A pleasant surprise

I subscribe to the White House Blog RSS feed via Google Reader, but most of the time I only skim through the posts.   However, today there was a post that really caught my eye.

“A New Year, A New Beginning” is a post with a video message from President Obama marking Nowruz which is the Iranian celebration of the vernal equinox (which for those of you who like precision istoday at 11:44 UTC, 7:44EDT), which also serves as the Iranian New Year.

Why I’m glad Pluto’s not a planet.

This is a thoroughly stale topic, but it manages to come up again and again.  In 2006, through a perhaps rather questionable procedure, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined the word “planet” in such a way as to kick Pluto out of the category, which apparently struck a nerve with some people.  I have yet to hear a compelling reason as to why this struck a nerve (I suspect that it’s that people don’t like statements to contradict what they learned in elementary school), but it did.

Personally, I was very glad.  The more one learns about Pluto, the less one should really feel that it merits the same category as the eight now official planets.  The first point is that Pluto is significantly smaller than the big 8.  In fact Mercury, the smallest planet, is 25 times more massive than Pluto.

Now, it’s fair to point out that there is great variation within the ranks of the planets and that some body has to be the smallest planet and that Earth is 18 times as massive as Mercury, so it’s a pretty arbitrary lower bound.

Promoting my own idea

I posted an idea to the Obama Transition’s Citizen’s Briefing Book at Change.gov: Encourage the Teaching of Foreign Language in Elementary School.

This is an idea that I feel has gotten too little play in the national discourse.  We are a country of immigrants and the biggest global power, but we find ourselves lacking in our ability to understand and reach out to those beyond our borders because we don’t teach enough foreign language in our schools and we tend to teach it high school and college, when it is far more difficult to pick up a new language and speak it well.

So, vote it up.

A disgusting development

Apparently, Israel has just banned Arab parties from running in the upcoming election.  The fact that Operation Cast Lead is occurring in the shadow of an election has been one of the more disturbing elements of the offensive, but this marks a new low.

If wants to claim that it’s a democracy and not an ethnocracy, it should reverse course on this decision immediately.

Ok, this is a little ridiculous

I knew that Obama liked Lincoln, but this is getting close to the point of a fetish.  Apparently, before the Inauguration, the President-elect will enjoy a meal with other members of the ceremony that is modeled after the foods that Lincoln ate on china modeled after that selected by Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd.

Microsoft should have used BitTorrent to distribute the Windows 7 Beta

Today, Microsoft officially released the first beta version of Windows 7, the successor to Vista, which has gotten largely positive reviews so far and personally, I think that the features look promising.

However, they did make a mistake today when they decided to have a limited release direct download from their website, which brought down their servers.  Now, Microsoft is a big company with vast resources, but corralling a rush of downloads to a particular timeframe for a sizable 2.4 GB download was apparently too much for even their servers.

Now, I would suggest that they use BitTorrent, as that would move some of the bandwidth load to those downloading the software.  I realize that as a proprietary software company, Microsoft has relied on income mechanisms that BitTorrent has undermined, but if Microsoft wants to remain a relevant player on the Internet, it should acquaint itself with tools that competitors such as Ubuntu have found.

If the improvements reported in Windows 7 are any indication, Microsoft has been developing a culture of introspection that has helped it correct some of the mistakes made with Vista which has taxed it’s brand image.  It think it’s time that Microsoft applies that same culture to its methods of distribution.

Black Swans in Gaza

One of the people who became prominent as the details of the financial crisis unfolded was Nassim Taleb, who’s a former trader who dealt with quantitative analysis and who is an outspoken critic of our current financial system.

His book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable discusses a concept that he calls a black swan described as thus:

“First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point  to its possibility.  Second, it carries and extreme impact.  Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.” (page xvii)

Taleb attributes his views to his experience both as a financial trader (particularly during the 1987 crash) and as a Lebanese citizen in light of the Lebanese Civil War, and as such, his ideas are particularly developed around military conflict and finance, which are particularly risky ventures.

Obesity

Ricky Gervais, the creator of The Office, got himself in a bit of media trouble because of a few lines from a recent audiobook, “The Ricky Gervais Guide to MEDICINE”, which is the first of a series of “guides” he tends to release.  The offending lines as recorded by The Telegraph were:

“I really don’t know why a doctor under a hippocratic oath takes the risk of something going badly wrong, sometimes with general anaesthetic, because someone can’t be bothered to go for a f—ing run.

“They have bits sliced off and tied up and sucked out. I want to say to them, ‘You lazy f—ing fat pig. Just go for a run and stop eating burgers. You might f—ing die’.

“Some things are not worth the risk. When someone’s facial surgery goes wrong because they wanted plumper lips or a little nose, I think they’re a f—ing idiot.

“If your arse is too f—ing fat, stop eating and go for a run.”

I can see why people would take offense, but I firmly side with Ricky here.

Double standards

On a muse, I decided to see what was being aired by the Chinese government’s media mouthpiece 新华(Xinhua).  To my surprise, three of the “TOP STORIES” on the English language version dealt with the turmoil in Gaza, two of which took a clear anti-Israeli slant in their titles (“Israel shells houses, schools in 11th day of offensive” and “Dozens of Palestinian children killed”).

I should note that at the time, only one on the Chinese language version did not focus so much on Gaza, with only one story at the time, with two more local stories, and a story about Obama’s chosen intelligence officers instead of the extra Gaza stories and the Russia-Ukraine gas standoff.

Now, in the U.S., our politicians voice unanimous support for Israel.  This makes sense, as there is a strong right wing pro-Israeli lobby in our country and our government has a large investment (to the tune of $2.4 billion dollars) in the very military that is involved in Operation Cast Lead, and it’s bad policy to bad mouth those in which one invests.

A much-needed xkcd

Click through for clearer reading

I like to seize upon opportunities to promote the metric system because the fact that the United States along with our pals Liberia and Myanmar still cling to systems other than the metric system is shameful.

I would also like to point out that U.S. Customary Units are already based on the metric system, so we are technically already using it, we just like causing ridiculous headaches for the sake of being quaint.