On 29 July 02010 with no comments
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I listened to a several-minute-long story on NPR on Wednesday morning about the $8.7B in Iraq reconstruction money that the DoD cannot account for. I think I paid pretty close attention. Yet something, the data encapsulated in this one pie chart by the folks at Good didn't reach my brain. Is it reasonable to assume that the DoD was funneling most or all of this money to black ops?
On 28 July 02010 with 2 comments
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The Super Charge ion Battery looks like the first real break-through in battery technology in a long time. It can charge to 90% of capacity in five minutes, and hardly loses any capacity after 6,000 cycles. It's a lithium-ion battery, so the fundamental technology is the same—Toshiba has just made a big leap forward in their use of that technology.
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I have lost hours of my life, over the years, to trying to write code that finds URLs in arbitrary chunks of text. I have failed every time. It looks like John Gruber has pulled it off here.
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Just what it says on the tin. Amazing.
On 27 July 02010 with 9 comments
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The long nature-or-nurture-styled debate over whether thought influences language or vice versa appears to be tipping in favor of language's impact on how we think. Beginning with Noam Chomsky, it's been assumed that our brains operate at a level above language, and that language is simply the conduit through we express what we're thinking. Now there's good evidence that language is part of the medium in which thoughts flit through and are stored within our brains. Depending on how your language is constructed, you may have very different understandings of the world around you and even of your own experiences.
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I have to give Chevrolet credit for shipping the Volt. I didn't think it would happen, and I said as much a few years ago. I figured it was just a lot of talk to keep their stock up.
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Babies are dying of whooping cough in California, while parents treat them with herbs and homeopathic elf poop. All because the parents won't get their kids immunized. One parent says that she thought that her toddler was going to die, that him having whooping cough was the worst experience that she's ever had…but still won't vaccinate her kids. And this is in Marin County, one of the most affluent counties in California. We're moving towards a future where terrible preventable illnesses are diseases of affluence—and ignorance.
On 22 July 02010 with 33 comments
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Every so often I've seen the word "biodynamic." The Seven Stars yogurt in our fridge, for instance, claims to be "biodynamic." What does that word mean? A cursory search revealed that it means more organic than organic, a higher level of quality and environmental friendliness. That is wrong. In fact, biodynamics is batshit insane. It involves astrology, the occult, communing with the spirit world, homeopathy, and little underground gnomes that push plants up to help them grow. Seriously. Read this article. It's a hoot.
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There are two ATMs at the south pole. This is an interview with the guy who is in charge of them.
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Jeff Bezos' remarks to the 2010 class of Princeton are surprisingly interesting (and brief). The thesis statement is that it's better to be kind than clever. That's an important lesson, one that I must constantly relearn.
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I think I'm drooling a little.
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If you want to use your iPhone's 3G signal to provide internet access to your laptop via its WiFi, you've got pay AT&T $20 month. Why? Because they can. Apple enforces this on their behalf by prohibiting any iPhone software that provides this tethering service. So this 15-year-old kid, Nick Lee, made what appeared to be a lousy bit of software—another flashlight program—but that is secretly a tethering app. While you're running it, your computer has internet access through your phone. Apple approved it, not having inspected in closely and people were briefly able to download it and tether their laptops. But word got out, of course, and Apple shut it down. Very impressive, Nick Lee! Not impressive, Apple.
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I read this great blog entry about a month ago that is still with me, and thus is worth sharing. It's a list of mistaken assumptions that programmers make about names. For programmers, this will be very frustrating to read, because this isn't a best practices guide, but rather a list of things that you'd be wrong to assume. Millions of people don't have last names. Millions of people have a given name as their last name and a family name as their first name. Millions of people's names change during their lives. Software—like this very blog's comment form—must allow for these and many other realities of names. (Related fun fact for website developers: Ireland has no postal codes…except in Dublin.)
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A study of 400,000 European adults over five years found that calories from meat cause more weight gain. That is, 500 calories per day from meat causes more weight gain than 500 calories from other foods. Which doesn't bode well for high-protein diets. Note that this study only determines correlation, and people's final weights were self-reported.
On 20 July 02010 with 3 comments
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The submissions to FMyLife that received the most "you totally deserved it" votes. And, yeah, these people totally deserved it.
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A very funny blog (at least from my perspective) featuring brief stories of sexism, all ending with "my fault, I'm female," in the "FML" vein.
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This story is just delicious. Who would have thought that a leaderless organization where anybody can claim to speak for the entire group could wind up fighting amongst themselves? We've got the Tea Party Express fighting with the National Tea Party Federation, one calling the other an "embarrassment," the other responding that the first organization is "absurd." With nobody in charge, this is a never-ending pissing match.
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If you believe that there's no such thing as using a word wrong—English is always changing, after all—then you should be A-OK with Sarah Palin's use of the non-word "refudiate."
On 19 July 02010 with 10 comments
For the AP, Charles Babbington writes about the Fifth District race
The bumps that Hurt and Perriello are finding on the campaign trail reflect nationwide discontent and suspicion among voters. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 68 percent of voters lack confidence in Democratic lawmakers, and 72 percent lack confidence in Republican lawmakers.
Only 26 percent of registered voters said they were likely to vote for their current House representative. Among those most likely to vote, 56 percent said they would prefer a GOP takeover of the House.
So we’ve got a pair of polls within the MoE that show that 70% of voters don’t trust lawmakers. We’ve got a deeply implausible poll that shows that 74% of registered voters are going to replace the incumbent. (Consider, for a moment, the odds of 322 seats turning over this November.) And we’ve got people expressing a desire about something that they have basically no input into, which is how people will vote in the rest of the nation, rather than what party they’d prefer to represent them.
Translation: Don’t nobody know nothin’. Pollsters, politicians, or voters, apparently.
On 16 July 02010 with 9 comments
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Republicans are attacking Harry Reid for not bringing enough stimulus money to Nevada. I'm confused—I thought Republicans thought that stimulus money was bad. Shouldn't they think that this is a good thing?
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779 people have been imprisoned at Guantanamo. Three have been convicted of a crime. That's a .4% success rate.
On 14 July 02010 with 5 comments
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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed a complaint against Rep. Gregory Meeks for what looks like accepting a very large bribe. A New York businessman gave him $40k in 2007, which Meeks is claiming was a loan despite that he never disclosed such a loan on any of his financial disclosures. The FBI got involved and Meeks paid back the money…by getting an unusual home equity loan from yet another New York businessman.
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A couple of years ago, the story developed that the AP was requiring that bloggers pay a licensing fee of $12.50 to quote just five words from an article. I only half-followed the story at the time, but I never figured out if it was for real or not. Columbia Journalism Review looked into this, and found that it's just not true.
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The term "western swing" was an invention of Spade Cooley's promoter. After Cooley defeated Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys in a battle of the bands, Cooley started to bill himself as "the king of western swing." I like Spade Cooley (well, I like his music; he stomped his wife to death and died in prison), but history has judged who deserves that title, and it's undoubtedly Bob Wills.
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Here's a fun new theory: gravity doesn't exist. That is, it doesn't exist as some sort of fundamental force in the universe, in the manner of magnetism. It's just a byproduct of randomness. Evidence that gravity is a bit player in physics has been stacking up, but nobody's yet figured out what really causes objects to be attracted to one another. Troublingly, the paper making this argument is terribly confusing, leaving some of the brightest minds in physics scratching their heads.
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Exercise doesn't offset sedentary activity. That is, the health problems that come from sitting in front of the TV for hours each day are not reduced by regular exercise. You can no more buy an indulgence at the gym now than you could at church in 1517.
On 13 July 02010 with 19 comments
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NHTSA's analysis of data recorders in Toyota acceleration accidents supporters the logical conclusion: that these incidents are matters of driver error. The drivers in these incidents are old, tending towards elderly. Acceleration problems wouldn't discriminate.
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The word is pronounced "controller." It's from the French "compte," meaning "to count." Who knew?
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What's up with people who pronounce the "T" in "often"? Soften, listen, fasten, christen, often. The "T" is silent in all of these. It turns out that it's not regional, and it's not erroneously pretentious—it's just wrong.
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The patient was going to die from the gut infection that had ravaged her body for months. So Dr. Alexander Khoruts tried a last-ditch measure: a fecal transplant. Her husband was the donor. She was cured within a day.
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Toddlers have a heck of a time with colors. And it's easy to see why—they're a purely social construct. Each culture has a different demarcation of colors. But the real problem turns out to be linguistic. In English, we put adjectives before nouns ("the red balloon"), which confuses the heck out of little kids. Simply reversing that ("the balloon is red") makes all the difference.
On 12 July 02010 with 3 comments
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A law school professor specializing in estate planning explains why our country has historically favored estate taxes, and why the current arrangement is such a serious problem. I thought I understood this topic, but I knew nothing about the newly established dynasty trusts that allow enormous fortunes to be sheltered, tax-free, indefinitely.
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Half of the people who have ever died have died of malaria.
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Today's New York Times has an article about corporate femblog Jezebel's attempted takedown of The Daily Show for not employing enough women. Unmentioned in the article is the photograph of Jezebel's office, which reveals a staff that consists almost exclusively of white males.
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As a TV show, WWII lacked believability. "There are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning. I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called 'World War II'."
On 9 July 02010 with 1 comment
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In March, BP told federal officials that, in the unlikely case of a spill, they could recover 491,721 barrels of oil from the ocean each and every day. Two and a half months after Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, they have collected a grand total of 67,143 barrels. Remember, kids: regulation happens not because of elected officials who are desperate to find stuff to regulate, but because of the blatant, dangerous lies of companies like BP.
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It's long been known that birds use magnetic fields to navigate, but now it can be known that the iron is actually superimposed on their vision. A researcher has even diagrammed what it looks like. I wonder how such creatures have dealt, historically, with significant movement of magnetic north. Do they die off? Or can they adapt fast enough to survive?
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In the past few weeks there's been a spate of articles about the psychology behind the choice to have children, but I think this is one of the better ones. It's got lots of good quotable bits about children, such as "They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit".
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While Poland was communist, they could sometimes get American films, but they couldn't get the promotional materials. So they had to make their own movie posters, frequently without any idea of what the American ones looked like. Apparently they still do this, since some of these posters are from post-communist Poland, like "Fight Club," "The Big Lebowski," and "Pulp Fiction."
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How bad does a university have to be to lose accreditation? As bad as Washington D.C.'s Southeastern University.
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In middle school, we learned that blood plasma pioneer Dr. Charles Drew died after a car accident, because the hospital refused to give him a blood transfusion on the basis of his race. Turns out that's not true. He died because his injuries were severe—a transfusion would have simply killed him faster. Bessie Smith's death was also not a result of medical treatment refused on the basis of her race.
On 7 July 02010 with 7 comments
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I'm awfully surprised to read that business is actually down—significantly—at BP stations, at least a handful of ones around Detroit. There's no organized boycott of any note. My guess is that people just plain don't like BP now. There's no such thing as gasoline brand allegiance, so consciously or subconsciously, people are just quietly going elsewhere. I can't imagine that it's having any effect on BP, but I also didn't think that people would boycott BP stations, so what do I know?
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Ah, yes, the Texas school board. Proof that the ability to get elected to office has nothing to do with the ability to govern. The transcripts of these meets are amazing. One board member muses that maybe they could just drop most references to, say, Jefferson, and instead teach about, say, Phyllis Schlafly. So that goes on the list, they vote for it, and that's that. There's simply no consideration of whether it's a good idea. Texas is going to produce a generation of imbeciles.
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See also: Recursion.
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An investigation into the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit climate research practices has found of the researchers that "their rigor and honesty as scientists are not in doubt," clearing them of any wrongdoing. The investigators rightly faulted the researchers for failing to comply with British FOI laws, finding that they were "unhelpful" on that front. This is the *fifth* investigation into the matter, and they are unanimous in clearing these researchers. I think we're done here.
On 5 July 02010 with 3 comments
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The most isolated tree on Earth was in the Sahara, 120 miles from its nearest neighbor, sprouting in the middle of the desert. A drunk driver ran into it and killed it in 1973. The only tree in 120 miles, and somebody plowed right into the thing. Amazing.
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The EU's Planck satellite spent a year surveying the whole of the universe from its vantage point a million milles from Earth, following up on the early nineties COBE mission by mapping background radiation. The resulting image is awfully impressive.
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The moral of this (funny) story is to never, ever use regular expressions to parse HTML. This is a timely lesson for me, because just a few minutes ago I was giving up on using an XML parser to deal with some light, poorly formatted SGML, figuring I could just fake it with regex. I'll return to the XML parser now.
On 2 July 02010 with 7 comments
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Climate researcher Michael Mann has been totally cleared of any wrongdoing by Penn State, using awfully strong language. "Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or other scholarly activities." End of story. This was the slender reed on which Cuccinelli's investigation of Mann was based. This was what "Climategate" was all about. Repeated inquiries by the British government and by Penn State have cleared all parties involved. There's no there there.
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Once upon a time, a small house was a good thing. How do we get back there? My house is just over 1,300 square feet, and that's working out pretty well.
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Men overwhelmingly prefer the facial features of small-footed women, for reasons of natural selection including childhood health. Also, women prefer the facial features of small-wristed men, which is good news for me and any future male offspring.
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David Axelrod: "If we allow a Republican Party that took a $237 billion surplus and turned it into a $1.3 trillion deficit over eight years to masquerade as the party of fiscal responsibility, then shame on us."
On 1 July 02010 with 1 comment
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The words of ostensible Christians in the mouth of Christ. While not fair to Christians in general, it sure is funny especially to those of us who are baffled by what passes for Christian values in mainstream culture.
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Woot got bought by Amazon. Their CEO sent this letter to his employees. It's pretty funny.
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The Sunlight Foundation has set up this great interface to browse and search Elena Kagan's 29,000 e-mails that have been released into the public record. I've just spent a few minutes reading through the "Starred (by all)" e-mails, and they're really interesting.
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I've been wondering how in the world Apple fit a gyroscope into the new iPhone. Turns out gyroscopes have gotten really, really tiny.
On 30 June 02010 with Comments Off
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I love Bittman's "101 Fast Recipes" series—it has served me well. There are some great, simple, seasonal grilling ideas here that I intend to put to work immediately.
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I think there is a lot in life that's improved with a little humor. I think there's a whole lot in politics that would benefit from levity. I'm glad to see that Elena Kagan (and, apparently, Lindsey Graham) feel the same way.
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Well, that's sad. No, what's that other thing? "Great." Yeah, that's it. Larry King is awful. He's emblematic of everything wrong with TV journalism today.
On 29 June 02010 with 5 comments
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In Japan, Christmas Eve is celebrated as we celebrate Valentine's Day. Complete with chocolate hearts.
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It is a truth almost universally acknowledged among technology professionals that Dell computers were really great through the late nineties, and about a decade ago began a sad slide that likewise claimed Compaq, HP, Packard Bell, NEC, Acer, and Gateway. They were all in a race to the bottom while Apple took the opposite tack. One can get an inside view of this in a recently unsealed lawsuit brought against Dell by one of the large businesses to which the manufacturer sold thousands of faulty computers. Dell was selling crap, they knew that they were selling crap, but they denied it all along.
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If this sort of crap is what Fox News is telling people about the economy, it's no wonder conservatives think that the economy is in worse shape than it really is.
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Io turns out to smell pretty ghastly, a result of sublimating frozen sulfur.
On 28 June 02010 with 16 comments
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Everything is weirder in Japan.
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"True lunch waits."
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Tuna turns out to be a great deal more interesting than I thought. Bluefin are warm-blooded. The Japanese didn't eat them until a couple of hundred years ago. It's not viable to farm them. And we're almost out of them.
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"One day, a killer whale in Puget Sound started pushing a dead salmon around in the water. The other whales in her community thought that was 'really cool,' Dr. Whitehead said, 'and within a few weeks, everybody had a dead salmon they were pushing around.' By summer’s end, the fad was over, and the behavior was never seen again."
On 18 June 02010 with 8 comments
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Every two years the Olympics are held. And every following year there are plenty of news stories about how much the host city is in debt, how many huge buildings that they have no use for, and what a big mistake that it was for them to host the Olympics. There's no learning going on here. When governments compete for the attentions of private enterprise, citizens lose.
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One guy plays SMB, another plays violin as a real-time soundtrack. Clever!
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I'm headed out on a Charlottesville->NYC->Connecticut->Boston->Montréal->Charlottesville road trip tomorrow morning, and intend to rely on this series of Montréal dining recommendations for my two night stay there.
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Google at the command line. This might just seem goofy, but for batch operations, or anything automated, this is really important. Sure, Google has APIs, but it's a lot faster to type something at the command line than whip up a whole script.
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Rep. Cantor has invested $15,000 selling short U.S. government bonds. Yes, the Republican Whip intends to personally profit from long-term failure of the federal government that he helps oversee. I've long suspected that some conservatives seek to destroy government institutions in order to "prove" that they don't work, but this is the first time I've heard of somebody so powerful actually betting on it.
On 18 June 02010 with 3 comments
Republican congressional nominee Robert Hurt can’t seem to make up his mind as to whether he’s going to debate his challenger from the right, Jeff Clark. In a recorded interview with The Daily Progress a week ago, he had this exchange with the paper:
DP: [Are you] going to be willing to debate Jeff Clark and Tom Perriello?
RH: We need to work out all of the details, but debates are a very, very important part of elections and obviously we want to make ourselves available to all of the citizens who will be judging us and we’re committed to doing that but obviously we have the details to work out. We haven’t talked with the Perriello campaign—I don’t think—about what they’re interested in.
DP: But would you be willing to?
RH: Absolutely.
That couldn’t be much more clear.
Then, shortly after midnight this morning, Hurt’s campaign released a written statement to the paper, in which he said that “we cannot allow the important debate in this election to be sidetracked by a candidate who is not serious about his campaign or his ability to win.” The campaign claims that Hurt wasn’t answering the question of whether he would debate Clark, but instead was…uh…well, they’re not saying. Apparently, if you ask Hurt if he’s willing to do something, he just says “absolutely.”
Hurt’s campaign is right to want Clark excluded from debates. I imagine the guy is polling below the margin of error. Not only would his involvement in debates probably not be useful, but it would be a bad political move for Hurt to give Clark any attention. Congressman Perriello quite naturally wants Clark included, because every vote that Clark gets is taken from Hurt. The problem here is this business of saying one thing one week and another the next, without explaining the change and, worse still, pretending that the Progress is at fault here. It’s OK to change your mind in the face of new information—in fact, it’s often the only reasonable thing to do—but you’ve got to share those facts with others if you want to be perceived as reasonable. Attempting to discredit a newspaper whose endorsement will be important this November is a foolish move.
I’d put money on the Progress endorsing Hurt. Or, rather, I would have. Now I’m not so sure.
