Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says the airline smoking ban already covers electronic cigarettes — which do not smoke or burn in any way.

In a world where it depends on what the meaning of is is, all the government needs to do is interpret. Regulating interstate commerce includes forcing people to buy things they don't want to buy, and smoking includes not smoking. You can make anything you want be true, if you only believe. And "you" means "the government," and "believe" means "dictate."

E-cigarettes are plastic and metal devices that heat a liquid nicotine solution in a disposable cartridge, creating vapor that the "smoker" inhales. A tiny light on the tip even glows like a real cigarette. They have prompted debate over how risky they are and whether they're even legal....

Numerous videos on YouTube show passengers using the devices on airplanes. ... [S]ome passengers have interpreted flight attendant instructions to mean that the devices were only prohibited when other electronic devices were not allowed during takeoff and landing.

It sounds like the passengers are doing a pretty good job at interpretation. It's an electronic device, not a smoking device.

Many airlines already have begun informing passengers that the devices are not allowed on flights, but [Senator Frank Lautenberg, author of the 1987 smoking ban] said there had been confusion over their use and wanted to make sure officials were solidly opposed to opening the door to e-smoking on planes. 

Opening the door? How dare a politician talk to us like that! The doors are open until they close them with laws.

"I understand from an airline's point of view the hassles it could create," [said Jason Healy, president of e-cigarette maker Blu Cigs.] "It's not the actual product, it's the disruption and explaining to everyone else that it's not smoke."

Not smoking does not become smoking because you have to keep explaining that it is not smoking. If the disruption of people thinking these things are smoking is important enough to deny the physical needs and pleasures of the individuals who use them, then summon up the political will to ban them explicitly.  And quit lying.

People need to quit smoking and quit lying. If you're trying to quit smoking, maybe it will help you to have an e-cigarette that delivers some of the satisfaction you get from smoking. There is no corresponding device to wean you off your lying. Oh, but you say you're not lying, you're interpreting. Hey, your interpreting looks more like lying that an e-cigarette looks like smoking, and I'm going to grab it right out of your mouth with my blog. How dare you disrupt me like that!

[Correction.]

"Imagine, if you can, the delight of the woman who steps into her 'ready made' house and finds the kitchen already equipped with..."

"... electric refrigerator, dishwasher, sink, electric or gas stove, built-in clock, abundant cupboard space--and even a two-day supply of groceries on the shelves. And she never will be bothered by cooking odors because an electric exhaust quickly removes smoke, dust and fumes from the kitchen. In addition to the windows, indirect lighting gives plenty of illumination for her work in the compactly designed room."

You had me at built-in clock.

"Do you want to reload this page?"

Aha! It's the computers that are fomenting violence in America! We always suspected the machines would find a way to destroy us, and suddenly I see their insidious mechanism. Don't retreat... reload!... this page.

We ... have shut ourselves in: machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little: More than machinery we need humanity; More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men...

Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate - only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural...

You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy let's use that power....

Do you know the source of that warning about the machines? It's this.

ADDED: Here's a plot summary of the movie I'm quoting from. The character you see there does not represent Hitler. I'm only now realizing that I shouldn't assume everyone knows the movie.

Solar energy...

... where it really matters.

"I can measure your body, in 3D..."

"... and I can make you perfectly fitting garments in the future without any sewing and stitching, making the needle and the thread obsolete."

"The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently" — "rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing."

Says Harvard Med School professor Michael Rich in this "most-emailed" NYT article about these kids today.

The article begins with an anecdote about a high-school student — Vishal Singh — who wasn't making much progress reading the book he was assigned to read over the summer. Hey! The book is Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," the book I was assigned to read in the summer of 1969. It's what the professors at the University of Michigan's experimental college — the Residential College (R.C.) — thought we ought to read to align our brains for whatever it was they planned to do to us.

Ha:

We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon "If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba.

Now, where are you more likely to find the other members of your karass? Sitting alone in your room reading "Cat's Cradle," or weaving your way through Facebook? The great irony is that if you were really into "Cat's Cradle," you'd love the web and the way kids today swim in it.

From the Wikipedia entry on Bokononism:

The religion of the people of San Lorenzo, called Bokononism, encompasses concepts unique to the novel, with San Lorenzan names such as:

granfalloon - a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is "Hoosiers"; Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common, so really share little more than a name.

Another example might be the teenagers who attend Vishal Singh's high school.

Busy, busy, busy - words Bokononists whisper upon witnessing an example of how interconnected everything is

... on the internet!

Hey, sorry. I got distracted. I was going to tell you all about that NYT article. I think something has happened to my brain. But I'm not a teenager. I'm practically a sexagenarian. Would it be wrong of me to be in your karass?

"Don't touch my junk." It's the new "Don't Tread on Me."

Says Charles Krauthammer.

Don't touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter. Don't touch my junk, Obamacare - get out of my doctor's examining room, I'm wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don't touch my junk, Google - Street View is cool, but get off my street. Don't touch my junk, you airport security goon - my package belongs to no one but me....

Do you remember how the government presented this newly intensified bodily search? Why did the Obama administration — which I associate with opposition to enhanced interrogation techniques used on terrorists — adopt enhanced pat-downs on ordinary citizens to protect us from terrorists? Was it done because of the introduction of the enhanced imagining scanners? I really don't know. Did the government explain this to us when I wasn't paying attention? Because I monitor the news for hours every day, and I don't know the explanation.

It seems to me that these 2 things happened together: new machines that see you naked and newly intense body searches. Am I wrong to believe that the new groping procedure was intended to get more people into the scanners they would otherwise resist? Someone, at some level of the Obama administration, decided that the only way to channel people into the see-you-naked machines was to make the alternative more offensive to nearly everyone. Personally, I'd take the grope over being seen naked, but I did a poll yesterday, and I see that the scanner is significantly more popular than the grope.  I suspect that was the calibration. And I suspect that if too many people choose the grope over nakedness, the plan is to intensify the grope until they get the scanner acceptance rate they need.

But why were the scanners introduced when they had to know people didn't want them? With healthcare reform, the Obama administration became associated with ramming things down our throats. The government knows what we should want and doesn't bother to find out what we do want or even to persuade us to want what they think we should. The scanners are the ultimate graphic example of forcing something on us without asking. We're only asked: Well, would you prefer to have us feeling all around your genitals? That's the kind of consent of the governed we're facing these days.

But why push the scanners on us? Do you remember hearing Obama or Janet Napolitano or anyone say anything persuasive about why these machines were bought? (Suddenly, I want to follow the money. For that, I will  move to a new post.)

(In my unscientific poll, 73%  of those who would keep flying, picked the scanner over the grope. I suspect the government needs a better acceptance rate than that to keep the lines flowing and justify the investment in the machines. But most of those of us who picked the grope haven't been groped yet, and if being seen naked becomes the norm, more of us may fall into that brain-dulled line that shuffles into the machine.)

"My girls would wear Chanel, maybe a little black dress... They were very elegant."

"A lot of guys who stay at the hotels go down to the bar and they'll have a few drinks with a pretty girl. At some point, she hits him with a price. It's an impulse buy."

The business model that is prostitution at luxury hotels.

As for Charlie Sheen:

Insiders were skeptical Sheen "stiffed" Anderson for $12,000. "The first thing they do is take an imprint of the credit card," one pro said.

What? They walk around with little credit card machines? "No, they're too bulky," the woman said. "The girls just roll their lipstick over the carbon paper to get an imprint."

Lipstick! Carbon paper! Come on. If they're wearing Chanel, you'd think they'd have one of these things:



It's fun watching that video about an iPhone Square and thinking about prostitutes using it. It's so everything-but-prostitutes.

Firesheep.

Eek.

I'd kind of already given up my once-raging habit of hanging out in cafés on café WiFi. Oh, how I loved free WiFi. And now, it's all over.

Computerized projections on the 600-year-old Astronomical Clock on Old Town Square in Prague

Video mapping incorporates the structure of the tower itself into the images (which evoke the history of the years of the clock's existence). It's nearly 10 minutes long — and worth it.

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

Tweeting your weight automatically..

... from a WiFi scale — after promising — via stickK — to keep your weight below X pounds.

That's what Ian Ayres did. And you can buy his Right To Gain Weight on eBay.

It's all about incentives... and you've got to have accountability.

Walk with me, while you see and hear everything that I see and hear...

... as I walk around talking to you on my cell phone using an earpiece with a camera stuck on it.

Emergency...

... brassiere.

How am I supposed to search for "$#*! My Dad Says" on my DVR?

Here's the transcript of last night's show. Sample line: "If it looks like manure and smells like manure, it's either Wolf Blitzer or manure." Dad's a right-winger.

Oh, let's see what CNN thought about the show that called Wolf shit:

Through an unlikely combination of elements -- a popular Twitter site; CBS trying to be "hip" about social networking; the chance to work with "Will & Grace" producers David Kohan and Matt Mutchnick; William Shatner wanting to try something new -- "$#*! My Dad Says" boasts the new season's most annoying title and the sight of a wasted resource in Shatner.

He plays Ed, a grumpy coot who complains about anything and everything....

Shatner knows how to spoof himself, and in interviews, he's clever and self-aware. Exactly none of these qualities are in evidence on "$#*! My Dad Says." Ed is some combination of the too-clever-to-be-believed grousing father from Justin Halpern's Twitter feed plus Archie Bunker -- i.e., the sort of character that CBS' older demo won't find too frightening because he's a familiar type.

CBS' older demo... Is network loyalty still a concept? I've been hearing since the 1970s that older people watched CBS. But back then there were only 3 networks and lots of us didn't have remote controls. I would have thought that by now people knew how to change channels and find stuff — $#*! — they like and that they wouldn't even bother noticing what network it was.

"The 5th Freedom! Freedom from unnecessary drudgery!"

I love the "Word to the Wives" film short (c. 1955) at this story about modern kitchens.  

Grape jelly and light mustard! Continuous ice circles!

"[C]ovetousness, schadenfreude, anxiety, dread, and on and on."

"It’s the frequent fruitlessness of such feelings that the Buddha is said to have pondered after he unplugged from the social grid of his day — that is, the people he lived around — and wandered off to reckon with the human predicament. Maybe his time off the grid gave him enough critical distance from these emotions to discover his formula for liberation from them. In any event, it’s because the underlying emotions haven’t changed, and because the grid conveys and elicits them with such power, that his formula holds appeal for many people even, and perhaps especially, today."

Robert Wright, writing in the NYT, on a theme that has been big in the NYT: how technology is hurting our brains.

Space toilet — bet you're not ready for that.

"This list isn't about the mindset of the class of 2014. It's about the mindset of the people who write it."

"It's about what makes them feel ancient. It's not about how college students think at 18; it's about how we think at 40 and 50 and 60. It's about how we think about the markers we once drove into the ground to mark what we considered Now, and how alarming it is to note that they are farther away than they used to be."

NPR reacts to the new Beloit College "mindset list."

From the list:

1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive....

17. Trading Chocolate the Moose for Patti the Platypus helped build their Beanie Baby collection....

19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

(Have they ever used a dial on a phone?)

42. Potato has always ended in an “e” in New Jersey per vice presidential edict.

Okay. That one distracted me. (I'm distractable, and no, I wasn't the youngest in my class when I was a schoolkid. I was the oldest.) This gets me to something I wanted to talk about. Yesterday, I was reading the "Religion" chapter of Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia," and I came across this:

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

That's the famous quote I was looking for. But read on:

... Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion, by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free enquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free enquiry been indulged, at the aera of the reformation, the corruptions of Christianity could not have been purged away. If it be restrained now, the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged. Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potatoe as an article of food.

So Dan Quayle gets a boost from Thomas Jefferson. (And so does Tom Coburn, who recently pressed Elena Kagan with the question: "If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the commerce clause?")

ADDED: I found the facsimile of the manuscript on line and determined that Jefferson did write "potatoe." See for yourself.

Energy efficient windows...

... versus vinyl siding.

(Warning: 1. Link goes to video that begins with a commercial, 2. Don't have vinyl siding.)

The $35 "iPad."

Here.