Top TED...

The top 20 most-watched TED talks.  I've only seen five of them.  I'm very curious to see what other people find interesting...

Ghosts in the ROM...

The photo at right was found in the system ROM of an ancient Macintosh SE.  It's part of an “Easter Egg” left in the ROM by the system's developers, some of whom are in this photo.

Geeks of a certain age will recognize a now almost-forgotten technique in this photo: dithering to get gray scale.  The photo actually contains nothing other than black or white pixels – the appearance of various gray levels is created by varying the relative prevalence of either white or black pixels over a given area of the photo.  Dithering is a bit harder than it might appear to be at first glance; the obvious approaches lead to grid patterns showing up as artifacts in the photo.  To make it look “natural”, the dithered pixels have to be randomized, as they are in this photo.  Pure black and white photos can be stored very efficiently, one bit per pixel, which I'm sure is why this technique was chosen here.

Read the whole story...

The Sages of Sacremento...

Unbelievable, it is – the idea that there are sages (of the human kind, not the botanical kind) in Sacremento.  The dominant human species in Sacremento is homo bozocus, as this article amply demonstrates.  The “logic” of the Sacremento Sages appears to be something like this: (a) social security isn't adequate to pay for a decent retirement in California, (b) companies have lots of money and nothing worthwhile to spend it on, and (c) therefore, let's make companies pay for retirement!  Then there's the added bonus of a cornicopia of corruption opportunities opened up by the possibility of handing out exemptions to favored industries (e.g., those that send money to the politicians).

This bill has already passed the Senate, is almost certain to pass the Assembly, and then it heads to Governor Moonbeam.  I have no intuition at all about his reaction, other than to forecast that his statements about his decision (whichever way he goes) won't make any sense.

It doesn't matter to me whether this bill turns into law or not.  The very fact that it passed even one half of our legislature is more than sufficient information for me.  California has gone off the cliff; it's heading the way of Greece, Detroit, and other such socialist/corruptocratic regimes.  Recovery to anything resembling the country I was born into seems like a vanishingly small possibility.  Time for us to get out, just as soon as we can arrange it...