Borepatch

Thursday, April 4, 2013

"Bigger than the Beatles"?

With a 27-1 second-week blast to the top for "Can't Buy Me Love," the Fab Four locked up the chart's entire top five:

The Billboard Hot 100, April 4, 1964

Position, Title
No. 1, "Can't Buy Me Love"
No. 2, "Twist and Shout"
No. 3, "She Loves You"
No. 4, "I Want to Hold Your Hand"
No. 5, "Please Please Me"

Go ask your parents about these songs, kids. And yes, it was this much of a sensation. Girls would go to their concerts to scream until the passed out. As you can hear, it was impossible to get a good live recording of their concerts.:

It's hard to overstate how big a part of my childhood this was.

Deadly Sin? I don't understand.

Srlsy. I don't get it.

Judgy Bitch is the new Rachel Lucas

Those of you who've been around the Intarwebz have run across Rachel. I posted before pointing to one of her epic rants:

I remember the first time I encountered this sort of opinion – that if women were in charge, humanity would live in peace. I was 11 or 12 years old and read it in a book, and I swear to god, I actually laughed out loud. I remember thinking, this fool has obviously never met any females.

...

Like the bitches in my 7th grade homeroom class. For reasons known only to Satan, a group of them decided they hated a girl named Cassie, who lived near me and was actually a really sweet kid. These girls befriended her for a while, let her into their “friend”ship ring of evil, and then suddenly one day when she walked in, they completely ignored her. I remember her crying later at lunchtime, and I heard that she’d told them that her stepdad drank beer in the evenings and now those little snots were telling the whole school he was an alcoholic. That rumor never died.

But that’s nothing. Wait until high school, when the competition for boys gets serious and the rumor-mongering takes on apocalyptic proportions. This is when the girls start calling each other sluts just because they like the same guys. There was a cheerleader at my high school who got pregnant in 11th grade and she went from being the one all of us envied to the one we all called dirty, dirty names. The boys never really said anything but the girls, oh sweet Jesus, we were brutal. On the bathroom wall, someone wrote in lipstick, “Tiffany is the WHOREleader! Keep your legs closed SLUT.”

Sugar and spice, my ass.

Then we grow up and start having babies, becoming those sainted “mothers” Sally [Fields] is talking about. You know, like Britney. Or more seriously, like this woman or this woman or this woman.

That's the least of the rant. Sadly (for us, I presume happily for her) she found Mr. Right and became the happily married Mrs. Right, which tends to cut down on the amusing Intarwebz ranting.

Into the fray steps Judgy Bitch with rants like this, about a feminist hand me the smelling salts Victorian melt down because an obituary of a pioneering female rocket scientist dared to mention that she was an exceedingly fine cook:

These things are not buried in some deep, dirty, secret part of the internet that is almost impossible to access. It would have taken Jezebel ten minutes to find out that articles and obituaries that refer to male scientists are just as likely to talk about their family, their spouses, their children, their hobbies.

So what is the source of feminist bitterness about women, incredibly intelligent, accomplished, brilliant women who are capable not only of building propulsions systems that keep satellites in orbit, but ALSO of making beef stroganoff, being great moms and loving wives?

Personally, I think it’s the order of priorities that pisses feminists off. The feminist ideal is this:

Me
Me
Me
Me
More me
My cat
More me
Yoga
Book club
Shopping
Pissing and moaning
How much will I get if I divorce him now?
Should I fuck the new intern? He’s kind of hot.
I hope that asshole doesn’t think I’m making dinner tonight
Shit, I chipped my manicure
Should I get a venti or a grande?
My house
My kid
My husband

Women like Yvonne have an entirely different set of priorities:

Husband
Children
Work

Epic, simply epic.

At this point I could point out that my Sister-In-Law is an actual rocket scientist, or that long time readers will not the prevalence of family posts here despite my Internet Security techie ramblings, or my admission (somewhere here, I swear) that Roberta X understands antenna theory in a way that I never could, and that doesn't hurt my widdle ego one widdle bit. But quite frankly, I don't much care what the Politically Correct crowd dislikes.

I am glad to see someone as Politically Incorrect writing rants as epic as Rachel used to. If you haven't spent time there (either place, really), then you're missing some of the best commentary (sharp as the finest English Cheddar) around. Snark, delivered in multiple 55 gallon drums.

You know the guy who's missing that? Don't be that guy.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Thank you, Petula Clark

For an irreplaceable part of my childhood.

This is from last New Year's Eve, but Ms. Clark has a new album coming out. All you kids, go ask your parents (or grand parents).

UPDATE 3 April 2013 21:30: Here's Grammy winning performer Miss Clark singing this in her prime - 1967. You crazy kids out there need to know that she's sold 70 Million records.

Man, I need a Martini. This is a visit to a Lost World.

Now that is a strong password

LOL.

Blackberry social networking shares pr0n

This kicked over my gigglebox:

Using a Blackberry Z10 for a little one-handed surfing might be more public than desired, as the social-sharing baked into the OS likes to share, um, everything.

Blackberry OS10, used on the Z10 handset, integrates social sharing deep into the OS and many users opt in to alerting Blackberry Messenger contacts about their musical preferences.

As the system is also linked to the video player, BBM contacts are getting notified about porn preferences too, which might prove more embarrassing than the latest single from One Direction.

You have zero privacy. Get over it.

Why I carry a .45

The old joke is "because they don't make a .46" but there's more to it than that. It's maybe a bit gauche to quote your own posts but this sort of sums it up:

But why do you need a standard capacity magazine? Because after she emptied her revolver into the guy, he went back to his car and drove away.

This was the Atlanta suburban Mom who when they guy broke into her house took her kids and hid in a crawl space. He broke down 4 doors to get to them. And so when there was no place yet to run and no place left to hide, and with her children behind her, she shot him.

And shot him again. And again. And again. Again.

And so he left.

Think about that - when she shot her gun dry, he turned around and left her house.

[blink] [blink]

There are two choices: standard capacity magazines holding more than ten rounds of 9mm, or .45 ACP hollow points. Shoot him a lot or shoot him with something that will put him down. I'm not trying to restart the caliber wars, but people who think that 7 round magazines are the shiznit don't have any idea what they're talking about.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Robert Johnson - Me and the Devil Blues

Just because.

Man shot by mother of two in home invasion sentenced to 10 years in prison

Breaking news on a high-profile case:

WALTON COUNTY, Ga. —
A burglar shot multiple times during a home invasion will spend 10 years in prison for the crime.

...

Investigators said Slater broke into a Loganville home on Henderson Drive in January and pursued a woman and two children inside. Investigators said Slater broke through a bedroom door, a bathroom door and a closet door before he reached an attic crawl space where the woman was clutching a .38-calibur [sic] handgun.

She must have been compensating for something, like four broken down doors. But that's not possible, because I heard that the attacker would have just taken her gun away from her. Or something.

But why do you need a standard capacity magazine? Because after she emptied her revolver into the guy, he went back to his car and drove away.

Politicized science

Here's the problem:

The problems lie of course not the academic community as a whole but a vocal and aggressive subset, egged on by an uncritical media and a chorus of fellow travelers. Most of the community are solid scientists, who strive to do good work. But the public face of climate science is represented by the most vocal and politicized elements. As readers here know, I could write a book about the unseemly shenanigans that have gone on in the area of disasters and climate change.

The climate community won't fix this situation until practicing scientists start publicly saying enough is enough

Yup. And here's the problem:

Climate change researcher James Hansen, the long-time head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is retiring from government employment to campaign for policies that he believes must be adopted to avoid impending catastrophic global warming, reports the New York Times. Back in 1988, on a blistering hot DC day in June, Hansen testimony at a Congressional hearing brought man-made global warming to the broader public's attention. Skeptics have questioned just how accurate Hansen's 1988 predictions have turned out to be ...

"Questioned"? Boy, howdy:

From their Die kalte Sonne website, Professor Fritz Vahrenholt and Dr. Sebastian Lüning put up this guest Post by Prof. Jan-Erik Solheim (Oslo) on Hansen’s 1988 forecast, and show that Hansen was and is, way off the mark. h/t to Pierre Gosselin of No Tricks Zone and WUWT reader tips.

Figure 1: Temperature forecast Hansen’s group from the year 1988. The various scenarios are 1.5% CO ₂ increase (blue), constant increase in CO ₂ emissions (green) and stagnant CO ₂ emissions (red). In reality, the increase in CO ₂ emissions by as much as 2.5%, which would correspond to the scenario above the blue curve. The black curve is the ultimate real-measured temperature (rolling 5-year average). Hansen’s model overestimates the temperature by 1.9 ° C, which is a whopping 150% wrong. Figure supplemented by Hansen et al. (1988) .

To summarize: Hansen underestimated the amount of CO2 that would be released into the atmosphere by 66%, but overestimated the warming that would result by 150%. His "Scenario C" shown here (the one which almost maps to the actual recorded temperatures) assumed that there would be no increase in CO2 at all after 2000.

The great thing about science is falsifiability - that science makes predictions that can be proven wrong. It is said that "the scientist proposes and nature disposes" - scientific hypotheses are mooted and abandoned when the predictions do not come to pass. Nature has pretty clearly disposed of Dr. Hansen's hypothesis. It can only be a good thing for him to leave the scientific establishment for the (no doubt much more remunerative) post of a lobbyist.

Doh!

I've been posting on the breakdown of the new "hockey stick" paper, and I forgot the first thing from this blog that went viral on Mr. Gore's most excellent Information Superhighway:

I made it on the handy-dandy Clippy-o-matic. Come to think of it, you could do another one:

Looks like the Climate Science Establishment have created a mock-o-matic!

Global Warming causes blizzards

Monster snowstorms have paralysed much of the UK:

LONDON: Britain's military was called into action Tuesday to airdrop fodder to farms cut off by freak spring snow as thousands of homes remained without power for a fifth straight day.

A Royal Air Force (RAF) helicopter was deployed in Northern Ireland in a bid to reach remote farms where estimates suggest up to 10,000 animals have been buried beneath snowdrifts 20 feet (six metres) high.

Here's a picture of the drifts from Wales. Notice that the snow is taller than the backhoe that is trying to dig a path:

Source: BBC

It's not just been a single freak storm. The month of March was the coldest in the UK in half a century:

This weekend's great Easter getaway will be accompanied by some of the coldest March weather in decades, with temperatures in the UK set to drop to their lowest levels since 1962.

Met Office figures show that from 1 March to 26 March the UK mean temperature was 2.5C (36.5F) – three degrees below the long-term average.

This makes it the joint fourth coldest in the UK, in records going back to 1910. The coldest March in the UK was in 1962, at 1.9C (35.4F).

But remember, the Science® is settled! p > 95%. Oh, wait:

The light green shaded area is the 95% confidence interval of what the models predict; the solid line is the actual climate. You'll see that there's been no warming at all since 1997. And that's with some dodgy fiddling of the numbers.

So why does the post title claim that this is all caused by Global Warming? Because everything is caused by Global Warming!

And this is simply hilarious:

Monday, April 1, 2013

Funniest April Fool's Day prank

Anti-drone shotgun loads containing depleted uranium. Well played.

Lucky Gunner's Drone Shells - A Product Courtesy of LuckyGunner.com

Hat tip: the Captain.

Latest climate "Hockey Stick" paper - scientific misconduct?

Wow:

However, here I document the gross misrepresentation of the findings of a recent scientific paper via press release which appears to skirt awfully close to crossing the line into research misconduct, as defined by the NRC. I recommend steps to fix this mess, saving face for all involved, and a chance for this small part of the climate community to take a step back toward unambiguous scientific integrity.

The paper I refer to is by Marcott et al. 2013, published recently in Science.

Just, wow. Pielke's post is long, and detailed, and very damning. And remember, Pielke is a "luke warmer" - believing that temperatures are rising and it's partially the fault of CO2.

Marcott's paper was a reconstruction of the climate over the entire Holocene - the last 11,000 years. It showed a rise to a maximum around 500 B.C. and then a slow cooling until a warming spike during the last century. Steven McIntyre (the man who shredded Michael Mann's original hockey stick paper) has a further shredding of Marcott's late and weak FAQ response to the many criticisms of his paper:

Marcott et al have posted their long-promised FAQ at realclimate here. Without providing any links to or citation of Climate Audit, they now concede:

20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.
Otherwise, their response is pretty much a filibuster, running the clock on questions that have not actually been asked and certainly not at issue by critics. For questions and issues that I’ve actually raised, for the most part, they merely re-iterate what they already said. Nothing worth waiting for.

They did not discuss or explain why they deleted modern values from the Md01-2421 splice at CA here and here. Or the deletion of modern values from OCE326-GGC300 as asked here.

Nor do they discuss the difference between the results that had (presumably) been in the submission to Nature (preserved as a chapter in Marcott’s thesis).

Nor did they discuss the implausibility of their coretop redating of MD95-2043 and MD95-2011 as discussed here.

Instead of dealing with actual questions, for the most part, their “FAQ” filibusters about questions that no one was asking in connection with this study.

Other than that, it's awesome. I for one would love to know the names of the scientists who participated in the Marcott paper peer review. It would be interesting to ask them their opinions. Remember, this paper was published in Science, ostensibly the most prestigious Scientific Journal in the world, and it was the blogosphere that found the problems, not the scientists.

One wonders if there is none so blind as him who will not see. OK, one doesn't wonder, actually.

Hitler finds out that Google is shutting down Reader

Heh.

Time begins anew

It's Opening Day, and we all know what that means:

Hey baby do you come here often? Only each year ...

Sunday, March 31, 2013

The Underpants gnomes path to salvation

Step 1. Accept the entirety of Progressive dogma. Don't worry that a lot of it seems to be nonsense.

Step 2. ???

Step 3.
~~Political domination!~~ Err, I mean Salvation!
If you don't understand this dynamic, please go back to step 1.

Blessed is the lamb

With spices, rosemary from our garden, and olive oil, on a bed of root veg. Plus home made dinner rolls rising.

Happy Easter to all, and keep in mind that the Feast is not only for the body, but also for the soul. Maybe even mostly for the soul.

A merry heart doeth good like a medicine,
But a broken spirit drieth the bones.

- Proverbs 17:22

Pride

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. ... There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. ... The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The deadly sins are the mortal sins, the ones that will see you separated from God. The greatest of the Seven Deadly Sins is pride. Dante wrote of pride as a "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbour". More than a technical foul there, when you think that agape is the commandment to love one's neighbor.

The ancients knew of this sin. The Roman Christians called it as superbia, and considered it a deadly sin as early as the fourth century. The Greeks called it hubris (Ὑπερηφανία) but they too knew it as a deadly sin; a study of Greek literature shows little else.

This seemed a bit odd to me when I was younger. Surely, I thought, there were graver sins. Murder, that sort of thing. And yet pride tops the list.

Gustave Doré illustration to Paradise Lost, book IX

Lucifer is said to be a fallen Angel, expelled from Heaven for the sin of Pride. If so, then perhaps Angels and Men are not so very different, at least in their vices. Lucifer is called the "seducer" turning good intentions and words towards the darkness. This is the core of why pride assumes pride of place in the pantheon of mortal sin: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Because pride can be uplifting, can inspire you to great achievement, to see through to an unexpected and seemingly unlikely success. That's the bait dangled before us. Hey, if a little is good, then a little more must be good too, right? And this is where we should hear Dante again:

love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbour

The least of the problem is that it leads easily and effortlessly to other Deadly Sins; contempt can turn to anger when pride is felt to be snubbed.

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is…the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

-Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

The Devil smiles. It's hard to see how you get there without pride.

But that's the least of the problem. The true problem of pride is that it can - and often does - stand in the way of Grace. The proud man might turn his back on that gift, turning from the fertile field to gaze upon the desert. There's a whole school of Country Music about what comes from Foolish Pride.

Because none of us are as strong as we'd like to be. We're surrounded by Grace, not just this Easter Day, but every day - grace offered by family and friends. Offered by those we love. Grace that literally saves us:

But she carries me, when my sins make me heavy,
And she loves me like Jesus does.
...
Yeah, she knows the man I ain't,
She forgives me when I can't,

None of us are as strong as our pride would like us to be. That's OK - this Easter day reminds us that we don't carry this burden alone. And if we look with eyes that will see, we'll realize that Grace is not found only in the chappel, but under our very own roof.

If we can find the strength to turn that pride to an honest humility, we might even realize that we don't just receive that gift of Grace, but we also can give it. It takes a strong man to fight the pride that Lucifer so loves to see in us. A pride sometimes stronger than we think we are.

That devil man, he don't stand a chance,
Cause she loves me like Jesus does.

A man can take some pride in winning that fight.

UPDATE 31 March 2013 15:24: I am a theological dilettante, but a professional is saying much the same thing. Worth your while.

Georg Friedrich Handel - "The trumpet shall sound" from "The Messiah

We mostly hear The Messiah at Christmas tide which is a bit strange since it was originally performed at Easter tide. Easter calls for music that reflects the triumph of the occasion, and Handel delivered that in spades. Best known to most is the Hallelujah Chorus, and while it's probably not true that His late Majesty George II stood due to its grandeur, grandeur it has nonetheless.

My favorite from the oratorio was the Easter offering here a couple years back, Worthy Is The Lamb. I guess that this is third string, but c'mon - it's The Messiah. There is no third string here.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

Justin Bieber is turning into the new Michael Jackson

#1 Son emails to point out the breakdown:

BERLIN (AP) — Justin Bieber had to leave a monkey in quarantine after landing in Germany last week without the necessary papers for the animal, an official said Saturday.

The 19-year-old singer arrived at Munich airport last Thursday. When he went through customs, he didn't have the documentation necessary to bring the capuchin monkey into the country, so the animal had to stay with authorities, customs spokesman Thomas Meister said.

Bieber performed in Munich on Thursday, beginning the latest leg of his European tour. He later tweeted: "Munich was a good time. And loud. The bus is headed to Vienna now. U coming?" He didn't mention the monkey.

No word as to whether his plastic surgery makes him look more like Liz Taylor.

Because bacon

This seems legit, even.

Via Mrs. Doubletrouble, the lovely and gracious hostess of the New England blogshoots who writes that this seems made for me. Heh.

Prediction: No new Federal gun laws for 2 years

Probably more, but that's a 2 year minimum. The Czar of Muscovy has a very interesting thought up about what's going on with people buying guns. Specifically, why people are buying guns:

The sheer number of people waiting in impossibly long lines to get their legal documentation in order is evidence that the anti-gun arguments are so bad that ordinary, reasonable, unbiased people are motivated to wait in those long lines.

As Mandarin pointed out, this isn’t just a case of the average American saying “Huh. Well, now that I have heard both sides, I might just look into getting a permit some day.” Rather, the average person is saying “Holy crap! I need to get a weapon now more than ever; and I don’t care how long it takes or what hoops I have to jump through.” That is how bad the gun control debate has gone for them. It doesn’t just suck: you’re driving them to the other side.

Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, and Michael Bloomberg don't care, which is why they've been spouting off their mouths - which is pouring gasoline on the fire. Harry Reid and the Red State Democrats (and the Purple State Democrats) do get this. I doubt very much that Reid was lying when he said that he didn't have 40 votes.

Democrats are nervous, other than the ones in very blue states. Gun control is something that is seen as a Democratic Party issue, and has been for 20 years. The fact that millions of new gun owners are in a panic trying to get guns and ammunition tells you that this issue has penetrated the consciousness of middle America.

As the Czar says, the Democrats are finding that they're driving the electorate into the arms of their opponents. Remember, an election looms next year. Memories are short, but not that short.

Some people are worried that a bland vanilla bill will make it to the Senate floor and then a swarm of extremist amendments will be rammed through via legislative sleight of hand. This won't happen, for many reasons:

The Red state and blue state Democrats don't want to vote on anything here because it's radioactive. No matter the sleight of hand, at the end of the day you have to vote.
The more extreme the amendment, the more radioactive it will be. Dianne Feinstein doesn't care, but Joe Manchin sure does. Harry Reid, for all his faults, knows how to count votes.
The House won't pass it, no matter what the Senate does. David Boehner has done a masterful job trapping the blue and purple state Democrats: by saying that they'd take up any bill the Senate passed, he gave the green light to the most radical wing of the Democrat Party to push their unwilling middle strongly towards the left.

I believe that the Senate will vote gun control down, in a massive defeat to Obama personally and the radical wing of the Democratic party. But the damage has been done.

I think that it's even worse for the Democrats. The main provisions of Obamacare are taking effect this year, and will be entirely in place by 1 January 2014. Costs will skyrocket, people will be forced to drop their insurance (and be fined for doing so). We already see hours being cut back for hipster baristas, and this will accelerate. It will also become very clear just how much Obamacare extracted money from the working class to fund insurance for illegal immigrants.

The costs will bite. If 5 million people are energized by the spectre of gun control, 20 million will feel the pinch of Obamacare.

And then people will remember that it was the Democrats and not the Republicans that forced this bill on them ("Obamacare", dig?). There may be mutterings about the illegitimate legislative process that they used to do this. Republicans of course will have no reason to "fix" the bill; as its unpopularity grows and the voters become increasingly enraged, they will say "Hey! I have an idea! Let's get rid of this because it's a nightmare".

Next year's elections will be about Gun Control and Obamacare, and nothing else. The Democrats see this. That's why no gun control can pass. Maybe they can ride the rapids of a single massively unpopular bill, but they can't survive two.

Eric Church - Like Jesus Does

I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.

- Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

The intersection of that hunger and that fear is where we find the gift of Grace. For many, the fear overpowers the hunger, and they never reach out for that saving gift. The fear wins, because in a very central way you have to simply give up to be receptive to the gift. It's not something that you do, it's something that you're given.

But she carries me, when my sins make me heavy ...

Yes, there's a Country Music song for that. Mostly these days only Country Music has a song for that, and today's is a great one. Eric Church is a newish Country singer/songwriter who worked his ways from dive bars to a record deal on the strength of the songwriting he started when he was 13. He has an old Nashville sound which is a big on an anachronism in this day of "New Nashville" (Taylor Swift and Rascal Flatts) - and is very likely the core of his fan appeal. He has a bit of the I'm more country than you which some find a little much, but his is an honest working man's Country music, filled with Country themes.

Like Grace.

She forgives me when I can't ...

We're surrounded by Grace, if we'll just open our eyes. Songs like this tell us some of the places to look. If we dare.

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.

- Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat

Like Jesus Does (Songwriters: Casey Beathard, Monty Criswell)

I'm a long gone Waylon song on vinyl,
I'm a backroad sinner at a tent revival,
She believes in me like she believes her bible,
And loves me like Jesus does.

I'm a lead foot leaning on a suped up Chevy,
I'm a good ol' boy, drinking whiskey and rye on the levee,
But she carries me, when my sins make me heavy,
And she loves me like Jesus does.

All the crazy in my dreams,
Both my broken wings,
Every single piece of everything I am,
Yeah, she knows the man I ain't,
She forgives me when I can't,
That devil man, he don't stand a chance,
Cause she loves me like Jesus does.

Always thought she'd give up on me one day,
Wash her hands of me, leave me staring down some runway,
But, I thank God each night, and twice on Sunday,
That she loves me like Jesus does.

All the crazy in my dreams,
And both my broken wings,
Every single piece of who I am,
Yeah, she knows the man I ain't,
She forgives me when I can't,
And the devil man, no, he don't have a prayer.
Cause she loves me like Jesus does

Yeah, she knows the man I ain't,
She forgives me when I can't,
That devil man, he don't stand a chance,
Cause she loves me like Jesus does.

I'm a long gone Waylon song on vinyl

Friday, March 29, 2013

Congratulations to Chris and Melody Byrne

Parents of a new born baby boy.

Good luck banning guns, Lefties

Problem the first: Defense Distributed to have plans for fully 3-D printable gun next month.

Problem the second: 3-D printers to be under $2000 by 2016:

"Widespread adoption of 3D printing technology may not be that far away, according to a Gartner report predicting that enterprise-class 3D printers will be available for less than $2,000 by 2016. 3D printers are already in use among many businesses, from manufacturing to pharmaceuticals to consumers goods, and have generated a diverse set of use cases. As a result, the capabilities of the technology have evolved to meet customer needs, and will continue to develop to target those in additional markets, Gartner says."

But Progressive ideology is the Vanguard Of The Future™, right? And Progressives are so much smarter than everyone else that I'm sure they'll figure out how to handle this.

I'm a bit skeptical about the printed guns we're going to see in the next few months, but I'm not at all skeptical about how technologies improve as they move through their adoption cycle.

Want

So want.

Oof

Corporate VP was in town last night and so we had a dinner meeting. He's a good guy, and it was a good meeting, but it was a late evening. Ice cream will be late today.

One thing that was an interesting experience was that the restaurant had karaoke. The third rendition of "Margaritaville" was our signal that the evening's festivities had reached their logical conclusion. If I ever make noise about going to karaoke night, someone please put me out of my misery.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Cry me a river

Cue the world's smallest violin:

Since 2003, print ads have fallen from $45 billion to $19 billion. Online ads have only grown from $1.2 to $3.3 billion. Stop and think about that gap. The total ten-year increase in digital advertising isn't even enough to overcome the average single-year decline in print ads since 2003.

Gee, I wonder why? We used to get both the New York Times and the Boston Globe. Then I figured out that I wasn't paying for news, I was paying for lefty slanted political indoctrination. And sudoku.

And so I don't get a paper anymore. And there are millions of people like me, and what do you think happens to the advert rates when we all cancel our subscriptions?

Via Free Northerner who explains what happens using only three words: Let it burn.

Prince William of Beta?

I LOLed. [warning: strong, and possibly NSFW language, especially if you have One Of Those HR departments]:

So yeah, everybody is chatting away about this and that and ruggers and then, quick as a flash, the Cyprus thing comes up on the news. First I've heard of it. So I put my whiskey down. I edge towards the box and listen in to get the jist of what is going on. Turns out there is a [redacted] "tax" on deposits. I'm shocked, clearly. Clearly, these German [redacted] aint all sunshine and gravy en aw. So, amidst the fact that the EU did something more reminiscent of Soviet [redacted] Russia just there, the fact that Putin and friends are bleedin fuming away because Cyprus is a dirty moolah Russian oligarch sex party, and the simple, brutal point that if this is happening in Cyprus, it can happen here, I look around and try to get a reaction. Not a damn thing. Barely a whimper. Like I be saying, langers, just langers like. Lads and laddies get back to it thereafter, and suddenly I'm pounding back shots like no one's business.

Later on, they have a feature on your one, eh, whats her name? The good looking lassie who is hitting the wall and married to Prince William of Beta? Yeah, well she got her heel stuck in an iron grate in this St Patrick's Day presentation thing, and there was this big curfuffle and it was all amusing and [redacted]. Every fiend in the pub got a good laugh out of it and the coldness set in. You fucking [redacted]. You blatantly ignore, the fact that a dubious organization went into another [redacted] COUNTRY'S SET OF BANKS, and skimmed the cream off of the top. Then some lassie gets her stiletto caught up and it is epic lozzlzlzlzlzlzlzlzlols for the whole family. Seeya later ye daft [redacted]! All you sniveling lefties are more concerned with a bunch of lassies winning the grand slam. Bread and circuses? Corn and porn ken, corn and porn.

Quote of the Day, right there. Yeah, it' the second one of the day. That's how good it is. And there's more - so very much more. Europe is toast. Don't believe me? Read on, and think on how still waters run deep:

My grandfather broke his [redacted] back burying dead bodies, in the hope his family, his lassie, his kids, would be worth something. And what the [redacted] do we have now? This degenerate culture where everything is a [redacted] shamrock atop of a house of cards.

Remember, Ireland is a great victory of the Euro preservation project. Iceland is not anything of interest to you, Prole. Trust your betters. Think on the Prince of Beta. Ignore Cyprus.

We have always been at war with Eastasia ...

UPDATE 29 March 2013 08:23: Link added. Thanks, Erich.

Quote of the Day: Learning

Man, I hope that some day someone says something this good about me:

I can’t remember if I met Massad Ayoob before or after I took my first class from Jim Cirillo. Like Marty, Mas modeled an obsessive concern with safety on his range, and the work ethic he brought to his classes struck me hard. Here was a man who called his class to order at 9 am, expected them to listen to lectures during lunch, sometimes didn’t let them off the range before 6 or 7 pm – and still expected them to study in the evening. A new student, I found the schedule grueling, and said so. He smiled at me with some concern, and said, “People work so hard to get to these classes and they should have full value for it. I want to be sure everyone gets more than they expected.”

That right there makes me want to take his class.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Wrecked dreams

I wonder what the story is behind this:

Because dreams there were.

"World's Biggest Cyberattack" really isn't

But it's quite a headline:

Internet speeds around the world have noticeably slowed down due to a massive "distributed denial of service" attack, reports the BBC.

These DDoS attacks bombard targeted web servers with so much dummy traffic that people trying to access a site for legitimate purposes are unable to do so. It's most analogous to a traffic jam on a highway with no one able to move.

The BBC says that security experts are describing it as "the biggest cyber-attack in history."

It may be the fastest - 300 Gbps of attack traffic is a pretty darn huge amount of traffic. It's coming from all over the 'net, and the slowdowns are mostly local as zombie computers in a particular region spew attack traffic, clogging regional links. There are reports of intermittent NetFlix slowdowns or outages, and it's from this.

But this really isn't anything new. Old attacks are scaled up. I thought the recent incident where a vast botnet army scanned the entire IPv4 address space in 30 minutes to be much more impressive.

How's that Hope and Change working out?

Boy, it's sure a good thing that we got those Civil Liberty hating Chimpy McBushitler and his Sith Dark Lord Darth Cheney out of office! Now we can all relax while the Lightbringer's FBI getting real-time access to GMail:

Last week, during a talk for the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann discussed some of the pressing surveillance and national security issues facing the bureau. He gave a few updates on the FBI’s efforts to address what it calls the “going dark” problem—how the rise in popularity of email and social networks has stifled its ability to monitor communications as they are being transmitted. It’s no secret that under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the feds can easily obtain archive copies of emails. When it comes to spying on emails or Gchat in real time, however, it’s a different story.

That’s because a 1994 surveillance law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act only allows the government to force Internet providers and phone companies to install surveillance equipment within their networks. But it doesn’t cover email, cloud services, or online chat providers like Skype. Weissmann said that the FBI wants the power to mandate real-time surveillance of everything from Dropbox and online games (“the chat feature in Scrabble”) to Gmail and Google Voice. “Those communications are being used for criminal conversations,” he said.

Relax, lie back and let the HopeNChange wash over you, Progs. Just like Guantanamo is groovy as long as the President has a (D) after his name, it's groovy if the FBI snoops in your bidness as long as the (D) sprinkles Righteousness Dust over everything.

And these people think they're smarter than us ...

The "Hockey Stick" climate graph has been proved!

Remember the "Hockey Stick", the graph showing a long-term stable climate that all of a sudden started going way, way up in the last hundred years? Remember the controversy about dodgy data and [ahem] novel statistical analysis techniques? Well, there's a new peer-reviewed™ paper in Science magazine showing that this is absolutely, positively shows that it's a hockey stick, all right.

Yup, it's a hockey stick. A peer-reviewed hockey stick. Yup. Sure is.

You may have seen this in the press. The problem is, it's [ahem] bollox:

This instantly ‘famous’ 2013 Science hockey stick paper derived from Marcott’s 2011 Ph.D thesis at Oregon State University, available here. His thesis doesn’t show a hockey stick ‘blade’ projecting above its anomaly baseline NCDC 1961-1990. H/T to Jean S, posted at Climate Audit. Something changed after the thesis was published to produce the new ‘blade’ in Science. That something was significant, since the Science paper’s Supplementary Information discussion said it did not enable discriminating such a temperature variation (i.e. a ‘blade’) on such a short a time scale.

Just to level the playing field, the link above comes from Dr. Judith Curry's site. Dr. Curry leads the climatology department at Georgia Tech, and come down on the "we're probably doing something to warm the climate" side of the argument. You should read both of those links, which are about as "warm" (so to speak) for the warmist side as you're likely to see in a mainstream science blog.

So what do you see on the "denier" sites? OMG:

As noted in my previous post, Marcott, Shakun, Clark and Mix disappeared two alkenone cores from the 1940 population, both of which were highly negative. In addition, they made some surprising additions to the 1940 population, including three cores whose coretops were dated by competent specialists 500-1000 years earlier.

Let me highlight that last sentence. This paper took some proxies that showed rapidly increasing warming a thousand years ago - during the Medieval Warm Period - and redated them so that they show rapid warming now. They arbitrarily added 1000 years to each data point, showing ZOMG industrial Thermageddon caused by burning carbon in today's factories when in reality the carbon would have been burned by monks in the day of William the Conqueror.

Let me say that again: this article shifted a number of warming proxy series by 1000 years to show that (a) the Medieval Warm Period didn't actually exist and (b) today it's ZOMGTHERMAGEDDON!

Let me say that again: they changed the data so that it was off by a thousand years.

Ahem.

And here's the punch line: this is a peer-reviewed paper published in Science magazine, probably the most prestigious scientific journal in the world.

Ahem.

So now we know that it's OK to do massive (thousand year) surgery on your data so long as you get an Approved™ result. Go ahead, it'll still get published in Science. But Sarah Palin is really dumb and ZOMGREPUBLICANWARONSCIENCE!!!eleventy!!!!!

Ahem.

Remember, even "luke warmist" sites are shooting this more full of holes than the 8th Air Force returning bombers in 1943.

At this point, every Progressive who ever said the words "Republican war on science" can just STFU and sit down in the back of the room. Grown ups are talking.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Seems legit

Seen in the Mall parking lot.

#1 Son thought it was pretty funny.

Well there goes my diet

I'd like two fingers of bacon, barkeep.

The Surveillance State

Brought to you by Mr. Gore's most excellent Information Superhighway:

I'm going to start with three data points.

One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.

Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up.

And three: Paula Broadwell, who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels -- and hers was the common name.

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time.

...

In today's world, governments and corporations are working together to keep things that way. Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect -- occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer -- to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments. Together the powerful spy on the powerless, and they're not going to give up their positions of power, despite what the people want.

This is important stuff, and you should RTWT.

The sexist origins of gun control

Interesting:

Fascinating. Up until now, I had thought of the Second Amendment civil-rights fight as a part of the enduring struggle for liberty against the powers of tyranny. This article presents a different perspective: that gun control is merely another facet of social control of more masculine men by women, white knights, and effete men.

Note that the whole chicks with guns thing is quite beside the point if this is true. Err, other than they suffer from false class consciousness. Or something. But RTWT, which is pretty interesting.

Monday, March 25, 2013

All their other stuff is ****, but this transcends so much.

Damn, I wish that this song didn't mean what it means.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions,
not to weep at them, nor to hate them,
but to understand them.

- Spinoza

Spinoza, you magnificent bastard. I read your book. But thank you, Brigid.

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow,
you gotta put up with the rain.

- Dolly Parton

Easy to say. And I notice that I have no "howl at the moon" category. Maybe that's a good thing.

Puppy play

Wolfgang and Dexter. That's a lot of patience on display right there.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

It ain't bragging if you can do it

I'm #4 out of 50 Million in Google ranking for "don't let the magic smoke out".

What a very strange place it is, Mr. Gore's most excellent Information Superhighway ...

EA Origins online gaming system allows attacks on your computer

If any of you are fans (and users) of Electronic Arts Origins online store/gaming network, you are vulnerable to more or less total pwnage:

A flaw in EA's Origin game store puts its 40 million or so users at risk of remote execution vulnerabilities

The vulnerability was described by security researchers Luigi Auriemma and Donato Ferranta of ReVuln, in a paper released on Saturday.

Origin is the distribution platform behind just-launched SimCity, along with other popular EA games such as Crysis 3. It lets EA roll out updates to its games, sell titles, and also provides DRM capabilities by authenticating players' games.

But the way the software authorizes players can also be used to hijack computers and install malicious software, the researchers found.

The researchers offer what seems entirely sensible advice to defend yourself:

The issue can be mitigated by disabling the

origin://
URI globally using tools such as urlprotocolview. This means a user will be no longer able to run games via Desktop shortcuts or internet websites with customs command line parameters.

Users will be still able to play games by running games directly from Origin. This limits the usage of command line parameters. An alternative solution would be to disable the origin:// handler in the users’ browsers which supports such feature.

Users are strongly encouraged at a minimum to set their browser to prompt when handling these links.

There's a reason that horse racing regulates horse names

Hoof Hearted. Say that three times fast.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Blogmeet AAR

Boy, that sure was fun. There was a good turnout and great conversation throughout (hey, that's the point, right?). The consensus was to do this regularly, so I'll set up another round for late April. No pictures this time around, but maybe at the next one.

Wolfgang liked his doggie patty (hamburger patty, no bun or fixins). He was really good with the convention of yappy little dogs at the next table - more than a dozen little dogs of various toy breeds. It seems that their owners get together regularly for doggy birthdays, and we suffered through a chorus of "Happy Birthday" for a Pomeranian.

Thanks to all who showed up. As to the next one, is Saturday a better day for some people?

Smart

I know some smart people. I grew up with some smart people, which is a mixed blessing. I've been lucky to meet some smart folks from reading them on Mr. Gore's most excellent Information Superhighway.

Sabra is one of those people, and when she brings smart, she brings it with a bulldozer. If I were as smart as people say, I would have written this. It's easy to be complicated, but distilling something to its bare essence is a talent I don't much has. But she does it. Damn, I wish I'd written that.

Get on out of here and get on over there. This is the real deal.

Blogmeet today

Anyone in the Atlanta area who wants to get together for gunbloggy meetup social hilarity, next Sunday is the date.

Date: Sunday 24 March

Time: 2:00 - 5:00 PM

Location: Lucky's on Roswell Road in Roswell GA (they are dog friendly on the porch, and I'll bring Wolfgang).

Wolfgang is pretty unmistakable, although a bit bigger now:

Johann Sebastian Bach - the Brandenburg concerti

Image via Wikipedia

292 years ago today, J.S. Bach dedicated these six concerti to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt. And there begins a rather amazing tale.

The Margrave was a Prince of the house of Hohenzollern, half-brother of King Frederick of Prussia. But Margrave was a title that came with no land, and so in 1721 Christian Ludwig was basically a hanger-onat the court of his nephew King Frederick William I. The new King was a military martinet, creating the army that Frederick der Große would use to fight off most of Europe, and had fired all the court musicians to fund the army.

There weren't enough musicians in Berlin to perform the new works, and so the scores were filed away in the Margrave's desk. There they stayed - unperformed - until his death more than a decade later. His heirs sold the score (containing Bach's handwritten dedication) for 25 silver Groschen (groats: about $22 in today's money). Then they descended into historical shadow - we simply don't know where they were for the next century or more, only being discovered in the Brandenburg archives in 1849.

This is astonishing because these concerti are quite simply the apex of baroque music. Other compositions may approach them, but none surpass them. And they were unperformed for the first 129 years after they were written.

But unperformed no more. Their musical importance is demonstrated that Youtube suspended their no more than 10 minutes in a video rule for this performance of all six of the Brandenburg concerti. Here's 90 minutes of the greatest of the baroque, thanks to Youtube, Bach, and a simply amazing sequence of lucky breaks that kept these from being lost forever.

Concerto I - BWV 1046: 1) 00:10 2) Adagio 04:12 3) Allegro 07:55 4) Menuetto (Trio I, Polacca, Trio II) 12:03 ;
Concerto II -BWV 1047: 1) 19:21 2) Andante 24:17 3) Allegro assai 27:56 ;
Concerto III -BWV 1048: 1) 30:43 2) Adagio36:17 3) Allegro 36:31 ;
Concerto IV -BWV 1049: 1) Allegro 41:22 2) Andante 48:22 3) Presto 52:19 ;
Concerto V -BWV 1050: 1) Allegro 57:07 2) Affettuoso 1:06:03 3) Allegro 1:11:51 ;
Concerto VI -BWV 1051: 1) 1:16:49 2) Adagio ma non tanto 1:22:14 3) Allegro 1:26:41

Bootnote: Bach is often described as "mathematical" in his composition style, and the workings of the music have since his day been compared to clockwork. Today turns out to also be the birthday of John Harrison, the discoverer of the Longitude and the most important clockmaker who ever lived - born this day in 1693. In a stroke of coincidence no less astonishing than the circuitous route that Bach's concerti took on their way to the concert hall, and perhaps appropriate for a man who ordered and measured time as none before, Harrison also died on this day in 1776.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

So if posting a pic of your kid with a gun gets you a visit from CPS

Should I expect a knock on my door?

Suck it, Jersey.

Remember, you're not allowed to ask certain questions at a University

"University" doesn't mean "place where the universe of knowledge is studied", it means "place where the universe of Approved™ knowledge is studied". Shockingly, this rule has been violated by a professor at the University of Texas in Austin whose peer reviewed article on the differences between the children of traditional families and gay or lesbian families revealed some Unapproved™ results:

23% of now-grown children of families with a lesbian mother said ‘yes’ to “Ever touched sexually by parent/adult“, versus 6% of those of families with a gay father and only 2% of those now-grown children from traditional mom-dad, Ozzie-Harriet families.

31% of now-grown children of families with a lesbian mother said ‘yes’ to “Ever forced to have sex against will“, versus 25% of those of families with a gay father and only 8% of those now-grown children from traditional mom-dad families.

12% of now-grown children of families with a lesbian mother said ‘yes’ to “Thought recently about suicide“, versus 24% of those of families with a gay father and only 5% of those now-grown children from traditional mom-dad families.

And perhaps the worst of all (to Regenrus’s career prospects) only 61% of now-grown children of families with a lesbian mother said ‘yes’ to “Identifies as entirely heterosexual“, versus 71% of those of families with a gay father and with a full 90% of those now-grown children from traditional mom-dad families. So much for theories that acculturation plays no role!

The reaction from sociologists and their cheerleaders in the Press was predictable:

Journalists and academics on the left reasoned: these results cannot be true because we don’t want them to be; therefore, they are not true. And that’s when the frenzy started. They began by pointing out what Regnerus admits in his article as a weakness: that the “lesbian” moms and “gay” fathers might not be (but also might be) full-time lesbians and gays, but have, at least once, engaged in a “same-sex” relationship, even if married to a heterosexual. This, according to progressives, invalidates the entire study, is not a “fair” comparison, is “deeply flawed” methodology, etc.

...

Neither do the folks at the New Civil Rights Movement who resorted to the standard political trick, when they could not disparage the results, they attacked Regnerus: “His professional integrity was cast into doubt…” etc., etc. The New Republic said “It’s a real relief to see the takedowns pile up in response to” Regnerus. It sure is! The LA Times used the phrase “hopelessly flawed.” And there was more, much more.

So much more that a team of academics who wanted nothing more than a return to peace and quiet were forced to issue an open letter which said “Although Regnerus’s article in Social Science Research is not without its limitations, as social scientists, we think much of the public criticism Regnerus has received is unwarranted for three reasons.”

Click through to RTWT which includes more of the defense. It seems that this is the most comprehensive study to date, and is backed by other studies. But no matter. It reaches Unapproved™ conclusions, and so the auto-da-fe is organizing.

Long time readers will recall that I quite frankly don't care whether someone is straight, gay, or in between. You'll also know that my response to someone telling me that I'm raising my kids wrong is that they can shove off with my compliments. Not my business how someone runs their own life.

But you'll also know that I don't much care for how scientific study has been bent by Progressives - the Democrats War On Science one might call it. For extra credit, compare and contrast with climate science.

A University is a setting, we're told, where ideas can flow freely. But only some ideas. What a wreck of a once noble institution.

LEARNING, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

I guess I'm not spreading mulch on the roses this morning

I'm feeling better (the doc was right, it would take 7 days), but I don't feel like pushing my luck and spending a couple hours in the cold rain. I'll reset to next weekend.

Oddly, I feel a little apologetic for not getting going. Clearly I'm feeling much better.

Recycled post: Indigo Girls - Southland in the Springtime

It's now spring, all official and everything. This is my favorite song about spring, and while this is a recycled post, it's not a bad one.

--------------------------------------------------

When God made me born a yankee he was teasin'

When we were exiled to Yankeeland, springtime was the worst. Summer there is a delight, with mild temperatures and no humidity; autumn is simply spectacular; winter is, well, it's a wonderland.

But there's no springtime. You have "dirty snow" season that turns into "mud season" which turns into about 3 weeks of actual springtime at the end of April, and then it's summer.
Yesterday in Roswell, I saw daffodils. February 3rd. The Camellia has been in bloom for weeks. It's glorious.

This song is particularly poignant for me right now, enjoying the first blush of spring here with the family. Thinking about the drive between Austin and Texas, which will come again all too soon but mercifully won't go on too much more.

Though I miss her when I'm gone it won't ever be too long

The Indigo Girls have been around for quite some time - this song is from around 1990, back before I listened to much Country music. But it captures the wistful longing for hearth and home, for the place where you belong, that is so common in Country.

Southland in the Springtime (Songwriter: Emily Saliers)

Maybe we'll make Texas by the morning
Light the bayou with our tail lights in the night
800 miles to El Paso from the state line
And we never have the money for the flight
I'm in the back seat sleepy from the travel
Played our hearts out all night long in New Orleans
I'm dirty from the diesel fumes, drinking coffee black
When the first breath of Texas comes in clean

And there's something 'bout the Southland in the springtime
Where the waters flow with confidence and reason
Though I miss her when I'm gone it won't ever be too long
Till I'm home again to spend my favorite season
When God made me born a yankee he was teasin'
There's no place like home and none more pleasin'
Than the Southland in the springtime

In Georgia nights are softer than a whisper
Beneath a quilt somebody's mother made by hand
With the farmland like a tapestry passed down through generations
And the peach trees stitched across the land
There'll be cider up near Helen off the roadside
And boiled peanuts in a bag to warm your fingers
And the smoke from the chimneys meets its maker in the sky
With a song that winter wrote whose melody lingers

And there's something 'bout the Southland in the springtime
Where the waters flow with confidence and reason
Though I miss her when I'm gone it won't ever be too long
Till I'm home again to spend my favorite season
When God made me born a yankee he was teasin'
There's no place like home and none more pleasin'
Than the Southland in the springtime

Friday, March 22, 2013

Reminder: Atlanta Blogmeet on Sunday

Quote of the Day

Well, there's something to this:

A commenter linked to this article about a software developer who was fired “after making sexual jokes in the audience during a keynote session at PyCon, a conference for Python developers.”

Software developers are nerds who don’t know how to behave around women. Because of this, they often will make inappropriate talk like the kind cited in the article. They don’t do this because they are evil and mean-spirited, they do it because they are nerds who don’t know how to behave around women.

And the reason they don’t know how to behave around women is because girls avoided them like the bubonic plague when they were in high school and middle school, and maybe even in college, so they never got to have any experience with hanging out with the opposite sex.

You'll have to click through for the punchline.

Color film of the B-17 "Memphis Belle" from World War II

Wow. Color film.

UPDATE 22 March 2013 16:34: Changed embed code to one that is available.