Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Flipping through the news this morning, Brit Hume’s Political Grapevine ended with this:

And from the wonderful world of education, an officer in England’s Professional Association of Teachers (search) is urging the education union to ban the word “fail” in classrooms across the country, insisting students “need encouragement rather than being told you haven’t done very well.”

Specifically, Liz Beattie, the organization’s Federation Secretary in Suffolk, says children’s aspirations to learn are crushed by the words “fail” and “failure.” So, she says, teachers should use the phrase “deferred success” instead. According to the Times of London, her motion will be formally introduced sometime this week.

Ah yes, instead of telling them they’ve failed, teach them to try, try again. I always sort of thought that’s what failure meant, unless preceded by modifiers like total, complete, or absolute. Then I click to the next headline: Report: One Failed London Bomber Arrested

Well let’s just hope these “failed” bombers become so discouraged that they don’t try anymore. But there is evidence to suggest they won’t give up that easily.

The latest shuttle launch was previously delayed by a fuel sensor failure. The sensors are obviously important, and you don’t want to launch when one isn’t working. Or do you?

Without the benefit of examining the numbers, I am going to sit safely here on my sideline and second guess the engineers at NASA.

Ok, assume you’re working for NASA, a well known governmental agency. Your goal is to put shuttles into space. Cost is not really a consideration. So somewhere you need to balance reliability with mass. Impeccable reliability and low mass will likely go hand-in-hand.

So, back to these fuel sensors. There are four them. But they only need two. So the system has increased redundancy, complexity, mass, and partial rate of failure. It seems they should remove the 4th sensor altogether, apply the mass to the remaining 3 making them all more robust.

Just because you’re a rocket scientist doesn’t mean that you can’t “keep it simple, Stupid!”

So actually, I’d probably argue for scrapping the shuttle program altogether. When comparing it to it’s original design goals, it’s a horrible failure. A cheap, reusable craft with quick turnaround between flights was a great goal. The space shuttle is only moderately successful at being reusable, and it performs even worse in the other two categories. We probably should have cut our losses after that last tragedy and started over again.

According to the New York Post [rr] he not only wanted to sell blow but poison it in order to more quickly kill cokeheads.

Osama bin Laden tried to buy a massive amount of cocaine, spike it with poison and sell it in the United States, hoping to kill thousands of Americans one year after the 9/11 attacks, The Post has learned.

…Sources said the feds were told that bin Laden personally met with leaders of a Colombian drug cartel to in 2002 to negotiate the purchase of tons of cocaine, saying that he was willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to finance the deal.

…Bin Laden hoped that large numbers of Americans dying from poisoned coke would lead to widespread terror.

“They wanted to kill thousands or [sic] people — more than the World Trade Center,” said a source.

I think the whole story is BS, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting. Let’s examine the possibilities…

(more…)

We have all been chastised repeatedly for the immorality of using freely available technology to acquire the music we want to hear free of charge. We have been told that we are at fault for the “20%” declines in the music industry. They must have realized that if we were going to steal music, they might as well make music so bad that we would completely lose interest altogether. And it’s not the overpaid celebrities and executives who foist this musical excrement upon us who suffer. Nooo! No no! It’s the little guys we are are hurting.

I get it. I’m a bad person.

Sue me.

(more…)

So I ordered up some cheapy USB cables last week. They came with a whopping $3 rebate. Well, since I was bored off my ass tonight, I decided to get the forms filled out and mail it in.

What a pain in the ass!

First I’m directed to an instruction sheet in .pdf format. I hate PDFs. It tells me to go to some website. At this point, though, I think it’s really cool that they have finally gotten the rebate thing down to filling out some information online.

WRONG!

After submitting my contact information, accepting the TAC of the site, inputting the order # of my purchase, and some other BS, I was congratulated.

Why?

Because all that was left to do was print out a damn form, attach the UPC barcode, and a copy of the original packing slip.

If these fucking idiots non-intelligent beings would have clearly implicated the price to be paid for the rebate, I would have given up from the start and not even attempted to claim it. As it is, however, I will move forward and eagerly await my $3.00 check.

Hey, it’s five AM. The alarm is set for five fifty-five. I went to bed at close to one. This would seem like the perfect time to do what I have traditionally done very well throughout my whole life: SLEEP. So why have I been sitting around blogging and reading news for the last hour?

How did my body get so confused?

Somehow, I have forgotten how to hibernate. How? Please. Tell me how.

Worse still, why am I almost considering getting ready and heading straight to work? Why when I know I’ll just end up taking a nap at my desk.

Did I manage to cross that enigmatic barrier from child to adult over the weekend?

Do I really think that 45 more minutes of sleep is going to help me whatsofuckingever?

Make that 40 minutes. I am going to hate myself later.

UPDATE: After about 20 minutes of “sleep”, a shower, breakfast and a small pot of coffee, I’m feeling like a million bucks. How long will that last?