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Mitt Romney is creepy. Seriously. Like if I had kids I wouldn’t let them within a hundred feet of his house unsurpervised creepy.
After Barack Obama made comments about entering Pakistan to find Al Queada Romney mocked him because Pakaistan is our ally (apparently). Says Mitt:
“He’s gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week,” said Romney,
This was followed by rousing sound waves of Republican chuckles.
Let me just say something. I’m pretty sure everyone knows Pakistan is our ally in name only. That’s not offensive and most people know Romney was aiming for cheap political shots. What bothers me is this - Dr. Strangelove is my favorite movie of all time and if Romeny had actually watched it he would have realized it was NOT Dr. Strangelove who ordered the Plan R attack on Russia (who was also actually not our ally). It was Genereal JACK D. RIPPER. Strangelove was the one talking about the underground civilization where the survivors were able to sleep with many women. Romeny knows less about film than he does about foreign affairs and his analogies are as lame as his gray hair tips. Thank you.
Venture Beat has some hilarious news from the Amp’d Mobile fire sale…
Amp’d Mobile, the mobile entertainment company that burned through $350 million in venture backing before imploding and auctioning off its assets last week, continues to baffle.
As mentioned, the chief executive flew around a black helicopter on company expense, and radically relaxed credit check requirements on customers to boost subscribers.
Now, looking at the company’s list of assets for sale (pdf), we find the company spent its financing on things like 50” plasma displays of four pages worth of porno DVD titles (see pages 7 through 10).
We’re still wondering how venture investors such as Redpoint (which lost $25 million in this) and Highland (which lost $50 million) could have let this happen.
Besides burning through $350 million, Ampd Mobile owes an additional $100M to carries such as Verizon.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I really don’t think this lunatic should be charged with murder because Channel 3 and Channel 15 crashed their helicopters into each other during their frenzied attempts to exploit him for ratings.
And even in the other examples they give in this article, none of those people should have been charged with murder either. It’s very dangerous to start expanding the scope of things so much so that people who were in different states at the time can be held responsible for the actions of other people. If you didn’t help plan or execute the murder, you shouldn’t be charged with it.
From the East Valley Tribune…
Legal experts said Saturday that homicide charges in the deaths of four news crewmen killed in a midair helicopter collision would be hard to prove.
Nonetheless, police officials intend to push the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office to file homicide charges against Christopher Jones, 23, who is accused of leading the police chase that the television news crews were following when their helicopters crashed.
Jones was booked Saturday on four counts of aggravated assault, two counts of vehicle theft and resisting arrest. No other charges were filed, but under Arizona law he could face homicide charges if prosecutors can show that his actions directly led to the crash that killed the four newsmen.
“This is going to be a tough one,” said former Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley. “If it were up to me, I would do everything in my power, but this is going to be very hard to prove.”
Romley, who served as county attorney from 1989 to 2004, said he can’t remember any similar cases that could serve as a legal guide. The closest, he said, involved two men convicted in the 1999 shooting death of a Chandler police officer even though they did not pull the trigger.
In that case, Arthur Lucero, Leroy Campbell and Sergio Martinez had robbed a jewelry store in Tempe and led police on a chase to a Chandler apartment complex. After ditching the getaway car, police discovered one of the robbers hiding in an apartment.
When officers charged in, there was a gunfight that left Martinez and Chandler police officer James Snedigar dead. Lucero and Campbell were not inside the apartment at the time, but both were found guilty of murdering the officer and their accomplice.
The Arizona Court of Appeals upheld the conviction.
In an ongoing case, a Phoenix woman faces murder charges in a 2004 robbery attempt at a Mesa check-cashing store following the death of her accomplice. The accomplice was shot and killed by the store’s clerk, who also shot Rhonda Wright multiple times.
Prosecutors reasoned that the clerk would not have pulled his weapon if the assailants had not entered his store.
I understand where these eggheads are coming from, but I actually like it more when teams can “sneak” up there and compete at the top level. If the Yankees were so much better, they should have showed up and played that way. They had a chance and it didn’t happen. End of story.
Seeing how far an underdog can go is half the fun of the game.
From USA Today…
Amid a bleak season for New York Yankees fans, science offers some solace — the wrong team, the Florida Marlins, beat them in 2003’s World Series, finds a study.
You may wonder, along with Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, how this injustice could occur?
“The world of sports provides an ideal laboratory for modeling competition because game data are accurate, abundant, and accessible,” answers the study in the journal Physical Review E. “Even after a long series of competitions, the best team does not always finish first.”
The problem, say study authors Eli Ben-Naim and Nick Hengartner of the Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory, is that the baseball season, at a mere 162 games, is too short. Instead, the number of games that would keep a lucky-but-lousy team from dethroning a statistically superior team is 265.
“Baseball actually isn’t doing too bad a job compared to other leagues,” says Ben-Naim, a statistical physicist. “Probably the worst is the National Football League with only 16 games in a season.”
Capone has the review and apprently it is not about the landscapes of America. Read this blurb
Early in the film, he introduces us to one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. She’s tall and leggy (I’d guess she’s near or at six-feet tall, with flawless features, a runway strut that will make your head spin, subtle curves in all the right places, and a devastating smile. It is only after all the straight men and gay women in the audience have fallen in love with supermodel-in-the-making Gerren Taylor that Roberts reveals that she’s all of 12 years old. Creep…Vibe…Setting…In–So…Very…Awkward.
If you use Photoshop regularly, you probably see this guy’s (rather unusual) name on the splash screen when it starts up. There it is, plain as day - long, rhythmatic and addictive.
Apparently, a lot of people notice it - so many that he has an online fan club. IronicSans sat down with him back in September, 2006 to get it straight from the source.
In an HCCI engine, fuel and air are mixed together and injected into the cylinder. The piston compresses the mixture until spontaneous combustion occurs. The engine thus combines fuel-and-air premixing (as in an SI engine) with spontaneous ignition (as in a diesel engine). The result is the HCCI’s distinctive feature: combustion occurs simultaneously at many locations throughout the combustion chamber.
That behavior has advantages. In both SI and diesel engines, the fuel must burn hot to ensure that the flame spreads rapidly through the combustion chamber before a new “charge” enters. In an HCCI engine, there is no need for a quickly spreading flame because combustion occurs throughout the combustion chamber. As a result, combustion temperatures can be lower, so emissions of nitrogen pollutants are negligible. The fuel is spread in low concentrations throughout the cylinder, so the soot emissions from fuel-rich regions in diesels are not present.
Perhaps most important, the HCCI engine is not locked into having just enough air to burn the available fuel, as is the SI engine. When the fuel coming into an SI engine is reduced to cut power, the incoming air must also be constrained-a major source of wasted energy.
I wonder if this will make regular cars sound like a diesel when it gets into its HCCI range? That’ll be cool. I want one! 
If you thought carboard dumplings, fish soaked in pools of bacteria and antibiotics, and poisioned pet food were the worst things China could export… think again. It seems that the Chinese (and other rapidly developing Asian nations) are largely responsible for the pollution that hovers over cities like L.A. and San Francisco.
The story was in today’s Wall Street Journal…
One tainted export from China can’t be avoided in North America — air.
An outpouring of dust layered with man-made sulfates, smog, industrial fumes, carbon grit and nitrates is crossing the Pacific Ocean on prevailing winds from booming Asian economies in plumes so vast they alter the climate. These rivers of polluted air can be wider than the Amazon and deeper than the Grand Canyon.
“There are times when it covers the entire Pacific Ocean basin like a ribbon bent back and forth,” said atmospheric physicist V. Ramanathan at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.
On some days, almost a third of the air over Los Angeles and San Francisco can be traced directly to Asia. With it comes up to three-quarters of the black carbon particulate pollution that reaches the West Coast, Dr. Ramanathan and his colleagues recently reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
This transcontinental pollution is part of a growing global traffic in dust and aerosol particles made worse by drought and deforestation, said Steven Cliff, who studies the problem at the University of California at Davis.
Aerosols — airborne microscopic particles — are produced naturally every time a breeze catches sea salt from ocean spray, or a volcano erupts, or a forest burns, or a windstorm kicks up dust, for example. They also are released in exhaust fumes, factory vapors and coal-fired power plant emissions.
Over the Pacific itself, the plumes are seeding ocean clouds and spawning fiercer thunderstorms, researchers at Texas A&M University reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March.
The influence of these plumes on climate is complex because they can have both a cooling and a warming effect, the scientists said. Scientists are convinced these plumes contain so many cooling sulfate particles that they may be masking half of the effect of global warming. The plumes may block more than 10% of the sunlight over the Pacific.
But while the sulfates they carry lower temperatures by reflecting sunlight, the soot they contain absorbs solar heat, thus warming the planet.
Asia is the world’s largest source of aerosols, man-made and natural. Every spring and summer, storms whip up silt from the Gobi desert of Mongolia and the hardpan of the Taklamakan desert of western China, where, for centuries, dust has shaped a way of life. From the dunes of Dunhuang, where vendors hawk gauze face masks alongside braided leather camel whips, to the oasis of Kashgar at the feet of the Tian Shan Mountains 1,500 miles to the west, there is no escaping it.
Sprint/Nextel and Clearwire - 2 1/2 companies known for having masochistically bad reception - are getting together to roll out a nationwide WiMax network for cell phones. With the combined bad reception of Sprint, the awful reception of Clearwire and their incredibly fragile (lately, frangible) modems, I’ll have…a phone that reliably gets NO signal and breaks apart on impact. But hey, at least it’ll be a smaller package.
Can you tell I’m a little peeved at the both of them?
Sprint Nextel is partnering with Clearwire, a broadband technology company, to build a nationwide WiMax network for cell phones, both companies announced Thursday.
WiMax is a wireless technology that offers high rates of data transfer and a long transmission reach.
The Sprint Nextel and Clearwire mobile WiMax network is set to have speeds comparable to wireline broadband, the type of Internet connectivity commonly accessed by cable lines. Users will be able to use the network for wireless activities such as downloading media files for full-length movies and conducting video conferences.
Pending government approval, the deal is expected to be finalized within 60 days.
But this could be pretty cool if it somehow, by a divine miracle, happens to work even somewhat correctly.
