Sixteen Volts

One mystery that I have occasionally wondered is that whenever I have seen actual old photographs showing the people in the American Old West, their clothes and overall general appearance look very different from what that you see in, say, movies set in Wild West. Also in the actual photographs, contrary to the myth, very few people seem to carry pistols holstered on their hip. In the pictures that actually show people carrying weaponry, their pistols seem very primitive and crude. Hrmph.

But not everything historical is forgotten. Sometimes our wackier American brothers love to dress up as Civil War soldiers and act out famous battles. In one article I once read about this phenomenon, I was amused by the way the people interviewed in it said that things were better in the past, and yet in the picture accompanying the story you could see a modern porta-potty in the background. Since the point of this activity is to have fun and make new friends, there is no reason that other epic historical struggles could not be given the same treatment. For example, we can see the video "Secret Wars Historical Reenactment Society".

Speaking of things that have puzzled me, I have never really understood why a co-op would somehow be an inherently socialist organization. Of course, in practice they usually are. But I don't think that it is an inherently essential feature of a co-op. In his post "Why I Like The Food Co-op", Professor Kurgman tells us about the enlightened food co-op that he shops in (no Wal-Mart consumerism for this progressive!) and links to the Park Slope Food Co-Op that in some ways sounds like it would be difficult to parody.

Sometimes people's motives to do stuff should be evident to any thinking person. The post ""Feminist Men": Oxymorons, or Simply Morons?" at GirlBomb lends support to my certain more... cynical assumptions about profeminist men. Follow the incentives and you usually see what is going on.

When I read the news release "Playboy TV rolls out racy new dating show" about a show in which two couples go on a couples date and hopefully have a foursome, I couldn't help but notice that in the best profeminist spirit, the article says that

The network said while women are being encouraged to discover "their inner bisexuality," man-on-man action is being strictly banned from the show.

Somebody certainly knows their target audience.

The post "Why Does The Unhinged Left So Hate Jeff Goldstein?" at Ace of Spades not only answers the question that it poses in the title, but at the same time it makes a far more important observation about why certain people simply have to be socialists. Read the whole thing. The same blog also skewers the new X-Men movie in the post "X-Men 3 Review: Wait For DVD".

Speaking of the stupidity of unions, the blowback for last Monday's transit strike in Toronto makes me want to ask the union if this little stunt was really worth it. Hint: when even the local commie rag Eye turns against you (see their editorial "Any sympathy we had for TTC employees is gone") it is time to stop what you are doing and go back to the drawing board. And if it is really true that a TTC ticket booth attendant gets paid 25 bucks an hour plus benefits like the editorial claims, I'd say that it's about freaking time to see if somebody else could do this job for less. I am sure that many people would be lining up to do it for $10/hour or so. And you know, perhaps we wouldn't even need human labour but there could be some kind of a machine to do this task, perhaps powered by steam! Could our modern technology possibly achieve such a feat?

I strongly support death penalty not just for murder but also for many other crimes, for the reasons that I explained in my old post "Don't let the ugly flowers bloom". Steve Sailer has noted in his new post "Three strikes laws and the death penalty" why planting the murderers in the electric chair is a necessary tool for the justice system, since it is the only real incentive that prevents big-time criminals from engaging in felony murder.

Lawrence Auster links to a news article "Changes in Orange bring exodus" that is absolutely surreal in many ways. I had to read this article twice just to make sure that I wasn't hallucinating it. Make absolutely no mistake about it, somebody will lose their job over this one.

In an algorithms course, binary search is always an educational algorithm to analyze first. This deceptively simple algorithm is surprisingly tricky to get right (using two indices that approach each other instead of just one that jumps back and forth in diminishing steps is a big help here), so after the first publication of this algorithm, it took over a decade for the first correct version to come out. Or did it? The post "Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken" tells us that the algorithm still had a bug that showed up in practice. However, if we start on this road, I bet that we would find bugs in other classic algorithms once we did not analyze them with usual implicit assumption that all integer variables are bignums.

Of all prejudices out there, prejucide towards the mentally ill must be one of the smartest and most useful to have. The news article "Bipolar teens see hostility in neutral faces" reminds us why.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, June 03, 2006 at 11:10 PM