Innocent Bystanders

That Dentist May Have Shot a Lion, But… July 29, 2015

…Obama ate a dog.

Cool. -lauraw July 28, 2015

You guys probably already saw this, it’s a couple years old. But new to me. Hat tip to Scott:

Priorities July 27, 2015

The little girl in front has a great future ahead of her at Planned Parenthood:

I Discovered a New Shape July 25, 2015

Well, it’s new to me, anyway.

I was working through some trigonometry problems, and there were a whole bunch that boiled down to “you have a seven-sided polygon, each side is x cm, find the area of the polygon.”  I didn’t do very many of those problems before I decided to make a short cut and just work out a formula:

A=(n [d/2]^2)/tan (180/n)

Where n is the number of sides, and d is the length of one side.

Figuring out that formula saved me some time, but as far as I know isn’t super useful.

At one point, I wondered what would happen if I did some weird stuff with the formula. Like what’s the area of a polygon with two sides? That produces a zero in the denominator, so it’s undefined. That makes sense. But what about a polygon with 1.9 sides?  That actually does produce an answer, and so does 1.8. If you set the side length to some constant (I picked 2 so the calculations would be easier), you end up with a dampened tangent/cotangent curve. Even more interesting is that you get holes in the curve at regular intervals.

After all that, I don’t know how to draw a regular polygon with 1.9 sides, but I can tell you how much area it has.

Japanese Role Playing Games, Generic Style July 25, 2015

If you’re like me, and you own pretty much every Final Fantasy RPG, as well as a bunch of Dragon Quests and other random Japanese RPG titles, this should be familiar to you:

If you’re not like me, then simply subscribe to my correspondence course, “15 Days to Being geoff,” and you’ll acquire all my vices with no money down.

[H/T: digg.com]

Hours of Home Entertainment July 20, 2015

What do you do when you’re at home, all alone with your iPhone, with nothing on the tube?

Well, if you’re an IB dude, you hook yourself up with one of these bad boys:

With iSperm, sperm analysis is easier than ever. Integrated with iPad mini, an optimized optical lens allows for microscopic examination with outstanding optical resolution. Observe and analyze sperm quality. Evaluate sperm concentration and motility automatically with the free App.

I guess it’s true that there’s always an app for that, no matter what “that” is.

Hunh. I always thought they’d have little capes.

About That Obama Recovery July 20, 2015

Here’s what the St. Louis Fed provides as the real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) median household income for 2003-2013:

Recovery? Not so much.

But this graph has an eerie resemblance to my super-duper, vastly-improved-over-the-BLS-U3-number, employment metric:

Mine goes for another 2 years past the Fed’s database, but the 2 charts seem pretty well matched through 2013.

So if you’re wondering why things seem to be so tough when we’re supposedly recovering, look no further.

Flying Over Pluto July 17, 2015

Ace often asks, “Is this something?” Well, this animation of the surface of Pluto is something.

Amid the constant drum of our disasters, foreign and domestic, this sort of achievement seems all the more miraculous.

The World According to Pao July 16, 2015

From Ace yet again, concerning the Ellen Pao implosion at Reddit. Ellen had this to say:

Fully 40 percent of online users have experienced bullying, harassment and intimidation, according to Pew Research. Some 70 percent of users between age 18 and 24 say they’ve been the target of harassers. Not surprisingly, women and minorities have it worst. We were naive in our initial expectations for the Internet, an early Internet pioneer told me recently. We focused on the huge opportunity for positive interaction and information sharing. We did not understand how people could use it to harm others.

Jiminy. Seems like most of us realized that the Internet could be a brutal place when blogs first came into being. I’m pretty sure, reading some of the alt. Usenet threads that preceded blogging, that trolling and online abuse have been with us since the early 80’s.

So Ms. Pao is a little slow and quite a bit more tender than the rest of us.

But I’d like to focus on the standard “women and minorities have it worst” complaint. I looked up the Pew poll to see what it really said, and it said nothing about minorities. Here’s what it said about the comparison between men and women:

Yep, women have it worse when it comes to stalkers and being sexually harrassed, but men experience more abuse in every other category, including threats of physical violence.

Ellen Pao offers us a very distorted view of the Pew poll, suggesting that the rest of her self-flattering story is equally distorted.

Trying to Salvage the Recorder With Some Beatbox July 16, 2015

Unfortunately nothing can stop the recorder from being one of history’s most annoying musical instruments.