The DJIA declined, plummeted, cratered, ...

More inspired economics writing from the NYT.

14+ years of comp.risks

I've only posted to comp.risks a few times, but my first post was in 1994 which means I've been following that list for at least 14 years. Yow.

This was my favorite post, a quote that has still stuck with me over the years since Y2K.

I do what the voices tell me to

From the latest comp.risks:

On the evening of 10 Nov 2008, a man's car got stuck on the Metro-North
tracks in Bedford Hills, N.Y. in Westchester County because he said his GPS
told him to make an immediate right turn.  Police blamed Jose Silva's
overdependence on GPS.  He was cited for driving on the tracks and not
obeying signs.  Metro-North spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said, "You don't
turn onto train tracks. Even if there are little voices in your head telling
you to do so. If the GPS told you to drive off a cliff, would you drive off
a cliff?"
A bit of common sense -- thank you, Ms. Anders.

Nearest Book Meme

Okay, okay, everyone else is doing it, so I will too:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I have on my desk two books, pretty much equally close to me: "Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 10" and "Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0c: A Shader Approach", both by Frank Luna.

From the D10 book:

"In addition, we discuss the intrinsic clip function, which enables us to mask out certain parts of an image; this can be used to implement fences and gates, for example."

and from the D9 book:

"The D3DX library provides the following function to compute a plane given three points on the plane: [prototype of D3DXPlaneFromPoints]."

No, I'm not doing any game programming, I'm just trying learn how to do 3D graphics and use my GPU -- using D3DImage, natch. (Turns out D3DImage only supports D9, not D10, so I had to go buy the older edition too.)

Good books, by the way: mathematics is not glossed over, but kept to the required essentials; good mix of theory and practice; reasonable examples; diagrams & pictures not so good in the D9 edition but much improved for D10. Much better than the other books on the subject, which tend to the pulpy "How to be a GAME PROGRAMMER in 21 days!!!" dreck. In fact, Luna could drop the word "game" from the title with very little content change, but I suspect his publisher would object.

What the election really meant

From today's NYT op-ed pages, Gail Collins on the meaning of Tuesday's election:

"Now American children are going to grow up unaware that there’s anything novel in an African-American president or a woman running for the White House."

I like that.