The Marines, and our other armed forces serving in Iraq, need your help. Else some have died in vain. (Both from Instapundit)

I finished Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need in 24.5 hours. The brevity of the book, and the lack of finals to study for, contributed to my rapid completion of the tome. I thought it was pretty good.

“Pretty good! That’s all! But this is Dave Barry, greatest humorist of our time!” I hear you scream. Yeah, yeah, I know the hype. I even link to his blog and read his column religiously. But Travel Guide was just not as laugh-out-loud funny as his columns. Maybe it’s the length, but it just wasn’t the spectacular success I expected. Maybe it’s the subject, and Hits Below the Beltway will be better (Barry 2004!), but I won’t know that for a couple of books.

The next project is Cannonball!. I expect it will be interesting; details on quality to come after I read it.

1. (Current Book)Cannonball! World’s Greatest Outlaw Road Race, Brock Yates
2. To Engineer is Human, Henry Petroski
3. Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway
4. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
5. Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett
6. Candide, Voltaire

Just finished The Flyers. It offers a good review of the Wright brothers’ accomplishments, and pairs that with the author’s modern-day experiences both in following the Wrights’ path and in his own opportunities to fly and visit aeronautics meccas.

That means I’m starting in on Dave Barry. If you hear laughing, it’s probably me.

1. (Current Book)Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need
2. Cannonball! World’s Greatest Outlaw Road Race, Brock Yates
3. To Engineer is Human, Henry Petroski
4. Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway
5. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
6. Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett
7. Candide, Voltaire

This semester’s coefficients of fear (C_!) for my finals are as follows:

• T, 1130: AE 3120 (Structures I); C_!=0.6
• T, 1450: AE 2220 (Dynamics); C_!=0.8
• W, 1450: ENG 4793 (Composite Materials & Processing); C_!=0.05
• F, 1130: AE 3450 (Thermodynamics); C_!=0.15

The C_! represents the estimated probability of having a test question I am unable to answer.

Blogger has given me an invite to GMail. So I now have one of those nifty accounts (patrick.oleary@…) but I probably won’t really use it for much. It might be replacing my burntmail account, and I may finally just stop accessing my spamtrap account (pao@mailandnews.com; I’m honestly not sure why I still bother to check it). I haven’t decided yet. My primary account will still be my school account, and my work account for work stuff. We’ll see.

Thought I’d lay these down while I’m thinking about it.

• I, Robot, Isaac Asimov
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
• More Terry Pratchett stuff from the Discworld series, probably including Small Gods and Mort
• Apparently there are Red Dwarf books, which I wouldn’t mind reading.
• Additional items to be tacked on until I make another post

I was in Memphis the first half of the past week for AIAA Region II Student Conference. The University of Memphis has a nice setup, including their own on-campus hotel (part of their school of hospitality and resort management) and the newly-built FedEx Institute of Technology. It’s a pretty good place to hold a conference.

A highlight of the trip was dinner the first night, at the famous Corky’s Ribs and BBQ. It’s some of the best BBQ I have ever had the privilege to consume, and it is far superior to 5th Street Ribs and Blues in Tech Square. I’d suggest trying the “dry” style ribs if you’ve never had them before and you get the chance to go. Also interesting is their partnership with another Memphis landmark: FedEx. That’s right, you can have delicious Corky’s BBQ delivered by overnight express to your home or business. I wonder just how many people take advantage of this service, since it’s very highly priced, but it’s a good idea for both Corky’s and FedEx, so I don’t see why not.

The other highlight was the trip to the FedEx rebuild and maintenance shop. In the shop that day were two A300′s, an A310, and an old Boeing 727. Most of FedEx’s aircraft are retrofitted passenger liners brought into freight service, but the A300-600F is a dedicated freight aircraft that FedEx is bringing increasingly on-line. Also, FedEx is going to be purchasing ten of the giant A380′s in a freight model that FedEx has been instrumental in designing. I asked our guide exactly for what market that degree of freight capacity was required, and his response, surprisingly, was “China.” The Memphis shop is being upgraded over the next few years so that the A380′s can be brought into service. Expect to see them in their garish purple FedEx livery in 2008.

I went to see Hellboy last week. Good movie, especially the characterizations. And the fact that the bad guy is Rasputin. How the hell can you go wrong when you make the bad guy Rasputin? There was some weirdness where apparently there’s a problem with the way the prints were interpreted by projectionists, which is discussed here.

Last night’s adventure was The Alamo. The third film that IMDB is aware of that uses that exact title, this one takes advantage of the fact that cool explosions and interesting cinematography get easier to do every day. Impressive visuals include Mexicans wrapped up in mesquite trees, the invented death scene of Davy Crockett, and sunsets in Texas. I also thought that the movie gave me a good feel of the tactics and strategy played out by all sides: the Alamo defenders forcing the battle to come to them; Santa Anna using nighttime bombardment and inducing fatigue in the defenders in preparation for assault; Houston refusing to reinforce the Alamo with the small army he was able to rouse. No, it’s not as good as the Band of Brothers miniseries in that regard, but it was quite acceptable. Other than the obligatory, “no we don’t really like war, but we’re still making a movie about it, look at the tragedy” story that in this film was told by Crockett (played well by Billy Bob Thornton (you know, a person with no other name could be appropriate for the role)), the movie didn’t wallow in itself, with long-winded speeches about freedom or the self-importance of the battle. I was impressed with the way the characters were built without that, one piece at a time, over the course of the film.

Finally, I’ve got Yuri’s Night to look forward to on Monday. If you are in the Atlanta area, and are at all interested in space, and want to talk to other people who are interested in space in the context of a party (sadly, we cannot sell alcohol this year, but we’ll be working on that problem for next year), then come on out to the Global Learning and Conference Center at around 2030 (we understand if you’re fashionably late) and get your party on. We’ll have snacks and (nonalcoholic) drinks, and music, and interesting people. Well, interesting space geeks.

The solution to this nation’s obesity problem isn’t suing the fast-food companies, or large-scale public health initiatives. A large (no pun intended) number of obese people will claim they have slow metabolism, or that their problem is otherwise genetic. Why are we ignoring them? The cure for obesity is clearly one of fixing the genetic problem that obese people have.

The genes that control weight were slowly narrowed down, over hundreds of thousands of years, to a group that results in what we would now probably refer to as underweight. Humans in the wild had to be fairly lightweight, since our major defense against predators was running and hiding, probably climbing trees as needed. Additional weight has a large penalty: death, because you couldn’t accelerate as quickly or run as far. I suspect that is also why we have much less fur than other mammals. Have you ever picked up a fur coat? Those things are heavy.

My proposed solution: bears. Breed a large number of black and grizzly bears, or some other violent animal-whatever’s appropriate for your part of the country-and train them to attack humans. Reintroduce the selection pressure that led to our genetic optimum for weight so many years before, and we will re-evolve into a more ideal form.

Possible side benefits include a relaxing on restrictions on Second Amendment rights as politicians realize that they aren’t getting elected if their constituents can’t kill the bears. Especially the obese constituents.

Incidentally, what are the demographics for voters by weight class?