Doing Ink

This probably seemed like a good idea, until the armed robbery and then ... prison.



oops!

Last Day

Yesterday was my last day in Capital Markets, so I sent an appropriately sappy note to my friends (note: it should be explained here that "appropriately sappy" in my context involves the words "bail" and "fire chief" ).

This is an example of the typical response:

I would love to stay in touch with you at least until 21 Dec 2012. Then all bets are off. America's decision to elect Jeb Bush for President in Nov 2012 should rightfully lead to the end of the world the following month.

I'll miss these jokers.

Finally, an MMO We CAa All Enjoy!

Looks like I'll be cancelling my City of Heroes account and heading here soon.

Cosmology

Ever since news of the discovery made national headlines, local hoteliers have been overwhelmed by an influx of atheists from all over the country who have flocked to Huddlesfield to catch a glimpse of the scientific relic.

Discovery here

Your search - isoclysmic - did not match any documents.

From the forums over at Ben Stein's movie, Expelled

Obviously, this primed free energy function as defined by Dr. Josiah Willard Gibbs of Yale and later slightly modified by Dr. Andrew Gibbs while he remained living into the last century (only Josiah Gibbs is usually given the credit) leads to a clear and fairly devastating disproof of evolution through the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

For those of you who are not well acquainted with the niceties of ID or with the hard realities of thermodynamics, this primed Gibbs Free Energy of an isoclysmic system (as given by K. Ludwig, L. Mayer, X. Austerlitz, and P. Olsen in 1885 in the Zeitschrift fuer Phys. der re. Naturfor., Vol. 10, No. 7, pgs. 23-24) that is quasi-statically bound to an adiabat such as a cell or a human body is while it is still alive is the entropy plus the enthalpy divided by a temperature-dependent scaling factor - often shortened to Enthrapy - please watch your spelling graphicsully. (It was a pleasant surprise, though, to see that someone here knows of this thermodynamic function!) It has its origin in a perfect differential and remains invariant under an arbitrary Legendre transformation. Case closed! Not only is the viability of evolution disproved, but the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics is necessarily vitiated. (see Turner, L.A., Am. Jour. Phys., Vol. 29, pgs. 71-76 for the standard reference.)


Utter, utter nonsense.

Everywhere, All The Time

Direct quote from a flyer advertising .. software.. I think...

"Windows(tm) is perhaps the most universal software in the world..."

not just universal, but the most universal ... in the whole world!!

idiots.

Lie Big, Lie Little

The GOP has a real problem with counting votes. I mean really, if they can't even count their own votes straight, how can they be expected to count nationally?

As you know, here at TPM we've been really curious what happened in the Republican caucus in Washington state. For probably the first time in all the primaries and elections I've ever watched, the folks running the election decided to stop counting the votes with 13% of the votes uncounted. And this wasn't a 70-30 blow out, but a tight race where the two top vote getters were separated by less than 2% of the vote. Then this morning, state party chair Luke Esser decided to declare McCain the winner.

...

In terms of consequence, Bush v. Gore it ain't. This is a relatively small contest in a nomination campaign that appears to be over. But this is something you'd expect either from Soviet history or a farcical passage in a Faulkner novel. And let's not forget the context. Huckabee starts the day with a blowout win in Kansas. That evening he gets the largest number of votes in Louisiana. Then in the third contest he's neck and neck with John McCain and looks like he may win all three contests of the day -- a shut-out for the all-but-declared nominee. Then as it's going down to the wire, the head of the state party decides he's seen enough and calls it for McCain.

I'm no fan of Huck, and I'm becoming a little warmer to McCain but Jesus! How entitled do you have to feel to think you can pull something like this off?

Pretty damn entitled.

More on Hate Speech

In which the Archbishop of Canterbury cites approvingly of the advances of Islam:

But now the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has cited the Beth Din as one of his reasons for believing that sharia, or Islamic law, can and should become a part of what he called "plural jurisdiction" in Britain. His reasoning, if one may call it that, is clear: Other faiths already have their own legal authorities, so why not the Muslims, too? What could be more tolerant and diverse? This same argument has been used already, and will be used again, to demand that laws governing "blasphemy," originally written to protect only Christians from being upset, should now, in a nondiscriminatory way, be amended to cover Muslims as well. The alternative—don't have any blasphemy laws and let religious people's feelings be hurt, just as the feelings of the secular are regularly offended by religion—doesn't occur to the archbishop and people who think like him.

Like it or not, the road to civilization is paved with opinions your delicate ears might not like. I wonder if Joe Ratzinger is also quietly clapping.

Another Day Older

and deeper in debt. Although in this case, that may be a very good thing. Some speculation on the MSFT/Yahoo deal around the idea of MSFT offering some high quality bonds into a bear market.

Edit: I received a note from corporate asking that I remove my speculation from the post to better comply with SEC regulations. There is substitute text which I could offer, but will decline to do so.

The Mormon's Miscalculation

I think this is about right:

Blame Christians. By significant margins, in poll after poll, in vote after vote a solid block of evangelical Christians said they would never vote for a Mormon. Since evangelicals made up nearly half of the Republican primary vote in some states, Romney was up against a deep well of distrust of a religion that many evangelicals still label a cult.
It showed again Tuesday, in exit polls in the bellwether state of Missouri. Among the small group of Republican voters who say they never go to church, Romney got his highest vote total – 39 percent. Among people who attend services more than once a week, he received his lowest, 21 percent.

Put another way, those dreaded secularists – whom Romney himself criticized in his off-tune and hugely miscalculated speech on religion in December – were far more likely to vote for him than were the most devout Christians.

It’s tempting to call these voters anti-Mormon bigots. Polls show evangelicals are three times as likely to vote for a black candidate as a Mormon. In the late 1960s, the percentage of Americans who said they would not vote for a Jew was in the teens. By 2000, that number was down to the low single digits. A similar tolerance opened up for Catholics.

After years of stoking the Christianist, End Times fires, the GOP is finally reaping what it has sown; it's thrown away it's best possible presidential candidate in favor of nominating someone who will lose, so a significant part of the base can "show them" how important this Christianists are.

I also largely suspect the leaders of the GOP really want to elect Hillary Clinton. They were never so powerful, or felt as needed, as when they were battling the Clintons, and a rematch probably seems very tempting. A number of articles I read over the weekend suggests the evangelicals want to elect a democrat for 4 years in a repeat of the Carter administration. The idea is that 4 years after that, they'll get a Reagan-like figure.

Of course, history doesn't work that way, but who am I to deny the destiny, power and plan of sky-father?

Least Best

Me: ... and that's probably the least-best option.
Geoff: Dad!
Me: what? it is!
Geoff: No Dad, your grammar is terrible.
Me: What do you mean?
Geoff: You use all these non-grammatical, nonsense phrases like "least-best" and "woman-president..."

Keep It To Yourself

Words to live by.

Or It Could Have a More Prosaic, Less Flattering Explaination

Of course, it could be sheer coincidence that Hillary Clinton showed a rare glimpse of emotion on the day before the New Hampshire primary and again on the day before Super Tuesday.

Ugh. The transparent opportunism is too much even for me. The only way it could be worse is if, afterwards, she turned to the camera and gave a plug for "Crocodile Brand Tears!(tm) Crocodile, when you care enough to pay for the best!"

Join?????? When was he Fired???

I'm in Sydney, where it's always tomorrow, and yet somehow I missed a key piece of news.

Karl Rove, the strategist behind President George W. Bush's ascendancy to the White House, will join Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel as a contributor starting with Super Tuesday, the network said.

I am shocked, just shocked by this compromise of the fourth estate!

Say Anything

Ann Coulter is trying to find relavence in a post-GOP world. I'm going to do her the favor and offer a link, so old time's sake.

It's like finding the kid who won the 100 meter at the Special Olympics and letting him beat you in a race to the kitchen for cookies. You know, just to make him happy.

Your God Delusion Index

Mine is 0, although given the way one of the questions is worded, I could conceivably get as high as 5.
It gets funnier as it goes on, stay in for the punchline.

Waking Baby

Dos and don'ts of child care.

A Failure of Terrorism

This is the most amazing sentiment I've ever seen from the GOP:

Perhaps Giuliani should blame Bush for his campaign’s demise. If Bush had not been so successful in preventing another domestic terrorist attack, Giuliani’s relevance to voters would be painfully obvious, and his deviations from party orthodoxy less compelling. Instead, he and Bush, the two public figures most associated with September 11, will watch from the sidelines as America turns the page.

more here

via

If only we had more terror so that everyone can see the danger of terror!! Too bad it's too unethical (and time consuming) for the GOP to actually cause some, in the public interest of course.

For me, the question I have never heard answered has always been, what did Rudy actually do during 9/11? He was mayor, yes. But it has always seemed to me that the fire and disaster recovery responded as they should to any major emergency, without a lot of prompting from Rudy. Other than being there, I dont know that he actually *did* anything more than anyone else would have done in the same situation.

I'm more than willing to change my mind on this, if someone has some pointers.

Alternative Universe

Korea yesterday and today. After a long day of presentations to an audience that is really only getting every other word we say, the Korea team offered to take us all out for dinner last night. Going out to dinner is a big part of the Korean business culture, so it was not an offer to be refused without it becoming a huge insult, so of course we went.
The team had been talking all day about the restaurant they had chosen, a “western” place since they thought some of our crew didn’t like Korean food. It turns out this is not true, but were not all exactly sure what they would have fed us, so we let them chose something non-Korean. Our (half-serious) joke all day was that it was going to be a “Country and Western” place.
It was not.

After a brief walk from the hotel (at 27F and I only brought clothes for KL and Sydney, like a dolt), we arrive at an Italian place in the building where our offices are located. The front is decorated in taffeta and bottles of red Italian wine, some of it quite good. The night was looking up.

We were seated at a long table, while the twitchy staff buzzed around us like flies on Seabiscuit. Our tables were set with chopsticks and beer steins but, what I had assumed to be bottles of red wine at first, turned out to be 750ml bottles of blended scotch. Odd.
We sat, still anticipating Italian, when generous pitchers of cheap beer arrived and everyone was poured. Okay. Then the shot glasses arrive. “Hmmmm”, I think to myself, “this is going decidedly pear-shaped”. Our “meal” soon come out, a hot steaming plate of what I first feared was tripe, but soon realized was a large plate of brats, sausages and hot dogs. This was followed very shortly by a football sized ball of aluminum foil which was found to contain bits of very spicy Szechwan beef and veggies. The westerns all looked at each other nervously, but there was nothing for it, so we shrugged and began to eat.

I turned to Brian, one of the guys I’m traveling with and said, “We’re sitting in an Italian restaurant, eating German brats, with Japanese beer and chopsticks, what the hell is going on?”
“Maybe they are trying to show us what the world would have looked like if the Allies had lost WWII”

and we havent even started on the scotch yet...

Every Microsoft Concall, Ever