Potpouri of Links

1. Practice vs. Innate Ability (practice and be purposeful & deliberate if you would be great; memory helps some)

2. Students get to name NASA Moon Satellites (how about burt & ernie)

3. In the name of Phoenix Jones (who watches the watchmen?)

4. Brookes on The Thing Itself (God writes straight with crooked lines)

5. Wills on Progressivism’s battle: “Mulligan!” (jokers to the right of me clowns to the left)

Potpouri of Links (Siri Edition)

1. Iphone 4s (Can't wait for mine)

2. Winter is coming (to Cleveland, if not Westeros

3. Crackberry withdrawal, day 3 (Siri's calling and she can't get through)

Potpouri of Links (Shakespeare Edition)

1. The million monkey march on Shakespeare ([typed] by an idiot, full of sound and fury)

2. Amanda Knox: Can you look guilty and not be?: (to find the mind's construction in the face)

3. Christopher Hitchens on living with cancer (Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?)

4. After killing off the exec producer, The Walking Dead is back (Zombies are the new ‘Simpsons,’ - [OK. That one's NOT a Shakespeare quote])

Potpouri of Links

1. Beeerrr in spaaaaaaacccceee (sounds right to me)

2. Teaching kids the alphabet in Cursive (for all you parents of 3rd graders)

3. Horton Hears Cthulhu? (brilliantly kooky)

Weekend Fire Pit

We were in need of a new portable fire pit.  The old one was eight or so years old and I was getting sick of wire brushing it and painting it.  I found a few that I thought would be solid, and last longer than the old ones.  But, in the end, my wife suggested I build one in the back yard as its material cost would not be that much more than a decent cast iron portable one.  And my labor is cheap; on Labor Day.  Of course I picked the hottest Labor Day weekend in memory to do the work; but, as my brother says, what doesn't kill you... hurts like hell.

If you are doing this job, take a look at a few sites.  The best I found was from This Old House.  But there area a few others that have a similar description.  Google around for something that you like, but keep a few things in mind.

First, account for drainage.  I did, setting mine down 30" with at least 24" + of gravel base.  It still fills with water when it gets wet.  If you live in a wet climate and are digging down into clay, consider a french drain at the bottom.

Second, remember that this will get hot.  Landscaping brick or mortared stone is decorative.  You must have a fire ring installed and something to insulate the regular brick/stone.  The one I built and the "This Old House" pit had a steel fire ring and several inches of gravel to insulate.  Others, insert a fire ring with plenty of room between the fire ring and the rock.

Third, you have to have some type of firm base, set down into the ground, or the wall won't hold.  This is particularly the case in climates where the ground freezes. 

Fourth, make sure you mark your center.  It's highly useful to drive a 7/8th inch pipe into the ground at your center.  Then, create a tool from 1 x 2 wood stake that will mark your radius.  If you don't, your fire pit may look like this.  More in the pictures below.

Here's what I used by way of tools and equipment:

• A manual laborer (You)
• An assistant manual laborer (Buddy) (Not necessary; my family and friends are too smart to respond for my paltry offerings of pizza and soda/beer)
• Spade shovel
• Regular shovel
• Steel rake or hoe
• Sledge hammer
• Tamper
• Wheelbarrow
• Rubber mallet
• 4' level
• 2' level
• Masonry hammer
• Calk gun
• Grinder with stone cutting wheel
• Saw
• Measuring tape
• Stone chisel

Here's what I used by way of materials and supplies:

• 1/2 ton 1/4" drainage gravel
• 10lb bag of pea landscaping gravel
• Steel fire ring
• Fire pit cover
• Bag of stone dust leveler
• 4 Tubes masonry glue
• 50 Brick 8 in. x 12 in. 
• 3 cans black high heat spray pain
• 4x1 wood stake
• 7/8" metal pipe, 4' long
• Rubber band

Potpouri of Links

Antibodies in the body politic? (Frum says Sara's a disease; ouch)

Pink slips and mortgages (10% of high earners would immediately default!)

Colbert on Steve (sweet!)

Fascinating, simple take on regulations (a harsh mistress - see the discussion thread)

Can we get the big stuff done?

From Neil Stephenson, Innovation Starvation:

Here's the synopsis:

"I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done...The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 crystallized my feeling that we have lost our ability to get important things done... [T]he real issue isn’t about rockets. It’s our far broader inability as a society to execute on the big stuff... The fondness that many such people have for SF reflects, in part, the usefulness of an over-arching narrative that supplies them and their colleagues with a shared vision. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it...Time for the SF writers to start pulling their weight and supplying big visions that make sense...Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail... Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done."

Brooks also has a take on this.

I tend to agree with both. The audacity and will to take big risks comes from either a feeling of acute necessity or the occurrence of innovation insulated by a degree of both ignorance of others failures and ambitiousness just short of hubris. When societies are threatened by a large, existential threat, they will take huge risks. Witness the great depression, the world wars and the Cold War from the previous century. What are the risks today that urge us on? Likely minimal by comparison. Or at least not felt acutely, for those seeing climate change as a serious long term threat. And, for the space program at least, there appears to be even less risk than we thought recently concerning near earth asteroids.

Genius insulated from easily accessible knowledge of other's failures with similar ideas is less likely to be thwarted early and more likely to have identified how to actually accomplish what was once failed. I think Neil Stephenson's point it spot on -- we may be stopping too many ideas early.

All this combines with a fear that not only can't we get the big things done, but we are poor at realizing, and taking steps to insure against, the big risks and black swan events. Hurricane Katrina and Japan's tsunami caused nuclear power plant meltdowns may demonstrate some of these failures.