The NFL regular season starts tonight.
The loser update returns next Tuesday.
Thank you for attending my TED talk.
Loser update update.
September 7th, 2023Obit watch: September 7, 2023.
September 7th, 2023Dr. Ferid Murad, Nobel prize winner.
He shared the prize in 1998 with Dr. Louis J. Ignarro and Dr. Robert F. Furchgott for their work on nitric oxide.
The researchers, working separately but in close communication, pressed ahead, and by the end of the 1980s had established that nitric oxide worked as a sort of signaling agent in the cardiovascular system, similar to hormones or neurotransmitters.
The discovery made possible a wide variety of drugs, most famously Viagra, which facilitates erections by increasing blood flow to the penis. It also saved the lives of countless premature babies, whose underdeveloped lungs needed stimulation, and patients with cardiovascular disease, which restricts blood flow.
Gloria Coates, composer.
Gary Wright, musician.
Marcia DeRousse, actress. Other credits include “The Fall Guy” and “St. Elsewhere”.
Giuliano Montaldo, Italian director and writer. IMDB.
From the “not quite an obit” department: Stephen Wolfram on Doug Lenat.
Random gun crankery, with a public service announcement.
September 7th, 2023The Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP) has opened up round 4 of 1911 pistol purchases. (Previously.)
Even better: with some limitations, you can purchase a second 1911, even if you’ve bought one from the CMP previously. That’s a new twist. There was formerly a lifetime limit of one 1911 per customer.
This might be your last chance to own a chunk of history. I, personally, won’t be buying one this time as I’m not eligible. (I technically got my 1911 this year, which disqualifies me.) But I’d really like to see some of my friends purchase 1911s from CMP, and if you need help navigating the process, I’ll be happy to try to help out.
Orders are being accepted through September 30th, so you’ve got some time.
Hattip: McThag.
Like buttah.
September 6th, 2023Let’s think about this for a few minutes.
The linked article says the butter sculpture weighs 800 pounds. That’s probably a approximate figure, and it may be somewhat lighter or heavier. But for our purposes, let’s use the 800 pound figure. As you’ll see shortly, we’re dealing with such large numbers, a few pounds either way won’t matter.
Now, as we all know, Bob, E=MC^2. Or, energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. So how much energy is there in 800 pounds of butter?
Bagatelle (#94)
September 6th, 2023Shot:
Chaser:
A retired doctor was arrested Tuesday after police allegedly discovered guns, drugs and prostitutes on his 70-foot yacht in Nantucket — following reports a distressed woman had possibly overdosed and “did not feel safe” onboard.
Scott Anthony Burke, 69, was slapped with drug trafficking and weapons charges after cops raided his luxury vessel — Jess Conn – and uncovered the trove of guns, cocaine and ketamine, court records obtained by The Boston Globe allege.
First, it was “no personal watercraft on Lake Austin during the holiday”.
Then, they put up big electronic signs telling us not to “drag chains” or “toss lit cigarettes” because of “wildfire risk”.
And now, it appears you can’t even have hookers, blow, and guns on your yacht. What am I supposed to do with my weekends now? And what’s the point of even having a yacht these days?
Joyless fun-suckers, sucking the fun out of everything.
Where do we get such men?
September 6th, 2023This is a Bell AH-1 “Cobra” helicopter.
It was commonly used as an attack helicopter during the Vietnam war. I would like for you to observe that it has two seats: one for the pilot and one for the co-pilot. It has no more seating inside. It is only designed to carry two people, plus armament and ammo. This will become significant in a little bit.
On Monday, Capt. Larry L. Taylor (United States Army – ret.) was awarded the Medal of Honor for actions on June 18, 1968.
Bagatelle (#93)
September 6th, 2023The street finds its own uses for things.
New Jersey business owner arrested for using a drone to drop dye packets into local swimming pools.
Oddly, it seems like his business was not a pool service business, but a heating and cooling service company. If it was a pool service company, that’d at least be understandable to me.
Obit watch: September 4, 2023.
September 4th, 2023Somebody out there is listening to me.
NYT obit for Marilyn Lovell (archived).
On Christmas Day 1968, while Mr. Lovell was on the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned spaceflight to orbit the moon, Ms. Lovell answered her door to find a representative from Neiman Marcus carrying a large box with moon-themed décor. In it was a mink coat and a note The New York Times would later describe as “the most romantic card in the universe”: “To Marilyn from the Man in the Moon.” Ms. Lovell did her household chores that day in pajamas and her new mink.
On that mission, Mr. Lovell named a triangle-shaped mountain on the lunar surface Mount Marilyn. It would later serve as a landmark for astronauts, and in 2017, after campaigning by Mr. Lovell, the name was officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union.
…
When Ms. Lovell’s 12-year-old daughter, Susan, became hysterical on seeing a priest at their door, Ms. Lovell found a way to soothe her. “Do you really think the best astronaut either one of us knows is going to forget something as simple as how to turn his spaceship around and fly it home?” she asked her daughter, according to Mr. Lovell’s memoir.
Reporters with notebooks, microphones and television cameras filled up the Lovell family lawn and driveway. She fielded a call from President Richard M. Nixon: “I just wanted you to know, Marilyn, that your president and the entire nation are watching your husband’s progress with concern,” he said. “Everything is being done to bring Jim home.”
…
When parachutes were seen on TV billowing out from the spaceship, guiding it safely to the ocean surface, a couple of famous astronauts in Ms. Lovell’s living room, Mr. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, opened champagne. President Nixon called with a new message: “I wanted to know if you’d care to accompany me to Hawaii to pick up your husband.”
She replied, “Mr. President, I’d love to.”
NYT obit for Douglas Lenat (archived).
Running across dozens of computers, Eurisko could discover possibilities that Dr. Lenat — and other humans — had not. But it needed help from human judgment. Machines could not be truly intelligent, he realized, unless they too had common sense.
The project was called Cyc. He set out to define the fundamental but largely unspoken laws that outline how the world works, including everything from “you can’t be in two places at the same time” to “when drinking a cup of coffee, you hold the open end up.” He knew it could take decades — perhaps centuries — to complete the project. But he was determined to try.
In recent years, the Cyc project — and the rule-based approach to A.I. research it represented — has fallen out of favor among leading A.I. researchers. Rather than defining intelligence rule by rule, line of code by line of code, the giants of the tech industry are now focused on systems that learn skills by analyzing massive amounts of digital data. This is how they build popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Many leading researchers now believe that this kind of sweeping data analysis will eventually reproduce common sense and reasoning. But as today’s computers struggle with even simple tasks and play fast and loose with the truth, others believe that the industry can learn from Dr. Lenat and his never-ending struggle to build common sense by hand.
My favorite Dr. Lenat story is partially in the article: the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron story.
In brief: Game Designers Workshop used to (still may) run a contest where you had a trillion “credits” to design the best possible fleet, according to the rulebook. The contestants were pitted against each other until one fleet won. Dr. Lenet fed the rules into Eurisko and iterated until it came up with what seemed to him to be an optimal strategy. He entered the 1981 tournament with his Eurisko designed fleet…and won.
The next year, GDW changed the rules. Dr. Lenet fed the revised rules into Eurisko, entered the tournament again…and won.
What the NYT obit doesn’t say: The third year, GDW told Dr. Lenet that if he entered the tournament with one of his weird computer designed fleets, they’d just cancel it completely. According to the Traveller wiki, he agreed to accept “the title ‘Grand Admiral’ as consolation.
Steve Harwell, former lead singer of Smashmouth. THR. Pitchfork.
Not much to say about this, really. 56 is awfully young, but all the stories go out of the way to mention his issues. And I was never a big fan of the band, with the possible exception of “Walkin’ on the Sun”.
Gayle Hunnicutt. Other credits include “Mister Roberts” (the TV series), “Get Smart”, and “Marlowe” (the 1969 movie with James Garner). (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Obit watch: September 3, 2023.
September 3rd, 2023I have seen a bunch of reports, but none I feel comfortable linking to, that Doug Lenet, artificial intelligence pioneer and good Austin guy, has passed away. When I find a good obit, I’ll post it on the blog.
Bill Richardson, former Congressperson, former governor of New Mexico, and negotiator.
His separate humanitarian missions on behalf of some 80 families won the release of hostages and American servicemen in countries hostile to the United States, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba and Colombia.
“I plead guilty to photo ops and getting human beings rescued and improving the lives of human beings,” he once said.
Marilyn Lovell, wife of astronaut Jim Lovell. I will probably post an update here when I find a better obit.
I know I’ve said “I’ll post a better obit” twice in one post, but it seems like, with the holiday weekend, we’re sort of in a dry spot for reporting about most things.
Obit watch: September 2, 2023.
September 2nd, 2023Jimmy Buffett. THR. Pitchfork.
Thing I did not know: Mr. Buffett and Jerry Jeff Walker were buddies.
…
The Margaritaville Store on Amazon, just in case you want your own frozen concoction maker. Frankly, $350 seems steep.
It looks like the nearest Margaritaville restaurant to me is in San Antonio. But there is one in Tulsa, Mike.
IMDB. That was the bad “Hawaii Five-0”. He was also in “Repo Man” (!!!!).
…
Mr. Buffett was also an accomplished author; he was one of only six writers, along with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and William Styron, to top both The Times’s fiction and nonfiction best-seller lists. By the time he wrote “Tales From Margaritaville” (1989), the first of his three No. 1 best sellers, he had abandoned the hedonistic lifestyle he once embraced.
“I could wind up like a lot of my friends did, burned out or dead, or redirect the energy,” he told The Washington Post in 1989. “I’m not old, but I’m getting older. That period of my life is over. It was fun — all that hard drinking, hard drugging. No apologies.”
“I still have a very happy life,” he went on. “I just don’t do the things I used to do.”
…
An avid pilot, Mr. Buffett owned several aircraft and often flew himself to his shows. In 1994, he crashed one of his airplanes in waters near Nantucket, Mass., while taking off. He survived the accident, swimming to safety with only minor injuries.
In 1996, another of his planes, Hemisphere Dancer, was shot at by the Jamaican police, who suspected the craft was being used to smuggle marijuana. Onboard the airplane, which sustained little damage, were Bono of U2; Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records; and Mr. Buffett’s wife and two daughters. The Jamaican authorities later admitted that the incident was a case of mistaken identity, inspiring Mr. Buffett to write the song “Jamaica Mistaica,” a droll sendup of the affair.
I’ve never been a Parrot Head, but I did own a copy of “Margaritaville” on a 45 RPM single. (Kids, ask your parents, etc.) I may have a rare (for me) margarita tonight in his honor.
Obit watch: September 1, 2023.
September 1st, 2023Gil Brandt, one of the men who built the Dallas Cowboys.
Mr. Brandt joined the Cowboys in 1960, before their first season, and worked beside Tom Landry, the taciturn head coach, and Tex Schramm, the innovative president and general manager, to make them a perennial winner and a two-time Super Bowl champion. In time, the Cowboys became known as “America’s Team.”
As the team’s vice president of player personnel, Mr. Brandt was known for expanding his scouting beyond major-conference schools. He drafted future stars like the wide receiver Bob Hayes, the defensive tackle Jethro Pugh, the offensive lineman Rayfield Wright and the linebacker Thomas (Hollywood) Henderson, who all played at historically Black colleges and universities.
Mr. Hayes, Mr. Wright, and the quarterbacks Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman are among the nine players whose drafting Mr. Brandt oversaw who were later elected to the Hall of Fame.
…
At Mr. Schramm’s suggestion, Mr. Brandt began using a massive IBM computer in 1962 to meticulously evaluate prospects. He assigned numerical values to many personality traits, including character and competitiveness, and to many physical qualities like quickness and strength; stored them on punch cards; and loaded them into the computer.
The result was a database that enabled the Cowboys to sift through information quickly and comprehensively, weigh the talents of prospects and make recommendations to Mr. Landry and Mr. Schramm. This gave the team a competitive edge.
…
Mohamed al-Fayed. I’m not sure how many people remember that name.
…
He’s probably better remembered as the father of Emad “Dodi” al-Fayed, who was killed with Princess Dianna and Henri Paul.
As rumors and conspiracy theories swirled, Mr. Fayed declared that the two had been murdered by “people who did not want Diana and Dodi to be together.” He said they had been engaged to marry and maintained that they had called him an hour before the crash to tell him that she was pregnant. Buckingham Palace and the princess’s family denounced his remarks as malicious fantasy.
The deaths inspired waves of books, articles and investigations of conspiracy theories, as well as a period of soul-searching among Britons, who resented the royal family’s standoffish behavior and were caught up in displays of mass grief. In 2006, the British police ruled the crash an accident.
And in 2008, a British coroner’s jury rejected all conspiracy theories involving the royal family, British intelligence services and others. It attributed the deaths to “gross negligence” by the driver and the pursuing paparazzi. It also said a French pathologist had found that Diana was not pregnant.
Mr. Fayed called the verdict biased, but he and his lawyers did not pursue the matter further. “I’ve had enough,” he told Britain’s ITV News. “I’m leaving this to God to get my revenge.”
Quick and dirty updates.
August 30th, 2023The Elvis gun went for $199,750. I don’t know if that’s inclusive of the bidder’s premium. (Previously.)
I wrote a while back about the criminal charges against Thomas Moyer, Apple’s security head and the somewhat related (I think) case against former Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith.
I missed, however, that the case against Moyer was dismissed in 2021.
But: a California appellate court reinstated the charges last week.
Appellate decision here. Interesting quote:
During the relevant time frame, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office rarely issued CCW licenses. Indeed, the office’s practice was to not even process an application for a CCW license absent a special instruction to do so. Only Sheriff Laurie Smith and a small number of others in the Sheriff’s Office had the authority to give such instructions. One of those individuals was Rick Sung, who appears to have run Sheriff Smith’s 2018 re-election campaign and after the election became the undersheriff, second in command to the sheriff. Undersheriff Sung also had authority to place license applications on hold even after licenses were signed by the sheriff.