bushwells | November 9, 2008A few regulars who drop by for grooming sessions and pant-hoots at the Refuge are probably aware that I am a long time J. Robert Oppenheimer fangrrl, or more accurately at my age, a fancrone. So when I discovered that Doctor Atomic was playing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, I impulsively bought tickets for yesterday's matinee performance and invited two friends to accompany me.
Gerald Finley as Oppie (left) and Richard Paul Fink as Edward Teller, right.
More below the cut.
John Adams' and Peter Sellars' (no, not the Dr. Strangelove species) opera focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer and…
jfiore | November 6, 2008New from Audio Designline is this three page FAQ on class D audio amplifiers. Not extremely technical, but it answers many questions for the technically minded. I remember studying class D amplifiers many years ago in college. In those days the quality was decidedly not hi-fi and the reliability was somewhere in the vicinity of a well-worn Yugo. How times change. Now they seem more common than fly dung and class D controller ICs and ASICs are offered by numerous manufacturers.
jfiore | November 5, 2008Norm Coleman never ceases to amaze me. No matter how much of a scoundrel you may think he is, he can always manage to go one better. For example, consider this story from CNN describing the election results. In an excruciatingly close election, we find Coleman barely ahead with 42 percent of the vote and Al Franken at a hair less. Out of nearly 2.5 million votes cast (not including a third party), they are separated by a mere 720 votes. As far as I can determine, once the result is within 0.5 percent (about 15,000 in this instance), a recount is triggered. But what does Norm "The Weasel"…
jfiore | November 5, 2008Here you go, from MSNBC:
http://www.polls.newsvine.com/_question/2008/11/05/2074539-do-you-agree-with-the-gay-marriage-bans
Currently at only 57% No.
jfiore | November 5, 2008If I hear one more person yammer on about Sarah Palin being positioned perfectly for a 2012 presidential bid, I'm going to scream. It's not going to happen for a couple of reasons.
First, there is no historical precedent. Being the losing VP didn't help John Edwards or Joe Lieberman. It didn't help Jack Kemp, or Bentsen, or Ferraro, or Mondale. You have to go back to 1920 and FDR before you can find a failed VP candidate who later became president. I think the reason why this is so was best articulated by General George Patton: "America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser." A…
jfiore | November 3, 2008An article from the Buffalo News offers some fuel for the "elitism fire". From Ohio, we learn of voter George Pounder:
Pounder looks at Obama and sees a Harvard-educated lawyer who talks in fancy words that don't necessarily resonate with the guys on the factory floor.
"We're basically blue-collar Democrats, here, and it doesn't seem like he's for us" Pounder said. "He doesn't relate to the working man, to the union man. He never got his hands dirty once in his life."
Wait a minute. Obama doesn't relate to the working man but McCain does? What? Have you ever read about their backgrounds? And…
jfiore | November 3, 2008I picked up the newspaper the other day and found a short article declaring that the news media have been biased toward Obama and against McCain. The article claims that reporting was favorable to the Democrats about 2/3rds of the time and that the only relatively "equal" outlet was Fox News. Hmmm.
The article referred to a report produced by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a self-proclaimed non-partisan watchdog group. A quick look at SourceWatch and even Wikipedia shows that this is no non-partisan group. The group was founded with seed money from notable conservatives such as Pat…
jfiore | October 31, 2008So North Carolina Democratic hopeful Kay Hagan is suing Elizabeth Dole over a TV ad in the race for US Senate. I really have mixed feelings about this story. The implication is that Hagan is an atheist (or at the very least is strongly associated with atheists) and that's patently untrue as she is an elder in her Presbyterian church. But, Hagan's suit declares that "the advertisement ... injures (Hagan's) good name and reputation in the community". The Dole camp counters that this information is something that Hagan is trying to keep quiet.
See? You don't even have to be an atheist to be evil…
bushwells | October 29, 2008Yeah, yeah, so you've seen this before. I still found it amusing. Hat tip to a dedicated Bertie fan in Ireland.
My favorite:
(Intelligently designed by Patrick Quigley and submitted to Inkling Magazine's Design Your Own Darwin Fish.)
jfiore | October 29, 2008Given the same players, how would changing the presidential tickets influence your vote? For starters, consider swapping the president and vice-president seats. A Biden/Obama ticket probably wouldn't change my overall view of the ticket. That is, there are some things I like and dislike about Obama and some things I like and dislike about Biden, but on balance, I think they'd average out to no net change. A Palin/McCain ticket is another story. I simply cannot imagine Palin in the top spot in the real world. Her anti-intellectual streak just makes me shudder. It would definitely make me think…
bushwells | October 19, 2008My seventeen year old daughter is keenly interested in politics and political figures so I wasn't surprised that she wanted to see Oliver Stone's biopic W. We saw it on Friday night in an almost full theater. In a nutshell, the movie was entertaining in a squirm-in-your-seat fashion.
Josh Brolin (l) [No Country for Old Men] starred as the Lame Duck (r). Although not a doppelganger, Brolin nailed Bushie's mannerisms and speech patterns perfectly. Interestingly, Christian Bale was originally cast in the role, but dropped out for various reasons.
As I reminded Spawn the Yonger, this is an…
jfiore | October 10, 2008Do your best to find a good caption for this picture. What is it about these blue and white signs?
Hmmm, let me think...let me think....
There's a theme here....
Yes, the first thought into my head was "Ah, this must be the Fantasy Corner."
You betcha!
jfiore | October 5, 2008A very interesting read in the Guardian today regarding the possibility of humans ever running a sub two hour marathon. This speculation always crops up when the marathon record is broken, most recently by the venerable Haile Gebrselassie who last week brought the mark down to 2:03:59.
The discussion always divides into the "No, never!" camp and the "Of course!" chorus. On the one hand, Haile's 4:43.7 average mile pace is mind boggling to the average student of the sport and a further lowering to the required 4:34.6 seems impossible. But, the same thing was said about the four minute mile…
jfiore | September 28, 2008Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia just broke his own world marathon best at Berlin this morning by being the first human being ever to traverse the 26.2 mile race distance in under 2 hours 4 minutes. Geb clocked 2:03:59 chopping nearly half of a minute off of his old record. This works out to 4:43.7 per mile pace or about 70.5 seconds per 400 meters (a single lap of a standard track).
The aerobic capacity of this man never ceases to amaze me and there is little more I can say. Story here.
jfiore | September 21, 2008No, not literally (yeow, there's an image I don't need). Harris had some wonderful commentary in Newsweek on the Republican VP candidate. Of particular worth is the following comment regarding "elitism" in US politics:
Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of…
jfiore | September 13, 2008Michael Medved's speech at the "Values Voter" Summit in Washington was a wonderful example of lunacy and demagoguery. I'll bypass the entire concept of a "values voter" to begin with as it implies that there's a voting segment that has "no values" (even Adolf Hitler had values, just not ones that most sane people share). I caught a chunk of his speech last night on CSPAN.
At one point Medved was discussing the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. He stated that Republicans agree on the big issues. For example, while there might be some disagreement in the Republican…
jfiore | September 12, 2008There's a great piece over on The Nation by Katha Pollitt regarding Sarah Palin. Pollitt offers a dozen questions that I'm sure will never be asked on a televised "debate" but should.
bushwells | September 10, 2008A couple of posts back, I plugged the Spore game a bit, and I see that proprietor of Pharyngula asks if anyone has played the game yet? PZ shrugs his skeptical shoulders and says insouciantly (well, maybe...I just like the adverb):
I've played with the creature creator, which is actually rather fun...but it's really just the most elaborate version of Mr Potatohead ever designed. What I've seen of the game itself puts me off a bit, though. It's not going to teach one single thing about evolution, and actually teaches several things that are anti-evolutionary. It's a design toy, not any kind…
jfiore | September 4, 2008There have been some particularly inane comments regarding Sarah Palin's "experience" including this bit of craziness from Steve Doocy of Fox News (and echoed by Cindy McCain a short time later). Applying the same sort of logic, we naturally arrive at the following top-ten list.
10. Alaska is the land of the "Midnight Sun", consequently, Palin must be an expert on solar energy.
9. The Iditarod race commemorates a rush to supply vaccine to Nome, and therefore Palin has obvious experience with health care delivery.
8. Mount McKinley is the highest peak in North America, and thus the closest…