How's that Hopey-Changey Thing Going?

Not so well, apparently.  Gallup reports that Obama's approval ratings have slipped by nine percentage points.

Oh, well.  Just nine points.  Not so bad, really.

Except that it's the biggest slip in Presidential ratings that Gallup has ever measured...

Business Failure Fail...

So you start a little espresso shop of your own, in a town that has Tim Horton and McDonald's locations.  Those chains capture most of the trade, and eventually your little business falters and dies.  Your shop closes, the signs come down, and you're looking for work.  But wait – your web site is still there.

So you leave a little message for your customers...

What a maroon!

Fast Inverse Square Root...

If you're not a geeky math type, there's nothing to see here.  Move along.

Wikipedia has a very readable article on the fast inverse square root algorithm that I first heard about in Doom's graphics engine.  Turns out its roots go back a bit further than I'd thought.

This is a great example of a phenomenon that has largely disappeared: clever, small algorithms that found very fast ways to make difficult (and ordinarily, time-consuming) computations.  The need for these algorithms has faded away with the development of ever more powerful computing platforms.  The inverse square root is now a single clock cycle computation on gigahertz graphics CPUs, with pipelined multiple cores reducing the effective cost even further. 

The need for these clever algorithms hasn't completely disappeared – you'll still find them in things like cryptographic systems, compression, etc.  But these are far more complex algorithms than something like an inverse square root.

In my earliest days as an engineer, in the late '70s or early '80s (I forget which!), I remember working with a company here in San Diego that had a product needing 16 bit pseudo-random numbers.  One of the principal engineers there had developed a teensy little algorithm – just a few lines of assembly language – that did the job for them.  Nobody there knew how or why this algorithm worked (despite its simplicity!).  All they really knew was that (a) it passed all their testing, and (b) it was very, very fast.  This made it quite valuable to them.

Today one can find many off-the-shelf pseudo-random number generators, some of them well-understood and documented.  They're all vastly faster than the one that firm was so proud of, and fast enough (on modern hardware) for all but the most unusual, demanding applications.

That story has been repeated many times, and one consequence of it is that these days it's actually a little unusual to find a software engineer (especially a younger one) who spends much time thinking about algorithmic efficiency at all.  Most of the time, this makes no difference at all – in fact, I suspect it makes these engineers produce better code in less time (optimization is a notorious complexity adder). 

But I can't help but pine (a little bit) for the days when even the most pedestrian accounting application could be made visibly more responsive through the work of a clever software engineer who could squeeze more computational power out of the slow computers of the day...

Listen...

Dedicated to my parents and my mother-in-law:

Ad for a Tea Party...

It does the best job I've seen yet of capturing the emotional state of those people motivated to participate.  Artifacts like this give me some hope for a ballot box revolution in 2010.  Via my mom:

My Kind of AARP...

Via my mom:

California, the Nanny State...

Looks like California is about to mandate low-transmissivity glass in cars.  This glass lets much less of the sun's energy through the windows, resulting in less heating of the car, thus resulting in less need for the fuel-hungry air conditioner.

Sounds good, right?

Well, this is the government at work – you should know better!  There are two major problems with the bill (which Schwarzenegger has already said he'd sign):

1. The glass is mandated for all automobiles under 10,000 pounds.  Not just cars with air conditioning.  It even applies to vehicles like jeeps with roll-up windows.
2. The low-transmissivity glass also impedes high-frequency radio waves, such as those used by cell phones, satellite radios, garage door openers, and electronic toll tokens.

Top-down central planning is fraught with such problems; this is just one more example of how such planning works very poorly.  But here we are, doing it again.

In 2010, these neo-socialists must go...

The Imperial Administration...

The Humana insurance company recently had the temerity to tell its subscribers that Obama's proposals were likely to raise their costs.  The Obama administration immediately slapped a (highly illegal) gag order on them.  Now comes this:

In its Friday ruling, Medicare slapped Humana on the wrist for disseminating information that it claimed was "misleading to beneficiaries"—even though it was perfectly true—but also lifted the gag order. Insurers will be allowed to communicate with enrollees, provided they get permission. This is basically a concession that the critics are right, especially considering that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius defended the policy as recently as two weeks ago while refusing to answer questions about this raw political coercion from a supposedly impartial federal bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the Administration is now threatening to strip the insurance industry of its decades-long exemption from antitrust law. This would blow a hole in the industry's profitability, as would ObamaCare for different reasons. The industry now faces a choice of playing ball with Democrats and getting punished, or trying to defeat the bill and being brutalized as an act of political revenge. This is the industry's reward for spending millions to promote "reform" in the hopes of not becoming a political target. It's still a target, and now it's poised to lose the policy fight too.

I hate to say it, but this sort of high-handed shenanigans feels an awful lot like Hugo Chavez' blatant manipulations...

Anatomy of a Smear...

The new book SuperFreakonomics has been slammed by the global warmenists as, well, a pack of lies.  One of the authors strikes back with a post about the anatomy of the smear, in (of all places!) the New York Times.  Recommended read...

Conditions for Life on Europa...

New discoveries about Jupiter's moon Europa:

New research suggests that there is plenty of oxygen available in the subsurface ocean of Europa to support oxygen-based metabolic processes for life similar to that on Earth. In fact, there may be enough oxygen to support complex, animal-like organisms with greater oxygen demands than microorganisms.

The global ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa contains about twice the liquid water of all the Earth’s oceans combined. New research suggests that there may be plenty of oxygen available in that ocean to support life, a hundred times more oxygen than previously estimated.

The chances for life there have been uncertain, because Europa’s ocean lies beneath several miles of ice, which separates it from the production of oxygen at the surface by energetic charged particles (similar to cosmic rays). Without oxygen, life could conceivably exist at hot springs in the ocean floor using exotic metabolic chemistries, based on sulfur or the production of methane. However, it is not certain whether the ocean floor actually would provide the conditions for such life.

Read it all.  It sounds like something from a science-fiction novel...

Just for Java Geeks...

IntelliJ's IDEA (my favorite Java IDE) has gone open source.  Woo hoo!

Robot Arms...

Here's something from over a year ago, but new to me: Dean Kamen talking about the prosthetic arms he's developed for injured veterans.  If you're into technology at all, then you already know who Dean Kamen is – the Thomas Edison of our time.   This invention of his is both amazing and heartwarming.  You'll need kleenex for some of the video...

Yikes!

Absolutely fascinating animated visualization of job losses and gains over the past 5 years or so.  The end of this animation is enough to make your hair stand on end (if, unlike me, you have much of that commodity left)...

Bullets, at a Million Frames/Second...

Dinosaur Doom...

For years now, scientists have believed that at least one of the major dinosaur extinctions was caused by a giant meteorite strike.  The leading candidate was one that struck Mexico.  Now they've found another crater, off the coast of India, that might be an even better candidate.

The Nuclear Option...

Ever since Obama's election, the Senate Democrats have been threatening to use the “nuclear option” to pass bills they badly want, even though the Republicans have enough seats to filibuster it.  Now it's looking like they're getting ready to actually do it, on the healthcare bill:

A key House committee on Thursday quietly altered its health care legislation in a way that could allow the Senate to mow over Republican opposition to Democratic reforms by exploiting a budgetary loophole.

The Ways and Means Committee adjusted its health care overhaul package so that the Senate, down the road, could avoid a filibuster and pass health care reform with a smaller number of votes than normally required.

The long-discussed process, nicknamed the "nuclear option," is known as reconciliation. It's coming into potential play after the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday became the last of five committees to approve health care reform legislation, sending the overhaul proposals a big step closer to the president's desk. Before it gets there, though, the bill has to pass from the committees to the floors of the House and Senate.

Under the normal process, senators can filibuster almost anything and the debate would only be cut off if at least 60 lawmakers vote to do so. For that reason, 60 is considered the magic number in the quest to pass health care reform out of the Senate.

But under reconciliation, typically used in the budget process, no filibusters are permitted and a bill can pass with just a simple majority.

So is this a dirty trick, an example of “cheating” on the part of the Democrats?  Not really, though you'll find plenty of people shouting that it is.  In fact, what they're doing is perfectly allowable under the bizarre rules of the Senate.  This kind of gamesmanship is something that Robert Byrd is (justifiably) famous for.  The real reason for all the screaming is that the Democrats are declaring their willingness to violate an informal understanding that has held for decades, but it is not an actual part of the rules.  What they're doing is actually quite democratic: they're allowing a majority vote to win the day.

Whether this is a good idea is an entirely different question than whether it's legal.  Once the Democrats violate this informal understanding, then there's a new informal understanding – and it will be there, inevitably, when the Democrats lose power and the Republicans regain it.  At that time the Democrats may well regret their decision...

Fascinating Visualization...

For the past year or so we've all been inundated by a never-ending series of gigantic financial numbers – $300B for this, $750B for that, $1.2T for that.  Getting any sort of understanding about these numbers is challenging; I, for one, will take any help I can get.

So when I saw this graphic, I found it instantly appealing.  By visualizing the relative amounts of money as different sized colored polygons, the authors have put the data in a form that our brains can easily digest.

Take a tour!  And check out the whole site -- it's full of interesting visualizations like this...

The Ant and the Grasshopper...

One of Aesop's fables is “The Ant and the Grasshopper”.  Most of us over a certain age learned about this fable in school, or perhaps even read it as an adult.  Wikipedia summarizes the original fable like this:

The fable concerns a grasshopper who has spent the warm months singing away while the ant (or ants in some editions) worked to store up food for winter. When winter arrives, the grasshopper finds itself dying of hunger, and upon asking the ant for food is only rebuked for its idleness. The story is used to teach the virtues of hard work and saving, and the perils of improvidence. Some versions of the fable state a moral at the end, along the lines of: "Idleness brings want", "To work today is to eat tomorrow" or "It is best to prepare for the days of necessity".

My mom came across a slightly updated version:

The ant  works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and  starving.

CBS, NBC ,  PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of  the shivering grasshopper  next to a video of the ant  in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America  is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How  can this be, that in a country of such wealth,  this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green.'

Acorn stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group  singing, 'We shall overcome.'  Rev. Jeremiah Wright then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper,  and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the  beginning of the summer.

The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government  Green Czar.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he doesn't maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

Moral of the modern version? 

Be careful how you vote next year.

Amen to that!

Oldie But Goodie...

Via my mom.  I couldn't figure out who originally said or wrote this.  Recently it's been attributed to a contest at Texas A & M, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong.

In any case, here it is – the definition of “political correctness”:

Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Go Ahead, Ram It...

Great sign, seen at a tea party.  Via my cousin Mike D.