Marmaduke Bannerworth

Cool beans.

2009-11-09T20:02:40Z

Up over 5% on MSFT in less than 4 trading days. *\o/*\o/*\o/*

Of course if I had kept the DELL, that would be up almost 8% :/

Another reason why socialized health-care sucks and Americans should see Canada as a cautionary tale

2009-11-07T00:19:56Z

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/11/06/ontario-priority-vaccine369.html

Quotable quote

2009-11-04T18:21:39Z

From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/us/05marriage.html

Evan Wolfson, executive director of the national gay-rights group Freedom to Marry, said the loss in Maine underscores "the fact that we need to continue those conversations and make ourselves visible as families in communities."

He added, "It shows we have just not done it long enough and deep enough, even in a place like Maine.”

Trading

2009-11-03T17:50:53Z

Sold DELL, bought MSFT.

Chicks Rock Boogie

2009-10-06T00:06:29Z

Saturday was an interesting day - more interesting than most in my life in fact.

The morning started abruptly with a 4:00am phone call from Russia crying about a server going down. I made the necessary arrangements with IT and decided not to waste the moment by rousing my bedmate for sex round 2. A little more sleep and I got up with my alarm, but instead of heading to the drop zone right away, I decided that it would be wise to be fashionably late and got some more sex and breakfast.

Made four 4-way jumps that didn't go all that well, but the team has been losing and adding people a lot lately and we've had to move down in experience quite a bit to keep it alive. I think there'll be a massive re-factor at the start of next season and hopefully we'll be back to the core of Mark, Rigo, me and a fourth person with the dedication to get a lot better over the coming season.

In the middle of the day my packer vanished, leaving me in the lurch. I was pissed until I found out the my packer had been arrested for smoking weed in the parking lot - in skydiving parlance you call that a "safety meeting."

Oh, and did I mention that there were porn stars there? There's a contingent of skydiving porn stars who jump out of taft - the only name I got was Nicole Sheridan (though her real name is Melle) - they certainly added spice to the party that evening.

The party was 60's themed. One of the freefly load organizers came dressed as a big bag of coke. Tickets were $5 for all you could drink. We did. Some British girl got a kick out of sneaking a condom onto guys shoulders in pictures - fortunately I didn't get tricked on camera, but there were some great shots.

Our 4-way team

Me helping myself to a little of Bart's costume (no it wasn't really coke)

Always fun to hump somebody in a photo when they don't know it's happening

Where's the condom?

How about now?

Unfortunately, I think my cup changed colours a few times over the course of the evening and that may be the reason behind my sniffles today :(

I <3 XKCD

2009-10-05T18:36:40Z

It looks great, but it needs more postfixins.

This picture gets funnier the more you look at it.

2009-10-03T00:32:46Z

A thought

2009-10-01T01:52:27Z

I wonder if you could base a business model on buying houses under foreclosure whose occupants are willing to pay rent to live there, converting homes into rental properties. You could create all kinds of creative rent-to-own schemes to convince people to keep up to date with the rent in hopes of regaining their equity stakes. You could effectively match rent to be marginally higher than the interest on the mortgage for the home at its current price, hence making their home rental monthly out of pocket cheaper than the mortgage they couldn't afford. If you were actuarially clever enough, I imagine you could sniff out a segment of underwater home owners who can't afford their mortgages, but can afford more than the interest on the loan you would need to buy the house.

Of course this is all theoretical at best right now because I think the major drop in the US housing market is yet to come. There are some 7 million foreclosures yet to trickle through this round of assfucking and I think home prices could yet well drop in half or worse.

Gyoza

2009-09-21T03:14:18Z

This is me at the Nisei festival gyoza eating competition. Look at the dude in the hat behind me. I think the subtitle of this picture should be, "impending doom."

Far out

2009-09-16T07:23:26Z

I've liked the question, "what word changes both is meaning and its pronounciation when it is capitalized?"

The answer I was told was polish.

I just noticed another answer, which I think is more elegant - august.

Brilliant idea.

2009-09-16T05:42:33Z

I have an idea for a psycho-social experiment that would yield a tonne of information about people. In a hallway of an apartment building, fix a webcam on the peephole of the door and stick a note to the door that says, "Dear UPS. Please leave my package with the resident service office downstairs," and paperclip a $1 bill onto the note. Then look at all the distinct people that walk by and see who snitches the dollar.

Any guesses on how many people would walk past before somebody stole the buck? Would it vary heavily by zipcode? Could you make a tv show out of this?

I haz a 4-way team

2009-09-13T06:47:01Z

I've finally got a 4-way skydiving team together. We're going to compete at the ghost nationals in October. The fourth is the most experienced by far. He asked me today, "how many jumps do you have?" "Two hundred and fourty five." "Really??? How come you don't suck?" I took that as rather high praise. I am very optimistic for my future in this sport.

And there are a lot of hot women around the dropzone. I'm not feeling too bad about being single right now. I've lost a lot of weight (mostly to slow down my fall rate :D). I don't look half bad.

gas updraft enrichment

2009-09-10T00:47:27Z

Considering a vertical wind tunnel, I think I've found the solution to cheap uranium enrichment. Instead of spinning gaseous uranium around in a centrifuge and arbitraging tiny variations in concentration of 235 and 238 or pouring it through a membrane or a temperature-diverse volume or any other such shit, why not simply separate our atoms by freefall.

Fortunately, at standard temperature and pressure, you can desublimate uranium hexafluoride.

So all we need is a big cylinder filled with uranium hexafluoride and helium. We lower the temperature until the smallest crystals begin to form. Then all we need to do is direct an upward current of helium (and we need to do a good job of keeping the air from being turbulent) at a very very very slow pace such that larger-than-one-molecule crystals of hex fall out immediately (to get sublimated, desublimated, and run again). If we can achieve uniformly small crystals (ideally each just a single molecule) then U235 and U238 will have strikingly different terminal velocities. We simply need to blow the helium at a speed (and keep its temperature and pressure completely constant) such that U235 blows up to the ceiling and U238 sinks down to the floor. (Actually, we could change the shape of the tunnel to make a thin horizontal slice where the dust of each isotope collects)

My limited understanding of chemistry tells me that UF6 would be perfectly happy forming 1-molecule "crystals" that could snow out in a slowly upward moving column of gas, the vast majority of which was helium.

Even if 99.9% of the UF6 formed larger crystals and fell out the bottom, tossing it back in the top is cheap.

The energy involved in this production would be insignificant and we would have really really really cheap nuclear fuel.

The beauty of it all is that we don't need extreme pressures or temperatures.

Idea

2009-09-09T03:35:03Z

If a municipality made it legal to build new homes with wood fireplaces, it would raise everybody's propery value because a wood fireplace is worth much more than the price to install it. The value goes up drastically when most people aren't allowed to have them.

The end of the Chris Ritchie chapter.

2009-09-06T06:27:39Z

Crazy.

Night jumps

2009-08-30T20:00:41Z

Parachuting under cover of night is awesome.

Do I have an accent or something?

2009-08-28T17:30:51Z

Fucking piece of shit DMV. I'm trying to pay the $500 that California steals from me every year for the privilege of wearing a small piece of sheet metal on my car. I cannot get the voice recognition to work for me *AT ALL* and after three tries, the fucker hangs up on me and I have to start over. It can't understand letters when I say them and it asks for them in phonetic alphabet form and it can't understand me on those either. I'm sure I could write software to handle this limited vocabulary better than theirs and I could do it myself in under a month. Of course quality doesn't matter in this environment, since they've got ways of making me pay. Fuckers.

Holy shit.

2009-08-15T05:13:55Z

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2598363071375453449

I want this guy to break RSL encryption.

What I do

2009-07-29T21:23:12Z

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2009/07/68495660/1#uslPageReturn

I designed the microtransaction system which is globally distributed and scales with hardware only up to larger than the entire global MMORPG market. I lead the team of programmers that implemented it.

On immigration...

2009-07-29T06:49:04Z

Democracies fear immigration because they are taken for fools by the underclass.

Wonderful!

2009-07-25T02:43:48Z

I was out on my balcony, having a cigarette and observing the aphid population on my jalepeno plants. It dawned on me that a plant is a very limited resource and that a high aphid density will result in plant mortality, yet they are very primitive insects and they breed like stink on a monkey. Then I thought, they also spread like peanut butter. Some aphids must be induced to leave a perfectly good plant and go searching for a new plant to infect. Evolutionarily, it makes sense that aphids would have a rather large territory and that they would tend to move away from others. Possibly there is a dominance structure or even violence.

The internet is great:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v279/n5711/abs/279324a0.html
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3883080
http://books.google.ca/books?id=3GHhGJC9z9EC&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=aphid+territoriality&source=bl&ots=iqSIv2dzk7&sig=_LSmVZO6CEIkPSZb6Iy59SZ_rdk&hl=en&ei=Xm1qSr3FJZL6sQO48sSWBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10
http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/15/1/94

Genious marketing

2009-07-21T19:36:42Z

Their service sucks, but I'm happy to be an investor in AT&T. I just got a brilliant piece of marketing from them. It was a standard throw-away form letter trying to upsell, but then there was a post-it stuck to it, printed in red ink in a font that looks like casual printing - what you'd expect if somebody wrote quickly on a post-it note. It said,
"Haven't head from you - hope you got this.
Kelly
Your AT&T Service Rep."

It immediately drew my attention and took me (and I'm smarter than the average bear) at least a second to realize that it wasn't actually penned by a person. That must increase the number of people who read the letter by some huge order of magnitude.

On standards

2009-07-21T19:01:18Z

What passes for chocolate in this country is appalling.

A thought

2009-07-20T20:09:00Z

Airlines serve a wide variety of meals, but on any given flight they tend to have 2, plus special shit for vegans and kosher eaters and whatnot. Why not have a menu and allow passengers to choose their meal when they book their flight (or have a default meal if they don't). You could then have the latitude to have higher quality meals for people who are willing to pay extra. Packing the meals onto the plane and serving the right meal to the right patron is pretty trivial to engineer. It's not all that different that boxing up packages for shipping in a warehouse.

Solution to the energy crisis

2009-07-15T05:40:54Z

I've figured out a brilliant way to make green energy. It would involve a power plant on a massive scale designed to harvest the potential energy of the atmosphere. Remember those plastic toy submarines that you put baking soda in and set in a pan of water?

If you think about it, there's a tremendous weight of air above us. I'magine a 33-foot deep pool of water, a mile high surrounding the entire Earth and think of how much mechanical energy the water falling into the Earth by gravity from miles up would generate. Imagine if this water was in containers. The atmosphere is a big, heavy, soupy sea above us. Maybe you have to be a skydiver to truly understand, but there's a lot of mass to be collected just outside your door.

Think of helium balloons and how they float and then imagine we fill them with something better than helium - we fill them with nothing; i'm talking about a balloon with a vaccuum inside it. We'd need a serious vaccuum - hopefully not so pure that you require liquid helium. In order to make this balloon keep its volume and not collapse, it would have to be made of extremely heavy material. Thus in order for the plant to be able to generate enough buyancy to lift its own weight, it would need to be magnificantly large. Effectively you need it big enough that a thick titanium hull would be relatively thinner than the rubber of a party balloon to the diameter of this exoblimp. It would be expensive to engineer and construct, but it could be done with 1980s technology.

You then simply control the air pressure inside the plant to make it rise and fall. The adjustments in pressure are minor and can be made by compressing or vaccuuming atmospheric air in a separate small compartment. You could then make this craft rise and fall by spending miniscule amounts of energy. You're making the motion happen by hedging the weight of all the air above you against the pull of gravity and the plant effectively breathes air by scooping in or dumping out atmosphere (like the bubbles being generated and bubbling out of the toy submarine). This wouldn't work in water, because water doesn't change its volume when under pressure (well, hardly) whereas air is super-combressible. The difference in volumes between states gives you massive leverage with little expenditure. Once you can lift large masses in such a fashion, you can leverage them falling back down into mechanical energy to drive a turbine. Thus one could harvest the energy stored in air pushing you down to make electricity. Best of all, the act of heavilly compressing air yields very cold liquids, useful for soaking up molecules in the air and making extremely pure vaccuums.

Phase I: Breathing in increases the mass of the plant and causes it to fall, producing a byproduct of very cold liquid air.

Phase II: Liquid air is possibly employed to lower the pressure of the plant, by improving its vaccuum lift.

Phase III: When its effectiveness is reduced, liquid air is vented (before it becomes a problem rather than a solution and to eliminate its weight) (or possibly allowed to warm, expand, and be used for propulsion) (the plant breathes out)

Thus we increase our weight by liquifying air and decrease our weight by venting cold liquid - like a fish's gas bladder. We get what amounts to a virtually free up and down.

Now lets not violate the laws of physics. It sounds like I'm trying to describe a perpetual motion machine - this is no more a perpetual motion machine than a windmill. It is powered by the kinetic energy of moving air. In this case, the plant contains the floatiest low pressure air there is. We use a relatively lower density than the atmosphere (at sea level) to have the atmosphere's weight push us up out of the way as it falls past us. The air's own potential energy from its height is being spent to give potential energy to the plant (much like water's kinetic energy falling from a height powers a hydro plant. We ride the air's spent energy to a height, then eat some air to increase our weight and fall on any machine that converts falling mass into electrical energy. The up down cycle would cover a lot of distance and would be slow. The plant would likely have to get heavy and sit down in inclement weather (unless it could use the pressure from sublimating liquid air to fight the wind).

It's going to take me some math to figure the size of the balloon, but I suspect it'll be cthulian.