| Monday
June 13, 2005 First see
the IQ debates summary document from last
week.
============
The following
section is reasonably long. If you want to skip it, the end of it is
here. The Taser Incident began when a policeman made a traffic stop.
You can find the beginning of it
here. It includes audio-video of the incident. There is mail and a
considerable amount of comment, including from me. Following now is a
lot of mail.
It began with:
Pretty disgusting if you ask me.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/video/taser_video3a.html
Ralph
After which there
was comment by me, and more mail.
Jerry,
I suspect the reason that woman got tazered is the
same line of thinking that got my Korean girlfriend subjected to the TSA's
tender mercies on her way home from Vegas. As you've noted before, the
authorities can't concentrate on the real threat because of the
Balkanization of our society.
Look, the only way the police department can avoid
getting sued is to TREAT EVERYONE THE SAME. With no exceptions for common
sense. So a woman who doesn't snap to it when ordered to get off the phone
gets the same treatment as someone who could be a threat. Otherwise every
time he uses his tazer he'll be in court accused of being a
racist/homophobe/anti-Muslim/whatever.
"You were following policy? Oh really, officer, what
about that time you ordered the woman to drop her phone? Isn't this a case
of selective adherence to the rules?"
In other words, as a practical matter if he doesn't
use the tazer here he can't use it when it's appropriate. Yes, it's
terrible, but I don't think you can chalk this up to thuggery on the part of
the police - they're doing what they've been trained to do.
On the other hand, I have no sympathy with the "she
deserved it, she should have known" argument. Just because she should have
known the police would probably carry through on their threat doesn't mean
they have the moral or legal authority to do so. If I walk alone at night in
a bad neighborhood I might well be doing something stupid, but that doesn't
mean the mugger is acting on some higher authority.
Eric Baumgartner
====
You said:
"This is all right and proper. The officer even
consoles the suspect. It was all done within policy, and after all, this was
a really awful criminal, driving with a suspended license. It was all done
properly.
So why are we not proud?"
This came across MetaFilter a few days ago. Amazing
and highly depressing at the same time. You are correct, it was completely
covered by the 'ROE'. How sad.
James Fallows has an interesting 'Future History'
article in the latest issue of The Atlantic. A look back from 2016 on the
coming U.S. political and economic crash. Not remotely plausible given too
many shaky suppositions, but enough consideration of how what we're doing
around the world today *could* have interesting and potentially negative
consequences.
Enough. I have to pack. Off to Seattle on Monday to
attend oldest daughter's wedding. I fully intend to lean over to the groom
at the end of the aisle and tell him, "Remember, all sales are final....."
Then a long-awaited week in the Canadian Rockies to recharge the batteries
and soul. [And if I keep seeing stories like this one, perhaps to do some
job hunting...]
-dean
--
Dean Riddlebarger
==
Jerry,
I suspect the reason that woman got tazered is the
same line of thinking that got my Korean girlfriend subjected to the TSA's
tender mercies on her way home from Vegas. As you've noted before, the
authorities can't concentrate on the real threat because of the
Balkanization of our society.
Look, the only way the police department can avoid
getting sued is to TREAT EVERYONE THE SAME. With no exceptions for common
sense. So a woman who doesn't snap to it when ordered to get off the phone
gets the same treatment as someone who could be a threat. Otherwise every
time he uses his tazer he'll be in court accused of being a
racist/homophobe/anti-Muslim/whatever.
"You were following policy? Oh really, officer, what
about that time you ordered the woman to drop her phone? Isn't this a case
of selective adherence to the rules?"
In other words, as a practical matter if he doesn't
use the tazer here he can't use it when it's appropriate. Yes, it's
terrible, but I don't think you can chalk this up to thuggery on the part of
the police - they're doing what they've been trained to do.
On the other hand, I have no sympathy with the "she
deserved it, she should have known" argument. Just because she should have
known the police would probably carry through on their threat doesn't mean
they have the moral or legal authority to do so. If I walk alone at night in
a bad neighborhood I might well be doing something stupid, but that doesn't
mean the mugger is acting on some higher authority.
Eric Baumgartner
==
Jerry P:
I also grew up in a small town, smaller than Memphis,
but the local cop used to park by the school to make sure drivers didn't
forget to slow down for the kids and in the winter, which in Oklahoma is not
that bad. We used to be invited to sit in his car with the heater going and
talk about things. I also had minor run-ins with police at Halloween when we
pretended we were pulling a rope across the street in front of cars, one of
which was a police cruiser. Nothing happened because the police officers
knew that we didn't realize that someone could panic and cause a problem. We
did get a stern lecture but told to go home. But in small town America, in
the good old days, the cops were not storm troopers who didn't remember who
they worked for. They didn't have a union and the police chief knew who
would get in trouble if they did act like storm troopers.
The facts were that the woman stopped her car when the
police lit her up. Yes, she was talking on the phone, which is an offense in
itself, but not worth an assault with a taser. It does demonstrate that her
priorities were talking on the phone not paying attention to the police. Bad
judgment, but the cop had nothing important to do other than wait out the
dumb lady. As a result he will have the incident on his record and that is
not a good career move. Maybe he can get a job in the real world where that
type of action would get him sued personally. Yes, she was stupid, but the
police need to understand that they serve the public. They are not the
authority, the public institution they work for has the authority and those
people are elected by the public. It is a representative democracy and poor
choices by one officer end up causing their brother officers more grief in
the long run. The public will respond in a negative manner long after the
incident is out of the papers, and it is a stain on the blue.
Charles Simkins
Actually my experiences with community
policing was the sheriff deputies and village constables of Capleville,
Tennessee, now a suburb of Memphis but then just a small town way out in the
sticks out Highway 78 from Memphis. We were actually closer to Mineral
Wells, Mississippi than to Capleville...
==
A woman in an SUV. UNMARKED police vehicle. She had
already tried to get out earlier and was told to stay in the car. She was
telling someone where she was and what was going on. 34 seconds from the 1st
yelling order to get out and being shot with taser. A gracious 18 seconds to
2nd taser shock.
Time from time marks on film.
I honestly do not know what I would do if my wife,
daughter, girlfriend, mother, or grandmother had that done to her, probably
go to jail for a long time. But for sure I would be looking for a slimy
lawyer.
Please leave my name off.
==
When I was but a young lad, my lawyer father
instructed me about how I was to conduct myself with an officer of the law:
"yes, sir; no, ma'am; yes, officer, whatever you say."
You see, the policeman--my father informed me--does
not decide the case, a judge does that. Arguing with a police officer is
arguing with the wrong person, and so is being disrespectful. Make sure that
when your attorney asks the officer in court if he had been treated politely
and with respect, that the answer is "yes." That may be crucial in arguing
with the right person,--the judge,--about your verdict in the matter.
What you said about Capleville is still true today in
my small Midwestern hometown. Drunks almost always get a ride home, instead
of to jail--for as many times as it takes,--and so do many of the local kids
who might get into rowdy situations with their gang of friends. For those
who repeat the offenses, a few days in the county work program, cleaning up
the parks, courthouse, and other public buildings, seems to restrain the
repeating temperament.
Separately, my wife and I have lived in Germany for 4
years and notice a sharp contrast in the attitude of the police from what we
have been used to in America. They are not "enforcers". They are not looking
under rocks for violations; they are not chasing down speeders (hidden radar
cameras taking your mug shot and license number to mail you the violation,
do that); they are not trying to fill the city coffers with fines. They are
there to help and investigate. This, in a country where children as young as
7, travel the city busses alone to get to and from school (the city transit
system IS the school bus system throughout most of Germany). That difference
makes for a much calmer and safer feeling about one's surroundings--aside
from being more sensible in the first place.
--Chuck
==
You said "Well, I drive an SUV, and at my age I am a
bit slow getting my legs to curl and uncurl, so I suppose I am doomed if
ever stopped by the police."
No, you're not.
Traffic stop procedure in Los Angeles is for the
alleged miscreant to stay in the car.
My source on this is firsthand experience in El
Segundo, summer of 2004. I'd made an error, was pulled over. Standard
practice that I've followed in such occasions in the past (going back
probably 30 years) has been to get out of the car, slowly, and walk back to
the officer. The moment I open the door and stand up, the officer starts
SCREAMING at me "GET BACK IN THE CAR, NOW!" There may be times to argue with
a cop, but this clearly wasn't one of them. I got back in the car, closed
the door, and waited. We did the entire traffic stop with me in the car, him
standing beside the door. He finished up with "When you are stopped out
here, STAY IN THE CAR. Getting out of the car is a good way to get a gun
pointed at you."
I have no doubt that, if I had not gotten back in the
car, as ordered, he would have very shortly been making a shoot/don't shoot
decision, and I would probably have lost the coin toss.
Chuck
As long as I stay in LA. After all, I
was once Deputy Mayor here...
==
Mike McDaniel wonders how long the public will
continue to put up with police bullying. I believe there's a relatively
simple answer. Until the cops begin to look like a significant danger to the
average man's family. At that point being a "law enforcement officer" will
become a much more life threatening occupation. Note that there is somewhere
in the neighborhood of ONE cop for every 800 or more people in the country.
They're badly outnumbered. Note that 40% of American households have guns in
them...frequently several guns for various purposes from target shooting to
long range varmint hunting. The cops are badly outgunned. Note that city
cops, county sheriffs and state trooper outfits are ALL having major
problems finding acceptable recruits even though the entrance requirements
have been sharply reduced. The cops are outnumbered and outgunned by a
population that's generally smarter (and more disciplined) than they are.
What does military history say about the probable outcome of this conflict?
Tim Butler Rock Hill, SC
========
Which ought to be enough on this
subject.
Back to beginning:
Begin Taser Incident
=================================
On Global Warming: A
debate/discussion
It began when I sent this email message to Gavin
Schmidt of NASA Goddard.
Following went up on my web page today
On Global Warming: There are several issues
here, all twisted together. Those whose funding depends on the "consensus"
that leads to the Kyoto conventions find it expedient to wrap them all
together into one issue -- Do You Care About Preserving The Earth or Are You
a Monster -- but that isn't a very useful thing to do.
First issue: is Earth warming? Yes, of course
it is; this is supported by all the evidence. Moreover, it has been warming
since about 1800, and we all know it: measure growing seasons everywhere
(look in old Almanacs if you like for planting dates and harvesting dates),
thickness of the ice in North America (we all know that cannon were dragged
across frozen rivers in 1776 in places where the ice no longer gets thick
enough to walk on, or never forms at all now), retreat of glaciers all
across the world and in both hemispheres. Yes. Earth is warming.
Second issue: is this due to human causes? Not
very likely. The very trends that show warming since 1800 also show that the
warming has been pretty uniform over that time, and modern industrialization
didn't put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to matter until well into the 20th
Century. Indeed, early coal burning probably put enough particulates into
the upper atmosphere to have a cooling effect. Certainly the 1815 eruption
of Tambura had a distinctly cooling effect (causing the notorious "year
without a summer" which was so gloomy that Mary Shelley wrote the gothic
novel Frankenstein because the Shelley's and Byron's weren't having any fun
on Lake Geneva due to lousy weather). But despite a glitch in the trend
during 1815 the warming has been pretty well linearly constant from around
1800 to 1960, at which point the warming continued but perhaps less rapidly.
This is hard to determine because this was when we began better
instrumentation, but that itself can cause ambiguities since we can measure
temperature effect undoubtedly caused by humans -- cities for example --
which are highly local.
Third Issue: is CO2 increasing? Yes. Is it
having an effect on Global Warming? Probably, but it's hard to see because
the trend in warming from 1800 is so strong that a small addition from CO2
isn't easily seen (if at all; there's some controversy on whether the effect
has been observed, but no one seriously contends that it is large yet).
There is serious debate on the future effects of CO2 on global warming, and
people with good credentials take all sides of the issue.
Effects of CO2: the best paper I have seen is
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm and I have yet to have one of the
environmentalists give me a serious refutation of what that paper says.
Fourth Issue: is Global Warming likely to
continue? Surprisingly, we don't know. If there is a serious possibility of
serious global warming we ought to be looking into ways of doing something
about it. Alas, the climate trends are such that it's as likely we are in
for another period of global cooling as warming, and I can remember when
climatology predictions at AAAS meetings were about the possibility of new
Ice Ages; Stephen Schneider who now mostly talks about Global Warming wrote
The Genesis Strategy http://www.wilmonie.com/cgi-bin/wmb455/105317.html
about preparations for global cooling not all that long ago. I took the
photograph of him and Margaret Mead that was used for promoting the book.
It's not a bad book although like much of Stephen's work it tends to get
polemical; which is to say he feels strongly about what he concludes.
Fifth Issue: what should we do? Note that this
is policy, not science. My recommendation is that we spend as much as we
must to obtain an understanding of what's going on and what we face: should
we be preparing for Global Warming or a New Ice Age? Or nothing at all?
Clearly the different courses of action are mutually exclusive, and except
for the "do nothing" alternative are likely to be expensive. Why Do Nothing?
Doing nothing seems wrong, but in fact might be proper: certainly we should
Do Nothing until we know what it is we are Doing Something about. As to why
"Nothing" may be the right answer, recall that the Vikings settled
Greenland, and prior to about 1325 there was a long period of warm climates,
long growing seasons, and generally mild weather: Good Weather. It may be
that we are warming back up to that point. Those concerned about CO2 are
right to point out that if we have a warming trend to an optimum the CO2
warming may take us well past that point to something we don't like.
However, there's little evidence that will happen, and there's even less
that it will happen suddenly: the Earth is big and the oceans are large, and
warming up the whole mess takes lots of time because there are so many
thermal sinks. We have no historical evidence of sudden onset warming.
We do have considerable evidence of sudden
onset cooling: England went from deciduous trees to snow and ice in under
100 years in the last Ice Age, and the Little Ice Age came on very quickly.
If we're warming up, preparations will be needed but there should be time --
and things will get better for quite a while before they get worse, so there
will be more money to spend on Doing Something. If however it's ICE that's
coming, things get worse before they get awful, there will be less money,
and less time. Schneider's Genesis Strategy is a start on what we might do.
And that, it seems to me, is about where we are.
So: since this seems so reasonable (at least to
me) why is there such bitter controversy and so many really horrible charges
thrown about, with people denounced, and attempts made to get people thrown
out of academic positions and professional societies for having contrary
views?
Well, there's a LOT of money at stake. The
"environmentalists" generally charge anyone who challenges their conclusions
and policy recommendations with being in the pay of the evil oil companies
-- and also work very very hard to see that every nickel of funding from
other sources goes to people with a big stake in the "consensus" position
and won't disrupt the gravy train. When we feared an Ice Age there wasn't a
lot of money for some reason; but Global Warming caught on, and there's lots
and lots of money for studies and academic positions, and if that dries up
-- who will support the "consensus" people? I admit that's a pretty harsh
view, and it probably doesn't apply to more than a small percentage of the
"consensus" defenders: but it emphatically does apply to many of the more
vociferous, and particularly to those who go about denouncing those who
oppose them.
It may be possible to have rational debates on
climatology, but my experience has been that if the opening arguments don't
convince you to join the "consensus" then either you will be denounced, or
communications will simply cease. That happened in the discussions with
NASA's Gavin Schmidt [gschmidt@giss.nasa.gov] here on this web site, and
that was neither the first nor the last time.
But the facts remain: the warming trend was
going on well before the CO2 levels began escalating. The Earth has been
both warmer and cooler in historical times. Computer models produce
predictions, but none of those models can duplicate the past (start with
1900 and run a 100 year projection that "predicts" the realities of the Year
2000; or start with 1950 and predict 2000 with the model; or heck, just give
us a good picture of what is going to happen next year, or this summer).
Observation scientists tend to be less enthusiastic about the "consensus"
and many reject it entirely. And there are counter-trends: We don't know if
we are headed for an Ice Age or Global Warming, but for a while at least
Warming produces a more benign world with more resources to spend. And the
return of the Ice Ages would be very bad.
And many of the environmentalist protagonists
use tactics that they would (and do) deplore if used by anyone else.
Which got this reply:
Just to show that I don't completely give up, here is
a picture that, I would contend, demonstrates what you request:
"start with 1900 and run a 100 year projection that
"predicts" the realities of the Year 2000"
http://www.realclimate.org/figure1_hansen05.jpg
The hindcast comes from running the models with our
best guess of all the historical forcings (including CO2, CH4, solar,
volcanoes, aerosols etc.):
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/data/simodel/F_line.gif
(full context from
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2005/2005_HansenNazarenkoR.pdf and
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=148 ).
Somehow I doubt you will be happy though....
Gavin
I replied:
Happy? If I thought we had a
real handle on all this I'd be ecstatic.
Query: what was the largest
driving factor? I will bet it was not CO2
You would lose:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/data/simodel/efficacy/Fig.28.pdf
CO2 is the largest single term, and when added
together with the other well mixed GHGs (CH4, N2O, CFCs etc.) they are
plainly dominant - most obviously so after about 1970 when the net forcings
start to be persistently positive (except for a couple of volcanic
excursions).
Gavin
Now wait a moment.
From everything I can see,
warming has been roughly linear since 1800. You are telling me you now have
a model that can show the trend from 1900 to 2000. Presumably it shows
fairly linear warming from 1900 to 1960, then a slight decrease in the
warming trend from then to 2000; at least that's what I see in the data.
If that's the case, I don't
understand how CO2 was a big driving force. Have I misread something?
The Earth is certainly warming.
Is it warming due to CO2 and human causes? If your model shows that, how
does it account for what happened between 1800 and 2000, or even 1900 to
1950?
You have set up a false dichotomy - either CO2 is the
only thing going on, or CO2 is not important at all. The actual situation is
that other forcings are important (volcanoes, solar, aerosols, land use
etc.) and for much of the earlier periods there wasn't one thing that was
was dominant. The dominance of CO2 (and the other GHGs) appears as the
largest term only in the last 50 years, and most clearly in the last few
decades.
>From 1900 to 1950, you have increases in solar and
CO2/CH4, and also a decrease in volcanism, balanced slightly by an increase
in aerosols (which is the most uncertain component).
In the last thirty years, solar was static, volcanism
increased (though not much has happened since Pinatubo), aerosols are
(globally) holding steady, and yet CO2 continues it's upward march.
Different periods have different things going on.
Overall, the biggest term this century has been CO2. I don't see a
contradiction there.
Gavin
We now pass to a long exchange in email format:
On Sat, 2005-05-28 at 16:52, Jerry Pournelle wrote:
> Biggest term this century? You mean 2000 -- 2005 or 1900 -- 2000?
I actually meant the last century (apologies). But
on present form, it is looking like being the biggest term this century too.
> Again, I look at the data and see fairly uniform linear warming from
> about 1800 to 2000, except that warming actually slowed a bit after
> 1960 (but not by much and that may or may not be a misreading).
>
> Is this incorrect?
If we stick to the instrumental period (1850+) to
avoid problems with tree rings and other proxies
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png )
things are kind of flat until 1900, a brief dip and then rise to 1940,
another dip, but basically flat until mind 1970s and then a steady rise
(doing a decadal average by eye). Not really radically different from your
reading....
> Because if the warming is uniform from 1800 to 2000, and we know CO2
> wasn't terribly important until well after 1920 and probably not until
1970.
... but I don't think you can claim the warming
has been purely uniform.
> Am I correct in understanding you to say that we had a warming trend
> driven by solar and perhaps volcanism until about 1950, after which
> that leveled off, but CO2 and man-made activity in general caused the
> continual warming after that? That we had a warming trend from outside
> causes, but that peaked out, and the warming we see now is from other
> causes that took over as the outside forces diminished?
I don't think that outside forces have diminished,
more that those outside forces that appear to have been important in recent
history are now just smaller than the effect of the increasing GHGs. Prior
to the 1950 say, GHGs were just one factor out of many, now they are the
dominant factor. It's clear that sometimes the other 'natural forcings'
(solar and volcanic mainly on these timescales) will sometimes work
together, and sometimes work in opposition (there being no mechanism
connecting them AFAIK). In the early part of the 20th Century they appear to
have worked together to warm, and in the late 17th Century, they may have
worked together to cool. In the early 19th Century they opposed each other.
The point is that we would have cooled in the 1980's-1990's if we were just
going by the natural forcings. Thus, detectability of the GHG forcing only
really became possible in the last few decades. Prior to that there was a
physical effect, but it could not be cleanly separated from the other things
going on.
> If so, is there evidence for this or is it an inference from the
> models? I know something about models and operations research in
> general, but not about the mechanisms of data gathering in
> climatology: it's my understanding that most of what we think we know
> about temperatures in the past comes largely from inferential sources
> like glacier retreats (linear from 1800 to present), ice thicknesses
> and breakups, growing seasons (from almanacs) and the like, there
> being precious little actual temperature measurement and recording until
fairly late in the 20th Century.
> Is this correct?
Based on the picture we have now of temperature
variations and how much information is required to estimate the global
annual mean anomalies of temperature, it turns out that we have a reasonable
idea of the global (or at least Northern Hemisphere) mean back to about 1850
from instrumental temperature records alone (though error bars obviously
increase as you go further back).
Estimates of the forcings (solar, volcanic, CO2, land use...) are put
together from all the relevant evidence from ice cores, early observations,
etc.
Models are used to see if the forcings and the observational data are
physically consistent over the recent time period, and that's what you see
in results like the figure I highlighted earlier.
Not all forcings are know to the same accuracy - in particular aerosol
distributions are difficult, as are some of the aerosol-cloud interactions
that are a big part of the forcings. GHGs are known well, and volcanoes are
reasonably well known....
> In which case the only independent solar data I know of until fairly
> recent times are records of the brightness of Venus and Mars as
> recorded by such places as the Lowell (I was on its board for 6 years).
...but there is also some uncertainty in the long
term solar changes.
There are data from a number of sources - sun spot records are one,
cosmogenic isotopes are another (isotopes like 10Be and 14C whose production
is modulated by the shielding effect of the solar magnetic field which
varies with solar activity). However calibrating this to climate-relavant
solar activity is pretty uncertain. You could double or halve the 20th C
solar contribution without straining credulity.
> I am trying to tease out what are the independent variables in the
> model and what are inferences.
The forcings are independent variables, the
temperature changes produced by the model are dependent on those (to the
extent that intrinsic variability in the climate allows), and the validation
is against the observed temperature data. Actually it's more complicated
than I state because of other data that are used to validate the models
(ocean heat content, sea-ice changes, etc...) and the use of models to
estimate the complex 3D fields of aerosol and ozone change, but that's the
basic idea.
> And I keep coming back to the fact that until not long ago the big
> concern was the Return Of The Ice (Schneider's Genesis Strategy). What
changed?
You have to put it in context. The early 70s saw
two advances that were quite novel - firstly that Milankovitch cycles did
explain a great deal of the ice age cycles, with the corollary that since we
are now in an interglacial, at some point a new ice age was likely.
Secondly, the cooling effect of particulates (aerosols) was first quantified
- and since (like GHGs) they are a by-product of industrialisation, they had
been increasing with time, giving a cooling tendency. These two things
coincided with the slight dip in temperature from the 1940s, and thus gave
rise to the idea that the new ice age was imminent. But before you make the
case that is exactly parallel to the situation today, go back to the
scientific papers at the time - you'll find that the discussions were often
very nuanced and often the impact of CO2 was balanced against the aerosols.
The classic 1971 NAS report concluded that much was unknown and more
research was needed. Of course, neither you nor I will claim that reports in
the popular media (i.e. Newsweek) generally do a good job of conveying
scientific uncertainty. William Connelley has done a nice job summarising
what the actual articles were saying:
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/
which even includes a brief discussion of the Schneider book.
Gavin
Which is where matters stand. I have asked a couple of climatologists who
don't subscribe to any of this for comments, but it has been well more than
a week and it is unfair not to post Dr. Schmidt's arguments.
I have no resources to challenge any of this beyond
my general views; I do think this is about as succinct a presentation of the
Global Warming argument as I know. I now leave it for your comments. I'll
have my own later.
Continued below
=====================================
Harry Erwin's Letter From
England
Subject: Letter from England
Things are very quiet at the moment. There's an
argument in the EU over tax monies <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4084594.stm>
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,7369,1505234,00.html>
<http://
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1652078,00.html> .
The Government is talking about providing child care
in the schools <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1652456,00.html>
.
Can anyone explain to me what Apple is doing? I
understand the development version of MacOS X 10.4.1 can be made to run on
most Intel-based PCs. Is Apple trying to steal Microsoft's user base?
-- Harry Erwin, PhD, Senior Lecturer of Computing,
University of Sunderland. Computational neuroscientist modeling bat
bioacoustics and behavior. http://osiris.sunderland.ac.uk/~cs0her
===============
Dirty Magazines
Soon after being transferred to a new duty station, my
Marine husband called home to tell me he would be late - again. He went on
to say that dirty magazines had been discovered in the platoon's quarters
and they had to discipline the whole squad. I launched into a tirade,
arguing that many men had pictures hanging in their quarters at our previous
post, so his new platoon should not be penalized for something trivial.
My husband calmly listened to my gripes and then
explained, "Honey, dirty magazines: the clips from their rifles had not been
cleaned."
R
Sounds like from Reader's Digest...
=========
Hi Jerry,
Here you go ! I fully expect to read about some nerd
getting arrested for playing a pc war game on an airplane someday.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050612
Thanks for all the great words, Lynn
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