Piers Morgan Interviews Gun Nut -- Well, Universal Nut -- Alex Jones on His Petition to Deport Piers Morgan

Alex Jones is not just any off-the-shelf/out-of-the-woods flake but is a talk show host with a substantial audience. Should you not want to listen to his bombast as it could cause you to lose several I.Q. points, let me summarize. In the seven minute interview, above, he manages to tie gun control discussion in the U.S. to the Russians, Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chavez, "globalism," the "New World Order," "mega banks" controlling the media, everybody but the Swiss, rape in India, Santa Anna attacking the Alamo, and Prozac and "mass murder pills" that are apparently part of a plot to get people in the U.S. to drug themselves then kill themselves and each other (I did not know this). He informs us that Britain took the guns and is now the crime capital of Europe (there were 37 gun deaths there last year versus 11,000 in the U.S., according to Piers Morgan), and now Britain wants to ban knives. Britain is a "total police state" and "everybody is fleeing it," says Jones. He offers to box Piers Morgan (suggesting Morgan should wear "Jolly Rogers" shorts, evidently believing that to be the symbol of England -- Jones is going to wear the red, white, and blue). “The government buys 1.6 billion bullets, armored vehicles, tanks, helicopters, predator drones, armed now in US skies, being used to arrest people in North Dakota.” "1776 will happen again if you try to take our guns."

Jones seems upset that people are trying to medicate him. Jones needs medication.

It has been suggested that Jones is not a good advocate for gun rights. That is true. There is a nuttiness and extremism he reflects, though, that is widespread, and, while his common travelers are not anything close to a majority of people, they should not be ignored. There's a reason so many buy into the crazy -- I suspect it's a combination of fear and ignorance, though that's speculation -- and whatever it is, it needs to be examined and addressed.

We Just Gotta Get This Out of Our System

We previously posted several times on PSY's Gangnam Style -- and we should probably apologize, but we refuse -- and, anyway, we thought we should show what is expected to be his next big hit, even though he released it two years ago:

"Right Now" was banned from under-19 audiences by South Korea's Ministry of Gender Equality and Family for what it deemed an "obscene" lyric, "Life is like toxic alcohol." Not speaking Korean, I don't understand any of these lyrics.

While we're on it, one of my posts was a mash-up of Gangnam Style and the Ghostbusters Theme -- which was awesome, by the way -- and that was in a tradition of posting excellent musical and video mash-ups. So here's another one: Whole Lotta Helter Skelter. (Look, I have to own up to the fact that I don't really like either the song Whole Lotta Love or Helter Skelter, but that they fit so well together is, to me, somewhat amazing.)

National Geographic Photo Contest Winners ... At Last!

It's three weeks since National Geographic was scheduled to announce their photo contest winners .. and now that it has done so I admit I'm a little disappointed. These aren't bad photos -- they're great photos -- but the judges overlooked a lot from what they had to choose from, in my view. I've covered the entries previously, and I've linked at the end of this post to my collections of what I thought were the best photos of the 22,000 submitted. Ah well ...

Grand Prize and Nature Winner

Mixed Ceramics

I have a large collection of ceramics images I use as reference works, and I thought it might be interesting to share a few of them. This is a small slice; the emphasis here is on thrown (wheel) work, sometimes modified after throwing.

By Dan Isher

Smetana -- Vltava (Die Moldau) from Ma Vlast

This seems a little soft -- you may need to turn it up to start.

The Vltava is a short symphony by Bedřich Smetana named after a river in Czech Republic; it is one of six pieces making up Smetana's cycle Ma Vlast (meaning "my country" in Czech) and is often known by its German name, Die Moldau. It may not seem recognizable at first but by 1:09 on the video you'll know you've heard it. Smetana composed this at or shortly after he went deaf at the age of 51; he never heard it performed. He died in an insane asylum about nine years later. (By the way, I had a hard time weighing a meaningful video versus the quality of the music performance; I went with the music.)

U.S. States Compared in Population with World Urban Areas

I thought it might be interesting to compare 2012 populations (estimated, as listed at Wikipedia) of the largest U.S. States with the populations of the largest urban areas in the world, and I've thrown in a few random countries and the largest Canadian province just for good measure.

Region	Population	Region	Population
California	38,041,430	Mexico City (Valley of Mex.)	19,463,000
Tokyo–Yokohama (Keihin)	37,126,000	Florida	19,317,568
Canada	35,002,447	Cairo	17,816,000
Jakarta (Jabodetabek)	26,063,000	Beijing	17,311,000
Texas	26,059,203	Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto	17,011,000
North Korea	24,589,122	Mumbai (Bombay)	16,910,000
Australia	22,864,478	Guangzhou/Foshan	16,827,000
Seoul–Incheon (Sudogwon)	22,547,000	Netherlands	16,775,273
Delhi	22,242,000	Moscow	15,512,000
Shanghai	20,860,000	Los Angeles	14,900,000
Manila (metro Manila)	20,767,000	Kolkata (Calcutta)	14,374,000
Karachi	20,711,000	Dhaka	14,000,000
New York City (metro)	20,464,000	Buenos Aires	13,639,000
São Paulo	20,186,000	Istanbul	13,576,000
New York	19,570,261	Ontario	13,506,000

You'll note that the New York State population is smaller than the New York City metro area; that's due to the inclusion of Newark, New Jersey, and southern Connecticut area in the metro area. More below the break.

Respighi -- Antiche danze ed arie per liuto, Suite No.3 - III.Siciliana

Advice on Use of Veet for Men

While I rarely go to Amazon for health and beauty advice (but then, how much do I need?), the comments for Veet for Men are quite helpful. For example, Andrew says:

DO NOT PUT ON KNOB AND BOLLOCKS

Being a loose cannon who does not play by the rules the first thing I did was ignore the warning and smear this all over my knob and bollocks. The bollocks I knew and loved are gone now. In their place is a maroon coloured bag of agony which sends stabs of pain up my body every time it grazes against my thigh or an article of clothing. I am suffering so that you don't have to. Heed my lesson. DO NOT PUT ON KNOB AND BOLLOCKS.

(I am giving this product a 5 because despite the fact that I think my bollocks might fall off, they are now completely hairless.)

There are 602 other reviews (as of the time of this post), all offering similar good advice, and a little poetry. I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that none of them strongly urge you not to put it on the shelf next to the jock itch cream. Also, don't substitute your boss's jock itch cream with Veet if you should happen to run into him at the gym, hypothetically, of course.

Clouds

It's worth clicking through to see the rest of them. Inspired in part by My Modern Met.

Somethin' in Me Teeth

Via Nothing to Do with Arborath:

This is not a cat.

Dick Morris, Asshat (and Our Newest Guest on the Island of Idiots!)

That's a pretty crude title, but he really is a fat obnoxious shitheel. I'm keeping my feelings in here.

Morris, a tax cheat and patron of prostitution, is a darling of extremist conservatives for saying things he should know are untrue, and getting things so wrong so often that an award "for stunningly wrong political, social and cultural predictions" is named after him by Andrew Sullivan. A brief history of Morris's inane prognostications is given at The Guardian -- it's worth seeing, really it's phenomenal. But doing so helps him generate publicity for his salacious books and to generate income in his role with Newsmax, a hyper-conservative "news" site that sells financial products.  According to Media Matters Morris has a long history of fabricating smears of progressives, and Media Matters backs this up with a long list of documented instances.

Maker's Special: How to Handle Electrostatic Discharge

Found at Neatorama.

The Sins of Isaac Newton

Listed sins in the Fitzwilliam Notebook; note
the numbering of each one

Via Mental Floss and Neatorama comes a bit from the notebooks of Isaac Newton from when he was 19 years old in 1662, 350 years ago. (This, particularly, is the Fitzwilliam Notebook, which can be found at The Newton Project, a neat site that has images and texts from many other of his other notebooks.) A selection of his confessions:

      * * *
Putting a pin in John Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.

Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons

Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command.

Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them

Wishing death and hoping it to some

Techniques of the Master Painter

Reference photo. All images from Gurney Journey, though
some originated in this article.

Blobby Photoshop "artist filter" adaptation

Master painting

James Gurney, author/artist behind the book series Dinotopia, who, among other things is an excellent plein air painter and very knowledgeable about technique, has a really interesting post about "image parsing" at his main blog, Gurney Journey. The thrust of the post is that:

Machines like Vangobot may develop the hand skills to manipulate the brushes and paints, but will they ever have artistic judgment? Is it possible for a computer to be programmed to see and interpret the world in the same way that an experienced painter does?

These are qualities of the "eye" or "mind" or even the "soul" more than the "hand." Blog reader M.P. invoked a quote from nineteenth century drawing instructor James Duffield Harding who characterized the great artist as having an instinct for "selection, arrangement, sentiment, and beauty" rather than just replicating reality.

      * * *
Note the difference in this master painter's interpretation. The details in the faces are accurately drawn, but rougher brushes are used for the foliage. The drapery is painted efficiently with big slashing strokes. The sky is painted loosely with spots of light. The sidewalk tiles are in perspective, but they're just suggested with thin dashing strokes. The colors are warmed up and intensified.

For a computer to do this, it would have to understand what it was looking at, and have an instinct to do all these subjective interpretations. It would need to be able to handle a lot of brushes in a variety of ways depending on what forms it was painting.

He's toying with us.

Median Household Income by Census Tract

Rich Blocks, Poor Blocks is a website that allows users to see the median household income by census tract throughout the United States. This is really cool. A similar -- in fact, more comprehensive -- set of maps can be found at The New York Times, which allow the users not only to search by median income, but by race & ethnicity, home value, and education, and various subgroups of those.

Negative Absolute Temperatures (!)

A "negative absolute temperature" is a temperature below 0° Kelvin. Zero degrees Kelvin is known as "absolute zero" for a reason. We have laws, people.

Well, anyway, now some highfalutin German physicists have gone and published a paper titled Negative Absolute Temperature for Motional Degrees of Freedom reporting that they have "created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time," according to Nature.

Schneider and his colleagues reached such sub-absolute-zero temperatures with an ultracold quantum gas made up of potassium atoms. Using lasers and magnetic fields, they kept the individual atoms in a lattice arrangement. At positive temperatures, the atoms repel, making the configuration stable. The team then quickly adjusted the magnetic fields, causing the atoms to attract rather than repel each other. “This suddenly shifts the atoms from their most stable, lowest-energy state to the highest possible energy state, before they can react,” says Schneider.

Well, I never.

What's next? Travel back in time?

I did use to have a math teacher who moved so slowly that I theorized that any substantial increase in slowness would require time to become negative. Yet, if one views temperature as the extent of vibration of a particle, then "negative absolute temperature" could be viewed as reversing time ... yes? Well, let's think that through ...

I have to admit I am a skeptic about the time thing, but then there is this thing with flipable interactions in Feynman diagrams where time is supposedly reversed -- supposedly for antimatter, though Richard Feynman, with his mentor at Princeton, John Wheeler, thought of that as one way of approaching quantum dynamics.

Sports Illustrated's 100 greatest Sports Photos

Sports Illustrated has what it purports to be the 100 greatest sports photos of all time -- of course, it's U.S. centric (since, evidently, the greatest sports photos are about the U.S.), but it's a great review, anyway. No photos from the swimsuit edition made the cut (I carefully looked). Via Kottke.

The Deep End by Jake Fried -- When Art is Not Beautiful

The Deep End from Jake Fried on Vimeo, via Colossal.

Ceramics by Kate MacDowell

Kate MacDowell is a ceramicist who handbuilds in porcelain -- as someone who works in clay (although I primarily throw), I can tell you how hard this is. Her great craft to the side, however, what matters most is her vision, and, for that, the work speaks for itself ... a few images:

An Incredible Fact: The Deadliest Fire in U.S. History Happened the Same Day as the Great Chicago Fire but was in Wisconsin

Image from a mural at the Peshtigo Fire Museum

October 8, 1871, was an incredibly bad day for disasters in U.S. History. In Chicago the Great Chicago Fire began and over two days burned through the center of the city up to the northside. It ended at Lake Michigan and killed several hundred, rendering homeless a hundred thousand, and destroying about 1/3 of the property, by value, in the City. Although the fire did begin, as in legend, at the O'Leary's barn, the actual cause is unknown. The O'Leary's house, south of their barn, was unscathed.

In Wisconsin that same day another fire broke out in the forest north of Green Bay. (N.B. Green Bay is about 210 miles (c. 335 km) due north of Chicago -- this was a completely separate fire.) There had been a drought that summer with only a few inches of rain (this also affected Chicago), and there were very strong winds blowing out of the southwest towards the northeast (again, same in Chicago). This led to the formation of a massive wall of flame which rapidly moved northeast scorching the forest killing hundreds and 900 to 2000 (estimates vary) as it blew through the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and surrounding villages until exhausting itself at an inlet of Lake Michigan.

"The Billionaire Shop"

People often say to me, they say, "Galileo, where do you shop?" (Actually, no one has said that to me, ever, but just bear with me, okay?) Well, if I had one place I could choose to regularly shop, it would be The Billionaire Shop. Oh, yes, you might say, "The Billionaire Shop is just a cynical attempt by an online casino to draw traffic and drive desire for the supposed 'easy money' that comes from gambling." And, well, you'd be right. But, still, I applaud its hubris; indeed, it pretty much defines hubris. Via Neatorama.

How We Know the Earth is a Sphere

And after these things I saw four angels standing on the fourcorners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.

Revelation 7:1-3

Yes, yes, it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but still it is valuable to consider how we know things:

I would add we know the Earth is not flat for many other obvious reasons, like, if it were flat gravity would be markedly greater in its center, tidal forces would tear the Earth apart, meteorites or comets could make holes the Earth (depending on how thick the Earth was and how large the meteorite or comet), seismological tests would not make any sense (since they disprove the flat Earth), plate tectonics would not make much sense, satellites would not orbit the Earth in the manner they do ... we could just go on and on.

Apollo Robbins is an Incredible Pick Pocket

Videos and a related story from The New Yorker (a great long form read) have been going around about Apollo Robbins and his skill with slight of hand and picking pockets, and I was reluctant to post on them because, c'mon, picking pockets? But really, this is incredible (be patient -- there's an intro):

The Best Saturday Night Live Skits of 2012

Okay, there's only one:

Well, I admit, this was pretty good too.

2012: Best-of Lists

I promised to post 2012 best of/wrap-up lists before the end of 2012, which just goes to show you how good my promises are. Well, I am finally doing it, below the break, but let me note, first, that Miss Cellania has a bunch of really good collections of lists from around the internet -- you know, if you really needed these you could have gone there:

• Music wrap-up lists
• Books wrap-up lists
• Movie year end lists
• Sports wrap-up lists
• TV wrap-up lists
• Science wrap-up lists
• Advertising wrap-up lists
• Tech and games wrap-up lists
• People oriented wrap-up lists
• Internet news/events/video wrap-up lists
• Photograph best-of lists
• Blog wrap-up lists
• News wrap-up lists
• Miscellaneous wrap-up lists 

That's a lot to go through (as if one really needs to go through every best-of list), so here's the best ones, in my view (as if one really needs to go through any best-of lists):

2012: A 4 Minute Video Wrap-up (U.S. Focused)

A YouTube video by Ryan James Yezak

The Blogosphere Having Been Duly Collected, Be It Now Resolved ...

Whereas it is traditional on New Years Day of the Gregorian calendar to make and announce sober resolutions of commitment to future good attitude, thought, and deed; and

Whereas today is indeed New Years Day as so marked upon the Gregorian calendar; and

Whereas if anyone needs to resolve to better conduct it could be the staff of this Blog;

Now, therefore, Be It Resolved as follows: 

1. This blog shall in the future avoid referring to Republicans, Libertarians, Ayn Randian "objectivists," and/or the "Tea Party," or their ilk, as dimwits, boobs, morons, boneheads, or idiots; nor shall this blog imply that they are such; nor shall this Blog do other things bringing disrepute upon the mentally challenged;
2. Galileo Feynman shall not eat chili to excess on New Years Eve, particularly as he is allergic to beans (true fact);
3. When at meals Galileo Feynman shall not make offensive sounds, when avoidable, that could lead his children to rue their lineage or question his maturity;
4. This blog shall not promise to post things and then forget to post them, busy, busy, busy, though It may be, such as year end lists, just speaking hypothetically, of course;
5. This blog shall not post photos of cats no matter how cute, silly, absurd, or human-like said cats appear, and we will have a stern talking to with Leonardo Sagan if he attempts to post photos of cats, including his own cats;
6. Sigmund Kirchner shall not in the future claim to have discovered things without first doing the math (or at least some sort of experiments);
7. We shall not in the future order from the Lord of the Rings specialty menu at Dennys Restaurants, even under threat of torture;
8. Albert Newton shall stop calling Marie Fermat the cutest little poster ever or referring to her as having "substantial bloggers" no matter how innocent he claims that is;
9. Marie shall stop punching Albert repeatedly in the eye; and
10. We shall attempt to post three to five times a day with the vast reserve of quality material we have to post, unless we feel like posting more or less or get some other wild weird ass hair brained idea.

So Be It, this 1st day of January 2013.

The Concentration of Wealth and Power in China

Recently Bloomberg News has published several articles with interactive graphics discussing how some decedents of leading figures from the China's communist revolution have amassed incredible wealth, potentially through their family names and connections. It's a story that has been told in part elsewhere -- the New York Times, for example, published an article with its own interactive graphics on the wealthy relations of Wen Jiabao (温家宝) -- China's Premier of the State Council ("head of government" and leading the cabinet, compare Xi Jinping (习近平) who is the effective leader of China). I thought it might be interesting to combine some of the key graphics from some of the articles.

A couple of brief introductory notes: Bloomberg uses the phrase "eight immortals" to refer to the elders, but that's sarcastic -- the "eight immortals" were legendary apocryphal figures in Chinese history, sort of superheros who went around solving problems, and whose images, when solitary are sometimes confused with buddhas'. In addition, several of the elders and some of their descendants appear very unhappy with profiteering by their families or spouses. Below are just static images; the articles (linked above) are worth clicking through to; there's a lot I've left out, like, for instance, the entire interactive part.

Winston Churchill, "Class Act"

All people are complex, capable of great wrongs and great rights, products of their cultures, victims and victimizers from ignorance, lack of understanding, and happenstance; we are vessels for creation and destruction. For these reasons hagiography is rarely accurate, this blog's name notwithstanding. Thomas Jefferson was a vindictive slaveholder; Mahatma Gandhi not only abused his wife but was a time-to-time racist (he referred to blacks as "uncivilized races," suggested black Africans are lazy, and actively supported the British military campaign against the Zulu, among other things); Albert Einstein essentially abandoned his natural children and was a notorious womanizer (his second wife was his cousin -- he still had many affairs after than marriage -- but he married her only after her daughter turned him down); Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had numerous affairs and plagiarized a large part of his doctoral dissertation. These people also were great leaders and thinkers. Gandhi, for example, for all his foibles still fought for woman's rights and human equality and ultimately became an icon to Steven Biko and Nelson Mandela in South Africa, not to mention King.

Which brings me to Winston Churchill.

It's 2013

Well, this is god damned annoying.

Via Boing Boing