I've been wondering for years why suppressors are cylindrical. A big fat round thing hanging onto the end of a barrel may make sense on a rifle, but it tends to stick up over the sights of a pistol, is often wider than the pistol, and fails to use the space under the bore. There are plenty of multi-port compensators that are streamlined into the slide of competition pistols. Except for the seam, it looks like one piece.

Why not just make a multi-port compensator or brake and close off the ports? No more baffles to align, it will look like part of the gun, and still offer plenty of volume for the gas to expand into without increasing the size of the pistol in any dimension apart from length. Hell, you could even make holsters for it.

Well it looks like AAC is halfway there. The Prodigy is basically a big old muzzle brake with a sleeve over it to close off the ports. Good idea. And of course they've patented it. But the sleeve is still a freakin' tube.

The Evolution 9mm is 1.25" in diameter and 7.25" long. That's about 8.9 cubic inches, minus baffles and threading. A box-shaped suppressor with the same volume could be over 2" shorter if it were 1.75" tall and 1" wide. And it wouldn't block your sights.

Interview with two of the better rock musicians working today on YouTube, and many of the comments are about them (gasp) smoking. This SXE shit is gettin' out of hand.

Let's just say Paul Verhoeven has redeemed himself for Starship Troopers.

Turns out, when you let him make a movie about real Nazis, he's damn good at it.

The Kills' cover of a Serge Gainsbourg song.

Shooting was great. Met two new Texan refugees, into shooting, Rock Band, Barbara Morrison—going to get to see her later this month a week after The Kills show—and Subarus. I think we're going to get along just fine.

The CZ Kadet works beautifully, as I knew it would. It's not more accurate than my Browning, but I wouldn't say it's less. Still smacking a 1" Shoot-n-C target with regularity. I still want a S&W 41 for swatting flies at 25 yards. The Levang comp is neat. Reduces flash and blast by concentrating it, focusing it just ahead of the muzzle from six drilled "nozzles" around the bore. Makes a very bright, sharply defined tongue of flame like I've never seen from a .22. I wouldn't even say it's an improvement, but I could see how it would really work on a .223, which would otherwise be producing a 3 foot ball of flame.

Took another look at the Gemtech Outback and decided against it. It's clever and all, with the helical baffle and the new titanium mount, but I don't like the idea of not being able to take it apart to clean it.

Saw the new B&T TP9 SBR with a suppressor. Not the matching B&T suppressor, but a Surefire with a new mount for the TP9's barrel collar. Even though the TP9 is pretty big, and has a stock, the all-plastic receiver makes it feel lighter than a full size steel 9mm pistol. (The bolt locks into the barrel extension, like an AR-15.) Only $2,000 for the whole package. And another $400 for the necessary tax stamps. What a bargain!

Time to go to the range!

(But not before buying tickets to see The Kills on May 22nd!)

"Pirates" maker to turn "BioShock" game into film

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Take-Two Interactive Software Inc (TTWO.O) said on Friday that "Pirates of the Caribbean" director Gore Verbinski will make a movie version of "BioShock," its hit video game about an underwater utopia gone disastrously wrong.

The movie will be made by Universal Pictures, a unit of NBC Universal owned by General Electric Co (GE.N), and John Logan, the screenwriter behind "Gladiator" and "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," was in talks to pen the script, Take-Two said.

"Gore is an avid video gamer and true fan of 'BioShock'. That was extremely important to us in deciding to move forward with this project," Christoph Hartmann, president of Take-Two's 2K Games label, said in a statement.

Take-Two did not disclose financial terms of the deal or other details, such as when the film would be released. The company is the target of a $2 billion takeover bid by rival game publisher Electronic Arts Inc (ERTS.O).

Released last August for Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Xbox 360 game console, "BioShock" won praise for its complex story, haunting art deco atmosphere and creepy characters such as Big Daddies and Little Sisters.

"BioShock" has sold more than 2 million copies and Take-Two is working on a sequel.

Just got my CZ Kadet conversion kit. What a beautiful piece of hardware. A .22 pistol that feels just like your 9mm CZ pistol because it is your 9mm pistol. Same trigger and grip because it uses the 9mm frame. Same manual of arms, fits the same holsters, and it's all steel, so it weighs the same. And even though it works on a different principle (blowback rather than Browning short recoil) the disassembly procedure is the same.

I don't have a suppressor for it yet—need to take a day to get the paperwork together and go see the sheriff—so for now I've just put a Levang linear compensator. Looks like a stubby can, and weighs as much as a Gemtech Outback, so I can get used to the balance with something hanging out on the end of the barrel. And there are plenty of competition .22s with compensators on 'em, so it's not as poseurish as a fake suppressor.

Almost forgot to mention another great feature of the CZ Kadet: they moved the bore axis down. The barrel sits lower in the .22 upper than it does in the 9mm slide, a little over 1/2" below the top of the upper. You know why that's so great? Because you can put a 1" diameter suppressor on it, and the top of the can will be even with the top of the "slide". Not protruding above it to obscure your sights.

It's the little details.

The Altima 3.5 SE has been catching my eye on the road lately, and now I see it's available with a CVT. And getting decent reviews largely because of the CVT. Otherwise it's just another overweight FWD coupe.

Now someone just needs to come out with a light RWD CVT. Looks like the Dodge Caliber R/T can be had with CVT and AWD, which would be an acceptable combination, but still a Dodge.

I saw the headline...

Austrian city asking for polite cellphone use

...and immediately mentally subtitled it....

Would you keep it down? I'm trying to rape my daughter in peace here!

I make a lot of posts about the small minority of sociopaths among us, largely because they do damage out of all proportion to their numbers. From time to time it's nice to be reminded of the converse, that the majority of people are actually pretty decent. At least in some cultures. That might actually be a good way to judge cultures: do business models based on the honor system actually work there?

By way of BoingBoing...

City Café doesn’t have Interac or accept credit cards. Neither will you see a cash register in the bakery. Instead, customers add up how much they owe themselves and drop their money into a fare box from an old bus.

“I liked the idea of simplifying things and ... the honour system made a whole lot of sense,” [owner John] Bergen says. “I liked the idea of simplifying things and ... the honour system made a whole lot of sense,” [owner John] Bergen says. “What irritated me about going into Tim Hortons, for example, was waiting in line for something as simple as getting a donut and a coffee. So the thought was, someone can pour his own coffee, grab his own bagel, cut it himself, throw the money in, and walk out. We don’t touch 60 per cent of the transaction.”

The bakery conducts audits every six months and Bergen says only once did things come up short.

“Our theory is that two per cent of our sales are being ripped off. ‘Ripped off’ in the sense that there are people who forget to pay or they make a mistake in paying, and then there are people who deliberately don’t pay. And every so often we have to kick somebody out that we know hasn’t been paying,” he says. “But at the same time we figure we’re being overpaid by three per cent. Some people come in and want a $2.75 loaf of bread, but they see we’re busy so they throw $3 in and walk out. Or, although we discourage tips, some people still give them to us.

And of course, this reduces overhead significantly, both for the bakery and for the customers, who can just grab 'n go instead of standing in line. That's real cultural capital: value rising from the essential decency of the majority.

I made a new drummer for Rock Band, name of Chessie. 'Cause I'm a locomotive. And a cool, cool cat. Then I used the art editor to give him a yellow T-shirt with the Chessie System logo on it. Liked it so much, I went online and ordered an identical T-shirt for myself.

I've said several times that there's no "America" when it comes to crime. The averaged crime statistics are a combination of two separate Americas, one very violent, and one very not. This is good news for the vast majority of Americans, and very bad news for a small minority. That needs to be fixed, but it does mean that most people can still lead peaceful, productive lives.

Well it turns out that there's no "America" when it comes to education. The averaged education statistics are a combination of several demographics. And we're doing fine at creating enough students at the top end.

Salzman and Lowell, you will recall, published a study for the Urban Institute a few months ago in which they debunked the myths that American kids are abysmal at math and science, that we are not producing enough people with degrees in those fields, that our average math/science scores are misleading because sadly we have not solved the problem of educating the underclass but the mainstream is fine, and so on. The Nature column by Salzman and Lowell not only summarizes some of their previous findings, but also makes some points that are, I believe new.

One of these new points is striking: In absolute numbers, the U.S. has more top-scoring kids in math and science than any other country studied–by far. The authors point out that it is mainly these kids who become the innovators later as adults, and we’ve got an excellent supply of them. This is completely counter to what one constantly sees in the popular press.

Which leads to a point Salzman made in announcing his article to the Sloan Industry Centers e-mail discussion group: “We’d welcome reactions and particularly thoughts on why the S&E shortage claim is so strongly believed despite lack of evidence.” The answer, of course, is that the groups that stand to benefit from a public perception of an S&E shortage–the tech industry (who want an expanded H-1B work visa program for its cheap labor), the immigration lawyers (who want an expanded H-1B for obvious reasons), the education lobby (”Give us more money so we can remedy the shortage”) and so on hire the slickest PR people money can buy. They’ve been at it for years, to the point at which many people in Congress, the press and the public at large simply take it for granted that “Johnnie can’t do math.”

It's similar to the Olympics: America's performance in China won't be determined by the fitness level of the average American, or even the average American athlete. As long as we have enough athletes at the top end to select as our representatives, they'll be playing our national anthem all day long. And that means all the rest of us Americans don't have to focus on increasing our average athletic abilities unless we want to. We can focus on being in the top end of whatever it is we do. Specialization is a wonderful thing.

I once had a neighbor whose knowledge of history was limited to two dates, 1492 and 1776, and even those two he mixed up as to which events each marked. His ignorance in other fields was just as profound; nevertheless he earned an excellent living as a paving contractor.

— Robert A. Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice

And if you think about it that way, national pride isn't such an odd thing. We're all dependent on each other for something, and as long as we all do a good job, we can all take a little bit of credit. The doctor and the scientist can spend years in school learning their trades because efficient farmers grow so much food that we no longer need the majority of the population to stay on the farm. They, in turn, make it possible for the athlete to do what he does by producing new innovations in medicine, nutrition, and equipment.

As with the Olympic teams, as long as we can fill out the individual fields, we'll all be pulling in the gold.

Open the nearest book to page 123, skip the first 5 sentences, post the next 3.

The kernel variable is named ip_sendredirects, or something similar. (See Appendix E.) Most current systems (4.4BSD, SunOS 4.1.x, Solaris 2.x, and AIX 3.2.2, for example) enable this variable by default. Other systems such as SVR4 disable it by default.

Yeah, it's a '94 copy of Stevens. I mostly keep it around for nostalgia, since Google has supplanted written documentation.

This is Nobel Prize material, right here.

Engineers find 'missing link' of electronics

Since electronics was developed, engineers have made circuits using combinations of three basic elements – resistors, capacitors and inductors.

But in 1971, a young circuit designer called Leon Chua at the University of California, Berkeley, realised something was missing. He was toying with the non-linear mathematics that describes how the four variables in a circuit – voltage, current, charge and flux – behave in the three basic elements.

The three building blocks each relate two of the four electronic properties of circuits, creating a chain linking charge to flux via voltage and current. But his calculations showed there should be a fourth device to directly link flux and charge.

"This was a stroke of absolute, sheer genius by Chua," says Williams. "He then worked through some complex mathematics and saw that such a device would have an unusual property: the ability to remember its past history."

Chua showed that his predicted device could remember the last voltage applied to it, and how long it had been applied. He dubbed the property "memristance" but the memristor was quietly forgotten because it was unclear how it could ever be built.

I really wish the Hard™ problems of mass & energy fell to cleverness like problems in electronics do.

Softball opponents offer unique display of sportsmanship

"We started laughing when we touched second base," Holtman said. "I said, 'I wonder what this must look like to other people.' "

Holtman got her answer when they arrived at home plate. She looked up and saw the entire Western Oregon team in tears.

"My whole team was crying," Tucholsky said. "Everybody in the stands was crying. My coach was crying. It touched a lot of people."

Saw this video in solar_diablo's LJ and it immediately reminded me of Fellini's Toby Dammit. Terence Stamp on that dark road...

I'm so glad I looked for this on YouTube, because someone's posted a few blurry clips with the original English dialogue, rather than the French dubbing. Even with the bad video, it's surreal and mesmerizing. There's still nothing quite like it, although you can catch glimpses sometimes in Kubrick and Terry Gilliam.

There's good "financial" news in the headlines today. It doesn't mean anything except that stock brokers and bankers are happy. If you equate them with "the economy" then you'll be happy too. But if you understand what's really going on, you'll understand that they really don't matter that much, and prepare accordingly.

The U.S. government is inflating itself out of debt.

We owe trillions of dollars. Fortunately, we also own the printing presses that make dollars. The solution is stupidly obvious and obviously stupid. We are just going to print all the dollars we need. Of course, those dollars aren't going to be worth nearly as much as they used to be, which means we're really not paying off our debts at all. We looked at our bills and said, "Let's not and say we did."

Except, we will pay as prices for everything go up. We're going to have to work harder for less. It's a tax. It's just like the government decided to take more of your paycheck, or more of your savings. Except they don't have to go to the trouble of passing any new laws, they don't have to debate it, they don't have to put a vote on record, or even to collect it. It's coming out of your paycheck automatically, it's coming out of your savings, it's coming out of your 401k.

The one brilliant part of it is, it taxes anyone who uses dollars, or currencies linked to the dollar. We're taxing the Chinese, the Middle East, and now that Europe is starting to print more too just to keep up with us, the French and Germans and everyone else.

At first, people are going to be happy about all this new money. Bankers and stock brokers especially, but also everyone getting $600 new dollars from the government.

(By the way, I hope you're not just sticking that in the bank. Because the longer you hold on to it, the less it will be worth. Inflation-taxed just like the rest of your savings. Buy things you'll need or want in the future. Propane, heating oil, non-perishable food, ammunition, liquor, an extra set of tires for your vehicles, medications if they'll keep. If you've already got all that stuff, 1/2 oz. of gold. Just remember you won't be able to eat it.)

So I expect to see a lot of irrational exuberance over the next couple of months. Followed by some deep, deep rage when people figure out that despite the extra "money", they're still finding it harder and harder to pay their bills and put gas in their cars. Just in time for the election.

I've fallen behind on watching Zero Punctuation, which is a shame, because it would have saved me the cost of Burnout Paradise. Anyway, it's as great as fucking ever, and in this one Yahtzee even makes a personal appearance.

I think Cox just added MHD to my lineup recently, and now I've got HD performances from Steve Earle and Amy Winehouse on my Tivo. Freakin' fantastic. It's a lot like those Met HD broadcasts, in that it's almost as good as being there, but right in my own living room. If you've got a provider that carries it, check it out.

1. Stryper singer Michael Sweet is the new singer for Boston.

2. Bobcats are showing up in backyards in Scottsdale and Fountain Hills.

3. It's theoretically possible to cross-breed humans and chimpanzees, producing a humanzee. Chimps and humans are members of the same genus. In fact, it may have been done already. But some people want to ban new attempts.

4. The guy who founded LifeLock ordered a credit card in his dad's name, but had the bills—which eventually totaled over $150,000—sent to his own business address. His dad denies he ordered the card. If that's true, the guy who promises to protect your identity is an identity thief.

   Dad "...has advice for any new parent: Don't name your kid after yourself."