Mark Kleiman unwittingly expresses a case for limiting government in general:

This is a special case of an underappreciated general principle: the difficulty of judging consequences in advance means that we should pay more attention to means, relative to ends, than would appear at first blush. Since it’s easy to know that torture is horribly wrong in itself, and very hard to guess the circumstances in which it would prevent something even more horrible, a flat “no-torture” rule may well have better consequences (putting the moral absolutes aside) than some nuanced rule.

In that way, refusing to consider the use of torture is like respecting the results of legal processes or not cheating to win elections. It reflects not only a decent respect for the humanity of other humans but a sensible evaluation of one’s own ignorance.

Sameer Parekh writes:

It appears that everytime I post to the blog, I start the post with, “it’s been a while since I’ve posted here.”

No wonder I forgot that he has a blog!

Another thing I wouldn’t mind hearing less of: the word infamous used as an emphatic synonym for famous.

Does this really work?

Today’s assignment was in a building where I hadn’t worked before, so I didn’t know about the fascist gatekeeper. Luckily my Costco card has a picture of me.

I oughta make a laminated card with my picture and a name such as “Archibald ‘Harry’ Tuttle”. Suggestions of other names are invited.

It’s a fair bet that my readers include at least one Mutant Enemy fanatic. Got a couple of canon questions for ya.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, anyone seen smoking is either evil, under a spell or doomed. (There’s one exception: Mrs Epps in “Some Assembly Required”, who seems to spend her days watching her dead son’s football triumphs on tape.) I didn’t notice whether the second vampire to acquire a human soul then stopped smoking.

In Firefly episode “The Train Job”, the sheriff of Paradiso shares a cigarette with a prisoner. Is anyone else ever seen smoking in that universe? I can easily picture Jayne with a cigar, but that’s just stereotyping.

A few of my Povray scenes include objects with negative indices of refraction; I’ve said of this one that three-quarters of it cannot exist in the real world. Now I read in The Economist that, because a negative-refractive slab could make a “perfect lens” (for obscure reasons), there’s an active effort on to create such a chimera; indeed the effect has been demonstrated but only with microwaves.