Important Breaking News from The Hill!

Stop the not-presses!

US President Barack Obama, in a speech delivered to a special meeting of the UN General Assembly, is calling Lady Gaga’s rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner — in which she swapped the lyrics “home of the brave” for “home for the gays” — “reprehensible.”

Shocking and momentous!

Hang on a sec, we may have misread...oh yeah, it wasn't anyone important saying anything important to anyone else important anywhere important, it was no-longer-a-congressman Allen West writing a Facebook post, which is something like what that guy in accounts payable who gets red-faced does. Except that guy in accounts payable has a useful day job.

In a Monday Facebook post, West wrote, “Having served in the US Army for 22 years alongside some very brave men and women, I find Lady Gaga's defiling of our National Anthem reprehensible.”

West has apparently been hired by Fox News, so no wonder Facebook has given him a rare spot on its editorial page, the prestige of which outstrips even the mighty— oh forget it.

Correction

Let My People Go to Jail

Wingnut welfare bum Thomas Sowell:

When teenage thugs are called "troubled youth" by people on the political left, that tells us more about the mindset of the left than about these young hoodlums.

Seldom is there a speck of evidence that the thugs are troubled, and often there is ample evidence that they are in fact enjoying themselves, as they create trouble and dangers for others.

Why then the built-in excuse, when juvenile hoodlums are called "troubled youth" and mass murderers are just assumed to be "insane"?

At least as far back as the 18th century, the left has struggled to avoid facing the plain fact of evil -- that some people simply choose to do things that they know to be wrong when they do them. Every kind of excuse, from poverty to an unhappy childhood, is used by the left to explain and excuse evil.

One such excuse is the lure of money. It leads people to do and say the strangest things.

All the people who have come out of poverty or unhappy childhoods, or both, and become decent and productive human beings, are ignored. So are the evils committed by people raised in wealth and privilege, including kings, conquerors and slaveowners.

I am stumped! Has anyone on the left written an appreciation of anyone who came from humble circumstances? Or referred to a king or conqueror or slave-owner as evil? No?

It seems to me that there is an opportunity here to put forth some kind of innovative political program.

Prior-to-Melting Linkage

Kanye West:

You want the historical record to be right.

Yeah, I don’t want them to rewrite history right in front of us. At least, not on my clock. I really appreciate the moments that I was able to win rap album of the year or whatever. But after a while, it’s like: “Wait a second; this isn’t fair. This is a setup.” I remember when both Gnarls Barkley and Justin [Timberlake] lost for Album of the Year, and I looked at Justin, and I was like: “Do you want me to go onstage for you? You know, do you want me to fight” —

For you.

For what’s right. I am so credible and so influential and so relevant that I will change things. So when the next little girl that wants to be, you know, a musician and give up her anonymity and her voice to express her talent and bring something special to the world, and it’s time for us to roll out and say, “Did this person have the biggest thing of the year?” — that thing is more fair because I was there.

But has that instinct led you astray? Like the Taylor Swift interruption at the MTV Video Music Awards, things like that.

It’s only led me to complete awesomeness at all times. It’s only led me to awesome truth and awesomeness. Beauty, truth, awesomeness. That’s all it is.

MooseStache:Someone is attempting to turn news into a flow of information chunks rather than articles:

The news business creates a pile of new content every day and then, effectively, throws it away and starts again. How does structuring news help you to you reuse content?

I call it news amnesia. If you do articles, you have to do this since you need something new today. I think it's as frustrating for journalists as it is for the readers. What we do is say “Here's the latest fact and the story it belongs in”. Maybe it belongs in two stories. We will then point these stories to each other. Nelson Mandela has been in hospital maybe five times in the last year. We have a story tracking this and people are following it and eventually when he dies we will update it. People do that already with pre-written obits but that's the exception. For a lot of other stories like legislation – say gay marriage in France – we were tracking it until it finally went through and then all we had to do was say “passed”. All the background, we already have that.

I hate Facebook, but Facebook is also an accumulation of cool data:

A photo doesn't have to be posted by a very popular page in order to trigger a large cascade. On January 17, 2013, a young Norwegian man by the name of Petter Kverneng posted a photo following the format of other "Million Likes" memes (MLM). The essence of this meme is that someone claims that they will have some sought after request granted (usually receiving a pet puppy or kitten) if their photo is liked one million times. In Mr. Kverneng's photo he is shown holding up a sign saying that his friend would have sex with him if the photo gets 1 million likes. The intent was not serious, as Mr. Kverneng later told ABC News: “it started as a joke, and it ended as a joke. Me and Catherine are just friends.” Nevertheless, the photo received a million likes in less than a day, producing a cascade of reshares, a subset of which is visualized below.

Freedom Sucks

Non-libertarian Cal Thomas:

One doesn't have to approve of the Court's "reasoning" in order to hand it to the gay rights campaigners. They have done a magnificent job advancing their objectives, but they couldn't have done it alone. A verse from the Old Testament warns about the detrimental effects such "advances" can have on individuals and nations that abandon moral boundaries: "In those days Israel had no king; everyone did what was right in his own eyes." -- Judges 17:6, NIV

Then, fortunately, there came an era in which the potty-mouthed could be stoned to death.*

*The Lovely Daughter and I were coming home from a doctor's appointment the other day and there was a shirtless crazy guy on the opposite corner swearing away. A sweet little old lady approached us and said "They should make public swearing illegal." The Lovely Daughter can say "bullshit" in Chinese with a good accent, but unlike her dad has decorum enough to refrain from calling elderly ladies crazy and fortunate to possess a shirt.

Henry and Glenn Forever

Since a certain Bastard has yet again made fun of Glenn Danzig, I suppose it's worth someone's while to point out Henry and Glenn Forever.



And of course an image search will net you much more.

Mixed Blessings

In the vast pool of people threatening to chop off your head and keep it as a souvenir, Ray Charles was less of a threat than most.

Why Republicans Lose

When Obama fucks up, the Republicans prove their barbarity.

Free Labour

After all that LGM internship stuff, more internships:

Two former interns have filed complaints with government against Bell Mobility, alleging the telecom giant broke labour laws by not paying them for work they did for the company.

“It felt like I was sitting in an office as an employee, doing regular work. It didn’t feel like a sort of training program,” said Jainna Patel, 24, who was an unpaid intern with Bell for five weeks last year.

“They just squeezed out of you every hour they could get and never showed any intent of paying.”
Jainna Patel says her internship with Bell Mobility was no different from an entry-level job, plus overtime, except that she didn't get a paycheque.

She filed a complaint with federal authorities in May 2012, which has yet to be resolved.

Patel and others were "associates" in a Bell program that invites 280 post-secondary grads per year to work voluntarily in Bell’s Mississauga, Ont., complex, for three to four months at a time, on projects that are supposed to enhance their future careers.

Thankfully, it's CBC reportage so...

Toronto lawyer Andrew Langille has studied the laws regarding internships and has helped interns with claims against several Canadian companies.

Overall, he estimates up to 300,000 young people are now working as unpaid interns in Canada. He suggests the vast majority of those arrangements are illegal.

“My estimates are somewhere above 90 per cent should be paid and they are not being paid,” said Langille.

[...]

“We’ve seen explosive growth within intern culture in the last 10 years in Canada and particularly in the wake of the global financial crisis,” he said.

So interships weren't an integral part of higher education for ever and ever and ever?

Autoluminescent

Jeepers, a Rowland S. Howard bio.

The Glories of Edmonton

Should we assume this is a typo?



See also.

The Bible is TRUE!

Newsflash!

I enjoy collecting information about studies that relate to some aspect of the Bible. Over and over, social science data tends to confirm the Scriptures.

A new study verifies the truth revealed in Paul’s statement in the Bible that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.

Paul didn’t say that money is the root of evil---although I’ve heard people misrepresent the Bible as supposedly saying that. Nor did he say it’s the lack of money that is the root of evil, although I’ve heard some people say that’s what it should say.

Yet I’ve known some poor people who were very greedy, and some rich who were not.

Well, a new study validates what the Bible said 2,000 years ago---not that it needs validation---that the love of money is indeed a corrupting influence.

Writing for CNBC, Mark Koba penned a report, “Just the Scent of Money is Corrupting: Study.”

Koba writes, “The report by University of Utah and Harvard researchers found that individuals who could gain monetarily through unethical behavior were more likely to demonstrate that behavior than those who weren't offered a financial gain.”

It's a pity there weren't other books on earth that mentioned this tendency, but few are as perspicacious as crazy desert zealots. This certainly confirms the story of Jesus filling up a pig with demons.

Inconvenience

Katie Kieffer makes the pro-life argument for universal health care:

I agree with the president in that, as women, we have the right to make our own health decisions. However the right to look after our own health is totally different from our right to kill, which is only a “right” if we kill in self-defense. Save for the extraordinarily rare cases where carrying or delivering a baby naturally will result in the mother’s death, there is no argument for killing an innocent baby out of self-defense.

I am sure it must be very distressing and frightening to face an unplanned pregnancy. For the young woman, I can see how she would feel like she should have the right to choose to end her baby’s life so that she does not need to deal with the expected inconvenience. But how can we compare inconvenience to life? It seems like they cannot be weighed against each other.

Quite an argument to present at Townhall, Katie, but keep plugging away and one day you'll get your socialized medicine.

Free Textbooks

Here are five free textbooks from OpenStax College. Whatever the hell that is.

Thus far:

College Physics
Introduction to Sociology
Biology
Concepts of Biology
Anatomy and Physiology

What the hell is it again?

OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Our free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course. Through our partnerships with companies and foundations committed to reducing costs for students, OpenStax College is working to improve access to higher education for all. OpenStax College is an initiative of Rice University and is made possible through the generous support of several philanthropic foundations.

POOP!

Intersection

Here's an intersection near my place:



This is at night, about 20 minutes ago. Back to basics in Quartz Composer. Top level:



Render in Image is piling up images from the stuff contained within it, according to how those things display colour. There's also a white background, as the image coming through is a few colours and as literally nothing as you can express on a computer. Inside there:



Video Input is split, one path removes the colour and ups the contrast to near black-and-whiteness. The black goes to alpha, which is transparency. That masks the plain video so the only things that poke through are bright chunks of the image. The Blending setting of the Billboard is set to Over, so images it produces are drawn on top of previous ones. The Blending setting of the Sprite is set to Add: a smidge of really dark nearly transparent colour eventually adds up to white, producing the fade. Might have to up the Sprite colour value a little there... It's another approach to get at this, and much less of a strain on the processor.

Soundtrack...um...

Vancouver Draw Down

Get here quick!

Check out the Main St. Poodle Doodle, join a Comic Jam, draw on a sports field with field marking chalk and much much more.

The Vancouver Draw Down celebrates creativity and challenges everyday ideas about what drawing is and what it can do. On June 15 over 35 FREE drawing workshops will take place across the city in community centres, museums, art galleries, neighbourhood houses and public parks.

The Lovely Daughter wants to be a hippie:

Tune In, Turn On, and Draw Down at Kitsilano
Liquid Light drawing with Sydney Hermant
Saturday, June 15, 2013 from 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Kitsilano Community Centre, Lobby Room, 2690 Larch St., Vancouver
FREE

Using techniques developed for psychedelic overhead projection in the 1960s, join Sydney Hermant to create and trace moving murals, accompanied by a psych-rock playlist.

Trees

Sound for the above from OBS:



I've been playing with filtered video in Quartz Composer. What I'm eventually aiming at is some kind of image accumulation; I'd like whatever's in motion to add to the image and whatever's static to stay. A big problem there is that video is inherently noisy, so if your method of accumulation is registering change, everything in every frame is changing pretty much all the time. The scary trees above are not entirely the product of psychedelic mushrooms, but instead are oak trees in the yard with two layers of edge-detection combined, one produces black edges and one produces coloured edges, the theory being that images might be best accumulated with edge detection because the rest of the image is undisturbed; a little jitter and a spot of colour remains, outlined in black. And indeed there are a few dead spots. Unfortunately the colours are like a plastic robot vomiting tinker toys, but it's a step.

Hmm, maybe there could be histogram comparisons between images and a drastic enough change produces an addition...

Play in Quartz Composer is probably something of a dead end now that Apple's new developer tools are out and there's not really any mention of it. Other things are out there that produce varying levels of satisfaction along these lines, but they're just not as easy/developed yet. I'm hoping that Field gets a little more usable for me.

Immigration

There are about 450 outfits offering nursing degrees in the Philippines, so this is an interesting news story:

Attention nursing students and parents of nurse aspirants, check with the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) if your school is accredited while there is still time to transfer and/or refund your tuition. This after the CHED ordered the closure of 218 nursing schools nationwide for sub-standard education.*

According to the CHED, these nursing schools are being closed for having consistently done poorly in nurse licensure examinations conducted by the PRC (Professional Regulation Commission) biannually.

The list of nursing schools up for closure has not been released yet because some have appealed the CHED's decision. When these are resolved, the full list will be made public.

For now, nursing students and their parents can contact the CHED directly at telephone no. 441-1228 to check if their school is in the list.

The education system there has a large component that exists solely to export people. And I gather there are lots of reasons to leave. So welcome, poorly qualified friends!

*Goes in the "believe it when you see it" file.

All Hail the Cloud

Via Tom Slee in comments at Crooked Timber, a nifty little presentation on scalability issues around really huge graphs. From the National Security Agency. Topical geekery! I didn't know about Accumulo for instance.

Anyway...start at 8:20. Haven't got the time to figure out YouTube embeds again.



Golly, if the NSA people manage to get the brain graph going someone will have a head in the cloud.

Cheap and Nasty.

Noticed here.