Closing a Loophole

I’ve had the gay marriage debate with a number of people who, while supportive of the theory, try to find ways out of actually supporting it, largely due to religious reasons. Personally, I think it’s fine to object to an idea based on religious reasons, just be honest about. Disingenuous libertarians have posed their position as “I’m for equal rights for everyone, but I don’t think the state should be in the marriage business at all. Therefore I wont support gay marriage because, you know, more government”. This is wrong on a number of levels both morally and logically. What they’re really saying is, “I don’t support this, so I will hedge by making my support contingent on something very unlikely, the end of heterosexual marriage. That way I don’t look like a bigot, but don’t have to expose my actual opinions”. It seems however that bluff is going to be called:

The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance seeks to defend equal marriage in this state by challenging the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling on Andersen v. King County. This decision, given in July 2006, declared that a “legitimate state interest” allows the Legislature to limit marriage to those couples able to have and raise children together. Because of this “legitimate state interest,” it is permissible to bar same-sex couples from legal marriage.
The way we are challenging Andersen is unusual: using the initiative, we are working to put the Court’s ruling into law. We will do this through three initiatives. The first would make procreation a requirement for legal marriage. The second would prohibit divorce or legal separation when there are children. The third would make the act of having a child together the legal equivalent of a marriage ceremony.

I completely and 100% support this effort, to the extent I am writing a generous check.
Look son! All the money your army scholarship will save me is going to a good purpose! to Freedom!!!

It will be interesting to see how people make a rational argument against this that can't be turned around and be for gay marriage.

Getting off the Gold Standard

The Almighty Dollar isn't back by gold anymore, in fact no currency is. There was a time when you could take a dollar bill to a bank and (in theory anyway) get $1 worth of gold for it. When it was decided to go off the gold standard, it was a Big Deal. The government created the fiction that it was still backing the dollar with gold, but in reality you dollar is backed merely by the credit of the US Government, with other currencies back the same way. This is all fine except when it goes wrong and you get hyperinflation spirals etc., but even there it's possible to dump value into other tangible assets for transport to other more stable countries. The upshot of the whole program as been a complex combination of lending, credit, inflation, recession and innovation that has propelled the world economy forward for most of a century.

I've always wondered though, "how much gold is there really?" which is another way of asking, "how much higher is the ceiling now than if we stayed on the gold standard?"

I ran across this today:
Finally, global gold mine production is between 2,500 to 3,000 tons per year and about 155,000 tons of gold would have been mined as of 2006, with a total value of $3.2 trillion at June 2006 prices. Underground an estimated 50,000 ton is left and booked as “reserves” on the balance sheets of mining companies.

For reference, the proposed US Government Budget for 2008 is $2.9 trillion.

Neat! :)

[As an aside, I don't really know how the anarchocapitalists tackle this problem. Anarchocapitalism seems to be gold standard type of economy, although in theory it could be backed by any asset. I should find out, but without the concept of a central bank, I think it isn't possible to pull off this fiction. I still think the biggest mistake Bremmer made in Iraq was not getting the central bank back up in 30 days.]

Credit Derivatives

I'm working on an interesting project at the moment, part of which involves designing an art-backed credit security. The basic idea is to take a bundle of a slow, illiquid asset, e.g. art, and turn it into a credit derivative that can be traded on an exchange. In the process I have learned some interesting things:

1) It’s quite possible to build a stable index for art
2) It turns out art naturally falls into a set of stable asset classes
3) It turns out that the value of sub-classes of assets, e.g. old masters, post-modernists etc. are surprisingly well correlated
4) Most interestingly: these asset classes have long term performance statistics which are different from either stocks or bonds in terms of market index correlation.

It’s #4 there that makes this a very interesting assignment. Some days, my job doesn’t completely suck.

Dawn Breaks Over Marblehead

oooohhhhhhhh! I get it! The Onion Editorial Cartoon is also parody!

I was wondering why "this guy really likes crying Statues of Liberty"

Sometimes I am a wee bit slow.

Andrew Sullivan Concedes Defeat

If no evidence can change your mind, no argument assail your logic, you've left the realm where reason can aid you and you're flying on blind faith.

Which was, actually the whole point.

Here
So when I am asked to justify this belief, as you reasonably do, I am at a loss. At this layer of faith, the first critical layer, the layer that includes all religious people and many who call themselves spiritual rather than religious, I can offer no justification as such. I have just never experienced the ordeal of consciousness without it. It is the air I have always breathed. I meet atheists and am as baffled at their lack of faith - at this level - as you are at my attachment to it. When people ask me how I came to choose this faith, I can only say it chose me. I have no ability to stop believing. Crises in my life - death of loved ones, diagnosis with a fatal illness, emotional loss - have never shaken this faith. In fact, they have all strengthened it. I know of no "proof" that could dissuade me of this, since no "proof" ever persuaded me of it.

Faith is a very human thing, and every single person has faith in something (or someone). It's not a rational thing, but an emotional one. I have, in general, no problem with people having faith in things. It's when you start trying to rope reason in to "justify" faith that I step off the bus. Reason is ultimately a tool of proof, of habeus corpus, or finding what's wrong and fixing it. No matter how elaborate the argument, convoluted the logic, or loud the proponant, the existance of god cannot be justifed by reason without evidence. And, as any preacher will tell you, if you only believe because of evidence, it isn't faith.

"Blessed Are Those Who Have Not Seen, Yet Believe" John 20:19-31*

*this is also what god said to me during my first NDE when I was a kid.

Death and Taxes

Excellent visual graphic for the US budget, 2007.

Awesome, except that it's real money.

An Ad from the '80s

What's going on in this picture? Cyndi Lauper video? Bangels re-union? Soft-core episode of Family Ties?

...

Windows ad?

Yes, I'm using wawa-wa-windows ... 386!

It's long, and normal until about 7:10. Then crack addicited monkeys take the directors chair and it goes right through the window. The attractive young man from accounting gets more than the Lotus 1-2-3 he was expecting.

amazing!

And what's up with the freakin' space shuttle???

A Sentence I Heard Today

"unbaptized baby is *not* the secret ingredient in McRib"

Cat on Fire

From Slate:

Hon. Loretta Sanchez has quit the House Hispanic Caucus, claiming its chairman called her a "whore." A shocking affront to Congressional dignity! ... Wait. ... Loretta Sanchez ... Loretta Sanchez ... wasn't she the distinguished lawmaker who sent out a Christmas card showing her ... er, cat on fire? I think she was! ... P.S.: Wonkette is on the case, sort of. But instead of the scandalous flaming "cat" card they chose one with a modest surfing theme!

lolerskates!

Also above that is a gem of bad "if you can't prove it isn't false, it must be true " logic.

Baby Chloroform

Julie Aigner-Clark responds to Timothy Noah's piece which basically points out that Baby Einstien is a bunch of crap and, well.. opens herself to even more of a trouncing.

She got to spend time on the stage with the president, being hailed as "hero" in the same class as a marine or a guy who threw himself under a subway train to save someone. If I were her, I'd have quit while I was ahead.

Does Math actually Exist?

This is kind of an interesting question, especially when you think the answer might be "no".
Let me be more specific about the question I am asking since, obviously, a lot of folks fail math and if you can fail at it, it must exist. What I mean is, does mathematics have an existence independent of the existence of humans or is it like the economy and merely a construct of the human mind for dealing with something else we cannot currently comprehend? Or is it like music? Music doesn't exist outside of humans, yet there is a lot of sound in nature.

Another way to think about is, “Is mathematics invented or discovered?”

If cats became sentient, tool using, technology using creatures, would they have the same mathematics as humans, or some completely different metaphor for dealing with that aspect of nature? (likely it would involving burying things).

Mathematics is certainly descriptive of nature, but is it actually part of it?

An interesting view here on the “no” possibility. Also, this is interesting.

"The only mathematics that we know is the mathematics that our brain allows us to know," Dr. Lakoff said in San Francisco last month at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Consequently, he says, any question of math's being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is. "Mathematics may or may not be out there in the world, but there's no way that we scientifically could possibly tell," Dr. Lakoff claims. Math succeeds in science, Drs. Lakoff and Nunez argue in their book, only because scientists force it to. "All the 'fitting' between mathematics and the regularities of the physical world is done within the minds of physicists who comprehend both," they write. "The mathematics is in the mind of the mathematically trained observer, not in the regularities of the physical universe."

Conservative Principles

I have wondered in recent times what the term "conservative principles" means. I hear it used by politicians all the time, but the ones who use it are also the ones expanding the government, engaging in nation building and rolling back civil liberties. Not thing which are encompassed by my understanding the tern conservative. I've been having a Montoya Moment where someone says to me, "I dont think that word means what you think it means".

Glenn Greenwald though, in his usual way, defines it for me in a way I now understand when I hear it:

One of the principal flaws of Sullivan's book is that it speaks of "political conservatism" in a way that exists only in the abstract but never in reality. The fabled Goldwater/Reagan small-government "conservatism of doubt" which Sullivan hails -- like the purified, magnanimous form of Communism -- exists, for better or worse, only in myth.While it is true that Bush has presided over extraordinary growth in federal spending, so did Reagan. Though Bush's deficit spending exceeds that of Reagan's, it does so only by degree, not level. The pornography-obsessed Ed Meese and the utter lawlessness of the Iran-contra scandal were merely the Reagan precursors to the Bush excesses which Sullivan finds so "anti-conservative." The Bush presidency is an extension, an outgrowth, of the roots of political conservatism in this country, not a betrayal of them.All of the attributes which have made the Bush presidency so disastrous are not in conflict with political conservatism as it exists in reality. Those attributes -- vast expansions of federal power to implement moralistic agendas and to perpetuate political power, along with authoritarian faith in the Leader -- are not violations of "conservative principles." Those have become the defining attributes of the Conservative Movement in this country.

Well done.

We now return you to our usual, amusing program.

Romantic Drama Equation

It's a Laffer Curve!

We Used to Call it Republican Government

Remember the War on Drugs where the government could sell your house for being accused of dealing narcotics? Or Rudy Gulliani's unconstitutional seizure of cares in NYC?
Well,according to these guys, they were just getting warmed up for the real hiest!

Betrayed by the Brain

As I have mentioned before, the human brain is an engine for believing things. All human brains, even the most rational sketpic.

Psychologists and anthropologists have typically turned to faith healers, tribal cultures or New Age spiritualists to study the underpinnings of belief in superstition or magical powers. Yet they could just as well have examined their own neighbors, lab assistants or even some fellow scientists. New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking — the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick — are far more common than people acknowledge.
These habits have little to do with religious faith, which is much more complex because it involves large questions of morality, community and history. But magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day.
The appetite for such beliefs appears to be rooted in the circuitry of the brain, and for good reason. The sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental distress. In excess, it can lead to compulsive or delusional behavior. This emerging portrait of magical thinking helps explain why people who fashion themselves skeptics cling to odd rituals that seem to make no sense, and how apparently harmless superstition may become disabling.

In my humble opinion, this makes the technical and scientific achievements of the past 10,000 years all the more remarkable. Rationality despite the fact that the human brain is fundementally irrational.

Sam Harris Responds

I think Andrew Sullivan is in over his head with Sam Harris. He demolishes 2 big pro-religion/pro-god arguments fairly quickly. The first is one of the oldest: if science can't tell me what happens after death, it must be god.

Contrary to your assertion, I have not made any claims about there being a "nothingness at the end of our mortal lives." The truth is, I don't know what happens after death. Is it dogmatic for me to doubt that you and the pope do? What reason have you given me to believe that you know that "something" happens after death, or that your something is more probable than the Muslim something, the Hindu something, or the Buddhist something? The question of what happens after death (if anything) is a question about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. It is true that many atheists are convinced that we know what this relationship is, and that it is one of absolute dependence of the one upon the other. Those who have read the last chapters of The End of Faith know that I am not convinced of this. While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us. But this doesn't entitle religious people to imagine that all their crazy ideas about miraculous books, virgin births, and saviors ushering in the end of the world are remotely plausible.

The second is the one I didn't want to make with Nick, in part because it's kind of mean and once made , the other side usually goes for shouts of bigotry rather than answer it. The idea is, basically, any logical argument you make for god can also be made for the devil. It's impossible to construct a reasonable argument for one which precludes the other. You can then extend that to polytheism, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Arguments for their existance are essentially the same as the argument for god. In fact the Catholic church has made exactly this extention to extend divinity to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Mary and a bunch of other gods and demi-gods they call saints. It's a surprisingly polytheistic religion, all ased on the extention that if one god exists and you can prove he doesn't, other could exist too.

Needless to say, your attempt to pull theism up by its bootstraps ("since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe; and the meaning of the universe cannot be in conflict with its Creator") could be used to justify almost any metaphysical assertion. "The Flying Spaghetti Monster who created the universe" is also "definitionally" the Creator of the universe; this doesn't mean that he exists, or that the universe had a Creator at all. Many other chains of pious reasoning could be cashed-out in the same way: "Satan is the Tempter; I find that I am tempted on a hourly basis to eat ice cream and have sex with my neighbor's wife; ergo, Satan exists." Or what if I suggested that what we know about the brain renders the idea of a human soul rather implausible, and one your brethren countered: "The immortal soul governs all the activity in a person's brain; I have no fear about what neuroscience will tell me about the brain, because the soul is definitionally the brain's operator." Would this strike you as an argument for the existence of souls? Granted, there are still many gaps in neuroscience into which a soul might still be inserted, just as there are gaps in our understanding of the cosmos into which the faithful eagerly insert God, but such maneuvers are utterly without intellectual merit. You can insert almost anything "definitionally" into those gaps. The Muslims have inserted Allah, and the Qur'an is His perfect word. The Hindus have inserted Gods of every color and flavor. Why don't these efforts persuade you?

All in all, Sam's doing well and, I think, Andrew's rather weak argument boils down to, "The truth will prove me right, you'll see. Besides people like religion so it must be true." I may be being unfair to AS though, so we'll see how he responds.

EDIT: Andrew responds here
An interesting approach, pointing out that there are kinds of truth beyond the emperical. That is certainly correct, for example, one cannot prove emperically that something is beautiful. However, in this context, what he's done is change the underlying framework of the argument, i.e. does god exist. If gods exist, they must exist within the physical confines of the universe, and hence, should be detectable. AS has changed the debate to to say god exists as a subjective reality rather than an objective one, and hence may not be subjected to the standards of emperical evidence. This is a sly bit of rhetorical slight-of-hand which pretty much ends the debate. From this point, you can claim almost anything since you've put it beyond the test of objective reality. We'll see how Sam responds, but I think Andrew has basically conceeded that god cant be objectively proven to exist and is attempting to bridge to a different set of criteria.

Cut to the Quick

Colbert gets it right:

Stephen Colbert: What made [Tuesday's State of the Union speech] so groundbreaking, I think, was all the new stuff we've never heard from the president before...like a domestic agenda. Take his proposal to fix the whole health care mess with the only proven cure-all: tax breaks...

Bush clip: And for the millions of Americans with no health insurance at all, this deduction would help put a basic private health insurance plan within reach.

Colbert: It's so simple. Most people who couldn’t afford health insurance also are too poor to owe taxes. But...if you give them a deduction from their taxes they don’t owe, they can use the money they're not getting back from what they haven't given to buy the health care they can't afford.

It might be true...

It might work, a friend of mine and I once snuck his underage girlfriend into a casino using this same trick.

> Garda - a classic
>
> From the State where drink driving is considered a sport, comes a
> true story from Carrick-on-Suir Ireland.
>
>
> Recently a routine Gardai patrol parked outside a local neighbourhood
> tavern. Late in the evening the Garda noticed a man leaving the bar
> so intoxicated that he could barely walk.
>
>
> The man stumbled around the car park for a few minutes, with the
> Garda quietly observing.
>
>
> After what seemed an eternity and trying his keys on five vehicles,
> the man managed to find his car which he fell into. He was there
> for a few
> minutes as a number of other patrons left the bar and drove off.
>
>
> Finally he started the car, switched the wipers on
> and off (it was a fine dry night), flicked the indicators on, then
> off,
> tooted the horn and then switched on the lights.
>
>
> He moved the vehicle forward a few cm, reversed a little and then
> remained stationary for a few more minutes as some more vehicles left.
>
>
> At last he pulled out of the car park and started to drive slowly
> down the road.
>
>
> The Garda, having patiently waited all this time, now started up the
> patrol car, put on the flashing lights, promptly pulled the man
> over and
> carried out a Breathalyzer test.
>
>
> To his amazement the Breathalyzer indicated no evidence of the man
> having consumed alcohol at all!
>
>
> Dumbfounded, the Garda said "I'll have to ask you to accompany me to
> the Police station this Breathalyzer equipment must be broken."
>
>
> "I doubt it," said the man, "tonight I'm the designated decoy".
>
>

What I Do At Work

part of a series. A note sent out today to the worldwide financial services crew on how I spent my weekend:

FYI: Continuous Query, the Next Big Thing in Streaming Data

In doing some research for solutions around real-time streaming data engines (e.g. Thompson, Reuters), it’s becoming clear that the next generation of quote engines is going to look quite different from the current one. Today a lot of streaming data technology is based on proprietary versions of the client/server model that we are all familiar with. Often the client side is a smart client, the server side is a highly tuned database and the transiting protocol is a web service (or it’s nearest moral variant). However, a lot of research is currently being done on Continuous Query Engines, which are vastly more efficient for processing multiple end nodes than current designs.

The basic idea behind a CQE is to identify which nodes are asking the same types of query , then group them for more efficient service, sending only deltas of information to the waiting nodes rather than long bursts of data. Clients are able to keep track of the deltas and cut down on complex query processing server side.

Below are a couple of papers I found in my research that I thought were interesting and did a good job of getting the concept across, along with at least one implementation.

I pass this along for informational purposes although, for the capital markets folks, this is something we need to really start thinking about. Many thanks to Ed Muth for suggesting this line of inquiry.


http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/sigmod02-cacq.pdf

and
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1170000/1164132/p31-agarwal.pdf?key1=1164132&key2=9067059611&coll=&dl=ACM&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618


an interesting implementation

http://java.sys-con.com/read/260054.htm

Meth Coffee!

Ah, it's only half-a-lie!

Best First Prize Ever!

For the Vanishing Point Contest

A trip to orbit:

The Rocketplane® XP Vehicle is a four-seat fighter-sized vehicle fitted with a delta wing and a V-tail which provide good flight characteristics both subsonically and supersonically. The vehicle is powered by both turbojet engines and a rocket engine, enabling it to accelerate to speeds just over 3,500 feet per second (2,386 miles per hour) and reach altitudes in excess of 330,000 feet (100 kilometers) providing the sensation of weightlessness for three to four minutes!

too bad I am disqualified :(

Can Tylenol Make You Stoned?

Probably not, but it's interesting that it's mode of action is based on activating cannabinoid receptors. I wonder if the Ant-Drug lobby will try to get rid of tylenol. Or at least confiscate it at airports.

Paracetamol (acetaminophen) is one of the most popular and widely used drugs for the treatment of pain and fever. It occupies a unique position among analgesic drugs. Unlike NSAIDs it is almost unanimously considered to have no antiinflammatory activity and does not produce gastrointestinal damage or untoward cardiorenal effects. Unlike opiates it is almost ineffective in intense pain and has no depressant effect on respiration. Although paracetamol has been used clinically for more than a century, its mode of action has been a mystery until about one year ago, when two independent groups (Zygmunt and colleagues and Bertolini and colleagues) produced experimental data unequivocally demonstrating that the analgesic effect of paracetamol is due to the indirect activation of cannabinoid CB(1) receptors. In brain and spinal cord, paracetamol, following deacetylation to its primary amine (p-aminophenol), is conjugated with arachidonic acid to form N-arachidonoylphenolamine, a compound already known (AM404) as an endogenous cannabinoid. The involved enzyme is fatty acid amide hydrolase. N-arachidonoylphenolamine is an agonist at TRPV1 receptors and an inhibitor of cellular anandamide uptake, which leads to increased levels of endogenous cannabinoids; moreover, it inhibits cyclooxygenases in the brain, albeit at concentrations that are probably not attainable with analgesic doses of paracetamol. CB(1) receptor antagonist, at a dose level that completely prevents the analgesic activity of a selective CB(1) receptor agonist, completely prevents the analgesic activity of paracetamol. Thus, paracetamol acts as a pro-drug, the active one being a cannabinoid. These findings finally explain the mechanism of action of paracetamol and the peculiarity of its effects, including the behavioral ones. Curiously, just when the first CB(1) agonists are being introduced for pain treatment, it comes out that an indirect cannabino-mimetic had been extensively used (and sometimes overused) for more than a century.

What Did I Get My Niece for XMas?

Fizz Wizard Reaction Kit
Space Sand
Safety Goggles
Periodic Table of Elements Poster with Bios
Cool Blue Light Experiment Kit
Glowing Gel Experiment Kit
Rubber Flubber Experiment Kit
Chemistry Wiz – Solids, Liquids and Gases
My First Chemistry Kit
Amethyst Crystal Kit
Rose Quartz Crystal Kit
Our Solar System iCD
Keychain Laser Pointer


there is a theme here....

Why Am I Excited About This?

Gears of War:

Despite the mantra of many gamers, graphics do matter. (As Bleszinski told GameSpy last year, "[U]ntil recently you couldn't express a nuanced brow raise or a wry grin which can say a thousand things to the user. Instead we'd just go, 'That's hard, let's give her some huge boobs and call it a day.' ")

I don't play this genre much, so why do I care? Because Microsoft is doing the next version of City of Heroes, Marvel Universe, and this is what I am looking forward to :)

Codependant Enabler

There is a very interesting debate going on over at AS on the top of the religious and the atheists. Interesting because Sullivan's logic is clearly wrong, i.e. he's trying to have it both ways, believing that reason leads to faith. His opponent, Sam Harris, keeps calling him on this and pointing out that reason leads to less faith, not more.

Personally, I think faith is a fine thing, if you have it, good for you. Where I step off is when you try to hedge your faith (believing something without evidence) and say it's based on reason (i.e. evidence). Nick and I did a quiet round or two last week, but frankly I dont have the energy or inclination to do a proper job. Nick's basic premise was "assume there is a god. based on that assumption, faith is logical", mine was "why would you assume there is a god? There is no evidence", it very quickly degenerates into which is the more reasonable set of assumptions. Personally, I've also thought the assumption of god without evidence is specious logic. I could use the same one to assume the existence of the Devil, or of just about any other mythological figure and would be unable to prove they dont exist (the debate usually ends when one shows that one is unable to disprove the existence of Santa Claus. Ends in a huff with a sentence along the lines of "you're not taking this seriously"). Just because you cant prove something doesn’t exist, doesn’t justify the assumption that it must.

In this dispatch Sam makes the argument that religious moderates are the codependant enablers of religious extremists, i.e. if you pick and chose which parts of religion to believe, choosing some and ignoring others, you enable extremists to do the same and have access to the same arguments, just with a different spin. If you're a moderate, it's difficult to say exactly what you have faith in, and back it up with any kind of coherent religious argument. Sam says, basically, if you throw out parts of your religion, why not toss out the whole thing as a bad investment, shudder the doors to the churches and spend the resources on more useful capitalist endeavors?

I eagerly await Sully's reply. He may come up with an argument I haven't seen before.

Edit: Having read Sam's note twice now, I think Sully has to change the subject in his reply. Sam is just too spot on.
BTW, in case you were wondering, I don't think we will ever live in a world free of religion. The human brain is just built too well as a belief engine. There will always be mystics, faith and foolishness in human history. I have not dispared though that religion will take on a less violent and noxious form in the future.

Where's Victory?

Why Klingon's Dont Run for Elected Office

Last Man Standing

From Wonkette:

Guess who somehow found room in his liver for some backbone? Teddy Kennedy!
The sole survivor of the CIA’s bold 1960s campaign to rid Washington of Kennedys, Senator Ted says Congress will be blocking whatever crazy “surge” Bush will announce tomorrow.

LOLerskates!

New Link

I'm going to offically add Hankspot to my blogroll to the right. Not a lot of posts/week ( a plus in my book), many of them interesting. I agree with some, disagree with others. If you enjoy some of these posts, you may enjoy some of his.

Hank's another CoH person who (I think) spends more time in game than out. Well known on the server, he's a decent guy (even if his style is very different than mine). He's had some interesting and amusing battles with some individuals in the Goon Squad.

As some of you know, my son Geoff has been underwriting my Something Awful membership for years now, making me a crypto-goon. I have not yet had the time, energy or inclination to purposely team with the Goons, but in the whole they've been decent players individually.

And yes, I know the Terrible Secret of Space!

Blue Origin

The future made a special guest appearence this week!

Neat!

Spiders! On Drugs!

Remember, this was done for Science!

Science!

A Rare Tale of Integrity and Engineering

I ran across this the other day while looking for something else. It's a true story of an architect, his building and a surprising lack of ass-covering.

Engineers really do think different. Almost makes me wish I had had the kind of mind it takes to study it.

It also makes me wonder if the novelity is due to the rarity.

In May 1978, while working on another project, LeMessurier discovered that bolts had been used to join the diagonal braces to the columns of the Citicorp tower (by then completed and occupied). This surprised him because he had originally specified that the joints should be welded (a proper weld between two metal pieces is usually stronger than the individual metal pieces). However, when he checked into the matter, he found that the contractor had proposed the change to bolts to make construction easier and less expensive, and that, after carrying out some calculations to ensure that the bolts were strong enough, LeMessurier's chief engineer had approved the change. This was all proper practice, and so LeMessurier did not think any more of the issue at the time.
Approximately a month later, LeMessurier received a phone call from a student working on a senior-year project. To this day he does not know who the student was, but the student said, in effect: "Sir, can I bother you for a minute? I know you are a very busy man but my professor thinks you should have put the columns on the corners to better resist the loads which occur due to wind blowing on the tower."

The rest of the story

I Really and Truely Did This

Here

Although I didn't know the term "Turning Machine". I had worked out a secret code for sending messages on candy-button paper when I was 6, with the "clever" notion that you could eat the message afterward or, better yet, eat some of the reamining buttons and send a reply.

My scheme crashed directly into reality when the first person I gave my siliva-covered, half-eaten strip of candy to (my uncle as I recall), looked disgusted and threw it away.

Slight Atheism Debate

Here with Dr. Nick

Nick and I politely take the field, politely click lances, politely return to our camps and each declare to our followers that we were the victors!

With no mention of Santa Claus or the FSM.

Not quite the gusto of a debate with TJIC, but I am also spared the usual tjicistan personal attacks and verbal diarrhea, so I think it's more interesting.

My respect for Nick over TJIC continues to accelerate.

Vanguard League Website

I did manage to build a website for my SG last month, and to my utter and complete surprise I find it not only being used, but it has an active Forum.

Check it out when you have a chance. The Trading cards are also my work. There should be more of them as more members send me their pics.

BTW, the Vanguard League is now in second place as a hero group on our server (Victory) and in 5th place over all. :)

Zune!

Hee hee

Longish Hiatus Over

I should be back to bloggin more regularly now. I picked up a nasty, nasty bout of the flu in London and have been down with that and the usual Holiday stuff since.
Actually, I have a back log of stuff to post, so there might be a surge before we resume normal operations.

Insta-Wine

Be Jesus through this efficeint Japanesse machine:

Heim Theory

If you read the first page of this and you mind isn't blown completely away you either didn't understand it or ... you're not from this planet.

It completely re-invents 20th century physics and makes very accurate predictions which have withstood emperical testing. The gaviton as a soliton of a probabilty-based dimensional extention to 4-space...

Damn!

Interstellar travel just might be within my lifetime afterall.

Instant Freezing Beer

Because beer comes in a sealed container, it's possible to chill it well below the normal freezing point and still have it in liquid form. This is interesting becasue when you top the top, the pressure drops and the beer freezes solid very quickly.



Here's the whole story.

Note that you can do the reverse process with hot liquids and a microwave oven, i.e. heat water past the boiling point but not have it boil. The trick is to have relavtively pure water with very few nucleation sites. If you add something with a little surface area, e.g. sugar, tea, instant coffee etc. the water will instantly boil up. This is a significant source of injury with tea btw.

Mars: 2020

This made me chuckle. I tried to identify all the missions and I think I got most of them. I'm guessing the little lost one is the lamented Phobos probe.

A Bad Day for PHP

Stefan Esser retires. He's an excellent security guy, but the Open Source community is often more like a religion than a software development house, and the one thing they can't abide is a heritic.

Saturday, December 9. 2006
Last night I finally retired from the PHP Security Response Team, that was initially my idea a few years ago.
The reasons for this are many, but the most important one is that I have realised that any attempt to improve the security of PHP from the inside is futile. The PHP Group will jump into your boat as soon you try to blame PHP's security problems on the user but the moment you criticize the security of PHP itself you become persona non grata. I stopped counting the times I was called immoral traitor for disclosing security holes in PHP or for developing Suhosin.
For the ordinary PHP user this means that I will no longer hide the slow response time to security holes in my advisories. It will also mean that some of my advisories will come without patches available, because the PHP Security Response Team refused to fix them for months. It will also mean that there will be a lot more advisories about security holes in PHP.
Posted by Stefan Esser in Security, PHP at 10:58

(

Father October

could take my confession.

Is that not just a little bit, well, I don’t know…suggestive? It kind of gives me the heeby-jeebies. I mean, it’s a priest. And if I’m not mistaken, they’ve taken a photo of him, trying to make him look almost seductive. Do I need a new pair of contact lenses or is this a fairly accurate assessment?Another point to make note of: there’s not one ugly priest in the bunch. It’s not like they got a shot of some 90-year old priest giving confession, or tried to represent the entire spectrum. These priests are in their prime and they are all fairly or very good-looking.

It's interesting to watch market forces collide with the Catholic Church. What's next Nun's at the Beach? A prime time soap opera? It should be a very interesting decade ahead for the faithful...

(via)

While you're over ther, Andrew seems to be talking himself in to accepting Romney's 1994 pro-gay outreach as a position, while distancing Romney's 2004 miscegenation-based anti-gay works. Seems similar to the benefit-of-the-doubting that lead to his Iraq endorsement. He does have enough intellectual integrity to call mea culpa on that though, so this could correct itself. If only the dems would get over Hillary already and show they are not actual GOP co-dependent enablers, otherwise sane middle-ground folks would stop rationalizing the best of extremely poor choices.

Saving Baby Miriam

This was sent over by a friend. When I read it, I thought of an arguement I had with my son a few years ago about the primary purpose of a soldier.

Playboy, May, 1963

Wow, a scanned in issue of Playboy from the bygone era.. Let's just chalk this up to "changing standards" and "different time, different place". There is actually more nudity on FOX these days.



(via)

And then there are times when I tihnk...

... maybe legalizing drugs isn't such a hot idea afterall. The matter-of-fact tone of this article is pretty amazing. At no point is it mentioned if the police hold the victim on drug charges. Or maybe I missed the point and that's assumed.

He was naked, on crack and in alligator's mouth

...
Mayid's call shortly after 4 a.m. sent four Polk County, Fla., deputies racing to the 2,150-acre lake just outside Lakeland, Fla., where they jumped into the water and wrenched Apgar's arm from the gator's mouth. The 45-year-old victim, who told authorities he'd passed out nude on the shore after smoking crack cocaine, was rushed to a hospital in critical condition.
Later Wednesday, state wildlife authorities trapped and killed a nearly 12-foot-long alligator thought to be the one that attacked Apgar.
...

Full article here

Foot Shoot for Programmers

From a former intern at CertCo (now a successful real-estate tycoon).

--------------------------------------------
> Shoot Yourself in the
> Foot in Any Programming Language
>
> The proliferation of modern programming languages
> (all of which seem to have
> stolen countless features from one another)
> sometimes makes it difficult to
> remember what language you're currently using. This
> guide is offered as a
> public service to help programmers who find
> themselves in such dilemmas.
>
> C
> You shoot yourself in the foot.
>
> C++
> You accidentally create a dozen clones of yourself
> and shoot them all in the
> foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is
> impossible since you can't
> tell which are bitwise copies and which are just
> pointing at others and
> saying, "That's me, over there."
>
> JAVA
> After importing java.awt.right.foot.* and
> java.awt.gun.right.hand.*, and
> writing the classes and methods of those classes
> needed, you've forgotten
> what the hell you're doing.
>
> Ruby
> Your foot is ready to be shot in roughly five
> minutes, but you just can't
> find anywhere to shoot it.
>
> PHP
> You shoot yourself in the foot with a gun made with
> pieces from 300 other
> guns.
>
> ASP.NET
> Find a gun, it falls apart. Put it back together, it
> falls apart again. You
> try using the .GUN Framework, it falls apart. You
> stab yourself in the foot
> instead.
>
> SQL
> SELECT @ammo:=bullet FROM gun WHERE trigger =
> 'PULLED';
> INSERT INTO leg (foot) VALUES (@ammo);
>
> Perl
> You start shooting yourself in the foot, but you
> lose the gun.
>
> Javascript
> YOu've perfected a robust, rich user experience for
> shooting yourself in the
> foot. You then find that bullets are disabled on
> your gun.
>
> CSS
> You shoot your right foot with one hand, then switch
> hands to shoot your
> left foot but you realize that the gun has turned
> into a banana.
>
> FORTRAN
> You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until
> you run out of toes, then
> you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out
> of bullets, you
> continue anyway because you have no
> exception-handling ability.
>
> Modula2
> After realizing that you can't actually accomplish
> anything in this
> language, you shoot yourself in the head.
>
> COBOL
> Using a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN
> place ARM.HAND.FINGER. on
> HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to
> HOLSTER. CHECK whether
> shoelace needs to be retied.
>
> LISP
> You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
> gun with which
> you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
> gun with which
> you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
> gun with which
> you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the
> gun with which
> you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds ..
>
> BASIC
> Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On
> big systems, continue
> until entire lower body is waterlogged.
>
> FORTH
> Foot in yourself shoot.
>
> APL
> You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day
> figuring out how to do it
> in fewer characters.
>
> Pascal
> The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the
> foot.
>
> SNOBOL
> If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot.
> If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.
>
> Concurrent Euclid
> You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.
>
> HyperTalk
> Put the first bullet of the gun into the foot of the
> left leg of you.
> Answer the result.
>
> Motif
> You spend days writing a UIL description of your
> foot, the trajectory, the
> bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory
> handles of the gun. When
> you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the
> gun jams.
>
> Unix
> % ls
> foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
> % rm * .o
> rm: .o: No such file or directory
> % ls
> %
>
> Paradox
> Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your
> users can too.
>
> Revelation
> You'll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as
> soon as you figure out
> what all these bullets are for.
>
> Visual Basic
> You'll shoot yourself in the foot, but you'll have
> so much fun doing it that
> you won't care.
>
> Prolog
> You tell your program you want to be shot in the
> foot. The program figures
> out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't allow it to
> explain.
>
> Ada
> After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to
> concurrently load the
> gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in
> the foot. When you try,
> however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong
> type.
>
> Assembly
> You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to
> discover you must first
> reinvent the gun, the bullet, and your foot. After
> that's done, you pull the
> trigger, the gun beeps several times, then crashes.
>
> 370 JCL
> You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000-page
> document explaining how you
> want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot
> comes back deep-fried.
>

From the Kitchens of Hell

Totally and completely edible.

This is for all you serious bakers out there. BE SURE to follow the instructions NOT TO PEEK AHEAD!!! If you do it will spoil the fun. And it IS fun!
- Judith
READ FIRST.....LOOK LATER....IT'S A LOT MORE FUN. Want to be forever eliminated from the guest list? Just take this to your next "pot luck" dinner!!!

Kitty Litter Cake" * ~
This is *no joke*
READ THE INGREDIENTS AND STUFF FIRST AND THEN LOOK AT THE PHOTO...
TRUST ME...

DON'T LOOK AT THE PHOTO FIRST, BUT LAST...?
This is for all you cooks out there looking for something a little different.........?WANT TO HAVE FUN AT A PARTY? PREPARE THIS RECIPE! COMPLETELY EDIBLE,?
BUT YOUR FRIENDS MAY NOT THINK SO!On a recent visit to our veterinarian to get shots for our cat I found this recipe on the waiting room bulletin board. After recovering from hysterical laughter, I obtained a copy from the office staff so my wife could make it, which she refused to do. I took it to work and gave the recipe to a lady at work who loves cats. The pictures below show the results of her work. It doesn't look very nice, but it's actually quite tasty, so I decided to pass it along.
CAKE INGREDIENTS:
1 box spice or German chocolate cake mix
1 box of white cake mix
1 package white sandwich cookies
1 large package vanilla instant pudding mix
A few drops green food coloring
12 small Tootsie Rolls or equivalent
SERVING "DISHES AND UTENSILS"

1 NEW cat-litter box
1 NEW cat-litter box liner
1 NEW pooper scooper
1) Prepare and bake cake mixes, according to directions, in any size pan. Prepare pudding and chill. Crumble cookies in small batches in blender or food processor. Add a few drops of green food coloring to 1 cup of cookie crumbs. Mix with a fork or shake in a jar. Set aside.
2) When cakes are at room temperature, crumble them into a large bowl. Toss with half of the remaining cookie crumbs and enough pudding to make the mixture moist but not soggy. Place liner in litter box and pour in mixture.
3) Unwrap 3 Tootsie Rolls and heat in a microwave until soft and pliable. Shape the blunt ends into slightly curved points. Repeat with three more rolls. Bury the rolls decoratively in the cake mixture. Sprinkle remaining white cookie crumbs over the mixture, then scatter green crumbs lightly over top.
4) Heat 5 more Tootsie Rolls until almost melted. Scrape them on top of the cake and sprinkle with crumbs from the litter box. Heat the remaining Tootsie Roll until pliable and hang it over the edge of the box. Place box on a sheet of newspaper and serve with scooper. Enjoy!?
"Kitty Litter Cake"
ANY OF YOU WHO HAVE A HALLOWEEN PARTY TO GO TO NEXT YEAR, THINK ABOUT THIS CAKE.
I KNOW OF SOMEONE WHO ACTUALLY MADE IT AND TOOK IT TO WORK. (THEY HAD A GREAT TIME!!)
BE BRAVE!!

Reader Quiz

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Fad Reader
Book Snob
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

(via)

Not A Good Week for Glenn Reynolds

2 in one week. First, Andrew Sullivan takes down Glenn for, well basically lying, about Sullivan's definition and use of the work "Christianist".

Now Gregory Djerejian takes him apart point for point on his selective use of quotes and his cherry picking, CYA on Iraq.

Not a good week at Instapundit.

heh, Indeed.

Why do I pick on Glenn? He's an exemplar of a particular type of rationalizing rightwinger that can find a justification for almost anything as long as it protects his aximoatic beliefs. While we all do this to one degree or other, most of us take time to consider, among other things, that we might just be wrong and act accordingly. Glenn seems to be of that breed who thinks that thought is cowerdice and honest re-evaluation is a kind of treason, so seing him backed into a corner is amply entertaining.

non-Calculated Risks

Gravity is a theory just like Relativity and Evolution. I once had a jaw dropping debate with an otherwise smart fellow who somehow thought that Stellar Evolution was related to biological evolution and that both were subject to Darwinian critique.

My Signature Weapon

This seems about right :) (via)

Air Strike You preferred a weapon with 74% power over speed and 85% range over melee.

You use Air Strikes. Fighting? Fighting is for idiots! All you have to do is make a quick walkie-talkie call and have the ground ahead of you carpeted with explosive charges. Your enemies will be searching frantically for refuge as you chuckle from afar.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on power You scored higher than 99% on range

Link: The What's Your Signature Weapon Test written by inurashii on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Excellent Cartoons

here. Too twisted to comment on.

What if Stan "the Man" Lee worked for Jack Chick?

Wow, I wish I had thought of this!

Wisdom Teeth et al.

I had my deeply embedded lower Wisdom teeth and some others removed Wednesday morning, a fairly major procedure. I assumed that, like most surgeries, it would be worst right after and get better as time went on. I seem to be wrong though and each day seems worse than the last. Wednesday was unpleasant, but not too bad. I slept most of it and even made a video in the evening. I was thinking of going to work on Thursday.

Thursday I realized they punctured my sinus cavity when they were working on my upper jaw, called the dentist and got a prescription for antibiotics. I was out for an hour or so in the morning, but was tired by the afternoon and in increasing discomfort. I started using the Codeine prescription I got (which I noted has a refill), which I hadn't needed before and was hoping to "save for later"

Last night I got up every two hours and was supplementing the codeine with 3 Advil. It was like having 4 pending root canals. Only two of the teeth, the bottom 2, were wisdom teeth, buried quite deeply with one "fused to the bone", the uppers were broken beyond repair.

They suggested to me on Wednesday that the swelling would peak "after 3 days", which better be today because I look like the Godfather at the moment. I am hopped up on Codeine and Tylenol atm, and will probably try to get some sleep.

A New Video

I've been working on an in-game instructional video for a server wide event I occasionally run in City of Heroes. It's a complicated 2-hour event called a Hami Raid, and generally involves coordinating approximately 140 volunteers for two hours toward jointly defeating a monster no one could defeat alone. The event is broken into phases and, frankly, even minor screw ups in any of the phases can spell disaster for all. I tend to run 2 or 3 of these a month, and a few other "Raid Leaders" on the server do the same. You need to be at the top of the game, level 50, to really participate, and folks that make it that far tend to have "strong personalities". Also, some of the 140 people are absolutely dedicated to seeing it fail for their own juvenile reasons. It's an interesting challenge. The reward for a successful raid is a very rare type of permanent bonus for your character and these can be traded. My whole purpose in running these is to make a market in these bonuses, called Hami-Os.

Since there is a continuous flow of players in and out of the raids, instructing new people and keeping the event popular is a little difficult. My solution is make an amusing instructional video showing folks what goes on and what to do. The video will be ready in December, but I was up late last night and threw together a 3 minute "trailer" to keep interest alive.



High Rez Version

If it looks a little like a confusing mass of people enveloped in lots of glowing stuff with no clue of up or down.... that's about right. You've got the experience of what it's like to be there.

I am, btw, the guy in blue with glasses who waves at the beginning and is standing near the lecture, aka BluShield.

Kiwi!

This is brilliant! Worth the 3 minute investment



(via)

Oobleck

At some point, every physics student makes up a batch of Oobleck, a non-newtonian fluid. What's a non-newtonian fluid? Basically it's a compound that acts like water when under little or no sheer stress, but a solid when subjected to lots of stress. The most common demo shows someone stirring a beaker of the stuff with a spoon, then hitting the fluid with a hammer and watching it shatter. You can mix up a batch at home, it's basically cornstarch and water (WARNING: DO NOT DISPOSE OF OOBLECK IN THE GARBAGE DISPOSAL).

This demo however, is a vastly superior demonstration:



(via)

Lt. Horvath at a Training Exercise

Department of Self-Absorption

Wow. Grover derivies the wrong lesson entirely:

Although some glitz has come off Mr Rove, Republicans have been more eager to blame botched campaigns and individual ethics scandals. “Bob Sherwood’s seat [in Pennsylvania] would have been overwhelmingly ours, if his mistress hadn’t whined about being throttled,” said Mr Norquist.

Obviously the real lesson is, "make sure the ball-gag is securely fastioned before choking your mistress.

The Last Temptation of Donald Rumsfeld

The Atmosphere

Excellently done. The universe is not your friend.

(via)

That's Pure Distilled Evil Coming Out Your Ass

Don't let Satan tempt you!



The part where they handed him the newspaper after chruch had me in stitches!

Once and for all, it's called Pop!

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The Midland
North Central
Boston
The West
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

I'll Miss You Pink Sugar

She was the gift that kept on giving, the Dan Qualye of her generation and I, for one, will miss her.
Bye Kitty!

Ass Rocket

Literally!

Video: Rocket man injured firing firework from his bottom

God is Dead!

Bad news, I was wrong and God exists. Good news: He's dead now and exists no longer!

All of the People, All of the Time

I thought it was P.T. Barnum, but it turns out to be Lincoln

What can I say about the election? It matched my highest, rational expectations. It was the right verdict, for the right reasons and I couldn't be happier. However, as my son has pointed out, it's just a question of time before they dissapoint, and I start voting GOP again.

A few notes:
The Diebold people at my conference were up all night. I predict the VA race will go to Webb because they have explained to Sen. Allen that they cannot produce new paper ballots. Many, many, many times, they have explained it. He's starting to get that "live by the sword, die by the sword" thing. He'll concide within 24 hours.

Civility may return to politics. Some things may again be off limits. I hope the dems dont impeach President Bush unless there are actual crimes. Lying to Congress is a crime, btw, even if that Congress winked and nodded at the time.

The president is, in fact, fucked. 2 years to go and a hostile environment. He may rise to the challenge, but his history says otherwise. I hope, for all our sakes, we don't make him the focus of the next 24 months. The best possible way to repudiate his actions is to deny him the attention and perfrom admirably.

Lincoln Cafee, I'm so sorry. I like you, I think you deserve high office, but I would have voted against you if I were still in Rhode Island. You are a co-dependent enabler and, despite your hihgly respectable positions, you allow the GOP to use you. If it were less close in either direction, I would have recommended a vote for you, but it's not.
The real tragedy is.... you would do the same.

That's it. In my opinion, America woke up, at least for a brief time. It's up to the Dems to govern for get voted out, Good Luck folks.

Tradesports Election

So I missed several opportunities last night to make some money on the GOP Senate control options. It swung wildly between 50-70% in favor of GOP control during the evening, and was at 86% when I went to bed. This morning, it's at 15%. This is based on the outstanding races in VA and MT, both of which are very close. VA I'm predicting will go for the Dems based on the uncounted absentee ballots which were tending strongly Dem. MT, no prediction.

Many opps to short the GOP last night, but alas, I let them slide.

BTW, the Diebold people were a little worried yesterday. I think today they are going to be more so. In VA and MT it's going to go to a recount, both of which in the past have worked to GOP advantage. In their paperless machines, "recount" just means re-checking the totals. I suspect if the GOP starts losing recounts, we are going to see bipartisan calls for the re-tooling of the Diebold machines.

It was an interesting night

Odds

Currrently tradesports has the election handicapped as a 80-85% chance of a Dem house and a 30% chance of a Dem Senate. So, assuming these probabilities are independent (they are not) and that the Central Limit Theroem holds, (it definately does not), the odds of a Dem Congress are .8*.3 = .24 or about 4 to 1 against. The odds for a GOP Congress is .2*.7 = .14 or about 7 to 1 against. That leaves a 62% (.56 for Dem house, GOP Den, .06 for GOP House, Dem Senate)chance of a split congress.

I can live with that.

Unfortuantely all the assumptions of independence are wrong.

Diebold

Looks like I will be spending Election Day with the Diebold security team. Should be very, very interesting. Details Wednesday.

Wired

I've been on he road all week and had exhausted the two books I brought with me, The Laides of Grace Adieu and Fragile Things. With 3 hours of plane travel ahead of me, I picked up a bunhc of magazines including the seldom read(by me) Wired. Not too shabby actually. I bought it for the article on atheism, but was delighed by the following: 6 word stories

The online article has a bunch of versions which didn't get printed, but the print version has them presented in some very interesting artisitic styles. Overall, I think the print version wins.

Worst Websites... Ever!

We get suchs gems as:
An endoresement from a dog
ALL CAPS TEXT
A nice picture of a pig's nose (I think)
bareass HTML
and a recipe for "Easy, Killer Margaritas"

My Space? no. AOL? Perish the thought. Craig's list? they wish they were this sophisticated. No, these are people running for office!

Michael J Fox Ad

I've always had a secret affinity for Michael. We're about the same age, approximately the same build and he's always played characters I could relate to. I was more than a little surprised and saddened when I found he's got Parkinson's, then a few years later was more than surprised when it became a possible diagnosis for me.

He's running an ad in Missouri on an issue he backs, stem cell research, to which I say, "good for him". The question in the media is, was he off his meds when he did it?



The answer is: absolutely not. This is what you look like when the treatment for Parkinson's is successful. When it's not, you look much, much worse. Depending on how far down the path he is, he might not be able to move or speak at all if he were off his meds.

Take a good look, this is the difference between a treatment and a cure. Just like diabetes, just like Alzheimer’s, just like MS (but unlike ALS where there isn't even a treatment), it's a long term, disabling disease, and the treatments are quite crude.

Will stem cells cure him? No. Will they help? No. Do we know that they will ever work? No. Stem cells might be a dead end, like so many other kinds of scientific research. Still, it's the best we have at the moment.

Do I think he should have made the commercial? Sure, why not? It's a cause he believes in, presented in an honest way. Let the marketplace decide.

And, btw, I think the whole "meds" question is a red herring. The presumption is that if he were "on meds" he'd look just fine and that if he were off he'd be somehow "faking". This is the Fallacy of False Choice. Off meds he looks bad, on meds he looks bad differently, either way there is no deception here, just his choice of how to appear.

E.T., Where are You?

There is an interesting debate over at PZ Myers site on the development of extraterrestrial intelligence. It's quite illuminating in a lot of ways, but I was struck by this insight:

What Percentage of Planets on Which Life Has Originated Will Produce Intelligent Life?

Physicists, on the whole, will give a different answer to this question than biologists. Physicists still tend to think more deterministically than biologists. They tend to say, if life has originated somewhere, it will also develop intelligence in due time. The biologist, on the other hand, is impressed by the improbability of such a development.

Personally, I remain optimistic about the chances of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, especially in light of progress in the last century on gravity. I would like to believe (but cannot objectively prove) that we're only a few decades away from a theory of inertial mass. Should such a formalism arise, we'd be well placed to build vehicles capable of interstellar flight.

However, this is an article of faith, not one of reason. The full critique is interesting and, although I can pick apart some of it, I reach a similar conclusion when I rebuild the argument with my corrections: i.e. intelligent, space-faring civilizations may not overlap in terms of space and time. The galaxy may only hold one or two at a time, separated by vast stretches of astronomical time. A million years is nothing in terms of astronomy, yet I can't imagine what future, if any, the human race has in that timeframe.

They may be out there, and they may be far more advanced than us, but if so, I can’t imagine them wanting to talk.

Chuck Norris isn't as dumb as a Brick, He's as Dumb as ALL the Bricks in Boston!

Appearently, Chuck doesn't get it:


"While I have as much fun as anyone else reading and quoting them, let’s face it, most “Chuck Norris Facts” describe someone with supernatural, superhuman powers. They’re describing a superman character. And in the history of this planet, there has only been one real Superman. It’s not me."

Sadly, he’s not talking about Superman. Though I suppose he could be, since the rest of this article is how he believes in magic because he saw it in a book somewhere. Just not a comic book. Though it might have had illustrations.

Chuck Norris Facts

(via)

and Any Day in Which You Learn Something Cant Be Bad

so any day in which you learn more, must be better!

Grammar Humor

As longtime readers know, I have a soft spot for grammar humor. This made me laugh.

A Lower Limit, to be Sure

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 54 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Antimatter Driven Sail for Deep Space Missions

NIAC was one of the projects I worked on in grad school in my Advanced Planetary Sciences class. My proposal was a combination of 3-body gravity assits (i.e. slingshot effects) and solar sails. It got you to the outer solar system in about 3 years and to the ISM in about 15.

This idea though, seems exceedingly clever and takes the solar sail idea up a notch. The basic idea is to build a sail embedded with fissile uranium, build an antimatter source and then throw antiprotons at the sail to cause the uranium to undergo fission. Total amount of antimatter needed to reach the ISM? 30 milligrams. (that seems small, but truthfully it's an enormous amount. 30 milligrams is ~ 2x10^21 antiprotons, and a typical accelerator will produce 10^5 or so per reaction).

The primary question relative to the performance of this concept is the momentum delivered to the sail by the fission of the uranium. If just the two fission products are released then the momentum is determined by the velocity and mass of one of the products. The antimatter induced fission of uranium produces a spectrum of masses. The width of this distribution, however, is relatively narrow and can be approximated by using palladium-111 as the average fission product. The energy released in the fission is taken to be 190 MeV. Thus, the velocity of the fission product is 1.39x10^7 m/s and the mass is 1.85x10^-25 kg/atom. The velocity would equate to a specific impulse of 1.4 million seconds.

It's actually more complicated than that, and the proposal goes into much more detail. I have some questions though about the secondary particle decay chains.

It's an interesting concept.

Candidate seeks textbooks as shields

wow

OKLAHOMA CITY --A candidate for state superintendent of schools said Thursday he wants thick used textbooks placed under every student's desk so they can use them for self-defense during school shootings.

"People might think it's kind of weird, crazy," said Republican Bill Crozier of Union City, a teacher and former Air Force security officer. "It is a practical thing; it's something you can do. It might be a way to deflect those bullets until police go there."

Crozier and a group of aides produced a 10-minute video Tuesday in which they shoot math, language and telephone books with a variety of weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle and a 9mm pistol. The rifle bullet penetrated two books, including a calculus textbook, but the pistol bullet was stopped by a single book.

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Crozier's experiment began with shots fired at a calculus textbook from an AK-47 Russian-style assault rifle. The shot penetrated two textbooks at once.
"We need to look at protection of young people that sometimes people may think you are a little smarter than everybody else or a higher IQ or whatever. They need to look at what the end result would be," Crozier said.


My suggestion: Give the candidate a calculus book, give his opponent a gun, and test this! Seems only scientific!

Video of Republicans shooting science books here

I have a better idea, lets give them bibles for this instead.

She can Eat Nails and Shit Lightning

Well, actually, it's half true....

MONDAY, OCTOBER 9 This week of emasculating pastels, incriminating tattoos, and glorious and surprising triumph kicks off today with a blast of lightning from a Croatian lady's anus. Details come from the Associated Press, which reports 27-year-old Natasha Timarovic had just finished brushing her teeth in the bathroom of her home in the Croatian city of Zadar when lightning struck. "I had just put my mouth under the tap to rinse away the toothpaste when the lightning must have struck the building," said Timarovic to the Zadar news channel 24 Sata. "I don't remember much after that, but I was later told that the lightning had traveled down the water pipe and struck me on the mouth, passing through my body. It was incredibly painful. I felt it pass through my torso and then I don't remember much at all." What Timarovic can't recall, an emergency worker supplies: "She was wearing rubber bathroom shoes at the time and so instead of earthing through her feet it appears the electricity shot out of her backside," said the unnamed medic to 24 Sata. "It appears to have earthed through the damp shower curtain that she was touching as she bent over to put her mouth under the tap." Despite suffering great pain and severe burning to her anus, Ms. Timarovic remains a lucky woman. "If she had not been wearing the shoes she would probably have been killed by the blast."

Second Life News

Reuters has dispatched a full time reporter into Second Life to... well.... report I guess.

Mr. Pasick, a Reuters technology reporter who was formerly earthbound with the news agency, is heading up Reuters’ first virtual news bureau inside the online role-playing game Second Life. While many independent journalists and bloggers have published inside such virtual worlds, Reuters is the first established news agency to dispatch a full-time reporter to do so.

“This is a very serious, old brand that stands for things and has principles, but that doesn’t take itself so seriously that it wouldn’t play in a gaming space,” Mr. Glocer said. “This appeals to a younger demographic. Even for people who don’t go in and play in Second Life, it shows Reuters has a certain with-it-ness.”

I've tinkered around in Second Life and, frankly, found it wanting. The interface would have been considered sub-par in the 90's, movement, object creation and interaction are all surprisingly difficult and, there is very little to do, apart from struggle with the application.

I passed on playing for any length of time, give me City of Heroes or even WoW anyday. I'm guessing the half-life of the Reuters reporter is about 3 months.

Coffee Spitting Quote

I need to time my coffee drinking better or I need waterproof monitors. I ran across this quote today, which I found very funny:

Dumbest Congresscritters countdown Radar profiles the ten dumbest nose-pickers in Congress, awarding top prize to Katherine Harris, a Republican from Florida:
If dumb Congress members were the X-Men, Harris would be their Wolverine

Unique Image of Saturn

Awesome image of Saturn, in the infrared, from the Cassini probe.

Buddy Jesus Serves in Iraq

I would never have thought of this, but it's a complex, highly interactive world.

As a result, his visage -- with a "ceramicized" or cartoon-like countenance -- earned an afterlife as a sticker, t-shirt, poster and dashboard figure. Not content with that action, however, Buddy acquired a recent feature role in an all-too-real drama starring the Mahdi of Sadr City and the U.S. military.
Carolyn O'Hara of the FP blog is not sure how the whole thing got started. One possibility is that the Iraqi's inserted Buddy into a forged U.S. pamphlet outlining potential abominations to be inflicted on the local militias. The other possibility is that U.S. soldiers had been circulating Buddy as a joke, or even an article of incitement. Either way, Buddy made the rounds, with the terrible result that the locals mistook him for one of their holy own.
As you can tell from the image, the mistake -- once discovered -- was not appreciated.

Link

Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages

From Bruce Schnier's Cryptogram. I've done some contract work for the NSA as part of what we were working on at CertCo, but I never got access to Crypto Quarterly.

Indexes to NSA Publications Declassified and Online



In May 2003, Michael Ravnitzky submitted a Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) request to the National Security Agency for a copy of the index
to their historical reports at the Center for Cryptologic History and
the index to certain journals: the NSA Technical Journal and the
Cryptographic Quarterly. These journals had been mentioned in the
literature but are not available to the public. Because he thought NSA
might be reluctant to release the bibliographic indexes, he also asked
for the table of contents to each issue.

The request took more than three years for them to process and
declassify -- sadly, not atypical -- and during the process they asked
if he would accept the indexes in lieu of the tables of contents pages:
specifically, the cumulative indices that included all the previous
material in the earlier indices. He agreed, and got them last month.
The results are online.

This is just a sampling of some of the article titles from the NSA
Technical Journal: "The Arithmetic of a Generation Principle for an
Electronic Key Generator" - "CATNIP: Computer Analysis - Target Networks
Intercept Probability" - "Chatter Patterns: A Last Resort" - "COMINT
Satellites - A Space Problem" - "Computers and Advanced Weapons Systems"
- "Coupon Collecting and Cryptology" - "Cranks, Nuts, and Screwballs" -
"A Cryptologic Fairy Tale" - "Don't Be Too Smart" - "Earliest
Applications of the Computer at NSA" - "Emergency Destruction of
Documents" - "Extraterrestrial Intelligence" - "The Fallacy of the
One-Time-Pad Excuse" - "GEE WHIZZER" - "The Gweeks Had a Gwoup for It" -
"How to Visualize a Matrix" - "Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages" -
"A Mechanical Treatment of Fibonacci Sequences" - "Q.E.D.- 2 Hours, 41
Minutes" - "SlGINT Implications of Military Oceanography" - "Some
Problems and Techniques in Bookbreaking" - "Upgrading Selected US Codes
and Ciphers with a Cover and Deception Capability" - "Weather: Its Role
in Communications Intelligence" - "Worldwide Language Problems at NSA"

In the materials the NSA provided, they also included indices to two
other publications: Cryptologic Spectrum and Cryptologic Almanac.

The indices to Cryptologic Quarterly and NSA Technical Journal have
indices by title, author, and keyword. The index to Cryptologic Spectrum
has indices by author, title, and issue.

Consider these bibliographic tools as stepping stones. If you want an
article, send a FOIA request for it. Send a FOIA request for a dozen.
There's a lot of stuff here that would help elucidate the early history
of the agency and some interesting cryptographic topics.

Thanks, Mike, for doing this work.

http://www.thememoryhole.org/nsa/bibs.htm

In reality, I suspect the NSA salted the list. It's what I would have done in their position.


FTR: I shot my resume over to them. You know, just in case...

Super Snark

Kieth Olbermann is fast becoming my favorite commentator on current events.



I sometimes dispare that I am one of the few Americans who remembers what the constitution says.