Robot Monkeys

I’ve noticed that even with Microsoft’s advertisement infrastructure, Facebook has the shittiest ads. Like absolutely HORRIBLE ads. There’s no excuse for that. Facebook knows EVERYTHING to target ads to people. They know where you are. They know what you like. They know all your demographic information. They know all your friends, and everything about them. They have everything they need to do microtargeting of ads. Yet, they epically fail.

“Punch the monkey and win a free ipod”? That’s your ad? Geez.

Recently they’ve been serving “Date hot chicks near you!” to me.

Until today…

As far as I can tell, It’s because I set my status update to “Jonathan is a sexxy dude.”

Two billion dollars my ass.

3 trillion dollars

Makes me think of Eisenhower

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

Or to bring it back to Iraq:

Three trillion could have fixed America’s social security problem for half a century.

William F Buckley Jr dead at 82.

Indubitably and most precipitously a great cataclysm hither forth unseen since the times of Euphiptese and his campaign against the the acolytes of Persephone and such as and so forth… and so it becomes clear to even the most pig headed simpleton of West Tisbury (which of course would unboubtedly be a Harvard man) that what Congress should do is CUT MY TAXES AND PASS THE HOOKERS AND WHISKEY ACT BITCHES!

I for one will never miss his pompus ass, bad posture, barrel chest, double chin (or perhaps it’s just a side effect of that horrible posture) and that atrocious fake accent.

The amount of information associated with the outcome of a random variable can be expressed as bits (aka “digits”), nats (aka “dits”), or hartleys (aka “bans”), depending on the base of the logarithm used in the calculation of the self-information of the random variable’s outcome. (Base 2, e, or 10 respectively.)

The self-information of outcome x is calculated as: I(x) = -log P(x)

For example. each side of a 10 sided die contains 3.32 bits, or 2.3 nats, or 1 ban, of information.

Now you know!

Related Links:
Self-Information on Wikipedia

In Information Week

Lock-ins are never good for customers: a business that isn’t confident that it can keep your business by providing the best product at the best price is a business that isn’t planning on providing the best product at the best price.

The only audio recording of the RFK assassination identifies two different guns.

Wow.

Now I didn’t know anything about the RFK assassination except that Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, was caught with a gun immediately after the shooting, and was convicted.

What I didn’t know was that, there were 14 bulletts were recovered, but Sirhan Sirhan’s gun only held 8! What the hell? Why was this man ever considered a lone gunman? The shooting took only 5 seconds. Just mathematically, there had to be another gun. The autopsy said RFK was shot from behind, including powder burns , but Sirhan Sirhan was in front. There were powder burns on RFK’s skin, but Sirhan Sirhan was 2 to 5 feet away.

Why would anyone believe any of this?

JFK? One man. RFK? Fucking coverup.

Update: Sun Feb 24 20:29:53 PST 2008
Now, I read the FBI Report, and you get 13 “bullets,” if you count every entry point. (e.g. Bullet 4, which entered RFK’s right back, exited his right front, and then was lost after it hit a ceiling tile, counts as two “bullets.” One that hit RFK, and another that hit the ceiling.)

Two feet is arms length, so you could easily shove the muzzle of a gun a couple of inches away from someone that was that close. All the bullets in the official story have them striking RFK from behind, which the conspiracy theorists claim were covered up.

So I’m going to completely back off from this. However, none of this accounts for the recording analysis that apparently passed muster enough to be published in the Journal of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, which is apparently the respected journal for forensic science.

If you were casting “The Presidential Election 2008: The Movie” who would you cast as Barack Obama?

Don Cheadle
Will Smith
Denzel Washington
Tyra Banks
Not sure

Type A: 68 lines
Type B: 11 lines

Pretty much everything you need to know about that crappy overly simplistic theory.

Citibank’s AccountOnline.com’s login page is absolutely broken. If you have no idea what your “security word” is and ask for a hint, you’re essentially told that it could be anything, including nothing. That really isn’t much a hint, because its safe to assume that your security word, if it exists, expresses some concept in the universe of concepts. If you’re asking for a hint, you what concept you’re supposed to guess from. But no. Citibank tells you “It’s a valid string of characters, including the null string.” Gee. Thanks.

However, if it’s actually nothing, you’re screwed, because the security word is a required field, and so you’re not allowed to enter if your security word if it’s actually the null string, which they specifically say is a valid security word.

God! How the hell does this pass testing? Sadly I know the answer. There is no testing.