essentialsaltes: (Yellowstone Falls)
... [and] the effects of climate change are branches hitting the windshield along the way.”

The Last Drop: America's Breadbasket Faces Dire Water Crisis - an eye-opening look at the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. I think the most mind-blowing fact is that, in the great state of Texas, water is not a public resource:

No other state’s water law allows such unfettered individual control. The danger, especially apparent as the Ogallala disappears, is that it favors an individual motivated to turn a profit in the present day above community needs of the future.

The Texas law allowed billionaire oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens to sell trillions of gallons of Ogallala Aquifer water beneath 211,000 acres surrounding his majestic Mesa Vista ranch, in Roberts County, near the Texas-Oklahoma border. In 2011, the now 85-year-old sold his water rights for $103 million to 11 water-impoverished cities nearby, including Lubbock and Amarillo.
...
Elsewhere, particularly in Kansas, farmers irrigating where the Ogallala is shallowest are required to meter their wells, observe water-use restrictions, and are fined for not doing so.

Landowners in the HPWD – even today – can choose to suck their portion of the Ogallala dry any time they like.


Whew! I'm sure glad California has no water problems!
essentialsaltes: (Quantum Mechanic)
Of 20 countries, the US ranks #4 in average (mean) wealth per capita at $301,000. Yay!

But #19th in median wealth per capita at $45,000. Boo.

A person who has the mean wealth would really be wealthier than about 95% of the population.



PS The average human being has about one testicle.
essentialsaltes: (Danger)
We received three offers on the house. We sent out counteroffers, and got some responses, and just a few minutes ago, we accepted one of them. It's not signed, sealed, and delivered, but we may have just sold our house.

On the buying front, we made an offer on the hipster place. We've received a counteroffer. I expect there were a lot of offers, so they're probably fishing for more money. But I figger -- hey, these people are hipsters... Let's send in the same offer, but we'll put a bird on it. It's a lock.

We dithered on the coke palace with a view, but ultimately we decided not to make an offer. And there's more fish in the sea at open houses this weekend.
essentialsaltes: (City Hall)
Things are moving fast. We've received three offers on the house. All have their good and bad points. This evening, we fired off our counteroffers. May the best bidder win. We also saw a couple houses today. At lunch, I snuck off work and we saw a place among the Dons. Digger had a look earlier, and Dr. Pookie actually got some live feedback from her visit. Now was our turn. I want to smack the hipsters who live there. But once you removed their ironic (but very real) moose head, and the organic chicken run, that place was pretty awesome.

This evening, we saw another place in the Dons. The view would kill lesser mortals. Literally, you would die. That first housewarming party, I'll just take presents and stack up bodies. The owner was in the music industry, and you can still feel the echoes of the cocaine fueled orgies that once took place there in the 1980s. Or possibly that's the coke that's still stuck between the mirror panels on the wall. It needs some love (most of us relics of the 80s do) but seriously, the view is un-be-fricking-lievable. Million dollar view, for less than a million dollars, with crumbling house thrown in.

We may be making offers soon....
essentialsaltes: (Dead)
For the past few days, I've been living about 2.5 lives, and not had time to catch up on it. Until now (?) We'll see how far I get.

click at your own risk )
essentialsaltes: (Jimi)
Wyrd Con 5 is Memorial Day weekend at the Westin LAX.

Live Game Labs will be running a number of events:

The Association for the Advancement of Rights for Fairytales Creatures

Limbo!

Thursday night, I'll be involved in supporting a benefit to support Seekers Unlimited, a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit dedicated to using live role-playing in education:




But most importantly...

On Saturday I'll be running "A Happening":
May 1969. The famous, the infamous, the obscure, the sublime, and the ridiculous gather together in a hotel in Los Angeles, just to find out what happens. A rules-light role-playing experience, where you portray the historical or fictional person of your choice (as they were in 1969).

Some character ideas.
Some background on the history leading up to May 1969. I'm inordinately happy that the calendar for 1969 is the same as 2014. I'm also inordinately happy that, on Mat 24th, 1969, Apollo 10 is on its way home from lunar orbit.
essentialsaltes: (Christian Disposal)
World Vision recently changed its rules to allow them to hire gay people who are legally married.

So certain segments of the Christian population behaved predictably, decrying the change and announcing they would stop supporting them.

Apparently, no one was around to shout, "Won't somebody please think of the children?"

And World Vision has unchanged its rules: "We have listened to you and want to say thank you and to humbly ask for your forgiveness."
essentialsaltes: (essentialsaltes)
Since we're thinking about moving, we've been doing some preliminary packing and culling. Today, we poked through glassware and the game drawers. Everything below is free for the asking, if you come and take it away, or otherwise arrange a handoff.

IMG_1894

(another photo)

The nicest things are probably the ones in front, the three champagne coupes that came from somewhere in Dr. Pookie's family, but without too much sentimental attachment, and the cut glass brandy snifter that neither of us knows whence it came.

Most of the other wine glasses have winery logos on them. Two beer flutes(?) with waterfowl on them. A total of 8 Ed Hardy shot glasses, 4 in a box and 4 loose. A plastic shaker with a devil's head on it. Rabbit-style corkscrew.

A few free things out of the game drawer:

A 3-D cat-themed Tic-Tac-Toe board from my grandmother (it is free, but you must carry away the guilt)
Bananagrams.
Quest for the Philosopher's Stone (which I saw at Origins '86)
Cults Across America (with box art by Toren Atkinson)

I also found some that are worth some dough on ebay. Can you believe History of the World selling for $110?

So here's a couple games that are not free, but I'd settle for friend prices:
History of the World
Tigris & Euphrates
Hacker from Steve Jackson. Hack computers like it's 1992!
essentialsaltes: (news)
Remember Barry Minkow?

ZZZZ Best Carpet Cleaning?

Wunderkind and child millionaire?

Convicted on 57 counts of fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison?

Apparently, he had a religious conversion in prison and became a pastor when he got out.

Well... he's just plead guilty to embezzling $3 million from his church.

(And he was already serving 5 years for securities fraud.)
essentialsaltes: (atheist teacher)
The best article in this month's Smithsonian magazine is the profile of Caroline Hoxby, who has studied the relationship between family income and the likelihood of a high-performing student applying to a top tier school. Maybe the most interesting tidbit of information is the relationship between income and students who perform at the 90th percentile or better on the college tests.



Yes, it's weighted toward richer students, but honestly it is nowhere near as skewed as I expected. The poorest 25% of families still produce 17% of these higher achieving students. BUT, these students just do not apply to Harvard. Harvard wanted to do something about it, so they made tuition FREE for poorer students. This had very little effect on their applications pool. So Hoxby's next step has been to work with the ETS so that high performing students on the college tests get a special packet, which not only encourages the students to apply to top schools, but also includes vouchers for free applications to these schools.

The other interesting tidbit was that, although many schools focus on urban areas to locate disadvantaged students of promise, her work discovered that there is also a lot of untapped potential in smaller towns and rural areas, where bright students do not choose to apply to faraway top tier schools.
essentialsaltes: (atheist teacher)
Interesting results of a global test of adult performance on reading, math, and problem solving.

"Not only did Americans score poorly compared to many international competitors, the findings reinforced just how large the gap is between the nation's high- and low-skilled workers and how hard it is to move ahead when your parents haven't.

In both reading and math, for example, those with college-educated parents did better than those whose parents did not complete high school.

...

The median hourly wage of workers scoring on the highest level in literacy on the test is more than 60 percent higher than for workers scoring at the lowest level, and those with low literacy skills were more than twice as likely to be unemployed.

...

This test could suggest students leaving high school without certain basic skills aren't obtaining them later on the job or in an education program.


'There is a race between man and machine here. The question here is always: Are you a worker for whom technology makes it possible to do a better job or are you a worker that the technology can replace?" he said. For those without the most basic skills, he said, the answer will be merciless and has the potential to extend into future generations. Learning is highly correlated with parents' education level.

'If you want to avoid having an underclass — a large group of people who are basically unemployable — this educational system is absolutely key,' Kirkegaard said."
essentialsaltes: (Secular)
Due to a lack of active duty Catholic chaplains, the DoD hires (why, exactly? *) 234 priests on contracts. Since they are not military, they are subject to the Antideficiency Act which specifically forbids 'government workers' from doing their jobs during a shutdown, even if they volunteer their services.

(Apparently the House passed a bill to fix this yesterday, but the Senate hasn't acted on it.)

From Snopes.



* Is there some sort of necessary quota of Catholic chaplains? If so, why not for other religions? Hm, now that I looked, I guess there isn't that much a disparity between the percentage of non-Christian military and the percentage of non-Christian military chaplains -- except, of course, for the "no religious preference" crowd -- but since the percentages are so small, that means there are only 33 non-Christian chaplains in the entire Armed Forces, "making it unlikely that personnel adhering to those faiths would ever encounter a chaplain of their faith tradition."
essentialsaltes: (Cocktail)
Been workin' like a dog on this, but finally got the big okay. Big contract (the biggest I've landed solo, I think) from a new client, and I'll be flying to Sweden later this month.
essentialsaltes: (Wogga Zazula!)
Buy my shit!

The item with the most sentimental attachment is by far the 3-DVD Criterion Collection edition of Brazil. But now I have it on Blu-Ray, so now's your chance. Some CDs, a few books, including the Radium Terrors, which you should not buy from me, because it is a bad book. Bad.
essentialsaltes: (NukeHugger)
The Two Cultures was originally delivered as the 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge. The phrase has (kinda*) entered the lexicon as a description of the gulf between science and the humanities. As a chemist and novelist, Snow somewhat straddled both worlds. And in descriptions of the lecture, that's usually what people focus on.

So I was prepared for "Scientists drive like this, while humanists drive like this." There is a little bit of that, but the actual content of the lecture goes well beyond that. One of the interesting things is how particular it feels to mid-century Cambridge... and how alien it sounds to normal people. The Cambridge dons of the humanities are a bit horrified by the parvenu scientists. 'I mean, yes, Newton was a mathematical philosopher -- oh, very well, he was a... scientist -- but at least he had the good taste to write in properly declined Latin.' Snow notes that the gulf is maybe not so wide in the US or the SU.

But where Snow goes with the theme was surprising. He identifies science as the cure for world poverty, starvation, and illness. And the moral thing for countries (like the UK, the US, and the SU) is to train thousands of scientists and send them off to the benighted corners of the world to uplift them (not only to cure disease, and introduce modern agriculture, etc. as angels from afar, but to help these countries go on to train their own scientists to carry out these tasks). To get a sense of the strength of his moral feeling on the matter, here's something from his "A Second Look" at the Two Cultures, written a few years afterward(**) (my occasional emphasis).

We cannot avoid the realisation that applied science has made it possible to remove unnecessary suffering from a billion individual human lives-to remove suffering of a kind, which, in our own privileged society, we have largely forgotten, suffering so elementary that it is not genteel to mention it. For example, we know how to heal many of the sick: to prevent children dying in infancy and mothers in childbirth: to produce enough food to alleviate hunger: to throw up a minimum of shelter: to ensure that there aren't so many births that our other efforts are in vain. All this we know how to do.

It does not require one additional scientific discovery, though new scientific discoveries must help us. It depends all the spread of the scientific revolution all over the world. There is no other way. For most human beings, this is the point of hope. It will certainly happen. It may take longer than the poor will peacefully accept. How long it takes, and the fashion in which it is done, will be a reflex of the quality of our lives, especially of the lives of those of us born lucky: as most in the western world were born. When it is achieved, then our consciences will be a little cleaner; and those coming after us will at least be able to think that the elemental needs of others aren't a daily reproach to any sentient person, that for the first time some genuine dignity has come upon us all.

Man doesn't live by bread alone-yes, that has been said often enough in the course of these discussions. It has been said occasionally with a lack of imagination, a provincialism, that makes the mind boggle: for it is not a remark that one of us in the western world can casually address to most Asians, to most of our fellow human beings, in the world as it now exists. But we can, we should, say it to ourselves. For we know how, once the elemental needs are satisfied, we do not find it easy to do something worthy and satisfying with our lives. Probably it will never be easy. Conceivably men in the future, if they are as lucky as we are now, will struggle with our existential discontents, or new ones of their own. They may, like some of us, try-through sex or drink or drugs to intensify the sensational life. Or they may try to improve the quality of their lives, through an extension of their responsibilities, a deepening of the affections and the spirit, in a fashion which, though we can aim at it for ourselves and our own societies, we can only dimly perceive.

But, though our perception may be dim, it isn't dim enough to obscure one truth: that one mustn't despise the elemental needs, when one has been granted them and others have not. To do so is not to display one's superior spirituality. It is simply to be inhuman, or more exactly anti-human.

Here, in fact, was what I intended to be the centre of the whole argument. Before I wrote the lecture I thought of calling it 'The Rich and the Poor', and I rather wish that I hadn't changed my mind.


(* Snow had (a little) better luck with his other lasting coinage: the Corridors of Power.)

(** An amusing bit of his reassessment is his discussion of how many people objected to "culture" in the title (because science and humanities are not cultures), and how many people objected to the "two" in the title (because there are more subsets), but then notes "No one, I think, has yet complained about the definite article.")
essentialsaltes: (Secular)
In an otherwise fine article in TIME about service organizations, and the particular good they can do for veterans, Joe Klein seems to go out of his way to offhandedly insult me and other non-religious Americans:

"But there was an occupying army of relief workers [in Oklahoma, after the tornados,] led by local first responders, exhausted but still humping it a week after the storm, church groups from all over the country -- funny how you don't see organized groups of secular humanists giving out hot meals -- and there in the middle of it all, with a purposeful military swagger, were the volunteers from Team Rubicon."

I mean, did I personally, give out any hot meals in Oklahoma? No. But I did give some money to the Oklahoma fund set up by the Foundation Beyond Belief, which ultimately raised some $45,000 for Operation USA, and the local food bank.

Why did I give to a charity run by humanists? Because in the past, assholes like Joe Klein have turned disasters into some kind of competition. It's not even enough to stop giving money to religious charities (though I did that long ago). Joe Klein was there with Team Rubicon, which as far as I can tell is a secular organization, but that's apparently not going to be enough to convince Joe that secular people are helping out. I'm not trying to 'win' this 'competition'; I'm not looking for recognition [as a child, I was too much influenced by Charles Emerson Winchester III's views on charity and anonymity]. Or a pat on the back. But I can't take a slap in the face like this without producing an angry blog post. So there.

Fortunately, the Friendly Atheist has already done a fantastic job tracking down information about the contributions of local and national secular groups after the Oklahoma disaster, including the giving out of meals of an unknown temperature, in partnership with Panera and Krispy Kreme. Funny how you don't see religious restaurants giving out food.
essentialsaltes: (Skeleton)
Hello,

We're writing to let you know we processed your refund of $0.01 for your Order 110-6477992-3144225.

This refund is for the following item(s):

Item: The Last of Us
Reason for refund: Pre-order price protection

Here's the breakdown of your refund for this item:

Item Refund: $0.01

We'll apply your refund to the following payment method(s):

MasterCard Credit Card: $0.01

We've processed a refund for the above order in the amount of $0.01.
essentialsaltes: (Empathyormurder)
Read this multipart story on the worst charities in the US.

"Every year, Kids Wish Network raises millions of dollars in donations in the name of dying children and their families.

Every year, it spends less than 3 cents on the dollar helping kids.

Most of the rest gets diverted to enrich the charity's operators and the for-profit companies Kids Wish hires to drum up donations.

In the past decade alone, Kids Wish has channeled nearly $110 million donated for sick children to its corporate solicitors. An additional $4.8 million has gone to pay the charity's founder and his own consulting firms."


"America's Worst Charities" is the result of a yearlong collaboration between the Tampa Bay Times and California-based The Center for Investigative Reporting, the nation's largest and longest serving nonprofit newsroom dedicated to watchdog journalism. CNN joined the partnership in March.
essentialsaltes: (column)
The Aztecs had bags of cacao beans that were used in trading, and also as a metaphorical reference for value. Due to their base-20 counting systems, they had bags with 400 beans (the Zontli) and bags with 8,000 beans (the Xiquipilli).

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