"Children and Guns: The Hidden Toll"

I've written before about gun rights issues, and I think this article from The New York Times (yesterday September 28, 2013) adds an important dimension to the discussion. To quote it's first few paragraphs:

The .45-caliber pistol that killed Lucas Heagren, 3, on Memorial Day last year at his Ohio home had been temporarily hidden under the couch by his father. But Lucas found it and shot himself through the right eye. “It’s bad,” his mother told the 911 dispatcher. “It’s really bad.”

A few days later in Georgia, Cassie Culpepper, 11, was riding in the back of a pickup with her 12-year-old brother and two other children. Her brother started playing with a pistol his father had lent him to scare coyotes. Believing he had removed all the bullets, he pointed the pistol at his sister and squeezed the trigger. It fired, and blood poured from Cassie’s mouth.

Just a few weeks earlier, in Houston, a group of youths found a Glock pistol in an apartment closet while searching for snack money. A 15-year-old boy was handling the gun when it went off. Alex Whitfield, who had just turned 11, was struck. A relative found the bullet in his ashes from the funeral home.

     * * *

A New York Times review of hundreds of child firearm deaths found that accidental shootings occurred roughly twice as often as the records indicate, because of idiosyncrasies in how such deaths are classified by the authorities. The killings of Lucas, Cassie and Alex, for instance, were not recorded as accidents. Nor were more than half of the 259 accidental firearm deaths of children under age 15 identified by The Times in eight states where records were available.

There's no gainsaying that the drafters and ratifiers of the second amendment had no idea how easy to misuse and how dangerous weapons would become. But evenso the amendment does not restrict safety devices for guns. The only argument against such safety devices is a policy argument, for they are nowhere in the text or meaning of the amendment, and the argument against them is a terrible policy argument.

Precussive Maintenance

Percussive Maintenance from Duncan Robson on Vimeo and via Colossal. Music by Joel Robson.

The Fountainhead in 5 Seconds

Via Cynical-C.

Improve Everywhere + Carnegie Hall

Our Moon

Via Colossal (specifically, Colossal purveyor Christopher Jobson's twitter account), Kottke, and Yahoo! News blog Geekquinox, this video is made from thousands of high resolution still images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's wide angle camera.  As is somewhat common knowledge, Geekquinox notes:

The moon really does rotate, even though it doesn't look like it from here. Because the moon is 'tidally locked' to the Earth, that means that it always has one face pointed towards us. However, it also means that the time it takes to rotate once is the same as the time it takes to go around the Earth — 27 days.

Mechanical Beauty

The blue gears (on a single axle) turn in a single direction
varying the red gear from clockwise to counterclockwise
depending on whether it is meshing at the time with the
inner or outer blue gear

Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements is a website reproducing each of the mechanical illustrations by Henry T. Brown, first published in 1868 and updated and republished many times since.  The website authors are in the process of animating Brown's illustrations.  The animations are fantastic; they make the function of the gears and other mechanical elements crystal clear (Brown's original drawings not so much, but that can be part of the fun).  If you care about how things work or how to make things work or just the beauty of function, this site is a wonder.

Via BoingBoing and O'Reilly Radar (which, btw, is a great site).

We're Living in the Space Age, Dude

Beginning "I am sick of hearing people say that the Space Age is "over" because we haven't sent humans back to the Moon. Seriously? That's your complaint? ...," Annalee Newitz begins a rant at io9 on the incredible technology we now have in space and the incredible amount of knowledge we've gained.  And, indeed, we knew so little about space even a century ago that we had no concrete knowledge of the size of the universe, the amount of planets, suns, and galaxies in the universe, what in detail composed them, that there might be dark matter and dark energy, or how most of it worked. A century ago Einstein's writings on special relativity and the quantum, which are now fundamental to physics and chemistry, had only recently been published and were barely understood; his theory of general relativity was still a year away. Humans had few large telescopes, had no large rockets, and had never sent anything into space nor had any realistic plans to do so.  We now have a space station -- we've had space stations for several decades now.  Oh how things have changed.

So Newitz's article is an enjoyable rant and right.  No, we are not going today to other star systems.  Really?  Do you think that is going to happen?  This is the space age for the foreseeable future.

Newitz's rant, BTW, seems to borrow heavily in tone from Louis C.K., and he is damn funny (Newitz not so much, though that's not her point), so you should watch this:

Comedy Central

Some Questions for Libertarians

I know a lot of people, which means that, among the many I know, I know a fair number of self-described "libertarians."  These range from a friend of mine who happens to be an auto mechanic and who believes that libertarians have discovered a new form of economics and likes to say "Who is John Galt?" to a friend who is a former Libertarian gubernatorial candidate and notable lawyer and is on the inside of the movement.  I've often been puzzled by the discontinuities in libertarian beliefs -- for instance, I am puzzled by libertarians who rail against "the right to privacy" -- and I know I am not alone in this.  An article by R.J. Eskow published yesterday in Salon (which I saw via Pharyngula) puts it right up front: "11 Questions to See if Libertarians are Hypocrites."

The whole article is worth reading, as Eskow puts the questions into context. Here, though, are his questions:

1. Are unions, political parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples of “spontaneous order” [a term used by the Cato Institute to define libertarian thought] —and if not, why not?
2. Is a libertarian willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded?
3. Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers who bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are also employing market forces?
4. Is our libertarian willing to admit that a “free market” needs regulation?
5. Does our libertarian believe in democracy? If yes, explain what’s wrong with governments that regulate.
6. Does our libertarian use wealth that wouldn’t exist without government in order to preach against the role of government?
7. Does our libertarian reject any and all government protection for his intellectual property?
8. Does our libertarian recognize that democracy is a form of marketplace?
9. Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a threat to our freedoms?
10. Does he think that [Ayn] Rand was off the mark on this one, or does he agree that historical figures like King and Gandhi were “parasites”?
11. If you believe in the free market, why weren’t you willing to accept as final the judgment against libertarianism rendered decades ago in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas?

I have to distance myself a bit from Eskow's questions (even in the context of the article in which they're propounded) as they make a few unfounded leaps and they're not that well phrased, complete, or ordered.  Still, they point up fundamental inconsistencies in libertarian dogmas.

And in so saying I have to point out that I am, as I supposed Eskow is, a strong believer in individual rights.¹ I seek a system which protects those rights and interests -- and provides the opportunity to exercise those rights and interests -- to the maximum extent for the maximum number of citizens. It's that last part that seems to me the too common rub with libertarians: they seem, too often, to seek to maximize rights for a few (usually themselves) to the detriment of everyone else. Yes, I think, democratic republican forms of government are the closest we've come so far to a regime of individual rights; and some government and some regulation, measured for it's reasonability, is necessary to protect our rights and interests.
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¹ Here I have to make a controversial (if correct) comment: individual rights are not "natural rights." They are made by people. That is not a political or philosophical observation; it is a factual one. It is something we cannot change no matter how much we wish it to be different. One would have to be extremely ignorant of history to think that individual rights have existed for many centuries (let alone forever). One would have to be extremely ignorant of the world to think that individual rights exist everywhere. One would have to be extremely ignorant of culture to think that all cultures reflect or even understand western notions of individual rights. One would have to be extremely ignorant of the process of government and lawmaking to think that rights or laws magically exist. That individual rights are not "natural rights" does not mean that individual rights are unimportant; it means their explication and codification is critical.