Mistletoed motorsports merriment

Let’s have some carblogging, shall we?

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The biggest news of the season is, of course, Michael Schumacher’s return to Formula One.

• Schumacher reveals comeback ‘trigger’ (Planet F1)

Michael Schumacher has admitted that he would not be returning to F1 with Mercedes had Ferrari not asked him to temporarily replace Felipe Massa in the summer.

Though that short-term comeback was called off due to a neck injury, Schumacher has admitted that the emotions generated by Ferrari’s call were the reason why he has signed a three-year deal with Mercedes to make a stunning return to the sport at the age of 41.

So… Schumi’s back with Ross Brawn — who’s just developed a WCC-winning chassis.  I don’t think this’ll be a repeat of 2002,  but if I was driving for someone else I’d be nervous.

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Somewhat older, but at least as interesting, is news from the sportscar world that Audi will be a core participant in the as yet somewhat shadowy Le Mans Intercontinental Cup:

• Audi opts for new prototype racing series (Planet Le Mans)

In the future, the so-called “Le Mans Intercontinental Cup” will consist of the major races of the Le Mans Series in Europe, the USA and Asia and aims to continue the heyday of the legendary World Championship for Makes. In its debut year in 2010, the 1000-kilometer race at Silverstone (Great Britain), the “Petit Le Mans” race at Road Atlanta (USA) and an event on the Asian continent. Further races are to be added in 2011.

Audi will contest the new Le Mans Intercontinental Cup in the 2010 season with two R15 TDI cars fielded by Audi Sport Team Joest. Three cars are planned for the 24-hour race at Le Mans on June 12/13. Audi Sport Team Joest plans also to contest the 1000-kilometer race at Spa-Francorchamps (Belgium), which Audi would like to use as a dress rehearsal for Le Mans, with three cars.

Hurrah!

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In somewhat more accessible terms, we are delighted to discover that Toyota is at least thinking about thinking about offering their FT-86 (it won’t be called that, but we don’t care — it’s a reprise of the hachiroku, a light fast RWD coupe) in stripped-down, track-ready, five grand cheaper form:

• REPORT: Toyota plans stripped-down, track-ready FT-86 (Jalopnik)

How cool is that?  This cool:

Image link goes to full-frontal Jalopnik car porn gallery

If that’s a real diffuser, I’ll probably need a Kleenex and a new pair of trousers.

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And for those with a keen appreciation for 1980s automotive history and a willingness to let their rear tires do little more than generate understeer torques, Honda’s reprising the fabled CRX — in hybrid form:

• Honda CR-Z brochure leaks, reveals sexy hybrid coupe (Jalopnik)

A six-speed H-gate, under 10s 0-60, and over 40mpg?  I like where this is going.

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Merry Christmas, everyone.

This is festive

Sick of the facile holiday bullshit?  The false cheerfulness and the musty smell of giveashit that spends most of its year hidden in the back of a closet?  Here’s some Penny Arcade to offset the more popularly prevalent expression of the season:

• The Last Christmas p1
• The Last Christmas p2
• The Last Christmas p3
• The Last Christmas p4
• The Last Christmas p5

And since nothing grates on the soul like some skidmark filching yard decorations bought under duress and set out reluctantly, another:

• The Deerly Departed

Just one of many problems that are more fun to solve with electricity!

Beers of Milwaukee, vol. 24

A strange thing happens to pale ales when one crosses the 49th parallel.  In Vancouver, pale ales are bittersweet and malty, much like a nut brown: witness the pale ales from Okanagan Spring, Granville Island Brewery, or Dead Frog.  In Seattle, however, a pale ale is really an India pale ale writ slightly small (Sierra Nevada; Red Hook; Flying Dog).  I can’t explain this discrepancy, but I surely do appreciate the diversity it engenders — especially when I can get both sorts.

Which brings me to Hopalicious Pale Ale, from Madison, WI’s Ale Asylum brewery.  It is, as its label suggests, quite hoppy without being “crazy bitter” — not entirely to my taste, given how much I enjoy bludgeoning my palate with Ruination IPA, but nonetheless tasty and serviceable.  Definitely worth looking into for fans of hoppy beer.

Process people

We discover with pleased satisfaction this insightful comment from Megan McArdle:

• The process of passing health care

Libertarians are process people, something that our political opponents find impossible to believe can be real, rather than disingenuous.  So when I say that I think Lawrence v. Texas might be the right result morally but the wrong result legally, it must be that I secretly want sodomy to be illegal, or at the very least don’t care.  Or when I am troubled by government intervening in the Chrysler bankruptcy process, it’s because I hate unions.  And of course, when I am against post-hoc legal judgments against bankers or their bonuses, it’s just because I’m an apologist for rich people.

But to a libertarian, process matters.  Having a good process is better than getting a good outcome, because a good process is one that maximizes your chances of getting good outcomes over time.

(Emphasis added.)

It’s tempting to rephrase this as “the ends do not justify the means”.  That is, of course, bullshit: the ends are the only things that can justify the means used to achieve them.  But if you’ve read your Sartre you’ll understand that ends go much further than one can comfortably and conveniently consider.  The process by which a bill is passed, for example, is itself one of the consequences of passing the bill: it establishes precedent and reinforces the means and powers used.  Those means and powers will touch a lot more than just the one bill.

Ms. McArdle worries about the way that health-reform bills going back to the Baucus proposal gamed the CBO estimate process and the don’t-touch language in the Reid bill that dodges around Senate procedural rules, but “process matters” is a bigger, more general principle than that.  For example, much of Bush 43’s term was marked by an expansion of executive power and a diminution of executive accountability.  This has now become business as usual, and conservatives are howling about it now that a left-progressive is doing the same thing.

Ratings on mortgage-backed securities form another example:

One of the reasons that we got so deep into the crisis is that people were substituting ratings for common sense.  Not all people, but enough.  If a security was rated AAA, well then, it must be an excellent security.  People confused the rating with an actual prediction of the future.

Indeed, the rating was supposed to bear some (not perfect) resemblance to the future.  But the more important the rating got, the more money there was to be made by gaming it.

The raters used metrics–perhaps more than they should have.  So if you knew the metrics, you could tweak the security to get a good rating on your toxic waste.  In the past, a well designed security would (arguably) have naturally passed the metrics.  But now the point was not to build a well-designed security; it was to design a security that would just barely pass the standards used by Moody’s or S&P.  Then people would buy your crap, and…  oops! we crashed the financial system.

(The whole article is worth reading.)

Process matters — but most people see process as only a means, not an end; something that deserves no weight of its own.

Shut up about Tiger Woods

Goodness me.  Rich handsome athlete has sex with many women.  Stop the fucking presses!  OMG ONOZ! Wait; I have an animated gif for that:

Shocked is what we are.  But as usual, Eric Crampton puts it better:

• Kanazawa on Tiger (Offsetting Behaviour)

In particular, he quotes Satoshi Kanazawa thus:

During the course of the year 2010, there will be at least one sex scandal involving a notable politician, there will be at least one sex scandal involving a notable athlete, and there will be at least one sex scandal involving other celebrities. And the politicians, athletes, and celebrities involved will all be men.

Yes, this is the most banal prediction that anyone can make. (I also predict that there will be lots of snow in Buffalo, NY, this winter.) But do me a favor: If you are going to complain that my prediction is banal, which it is, then please don’t act surprised when it comes true, which it inevitably will. A statement cannot simultaneously be banal and surprising (let alone outrageous and disappointing) at the same time.

Zing!

I don’t mean to suggest that Tiger Woods was justified in cheating on his wife.  But as Mr. Kanazawa points out, this is far from a surprising turn of events: handsome young world-class athletes are likely to attract shit-tons of groupies, and the drive that creates a world-class young athlete is unlikely to be satisfied with abstract measures of sporting success.  If we deny the biology behind these things, we’re likely to end up confused and disappointed.

Beers of Milwaukee, vol. 23

Et enfin encore, nous sommes de retour.

We begin this edition with Berghoff Brewery’s Sundown Dark beer.  This is something like a nut brown ale, with a nod toward the sort of black lager exemplified by the Okanagan Spring brewery.  It’s malty, but not overwhelmingly so, and has a nice richness to it without being overwhelming.  Sundown Dark is far from my favourite kind of beer — I rather like ridiculously strong flavours like those in Old Rasputin or Ruination IPA — but it’s definitely worth the effort of drinking.

The next beverage on our list is Stone’s Double Bastard ale.  It’s like Arrogant Bastard but, uh, more so.  (Among other things, it’s 10.5% ABV.)  It’s thick, sweet, rich stuff — but not quite as complex as the Bastard.  Double Bastard is more of a front-loaded sledgehammer of mostly-fermented sugars, with a long but rather thin and monotonous bittersweet aftertaste.  Excellent stuff, but after reacquainting myself with Arrogant Bastard I’m left a bit underwhelmed.

Mustering some giveashit

TJIC waxes eloquent on gift-giving as signaling behaviour:

• DeMorgan’s Law as applied to gift giving

Because I’m a huge nerd, I made it into an equation:

A && T && M → G

where:

A == caring, as expressed in paying Attention to recipient’s interests
T == caring, as expressed in Time spent
M == caring, as expressed in Money spent
G == Gift purchased

The corrolary to this, where no gift is purchased, is – by DeMorgan’s Law:

~G → ~A || ~T || ~M

RTWT.

(M could possibly be better expressed as Effort; either effort spent at work earning money to buy a gift, or effort spent directly on the gift in question.  The latter is of course well-appreciated by the Starving Student demographic — or ought to be.)

I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried

Stripped to its bare essentials, regulatory capture is what happens when a corporation tries to legislate its competition out of existence rather than, you know, competing with them.  It happens in all sectors: banking, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, software, sex toys…

Wait, what?

• ‘Urgent need’ to regulate sex toys, MP says (Globe and Mail)

Put down anything you’re drinking before you read on.  I’m not responsible for drenched keyboards.

When you’re the young owners of a Toronto sex shop specializing in eco-friendly vibrators and other adult toys, getting the ear of a Member of Parliament can be a challenge.

So, entrepreneurs Kim and Amy Sedgwick started off slow. The self-branded “eco-sisters” wrote a letter outlining their concerns of a “dangerous” problem hidden away in Canadian bedrooms everywhere – chemicals used in the majority of Canadian sex toys that pose a potential health risk for women.

YA RLY.

And what are these awful chemicals?  As if you had to guess….

The issue is over plastics such as bisphenol A, a controversial chemical in Canada, and phthalates, used to make plastic soft and flexible. Dozens of studies have shown the chemicals may cause hormonal complications at certain levels of exposure, yet both are common in sex toys, which are classified as “novelty” items in Canada and are therefore removed from almost all oversight, Ms. Sedgwick says.

So while bisphenol A can’t be used in baby bottles, and phthalates can’t be used in children’s mouth toys, there’s no rules preventing their use in a vibrator, Dr. Bennett says.

I’m given to understand that BPA is most likely to leach out of polycarbonates into strong acids or boiling water.  If that’s your kink, you’re probably already using stainless steel.

(Note also that the “certain levels of exposure” shown to induce hormonal complications — BPA and phthalates are xenoestrogens — are left unstated in the article, and no consideration is given to levels of absorption of either from sex toys during use.  Who wants to write the ethics review for that study?)

Life, as ever, is toxic.  This strikes me as a shrewd move by the Sedgwick sisters and a drearily predictable overreaction — zOMG teh chemicalz r in ur dildoz!!1 — by MP Bennett.