Dare I negotiate this into my contract?

Talk about a fringe benefit:

One of the biggest insurance companies in the world held a party for salesmen where they were rewarded with the services of prostitutes.

Munich Re is the world’s biggest re-insurer – in other words, the company acts as an insurance company for other insurance companies.

One of its divisions, Ergo, told the BBC that the party had taken place to reward salesmen in 2007.

A spokesman said the people who organised it had since left.

The gathering was held at a thermal baths in the Hungarian capital Budapest as a reward to particularly successful salesmen.
‘Whatever they liked’

There were about 100 guests and 20 prostitutes were hired.

A German business newspaper said the prostitutes had worn colour-coded arm-bands designating their availability, and the women had their arms stamped after each service rendered.

According to Handelsblatt, quoting an unnamed participant, guests were able to take the women to four-poster beds at the spa “and do whatever they liked”.[...]

Then again, given how far science is advancing, one might never know if “she” is real or…

Back in 2007, computer chess programming guru David Levy wrote a provocative book about robot-human relations entitled Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. In it he made a number of bold predictions regarding future relations between humans and machines, the most surprising of which being that we would fall in love with robots.

Fast forward 4 years (and almost 3 Moore’s Law cycles) and it seems as though his predictions are no nearer coming true than they were when he made them. David Hanson’s skin has gotten more realistic and more people know about Hiroshi Ishiguro’s real looking androids, but many important developments stand in the way of our considering robots something we could one day fall in love with.

So what’s standing in the way of our moving more quickly toward robots as companions?

In an interview with Levy earlier this year, Dr. Kim Solez inquires into what obstacles there are in creating the robots envisioned in Love and Sex with Robots.

Perhaps surprising, Levy doesn’t think there are any real psychological obstacles in the way of our making robots our romantic companions. In fact, he thinks, “It’s almost entirely a question of investment.” [...]

19 May 2011 (noon)

Workout notes I didn’t feel good in the morning.
I had to force myself to walk to the pool; I swam 1100 yards and did PT/Stretching/sit ups afterward:
4 x (25 front, 25 free, 25 side, 25 free, 25 side, 25 free)
5 x 100 free on the 2: 1:49, 1:50, 1:49, 1:48, 1:48

It didn’t feel that bad. I need to work on getting my elbows higher though; that is probably why my times were so glacially slow.

Politics
This is Dick Morris on Newt Gingrich. Gingrich, beating Obama in a debate? Yeah right. Both Mr. Morris and I would love to see Mr. “please don’t quote me” Gingrich win the Republican nomination!

Science/Mathematics
Jerry Coyne’s post is rather funny:

But when you go to the paper, you’ll see that its abstract is so opaque to a non-mathematician that it might as well be written in Martian:

We show how to measure the failure of the Whitney move in dimension 4 by constructing higher-order intersection invariants of Whitney towers built from iterated Whitney disks on immersed surfaces in 4-manifolds. For Whitney towers on immersed disks in the 4-ball, we identify some of these new invariants with previously known link invariants such as Milnor, Sato-Levine, and Arf invariants. We also define higher-order Sato-Levine and Arf invariants and show that these invariants detect the obstructions to framing a twisted Whitney tower. Together with Milnor invariants, these higher-order invariants are shown to classify the existence of (twisted) Whitney towers of increasing order in the 4-ball. A conjecture regarding the nontriviality of the higher-order Arf invariants is formulated, and related implications for filtrations of string links and 3-dimensional homology cylinders are described.

(Presumably “Arf invariants” don’t refer to the unchanging vocalizations of a dog. )

This shows how far removed mathematics is from even other scientists. Or are our own biology abstracts just as opaque to mathematicians?

Answer to his question: yes, at least to me.

Note: the paper is about 4 dimensional topology; few non-specialists would understand this abstract either, though the Arf invariant (named after a Turkish mathematician) is really a quadratic form over the field of order 2. It has applications in knot theory and in graph theory.

Osama bin Laden’s Replacement – The Colbert Report – 5/18/11 – Video Clip | Comedy Central

ColbertNation.com video – Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command gets passed over for a temp who doesn’t even have a beard.

Osama bin Laden’s Replacement – The Colbert Rep…, posted with vodpod

19 May 2011 (am)

Workout notes Nothing yet; I woke up with a slight headache and mild nausea. My guess: I didn’t eat at all two days ago and ate only mildly yesterday; also I had only one cup of coffee yesterday.

It was one of those “you should eat but don’t really want to” things.

Hence I slept in and missed yoga; I’ll swim and stretch over lunch; at least that is the plan.

Racewalking: this was from July 2004; in May of that year I did my 101 miles in 24 hours:

This was from a 3K judged racewalk at a track meet; I managed 18:03 with zero calls. Note that my right knee is nice and straight. It doesn’t do that anymore, which is one reason I don’t do judged racewalks anymore; I am physically incapable of following the rules.

I still am a fan of the sport though, and I still attempt to walk long distances (marathons, etc.)

Government overreach
Strangely enough, the FBI doesn’t need a warrant to put a gps tracker to your car, even if it is parked on private property.

This is horrific: an ex marine and combat veteran is killed in a mistaken SWAT raid.

I really don’t know what to say.

msnbc video: Maher plays Hardball on the 2012 race

msnbc video: Maher plays Hardball on the 2012 race, posted with vodpod