perfidy

Loyal reader John Veit emails us with news of US Patent 6023874.  Why is this important?  Well, for John, it's important because he's the patent holder.  For us, it's important because when the zombies come, we will want an instinctive, automatic aiming system so that we can rapidly engage and de-brain our undead assailants.  And that's what John has come up with:

This looks like an exceedingly simple mod for a handgun. And though I haven't tried it, it looks like the sort of thing that would work. I imagine the grip would feel weird at first, but I'm sure I could cope with that if the benefits were there.

The video mentions that this method isn't recommended for the M1911 handgun. My personal sidearm is a Kimber custom classic, modeled closely on the 1911. Perhaps John can chime in in the comments on whether this prohibition is just for actual 1911 models, or pretty much any .45 on that model. I'd certainly like to try this system out.

Related: Isegoria a while back on the half triangle Opti-Sight technology. More information on Aimed Point Shooting here.

What if the Singularity already happened?

Damn, you stop paying attention for one second.  One second.

... he can perhaps assuage his hunger with this nifty Zombie putter-downer recommended by Rocket Jones:

Rocket Jones' description is apt:

"If you'll notice, besides the space saving bullpup design, there are two magazine tubes sitting side by side under the 18.5" long barrel. There's a selector lever that you use to set to feed from either magazine. Can you say "seven rounds of double ought *and* seven more of slugs?" I knew you could. That's fifteen rounds (one in the chamber) of sweet zombie brain perforating power right there."

But really, it was almost spoiled when he pussies out on the bore:

"My only reservation is that this puppy is 12 guage. I like 12 guage, but if I'm going to be shooting enough to warrant this kind of weapon, I'd rather see it in something a tad more benign to the shoulder like 20 gauge or even .410. That would probably also add a couple more rounds to the magazine capacity too."

Shame on you, Jones.

The World's Most Perfect Zombie Killing Weapon?  Until we get plasma rifles, this is certainly a contender.

Sorry for that title.  But, as you'll see, it is appropriate.

I've accumulated far too many open tabs in my browser.  So, I will offload them to you.  Some you've probably already seen, some are kinda stale.  But they all were important to me, and I cherish them.

• Several from Zero Hedge, which is your one stop shop for economic sturm und drang.  Prepare for the Hyperinflationary Great Depression - this tickles my disaster funny bone.  I've been reading a lot of Vox Day over the last few months, and this article is more or less in line.  And here are two possible responses to that problem: leave, or mooch.
• Grerp talks about the fourth turning. Parts 1, 3 and 4 are certainly worth reading.  But part 2 hit me.
  

  I read Strauss and Howe's 5-page description of the built-in craziness of childhood in the 1960s and 70s nodding the whole time. Someone is finally saying it: Gen X had a shortened, unsettled, unstable childhood and it permanently affected the way we see the world. Permanently. Affected. Permanently. Latchkey kids were left unsupervised daily and many of the rest of us were allowed to do adult things far too early. Illegitimacy got a good running start, and

  "n the middle 1970s, the distinction of occupying America's most poverty-prone age bracket passed directly from the (elder) Lost to the (child) 13th without ever touching the three generations in between. By the late 1970s, the child suicide rate broke the Lost's previous turn-of-the-century record. Through the Awakening, the homicide rate for infants and small children rose by half, and the number of reported cases of child abuse jumped four-fold."

  Does anyone remember this? You'd think, from the coverage in the media, that teen suicide was just discovered in youth. Oh, no. Gen Xers broke the record back there, but it's all just lost in the ether. Reading all of this I realized for perhaps the first time that other generations hadn't had this experience. I mean, I knew that divorce and illegitimacy climbed and climbed through the 60s, 70s and 80s and that families fragmented and got poorer in general. What I never considered was that for the first time in history, that fragmentation was largely an optional choice that the generations before us could and did make.

  Families have always broken up. Death was an ever present companion in human society, and it was not at all uncommon for one or the other parent to die and then remarry to keep the family solvent and functional. These arrangements sometimes worked and sometimes didn't, people being people. There have always been kids who were raised by their grandparents or aunts and uncles. Because their parents died. As in, keeled over, went 10 toes up. But with the advent of modern medicine and especially drugs like penicillin, the incidence of parental death was drastically reduced. Boomer kids feared polio, not smallpox or typhoid or tuberculosis. The kids in Gen X experienced family breakdown, then, because their parents flaked, because they put themselves first, because the kids in our generation weren't "worth the parental sacrifice of prolonging an unhappy marriage."

  Wow. Thanks. The adults around us preferred to deal with the divorce epidemic by producing after-school specials and writing stuff like It's Not the End of the World rather than pressure Silent and Boomer parents to stick it out for the kids.

  ... Gen X is made up of kids who were told by word and action that the happiness and well-being of the adults in their lives was more important than their happiness or well-being.  And many of us are tired of the unhappy housewife meme.  We are tired of being told to be grateful for the freedom, to be glad we didn't grow up in the oppressive climate of the 1950s.  Plenty of Gen Xers (and Gen Ys) would have traded the "liberation" given them for Mom and Dad living in the same house and dinner being on the table regularly at 6 PM.  We can't appreciate rebellion against security and authority because security and authority were scarce resources in our childhood.

  I'll continue this series with other thoughts gleaned from The Fourth Turning, but just for the above, the explanation for Gen X's anger, apathy and cynicism, I am grateful to the authors.  We don't feel the way the Boomers feel because we didn't grow up the way the Boomers did.  Even those of us growing up in stable homes could feel society splintering all around us, and we wondered if and when our parents would decide to chuck it and go find themselves.

  Growing up in the 70s, for me and most of my friends, that's what it was.

• Government policies may have had something to do with the recent unpleasantness. I try not to be overly conspiratorial. If you look at it one way, an incompetent or clueless government merely enabled certain elements in the financial sector to run hog wild and break shit. But if you look at it another way, those elements probably had a large effect on how those regulations were written and enforced in the first place. Which means they got the laws they wanted, and then ran hog wild.
• Alt Right on Monarchism, and on Monarchism.
• A few good Whiskeys.  I've added him to my feed.
• Taleb excerpt - AntiFragility.
• Naught for Your Comfort.  I had never read Ballad of the White Horse before.
• The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.  Interesting.
• Karl Rove is by no means my hero.  Scott at powerline sums it up: "Rove explains the vicious strategy at the heart of Obamacare: pass terrible legislation, and then collect a toll by exempting your friends--those who pay you lots of money--from that legislation, while your enemies have to live with it. We have had various forms of corruption over the years, but I don't believe we have had, within memory, anything quite this disgusting. The worst malefactor here, besides President Obama himself, is AARP."  It is disgusting.  And not at all surprising that the cold, deathlike hand of the AARP is involved.  Reference the link on boomers and the fourth turning, above.

I started this post yesterday, but was sidetracked by a sudden shopping emergency.  So much for that resolution.  But the key is to jump right back on the wagon, right?  So I will do, for my conscience and your edification, two (2!) posts in penance.

Instapundit linked this item - Compact Fusion Experiment Demonstrates Confinement of 100 keV (Billion-Degree) Ions in Dense Plasma which is indeed cool news:

In a breakthrough in the effort to achieve controlled fusion energy, a research team at Lawrenceville PlasmaPhysics, Inc. (LPP) in Middlesex, NJ, announced that they have demonstrated the confinement of ions with energies in excess of 100 keV (the equivalent of a temperature of over 1 billion degrees C) in a dense plasma. They achieved this using a compact fusion device called a dense plasma focus (DPF), which fits into a small room and confines the plasma with powerful magnetic fields produced by the currents in the plasma itself. Reaching energies over 100 keV is important in achieving a long-sought goal of fusion research—to burn hydrogen-boron fuel. Hydrogen-boron, (also known by its technical abbreviation, pB11) is considered the ideal fusion fuel, since it produces energy in the form of charged particles that can be directly converted to electricity. This could dramatically cut the cost of electricity generation and eliminate all production of radioactive waste.

The dense plasma focus has been studied for over 40 years. However, LPP has been able to make great strides since its ―Focus-Fusion-1 experimental device started producing data in October, 2009, due to its unique, patented design. Most importantly, its electrodes, which produce the self-pinching action that concentrates the plasma and current, are much smaller than those of other DPF devices with similar peak currents. The electrode assembly is only 4 inches across and less than 6 inches in length.

The fusion energy yields achieved in these experiments are still far less than the energy used to run the machines. However, LPP hopes to make rapid progress in the coming year when the machine will be running with hydrogen–boron fuel for the first time.

They've made more progress in fusion in the last couple years than billion dollar efforts achieved in decades.  What may not be apparent at first sight, though, is that the lead researcher behind all this progress - Eric Lerner of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics - is the author of The Big Bang Never Happened, and his proposed ideas regarding plasma cosmology - quasars and the like.

Robert Bussard of Bussard Ramjet fame had another line of investigation that was similar in some respects - the Polywell - but funding ran out and then he died from multiple myeloma.  Research does continue though.

I'm thinking I'm going to something slightly different. I'm going to do resolutions this year on a month by month basis, and report on my progress before issuing the next set of resolutions. Obviously, some of these will be repeating month to month, but I want to be a little more granular - and keep more records of my progress.

So, here are January resolutions:

• Follow the 4-hour body diet plan for the month.  This diet is in large part identical to the paleo diet that I followed from July through Thanksgiving.  I lost just shy of 40 pounds.  I want to lose another 20 pounds.  The main difference with the new plan is that it actually encourages cheating, one day a week.  I'll throw a post up later with some more information on the diet, and other stuff from the book.
• Post on Perfidy at least once a day.  And I don't mean average at least one post a day, I mean post at least once every day.  Hopefully more, and get this habit locked in.
• Start a new, time-consuming hobby.  I've always teased my wife that I need a hobby that sucks time as much as her band, just to even things out.  I've decided to start studying physics.  I was a physics major, once, and I'd like to sharpen my math and science skills.  The early part will be just catch up - elementary physics refresher courses from a variety of sources, and math as well.  There'll be a post forthcoming on this, too.
• Read one thinky book a week.  SF doesn't count.  For January, I will read the 10,000 Year Explosion, The Mystery of Capital, The Long Summer (How Climate Changed Civilization) by Brian Fagan, and Keegan's First World War.  (Having unpacked my books for the first time in four years, I've found lots of books that I want to read that I never got around to.)
• Read Volume I of the Harvard Great Books.  This one will be easy, I'm already half done.  There's fifty volumes, so that's over four years at that pace.  But, I hope to increase the pace.
• Catalog my books, and start getting digital copies of them.
• Get passports for the family.
• Get a budget in place, and automate as much as my bill paying and finances as I can manage, to reduce craziness.  The last few years have been difficult, what with layoffs, uncertainty, etc.  But now that I've relocated, cut my housing expenses in half, and have a small measure of job security, it's time to get off the paycheck to paycheck life I was kinda forced into by the necessity of juggling payments and such.
• Become a better person and take over the world.

And I think that's enough for one month.

Gary Taubes, author of the life-changing (for me, at any rate) book Good Calories, Bad Calories now has a blog, and  a new book coming out this month - Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. That would make a nice late Christmas present.

Coming out two weeks before that, in fact, this next Tuesday, is Tim Ferriss' new one, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman. I enjoyed his first book, the 4-hour Workweek, which, while not exactly containing world-shattering new information is useful in providing in one place information and a perspective that would have taken vast effort to compile. It hasn't changed my life - but I hope it will in the new year. At least a little, anyway. I think the new one will be a useful companion piece to the information I've already assembled for the whole diet/exercise program I'm now following.

I'll post a review once I get it.

Just got one of these:

Color me jealous.

The Hawaiian Libertarian drops a big post on the whole smoking is bad for you thing.

I don't know what would piss off Mrs. Buckethead more - me continuing to smoke, or continuing to smoke and justifying on the basis that the government is lying.

There's a few links in the article - ones that Aretae didn't include in his posts on the subject a while back.

I think I will switch to American Spirits or the like, though. I've been smoking cowboy killers for too long. I don't really want to go to the trouble of roll your own, and smoking organic would fit in (a bit, kind of) with my general trend toward healthier stuff.

[wik]: The other posts in the red pill series over at HL are all worth reading, if you haven't already. And you should have. Slacker.

If you pay attention to science news, you may have noticed this sort of headline: "Scientists Shocked" or "Scientists Baffled." The teaser headline leads you to a heroic story of hero scientists heroically unjamming the gears of science.

What you may not have noticed is the pattern. Six or seven times out of ten, the scientist is an astronomer or cosmologist. And if you read even more closely, you'll find that the same sort of shocking results crop up at regular intervals. For example, every time a probe gets near a comet, we see a rash of reports of baffled scientists running around with their heads cut off, shocked at the results reported back by our robotic emissaries. Often, in the second paragraph, or perhaps the last, you'll see a comment along the lines of "It's back to the drawing board."

But two years later when the next probe arrives, the same confusion reigns.

Clearly, someone did not go back to the drawing board, and paradigms were not altered.

Aside from comets, one of the most common sources of bafflement is electromagnetism in space. Keep this in the back of you mind next time you scan the science news. Remember that hot gas is plasma. Plasma is electromagnetic. The easiest way on earth to generate high energy radiation - gamma, x-ray - is with plasma devices, entirely without the need for rapidly spinning gravitational sources. Finally, there's no such thing as magnetic field line reconnection - field lines are as real (though fully as useful) as lines of longitude or latitude. They can't reconnect.

Now read an article like this one. It's typical.

Here's a fun one about ball lightning, with a space connection.

In other science news, climate models are awesome. Borepatch weighed in on that one, too. And sunspots may have had something to do with the little ice age.