Wow.

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jun/02/sepp-blatter-fifa-president-resigns

“There are two kinds of countries in the world; Metric countries, and countries that put a man on the moon.”

Apologies to all, and thanks to goo_on_shoe for the quote.

So this is supposed to be Pan’s origin story.  It looks like it might be great, but it was supposed to be a summer release that’s been pushed back to the fall so…

Also, bonus points if you can name the actor playing Blackbeard.

“The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you.” – B.B. King

R.I.P.

G+ did something with its stream presentation where I thought I was commenting on a re-share of something The White House posted, but was actually posting to the original thread.  I’m uncomfortably excited to see what happens, given the very different audience than the one that I expected.

There are serious questions concerning Boxing as a sport, and whether a civilized society should allow such an obviously corrupt and brutally destructive enterprise to endure.

I just hit a series of buttons on my cable remote that resulted in me spending $90 for the ability to watch two grown men punch each other for an hour.  I am extremely excited for this match, so much so that the excitement is honestly swamping my ability to reason about the moral issues its existence raises.

FTR, I’m 100% Manny Pacquiao.  Go Pac-Man!

248 days seems like a totally arbitrary number, right?  Well, consider this:

2^31/24/60/60/100 = 248.5

What if each generator has a counter of some kind that’s represented in the code as a basic integer.  Your basic, standard integer is 32 bits long, with one bit used to indicate the sign (+/-), leaving 2^31 possible values.

There are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in each hour, and 60 seconds in each minute.  If this hypothetical counter increments every 10ms or so, then halfway through day 248 it will reset to 0.  It’s obviously impossible for us to know if that’s what’s going on here, but it’s definitely plausible that something like this is the root cause of the glitch.

h/t Piotr Kucharski

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/may/01/us-aviation-authority-boeing-787-dreamliner-bug-could-cause-loss-of-control

The Meta-Ethical Problem

There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards Immanuel Kant. You have the ability to pull a lever and change the trolley’s path so it hits Jeremy Bentham instead. Jeremy Bentham clutches the only existing copy of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Kant holds the only existing copy of Bentham’s The Principles of Morals and Legislation. Both of them are shouting at you that they have recently started to reconsider their ethical stances.

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/lesser-known-trolley-problem-variations

Worst conversation ever.