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.