Spinning Yarn: but what can I make with it?

I've been spinning recently, in between studying for exams (and taking them). I finished off some cranberry-peach-pinkish roving I bought almost two years ago (actually, I bought all my roving in about the same 3-month period), and am halfway done with some dark peach/cream roving I bought from the same person, same kind of roving, just different colors.

I'm not very good at figuring out how much I can knit with something, though, but I think this wool I'm spinning up now (into something that'll knit on, eh, size 5 or 7 US needles - that's around 4.0mm) could make a very pretty little vest. If I have enough yarn.

Otherwise...maybe spiral-knit legwarmers and a matching hat. Or something.

My spinning wheel is a Kromski Minstrel, which is a castle-style wheel, and I love it. I use it almost exclusively with Scotch tension, not the double drive.

So, spinning is good because I can sit and spin and watch an episode of The Avengers or The X-Files or something else on DVD, and turn my brain off from the exam-studying, without worrying that I'll get bogged down and lose a whole day or something, which is what could happen if I stick my nose in a book other than a textbook.

So, what's a good way of gauging what I can knit with something, based on what I have?

Well, there's the Knitting Fiend's yardage estimator. Or the conversion chart over at Fiber2Yarn. Or maybe Knitting.About.com has something.

Good grief, I'm actually offended

by my stupid CALI lesson on Assault.

Man leans over woman lying in her bed and makes indecent proposals.

Assault, or not?

Assault is the deliberate creation of an apprehension of a harmful touching. (If the harmful touching occurs, that's battery. The intent can be to create apprehension of touch, or the actual touch.)

Here's an excerpt of why my 'no' or 'maybe' answers were wrong:

"In any event, the man leaned over the bed: that's an overt act. Also, I think the only reasonable assumption to make on these facts is the man is close enough to touch the woman, so this places her in apprehension of imminent offensive body contact."

The only point that might make it possible to infer apprehension of harmful (unwanted) physical contact is the fact that the woman in this scenario is in her bed. There's no context of any kind, and I'm sorry, as an educated Western feminist, "indecent" to me is not a code word translating to "unwanted".

A man leans over my bed and whispers something "naughty" in my ear? And that's assault? Did you read the actual explanation here? "[T]he man is close enough to touch the woman, so this places her in apprehension of imminent offensive body contact." You realize I can infer from that statement that any time a man gets close enough to touch a woman, that's assault.

Are you kidding me?

Right, and all sex is rape.

Let's have some context here, people, for Pete's sake. How about "A strange man"? Then I might say: bed, 'indecent', leaning, okay, that could be assault.

Money Where the Mouth Is

EliminationistWatch

"If someone is going to run the day-to-day operations for the Republican apparatus to elect U.S. senators across the country, then dog-gone-it, it better not be somebody who practices a lifestyle that is diametrically opposed to the evangelical Christian base that delivered George W. Bush and the Republicans in the Senate the victory they saw in November," he says. Glover says Allen's executive director recently resigned because he was outed as a homosexual.

Soon enough, it will be illegal for anyone to employ homosexuals. The people have spoken, after all. And definitely, no more man dates.

This is America. In America, we don't believe in that.

We are a moral people. A people who have built diversity into our very foundation. A people who are proud to be a nation of immigrants, a nation of tolerance, and a nation of justice. In America, we believe in the Bill of Rights, we believe in equal protection under the law, and we believe that all of us should have the same opportunity to work hard, succeed, and live the American Dream.

Moral people do not hurt others for being "different".

Leave that kind of crap to people like the Taliban.

Evolutionary Theology

Re-visit Beautiful Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay!

Memo Ordered Silence in Iraqi Abuse Case

"The only thing that torture guarantees is pain," [Former FBI, interrogation instructor] Navarro told the AP Tuesday. "It never guarantees the truth."

US forces face new inmate abuse claims

FBI saw 'abuses at Guantanamo'

BI counter-terrorism agents sent to the Guantanamo Bay camp complained to the Pentagon after witnessing "highly aggressive" interrogations and apparent prisoner abuse.

In a letter leaked last night to the Associated Press, Thomas Harrington, who led the team, told Maj-Gen Donald J Ryder, the army's chief law enforcement officer, that the Pentagon ignored FBI complaints about a series of incidents that matched the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

ACLU says special forces threatened abuse witnesses.

ACLU Torture FOIA lawsuit.

There is growing evidence that the abuse of detainees was not aberrational but systemic, and that senior officials either approved of the abuse or were deliberately indifferent to it.

---

Rumsfeld Hates Soldiers. Well, that's what the article *should* be called.

Troops grill Rumsfeld over Iraq The BBC's more polite than I am.

Old Soldiers Back On Duty

Remember the saying about absolute power? Yeah. Absolute power...it's fun when you have it. Not so much when someone else has it over you.

Ohio Vote Fraud

Conyers to Hold Hearings on Ohio Vote Fraud

The Clinton Curtis Affidavit. Clint's a programmer who was asked to create vote-fraud software. Purely as an intellectual exercise, I'm sure.

running report on the hearings, by William Rivers Pitt.

If the Ukraine can do it

then so can we.

Recount requested in Ohio

Dominion Theology

From over on ljdemocrats on dominion theology:

The gist of it is that Jesus can't come back until a "revived" church takes over the world and everything in it.

Once the church has purged all evil from the world, Jesus can come back.

So, the reading that I'm familiar with, that Biblical prophecies

a. are like 'signposts' that something is coming; and,
b. are predestined and will happen whether you try to help or not,

Is completely incorrect in the dominionist paradigm. What dominion/"Kingdom Now" types actually believe are that Biblical prophecies are simply instructions on how to bring about certain events.

Because God is what, your puppet? Just waiting for you to pull on all the right strings? Let's see there's the "wars and rumors of wars" string, and the "Jerusalem" string, and all the other strings, and just pull them, and *poof*. Look, everybody, it's Jesus!

If you force these things to occur, God will do your bidding and return.

I don't get how that fits with an image of an omnipotent God, because it sure sounds more like casting a magic spell or something. Do X, do Y, and God will appear!

I don't know about you, but I'm flashing back to Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams", and I'm pretty sure a bunch of dead baseball players aren't God.

Maybe I should take that last statement back. I do live in Red Sox Nation, now.


(For more on dominionism, check out
Kit's Concatenation or twistedchick,
Theocracy Watch,
and Brad Hicks)

Medical Malpractice and Tort Reform

We've been studying medical malpractice in my Torts class, so I allegedly now know what the word means. (Yeah, it means the same thing you thought it means, I just read a thick book and went to class to verify it. Science is all about verifiability, baby.)

And, over thanksgiving holiday, malpractice insurance and capping jury awards came up as a subject of conversation, and I wound up saying something that probably made me look extremely cynical (which is funny, because I usually let J do that, but she wasn't there, so I stepped up as best as I could).

(*waves at J* Miss you, dollface! Wish you were here! Though, probably not right this second, 'cause, you know, studying for midterms and my Torts final.)

The cynical statement: I'm not sure there's a direct relationship between capping malpractice awards and the insurance doctors pay. Insurance companies are going to charge doctors whatever they think they can get away with, and they're already got a certain payment level right now. Why would they drop it just because malpractice awards have gone down? That's not what they're in business to do.

So, and here's me dropping the cynicism, instead of capping jury awards in the hopes a trickle-down Reaganomic-esque effect will save doctors from absurdly high malpractice insurance rates, go and and cap the damn rates, instead.

At the very least, there's a direct causal relationship you can affect if you do that.

In other news, Corp Reform discusses the "McDonald's Coffee Case". Now, the truly cool thing is we talked about that case in my Torts class (though not when talking about comparative negligence, which might've made more sense).

Yes, whenever someone hears about that case, they think - she spilled coffee in her lap in a moving car! Git deserves it. I sure thought that.

Well, actually, upon closer inspection, the coffee was negligently, dangerously hot, and the car wasn't moving.

What's negligently hot? Pushing 200 degrees, Fahrenheit, when anything over 140 constitutes a burn hazard. Let's just describe that 180-190 McDonald's coffee temperature range as "well beyond the ordinary consumer's expectations". So, Stella (the plaintiff) was found by the jury to be 20% negligent, and McDonald's the rest - which means in a comparative fault regime, Stella's award for damages for McDonald's is minus the 20% due to her own negligence.

Note that it took a jury award of 2.6 million to get McDonald's attention. The preceding (as Corp Reform points out) 700 other injuries from the uber-hot coffee didn't.

And frankly, that's part of one of the purposes of the tort system: deterrence. And the only way to get the attention of a company that large is hit them with an award whose amount is significant to them. Not to you and me. To them. And other companies like them.

(It appears I'm riffing off topics brought up by Making Light today. Well, at least that way, they're interesting topics.)

And thank you, Corp Reform and Making Light, for helping me study for my Torts final today. I appreciate it.

Email Scam PSA

When is an email legit corporate spam, and when is it someone "phishing" for your personal contact or credit card information?

So, I got a 10 out of 10 on the first Phish test. All it asks is that you look at an email, and decide if it's bull, or not.

And a 9 out of 10 on the second test.

Wanna know how I do it? I don't trust people who tell me my account my be closed/suspended, etc., if I don't do what they want*. That's pretty much my rule of thumb. Plus, sure, there's the years of experience floating in the back of my head on

a. how corporations talk to consumers, i.e., me;
b. who I do business with.

Not that hard.

*In fact, that's why I missed the one on the Phish II test. I was overly suspicious.

Stopping Email Fraud (PDF). From MailFrontier.

Phishing Top Ten (PDF). Tips to avoid being Phished, from MailFrontier.

(Hat tip to Making Light.)

Sneak Peek into My Mind

I should not be allowed to watch the intro credits to the TV show "Due South", because I get all homesick and misty for the great white north in the span of about a quarter note. I will never stop being from Alaska, even when I've been gone from there for another 17 years. Look at that sweeping vista of snow! *sob* I can smell the crispness in the air from here.

*gets all misty just thinking about it*

"Guinea Pig Kids"

Debunking "Guinea Pig Kids" and More Guinea Pig Kids

Guinea Pig Kids, including transcript.

Democracy in Action

Guerillanews has some pictures of American Democracy™.

Torture OK in US

Attorneys for the prisoners argued that some were held solely on evidence gained by torture, which they said violated fundamental fairness and U.S. due process standards. But [deputy associate attorney general Brian] Boyle argued in a similar hearing Wednesday that the detainees "have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court."

And THEN that same attorney says

that if the military's combatant status review tribunals "determine that evidence of questionable provenance [torture] were reliable, nothing in the due process clause (of the Constitution) prohibits them from relying on it."

But THEN he says there's nothing like torture going at GTMO, even though Amnesty International and the International Red Cross seem to disagree.

I tell you, I just don't know who to believe: guy working for most secretive, power-hungry US Administration in history, or watchdog groups of longstanding international repute?

PoTAYto, poTAHto.

Now, in another article, the same attorney was speaking with a different judge:

"If a little old lady in Switzerland writes checks to what she thinks is a charitable organization for Afghanistan orphans, but it's really supporting . .. al Qaeda, is she an enemy combatant?" [U.S. District Court Judge] Green asked.

Boyle said the woman could be, but it would depend on her intentions. "It would be up to the military to decide as to what to believe," he said.

It would be up to the military to decide what to believe.

Now see, I don't want someone thinking I don't respect one of the greatest institutions America has going for it: service. No, no, no. What bothers me is that, unless Switzerland is a new front on "the war", and the BBC just isn't reporting troop movements yet, it is now the job of the American military to determine if every single person on the planet may be detained by the US, sans rights.

Marriage Debate

Jonathan Rauch points out the blindingly obvious over at MarriageDebate.com:

the rule that infertility disqualifies all gay couples from marriage but disqualifies no straight couples is a crass double standard that demolishes the very principle (marriage=procreation) on which it's supposed to be based.

(via Alas, a Blog)

20 Years Later: Bhopal

Fusion Reaction reminds us that yesterday, Dec 03, was the 20th anniversary of the chemical spill in Bhopal.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the world's worst industrial accident. In the early morning hours of December 3, 1984, a toxic chemical leaked from a Union Carbide factory in northern India and killed thousands of people in their sleep. The estimates of the dead ranged from 3,000 to 10,000 and we may never know exactly how many died.

Shabbat in Space

A Responsum Regarding Space Travel

Fascinating discussion of when a Jew should observe the Shabbat in space. When days stop behaving like days, do you stick with the sun, or follow your watch?

Since the eighteenth century, rabbis have discussed how to observe Shabbat in “inner America”, Norway, Sweden, Alaska, Iceland and other areas where the sun does not rise or set for months on end. Polar days are unusually long; space days are unusually short – but the general problem is similar.