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The point we Americans are making is; Of all those scary guns you have seen, how many of them actually shot you? Now here's the other question; Of all those surveillance cameras, How many of those have actually shot you?

So you are standing in front of an object, and if it's a camera you have 100% chance it'll "shoot" you but if it's a gun you have 0.001% chance it'll shoot you ... which would you rather it be?

Saying that, the stats. I've seen for CCTV is that it doesn't deter major crimes anyway (although that's often the reason they are bought) only minor ones.

You probably also want to read this guy.

Must be much more than 100 a barrel, the solar cells used on hondas car in 1999 cost $300 a cell
http://www.pv.unsw.edu.au/HighEfficiencySolarCells 8.htm

It takes about 3000 cells for a single person car and 5000 for two person. Thats $900,000 just for your cells and that gives you about 8 square meters is in a bright summer day gives you about 1920W of power.
Hmm thats less than a 20 amp service in the us, and it doesnt cost almost a million us dollars!!

Lotus Domino uses a security feature where as each attempt fails, the password prompt is delayed by a number of seconds. The delay increases exponentially, but never completely locks the user out. After a set period (minutes), the delay goes away and you start again.

VERY affective in blocking brute force attacks...

Generally, any system would be better with Notes security in place. It's certainly sufficient for several TLA orgs (NSA, CIA...)

Also, the next time you are stuck in gridlocked traffic because some self-centered type parked illegally and a bus or truck can't make a turn, please spend the time provided to you contemplating your stance on the "oppression" of issuing parking tickets.

That said, I think that these cameras are more stupidity (like the layer after layer of stupidity being added at the airports). As good SysAdmins we all understand that STUPIDITY /= SECURITY.

Lott does not mention that none of Miron's correlations between gun-control laws and homicide were statistically significant. (In his book it's worse--Lott falsely claims that half of the correlations are significant.) Nor does he mention that Miron's measure of gun laws was badly flawed. Their measure was a simple three point scale with 0 being no laws, 1 being some controls, and 2 a complete ban. On this scale the US and the UK have the same gun laws, and France and Germany have less restrictive laws than the US.

And Lott unaccountably fails to mention all of the studies that have examined the relationship between gun ownership and homicide with international data. The most sophisticated of these, with a vastly better measure of gun ownership and more statistical controls than Miron is by Anthony Hoskin in Justice Quarterly 18:3 pp. 569-592 (2001). Hoskin found:

"Two-stage least squares regression, which controls for homicide's effect on firearm availability in addition to a number of other confounding factors, reveals a statistically significant positive effect of firearm availability on national homicide rates. The magnitude of the association is considerable. The observed relationship is found to be insensitive to sample composition. Results also indicate that homicide rates do not influence levels of firearm availability."

That's more guns, more crime. Don't expect Lott to admit that this study exists any time soon.

I've found the linux kernel's built-in RAID capabilities more than adequate for most of my fault tolerance needs. The best part is I can move the drives to pretty much any system - a new motherboard, whatever - without having to worry about kernel support or finding that IDE driver. If a drive fails I can boot its mirror up in any system and be in great shape. I also use the utility mdadm to email me if one of the drives fails. For some linux firewall systems I've built, I use old crappy 6GB drives, but mirror them so there's no risk if one of them goes out. Looking at my basement firewall now and...

root@fw01:~# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid5] read_ahead 1024 sectors md0 : active raid1 hdb2[0] hda2[1] 38796864 blocks [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none>

everything is cool!

nightreaver root # hdparm -Tt /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 1444 MB in 2.00 seconds = 720.67 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 298 MB in 3.00 seconds = 99.28 MB/sec

I recently attended The US-Australia Free Trade Agreement and Intellectual Property - A Symposium which was hosted by the Baker & McKenzie Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre, UNSW Law Faculty. You can find the transcript here, and mp3 sound files here, here, and here. It was a most interesting presentation, although in some ways I think it missed important 'features' of the FTA. Features which affect us all like most of Chapter 17, especially the introduction of DMCA like laws. More time was spent discussing mostly irrelevant issues like the 'protection' of information that may otherwise be cached by ISPs. The site is a good resource nonetheless - it's just unfortunate that people don't know what's good for them and are more interested in irrelevant news than items which will actually make a difference to them.

I recently attended The US-Australia Free Trade Agreement and Intellectual Property - A Symposium which was hosted by the Baker & McKenzie Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre, UNSW Law Faculty. You can find the transcript here, and mp3 sound files here, here, and here. It was a most interesting presentation, although in some ways I think it missed important 'features' of the FTA. Features which affect us all like most of Chapter 17, especially the introduction of DMCA like laws. More time was spent discussing mostly irrelevant issues like the 'protection' of information that may otherwise be cached by ISPs. The site is a good resource nonetheless - it's just unfortunate that people don't know what's good for them and are more interested in irrelevant news than items which will actually make a difference to them.

Not to nitpick, but... technically speaking, if the power of the sound output is half as much as it was before, it is about three decibels quieter, since decibels work on an log-10 scale. Explanation here.

Philip Morris did take up ADTI's offer. (Though they offered them less money). Details are here.

The Clinton plan included an increase in taxes on cigarettes from 24c per pack to 99c. Understandably, PM was not in favour of this, so a Philip Morris executive suggested an astroturf campaign, writing to one of his people:

Having just read the Washington Post with a series of provocative articles about Canada cutting taxes, CBO estimating higher costs AND job loss from the Clinton plan and then our old favourite, former president current homebuilder, Jimmy Carter explaining why higher taxes will help tobacco farmers, it occurred to me that we ought to turn a few of our better letter writers loose to blitz the targeted states with letters to the editor about Clinton, Carter and Canada...

David N & I think the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute is perfect for this kind of thing. We are working with them on a proposal.

Our three key executives, Cesar Conda, Bruce Bartlett and myself, will run this campaign and we will devote the full energies of our operation and its consultants to this task. We plan to activate our key Advisory Board Members, including Jack Kemp, Robert Kasten, Dick Armey, Michael Boskin and others to mount a public awareness campaign immediately (see enclosed list of Center on Regulation and Economic Growth participants).

As you can see from our press in recent months, we are in a position to deliver. We would like to request $60,000, or $30,000 a month, to implement this program.

The Clinton plan included an increase in taxes on cigarettes from 24c per pack to 99c. Understandably, PM was not in favour of this, so a Philip Morris executive suggested an astroturf campaign, writing to one of his people:

Having just read the Washington Post with a series of provocative articles about Canada cutting taxes, CBO estimating higher costs AND job loss from the Clinton plan and then our old favourite, former president current homebuilder, Jimmy Carter explaining why higher taxes will help tobacco farmers, it occurred to me that we ought to turn a few of our better letter writers loose to blitz the targeted states with letters to the editor about Clinton, Carter and Canada...

David N & I think the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute is perfect for this kind of thing. We are working with them on a proposal.

Our three key executives, Cesar Conda, Bruce Bartlett and myself, will run this campaign and we will devote the full energies of our operation and its consultants to this task. We plan to activate our key Advisory Board Members, including Jack Kemp, Robert Kasten, Dick Armey, Michael Boskin and others to mount a public awareness campaign immediately (see enclosed list of Center on Regulation and Economic Growth participants).

As you can see from our press in recent months, we are in a position to deliver. We would like to request $60,000, or $30,000 a month, to implement this program.

The Clinton plan included an increase in taxes on cigarettes from 24c per pack to 99c. Understandably, PM was not in favour of this, so a Philip Morris executive suggested an astroturf campaign, writing to one of his people:

Having just read the Washington Post with a series of provocative articles about Canada cutting taxes, CBO estimating higher costs AND job loss from the Clinton plan and then our old favourite, former president current homebuilder, Jimmy Carter explaining why higher taxes will help tobacco farmers, it occurred to me that we ought to turn a few of our better letter writers loose to blitz the targeted states with letters to the editor about Clinton, Carter and Canada...

David N & I think the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute is perfect for this kind of thing. We are working with them on a proposal.

Our three key executives, Cesar Conda, Bruce Bartlett and myself, will run this campaign and we will devote the full energies of our operation and its consultants to this task. We plan to activate our key Advisory Board Members, including Jack Kemp, Robert Kasten, Dick Armey, Michael Boskin and others to mount a public awareness campaign immediately (see enclosed list of Center on Regulation and Economic Growth participants).

As you can see from our press in recent months, we are in a position to deliver. We would like to request $60,000, or $30,000 a month, to implement this program.

The Clinton plan included an increase in taxes on cigarettes from 24c per pack to 99c. Understandably, PM was not in favour of this, so a Philip Morris executive suggested an astroturf campaign, writing to one of his people:

Having just read the Washington Post with a series of provocative articles about Canada cutting taxes, CBO estimating higher costs AND job loss from the Clinton plan and then our old favourite, former president current homebuilder, Jimmy Carter explaining why higher taxes will help tobacco farmers, it occurred to me that we ought to turn a few of our better letter writers loose to blitz the targeted states with letters to the editor about Clinton, Carter and Canada...

David N & I think the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute is perfect for this kind of thing. We are working with them on a proposal.

Our three key executives, Cesar Conda, Bruce Bartlett and myself, will run this campaign and we will devote the full energies of our operation and its consultants to this task. We plan to activate our key Advisory Board Members, including Jack Kemp, Robert Kasten, Dick Armey, Michael Boskin and others to mount a public awareness campaign immediately (see enclosed list of Center on Regulation and Economic Growth participants).

As you can see from our press in recent months, we are in a position to deliver. We would like to request $60,000, or $30,000 a month, to implement this program.

It's a joke, I get it.

Having said that, it's America and the other developed countries that are raping the planet right now.

The problems we are causing are too numerous for me to list, but we need to stop!
This website has the right idea, but I can't see many of us volunteering for it, at least not until a Peak Oil Depression sets in.

I have a couple of questions:

1. Who is backing the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology? Where does their money come from? Scientists? Scientists that work for big pharma? Scientists that work for biotech firms?

2. For all the people who have posted things like: "People have been saying that X invention would kill everyone for years, but it hasn't happened", just remember -- they only have to be right once. Might they not be right this time?

Enrico Fermi was the one who proposed that we haven't discovered extraterrestrial "life" or "intelligence" (or been discovered and contacted by it) because any advanced extraterrestrial society would have already killed itself off before advancing to the point where extraterrestrial travel is possible (Fermi's Paradox is what this is called, although my explanation is pretty inelegant).

GF.

It looks like this is what NVIDIA have done with BMRT when they bought it: look at what has become of exluna.com

If anyone's wondering, a couple of the latest releases of BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools) before NVIDIA pulled the plug on them are available here

<davidm@tiger.hpl.hp.com> (04/01/23 1.1474.119.7)
ia64: Drop copyright notices on header files which are either entirely trivial
or ended up being trivial variations of another file. Fix some
missing attributions and rephrase existing attributions for specifity.

Caffeine is a drug, and all drugs have a lethal dose. According to this site, the lethal dose of caffeine "appears to be" between 5 and 10 grams. So, coffee is around 100 mg per cup, so, 100 cups = 10,000 mg = 10 grams. So that should do it. Of course, you'd have to consume these very quickly to get the full "effect".

1. Why functional programming matters by John Hughes. An oldie but goodie, this can get you motivated to actually learn the language.
2. Hal Daume's Haskell tutorial is very complete, free and much better than the "Gentle Haskell Introduction" which isn't very gentle at all.
3. The Haskell Language definition is the official language description.
4. GHC's library reference, which you will use constantly on anything non-trivial.
5. The foreign language interface manual. Since Haskell has a small library you will probably need to call functions written in C a lot to get anything done. Luckily, Haskell's foreign function interface is quite nice.

Yes, well Linux also has Feisty Dunnart's on it's side... crap.

So the question must be raised *what* would the Universe look like if /.ers had had a billion or more years to work on it? Yes, I know that many of you will argue that it should not look much different but you have not run the numbers as I have on planetary disassembly times. Nor do you understand the limits of nanotechnology to the extent that I do.

I've tried to explore and address some of these questions in my papers about Matrioshka Brains as has Dr. Sandberg in his exploration of the various types of Jupiter Brains.

These are not new concepts -- they have been discussed on the Extropians list for perhaps a decade. There are a few good astronmers and astrophysicists who discuss these ideas but to a large extent mainstream science seems stuck in the paradigm that the universe simply must be dead.

Until we deal with whether or not that is a fundamental misconception we may be plagued by concepts like Dark Matter and Dark Energy that could be resting on very questionable evidence.

Robert

If in doubt, it's spam. Simple rule, really. If some company really wants to report that my "Payment is past due" they'll send me a letter. Besides, most corporate contacts aren't going to be named "kaislyais." It takes a split second to make this judgment.

Maybe you are smarter than the average spammer, but you need to prove it. When you produce your magical filter, I'll consider your intellectual prowess.

You make it sound like I was claiming to be the world's statistical NLP expert. Yes, I have my own ideas, along with hundreds of other people. In general I think it's a safe bet to say we're smarter than spammers. I'm not really interested in proving anything, since I never intended this to be an IQ competition. I don't think it's big-headed to assume I'm smarter than a slimeball.

As for the magical filter, it isn't magical, and it already exists. As I said, PC hardware severely limits the kinds of algorithms that we can use without making the user impatient. If you'd like to run it, I'll gladly send it to you, but don't expect me to document anything, and don't complain about the run time :-)

Currently I use a hybrid filter which uses a word clustering algorithm to concentrate the information which flows into a feed forward neural network. Currently I'm examining the use of SOMs instead of feed forward networks to automatically generate document classes. I'm also looking into ways to use the neural network as feedback to fine-tune the clustering algorithm.

I believe these blends of statistical and information-theory techniques with "sloppier" systems like neural networks will become more and more valuable as people continue to research them.

As I said though, it's a research project which means it has no documentation and the training process is laborious and not yet automated. It's not the kind of thing you install on a mail server and just forget about. I'm more interested in the filter than the mechanics of getting it integrated into mail systems.

Here is the lkml announcement

Linus' announcement

and the guy who named it here

Nick

Linux kernel 2.6.2 aka 'Feisty Dunnart' released," and adds some possibly useful information "about Dunnarts

So now Linux' mascot is a dunnart uh?

Well check out this picture from the link in the /. blurb: doesn't that look like a badly wounded rodent implacably attracted by a mentally deranged radioactive red hat?

Scary if you ask me ...

Do this, or something similar in your area. You will get credits for a lot of the medically oriented subjects, and you will learn the Computer Science from the ground up. I believe if you're going to use Computing, ensure it is firmly based on theory, and not hacking. Hacking you learn to do, but theory is harder to get afterwards. You may never code a bubble-sort, but you'll know where to look if you need to.

My AUD$0.02

Whatever, man. I have G5 and Itanium2 machines at my desk.

Check out this guy who claims to have an ia64 in his bedroom.

Wrong. Zero dB is just an arbitrary choice and a sound at 0 dB has nonzero amplitude. In air the reference pressure is normally 20 micropascals. The previous poster is correct, the decibel scale is relative, and negative infinity dB is truly silent.

Exactly what we are working on.

My boss gave a paper at linux.conf.au this year, and you can see more information on our WiKi. One of the guys here has even written an IDE driver in Python.

We also want to push microstate accounting, a way to get really fine grained statistics on what your kernel is doing (i.e. how long is spent waiting on a futex, etc?).

Exactly what we are working on.

My boss gave a paper at linux.conf.au this year, and you can see more information on our WiKi. One of the guys here has even written an IDE driver in Python.

We also want to push microstate accounting, a way to get really fine grained statistics on what your kernel is doing (i.e. how long is spent waiting on a futex, etc?).

Ahhh, but to believe Fermi's paradox, don't you also have to believe that we will never travel "seemingly" faster than light, and that we already aren't being visited by intelligent life?

Both of which I do not subscribe to.
Some others who may disagree with Fermi.

And for those that wish to toy with probability:

Universe is approx. 12.5 billions years old

our little planet is approx. 4.5 - 5 billions years old, relatively young

and humans have been on this planet for only approx. 200,000 years, far less time than the dinosaurs were around (150 million years compared to human's measly 200 thou). And yet, in that time we have put one of our kind on the moon.

We humans have been around for approx. 0.000016% of the age of the Universe.

Extremophiles: Life arises much easier than previously thought and the idea of life needing Earthlike conditions is quicly being proven false.

Extrasolar planets:
Current numbers show that there should be approx. 100 billion extrasolar planets in this galaxy alone. There are 100 billion galaxies.

All I'm saying is that the simple probability of intelligent life is gaining ground through the ongoing discovery of human knowledge about the universe we reside.

That's true. Computer languages that don't stick close to "regular" human expression are very popular and growing quickly. Languages that resemble written English are dwindling rapidly.

After all, code is meant to be written, not read, and programmers should strive to write such that their work can't be understood by anyone not an expert in the language they're using.

Put another way: as long as I have to fix other people's code, or I want my boss to be able to read my code without me spending an afternoon explaining it to him, I really hope it doesn't look like a string of line noise. English-like constructs may be distracting for some, but they're pretty handy for the rest of us.

Duchess is an awesome chess-based game for 2-6 players. The board is warped so that 'straight' (normal moves) paths actually curve away from the center of the board. It also uses a few custom pieces with weird moves and/or special powers, but you can leave those out if you really want just the originality of a strange board.

I don't know about really obscure stuff, but we could take another look at something obvious: power.

• Pebble bed modular reactors are very safe, very clean, and ready right now. Come up with some improvements on them.
• Fuel cells. They're still not good enough for general use, but they have good prospects -- look at vanadium redox batteries.
• Solar panels. They're already the best solution for most remote stuff in relatively sunny climates (navigational buoys, spacecraft), and they're still not very efficient (15%?).
• Energy transmission by microwave or laser (e.g. for orbital solar power).
• Floating seawater-cooled reactors. Don't laugh.
• Passive or semi-passive stuff: tidal, geothermal, hydroelectric, weird-ass solar chimneys, etc.
• Why muck around? Go for cold fusion. Yes, the most famous attempt was a fraud. Yes, it's not going to be ready tomorrow, even given a huge breakthrough. But the potential is amazing.

There are three basic kinds of power: grid power, which comes in bulk; portable fueled power, like a car engine; and embedded power, like a battery. All of could be a lot safer, cheaper, and cleaner. Happy research.

John Lott is not a good reference for the pro-gun lobby. He has difficulty being honest. See Tim Lambert's site for detailed analysis of Lott's errors and misrepresentations. Lott has misrepresented Kleck and Kates' work as well.

John Lott is not a good reference for the pro-gun lobby. He has difficulty being honest. See Tim Lambert's site for detailed analysis of Lott's errors and misrepresentations. Lott has misrepresented Kleck and Kates' work as well.

Extremophile bacteria are found in all sorts of extreme places. Some can live in jet fuel (they corrode the tanks and require antibiotics in jet fuel). Others live in the acidic high-temperature hotsprings in Yellowstone. And entire ecosystems thrive around the 600 degree F "black smokers" in deep-sea thermal vents.

The article is also wrong on this point - he says that a 10 dB difference sounds to human ears like a doubling of the level. That's just wrong.

From this site

Experimentally it was found that a 10 dB increase in sound level corresponds approximately to a perceived doubling of loudness.

The point of using bels is that it is a logrhythmic scale.

Again, from the site given:

For instance, suppose we have two loudspeakers, the first playing a sound with power P1, and another playing a louder version of the same sound with power P2, but everything else (how far away, frequency) kept the same.

The difference in decibels between the two is defined to be 10 log (P2/P1) dB

If the second produces twice as much power than the first, the difference in dB is 10 log (P2/P1) = 10 log 2 = 3 dB.

If the second had 10 times the power of the first, the difference in dB would be
10 log (P2/P1)= 10 log 10 = 10 dB.

If the second had a million times the power of the first, the difference in dB would be
10 log (P2/P1) = 10 log 1000000 = 60 dB.

So going from 40dB to 80dB is an increase of 40 dB, or
10 log x = 40,
log x = 4,
x = 10^4
x=10000

or doubling the apparent volumn requires ten thousand times the power. Sorry, I don't buy it.

BTW, IANAAudio Engineer, IAAArcher.

Also by the way, 197 dB is equivalent to standard air pressure at sea level ... from the "useless trivia that is fun to know" department.

I don't know. Isn't the difference between their "form of sentience" and ours essentially a difference of degree, not of type? How about this thought experiment: Take your brain, a perfectly functioning human brain in that it (apparently) has the capacity for abstract thought, and remove one neuron; repeat until you're a vegetable. Where do you draw the line between our thinking and apes'?

I think the best we can do is to attach labels to these states of being--sentience, self-awareness, vegetable, whatever--for the sake of discussion, while remembering that the difference is fuzzy. But it's probably not accurate to say apes have a lower "form" of sentience unless you qualify what you mean more precisely.

It sounds like you might be interested in the process of testing animals for what is called the "theory of mind," if you're not already familiar with the topic.

yours

Use Solar Roof Tiles

This design may account for the fairly astonishing efficiency claims, as well: the light is getting focussed onto a small area, and the chips will be running at very high temperatures.

Despite the complex quantum-mechanical nature of photovoltaic conversion, there are still underlying thermodynamic limits, and to an extent they can be treated as heat engines running between 6000 K (the surface temperature of the sun) and 300 K (the surface temperature of the Earth), which gives theoretical (Carnot) efficiencies ~90%.


Good over-views are available on the web.

Focussing or concentrating sunlight should make it easier to reach something close to this efficiency in practice.

That said, these suckers are going to have lots of moving parts (phased arrays, anyone?) and it's likely to be a while before we are buying them at Home Despot. And as an earlier poster pointed out, turning off the lights (just putting light switches where ordinary employees can turn off the lights!) is going to save us far more energy in the short term than anything else.

Of course, a good way to encourage people to save energy would be to create a market which could price energy appropriately given the level of supply and demand, rather than running about in a panic and capping the price every time it looks like consumers might actually notice the bite their energy bills are taking out of their bank account.

--Tom

Nanoscale titania (esp. anatase) is also useful for pollution cleanup. Some researchers are even combining it with nanoscale iron oxed.

See this Google search and this page

Mach isn't slow.

Perhaps you would care to explain this then. (Relevant pages: 15, 16, 17.)

"Some time ago, over a year, teh exact date escapes me there was a shooting on a university campus. The gunman was later aprehended. This was the extent of most of hte national coverage. They told you it happened, who the shooter was, who was shot, where it happened, and that the guy was caught."

You are referring to the Appalachian Law School shootings. You are also, deliberately or not, misstating what happened.

This case was popularized by the work of pro-gun researcher John Lott. It is an important anecdote in his book The Bias Against Guns. Lott claims that in only 4 of 208 stories on the incident was the fact that the students apprehending the gunman used guns mentioned. Unfortunately, Lott's methodology is screwed up. He counts identical wire service stories appearing in different papers as different stories.

Tim Lambert has done the hard work of debunking this story. For another perspective on the accounts of the incident, see this entry of his blog.

"These weren't off duty cops, just normal students that had guns in their cars."

That's what Lott and the pro-gun movement wants you to think. Unfortunately, it just isn't so. They WERE cops. There are two "student heroes", Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross. (Note: the quotes are not intended to minimize their actions.) Bridges is a deputy at the Buncombe County Sheriff's Department. Gross was director of police corps training at the North Carolina Justice Academy in 1998 and 1999 (before entering law school). During breaks at law school, he works as a cop for the Grifton force. And he put on a bulletproof vest and retrieved handcuffs from his car before slapping them on the tackled suspect who has run out of ammunition.

Check out Lambert's entry on the incident.

Finally, if Lott isn't discredited enough, consider that he also pretends to be a 115 pound woman to bolster his case and attack his critics. Too bizarre to be true? Check out Who is Mary Rosh? and Lambert's information and see for yourself.

"Some time ago, over a year, teh exact date escapes me there was a shooting on a university campus. The gunman was later aprehended. This was the extent of most of hte national coverage. They told you it happened, who the shooter was, who was shot, where it happened, and that the guy was caught."

You are referring to the Appalachian Law School shootings. You are also, deliberately or not, misstating what happened.

This case was popularized by the work of pro-gun researcher John Lott. It is an important anecdote in his book The Bias Against Guns. Lott claims that in only 4 of 208 stories on the incident was the fact that the students apprehending the gunman used guns mentioned. Unfortunately, Lott's methodology is screwed up. He counts identical wire service stories appearing in different papers as different stories.

Tim Lambert has done the hard work of debunking this story. For another perspective on the accounts of the incident, see this entry of his blog.

"These weren't off duty cops, just normal students that had guns in their cars."

That's what Lott and the pro-gun movement wants you to think. Unfortunately, it just isn't so. They WERE cops. There are two "student heroes", Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross. (Note: the quotes are not intended to minimize their actions.) Bridges is a deputy at the Buncombe County Sheriff's Department. Gross was director of police corps training at the North Carolina Justice Academy in 1998 and 1999 (before entering law school). During breaks at law school, he works as a cop for the Grifton force. And he put on a bulletproof vest and retrieved handcuffs from his car before slapping them on the tackled suspect who has run out of ammunition.

Check out Lambert's entry on the incident.

Finally, if Lott isn't discredited enough, consider that he also pretends to be a 115 pound woman to bolster his case and attack his critics. Too bizarre to be true? Check out Who is Mary Rosh? and Lambert's information and see for yourself.

"Some time ago, over a year, teh exact date escapes me there was a shooting on a university campus. The gunman was later aprehended. This was the extent of most of hte national coverage. They told you it happened, who the shooter was, who was shot, where it happened, and that the guy was caught."

You are referring to the Appalachian Law School shootings. You are also, deliberately or not, misstating what happened.

This case was popularized by the work of pro-gun researcher John Lott. It is an important anecdote in his book The Bias Against Guns. Lott claims that in only 4 of 208 stories on the incident was the fact that the students apprehending the gunman used guns mentioned. Unfortunately, Lott's methodology is screwed up. He counts identical wire service stories appearing in different papers as different stories.

Tim Lambert has done the hard work of debunking this story. For another perspective on the accounts of the incident, see this entry of his blog.

"These weren't off duty cops, just normal students that had guns in their cars."

That's what Lott and the pro-gun movement wants you to think. Unfortunately, it just isn't so. They WERE cops. There are two "student heroes", Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross. (Note: the quotes are not intended to minimize their actions.) Bridges is a deputy at the Buncombe County Sheriff's Department. Gross was director of police corps training at the North Carolina Justice Academy in 1998 and 1999 (before entering law school). During breaks at law school, he works as a cop for the Grifton force. And he put on a bulletproof vest and retrieved handcuffs from his car before slapping them on the tackled suspect who has run out of ammunition.

Check out Lambert's entry on the incident.

Finally, if Lott isn't discredited enough, consider that he also pretends to be a 115 pound woman to bolster his case and attack his critics. Too bizarre to be true? Check out Who is Mary Rosh? and Lambert's information and see for yourself.

"Some time ago, over a year, teh exact date escapes me there was a shooting on a university campus. The gunman was later aprehended. This was the extent of most of hte national coverage. They told you it happened, who the shooter was, who was shot, where it happened, and that the guy was caught."

You are referring to the Appalachian Law School shootings. You are also, deliberately or not, misstating what happened.

This case was popularized by the work of pro-gun researcher John Lott. It is an important anecdote in his book The Bias Against Guns. Lott claims that in only 4 of 208 stories on the incident was the fact that the students apprehending the gunman used guns mentioned. Unfortunately, Lott's methodology is screwed up. He counts identical wire service stories appearing in different papers as different stories.

Tim Lambert has done the hard work of debunking this story. For another perspective on the accounts of the incident, see this entry of his blog.

"These weren't off duty cops, just normal students that had guns in their cars."

That's what Lott and the pro-gun movement wants you to think. Unfortunately, it just isn't so. They WERE cops. There are two "student heroes", Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross. (Note: the quotes are not intended to minimize their actions.) Bridges is a deputy at the Buncombe County Sheriff's Department. Gross was director of police corps training at the North Carolina Justice Academy in 1998 and 1999 (before entering law school). During breaks at law school, he works as a cop for the Grifton force. And he put on a bulletproof vest and retrieved handcuffs from his car before slapping them on the tackled suspect who has run out of ammunition.

Check out Lambert's entry on the incident.

Finally, if Lott isn't discredited enough, consider that he also pretends to be a 115 pound woman to bolster his case and attack his critics. Too bizarre to be true? Check out Who is Mary Rosh? and Lambert's information and see for yourself.

Superheating water

The decibel scale is log base 10, so 90dB is 10 times louder than 80dB.

This will explain it.