A. Have to postpone Montreal and Toronto AGAIN due to interviews, bad timing w/ unemployment funding GRRRRL>>L> can't i at least get out of this country for a little while? it's been almost 6 months!!!
i. no fee, rearranged to leaving Xmas day, returning 1st space not available so made the 9th and will call for every day until departure or pay the change fee to take Air Canada back.
B. obtained new visa debit as 2 charges were unwarranted/wanted.
C. it's cold.
D. Interview #3 went well but I don't know if I want it. Two job offers are better than one and both are 1099, all sales but they cross one another so we'll see. both would give me what i want and look good on the resume - financial services.
E. Teacher aps are going out to community colleges. there is a 30% increase in enrollment. Western bumble flip Nevada wants to see me but I don't want to move, online teaching only part-time folks...
F. Started reading Jim Rogers first Investment book, "Investment Biker" having finished Bob Barr's "Meaning of Is" and Jerry lewis love story of Dean martin audiobook. the next audio book is Ling Lung, pianist of China. (Did I mention i wanted out of the country today, now, soon?!)
G. Stupid questions on facebook by people IM'ing me I don't know. yes, this includes comments on the Jesus citings who haven't looked at the article to go w/ the dog asshole-jesus pictures. gotta love it..


Let's take this break for a Monday, People of Walmart moment. I've actually seen something like this first guy rolling around Vegas in 110' desert heat of summer but he WAS carrying water, not baby oil.



and this is straight out of Hoosierville central, swear it is 'time to clean out the shitter' ala' Chevy Chase Xmas vacation movie.

Helen: You realize your Helen Files will make everyone think I'm mean and shallow.
Rob: Well, everyone who reads my Live Journal. Which is approximately no one.
Helen: True. You don't have any friends.

The world is a tome which is being read to us from a translation of a translation of a translation, and so on. The original, we may never know, nor may we prevail on the reader, or readers, to alter their pace.

But we can alter the text. We can mark it out, rip it, deface it, annihilate it, atomize it. We can rewrite a portion of it, that part with us in it, a little or a lot at a time, with partial control over the results (there are always editors). We can submit revisions to the writers themselves, and soon see changes and updates in our world.

This latter method is the best, the most organic, and the hardest. Translation presents many difficulties. The message must be filtered in through one and then another, to the proper destination, then filtered back out through another and yet another again. Errors are bound to creap in. They are not (always) errors of stupidity, or malice, mainly just errors in translation. On the whole, the translators are well-intentioned. They exist to serve. They can't always figure out what we are saying. They don't speak our language.

They speak the language of clouds, of star-scented space, of the pressure of fusion. They speak the language of alacrity, of reluctance. They speak in the speed of light and Avogadro's number. They speak the language of old man coconuts, vaseline space, murdle and meat, the anagram, the analemma, the anathema. They speak in fiances, bonuses, reunions.

They speak in the language of magic and mung. Of nuclear fuck egghead, squeamish raingear, lather moon and mingos. Stivers manhood, swahili bikini, four fronds and one unfurling.

They speak in words that don't refer to things, but are things. As your eye moves across your field of vision, you are reading what they write.

jsnead summarizes an article about various British ex-Jihadis and how they got that way. Good stuff. A few quotes:

{But there was an inhibiting sympathy for the victims of 9/11 -- until
the Bush administration began to respond with Guantanamo Bay and bombs.
"That made it much easier. After that, I could persuade people a lot
faster." }
{"Nobody ever said " you're equal to us, you're one of us, and we'll
hold you to the same standards," says Husain. "Nobody had the courage to
stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at
[Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay
people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?"
}
{Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11
-- from Guantanamo to Iraq -- made jihadism seem more like an accurate
description of the world.}
{But the converse was -- they stressed -- also true. When they saw
ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began
to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism
when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq
War}

When you do web development, you keep track of web trends. It's part of the job.

Crawling the CSS of a site my boss-web-monkey frequents, I found their 'competing with 4chan' section, which due to content the motivator it inspired will be ( under the cut. )

http://www.esharp.eu/Web-specials/Washington-s-House-of-Lords

my Fisk of the article after the cut
( Read more... )

• 17:03 Cold. Wet. #fb #

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- two new areas (technically areas i had already made, just not finalized)
- started to made some optimization test toggles; coded all of the toggles and made about half of them do their function (the other half will finish tomorrow); after it's done i'll be able to turn on or off any effect/type of object drawing/particle system/etc on and off individually to test which is the slowest and which ones reduce the fps the most, and will be able to focus on the problems

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/04/AR2009120403073.html?sub=AR
(bugmenot may be required...)

"Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875."

I won't go so far as Will did and claim that it won't happen, but I will say I know which side I'd put my money on if I had to bet on it. Of course, Will is wrong about one thing... if we have that kind of restriction on carbon and some major break through DOESN'T happen, we won't have that kind of population - we couldn't support it... of course, we'll just ignore the massive starvation, etc that will occur if we actually try to enforce it.

Seeking Advice


Now I'm done.

This is just a dump of my MP3 directory so's I can show it to a few folk. Browse, ignore, or laugh as you'd like.
( The whole shebang... )

The radio was all abuzz over the EPA's latest decision that green house gases can be regulated by them. I don't know who the quote (it was radio - but I do remember it was some official) saying this would not hurt business. Oh really? _IF_ regulating carbon was good for business, you wouldn't need a law. Trust me, businesses like to make money - you show them it is more profitable to limit carbon and they'll do it. Show them it's break even and they do it for the PR... show them that it's close and they'll likely do it just for the PR... Hell some companies do it now even though it's tremendously more expensive because they know there is a market niche that will pay the premium. This is stupid beyond believe. Of course it's going to be bad for business (as a whole)... morons. Now maybe you can argue it's worth the price, but then make that argument.... don't try to pull this over on me...

The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

Terry Pratchett

The epistemic credibility of any proposition or theory in science has to do with the degree to which the work done to validate it was done in a transparent, decentralized process. Apart from the moral and philosophical differences between being a Creationist or Holocaust Denier and merely being a detractor on AGW, I'm beginning to think that this is the chief difference, and why the constantly drudged up analogy between these is not only offensive, but deceptive.

This is what makes AGW different from other scientific research. You could argue that money changes things, that it gives researchers incentives to either be “deniers” or “warm-mongers.” But that's more symptomatic – if money is “tainting” the scientific process, it's only because that scientific process has gone into a political direction, creating potential winners and losers who have a vested interest in the outcome of research. The real problem is that we have government and intergovernmental panels and institutions that have made a self-conscious effort to put out a single consensus view, a single view that, if you consider the implications of rent-seeking and public choice theory, should not be expected to conclude that they are not necessary. Of course, the answer will always be something like, “This is a crisis!” followed up by, “We need more funding.” The other component of that will be polarization, in the form of stigmatizing and smearing those with opposing research as industry toadies or scientifically illiterate, or both.

This is not how the scientific process is supposed to work, and generally is not how it has worked. Scientific discoveries take a long time to be independently validated and supported before they become “consensus,” if we have to use that word. Certainly this implies a transparency as well, where both the data and the means by which it is processed are open for all to examine and reproduce. Above all else, and I think Hayek would back me up on this, scientific progress is supposed to be more of an emergent order, a bottom-up process of independent inquiry converging on similar results. But with the very existence of institutions like the IPCC and the CPU, and with Climategate, evidence of campaigns to capture control of research journals, the bottom-up process of scientific research and discovery has been subverted and reversed. We now have centralized authorities hiding their research, asking us to take their conclusions as dogma, and perpetuating it in a top-down fashion. Note that all of this is independent of whether AGW is true or not. The problem is with the process used to research AGW and perpetuate AGW as the truth.

Another line of criticism that deserves some further investigation goes as follows. As a system, Earth's global climate is arguably among the most complex we know, if not the most complex. The difficulty with studying complex systems is that it is extremely difficult to understand how external and internal factors impact the system on a macro level. You end up with a situation where the formulation of the null hypothesis, or falsification criteria, are, if not impossible, extremely difficult. It should not be a surprise then that the best we can do at this point is to construct computer models, all of which have proven problematic. As I understand matters, programmers and scientists have yet to successfully construct models that accurately predict climate outcomes beyond predicting the weather for discrete geographic areas within about a week or two.

I wonder if climate science itself is an attempt at modeling future outcomes analogous to Isaac Asimov's fictional science of psychohistory. In the Foundation series, psychohistory is an imprecise science that can predict broad outcomes of human action on the macro level, but cannot predict what individuals may do on the micro level. Thus, when an individual of extraordinary psychic abilities who calls himself “The Mule” comes along, he is single-handedly able to overthrow the Seldon Plan – the plan, created by Hari Seldon, intended to shepherd the survival of galactic human civilization through a sort of “middle ages” via the intellectual and political leadership of the two Foundations.

I mention this because the appearance of the Mule is not taken to be a falsification of the theory or science of psychohistory. Ordinarily, when a black swan appears, it can be taken as the falsification of the theory that all swans are white. The Mule's empire, which destroys the remnants of the Galactic Empire prematurely and even conquers the First Foundation before his ultimate defeat, were not part of the Seldon Plan. But psychohistory, as a science, offers no falsification criteria, because any deviations from predicted outcomes can be attributed to the unpredictable outcomes of individuals acting on the micro level. And so it is with climate science, at least where it attempts to make predictions about the future. If the climate doesn't behave in the way that the science says it will, it can always be attributed to external factors beyond the abilities of scientists to predict and account for. Variations on the micro level can thus unmake the predicted macro outcomes.

I don't think this means that climate science as such is a fool's errand, that computer modeling is useless, or even that successful predictions are impossible. But it suggests that there are major epistemic barriers that make climate science a very different enterprise than standard physics, astrophysics, biology, or even historical research. And I'm wary of staking our economic liberty on such a dubious set of principles – and this was even before Climategate put all of the extant research in doubt. Climategate, if nothing else, may provide evidence for my hypothesis above about the folly of the centralization of the scientific process. It need not overthrow AGW outright to at least force scientists and other players in that field to ask tough questions about how this process should work.

From my favorite foodie blog, Serious Eats:

http://www.georgehart.com/bagel/bagel.html

topological instruction for cutting a bagel into two linked circles. If there are Space!Bagels I can totally see River doing this to her breakfast and Avon and Simon figuring out how the hell she did it.

PS--oh, OK, it's after Thanksgiving, so I put my Christmas icons into rotation.

Haven't seen you in years, but you were one of the more colorful girlfriends.