I am … unhindered by talent

My sister just hooked me with with the First United Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster whose devoted members believe

the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

The letter to the Kansas School Board is priceless, and includes a brilliant discussion of the important causal link between the the declining number of pirates and global climate change (see the graph below).

I had to run to the bathroom part way through the page (a big bottle o’ water’ll do that to ya) and I had this inane grin all the way down the hall, chuckling strangely to myself and frightening new students as I went. Oh, this is so good. I’m reduced to incoherent giggling!

And the best part??? You can buy stuff!!! Mugs with the Flying Spaghetti Monster! Shirts with pirate graph!

Someday I should create a web presence for the Church of the Wildly Indifferent, which I founded back in high school. But today…I should work on my classes.

Thanks tons to my sister for the great pointer! And, unsurprisingly, if I’d been keeping up with pharyngula more closely I would have known about this months ago (here, there, and elsewhere).

I’m going to go giggle quietly in the corner for a while…

Related posts

• No related posts.

Martin Fowler just blogged in a positive way about Open Space meetings, and he’s smarter (and more experienced) than your average bear (e.g., me).

I really have to get myself in some situation where I get to seriously try something like this.

Related posts

• No related posts.

This week Ebert choose “Schultze gets the blues” as his video pick of the week. I’d never heard of the film before, but now I’ve just got to see it. A German polka accordionist who discovers a love for zydeco late in life through a chance snippet on the radio? And travels from Germany to the bayou to check it out?!?

This is so cool it makes me all incoherently happy. It comes out Tuesday on DVD and I’m already arranging to get a copy to watch with my FYS students.

Rock, rock on!

Related posts

• You folks are super generous! (2)
• Wonderful little film about Paul Rand (0)

…POTENTIALLY CATASTROPHIC HURRICANE KATRINA NOW MOVING
NORTH-NORTHWESTWARD TOWARD THE NORTHERN GULF COAST…
– From the National Weather Service “Hurricane KATRINA Public Advisory”

Yikes! These folks don’t use phrases like “potentially catastrohpic” lightly. I think I’m glad to be over 1,000 miles from this particular party.

Spend a while at the National Weather Service’s excellent site and you can learn way too much about Hurricane Katrina. That’s one serious storm in a nasty mood. Note in the image above, for example, she extends entirely across the Gulf from north to south, and damn near spans it east/west as well. You can spend way too long at the NWS site looking at the different kinds of satellite imagery (WeatherGirl and I rather enjoyed the infrared and water vapor loops from GOES Storm Floater 1) and reading wonderful prose like the quote above.

WeatherGirl and I were suggesting that this nasty hurricane season might be a sign of global climate change, but the National Weather Service ain’t buying it (and here). Their language, though, has that wishy-washy “We need more study” feel that we’ve been getting from Our Fearless Leader since taking office, so one has to wonder if the change in opinions (in the early 90’s they were pretty sure that there was a connection) may in part be a reflection of a change in who’s in the boss’s chair. I would hope not, but the current administration’s fairly violent anti-science streak makes one wonder.

And all this may put a crimp in the planned FYS convocation speech on Wednesday by Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (seen here with a group of students slightly younger than the average UMM first year student). Nothing’s been said, and I’m sure we’ll have to wait and see what actually happens with the storm, but you could hardly blame her for deciding that staying home and dealing with a major state emergency took precedence. I hope that she somehow manages to make it because I was really looking forward to her presentation, and we obviously hope that the storm isn’t as devestating as the current predictions suggest it might be.

Fingers crossed.

As of Monday morning, 29 Aug, it’s official: The governor is staying home to help with the aftermath of the hurricane. We’re hoping to reschedule in the next few weeks, though.

Related posts

• No related posts.

In a surprise bout of competence, mostly brought on by a fairly math-y set of problems and fairly good focus, I managed to be one of the 200 to advance to Round 3 of the Top Coder Open! Huzzah! I even placed third in my room, earning a whopping (but appreciated) $50 to add to my t-shirt.

The problems were indeed quite math-y, which is definitely better for me than the big dynamic programming search problems, where I tend to get bogged down in the details and spend forever debugging. I was pretty fast on the 250 point problem, although I got a little bogged down initially because I missed some important details on my first reading. I wasn’t so fast on the second problem, but not a lot slower than other people, and mine survived the challenges and system tests where many didn’t. After all that, though, I really didn’t have any time to work on the third problem, which is too bad because it looked interesting.

In the challenge phase I found a solution to the 250 problem that I knew was wrong, but I just couldn’t find a counter example that I was comfortable throwing at it. It later failed the system tests, so I was on the right track, but time ran out on me. Arghhh. The stinker is that if I’d correctly challenged it the additional 50 points would have made me second in my room, earning me $75 instead of $50. Such are the vagaries of competition.

In the end I actually placed 109th out of the 364 that turned up tonight, which is a lot better than I would have ever guessed. This good showing jumped my rating by 127 points putting me nicely back in yellow after my summer visit to blue. Happy, happy…

Sadly, I may not be able to compete in Round 3 despite qualifying. Next Wednesday evening is our opening First Year Seminar convocation is at 7pm, and competition starts at 8:30pm. If the speaker (Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco - cool) is on the short side I might be able to dash over and compete, but if it’s a long one or there’s a good discussion afterwards then I’ll have to skip the competition. It’s hardly the end of the world, though, as there’s precious little chance that I’d make it to Round 4, and FYS is definitely the priority if there is indeed a conflict.

Now I need to go back to course prep.
Classes don’t really start Monday… Classes don’t really start Monday…
Classes don’t really start Monday… Classes don’t really start Monday…
Classes don’t really start Monday… Classes don’t really start Monday…
Classes don’t really start Monday… Classes don’t really start Monday…

Related posts

• No related posts.

…but is allowed way too much TV time…

Pat Robertson is yet another of way too many religious zealots working desperately to further distort the U.S. political spectrum and give religion in this country a bad name. It would appear that now this senior spokesman for a host of Bad Ideas has really and truly gone off the deep end.

For quite some time he’s been publicly (i.e., on television!) praying for openings on the Supreme Court so that Our Fearless Leader™ can appoint some God Fearing Good Guys™ to further the cause of saving us from ourselves. While it is hardly uncommon to wish to replace our political foes with allies, it’s a bit tricky in the case of the Supreme Court since the only two ways out are retirement or death. (Well, you can also be declared unfit, but that seems unlikely in a universe where Robertson still has his job.) So it seems just a wee bit ghoulish for Robertson to be praying for vacancies, and a less generous soul might draw comparisons to things like Khomeini’s call for the death of Salman Rushdie. But I wouldn’t do that. Really. Not even think about it. (We were living in in the U.K. when all that went down, and it was uber creepy.)

Not content with a little anti-democratic religious fundmentalism on his home turf (just what the founding fathers were hoping for), Robertson has now gone international, and in the process gone completely gone ’round the twist. Yesterday, on his depressingly popular TV show “The 700 Club”, he publicly called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the elected leader of Venezuela (but not so terribly popular in Shrub Oil circles back here):

If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”

(as quoted by the New York Times).

Simply amazing, ain’t it? You know he’s really gone too far when even the Bush White House and other “Conservative Christians” felt the need to distance themselves from the remark. This is, of course, the very least that we should expect from our leaders in such a situation. As Bernardo Ã?lvarez, the Venezuelan ambassador to the United States, put it quite succinctly:

Mr. Robertson has been one of the president’s staunchest allies. His statement demands the strongest condemnation by the White House.

It’s a sad sign that the poor saps at CBN don’t pull Robertson from the airwaves, or provide any sorts of disclaimers on their web site (as of this evening). Robertson’s remarks are so clearly inappropriate and unacceptable that CBN’s continued tolerance them speaks volumes to how little the ideals of open and informed discussion and debate must count for in that organization.

Sigh…

Props to WeatherGirl (and The Daily Show) for tapping me into this story.

Related posts

• Yet another quiz to help you decide how to vote (3)
• Where do they find these people?!? (3)

I’ve just managed to get my third TopCoder Open t-shirt in a row! Each year’s Open runs through several phases culminating in a handfull of far better contest programmers than me going to some nifty place to compete for 10’s of thousands of dollars in prizes. Here in the early phases there aren’t thousands of dollars at stake, but everyone that does well enough in the qualifying round to get to Round 1 gets a t-shirt, and I’ve just snagged my third straight shirt :-).

I’m still not doing as well as I’d like, with my few summer performances all being pretty sub-par and gently dropping my overall rating every time. I only just qualified for the Open on Tuesday/Wednesday, being 694 (or some such) with the top 700 going through. This morning’s Round 1 went at least a little better, and I placed 310 out of 670 that competed. (This raised my rating by over 40 points, but given that I dropped nearly 300 since last September, there’s still a ways to go.) The top 400 go on to Round 2, so I get to suffer through this again next Wednesday night. The problem set this time was really mathematical, which tends to work well for me, but I made the 500 point problem a lot harder than it needed to be and lost quite a few points there. I had two successful challenges in the challenge phase (+100 pts to me!), but then also had two unsuccessful challenges (-50 pts to me) for a net +50 in the challenge phase. The first incorrect challenge was a direct effect of my making the 500 point problem harded than it needed to be (I thought you couldn’t do something simple that obviously you can). The other incorrect challenge was to a program that later failed a system test, so I was right to be suspicious but obviously didn’t get the right challenge case.

I made the top 200 that go on to Round 3 once before, but I’m not optimistic that I can scrape off that much cruft this time. We’ll see.

A nerd’s idea of a discussion of fashion: “Hopefully the shirt will be cool. I really dug the shirt two years ago, but last year’s shirt was kinda dumb.” Yeah, OK, that was me talking, but we don’t have to tell anyone, do we?

Related posts

• No related posts.

Classes start on 29 August which, for those not near a calendar, is just under two weeks away. One of my courses this semester is a Computer Graphics course. This isn’t my area, but no one else here has any more background so it’s fallen in my lap when we’ve done it. Because no one here’s really active in this area we haven’t done it all that often; I’ve taught three or four such courses in the 15 years I’ve been here, and the last time was something like 6 years ago. But there’s high student interest, so once again into the breach.

And so, just days before the course is set to begin, I discover (entirely by accident) blender. I’m not sure what role it would have in the course (we’re going to focus more on how you would implement something like blender than on how to use it), but it would have been nice to have a little time to play with it and think about how it might have fit in. Ugh.

For those who, like me, know not the wonders of blender, it’s a pretty darn spiffy looking open source 3D modeling and animation tool. The image above came from their gallery, and I definitely recommend this fun little movie from their movies page. It looks kind of like the wondrous POV-Ray, but with neat modelling tools built in. Nice stuff.

And of course the first student I mention it to is all “Oh, yeah, I have that on my computer”. Which raises the question of why I didn’t canvas the students for tool ideas last Spring, especially since they are way more on top of graphics than I am. Humph.

Will I ever learn? Sadly, I have my doubts…

Related posts

• No related posts.

A few weeks ago JPL announced the discovery of a 10th planet in our solar system! A name for this newfound member of our neighborhood has been proposed but not yet approved.

And there are people who think that science takes all the excitement and mystery out of the world. They obviously haven’t ever really done science and seen how amazing the discoveries can be, nor can they possibly understand the way in which one answer opens up dozens upon dozens of new questions.

Related posts

• No related posts.

Last night WeatherGirl and I listened to PZ (”Pee Zed” in most of the English speaking world) Myers fine interview on BBC’s 5 Live as anticipated here earlier.

Apparently 5 Live had had some ID folk on last week spinning whatever nutcase yarns that they typically spin, and last night was to provide “balance”. (”Last week we had several speakers mention the importance of gravity, so this week we’ve brought on I.M. Wacko to discuss his claims that gravity is just an illusion brought about by the consumption of too much corn syrup in western diets.” Yeah, fair and balanced.) I was quite disappointed in the fellow that interviewed PZ, as he was frankly way too measured and “fair”, which gave the ID’ers a lot more credibility than they deserved. PZ did a good job, though, and nicely laid out the key issues (e.g., lack of anything resembling a testable theory).

Better in several ways was the segment that immediately followed, where a different presenter interviewed Phil Plait who runs the fun Bad Astronomy site. The second presenter opened with this bizarre clip of a guy speaking at a creationists education (shudder!) conference (shudder again!). This guy went through a whole list of evidence for why the universe is a wee bit older than that dust bunny under my couch, and then pronounced that because this contradicts the Bible, it’s all got to be wrong! That simple! We’re done! Wow… A truly remarkable performance, and we’re lucky to have this kind of bizarre thinking on tape. Wow… Again… So the presenter plays the clip and presents Plait with a wonderful opportunity to respond, which he made the most of. The two of them then ripped into ID quite nicely for several minutes, which was a real pleasure. It unfortunately left Plait zero time to discuss things like the moon hoax, which is what he thought he was being interviewed for, but this listener, at least, thought it was a fair trade.

In the discussions on both Paul and Phil’s blogs several people have suggested that the two of them would make an excellent double act, and I must agree. I think that their areas of expertise and manners would complement each other quite nicely, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get in their way if they were gunning for some more of that crazy old wooly thinking.

The Beeb typically archives things like this for exactly a week, so you’ve got about 6 days to check it out before it disappears!

Related posts

• No related posts.