Wednesday, August 27, 2008

A Happy Accident

Gov. David Patterson knocking John McCain:

Gov. David A. Paterson, continuing his oratorical assault on John McCain as Democrats gather in Denver for their national convention, used a phenomenon known by physicists as the “Parallax Effect” to slam the presumptive Republican nominee.

...

“When something is so far away that you cant even measure it, you take an object that’s a little closer. And by knowing the distance between you and that object, you can now assess how far away the third body is,” Mr. Paterson told New Jersey delegates in a speech on Wednesday morning.


Astronomy metaphors from a blind guy!

David Patterson: Awesome Governor, or the AWESOMEST Governor?



[Hat Tip: Wonkette]

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

AAARGH!!

There's a commercial for Wendy's stupid new artery-clogger wherein a girl offers a guy a bite of her salad, and the guy responds that he's a "Meatatarian." He then takes a bite of his sandwich which has CHEESE AND BREAD ON IT. He also has french fries, which are (technically) made from POTATOES!

I'm sorry. This commercial comes on ALL THE TIME, and it really INFURIATES ME.


It's so infuriating as to not even be on stupid YouTube for me to link to. God damnit.



ALSO: WENDY'S. YOU ARE NOT NOT FAST FOOD. YOU ARE AN ESTABLISHMENT WHEREIN ONE IS SERVED 'FOOD' FROM BEHIND A COUNTER IN A RAPID FASHION. GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELF.

Again, I realize it's just a stupid slogan and I'm a worse person for getting riled up by it, but still: I AM FUCKING RILED.



Also also: Bangkok Dangerous looks like the most retarded movie of all time. Seriously. The marketing campaign is literally: "ACTION MOVIE! EXPLOSIONS! ASIAN CHICKS!" Towards the end of the trailer, since it's an action movie, the time comes for the gravel-voiced announcer to make a pun based on the title. So he says, "Things are about to get...Dangerous." That's not a pun; that's a fucking crime.

I Love Theoretical Math Articles on Wikipedia

LOVE them:
An approximation algorithm is called a c-approximation algorithm for some constant c if it can be proven that the solution that the algorithm finds is at most c times worse than the optimal solution. Here, c is called the approximation ratio. Depending on whether the problem is a minimization or a maximization problem, this can either denote c times larger or c times smaller, respectively. For example, the vertex cover problem and traveling salesman problem with triangle inequality each have simple 2-approximation algorithms. In contrast to that it's proven that the traveling salesman problem with arbitrary edge-lengths can not be approximated with approximation ratio bounded by a constant as long as the Hamiltonian-path problem can not be solved in polynomial time.


They're like those embedded 3-d Magic Eye posters for your entire left hemisphere! If you look hard enough, you can see a sailboat, travelling the shortest route between several islands that are various fixed distances from each other.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Addendum:

Kim Kardashian just said that this year she wanted to "do things that make [her] uncomfortable" and "step out of [her] box."



...



Buttsecks?

The Dream Is The New T-Pain

"Feat." in the Number 7 AND Number 6 videos on today's 106 & Park? GTFO.

Where ARE you, Nate Dogg? Truly, the world mourns for thee. Please, come back and Regulate all over these inferior fools who have welled up in your absence like feudal states after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

David Brooks Is an Idiot

"Barack Obama has decided upon a vice-presidential running mate. And while I don’t know who it is as I write, for the good of the country, I hope he picked Joe Biden.

Biden’s weaknesses are on the surface. He has said a number of idiotic things over the years and, in the days following his selection, those snippets would be aired again and again.

But that won’t hurt all that much because voters are smart enough to forgive the genuine flaws of genuine people."

(Emphasis mine)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

You WISH, Brooks. Voters are petty and borderline amnesiac.



Like, who gets PAID to write shit like this? I was doing an OK job of not being upset earlier, but now that I'm drunk, I can say it: Joe Biden was a fucking STUPID CHOICE. Sorry, Barry, but Biden means you're playing McCain's game. Biden's a complete and utter toolface who, by virtue of being a slimy career politician, has believable foreign policy credentials. Woo-motherfucking-hoo. Ugh. Hype is most of what Barry had going for him, and, by picking Biden, he acknowledged it as such, and, in doing so, deflated its power.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Politics of Drafting

At a town hall meeting in New Mexico today, John McCain endorsed the draft, telling a pro-draft question-asker "I don't disagree with anything you said."

The question is:
1)Will enough of the right kind of people (i.e. people who don't spend their days writing "Moulitsas" after their first name all over their notebook) will notice/care about this to put it on the teevee tonight/this week/ever?
2)IF (and, obviously, only IF) this does become an issue, and McCain is forced to address it in some way, will he back out of this statement? Sure, it's on the internet, but he's a politician, and the draft issue actually comes equipped with a really handy escape-hatch: "I respect the bravery and heroism of the men and women of our volunteer military..." &c, &c. Yay troops! Yay military! Yay [Apologizing politician]! Points are scored with the right demographics, the end. But McCain is also pitching himself on his "straight talk," such that actually being coerced into repudiating his own statement in a relatively short time-frame would potentially do some damage (consider Obama's recent polling woes against the background of the "moving to the center" meme that's been percolating all summer for the general idea.) The thing is, a lot of people (NOT just THE MSM [boo! hiss! off with their heads! &c], but real, genuine, vote-casting people) completely buy into McCain's honest maverick schtick, because he sells it hard, and it makes sense to people—McCain plays on the whole Rambo/The A-Team locus in the American popular consciousness. The net effect is why I wonder about 1, above.

I'd like to think that reinstating the draft is held so abhorrent among the general populace that McCain's support for it would significantly decrease his popularity. On the other hand, there are a lot of people whose bellicosity has survived (if not increased) in the face of the senescence and/or obesity that has long disqualified them for military service, but not for voting.

I still don't think it'll ever get brought up effectively, though.


[Hat tip Queerty]


(Totally ADD BONUS LINK: NAND)

Thursday, August 14, 2008

The Onion Is Just So Great Sometimes

From an article about Obama's secret hillbilly brother:
A statement issued last week by Obama's top adviser, David Axelrod, claimed that the two lived together only for a brief period in 1981, shortly before Barack left to attend Columbia University and Cooter had to drop out of chicken-killing school because an air conditioner fell on his head.


Brilliant.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Work is Gonna Be SO Much More Tolerable

The Daily Intelligencer says the Yankees might not make it to the playoffs. This would be AMAZING. I've always considered the Yankees to be kind of evil, and when they STOLE JOHNNY DAMON from the Red Sox after the Sox beat them for the first time in forever, their status as the Evil Empire of baseball was cemented in my mind. Plus, I'm not a Sports Guy by nature, and it's REALLY HARD to care about baseball (I like to say it's the reason they invented SportsCenter.) So, people (=New Yorkers=my coworkers) not talking about baseball this fall will be really pleasant.

NOTE: I sort of like the Mets, in as much as the only things I know about them are that they're underdogs and from Brooklyn. So if they do well and people talk about them, it'll be substantially more tolerable.

Good Stupid

The New Yorker, that most ivory of aesthetic towers and highest of Critic-with-a-capital-C dudgeon, loves Wipeout, the absolutely amazing summer throw-away "competition show" (as TNY calls it) on ABC. Somebody (Gawker? Mollie? I just can't TELL ANYMORE!) once referred to it as "Guts for grown-ups," which is EXACTLY what it is, except in the water, and (obviously, in these oh-so po-mo times), 300% snarkier. I think the final obstacle in Wipeout is way less hard than that final huge chaff-and-boulders-and-shit-spewing mountain at the end of Guts.

I first caught it at the beginning of the summer (maybe the 1st ep, even) at Mollie's, cause she and Rach don't pay for cable. Which is to say: Mollie and I (especially I) are fucking BLEEDING EDGE cultural mavens.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

RIP Isaac Hayes

OH NOES!

"Why are so many good people dying?" -Roomie Rachel*



*Quoting friends/roommates on your blog copywright Julia Allison