So much for the spirit of learning

I just made a P-x-y diagram.

It certainly looks like a P-x-y diagram, but I'm not really sure what the curves mean.

I'll just leave it unlabelled and assume that the marker will assume I know what things are.

Often in engineering, we are told to do something to solve a problem because it works and not to think too deeply about it.

It gets really ingrained and sometimes we take it to too much of an extreme.

Last week I was working on a Transport assignment.

"Does this graph look right to you?"
"Yes, I mean wait, what are those lines?"
"Uh, let me read the problem statement and get back to you"

Like in Jeopardy, when you ring in the answer before the question gets read.

One more thing: I hope the med students run their training patients with better care than we run our training distillation columns. Otherwise I'd stay away from the hospital at Mac.

Oh fuck this

Brb, quitting Minecraft forever.

Upon reflection

I think that Gundam 00 has actually become my favourite Gundam series (i.e. excluding OVAs, movies) ever.

When I watched first season by itself, I thought it was a trainwreck modeled after Code Geass, but after finishing the entirety, I totally understand what the writers were going for [1].

The thing about Gundams is that as a real robot show, it never actually was that plausible.

Like what, you didn't notice that the Titans/Zeon come out with a new mobile suit every week?

That the Jetstream Attack was retarded?

That Amuro Ray pushed an asteroid away from Earth by the power of his mind?

Various shows have tried to put forward serious explanations for why things are the way they are. Like all of those new models are just prototypes for field testing by elite forces and all of those wildcard pilots are elite members allowed to exercise their individual judgment on the battlefield. 00 takes all of these explanations, and then immediately highlights how ridiculous they really are:

"Another new model? How much money does the Federation have?"

or

"What about you Mr. Bushido, are you going to follow my orders?"
"No"
"No?"
"I have a license; I'm a one man army"

All of those kids who step into a Gundam and just naturally good at piloting? "Okay!" says 00, "we'll recruit this guy whose sole credentials are that he looks like our previous pilot who died!"

And they don't just take from the UC. You thought Wing was gay? We will make sure our show is the gayest! You thought Strike Freedom was broken? We will break all our Gundams in half and then escalate the enemies' weapons to match!

It's like it was made by a bunch of guys who really like Gundam sitting in a room. They're aware of every 3 times faster, you punched me twice joke on the internet and they want to make sure to include it. They didn't just sit there and trash talk Destiny, they laughed about it and then threw in a few gratuitous transformation sequences as a tribute.

In this sense, 00 really succeeded at what Turn A tried to do, that is unify the Gundam multiverse, but while Turn A was concerned with the physicality of it all, 00 took the spirit of every series, mixed it up, and boldly turned it all to 11.

They do make a serious attempt at characters and theme, and while it's not outstanding, it is an entirely respectable performance and stands well against their contemporaries. They could've gone the serious route, but it's been done over a million times already and Zeta is pretty hard to top in this respect. So they gave you a roller-coaster ride instead.

For everyone else, you still have Unicorn. No more complaining.

So then, between 00 and Force, most of my great ideas has already been put to paper. What now...

1) The movie was weak on substance, but I consider it acceptable if only for closure. That and the Solbraves are amazing [2].

2) Trans-Graham.

Kadokawa, you make me laugh

So everyone knows about Newtype magazine.

You know, for Gundam fans that aren't hardcore enough for Gundam Ace.

Now the thing about Gundam is that, ever since Gundam W revealed the untapped potential of yaoi fangirls, Sunrise has gotten progressively gayer and gayer until the logical conclusion of a trap piloting a reverse trap.

So of course, a spinoff of Newtype only makes financial sense. Newtype Romance.

At the same time while this is happening, someone somewhere else discovered that there is also an untapped potential for people that like mechas, and also like bishoujos.

Naturally Kadokawa is getting on this bandwagon. Time for another spinoff!

Enter the newest magazine to enter their publishing family: Nyantype.

The only place where you would get this and this at the same time.

Ha!

Setting the gold standard

Are you ready, Main Cannons?


Force is a lot better than ViVid.

Just as planned!

Maybe some of you have heard of the presidential helicopter program that spun out of control and got cancelled after some 3 billion dollars.

There was some (half-serious) speculation that the semi-complete birds would end up being sold to Canada for dirt cheap.

As it turns out, they have been sold to us for dirt cheap, and these helicopters are really tricked out. The government intends to use them for SAR.

Yes! Finally, some actually useful equipment!

Don't get too excited, the second part of the speculation was that we'll end up spending large amounts of money downgrading its capabilities for whatever reason.

Oh yeah, and we only need them in the first place because for some reason we can't get spare parts for the old perfectly capable helicopters. As in it's apparently not possible or something.

I don't know what's worse, a defense department that consistently has massive cost spiral issues or a defense department that consistently collects great bargains and then spends large amounts of money to break what they just bought.

Studying is going well, thanks for asking

I made a Dominion tracker for myself, but anyone can use it if they want.

It's hosted here, courtesy Will.

It may very well turn out like that time in Settlers where I calculated my expected values for all the resources and then watched helplessly as I was unable to do anything about it despite the game unfolding exactly as predicted.

But you have more control in Dominion, so who knows.

As with anything open-source, I'm giving no documentation, what, are you an idiot or something?

Naturally it doesn't take into account a lot of things, in particular the expected handsize algorithm makes me very unhappy.

So if any CO majors would like to formulate some better equations for me *cough*Dani*cough* I would be happy to make the changes.

Pimp my code

I guess this works:

---

function combination(n,k){
return factorial(n)/(factorial(k) + factorial(n-k);
}

function factorial(n){
nf = 1;
for (i=1;i<=n;i++){
nf = nf*i;
}
return nf;
}

---

I'm looking for something more like:

---

def combination (n,k)
f = lambda {|x|(1..x).inject(1){|x,y|x*y}}
result f(n)/(f(k)*f(n-k))
end

---

If anyone can use array.reduce in Javascript without it turning into a mess, I would like to know. <_<

It's cheaper anyhow

As people may know, I often quit hobbies when my friends get too good at them.

Ever since Phi introduced Dominion to me last Christmas break, I've been in love with the game. But only recently have I found out that an online client exists, and that's been what's really helpful in actually convincing people to play.

Net money spent: $0

Score!

I enjoy Dominion because it's kind of like Magic on ADD.

There are many problems with casual Magic. There's always been the disparity in how much money people are willing to spend on the game with the accordingly disparate deck power levels. The bigger problem for me is that after awhile, all the match ups between people's main decks have been played out and that's boring. At that point there's the option of spending more money to build new decks, or making terrible secondary decks with super volatile power levels. Not cool. Drafting is an option, but at that point you've committed $15 - $25 and an entire afternoon to playing Magic.

Dominion solves all of those problems: everyone shares the same card pool, you build a new deck every game, and you play. If you end up with something you hate, it's scrapped at the end of the game anyways and you're free to make something new. And having played with Desire builds before, let me assure you that building a stormy engine that cycles your deck twice over in Dominion is every bit as satisfying as resolving a lethal Brainfreeze.

Magic multiplayer has the problem of single player decks being totally unsuited for the format. Control decks with one-use spells for instance. Actually, control decks in general make people mad. Combo decks work once before people get wise and start to gang up on you. EDH is a good start, but also gets stale without fresh card infusions every so often. Emperor is one of my favourites, but having a requirement of exactly 6 people is hard. Dominion on the other hand is less confrontational, so while multiplayer changes the game dynamics, it is difficult to for people to team-up. In this sense it's more "tactically pure". People might see it as a downside, but really you still have fun interacting with friends; if I wanted to play diplomat I'd play Diplomacy. Incidentally, I can never convince people to play Diplomacy...funny that. The flexible player requirements are also a nice bonus.

Magic has terrible mana issues. You can have the right curve and land count and still run into mana screw frequently (probably 20-30% of the time). One deck primer I read specifically mentioned how to decide if you want to mulligan to 2 when you have Chalice of the Void in hand, which means that scenario can be expected to occur repeatedly within a reasonably finite amount of time. Yes, it hits everyone and, averaged out, good players will rise to the top, but it is never fun hitting your 4th land on the 8th turn. In Dominion you cycle your deck so many times and draw so often that if you have terrible economy throughout a game, it's almost certainly your own fault for building a crappy base.

Finally, it's super easy to pick up. Most everyone will fully understand the rules before the second game. So people who would never play something like Magic [1] can get right into it. Naturally, the fact that there is no capital cost for new joiners is also helpful.

That said, can I convince anyone want to buy some poker chips?

1) Not that it affects my decks at all, but post-2010 combat rules are bullshit. Everything uses the stack except combat? Stupid. Extra rules baggage.

y u no liek?

This is the very lovely Panamera that everyone else seems to hate:

This is the CTS-V wagon that everyone gushes over:



WHY??

No way!

This is what the Batmobile should look like!







Soo~ sweet!

Stealth, the white elephant

Stealth is very expensive to make and maintain. There are other trade-offs too, for instance, the F-22 nose is smaller than the nose of F/A-18(E/F)s and F-15s so the latter jets can be upgraded to hold better avionics.

Aircraft usually have a service life of 30 years. So here's a problem, if anyone starts building radar sophisticated enough to track stealth aircraft (VHF/UHF beams), you can't just modify your fleet to counter it. Your stealth advantage is negated.

At least F-22s have their thrust-vectoring and supercruise abilities, so they would still make very capable air-to-air fighters. Very overpriced ones, but that's a sunk cost.

As far as I'm aware, F-35s do not have all-aspect stealth as F-22s do, so they will be easier to crack. F-35s have the flight envelope of an F/A-18 and no supercruise. Without stealth, you just bought a $115m gen-4 fighter with somewhat bigger load out. Bravo.

Anecdote: the USAF does not intend to use F-35s for air-to-air. That will still be the mission of their F-15Cs and F-22s, the F-35s will supplant (or supplement?) the F-16s for strike and SEAD roles. Take that as you will.

What I think is a better alternative? Active defenses. Electronic warfare. Get a better ARM up and running (I hear HARMs are terrible, and ALARMs are marginally better) and send in your Growlers and Wild Weasels. And if the enemy adapts, you just need to come up with a better jamming pod instead of scrapping the fleet.

No, I haven't done May yet

First Class

Now, this is the kind of movie that M. Grondin would write a 3500 word exposition on, including a 100 word treatise on Michael Fassbender's chemistry with Hugh Jackson, whose character who shows up for a net 10 seconds. Interestingly enough, he will fail to comment on why Erik, who was quite a snappy dresser for the first 2 hours, would show up in the last scene wearing a red suit, cape and purple helmet.

In light of this, I will choose instead to critique some things that literally no other critic would.

Naval tactics.

Firstly, I may have misheard, but I was under the impression that the 7th fleet was ordered to blockade Cuba. I hope they were actually talking about the 2nd fleet because sailing from Fleet Activities Yokosuka to Cuba tends to take a long time.

Big clusters of ships show up a lot in pictures. Those are not real battle formations, they are just posing for the camera. In reality you could have ships from an B/C/ESG picketing 10km away along the likely threat vectors.

Sonar. It's not just the act of sending sound waves out, you need to be able to pick up the echoes and discern them. This ability of Banshee was not alluded to in the film previously. Additionally, the difficulty of littoral sub hunting isn't in illuminating the ocean floor, it's discerning what are the subs and what are just rocks.

There were 2 Iowa class battleships present at the battle. All of them were decommissioned in the 50s.

Assuming they were active and deployed to blockade, they would never use their 16" guns for such a role. I'm thinking the 40mm Bofors or the 5 inchers at most. Also, warning shots, the more civilized nations among us tend to use those.

Or you know what's even better for maritime interdiction? Aircraft, and as it turns out, we even had aircraft specifically built for this role. They are called P-2s and they are the shit.

Speaking of aircraft, you'd think that either side would be concerned that there is a rogue plane circling their airspace the whole time. What are those AA pickets doing?

Is Beast really that smart? He decided to take the SR-71, a plane designed for the sole purpose of flying faster than anything else airborne, and make it VTOL. Seems like what they need is a C-130. I mean, however slower they move in that, surely they'll still beat the blockaders sailing in from Japan.

A Mk12 5/38 has a range of 12km, missiles even longer. I don't know why all the ships were steaming in what looked like a counter-current PASSEX 2000 yards off the coast to engage, it's a nonsensical tactic.

On the other hand, it's kind of difficult for a person to see at that distance. So while Magneto might be good at passing metal through the air, I don't imagine his fire control being very good. It's kind of hard to hit ships because they are small compared to the ocean (and it'd be even harder if the entire combined fleets weren't sailing like every ship was doing CONREP exercises with every other ship). Unless he could detect the electromagnetic anomalies in the Earth's field caused the the metal hulls, but that'd be such bullshit. Well. As if levitating isn't already bullshit.

Yes, I do mix units a lot; deal with it.

"My face is starting to feel numb"

If the cup is spilt, just pour more water in

Minecraft is one of those games that means something different to everyone.

This naturally makes it difficult to administrate a server.

I don't even know what you two want from Minecraft!

What do I want from Minecraft?

That's easy.

I want to create beautiful things, I want others to see what I create and I want to see what others create [1].

I've spent unreasonable amounts of time on the old server, everybody has spent unreasonable time on the old server, and we've built quite an impressive piece.

I want to toss it all.

Why?

I like to think of it like illustration; nobody works on the same piece forever. There always comes a time to stop, and there are two reasons for it [2]. First, is that the picture is perfect and adding more would do nothing but spoil it. The second is burnout: either it's flawed and not worth salvaging, there is nothing more to be learned from it, or just boredom from working on the same thing for so long.

And for me, it has gotten to be all three.

Of course, not everybody is me and is understandably reluctant to throw away man-months of work.

I can't really convince anybody otherwise if they really think that the old world is a masterpiece, or if they really want to complete that project they've been slaving away on for weeks.

But fear of starting anew? Maybe I can say something about that. Don't get me wrong, there are tons of things I love about the old world; I love Joe's town, I love my basement and, yes, I even love your vault room, Overmeyer. There are things to like about my old art too, and people ask me often why I toss as many pieces as I do, or even something like why I work in one layer. Aren't I afraid of losing the work? Not particularly. I did it once, I can do it again and moreover, I will get better at it in the future. And then it becomes easier and easier to see the flaws in past work, despite their redeeming features.

No, I haven't got any big art projects lately, but I am infinitely more pleased with the sketches I pound out on a whim now than what seemed like massive undertakings many years ago. It's easy to tout the persistence of Minecraft, but let's not discount stagnation either, which is a trap easy to fall into. Keep the old world, archive it as a record of our achievements. But let's start something new, and make it better than before.

So here's to fresh starts: cheers, mates.

1) I was also going to talk about my view of mods, and it relates, but this post already crept so long, so I'll save it for another day.

2) There's also the "commission deadline is approaching so I need to maximize my effort to money ratio" reason but I think we have the luxury of ignoring that one.

I quite like these covers

This is why healthcare costs are out of control

Not the point of the article, but it caught my eye:

Before Elias Zerhouni became director of the National Institutes of Health, he was a senior hospital leader at Johns Hopkins, and he calculated how many clinical staff were involved in the care of their typical hospital patient—how many doctors, nurses, and so on. In 1970, he found, it was 2.5 full-time equivalents. By the end of the nineteen-nineties, it was more than fifteen. The number must be even larger today. Everyone has just a piece of patient care.

At one point, they looked you up and down, gave you some taps and made a diagnosis. Now you get sent off for blood tests and scans with more acronyms than an MBA class; someone needs to pay for all of the equipment and technicians.

Much better than the F1

If this is Gundam.

Then this is White Glint.

Which makes it about the hottest McLaren ever.

Interesting

Since every major except two leads *half or more* of its recipients to be dissatisfied with their careers, it might be better to ask why studying chemical engineering or management information systems leads to job satisfaction, and whether we can use the answer to better prepare students of all majors for their lives ahead. That seems more likely to have a positive affect than finding better ways to move humanities majors into fields whose satisfaction level is not much higher.

Responder:

I think the answer to that question is fairly simple. If you study chemical engineering, or management information systems, or accounting, you pretty much know what you're getting into.

That's actually a really interesting question, and that answer can't be the right one. The number 1 reason people in my class are in my class? "I wanted to do engineering but I wasn't sure which so I just picked this one". Oh and there's this tidbit: "I went into enviro because I wanted to do engineering and wasn't sure which, chem was my second choice".

So basically my major is a collection pool of engineering students that weren't sure what they wanted to engineer. I'm pretty sure most of us didn't even know what chemical engineers did until second year.

My answer? *shrug*

If I had to pick...

...a favourite sports car, a true sports car, it would definitely be the GT-R.

First its looks: the lines were from Gundam and the dials from Gran Turismo, a truly Japanese inspired creation. And true to Japanese humility, it's about as understated as a sports car can look.

Haven't your parents ever told you not to judge a book by its cover?

A new Aventador, bright orange and nostrils flared, will run you at least $300k, pack a 6.5 V12, give you nearly 700 horses and get you from 0-60 in 2.9s. The definition of ostentatious.

A new GT-R will also get you there in 2.9s. It will do this while carrying an extra 200kg in amenities and it will do it with "just" 530 horses in a 3.8 V6 and it will do it while costing you a much more reasonable $80k.

The last gen GT-R finished the Nurburgring in 7:26, beating the much more expensive F458 by more than 6 seconds. The 2011 GT-R improves that to 7:24 (semi-wet), just topping the Enzo: the Ferrari built singular-purpose racing machine.

The Enzo does not cost $80 000.

Nor does it have power windows.

So why buy Italian? I suppose if you want to throw money into holes while looking ridiculous (and I concede that there is definitely a market to be tapped in this area), but engineering? Leave it to the Germans. And the Japanese.

Good thing I didn't go into enviro, eh?

I would clearly be the worst enviro eng ever.

Or

We can finish carving vanity portraits of Presidents into mountains.

That's acceptable too.

When the Levee Breaks

There is something to be said about the wisdom of challenging nature.

But part of me thinks it just means we're just not trying hard enough.

We did conquer the Yangtze, right? We did carve a 50-mile channel through Panama, right? If it's not working, it's nothing that we can't fix with more shovels, steel and concrete, right?

If every dollar going to JSFs from the USAF was poured into the USACE, we could build a labyrinth to entrap even the mighty Mississippi. An aegis over New Orleans that'll deflect Category Vs like whippoorwill wing beats.

The Flood Control Act of 2011.

Go.

Go.

Go.

I hear that the DPJ in Japan has cancelled a plan to tsunami-proof its entire coastline. It was projected to take 400 years.

You know what, let's go for it. We have to start somewhere.

So 500 years from now, people can look back.

And think.

Fuck yeah, humans rule.

Applied Math

If I spend $20 a day and get $10 a day and I have a control volume of $100 a day, then that's like I'm losing $10 a day and I'd be out of money in 10 days.

Now lets say I have chocolate coins. If I get twenty coins a day and eat ten, and then I end up with ten coins in my pocket everyday. Except I don't except because some of the coins will melt together, so we add a reaction term.

Now, we can't use it in this form because it's too complex. What we can do is we combine it with what we've empirically determined in Fick's Law. Fick's Law to the rescue!

"Does anyone else get the feeling like they understand everything in this class and at the same time-"

"Absolutely nothing at all? Yes."

Maybe the LPD-17s weren't that poorly designed

Maybe Avondale is just a shitty yard.

I'll go with that.

China

Al Qaeda once sent five terrorists to China: One was sent to blow up a bus, but he wasn’t able to squeeze onto it; one was sent to blow up a supermarket, but the bomb was stolen from his basket; one was sent to blow up a train, but tickets were sold-out; finally, one succeeded in bombing a coal mine, and hundreds of workers died. He returned to Al Qaeda’s headquarters to await the headlines about his success, but it was never reported by the Chinese press. Al Qaeda executed him for lying.

One thousand words

Philip Gourevitch is right.

Right now, the face of the Bin Laden excursion are pictures of jubilant crowds in DC and New York.

If pictures get released, this would be instantly supplanted by the image of a man with a bullet hole in his face.

Lets stay positive here.

Just in case you forgot it was a Bimmer

BMW is infamous for racking up $Texas above a vehicle's base cost through extras.

Using their online configurator, here are the ways of skinning your wallet that I've discovered:

-If you want 19" wheels on your 5-series, you must order the entire Sports package (+$2500 CDN)

-If you want the Sports package on a 535i, you must order the Executive package (+$5400), though the converse is not true. You also do not do this if you buy a 550i.

-Jet Black on your 335i is no charge, but Black Sapphire will cost you (+$800). And Ruby Black Metallic will cost you even more because you have to order the BMW Individual Collection (+$3900).

-On that note, if you want a High Gloss Shadow Line on your 5-Series, you need the Sports Package, or if you have 335i the M-Sports Package (+$3500) and you'd get an M-badge on your boot even though the vehicle is not of the M-series.

I was going to continue but really I can't keep these things straight in my head anymore.

Suffice to say though, the same sort of deal is going to happen if you try to buy a Mini.

Sometimes

Sometimes you find of picture of someone that just nails it.

It's inexplicable; you can't explain it.

But somehow it just catches their essence.

I don't know where I'm going with this.

I'm just Facebook creeping people now.

The space shuttle could use more door guns!

People like to complain about talk about how great the AK-47 is and how much the M16 sucks based on the Vietnam war. Okay guys, in case you haven't noticed, that was 40 years ago and we're on the M16A4 already, it's hardly the same rifle anymore. How about directing the debate towards some real comparisons, like the SCAR or HK416?

A-10s aren't that great. It's not a must-have addition to every air force ever. Remember, they were built as tank hunters, that makes them about as suitable for close-air as an Apache. The fact that Apaches and A-10s are better at the job than F-16s speaks very little to their abilities. What you really want for COIN is an ISR platform with long loiter time and small yield precision strike, oh look, it's called a Predator. And what a coincidence! Turns out that that's the bird everyone's scrambling to buy! Sorry internet generals, I'm sorry it won't come back with bulletholes from 20mm cannon shells, it's only good at doing its job. Alternatively, if you really need a man in your plane, Super Tucanos are what people in the know are actually gushing about, so take your Soviet-era flying battle tanks and shove it.

Battleships are done with. It's over. You know how often they've been called on for fire support with their 5" guns vs 16" guns? Spoilers: it's heavily weighted towards the former. And since their deactivation, the world has only grown more wary of collateral damage so the chances of us actually needing their large rifles again are slim. Besides that, they're unaffordable to operate.

So what were we going to do after attracting sentient life?

Lets say they'll try to aim for the area of greatest interest.

Perhaps an area with lots of radio waves. Like maybe downtown Los Angeles.

What happens if the United States shoots down the spacecraft with an SM-3 because it was re-entering at high speed towards LA?

I am finding isolationism more and more appealing as I think about it...

So what were we going to do if SETI found life?

It'd be like SMS, but slower.

@T = 0 (outgoing): "hey did u ever figure out [x]? we're having trouble and the future of humanity kind of depends on it lol"

@T + 150 years (outgoing): "actually nvm, we figured it out"

@T + 600 years (incoming): "no, but msg if you get it working we'd like to know"

@T + 750 years (incoming): "yeah we got it too"

@T + 750 years + 1 month (incoming): "lol"

@T + 750 years + 2 months (incoming): "good talk"

On the economics of gambling

There's a saying, the lottery is a tax on the stupid.

I have thought about this and come to a conclusion.

No, no it's not.

The underlying assumption is that you have a reasonable habit, say once a week.

The marginal happiness of having the extra $10 in your bank account is negligible, even non-existent.

But on the off shot that you win a big pay-off, that will significantly impact your happiness.

When office pools come into play, there is an even bigger psychological motivation.

Let's look at insurance, clearly E[X] is less than 100%, otherwise State Farm wouldn't be in business. But no one would tell you that insurance is a stupid tax.

That $10 is psychological insurance. That all your coworkers won't hit the $21 million and leave you all alone. Because that'd suck.

Do as I say, not as I do

Here are the first 5 random art tips off the top of my head that won't really help you draw, but may help you draw better (YMMV):

1) Don't pet your lines, lay them down with confidence and if you get it wrong, erase with confidence. Unless you're using ink; then you're fucked. In that case, I like to deal with it by changing the lighting scheme and hiding my mistakes in dark, dark shadow.

2) Static poses aren't interesting, make the pose more interesting or change up the camera angle.

3) If you copy straight off a photograph, people will know. Camera lenses foreshadow more dramatically than human eyes; know to correct for it.

4) When using paints, mixing transparent pigments will give vibrant colours and mixing opaque pigments will give you mud. This is true irrespective of the medium (e.g. cadmium yellow is opaque whether it's watercolour or oil).

5) Don't waste your time drawing anime lolis, you'll never get anywhere doing that. <_<

Is Britain retarded?

They are building 2 new Queen Elizabeth class carriers costing close to $5b, of which one will be immediately mothballed upon completion and possibly sold without ever being afforded an air wing. Because they're too expensive to operate and it's cheaper to build them than to cancel construction.

I'm so glad we don't have to deal with this kind of crap (hopefully).

Placing the HMS Prince of Wales indefinitely into "extended readiness" reserve though? How strangely appropriate.

Everyone loves the new Malibu

I think everyone is retarded.

The alpha and the beta

Stats 101, just so everyone's on the same page: there are 2 types of errors.

Type-1 (alpha) error is a detection (false-rejection) error.

Type-2 (beta) error is a rejection (false-detection) error.

What does this mean for our lives?

Let's pretend there exists a social welfare program for people whose houses spontaneously combusted. In order to determine if they should be granted restitution, their situation is quantified on a scale by some means. Of course there will be people who burn their houses down to scam money and we would seek to exclude them from this system. In an ideal world, we would imagine a distribution of scammers and non-scammers on the scale as such:


Yes, prepare for a lot of bad MSPaint diagrams because I can't be assed to work with Illustrator.

So in this ideal world, it's simple. We set P as the cut-off point and exclude everyone who scores higher than P on the scale and accept everyone who scores less than P. Done!

Except no.

By central limit theorem, we would expect normal distributions of both populations centered around separate means (if this test has any amount of effectiveness):


At point Q is how the average Spontaneous Combustor shows up and point R is the average Scammer. Under the two bells are how the populations of both categories are expected to be distributed. Notice though, how they overlap! I guess you can argue that a better test would space the curves further apart, but realistically you rarely see that kind of thing in real life in any meaningful way even in stochastic processes that don't involve one set of sentient beings trying to appear like the other. What you can do, is tighten the acceptance criteria and shift P left, or relax it and shift P right.

Okay, here's where the math gets a bit sketchy with assumptions, but bear with me. You can decide if it makes sense or not (it does to me), but doesn't affect my core premises either way.

The population of Scammers is much less than the population of Spontaneous Combustors so our distributions actually look like this:


Now if P is where % alpha is equal for both hypotheses, the absolute alpha and beta for our leftmost graph is:


I might've eyeballed P too far right actually, but no matter. As you can see, because one group is larger than the other, even if we accidentally accept the same percentage of blue as we reject red, the absolute alpha is much bigger than beta.

So a huge part of social policy is really all about where we want to move P. We will never know absolutely how big each slice is because obviously if we had a foolproof way to detect it, we wouldn't be committing these errors in the first place! The question is in which direction do we want to err?

In every aspect of our social systems, Conservatives are so frightened of Type-2 errors that they cripple them to beyond usability for many people with legitimate needs for them. Whether this be something like unemployment insurance, disability insurance, or even something as fundamental to democracy as voting.

Realistically some number people in real need is going to look exactly like some number of people that aren't in whatever system you're using the quantify "need". I would argue the number of the former is much greater than the number of the latter in whatever confidence interval we're using, but for the sake of argument let's say it's 1:1.

You have 2 applicants to social welfare program x. One who is in dire need through no fault of his own and another one who is scamming for money.

You can choose to shut neither or both out. Which do you choose? Which do you think is the appropriate choice for a developed democratic society?

Either the CPC thinks that a token amount of infringement is unbearably galling that they would rather shut the door on someone who has paid into the social system in the expectation of being protected when luck turns sour or they are just looking for an excuse to Not Give a Damn.

Pathetic. Or evil. You decide.

Additional food for thought: Engineering stats begins at the CLT whereas that's about the point after the stats most math students take ends. It's almost as though they said to themselves, "whoa, we better stop now or else they might learn something useful!".

Answer me this, economists

Overmeyer got me started on this rant and now I can't stop.

These are the accepted facts:

1) The only way Western nations sustain GDP growth is through a larger workforce, this can come from children or from immigrants.

2) The most effective manner for governments to increase revenues is to grow the economy. Mind you, this doesn't necessary mean that tax cuts are always a good idea, but that is an optimization discussion to be had elsewhere.

Just one problem with this model...

It's a ponzi scheme! A literal ponzi scheme!

That's bad enough as it is, but it gets worse.

As you know, the Americans are facing a trifecta of spending problems in healthcare, defense and social security that will reach crisis levels by 2050 at this rate. These are systematic problems that all developed countries will face sooner or later.

Healthcare spending goes up because we know about more problems today, we have more complicated treatments today and we are better at keeping old people alive today. We have better quality services today than 50 years ago, but these services cost money and in combination with the other factors, we have more people using more expensive services more often.

Defense spending goes up because defense platforms get more complicated every generation, R&D costs goes up, maintenance costs go up, operating costs go up and then you don't even have a huge consumer base to spread capital costs. The opposite even, because you have the inherent inefficiencies with every country trying to maintain domestic defense production capabilities.

Social security is easy to explain, more old people living longer equals more money. This problem is most immediate in Japan because their low birthrate (even by developed standards) in conjunction with xenophobic immigration policies means they'll soon have gone from four workers sustaining every non-worker to half that. In this respect, we should be keeping an eye on how they deal with this as a lesson to the rest of us.

These are all structural problems! It's like building a skyscraper on a foundation of mud. You can try and keep building higher and propping it up with supports but eventually the entire thing is going to collapse. Euro nations have been keeping their defense budgets under control simply by buying less and less things (at this point the UK and Dutch armed forces have buckled), which is fine, but the other two things are things that constituents will absolutely not stand to cut and this puts politicians in a position where they are reluctant to make any big changes until shit actually hits fan.

And it puzzles me why people haven't been sounding the alarms decades ago. This is clearly unsustainable and, like it or not, we will see some hard choices being made in the upcoming decades.

Escalation, gentlemen?

So the 26th MEU had operating off the Kearsage in the Med for a while now.

What's interesting is that the USS Bataan (LHD-5) and HMS Albion (L14) will be heading into the region very soon carrying the 22nd MEU, troops of the Korps Mariniers and the 539 Assault Squadron of the Royal Marines.

Officially, the Bataan ARG is to relieve the Kearsage ARG and the Albion is participating in Exercise Green Alligator.

But unofficially it looks like a surge of 3 marine battalions' strength + support off the coast of Libya.

Hmm...

Redundancy

Why isn't this text displaying properly?

Control panel says I got "Gill Sans" and "Gill Sans MT" installed already.

Oh!

"Gill Sans MT Pro".

Fire sale!

Rumours are that the Dutch plan to liquidate their entire Leopard 2A6 inventory.

LET'S BUY THEM ALL!

Spoilers

In season three Liz briefly dated her neighbor Dr. Drew Baird (played by Jon Hamm)

Pffffft-

Soda -> Monitor

That's it, I have to make it to S3.

This show is the best

"This is the worst!"
"Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were 5th cousins"
"Okay, on a count of three, say what level of cousins we'd have to be for this to be okay...1...2...3"
"5th!"/"Unacceptable no matter what!"
"This is never going to work"
...
"I think we're 3rd cousins"
"Yeah...I'll see you at the reunion"

Annex:
"Yo, remember when we got that email from those Nigerians that needed our help getting all that money out of Africa? We did it! Got the cheque today!"
"Word"
"I would've been happy if it were just for helping the dethroned prince of Nigeria; this is great, we should treat ourselves"
"You want to go to Vegas and buy a bunch of sarcophagi?"
"Nah, I don't even use the ones I have"
"We could add someone to the entourage"
"Yo that's a good idea, what's Young Larry doing these days?"
"He's in Jay-Z's entourage"
"What about Cheese?"
"He's rolling with Ghostface Killah now"
"Fatboss?"
"Studying Hotel Administration at Cornell"

So you want to be a rapper

But can't find a good rhyme? Well you could always rhyme with the same word, or even the same sentence, but I'm going to show you some other options you may not have considered.

A) Drag out the words so long and hope people forget about the rhyme:

"Cause you'll never get on top off this, so mommy's best advice is to get on top of this
Have you ever had sex with a pharoooOOOoooah?"

B) Make up your own language:

"Waiting on the Pizzle, the Dizzle and the Shizzle
G's to the bizzack, now ladies here we gizzo"

C) Brute force:

"So no matter what been through, no matter what you into
No matter what you see when you look outside your windu"

D) You are just not trying hard enough:

"Opened up your heart 'cause you said I made you feel so comfortable
Used to play back then, now you all grown-up like Rudy Huxtable"

Finally, I would like to remind everyone why Lil Jon is amazing:

Libya air gambit failed

The best possible outcome was that Gaddafi's forces would recoil immediately in the face of Western air supremacy and force a turnover of government.

Unfortunately that's not what happened. So short of miracles, we have two options now: further escalation (we go land) or defeat (of course when we lose, it won't be spun that way).

The general public still has hope that the rebels can go it all the way with Western air support. Can we trust the rebels to win a war? Quite bluntly, no. They have no C2 and they have lawyers and accountants for soldiers. We've spent a decade training the ANA and they still have essentially no capability for directing NATO air on their own, so there is zero chance of that with the Libyans. They'd need SpecOp support at minimum and realistically more like a couple of battalions of marines.

Who would've saw this coming? Quite possibly every milblog network ever. Anyone who actually knew anything about military operations had this kind of mess predicted well before the campaign even began. By all sensible calculations, this war should not have happened.

The public is fickle though. And so is France.

Update 03/29/11: Stavridis testifies that NATO has not ruled out the possibility of ground peacekeeping forces in the future; US Congress is outraged. Shit, since it's a NATO commitment now, is our [Canada's] 3 month withdrawal timeline scrubbed? The US doesn't plan to withdraw any assets from theatre except a 688. Actually, Warthogs and Spookys are giving CAS now, it's like they're not even trying to pretend anymore. An A-10 and P-3 took out 3 Libyan patrol boats. Peculiar. Either we're seeing AirSea Battle concepts permeate in operations or the enemy is just such a piece of 3rd world rubbish that the powers that be decided anything that flies and would lob a 125lb warhead is good enough.

Update 04/02/11: WTF B1-Bs in Libya are they carpet bombing the whole damn place

Crying for you, Canada, I'm crying for you

Why is my best case scenario a government that runs itself in circles just so another worse government doesn't go around punching holes in the ship's hull?

x_x

Food for thought

Why haven't governments around the world been contributing money to Japan (like after Haiti)?

We are, we're backing up their currency behind the scenes.

What does that mean?

It means Japan can print its own damn money.

Two thoughts

America has launched 160 cruise missiles into Libya thus far. Every Tomahawk costs a million and a bit dollars, so when you think about it, it'd actually be cheaper for them to be dropping Ferraris on their enemies. But here's the really nuts part: the US Navy can shoot up to 255 of these every year without affecting their budget because they buy about that much every year anyways just to keep their stocks current. They had just used ~180 million dollars worth of ordinance, triple Great Britain's entire inventory, and it literally has no effect on their budget. Needless to say, I think their defense spending could stand to be cut a bit.

Theoretically NATO allows alliance members to have a very robust C2 capability in coordinating their efforts. Yes, NATO's C2 structure is indeed very good. The problem is that it seems most of the time when they get involved, its member nations have their own ideas about mission scope and are all off doing their own thing simultaneously. And of course America is always doing its own thing. It's like adding another head to the same mess of limbs. Time to reconsider the concept I think.

Fun fact: "Norway grounded its F-16s in Crete simply because it had no idea who was who and why."

Election Blues

As far as I'm concerned, one party is the avatar of evil and the other one is so inept as to lose a popularity contest against an avatar of evil.

There are also some regional flavors too, I guess.

I wonder if Japan is the final evolution of democratic societies: bankrupt, ineffective, childrenless.

What are they supposed to be rescuing people from again?

As you may have heard, Tokyo's elite Hyper Rescue Force has been dispatched for operations.

These are the possibilities that come to mind:
This.
Or this.
Maybe even this.

I sincerely hope this is what Japan has been up to.

Cacti are pretty easy to take care of

"Hey, I just bought a cactus, how often do you water yours?"
"Never! I thought you watered them!"

They look like they're doing well to me... <_<

Update: "Overwatering of cacti is the single biggest cause of plant loss." Well, glad I got that covered.

Let's see

Not a fan of intervention in Libya, because I think it's a campaign the Arab-NATO alliance can't afford to lose once we get involved and then it will inevitably escalate into a clusterfuck. It will be interesting though because the UK and France are going to take the lead on this one. And we all know the UK forces are on collapse, so I guess France. Whoo!

France spends a lot on its military and will almost certainly send in the FS Charles de Gaulle (R91). Italy has dispatched the Giuseppe Garibaldi (551). [1] Gosh, France and Italy! Okay, let's see what they got. There's a lot of honour to be reclaimed here. [2]

Canada is sending over 6 Hornets. Those are CF-18s, totally different, they got a "C" in front. And cockpits on their bellies. This is good, if all the other NATO countries pitch in a few fighters like this, there will be a good number available for constant CAPs.

USS Enterprise (CVN-65) is still chillin' in the Red Sea. I think America will have to move it; they are taking their sweet time though. USS Florida (SSGN-728) did just sail into Naples though.

Hmm...

The thing you got to know about these guided missile subs is that they can carry about an entire surface group's worth of Tomahawks with them. [3]

Someone is thinking ahead...

Update: Obama has told Congress that US fighters will not be involved. Looks like Enterprise will not be recalled. Administration sucks at communicating. W/e, we don't need any more fighters, tankers will definitely be in demand though.

Update 2: American (mostly American) and British subs and destroyers have lobbed 110+ cruise missiles into Libya. Charles de Gaulle should be sailing from Toulon right about now. Our planes have landed in Sicily with the Danes. The operation is finally rolling now.

Update 3: Harriers from Kearsage have done...stuff. Enterprise might be going to relieve USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70); Carl Vinson is with the 5th fleet right now, not even close.

1. I know these French and Italian ship identifiers are useless for identifying what kind of ships they are, but I feel I have to add it for consistency; they are catapult and ski-jump carriers respectively. Ski-jumps only have a small complement of fixed-wing aircraft though (10ish), so the reliance is going to be mostly on Italian airfields and the nukes. Plural assuming Enterprise ever gets there.

2. Obvious joke is obvious. It had to be made.

3. On destroyers and cruisers alike, obviously only a small number of cells are made available for TLAMs; a majority are probably filled with anti-air.

Japan: Tsundere for America

A picture is a worth a thousand words. I guess what I have is an encyclopaedia on the tsunami right here.

The Big Picture is one of the best photoblogs on the internet. They always have high quality shots of current events. I never noticed how depressing all their titles were before though:
Massive Earthquake Hits
Aftermath
Vast Devestation
Tragedy Deepens
Continuing Crisis
Hopes Fade (Seriously guys??)

Oh no! Not Mio!
The Struggle to Recover (More optimism! Oh boy...)
R3
Aftermath

This is probably the most uplifting one. You know how Okinawa has been trying to kick the Americans out for years? Guess how much goodwill a fleet of circling Seahawks carrying relief brings? Answer: A lot.
Operation Tomodachi


Heartwarming.

Nukes again

Of course the situation in Japan is still developing, maybe for the worst, but I am going to stand by my man:

Whether my unwavering trust in my fellow engineers of 50 years ago who designed and build [sic] the plant, or my complete trust and admiration of my fellow engineers who are currently operating the reactors makes me a level-headed guy or right-out stupid is also hotly debated. Most people hope for the former, but some opt for the latter.

I have faith in all of you, engineers. Don't let us down.

Acronyms

I like it when acronyms stay as just acronyms; no need to get clever with them.

AEUG - The prettiest acronym I know, I wonder if someone's taken it on their license plate already.

BASF - Also very pretty; got to support the industry. Elle oh elle.

I think at one point they tried having AEGIS as a backronym. Guess it was stupid, now it's just Aegis.

Throwing numbers in is interesting too. Maybe not aesthetically, it's fun to say though.

Going nukes

Here's the thing, Fukushima I-1 is one of the oldest reactors in service with TEPCO, built to withstand 8.2 earthquakes. It survived an earthquake 5 times the intensity, followed by a tsunami and ultimately failed because the backup backup generators shipped in by the military had the wrong power sockets.

And nobody died.

Nobody will die.

By all means this should be indicative of how safe nuclear power is. But that's not what the public is going to take away from this. For instance, Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) wants to impose a moratorium on further building any plants in the United States. I wasn't aware that the midland United States was tsunami central; just, keep these things away from Cali.

I guess expecting the media, as stupid as they are, to get nuclear reactors right was a doomed prospect from the beginning. Not that TEPCO did much to help, I heard the press conferences on the NHK being described as, "shit from the source".

Okay.

Hey, Mr. Lieberman! Mr. Lieberman! You live in Connecticut right? That's where Electric Boat is; how do you feel about the nukes getting built in your backyard right now? 774s don't sail on lollipops and sunshine, you know.

Playing it straight

Canada's administrative divisions are pretty straightforward: 10 provinces, 3 territories, all with a capital and one more for the country.

And that is a bit unusual.

America has got Washington DC as a separate entity from the other states. Then they got little oddities like Puerto Rico.

The United Kingdom is made of four countries, which is peculiar enough.

Germany has their city-states like Berlin and Hamburg.

China has certain cities (like Shenzhen and Shanghai) designated as "special economic zones", Hong Kong and hot potatoes like Tibet. I'm not even going to touch Taiwan.

Japan has designated cities (like Sendai and Osaka[1]), and Tokyo itself is a prefecture. Former Tokyo city is subdivided into wards that would all be considered cities unto themselves anywhere else.

I don't know much about France, I expected to turn up something funny about their arrondissements but got nothing. You can amuse yourself by repeating the name though. Arrondissements. Arrondissements. Arrondissements.

1. Lol, Osaka.

Your parents must be soo hood, Oleksi

The hottest fires don't actually make the hardest steel; the trick is fast quenching of γ-iron to under the martensitic transition temperature. Admittedly, the truth is quite poor as a tagline.

Thanks, internet

Someone has kindly provided ASCII art illustrating the difference with a tsunami:

●[４m Wave]
　　　　　　　　　　　　

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　波
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　波
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　波波 　　　　　　　　●
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　波波波　　　　　　　　　人
波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波－－－－－－－－－－－－－－

●[４m Tsunami]
　　←[Extending offshore for miles]

　　　　　　　　　　ゴゴゴゴゴゴゴ‥　　　　　　　　　

波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波
波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波　　
波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波 　　　　　　　　 Σ　●
波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波　　　　　　　　　　　人
波波波波波波波波波波波波波波波－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－

Peter Wu says
gogogogo
wait are the waves made of waves?
lol, yeah I think they are

crobert says
no it's made of mud and cars and buildings and other shit it swallows

Peter Wu says
no I meant in the ascii

crobert says
lol yes
there's a version where it's made with
waves and mud and cars and buildings and fire

Hey America!

The 2nd Amendment was never intended as a provision for self-defense.

Can you be less retarded about gun control?

Ampharos to be done in approximately never

Who the hell teaches Rollout to Shuckle anyways?

Koreans have invented the worst chopsticks in the world

1) They are flat. In a bad way. They're just annoying to hold and manipulate.

2) They are metal. I.e. they conduct heat. That would be bad if there were a culture out there that likes to serve food in scaldingly hot stone bowls. Good thing this culture doesn't exist and is certainly not the same culture that invented those ridiculous chopsticks.

Data Synchronization

I've long given up on it: too many platforms, too many operating systems. What I've ended up doing is designating devices for particular functions and never using anything else for that.

Blackberry: Contacts -> Backed up on desktop
Macbook: Music -> Backed up on desktop
Desktop: -> Everything else, backed up on external

I also assume everything on the cloud is backed up on the cloud. Photobucket, my magical girl image collection rests in your hands.

There might be an easier way, I don't know. I haven't seen anyone with multiple computers do better.

Different Strokes

12:50
Peter ] ] ] ] ]
get a ps3
and play
catherine

12:50
crobert
i stopped becoming interested
after i realized there's no demon summoning
and it's just a half naked dude climing up blocks

12:50
Peter ] ] ] ] ]
yo
that's when I became interested

Clarification

That is not a dig at our maritime forces. The Single Halifax Class Vessel has done excellent work in Somalia and Haiti.

More that as dictated by logistics our response to anything is largely uniform.

Sure gives our generals less to think about.

On Libya and airplanes

Enforcing a no-fly zone in Libya is a bit like moving all the furniture from your living room into your basement. Nobody doubts that it can be done, but it'll take strenuous effort. Especially that 50 inch internal projection TV from 2002.

There's a good rundown of all the problems here so I won't bother listing them.

I don't know where the 5th Fleet order of battle can be sourced but based on all the talk about USS Enterprise (CVN-65), I assume that there are no other carriers that are surge available for the region on short notice.

And Enterprise had just sailed through to the wrong side of the Suez just a couple of weeks ago, where plans are for it to hold station.

Two amphibs (LPD-15 and LHD-3, Ponce and Kearsage respectively) are being surged but that's just sensible in case there's need for a forcible NEO; the area is going to be swimming with these things from all nations.

Other than that, Spain could possibly divert Príncipe de Asturias (R-11), a ski-jump carrier.

So it looks like the chances of NATO/American intervention are slim.

In other news HMCS Charlottetown is going to be deploying in that region. Typical. I predict that, for now and the next 10 years, Canadian naval response to the greatest crisis in the world at any given time will be the deployment of a single Halifax class vessel!

Trials and tribulations of used car shopping

After getting reared by an SUV and scrapping the Accord, I found a newer Maxima with lower mileage for $1800 more than the insurance reimbursement.

Turns out what I thought was a great deal has a couple of flaws.

Passenger window is gimped.

Okay, whatever. Easy fix, the internet tells me.

Rear ABS sensor has salt corrosion.

Ooops! Goodbye VDC, traction, ABS!

Well that has to be fixed, no question. On the brighter side, the car drives well; the shifts are virtually unnoticeable, which is a step up from the Honda.

Still, Great-Deal had just turned into Okay-Deal post-purchase.

And what the hell was the previous owner doing, ricing the vehicle instead of fixing a bad ABS sensor?

"It's okay, I know how to pump the brakes"

Because that is totally the same, right?

My mother had comforting words.

"Look at this stack of papers you removed from the old glove compartment, it's every time your father took it to service without telling me; they're all like $400 and $500 each!"

Damn! No wonder that Accord worked flawlessly.

Damn enivros... [Part II]

"What time did you get in today?"
"Hey! I got in early today! 7:50!"
"I'm surprised, why?"
"I slept in and couldn't bus it in time so I drove"
*facepalm*

Damn enviros...

{I told myself that I would enjoy my break to the fullest on my last day here}
{Did you enjoy it the fullest?}
{It took and hour and a half, it's the fullest break I've had yet}
{That's not what I meant, but yeah an hour and a half is pretty long}
{Not as long as Margaret}
{Margaret is unbeatable}

...

"Hey, did you guys have to go to that meeting?"
"No, why?"
"I fell asleep"

{Margaret just slept through her meeting}
{She's unbeatable}

...

*20 minutes to quitting time*

"Have a good weekend!"

{I think Margaret just left}
{Damn}
{Unbeatable}

When did Watson become so tank?

Last I heard of him months ago, IBM had him in the 70th percentile and was desperately trying to squeeze a few more points of performance out of him.

Anyways, job well done.

I understand now

I think a while I posted my surprise at the DDG-1000s being unable to support Standard Missiles.

Why not? They got the radar, they got the launch tubes.

Except I managed to overlook that the AN/SPY-3 is a Raytheon system and AN/SPY-1 Lockheed Martin. Oops.

It has been commentated that Raytheon has been re-inventing every wheel to avoid using Aegis.

Relatedly, the LCS platforms had (still have?) this problem of integrated weapons systems where the arguably inferior Lockheed platform couldn't possibly lose the downselect while the General Dynamics/Austal platform's got nuthin'.

Well played, defense industry, just as planned.

One shot, one kill?

Preposterous! The winning move is clearly to launch all of your missiles at once at the first sign of provocation!



You can see where Eureka 7's choreography was inspired from at 2:22.

Incidentally the VF-1 design was based off of the F-14s, which, being designed as a fleet interceptor, was intended to dash out at high speeds, let loose its payload of Phoenix missiles and then dash back.

The great Twitter experiment

Let's call it a private beta.

I decided that I like the Steelers

I am still not going to watch the Superbowl.

Hold on a minute!

I know the Egyptian military is being criticized for standing by while protesters clash in the streets.

Well, what the hell do you want them to do?

I can see the appeal behind having some heavy armour backup when you're a rebellious teenager hurling rocks, and I would be slinging stones with the best of them if all my friends called me up and told me they were going downtown, but getting the military involved in civil matters is a bad idea because you are escalating the force. By a lot. You don't give riot police guns, you don't deploy the National Guard for security and you don't bring a grenade to a boxing match. I would hope that the people in charge are more responsible than that and I'm convinced the US administration is principal in urging restraint with their secretive backroom deals (as is their way).

So shooting is out, what's the next best thing? Well, I guess it'd be trying to segregate the violence with their armoured columns. Which is what the army is at least attempting to do through the melee in the streets, so credit to that.

7 dead? That's a papercut compared to what'll happen if some yahoo hijacks the .50 cal off an M1's turret. And when you have people outnumbering tanks a thousand to one, something is bound to happen if you give it reason.

Made in the USA, baby. Made in the USA.

Hōkago no Pleiades

Looks like Gainax is jumping on the moeblob bandwagon now:


Good thing too.

Because Fuji Heavy Industries didn't have enough magical-girl mascots before.

In a nutshell

CivFanatics has a pretty well written guide for beginners. But that's long.

So here's my condensed new player guide for Civ4:

Tile Improvements:
1) Never work an unimproved tile
2) Food is the most important resource
3) Never work an unimproved tile
4) About 1.5 workers per city early game
5) Overlap is fine; every city only needs a few good tiles, when are you going to get to Pop 20 anyways?
6) No seriously, go Slavery and just whip the guy working that bare grass.

War:
1) Your army should be 50% siege units
2) If you settle a hill city near an AI that might war, it'll be pretty unassailable with archers then longbows.
3) It could happen at anytime

Economy:
1) Cottages on all the grass you can support, Emancipation + Free Speech + Emancipation + Free Market
2) Alt: Farms + Workshops + Windmills + Watermills + Specialists, Representation + Caste + State Property; try to build Pyramids
3) Alt 2: Espionage

City Improvements:
1) Granaries, Forges, Aqueducts mandatory
2) If you don't have anything useful to build, switch the city to Wealth or Research
3) That Bank you're building in that hill city with 5 gold per turn? That falls under Not Useful.
4) If you don't know whether you need that Wonder, you don't

They say humans aren't built for multi-processing

But I can certainly hyperthread.

And you thought the Hodge Conjecture was impenetrable...

I started listening to Kotoko from clicking through moon links on Youtube.

Anyways, it piqued my curiousity with Baldr Sky, so I go to Wikipedia and the article pretty much made no sense.

Well okay...then I thought maybe the article would be more comprehensible if I had a character list.

Instead I found this:

Okay, maybe that's not entirely indeciphera-whaat??

What the fuck?

Screw this, imma listen to Calamity Trigger.

In hindsight, impenetrable is probably the wrong choice of word.

Can you imagine the engineering discussions that preceeded this?

Management: So you say this is the best solution your team has come up with?

Lead Engineer: Yes

M: This is the most practical and economic solution to our problem?

E: Yes

M: Well, this seems like a really complicated system...

E: Having a distributed platform is great, because it gives our system robustness, of course ideally we'd want to have all the parts working but we can still go on if some parts fail.

M: ...and there are some unorthodox components...

E: It's true that there are some parts we are going to have to build ourselves, but you'll see that a lot of these are also modifications of proven technology that we can license from third party vendors.

M: ...and this user interface...

E: We've come a long way with our voice activated technologies, you'll find it to have excellent reliability in part because the keywords we chose are very unambiguous.

M: Okay I'll trust your judgment on the hardware side, but are you certain we need to have one person directing and another person performing the authorizations?

E: You'll find that separating tasks so that there's always an independent reviewer is quite common in safety critical industries. Besides, for all the money that is involved in the project, the cost of hiring another body is hardly significant.

M: Fair enough then, for now you have my probationary approval if you can implement the proposal within the specified budget.

Thus.

You know, I've never been to Trinidad before...

I'll have to assume Nicki Minaj is representative.

SIGH

So remember there was a guy a while ago who got Fate tattooed on his back.

This guy.

Anyways, at the time he was saying he wanted to get Nana Mizuki (alternatively know as Fate-chan's voice actress) tattooed on him next. Of course people called him an idiot.

But that was then and now is now:

What gets me though is that as far as ink goes, that is a damn fine tattoo. He found an excellent tattoo artist-to do this?? ARGGHHH!

edit: Incidentally, he hopes Nana Mizuki would get married soon because that's how he rolls. Wut.

DFC

Nice

Teslas haven't really been captivating to me, but their new S model is very compelling:

Blah

Maybe I'll do more with it. Maybe not.



Looking back (Feb '10, Jul '08), I think even though I've improved, my satisfaction hasn't. Blah.

Five stars

The OST for Panty & Stocking is out.

The cover and tracklist is noteworthy:


1. Theme for Panty & Stocking
2. Immoral Church
3. Fly Away
4. Daten City
5. Beverly Hills Cock
6. Pantscada
7. Dancefloor Orgy
8. D City Rock
9. Juice
10. EPTM feat. Kodai of KinKieS (Booty Bronx Remix)
11. Cherryboy Riot
12. Technodildo
13. CHOCOLAT
14. Theme for Scanty & Knee Socks
15. Schranz Chase
16. Tenga Step
17. See-Through
18. Corset Theme
19. Champion
20. Fallen Angel

I have to say my favourite title is Technodildo.

Come to think of it...

Exposé is pretty much Strategic Zoom for my operating system.

We all know how much I love Exposé.

Strategic Zoom

After playing Supreme Commander, it's evident that Strategic Zoom is pretty much the best function in gaming ever. Now I can't live without it.

Civilization: Strategic Zoom
Homeworld: Strategic Zoom
Starcraft: No Strategic Zoom

I'll never be able to play it again. Like what the fuck, I can only see like 8 units on my screen at a time? I'll send my wraith to scout and it'll get lost and I'll never be able to find it again.

I bet after Advanced Warfighter, I won't be able to play even first-person shooters without Strategic Zoom.

D-NY, represent

First Responders bill:

Bill delayed, for the record.

Pretensions

Check out this concept:



It's fresh, friendly, good looking and absolutely useless.

I can only imagine trying to find my 2% in an aisle stocked with nearly identical yellow boxes typefaced with difficult to distinguish text. You know, of all the things she decided to emphasize on the box, it's the words "Drink ME I AM MILK". Thanks. This is not helpful from a consumer's perspective. Someone will be sorely disappointed when they walk home with a box of cheese instead of a stick of butter.

These things can be fixed; there are simple fixes. That's not the point.

These issues are things that should've been at the forefront of consideration but wholly overlooked. So many designers are preoccupied with making something distinct and beautiful that they forget about the importance of function of form.

It's worthwhile to make something aesthetically pleasing, but products are made to be used, not to be displayed in a museum.

I had foie gras once

It was underwhelming.

Somehow it looks a lot more appealing in pictures.

Anyways, here's an interesting article.

Windows 7 First Impressions

I'm finally running a modern Windows system on one of my own boxes now.

Hey, I am a Mac user after all.

First off, it looks very nice. Straight up one of the best looking operating systems around, though I do believe KDE has had that style for a long time now.

The problem with 7 is that there is never a new feature there that makes me think, "I wish I had that before" or "that's a really great idea". I got that feeling all the time with OS X. Or even with major revisions of Firefox.

I don't care about how much they've changed under the hood; I don't have lasting virus issues (which can be about 80% attributed to "not being a retard") and it just doesn't affect me as an end user.

What does affect me is their silly pop-ups that come up anytime I want to do anything. I understand the reasoning behind it, but (a) once some average user sees it come up a million times a minute, they'll just ignore it and click affirm to everything and (b) doesn't ask for your admin password to make modifications so while it might protect you from random internet programs, it doesn't prevent some guy from just screwing around with your computer. The Windows convention of always running as admin is dangerous, SUDO is a very good idea.

The new taskbar looks nice, but the latency from me hovering over an icon to it showing me what windows are open is aggravating. The worst part is, this is actually a good idea; just let me change the timings.

The new Start menu is stupid. I can't rely on the Search function to find what I need since it selectively indexes and I have no clue how it chooses to either. Then when it inevitably fails, I am forced to dig through all my folders to find what I need because it apparently never occurred to Microsoft that there are files I use often enough to want to keep in a location that is easily accessible while not often enough to be on the Desktop or Taskbar. Argue about indexing optimization all you want, all I know is that Spotlight never fails to turn up what I want (even if it's some text file in an obscure directory) while Search comes up empty quite often.

I could talk more, but my feeling has been conveyed. I think what Microsoft did was hire a lot of graphical designers in recent years, but neglected interface designers. Because Windows Phone 7 looks quite good. Bing looks quite good. Windows 7 looks quite good. But they all have tons of shortcomings in their functionality. This is why Google and Apple are running circles around, because at the end of the day Google's page-rankings give me what I want and Bing's doesn't.

Bonus story: This morning I wanted to check something in another browser so I literally opened IE 8, typed something into Bing search and pressed enter. This naturally caused Windows to come collapsing down around me as IE failed, and Explorer, and Task Manager, and every other possible program except (ironically) Firefox. Fresh install, brand new computer; should not be happening, Microsoft. No excuse.

I dimension the die!

What's the functional difference between rolling a 12 sided die and two 6 sided die? Well, for one you can't roll a 1 with two dice. More importantly though, you'll see a stronger regression to the mean with more dice.

Let's say theoretically we have a 10-sided die numbered [0,9]. Your probability of rolling a 5 is 10%.

If you have three 4-sided dice numbered [0,3], the probability of rolling a 5 suddenly becomes 19%.

If you flip 9 coins, the probability of landing 5 heads is now 25%. Moreover, the probability of rolling either 5 or 6 (the expected value is 5.5) is 49%. Of the 10 possible numbers, half the time you'll only get 2 of them!

I assume this is why a lot of boardgames roll two dice, because it normalizes the probabilities; you're 6 times more likely to roll a middle value like 7 over something extraordinary like 2 or 12.

With Betrayal, the rolls consist of up to eight 6-sided dice with two faces each numbered 0, 1 and 2. Basically 3-sided dice. Therefore we should see some strong regressions to the mean; for instance, if we were to roll five such dice the probability of getting at least a 4 is 79%. To roll 3 or lower and be beaten by a roll with 3 dice has a probability of 11%. To do so twice in a roll is literally a 1 in 100 proposition.

So basically Michael really sucks at rolling.

Someone should show this to Keyar

Plausible campaign platform?

No tax raises!

In order to pay for everything...

...we'll hire more auditors!

Irregardless, Penny Arcade is objectively good. Literally.

I was reminded of this comic today. It is one of the most profound series of web comics I've ever seen:



Gabe usually hits homeruns when he's on a fatherhood theme.

Much better than miscarriage comics.

Additionally

I believe that the existence of a systematic problem with "welfare queens" has always been a myth perpetuated by Conservatives to channel money away from programs that don't involve oil or missiles.

...and hell, they're doing a terrible job with the missile things too; what good are they?

Ridiculous

Our disability claims system intentionally rejects the majority of claimants for their first application because they believe this deters fraudsters?

This is stupid!

Absolutely stupid!

Hey, government, guess what group of people have the most dedication and time to jump through your stupid hoops?

Hey, guess what group of people get fucked over the most?

Who was the fucker that came up with this brilliant idea?