Chemical Arms Inspectors Say Syria Has Destroyed All Declared Sites

The New York Times reports Chemical Arms Inspectors Say Syria Has Destroyed All Declared Sites "The international chemical weapons watchdog said on Thursday that Syria had met an important deadline for the ‘functional destruction’ of all the chemical weapons production and mixing facilities it declared to inspectors, rendering them inoperable, under a deal brokered by Russia and the United States."

Now it would be really nice if we could get a ceasefire to allow vaccinations to put down a polio outbreak in refugee camps.

The Onion Nails It

The Onion: Red Sox Fan Dedicates Garbage Can He’s Lighting On Fire To Marathon Victims.

BOSTON—Fifteen minutes after the Boston Red Sox defeated the St. Louis Cardinals to become World Series Champions, sources are now confirming that local man Bradley Ferrante, 26, is dedicating the trash can he’s lighting on fire to the victims of last April’s Boston Marathon bombings. “4/15, never forget!” said a visibly intoxicated Ferrante before throwing an entire book of lit matches into the trash bin, stumbling slightly before kicking it to the ground, removing his shirt, and screaming “Go Sox!” “Dynasty!” “Big Papi! We love you, Papi!” and “We’re the fuckin’ champs, baby! Boston Strong! Yankees suck! Woo!” At press time, Ferrante was hunched over on Boylston Street, vomiting roughly 800 yards from the marathon’s finish line.

Nikon Small World 2013

In Focus Nikon Small World 2013 "Nikon has just announced the winners of the 2013 Small World Photomicrography Competition. Started back in 1974, the contest invites photographers and scientists to submit images of all things visible under a microscope. I was fortunate enough to have been asked to be a judge in this year's competition, and am happy to finally be able to share some of the winning images with you. Taking first place this year is a 250x view of a marine diatom by Wim van Egmond (photo #2 below), showing the complexity and stunning detail of its fragile helical chain. Other entries include close-up views of ladybug feet, mollusc radula, dinosaur bones, nerve structures in embryos, and much more. Enjoy a trip into a miniature world through the images shared here with us by Nikon, all from the 2013 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. [32 photos]"

Secret Messages Left on the International Space Station

Secret Messages Left on the International Space Station.

"‘We did a lot of maintenance during our flight and rotated out a lot of the experiment racks and we saw many signatures on the internal hull or on the inside parts of the racks,’ Marshburn told Universe Today via phone from Johnson Space Center. ‘Things like ‘Greetings from the Water Recovery team!’ with everyone’s signature. That’s fairly prevalent on the inside, particularly behind the racks, but not in plain view.’ But he’s never seen anything on the external parts of the space station before."

HBOs Masterclass

HBO has a documentary series called Masterclass. I recently caught an episode with Wynton Marsalis and then setup a TiVo wishlist. I've now caught the Kathleen Turner and Bobby McFerrin episodes. I've really enjoyed them and learned a bunch from them. Each takes 4 students in some art discipline and paired them with a master for a day or two leading to a performance. I've learned a lot about acting, singing, architecture (a while ago I saw a Frank Gehry episode) as well as collaboration, education, and improvisation. I couldn't find a good landing page on the HBO site, but if you have HBO, I highly recommend it.

Rand Paul Plagiarized Speech From Wikipedia?

This is pretty amusing. Rand Paul Plagiarized Speech From Wikipedia, Rachel Maddow Says "In a speech given in support of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, Paul referenced the 90s science fiction movie Gattaca. The Kentucky senator used the plot of Gattaca--a dystopian world in which eugenics is widely practiced-- to attack pro-choice advocates. Even more bizarre than his choice of metaphor are the similarities between Paul's speech and the Wikipedia page for Gattaca."

Feed Up With Healthcare.gov Story

Someone needs to teach Obama how to explain things or he needs to get Bill Clinton to do it again. With all this talk about people being thrown off their existing health care plans (I heard 2,000,000 people this morning) I've yet to hear anyone ask how many people were thrown off their plans last year? Or were thrown off once they got sick or made claims? Every year I've had to pick a new plan or seen the cost of my plan go up significantly. I knew at the time that Obama's soundbite claims were too broad. He usually said that if you get coverage via your employer it won't change, and that's still true (unless of course your employer changes or changes their coverage which happened before and after Obamacare).

And the woman who's insurance costs have gone up 10x? She was paying $54 per month before that and was happy with that plan. I want to know what that plan covered and if she ever used it or got any money from the insurance company?

And would someone other than Ezra Klein point out to some GOP Congressman they're interviewing their own complicity in the problems? The GOP’s Obamacare chutzpah. And people should point out to Ted Cruz that the health insurance he gets via his wife's employer has a tax subsidy. Now he might think all taxes are bad and that any discounts on taxes are good, but that doesn't change what it is. If you don't get insurance from your employer the tax deduction you can take varies depending on your situation.

Fix the damn website, fire the people who screwed up, fine the contractors for not meeting their obligations (or fire the lawyers that wrote the crappy contracts) and get in front of the messaging. It's not that hard.

Update: At least WonkBlog is trying hard to explain this stuff. The Health-Care Trilemma: How Obamacare is changing insurance premiums

Heathcare Hearings

These hearings, and in fact most Congressional hearings are just a joke. To show I'm not completely biased, the first person I saw speak was Rep John Lewis (D-GA). He was yelling at the witness about how the Republicans filibuster and closing of the government reminded him of Congress's behavior during the Civil Rights Movement. Then he said he made a chart of the successes of the ACA and had the witness read it aloud. Moronic.

But if you're someone who thinks the government should be run more like a business, I agree that even business meetings (which all corporate people complain about) are run better than these hearings. Each person gets 2-3 mins to ask questions and they alternate from one party to the other. This guarantees that no information comes out in any depth. It's almost exactly the opposite of the way any business meeting is run.

Three Centuries of Debt and Interest Rates

Krugman on Three Centuries of Debt and Interest Rates in England.

"The print is a bit small, but the blue line is the ratio of public debt to GDP, measured on the right axis, and the red line is the yield on long-term government debt, measured on the left.

You might think that these data, and the relationship they show — or, actually, don’t show — should have some impact on our current debate, especially given the tendency of many players to reject modeling and appeal to what they claim are the lessons of history."

The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel

The Atlantic has a nice list, The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel

Followup: '50 Greatest Breakthroughs,' the Illustrated and Expanded Edition.

Senator changes tune, now is “totally opposed” to foreign leader surveillance

Ars Technica writes of Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) Senator changes tune, now is “totally opposed” to foreign leader surveillance.

“Let me state unequivocally: I am totally opposed," Feinstein said. “Unlike NSA’s collection of phone records under a court order, it is clear to me that certain surveillance activities have been in effect for more than a decade and that the Senate Intelligence Committee was not satisfactorily informed. Therefore our oversight needs to be strengthened and increased.”

I wonder what she'll say when it turns out the NSA has been collecting her calls (which since they collect all calls I'm sure they have).

I just don't get this at all. The purpose of the NSA is to spy on other countries and you'd think you'd get more interesting intelligence listening to presidents than to say bakers. It is illegal for them to spy on Americans. And yet, people are upset that they're spying on foreign leaders and not upset that they're collecting all electronic communications of Americans at home. Of course they're spying on foreign leaders, that what spying is.

Colbert had a good interview about it with Mark Mazzetti.

In the meantime, Challenge to NSA spying pressed,

A privacy advocacy group, seeking to keep alive in the Supreme Court its challenge to the federal government’s secret sweeps of electronic and digital communication data, argued on Monday that the privacy of “every person in this country” is at stake in the case. It contended that the government — in this case and in lower court cases — is trying to shield the National Security Agency’s spying operation from any court review.

Apple Forums Becoming Less Useful

Companies should stop pissing off Lawrence Lessig. This time it's Apple and it's legit. Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department.

"So, hey #Apple, if you want the free help given by members of your community, treat them with respect. A simple — “thanks for the comments; we’re looking into it” — would be a really cheap way to show respect. And a policy against scrubbing comments offering people completely legitimate advice for dealing with their technical problems would be one more, though admittedly, that’s less cheap."

Update: Lessig is famous for his talks and his unusual slides. He's looking to move away from Keynote as the update broke his slides.

Congressional oversight of the NSA is a joke Says Congressman

Rep Alan Grayson (D-FL) Congressional oversight of the NSA is a joke. I should know, I'm in Congress.

"Despite being a member of Congress possessing security clearance, I've learned far more about government spying on me and my fellow citizens from reading media reports than I have from 'intelligence' briefings. If the vote on the Amash-Conyers amendment is any indication, my colleagues feel the same way. In fact, one long-serving conservative Republican told me that he doesn't attend such briefings anymore, because, 'they always lie'."

"I've requested classified information, and further meetings with NSA officials. The House Intelligence Committee has refused to provide either. Supporters of the NSA's vast ubiquitous domestic spying operation assure the public that members of Congress can be briefed on these activities whenever they want. Senator Saxby Chambliss says all a member of Congress needs to do is ask for information, and he'll get it. Well I did ask, and the House Intelligence Committee said "no", repeatedly. And virtually every other member not on the Intelligence Committee gets the same treatment."

Really David Gregory?

I'm not a big fan of David Gregory (ever since this) and don't watch Meet the Press much as a result. This tweet he posted today really surprises me:

.@ezraklein Will there be measurable damage done to the overall program by these rollout problems? #TweetThePress

The whole twitter conversation will supposedly be here but now I'm getting a 404. My favorite response was this, "Hard to answer that in 140 characters. Much easier in 2,000 words: link to wonkblog …"

Now I do depend on Klein for this kind of info too because he and his staff (particularly Sarah Kliff) seem to be covering it better than anyone. But I'm not a journalist, David Gregory is (supposedly). Him asking another journalist this seems to be the equivalent of asking a another student "what did you get for number five?". Now he does host the longest running TV show of all time and it is called Meet The Press, but Gregory could have just read WonkBlog to find out the answers like I did.

Tweetbot 3 Questions and Answers

My Twitter client of choice is Tweetbot. It's a little expensive for a twitter client (that is, it's not free) but it works very well, syncs between my mac, iPad and iPhone (unfortunately that's three different products, I think the iOS ones could be a single universal client), and basically does what I want in all circumstances (multiple accounts, Instapaper support, lists, builtin browser, etc.). They just came out with a new version for iOS 7 on the iPhone and it's good (and on sale now for just $3 instead of $5).

In addition, here's the best example I've seen in a long while of how a company should communicate with their customers. Tweetbot 3 Questions and Answers — Tapbots Blog. They answer actual questions they've gotten, using plain language that actually addresses the question. They say which issues they are working on correcting and in other cases what the design thinking was and ask, "Please try to live with it for a few days, if you still hate it after that let us know." That's how to treat your customers.

Whither iWork?

I haven't installed Mavericks yet but I probably will soon. I'm curious about the updated iWork apps but I keep hearing about missing features. The lists of complaints I've seen include missing customizable toolbars and format bars, but that seems to be missing the point of the new sidebar. Also I didn't even know they had AppleScript support so losing that isn't a big deal to me (and I haven't seen an interesting example of what people were using it for).

I've seen complaints about Numbers loosing some advanced sorting functionality that I might find myself missing but the only one that really resonates for me is losing custom formats. In my fantasy baseball sheets I created an AVG format that was 3 decimal places and no leading zero. Not a biggie, but in charts in my movie lists I created a format to display labels on bar charts but to display nothing if the value is zero. This made some charts look much better but custom formats weren't supported on iOS. When opening the sheet on iOS there was a notice saying it couldn't handle them and gave me the option of removing them or creating a copy of the sheet without them, which seemed fair. And that leads me to...

Whither iWork? "The fact that iWork on the Mac has lost functionality isn't because Apple is blind to power users. It's because they're willing to make a short-term sacrifice in functionality so that they can create a foundation that is equal across the Mac, iOS, and web versions. It will take time to bring these new versions of iWork up to parity with what the Mac used to have. In the meantime all platforms have to live with the lowest common denominator."

While I agree with the sentiment I'm not sure I agree with the specifics. At least with custom formats, they already coped with different support on different platforms in a graceful way and rather than adding support on iOS they removed it from OS X. Lame. I also understand they removed the Outline View and the search panel, which had nothing to do with file format compatibility.

We've Reached The End of Antibiotics

The latest Frontline was Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria. I haven't watched it yet but I saw a link to this scary interview, Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”.

The more you use an antibiotic, the more you expose a bacteria to an antibiotic, the greater the likelihood that resistance to that antibiotic is going to develop. So the more antibiotics we put into people, we put into the environment, we put into livestock, the more opportunities we create for these bacteria to become resistant. …We also know that we’ve greatly overused antibiotics and in overusing these antibiotics, we have set ourselves up for the scenario that we find ourselves in now, where we’re running out of antibiotics.

We are quickly running out of therapies to treat some of these infections that previously had been eminently treatable. There are bacteria that we encounter, particularly in health-care settings, that are resistant to nearly all — or, in some cases, all — the antibiotics that we have available to us, and we are thus entering an era that people have talked about for a long time.

For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about ‘The end of antibiotics, question mark?’ Well, now I would say you can change the title to ‘The end of antibiotics, period.’

We’re here. We’re in the post-antibiotic era. There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can’t. …

The GOP’s Obamacare chutzpah

WonkBlog describes The GOP’s Obamacare chutzpah "The classic definition of chutzpah is the child who kills his parents and then asks for leniency because he's an orphan. But in recent weeks, we've begun to see the Washington definition: A party that does everything possible to sabotage a law and then professes fury when the law's launch is rocky."

He then goes through a lengthly list of the ways that the GOP contributed to the problems.

Space trash is a growing problem. These economists have a solution.

I love when WonkBlog finds out about a topic in a new field (particularly when I've known about it before). It reinforces to me how well they explain complicated things. Space trash is a growing problem. These economists have a solution.

Home Theater Upgrade

I watch a lot of TV and movies but I don't upgrade my home theater equipment very often. My TV was 11 years old. An expensive (at the time) Panasonic 42" Plasma TV. I had a Denon A/V receiver I got a couple of years later and a Panasonic DVD player. My TiVo was a Series 3, about 7 years old. I got my money out of the lifetime service option (I think I managed to transfer that over from a previous TiVo) but I did replace the hard drive once and it was starting to act up again (a few reboots and pauses).

There were some limitations. The TV and receiver didn't support HDMI connectors so everything was using component video and digital audio cables (I think all were optical). That was fine. I have a Wii and an AirPort Express to stream audio from my mac and iOS devices. But that meant I couldn't use an Apple TV or some other newer devices. Many blu-ray players now just have an HDMI connector. Also, while the TV was HD, it had a resolution of 1024x768 which meant the best it could do was 720p. Higher resolution 1080i and 1080p were beyond it.

So I was thinking of upgrading and then TiVo finally announced their new Roamio and I was interested. After my Series 3 then rebooted on its own, I ordered one then I started looking at home theater equipment reviews in The Wirecutter. I was very happy with their articles, picking the best device in a category and explaining the choices and selection process. I was thinking of buying some of their step-up choices but the more I researched the more I agreed with their best picks. So I ended up getting their picks for Best TV, Best A/V Receiver and Best Blu-ray Player. Here's some of my thinking.

The TV is clearly the best reviewed TV around (some say ever). There are even higher end ones, but this has a great picture for not crazy money. From Amazon I got the 50" version for $1000 (seven times less than I paid for a 42" plasma 11 years prior). I looked at their Best $500 TV choice but it was limited to 720p, didn't have as a good picture (I like rich blacks for old movies) or as a good an anti-glare coating (I've been known to watch movies during the day) and didn't do 3D. I don't have much use for 3D now, but if I keep this TV as long as the last one, some future proofing seemed nice. This one also had network features (aka a "smart tv") and the cheaper one didn't. I didn't see a need for the smart features but I suppose they're worth something (and could be upgraded over time). Also I was saving some money on expectations for a receiver so it seemed reasonable to put it in the TV which I'll be looking at. I'm not a hardcore gamer so the one issue of some video lag didn't bother me at all. I expect to keep this TV until it's time to upgrade to 4K video (if that ever happens).

The TV picture is gorgeous. While the screen is 8" bigger, the bezel on this model is smaller than on my old TV. The picture looks both bigger and better and yet fits right in where the old TV was. It's nicer, but not overwhelming. The image is bright and the colors vibrant. I pulled out my old Toy Story DVD because it has a THX Optimizer on it with some image patterns to help you set up the video controls. I even remembered I had ordered the free THX blue glasses and where they were. So I set that up was and was happy. Then a friend mentioned he looked up the settings that some experts post on a forum. I found this for my TV and was surprised to see that there are a set of slides to download to a sd card to run in slide show mode for 100 hours to break in the TV before configuring the video settings. Yeah I'm not doing that. An alternative is to watch regular TV for 250-300 hours. Fine, after Halloween I'll try out these settings, in the mean time I'm pretty happy.

My last receiver was about $1000 so seeing The Wirecutter's pick was $250 surprised me. Shifting to HDMI means many fewer cables and I'm sure simpler insides. It supports 4 HDMI inputs and I had plans for all of those so I thought about future proofing and getting a step up pick with more inputs, but as I researched, it seemed less necessary. At $250, if I need a new receiver in a few years I'll upgrade. I agree with the review that many features on a receiver aren't necessary. I want it to have good sound and switch inputs. Since I've moved all video to HDMI I don't need it to up-convert or anything like that. The one thing I looked out for was that it passed through 3D so that a 3D blu-ray would play on the 3D TV if I ever wanted that.

As for sound, I didn't really use the DSP stuff on the old receiver so this Yamaha had plenty. I'm surprised but I have used a few of the "sound programs" like "Sports" and "The Bottom Line" (a Jazz club effect) and now regularly watch TV with the "Drama" setting. The Wirecutter said that Dynamic Compression was the one useful sound feature and I have used on occasion when watching something late at night. I have surround sound but not a subwoofer (I have neighbors) so 5.1 was just fine. For radio, sure some FM reception is nice, but mostly I want to stream audio from a computer or iOS device (iTunes or Spotify or whatever). The thing it was missing was builtin AirPlay but I have an AirPort Express already and I'm sure I'll eventually get an Apple TV so it didn't need to be builtin. And whatever was builtin would only stream audio and I'd eventually want to stream video too so I'd be looking at an Apple TV anyway.

Since I was going with HD everything it seemed reasonable to get a blu-ray player too and they're just $100. Their pick from Sony seemed fine, particularly on sale at Amazon for $95. It's supports 3D and the Yamaha Receiver will pass it through to the TV, so I'm good to try an Avatar 3D blu-ray or something eventually.

One feature to consider in all of these components is networking. Streaming services for video (Netflix, Amazon) and audio (Pandora, Spotify) are pretty nice. You can get TVs, receivers, blu-ray players, etc that all offer these features but you really don't need them in all your components. This was the one downside I found to The Wirecutter's strategy of picking the best of each device rather than also having a Best System. So my TV and blu-ray player have various streaming options but I'm probably never going to use them since my TiVo has them too. Still I connected them all up with ethernet cables which are more reliable than wifi (and my router was right next to the TV stand) and found they all downloaded and installed software updates when turned on (which was kind of nice). Another network feature is DLNA which lets you stream stuff (video, pictures, audio) from computers. It seems more prevalent for windows but there are some apps for iOS that are supposed to work. The Apple alternative is AirPlay via an AppleTV. Again to use this you only need support for this it in one device, I have it in both the TV and blu-ray and this redundancy makes the choice of skipping networking features in the receiver seem much better.

The last system-wide feature I learned about is called HDMI Control or CEC. With HDMI cables being digital and with devices getting more complicated the industry looked to do more with the digital connections. So if your TV is streaming Netflix for you, you want some way to send the audio back to the receiver to send to the surround speakers. You could use another cable but HDMI Audio Return Channel (ARC) lets this happen on the same HDMI cable you use to output video from the receiver to the TV. CEC lets the different remotes control the related devices. So turning on the TV will turn on the receiver and the blu-ray player and the volume controls on any of the remotes will affect the receiver. This is another nice benefit of using HDMI cables that I didn't anticipate, but it wasn't easy to get working.

While HDMI CEC is an industry standard, all the venders had to implement it and they have some differences and they all seem to have rebranded it to something else. So Panasonic calls it Viera Link. I do have a universal remote I've used but the remote that came with the new TiVo is quite nice. It's uses radio instead of infra red so it doesn't need to be pointed at the TiVo and it's designed well and has a few unique buttons. One problem is that it's not a learning remote. You can enter codes for different equipment to make TV power and input buttons and volume and mute buttons works with a receiver, but there are no macros and no Receiver power button. HDMI CEC would mean I could the one TV power button to turn on/off my receiver too. My problem was that when I did this, the sound came from the TV and not the receiver. Googling led me to this answer. It seems the Panasonic TV has all the HDMI control options in the setup menu which was easy to find, but there's another option to be found in one the networking apps called VIERA Link and that has one setting for "Speaker Output", change it from TV to Home theater and it all works fine.

So the main device I interact with is the TiVo Roamio. I got the Pro model just to be decadent. I've had it about a month now and am very happy. WIth six tuners I never have a conflict (though I have wanted to record six things at once a couple of times, Sunday has a lot of good TV) and with a 3TB drive I'm not going to run out of room for years, if ever. The picture looks great and I'm having it output everything at 1080p. I got it before the new TV and even hooked up to the old TV using 720p the picture looked much better than my old Series 3. The new HD interface is mostly great and familiar. I like that all movies have their year appended to the title (so you can tell it's a movie) and that almost all TV shows have the season and episode number in their descriptions. Also the guide now shows icons for things that are scheduled to be recorded and new series episodes have a NEW icon. It doesn't manage to show more information on the screen though, the extra real estate is taken up with some ad-like things at the top and a thumbnail picture of what's playing (which I've grown to like over the previous system of overlaying the guide info on top of the full-screen picture).

There are some little things that have annoyed me. Sometimes the clear button will return you to full-screen video, sometimes it won't. It took a while to figure out that the zoom button always works to return to full-screen video. I think I used to be able to use the channel up/down buttons to scroll through a wish list's upcoming show details and now I can't. I also feel like to the rate a show (with thumbs up/down) I have to click more to get to the details description. Right-arrow while watching TV brings up a screen with a few tabs showing info about what's playing, whats being recorded on the other tuners, closed captioning information, and alternate sound tracks. For some reason these tabs are in a different order if you're watching live TV or a recorded show. So that makes a macro to turn on/off closed captions is impossible.

I upgraded from an old TiVo and that process was always start over completely. There was no way to move channel lists, favorite channels, show ratings, season passes, wish lists, or web video subscriptions. Now at least you can transfer season passes via their web site but that wasn't as smooth as it could be. The order of the passes wasn't preserved and auto-record wish lists didn't come over either. Some passes came over but the show is on hiatus and there are no upcoming episodes in the guide; these are displayed as "Corrupt - delete me" which isn't what you want to see. It's also wrong, the correct thing to do is leave them and wait for new episodes to appear in the guide and then they will fix themselves (I've seen this happen in a couple of cases).

There was an issue with certain FiOS cable cards so I was sure to pick up the right model numbers. Cable card install was easy enough, you put it in the TiVo and call an automated FiOS number and read a few codes to active it; but the HBO and Cinemax channels didn't work. FiOS encrypts those and I had problems when they started doing so. I called FiOS, the tech was nice, admitted he hadn't done this before, but got it working within 15 minutes.

The Roamio has a big new feature that it can download and stream video to an iPad or iPad via the TiVo app. I've tried streaming to the iPad once and it was quite nice. It picked up right were I left off, but when I went back to the TV I had to manually advance to the new position. I've just used this on my home network but apparently as of today it will work out of the house too. I can definitely see using this when traveling and it being very useful in a household of several people.

Even though the TV and blu-ray have streaming features, I'm probably going to stick to using the ones in the TiVo. They have good netflix support which is the one service I use now. There's also Amazon Instant but I never understood how that's different from what I get via my Amazon Prime subscription and don't use it much. It is nice that these services are integrated into the search functions of the TiVo. So it will tell you if something is on the device, listed in the upcoming guide or available via Netflix or Amazon.

The only game console I have is a Wii. I used component cables to connect it to the receiver but the Yamaha isn't capable of converting that signal to HDMI so I'd have to run component cables to the TV and switch the TV input to use the Wii. That's not horrible (that's what macros on universal remotes are for) but not ideal. Then I found this device that converts the Wii output to HDMI for just $20 on Amazon. It seems to work perfectly and makes the connections and use a little easier.

I bought five different color High Speed HDMI Cables with Ferrite Cores from Monoprice for about $27 and got a pack of five ethernet cables from Amazon for under $14.

Overall I'm really happy so far.

The Daily Show Nails It

I thought all of The Daily Show last night was really good. Here's a link to the whole episode. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - October 23, 2013. If you don't watch the whole thing, at least watch the first segment about how CNBC in particular reported about the JP Morgan $13 billion settlement.

Smart Clothes Science Symposium

The Radcliffe Insititute is having a Smart Clothes Science Symposium next month. If you're in the Boston area and have the time, it's free. I'm going.

"Radcliffe’s annual science symposium will focus on ‘smart clothes’ and the science of designing materials that improve and protect lives. Experts in biology, design, engineering, materials science, medicine, and nanotechnology will address a variety of topics, including digital fabrication, soldier-related technologies, smart materials and biology, wearable technology, and the future of innovative substances."

Traditional Chinese medicine origins: Mao invented it but didn’t believe in it.

This is a pretty remarkable story, Traditional Chinese medicine origins: Mao invented it but didn’t believe in it. "Mikulski and the rest of the Senate may be surprised to learn that they were repeating 60-year-old justifications of Chinese medicine put forward by Chairman Mao. Unlike Mikulski, however, Mao was under no illusion that Chinese medicine—a key component of naturopathic education—actually worked. In The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Li Zhisui, one of Mao’s personal physicians, recounts a conversation they had on the subject. Trained as an M.D. in Western medicine, Li admitted to being baffled by ancient Chinese medical books, especially their theories relating to the five elements. It turns out his employer also found them implausible."

Godwin and the Greenback

Krugman in Godwin and the Greenback explains the dollar's role as a reserve currency. "The bottom line is that while saying ‘the international role of the dollar’ sounds very sophisticated and important, the more you know about all this the less you care. This is simply not a big deal."

Making sense of the JP Morgan settlement

Felix Salmon, Making sense of the JP Morgan settlement "As Eavis explains today, the settlement breaks down into three parts. $6 billion goes to compensate investors for losses on mortgage securities; $4 billion is relief for homeowners; and the remaining $3 billion in fines is specifically targeted only at actions which took place directly under Dimon’s watch."

"In other words, Parsons’ premise is exactly wrong: JPM is not paying penalties for mistakes made by Bear Stearns. All that it’s doing is making good on obligations of WaMu and Bear related to securities they sold. And it’s inherent in buying a bank that you become responsible for its liabilities as well as its assets."