So this is pretty great:

It reminds me of some of the theories surrounding teleportation I bat around in my head. The only way I can imagine teleportation working is essentially a cut-and-paste job, in which case it seems likely to me that you are cloning yourself and killing yourself every time you use one. If we’re going with supernatural technology, it seems to me like portals are safer.

I’ve mentioned here and there that we’re going on a trip, and so we are! To Alaska, where my sister-in-law Ellie will be getting married for the third and we hope joyfully permanent time.

This will be the first trip we’ve taken in 2015. I’m looking forward to seeing the in-laws, and looking forward to the weather, but am really not looking forward to the flights, which will involve two days in each direction. The flight from Dulles (yay!) to Zaulem will be be direct, which is better than adding a fourth leg to the flight but but is an awfully long time to spend in a plane. We’ll be spending the night in Zaulem and then on to Anchorage and then Fairbanks. It’ll be our first time in Zaulem since we moved away, though it’ll pretty much be a matter of going to a hotel room and then back to the airport.

We don’t fly exceptionally well as a family. The ways in which my personality’s and Clancy’s clash are accentuated with every phase of such transportation. Kids, it turns out, make transportation more complicated. Unfortunately, we live just far enough away from the family (nevermind Alaska!) that driving is also extremely rough.

It’s almost enough to make me a fan of rail…

Google is repurposing a coal plant in Alabama to be a new data center.

From Brother Judd: All Anglospheric Politics Is Indentical.

The HUD SCOTUS ruling was a policy victory for the left, but could create problems politically.

I thought the incline/decline in Western Wyoming was rough, but this puts that to shame.

Somewhere along the way, adults and coloring books became a thing.

Here is a thought: If someone goes so far as to change their name to avoid undue public attention, how about we do not actually publicize their new name?

Churches are often told they need to liberalize in order to avoid irrelevance, but Alexander Griswold argues that liberalization leads to irrelevance. Along similar lines, Mollie Hemingway is sadly correct when she criticizes the New York Times for calling United Church of Christ (and the Episcopal Church) “major denominations.”

David Cameron is doing a good job of making me think maybe I’d be a Liberal Democrat.

If the lights went out, here is what some cities would look like.

On efforts to create a music triangle in the South.

The gaps in which being human happens

Welcome to Pariahville, a city of refuge in Florida for sex offenders.

Lisa Endlich Hefferman defends the Mommy Track.

This video seems to be getting attention from cat people, but it’s the guitar at the end that just kills me.

It’s just like “OH! OUCH! Oh, and of course the guitar just has to join in…

It’s no fun dealing with a sick dog, which is one of the things that we’ve had to deal with lately.

Even when healthy, Lisby lays around the house a lot. So it’s not always easy to tell when she isn’t well. In this case, the illness took the form of an inflexible bladder. It first started by waking up in the morning and finding a puddle on the carpet. Then it started seeming like we were having to take her out and awful lot. It got really bad when I would ask her if she needed to go out, I’d start getting my shoes on, then she would just pee on the floor while I was doing so. (As near as I could tell, saying “outside” caused her to relax her bladder… which left her unable to hold it for even a couple minutes.)

By the Sunday, she was vomiting and her lack of energy had become really evident. She’d become seriously dehydrated.

It turned out to be a bladder infection (we’re pretty sure). It took quite a while for her to rebound, but she did.

What’s kind of funny is how much having both a dog and a little one prepares you for the handling of a lot of urine-related issues.

Especially little Lain.

We had a lot of difficult getting Lain to sleep at night, and one of the things we relied on was milk and later water. The problem with this was that she would overwhelm her diaper. Even if I changed her diaper at three in the morning, by morning it would be overwhelmed again. Dealing with extant urine had become a part of life. That situation resolved a few months ago, but dealing with Lisby gave me flashbacks, as I was setting my alarm for three in the morning to take the dog out.

The good news is tha the solution for all of the above is about the same. When we first got Lisby, one of the things I immediately got was some urine-cleaning solution. Turns out, it works for baby urine, too! And spilled soft drinks.

Tom Carmody has an instant classic piece on Iceman, a quasi-antagonist in Top Gun played by Val Kilmer. Carmody argues that between Maverick (Tom Cruise) and Iceman (Val Kilmer), Iceman is the one you want to work with:

From the beginning of the movie to the end, Iceman seems like the kind of pilot I want operating a fighter plane, whether it’s the Cold War or tomorrow. He’s not concerned with scoring points or showing off. He isn’t going to pose with the enemy. He’s not going to unnecessarily antagonize anybody or raise the geopolitical temperature. He wants to win, and to bring everyone back alive. He’s just really good at what he does.

Maverick, on the other hand — okay, he scratches three MIGs to Iceman’s one in the final dogfight. But he also seems like he might be a self-obsessed sociopath who should probably be in treatment and definitely needs to learn how to act his age.

Hard to argue with that. He also has some other examples of “bad guys” who were actually good guys. The principal from Ferris Bueller, for example. It’s pretty hard to argue that one. He also mentiones everyone trying to get Axel Foley to tamp down in Beverly Hills Cope, which is not only true but also applies to half of the exasperated supervisors and weenie due process people in half of the cop movies ever made (especially when crime was high). He also mentions Walter Peck, the EPA prick from Ghostbusters.

There, of course, I have to draw the line.

He’d have a point if he had intervened sooner, before the presents of ghosts had become so apparent. At that point, yeah I would think that it was a giant con job. Just about everyone would. But once it’s a known thing, a reasonable EPA would be actually spending its time conferring with the Ghostbusters and finding out what exactly it is that they know and developing their own plan. Once you have an EPA task force or something actually doing something about the problem, then maybe you shut the Ghostbusters down. But Peck is so reviled not because the movie tilts against him (as is the case with the other characters) but because his character really is the consummate bureaucrat. There’s obviously a problem, there is no known way of dealing with the problem, and here are people dealing with the problem, but since they’re making a profit off of it and we didn’t expressly allow it we have to shut them down.

Anyhow, here’s a video on a pro-market view of Ghostbusters:

Educational software for children should be aimed at children and not parents and educators. Did anyone else here ever play Spies in Europe? It was a predecessor to Carmen San Diego. Fond memories, from which I learned all about Europe.

When you’re wrong, you can always convince yourself you’re right.

The “Florida Man” phenomenon is more a product of Florida’s open government laws than anything to do with the Sunshine State.

When it comes to flipped houses, buyer beware. We found out our house was quasi-flipped some time after we bought it. Oh, and that a dog was left to starve in our basement after an acrimonious divorce.

At least arguably, the best and most cost-effective way of dealing with the homeless is to give them housing. Too bad you could never get Republicans on board with the idea.

On the other hand, half of state housing in New Zealand tested positive for meth.

Do fetuses feel pain? It’s complicated.

Mormons pay their debts. Their student debts if they went to BYU, at any rate. Other praiseworthy schools: Vassar, Harvey Mudd, and Notre Dame.

Have recent studies and reports exaggerated the prevalence of racism?

Here’s a really cool map of population growth/loss trends in Europe. It’s interesting how uniform growth is in France and the UK (and Ireland!).

Here’s an interesting concept. Safety Trucks that allow people behind trucks to see what’s in front of it.

Charles Lane argues that we should have fewer elections, for Democracy’s sake:

One of political science’s better-established findings is that “the frequency of elections has a strongly negative influence on turnout,” as Arend Lijphart of the University of California at San Diego put it in a 1997 article.

Yet in the United States, we constantly hold elections: Every two years, we elect a new Congress and, in many states, a new legislature. Every four years, that’s combined with a presidential election. Some jurisdictions squeeze local balloting — for sheriff, school board, judge, coroner, you name it — into the years between midterm congressional and presidential elections. Of course, these are often twice-a-year exercises, since a primary precedes the general election. Sometimes primaries have runoffs!

The United States and Switzerland don’t have much in common, but they both have (a) frequent elections, with Switzerland holding at least three or four national votes per year, in addition to cantonal elections, and (b) relatively low voter turnout. A mere 49.1 percent of registered Swiss voters cast ballots in the 2011 national parliamentary elections.

First, I believe there is some truth to this. For instance, we have far too many elected officials. First off, we elect judges when we really shouldn’t. But whether we think judges should be elected or not, for a lot of urban voters it overstuffs the ballots considerably. When I lived in Colosse, there were over 300 judgeships, and while their elections were staggered over time, there were still scores of them every single election. When I first voted at 18, I read up on every single race. But political nerd that I am, that didn’t hold up after the first few elections. I would vote straight-ticket Democrat on the basis that Colosse County was Republican and any Republican judge close enough for my vote to matter was probably a lousy judge. (Colosse County is now not so red, so I don’t know what I would do.) There are also multiple executive positions at every level of government, many of which probably don’t need to be independently elected. I also question the city/county distinction and believe that as often as not we should merge those governments.

It’s also true that we have too many election days. This includes bond elections, periodic recalls, and special elections to fill vacancies. It seems reasonable to me that we should be able to reduce elections to an annual affair without too much of a problem. There may be some emergency bond election that may not be able to wait until November, and I think provisions can be made for those such as requiring turnout thresholds. If you can’t get more than 30% of voters to show up to vote for it, it can’t be all-important. I am not a fan of recall elections generally, but absent something impeachment-worthy (where impreachment is a possibility) the solution is to work it so they’re up for election the next November along with whatever other elections are being held. And I believe we can – and should – restructure how we handle succession in case of a death or retirement. I also support IRV to avoid runoffs (and hell, maybe do away with primaries).

Beyond that, though, I believe that holding national elections every four years – and only every four years – is a terrible idea. I don’t believe that it’s too much to ask voters to come out once a year. I’m open to “voting week” instead of “voting day” if that’s the hangup, despite my general skepticism of excessive early voting opportunities. And voters who can’t be bothered to vote once every two years don’t especially deserve to have their voices heard. This may create some discomfort at the national level with the “two electorate problems” but canceling elections is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Realignment is constantly shifting, and the situation will resolve itself at some point. I prefer both the voter feedback that midterms can provide, as well as having different elections devoted primarily to different levels of governments. While the US may be a bit of an outlier when it comes to the sheer number of elections we have, in parliamentary federal republics provincial elections often do not align with national elections (and shouldn’t).

If I were in charge, we’d have election week every November basically going presidential-local-gubernatorial-local. It wouldn’t be strictly federal-local-state-local since legislator elections at the state and federal level should still be staggered, but that does have the advantage of boosting turnout somewhat while also allowing the focus on elections to be more federal some years and state the others. I’m not reflexively against having state elections on odd years and avoiding that, though presidential-gubernatorial-local/congressional-local/gubernatorial lacks elegance and I’d need to look up how it affects turnout in odd-year states (Louisiana/Jersey/Virginia).

The current system is messy, and apart from certain electoral advantages I can understand the impulse behind deciding that policy should be decided (perhaps even at all levels) on very periodic elections but where most people show up, but I would prefer that be balanced with tighter feedback and a bit of separation between state election years and federal ones where the issues are often different. By all means, we should look at reducing the number of elections we have, but within limits.

This is pretty wild.

I remember when I first saw the Final Fantasy movie, and how amazing it looked. It actually still looks pretty good at points, though at others it doesn’t.

I was really excited to see that they did an update to Appleseed, which was one of my favorite anime productions back in the day. I was pretty disappointed when I saw that it was crappy CG. Crappy CG is worse than all but the worst animation. Trying and failing miserably (to be realistic, in this case) is way worse than kind of taking something that’s not meant to look real. And attempts to merge the two continue to look odd.

On the other hand, if they can get it to look consistently as good as the above, that would indeed be pretty fantastic. Of course, advances in CG have revealed how silly the physics of regular movies are, and this could have some unfortunate biproducts, too. Indeed, it’s the advances in how CG look that make the movements in Appleseed look so bad.

Anyway, here’s the animated Appleseed:

And the newer one:

What to do about the liberal bias in social psychology? Piercarlo Valdesolo argues that neutrality of perspective, and not equality of perspective, should win out.

A look at the cisterns of San Francisco, and a cave in Georgia (the other Georgia) so big it has its own Subway.

Gundam/Voltron is happening!

Martin Robbins is worried about sexism and racism on future Martian colonies.

Snake People are having fewer sexual partners than Generation Xers. Good for them, I say.

Peter Schellhase discusses the conservative vision of Hayao Miyazaki.

Nancy Cook writes about rural planning in the ag sector.

The oil slump has hit the petroleum engineering community hard. My Man in Texas says that this is a mistake, because they’re going to be needed.

Scott Sumner gives us an update on the Sunbelt.

It’s good that you went to college and all, and hey it’s great that you went to an Ivy League school, but maybe you need some vocational training.