Dear God, they invented a universal translator…

I wonder if Uhura ever told Kirk…”Yeah…there’s an app for that.”

Jamie posted this at 11:31 AM CDT on Friday, December 17th, 2010 as Nerdom

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Q: What happens when an alligator bites an electric eel?

Tom posted this at 4:07 PM CDT on Thursday, December 16th, 2010 as Animal Kingdom Strikes Back

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I recently had something of a personal victory in the criminal justice system. I played a very small role in the prosecution of two murderers who picked up a girl at a bar on Mardis Gras, killed her, dumped her body in the country, and set her on fire. The murderess got 60 years, her husband got life.

Seeing the inside of such a prosecution shows the true inadequacies of the legal system. We got, more or less, as strong a punishment as the law allowed for these two. Yet Christy’s still dead, her mother still mourns her, her friends still miss her, and, something that is frequently overlooked, the murderers have a young child who will grow up without his parents, and who will one day learn that his parents are monsters. In a murder case, there is no justice to be done; there is only vengeance to be had, and a society that needs protecting.

What is subtly horrifying about the case is that most of the investigation seems to have revolved around clues left from the attempt to burn the body (video surveillance from a gas station where they bought gas and a can; the murderess’s ID left beside the body, evidently in a hare-brained identity theft scheme). Had they just picked the girl up, murdered her, then dumped the body, there’s a decent chance they would have gotten away with it.

Getting away with murder is not at all an uncommon thing in America. About 1/3 of murders seem to go unsolved, and this is an improvement from a few years ago, when 40% went unsolved. With any “luck” – if you will – these cases may be solved at a later date. Or they might not be; viewers of Cold Case would be disappointed severely to learn the actual clearance rates for cold cases.

But of course, those clearance rates reflect only those murders we know of. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly juveniles, are reported missing. The vast majority are found, and returned home in one piece. But thousands of people each year simply disappear and are never seen again. Perhaps they run away, perhaps they’ve lost their memory, perhaps they died in an accident in the woods, or perhaps they were killed by people more adept at disposing of bodies than the Hernandezes. We can guess, but we can’t know.

459 murder victims have been found in the last 40 years along our nation’s interstates. Nearly all of these cases go unsolved because they appear to be committed by long-haul truckers who pick up people in one place and dump them in another. The FBI seems to think many of these crimes were committed by serial killers, and that may be correct.

It seems to me that if you’re going to kill a prostitute or hitchhiker and dump the body in west Texas, simply driving one or two miles off of the interstate would allow you easily to leave the body in a place where it wouldn’t be found. We can only calculate the number of such bodies in our nightmares.

It’s a dangerous world out there, probably more dangerous than most (any?) of us realize. Sometimes we can have to look at the crimes we solve – and how easily they could have slipped through the cracks – to get a terrifying glimpse at how many we don’t.

Apollo posted this at 2:03 PM CDT on Sunday, December 12th, 2010 as Tragedy

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Like 90% of job-seeking Americans, I’m employed and was not able to watch this live. But I wish I had.

The Greatest Orator in All Space-Time had to bring in Bubba to argue for his polices? And then Barry left the stage? These are the sorts of things a man is supposed to be able to do for himself. Is he going to call in Bubba tonight to aid in putting the O back in Mrs. O? Since Barry’s now abandoned any pretenses of being a man, she should be so lucky.

This is embarrassing. Really, really embarrassing. Let’s not forget, among other things, that whatever Clinton’s reputation for moderation and fiscal Blue Doggism, he was a tax hiker. In 1992, he campaigned saying that we had “the worst economy in 50 years,” and then promptly raised taxes after he got into office. Now he’s telling us that not raising taxes is the way to economic growth. And he’s more credible on this issue than The Most Persuasive Creature Since That Snake That Got Eve To Eat That Apple? Wow.

UPDATE: Here’s the video

Apollo posted this at 8:22 PM CDT on Friday, December 10th, 2010 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, CHANGE!

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This is Great-Leap-Forward-level economic planning.

Apollo posted this at 7:48 PM CDT on Friday, December 10th, 2010 as An Insult to Drunken Sailors, CHANGE!

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Hiring a bar tender for a party in a 400 sq. foot apartment? Not even mixing drinks, but pouring punch into cups?

“In my opinion, if you don’t have a bartender at your party, you’re a loser,” said Dustin Terry, who lives a floor below Ms. Argiro and said his job was to get models and Saudi royalty into hot clubs. “The bartender brings class and sophistication.”

“If you can’t afford to hire a bartender,” he added, “you shouldn’t be having a party.”

But I’m already paying a valet to park cars in my driveway, a doorman to open the door, a waiter so that my guests don’t have to go to the counter to get more food, as well as a man I pay to wait around and fill in if my valet, doorman, or waiter gets injured sometime during the night (honestly, imagine the mortification at having to inform guests that they’re going to have to open the door for themselves on the way out just because your doorman pulled a hamstring earlier in the evening). If I have to hire someone else, I won’t be able to afford such high status drinks as “vodka punch” and “rum eggnog;” I’d probably have to consolidate the two into some sort of dreadful vodka eggnog. But at least it would be poured by a guy in a black turtleneck, so perhaps it’d be worth it.

Hired help telegraphs a new maturity and polish, said Marc Levine, who runs Premier Party Servers and Model Bartenders, which cater parties in New York and other cities. “You’re bringing your party to the next level, stepping away from the college kegger,” he said, “and actually entertaining in your New York City apartment.” 

Every time I hear someone say “New York City” like it’s something special, I think of these old commercials:

And there’s a practical consideration. “Hosts don’t want to have to look after their guests’ needs,” said Matt Solan, a bartender who works many such small locations. “But they also want a level of prestige.”

The rule is, I’ll pour you one drink, and after that if you need another, you know where it’s at.

The job may also include helping the host clear tabletops throughout the night, answering the door and hanging up coats. Despite that, Mr. Solan said, “People’s expectations can be somewhat low,” especially when the hosts are young and self-conscious about hiring help. “They’re happy when you just circulate, grabbing garbage,” like dirty cups and cocktail napkins.

Hah! The New Yorkers are so rich and classy that they hire bartenders, even though they don’t know what bartenders are supposed to do. As evidenced by . . .

David Shiovitz, who runs Columbia Bartenders, which sends out Columbia University undergraduates and graduate students, said that, were his bartenders asked, say, to strip or dance, “They have the right to say, ‘That’s not in my contract,’ ” he said.

Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, says “I’m a sophisticated young adult now” quite like hiring an undergrad to pour rum punch into cups and then pressuring him to take off his pants for your guests’ amusement.

Another guest, Eric Carson, 32, a stock trader who lives in nearby Greenpoint, agreed that the bartender added class. “I feel very sophisticated at this party,” he said. “And I usually feel like a complete dirt bag.”

Bartender wages: $195. Bartender tips: $80. Making your dirtbag friends feel sophisticated: Umm, I guess that costs about $275. Seems like it’d be cheaper just to ditch the dirtbags and get sophisticated friends who can pour their own damned drinks.

Apollo posted this at 9:53 AM CDT on Friday, December 10th, 2010 as Amer-I-Can!, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

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Ladies and gentlemen, not only have we found a super-earth planet orbiting another star, we have sufficient information to know the contents of its atmosphere and surface gravity.  Coincidentally, the a latter is almost the same as our own.

Tom posted this at 9:59 AM CDT on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 as Science!

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The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.

But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

These numbers are part of why those of us who grew up in rural parts of the country simply don’t comprehend the gun-grabbing impulses of some. Every single year, millions of Americans carry high power rifles into the woods and more or less do as they please – some shoot at deer, some just drink a lot – and it is a complete non-story. The number of people injured and killed by these guns will pale in comparison to those injured and killed in driving accidents during the same time period.

But however well or badly we handle our guns, woe will befall he who thinks he can conquer America. 500 years ago, Machiavelli compared ancient Persia with then-modern France. Persia was highly centralized, so the emperor was firmly in control of all parts of his realm, and could muster enormous numbers of men to any part of the country. But if you could defeat that army and the central authority that raised it, then you would almost immediately control the whole nation, as Alexander showed. Medieval France, on the other hand, was very decentralized, with petty dukes controlling small centers of power throughout the country. Because of this, the king of France had only marginal control over vast swaths of his country , but no invader could stand a chance at conquering France because of all the small bands of local opposition.

I wish N.M. was around today, if only to hear the praise he would have for a nation that every year assembles and then disbands the world’s largest army purely for the purpose of managing its deer population. For millenia, philosophers have pondered how one can maintain a well-armed population that can fend off all attackers, while simultaneously maintaining ordered governance.  In America, we’ve fulfilled this dream, and we’ve done it so well and so effortlessly that no one seems to have noticed.

Apollo posted this at 2:12 AM CDT on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 as Amer-I-Can!, Politics

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This video’s commentary/narration is obviously one-sided, but it’s impossible to watch it without getting angry.  If you don’t have the time to watch the full video, the TSA harasses a woman for 40 minutes because she asked that her breast milk not be xrayed.  She had printed out instructions from the TSA’s website that basically back her up.  They threatened to arrest her for her being uncooperative, refused to let her see her own items, forced her to go through the x-ray machine multiple times, and gave her the full pat-down.

The unforced insanity, heartless bureaucracy, and invasiveness are appalling for obvious reasons and thoroughly deserving of our outage (they actually suggested a woman throw her breast milk in the trash; who does that?).  But I’d like to call attention to the glass-walled “Special Inspection” booth the passenger is forced to spend 40 minutes in while she pleads her case.

Putting this device where it is — right in the center of the screening area — is something a free people should never have to endure.  I’m sure the TSA justifies it as some sort of modern-day Panopticon, but the better analogy is to a public stocks.  Silently, and without having to say a single word, the TSA can intimidate dozens of other travelers into submission.

See that woman there?  She caused us trouble.  You don’t want to cause trouble do you?  Have a nice day, sir.  Hope you don’t miss your flight.

The TSA has almost certainly made us marginally safer through deterrence, despite the fact that they’ve never actually caught a terrorist in the act; at best, they’re only capable of catching the last unsuccessful bomber (God only knows what they’ll do when al-Qaeda uses a bomb hidden in a body cavity) .  But this is madness.  As can be said of so much of the security measures passed since 9/11 the costs vastly outweigh the benefits.  We’re dealing with a bunch of losers who try to kill a few hundred people a couple of times a year and who haven’t been successful at it in over nine years.

They’re not worth it.

H/T: Megan McArdle

Tom posted this at 11:02 AM CDT on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 as Liberty and/or Security

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