I have just one question about President Bush's trip to Europe: Did he and Laura go shopping?
If they did, I would love to have been a fly on the wall when Laura must have said to George: "George, do you remember how much these Belgian chocolates cost when we were here four years ago? This box of mints was $10. Now it's $15? What happened to the dollar, George? Why is the euro worth so much more now, honey? Didn't Rummy say Europe was old? If we didn't have Air Force One, we never could have afforded this trip on your salary!"
Friday, February 25, 2005
Honey, I shrunk the dollar
Taken from Spiegel On-line: Opinion: Honey, I shrunk the dollar
Thursday, February 24, 2005
How could I have missed this?
It turns out Alan Keyes' daughter is a lesbian. She apparently came out at a PFLAG meeting earlier this month. I can't believe I missed this wonderful IRONIC STORY.
CNN.com: Daughter of conservative Republican calls herself 'liberal queer'
You see, the reason it's ironic is that Alan Keyes has been putting his foot in his mouth all of his life, and he really took a big gulp last year just before the election.
CNN.com: Daughter of conservative Republican calls herself 'liberal queer'
You see, the reason it's ironic is that Alan Keyes has been putting his foot in his mouth all of his life, and he really took a big gulp last year just before the election.
Her father, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois last year, created a stir in August when he said during an interview that homosexuality was "selfish hedonism" and that Vice President Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter was a sinner.His actual quote was that if his own daughter was gay, he would tell her that she was being a selfish hedonist. Well, NOW HE GETS THE CHANCE. Isn't it great?
You can't do everything, and so everything can't be done right...
So due to graduate school, I didn't do FIRST this year. It just would have taken too much time, and four years of FIRST really was enough. I thought I recruited some good talent onto the team and left them with enough tidbits of info to help them get start out better than I did. At least, that's what I thought.
You see, FIRST is a national robotics competition that aims to introduce high schoolers to more advanced science and technology by exposing them to real engineers doing real engineering problems (like building large robots to compete in complicated competitions).
Last year Tom and I were in our fifth year of undergrad and both doing some in-depth study of controls engineering, so we decided to extend some of this into FIRST. We did some pretty interesting things (for a FIRST team) with drive train and arm control on the robot last year. And on top of that, we taught the high schoolers about things like PID and heuristic tuning of PID constants. This brought us the "Engineering Inspiration" award, the silver medal at the regional competition we went to. This also won us a ticket to nationals. And it made some of the mentors (like Tom and me) feel pretty proud.
So that was the last year we both did work with FIRST. This year the remaining FIRST memebers were trying to duplicate some of the robust control that we did. In retrospect, I don't think we did a whole lot, but apparently it was more difficult than I remember.
They just don't get it. No matter how much you show them, they all keep reverting back to the naive solutions that, to them, look novel, but to anyone with half a brain, look idiotic.
And there are little things too -- like they couldn't figure out how to turn the relays (just DPCO 4-way switches between the battery and the thing being driven) into simple SPST switches for the compressor (so they don't accidently reverse the polarity on the compressor). This is just simple stuff. Anyone who actually knows what "ground" ACTUALLY means should be able to do this.
In fact, that should have been the test. When they came to me for help (via e-mail advice), I should have said that before I give them help, they have to prove to me that they at least know how to turn a DPCO 4-way into an SPST for driving a polarized compressor. If they failed to do that, I'd say that my help would be useless to them.
It's hard for me to accept that even though I know what's best, there are going to be plenty of people who simply don't know enough to actually be able to do what's best. I guess that's what it's like to be an engineer. A world full of people who appear to be idiots but simply are just stupid.
You see, FIRST is a national robotics competition that aims to introduce high schoolers to more advanced science and technology by exposing them to real engineers doing real engineering problems (like building large robots to compete in complicated competitions).
Last year Tom and I were in our fifth year of undergrad and both doing some in-depth study of controls engineering, so we decided to extend some of this into FIRST. We did some pretty interesting things (for a FIRST team) with drive train and arm control on the robot last year. And on top of that, we taught the high schoolers about things like PID and heuristic tuning of PID constants. This brought us the "Engineering Inspiration" award, the silver medal at the regional competition we went to. This also won us a ticket to nationals. And it made some of the mentors (like Tom and me) feel pretty proud.
So that was the last year we both did work with FIRST. This year the remaining FIRST memebers were trying to duplicate some of the robust control that we did. In retrospect, I don't think we did a whole lot, but apparently it was more difficult than I remember.
They just don't get it. No matter how much you show them, they all keep reverting back to the naive solutions that, to them, look novel, but to anyone with half a brain, look idiotic.
And there are little things too -- like they couldn't figure out how to turn the relays (just DPCO 4-way switches between the battery and the thing being driven) into simple SPST switches for the compressor (so they don't accidently reverse the polarity on the compressor). This is just simple stuff. Anyone who actually knows what "ground" ACTUALLY means should be able to do this.
In fact, that should have been the test. When they came to me for help (via e-mail advice), I should have said that before I give them help, they have to prove to me that they at least know how to turn a DPCO 4-way into an SPST for driving a polarized compressor. If they failed to do that, I'd say that my help would be useless to them.
It's hard for me to accept that even though I know what's best, there are going to be plenty of people who simply don't know enough to actually be able to do what's best. I guess that's what it's like to be an engineer. A world full of people who appear to be idiots but simply are just stupid.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Pope: Gay marraige part of 'ideology of evil'
This guy (Pope: Gay marriage is 'evil') has got to go.
It all seems so hypocritical because:
It all seems so hypocritical because:
- The Catholic Church makes a business out of taking people up the ass.
- You know a guy as groovy as Jesus had to have a guy on the side. Maybe Judas was just a disgruntled lover?
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Stereotypes
Just because it's a stereotype apparently doesn't make it any less true . . .
Kid Rock arrested on assault charges
[ Side Note: Kid Rock is a rapper? When did this happen? Additionally, I'm sure $3,000 is the appropriate bail for Kid Rock. Good call there. ]
Kid Rock arrested on assault charges
NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) -- Kid Rock was arrested Wednesday by Nashville police on charges that he punched a disc jockey at a strip club.
The 34-year-old rapper was released after posting a $3,000 bond on a charge of simple assault, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.
[ Side Note: Kid Rock is a rapper? When did this happen? Additionally, I'm sure $3,000 is the appropriate bail for Kid Rock. Good call there. ]
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
*WEAK* Law of Large Numbers
So recently someone forwarded this RedNova News article to me:
Can This Black Box See Into the Future?
It actually refers to a real project going on at Priceton:
Global Conciousness Project
Now, the RedNova article does a pretty poor job explaining what's going on at Priceton, so this blog is going to appear to be poking fun at Princeton (and in some small amount it is), but it's mainly making fun of the idiots at RedNova.
For one, if the REG was generating 0's and 1's and adding the next flip to the sum of the previous flips, there's no way the line could hover around zero. Neither 0 nor 1 is negative, so it cannot ever decrease! (also note that the REG is man-made, so it will never be truly random)
So I'm assuming they meant the REG was generating a discrete uniform distribution taken from the support set {-1,1} and logging the cumulative sum of those flips (that sum would thus be a random process). Now, this random process IS NOT SURELY CONVERGENT. RedNova is trying to use the law of large numbers to illustrate what's going on, but they don't realize that they're just using the WEAK law of large numbers here. In reality, as time goes on, the probability that this random process converges to 0 actually DECREASES.
So I decided to generate some examples. I simulated this random process (using MATLAB's uniform random number generator) three times for 5000000 trials each. Since each of their trials is a second long, this corresponds to what you might expect to see if you ran this random process for about 58 days straight. Notice that these plots are not flat lines, do not stay near zero, and have lots of strange trends that should not be interpretted as some blip in the global consciousness. Pay attention to the scale too. These are not drifting a little; they are drifting by thousands of points each realization. Note though that if you bin the values coming from the random vector generating this process, it's almost perfectly uniformly distributed on {-1,1}.
Does this mean something really big is about to happen?
Can This Black Box See Into the Future?
It actually refers to a real project going on at Priceton:
Global Conciousness Project
Now, the RedNova article does a pretty poor job explaining what's going on at Priceton, so this blog is going to appear to be poking fun at Princeton (and in some small amount it is), but it's mainly making fun of the idiots at RedNova.
For one, if the REG was generating 0's and 1's and adding the next flip to the sum of the previous flips, there's no way the line could hover around zero. Neither 0 nor 1 is negative, so it cannot ever decrease! (also note that the REG is man-made, so it will never be truly random)
So I'm assuming they meant the REG was generating a discrete uniform distribution taken from the support set {-1,1} and logging the cumulative sum of those flips (that sum would thus be a random process). Now, this random process IS NOT SURELY CONVERGENT. RedNova is trying to use the law of large numbers to illustrate what's going on, but they don't realize that they're just using the WEAK law of large numbers here. In reality, as time goes on, the probability that this random process converges to 0 actually DECREASES.
So I decided to generate some examples. I simulated this random process (using MATLAB's uniform random number generator) three times for 5000000 trials each. Since each of their trials is a second long, this corresponds to what you might expect to see if you ran this random process for about 58 days straight. Notice that these plots are not flat lines, do not stay near zero, and have lots of strange trends that should not be interpretted as some blip in the global consciousness. Pay attention to the scale too. These are not drifting a little; they are drifting by thousands of points each realization. Note though that if you bin the values coming from the random vector generating this process, it's almost perfectly uniformly distributed on {-1,1}.
Does this mean something really big is about to happen?
Monday, February 14, 2005
Saturday, February 12, 2005
The Hunt for Red October
The Hunt for Red October was on TV tonight. I really like that movie. I really do. Such a good movie.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Bombing Iraq: It's Fun and SAFE
So North Korea came out today saying that they're going to "bolster its nuclear weapons arsenal." This is the first time North Korea has actually admitted actually having nuclear weapons. The Bush administration really hopes that China will get involved, even though in the inauguration we were told that spreading freedom and democracy is our number one priority. (not really China's way) But that's not what I want to comment on this post...
Iran also had similar sentiments as North Korea, as seen in Iran says it won't give up nuclear technology.
Now, as everyone [QUOTE]now[/QUOTE] sees, Iraq never had any WMD. At first, people said that it was sad that we spent so much of our military resources on Iraq when North Korea and Iran were a far greater great, but can you imagine what it would have been like if we attacked North Korea or Iran? They might have shot back!
It's pretty clear that Bush was going to bomb SOMEBODY. He's accustomed to lining up babies in his back hard and blowing their heads off for God or some other reason, so it just makes sense that he was going to need to kill SOMETHING while in office.
So he actually made a smart decision. Pick the guy who doesn't have ANY WEAPONS AT ALL. If he would have bombed Iran or North Korea, they might have actually retaliated! Iraq had **NO CHANCE** of retaliating as they had NO WEAPONS.
So if you're looking for a good place to bomb, Iraq is definitely a good choice. You get all the "fun" of "shooting some people" without any worry about them shooting back.
The moral of the story: if you want Bush to leave you alone, build nuclear weapons. It's much safer that way.
Iran also had similar sentiments as North Korea, as seen in Iran says it won't give up nuclear technology.
Now, as everyone [QUOTE]now[/QUOTE] sees, Iraq never had any WMD. At first, people said that it was sad that we spent so much of our military resources on Iraq when North Korea and Iran were a far greater great, but can you imagine what it would have been like if we attacked North Korea or Iran? They might have shot back!
It's pretty clear that Bush was going to bomb SOMEBODY. He's accustomed to lining up babies in his back hard and blowing their heads off for God or some other reason, so it just makes sense that he was going to need to kill SOMETHING while in office.
So he actually made a smart decision. Pick the guy who doesn't have ANY WEAPONS AT ALL. If he would have bombed Iran or North Korea, they might have actually retaliated! Iraq had **NO CHANCE** of retaliating as they had NO WEAPONS.
So if you're looking for a good place to bomb, Iraq is definitely a good choice. You get all the "fun" of "shooting some people" without any worry about them shooting back.
The moral of the story: if you want Bush to leave you alone, build nuclear weapons. It's much safer that way.
SIDE NOTE: Someone being interviewed on Lou Dobbs Tonight (an AWFUL show) just mentioned that people are mistaken if they say we went into Iraq for WMD's. Apparently we went there to change a region of the world for the betterment of mankind. If Bush would have said that then, no one would have been behind him. If he's saying that now, someone needs to play his own press releases back to him.
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