Balloon Juice Comment of the Day

Balloon Juice � Blog Archive � Open Thread: FTFY FTW: "Those who bash the Rangers as “W’s team” are missing the larger symbolism, methinks. W ran that team into the ground and Hicks scorched the earth that was left. But eventually when someone who cared and knew what they were doing took over, they rose from the ashes. Hopefully, the country follows su"

Web Designer Needed

SousVide Supreme Water Oven

SousVide Supreme Water Oven - Specialty Electrics - Electrics - Sur La Table

Vacuum-sealed food loses virtually none of its flavor or nutrients during cooking, and the pressure encourages flash marinating, naturally enhancing the delicious tastes and aromas of the food with little added seasoning.

Yes, Please.

Reader Survey

Now that I am actually getting more than 3 people a day reading this beast I am going to periodically post a link to a blog survey. Yes, Yes it helps target advertising... Please take my Blog Reader Project survey.

New Honda Unicycle

Thanks to Diana Adams for the link to this

On A Personal Note

After 3 months of looking, I will once again be gainfully employed on November 1. Higher base salary than my old job and it doesn't snow in Atlanta. Life is good. Yay!

LV Review Journal or LV Sun?

Balloon Juice

Here’s a little hint for the Review-Journal: when you have a competitor in town, bloggers who want to discuss Las Vegas politics will link to their stories about voter suppression, the Angle/Reed race, the Tea Party Express and anything else that happens in your neck of the woods.

Too good a paragraph to not steal. Don't sue me

MS Liveoffice

Actually not half bad.

I had to fill in a WORD format job app today and openoffice was being a pain in the ass and not rendering it at all well so i fired up LiveOffice and did my thing.

Working in a browser is always vaguely scary to me so I hit save more often then i normally would have I am sure. Not a painful experience at all.

xkcd - perfect as always

Go look at all the stuff there, it is a brilliant site

Smells like a court martial

Joe Miller's private "guards" were active-duty military - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com: "But revelations today have made the story much, much worse still.� ADN now reports that not only was Joe Miller's excuse for why he had hired private guards a lie, but two of the guards who handcuffed the journalist and threatened others are active-duty soldiers in the�U.S. military:"

DADT dead?

Military recruiters told they can accept openly gay applicants - CNN.com: "Washington (CNN) -- The Pentagon has advised recruiting commands that they can accept openly gay and lesbian recruit candidates, given the recent federal court decision that bars the military from expelling openly gay service members, according to a Pentagon spokeswoman.
The guidance from the Personnel and Readiness office was sent to recruiting commands on Friday, according to spokeswoman Cynthia Smith."

Nice House

Telegraph:

The richest man in India, Mukesh Ambani, has moved into his new home in Mumbai which is 27 storeys high and worth £630m.

It's the goverment's fault Bank of America issued shitty MBS?

I wondered how long it would take to get to this...

I was listening to Bloomberg's coverage of PIMCO and the NY Fed asking for their money back from B of A and some talking head came up with the brilliant theory that this was to some extent the government's fault for mandating some of Bank of America's asset buys.

Even if the government held a gun to the banksters heads how the hell would it be their fault if what everyone knew was a shitpile turned out to be a shitpile?

The complete lack of responsibility from the financial sector is remarkable

Balloon Juice Comment of the day

Balloon Juice

Sucking wealthy cock is hardly necessary for civil debate. Not stringing said rich bastards up from a lamp-post with their own intestines, however, is necessary for civil debate.
We are being civil. Don’t fucking push it.

The Conway Rorschach | Talking Points Memo

The Conway Rorschach | Talking Points Memo

I have a real problem with all the prissy condemnations coming from liberal commentators about Conway's ad on Rand Paul's youthful playing with contempt for Christianity. People are acting as if it is some kind of political sin to point out to ordinary Kentucky voters the kind of stuff about Paul's extremist libertarian views that everyone in the punditry already knows. This does not amount to saying that Christian belief is a 'requirement for public office' as one site huffs. It is a matter of letting regular voters who themselves care deeply about Christian belief know that Paul is basically playing them. No different really than letting folks who care about Social Security and Medicare know that Paul is playing them,
One reason that Dems do not seem to be able to play hardball -- in a viciously hardball political world -- is that Dems often lack conviction or the will to be eloquently honest (for example, on taxes). But an equal problem is that when someone does play hardball, the rest of the prissy liberal Mugwumps tut-tut them about it.

I say, go for it, Jack Conway. Does anyone doubt that Paul and his supporters would have used similar publicly documented material against Conway (or even less material)?

You don't bring a knife to a gunfight ...

Excel and High performance computing

From Microsoft Technet

Windows® HPC Server 2008 R2 integrates with Microsoft® Excel® 2010 to help run workbooks and user-defined functions (UDFs) faster by offloading calculations to the cluster. If a workbook contains independent units of calculation, multiple compute nodes can perform the calculations simultaneously. Parallel computation can significantly reduce workbook calculation time and make calculations across larger data sets more feasible. Many complex and long-running workbooks run iteratively—that is, they perform a single calculation many times over different sets of input data. These workbooks might contain complex Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) functions or calculation intensive XLL add-ins. This type of workbook is suitable for cluster acceleration.

Speaking as someone that spends his working days trying to make the world safe from Excel misuse, this is just fucking wrong.

Fart Silencer - yes really

Fart Silencer: As Weird As You Imagine It To Be! � Bit Rebels

As odd and uncomfortable as this subject might seem, it’s just one of those topics that is too hilarious not to cover. Before I continue, just know this device is as odd as you imagine, and it goes exactly where you might guess it would go. So, now that we have that cleared up, we can move on to the more technical aspect of the whole thing. As you might think, it’s a device to keep your wind from making you the center of attention whenever you have eaten beans or cabbage for dinner.

Or as it would be called around these parts, the silence of the ducks

Exoplanets

Gallery of exoplanets: real pictures of alien worlds | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

We know of nearly 500 other planets orbiting other stars. However, the methods of finding these exoplanets are indirect. We measure their effect on their parent stars, but we didn't directly see the planets themselves... until 2005, when the first image of an actual world orbiting another star was announced.

The lovely lady that shares my life is a aficionado of all things exoplanet. Hope she likes the pics.

DNA seen through the eyes of a coder

DNA seen through the eyes of a coder

I'm not trying to force my view unto the DNA - each observation here is quite 'uncramped'. To see where I got all this from, head to the bibliography.

Quite clever

President Obama to be on Mythbusters!

Zandar Versus The Stupid

At the White House Science Fair today President Obama announced (and let's face it, like the last President would have ever had a White House Science Fair) that he'll be appearing on the December 8th episode of Mythbusters as he challenges Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage to revisit the myth of Archimedes' solar-powered boat-burning light beam and make it work.

So will that now make him our Geek-In-Chief?

Joe Miller: "Build that Wall"

Joe Miller: "If East Germany could [secure their border], we could" | Video Cafe

Miller replied: 'The first thing that has to be done is secure the border. . . East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could.'

Dork

Anonymous cowards buy the US mid-term elections - Boing Boing

Boing Boing

Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of right wing attack ads have been aired in this US mid-term election season, but for the most part, no one knows who is paying for these ads, as the payments are laundered through shadowy political organizations that are late (or negligent) in complying with disclosure rules.

I do love the name "Anonymous Coward"

Rich people and our lack of appreciation thereof

Balloon Juice

The problem in America isn’t that a simultaneously unknown and insufficient numbers of liberals are unwilling to internalize some nonsense about rich people that an Atlantic columnist made up on the spot. The problem, as far as I see it, is that too many privileged people can’t get it through their damned heads that most poor people aren’t lazy, drunk, or just living large on the welfare, but were born into far shittier situations that most of the wealthy people in America. I’m willing to agree that most rich and poor people work really hard for what they have. Just the rich have it a helluva lot better and their concept of “hard” is a little different. I’d also point out that the growth in income inequality and the stagnation of income mobility after the policies of the last 20-30 years would suggest that rich people, if they want their feelings catered to even more, should probably get a dog.

Quantum Chromodynamics

[1002.5032] Resource Letter: Quantum Chromodynamics

This Resource Letter provides a guide to the literature on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the relativistic quantum field theory of the strong interactions. Journal articles, books, and other documents are cited for the following topics: quarks and color, the parton model, Yang-Mills theory, experimental evidence for color, QCD as a color gauge theory, asymptotic freedom, QCD for heavy hadrons, QCD on the lattice, the QCD vacuum, pictures of quark confinement, early and modern applications of perturbative QCD, the determination of the strong coupling and quark masses, QCD and the hadron spectrum, hadron decays, the quark-gluon plasma, the strong nuclear interaction, and QCD's role in nuclear physics.
The letter {E} after an item indicates elementary level or material of general interest to persons becoming informed in the field. The letter {I}, for intermediate level, indicates material of a somewhat more specialized nature, and the letter {A} indicates rather specialized or advanced material.

Because you can never know too much about this...