Helen of Troy

An objective analysis of Beauty:

One helen is sufficient good looks to launch one thousand ships, and to cause the destruction by fire of an entire city. The objective standards of Ship Launching and Arson may now be used to analyze feminine beauty.

--"Helen of Troy" by David Lance Goines

A very funny piece.

The Unknown

"As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know."
-- Donald Rumsfeld
Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
-- Socrates

To me, Rumsfeld's musings is not only a clear example of the kind of statement public officials should never make because it is so internally complex that it leaves the listener completely perplexed, but it is also interestingly incomplete.

Let's assume its complexity is self explanatory, so I will deal with the incompleteness.

What he is trying to do, is to enumerate all combinations of facts that are {known, unknown} and the state of our knowledge about the facts.

We can construct a table of all combinations and fill it in with Rumsfeld's quotes, like this:

	What we know about our knowledge of the facts
	We know if we are informed or not	We are not aware of the question
Known facts	There are known knowns. There are things we know we know.
Unknown facts	There are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know.	[...] there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know we don't know.

This leaves us one empty square, things that are known or knowable, but we are ignorant of even the question to ask. Isn't it interesting that that is the very permutation he left out? I think it is symptomatic of the whole administration; There are things that could be known, and might even be known, but the Whitehouse is to ignorant to even ask the question.

Analysis of the NSA wiretap scandal

Here is the best analysis I have seen so far of what might be behind the Bush/NSA wiretap scandal. Something like this would indeed not be able to pass the current court review.

Mighty Mouse to the rescue!

This is a pretty amazing story about a robot dislodging a stuck canister of radioactivity.

In itself, that might not be so amazing, but this wasn't just any little canister. Apparently it was a hefty chunk of Cobalt 60 that was "powerful enough to kill a person in half a minute", so nobody at the lab volunteered to get in there and give it a swift kick.

The Gamma radiation was so powerfull that it "melted" some of the tools and would disable the robots electronics in about an hour. Ouch!

Spaghetti or Sushi? Both please!

This is actually a USB cable, you plug the device in at the business end of the fork.

Here are some USB drives suitable for connecting to the fork.

Neat! I want one.

Flexible clock from Citizen.

This one is something like $4000, but I'm sure the cost will drop like a stone. Expect to see electronic billboards in just a few years. Electronic ink is just going to change how the world looks so fast it will make our heads spin. Just imagine, electronic wallpaper... show anything on anything... woof!

Einar is reading!

Einar had his reading epiphany yesterday. Now he can read, he just has to learn all the words first. Until then it is slow going as he has to sound out each word.

This morning he showed off in school as we dropped him off. The first pages of the book went blazingly fast, probably more due to memorization than to studying speed reading. After that is was more like one word at the time, but if he was asked about stuff he hadn't worked on before, he could still do it.

The deal is that when he can read, he gets a computer. It's getting very close. Santa will have to start worrying.

N'wam k'honi soit qui mali

The big problem with pornography is defining it. You can't just say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: 'N'wam k'honi soit qui mali,' which means, 'If you think you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be interested in.'

So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled 'The Girls of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked,' some people would call it pornography. But others would not. And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev. Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked.

- Dave Barry, "Pornography"

more quotes...

Brown to start emergency planning consulting business.

So what possible use could there be for a disaster planning consulting firm headed by a certified disaster?

Think about it this way...

If he didn't have this new job, all that would be left to him would be a book deal for a tell-all best seller...

So... how many ghost writers with book contracts do you think were lined up in front of Brownies house when he was sent back to Washington? 10? 20?

Most of them would have been pure hacks -- and I mean that in the most disrespectful way -- but one or two could have been good enough that it would really hurt just in time for the 2006 elections.

So a few "friends" decide to get together and start a little consulting gig for Mr. Brown.

They generously fund this new business and give him a bit of stock so he has an interest to protect. Then they point out that if he writes a tell-all book, the business will "most likely" go down the drain.

Now, if he had a backbone and some integrity (yes, yes, this is purely hypothetical) he would decline such a deal as it was obviously made just to manipulate him some more, but as we see in the news, there is now a new consulting firm in Washington DC. Just what everybody needed.

Sprinkle lightly with cynicism to taste.

Geocaching

A wonderfull sunny November day. Our first Geocache ever and we found it after just a few minutes looking.

Droped off a token and picked one up to pass on to the next cache.

Just as we found it, another couple with a GPS reciever came up to us. They to were looking for the cache. They had done about 110 caches, but this was the first time they got there just as somebody else had found the cache.

I guess we found a new hobby!

--Einar, Ron, and Johan