The NBA is back, baby..

Cool. it's time to get serious.
A few points and predictions:

• Steve Nash is *still* the best PG in the league. While Chris Paul is destined to be the next great PG, he isn't there yet. Nash is still a better passer, shooter, court seer, decision maker, had to deal with 2 head cases in Amare & Marion, *and* had to reformulate his offense with the introduction of Shaq. Chris Paul will have to deal with the curse of Shinn this year, as well as the extra physical toll due to the Olympics.
  
• The Suns will not suck as much as everyone thinks. They have a front line that can beat the Lakers and the Hornets, if Shaq has been doing the work to become more mobile. Their new found depth will help.
  
• Kobe will be injured for extended periods this season. For that reason, the Suns will win the Pacific.
• Either LeBron or Chris Paul will win the MVP, this year. maybe Amare, if he has the statistically monster season we expect.
  
• Western conference in this order:

1. Hornets
2. Jazz
3. Suns
4. Rockets
5. Lakers
6. Spurs
7. Mavs
8. Blazers
   

• The winner of this years title will be a team that didn't send someone to the Olympics.
  
• The Jazz are this years championship dark horse.
• Boston will get back to the finals. One of Jazz, Suns, Rockets in the West.
  
• The Knicks will make the playoffs. As will Portland.
  

Friday morning jazz-grunge

Foo Fighters & Chick Corea at the Grammys, with a theme for our times:

If you reward behavior, you'll get the behavior you reward.

Today I booked a trip to Austin, for SC-08. For some reason, Travelocity thinks I'm a cripple, and chose an accessible room for me, which I missed in my struggle to complete the transaction.

Now, not being a complete asshole, and knowing that a lot of disabled people turn up to the SC show, I figured I'd do the right thing & give up the accessible room for a standard room, since they cost *exactly* the same.

I phoned Travelocity, and after waiting for 20 mins for a service rep, they wanted $260 to make this trivial change. Phoned the hotel, and they wouldn't make the change, since I booked it through Travelocity.

Now, I tried to be a nice guy, I really did, but all I got was a load of jip.

To be honest, I'm a little pissed about it, because there shouldn't be any barriers to doing this kind of thing, especially when there's no cost. But these companies all hide behind their policies, which dehumanize the people working for them. We've become an amoral, callous people.

The cold war with Cuba will end soon.. but...

Because of this.

20 Billion barrels is a lot of oil, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Mexico, Venezuela and Cuba form a little bloc, just like the Arab nations. I'm guessing their instincts would not drive them to be overtly friendly to the US, especially if we continue our neo-imperial foreign policy.

It's going to be hard for President Obama to solve this, without pissing off the wingnuts.

I think we're already in a situation where a whole bunch of armed people think that any Democratic administration is inherently illegitimate, and that if Barack Obama becomes President, the only way that could happen is if the election was stolen. If President Obama normalizes relations with Cuba, and ends the fake cold war, that could trigger a whole bunch of trouble.

The question I have in my mind, is whether we will have a second civil war in this country, with the Rollers and Christian Paranoids vs. everyone else. From a population point of view, it's a 40:60 split between the Christianists and the rest of us, and they're armed. Heavily armed.

This is the true danger of a Blackwater or similar company: a private army outside the control of any legal authority, and subject only to the whims of its owner, who happens, in the case of Blackwater, to be a true, balls to the wall, Christian Dominionist.

Joe the Plumber...

sounds like the title of a Primus song.

Here's a real Primus song:

Evidence that if there is a God....

he/she/it has a sense of humor. Congrats to Krugman. I'm sure the money will come in handy in these troubled times.

Still, I have to say, he didn't strike me as the kind of person who was Nobel worthy. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan, but his NY Times columns really don't betray the kind of searing intellect or organizational capability I'd normally associate with Nobel laureates or Fields Medal winners, Kary Mullis notwithstanding. And I've met a few of both, including the bongo player, over the years. Guess I was wrong.

From a political point of view, though, this is a big plus for the Democrats. Krugman was Hillary's economic adviser, and the prize is going to be seen as a significant kind of approbation.

And I'd bet dollars to pesos that Bill O'Reilly is just about ready to blow a gasket. *That* is going to be fun to watch.

From the dept of the bleeding obvious...

IBM's tech marketing guys just put up a page on how to optimize your app using Lapack. Oh really??.. Can we have a page about kittens too ?

I'm not sure they realize how lame this is, nor do they understand they it betrays a level of ignorance about HPC that is quite astounding. LAPACK is a sort of HPC Rorshach test.. it's main use is for the HPL benchmark, and although some solvers do use those routines, most don't.

Whenever I deal with a company in the HPC space, and they get all exited about LAPACK and other libraries, I start the countdown until they do out of business. Now, there's no danger of IBM getting out of the HPC space, since because of BlueGene and P series, they're one of the few companies making money in this space. But it's depressing to see such an unsophisticated and prosaic piece from them.

Barack Obama: Superhero

IDW publishing has just put out their Presidential Material series, a couple of comic books outlining the biographies of Barack Obama and John McCain. From this cover, Barack looks like a man on a mission:

New Nobel prizes for Medicine

Montagnier & Barre-Sinoussi for the discovery of the AIDS virus, and Hausen for discovering the link between HPV and cervical cancer. Its good to see truly important work being acknowledged.

Still crazy after all these years...

So, John McCain has a wild and crazy brother? Scary thought. Although, reading the new article in Rolling Stone about St John, one would still have to give the edge to him.

This reminds me of the Vick brothers... just when you thought Marcus Vick was a total loon, along comes Michael to put things into true perspective.

She sells Sanctuary.

Just watched the new SciFi channel show, Sanctuary. The premise is interesting, with a mix of Victorian Gothic and modern themes.

The first show was a little hokey, and the pacing was a little uneven, as all first shows are. But the villain was pretty good, although he was dispatched fairly quickly and without too much fuss, despite being quite dark and formidable. It's too much to expect this show to be as intelligent as Galactica, but there are signs the producers could make this show fairly sophisticated, once it gets into it's stride, without alienating the audience.

In any case, Amanda Tapping is smoking hot as a long haired brunette. That will be enough to keep my attention, for now.