Found in translation

About a mile from my house, there is a large office building with three German firms inside. Their names are LuK, INA, and FAG. Their logos appear on the office building's sign in that order.

LuK INA FAG

To top it off, this office building is located on Big Beaver Road, which happens to be Exit 69 off of the interstate. (I swear I'm not making this up.)

UPDATE: If you go to FAG's homepage, click on News, then click on New Products, you'll see that they make a FAG Detector. (Thanks to Kurt for the tip.)

Let's end it on this

Massachusetts is considering implementing an idea I had a long time ago:

Based in part on the findings of a death penalty panel he appointed, the bill would limit capital punishment to the "worst of the worst" crimes including terrorism, the murder of police officers, murder involving torture and the killing of witnesses. It also would use evidence such as DNA testing to protect the innocent...

...It also suggests doing away with the legal standard of guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt" in a death penalty case, and replacing it with a finding of "no doubt."

"The weakness in the death penalty statutes in other states, of course, is the fear that you may execute someone who is innocent. We remove that possibility," [Governor] Romney said.

The mini Mac

The rumor mill is buzzing about a supposed $499 monitor-less Mac, to debut at the Macworld Expo on January 11. The idea is that iPod users are eager to try out a Mac, but not at the current price points. Two questions pop to mind:

1. Is this just Apple counter-intelligence, designed to flush out the insiders who leak secrets?

2. How fucked up will it be when Apple sells an iPod that costs more than one of their computers?

Live by the semantics...

Scripting News, December 27, 2004:

On this day in 1997, a new format for Scripting News, in XML, the format that would become RSS 0.91. Note the concept of "content flows," this is what made the format different from others that were "site summaries."

Come on adore on bended knee

It's still the holiday season, so I suppose it's not too late to link you to the holiday edition of "This Week In God". However, "This Week In God" makes very little mention of Christmas, so I will link you to December's "Mark Your Calendar" to avoid being accused of "attacking Christmas".

And if I may link to one more Daily Show clip that's completely unrelated to the holidays, here's "Stone-Cold" Stephen Colbert with a rare case of the giggles.

O come let us adore him

The pimple on my ass finally disappeared today!

Truly it is a Christmas miracle!

I hate phonies

Back in high school, some of the less studious students would refer to Cliff Notes or Spark Notes so they could write book reports. Now, a mother in Maine is referring to Spark Notes so she can have a book banned from her child's school!

Andrea Minnon of Lebanon [Maine] said she had never heard of "The Catcher in the Rye" before she learned that it was on her 14-year-old son Spencer's freshman reading list. After researching the book online with her husband, she concluded that it espouses immoral ideas that are inappropriate for freshman-age students. Now she wants it removed from the freshman curriculum....

Before filing her complaint, Minnon said, she and her husband researched the book using Sparknotes, an online study guide. She is now reading the book.

"That's where we got a lot of our information about (Holden Caulfield) being with a prostitute, his lying, his drinking, using girls for pleasure and his depression problems," she said.

Those mature themes, plus the profane language used by the main character, are inappropriate for 14-year-olds, she said.

(via Metafilter)

Rocked off your rocker

Scoble, I think you've oversimplified yet again.

Apple is positioning its product as a cultural movement. "Wearing white headphone cords say you're cool" is what Apple's advertising is saying. They imply "you can be like Bono." What's cooler than that?...

...Is this rocket science? Am I off my rocker?

• Carry every song you own on an object the size of a deck of cards.
• It's as simple as plugging the iPod into the computer. That's it. Really.

For those of you who want to sell like the iPod: start by thinking about how to create a cultural movement.

Curbside prophet

Because of my previous post, I have decided to share my own theology with you. It is based on two scientific axioms:

• The planet Earth has a magnetosphere which deflects solar wind.
• Each human brain has hundreds of billions of neurons in a unique configuration.

Within my theology, there's no need to miss the departed, because if you live within the right latitudes you can see them! Your afterlife within the Van Allen radiation belts lasts either until you're reincarnated (which is simply an application of conservation of energy), or annihilated by a gamma ray.

You may be wondering, what happens if you go to hell? To be honest, God hasn't filled in that part of the puzzle yet, but I'm assuming that your soul-energy goes to power Yanni's synthesizers.

Run away, run away!

After taking classical mythology at my bleeding-heart-liberal university, I was ready to assume that stories of dragons came from the "myth of the quest". Silly me! Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily explains why I'm completely wrong.

The evolutionists insist the dinosaurs lived millions and millions of years ago and became extinct long before man walked the planet.

I don't believe that for a minute. I don't believe there is a shred of scientific evidence to suggest it. I am 100 percent certain man and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time. In fact, I'm not at all sure dinosaurs are even extinct!

Think of all the world's legends about dragons. Look at those images. What were those folks seeing? They were clearly seeing dinosaurs. You can see them etched in cave drawings. You can see them in ancient literature. You can see them described in the Bible. You can see them in virtually every culture in every corner of the world.

Did the human race have a collective common nightmare? Or did these people actually see dragons? I believe they saw dragons – what we now call dinosaurs...

...You know what I think? I think we've been sold a bill of goods about the dinosaurs. I don't believe they died off millions and millions of years ago. In fact, I'm not at all convinced they've died off completely.

[Via Three-Toed Sloth]

I'm going deaf, you're growing melancholy

On the song "If She Wants Me" by Belle & Sebastian, the singer sings,

If I could do just one near perfect thing I’d be happy

Speaking of math...

I'm expecting to graduate with a B.S. in Mathematics in May. Resume available upon request. :)

(This is in response to Brad Delong.)

Why Republicans shun academia

Jonathan Chait has a fantastic editorial in the L.A. Times, entitled "Why Academia Shuns Republicans". His article actually explains why Republicans shun academia -- because of spreading GOP anti-intellectualism. But it also has some fun parts:

A few weeks ago, a pair of studies found that Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans among professors at leading universities. Conservatives gleefully seized upon this to once again flagellate academia for its liberal bias.

Am I the only person who fails to understand why conservatives see this finding as vindication? After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?

Conservatives have a ready answer. The only reason faculties lean so far to the left is that deans, administrators and entire university cultures systematically discriminate against conservatives.

They don't, however, have much evidence to back this up. Mostly, they assume that the leftward tilt is prima facie evidence of anti-conservative discrimination. (Yet, when liberals hold up minority underrepresentation at some institutions as proof of discrimination, conservatives are justifiably skeptical.)

But the rise of fashionable left-wing scholarship can be blamed for only a tiny part of the GOP's problem. The studies showing that academics prefer Democrats to Republicans also show that this preference holds in hard sciences as well as social sciences. Are we to believe that higher education has fallen prey to trendy multiculturalist engineering, or that physics departments everywhere suppress conservative quantum theorists?

Unrealistic expectations

A reader on Macintouch asks,

I have one daughter who likes to make up songs and another who would like to accompany her on a couple of different instruments. Unfortunately, neither one is old enough or experienced enough to be able to easily figure out the notes or chords of the made-up song.

I thought I saw, some time ago, a piece of software that claimed to be able to 'listen' to music played or sung and create notation. It doesn't have to be particularly accurate, just close enough to give a starting point.

It also would be nice if it were affordable but I would entertain any and all suggestions.

My suggestion is: don't be a cheapskate, and pay for some music theory lessons for your daughter!

UPDATE: Ian Coleman emailed me and pointed out Intelliscore Polyphonic. While at first glance this proves me wrong, I recommend reading the FAQ page and seeing all the caveats. I suspect that Intelliscore would have enormous amounts of trouble with such things as modulation. (Geekable readers are welcome to purchase me a copy of Intelliscore Polyphonic so I can test my predictions.)

Must be a logical mind game

Josh Marshall clears the spin away:

Simply financing the 'transition costs' of phasing out Social Security will cost a good trillion or two dollars, maybe more -- by the White House's own informal estimates. And where on earth are we going to get that money? Borrow it, says the White House. Notta problem. In other words, we have to start phasing out Social Security now because if we don't we're going to face some big borrowing in a few decades. But we can avoid that horror of horrors by doing some big time borrowing now to finance abolishing Social Security [so] we won't have to face that terrible fate a few decades from now.

Makes perfect sense, right?

Typhoid Mary

David Ramsey has written an article about his experiences with Windows viruses. He notes that his PC was reinfected with a virus within minutes of reinstalling Windows XP.

My favorite part is at the beginning:

I build my own PCs from scratch (we'll overlook for the purposes of this rant that these days that's only slightly more difficult than building with Legos)...

If you are running Windows and are not running a firewall and a frequently-updated anti-virus program, then your computer is infected. It might be infected even if you are running this stuff. And you had better simply get used to little dialogs popping up saying things like "Program svchost.exe is trying to access the Internet. Allow?" and "The program is waiting for Norton Antivirus to scan the file" because that's simply the price of using the Typhoid Mary of operating systems today.

(Via Macintouch)

Life's but a walking shadow

I like Peter Woit, as he is skeptical of new paradigms:

For the life of me I can't figure out why smart physicists and philosophers can't see the obvious fact that is staring them in the face. You don't need a new paradigm of how to do science, the old one works just fine. If you have a conjectural theoretical scientific idea, there are two ways in which it can turn out to be wrong. Either it predicts something that disagrees with experiment, or it is so vacuous that it predicts nothing. The evidence is now overwhelming that, if string theory is consistent at all, it is wrong for the second reason.

UPDATE: Fafblog is a fan of the new science paradigm. Since Fafblog is the best blog, and the Fafblog, I cannot argue.