Let’s Hang Congress

As Mark Twain once rudely noted:

“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Regardless of your political or sexual orientation it’s hard to disagree.  The current Congress is the largest collection of brain-dead fuckwits since the previous Congress and no doubt the next Congress will be even worse.  What’s a bereaved citizen to do?

How about the simple obvious solution: let’s hang everyone in Congress!  It’s simple, direct and effective.  Left wingers will be delighted because a lot of right wingers will hang.  Right wingers will be delighted because even more left wingers will hang.  Independents will be thrilled because left and right wingers will hang. 

Now I know what you are thinking,  “If we hang Congress won’t it be more difficult to find people to run for office?”  I have to agree; hanging doesn’t seem like much of an incentive.  We have to strike a balance between hanging and the grotesque perks of Congress.

Currently there are 535 members of Congress.  Let’s get a big jar of jelly beans and number the beans from 0 to 534.

0, 1, 2, 3, ..., 534

Then every year, instead of listening to boring State of the Union speeches, we hold a public drawing.  Some lucky blindfolded child,  (because we are doing it for the children),  will reach in the jar and grab a bean.  If the bean is numbered 0 we hang everyone in Congress.  If another number comes up it’s back to the trough for another year. 

The typical member of Congress serves about ten years:  thank you Google.  What are the chances the average member will swing?  This is easy to compute. Generate 10 random integers between 0 and 534 and see if 0 pops up.  In the J programming language:

   ? 10 $ 535

195 467 514 498 79 345 306 344 450 530

This lucky Congress critter survived.  If we run this experiment ten million times we get:

  10000000 %~ +/ 0 e."0 1 ? 10000000 10 $ 535

0.0185448

or a 2% chance of hanging.  Considering the prerogatives, pork,  perks, and pensions of Congress a measly 2% chance of hanging seems about right.  Most of the time it’s business as usual and every now and them the public enjoys the spectacle of terminal term limits.

2012 Business Opportunity

Are you an unscrupulous deranged crank with the track record of a government budget forecaster?  Do you have no shame and assume everyone around you is an inbred moron?  Can you say one thing one day and the opposite the next and see no contradiction?  Do you consider “evidence” to be shit that you make up whenever you feel like separating fools from their money?  If you answered yes to any of these questions then you might have a bright future as a 2012 entrepreneur.

But you have to act fast.  End of the World deals only come around every few years.  Seize the moment or you may have to wait months before the next opportunity to scam credulous dolts.  My advice: strike while the iron is hot. After 2012 the only people making any money on 2012 will be sour skeptics telling us I told you so and we all know how much that pays.

Since we have no qualms our only problem is marketing. We have to find the right 2012 product.  The field is getting crowded and we must exercise caution. 2012 entrepreneurs welcome competition like drugged out bike gangs welcome competition.  With this in mind we have to rule out:

1. Movies:  2012 opens this weekend and if the critics can be believed we now have a viable substitute for water boarding and Itsy, bitsy, teenie, weenie, yellow polka dot bikini looping endlessly.
2. TV specials: The History Channel has locked up this market segment with one mind draining special after another.  If I even see the number 2012 on the History Channel again I will climb up the nearest Mayan pyramid and cut my own heart out! 
3. Survival gear: What’s a girl to wear when the world ends.  Get your end of the world gear now before the panic, or intelligence, sets in.
4. T-Shirts: Every disaster needs one.
5. End of the World Party Catering: Annihilation on an empty stomach is so 2011.
6. Mayan Resort Holidays: This one actually makes some sense. The prospect of heaping scorn on scores of new and old age nitwits on December 22, 2012 would warm my cold skeptical core.

Let’s face it breaking into the 2012 market is hard.  It takes an imaginative opportunistic whore to come up with a market worthy 2012 scam.  I’m out of ideas;  maybe you can do better.

Hard Ass Skeptic Rules

I am a hard ass skeptic.  A hard ass skeptic is somebody that holds:

1. Ghosts do not exist
2. Gods do not exist
3. UFOs are not alien spaceships
4. There are no Yetis
5. There are no psychics
6. 9/11 was not an inside job
7. Life after death is nonsense
8. Reincarnation is more nonsense
9. Somebody called Christ did not rise from the grave
10. Mohammed did not ascend to heaven
11. The world will not end in 2012
12. Heaven and Hell do not exist
13. You cannot build a Good and Evil meter

Hard ass skeptics are often accused of being sour, bitter, judgmental know-it-alls by the usual crew of credulous buffoons.  Cry me a river people!  No matter how many idiotic ghost hunting shows you put on the history channel you are never going to convince a hard ass skeptic that ghosts exist. Just so we can all get along I am going to disclose how you can win an argument with a hard ass skeptic. 

The key to marketing ideas to hard ass skeptics is to understand what hard ass skeptics consider valid arguments.  Hard ass skeptics will consider only two types of arguments:

1. Mathematical proof
2. Hard science

If you cannot couch your argument in these terms just shut the fuck up.  You are wasting your breath and the hard ass skeptic’s time.  

I know this is harsh but it gets worse.  Mathematicians and scientists make mistakes: lots and lots of mistakes.  How does the hard ass skeptic deal with this inconvenient truth? The typical hard ass skeptic simply doesn’t have enough time, skill or expertise to filter out all the rubbish from the rubies.  So the hard ass skeptic assumes it’s all crap until there is verified overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  

Finally, hard ass skeptics put the burden of proof on a supposition’s supporters. It’s not the hard ass skeptic’s job to prove you are wrong.  It’s your job to prove,  beyond any reasonable mathematical or scientific doubt, you are correct.   So please stop whining about how we haven’t proved that  psychics, Yetis or Heaven do not exist.  It’s not our job and it never will be.

Counting Gods

How many fingers do you need to count gods?  If you are like most people you simply assume the set of gods is enumerable and then you start fighting over which value in the set of positive integers   or  is correct.  This process is elegantly explained by this flowchart.

I have a simple question. Is the set of gods enumerable?  For all you innumerates out there a set is enumerable if-and-only-if its members can be counted.   It’s a rather astonishing fact that many humdrum sets cannot be counted.  Do you remember line segments  from school geometry?

The number of points in any nonzero length Euclidean line segment  cannot be counted.  There are more points in than there are counting numbers.  If you don’t believe me  check out Cantor’s diagonal argument and savor a classical mathematical treat.

Once you get your head around the idea that some things cannot be counted the notion of counting gods looks ludicrous.  Why do you expect to tally your supreme beings with ordinary counting numbers when they cannot deal with line segments?  Perhaps god counting requires more than positive integers!

Perhaps the bloody disputes between atheists and deists can be resolved with rational numbers .  How about fractional   gods.  Let’s just split the difference and all get along.  Unfortunately rational numbers will not satisfy ultrapolytheists, believers in more gods than you can count, because you can count rational numbers.  Ultrapolytheists need to get real – the numbers  – anyway.

Counting gods is a complex problem.   Electrical engineers cannot deal with the wiring in your fridge without complex numbers  .  Maybe a god count of is the ticket

If this sounds silly, condescending and sarcastic congratulations your bullshit detector is working.  However,  ridiculous as this little diatribe is,  it is as sound as any mainstream religious doctrine.  So if you find this absurd and, you have a fixed god count in your little head,  who is really being silly?

F# Sirens are Seducing

For the last few days I have been playing around with an early release of F#. F# looks like it might be a .Net language that I can stand!  The alpha-geeks at Microsoft Research have convinced their corporate masters that the world needs a functional programming language that can be compiled and executed as efficiently as traditional imperative and object oriented languages.

As a long time user of interpreted functional programming languages I can only say: it’s about freaking time!

F# appeals to me for a number of reasons:

1. I am familiar with many of the concepts of functional programming.  Coming from the APL world I have been using many of these ideas for decades.
2. F# can  use .Net facilities.  It can call, and be called, by any of the  .Net languages.  Lack of deep supported integration with host facilities has always hurt languages like J.  You pretty much have to roll your own for everything.
3. F# can be compiled to virtual machine code just like C#.  APL,  J,  K and others do not compile well.  Heroic attempts have been made to compile APL and similar languages but sometimes heroes fail.
4. F# supports asynchronous and parallel programming. The typical computer these days has two, four, eight or more processors.  In the very near future your grandmother’s PC will have eight or more 64 bit processors and perhaps hundreds of gigabytes of real, (not virtual), memory.  Programming such machines with conventional languages and tools will be,  as one blogger noted,   insanely complicated.  F# may provide a means to focus the power of such machines without sweating blood.

I have  ordered Programming F# and now I actually have something to look forward to in Visual Studio 2010.

Nobel Peace Prize Idol

My doubts about the Nobel Peace Prize started when Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho won during the Vietnam war.  In my naive youth I thought a peace prize might have something to do with peace!  I was so cute and unsophisticated in those days.  As I aged I developed a robust sense of irony but when Yasser Arafat won the peace prize I was again dumbfounded.  How could an outright unrepentant  murderer qualify for a peace prize?  Clearly my sense of the absurd needed work.  I labored long and hard and when Jimmy Carter won for not being George Bush I took it in stride.   Then Al Gore won for saving the Earth from global warming.  Again my cynical detachment required tuning.  What did global warming have to do with peace?  Did I miss all the brutal carbon dioxide wars?  Finally I understood.  The Nobel Peace Prize has nothing to do with Peace! Of course I still foolishly harbored some illusions that you had to do stuff. This morning, upon learning that Barak Obama had won, I divested my final illusions about the peace prize.   The Nobel Peace Prize is now worth less than a Canadian Idol win.  At least some Canadian Idols can sing and dance.

Google Earth Image Touring

In a scientific poll of one, (I sampled myself),  Google Earth was voted the greatest free program on Earth. The brilliant developers at Google have managed to turn the most unlikely subject, geography,  into a video game.  And what a game it is!  Google Earth doesn’t troll around in an adolescent make believe world.  Google Earth serves up the real thing.   This would be amazing enough but with Google Earth you can explore the Moon, Mars and the night sky as well.  If you have any geographic  or astronomical needs get Google Earth.

I got into Google Earth a few years ago when I started geotagging old pictures.  Locating old, pre-GPS pictures, is one of the better Google Earth games.  My mother snapped this Instamatic picture of me in 1964.  I am standing in front of the Uintah mountains in north eastern Utah.

1964 was long before GPS was even a dream.  To find exactly where I was standing I turned on Google Earth’s terrain feature and slowly followed the adjacent road until all the landscape features matched up.

For famous sites it’s not this hard.  Here I am at Stonehenge.  Stonehenge is a Google Earth nobrainer.

 

Over the last few years I have geotagged hundreds of images.  It’s something I will continue to do until I drop dead. Online picture sites like SmugMug provide automatic mapping of geotagged images but Google Earth does a much better job if you do a little KML programming.  KML is an XML namespace used by Google Earth and Google Maps.  It can be used to tour geotagged images.  When KML files are compressed,  (any ZIP utility will do),  they are given a KMZ file extension.  KMZ files can be loaded by Google Earth.

The attached KMZ file geotagged.kmz was generated by a J script I put together to query my geotagged SmugMug pictures.  When loaded into Google Earth it spins around the world pausing to display all the pictures I have geotagged.  I realize few will be interested in my pictures but it’s not hard to extract the KML embedded in geotagged.kmz and adapt it to your pictures.  Go forth and hack my friends.

My Olympic Spirit

The US tax payer dodged a bullet yesterday (October 2, 2009).  The IOC, that cabal of corrupt whores, awarded the Olympics to Rio instead of Chicago. I’ve seen Rio, it’s a beautiful city, and I pity the poor people there that will soon be paying out the wazoo for the dubious honor of enduring another installment of the world’s largest publicly funded real estate orgy followed by a two week drug enhanced circus of the inane.Read More

Lens Lust

I suffer from a common and debilitating condition commonly referred to as NEM: Not Enough Money!  NEM imposes all sorts of conditions and hardships on its victims.  In my case NEM limits my lens lust. Without NEM I would have warehouses full of the finest cameras and lenses but as a lowly NEMite I am forced to choose wisely.

For months I have had my eye on the Nikon f1.8  35mm AFS DX prime.

My logical reasons for lusting after this lens are:

1. I have a DX format Nikon AFS DSLR.
2. The FOV, (field of view), of standard 50mm lenses mounted on DX cameras is to narrow: 35mm is about right.
3. f3.5,  the standard kits lens aperture,  is simply not fast enough.
4. My NEMly budget is limited.
5. Modestly priced prime lenses often out perform far more expensive zooms.
6. I have had good results from prime lenses in the past.

I knew I wanted a lens like this even before Nikon started offering it.  For the last three years legions of Nikon users have been waiting for modern,  reasonably priced,  AFS primes.  During our long wait it seemed like every Nikon lens announcement was another chintzy slow starter zoom or a ridiculously overpriced fast zoom.  When the global economy went in the tank this lens appeared.  My first thought; they’re offering something that people will actually buy in a recession. 

After the f1.8 35 appeared buying one proved difficult.  Remember those legions of Nikon users: lots of them wanted this lens.  For months you couldn’t find this item in stock anywhere.  The other day I read that it was available at B & H  so I hopped online and ordered instantly.

So how does it work?

It’s apparent from the raw NEF files that it’s sharper and renders straight lines better than the kit 18-55mm lens.  The f1.8 also does something I have dearly missed.  If you crank open the aperture you can produce a nice blurred background: bokeh baby!

Laws or Suggestions

The other day while torturing myself with CNN I heard Henry Waxman, that living argument for congressional term limits, tell us that the new, all singing and dancing,  US health care bill would not fund abortions or pick up the tab for illegal immigrants.  Maybe Henry is telling the truth, hey it could happen, pigs can fly if they’re dropped high enough, but I suspect Henry is confused about laws and suggestions.

Laws come in many forms and flavors but all laws mathematical, scientific and legal have a common trait: enforcement.  Mathematical laws, theorems if you will, are self enforcing.  If you accept the fundamentals or axioms of a theory and adhere to clear logical rules of inference you don’t have a choice about accepting valid results or proofs.  A sure sign of crankhood is the steadfast refusal to accept mathematical results. To this day we still run into circle squarers.  They’re a dying breed and I find their insanity kind of cute.   If only was an algebraic number there would be hope but fortunately it’s transcendental and there isn’t.  Even the FSM, (Flying Spaghetti Monster  — or God for you fundamentalists),  cannot square the circle with a straight edge and compass; it’s an absolute impossibility.  Mathematical laws are not girly men.  They’re tough enough for any neighborhood and won’t back down even for deities.

Scientific laws also police themselves.  You aren’t going to build a perpetual motion machine,  get colder than absolute zero,  force mass faster than the speed of light or convince a stubborn coin that its past has any bearing on the next toss.  Nature is a tough cop and she isn’t going to take crap from anyone.   Mathematical and scientific laws are called laws because you are forced to obey.  Law and enforcement is symmetrical;  you don’t get one without the other.

When we enter the legal domain this symmetry breaks down.   Legislatures, parliaments and dictators can pass any law they want but unless they enforce it it’s not a law; it’s a suggestion.   Have you ever driven down the freeway at the speed limit and watched all the cars, even the ones driven by little old ladies, zip past you?  Are all these drivers breaking the law?  In some looney legal universe yes; in the real one they are ignoring the suggested speed limit.  Without cops there are no speeders!

As a matter of personal policy I ignore all legal  suggestions.  I only obey enforced laws.  Without parking tickets I would always park in the handicapped spots; they’re more convenient.  Without the IRS I wouldn’t pay a dime of taxes.  Without prisons I would steal with impunity.  I’m not a bad person just an honest one.  Human legalities only become law when enforced.  Now Henry’s health bill may contain verbiage forbidding payments for abortions and illegals but unless they’re is a corresponding, rigorous and funded enforcement regime to insure that Henry’s suggestions become laws he’s just spouting bullshit.