bascule

Here's another fun story: I went to a bar last night. All they had were 10 oz mugs and 23 oz glasses (which appeared to me to only hold about 18 oz). They also had "pint" glasses (12 oz) which you could order Guinness in... and nothing else. I tried asking for a "British pint" and the bar tender held up the 12oz glass with a confused look on his face.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group recommended a phased withdrawl. You may or may not have seen the New York Post's response to the ISG report:

If you made a programming language, what would it be? I'd be aiming to create a context free, third generation programming lanugage. I would like to implement the Actor Model in a means which is a superset of the underlying language, which I would desire to be pure object oriented. Pure OO languages and languages based around the Actor Model have some striking similarities (the first pure OO language, Smalltalk, was based in part around the Actor Model) The Actor Model assumes a pure-Actor language. And indeed Actors work much like objects, save for concurrency and message processing control. I believe objects should be the underlying data primitive, but I do not believe threads and asynchronous message queues should form the concurrency primitive. Something higher level, involving synchronization, is needed. What I'm really looking for is a "microthreaded" pure OO language where microthreads implement either Actor or Reactor. I'd be hard pressed to say what I think about Reactor as the fundamental message processing primitive. I'd prefer Reactor be used in the implementation of Actor, but even in that case the kind of sanity checks provided by actor are no longer language-enforced. Bottom line: I see immense value in concurrency and objects. There must be some sort of compromise between pure OO and Actor. It just hasn't yet been realized.

Yeah, that video rocks. I e-mailed the creator regarding some of the ideas I had betwee him and Dennett. He never got back to me. :/

That's the Iraq withdrawl date set by the US Senate in a recently passed bill: http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2044498,00.html The bill passed by a narrow 50-48 margin. It's pretty clear Bush will veto. After all, he doesn't want Congress to have any input, err, to "micromanage" the war

I guess everyone missed the point of my post. Regardless of if people and corporations do stupid things and mutually screw each other, they're participating in a market, and in doing so affect other people in the market. Normal people who wanted to live the American dream are now getting screwed. Their "investment" in a home ended up costing them money through no action of their own. An elimination of regulation let stupid people do stupid things, and in the process vicariously screwed others. I bought a two bedroom condo from a family raising a child who wanted something bigger. I got it for less than half of what they bought it for. You can see that as doing them a favor, as their home had been on the market for a year. But in the end the market screwed them. They lost nearly a hundred thousand dollars from buying their home during a time when the powers that be decided to experiment with deregulation. So to repeat myself, again, what possible advantages were there to deregulating mortgage lending, beyond people like me being able to buy a home for half of what the person I bought it from got it for?

Create a 10m deep trough which a displaces an equal volume of water, resulting in complete destructive interference.

Yes, for some reason they seem to greatly resemble jokes about the Polish No I know a lot of dumb girls bleach their hair blonde. Paris Hilton is a prime example. She's dumb, but naturally a "dirty blonde" (light haired brunette) much like myself. Is there? Well I heard a rumor about yo momma getting busted for prostitution. And since there's always truth in rumors it must be true: yo momma is a whore. Oh wait, maybe rumors are often baseless

The biggest problem is that expected policy recommendations are stopping people from accepting the physical science basis. That's why I prefer not to make policy recommendations. I think the only one I've ever made is banning incandescent bulbs.

Well, there's the part where they parade around a cardboard cutout of Bush (I guess true conservatives think Bush is a liberal, am I right? That's what Michael Savage always says anyway.)

Ever heard of Project Orion?

Depends a lot on the type of beer. A 16 oz Guinness is usually around $5.00. Some of our local microbrews will run you $6.00. Very true. I used to live in Fort Collins, home of New Belgium Brewing, known primarily for Fat Tire (not one of their more remarkable brews, but definitel ythe most popular for some reason) There's some excellent microbreweries around, to be sure. Yes, they are definitely awesome. 500 years of traditional preparation by Trappist monks definitely makes for a tasty beer. That's made by Coors (Colorado's own crap brewery) It's truly awful. It's a sub-par unfiltered wheat beer. I've seen a fair number of signs advertising it. Can't say it's really popular. We have a number of Beglian-inspired microbreweries around here (most notably New Belgium) who make some excellent wheat beers. Compared to them Blue Moon tastes like water.

I'm an connoisseur of beer. That may be surprising, as I come from the country that brought the world Budweiser, Miller, and Pabst. My home state of Colorado is the top beer producer in the nation, thanks in part to our massively successful regional brewery Coors. But they all taste like ass. So my taste turned elsewhere. I soon developed a strong taste for the nitrogen-infused beers of Great Britain and Ireland. Guinness, Boddington's, Murphy's, Belhaven, Tetley's, Old Speckled Hen, and Wexford soon topped the list of my favorite beers. From these beers I learned that what had always been described to me as a "pint glass", wasn't. All of the above beers come in one pint (or thereabouts) cans. For anyone familiar with the Imperial System of measure this constitutes 16 fluid ounces. For some reason Americans, at least around here, have gotten into the habit of calling 12 ounce glasses "pint glasses", and worse serving 12 ounces of beer as "a pint." Trying to pour one of the above beers into a 12 oz glass makes abundantly clear a simple fact: 12 oz is not a pint! I now own several true pint glasses suitable for pouring one of the above beers into at once, so I need not let it sit around in the can as the nitrogen bubbles out of it. It all goes straight into the glass. But now I feel like the only American who knows what a pint actually is. A few times I made the mistake of ordering "a pint" when given the decision between 12 and 16 oz at various restaurants. Inevitably I would receive my "pint"... in a 12 oz glass. So I gave up on that. Since "a pint" clearly means 12 oz to these people, I'd order exactly what I wanted: a 16 oz beer. I'd await my 16 oz beer, and unsurprisingly be served a paltry 12 oz glass. What the hell? So I gave up on that approach entirely. Clearly units of measure are beyond these people. I'd go with something much safer: I want a mug of beer. Sadly, this approach failed as well, for they'd return... with a 12 oz mug. Apparently in America, it's simply incomprehensible to order beer in anything other than 12 oz units. Think these people could switch to the metric system? They can't even figure out what a pint is... try getting them to serve you half a liter of beer.

Let me say something else. In my last post I did a lot of harping on "idiots" who got ARMs but didn't intend on selling their house in two years (about the only reason for anyone to get an ARM) Having been through the process, I can't really call these people idiots. Buying a home is hard! I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person, and I found the entire process incredibly confusing. Perhaps the best part I ever did throughout the process was taking a homebuyer's course. It was horribly early in the morning (for me) and quite a drive, but it was free, and they even had free food! But more than that, they had a professional mortgage lender go through various types of mortgages. At that time I hadn't gotten a mortgage yet, I had just gone under contract and was about to go through the rigmarole of the whole process (however half the people there raised their hands if they were closing in the next week! I was shocked) First she gave her whole sales pitch for an ARM. She painted a sunny picture of a bright future where prime decreases thanks to a booming economy. ARMs work in your favor! Get one today! Then she broke out of that and started doing the math on the board, given just recent history. And it was shocking. Then she wrote the number $100,000,000 on the board and told us that was the total value of property foreclosed upon in our state in the last week alone. Had I not taken that class, I can't say what decisions I would've made. I was completely naive going into the process, and that class made me question many things I hadn't before, including whether I should be buying a home in the first place and could I actually afford one? I think there's a lot of people who wanted to the live the American dream and purchase a home for their family, saw an opportunity to buy one, perhaps with a seedy financial past. They didn't know a reasonable percentage of total income that they should give to a mortgage, and found something of a loophole in the law regarding subprime loans which could eventually end up taking a monsterous chunk out of their total income. They were very likely lost in the whole process. It's incredibly confusing, especially your first time. You have no idea what to expect. The mortgage seems like a trifle after dealing with the massive process that is closing. Then it sits in the back of your mind for two years, until it resets. Then what?

In terms of deregulation, this applies specifically to mortgage lenders. It's something of a repeat of the S&L scandal, in this case corporations attempting an exploitative course of action (offering rip-off loans), preying on people dumb enough to sign (again and again and again), and watching their collective action blow up in their face. This Modern World (which I'm sure most of you hate) did a good job describing the situation: http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=22163 "In the long run is great." In the mean time we have mortgage lenders going from "blue chip" to worthless. We have ordinary, hard working people who bought homes whose value was inflated due to all of this. Now their homes are worth less than what they took out their mortgage for. They did everything right, and rather than gaining equity, they're at a loss for their purchase. Their investors screwed out of their money, and worst of all record foreclosures ensuring that millions are now without homes. Now why exactly is deregulating mortgage lending a good idea? Let me interject something else here: I profited from this clusterf*ck. I bought my home for less than half of was worth. I felt bad for the person I was buying it from. It had been sitting on the market for over a year. In the sale the seller lost considerable money they have to now pay back. You're really failing to see the big picture here. This doesn't just hurt the idiots who got ARMs only to instantly get foreclosed on when they reset. It doesn't just hurt the subprime mortgage lenders who are now bankrupt because they tried to prey on idiots only to realize their business model was bound to crash eventually. It hurts the motherfu*cking American dream. People who had the dream of owning their own home got mortgages at inflated values thanks to other people's idiocy. Idiots drove up the market prices, and other people had to pay market value. Now your average Joe who wanted his slice of the pie is screwed. What about all the people who were planning on selling their homes for at least the purchase price, if not a reasonable gain. How long do they have to wait? The average person owns a home for five years before selling it. How many couples now want to start a family and move out of their two bedroom condo into something bigger. Do they wait, or just eat the loss? I think I've made the point to the contrary abundantly clear at this point. Now please, tell me, what possible advantages were there to deregulating mortgage lending? I can think of about one: I'm a guy who was in the right place at the right time, and watched the market collapse right as I was ready to buy a home. I made out like a bandit! Hooray capitalism!

It was more around the late 50's/early '60s when there was a decrease in solar luminosity coupled with an increase in volcanic activity (which meant a reduction in reflective aerosols). These were the primary radiative forcings driving the climate system at that time: a period of higher solar intensity coupled with fewer reflective aerosols emitted from volcanoes drove the climate towards warmer temperatures over the first half of the century. During that time anthropogenic CO2 was increasingly exponentially but was not the primary radiative forcing: During the latter half of the 20th century, CO2's impact as a radiative forcing skyrocketed.

Okay, point taken. I don't have an answer for you, beyond RealClimate's answer that successes in other areas still corroborate the validity GCMs. Failing to predict the behavior of such a large part of the climate system is disturbing in terms of my confidence in GCMs, and will need to be addressed if the problem can't be corrected.

http://www.theonion.com/content/infograph/the_secret Yeah, anyway, this seems to be the biggest crock of new age bullsh*t to reach the public consciousness since What the Bleep. What does it have to do with liberals, or Jesus Camp?

Well, I just watched the trailer and read the Amazon page. It's like a newager took a newage cannon and strapped it to my forehead and fired a load of sh*t directly into my brain. I'm still yet to find a concise description of what "the Secret" actually is, but they claim Isaac Newton translated some emerald tablet of Hermes (messenger of the Gods) in order to figure out the universal law of gravitation. Yeah, and something about how everything's made out of energy. Yeah, Einstein figured that one out. You can thank him, not some retarded new age tablet crap. Living in a town full of retarded new agers, I can't help but hear about this sort of thing and getting very angry. So sorry if this post comes off as less than tactful. Oh, and the whole thing seems to be tied into some other series of books called "The Law of Attraction". Sounds like a big money making scheme to me. Looking at the Amazon recommended books this definitely appears to cater to a new age crowd seeking self help. People are confused. They turn to sh*t like this for answers. Pangloss, not sure what you were getting at originally, but here's one leftie who definitely HATES this sort of thing.

I hadn't heard of this movie until today. I'm not in a position where I can really click on the link and watch this video. However today I picked up some pamphlet from some crazy local psychic organization who charges $50 to send you a cassette tape to perform a remote psychic healing of yourself or your pet. Wow. They're showing "The Secret" I mean, I call myself a hippie, and I like lots of crazy hippie things, like long hair, poi, various herbal supplements, tea, etc. But anything recommended to me by some psychic ripoff group gets a big thumbs down. So, with nothing to go on but the recommendation of some psychics, am I right that this is a bunch of new ager crap?

Ignore what you don't want to hear? Fine by me. Continue spreading discredited information. RealClimate went into this two years ago before satellite and radiosonde calibration attributed an unexpectedly cool troposphere to instrumental error. The author supposed (and his suppositions were later bourne out) that radiosondes were giving inaccurate results, and notes that radiosonde data was being used to calibrate satellite measurements. However, his conclusion is perhaps the most important part: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=179 When a theory fails to be predictive for a given set of data, then the data are invalid, the hypothesis was wrong, or both. What do you really think happened here?

Because you give a one sentence expectation in response to a stated one sentence condition. In certain cases (specific period of paleoclimactic change) you are correct, but you really need to place any statements like this in scope.

What about jet fuel mixed with hundreds and hundreds of tons of petroleum-based office products?

Sounds like you're describing a concurrent programming language. Concurrent language encapsulate tasks as processes within a shared memory space (which can be implemented as OS LWPs) that can communicate using asynchronous message passing. You may want to check out the Actor Model and see if it's similar to what you're describing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model

And flaming debris. Oh they did, did they? Yeah, looking more plausible already. I'm going to go with a 757s full of enough jet fuel to make a transcontinental journey hitting two of the largest office buildings in the world, loaded with lots of combustible furniture. I'm going to go with load bearing walls and the way the floors were connected to them. WTC did not use traditional "egg crate" steel construction like the other building you linked. No they didn't. "It's never happened before, therefore it can never happen!" Airtight logic He decided due to the TREMENDOUS LOSS OF LIFE from the other buildings collapsing with firefighters inside that they should pull out.