The spirit of Ireland

The Sassenach neighbors objected when an Irish developer wanted to tear down an Edwardian house to build a development. (Come on, it’s England;  Edwardian houses are “new development.”) So he called the place “Pogue Mahone Court”, a phonetic rendering of “Póc mo thóin”….which means “kiss my ass.”

Real piano, tunable in real time

Introducing the Fluid Piano.

It sounds more like a fortepiano; I suspect that the slider mechanism wouldn’t work well with extremely high tension strings like on a modern piano. Part of that might be intent as well; the instrument blends well with sitars, which was a concern of the inventor. But this appears to be the first microtonal piano with potential, as it does not involve an unfamiliar and complex keyboard and is easily user tunable in real time. Of course, tuning during performance requires use of one of the hands.

I suspect that it’s too little, too late, given the existence of cheaper, more portable and more versatile virtual-piano products. But it’s a great idea.

Prophecy of a modest proposal

Wicked thought as I hit “publish” on the last post: We buy out supernumary employees, like AOL just did with a third of their workforce.  So… when everyone works for the gooferment, will they offer buyouts? How much would they have to offer your next-of-kin before you’d agree to just drop dead?

-2.857% ROI

That’s what I figure the folks in Pontiac got from building the Silverdome, which cost$55.7 mil and just sold at auction for a whopping $583K. It was probably even worse, as I’m sure the cost didn’t include the cost of borrowing the money. “Yeah, but consider the jobs”. Hokay, how many jobs were “saved or created” by giving the Lions a new home? For that kind of dough, we could have paid 52 guys $30K a year for 35 years to sit around and play cards. That’s even worse performance than Detroit’s housing stock, the value of which is rapidly chasing zero ($7.5K median home value, and the National Association of Realtors won’t even report sales prices.) As a commenter on Say Uncle asked, “I can’t help but wonder when it’ll be turned into a giant Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) facility.”

Thanks to Beck for keeping me current with my MI homies.

UPDATE: If the good citizens of SE Michigan had used that money for a solid gold statue of Coleman Young, it would be worth over $354m today

Big Media finally screwed by a copyright law

50s-70s artists can take their copyrights back — or get more money for leaving them alone.

The [1976] Copyright Act includes two sets of rules for how this works. If an artist or author sold a copyright before 1978 (Section 304), they or their heirs can take it back 56 years later. If the artist or author sold the copyright during or after 1978 (Section 203), they can terminate that grant after 35 years. Assuming all the proper paperwork gets done in time, record labels could lose sound recording copyrights they bought in 1978 starting in 2013, 1979 in 2014, and so on. For 1953-and-earlier music, grants can already be terminated.

The Eagles plan to file grant termination notices by the end of the year, according to Law.com. “It’s going to happen,” said Eveline. “Just think of what the Eagles are doing when they get back their whole catalog. They don’t need a record company now…. You’ll be able to go to Eaglesband.com (updated) and get all their songs. They’re going to do it; it’s coming up.”

It’s so delicious. Check out the comments on Wired: no sympathy at all. As the Eagles said, “Get over it!”

Po’ Dede’s a little confused

Dede Scozzafava, the Republican congressional nominee who dropped out of New York’s special election last week to endorse Democrat Bill Owens, said Wednesday night that the GOP is “really not based on any sort of substance.”

If that’s so, how’d she get booted out? Wait, Politico might be playing loose with quotes:

Speaking with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Scozzafava warned Republicans that “you have ideology that’s really not based on any sort of substance that can move an agenda forward, that can really help people in this country.”

What if you want to move an agenda back?

“You know, the original Republican Party was all about less government interference in the lives of individuals. It was about promoting self-sufficiency versus government dependency.”

That’s debateable. If subsidized railroads and harbors and opposition to polygamy qualify as “less government interference in the lives of individuals”, OK. Their first President sure interfered in a lot of lives.

Domestic terrorists accuse Hillary of racism

How sweet it is when the Left turns on their own!

Nickel-n-dime pro-life

My wife had occasion yesterday to accompany a friend to an abortion clinic. The only part of the experience that bothered her was that, “by law, they said”, the mother had to be offered an ultrasound of the fetus. Mind you, she didn’t actually have to look at it; she had to be offered, and could decline, which she did.

Now, I understand how such a law could come to be. There are lifebots out there who would say, “If they only see that it’s a BAYBEE, they won’t go through with it, because BAYBEEZ are cute ‘n adorable.” True enough, but I’ve seen early-term ultrasounds, and if you can tell that’s a baby, you have more imagination than I have. And they probably figure this is pretty harmless, and not really an infringement of anyone’s liberty, though it does mean that the clinic has to have ultrasound equipment, which maybe they wouldn’t need otherwise (though having it is certainly a good idea). Conservatives figure that none of their laws infringe liberty, because they’re the pro-liberty party.

Maybe my conservative friends would see things differently if we applied this strategy to Blue Team issues. What if, every time you bought a gun or even ammunition, you had to be shown pictures of what that particular caliber does to human flesh, because, really, you might be ignorant of that, since most of us have never shot anyone. “Yes, the .308 is pretty gross; wouldn’t you rather buy a .22?” Or what if fast-food milk shakes came with a picture of a diabetic’s gangrenous extremities printed right on the cup? Let’s not even discuss cigarettes. We’re all dolts, and need to be scared into taking care of ourselves… Yes, life could become one big shop safety/driver’s ed film.

It doesn’t help my opinion of this that I’m so squishily pro-life as to be barely pro-life at all. It’s a really hard sell to convince me that “There ought to be a law” about darn near anything. But I have no way of proving with reasonable certainly that the fetus is not a human being, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that it is a human being, and if government exists for anything, it’s to protect the lives of human beings. That doesn’t offer a lot of wiggle room. One could argue, I suppose, that fetuses don’t enjoy the protections of citizenship (since the unborn are by definition not native-born), but that doesn’t get you anywhere; if it’s OK to kill people because they aren’t citizens, then let’s grab our baseball bats, go down to the WalMart parking lot and bash us some Mexicans.

Worse, in this particular case, I can’t help seeing the abortion as a goodness. This is a person with a messed up life, who has been crawling out of the messed-up part and can’t afford to slide back. The child would be a born cheesesucker. I really can’t gin up any judgement whatsoever. When Rusty tried to bait me about it, I said, “She’s going to Hell anyway; one fewer sin isn’t going to change that.” She was taken aback a bit, mostly I think because her ex was in the habit of telling her she’s going to Hell. But I’m sorry, pagan girls are held to a looser standard than pillars of the Lutheran Church like George Tiller. I don’t approve; I certainly wouldn’t want to pay for it. But I have absolutely zero interest in hiring some guns to stop her from doing it. Does that make me an evil baby-killer-enabling person? I don’t know, and I don’t much care. Auntie Ayn would say, “Contradiction? Check your premises”, but I suspect she might not have much truck with some of the premises at work here. Given the track record, I think I’ll get better input from the Holy Spirit anyway. But I’m writing this because I have contradiction and uncertainty, and this one is in my face.

Like, “Why aren’t you in jail too?”

This afternoon, Dr. Eduardo Torres Cuevas. the director of the Cuban National Library will be speaking in NYC, and Robert Kent suggests a few questions that could be respectfully asked of him.

The Bob Marvin of the 2030s?

A novel version of “What I did on my summer vacation” — college kid with no woodworking experience builds a contrabass recorder.