Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  From C. Edmund Wright, writing at American Thinker:

But forget low-information voters for just a minute; the malignancy that is really destroying this country is low-information people with high-profile power and/or influence. You know, people who would lobby for, comment on, advocate for, or vote on laws like ObamaCare without any understanding of its real-world impact. Such felonies are then carried out by low-information bureaucratic microbes with the power to destroy lives and businesses with impunity, and a political and talking-head class with the access and sway to codify these common malfeasances. Destruction of private property and liberty – and these two concepts are not divisible – takes place in government cubicles every minute of every day across the country. And why not?

Read the whole thing...

Anything for love...

Anything for love...  Just watch it...

Social justice...

Social justice...  Jonah Goldberg explains the left's favorite hobby horse.  It's really all about stealing money from some people and handing it to others (with the government taking their percentage, of course)...

U.S. tornadoes, 1980 - 2012...

U.S. tornadoes, 1980 - 2012...  A nice interactive map.  No tornadoes where we're going!

Geek: binary floating point kills...

Geek: binary floating point kills...  The infamous Patriot missile failure to knock down a Scud that struck a barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia (in 1991, during the first Gulf war), was caused by the failure of a binary floating point number to exactly represent the value 0.1. 

I once interviewed a software engineer who had quit his previous job, writing firmware for an insulin pump.  I asked why he had quit, and he relayed a story that is the stuff of nightmares for any software engineer: the first time his code was used on an actual patient, in trials for the insulin pump, the patient died of an insulin overdose.  The overdose was tracked down to a software bug caused by a floating point problem very similar to the one described above.  It was in code that my candidate had written, and he quit that same day.  This explained why one of his first questions for me was whether our software was ever used in a way that could hurt or kill someone...

NIST Randomness Beacon...

NIST Randomness Beacon...  It uses quantum effects, but the bandwidth is quite low...

How do we know that Flight MH370 went down in the southern Indian Ocean?

How do we know that Flight MH370 went down in the southern Indian Ocean?  Easy to understand explanation...

Something is badly wrong when...

Something is badly wrong when ... a one day visit to Brussels by our president requires an entourage of 900 people, 45 vehicles, 3 planes, and 9 helicopters. 

It sounds like something out of an implausible Hollywood political comedy.

I don't even want to think about what that's costing us.

I want a new administration, please.  Now!