Bevatron Repairman

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• Commented on Maricopa deputy steals defender's paperwork during a court case
  I love the court order: apologize and if it is not sincere enough, you are going to jail....
• Commented on Senators draw maps of their home states
  Susan Collins' Maine is pretty stout....
• Commented on Apple patents anti-user attention-complianceware
  I had to sit through something like this for a four-hour sexual harassment training video: if you answered wrong, it replayed the section. If you missed a prompt to continue for more than a minute, it replayed the section. Oh,...
• Commented on The Green Flash of the Sun
  @9: I'd love to see those, but your link seems off....
• Commented on The Green Flash of the Sun
  As I recall, it wasn't until about 1960 that it was actually caught on film. I ran across a scientific american article on from the early 1960s when I was looking for something else....
• Commented on Soap will wash away your sins
  Oh good, I'm tired of those scented indulgences my wife keeps putting in the bathroom....
• Commented on Charts showing how much US residents pay for health care compared to people in other countries
  The drug price is an interesting number, the rest not so much. Medical accounting is the blackest of arts and trying to tease out all the cross-subsidies present in this stuff is impossible: part of the reason hospital bed costs...
• Commented on Will the Duggars Inherit the Earth?
  I, for one, welcome our new Duggar Overlords....
• Commented on Canadian folk singer dies after coyote attack
  That's terrible. Still, while I see a coyote in the (SF) East Bay hills about once for every ten or twelve miles I hike, they are invariably hightailing it away from me as fast as I can. I don't worry...
• Commented on Iraq: Open Thread, "Bloody Sunday"
  @2: There are lots of things the United States has done wrong in Iraq, but this atrocity wasn't one of them: the United States didn't make someone deliberately car bomb a government building, sorry....
• Commented on Infographic: Left vs Right
  It used to be that networks agreed to use all the same color for election night projections, but they used to swap every other election -- Reagan's landslide was in Red, but so was Clinton in 1992 and 1996. With...
• Commented on What actual Mayans are saying about 2012
  But the Harmonic Convergence worked out as predicted. Yes even did a song about it....
• Commented on Gallery of NASA's early spacecraft models
  To me, the history of the design and engineering of the Apollo program is far more fascinating than the stuff of the missions themselves. Charles Murray wrote a great book about the engineering history of the program. I recall a...
• Commented on Watch What You Say About Welsh
  I took a bit of Welsh when I was at Cal. Except the sounds being unfamiliar to me as a US English speaker and some of the pronunciations being a bit counterintuitive, I didn't think it was any weirder than...
• Commented on Saint Expedite
  For at least the first 1500 years or so of the Catholic Church, Saints were largely not endorsed by the Vatican and the recognition and development of Saints was mostly a local thing. Although the veneration and communion of saints...
• Commented on Thoughts for Polanski apologists, by another woman raped at 13.
  I suppose I was most disappointed by Salman Rushdie signing onto one these awful defenses of this dirt bag. A fellow I thought had a certain moral seriousness....
• Commented on Money for Nothing: One Man's Journey through the Dark Side of Lottery Millions
  I used to work at a very large law firm in San Francisco and one of the partners there (who I assume made in the $1M-$1.5M range) cleared, IIRC, about $14-18M in a lottery win. Still worked insane hours. Still...
• Commented on One small step for a clown, one giant leap for clownkind.
  It probably makes mime work easier. Vacuum and all....
• Commented on The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind -- fantastic new book about a how a Malawian teenager harnessed the power of the wind
  I have loved following this story on BoingBoing. Hurrah!...
• Commented on The speech Safire wrote for Nixon if Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the moon.
  Also, speaking of alternate history addresses, here's the draft of Eisenhower's statement had our troops been repelled from Normandy: “Our landings have failed and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based...
• Commented on The speech Safire wrote for Nixon if Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the moon.
  @6: The CM could be (and was designed to be) handled by the Command Module Pilot if need be. Indeed, the CMP had a number of things to do while the other guys were on the moon. @31: There were,...
• Commented on Notional future They Might Be Giants albums about War on Terror, labor history
  Nothing is catchier or more commercial than a song about the Haymarket Square Riots, I'm here to tell you....
• Commented on Raising money to air an anti-special-interest ad with Lessig and Olbermann
  People who are against a public option are either murderers (@9) or dupes (@21)? And all this time, I thought it was the conservatives who had no aptitude for nuance....
• Commented on Ask the Government Printing Office to release the US Constitution in XML
  Oops, ne'er mind. Didn't realize you were talking about a particular annotated version of the Constitution. My bad. Go, GPO!...
• Commented on Ask the Government Printing Office to release the US Constitution in XML
  Can't some individual just put the Constitution out in XML? Is there some reason folks need to get the government to do it for them?...
• Commented on Surveillance video of insurgents in Afghanistan accidentally blowing themselves up while planting a bomb
  @68: I don't see how Article 5 of the NATO treaty suggests that the armed attack has to come from a nation-state. http://www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm And my read of the text is that it is entirely self-executing. Besides, NATO invoked Article 5...
• Commented on Boing Boing's September 11, 2001 archives.
  I had been working on a project finance deal closing until around 2am (Pacific) - which had been scheduled to close on that Thursday - so took a cab back to the East Bay, had a belt of whisky, and...
• Commented on Daredevil LA tagger "Buket" of YouTube fame gets nearly 4 years in jail.
  Lots of graffiti is very, very cool, but a 150 pound fellow dropping onto a car at 65mph could get several people killed. I think four years is excessive. I'd love to see a guy like this put some of...
• Commented on Harvard Crimson runs ad for Holocaust denier
  @2: Uhm, whatever the Germans did to kill gypsies and homosexuals in the concentration camps -- and they did -- no German did so with the understanding that they stood a chance of eliminating those groups wholesale. Catholics got sent...
• Commented on Al Franken draws map of the US
  It's no trick. I can do something like this -- maybe not quite as well, but close -- and no state will touch any state its not supposed to. I'm a doodler and a life long geography nerd. I can...