Simra's Mega-Feed

IMG_9009

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:44:38 +0000

simra posted a photo:

IMG_9008

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:44:35 +0000

simra posted a photo:

IMG_9007

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:44:26 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Random post

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:28:30 +0000

This is a random post to indicate that I'm still alive and I've repaired perms on this blog, deleted spam comments and generally hope to get things ship-shape before I move the site to a new provider.

Howdy folks, hope you're all doing good. :-)

Camping

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 08:22:59 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Hemingway

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 08:22:49 +0000

simra posted a photo:

The bush in our back yard.

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:29:31 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Arrested Development pwn Stage 5

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:37:01 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Vancouver Folk Music Festival.

I'm a little disappointed because the color settings were out of whack on the camera, but it's still a great shot of the audience, as well as the action on Stage 4. We caught the tail end of a high-intensity set- I wish I'd been there for more.

Vancouver Folk Music Festival

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:28:31 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Stage 4, 5 and Main Stage Pano during Steven Page's set.

Main Stage, with a teeny weenie Steven Page rockin' out, Vancouver Folk Music Festival

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:09:58 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Veda Hille on Stage 5, Vancouver Folk Music Festival

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:09:20 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Bird Man?

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:07:49 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Main Stage across the duck pond, Vancouver Folk Music Festival

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:06:42 +0000

simra posted a photo:

The unwritten chapter of Alice in Wonderland, Vancouver Folk Music Festival

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:04:42 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Wandering Carnival Band, Vancouver Folk Music Festival

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:03:16 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Stage 2, Vancouver Folk Music Festival 2009

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:56:37 +0000

simra posted a photo:

IMG_8490

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:26:33 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Mt Rainier at Sunset

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:26:05 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Shot from UW campus

Spanish Bank

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:34:08 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Spanish Bank

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:33:54 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Spanish Bank

nobody@flickr.com (simra) — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:31:53 +0000

simra posted a photo:

Those bacon posts don't seem so funny now, do they

Joe Beese — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:35:58 +0000

Amazon explains cataloging error that banished queer books to "adult" purgatory

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 07:13:45 +0000

More information on how Amazon came to misclassify over 50,000 books (including books about feminism, about gay and lesbian themes, etc) as "adult" and make them largely invisible to searchers. Turns out Patrick's theory was largely correct -- an employee in France filled in a field incorrectly and clobbered the listings for 50,000 items.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.
Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Amazon begins to re-rank affected 'adult' books; theories swirl [UPDATED] (via Lisa Gold)

Amazon.com unlists books by or about gay people from sales ranking and searches, provoking massive Amazonfail protest on Twitter, blogs. Out of the bookstores and into the Tweets [Dumbass]

(author unknown) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:35:41 +0000

Shared by simra
Shared from Fark because this is about as farked as it gets. What is Amazon thinking?

Think Progress

Magnetic Movie (2007)

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:01:11 +0000

This enchanting little short was produced at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory, at UC Berkeley in 2007, and has won a number of awards at film fests since. Snip:

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries . All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries . Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons . Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?.

Magnetic Movie, A Semiconductor film by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. (thanks, Marianne Shaneen!). Ed. Note: this video was previously blogged on Boing Boing Gadgets.

Can't see the video? Click here

A graphic depiction of distressed RE sales

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:08:00 +0000

Tough geometric brain teaser

(author unknown) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:32:08 +0000

Shared by simra
This is a good one... good luck!

BB pal and former guestblogger Bruce Stewart sent along this slippery little geometry brain teaser. Click the image to see it larger.

What were arcades like, Grandpa?

(author unknown) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:51:54 +0000

Shared by simra
This brings me back to those gr 9/10 days of Street Fighter and Tiger Shark at the Sting. The cool older kids (and the drug dealers) spent most of their time at the back, playing pool. Once you got good at Tiger Shark, a single quarter could last you the whole lunch hour.

In this RPGNet forum, a youngster asks, "I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play. This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like."

Well, let me tell you Billy, when I was a boy, there was an arcade at the Sheppard Centre, and we would sneak off there at lunch and after school and during spare periods and when we should have been in class. There were older teenagers, 18 or 19, who more or less lived there. One of them sold hash on the side, but mostly they just seemed to be bums. Really, really cool bums. One of them was amazingly good at Gauntlet. He'd play it all day long, spending an hour carefully honing a character to an incredibly buff state, and then he'd sell you his game for a couple bucks (the proto-goldfarmer of suburban Toronto!). We'd all crowd around and shout encouragement. The guy behind the counter, George, in his 20s, treated us like lovable scum, like you see bartenders treating the barflys in a sitcom from the era. We all knew whose initials were on the leaderboards. We were allowed to smoke in the arcade and we smoked like chimneys. All the games had volcano-crater burns from our butts. The worst offense in our universe was to pull the plug during someone's game. That always meant fights.

Downtown, on the Yonge Street sleaze strip, we had giant arcades, with pinball rooms at the back. These places moved a lot of hash, and no one seemed to know anyone else except for the hustlers, and theoretically they wouldn't let you in during school hours, but they also always had the latest games. Walking into one of those places was like attending Comdex -- a tour through the gimmicky universe of faster-than-light technological innovation, only we didn't have hucksters, we had to pay 25 cents for our demos (or lurk over someone's shoulder while they played).

There weren't many girls around the arcades -- later, a standard ironic/nostalgic boyfriend-girlfriend joke in my social circle was "Let's go to the arcade and you can hold my skateboard" -- but they were often very, very good. And tough. You had to swear like a sailor at the arcade.

In arcades, you queued up for popular or new games, usually. You set down a quarter or a button or something on the machine (quarters were the popular choice), and you watched, and when the next round came up (in fighting games, this was when someone lost, but in other games, it was when they ran out of quarters), you jumped in. This usually meant you were playing against someone else, so you got to know everyone who was a regular quick.
The 'no throwing' rule was kind of a house-rule for a lot of places. See, the older fighting games had really wonky response and collision detection, and in some of 'em (Mortal Kombat, for one), a throw did pretty decent damage and couldn't be interrupted in a lot of cases. If you wanted to, you could just drain down the other guy's health like that, and since everyone was paying to play, it was a dick move to do so. I know in our arcade, there was a little sticky on the Street Fighter machine, reading, "M.Bison is an automatic forfeit of next turn", which meant that, if someone chose Bison (who, in the older Street Fighters, was dangerous as hell in an experienced player's hands), they got to play one round with him, and, win or lose, they had to hand the controls over to the next player in line.

What were arcades like? (via Waxy!)

Yours truly in the New Scientist

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 07:03:47 +0000

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16655-chaos-filter-helps-robots-ma...

Ok, the article isn't about me but about Paul Newman's work at Oxford, but I got to be the independent expert vouching for how cool his stuff is. 3 seconds of fame used up. 12 to go.

BigDog Sets New Record

Evan Ackerman — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:18:39 +0000

Boston Dynamics’ quadrupedal BigDog robot set a new legged autonomous distance record last year by traveling 12.8 miles without any human intervention. Following a series of GPS waypoints, BigDog walked a 2.5 miles per hour, autonomously avoiding obstacles and dealing with varied terrain until its fuel ran out.

This is pretty impressive, but not good enough for DARPA, who wants a legged robot with a range of 20 miles and a 400 pound payload for its new Legged Squad Support System program. Based on the progression of the BigDog system, though, I have no doubt that this will be achievable in the near future.

Just for fun, here’s a new (but unrelated) video featuring BigDog:

[ Boston Dynamics ]

The amazing dollar-gold relationship

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:07:00 +0000

Slashdot slashdots Slashdot

(author unknown) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:00:25 +0000

Shared by simra
I'm amazed that the universe didn't collapse on itself.

A technical failure in a data-center switch caused Slashdot to flood itself with bogus traffic, shutting down the service for 75 minutes. Honestly, the only reason I'm posting this is so I can include that ^^^ headline. It's the headline I was born to write, srsly.

As a precautionary measure I rebooted each core just to make sure it wasn't anything silly. After the cores came back online they instantly went back to 100% fabric CPU usage and started shedding connections again. So slowly I started going through all the switch ports on the cores, trying to isolate where the traffic was originating. The problem was all the cabinet switches were showing 10 Gbit/sec of traffic, making it very hard to isolate. Through the process of elimination I was finally able to isolate the problem down to a pair of switches... After shutting the downlink ports to those switches off, the network recovered and everything came back. I fully believe the switches in that cabinet are still sitting there attempting to send 20Gbit/sec of traffic out trying to do something — I just don't know what yet.

Slashdot.org Self-Slashdotted (via Hack the Planet)

Scary-ass job-loss chart comparing previous and current recession

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:26:32 +0000

From the Speaker of the House's blog -- a chart showing the job-losses by month in the past two recessions (red=2001, blue=1991) against the current recession (that suicidal green line plunging to its death).

Shit.

What 3.6 Million Jobs Lost Over 13 Months Looks Like (via Isen)

Wm. Shakespeare's Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 21:00:48 +0000

Emily sez, "There is this meme traveling around Facebook where people write a list of 25 things about them. My friend Mike McPhaden took this list to a whole new level. He made a list called 'Wm. Shakespeare's Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me' written entirely in Old English with a modern twist and is fricken genius."

1 Sometimes I Feele so trapp’d by iambic pentameter... Does that make me a Freake?
2 I haue been Knowne to cry at Bear-baiting.
3 I am not uery ticklish. I am Not. So prithee, do not euen try. Waste. Of. Time.
4 I cannot keep Lice, and know not why.
5 Sometimes I thinke plays are all Talke, Talke Talke, and wish for a cart-chase scene. I tried one in The Merry Wives, but it looked like Shitte, so I cut it. The men playing the horses were so Pissed at me.

Wm. Shakespeare's Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me (Thanks, Emily!)

Why am I not surprised? It looks as though Andrew Wakefield probably falsified his data

(author unknown) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 05:50:00 +0000

HOWTO Launder precious heavy metal t-shirts

(author unknown) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 05:46:44 +0000

Shared by simra
If only I had known...

Scott Truemetalradio Maxwell's "Heavy Metal Laundry Tips" are not only convulsively funny, they also sound like pretty good damned advice for keeping your t-shirts fresh and none-more-black.

1) WOOLITE IST KRIEG. Your precious metal shirts are meant to be handwashed, so as to preserve the ink prints and the integrity of the fabric. Woolite is expensive, but it is an investment in your metal cred. In recent years, WOOLITE DARK has been introduced, formulated for dark clothes exclusively. USE IT! Immortal would endorse no less.
2) COLD WASH ONLY. Allow your clothes to soak in waters as cold as the rivers of Blashyrkh itself, without agitation. HAND WASH, or use the "hand washables" cycle on your washing machine. Your precious metal shirts get enough violent agitation when you're wearing them in the mosh pit.

Read on for additional wisdom, including the timeless advice, "AIR DRY ONLY. Dryers are false metal."

Heavy Metal Laundry Tips (via Making Light)

(Image: Derek (Cast the Stone), a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Lorri37's Flickr stream)

NEW 8547 MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0

Robotica — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:52:00 +0000

The new MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 box is shown at a toy fair in Canada.

After some rumors and spy shots that we saw the last few days, now officially the new sets are revealed on a toy fair in Canada.

Lego's Upcoming Sets For August - Mindstorms, Power Miners, and Space Police
by Kris Abel on Sat 24 Jan 2009 02:40 PM EST

Among the many prototypes on display at Lego Canada's booth at this year's Canadian Toy & Hobby Fair were a new set of Mindstorms programmable robots and construction sets for two new science fiction brands. Power Miners is a series of fantasy machines that dig down into the earth to discover rock creatures and Space Police, a futuristic battle between law enforcement agents and the outlaws who try to escape their capture.

a new color sensor, 612 pieces, 4 New models, Cool looking Alpha Rex, a zamor shooter tracked vehicle, an alligator that can walk and snap, a color sorter that can also shoot the balls across the room.
The all new color sensor looks real cool.

Looking forward to see the new Alpha rex walk, on a movie.

Martyn

Microsoft added only 164 employees in December

(author unknown) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:00:42 +0000

Shared by simra
... and I was one of the lucky 164. :-/ The next 12 months or so are going to be interesting.

Even before Microsoft's layoff announcement Thursday, the company had already been cutting back sharply on its hiring.

National Film Board of Canada puts its archives online, free

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:04:35 +0000

Andrew sez, "The National film Board of Canada (NFB) has opened up its vault - more than 700 films, clips and trailers are now available on the film board's new website launched today. From entertaining shorts and cartoons, to deeply moving or disturbing documentaries - they're all there for free, with more being added every week."

Hell yes. This is how public money should be spent. And yes, they have The Big Snit, my all-time favorite NFB short.

Films : All - NFB (Thanks, Andrew!)

Previously:

Canadian Nat'l Film Board puts 50 classic shorts online - Boing Boing

Obama's whitehouse.gov nukes 2400-line Bush robots.txt file

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 23:12:28 +0000

Yesterday, the robots.txt file for whitehouse.gov had ca. 2400 lines worth of files and directories that search engines were not allowed to index. Today, the file is two lines long: "User-agent: *" and "Disallow: /includes/"

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /omb/search
Disallow: /omb/query.html
Disallow: /expectmore/search
Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
Disallow: /results/search
Disallow: /results/query.html
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/text

The country's new robots.txt file

Larger Milky Way has implications for the Drake Equation and the Great Silence -- or does it?

George — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:05:00 +0000

Apropos of Russell Blackford's recent posts about the Fermi Paradox, it should be mentioned that the Milky Way is 50% larger than previously thought. This will likely have implications to our appreciation of the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox.

What tipped cosmologists off was the discovery that our galaxy is spinning 15% faster than formerly assumed. The lead researcher on the project, Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, estimates that the Milky Way's spin is about 914,000 km/hour, significantly higher than the widely accepted value of 792,000 km/hour.

The only thing that could account for this increased spin rate was more mass -- a lot more mass. As a result of Reid's findings, our models now need to account for a galaxy that is 50% heavier, 15% wider and contains a mind-boggling 3 trillion stars! That is an astounding 750% increase from 400 billion.

You might want to pause for a moment and think about this.

This is remarkable news and the implications of these findings are going to take a while to sink in. My first reaction was to consider the implications to the Fermi Paradox. Does a significantly larger Milky Way accentuate or diminish the problem that is the Great Silence?

First off, it throws previous Drake Equation estimates out the window. Blogger Paul Hughes has already crunched some numbers and has come up with his own estimate: he believes there may be as many as 12 billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy capable of supporting liquid water and in turn carbon-based life as we know it (Hughes doesn't take the equation beyond that as he was inquiring into the number of potentially habitable planets).

But as many of my readers know, I'm not a great fan of the Drake Equation to begin with. It's in dire need of an upgrade and it completely fails to account for the cosmological development of the galaxy and other temporal aspects. That said, it's safe to assume that the probability of extraterrestrial life emerging in the Galaxy is now significantly higher than it was before -- both in the Galaxy's long history and now.

Second, the new and improved Milky Way throws off previous calculations as to how long it would take an advanced civilization to inhabit all four corners of the galaxy. An extraterrestrial migration wave would likely be comprised of self-replicating colonization probes that spread out across the galaxy at an exponentially increasing rate. Previous estimates placed complete Galaxy-wide colonization at a few million years. Given that we were wrong about the size of the Milky Way and the number of stars, we have to conclude that it would take longer to colonize the entire galaxy.

Just how much longer I'm not sure [sounds like a future project in the making], but given that we're talking about exponentially increasing migration rates I would have to think that we are not talking about an order of magnitude. And even if it does take significantly longer, we still have to take the extreme age of the Milky Way into consideration and the likelihood that intelligence may have emerged in the Galaxy as long as 4.5 billion years ago. The age of the Galaxy is still disproportionately longer than even the most pessimistic colonization rate estimates.

What does all this mean?

Well, nothing really. The Great Silence is obviously still in effect and something's still screwy with the Universe. A bigger Milky Way means that there's likely more intelligent life in the Galaxy than we had previously assumed, but that interstellar colonization and communication rates are slightly longer.

The Fermi Paradox lives on.

Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Don’t Like You, Nothing Personal: 3 Emerging Economic Trends; Adjustable Rate Mortgages Disappearing, Federal Reserve Wants More Money, and Financial Honor.

drhousingbubble — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:59:46 +0000

In the investing world you learn to expect the unexpected. I think most of us can put our pride aside and realize that we are living in a very different financial world, one that has not been seen in over a generation. In these gut wrenching times, you might as well spend your money on going to Magic Mountain instead of playing the stock market. So many investing philosophies are being turned on their head. Does dollar cost averaging still make sense? Is having your money in the S & P 500 really mean you’re diversified? Is real estate the safest investment? I think these questions are making many over the counter pop finance books seem obsolete.

I hate to break it to you but the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury really don’t like you. They view most Americans as hamsters that serve only one purpose, to shop and consume. You will never hear them trying to push an agenda that would encourage Americans to be savers or manage their money wisely. How can they? They don’t do it so for them to say this would be hypocritical. In fact, their policy actions including dropping rates to near zero put us in a perilous situation that now is looking more and more like Japan’s lost decade. We have Ben Bernanke saying this to an audience in London:

“In my view … fiscal actions are unlikely to promote a lasting recovery unless they are accompanied by strong measures to further stabilize and strengthen the financial system,” Bernanke said.”

This guy. He has already taken on over $2 trillion onto the books of the Federal Reserve with questionable assets and he is still asking for more. These are the actions of a monetary policy ideologue. He is going to have a tough time admitting that monetary policy is simply not helping anyone aside from his masters in the crony capitalist regime. The banks have done so well, that we even have Citi and Morgan Stanley merging brokerages. While people are being laid off left and right, we have a $2.7 billion deal going down. And make no mistake, Morgan Stanley is only doing this because the Fed and other government institutions are back stopping $306 billion in toxic assets. Bernanke then gives us another nugget of wisdom:

“Financial markets remain frozen partly because a “large quantity of troubled, hard-to-value assets” is still on institutions’ balance sheets, Bernanke said.

There are several ways to solve this problem, he said, all involving public funds.

The government could simply buy the troubled assets, or it could give asset guarantees and agree to absorb part of the prospective losses, he said.

“Yet another approach would be to set up and capitalize so-called ‘bad banks,’ which would purchase assets from financial institutions in exchange for cash and equity in the bad bank,” Bernanke said.”

Here we go with this stupid bad bank idea again. Keep in mind that Wall Street and banks have hidden the most insidious stuff and are only itching to load it off onto the American tax payer. The premise of the bad bank is such a stupid notion. You want to know a secret? We already have a bad bank. In fact, we have about 8,300 of them!

It Was Good Knowing you Adjustable Rate Mortgages

If you haven’t noticed, adjustable rate mortgages especially the pay option ARM variety are probably the most toxic financial instruments ever created. The irony of this all is that mortgage rates are now at historical lows:

With lower rates, you would expect this to be good for the housing market yet the problem with many option ARMs isn’t the rate, it is the terms once a recast hit. The rate can be zero and it will still send thousands of families on the street. Many on more conventional adjustable rate mortgages may benefit with recent lower rates. Yet this is a very small percentage. And guess what? It looks like we are saying adios to adjustable rate mortgages here in Southern California:

Source: Lanser on Real Estate

In November, only 4% of all homes bought used adjustable-rate mortgages. This is the lowest rate since the survey started back in 1988. A couple of things are happening here. First, many of the defunct toxic mortgage shops have now imploded and many were here in Orange County including New Century Financial. So new buyers may not have a wholesale shop to buy from. Second, many people now realize the destructiveness of these products and no longer want to use them. Third, there is no secondary market for this crap anymore. In addition, why would you want to go with one of these products when the 30 year fixed is now at historical lows? If rates shoot up in the future, the ARM is a horrible product. Why not lock in rates at the bottom right now (assuming you are buying)?

Much of the exotic mortgage financing is pretty much being flushed out of the market:

Subprime is now gone. Alt-A is nearly extinct. And jumbo is a tiny ballgame. Plus, in one or two years we won’t even need to worry ourselves about jumbo loans in California since property values won’t even come close to the loan limits. Get ready for a 30 year fixed world. Adios toxic mortgages, it was fun while it lasted.

The Shame of Finances

Some of you may have heard the story of Adolf Merckle, the German billionaire who killed himself after his empire started having some trouble due to the economic crisis. Keep in mind that Mr. Merckle was ranked as the 94^th richest man in the world and his bad bets, mostly on Volkswagen ended up costing him $535 million which still left him with a sizable portion of his wealth intact. His wealth last year was estimated at $9.2 billion:

“His family, which had reported him missing after he failed to return home, said in a statement: “Adolf Merckle lived and worked for his family and his firms.”

“The distress to his firms caused by the financial crisis and the related uncertainties of recent weeks, along with the helplessness of no longer being able to act, broke the passionate family businessman, and he ended his life.”

You know the sad thing here is that he did not do anything illegal. From all reports, it looks like his life was business and he took on a major hit that must have struck deep at his identity as a successful businessman. There are many cases of Japanese businessmen committing suicide because of bad business deals. Shame and honor run deeper in other cultures it would seem.

In our culture, we have people like Bernard Madoff running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme and being out on bail lounging at his Manhattan penthouse. In the process, he is sending jewelry to family members. Think of the parade of CEOs going in front of Congress, getting verbally tongue lashed only to have their entire financial fortune untouched. They have no shame. They don’t care. Do you think they know what honor is? That is why many in our society will never understand the suicides of some of these other wealthy individuals. They can’t understand how someone can place something so high that it actually crushes their spirit and the only option out they see is suicide. Yet looking at our prima donna wealthy class, I am not shocked that these people have no shame or even honor. They can’t even spend one night in jail!

I’ve had a debate with colleagues regarding teaching ethics. I’m in the camp that just because you cannot instill ethics into someone, that does not mean we should not try having some guidelines. If you are a product of your environment, think of what future generations will become? What do you think a nation run on pure consumption will produce? It commercializes everything. In fact, Bernard Madoff is only the whipping boy of a deeply corrupt Wall Street culture with no honor. They are only looking out for themselves and finally, the majority of Americans realize that they have been played. To only know how things will look in 2019. I think even 2010 will look like a vastly different investing world.

Did You Enjoy The Post? Subscribe to Dr. Housing Bubble’s Blog to get updated housing commentary, analysis, and information.

Post from: Dr. Housing Bubble Blog

Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Don't Like You, Nothing Personal: 3 Emerging Economic Trends; Adjustable Rate Mortgages Disappearing, Federal Reserve Wants More Money, and Financial Honor.

The Beast's 50 most loathesome people in America

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 04:54:15 +0000

http://buffalobeast.com/134/50mostloathsome2008-full.html

One of my favorite annual lists. Obama takes spot 50, which is kind of like an honorable mention- they knew they had to put him in but to put him anywhere other than 50 would imply they really mean it... DHS Agent: "OMG this newspaper thinks Obama's the 49th most loathesome person in the world. Set up the wiretaps."

How do you spell "Bread, not circuses?"

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:56:27 +0000

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090112.wvanoc0112/B...

With $458-million dollars. Every Vancouverite opposed to the freakshow can celebrate their bittersweet moment. Is it too late to just cancel the whole thing?

Burn The Rope

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 04:58:33 +0000

Great rewards lie in store...

http://www.mazapan.se/games/BurnTheRope.php

Volts-IQ, we hardly knew ye

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 08:00:30 +0000

http://volts-iq.com

'Nuff said.

WTF?

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 01:51:21 +0000

Today's special inbox message.

This is a system generated message informing you that the above-named person is a federal prisoner who seeks to add you to his/her contact list for exchanging electronic messages. There is no message from the prisoner.

You have only the following options in response to this message.

* You may APPROVE this prisoner for message exchanges by clicking here and then clicking the Send button; or

* You may REFUSE this specific prisoner's request for message exchanges by clicking here and then clicking the Send button; or

* You may REFUSE this and all future federal prisoners' requests for message exchanges by clicking here and then clicking the Send button.

Any additional response will not be delivered to the prisoner or the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

By approving this transaction, you consent to have Bureau of Prisons staff monitor the content of all electronic messages exchanged.

Once you have been approved by the Bureau of Prisons to correspond with the prisoner, the prisoner will be notified and must initiate messaging.

For additional information related to this program, please visit the http://www.bop.gov/inmate_programs/trulincs_faq.jsp FAQ page.

If programming languages were religions

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:42:48 +0000

http://www.aegisub.net/2008/12/if-programming-languages-were-religions.h...

... which makes me a Mormon with a secret Voodoo fetish and dabblings in Judaism, Islam and Zen Buddhism.

Best of '08 from the intemperate lurker

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:05:42 +0000

I hardly posted this year, so who am I to talk about the best of 2008? Look at it this way: just because I was silent doesn't mean I wasn't lurking.

My blogroll has grown to 355 subscriptions. That's a bit much to manage, but there are a handful of blogs that I come back to over and over. Here's my rundown of faves and knee-jerk reads.

Economics was the theme of '08, for obvious reasons. It's all about The Mess That Greenspan Made.
http://themessthatgreenspanmade.blogspot.com/
Ok, maybe he cheers too much for gold, but he's got the right idea.
For a more center-of-the-road approach, see The Economist. Not quite as good as the print edition, but still a decent reference:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/economist/full_print_edition
P.S. if you're looking for a stock to short to the bottom:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/agoracom-braintech
HAHAHAHA. Just kidding, Rick. ;-) ;-)

Amusements and diversions:
XKCD always strikes a chord with me. The more melancholy it gets, the better it is.
http://www.xkcd.com/atom.xml
Indexed offers its daily dose of wisdom:
http://indexed.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
... and Strange Maps appeals to the inner geography geek:
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/feed/

Unicorns and Guily Pleasures:
The Xeni vs Violet smackdown was the buzz of the blogosphere this year. My money was on Xeni's version of the truth. VB probably won more eyeballs.
http://www.boingboing.net/atom.xml
http://www.tinynibbles.com/feed (prlly NSFW)

I don't give a flying frak about politics any more, but it warmed my heart to see the democrats and a real leader take the throne. For some reason Huff wins over KOS, just on sheer volume:
http://feeds.huffingtonpost.com/huffingtonpost/raw_feed
... and yes, just because I've moved to Redmond doesn't mean I've forgotten I'm Canajun. 2 points for maximum offense:
http://canadiancynic.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I'm still paying rent in Vancouver. :-( Miss 604 makes it all better. Except for those annoying copyright notices.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/miss604rss

For whatever reason, Buddhist, Atheist, Cephelapodist and Roboticist sites were not high on my radar this year. Friends, acquaintances and pseudo-internet-friends were, though. Some feeds worth digesting, just because, in absolutely no order:
http://smart-machines.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
http://alweb.homeip.net/blog/?feed=rss2
http://haikufactory.com/feed/atom/
http://letrangers.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
http://blog.mikedaum.com/feed/atom/
http://pooyak.com/blog/atom.xml
http://www.dudek.org/dudek.org/blog/rdf91_xml
http://level8.wordpress.com/feed/
http://streebgreebling.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/17586196933164395276/state... (Eli Sagor)
http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/18067771064896365845/state... (Mike Daum)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Simranet (Yours Truly!)

Happy holidays, one and all, and all the best in the new year.

YAAP (Yet another awesome post)

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:14:35 +0000

Prepare to be awed by the Periodic Table of Awesoments

http://www.eatliver.com/i.php?n=3723

Another Frightening Show About the Economy

Robert Sim — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 23:10:00 +0000

Sorry, my simra.net host is down tonight so I'm posting here...

aka another fantastic This American Life episode on the state of the economy. It's a couple months stale but it does an excellent job distilling the current FUD crisis...

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio_episode.aspx?episode=365

Found via BB, which also has a nice graphic illustrating just how exceptional 2008 has been:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/09/sp-returns-and-the-r.html

YAMC: Yet another mortgage crisis

Robert Sim — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:38:00 +0000

Retail is the new black in economic crisis-mongering:
http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081127.wcommercial1127/BNStory/Business/home?cid=al_gam_mostview

Speaking of crises, the globe really botched the story yesterday with this article:
http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081125.wpaulson26/BNStory/Business/home

What the article fails to mention is that while, yes, $7-trillion in guaranteed debt will be gracefully inserted into the USA's balance sheet, it's extremely unlikely that 100% of it is toxic. I have no idea what the real default rate will be.. but still, even 10% is $700B which is not chump change.

All that said, exactly how much money will the Fed have to print to keep things floating?

Dwight's Perfect Crime

Robert Sim — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:43:00 +0000

Testing 123

Robert Sim — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:16:00 +0000

I'm experimenting with merging my flickr feed, google shared items, and this blog feed all under one super-feed hosted by Yahoo pipes. There may be some repeat posts, so bear with me. Everything will still be piped through feedburner so you shouldn't have to make any adjustments...

ChChChChanges

Robert Sim — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:38:00 +0000

1. I'm losing my hosting provider. :-( In the meantime we'll camp out over here at blogger. Once the dust settles on #2 and #3 I'll look into reviving all the old posts.

2. Where'd ya go? I was looking for a new job. It takes time to find a research job that's a good fit, so hence the longish blackout. There's so much of me that's already on the net already but I figured I'd err on the side of caution. Hopefully my new employer won't be shocked by my endless irreverence. Which brings us to...

3. I've got a new job! The story is long, complicated, and unbelievably dull, but I'm heading back to Microsoft to join the Windows Live Experience Team in a research capacity. No robots or vision for a while... I look at it as the same toolbox-- new problems. It's very exciting to think that I am getting into an area of machine learning research that could impact literally millions of people. Hopefully for the better... :-)

So long, Braintech, and thanks for all the fish. We did some great stuff over there but in the end it was not meant to be. If you're a vision scientist looking for work, feel free to contact me and I can put you in touch with them. simra at ubc cs still works, so does robert.sim 's gmail.

Oh crap he's back.

Robert Sim — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:55:00 +0000

More to come... :-)

I've moved (again)

Robert Sim — Tue, 30 May 2006 10:56:00 +0000

Update May, 2007: My new blog is simra.net/blog.
Previous post...
Please visit my (old) new typo blog at simra.net.

Robot hazing

Robert Sim — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 10:22:00 +0000

Title says it all

Land disputes in BC

Robert Sim — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 10:27:00 +0000

Long time no see...

The Tyee has an eye-opening article this morning concerning public access rights and the sad legacy of land entitlement in BC.

music of the week

Robert Sim — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 23:15:00 +0000

The Friday morning waitress at the Naam has great musical taste and for a while she had a fantastic mix tape of Iron&Wine, the Velvet Underground and a handful of other great tunes. When it slipped off the playlist in favour of a new album I was a bit disgruntled, but the replacement is absolutely amazing- Sufjan Stevens' (C'mon feel the) Illinoise is the kind of music that wedges itself in your brain and won't let go. My first impression was that he's got Paul Simon's voice, but the album sounds more like classic Mahavishnu Orchestra mixed with Stereolab mixed with The Polyphonic Spree (my first exposure to which was on Austin City Limits). Everything old is new again...

No links tonight... google them on your own. !!

Election post-mortem

Robert Sim — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 09:44:00 +0000

No big surprises last night, but it was satisfying to see Sam Bulte lose her seat. The Vancouver Sun's headlines this morning made big on the fact that the PC's were shut out of every seat in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. While the West definitely decided this election (proving Ontario is not the stronghold the Reformers used to gripe about), the split is still very regional- rural/urban, Atlantic/Quebec/Ontario/Praries/BC. Here's hoping a Liberal/NDP block can keep the more radical PC's in check.

January in Vancouver

Robert Sim — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 09:40:00 +0000

It's well over 10 degrees C here this morning, the grass is nice and green and there's even some blue sky peeping through the clouds. Great reasons to love living in this city... :-)

Election coverage...

Robert Sim — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 10:30:00 +0000

Last post for today, honest. As a follow-up to the canadian election, The Tyee, which, in my opinion, is the best independent source of news coverage in Canada, has re-opened its election superblog. Follow the blow by blow...

Happy new year, partie le trois..

Robert Sim — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 10:10:00 +0000

Miscellanea: We're just back from our annual holiday visit to hogtown to see family, old friends, etc. The big news is Ravi Bhat successfully defended his PhD in late Dec, which was an extra reason to crack open the bubbly. We also had a great trip to Kingston and Montreal before flying back to Vancouver. Our friends Kelly and Matt (and kids and pets, etc) have a wonderful place in the woods north of K-town and our visit there is always the most relaxing thing I've done all year.

Post-holiday playlist:

Phish -- Round Room
Grateful Dead -- Workingman's Dead
Coldplay -- Parachutes
The Beatles -- Rubber Soul
Sarah Harmer -- I'm a Mountain

Now, on with the show.

Happy new year, part the deux.

Robert Sim — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 09:51:00 +0000

It's election time in Canada and Boingboing has been running a series of posts on incumbent Liberal MP Sam Bulte's relationship with the entertainment industry. The main thrusts of the story are that Bulte is the industry's champion for copyright reform in favour of clamping down on user's rights, and furthermore, Bulte is 'on the take' so to speak, receiving campaign financing from the industry and benefitting from industry-sponsored campaign fundraisers. Bulte seems to have forgotten that her role as an MP is to represent her constituents, rather than whoever's lining her pockets.

While Bulte is exhibiting a certain style of American politics that doesn't wash well here north of the border, I'm very curious to know how many other Liberal and Conservative candidates have similar kinds of mutual back-scratching ties- to, say, pharmaceuticals, forestry, agriculture or mining. My sense is that Bulte is only the very public tip of a deep, ugly iceberg.

Happy new year, part un.

Robert Sim — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 09:36:00 +0000

A slurry of posts to ring in the new year. First off, this month's Wired magazine has a good, if fluffy, article on Stanley, the robotic vehicle that won the Grand Challenge a few months back.

Sebastian Thrun gave a talk at NIPS last month on their success, and the general muttering that I heard from the crowd was that it was thin on any brilliant technical breakthroughs. People seem to miss the fact that Stanley was one of only a handful of vehicles to actually finish the race. Beyond that, the deeper message, and one that I think is important for robotics research, is that success with real-time systems is not so much about engineering the system to death but coming up with simple, fast hacks that get the job done. This was our experience in the AAAI competitions as well. The down-side of this approach is that you wind up with brittle systems that work well in the desert, say, but break in the city (and vice versa).

As an aside, I had a chance to take a ride in Stanley in Nov 2004, shortly after the team finished their first desert trial. Sebastian and Mike Montemerlo were ecstatic that they had completed roughly 7 miles of the 2004 course. They were looking like serious contenders right from the start. I asked Sebastian @ NIPS what his plans are for the future, and he sounds serious about city driving and a run from San Francisco to L.A.

Go green!

Robert Sim — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 19:10:00 +0000

If you're Canadian, take a few minutes to sign this petition to include the green party in the upcoming electoral debates: http://www.info-greenparty.ca/petition/.

More about it here.

Classic breakfasts and NIPS

Robert Sim — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 09:41:00 +0000

Friday is my favourite day of the week, not least because I manage to sneak out of the house early and head down to the Naam for breakfast. The Naam is special for so many good reasons- Kitsilano/Point Grey/UBC suffer from a serious lack of 24 hour restaurants, and the Naam offers something close to the Montreal breakfast I was spoiled on for so many years. Then there's the cozy fireplace and the usual trickle of people that make Kitsilano a great neighbourhood.

Back to work, though. This week we've got a series of pre-NIPS talks as people float into town for next week's big event. Yesterday Nic Schraudolph gave a nice talk on fast optimization methods, and later today we've got Aaron Hertzmann who does nice work in machine learning and graphics. ... and I'm also looking forward to Vinod Nair's talk on Monday, as his work looks to be related to my Ph.D. work. (Vinod is one of Geoff Hinton's students at UofT). Finally, there's NIPS itself, which promises to be as interesting as ever.

What's playing...

Robert Sim — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 14:25:00 +0000

Vapid content alert... in heavy rotation on my ipod:

Sarah Harmer -- I'm a mountain
Harry Manx -- Mantras for madmen
Harry Manx -- West eats meet
Iron & Wine -- Our endless numbered days
Indigo Girls -- All that we let in

... the thing about blogs.

Robert Sim — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 11:08:00 +0000

Well, there you have it. How many weeks since my last post? Not an auspicious start. This morning, it's snowing and slushy in Vancouver (a somewhat rare occurence), which makes me nostalgic for the east coast.

Just off a visit to Nick Roy @ CSAIL/MIT where I gave a talk about my work. We had a good week of work and managed to get out to a Blue Rodeo show, which, despite professing only a passing interest in the band, made the whole trip worthwhile. :-)

Why am I back? That was the question I left unanswered the other week. This blog might provide a clue: Bowen Island Journal. Bowen is a tiny island off the end of west van. We almost rented a place there when we moved here, but figured the 1.5hr commute wouldn't be all that much fun. Chris Corrigan's B.I.J. is one weblog that I return to again and again. He's managed to capture the essence of a place and its community so well. ... and it provides the kind of inspiration I'm looking for in articulating how blogging can really make a difference to the web. Chris' blog is pure content. There are no vapid "Check this out. LOL" links. ... and so, this is my goal for this blog- to capture a time and place, with a minimum of useless fluff. Not so much the physical place of Vancouver, or Canada, but life as an academic, as a scientist, a roboticist, a dad, a husband, etc. Over time, I hope this blog will produce a deeper portrait of life as I see it, or at least as I'm living it.

Wish me luck!

Preamble: how on earth did we get here?

Robert Sim — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 10:50:00 +0000

Some time in 1999 Scott Burlington and I wrote a little perl script called headline that screen-scraped stories off our favourite web sites, and posted them to a web page. At the time, there was no such thing as RSS, so we had to write custom code to scrape each site that we wanted headlines from. We ran the simple gauntlet of slashdot, wired, APOD, stock tickers, etc, and also posted links to the now-defunct Suck, which IMHO is still the uncontested all-time champ of web-based political commentary. It was great fun and I felt like we were playing a part in an amazing cultural renaissance. Of course, the main purpose for me was to entertain myself while procrastinating on my Ph.D. work (much as I'm doing right now- procrastinating on looking for faculty jobs. ;-)

Some time later I started thinking about how I could make my web site a little more dynamic and crafted together a rudimentary weblog. Of course, I didn't call it a blog at the time, and I'd never heard of Movable Type, but once it went live, I was hooked. I used the blog to post links I found entertaining, original book reviews, movie reviews, and then later it became a political tool for informing the masses about McGill's IP policy and other doings in my role as Grad Senator and later VP Academic for the grad society.

But there's a problem with blogging, and web culture in general and it's this: like the space occupied by electrons orbiting an atom, the web is mostly vacuous- devoid of content. We've created a device in which millions of monkeys type away (taking time away from other productive activites) all to produce commentary. The few monkeys who actually contribute content to the net act as giant lint brushes, ever collecting the detritus of links from the blogosphere. What are trackbacks other than a kind of showmanship- my lint collection is bigger than yours! Na-na-nana-naaa...

Now I must admit here, that I played my own small, embarassing part in this collective alternation between navel-gazing and hero worship. I lost countless hours scouring metafilter, fark and boingboing, looking for whatever it is that would give me a rush of pleasure and/or self-righteous indignation for the morning and make me look forward to eventually getting down to work.

Somehow, I managed to finish my Ph.D. (in robotics, not weblogs), and when I moved to UBC in Jan 2004 I swore off blogging. I was done, it was time to grow up and get down to work... and you can see where I've ended up. Why did I come back? I'll save that discussion for tomorrow.

First post...

Robert Sim — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 11:08:00 +0000

Welcome back! It's been two years since I quit blogging cold-turkey. I'll explain my reasons for the hiatus later. In the meantime sit back, relax and enjoy the scenery.