Sam Harris has a good explanation of rules to live by if attacked:
The primary goal of self-defense is to avoid becoming the victim of violence. The best way to do this is to not be where violence is likely to occur. Of course, that’s not always possible—but without question, it is your first and best line of defense. If you visit dangerous neighborhoods at night, or hike alone and unarmed on trails near a big city, or frequent places where drunken young men gather, you are running some obvious risks.
Whatever your training, you should view any invitation to violence as an opportunity to die—or to be sent to prison for killing another human being. Violence must truly be the last resort. Thus, if someone sticks a gun in your face and demands your wallet, you should hand it over without hesitation—and run.
This is the core principle of self-defense: Do whatever you can to avoid a physical confrontation, but the moment avoidance fails, attack explosively for the purposes of escape—not to mete out justice, or to teach a bully a lesson, or to apprehend a criminal. Your goal is to get away with minimum trauma (to you), while harming your attacker in any way that seems necessary to ensure your escape.
I've started Krav Maga training mainly to get in shape—but also because Krav Maga teaches the same principles.
This month's Atlantic includes a dispatch about an economic solution to poaching:
Harvesting big males might be sustainable, says Craig Packer, who studies lion ecology in Tanzania, but only at a rate that would yield far less in trophy fees—one lion per 1,000 square kilometers in rich habitat. Hunters in Tanzania take up to 10 times that number, shooting their way down the age cohorts.... A male lion needs six years to establish himself in a pride and rear a new generation.
Tourists would no doubt be horrified by the notion that trophy fees from hunters are one reason lions, leopards, and other predators are still out there for them to admire. But they themselves are guilty of indulging in a double standard. They object strenuously to any hint of hunting—and then, said one baffled tourism executive, “they tuck into a gemsbok steak that evening, without a pause.” One alternative that WWF hopes to test is getting tourists to behave like hunters and pay a sort of trophy-photography fee—say, an extra $10 for each sighting—to go into a special fund for lion conservation.
I would prefer, of course, that people shoot lions with Canons rather than guns.
Last one from Saturday's photo shoot with historian Mimi Cowan:
ISO-3200, f/5.6 at 1/250, 250mm, here.
New time-lapse video from the International Space Station:
The blog engine running The Daily Parker, dasBlog, last got updated in March 2009. It appears moribund; no one's updating it anymore. This happens in software development all the time. As a user of the software, however, I'd like some new features and some defect corrections. For example, I complained last month that I couldn't switch from GUID permalinks to more user-friendly ones. I also found a bug in the module that lists the months, off to the side. And I want to show the posting time in the local time zone where I made the post.
All of these things require changes to the code. It's an open-source project, so getting the code is easy, and I've had it for years. Only, the dasBlog project appears moribund.
So I've decided to start my own private code branch. Not only will this allow me to make the changes I want, but also it will allow me to integrate with Inner Drive libraries, which I'll need for the time-zone update.
I don't know when I'll have time to work on it, but at least now I feel like I've got some control over the blog engine. There are lots of blog engines out there, including some open-source .NET-based engines. But this is post #2758; I really don't want to convert all those entries to a new format.
Historian Mimi Cowan needed new headshots for her professional CV. So yesterday, we got a few:
ISO-800, f/5 at 1/250, 116mm, here.
And if she releases a solo album, we got the cover photo:
Today marks ten years since the last time a mainline U.S. air carrier had a multi-fatality accident:
There have been several terrible accidents involving regional planes — all of which have been discussed in this column, from the Air Midwest crash in 2003 to the 2006 Comair crash at Lexington, to the Colgan disaster outside Buffalo in 2009. And in 2005 a young boy in a car was killed when a Southwest Airlines 737 skidded off a snowy runway at Chicago’s Midway airport. Yet amazingly, an entire decade has passed since the last large-scale crash involving a mainline U.S. carrier. Somewhere on the order of 5 billion passengers have flown aboard the country’s biggest airlines in that span, aboard some 35 million flights.
Ten years is a record unsurpassed in virtually the entire history of U.S. commercial aviation.
Ten years, in fact, is about 10% of the entire history of U.S. commercial aviation. And while today is the anniversary of a terrible accident, how cool that we haven't had another of its kind since.
My weather demo, Weather Now, is 13 years old today. I launched it as an ASP 2.0 application on 11 November 1998.
The Wayback Machine first crawled the site about a year later, on 20 September 2000. Check out the site's evolution; it's trippy.
It won't look pretty:
It would be a gigantic financial shockwave. Once departure by Italy were a serious prospect, there would be runs on its banks as depositors scrambled to move savings to Germany, Luxembourg or Britain, in order to avoid a forced conversion into the new weaker currency. The anticipated write-down of private and public debts, much of which is held outside Italy, would threaten bankruptcy of Europe's integrated banking system.
There would be runs on other countries that might even consider leaving. A taboo would be broken. Credit would collapse. There would be a dash for cash (those €500 euro notes would come in handy). Businesses short of it would go under. Capital controls and restrictions on travel would be needed to contain the chaos. Once the recriminations start, the survival of the European Union and its single market would be under question. It's all a frightening prospect. But that doesn't mean it won't happen.
Good thing I still have a few pesetas and escudos lying around...
The temperature finally got down to freezing at O'Hare, which is the latest freeze recorded there since records started in 1958:
With widespread freezing temperatures across the Chicago metro area, Friday's official low temperature reading at the O'Hare observation site should bottom out well below 0°C --- marking the first time readings there have dropped below that mark since April 1st. It also marks the latest in the season the first 0°C temperature has been observed at that site since it was established in 1959.
(Tom Skilling errs in two places here. First, the O'Hare site opened on 1 November 1958; second, while he's correct that the temperature last dropped below 0°C on April 1st, it only reached 0°C last night.)
The forecast calls for temperatures as high as 16°C this weekend, followed by...winter.