Merry Christmas 2022

[No Remorse] Briefly noted:

  • Senator Rand Paul issued his Festivus Report on Government Waste. Which describes "$482,276,543,907 in government waste."

    How do you get that big a number? Looking at the PDF report, it turns out that 98.5% of the waste is FY2022's interest paid on the national debt ($475 billion).

    So everything else is pretty small in comparison. Still, nobody ever gave me $118,971 for…

    Marvel fans are probably familiar with the 2018 box office hit Avengers: Infinity War. The movie follows Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk as they fight against Thanos, an evil warlord intent on destroying humanity to save the environment (subtle, environmentalists in Hollywood, subtle).

    In the movie, Thanos sports an “Infinity Gauntlet,” which gives the wearer extraordinary powers merely by snapping one’s fingers. Inspired by the film, researchers at Georgia Tech convinced grant reviewers at the National Science Foundation (superhero fans themselves, one assumes) to give them $118,971 to study if a real-life Thanos could actually snap his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet.

    The study ultimately determined wearing metal gloves while attempting to snap does not generate enough friction between one’s fingers to successfully create a snap.131 In their own words, "[o]ur results suggest that Thanos could not have snapped because of his metal armored fingers. So, it's probably the Hollywood special effects, rather than actual physics, at play!"

    Seems they discovered what they set out to learn, but at what cost? To paraphrase Captain America, the NSF is not looking for forgiveness for wasting American taxpayers’ hard-earned money, and it’s way past asking for permission.

    I've deleted the footnote, which points to a Live Science article: Scientists find the fastest acceleration in the human body. Ooh!

    Using high-speed cameras and state-of-the-art force sensors, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology measured the speed and acceleration of finger snapping and studied the little-known physics that makes it possible. They found that a finger snap is the fastest acceleration of the human body ever measured — and that the physics involved would have made it impossible for Thanos to perform the apocalyptic gesture, at least while he was wearing his metal "Infinity Gauntlet."

    Their results, published Nov. 17 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, show that the maximal rotational velocities of the finger snap are 7,800 degrees per second and the maximal rotational acceleration is 1.6 million degrees per second squared — a blistering three times the acceleration produced by a professional baseball player's arm.  

    "When I first saw the data, I jumped out of my chair," study senior author Saad Bhamla, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, […]

    Your tax dollars at work, getting an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology to jump out of his chair.

  • Still a little early for end-of-year lists, but Jeff Maurer is pretty sure he's found The Only Five Things I Liked in 2022. And here's a (relatively) serious one, in spot #2: "A noticeable shift towards YIMBYism"

    What do AOC and I have in common? We both recognize the need to build more housing (uh…at least nominally). I consider the need to build more housing — which can be done simply by removing archaic and poorly-considered barriers — probably the most obvious, clearly-beneficial policy choice facing Americans today. It’s like we’re starving, and we stumbled across a Honey Baked Ham. Now the question is: “Should we eat the ham?” Yes…yes, I think that we should. I really don't feel that this is a tough call.

    I seem to have noticed this viewpoint becoming part of lefty canon in the past year or so. I’ve seen Twitter profiles with red roses complaining about parking requirements and minimum lot sizes. Smart people like Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias have noticed people coming over to our side. I don’t know why this is happening; it might be a byproduct of a petulant “BOOOO, the SUBURBS” attitude suitable for an Arcade Fire song. Trump and Fox News did have a brief “Democrats are destroying the suburbs!” NIMBY moment that may have reoriented the far left’s policy alignment. But no matter why it’s happening, I’m glad that our numbers are growing.

    But don't miss number four, either. Jeff's a very funny guy.

  • On Christmas day, I really should do something day-appropriate… how about this, from Reason's resident Christian, Stephanie Slade? She argues Against Game of Thrones Christianity.

    For many members of the so-called New Right, one thing is clear: Classical liberal principles are not getting the job done.

    The left, after all, has no compunction about using the state to go after conservatives. As far as those illiberal progressives are concerned, Catholic hospitals should be forced by law to perform abortions, and social media companies should be threatened with regulatory action if they don't agree to scrub their platforms of ideas and information unfavorable to the Democratic Party.

    So instead of a principled commitment to limited government and individual liberty, the argument goes, conservatives who "know what time it is" should be willing to use public power to attack their foes. Anything less amounts to unilateral disarmament or even suicide.

    The stakes, in this telling, are existential. It's not uncommon to hear that a future of Soviet-style persecution awaits those who refuse to embrace a sufficiently "muscular" response. A New Right influencer once told me that the liberalism of the American founding, by making conservatives squeamish about fighting fire with fire, was apt to land her in a gulag. Like the famous maxim from Game of Thrones, it's a vision of politics as a literal war in which you win or you die.

    I was reminded of a lengthy Disqus comment discussion I had earlier this year about my mild objection to a Granite Grok article equating political opponents to rats in the chicken coop. And you know what we do to them.

  • New Hampshire is allegedly the "Live Free or Die" state, but as near as I can tell, we are behind another state in at least one area. The College Fix reports creeping libertarianism in the Beehive State: Utah axes degree requirement for 98% of civil servant jobs.

    Utah will no longer require a bachelor’s degree for about 98 percent of its civil servant jobs, according to a recent decision by the state’s Republican governor.

    “The state executive branch has 1,080 different classified jobs. Of those, 98% – or 1,058 – do not require a degree,” according to a news release shared with The College Fix by Governor Spencer Cox ‘s media team. “Instead, the state’s hiring managers and hiring committees consider comparable experience as equal to educational qualifications at every step in the evaluation and recruiting process.”

    Sounds like an easy win, Chris Sununu. Ask yourself, does a "Technical Support Spec IV" (salary $56,881.50-67,509) really need a "Bachelor's degree from a recognized college or university with major study in mathematics, computer science, business administration or a related degree field with at least fifteen (15) credit hours in the field of computer science"?


Last Modified 2024-01-30 7:11 AM EDT

Rizzio

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

This book made the WSJ's "Best Mysteries of 2021" list. (I'm slowly getting to the end of that.) Which is kind of odd. Because the book, while good, isn't really a mystery; it's a recounting of the events surrounding the 1566 murder of David Rizzio, which actually happened. Rizzio was the secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots.

It's very short, 118 pages. The author, Denise Mina, has an oddball, but very readable style. She gets into the heads of all involved, and is not shy about speculating beyond the known historical facts. She does a fine job of describing the despicable characters of nearly all involved. She describes the murder as part of a massive conspiracy to replace the Catholic Mary on the throne with her scheming Protestant husband, Lord Darnley. One of the conspiracy's major goals was to force the pregnant Mary to miscarry, via mental and physical abuse. All is described in technicolor, squirm-inducing detail.

When you're as ignorant about sixteenth-century history as I am, the suspense is heightened. I avoided the relevant Wikipedia pages to prevent spoiling that.


Last Modified 2024-01-15 5:22 AM EDT