By Randall Munroe, http://xkcd.com/171/

On his blog, Sam Harris has posted a powerful commentary on guns. His position is not readily pigeon-holed as pro or anti gun, but rather he concedes certain realities and necessities with his customary rationality, logic and clarity. I find myself not always comfortable with his conclusions and positions, but I am nevertheless in essentially complete agreement.

I've chosen one paragraph from his commentary which seems to me right to the point:

This is the actual lead sentence from a USAToday story today:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/11/15/texas-train-crash/…

origins diverse
from throughout the universe
there is no better verse
than 'nature is perverse'

Joel Pett, a cartoonist with the Lexington-Herald Leader, has brilliantly captured the silliness of opposition to climate friendly policies with the caption:

"What if it's all a hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"

The cartoon itself is widely reproduced on the internet, but I haven't paid the fees to reproduce it here. Still, you should be able to find it at one of these links:

• Arlo Hemphill's blog
• Kash Farooq's blog
• The Hoyden's blog
• or Joel Pett's own Facebook page.
•  

OK, I do mostly like Netflix. Even though they often won't stream the film I'd really like to watch, usually I can find something I haven't seen. But their "Suggestions For You" are, often as not, just silly.

Here are two examples Netflix thought I'd like, and why:

1. Rackspace, 512M RAM, quad-core, Debian 6 (Squeeze), 64-bit, stock php.ini memory_limit =128MB
2. Amazon EC2,612M RAM, single-core,Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 64-bit, micro-instance:ubuntu/images/ebs/ubuntu-lucid-10.04-amd64-server-20120110 (ami-8eb33ebe), stock php.ini memory_limit = 128MB.
   1. Added a 3GB swap volume, as no swap was included in the AMI

I host a number of low traffic Drupal (drupal.org) websites.  Several for a non-profit, a few consulting shops, a book & poetry site.  Low traffic, but a couple sites use lots of drupal modules, so performance and resource limits can sometimes be issues.

OK, here's the story.

I've got my Google homepage setup to give me headlines from various sources.  Anything really big will be on all of them.  You know, I need to keep informed.  So as I can hold an informed conversation down at the Wheelhouse Tavern.  But from time to time there will be an oddball headline that just catches my attention.

Today's winner?  This one:  "Army looking at how fish oil might reduce suicides."

Mind you, I'm not all that interested in the story.  I just want to parse the headline.

Money isn't real: it's just a mutual agreement to keep track of what we've promised to each other.  Frequent Flyer Miles are even less real.  But trading the two, until today, could get you travel around the world at no cost.

Here's how it works.  Get one of those credit cards that gets you frequent flyer points for your purchse.  Then, go to the US Mint and buy dollar coins, charged to your credit card.  The Mint would ship you the coins for free.  You deposit the coins in your bank, pay off your credit card, and pocket the Frequent Flyer points.  Voila.  Something fo nothing.