Coyote Blog

Calculus in 20 minutes. Awesome.

I have told my story before of finding myself a visitor to Manhattan on 9/11.  I watched much of the disaster unfold from the roof of the W Hotel, and spent a weird Omega Man-like evening as some of the only people walking around a deserted Manhattan (police were letting people leave the island but not come back).  And the surreal drive around a still car-free Manhattan the next morning, as police would admit there was one way off the island, but out of some bizarre notion of security would not tell us where it was, so we drove much of the perimeter until we got out via the GW at the north end.

We were lucky in about  a zillion ways that day.  Our kids were being watched back in Seattle by someone with the flexibility to watch them for the four more nights it took us to get home.  We randomly bumped into a friend who had the last rent car in Manhattan and was headed west.  And, of course, my meeting was in midtown, unlike several friends of mine who had meetings in the WTC and never got out.

I still think the two best works of journalism on 9/11 I have seen are National Geographic's "Inside 9/11," which is airing off and on this week, and the Onion's 9/11 issue.  I know the latter choice seems weird, but the Onion was easily the first place anywhere to try to make people laugh when everyone was being so serious.  They did a great job of being funny without being disrespectful.  A bunch of the articles are still funny, and this one seems dead on in retrospect:

"America's enemy, be it Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, a multinational coalition of terrorist organizations, any of a rogue's gallery of violent Islamic fringe groups, or an entirely different, non-Islamic aggressor we've never even heard of... be warned," Bush said during an 11-minute speech from the Oval Office. "The United States is preparing to strike, directly and decisively, against you, whoever you are, just as soon as we have a rough idea of your identity and a reasonably decent estimate as to where your base is located."...

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the war against terrorism will be different from any previous model of modern warfare.

"We were lucky enough at Pearl Harbor to be the victim of a craven sneak attack from an aggressor with the decency to attack military targets, use their own damn planes, and clearly mark those planes with their national insignia so that we knew who they were," Rumsfeld said. "Since the 21st-century breed of coward is not affording us any such luxury, we are forced to fritter away time searching hither and yon for him in the manner of a global easter-egg hunt."

Standing in opposition to Bush and Congress is a small but growing anti-war movement. During the president's speech Tuesday, two dozen demonstrators gathered outside the White House, chanting and waving placards bearing such slogans as "U.S. Out Of Somewhere" and "No Blood For Whatever These Murderous Animals Hope To Acquire."

Here is some footage of the disaster that was not released until years after the event.

I was a consultant for McKinsey & Co. for about 5 years in Dallas.  This was NOT me:

Through conversations with several staffers who have endured the McKinsey interviews, we've assembled a portrait of the typical consultant. First, they're quite young! Despite the early perception that they'd look like pasty lawyers wielding big-wheeled suitcases, they're apparently a plucky, charming bunch.

"They're kind of hot," said one source.

Crisp shirts, no jackets, freshly pressed pants"”not unlike the fresh-faced boys who posed for the Harvard fashion shoot in the Styles pages of The Times this past weekend. They jot notes down on legal pads and in marble notebooks.

Though I will say, much to my kids' ever-lasting amusement, McKinsey did send me to a sort of executive charm school when I started managing teams, because I was such a hopeless geek.  Actually, my main problem was that I was adult-ADD, and couldn't sit still in a meeting.  It's fine roaming around the room in hyperactive fashion when its your own company (ala Steve Jobs) but it is not OK when you are a 25-year-old consultant to the CEO of a Fortune 50 company.

My personal style didn't work any better in any of the other companies I worked for.  Aerospace was probably the biggest mis-match.  There is just no place for a hyperactive marketing guy in a business that takes 10 years to close a sale.  So I now run my own company, and there is no one above me to complain.

Like Franken, I can freehand draw the US with all fifty states from memory.  But I start from the opposite corner, in Washington state.  But, I can also drink a beer while standing on my head, and used to (when I played rugby) race people saying I would drink one upside down in the time they drank two normally.

I have never gotten as bent out of shape by reverse discrimination charges as have many Conservatives.  If private organizations, for whatever reasons, choose to relax standards to let certain groups into their businesses or universities in larger numbers, so be it.  I find it outrageous that this is considered "progressive" when done in favor of certain races, and "racist and evil" when done entirely symmetrically in favor other other races, but I am still all in favor of letting private organizations set their own admissions or hiring standards.  Public organizations, of course, are held to a different standard, and my reading of "equal protection" has always been that standards really should not vary across races.

That being said, I found this amazing.  For the reasons stated above, I am not ready to get up in arms about it, but I do think the extent of the asymmetry in standards is much greater than most people would guess.

One thing I have learned from a number of years of being a vocal climate skeptic on the web:  When group A makes an argument, and group B responds only with ad hominem attacks on motivations and funding sources, then group A is winning.  It may not seem that way in the media, mainly because the media has gotten to the point where they accept ad hominem attacks as valid rebuttals to scientific or policy arguments.

Remember that charges of faulty motivations, being funded by evil scheming organizations, or even of racism are effectively admissions of weakness.  People who make such arguments are basically admitting that they cannot argue the issue on its merits, and so must resort to tarring the other side so that they can say the people raising the issue don't deserve a response.

Hat tip to Radley Balko, from 1150 WDEL

And, the leader of an anti-drunk driving group hopes those images don't send the wrong message to the millions of young people who saw the president drinking on TV.

Nancy Raynor is president of the Delaware chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

She says her group isn't "prohibitionist," but it is is concerned about what teens and childrens take away from seeing the president drinking on TV.

Kids would have seen the President drinking a very modest amount of alcohol, and then not driving. And this has what to do with drunk driving? Answer: nothing. Because despite her protestations, MADD has become a prohibitionist organization.

XKCD, of course.
I really felt this way when it came time to take my first baby home from the hospital.   You can't just be letting me take him home -- I don't know what I am doing!

From a reader:

Preventive care is for people.
Preventative care is for cars.

Sounds like flammable / inflammable to me, but I will try to get it right.

The Manhattan Airport Foundation.  It would certainly cut down on muggings.

Today is the 30th 40th* anniversary of the most expensive flubbed line in history.  "One small step for A man, one giant leap for mankind."

This is one of the three "where were you when..." moments in my memory (moon landing, Challenger explosion, 9/11).  Actually, I have a fourth of equal power for me, but it does not seem to be on very many other people's lists.  That was the moment in 1989 I turned on the TV and saw people climbing on and partying around the Berlin wall.  I don't know if there was simply not any warning for this moment, or if I was in some kind of new job lala land and missed the lead up, but it was a real wtf moment for me, a total surprise.

* This is the second time I have done this in a week, dropping a decade in the math.  I think it is some subconcious process fighting aging.

This person is selling old billboards - the actual full sized original art, typically about 9 feet tall and 20 feet wide.  So if you have a really big wall you need to decorate...

I found the site because model railroaders use it a lot -  the pictures from the web site when printed on a color printer size about perfectly for scale billboards, and it is surprisingly difficult if one is building a period railroad to get the appropriate period commercial art to decorate it.

Having the A/C fail when it is 115F outside.

The good news is that it is only 92 in my bedroom.  Oh, and its a dry heat.

Update: The candy bars in my pantry are all melted.

Julius Shulman, creator of perhaps my single favorite urban photo, has died at the age of 98.  I like the black and white version linked above better than the color, which I confess I had never seen before.

The new bypass bridge at Hoover Dam.  Photo courtesy of the Mail Online.

Today I dropped my son off in England for summer school.  As background you need to know that he has lived in brand-new-out-of-the-shrinkwrap American suburbs all of his life.  So it was funny to me to see the look on his face when he was told at the college that his dorm room elevator was broken and might not be fixed for at least a month.  The "WTF?" look was priceless.  I could see him thinking that a one hour outage of infrastructure would be something to comment on back home, but a month??

But the really funny part was when the Dean asked him to check his rooming envelope to see his room number, and he realized the implication of the three digit number that started with "7."  As with most teenage boys, he wanted me gone anyway ASAP, and I was happy to leave him to his independence and avoid the trudge up to his room.  After I left, he still had a small voyage of discovery as he learns that "floor 7" in England is actually euqivilent to "floor 8" in the US.

Krispy Kreme in the Harrod's food court.

What's next?  Page 3 girls at the NY Times?  Well, it couldn't hurt...

I almost never publish links posts.  But I was really stuck when I read Radley Balko's Saturday Morning Links post because every one was awesome.  Balko is not only one of the best bloggers out there, but a great journalist as well in a field of us pundits who put on pretensions of being pajama-clad investigators.  So here are all of his morning links:

Why there are 60 minutes in an hour

Bloomberg takes the next step down the road toward anti-tobacco hysteria.

Zimbabwean newspaper prints billboards on paper made from the country's worthless currency.

Legless frogs epidemic probably not caused by pollution, but by dragonfly nymphs with a jones for frogs' legs.

Obama administration will support indefinite detention of terror suspects without a trial; drops the news late in the evening on a summer Friday.

TSA detains man for comic book script. Kicker: Scropt was about a guy who gets wrongfully harassed by the government for writing fiction about terror attacks that came true.

There actually was a US Route 666, in the four corners area.  It was renumbered under pressure from Christian groups, and for the pragmatic reason that people kept stealing the signs (I would love to have one).  Apparently there was a horror film by that name, but it couldn't be as good as the classic Interstate-60, an exploration of freedom and slavery that is one of my favorites and should be on the must-see list of every libertarian.

Update: From my son, Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

Lots of eulogizing going on.  This one on Ayn Rand and Fawcett is certainly unique, though.  Don't think that will make 20/20 tonight.

Postscript: Yes, I am of that age that I had her famous poster on my wall (Fawcett, not Rand).  Ms. Fawcett was a member of my personal klutz-to-the-stars club.  I once got an ink spot on her white blouse awkwardly trying to get an autograph (back when I used to value such things).  I have also stepped on Raul Julia's foot at the academy awards, slammed a door open into Martina Navratalova's face at a hotel in Houston, thrown up in Neal Armstrong's bed at a ranch in Wyoming, and spilled a large fountain drink on Brooke Shields at Princeton.

I don't know if this is a result of the credit tightening or just mindlessly poor service by Wal-Mart credit as provided by GE Capital

Continue reading ‘Wal-Mart Credit Compaint’ »

Today in my inbox I got a letter from "Governor Mark Sanford" with a pitch to join the Goldwater Institute (a conservative / free market think tank here in Arizona).  Oops.

An Australian MP brings a screaming toddler onto the floor of Parliament during a debate and is shocked when she is asked to take her kid out.  She demands a more family-friendly workplace  (there is some suggestion it was all a manufactured stunt).   The story is guaranteed to further piss off single people who already feel that they have to work extra to cover for their co-workers with kids.  I have two kids but have never expected the world to defer to me.  When I had my first kid, I had a job at McKinsey & Company that really wasn't compatible with how I wanted to raise my new child.  Rather than storm around about family friendly work places, I quit and found a job that did fit.   After all, having the kid was my choice, not theirs.

... a debate between Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Al Sharpton certainly leaves me without a side to cheer for.

My wife has more of her patterns she has designed for knitted handbags for sale, here or at her own site here.