Obama and the Dictators

Daniel Henninger:

In New York this week, I asked a former Eastern European dissident who spent time in prison under the Communists: “If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo Chávez, what would you think?”

He said: “I would think that I was losing ground.”

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You’ve Just Been Punked by the City of Washington D.C.

The city of Washington D.C. is ticketing people for parking in their own driveways!

It turns out that D.C. has an odd, obscure law stating that the land between the front of your house and the street, otherwise known as your driveway and front yard, falls under a bizarre classification known as “private property set aside for public use.” Essentially, though owners have to pay for its maintenance and upkeep (they can be fined if they don’t), it’s considered public property. Which apparently means that, technically, you can’t park your car on it. The city recently dusted off the law, and began writing parking tickets if any part of a resident’s car is parked between the front facade of their house and the street, even if it’s parked in the driveway.

When Anderson complained, one D.C. official told her that if she wanted, she could pay the city to lease the land between the front of her house and the street, which would allow her to park her car there legally. [emp added]

Upon hearing about this my spouse commented, “No wonder they don’t want citizens to have guns.”

Certainly sounds like a, “Woman! Fetch my Gun!” type of situation. 

If some city official had told me I could lease my own driveway back from the city, I would have been looking around for the hidden cameras. Seriously, this is so bad it’s funny. 

Seriously Pathetic

From a letter to the editor in today’s WSJ:

A few years after retirement I had a chat with an eager young fellow a month away from his MBA in finance at the Wharton School. I asked what appealed to him about finance. “It is so scientific,” he replied. I then asked him what he thought about Long-Term Capital Management. “Never heard of it,” was his answer.

Book Review — Marchant, Decoding the Heavens

Marchant, Jo, Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer–and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets, Da Capo Press, 2009, 328 pp.

Defining the Word “Anachronism”

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the sponge divers of Greece lived through a technical revolution … the appearance of the diving helmet. After many centuries of free diving to harvest local sponges, the new equipment suddenly allowed access to much more of the Mediterranean sea floor and previously unexploited sponge beds. The industry boomed. Inadvertently, the diving helmet also led to the discovery of a shipwreck off the coast of the small island of Antikythera. Amidst the spectacular bronze and marble statues at the wreck site was a strange lunch box-sized lump, covered in a limestone coating from centuries of immersion and distorted by the effects of decomposition and corrosion. Here and there were visible bits of wood and corroded bronze, faint inscriptions of ancient Greek and what appeared to be thin loops or gears.

Compared to the glamorous artworks it was found with, the “lump” was rather unprepossessing and, indeed, it spent most of the 20th century in obscurity. Not knowing what it was, the curators made little effort to preserve the object, and increasingly, it broke into a more and more fragments in the storage rooms of the Athens’ National Archaeological Museum. The early 20th century descriptions made their way into the hands of a physicist and historian of science named Derek De Solla Price. In the 1950s, he made serious efforts to fully explain what it was, culminating in a 1974 book Gears From the Greeks. And it was partly through his efforts that people as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Jacques Cousteau, and Richard Feynman took an interest in the enigmatic archaeological find.

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Waking Up Sleepy Teenagers

Have a teenager that has trouble going to sleep at night and who can’t be gotten out of bed in the morning by any means short of explosives? They might have “delayed sleep phase syndrome” and a simple therapy using special sun glasses and blue colored lights might be the key. 

My son has this pattern. He becomes very active around 9pm and then cannot sleep until 2am or so. Needless to say, he doesn’t want to get out of bed in the morning.  I did the same thing when I was his age. 

I wonder if this is related to artificial lighting? It has been long known that artificial lighting alters the human body in unexpected ways, e.g., causing puberty in girls to start sooner, and this might be another “lightbulb” related phenomenon.

I’m going to give this a whirl with my son using the sunglasses. I’ll let you know if it works.