What do you get when you cross . . .

Probably the greatest incarcerated fraction of society in US history, receiving the closest thing to socialized medicine short of the VA, drawn from an illiterate underclass, that still has access to all the drugs it wants and gives hypodermic needles and tattoos to each other?

A hepatitis-C time bomb.

Whom do we get to thank?

Addendum, 1 April: Don't forget prison rape.

Idea number 1201

Megan McArdle, guestblogging at Instapundit, quotes a blogger charting the trajectory of music along technology, wondering what comes next, and how to recapture the magic of music you haven't heard yet:

[the iPod confers] incredible levels of control over what we listened to at any moment. It’s simply next in the progression from LP (moving the needle from track to track), to cassette (pressing FF and guessing), to CD (pressing next, but still limited to one album). Now, at your fingertips, there is the power to pick any song, play it for any length of time, and skip to another song, and keep skipping until you find what it is you want to listen to. While there is great, great joy to be had in simply shuffling at random (the wild success of the iPod Shuffle definitely illustrates this), I think all will agree that it is not enough.

Well, it seems simple enough : equip your player with a Bluetooth transceiver and hope enough other player owners do too. Tuck a protocol between the Bluetooth and your player, such that when two players come within range of one another, they compare their inventories and exchange songs that the other does not have. For intellectual property purists, set a flag to play it once and delete it, but leave a chit identifying the incoming, once-played track. At the end, sound a prompt to the listener, "keep, or clear?" If you choose to keep it, it stores the artist, album, label, license terms and so forth so you can find it and (if the artist demands) buy it.

If you are among several people with shareplayers (a long workout, say), enter a share-ffle (shruffle?) mode that gives each player a turn to offer a track to everyone else.

A lurker mode allows you to walk down a crowded street, allowing other shareplayers' tracks to fade in and out of hearing. The protocol already skips tracks you already have, could even be told to skip artists, albums, labels, and genres you choose. FF allows you to skip a track from one player and go to the next-most-audible player. Play grabs a track, or its tag, whenever it sounds interesting.

As much as it pains me to say it, mobile phones with mp3 features are probably better-positioned to deploy this capability than straight mp3 players. They already pack Bluetooth and they're supported by companies that have a history of charging out the ass for simple features (remember paying a separate fee for "tone dialing" on your landline phone?).

As always, this reminds me of High Plains Drifter: somebody is leaving the door open and the wrong dog can come home. Serious consequences for a mobile phone. Equally serious for a non-phone mp3 player that eventually comes to dock in at a computer. But these are the same risks that file sharers take already.

Abject terror in the Di'trick

I've skimmed the ruling on Parker v DC, and read much of what the blogosphere has had to say about it, and have little to add, other than:

• About damned time.
• The Supremes can still dick it up, by ruling its applicability so narrowly, and government's compelling interests so broadly, as to render the Parker ruling itself immaterial. See what good the Fifth Circuit's Emerson ruling did for Emerson the man.
  
• The Republicans in the Congress and the Executive can also snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by bowing, scraping, being conciliatory and bipartisan, and otherwise slicing their own throats along with ours.
  

I'm still stocking up on C/BE of various flavors.

Update, 30 March: GOP preparing to dick it up. See, I told you.

Andy, where's my 15 minutes?

All I want to know about 300 is whether Elephantinos the tinker appears and utters his signature line.

Ungulate sur la tension

• You'll need a cut of some red-meat animal, game meats will do well, we cooked this recipe with antelope, a roast of about 2 lbs.
• Four medium potatoes
• Half a medium onion, diced finely
• One 10oz can of cream of mushroom soup
• Half a cup of fresh mushrooms, sliced
  
• A tablespoon butter
• A pressure cooker

Dice the onion and toss it into the pressure cooker over low heat with half of the butter, and chase it around with a wooden spoon until it begins to brown. Take it off heat and add 1 tsp garlic powder.

Eye and dice the potatoes so they are in chunks roughly half an inch on a side. Peeling is optional. Spread them in with the onions to an even layer.

Cut the meat into chunks about an inch on a side. Lay them upon the potatoes.

Dump in the can of mushroom soup and scatter the mushrooms over all of it. Sprinkle with black pepper. Add the remaining butter. If this is game meat, kinda lean, you can also add a teaspoon of bacon fat if you have it.

Add 1/2 cup of water. Bring the open pressure cooker to a simmer, remove from heat, put on and lock the pressure cooker's cover. Put back on heat, run the heat up until the cooker's regulator indicates it is at pressure (a hiss, usually) then back the heat off to lowest simmer; find the burner setting that maintains the pressure cooker at a continuous faint hiss.

Simmer for 20 minutes, then relieve pressure according to the cooker's directions. Serve.

Indian tanning

The animal hides I harvest this year will be braintanned. It just logically follows that if I shoot it myself, and dress and butcher it myself, with ammunition I handloaded myself, the rest of the animal deserves preservation that I can also accomplish. Ever the cheapskate, I want to do it cheaply even if that means more work, and maximize the products resulting from the animal.

I mentioned this to the two female offspring units, and they sound very enthusiastic about helping me. They'll get to keep some bones or other animal parts to show at school, maybe.
Mlle. Sklodovska is very interested in beadworked American Indian clothing, and a chamoised antelope hide would serve very well for that.

We'll see whether this enthusiasm persists when it comes time to scud a sopping wet hide, or mash an antelope's brain in a bucket.

Firstborn's infatuation

Firstborn now cares for a Tamagotchi, having seen many of her friends caring for them.

These devices appear to have been Furby-ized since I first heard of them maybe 15 years ago; hers has a little IR window through which it can communicate with others nearby, ostensibly so they can exchange electronic genetic material and procreate. Hers has had offspring.

For all I know, these little buggers can receive data through the screen flicker of a computer monitor (not the first time this has been done). This would enable Firstborn to download changes to her pet from one of the fansites, such as new foods, grooming, tricks or a simpler feeding schedule.

She has already "lost" 3 of her pets in this device, one because of a hard reset (I think), others not because of hardware malfunction, but because it must just have been their times to die. She was devastated the first few times, but now sniffles a bit and starts the pet over, always with the same name.

Gets me to wondering: is anybody hacking these things, distributing communicable diseases through the IR port? And how much protection is their Japanese maker placing on these devices to immunize them? And can the immunity also be transferred from device to device?

There's a networking-security graduate thesis in here somewhere.