Smart.

Google is releasing The Next Big Thing, called "Glass."

The idea of wearable computers has been around for a while, but no one has really fielded a worthwhile model. (Oh, I know that Apple tried it, but this is completely different.)

IF this works (and eventually, someone will get it right), this will be a bigger deal than broadband was to the Internet.

Google is thus far kind of hit or miss on some new apps, and their branded hardware has never set a benchmark, to my knowledge. But this is a new device that hasn't really been fielded before, and their marketing strategy is pretty smart.

See, you have to apply to get the right to pay $1500 for one, right now. That will of course change, later, but right now, your price of admission is a grand and a half, and an application that includes an essay, and perhaps a video.

Why? Because genius, that's why.

They're beta testing. You want your beta testers to be invested in the product, or they'll put it down without input.They must have some confidence in it, to be trying this. But maybe some design guy sold it to marketing with:
"Hey, we can't fail! We get to claim that we're beta-testing, not generally releasing the product, and each enduser is paying us to do the research. Worst case scenario is that it's back to the drawing board. Best case: we send a service pack module upgrade, and proceed with production as is."


The weak point isn't going to be the shaky video; it's going to be in the speech recognition. It needs to NOT fire off some app, just because you left it on while walking through a noisy crowd, or while watching a movie.To quote my friend Ed: "You know it's only a matter of time before people start using Google Glass to make their own pornos."
He's probably right, but there have been wearable cameras for a long time. I think that it's the integration that will be the big deal. Google is pretty good at taking existing technology, and integrating it. Look at the excellent job that they did with Google Maps integrating with their search engine, with their one-of-a-kind StreetView, and their superb Earth. (You haven't downloaded Google Earth to your machine? I don't even know you, anymore.)
 
Some worry that it moves us a little further down the slippery slope of not having to interact with human beings around us. I submit that it will pull our heads up. Right now, when I want to interact with the Internet, I sit down and face a computer screen, in a corner. I am effectively sequestering myself from the world.  Something like this could permit the easy give and take of data, while out and about.

In a year, we'll know if this one took or not.  Given the proliferation of 4G smart phones out there (with which it will pair), I reckon that it's got a fighting chance. Eventually, someone will get us there.

A good run, but not far enough?

Ernest Borgnine died today, at age 95. Here below, he describes his quick and easy technique to retain his youthful longevity:

Men around the globe were really, REALLY hoping that he'd hang on until age 100 or greater.

Uh, we were all pulling for you, Ernie.

Just stop it.

My mother and I were talking today about the public reaction to the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.

And we're appalled.

"Commemoration" isn't such a distant cousin of a word from "Celebration." It would seem that many have forgotten that there actually is a difference, and that those that know it seem to be blurring the lines pretty heavily.

I get that no documentarian worth his salt would fail to comment on the tenth year passing since our nation suffered an attack that had such ramifications. But the goal of those watching, and the goal of those showing the documentaries seems to be a type of entertainment.

Like a horror movie. "Ooh, it gives me shivers to remember where I was when I heard..."

I'm disgusted, and I'm not participating.

You want to wave our flag? Push to bring back most of our troops from the errands we've sent them on. Push to sunset the Patriot Act for good. Push to fire the TSA. Push to strengthen our borders (still as porous as they were 10 years ago, from what I see.).

But don't use some arbitrary tenth anniversary of the death of our countrymen as a day to be entertained. Do something GOOD for your country for a change, would you, please? We've spent the last 3,652 days dismantling it.

Escort.

Tonight, I take my daughter and her two best friends out to dinner in the Big City of Fort Worth, TX. Well, it's awfully big, to us.

My daughter loves a restaurant there, and I'll be taking her there for her 12th birthday. She was allowed to invite her bestest friends. I'll be along to pay the check, and such. But basically, it's a first Girls' Night Out, for her. We'll walk the Stockyards or Sundance Square, or whatever.

I'm happy to blend in, and not make eye contact, as I'm sure she desires. Each girl carries a cell phone. I carry a cell phone and a gun or two.

On the way in, I think that I shall make clear my expectations about expected response to directions. My elder daughter knows them. But the other girls may not fully get that run, and get down mean exactly that. In my family, we also have a benign-sounding danger phrase, which I suppose that I will let them in on.

I, of all people, recognize that the world is actually a safer place than we give it credit for being, and I don't much think about these things, until I get put in charge of Other People's Children.

But when I take a group of kids downtown on a Friday night, I gird myself a bit tighter.

Not no, but HELL NO.

Comes now the government's proposal to bail out the flagging newspaper industry.

Come on-- really?

Is this one that hard to see?

Look, I've got newspaper nostalgia, too. My mother was a longtime reporter for a major newspaper, and I grew up a believer in newspapers. In fact, I was invoking her journalistic ethics when I was crying foul over the reporting of our President's "jackass" comment last week. (Good reporters respect "Off The Record.")

But even if you believed that our country had PLENTY of money to just give away (it doesn't), surely anyone can see that you don't want our newspapers to become beholden to the government that they're supposed to be critical of?

If the newspaper industry tanks, then I'm damned sorry to hear it. But that's free enterprise. The people will get their news, and evidently will have to seek it from other sources. But do NOT support the federal bail-out of your news sources, unless the idea of a weekly "Letter From Our Leader" column sounds good, along with White House review of editorial police policies.

The truth will set you free? Set us free from the Pravda.

Resentment? Moi?!?

In late 2001, my wife and I were tired of renting. With a second child on the way, we knew the little two-bedroom apartment was about to get crowded. We looked at our combined income and realized that we might could swing a house, if we kept our sights low. And if our credit was good enough.

It turned out that our credit was great. Credit may be a score, but really, it's a series of Pass/Fail tests. That match play never showed how close to the bone I'd gotten at times-- only that I'd managed to pay my bills. Nowhere on it was reported how I had several times pawned my shotgun, or my .45, to make the rent check. (And then scurried back to pick them up at the next pay check.)

So we bought a little 19 year-old 1440 square foot fixer-uper for $70,000. We fixed it up as we lived in it, doing most of the work ourselves. We lived happily. 5 or 6 years later, we sold it for $96 grand to the first person who looked at it. I think she got a heckuva deal.

We put our little profit in the bank, and rented for a year and a half, until we saw our current fixer-upper. We plunked down about $70k for this foreclosed-on old house, and then spent about $30k fixing it up, and moved in. I still need to re-plumb the master bath's sink.

During the course of all of this, we've been driving the same old second-hand Civic, and my wife has picked up a salvage title Saturn.

I'm not trying to poor-mouth. I've got it pretty good. Damned good, in fact. My credit is just as good now as it was when I applied for the mortgage on that first house, and we're still meeting payments. Sometimes we even go out to eat. :) But I don't have a lot of extra; there is a moratorium on gun purchases until grad school is over with.

What I will NOT have to do is beg my neighbor to bail me out, for having promised to pay more than I could afford.

And if I sound a little resentful for having to bail my neighbor out for having bought a new house, and having parked a new car in the driveway of it every day, then by golly, I've managed to accurately convey my feelings on this issue.

Revisiting Miami, 1986.

In my reading today, I had occasion to look again at the Miami shootout of such notoriety. And I came to a couple of conclusions:

After the famous 1986 Miami FBI shootout, there was a lot of fallout. Contrary to the opinions of many who know little about the event, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation did NOT sweep the issue under the rug. In fact, they made a major investigation of the incident, piecing together who among the 9 participants in the firefight had fired which of the 129 rounds in that shootout. You can read about it here, or here, if you'd like. I don't have personal knowledge of any facts that would conflict with the FBI findings, or the facts presented above.
What we do know is that the aftermath was controversial. How, wondered many, could two crooks beat a whole squad of FBI men?

Well, first off, they didn't. Both bad guys died, right there on the scene. Unfortunately this occurred not before they killed two and seriously wounded two other FBI agents trying to arrest them. In fact, only one agent managed to avoid injuries.

But that's not good enough.

Well, no, it wasn't. Platt and Matix, the bad guys, almost managed to get away from the shootout scene, with an agent's car.

What were the major problems hindering the FBI? Was it that their guns were insufficient?
Well, no.
Or yes.
Yes and no.

One of the major rules in gunfighting is to have them, if at all possible, using a long gun. Both Platt and Matix adhered to this rule, and the FBI failed pretty badly in this regard. Platt fired 42 rounds of .223 out of his Mini-14 rifle at the agents, and scored lots of hits for effect. No concealable body armor would have stopped those rounds, and only two agents were wearing body armor. Platt was varsity. He had practiced a lot with his Mini-14, and knew how to use it. He had military training, and when the agents ducked behind cover, he advanced on them shooting. Matix fired a 12 gauge shotgun at the agents, getting off only one round. He was shot early on, by one of the agents (McNeil), and that fact likely saved lives. The first order in operations when faced with two such hostile armed men up close is to take out the shotgunner.

Yet the rounds that stopped both men were .38 Special +P lead semi-wadcutter hollow points. These were fired by one of the gutsiest lawmen ever to clank when he walked, Edmundo Mireles.

Mireles deserves special mention. After he was wounded in his left arm, he used his one good arm to cycle and fire his Bureau 12 gauge shotgun 5 times at the two men as they struggled to drive an FBI sedan away. He then advanced on them from the front, killing both men by firing through the windshield with his S&W revolver.

Fiat that the stop was going to happen when and where it did, with that number of agents. What should we have done to equip them differently? Well, shotguns all around would have been nice. Rifles would have been nice. (Notice: LONG guns.) These both would have improved the good guys' hit ratio, but just as importantly would have improved the likelihood of stopping the bad guys with their hits. Matix was hit three times before Mireless made his heroic charge, and Platt was struck at least 9 times before that charge.

How else could we have equipped them better? The FBI decided that the day had dawned when agents should be issued auto pistols of bigger and better calibers. They went through a bizarre process of obtaining 10mm S&W auto guns, then requesting a lighter loading, then ditching the whole 10mm concept altogether and getting .40s, a round that arguably could trace its lineage to the lesser 10mm loadings, which arguably stemmed from reactions to this shootout.

I submit that, while a good auto pistol of a caliber starting with a "four" is a decent start, they would have done better in getting every Bureau car outfitted with a quality auto shotgun.
I have NEVER heard anyone make this argument, and it surprises me. Listen to The Gun Zone's description of the only use of a shotgun by any agent in that gunfight:

"As Platt entered the FBI's Buick and his partner appeared out of nowhere to slip into the passenger's seat, Mireles carefully supported his Remington 870 on the right rear bumper of McNeill's Olds, and fired a round of 00 Buck at Platt, hitting him in the feet. As the man slumped into the driver's seat and sought to restart the car, Ed deliberately pulled the 12 gauge shotgun down between his thighs in his sitting position and with only one hand, worked the action to rearm his weapon, then painfully rolled out and somehow managed to fire at Platt. Four times Mireles did this."

I submit that a shorty Remington 1100 with an extended magazine and 6 shots of anybody's brand of buckshot in each car could have ended that fight fast. I would certainly submit that Mireless sure would have appreciated one that day.

Oh, other lessons? Have backup guns. Have reloads. Only center hits count. And never, ever, ever give up.

Decision point: Now.

In the blog before last, I called for your action in time of crisis. But, frankly, I left one point a little ambiguous. I said:

And there he is. Picking people off. Maybe you're next. Or maybe chance will smile on you. How many guns does he have? How many bullets? Maybe he has enough for all of you. This can't be allowed to continue.

It's time.

Time to decide-- are you going to dig down and hide among the fallen and hope that you live? Are you going to claw your way to an exit and leave the rest in the lecture hall? How are you going to live with yourself after that?

To which, in the Comments, my friend Don Gwinn rightly responded:

I decided a long time ago.

My decision is not quite as simple, though, because at any given time I'm the adult responsible for 12-24 children. Other peoples' children. So there are risks I've chosen not to take. I won't go looking for anyone, for instance. I've been called a coward for that, but the fact is that I don't see the percentage in leaving a group of students on their own to take their chances while I go glory-hunting.

That said, I think the only way to react fast enough to matter if someone does burst into the room and start hurting people is to know ahead of time exactly what you plan to do about it.

My plan is simple. I intend to reach the attacker as fast as I can and disarm him as fast as I can. Everything else depends on what's between us, what he's armed with, what I'm armed with, and what happens next.

Don states it very simply, and very well: in the instance that someone appears to be displaying a threat of deadly force to those in his charge within his area of responsibility, he will immediately address the problem directly.

When I was 12, my dad called it "Contingency Planning."

When I was in Driver's Education, they called it "IPDE" ("Identify. Predict. Decide. Execute.")

In the military and tactical training, they call it the "OODA Loop." ("Observe. Orient. Decide. Act.")

If you wish, think of it as a protocol. The ONLY decision that you should have to make is whether to implement your self-defense protocol.

Make scenarios in your head:

--"IF a man walked into the room shooting AND I can reach him, THEN I will attack him."

--"IF I'm alone in a room or building AND a man points a gun at me AND I can get away, THEN I will run like a striped-arse ape. "

And so on.

(No, I'm not going to explore the logical "Else" part of programming.)

Make this part of your life. Just like slamming on the brakes when an idjit pulls out in front of you on the road, you must decide ahead of time how you will react. Waiting until the occasion arises is a road to indecision.

Decide now.

Decide before you have to.

And, like putting on your seatbelt or paying flood insurance on yur house, I hope you never need to use it.