Michael Alan Miller

I found a few interesting images when I was researching a previous post. As is typical on the internet, the first one is contextless. But as near as I can tell this is an all-female flight crew of a KC-135 Stratotanker. How do I know this? I read a lot. A lot. And I was in the Army, which helps a little.  There is a pilot and co-pilot. The one on the right in the seat area is a captain, the one bottom left is a first lieutenant of the two whose ranks can be seen. The other two I can’t see their ranks, but the co-pilot in the other seat is probably a captain or first lieutenant. The first lieutenant (the one on the bottom left) would be a navigator. The one on the bottom right would be the boom operator (the hardest job on the plane, btw).  Their nametags and unit patches are not on, which probably has to do with their wearing desert fatigues and therefore are on mission*:

The one below actually had a caption embedded, and it was: “Four F-15 Eagle pilots from the 3rd Wing walk to their respective jets at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska, on Wednesday, July 5, for the fini flight of Maj. Andrea Misener (far left). To her right are Capt. Jammie Jamieson, Maj. Carey Jones and Capt. Samantha Weeks. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Keith Brown)”

Cool to find this stuff. I just want to help put the idea out there if some random girl or woman dreaming of this stuff does a Google search and finds my blog (FSM help her) she might realize that yeah, she can be like Starbuck if she damn well wants to be.

*If you get captured, don’t want them to know who you are.

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A more sensible look at ad-blocking.

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How the cure for scurvy was lost over and over again.

Though it took great historical liberties, the movie Agora demonstrated well just how much knowledge that we take for granted these days is not at all easily discoverable.

Quick, without googling: with no modern instruments and no tools we take for granted, how would you demonstrate conclusively that the earth is rotating?

You wouldn’t, that’s how.

If we ever did find any truly advanced alien technology, the chances we’d be able to reverse engineer it would be about the same as the chance that a cat could reverse-engineer my GTO. Even a very smart cat.

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Right on.

Every few weeks, someone will ask me after I do some odd IT feat, “How did you get so good at this stuff?”

It kind of puzzles people when I reply, “I have broken more software, hardware and software installs than I can count. The reason I know how to fix all of this is that I’ve broken everything you can think of dozens of times and had to fix it because it was me or no one.”

And it’s true. That’s exactly how you get good at something, just going out and trying it. And if you’re like me, shit will get broken in the process.

And this is true, too.

Because I read a study once that demonstrated pretty conclusively that people who apply rationality in one field usually don’t transfer it to another field (such as, say, a logician might be completely unable to figure out how to change a carburetor), I’ve been trying to intentionally subvert this human tendency by being aware of it (which is the easiest way to subvert our badly-non-designed brains) and using ideas and techniques (which are just applied logical processes) learned from IT troubleshooting.

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Female WWII pilots get their due, after their achievements were ignored for years.

Nine months before the war ended, the WASP program was disbanded. The female fliers were told to come home at their own expense and not to talk about their achievements.

Couldn’t embarrass the poor men, now could we?

Even though the last Terminator movie was pretty bad (god, I miss the TV series), what I always have liked about the Terminator movies and series is that when a woman does something, there’s never any question about it — like, “Oh, you’re a woman, you couldn’t possibly do that.”

When the female A-10 pilot pulls off her helmet after ejecting, no big deal is made out of it that she’s not — gasp! — a man, and no one in the movie ever questions her competence, abilities or decisions (just as in the rest of the Terminator movies and series), not even jokingly or in an implied manner, based on her coincidental gender.

I know the real world isn’t like that, but I don’t always want to see the real world. Else, why would I watch sf anyway?

Incidentally, we’ve come a long way. One of the Thunderbird’s (the Air Force’s elite demonstration team) pilots is a woman, Maj. Nicole Malachowski. Cool.

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My belt is now completely useless, I realized as I was dressing for work today. The last hole is not even close to making it useful anymore.

Definitely time for clothes shopping, as my pants are now falling off, too.

And no one wants to see that.

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Why Toyota is having problems figuring out what is wrong.

I know most auto makers use so-called “fuzzy logic” controllers in their cars. Incredibly complicated, and incredibly variable in their behavior based on hundreds of sensor readings a second. If the runaway car problem is even happening at all (which I have my doubts about — after all, scientific studies showed with near 100% confidence that there were no medical problems from silicon breast implants despite the sensationalistic press coverage and lawsuits), it’s probably due to some runaway condition related to sensor readings being slightly unexpected that only happens every 100 billion miles driven.

So, basically, unfixable.

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I must be reading the nerdiest non-math textbook in the world right now: The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and The Proto-Indo-European World.

And it’s really good, btw.

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I also thought the article on ads that ran on Ars Technica was pretty dumb.

When some company starts paying for my $3,000 of computer gear, my $60 a month internet connection, and my power to run it all, I will look at their ads.

Until then, no deal.

And this won’t be solved until micropayments occur, which will be never, likely, given the oligopolgy status of Mastercard and Visa and their regulatory capture.

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All the AIG execs should be in jail.

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By the way, the weight I’ve lost has not been through really any eating of nasty foods, such as fat-free or reduced calorie items.

It has just come through eating less, and less often. If I’d know it was going to be this easy and painless, I would’ve done it sooner.

Everyone is different, but I’m guessing most diets get busted through lack of willpower rather than anything “genetic.”

But now that it’s habit — and now that my body just simply cannot eat as much — it’s natural.

Going to be weird eating more (which will be necessary to even maintain my weight) when I start lifting weights again.

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What happens when you live in a culture of prudes.

The snow sculpture is pretty good, actually.

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Wow, Chrome is slow without adblock. The fucked up part is, it’s even slower with adblock (after-the-page-loads parsing will do that).

To be fair, it is slightly faster than my modded Firefox on pages with absolutely no ads — but the interface is still terrible.

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Someone on Reddit has also noticed all the “If you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about?” justifications people use about spying and surveillance lately.

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I have mixed feelings about open carry and even concealed carry of guns.

I’ve considered getting a concealed carry permit for years, but likely won’t do it. I don’t even have to take a training course, since I was in the military and handled guns safely all the time. (And grew up redneck, but that doesn’t count in the eyes of the law.)

There have been situations where I would’ve felt a lot safer with a gun — not just pepper spray — but that’s only been once or twice. Going into a stranger’s house buying something from Craigslist is one such situation that I can recall.

Those who do concealed carry are pretty safe, and law-abiding. Because, duh, if you aren’t you just carry the gun any fucking way, like my dad used to do before he went down the straight and narrow. The liberal outrage over concealed carry, the statistics show, is unjustified. And it also appears to reduce violent crime slightly, but that’s hard to measure.

But see, growing up with guns, and being in the military, they don’t make me feel manly or powerful. They make me feel guarded and vulnerable, because the worst thing that can happen is for a) Someone to know you have a gun and take it from you or b) Someone to know you have a gun, period.

If I were ever to concealed carry, no one would ever know. Which is the way it should be.

Personally, I’d rather wear a sword, if I knew how to use it (which I don’t). But that’s even more bulky, and at least 60% of the reason I don’t conceal carry is the weight would be bothersome as I hate even keys being in my pocket.

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