The Iron Yuppie

I'm going to spend some time on checking out whether or not this documentary is correct, but if you're ANY voting company, I'm really surprised you don't bend over backwards to make your code auditable. I mean if Microsoft, who regards their IP pretty strongly, can make source available to large customers and governments, a little company like a voting system surely could as well.

As an aside, nice work Google Video for linking this up to make it easy to post!

As another aside, bad work Google Video on a random error at the end that made me retype this blog entry. :( In fact, this is now the third time I've tried to post it. It logs in fine, but when I try to post it says "Invalid login". Weird, and almost more annoying than if you hadn't offered the feature at all.

D

There's a new movie out: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Go see it. Enough said.

Free energy for all!

I've always been fascinated by this. These guys claim to have found a way to get a machine to output more energy than is put in, thereby creating limitless energy. Of course this is absolutely impossible, but I've never understood how everyone gets duped into it EVERY time.

For those not versed in physics, here's your summary:

Conservation of energy states that the total amount of energy (often expressed as the sum of kinetic energy and potential energy) in an isolated system remains constant. In other words, energy can be converted from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed.

So, IN THEORY, you can put energy in and the most you can ever get out the other side is the exact same amount of energy, never more. Of course, we live in the real world with friction and resistance and other unsavory characters which means even getting out 100% of the energy you put in is impossible.

But what always stuns me is how everyone always reacts like this time is the one time we can do it. These Irish guys are "scientists" yet they violate the fundamental laws because this time they've figured out a way. The press looks at it with skepticism, but they still give these guys coverage. And people read these stories and say "fine, all those other times, people were wrong... but THIS time, this is it!". Well I haven't looked at these folks invention, but I can tell you this much. They're wrong.

Great item in the New Yorker in the piece about kids and eating new food. I quote:

By the age of four or five, almost all children become "neophobic": they develop an aversion to new foods, and to vegetables in particular.

How fascinating! Looks like the key to beating kids aversion to interesting foods is to cram their faces full while they are still very young. Myself, I really don't hate many foods, but water chestnuts are among them. But I know how to beat it! Shortly after the above quote, in the same paragraph:

... there's no real substitute for patience; the average five-year-old has to taste a new food between five and ten times ... before he'll accept it.

Nice! So all I have to do is gorge on water chestnuts for an entire week straight and they'll be my favorite food ever! Simple enough.

Wow, long time gone. Sorry it's been so long, but we were traveling. You can read about all of our travels on our blog, the Wacky Adventures of the Aronchicks. The trip offered plenty of reading and thinking time and I've got a LOT to blog about, so here's hoping I actually stick to a schedule. For those who are curious, here's ROUGHLY the path we took... I say roughly because, unfortunately, Ask.com doesn't cover Croatian maps, which we also visited. Here's what that path looks like:

I suppose now is as good a time as any to throw in the obligitory geek comment. Why did I use Ask.com? Because they were the only one that had a clear way how to use waypoints... why Live & Google? Why? I would have loved to use your services (especially since Live.com can map Croatia), but no waypoints = can't use it.

I was browsing through the love-fest about Apple I saw over on Digg [http://theocacao.com/document.page/298] (which, as an aside, I'm so stunned at how much I love the company I'm with. I mean, 7 years ago, you couldn't pry a Mac from my cold dead hands, and now I'm completely in the opposite camp. It's not to say that I don't recognize their very impressive focus, but I'm not a fan of OS X's UI, ESPECIALLY the dock (I still love OS 9), and it still annoys the crap out of me that so many of the best games and programs seem to be way delayed in coming to the Mac. On the other hand, the shareware and simple programs that DO appear on the Mac are orders of magnitude better than their PC counterparts (BBEdit v. UltraEdit as an example)), and I came upon a program that is REALLY cool.

It's call WriteRoom and not only does it take over the entire screen, but it drops ALL the extra stuff you have around to reduce distractions. Check it out...

I absolutely love it! I wonder with the new Parallels for the PC if I'll be able to run Mac programs...

D

Man, I've wanted to know where that Lorem Ipsum text that is the default for so many programs text came from. I actually thought it was real language, but apparently it's just jibberish, or more like Latin words that are mixed up (Imagine "quick lazy the jumped fox dog over") but seem like and are formatted as correct text. Thanks Digg!

read more digg story

Updated: The comments pointed out this site: Lipsum ... that's probably the most useful thing I've ever seen in a Digg comment.

Thanks digg for finding this! Let me tell you, I thought it was so cool to read this first appearance of Superman. The interesting thing is how different it was from the standard legend:

• Krypton was dying from "old age"
• Superman grew up in an orphanage
• Superman is only described as "leaping", never as flying - and the comics all
• He is not described as impermeable, but that "nothing less than a bursting shell" can penetrate his skin
• There are scientific reasons (!!) given for how he's so strong
• His second crime stop ever described is domestic violence
• There is a science lesson embedded about closed circuits and electricity
• And, finally, it's only 15 pages long and there are 64 total pages in the book... wild!
  

Check it out! Plus, I LOVE those old-timey ads.

read more digg story

This just in, Madonna is still hot. I thought she had lost a little too much weight, I liked her a bit better in the "Open Your Heart" / "Express Yourself" era, but still.

I love this song too: Hung Up

But the reason for this post is how funny I think it is that she's sampled an ABBA song that was released just a year before her first release ("Everybody") and just three years before her first album ("Madonna"). Her longevity is, in fact, so great that she has made it back to the point where society and popular culture has circled back and now finds the stuff she did at the start of her career in vogue again. She's going to be sampling her own songs soon. I love it!

I must have blogged about this before. Oh wait, I have. Twice. Three times. Oh fine, just count it as infinity and let's move on.

Anyhow, brand new book I came upon in an old edition of the New Yorker- Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? First, I love the fact that he's a psynchologist and not a commentator. It's the right perspective to take on this stuff. Second, I love the fact that he's done this on a long term basis, looking at two hundred and forty eight people commenting over 20 years. Big n... Dave like. But the piece de resistance comes right in the second paragraph review:

The accuracy of an expert's predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by regularly reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote.

PRICELESS. So basically, the bum on the street is probably just as likely to give you decent advice as the guy who has been studying the situation for 20 years. Mind you, I actually think this is more an effect of the total seeming randomness to events (Tetlock tested huge society changes like political freedom, economic growth, repressions, recessions) than experts actually being misinformed, but still, it makes you put into context some of the insanity with which we trust someone who gets quoted.

Just one more thing I'd do if I had a talk show. The first thing an expert would have sitting right next to his/her head would be a scorecard of previous predictions and/or quotes from the past. Just so the audience could get a sense how good this guy/gal was.

Here's the book I was talking about: