“It’s raining ash in California, forcing us to wear a different kind of mask than we wear for the pandemic when we go buy the generator we need for either rolling blackouts or preemptive outages so we can work from home if we haven’t been evacuated or our house hasn’t burned down.”
— How's that one-party rule working out for you, California?No pictures yet,
… but I have uncled. Matthew Marion Greely was born this morning, making my brother Mike and his wife Polina into very happy, very tired, parents.
Welcome to Earth, little guy. You share a birthday with Poul Anderson, Ricardo Montalbán, Joe DiMaggio, Andrew Carnegie, Amy Grant, and the Bush twins, so we expect great things from you.
Shock the Monkey
In this well-linked news, a team of researchers has reported success at curing erectile dysfunction with shockwaves. When describing how much force is being applied to the penis, they chose a very revealing comparison:
"These are very, very low energy shock waves," Vardi said. Each shockwave applied roughly 100 bar of pressure — some 20 times the air pressure in a bottle of champagne, but less than the pressure exerted by a woman in stiletto heels who weighs 132 lbs. (60 kg).
Apparently medical research is now being performed in full dominatrix gear. Who knew?
Dear Blizzard,
Today I finally converted my World of Warcraft account into your new, one-ring-to-rule-them-all Battle.net account system. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the email address I gave for my new, unified login name is “nospam@jgreely.com”. You sent me a confirmation email that my account had been converted, and that my new login name would be “n***@jgreely.com”.
This would be a nice little touch of security, except for the fact that you sent the email to nospam@jgreely.com, making it pure theater. Next you’ll be asking me to take off my shoes and empty my water bottle…
[to be clear: the problem is not that they sent email. That was expected and desired. The problem is that the body of the message pretends to “protect” my login name by masking it, in a message sent to the email address that is identical to that login name]
Never trust the comments, reason # 14B7
The comment said, “calculations done in base 16”. The code said, “n % 12”.
The code wins, always.
At least it wasn’t done in a base-11 substitution cipher, because that would stump dozens of highly-intelligent alien races for centuries.
I do not recognize this place
Something about this story just seems a bit, shall we say, “over-hyped”:
In the space of 11 days this year, seven people were murdered in Salinas. Each killing, like the record 25 homicides the previous year, spilled from the gang warfare that this summer pushed the homicide rate in the city of 140,000 to three times that of Los Angeles. Residents retreated indoors at night, and Mayor Dennis Donohue affirmed his decision to seek help from an unlikely source: the U.S. military.
...
"Obviously, there are restrictions," said Salinas Deputy Police Chief Kelly McMillin. "Not only the constitutional part of it, but just the idea we are going to have choppers fast-roping onto Alisal Street."
As far as I can tell, it boils down to: “not many jobs right now for young male unskilled workers who don’t speak much English, so joining a gang seems like a good idea; at least, until you get used as cannon fodder in a fight against another gang”.
And, of course, when the total number of homicides is so low, it’s easy for one or two serious incidents to dramatically alter the rate, creating a dramatic “worse than LA” comparison.
Not to imply that there are no problems. It’s quite clear from the statistical data that, taken as a whole, the Salinas SMSA has crime rates comparable to much larger cities; it’s just highly concentrated geographically. The warzone they paint in the article is nothing like the kid-friendly neighborhood where I handed out big handfuls of candy on Halloween night to roving bands of (often unescorted) little monsters.
[Update: a quick bit of math to show the rate swing: in 2006, the homicide rate was only 82% of the national average (4.7 versus 5.7), while in 2008 it was three times higher (17.4 versus 5.8). Since these are numbers per 100,000, and the current population is 148,350, that’s a difference of 11 homicides. The rate was also significantly lower than the national average from 1987 to 1991, which happens to be a period with low unemployment and lots of construction.]
HexBash
I had a perfectly good reason for doing it this way…
declare id
function hexhex () {
printf -v id %06X 0x$1
}
SuperMacro, to the rescue!
[no relation to the ancient Borland SuperMacro product, which we once used to automatically navigate the swamp in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. clap, hop, kweepa]
Like most MMOs, Champions Online has some built-in macro support. It’s fairly primitive at the moment, but there are certain key-bindings that I want for all characters.
