calling Carl Pham

When, oh when, will Carl Pham start his own blog?

(hey, I just think the guy needs a little nudge)

stark contrast

Here's Linda McMahon debating Dick Blumenthal. The contrast between a successful business owner running for office, compared to this twit, is instructive: socialists don't have the first clue about how to create a job.

true colors

Having had the East Anglia Climate Research Unit datasets discredited, the fearmongers at the forefront of the Anthropogenic Global Warming alarm have had to try other tactics, as the short film 10:10 out of the UK has shown. Far from being humorous, the film lays bare the worldview of the AGW crowd: "we have power over you, you will submit to our will or die". That's it, in a nutshell.

They supplied their own petard:

cool writing tool

A few months back I stumbled upon the Check Text Readability analyzer. This produces results of a reading ease score from 0 to 100, with higher scores being easier to read. It also produces several grade levels (number of years in school) according to various different methods, and shows an average score of those.

I entered the following text into the analyzer:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

This Robert Heinlein quote yields a grade level of 15 (i.e. third year college or tech school) and a reading ease of 36.

Let's see how the analyzer works on this gem:

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.

This produced a readability of minus 32 and a grade level of 32 (i.e. in school from age 6 to 38). It is, in short, utter bovine excrement. And, that was the intention all along.

Curious, I entered other text and tried again. The famous Lorem Ipsum text produced a readability of minus 1 and a grade level of 19.

The Check Text Readability tool allows a writer to get a handle on the level of their writing, and can serve as a warning that the text is unnecessarily complex. Ideally the readability of any text will be as high as possible. The grade level of the audience can also be considered. For instance, if the target audience is teenagers the grade should be around around 8 to 12. Here's another sample from something I wrote three years ago:

So, what should NASA be doing, beyond just developing those enabling technologies? If they are going to go about doing the Vision for Space Exploration, then what is the better way to do it?

The solution is to decouple the mission from the implementation. It matters that it gets done, not that NASA does it or that the agency does it in a specific carved-in-stone way. NASA can't do it all by itself anymore, so it shouldn't even try. No more of this business of NASA building their own brand new launch vehicles and their own brand new manned capsules and their own brand new moon landers and their own brand new moonbases and micromanaging every detail. It is a brittle way of doing things, and the slightest hiccup in the yearly budget process or the slightest failure along that critical path brings everything to a screeching halt.

Grade 11 and 60 readability. It's simple enough for even a congressman to understand.

deja vu

Here's Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus on CNBC early Friday morning, September 17th:



The part that rang a bell for me was from 4:27 to 5:39 -- "every day there's a new regulation... I can't plan"

(a week passes by...)

I was going to post this on the 18th, but I just couldn't put my finger on what it was that rang that bell about that phrase. Just now it occurred to me: it's 2010, and they probably number the new regulations in sequential order. Would we be up to directive 2010-289 yet? (Let's see... 30 days hath November... I guess we'll have to wait for October 16th for regulation 10-289, assuming a new one appears daily.)

no kidding

Via Instapundit, this:

they wanted "a natural life" but that they had ended up living "surrounded by wild animals".

I think my irony meter just exploded.

lost pioneer

Bob Truax has died.