JamulBlog

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Inspirational Moment...

This video appears to be a promotional for an outfit called DDP Yoga, and that outfit is the subject of some criticism on the intertubes. Whether this man's results were due to DDP Yoga, however, is irrelevant to the inspiring story:

McIntyre Got Some of His FOI Information...

...and it's obvious that East Anglia and its cabal of warmists were diddling the data to get the notorious “hockey stick”. Mr. McIntyre was right all along. When the rest of his FOI data is forthcoming, I suspect we'll see this in even more detail. Steve McIntyre's detailed analysis is online, of course, 'cause that's how the dude rolls. Unlike the “professional scientists” who treat him with such contempt...

Bertrand Russell's Ten Commandments...

Bertrand Russell is probably best known as a philospher and mathematician, but he was many other things as well. In his autobiography, he has a section he calls A Liberal Decalogue – essentially, a set of ten commandments for teachers. As I read them, it occurred to me that they were an equally valuable guide for scientists (who are, after all, teachers of a rather special kind). Then it further occurred to me that they were a concise illustration of what's wrong with climate science today. Cherish them:

Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

A little googling around the intertubes shows that I am far from the first person to make this connection. Late to the party, as usual!

Excellent XML and PERL Rants...

I've not run across Erik Naggum's web site before, but in searching for a coherent argument about the evils of XML I ran across his excellent rant on the topic (political components aside). Then poking around, I found another excellent rant about the execrable programming language PERL. A most satisfying find, I must say...

On C++

I try very hard to never be in a position that requires me to program in the C++ language again – I've had far more than my share of struggles with that blight upon the programming world. So you can imagine my amusement in running across these quotes:

When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.

Steve Haflich in alt.lang.design, December 1994

Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using rocks to sharpen sticks.

Thant Tessman in comp.lang.scheme, December 1996

Of course SML does have its weaknesses, but by comparison, a discussion of C++'s strengths and flaws always sounds like an argument about whether one should face north or east when one is sacrificing one's goat to the rain god.

Thant Tessman in comp.lang.scheme, April 1997

As for C++ – well, it reminds me of the Soviet-era labor joke: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” C++ pretends to provide an object-oriented data model, C++ programmers pretend to respect it, and everyone pretends that the code will work. The actual data model of C++ is exactly that of C, a single two-dimensional array of bits, eight by four billion, and all the syntactic sugar of C++ fundamentally cannot mask the gaping holes in its object model left by the cast operator and unconstrained address arithmetic.

Guy L. Steele: Objects have not failed. OOPSLA 2002

Water Wings Won the Cold War...

Well, not directly. But apparently the wily Mao used water wings (amongst other things) to humiliate Khrushchev during his state visit to China in 1958. The fallout from this meeting changed the course of the Cold War by making the Sino-Soviet split permanent:

The results of the talks were felt almost immediately. Khrushchev ordered the removal of the USSR’s advisers, overruling aghast colleagues who suggested that they at least be allowed to see out their contracts. In retaliation, on Khrushchev’s next visit to Beijing, in 1959, Taubman relates, there was “no honor guard, no Chinese speeches, not even a microphone for the speech that Khrushchev insisted on giving, complete with accolades for Eisenhower that were sure to rile Mao.”

Suppose, just suppose, Mao had been welcoming to Khushchev in 1958. How would our world be different today?

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Life of Julia: Some Other Perspectives...

The Obama campaign's Life of Julia is starting to look more and more like one of those exploding Acme cigars. Two people with slightly different views and predictions, here and here...

Fauxahontas...

That's Mark Steyn's styling in his take-down of Elizabeth Warren and Harvard University over the former's claiming to be Indian (as in “native American”) while employed at the latter. Here's an excerpt:

So did the University of Texas, and the University of Pennsylvania. With the impertinent jackanapes of the press querying the bona fides of Harvard Lore School's first Native American female professor, the Warren campaign got to work and eventually turned up a great-great-great-grandmother designated as Cherokee in the online transcription of a marriage application of 1894.

Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have – hang on, let me get out my calculator – duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother's wedding license application. And now it's here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren's memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams From My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran'ma as Cherokee, but let's cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn't be black. She would if she could, but she couldn't. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind – "people who are like I am," 31/32nds white – and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America's melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

Just in case you're having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite-Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich's Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it's the other way round. Progress!

Do go read the whole thing...

Obama's Escape Clause...

Michael Mukasey was the U.S. Attorney General in the last George W. Bush term. In Monday's WSJ he had a column (which I just read this morning) laying into Obama for his unseemly grabbing of credit for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But he also revealed something else, even more despicable: Obama had prepared a way to blame the military if there was any failure in this incredibly high-risk mission. Mukasey:

A recently disclosed memorandum from then-CIA Director Leon Panetta shows that the president's celebrated derring-do in authorizing the operation included a responsibility-escape clause: "The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven's hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out."

The contrasts here with the famously different leadership style of Eisenhower and Lincoln are obvious, and (I hope!) familiar to most.

Shame and embarrassment. That's what I feel right now...

Unemployment Down and Up...

I've and others been railing about the government's extremely misleading “unemployment rate” numbers, which the lamestream media generally parrots without comment. For April, this published number dropped slightly to 8.1%. However, the actual number of people who are unemployed climbed substantially. How can this be? Why, through the magic of blatant statistics manipulation, of course. Bruce McQuain has a nice explanation, and also raises a related point about older workers.

But a funny thing seems to be happening on the way to the November elections. The lamestream media is belatedly paying attention to this manipulation. A few newspapers and reporting organizations talking about this may not seem like a big deal, but...they haven't been doing so heretofore, and we're in the runup to the 2012 Presidential election. Somehow I don't think this is a good omen for Obama.

Which is just fine with me, of course...

Friday, May 4, 2012

A Suggestion for the Obama Campaign...

The Obama campaign recently selected their official 2012 slogan: “Forward”. We respectfully suggest this graphic to go along with their lovely new slogan:

GIMP 2.8 is Released!

GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program, the free open source image editing software) 2.8 is the long-awaited next major upgrade. It (finally!) includes “single window” mode, which many people (including me) prefer over the current user interface. It also includes many improvements to the underlying image manipulation algorithms, including some support for higher color depths (24/32 bits).

Unfortunately for me, the Mac OS ports aren't yet released, so I haven't been able to actually try it...

Cats and Dolphins, Playing Together...

Via my mom: a cat and some dolphins, playing together (not embeddable, sorry)...

Manure Spreader for Sale...

Via reader Jim M.:

FIFTY YEAR OLD MANURE SPREADER - $1 (WASHINGTON, D.C.)

Fifty-year old manure spreader. Not sure of brand. Said to have been produced in Kenya. Used for a few years in Indonesia before being smuggled into the US via Hawaii. Of questionable origin. Does not appear to have ever been worked very hard. Apparently it was pampered by various owners over the years. It doesn't work very often, but when it does it can really spread the manure and sling it for amazing distances. I am hoping to retire this manure spreader this November.

But I really don't want it hanging around getting in the way. I would prefer a foreign buyer that is willing to relocate this manure spreader out of the country. I would be willing to trade this manure spreader for a nicely framed copy of the United States Constitution.

Location: White House, Washington, D.C.

More Evidence for Liquid Water on Mars...

And the evidence comes via the plucky Mars rover “Opportunity”, currently exploring the Endeavour Crater. It's now eight years into it's 90 day mission...

The Life of Julia...

I just read an apt metaphor for the repeated mistakes of the Obama campaign, but I'm not sure who to attribute it to – it's been picked up by numerous sites with conflicting attribution. The metaphor: the ACME exploding cigar. Obama's campaign team keeps buying (and lighting) another of those cigars every few days. Most recently we had their exposure of the Romney “dog on the roof” incident morphing into “Obama ate dogs” (boom!), and their pointing out that Romney's grandfather lived in a community known to include polygamists morphing into the disclosure that just about every male in Obama's lineage except Obama himself (so far as we know) actually was a polygamist (boom!). As noted below, Obama's recent speeches taking personal credit for the Obama raid are looking like perhaps another ACME cigar.

And here's yet another. Still up on Obama's campaign site is The Life of Julia. It's an almost unbelievably blatant piece of propaganda supporting the entitlement mentality state. The more I look at it, the angrier I get – and it's not just me. This deserves to be another ACME cigar, and I see some buzz building on it, so maybe it will.

Another thing occurs to me as I look at The Life of Julia: it's a great illustration of the gulf between those with the entitlement mindset and those without it. I'd be willing to bet you that a great many people read this and say to themselves “Yes, that's right! That's how it should be! I'm voting for that Obama guy, 'cause he gets it!” Other people (like me!) read it and say “What the hell is wrong with these people? Are they missing some essential gray matter or what?” People in the first group, with that entitlement mindset, dominate Greece today – and are majorities in other European countries. They don't yet dominate here in America. Whether they're the majority here or not will be measured to some extent this coming November...

Obama Pissed Off the Wrong Guys...

Many Navy SEALs and other Special Forces “operators” are quite unhappy about the way that Obama is publicly taking credit (“spiking the football”) for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. They're discomfited by the unseemly braggidocio, and they feel endangered by some of the public disclosures that have been made. Now there's an ad (below) being aired expressing this anger, and some SEALs and “operators” are signing up to take their reaction to the public.

This is one group of people I wouldn't think the Obama campaign managers would want to have agitating against them. But they've gone and pissed them off royally, and it's shaping up like Kerry's “SWIFT boating” all over again...