Interpolation Tricks...

Some of these are new to me, though I was well aware of the peculiar usefulness of the range 0..1.  I particularly like “smoothstep”...

Flying Pigs Moment...

A famous report, the darling of the progressive obliviots, employee of a famously left-wing newspaper, writes an article declaring straight up that Obama is lying about the origins of sequestration.

Bob Woodward in the Washington Post.

What the hell is going on?

Graph of Doom...

Alternative title: Graph of Greece-in-the-Making.

Many surveys and polls have shown that a majority of the U.S. voters believe that the federal government should cut spending.  The Pew Research Center decided to do a survey to see what specific kinds of spending the voters would support cutting.

Answer: none.

Lemme get this straight: the voters want to cut spending generally, but there are no specific kinds of spending – not even one category – that a majority of voters agree should be cut.

Mind you, this is mathematically possible.  If every voter only supported cuts in a single expense category, then if 5% of voters supported cuts in any given category we'd get results like this.  So it's not necessarily the case that any (much less all) voters are being insincere here.  It could be, and likely is, simply that we all have different ideas about where the cuts should occur.

I can only think of one solution for that: cut everything.  Hey...doesn't that sound a lot like the (to be dreaded) sequestration?

The real problem caused by this phenomenon is political: any politician driven primarily by self-interest (that would be all of them) is going to find it very hard to support real cuts in (say) agriculture – because most of his or her voters are going to think that's wrong, and remember that at the next election.  Consensus fails in this situation; ideology and leadership are needed.  I don't know where we're going to find them...

Thatcher Quotes...

Here's a nice collection of Margaret Thatcher quotes.  Like the Reagan quotes I linked a few days ago, this one also contains several I'd not seen before, including this gem on political consensus:

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.

Oh, Maggie, that's exactly what's wrong with political consensus, in just a few words.  Perfect...

And here's one of my all-time favorite Thatcher quotes, which I've heard many times before:

We should back the workers, not the shirkers.

You hear that, CongressCritters?

World's Cutest Frog...

Via Althouse: