Category: Uncategorized

Buy a girl a robot, and the next thing you know, she wants another one:

iRobot CEO Colin Angle will offer a “sneak preview” today of the company’s latest innovation, the iRobot Scooba™ Robotic Floor Washer. The Scooba will be unveiled at The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, Calif. Scooba, a next-generation robot, is designed to vacuum, scrub and dry hard floors automatically. The new robot builds on technology advances from the company’s runaway hit, the iRobot Roomba® Robotic Floorvac.

In addition, iRobot today announces a partnership with The Clorox Company through which the two firms have developed a specially engineered cleaning solution for Scooba. Clorox, a leader in home cleaning, and iRobot, the leader in commercial robots, began the collaboration about a year ago to create a cleaning solution that, when combined with Scooba, delivers a new level of cleanliness to floors.

“iRobot Scooba underscores our commitment to building robots that perform everyday tasks more effectively,” said iRobot Chief Executive Officer Colin Angle. “Scooba will liberate people from mops and buckets, and introduce a revolutionary way to clean floors.”

Scooba’s revolutionary cleaning process allows the robot to simultaneously vacuum, scrub and dry hard floors, all at the touch of a button. Unlike a conventional mop and bucket, the robot only uses fresh water and cleaning solution from a clean tank, so Scooba never spreads dirty water on the floor. Scooba cleans wet spills in addition to dirt and grime, and it is safe for use on all sealed hard floor surfaces, including wood and tile.

Space Bunny doesn’t often barge into my office to show me something on her laptop – usually, she’ll just shoot me an email – but she made an exception for this breaking news. Although a moment after she’d left the room, I did hear a cry of dismay, apparently upon her discovery that Scooba won’t be shipping until the end of this year.

I’ve made up my mind. There’s no reason the little beasties can’t be modded and made Internetable. It’s hacker time.

Pat Tillman’s parents speak about their son’s death on ESPN:

Pat had high ideals about the country; that’s why he did what he did,” Mary Tillman told the Post. “The military let him down. The administration let him down. It was a sign of disrespect. The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting.”

Patrick Tillman Sr., a lawyer, told the Post he is furious about a “botched homicide investigation” and blames high-ranking Army officers for presenting “outright lies” to the family and to the public. “After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this,” the father said. “They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy.”

The government story is ALWAYS false. Remember that. ALWAYS. Sometimes it’s only a minor detail that’s wrong, often it’s a complete fabrication from start to finish. I don’t know what the truth is about Pearl Harbor, JFK’s assassination or 9/11, but I am 100 percent certain that the official version is false in some way.

I mean, from a scientific and historical point of view, I find the concept of aliens on this planet to be improbable to the point of utter absurdity. The only thing that makes me allow for the possibility of their existence is the fact that the apparent US government position is that they don’t.

A National Review reader sums it up:

So let me get this straight. The Democrats agree top allow three votes they can’t stop in return for the Republicans stopping all the other votes they ( the Democrats) can’t stop. The Republicans agree that the Democrats can do this again if they decide conditions constitute an “extraordinary circumstance”, and the Republicans agree that until the next election they will allow them to do this witout fear of retribution. This is what passes for moderation and compromise in Washington? What did we gain that we didn’t already have? What did we give up in return for nothing? Forget the RINO argument, any Republican that agreed to this deal is just plain stupid and deserves to be defeated for incompetence.

Stupid? No, not at all. Unless you understand that the whole point of the filibuster deal is to ensure that the National Democrats have a good excuse to avoid nominating any judges who will respect the Constitution as demanded by their conservative base, you’re going to mistakenly conclude that they are stupid and continually being tricked by those cunning Social Democrats, who, despite their superior brainpower, can’t figure out how to win an election.

Keep in mind that you’re talking about the party that put Howard Dean in charge of its money grubbing. You know, the astute fellow who thinks he’s going to reach out to the religious half of America by talking about the New Testament wisdom to be found in the Book of Job.

John Tierney writes in the NYT:

Economists recently tried to find out in an experiment in Pittsburgh by paying men and women to add up five numbers in their heads. At first they worked individually, doing as many sums as they could in five minutes and receiving 50 cents for each correct answer. Then they competed in four-person tournaments, with the winner getting $2 per correct answer and the losers getting nothing.

On average, the women made as much as the men under either system. But when they were offered a choice for the next round – take the piece rate or compete in a tournament – most women declined to compete, even the ones who had done the best in the earlier rounds. Most men chose the tournament, even the ones who had done the worst.

The men’s eagerness partly stemmed from overconfidence, because on average men rated their ability more highly than the women rated theirs. But interviews and further experiments convinced the researchers, Muriel Niederle of Stanford and Lise Vesterlund of the University of Pittsburgh, that the gender gap wasn’t due mainly to women’s insecurities about their abilities. It was due to different appetites for competition.

“Even in tasks where they do well, women seem to shy away from competition, whereas men seem to enjoy it too much,” Professor Niederle said. “The men who weren’t good at this task lost a little money by choosing to compete, and the really good women passed up a lot of money by not entering tournaments they would have won.”

I think there are two important things here. One, gender feminists should, as usual, be dismissed as intellectual buffoons because their emotion-based opinion of how the world works is again provably at variance with reality. Women are security-obsessed and risk-averse – at least when they think about about it – and so they tend to lose out in any situation where the risk-reward tradeoff comes into play.

However, and it’s a big however, women are absolutely correct to place value on things other than maximizing income. Money is useful for one reason and one reason alone; it can allow you to acquire many of the things you want. But not everything has a price tag and as too many millionaire CEOs have learned late in life, time is more valuable than money.

How much would you pay to cuddle your daughter for five minutes at bedtime? What if it was the last time you’d have the chance to do so? It’s a bit ironic for me to say this, given my curriculum vitae, but for most men and women, there are far more important things than being the top salaried dog in Cubicle City. I respect those who play to win when they decide to play, but I respect those who make wise decisions about whether the game is worth playing even more.

Bill sees a metaphor:

The “mark of the beast on the hand an forehead” just means submission and acknowledgement of lordship. It clearly does not mean a physical mark, Jesus was clear on this when he condemned the Pharisees for wearing scripture as their frontlets while not following it. Reference Exodus 13:9 and 13:16, and Deuteronomy 11:18, and the related verses. This “mark of the beast” crap is what happens when Christians divorce their Scripture from it’s Jewish roots – they can’t understand it.

Of course, this sounds remarkably like those pre-1948 Biblical interpreters who had a panoply of explanations for the supposedly metaphorical nation of Israel in Revelations. Now, Bill could be right, of course, but to say that it “clearly does not mean a physical mark” is a serious exaggeration.

Given that there is now an implantable technology that appears increasingly likely to be used for buying and selling and the US government’s increasing tendency to govern all financial transations, his metaphorical argument is on shakier ground than it has been in 2000 years.

The hallmark of a prophecy is one that accurately predicts the future, after all.

Experts in source-criticism now know that The Lord of the Rings is a redaction of sources ranging from the Red Book of Westmarch (W) to Elvish Chronicles (E) to Gondorian records (G) to orally transmitted tales of the Rohirrim (R). The conflicting ethnic, social and religious groups which preserved these stories all had their own agendas, as did the “Tolkien” (T) and “Peter Jackson” (PJ) redactors, who are often in conflict with each other as well but whose conflicting accounts of the same events reveals a great deal about the political and religious situations which helped to form our popular notions about Middle Earth and the so-called “War of the Ring.”. Into this mix are also thrown a great deal of folk materials about a supposed magic “ring” and some obscure figures named “Frodo” and “Sam”. In all likelihood, these latter figures are totems meant to personify the popularity of Aragorn with the rural classes.

Because The Lord of the Rings is a composite of sources, we may be quite certain that “Tolkien” (if he ever existed) did not “write” this work in the conventional sense, but that it was assembled over a long period of time by someone else of the same name. We know this because a work of the range, depth, and detail of The Lord of the Rings is far beyond the capacity of any modern expert in source-criticism to ever imagine creating themselves.

The tension between source materials and the various redactors is evident in several cases. T is heavily dependent upon Gondorian records and clearly elevates the claims of the Aragorn monarchy over the House of Denethor. From this it is obvious that the real “War of the Ring” was a dynastic struggle between these two clans for supremacy in Gondor. The G source, which plays such a prominent role in the T-redacted account of Aragorn, is significantly downplayed by the PJ redactor in favor of E versions. In the T account, Aragorn is portrayed as a stainless saint, utterly sure of his claims to the throne and so self-possessed that he never doubts for a moment his right to seize power. Likewise, in the T account, the Rohirrim are conveniently portrayed as willing allies and vassals to the Aragorn monarchy, living in perfect harmony with the Master Race of Numenoreans who rule Gondor.

Yet even the T redactor cannot eliminate from the R source the towering Amazon figure of Eowyn, who is recorded as taking up arms the moment the previous king of Rohan, Theoden, is dead. Clearly we are looking at a heavily reworked coup d’etat attempt by the princess of the Rohirrim against Aragorn’s supremacy. Yet this hard kernel of historical fact is cleverly sublimated under folk materials (apparently legends of the obscure figure of “Meriadoc”). Instead of the historical account of her attempt on Aragorn’s throne as it originally stood in R, she is instead depicted as engaging in battle with a mythical “Lord of the Nazgul” (apparently a figure from W sources) and shown fighting on Aragorn’s side. This attempt to sublimate Eowyn does not convince the trained eye of the source-criticism expert, who astutely notes that Eowyn is wounded in battle at the same moment Denethor dies. Obviously, Eowyn and Denethor were in league against Aragorn but were defeated by the latter’s partisans simultaneously.

I’ve read this before, but after seeing a link on The Corner, I couldn’t resist. This is simply beautiful; a nearly perfect taunt. I don’t know if there’s ever been anything so completely and utterly ridiculous as the circular argument that insists parts of the Bible are unreliable because they conflict with Q. Now, the document Q does not exist, but is theorized to perhaps have existed, and is therefore considered to be more reliable than documents we know for certain to exist and can actually examine.

Got that?

Farmer Tom engages in mild pharasaics:

I content that alcoholic drink is not necessary for the Christian walk, may be harmful to the Christian walk and should be avoided.

True, true, false. Anything can be harmful to the Christian walk, from alcohol to zebras. Sure, you or I may be able to look at a zebra without lust in our hearts, but pity the poor brother equiphile.

The good farmer’s points are quite familiar to me, as a Southern Baptist, and they are wildly, even ludicrously unconvincing. First, dealing with the etymology, new wine is not grape juice. It is an alcholic beverage that should never be kept in the back of a car when driving over a mountain pass; had I kept in mind the saying about not putting new wine in old skins, the back of our car might not have smelled of yeast for a year.

Second, only a teetotaller could buy into anything as silly as the idea that Jesus turned the water into grape juice. There is no such thing as quality when it comes to grape juice, but anyone who has ever been to a wedding has drunk the cheap merlots and cabernets that are served to the masses. The wedding guests were likely surprised because Jesus gave them something velvety and smooth, with a mellow, full-body flavor that contrasted greatly with the bitter and tannin-heavy inferior stuff that preceded it.

I’ve drunk everything from Night Train to Italian wines so good they don’t even think of exporting them and I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Jesus Christ was not only a wine drinker, but was a bit of an oenophile to boot. When even the teetotaller’s Scriptural references are nonsensical, it should be quite obvious that this is one of the many examples of Man using the Bible as a mirror instead of as a guide.

As for the weaker brother argument, I would neither serve wine to an alcoholic nor drink it in front of someone I knew was struggling to control it. But you can make a better Scriptural case that to spurn wine is to spurn Jesus Christ than to argue that Christianity is incompatible with drinking alchohol in moderation.

We had another tournament this weekend, a small one, but my expectations could not have been lower. For one thing, half the tournament team was out due to their first communion festivities, I got a phone call from the mother of my best second-team player that he was sick the night before, and then when we showed up, one of my tournament team substitutes and my second-best second-team player were both missing.

It was so bad that we only had four players, we didn’t have the requisite five needed to take the field without a certain little boy too young to even be on the team. However, he was fortuitously sporting the correct jersey and shorts, so we could at least participate even if we were going to lose badly. Given that the pro team was going to be there, a team that promised to be tough even if we had everyone, to say that I was not optimistic would have been an understatement. I even warned all of the parent’s accordingly, especially the father of one six-year old who has a tendency to forget what’s going on and likes to lie down in the grass and start playing with it.

But we did have our goalie and our best defender, plus a solid midfielder, so I figured we could keep our losses to the 5-1 neighborhood. But the two little ones were, surprisingly, not completely ineffective, and the score was 1-1 in the first game when the two missing players turned up. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to explain anything to the second-team player and we blew several good opportunities so the game ended up 2-2.

We started off badly in the second game, giving up a horrible goal when both defenders and the midfielder closed on an attacker, leaving the area in front of goal wide open. The attacker made the pass and we were down. However, we struck back quickly as the midfielder, a big kid who is relatively new to our team and the idea that passing the ball is our priority, suddenly realized that he was attracting three defenders himself and started to pass to the kid who’s usually a sub. We scored three times that way and I was able to use the two little ones to give the older kids a rest. The game ended 3-1, which meant that we already had one more win than I’d hoped.

I’m not sure what happened in the third game. The second-team kid is a tall, gangly boy who isn’t entirely in control of his long legs and arms, and although I’ve tried to explain our basic concepts to him before, he never seemed to get it. But something seemed to click at just the right time and he was in the right space every single time we went on the attack. He ended up scoring four goals that game, and incredibly, one was from the clueless six-year old who, in imitation of the midfielder, brought the ball down the sideline, drew the defender and sent a hard, fast pass right across the face of goal. The tall kid finished flawlessly and I thought the look on the face of the six-year old’s father was the perfect mix of utter shock and pride.

It seemed we’d somehow found ourselves in a position to win the tournament, which was based on points, if we could manage to defeat the pro team. We had seven points, they had nine, so only a win would do. Normally I’d like the odds with our best against their best, but even with the confidence-inspiring run we were on, it was hard to be optimistic about our chances. But the kids put the pressure on them right away and while the other team was perfectly disciplined as always, they seemed to mistake our more fluid approach for indiscipline. They play in a square formation, while we don’t have a proper formation but focus on running to open space and always getting someone into “the hole” in front of goal on the attack while never abandoning it completely on defense.

I’d encouraged the kid who is usually a substitute to get more aggressive and after he won a corner for us, he managed to put it in the net. That seemed to shock them and after the midfielder hammered home a shot from long range, they fell apart completely. The two little ones not only got in after the third goal, but we actually managed to outscore them while they were in there. The littlest one had almost no clue what was going on, as usual, but he’s well-trained as to what to do when our defenders both move to the side – he rushed back to cover “the hole” – so even though he lost track of what was going on, when the centering pass came, it hit him in the back of the legs and shut down their attack. His teammates, of course, made much of him for that.

We ended up winning the game 4-0 and the tournament with ten points. The kids were all celebrating like maniacs while the parents and I just stood there and looked at each other in disbelief.

It was a very good day.

From the Red Star’s reader representative:

On the local scene: On Friday, May 13, this newspaper reported that St. Paul Police Sgt. Gerald Vick, killed in the line of duty a week earlier and laid to rest a day before, had a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit for driving at the time of his death. The Star Tribune’s report carried the page one headline “St. Paul police officer was drunk when shot.” A firestorm of reaction ensued with more than 80 readers contacting the reader’s representative. About two-thirds were furious with the report. Of those, about half said the newspaper shouldn’t have reported the news at all or at least not on page one. The other half objected to the word “drunk” in the headline, but reluctantly agreed the test results were news that had to be reported, despite the dreadful timing for the grieving family. About a third of the 80 readers thought criticism of the media was unfair, that the test results could affect the prosecution — clearly an issue of intense public interest — and were newsworthy.

It’s not up for debate; the cop was sloshed when he was shot. Considering that the newspapers never hesitate to report that someone wasn’t wearing a seatbelt or a helmet in a fatal accident – but only, of course, when they’re not – what distinguishes this bit of information is that it’s probably actually relevant to the case.

The deification of the police in this day defies belief. Most are decent human beings, plenty are not. They don’t protect anyone, they don’t even have a legal obligation to do so and their primary responsibility is picking up the pieces afterward so that the public won’t feel that the authorities are helpless.

My cop friends will be the first to admit that the possibility that this guy drank too much and started something he couldn’t finish is a real one. To sweep the facts under the table in order to present a palatable image of a noble, sanctified and fallen hero would be disgusting and an offense to the real heroes.

For once, I think the Star & Sickle is being unfairly criticized, which is a pity because there’s so much for which they genuinely deserve criticism, if not ridicule.