Month: November 2004

Well, I’m sure the Bush administration is arranging an immediate pullout of all U.S. forces from Iraq. In today’s BBC News I found this:

Pop star Madonna has said the United States should withdraw its troops from Iraq immediately.

If Madonna wants out, it’s only a matter of time.

Good old Dirk sure knows how to raise my spirits… he sent me a link to a news article discussing the resignation of John Ashcroft.

My fave quote:

Ashcroft, in a five-page, handwritten letter to Bush, said, “The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.”

Sweet! America is secure… so we’ve apparently won the war on terror! I was such a naysayer, always criticizing ol’ John because I thought we could never really defeat the terrorists. Boy, I’m sure eating my words now! I guess now that they’re finished (and crime too!) John needs to move on to other things. Like, uhh, running for Missouri state senate or something.

Mwah ha HAAAAAAAAA!

“Happiness is like peeing your pants. Everyone can see it, but only you can feel its warmth.”

— Seen on an internet forum

Seen on kiro5hin.org:

Two things were made clear by the recent Presidential election. The first is that clique surrounding George W. Bush is not bothered by scruples in the pursuit of what they want. They will make promises that make no sense, ambush opponents with carefully planted lies, rig the voting machines, and use their power to manipulate the news. Perhaps the boldest and most sinister expression of this character trait was explained to Ron Suskind by a senior Bush aide:

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Such monumental hubris can justify anything.

The second reality the recent election made clear is that, regardless of whatever election-rigging might or might not have tipped the scale in Bush’s favor, it is undeniably true that over fifty-five million American citizens honestly did ignore Bush’s failure to get Bin Laden, ignored the missing WMD’s, ignored the thousand war dead, ignored the back-door draft, ignored the two hundred million dollars wasted, ignored two dollar a gallon gasoline, ignored the plunging stock market, ignored our vanished international reputation and dwindling list of allies, and voted to let George W. Bush keep doing it for four more years.

Let the countdown begin: coming soon to Beijing is the 2004 World Toilet Summit.

That’s right, it’s a chance for world leaders to gather together in peace and unity to discuss… I don’t know, the state of the toilet facilities in China or something.

Best quote:

“Toilets represent the level of development of a country, a region,” Yu Debin, deputy director of Beijing’s Municipal Bureau of Tourism, said Friday at a news conference. “They also represent a region’s spiritual and material civilization.”

The summit is being hosted by the World Toilet Organization, and culminates with World Toilet Day on November 19.

And no, this is not a joke.

I can only hope Bush is, like, an invited speaker or something.

It comes as no surprise that the average weight of Americans has increased– something like 40 pounds in the past fifty years. But now a new government study (motto: “Remember, it’s your tax dollars we’re spending here!”) has shown that the airline industry is getting hammered because of it.

“The extra weight caused airlines to spend $275 million to burn 350 million more gallons of fuel in 2000 to carry the additional weight, the federal centers estimated in a recent issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.”

Now, I’ve weighed 165 pounds since my junior year of high school. I fluctuate plus or minus five pounds or so, but overall I’ve been the same size for the past fifteen years. As those other passengers continue to bloat, I’m thinking I should demand some kind of “low fat credit” on my ticket prices. Or, conversely, there could be a “fat surcharge”. Either way, it doesn’t seem fair that I pay for the jet fuel to fly the huge guy next to me across the country.

Zack was helping me make a batch of sugar cookies (bake sale tonight!) and he kept wanting to stir. I told him I’d stir it a little first, and then he could do it. He was pretty insistent, and repeatedly asked if he could do it now.

“Now?”
“Not yet.”
“Now?”
“Not yet.”
“Now?”
“Not yet.”
“Now?”
“Not yet.”

Finally I told him, “Zack, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.”

He looked at me, undoubtably preparing his zippy retort, and then said, “Fine, I’m going to have a banana.”

From a Yahoo News article:

LOS ANGELES – A man was charged with trespassing after he stripped naked, scaled a airport fence, ran across the tarmac and climbed into a plane’s wheel well before firefighters talked him out, officials said.

Airport authorities will look into improving the fence, said Paul Haney, a spokesman for the agency that operates the airport.

Comments:

1) Barbed wire? Naked? Ouch.
2) Flying from L.A. to Australia, unpressurized, at 35,000 feet. Hmm.
3) Good thing they’ll improve the fence. That’ll surely put an end to these kinds of shenanigans.

“When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I’m beginning to believe it.”

— Clarence Darrow

I’ve been pondering an interesting question for a while and can’t come up with a satisfactory answer.

Consider the number pi. Also consider the works of Shakespeare, converted into a string of numbers where each number represents a letter (a=1, b=2, or you could use ASCII codes, or whatever). In fact, we can consider any series of numbers that’s well-defined, but Shakespeare makes it more fun.

The question: is it possible that Shakespeare is encoded within pi somewhere?

In a larger sense, the question is whether an arbitrary sequence of digits can be found within pi. You can even use different bases, if that suits your fancy. The problem doesn’t really change.

At first, I thought the answer was definitely “yes”. After all, pi is infinitely long and has a (seemingly) random ordering of digits. Somewhere in that mess, perhaps septillions of digits down the line, surely you can find Shakespeare.

My hunch wasn’t strong enough proof, so I began to consider how to disprove it. In other words, can I construct an infinitely long irrational number and a sequence of numbers that does not appear anywhere within it? At first I considered a non-repeating sequence of, say, ones and zeros that increases its count on each iteration. To wit:

1.010011000111000011110000011111…

It’s clear that the sequence “123” will never appear in this number. I believe the number is irrational, because it cannot be represented by a fraction– or, more loosely, because it’s infinite and never repeats. Thus, Shakespeare will never be found in here.

But pi is a slightly different animal: it has a fairly even distribution of digits– if I remember right, there is almost exactly a 10% occurrence of each digit zero through nine in the first million digits of pi. However, I don’t believe it’s been proven that the distribution is even (meaning pi is a “normal” number), and thus it’s entirely possible that somewhere down the line it becomes all sixes and sevens or something.

Anyway, I want to believe Shakespeare is in there, but I can’t come up with a strong conclusion.

(Yes, this sort of thing keeps me awake at night.)