Category: Geekitude

Tab Clearing

Time to clear out some open tabs on the browser.

You Think You Know Me looks like an interesting party card game. Particularly if you have people you’d rather not play Cards Against Humanity with.

Tam recommended Thyrm lens covers for your weapon mounted light. These are disposable covers for range time to keep the lens clear.

What do you call a guy who is a decorated Navy SEAL, a Harvard-trained medical doctor, and an astronaut? I’m going with “Dr. Kim.” The best comment I’ve heard is this is the kid who when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up answered “Everything!”

When In The World

This is a nifty site that lets you put in an address and see where it was over the last few hundred million years. Allocate at least an hour of wasted time.

On a side note, it’s kind of amusing how much of the time Florida was underwater.

Reliving a Bit of My Youth

Tonight, I’m introducing The Fiancee to one of the pivotal movies of my childhood.

One of the local theaters is doing one of those single night screenings. I warned her that I might be reciting the lines and singing along with the songs.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

I was listening to this week’s episode of War College, and they were discussing a new book Strategy Strikes Back. The authors were discussing how to use Star Wars as a lingua franca to discuss military matters. The point that was being made is that Star Wars is a multi-national, multi-cultural, and multi-generational experience that can act as a bridge. Particularly when talking to someone outside of one’s normal culture or even sub-culture.

I found this to be of particular interest as I’m a part of several sub-cultures that live outside mainstream culture. And even those sub-cultures don’t talk well to each other, such as taking atheism to a regular person in the gun culture or talking guns to other atheists. Or talking libertarianism to either. At least with Star Wars there are some touchstones that provide shared frames of reference.

At least it would be nice not to be talking past someone.

And yes, the post title is from a Star Trek TNG episode

Diversity Is A Good Thing, As Long As You Know What To Diversify

Reason put out this article earlier this week on the dangers of Silicon Valley’s burgeoning ideological conformity. Let’s look at the first couple of paragraphs:

When it comes to software, Silicon Valley understands the threat of monocultures. If 100 percent of computers run the same code and malware authors discover an exploit, 100 percent of computers will be vulnerable to the same attack. Fortunately, the way to reduce such risks is straightforward: Increase diversity.

Alas, this insight seems limited to software. Technology executives have yet to fully recognize the risks posed by the potent political monocultures forming inside their own companies.

The problem is that so many who push “diversity” fail to understand what they need to diversify. For these tech companies – and other places pushing diversity for diversity (cough, universities, cough, literary circles) – they are mistaking the biological for the mental. In essence, they are saying because they have both golden labradors and chocolate labradors, they are diverse – and they don’t see the problem when large numbers of their dogs die off. For tech companies, the biggest threat from this failure to recognize they are not really diverse is going out of business because they’ve alienated enough customers.

However, the same issue is impacting the RKBA. I keep hearing how we do we get more women, POCs, young people, etc. involved in the gun rights battle. Too many times, I see the RKBA making the same mistake of substituting outward diversity with inward diversity. You can’t invite people with one breath, and with the next demand they immediately conform to every thing you believe outside of RKBA – such as God, abortion, economics, and/or the current issues of the day.

We’re not breeding stronger livestock, so we shouldn’t be looking for biological diversity. We’re trying to breed stronger ideas, so we need ideological diversity.