Funmurphys: the Blog

The Triumph of Hope over Experience

Five Years of Blogging

Oct 12

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Inside Blogging, Me | 1 Comment

I suppose I could have titled this post 5 years down the drain, but I didn’t. I didn’t because I’ve enjoyed a lot of the minutes I’ve spent blogging. Oct 3, 2002 I joined the blogosphere with 3 posts and a design that’s changed very little over the years. 1420 posts, 629 comments, and a switch from Greymatter to Movable Type later, I’m still writing. Along the way over 110,000 different people have visited (according to eXTReMe Trackgin) and I’ve picked up two too infrequent co-authors. Eric Olsen at Blogcritics got me started in blogging, with a short run as a reviewer there. So again, thank you Eric, and may my reader(s) forgive you.

I’ve had a webpage for almost 11 years now; I started out in AOL Hometown when I put a family newsletter online, and then branched out shortly thereafter into a bloglike creation I called Stimulus and Response. In those days, I did most of my writing at the Fruit of the Murphy Loins various practices or waiting before events (for you non-parents out there, you have to get to things like concerts and dance receitals long before the scheduled start time when your little darling is in them). I continued to branch out under the umbrella of Funmurphys.com, but once the blog got going, all the rest has fallen by the wayside. In internet years, I’m so old the blog should be called Kevin 5.0.

Thanks for reading, 100 years ago I couldn’t have hoped my writing would reach over 100,000 people all over the world.

Assolutamente! And I Don’t Even Drink Coffee

Oct 10

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Economics, European Vacation | No Comments

Someday, I’ll finish the tale of the Murphy Family’s European adventure and include pictures of Venice, my favorite of all cities. Until then, you’ll have to make due with this story:

Immediately upon arriving in Venice, Italy, a friend asked a hotel concierge where he and his wife could go to enjoy the city’s best. Without hesitation, they were directed to the Cafe Florian in St. Mark’s Square. The two of them were soon at the cafe in the crisp morning air, sipping cups of steaming coffee, fully immersed in the sights and sounds of the most remarkable of Old World cities. More than an hour later, our friend received the bill and discovered the experience had cost more than $15 a cup. Was the coffee worth it, we asked? “Assolutamente!” he replied.

Venice is that good. Heck, I’d take up drinking coffee just for that experience.

The post I took it from is also quite good, and explores the difference between cost and price and why music, even in the digital age, won’t be free. The value (and thus the price a consumer is willing to pay) of an experience to a consumer is not the sum of the costs that go into that experience.

And who says posts about economics have to be dismal and boring?

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Torture 2007 Style

Oct 8

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Current Events | No Comments

In light of this junk article out of the Washington Post about WWII interrogators criticising modern ones, I thought this article was just chilling: CIA May Threaten Detainees with Senate Hearings. Now that would make anyones blood run cold.

Back to the cranky old men, what do we know?

They illegally violated the Geneva convention on reporting the capture of prisoners, and let’s be clear here, they knew exactly they were in the wrong and there was no question that the people they were interrogating were legitimately covered by the convention as lawful combatents.

They were not interrogating terrorist true believers who were ready to die for their cause. According to the article, they were interrogating soldiers and scientists. Clearly, some of the participants were quite willing to talk.

It’s not clear how much real information they really did glean since the real intellegence story of WWII is that the Allies broke most if not all the important Axis codes during the war (especially Japan’s codes). The problem was how much action to take on the information gained so that the enemy wasn’t tipped off.

The claim is that they discovered submarine tactics – without naming them. Well, lest we forget it was the British capture of U-boats that led to the breaking of the Naval Enigma code. It wasn’t knowledge of U-boat tactics (such as the details of Wolfpack operations), but the use of long range patrol aircraft to cover the North Atlantic that put an end to the U-boat menace.

Another claim is that they learned groundbreaking secrets of rocketry – which could well be, but the Allies didn’t capture Werner von Braun his team of scientists until May 2 1945 and Von Braun was trying to surrender to Americans. So we know they came willingly, and they came too late to have any effect on the war.

The final claim was that they learned secrets of microwave technology. Since they weren’t interrogating British scientists, perhaps what they mean is they learned about the strengths and limitations of German radar, as the British invented microwave technology and together with the United States held the lead in microwave and radar technology. And when would they have captured a German microwave scientist? Again, it couldn’t have been until late in the war.

Ahmadinejad Confronted At Another University

Oct 8

Posted by Kevin Murphy in International Politics | No Comments

Hmm, are the usual busybodies going to take Iranian students to task for a lack of hospitality?

Don’t they know this only helps the whackjob in his own country? Don’t they know this goes against the traditions of a 7,000 year old country that values hospitality so much, it actually forces foreigners to be guests who never overstay their welcome, even if the visit lasts over a year?

SCHIP

Oct 8

Posted by Kevin Murphy in National Politics | No Comments

I read in the papers about President Bush’s heartless veto of SCHIP — and that’s how it’s always described, heartless, like he’s taking money from orphans or is going to personally infect these nameless masses of kids with some horrible disease and then sit back and laugh in the White House as they aren’t treated because they don’t have “access” to health insurance – and I had a couple of thoughts.

First off, I thought after the Democrats raised the minimum wage in this country, nobody was going to be poor anymore. Silly me. Too bad they didn’t have a set of bench marks for that feel good but harm some while helping some others kind of non-solution. The way to raise wages isn’t by legislative fiat but by helping people to be more productive.

Secondly, where were all these handringers when President Bush was proposing tax cuts for parents? What a novel idea, let parents decide where they want to spend their money for the children, not Washington.

The crazy thing is, the fight is over just how much the program gets expanded, and oh by the way we’re already covering kids above “the poverty line”.

Before we get caught up in all the partisan back and forth, with deception the rule of the day, or go all gushy because children are involved, let’s think. What kind of healthcare system do we want – one with more third party pay, or one with less? And how do we want to pay for programs – with targeted taxes on one group to help another group, or with broad based taxes to help broad swaths of society? Do we want a battle over icons, another meaningless skirmish between two political parties, or do we want to think clearly about public policy? Because in the mangled words of a real political titan, here we go again — down the path of slogan wars and demonizing not just what we don’t understand, but what we don’t want to understand.

Department of Weird Coincidences

Oct 7

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Inside Blogging | No Comments

So I’m reading Instapundit who links Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy about Clarence Thomas and just how prestigious Assistant Missouri Attorney General is, in the course of which he links to a bunch of people who served as Assistant Missouri Attorney General. One of the names, Ottenad, was familiar and so I followed the link to John Ottenad’s Missouri Bar bio. Judge Ottenad is the OA advisor for New Horizons district, and I saw plenty of him at the OA Fall Reunion, which I actually blogged about.

And there you have this years odd coincidence.

Funny Bone Meets Thinking Cap

Oct 7

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Science | No Comments

Hot off the press, get it while it lasts — the 2007 Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded:

  • BIOLOGY: Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night. No link to her classic lecture “A Bed Ecosystem,” but you can look it up in the lecture abstracts of the 1st Benelux Congress of Zoology, Leuven, November 4-5, 1994, p. 36. However, if you value a good nights sleep as I do, I recommend against actually reading her work.
  • CHEMISTRY: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin — vanilla fragrance and flavoring — from cow dung. I just wonder why they thought to look for vanillin there in the first place. Toscanini’s Ice Cream, the finest ice cream shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a new ice cream flavor in honor of Mayu Yamamoto, and introduced it at the Ig Nobel ceremony. The flavor is called “Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist.”
  • LITERATURE: Glenda Browne of Blaxland, Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word “the” — and of the many ways it causes problems for anyone who tries to put things into alphabetical order. Hey, Microsoft can’t properly order numbers, so we have no hope of handling “The” properly. A maybe, An probably, but not The.
  • PEACE: The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon — the so-called “gay bomb” — that will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other. I’m outraged they didn’t include a citation for the fact that this groundbreaking work also examined the desirability of a chemical weapon that created “severe and lasting halitosis” – or that it dates back to at least 1994.

While there is a certain silliness to the these, there is more than a little importance. As the award states, the Ig Nobel is for achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think.

The War By Ken Burns II

Oct 2

Posted by Kevin Murphy in TV | No Comments

OK, I’m not the only one disappointed in The War. After watching more episodes, I think what bothers me most is that as a collection of rememberances it’s fine, but all that the ground eye views add up to is a bunch of ground eye views. Overall strategy is rarely discussed, and only to point out the flaws. So what you are left with is a litany of horor, and let’s face it, it doesn’t take long for the litany of war horrors to grow repetative. People die, are horribly maimed, starve, become inured to death and the suffering of others, and just want to kill as many of the enemy as it takes to get them to quit. Oh yeah, generals screw up and don’t mind killing almost as many of their own men as the enemy. There, I’ve summed up the show, except for the part where American soldiers committed atrocities like killing prisoners and civilians and lots of our equipment was substandard.

Why were we fighting? From the show, one would think it was only because the Japanese attacked us. Although, it is informative to discover that even by late 1944 America was growing tired of the enormous casualties (Total American deaths in Iraq and Afganistan wouldn’t even be a week’s worth of American deaths in late 1944). Surely there must have been more to it than that?

Perhaps it’s because my father served on a submarine, but I’m a amazed how the word hasn’t even been mentioned yet (U-boat has as the Second Happy Time got it’s due). Maybe Mr. Burns doesn’t realize that submariners suffered the highest loss rate in the war (which isn’t to minimize the losses or the terrible experiences of the infantry) but had a huge impact on Japan’s ability to wage war. But by golly, I get to hear half the columns written during the war by some newspaperman who’s name I’ve already forgotten.

With all the material, all the footage, all the time, all the money to work with, it should have been amazing. Instead, it’s watchable.

The War By Ken Burns

Sep 28

Posted by Kevin Murphy in TV | No Comments

I’m watching The War, and I have to wonder two things: (1) What kind of makeup are they putting on these people, because they look amazingly young for their eighties (full disclosure, my father who signed up with the Navy in 1942 at the age of 17 aand served on submarines doesn’t look near that good), and (2) what kind of nutritional supplemants were the people on, because they remember every last little detail (full disclosure, I haven’t talked too much about with my father about his wartime experiences, but he does remember quite vividly two things — how the Navy screwed him out of two weeks of leave between basic and signalman training, and how much he hated the peacetime Navy following the war — but his memory doesn’t seem near so detailed).

I have time to wonder this because the show alternates between what I like to call action and boredom. Great, I get to see the exact process of recycling a tin can, from removing both ends, to stomping it, to putting it in the tin bin. Can we get back to Gaudalcanal please, before I fall asleep. Marines are dying out there. I’d much rather listen to the guy tell the heartrending story about wishing his best buddy would hurry up and die on Bougainville because the sounds of him dying were keeping him awake than hear about how everybody pitched in on various drives stateside.

The show starts out as the story of 4 American towns in WWII, which is an odd organizational principle, but quickly it doesn’t matter. If they need a veteran to tell a story, why they just don’t mention what his hometown was. David Inouye is interviewed, and he wasn’t from any of the 4 towns, but they wanted a decorated Japanese-American so they got him. The show is an odd hybrid – a mix of on camera remembrance, photos and videos from the time, and voice over from the omniscient narrator. It’s kind of like going to the Golden Corral to eat – there’s a little of something for everybody, the food is good if uneven, but not outstanding.

I have to say though, one thing comes through loud and clear: war is hell, even if it is just or necessary.

Ahmadinejad Confronted at Columbia

Sep 25

Posted by Kevin Murphy in International Politics | 2 Comments

I don’t know who’s more shocked, me or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Lee Bollinger was Lucy to Ahmadinejad’s Charlie Brown last night at Columbia; both Mahmoud and I figured he was going to get a free kick, but President Bollinger to his credit pulled the ball away and Mahmoud took a tumble. When I read the front page article in the Post-Dispatch this morning, was I ever surprised. Not only did an American academic confront evil, the Post reported it!

Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended Holocaust deniers and raised questions about who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks in a tense showdown Monday at Columbia University, where the school’s head introduced the visitor by calling him a “petty and cruel dictator.”Ahmadinejad, appearing shaken by what he called “insults” from his host, sought to portray himself as an intellectual and argued that his regime had respect for reason and science. But the former engineering professor soon found himself drawn into the type of rhetoric that has alienated American audiences in the past.

He provoked derisive laughter by responding to a question about Iran’s execution of homosexuals by saying: “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.  I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.”

That was the lead of the article, not buried after the jump. Yowsa

Man, did I ever misjudge President Bollinger:

Bollinger drew strong criticism for inviting Ahmadinejad to Columbia and had promised tough questions in his introduction. But the stridency of his attack on the Iranian leader took many by surprise.”You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated,” Bollinger told Ahmadinejad about the leader’s Holocaust denial. “Will you cease this outrage?”

While I wasn’t the only one (pleasantly) surprised, apparently I’m in the minority. I admit it, I thought Columbia was going to roll over on it’s belly like a submissive dog, but instead the Hound of Cullan showed up.

It’s one thing to call people names when you know that person isn’t going to do a thing to you and you aren’t looking evil in the eye (yes, I include all those people who compare Bush to Hitler); it’s another to be on the stage with a man, President of a ruthlessly repressive government who doesn’t hesitate to order the torture and death of his own people, who murders via proxy (Hezbollah, Hamas) civilians in neighboring countries, and who is currently waging a proxy war with America in Iraq, look him in the eye, and call him out. Believe me, if that happened in Iran, Bollinger would be dead now. That takes both moral and physical courage, a couple of virtues that I thought was totally lacking in today’s Universities.

Lee C. Bollinger, you da man!

And no, I don’t think calling out Ahmadinejad, even though he’s the face, not the brains and muscle behind the current dictatorship, is disrespectful of Iran and it’s rich and ancient culture. Iran and Iranians deserve better than Ahmadinejad and the mullahs behind him, but I can understand their reluctance after being burned by the 1979 revolution that brought the current religious dictatorship to power to have another go at revolution.