I wrote recently about my pet theory that Mitt Romney is a deliberate Republican decoy—a red herring—to encourage an otherwise lackluster public to vote for Obama, who is himself a nearly perfect Republican candidate. See Are we not paranoid enough? if you’re interested in hearing more about that argument.

The long-ish article This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) also discusses the seemingly improbably inept Romney and wonders how broken the U.S. political system has to... [More]

In recent weeks, the Mitt Romney campaign has had a string of “how could he have said that?” moments where you really have to question his—and his team’s—political savvy. Some comments are so over-the-top nefarious that I’ve started to wonder whether he’s not doing it on purpose, Whether the Republicans’ hatred of Obama is all a sham. Whether their relentless push behind the clearly deeply flawed and vacuous Romney isn’t just a way of goading otherwise unmotivated voters to get behind the... [More]

Olivia Wilde was on the Daily Show recently (full episode) to promote a film. Jon Stewart was not only bedazzled by her, but also by her having had Christopher Hitchens as a babysitter when she was much younger. They lauded good ol’ Hitch for a while ‘cause he was such a stand-up guy, especially for someone who was a raging alcoholic (their words). When Jon asked her how her family had gotten Hitch as a babysitter, she responded that her family was part of a wonderful group of journalists that... [More]

1. Contraband (2012) — 5/10
2. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) — 7/10
3. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) — 7/10
4. The Planet of the Apes (2001) — 5/10
5. The Avengers (2012) — 8/10
6. Young Adult (2011) — 6/10
7. Intouchables (2011) (fr) — 8/10
8. Der Verdingbub (2011) (ch-de) — 8/10
9. The Quest (1996) — 6/10
10. Avatar (2009) — 8/10
11. The Number 23 (2007) — 6/10
12. The Big Bang Theory (TV series, 2007-2012) — 7/10
13. Louie (2010-2012) — 10/10
14. Paranormal Activity 2 (2009) — 3/10
15. The... [More]

That’s my favorite quote from that show, but the whole thing was a tour de force, a satirical analytic onslaught by the Daily Show news team. If you’re a fan of the form—or if you’d like a more honest lens (comedic though it may be, it’s more honesty than you’ll get from Wolf Blitzer) through which to view the presidential campaign (the... [More]

Samantha Bee of the Daily Show recently logged an excellent two-minute segment on abortion, a woman’s right to choose and the Republican convention. The whole segment’s quite good but you can start at 01:15 if you’re in a hurry, where Jon Stewart introduces the “human life amendment” plank of the Republican platform that would essentially outlaw abortion as murder by applying the 14th Amendment to the unborn. Romney doesn’t agree with this…and Republicans are fine with it. Why? Because they... [More]

NB: Don’t worry if you don’t understand this introductory paragraph; feel free to blow right through it and see how you fare with the alternate explanations and analogies below.

The news so far is that the scientists at CERN have announced that they have consistently been able to generate bosons at around 126GeV with a certainty of 5 sigmas. The Standard Model of physics predicts that this energy level is sufficient to generate the long–sought-after Higgs boson, which is the only predicted... [More]

If scooping information from the madly bubbling froth of the U.S. media lies at all within your purview, you will no doubt have heard of the latest rage in American literature, called 50 Shades of Grey. A modicum of research reveals that the epithet literature is a good deal more generous a term than the referenced work earns.

It’s more commonly called “Mommy Porn”[1] which seems to be the designator that U.S. culture is going to use to indicate that reading poorly written soft-core pornography... [More]

The first round of the EM—which stands for Europameisterschaft[1], which means European championship in German—is over. The qualifying teams are mostly predictable, with all of the usual suspects making it through to the quarterfinals—France, England, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal—as well as the Czech Republic and Greece thrown in. Greece won the whole thing with an excruciating defensive style in 2004 and the Czech Rpeublic is often quite solid, so not really a surprise.

Some of the... [More]

1. The Adjustment Bureau (2009) — 7/10
2. The Town (2010) — 9/10
3. Valkyrie (2008) — 7/10
4. The Wicker Man (2006) — 4/10
5. Couples Retreat (2009) — 2/10
6. The Queen (2006) — 3/10
7. The Hangover Part II (2012) — 5/10
8. Star Wars: Episode V − The Empire Strikes Back (1980) — 9/10
9. The Running Man (1987) — 6/10
10. Equilibrium (2002) — 9/10
11. Dorian Gray (2009) — 6/10
12. Star Trek (2009) — 9/10
13. Inside Man (2006) — 9/10
14. Rocky 2 (1979) — 6/10
15. Shrek the Third (2007) — ... [More]

Here’s an interview of Diane Keaton by Stephen Colbert. It’s hard to describe, but it’s very entertaining[1], in a very nonsensical and silly and non-goal-oriented way. Just pure improv; it’s hard to imagine that they rehearsed it.

Diane Keaton Interview by Stephen Colbert in 30.04.2012 (Colbert Nation)

I recently received a request to post an info-graphic (included below) detailing the results of a recent study published by UC Berkeley, called Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior by Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancatoa, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). The original infographic is hosted at a site called Accounting Degree Online, for some strange reason. At any rate, the findings are kind of interesting.

The URL to the graphic includes the text “Rich people are unethical” but it could more accurately be called “Rich people are unethical (so are... [More]

Google has recently begun more aggressively trying to get people to stop using the Opera browser. There are not many of us (less than 2% of the worldwide market), but Opera isn’t exactly so difficult to support. Google products do support the following browsers:

“Google Flight Search has not been optimized for your browser. For best results, please try Chrome, Firefox 3.5+, Internet Explorer 8+, Safari 4+.”

So, browsers that are around 3 years old—Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8—are... [More]

It’s not that Greece’s financial situation is complex. It’s that the common explanation for Greece’s troubles—that the Greeks as a people are lazy—is not only incorrect—per capita, the average Greek works more than the corresponding famously sedulous German—but deliberately racist and unhelpful.

Greece is currently running a larger deficit because of state-incurred debts. These debts are due not to exorbitant expenditure on a hopelessly top-heavy and overgenerous social apparatus—as... [More]

The post Filosofia monosillabica by Mark Liberman (Language Log) included the image reproduced to the left.

Taking some artistic license, this translates roughly to:

Who can, will not
Who wills[1], cannot
Who knows, does not
Who does, knows not
And so the world
goes badly

The article Israel: No Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program; Barak: Any decision to Strike Iran “Far off.” by Juan Cole (Informed Comment) published a good summary of the current situation vis á vis Iran’s nuclear program. In an effort to provide a public service announcement for right-wing wackos whose lust for war can never be satiated, it is reproduced below.

“Israeli intelligence agencies have worked up an intelligence assessment that Iran has not yet decided whether to begin a military program to construct a nuclear... [More]”

I’ve discussed Ron Paul’s platform before. In his case, the situation is reversed: foreign policy is the only plank in his platform that sticks out from an otherwise run-of-the-mill Libertarian platform. Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, seems to be so level-headed about so many things. She’s so down-to-earth and seems to understand the causes—rather than symptoms—of America’s problems.

And then you read the National Security / Foreign Policy Issues by Elizabeth Warren page on her web site and you’re... [More]

There exist a few gargantuan time-wasting and mind-numbing web sites that scoop up hours of attention like a whale does krill. Facebook, with its coterie of applications (like Farmville and Mafia Wars, though I fear my lack of experience here is showing), is the undisputed king, but Twitter also looms large. The carcasses of others, like MySpace or Friendster, twist far off in their wake, drifting slowly down on gentle currents that carry them deeper into obscurity. Others, like LinkedIn and... [More]

I haven’t watched any of the debates in anything approaching their entirety but as a frequent viewer of both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, I have seen clips from many of them. Though the words falling from the candidates’ mouths are often reprehensible, pandering and self-serving, even they aren’t the primary cause of the feeling of horror these debates engender. No, that feeling is primarily caused by the hooting, hollering and booing that comes from the audience and not the noises... [More]

Observe and Report (2009) — 2/10

Seth Rogan stars as a bipolar mall cop. It’s as bad as it sounds. Written and directed by someone named Jody Hill, it’s hard to believe that the ordinarily quite genial Rogan was in this movie for any reason other than that he lost a bet. None of Rogan’s fellow mall cops are in any way endearing. His quote-girlfriend-unquote is appalling and nothing recommends this film.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011) — 5/10

Daniel Craig stars as an alien abductee from the old... [More]

Even the official Academy Awards web site isn’t allowed to show trailers and clips from the official nominees. Score one for the studios?

So it’s another dreary Saturday (weather-wise) and I’m trying to make my way through this article, List of Pardons Included Many Tied to Power by Campbell Robertson (NY Times).

It tells of a traffic accident:

“Scotty Plunk, the driver of the truck, was killed. The driver of the Toyota, 19-year-old Joel Vann, had been drinking so much that he did not remember the accident.”

Plunk killed by teenage drunk driver, Vann. The story is about why Haley Barbour—notoriously corrupt governor of Mississippi—pardoned him.

“It is... [More]”

These are some thoughts I had as a read through the State of the Union 2012 – Transcript by Barack Obama (C-Span) (PDF).

The Synopsis[1]

1. The U.S. military is the awesome.
2. Soldiers are better than civilians.
3. American businesses have been wayward, but should be forgiven and paid to come home.
4. Americans are wicked smart and more enterprising than anyone else on the planet, but they have been chronically undereducated and under-trained
5. College costs too much; college tuition loans will kill us all
6. We need more fossil... [More]

1. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) — 9/10
2. The Wolfman (2010) — 6/10
3. Lonely Hearts (2006) — 7/10
4. OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions (2006) (fr) — 7/10
5. Brooklyn’s Finest (2009) — 8/10
6. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) — 8/10
7. There Will be Blood (2007) — 6/10
8. Nothing But the Truth (2008) — 8/10
9. Dogville (2003) — 9/10
10. Antichrist (2009) — 8/10
11. La Belle Noiseuse (1991) (fr) — 7/10
12. Invictus (2009) — 7/10
13. You Don’t Know Jack (2010)... [More]

This graphic Geeks versus Non-Geeks when Doing Repetitive Tasks (How-to Geek) illustrates quite nicely how programmers approach the world of problem-solving.

The chart does not show just much time must be spent before the programmer wins, that being dependent on the complexity of the task. The probability that the task will recur is also highly relevant, as automation of a smallish, one-time task is useless. Neither of those things will stop a determined programmer, though, who will automate no matter... [More]

Guy patien[t]ly waits for elevator and gets on said elevator (YouTube)

But still … can that possibly be real?

Who gets so pissed at an elevator that

will
not
show
up
GOD
DAMMIT

—Why is the world against me? On this too, God?—

that he just rams the doors until he DEFEATS THE STUPID ELEVATOR.

Just this one time, he’s won.

THERE.
THAT WILL SHOW THEM.

Who’s
B
o
o
o
o
s
s
.

7 more of the world’s most brilliantly pointless street flyers (happy Place). Some are pretty original; some are kinda mean; some are kinda lame.

I laughed at these:

Have you seen this bird? Because they are everywhere.

I finished this Garfield puzzle

Reward for Eddie

The detail is too good not to be true:

“Black manx, white markings on belly. no tail. Six years old. Red collar w/tags. Overweight. Mews all day / night demanding attention. Won’t stay off countertops. Eats directly from unattended plates, knocks glasses/bottles/vases onto floor. Various expensive ailments. Doesn’t do tricks or anything... [More]”

The article Obama signs defense bill, pledges to maintain legal rights of U.S. citizens by David Nakamura (Washington Post) tells of how the NDAA was signed into law by what appeared to be a reluctant President Obama,

“Obama initially had threatened to veto the legislation. In a signing statement released by the White House on Saturday, Obama said he still does not agree with everything contained in the legislation. But with military funding due to expire Monday, Obama said he signed the bill after Congress made last-minute... [More]”