Can the Feds cut the deficit?

The Republican house has made a start. They whittled $100 billion (or $61 billion prorated) off "non defense discretionary spending". Which ain't much compared to $1.4 trillion of new red ink this year. But it's a start. If the Feds don't have the gumption to pass these token cuts, we are doomed. They will never have the stones to attack the big entitlement programs.
Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security eat up the bulk of the federal budget. Cutting those is going to hurt, 'cause a lotta people take advantage of them, and they will all complain mightily when their benefits are reduced. Some the the sting could be eased by measures that reduce the overall cost of health care. Allowing interstate sale of health insurance, allowing import of drugs from abroad, banning consumer advertisements of prescription drugs, and clamping down on medical malpractice suits would help a great deal.
Then we could eliminate the federal farm subsidies, the federal ethanol subsidy, federal education spending, and federal highway spending.
It's gonna hurt, but there is no alternative. We won't be able to sell US bonds at any price if the federal debt goes much higher.

Is Spring a Myth?

Terrible blizzard yesterday. Wind howled around the house all day, snow every where. Got cold last night and its still below freezing up here. Today the town road grader made four passes up and down my street trying to push back the snow banks. Fortunately my mailbox survived this operation. I got drifts 8 feet high in places. More snow is forecast. And this is March?

GIMP, the poor man's photoshop

It's a great program, it's free, runs under Windows, and it's fans claim it can do everything Adobe Photoshop can do.
Trouble is, no manual. No overview. The program has a zillion options, and it's very difficult to figure out what they do. The on-line help is full of "alpha channels" and "layers" and other strange words all of which lack a definition in ordinary English.
With all the fancy options, GIMP cannot, or I cannot figure out how to make GIMP, do a cut and paste. My needs were very simple, I wanted to print out a stone wall texture that I could use to cover up the wood basement of a HO railroad building to make the wood look like a cut stone basement. I had a snippet of stone wall and all I wanted to do was copy and paste the snippet to fill up a 8.5 * 11 piece of paper.
I finally had to use plain old Microsoft "Paint" to do the copy and paste. Fancy GIMP just would not do it.

Sea Turtle mythology (navigation)

An article in "Wired" claims that sea turtles navigate by sensing the earth's magnetic field (quite possible) and can sense longitude magnetically (not likely at all). The author is clearly unfamiliar with magnetic compasses, magnetic variation, and magnetic dip, all subjects well known to seamen for hundreds of years. Nor has he read the classic investigation of homeing pigeon navigation done many years ago.
Finding longitude at sea has been intensively studied for centuries. The only way to do it magnetically is to measure magnetic variation. The magnetic poles are not exactly at the geographic poles which means magnetic north varies from true north. Variation ranges from zero to maybe 20 degrees, depending upon where you are. Variation is measured by comparing magnetic north (compass reading) with true north. For human navigators true north is found by observing Polaris, the north star, or by use of a gyro compass (invented around the time of WWI). It is doubtful that sea turtles can use either method.
The earth's magnetic field lines run horizontally at the equator and run nearly vertically right at the magnetic poles. The angle of the magnetic field with respect to the ground is known as magnetic dip, and can be measured with a simple apparatus, essentially a magnetic compass mounted on its side. Human navigators do not use magnetic dip to find latitude because measuring the height of the sun at noon gives a much more accurate latitude indication than magnetic dip does. But the magnetic dip method could be used by sea turtles.
I doubt that sea turtles are better animal navigators than homing pigeons are. Homing pigeons are so good at finding their way back to their homes that they were used to transmit messages up until the invention of portable two way radios in WWII. Pigeons navigate partly by observing the sun and partly by sensing the earth's magnetic field. On overcast days pigeons depend upon magnetic navigation. Attaching small permanent magnets to the pigeon's feet will disable their magnetic sensing. Pigeons released with magnets on overcast days always get lost.
I suspect the real truth of the sea turtle story is that the turtles can sense the earth's magnetic field and can navigate about as well as homing pigeons, using the same techniques. I do not think the turtles, or the homing pigeons can sense longitude.

Boeing wins the tanker contract

I've posted on this before. The Air Force announced Boeing gets the tanker contract ($30 billion) and Airbus, aka EADS, looses. Let's see if the contract award survives a challenge, last time Boeing challenged an EADS win and their challenge was upheld in the courts. Barring a successful challenge by EADS, Boeing has a nice fat contract that will give them business for the next decade. We are talking 180 big 767 airliners with the seats removed and fuel tanks in stalled. That's a big and lucrative job.

Obama and Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)

On a slow news day Obama knows how to get our attention. He declared a recent act of Congress, the Defense of Marriage Act, unconstitutional. He distracts the newsie's attention from his weirdo responses to Egypt and Libya by bringing up a hot button topic, (a wedge issue) that his left wing base will love, and perhaps the independents will not be offended by.
As a matter of process, Obama is way out in left field by declaring an act of Congress to be un constitutional all. The standard procedure is to propose new legislation to Congress, rather than declaring existing legislation unconstitutional.
As a practical matter, Obama will solidify his left liberal base, attract a lot of press coverage, and outrage the Republicans. Where the vast mass of independents really stands is unknown, clearly Obama thinks this will rally them to his banner. I hope he is wrong but you never know, Obama was clever enough to get elected president, so you cannot write him off as a dunderhead.

The American Revolution

It's a DVD I borrowed from the Franconia town library. It's good. It's a four DVD set of lectures on the revolution by Allen Guelzo of Gettysburg College. I've watched the first two DVD's, some 12 lectures. Professor Guelzo clearly knows his subject backwards and forwards. He speaks at length without notes. The format is the classic college course lecture, Professor Guelzo stands at a podium and delivers a lecture. There are some audio visual aids, maps, portraits of revolutionary war participants, the sort of thing a professor might use in a real college.
This guy is good. I watched all 12 lectures in the first set of DVD's and stayed wide awake. He presents the generally accepted history of the revolution, in plain and clear speech, no jargon. No conspiracy theories, no politically correct deviations, professor Guelzo tells the story straight, with lots of detail.
If you have a child looking for a college, consider Gettysburg College. If they have one guy this good on the faculty, they probably have more.