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Beating me to the punch, Miles Grant provides an illustration of the Gulf Coast oil spill as it would look relative to Virginia. It's much, much bigger than I thought. A spill like this would bring about an economic apocalypse for our maritime industries.
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Once a economic or social indicator is measured, codified, and tested against in order to develop policy, Goodhart's law tells us that it will cease to be a useful measurement. This is something we've probably all observed—I'm glad to know that there's a name for this.
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The water-bearing astroid in question orbits in the sun in the big gap between Mars and Jupiter. Water is starting to look like it's nothing very special, at least within our solar system. The universe must be fairly teeming with life.
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A cardinal rule in the website development world is to display every image at the same resolution at which you've created it. Want it 10% smaller? Back to Photoshop. It'll look like hell if you resize it in the browser. But, actually, resizing is pretty good in most modern browsers. Except for Internet Explorer. That's ghastly. It turns out that there's a CSS extension for IE that instructs it to use bicubic interpolation (read as: big-boy image resizing) instead of nearest-neighbor, or whatever it uses by default. IE just needs one big "stop sucking" flag.
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Has anyone considered the fact that since the President, via Homeland Security, is sending Swat investigators to other oil platforms suggests that they think someone caused the explosion on purpose.?
Wow. Yeah. I’d heard that he was sending teams, but, yeah, it’s SWAT teams. What in the world does a SWAT team know about oil platforms? If this is just to inspect them for problems that could lead to explosions, would teams of, say, mechanical engineers make more sense?
You’re right—that’s ominous. If this was terrorism… Well, then things are about to get ugly.
I think if they could prove it was terrorism… it would’ve been ugly already. That said, the explosion did happen the day before “earth day”.
But that’s probably just a happy coincidence.
It sounds like a communications failure at the intersection of “the glorification of military terminology” and “trying to be figurative at inappropriate times.” According to the Wall Street Journal:
The Interior Department said it has assembled a “swat team” of inspectors to review safety at offshore drilling rigs across the U.S. Mr. Salazar was scheduled to meet in Washington late Thursday with representatives of more than a dozen oil and natural gas companies to discuss how to reduce the odds of another catastrophic blowout, according to an email sent by Mr. Salazar’s office to industry representatives.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703871904575215714243494620.html?mod=WSJ_Markets_section_Commodities
What their basically trying to do is to emphasize the seriousness with which they take this situation by equating it with a barricade hostage situation, only no one on the communications staff at either the White House or the DOI stopped to consider that maybe we wouldn’t realize that maybe we might take them literally and believe that there is an actual barricade hostage situation. Which isn’t a completely ridiculous thing for us to assume when they’ve just finished talking about the DOD and DHS.
I’m reminded of the incident where these same communications people scheduled a low fly-by of Air Force One over New York City for a photo op (completely failing to realize that doing so would make all 8 million inhabitants think another 9/11 was occurring). It’s not the first time the normally-articulate communications staff in the administration suddenly caught a case of the stupids when thinking about/talking about terrorism (even metaphorically).
Figuratively, I think they should all be whipped with wire coat hangers until they learn their lesson, but if someone makes the mistake of assuming that I was being literal, I won’t mind.
Swat also performs duties other than “Barricade hostage situations”.
They:
Work Countering terrorist operations
And
Provide additional security at special events.
This certainly might qualify as “a special event”.
What you smokin’ Willis?