Everyone lining up to give tributes to Michael Jackson. Sure, I will concede that he was a transformative influence in music/culture.
But I have to point out that he was accused of major crimes with young boys. Although he was not convicted, in my view the evidence was fairly damning. I guess I am not willing to simply close my eyes and pretend that Michael Jackson was a great man. He really wasn’t !
Just went mountain biking with my friend Dave in Boulder, CO. We went on the Walker Ranch trail. I have done some mountain biking in NJ and IL but biking in CO is really a different story. The trail is at the edge of sharp drops. Really you are inches away from a tough fate. You go down a dirt trail over loose rocks. The difficulty level is pretty insane ! And of course you have to carry your bike up over a hundred feet by the waterfall, that is not an easy thing.
It was a lot harder than any mountain biking I have done before. Even Dave’s bike exploded. I have never seen a bike literally explode before but the gears just came flying off !
I guess that is typical biking in CO, but for me it was pretty insane ! But it is good to get out of your comfort zone once in a while.
Now the big late-night comics are Leno, Letterman, and Conan O’Brien. I just don’t find these guys that funny. They all have their shticks. They have the band leader that laughs at their jokes. Then a guest comes out with some pre-planned chatter. To me it is all a bit staged and stale.
But the best late-night comic is Craig Ferguson. Craig doesn’t have a lot of expensive sets and tricks. It is just Craig on a plain wooden set. He has a bit of spontaneity. He just gets out there and talks about some funny things on his mind. He is the best at interviewing guests.
He doesn’t rely on scripts or canned jokes. He just sort of does his thing.
Pittsburgh’s North Shore Connector is completed.
Oh wait- it’s not completed.
They did dig 2 lovely holes for $500 million, but they need $100 million more to finish the job.
And that for a project we never wanted.
So what to do now?
Blow the stimulus money?
Instead I suggest that we can make the rad-dest skate park ever !!!
The genuiuses at HR at our company decided to have a “Biggest Loser Contest”. The idea is (like the TV show) to divide up into two groups, and see which group shall lose the most weight. The competition should encourage us to be healthier.
Anyways one of the groups decided that the best way to win the competition was to bring in chocalate cake for the other team. Naturally the other team retaliated by bringing in cookies for the first team. Soon our break room and other areas were filling up with chocolate and sugary snacks.
So far it looks like everyone has gained a few pounds. So I hope they call a stop to the competition or maybe restructure it. Otherwise our company will be the Biggest Winners !
A lot of people raise their eyebrows when I say that the wacky people who believe in aliens may be right. People in Roswell in the 1940s-1960s reported seeing aliens fall to the ground and then military personnel arrive to take them away to hospitals. For years, officials called these people crazy lunatics.
But take a look at this 1997 Air Force declassified report:
report
Kind of amazing! The Air Force admits that they were in fact dropping bodies from airplanes. Now the Air Force claims that they were test dummies. But it seems pretty odd!
I have sent a note to President Obama requesting that he immediately release all information on aliens ! I have also volunteered to be his Ambassador to the Aliens.
So far I have not heard back though.
The Steelers quarterback, Big Ben, recently had a concussion. But now he is going to play football again next week.
Football is a game. It’s not worth losing your life over. If Big Ben chooses not to play, he will lose some money and the Steelers may lose. But ultimately that is small potatoes compared to risking permanent brain injury.
Instead of pressuring the guy to play, maybe it is time for him to hang it up.
Then he can live a very nice life with all the money he has accumulated.
I have been watching HBO’s House of Saddam. I got to admit it has been a pretty riveting show. The sheer brutality of Saddam is terrifying. He shoots his best friend, just to show that he can. He assasinates his brother-in-law.
And if Saddam is terrifying, his son Uday is worse. While Saddam seems generally sane, Uday comes off like a sadist. And they don’t even show everything that Uday did.
I have been watching HBO’s House of Saddam. I got to admit it has been a pretty riveting show. The sheer brutality of Saddam is terrifying. He shoots his best friend, just to show that he can. He assasinates his brother-in-law.
And if Saddam is terrifying, his son Uday is worse. While Saddam seems generally sane, Uday comes off like a sadist. And they don’t even show everything that Uday did.
Watching the movie does give me a measure of satisfaction that we have got rid of Saddam. I will always feel that this war was a huge mistake.
So you don’t have to write a comment saying that life is worse after Saddam, or that Bush is a killer, or that the war was fought about WMD which were never found. I will grant you these points.
But still it has to be said that Saddam was a killer that ruled a nation, and now he is dead.
Watching the journalist throw shoes at Bush the other day was illuminating. In Saddam’s era, that man would be dead before you blinked. Now he is just being beaten severely.
And so there is a vexing issue. What do we do about nations that are ruled by killers? Saddam was unusually bad, but you can make a list of countries that are ruled in a similar fashion. In North Korea, they are starving their people. In Egypt, they have no freedom of speech. Many people don’t realize what a terrible regime the Chinese government is. One of my Chinese friends compared Chinese government to Germany under Hitler. They can take you from your house and make you disappear.
Or look at any number of nations in Africa. There the brutality is scary. The human life is not worth much in many African countries.
I think sanctions often don’t work. But Iraq proves that military action is the bad move as well.
So I ask you Hillary: what is the role of the U.S. government in human rights across the world? What responsibility does the U.S. have to act, when a government is murdering its people?
So I just got up from a relaxing nap, at which point Val informed me that she had been cleaning for the last two hours. At that point it hit me: wow, I have grown up to be Goofus and married the female Gallant.
For those of you not familiar with Goofus and Gallant, they were two characters from a magazine called Highlights, that you often find in the doctor’s office. Goofus was a selfish bastard, and Gallant was the hardworking and thoughtful individual.
I did a websearch to find out how Goofus and Gallant are doing today. They now have their own website- check it out here :
http://www.highlightskids.com/Stories/GnG3/h1gng1.asp
I played the Goofus and Gallant game and sure enough, I made bad choices that landed me in a heap of trouble. Fortunately I finished the game just a case of Poision Ivy, rather than a worse consequence.
Matt discusses haircuts for guys with a little bit less on top
[ This is the simplified version without explicit time-dependent analysis. I was thinking of publishing this but not sure what journal would take it. Maybe I could submit it to GQ ? ]
The optimal haircut for a guy pretty much has p(x)=constant, where x is the spatial position, and p is the hair length at that positioin. For now let us just consider x as a linear variable although it can be easily generalized to a vector.
Let D(x) be the hair-follicle density. Ideally, D(x)=constant.
But some guys have a hair follicle density D(x) that is non-uniform, which is a non-ideality.
So if we set p(x) proportional to D(x), then p(x) will be non-uniform which is not optimal.
There are a couple solutions.
First, you can set p(x)=0. That’s the Michael Jordan look. It is certainly a solution although it is unstable as a function of time, so that it requires constant haircuttery.
Another solution is to set p(x)=1/D(x), which may be denoted as the inverse haircut. This is favored by many hairdressers you will find at SuperCuts, etc. Avoid such hairdressers. The problem here is again the time dependence. The length is a function of time, and what you will find with an inverse haircut is that it looks good at t=0, but it fails with increasing time.
The last solution is to have a non-local solution for p(x), also known as the comb-over. This solution becomes increasingly untenable as D(x) has more shape to it. The observer can easily see the non-local solution.
Currently, our research group is working on advanced mathematical models and simulations to further analyze and address such problems !