So far, this blog hasn't been blessed with much in the way of comments, but we got a doozy this afternoon.

Check out the first (and at the time of this posting) only comment on this post.

Just go ahead and read as much of it as you can before getting bored. The start of the final paragraph, though, I think is illuminating:

A word for those who respond with the usual 'I know more than you. Look how smart, knowledgable, and articulate I am' crap. Let me say this in advance. I don't claim to be an expert in this field.

In other words: "I know how things really are, don't confuse me with the facts!"

The next employment report comes out on Friday, and I'm going to make a prediction: for the first time since December of 2006, the Household survey will begin to rise--and won't continue to bounce in the 145-146 million jobs range that it has been in for going on two years.

Of course, the counterargument would be all the reports of illegal laborers returning home. They count in this survey, and the fewer jobs they are around to fill, the fewer jobs there are.

We'll see.

It's pretty clear to me that the media are hyping Palin's family situation out of a complete misunderstanding and complete lack of knowledge of what they sneer as the "religious right". They want, they are salivating, they are thrilled with the idea that the "religious right"--of which they know nothing--will throw out Palin because of her daughter's indiscretion. "Unmarried sex!" cry the media, while giddy over their belief that the "religious right" won't tolerate such a thing.

Clueless, absolutely clueless.

I doubt many of the heavy hitters in the media know any, and certainly aren't close to, anyone who would consider themselves "religious right". In that complete ignorance, they make a fundamental miscalculation:

Assumption: The religious right is intolerant--a girl who gets pregnant as an unmarried teen would be run out of town on a rail by the Jesus freaks, shunned by her family and community forever!!! The more we hype Palin's daughter's pregnancy, they think, the more sure it will be that Palin will be forced by the Hezbullah wing of the Republican party to drop out--thus discrediting McCain and striking a mighty blow for Obama! Obama! Obama!

Truth: The religious right are religious people who try to walk in the footsteps of Jesus--a guy who put forgiveness and acceptance of sinners awfully high on his priority list. The Sermon on the Mount for starters: "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven...And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" Or how about a little John: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

If they actually weren't creatures of the metropolitan coasts, and actually got out more, the media might have a clue.

As it is, while they think they are trashing the Republicans, they are actually helping them. That's how clueless they really are.

T. Boone Pickens has an ad or two in which he calls our purchasing of foreign oil "the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind." If I buy a car for $20k, is that a $20k transfer of my wealth to the car dealer? Is the car dealer $20k richer? Am I $20k poorer? Don't I have the car?



But what do I know. I'm not a billionaire.

Ann says: You are correct in that if I pay what I consider a reasonable price (or an unreasonable one that I must make out of necessity) for your product, and in return I get the use of that product, then it's true it is a 1:1 trade.

However, if I pull a commodity out of the ground for a few dollars a unit, but because of a real or perceived scarcity of that product, I can charge more than ten times the production cost, then I'm getting an awfully good deal out of it. And, if I then use my capital gains for nefarious things...such as funding a world-wide religious cult bent on world domination, which also just happens to engage in widespread war and terrorism against the very people who paid me for my commodity--people who themselves have vast quantities of this same commodity that they refuse to exploit, then all I have to say to the people who bought my stuff is this: SUCKERS!!!!

I don't know much about Sarah Palin, McCain's choice for his VP running mate. Her name was certainly floating around out there as a potential candidate, so it wasn't a complete surprise. Still, it seems like a bold choice on McCain's part.

The question that first comes up is her experience. Some Republicans worry that her lack thereof means they can no longer criticise Obama's lack thereof. I don't think that is much of a point; if Obama's lack of experience were going to hurt him it would have done so already, during the Democratic primaries. On the other hand, the Democrats will find it difficult to criticize her lack of experience without drawing more attention to Obama's thin resume. And I think their claim that running for president counts as presidential experience is laughable.

What is certain is that the Republicans have been energized by this pick. There is a buzz around the right-wing blogosphere that the campaign outlook has changed, and changed for the better. I have no doubt that Palin will bring in more votes for McCain than Biden will bring in for Obama.

It should be an interesting couple of months ahead.

I watched a little of Obama's convention speech, and read some more of it. I can't say that I was very impressed. It seemed mostly to be a list of goodies that he promises to deliver: free health care, affordable college, high-quality jobs, re-vitalized Detroit, and end to the outsourcing of jobs overseas, plentiful cheap and clean energy, etc. Of course, he also promises to make "the other guy" pay for it all. This is change? It sounded like every other Democratic presidential campaign speech since the New Deal.

The great breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence has been just around the corner for the past 50 years or so. From Instapundit I found this link:

I hope Intel warned the Luddites and pessimists away at the door, because the chipmaker had a lot of bullish statements Thursday [August 21] about its belief that computers will become smarter than humans.
At the Intel Developer Forum here, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner showed off a number of technologies in computing, robotics, and communication that he cited as evidence that Ray Kurzweil’s concept of “singularity,” when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, is impending.

Demonstrations spotlighted the wireless transmission of electrical power, dextrous robots with new sensory abilities, a direct interface to the brain, programmable materials that can be used for shape-shifting devices such as resizable cell phones, and silicon photonics that enables chips to communicate with photons rather than electrons.
“We’re making steady progress toward Ray Kurzweil’s singularity,” Rattner said.

Do you notice anything in common about the "demonstrations" mentioned above? None of them have much, if anything to do with A.I. Whether computers are powered wirelessly or through a cord is not relevant to how they process information. Nor does a more dexterous robotic hand make a computer more intelligent. Interfacing to the human brain may link human intelligence to computers, but that's not really A.I. Programmable materials sound interesting, but as far as AI goes, the question is the programming, not the materials. And photon-based computing may yield faster computers, but speed alone is not what makes for machine intelligence.

Count me among the Luddites and pessimists.

Happy Labor Day everyone! We had my wife's sister and husband over for the weekend, and a good time was had by all. It's the unofficial end of Summer, and you can feel a bit of Fall in the air here in the Northeast. There is something exciting about the coming of Fall. Maybe it's the kids heading back to school or the dramatic change in seasons that is about to come. Soon we will be putting on jackets and picking apples! I'm looking forward to it.

I didn't realize NYTimes columnist David Brooks could be funny.

I loved his column today. It is a slam at the empty platitudes of all politicians (and the reason I can't stand to listen to any of them open their mouths), and he is particularly good at skewering Obama:

[ David Brooks ] My fellow Americans, it is an honor to address the Democratic National Convention at this defining moment in history. We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.”

[...] As a child, I was abandoned by my parents and lived with a colony of ants. We didn’t have much in the way of material possession, but we did have each other and the ability to carry far more than our own body weights. When I was young, I was temporarily paralyzed in a horrible anteater accident, but I never gave up my dream: the dream of speaking at a national political convention so my speech could be talked over by Wolf Blitzer and a gang of pundits.

Read it all. It's good.

Google Maps Street Views is shockingly out of date! I'm pretty sure my sisters don't have this volvo any more:

and Mom and Dad have resurfaced their driveway:
Our home looks up to date though:
I'm not sure why I'm posting this, other than I think it's impressive.

Ann says: Actually, that's the LR3 (10.4 MPG) we got rid of at the end of July--so it could be as little as a month old.

The University of Minnesota football team is getting a new stadium.



I don't know how the financing went through, but I generally like the idea of having the stadium back on or near campus. The move to the Humphrey Dome downtown was a disaster. Having been on that campus for 5 or 6 years, I can tell you that student support for the team seemed pretty low. Having the team play on campus should help.

Too bad they tore down Memorial Stadium though.

Man, there is a lot of science and tech hype out there. Here for example, is a video that purports to show a major advance in computer graphics and animation technology. Have a look.



Very impressive, isn't it? Well, I'm not buying it. First of all, the clip says "What you are about to see is a wholly computer-generated animation." This is not true. It's clear that the facial area is synthetic, but everything else is simply a video. In fact, for each of her answers to the question asked, a new piece of film was shot with the actress saying exactly the words you hear. This is a far cry from having the computer come up with realistic motion from scratch.

Second, this really isn't animation at all, it's motion capture. This means that they put a large number of location sensors at points on the actress's face while she spoke, and a computer recorded all of the positions of those points at each point in time. This data was then used to create a computer model of the speaking actress speaking those exact words. Again, this is not a purely synthetic model of her facial movements, it's literally measuring her face while she's speaking. It is not clear that the computer model could be used to say something other than what was said when the actress's face was measured.

Finally, the only really synthetic thing here is the facial shading and color. Actually, this might have been based in part on color and shading samples from the film, but I'll give the creators the benefit of the doubt there. But this benefit is easy for me to give; upon close inspection I don't really think the color and shading look realistic.

Having worked in the computer graphics and vision research world has made me sensitive to what I think are inflated claims of success in these fields. I often see such claims in the popular press, and popular-science press. I recommend taking such things with a grain of salt. I often suspect that these claims are made as bait while fishing for funding, either venture capital or government grants.

Ann says: Update: Yep, they're trying to tell us this is an ultra-green convention:

[ Nancy Pelosi ] “The 2008 Democratic National Convention, like our great party, is about the future – the future of our country and the future of our planet,” says House Speaker and permanent Convention Chair Nancy Pelosi. "That is why we are ensuring that this Convention will be the greenest, most sustainable, most successful political Convention in history.”

As Glenn Reynolds is fond of saying: "I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who keep telling me it's a crisis start acting as if it's a crisis." (1, 2, 3, and 4.)

Here's the stage for the Democratic convention:



What are the power requirements of that? And will they actually have the gall to stand up there and preach to the country about energy efficiency?

Steve Says: Bleah. Looks familiar.

Update! "Grouchy Don Johnson was my dad." That's not the sign though.

A Google search today for "Grouchy's Cafe" returns nothing:

No results found for "grouchy's cafe".

Now, I know for a fact that years ago Grouchy's Cafe was a truck stop somewhere off I-94 between Milwaukee and Minneapolis. Our family used to pass it on trips to grandma's house when I was a kid. I remember looking out for the sign from the road. As I recall, the sign was in the shape of a standing man, presumably Grouchy himself, holding a placard over his head that read, not surprisingly, "Grouchy's Cafe." He may have had on an Indian headdress... or my imagination may have added that over the years. My vision of him has him looking a bit like Woody Allen. Weird.

I also remember the place because my parents accidentally left one of my sisters and me there! Once back on the freeway, they had to get to the next exit and double back, and that took a while. I was old enough to figure out what happened, I think my little sister was a bit scared though.

In any case, I'm impressed that there is no record on the net of its existence. So I'm writing this post to give it the immortality it deserves. If you've found this post via Google, leave a message, and share your memory of Grouchy's Cafe.

Ann says: I've done the same websearch before too. Nada. I'm not sure it was on I-94, though. Might have been on one of the smaller highways.

Steve: Yes, I thought that too. Perhaps it was off the state highway that was there before I-94 was built. It must have been near the freeway though.

I almost hope something was lost in translation here:

[ Sydney Morning Herald ] An Islamic body in Nigeria has issued a death sentence on a man who married 80 women well above the maximum of four allowed, the Guardian newspaper reports.

The Jamatu Nasril Islam (JNI), one of Nigeria's top Islamic bodies, said in a statement that Mohammadu Bello Masaba from the central Niger state stood condemned to death unless he divorced 76 of the women in four days.

"Unless Masaba repents within four days and take only four wives from the herd he remains condemned to death, according to Sharia law," the statement said.

I know people say some Muslims treat their women like cattle, but...

National Review has an article detailing Obama's position during the Illinois legislature's debate over "born alive" abortions. They quote this section from Obama on the floor of the Illinois state house:

OBAMA: Yeah. Just along the same lines. Obviously, this is an issue that we’ve debated extensively both in committee an on the floor so I — you know, I don’t want to belabor it. But I did want to point out, as I understood it, during the course of the discussion in committee, one of the things that we were concerned about, or at least I expressed some concern about, was what impact this would have with respect to the relationship between the doctor and the patient and what liabilities the doctor might have in this situation. So, can you just describe for me, under this legislation, what’s going to be required for a doctor to meet the requirements you’ve set forth?

Just to be clear, the highlighted section is pretty key. Obama is objecting because of questions about the abortion doctor's "liability".

So here's the question, in a legal sense, liability refers to the right someone else has to sue you for your actions. Who would be doing the objectionable suing, and on what grounds would the doctors be getting sued?

I think it is clear that Obama is not objecting to the child suing the doctor because the doctor refused treatment and the severely-premature baby died. The baby's dead and has no advocate to hire a lawyer.

What Obama is questioning is this: will the doctor get sued by the mother for creating a live baby instead of a dead fetus? In other words, Obama's position is that regardless of the true viability of the fetus/baby and its ability to live apart from its mother, the mother has a right to a dead fetus and can sue the doctor if she doesn't get exactly that. The law, however, would require the doctor to help the infant, should it survive--thus opening the doctor up to the mother's lawsuit. So, in order protect the doctors from such litigation--to protect their right to give the mother a termination, even of a live, already-born baby--Obama essentially sanctioned infanticide.

I've been watching a lot of Penn Jillette on line recently. Both his "Penn Says" bits and his work with Teller, in there Showtime series Bullsh*t! You can find video clips at youtube.

Penn seems to be a libertarian athiest, and I think sometimes a bit extreme. He's often pretty vulgar. On the other hand, I find myself agreeing with him much more often than not when it comes to politics and culture. Case in point, where he voices what I am thinking about this anti-Walmart couple:

In shortening this headline:

Surgeons prepare for world’s first full-face transplant

Drudge dropped a word and left it with this:

Surgeons prepare for world's full-face transplant...

What would Al Gore have to say about changing the entire face of the Earth!?

My bro forgot at least one:

Sheriff Taylor, Mt. Airy North Carolina (another is in Raliegh)

Surprisingly the international edition of the German magazine "Spiegel" has a long article about the Olympic committee's "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" act when it comes to the freedom to protest that the Chinese promised when they won the games, but have--surprise! surprise!--not delivered.

Rogge's Silence: The Phantoms of the Beijing Opera.

As far as my extremely-rusty German goes, I can not find the same article in the German edition. But on Monday they did print an article about a protester that was arrested when he applied for a permit to demonstrate--this was what the Chinese government promised to allow: like in the US, the Chinese set up specific protest areas and were to allow permits to grant people the right to protest. So far, 77 applications to protest have been filed. None resulted in permits, but most resulted in the arrest of the person filing the request.

Newsweek has a similar article: Why China Sentences 70-Year-Olds

If anyone needs an example of how brittle China's Communist Party leaders think their country is, look no further than the case of Wang Xiuying and Wu Dianyuan. The elderly women, who both walk with canes and have failing eyesight, were sentenced to serve one-year terms in a labor camp after they applied to hold a legal protest in Beijing. And if you think there was no method to this madness, that it's somehow the fault of some random thug in the Ministry of Public Security, I'd caution you to think again.

[...] So when Wang and Wu heard that, with the Olympics, authorities in Beijing had set aside special protest zones in three parks, they applied. Not once but four times. On the fourth time, they were detained and then sentenced -- by the cops, not a judge -- to a labor camp. (They haven't been incarcerated yet but will if they violate various provisions or regulations.)

Time picked up the same story about the grannies being sent to a labor camp.

The Washington Post picked up the non-existent protests too. In fact, they went along when a prominent protester invited the media with him when he went to apply. He ended up disappearing: After Friend Disappears, Ji Sizun Confronts Police and is Detained Himself.

When the Chinese government announced at the end of July that it would set up special zones where people could demonstrate during the Beijing Olympics, it seemed almost too good to be true. For months, the country had been under fire from critics who accused it of trying to kill dissent ahead of the games.

While optimists said the fact that Beijing is allowing any public protest at all is a victory for human rights, pessimists worried that the whole thing was a set up and the applications would be used to round up protesters and control their movements during the games.

Obviously, the pessimists were right.

WaPo: "The three protest zones have so far remained empty of demonstrators."

At least the IOC has made a little noise about this.

[Globe and Mail] In a tacit criticism of China's intolerance of dissent, the International Olympic Committee says the Chinese government should have allowed its official protest zones to be "genuinely used" by demonstrators, rather than letting them sit empty.

It is the latest sign of IOC discontent with China's unwillingness to permit any demonstrations at the three parks where the government had promised to allow protests during the Beijing Olympics.

Beijing announced this week that it had received 77 applications from 149 people who wanted to protest at the designated zones during the Games. Yet no protests have taken place. All of the applications were "withdrawn" or rejected for various reasons, according to the city government.

In reality, many of those who applied were detained or jailed by the authorities, human-rights groups say, arguing that China used the protest zones as a propaganda tactic to give the appearance of complying with international standards, while actually using the application process to identify potential protesters.

Other articles: Daily Telegraph (London), New York Times, AP, The Star (Toronto).