(From multiple sources)
1. grab the nearest book.
2. open the book to page 23.
3. find the fifth sentence.
4. post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions
“Consider N data points uniformly distributed in a p-dimensional unit ball centered at the origin.”
(From Hastie, Tibshirani & Friedman, The Elements of Statistical Learning. Yes, I admit to being a geek.)
Bush’s Medicare dream turning into a nightmare (Skullduggery w.r.t. the recent Medicare reform bill)
SCO takes on US government’s supercomputers (SCO has decided to sue the Department of Energy for using Linux, too. This legal strategy is getting increasingly…. umm. right.)
Intelligence aide claims Bush ignored al-Qaeda (Former national counter-terrorism adviser for every administration from Reagan through the younger Bush has a new book out and appeared on 60 minutes, accusing Bush of systematically refusing to heed warnings about al-Qaeda and being interested only in Iraq)
Royal Dutch/Shell Restates Again (Your next major financial scandal in the works)
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, leader of Hamas, was killed today by a helicopter gunship attack as he was leaving the mosque. Several other casualties reported in the vicinity.
The title of this posting is because (a) it’s approaching Passover, a traditional peak time for terrorist strikes anyway, and (b) this is, by far, the highest-level Hamas (or other terrorist) operative ever killed by Israeli forces, especially in quite so public a fashion. The result is almost certain to be tremendous violence, and it’s not at all clear to me why the hell the government thought that this would be a good idea. Violence has been at overall low levels recently, although this is in part because of very stringent enforcement efforts by the Israeli government – the wall, bad as it may be for other reasons, has been very effective at cutting down terrorist attacks, and a major attack was recently thwarted in the northern port city of Ashdod.
But this… this one is really asking for an opening to the gates of hell. It’s second only to killing Arafat for impact.
Some more analysis from Debka here. They seem about as confused as I am, although they offer some other points. Be aware that Debka has a right-wing (by Israeli politics axes, not American) bias.
(Stolen from )
“If you…”
1. …owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?
I’d either run a cafe of much the sort described, or a more traditional restaurant, a small, intimate sort of place in the mountains, focussing on traditional food types with subtle variations, and a lot of experimentation in the sides and garnishes. I’d definitely be aiming for a few stars. 🙂
2. …owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?
Very likely a bookstore, trying to go for real depth of inventory and a very knowledgeable staff. A pleasant environment and maybe a cafe next door. But I’m not really much the type to be a retailer.
3. …wrote a book, what genre would it be?
Probably a textbook on physics, mathematics or some related subject. Maybe, many years from now, I’ll try to tackle a systematic work of philosophy – but that’s for much later.
4. …ran a school, what would you teach?
Well, everything. I’d try to run a universal academy; no matter what the level, try to make certain that the students left with a strong basic knowledge of every field, and an in-depth knowledge of at least one. I would expect all students to end up conversant in language, literature, history, science, mathematics, and engineering, at least enough to function. And I’d probably be kinda old-fashioned and also require things like foreign language and physical education – mens sana in corpore sano and all that.
5. …recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?
Classical piano. Probably some combination of Beethoven and Chopin, with something lesser-known — maybe some interesting Spanish composer? — for balance.
It’s 0400 on what’s now a Sunday, I get home, and I can still hear my upstairs neighbors walking around.
Do these people never sleep?! I hear them doing this at more or less every hour imaginable…
If you call me “Yonatan,” you either know me from work, or you’re a friend of mine.
If you call me “Yony,” (long o) you are either one of two specific exes, or met me during a particular time window about two years ago.
If you call me “Yony,” (short o) you are probably a friend of mine.
If you call me “Yony,” (with a Hebrew accent) you are probably a relative, or Israeli.
If you call me “Dr. Zunger,” you probably know me professionally, and only from a distance.
If you call me “Fred,” you probably have me confused with someone else.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that accusers have the right to confront witnesses which may exculpate them, and that the Sixth Amendment commands “not that evidence be reliable, but that reliability be assessed in a particular manner: by testing in the crucible of cross-examination.” (This being from the majority opinion, written by Justice Scalia)
What I find particularly interesting about this is that certain other cases, e.g. US vs Moussaoui, are coming up in which this is expected to be a very substantial issue. A strong ruling from the court in this case – and with an opinion written by Justice Scalia, of all people – could be a very significant influence on what comes next, and could even provoke a constitutional crisis if Ashcroft follows through on his threat to unilaterally remove Moussaoui from the justice system if the courts rule in Moussaoui’s favor.
The case today was Crawford v. Washington, No. 02-9410.
The porn business is high-margin low-volume, very competitive and has a low turnaround time. This forces it to be extremely responsive to even subtle undercurrents in the mood of its customer base.
Conjecture: The set of popular textual advertisement themes for porn (e.g. subject lines of porn spam) undergoes systematic collective fluctuations. (New popular themes arise and disappear) These fluctuations contain a nontrivial signal about the current zeitgeist among the primary target audience (suitably subsection the audience if there is enough breadth in the market to justify so doing) and could be usefully mined for a lot of interesting information about what’s going on in the country. Its fast response time makes it particularly interesting.
This could be a better signal than e.g. tabloid covers, since while they have similar fluctuation patterns, they seem to have settled down into a fairly constant set of themes that doesn’t fluctuate nearly as broadly as porn.
Opinions?
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 