Non Fiction

Urinals Shaped Like Woman's Mouth Cause Stir in Vienna October 19, 2006
VIENNA, Austria — An Austrian businessman announced Thursday he would get rid of urinals shaped like a woman's mouth from a public toilet near Vienna's national opera. The urinals, which are located in the "Opera Toilet," a lavishly decorated public restroom, feature thick, lipsticked lips, a set of teeth and a bright red tongue.

"We think that it's tasteless, misogynistic and offensive," said Marianne Lackner, media spokeswoman for the Vienna Department of Women's Affairs.
Monika Vana, the Green Party's spokeswoman for women's affairs, said they are "sexist and inappropriate."

Neuhold Gerhard, owner of the toilet's operator Neuhold Gerhard Limited, said he would remove the urinals.
Gerhard added that he thought it odd that public interest has only now been focused on the urinals, as they have been around for three years.

Images Only Blog

I started an images only blog.

Before computers, commercial artists had swipe files. Artists collected and indexed images that interested them. When they needed to come up with something "different," they flipped through the files and swiped or borrowed or modified a visual idea.

http://arthasreasons.blogspot.com/

Put this just inside your front door

Be Nice?

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
Winston Churchill

"A modest little person, with much to be modest about."
Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
Clarence Darrow

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."
Moses Hadas

"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know."
Abraham Lincoln

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
Groucho Marx

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
Mark Twain

"He has no enemies , but is intensely disliked by his friends."
Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend... if you have one."
George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one."
Winston Churchill, in response

"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others."
Samuel Johnson

"He had delusions of adequacy."
Walter Kerr

"There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure."
Jack E. Leonard

A "circus of rogues"

10 biggest fools on the Hill
Based on an article by Holly Martins
Congress has never been a bastion of intelligence. But when it comes to sheer stupidity, the men and women of the 109th have distinguished themselves as a breed apart.

For every year you spend in California, you lose five IQ points, so it should not surprise anyone that Senator Barbara Boxer is on the list.


Sen. Barbara Boxer caught in a fruity deep thought.

Boxer is a limousine liberal running a few gallons short of a full tank. After convening a Democratic press event at a gas station to publicize high oil prices and accuse Bush and Cheney of being too cozy with the oil industry, California's junior senator "hopped into a waiting Chrysler (18 MPG)," noted the Washington Post, "even though her Senate office was only a block away.

Link to the list of fools

Here come the scandals

Surprise!


A RAPID RISE:

By SHANNON BEHNKEN The Tampa Tribune
Published: Oct 22, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG - A year ago, Dawn L. Molen quit her job as a commercial loan officer and set out to become a real estate agent.

The 26-year-old got her license and quickly landed a job at Charles Rutenberg Realty in St. Petersburg.

With three months' experience, the agent who had never listed a home closed her first sale Jan. 27 in a working-class neighborhood. Her buyer paid $45,000 more than the asking price. It stunned her peers.

From then on, Molen brought in contracts by the stack.

Over the next eight months, the agent found buyers for 35 more homes, most of them clustered in St. Petersburg and Pinellas Park. At a time when real estate agents would have been happy to close two sales a month, Molen found buyers willing to consistently pay $50,000 to $70,000 more than the original price, according to documents obtained by The Tampa Tribune. Collectively, the homes sold for at least $2 million more than originally listed.

Her boss thought she was a rising star.

But there was something he said he didn't know: Some of the money wasn't going to the sellers. It was going to a third party with ties to Molen, sometimes without the knowledge of the lenders or the sellers. Federal and state laws require full disclosure to lenders detailing where the money goes.

The Heart

The last time I saw Paris
Her heart was warm and gay,
I heard the laughter of her heart in every street café.

-Oscar Hammerstein II

A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love.

-William Butler Yeats

Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache:
Do be my enemy for friendship's sake.

-William Blake

Heaven, I'm in heaven
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.

Irving Berlin

Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

-Virginia Woolf

In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end
This poison, that he cannot trust a friend.

-Aeschylus

We'll go no more a-roving

By Lord Byron

So, we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

"A man’s got to know his limitations."

In his book, The Science of Hitting, Ted Williams explains that he carved the strike zone into 77 cells, each the size of a baseball. If he swung at only his best cells he could be a .400 hitter, a hall of fame player. If he reached for his worst cells, he would only bat .230, barely average. Ted Williams knew his strengths and weaknesses. Do you?

No more excuses - back up your computer data

You know you should floss every day.
You know you should eat fresh fruit and vegetables every day.
You know you should back up your computer data everyday.

Prices have come down. For a hundred dollars, you can back up your data by pushing a button.

Just do it.

Here is an one option.

Buy.com has the Western Digital Dual-Option Combo 250GB USB 2.0 / Firewire External Hard Drive with Built-In USB 2.0 Hub - WDXB2500JBRNN for a low $99.95. Free shipping. Tax in CA, MA, MD, TN.

You Can Complain, or You Can Make Money

excerpts from essay:

You Can Complain, or You Can Make Money
By BEN STEIN
THERE is extreme income inequality in this country. It is hard to say whether it’s the fault of President Bush, since there was also extreme income inequality under former President Bill Clinton, and in fact there has always been extreme income inequality.
...................
There are a number of ways to respond to this situation. You can become indignant and say that it’s a violation of American democratic principles. This is a good way to put yourself into a sanctimonious mood, and it offers some psychic satisfaction.
...................
Another way, possibly more satisfying in the long run, would be to ask yourself how the top 1 percent of wealth holders and income earners got to be that way, and then to try to do it yourself.
...............................
• You do not get to it by studying African feminism in the 19th century, whether or not you are at an Ivy League college. You do not get to it by studying Bulgarian poetry. You do not get to it by any field of endeavor or study that is esoteric and has no connection with helping other people either become healthy or make money.
...................
• You make money by learning skills that lead to any of these: making people feel and look better, learning how to draw their wills, learning how to manage their money so they don’t under perform the bogey terribly, learning how to make complex things like computer parts in ways that lead your employer to make money and reward you with stock options. This is by no means an exclusive list.
...................
But if you are not one of these people — if you feel better making pottery or teaching school or policing the streets — you can have a fabulous life, too. In fact, from what I have seen, you can have a better life if you just stop thinking that everyone is supposed to make the same wage and just feel happy with who you are.

link to article

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.

Cool Science Image

visualcomplexity.com

Web Mapping Pacific Northwest National Laboratory - USA
link- http://starlight.pnl.gov/appWeb.stm

Starlight is a generic information visualization tool, developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, that is applicable to a wide range of problems.

Quotes for the day

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
- John Ruskin

Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most.
- Joseph Wood Krutch

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
- Raymond Chandler

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
- Samuel Johnson

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
- P. J. O'Rourke

peter callesen - paper artist

A friend sent me some images from Peter Callesen.

Click on the link to see more of his work.

peter callesen

Approach of Winter

The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together,
bending all,
the leaves flutter drily
and refuse to let go
or driven like hail
stream bitterly out to one side
and fall
where the salvias, hard carmine--
like no leaf that ever was--
edge the bare garden.


William Carlos Williams

Free Money? Non-transitive Dice

The diagrams of Efron's dice are shown on the left.Here is the game we play with them. You can choose any die (singular of dice) that you want, and then I will choose my die; we roll our dice and the higher number wins. Which die would you choose?

It turns out that it doesn't matter which one you choose, I will win 2/3 of the time, you will only win 1/3 of the time (in other words, I have a 2:1 advantage). Whichever die you choose, I will choose the one immediately to its left. If you choose the left one, I will choose the right one.

link to buy the dice (I don't know the merchant!)

http://www.grand-illusions.com/toyshop/ntdice1/

link to detailed explanation

http://www.jimloy.com/puzz/nontran.htm

What does transitive mean?
If Tom is taller than Dick and Dick is taller than Harry, then Tom is taller than Harry. This is the transitive property for the relation "taller." In the case of the four dice diagrams shown above, the surprise arises from the mistaken assumption that the relation "most likely to win" is transitive between pairs of dice. It is not.

Talking Heads Really Are Idiots

Have you noticed that the bad Florida hurricane season didn't happen? Now these experts are predicting a warm winter. Yet no one I've seen on TV has asked why we should take their forecasts seriously. Yes, it's only TV, but the problem is pervasive.

Philip Tetlock'’s book, "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?"

Excerpt from review:

people who make prediction their business, people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables —are no better than the rest of us. When they a’re wrong, they a’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles

How to Fight a Traffic Ticket

WikiHow: "One minute you’re cruising down the highway making record time , and the next you’re pulled over on the side of the road with the flashing lights of a police cruiser in your rear view mirror. Were you really guilty of the crime? Since you are innocent until proven guilty, here is how you can try to beat that ticket."


http://www.wikihow.com/Fight-a-Traffic-Ticket

excerpt from possible tactics-

• Adopt the 'low-profile' technique. Ask the officer if you can handle the ticket by mail. The officer will immediately see you as a low probability to go to court and may take fewer notes. When you do challenge the ticket, the officer's sparse notes will make him want to skip the hearing. Even if he does come to the hearing, his sparse notes and memory will help the judge decide in your favor. Questioning the officer on the other hand will cause him to write voluminous notes on the traffic stop.

Think. It's not illegal yet.

Science Blog : "Special OJ can cut heart attack risk
Submitted by BJS on Wed, 2006-10-11 06:38. bioscience & medicine

Plant cholesterols known as sterols -- recognized for their cholesterol-lowering power when added to margarines, salad dressings and other fats -- also have been found to be effective in reducing low-density lipoprotein, or 'bad' cholesterol' levels, when added to orange juice. Now, UC Davis researchers have found that twice-daily servings of a reduced-calorie orange juice beverage fortified with plant sterols also reduces levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation and an accepted risk marker for heart disease."

Thinking Machine 4

Thinking Machine 4:
Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/index.html

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

A tax is repealed!

FLORIDA INTANGIBLE TAX ENDS

It's now official.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed a bill into law last week that finally repeals the state tax on stocks, bonds and other intangible property.

The tax, which Bush had repeatedly called "insidious," was levied on the market value of intangible personal property that is owned, managed or controlled by Florida residents or people doing business in Florida.

The state Legislature had been chipping away at the tax for several years.

"The repeal of this tax eliminates a penalty on Floridians who take responsibility for their own retirement by saving and investing over a lifetime," Bush said in his statement.

Although most Democrats opposed the repeal, which they saw as a shift of the tax burden from the wealthy to other taxpayers, the legislation passed easily in the House and Senate.

About 300,000 people were effected by the tax. They are expected to save about $131 million annually in taxes.

The repeal is effective immediately.

The final payment by taxpayers was due June 30, 2006.

08/09/06

The Why And How of Bubbles.

fmo0606.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Probably the best description of what is happening and has happened in housing comes from Richard DeKaser, Chief Economist at National City Corp.'s (NCC) Economic Office. Paraphrasing from the June 2006 Financial Market Outlook, talking about the residential housing market:

Under ordinary conditions, which are implicitly embedded in most statistical models, rising prices subdue demand, all else being equal. But in a bubble the opposite is true; rising prices not only fail to subdue demand, they actually excite it. [REIT Investors] make purchases not based on relative value propositions (e.g. [relative asset returns]) but on the belief that future price gains will reward current purchases. This self-fulfilling proposition then builds on itself. That is, until it doesn’t, and the economics profession isn’t especially strong at pinpointing these tipping points.

typoGenerator

If you want to create a one-of-a-kind card for a special person here is the way.
You probably will have to try several times to get a good one.

http://www.typogenerator.net

how to use typoGenerator

just type some text - the generator searches images.google.com for it and creates an image, using the text.
If you type senseless text, no image will be found, which can create nice effects too.

If you have been patient and waited for the generated result, you can influence it: if you like the positioning of the text, choose: 'keep text'; if you like the colors of the text, choose 'keep colors' and if you like the generated background image, choose 'keep background'.

The Power of the Dog

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

the rest of the poem by Kipling is here-

http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/poems/kipling3.asp

The Old Curiosity Shop

When you visit Asheville, North Carolina, be sure to stop by at Longstreet. If you have an eccentric uncle, this is the place to get him an 1811 print of candlemaking tools or an old German poster of a World War One fighter plane. Antique maps are everywhere.

The posted business hours for the store are only a suggestion. If the front door is locked during "normal" hours, go have a cup of coffee and come back in twenty minutes. Your persistence will be rewarded.




Antiquarian Map and Print Gallery


Longstreet
Antiquarian Maps & Prints
8 Biltmore Avenue
(On the town square)
Asheville, NC 28801
828.254.0081


http://www.thesciencebookstore.com/default.asp

How To Ask a Computer Geek a Question

excerpt from: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

Before asking a technical question .... do the following:

1.
Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
2.
Try to find an answer by reading the manual.
3.
Try to find an answer by reading a FAQ.
4.
Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.

When you ask your question, display the fact that you have done these things first; this will help establish that you're not being a lazy sponge and wasting people's time. Better yet, display what you have learned from doing these things.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#intro

the wisdom of a world poker champion and a bond king

“Ain’t only three things to gamblin’,” Pearson said, “knowing the 60/40 end of a proposition, money management, and knowing yourself.” Those rules, I thought, looked incredibly similar to my own philosophy inscribed in Everything You’ve Heard About Investing Is Wrong, written 10 years ago, except mine were derived from blackjack and a UC Irvine mathematics professor, Ed Thorpe. Blackjack, and by implication investing, could be conquered I wrote, by identifying opportune moments when the odds favored the player as opposed to the dealer and by altering the size of the bets accordingly. I also devoted an entire chapter to an investor’s personal alarm clock and the necessity for understanding not only human nature but also your own individual behavior within the web of mass psychology.

From Bill Gross at Pimco