Spooky Glowing Halloween Lego Men

I wish I had the compunction and drive to make this really cool glowing Lego zombie and headless horseman for Halloween decorations.

It is explained at the Evil mad Scientist Laboratories and doesn't look too hard. Just jamming some LED's into their drilled out heads and bodies. Creepy.

(via Boing Boing Gadgets)

World Champion Philadelphia Phillies

"World Champion Philadelphia Phillies", don't you just like the sound of it.

There is a parade today at noon down Broadstreet in Philadelphia and I aim to be as far away from that as possible. Still I celebrated when the won on Wednesday night in one of the weirdest World Series games ever.

They didn't break my heart this year. They went all the way!

Go Phils!

Test your color IQ

In this quiz, move the color tiles around until the tile are lined up by hue and color. Lower scores are better, zero is perfect.

I got 8, but I bet if I color calibrated my monitor I could have gotten zero.

My debut album

Follow this process to generate your new band's name, debut album and album cover art:

1. Click to get a random wikipedia article. The name of the article is the name of your band.

2. Get a random quotation. The last four words of the last quote is the name of your debut album. Reload the page to get more random quotes.

3. Explore the last seven days at Flickr to get some album art. The third picture is your new album cover art.

My new band, Unexpected Company, will be performing "All Your Fine Trappings" on our first album. Here is the art.



I think the process worked rather well for me. What's the debut album for your new band?

(via Prefsurfer, via This Could Only Happen to Me, via a DIYnot forum post, via a random e-mail forward)

One week to the election - Democratic electoral win in simulations

There is essentially not change from last week in the electoral vote simulations as predicted by the InTrade prediction market data for each state.

The median vote tally for Obama has crept up to 345, but the states in the strong and weak Democrat, and strong and weak republican columns have remain almost the same. With Indiana and Missouri wobbling back and forth but not changing party identities. MSNBC and others still try to make this look like a race, but the prediction markets say otherwise.

I will run the simulation again one more time next week before the election is over and then we can do some analysis.

Gravity Wave Clouds over Wilmington Delaware yesterday

There were these strange cloud formations over Wilmington, Delaware yesterday around 5pm. There looked like the clouds were large waves with light and dark areas that looked like a frozen undulation across the sky. I recalled that there is a cloud effect called gravity waves and I tried to get a picture or two with my cell phone. Unfortunately the pictures don't give the full effect. You could see many bands of dark and light depending on the direction you looked and the waves stretched from horizon to horizon, it was very eerie. I took two pictures pointed to be next to each other to try to give a sense of the scale.

Looking slightly left (approx west north west)

Looking slightly Right (approx north west)


This youtube video shows an time-lapse example of gravity waves over Toma, Iowa that gives the full effect.



I didn't have the time or equipment to try to capture that much time-lapse motion of our gravity waves clouds yesterday. So many natural phenomena, so little time.

Current Reading List and Just Read List- Science Fiction, Fantasy, History and Words

I tend to let my list of favorite authors pile up books for a while and then get them all in mass clump and then read them voraciously. At this rate I will fill up the new library far too soon. I have a plan to show how there are some similar themes in the science fiction I am reading lately. Multiple/Parallel worlds being the most important. For now just the lists:

Retiring...

• Shuttle Down by Lee Correy
• Rude Mechanicals by Kage Baker
• Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels by Scott McCloud

...off of the just read and reading list to the side.

And adding:

• Nation by Terry Pratchett
• Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams
• Incandescence by Greg Egan
• The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• Brasyl by Iam McDonald

Reading to come will be:

• Shakespeare The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi
• Interface by Neal Stephenson
• How to Ditch Your Fairy by Justine Larbalestier

Perhaps I will get around to reviews as I read them. Apersual of the lists shows the science fiction you would expect, some fantasy though some of both of these are young adult novels. History and words from Sarah Vowell and Bill Bryson.

Market Indicators for fun and profit

Somewhat for my own benefit and because of some discussions I have been having with others, I have been collecting market indicators in an attempt to find the one that best captures, for me, the turmoil in the markets and the various sectors of the global financial system that are affected. This means not only stock market indices, but something to capture the credit crisis, the housing crisis and the price of oil and gasoline (perhaps other commodities later).

Firstly, places to find charts of the world stock market indices:

For the United States, Google Finance reports the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ (really NASDAQ is the stock exchange and the Nasdaq Composite is the index).

The Nikkei 225 is an index for the Tokyo Stock exchange. Nikkei 225 charts at Google. Nikkei 225 charts at Yahoo.

The Hang Seng is an index for the Hong Kong stock exchange. Hang Seng charts at Yahoo.

The FTSE 100 is an index for the London Stock Exchange. FTSE 100 charts at Yahoo.

Two other items of interest in recent times have been housing prices and oil prices:

The Case-Shiller index follows housing prices in 20 cities and normalizes them to a baseline of 100 in January of 2000. Standard and Poors has downloadable files of the S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Index each month. A look at the past few years shows the nice bubble that is one of the things causing the financial crisis. You can't always have prices of things run ahead of salaries.

More data than you can stand about oil prices, volumes and its related products is available at the Energy Information Administration. I started with the US imports of oil by country tables here and clicked various other buttons on the petroleum navigator bar at the top of the page.

Finally, I was looking for an indicator of the credit crisis:

The TED spread has been mentioned in a few blogs of late(TED Spread quote at Bloomberg). I myself was looking for an indicator to understand the credit crunch part of the problem. How can one see whether banks are lending to each other or not. I settled for the LIBOR which is the interbank lending rate. The TED spread takes this further. TED stands for T-Bill for treasury bills and Eurodollar which refers to the LIBOR rate and often involves loans between euros and dollars. It is the LIBOR 3-month rate minus the 3 month T-bill rate. The reason for that is that the T-bill rate is a measure of the least risk you can undergo loaning money for 3 months, everyone expects the US government to pay back the money on a T-bill. Loaning money between banks is riskier so the LIBOR tends to be higher, the TED just subtracts the baseline least risk. Usually this number is 0.5% but lately it has been shooting up to 4% and 5%, an obvious indication of banks unwillingness to loan to one another and a reflection of the credit crunch.

Are there other favorite indices that my readers are using to understand the crisis that might be helpful?

The best view I ever had from a toilet

The Mail online ran an article on the toilets with the best views in the world. Many are on the peaks of mountains or the edge of beautiful ocean vistas. Most would be worth visiting.

It reminded me of one outdoor toilet on Easter Island. It was at the ranch where we stayed the night during our horseback riding trip around the entire island. This ranch was within walking distance of Terevaka which contains Rana Raraku, the volcanic crater and quarry where the special stone for the moai (the stone heads) comes from. You could see the volcano dotted with moai that never made it to there final locations. Unfortunately some of these pictures were only taken with the old crappy Treo camera, so they'll never be in a glossy magazine.


The Toilet


The View.


The Moai on the volcano closeup.




Mostly carved but unfinished moai in the quarry itself.




The view of camp and the toilet from the volcano. The toilet is next to the red house. Click on the picture for larger.

Democrats maintain their formidable lead in Presidential Electroal. Vote Simulations

Barack Obama still holds a formidable lead in the presidential electoral vote simulations based on the state by state InTrade prediction market data. From today's results, the Democrats win 99% of the simulations and the median electoral vote count is 340.

There has been little change in the assignment of states to strong and weak categories except that previously weakly Republican Indiana has strengthened for McCain. If instead of the median we look at assigning the states based on the state by state prediction market data, the totals are 364 for Obama to 174 for McCain.

I imagine that the race will still tighten in these last two weeks. It will be interesting to see if that is reflected in the prediction markets.