Hitler rants about Avatar Movie Preview

OMG. These Hitler things ... they defy Godwin's Law! Maybe the law is more of an observation within a certain set of constrained parameters than an actual law?
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Standoff?

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Dear Queen

The Daily Bell:

"Dear Queen,

We received a copy of your correspondence and because we think the LSE has confused the issue, we wish to try to sort it out for you. First of all, you must realize that the LSE has a socialist and collectivist bent and is well known for its specialization in a form of economics called econometrics. Econometrics and socialism go hand-in-hand. Collectivism mandates government control. And if government is going to control something, it will need forecasts and modeling on which to base budgets. Econometrics provides what is necessary. The math is impressive and the individuals involved have a good deal of skill when it comes to numbers.

But a facility with mathematics does not necessarily create a logical or realistic model. In fact, modeling does not work. Free-market economists have pointed out that through human action individuals change their behavior based on their conditions. A model may show a lack of food and upcoming mass starvation, but people faced with starvation will try to plant gardens and raise animals to ward off hunger. Thus, no matter how good the models are, they will never correspond to reality as they are based on trends that will always readjust, throwing the model out of whack.

So, what really did happen? It is the same thing that happens every time. Western central banks inflated, causing a build up of mal-investments that eventually caused a very bad bust. There is not much to do about it at this point except let the ruin run its course. But instead governments in the West are propping up the financial industry and refusing to let large companies fail."

This mal-investment thing is easy to grasp. Just walk around downtown Bellevue and admire all of the new but substantially empty condo towers. That's mal-investment caused by cheap money (i.e., low interest rates). Keeping interest rates low doesn't really solve anything. It doesn't cause more people to move into town. It doesn't make all of the other housing opportunities disappear. It just makes it easier for those companies to hang onto their empty buildings a little longer before they go bust. Then someone will swoop in and buy the stuff cheap and figure out something useful to do with it.

Your basic Libertarian - namely Peter Schiff - will say, "We have to take the medicine of bankruptcy to fix the problem of cheap money" or some such. It sounds so horrible. But if you look at those empty buildings you think, "Some idiot made a bad bet and now we have a giant empty building in our town. Too bad his company will go bust." You don't think about society and social engineering and medicine. You think, "Bummer. I'm glad that's not me." Unless, of course, it is you, but then your company (probably not you) would go bankrupt and you would have to find something new to do.

But the government makes it hard for you to start over as well when they keep interest rates low. Instead of some entrepreneur figuring out what to do with the empty building it just sits there. There's no new construction going on ... there isn't even any demolition work! It's just a malaise and it's very sad. The cheap money keeps bankers from going bankrupt from the losses on these loans but it doesn't do anything else for the community except help it stagnate.

(Bellevue's not that bad off ... but by all accounts Detroit is.)


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Similar

I wonder if these clips had the same animator? Or animation director?
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Really? No Parking?

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I'm so sleepy

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Seriously, G'Night Dudes

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No way it's bedtime!

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Yes, it's bedtime!

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Is it bedtime already?

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Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 - smokin' hot!

(More.)
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Uh oh

First I was like, "WTF?"

Then I was like, "This guy's hilarious!"

Then I was like, "Uh, I'm getting a little scared."

Then he pulls out the financial crisis cards, and I thought, "Dudes, this is psycho, I hope this kind of anger doesn't get out of control."

It's a 10 minute roller coaster.

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The Debt Limit

More Red Ink? Yeah, We’ve Got That:

“Congress has never failed to raise the debt limit when necessary. Because members of both parties have long recognized the need to keep politics away from this issue, these actions have traditionally received bipartisan support,” he [Timmay Geitner] wrote. “This is clearly a moment in our history that calls for continuation of that tradition.”

Spending: a language both parties of Congress can agree on. With much less expected in the way of tax revenue this year and 3.6 trillion in new debt to be issued over the next couple fiscal years, an increase is assuredly inevitable.

Both parties are weasels. Ronald Reagen, the great proponent of smaller government, set record debt levels as president. The Republicans lie to your face and tell you they want smaller government, and then massively increase it; the Democrats tell you straight out they are going to fuck you, and we're so mad at the Republicans, that we elect them, and then bend over.

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The Infinite Tape

I read most of The Annotated Turing during our Alaska cruise. In college they mumbled something about an infinite tape that a Turing machine could make marks upon and this represented all computers ever. It never made any sense to me.

The key thing that makes the Turing machine work - and which key fact was left out in the course I took - is the temporary storage. The temporary storage is every other square on the tape. Nobody in college said anything about temporary storage. Amusing, or, really, sadly, the cover of the book doesn't show the use of the temporary storage.

And where were the instructions stored? On a piece of paper, it turns out. And pattern matching is used to find the next transition, kind of like a Prolog predicate. And (generally) when Turning said computer he meant a person which was the traditional usage of the word back then. One of Turing's huge intellectual leaps was that the computer didn't have to be a person! Hence the test Turning invented about what makes a person a person and a machine a machine: the famous Turing Test.

My wife learned about Turning Machines in a class she took from Arvind. Apparently Arvind is not only a computer architecture genius but also a great teacher. I never met Arvind but I was caught up in the backwash of some of the work he did at UCI. I shared some lab space with a couple of guys - Curtis and and James (last names long since forgotten*) - who wrote a seven pass Dataflow compiler in Simula. (The language was called Id, for Irvine Dataflow.)   In the tradition of Turing, speed was not an issue. In other words, the entire thing was dog slow, but that wasn't the point.  I can't remember what it compiled Id into - either more Simula or PDP-10 instructions.  Most likely more Simula.

I think Dataflow as an architecture was put on commercial hold because chips just kept getting faster and faster without the need for parallel programming (in most cases). Now that all of those computer transistors are dedicated to parallelism perhaps Dataflow will come to the rescue as a computational model.

Anyway, great book!

Oh, and get this - it's by the guy that wrote all of those popular Windows programming books, Charles Petzold! Good work, Charles!

* I think this is James.

[Update: Check out this awesome video of a real life Turing machine that Braeden Shosa brought to my attention.]

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ms Amsterdam

The ms Amsterdam is the flagship boat of the Holland American cruise company. It's actually a medium sized ship - it only holds 1,400 passengers. Tailing us by about 1/2 hour was the Golden Princess that holds 3,000 passengers and it was huge! Our boat was a bit more intimate. It was only a few minutes walk from stem to stern.





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North to the Future

I watched Shatner doing Palin today:





It's not clear from the editing if Shatner is doing Palin literally or following the editing of the clips.

I found the full transcript of Sarah Palin's Farewell Address over at the Huffington Post and in fact Shatner is doing the second paragraph, word for word. So that mystery is cleared up.

But ... WTF? It's an amazing speech, really, if you give her the benefit of the doubt, and disable any critical thinking ... you might even enjoy some of her sentiments.

"Be wary of accepting government largess."

Good advice - there are always strings attached.

But then ... why get a per diem for working from home?



Doesn't that seem ...

"And we have come so far in just 50 years. We're no longer a frontier outpost on the periphery of the world's greatest nation. Now, as a contributor and a securer of America, we can attain our destiny in the promise of our motto 'North to the Future.'"

North to the Future. North to the Future.

Right.

North ... to ... the ... future. Well, that's actually their motto! You can't blame her for that, can you?



Don't we need to go "Back to the Future" before we can go North to the Future?



I'm so confused.

But anyway, she'll be the backbone of the formation of the stream that is a river that I'm so thankful and grateful and will become a new political party and it will dominate because of the stream of babies it will produce.

Or something.

Actually, let's quit kidding around and jump straight to the facts. The facts are these: David Letterman and Conan O'brien have teamed up to underwrite Sarah Palin's political career. The reasoning should be obvious - the loss of revenue caused by the removal of Bush from office could cripple the humor industry and its only with this kind of stimulus that late night TV can retain it's rightful place as a part of every American's day.

Am I rambling? I'm just so inspired by Ms. Palin that whatever small amount of editing goes into this blog just seems like overkill.

Okay! G'night all!





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Governor's Mansion

This is the Governor's Mansion in Juneau, Alaska. Normally Sarah Palin would come out at 2:00 p.m. and model an outfit for a few minutes but the actual duration of the legislative "season" in Alaska is quite short and anyway she had announced her resignation already and the first thing to go was the daily modeling. What a shame.

Okay, I made that up, but this really happened: as we approached the mansion, a ten year old girl ran up and said, "I'll pretend I'm Sarah!" I couldn't tell if the kid was making fun or serious but on reflection I'm going with serious.

This is also true - that totem has a flea in it - the part with the big thin nose (I guess technically it would be a proboscis). I'm told it's the only totem in Alaska with a flea in it. Totems are like family crests and don't have any religious meaning. They supposedly tell a story. I don't know the story of the flea and the Governor's Mansion though.



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Misty Fjords

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