perfidy

Nah, not really. It's actually a new mine-clearing vehicle. But it would be cool if it were a jihadi harvester.

Schizophrenic mercenary helicopter pilot Murdoc has the latest.

Speaking of loan repayment calculators, certain acquaintances of mine are dealing with a client who wants an application that calculates loan payments. This client is a CPA in charge of finances for a large entity. This individual believes that a loan repayment schedule should look like this:

For a loan of 1000, for ten years, at 5% APR, with yearly payments.

Plugging the loan amount, number of payments and interest into a standard loan calculator, you get something like this:

Given that the stated purpose of using the first formula was to save the loan recipient money, the client's stubborn refusal to admit that maybe their conception of simple interest loan repayment plans is a bit out of touch with standard accounting practice, general wisdom and in fact reality.

A few things to consider: while the second scheme is not exactly intuitive, the total interest paid makes sense when you consider that over the term of the loan, you will owe half of the loan amount, on average. The decreasing interest/increasing principal as percentages of the payment amount make sense when you realise that at any given moment, you're paying 5% interest on the remaining balance. It has to work that way if you want a constant payment over the term of the loan.

I am not an accountant. I have software do my taxes, and I haven't ever thought about this subject in any depth whatsoever until today. But what is obvious to me is not to the client, who in the interest of protecting his loan recipients is proposing terms that a loan shark would love - especially the 50% interest on the last payment.

But there is a certain degree of... rightness about this.

Things I'm considering for t-shirt slogans:

• College
  
• Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
  
• Go Lemmings Go
  
• You bastards are... Bastards
  
• i hate clowns
  
• Stay back 200 yards :: Court Order
  
• RTFM
  
• WAR
  
• Hateful, talentless, war-loving trailer trash

An interesting bit in the the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists forwarded to me by a coworker. The author makes the case that the firestorm caused by a large nuclear blast will (for 100kton+ nukes) almost certainly be greater in extent than the blast zone.

Seeing as I work about four blocks north of the White House, I think it is safe to say that I will be well within the zone of "100% fatality" should someone light off a city killer within the District of Columbia. Now, if it was only a pony nuke - Hiroshima size or smaller, I might survive, depending on where exactly it went off. Unlike Hiroshima or other WWII-era Japanese cities, DC is built largely of stone, which should provide greater blast and fire resistance than a city made of, say, paper.

Interestingly, I was reading a while back that in many respects, a nuclear weapon is less effective than the equivalent amount of conventional explosives. The reason being is that while there is a tremendous amount of oomph in a nuke, it is very, very concentrated. Beyond a certain point, the stuff in the immediate vicinity of a 15kton bomb cannot be destroyed any more. But if you dropped 15,000 one-ton bombs in a grid pattern over a city, you would do more damage, because the destructive forces would be more evenly applied.

The great advantage of nukes is not their destructive power per se, but rather that so much destructive power could be delivered with significantly less effort. From thousand bomber armadas to a single plane. The economy of force is what made nukes so attractive to military planners. Political considerations made nukes unwieldy as a battlefield weapon, and we were stuck with conventional weapons for decades.

However, new technology has brought us to the same point. Precision weapons make it possible, again, to destroy targets with a nuke-like economy of force. A single plane with an appropriate load of smart munitions can destroy any given target. With dumb bombs, thousands of planes would be required to have even a outside shot of destroying a given target. *

I would wager that nuclear weapons will not be used in anything resembling a regular war in our lifetimes. With the advent of precision weapons, there's just no point to using nukes. The political fallout would cause more damage to the user than the bomb would to the enemy.

Where I would imagine their use is as a weapon of terrorists, a mad regime, or in space.

* [Wik] And if you're not familiar with the history of strategic bombing, you'd be stunned at how ineffective bombing was in the era before precision guided weapons. Post war calculations showed that pretty much the entire US Air Corps would have been needed to ensure that a single city was knocked out, and stayed knocked out, for the duration of the war. Bombers hitting their target was akin to winning the lottery. High altitude 'precision' bombing was a joke.

There were only two ways to ensure that a target was actually destroyed. One was to go in real low and slow. That tactic had the unfortunate side effect of leading to enormous casualties among the bomber crews. The other was to intentionally cause large scale firestorms with incindiary bombs. The fires would spread far beyond the blast zones of the individual bombs. This tactic had the unfortunate side effect of killing tens of thousands of presumably innocent civilians.

[alsø wik] Here are some nifty websites that allow you to calculate the blast effects of nuclear weapons:

• Here's a couple simple ones that operate like your basic loan repayment calculators.
  
• From FAS, a more sophisticated one that overlays blast radii on selected US cities.
  
• And here is the famous asteroid impact calculator, which allows you to contemplate the devastation caused by truly large explosions.
  
• Finally, a silly site that calculates the blast effects of nukes on spaceships.

With my offering only my fourteenth entry in the 50-Book Blogger challenge now, in the end of July, readers may wonder if I have an ice cube's chance in hell of actually finishing twoscore and ten volumes before the close of the year. Don't be silly! Ha! Although I have only written about fourteen books, I just finished book number 41 yesterday. I've been busy readin', like Bill Hicks in the Waffle House.

i'm eating and I'm reading a book. Fine. Right. Waitress comes over to me (chewing), "What you reading for?" Now, I said, "Wow... I've never been asked that. Goddang it, you stumped me! Not, 'what am I reading,' but 'what am I reading for?' I guess I read for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones....is so I don't end up being a fucking waffle waitress. That's pretty high on the list." Then, this trucker in the next booth gets up, stands over me and says, "Well, looks like we got ourselves a reader."...It's like I walked into a Klan rally dressed in a Boy George costume or something.

So, you feckless mob of Waffle waitresses, here is what I've been reading.

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer/Heart of Darkness (two novellas, count as one in my world!)

Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos

Deep thoughts and other blather below the cut.

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

Chernow has delivered yet another in a long string of reassessments of American Founders. Along with Joe Ellis’ American Sphinx, David McCullough’s John Adams, a slew of books about Ben Franklin by everyone from Walter Isaacson to Edmund Morgan, and most recently by Joe Ellis again writing on George Washington. Of all these, it is probably true that Hamilton was the figure most deserving of a second look. (After all, even if John Adams has been remembered largely as a crank, he was still President. Jefferson, he just needed to be taken down a peg or two.)

Apart from a fairly recent but thin appreciation by Victor David Hanson, Hamilton has languished in the second rank of American founders alongside Thomas Paine, Governeur Morris and Elbridge Gerry. This is particularly unfortunate because, as Chernow demonstrates in admirable detail, we owe a great deal of our political culture and national infrastructure to Hamilton’s machinations.

Chernow’s command of detail is particularly impressive. Aggregating every scrap of paper he could find on Hamilton from his boyhood in Nevis to his secret correspondences with his eventual blackmailers, Chernow traces not only Hamilton’s trajectory through the world of the Americas but also the effects of his passing. Finally I have a good sense of exactly how Hamilton came up with his revolutionary ideas for taxation and finance that helped fund the young United States, and this after I taught it for two semesters!

Numerous small details set this above the standard historical appreciation. One is how Chernow treats Hamilton’s father. He seems to have been a hard-luck man with a self-destructive streak, and he was almost totally absent from the young Hamilton’s life. Through a series of vignettes we see Hamilton as a child pass from guardian to guardian, finally moving into the house of his best friend’s family, which friend resembles Hamilton to a striking degree. (Hmmm.) Meanwhile, Hamilton’s “father” is in and out of the picture, asking for handouts, being a bum, periodically trying to be a dad, and so forth. Throughout the book, Chernow keeps us in mind of his sad fate as Hamilton ascends to the stratosphere: aide to George Washington, Secretary of the Treasury and so forth. As Hamilton rockets upward, Chernow traces his father’s slow decline from island to island down the Caribbean, each time to meaner and meaner surroundings. He periodically checks in with his son, usually looking for a handout, until finally he dies lonely and nearly forgotten at the very bottom of the Caribbean to where the scum and villains drained.

Although I tend to distrust biographies that psychoanalyze their subject, especially if that subject is long dead, Hamilton left such copious writings, and was screwed up in such evident ways, that Chernow’s analysis along these lines is convincing. What made him rise to Aaron Burr’s bait? Was it the knowledge that in the past, the mere threat of a duel made his adversaries back down? Was it grief over his son’s death in a deul a few years before? Was it the narcissist’s realization that his star was fading and his prominence at an end? Was it a simple death wish? Or was it a stupid idea and a tragic mistake? Chernow explores each of these possibilities and balances each of them against what the reader has come to understand about Hamilton’s inner mind.

The only thing that might be said against Chernow’s treatment is that he does probably engage in a little character assassination of Hamilton’s peers and competitors – notably James Madison and Aaron Burr – by way of burnishing his subject’s own image. This is a common fault of historical biographers, and by now readers probably know to read past the hagiographical leanings when they encounter them.

While I die a little inside at the idea that some enterprising author might soon cough up Governeur Morris: A New Appreciation, if the current fashion for books about the Founding Fathers continues, Alexander Hamilton, is an overdue and worthy addition to the current Founding Fathers canon.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I regret to admit that it has been more than two decades since I read any Charles Dickens. When I was a young boy I had a bunch of abridged classics volumes for kids, and I remember reading A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist. I may also have read A Tale of Two Cities as a sophomore in high school, but I can’t be certain. I don’t remember high school so well.

My consternation stems from the fact that though I profess to be a great lover of vivid narrative fiction and excellent writing of all kinds, I have read more than twice as many pages of Piers Anthony than of the greatest novelist ever to write in English.

So, Great Expectations, of which I expected great things. I did not get them, at least not in the way that I expected. Dickens belongs to another time, an era where novelists did not engage in nonlinear narrative or postmodern trickery. In a way, Pynchon has ruined me for Dickens.

But to read Dickens is to be reminded of the unassailable virtues of masterful writing. Foreshadowing, mise-en-scene, settings that are actors in their own right, and sharply defined characters who are consummately confused about their motivations: these are Dickens’ tools, and he uses them incredibly well. From the first graveyard scene where Pip encounters the escaped convict to the ending, when Ms. Havisham wrecks her own rotted wedding tableau and Pip finds that he has cut himself out of everything he valued, Dickens hangs a plot built mainly of coincidences and hidden machinations on the believable inner workings of a few key characters. There are Tom Gargery and Ms. Havisham, each of them in their own ways the model of constancy. Pip is the evanescent youth, oblivious to the harm his actions can do. Estella is a wind-up weapon, set on her path by Ms. Havisham to wreck everyone she meets. In short, it turns out the hype is true: Dickens tells a hell of a story.

If you ever end up reading Great Expectations, make sure to get an edition that includes Dickens’ original downbeat ending as well as the happy ending his publishers insisted he tack on instead.

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer/Heart of Darkness

For having seen Apocalypse Now about fifteen times, I had never gotten around to reading the source text. Not that necessarily means anything, because the similarities between Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now are mainly superficial; there’s a boat, a river, and a deranged quasi-warlord/philosopher at the other end. There is one other similarity that runs deeper, though it fails to unite the stories so much as set them further apart: discursiveness.

Conrad can be an extremely economical writer. In fact the novella The Secret Sharer packs a huge amount of psychodrama into a short sixty pages or so. The Secret Sharer is about a young sea captain in charge of a restless crew in the Philippines in the early 19th century. On watch one night, he rescues a naked swimmer from the water. The swimmer turns out to be a mate from another British vessel in the same waters. The young captain takes a liking to this man, who is much is age and from a similar background, even after he finds out that the other man killed his captain and swam away to escape.

The remainder of the story involved the captain’s effort to hide the man from his crew and eventually aid his escape, nearly wrecking the ship in the process. Conrad spends a lot of time detailing the numerous ways in which our young captain sells out his ethical and moral obligations as a captain in the British Navy and as a human being, though he leaves unsettled the answer as to quite whether our young captain is feeling restless and bored, insubordinate, or merely self-destructive. For all its brevity, The Secret Sharer is uncommonly richly textured.

The opposite could be said of Heart of Darkness. Speaking through his narrator, Conrad hides everything – motivations, descriptions, actions, even scenery – behind a heavy scrim of words. In fact, since the framing device of the novella is that the story is being told by a man to his friends as they sit becalmed in London Pool waiting for the tide to turn, everything that happens, happens at two removes from the author’s point of view.

Nothing just “happens.” Instead, events and people lurch out of an obfuscating fog of words like mountain peaks through an ocean mist, complicating and deadening what is otherwise a perfectly straightforward story of a trip up a river. And, indeed, words are central to the story. The blandishments of the narrator’s colonial contacts fail to understand anything beyond what is in front of their nose. Half the novel is spent waiting for boats to be repaired, and as they sit in river mud the crew festers in jungle clearings, endlessly talking about trade, fortunes, and the natives upriver.

And the natives are the other key. Set apart from the narrator and made to seem totally alien, Conrad even lets the words “Booga-booga” slip at one point by way of setting his European “heroes” apart from the native Congolese they encounter. Not blessed with the cushioning power of words, the natives instead cause (and largely engage in) the only direct actions taken in the entire novel: shooting, killing, running, dying. It is only as the river boat comes upon Kurtz’ camp in the heart of the Congo that the novella arises from its torpor of glancing allegations and sideways half-gestures to chronicle the moment when everything turns to shit. And as our narrator heads back down the river toward the colonial outposts he recently left behind, the scrim of words comes down once again to hide the blood-slicked deck, the dead crewmen, and the pointlessness of the mission.

I can’t say that I thoroughly enjoyed Heart of Darkness, but sometimes fascinating displays of writing don’t have to be enjoyable.

Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842

Nathaniel Philbrick’s previous book was the tale of the whaleship Essex, which was lost at sea when an 85-foot whale they were attempting to harvest got angry and kicked the ship’s ass. Only eight men survived the wreck, and that after a months-long ordeal lost at sea. The news of this incident, once it made it back to Nantucket, formed the basis of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

This time, Philbrick tackles the story of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, an attempt to do for American navigation what Lewis & Clark did for American orienteering. Although the Expedition was a nominal success, in that the ships did circumnavigate the globe while making detailed sea charts of heretofore uncharted regions of the Pacific and Antarctica, that success came at a very high price.

The book may as well have been called Ego On The High Seas. The eventual captain of the Ex.Ex. (as the Expedition was dubbed), Lt. Charles Wilkes, was a great theorizer and organizer, but an awful captain. A green leader without command experience, a commission, or a stable personality, Wilkes was a martinet who led his motley assortment of ships into disaster after disaster. Through a stunning series of achievements – sailing closer to the South Pole than any other expedition ever had done, charting a number of uncharted South Seas islands, circumnavigating the globe, taking gravity readings around the world and atop remote mountains – the expedition did great things.

But as Philbrick shows, the expedition was barely given halfhearted attention by the Federal government, and Wilkes was made commander mainly by dint of the fact that he made a pest of himself on the issue. Through his poor and sometimes insane leadership, Wilkes managed to lose several ships, alienate all his officers and crew, and get several crew members killed in both shipboard accidents and in attacks by cannibals.

Fans of Neil Stephenson and Patrick O’Brian would enjoy this book as well as In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. Both are cracking good sea yarns full of texture and detail about shipboard life in the mid-nineteenth century. Philbrick is lucky that the Ex.Ex. was peopled by memorable personalities, and these characters and the high adventures they happen into keep Sea of Glory going through a few patches of didactic writing.

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos

Many years ago I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Unlike most people, I actually finished it, but like most people nothing really sank in. Until recently the best I could claim was to have heard of String Theory, but I would have been hard pressed to tell you exactly what it was all about. Did it have something to do with timelines and the synchronicity issues that stem from the communication limitations imposed on the universe by the speed of light? Or was it something to do with particles. (Answers: no, and sort of.)

Brian Greene, a respected physicist and researcher in the esoteric new field of SuperString theory, has now written a book that like Hawking, tackles questions of the nature of the universe we live in, but unlike Hawking, one that is actually readable and explains the issues and debates in a clear and comprehensible manner. A couple years ago, travel writer Bill Bryson wrote a book called A Brief History of Everything in which he took a layman’s approach to the the cutting edge of a number of scientific disciplines; astronomy, cosmology; geology; evolutionary biology; physiology. It was a fascinating tour de force that really did make me feel smarter for having read it.

Greene is an actual scientist, which means that his explanations of modern cosmology are necessarily more detailed than Bryson’s naïve approach. Luckily, he is also an outstanding writer, deft with analogies and metaphors that illuminate the fundamental issues of a given field of study without letting the metaphors get in the way of the facts. For example, his discussion of why using wormholes for time travel is even more difficult than we would think, using Bart, Lisa, and the Quickie-Mart as his subjects, is perfectly lucid and entertaining to boot. Of course! Bart would end up trapped in the future! It’s so obvious!

Moreover, Greene is a generous writer, readily acknowledging when a debate is far from settled. While he does of course have his own opinions, he allows the copious footnotes to carry some the weight of the various controversies that are not particularly urbane to a lay discussion. The footnotes are also where he puts a lot of the math for advanced readers, thank goodness.

I like to think of myself as a generalist, a modern day Renaissance man or natural philosopher with a keen interest in a number of fields. This only gets more difficult as every field of study bifurcates and balkanizes, splitting into mutually unrecognizable sub-sub-subfields each of which require specialized knowledge to navigate. Greene’s book goes a long way toward making the lives of true modern renaissance men - yes, yes, like me (thank you so much!) - that much easier.

Interesting. Notice the four-way tie for second bewtwixt crow, bear, eagle, and fox. Absent from the possibilities are both rats and capybaras. And their nipples.

Which animal totem best suits you?
created with QuizFarm.com

When you hear the phrase "robotic camel jockey," what do you think of? I bet it's not this!

Via the new and soon-to-be-blogrolled centrist group blog donklephant, we find that the United Arab Emirates, in an effort to stem a tendency toward human slavery and slave trafficking to supply very small and young jockeys for their national pastime of camel racing, is actually using remote-controlled robotic camel jockeys. The jockeys are as light as a young boy, eiliminating the market for cage-raised and underfed young boys originally kidnapped or sold into slavery in Asia and sent to the UAE to be used as jockeys.

Hard to see how this fits into the Space Robots' master plan to subjugate humanity and crush them under their titanium-alloy heel; indeed, quite the opposite!

Via an end-of-day email from a friend, perhaps an old gag, but since I don't recall having ever seen it, it's new to me. It also has enough plausibility that I had to think for a minute that it might not be a gag:

A research institute has recently discovered what is believed to be the heaviest chemical element yet known to science.

The new element has been named Governmentium. Governmentium has 1 neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 11 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of governmentium caused one reaction to take over 4 days to complete when it would normally take less than a second.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 4 years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, governmentium mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization causes some morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as Critical Morass.

You will know it when you see it.

In honor of the anniversary, yesterday, of the first landing of men on the moon google has loaded lunar map data into their google maps interface. Go here, and you can see where the six Apollo missions landed.

Zoom in on the place where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed, and you can see the actual terrain that those heroic astronauts walked upon.