MSNBC "The Last Word" Lawrence O'donnell on NYPD police brutality during Occupy Wall Street protests

Image file size of the Earth

TL;DR The file size of a 72ppi PNG image of Earth's surface is 3.37 zettabytes, or 3,705,354,190,000 gigabytes.

Ruby v. Python

I'm gonna lose 80% of my 10 readers with this.

$ uname -a
Darwin peregrine 10.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.6.0: Wed Nov 10 18:13:17 PST 2010; root:xnu-1504.9.26~3/RELEASE_I386 i386
$ python --version; time (python -c "print ''.join([chr(int(x, 16)) for x in '54 59 20 66 6f 72 20 74 68 65 20 75 70 76 6f 74 65'.split()])")
Python 2.6.1
TY for the upvote

real 0m0.039s
user 0m0.014s
sys 0m0.015s
$ ruby --version; time (ruby -e "puts '54 59 20 66 6f 72 20 74 68 65 20 75 70 76 6f 74 65'.split.map{|a|a.to_i(16)}.pack('c*')")
ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-12 patchlevel 174) [universal-darwin10.0]
TY for the upvote

real 0m0.012s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.003s
$

Partially [ via reddit ]

Update: Well, my friend Chuck over at evilchuck.com pointed out that my original post is a completely pointless comparison, since both interpreters are doing practically nothing.

He is absolutely right. If this were used as a "benchmark test" it would be laughable. Well I included the time stats, so I guess I asked for it.

Here is a little test program for generating N sets of random hex strings 17 characters long and then decoding the sets one at a time.

Ruby code:Blargh:

$ time ( ruby test.rb 500 )
wnATVthnfLdBCQguVr
[ Large output elided. ]
jPgUoj1VtucFgrt7iv

real 0m0.051s
user 0m0.030s
sys 0m0.005s
$ [ With n = 5000 ]
VyiKEjdJhjMKHPRqpP
[ Larger output elided. ]
Uh3 Wsg2 HUbAAe04J

real 0m0.461s
user 0m0.293s
sys 0m0.017s
$ [ With n = 50000 ]
yKfTGOrtCJTtyWvWJk
[ Even larger output elided. ]
QkxCNYwEFVund6H8kz

real 0m3.991s
user 0m3.238s
sys 0m0.136s
$ time ( ./test.rb 100000 -q )

real 0m6.531s
user 0m6.183s
sys 0m0.114s
$ time ( ./test.rb 1000000 -q )

real 1m42.502s
user 1m17.887s
sys 0m2.240s
$

And here's a test for some python code that I hacked together that is probably really crappy but seems to do the job.

Python version:Running it from my bash shell produces:

$ time ( ./test.py 500 )
lFy 7ZGqT1Oc BT31
[ Elision. ]
fnpLoKCaYFWL9U9SE

real 0m0.089s
user 0m0.047s
sys 0m0.024s
$ time ( ./test.py 5000 )
Hqa2g4iX6Nw8Nzua5
[ Elision. ]
ofMMAG WnxUEP0RVC

real 0m0.345s
user 0m0.282s
sys 0m0.030s
$ time ( ./test.py 50000 )
kVgC4etTXn5vxrLzV
[ Elision. ]
ot8PSkiWyn1KTitXT

real 0m3.402s
user 0m2.647s
sys 0m0.108s
$ time ( ./test.py 100000 -q )

real 0m4.403s
user 0m4.241s
sys 0m0.064s
$ time ( ./test.py 1000000 -q )

real 0m43.506s
user 0m42.172s
sys 0m0.565s

Clearly, Python is much faster than Ruby for large sample sizes. At 1M, Ruby finishes in 1m43s real and 2.24s sys. Python finishes in 43.5s real and 0.565s sys.

Just for fun, I tried running the ruby code with Ruby 1.9. This isn't fair since I am not going to go to the trouble of installing Python 3.0.1, but it doesn't matter. Ruby 1.9 is significantly faster than 1.8.7, but still can't beat Python 2.6 for this particular test.

$ time ( ruby19 test.rb 1000000 -q )

real 0m49.606s
user 0m47.847s
sys 0m0.764s
$

I was curious, so I tried to isolate the decoding part of the two versions. Here's what I found:

$ ruby19 test.rb 1000000 -q
user system total real
16.750000 0.310000 17.060000 ( 17.843644)
$ ./test.py 1000000 -q
1 function calls in 14.241 CPU seconds

Ordered by: internal time, call count

ncalls tottime percall cumtime percall filename:lineno(function)
1 14.241 14.241 14.241 14.241 test.py:18(decode)
$

Looks like the decode method written in Python is executing at least 3 seconds faster.

These tests are not intended to be benchmarks of any kind. True benchmarking is a science in which I have not educated myself very well. I just wanted to get a feel for some of the differences in Python and Ruby idioms and a rough comparison of their execution time. My guess is that if anyone were to take a close look at the code used in this post, they'd be able to point out several flaws and mistakes that would affect the overall statistics.

Update 2: Thought I'd try JRuby, and...

$ time ( jruby test.rb 1000000 -q )

real 0m28.038s
user 0m29.531s
sys 0m1.310s
$

Wow.

Amazon saves Christmas

Not that Christmas is even a big deal for me, but it seems fun to say.

This year I'm donating money to charities and foundations in the names of friends and family members because I don't believe that a rational human being can ethically do any kind of business in America anymore.

However, I am not an ideologue (okay, maybe a little bit). And I did compromise my principles to make a couple purchases. One of which was a book for my family and friends about anthropogenic climate destabilization -- in other words: humankind's ongoing and deliberate destruction of the planet's tiny layer of organic material and gases.

Those books never made it to me.

Of course, the tracking status says that they were delivered:

Date	Time	Location	Event Details
December 20, 2010	12:09:00 PM	San Antonio TX US	Delivered
December 20, 2010	12:21:00 AM	San Antonio TX US	Out for delivery
December 20, 2010	12:21:00 AM	San Antonio TX US	Arrival Scan
December 17, 2010	05:29:00 AM	Oklahoma City OK US	Departure Scan
December 16, 2010	11:22:00 PM	Oklahoma City OK US	Arrival Scan
December 16, 2010	07:13:00 PM	Tulsa OK US	Departure Scan
December 16, 2010	06:36:00 PM	Tulsa OK US	Shipment received by carrier
December 16, 2010	11:44:22 AM	US	Shipment has left seller facility and is in transit

That means that the UPS parcel delivery person apparently drove his truck into my gated apartment complex without dialing the apartment number at the gate. Then parked outside my apartment building. Then took my package out of the truck. Then placed the package in front of my door... and then walked away.

Meanwhile, I was just getting back to work from lunch, completely unaware that someone was stealing the package of books off the ground outside my apartment.

Should have specified that a signature was required, I guess. Duh.

But that isn't the point. The point is that UPS was paid to deliver a package to a recipient. They should be held accountable for their complete lack of care, concern or competence in getting that job done. In my opinion it is their responsibility to deliver a package to a recipient. Because otherwise, what's the fucking point?

If they bear no such responsibility, then why don't they just deliver the package to a landfill? What is the difference between a package that gets delivered to a landfill, and a package that gets abandoned on the ground at an address that may or may not be correct with nobody around to witness its delivery? Is the difference just some words recounting a particular event? That is meaningless. Unless I actually receive the parcel, the delivery is worthless. In fact, it is less than worthless, it robs me of the time that I wasted expecting a delivery when I could have spent that time ordering the parcel from an alternative source with an alternative delivery route and process.

These questions are rhetorical, but fair and reasonable.

It is clear that UPS should be held accountable for the cost of these items, and the re-shipping.

I contacted Amazon.com about this matter, and they promised to ship the order again, this time with overnight delivery -- without any cost to me. Amazon.com is amazing.

This still doesn't get UPS off the hook. It is foolish of the UPS delivery person to have refused to leave the parcel with someone in the office of my apartment complex.

Update: So I got the second package from Amazon.com. Guess who they used to send it. Yeah, that's right. So apparently the fella delivering the package this time around didn't care to make sure the package actually got into the hands of the recipient either, and he just ran off after dropping it at my door.

Oh well. It's that time of year I guess. He must have had a ton of other parcels to deliver, and he was probably completely overburdened. I would have given him a tip, but I didn't feel like running after him in the cold.

You know what? Screw you, UPS, for overloading your drivers so much that they can't even wait for someone to answer the door. UPS, you are a $42.6 billion business. Your profits have been down 28% since 2008 to (boo hoo) $2.2 billion in 2009.

You're telling me that you couldn't hire a few dozen extra part-time drivers for the holidays, at the Scrooge-wages of $8.50-$9.50? That would have been about $50,000 to hire 36 extra drivers during the month of December. You could have afforded it, and it would have covered your demand for San Antonio and balanced the workload enough so that your delivery persons could actually wait for people to answer their door before they ran off, leaving the parcel alone and unsecured.

You surely have a quick on-boarding process considering that you almost certainly have a ridiculously high employee churn -- I mean, given that you over work your part-time employees on the holidays by assigning them with routes that are too long, and with truckloads that are too full. You sure don't have enough full-time employees.

If you did have more full-time employees, then maybe you would be able to hire fewer part-time employees to fill in the gaps during the holidays. This would allow you to focus on what it is that you actually do for your customers, both senders, and recipients -- ensuring the transportation of products all over the country. But instead, all you care about is the money. Merry Christmas, UPS.

Gravity might be entropy

And entropy is a loss of quantum information in matter.

Tonight I read an article about some ideas on entropy and gravity that seemed to suggest that gravity is somehow an outcome of the complex relationship of the quantum information, or states, of the subatomic particles that make up matter.

Trying to understand this, I'm imagining that a chunk of space dust: not much matter, not many subatomic particles in various states of interaction. Big planet with lots of matter: lots of subatomic particles, all in various quantum states, all interacting in complex ways.

Jae-Weon Lee at Jungwon University in South Korea seems to have some pretty advanced ideas about gravity and quantum information. His theory seems to arise from Landauer's principle which suggests that data erasure or merging of computational paths results in more entropy. Entropy is basically just the loss of structure or information.

The article doesn't really get into the details of how changes to subatomic particles' quantum states actually causes gravity. I guess I'll have to do some more reading on the subject to get a better handle on the ideas.

But the article did remind me of some ideas I was playing with a few weeks ago now.

The Earth is a pretty bizarre place sometimes. Life on this planet seems to organize itself in ways that seem so, well, disorganized. Nature is almost always portrayed in stories and films as a wild, uncontrollable, random place where nothing makes sense, and everything is in constant flux. This idea seems to be deeply entrenched in Western thought -- the idea that the natural world of life on this planet is chaotic. Even deeper thinkers tend to imply that its patterns are spontaneous and simply the inevitable result of mathematical coincidence.

What if life itself is the result, or embodiment of entropy? The most chaotic environment I can imagine is when the universe was theoretically just a hot plasma soup. All that energy began to condense into matter and collect in gravity pools and spin around singularities. Eventually matter seems to have somehow organized itself into reproductive patterns -- life. But why?

What if the mathematically chaotic patterns that we observe in nature are a sort of response to gravity and the loss of information?

It almost seems as if this planet's life is itself intent on escaping Earth's gravity. Single-celled organisms writhe and wiggle about in fluid. Fish propel themselves through the oceans. Amphibians drag themselves ashore and lurk about. Insects burrow and crawl and dart and fly. Mammals run and swim. Birds soar. Anything, any movement, it seems. To ever stop is just to die.

As if gravity somehow represents death, while at the same time being the womb of life. As though the vastness of space were the ultimate destination of life, and the one true outcome of order from chaos. Every creature, toiling forwards, gazing upwards, arms outstretched, wings unfurled, desperate to escape the clutches of their origin.

As if life was intent only on filling up the voids of the universe with the energy represented and embodied by its patterns. The proportions of energy represented by an individual life form are astronomical when observed at the sub-atomic level, but spread throughout an organism, mechanically organized energy propels life into patterns of events that play out through time in what seems like nothing more than chaos.


Almost certainly, I don't know what I'm talking about, but ideas are fun to play with.

Zombie questions

Just a couple to start with for now I suppose.

1. Are zombies capable of a tactical strike? For instance, I have Masterchief-style body armor. But I have to recharge every so often at a solar power collection point. Will zombies destroy the power charge machine to prevent me from continuing to use my battle suit?

Show your work.

2. Poll: Are zombies cannibals? Yes or no. Will a zombie or mob of zombies ever attack a regular human and devour him or her completely, leaving only the victim's skeleton?

The Internet is stupid

From a MetaFilter thread:

If you turned [the video] off 90 seconds in, then maybe fart humor is more your speed. Not that there's anything wrong with fart jokes.
posted by Plutor at 10:19 AM on October 30, 2008

I clearly said 1.5 minutes, not 90 seconds....

/sheesh
posted by HuronBob at 10:23 AM on October 30, 2008

This is not news, but I mean, why stop collecting the evidence?

The squirming Economist

Two days before the election in 2000, The Economist endorsed George Bush for President. Two terms later, five days before the inauguration of President Obama, The Economist joins the rest of the media in falling all over itself to pound yet another nail in the coffin of the Bush presidency.

Mr Bush and his inner circle labelled the Democrats "Defeaticrats" whenever they were reluctant to support extending the war from Afghanistan to Iraq. They manipulated intelligence to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had close relations with al-Qaeda. This not only divided a country that had been brought together by September 11th; it also undermined popular support for what Mr Bush regarded as the central theme of his presidency, the war on terror.

Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, remarks how unusual it is for a president to have politicised such a national catastrophe: "No other president—Lincoln in the civil war, FDR in world war two, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the cold war—faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances, failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonised the Democrats."

Before you go pointing fingers at The Economist for the flakiness of its editorial staff, perhaps you should take a closer look at yourself. Given the numbers, it is not too unlikely that the hand casting a vote for Bush in 2000 or 2004 is the same hand that cast its vote for Obama in 2008.

Americans finally start saving their money

The Wall Street Journal has an article about how Americans are finally saving their money instead of spending their speculative investment returns before they've hatched. Apparently 2008 is the first time that average Americans have ever saved more money than they spend on credit since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1952.

On a related note, my company has recently begun offering free (employer-sponsored) courses by Dave Ramsey on how to save money.

Dave Ramsey certainly offers a popular and much-needed service of educating our pathetic country on how to use money.

However to charge people for money management education is equally pathetic, and borderline predatory. With one face Ramsey tells his audience to cut expenses and be frugal and in the same breath and with snake-oil-salesman charm shouts, "Buy my DVD, for only $59.95! Join my online Money University(tm) for only $99.95!" I've actually been to a Dave Ramsey "Total Money Makeover LIVE event" that was held at the Freeman Coliseum here in San Antonio, so I'm speaking from personal experience (the ticket was a gift).

Obviously he is presenting his products as investments -- that his customers will see a return on their investments in his talks, course material, and literature. Sort of like installing solar panels on your house -- there's an initial cost up front, but eventually you recoup your investment in electricity savings.

Unfortunately, this is really not the case with Ramsey. You aren't actually getting anything tangible at all. You aren't improving your house or anything. You're not buying a savings bond. You're not buying groceries with that money. All you're getting sold is common sense that you should have had in the first place in a glossy packaging of typical American marketing.

I suggest that Ramsey actually targets people with poor valuation skills to whom to peddle his wares. In other words, the people he is supposedly "helping" are the very people who wouldn't be able to discern the true value of his product relative to its cost.

As seen on TV.

[ via Boing Boing ]

If time travel is possible, then why haven't we been visited?

I know this topic has been addressed numerous times on the web and in an endless stream of science fiction books, movies and television shows, but I'd like to see if anybody out there has their own ideas. The idea is that time travel cannot be possible, because if it were possible then a working time machine would inevitably be engineered sometime in the future.

Once a time machine was in the hands of human beings, there would be all kinds of weirdness happening. What could stop us from traveling back in time to "fix" things to our advantage? Surely if time travel is possible then a time machine will exist in the future and someone will abuse it.

Given the amount of time in the future (theoretically infinite) someone traveling back in time to visit us is simply unavoidable if time travel is possible.

So why didn't we catch any people from the future taking their vacations in the Ming Dynasty?

Possible explanations for why this doesn't seem to have happened:

1. It has already happened, but the government has covered it up.
2. It has already happened, but a secret future agency of time cops has been traveling back in time and short circuiting the offending time travelers before they can commit their abuse of the past.
3. We don't have as much time as we think we do. The sun will go nova (or another global catastrophe) way before we think it will and there is nobody left on future Earth to travel back in time.
4. Time travel simply will never be possible no matter how far our scientific and technological advances take us.
5. Update: Greg Lange of greglange.com has suggested that it may only be possible to travel into the future, and not the past. Forward-only time travel certainly seems possible given the phenomenon of time dilation based on velocity close to light speed in the theory of special relativity (see the Wikipedia article on the twin paradox).
6. Update: Another possibility involves imagining that traveling back in time instantly shifts the traveler into an alternate universe exactly like our own, except with the traveler temporally located in a time in the past instead of his native time. This would explain why no one has ever seen a backwards time traveler -- we're all still in this universe. The time traveler doesn't travel back in time to our time, but backwards in the time line of a completely different universe.

What do you think?

Trivia Night

Wess, Courtney, Medina and I won trivia night Monday at the Thirsty Turtle.

Going into the final round, our team, the Protein Shakes, were in third place with 59 points. Team Rusty Trombones were in first place with 75 points.

The final question, for as many points as our team wished to risk up to 20 points, was, "What are the most common languages on the Internet, in order from most to lease common?"

(On our answer card, I immediately started writing, "HTML", "Javascript", "PHP", and "ASP".)

Just then the MC called out, "Spanish? English? Japanese? Chinese?". That was lucky, because I was just guessing about the web programming languages. I was probably way off.

We risked all 20 points and won first place. What do you think the answer was?

I was wrong about Kant

I was talking to Greg about Kant yesterday, and found I was wrong about two things.

First, I had said that Kant was from France, and was a Roman Catholic. This was wrong -- Kant was German, and raised in a Lutheran family. I think I had him mixed up with Descartes.

Second, at some point, I mispronounced Kant as "can't" for some reason, even though I had already been pronouncing it correctly during the conversation. Thanks Scott, for correcting me.


Greg sent me an instant message with a quote he attributed to Kant in which Kant seemed to deny knowledge and demo a need for faith instead.

Greg also said that Kant believed that morality is a function of duty to an obligation, and that the function of morality to duty was broken if fulfillment of the duty was beneficial to self.

Greg said that these two things were enough to condemn Immanuel Kant. He repeated that: condemn him.

I dunno about all that. I'll have to do some more reading.


I kinda like Kant. Here's something that he said that makes me like him:

"The [practical law] tells us what we have to do, if we wish to become possessed of happiness; the [moral law] dictates how we ought to act, in order to deserve happiness." (Critique of Pure Reason, p 452)

And also:

"All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought." (Critique of Pure Reason, p 189)