Brownian Motion

Fat Man Little Boy Tubby the Tuba

Well, maybe it was headed toward Organissimo immortality, but then Brownian Bowel Movement got into the act and ruined everything. Fucker.

He wanted shriveled testicles?

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By July 19, 2007 Computer Checkers Program Is Invincible By KENNETH CHANG For an exercise in futility, go play checkers against a computer program named Chinook. Developed by computer scientists at the University of Alberta in Canada, Chinook vanquished human competitors at tournaments more than a decade ago. Now, in an article published today on the Web site of the journal Science, the scientists report that they have rigorously proved that Chinook, in a slightly improved version, cannot ever lose. An opponent, no matter how skilled, practiced or determined, can at best achieve a draw. In essence, that reduces checkers to the level of tic-tac-toe, where the ideal game-playing strategy has been codified into a series of immutable rules. But checkers — or draughts as it is known in Great Britain — is much more complex, with 500 billion billion theoretically possible board positions; it is the most complex game that has been solved to date. Jonathan Schaeffer, a professor of computer science at the University of Alberta, set out on his checkers-playing quest in 1989, aiming to write software that could challenge the world checkers champion. He and his colleagues finished their computations 18 years later, in April. “From my point of view, thank god it’s over,” Dr. Schaeffer said. Even with the advances in computers over the past two decades, it is still impossible, in practical terms, to compute moves for all 500 billion billion board positions. Instead, the researchers took the usual starting position and then looked only at the positions that would occur during the normal course of play. “It’s a computational proof,” Dr. Schaeffer said. “It’s certainly not a formal mathematical proof.” Because of the vast numbers of calculations, the researchers had to painstakingly keep track of every bit of data. The miscopying of a single bit — the type of glitch that did occur every few months — could render their result incorrect if it were not caught and corrected. Anyone can play a game against the perfect Chinook at http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/. (It is limited to 24 matches at a time.) The earlier incarnation of Chinook, relying on artificial intelligence techniques and the combined computing power of many computers, competed in the 1990 United States championship and placed second behind Marion Tinsley, the world champion who had won every tournament he had played in since 1950. That achievement should have earned Chinook the right to challenge Dr. Tinsley, a professor of mathematics at Florida State University, for the world championship, but the American Checkers Federation and the English Draughts Association refused to sanction the match. After much wrangling in the checkers world, Dr. Tinsley and Chinook battled for the Man-Machine checkers title in 1992. Dr. Tinsley won, 4 to 2 with 33 draws. Chinook’s two wins were only the sixth and seventh losses for Dr. Tinsley since 1950. In a rematch two years later, Dr. Tinsley withdrew after six draws, citing health reasons. Cancer was diagnosed, and Dr. Tinsley died seven months later. In subsequent tournaments, Chinook handily triumphed over other human challengers, but the unfinished match against Dr. Tinsley left a lingering question of whether Chinook could claim to be the best of all time. The new research proves that Chinook is invincible in the traditional game of checkers. But in most tournament play, a match starts with three moves chosen at random. In solving the traditional game, the researchers have also solved 21 of the 156 three-move openings, leaving a crack of hope for humans, at least for now. For Dr. Schaeffer, the next game he hopes to conquer is poker. Next week, his program, Polaris, will take on two professional poker players in Texas Hold’em for the $50,000 man vs. machine world championship. Home

Here's a couple of possibilities: Bookseller Photo LIKE US: PRIMATE PORTRAITS (ISBN: 0393034992) Schwartz, Robin Bookseller: www.modernrare.com (Chicago, IL, U.S.A.) Price: US$ 110.00 [Convert Currency] Quantity: 1 Shipping within U.S.A.: US$ 7.45 [Rates & Speeds] Add Book to Shopping Basket Book Description: New York City, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Hardcover. Book Condition: As New. Dust Jacket Condition: As New. 1st Edition. 1st Printing. 87 pages. Published in 1993. The photographer's breakthrough debut collection. One of the most beautiful photography books of the year 1993. A lovely production by Robin Schwartz: Small-size volume format. Black cloth boards with metallic-silver titles on cover and spine, as issued. Photographs and text by Robin Schwartz. In pictorial DJ with black titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Presents the naturalist photographer's witty and loving work on various primates: Monkeys, gorillas, chimpanzees, and many others. What is singular, and much-discussed, about many of the photographs is the way Schwartz has photographed the animals in artificial, man-made settings, dressed and seemingly behaving and posing like humans. As the publisher's blurb says, it asks the eternal question, "How much do we have in common with our fellow primates?" Quite a bit and most of it very comforting, actually. A wonderful book. This title has been out-of-print for a very long time. This is one of very few copies still available online and has no flaws, a pristine beauty. A scarce copy thus. One of the most talented living American photographers. A flawless copy. ISBN 0393034992. Bookseller Inventory # 4069 Gorillas (ISBN: 0747202117) Sara Godwin Bookseller: Bills Books or Bangor Bookshop (Bangor, Wales, United Kingdom) Price: US$ 18.86 [Convert Currency] Quantity: 1 Shipping within United Kingdom: US$ 6.81 [Rates & Speeds] Add Book to Shopping Basket Book Description: Headline, 1990. Book Condition: Good. Bridging the Gap between Man and Ape, principal photography by Gerry Ellis. Bookseller Inventory # 007613

I first saw Mark O'Connor at a club in St. Louis in 1976. He was 15, and he could play! I've always preferred his guitar work over his fiddle; unfortunately he has been forced to drop guitar because of chronic bursitis. Here's a good example of O'Connor at about age 20. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jaxdj4wLHnA...ted&search=

I just picked up the Guaraldi - Bola Sete album. The vendor sent me a freebie with my order--a Kenny G. Xmas album!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/world/mi...ast/12iraq.html The New York Times July 12, 2007 $282 Million Stolen in Heist at Private Bank in Baghdad By ALISSA J. RUBIN BAGHDAD, July 11 — In an astonishing heist, guards at a bank here made off with more than a quarter-billion dollars on Wednesday, according to an official at the Interior Ministry. The robbery, of $282 million from the Dar Es Salaam bank, a private financial institution, raised more questions than it answered, and officials were tight-lipped about the crime. The local police said two guards engineered the robbery, but an official at the Interior Ministry said three guards were involved. Both confirmed that the stolen money was in American dollars, not Iraqi dinars. It was unclear why the bank had that much money on hand in dollars, or how the robbers managed to move such a large amount without being detected. Several officials speculated that the robbers had connections to the militias, because it would be difficult for them to move without being searched through many checkpoints in Baghdad. Otherwise on Wednesday, there was only scattered violence in the city, although 18 bodies were found by the police in different neighborhoods, signaling that sectarian killing had not ebbed. In a village just north of Falluja, however, extremists in two vehicles, possibly in an act of revenge, forced the residents of a house inside, locked the doors and blew up the building. Eleven people died, according to a report by United States marines who operate in the area. The house is owned by a member of the local provincial security forces, which are fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni Arab insurgent group that includes some foreigners. In Mosul, an American helicopter returned fire after being shot at, but hit civilians, according to Brig. Gen. Abd al-Kareem Khalaf Juboori of the Mosul police. Two people were killed and 14 wounded, including two children. The killing continued in Diyala Province, where American operations are under way to try to reduce the influence of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Three bodies were found with signs of torture near the town of Khalis; an army checkpoint was attacked with mortars; a local police station was attacked; and a roadside bomb killed an Iraqi Army soldier and wounded four others in Khan Beni Sa’ad, about 50 miles from Baghdad. Iraqi solders at a checkpoint near the Syrian border seized a truck carrying 200 suicide vests. While the vests had not yet been loaded with explosives, a car filled with explosives was found nearby. The police suspect that the two were traveling together, said Maj. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf, an official at the checkpoint. The government announced several measures to help repair the damage from the enormous truck bomb earlier this week in Amirli in northern Diyala Province. Families who lost one or more relatives will receive a payout of $2,400, and families that had a relative wounded will be awarded $800, said Abbas al-Bayati, a member of Parliament designated by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to oversee the area’s reconstruction. Mr. Maliki also allocated $10 million to rebuild the remote village. The Ministry of Trade announced it had begun a coordinated effort with the Defense and Interior Ministries to ship food to areas that insurgents had cut off, and was making Amirli a special priority, along with Rutba in western Iraq and Tal Afar in the north near Mosul. The German Foreign Ministry announced the release of Hannelore Krause, who had been held hostage for 155 days by Iraqi insurgents calling themselves the Arrows of Righteousness. But her son, who is 20, was still being held, and in an interview on the Arabiya satellite television network she asked the German government to comply with the kidnappers’ demands that her country withdraw their troops from Afghanistan. “If they do not withdraw, they will slaughter my son,” she said. Meanwhile, the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants said Wednesday that the number of refugees worldwide increased by almost two million in 2006, pushing the total to nearly 14 million, the highest level since 2001, The Associated Press reported. Iraqis accounted for more than a third of the increase. The committee, a nongovernmental group in Washington, said that of the 790,000 people who left Iraq last year, 449,000 went to Syria and 250,000 to Jordan. About 80,000 went to Egypt and 202 to the United States. Cleric Flees After Death Threats BAGHDAD, July 11 (AP) — An Anglican vicar who may have received a cryptic warning about the recent failed car bombings in London and Glasgow has fled Iraq after threats against his life, an associate said Wednesday. The vicar, Canon Andrew White, a Briton who ran Iraq’s only Anglican church, left Tuesday and returned to Britain, the associate said on condition of anonymity, saying the British Foreign Office had asked that it be the only source of information on the case. The associate refused to elaborate on the threats. But the BBC Web site said pamphlets dropped in Shiite areas of Baghdad said Canon White was “no more than a spy.” Canon White had been working to secure the release of five British hostages who were seized at the Iraqi Finance Ministry on May 29 by gunmen wearing police uniforms. On July 4, he told The Associated Press that he had met a man in Amman, Jordan, in April who was identified by religious leaders as a leader of Al Qaeda. The man told him, “Those who cure you will kill you.” Canon White said in retrospect that it might have been a warning of the plot to blow up car bombs in London and Glasgow. All the suspects worked in the medical professions. Canon White had been visiting Iraq regularly since 1998 and remained here after the American invasion in 2003, holding services inside the Green Zone. Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Diyala, Mosul, Hilla and Falluja.

http://www.askart.com/AskART/index.aspx

Filed at 2:34 p.m. ET RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Doug Marlette, the North Carolina-born cartoonist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988, was killed in a single-car accident Tuesday morning in Mississippi, authorities said. He was 57. Marlette was the passenger in the car, which struck a tree after skidding on a rain-slicked road, said John Garrison, the coroner in Mississippi's Marshall County. ''Evidently, it hydroplaned, left the highway and struck the tree,'' Garrison said. Marlette's editorial cartoons and his comic strip, ''Kudzu,'' are syndicated worldwide. Marlette began drawing political cartoons for The Charlotte Observer in 1972. He won the Pulitzer in 1988 for his editorial cartooning in both Charlotte and at the Atlanta Constitution, which he had joined the year before. He said at the time that his biting approach could be traced in part to ''a grandmother bayoneted by a guardsman during a mill strike in the Carolinas. There are some rebellious genes floating around in me.'' He joined New York Newsday in 1989. He has also worked for newspapers in Florida and Tulsa, Okla. ''Cartoons are windows into the human condition,'' he said when he joined the Tulsa World last year. ''It's about life.''

This "anti-scam" site is in itself a scam. Why else would they ask for paypal donations to fund such an inefficient and meaningless attack on scammers?

Here is my nominee: http://www.vlib.us/web/worldwideweb3d.html

AP LISBON, Portugal — The Great Wall of China, Rome's Colosseum, India's Taj Mahal and three architectural marvels from Latin America were among the new seven wonders of the world chosen in a global poll released on Saturday. Jordan's Petra was the seventh winner. Peru's Machu Picchu, Brazil's Statue of Christ Redeemer and Mexico's Chichen Itza pyramid also made the cut. About 100 million votes were cast by the Internet and cellphone text messages, said New7Wonders, the nonprofit organization that conducted the poll. The seven beat out 14 other nominated landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower, Easter Island in the Pacific, the Statue of Liberty, the Acropolis, Russia's Kremlin and Australia's Sydney Opera House. The pyramids of Giza, the only surviving structures from the original seven wonders of the ancient world, were assured of retaining their status in addition to the new seven after indignant Egyptian officials said it was a disgrace they had to compete. The campaign to name new wonders was launched in 1999 by the Swiss adventurer Bernard Weber. Almost 200 nominations came in, and the list was narrowed to the 21 most-voted by the start of 2006. Organizers admit there was no foolproof way to prevent people from voting more than once for their favorite. A Peruvian in national costume held up Macchu Picchu's award to the sky and bowed to the crowd with his hands clasped, eliciting one of the biggest cheers from the audience of 50,000 people at a soccer stadium in Portugal's capital, Lisbon. Many jeered when the Statue of Liberty was announced as one of the candidates. Portugal was widely opposed to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Another Swiss adventurer, Bertrand Piccard, pilot of the first hot-air balloon to fly nonstop around the world, announced one of the winners _ then launched into an appeal for people to combat climate change and stand up for human rights before being ushered off the stage. The Colosseum, the Great Wall, Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal and Petra had been among the leading candidates since January, while the Statue of Christ Redeemer received a surge in votes more recently. The Statue of Liberty and Australia's Sydney Opera House were near the bottom of the list from the start. Also among the losing candidates were Cambodia's Angkor, Spain's Alhambra, Turkey's Hagia Sophia, Japan's Kiyomizu Temple, Russia's Kremlin and St. Basil's Cathedral, Germany's Neuschwanstein Castle, Britain's Stonehenge and Mali's Timbuktu. Weber's Switzerland-based foundation aims to promote cultural diversity by supporting, preserving and restoring monuments. It relies on private donations and revenue from selling broadcasting rights. The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, keeps a list of World Heritage Sites, which now totals 851 monuments. But the agency was not involved in Weber's project. The traditional seven wonders were concentrated in the Mediterranean and Middle East. That list was derived from lists of marvels compiled by ancient Greek observers, the best known being Antipater of Sidon, a writer in the 2nd century B.C. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos lighthouse off Alexandria have all vanished. ___ On the Net: http://www.new7wonders.com

Kim Carnes Kim Cattrall Oscar Hammerstein Jr Oscar DeLahoya(sp?, boxer) Floyd Patterson Cassius Clay Brick Fleagle Peter Beagle Legal Eagle

Allen Ginsburg Lawrence Ferlinghetti Gregory Corso Enrico Caruso Robinson Crusoe Swiss Miss

“As a surrealist, I quite enjoy having dementia,” he said in an interview with Time Out London last month.

Spin Marty Ernest Borgnine

Dudley Fosdick Fearless Fosdick Braveheart

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By July 8, 2007 Essay Jazz Messenger By HARUKI MURAKAMI I never had any intention of becoming a novelist — at least not until I turned 29. This is absolutely true. I read a lot from the time I was a little kid, and I got so deeply into the worlds of the novels I was reading that it would be a lie if I said I never felt like writing anything. But I never believed I had the talent to write fiction. In my teens I loved writers like Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Balzac, but I never imagined I could write anything that would measure up to the works they left us. And so, at an early age, I simply gave up any hope of writing fiction. I would continue to read books as a hobby, I decided, and look elsewhere for a way to make a living. The professional area I settled on was music. I worked hard, saved my money, borrowed a lot from friends and relatives, and shortly after leaving the university I opened a little jazz club in Tokyo. We served coffee in the daytime and drinks at night. We also served a few simple dishes. We had records playing constantly, and young musicians performing live jazz on weekends. I kept this up for seven years. Why? For one simple reason: It enabled me to listen to jazz from morning to night. I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers performed in Kobe in January that year, and I got a ticket for a birthday present. This was the first time I really listened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thunderstruck. The band was just great: Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone and Art Blakey in the lead with his solid, imaginative drumming. I think it was one of the strongest units in jazz history. I had never heard such amazing music, and I was hooked. A year ago in Boston I had dinner with the Panamanian jazz pianist Danilo Pérez, and when I told him this story, he pulled out his cellphone and asked me, “Would you like to talk to Wayne, Haruki?” “Of course,” I said, practically at a loss for words. He called Wayne Shorter in Florida and handed me the phone. Basically what I said to him was that I had never heard such amazing music before or since. Life is so strange, you never know what’s going to happen. Here I was, 42 years later, writing novels, living in Boston and talking to Wayne Shorter on a cellphone. I never could have imagined it. When I turned 29, all of a sudden out of nowhere I got this feeling that I wanted to write a novel — that I could do it. I couldn’t write anything that measured up to Dostoyevsky or Balzac, of course, but I told myself it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to become a literary giant. Still, I had no idea how to go about writing a novel or what to write about. I had absolutely no experience, after all, and no ready-made style at my disposal. I didn’t know anyone who could teach me how to do it, or even friends I could talk with about literature. My only thought at that point was how wonderful it would be if I could write like playing an instrument. I had practiced the piano as a kid, and I could read enough music to pick out a simple melody, but I didn’t have the kind of technique it takes to become a professional musician. Inside my head, though, I did often feel as though something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started. Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way. Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist. Even now, almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model. One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!” I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them. Haruki Murakami’s most recent book is a novel, “After Dark.” This essay was translated by Jay Rubin. Home ap

Only if she had been waving the sparkler herself. Seriously, I only enjoy reading about the mishaps and accidents that occur to brain dead teenagers and adults. Almost every boy turned by time into a man still harbors, to a greater or lesser degree, some boy-baggage. Shooting off fireworks, while not a very high-minded pursuit compared to, say, watching baseball games on tv, is usually harmless. Do you experience a rush of pleasure when a pro athlete breaks a bone?

Return to regular web page Detroit News Online July 6, 2007 Scientist's lab work probed State weighs legality of using forensics lab to test spouse's underwear for DNA of another woman. Kathy Barks Hoffman / Associated Press LANSING -- A state forensics scientist who said she tested her husband's underwear for DNA to find out if he was having sex with another woman is being investigated to determine if she violated policies banning the use of state equipment for personal reasons. Ann Chamberlain-Gordon of Okemos testified in a March 7 divorce hearing that she ran the test last September on the underwear of Charles Gordon Jr. Asked by his attorney what she found, she answered, "Another female. It wasn't me." She also said during a May 25 hearing in Ingham County Family Court that she ran the test on her own time with expired chemicals that were set to be thrown away. The Michigan State Police, which oversees the Lansing forensics laboratory where Chamberlain-Gordon works, is conducting an internal investigation. It expects to decide by next week if disciplinary action should be taken. "We don't know exactly what was or wasn't done," State Police spokeswoman Shanon Akans said Tuesday. "We haven't completed our investigation." A request for comment was left Tuesday with Chamberlain-Gordon. She has not had her duties restricted during the investigation, Akans said. The DNA test came to light after Charles Gordon's Lansing attorney, Michael Maddaloni, sent a letter to the State Police and some media outlets questioning how many times DNA tests have been improperly run. Maddaloni said Tuesday that Gordon -- who court records show was a former Canadian Football League player -- disputed his wife's testimony that he acknowledged a sexual encounter with another woman after she found the female DNA on his underwear. Gordon, a defensive back, played with the CFL from the early 1990s through 1997. Chamberlain-Gordon received the inaugural award for Outstanding Contribution to the Michigan State Police Biological Services in 2006 for her research and method development in embryonic/fetal DNA recovery, according to Forensic Science Consultants Inc., which lists her among the forensic scientists it employs. According to information on the Williamston company's Web site, Chamberlain-Gordon has worked for the State Police as a forensic scientist since 1999 and was interim supervisor of the biology unit in 2005. She has given expert witness testimony in more than 50 cases, including in last year's trial involving the death of 7-year-old Ricky Holland. State Police policies dealing with the care and use of property state that "department supplies, materials or equipment shall not be used for any non-duty or non-department purpose." Akans said she didn't know yet whether Chamberlain-Gordon had used state equipment. She added that State Police managers think they have strong policies in place to keep forensic labs secure, but said changes might be made once the investigation into Chamberlain-Gordon is complete. "The integrity of the lab means so much," she said. "We'll be looking at that and seeing if there aren't places to strengthen." Return to regular web page

Denny Laine Paul McCartney Wingy Manone Heather Mills Peg Leg Bates Captain Ahab

Anti-freeze. It's too valuable an export.

Sorry. It's a fireworks animation done with colored paper cuts. It keeps the booms and bangs to a minimum. It's actually very clever.

Anyone seen this? http://tinyurl.com/38zd6q