Persistence Over Intelligence

http://essays.dayah.com/persistence-over-intelligence

Conan O’Brien May Be About to Push the Envelope on Late Night Television

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=GME5nq_oSR4

Scale of the Universe

http://www.primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe/scale-of-universe-v1.swf

I've seen a lot of these, and even made one at some point, but this is by far the best one I've seen.

5 Lessons of U.S. Plan for a Permanent Military Presence in Australia

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/5-lessons-of-us-plan-for-a-permanent-military-presence-in-australia/248266/

The U.S. has arranged with Australia to install a permanent military presence near the northern Australian town of Darwin, a move that signals shifts in President Obama's foreign policy and the U.S. vision for its role in the world. Obama will formally announce the new base with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard during his visit to Australia next week, the Sydney Morning Herald reported this morning.

U.S. Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit From Iraq

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/world/middleeast/united-states-plans-post-iraq-troop-increase-in-persian-gulf.html?_r=2

Argument recap: For GPS, get a warrant

http://www.scotusblog.com/?p=131423

Midway through a federal government lawyer’s plea Tuesday for unrestricted power for police to use new GPS technology to track cars and trucks on public roads, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., sketched out just how the Court may well restrict the practice.   Despite an unqualified prior statement by the Court that one moving about in public has absolutely no right to expect privacy, the Chief Justice said that such a right might exist, after all, and it could trump the fact that the movement was in public.  If the Court can find a way to say just that, police almost certainly would have to get a warrant before using GPS to monitor where suspects go.

Vaccine-wary parents warned against sending ‘chicken pox lollipops’ through the mail

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/vaccine-wary-parents-warned-sending-chicken-pox-lollipops-mail-article-1.973738

Parents fearful of vaccinations are being warned by a federal prosecutor that making a deal with a stranger who promises to mail them lollipops licked by children with chickenpox isn't just a bad idea, it's against the law.

Remind me again why we don't require a license before people can have kids?

Color of Time

I was stumbling and came across this site:

http://bickov.com/projects/the-moment-of-color/start2.html

It changes the background color for every second of time.  The obvious way to do this would be the convert the HH:MM:SS of time into a RGB value.  However, it was clear that wasn't what that site was doing, because the color changed dramatically every second.  I thought perhaps there was something more interesting going on.  It did mention that every second would have a unique color, which would imply that it took the date into account too.  I thought perhaps it took the unix epoch time and converted that into hex values.  It could use a simple hash of the time and then just take the last 3 hex pairs and use them directly.  That wouldn't absolutely guarantee unique times, but it would be about as close as you could get with the limited space of RGB values.  Since 256³ = 16,777,216 you'd have enough colors to only have to use each twice per year.

I checked the source, and was somewhat disappointed to see it was just generating random values.  I guess it was just a concept.  You could at least seed the RNG with the hour, minute, or second values.

I decided it would be somewhat interesting to see it implemented the way I had originally envisioned it, and set out to make it.  I began by copying his code since it was relatively easy to follow.  However, every time I attempt to use javascript I'm reminded of the inadequacy of my "pretend it's just C++" method of programming it.  So, I scrapped the code and started over from scratch.  After more troubles trying to figure out how to do things that should be simple in javascript, I got it working pretty well.  There are still some things I'd like to change, but that's not very likely.

I'll admit his is prettier than mine, but I think mine is more interesting to watch.  In order to make full use of the color space I'm not directly using the HMS values.  I'm converting them into a ratio and then multiplying that by 255.  In other words (#seconds/60) *255.  This allows a just barely perceptible change in color each second.  Also, I wanted to make the foreground color complementary colors.  However this is apparently not that easy to do.  I ended up just subtracting each hex pair from 255, which gives sometimes complementary colors, and painfully jarring colors the rest of the time.

http://daleswanson.org/things/clock.htm

White House Responds to Petitions

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petition-tool/responses

The white house has begun responding to the petitions that had the requisite signatures.  I was pretty cynical about what the responses would be.  However, I must say the responses surprised me. That is, I was surprised at how condescending, circular, and filled with bald faced lies they are.  Perhaps I'm too insulated from politicians' day to day lies.  

Also, I suspected that there would be petitions about not taking petitions seriously.  However I expected this would take a few months.  However, literally the day after the first responses were posted there were already multiple petitions to take the petitions seriously.  Here are some of my favorites:

Actually take these petitions seriously instead of just using them as an excuse to pretend you are listening

Offer a response to marijuana legalization petitions that isn't written by someone legally required to oppose them.

We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition.


One silver lining is that they did respond to the petition demanding they acknowledge aliens. In their response they mentioned the various ways we're looking for signs of alien life.  Interestingly the first one, SETI, has been shut down since April 2011 due to lack of funding.  It requires $5 million in funding, ie, less than 0.0005% the cost of the Iraq War.

And since I've been watching these videos nonstop, I'll link this one about SETI here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHuve33yOVY

Bizarre Lunar Orbits

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/06nov_loworbit/

The orbit of PFS-2 rapidly changed shape and distance from the Moon. In 2-1/2 weeks the satellite was swooping to within a hair-raising 6 miles (10 km) of the lunar surface at closest approach. As the orbit kept changing, PFS-2 backed off again, until it seemed to be a safe 30 miles away. But not for long: inexorably, the subsatellite's orbit carried it back toward the Moon. And on May 29, 1972—only 35 days and 425 orbits after its release—PFS-2 crashed.