So, I'm just going to lay this out very simply, even though in the linked video, Olbermann appears to consider this too distasteful to do more than just touch upon (and indeed, there are bigger fish to fry first).

An "interview" is supposed to be a question and answer session between a reporter and the interviewee, right? So that the reporting is basically saying, "the reporter asked this question, and the person being interviewed gave this particular answer to that question", right?

So, in what lunatic alternate dimension does this become "an interview is a creative reinterpretation of what we think we'd like this person to have said in response to these questions" and make Katie Couric's interview session with John McCain, as aired not a massive breach of journalistic integrity because basically, what they aired showed McCain giving an entirely different answer to the question asked about the troop surge.

In short, what CBS aired was decidedly fiction and "news" is supposed to be non-fiction.

McCain has problems with facts and timelines. Kinda like Reagan in his second term, after Alzheimer's started to effect him.

So, doesn't CBS believe in 'journalistic integrity'?

I wrote: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh." It appeared as: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh."

There is no length issue. This is someone thinking, "I'll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best."

Well, you fucking don't. This was shit, shit subediting for three reasons.

...

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed "a" so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

Very funny letter by Giles Coren to his sub-editor about the removal of 'a' from one of his sentences in an article.

'I have never ended on an unstressed syllable!' | Media | The Guardian

Theory of Poker by David Sklansky discusses theories and concepts applicable to nearly every variation of the game, including five-card draw (high), seven-card stud, hold'em, lowball draw, and razz (seven-card lowball stud). This book introduces you to the Fundamental Theorem of Poker, its implications, and how the theorem should affect your play. Other chapters discuss the value of deception, bluffing, raising, the slow-play, the value of position, psychology, heads-up play, game theory, implied odds, the free card, semibluffing, and much more.

Many of today's top poker players will tell you that this is the book that really made a difference in their play. That is, these are the ideas that separate the experts from the typical player. Those who read and study this book will literally leave behind those who don't, and most serious players wear the covers off their copies. In many ways, this is probably the best book ever written on poker. (276 pages; ISBN #1-880685-00-0...$29.95, Retail customers visit our order form to see our special Two Plus Two Forums price)

If you read one book on poker, this should be it. Not focusing on one game, this book will teach you how to think about poker if you want to understand the game well enough to win. Makes the game much more fun.

Two Plus Two Books

Bait and switch

I feel badly for the airline industry. They are caught in a never-ending price war due to online websites and their own commodification. Pick the cheapest flight to get from here to there...

The natural short-term solution is bait and switch. Advertise the lowest price you can imagine and then require add on fees so you can actually make a profit.nullnullnull

Seth's Blog: Bait and switch

He isn't running on a "one man, one robot" policy yet but he is running.
Rufus For Mayor

I like Rufus as a person, but this in no way constitutes a political endorsement :)

Rufus For Mayor

WEDNESDAY, July 23 (HealthDay News) -- Eating half a serving of soy food a day lowers sperm concentrations and may play a role in male infertility, particularly in obese men, Harvard University researchers report.

The reason for this relationship between soy and sperm count isn't clear. However, researchers speculate that soy increases estrogen activity, which may have a negative affect on sperm production and also interfere with other hormonal signals.

Kinda funny how people switch to Soy Milk for health reasons.

Soy Linked to Low Sperm Count - MSN Health & Fitness - Men's Sexual Health

Introduction

Costa Rica is not known for offering tremendous size in its waves, but rather, consistent head-high surf at any time of the year. Many people think that the best way of surfing in Costa Rica is to rent a car and try to follow the surf. This, with very few exceptions, is the best way to spend a lot of unnecessary time in your car and miss the waves. Costa Rica's surf areas are defined by location and seasons which make surfing in Costa Rica very user friendly.

Costa Rica Surfing: Recommendations

Adults should keep the phone away from the head and use the speakerphone or a wireless headset, he says. He even warns against using cell phones in public places such as a bus, because it exposes others to the phone's electromagnetic fields.

What alarmism! Give me a BREAK. I'm not a physicist, but isn't there something called the Inverse-square law of light/EM intensity that would protect the other passengers of the bus? Or are we all so allergic to the EM we've been exposed to for about 100 years now that a tiny dose of EM from several feet away is going to hurt us?

Cancer expert unaware of Inverse Square Law

Lisdexamfetamine (L-lysine-d-amphetamine) is an inactive molecule prodrug (brand name Vyvanse) consisting of the psychostimulant d-amphetamine coupled with the essential amino acid L-lysine. Lisdexamfetamine was developed so that the psychostimulant is released and activated more slowly as the prodrug molecule is hydrolyzed—consequently cleaving off the amino acid-during the first pass through the intestines and/or the liver. Essentially, this makes lisdexamfetamine an extended-release formulation of d-amphetamine; however, the release characteristics are integral to the molecule itself, rather than simply the pill construction.

Lisdexamfetamine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And people accuse me of offensively characterizing people who reach different conclusions than I have. It is to laugh. In reply, and attempting to remain more civil than Robin had been, I said this.

You misread the article, Robin. If you look at the power-consumption results on page 14, you’ll see that the Hitachi drive drew more power *at idle* than the Sandisk SSD did *under load* - and that doesn’t even count the difference in cooling needs. The MemoRight SSD also used less power at idle than the Hitachi did, and idle is where most notebook drives are most of the time. Those results are starkly at odds with the traffic-generating headline, and until the inconsistency is resolved I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions. What problems do exist with SSD power consumption are also more easily solved than you let on. Some functions can be moved back to the host, others to dedicated silicon which can do them very efficiently. It’s not like hard drives don’t have processors in them drawing power too, y’know. When somebody does a head to head comparison where the drives are idle 90% of the time and only reading 90% of the remainder, and properly accounts for the fact that whole-system I/O performance might not scale perfectly with drive performance, then it’ll be worth paying attention to.

Of course, Robin tried to poison the well by preemptively dismissing any methodological criticism as “denial and obfuscation” but I’d like to expand on that last point a bit. At the low end of the scale, a slightly improved I/O rate might prevent a processor from entering its power-saving sleep modes. At the high end of the scale, a slightly improved I/O rate could push a multi-threaded benchmark past the point where context switches or queuing problems degrade performance. In these cases and many others, the result can be more instructions executed and more power drawn on the host side per I/O, yielding a worse-than-deserved result for a faster device on benchmarks such as Tom’s Hardware used. Since the power consumed by CPUs and chipsets and other host-side components can be up to two orders of magnitude more than the devices under test, it doesn’t take long at all before these effects make such test results meaningless or misleading.

I’m sure Robin knows a thing or two about storage benchmarketing, which is not to say that he has engaged in it himself but that he must be aware of it. Workloads matter, and any semi-competent benchmarker can mis-tune or mis-apply a benchmark so that it shows something other than the useful truth. Starting from an assumption that Tom’s Hardware ran the right benchmark and demanding that anyone else explain its flaws is demanding that people reason backwards. Instead we should reason forwards, starting with what we know about I/O loads on the class of systems we’re studying, going from there to benchmarks, results, and conclusions in that order. That’s where the �... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Canned Platypus » SSD Power Consumption