If your job is security related, one particularly rapid way to find yourself unemployed is treating confidential material carelessly. This is true even if you happen to be Britain’s counter-terrorism chief… talk about an oops moment.
Bob Quick's documents
I have no idea what Tamil protesters in downtown Ottawa want. Nor do I care.
But if they think that blocking traffic and effectively shutting down public transportation on a busy weekday afternoon in the middle of a spring snowstorm is a way to garner sympathy… well, perhaps it’s time to think again. Whatever their demonstration is for, I am against it.
Yes, according to CNN there are signs that an early and strong recovery may be on its way:
I tend to agree. I began to wonder weeks ago if things perhaps look a little bit brighter than the gloomy news suggest. I guess this will make Republicans unhappy… how can Obama fail if the economy recovers?
I’ve been watching Obama speaking in Prague the other day, and the background was eye-popping. It almost looked like Obama was on a soundstage… in the foreground, everything looked crisp and sharp, but the city in the background just vanished in thick fog. It almost looked surreal (or like an alien planet in an old Star Trek episode.)
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Whatever my opinion is of the “fair and balanced” editorial policies of FOX News, I had no reason to doubt that the company itself was a legitimate business.
Until now.
As I was searching for news on North Korea’s failed rocket launch, one link I clicked on was that of a FOX News posting on this story. The page came up, along with the usual series of ads… except that one of them looked more than a little unusual. Not the kind of ad you expect to see on a legitimate Web site.
It said, “Christian Mom Makes $5k/M”. And sure enough, it’s a scam. The Web site, registered in December 2008, just reeks of fakeness; fake life story, fake testimonials, further postings “disabled due to spam”. Not to mention that what it actually sells, the so-called “Google Home Business Kit”, is not worth anything… you can make money with Google (google.com/adsense) but you don’t need to buy any “home business kits” to do so, and you’re unlikely to make $5,000 or even $500 a month.
So perhaps FOX was duped when they accepted the ad of a scamster? I was tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt but then I scrolled to the bottom of the page where this ad was repeated along with two other advertisements. One was titled “I’m Happy I Lost My Job”. Same idea: fake Web site, fake testimonials, $5,000/month, Google Home Business Kit. The person this Web site supposedly belongs to claims to have come from the Ottawa area. Does this mean that the ad was, in fact, geographically targeted because my IP address puts me in Ottawa, and any scamster knows that I am more likely to believe an ad if it comes from my local neighborhood? I have a proxy server in the US, so I tried reaching the FOX Web site through that server with a different Web browser. Same result, same three ads. I even tried to run the browser on that remote server (painfully slow, through an X-Window connection) and still, the same ads came up. So the Ottawa thing is perhaps just a coincidence.
Compared to these two ads, the third link, which was for a teeth whitener ranked #1 by Rachel Ray (presumably I’m supposed to know who Rachel Ray is; hmmm, let me check, Rachel Ray is the title of a novel by 19th century English novelist Anthony Trollope, but there is a television personality named Rachael Ray, presumably that’s who they meant) almost seems legitimate. (Of course if it had been authorized by the real Rachael Ray, they’d presumably have spelled her name correctly.)
So what does this tell us? I can think of several possibilities, most quite unflattering to FOX News and their viewers. For instance:
But the real question is, what does this say about the quality of the news they deliver?
North Korea’s news agency informs us that the satellite their country launched overnight is orbiting normally, transmitting immortal revolutionary songs.
Too bad that according to NORAD, the launch vehicle’s second and third stages, along with the payload, are at the bottom of the Pacific ocean.
The gravitational theory that I’ve been working on for some time with John Moffat is called STVG, or Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity. It grew out of Moffat’s investigation of Nonsymmetric Gravity.
There is also a phenomenological formula called MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) that effectively flattens out the acceleration curve at high radii from a point source. MOND is nothing more than a formula designed by its creator, Mordechai Milgrom, to solve a specific problem, namely the rotation curves of galaxies. It is not rooted in any theory, and in fact, it is known to contradict some; for instance, it violates the law of conservation of energy and momentum. This is why Jacob Bekenstein endeavored to create a relativistic theory called TeVeS, which fixes MONDs problems, while still gives the approximate MOND acceleration formula in the case of weak fields.
Both STVG and TeVeS are gravity theories, and both happen to incorporate tensor, vector, and scalar fields. Beyond that, however, there’s nothing in common between the two theories.
Unfortunately, many Wikipedians don’t know this, and try from time to time to merge the STVG and TeVeS articles. Hopefully not any longer… I just posted a long, fairly complete description of STVG on Wikipedia.
They did a group photo at the G-20 and our very own Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, was missing. According to a Canadian television channel, he was busy engaged in a discussion with an official. According to the BBC, he was in the toilet.
Stephen Harper
So they redid the group photo. Or tried to, anyhow. This time around, Berlusconi appeared to be missing… there was no word why.
Nonetheless, signs are that the G-20 meeting was (at the very least) not a failure, and perhaps even a modest success. I guess we’ll know in the next couple of days. But, if it is not just wishful thinking and real, meaningful decisions were made, then perhaps this is where the world changes to a track different from the one followed in the 1930s… instead of choosing protectionism, leading to a collapse of international trade, we’re choosing to keep the system of international trade robust and intact.
The BBC just updated their story: quoting a Harper press secretary, they’re now saying that Harper was indeed engaged in a conversation with an aide, he was not in the washroom.
Some interesting papers on ArXiv today: the variation of a fundamental constant, a new class of galaxies discovered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and finally, an notable essay on quantum physics.
When the Texas Board of Education votes, the whole US listens, as due to its size, Texas dominates the textbook market. And, sadly, the Texas Board of Education appears to be dominated by ignorant yahoos who are no better, only less violent (so far!) than their ignorant yahoo Taliban friends who blow up thousand-year-old statues and schools full of young girls just because the facts happen to disagree with their religion.
Get it through your incredibly thick, incredibly tiny heads, you incredibly stupid morons (and yes, I do mean it: show me a person from the Texas Board of Education who voted against the proper teaching of science, and I don’t care if she is a hard working mother of five who never meant any harm to anyone, I am willing to use the same words in her face, with the intend to offend, in the hope that I might get through): the Universe is 13.7 billion years old (at least; as a minimum, we know that there was a surface of last scattering 13.7 billion years ago.) Humans and apes descended from the same primitive life forms that have been on this Earth for at least about 3 billion years. The climate is changing, even if there may be legitimate debate about the extent to which this is caused by man, CO2 in particular, and whether or not a warming is indeed bad for us. If you want to hide from hard science, go and crawl back to your stupid little church and leave the Board of Education. Unless your true intent is to take Texas (and America) back to the Middle Ages, just like your little Taliban friends over there in Afghanistan.
Folks working on quantum computers are busy trying to make sure that entangled states remain entangled, because decoherence is death for a quantum computation. But now, Gross et al. showed that too much entanglement may not be a good thing: it can result in quantum computers that offer no improvements in efficiency over conventional computers.
Ever since I became the unfortunate owner of a new laptop (rather nice in most respects, actually) that requires Vista, I’ve been cursing the programmers in Redmond.
One prevailing mystery was this: if my laptop is in Sleep/Hibernation for more than a few hours, why does it take literally forever for it to wake up? And why is there is constant disk activity while I wait for it to respond?
It seems that I may have found the answer. It’s the blasted Superfetch service in Vista, ostensibly designed to help speed up the launching of applications. Perhaps it does that… but on a laptop, it also does many other things, none of them pleasant. It seems that the best thing to do is to disable the Superfetch service once and for all, and call it a bad memory.
A new study, showing a strong correlation between circumcision and decreased rates of AIDS and genital herpes in males, is now touted as an argument in favor of circumcision here in North America.
There’s only one problem. The study was conducted in Uganda. I mean no disrespect towards the personal habits of Ugandan men, but Uganda is a third world country where most people do not necessarily have easy access to hot showers (or indeed, running water.) Before such a controversial recommendation is made, should a study not be conducted that properly takes into account the standards of personal hygiene here in North America?
I’m hearing on the BBC that Japan’s exports in February are down 50% since February last year and that their car exports are down an astonishing 70%.
These numbers are insane. What is this world coming to?
If only I had known about it earlier… I am not a theater person, but The Gladstone’s The Radio Show definitely sounds like my cup of tea. Too bad it’s on for only three more days, and these will be three very busy days for me.
Republican lawmakers in America are concerned: they think that the request of the Obama administration and its treasury secretary for additional powers represents an unprecedented power grab. Being a libertarian at heart, I share their concerns even as I recognize the necessity for unprecedented government intervention at a time of unprecedented crisis.
But, it is difficult not to notice of the hipocrisy. The same lawmakers did not appear to be nearly as upset when the Bush administration grabbed unprecedented powers… not in the economic arena, mind you, but in the area of safety and security, directly impacting the personal freedoms and liberties of not just Americans, but also foreign nationals on American soil, such as Canadian Maher Arar who was deported to Syria for torture and unlawful imprisonment. If only Republican lawmakers were as eager to guard constitutional freedoms back then!
My god. Is this really what the “fair and balanced” network thinks of Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan, and the 117 Canadians (including a civilian diplomat) who died there?
I wonder why Canada even went there to fight. After all, it wasn’t Canada that was attacked on 9/11. Fortunately, I know that not all Americans are as dumb as these clowns… what is troubling is that way too many Americans DO watch FOX and believe that it presents an unbiased view of the world.
The video responses to this clip are interesting, too. One is an “adults only” propaganda piece warning us about Islam’s plans to take over the world. Oh my, I am so afraid, there are Muslims everywhere!
Yes, they do teach this in flight school. But even professionals make mistakes… and when those professionals happen to be pilots, they often pay with their lives:
Fortunately (?) in this case only the pilots had to pay, as the airplane in question was a FedEx cargo plane.
I am watching a documentary on BBC World.
BBC World is available here on basic analog cable, which is the only kind of cable I am interested in having in the house. (Mainly, I am put off digital cable because of the need for separate set-top boxes, but DRM also doesn’t help, not to mention the nasty habit of the box to wake up in the middle of the night to perform an OS upgrade, clearly demonstrating that I am not in control of equipment that is in my house.)
However, BBC World is, it appears, a high definition (HD) broadcast, so on analog cable it appears with a black stripe on the top and the bottom of the picture.
This particular documentary, however, was apparently shot in standard definition. So BBC World chose one of three options, each less than perfect: instead of cropping the picture at the top and the bottom, or introducing black stripes on the left and right, they decided to stretch the picture horizontally. Why so many people prefer a distorted picture over black stripes, I have no idea.
But this means that on my standard analog cable, I get a standard definition show that appears at less than standard resolution, vertically compressed, distorted, with unnecessary black stripes at the top and the bottom. Isn’t HD just glorious?
HD madness
Fortunately, as I tend to watch TV on my computer, I always have the option of stretching the video window vertically and get a picture with the correct aspect ratio. This option is not necessarily available on ordinary televisions.
Behind this ridiculousness is the insane decision to change not just the resolution but the aspect ratio of HD broadcasts. Why, you might ask? Very simple. If the aspect ratios were the same, most people could not tell the difference between standard definition and HD even when the broadcast was true HD, which often is not the case (older shows, and even some newer shows, are shot in standard definition.) So how do you convince people to buy HD anyway? By making it apparent that they have a “better” television set because it is wider.
And this has been done before. Back in the 1950s, when movie studios were seriously worried about the competition of television, they changed the aspect ratio of Hollywood movies, intentionally making them incompatible with the standard 4:3 aspect ratio of NTSC/PAL television. What is amazing is how well they managed to convince the public that a wider picture is better, providing yet another example of just how easy it is to manipulate people.
I’m done watching the very final episode of Battlestar Galactica.
Wow. Now this is what science fiction television is supposed to be like. When I saw the pilot movie back in 2003, I simply wondered, how on Earth they could possibly make something this gripping out of the “re-imagining” of a cheesy early-80s space opera? But they did… and the show never wavered in quality. I am sad that it’s over, but I respect their decision to finish the show the right way.