Tuesday: It rained today.

• Bunny.
• Cat.
• This again argues that eventually we'll need a guaranteed minimum wage.
• This should not be legal.  Obtaining a contract to force a captive population to pay you money to have access to their own funds is reprehensible.  I don't care what they did to end up in jail.

Monday: Whatever, I'm tired.

So here's the one link for the day.

• Dog.

Sunday: I wasn't super impressed with this burger.

First of all, they just dumped like half an onion on top.  "Fried onion strings" does not equal "half an onion.  They also have problems with "medium."  It came out too cool.

I also don't understand people who walk slowly, and then stop in the least useful places possible.  I was on the elevator down to WF this evening, and the girl who didn't think shoes were necessary and her friend (who did at least have sandals on) stepped out into the store, and then stopped.  Remember zero seconds ago when we were all on the fucking elevator together?  Did you think I was just riding it up and down without any intention of going shopping?

Also, if you're wearing your baby on your stomach, you probably don't need to bring the stroller that is larger than a damn shopping cart.


Then I came home, watched a Simpson's episode that was sufficiently bland that I sat down and reimplemented the thing I did for the Supreme Court for a generic data file.  Feeding the main voice actor cast for the Simpson's into it (and quantizing on years because working out partial years would have taken more time than I wanted to spend.

Individually.

Summed.

Based on this, The Simpson's is unlikely to lose any of the main cast until 2020 at the earliest.  Assuming they keep going after that, they can continue for about another twenty years before they lose half of the cast.  However, Harry Shearer is that first line, and he voices about a third of all characters on the show.  That would probably be hard to recover from.

• So this guy is pretty much a horrible person.
• Bunny.
• Joe Biden.
• This is a brilliant pun, but it requires knowledge of Gundam Wing.

Saturday: I did go get some groceries today, so I technically did something.

I also got ramen, and that's where I saw this.

Risu is Japanese for squirrel.

Apparently there's a whole range of products made by this company.  I enjoy the idea that there's a far off land of Noble Squirrels, who have a detailed hierarchy of Squirrel Counts and Squirrel Barons, but each day, they all go off and craft the finest housewares out of plastic.

• I had never heard of Prevost's squirrels until I saw them on a youtube video last night.
• Look at them.
• "Beautiful squirrels."
• Another blog.
• I'm sorry, but I disagree with you, IUCN Red List.  I believe "least concern" is just rude.  I now have "most concern."
• Kansas is going to be selling sex toys.
• You're a jerk, dog.

Friday: Record companies are stupid.

I was going to put another "here's a youtube video of this song that I keep hearing on the j-pop station" here, but I can't, because the only video I can find is this one:

Which is a karaoke version of the video, so it misses the really interesting vocal line.  It shifts between calm one-e-and-ah-two-e-and-ah three (four) and this really complicated fast line that comes out staccato as she crams all the words in to fit.  It's really nicely done.

However, there's no way for me to actually buy it quickly.  Amazon US only has the CD from their resellers, and Amazon JP offers an mp3, but despite having the same name, the US account isn't the same as the JP account.  Basically, even though I heard the song on the radio here, mp3 licencing doesn't let anyone sell it.  That's stupid.  So I can hear it, look for it, fail to find it in the stores, and then look elsewhere.  The end result is the same, but because of stupid licencing issues, the music companies have lost out on a sale.

• I liked this pun.
• It's worth clicking through to the media files to see how much this mine damaged the environment.
• Huh.  That's interesting.
• Again, yes.  Taxes on rich people should be increased to counter this trend.  They won't, because people (like, for instance, the Republicans in Congress) are assholes.

Thursday: You're a jerk, dog.

A real jerk.

• Remember that thing I posted before about tuition increases vs state funding of schools?  "It requires the state Legislature to allocate enough funds to pick up rising utility costs and other operating expenses that were going to be paid for by the larger tuition increase."  This is exactly the point.  It costs X to fund things.  There are two sources of money.  Therefore, decreasing one forces the other to increase.
• Rainicorn-cake.
• Their bullet points sum up the facts.
• Birds are jerks too.
• Pizza.
• Wrath Hover Ginsbot will not retire anytime soon.  Good.
• I also want to point out that I have the top google image search for Wrath Hover Ginsbot.

Wednesday: What are you doing, David Tennant?

I saw a commercial that had Peter Carlisle on it, and it listed him as "prosecuting attorney."  My thought?  "Wasn't he mayor?"

Yes he was.

But when I googled him, there's David Tennant, being all, "did you mean me?  I played a character with that name once."  No, David Tennant.  I did not.  Stop stealing the identities of real people.

• This is horrible.
• Paul Ryan is a lying bag of shit.
• Chansey.

Tuesday: Blah

I understand, cat.  I understand.

I don't remember what I was going to put here.  Some math thing, if I remember correctly.  Instead I'm going to tell you about the guy I nearly ran over last week.

I'm going to claim it's his fault.  I was driving down the road, and I see a guy standing in one of the cross streets.  Well, not standing.  "Sweeping."  He had a broom, and he was sweeping the street.  The public street.  That usually take care of themselves.  He was diligently sweeping, and kept backing up, towards the street I was on.  I swerved out of the way, as he continued sweeping into my street.

I'm in a car.  Cars are not known for being sneaky.  Therefore, this asshole heard me coming, and was like, "meh, whatever," and kept sweeping the street clean.

"Oh, maybe he was trying to keep the storm drain clear!"  No.  He was sweeping into the storm drain, and besides, the cross street steeply rises up the hill.  This guy wasn't trying to prevent flooding.  He was trying to kill himself in the dumbest way possible.

• I apparently pinned the story from CrazyTown news, but Dinesh D’Souza kind of got off with a light sentence for intentionally breaking campaign finance laws.  The super lax campaign finance laws that you can get around without much trouble most of the time.  He's kind of a dumbass.
• Two points from this link: Apple basically thrives off the inability of most tech reporters to realize that they've stopped innovating.  Second point:  Is that really the new iphone design?  They said, "we need two tiny holes and one long hole for sound, and we want them all up here," and no one sat down and drew a :| smiley?  They went with "maybe kind of a bird, sort of, if you imagine a lower beak line?"  Fucking christ, apple.  Get with the faces-in-things program.
• Or, I guess, with the "people probably don't want phones that bend" program.  When I was looking at tablets, I spent a lot of time at Bestbuy trying to flex them.  That is an important feature.
• Ash Ketchum.  Wizard.
• That's not how you leopard, leopard.
• Usually I make fun of the 50s, but this looks yummy.

Monday: My new office has a whistle in the A/C vent.

It's annoying, but it's not a permanent thing.  It fades in and out.  Like I said, annoying.

I've heard this song like three times in the past week or so.  It is a good song.  It's odd though, that using the "add video from youtube" blogger search for "half the world cargo" doesn't actually find the song, even though google and youtube searches do.  Search is like the thing you do, google.  How did you fuck this up?

• Animal food.
• Animal trying food.
• Raichu cycle.
• Velma.

Sunday: So I went and got curry.

This was a much better option than the cheese I got last time.  "Fresh mixed mushrooms" means they throw a pile of mushrooms into the curry as it's cooking, so you get something in the sauce.  Yummy.

• This is super long to read, but I think it's a good take on the conservative movement.
• Minimum wage.
• I like how no matter what, Misty and Jesse still have to change into nurse uniforms before they can help.  That's time that I'm sure Weepinbell and Voltorb were happy with waiting.
• Lizard date.
• Dogs.

Saturday: I should probably try to do something tomorrow.

Fine, this picture.  I'll use you because I don't have anything better.

• "[...] but authorities told her no crime had been committed."  That's right.  It's not against the law for people to disagree with you.  It's also not a crime to be asked to be on a panel asking why you support your stupid team name, and then have that panel forced to confront people who don't like that name.  "Ohs noes! I actually have to see people in person that disagree with me!   Call the cops!"  Jackass.
• And another reminder that Republicans are pretty much wrong on everything, and fundamentally don't care about anyone.
• I think at this point, CNN should probably just close up shop.  When you stop having any editors reviewing things, it's time to stop pretending you're informing anyone.
• The sun.

Friday: My new office has a bird.

It's on the outside, so it's not just somebody's left behind decoration.  I assume it's there because birds are stupid, so you have to show them where windows are so they don't crash into them.

And I decided to only post the not-horrible links today.

• Ice King.
• Red Panda.
• Boot Bunny.

Thursday: New office day!

Of course, I didn't take a picture of it or anything.  That would have made sense.  I also need to figure out what you put in an office.  I have a desk, a filing cabinet, a bookshelf, and a trashcan.  This fills about 25% of the space.  Fridge?  A second chair in case someone stops by?  I'd kind of like a tiny table that I could use to work on my laptop if I ever had to do that for some reason.  I also need to put up something that isn't "bland white walls."

Something like this, but less "god-y."

• So I think this is a good thing.  Here's why:  someone who studies economics thinks it would have been bad for Scotland.  Second reason: losing Scotland would probably force the rest of England to be run by the Tories all the time.  They're basically jerks, so that'd be a bad thing.
• Pizza.
• Surely there are polling results from long ago.  It seems like empirically determining the outlier distribution would be a better way to handle things.  Or at least confirm that the t with 2 degrees of freedom is a satisfactory model.
• Yes, but also no.  First up, anytime there's a "H/T" to the American Enterprise Institute, it's best to be on the look out for how you're being lied to.  The BLS link relies on java, and fuck you BLS, we don't need java to plot data.  I have a suspicion that the numbers listed in this plot are not inflation adjusted, and since "journalists" suck at everything now-a-days, I can't find any information on what kind of dollars they're using.  Looking at figure 3 (page 18) of this report compiled by Sheeo (no, google, I did not mean sheep), the cost of college per unit of education (their FTE) is roughly constant in inflation adjusted 2013 dollars at $12000.  My inflation calculator suggests that if the "annoying gif graph" is using unadjusted dollars, then that's 200% of the increase right there.  Looking further at Sheeo's figure 3, the "tuition" portion has increased by another 200% or so, which to within the handwavy numbers I'm using, matches the gif graph.  Great, so it all checks out, so there's the yes.  The "no" part is that if the tuition portion is increasing, yet the cost per unit is constant, the other part must be decreasing.  That's "educational appropriations."  The portion of the unit cost that's paid by the government as part of the taxation and disbursement of funds.  Tuition is not increasing because colleges are building fancy new dorms and hiring too many people who teach some dumb class no one needs.  Tuition is increasing because colleges have to make up the money that's been stolen by tax cutting assholes.
• James.

Wednesday: New office tomorrow. For realsies, this time.

I hate you, the 50s.

• Pandas.
• Cool.  Although I'm not a big loco moco fan.  And it looks like you have to call the farm ahead of time if you want to buy rabbit.
• This is going to be terrible.  Why?

First, some background: after reading Season of Mists, I picked up the first volume of Lucifer.  Although there are bits that I didn't like that much, as a whole, it is probably one of the best comics ever.  Need a reason why?

Mona Doyle, murdered friend of Elaine Belloc, daughter of Michael: "How about -- hedgehogs?  They're small and they get run over a lot.  Someone should look out for them."

Lucifer: "Very well. You are the tutelary spirits of this world. Though none will name or bless you, even in their thoughts. Mona Doyle, I set you over hedgehogs. Elaine Belloc, I set you over everything except hedgehogs. Keep the noise down to a reasonable level. And in case you should be tempted to look over my shoulder -- don't."

That is one of my favorite lines ever.  In any case, Lucifer tells a brilliant story with detailed characters who have actual personalities, and I can't imagine a TV show is going to accurately portray it.  It's simply not going to have the budget necessary for things to not look like they're TV-grade computer graphics.  I also don't believe that they're going to be able to pass all the stories through without people freaking out.  Changing the stories to make people more comfortable with them would ruin things

For example: they can't do the Season of Mists story.  That's almost certainly part of the Sandman package.  So they just have to allude to what happened, so he ends up in LA.  But Lucifer spends like zero time at Lux during the story.  The very first story has him leaving to go on the mission that grants him the one thing he needs to launch the entire rest of the storyline, which in turn plays out mostly in Hell, various other similar locations, and then completely different universes.  Are they going to explain who everyone is?  I'm reasonably sure 99% of the TV watching public have no clue who Bergelmir, Susanoo-no-Mikoto, or frankly, even something easy like Fenris are.

So I suspect they'll make the pilot, it'll be weird, and they'll not get picked up.  The only good thing I can see coming from this is that hopefully Mike Carey will get a decent amount of money out of the whole thing.

Tuesday: My office is weird and echoy now.

In preparation for moving offices, all the other stuff in my old office was moved out today.  I think this means I'm probably moving to the new office tomorrow.

Dogs shouldn't be allowed to use tanks.  It's just a bad idea.

• For fuck's sake.
• Wikileaks decided to weigh in on the "gamer gate" thing.  They are really doing a bang-up job on ruining any goodwill they may still have.
• I mean, fucking Cracked has a better actual story about this.  To quote: '"Gentlemen," we said amid the stunned silence, "do you realize that if what they're saying is true, then this is still the most pointless fucking bullshit anyone has ever forced us to read?"'
• Animals.
• Bunny.
• Bunny.
• Four bunnies.
• Two squirrels.
• Pokemon.

Monday: All the links today seem to have stories.

This dog is pissed.

• Except this one, I guess.  This is just TSA being stupid.  Even if you were given an order to search a guy who's already finished his flight, can't you point out that that's stupid?
• I guess they're re-releasing the SuperDictionary.  I have a copy of the original, because when it first appeared as a meme (July 3, 2006, according to my Amazon history), I immediately bought it.  This was a good idea, as it's now twice as expensive as when I bought.
• It would be a shame to stop watching a show because the creators decided to be dicks.
• I saw this character in an image today, and was reminded of an idea I had in the back of my head, and went to wikipedia to check.  "[...] the characters were originally planned to be female, but were changed to "newhalfs" (a Japanese term for transsexual or transgendered individuals)[8] due to the suggestion that "hitting women was considered rude" in America and the concern that feminist groups would sue."  What?  Dear Japan, I have a suspicion that you maybe didn't know how America worked in the 1980s.
• So this was the big tech story today.  Fun fact: I've been watching these guys play Minecraft for close to two years now, and so this weekend I finally decided that $7 was a vanishingly small amount of money, and bought it.  Less than 24 hours later the rumors of this sale started.

Sunday: I had no plan for today, either.

When it was time for dinner, I went with the strategy of "get in the car and drive and you'll figure it out on the way."

Enchiladas at the Mexican place was the solution.

Now for one horrible story and three nice things.

• Seriously, do you have to be a moronic bully to be a cop now?  Is that really the requirement?
• I think Mr. 50 Cent should have just ignored this, and let it just die down.  Responding just means that people like me, who frankly don't care, now think that 50 Cent really didn't know what a grapefruit was, instead of my default "Aziz Ansari is a comedian, so this is probably a joke."
• Chipmunk.
• This is the only thing I've seen DC do right in years.  "Yeah, we're bringing back the silliest pair of characters ever, and we're just going to wizard them into being the actual ones from before the 90 reboots we've fucked up since."

Saturday: I didn't have a plan for today.

So I got a burger.

Then I read the internets.

• Squirrel.
• There's a squirrel in the second one.
• You're a jerk, dog.
• Bunny.
• I really want to read these books.
• Spider-Man.
• Universal income.
• Mashed potatoes.

Friday: I spent all evening watching the Murder Team 5 special

So I didn't get a chance to read all my internets, so I don't have a lot of links.  And, I'm going to take time tomorrow to do screenshots, because I feel the special deserves screenshots.

Am I crazy, or can you see the Ca lines in the green?  There's a faint darkening in the full size image, and I think it's in the right place.

• Astronomy's at the top, but the interquartile distance shows that there's a lot of variance in salaries.
• And now I want Italian food.  Again.  Like always.
• Why would you think this is a good idea in the first place?

Thursday: Whoops.

It turns out that if I use my work mouse in a certain way, the left button does this.

• Pikachu.
• Vacation.
• So old people are going to get their student loans forgiven, aren't they, and then when people ask about the other 96% of people with student loans, the answer is going to be "nope," right?
• Machida Squirrel Park.
• It's basically just an hour train ride from Shinjuku.

Wednesday: guh

"Wait, what are we even supposed to be doing?"

• The last one.
• That is not how you puppy, puppy.

Tuesday: "Oh. Both."

When I got home today, I did the usual thing, and pushed the "go up" button.  However, I'd decided I wanted to check my mail, so hit the "go down" button.  "Huh.  I wonder which one is going to get here first."

"D-Ding!"

"Oh.  Both.  Both will get here first."

I wish I could live like Rilakkuma.

• Not animals.
• It was interesting to see which journalists I follow on twitter could absolutely ruin their credibility by claiming that this stupid apple thing was "going to change the entire world."  No it won't.  It's another fucking phone iteration and a stupid trinket that no one needs.
• Good.
• This looks like the definition of collusion.  Wage fixing is illegal for a reason.
• Animals.
• Bears.
• Birb.
• Damnit, cat.  Stop trying to steal my pizza.
• The important thing to note is that the new Pokemon games are remakes of a previous generation, but if you've traded Pokemon through each generation between the original and remake (which you could only do back that far), then you'll effectively be able to trade the Pokemon back to the original trainer.

The news just explained why it's so hot out.

See, things won't cool off until January or February, so we'll just have to deal with those extra seven degrees.

Monday: Riding in the elevator with a tiny dog is always a good thing.

The dogs are immediately curious what you're doing in their magic room, and when it stops at your floor, the dog thinks that it's time to get out too.  I suspect it's because all the floors with apartments are open air, plus dogs are notoriously bad with numbers and counting.

On the other hand, if you get on the elevator and someone tries to give you a lobster, you're probably riding with a psychopath.

• I think this explains the power flicker that I saw.  I didn't lose power, but there was a clear glitch in the lights and fan.
• Richard, what are you doing?
• Comparisons.
• A baby bear's constant struggle against gravity.

Sunday: Ramen day!

First up, this dickbag was at the ramen place with his stupid e-cigarette.  The internet claims they don't release anything.  Fuck the internet, it's wrong.  This guy's released acrid chemical shit.  Plus, where as smoking a regular cigarette makes you look like a dumbass, smoking one of these makes you look like a deluded dumbass who thinks they're being healthy.  Hopefully they'll get banned in public places soon.

He even had a tiny fanny pack for his e-cigarette.

Also, this guy was coughing and wheezing constantly.  Dumbass.

Anyway 

Ramen!  Also gyoza, but today is not gyoza-day, because that's hard to say.

 Then on the way home, I decided I wanted to get a pineapple fanta (not pictured because I drank it hours ago).  The 7-11 had this in the hot food case.  Don't look at any of the food, though:

My mom has the bigger size of this dish pattern.  Weird.

• Awkward turtle.  Check the gif on the right side.
• Bunny!  No!
• Bird.
• Black Books.

Saturday: And then I successfully did nothing all day long.

Except some stupid work stuff.  Because that's apparently something I have to do on a Saturday.

I plan on getting ramen tomorrow, so that's a plan.  Also working through the DVR stuff.  I cleared three shows today, but those were small things.  I may just tackle the growing mess that is my backlog of Pokemon XY.

"No, look.  You jump down first, see if there are any fish, you tell us, and then we come down afterwards.  It makes more sense than having all three of us jump down if we may just have to climb back up."

• Bunny! No!
• Huh.  Ok.  So it turns out that mongeese aren't just like squirrels.  Noted.
• I can only imagine how many people bought these mail order hamsters, and then had to deal with the horror of the babies getting eaten.

Friday: I need to figure out what I'm doing this weekend

It'd be nice to have some sort of plan.

"Just a nice relaxing day out at the lake."

• Bunny.
• I tried to come up with a corgi/Dragonball pun, but couldn't find a good one.
• Why is the raccoon 50% more expensive than the monkey?  Raccoons are native animals.
• Bench.
• Popes.
• Landau and Lifshitz is available from the internet archive.

Thursday: Logic and math

Or, more specifically, I think I fixed the last big problem in the stuff at work, and it turns out to be a logic error.  The math is due to the fact that I was going to do some math stuff here, but my test code doesn't quite work due to the fact that I have quantization issues in my images, and I'm too lazy to put in a proper way to handle that.  I think a drizzle like algorithm will do the trick, as I don't need to have insane precision, just enough to smooth out the bumps.

"Damn it, I forgot the burgers!"

• I think Krugman is misunderstanding the Princeton team's two predictions.  The today number is the current snapshot.  The election day one is a "regression to the mean" one, which attempts to smooth large outliers by assuming things trend to the Gaussian mean of one of the parameters.  Since the news yesterday was not just a random discrepant poll but a systematic change in the Kansas election, there isn't enough time for that shift to be significant in that estimate.
• Also, this jackass, and his wife, are both going to jail for a long time.
• I went googling for a recipe that I saw a gif of, and wanted to know what they were doing, but instead, I found this.  I'm calling it a win.
• Friendly squirrel.
• Sleepy squirrel.
• Boom boom boom..

Wednesday: Sick day

Which sucks, but I'm reasonably sure it's just something that I ate seriously disagreeing with me.  However, since the goal of today was going to be "figure out why the last fucking thing in this stupid supercomputer thing keeps donking up," I was able to do a number of tests from home.  The answer?  "No fucking clue."  So that's fun.

"Shit.  I thought I left the keys here!"

• Well.  That one's coming close.
• Peg + Cat is an odd show.
• You're a fucking disgrace, Tony Scalia.
• Cats.
• When I was in Baltimore, I was super jet lagged, and the only thing I could find to watch were reruns of Family Feud.

Since the asteroid page won't load in my browser, but will on the tablet:

Earth, moon, asteroid.

Tuesday: Ugh. Work. Telecons.

Bears.

"Ok, let's see what the stock market is doing."

• Technically, I don't need a thing that makes my bread into bears, but still.
• The last one.
• So now Cracked has a better understanding of economics than many elected officials.
• This way to multiply numbers.

I would argue that it should be slightly more rigorous.  You draw the lines the same way, but you clearly label things as "these two lines represent two sets of ten" and "this line represents one set of one".  This way, you explicitly see that you have (3*1)*1 + (3 * 2) * (1 * 10) + (1 * 1) * (10 * 1) + (3 * 1) * (10 * 10).  This also makes it easier to expand this to higher values (you just assign a set of lines to the hundreds place).

Monday: Labor Day

I thought about driving around the island today, but then I remembered that last time I did that on a holiday, I basically spent two hours stuck in traffic.

So instead I went to get a burger.

But they put it in a to-go bag.  Cheesy tots can never be "to-go."

• Sketches.
• Cat.
• Red pandas.
• This is interesting but long.