There’s been a bit of media attention lately to the exorbitant amounts of money that we as a people spend to fund the campaigns of our elected officials, especially presidential candidates. And any sane among us will agree it’s entirely out of hand. No matter how much you may favor a candidate for whatever policies they endorse or propose we should not and cannot endorse any candidate that will utterly waste these dollars on campaigns.

To that end I call on all Americans to pledge not to vote for any high-spending candidate in 2008 or any other election. Campaign funding has the benefit of being mostly transparent, so it is rather trivial to find out what your candidates are spending. Do that, and if they are spending too much money then do not vote for them. I won’t be.

It’s the principle of the matter that if their ideas are sound we should not need to spend all of that money to decide we like them. And it’s the practice of the matter that any candidate that can justify spending so much to get elected will not have the restraint we grossly need once they hold office. Get the word out to people, let one another know this is the deal-breaking issue that precedes the others and let’s see if the candidates are actually willing to step up to the challenge of running a sane campaign before they get the chance to sit in office.

In grade school we had book reviews or book reports as they called them. Sometime around first or second grade I did one on a book about electric cars. The book covered a brief history of the machines and talked about some of their advantages and disadvantages.

In the end my natural conclusion was “these things suck.” Such is the opinion of a youngster who perceives noiseless, combustion-free transportation as lame. There’s no explosion, there’s no gas station, maybe most important, there’s no high speed car chases.

But so much for all that. These days the electric cars look better and better. They’re making advances on the speed issue.* The noiseless and combustion-free aspects are godsends. They can be made less expensive and more robust than traditional automobiles, not to mention smaller and more dependable.

The battery issues are also being examined, but how hard would it be to replace gas stations with automated battery swap centers? Don’t got time to charge? Swap out your cells for a convenient low price. It’ll be some time before they reclaim the roads, but it seems if we want to continue to use autonomous transportation they are the best solution. Even hydrogen fuel cells would be better off in a generation environment than in a mobile transporter.

*The speed issue is rather important to consider on its own, so I’ll try to throw another shortpost up soon about that one.

-Adam

The latest rhetoric proffered by Bush and Snow about the Quds of Iran giving aid, including weapons, to Iraqi insurgents is approximately, “The government of Iran is just as guilty whether this happened with or without their knowledge.”

And that seems to be a knife that really should cut both ways. Bush is thereby calling himself just as responsible for 9/11 whether he knew about it and let it happened or didn’t know about it and failed to respond adequately.

This just in, for immediate release, and all that jazzzzzzz.

Tool will be playing a show on 0×0004 0×000D 0×07D7 here. That’s a Friday.

Glad to hear. The System.

(update: Show got pushed back due to an injury.)

This’ll be brief as space allows. Something I’ve been mulling over for a good six months at least. The design of a program or the solution to a problem must be dissected into subprograms and subproblems. We don’t see this nearly enough. It should be one of the key ideas drilled into us from birth.

You learn it in math, with the order of operations and some other early concepts. You learn it in long division and long multiplication to an extent. Still, it’s not nearly as clear as it should be.

If you need to clean a room how should you proceed? Well first you need to define what the final state should be (ie, when is it clean?) If this is the kitchen then it’s clean after the floor is swept (or mopped), the counters and table are wiped, any food is stored, and the dishes are clean/put away. Bam. Right there we have four sub-problems and some early leads on child-problems for those.

[Eg, (mop or sweep or (mop and sweep)), (wipe counter and wipe table), (store food in cupboard and store food in refrigerator), (dishes for dishwasher and dishes for hand washing)]

How you attack the overall problem, be it by a combination of bits of work on each problem (Eg, working across the kitchen from one end doing each piece of each subproblem) or doing each subproblem in whole before the next, isn’t that important in most cases.

Sometimes, though, you’re much better off choosing one or the other approach. That depends on the problems/subproblems. Optimization happens when you understand the problem enough to keep some work in progress at all times. Great chefs learn to do this out of necessity to have each dish ready at the right time.

Anyway, that’s some preliminaries and I’ve tried to keep it short. Will continue later. Adios.