UW Police Chief Responds to Concealed Carry on the UW Campus

Here is UW-Madison's response to the new concealed carry law in Wisconsin:

UW Madison Students, Faculty, & Staff,

When Wisconsin’s new concealed carry law goes into effect on November 1, 2011 all weapons will remain prohibited in UW Madison buildings. If you see a person who is not a police officer in uniform carrying a weapon in a UW Madison building, call 911. As allowed by law, persons with licenses will be allowed to have weapons in parking areas and on the grounds of the university. However, do not assume a person has a license. We recommend you think “safety first” and if you err, please err on the side of calling police. Our police officers are trained to react appropriately to those legally or illegally carrying weapons. As always, call UWPD if you see suspicious behavior or someone with a weapon on UW Madison property.

Thanks,

Chief of Police Sue Riseling

Associate Vice Chancellor

UW Madison

I wonder how the NRA will react to the new UW Policy? My guess is that they will consider it harassment. I also wonder whether the NRA has thought about what will happen the first time a concealed carry permit holder pulls a gun in self-defense and is shot by a police officer who assumes they are the doer?

Financial Crisis, Stimulus and Regulation: Next Time Won't Be Different

In spite of the smack down from Rick Santelli (CNBC's "freaked out white man") Ezra Klein, a financial columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote an excellent piece (here) on the Late 2000 Financial Crisis (also known as the Subprime Mortgage Crisis). Klein's article argues that there is never the political will to either (1) impose strong enough regulation to prevent financial crises or, (2) once the crisis has started, provide enough stimulus to bring the economy back to full employment.

One particular quote from the article caught my attention:

It is never possible for the political system to do enough to stop them [financial crises] at the outset, as it is never quite clear how bad they are. Even if it were, the system is ill-equipped to take action at that scale [once the crisis has started].

If Klein is accurate, the theories of Keynesian intervention and of central bank control of the economy are fundamentally wrong--something to think deeply about at a possible libertarian moment in US politics.

Driven Crazy By Golf

The video above is a very funny piece by trick shot artist J C Anderson lampooning instruction based on The Golf Machine (TGM). TGM is based on a book by Homer Kelley (here). Some of the concepts in Stack & Tilt methodology came from TGM (here), in fact you can look at S&T as a simplification of TGM.

Reading through Kelley's book is almost impossible. Every rule of good writing (see George Orwell's rules here) is broken repeatedly. Kelley was an engineer and took an engineering/physics approach to analyzing the golf swing. What he did continues to fascinate people trying to understand the golf swing, but getting through the book is no easy matter.

I once remember reading that the American engineer Buckminster Fuller (Bucky Balls, the geodesic dome and the Dymaxion car) had been driven crazy by the industrial revolution (if you want to read and understand more about Buckminster Fuller, there is a great website here). Possibly the same could be said about Homer Kelley and golf. Both Homer Kelley and Buckminster fuller did such solid and useful work and have so many committed followers that we really can't overlook their accomplishments, no matter how it is presented.

S&T vs. RST at Address

One of my correspondents recently asked me to take a look at an article titled Stack and Tilt Golf from a Biomechanics Viewpoint (RST). There has been a lot of comment about the biomechanics of S&T vs. the perfect golf swing (for example, here). I cannot comment on biomechanics but, for myself, if some athletic movement is producing pain or outright injury, I'm just not going to keep doing it. If the movement is just activating weak or little used muscles producing soreness, I'm willing to keep going if the athletic movement is producing good results.

The RST (Rotary Swing Tour) article looks at five aspects of S&T vs. RST: (1) address, (2) ball position, (3) takeaway, (4) impact and (5) follow through. Before looking at each criticism, a few general points. RST theory (here) assumes that there are two basic swings that can be mastered by any golfer: RST and RS1, for rank amateurs. I disagree with this premise. Its very clear from the S&T book (here) that address, ball position, takeaway, impact and follow through are actually variables that can be manipulated to produce a particular ball flight or to fit the body confirmation of an individual golfer (GolfTec put my swing up against Ernie Els and Tiger Woods here, really). The RST article goes on to analyze Aaron Baddeley's version of the S&T swing as if it was the S&T swing. Moreover, Baddeley's variant, while he was still using it, departs from the canonical S&T swing in ways that he could have modified within the S&T framework.

Starting with address (in the graphic above), we have Chuck Quinton doing the RST setup on the left with Aaron Baddeley on the right. Baddeley is standing further away from the ball and he is balanced on the balls of his feet (yellow line) rather than over his ankles (red line). The RST swing recommends balancing through the center of the ankles provides more rotational freedom.

The graphic above shows Mike Bennett and myself at address. The address position looks very similar to RST except our torsos are flexed forward rather than the arched back position of RST. From the book (p. 46):

Your torso from the downtarget view should be flexed forward, toward the ball, but your spine should not be in a straight line. Your spine should curve forward slightly, or tilt progressively more from bottom to top, so tat your neck is angled more toward the ball than your lower back. This rounding of the spine serves two purposes. First, it allows your shoulders to roll inward and your arms to pinch against your torso., Second, it tilts your head downward so you can see the ball without straining to look out the bottoms of your eyes.

I've tried the straight-line back position advocated by RST and found it unnatural and uncomfortable. I found this out for myself well before being introduced to S&T. Obviously, for some golfers, the straight-line back position works well. Many tour players look perfectly comfortable in this position. It's one of the variables you can manipulate.

In future posts, I'll deal with ball position, takeaway, impact and follow-through.

Think Different

A Moment of Silence for Steve Jobs

...lest we forget the startup sounds of the Mac SE.

Steve Jobs: Love and Death

In his 2005 Stanford Commencement address (video above and transcript here), Steve Jobs said that "You've got to find what you love" and "Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Since 1969, I have worked on every type of computer platform (Supercomputers, mainframes, minicomputers, graphics workstations, IBM PCs, Macintosh, etc.). I must say that the only platform that was fun to work on (rather than just hard work) was Macintosh. What an extraordinary compliment and achievement in a world where everything was supposed to be cool.

A friend of mine who was a graphic artist sent me the following note today:

Reading about Steve Jobs' death tonight I recalled my introduction to Apple, and to the Mac, in your office, circa 1988 - if memory serves, you had set a Mac up for me to play with. After 30 minutes I was dazzled, and I have been ever since. I just wish I'd bought stock. In our household we have 2 laptops, 3 desktops (2 inactive but they're still sitting around) 2 iPhones and several iPods. Just today at work I downloaded an ebook to my Touch. It was so easy.

I'm still in love with the stock (here), the computer, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and future products yet to be invented. Steve Jobs, 1955-2011, RIP.

Prohibition vs. Regulation

I just finished watching the three-part PBS series Prohibition by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Prohibition in the United States officially began with the Volstead Act in 1919 and ended with its repeal in 1933 during the Great Depression. The images of the period captured in the PBS documentary were nostalgic, compelling and fresh (many I had never seen before). The video above gives a preview of the series.

The timing of the series, right after the current Great Recession, makes the analogy pretty clearly. One of the interesting points made at the end of Episode 3, made by Daniel Okrent (Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition), was that under Prohibition it was easier for anyone to get a drink then after Prohibition when drinking was regulated--an interesting history lesson in the importance and benefits of regulation.

Another interesting point made by historian Michael Lerner involved the unintended consequences of heavy-handed legislation. Prohibition was the "grade school, college and graduate school" of organized crime in the US, the effects of which remained long after Prohibition had been repealed.

I also enjoyed to comments of Catherine Gilbert Murdock (Domesticating Drink): "One could argue that it was not simply drink that was domesticated in this decade but men as well" (p. 7).

Right Wing Fixation on Fertilization

The NY Times ran a comprehensive article today (here) that explores the important role of the world's forests in controlling CO2 emissions and global temperature. The causal diagram below summarizes the article (click to enlarge).

CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning enter the atmosphere where the greenhouse effect increases global temperature. At the same time, atmospheric CO2 concentrations are absorbed (Co2 sequestration) by the oceans and by the forests. Co2 fertilization increases the growth rate of the forests, but wild fires, insect infestations and water deficits created by global warming decrease forest biomass as does outright deforestation and poor forest management techniques.

The article details how the right wing has latched on to C02 fertilization to argue that global warming (if it really exists) will benefit the planet. Unfortunately, the forces reducing forest growth are overwhelming the CO2 fertilization effect.

In addition to being sinks for carbon emissions, the forests and the oceans provide biodiversity (fish, animals and plants) that are threatened by ocean acidification and forest die-off. The article concludes that we cannot count on natural feedback effects to control climate e.g., there are limits to how many trees we can plant on the available land as a way to absorb Co2 emissions. The only option is to reduce CO2 emissions.