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Monday Link Salad
Jan. 11th, 2010 03:36 pmA collection of links with (brief) added content, presented for your consideration:
A) Much has been made by The Usual Suspects (tm) about how the movie Avatar is anti-military and anti-American. Well, here's a libertarian defense of the movie. Money quote? They [Na'vi] had refused to sell the property to the outsiders. There was nothing the outsiders could give them that would make it worth their while. What should we, if we are good capitalists, conclude? That, just as in the Kelo case, the people currently sitting on the land value it more than the outsiders. The land is already in its highest-valued use.
B) Via John Scalzi, the sad story of the end of the science fiction writer H. Beam Piper. BTW, the blog, that of the science fiction writer Frederik Pohl, is a fascinating look at the early days of SF. Fred got started writing SF back before World Wars had numbers and the hottest rocket flying was whatever Robert Goddard had in the back of his pickup truck.
C) Staying on a science fiction note for a minute, I am reminded that the average human body has approximately 10 trillion bacterial cells with their own DNA. These cells do quite a bit of work for us, including a lot of digestion. Might it be, the article goes on to ask, that ingesting alien bacteria would allow humans to eat alien flora and fauna?
D) Ending on a more serious note, we are finding that Major Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, apparently wasn't a very good officer. Despite that fact, he got retained and promoted. Unfortunately, and especially during wartime, the press of needing somebody to fill a slot leads to retaining less-than-optimal people.
A) Much has been made by The Usual Suspects (tm) about how the movie Avatar is anti-military and anti-American. Well, here's a libertarian defense of the movie. Money quote? They [Na'vi] had refused to sell the property to the outsiders. There was nothing the outsiders could give them that would make it worth their while. What should we, if we are good capitalists, conclude? That, just as in the Kelo case, the people currently sitting on the land value it more than the outsiders. The land is already in its highest-valued use.
B) Via John Scalzi, the sad story of the end of the science fiction writer H. Beam Piper. BTW, the blog, that of the science fiction writer Frederik Pohl, is a fascinating look at the early days of SF. Fred got started writing SF back before World Wars had numbers and the hottest rocket flying was whatever Robert Goddard had in the back of his pickup truck.
C) Staying on a science fiction note for a minute, I am reminded that the average human body has approximately 10 trillion bacterial cells with their own DNA. These cells do quite a bit of work for us, including a lot of digestion. Might it be, the article goes on to ask, that ingesting alien bacteria would allow humans to eat alien flora and fauna?
D) Ending on a more serious note, we are finding that Major Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, apparently wasn't a very good officer. Despite that fact, he got retained and promoted. Unfortunately, and especially during wartime, the press of needing somebody to fill a slot leads to retaining less-than-optimal people.
