Below is a video that's going around, taken from a cop car. This is not my knee-jerk post about cops getting away with stuff: the victims fucked up, and the cop has been charged with manslaughter nonetheless. Go ahead and take a look.

( embedded YouTube video + text summary )

Here's a thing to notice: between when we can see the turn starting and when the brake lights come on, around two seconds S L O W L Y tick by. About a second after that, not having slowed visibly, the cop car has hit the victims' car. EDIT: Google map showing the distance he traveled during this time.

The kids died because they saw how far away the cop was, but they either didn't realize he was going 2-3 times as fast as they expected or didn't understand the implications. If he had been going half as fast when they started to turn, there would be been 6 seconds instead of 3, and

- they would be been across the street already
- if they had stopped right in front of him for whatever reason, he would have had 2 seconds to notice, 4 seconds to brake, and 50% less speed to shed, and so it would have been a fender-bender at worst.

"What can we learn from this?" Being on the road and not killing yourself and other people means:

(1) Being aware of the current situation on the road.
(2) Actively anticipating what other people might do, rather than assuming they're going to do what's convenient for you.
(3) Being aware of what they're anticipating you'll do, and doing exactly what they expect. If you're going to do something they don't expect, communicate it very clearly well in advance and don't do it until you can tell they've seen you.

I'm not the cops: I'm not going to say "never go 100mph", because that's fun sometimes (or so I hear). Whatever. But regardless of whether you're breaking the rules at the time, you have an absolute duty to the other human beings on the road. Setting aside speeding, which no doubt the prosecutor will harp on because it's the part that's actually against the law, there are two pieces of terminal FAIL here:

The cop saw oncoming traffic, he saw them in the left-turn lane, and he should have hit the brakes hard and shed that extra 40mph right then, because you don't know whether someone else has correctly judged your speed or what they think they can get away with.

The victims saw oncoming traffic and they decided "eh, we can make it" instead of just waiting for it to clear. That was a stupid decision: there was nodamnbody on the road, they would surely have had their chance right after the cop cars, and you can't count on your brain's estimation of phase space parameters. But hey, they were teenagers, which means the bits of their brain that anticipate consequences are not entirely working yet, never mind that we let them fight in wars and drive cars around town.

(And this is why, if you don't leave at least a 4-second following distance when you're behind someone in traffic, I get angry: sure, you can see the traffic ahead, fine. But what about that time when someone does something a little bit boneheaded that you didn't think about? If it's their fault legally, does that make it better that someone is dead?)

Oh, the huge manatee!

That is all.

via gustavolacerda

4726340, god damn it

Is there a name for the class of movie that is quite enjoyable despite the fact that the plot is driven at every step by the characters' stupid mistakes?

Seriously, I am too busy laughing to get worked up by what a douchebag this guy is:



so somebody else please get worked up for me.

(BTW, I am allowed to use the word "douchebag" 100 more times before I have to find something else call douchebags. "Triple-cream fuckstick" was nice, but I don't want to have to go back to explaining it to people. I'm open to suggestions. 98.)

In other news, "I ain't moved".

I recently subscribed to Laura McLay's blog, "Punk Rock Operations Research", and have been quite enjoying it. Today she points out that the statements attributed to Larry Summers (effectively: "girls are bad at math, and maybe it's intrinsic"; this does not appear to be supported by the facts) were not the statements he made (effectively: "boys have higher variability in math ability [i.e., a *broader* bell curve, resulting in more geniuses and more failures], and maybe it's intrinsic"; this does appear to be accurate).

Via mkb_technologie, NYTimes interactive graph breaking down unemployment by race, sex, age, and education level.

So, I was excited about the Droid. Then I saw that there was such a thing as a Droid Eris, and I felt that I had no choice but to buy it. $99 with a 2 year contract? Very reasonable.

Then I got to the "pick a plan" screen.

You people—by which I mean, people who buy smartphones—you people, you are insane.

Words cannot express how stupid any of these ideas is:

- paying $20/month for unlimited texts OR
- paying $0.20/text

- paying $80/month for 450 minutes of airtime OR
- paying $250/month for unlimited airtime OR
- paying $2/MB. That's per MEGAbyte. Mega, not giga. I could FedEx you floppies for less money. WHAT DECADE IS THIS?

In other words, a usable plan costs between $100 and $270 PER MONTH, and you commit to two years of this at a time. And if you ever go outside the US, well, we won't talk about international roaming, because no matter which plan you pick, it will be cheaper to just BUY A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PHONE TO USE WHILE YOU'RE ON VACATION.

What. The. Fuck?

Millions of people look at the same screen I looked at and don't hesitate. I have a really hard time fathoming their motivation. Things you could get for a year of Droid:

- a nice kayak
- a sweet road bike
- a respectable gaming laptop
- a prosumer DSLR with a couple of good lenses
- a beater of a car
- a quite serviceable used motorcycle
- a month in Europe
- 3 ounces of really good weed (or so I hear)
- a hell of a night out

Is being able to browse the web without having to step into a coffee shop really worth more than your favorite one of the above, per year?

Current Mood: foaming

Hamster In Tutu Shuts Down Large Hadron Collider

I'm currently making my way through The Name of the Rose, and the characters are getting rather into discussions of the differences among various religious orders, including Franciscans, Fraticelli, and Minorites. These three in particular, the internets tell me, are just different names for the same order.

Oh my brothers and sisters, is Umberto Eco just fucking with me, or are the internets missing a fine distinction?

(Answer: "Fraticelli" is a name both for Franciscans in general and for an extremist offshoot, but Wikipedia doesn't have good docs on them.)

Tralfamadore Boltzmann Brain

discuss.

This weekend was pretty quiet. I was a Bad Pagan¹ and didn't do any Halloween stuff. To make up for it, I'm going to have to do some really weird shit for the solstice, like in a cave or something.

( in which gasoline is run out of, siphoned, sprayed in an eye and poured from a cup; Masse True Value is discovered to be the One True Hardware Store; 100lb of dry goods is carried on the back of a motorcycle; and a Dremel tool acquired ) TWO WHEELS GOOD, FOUR WHEELS BAAAAAAAAAAD.

Later we saw The Big Broadcast of October 30th, 1938 (but it was a bit slow and she wasn't all that into the auditory experience, so we left early).

Then we rearranged the entire house and I went to a gay square dance event called by a man who:

- went to my high school and graduated 7 years before I was born
- wrote² the programming language I love most, which nobody uses
- wrote³ the programming language I hate most, which everybody uses

And how was your weekend?

¹ This is not entirely unexpected. I'm more of a heathen, really.
²with another guy
³as one member of a large team

Chaos, a genus of amoeba, is 1-5mm wide.

One cell. (And it's not a cheesy fake single cell like slime molds.) And it's big enough to poke with a stick. How awesome is that?

Also, its name is Chaos.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/want-50mbps-internet-in-your-town-threaten-to-roll-out-your-own.ars

holy bejesus fuck (via reddit)

I just played soccer and rode home on the motorcycle. The dog is now really into sniffing the soles of my shoes. I've verified that I'm not leaving a trail of filth behind me as I walk around the house, so I'm guessing she's just passionate about sports.

via hitchhiker, I don't know WTF: http://shortstoryathon.blogspot.com/2009/10/cant-stop-signal.html

This is a spectacular one-time offer you just won't be able to pass up.

I support an awful Piece of Software that I hate. People are pissed off at me because I haven't been making it do its job passably; I haven't because, every time I go to look at this software, my consciousness slides off it like a duck off a sheet of duck-lubricating material and I go do something else useful, or useless—as long as it's not this one thing, because OH how I do hate it, yes I do. There is a serious SEP field around this thing, but it is, in fact, not SEP: it is, in fact, My Problem™.

I suspect you have a problem just like this and know exactly what I mean.

I will be able to totally kick this problem's ass if someone else who can grasp the issues but completely lacks the emotional involvement to create the SEP field (hence: does not work here and is in no way at risk of having to support this Piece of Software) is there paying half-hearted attention and commiserating while I work on it and drink beer and bitch about it. You probably don't have to actually think about the problem, even.

If you will be this person for me, I will (a) provide the beer and (b) do the same for you, either in advance or at some Unspecified Later Date, cross my heart and stick me with an etherkiller. I promise it won't take more than an hour or ten spread over one or eight weeks.

OK, when I stopped reading my friends list a few months ago, people were mobbing the Tor editors and various SF authors because they wrote about race in a way that seemed condescending and clueless. This was called "RaceFail 09". The targets were hounded out of the community.

I've been back for a few days, and people are apparently mobbing some random other people who asked for help developing a survey because they wrote about transgender issues in a way that seemed condescending and clueless. This is called "SurveyFail". The targets were hounded out of the community.

From here, these look like the same thing. It looks like the people doing this are smarter and more ethically grounded than SomethingAwful goons and Anonymous, but despite limiting their tactics and having ends that seem more just, they are indulging in the same impulses rather than treating their fellow human beings with compassion or doing something useful about the problems they say they hope to address.

I'm glad none of my friends seem to be directly involved this time. Kept at a distance, it's just dull and uncomfortable.

This (via pure_doxyk)

Via pure_doxyk, the problem.

Relatedly, a poll:

Poll #1445464
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 14

I would yell in the streets...

Dear WickedLocal,

When you post racially sensitive articles and buy some filtering software to apply to the comments, you should be careful the software does not commit the clbuttic mistake of overzealous bowdlerizing, or you'll get a lot of letters wondering what a "su****ious person" is supposed to be.

Love,
—en_ki

this

W
T
F

GMail really really wants to sell me cornhole bags. Like, for days now, that's the main ad I've been getting.

After looking over the site for a while, I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean "condoms for anal sex" or "colostomy kits", but I can't for the life of me figure out what these little pillow things are for. I mean, yes, for your anus, but HOW?

If Esperanto isn't evil, why are they always hating on Volapük?

The world of home video has come full circle. I watch movies and TV shows these days with the Netflix online service, mostly, which is quite fast at work (distractions can help me stay focused, sometimes) but takes a terrific amount of time to buffer when I watch it at home. What's worse, it has to buffer fully at the current spot in the video before it will let you move to a different spot.

The application records the place you left off, even if it's the end---so if I ever want to watch something at home that I've already watched, I always have to remember to rewind.

That's what I'm talking about.

Rule 34 is self-referential.

So, yeah. Religion.

I went looking this morning for Hooke's Micrographia. (Done right, it would make a great gift book, being both a classic and full of rather striking drawings. Sadly, there seem only to be paperbacks with rather weak illustrations.)

Check out the Amazon page for it. The tags are:

religion(402) science(291) atheist(206) evolution(194) god(168) christianity(109) richard dawkins(96) biography(92) history(90) immunization(20)

and the "Active Discussions In Related Forums" are

Evolution of H1N1 has been predicted
Global warming is nothing but a hoax and a scare tactic
The emperor of evolution has no clothes. Who is the Emperor?
Magnetism can increase intelligence
Earth Quake
Homosexuality and Natural Selection?

In other words, useful information (e.g., tagging Hooke's work with "microscope") is almost completely drowned out by the fight between pro-science atheists and anti-science religious people.

Set aside the Columbia School of Journalism "two sides to every story" bullshit and admit one thing: creationists are 100% wrong, and are 100% to blame for this fight. There's nobody has to go out and push the theory of evolution: it is a fact, it is the foundation of biological science, and the layers upon layers of research it makes possible has savedbillions of human lives by improving crop yields and curing diseases. The fight exists because of the people who, for reasons that have nothing to do with observing reality and everything to do with their adherence to doctrine, claim otherwise.

Now, it's theoretically possible to be both pro-science and religious. I have met people who claim to believe both (a) in the tenets of religion and (b) that science is more informative than religion about the nature of things and the causes of events in the physical world; and indeed, even the President of the United States makes such a claim.

But where are these people, exactly, in this fight? It's really kind of odd that one of the sides is pro-science atheists, specifically. I don't see, say, mainstream Christians getting into it with the Creationists over this; if they get into it at all, they're standing on the sidelines telling everybody to chill, and that this level of anger isn't productive.

Get off the goddamn fence. The longer you sit there, the more you look like the other side.

merle_ had a post that reminded me of this.

I parked my bike at the Davis Square subway station a week or two ago, hanging my helmet on the bars as usual. A woman waiting for the bus asked "aren't you afraid someone's going to steal your helmet?" and I explained that no, it was cheap enough to be easily replaceable ($30 new) and not worth stealing (resale value $0, since it was old and battered and Boston has a group that gives away free new helmets, no questions asked). I used fewer words than this, because I am a laconic motherfucker what is never verbose.

After a little back and forth, I said "if somebody needs my helmet that badly, they're welcome to it" and left to get on the train. She said "ooookay" in a voice that said

"(1) I think you are crazy; and
(2) I am going to steal your helmet as soon as you're gone, just to make a point".

Poll #1392656
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19

When I came back 12 hours later,

What do you do with your helmet?

(NB: normal bicycle helmets. Motorcycle helmets and special nice gear you only wear sometimes are a different matter.)

Also, my lights are way more resell-able, and I leave those on, too. Thieves take note: they are coated in ball python venom.

Poll #1390943
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19

Anything happen the last six weeks or so?

I apologize for the previous post, now hidden. It was somewhat trollish in demeanor, not in line with the idiom I've been cultivating, and not likely to be effective in advancing any worthwhile goal. It was an artifact of my mood and of my hearing about a bolus of unpleasant current events culminating in despicable behavior on the part of the leaders of a major world religion.

I remain of the opinion that, as others have said, Pope Benedict XVI could stand a kick in the teeth, and also that there is no God. (Extensive citations available upon request.)

This has been your slightly more level-headed message of the day.

I thought it was too late to get a Eurail pass (since the official site said it was too late when I checked on Tuesday, even with overnight shipping), but I ordered one from RailEurope.com at 4 PM yesterday, and it was delivered to my house (thanks maru_mari!) at 10 AM. On the basis of that experience, I can't recommend them highly enough.

So, uh, there's a new Discordian sacrament.

It involves squirting cold water in your left ear. Or, what the hell, someone else's.

Meanwhile, here is loosechanj's idea of music:

maru_mari has a Honda Shadow now.

Being visible is an acquired skill, and one that is probably harder and definitely different on a motorcycle. Her efforts made me think about what I do on a bicycle:

- Trackstands at intersections, standing on the pedals while moving; be up off the seat any time except when I'm head-down spinning or just killing time.

- Look where I intend to go, look the driver in the eye to establish that they see me and are braking (but don't look long enough to give the impression that they have a choice), then look where I intend to go.

- Subway Face: a nice cold facial expression that says "you are made of meat, but I am not currently hungry" is optional but sometimes helpful.

- Once I'm looking where I'm going to go, go already. (Don't give them time to think "hey, I could hit the gas now and intimidate that guy".) I watch for bozos in my peripheral vision and stop/dodge if they're doing something stupid.

What do you do on a bike, motor or otherwise, to get people to see you and not hit you while you get to go where you want to go? Does it work?

Poll #1360422
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 12

Have you repulsed the monkey this week?

How does that make you feel?

Poll #1358884
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19

What's getting in the way of your mad science experiments this semester?

Walden Pond is in Concord.

Psych, it's in Lynn.¹

Massachusetts is fired.

Anyway, I'm probably going to ride out to one of those on Saturday, starting when I'm back from Tai Chi (11 or so). It's supposed to be sunny and 40°, which is like summer. I figured I'd go with the one with the little shed where that dude lived that one time and they tore down the shed and build a new one just like it. Anybody feeling particularly Thoreauvian, you know where to find me.

¹There is a Walden Pond in Lynn. I'm sure it's a nice pond. It's not Walden Pond, though. But if you start in Medford and just say Walden Pond, guess where Google Maps wants to send you?

Current Mood: thoreauly disgruntled

Not sure who dglenn linked to this Philip K. Dick essay recently.

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.

Incidentally, there are snakes in Hawaii.

Getting a little into Arthur Russell this morning.

I have a mandolin
I play it all night long
It makes me want to kill myself
I also have a dobro
Made in some mountain range
Sounds like a mountain range in love
But when I turn up the tone
On my electric guitar
I'm afraid of the dark without you close to me
I went out to the forest and caught
A hundred thousand fireflies
As they ricochet round the room
They remind me of your starry eyes
Someone else's might not have made me so sad
But this is the worst night I ever had
'cause I'm afraid of the dark without you close to me
You won't be happy with me,
But give me one more chance
You won't be happy anyway
Why do we still live here
In this repulsive town?
All our friends are in New York
Why do we keep shrieking,
when we mean soft things?
We should be whispering all the time...
—Magnetic Fields, "100,000 Fireflies"

this is the worst song i have ever seen in my life. the only reason i even looked this crap up is because i am doing a essay on daniel handler which used to be in this horrible band i hope this band doesnt exist anymore because if it does then it really needs to die
—anonymous review of same

What's stuck in your head?

The Boy Who Cried Wolf
On Grief

I'm sorry. I don't know how it happened. It's been weeks since I posted something really regrettable, so I'm going to have to rip off pure_doxyk:

Poll #1342884 A Misterious Poll
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

Why am I Mr. ___?

Goodbye, Mr. ____.

Mr. ___, he dead.

Poor, poor, Mr. ___.

For extra points, which two Misters would you interchange in order to make their order more beautiful?

I forgot to mention that I was tagged with this meme once:

If you can read this, you're officially authorized to ignore memes. If somebody tags you, you still don't have to do it: you're free to be quiet for a while, or just say something that you want to say instead of something scripted. Likewise, you don't have to believe in anything that's not true if you don't want to. You still can if you want, but you don't have to.

So I'm tagging everybody, and it's OK if you don't tag anybody else, but it might be nice if you did, you know?

Now that I'm free, all I really want to do is go to Pittsburgh.

(1) technical support, n.: jock strap for rock climbing

(2) The Who's "My Generation" makes a decent marching cadence

I had read about generators but not used them. I did some reading up after the user group on Wednesday night and figured out how they work, and:

If you write a function that happens to have a "yield" statement in it, the function becomes a generator, which behaves in a completely different way from a normal function.

(I don't have a problem with generators. Ruby's Enumerable, Scheme streams, all good. The problem is that you have a function that, without any change in how it's declared, changes from a function-you-call-and-get-something-back to a function-you-call-to-get-an-object-that-you-call-a-method-on-to-execute-the-function-you-wrote because somewhere in its code is a magic statement that changes its nature.)

When you write a language feature like that, you're saying you don't give a damn about readability. For a language that sells itself on readability, that's FAIL FAIL FAIL SUPER FAIL. Go home, blog about what you did, and study Cobol for a year as penance.

$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jul 23 2008, 11:00:16) 
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> def function():
...     print "hello"
... 
>>> def generator():
...     print "hello"
...     yield "goodbye"
... 
>>> function()
hello
>>> generator()
<generator object="object" at="at" 0x6bbc0="0x6bbc0">
>>> generator().next()
hello
'goodbye'
>>>