Beannachtaí leat, anois agus go deo. Tá mo chroí agat i gcónaí.

Holy crap. Is there an action star of the last 30 years who's not in this flick?

Saw this post about a Bob Jones University textbook over on Fark and had to click. Words simply fail. This is a University?

Is rolling 2 d10s statistically the same as rolling a d100?

If you have red and blue d10s, and roll them both simultaneously, with the red as the tens, and the blue as the ones, doesn't that have the same level of randomness as a d100?

This was sparked by the realization that a pair of d10's can be had for less than a dollar, whereas d100's range around $10.

A Reagan-appointed Republican Federal Judge who owns a bunch of oil company stock has said the government can't stop drilling in the gulf because, you know, just because one rig went blooie doesn't mean others will.

Yeah. And when I was learning to ride a motorcycle about 200 years ago, the old Calif. Motorcycle Highway Patrol guy who taught my cycling class told us that even if the last 1000 blind curves you took didn't hide oil slicks that would lay you out flat, you should still act like there might be a slick or a gravel patch around the next blind curve until you saw otherwise.

This is sort of like the flight instructor's saying, "There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there no old, bold pilots."

This thought pattern used to be called "conservatism." What is currently passing for conservatism in political circles, specifically when it comes to regulating the oil industry, not to mention bankers, investment houses, health insurance companies, and other white-collar thieves, could more accurately be called "moronism."

Judge Feldman and a whole lot of Republicans and loonietarians need to learn about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, assuming they're smart enough to understand it -- which is unlikely.

Come for the tech, stay for the puns :-)

Front page article that looks to be interesting reading.

I just saw that Martin Gardner died a week ago this past Saturday. Slashdot covered the story last Sunday.

I read his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American every month for many years, and own several of his books. He will be missed.

One of my early programming experiences was inspired by his column about John Horton Conway's game of Life. I coded it in Fortran for a Burroughs B-1700 (IIRC) in 1975, for my high school programming class. We wrote our programs on punch cards, and the teacher took them to the computer at city hall to run. I had coded what I thought to be a modest twenty-five by twenty-five cell array, for a run of fifty iterations. I learned the next day that I had brought the city computer to its knees, forcing a hard restart. I did not know at the time that Fortran stored its arrays in column-major order; apparently the machine had been thrashing its minuscule memory something fierce. :-). Of course, I could probably get arrested for that now.

Thanks, Martin, for many hours of enjoyment and great memories.

For this day...

        Wanna cry for you
        Would it do any good?
        If I rained for you
        It would just be water
        And the night's with you
        And the storm's in your head
        And you're down and you're down
        And I can't lift you

        I'm powerless to change your world
        I'm powerless to stop the hurt

        I'll give you my heart, give you my shoulder
        Give you my heart, give you my shoulder

        Wanna run for you
        Would it do any good?
        If I flew for you
        You would still be standing
        And it's hard watching
        'cause I'm part of you
        And it's hard not to
        Not to know what I can do

        I'm powerless to change your world
        I'm powerless to stop the hurt
        I'm trying hard to be your tower of strength
        I'm trying hard to bring you back to joy

        I'll give you my heart, give you my shoulder
        Give you my heart, give you my shoulder

        When the night just cuts you through
        And the dream is lost to you
        When you're worried and confused
        I will give you my heart give you my shoulder

                        -- Heather Nova

...that changed my life - then, now, always.

I saw Star Wars in theatres with the family. I only have vague emories of it, but distinctly remember playing light sabre with the wiffle bats afterwards :-) I was only 4 when Star Wars was released, so my memories weren't very distinct.

But they were there! I was watching Saturday morning cartoons with my brother when all of the sudden there were spaceships flying around Asteroids in a trailer for "The Empire Strikes back." I remember running with my brother to find the folks and informing them that the new movie was out. I remember it was a warm day, and that the folks were outside gardening, but mainly I just remember being really, really excited, even though i only vaguely remembered the first one.

I'm pretty sure we saw Star Wars in theatres again before we went and watched Empire. I'm vague on that, though, and I wouldn't swear to it, but I do know I saw Star Wars in theatres either before Empire or Return of the Jedi. I remember because after going to the movie I went with my dad to his work, I drew the Jawa Crawlers. I had forgotten them, but was entranced by their size.

Keep in mind to, this was before VCRs acheived ubiquity. So there weren't a whole lot of options for seeing a movie that had been in theatres othewise.

So that's my tale. Empire will always have a special place because it is the earliest movie I can remember being excited to go see. It also reminds me that, back then, well before the internet, most people really weren't aware that another Star Wars was going to be coming out until they started with the advertisements.

Now you can't help know that one is coming out before they've even shot it!

I started off trying to be reasonable, but I knew it was only a matter of time before the downmods came.

If this had been Microsoft all of /. would've been in a lather, but since it's Apple, well, clearly they're just filthy thieves then, right? That Apple's own fskd culture kept them from accepting the phone back? Well, clearly he didn't try hard enough to return it, so its all his fault that they lost the phone.

Apple really is just Microsoft with an inferiority complex.

Apparently, earthquakes cause stupidity. No, really.

Supposed "sorceror" may not be beheaded tomorrow. Boggles the mind.

In other news, a Saudi judge has issued an arrest warrant for one "Dread Pirate Roberts", aka "Westley", aka "Farm Boy" on charges of piracy, after catching a documentary on late night TV.

I'd think anyone whose plan was to kill an officer so they could ambush the funeral as an attack on the Government should properly be referred to as "Terrorist."

I started on the first Episode of Season 2, (Adama getting shot by Boomer'd be the highlight there folks!) and I realized I was too far back. So I watched Flight of the Phoenix again. Everything I said before still stands and then some. I forgot how powerful and draining a show it could be.

Tomorrow I have a meeting so I'm going to watch the Extended Version of Pegasus come Wednesday. (It also means I have another excuse for seeing Peacefinder to return Season 2.0!)