...

E-musings

There are few things that mesh as well as listening to the Tron Legacy OST


and reading this:


It reminds me a lot of the Mass Effect 1/2 sound track with its heavy emphasis on distorted synth, simple melodies and moody silences.

Merry "Bum in a suit" day

Hope everyone gets to relax, eat well, drink, and spend quality times with their loved ones. Well... that is... except for the Jews... everyone gets a day off from the Jews. And to the Jews reading this: get back to work.

Santa's Candyman

Critical Party Mass Achieved!

Good news folks. My New Year's Eve party is taking shape. The most important thing for me is to be surrounded by my friends, not to mention my special friend Lola. Which is why I'm happy to announce that so far I have her confirmation, not to mention Woody's and Dave's. Although Napoleon has not confirmed, I am sure that with this new knowledge as well as the awesome pressure I will apply, he is an honorary confirmation.

That leaves only YOU!



Put on your party hats kids! We're gonna have a good time!

It's an open house, so invite whomever you please.

See you soon!

Metal and Bones

This guy I know, he was in a terrible car accident.



And now he looks like a cyborg.

How About a Little Debate

Hey, so what's the big difference between a job and prostitution? I mean really. Why is prostitution so stigmatized?

Tesla Is the Electrique Jesus

Beauty!

iWeb fail.

Abbreviations don't always work as intended I suppose....

EVEN MORE EXTREME!!!!

And with no music.

Seriously though, this is some crazy shit.

Cars

Yeah, I know a car video. Unacceptable with regards to my general absence on the blog.

But you know what? It's an amazing video. Really tense. And the sound is magnificient. Enjoy.

Finally!

One that makes sense!

By the way, pay attention to where and how this guy grew up. That's one hell of a story... one hell of a story.

NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2

NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2

Molesto's Best Police Getting Shot At Movie Scenes !

Less percussive then guy with hands in face but more on the point

$50 budget and a video camera

Regardless of what you think of this video, you can sign the petition here

This Is Awesome

I love Carl Sagan. I wish he was in charge of the planet.

Author of Respect

Complete news from our Favourite Commis à l'Épicerie

This makes me want to live solely of rice and beans so I can save up to go see Wintersun in Europe. It's almost feasible considering many of the shows are happening in cheap countries.

Anyways, can someome please give him a decent tip next time he brings your groceries to the car?

And what's up with Bonerpants passing off second-hand info? It doesn't take a Master's to know that primary sources are better. Believe me, I know; I don't have a Master's.

Oh yeah, from the official website

News update

Hi everyone! It´s been a while.

I´ve been working very hard with the synths&orchestrations and I can finally say that I´m feeling very positive about finishing this long and gruesome task by christmas. So hopefully around the end of December I can finally start mixing the album17.11.2010
. I still have a few vocal parts unfinished, but I will be singing them meanwhile I´m mixing.

The only problem about the mixing is that my current computer gear simply cannot handle these insanely huge projects. And the other problem is that I have no money for new gear. So we have discussed about this problem with our label&management and they have agreed to help us with an advance to buy new and more powerful computer gear, but only if we agree to play a few shows and show people that Wintersun is still alive. So after carefully weighting all the different possibilies, we think we need to play these shows to help the completion of the album.

The shows will be for now:

Metalfest (3 shows)
Metalcamp (1 show)

There´s lot of work and preparation to do for these shows, ´cause we have to update our live gear as well, sort out technical difficulties and of course rehearse the songs. This will most likely affect negatively with the mixing schedule, so I can´t give any predictions with that yet. I also need to try out the new computer gear first and see how it handles these projects. The software is still not 64-bit, so the "infamous 4GB RAM limit" might also be a problem with the mixing, since these projects already eat about 3GB without any plugins. But I will do my best to overcome this challenge the fastest way I can.

And no worries, these shows will definitely not be cancelled. So we are looking forward to you guys, see you at the gigs! Who knows, we might even play a one new riff... I mean a song! ;)

Jari, Kai, Teemu & Jukkis

This is pretty awesome.

crap indeed, Molesto.... crap indeed.

a bit of a stretch from this:

News from our favorite commis à l'épicerie

Wintersun has finally shown a sign of life. Drummer Kai Hahto posted the following short announcement on his personal Facebook page:

"Wintersun will be playing 4 shows at least next year: 3 Metalfest shows in May 2011 and also Metalcamp 2011. That´s good news."

Some overly optimistic fan made the assumption that perhaps the long overdue album Time would be done by then... to which Hahto responded:

"Time has progressed very well and we hope that we can start mixing in December. But the shows are confirmed and after the new album is out, we start playing more actively. Let´s see what happens next year."

The Wintersun drummer also promised there would be "some updates" somewhere next week at the band's official website. Stay tuned.

I knew it all along !

Fine! I'll post something

Seriously, way to have everyone, including me, avoid this increasingly diseased blog. I seriously preferred that necrophilia pic from 2006. So anyways, I know Halloween is over and all, but we really need to all hook up and watch this movie sometime soon:

And yes, it stars our favorite angel-haired quotesmith

Has this ever been posted on the blog?

Because it should be.

My girlfriend gave a sex talk at a high school the other day and one of the questions was "Is a blue waffle bad?" She did not what a blue waffle was then. Now we all do.

She then proceeded to show me another horrendous picture of disease-mutilated lady-genitals.

Perhaps she was taking her revenge on me since after she got out of the shower, I was at the computer wearing nothing but a merino-wool t-shirt, listening to this :

Why Single Girls Want to Meet European Men

Breasts

Screw you assholes!!!

If you don't start participating in the blog more, I'm going to have to sew all of you into a human centipede!


(video unrelated)

Ohhhhh....

So that's where George Carlin went!



But...



I guess I'll be seeing George at some point.

Hey Woody! Thanks for visiting. There, enjoy.

grosse langue
envoyé par amoroso78. - Découvrez des webcam de personnalités du monde entier.

Life Is Beautiful

For the ladies.....

Molesto's Psychoetheral Internetional Mixture of Double Dassin Rainbow Été Indien

So you know that mix of Pink Floyd's the Wall over dubbing the Wizard of Oz and how it fits in a hallucinatingly eery way that every bleached t-shirt wearing fucking hippie will tell you about?
Well, it turns out I've inadvertently discovered another awesome mix that will shock that hippie so bad he'll lose his remaining dentition and melt his brains so he never mentions Pink Floyd again and starts listening to Green Jelly instead (for some reason).

Here goes (I dont know how to edit movies yet so you'll have to follow the instructions)

1- Start by pressing play on Joe's video, and then immediately proceed to next instruction (whatever you do, don't look at Joe's image directly, or else his devastating good looks will spontaneously burn your soul )



2- Once you've pressed play on Joe's video and covered your eyes, wait till he starts talking about autumn (about 20 secs into it), and then press play and watch the next video. Do not adjust either videos volume, they're already mixed perfectly.

Hey...

I wonder what they were saying to each other....

Cool Stuff

via Juxtapoz.com

The labyrinth of tunnels beneath London's Waterloo station have been converted into a large-scale evocation of Dante's Inferno. Opening tomorrow, Hell's Half Acre is an impressively creepy and comprehensive installation.

Take an early look at Hell's Half Acre, Lazarides Galleries' new off-site exhibition, which will be open for viewing from just October 12 to 17, 2010.

Visitors will explore a unique interpretation of the nine circles of hell through the vision of artists including Conor Harrington, Vhils, George Osodi, Antony Micallef, Doug Foster, Todd James, Paul Insect, Mark Jenkins, Boogie, Ian Francis, Polly Morgan, Jonathan Yeo and many more.

Perhaps out of synch with our usual fare

I found this article fascinating and thought I would share. I think I probably gained more insight into how markets work with this one article than with reading the Economist on a daily basis. It also paints an unsurprising picture of why it is exactly the market is largely stacked against the little guys, how sophisticated the big players are and how, probably within our lifetime, AIs will be the main driving force for market activity. It'll be like Terminator but the T-1000s will all look like Charlie Sheen in Wall Street:

On May 6, 2010, I got a phone call from a good friend of mine who day trades. "Are you watching the market?," he asked. "I've been keeping an eye on it," I said. "It's down about 200 points." I had Bloomberg's site open in a browser window on one of my monitors, and it looked to be a fairly typical down day. "No," he replied, "it's down like 1,000. I wouldn't be calling you if it were down 200 points."

My friend knows that I follow high-frequency trading (HFT), and it was immediately apparent to him and everyone in the market that day that the machines were doing something really screwy—hence the phone call. But by the time I learned that all Hell had just broken loose, the drama was mostly over. In the space of a few minutes, the complex, highly interconnected, tightly-coupled computer system that we quaintly refer to as a "market," had crashed and then recovered. The Flash Crash (of 2:45pm) wasn't quite a kernel panic, but the SEC's recently released postmortem inadvertently suggests that it may as well have been.

My former academic advisor, theologian Harvey Cox, once famously argued that, to a student of religion like himself, the market looked an awful lot like a deity. In that vein, I'll suggest that, to this student of computer science, the market as described in the SEC report looks like an awful lot like a giant, multithreaded software application. And on May 6, the market did what every piece of multithreaded software eventually does in response to just the wrong mix of execution conditions and inputs: it crashed.

The end of auditing: the Data Deluge Makes the SEC Obsolete

The first lesson of the SEC report is, be careful what you wish for.

The computerization of the market was supposed to bring about a revolution in transparency. Unlike the market of an earlier era, where humans executed trades by talking to (and shouting at) one another, the electronic communication networks (ECNs) that emerged in the late 70s logged every detail of every trade for later auditing. No more "he said, she said" when resolving a dispute or ferreting out fraud—just go to the tape. But then came the flood.

After a solid decade of moving almost all trading activity onto electronic systems (the NYSE floor is just there for show at this point), the market generates so much data that it's nearly impossible for a mere governmental agency like the SEC to analyze. There are literally tens of thousands of quotes per second in hundreds of thousands of symbols across multiple electronic exchanges—the SEC would need the brain and computer power of the NSA to even begin to do a credible job of crunching this many numbers for a credible post mortem.

The SEC acknowledges in the report the massive problem that this amount of data poses. While the agency did what number crunching it could, it also had to rely heavily on interviews with market participants. These participants each have their own, uncrunchabley huge mountains of data, which have led them to their own conclusions about what went on between about 2:30 and 3:00pm that day.

Again, the shift to ECNs was supposed to prevent exactly this problem by giving regulators complete transparency into every last detail of every trade. (And again, be careful what you wish for.)

The amount of data isn't just a problem for regulators. Much of the report details how the systems of the market participants were themselves overwhelmed in real-time with the sudden surge of digital information. Processing began to slow, queues filled, backlogs developed, and machines were eventually pulled offline as the humans intervened and tried to sort out possible data integrity issues.

Beyond the challenges of reconstructing events, the traders also use some subset of the data firehose that the market's machines throw off today as input to train the algorithms that will run the market tomorrow. So at some point, we'll wake up and realize that it's really turtles machines all the way down. Put that in your bong and smoke it, Keanu.

Don't blow on it or it might fall over

The second lesson of the SEC report is that the market is fairly fragile, which is about what you'd expect from a giant, multithreaded computer that has been brought online piecemeal with no oversight. The wrong input at the wrong moment could trigger a race condition, or a deadlock, a livelock, or some other concurrency hazard that brings it all down.

The report fingers a large derivatives trade by an unnamed fund (which we now know is Waddell & Reed) as the spark that caused the conflagration. A clumsily executed selling algorithm began dumping a type of futures contracts called the E-mini into an already volatile market, and a group of HFTs absorbed the initial wave of sell orders and began passing them back and forth rapidly, buying and selling the contracts amongst themselves without any one HFT ever intending to build a net long or short position.

(Now, to explain why a bunch of algorithms would execute a burst of trades with each other that were intended to have no real net effect on anyone's position would require an explanation of liquidity rebates and market making. That's too deep in the weeds for this post, but here's my nutshell explanation: the market-making HFTs get paid by exchanges and dark pools to provide liquidity in certain stocks, but what many of them actually provide are mere quotes—tens of thousands of quotes per second, without any real money behind them. The only real purpose of this is to give the appearance of liquidity in a stock so that the algo can get paid for doing its tiny part to keep the market liquid and orderly.)

So when the HFTs got hold of the futures contracts that the Waddell & Reed algorithm was selling, they would've first looked for legit buyers to flip them too. And, not finding any legit buyers, they just started rapidly buying and selling amongst themselves to at least pick up some rebate money. The poor, stupid Waddell & Reed sell algorithm saw all of this buy/sell activity suddenly spring up, and it mistook the spike for real, active interest in its giant batch of futures contracts. So it (logically) capitalized on that interest by increasing the pace of its sales; it wanted to do all its selling while the market was (seemingly) hot.

But the sell algorithm was mistaken—that HFT-induced spike in trading activity did not reflect any sort of genuine market appetite for the futures contracts it wanted to sell. It was just the machines playing "pass the potato," almost certainly for the purpose of generating tiny rebate profits.

The SEC describes these shenanigans in two different, widely quoted sections:

Still lacking sufficient demand from fundamental buyers or cross-market arbitrageurs, HFTs began to quickly buy and then resell contracts to each other—generating a “hot-potato” volume effect as the same positions were rapidly passed back and forth. Between 2:45:13 and 2:45:27, HFTs traded over 27,000 contracts, which accounted for about 49 percent of the total trading volume, while buying only about 200 additional contracts net...

...Furthermore, 16 (out of over 15,000) trading accounts that were classified as HFTs traded over 1,455,000 contracts on May 6, which comprised almost a third of the total daily trading volume. Yet, net holdings of HFTs fluctuated around zero so rapidly that they rarely held more than 3,000 contracts long or short on that day. Moreover, compared to the three days prior to May 6, there was an unusually high level of “hot potato” trading volume—due to repeated buying and selling of contracts—among the HFTs, especially during the period between 2:41 p.m. and 2:45 p.m. Specifically, between 2:45:13 and 2:45:27, HFTs traded over 27,000 contracts, which accounted for about 49 percent of the total trading volume, while buying only about 200 additional contracts net.

At some point, the HFTs realized that they had built up a net long position in the E-mini, so they started dumping it. This HFT selling combined with the still-ongoing selling of the Waddell & Reed algo to create an exceptional amount of sell pressure in that contract. In spite of all the selling, there were no buyers, so the contract's price began dropping like a stone.

Meanwhile, because the derivatives market is linked to the underlying equities market by any number of instruments (e.g., ETFs) and strategies (e.g., cross-market arbitrage, hedging), the selling pressure in the E-mini quickly translated into selling pressure in the equity indices, and that's when the real party started.

The algorithms that buy and sell stocks in the equities market were using the previous few minutes' action in the derivatives market as inputs to guide their trading, and when they registered the giant sell-off described above, some of them had safety controls that told them to stop trading so that the humans could take a look to see what was wrong. And as these algorithms pulled out of the market, the market got more illiquid and prices dropped faster.

Other algorithms saw the precipitous price declines across the derivative and equity markets, and assumed that some type of cataclysmic event had happened; so they, too, quit trading. Still others couldn't handle the sudden surge in market data coming their way, so they checked out. Others didn't trust the data they were getting, so they stopped trading until the apparent technical errors could be sorted. The net effect was that all across the market, the machines began either selling or shutting off, all at the same time. With all the buyers suddenly gone from the market, prices immediately tanked, all the way to zero in some cases.

Once everyone realized that the world hadn't ended, and that the massive sell-off was globally irrational (despite how locally rational it had seemed to the individual algorithms), they jumped back into the pool as quickly as they had gotten out. And the market magically levitated right back up.

A giant, multithreaded computer

The final, and perhaps most important, lesson of the SEC report, at least for a computer person like myself, is that the market is behaving as one giant multithreaded software application.

Now, to be a single multithreaded app, as opposed to an unrelated collection of multithreaded apps, the different threads must somehow interact with one another. In other words, the threads must share and jointly modify some kind of state.

What state do the various apps and algorithms that run on Wall Street's machines share? At the very least, every part of the market shares the quote feed, and some parts are even more tightly coupled than that. But let's focus on the quotes.

The price of, say, AAPL at any given moment is a numerical value that represents the output of one set of concurrently running processes, and it also acts as the input for another set of processes. AAPL, then, is one of many hundreds of thousands of global variables that the market-as-software uses for message-passing among its billions of simultaneously running threads. Does it really matter that those threads are running on separate machines at different institutions?

I throw this perspective out there for open discussion by the Ars community, and I'd be quite happy if someone could demonstrate that I'm crazy. Because if I'm not crazy, and the market really is essentially an enormous piece of multithreaded software, then I'm not entirely sure what kind of rabbit hole we've all gone down. I hope the computing field's experiences with large, multithreaded, distributed software (e.g., cloud computing) isn't indicative of what we're all in for.

(this is not about funny animal videos)

And then I realized the pinnacle of evolution was not us, the male humans, but rather this refined animal, the epitome of grace, the majestic and wondrous Ostrich.


We are only errors in the genetic path that led to Ostrich perfection.

I'm pretty sure this is for real...

Wow

It had been a while since I drank myself to that level. Thank God I had a trash can in my room.

Thank God.

Hey Molesto!

By the way...

I'm still a fucking animal!

haha.... ha.

I am not a human being

I am a fucking animal

C'était un ptit baveux, il partageait pas le chmin, y avait un char bleu marin...

hey, mourelatos, which one are you?

Couldn't Help It

It's so infectious!

Love it.

But wait! There's more.

(Click on the image, fool)

From Regretsy

Beatiful masks:



...and the human centipede cat toy:

How the media caused the next holy war...according to the media

So here is a BBC article about how the "Burn the Koran" thing got so much attention. This is to put to rest certain questions we had during our last human to human conversaische.

How Koran burning story grew from obscurity

And the winners are:
For first large media corp to talk about this guy: CNN
For first public figure to take this guy's actions seriously: General Petraeus (Clinton came in forth)

So yeah, now we know.

If you're posting that...

Then I guess you've never seen this one:

Be careful boys, trek fit can lead to some serious lifestyle changes:

Why you ain't shit

Also, forget Trek Fit. Them New York parks are breeding uber men.

Could not Help It

My Lips Are Sealed

My Lips Are Sealed

Beat of a different drum.

I actually like the Jeff Buckley cover. Yeah, it's early millenium OC shit for the tweens but it fits and the interpretation conveys the right emotions. The blues song is soul crushingly horrible though.

Unsurprisingly, people have very different tastes in everything, from games to music to everything else. I'm pretty much known as a game and movie snob: I'm super critical of pretty much everything but it doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge the fact that others might have very different ideas as to what does or does not make a good game.

That being said I've dated someone who though the former was really good and the latter was really bad. If she wasn't so gifted with the beejs I too would have been quick to part ways then and there:

Music and Love

Is bad musical taste a reason to dismiss someone ?

There's this girl, right ? We've been exchanging musical tastes and hers are the worst I have ever heard. It makes me angry. I just wonder what else it hides. Ya know? Also, to me it shows a bit of retardedness.

I mean, I don't go out say, "hey baby, I like metal, check this out" :



Oh no, I don't do that. What I do do is say that I like passionate music, you know something gender neutral, like Oum Khalsoum :



So you know what she does?

She sends me the most soulless milktoast crap I've ever had the misfortune of hearing. I mean it's supposed to be blues and the guy is black. How the hell did this even happen?




Keep in mind that when I challenged her to find a better cover than this:



She sent me this:



I wish I was more fluent in sign reading. I mean, shit the songs she sent are the musical equivalent of her telling me her bed is pilled high with stuffed animals. I can only imagine her having a huge bush and the dead fish being her favourite position.

No Shit!

La pollution générée par l'exploitation des sables bitumineux de l'Alberta serait plus importante que le prétendent les représentants de l'industrie et le gouvernement albertain.

C'est la conclusion que tire une équipe de chercheurs de l'Université de l'Alberta qui a découvert des concentrations préoccupantes de métaux lourds dans l'eau et l'air du nord de la province.

Selon l'étude, publiée dans la revue américaine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, la concentration de plomb et de mercure dans les cours d'eau de la région sont supérieurs aux niveaux considérés comme dangereux pour les poissons. Les recherches, conduites par l'écologiste David Schindler, ont révélé la présence d'au moins 13 contaminants toxiques dans des échantillons d'eau prélevés dans la rivière Athabasca.

Selon l'auteur de l'étude, David Schindler, le système de surveillance environnementale du gouvernement albertain et de l'industrie occulterait des données essentielles sur la santé de cette rivière.

Le gouvernement albertain a longtemps maintenu que ces contaminants sont naturellement présents dans l'environnement et se retrouvent dans la rivière la où affleurent des des gisements de sables bitumineux.

Mais David Schindler, qui a effectué des relevés tant en amont qu'en aval des sites d'exploitation des sables bitumineux, est catégorique sur l'origine humaine de cette hausse de contaminants dans l'eau.

Il réclame en conséquence une meilleure surveillance de l'industrie dans la province.

Dans une étude préliminaire publiée en décembre dernier, David Schindler soulignait que les raffineries des sables bitumineux généreraient approximativement cinq fois plus de pollution que le révèlent les données de l'industrie.

Le gouvernement fédéral remet en question la démarche du chercheur David Schindler. Plus tôt cette année, le ministre canadien de l'Environnement, Jim Prentice, avait qualifié « d'allégations » les résultats préliminaires de l'étude de David Schindler.

Radio-Canada.ca avecPresse canadienne

I wish I was this guy's friend:

Stephen Hawking

Please stop making me put up photos just so I don't have to stare at insane trash clowns. (although this is a good one)

the juggalo saga continues

I just learned a new term: MMFWCL

It stands for Much Mother Fucking Wicked Clown Love.

There's got to be more to this than just a bunch of white trash freaks who like soda and shitty music, no?

Saint Chrysostème !

the koreans have outdone the japanese... again?

Monitor Test

Warning : Do not scroll down if you believe your computer monitor has not been tested for the new ISO-2010 standards dealing with extreme graphics stress.
The IEEE has produced a test for the new set of standards for computer monitors dealing with the visualization and rendering of extreme douchebaggism. Scroll down if you want to know if your Monitor is built to resist the rendering of an image containing dangerously high levels of douchebag. Be advised that some monitors have been known to melt down after just a few seconds of displaying the image, due to the ridiculously high concentrations of douchebag being displayed.

Reason not to suicide # 4 (be alive for Human VS Robot soccer in 2050)

Cool Site

I found this website once upon a time upon returning from a drunken adventure. I added it to my favorites with the intention of sharing it on the blog the next morning. I was too drunk to blog. That was about a year ago. Needless to say, I forgot about it until now. I must finally be recovering from the brain damage I inflicted upon myself that night.

It's called Urban Exploration Montreal

So there's this thing...

where the fish apparently become murderous monsters that's a total throwback to the 3D B-Movies of yore. There's plenty of clever kill shots, buckets of gore, 3D tits and general tomfoolery in this movie to make it the best use of 3D short of a Toxic Avenger remake - and an 83% rating on Rotten Tomatoes doesn't hurt either.
So I was thinking perhaps some of you, my fellow miscreants, would like to partake in the spectacle that is Piranha 3D. Any takers for this week/weekend?

Boy am I glad...

that I'm not the only one who feels this way about TIME. Now can someone please tell my parents to stop buying it! FUCK!!

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults

cumpleanos baby!

also, i forgot to mention on august 17th that it was the blog's 4th birthday.

Charles Darwin

The purpose of this post is merely to make sure that those no-talent assclowns in the previous post are not the first thing I see when I come to check out the blog.

Man at La Ronde told to cover up Bob Marley t-shirt or leave

Man at La Ronde told to cover up Bob Marley t-shirt or leave

ridiculous

this band makes me want to cut my eyes out and ears off.

oh, and by the way, they were at the top of the Billboard rap albums chart. RAP.

Today's gonna be a good day!!

Since we're all single

we should play one of these games someday...