Pat Buchanan, a conservative pundit who, unlike many of his peers, is right slightly more often than a stopped clocked, just ranted on MSNBC that the Nobel Peace Prize has become nothing more than political power grab by, and I quote, “Swedish Socialists.” He went on to add that the Swede Commies are spearheading a global domination conspiracy

Read the whole thing… It even gets better than this.

Now granted, in my mind I wanted a roughly 40-50 dollar robot that was solar powered that I could permanently mount in my gutters and it would realize that it should clean the gutters on a regular basis.  So, some sort of autonomous gutter cleaning robot.

But literally 30 minutes later, I received an email from the fine folks at iRobot showing me the Looj.  I have to be honest, I am beginning to wonder if the Roombas are spying on me and reporting home

Based on what you’ve told us so far we’re playing this track because it features a subtle use of vocal harmon, demanding instrumental part writing, extensive vamping, thru composed melodic style and minor key tonality.

Holy crap. I told it *one* song and it figured out exactly what the music I like contains. To a frighteningly accurate point. The people at the music genome project are incredible.

Remember the one about the B-52 bomber that, according to legend, had six nuclear weapons loaded onto it by accident, which, of course, could not have happened—by accident—for a dozen different reasons, or more.

Airman 1st Class Todd Blue was assigned to the unit that provides security for that bomber wing at Minot Air Force base. He died while on leave in Virginia. No further details have been released.

Coincidence?

Natha: Dad, I’m ignorant as to what ignorant means

Me: Huh?

Natha: Ignorance means not knowing something, but I don’t know what ignorant really means, so can I be ignorant about ignorance?

Me: Natha, you just discovered self-referentiality… congratulations, you just stumbled upon one of the greatest math problems of all time.

Natha: Wow, and I’m just seven. I should be ignorant about more things, if I knew what it meant.

Gödel, eat your heart out. There’s a new kid in town, and he’s ready to tackle the halting problem.

Update: Natha just added: “I hope I get a math quiz today!”  Sometimes, I think I’m doing a good job as a dad.

For instance, Bush asserted that “Iraq’s national leaders are getting some things done,” such as “sharing oil revenues with the provinces” and allowing “former Baathists to rejoin Iraq’s military or receive government pensions.”

Yet his statement ignored the fact that U.S. officials have been frustrated that none of those actions have been enshrined into law — and that reports from Baghdad this week indicated that a potential deal on sharing oil revenue is collapsing.

…

Bush also thanked “the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq.” But the State Department’s most recent weekly report on Iraq said there are 25 countries supplying 11,685 troops — about 7 percent of the size of the U.S. forces.

…

The president also painted a relatively favorable picture of Baghdad, saying that a year ago much of it “was under siege” but that today “ordinary life is beginning to return.” He did not mention that much of the once-heterogeneous city has been divided into Shiite and Sunni enclaves.

…

The president also said that groups of “Iranian-backed militants” are “being broken up, and many of their leaders are being captured or killed.” In congressional testimony this week, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker emphasized that Iran poses a looming menace in Iraq.

I probably copied and pasted more than I should have, but this is truly notable.  It is worth reading, and will make anyone who loves freedom and democracy happy.  Once the American media begins fact-checking and doing it’s job again, the US can regain it’s position as a moral and ethical leader in the word.

Why oh why must NFS hang so when I try to mount it?

And then, dmesg to the rescue… some idiot forgot to turn the portmap service on the machine.  *sigh* alas, I am that idiot.

So many leaky abstractions, so little time.

This is one of the best youtube videos that I have seen recently. It effectively captures the truth, in a poignant and painful fashion. We may not want to admit it, but we have done *wrong* things as a country. We are still the best nation on earth… we can still be the moral and ethical guardian of our times, if the American people stand up and say: “this is not what america stands for.”

The International Labour Organization, in a study released today, puts the U.S. at the top of the global charts for productivity last year measured as “value added” per person employed each year: $63,885. The next-closest were Ireland ($55,986) and Luxembourg ($55,641). (The productivity figure is calculated largely by dividing a nation’s gross domestic product by the number of people working.) In a separate measure, value added per hour worked, Norway topped the ILO list ($37.99) followed by the United States ($35.63) and France ($35.08).

This is notable.  Even though the rest of the world is catching up, the US still has an edge.  I have no choice but to wonder however what the “distribution” of worker productivity is?  If we were to graph the worker productivity against “value added” per person, would we see a nice standard normal curve like we could hope?

I have to believe that is not the case.  I think that the US has been eroding away at the middle class long enough that we would begin to see a “double hump” distribution in which we were beginning to resemble Fritz Lang’s Metropolis rather than the land of the free and the home of the brave.  In my personal experience there is a gulf growing between “laborers” and “thinkers” which seems deeper and deeper every year.  I am fortunate to be in the IT industry, and even more fortunate to be employed to do interesting thinking that benefits my employer.  My “value added” quantity would be difficult to gauge, but it would probably be orders of magnitude greater than the standard quantity.  But I am not unique in this, there is a great number of other thought workers in the trenches who do the same, who’se individual contributions are greatly going to pass the $63,000 barrier described above.

Then again, maybe this is simply a mis-perception on my part, and the stratification of worker value add has always existed, and it is simply through my in-situ perception that it seems notable or interesting.  Though I can’t help but feel that the gulf between the brains and the hands is wider and wider than ever.