I’ve been rewatching Cowboy Bebop lately, a bit at a time, when I have the chance. I just reached the ending again.
I’ve seen it once through before, and watched parts of it since here and there – but this is the first time I’ve rewatched it from beginning to end. It gains a lot on second viewing.
What’s surprising is the seamless texture. It’s much more clearly a love story – not agape but philia.
s33k3r, you should watch this sometime. I think you may enjoy it.
…every army needs, in key if unglamorous posts, men who can reason and
make lists and arrange for provisions and baggage wagons and, in general,
have an attention span greater than that of a duck.
— Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
From Reuters: TV ratings for State of the Union have slipped. Apparently 30% fewer people watched this year than last, because without a war brewing it just wasn’t as dramatic.
I’m always glad, for one, to know that our wire services are keeping such careful track on television rating numbers and what they mean for politics.
(Depressingly enough, of course, these numbers do mean something for politics – or at least, they do now that they’re publicized and being discussed.)
And on a different note, also from Reuters, the rabbi Shlomo Eliahu of Tzfat (one of the old hearts of cabbala, and to this day a thriving center of rabbinical thought) has composed a new proposed standard prayer for surfing net.pr0n.
No, I’m not kidding.
Well, at least it’s topical and relevant in our day and age…
I’ve finally gotten annoyed by my current bank (SFCU) one time too many. Are there any banks in the Mountain View area that people out here have had good experiences with?
J. T. Chang, Recent common ancestors of all present-day individuals. Chang considers a statistical model in which a population of constant size n goes through successive generations, and shows that (under suitable assumptions – infra) for n reasonably large (>~200 based on numerical simulations), there exists a single common ancestor of everyone in the population log2 n generations in the past – and if one goes approximately 1.77 log2 n generations back, everyone in the population is either a common ancestor of all people in the present generation, or of nobody. That is, either a given family line has died out completely, or just by statistical diffusion, they’ve become related to everyone living.
Applied to the population of Europe, this threshold seems to happen about 1000 years in the past. So it’s fairly likely that everyone with even a single European ancestor within the past 100 years or so can, in fact, claim descent from Charlemagne.
There are two technical assumptions in this paper. One is constant population size; it seems like it would be straightforward, although a technical pain in the ass, to relax this. The other more interesting one is that it assumes a random mating model; i.e., the probability that someone in generation t is a parent of someone in generation t+1 is uniform. This obviously isn’t correct, but I can think of a good way to model something more realistic – consider a set of k populations of size fk, each of which has random mating within it, and with a cross-mating probability distribution pk k’. This could model the existence of disjoint social or geographic groups. I’m rather curious about whether this would substantially change the results. One interesting question is, given a total population size and a decomposition into subgroups, whether or not there’s a “critical size” for a subpopulation which will lead in finite time to that population dying out, becoming completely assimilated, or becoming ancestors of everybody.
In the past day, I’ve come across a surprising number of bizarre words in the English language.
Yes, these all are real.
Bathykolpian: Deep-breasted.
Yes, the English language has a word for everything.
Current Music: (I wish they all could be) Bathykolpian girls… [Now firmly stuck in my head]
In Israel, late at night, the government started erecting a 30-foot wall separating Jerusalem from the neighboring town of Abu Dis. (story)
I don’t know why, but this in particular terrifies me, like it’s a sign that something truly horrible is going to happen. Not in the usual politics sense – in some vaguer and more metaphysical sense. This is a bad idea, one that’s going to have consequences for ages to come, and I’m very scared of what may come next.
So this politics post is dedicated to pure hearsay and strange rumors that I’ve been hearing bits of lately. As a latest reference I’ll just point people in the vague direction of debka, a notorious rumor mill if there ever was one, but a lot of this has been showing up in a wide variety of channels – NY Times, IHT, and so on. The point of this is mostly to mull over strange ideas.
That wacky Qaddafi
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 