Michelle Bachmann is that you?
"Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas." -Rep. Michelle Bachmann, April, 2009

or is it Sarah Palin?

  "But obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies." --Sarah Palin, after being asked how she would handle the current hostilities between the two Koreas, interview on Glenn Beck's radio show, Nov. 24, 2010

or Paul Ryan?

“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

but in April 2012 he said

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan told National Review on Thursday. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.”

Politicians... gotta love 'em...

This seems to be the political equivalent of Microsoft's forthcoming release of Windows Vista 2.0... Pretty, but dysfunctional... sleek but pointless, rich but morally and ethically bankrupt.

Another obligatory bit of irrelevance:

Terry Bisson's story on film...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFZTAOb7IE

1) State alleged facts. GOTO 2
2) Play Evil Laugh GOTO 3
3) Run Flying Police Box Video GOTO 4
4) Queue Dr. Who theme....

Hate the rapid release cycle of Firefox... but I like having No Script... which Chrome does not have...

  in addition I do not trust Google overly much especially since they seem to want to strip away anonymity. While I am certain Google can figure out who I am, I prefer the ability to walk down a digital street without being assailed by them or their government minions all of the time. Firefox does not have that problem in that it is the product of a software developer and not gateway to the revenue stream of a commercial tyrant pretending to be the friendly giant.

  If Google does not want to be evil then it would not love its revenue stream so much and let their browser development team become a true open source project... that is not likely...

Questions then:

What is a historian's role? To recite the past? And if that is the case, what then is the relevance of historical study at all?

Is this why that most of these cycles research efforts [call it cliodynamics, cliology, psycho-history] is from non-historians? Is it because historians cannot see patterns in the data or is there factually no true data pattern? Could it be historians are so stuck on their own way of seeing things that it is left to others to advance the field? [as Alvarez did when he proved the mass extinction 65 M years ago was caused by an impact] Why does Dewey's and Kondratiev's work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave appear to make sense? Or are we "making patterns" out of statistical noise?

Cliodynamics seems to be the new, trending name for... Cliology [see the afterward of the hard cover edition of "In the Country of the Blind" by Michael Flynn which originally appeared as a two part article 'Introduction to Psychohistory' in Analog magazine in 1988] and "Cycles Research" founded by economist Edward R. Dewey http://www.cyclesresearchinstitute.org/ Also a book by Dewey "Cycles, The Mysterious Forces that Trigger Events..." and some of the papers presented in the Journal of World Systems Research archives such as this one from 1995: "The Next World War: World-System Cycles and Trends" http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol1/v1_n6.php

Dewey was of the belief that the cycles he uncovered had a 'rational cause'...

Yes, Just because the Petroleum Institute believes tomorrow will be just like yesterday does not make it so... [note I say 'believes' for without any corresponding proof or research it is belief not science -- see http://berkeleyearth.org/ for a skeptic's results]...

Ever try to tell a Libertarian that has drunk the kool-aide that their free market liberty is swapping big government inefficiency [ineffectiveness which protects all of us -- read Heinlein] for a Darwinian construct that has no moral or ethical foundation? Libertarian Religion [sorry the political party and their weak sister Tea Baggers] is bad for the present and worse for the future... Don't they realize the "death panels" of "free market health care insurance" is already sitting-- they're called actuaries?

So irrationality does not occur in just religion... it happens in politics and probably every other human endevor... If we were rational we would be a lot different than we are...

My mother used to say: "Just because they are polite, doesn't mean they are nice."

Remember that the next time your boss politely makes irrational demands and leaves you holding the bag.

The problem is that they have stopped being a science agency and become a "management agency"... where the "managers" are not really scientists... they've "outsourced" the brains in the name of "cutting the size of government"...

the problem with this kind of thing is that instead of science driving the programs it's a bunch of corporate manager types who want to make a profit and career government politicians [I won't call them bureaucrats as these fellows don't serve a useful function whereas the scientists NASA used to employe were considered bureaucrats] ] who make decisions... and then the elected politicians get involved with "pork barrel" considerations...

And that is why we had a Challenger disaster--- profit seekers and fame seekers decided to let fly when the engineers said don't.

It's too bad that we've lost the political will to be a space-faring nation. The tail [the aerospace giants] now wags the dog [the science]

I grew up in Canoga Park and West Hills.... I got to see the Santa Susanna mountains light up when they ran tests when I was a kid in the '60s... then I got lucky:

I worked at Rocketdyne during the 80s... programming 3 and 4 axis Coordinate Measuring Machines, writing data evaluation and utility programs, and Inspection procedures in the "Precision Measuring Room" for the SSME QA organization... there were only about six of us that did that as the technical staff that over saw about 40 Machine Parts Inspectors [A 3 shift operation during the height of SSME]... We touched the hardware for everyone of the shuttle engines... As far as I was concerned workin' at "The Rocket Factory" was my ideal job...

We had a mixed batch of stuff to work with: Zeiss CMMs [applications to drive the machine and write "measuring routines" was written in HPL on 9000 series "calculators"], an Italian CMM made by DEA with a DEC pdp-11 with 16k of 12 bit core [A C64 had more computing power]... [the measuring app was loaded via paper tape and output was either via DECWriter and/or punch tape]. I got to write an app to read data punch tapes on a Model 43 Teletype Paper tape reader and convert them to an ASCII txt file on a IBM-PC XT

In the mid 80's they upgraded the DEA to use an HP computer that ran HP Rocky Mountain Basic... we did not have anything networked-- it was all sneaker net so I had to write an app for that HP to do a matrix coordinate rotation [from raw coordinate system to measured coordinate system] on the recorded measurements and then output them as a text file to a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. The disk was walked over to the IBM PC-XT which then read the HP sector formatted disk using a commercial app and written to the IBM's "massive" 10 Mb disk. We then either plotted the data or wrote it to a floppy and delivered it to the Stress engineers... As I understand it that app lasted 9 years without a revision [long after I left]. I also wrote a plotter app that drove an 8 pen HP IEEE-488 Bus Plotter

Languages? MS / IBM compiled basic, HPL, early on we had a time-share plotter app written for us in Fortran, Turbo Pascal [which is what I used to write most of the utility apps for PC because it was cheap and fast]. We also delved into HP calculator programs [HP11 and HP-67].

I once got to go up to the Hill for a static firing of a set of Atlas engines [three engine set] at 3/4 of a mile away the engines sonic waves prevented me from catching a breath while the engines were firing...an F-1 has about 10 mtimes the thrust as an Atlas Set.

Oh the stories...The memories...

USENET was social networking

I have a hard time understanding why people would whine about an outage from a free service. As for "paying customers" -- what were you thinking? You're getting exactly what you paid for a cheap service level. This isn't Old Ma Bell. There is no non-carrier VoIP service has the service level of Ma Bell's wired network. .
Remember that "fast and cheap" is also = "prone to outage"

Or maybe Insipid Slashdot Poster

My tongue is only partially in cheek when I say:

Regulation? Regulation!

In stinkingly rich Kapitalist Amerika, Home of Libertarian Free Market Forces of Kapitalist Goodness... [and Fox News], we do not have nor will "market forces" allow regulation of ISP and wireless communication monopolies... Because In Kapitalist Amerika, the Tubes and Pipes and data thingies are owned and operated by soulless Libertarian Corporations obsessed with down-sizing your wallet. What? You don't like market forces? Buy new Congress, Comrade, just like they did.
[The same principle applies where any entrenched "market forces" are permitted to influence their markets by favorable regulation -- copyrights and patents are another Kapitalist minefield where 'market forces' have subverted the intention of the Constitution].

If it talks like a utility and walks like a utility: regulate it like a utility. The whole "If you regulate it they won't innovate" argument is bogus. The carriers are not innovating now-- except to figure out more ways to charge you more wile providing a lower standard of service.