Funmurphys: the Blog

Alls Well That Ends Well

The weather this year has had an unusual pattern - nice weather on the weekend, lousy weather during the week. Normally it's the other way around, although last weekend the weather wasn't nice. I ought to know, I was out in it camping with the scouts again. I may have to keep going until we get a nice weekend. It could have been worse - the rain came after the tents were up on Friday night and we are safe and snug in our, err, sleeping bags. It seems to be a tradition that we pitch our tents in the dark, which leads to surprises in the morning -- our worse, in the night.

Here the new scouts are getting instruction from the Senior Patrol Leader the night we arrived:

Read on for more fun filled photos and exciting adventures...

Those home improvement shows have designers always going on about bringing the outdoors in. Well, look at a picture of the scouts kitchen and tell me if we succeeded or not:

What's cooking? Pancakes? I think those are more like fried dough balls, but good!

We were at Pere Marquette state park, and this is the Boy Scouts, so we hiked. We came across a tree recently blown over right on the trail (yes, we did manage to get through):

Along the way every now and then you could glimpse the river and its plain through the trees:

Eventually we made our way to the twin shelter, which was a nice place to rest and admire the view:

Although the site itself was gorgeous:

But that wasn't our ultimate destination, just a waystop along the way. So we pressed on, upward, onward, excelsior! At last we made it to McAdam's Peak and the view from there is quite nice:

This park is famous for the Bald Eagles you can see in winter, but we weren't there in the winter. So it was back down to the visitor's center via the ravine trail (I'm glad we went down it, not up it):

That night we had a fire - and there are few things nicer than a fire on a cold spring night (especially when you don't have to help gather the wood):

The weekend was exceptionally windy, which made the cold much worse. Several of the tents were blown over, including mine. Here we are Sunday morning making ready to leave. That's my tent on it's side - I tipped it over to dry the underside which was still wet from the night before:

The drive alongside the rivers home was pretty, and the bridge at Alton is a sight worth seeing all on its own. But the best part was the long hot shower at journey's end.

I Want Your Pity

I've been sick all week with a bad cold. Not enough to force me to stay in my bed all day, but enough to ruin the week. When I'm not hacking up a lung, I feel like I'm lost in the fog. The weather around here hasn't helped - what happened to those warm sunny days? Cold and wet is no way to go through life.

Another Harvest of Insights from Mignon McLaughlin

More aphorisms from "The Neurotic's Notebook" (still out of print, but worth buying second hand).

Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway.

Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we never had, for the first involves knowledge and pleasure, the second only ignorance and pain.

True remorse is never just regret over consequence; it is regret over motive.

Self-discipline is the hardest thing to learn; you need self-discipline to learn it.

If despair will yield at all, it will yield to a good night's sleep.

Altruism is a hard master, but so is opportunism.

The Prodigal Returns

John Zimmer at Letters from Babylon has a great post, The Prodigal Brother contemplating my favorite parable of Jesus: the prodigal son. There are a couple of major lessons in the parable, one for the son and one for the brother. The son's lesson is about receiving God's love and forgiveness, and the brother's lesson is about extending God's love and forgiveness to others. They are both hard lessons to really learn and understand.

Vive La Difference

Another scandal, another politician resigns in disgrace. OK, it happened in the Czech Republic, but it's something that happens everywhere. And it's the sort of thing that may lead you to believe that democracies are more corrupt than dictatorships. But the true difference is that in functioning democracies corruption is found out and punished, while in dictatorships even if the corruption is found out it is rarely punished.

Modernism

It's a good thing Chess wasn't invented in the video game era, as this Gamespot chess review reveals. I wonder what they would have thought of Go.

Link via Psychochild's Blog.

Faded Glory

Why doesn't the space program get much coverage these days? I know I'm a tech head and all, but our endevours in space get much less coverage than it deserves. How many people even know we have a crewed international space station, let alone we just had a change in crew up there?

A Quintet of Quotes from the "Neurotic's Notebook" by Mignon McLaughlin

It's out of print, but worth picking up second hand.

Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our full powers.

Try as we will, we cannot honestly recall our youth, for we have lost its main ingredient: suspense.

You will turn over many a futile new leaf until you learn we must all write on the scratched-out pages.

We long for self-confidence, till we look at the people who have it.

Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all of the difference.

Let's Give Them Something To Think About

The ChicagoBoyz take on reproductive freedom and marvel at the attempt in Illinois to restrict ultrasound so that pregnant women can't get an ultrasound without a doctor's permission because it's an effective tool in persuading women not to have an abortion (yes, I get letters from the local Crisis Pregnancy Resource Center requesting money to buy such machines because they are effective, so here's the proof that they really are). So much for "hands off my body".

Businessweek has discovered a story that's bound to get every blog in the country to link to them -- "Blogs Will Change Your Business ". With lines like "Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business -- including yours." how can any blogger resist linking? And they even do it in a traditional blog form, so we can't even ridicule them as clueless MSM. Insidious.

Armavirumque takes a look at the new pope's elevation in such an educated manner I'm not sure I followed. But I did understand his dig at Andrew Sullivan, even if it wasn't as graphic as Wizbang!'s: (how's that for some punctuation)

Cafe Hayek talks international trade in such a down to earth way I clearly understood it.

The Japanese have apologized, again, for all the really awful things they did in WWII. Will this smooth the waters over with China? Beats me, because while I think even the Chinese goverment is kinda hoping this dies down, they can't be seen as being soft on Japan.

Cronaca complains about the ongoing destruction of the Temple Mount at the hands of the Islamic Waqf, and wonders where the howls of outrage are. Me too, so according to Business Week I'm doing the most I can to help just by posting this.

Over at Professor Bainbridge's I discovered a readibility test and of course I plugged in the ol' web page. I'm not sure if the blog roll distorts the results, but here they are anyway:

Readability Results for http://www.funmurphys.com/blog

Readability Results

Summary	Value
Total sentences	522
Total words	5,306
Average words per Sentence	10.16
Words with 1 Syllable	3,640
Words with 2 Syllables	1,064
Words with 3 Syllables	427
Words with 4 or more Syllables	175
Percentage of word with three or more syllables	11.35%
Average Syllables per Word	1.46
Gunning Fog Index	8.60
Flesch Reading Ease	72.97
Flesch-Kincaid Grade	5.61

What's it mean? I write at the level of popular novels, I'm a scosh too readable, and people who passed at least the fifth grade should be able to read me.

Mary Madigan at Michael Totten's (that's the trouble with naming your blog after yourself -- hey, you could have used the word eponymous and kept the fifth graders at bay -- then invite other people to post) looks at love of Armaggedon amongst the fringe of the environmentalists.

President Bush keeps shaking things up -- now he's named a Marine as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (shouldn't that be Chief of the JCS?). No word on the Navy's reaction.

The Vodka Pundit's Sidekick writes about the biggest story you're not reading about: "And what a story! It's got corruption, Kennedys, secret informants, Clintons, even weird sexual allegations." Hey, I want to read about that!

In a move that should surprise nobody, the woman who claimed to have found a finger tip in a bowl of chilli at Wendy's was arrested today. I watch those shows on the food channel, (Unwrapped and The Secret Life Of -- both of which you ought to be watching too), so I know if somebody loses a finger anywhere near the chilli while being made, they stop the line and if they can't find the finger, they dump the chilli because that's a lot cheaper than paying a claim down the road when someone else finds the finger. And nobody, nobody, overlooks losing one and half inches of a finger.

Speaking of food, Tom Maguire links to a NYT article that tells us that contrary to what's been said in the past, that whole overweight thing, don't worry. A few extra pounds is actually a good thing, at least when it comes to life expectancy. Tying your shoes, well, that's a different problem. Now I can get back to ordering chilli from Wendy's with neither worry nor guilt. I remember my local paper, the St. Awful, doing front page articles and writing fulminating editorials when the CDC was telling us that obesity was the number 2 cause of death. I'm not holding my breath (because that would lead to death!) for them to run front page articles and write fulminating editorials about how parts of the CDC are trying to scare us to death, since that's pretty much the press's stock in trade.

Blognor Regnis provides reason 793 why I don't respect academics. I do respect people who, through no fault of their own, are academics.

Speaking of Chilli, the first census of gut bacteria was taken by a fellow Standford man and found 395 variety of microbe living in healthy guts. Just remember, bacteria in the human body outnumber human cells by a factor of 10, and counting the bacteria that live on the outside, people are really just a big bacteria trellis. And in the category of information I didn't want to know, the weight of a human turd is half bacteria. And in the category of information I can use, I can blame my weight on the efficiency of my gut bacteria. I'm not overweight, I'm improving my life expectancy through superior bacteria.

Spore

Greg Costikyan isn't the only person to notice that the ever increasing budgets for games harms games and the industry. In fact, Greg is quite bleak in his outlook.

Will Wright, the Will Wright, has noticed and is trying to do something about it with a game called spore. The idea is in line with a lot of his open ended sims-type games: The game provides the tools, the players provide the content. Spore promises to be another groundbreaking, huge selling game from Wright. Let's hope that helps to avert the future Greg sees and laments. And while money seems to be the limiting factor on making games, time is the limiting factor in me playing games.

I used to talk about Wright like Woody Allen (I liked his earlier, fun games, but didn't care for the later, too controlling games) but Spore promises to break that complaint. Thanks, Tanya, for letting me know how I'll be spending my time in the future.

What Are They Thinking?

I'm filing this under solution in search of a problem -- Google will keep track of all your search requests for you. Thanks Google, but that helps me how? If I want to keep track of something I've found, I use a bookmark. Very handy, those. Perhaps Google hasn't heard of them.

It's not a savvy public relations move - Americans are down right privacy paranoid these days, and few of us are comfortable with the thought of anybody keeping track of every search we ever make. Now I understand that you have to register and then log in to have your searches remembered, but the perception is going to be that Google is keeping track. And if people get to thinking and consider that their ISPs can keep track of that plus all the web sites they've ever visited, the country is going to get one great big queesy feeling -- I could even see a bout of legislation coming on. Nope, somethings are best left unremarked and hopefully unthought of.

I'm Perfect, You're Not

As I have two Fruit of the Murphy Loins, I find the cell phone to be indespensable to the modern parent. The ability to coordinate my movement with my other leader has saved the day on more than one occasion - most recently when I summoned breakfast at the chess supernationals. But I find that it does reinforce a lot of bad behavior in people - poor driving, incessant chattering, loudmouthery, just general obnoxiousness and cluelessness. Last night when we were leaving a restaurant, a gentleman was talking on his cell phone squarely blocking the exit door. We were not quiet entering the vestibule; my loud "excuse me" caused no change in his location; only when I reached around Sir Clueless to shove open the door did he move slowly out of the way without apology or even any acknowledgment of our existance. I have no idea what he was discussing, but I know it wasn't that important.

People, let's be aware out there.

The Undiscovered Country

Powerline has reprinted the best piece on the relationship of blogging to newspapers I've read yet. Here's a taste of what Phil Boas had to say:

Here’s what newspaper editors and writers should know about this new Internet phenomenon. Bloggers don’t have much respect for you. You are the "legacy media," the MSM. You’re the Roman Catholic Church to their Martin Luther and his new high-speed cable modem. To Hugh Hewitt (hughhewitt.com), the blogosphere’s leading cheerleader and one of its most polished practitioners, you are Stalingrad in 1944. Your institutions are hollowed out and your walls are scorched.

But of course, Stalingrad held, didn’t it. And that gets me to the second definition of bloggers. They are your light in the tunnel. The newspaper industry has known for a long time that eventually wood pulp would give way to microprocessors. That long-awaited paradigm shift now seems imminent. We may very soon be predominately an electronic medium and that has many print executives on edge.

...

We are headed to the Web in a big way and our readers, especially our most engaged readers – the bloggers - are going with us. They are giving us a taste now of what our new environment will be like. They will challenge and cajole us to confront our biases and our mistakes. And if we don’t confront them, they’ll clean our clocks.

That's just a taste - you should read the whole thing.

Now is When

A (OK, The) commentor in my post below China vs. Japan made the remark that "I don't know anyone who lives in China who seriously believes that the Chinese are ready for democracy." That got me to thinking - when are a people "ready for democracy"? Is there something that can be done to get them ready?

Was Japan or South Korea ready for democracy when they became democracies? How about Taiwan? They aren't so bad as democracies after some initial growing pains.

Now a successful country isn't built just on democracy (I prefer representative government) - the rule of law, private property, and free markets are probably even more important. But the four do seem to go hand in hand, and all four can be, let's face it, somewhat difficult. The US is fortunate because we started with all four from our British heritage, but other countries that were once ruled by the British show that it's a matter of culture, not race.

And I think, just from looking around at the history of nations, the best way to get ready for democracy (and the rule of law, free markets, and private property) is to experience it. Most nations start out shaky but improve over time. They indulge in trial and error and sometimes (like the Wiemar Republic giving way to Nazi Germany) things don't work out so well.

If you compare South Korea to North Korea, they were essentially identical in 1945. They were split based on a line of occupation, one side under the US and the other under the USSR. 60 years later, one is a basket case in every way, and the other has become a representative democracy. Not perfect by any means, but then there isn't a perfect country. Taiwan and Japan have both come become much better at democracy in recent years.

Just like so much in life, democracy is a process that requires practice to get any better at it. Now that may mean it's best to phase it in stages, but ultimately "not ready yet" is a copout. If not now, then when? Because the sooner a nation starts the process of democracy, the sooner it will have a well functioning one.

China Vs. Japan

The semi-confrontation between China and Japan is interesting (though at root very sad) for a number of reasons. One is the reversal in roles - where once China was an ally and Japan an enemy, now Japan is an ally and China a rival. So there is a temptation to dismiss China's concerns. But the flashpoint - the sanitization of Japanese history in WW2 - is a real one. The Japanese did dispicable things, killed and enslaved on an epic scale, and are still disliked and mistrusted by other asians for it still. While it rankles national pride, the truth should be taught so it can be learned from. But nobody likes to be reminded of their mistakes, and such dislike is only compounded by traditional Japanese (and Chinese) views on honor, respect, etc. (normally rolled into "face").

On the other hand, one wonders if Chinese history books teach the reality of Mao - the untold misery and death he and his cohorts brought to the Chinese people. He did far more harm to the Chinese than the Japanese ever did. Is that included in Chinese textbooks? Or how about Tibet? But that leads to another observation - people are far more forgiving of who they consider "the same" than those they consider "other". (You can see this at work in Democratic and Republican partisans in this country who routinely howl and gnash their teeth at actions by the other they ignore in themselves). And both societies historically have been very nationalistic and xenophobic.

And that leads to the idea that you can't look to who's hands are the dirtiest - you have to look at the particular instance and facts. Are Chinese right to be upset about Japanese rewriting history doesn't really depend on how well China writes history, how well they've behave towards other nations, nor even how they currently treat their own citizens (which can be pretty awful). It depends on whether the Japanese can rewrite history to feel better about themselves.

The Chinese response also raises questions as to what is going on in China. First you have a regime that has no legitimacy beyond the fact they are already in power. It's communist in name but while it's politics are communist it's economics are more capitalist (and mercantilist). It's fearful of internal enemies, which is the only thing that can account for it's dread and suppression of Falun Gong. And it's fearful of it's neighbors - none of whom are friends and allies (with the possible exception of Pakistan). India's rise and increasing warmth with the US only ads to the to the fear. Given that, you wonder why the ruling elite has embarked upon policies of confrontation - with Japan, with Taiwan, and to a lesser extent the US.

What's Playing

I like movies. The fruit of the Murphy Loins are old enough that I can go see movies without them. I don't see that many movies. What's wrong with this picture?

Hollywood.

Hollywood has real difficulty in making good movies. I don't expect lots of great movies to be made every year -- I'm happy with one or two. Of course, some years it's zero. But that's a reasonable expectation for greatness in film making. The trouble is all those other movies. Look what's playing now in box office order:
(1) The Amityville Horror. A remake of a poor horror film -- that's a prescription for a winner.
(2) Sahara -- Uh, is this something different than the remake of The Flight of the Phoenix?
(3) Fever Pitch -- The Farrelly Brothers, could be good, but Jimmy Fallon, not too likely.
(4) Sin City -- Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez! I'd love to go see this one, but I doubt I could ever get the wife to go. I'll have to see if guys night at the movies can be brought back.
(5) Guess Who -- A remake. The female half of the family saw this while the male half was doing chess. My daughter liked it but my wife thought it stunk.
(6) Beauty Shop -- A copy. I'm completely the wrong demographic for this one.
(7) Robots -- My brother saw this one and was not impressed. This is a common problem - a movie that promises a lot but only delivers a little. I much prefer the ones that promise a little but deliver a lot.
(8) Miss Congeniality 2 -- a sequal. Could be good, love Sandra, but realistically not a must see movie.
(9) The Pacifier -- I can't admit in public that I'd like to see this movie.
(10) The Upside of Anger -- This could be my kind of movie, but it has chick flick written all over it. That was the great thing about Tin Cup - it looked like a chick flick in the previews, but it was really a guy film when you saw it.

Is this really a lineup that inspires you to see more than 2 movies? 5 out of the top 10 is what they should be shooting for, but they can't get there.

Clock Cleaning of the First Rank

As long as I'm on takedown's, Glenn Reynolds pretty much knocks Sylvester Brown's block off. The problem isn't that Sylvester has a poor memory, it's that so many people have bad memory's and share the same view. And if you don't understand our strategy in the War on Terror, you won't be able to decide if it's the right one or not, or if it's effective.

But I have to admit I read Sylvester pretty much to find out what a particular demographic is thinking, not reality. Reality rarely intrudes, usually as a distant line on the horizon, sometimes glimpsed but never arrived at. Here's another howler of a column, wherein Sylvester grapples with the real meaning behind an IMAX film at the local Science Center. Seems some local peace activists (where were they during our war in Kosovo?) don't like an aviation themed movie financed by Boeing with the full cooperation of the Air Force -- it's just a long military recruitment ad in their opinion -- no word on their take of Top Gun. I loved the response of the Science Center:

John Wharton, vice president of strategic initiatives at the Science Center, said he can hardly comprehend the activists' concerns.

"The film may not deal with the Iraqi war, it may not teach aviation, but it certainly deals with the application of technology," Wharton said.

"We recently ran 'Super Speedway,' a film about auto racing. We weren't trying to recruit drag racers. We ran a film about raising the Titanic. Was that an attempt to recruit scuba divers?"

Still, Sylvester's not sure:

"Are there ulterior motives behind the military film? Maybe, maybe not. I haven't seen it. I'm more bothered that since President George W. Bush's election, Americans are often asked to accept a manufactured reality. "

Like no pre-war speechs about delivering democracy to the Middle East? Or
"That news came on the heels of the conservative fake news reporter-Internet porn escort who was allowed access to the White House for two years. That exposure came after revelations that conservative columnists were paid to promote the administration's pet projects and policies."

Of course you can't blame Sylvester, he recalls reading it the paper, so it must be true. Or perhaps in a book or even a movie. I mean, just read this howler of a column (you'll laugh until you realize he isn't alone in his paranoid fantasies) all about seeing a movie based on a book about Karl Rove and how he pretty much runs the country with his brilliance containing gems like this one:

"It would take an audacious genius to create fake news and slip it under the radar of seasoned journalists. Dan Rather, a real newsman, damaged his reputation and almost lost his job under such accusations. Rather produced documents critical of Bush's military record shortly before the election last year. OOPS! He didn't bother to validate the authenticity of the documents and was accused (mainly by conservatives) of a partisan attack against Bush. No one knows definitively if the documents were forged. We do know, however, that media attention shifted away from Bush's dubious military record to the origination of dubious documents. Some wonder whether Rove somehow leaked dummied documents to CBS? Hmmmm."

And in Sylvester's not uncommon trademark, he doesn't have the facts straight. It isn't that Dan didn't bother to authenticate the documents, it's that he did and his experts told him they couldn't authenticate them. And every expert has in fact reached the conclusion that the documents were forged - even the experts CBS brought in for their internal investigation.

And if you go back to when he was gloating about his bet with Bill O'Reilly, there's this gem "You're no Bush clone. In fact, I heard you criticize Bush on your radio show Jan. 19. You were commenting on his ever-morphing reasons for invading Iraq."

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm

Would one of those ever morphing reasons be, oh I don't know, perhaps bringing democracy to the Middle East? Of course, no mention of what those reason's might be.

If you want to know what the latest weird leftest fantasy is, Sylvester is your man. If you want a grasp of reality, best to give Sylvester a wide berth, along with most of the rest of the paper he appears in.

Men Vs. Women

Shelley at Burningbird has a nice takedown of a post by a "Christian Libertarian" called Vox Popoli. When I followed the link to his post, I thought at first it was joke, then a lousy one, and then I realized I was reading a dead mackeral hocked up days ago.
"Far too many women are fascists at heart."
"given the obvious connection between the female franchise and the West's continental drift into"socialism."
"It's time for men to fight back against these laws with the nuclear option. Refuse to get married in the eyes of the law."

I do think there are more differences than the obvious ones between men and women, but I also happen to think that makes us complementary, not adversaries. The problem isn't that just that far too many women are fascists, but that far too many men and women are fascists or socialists or communists. I don't recall women's votes putting Hitler over the top, or Stalin, or Mao, or Mugabe, or Saddam.

Yes, I think a law mandating men do more around the house and spend more time taking care of dependents is silly and an intrusion - but in line with a lot of other silly intrusions that people, both male and female seem to want. Wouldn't the better response be to mandate that women do more manly tasks plus codify a minimum amount of sex to show how silly the whole thing is?

Hovercraft Hubbub

Since we were out of town last weekend, friends picked up my son's Science Fair project -- it made it to the Greater St. Louis Science Fair as both Fruit of the Murphy Loins' usually do. But this time there was something different - he was picked to be part of Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challange which I have to admit I'd never heard of before. The paperwork says there are 3,000-4,000 projects picked to enter each year, and that the idea is to extend to younger children the fun and excitement of Intel high school science fair. Near as I can tell, there were 47 projects picked from the GSLSF this year. So we're pretty happy.

We built a hovercraft (thus the title, Hovercraft Hubub - you can't go wrong with alliteration) and tested his hypothesis that it could carry two children (to wit, the Fruit of the Murphy Loins) in style and comfort. It sounds impressive, but it's a 4'x4' sheet of plywood, a shower curtain, a leaf blower, a coffee can lid, and assorted fasteners made from plans we found on the internet. It only "flew" inside our garage about 1.5" off the ground and didn't travel more than a couple of feet - although I spun it as much as the fruit allowed. I don't think we'll be winning the paid trip to Washington D.C., but it was a fun project to do and hopefully will encourage both the Fruit in their appreciation of the technical side of life. All the kids knew about it from the school science fair. When parents find out how easy it is to make and how well it did, I think there will be more hovercraft built at his school next year.

Wise Words

Eugene Volokh picks up on a commentary by Burt Neuborn in The Nation about the left's (or progressive's) addiction to the court system where he warns that simply relying on the courts to render verdicts rather than persuading people is a mistake. I have to agree - the long term battle ground is hearts and minds, not 5 particular justices. And he picks three good examples - abortion, gay rights, and separation of church and state.

One of the things that irks me when discussing abortion rights is people who begin and end with "it's a constitutional right" period. Yeah, because 5 people said so, not on anything actually in the constitution mind you, but based on emanations from the penumbra of the Bill of Rights. I don't know what that literally means in a legal sense, nobody does, but in practice it means a majority of the Supreme Court can hand down any ruling they want and it's the law of the land. Not only is it non-persuasive, it's infuriating. There are other arguments for abortion, which I don't think beat the arguments against, but some of them are at least somwhat persuasive and not at all infuriating.

Quite frankly there is a danger if many important descision is usurped from the people and their elected representatives and made by the judiciary -- it destroys representative government with its art of compromise and softening the rough edges and makes politics a winner-take-all match between two sides that are dedicated to packing the judiciary with their own.

I'll go an example further - the famous Brown vs. Board of Education case that "ended" segregation in schooling. Only it didn't end segregation - public schools are still separate and unequal, only more unequal which is more important. Predominately black schools in the city of St. Louis are as a practical matter far worse now that they were in 1954.

And that's an important fact - there are limits to what laws can do, much more so that the limits on what majority culture can do.

Trust The Experts

When I read the story in the paper this morning (Yes Virginia, I still stain my hands with soy based ink in the morning skimming an old timey product I don't trust), I was surprised by the revelation that in instead of waiting for air travel to disperse a deadly new flu virus around the world, researchers were speeding up the process by shipping 50 year old deadly flu virus around the world. A company included it as part of a test kit used in routine quality control for labs.

What were they thinking? They weren't.

The good news is that people born before 1968 may have some immunity, so the funWife and I are OK. The bad news is my kids were born after then.

SuperNationals v2

This post is new and improved because it has pictures! When I say the hotel was a fabulous resort hotel, I mean this fabulous:

The place was so huge, and the Mills Mall next door was so huge, I lost a couple of pounds while eating out every meal. Except for breakfast on Saturday, when I was happy just to get anything. We figured we'd eat at the hotel, but when you have 5,000 players plus family all trying to eat before 9AM and only two (possibly 3) eateries were open in the hotel, I called my wife and demanded she find food for us. McDonalds was mobbed, so she hit Citgo and got us some powdered donuts and something that resembled a very small danish.

I don't want to give the impression that it was a complete disaster, but there were some rocky parts. The crush of people at the first round trying to get in the playing room but trapped in the hallway outside is something I'm trying to forget. We ducked into the game room just to re-oxygenate. While the pairings were up late, I can't believe the people who just piled up in front of the bulletin boards waiting but uncomfortably crammed in. For K5 and K6 I think the parents were in there because they didn't want their kids getting hurt, but I think it would have been better if they had just stayed back. It was comical watching them trying to get back out from the crush at the boards. Fortunately, after the first round the pairings were up well before the start of the round and spread well apart. After that rocky start, things on the playing end went very smoothly.

The blitz tournament had two defects: they moved the location without putting up a sign -- you had to ask one of the scarce as hens teeth tournament officials -- they started late, and OK, three defects, they took too much time between pairings, especially in the beginning. Here Kyle is ready to go despite the confusion and chaos in round one of the blitz tournament, just waiting to play chess:

Day 1. We were a little hyper in the first round after all the excitement of just getting to the point of finding where to sit, but new chess shirt is on, attitude is going, and it's time to make a point before the game even begins:

Day 2. We've had our donuts, we've got two games under our belt, we know the drill. Sit down, relax, fill out the red card, get the game notation all set up, pose for a picture, hope the old man leaves soon.

I thought the local tournaments were impressive until I went to this one. 5,300 kids playing chess, talking chess, arguing chess, helping each other with chess. They also ran around and acted like kids, and if they hadn't been wearing shirts with chess related slogans you wouldn't have realized they were there for the tournament. We never did go hear any of the lectures because he preferred to hang out in the skittles room with his chess buddies playing the game (bughouse was the most popular) than sit and listen to people, Grandmasters, talk about it. Maybe next year. Here's the picture that sums up the weekend:

News Great and Small

Andrea Dworkin passed away. While I disagreed with her views about most everything, her firebrand should have burned for years more.

We may be planting trees too deeply. On trees that aren't pines, you should be able to see a flare just before the tree goes into the ground. If you can't, it's too deep and the roots (and therefore the entire tree) will suffer.

China and India are talking about resolving their long standing border disputes. This is big news, and may represent each country using the other as a counterwieght to the US. I think though that the trend of the US and India growing closer is too big to stop as it's fed by the growing similarities in the two countries. Now if China would also throw of the political shackles as well as the economic ones, we'd be getting somewhere.

A team at the University of Liepzig claims that they can isolate "embryonic quality" stem cells from adult blood. They use the stretchiness of stem cells to isolate them from the rest of the blood cells and they use a drug called G-CSF to fill the blood with stem cells from bone marrow so there are enough to harvest in the first place.

Scores are being settled with John Bolton in his confirmation hearings as old foes are complaining bitterly about him. I had to laugh when Joe Biden, who's not a bad Senator, said that anytime a senior official calls in a lower-level one "and reams him a new one that's just not acceptable." Somehow I think Joe has reamed a few new ones himself, but I doubt the press will be out looking for current or ex subordinates who've been so reamed. I don't know that much about Bolton, but the idea that the UN needs a sympathetic nudge to get back on track is just ludicrous - it needs a few swats with a two by four to get it's attention and then a series of hefty kicks in the pants to get it pointed in the right direction. Non metaphorically, it needs major structural change that isn't going to happen without strong and unrelenting accountability.

Nick Krisof has discovered that the American people don't trust the news media. Tom Maguire discovers one set of error's Nick makes, and Pendagon discovers a whole nuther set. See Nick, this is how the newsroom you want works - same story, two viewpoints.

Vladimir Putin says he won't seek a third term in office in 2008. Well, a nice democratic change in leadership would be a sign of growing maturity in the democratic process and help acustom Russia to the practice of democracy. Davids Medienkritik has more on Putin's trip to Germany.

Wisconsin is seriously considering a feral cat hunting season. I think they don't have enough Asian restaurants is all. (It was just a joke people.)

Apple has announced that Tiger, or OS X 10.4 (yes, I know the X and 10 are redundant, but Apple doesn't) will ship April 29. This is the first OS upgrade I've ever planned on buying , let alone actually buying. Hopefully it won't break any of my favorite games.

Omaha is home to a military anti-terrorism think tank. Good. Maybe Geitner could led them a hand.

AP took a poll and discovered to their amazement that "Many Dread Preparing Taxes." No kidding. It sounds like the winning entry in a Wizbang most obvious headline contest. Soon they'll be running articles about how it gets hot in the summer.

It's official - humor is good for you. How long before Sienfeld is being prescribed as an anti-depressent?

SuperNationals

The whole funMurphy family just got back from spending a long weekend in fabulous resort hotel. OK, we actually slept across the street. But it was more than that, it was the 2005 Chess Supernationals, with 5,300 entrants, one of whom was my son. Supernationals is the combination of the Elementary, Junior High, and High School National championships into one huge, and I do mean huge, tournament. There were chess players everywhere, playing chess and having fun. They were even going over notation in the bathroom!

The Bughouse and Blitz tournaments prior to the main event came off as poorly organized, and the first round was such a disaster (the pairing's for my son's section didn't go up until 45 minutes after the start time) I was worried that the weekend was going to be a total loss. But the successive rounds all went smooth as silk, and he had such a good time, we'll be going to more of these tournaments.

UPDATE: Now with pictures!

Christian Law Making

Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost has announced a a new blog symposium -- Judeo-Christian Morality in an Ethically Pluralistic Society. I wrote something vaguely near that topic last summer, so I'm slightly tweaking it and presenting it here for my entry in the symposium. I'm specifically addressing how Christians should approach law making, in any human society.

Christian Libertarian - that's how Josh Claybourn describes himself. I don't know if I'd go that far, but I think that Christianity with its emphasis on faith is more libertarian than works (following the law) based religions.

What are the beliefs of Christianity (at least from my point of view) on law? Well, God does have laws. There are laws you have no choice about -- the physical laws that govern the universe. They are the same everywhere and universally obeyed by all of creation without any possible choice.

But there are also other laws, where we do have choice. Let's call them moral laws, and we can keep them, or we can break them. Up to this point, some other faiths would be agreeing with me. But here's where Christianity comes in -- nobody follows moral laws perfectly. We are all sinners is a basic Christian teaching. And what is the penalty for sin? Death. Now I happen to think that there are immediate consequences for vice and virtue, and there are defered consequences. But what's clear is, under God's law, every person on the planet has transgressed against God's moral laws, and the penalty for doing so is death. I see dead people, and they don't even realize they are dead.

So if we were to institute God's law as our own civic laws, we'd have to execute everybody on the planet. So really, what would be the point? And quite frankly, it seems awfully presumptious to pre-empt God. Since no man is saved by the law, why then should we try? And what would our plan of salvation be?

What then should our laws be based upon? Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a good start. Human laws should be for our own use, not our own goodness. If God does not compel good, how and why should we, especially since our means are so much less. And as our means are so much less, so too should our laws be.

To be sure, there is overlap between God's moral law and what should be human laws - thou shalt not murder comes to mind. But who's going to enforce thou shalt not covet your neighbor's spouse or stuff? Or love God with all your heart, or love your neighbor as yourself? Jesus called out the last two as the wellsprings of all the commandments, and is there any real way to humanly enforce these laws?

Now don't take this to mean that I don't think following God's laws isn't important -- I just think that is between ourselves and God, with the help of our fellow children in Christ, not the local constable and magistrate. The law doesn't save. Repeat that after me: the law doesn't save -- Jesus saves. It's okay if humans don't outlaw everything that God does. By all means we should never shirk declaring what's right and what's wrong nor should we lose sight of the power of our example.

Lion Of Chess

In honor of the upcoming Chess Supernationals in Nashville TN, here is the male fruit of the murphys loins with his latest chess trophy:

The photo is lousy, but his play that day wasn't.

She's Worth It

Jane Galt has a fabulous post that you should read that is ostensibly about gay marriage but is really about any form of society reform. When I first came across a link I didn't really want to read another post about gay marriage, especially a long one. But after the third or fourth "go read!" I girded my loins and boy was I ever happy:

Is this post going to convince anyone? I doubt it; everyone but me seems to already know all the answers, so why listen to such a hedging, doubting bore? I myself am trying to draw a very fine line between being humble about making big changes to big social institutions, and telling people (which I am not trying to do) that they can't make those changes because other people have been wrong in the past. In the end, our judgement is all we have; everyone will have to rely on their judgement of whether gay marriage is, on net, a good or a bad idea. All I'm asking for is for people to think more deeply than a quick consultation of their imaginations to make that decision. I realise that this probably falls on the side of supporting the anti-gay-marriage forces, and I'm sorry, but I can't help that. This humility is what I want from liberals when approaching market changes; now I'm asking it from my side too, in approaching social ones. I think the approach is consistent, if not exactly popular.

The Pope is Dead, Long Live the Pope

Unless you read the New York Times, you can't have escaped the fact that Pope John Paul II died. Here in St. Louis, the local paper has treated us to wall to wall coverage, seemingly the only other thing that comes close was that the final four (as in College Basketball) was played here as well. The cable news people have wall to wall coverage, pushing even Michael Jackson's legal difficulties into the background. I'm not sure what I can add, but I'll try anyway.

I'm not Catholic, and this isn't the time to go into my theological differences with Catholicism (of which I have a few). And as an institution that has been around so long, it's made it's share of mistakes. But this isn't the time to go into them. Now is the time to remember Pope John Paul II and celebrate his life. And there is much to celebrate. But I'm not going to give a laundry list, instead I'm just going to say that this Pope had moral authority, and he excercised it well. I think one of the differences between left and right is that the left looks more to institutions, such as the UN, for moral authority, while the right looks more to people for moral authority (or at least for it's expression). And one of interesting quirks of people, this one included, is how we love to have a moral authority on our side, but seek to undermine it when it is arrayed against us.

The next pope may end up with as much or more such moral authority as Pope John Paul II, though I doubt it, but he won't have it to start with. It takes a lifetime of moral action, of consistantly standing up for what you believe to be right despite all the slings and arrows that come your way. Now I don't think the Pope was always right, but I do think that because of who he was you needed to pay attention to what he was saying. I will miss his voice.

Crossover Campout

My son crossed over from Webelos to Boyscouts not long ago. For the boys, we had the flaming neckerchief, the flaming arrows, and the smoking bridge. For the adults, I stepped down as cubmaster after 3 fun filled years. Then we all went with the troop and camped at Beaumont. This was before the weather got so nice here, although it was thankfully better than predicted. After we arrived at the camp site, the boys were assigned their tents; the dad's had to pitch their own. My wife, who was alone at home as our daughter was spending the night with friends, wasn't thrilled when I called and asked her to bring the tent poles that I left behind. And then to bed, with extra blankets, handwarmers stuffed in the sleeping bag, and night cap firmly in place. I slept good. Next morning was beautiful if cold:

It was chilly morning, but we were warm snug in our warm clothes. The guy without the coat - he didn't spend the night. The rest of us pictured did. The adult patrol, the Old Goats, made breakfast for the new scouts -- pancakes and sausage. We had enough pancakes to serve them the old fashioned way, flipped over the cooks shoulder with a fifteen second rule. That is, the first fifteen seconds they are on the ground doesn't count.

We were at one of the camporee sites at Beaumont, an open field along a creek nestled in the rolling hills of the area. It may not be breathtaking, but it is beautiful:

After the new boys were finished with their scoutcraft for the day -- forming patrols, naming them and devising their troop yell, earning their totin chit and fireman chit -- it was time to run around and play:

This was also the troop feast weekend, so while the new scouts were playing, the older scouts were cooking their feasts. The Old Goat patrol sampled the various patrol's meals:

That night it got cold, real cold out in the field where we were, so a fire was mighty nice.

The next morning, it was time to pack everything up, police the campsite, an go home to warm showers and razors. I may not be a real old Goat, but I sure smelled like one after two nights of camping. So too ends this account, and I leave you with Mr. Morgan waving goodbye:

English Pronunciation

I know this has floated around the web a few times, but that's because it's good.

Reasons why the English language is so hard  to learn:

1) The bandage was wound around the wound.

2) The farm was used to produce produce.

3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

4) We must polish the Polish furniture.

5) He could lead if he would get the lead  out.

6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert..

7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.

8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

10) I did not object to the object.

11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

13) They were too close to the door to close it.

14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.

15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail

18) After a number of injections my jaw got number.

19)  Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.

20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

Dog Blogging III

It's time to bring back that Saturday favorite, dog blogging. My wife and son took the dog with them to Castlewood for a hike on Thursday; I spent part of Thursday night removing hardened gum (spearmint judging from the aroma) from his paw. Scissors and denatured alcohol were required for the job, and trooper that he is he didn't complain a bit, he just took it like a, well, a man. He is the sweetest dog, but he has the put upon, o woe is me look down pat:

Notice the use of the blanket as a pillow. Just in case you were wondering, he's a Welsh Pembroke Corgi, and he's reached the time of year when the fur explodes off of him.

What Njal Said

Donald Sensing takes up Tom Bevan's Op Ed that asks, among other things:

If one is convinced of the moral strength of the argument for saving Terri Schiavo (which millions upon millions of Americans are), and if one further adheres to the proposition that every innocent life is worth protecting and that we as a society must not countenance a system that results in the death of a single innocent soul, are we not then obligated to reconsider support of the death penalty under all circumstances except those in which confessions have been given voluntarily?

I'm a death penalty agnostic, but I don't buy this argument as a reason not to have a death penalty. Here's where it falls apart: "a society must not countenance a system that results in the death of a single innocent soul". Very few systems any human society sets up can make this claim, and certainly none that involves dealing death itself. It simply is an impossible standard, and to set it up foolishness. Set up a system that takes the fewest innocent lives is workable, but any is impossible.

And when I say any system, I pretty much mean any system. Our transportation system kills the innocents at an absolutely ferocious rate - 40,000 in cars and trucks a year in the US alone. Airplanes and trains are killers too. Horsedrawn vehicles, heck horses themselves were killers before mechanical transportation means came into effect. Energy - between coal miners killed, gas explosions, deaths at refineries etc. it too is a killer. Or how about something as mundane as keeping clean - people are killed in showers and tubs every year. And don't get me started on how many buckets kill kids every year. You might argue that since the purpose of these systems isn't to kill people, we should be more forgiving of such outcomes, but isn't that exactly backward?

Now go back to criminal justice, and you'll find that there are far more innocents locked up than executed. Why nobody worries about that is beyond me; why a life time wrongfully in prison being raped is nothing to care about yet wrongful execution, whoa, can't have that is beyond me.

The real standard is to minimize the undesirable effects, and death of the innocent is hugely undesirable. It's something that should and can always be worked on, but there is no absolute possible. We often say that our justice system is designed to let 10 criminals go free rather than wrongly convict 1 innocent person; yet we don't say we let every criminal go free rather than wrongly convict any innocent person -- because it not only sounds absurd, it is absurd. And yet that's the standard that is raised here.

After winding his way through other knotty problems (it should be remembered that the original knotty problem was solved by one of the original applications of thinking outside the box: the application of a sword to cut instead of fingers to untie) he formulates his larger question:

At its core, the dilemma is this: At what point are we forced to live within the law even if we disagree morally with some of the outcomes resulting from its application?

Now we have a good question. I don't know that I'd call it a dilemma as that implies a single decision whereas I think this kind of issue is neither a single decision nor a decision alone. As I said before, any system implemented by man is going to have problems, so I take it as a given that I will morally disagree with some of the outcomes of our legal system. And here my options aren't to only live within or without the law, but to try and change the outcomes and the very law itself. I would argue that it is my moral obligation to try and change outcomes and the law itself in those cases where I think the outcomes are wrong.

Frankly, I think a better question would be phrased:

At what point am I forced to live outside the law because I disagree morally with some of the outcomes resulting from its application.

In other words, at what point does my working within the law, because that should be my default position, become itself wrong? I think the answer my friend varies from person to person. The Declaration of Independence is one attempt to answer that question; I have to be thankful to our forefathers to bequeath a system of government where I don't have to rebel to effect changes in our laws.