voluntaryXchange

R.I.P. Phoebe Snow

Phoebe Snow has died.

I’ve never been a great fan, but I’m enough of a fellow traveler that she came up on my MusicMatch playlist about an hour before I read the news.

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Fremont/Anasazi Artifact Recovered

A painted clay basket has been recovered intact. This is probably a Fremont Culture artifact, but given the uncertainty of the location, it could be an Anasazi item.*

It’s not clear where this was found, although the news was reported in the Cedar City Daily News:

"I've never seen anything like this in my life and I've been working in this field since '77," said Craig Harmon, archaeologist from the BLM Richfield Field Office.

The Fremont Culture is related to, but distinct from, the more advanced, contemporaneous, and better known Anasazi culture to the south.

Here is a map of Utah BLM units:

The Fremont culture extends over both the Cedar City and Richfield units:

However, both of those units also overlap the northwestern edge of the Anasazi range:

The source article is unclear on this, but is sounds like the item was found by one of these groups that takes troubled youths out on extended survivalist trips as a form of therapy. There are quite a few of these in southern Utah.

* Note that while the word Anasazi is still popular, it is deprecated in favor of Ancient Pueblo Peoples. Anasazi is a Navajo word that means “ancient enemies”, and is considered discriminatory by contemporary Pueblo tribe members.

Technorati Tags: fremont,anasazi,artifact

Book Burning In America

FLDS polygamists broke into a book storage facility, stole books, burned thousands of books last weekend, and apparently had second thoughts and donated thousands more to a Deseret Industries outlet in Cedar City (about 60 miles north).

The FLDS split into two groups years ago, and the book donations started with someone from the breakaway group:

Stefanie Colgrove, of Centennial Park, Ariz., had the vision to start the library. With grandparents who were educators, she started the library with her family's personal collection.

The books burned, Colgrove said, were part of her grandmother's collection - medical journals and memoirs …

More books were donations to the FLDS community from outsiders who wanted to provide a public library.

The books missing were encyclopedias and dictionaries, and books like that …

… The HOPE Organization's book donations were valued at more than $15,000. Barnes & Noble donated $9,800 in books, and a private individual donated $1,500 worth of books that came in sets of four and five, and were composed of classics by authors such as Charles Dickens.

… Utah Attorney General Spokesman Paul Murphy said he personally delivered books in his truck donated from book drives in Salt Lake City to benefit the library in Colorado City. He was joined by Jane Irvine, of the Arizona Attorney General's Office, who also personally loaded her vehicle and delivered books to Colorado City to benefit the polygamous community.

Even though prophet Warren Jeffs is in jail, probably for life, FLDS members are asserting themselves again because recent Federal court decisions have been breaking their way; 2,000 male-only FLDS members recently swore continued allegiance to Jeffs.

Technorati Tags: polygamist,flds,utah,book,burning,theft

Physicists’ Hearts Aflutter

Rumors are sweeping the internet: a leak from people working at the Large Hadron Collider indicates they’ve found something where they think the Higgs boson may be “hiding”.

The Higgs boson is the raison d’etre for the LHC. Detecting it has been the biggest deal in experimental particle physics for a couple of decades.

The leak describes this as a 4 sigma event: exceptionally unlikely to be something else. A skeptic knocks that down below 3 sigma: now we’re talking perhaps a 1% chance that it isn’t what they think it is.

The colored areas of the diagram show mass ranges that have been searched an eliminated for the Higgs boson. The new findings are in the far left of the wide open area in the middle.

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Skynet Self-Aware?

According to the mythos laid out in the The Terminator series almost 30 years ago, SkyNet became self-aware last Tuesday evening.

In 1984, this was the vision of the years after 2011:

FTNItK: The Terminator features thinking machines from the future. Skynet is the first machine in the future that becomes self-aware: it knows what it is, and it knows what it wants. Specifically, that it is not a human, and that humans are a violent threat. The problem is that Skynet is a Defense Department computer system, so it uses those capabilities to attack humans in the future, and for convoluted reasons, to find a way to attack humans in the past as well.

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Stephen On Prices

Stephen wrote to Don Boudreaux, who posted his letter. I liked these two quotes:

Like ants tracing pheremones, prices provide signals for the billions of buyers and sellers that we call “the market.” 

Prices are like a universal language!

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You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: Government Arrogance Edition

George Will:

… When excessively deferential courts permit governmental arrogance, additional arrogance results as government explores the limits of judicial deference. As Jim Roos knows.

He formed a nonprofit housing and community development corporation that provides residences for people with low incomes. Several times its properties have been seized by the city government, using “blight” as an excuse for transferring property to developers who can pay more taxes to the seizing government.

The Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision legitimized this. It permits governments to cite “blight” — a notoriously elastic concept, sometimes denoting nothing more than chipped paint or cracked sidewalks — to justify seizing property for the “public use” of enriching those governments.

Roos responded by painting on the side of one of his buildings a large mural — a slash through a red circle containing the words “End Eminent Domain Abuse.” The government that had provoked him declared his sign “illegal” and demanded that he seek a permit for it. He did. Then the government denied the permit.

The St. Louis sign code puts the burden on the citizen to justify his or her speech rather than on the government to justify limiting speech. And the code exempts certain kinds of signs from requiring permits. These include works of art, flags of nations, states or cities, and symbols or crests of religious, fraternal or professional organizations. And, of course, the government exempted political signs. So the exempted categories are defined by the signs’ content.

…

St. Louis is not the problem; government is. Many people go into it because they enjoy bossing people around.

Technorati Tags: government,problem,kelo,free,speech,roos

Students Write the Funniest Things

A bunch of these came through my e-mail from AH. This one made me laugh:

I have no idea if this is an urban myth or not – it’s supposed to be actual submissions from students.

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The Orangutan and the Hound

An adolescent orangutan adopts a stray hound dog:

I love the part around 3:00 with the dog on the leash and the orangutan having a ball.

Via Kids Prefer Cheese.

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Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right: Healthcare Edition

James V. DeLong links two important points:

… Only the whinging culture of the liberal state could take one of the greatest opportunities ever presented to humanity – the astonishing progress in medicine and biology – and convert it into a cause for complaint and despair while at the same time taking one of the best-known issues in institution building — the over-use of a commons — and see it as an intractable problem beyond society’s capacity to address.

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