Having fun with gravity!

Play this at full screen!



HT: American Digest

PS - "Don's Version" in the grab does not refer to me, but to the poster on Youtube.

Only three Munchkins remain

Via Michael Silence, I learn that one of the Munchkins of The Wizard of Oz has died: "'Wizard of Oz' Munchkin Karl Slover dies at 93"

DUBLIN, Ga. (AP) — Karl Slover, one of the last surviving actors who played Munchkins in the 1939 classic film, "The Wizard of Oz," has died. He was 93.

The 4-foot-5 Slover died of cardiopulmonary arrest Tuesday afternoon in a central Georgia hospital, said Laurens County Deputy Coroner Nathan Stanley. According to friends, as recently as last weekend, Slover appeared at events in the suburban Chicago area.

Slover was best known for playing the lead trumpeter in the Munchkins' band but also had roles as a townsman and soldier in the film, said John Fricke, author of "100 Years of Oz" and five other books on the movie and its star, Judy Garland. Slover was one of the tiniest male Munchkins in the movie.

Long after Slover retired, he continued to appear around the country at festivals and events related to the movie. He was one of seven Munchkins at the 2007 unveiling of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame dedicated to the little people in the movie. Only three remain of the 124 diminutive actors who played the beloved Munchkins.

Dream the impossible dream . . .

... with emphasis on the "impossible."

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — A woman arrested at “American Idol” tryouts says she will continue to follow her dream to sing.

Brittany Acosta, 21, was arrested when police say she tried to force her way into the competition. ...

According to police, she said: “I’m not leaving. This is my dream. My life is ruined.”

Acosta admits she’s tried out at six different times in six different cities to try to make “American Idol.”

Costa was arrested last month and charged with trespassing. She’s accused of showing up at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center for “American Idol” tryouts without credentials and refusing to leave.

I am reminded of the remark of the Old West steam engine locomotive engineer who saw a buffalo ahead of him, charging the train at full tilt. "Old boy," he said, "I admire your courage but your judgment stinks." And so with Ms. Costa: we may admire her determination but at some point her judgment doesn't seem too good.

This is what she's up against every time she goes to an audition:

And that is only part of the crowd trying to get an audition.

Has Britain reached its turning point?

Views from across the Pond: Peter Hitchens says that the degeneracy of British society is now irreversible; it is a "polluted flood ... not a tide." Britain, he says, is "The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain," and no longer is it great. The political class has been devotedly destroying what used to be called "civilized society" since the end of World War II while energetically isolating themselves from what they wrought.

Here is an example of how little he [PM David Cameron] knows about Britain. He says that the criminals of August will face the ‘full force of the law’. What ‘force’?

The great majority of the looters, smashers, burners and muggers have not been arrested and never will be. Our long-enfeebled police were so useless at the start that thousands of crimes were committed with total impunity.

Now we know why they don’t call themselves ‘police forces’ any more. But they aren’t ‘services’ either, for they certainly don’t serve us or do what we want them to do, preferring to arrest us for defending ourselves. The criminals, who are cunning without being intelligent, all know this. They will wait for the next chance. ...

They have all learned what most British politicians somehow cannot grasp – that the more encounters you have with our justice system, the less you fear it. A few ‘exemplary’ sentences – none of which will be served in full, or anything near it – will only help to spread the word that arson, robbery, violence, spite and selfishness are not punished here any more. Indeed these are the things we are now famous for around a world that once respected us.

But maybe not. Charles Moore write in The Telegraph that the dysfunctions that Hitchens describes are neither very old not deeply rooted, and that in fact a consensus is already in place both socially and politically to bring literal discipline back to law enforcement and social order - "How to recover Britain’s streets for civilisation."

As someone who was a young journalist the last time a wave of disorder swept through the country, I am struck by a great change that has taken place. Contrary to what you may have read, this change is not that violence has increased. It was in 1981 that horrible things like attacking fire engines, trying to kill policemen and using riot as a cover for mass looting first showed themselves in mainland Britain. Although the technology is different today, allowing the criminals to bring trouble to more places, the ferocity of violence has been, if anything, slightly less bad than in Brixton or Toxteth 30 years ago.

No, the difference lies in public attitudes to what has happened. This time, the attitudes are much better. Then as now, of course, most ordinary citizens were unequivocal in their disgust at rioting. But in 1981, the prevailing culture among our ruling elites was different. The weight of the BBC, local government, trade unions, officialdom, came down on the police for being too harsh, and, needless to say, on the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, for the same crime. The chairman of the Merseyside Police Authority supported the rioters, saying: “They would be apathetic fools if they didn’t protest.” In Parliament, Michael Foot, the Labour leader, hurled anathemas at the evil Thatcher. In the capital, a young man called Ken Livingstone took over the Greater London Council in a post-election coup, and began attacking the police.

The resuly has been that British police have been thoroughly tamed, subjected to harsh sanctions and even dismissal or actual arrest themselves for enforcing the law too vigorously, which means very much at all. So,

We all saw the police hanging back from making arrests during this week’s troubles. The reason is that, under current rules, arrests are a bureaucratic and legal nightmare. They require at least two officers and inordinate processing time. If there is “insufficient evidence”, the police can be sued for false imprisonment. The scenes all over England this week were uniquely appalling in their scale, but in the character of the police response they were very like what happens in hundreds of towns every Saturday night. Young people tip out of the pubs behaving badly, and the police, worried by what they might be accused of, just watch them.

Yet Moore says that this is n ot in the slightest the atttitude among the political class any more, and that from the prime minister on down, on all sides of the aisles, so that,

In 1981, an MP saying that he supported the police was making a controversial political statement. This week, he was uttering a commonplace.

There is a resolute recognition that the need for civil peace must come first. Mr. Moore does not discuss how all this will find its way into actual law and policy, which is of course the key question.

For us colonials on this side of the Pond the key question is simply: "Is Britain's 2011 August an avoidable portent of America's future?"

In my conversations with people this month and readings I have been struck by how many people here believe that what have seen in Britain is looming in America, not today, not even imminently, but certainly nonetheless. Even Peggy Noonan writes (link may be perisable),

What does this have to do with America? What we're seeing on the streets in Britain right now is something we may be starting to see here. It hasn't come together in a conflagration, but it is out there, and I think it's growing. And as in Britain, it doesn't have anything to do with political grievances per se.

Philadelphia right now is under curfew because of "flash mobs." Young people send out the word on social media, and suddenly dozens or hundreds of them hit a targeted store, steal everything on the shelves, and run, knowing no one will stop them or catch them. It's happened in other cities, too. Sometimes the mobs beat people up on the street and take their money. There are the beat-downs in McDonald's, where the young lose all control and the old fear to intervene. There were the fights and attacks last weekend at the Wisconsin State Fair. You've seen the YouTubes of fights on the subways. You often see links to these stories on Drudge: He headlines them "Les Miserables."

Whether Charles Moore is right that the flood there can be reversed is not predictable yet. There is a vast chasm between politicians knowing what must be done and summoning the will to do it. One thing is for sure: the cancer has not yet metastasized in America so much that it can't be reversed. But the question of political will here is just as pressing. Fortunately, so far the signs are encouraging.

-----------------------------

The film industry is often ahead of the game in understanding (and taking commercial advantage of) the mood of the people. Last year Michael Caine starred in the British film release, "Harry Brown."



Hollywood went down that trail many years ago, of course, with the "Death Wish" series starring Charles Bronson in 1974.



And what, after all, is Batman but the precursor to both of these?

You will hate me for posting this

"Abbottabad Obama"



But you'll hate yourself more for listening to it.

The $10,720,000 slave

Only in America, where there used to be real, chattel slavery, would someone set to be paid $10.72 million this year say he was in "slavery."

Vikings running back Adrian Peterson compared NFL owners' treatment of players to "modern-day slavery," according to an online interview published Tuesday by Yahoo! Sports....

When discussing other players feeling the same way, Peterson said: "It's modern-day slavery, you know? People kind of laugh at that, but there are people working at regular jobs who get treated the same way, too... ."

Not even other football players are buying it.

Green Bay Packers running back Ryan Grant took exception to Peterson's comment, writing on Twitter: "Their is unfortunately actually still slavery existing in our world. Literal modern day slavery. That was a very misinformed statement." ...

Saints fullback Heath Evans said he agrees with most of the Twitter responses about Peterson, which have been mostly negative.

"We are all blessed to even strap a helmet on in this league!" Evans tweeted.

Adrian, you are being paid more in one season than even a Milwaukee school teacher will make in a lifetime, and you say your work, which you freely chose and leave anytime, is slavery? Bub, you're being paid millions to play a game! Get a little perspective, please. No wait, make that a lot of perspective.

The President's Speech - coming to a multiplex near you

The smashing success of Best Picture winner, The King's Speech, has Hollywood looking for a sequel. And here it is!

"Inside Job" documentary not so inside

Don't believe everything you see in last night's Oscar winner for best documentary.

Jeopardy's Watson computer: Just a high-speed moron

Here is the Youtube of IBM's computer, Watson, beating its human challengers like a mongrel dog on Jeopardy last night. Look carefully at the clues? Notice anything?



Almost none of the answers on the game board required any kind of abstract reasoning to answer. In fact, you could put a human with practically no knowledge of the subjects on the board in front of a computer connected to Google and that person could simply type in the nouns of the clues and get the same answers.

Example - the first question of the game:

And the Google:

Strip out Watson's blinding speed, and it is no smarter than human beings at all. Watson, for all its engineering impressiveness, simply did only what computers have always done: collate at blinding speed (and compute mathematical probabilities to choose an answer). It does not matter that Watson was not connected to the Internet since its mass-memory unit holds 16 Terabytes of data, processed by a 2,880 processor core. As my own computer professor said (many years ago!), "A computer is just a high-speed moron." There is nothing about Watson that I have read so far that obviates that observation.

I think its programmers must have realized this since they artificially crippled Watson by design. Note that Watson was programmed not to buzz in unless it computed an answer of at least 50 percent "confidence" of being right. This was an entirely artificial barrier. Why not 75 percent? Or 25 percent? Or any level at all? Watson is so blindingly fast that it could have buzzed in for every question before either champion (making their presence merely ceremonial, which it almost was anyway). Then Watson simply could have given its top answer, regardless of confidence level, and the computer still would have got 90% of the questions right.

In other words, if the game had allowed Watson to give uncrippled answers, it would have always answered first and would have won even more decisively. But then, with access to the same amounts of data resources through Google, I could beat the two champions if the game always allowed me to answer first. In fact, I'd win under the same confidence crippling as long as I could answer first - because clearly Watson will always be able to buzz in faster than a person.

So what does Watson really prove? From a technical, engineering and programming perspective, it's an amazing achievement with enormous potential for a wide range of applications ranging across broad multi-disciplinary subjects and problems. As for the Jeopardy game, there's less than meets the eye. Count it as a proof-of-concept exercise. What it did not do was reason abstractly. It just collated amazing amounts of information very rapidly. But we already knew that computers are faster than we are for specified tasks. That's why we build them to begin with.

Sorry, Prof. Reynolds, the Singularity has not arrived.

Update: Good discussion on this at The Speculist, including this nugget:

@stephentgo: Repercussions of IBM's Watson unknown, but any job that involves answering questions by phone will soon be at risk. http://bit.ly/hp91hW