Sucking down goats

Daniel Drezner notes:

Since goat meat is better for you than other forms of meat -- the fat content is 50%-65% lower than similarly prepared beef while the protein content is roughly equal -- someone should be promoting the Goat Diet.

We put the K in Kwality

Corporations want to make sure that the crap they sell you is of the highest quality. Thus standards such as ISO 9000 are born, ensuring that the process for making crap is completely documented and followed.

Now they want to apply quality standards to open-source software. Personally, I never understood how you could document the creative process, but damn it, they're gonna try.

(Calculating the percentage of GDP attributable to tax lawyers, ISO 9000 auditing, and pyramid schemes is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Gurin and Malon

Sunday is Fun Day, so here's a very cute game to remember: Binary Land.

Large flesh-colored squirrel

This post is a couple days after the fact, but I thought everybody should compare this recent news story and the lyrics of this 1950s-era song.

I figure the odds be fifty-fifty

A Reuters headline today:

Report: Nearly Half of HIV Adults Are Women

That hip-hop culture

Rush Limbaugh, November 22, 2004:

...I've been watching interviews with ex-NBA players and current NBA players. You know what the common theme that I'm hearing is? "Well, I'm not going to be dissed. I'm simply not going to be disrespected. Somebody disrespects me, they're going to pay for it." Meaning, "A fan disrespects me, that fan's going to pay for it," not just another player. And that comes right out of the hip-hop culture, and it's not just that. You look at NBA players and the uniforms, you don't have to go back very far. The uniforms have changed totally. They're now in gang colors. They are in gang styles.

SENATOR ZELL MILLER:  If you‘re going to ask a question...
MATTHEWS:  Well, it‘s a tough question.  It takes a few words.
MILLER:  Get out of my face. If you are going to ask me a question, step back and let me answer.
(Laughter)
MATTHEWS:  Senator, please.
MILLER:  You know, I wish we... I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel. Now, that would be pretty good.

See, in the Old West -- and I would have loved to have been in the Old West -- Al [Franken] and I would have just had a little -- a little shootout, you know? We would have went out on Wilshire Avenue, and six-shooters. Now, he's a much smaller target than I am -- about four-foot-eleven, but he's wider. And it would have been, you know, Clint Eastwood time. I would have had the serape, would have given my squint, and I would have put a bullet right between his head.

I didn't mean for it to catch on!

About 10 days ago I linked to this news story about a 6-year-old child being tasered at school for threatening to harm himself. It seemed pretty crazy and unbelievable at the time.

That school now seems cool-headed and rational compared to this local story about a 14-year-old being tasered because he wouldn't stop playing his Game Boy.

I doth Artest

Today during my breakfast a loud, irrational man joined me at the bar. He was all steamed about the recent Pistons-Pacers fracas, and had some very... unconventional views about the topic.

Namely, (1) that NBA players are professional athletes who should never go up in the stands, and (2) that Ron Artest and others should be charged with attempted murder. He also thought that Pistons fans should sue the NBA en masse, and thought he should call Geoffrey Fieger himself to recommend litigation.

When I tried to suggest that perhaps the beverage-tossing fans were partly to blame for the fights, I was interrupted and told to shut up. So I did -- and he still kept angrily muttering about the Pacers to himself.

Really, who is the boss?

Did anyone see Saturday Night Live an hour ago?

Isn't Fred Armisen's impersonation of Tony Danza uncannily accurate?

Not

According to Slashdot, Microsoft has patented the concept of negation.

Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am". Microsoft has shown that the contrapositive is true, namely, "If I am not, then clearly I'm not thinking."

(Do you think I can still patent the universal quantifier?)

Privatized for your protection

• Mark Schmitt: "...you can't really claim a mandate to privatize social security when you accused your opponent of lying when he charged that you intended to privatize Social Security..."
• Hullabaloo: "I'm assuming, of course, that if employers drop health insurance they will then be required to give their employees a raise in the amount of what they were paying for their health care, less the tax break. They will do that, won't they? Of course they will. Otherwise, these working people will be forced to "save" money that they don't have. That wouldn't be right. But if that happens let's face it, if you can't afford to make ends meet that's what churches are for. Be good and maybe you'll be allowed some charity. (Or you'll be allowed to pray for some, anyway.)"

Grid

My former schoolmate Robin created a nifty Flash movie that attempts to predict the next 10 years of media history. It's been Slashdotted, Scobled, and Kottke-ed, so I figured I'd try to say something unique about it.

I think the notion of data privacy will either reshape the "desktop metaphor" or become one of the most important uses of metadata. Modern operating systems already have a notion of "permissions", but setting up file permissions can be very tricky. There needs to be a better interface for telling the computer how certain pieces of data should be shared. AOL Instant Messenger already has a good start ("Allow all users, allow all users except these, block all users except these..."), but we're still waiting for a breakthrough.

It's not hard to envision a world where people have fast broadband connections (upstream AND downstream), using computers that have operating systems that can easily share data. The interface would be streamlined to allow instant publishing. ("Computer, set the privacy level of this file to 'world-readable'. Computer, set the privacy level of this file to 'wiki'.") Everybody would be a media producer, just like in "epic".

The question would then become, do you really want to hear everybody's opinion? (And would conservative think tanks still insist that the grid has a liberal bias?)

Think of the mothers!

You can support some crazy proposals using statistics:

After only three deaths in an estimated 360,000 uses, the GOP-led Congress plans to reintroduce a bill to "temporarily suspend" sales of RU-486 so it can be more thoroughly investigated. With a maternal death rate in the US of 12 per 100,000, RU-486 is about 13-14 times safer than a full term pregancy. Of course, the solution is simple: suspend all pregnancies for a year so we can more fully evaluate their safety.

Reckoning Delay-ed

Yay for hypocrisy!

House Republicans approved a party rules change Wednesday that could allow Majority leader Tom DeLay to retain his leadership post if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury on state political corruption charges.

By a voice vote, and with a handful of lawmakers voicing opposition, the House Republican Conference decided that a party committee of several dozen members would review any felony indictment of a party leader and recommend at that time whether the leader should step aside.

House Republicans adopted the indictment rule in 1993, when they were trying to end four decades of Democratic control of the House, in part by highlighting Democrats' ethical lapses. They said at the time that they held themselves to higher standards than prominent Democrats such as then-Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (Ill.), who eventually pleaded guilty to mail fraud and was sentenced to prison.

Mac daddy

Perhaps there's something to the theory about Mac users scoring with the ladies....

Legalized torture

Via Metafilter, here is William Shatner butchering "Rocket Man".

This explains a lot...

Hot pod

I think this may be the cruelest example ever of "ways to set up Jeff for a crushing disappointment".

In other words, I'm not convinced that "Hey baby, I've been using Macs since System 6.0.2!" will ever be a successful pickup line.

Must have been a pretty big kid

Some interesting convergence between today's news, and this week's South Park episode....

Essential Mac software

As a college student, I need special tools to get things done. Here's a list of the applications I use on my Mac. (Applications included with Mac OS X have been excluded from this list.)

Read the rest of "Essential Mac software"

Panic

I just had a kernel panic on my iMac. (This happens so rarely, I think it's newsworthy when it does occur.)

Apparently 10.3.5 + Unison + iChat + doing an Entourage rebuild at the same time is a recipe for disaster.

Pimping ain't easy

Wired News goes literary:

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: "Pimping session over."

Real science

Fafblog's latest post is all about leprechology, sasqualogical processes, and dodgeballs.

It is one of the funniest things I have ever read on the Internet, just like this.

Fun political points

Perhaps all these links and blurbs belong on Snarkmarket, but I'm putting them up because they make me smile.

• Atrios: "People who do well in the market like to believe they're "smart investors." Maybe they are. But, most of them just got lucky. Being a "smart investor" means that you know more than the market does, something which can't exist if we believe the markets are efficient, as our conservative trolls usually do."
• Talking Points Memo: "Yes, the president got more popular votes than any other candidate in history. He is followed by John Kerry.... The fact that the president got more popular votes than anybody in the past isn't a measure of the margin of his victory. It's a measure of population growth, which (unless he's more of a bounder than we know) he is not responsible for, and a high-turnout election, for which his unpopularity is as responsible as his popularity."
• Pandagon: "Informed of [a report ranking the healthiness of all 50 states], Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana derided the top three as "condescending granola-crunchers" out of touch with heartland values like "saturated fat and sittin' around". They further noted that frequent doctor visits were for "cowards" with "affordable health insurance"."

Math test, and math retest

NPR's All Things Considered had a fantastic report about AP Calculus today.

The report discusses how many universities are adjusting how much credit is awarded for good AP scores. Universities are finally realizing that a multiple-choice test is not the best way to evaluate someone's mathematical proficiency, and in some cases they end up re-testing students when they get to college.

Another very important point raised was that most middle and high school classes don't discuss the art of proof at all. Most pre-university math is computational, whereas I can tell you that all high-level college math courses are primarily about proving assertions. Of course, the high school curriculum is largely determined by the tests that students will take (e.g. the AP Calculus test, state-level evaluations for No Child Left Behind), and you can't test proof-writing on multiple-choice tests. Thus proofs are rarely covered.

As someone who got a 5 on the Calculus BC AP test, and passed out of two semesters of college calculus, this doesn't affect me anymore, but I hope that these universities' actions will lead to better math skills for the next generation of university students.

Welcome to the jungle

I am addicted to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. (I did make time to vote, though.) It is such an engrossing game!

Here's a little tip: if you're still in Los Santos, you can make a lot of money by killing drug dealers. Each drug dealer drops approximately $2000 on the ground after you kill them. You can usually identify drug dealers by (1) their habit of standing still more than other pedestrians, and (2) how they ask you if you'd like to buy drugs when you walk up to them. (Don't tell them Yes or No -- just lock your AK-47 on their head and fire.) Not all drug dealers wear the same outfit!

I also hope you knew that there's free body armor within a 30-second jaunt of the Johnson Home in Ganton. It's under an overpass inside the flood control basin, east of Grove Street. It makes the early missions much easier if you're always wearing body armor.

The stakes

Overheard in the hallway at school today:

Female: I stayed up really late last night. I was so nervous!
Male: You're nervous? You're not the one who could be drafted!

Shitty shit

In a trend that's even worse than Bush winning, many states (including my own) have just stained their constitutions with discriminatory anti-gay referendums. Here's a little bit of what happened here in Michigan:

The Coalition for a Fair Michigan aimed most of its criticism at the "similar union for any purpose" phrase. The proposal, they said, would have sweeping and radical consequences.

By doing so, the coalition hoped it could convince voters that instead of protecting marriage, they were imperiling existing benefits, such as health or death benefits, granted to the partners and children of some public employees, gay and straight. Early on, opponents also tried to make the argument that the proposal applied to private-sector employers.

But polls and focus groups consistently showed that voters were not interested in such details.

Shit

Well, according to CNN, Kerry conceded the election to Bush, so I guess that means it's over for now. The people have spoken, and approximately 51% of the people feel that unjustified wars, record deficits and increasing numbers of abortions are OK as long as the President feels he's doing God's work.

I'll leave you with two opinions, neither of which I wrote. Matthew Yglesias warns,

I would caution anyone against deluding themselves into believing that a second Bush term won't be so bad. With a majority of the popular vote and expanded margins in the House and Senate, we're going to see Bush Unleashed -- something that will probably be much crazier than what we've seen over the past four years.

Don't believe me? Consider the highlight reel of reelected presidents over the past 50 years. Ike won a second term and watched in dismay as his chief of staff was forced to resign over a vicuña coat. Richard Nixon buried George McGovern in 1972 and then resigned a year and a half later when Watergate finally caught up to him. Ronald Reagan sweated out his second term wondering if he'd be impeached over Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton didn't have to wonder: Two years after his reelection, he was defending himself in the first impeachment trial in over a century.

CS jaywalking

Here's a gem from the comments section at The Daily WTF.

I have a friend who works at Microsoft ... and he asked an interviewee "what's the running time of a binary search?". The candidate answered "2 nanoseconds".

Priorities

Tough decision ahead: do I vote today, or play a bunch of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas instead?

My evening

Boo... My VW Beetle got rear-ended for the second time today. And it took about an hour for a State Police car to show up because of the John Kerry motorcade! :(