Movie: Primer

At the call today, while comparing and contrasting movie plots (the team activity's movie still fresh in our minds) I was stumped trying to remember a well-recommended movie about time travel that was supposed to be well-nigh impossible to completely understand the first time through. I promised I would post the title on the blog as soon as I remembered.

Well, it was Primer. A movie about two engineers who accidentally discover time travel in their garage. (HP really should have sponsored this at some point, since it's quickly becoming a cult classic.)

I had never even heard of the movie until I saw this comic.

And I still haven't watched it, even though it's free to watch on Google Video.

Tobor

That's it. I am going to legally change by name to Tobor.

Most lucrative college degrees

There is a somewhat interesting article talking about the Most lucrative college degrees on money.cnn.com. The data comes from the National Association of Colleges and Employers so I guess that makes it legit. I thought it was interesting because when I was in school the top of the list looked like this:

1. Chemical Engineering
2. Electrical Engineering
3. Computer Science

Now the top of the list looks like this:

1. Petroleum Engineering
2. Chemical Engineering
3. Mining Engineering
4. Computer Engineering
5. Computer Science
6. Electrical Engineering

However, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering have such similar salaries that for all practical purposes they tied for fourth. Even so, that still means hat Mining and Petroleum bumped them out of the top three. I guess the world isn't as digital as we all though.

Android vs Chrome (OS)

I think there is a lot of confusion regarding google's decision to come out with another linux based operating system. You can read some of the debate here on gizmodo. I myself think it may have been a pretty dumb idea to call your OS the same thing you call your web browser... but hey. I will reserve judgement, maybe that is exactly what they wanted to do.

Also, I will offer this guess: The difference between Android and Chrome will be, by and large, the graphics pipeline/subsystem. Android's largest difference from normal linux is its use of a custom framebuffer instead of the X11R6 we all know and love. I predict that in the long term you will see Chrome and Android move close together, but Chrome will maintain X11R6. That's my guess and its worth what you paid for it.

They just don't do movie trailers like they used to ...

... but maybe they should.

Please compare ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz86TsGx3fc

Mildly intriguing ... at least until you realize it's from the Dean/Emmerach team who've already bored us with blowing most of this stuff up many times before. The say "from the director of Independance Day and The Day After Tommorrow" CLEARLY like they think that's a good thing.

At least you can't say they didn't warn you first.

And now, for the awesome v1970's version.

http://vimeo.com/5463875

Now you kinda wanna see it anyway, don't you?

Wells Fargo competes for worst bank in the world

Just when JP Morgan Chase and Citi are being hounded for their credit card policies, it is good to see that Wells Fargo is keeping them honest.

The City of Baltimore and the NAACP have now filed suit against Wells Fargo for marketing sub-prime home loans to prime black borrowers. Because this is a law suit there are now sworn affidavits from people like Mr. Paschal who says:

They referred to sub-prime loans made in minority communities as ghetto loans and minority customers as "mud people..." The company put "bounties" on minority borrowers. By this I mean that loan officers received cash incentives to aggressively market sub-prime loans in minority communities.

The New York Times conducted their own study and found that in the city of New York, 16.1% of black borrowers making at least $68k per year had a sub-prime home loans while only 2% of white owners in the same income bracket had sub-prime loans. The New York Times quoted Beth Jacobson, Wells Fargo's top producing sub-prime loan officer, as saying:

We just went right after them. Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches, because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out sub-prime loans.

That's right, Wells Fargo aggresively marked sub-prime loans to black people at their churches. You can read more here.

Good Ethiopian Restaurant in PDX

Periodically, I'll just repost stuff I don't want to lose down my Inbox memory hole. Like a personal review of a promising restaurant to keep in mind:

For father’s day the family took me out to a new (to me) Ethiopian
restaurant that we really enjoyed:

http://www.bete-lukas.com/
http://www.yelp.com/biz/bete-lukas-ethiopian-restaurant-portland

I like Ethiopian food, but it’s normally too spicy for the kids and Tomo. Bete Lukas was not spicy, but extremely savory. We ordered a couple of the vegetarian platters and chicken dish. I had a glass of the honey wine, which was pretty tasty too..

This place is pretty nice compared to Jarra’s or Queen of Sheba: It has full bar, and is vegetarian friendly. (Thought the kids were literally fighting over the chicken dish we got, so we had to order a 2cd plate of it.)

Anyway 4 stars! If you like Ethiopian, or if you have never had it, I highly recommend it. (It would be a good place for a date for you bachelors, or a nice place to take the wife…) It’s on SE 50th between division and Powell. It’s on the 2cd floor of kind of non-descript cinderblock building, so it’s easy to miss, but well worth the effort. Dinner only.

-Morgan

Economy to get better... except for jobs.

The National Association of Business Economists is forecasting a modest Q3 rebound in real GDP. However, they expect the national unemployment rate to hit 9.8% by the end of 2009. That, in it self is neither surprising nor troubling to me. What troubles me is that they forecast unemployment to improve only slightly and for us to have a 9.3% unemployment rate at the end of 2010. Ick.

Terraform Earth Now!

I've been reading the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.  It's quite good, though rather long and has some tedious (for me) passages detailing Martian landscape and geology.  Terraforming (and the political battles surrounding the speed, methods, and outcomes) is a major theme of the series.

One thing I've been noodling on is the idea "Terraforming" earth.  I see global warming as a proof-of-concept that we can influence (control) our macro-environment.  According to this article, we've have been doing it indirectly for 1000's of years:

"About 7,000 years ago, levels of carbon dioxide and methane began rising. During every previous similar interglacial period, of which there are at least seven, greenhouse-gas levels fell.

To explain this, palaeoclimatologist Bill Ruddiman formulated the “early anthropogenic hypothesis,” which holds that the source of these gases was land clearing and flooding for rice production by prehistoric farmers beginning 8,000 years ago. While this hypothesis still ruffles the feathers of many a climatologist, there remains no better evidence explaining the Holocene greenhouse-gas anomaly.It is even possible that global warming caused by prehistoric farmers has delayed the onset of the next ice age, which is due right about now."

from "http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ftf-ellis-1/"

Banks would rather tear down brand new homes than sell them for a loss!

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Partially-completed-SoCal-apf-15147127.html?.v=3

They will foreclose on people and throw them out, and then turn around and tear down perfectly good brand new houses rather than sell them at a loss.... What is wrong with this picture....

Swine flu sound track (H1N1)

Stolen directly from gizmodo.

Anti-anti-aliasing

http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/vdSgvxg_VrU/kindle-2-displa.html

This article reminded me that my Stanford computer graphics professor told me he'd considered removing the section in his intro course on Computer graphics on "halftoning" altogether, but then decided to keep it around with low resolution display devices in mind.

With that in mind I found the place in the article that linked to the various image capabilities of the recent e-readers somewhat interesting.

http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/2009/03/are-kindles-16-shades-of-gray-big-deal.html

I want to know when they are going to address how off the neutrality of thse 16 points of gray are in the upper-middle regions ...

Make Work Pay Satan?

Next year, Obama's "Make Work Pay" tax credit will be evenly dispersed throughout the year. The cap for married filers is $800/year, or $800/12 per month. That is $666 x 10^-1. Coincidence?

I am moving to New Zealand

Google? Evil?

Well, google might not be evil, but apparently they have been pissing of web developers enough to get them to leave. That is, at least according to this article on CNN: Why Google Web Designers Keep Quitting In A Huff.

I found this section of the article particularly interesting:

- Google doesn't really need web designers. Google search, which drives 99% of the company's revenue, is a design masterpiece because it's hardly designed at all. Competitors like to slag Google for relying on "10 blue links" but it works and Google won't need designers to change it anytime soon.

- Google is a sales-driven company that likes to call itself an engineering-driven company. So even if Google plans to change a product, it won't go to the Web designers first.

I think they are right. The 1% of google that makes 99% of the profits is done. The only thing they need now is to keep sales up. This kind of squashes my desire to work at google one day. Of course, I wanted to work on the back end anyway...

Thinking the Unthinkable

I came across an article on the downfall of the newspapers.   The plight of the newspapers didn't really interest me, but the article had some interesting things to day about selectively _not_ thinking about the worst case scenario:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/shirky09/shirky09_index.html

"When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away."

It reminded me a little bit of printing in general.

In honor of Thomas Friedman's speech at PSU on Monday

this article about Friedman's style had me ROTFLOL and all that ... here's a quick glimpse of the prose ...
In The World is Flat, the key action scene of the book comes when Friedman experiences his pseudo-epiphany about the Flat world while talking with himself in front of InfoSys CEO Nandan Nilekani. In Hot, Flat and Crowded, the money shot comes when Friedman starts doodling on a napkin over lunch with Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine. The pre-lunching Friedman starts drawing, and the wisdom just comes pouring out:
I laid out my napkin and drew a graph showing how there seemed to be a rough correlation between the price of oil, between 1975 and 2005, and the pace of freedom in oil-producing states during those same years.
Friedman then draws his napkin-graph, and much to the pundit’s surprise, it turns out that there is almost an exact correlation between high oil prices and “unfreedom”! The graph contains two lines, one showing a rising and then descending slope of “freedom,” and one showing a descending and then rising course of oil prices. Friedman plots exactly four points on the graph over the course of those 30 years. In 1989, as oil prices are falling, Friedman writes, “Berlin Wall Torn Down.” In 1993, again as oil prices are low, he writes, “Nigeria Privatizes First Oil Field.” 1997, oil prices still low, “Iran Calls for Dialogue of Civilizations.” Then, finally, 2005, a year of high oil prices: “Iran calls for Israel’s destruction.”Take a look for yourself: I looked at this and thought: “Gosh, what a neat trick!” Then I sat down and drew up my own graph, called SIZE OF VALERIE BERTINELLI’S ASS, 1985-2008, vs. HAP- PINESS. It turns out that there is an almost exact correlation! Note the four points on the graph:

http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html

NPR: Zombie Banks Feed Off Bailout Money

This morning on my way to work, I heard a radio story on Zombie Banks. What Chris Arnold had to say immediately rang true to me.

A zombie bank keeps draining bailout capital from the government but doesn't respond with any meaningful lending that helps the economy recover. The prevalence of zombie banks made the long Japanese recession of the 1990s especially painful.

More importantly, what do you do with a zombie? Do you give it money so that it will get well again? No! You shoot it in the fucking face! I am glad that nationally there are finally economists realizing that these gargantuan financial institutions do not need more money. They need a head shot.

IBM shipping jobs abroad (and workers too!)

IBM is now offering laid off employees in the US and Canada jobs in India, Nigeria, and Russia (source). I particularly like this:

Only "satisfactory performers" who are "willing to work on local terms and conditions" should pursue the jobs, the document says. IBM would not immediately confirm if it means that the workers would be paid local wages and would be subject to local labor laws.

Lee Conrad, a spokesman for Alliance@IBM, had the following to say:

IBM not only is offshoring its work to low-cost countries, now IBM wants employees to offshore themselves... At a time of rising unemployment IBM should be looking to keep both the work and the workers in the United States... This is unacceptable to the Alliance and we are pursuing this by asking our members and all IBM employees to contact their political representatives to demand an accounting and transparency in job cuts and offshoring from IBM

Perhaps every worker at every Fortune 500 company should contact their elected officials, as this could happen to any one of them.