AOL Presidential Match will give you a short quiz and then tell you which candidate you agree with most. Here are my scores:

Kucinich: 100%
Sharpton: 97%
Kerry: 91%
Edwards: 83%
Bush: 4%!!!

I’m calling the score associated with Bush my “Jerk Number”. I am 4% a jerk. That’s pretty low. Can anybody beat me? What’s your Jerk Number? Be honest, no gaming the system.

Toss Out the Toss-Up: Bias in heads-or-tails

If you want to decide which football team takes the ball first or who gets the larger piece of cake, the fairest thing is to toss a coin, right? Not necessarily.

A new mathematical analysis suggests that coin tossing is inherently biased: A coin is more likely to land on the same face it started out on.

“I don’t care how vigorously you throw it, you can’t toss a coin fairly,” says Persi Diaconis, a statistician at Stanford University who performed the study with Susan Holmes of Stanford and Richard Montgomery of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

I can’t believe these so-called “scientists” overlooked the obvious solution to the bias: Just start the coin on a random face!

Two high-strangeness stories came in off the feeds today. The first: Unit of measurement elected head of standards board

Back in 1962, some fraternity at MIT used one of their pledges, Oliver Smoot, to measure the Harvard Bridge. This became part of MIT and general geek folklore, and today even Google recognizes the Smoot as a unit of measurement.

Just recently, the very same Oliver Smoot was elected to be the President of ISO, the people who define internationally the units of measurement used for, well, everything. I can’t put it better than overstated:

Is it just irony that a unit of measurement was elected to be the Grand Poobah of international standards? Or is it that Smoot has been cast into this position by that one fateful night, unable to escape his role as a measuring stick? Or perhaps he is an obsessed megalomaniac who will settle for nothing less than the Smoot being recognized as the basis for all measurement?

In any event, I’m sure his position is quite deserved, as in the past he has shown us all that he is a great ruler.

As I was still recovering from that one, this came in: For Exercise in New York Futility, Push Button.

Millions of dutiful city residents and tourists have pushed them over the years, thinking it would help speed them in their journeys. Many trusting souls might have believed they actually worked. Others, more cynical, might have suspected they were broken but pushed anyway, out of habit, or in the off chance they might bring a walk sign more quickly.

As it turns out, the cynics were right.

The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on, according to city Department of Transportation officials. More than 2,500 of the 3,250 walk buttons that still exist function essentially as mechanical placebos, city figures show. Any benefit from them is only imagined.

Amazing.

In Japanese Hands, Snowball Fighting Has Really Grown Up

On winter evenings, men gather outside a hotel in Japan’s frozen north to heat snow with an oil stove in a vinyl tent. When the powdery stuff becomes malleable, they shovel it into a mold resembling a giant cupcake tray, and stamp out 1,000 perfectly round snowballs of regulation size: no less than 2.56 inches in diameter and no more than 2.76 inches.

Here’s where you can buy the regulation practice snowballs (46g nylon covered beanbags):

I also found this collection of videos explaining the game, This one covers some of the basic rules.

Earlier this week: Republicans Accuse Kerry of Planning Dirty Campaign

The head of President Bush’s Republican Party accused Democrat John Kerry’s campaign on Thursday of planning the “dirtiest campaign in modern presidential politics” in a scorched-earth bid to oust Bush in November.

Soon afterwards: KERRY FIGHTS OFF MEDIA PROBE OF RECENT ALLEGED INFIDELITY

A frantic behind-the-scenes drama is unfolding around Sen. John Kerry and his quest to lockup the Democratic nomination for president, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

Intrigue surrounds a woman who recently fled the country, reportedly at the prodding of Kerry, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

A serious investigation of the woman and the nature of her relationship with Sen. John Kerry has been underway at TIME magazine, ABC NEWS, the WASHINGTON POST, THE HILL and the ASSOCIATED PRESS, where the woman in question once worked.

And then: Actress And Anti-War Activist Jane Fonda Speaks to a crowd of Vietnam Veterans as Activist and Former Vietnam Vet John Kerry (LEFT) listens and prepares to speak next concerning the war in Vietnam (AP Photo)

But then: 1971 Photo of Kerry Doctored

As a 20-year-old photographer documenting the country’s struggle over the Vietnam War, Ken Light snapped the picture of John Kerry at a peace rally in Mineola. It captured the future senator alone at a podium, squinting into the sun.

Light did not photograph Jane Fonda on that warm June Sunday in 1971. The actress, who is reviled by many Vietnam veterans for her vocal stance against the war, did not even attend.

But when opponents of the Democratic presidential hopeful began e-mailing Light’s picture to one another four days ago, it depicted Fonda standing by Kerry’s side. The photo had been doctored.

And just today: Woman Denies Rumors of Kerry Affair

A woman who has been the subject of rumors linking her to Sen. John Kerry denied Monday that she ever had an affair with the Democratic presidential candidate.

Breaking her silence four days after the allegations surfaced on the Internet, Alexandra Polier issued a statement to The Associated Press, saying, “I have never had a relationship with Senator Kerry, and the rumors in the press are completely false.”

IT WORKS! I got a region-free DVD player the other day. It didn’t work at first, but there’s a firmware upgrade, and now I’m 100% region free. I asked Walde to bring over his most diabolically formatted DVDs to test. He produced a disc that was the “perfect storm” of DVD incompatibility: A region 2, PAL, anamorphic wide screen disc. And it played perfectly!

I believe it is every American’s patriotic duty to circumvent DVD region lockout, or any other artificial limitations put in “consumer” products. Crippled technology sucks!

If you’re interested, this player that works for me is an RJ Tech RJ3700, and we got it from Sina.com. It came with two “free” karaoke microphones. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

Like I said, it didn’t work out of the box, but there’s a firmware upgrade available from the manufacturer. The instructions for how to burn the firmware to a CD were very vague, but I happened to find this set of instructions for a Polaroid player that must use the same chipset or something. I had success using the firmware provided by RJ Tech, but burned and loaded using the instructions provided by Polaroid.

Looks like offshoring may be a “big issue” in 2004:

Bush is pro:

Wading into an election-year debate, President Bush’s top economist yesterday said the outsourcing of U.S. service jobs to workers overseas is good for the nation’s economy.

Shipping jobs to low-cost countries is the “latest manifestation of the gains from trade that economists have talked about” for centuries, said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Kerry is con:

Little wonder offshoring has become a red-meat issue for angry trade unionists and their supporters. After his victory in the Iowa caucuses last month, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry railed against federal tax incentives to companies that outsource jobs. “We are not going to give one benefit or one reward to any Benedict Arnold company or chief executive officer who take jobs and money overseas and stick you with the bill. That’s over,” he said.

I just discovered languagehat today. It’s great! He (?) speaks 13 languages, and seems to be familiar with, like, all of them or something. He also likes hats.

Just the other day there was this great post about Asian Acronyms. Note that not only are his posts really good, but the comments are actually insightful and interesting too. And according to GeoURL, he’s nearby, maybe in Connecticut, or Long Island. (It actuallly shows him as being in the middle of Long Island Sound. Maybe he’s in a top secret underwater language research lab, with Dick Cheney. And he probably calls him Mr. Cheeney, not Mr. Chayney.)

Subscribed!

New research on the famous ALH84001 meteorite shows that the internal structure of the fossilized worm looking things very closely match the internal structure of real bacteria on Earth. Here’s an article about the research.

The even more amazing thing is, if this is right, life on Mars pre-dates life on Earth!

“They” finally found a video of the guys breakdancing for the pope.

But it’s still not high enough quality to make what I wanted to, the holy grail of surreality: An animated gif of the guy spinning around, while the Pope hits him with his “Pope wave”.

You may consider this a lazyweb request.

Last June: Gold Kitty. Now:

Platinum and Diamond Kitty! Competitively priced at just ¥3,000,000. Act soon, only 30 have been made.

A mind bomb in today’s NASA Mars press conference:

Q. Have any of you slept?

Pete: we slept for three years. I got 4 hours.

Arthur: I got about an hour last night.

Steve: landings are special. Once you get into Marstime, it’s fine. I got into the Gusev groove. I was getting 6,7, 8 hours sleep. What’s hard is changing rovers. The jump to Opportunity was a 12 hour time zone change and that’s hard. I’ve been sleeping in little 2 and 3 hours.

I already knew that the crew back on Earth is operating on Mars time, sleeping and waking as the Spirit rover does, with 24.6 hour days. What surprised me is now that Oppurtunity has landed on exactly the other side of the planet, they’ve had to switch their schedules 12 martian time zones to stay in sync. Whoa!

By the way, Asa Dotzler has the best Mars rovers coverage on the Internet.

Imminent death of “Imminent death of X predicted” predicted.

I have a Motorola cable box, from Comcast. And I hate it. IT SHOWS ME ADS ALL THE TIME! Every time you change a channel, it shows you an ad. It also shows ads whenever you check the program guide. The menus are full of ads. It pretty much shows you ads every time it gets a chance. It is also incredibly slow at changing channels, the slowest one I’ve ever had. I always assume it’s the ad processing that’s slowing it down and get madder and madder the more I use it.

Today it came up with a new trick. There was a little red light on the front panel, that I’ve never seen before. It was next to a label, “NEW MESSAGE”. Being incredibly stupid, I get all excited. I’d seen the “messages” feature before when I did my normal depth-first traversal of the menus when I first got the box. But it was always empty. I quickly turned on the TV, went into the menus and selected “VIEW MESSAGE”.

You probably already know what happened next. It was another ad! “Don’t miss WWE Wreslemania XIXICXIIV! THIS SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY!”

Who could possibly replace WILLIAM SHATNER as the spokesman of Priceline.com?

Sudden interest in Mars because of…? Here’s a story at Petroleum News

Briggs said NASA has been working with Halliburton, Shell, Baker-Hughes and the Los Alamos National Laboratory to identify drilling technologies that might work on Mars.

[…]

Halliburton and Baker-Hughes are working on some very advanced systems, Briggs said, some so advanced they aren’t willing to talk much about them.

Free Press International has picked up on the whole halo thing (more halos). It’s some kind of international conspiracy! I suppose it just could be a running joke / handy way to get your picture published. But conspiracies are more fun.

part of a continuing series

Here’s my TODO list for 2004:

• Real Life
  • Get Master’s degree.
    • To do this, complete final class and seminar.
      • To do this, stop wasting time working on stupid TODO lists and get back to work.
  • Then: Go on big huge vacation.
• Online
  • Upgrade to WP1.0
  • Enhance word of the day
    • Add features to make each entry more useful (links for dictionary lookup, cross reference between words, pronunciation guide, more meta data.)
    • Make it easier for me to publish. There should be a word of the day wizard that suggests words I haven’t done yet.
  • Spam filtering
    • Flip the switch that consigns spam comments to oblivion. I think it works!
    • Release spam filter.
  • Feed on Feeds
    • Finish and release 0.2.
    • Then: Do templates, plug-in system, Atom, and a non-PHP API.

Or is it finally for real this time? I watched the entire last stupid State of the Union speech because it was rumored he was going to mention space. Instead I got:

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way — they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies. (Applause.)

It does sound pretty real, though. And here’s 8 million more stories.

The rough plan, which sounds quite ambitious: Finish the space station. Then junk the shuttles and work on this new CEV: “Crew Exploration Vehicle”. It starts testing in 2007. Back slowly away from the space station, and focus on returning to the Moon, starting in 2013. Establish a permanent Moon base, and then start thinking about sending people to Mars.

I hope this is all going to be backed up with some well thought out rationale when it’s actually announced. But who wouldn’t get excited over a Moon base?!?!?

Have you heard of the Uncanny Valley? Here’s a good example:

More

Galactor Nemesis of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. aka Katse, Zoltar. Reports to strange floating eye/bird. Master of disguise. Super genuis. Hermaphrodite. Cool hat.

Galactus Giant planet sized guy. Eater of worlds, devourer of planets. It has always been so, and so it shall ever be. Created, and now feuding with, the Silver Surfer. Cooler hat.

This has been a public service announcement from messy-78.

The History of Eating Utensils

Here’s a reasonably interesting description of interview and clearance process at the NSA. Sorry, it’s a PDF. One of my proudest possessions is my NSA mug. It has a secret code on it. When filled with a hot liquid, the answer is revealed. It rules.

I found that PDF at Cryptome. By the way, when you click on that link, it will set off all sorts of alarms in the Carnivore boxes installed at your ISP. (the FBI considers Cryptome a source of information that could harm the United States)

One time I interviewed at a big defense contractor. The interview process was crazy. They would say stuff like “This position involves Unix, and… a database. I think that’s all I can say. You’ll have lots of fun, but never be able to tell anybody what you do.” They told me if I started work there, the clearance process would take 6 months to a year. During that time, I’d be paid to sit in a room called “the leper colony” and do nothing. I did get a job offer from there, to work in their “SPACE SYSTEMS” division (how cool is that!) But, I turned it down. I didn’t want to move to Texas. I probably missed an oppurtunity to work on the EXOATMOSPHERIC KILL VEHICLE or something.

Instead I went to Pratt and worked on everything from their coolest stuff all the way down to the bottom of the barrel: the mainframe based payroll system. Y2K was coming, you know. That COBOL wasn’t about to remediate itself.

“Hey what is it?”

For some reason, this commercial gets me, every time. This site doesn’t support direct linking, but you can see it by going here and then clicking “WHAT WE’VE DONE” then “Geico” (on the right) then “TV: Couple”.

Other commercials I’ve liked recently: The one where the vending machine goes crazy and shoots coffee everywhere destroying the office. I can’t find this one online, any help? And the other really good one is the new Nintendo one with schoolkids running through the streets. I liked the music, so I did some searching. Here’s the MP3, and here’s the lyrics (scroll down for translation).

President Bush’s Baghdad turkey was for looking, not for eating.

In the most widely published image from his Thanksgiving day trip to Baghdad, the beaming president is wearing an Army workout jacket and surrounded by soldiers as he cradles a huge platter laden with a golden-brown turkey.

The bird is so perfect it looks as if it came from a food magazine, with bunches of grapes and other trimmings completing a Norman Rockwell image that evokes bounty and security in one of the most dangerous parts of the world.

But as a small sign of the many ways the White House maximized the impact of the 21/2-hour stop at the Baghdad airport, administration officials said yesterday that Bush picked up a decoration, not a serving plate.

Is anything real? Ever?

I am * made flesh

Jorn Barger is the inventor of the term “weblog” and writer of robot wisdom, one of the longest running and most interesting weblogs out there. But he has been missing from the Internet for several months. Just today I started looking around to see what’s going on. I found his most recent Usenet post, made two months ago. I couldn’t find any later evidence of activity, and quickly gave up. He’s had absences before, and I figured he’d show up again eventually.

Then suddenly every weblogger on the planet started linking to this: Have you heard from Jorn Barger? Apparently he’s been missing from meat-space as well, for about two months. Today’s the day, apparently, that me and everybody else noticed.

UPDATE: Seems like he is fine, but is laying low for a while.

All I can add to previous post is that he made it pretty clear that Barger had asked to have his privacy respected. I gather in a somewhat abrasive manner, along the lines of, “I don’t have to to tell you squat. This is America.”

So move on, nothing to see here.

We went to a top secret preview screening of The Missing tonight. It was a perfectly reasonably good movie. A good time was had by all.

By the way, we got to go because of our local video store, Tommy K’s, which totally rules. Everybody should go there instead of Blockbuster. If you live in the USA, that is. And in Connecticut. Ummm…. and they really only have stores near New Haven. OK, forget it.

Jenny told me that they finally came around to pick up the leaves. I told her to quickly secretly take pictures!

It turns out it wasn’t as high tech as we thought. They just rake up the leaves…

And then use this thing to grab them up and dump them in the truck.

No Mr. Snuffleupagus after all.

Roy Moore, the crazy chief justice of Alabama’s supreme court who thought it would be a good idea to place a monument of the ten commandments in the state courthouse, has been fired! This is part of a recent series of surprising wins for the good guys.

Think we can make it three in a row?

Today from Mr. K’s Remainders: A totally cool isometric cartoony explanation of how Legos are made.

Exploring the same site (Pop & Company) a little more, I found this: Super Mini-Games! Justice Leage Super Cubes and Mashi-Mojo are my favorites.

This post is in tribute to Jenny, who saw a challenge…

…and took it.

Against all advice and logic, she beat the leaves!

Now we wait for collection.

By the way: what’s more annoying? New homeowner posts, or new parent posts?

OK, this is getting scary. Can somebody please find out who keeps taking these pictures, and why?

Bored? Learn how to fly an SR-71!

Table of Contents | How to start the engines | Bailout

However, if you’re interested in Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar Systems, you’re out of luck. Try FAS, they always know everything.

(via memepool)

This somewhat spooky video shows how vines climb so well:

They’ve got lots more videos like this at the Plants-in-Motion site.

randomchaos is doing a daily Japanese lesson! Here’s all the old lessons, so you can catch up, and this link always shows the latest.