Amazing Grace...

Some beautiful music...

Dorothy and the...

Via Marsha Y., this punny perversion of Baum's iconic phrase:

So, there's this yellow toad wandering around in the forest kinda pissed off because he doesn't want to be yellow. Life would be easier if he were brown like the other toads.. He'd sure be less visible to predators for one thing.
 
Anyway... this yellow toad bumps into a fairy godmother. He begs her: "Fairy godmother, please make me brown like the other toads. I am tired of being so visible to predators and such."
 
The fairy godmother whips out her magic wand and says "Abracapokus!  You're brown!"
 
The toad looks down and sees that he is brown except for his package, which is still yellow. He says to the fairy godmother: "Wait a minute! My pecker's still yellow!"
 
To this the fairy godmother replies: "I don't do johnsons. You will have to go see The Wizard of Oz for that."
 
The toad thanks her and hops off on his way.
 
There is also a purple bear wandering about the very same woods. As luck would have it, he encounters the very same fairy godmother. He implores her: "Fairy godmother, please make me brown like the other bears. None of the lady bears want to be seen with me on account of the hunters can spot me from a mile off."
 
She, being a nice fairy godmother, takes out her magic wand and says: "Pokuscadabra! You're brown!" The bear looks down and sees that he is, in fact, brown with the exception of the ole twig and berries, they remain purple. He says: "My wang is still purple!"
 
She says: "I don't do units, you will have to go see The Wizard of Oz for that."
 
To this the bear replies: "Well that's just dandy, but how the hell do I find The Wizard of Oz?"
 
The fairy godmother answers: "That's easy... just follow the yellow dick Toad!"

This pun's for you, pater...

Very Cute...

Italian Bread...

Via my mom:

Two old guys, one 80 and one 87, were sitting on their usual park bench one morning.

The 87 year old had just finished his morning jog and wasn't even short of breath.

The 80 year old was amazed at his friend's stamina and asked him what he did to have so much energy.

The 87 year old said, "Well, I eat Italian bread every day.  It keeps your energy level high and you'll have great stamina with the ladies."

So, on the way home, the 80 year old stops at the bakery.  As he was looking around, the lady asked if he needed any help.

He said, "Do you have any Italian bread?"

She said, "Yes,  there's a whole shelf of it. Would you like some?"

He said, "I want 5 loaves."

She said, "My goodness, 5 loaves .... by the time you get to the 5th loaf, it'll be hard."

He replied, "I can't believe it, everybody knows about this shit but me."

Dribbling Teapots: Solved...

Scientists have solved the pressing problem of dribbling teapots.

French scientists.

Just sayin'...

Saturn at Equinox...

A spectacular photo collection, taken by Cassini in the Saturn system.

There's more science in this web page than in the entire history of the International Space Station.

For less than 1% of the cost...

Strange Factoid of the Day...

I can't even come up with a theory about this one.

The chart at right shows the average credit score for people with email addresses at various Internet domains.  For instance, if your email address is crazy_pecan@aol.com, then you'd be counted in the AOL domain.

Someone at CreditKarma came up with this study.  Why they would look at this correlation is just as interesting a question as the results of it.

Why on earth should people with a Yahoo email address have a (much) lower credit score than those with a BellSouth email address?  I have no idea.

Anyone got a theory?

Update:

My friend Doug W. (a clear thinker who is mathematically inclined) says, in effect, “Move along, there's nothing to see here!”  His explanation, which makes sense to me, though I certainly didn't catch it at first:

I’m not convinced there’s anything real here. My first gut feeling is that it’s a distribution to be expected, but there just isn’t enough info to draw any conclusions. For example, what is the standard deviation of credit scores? The range here is not that large, and they don’t say how many samples there are from each domain. Let’s take a simple model, which is probably wrong but illustrative nonetheless. There are 7 domains listed, and a total of 20,000 credit scores, so suppose that there are ~3000 per domain (certainly it isn’t evenly distributed, but the results wouldn’t chance much). The expected standard deviation given N samples is about sqrt(N), or 1/sqrt(N) as a fraction. So, for 3000 samples, you’d expect about 1/54 ~= 2% as a std deviation. So you’d expect 95% of samples to be within ~4% of the mean. If the mean is 665, and the std deviation is 15, then everything is exactly as you’d expect.

Vote Carefully...

Another via my mom:

John was in the fertilized egg business in Alabama. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called 'pullets,' and ten roosters to fertilize the eggs. He kept records, and any rooster not performing went into the soup pot and was replaced.

This took a lot of time, so he bought some tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone, so he could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing. Now, he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report by just listening to the bells.

John's favorite rooster, Ol' Bama, was a very fine specimen, but this morning he noticed Ol' Bama's bell hadn't rung at all!

When he went to investigate, he saw the other roosters were busy chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing, but the pullets, hearing the roosters coming, could run for cover. To John's amazement, Ol' Bama had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring.

He'd sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one.

John was so proud of Ol' Bama, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges. The result was the judges not only awarded Ol' Bama the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pullet Surprise as well.

Clearly Ol' Bama was a politician in the making. Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren't paying attention.

Vote carefully next year, the bells are not always audible.

The Cash Cow...

Via my mom:

Lemon Picker...

Via my lovely wife:

A woman applying for a job in a Florida lemon grove seemed to be far too qualified for the job.

The foreman frowned and said, "I have to ask you this; "Have you ever had any actual experience in picking lemons?"
 
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have!" she replied. "I've been divorced three times and I voted for Obama."

Let's not do it a fourth time...

If It Looks Like a Duck...

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...