By brotherly demand...

By brotherly demand...  My brother saw this Bill Whittle Afterburner video, apparently for the first time, and said:

You MUST put this on your blog, bro!

Yeah, he really talks like that.  He's never left New Jersey, and the place has apparently soaked his neurons in what passes for the “culture” in that sad and intellectually desolate place.  But he did pick one of Bill Whittle's best, so despite the fact that I posted this just a few months ago, here's a replay to make my brother happy.

At the end, Bill says “Don’t mess with Texas!”  I'd like to add to that: “Don’t mess with Utah!”  If Utah gets Californicated, I'm not sure where we could run to.

Oh, and a note to my brother: you live in one of the few places on earth that can make California look well-managed.  Escape while you can!

Dog Goldberg machine...

Dog Goldberg machine...  You'll want full screen for this one...

Only in England...

Only in England...  Can you imagine the feminista uproar were this to play on U.S. television?

Our narcissist-in-chief...

Our narcissist-in-chief...  Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom is not amused:

And he wants you – and Ryan Seacrest — to know that, in point of fact, he looks really sharp in jeans, particularly when he’s not dressing in loose jeans on one specific occasion so that he can show off his canon while throwing out a first pitch without, you know, getting his giant balls all bound up and what not.

Good lord. What a fucking narcissist.

Does no one around this guy have the guts to tell him he looks ridiculous trying to fake the trappings of what society has come to look on (and Obama, as an academic, would vehemently reject, even as he so strives for it) as comfortable masculinity?

RTWT...

People are awesome 2013...

People are awesome 2013...  Or, as reader Simi L. said when he passed this along:

PEOPLE ARE INSANE 2013 strikes me as a better title. I wonder how many of these people are no longer with us in 2014?

Indeed...

If those two are my choices on the ballot, I’m writing in Nachos Supreme With Extra Cheese...

If those two are my choices on the ballot, I’m writing in Nachos Supreme With Extra Cheese...  Ah, Rachel, my morning isn't complete without your trenchant commentary.   I have to steal the whole thing because it's so short:

I can’t find the link now but this morning I was reading another (allegedly) serious news article which predicted that, in this (allegedly) advanced civilization that is supposed to contain a certain number of rational adults, the two main contenders for the (allegedly) most important job on Planet Earth in 2016 will likely be Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. So either another Bush or another Clinton president.

That’s all. I’m just amazed we pretend to be a serious country anymore.

If those two are my choices on the ballot, I’m writing in Nachos Supreme With Extra Cheese.

Obama is not her hero any more...

Obama is not her hero any more...  This girl was a moony Obama hope 'n changer.  The past five years have brought her much disillusionment.  Now she pretty much loathes all politicians, of any stripe.  Her political philosophy is right out of the '60s flower children playbook, though that is obviously long before her time.  Still, it's nice to see that That One doesn't hold all the younger progressives in his thrall...

120 year old color photos of Ireland...

120 year old color photos of Ireland...  Many more like the one at right!

Hawk v. Squirrel...

Hawk v. Squirrel...  Nobody gets eaten, but there is some truly amazing cinematography on display here.  You'll want full screen on this one!  Via my mom...

Yosemite in HD time-lapse...

Yosemite in HD time-lapse...  Nice music, too.  I haven't been back to Yosemite in quite a few years – the ginormous crowds there put me off.  But seeing it on display here makes me want to go back!  You'll want this one full screen for sure...

This seems ... plausible...

This seems ... plausible...  The folks at The Onion nail it:

John Kerry Poses As Masseuse To Get Few Minutes With Putin

Maybe the satire business wasn't so hot, so they've crossed over into actual journalism?

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  Bret Stephens, in the Wall Street Journal:

We need a fat president.

That line was a humorous throw-away, but the rest of Mr. Stephen's commentary is serious.  Go read...

Hard physical labor...

Hard physical labor...  That's something I'm not used to :)  But ... I own a 20' x 60' steel building kit (story on that below), and it's not going to Utah with us.  The kit consists of a few thousand parts, including over one hundred formed steel panels, and it weighs nearly 4 tons altogether.  So I built a stand to display it nicely, and now I'm in the process of moving it from it's previous storage place, way out in the back of our yard, to the stand near our front gate.  Picture me – this terribly out-of-shape grey-bearded nerd, loading between a half ton and a ton of steel at a time onto the front of my tractor, then unloading it onto the stand.  Yikes!  I'm about a third done right now, and I'm feeling it in every muscle.  Probably by tomorrow evening I'll have it all nicely on display, and then I'll officially list it for sale.  I paid just over $12,000 for it ten years ago, and it looks like the prices haven't changed much...

The story behind that steel building kit: in 2004, just after the 2003 fires burned within a mile of our home, we decided to put up some fireproof storage.  What better than a steel building for fireproof?  So I cut-and-filled a pad in our back yard for a 20' x 60' building, and bought the kit.  Not long after the kit was delivered, and completely by coincidence, Debbie and I took a drive out to the end of Montiel Truck Trail, one of the areas that was devastated by those fires.  While we were driving around, I noticed that there was some wreckage of steel buildings visible.  I looked a little closer – and discovered that all the steel buildings had collapsed.  Every. Single. One. Of. Them.  What happened?  Well, it turns out that it's the same exact phenomenon that caused the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11.  Steel gets much weaker when heated by fire.  And these steel buildings aren't designed to be strong enough to stay standing when they are heated.  Later I talked with a fireman, and he told me that they really disliked the steel buildings, precisely because they were so prone to collapsing – and without much warning, either.

So we shelved the plans for that building.  Naturally, it wasn't returnable :)  And now I have a beautiful 1200 sq. ft. building kit available for someone who wants the work or storage space, or a barn, and who wasn't expecting it to be fireproof...

Finally: gravitational waves observed (indirectly)...

Finally: gravitational waves observed (indirectly)...  In the news this morning is the announcement by a team of scientists that they believe the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole has observed evidence of gravitational waves. 

The hunt for gravitational waves was one of several scientific endeavors of the late '50s and early '60s that got me excited about science as a kid.  Back then, the state of the art in gravitational wave detection was direct observation via resonant aluminum cylinders weighing up to several tons, using piezoelectric sensors to detect the vibration.  These massive precision detectors really caught my fancy, and I read everything about them that I could get my hands on.  That search for gravitational waves has continued ever since, with incrementally more sophisticated and sensitive instruments being built in an effort to observe them.  Perhaps the most exotic were long baseline interferometers, of which several were built in the western U.S. 

And now, finally, it looks as if the scientists have succeeded...

Don't mess with the little old ladies...

Don't mess with the little old ladies...  This recording of a voice mail seems to surface every couple of years and go viral.  I suspect I've posted it before.  Doesn't matter; it's still funny as hell after listening to it multiple times this morning :)

It would be interesting to know if this is a prank (e.g., someone recorded it just to be funny), or if it's real.  Snopes looked into the question and decided they couldn't really tell – though they do name someone who claims to be the man heard on the recording.

Either way, it's a hoot!

Compression = intelligence?

Compression = intelligence?  The Hutter Prize is intended to encourage research in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by offering (currently) a 50,000€ (about $70,000) prize for solving a specific problem.  The general idea is along the lines of the X prize: by offering a modest prize, one can provoke research that would cost much more than that – along with generating lots of passion, enthusiasm, and competition.  All good.

The challenge with AGI is what one would award a prize for.  So far the achievements of AGI are esoteric, certainly not accessible to anyone other than specialists in the field.  Furthermore, there is legitimate debate about whether even AGI's successes are anything more than trivialities wrapped up in complicated software and fancy words.  Nobody has yet done anything actually useful (or even entertaining) with AGI yet.

So what kind of a goal would be worth a prize? 

The Hutter Prize folks chose lossless data compression of a specific English text file, and I don't know whether to laugh ... or laugh.  Their premise is that solving compression problems is equivalent in some way to general intelligence.  I know a little bit about data compression, and I know some people who are genuinely experts.  I know much less about AGI.  I don't recall ever talking with them about the Hutter Prize, but I'm pretty sure I can predict their reaction: the act of writing a data compression program might require intelligence (it certainly requires persistence!), but the resulting data compression program isn't going to be “intelligent” by any definition of that word!

But if you're into data compression, especially if you're a starving student, maybe that Hutter Prize will spur you into developing the next best data compression algorithm!

Schadenfreude moment...

Schadenfreude moment...  This morning I read these words in the middle of a much longer article:

Most Democrats up for re-election are trying to put some distance between themselves and the president, choosing surrogates such as Mr. Clinton to campaign for them, particularly in the South and parts of the West.

Asked whether Mr. Obama is a liability, Representative Ami Bera, Democrat of California, demurred. “We haven’t really focused much on the president,” he said. “We’re focused on Sacramento County and the folks that are there.”

Other Democrats are openly critical of the health care law in their advertisements. In one ad promoting Representative Ann Kirkpatrick, Democrat of Arizona, the narrator says she “blew the whistle on the disastrous health care website, calling it ‘stunning ineptitude,’ and worked to fix it.”

But that's not what brought on the delicious, soul-warming schadenfreude.  This is: I read those words in the New York Times, the paper of progressive-mongering.  Bwaahahahaha!

Things that make you go “Hmmmm...”

Things that make you go “Hmmmm...”  My mom forwarded this to me, with approval.  There are a lot of people like my mom.  Maybe the progressives should be concerned about more than the 2014 elections???

Honest slogans for college majors...

Honest slogans for college majors...  Via friend and former colleague Aleck L.  An example (one of many):

Latin: because useful is overrated.

Ha!

Awkwardly sleeping dogs...

Awkwardly sleeping dogs...  Bunches of them, via friend and former colleague Aleck L...