Corporations deserve Second Amendment rights, too

A recent Supreme Court ruling here in the US overturned long-standing limits on corporate political spending on the basis that it was an unconstitutional limit on freedom of speech. So naturally, this got me thinking: if corporations are "persons" that have the First Amendment right of free speech, shouldn't they also have the Second Amendment right to bear arms? Trade wars would be much more interesting that way, as would takeover battles.

And the entire financial crisis might have turned out differently if there had been a right to arm Bear Stearns.

3D Movies are the new Quadraphonics

Some of us are old enough to remember the audio industry's brief and unsuccessful flirtation with four channel "quadraphonic" sound. With speakers arranged at four corners of the room, it could sound reasonably convincing, provided the listener sat in the center of the sound field and kept his head absolutely still. If you turned your head, the sound source had a tendency to "ping" from one location to another. It was a technology that was supposed to deliver surround sound; unfortunately it appeared to have been created by people who knew everything about audio electronics, but nothing about how people actually hear.

Similarly, 3D movie technologies appear to have been created by people who know everything about digital projection, but nothing about how people see. In fact, "3D" is a misnomer: what you're actually getting is "stereoscopy", like a Magic Eye picture or (if you're older) a View-Master. Consequently, the picture only truly looks "right" from one position, where the relative positions of the stereo images "make sense".

In reality, stereo image separation is only one cue of many that people use to infer depth, and most of the cues we rely on are already present in a 2D projection. If they weren't, we wouldn't be able to make sense of flat images such as photographs and paintings. We would perceive them merely as lines and blobs of color rather than as representations of the world. (This is especially true of images rendered on a surface whose geometry actually contradicts the image, for example a Greek soldier painted on the side of a vase.) Conversely, if stereoscopy were so critical to depth perception, there wouldn't be so many animals that sacrifice binocular vision for enhanced peripheral vision by having their eyes on the sides of their head.

The biggest problem with stereoscopy in the movies comes when the stereo cue is inconsistent with the many other cues such as motion parallax, depth of focus, or relative motion (unless you're sitting in the theater's sweet spot), as it often is with 3D movies. What you then get is a headache or, if you're really unlucky, motion sickness.

Word of the Day: Sarahpalindrome

Sarahpalindrome (n.): a political statement that makes as little sense backwards as forwards. Example: Sarah Palin's resignation speech as Governor of Alaska.

NCAA Issues Sanctions Against Republican Party

In an unprecedented move, the NCAA announced today severe sanctions against the Republican Party. A four-year long investigation uncovered a pattern of systematic recruiting violations, illegal contacts with interns, and inappropriate financial inducements. "If you think that what Reggie Bush did was bad", said an NCAA spokesperson speaking on condition of anonymity, "You should see what we learned about George W. Bush". In a press statement in response to the announcement, the Republican Party immediately identified the anonymous spokesperson, published his home address, and urged reporters to investigate his background.

The NCAA announced an extensive list of sanctions against the GOP. Most significantly, the two National Election championships that the party won under Bush will be vacated and erased from the record. The NCAA has yet to decide whether to award those championships to the losing finalists, Al Gore and John Kerry, or to leave them vacant. The GOP will also forfeit numerous Senate and House victories in which Bush played a part.

Critics of the NCAA's actions point out that, as with previous sanctions issued by the organization, those chiefly responsible, including Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove, have moved on to lucrative new positions outside the organization and will be largely untouched by the punishment.

Three More Things That Make No Sense...

...in the Star Wars universe.

1) Every planet in the galaxy has roughly the same gravity, regardless of the size or composition of the planet, so everybody can move around comfortably.

2) Every species in the galaxy can breathe the same atmosphere (with a couple of exceptions), which is also the same on every planet.

3) Apparently, there are fewer than 900,000 droids in the entire galaxy, serving billions of sentient beings. How do we know? Star Wars Episode I makes it clear that "R2-D2" is an individual designation, not a model number. And in the entire canon, every droid is named using the same pattern. There is no instance of a droid with a number larger than 9 in its designation. Other episodes confirm that "R2" is the model type. So even allowing for letters or numbers in the 2nd and 4th place, that allows for fewer than 1,000 of R2-type astromech that seems to be everywhere, including on-board every fighter before they run out of numbers.

Vatican Identifies Real Cause of Sexual Abuse Scandals

Recent attempts to blame Jews, Freemasons and homosexuals for the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church having been roundly condemned by the outside world, the Vatican has announced that it has uncovered the true conspirators responsible. It turns out that the real perpetrators were the Gypsies, the mentally and physically disabled, and trade unionists, along with a few Jehovah's Witnesses.

Pope Benedict referred to his own traumatic wartime experiences in disavowing earlier comparisons to anti-semitism.

However, identifying those guilty of the sexual abuse may not be the end of the Vatican's troubles: there still remains the thorny question of why the church bureaucracy failed to act on the abuse for decades...

Meetings, meetings, meetings

A business meeting is an ideal gas. It consists of a set of randomly moving, non-interacting particles.

And it expands to perfectly fill the space available on a calendar.