Oh my

This one goes to eleven.  And twelve.  And ten thousand.  (videos of car stereos playing so loudly that they shake the cars to pieces.) (i.e, this XKCD has been checked-off)

The dumbest thing ever?

That can't possibly be true, can it? The shadow seems to be in the right place, but... wow.

From the Department of Big Dumb Explosion Movies

Michael Bay vs McQ. Fight!

Pitbulls are great with children

Dogs Are Aggressive If They Are Trained Badly

ScienceDaily (May 1, 2009) — Many dogs are put down or abandoned due to their violent nature, but contrary to popular belief, breed has little to do with a dog's aggressive behaviour compared to all the owner-dependant factors. This is shown in a new study from the University of Córdoba, which includes breeds that are considered aggressive by nature, such as the Rottweiler or the Pit Bull.

Interesting, but bad trainers probably do correlate with breed. I doubt there are owners who fight wiener dogs.

apropos of nothing

All swans are grey in the dark

Lots of interesting ideas and some odd ones too: Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom, by Bryan Appleyard, From The Sunday Times, June 1, 2008

I liked this one:

Every year he puts a few thousand dollars aside for contingencies – parking tickets, tea spills – and at the end of the year he gives what’s left to charity. The money is gone from day one, so unexpected losses cause no pain.

But a little less this:

He was educated at a French school. Three traditions formed him: Greek Orthodox, French Catholic and Arab. They also taught him to disbelieve conventional wisdom. Each tradition had a different history of the crusades, utterly different. This led him to disbelieve historians almost as much as he does bankers.

But, crucially, he also learnt from a very early age that grown-ups have a dodgy grasp of probability. It was in the midst of the Lebanese civil war and, hiding from the guns and bombs, he heard adults repeatedly say the war would soon be over. It lasted 15 years. He became obsessed with probability and, after a degree in management from the Wharton business school at Pennsylvania University, he focused on probability for his PhD at the University of Paris.

For the non-mathematician, probability is an indecipherably complex field. But Taleb makes it easy by proving all the mathematics wrong. Let me introduce you to Brooklyn-born Fat Tony and academically inclined Dr John, two of Taleb’s creations. You toss a coin 40 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of it coming up heads the 41st time? Dr John gives the answer drummed into the heads of every statistic student: 50/50. Fat Tony shakes his head and says the chances are no more than 1%. “You are either full of crap,” he says, “or a pure sucker to buy that 50% business. The coin gotta be loaded.”

The chances of a coin coming up heads 41 times are so small as to be effectively impossible in this universe. It is far, far more likely that somebody is cheating. Fat Tony wins. Dr John is the sucker. And the one thing that drives Taleb more than anything else is the determination not to be a sucker. Dr John is the economist or banker who thinks he can manage risk through mathematics. Fat Tony relies only on what happens in the real world.

I think this is less profound than it appears. It's the hidden variable theory of smartness. Exactly what's the recipe to become Fat Tony and not Dr John? By being cynical? Going around pointing out that the emperor has no clothes isn't of much use in a nudist colony. That's Socrates gig, anyway. As to not getting fooled or taken as a sucker, well, don't bet on coin tosses - hard to cheat an honest man, etc, etc.

Oh man, it's funny cause it's true

Stupidest criminals ever.

Darwin Award Candidate

Man fatally shot when he tried to hold-up an off-duty - but still uniformed - police officer at a NE DC gas station.

DC's gun bans should, and probably will, go away.

Update: Obviously, we need a price-gun ban.

Ejected

This seems entirely stupid-headed:

Major League Baseball's DRM change strikes out with fans

Some hardcore baseball fans have been left stranded on third base by Major League Baseball after it decided to change DRM systems. As a result, game footage purchased under the old DRM scheme are no longer viewable, leaving fans with unwatchable footage—and no refunds.

Diehard (and recently ecstatic) Red Sox fan Allan Wood has blogged about his bad experience with MLB's Digital Download service. In 2003, he began downloading games at $3.95 a pop and burning them to CD-R. In anticipation of the Red Sox debut of Daisuke Matsuzaka last spring, Wood decided to watch some 2006 footage of him pitching in the World Baseball Championships for Japan.

Instead of seeing Dice-K toeing the bump for the Land of the Rising Sun, Wood was told he needed to obtain a license to watch the video. He was then directed to a DRM "phone-home" page at MLB.com to verify that he was indeed licensed to watch the footage. One problem: the page was gone. Since the DRM scheme couldn't verify that he was allowed to watch the videos he had purchased, he was out of luck.

Assuming that's all true, if MLB is going to end one DRM service, it seems like they should just switch over the account for the new service, or set some bit to readable, or whatever. The PR fallout of this, for both the league and for DRM services all around, seems like it would be bad enough to make them offer some sort of refund, but maybe not. Of course, this is minor league compared to what would happen if iTunes disappeared.

Plumbing the Depths

Again, I can't help myself, but the hi-fi dumbo parade continues. Not content with magic marker CD stabilizers, $8000 speaker cables, babinga wood speaker cable supports, etc, there are now amplifiers with wooden heat sinks. You'd think thermal conductivity would be important for a heat sink, but that's just for the masses. I'm guessing they tried vinyl first, but that they had to switch because they kept melting off.

Point 1: Most Sins are their own Punisments

Craigslist meets Wallstreet

Point 2: One of better Spengler's better maxims is that, generally speaking, and in all times and in all places, men and women deserve each other. For better and for worse, and in that case, worse.

Playing Chicken with the MetroRail

I agree, the Wagner is an inspired choice on this bit of stupid driving youtube ha ha. And speaking of: You call that Wagner?

Graduated in the top 66% of my class.

Actual lines from Resumes...

I Stand Corrected

"Stick shift" foils car thieves
Wed Jun 20, 2007

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Two U.S. car thieves failed to make their getaway in a car they had just stolen because they couldn't figure out how to use its manual transmission, a witness said on Wednesday.

Like Feynman said, there's always room at the bottom.