We’ve Moved!

I’m moving. You can find the new site here, but this site will stay active in order to give the reader(s) an opportunity to update bookmarks. Let me say that WordPress has been great, and is a wonderful platform, but as I develop my own html/css skills I would like the flexibility to enhance the sites with my own ideas. See you on the other side.

Uh Oh……

Wondering when I’ll get this card…..

Via Maggie’s Farm…

Music Through The Generations

It’s the time in our lives when friends start throwing parties for their daughters. These parties can take several forms; sometimes a party at the home of the parents, which is nice, and sometimes the form can be a BIG party at a hall. The latter form means tuxedo, band, and LOTs of people.

So, last night, we joined 500 or so of our closest friends to celebrate the coming out of 5 daughters. A great time was had by all…..

The Voltage Brothers provided the music. As usual, the music begins gently enough, not so loud as to prevent conversation, and not so energetic as to distract the old people from the task of meeting the daughters. But, like a carefully managed psy-ops campaign, the flow of the evening is regulated by the volume and genre of music.

And here is where things are different. When I was in my early 20s and starting to participate in these kinds of functions, the first hour of the party was for the adults. Once they cleared out, it was time to get it on. The music changed, the ‘feel’ changed, and it was time to get down and dirty.

We knew that our parents hated the music that we liked, that we listened to at college parties, and that they considered a most radical departure from ‘their music’.

But the music that we liked is STILL the music that these kids like. I mean, Sixty-Minute Man was an old song in 1972! Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag still gets ‘em on the floor.

So, you know, we’re all fighting for room on the dance floor, and sometimes the parents are better dancers than their children…..although it is somewhat disconcerting to see Mom shaking her booty with a little more enthusiasm that her son’s date. Or more likely, it is disconcerting to see my friends’s daughter shaking her booty witht the same enthusiasm that I witnessed from her mother in 1972….

I just wonder about the trans-generational nature of music, and what it means for all of us to have much more in common with the children than our parents ever had in common with us……

When You Think It’s All Too Much…

Remember, no matter how bad it seems, there is always someone else in worse shape (or so I tell my wife).

For a pictorial display of that lemma:

Lucky Day

Currently fascinated by pixdaus which is providing me with a daily dose of amazing photos, one of which appears below. Do you think they had a little trouble with their hearts after this event?

A Deserved A

These fellows better get an A for their class with Dr. Langville……..

Last month, two College of Charleston math majors came up with a mathematical formula to predict the winner of the NCAA basketball tournament.

Neil Goodson and Colin Stephenson’s mathematical formula had Kansas and Memphis meeting in the championship game and Kansas winning the NCAA basketball title.

That is exactly what happened.

I hope they won their pool……

Evolution Through Genetic Algorithms

Genetic algorithms are a subject somewhat beyond my ken. But it doesn’t take a geneticist or a computer scientist to comprehend the implications of the process. The possibilities are explosively revolutionary.

From our fellow bloggers at Q and O, a glimpse of what the future might portend. A slice to entice:

One of the consequences of growing computing power is the feasibility of generating improvements through what you might think of as a massive trial-and-error approach. Random variations are introduced into designs, and the results are measured against some metric to see which ones do best. Those best variations are then “cross-bred” with other good variations to see what comes out.

The result can sometimes be dramatic improvement over anything a human designer can come up with. For example:

At the University of Sydney, in Australia, Steve Manos used an evolutionary algorithm to come up with novel patterns in a type of optical fibre that has air holes shot through its length. Normally, these holes are arranged in a hexagonal pattern, but the algorithm generated a bizarre flower-like pattern of holes that no human would have thought of trying. It doubled the fibre’s bandwidth.

When I think about the application of this technology, plus the real genetic manipulation going on in biology, and the availability of information on all kinds of innovative ideas from search engines, I think there’s a lot of possible cross-reinforcement. Innovation has been accelerating throughout my entire lifetime, and it shows no signs of stopping that acceleration. The very pace of innovation picks up every year…

What if someone uses genetic algorithms to improve the genetic algorithms themselves? Will genetic algorigthms thus become more efficient and flexible? Will our lives someday be managed by a device that uses genetic algorithms to find the best way to satisfy our desires?

Read the whole thing, and follow the links. Amazing stuff.

Cross posted at Gates of Academe.

The Latest NIE

I won’t bother with links, or any pithy extractions of quotes that support my position. I will simply note the nearly total acceptance of this intelligence evaluation by those who, not so long ago, questioned the political leanings of the drafters of other, earlier NIEs that drove policy in a direction they did not like.  The question that comes to mind is why we should believe any analysis coming from the politicized and ineffective policy shops of our intelligence organs. The entire process is foul with politics, and nearly void of common sense.

Again With The Term Limits

From the folks at QandO, longtime favorites of your scribe, comes another insightful post.

The meat:

I’d posit instead that term limits increase choice in politicians, because it throws open races that would otherwise be foregone conclusions because of the money and power of the incumbent. I find it difficult to believe that a legislature with 11% approval but 95% plus re-election rates offers the electorate anywhere near the optimal amount of choice.

However, the main reason I favor term limits is because I think career politicians become utterly detached from the real world. Many (most?) of them go from law school to some short law career to politics, and then spend decades in a fantasyland. Washington is like Hogwarts to these people. They are induced by the culture there to believe they can perform magic by passing laws. Inside the Beltway, that magic actually works; they get great press from newspaper reporters than have an extreme bias in favor of activist government, and they get treated like royalty on an everyday basis.

I don’t see any cure for this problem that does not involve forcing these people into the real world, and that means term limits. I agree with former senator and presidential chief of staff Howard Baker, who believes that our system simply does not work well with career politicians. He prefers what he calls a “citizen legislature“. That makes a lot of sense to me.

95% re-election rate and 11% approval rating. Just think about that for a few minutes.

Then consider if there is any relationship to this:

Bale Adrift!

Spotted, outside Bozeman. The bale that nearly got away….