My celebration is subdued this year, for various reasons, but I hope all of you have a good day. I also hope that you have some pie today, whether you go out somewhere or bake your own. (And if you feel like baking your own, once again I’ll link to the King Arthur Flour pie crust video.)
Also, the good folks at O’Reilly are offering 50% off on “science and math” ebooks today, just in case you see something you’re interested in.
Ever hear of the “Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program”? BTOP “passed out several billion dollars to help upgrade broadband networks across America as part of President Obama’s initial stimulus package in 2009”.
Let’s set aside the question of where the government’s constitutional authority to pass out that kind of money for that purpose comes from. Some of that money went to West Virginia.
So they needed routers. Not a problem, right? Except the State of West Virginia and Cisco decided that, instead of purchasing routers for each location that were appropriate for current and projected needs, they’d buy one specific Cisco router for everyone.
But, hey, they can use these routers to run VOIP, right?
And those $20,000 Cisco routers didn’t “come with ‘the appropriate Cisco VoIP modules’ to work with the system.”
And it isn’t just the state police. There’s a one-room library in Marmet (population 1,500), open three days a week, with one internet connection. And they run it through a Cisco 3945.
But how bad could it be? Surely Cisco was the low bidder, right?
I hate to say “I saw this coming” when the Feds first started talking about expanding broadband access. But then again, Hellen Keller would have seen this coming.
Obit watch: C. Everett Koop. (True story: I used to live a stone’s throw away from the DrKoop.com headquarters. I didn’t move; DrKoop.com did.)
The NYT has discovered NFA trusts.
Ever notice how the NYT, LAT, and other media outlets refer to things they don’t like as a “loophole”?
Frankly, I don’t believe the NYT‘s claims here. I suspect they’re being dishonest with the readers. However, I haven’t looked into NFA trusts; I’m not at the point in my life where I’m ready to purchase automatic weapons. (However, my brother and I had a discussion last night, prompted by the existence of “The Sliencer Store” near the movie theater I went to. A silencer for some of my .22LR guns is becoming more tempting.) Are there any readers out there who know more about NFA trusts and are willing to comment?
The LAT, meanwhile, is pre-occupied with the non-existant “gun show loophole”.
Speaking of movies, I considered live-blogging the Oscars on Sunday, but I figured my live blog would go something like this:
7:30 PM: Ceremony finally starts.
7.45 PM: First call by a celebrity for “reasonable gun control”. Sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m going to bed.
The one nice thing to come out of the Oscars, in my humble opinion, was that “Argo” started playing at the Alamo Drafthouses again, and at reasonable times. I ended up seeing a matinee showing yesterday.
Yes, it is very much a “Hollywood saves the world” movie, as well as a “heroic Federal employees” movie. Yes, “based on a true story” means that some of the facts have been fudged.
And I don’t care: “Argo” is a good story, well acted, well directed, and just the right length. Of the nominees I’ve seen, I liked it more than “Django Unchained” and (sorry, Mom) “Lincoln”. (I still want to see “Zero Dark Thirty”, but haven’t gotten to it yet. The other movie from last year I was excited about and didn’t get to see is “The Master”, which I think is going to have to wait for DVD.)
More on the Maureen O’Connor story from the NYT. Highlights:
…
The Chelyabinsk meteor story is the kind of thing I feel obligated to comment on, but am still sorting out. I know my readers are looking to me for answers to such questions as “is it time to crack open our neighbor’s heads and feast on the tasty goo inside?” While you wait, WSJ coverage. And I’m going to break with one of my rules and point folks at Slate. My justification for this is that I’m pointing you at Phil Plait and “Bad Astronomy”: if anyone is going to be on top of this story, it will be Plait. Plus, he’s got lots of video.
You can get botulism from prison wine, aka “pruno“, aka “that stuff that’s frequently fermented in a cell block toilet or other places just as disgusting”.
(You know where else you can get alcohol from, with less risk of botulism? Sourdough starter. No, really; the liquid that separates out and rises to the top if you leave it sit is somewhere between 12% and 14% alcohol. I haven’t tried drinking any of it, but I suspect it tastes a little better than pruno.)
Today’s the last TMQ of the season!
Hurrah, hurrah!
No more “cosmic thoughts”!
Hurrah, hurrah!
The readers will cheer and the blogger will shout!
And we’ll all feel happy after the last TMQ of the year…
I think everyone knows I geek out over pi, and the calculation thereof.
I’m not sure that folks know that I also geek out over prime numbers, primality testing, and the calculation of large prime numbers.
But I do. And we have a new largest known prime.
Commenting over at Tam’s place led me to Wikipedia, to refresh my memory of the Rankine scale.
And a footnote there, in turn, led me to something I’d never heard of before: VSMOW. That’s Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water, “a water standard defining the isotopic composition of freshwater”.
You see, if your water doesn’t have the exact right isotopic composition, you may see errors in your calibration of up to “several hundred microkelvin”.
I prefer being a time geek, but I have to admit that being a temperature geek does appear to have some thrills.
As seen at Blood Bath and Beyond yesterday:
That’s volume III of the “Presidents of the United States” Pez dispenser collection. They also had volume II, but I did not see volume I.
I note volume III specifically because this is the one that includes Millard Fillmore. Yes: a Millard Fillmore Pez dispenser is a real thing that you can buy and not the punchline of a David Letterman joke.
(You can get the Pez Presidents Collector Set Vol III
Some people are obsessive.
Some people are so obsessive, they start blogs.
Some people are so obsessive, they start blogs devoted to a single subject.
Some people are so obsessive, they start blogs devoted to a single movie.
Some people are so obsessive, they start blogs devoted to a single movie that isn’t f—ing “Star Wars”.
Some people are so obsessive, they start blogs devoted to a single movie that is currently in legal limbo.
Okay. You’re tired of the joke by now, so let me introduce Sorcerer1977, a blog devoted entirely to the 1977 William Friedkin movie “Sorcerer”.
Friedkin did this right after “The Exorcist”; it wasn’t well received at the time, but it seems that over the years, something of a cult has grown around it. Lawrence and I watched it quite a while back (I think it was so long ago we watched it on VHS). I’m a fan of “The Wages of Fear“, which “Sorcerer” is something of a homage to, and I actually think I prefer Friedkin’s version to Clouzot’s.
I’d love to see it again, but the movie is currently tied up in legal limbo which prevents a proper re-release. Both Paramount and Universal say they don’t own the rights to the movie, and have no idea who does, so Friedkin is suing both studios trying to get the ownership issue cleared up.
Anyway, the guy behind this is seriously obsessive and seems to be trying to cover every aspect of the movie – digging out old interviews with Friedkin and other people involved in the production, discussing the Tangerine Dream soundtrack, etc. etc. etc.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s an awesome goal.
(Hattip: directly, Coudal Partners. Indirectly, Gruber.)
We apologize for the lateness of this post. We are dealing with some personal issues that put us a little behind this afternoon.
Let’s just go ahead and jump into this week’s TMQ. Before we get started, though, we’d like to note something that strikes us as unusual: there is no mention of Jovan Belcher or Saturday’s events in this week’s column. We don’t think TMQ is the type of person who would say “Everyone else has said it better, so there’s no point in my saying it”, so his silence strikes us as unusual.
After the jump…
I mean, other than “The Adventures of Accordian Guy in the Twenty-First Century“?
Yes, yes he does.
I ran across this on the Y Combinator Twitter yesterday, and thought I’d give FizzBuzz a shot. I’d estimate it took me just under 30 minutes to get the code you see here, which I believe “works”. Part of that time was taken up with assisting one of my cow orkers with a problem, though. An embarrassingly large chunk of that time was taken up by my having to look up the Perl syntax for “for”, “if”, and the modulo operator. I’m a bit rusty; the last time I wrote substantial Perl code was about a year ago (a Perl script that parses CSV data from a file and imports it into a SQL database).
Anyway, code:
#!/usr/bin/perl
for ($index = 1; $index < 101; $index++)
{
$div_by_3 = 0;
$div_by_5 = 0;
if ($index % 3 == 0) {
$div_by_3 = 1;
}
if ($index % 5 == 0) {
$div_by_5 = 1;
}
if ($div_by_3 == 1 && $div_by_5 == 1 ) {
printf "FizzBuzz\n";
} else {
if ($div_by_3 == 1) {
printf "Fizz\n";
} else {
if ($div_by_5 ==1){
printf "Buzz\n";
} else {
printf "$index\n";
}
}
}
}
As always, when I put stuff like this up, I welcome criticism or comment on how I could have done it better (or, in this case, “right” if I did it wrong). The way I see it, I can’t get any better if I don’t solicit and accept criticism.
(Followup from deVilla here.)
Edited to add: I was going to upload a Python version that I wrote in (about) 20 minutes (I think). I keep planning to sit down and learn Python, but then somebody calls and wants to go riding bikes or whatever…anyway, I couldn’t paste that here and have it come out the way I wanted to, so I’ve uploaded it here. (I had to change the extension from “.py” to “.txt” because WordPress didn’t like “.py”.)