SEALs: Obama Has a “Trust Deficit”

Great New Romney Ad...

Amen, Brother...

Via Bruce Kesler at Maggie's Farm:

A man on his Harley was riding along a California beach when suddenly the sky clouded above his head and, in a booming voice, God said, 'because you have tried to be faithful to me in all ways, I will grant you one wish.'

The biker pulled over and said, 'Build a bridge to Hawaii so I can ride over anytime I want.'

God replied, 'Your request is materialistic; think of the enormous challenges for that kind of undertaking; the supports required reaching the bottom of the Pacific and the concrete and steel it would take! I can do it, but it is hard for me to justify your desire for worldly things. Take a little more time and think of something that could possibly help mankind.'

The biker thought about it for a long time. Finally, he said, 'God, I wish that I, and all men, could understand women; I want to know how she feels inside, what she's thinking when she gives me the silent treatment, why she cries, what she means when she says nothing's wrong, why she snaps and complains when I try to help, and how I can make a woman truly happy.

God replied: ‘You want two lanes or four on that bridge....?"

Amen, brother...

A Fine Rant...

Dave Carter, one of my favorite regulars over at Ricochet, has a fine rant about Obama today.  He concludes with this sub-rant about the significance of this particular election:

This election, certainly the most significant in our lifetime, is not about "revenge," as the President so boorishly announced, nor is it about moronic thugs holding their pants up long enough to threaten riots. It's about 9,000 coal mining jobs lost in the last month alone. It's about 48 million people on food stamps, and 23 million people unemployed. It's about a work force that is smaller now than when Barack Obama was inaugurated. It's about a 14.3 percent unemployment rate in the black community. It's about a new IRS requirement that will take effect in 2014, requiring all taxpayers, in the words of sworn testimony, to, "…file their tax returns reporting their health insurance coverage, and/or making a payment." It's about the evisceration of our national defense and, in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, troops who no longer trust their commander in chief.
AngryAmericanFreedom

It is ultimately a referendum on us, and it's about what kind of country our children and grandchildren will inherit. It's about whether they will be free men and women, freedom here being defined differently than the progressive's definition which stipulates that one must be freed from want or fear through the dictates of centralized planners. History, however, shows that the only path to liberation from want or fear is the path of individual sovereignty. Those in the northeast who chose the liberal path now go hungry, and cold, and fearful, while their government masters flail about, desperately seeking to free the private sector from the onerous rules and obstacles that they imposed. We see now what the Founders knew over two centuries ago; that free people and free markets are the surest means to freedom from want and fear, and that centralized government control over a nation is the surest path to despair, want, fear, and servitude. It's about Liberty. It's about We the People, endowed with unalienable rights, being the masters of our lives and our government instead of the other way around. It's time to reclaim the American ideal.

Oh, do go read the whole thing!

Lenticular Clouds...

We occasionally see lenticular clouds over our local mountains.  A particuarly good display hereabouts might have 3 layers.  Look at these, from near Mt. Rainier!  Via APOD...

Don't Forget!

Via reader Simi L.:

NetQuakes...

Something like two years ago, I first read about the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) “NetQuakes” program.  Basically the USGS wants to get a denser network of seismographs in certain earthquake-prone area, such as southern California.  To reduce the cost of such a network, they came up with a capital idea: enlist a network of volunteer “seismograph hosts”.  Each of these hosts had to have a home with a concrete slab, power, and Internet access.  That describes just about every house around here, including ours.  So I signed up to be a volunteer.

Nothing whatsoever happened after that, until last week – when completely out of the blue, a nice young fellow from USGS called me and asked if I was still interested.  Of course I said yes, and last Thursday he showed up with a GeoSIG IA-2 “Internet Accelerograph” (PDF datasheet) just like the one at right, and a few tools.  I had picked out a spot underneath my IT gear that he thought was just dandy, and in just a few minutes he had the thing installed, powered up, checked out, and connected to the Internet (via WiFi!).  The bracket that holds the instrument (seen in the photo as the metallic plate on the bottom) is bolted to my slab and leveled.  The instrument itself snicks right into that bracket – so as my slab moves, the instrument itself moves.

And exactly what is the instrument?  The summary: a three-axis accelerometer with some smarts around it to pick the “strong motion” events to bother reporting, and to record not only the event itself but some time both before and after it.  The whole thing is running on an ARM processor; the OS is Linux.  Quite the modern piece of gear!

The data it collects is published up to the Internet and is publicly accessible.  The page for my particular instrument is here; a map of all the instruments is here (from here you can get to the data for any instrument).  The image below shows what the seismograph (all three axes) produces for an event it records:

If you'd like to volunteer for NetQuakes, here's the signup page.

To Catch a Geek...

...just cite a number that's an even power of 2.  The New York Times yesterday had a headline that did just that: 512 Paths to the White House.  As any geek would instantly know, 512 is 2^9 (2 raised to the 9th power) – so the chances are that some set of binary choices was being examined.

In this case, the binary choice was Obama or Romney winning any one of the nine “swing” states.  The New York Times counts nine states as possibly going either way on election day; other observers count as many as thirteen. 

Two choices, nine states equals 512 (2^9) possible combinations of Obama/Romney wins in those states.  The page linked above has a nice, interactive “tree” diagram that lets you explore all those possibilities.  The subtitle points out that in 431 of those combinations, Obama wins the election; in 76 of them, Romney wins – and in 5 of them there's an electoral college tie (which means that the House chooses the president, and the Senate chooses the Vice President).  The fact that more combinations lead to an Obama win tells you nothing at all about the probability of an Obama win; it's just the result of Obama having more electoral college votes in states like California or New York, where there's almost no chance of him losing.

That even power of two caught my eye, though.  Without that, I'd never have clicked through to see that page :-)

Polarized Politics: Cognition Research Tool...

One of the challenges facing our democracy is the way that our highly polarized politics isolates many people into “bubbles” of thought and logic.  In these bubbles, reflexive reactions replace actual thinking and consideration.  This makes it difficult (or perhaps even impossible) to change minds and to forge useful compromises. 

Moving people out of their bubble is hard – and therefore quite rare.  In nearly all the cases I know of, it is a process begun and finished entirely on a person's own initiative.  The fascinating blogger Neo-Neocon has a wonderful series of posts that describe her escape from just such a political thought bubble.  Read those posts and you'll gain an understanding of just how difficult that escape was.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a tool that would make it easier to puncture the bubble?  That's just what a professor and graduate student team at the University of Illinois claims to have found, and they tested their tool (in part) by using people solidly in a political bubble.  It's an incredibly simple tool: a difficult-to-read font.  Seriously.

“Go To” Statement Considered Harmful...

I've been programming computers for over 40 years now, in more languages than I can remember accurately.  Those languages include dozens of machine languages, close-to-machine languages (C, especially) and dozens more high level languages.  A few years before I started programming, the pioneering computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra published his famous monograph Go To Statement Considered Harmful – and, silly me, I thought that every living programmer was very familiar with it.  It was the seminal work that led to the notion of “structured programming”, which in turn quickly advanced into a rich and diverse set of programming language design ideas that is still evolving today.  Mr. Dijkstra started it all with that paper.

Last week, I discovered that several of my colleagues – all much younger than I – had never even heard of Dijkstra's monograph.  Worse, they'd never heard of the notion that “go to” statements were harmful.  They knew they shouldn't use them, but really didn't have any idea of why.  It was just something they'd been told.  I sent them a link to the paper, which is reproduced online.

For some reason that I can't quite identify, I found this just as shocking as the day a few years back when I discovered that many quite effective young programmers had no idea how computers actually worked.  I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that both of these things are central to my practice of the programming art.  That makes it difficult for me to understand how anyone could effectively practice programming without the same understanding – but the evidence is agin me...

Pre-Election Steyn...

Mark Steyn says:

I don't know whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden won't even try – and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark, and try to imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt, dependency, and decay. As I said at the beginning, in different ways the response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental unseriousness of the superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is the choice facing the electorate Tuesday.

Get serious, folks. Please...

Uninstalled...

Nice One, National Review. Nice One!

Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann took a great deal of ribbing, not all of it good-natured, for his recent display of ego: he claimed that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, when in fact no such thing had occurred.  What did happen is that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore for their work on global warming climate change – and Mann was one of several thousand people that contributed to the IPCC report who got a certificate from the IPCC lauding them for their work.

Now, personally, I have no desire to be recognized by the committee that selects the Nobel Peace Prize winner.  It's hard to imagine a group of people I'd be less interested in being associated with – Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, etc., etc.  But Mann apparently has other feelings about that association, and his efforts at self-promotion have rightly earned him scorn from just about every direction.

The National Review outdid all his critics, though.  They took out a full page ad on Halloween in the Penn State (where Mann works) student newspaper.  It's reproduced below.  Via Watts Up With That:

Awesome, National Review. Just awesome!

Pack of Lies...

I don't generally think of newspaper editorials about political candidates (or endorsements, for that matter) as being newsworthy in and of themselves.  They're mostly of note for ideas and perspective.  Yesterday's editorial in the Las Vega Review-Journal, though, is an exception – I think it is newsworthy for it's forthright conclusion:

This administration is an embarrassment on foreign policy and incompetent at best on the economy - though a more careful analysis shows what can only be a perverse and willful attempt to destroy our prosperity. Back in January 2008, Barack Obama told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle that under his cap-and-trade plan, "If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them." He added, "Under my plan ... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." It was also in 2008 that Mr. Obama's future Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, famously said it would be necessary to "figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe" - $9 a gallon.

Yet the president now claims he's in favor of oil development and pipelines, taking credit for increased oil production on private lands where he's powerless to block it, after he halted the Keystone XL Pipeline and oversaw a 50 percent reduction in oil leases on public lands.

These behaviors go far beyond "spin." They amount to a pack of lies. To return to office a narcissistic amateur who seeks to ride this nation's economy and international esteem to oblivion, like Slim Pickens riding the nuclear bomb to its target at the end of the movie "Dr. Strangelove," would be disastrous.

Candidate Obama said if he couldn't fix the economy in four years, his would be a one-term presidency.

Mitt Romney is moral, capable and responsible man. Just this once, it's time to hold Barack Obama to his word. Maybe we can all do something about that, come Tuesday.

New Romney Ad...

Rachel Says: “Goosebumps”...

Rachel Lucas says:

Pretty sure this video is somehow racist because it presents, in simple graphic form understandable even to your most naive and childish Facebook friends, some facts and math-things that are unflattering to President Be-Cool-Honeybunny. Seriously though, it’s a great video. A little long but gave me goosebumps all the way through.

Awesome Table!

Just ran across this amazing table...

Curiosity: Self-Portraits...

Curiosity is behaving like a teen-aged girl taking pictures of herself on her mobile phone...

Gulp...

I can't think of anything encouraging to say about this:

Hurt...

Via friend and reader Larry E., who pointed this out in comments yesterday.  I'd never heard this song before at all, much less Johnny Cash's cover of it.  Beautiful: