How Well Do You See Color?

Well first can you even see colors: Do you see numbers in all of these circles?

Yes? Okay good - you're not colorblind.

But how good is your color vision really?

Well you can take this more difficult test and see how well you can discern subtle differences in color hue by sorting them. (Click on image to go to test)

This is harder than it seems since the human eye sees color well but isn't so good at detecting small changes in color, especially over a short distance. In fact much of the power of JPEG compression comes from the fact it can throw away a lot of color variation information in an image that the human eye would never be able to see anyway.

However just as the colorblind are at one side of the bell curve of color sensitivity, there are tetrachromats on the other side. Typically women these rare people actually have an extra type of color cone in their retina (between red and green) that allows them to differentiate colors much better than the average person. You moron-types might even be married to one of these. more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:16 PM | Comments (460)
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My dad used to say "Son, there's two kinds of people in this world. People who know what the hell they're doing, and assholes like you."

Good talk dad. Good talk. I treasure those moments.

People who know what they are doing:

The Plague 19
Muletrain2016 19
Jimmytheleg 19
Porky 19 (he had 3 K's in the name) (I don't know what that means DiT)
annieposition 18
Anthony L 18
Brooklyn Babe 18
Scantily Clad Scandi's 18
FMG 18
Pastafarian 18
Scott 18
MD-Moron 18

People who sorta know what they're doing:

DrewM 17 (RINO!)
CDR M 14
Andy 14 (Ben made me do this)
Russ from Winterset 13
RD Brewer 13

Assholes like me:

DiT 11
Ben 11
Gabe 9
Ace 8

thanks Ben and CDR M for the results.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 03:58 PM | Comments (110)
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Just a new thread.

Posted by: Ace at 02:19 PM | Comments (429)
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What is the Fifth Amendment again? What is the actual situation in which you're permitted to invoke it?

Ah yes: You invoke your Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when an official inquiry would compel you to yield evidence against yourself, which could be used against you in a criminal trial.

Lately no one says that anymore; they invoke it vaguely, speaking of their rights to keep silent "based on any part of the Constitution which might be relevant," or whatever, avoiding naming the Amendment whose protections are sought.

In the letters sent to the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, attorneys for Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison and CFO W. G. Stover said they advised their clients not to provide testimony during the hearings.

I think @johnny_shop's most excellent scandal timeline needs a fresh entry at the end.

@karolnyc, meanwhile, notes that Solyndra was a terrible thing even before the bankruptcy and loss of $535 million of taxpayer dollars.

The major problem with Solyndra is not all the ways that the government failed to prop up a company, or all the bad reasons why the Obama administration chose Solyndra to receive such an obscene amount of money. Pointing out that the Obama administration is inept and using Solyndra as an example is valid but it only focuses on a part of the bigger problem.

That bigger problem, of course, is that the government gave out half a billion dollars to a company employing 1100 people, and that this was considered a success (before it wasn't). That's around half a million dollars an employee.

We're at the point where giving away half a million dollars per employee is considered a good use of the tax dollars the government collects and now the government wants to collect even more.

Why not just give each potential employee $250k, which might actually stimulate the economy while saving a quarter of a billion dollars.

President Obama is playing his class warfare game by insisting "the rich" aren't paying their fair share. He wants to collect more money from those who have been successful in their businesses in a way that he clearly hasn't.

This is a president who has never run anything and never had to succeed in making a profit. Being a community organizer isn't inherently a bad thing, it just doesn't prepare someone from the realities of balancing budgets and making smart investments.

Solyndra wasn't making a consumer product, or a business product; it was making a political product, and of course it found eager buyers in Obama's regime of Keynesian Kops.

Posted by: Ace at 12:50 PM | Comments (461)
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Back in 2007, Obama was questioned very, very softly on some of his investments.

"What I wanted to make sure is that I didn't want to invest in companies that potentially would create conflicts with my work here," said Obama, who has campaigned on the need for stronger congressional ethics rules. "Obviously, the thing didn't work the way I wanted it to."

Obama purchased $5,000 in shares for AVI, which was developing a drug to treat avian flu. Two weeks after buying the stock, as the disease was spreading in Asia, Obama pushed for more federal funding to fight the disease, but he said he did not discuss the matter with any company officials.

Obama also had more than $50,000 in shares of Skyterra, a company that had just received federal permission to create a nationwide wireless network that combined satellite and land-based communications systems.

Among the company's top investors were donors who raised more than $150,000 for Obama's political committees, the New York Times reported Wednesday. The stock holdings were first examined Monday by the financial Web site, Thestreet.com.

The reports found no evidence that any of his actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months he owned the stocks. Obama lost about $15,000 on Skyterra and earned a profit of about $2,000 on AVI. Skyterra stocks continued to drop after Obama divested.

So he did not make money on Skyterra, but he had a cash-money relationship with Skyterra's biggest investors.

And why is that important? Because Skyterra is now known as LightSquared.

Thanks to Todd.

Posted by: Ace at 12:41 PM | Comments (41)
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It should be noted that even if everyone paid the same flat-rate in taxes, the rich would pay more. Obviously-- they have more money. If everyone was taxed at 23% flat, then a poor man making $20,000 per year would pay $4600 in taxes (assuming he didn't get breaks and credits to reduce this, which he almost certainly would) and a rich man making $2,000,000 per year would pay $460,000.

That's more, isn't it? That seems like a great deal more to me.

But it is urged that the tax rate also be progressive, such that the rich also pay a higher effective rate on their earnings than the poor.

Obama alleges that by this measure, the rich aren't paying their fair share, that even though they may be paying more in absolute dollars than, say, a secretary, they are paying a lower effective rate of taxation, and that's not fair.

Is that fair? I don't know, once you're kicking more than a hundred thousand per year to Uncle Sam I'm not having an easy time saying you're a free rider.

But even taking Obama's goal as a worthy one, does he have the facts of the matter right?

No, of course not, and he's so far off the mark that even AP feels obligated to note this.

On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

The 10% of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70% of federal income taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

...

This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average 29.1% of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes, payroll taxes and other taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay an average of 15% of their income in federal taxes.

Lower-income households will pay less. For example, households making between $40,000 and $50,000 will pay an average of 12.5% of their income in federal taxes. Households making between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7%.

So, Obama commits a foul during the annual Andover-Deerfield debate by making an false factual claim.

That should really eat at David Brooks, because apparently Prep School Grace is the only thing that matters.

Posted by: Ace at 12:18 PM | Comments (135)
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Via Hot Air, at FoxNews.

In just three weeks, online gamers deciphered the structure of a retrovirus protein that has stumped scientists for over a decade, and a study out Sunday says their breakthrough opens doors for a new AIDS drug design.

The protein, called a protease, plays a critical role in how some viruses, including HIV, multiply. Intensive research has been underway to find AIDS drugs that can deactivate proteases, but scientists were hampered by their inability to crack the enzyme's structure.

Looking for a solution, researchers at the University of Washington turned to Foldit, a program created by the university a few years ago that transforms problems of science into competitive computer games, and challenged players to use their three-dimensional problem-solving skills to build accurate models of the protein.

With days, the gamers generated models good enough for the researchers to refine into an accurate portrayal of the enzyme's structure. What's more, the scientists identified parts of the molecule that are likely targets for drugs to block the enzyme.

Two obvious points. One, "The Wisdom of the Crowd" can be used to solve problems in the information age.

Two, any time you convert something that feels like work into something that feels like pleasure or play you can get a lot of stuff done, because people don't mind dedicating hours to a pursuit if it's fun.

One neat application of this is CAPTCHA, which asks human users to decode distorted words from books which are being digitized. The words aren't recognizable by OCR means, so humans are enlisted to guess at the words, automating the process of converting a screen-capped page into a digitized books.

Actually now that I see that that is free, I'm wondering if I shouldn't throw a CAPTCHA on the comments to keep out the spammers.

Posted by: Ace at 11:53 AM | Comments (136)
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An Air Force General already reported, on the record, that the White House tried to push him into altering his testimony in order to help LightSquared.

LightSquared has a neat business plan -- wireless internet for homes. They'd just beam the signals to your house, and your home would beam back your imputs. No cable-optic or copper wires.

The problem is that the particular band of the electromagnetic spectrum LightSquared purchased for this purpose happens to sit right next to the band for GPS positioning, and there are questions about whether having so much traffic in a nearby band would disrupt/distort the GPS signal. Which, of course, not only has gonzo consumer applications, but crucial military ones.

Now another government official steps forward to say the White House offered him "guidance" about the timetable for resolving the question of whether about signal bleed from LightSquared's band would disrupt the GPS band.

Anthony Russo, director of the National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing, told The Daily Beast he rejected “guidance” from the White House’s Office of Budget and Management suggesting he tell Congress that the government’s concerns about the project by the firm LightSquared could be resolved in 90 days, a timetable favorable to the company’s plans.

“They gave that to me and presumably the other witnesses,” Russo said. “There is one sentence I disagreed with, which said that I thought the testing could be resolved in 90 days. So I took it out.”

Russo said he objected to that language because “I have low confidence that we can complete all of the testing in 90 days.” He estimated that such testing would take at least six months. Russo called the White House efforts to alter his testimony “guidance rather than pressure.”

Right, well, that's what he says.

Posted by: Ace at 11:23 AM | Comments (130)
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For once that's not a made-up quote. He admits he's got a real blind spot when it comes to President Impeccably Creased Trousers.

IÂ’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. IÂ’m an Obama Sap.

When the president said the unemployed couldnÂ’t wait 14 more months for help and we had to do something right away, I believed him. When administration officials called around saying that the possibility of a double-dip recession was horrifyingly real and that it would be irresponsible not to come up with a package that could pass right away, I believed them.

I liked ObamaÂ’s payroll tax cut ideas and urged Republicans to play along. But of course IÂ’m a sap. When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.

It recycles ideas that couldnÂ’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didnÂ’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives.

After hitting the specifics of Obama's non-proposal for a while, he concludes:

The president believes the press corps imposes a false equivalency on American politics. We assign equal blame to both parties for the dysfunctional politics when in reality the Republicans are more rigid and extreme. ThereÂ’s a lot of truth to that, but at least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think. The White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths. To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used.

The White House has decided to wage the campaign as fighting liberals. I guess I understand the choice, but I still believe in the governing style Obama talked about in 2008. I may be the last one. IÂ’m a sap.

David Brooks is a very soft thinker. Although it's nice that he's writing something bad about Obama, this piece says a lot more about him than it does about his intended target.

Why was David Brooks so smitten with Obama? And why is he so disappointed with him now?

He was smitten by Obama's promise to "raise the tone" of debate, to make politics less of a dirty, populist affair and more of a high-minded exchange of wonkish ideas by the denatured, gray intellectual class. And he's disappointed because Obama is repudiating that promise, and unleashing his inner demagogue.

Is an "elevated tone" in politics desirable? I suppose. I wouldn't mind it. Eh, cancel that, I'd welcome it.

However, what priority should this be on anyone's list of wants?

Very high, as David Brooks seems to rank it? Or rather very low, given 1, substantive goals are much more important than what "tone" was employed to achieve those substantive ends, and 2, the "tone" in politics has generally never been terribly elevated so a pining for it is a quixotic self-delusion.

I wrote about this in the update to the Jon Stewart post, noting that this was a fairly trivial goal to dedicate oneself to.

Is it a decent goal? Sure, it's decent. Sure, as someone who is occasionally revolted by cheap demagoguery, I'd like to see less cheap demagoguery (unless I'm the one employing it and it seems effective). Sure, I'd like to see, say, FoxNews strive for a more elevated tone, more like the New York Sun than the New York Post. Sure, it would be nice if politicians spent more time on economic policy and detailed solutions than gotcha opposition research.

A decent goal, but how high exactly should that be on my list of priorities -- especially given, as I've said, that it's never going to happen?

For David Brooks, this abstract goal of having a less uncouth political class, filled with politicians who at least spoke more like himself, with the particular set of manners and restraint of declasse passion of the status-assured, educated old-money Anglo-Saxon aristocracy is of a higher priority than any tangible political policy goal.

Supposedly he's a "conservative," at least on fiscal matters, and ergo should have opposed Obama on those grounds. But for David Brooks, the idea of a man with an impeccably-creased trousers, who spoke with a Bluffer's Guide fluency about Reinhold Niebuhr, who would make our national dialogue possibly sound more like Firing Line than Crossfire, trumped all tangible political goals such as keeping government spending down and limiting government's expansion into new areas which it could screw up.

But no. For David Brooks, a sharp trouser crease trumped a sharp demarcation of the boundary of government intrusiveness.

Consider what this says about David Brooks.

What I mean is this: If this weak, vague, gauzy crap is your greatest concern, what does that say about you?

Well, it says you're a soft-thinker. But apart from such personal attacks, it also says that you're a member of the comfortable upper middle class with virtually no fear of economic dislocation. While you may have opinions about economics, you can afford to prioritize such matters below worries about "tone," because you are altogether immune from economic misery.

Your job is set, guaranteed for life (virtually), with few competitors for it. You're a one-man operation, an employee; your only interaction with the realities of business life is cashing a check, meeting with investment advisers, and occasionally pitching a book to a publisher.

You do not particularly fear a reduction of wages or an increase in taxes, because you're already making as much money as a writer could reasonably expect to make. Plus, there is not (yet) any way to tax the non-pecuniary benefits of your job -- influence, fame, respect, easiness of it all -- which far outstrip the pecuniary ones you have to give the government a piece of.

In short, you are someone whose interest in politics is chiefly a theoretical matter. You have no skin in the game. You can afford to be dispassionate about Obama's $500 billion cut to Medicaid, because in all likelihood you'll be an employed writer into your seventies and will have private insurance and even when retired will have enough money to opt out of the system. You can afford to have an intellectual's distance from Obama's choking regulatory overreach, because your only "business" is writing seven hundred words twice a week; you have no employees, no mandates, no regulations to comply with. You can gamely defend your cultural brother-from-another-mother Obama even as his policies do nothing to decrease (and probably in fact increase) grinding unemployment of levels of misery not seen since the Great Depression, since your job is effectively pink-slip-proof and even the friends you know who've lost their jobs are largely rich and therefore have plenty of cushion for three or four lean years.

In short, you can afford to give Obama a pass on all of his destructive policies, the policies which really hurt regular people who are not so fortunate as to have comfortable, bulletproof berths at the New York Times, and focus laser-like on childish frettings about "tone" and its alleged "elevation" because you're as removed from the vigor and scuffle of the scrum that is the working world as the palest, dottiest tenured professor.

I'll say one thing about union members -- at least they are fighting for something tangible and real. Money in pocket -- can't get much more tangible than that. I don't approve of their agenda of taking from everyone else so that they can have more, but I can at least accept that they're pushing for something real.

And David Brooks?

Still just pining for a president who speaks eloquently of great books and 60s French cinema in a practiced non-regional diction (or a regional diction, if that region is Andover, Massachusetts). The kind of man you'd like to share a beer port with.

Must be nice, to be so nicely ensconced in a cushy berth that you're liberated from all other, more tangible concerns of politics.

And I'm sure it is nice. I don't begrudge him that, exactly.

What I fault him for is his solipsism -- he is incapable of understanding that perhaps he should worry about the concerns of people less well-off a little more, and not agitate relentlessly for a "politics" which, to the extent I can understand it, consists chiefly of concerns about prep school manners.

Can David Brooks step far enough away from his own vantage point -- can he imagine, for a moment -- to realize that most businessmen are more sharply regulated, and are more harassed by the government, than he himself experiences, as part of the very tiny cadre of professional writers?

Does his politics take into account, at all, the notion of the greatest good for the greatest number (and least woe to the rest), or is it all about, and only about, making David Brook feel not-so-embarrassed or so much the outsider at Upper West Side dinner parties?

Politics is personal, the leftists used to say, but isn't this taking things quite too far?

Posted by: Ace at 10:28 AM | Comments (248)
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"I think you're lying, Tucker."

He responds by asking her why she gives convicted rapist Mike Tyson puff interviews.

Then it starts to get personal.

I knocked the Daily Caller for this on Saturday on Twitter (but didn't care to spread the actual story around too much, so I didn't post it on the blog).

The original article is neutrally written. There is not a suggestion of the writer's belief that Mike Tyson is out-of-bounds, not a word of criticism for the ESPN radio hosts for taking the interview here.

Only later does an Editor's Note appear indicating the piece was published to elicit condemnation.

Sometimes it's hard to read tone, but the sense I got from the original piece was that the best jokes were being highlighted.

The Original Piece: I have been referring vaguely to the original piece because I didn't want to give them the traffic they seemed to be looking for.

Google "Daily Caller Tyson Palin" if you want to see the original story, and video, but be warned, the print digest of the Tyson interview is edgy and offensive, and the actual audio of the interview is probably NSFW. Locker-room sex stuff. And just in case it isn't already risque enough, Tyson starts throwing in some weird racial stuff, too.

Posted by: Ace at 09:18 AM | Comments (428)
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