Quotes of the Day

Anna Chapman in Moscow June 2011

The strength of Putin’s rule is not so much in his iron grip on everyone’s life, or the sophistication of his spies. It’s the deep-ingrained belief of many Russians, both among the elite and commoners, that the government is the only thing that can protect each of us from the rest of us. - Dima Vorobiev on Quora

I am glad to see that Russia is making some economic progress. Putin might be a killer, but is there anyone who would prefer that Stalin was still in charge? Did Putin order the execution of the Russians who were killed in Britain recently? Seems pretty thin to me. I mean our government is not always the most competent when ferreting out the details. I suspect someone had a personal grudge. Maybe it was Putin, maybe it was someone else. Whatever. In any case I am looking for a picture to post and I come across Anna Chapman, who was some sort of real-life Bond girl.

It's no secret that we live in an era of overabundance of information. Today a day a person learns more than a hundred years ago could learn for a lifetime. In this uncontrolled flow of knowledge it is difficult to understand: where we are honest and where we are deceived. And as a result, many take on faith all incoming information. Or, on the contrary, they throw themselves away, not even allowing the thought that it can be reliable. When this winter the swine flu epidemic hit most of Russia, there were many versions of its origin. Up to the point that it came to us from the territory of Ukraine - allegedly in the laboratory near Kharkov, the Americans are developing biological weapons. A crazy theory that, nevertheless, has a right to exist. - Anna Chapman via Google Translate

Seems like wacko conspiracy theories exist on both sides of the ideological divide. Oh wait, maybe the CIA actually did infect Russia with the swine flu. I wouldn't put it past them. They certainly have a long history of dirty tricks. I don't actually think they did. Mother Nature doesn't really care what we do or say. Sometimes her vicious nature just asserts itself and a zillion people die.

P.S. While looking at pictures of Anna, I came across several that had her posing with a gun. Well, if you're going to be one of the elite, and I'm pretty sure being a real-life Bond girl qualifies, you need to be able to handle a firearm. But this pic won out because we have a Russian church in the background. I don't think it's St. Basil's, but I am pretty sure it's in Moscow.

Making Records

WarmTone™ Record Press Promo
I've been listening to KQRZ lately and I've been hearing some strange stuff. Occasionally I will hear something I recognize but it's usually stuff that sounds like it's from the 50's or 60's, but they are tunes I've never heard. And then I realized that for every tune that makes to the top 40 on the radio, there are probably a thousand or ten that don't, which makes Don Kirshner (the man with the golden ear) in The Brill Building all the more extraordinary.

Every one of those records needed to be recorded in a studio and then the recording had to be turned into a master for pressing vinyl records and then you can finally start the press and start cranking out copies. A complicated and exacting process.

Looking for pictures I turned up a photo essay on LSD about the old record making business, and then a Pop-Sci story about a brand new company making new record presses. Back in the 50's and 60's most of the records were 7" 45's. You bought it on a whim, played it until you got bored and then threw it away, or you did if music was that important to you. At a friend's urging I bought one (85 cents as I recall), I didn't particularly care for it, and I never bought anymore. 85 cents was more important.

Pic of the Day

Shadow of the Eiffel Tower aligned with the Pont d'Iéna

Just one of those freak occurences. Via Quora

Train of the Day

Steam Train in the middle of the Freeway - Santa Fe 3751
Google Maps show there is such a track in LA. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, LA is a big city. They are bound to have all kinds of weird shit. Via Posthip Scott.

Quote of the Day

H. L. Mencken, 1917

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H. L. Mencken

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Factorial

Someone on Quora wanted to know if you could compute 1,000,000,000! (one billion factorial) on a computer without the computer blowing up and catching fire. I said sure, though you would need some storage space as the result of such a computation would be roughly 9.5 billion digits long. And then someone else asked how long that would take, and that's a little harder to figure out. There are any number of computing problems that would take zillions of years to complete. Is this one of them? I don't think so, so I wrote a program using the GMP library to check. Every 100,000 numbers, it posts the elapsed time. Dennis put it into a graph.

Computing 1,000,000 Factorial
X Axis is the number divided by 100,000
Y Axis is the number of seconds

Evaluating 1.6932x^2 + 0.1023x - 0.75 with x set to one billions gives us 1.6932e18 seconds. You will notice that only the first term of that polynomial has any bearing on the result. The second and third terms are down in the noise. It works out to be 53 billion years. So the real answer to the original question is no.

Of course, if you could line up a billion super fast processors you could knock that down to 53 years, and if you figure out a more efficient algorithm, you could probably cut that in half. Still, it would take a very long time and all you would get would be a really long string of digits.

United Fight Club Back In The News

Ruben Lee, center, with fellow flight attendants during an earlier part of his United Airlines career.

United Airlines lost a court fight to a former employee. The description of the testimony sounds like something out of a Soviet show trial.

Lane put a supervisor on the witness stand, he recalls, "and I said, 'In the hierarchy of rule violations, these are pretty ticky-tacky.' He said, 'I don't agree.' I said, 'For example, watching an iPad for a few minutes is certainly less serious than lighting a campfire in the bathroom of a flight when it's at 35,000 feet.' And he said, 'No, I disagree with that.' I said, 'Seriously? You think lighting a campfire in the bathroom is as serious as watching an iPad for a few minutes?' And he said, 'Yes.'"

The supervisor has apparently confused with loyal obedience with truth. Westword has the story. Via Flight Aware