Coyote Blog

Via Radley Balko and Pat’s Papers, comes this chart on Canadian water consumption during the Olympic Hockey finals.  As he asks, what happens when everyone in the country goes to the bathroom at the same time?

Some of you may have seen me on Glenn Beck today.  If you are like me, and don’t do stuff like that very often, you may be wondering just what being on such a show is like.

The process began with a call from one of Beck’s assistants.  She spent over an hour with me in multiple calls to make sure she absolutely understood all the issues and could communicate them to Beck.  She also called the PIO at Arizona State Parks several times to get their perspective.  Then she had me come into the Fox local station in Phoenix.  This is where the process went a bit different than I expected.

First, I was still sitting in the green room about 9 minutes before I was supposed to go on the air, and thus was getting a bit nervous.  When they came to me, I expected to be taken to some tiny studio.  Instead, I was led out to the busy news floor, in the middle of all the desks with people working.   There, I found a camera and a stool.  They miked me and put on my earpiece.   Hearing the feed was a bit of a challenge, because people were on the phones at all the desks right near me.

Doing the interview is more like doing radio.  It may look on TV like we see each other, but I can’t see Beck and can’t pick up on his body language.  We end up talking on top of each other several times.  At one point, the lady at the desk next to me goes into a drawer for stapes or something and bangs my butt, ripping out my earphone and effectively disconnecting me from the show.

Anyway, it was fun and if given the chance, I expect to be better next time.  I will post a link to the video when I find it.

I saw some news story that Tiger Woods was going to publicly apologize.  Why?  What did he do to me?  He is either good with his wife and kids or he is not.  The rest of us are irrelevant.  I suppose he could apologize to us for letting us down by under-performing his public  image, but in turn we should all apologize for feeding like emotional vultures on his family’s personal problems.   Besides, he has taken a $100 million a year hit for the damage he did to his own image.  I am willing to call things square between us.

Via TJIC, I meet this guy on every long distance trip.

Apparently, there are some people who: A) Cannot judge their own speed except in relation to the vehicle directly in front of them, and B) Cannot hold a steady pedal for love nor money. So there we’ll be, in the agrarian hinterlands of Indiana or Kentucky; me rolling along in the left lane and passing the occasional car on the right when I notice Mr. Wobbly Throttle a’creepin’ up in my mirrors. When he gets close enough I’ll signal right and let him pass, which he does, after a fashion, but sort of bogs down once he’s just off the port bow. We’ll roll in formation like that, me starting to fume, until we come upon a car in the right lane that forces me to turn off the cruise and tuck in behind Wobbly.

As we pass the slower traffic, Mr. Wobbly Throttle, now bereft of vehicles to overtake, starts to slow down. He notices me in his mirror and sometimes darts right, sometimes slows down further and gets passed on the right (traffic gods, forgive me!) I’ll hit “Resume” on the cruise control in the left lane, but a mile down the road, sure as God made little green apples, here comes Wobbly again, as though drawn to a magnet in my back bumper. This dance can go on for over a hundred miles, and is pretty well guaranteed to have me chewing the steering wheel in frustration in only a fraction of that distance. For Vishnu’s sake, man, pick a speed and hold it!

Apparently the threat of GTBE  (galactic toilet bowl effect) is less than once thought.   But what about anthropogenic sources?

Can’t say that I really care, but I find all the quivering excitement here hilarious:

If Tiger Woods winds up in Wickenburg for rehab over his apparent sexual compulsion and pill addiction, local businesses are ready.As the rumor mill seems to suggest, Tiger would be checking into the Meadows Rehabilitation Center in Wickenburg just after New Years, and despite being a little late in covering Tiger-gate’s Arizona connection, the Arizona Republic reports today that local businesses are gearing up for golf’s greatest Lothario.

For example, the owner of Sundance Pizza in Wickenburg, Bob Halsey, has already placed a sign in front of his store that says “Hey, Tiger, we deliver.”

Chances of Tiger ordering some of Halsey’s take-out are probably unlikely — perhaps a more suiting sign should say “hey, droves of paparazzi, we deliver.”

If Tiger does end up in Wickenburg, the number of paparazzi that will descend on the tiny town is certain to cause a boom for the local economy. Some tabloids are even rumored to have placed journalists in the rehab center themselves, in order to get the real dirt on the golf great.

Paying lots of money to stop having sex with hot women seems an odd thing to do.  From my experience he could take up playing Dungeons and Dragons and have the same result for a lot less money.

Those of you who have read Neal Stephenson’s Crytonomicon may remember the side tale of Randy Waterhouse’s molars.   A lot of the fun of a Stephenson novel is not the plot but the side expositions on everything from number theory to Cap’n Crunch.   This is perhaps doubly true of Cryptonomicon, whose plot is only so-so (hunting for Nazi gold, sort of) but whose prose and exposition are fantastic.  Anyway, in that story, one of the main characters has a problem with these horrible wisdom teeth that are impacted so deeply in his skull that oral surgeons have to run out and have 2-3 cocktails to overcome the shivers of malpractice fear they get from just looking at the x-rays.

Fun exaggeration in the service of fiction, until we took my daughter to the dentist yesterday.  My daughter already has a history of weird teeth.  She had to have oral surgery before she was 10 to remove a baby tooth that somehow never emerged and was up deep in her head somewhere, upside down or sideways or something.  So anyway, she still has 8 baby teeth in her head past their expiration date, and the orthodontist finally insisted they had to be removed.

No problem.  Baby teeth are a layup to remove.  Fifty bucks each says the dentist  (which caused us to give our daughter a financial incentive — we told her if she could wiggle them out beforehand, we would pay her half, which she did with two).  Anyway, baby teeth are easy, no big roots, nature wants them out at this point anyway, etc.

And most of them were just that — easy.  Except for one.  The dentist simply could not get it out.  The appointment went on and on, because the dentist kept running back to the x-ray to make sure she was really pulling on a baby tooth and not some adult tooth.

Anyway, it eventually came out, after much pain and suffering on my daughter’s part.  One of her “normal” removed baby molars is on the right for comparison.  The Ripley’s tooth is on the left.  It just sort of looks evil.

Incredible stop motion Lego recreation of a scene from the Matrix movies.

One of these is an actual product, and one is a joke invention from the Onion.  Can you guess which?

So which is it – the ipod dock in a pet bowl or the ipod dock in a vacuum cleaner.  One has to be real, they are not both fake, though neither make any sense to me.

The vacuum.

The pet bowl.

I have been having a 6-month run in with a Hawaiian bank over a land loan.  Today I finally yelled at a supervisor, without really thinking about what I was saying, that it seemed like their bank was systematically given their mainland customers the shaft.  Lo and behold, in 20 seconds I had a complete resolution.  What I have been missing all these years as a white male!

Never heard of tilt-shift photography until today, but it is cool.  Here is an example – real scenes are digitally manipulated to look like it is a model.  Which in fact is exactly the opposite of what I try to achieve with my model railroading.

Update: The video seems to have left the building.

May still be linked at engadget

A social science study that has something good to say about TV.  I agree with Miller that it seems a stretch to call this economics.

I hardly know what to do with this.  When this is a pressing enough gender issue to demand NOW’s attention, perhaps it is time to declare victory and move on to weightier topics.

A couple of weeks ago, President Obama had members of his cabinet, as well as members of congress, including Flake, over to the White House for a game of hoops.

They were all men.

Sounds like the boys had some fun but If you ask the “Debby Downers” from women advocacy groups like the National Organization for Women, the games lack of estrogen is unacceptable.

“Relationships get built in those more informal settings,” NOW President Terry O’Neill told ABC News, “and the relationships have a huge impact on the influence an individual has. We know what happens when we segregated whether it by race or whether it by gender — you end up with 1st class citizens and you end up with 2nd class citizens.”

Fortunately we have moved beyond quotas.  Not.

“It’s extremely important, now especially, for the president to have as many women as men in his closest circle of advisors. … If women had been at the heads of the companies on Wall Street instead of these masters of the universe then we might not be in the predicament that we’re in today,” O’Neill says. “[The ratio of women to men] needs to be 50/50. Women are 52 percent of the voting public so obviously there needs to be 50/50 of any Cabinet.”

I will be counting the men at the next baby shower.

One terrorist nuke here would bring western civilization close to collapse.  Via Maggies Farm

Combine 40% French design and engineering, 40% political correctness, 10% Hello Kitty and 10% of WTF to get this new electric concept car from Renault with square wheels called the Twizy.  I don’t think this is a put on.

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.