Author: matthew

Utah is weird.

There, I said it. It’s just a plain weird place to live. I went to a picnic the other day, and the most distinguishing characteristics about it were the utter lack of any minorities, any alcohol, and the undercooked hamburgers busily worked over by a tall white guy named Brian. There were hordes of smiling white faces eating rare burgers with perfect teeth, while fat, pink babies crawled or toddled on the grass.

I grew up near Washington, D.C. Ethnic and habit diversity is something I’m used to. The monoculture of race and habit is unsettling.

Utah is also weird for its unique restriction on the distribution of “hard liquor”. Only three places are allowed to sell hard liquor: state-owned liquor stores that make an enormous profit, “private clubs” that in any other state would be called “bars”, and restaurants which derive more than 50% of their gross profits from the sale of foodstuffs other than alcohol. You aren’t allowed to have an open container of alcohol anywhere in public in Salt Lake City, Park City, and a number of other municipalities.

Like I said, weird.

A “private club” is an odd beast. Basically, to enter any bar in Utah, you have to fill out a lengthy form, show ID, and pay a club membership fee (minimum $5 or more). This makes bar-hopping a very expensive and time-consuming proposition for visitors. There are also specific rules about how many guests a private club member is allowed to bring with her into the bar. The oddest thing is these rules are codified into laws, with like actual jail time attached if you bring 8 friends with you into a private club rather than 7 or fewer.

Anyway, yesterday the Utah State Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission invited the public to comment on the issue. The quotes that sticks out to me, though, came from opponents of allowing “bars” in Utah. Their arguments were:

1. That not requiring name, address, phone number, and emergency contact information at bars would make it more difficult to prove drunk drivers had been drinking because there would be no written record of their entry to a bar,
2. That maintaining a list of every person who drinks at a bar in Utah is required for law-enforcement purposes,
3. That removing the “private club” restriction would send a mixed-message to youth; while we’re spending millions of dollars on the DARE program to convince children not to use alcohol or drugs, we’re also liberalizing our bar laws and thereby promoting the use of a “potentially dangerous controlled substance” (her words),
4. And finally, that we should not send the message that Utah’s moral standard on liquor can be abrogated for money from tourism and business.

My questions are: Do other states have a problem proving the guilt of a drunk driver using a Breathalyzer or traditional drunkenness tests? Are those who go to bars any more likely than the general public to commit a crime where their private-club record will help the case? Doesn’t DARE stand for “Drug Abuse Resistance Education”, and can’t responsible adults imbibe from time to time without it being “abuse”? Does the “moral standard” of those who oppose the private clubs modification really require that they make it as difficult as possible to get a drink in Utah?

I’m with Governor Huntsman on this one: get rid of the ridiculous “private club” requirement to serve liquor in Utah. It is a burden on visitors and those who wish to legally imbibe. It’s an arbitrary distinction that amounts to nothing more than a drinking tax imposed by those who want to bend the rest of the state to the will of the religious majority.

From a post today on another board, I decided to archive my opinion. Like I’ve said before, I learn what I think when I read what I write:

I would guess a bunch of the “abstinence is evil” crowd has an STD and/or has had an abortion. Regardless, we should use them as our model of acceptable behavior. :blink:

Abstinence-ONLY education (Title V) is evil insofar as it leads to an increased rate of sexually-transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy among teens. Note I’ve never had an STD or suggested abortion as you impugn. Abstinence is not evil; abstinence-ONLY education in its current form — bribing school districts to abandon comprehensive sex education that brought down the epidemic rates of abortion and STDs of the late twentieth century — is evil.

Title V restricts discussion of or advocacy for any birth-control method other than abstinence. Violation of this restriction by even a single teacher in a district endangers the entire district’s federal funding. Is it the American way to pay schools to silence conscientious teachers who favor comprehensive sex education and don’t echo the party line?

What do you think the people in New York have been taught – abstinence? Hardly.

New York is an urban area, with a birth rate and STD rate among teens consistent with other demographically-similar cities. New York rejected the federal abstinence-only education grant because of the strings attached: federal interference in local education efforts. “Abstinence-ONLY” funds are statistically ineffective at reducing teen birth rates and STD rates, while comprehensive sex education — including abstinence — leads directly to a 60% reduction in teen birth rate, with a modest reduction in STD rates.

New York’s rejection of the Federal purse with strings attached was a smart move if the goal is to reduce teen birth and STD rates. Abstinence-ONLY education is ineffective policy, at best. Since abstinence-ONLY’s introduction in 1996, teen pregnancy has been on the rise. Comprehensive sex education, which was common until the 1996 Title V introduction, showed dramatic results in both STD reduction and teen-pregnancy reduction according to several CDC statistics.

Comprehensive sex education programs introduced in the 1970s and 1980s rebuilt the dam bridged by the rampant promiscuity of an earlier era. Today’s modification into “abstinence-ONLY”, at best, is a finger in the dike attempting to hold back the flow of STDs and unwanted pregnancy, with negligible results.

Scientists made a valuable discovery recently: they cataloged the changes in a bacteria’s DNA as it underwent a major evolutionary shift.

This is substantial for scientific, cultural, and religious/doctrinal reasons.

Scientific: This bacteria made a cross-species leap. In approximately 31,500 generations, a mutation developed that allowed E. coli to metabolize citrate. A distinguishing feature of E. coli from other bacteria is its inability to metabolize citrate. This is akin to a human being suddenly developing the ability to safely metabolize rotten meat without sickness, like a vulture, or a cat developing the ability to learn to speak English. It’s a radical shift in a species due to an extremely unlikely mutation that took tens upon tens of thousands of generations to manifest.

Cultural: From the article:

In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories.

Lenski’s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events,” he says. “That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.”

Religious/Doctrinal: From LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie’s famous “Seven Deadly Heresies” speech:

Should we accept the famous document of the First Presidency issued in the days of President Joseph F. Smith and entitled “The Origin of Man” as meaning exactly what it says? Is it the doctrine of the gospel that Adam stood next to Christ in power and might and intelligence before the foundations of the world were laid; that Adam was placed on this earth as an immortal being; that there was no death in the world for him or for any form of life until after the Fall; that the fall of Adam brought temporal and spiritual death into the world; that this temporal death passed upon all forms of life, upon man and animal and fish and fowl and plant life; that Christ came to ransom man and all forms of life from the effects of the temporal death brought into the world through the Fall, and in the case of man from a spiritual death also; and that this ransom includes a resurrection for man and for all forms of life? Can you harmonize these things with the evolutionary postulate that death has always existed and that the various forms of life have evolved from preceding forms over astronomically long periods of time? …

My reasoning causes me to conclude that if death has always prevailed in the world, then there was no fall of Adam that brought death to all forms of life; that if Adam did not fall, there is no need for an atonement; that if there was no atonement, there is no salvation, no resurrection, and no eternal life; and that if there was no atonement, there is nothing in all of the glorious promises that the Lord has given us. I believe that the Fall affects man, all forms of life, and the earth itself, and that the atonement affects man, all forms of life, and the earth itself.

I agree exactly with Elder McConkie’s line of reasoning, but to the opposite conclusion.

So this fall, as usual, I’m the audio engineer for a three-day conference in Salt Lake City with several hundred attendees, and about three times that number listening live online. While the quality seems fine, I’m looking for alternatives to bring the best experience to listeners.

Here was last year’s setup:

• Two laptops: one Windows, one Linux.
• Windows laptop runs Cakewalk Sonar, recording an archival-quality 16-bit, 44.1KHz stereo feed from a combination of various mics. I think the only change I’ll make this year is to give the room mics a bit more boost so that the audience sounds as large as it is… last year’s recordings sounded like there were maybe a half-dozen people in the room.
• Linux laptop runs BlackICE pumping audio to an ICECast streaming MP3 server over the hotel’s wi-fi link. This is a live feed, and ran all weekend long with only one hitch.
• Mackie twelve-channel mixer.
• Podium mic and two condenser room mics to provide atmosphere.
• Two wireless hand-held microphones: one for presenters who prefer to walk rather than stand behind the lectern, a second one used by my gofer to field questions from the audience.
• One wireless body mic; I’ve never been very impressed with this one. It just sounds muted compared to the high-quality hand-held stuff and lectern-mic. These days it functions as an adjunct mic in case I need to separate the room feed from the online feed.
• Line-in from the AV stand next to the projector for multimedia presentations and movie showings (last year, I had a nasty ground loop on this line; I think I’m going to make this link wireless so that I avoid that particular electrical phenomenon. You can’t get TRS-balanced output from a laptop.)
• During downtime, I would compress and upload archival audio to the web site. This is a very labor-intensive process that I’d rather save until a few days after the conference, but I’ve done it for the past three years.

Now, this year, I’m thinking that I should have a similar setup, but with a totally new twist: Blog Talk Radio. This site would allow me to schedule the presentations in advance, provide automatic archiving, as well as allow call-in telephone numbers and an online chat room to field questions for Q&A sessions.

This would require a third laptop, but I could have my assistant screen questions on the chat room and announce them to the guests in the ballroom during Q&A, or even have the call-in on the sound system in the room (though, of course, we’d have to ask them to turn down their radio and pay attention to the phone instead).

The huge plus-factor for BlogTalkRadio, for me, is that I’d already have an audio archive of the sessions online, created real-time while we’re recording. This would save me the step of having to compress and upload the archival recordings during the session, so that I could hang with other guests and take a potty break now and then. A few days after the conference, I could store the MP3 archives on the web site like usual.

Any alternatives that might work better, or enhance the experience?

Additionally, I’d love advice on how to avoid the ground-looping problem on the long line from the laptop to the mixer. That 60Hz hum is obnoxious. My initial thought is to go buy a line-level wireless transponder. My second instinct is to keep the laptop up next to the presenter, use a long VGA cable, and have a mixer with a balanced output up at the presentation-table. This setup would let me use a balanced connection for that long run, and, with luck, eliminate any ground-loop issues. Or, maybe, I should just go buy a Direct Box.

Hey, guys, sorry for the weirdness on the web site today. We had some emergency downtime last night. I could only fix the web server just enough so that all the sites ran before I had to take off for Logan for the day. All is back up now, and seems normal.

Time Magazine is doing an article this week on the use of antidepressants in the US military: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1811858-1,00.html

I am reminded of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Q shows Picard what the human army of the past was: drug-enhanced androids, absolutely malleable to their commanders’ will. Not so different from the Borg, really. Unfortunately, after cruising Wikipedia and some other sites looking for a plot summary to clue me into which episode that brief event happened, I didn’t find it. Alas.

Anyway, it’s interesting to me that soldiers who would have, at one time, been removed from combat duty are now given drugs, return to “normal” (or at least combat-readiness), and then are pushed back into the front lines. Is wholesale medication of our soldiers a suitable approach in the fight to police the world? Or are we reducing our soldiers to human consumables, used to their maximum and discarded when the need has passed?

My gut reaction is that a soldier’s life is harsh. Chris once described part of his job to me. Falujah had been a hot-bed of insurgent activity. For several days prior to US cleansing of the city, it was leafleted in Arabic, indicating to the residents that any person left in the city after a certain date would be considered an insurgent, and killed on sight. Chris and his unit were required to purge the city of any remaining people once the day arrived. That kind of relentless door-to-door extermination, in my opinion, must leave a deep and lasting impression on the human psyche. If an anti-depressant can help a soldier get his job done… well, I’m in favor, though I hate the necessity of killing.

Oh, and if anybody can remember the name of that episode where Picard suddenly finds himself in a kind of rubber suit supposedly reminiscent of soldier armor of the Federation’s dark past, that would be cool.

So my first month with the iPhone is over. Overall, I really do like the device. It’s absolutely best-in-class of any mobile device for web browsing and user interface, pretty close to Palm functionality (and clearly superior to Windows Mobile functionality and ease-of-use) for basic PDA functions, is an intuitive and great-sounding phone, and a decent iPod and media player.

Here, however, are my list of negatives.

• You can’t schedule mail polling. I only want to poll for my mail on my phone during weekdays, 8-5. I don’t want to poll every hour of every day. And particularly I don’t want to poll in the middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep and those administrators overseas have some kind of emergency that results in a mail-storm that I don’t want to deal with until I’m on-shift.
• You can’t install third-party apps without jailbreaking it. Yeah, I know, it’s pretty trivial, and I know, Apple is poised to open their store in less than a month, but there it is.
• Edge is slow. Knew it going in, agree with it more now that I own the device.
• Can’t use it to transfer music or videos from one of my computers to the other. Yes, sure, I know that’s a problem with all iPods, but there it is. I’d like to dump a gig or two of useful stuff onto the phone so I have it with me wherever I go, and can stop using this lousy 2GB keyring fob. But no, that’s not part of the Apple Way.
• Getting ringtones on the phone is annoying and expensive. Yes, there are workarounds, but they invalidate your product warranty. Stupidly.
• Limited on-board working memory. The browser chokes on complicated pages, and they can really slow down the phone.
• The web browser gives a really cryptic error message: “There are too many pop-up windows open”. I didn’t even know that I could have multiple tabs open in the browser for several weeks after owning the phone, nor did I know that they needed to be closed from time to time. Could really use some better visual clues.
• Love the mapping function, but the “Current Location” functionality is pretty darn inaccurate and spotty. I understand the lack of coverage and less-than-GPS location functionality is inherent to the way it figures out your location, but still, when I need most to figure out where the heck I am is when I’m in the middle of nowhere and don’t know where I’m going. Still have to carry around the old-fashioned map.
• Only one good and loud ringtone installed by default. The rest are way too quiet.
• Speaker output from the dock output stinks. From the headphone jack, it’s really quite good, but using the dock connector is extremely noisy with cell noise unless you shut off the mobile phone portion of the iPod.
• No Linux interoperability that I’ve been able to figure. I understand I can fix that by jailbreaking.
• No offline reader program of any sort. If I want to, for instance, read the unabridged version of the Count of Monte Cristo, I can only do so via Edge or Wi-Fi. The three core functions of a mobile device are PDA functionality, a phone, and music playback. Nice to have, immediately after that, is video playback and recording, an e-book reader, and games.
• Oh, yeah, no way to record video. Only still photos.

So, overall, I really like the device. But I like to be both picky and irritable. Thank the deity of your choice that you don’t have to live with this grumpy old man.

Unless you’re my wife.

Then I hope you enjoy your iPhone as much as I do, dear!

I got into a discussion on another board today in a discussion regarding if polygamy should be legalized, and wanted to archive this comment permanently here on my site. I have such a fundamental disagreement with this person that I needed to capture his myopic mindset to remind myself of the kind of opposition that rational people face trying to come to acceptable compromises with irrational zealots.

Our God-inspired Constitution has never really been tried…

God had nothing to do with the Constitution. I don’t see His signature anywhere.

I submit the Constitution was inspired by men trying to achieve a Republic free from the tyranny of religious leaders pulling the puppet-strings of petty dictators, free from the tyranny of kings and genetic rulership, and free from the tyranny of the majority who would grind the minority under their heels if they could. Our implementation of those ideals is flawed, to be sure, as has been every human endeavor, but it’s been one of the best runs so far.

To say that we have not “tried” our Constitution, with hundreds of years of case law indicating the opposite, is the height of black-and-white thinking. The Constitution is tried every day. Our culture is diverse, our opinions many, and our arguments heated. Yet we accomplish a peaceful revolution every four to eight years successfully, and have done so for generations.

“Never really been tried” indeed!

I am a constitutionalist.

Then you recognize the Constitution allows amendments. This includes the Sixteenth Amendment, empowering the Federal Government to again levy income tax after its suspension due to the controversial 1895 Pollock decision. We The People granted this right to the government, and these taxes may be used as we legislate, including policies to encourage public health, education, and beneficial policies like encouragement of monogamous relationships.

And, unfortunately, occupy a foreign country here and there. But that’s a different argument.

Freedom is the ultimate political good. Anything that curtails freedom is evil. There is no much vaunted “balance”. That’s a pipe dream.

I fight for that “pipe dream” in my local politics, in letters to my Representatives and Senators, in voicing my opinion in Letters to the Editor of my local paper, in my online blog, in my conversations with others, in City Council meetings, and ultimately in who I choose to represent me via the ballot box. I agree, we will never reach the ideal state of a perfect balance of interests. That’s just life. I am happy to pay my taxes because I recognize the tangible benefits they have brought and continue to bring me and my family. Should taxes grow excessive, I will oppose them to bring them back to reasonable levels.

You and I appear to have different definitions of evil. I believe that which maximizes human happiness, quality of life, quality of relationships, and human knowledge, is good. That which acts in opposition to those things is evil. Freedom is generally a good thing, but if taken to extremes, it can work against those values… I refer to such absolute freedom as “self-sufficient poverty”. The balancing act to try to maximize good is not a pipe dream, but a worthy goal that, while probably never fully achievable, can be achieved in part.

Lethal force is the ultimate power of government. It asserts a monopoly on its use, and defends that monopoly rigorously. Any law ultimately rests on that (threat of) lethal force.

While I agree that “ultimately” any law — including tax incentives — rests on the use of lethal force, it’s a real stretch to say that if you support tax incentives to encourage monogamy you’re holding a gun to the head of polygamists.

Any time someone says, “There ought to be a law,” he is saying that people who disagree with his position, should they disagree strongly enough, must die. That’s the nature of government.

Poppycock! Pure poppycock! If I favor tax incentives for a large business to move to my neighborhood, I’m not offering to kill those who disagree. You’re proposing that people who disagree on public policy issues are willing to execute those who oppose them. We The People agreed to tax ourselves to promote the welfare of our citizens and provide national defense. If you disagree with how those funds are allocated, you’re not threatening violence, you’re pleading cases and providing supportable arguments.

Extremist, black-and-white positions and unwillingness to compromise are the greatest wellspring of evil and violence in the world today. Do you really want to drink from that particular fountain?

So on June 7, 2008, I’ll be entering my first radio-control pylon race. I encountered a cool video on Air Sports Net that shows the National Championship races.

Now, the model I’ll be racing is called a “sport quickee” — category Q500 — that runs approximately half the speed of these Q40 championship racers you see in the video speeding along at over 200MPH. Yet it’s still a race, and there’s pretty intense competition for a fun-fly. My model is a Lanier Predator 2 with a Thunder tiger .40 in the nose. A part of me wants to get a second kit just in case my first has a run-in with terra firma… but my budget and time availability probably won’t allow it.

For the past decade, my wife and I lived in the same house. It was a small but serviceable townhome-style twin home on just a little less than a tenth of an acre of land. We had a couple of small garden plots, a back yard just large enough to entertain a small party, and although I did not have a green thumb, with the help of my wife I was able to keep the lawn tidy.

I have learned a new definition of pain. I had trouble sleeping last night because I was so sore from aerating an acre of land.

A large parcel of land is good, I suppose, if you really value a lot of yard work. I don’t.