YouTube - Sesame Street: Martians Radio

Munah Munah

YouTube - Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four

Check this out: YouTube - Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four -- this is one of the neatest visualization of statistics I've seen in a very long time.

The Minecraft Experiment

I recently started playing Minecraft (and mistakenly hooked my sons on it too-Doh!) and I've been following the community off and on as it goes. I read The Minecraft experiment, day 9 and completely laughed myself to tears.

Read the whole series if you like this one. It's a riot.

And on that note...

John Carmack of id Software fame has now chimed in with his two cents on our current model of government. Here's a quote:

It is unfortunate that income taxes get deducted automatically from most people’s paychecks, before they ever see the money they earned. A large chunk of the population thinks that tax day is when you get a nice little refund check. Good trick, that. If everyone was required to pay taxes like they pay their utilities, attitudes would probably change. When you get an appallingly high utility bill, you start thinking about turning off some lights and changing the thermostat. When your taxes are higher than all your other bills put together, what do you do? You can make a bit of a difference by living in Texas instead of California, but you don’t have many options regarding the bulk of it.

Also, it is horribly crass to say it, but taxes are extracted by the threat of force. I know a man (Walt Anderson), who has been in jail for a decade because the IRS disagreed with how his foundations were set up, so it isn’t an academic statement. What things do you care strongly enough about to feel morally justified in pointing a gun at me to get me to pay for them? A few layers of distance by proxy let most people avoid thinking about it, but that is really what it boils down to. Feeding starving children? The justice system? Chemotherapy for the elderly? Viagra for the indigent? Corn subsidies?

Articles & Essays by Orson Scott Card - Afterword to the novel Empire

I believe everyone in the United States should read Articles & Essays by Orson Scott Card - Afterword to the novel Empire, just as a reminder of how insane politics have become nowadays.

The more I read, and the more research I do on the upcoming elections, the more I start to think that no matter who I choose to represent me at whatever level of govenment, I will have made a fatal mistake in judgement.

Sadness

While waiting for coverage of the Soyuz TMA-18 reentry to continue, NASA ran footage of the final roll out of shuttle Discovery. The whole thing was very sad.

There's something amazingly painful about watching the end of the NASA human spaceflight program, and more than likely the end of American astronauts in space.

Hopefully, Russia and China can keep the dreams of a human future in space alive.

Color Survey Results « xkcd

xkcd recently posted a color survey, and today he finally posted the results.

Apparently, I'm thankful I didn't take this, because the results are just insanely hilarious.

Web publications suck

Many of my weekly computing magazines are converting over to a web-based format, published in PDFs, to save on publishing costs and to "go green". I personally don't have a problem with those reasons, but I'm not a fan of the format. It's tedious to read and slow to download.

HOWEVER, I AM a hater of publications who move to this format, but don't upgrade their servers to handle the load. I've got three different magazines on this format, and I can rarely download the damn things at work, because they're so slow, or throw 500 errors, etc. I can usually read them at night at home, because the entire US business world isn't beating them into the ground at 11 pm.

Please people, beef up the servers if you're going to publish this way.

Obama Administration cancels Constellation

The news is out, and the Obama administration has officially requested that NASA cancel the Constellation moon program, and replace it with partnerships with private industry and international partners.

Well, here's my read: NASA is dead. Our leadership in space is dead. We will no longer do anything that may be classified as risky, cannot be fostered off on an international partner, or won't turn a profit.

You think NASA has been risk-averse the last 20 years? Wait until private industry is responsible for the vehicles. You won't see any human doing ANYTHING that might cause a lawsuit. Visits to Hubble or anything similar will never happen again.

My bet is we'll be watching the Chinese take over real exploration, while we hide under our blankets on Earth. Hell, the Russians will be kicking our loser butts in 10 years. Maybe we'll still be present in low earth orbit. Maybe. The Russians will probably pay us off the ISS with their oil money and kick us out of there too.

Oh, I should also probably mention: a TON of smart engineers and high-tech workers are about to lose their jobs. I wonder if they'll let complex 39, the LCC and the VAB rot away like so much of the Cape?