Category: Humor

This Is Why We Win

Today I read the following quote, presented here in its original form, warts and all:

[user to which they are directing their reply] during 1936-1959, the standard infantry rifle was the M1 Garland. It was a rapid fire semi automatic General George Patton called “the greatest battle implement ever devised”. Just because our military now has more efficient and powerful weapons (60 years), that does not discount the destructive power of the M1 Garland, a rifle similar in nature to the yet more powerful and modifiable AR 15, and once used in our military

-Tafari Gh, a commenter at the Huffington Post

Nearly every thing this commenter wrote is wrong.

We win because our opponents are idiots and know not about what they speak. It should really hurt to be that stupid.

Hat tip to J. KB for the original link.

Ballistic Monte Carlo Methods

This is a paragraph I never thought I’d see in the academic literature:

“[W]e advocate the use of ballistic-assisted (i.e. projectile-based) random sampling methods because they are both easily accessible and parallelizable. In particular, shotgun-assisted random sampling seems very suitable becaues of the presumed abundance of shotguns in cataclysmic times and the speed at which they can generate samples.”

– Vincent Dumoulin, F?lix Thouin – “A Ballistic Monte Carlo Approximation of ?“

Awesome. That’d make for an amazing grant application.
See here for a summary article that explains things for non-mathematicians.
Edit: Somehow I borked the initial post by forgetting the title and screwing up a link. I’ve now corrected these errors. If you’re still seeing those errors in your feed reader, please refresh the feed.

Ammoman’s open list gets spammed, subscribers lose their minds

Ammoman?uses a Yahoo Groups mailing list to announce the availability of various products, specials, etc.
Evidently the list manager failed to configure the list to be “announce only” for authorized senders. Instead, it was setup to be an unmoderated discussion list. This misconfiguration wasn’t noticed up until today when a spammer randomly decided to send a spam message to the list.
Evidently this caused the entire list to lose its mind, with hundreds of people replying to the list, first to inquire about the spam, then to wonder why they were getting copies of messages from others inquiring about the spam, followed immediately by people trolling the list, followed by hundreds more sending “UNSUBSCRIBE” or “REMOVE ME” messages to the list (even though that merely sends that message to everyone and doesn’t unsubscribe one from the list — the list itself has very clear unsubscribe instructions at the bottom of every message but people can’t be assed to read it). All of this helps contribute to the chaos and amplifies the list traffic dramatically. (Fortunately, a simple filter redirects all the crazy list messages into the trash folder — in a day or two I’ll remove the filter so I can get the regular notifications from Ammoman.)
Also, some people evidently blame the government and, specifically, Obama for this incident.
It disturbs me that people too stupid to figure out how to unsubscribe from a mailing list or setup a filter and who blame the government for a relatively minor technical cock-up walk among us every day. (Again, The Onion is prophetic.)