Happy Thanksgiving!

For all my Danish friends out there, please prepare a meal of roast turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potatoes and rolls. Open a bottle of wine and spend the evening discussing what you're thankful for. This is NOT just another Thursday!

Enjoy!

Ken

I'm feeling old...

Just learned about TwitterVision.

If you've never seen it before, it shows the latest tweets appearing on Twitter's public feed in context on a world map. So, if you generate a tweet in Chicago, then if TwitterVision selects your tweet for display, then it appears in a bubble above Chicago.

The reason I'm feeling old is that after I visited it for the first time, I clicked on the button labelled 3D.

Okay, time to retire! :-)

Ken

Bungee Connect

Just saw a presentation on Bungee Connect:

<http://www.bungeeconnect.com/>


In a word: awesome! (If you are interested in developing applications for the Web.)

Now that I know about it, I need to re-write my software engineering class. :-/

Ken

Memories of Ice

"Memories ofIce" is the name of the third book of Steve Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series and its also the book that I've just finished. Like the second and first books of the series, it is beyond awesome, beyond words, really. You just need to drop everything and start reading this series. It is literally the best that epic fantasy has to offer.

Through the ups and downs of the election just past, when I had to deal with the very real fear that America was going to choose to continue the disasters of the last eight years, I was able to survive by playing with my kids of course (kids are the best means for restoring sanity that I know, they are so "in the now" that they can't help but pull an adult out of his abstractions and distractions) but also by sitting down and enjoying a section or two of "Memories of Ice".

I've said it before, Steven Erikson is a Genius, and Memories of Ice does not disappoint. All of the main characters from the first book return and are expanded and built upon. By the end of the book, when Erikson decides to kill off a character that has been there from the beginning and was easy to love, it felt like a punch to the gut! But satisfying, the scene in which this character dies can stand toe to toe with the best that movies have to offer and the epic story that unfolds in the 913 pages of this story would foil any attempt to turn them into movies. It just shouldn't be done... best to reward only those who put the investment into reading them.

So, what next? I've got a ton of books on my stack from many of my favorite authors... but Steven Erikson has me firmly in his grasp. Today, over lunch, I'll be starting book four! :-)

Ken

Bush sets New Record!

Bush is now more unpopular than Richard Nixon was when he resigned from office!

I love it!

Remember, this was the person that evangelicals told us was picked by God to lead our country for the last eight years. Looks like God backed a loser! Unless, God picked Bush to lead our country into the toilet. Then, if true, He picked a winner!

:-)

Ken

YES WE CAN!

I am so proud of my country!

Ken

Vote!

Just do it!

Then watch these sites for election news throughout the day:

FiveThirtyEight

Electoral Vote

Bruce Schneier's Thread at Making Light

Enjoy!

Ken

John Mitten is Stupid

The New York Times covered a Palin rally today in which supporters of John McCain chanted the following phrase:

Vote McCain, not Hussein!

This is a play on the fact that Obama's middle name is Hussein: A fact that many stupid people use to make the assertion that Obama must be a Muslim! This is stupid because these people only apply this "logic" when its convenient for them. If they attempted to apply this rule consistently (that people must be what their name implies about them) then they would have to insist that I'm a drummer because my middle name "Mark" was selected because my Mom, back in the late 60s, liked a group that had a drummer whose name was Mark. Of course, I'm not a drummer, and thus would confound their attempt to use this rule. (In the same way that Obama confounds them, since he isn't a Muslim, but a Christian, indeed has been a Christian for many years. And I'm with Gen. Powell on this one, so what if he WAS a Muslim? Is there a law against being Muslim in this country? Not the last time I checked.)

Indeed, they could then move on to saying, well Ken must be a football player, since the Cincinnati Bengals used to have a quarterback named Ken Anderson. And, once again, I would have to disappoint them: I don't even like football. So, spending just a few seconds thinking about this and demonstrating two quick counterexamples should end this stupid obsession about Obama's middle name, but remember we're talking about stupid people here and stupid people are fairly immune to logic.

But, none of this explains why this post is entitled "John Mitten is Stupid"... John Mitten is stupid because he goes on record in the linked article as saying that he guesses the reason that Barack Obama has the middle name 'Hussein' is because he's named after Saddam Hussein.

No, really, that's what he said. Go click on the link and scroll down to the bottom.

So, score one for Karl Rove and all his disciples... their ability to slime good people and fool stupid people is still unparalleled. Indeed, Karl Rove would probably get a good chuckle out of seeing John's asinine assertion.

First, only Obama's parents know the real reason why they chose the middle name Hussein for their child. I suspect that Obama's middle name is Hussein because it means "good; small handsome one". In that, its similar to my first name, Kenneth, which means "fire born; good-looking". And what parents wouldn't think that their baby boy is both good and handsome?

Second, Barack Obama was born in 1961. So, for John's assertion to have any hope of being true, we would need to ascertain that Saddam Hussein was a household word in the US in 1961. In other words, Saddam Hussein would need to be so well known and respected in, say, 1960 that Barack Obama's parents would have heard of him and liked him enough to decide to name their son after him.

Lets take a quick look at Wikipedia's article on Saddam Hussein. Saddam was born in 1937 and would have been 23 in our target year of 1960. It turns out that one year before, in 1959, he was a member of the Ba'ath party and helped the CIA in a failed attempt to oust then Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim. After that assassination attempt failed, Saddam was forced to flee to Egypt where he remained until 1963.

Okay, armed with that information, lets calculate the chance that Obama's parents would have heard of a 22 year old Iraqi Baathist in the employ of the CIA who had to flee to Egypt and lie low for a while... let's see:

0 x 0 x 0 x 0 x 0 = 0

That's right, there exists a zero percent chance that Barack Obama was named after Saddam Hussein, and such a conclusion can be reached by anyone with a brain after thinking about it for no longer than five minutes.

QED