Solar Powered

1366 watts per square meter, baby

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He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.

In case you ever doubted that David Brooks is a world-class hack.

The Solitary Leaker - NYTimes.com

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Getting My Pebble Nerd On

If you don’t care about developing for the Pebble watch, then you will want to skip this entry. Quick exit: La Liga standings.

These are my notes for getting the dev environment set up on a MacBook Pro, OS 10.7.5, for my own reference and maybe yours as well.

I got through Step 1 without problems.

Step 2 was a little rough.

As the iPhone Pebble app wasn’t available at the time of this writing, I had to go the libpebble route. The lightblue (Bluetooth communications) package complained about something involving XCode; I opened XCode, installed the latest version of the command line tools, and either that, or some other random action, fixed the problem. Grabbing the time from the phone failed the first few times, as the pairing between my computer and watch seemed flaky, but eventually it stuck and the connection is reliable, at least for now.

The rest of the installation, through step 2.4, went smoothly, though I did have to run brew link --force freetype per the instructions for OS X 10.7.

The next step is to actually build something…

Filed under coding pebble nerd

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Without synchronization, it takes an average of 20 minutes to drive five miles on Los Angeles streets; with synchronization, it has fallen to 17.2 minutes, the city says. And the average speed on the city’s streets is now 17.3 miles per hour, up from 15 m.p.h. without synchronized lights.

To Fight Gridlock, Los Angeles Synchronizes Every Red Light - NYTimes.com

My pet peeve: The 2nd sentence is just the first sentence in different units. Stuff like this suggests that the author is just spouting the numbers, and doesn’t understand them. At least, in this case, the numbers are internally consistent!

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Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. [United States v.] Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.

—Justice Scalia

Why Liberals Should Thank Justice Scalia for Gun Control - NationalJournal.com

If you are to the right of Justice Scalia on any issue, you may want to re-evaluate your position.

Filed under politics

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There’s enough crazy people out there that would attack on the right or the left. But I think when you are being protected by people who have weapons by responsible people, I can’t see why you would be opposed to that for other people,

Rand Paul hits Hollywood on gun control - Kevin Cirilli - POLITICO.com

I’m pretty angry today.

At the bus stop, one of my sons realized that he forgot to bring his musical instrument to school. So, after he and his brothers got on the school bus, I drove over to the school, checked in, and dropped it off at his classroom. While walking down a hallway, a girl whom I did not know came around the corner. She looked up at me, and for a fleeting moment, I saw real fear in her eyes. Fear of a strange man in her school.

And it made me angry.

Not at the girl of course, but that this is the reality of Sandy Hook- little kids, most of whom have heard about Sandy Hook in some form, are now likely to be petrified when they see a strange man walking around in their school. They don’t deserve that.

I smiled at the girl, she smiled back, and we went on with our day.

Now, as for Senator Paul: Nice work on the drone filibuster, but I see now that he’s back to being a putz. He’s making a straw man argument and he knows it.

Few people have an issue with well-trained people carrying weapons of moderate power. Like, say, the police. Here’s my platform on the issue:

  • I would like it to be less convenient to obtain a weapon.
  • I would like strict regulation of high capacity magazines.
  • I would like the background check process to be strict and robust.
  • Though I think maintain gun ownership databases would be of practical benefit, it’s not worth attempting

In sum: I want well-regulated weaponry to be available to well-regulated people. I want fewer weapons to be readily available to people in a less-regulated environment.

I think it’s instructive that Justice Scalia clearly indicated the limits of the 2nd amendment in D.C. vs. Heller.


Filed under politics

1 note

First, the relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP.

Second, emerging markets face lower thresholds for external debt (public and private)—which is usually denominated in a foreign currency.

Third, there is no apparent contemporaneous link between inflation and public debt levels for the advanced countries as a group (some countries, such as the United States, have experienced higher inflation when debt/GDP is high).

The story is entirely different for emerging markets, where inflation rises sharply as debt increases.

Don’t sweat the debt (so much):

http://www.nber.org/papers/w15639.pdf?new_window=1

Filed under economics