When The Cia Tried Its Hand At Magic

The Boston Globe writes When the CIA tried its hand at magic "The CIA hired [magician John] Mulholland to explain techniques of sleight-of-hand and surreptitious signaling so that agents could use them in the field. His text, which was originally supposed to have been destroyed, has now been recovered, declassified, and reprinted as ‘The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.’ "

The included slideshow is interesting.

James Galea Card Trick

Lots of fun:

The Visual Display of Stupid

Kieran Healy pointed out The Visual Display of Stupid brought to you by Fox News. I don't know does Palin's 70% really look bigger than Romney's 60%?

Tough-guy John Bolton, hiding under his bed

Glenn Greenwald writes Tough-guy John Bolton, hiding under his bed.

"John Bolton and his comrades love to run around accusing anyone who doesn't want to wage more wars of being an 'appeaser' and 'surrendering' to Terrorists, but Bolton's cry here is the ultimate, definitive surrender:  I'm too scared of the Terrorists to go about my normal life.  I'm too petrified even to have my family in the same city as a terrorist trial.  We can't adhere to our normal political system because the Terrorists will kill us all."

"All over the world, countries have put terrorists on trial in their largest and most important cities -- London, Madrid, Mumbai, Denpasar (the capital of Bali)."

I really don't understand why people should be afraid of having a trial in NYC, they have them all the time. They've tried terrorists there before. Yes I know this is just the GOP talking point of the moment, but why is anyone buying this one? What do they think the terrorists will do? Bomb a court house? Ok, is that worse than 9/11? Nuke the city during the trial? They already think that (and it's not going to happen). And remember it took al Qaeda years to plan 9/11 (and their attempts failed until they got the help of German terrorists).

Kenny's Seventy Greatest Films Of The Decade

Glenn Kenny's My Seventy Greatest Films Of The Decade. I just read through it quickly and I disagree with a lot, but still, a list to read through.

The Lego Matrix

What have you made in Lego? Anything this good?

A Serious Man and Quantum Theory

Rob Owen from Ithaca, NY writes to Roger Ebert about The Coen Bothers and Serious quantum theory. He picked up a few more references than I saw.

The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody

You have to know the muppets to really appreciate this, but then you have to know the muppets. It gets hilarious at about the 2 minute mark.

Debating Filibusters

TPM has an interesting post, More on Filibusters. I'm not sure where I fall on it, but I think it is too easy to filibuster and Senators should watch the old Star Trek episode A Taste of Armageddon.

Google Teams Up With Tivo to Give Advertisers a Clearer Picture

I don't really understand how this is going to work, Google teams up with TiVo to give advertisers a clearer picture.

"Here's where the fear and loathing come in. Google promises that advertisers pay only when their ads are seen. But TiVo lets viewers fast-forward through commercials. Now, with TiVo's data, collected from millions of digital video recorders across the country, Google can tell exactly which of those commercials are being bypassed. If all the commercials are being skipped, the channel gets no money. It's easy to see why TV executives get heartburn over this."

Is Google just processing the TiVo data and if so why doesn't TiVo do it itself? "Google currently has an agreement with EchoStar to sell ads on its Dish Network and collect similar data from the satellite TV company's subscribers." So Google sells advertising time on TV? Or are they just talking about the ads that the TiVo interface puts up, in which case, why doesn't TiVo already have the click-through info? Anyone understand this?

Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages

The Wall Street Journal writes Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages. "Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting. Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages."

The 100 Best Films of the Decade

Earlier this month the London Times listed
The 100 Best Films of the Decade. "Art house or Blockbuster? Juno or Jason Bourne? Is The Bourne Supremacy really better than Brokeback Mountain? And if Finding Nemo made it, what the hell happened to Shrek?"

I've seen 74 of them and The theme of the list seems to be films that pushed the medium to new areas and that I can respect but it's a really odd list. Wedding Crashers at 90!?! Anchorman at 62!?! I enjoyed The Squid and the Whale but I don't think it makes the list and Bad Santa certainly doesn't (let alone at 54). Syriana three spots above Dark Knight? and Far from Heaven 18 spots above Syriana?!? Borat at 11?!!? Team America at 5!!

I liked Crash, though would have places far above 98 though I know of lot of people that hated it. He's got some very good documentaries on the list like An Inconvenient Truth, Touching the Void and Man on Wire. And I'm glad to see Pixar make the list though I wouldn't have included Monsters Inc. City of God is very well deserving but Children of Men is not. I'm also glad to see United 93 and Let the Right One In at 19 and 18 respectively.

I've seen the top 9 and am not sure any would make my top 10, maybe No Country for Old Men. One thing for certain, their top film of the decade, Hidden (Cache) wouldn't make my list at all.

And yeah I'll have to think my list of top films of the decade. I will be able to do one of the year pretty easily as I've been keeping a list of everything I've seen.

Trials of Guantanamo Detainees

A week ago Friday, Glenn Greenwald wrote in Salon about Guantanamo, Detainees to get the "state-always-wins" system of "justice".

"So what we have here is not an announcement that all terrorism suspects are entitled to real trials in a real American court.  Instead, what we have is a multi-tiered justice system, where only certain individuals are entitled to real trials:  namely, those whom the Government is convinced ahead of time it can convict.  Others for whom conviction is less certain will be accorded lesser due process:  put in military commissions, to which most leading Democrats vehemently objected when created under Bush.  Presumably, others still -- those who the Government believes cannot be convicted in either forum, will simply be held indefinitely with no charges, a power the administration recently announced it intends to preserve based on the same theories used by Bush/Cheney to claim that power. A system of justice which accords you varying levels of due process based on the certainty that you'll get just enough to be convicted isn't a justice system at all.  It's a rigged game of show trials."

A Day in the Life of the MBTA

Vanderlin has some cool infographics, A Day in the Life of the MBTA. The MBTA is the Boston Subway.

"The subway data from August 12, 2009 was parsed in openFrameworks and Matlab using custom applications. Statistical analysis was performed in Matlab for subway loading (temporal and geographical including the entire MBTA, individual lines, and individual stations), rate of subway activity, and associated data. openFrameworks was used to generate the central visualizations for the project. Programs were written to interpret data that was processed into several arrangements to emphasize different trends within the data. Linear charts were used to display the activity of stations on a given line to show the geographic relation of activity throughout the course of the day. Circular 24-hour clocks for individual lines and stations were made in order to see the relative activity throughout the day. Pie charts were used to visualize rush hour commutes on each line, showing the contrast of activity during morning and evening rush hours. Histograms were used to show the breakdown of daily activity in a linear fashion."

Here's one. "Built around a 24 hour clock each ring is a train station the thickness of the line represent the amount of people on the train at that time."

and the detail:

10 Best Animated Short Film Contenders

If you play my Oscar pool and never see any of the animated shorts aside from the Pixar ones, you might be interested in this: Academy Announces 10 Best Animated Short Film Contenders.

"The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced the animated short films short list, a list of 10 shorts, narrowed down from 37 films, that will advance in the voting process for the 82nd Academy Awards. The Academy branch members will select five nominees from the ten titles. I have included the list of 10 short films after the jump, along with trailers/previews, or video embeds of the full short films, when available."

Unfortunately, only the first one, The Cat Piano is the full film. The rest are just previews, though there is one of A Matter of Loaf and Death with Wallace & Gromit.

Texas' Gay Marriage Ban May Have Banned All Marriages

This is amusing. Texas' gay marriage ban may have banned all marriages. The clause in question (clause B) is: "This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage." I'm sure this is just a mistake that will be corrected, but it's amusing (unless of course you're affected by it).

The Fall of Greg Craig

Time had an interesting article The Fall of Greg Craig. He was the top White House lawyer charged with closing Guantanamo who recently resigned.

Sarah Palin Book Signing - Interviews with Supporters

It seems the only people who give worse interviews than Sarah Palin are her supporters:



"On November 20, 2009, at a Borders bookstore in Columbus, Ohio, Sarah Palin held a book signing event in support of "Going Rogue". Palin's supporters wanted her to run for the presidency, but they weren't exactly sure what she'd do as president. Short on specifics, most of them were uncertain what her policy positions are. They just felt that they liked her. She's "real". And that the solution to all of our country's problems—health care, energy, the deficit, unemployment, and the economy—was to cut taxes and lower spending, and Palin, they said, would solve them by doing just that."

Scary.

MIT ESP - Splash

If you have (geeky) High School kids (or will), you might be interested in MIT ESP - Splash "One weekend in November, thousands of students of all types flood to MIT just for ESP’s Splash program to learn anything they want. From fractal fun to Hungarian history to aircraft analysis, Splash participants are introduced to a huge variety of topics by over 400 classes taught by teachers from the MIT community. Want to take a class on Egyptian mythology? Origami? Chemical sensors? All are possible.

Over the course of 20 hours during Splash, you can get your feet wet with a short introduction to any number of subjects—things you always wanted to learn, or topics you never knew existed. Or you can dive head first into an in-depth seminar or intensive workshop. The whole thing happens over the course of two intense days on the MIT campus, with classes taught by MIT students and community members."

The list of classes is pretty cool.

Geekery

This is probably the geekiest thing I've done in a while.

Four of us used to play the card game pinochle pretty often, but unfortunately Ed moved away.
We found a replacement fourth, but it's still difficult to get all of us together. Today we had three and were going to play to Schafkopf, but instead we tried this.

We set the laptop on the table and setup a (fullscreen) video iChat with Ed. We dealt the cards here and picked up his hand without looking at it and showed it to him (we turned off the local view of the camera so we didn't see the cards). He took a screenshot so he could stare at his hand, even if he couldn't rearrange it. I taped two pieces of thick paper together so we could lay out each of his (12) cards separately and have them numbered by position.

My (external) iSight camera was tilted down to the table. We put a sheet of paper down where it was aimed and we played our cards there so Ed could see them. When it was Ed's turn he called out a number (like "card number six") and we played the card in that template position. He used Illustrator to mark the cards on the screenshot as he played them so he saw what was still in his hand.

It worked surprisingly well. We could see and talk with Ed and could play normally. The down sides for Ed was that he mostly just saw the table and couldn't rearrange his cards. On our side we split the duties of holding up the hand for him and putting the cards in the template (and playing them). It was odd for one person since he never saw cards thrown from his right, but I don't think we played out of order any more than we normally do.

It seemed worthy of The Big Bang Theory and I'd do it again anytime.

More Cassini Eye Candy

Lots of pretty images and data from Cassini around Saturn.

Universe Today reports Infrared Saturn, Peek-a-boo Moons.

Here are raw images from today of the moon Enceladus.

And looking around our solar system, Cassini instruments has changed our understanding of the shape of the Heliosphere around our solar system.

Rutherford Crater on the Moon

Bad Astronomy points to this image of a small part of Rutherford Crater on the Moon taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:

The LROC Image Browser lets you browse through some amazing images and zoom to great detail. Quite impressive.

How Images of the Planets have Changed in Past 30 Years

Popular Mechanics has a fantastic post, Pictures of Planets & Solar System - How Images of Mercury, Venus, Mars & Neptune Have Changed in Past 30 Years. "Pick up a 30-year-old astronomy textbook and you will find more illustrations of planets than actual pictures; Pluto still holds onto its full planet status and exoplanets are theoretical. In the intervening decades, new instruments and methods have acted together to form one giant, interdisciplinary zoom lens on our planetary companions in the solar system. We now not only have hi-res images of planets, we can also predict their weather, dig for water under their surfaces and send spacecraft through icy plumes on their moons. Planet by planet, here's a quick guide to how our vision of the solar system has changed in the past 30 years."

It's only 8 short pages and has great pictures.

The Visual Display of Unemployment

I'm not sure where this comes from but it claims to be by Latoya Egwuekwe, The Decline: The Geography of a Recession.

Color Photos of Holland in the 1890s

The Library of Congress has been posting old photos on Flickr for a while now. Today they posted several from Holland in the 1890s but these are in color. Here's one called Road to Scheveningen:

Start with The Oude Gracht Hamburgerbrug, Utrecht, Holland and click backwards through the stream.