Passover has (finally) ended, and now, once again, it's time for a linkfest of links that have been forming plaque on the walls of my intertubes for the past two weeks or so. Some of them are seriously OLD, but I want you to have them, anyway. Please stay with me till the end, because way at the bottom of this post, I have a couple of future classics from the Sunday New York Times that are almost worth the price of the paper.
1. In the past couple of weeks, the biggest issue in politics, in case you're a Japanese World War II fighter who's been holed up in the Pacific until yesterday, has been whether Obama flipped the bird at Hillary while speaking to his supporters following the final debate in Pennsylvania. The Hillarosphere demands to know. And Baseball Crank has another photo that may provide circumstantial evidence.
2. The Democrats' Nightmare Scenario (via Instapundit)
3. More popcorn, please!
4. McCain goes to NOLA, and an African-American participant at a town-hall meeting says this: "I want to inform you that everybody in the camp here is not a Republican." Does he mean (a) literally no one is a Republican, or (b) colloquially, not everyone is a Republican? Who cares, anyway, besides anal-retentive grammar wackos like me?
5. As Warner Wolf might have said, if you studied math in school since about 1961 . . . YOU LOST! On a related topic, Hillary Clinton does some math trolling for delegates and votes from Michigan.
6. Gov. O'Malley calls a special session of the legislature to pass a law declaring the official state dessert of Maryland. (Only kidding about the special session. Beats the hell out of raising our taxes, though.)
7. The man-cave: "Like most stories that end up with a man mowing his friend's lawn in a dress, it started out innocently enough." (via Fark, of course)
8. Sometimes it pays to test your personal machinery before reporting its theft by voodoo to police. As the police chief himself put it: "'I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke,' Oleko said.
'But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, "How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it",' he said."
9. Public Service Announcement: Be careful when eating in Canadian restaurants.
10. "Le Petit Singly is a farm that specializes in making cheese from women's breast milk." (via Ace)
11. This one's so old, it's already been overtaken by events. You remember the McLean school that banned tag in the schoolyard? Well, tag's back, but not before a week of "reorientation lessons on playground safety." I swear I'm not making that term up.
12. Patch (for women) aims to make you (not you, you) feel sexy. (via Ace)
13. Rick Monday saves the flag. In 1976. But now, there's a video.
14. American expat in Paris whines about the falling dollar. My heart bleeds.
15. False advertising from Moron Pundit: a very non-moronic defense of the tax deduction for child dependents.
16. Doubleplusundead on more misery with McCain. For me, if you want to know why McCain hasn't sealed the deal with conservatives -- I'm going to vote for him, anyway -- read George Will's column this morning. Two words: campaign finance.
17. The Children of Israel were enslaved in Egypt by a Pharaoh who took great pleasure in persecuting gays, who were brutally forced to arrange flowers for the Egyptians. Hence, the orange on the seder plate. Funny, I had always heard that it was supposed to represent Pharaoh's fear of the vagina.
18. And finally, the moment you've been waiting for -- the two classics from today's New York Times: (a) In the travel section: "In 2007, nude recreation represented a $440 million industry — up from $400 million in 2001 and $200 million in 1992." (b) In Sunday Styles: A family adjusts to the father's sex change -- "Through Sickness, Health and Sex Change."
Showing posts with label math. Show all posts
Showing posts with label math. Show all posts
April 27, 2008
Sunday evening linkfest
April 09, 2008
Wednesday linkfest
This is the place where I drop links that I've been collecting but haven't had time to write about while I've been trying to figure out my mother's taxes.
1. From the distaff side of the moronosphere, S.Weasel has a delightful tribute to Charlton Heston. Well, to his buttocks, anyway.
2. Speaking of the moronosphere, check doubleplusundead regularly for his daily roundups, called "around the moronosphere in 80 iq points." I think the Moron-in-Chief was responsible for that name.
3. Since it's tax time, I'd like to bring you this: "Woman Apologizes for Pitbull Attack on IRS Employee." (via TaxProf Blog)
4. Here's the barbecue guy who loves the NoKos. The FBI already knows about him, thanks to his dad. Really. Will there be a place for him as Secretary of State in the Obama Administration? And this: A coincidence?
5. Will you be more in love with your wife if she learns to play poker? This article says you will. It sounds totally asinine to me, because you play poker precisely to be alone with the boys, but there are some other tips for women that sound a little better than that.
6. If you live in Minnesota, your tax dollars are funding what may be a madrassa.
7. Ace writes about a post by a user at Obama's site attacking the Jews. A commenter finds the cached link after the post is taken down.
8. From the Department of Old: "Woman's Lawsuit Claims Bra Injured Her / Victoria's Secret Denies Claims." (via Ace's headlines last week)
9. From the Department of Not So New: Starbucks won't let you customize your card with "Laissez Faire" but will let you use "People Not Profits"? (via Volokh)
10. Child "maths" genius-ette becomes a call girl (with probably NSFW photo) (via Fark)
11. Get your ice cold Mets motivational poster, courtesy of Baseball Crank. Not that I've already given up on them -- that'll take another few days like yesterday.
February 12, 2008
Primary Tuesday linkfest
You may have heard that the Maryland primary was held today (as were the primaries in Virginia and the District of Columbia). I showed up at 7:00 in the morning as the polls opened. Why I bothered I'll never understand. It was down to a decision between my fourth and my fifth choices for the nomination. (I registered a protest vote by voting for my first, who was already out of the race.) But I did vote for the Mission Impossible guy to run against our Democratic congressman in November, and I voted for school board, too.
Although I declined it, the election judges foisted an "I voted" sticker on me. I tried to convince my 16-year-old son to wear it to school today, but he doesn't like his father's sense of humor.
Anyway, here's tonight's linkfest, starting with the political:
1. In last week's linkfest, I pointed you to a video of Obama supporters in a Luntz focus group being asked to name a single accomplishment for Obama. Today, we have the second installment in the same quest. Not as good as the first one, but one member tries to "pass," as if this were law school, and another says Obama's accomplishment was being the only black senator.
2. From a few days ago . . . Mickey Kaus: "Marion Barry to endorse Obama: Isn't there something Obama can do to stop this?"
3. The Republican Jewish Coalition begins an ad campaign that hits home for Jews on the most sensitive issue ever: "I Used To Be A Democrat." Truly hitting below the belt. At this rate, within no more than 50 years, the Republicans will increase their share of the Jewish vote to 30 percent.
4. The BBC: "With Valentine's Day around the corner, don't trust your instincts when it comes to selecting a mate." No, you should choose mathematically. Yes, mathematically. Or, to quote the Brits, you should use "maths." (In America, we can't even do math in the singular, let alone the plural.) Here is the formula, in case you were wondering:
Putting this into an equation, we could come up with the following (W=Witty, G=Aggressive, Ay=Your Attractiveness, AH=Her Attractiveness, R=Her "Amount" of Current Relationship; all variables from 1-10 with 10 being high):(via Fark)
You would, of course, have to evaluate the results on some type of scale, like the one here:
If ASK is less than zero you should lower your standards
If ASK is between zero and 1, you have exactly a snowball's chance in hell with her
If ASK is between 1 and 10, game on!
If ASK is greater than 10, consider her more attractive friend instead
5. Don't hit the "Reply to All" button. And don't reply to a message where the settings are borked and any reply is treated AS IF it were "Reply to All." That's the lesson from a Department of Homeland Security contractor's experience, related in The Belmont Club. Bonus: The distribution list for this intelligence report somehow included a fellow in the defense industry of Iran. Yes, that Iran. (hat tip: fee simple)
6. If you've been dissatisfied with the current generation of composting toilets, I have good news for you: "The Next Generation of Composting Toilet Technology is Here." (hat tip: Son of the Right Hand) But if this toilet won't dispose of the dead bodies I have lying around, I'll just have to wait until the next generation after that.
May 10, 2007
Prodigy composers
I have a homework question for you classical music mavens to do over the weekend. But before I tell you what it is, let me give you a little background.
When I was a senior math major in college, I was busy trying to find other fields to go into, because I knew I didn't have the talent for a career in math. What I used to say was: "When Galois was my age, he was dead." Galois was a young French mathematician in the early 19th century, who "died from wounds suffered in a duel under murky circumstances at the age of twenty." Before he went to that fateful duel, however, he wrote down some of his mathematical ideas, which later became highly significant in advanced algebra.
Like many mathematicians, classical composers often were prodigies. If you haven't heard of a fellow named Mozart, perhaps you should scroll down to the next post.
Mozart, of course, was not the only prodigy composer. I've been listening to Felix Mendelssohn's Octet for Strings lately, which he wrote at age 16. This is a stunningly brilliant work, and although I really am not the greatest Mendelssohn fan in the world, it's almost impossible to offer too much praise for the Octet.
All of this led me to say that if Mendelssohn had died right after writing the Octet, that work alone would have demanded that history treat him as a great composer.
So, finally, here is my question:
Can you name other works by other composers, written at the age of 20 or younger (easier version: 30 or younger), that alone would have made them a great composer?
I'm not going to grade your answers. I don't have any answers, myself. I was just wondering what you can come up with.
February 24, 2007
The answers
You think math has only right and wrong answers? Try insane (but funny) answers. (The first is my favorite.)
Via Ace, who points out: "They are too funny to be real wrong answers as claimed, but still pretty cute."
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