Don't Mess with Texas!

Via my mom:

Curiosity: Mars, Up Close and Personal...

 Here's an image from the Mars Hand Lens Imager, a camera designed to work just like a geologist's hand-held lens.  You're seeing the surface of Mars here as if seen through a lens like Sherlock Holmes used.

Awesome stuff!

Ambrym Volcano...

This video is awesome.  The two guys in it are completely insane:


Here's Geoff Mackley's web site, and here's a map showing where the Ambrym Volcano is in the world:


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Suicide is Now the Leading Cause of Injury Mortality...

That's the attention-grabbing headline.  The phrase “injury mortality” distinguishes death from injury of any kind from death by disease of any kind.  Deaths by disease still greatly exceed deaths by injury.

Automobile accidents have long dominated injury mortality in the U.S., but these deaths have declined greatly over the past couple of decades as safer cars hit the road.  At the same time, suicide rates have increased gradually – partly due to easier access to drugs, partly for reasons not yet understood, and (more recently) partly because of the recession (suicides historically increase during financial hardship).  The reality isn't quite as dramatic as the headline, but it's still bad enough...

The Dark Side of Plea Bargains...

I've never liked the whole idea of plea bargaining, for several reasons.  The aspect that bothers me most is that plea bargaining encourages innocent people to plead guilty, which means the wrong person is being punished and the right person isn't.  Today's Wall Street Journal ($) has a disturbing article about this very phenomenon...

Toom-Cook Multiplication...

Over the years I've written several “math packs” – collections of mathematical functions that can't be performed on the underlying computer's hardware.  Back in the bad old days of 8 bit microcomputers, this even included multiply and divide (the hardware could only add and subtract).  These days most computer hardware can handle 64 bit integer math and double precision IEEE floating point math (including the common transcendentals).  For integer math larger than 64 bits, though, math packs are still the order of the day.

Multiply and divide on integers much larger than the computer's hardware can handle are fairly complex operations.  In all the math packs I've written, the approach taken is the software equivalent of longhand multiplication and division (albeit in binary, not decimal).  This morning I came across an algorithm for multiply that is faster: the Toom-Cook multiplication algorithm.

One of the many fascinating things about the world of software is that new ideas are popping up all the time, even for hoary old algorithms that you might think were so basic they couldn't be improved...

Monkey, Goat, Tightrope, and Cup...

I knew that goats were agile creatures, but I never suspected they could do something like this:


When I see something like this, I'm always left wondering how on earth someone came up with the idea to put on this sort of show.  Who wakes up and says: “Hey, I've got it!  I'll train a goat to walk a tightrope and stand on a cup, while a monkey does a handstand on its head!”  I guess I'm not cut out for a career in show business...

Canada has a Front-Row Seat...

...from which to watch the U.S. go down the drain.  Conrad Black is the author; here's his blistering conclusion:

And now, in an astounding demonstration of national fecklessness, a failed president is running slightly ahead in the polls of a challenger who has a real CV, unlike recent presidents, but who is so politically oafish and plastic, he makes Elmer Fudd seem charismatic. The incumbent has raised the national debt by 50% on what had accumulated in the 220 years of American independence prior to four years ago — that is $17,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States, in just four years. And Mr. Obama’s tocsin is the comprehensive assertion that: “Experts agree that my plan will reduce the deficit by $4-trillion.” These magic 13 words confirm the reduction of the deficit from $1.5-trillion annually to $1.1-trillion annually in the next ten years, in a country that four years ago had a money supply of only $900-billion.

About 70% of the American deficit is “bought” directly or through the banking system by the Treasury’s 100% subsidiary, the Federal Reserve, and the minimal interest paid on it is recycled back through the Federal Reserve to the Treasury, so the cost of borrowing is zero. It is the ultimate Ponzi scheme, the fiscal nirvana of endless, mountainous debt, rendered easily bearable because it doesn’t cost anything. It is a fraud, a mirage. It all possesses the hypnotic allure of the Gotterdammerung — as the Gods ascend to a burning Valhalla. If this administration is re-elected, Canada, as it has for the entire mighty spectacle of the inexorable rise of the United States, will have the ring-side seat for a disaster. Prudent, hesitant Canada, ran 14 federal government surpluses in a row. We are the pigs in the brick house — it isn’t a heroic position, neither daring nor stylish, but Canadians are peering through the portals of their stout solid home, transfixed and astonished.

The fact that Willard M. Romney is still running almost even in the polls despite his demiurgic implausibility as a candidate, afflicted by a one-person pandemic of foot-in-mouth disease, illustrates the concern of the American voters. Either Romney lucks through and numerate sanity starts to return to American public life, or the most self-destructively incompetent regime since James Buchanan brought on the Civil War, will come back and stoke up a truly spectacular inferno that will purify America in a mighty economic Jonestown. There will be no more tugging at a trouser leg from Canada — either a comradely pat on the back, or a neighbourly blast with a fire extinguisher, but this operatic crescendo can’t continue for one more full act.

Now go read the whole thing...

Top Ten Things Obama Should Have Done...

According to Mickey Kaus, one of the few sane Democrats writing on the web...