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Comment Re:Wrong Number on Little Boy (Score 1) 172

From Wikipedia: At 11:01, a last-minute break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed Bockscar's bombardier, Captain Kermit Beahan, to visually sight the target as ordered. The Fat Man weapon, containing a core of about 6.4 kg (14 lb) of plutonium, was dropped over the city's industrial valley at 32.77372N 129.86325E. It exploded 47 seconds later at 1,650 ft (503 m), ± 33 ft (10 m), above a tennis court halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works (Torpedo Works) in the north. This was nearly 3 km (1.9 mi) northwest of the planned hypocenter; the blast was confined to the Urakami Valley and a major portion of the city was protected by the intervening hills.

Comment Re:Not really needed anymore. (Score 1, Insightful) 410

how is it that Asians are any less disadvantaged than Blacks or Latinos?

There are less broken homes in the Asian community, and studies have consistently shown that children raised in two parent households have an advantage over children raised in single parent households, even after external factors like wealth are corrected for.

Of course, if you point this fact out, you're called a racist. It doesn't matter if you're a stodgy old white guy or a famous African-American comedian.

Comment Re:Physically Impossible (Score 1) 239

This is another classic example of the marketing department working against the engineering department, with the %$#@! marketeers winning, again, sadly.

I would attribute it more to economy of scale: It's cheaper to produce one speedometer that will work across your entire product line than to produce one tailored to the maximum speed of each model you sell.

Comment Government fights the last war.... (Score 1) 239

Why do they bother with all of the ridiculous security protocols for airline passengers when apparently it's pretty easy to sneak a 16-year-old-kid-sized bomb into the wheel well of an aircraft on the tarmac?

The Government fights the last war, because it's reactive rather than proactive. If 9/11 had consisted of four blown up airliners via wheel well bombs this hole would have been closed a long time ago. Likewise, if some jackass hadn't tried to light his sneakers on fire we'd still be able to board without taking our shoes off.

Comment Re:Sick Society (Score 1) 253

Divide 40 000 by 300 000 000 and you have a proof (in your mindset) that there is no link between boobs and breast cancer.

If you want to take this stupid analogy to its logical conclusion you'd have to suggest mandatory mastectomies to save those 40,000 souls. Granted, you'll be punishing 99.987% of women, but you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, eh?

Comment Re:Sick Society (Score 5, Interesting) 253

As long as the NRA and RWNJ refuse to acknowledge that we have a gun problem, not a people problem, the deaths will continue and there will be nothing to stop it.

~300,000,000 guns, ~100,000,000 gun owners, with about ~14,000 annual homicides committed with firearms. Rhetorical question: What's 14,000 divided by 100,000,000 or 300,000,000?

It is a people problem. Studies have shown that the vast majority of first time murders already had extensive violent criminal records. Clearly the justice system is not doing these people or society justice, since there were ample opportunities to intervene before they took a human life.

It's also a socioeconomic problem, because crime is driven in large part by poverty. You want to cut gun violence? End the war on drugs, increase education and job placement funding, and start to look at seriously reforming our mental healthcare system.

Of course, all of those things are hard to do. It's a lot easier if you can just blame the guns, as though inanimate objects are possessed of powers of their own.

Comment Re:Who watches the watchers (Score 1) 243

You're claiming that Reynolds v. Sims was a bad decision?

Yes, it was, because it allows the urban parts of the country to dictate policy to the rural parts. It removed a critical check against the tyranny of the majority. It has lead to three generations of rural disillusionment and resentment that has now reached the point where there are mainstream secessionist movements (because Reynolds v. Sims couldn't touch the structure of the United States Senate, just the State level upper houses) in several States.

Your perspective would probably be different if you lived in any part of New York outside of New York City, or Western Massachusetts, or Southern Illinois, or rural California, blah, blah, blah.

f you want to argue against it, please explain on what grounds you believe it to be a problem, and why what you would replace it with would not be worse.

Explain to me why it's acceptable for the United States Senate to be allocated based on geography instead of population, but not for the New York State Senate to be similarly allocated? What would be so horrible about creating a State Senate that granted each County two Senators while retaining the population based Assembly?

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The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh

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