Month: October 2006

Consumer Confidence.

Jebus I love how the media spins good news:

Treasuries rattled by retail, consumer confidence data

That’s the Reuters headline from Google News’s #1 return on a search for “consumer confidence.” Want another example?

Bonds spooked by consumer numbers

That’s from CNNMoney.

What’s the horrible news that’s destroying the bond market?

Consumer confidence – and spending – are up. Retail sales are up. So is the dollar.

THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!

For some, apparently, there cannot be good economic news. It might lead to Republicans getting credit! Can’t have that.

Well, I’ve done my part to assist. I spent a few hours yesterday buying a new truck. I didn’t help out Ford or GM this time (sorry, JimmyB), I bought a made-in-Tennessee Toyota Tundra, which I have committed to making payments on for the next five years.

How’s that for “consumer confidence?”

This deserves repeating, so I shall. Taken verbatim from The Purple Avenger‘s blog:

My best friend is a lawyer, bright, gifted, … PhD in law; bored with his job, he decided to study engineering. After his first quarter, he came to me and said that the two “C”s he’d achieved in Engineering Calculus 101 and Engineering Physics 101 were the first two non-A grades he’d ever gotten in college, and that he had had to study harder for them than for any other dozen classes he’d had. “I now understand”, he said, “why engineers and their like are so hard to examine, whether on the stand or in a deposition. When they say a thing is possible, they KNOW it is possible, and when they say a thing is not possible, they KNOW it is not. Most people don’t understand know in that way; what they know is what we can persuade them to believe. You engineers live in the same world as the rest of us, but you understand that world in a way we never will.”

I don’t think that you have to love math to be an engineer, but you are going to have to learn it. That means that you’re going to have to do the homework, correctly. Mistakes and “close enough” are the ways to build bridges that fail.
htom | 09.26.05 – 2:10 am

Knowing, in your soul, that if you screw up your work you could be responsible for the injury or deaths of innocent people tends to make you look at “reality” in a way I think is different from the majority of the population. Engineering attracts those with a certain kind of personality, and repels others.

At the Gunblogger’s Rendezvous I spent some time talking with SayUncle, and among other things we discussed personality types. As I’ve noted here before, my Myers-Briggs personality type is INTJ – Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging. According to Wikipedia, INTJs make up about 2.1% of the population (and, I think, a significantly larger proportion of bloggers). I believe this profile accurately describes me. (My wife agrees. She said I ought to frame it.):

To outsiders, INTJs may appear to project an aura of “definiteness,” of self-confidence. This self-confidence, sometimes mistaken for simple arrogance by the less decisive, is actually of a very specific rather than a general nature; its source lies in the specialized knowledge systems that most INTJs start building at an early age. When it comes to their own areas of expertise — and INTJs can have several — they will be able to tell you almost immediately whether or not they can help you, and if so, how. INTJs know what they know, and perhaps still more importantly, they know what they don’t know.
INTJs are perfectionists, with a seemingly endless capacity for improving upon anything that takes their interest. What prevents them from becoming chronically bogged down in this pursuit of perfection is the pragmatism so characteristic of the type: INTJs apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion “Does it work?” to everything from their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms. This in turn produces an unusual independence of mind, freeing the INTJ from the constraints of authority, convention, or sentiment for its own sake.
INTJs are known as the “Systems Builders” of the types, perhaps in part because they possess the unusual trait combination of imagination and reliability. Whatever system an INTJ happens to be working on is for them the equivalent of a moral cause to an INFJ; both perfectionism and disregard for authority may come into play, as INTJs can be unsparing of both themselves and the others on the project. Anyone considered to be “slacking,” including superiors, will lose their respect — and will generally be made aware of this; INTJs have also been known to take it upon themselves to implement critical decisions without consulting their supervisors or co-workers. On the other hand, they do tend to be scrupulous and even-handed about recognizing the individual contributions that have gone into a project, and have a gift for seizing opportunities which others might not even notice.
In the broadest terms, what INTJs “do” tends to be what they “know”. Typical INTJ career choices are in the sciences and engineering, but they can be found wherever a combination of intellect and incisiveness are required (e.g., law, some areas of academia). INTJs can rise to management positions when they are willing to invest time in marketing their abilities as well as enhancing them, and (whether for the sake of ambition or the desire for privacy) many also find it useful to learn to simulate some degree of surface conformism in order to mask their inherent unconventionality.
Personal relationships, particularly romantic ones, can be the INTJ’s Achilles heel. While they are capable of caring deeply for others (usually a select few), and are willing to spend a great deal of time and effort on a relationship, the knowledge and self-confidence that make them so successful in other areas can suddenly abandon or mislead them in interpersonal situations.
This happens in part because many INTJs do not readily grasp the social rituals; for instance, they tend to have little patience and less understanding of such things as small talk and flirtation (which most types consider half the fun of a relationship). To complicate matters, INTJs are usually extremely private people, and can often be naturally impassive as well, which makes them easy to misread and misunderstand. Perhaps the most fundamental problem, however, is that INTJs really want people to make sense. 🙂 This sometimes results in a peculiar naivete’, paralleling that of many Fs — only instead of expecting inexhaustible affection and empathy from a romantic relationship, the INTJ will expect inexhaustible reasonability and directness.
Probably the strongest INTJ assets in the interpersonal area are their intuitive abilities and their willingness to “work at” a relationship. Although as Ts they do not always have the kind of natural empathy that many Fs do, the Intuitive function can often act as a good substitute by synthesizing the probable meanings behind such things as tone of voice, turn of phrase, and facial expression. This ability can then be honed and directed by consistent, repeated efforts to understand and support those they care about, and those relationships which ultimately do become established with an INTJ tend to be characterized by their robustness, stability, and good communications.

Out of all of that, the one thing that really struck me is the phrase “Does it work?“ That’s it, exactly.

I’m not a perfectionist. As an engineer I am thorougly familiar with the aphorism that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” I once described my job to someone as follows: “To solve my customer’s problem A) using the most current, appropriate technology, B) in the most timely manner and C) at the best price possible. Choose any two.” I’m not a perfectionist, but I’m more than happy to reject a lot of what other people would consider “good enough.”

“Good enough” too often gets people killed, but “perfect” never gets built.

Why I Learned to Type.

Instapundit writes The Death of Cursive, linking to an article in the Washington Post that reports:

The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it’s threatening to finish off longhand.

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

I’m 44, but I haven’t written in cursive in decades. I quite literally no longer can.

Put bluntly, my handwriting sucks. My mother says I should have been a doctor. The computer keyboard didn’t kill my longhand. I learned to type because I knew that, in order to communicate via the written word, it was a far better option for me.

Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it’s important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter compositions, from the earliest grades.

Simpler, shorter compositions? Obviously they haven’t been reading this blog.

Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research. And others simply lament the loss of handwritten communication for its beauty, individualism and intimacy.

“Future historical research” of the kind typified by Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America? And, really, what does handwriting have to do with “beauty, individualism and intimacy”? Does no one on the WaPo read Lileks? Mark Steyn? Victor Davis Hanson? Would their work read any better if it was printed in longhand rather than Times New Roman?

Cursive script was invented because of the quill pen. Picking up and setting down the point of the quill produces blotches, so to make the paper as clean as possible it was best if one wrote with one continuous motion, nib always in contact with the paper. When steel nibs and then fountain pens were created, that problem still existed. (Back when I still wrote cursive, I loved writing with fountain pens. My penmanship still sucked, but I liked the look of it.) But in the era of the Bic ballpoint, it’s not a problem anymore. And in the electronic age where text appears in pixels, cursive has – rightly – gone the way of the dodo bird. I do not lament its loss.

Instead, we have a myriad of fonts to choose from (though not so much on Blogger), and those fonts can add much to the content and feeling of the written piece. Like this James Lileks review of Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith:

Wouldn’t be the same in cursive, would it?

Trebuchet!.

An interesting time-waster, GlobalSpec’s Trebuchet Challenge. Judging from some of the scores, there are some serious medieval-weapons nerds among the engineering community.

Another Case of Child Abuse.

Defending himself, mother, boy kills intruder

14-year-old fires once, hits man in head

By Beth Wilson and Mary Ann Cavazos Caller-Times
October 10, 2006

Police said a 14-year-old boy was defending himself and his mother when he shot and killed an intruder Monday afternoon at their home on Ocean Drive.

Capt. John Houston said the 14-year-old boy, whose name was not released, was home from school after becoming ill, and his 46-year-old mother, Rose Ann Kozlowski, had just returned from the grocery store when she was confronted by a man with a knife.

Yes, laws that prevent people from getting guns will certainly prevent violent crime, won’t they?

Cmdr. Jesse Garcia confirmed during a news conference that police received a call from one of the residents of 4221 Ocean Drive at 12:55 p.m. and responded to a report of a man tying them up and holding them at knifepoint.

The man, only identified as a black man in his 30s or 40s, led the mother and son to the upstairs master bedroom, where he bound their hands with men’s ties and ransacked the house for valuables.

“He packed up her SUV in the garage with those items. He threatened to kill them repeatedly,” Houston said.

After the robber caught the woman trying to untie herself once, she was able to free herself and her son and find her husband’s pistol in a security box under the bed. She tried to shut double doors to the bedroom as the man tried to push them open and her son held the gun.

“She was using all her strength to push them,” Houston said, adding that the boy aimed at the man through a space in the door and fired one shot.

“He shot once and hit him in the head, killing him instantly,” Houston said. “He took a life-saving measure to save his mother and himself.”

Good shooting, kid.

Soon after the incident, police cars lined Ocean Drive near the house, which is between Ocean View Place and Aberdeen Avenue, and neighbors stood nearby watching officers investigate.

Houston said police also are investigating the possibility the man had an accomplice because neighbors reported seeing two black men in a green 1970s four-door sedan, possibly a Lincoln Continental, driving slowly around the neighborhood a couple hours before the incident.

The best part about this story? This poll results at the sidebar:

I’d like to see a few more responses, though.

UPDATE: Thursday, 10/12

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is why the gun-grabbers fail at the polls and have had to resort to attempting legislation from the bench.

End of update.

This is another case like the 11 year-old boy who shot a knife-weilding intruder in South Bend, Indiana in 2002, or the 12 year-old boy who frightened off five home-invaders earlier this year.

But children shouldn’t be exposed to guns, we’re told. It’s dangerous. Yes, each year some children die from accidental gunshot wound. Author Jean Hanff Korelitz believes that number to be over 4,000 annually, and said so in a Salon.com piece, but the Centers for Disease Control reports that in 2003, 56 children 14 years and younger were such victims. In 2002 there were 60. In 2001 there were 72. Each and every year, despite an ever-increasing number of firearms in private hands, the number of accidental deaths by gunshot – even among children – has been declining. But guns are bad. Guns are evil. Children shouldn’t be exposed to firearms because they’ll only harm themselves or their playmates with them.

Tell that to Jessica Carpenter.

Getting Ready for the Rendezvous.

The ammo is loaded and ready to go. One .30 cal can about half-full of .45ACP, a .50 cal can with 400 rounds of .223 in boxes, and a full .50 cal can with 376 rounds of .30-06 on Garand clips in bandoleers. In the range bag are several loaded 8-round 1911 magazines, some loaded AR mags, and 250 rounds of .45LC. I’m bringing my Garand, my AR with both uppers, my Kimber 1911, and my M25 Mountain Gun. I’ll pack my clothes tonight, load up the truck in the morning, and hit the road for Vegas about 8:00 AM which should put me into Phoenix just after rush hour, and into Vegas in the late afternoon. I’ll leave Vegas nice and early Thursday, and get into Reno about check-in time.

Hope to see lots of you there.

And yes, I’ll let you shoot my guns. That’s why I’m bringing all the ammo.

I Might as Well Give This Gig Up.

Other people do it better than I.

Go read Tam, if she’s not already on your blogroll. She says precisely what I wanted to say.