NSFW…

…in beta,

But still released!

I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but I’m MORE than happy to finally ditch Transmission.

EDIT: I’ve had a chance to play around with it… it’s definitely nowhere near as featured as the Windows version, but it’s definitely a good start.  It’s much faster starting up than Transmission, and feels very speedy.  Unfortunately a majority of the private trackers I go to still only support Transmission for Mac clients, but uTorrent for Mac DOES support encryption.

My biggest gripe is with the lack of a pop up or side drawer upon opening a new torrent file to select which files within a torrent you would like to download without starting the torrent immediately.  The mac version comes close, with offering an option to not have torrents start after opening, and it DOES at least give the option to pick and choose which files you would like in a torrent…you just have to open and load the torrent first, then set which ever files you don’t want to “Skip” then manually start the torrent within the application.

As I said though, definitely a terrific start.

http://mac.utorrent.com/beta/

From ScienceBlogs:

Thought this was interesting video. Peter Schiff calls the recession a year ago and gets laughed at. The first video is my favorite, so at least watch that one. I feel like he outlined it pretty well and then Art Laffer starts laughing at him with extreme arrogance.

Barack Obama:

As I said yesterday, the economic crisis we face demands that we invest immediately in a series of measures that will help save or create two and a half million jobs and put tax cuts in the pockets of the hard-pressed middle class. Many of those new jobs will come in areas such as energy independence, technology, and health care modernization that will strengthen our economy for the future.

But if we’re going to make the investments we need, we must also be willing to shed the spending we don’t. In these challenging times, when we are facing both rising deficits and a sinking economy, budget reform is not an option. It is an imperative.  We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness, or exist solely because of the power of a politician, lobbyist, or interest group.  We simply cannot afford it.

This isn’t about big government or small government. It’s about building a smarter government that focuses on what works.

Chalk me up as a smart-government liberal.  This is what Obama does.  He doesn’t concede the framings and paradigms that currently exist, he challenges them, and remakes them.  This is what makes him great.  Most Democrats would try to win the spin war to avoid the big government criticism, but Obama confronts it head on, and preemptively.

If you haven’t seen the 60 Minutes interview yet, it’s a pretty good one.  I just can’t help feeling great about the fact that he’s our soon-to-be President.  The guy is just 100% legit.  And, for that matter, so is Michelle.  She’s still just sitting there choppin’ him down a peg:

Kroft: You told me that when you went off to Washington and made the decision to live there and when you came back to Chicago you had certain chores that you had to perform. You had to wash the dishes and make your bed.

Mr. Obama: Yeah.

Kroft: Are you free now on that front?

Mr. Obama: Well, I…

Kroft: Certainly there’s gonna be somebody else to wash the dishes and make your bed.

Michelle Obama: Yes.

Mr. Obama: There sometimes it’s soothing to wash the dishes.

Michelle Obama: You? Since when was it ever soothing for you to wash the dishes?

Mr. Obama: You know, when I had to do it. I’d make it into a soothing thing.

You can watch the full thing, in segments, here.

I’ve been meaning to write about Rahm Emanuel for awhile now because I thought it was truly a brilliant decision.  There was a reason that this pick was derided by conservatives because it scares the shit out of them.  He didn’t get the name Rahmbo for nothin’:

Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel’s success is his legendary intensity. There’s the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There’s the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army. And there’s the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting “Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!” and plunging the knife into the table after every name. “When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape,” one campaign veteran recalls. “It was like something out of The Godfather. But that’s Rahm for you.”

This guy is a giant asshole, which is great, because Barack Obama is not a giant asshole.  Barack will provide the soft velvet touch, while Rahm delivers the iron fist to your gut.  That, my friends, is how you get things done in Washington.

Yglesias has me yelling “YES!” at my monitor again…

The larger issue here, however, is that members of congress and high-level executive branch officials need to be paid more. These people make decent salaries — they’re not poor. But at the same time, folks like a backbench member of the House of Representatives or the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America are supposed to be important actors in American society. It’s not a good idea for them to be making orders of magnitude less money than important people in the private sector. Somewhat less, sure. But over time the relative salary of a cabinet secretary versus a corporate executive has eroded enormously for no good reason — it’s not as if the budget savings involved are large enough to make an appreciable difference.

Meanwhile, this becomes a problem when you get deeper down into the regulatory agencies. If the EPA is supposed to be able to assess the level of pollution somewhere and take a bad actor to court if he violates the law, then the EPA needs to have good scientists and good lawyers working for it. That means those people need to be paid salaries that are competitive with what people in those fields can make in the private sector. If you don’t do that, then you either get people who are incompetent or, worse, the “revolving door” phenomenon in which the real value of government work is to cash in later by defecting to the private sector in a way that corrupts the regulatory process.

I’ve been saying this for years.  Government sucks because it hires low-talent employees (generally).  In order to make government better you need to hire high-talent employees, and to do that you need to pay higher salaries.

Hey everyone. I haven’t posted in a while. Love the blog, just never get around to posting. Driving through life at 80 miles and hour and keep missing my exit, if you know what I mean (don’t even think I do.)

Anyways- I just wanted to write that things are going great. The school quarter wrapped up a week ago, and then I flew out to San Francisco to AdobeMAX where things went great, and now I am back at Rochester and heading to Boston from Tuesday to Sunday for thanksgiving break.

On a few topics that deserve more elaboration, AdobeMAX went great. I gave a presentation on the New Media Showcase which was my senior project along with other juicers and talented youngin’s and the presentation was about not only the showcase but sort of a general philosophy on new media and education and the like. Again, this deserves more attention, but the talk went spectacularly. I was at a special Adobe event at Adobe headquarters before the actual MAX presenting to educators and industry leaders and the like. I was the first in a series of talks, and I got to talk for 40 minutes. I really felt like somehow the talk came together, and I really ended up impressing a lot of people. People were coming up to me and the professors all day saying what an excellent job I did and I actually was being referenced in future talks throughout the day. One guy told me that when I got up there, he didn’t expect me to say anything “important” or enlightening or anything that would get him thinking. He said that I just blew him away and that some of the stuff I was talking about really got him thinking. Anyways- it rocked. Real hard. Adobe gloating done.

On to school, school went awesome. Army Ants wrapped up great. I need to capture video on the school computers of the game so I can post it here and elsewhere. I think the game went really spectacularly.

Finally, Darkwind Media is rocking out hard. Luster is blossoming into a fine young gentleman. We will be releasing our first public demos soon, which show off some neat shaders and also take that platform and create a visualizer out of it. Real cool stuff. Be sure to “stay tuned”

That’s all. I need to post more. I need to comment more. I read everyones post and I am glad everyone is doing well. Peace my friends. Keep on Juicin’

P.S. Future posts to come: One on “What Android means for the future of mobile devices” based on my own speculation and a second on “Army Ants : A Post-Mortem”

Now I know how some of yas feel about movie trailers and the like, but I feel like this one is worth a watch.  It doesn’t seem like your typical Aronofsky joint (by which I mean including the use of “experimental” type of camera shots and the like), but it definitely looks interesting.  

Plus, I have a feeling that Mickey Rourke is going to be a front-runner for the Best Actor Oscar for his role in this.

Click on the poster to go right to the Apple Trailers page.

I was just wondering how everybody feels about being solicited almost daily by MoveOn.org, if you are. If not, they’re asking for a lot of money… I know money helps a lot, and that as a government you need money to do things, but is this one of the side effects of having a campaign that wasn’t financed by lobbyists? Are American Democrats effectively replacing the financial role of lobbyists? I’m all for government of the people, by the people, for the people… and I understand the value of not owing favors to large corporate institutions… but I guess I didn’t realize the financial vacancy that would need to be filled. Of course, there’s a good chance I’m misunderstanding the whole situation… any thoughts?

Let me save everybody some time and effort. Never, under any circumstances, allow yourself to purchase a glass-top electric stove. The place I’m renting now came with one, and it’s pretty much the bane of my kitchen.

First off, it doesn’t cook nearly as well as the gas stoves I’ve used before. I’m not sure if it’s because of the way the stove heats or what, but things boil and fry really differently (and not for the better). If for some reason you DO get stuck with one of these, be prepared to constantly stir any thick liquids to prevent them from scalding.

Secondly, NEVER NEVER EVER EVER EVER spill anything on the stove surface when it’s hot (which can be up to 40 minutes after you turn it off, by the way). Doing so will invariably lead you to scrubbing your brillo pad into oblivion and chipping away your thumbnail in an effort to undo the grime. If that doesn’t work, which it won’t, you’re going to need to break out the big guns. I’m talking about razor blades and special cleaners. To get this thing looking respectable, you’re going to have to give it special soaks and scrape the surface with a razor blade. It’s like having another face the size of a boulder and covered in char marks.

Save yourself a lot of trouble, and prepare higher quality food with less hassle. Get a gas stove. I’m 100% positive about this. If you really want an electric stove, I’ll sell you mine. You can have it for cheap, because I can’t seem to get the F$!@ing top of it clean anymore.

A bunch of really smart and hardworking French, German, and Hungarian physicists ‘proved’ Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, the famous E = mc². Basically, there was a lot of supercomputing that needed doing and not a lot of it getting done.

Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905. The theory is “special” because, unlike his later Theory of General Relativity, it only accounts for special cases of motion. For example, you can’t compare a spinning reference frame (say, a carousel) to a stationary reference frame (the screaming kids in line). Einstein later refined his idea of relativity between 1905 and 1915 and proposed the General Theory of Relativity, which works in all reference frames (more after the jump). To put everything into perspective, consider this: the first production Model T was built in 1908. Before computers, particle accelerators, the internet, or automobiles, this man had unraveled the inner workings of the universe with his brain and a chalkboard. The article was on the Discovery Channel’s Science page.

Nov. 21, 2008 — It’s taken more than a century, but Einstein’s celebrated formula e= mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France’s Center for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world’s mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons [are comprised of] smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.

The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?

The answer, according to the study published in the journal Science this week, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity….

The General Theory of Relativity predicts that things with mass bend the fabric of space-time. And that’s about as blunt as it gets, unfortunately. Think of space-time as a bed sheet pulled taut between two people. Now if you place a ball on the sheet, it deforms a little bit. The universe is kind of like that, except the sheet is woven from the imperceptible fabrics of space and time, it’s 4-dimensional (height, width, depth, and time), and really really really big. It’s huge. The General Theory of Relativity was “proved” by the observation of a solar eclipse in 1919. If matter bends space-time, a really massive object like the moon should bend it a lot, right?. And that’s what you see in photos of eclipses — light from the sun “bending” around the moon. Since light always moves in straight lines, we can infer that the fabric of the universe is itself bending around the moon.

Personally, I have no idea what it is actually like in Iran, beyond the politics that fly around in the news. This seems like a taste:

Iran: a nation of bloggers from Mr.Aaron on Vimeo.

Just like us, right?

Eric and I saw Iron & Wine last night. I don’t know if any of you guys listen to that shit, but it is literally, and figuratively unreal. I managed to find a live recording of them and its a rather accurate depiction of what we experienced last night. Watch it here. If you guys don’t have time to watch it, I highly suggest letting it play in the background of all your other firefox and/or safari windows as you listen to its beautiful eloquence.

And for those of you who have never even listened to Iron & Wine at all, I would say to you this :

Buy the album Sheperd’s Dog. It’s one of the best album’s I’ve heard in I want to say 5 years. I kid you not. Also, here’s a link to buy it ! Everyone have a great day and enjoy the music.