I dropped in to a computer store today to price flat monitors. They’ve come down more than I thought. I might even buy one this year – if I get a job.

The houseguest said something about “a reasonable facsimile of caffeine” and naturally I thought: what do you get if you replace a C in a caffeine molecule with Si?

Aubrey Turner reports that Condi Rice, for good personal reasons, is firmly for RKBA. (Link from Bitter Bitch)

Though Nordyke v King follows the Ninth Circuit’s gross misreading of US v Miller (1939) in its Hickman ruling, it’s interesting because Gould’s concurrent opinion says:

I join the court’s opinion, and write to elaborate that Hickman v. Block, 81 F.3d 98 (9th Cir. 1996), was wrongly decided, that the remarks in Silveira v. Lockyer, 312 F.3d 1052 (9th Cir. 2002), about the “collective rights” theory of the Second Amendment are not persuasive, and that we would be better advised to embrace an “individual rights” view of the Second Amendment . . . .

Our panel is bound by Hickman, and we cannot reach the merits of Nordyke’s challenge to Second Amendment. [sic] But the holding of Hickman can be discarded by our court en banc . . . .

As Comedian points out, this judge was appointed by Clinton!

This raises an interesting procedural point of which I was unaware: this panel could not challenge Hickman because it was only three judges, not the full Circuit Court of Appeal. (How often does a Circuit sit en banc?)

Ian Frazier visits a typewriter wizard (Atlantic Monthly, 1997). Martin Tytell has stories to tell about converting typewriters for other alphabets:

There he received his hardest job of the war – a rush request to convert typewriters to twenty-one different languages of Asia and the South Pacific. . . . The implications of the work and its difficulty brought him to near collapse, but he completed it with only one mistake: on the Burmese typewriter he put a letter on upside down. Years later, after he had discovered his error, he told the language professor he had worked with that he would fix that letter on the professor’s Burmese typewriter. The professor said not to bother; in the intervening years, as a result of typewriters copied from Martin’s original, that upside-down letter had been accepted in Burma as proper typewriter style.

(Link found at Jonathan Borwein’s Quotations Page, which is mostly about the sciences)

Sunday I went to a target range for the first time in many months. I had what I call a left-handed day, when my ‘weak’ hand was much steadier than my ‘strong’ hand. (On average I’m nearly as accurate with either hand; the eye does most of the work, and in me neither eye is clearly dominant.)

My elbows have been sore lately, particularly the right. (It’s fate. I normally carry burdens on my right, because the left shoulder has had intermittent pain since age 16.) Vince Miller, at the range as usual on Sunday, said glucosamine did wonders for his “.44 Magnum elbow”; so I bought some at Trader Joe’s afterward. (.44 Magnum was, as Inspector Callahan said, “the most powerful handgun [caliber] in the world”; it has since been surpassed, but .50AE is relatively rare.)

Vince also reported that a friend of ours has been sent up for five years for unchastity with a minor (age 16 if memory serves). We sigh heavily.

Oh dear: John Lott, scholar-darling of the Gun Lobby, may be dirty. (Julian Sanchez of Cato broke the story.) I hope the Gun Lobby (statist-speak for all of us who don’t buy the victim-punishing dogma of Feinstein, Schumer, Brady et al.) will have the sense to disown him if necessary. On the other hand, of course, despite the ‘Mary Rosh’ affair I hope the sunlight will ultimately show his work to be clean.

The worst outcome of this matter – coming on the heels of the Bellesiles scandal – would be to discourage serious social scientists from looking at gun issues, leaving nothing but a war of slogans.

I wonder whether statistical “deaths by firearms” include victims of blunt trauma with an empty gun; though I doubt it’s a big number.