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Today Arse Technica has another risible headline up: "How gravitational wave detectors survived the Contract With America," it says, and the lede goes on, "Could a basic research project get funded now? Probably not, science advisor says."
The implication is that because Congress is nominally run by Republicans--who are, of course, science-hating nazis--there's no way in hell the LIGO detector could ever get funding if it were proposed today. There is only one tiny little problem with it.
It's fucking wrong.
In the mid-1990s, it was the Clinton administration, working with a Democrat-run Congress, which gutted all kinds of scientific research, up to and including the Superconducting Supercollider which would have beat CERN to the punch in discovering the Higgs boson if it hadn't been canceled by the political party which has a proven history of actually hating science. (William Proxmire, for example, was a Democrat. He did everything he could to gut space exploration.)
The main reason our government is not (or should not be) paying for pie-in-the-sky experiments is not because icky, superstitious, australopithecean, Rethuglican nazis are in power, but because our government is spending three million dollars a minute it doesn't have on supporting a welfare state we cannot afford. If we were running budget surpluses it might be a different story.
Nevertheless, somehow, science continues to get funding from the federal government. Even with the GOP in charge.
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Francis Porretto has a post up about a muslim suing a gun range because the owners of said range wouldn't let him go shooting, after he acted in such a way that they were fearing for their safety. Subsequently they learned the muslim in question was a board member of CAIR which--as far as I'm concerned--ought to be grounds for deportation and exile.
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If you divorce someone because he didn't put his dirty dishes in the sink, you are a selfish asshole.
The author’s ex-wife did not divorce him because he failed to put his glasses in the sink (although he should have put them away.) She divorced him because she’s so selfish that she would rather cluster-bomb her family than let go of her overgrown sense of entitlement. The perpetrator of a divorce is never practicing charitable love. The victim of a divorce might not be either, but for the perpetrator, it is a certainty.Here's the thing about marriage: it does not magically make two people super-ultra-compatible, and as Sammy Hagar once said,
If you want love, you've got to give a littleSo yeah, your husband is going to forget to put dishes in the sink, and your wife is going to put the toilet paper on upside down and incompletely so that when you go to grab some the roll pops out and unwinds halfway across the bathroom where the cat decides NEW TOY! and starts clawing at it-- Your spouse is guaranteed to do something--to have some habit--that drives you absolutely buggy. What it all comes down to is your commitment to that other person; and if you're so entitled and selfish that you let these little incompatibilities (because they are always little) get between you and your spouse, you shouldn't have made those vows and gotten married in the first place.
If you want faith, you just believe a little
If you want peace, turn the cheek a little
You've got to give, you've got to give, you've got to give
To live
This story reminds me of the woman who realized that she excoriated her husband over all kinds of imagined defects--such as buying the wrong kind of hamburger when all she said was "get some hamburger"--and realized that she was actually being abusive. It's the same kind of thing.
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Cable guy came today. We got one of the first X1 boxes (X1 came out when my wife still worked at Comcast) and it was showing its age; we had some flickering and occasionally there was a line of static crawling up the right side of the screen that looked exactly like a crease in videotape--but there's no tape in this machine.
Guy came and checked everything and concluded the box needed replacing. The original X1 boxes have been superseded twice now, and as is typical of any first release the original boxes had some bugs. The new box tunes channels in a lot faster, and the guy told me that we may not have even lost our recordings and settings--he says they're all cloud-based now. That would be nice.
Could have gotten a voice-activated remote, too, but no.
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Last night I was up late. Mrs. Fungus volunteered for some overtime, so she had to get up at 5:30; I inadvertently stayed up until 4 AM, reading my favorite author.
The old stuff, vintage 1999, which I wrote using Professional Write--you know, some of that stuff is pretty intriguing now. I'm starting to think I might hack it into something usable and post bits and pieces here. Some of the stories have been outstripped by reality (such as my Tech Cop series where the characters all carry "PDAs" that are, essentially, modern smartphones) and some of them are simply not salable (such as the story where a guy somehow bales out of a 747 even though the door does not open inward) and some are destined never to be finished.
Some of them cry out for further work. There is, for example, the story I began about some monks somewhere in the western United States who enlist the aid of a UFOologist to deal with this mysterious object they found in their abbey. The abbey in question was supposed to be a high-end supercomputing research center (because information management has been a staple of monastic life since it existed) and I recall that I had some other tricks up my sleeve, but the story wasn't interesting to me...then. Now that the tricks are lost, of course, I keep thinking I could do something interesting with this story, but I'm really not sure what just yet.
There's a lot of stuff there that bears looking into. We'll see.
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The cable guy is an anime fan, and he told me that my My Neighbor Totoro wall scroll is cool. His girlfriend's birthday is coming up and she's a Sailor Moon fan, so while he was outside doing his thing I tried to find the SM folders I came across while cleaning the basement, thinking that I'd say, "Here, give these to her," and get rid of something I will never use but cannot bear to throw away. I could not find them, of course, because the basement is cleaner but it's not organized yet. *sigh*
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Now I must attend to some things, so I may as well get my butt in gear.