Daylife is a good way to follow the news visually. Their actual news isn't so good yet, and I am still figuring out how to use it, but if you want to follow all the pictures taken of something in the news, such as squirrels, acorn, Barack Obama, Joe, or anything else frequently photographed by the news media, Daylife has nice large images under an attractive cubist interface.
In this screen shot of a frame around 1:59 in this video at the BarackObamadotcom Youtube channel, big brother Barry holds his sister Maya by the Golden Gate Bridge. I love this picture. Since Maya was born in August 1970, I'd guess this could be the summer of '72? I tried to restore my screenshot of the lo-res video of the faded photo to what I imagine the scene actually looked like. Despite some artifacts in the sky and under the bridge, I think this is about right.
The shirt was (Vietnam) camouflage green, not (Desert Storm) brown, as it appears in the reddened photo. I used to have one like it around the early 70s, shortly after I ruined the paisley one by forgetting some chewing gum in the pocket. Some green light reflected off the shirt onto Maya's arm, Barack's face, and the side of Maya's face. Young Barack's hair was more of a deep rich brown with reddish highlights in the bright sun, if these colors are right, and Maya's hair was a lighter brown with a reddish tinge, too. They are both squinting under a bright late-morning sun. I guess they are in a spot Golden Gate Park, facing south. I don't know the area well. It's a really nice snapshot of (the universal) brother and sister.
The Obama campaign YouTube site has a video complaining about the McCain robocall attack. McCain cannot afford or convince humans to do his dirty work, so he has been employing bots to speak ill of Obama in hopes that the humans will repeat the rumors.
That reminded me of a song… which needs a few tweaks…
When the financial melt-down bail-out was first proposed, I marveled at how the paper losses of a handful of bankers could be judged more worthy of intervention than the one-million plus families who have lost their homes in the mortgage crisis over the past year.
Much has been written about socialism for the rich, fascism, moral hazard, and other hazards of this, which I won't re-hash here, since the proposed massive bailout seems to have now become law, well-lubricated with pork fat the second time. Does anybody hear a squealing sound?
I had thought of how difficult it would be for George Bush to persuade people to give him 700 billion dollars, and two songs by the Who came to mind. Initially, We Won't Be Fooled Again, and later, Behind Blue Eyes. This song in its original form seems to reflect the great pain of the bankers. After all, doesn't one banker losing a million properties feel a million times the pain of a family who only loses one? I'm not really sure that the banking class is literally entirely blue-eyed, but let's just say they figuratively are. This song dedication goes out to the clueless Henry Paulson, who will represent the banking class. I don't have a radio station or even a YouTube video or slideshow for this, I'm just suggesting a soundtrack as a concept. Some annotations to the lyrics have been provided for the illumination of the metacognitively challenged.
This is the Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart, courtesy of the highly-perceptive reverse-engineering skills at adennak.com (AKA ph33r and loathing). Apparently the chart has gone viral, and I am only one of at least several tens of thousands if not millions of people who got this in an e-mail. What can I say? He so nailed it. This is far more articulate than any analysis you'd get on CNN. The programming metaphor may be a good fit since Palin looks animatronic, to me. Hollywood, it's not too late to include a Palin look-alike in the re-make of Westworld.
BBC nuclear bomb script releasedPDF
A script written by the BBC and the government to be broadcast in the event of a nuclear attack has been published. The script, written in the 1970s and released by the National Archives, included instructions to "stay calm and stay in your own homes". Scripts were written to reassure the public the BBC was "still there".
BBC TRANSCRIPT TO BE USED IN WAKE OF NUCLEAR ATTACKNot to worry, then!
This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. We shall bring you further information as soon as possible. Meanwhile, stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your own homes.
Remember there is nothing to be gained by trying to get away. By leaving your homes you could be exposing yourselves to greater danger.
If you leave, you may find yourself without food, without water, without accommodation and without protection. Radioactive fall-out, which follows a nuclear explosion, is many times more dangerous if you are directly exposed to it in the open. Roofs and walls offer substantial protection. The safest place is indoors.
Make sure gas and other fuel supplies are turned off and that all fires are extinguished. If mains water is available, this can be used for fire-fighting. You should also refill all your containers for drinking water after the fires have been put out, because the mains water supply may not be available for very long.
Water must not be used for flushing lavatories: until you are told that lavatories may be used again, other toilet arrangements must be made. Use your water only for essential drinking and cooking purposes. Water means life. Don't waste it.
Make your food stocks last: ration your supply, because it may have to last for 14 days or more. If you have fresh food in the house, use this first to avoid wasting it: food in tins will keep.
If you live in an area where a fall-out warning has been given, stay in your fall-out room until you are told it is safe to come out. When the immediate danger has passed the sirens will sound a steady note. The "all clear" message will also be given on this wavelength. If you leave the fall-out room to go to the lavatory or replenish food or water supplies, do not remain outside the room for a minute longer than is necessary.
Do not, in any circumstances, go outside the house. Radioactive fall-out can kill. You cannot see it or feel it, but it is there. If you go outside, you will bring danger to your family and you may die. Stay in your fall-out room until you are told it is safe to come out or you hear the "all clear" on the sirens.
Here are the main points again:
Stay in your own homes, and if you live in an area where a fall-out warning has been given stay in your fall-out room, until you are told it is safe to come out. The message that the immediate danger has passed will be given by the sirens and repeated on this wavelength. Make sure that the gas and all fuel supplies are turned off and that all fires are extinguished.
Water must be rationed, and used only for essential drinking and cooking purposes. It must not be used for flushing lavatories. Ration your food supply: it may have to last for 14 days or more.
We shall repeat this broadcast in two hours' time. Stay tuned to this wavelength, but switch your radios off now to save your batteries until we come on the air again. That is the end of this broadcast.
This is the textbook definition of Nuttwerx Squirrelization. Come to think of it, it could be Squirrel Nuttwerxization as well. You are what you eat, and the squirrelly hostess is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. When preparing members of the order Rodentia for your dining pleasure, presentation is important. That's my line; the ones in the video are nuttier. This looks like a job for Sarah Palin. (The Kill-It-Yourself movement. Teach your children well, the squirrel's hell…) Perhaps it could be on the White House menu then. What sense does cheese make? I'd suggest peanut-butter and squirrel sandwiches. I somehow find myself wondering how a squirrel-melt smells (not tastes) and am eagerly awaiting the time when computers are equipped with smell cartridges, and a standardized olfactory codec for YouTube enables the smell of fresh, lightly toasted squirrel melts to waft gently away from the fan of my laptop. And now, if Euell excuse me, as a counterpoint and in the interest of equal time, I need to go listen to the White Stripes' Little Acorns, a celebration of the dignity and inspiration of that noble forest denizen.
("Be like the squirrel! Be like the squirrel!")
v=7RlK0Xd4c2c
Via Posthuman Blues.
Presidential candidates debate transcript wordle and some visual after-debate zeitgeist from daylife.
What's this I hear about McCain suspending his campaign and possibly not showing up for the debate? Does this mean he is no longer contesting the election? Will Obama debate his empty chair, a spokesdrone, or YouTube videos of McCain? Or is this McCain saying that this "election" stuff just isn't all that important. "I'm far too busy spending ONE TRILLION DOLLARS of your money bailing out some good buddies back in Washington DC and I just don't have the time to explain it all to you little people! I'm a busy man!" Would McCain just suspend the election itself if he thought he could?
I was at tv-intros.com today through a google search gone astray and really enjoy that site altho I basically hate(d) TV. There are many downloadable WMV files of virtually every TV intro I know of. I stopped watching TV in the 1970s so the ones I am interested date from that era. With McCain in mind, I drew up a TV line-up which would be the ones approved by the Homeland Security team during the McCain administration, presumably after the government bailed out all of the failing TV networks and the production of new TV series died out in favor of pre-millenial nostalgia.
"Chinese menu" - just pick one item from each column. Click on it; it's big.
Different layout:
Republican Vice-Presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin continued to enhance her foreign policy credentials today as she toured Florida's EPCOT Center, meeting with the newly-installed animatronic presidents Zardari, Hamid Karzai, Indira Gandhi, and Abraham Lincoln. Later, the former beauty queen had lunch with Cinderella and Minnie Mouse, where the conversation veered away from the everyday concerns of hard-working fictional characters in the fantasy land community into an unexpectedly heated discussion of animal rights. Local reporters and national media were chased from the scene by an angry John McCain, who appeared to be shadowing Mrs Palin. Mrs Palin left the event by helicopter, and was last seen attempting to bag Bambi from the low-flying aircraft. Technicians who arrived on the scene were unable to field dress the animal due to rust and extensive soldering. The Disney autonomouse region casts 3 of the state's 27 electoral votes through a tough 2000 compromise that had the kingdom suspend its armed, eared, four-fingered secessionist struggle in exchange for implants in the spinal cords of the Bush royal family and their offspring.
Take the median value of all polls in a state over the last month for each state. Use that as the best guess of how the state will vote. I admire the simplicity of that approach, especially since I am also a big fan of the power of the median as opposed to the overrated mean or average. Calculating the median also saves energy or computing power. Their method is not only simple but powerfully predictive. This method, (Gott and Colley's Median Poll Statistics), predicted 49 out of 50 states correctly in 2004. It currently has Obama getting 273 votes due to adding IA, CO, and NM to Kerry's 2004 states. Which polls to use? They use (the same ones as) RCP although you could theoretically add more polls and get an even better result since the median method automatically eliminates outliers. Mr Gott has done a good job with the map, too. (It would make a good quilt, RISK board, or pendant of fuse beads AKA iron beads in Japan.)
Wordle is a fun and interesting tool. You may find a use for it. On the right is a wordle from the text of Vonnegut's God Bless You Mr Rosewater. On the left is one from posthuman blues. Original writing of your own and dynamic changes sources such as google news give interestingly varied results. Wordle of Cat's Cradle is below.
http://wordle.net/
http://wordle.net/create
Because it would be bad luck to leave the old one with McCain ahead, here is my new electoral graphicalization. NeoOffice(2.2.2) works on this MacBook but looked bad. Excel came through again. I got the single center gridline at 50% to come out somehow (Excel stopped rejecting that modification) and I stuck a picture behind it. Time order is geological as before. I made it A3 size (click on it!) but some inexplicable artifact came into the horizontal bars. Maybe it is "shadow" and I'd have to go back through the "wizard". As before, data is from electoral-vote.com and inspiration from EVStrength.com.
I wasn't really familiar with the work of David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) but I hope to become more familiar with his work. Like Jim Carrey, he was born within a few days or weeks of me, which seems to sometimes give a similar outlook due to astrological, terrestrial, or zeitgeistical influences. Harper's magazine has released PDFs of his work as a memorial. I am looking forward to reading them soon.
September 1989
Everything is GreenDecember 1991
Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern boyhoodAugust 1992
Rabbit ResurrectedSeptember 1993
The Awakening of My Interest in Annular SystemsJuly 1994
Ticket to the Fair (Video–Reading in 2000)January 1996
Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruiseJanuary 1998
The Depressed PersonJuly 1998
Laughing with KafkaOctober 1998
Brief Interviews with Hideous MenApril 2001
Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usageFebruary 2008
The Compliance Branch
Remembering another of those politely overlooked moments at the RNC:
This is just a graph inspired by the assiduous data collection at electoral-vote.com and the superior graphicalization at EVStrength.com. The data is from http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Data/scores-2008.csv
This is an Excel graph; my first attempt with OpenOffice.org was too ugly to look at (inducing epileptic seizures in viewers not wearing protective eyewear). I am test-driving OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta, an Aqua version for the Macintosh, after abandoning the newest version of NeoOffice, which didn't work at all.
I think this is just a one-off. I don't plan on doing this regularly. I wanted to see what it looked like and what I could do with ooo (Answer: a lot, but Excel was better). Click on it for the full-size image. If it makes no sense to you at all, go to electoral-vote.com and EVStrength.com for a better explanation of the key (AKA legend) and methodology.
Briefly, Strong is a 10%+ lead, Weak is a 5-10% lead, and Barely is a less than 5% lead. Tied are within 1% in polling. The stacked percentage bar graph reports percentages, but 100% is 538 electoral votes. 50% is 269. Each 10% line is 53.8 electoral votes, and the 2% tick marks therefore indicate 10.76 EVs. Since there are 50 states, the 2% marks also indicate an average (nonexistent) state with 10.76 electoral votes. IN, TN, MO and WA are closest to average with 11 EVs each, so you can think of a 2% tick mark as indicating one of them. Coincidentally, these 4 states lie (today) in 4 different states of confidence (of the 7 bands represented).
