The debate is on. The upcoming blogospheric analysis of this US Presidential debate will prove interesting. Kerry seems pretty smooth, but he keeps pointing with his thumb. a live blog of the event.
Update 8:35 PM - Kerry won in my opinion. Not a big win, but this debate certainly didn't knock him out of the race. Others think differently.
It's almost totally unbelievable, but in this post on LGF, despite what Occam's razor tells us about stuff like this and all of the other material that makes up a "preponderance of evidence", we learn that some among us are still holding onto an irrational belief that the Bush/Killian memos might be authentic. David E. Hailey, Jr., Ph.D. has a new analysis proving this.
Dr. Hailey's argument is full of a number of hilarious holes (like his use of a word processor to prove that a typewriter could have created the memos), but these errors in logic aren't the only reason he looks like a fool.... His credentials and his analysis might be a lot more impressive, if he had spent a little more time proofing the section of his analysis that attempts to extol his and his Lab's qualifications:
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| Screenshot of Dr. Hailey's analysis from his website |
These errors are also present in the PDF version of the analysis (local copy).
$ ls -l Bush_Memos.pdf -rw-rw-r-- 1 bohnsack bohnsack 1278587 Sep 30 07:17 Bush_Memos.pdf $ md5sum Bush_Memos.pdf c3a9b2af0544e725cc80ccda0d25065f Bush_Memos.pdf
There are few of us who do not make the occasional grammar or diction mistake, but an error of this type in a paragraph that's supposed to lay out an English professor's credibility is beyond amusing. Details matter, especially when you're trying to prove something. If this English professor has so much difficulty with English, one has to wonder if he could have similar problems with critical thinking skills.
Update 2:39 PM - Not only does Dr. Hailey need a fifth grader to help with his grammar, it turns out he's also a total fraud. Ha. Ha.
There seems to be a trend developing here...
Update 6:36 PM - Maybe not a fraud, but still lame.
Update 10/1/2004 7:20 AM - The professor's website is down this morning and there are other developments
Update 10/7/2004 3:55 PM - Not a fraud, but unquestionably incompetent and blinded by bias.
Luiz DeRose from Cray
o Tools and Techniques for Performance Analysis
- profiling
- hardware counters
- PAPI
- perfsuite
- MPI logging
o Hands-on lab
o I/O Performance tools
- parallel I/O overview
- parallel I/O tools
Federico Bassetti
o Realistic Performance Expectations on Linux clusters
Made up for being new at NCSA here. Lots of good information.
o Hands-on lab
Today was mostly excellent. They earned their conference fees today.
I'm attending the Linux Cluster Institute's Applications Module Program at UNM today and the rest of the week.
Today's topics:
Doug Pase from IBM
o Performance Programming on Intel & AMD Architectures
Stuff about memory/register/cache arch, vectorization, etc. Some interesting things were discussed, but I was mostly familar with the material. It was good to cover it as intro before the rest of the day's information.
o Performance Programming on Intel & AMD Architectures
Apply stuff from the previous discussion to basic performance techniques: loop unrolling, memory access patterns, data alignment, FP multiplication by recripocal instead of division, subroutine inlining, etc. Interesting stuff. It clarified at lot of stuff that I was only vaguely aware of.
Ron Brightwell from Sandia
o Linux Cluster Programming
Overview of MPI. Again, stuff I knew a little bit about is now much clearer. Excellent info. Good speaker. Poor slides: Sorry, not my slides, that point is incorrect, etc.
Luiz DeRose from Cray
o Debugging parallel applications with Totalview. Far too much basic information about how a debugger works in serial mode. I know that stuff. Skip to the parallel stuff please. Why show powerpoint slides of a program? Show the actual program in operation. Oh.. and we don't actually have a way to run Totalview in parallel, because LSF on the machine we're using doesn't support X11 tunneling in interactive sessions. Nice.
Federico Bassetti from NCSA
o Local Conputing Environment. A discussion on how to use some of NCSA's resources. Nice guy, but he didn't seem an expert on what's in NCSA's machine rooms. Many incorrect slides. Again, why talk and point, when we could be typing.
I took a trip around southern New Mexico yesterday... Valley of Fires Recreational Area, Lincoln National Forest, White Sands National Monument, etc. There were a lot of interesting things to to see, and many images were captured, but processing and upload of the majority will be delayed until later in the week.
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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: The effect was cool for five minutes. Aside from that, the movie was pathetic and a waste of my money. Bad, bad, bad.
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Canon's new flagship 35 mm SLR: EOS-1Ds MarkII
Street price: $7,999 |
Wow. What kind of Canon-nut photography enthusiast wouldn't want of these babies? Too bad its price puts it out of striking distance for the amateur. Personally, I'm going to wait to see what the 20D's successor is going to look like, before I replace my 10D. It might be a wait of more than a year and a half, but I can probably handle it.
Head over to slashdot for Michael Badnarik's answers to 15 questions asked by slashdot readers.
Nader's back on the New Mexico ballot. Evidently, campaign finance records show judge Wendy York, who had previously issued a ruling blocking Nader from New Mexico's November 2nd ballot, contributed $1,000 to John Kerry's presidential campaign in April. Naturally, a GOP state senator wants judge York to step down.
Wheee....
Update: Nader's back off the ballot via a different judge.
If you go over to BoingBoing.net and read this story, you'll find a post from Cory Doctorow with a mash-up image of Michael Moore/Che Guevara:
If you go to Designed By Monkeys, the company that made this image and sells schwag featuring it, you'll find that they're donating a portion of their profits from the sale of this strange image to MoveOn PAC, who are responsible for this gem of an add:
So... what's this saying? Moore's leading a revolution that will lead to the surrender of our troops in Iraq, our purchase of a T-Shirt will further this cause, and Mr. Moore should be exalted?
I'm finding boingboing's increasing amount of DNC/Disney/porn-oriented fetishing pretty lame, but for now at least they have enough other cool stuff for me to ignore the garbage. However, this growing Che Guevara love, here and in other places, has me totally baffled. I can't understand why it's cool to wear stuff with Che Guevara's image on it. Earth to wackjobs: Guevara was a Marxist. He was a key figure in Cuba's communist revolution and subsequent dictatorship, until Castro found him to be too extreme. Do people wearing this stuff advocate the most extreme form of revolutionary communism? If not, why do they wear shirts emblazoned with Guevara's image? From this page, I find the following interesting bit of Che Guevara history:
After a tense 13-day standoff between US President John Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev, the missiles are removed on condition that the US withdraws its missiles stationed in Turkey and cease its attempts to overthrow Castro. During the crisis, Guevara argues in favor of a first strike and is bitterly disappointed when the missiles are withdrawn.
That's right folks, Señor Guevara advocated nukeing the United States of America and was pissed when Castro didn't get it done. The duped young Americans we can now see wearing Che T-Shirts might not even exist today, if this madman was allowed dictate Cuban foreign policy in 1962. Heck, there's a good chance none of us would be alive, if Che had had his way.
Che had a lot of other "interesting" views:
"It must be clearly established, however, that the government of the United States is not the champion of freedom, but rather the perpetuator of exploitation and oppression against the peoples of the world and against a large part of its own population." Full copy of Che's speech
"Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism, and a battle hymn for the people's unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America" Full copy of Che's message
"A relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy. We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it: to his home, to his centres of entertainment; a total war."
I have a few questions:
Idiocy like this is part of the reason why, for better or for worse, we're going to have Bush as our president for another four years. Most Americans (more than enough to secure victory in a presidential election) find this kind of thing extremely distasteful. Not too many of us identify with communist America haters.
Oh... and there's this (via LGF) and this. Not so many Americans respond favorably to that kind of thing either.
Update: or this, etc., etc.
Props to Adrian Sannier, who, with his new blog, has vaulted himself into highest ranks of hip engineering professors. I almost stayed in Iowa to study HCI with him and JO. That would have been a lot of fun.
A ten minute hike from my house into the Sandia foothills yields this view of Mount Taylor and the city:
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Skippy's analysis of recent political news is awesome. I wonder about him sometimes, but I can not deny his genius.
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