Are magical

I’ve been seeing headlines on CNN and the like saying that Clinton claims the tide has turned. Has it really? Let’s take a look at the numbers.

• Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary with 55% of the popular vote. CNN shows her with 83 of the 158, but with two delegates unallocated since the results are still not completely in. For the sake of explanation, let’s just give her the other two, for a total of 85 delegates to Obama’s 73.
• There are 492 delegates remaining to be allocated in the primary process
• In order to surpass Obama in the popular vote, Clinton needs to win 326 of those delegates.
• In order to gain that many delegates, Clinton needs to get at least 66.2% of the popular vote.

Given her past performance and the landscape as it is, it would take something truly astounding for Clinton to oust Obama. While she might have won Pennsylvania, in real terms, she has lost ground to Obama. There are fewer pieces on the chessboard and the game is even more heavily weighted against her.

The question I keep on asking myself is: why is Hillary still in the race? Am I missing something? Perhaps she will succeed in convincing the DNC to put Michigan and Florida back in play.
Does she think she can persuade enough superdelegates to come to her side? Or does she think that if she drops out now, people will think she’s a quitter and not respect her in the future? Or, given her comments about McCain’s lifetime of experience she’d rather see McCain win than Obama, hence her scorched-earth campaign tactics? I honestly don’t know.

The Rockies are in the World Series this year, which means that there are at least two games played in Denver. For some reason, the Rockies decided to only sell tickets to the game online, claiming it would be the most ‘fair’. Fair to ticket brokers and people with a room full of computers at their disposal, perhaps, but not fair to many die-hard fans who don’t have high-speed Internet connections.

The first attempt to sell tickets online failed spectacularly. Paciolan, the company contracted to do ticket sales overestimated their ability to handle the load and their servers did not fail gracefully. Paciolan and the Rockies management lied and said that an ‘external malicious attack’ brought the site down. If by that you mean, millions of people tried to buy tickets and the server couldn’t handle the load, then perhaps that’s true. They regrouped and decided to try again the next day.

Today appeared to most to be more of the same. I had three computers that all got nothing but server timeout errors, except one that was waiting to connect from 12:00 sharp to 2:30, when the games sold out. I knew two people who managed to get tickets to the game. One of them appeared to get lucky, went through the normal process and bought tickets.

The other person who I know put on his grey hat, and bought enough tickets to max out his credit card. The servers that were handling the ticket requests were labelled ev1.evenue.net through ev15.evenue.net. He found that by using IE (because of the way it sends back cookies – using other browsers on edited server URLs would give errors) and editing the server URLs and using a lot of computers on a really fast network connection, he could find a server that wasn’t too busy to handle requests. This strategy worked well enough that he managed to max out all of his credit cards purchasing World Series tickets. I would have done the same to try and buy tickets, but since I don’t have Windows running natively anymore I tend not to run IE.

There seems to be a lot of bile directed at Jay Alves, the Rockies spokesperson, which he doesn’t deserve. He doesn’t make the news, and if Paciolan is lying about the problems that they’re having, that doesn’t give him much to work with in confronting the press. I do wish he would stop saying that the Rockies are even more frustrated than the fans. They’re not. They get to go to the games.

I am amused that everyone that I know who ‘played by the rules’ was shut out of ticket sales, but the person who his hacker hat on was able to buy until his credit card was maxed out. I think it’s a safe bet that most of the tickets went to brokers and will be auctioned off on the secondary market. I don’t want to sound conspiratorial, but with MLB getting a cut from secondary market sales on StubHub, MLB probably likes it that way.

According to the Guardian

Since August 21 the North-West Passage is open to navigation. This is the first time that it happens,” Nalan Koc, head of the Norwegian Polar Institute’s climate change programme, told reporters in Longyearbyen, a town in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.

Meanwhile I’m sure the global warming skeptic crowd is trying to find some way to dispute the climatologists’ use of statistics. But hey! New shipping route!

And so does Computer Science. The New York Times reports that despite growing numbers of women in math and other engineering disciplines, they are less likely to pursue CS.

The prevailing theory in the article is that women assume they need to already be proficient in programming and fall into that ‘hacker’ stereotype in order to be good at or enjoy CS. That’s too bad. Being good at math helps, a lot, but really the only attribute necessary is wanting to solve interesting problems using computers. Hollywood does sure have a bizarre picture of what it’s like to be a developer, though.

An amusing post on the Freakonomics Blog about a ‘paper’ attempting to quantify who was the better singer for AC/DC: Bon Scott or Brian Johnson.

Interesting data, but the analysis is completely wrong. If the participants made better decisions listing to newer-era AC/DC, that means their brains were less engaged with the music and more engaged on their tasks. Therefore, to ascertain the better singer, the worse the decisions made by the individuals, all other things being equal, the more the listener subconsciously likes the song due to the larger amount of scarce thinking resources allocated by the brain to the music.

That, and, well Ride On is AC/DC’s best song, ever.

I don’t know where this Leonard Cohen performance of ‘Who by Fire’ with Sonny Rollins playing saxophone came from, but holy cow! That’s got to be one of the best jazz solos ever – that bit at the end, as one of the commenters say, will recalibrate your DNA.

(hat tip: ongoing)

I am going to resolve not to exhale. That should keep several thousand pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere. On a less sarcastic note, two of the most interesting things I’ve read on the subject are Freman Dyson’s Global Warming Heresies. As a scientist I have tremendous respect for him, and it’s an interesting and different point of view. Equally interesting is the response from Alun Anderson the editor of New Scientist. Both are worth reading so I won’t bother to summarize here.

The aspect of this debate on Global Warming that I find the most tedious is the focus on whether humans are the cause or not. I mean it’s an interesting question, but it’s sure as hell not the question. Even worse, I am not sure what possible evidence could demonstrate this with any degree of certainty. The questions that matter are

1. Is global warming happening? If so,
2. How will it impact us, and
3. What should we do about it?

There seems to be general agreement, at least among the non-faith-based community, about number one. There seem to be many dire movie plot predictions about the second from lots of people with some sort of axe to gride. As for the third, there seem to be two mainstream positions, both of which are bullshit:

1. We need to stop using carbon NOW or else we are DOOMED! DOOMED! and
2. Heck, one volcano puts out more carbon than all of us measly humans do in CENTURIES, so let’s go drilling for more oil

Personally, I think there are tons of really good reasons to diversify our energy sources that have nothing to do with catastrophe-mongering. We have far too many eggs in the fossil-fuels basket, and far too much of our fossil fuels are in the hands of crazy people. Our society and our position in the world would benefit greatly by diverse and decentralized means of energy production and less need for consumption. So while I agree with the cause of consuming fewer non-renewable resources, I am annoyed at the demagoguery in the motives of the climate people.

And what is really stupid about the whole discussion is that it takes attention away from the pressing questions about what to do about the things that will happen. There are all kinds of things that might happen and some of them would be pretty catastrophic if they did, but I can’t predict the future, and I’d rather eliminate them as decision-making factors – since they also might not happen, they cancel themselves out as variables in the decision making equation.

Unless something radical happens to reverse what is well underway, lots of arctic ice will melt. That will totally destroy the livelihoods of hundereds of thousands of people up north. So are we going to let them die, are we going to proactively give them the tools they need to find another livelihood, or are we going to do nothing until it’s too late and then pay billions of dollars to move their cities farther inland and let them live on welfare for the rest of their lives?

As lots of this ice melts, a lot of cold water is going to come into play that will be prime fishing waters. It will contain some of the world’s best oil reserves. Unless something else radical happens, world oil production will continue to steadily decline, so these waters, north of Alaska, Russia, Norway, etc. will become super valuable. What does this mean for foreign policy, and should we be starting to work out some of these almost inevitable issues via diplomacy now?

On a lighter note: step by step instructions to make your own bacon – Yum!

Here’s a video:

Long time no post…but I have some interesting tabs building up on the browsers so I figured I’d post them.

A New Day

Looks like Rove is Retiring – maybe the Democrats can hire him

CEO Libraries

If you look in the book collections and libraries of the super-successful, you’re not going to find any of those business books written by and for the MBA crowd.

Don’t be Evil

Google is turning off their video purchasing service. As a result, videos that users paid for will suddenly cease to be viewable. A new generation of people will learn never to purchase encumbered content, but it’s a shame that Google, with effectively unlimited space and bandwidth, is leaving customers naive enough to trust them out in the cold.

Novel use for Flickr

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon Univerity (my alma mater!) announced a way to convincingly fill in arbitrary-shaped holes in pictures by scanning a database of images and looking for one that will fit.

Send in the clones!

Within weeks of the iPhone’s release, Chinese clones are coming out. It is amazing the manpower and infrastructure that goes into cloning everything from cars to consumer electronics. Perhaps it doesn’t have the iPhone’s build quality, but it has two replacable batteries, six speakers, and two SIM card slots. Nuts.

Saving the cavendish

The bananas that you buy in the store are seedless, which means that they are sterile and have no way of reproducing. They are reproduced artifically and every banana tree is an exact genetic copy of the other. Great for consistency, bad for disease resistance.