Now that's some recycling I can get behind

Weird statistics

Observe.

Question: how does one end up between Minneapolis and St. Paul on...anything? Isn't this kind of like ending up on a ranked list of characters in Hamlet between Rosencrantz and Gildenstern?

(Oh, you know you liked the quasi-obscure Shakespeare reference, didn't you?...)

Ron Paul grilled on slavery remarks

You know, the truly remarkable part of this interview is less what Paul did or didn't say about slavery but that he's trying to talk about history without engaging in demagoguery and he's challenging preconceived notions of history and policy. This is the reason people like Ron Paul so much and why I, at least, enjoy listening to him. I still think his fundamentally libertarian platform is dangerous, but he genuinely believes in it and argues honestly about his positions, which is admirable and sorely lacking from any other candidate on either side of the isle.

Actually, I take that back...you hear it also from Kucinich and Gravel, but both of them are so weird that it gets lost in the noise. Also, it's more remarkable to hear from the Republican side given most of the Republicans of at least the past 7 years have been...what's the word...idiots. And demagogues.

Well, see, now I want to see all of these

The Most Controversial Films of All Time.

Mmm...criteria-less internet list-tastic...

The French are dumb

We rename side dishes, they ban the use of ubiquitous words because they sound too English-y. And stupidity knows no borders...

The worst movies ever

Care to guess what the worst movie ever is on RottenTomatoes.com's list of worst-reviewed movies? If you guessed "Baby Geniuses 2," you're wrong. Close, but wrong.

Huh...maybe there's something to this Internet thing

You know, I reluctantly have to admit: many of these startups don't seem like half-bad ideas (except the natural language search engine...I tried Ask Jeeves, it sucked, and Google has far more talent than you guys do anyway).

Have a merry fucking Christmas

You'll have the joy and love of the lord in your heart, Michael, or god help me I'll beat it into you!

(wonder why Michael's not too keen on religion at the moment?...)

Also, Merry Christmas. :-D

Peanut butter: an atheist's nightmare!

Apparently the culinary arts continue to pose an enduring threat to those that would foolishly oppose Creationist thinking. First it was the banana, now it's peanut butter.

(Wow. Just...wow.)



This is perhaps a better summary of Creationism:

Presents opening children

It's things like this that allow me to deal with Christmas.

In three days...

I will no longer be forced to go walking in a Winter Wonderland.
I will not have to be subjected to dreams of a White Christmas.
The little drummer boy will STFU.
And the nativity scenes will finally go away.

Oh, it will be blissful...

Overanalyzing stupid Facebook data

From Facebook:

3rd in "Who is more entertaining"
4th in "Who is sexier"
6th in "Who is more organized"
6th in "Who would I rather kiss"
8th in "Who is more powerful"
16th in "Who has a better smile"
21st in "Who is a happier person"

I find so much of that weird. Okay, dead last for "happier person" is downright predictable. Anyone who has met me would struggle to describe me as "peppy." And while mildly flattered that I did as well as 4th in "sexier," I am mystified by the combination of that with 16th for "better smile." Don't get me wrong, I have complained frequently that I have a goofy-ass smile that makes me detest most pictures taken of me, but how does one reconcile the "sexy" with the "detestable facial expressions"? Am I a brown bagger/butterface? Is that it? 'cause I've seen me with my shirt off. It's not pretty, people. I mean, I _am_ a beautiful Adonis of a man, but still...

Update: Found out each of those constituted 1 (or at most 2) comparisons. Statistically insignificant sample, anyone? Come on people! I know you procrastinate! You can do better!

Bill Maher's dickheads of the year

Bill Maher is kind of an asshole, but he's an asshole whose opinions I often agree with. And the commentary in the list is priceless. Case in point:

Sen. David Vitter

"Even more disgusting than Craig. Caught dead to rights as a customer of the D.C. Madam, and explained it away by saying, "Several years ago I received forgiveness from God in confession." Oh, well, all righty then, it's all good, then you're obviously not a disgusting, horrible hypocrite who runs on family values and then fucks whores at home and in Washington."

Being a skeptic for fun and profit

Supposedly haunted Chinese building: $6500
Supposedly haunted Chinese building after haunting has been debunked: $133,000
Look on former owners' faces when they find out their dumb, superstitious asses could have made six figures by removing 10 catfish: priceless.

Fox News: "Want a better sex life? Get pregnant! (We're talking to you, teens!)"

This is the mouthpiece for the same set of people that object to sex education because it will induce teens to have sex, right? And they're saying that women often have their best orgasms when they're pregnant? What kind of message does _that_ send??

What are the writers doing?

Turns out, still writing. But for the intertubes.

Please, for the love of god, stop taking the Bible literally

Jesus. Tapdancing. Christ. Evangelicals are stupid. Wow are they stupid...

Signs you might start worrying about Microsoft's future include

...when the army starts buying macs for security.

Actually, I think the combination of virtual machines (because they allow you to run one OS for backwards compatibility and another OS for newer stuff that actually, you know, works, thus providing a migration path out of Windows) and web applications (because they only need a web browser to work and are much easier to deal with maintenance-wise on the client's side) are the more likely downfall of Microsoft. But that won't happen for a while. 5 years at the very earliest, likely longer.

A quick defense of the anthropic principle

I have touched on the anthropic principle before; a concise metaphor occurred to me while watching a documentary on the formation of the solar system. (aside: did you know that all the water on Earth is believed to have accumulated from rocks displaced from the asteroid belt by Jupiter and hurled at Earth in the early solar system? Or that the moon was formed from the aftermath of a collision with some other nameless proto-planet? Crazy shit...)

Anyway...anthropic principle. Design arguments always seem so...anthropocentric. Narcissistic, even. They claim that the universe seems to be profoundly well-tuned exactly to support life. You start hearing the facts and it starts to sound compelling: tweak the weak nuclear force just a tiny bit, and atoms either collapse on themselves or fly apart. Tweak the gravitational force a bit, and the universe itself does the same thing. The universe has just enough mass, produced just enough carbon, etc. etc. etc.

But then you have to step back. Isn't this all a bit self-centered? Why are we so surprised? Let's use a simple metaphor: Imagine you just won the lottery. 6 numbers, each between 1 and 30. Right there are more than 400 million possible combinations, and YOU WON! Holy shit! How could this be?! 400 million possibilities and you got exactly the single combination that would win you a million dollars?! Surely it can't just be luck. That's so profoundly improbable, someone must have chosen you to win. God! God must have chosen you to win! There can't be any other explanation. God designed the game so that you won! How else could such a fantastically improbable event have come to pass?

See the logical fallacy yet? It feels very personal, but if you step back for a minute, something doesn't jive. Look at the lottery as a whole. Any single number, including the winning one, is highly improbable. But remember: there are millions upon millions of people playing, so _someone_ is going to win. And someone always does. There's always some excited woman with a bad hairdo who goes ballistic when they tell her she won. Every time. And indeed, that's the point: _someone is going to win_. The fact that the chance any single person is going to win is astronomically small doesn't change the fact that someone, somewhere, is going to win the lotto. It is a near certainty.

In fact, wouldn't it surprise you if you heard someone _hadn't_ won? It does happen every so often; they occasionally have to roll over the jackpot, which is when you get those really big lotto drawings. But what if the lotto went 10 times without a winner. Or 100. Wouldn't that freak you out way more than hearing some particular person had won?

Well, of course, the same analysis applies to the Design theory. I've said before that there's no reason to believe all arrangements of physical laws are equally probable, and hence the whole argument is relatively meaningless, but let's pretend for a second. What if bazillions of universes without the finely tuned physical constants existed before this one? Or what if there are other such universes existing in parallel to ours? Remember, a Design argument implicitly presupposes that all such universes are equally viable and, in some sense, equally probable, hence the excitement about being in the one where all the physical constants work out.

So, again, what about all those other universes? Well, there wouldn't be anyone there to see those other universes, now would there? They'd be lifeless voids, most of which would destroy themselves in short order. Not only would there be no life, there'd be no stars and perhaps no anything. Just a whole lot of nothing. Imagine it: a flotilla of parallel universes floating out there, dead. But remember: we know there's one combination of physical laws that does result in life. So somewhere out there, life crops up. On one of those myriad universes floating in that sea of nothingness, exactly the right combination of constants exist to foster life. Suddenly, that life wakes up. It looks around. Its eyes get wide, and it exclaims, "Holy shit! We won! God must really love us!"

Nope. Just probability. Combinatorics. Your little blue globe had to exist somewhere. We're happy for you and all, but it's just another lotto drawing. Someone had to win. And someone did. Yay. You want a cookie?

Generational divide in copyright

The obvious reaction is, "Well, duh."

But, of course, that's simplistic. Or at least, the issue merits further analysis. Why are kids much more willing to brazenly ignore copyright? I think the simplest answer is that they have grown up with modern technology a) that makes it easy to the point of being innate to copy data, and b) for which the instruments of copyright enforcement (i.e., DRM) present a perpetual annoyance and frustration when trying to do simple things like use a song that normally lives on their computer on their mp3 player when they go to the gym.

I honestly don't know what the right answer is when it comes to what public policy should be. As I've said before, I think watermarking, if it worked, would be a better solution than DRM. In general, I'm a big fan of using instruments of accountability for illegal activity over instruments of prevention. Indeed, that's the main problem with music distribution on the Internet. Think about it: when you walk into a toy store, you can play with the toys before you buy them. Hell, you can generally even walk out with them without paying and often get away with it. So why does anybody pay for anything? Partly out of an inner morality, yes, but I think more importantly because they stand to get caught. They, personally, can be seen walking out of the store. They can be caught on video with something they haven't paid for in their hands.

The point is that there's accountability. There ostensibly isn't prevention. It's not like there's a giant magnet that will suck the toy out of your hands. You aren't _prevented_ from doing something illegal (in the same way that your car's accelerator will not prevent you from going more than 65 mph). No, what keeps you from stealing, and what keeps you from speeding, is accountability if you do those things.

Lynne Spears parenting book held up

...for "obvious reasons." What? Why?! Hell, with Ms. Christy McPremaritalSex knocked up, there should be _more_ of a market for the book! Who wouldn't want to read something by a woman who was so deluded that, despite being the mother of two of the most public examples of fucked-up children in the country, she decided to write a book on how to be a good parent? That's fucking _entertainment_ if I ever saw it!

(P.S. Incidentally, no, Lynne is not a worse parent than Britney. Britney drives drunk, runs over people, and thought that Kevin Federline would make a good father. She wins for worse mother.)

Duke Nukem Forever: beyond sad

Oh, this makes me smile.

If you haven't followed video game development for the last, oh, decade, Duke Nukem Forever is notorious. If you haven't heard of it, that's because it doesn't exist. It has notoriously not existed for well over a decade. "Development" started on Duke Nukem Forever in 1997. Right, _that_ 1997. The one in the previous millenium. The one before I graduated from high school. That one.

It's never been released. But it refuses to die. Like a fucking immortal zombie, its decaying stench perpetually permeates the rumor mills. Indeed, a new trailer for it has even cropped up...yet again...in recent months. But don't worry...I have full faith we'll never actually see a real game. I choose to rest my vain hopes on Starcraft 2.

Evangelical hypocrisy

A nice little Washington Post op-ed pointing out the obvious: that Christian politicians aren't behaving like Christians (much like the supposedly Christian KKK members weren't behaving terribly Christian either).

Why Democrats get defensive when accused of being "anti-Christian" or even "anti-religious" is beyond me. The right response is, "We represent mainstream Christianity. You represent a fear-mongering cult that doesn't represent Christian values. Fuck off." Obama has done a little bit of this, but damn...those not on the Religious Right have the most remarkable ability to cede the terms of the debate to the other side.

Ees redeeeculous.

Quotes from my father

"A good Christmas tree should look like a middle-aged hooker."

Anyone who knows my parents knows I am not making that up.

So, are you busy Friday night?

...because we apparently need to have an orgasm at exactly 10:08 PST. For the earth. Or something.

The universe making it absolutely, crystal clear that the Spears family is trailer trash

Yup. 16-year-old sis is preggers. Awesome.

"It was a shock for both of us, so unexpected," Jamie Lynn told OK!, according to the Associated Press. "I was in complete and total shock and so was he."

Okay, you had sex, right? And I'm guessing you used no form of protection? And you're 16? Yeah. No, I can totally see why that would be unexpected...

Update: AH-HAHAHAHAHAhahahaha...

Two words for running tours of Rome

Fuck. That.

The Discovery Institute's talking about the Internet now???

Shit...really? _That_ Discovery Institute? Why are we listening to them?

Oh, and please don't use the term "scholar" and "Discovery Institute" in the same sentence. It physically pains me.

It shouldn't surprise me that the conclusion of Captain ID is that, "...and therefore net neutrality is bad." Incidentally, let me point out before moving on the following passage in the Ars Technica article:

"The first two [of Captain ID's] examples have nothing to do with any sort of commonly-understood concept of 'Net neutrality (neither Google, MySpace, nor Dell are network operators), but one sees what Swanson means."

How typical of Discovery Institute publications: "Well, it's kind of incoherent nonsense, but we can sorta kinda see the point the guy was ineptly trying to make."

First, let's point out that this is just the classic last-mile problem being rehashed. This has nothing to do with the capacity of the Internet itself. It's an economic rather than a technical problem.

Further, it's alarmist horse shit. They make it sound like we will continually need to upgrade wires into everybody's homes. We don't. Install fiber once, and the problem is basically solved, at least for the next few decades. The problem just becomes who is going to pay for the wire. And hey, psst, you know what? If private enterprise is balking at paying for it, we could...*gulp*...get government to do it. It's common infrastructure. That's supposed to be part of what government does. We did it with roads, we did it with electrical wires, and we did it with telephone wires. Why is fiber so different? Government builds the wires and then leases them to ISPs. You get the side benefit of inducing competition in the ISP market. Come on people, it's just not that hard!

If a bunch of schmucks from Utah can do it, I think we can handle the problem, don't you?

Fuck Apple

Despite being a relatively recent Apple convert, they still do things that piss me off. Case in point: if you want to upgrade the amount of RAM in your MacBook Pro, you can either order from Apple, or you can order the same goddamn thing from someone else for almost 1/4 the price.

The fuckers are taking advantage of the fact that people don't know any better to charge a 300-400% markup!

What the hell happened to arbitrage? If free markets worked, shouldn't this shit not happen?

Castro

According to the History channel, we tried to do the following to Castro:

• invade him
• get his girlfriend to give him botulism
  
• get his lawyer to give him a scuba suit infected with not one but two deadly biological agents
• pack a mollusk with enough explosives to kill him
• 634 other weird assassination attempts
  

Man, we're fucking assholes. No wonder that guy is so angry and bitter.

Also, rather unrelatedly, after the Soviet Union launched Laika into space, they launched Belka and Strelka, also dogs. Strelka had puppies after returning to earth, and one of them was named Pushinka. Pushinka was then given to Caroline Kennedy, JFK's daughter, as a gift (inevitably kind of a "fuck you" gift, I have to imagine). Before Caroline could have Pushinka, the CIA had to screen Pushinka to make sure she was not a Soviet spy dog. I have to wonder how that interrogation went.

"WHERE ARE YOUR ALLIANCES?!"

"*turned-head, ears-up, inquisitive doggy look*"

"TALK!"

"Woof!"

"Don't fuck with me, dog! We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way!"

"*licks ass*"

Interestingly, one of JFK's other dogs boned Pushinka, and she had puppies that JFK referred to as pupniks.

Who says you don't learn anything on television?

Business people apparently don't understand English words

What you said:

“Universities don’t innovate,” says Curtis R. Carlson, chief executive of SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, Calif., that bought what remained of RCA’s lab. “Innovation means you get it out so people can use it. The university is not going to take it to the world.”

What you meant:

"While universities do most of the innovation, they tend not to productize. Those innovations don't always turn out to be practical, cheap, scalable, or a thousand other things that a functioning product depends on, particularly in the time horizons that the short attention spans of MBAs like me can wrap their heads around."

We make orders of magnitude less money than you do; the least you could do is give credit where credit is due. You might have heard of a little company called Google? Care to guess whether that innovative little venture came out of a university or not? Want me to send you the list of companies that were started out of Stanford, Berkeley, or UW alone (nevermind MIT, Harvard, etc.)?

What's happening in New Jersey

I'm at a gate in the Newark airport. I sent this email to a friend and thought I'd kill two birds with one stone:

"There are two large, bald black men talking with two police office in front of our gate. I think someone coming off the incoming plane is about to have a very, very bad day...

Also, I just had the _worst_ panini of my entire life, and I paid $7 for it. New Jersey really is the shittiest place on earth!"

Your daily douchebag (12/12/07)

A DD to Representative Steve King (R-IA) for introducing this gem of a House Resolution. Admittedly, it should probably be shared by the entire House for passing such horse shit.

What's the matter, Steve? No more condiments left to rename in the House cafeteria?

Idiots...

A brave new world of social networking

Know what's a really weird sensation? Getting a Facebook friend request from a professor in your department. Gratifying, but weird. :)

...and, I'm back to Firefox

Blogger no likey Safari. It adds weird div tags to everything, and ever time I try to paste something into the blogger window, it appears at the bottom of my screen. Weird.

Plus, Safari seems to crash too. I think it's Flash killing both of them. Take me back, Firefox?

Clinton's earmarks

This LA Times article just makes me detest Clinton and like Obama more. And frankly, I have a proposed rule: anyone who voted to give Bush the power to invade Iraq doesn't get to play in national politics any more. At least not this election cycle.

Your daily douchebag (12/11/07)

What an asshole.

"Abraham said this condition [that he accept the scientific basis of evolution] was never spelled out in the advertisement for the job and that his dismissal led to severe economic losses, an injured reputation, emotional pain and suffering and mental anguish."

I...he...gah! I don't even know where to start. Frankly, I think this sounds like a ploy to me. You can't tell me he didn't know that he might, just might, be expected to apply evolutionary principles in his job at Woods Hole. Anyone competent enough to be hired to work there knows that. I think he got himself hired to provoke them into firing him just to fan the flames of controversy. The fact that he is now employed at Liberty University only confirms this fact, as far as I'm concerned.

More generally, of course, I don't even know what it means to do biological research if you're not using evolutionary theory. It's like doing physics when you question the validity of math. It's a meaningless concept. "Un-evoluationary biology" is roughly equivalent to "pixie-based optics research," and yes, those closed-minded assholes at Caltech are going to "discriminate" against you and your pixie-based theory of light just as well as the guys at Woods Hole are not going to be happy about trying to perform Jesus-based pseudoscience inside their doors.

(Idiots! This country is full of idiots! And I'm trying not to think about the fact that Liberty enjoys tax-exempt status...)

Barbie was a dirty whore

No, seriously, apparently Barbie really did start out as a German whore.

Who knew?

An automated way to turn hormones and desperation into money!

It seems the Turing Test has finally been passed: a robot that can flirt its way into guys' personal information at the rate of 10 an hour!

Have I mentioned what an awesome species we are?

George W. Bush: Still an asshole

Censoring scientific research that didn't agree with his policies?  Check.

Wang! (nsfw)

Predictable

A boy scout leader who was vehemently anti-gay turns out to have molested little boys?!  Why, I never would have guessed!!!

*bangs head against wall*

Will everyone who is vocally homophobic just come out and admit to yourselves and us that you're gay so we can save each other an enormous amount of stress and frustration?  'k thx.

The God Effect

...from the New York Times' list of the most important ideas of 2007.

In case you were wondering, it's shit like this that makes me pessimistic about the salvagability of the human race. We're all just selfish little animals at core. We need either the threat of divine retribution or the threat of social ostracism to induce us to be nice to each other.

What a fucking blight on the earth we are as a species, eh?

And speaking of being basically animals...

Also, from the same article: give up hope. Your happiness depends on it.

Finally, how sadly materialistic are we?

Let them eat OLPC!

Hear, hear! Glad to see someone whose opinion seems to be more valued than mine seems to agree.

The original human tetris video

Several of these have floated around, but this is (or claims to be) the first.

The Original Human TETRIS Performance
Uploaded by NOTsoNOISY

Flux capacitor

I am mildly embarrassed to admit I kinda want one.  Not $200 kinda want one, but kinda want one.

Oh, and while we're at it, I kinda want a TriForce, too...

I'm gonna shut up now...

Signs of the apocalypse

I had a very weird experience yesterday.  I finished my AI final project.  Then I got the weirdest sensation.  It was like...like...a _lack_ of impending doom and panic.  Suddenly, I realized why: I had finished a full two and a half days before the deadline.

WTF.

I became concerned about witnessing other signs of the apocalypse after that.  Luckily, though, all the video footage I had taken over the past two days for the holiday skit on Friday was torn to shreds by a malfunctioning miniDV reader tonight, leaving me essentially no time to reconstruct it.  So, you know, _that's_ good.  I was worried there for a minute things might actually be going well in my life...

What BC stands for

I think I need to have a new tag: physically painful stupidity.

I learned a new word today!

Rickrolled.

A better definition is here.

(you expected me to resist that?  Really?)

"Here comes another bubble"

The state of the business side of tech gives me a headache.

Google now officially terrifies me

What did it?  Well, in my last post, I wrote, "Fuck Yale."  Within an hour, that post showed up in Google search results for "fuck yale."

They're watching us all, aren't they?...

Signs I'm tired and slightly delirious

I just wrote the following in my final AI writeup:

"The results were then filtered to remove relationships involving pronouns in the subject and re-sorted based on the number of supporting instances of the relationship. These were then tagged using a custom web interface by the author as well as trusted members of his friends and family deemed competent to tag the validity of such relationships (i.e., they completed 6th grade in reputable school districts or held at least bachelor degrees if they were trained in institutions of dubious academic merit like Yale)."

Yes, it's staying in there.  Fuck it.  Also, fuck Yale.

Russia votes early and often

Lest you delude yourself into thinking Putin was democratically elected...

Software patent grumble

The more I see stories like this lawsuit against Apple for the iPhone's visual voicemail, the more angry I become at the state of IP law in the United States.

This is stupid.  Anybody can see that.  They're honestly claiming a patent on the ability to touch someone's name and hear a voicemail from that person?  Really?  _That's_ your significant scientific achievement, your innovation?

It's retarded.  You shouldn't be able to patent something any schmuck who has used a computer can think up in the course of having a cup of coffee, for fuck's sake.  Patents were supposed to promote innovation.  Now any time anybody designs any kind of hardware or software at all, they get sued for it.  It's ridiculous.

"I like my women like I like my coffee..."

...hairless?

Venezuelans vote aftermath

...and we have our answer: Yes, Venezuelans are stupid!

You know, after looking at Nazi Germany, Bush's election, and now this shit in Venezuela, I'm really much less keen on the idea of democracy as a means to promote effective government.  It empirically really doesn't seem to do a hell of a lot better than the other options, frankly.  And I'm half-serious here...even a dictator has to maintain his support or, at some point someone will come in and shoot him.  How much different is that from convincing a population to vote to give you whatever powers you want?

I suppose that sentiment is just a rehash of the now-infamous Goering quote:

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Update: I, erm, take it back?

Romney squirms

Wow...two amazing things about this clip:

1. You can watch Romney flip-flop in front of your very eyes in the span of one minute!
2. To see how stupid Huckabee's and Hunter's argument is, pretend for a minute they were talking about black people in the military.  The argument is not one iota different.

Blond...so very blond...

Ow.  Ow ow.  Ow OW fucking ow.  I didn't think stupidity could inflict physical pain, but...OW.

It's suddenly crystal clear how George Bush got elected.

It is immensely entertaining to watch Foxworthy try to maintain a straight face.

Venezuelans vote

Alternative article title: "How stupid are the Venezuelan people?"

Also, doesn't the whole "vilify an external power for political gain" thing sound vaguely familiar?

When things are "false," they are not "in dispute"

A very amusingly concise commentary on the shit Rove is currently trying to pull by Krugman.  (click through his link to understand what he's talking about)