Total Eclipse of the Moon

Path of March 2016 Total Solar Eclipse (Animation)
From NASA. Due Wednesday March 8 at 23:11 UTC, which means it will be around 11 in the morning when it starts in SE Asia. NASA also has another one with a different view of the situation up on YouTube.

The Magician - Sunlight

The Magician - Sunlight feat. Years & Years (Official Video)
Great tune, nutty video featuring fat man. Could that be me? I hope not, but yes, it probably is.

El Chapo Speaks

Sean Penn and then-fugitive El Chapo Guzmán, on October 2nd. The photo was taken for verification purposes. After a long dinner and conversation, Chapo granted Penn's request for a formal interview. Courtesy of Sean Penn

Two months ago Rolling Stone published a story Sean Penn wrote about interviewing Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera AKA El Chapo, the head of the Sinaloa drug smuggling cartel in Mexico. I don't know what kind of malware Rolling Stone is using to produce their webpages, but it almost killed my machine. So I did like I did with the Jury Nullification story I posted yesterday and turned it into a Blogger 'page'. You can see it here.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Sean Penn. He is not my favorite actor, but that might be because he strikes a little close to home. It might be that he just has a more extreme version of some of my traits. There are a bunch that we don't share, but the ones that we do are a little unnerving. Whatever. He's a crazy man, I'm a crazy man, we're all a little crazy here.

The bulk of the story is about how he arranged the interview, the interview itself is pretty short. There are some surprising bits to it, like Guzman being as powerful as the President of Mexico, and how none of the things that we might think would have an impact of his business have any impact at all. And there are some parts that don't make any sense at all, but then we have a Mexican telenovela superstar in the mix, and the universe they inhabit has got to be out of this world, so translation might have a hard time crossing the cultural divide. In any case it's an entertaining and enlightening story, regardless of your opinion of Sean.

Jury Nullification

The Trial of John Peter Zenger

Clearing out some old files I came across a copy of The Liberty Voice from 2009 with the headline

Jury Nullification: The Right of Free Americans

It's a fine article, so fine I considered scanning it, but then I thought 2009 is not that long ago, maybe it's on the net, and it is. However, the webpage is so riddled with ads that is makes it almost impossible to read, so I copied, pasted, edited into a simple text file and added it to my pages. You can find it here. Yes, it's criminal, but dang, so is subjecting a body to the horrors of modern web page advertising.

Looking for pictures I found a couple other good articles on the subject (that are readable):

• Jury Nullification by Doug Linder (2001)
• Jury Nullification: Why Every American Needs to Learn This Taboo Verdict by Kevin Mathews (2014)
• Rethinking jury nullification by Ilya Somin (2015)
• Nullifying juries more interested in justice than some prosecutors by Glenn Harlan Reynolds  (2015)
• Weedman Nullification (previous post on this blog)

Mystery Notes

Bruce Willis as Korben Dallas in The Fifth Element

Cleaning out old files today and I came across a business reply mail card with a bunch of notes scrawled all over that completely filled the available white space. It looks like I used it for a bookmark and made notes as I went along, but I will be durned if I can remember what book I was reading. Whatever it is, it's a big book, given the page numbers that I wrote down. And it's fairly recent, as in the last 20 years, given the reference to The Fifth Element, unless there was another use for the term before the movie came out. I'm gonna go look on my bookshelf and see if anything jumps out at me.

Page Topic

389 Elector to page 391

404 obnubilated

414 Lucubrations

456 Right to Left? From the South / East?

504 Arianism

500 The Fifth Element

503 professors

540 obstreperous

606 Captains

610 Cheruman

636 derivative

662 wanted

667 quixotic

742 Mosquito Coast

762 Guanajuato

I found it! The only books I have that are long enough are Neal Stephenson's. I looked at a couple with no luck, but I finally picked up The Confusion, which is set in the late 1600's. So what's the deal with The Fifth Element? Here's the passage:

Update October 2017 replaced missing picture.

Go Programming Language

I thought I would make an attempt to learn Go, Google's programming language. I'm wading through the Tour of Go and it is a bit of a slog, not really holding my interest. Let's see if I can take a simple minded C program and rewrite it using Go. The original is only 45 lines, the problem it handles is rudimentary. How hard can it be? Well, if you don't have a good reference, almost impossible. So I start looking for something more useful and I come across this page which includes this bit:

Introduction

Go is a new language. Although it borrows ideas from existing languages, it has unusual properties that make effective Go programs different in character from programs written in its relatives. A straightforward translation of a C++ or Java program into Go is unlikely to produce a satisfactory result—Java programs are written in Java, not Go. On the other hand, thinking about the problem from a Go perspective could produce a successful but quite different program. In other words, to write Go well, it's important to understand its properties and idioms. It's also important to know the established conventions for programming in Go, such as naming, formatting, program construction, and so on, so that programs you write will be easy for other Go programmers to understand.

This document gives tips for writing clear, idiomatic Go code. It augments the language specification, the Tour of Go, and How to Write Go Code, all of which you should read first.

I'm putting it here in my blog because it has links that might be useful and also so I can find it. My bookmark bar runneth over.

TW3RK-BOT 1.0

Basement Jaxx - Never Say Never ft. ETML
This is more than a little nuts. The tune doesn't appeal to me but the video is way out there. International Business Times had the story back in July of 2014:

   British electronic dance music duo Basement Jaxx have released a new music video that features Japanese scientists creating TW3RK-BOT 1.0, a new type of robot that specialises in twerking.
    The video for Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe's new single "Never Say Never" parodies the futuristic robotics technology coming out of Japan, such as inventor Nobuhiro Takahashi's SHIRI robot butt and Hiroshi Ishiguro's new humanoid robots at the Miraikan.
    A laboratory of Japanese scientists work to develop a robot that can emulate a human dancing and twerking, by scanning the movments of twerking dancers into a computer and a making silicone cast of a perfect human derriere.