From the former Seattle police chief regarding the legalization of drugs:
Our professional experiences have led us to conclude that the more dangerous an illicit substance—from crack to krank—the greater the justification for its legalization, regulation, and control. It is the prohibition of drugs that leads inexorably to high rates of death, disease, crime, and addiction
Can I hear an amen?
Somehow it was only today that I first heard the notion of Five Flags, the notion that one can have more freedom and fewer encumbrances by not having ties to any one country. While it seems to be little more than a complicated means of avoiding responsibility, it’s interesting.
For about $10 million, you can go to cosmonaut training and have a chance at getting shot up into space. (If your launch gets cancelled or you get sick, the money is non-refundable.) Or, you could bring the wooly mammoth back from extinction
I’m a long way from having $10 million to spend on something random, but if I did, I don’t know which I would pick. Probably bringing back the extinct animal. Come to think of it, you could charge admission to see and maybe even pet it, and you’d probably even get your $10 million back in a few years.
Posted as a comment to an article one of my friends posted:
“I need y’all to be really, really quiet for this. I need you to really understand what I’m telling you. Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama’s running so we all can fly.” – Jay-Z
Whatever your political opinions may be, one thing is clear about an Obama presidency. While there are still barriers based on race, they are not anything that cannot be overcome with a lot of hard work. It’s a big step towards a post-racial society, and while I’m sure it’s wishful thinking, I am hoping it’s also a step towards a post-partisan society. I have a lot of friends who are registered republicans and I agree with them on more than I disagree, and getting 52 percent of the popular vote means there are a lot of GOP members who saw things the way I do.
I will have to admit, though, that we took an active role in this campaign starting in the primary season. We’ve given money, time and pizzas to the Obama campaign. We had volunteers staying at our house. I did four canvassing shifts on election day alone. I hope that Obama can run the country with the same skill, efficiency and strategic acumen that he applied to his campaign, which was truly the first 21st century political campaign.
While his victory, especially in Colorado, heightened our joy, I have to admit it’s increased my expectations as well. I put a lot of energy into him winning, so he better do a good job. As we’ve learned in Iraq, winning the war is the easy part. Winning the peace is the true struggle. This is a start
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.
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.