Shannon Love

I’m More Awesome Than You CAN Imagine

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Sorry I haven’t been blogging any during the last eight months but the truth is that I’ve been wrestling with a big decision that affects everyone and I didn’t quite know how to explain it. Now, I’ve come to a decision and I think it only right that I inform you all of it so that you have some time to prepare yourself.

Here goes… I’m turning off the Universe.

Yep, that’s right, the whole shebang, from littlest Higgs Boson to the greatest galaxy clusters. Say goodnight, Gracie.

I know this will be hard to accept, but, you see, you’re not real. I mean, you are real as far as the experience of yourself and every other human being you know of but you aren’t, you know, real real.

I’m not explaining this very well.

You see, I wrote you. That is to say I programmed you.   I programmed you and every other person, place and thing in your universe. You’re  just a simulation, a very big video game,  based loosely on once-real people, places and things that I created. Not only did I create the simulation but I can start it, stop it, rewind it and alter it at will.

And all that kinda makes me god. I mean not GOD god but just god of the universe you experience. Let’s just say, “god as far as you are concerned.”

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Occupy Wall Street: Fascists Are More Organized

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An Occupy Wall Street (Boston) person whines that his movement has become “fascist”.

I’d be more impressed with this supposed epiphany if people like that didn’t define “fascist” as, “someone who told me no.”

The Occupiers are not naive, idealistic, children. They do not act out of a desire for the greater good. They act out of megalomania. They see themselves as some kind of Nietzschean supermen whose superhuman political insight and moral superiority mean they don’t have to follow the same rules as anyone else.

They’re special and get to occupy public property for their sole use. They’re special and get to violate the property and movement rights of others. They’re special and get to cost other people their jobs and livelihood without consequence. They’re special and nobody else has the moral right to restrain them in any way or refuse their dictates. It follows that no one has the moral authority to tell them “no”. Anyone who does tell them “no” is axiomatically evil and the worst kind of evil at that, i.e., fascist.

That includes their fellow ideologues.

Communists and fascists were driven by a similar self-righteous arrogance but both philosophies held that in the grand scheme of things, individuals were unimportant.

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More Nervous than a Mythbuster’s Insurance Agent

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Mythbusters is a science popular show on the Discovery channel. They test urban myths and the like using a variety of cleverly improvised experiments.  They often say their insurance company has stopped them from doing this or that experiment. I really believe that. A lot of their stuff is clearly very dangerous despite their precautions.

When I see someone sweating something, I often quip, “He looks more nervous than a Mythbuster’s insurance agent.”

Well, it looks like the Mythbuster’s insurance agent really has something to sweat about now. During an experiment at the Alameda county bomb range that involved firing a large blackpowder cannon with what looked like an 8-12 inch cannonball, the ball skipped out of the range and shot through a house in the nearby suburban neighborhood.

Nobody was hurt but it’s California so they’re going to get sued for all kinds of emotional trauma.

When I told this my son observed, “That’s seems like (an assumed) risk of living near a bomb range.” Yep, but that won’t help.

I hope it doesn’t do in the show.

All Attacks Aren’t the Same. That’s the Surprise.

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So, a new memo has surfaced regarding US military intelligence prior to Pearl Harbor.

In the newly revealed 20-page memo from FDR’s declassified FBI file, the Office of Naval Intelligence on December 4 warned, “In anticipation of open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal and the Territory of Hawaii.”

That’s supposed to be a significant revelations? What, previous memos only warned about Japan’s keen interest in Minnesota? I hate to tell people who are all a twitter about this memo and other similar “revelations” but nobody in the American military or government was really surprised there was an attack on Pearl Harbor or any other major US pacific military asset. The entire Pacific was under a war warning and the entire US military was prepping for a possible Japanese attack somewhere. The US carriers were not caught at Pearl Harbor because they had been deployed to ferry aircraft to points in the western Pacific where an attack was anticipated, e.g., Wake Island.

Pearl Harbor wasn’t a surprise of intent, it was a surprise of capability.

No one in the US Navy thought the Japanese had the physical capability to strike Pearl Harbor with carrier aircraft. That was the surprise.

Yamamoto surprised the US Navy, and everyone else, because he was a “black swan”, i.e., a rare and unpredictable outlier.  

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Aptera: The Failure of Design By Stated Preferences

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Aptera, the 120-300mpg car design, has shuttered it doors for good as I predicted it would three years ago.

The failure of Aptera and similar designs reveals the real-world functional differences between stated preferences i.e. what people tell themselves and others they want, and revealed preferences i.e. the things people actually end up choosing. People tell car designers and manufactures they want and will buy an inexpensive, efficient, two-seater commuter car but when it comes to putting money down for one they don’t follow through.

The conflict between stated and revealed preferences has significant political ramifications.

Looking back over my previous post on Aptera and the subsequent comments, it’s clear that Aptera specifically failed for three major reason:

  1. It was uni-dimensional design that sacrificed every other functionality for fuel efficiency.
  2. Cars are general tools. Every if  people spend 80% of their milage commenting, they still have other task the car needs to perform to some degree. A car that cannot fulfill these secondary task necessitates that the car owner spend time and money finding other solutions. That additional expense usually destroys any economic advantage the unidimensional design purports to offers.
  3. The Aptera specifically represented nothing knew. Everything in the design had been repeatedly tried before and always failed. Specifically, highly efficient, two-seater commuter cars using a wide array of  technologies have been repeatedly offered since at least the 1920s in all parts of the world. They all failed to catch on.

The last reason brings me to the “Smart” car. Marketed as “unboring”, “uncluttered” and the “uncar”, they should have added “unusable” and “unsellable”.  The Smart car is another in a long, long, long list of attempts at a highly efficient, two seater, urban car. Arguably, it could be the best attempt ever made. It’s failure should, but won’t, drive a stake into the two-seater commuter car concept.

The Smart car’s design and technology are impressive.

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