My wife and I are moving to Nebraska on the 28th (arriving there on the 30th). We’ve been busy lately doing all the things necessary when moving, especially when moving out of state: packing, filling out change of address forms for all of the utilities, journal and magazine subscriptions we have, etc.

Tomorrow we’re attending a cousin’s wedding in New Orleans, then on Saturday we’ll load up the truck (with the help of some movers) and head on up to Nebraska. I’ll be driving a 16′ Budget truck and pulling our car on a trailer for 1082 miles. That will be an interesting adventure in itself. Aside from all the hassle, we’re really looking forward to making a fresh start in a new state.

I won’t have much in the way of internet access until Tuesday, the 30th, at the earliest.

And then, from August 5-10, I will be attending the Objectivist Center’s graduate student summer seminar.

Did anybody catch the Bruce Willis interview on David Letterman’s Late Show a while back? The one promoting Live Free or Die Hard? Willis, who I’ve heard is an atheist, came on the show wearing a wind turbine “hat” and proceeded to make fun of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. At one point he joked that he was making his own documentary entitled An Unappealing Hunch. I thought it was all pretty funny.

What’s odd though is that the video of the interview has been removed from YouTube, supposedly for “terms of use violation” but I don’t buy it. There are still plenty of other Bruce Willis/Late Night interviews from other episodes on YouTube. How much do you want to bet some watermelon complained to YouTube about the interview and got it yanked from the site? If anybody can find the video anywhere or downloaded a copy before the great mysterious disappearance, please let me know. Update 10/18/11: The video is back up on YouTube. A helpful commenter provided the link.

There’s a new study out in the July 2007 issue (Vol.XL, No.3) of PS: Political Science & Politics, published by the American Political Science Association (APSA). It purports to rank universities by the quantity of quality job placements of the Ph.D.s graduating from their political science departments.

86 schools that awarded at least 30 Ph.D.s over the 15 year period from 1990-2004 were ranked; those that didn’t, weren’t. Included in the weighting system are the following criteria: percentage of Ph.D. recipients placed in tenure-track faculty positions; prominence of the schools at which they are placed; corrected for the size of the department, in terms of number of faculty, from which the Ph.D. recipient graduated; corrected for the size of the department, in terms of student graduates, from which the Ph.D. recipient graduated (with a per-capita measurement derived by dividing each row of the matrix by the number of Ph.D.s granted by the institution). Not all of us get tenure-track jobs, or university jobs at all for that matter – shocking and horrifying, I know.

Where does LSU come out on this ranking system? 52 out of the 86…of the universities that met the criterion noted in the first sentence of the above paragraph. There are probably a lot of universities not ranked at all because they don’t meet this criterion. LSU ranked close behind Vanderbilt, UC – Davis, and Penn State. It ranked ahead of, in descending order, Arizona State; U. of Florida; SUNY, Binghamton; Notre Dame; George Washington; SUNY, Buffalo; UC – Santa Barbara; Washington State; Georgetown; Purdue; Claremont Grad.; Hawaii; Fordham; Catholic University; U. of Nebraska; Temple; and Texas Tech, among others. This is not bad news for me…I think.

There are others. Here is just one example, discussed by Roger Pielke, Sr., on his blog Climate Science, of how environmentalists (like William Connolley of RealClimate, who is a heavy hitter on Wikipedia) bias Wikipedia’s environmental articles:

I’m rather late posting about my second trip to the range with my Taurus Millennium Pro PT111 9mm. I went the Friday before last. My parents were in town and I went with my dad, who wanted to shoot and zero his six-shot, single action, .22 revolver (that thing has almost no recoil, very easy to shoot, but also big enough and with a long enough barrel to still look imposing). Readers may recall I’ve been having some FTE problems with my pistol. I think I have that problem figured out.

I started out with 12 rounds of the good stuff, Hornady TAP FPD. The gun fired them flawlessly.

Next, I shot three mags (36 rounds) of WWB. Again, the gun fired them flawlessly, with the sole exception being an FTE on the second-to-last round on the last mag.

So, that’s only one FTE out of four mags (48 rounds), and that being on the 47th shot.

Possible reasons why the gun is performing better now: 1) Better ammo; 2) it’s getting broken in; 3) I’m managing the recoil better, thus bleeding off less of the energy in the cycling of the action; 4) I’m getting better at cleaning it.

I had more FTEs after that though.

I fired the remaining 13 rounds of Hornady next. No FTEs, but this time the slide failed to lock back when the mag ran empty; I’m thinking it is because the gun is getting pretty dirty by this point. 61 rounds so far, only 1 FTE.

All told I fired 25 rounds of Hornady, 124 rounds of WWB, the last 27 rounds of Speer Lawman, and the last 26 rounds of that crappy Russian-made Monarch, for a total of 202 rounds, through the gun. I didn’t keep count of the number of FTEs. The dirtier the gun got, the more I had.

I got a tip on the FTE problem from the owner of the range. He told me that Taurus semi-auto pistols, and I think he also mentioned Ruger, have rough (or tight?) action that causes that when they get dirty. (This may not apply to the new Taurus 24/7 OSS.) He advised me just to rack the slide and put a few drops of gun oil in key places then work the action a few times. That ought to help. I’ll try it next time.

So…my revised evaluation of the gun: It’s nice and compact, with good firepower, and is good for practice (including clearing and cleaning on the range), and it is still good for personal and home defense too. Why, despite the FTE problems, is it still good for personal and home defense? Because so long as it is clean, properly lubed, and loaded with decent ammo, I won’t have any problems performance-wise for the first 3-5 mags. Odds are I won’t need that many in personal and home defense situations. One can only carry so many mags on one’s person during everyday concealed carry. And I only own two at the moment in any case. Bottom line: I’m confident I can fire at least 3 mags through it without any problems. Particularly when the low price is factored in ($350 w/tax), I consider this gun a good buy (especially as a first handgun). Later, when I can afford it, (and my wife gets more used to the idea of my owning, shooting, and carrying on a daily basis, handguns), I’ll purchase a higher quality (and probably more expensive) handgun. My next gun purchase, though, will probably be a 20 gauge Mossberg 500 field/deer combo shotgun (26″ barrel with three different chokes, 24″ fully-rifled barrel for slugs), plus a turkey choke and an 18.5″ security barrel.

P.S. If anyone thinks I just shouldn’t accept the FTEs, that even a Taurus pistol shouldn’t be having so many, and I should send it to Taurus to get it fixed, feel free to let me know.

Check out these two cool revolvers. I’d probably buy them if I could afford it right now.

Smith & Wesson’s Shield Gun, Model 327 TRR8

Taurus’s The Judge .45/.410 (yes, it can shoot .45 pistol rounds and .410 shotgun shells)

Hat tip to Nolan for bringing this clip to my attention.