Quote of the day

"...the famed Russian hospitality is mostly just the Russian love for seeing a foreigner drunk."

- Bruce Chatwin?

Quote of the day

I know you need your sleep now, I know your life's been hard,
But many men are falling where you promised to stand guard.....
-LC

A demigod passes

printf("goodbye, world\n");

A few REAMDE excerpts, to get across the flavor of his writing...

A few of my favorites, lets me use the "copy" feature of my Kindle software (glad they added that to the PC version):

The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 15). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

Video games were a more addictive drug than any chemical, as he had just proven by spending ten years playing them. Now he had come to discover that they were also a sort of currency exchange scheme. These two things—drugs and money—he knew about. The third leg of the tripod, then, was his exilic passion for real estate. In the real world, this would always be limited by the physical constraints of the planet he was stuck on. But in the virtual world, it need be limited only by Moore’s law, which kept hurtling into the exponential distance.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 34). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

But each had a kind of confidence about him that was not often found in young men who had followed the recommended path through high school to college and postgraduate training. If she had wanted to be cruel or catty about it, Zula might have likened those meticulously groomed boys to overgrown fetuses, waiting endlessly to be born. Which was absolutely fine given that the universities were well stocked with fetal women.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 160). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

Zula asked Yuxia what a Hakka was and learned that they were the only Chinese who had refused to take up the practice of foot binding. So “Big-Footed Woman” was not just a throwaway line. Not only that, but they would buy the unwanted female children of their Cantonese-speaking neighbors and raise them. Yuxia was not the type to deploy terminology like “feminist” or “matriarchal,” but the picture was clear enough to Zula.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 242). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

...Sokolov recognized, in the black jihadist’s movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr’s heaven.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 340). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology. You simply couldn’t go to a gun range without being cornered by a man who wanted to talk to you for hours about the ballistics of the .308 round or the relative merits of side-by-side versus over-and-under shotguns.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 603). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

What he wasn’t so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (pp. 893-894). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

Stephenson, Neal (2011-09-20). Reamde: A Novel (p. 893). William Morrow. Kindle Edition.

REAMDE read

No, I spelled that right.  The author, Neal Stephenson, named it after a fictitious virus (which was a misspelling of the "README" common in computers, and probably a reference to "reamed" as well).  It's a roller coaster ride involving a young couple, a massively multiplayer roleplaying game, Russian mafiosi, Chinese hackers, spies, and an Al Qaeda cell headed by a Welsh terrorist.  Oh, and currency exchange.

This may be his best written novel yet, although some people were disappointed in it (it was not as brimful of technological flights of fancy as his usual fare).  Perhaps the cast of characters is a bit large and hard to keep track of, but he ties everything together splendidly.  Don't expect very deep character analysis, but do expect to be surprised by his sudden turns and made thoughtful by some of the ramifications of technology that he exposes (such as using computer games to facilitate real life crime).

Arild Begins

Just got back from the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra's first performance with Arild Remmereit in his new role as Music Director (apparently he has guest conducted on 3 previous occasions, but I do not believe I saw any of them).  He is from Norway, but spent much of his life in Vienna, Austria.

I'm always willing to give a guy a try, and like to start with an open mind, but when he mentioned that all the programs he would be doing this season would have a FEMALE composer I was not pleased.  Not that I have anything against female composers (honestly, I didn't really know there were any in the classical field, but they have certainly done fine in pop) but I find the idea of choosing music on the BASE of the composer being female no less loathsome than choosing on the base of the composer being Aryan.  In Arild's defense (and please do not think I am being overly familiar by using his first name, the program calls it "Arild's Inaugural"), from the very beginning of Amy Beach's Symphony No. 2 in E minor, "Gaelic", Op. 32 I was impressed.

This was music I had never heard before, but it was fascinating, stirring in a mildly disturbing way.  There was nothing weird about it, she did not seem to feel she had to be different than the men, just very good.  Symphonies are not my favorite form of music, I think my attention span is just a bit too short for works of that length, but this one did not drag at all, and it often enchanted.  The conductor mentioned before beginning the symphony that this was not part of the standard repertoire and our applause might be what makes that change....or not.  I quote from memory: "So if you do not like this piece, be sure to boo loudly!"

I don't think I've ever been encouraged to boo at a classical concert before, especially not by the conductor, but his efforts seem to fall on deaf ears: at the end all he got was loud applause and a standing ovation with not a single "boo" to be heard in the crowd.

After the intermission we got four shorter pieces on the program: two by Norwegian composers (Halvorsen and Svendsen - both unfamiliar to me but I was glad to get to know them...the first was a quirky march that almost made you want to find some battle to march into, the second a romance featuring the concertmaster as soloist) and two by Strauss (and unfamiliar waltz and a familiar polka).  While no single song left you quite as impressed as the symphony that started it, each one was really unpretentious and enjoyable...you regretted having to sit instead of being on your feet and moving with the music.  I think that this is actually more in spirit of the times of the compositions, these guys were the rock stars of their centuries, and people listened to them to party.

At the end the applause was a bit awkward...we were kind of expecting to do the applause (not standing ovation this time, but only because it feels a bit odd to do a standing-o for a three minute polka no matter how damn good it is) with the standard two calls back for additional bows and pointing out the star performers in the orchestra, but he didn't let us....each time he jogged back from leaving the stage he started another piece without giving us time to stop clapping, and they were all fun, slightly silly pieces (one involving the whole orchestra chanting "tick-tock" repeatedly throughout an otherwise quiet part of the piece).  One was concerned that unless the audience learned just the right applause techniques he would never let us leave...and one wasn't entirely sure that would be a bad thing.

He capped these pieces (I think there were four in all, including this last) with the Radetzky March, with the audience clapping the beat, and him turning around and conducting the audience to do quiet little claps for the quieter section and thunderous claps for the fortissimo.  This guy is a master.

One thing puzzled me, and he alluded to it.  Beach's Symphony No. 2 was the first symphony composed by an American woman.  Why did she start with No. 2?  My current working hypothesis is that she wrote a Symphony No. 1 while she was on steroids, and this one was disqualified by the Olympic committee on that ground...but I don't think the Olympic committee existed yet, and if it did probably would not have extended it's influence over classical music.....inquiring minds want to know!

Quote of the day

At this point, I should repeat my long-standing conviction that speech errors, by politicians and others, are rarely if ever worth the fuss that they sometimes generate
- Mark Liberman

Quote of the Day

"You can get rid of a surprising number of kittens on Craigslist.  In fact, the capacity seems unlimited."
  - Bob Armstrong

Quote of the day

"Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever."
- Anonymous student

Quote of the day

"He urged me not to fall into the trap that so many aging directors fall into – that the women get younger and younger and nuder and nuder. That's all I needed to hear. I most definitely intend for the women in my films to get younger and younger and nuder and nuder."
- Lars von Trier

Midnight in Paris

I already mentioned on Facebook that I liked this movie, but I didn't say why.  The movie has a dash of wish fulfillment (who hasn't wanted to be able to engage with their long-dead heroes?), some amusing brief character sketches, and an over-all framework that actually works.  Meeting with people of the past has been done before in writing and in film (the Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, and the Riverworld series take the people OUT of their native environment; this movie and many time-travel stories allow them to be viewed in their native time), and their is a danger of getting carried away by dumping too many past characters into the story to the detriment of the main character.  In this movie, the other characters are enjoyable but actually bring the main character into better focus.

My wife Jocelyn loves movies with costumes and scenery from other places and times, but she was a bit worried at the beginning that the director seemed obsessed with displaying too many Parisian vistas.  Do not fear, this does not degenerate into a family travel album.

My favorites in this movie were Adriana (Cotillard), Hemingway (Stoll), and Dali (Brody).   I never noticed how much Owen Wilson resembled Woody Allen before, but he seemed to absorb Allen's character in a younger body.

Quote of the day

He experienced her presence in his house not like that of a dog, which has no secrets from human beings, but like that of a cat, which is itself a secret -- and to that extent he felt free and unthreatened.
  - Harry Mulisch, "The Discovery of Heaven"

Quote of the day

"Never tell a woman anything, because she'll misuse it in order to understand you."
- Onno, from Harry Mulisch's The Discovery of Heaven

Quote of the day

Basically, we don't have any macro models that really work, in the sense that models "work" in biology or meteorology. Often, therefore the measure of a good theory is whether itseems to point us in the direction of models that might work someday.
 Noahpinion

Who knew (St.) Augustine was a Berber?

Language Log has a post focusing on the Berber language as spoken in Libya.  Apparently, there is a sizable (suppressed) Berber minority there.  I think I first heard about Berber in the context of an article I read as a child about the Tuareg (Tuareg is a Berber language), notable because "In Tuareg society women do not traditionally wear the veil, whereas men do."


Apparently, Berber is an Afro-Asiatic language, like Arab, Hebrew, and ancient Egyptian (which survives in daily use only among Egyptian Christians (Copts) who use it in their services like Catholics used to use Greek and Latin).

Quote from Dave Barry, in Language Log:

"The Hawaiian language is quite unusual because when the original Polynesians came in their canoes, most of their consonants were washed overboard in a storm, and they arrived here with almost nothing but vowels. All the streets have names like Kal'ia'iou'amaa'aaa'eiou, and many street signs spontaneously generate new syllables during the night."

My own explanation for this was the Hawaiians were once united with the Czechs, divorced, and in the settlement one got the vowels and the other the consonants.

"A good samurai will parry the blow"

She must have loved that quote, I lost track of how often she quoted it.  It can't have been too many, because that would be wrong -- and for me there was nothing wrong with this book.  I'm not sure which book this one pushes off my top ten list, but it's position is secure.

Art, science, religion, philosophy, growing up, settling vs. striving....this book weaves them all into a fabric that wraps reality and dreams together.  At various points I might have told friends what I though this book was about, but that changes as you read it.  Unlike Cien Años de Soledad, which also follows a family through the generations, this book comes into sharper and sharper focus as the years go by, and you realize the character you at first enjoyed is really background for the more vibrant character you are enjoying now.

One point that should be kept in mind: this book has no relation to the Tom Cruise movie of the same name, and only a passing relation to samurais - the title is an allusion to the Kurosawa movie "The Seven Samurai", which is a favorite of one of the characters.  It does have some negative criticism for the movie:

Cast your mind back to this film for one moment.  Identify, if you can, a suitable moment at which to place your arm around the shoulders of your companion and kiss her.  You cannot?  No more could I.  After half an hour, no suitable moment presenting itself, I chose an unsuitable moment -- I was rebuked.

I really want to recommend this book, but I'm not sure that everybody can appreciate it.  Although the book has no sluggish parts, it does use some techniques that might be confusing and off-putting if you don't get them.  There will be things beyond your comprehension you might want to just skip over, but they are brief.  If you are contemplating suicide, there are some helpful techniques to avoid it (for example, watching "The Importance of Being Earnest"), but they might not work -- but if you do commit suicide after reading this book, it is not because the book depressed you, it is because the depression was just too deep for the book to lift.

Quote of the day

Nearly finished the book (highly recommended for those who crave highly intelligent reading material, and aren't put off by the occasional challenge), so here's one more:

My mother went to a Swiss finishing school -- her mother was Lebanese, and frightfully cosmopolitan -- and the girls were all made to study French, German and English, with Italian for bad behavior.

(Helen DeWitt, "The Last Samurai")

Shipwrecks in Shakespeare

I don't think they got it quite right tonight on Jeopardy, although I might not have gotten the text of the question completely straight - I thought it was something like "One of the two plays of Shakespeare where the action began with a shipwreck".  My first thought was "The Tempest", and that's the answer all three contestants got.  The second choice offered was Twelfth Night, which was not the first thing I thought of when looking for a second choice.

How about The Comedy of Errors?

From Act I, Scene I (bolding mine):

O, had the gods done so, I had not now
Worthily term'd them merciless to us!
For, ere the ships could meet by twice five leagues,
We were encounterd by a mighty rock;
Which being violently borne upon,
Our helpful ship was splitted in the midst;
So that, in this unjust divorce of us,
Fortune had left to both of us alike
What to delight in, what to sorrow for.
Her part, poor soul! seeming as burdened
With lesser weight but not with lesser woe,
Was carried with more speed before the wind;
And in our sight they three were taken up
By fishermen of Corinth, as we thought.
At length, another ship had seized on us;
And, knowing whom it was their hap to save,
Gave healthful welcome to their shipwreck'd guests;
And would have reft the fishers of their prey,
Had not their bark been very slow of sail;
And therefore homeward did they bend their course.
Thus have you heard me sever'd from my bliss;
That by misfortunes was my life prolong'd,
To tell sad stories of my own mishaps.

Since nobody guessed that, I guess I'll never know why that was not considered a valid answer

Quote of the day

"Andy Warhol is still famous for saying 43 years ago that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. It’s more likely that in the future everyone will be famous to 15 people."


- Steve Sailer

Quote of the day

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,

Now patches where some leanness of the soil's

Broke into moss or substances like boils;

Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him

Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim

Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"

Quote of the day

An American in Britain has sources of solace available nowhere else on earth.  One of the marvelous things about the country is the multitudes of fried chicken franchises selling fried chicken from states not known for fried chicken on the other side of the Atlantic.  If you're feeling a little depressed you can turn to Tennessee Fried Chicken, if you're in black despair an Iowa Fried Chicken will put things in perspective, if life seems worthless and death out of reach you can see if somewhere on the island an Alaska Fried Chicken is frying chicken according to a recipe passed down by the Inuit from time immemorial.
   - Helen deWitt, The Last Samurai

Quote of the day

"I conclude that economics is not yet a science.  Economics is most like a science when people do not care about the outcome of the argument."
- Tyler Cowen

I had to apologize last night....

Of course, it is not all that rare for me to apologize.  When I inadvertently jostle somebody, or I step on somebody's foot, a heartfelt "sorry" or "get out of my way" slips past my lips without much emotion.

But this time I was actually wrong.

One of the most likely things for me to order at a bar is "a Grand Marnier, straight up in a snifter".  I've been ordering this since the 80s without the occurrence of any disasters.  Sometimes I just say "Grand Marnier", figuring it's the most likely way for it to be served - in a brandy glass, without any ice.

Last night, before the RPO concert at Max's across the street, I ordered a "Grand Marnier" and the bartender asked "neat?" and I said "straight up".  She brought me a concoction I didn't even recognize, cloudy and cold.   After looking at her incredulously, I repeated "Grand Marnier, straight up"?  She nodded cheerfully.  I informed her what I thought "straight up" meant...she seemed dubious, but set the original glass aside and poured me a new one the way I wanted it.  As I enjoyed it, I decided to look up "straight up".

To my amazement, it was exactly the concoction she brought me in the first place....strained through ice to chill it and then served without any further ice to water it down (logical, if you want your drink cold).  For almost thirty years I've been ordering drinks "straight up" without finding out what that actually meant (OK, the article DOES say

"Straight up" means "chilled and served without ice in a cocktail glass" but is often used to mean "neat."

In retrospect, there have been times when bartenders asked  whether I wanted it chilled, but I thought they were just offering an additional unrelated service.  On this occasion, since I had just overruled her "neat" (thinking I was actually confirming it) she couldn't have asked for further clarification without seeming argumentative.

I bought the original glass as well to get an idea of what I've been ordering all these years (not bad, actually, but the temperature tempts you to pour it down the throat much faster than is wise) and apologized.  I'll be ordering it "neat in a snifter" from now on (although back in the 80s "neat", which was the first word I learned for the concept (in a Chinese cookbook, of all places), usually got the bartender to ask "You mean 'straight up'?"

Am I the victim of regional language change, or just delusional?

Favorite mistranslation involving goats....

This has been around for a while....a question posted to a computer oriented help group:

This is question, engish is faulty therefore the right excused is 
requested.  Thank google to translate to help.  SORRY!!!!! 

At often, the goat-time install a error is vomit.   To how many times like
the wind, a pole, and the dragon?   Install 2,3 repeat, spank, vomit blows 

14:14:01.869 - INFO
[edu.internet2.middleware.shibboleth.common.config.profile.JSPErrorHandlerB eanDefinitionParser:45]
- Parsing configuration for JSP error handler. 

Not precise the vomit but with aspect similar, is vomited concealed in fold of
goat-time lumber?   goat-time see like the wind, pole, and dragon?  This
insult to father's stones?    JSP error handler with wind, pole, dragon with
intercourse to goat-time?  Or chance lack of skill with a goat-time? 

Please apologize for your stupidity.  There are a many thank you 

Hypotheses included anything from a parody to an attempted back-translation:

Often, I get a program error on install. How much do I have to configure? I tried a re-install 2 or three times, and it brings up errors.
Not the same error, but similar: are errors hidden in the program log? A problem with the calling object? JSP error handler configuration connection at runtime? Or perhaps a misunderstanding of the program?

Obscure segue of the month

The prize goes to one of my favorite bloggers (my most frequently hat-tipped, too!), Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, who bafflingly connects a post about the responsibilities identical twins might have to each other (the idea is here that a twin who reveals details about their genome automatically reveals the same about the twin) with a post about swimsuit pictures.

Amazingly, this actually works.  In the second post, the question is whether women who reveal their bodies are violating some duty to OTHER women not to be seen as sex objects (making both posts about externalities toward other members of a genetic group - one very specific, the other everybody having two X chromosomes).

Reassuringly, the swimsuit pictures are OK by Katja Grace, the philosophical writer of the second post:

In sum, I agree that women who look like ‘sex objects’ increase the expectation by viewers of more women being ‘sex objects’. I think this is a rational and socially useful response on the part of viewers, relative to continuing to believe in a lower rate of sex objects amongst women. I also think it is virtually certain that in any given case the women in question should go on advertising themselves as sex objects, since they clearly produce a lot of benefit for themselves and viewers that way, and the externality is likely miniscule. 

Personally, I think the women in question could go quite a bit further in advertising themselves as sex objects than by just posing for swimsuit issues.

Quote of the day

"Polygamy ends when children cease to be a net economic asset.  As society progresses and urbanizes, there are cheaper ways of having sex with multiple women, if that is one's goal. "


- Tyler Cowen

Sensitivity

Haven't blogged as such for ages, mostly just posted items on Facebook.  Makes sense for bits you just want to pass along without much commentary of your own.

Here's an item from back when (via, no surprise, Marginal Revolution) to break that more-or-less silent streak.  You've probably heard about sensitivity workshops - some unhappy college student says something racist or otherwise insensitive and is sentenced to some sort of re-education, usually without the accompanying risk of death common in Maoist days.  The item is about the opposite, humorously suggesting workshops for people in how NOT to be offended:

Exercise #3: An Awkward Moment.  Stand before the group and tells a story about a time you inadvertently gave offense.  After each story, the group chants, "It was no big deal!"

That's the sort of affirmation I could live with.

Selene of Alexandria

I just might get this book for free.  If you're interested, try Selene Giveaway .  Just click on the "Selene of Alexandria" link and you'll get a synopsis of this historical fiction set in the time of Hypatia ("SELENE is bright, impulsive, stubborn, and a little spoiled by her father, a city councilor.  Since her mother’s death, she longs to forgo the privileges of her class to become a physician—an impossible dream for upper class girls who never engage in a profession. ").

I enjoyed the author's commentary on the movie Agora (set in the same time), so I'd look forward to reading her work..

Genocide - what's the big deal?

The question is raised on The Volokh Conspiracy, not for the first time.  Nobody is saying genocide is OK - but there is an obsessive attempt to draw a line between genocide and "mere" mass murder.  If somebody wants to make the point that Stalin was a much nicer guy than Hitler because - despite Stalin maybe* being relatively responsible for more deaths - Stalin's deaths were just murders rather than genocide, I am not going to be especially impressed.  Nor, for that matter, am I going to be impressed with somebody who argues that Hitler is nicer than Stalin because his death-count was lower.  Both Hitler and Stalin were quite bad enough, and the idea of some sort of contest between them is macabre.

The issue came up because of the book Stalin's Genocides, which argues - well, it is pretty clear from the title what it argues.   Apparently, the issue is important from the standpoint of international law because if a country is committing genocide then it is legitimate to interfere, but if a country is only slaughtering millions of its own people without regard to ethnicity (kill all the educated people or all the rich people), then that is an internal matter.   It's pretty clear something is a bit off with international law here, but it's hard to get people to accept a definition that makes their own country guilty.














*I've heard figures going both ways.

Chimps gone wild....

They may not be all that great at acquiring human language, but they do pretty well at those obscene gestures.

Quote of the Day

I am not, of course, a believer, but if I were, I’d prefer to imagine a deity occasionally plagued by these thoughts—an agnostic God who sometimes doubts Himself.
 - Julian Sanchez

Things you learn reading Mary Roach's "Packing for Mars"....

Regarding the fittings for urine collection in space suits: "To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts opting for L when they are really S, there is no S.  'There is L, XL, and XXL', says Hamilton Sundstrand suit engineer Tom Chase."

Teach like an Egyptian

Saw Agora last night at the Little Theatre.

I'd read a lot about it, and already knew there were some historical inaccuracies (and unfounded plot points, such as crediting her with the discovery of elliptical orbits), but I wasn't much bothered by having the satellite view include the Aswan dam.  It is a story about a leading female intellectual from a time where females where better off staying out of the limelight, blended with religious strife between Christians, Pagans, and Jews.

Hypatia was acted brilliantly, and the movie had quite a few high points.  Overall, I found it dragged in parts, and a few other parts seemed a bit preachy - but I was still impressed and touched.  At the end of the movie, a manly tear welled in the corner of my eye, but I managed to stop it from spilling.

I'd recommend it to anybody fascinated by the subject matter, but not to everybody.

The Doctor's Dilemna

Enjoyed the play (newly knighted doctor falls in love with 20-years-younger wife of a sick artist who is a scoundrel - is it best the husband die?).  The director's notes in the program was some frightful twaddle of a paean to socialized medicine.  To be fair, Shaw himself was an unapologetic commie.  He had the intellectual honesty to admit that for his ideal to work, it was understandable and necessary to have people shot when they were shirking their duty, but didn't seem to come to grips with the downside of that concession - apparently the people that would be doing the shooting were all fair, reasonable and altruistic.  Although Shaw mentioned the concept in the play, this was a tangential mention - the play was really about the value of life and the decisions we have to make.  The saving grace of the program notes were luscious photographs, including many of great artists killed by tuberculosis.

Next play, after dinner, is John Bull's Other Island.

Programmers vs. System Administrators (or NOT vs.)

I love this post describing the difference between programmers and system administrators:

Programmers are like vampires. They're frequently up all night, paler than death itself, and generally afraid of being exposed to daylight. Oh yes, and they tend think of themselves (or at least their code) as immortal.

System Administrators are like werewolves. They may look outwardly ordinary, but are incredibly strong, mostly invulnerable to stuff that would kill regular people -- and prone to strange transformations during a moon "outage".

Haven't posted an XKCD for a while....

But I was sharing his work with my brother-in-law David (also known as "Fred", his vanity plate reads "YABADO"), and so:

Original here.

Liberatarianism (or Liberaltarianism) is actually doing well?

It doesn't usually feel that way, especially when you look at poll results, but a good case is actually made here.

Now I think that a lot of gains have been made that are actually being lost, but I suppose one should not forget the gains.

HT MR

Monkey business...

I thought I blogged this before, but it looks like I was only intending to.  I mentioned at a party today a study in which economists found similar behavior to ours in monkeys - areas in which monkeys are not only as irrational as we are in our decisions, they are actually irrational in the same way.

Laurie Santos describes the study in this talk here.  Of course, in order to study how monkeys use money, first they have to be taught to use money in the first place.  And once monkeys understand the value of money, they engage in thievery (as described in the talk above) and even prostitution.

If you don't want to watch the whole video, the Freakonomics guys describe the same experiment here, including:

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

Quote of the day

"The world's worst nuclear power plant disaster is not as destructive to wildlife populations as are normal human activities."

 - Robert Baker, quoted in "Whole Earth Discipline"

Quote of the day

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists stopped carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe (except for France, which fortunately responded to the '73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear).  Greens caused gigatons of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere from the coal and gas burning that went ahead instead of nuclear.  I was part of that, too, and I apologize.

--- Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

How would you like it if your spouse bought THIS?

Another great "Markets in Everything" post from MR.

MR brings home the headline bacon.....

Indeed, these two are more than worthy:

Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts

and
Mongolian neo-Nazis: Anti-Chinese sentiment fuels rise of ultra-nationalism



Click through above for details such as

Their right hands rise to black-clad chests and flash out in salute to their nation: "Sieg heil!" They praise Hitler's devotion to ethnic purity.

But with their high cheekbones, dark eyes and brown skin, they are hardly the Third Reich's Aryan ideal. A new strain of Nazism has found an unlikely home: Mongolia.

Glad I wasn't coaching North Korean kids.....

Apparently losing is very bad:

The broadcast of live games had been banned to avoid national embarrassment, but after the spirited 2-1 defeat to Brazil, state television made the Portugal game its first live sports broadcast ever. Following ideological criticism, the players were then allegedly forced to blame the coach for their defeats.

HT MR

The living Buddha and benefits fraud....

Sometimes it doesn't pay to be a celebrity. Records showed that Sogen Kato was, at 111 years, the oldest man in Tokyo. But when officials went to visit him in order to congratulate him, they found (after some resistance from his relatives) only his mummified body. Apparently he had been dead 30 years while his checks were still being cashed.

Mr Kato's relatives told police that he had "confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha," according to a report by Jiji Press.

But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000: £70,000) in widower's pension payments via Mr Kato's bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn.

The pension fund had long been unable to contact Mr Kato.

HT MR

Things you didn't know about men and women.....

If this sounds odd (excerpt):

Given that men are, on average, physically weaker than women: It's hard to see how they're going to win wars without troops, and survive walking the streets without alpha females willing to protect them. Among alpha females, chivalry is dead. If beta females are chivalrous, so what? Even if beta females had the courage to pull a rapist off of her victim, would she have the fortitude? Considering that the beta female wouldn't even be physically fit enough to join the U.S. Army, it's hard to imagine her stopping a wolf pack.

it has been regendered. HT Prettier Than Napoleon

Life as an adventure

Tyler Cowen from Marginal Revolution ponders one of his favorite philosophers (just follow the link, boys and girls) who compares literary adventures (where the main characters often follow a path that has been mapped out for them by either a living guide or a trail of clues) with real life careers.

His Robin Hanson quote is worth quoting again:

If you want life paths that quickly and reliably reveal your skills, like leveling up in video games, you want artificial worlds like schools, sporting leagues, and corporate fast tracks. You might call such lives adventures, but really they pretty much the opposite. If you insist instead on adventuring for real, achieving things of real and large consequence against great real obstacles, well then learn to see the glorious nobility of those who try well yet fail.

Those exotic Antarctican accents really turn me on!

If you've heard about the recent spy case, the Russians were able to divert suspicion by pretending to have Belgian accents (if you follow the link, there'll be a bit of a rant on how we are not only disadvantaged here in not knowing foreign languages, we are provincially ignorant of the outside world). One spy even convinced a college friend she was from Antarctica (although she came clean later and told her she was actually from Russia - some spy)!

Now Quebec ... THAT makes sense.

HT MR

My tiny contribution to Australian linguistics....

An example of liberty measles.

Quote of the day

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.
- internet wisdom forwarded to me by John Wurtenberg that didn't use the word "hell"

Dialog of the day

You'll have to follow the HT to see how

As an aside, I cannot refrain from relating another anecdote, which is told of Gore Vidal. In a TV interview he was asked: "Was your first sexual experience with a man or with a woman?" To which he replied: "I was too polite to ask."

fits into the Kagan confirmation hearings.

"Ae day whan he wis striddlin his cuddie doun the brae"

Perhaps translating Chinese into Scots is a sign that somebody has too much time on his hands, but I found myself oddly fascinated.

It's been a while since I put up an XKCD....

...and they are always so, so good.....

Quote of the day

"The difficult thing with quotes on the internet is verifying them" - Abraham Lincoln

Jocelyn is home!

Picked her up this morning, not much in the way of dead time in the process. When I got there - just to drop things off - she was just away getting x-rays. Just as they were explaining that, she was wheeled in. From there on in, it was signing papers, putting on clothes, packing things up, and getting the car from the garage to load her in.

After that, the focus was on getting her some Abbot's Frozen Yogurt on the way home. The first place was sort of closed - not open until noon. The second location Jocelyn remembered was no longer there. But the third - next to the amusement park and the lake, and not strictly on the way home - was the payoff.

Now she is safely home, and I am off to work. Erich will keep the patient under observation.

Quote of the day

"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

- Molly Ringle, 2010 Bulwer-Lytton winner, HT MR

Hospital liveblogging

I'm in the waiting room now. Should be with J in pre-op when she is prepped.

They have wireless everywhere here, yay.

Update [14:08]: Now in pre-op. Jocelyn has a splint/cast on one arm, and the other is intubated. She still manages to read her Kindle. Lady next to her bed is very upset because her man's operation has been canceled.

Update [15:38]: Still in pre-op, things are a bit backed up. Upset lady ended up missing her cellphone, minor panic, after a bit they found it on the floor on our side of the curtain.

Update [15:51]: I know everybody wants to see pictures of the wife smiling, but I don't want her whacking me with that heavy cast of hers.

Update [16:48]: STILL waiting. They gave me a $5 bonus voucher for the cafeteria to show they care. Jocelyn, however, hasn't had any food since midnight (she went to bed early but set the alarm clock to 23:30 to get some food in just before the deadline) and is beginning to rate orange on the Cannibalism Threat Indicator System"

Update [18:58]: STILL waiting, but at least in a different place. Jocelyn has signed the doctor's consent form, had the IV she had in for 5 hours removed (it was getting painful) and will soon have another IV in. We've met with the anesthesiologist, and she figures we'll get started any minute now - just after the cafeteria service closes and I can't use my food vouchers anymore. Asked whether she had a message to her sisters, she said "No, I just wanna get this show on the road!"

Update [19:50]: Made it to the cafeteria while there was still hot food available. The surrender of the glasses (they wanted her to keep the glasses as long as possible so she could sign stuff) has taken place. The anesthesiologists have wheeled her away. I'm sure people would rather have details on the patient - so would I - but all I can offer is detail on the dinner - two slices of pizza, one veggie (broccoli, tomatoes, cauliflower, onions, I think even artichokes) one pepperoni. Parfait. Coke. Will blog again when I hear anything.

Update [20:40]: Family Waiting Room at Strong - where I just heard the operation is complete, went well, two pins are holding the bones in a good position, and Jocelyn is awake already and I should be able to see her in half an hour.

Update [22:23]: Everything still good, was just overoptimistic about being able to see Jocelyn quickly. Should be soon, though.

Update [23:26]: Got to see the patient-bunny. Unfortunately, this operation hurt, she was feeling quite miserable. She won't be going home tonight, I can pick her up in the morning. I saw her in the Post-Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU) and they just wheeled her to a patient room a moment ago - I'm blogging while they are making her comfortable there. She's getting some meds now that got the pain down to bearable. They'll probably be kicking me out soon, it sounded at first like I was only going to get to see her for a few minutes but I've been with her almost an hour.

New day, new topic!

Whores and Holes - two great things that go great together

But they don't sound THAT much alike....unless they are black, and you are the NAACP.

If you're not going to click on the links to get the full story (and you should), Hallmark recalled an audio card with an astronomical theme (which included "black holes") because somebody in the NAACP thought it sounded like "black whores". You can judge for yourself if you follow the links.

Don't cry over spilt milk - build storage tanks....

As though the EPA didn't have anything better to do, they were threatening to apply rules meant for oil spills to milk:

The EPA regulations state that “milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil. Thus, containers storing milk are subject to the Oil Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure Program rule when they meet the applicability criteria ...”

Unfortunately, Marginal Revolution didn't post this until weeks after it was announced that this would not be the case.

Vuvuzela virtuoso visiting Eastman Theatre?

Seems unlikely, but clearly so far the biggest winner at the World Cup is this delightful little instrument - and the biggest losers are those condemned to have to hear it unwillingly. Perhaps, as with garlic, the solution is "If you can't beat them, join them."

Now we can not only see any web site to the background of vuvuzela sounds, youtube has added a gadget (soccer ball shaped) that lets you mix the audio of the clip with the appropriate sounds.

Another loser would be astrology, after France rather convincingly showed that it is NOT useful when selecting your soccer team.


Update: the horror!

Women in literature - the early years

I've been reading Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, a book about language history. A passage in it reminded me of a gurl friend of mine, who takes an interest in early female authors - although this one is well before the medieval times that interest her.

Akkadian bilingualism would have become common in the elite, and one can see evidence of this at the highest level, since Sargon's daughter Enheduanna is supposed to have composed two cycles of Sumerian hymns, and the most famous (to Innanna) has been found in some fifty copies.

This participation by women, especially princesses and priestesses, in Sumerian literature was not uncommon. They wrote funeral hymns, letters and especially love songs.

Thy city lifts its hand like a cripple, O my lord Shu-Sin
It lies at they feet like a lion-cub, O son of Shulgi,
O my god, the wine-maid has sweet wine to give,
Like her date-wine sweet is her vulva, sweet is her wine.....

(in background here, Sargon and his daughter were not Sumerian, they were Akkadian - and their language was not at all closely related, although they adopted the Sumerian cuneiform writing system for their own language and kept Sumerian culture alive)

Does anybody have any cunnilingus reference that pre-date this?

Coyote's public service announcement....

...needs to be widely distributed:



(Coyote, who is all about public service, here)

The excitement of chess

This xkcd comic turned out to be inspirational.


I sort of wanted to try it, too, but some went further than just wanting.

Quote of the Day

"The referee's should have been wearing pink in the match where the German striker was given two yellows."
- An Australian co-gamer

My goal this week....

...is to use the word "invidious" in a sentence without sounding like an utter plonker.

I'd love to know the story behind this....

Texts from last night is supposedly a collection of odd text messages people have received. Not all that different, except for tech level, from Overheard In New York.

Sometimes one of these brief excerpts really leaves you wondering about the story behind it. This one, for example:

My vagina has become a graveyard for my brother's friendships

My best guess is that she has had relationships with friends of her brother's.

Hating BP "before it was cool"

Katherine Mangu-Ward gloats a bit here, about an article she wrote in 2006:

For an example of a company apparently trying to single-handedly save the planet through expensive public relations alone, one needn't look farther than the corporate darling of serious environmentalists and greenish consumers alike: BP

BP is first among many companies that have opted to do their environmental penance in the glare of the spotlight. British Petroleum (recently rechristened BP, following KFC's model in removing unsavory words from its brand name) has been much ballyhooed for its commitment to the environment. Most of the ballyhooing is being done by BP itself.

A gas and oil company with $225 billion in revenue, BP is part of an industry that will keep environmental advocacy groups in business for as long at it exists. Yet these days BP is styling itself "Beyond Petroleum" and declaring that it's "thinking outside the barrel." BP's Environmental Team has crafted an elaborate advertising campaign and rebranding effort, recently expanded to the Web. Its goal: to convince the world that a company that sucks dead dinosaurs out of the earth, turns them into gasoline, and delivers that gas to SUVs can also be environmentally friendly enough to use a green and yellow sunburst (or is it a flower?) as its logo....

One might be forgiven for wondering how BP is managing to take in hundreds of billions in oil and gas revenue, apparently in its spare time.

I've never been a big fan of finding scapegoats, but in this case it seems like there was some definite negligence involved. Of course, we'd all like to think this isn't a necessary cost of our need for energy....

Gladiator graveyard

Pretty cool, a burial found in York appears to be of at least 80 gladiators, all young men with especially well developed right arms in good condition, not counting the decapitation and lion bites.

HT Archeaoblog, which in another post sets the record for blogging about the earliest shoes. As they point out, even the Manolo puts his foot in on that one!

Smile - people will wonder what you're up to....

...or apparently, they'll at least figure you're not trying to start a fight. Maybe that's why The Virginian emphasized you have to "smile when you say that."

The little quiz linked to in the link is short and kind of fun - i got 14 out of 20, for the record.

Personality of the week: builder and book burner

Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang

Started the (first version of the) great wall and destroyed (almost all) the literature.

Quote of the day

"Politicians are not magic. The less they do, the better."
- John Stossel

Quote of the day

"You cannot stand what I've become
you much prefer the gentleman I was before -
I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control,
I didn't even know there was a war...."
- Leonard Cohen

As much as I hate to tolerate assault....

...sometimes I actually find myself cheerleading it.

Almost makes one want to draw Muhammed!

I'll deal with it somehow....

A new study purports to show that exposure to beautiful women is bad for men's health. By some strange circumstance, I am still alive today. This is anectodal counter-evidence at best, but I must agree with the source that this study is suspect. The criticisms are not only funny but right on the mark.



Hat tip Skepchiks.

Quote of the day

(in response to "I thought you were honest")
"That's a common misperception. I just hate people."
- Alice from Dilbert

Not a cause I support.....

...but it IS kind of funny.

I guess putting some kind of boundary to vandalism seems almost worthy, unless you are a chicken concerned about being misunderstood.

Trivia of the day

Maltese is the only semitic language normally written in a Latin alphabet.
- Language Log

Is it just how submissive the little dears are, then?

I am generally open minded, but for the longest time I have believed that the two areas in which women were simply inferior to men were weightlifting and chess. I concluded the latter back in my chess playing days when I was perusing the ratings tables in Chess Life & Review. If I had been a woman, my rating would have placed me in the top ten women in the United States. As a man, I wasn't even in the top thousand. That doesn't mean NO women could beat me, but it does suggest amazingly few...and there were many men in the "no woman could beat me" category. Yes, I'm sure that women are not encouraged to play chess as much as men are (not that a "nerd" reputation is all THAT prized even among men), but the difference just seemed SO extreme there had to be some sort of biological factor.

Now I see this study. In short: no. Now I'm not saying this study (42 pairs of various skill levels) completely dispels my notion - how many of those pairs were tournament level players? - but it certainly weakens my case...and it would provide another explanatory mechanism if women just like to lose (to a guy - the women apparently played harder if they THOUGHT they were playing against another woman).

Any of you girls want to help me out lifting this heavy package?

OK, I understand....

Courtesy of Marginal Revolution, which also points out that California is the seventh most risky debtor in the world (Venezuela, Argentina, Pakistan, Greece, Ukraine and the Emirate of Dubai are even worse), explains the mathematics of CDOs so YOU can understand it, and how to give somebody crabs.

The man who mooned Spitzer

I've linked to Coyote before, but never realized that the crowning accomplishment of his life actually occurred back in his student days, and while he continues to soar it is too much to hope he could ever reach those heights again: mooning Spitzer.

(the link also has mild relevance to the Supreme Court nomination)

Planetary news

Despite losing one of its stripes, Jupiter will remain a planet.

Even if Pluto gained one, it still wouldn't be.

Apartment dwelling woes....

Some of my friends have had difficulties with their neighbors when they lived in apartments (yes, I'm thinking of YOU, professor!), but at least none have ever complained to me about being kept awake by exorcisms.

Things gone terribly wrong

"You shoot two dogs in front of a seven year old--who could have been killed by a stray round, and at the very least will carry this hideous recollection to the grave. And why? For misdemeanor pot possession?"

- Megan McArdle

Hairdressers and transvestites saving the environment

in a rather unexpected way....

Quote of the day

"Do we really want to live in a country where when someone busts into your house at night you're supposed to assume they might be cops?"
- Megan McArdle's Quote of the Year, by unnamed commenter.

"Remind me to never be the first one who falls asleep in this crowd"

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, riffs on the news that a Chinese man who "died after his friends inserted a live eel into his rectum as a practical joke when the man was asleep". What cards!

As he phrased it, "With friends like that, who needs enemas?"

You must consider daughter-cattle ratios

Always, in my ignorance, somewhat preferred shorter girs, but it turns out tall girls fetch more cattle.

"Slip and fall down carefully"

...an article on Chinglish, via MR.

The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”

The same link collection also takes us to this:

That zooming in bit especially frosts me.....

This article on "Top 10 things Hollywood thinks computers can do" hits a couple of my pet peeves. As you can tell, my single biggest irritation has been that in almost any movie you can take a grainy security video frame and "enhance" it to see a bacterium on the skin of an intruder. The other one is about guessing passwords, although for me it hasn't been just the EASE of guessing, it also has been how there often seems to be some sort of special hone-in-on-the-password interface that computers are equipped with.

OK, I'll play along....

...with this game:


First thing I ever ordered from Amazon -
April 5, 1999 - Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham (Agatha Raisin Mysteries, No. 8)

Quote of the Day

To cure political correctness, we must commit to being more intellectually shameless.
- Dave Marney, commenting to the Volokh Conspiracy

Bitch-slapping the educated

Language Log had a couple of interesting items recently (granted, not much different than saying "The sun rose this morning!")

One was about "begging the question", a phrase more often used these days to mean "raising the question" than what it used to mean, which was something like "assuming your conclusions" or "arguing in a circle". Anybody employing the more common usage is liable to be corrected by some pedant who wants you to know he knows the "correct" usage, but this item goes into the whole history of the item. The recommendation is just to avoid using the phrase completely to deprive pedants of their target.

The other is another rant directed at Strunk and White, which I've always enjoyed because I've been irritated myself by editors that take their mostly useless advice far more seriously than either Strunk OR White did.

Interesting point for entrepeneurs

MR points to an item by Paul Atkins that indicated Apple Computers was considered too risky to do an IPO in some states.

Stories from my life

A guy with whom I'm playing an online computer game commented to me: "As a programmer you already know, there is no such thing as a "random" glitch".

There may be a cause, but things can look pretty random. I had to fly down to North Carolina once because a system we had written for a large company (controlling vending machines that took credit cards) started randomly charging customers $0 for some of the purchases (which were NOT $0).

I remember the flight well, because I had a cold and the cabin was unpressurized, and I arrived weak and pale with blood trickling out of my ears after some of the worst pain I've ever experienced. The guy in charge of the computer that was running my program whom I was rushing to see was unable to see me at first because an Ebay auction on some collectible was in the end stages, but finally I got to see the system.

After hours of comparing my input logs to the output we were generating, and trying to figure out HOW my program could possibly produce such nonsense - and running the program in a test mode with the same input to try to reproduce the problem - I was ready to tear my hair out.

I wrote a quick test program that did simple arithmetic and logged the output. It worked fine. I went to my hotel room in despair and left it running.

The next day, I checked the output log of the test program and found that for several minute-long periods the computer would add 1 and 1 and arrive at 0.

The computer they were using to run my program was really a collection of a large set of processing units, and processes could be run by any one of these - when my process was run on a defective unit, it produced defective results.

When I asked them how this could possibly have been going on undetected, they explained that the system ran diagnostics continuously, but the results were sent to a display that was itself no longer working, so they hadn't checked in months. Probably higher priority Ebay auctions.

Our president explained to me that it would be bad for company relations if I killed anybody. In retrospect, it might have been worth it.

One of the downsides of not having gay marriage....

...that I've heard described has been that married couples get fewer restrictions when visiting each other in a health care situation. But I never quite thought that a couple that was not married would be separated like THIS.

"According to the suit, when Harold, Greene’s partner of 20 years, fell ill, the county refused to let Greene visit him in the hospital, despite the couple’s meticulous efforts to name one another in their wills, powers of attorney, and medical directive documents."

One wonders whether even if there HAD been a marriage whether things would have gone any better...but in any case, it is shocking that this sort of thing could be going on even nowadays.

A soul is a terrible thing to waste....

....but to promise it in exchange for a computer game is pretty reasonable.

The April Fool's joke made the point that nobody actually reads those online agreements. Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Quote of the day

Blonde chick to friend: So I ran into that guy and confronted him. I was like, "why didn't you say hi to me last Friday? I know you saw me, but you didn't say anything. Listen, if you're going to sleep with me Thursday night, you can't just not say hi to me on Friday. I know it's common for a lot of businessmen to sleep with prostitutes and then ignore them the next day when they see them on the street, but they pay them. If you're going to ignore me, fine... but I expect a check in the mail."
- Overheard in New York

How happy is happy enough?

Well, if you're not there yet, Badakesuyo tweets how to move in the right direction.

How gay is gay enough?

In a bizarre development, 3 athletes ruled insufficiently gay are suing to have the determination overturned, as well as reinstatement of their standing and money damages.

At one point during the proceedings, the lawsuit alleges, one of the plaintiffs was told: "This is the Gay World Series, not the Bisexual World Series."