gregladen | September 28, 2009We have had a cool summer here in Minnesota, and this has brought out the miscreants who for their own reasons do not want to get on board with the simple, well demonstrated scientific fact that global temperatures have risen, that we humans are the primary cause, and that this climate change has negative consequences.
There are probably different reasons people do not want to get on board with this reality. The main reason especially for younger individuals is that they have been told by their political mentors to not accept global warming. The political mentors, in turn, reject global…
gregladen | September 28, 2009Roman Polanski has been wanted by the Las Angeles police since he skipped town a few decades back before sentencing on an "unlawful sex with a minor" charge. That was the plea he copped for much more serious rape charges. He has more or less ignored the fugitive warrants because for some reason you can rape someone in the United States and then live in France and that's OK. Polanski was busted by Swiss officials when he went to Switzerland to receive a lifetime achievement award. He is expected to fight extradition.
Originally ...
Polanski -- a household name both for his movies and…
gregladen | September 27, 2009 .... of the blog Highly Allochon ... Highly Allochthon ... no, wait, .. Got it Highly Allochthonous.
gregladen | September 27, 2009Unlikely, but it could happen. A judge recently ordered a person's Gmail account to be shut down. Why? Because that person received an email from a bank. The email was not supposed to be sent to that person, and it contained account information that person was not supposed to see.
The order, issued Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge James Ware in the northern district of California, also requires Google to disclose the Gmail account holder's identity and contact information. The Gmail user hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing.
The Rocky Mountain Bank, in Wilson, Wyoming, sent…
gregladen | September 27, 2009A very interesting day. I got word in the AM that Derick would be digging a trench across the Cabin property tomorrow, and as an archaeologist I could not possibly skip that, so I ripped a rotten board out of the porch as fast as I could, threw in some laundry, and watched the beginning of the football game.
I was a bit discouraged as the third quarter was progressing and it looked like the Vikings were not going to sweep the 39ers (yes, I'm taking away ten points). So I sawed the rotten board into four pieces. Two went into the garbage (sneaky) and one in each car. The car bits will…
gregladen | September 27, 2009... if Nate Silver's analysis is correct.
If a person is asked to make up a bunch of numbers ... random numbers ... s/he will tend to make up non-random numbers instead. So, for instance, if I ask you to state random numbers that have two digits, and I plot the second digits on a hisogram, and then I ask my computer to make up two digit random numbers and plot the second digits on a histogram, my computer's histogram will show roughly the sane number of 0's as 1's as 2's .... as 9's (especially with a large sample size) but you, being a silly you-man, will make up numbers with more of one…
gregladen | September 27, 2009You think this was bad? It gets worse.
Do not play the movie (below the fold) without your finger/mouse on the volume button of your computer.
Above: footage from ongoing protests at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. Police and US military have blocked off a security zone in the city, expelling all homeless people from the area, and with the exception of Burmese Monks, anarchists, anti-capitalists and others downtown is reported to be largely empty. Confrontations between police and protestors have already occurred. Tear gas (possibly OC gas) and LRAD sonic weapons have been used against…
gregladen | September 27, 2009Guys. There may be times when you feel your wife or long-term girlfriend has been sleeping with another man. You may suspect she is even pregnant from this activity, and you are not the father. There is a way to fix this, using traditional medicines and some magic, so that your wife/girlfriend will have a spontaneous abortion if you are not the father of the child. You will need an ancient Canaanite or Hebrew priest to help mix up the concoction, and you have to go find The Lord himself (Plan ahead! He is not always available!) to help out as well, but overall, the procedure is not that…
gregladen | September 27, 2009We expect to have a new male baby on November 20th +/-. But we don't know what to name it. Do you have any suggestions?
The person's last name will be "Laden." So you have to say any name suggestion you have out loud with "Laden." For example, if you are thinking "Aden" then say:
"Aden Laden ... ooops, no it rhymes, forget that."
or
"Ben Laden .... ooops, news-splashed terrorist associations, forget that."
and so on.
So.... any suggestions?
gregladen | September 26, 2009Cobol is the opposite of a modern computer langauge, in some ways. But it is the language that a lot of business systems are written in, so chances are you "use" Cobol almost as much as you "use" Linux, even if you never heard of either.
COBOL is used to power almost all global ATM transactions and runs almost three quarters of the world's business applications. It helps book hundreds of holidays every single day.
And, according to enterprise application management company, Micro Focus, more than 200 billion lines of COBOL code in existence, with hundreds more being created every single day…
gregladen | September 26, 2009Its a 1980s dating video montage. I think some of these guys were left over from the 70s.
I guess I'd go with the Viking.
Bonus video:
gregladen | September 26, 2009
What they are referring to is a paper by Mojib Latif in which he notes that the media often misrepresent global warming as a continuous, year by year increase in temperature. The truth, of course, is that annual temperature varies up and down but the baseline for this variation has been going continuously up.
Like a road going up a mountain. Often the road goes up and down and up and down cross the complex terrain of the mountain side. If, while driving up this hypothetical mountain, the road dips down for a moment, one does not say "Oh, we're going home now. This whole driving up the…
gregladen | September 26, 2009Female monarchs in the eastern part of North America have declined in number over the last three decades, according to recent research.
the female to male ratio for the butterflies east of the Rockies has gradually been changing. In the late 1970s, Davis said, females made up around 53 percent of the Monarch Butterfly population that migrated to Mexico for the winter. Today, that number has dropped to about 43 percent, he said, which paints a dire picture for population recruitment. Davis outlines his findings in a new paper co-authored with Eduardo Rendón-Salinas of World Wildlife Fund-…
gregladen | September 25, 2009The detectives who waited on my doorstep the afternoon after Jake's murder asked lots of questions, even if they were about Carla, and they listened very well. I was nervous at first, but once I got over the shock of seeing them at my door, I was telling them everything.
Enjoy a little free on line fiction at Quiche Moraine.
gregladen | September 25, 2009This is not a parody. I think.
Hey, wait, is that the Apple guy on the left?
OK, let's do an activity. Let's list all the things that could GO WRONG at this party! OK?
I'll start:
OH, and I love the fact that at the end the Apple Guy (the one on the left) gives us the South American guy-to-guy symbol for "I just slept with your wife, loser!"
Hat tip: Somebody from a different OS company.
gregladen | September 25, 2009You've certainly heard of the ARIS 2008 survey from Trinity College. One of the more interesting aspects of the survey is the demonstration that there is a sex difference in patterns of religions identification. Below I give some links where this has been discussed, but I want to note that in many discussions one of the first things people say ... quite reasonably ... is that the differences seem small and potentially well within the normal sampling error of a survey.
The reason people think that is because they are accustom to survey data in relation to political polling where sample error…
gregladen | September 25, 2009"At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth."
~Neil Tyson