This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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Gone for a few months, and look what happens! The number of countries with State Department Travel Warnings skyrockets! From 25 to 29!
State Department Travel Warnings Over Time
Of course, looks like these four were all added in the last 2 weeks, and looks like they are all hurricane related. No countries were dropped from the list. The Bahamas and Turks & Caicos were added on September 1st for Hurricane Frances. Cuba and Grenada were added on September 9th for Hurricane Ivan. Given the nature of these warnings, I expect the SDTW Index to drop back to the normal level of around 25 in a few weeks absent other developments.
I swear it wasn’t me!
Man falls from tree at Loxahatchee nudist community
(Andrew Marra, Palm Beach Post)
A man at the Sun Sport Gardens nudist community in Loxahatchee was flown to St. Mary’s Medical Center this morning after falling 20 feet from a tree… It was unclear what the man was doing in the tree.
I added another graph. My ranking on the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem. Fun Fun.
Abulsme.com Ranking
A chart of my ranking on the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem. I haven’t been doing all that well. Nobody links to me. Of course I haven’t been advertising myself and asking people to and such. And I usually don’t have much that I’m saying that people would link to anyway. But still! I’m dropping like a rock!!!
Just got home from the 12:01 AM premiere showing of Return of the King. This finished up seeing each of the first two extended versions in the theaters the last two weeks. It was great. Even getting there an hour before the movie, we got crappy seats (way up front). But I got used to that after the first 15 minutes or so.
In any case, as expected, it was great. All three were. Can’t wait for the extended edition of this one.
As usual, a few things were left out or different from the book, but no matter, it was very true to the spirt of the book, and it was just an incredible movie.
Thanks Peter Jackson! Great Job!
And now, I only have time for about 3 hours sleep before getting up for a job hunt related meeting, so I’d better get to bed. I’m exausted!
Wow, this brings back memories… For several years while I was at Carnegie Mellon, my friend Chad and I worked at the Fine and Rare Book Room at CMU’s Hunt Library. One of the things we had to help catalog and keep in order and good condition and such was indeed CMU’s collection of copies of this poem.
Carnegie Mellon houses collection of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”
AP on NEPA News
“The illustrations are almost always showing a nostalgic view of life in the United States,” said Mary Kay Johnsen, the special collections librarian at the Hunt Library. “The illustrations are always showing toys of the parents’ generation, not of the toys the kids would be receiving with the book of that year.”
(via Google News: Carnegie Mellon)
Mary Kay was our boss at the library. She is still there. And here she is quoted by the AP. Very nice. Those were good days. I remember spending a good deal of time looking at those books.
Ah, memories…
Found this post this morning. Gotta love discussions of non-Euclidian geometries. I need to find a way to carve out some hours each week to play with fun math. It has been way too long.
Non-Euclidean Space
(USS Clueless)
In Euclidean geometry, the fifth axiom was: if there is a line on a plane, and a point on that plane which is not on that line, then there is exactly one line on that plane passing through that point which is parallel to the other line.
For a long time, it seemed to many as if that didn’t need to be an axiom, and much effort went into trying to prove it using the other four axioms, all of which failed.
In the 19th century, some mathematicians decided to try a different approach. One can prove a statement is false by presuming it is true and showing that leads to a contradiction. (Or vice versa.) So what they hoped was that they could try to show that the fifth axiom didn’t need to be an axiom by showing that every alternative statement of it led to a contradiction. If successful, that would mean it was tautological and thus didn’t need to be axiomatic.
Of course, I’d spent a lot of time looking at various non-Euclidean geometries in the distant past… nothing really intense, but the basics… so nothing really NEW in the article for me, but it was good to see that kind of thing again. Makes me want to go do some 12-dimentional contour integration. :-)
A gallery of really funky optical illusions which I had not seen before. The first one especially freaked me out. It so completely looks like it is moving. But it is not.
The Latest Works
(via Merovingian on AppleInsider)
Rebecca, can you give this a proper literary critique?
Writen by commander in Chief W, for first lady Laura’s return from Europe a few weeks ago.
President Bush pens a poem (AP on CNN)
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Oh my, lump in the bed
How I’ve missed you.
Roses are redder
Bluer am I
Seeing you kissed by that charming French guy.
The dogs and the cat, they missed you too
Barney’s still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe
The distance, my dear, has been such a barrier
Next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier.
— George W. Bush
(via BlogDex)
BBSpot OS Quiz
You are Slackware Linux. You are the brightest among your peers, but are often mistaken as insane. Your elegant solutions to problems often take a little longer, but require much less effort to compute.
(via Angelweave)
Seems pretty much right on the money.
And just at lunch today I was talking to some folks about dropping a couple of my season passes (including this one) in favor of some other things. Given this, perhaps I will wait. Hopefully it will air in the US too! And hopefully it will not suck!
Doctor Who ready to come out of the Tardis for Saturday TV series (Tom Leonard, Daily Telegraph)
After aeons drifting hopelessly lost in the space/time continuum, Doctor Who is finally coming back to Earth. In a move that heralds the most eagerly anticipated comeback in television history, BBC1 said yesterday that it is developing a new series of the sci-fi classic.
(via SlashDot)
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