A smattering of some of the things I saw posted this Independence Day:

A dumb tweet by a very smart guy, Dr. Drang:

Because we prefer to fund defense contractors, the Higgs boson gets discovered at CERN instead of a US national lab. Happy 4th, everyone!

Rare that a big-brained dude such as Drang would commit such a logical cause-and-effect fallacy. But of course we funded the defense department at the expense of our own national labs that it should go without saying and be tweeted without evidence. Don’t tell the education establishment that they you are encroaching on their “bake sale for a bomber” argument because they lay claim to that money too.

Jeffrey Zeldman has a “July Fourth Message” that consists of:

Happy ordinary day to my friends in Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra…[snip about 200+ other countries listed alphabetically and ending with]…Zambia, And Zimbabwe.

Not one to partake in any American exceptionalism, Zeldman has to give a trophy to all the other kids on the playground too. Of course, more than a few countries on his list can owe their “ordinary” days to the fact that we had our extraordinary one on July 4, 1776.

Please stop circle jerking my RSS feed. Do you really think I subscribe to your site, but not John Gruber’s Daring Fireball? Save your pointless Linked List (how ironic) post, sans editorial. And “Gruber nails it” doesn’t count. “Gruber is wrong” is only marginally better, but you have to explain why.

I can’t wait to see how many links show up for John Siracusa’s upcoming epic Mountain Lion review. Most of which will probably be posted after Gruber does it.

Ars Technica has a detailed article about the long and expensive failure that was the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), a software-defined radio that was going to solve all sorts of comm problems, especially in the coming age of advanced data links.

Interesting story: The A-10C was supposed to be the first Air Force platform to have a JTRS radio. The program was waaaay behind and the cutoff date for getting any datalink in the new A-10 was fast approaching. At the wire, the Air Force took money out from the JTRS program and bought Situational Awareness Data Link (SADL) radios instead. However, much of the design and hardware work had already been done based on the lofty promise of JTRS and there wasn’t money or time to go back and make changes.

So today the A-10C flies with SADL radios, but the switch in the cockpit to turn it on is labeled “JTRS.”

Marco Ament today:

People always ask me how they can make great coffee.

I am not one of them. Coffee is noting more than a caffeine delivery device. I use a Keureg, which I’m sure is sacrilege to guys like Ament and Shawn Blanc. And I don’t care because it is quick, efficient and tastes fine to me.