Sleepless in Midland

Farm subsidies - safety net or give away?

I heard on the radio news the other day that Randy Neugebauer, R-Lubbock, was complaining about the lack of movement in the Senate on the farm bill.  The farmers needed it, he said, so they could make plans as the planting season approached.  "Farmers understand they will have to make some decisions pretty quick and they need some certainty," Neugebauer was quoted as saying in the Lubbock Avalanche Journal.

If  farmers make plans based on what they expect to receive from a farm bill then that pretty much puts to rest any argument that farm subsidies are supposed to serve as some sort of safety net as opposed to a handout.

It brings to mind the stories a transplanted farm community lawyer used to tell.  He said that every time a new farm bill was signed into law he and his farming clients would sit down with it and look for ways the clients could make money.

Please keep the veto pen handy, President Bush.

Your DNA -- spit it out and figure it out

For a thousand bucks the customer gets to spit into a container and mail it to the lab where the DNA is sliced, diced and genotyped.   Then they tell you what the present state of genome science says about you.

The 23andme.com co-founders, Linda Avey  and Anne Wojcicki, were on Wired Science the other night doing an interview about their venture.  (Watch the interview here.)

Variations in the DNA sequence are called snps, and there are said to be 10,000,000 of them, of which, the company can analyze 580,000.  (They use the Illumina chip which is supposed to be able to analyze 550,000, and they've added another 30,000 on their own.)  This still falls far short of the total.  But they say these are the most important ones.

Then there's the price.  Technological prices have historically fallen after the initial introduction, and this one may follow suit.  In this regard, the Illumina website boasts that its chip can yield a result for as low as $290 per sample.  So 23andme has a nice markup in place, and if it catches on there will be more competition and lower prices.  But the added value is the analysis.

The customer gets the results then visits the company website to see what his/her snps might mean for the prospects of developing, for example, poppa's hairless head.  As the research develops, the website  provides this:

23andMe's Marker Effects chart helps you see how certain genes contribute to a person's chances of developing a condition or disease - providing context to your own genetic information. And as the science keeps advancing, 23andMe will update our charts to reflect the latest research.

The website doesn't say, but I would expect a fee for viewing those updates.  Oh, and how did they get that name?  A genome is comprised of 23 chromosomes, hence the name, "23andme."  Ah those clever entrepreneurs.  Where would we be without them?

Mmmmmm, MREs!

Time for something a little bit different now that we've finished off the Thanksgiving turkey.

Our special today is a military meal ready to eat.  It consists of a warm veggie burger topped off with barbecue sauce layered between two pieces of wheat snack bread.  Spice it up with Tobasco sauce as needed.  It's served with side dishes of potato sticks and succulent raisins.  To wash it down, beverage packets mixed with water produce refreshing glasses of tea and orange drink.  For dessert, a cinnamon scone and two pieces of gum.  Bon appétit!

The most fascinating part is the flameless heater.  It consists of a packet containing magnesium, iron and salt which when exposed to a small amount of water generates an exothermic reaction producing heat.  More specifically, from the freepatentsonline.com:

...said powder mixture includes approximately 7.5 grams magnesium 5 atomic weight percent iron supercorroding alloy, approximately 0.7 grams inert filler, 0.5 grams NaCl, and approximately 0.3 grams antifoaming agents. ...

To use the heater, the top of the bag is opened and water added until the water level reaches preprinted fill lines on the bag. The water passes through the holes in the pad cover and by wicking through the paperboard, wets the pad and initiates an exothermic chemical reaction. The reaction takes the general form of: Mg+2H.sub.2 O.fwdarw.Mg(OH).sub.2 +H.sub.2 +heat (and steam).

... When activated with 45-65 milliliters of water, the heater generates enough heat to raise the temperature of an 8 ounce food package 100.degree. F. above its starting temperature within 12 minutes.

After all, who wants a cold veggie burger?

Right about now you are probably asking, "Where can I get some of these?" And since it says on the package, "U.S. Government Property.  Commercial resale is unlawful," one has to wonder how they came to be available for commercial resale.  The story that was told to me was that the military training maneuvers in the vicinity of Ft. Bliss at El Paso often involve trips into the desert.  And they take plenty of MREs with them.  But once they finish with the training they dump the uneaten MREs to lighten the load for the trip home.  Later, the story goes, someone collects those discarded MREs and makes them available for sale to the public.

Back to the question of where to get them.   I've seen them for sale at gun shows, and I admit to being a little bit bothered by the fact that government property is being pilfered like that.  But do an ebay search for MRE and see just how many are available for sale.  Are they thieves or just low paid soldiers trying to make ends meet? And since so many are doing it there must be a comfortable collective sense that there's nothing wrong about it.  Whatever the answer, hopefully this is as bad as it gets and some of our more important military property isn't walking off base to get sold at market prices.

Scott McClellan as Emily Latilla

Via his publisher the other day:

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself.

Now:  Never mind.

I am thankful for...

YOU!

Thank YOU for visiting this meager effort at entertainment and education.  I am your humble servant, and if you browse around you will see many reasons for me to be humble.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner!  Cartoon via F-minus

Bank cameras and bank robbers

A couple of years ago I opined about the poor quality of the cameras that banks used to capture images of their customers and robbers.  See.

Well, things have changed.  Even cheap digital cameras provide a high quality image, and they've made those bank robber photos a little more lifelike.  For example, a bank robber in Odessa was caught on the same day he robbed the bank.  See Bank robbery suspect arrested.

And take a look at that picture -- crisp and colorful.  Bonnie Parker could have looked pretty good in one of those.  Robbing banks certainly ain't what it used to be.

On a possibly related matter, the Odessa American article linked above says authorities are still looking for Adrian Madrid Barrera for questioning about a bank robbery that occurred on January 31, 2007.  Maybe it's a coincidence, but this Crime Report (PDF) states that someone with that exact same name was arrested in Odessa for traffic warrants and heroin possession a year earlier.

Updated 11/27/07:  Adrian Madrid Barrera turned himself in to Odessa police on 11/26/07.  Source.

Kitzmiller v. Dover -- the intelligent design case

It started with a couple of school board members in Dover, PA, who had strong beliefs that a supreme being created human and all other life on earth and who were disturbed at the references to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in the biology text books.

The result was the U.S. District Court case of Kitzmiller v. Dover [PDF].  And last week NOVA broadcast an excellent show titled Judgment Day, Intelligent Design on Trial on PBS which was a Cliff's Notes version of the issue of whether "intelligent design" was a scientific theory or simply a religious argument, specifically,  "creationism" in disguise.

Creationism had already been tossed out of public schools by the Supreme Court in the 1987 case of Edwards v. Aguillard which held that a Louisiana law prohibiting the teaching of evolution unless accompanied by creationism violated the first amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion").  So the issue in Kitzmiller was merely whether or not the school district was attempting to inject creationism into the school curriculum by the requirement that teachers read a prepared statement to the students.

That statement involved Of Pandas and People which was a book proposed as an alternative to evolution, copies of which were given anonymously to the Dover school.  The school board rejected Pandas as a text book, but they reached a compromise by which science teachers were required to read a statement to the ninth grade biology students.   Read the whole statement in the judge's order in Kitzmiller v. Dover [PDF].  The statement basically instructed students that Darwin's theory was not fact, gaps existed in the Darwin's theory, the Intelligent Design theory was an explanation for the origins of life that differed from Darwin's, and Of Pandas and People would be available in the library for interested students.

Darwin's theory is often diagrammed as a tree of life starting with simple life forms at the base evolving into multiple branches representing different life forms.  Of Pandas and People presented the idea that life was created suddenly and at various times for each species.  So instead of a tree, there are straight, vertical, parallel lines.  Furthermore, living beings are so irreducibly complex that they couldn't possibly have evolved from some lower life form according to the ID theory.  Well, it turns out the book had been around awhile, and evidence presented at the Kitzmiller trial showed that previous versions had used the words "creationism" and "creationists," but after Edwards those words were changed to some variation of "intelligent design."  In fact, there was one incident where the word "creationists" was changed to "cdesign proponentsists."

An example of the irreducible complexity given at trial was the bacterial flagellum which has a very unique motor that spins its little tail giving it propulsion.   It's  such a complex little engine and had so many parts that it couldn't operate if any of the parts were not present.  Therefore, it couldn't have evolved from something else, the ID theory goes.

But wait a minute.  There's another tiny little critter called the yersinia pestis which has a thing similar to that engine but lacks some of the parts.  And in that instance the tail serves as an injection device.  So the effort to disprove Darwin's theory failed.

An expert witness provided an amusing example of how some things aren't as irreducibly complex as they might seem.  The ID proponents sometimes use the mousetrap as an example of a device that couldn't function if any of the parts were missing and analogize this to a living creature that couldn't exist without its parts and thus couldn't have evolved.  So the witness came to court one day with a mousetrap as a tie clasp.  Enough parts were missing that it couldn't possibly serve as a mousetrap.  But as the witness said, it worked perfectly, though inelegantly, as a tie clasp.  Score one more for the Darwinists.

But religious dogma is actually quite flexible, albeit slow to adapt.  Originally religions explained gaps in our knowledge of how things worked.  They explained the unexplainable.  For example, the sun, the tide, the stars, etc., were controlled by the gods.   And as scientific explanations became accepted, religion narrowed its focus to those things that still couldn't be explained.  And at this point in time science cannot explain how life originally began.

How did life begin?  Here's what I would tell the Dover ninth graders: We simply aren't smart enough and don't have enough information to know.  And here's a story to go with it.  Each morning I take dog food out of a big bag and place it in a container for the dog to eat.  The dog can see me do that, and in his own mind he may have some explanation for it.  But he doesn't have the brain power or the information to figure out the manufacturing process, the distribution channel, or the retail transaction.  Humans understand this, but the dog may think I'm some sort of god.  So in this regard we are like dogs.  We simply aren't smart enough, and more to the point, we don't yet know enough to explain how life began.  For the creationists it's obvious, God did it.  For the rest of us it's still an unknown.

Darwin's theory has been tested over and over again and provides a logical explanation for natural phenomena.  And creationism?  Well, to believe that you just have to have faith.  And the judge in Kitzmiller wisely decided to let the kiddies learn science first.

Updated 11/20/07:  Joe Hathaway emailed a link to Experts find jawbone of pre-human great ape in Kenya.  Excerpt:

NAIROBI – Researchers unveiled a 10-million-year-old jaw bone on Tuesday they believe belonged to a new species of great ape that could be the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans. ...

The species – somewhere between the size of a female gorilla and a female orangutan – may prove to be the 'missing link', the key step that split the evolutionary chains of humans and other primates, Kenyan scientists said.

'Based on this particular discovery, we can comfortably say we are approaching the point at which we can pin down the so-called missing link,' Frederick Manthi, senior research scientist at the National Museums of Kenya, told reporters.

Once life is discovered on Mars or another planet then we will really be in for an educational treat.

Updated 11/21/07:  In a comment, below, Les reminds us of Moreno vs. ECISD which is the ACLU sponsored case in which several Ector County taxpayers are suing the Ector County Independent School District and the district trustees over the decision by the school district trustees to place a Bible course in the school curriculum.  See the original complaint here (PDF).  Something to keep in mind is that, according to the NOVA program,  the Kitzmiller v. Dover plaintiffs' lawyers were awarded a million dollars in fees for which the Dover school district would be liable.

Consultants advise MDC to start blog

That was the headline of an MRT article today which tells us that is the method the Midland Development Corp. consultant proposed to counter criticism from a local blog, presumably Jessica's.

Well, blogging isn't as easy as it looks.  It's not just a bunch of words, there are all of those periods, commas and apostrophes, too, not to mention -- gasp -- dashes.  Don't try this at home.

Unless some MDC member already had a hankering to do it then they would probably have to hire someone to write it.  So here's a suggestion:  Outsource:  Instead of starting a blog from scratch, the cash rich MDC could simply pay a bounty to the other local bloggers.  Here's a suggested pay scale:

A positive article about the MDC  -- $500;
An article bashing  Jessica -- $500; and
One both praising the MDC and bashing Jessica -- $1,000.

It could qualify as a code 51 local incentive.

Hey, I'm just trying to be helpful.

Blog readability

Just how smart does someone have to be to read this blog?  Not very.  No advanced education required here.

Check your blog's readability level.  Link.

Via Volokh.

Texas Recycles Day

They get old so fast, those computers.  It happens every couple of years.  We need a way to get rid of that obsolete computer, but we don't want to toss it into the trash.

Here's a guide telling how to recycle specific items:  PDF.  And in Midland and Odessa Texas Recycle Day occurs on November 17 where computer equipment can be dumped, er, I mean recycled.

Don't forget to wipe the hard drive first.  I used the partnership of Chisel & Sledge the last time for rendering the hard drive useless.  But Kim Komando recommends Eraser for wiping it clean.

And that ship's distress beacon you want to discard?  Don't toss it in the dump.

Coolest video I've seen today

It's the youtube video of FAA flight patterns over the U.S. stylized and put to music by Aaron Koblin.  Click to watch it.

Via Presurfer.

Border crossings, drivers' licenses, and voter registration

Adaptability has been the key to survival since the dawn of man.   And Jimmy Patterson tells a heartwarming story about one man's ability to adapt.  The resourceful subject of his story made a successful career change from oarsman to entertainer as his neighborhood border crossing was closed.  He's a survivor.

And others will survive stricter border enforcement and that dreaded fence.  The Houston Chronicle has an article online about how a border fence has affected the towns of Columbus, New Mexico, and Palomas, Mexico, titled Fence's presence felt.  Excerpt:

Families tend to have members on both sides of the border. U.S. farms like the Johnsons' relied on Mexican workers hopping the border to work by day and heading back south at night.

Migrants heading farther north would often stop by the border farms to ask for water or food for the journey. They were never turned away, Johnson said, and they would often do chores to repay the kindness.

That changed in the 1990s when tighter border enforcement — first to the east in El Paso, then to the west in Arizona — funneled the growing waves of migrants from the Mexican interior and Central America though Columbus and other parts of New Mexico.

Vehicles carrying illegal narcotics or illegal migrants would plow through the border fence across the Johnsons' land. Scores of migrants led by smugglers, called coyotes, would trek through the fields, scaring livestock and leaving trash. The smugglers would sometimes be armed.

"I understand the plight of the people," said Johnson, who speaks Spanish and whose family has been farming here since 1918. "I live with these people. If I were in their shoes, I'd be doing the same thing.

"What I don't like is the business that transporting them across the border has become," he said. "Things became dangerous."

Complaints from the Johnsons and others on the border prompted New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to demand federal action.

A waist-high reinforced barrier designed to stop vehicles was built on the border — a stretch of it on the Johnson farm stood a few feet inside Mexico. National Guard troops camped near Columbus.

Richardson called on Mexico to bulldoze houses in Las Chepas, a largely abandoned hamlet just across the border from the Johnson's farm that has served as a staging area for smugglers.

"From a law enforcement perspective, it's curtailed a lot of our problems," said Sharon Mitamura, a deputy sheriff who patrols the border on either side of Columbus.

"You have legitimate people who are coming here," she said of the border jumpers.

"But you also have the coyotes who are bringing people across," she said, "and you have the bandidos who are stealing."

The same human crush that alarmed the Johnsons created an industry in Palomas.

Restaurants and stores sprouted. Small hotels and boarding houses went up. Buses and other vehicles transported people.

So an industry comes and goes.  And people adapt.

In the meantime, farther North, Hillary Clinton is still unable to say whether she supports or opposes giving drivers' licenses to illegal aliens.  The issue is too complicated for sound bites according to an unimpeachable source, who by the way, signed the "Motor Voter" into law in 1993, which according to John Fund, will make it very easy for illegal aliens with drivers' licenses to register to vote in U.S. elections.

Perhaps a compromise of sorts could be reached if said drivers' licenses stated in bilingual all caps that the bearer is a non-citizen and is ineligible to vote and by making it a serious crime for election registrars to register illegal aliens for voting in the U.S.

So can people adapt?  Sure they can.  But the solution has always been with the Mexican government whose políticos need to figure out how to build Mexico's own economy and export something besides people and drugs.