allowed a jet of flame from the SRBs to lance into Challenger‘s main fuel tank, destroying the entire vehicle.)

All of this is very old news.

It’s fashionable again these days to whine and piss and moan the old refrain that America is losing its competetive edge, that all the good jobs are going overseas, and so on ad nauseam. So let’s do something about it. Let’s put our heads together, let’s loosen the purse strings — and for fuck’s sake, someone please promise Burt Rutan free drinks or whatever the hell it is he likes, if that’s what it takes to get him to join the huddle — and let’s design and build something truly audacious, so that we can finally send the Shuttle off to its well-earned retirement.

Gee, that’s a… shame

Idiots

Russia’s biggest spammer was brutally beaten to death this weekend, and I find that my laments have more to do with the murderers’ failure to film the whole thing pour encourager les autres, and their choice of a spammer relatively unknown in my part of the world, than with the supposed sanctity of human life.

I’d ask, rhetorically, whether this makes me evil, but the truth is that I don’t care. A “yes” wouldn’t change my mind in the slightest, so buggrit.

Instant Karma

Idiots

Last night, driving home around 9:30, I saw the telltale burst of dim orange sparks on the highway indicating that the occupant of the car 100 or so feet ahead of me had tossed a lit cigarette out the window.

Oh, well. It’s irritating and makes you wish for something unpleasant to happen to the thoughtless oaf who did it, but it’s something you see every day.

What you don’t see every day is the police cruiser that has just lazily passed you — causing you to throw a quick, anxious glance at the speedometer, of course, because you’re only human — put on a burst of speed, cut in its lights, and flag the offender over. It made my evening. I’m sure it didn’t make the butt-head driver’s, but perhaps it’ll prompt him to think twice the next time he’s tempted to dispose of a lit cigarette in the tinder-dry environs of summertime California.

Beatings all ’round

Idiots, Politics

“It was the kind of crowd that would have made the Fool Killer lower his club and shake his head and walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Where to begin with this one? Well, with the facts, I suppose.

  1. Newsweek publishes a small sidebar item alleging that interrogators at Guantanamo flushed a copy of the Qur’an down a toilet.
  2. The faithful in Afghanistan, incensed by this, stage riots in which several persons are killed.
  3. Newsweek determines that it cannot substantiate the allegation, and retracts it.
  4. The White House, scrupulous and unwavering adherent to the absolute truth that it is, comes down with the righteous indignation of injured virtue on Newsweek for running with something it wasn’t absolutely certain about, insinuating in the process that the blood of the dead Afghans is solely on Newsweek‘s hands. (Because this is, after all, a sentence in the exalted Periscope section, by all that’s holy, not something trivial like the decision to invade and ineptly occupy a fractious country in one of the most volatile regions in the world.)

    Stepping in to assist with the arduous and thankless task of pillorying Newsweek is the full force of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders and the rest of the Jingosphere, who are never so indignant about the death of Muslims as when liberals or the mainstream media might somehow be implicated.

  5. A Pentagon investigation prompted by the furor over the Newsweek report determines that while it cannot be substantiated that the Qur’an was ever flushed down a toilet, it was definitely stepped on, kicked, and splashed — inadvertently, it would seem — with urine. In the proud tradition of righteous vindication and unblemished consciences since time immemorial, these findings are released late on a Friday afternoon, ensuring that they would quickly be plowed under by the weekend news cycle.

There is so much scorn and contempt to be dished out here that it’s hard to decide who gets the first helping.

The administration gets its usual generous serving, of course — this time for having the gall and effrontery to accuse Newsweek of insufficient regard for the truth. This from the people with such a long record of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies that we’ll need to devise a new numbering scheme just to catalog them all. It takes a certain kind of genius to straight-facedly accuse others of playing fast and loose with the facts when you yourself have swept so much dirt under the rug that the resulting bulge is making it hard to keep the lamps standing. It’s a kind of genius I don’t understand, and hope I never will.

Let’s save a healthy portion of the aforementioned scorn and contempt for the rioters, though. You need to be in possession of a highly-refined grade of dumbshit to let yourself, or fifteen of your countrymen, get killed over a book. I don’t care if it’s a holy book. If your God is so small and weak that treating a copy of His words with disrespect actually diminshes Him, then He and you both have more pressing problems.

Lest you think that I’m being cavalier because it’s not my holy book, let me disabuse you. You can damage or destroy as many copies of things I hold dear as you have the energy for. Shred them. Burn them. Piss on them. Wipe your ass with them. I don’t care. Because they are merely symbols, representations of things that cannot be destroyed unless you manage to kill every last person who knows and loves them. If you can’t understand the distinction, then you probably get a lot of weird looks in restaurants, too, because you must wind up forgetting yourself and taking a bite out of the pictures in the menu from time to time.

About the only people who don’t wind up looking bad in this entire pathetic shitstorm are the folks at Newsweek. They got the essence of the story right, if not its details. The fact that other people were stupid enough to kill or die over it is not Newsweek‘s fault. When it was revealed that they’d made a factual mistake, they went into a veritable frenzy of excruciatingly public self-examination, vowing to amend their processes in ways that would prevent a recurrence. If I’m worried about anything as regards them, it’s not that they’ll make a similar mistake again, but that this whole sorry affair has left them so cautious as to be ineffective. The people running the clown show need more scrutiny, not less, and Newsweek needs to keep its part to provide it.

Today, on The Clown Show

Idiots, Politics

President Bush simultaneously derides an Amnesty International report condemning conditions at Guantanamo Bay — where people are held without, you know, so much as the pretense of due process — as “absurd”, and then proceeds almost in the same breath to decry the conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, piously declaring that “Here, you’re innocent until proven guilty and it appeared to us, at least people in my administration, that it looked like he had been judged guilty prior to having a fair trial.”

Hee hee ha ha ho ho… sob. We’ve done it. We’ve crossed some kind of event horizon from which not even irony can escape.

If you’ll excuse me, I need to beat my head bloody on the desk.

Hate Sink

Hardware, Idiots

A few moons ago, I acquired a Thermaltake PIPE101 heat sink, a sexy little skived-copper-fin-and-heat-pipe affair. Well, okay, sexy, but not exactly “little”. It has mounting holes for a 92-mm fan, which makes it a mite larger than the typical heatsink.

This was originally a selling point, as I am a student of the big-slow-fan school of quiet cooling, but it turns out that the motherboard of the Athlon XP machine I was planning to put it into places the processor socket near the very upper edge of the motherboard, where it practically abuts the power supply. The PIPE101 won’t fit there. Oops.

So I put it aside, thinking that since it could also be used as a Socket 939 heatsink, I’d have occasion to use it whenever I got around to building an Athlon 64 machine, something I knew I’d do eventually.

Or maybe not. Because, in order to do triple duty as a Socket A/Socket 478/Socket 939 heat sink, the PIPE101 eschews most of the benefits of the AMD-designed retention bracket in favor of its own screw-in metallic clip. This clip has two possible orientations, and it’s hard to tell from the indistinct pictures in Thermaltake’s documentation which one you’re supposed to use, but in a sense it doesn’t matter: they both would have required exerting an amount of pressure upon the whole assembly that, frankly, terrified me.

Screw that, I decided. I am not jepoardizing my $350 processor-plus-motherboard investment just to save my pride and a $30 heat sink. I wound up using the AMD heat sink instead; said sink seems reasonable, is designed to clip into the AMD-designed retention bracket, and uses an elegant lever-arm mechanism to ensure adequate tension without dangerously heroic effort.

Memo to self:

  • Think long and hard before buying anything from Thermaltake ever again. Thermalright and Arctic Cooling both make nice gear whose installation requirements seem considerably saner.
  • Try to buy a heat sink that is designed for your particular processor, rather than a jack-of-all-trades design, unless you’re sure that the latter is sufficiently well-engineered to work cleanly with your hardware.
  • Check the fit on any prospective heat sink before you spend the better part of an hour lapping it. Idiot.

Memo to would-be vendors of aftermarket coolers:

  • With Socket 478 and Socket 939, Intel and AMD both went to the trouble of designing retention brackets that could realistically support the kind of large, heavy heat sinks needed to dispose of the thermal waste their processors produced. These brackets, while differing from one another, were both created with thought and care, and, when properly used, allow the installation of heat sinks without requring excessive force or pressure.

    Use them, you wankers. The next time I open a heat-sink package and find some bullshit little stamped-sheet-metal “adapter” that I have to screw into some part of my motherboard before I can get down to business, I’m going to hurt someone. That goes double if I have to remove part of the existing mounting hardware first.

Uh, anybody want to buy a barely-used heat sink? It’s been lapped and everything, and should work very nicely on any Socket A motherboard with enough room. Act now, and I’ll even throw in a 92-mm fan for free.

The Cargo Cult Erects Monuments

Idiots, Travel

Should I have entertained any lingering suspicion that the permissive treatment I recieved at the Freer Gallery, at odds with the written policy hanging before my eyes, was some kind of anomaly, it was dispelled at the Museum of Natural History.

Like the Freer Gallery, the museum greeted visitors with a placard expressly forbidding weapons. (I don’t carry the knife for use as a weapon, but it’s pretty hard to argue that three inches of honed steel couldn’t be put to offensive use by one with the right inclination.) It also forbade food. Finally, it required that visitors pass through a metal detector before entering the museum. Figuring that we were well beyond the gray area, I put the knife in the bag containing our dim sum and handed the bag to the attending guard.

He poked disinterestedly at the food containers and handed the whole thing back to me. Shrugging, I returned the knife to my back pocket and walked through the detector. Some understanding of the game’s rules was beginning to dawn, and so I wasn’t entirely surprised when it let me through without a hiccough. I did have to wonder just how much metal I would need to carry before raising a red flag, but never mind.

The gemstone and mineral exhibit was impressive, although the entomological section was disappointing. (All the exhibits were dead. Dead, dead, dead. I’ve seen more impressive living specimens at the Memphis zoo, and more impressive dead ones on the walls of Celina’s co-worker‘s office.)

“You missed all the fun.”

Idiots, Travel

It figures that if we happen to be visiting the nation’s capital during the occurrence of a minor and ultimately harmless security incident that winds up producing a panicked and disorderly evacuation of numerous federal edifices and therefore making the national news, Celina and I will somehow find a way to be on a clothes-shopping trip in another part of town when all the excitement goes down.

This seems to be an extension of the same principle whereby we seem to be elsewhere whenever a really interesting earthquake hits the Bay Area; in both instances, I don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

Cargo-Cult Security

Idiots, Travel

Being a well-trained little sheep, I made sure to place my my clip knife into my checked baggage. Once we landed in D.C., though, I resumed carrying it in my back pocket. It didn’t occur to me, though they’re all on the National Mall and therefore within line-of-sight of the Capitol, that the museums we were planning to visit might have developed their own flavor of post-9/11 paranoia.

At the door of the Freer Gallery, we encountered a guard whose duty it was to search Celina’s purse, using a small dowel to poke about the interior without placing her hands in jeopardy. While she went about her task, I read the sign behind her, which declared that knives, among other things, were barred from the museum.

Wanting to be a good citizen — and, I’ll admit, wanting to avoid being raped right through my pants should I later be found out — I unclipped my knife, held it out to the guard on my open palm, and asked as politely as I could if I might be permitted to check it.

She paused and said, almost apologetically, “Oh, that’s okay, sir — we only check bags.” So in spite of the sign at her back expressly forbidding it, and despite my complete willingness to check it, I would up carrying the knife through the museum, because doing otherwise would have required causing a fuss.

I really don’t know what to say.