rose.blog

The Quantum Pontiff has posted a cool probability question which is guaranteed to torment your brain. Here it is.

I was reading an anthology of Ramsey Campbell stories and in the prologue to “The Chimney”, which won a World Fantasy Award in 1978, he mentions that Harlan Ellison said that it was a stupid story and shouldn’t have won the award. Ellison is known for being “abrasive and argumentative”. Here is an interview with him on the subject of paying writers for their work.

After watching Georges St Pierre DOMINATE Matt Hughes and hearing that he thought about trying to make the Canadian Olympic wrestling team I’m wondering whether he might be able to beat Travis at 82kg. Travis already qualified the weight and won the trials so it’s basically moot at this point but still.

With any normal human with little competitive experience in wrestling I’d say not a chance, but GSP is some kind of superhuman freak. He took Hughes down four times??? On the other hand he would be giving up some weight to Travis, maybe 20 pounds… and Travis is a tough dude as I have firsthand experience from my days at SFU although he got real good a bit later than my time.

GSP could try at 74kg but then he’d have to beat Matt Gentry who is an NCAA champ, I’d have to go with Gentry at 74.

I don’t know, I’d love to see whether GSP could take Travis.

Gettin down with a trunk of funk. My favorite quote:

Most of the food I eat doesn’t taste good. I don’t eat for taste, I eat for performance.

Like I said, the King of Awesomeness. You WILL go and do stairs after you watch this.

Here is (part of) the first tech talk I gave at Google May 2007.

Here is our latest tech talk.

Mohammad gave a talk at QEC07 at USC December 17th. Here are the slides:

20071217_mohammad_amin_qec07.ppt

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded 1/2 to Al Gore and 1/2 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. My dad, Dr. George Rose, is a member of the panel. Very cool!!! Here is a link to one of their reports.

It’s pretty clear that we have a difficult and unsustainable relationship with our environment. Here is a link to a book that my dad just published which is a fascinating and important account of humans vs. the North Atlantic fish stocks. Iffen you’re not aware, cod have shaped the course of human history as much as almost any other species in our history.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in environmental / sustainability issues. In addition to its scientific and historical content, the book is beautiful, full of full-color maps, illustrations and pictures. From the book’s description:

The devastation of many of the greatest North Atlantic cod stocks, particularly those of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Grand Banks, has become an icon for the unsustainable relation between human exploitation and Nature. Here, George Rose tells the full story of that devastation, in scientific detail, for the first time – from the formation of the North Atlantic marine ecosystems to the massive stock declines in the last half of the 20th century. Politics and the fisheries are inextricably entwined. In Cod, Rose recounts the many political influences on the fisheries over several centuries and describes how neglect from the late 1800s onward led to insufficient scientific knowledge and little protection for the stocks when massive Euro-Russian fleets targeted the Grand Banks after World War II, destroying the most prolific fishery the world has known. Cod is no armchair account, but a controversial one that includes original information on the North Atlantic fisheries.

Race walking is really stupid. Angry crazed Samurais are awesome. Put them together and you get this.

Here are some interesting Kimbo Slice facts.  He is related both to Rhadi Ferguson (pretty famous judo dude) and Emanuel Augustus (one of my fave boxers).

Yeah bend that inanimate carbon rod Kimbo. Scary.