Thursday, November 21, 2013

But it's all Bush's fault!

But it's all Bush's fault!  Reader and friend Simon M. passes along an old urban legend that's been reworked a bit:
Linda Burnett, 23, a resident of San Diego, was visiting her in-laws and while there went to a nearby supermarket to pick up some groceries. Later, her husband noticed her sitting in her car in the driveway with the windows rolled up and with her eyes closed, with both hands behind the back of her head. He became concerned and walked over to the car. He noticed that Linda's eyes were now open and she looked very strange. He asked her if she was okay, and Linda replied that she had been shot in the back of the head and had been holding her brains in for over an hour.

The husband called the paramedics, who broke into the car because the doors were locked and Linda refused to remove her hands from her head. When they finally got in, they found that Linda had a wad of bread dough on the back of her head.

A Pillsbury biscuit canister had exploded from the heat, making a loud noise that sounded like a gunshot, and the wad of dough hit her in the back of her head. When she reached back to find out what it was, she felt the dough and thought it was her brains. She initially passed out, but quickly recovered.

Linda is a blonde, a Democrat, and an Obama supporter, but that could all be a coincidence.

The defective biscuit canister was analyzed and the expiration date was from 2008, so it was determined to be Bush's fault.
I like this version better than the others I've seen over the years :)

ObamaCare debacle update...

ObamaCare debacle update...  Because there's no such thing as too much schadenfreude!

It's really not done yet!  From an article in The Wall Street Journal:
One particular challenge that remains is building a payment system to transfer those subsidies to insurance companies. Mr. Chao said those "financial management" parts of the system aren't needed right away, but officials acknowledged that they must be running by January, when insurers will be expecting the subsidies to start flowing in.
That's a rather fundamental piece he's describing, and it will clearly be a very complex piece of technology – in particular, chock full of security concerns because of the vast amount of money that will be flowing through it.  We're just over a month from when it absolutely has to be working – and they haven't even finished building it yet, much less testing and debugging it.  As an ancient and venerable software guy, I can tell you that's clearly bad, very bad – and Mr. Chao knows it, unless he's a complete idiot.  That means they're spinning and lying to us.  No real surprise there, but you can consider this confirmation...

A yeoman's job, Mr. Taranto is doing.  Writing at The Wall Street Journal, he's clearly been feeling the schadenfreude as he skewers That One's ObamaCare rollout every day.  I loved this line:
"At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals," Klein wrote (as if that were not an intrinsically worthy goal!).
Ha!

They're going to take our money!  Funny how little support socialism gets when people have to actually, like, pay for it.  The tricky part turns out to be making people notice that they're paying for it...

How the GOP should fix ObamaCare. Most of this piece is singing my song...

Too much schadenfreude?  There may come a day when we're enjoying the schadenfreude too much – but today is not that day!

Why youth is revolting against Obama.  ObamaCare is only part of it...

Obama's slow learning curve.  We're paying the price for That One's profound disconnection with the American reality...

Hacker bait.  IT security pros point out an abundance of gaping security holes in healthcare.gov's implementation and design.  The potentially huge financial rewards is already attracting the cockroaches hacker crooks from every dark corner of the globe...

When you've lost Time...   Just look at the current cover!  Oh, my, how far That One has fallen from his lamestream media pedestal...

Poll: 84% of Democrats want ObamaCare changed or repealed.  That's the kind of thing that strikes terror into the hearts of incumbent Democrats up for re-election in 2014.  Is that the sound of rats scurrying I hear?  Why yes, yes it is...

50 to 100 million more cancellations to come.  Just in time for the 2014 elections.  The movement to repeal or significantly change ObamaCare is starting to get the kind of political muscle behind it that it nees.  This will help, immensely...

ObamaCare promotion organizations are also politically involved.  You're not really surprised by this, are you?  Project Veritas is shining sunlight on a shady and bad-smelling place...

Will we ever get our $2B back?  Looks like the answer is probably “no”.  Taxpayers have lent ObamaCare promotional groups nearly two billion dollars.  There's no evidence to date that these organizations have been effective, or that they will be – and even less evidence that taxpayers will be paid back.  Now Sebelius and the HHS are stonewalling investigating Congressmen.  Sound familiar? 

When even California won't go along with your socialist program...   There's a message here for That One's administration, though I doubt anyone there is paying attention...

The Bush Team fights back.  John Yoo was a member of G.W. Bush's Justice Department.  His piece on Fox News today is a scathing indictment of That One's responses to the ObamaCare rollout debacle, and specifically directs scorn at the comparisons some on the left are making with Katrina.  An excerpt:
Bush’s second term ran aground because he failed to use the president’s powers effectively in the very setting for which they were created.  He eventually recovered with the surge in Iraq, a brave decision that showed the presidency at its best.

Obama is hitting the shoals for the exact opposite reason. ObamaCare’s collapse does not result from an act of nature or the attacks of a foreign enemy.  Instead, it is a perversely self-inflicted, man-made disaster that replaced the efficiency of the private markets with the tangle, confusion, and ideological bias of government bureaucracy.

By suspending the insurance mandate for a year, Mr. Obama does not use the powers of the presidency to protect the nation from unforeseen events.  He instead uses the executive to protect the American people from himself and his signature policy.

Every time he waives yet another ACA regulation, Mr. Obama blocks himself from acting and allows the return of the private market that existed before his election.

The Framers never vested the presidency with great powers for such purposes. To avoid responsibility for his policies, Mr. Obama must violate his constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

According to long practice, a president may selectively choose the cases to prosecute because the federal government does not have the limitless resources needed to chase down every violation of the laws.

But the executive power over prosecution does not allow a president to refuse to simply enforce all cases under a law. That amounts to a suspension power that the Framers consciously rejected by including the Take Care Clause in Article II of the Constitution. 

Our QE addiction...

Our QE addiction...  Forbes: Bernanke Fed has no clue how to taper QE without tanking the markets.  Gulp...

Curiosity's “Seven minutes of terror”...

Curiosity's “Seven minutes of terror”: the backstory...

Tal Golesworthy is my kind of engineer!

Tal Golesworthy is my kind of engineer!  If you have a heart condition that requires terrifyingly risky surgery with questionable benefits to fix, what do you do?  If you're a real engineer, you'll design something better, of course!  And that's exactly what Tal Golesworthy did – plus he was the first to receive the new treatment.  That was five years ago, and he's still going strong.

All that, and an awesome name to boot!

The viola organista...

The viola organista...  This was completely new to me – an instrument designed (but apparently never built) by Leonardo da Vinci.  It's been built and has had its concert debut (video at left). 

The viola organista is a string instrument that sounds much like a cello, but it's played like a piano.  It's full of moving parts, and acoustically it's quite sophisticated.

Awesome!

The Gipper's rules for negotiation...

The Gipper's rules for negotiation...  As relayed by George Schulz, writing in today's Wall Street Journal:
1. Be realistic; no rose-colored glasses. Recognize opportunities when they are there, but stay close to reality.

2. Be strong and don't be afraid to up the ante.

3. Develop your agenda. Know what you want so you don't wind up negotiating from the other side's agenda.

4. On this basis, engage. And remember: The guy who is anxious for a deal will get his head handed to him.
I have zero confidence that That One's administration is following any of these rules...

The Middle East muddle...

The Middle East muddle...  There's a great (and short) summary of Middle Eastern tensions on Strategy Page...

Apollo data recovered from tape backup after more than 40 years...

Apollo data recovered from tape backup after more than 40 years...  If you're in IT, you know that's a small miracle right there :)  Scientists have now analyzed this old data to figure out the rate of dust deposition on the moon – and it's much faster than expected...

Geek: the sounds of sorting...

Geek: the sounds of sorting...  This little bit of geekly entertainment is the most fun with sort algorithms I've had in a long, long time.  It's not just entertainment, either – the visualizations are a great aid to understanding how the algorithms work.  Much more detail here and here.  Kudos to these folks for a great visualization (with audio, too)!

In my youth, while in the U.S. Navy, I spent a great deal of time implementing and tuning one particular sorting algorithm: merge sort.  We had log data captured during the Vietnam war, produced by the NTDS system I maintained, that was (of course!) in linear time order.  We needed that data to be ordered by various other things, such as by target.  The data was far too large to fit into the computer's very limited memory; it was stored on tape.  I had the job of figuring out how to sort that data, using the four tape drives attached to the computer.  The best answer was a merge sort.  I remember that my first implementation took over a day to run, which was dangerously close to the average up-time of the system (computers back in those days were not very reliable!).  After weeks of tuning, I managed to get that down to “just” a couple of hours.  Most of my performance gain came from figuring out how to use multiple computers to increase the amount of (relatively fast) computer memory I had available.  That turned out to be a career-changer, as I was sorting the data faster on a deployed ship than the big data center in the Philippines could do it.  I ended up being helicoptered from my ship to the USS Enterprise, and from their flown on a COD to Subic Bay, where I taught the data center folks how to do it.  They had lots more computers than my ship had, so their implementation ended up being much faster.  After that incident my job shifted from primarily being a hardware repair guy to being a programmer...

Ospreys delivering aid in the Philippines...

Ospreys delivering aid in the Philippines...  Not the osprey bird, the U.S. Marines' tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey transport plane.  This is a chance for the controversial aircraft and their crews to show their stuff.  Their U.S. Marines stuff.  Go, Marines!

Oopsie!

Oopsie!  A 747 belonging to Boeing lands at the wrong airport

Whenever I see a story like this (and they're not actually all that infrequent), I wonder: how does the pilot ever live this down?  And it's got to be worse for a Boeing pilot...

Welfare states...

Welfare states...  Many believe that the real agenda of the warmists is to use AGW as a pretext for a massive redistribution of wealth from richer nations to poorer nations.  Anyone holding that suspicion saw the demand for $100B in annual payments from rich nations to poor nations at the U.N. climate talks as validation, or even proof.  But now the poor nations have been rebuffed; their demand denied, and they've left the talks.

Personally, I think the notion that such transfers would actually mitigate the effects of AGW (even if there is AGW) is absurd.  One of the major reasons countries are poor is their political systems are blocking prosperity for all but the thugs at the top.  Like other cash foreign aid, the vast majority of it would be siphoned off to enrich those thugs.  Hell, even the food we send to North Korea is mostly being siphoned off!

My twin brother did it!

My twin brother did it!  That sounds like something out of a movie plot, but it's actually happening...