I am not trying to be a crotchety old guy, but sometimes the quality of blog comment is affected by the fact that bloggers are too freaking young. On any number of issues, from climate to politics, I see folks treating certain events as unprecedented that anyone with a memory of the seventies (or even the eighties) could put in much better context.
Here is a good example. Dumb girl creates fake thesis rating college boys she slept with, grading them on their sexual pros and cons. It inevitably gets in the wild and much angst and hilarity ensues.
But this kind of thing is old news. I remember for example, in the late seventies or early eighties (can't find a link) a couple of women from Yale published a book on the boys at Yale and their sexual pros and cons, including a star-rating system. And they published proudly and knowingly, no accidentally.
This is pretty interesting -- OK Cupid did a phrase-frequency count in its online dating ads and were able to sort them by race and gender, and then identify those phrases that the particular race-gender combination used most uniquely. Its kind of amazing just how much the analysis might fit your stereotyped guesses. Among many others, horseback riding, baths, and Jodi Picoult for white women, with Tom Clancy, Harleys and Soundgarden for white men. Check it out here. (hat tip Flowing Data)
Sunday's shirt at Teefury. Pointed to me by my daughter, who was convinced I was geeky enough to want this. Shirts only sold one day so if you click tomorrow you will see something different. This is the image from the front:
These guys sell a 1/4-scale RC King Tiger tank, perfect for tearing around the neighborhood. Six feet long, nearly 600 pounds. Uses electric motor rather than gasoline, which seems odd to me -- probably takes more juice to recharge it than a Chevy Volt (and that's OK). This would almost be wasted here in Arizona, where people would just think it was cool. I would have to take it back to Cambridge to have any real fun. (Yes, your neighbor can get a T-34/85 if they feel the need to respond).
I was thinking today, what must the families of the 11 people killed on the Deepwater Horizon be thinking? Their losses are never mentioned in any news reports I see. Its all about getting oil on the ducks.
Sure, I am pissed off about the enormous damage to the Gulf Coast as well. But I got to thinking, were I the engineer that made the wrong risk/safety decisions here, what would I feel most guilty about? I was put in that position for years in a refinery, constantly asked, "is this safe" or "can we keep running" or "do we need to shut down" or "is that vibration a problem?" These are difficult, because in the real-world of engineering, things are not ever perfectly safe. But never-the-less, if I had made the wrong call here, I think I would be feeling a lot worse about the 11 dead people than a number of dead fish and birds. Perhaps my priorities are out of whack with the times.
By the way, TJIC has a great post on risk and cost in the real world of engineering. I agree with his thoughts 100% from my experience as a troubleshooter / engineer in the field making just these decisions.
Look, we all trade off safety in order to save time and expense.
Do you put on your seat belt when moving your car from one point in the driveway to another?
Do you buy the car that costs twice as much, because it's got a 1% increase in crash survivability?
Did you pay $40k to get industrial fire sprinklers installed in your house?
Do you have a home defibrillation machine?
There is nothing wrong, in the abstract, with trading off safety in order to save time and expense.
The question is whether BP did this to a level that constitutes "gross negligence".
I had an early morning flight out of Louisville today, and so stayed in a hotel near the airport to maximize my sleep time. Usually this is fine, as most airports are dormant from 10pm to 6am. Unfortunately, I failed to remember that Louisville is the main air-hub for UPS (like Memphis is for FedEx) so a big bank of planes was landing around midnight, and more noisily, taking off between four and five AM.
I often criticize irrational behavior, so I feel must confess to such behavior of my own. I was considering purchase of some software that was $89.99 plus a $20 mail-in rebate, for a net of $69.99. I probably would have been willing to pay the $89.99, but the rebate scared me off. Why? Because I know from past experience I would probably fail to do all the rebate paperwork (they count on this, which is why they offer rebates rather than discounts). I would therefore feel guilty that I lost out on $20. The package of $89.99 for the software was fine, but $89.99 for the software plus guilt was too high.
Can't you picture some Federal bureaucrat with purview somehow over wood pallet fires trying to fan the flames of public opinion in the interests of his or her job security and budget?
The other candidate is this from an outstanding XKCD post on a color naming survey he did (via TJIC).
I am endlessly fascinated by the architecture and infrastructure of Manhattan. I am probably one of the few non-locals who owns this book, as well as others in the series. I highly recommend the Scouting New York blog for those of you who love the hardware of Gotham more than its software. This post is a good index to many of his best features.
Via Radley Balko and Pat's Papers, comes this chart on Canadian water consumption during the Olympic Hockey finals. As he asks, what happens when everyone in the country goes to the bathroom at the same time?
Some of you may have seen me on Glenn Beck today. If you are like me, and don't do stuff like that very often, you may be wondering just what being on such a show is like.
The process began with a call from one of Beck's assistants. She spent over an hour with me in multiple calls to make sure she absolutely understood all the issues and could communicate them to Beck. She also called the PIO at Arizona State Parks several times to get their perspective. Then she had me come into the Fox local station in Phoenix. This is where the process went a bit different than I expected.
First, I was still sitting in the green room about 9 minutes before I was supposed to go on the air, and thus was getting a bit nervous. When they came to me, I expected to be taken to some tiny studio. Instead, I was led out to the busy news floor, in the middle of all the desks with people working. There, I found a camera and a stool. They miked me and put on my earpiece. Hearing the feed was a bit of a challenge, because people were on the phones at all the desks right near me.
Doing the interview is more like doing radio. It may look on TV like we see each other, but I can't see Beck and can't pick up on his body language. We end up talking on top of each other several times. At one point, the lady at the desk next to me goes into a drawer for stapes or something and bangs my butt, ripping out my earphone and effectively disconnecting me from the show.
Anyway, it was fun and if given the chance, I expect to be better next time. I will post a link to the video when I find it.
I saw some news story that Tiger Woods was going to publicly apologize. Why? What did he do to me? He is either good with his wife and kids or he is not. The rest of us are irrelevant. I suppose he could apologize to us for letting us down by under-performing his public image, but in turn we should all apologize for feeding like emotional vultures on his family's personal problems. Besides, he has taken a $100 million a year hit for the damage he did to his own image. I am willing to call things square between us.
Via TJIC, I meet this guy on every long distance trip.
Apparently, there are some people who: A) Cannot judge their own speed except in relation to the vehicle directly in front of them, and B) Cannot hold a steady pedal for love nor money. So there we'll be, in the agrarian hinterlands of Indiana or Kentucky; me rolling along in the left lane and passing the occasional car on the right when I notice Mr. Wobbly Throttle a'creepin' up in my mirrors. When he gets close enough I'll signal right and let him pass, which he does, after a fashion, but sort of bogs down once he's just off the port bow. We'll roll in formation like that, me starting to fume, until we come upon a car in the right lane that forces me to turn off the cruise and tuck in behind Wobbly.
As we pass the slower traffic, Mr. Wobbly Throttle, now bereft of vehicles to overtake, starts to slow down. He notices me in his mirror and sometimes darts right, sometimes slows down further and gets passed on the right (traffic gods, forgive me!) I'll hit "Resume" on the cruise control in the left lane, but a mile down the road, sure as God made little green apples, here comes Wobbly again, as though drawn to a magnet in my back bumper. This dance can go on for over a hundred miles, and is pretty well guaranteed to have me chewing the steering wheel in frustration in only a fraction of that distance. For Vishnu's sake, man, pick a speed and hold it!
If Tiger Woods winds up in Wickenburg for rehab over his apparent sexual compulsion and pill addiction, local businesses are ready.As the rumor mill seems to suggest, Tiger would be checking into the Meadows Rehabilitation Center in Wickenburg just after New Years, and despite being a little late in covering Tiger-gate's Arizona connection, the Arizona Republic reports today that local businesses are gearing up for golf's greatest Lothario.
For example, the owner of Sundance Pizza in Wickenburg, Bob Halsey, has already placed a sign in front of his store that says "Hey, Tiger, we deliver."
Chances of Tiger ordering some of Halsey's take-out are probably unlikely -- perhaps a more suiting sign should say "hey, droves of paparazzi, we deliver."
If Tiger does end up in Wickenburg, the number of paparazzi that will descend on the tiny town is certain to cause a boom for the local economy. Some tabloids are even rumored to have placed journalists in the rehab center themselves, in order to get the real dirt on the golf great.
Paying lots of money to stop having sex with hot women seems an odd thing to do. From my experience he could take up playing Dungeons and Dragons and have the same result for a lot less money.
Those of you who have read Neal Stephenson's Crytonomicon may remember the side tale of Randy Waterhouse's molars. A lot of the fun of a Stephenson novel is not the plot but the side expositions on everything from number theory to Cap'n Crunch. This is perhaps doubly true of Cryptonomicon, whose plot is only so-so (hunting for Nazi gold, sort of) but whose prose and exposition are fantastic. Anyway, in that story, one of the main characters has a problem with these horrible wisdom teeth that are impacted so deeply in his skull that oral surgeons have to run out and have 2-3 cocktails to overcome the shivers of malpractice fear they get from just looking at the x-rays.
Fun exaggeration in the service of fiction, until we took my daughter to the dentist yesterday. My daughter already has a history of weird teeth. She had to have oral surgery before she was 10 to remove a baby tooth that somehow never emerged and was up deep in her head somewhere, upside down or sideways or something. So anyway, she still has 8 baby teeth in her head past their expiration date, and the orthodontist finally insisted they had to be removed.
No problem. Baby teeth are a layup to remove. Fifty bucks each says the dentist (which caused us to give our daughter a financial incentive -- we told her if she could wiggle them out beforehand, we would pay her half, which she did with two). Anyway, baby teeth are easy, no big roots, nature wants them out at this point anyway, etc.
And most of them were just that -- easy. Except for one. The dentist simply could not get it out. The appointment went on and on, because the dentist kept running back to the x-ray to make sure she was really pulling on a baby tooth and not some adult tooth.
Anyway, it eventually came out, after much pain and suffering on my daughter's part. One of her "normal" removed baby molars is on the right for comparison. The Ripley's tooth is on the left. It just sort of looks evil.
One of these is an actual product, and one is a joke invention from the Onion. Can you guess which?
So which is it - the ipod dock in a pet bowl or the ipod dock in a vacuum cleaner. One has to be real, they are not both fake, though neither make any sense to me.
I have been having a 6-month run in with a Hawaiian bank over a land loan. Today I finally yelled at a supervisor, without really thinking about what I was saying, that it seemed like their bank was systematically given their mainland customers the shaft. Lo and behold, in 20 seconds I had a complete resolution. What I have been missing all these years as a white male!
Never heard of tilt-shift photography until today, but it is cool. Here is an example - real scenes are digitally manipulated to look like it is a model. Which in fact is exactly the opposite of what I try to achieve with my model railroading.
Update: The video seems to have left the building.
A couple of weeks ago, President Obama had members of his cabinet, as well as members of congress, including Flake, over to the White House for a game of hoops.
They were all men.
Sounds like the boys had some fun but If you ask the "Debby Downers" from women advocacy groups like the National Organization for Women, the games lack of estrogen is unacceptable.
"Relationships get built in those more informal settings," NOW President Terry O'Neill told ABC News, "and the relationships have a huge impact on the influence an individual has. We know what happens when we segregated whether it by race or whether it by gender -- you end up with 1st class citizens and you end up with 2nd class citizens."
Fortunately we have moved beyond quotas. Not.
"It's extremely important, now especially, for the president to have as many women as men in his closest circle of advisors. ... If women had been at the heads of the companies on Wall Street instead of these masters of the universe then we might not be in the predicament that we're in today," O'Neill says. "[The ratio of women to men] needs to be 50/50. Women are 52 percent of the voting public so obviously there needs to be 50/50 of any Cabinet."
I will be counting the men at the next baby shower.
Combine 40% French design and engineering, 40% political correctness, 10% Hello Kitty and 10% of WTF to get this new electric concept car from Renault with square wheels called the Twizy. I don't think this is a put on.
