Daves Old Porn

I recently came across a show called Daves Old Porn. It airs on Showtime on Thursdays. It's Dave Attell sitting on a couch and he watches porn from the 70's and 80's. He usually has another comedian like Bill Burr, Daniel Tosh, or Kathy Griffin watch also. They make jokes and hilarious comments. Each show has a "theme" (meaning a specific porn star that they focus on) and about half way through, they bring out the "themed" porn star to comment on their work. They even drop porn knowledge every now and then. You see tits but everything is covered by strategic VHS tapes or by Dave and his guests sitting on the couch. The best episode so far was the one with Artie Lange. God that dude is funny.

HFR 3D

Per our ongoing HFR discussion.

Do you use Viagra at work? Brandon Marshall says NFL players do

Just read this.

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/bears-brandon-marshall-says-nfl-players-viagra-field-184549686--nfl.html

2012 Honda Civic

I took my car into the shop about 2 weeks ago (2000 Honda Accord with 234,000 miles on it). It's been shaking in the morning when I start it up and has been burning through coolant. I know it wasn't the water pump because I just got that replaced in January I believe. The shop checked it out and said it could either be a warped head gasket or a cracked head gasket. If it's warped, $1200. The guy didn't even give me an estimate for a cracked one :) . Since I only bought the car for $2900, there was no way I was gonna spend $1200 to fix that one issue. So I started looking into a new car. I looked at a Hyundai Elantra, Subaru Impreza, and the Honda Civic LX. Long story short, went with the Civic.

As a side note, this car has an ECO mode which helps you save fuel by changing shifting, slows acceleration a bit, makes the AC work a little less, etc. I'll be doing an experiment where I drive on an entire tank of gas with both the ECO mode ON the whole time and with it OFF the whole time to see what kind of a difference it makes. Look for that in the coming weeks. Here are some sexy pics:

Motion Smoothing

Anyone have any opinions on motion smoothing?

I have to admit I was ignorant of this technology until recently.  My disc player wasnt working so I recently watched a dvd on my laptop connected to my tv, which couldve been played by the default player Cyberlink's PowerDVD, as mentioned in the linked articles below as using motion smoothing.  Something was looking really unnatural in the way things were moving, and I was uber conscious of it.  It was driving nuts and hard to just concentrate and enjoy the film. Cut to even more recently watching tv and films on a friends new LCD and the same unnatural movement was going on that just drove me nuts.  So I flipped around the settings in the menu and found that "motion smoothing" was turned on.  I turn it off and I watch the film in its original frame rate or whatever and its not driving me mental.  

So yeah, my opinion is that its not worth it and it would make a lot more sense to watch a movie in the original frame rate.  The technology may be cool, but shouldnt be implemented as it currently exists. Opinions?

Some articles:

Motion Smoothing: 120Hz and 240Hz Refresh Rates Explained

How New TVs Display Old Content with Motion Smoothing

Skynet is real

I saw this while in my car this morning on my way to the liquor store. I guess I was the only one who realized the implications of this. This is how it starts I guess.

Now. How do we stop it?

Awards Season: Cy Young

It's that time. The time when old versus new, tried versus true, and bullshit versus horseshit comes about. I of course am talking about the baseball awards season. Let's start with the discussion of the four major awards (well two really). First there is the Cy Young award given to the best pitcher in each league and is pretty self explanatory, but then there is the MVP award given to the "most valuable player" in each league. How the hell can you determine value? Statheads are trying to do this with WAR (wins above replacement), but what the hell is a replacement level player? Old time writers and inside-the-box thinkers want to say that the most valuable player is the player whose value to his team is the highest in the MLB, while new sabermetricians want to say that the MVP is the guy with the best WAR and therefore is of the highest value. I have to say that I think both are wrong. I do not think WAR accurately reflects how good a player really is and we know that once Theo sells off everyone on the team, Darwin Barney will be the most valuable player on the Cubs simply because he will be the only one left. What you really have to look at is what kind of offensive production does your player give you and then find the most productive player in baseball and then that is the guy. Now a further problem with the MVP is that it is not inclusive to any position and it can include pitchers. This is dumb because pitchers have their own award. I only look at offensive players for the MVP. Pitchers are defensive players only. This brings me to something I want to talk about with regards to this year's results, but let's just get right into it. I will show you the baseball writers of America votes followed by the results from the THFL scoring system.

Cy Young:

NL Cy Young Votes 2012

AL Cy Young Votes 2012

THFL top 10 pitchers 2012

Can you see a problem here? Gio Gonzales isn't even in the top 10 pitchers in the THFL system, but he is number 3 in the BBWA votes? Come on man. Also, note that Justin Verlander scored about 68 more points than David Price this year, but lost the Cy Young. Verlander had a 2.64 ERA while Price had a 2.56 ERA so what is the big deal? The big deal is that Verlander pitched 27.333 more innings than Price did this year which amounts to 3 entire 9 inning games. This is a lot more baseball and his ERA is only slightly higher at 2.64. Verlander had 34 more Ks than Price as well and had 6 fewer wild pitches. I just don't see how Price could win given the numbers here except for the fact that Price had 20 Wins! Wins! That's what the writer's know and love. Poor Verlander only had 17. Now the Dickey versus Kershaw story is much closer as both had nearly identical strikeout numbers and Dickey only pitched 6 more innings than Kershaw. Dickey posted a 2.73 ERA while Kershaw had a 2.53 ERA. But again Dickey won this award because he had 20 wins to Kershaw's 14. Did you know that pitchers cannot win you games? They can only prevent losses because a pitcher is a defensive player only!!! Dumb. They (the BBWA) got it wrong.

Coming soon: the MVP award...

Benchmarking

I created a benchmark to be run in one of our simulation programs. Our "big machine" in the lab is a quad-core Xeon E5430 machine with 32GB ECC ram. I always go to cpubenchmark.net to see benchmarks based on their own passmark software to get an idea of where a CPU ranks and I think it gives a generally good idea of what to expect. There, the E5430 scores 4,095 while the AMD 8350 scores 9,378 for a ratio of 2.29x. But this is for a benchmarking suite, but what about our math heavy benchmark that should be more suited to the traditional server grade crunching machines with Xeons?

Passmark
Xeon E5430: 4095
AMD 8350: 9378
ratio: 2.29x

Simulation Benchmark:
Xeon E5430: 627 seconds
AMD 8350: 337 seconds
ratio: 1.86x

So we are sitting at 1.86x which is below the Passmark result, but I think within reason given that I am using a home-user grade cpu vs. a server-grade cpu in a mathematics contest. During the sim we do use about 60% of the RAM which is about 20 GB which is cool. I am happy with this performance. The AMD 8350 costs $220 now, but the Xeon cost about $500 four years ago. Add in the cost of the more expensive motherboard and stuff and you have quite a nice performance/cost improvement seen here.

Coming soon... overclocking results.

New PC build

I decided to build a PC for me to keep at the lab that I could remotely connect to and run my simulations on. Nothing too special because what is so special about PCs these days? Anyway the quick specs are

750W PSU
AMD 8350 eight-core CPU
32GB DDR3-1600 RAM
NZXT Phantom case

That's about it. There is a 1TB drive I had at home that I threw in and I added a cheapo graphics card just to have video output. I brought in my old Samsung Syncmaster 712n to serve as it's monitor and I have had this monitor since August 2004 before I started up at ISU so it has served me well even though it was just sitting on my desk at home. Here are some pics:

I added the front 140mm case fan since it came with my CPU heatsink as a free gift. Speaking of the heatsink, I couldn't figure out how to install it at first so I just hooked up the stock AMD cooler which performed well enough to keep the CPU from overheating during full load, but I did manage to get the aftermarket cooler (a Xigmatek Dark Knight ii Night Hawk eidtion) and it managed to knock the temps down by 30 C or so. The case is nice and I felt like this was my cleanest build ever although as always there are just so many damn cables tucked away on the backside. I am definitely going with a modular PSU next time. I may upgrade this with round SATA cables, but I am happy with it for now. The fans are 140mm IN, 2x 120mm IN, 120mm OUT, 200mm OUT and I think I am happy with this. I pieced this one together for running simulations which are extremely parallel and like multithreaded CPUs which is why I went with the 8350 from AMD. 32GB of RAM rounds it out for the sims (believe me it is necessary). Anyway, I recommend the NZXT Phantom.

An open letter to Greg Byrne

Dear Mr. Byrne,

As athletic director of the University of Arizona you surely have a lot on your mind these days. We are fighting for bowl eligibility tomorrow against Colorado and we are also opening our basketball season this Sunday against Charleston Southern, but these are only several examples of the things you have to deal with at the moment. Clearly as a "modern" AD you have to not only worry about finding coaches for our teams, but also how to market our brand. We are doing quite well in that regard with the new Pac-12 tv deal, but we can do so much more. I don't know how involved you are with the athletics website, but I hope you will give my request the proper treatment it deserves. Did you know you don't have an iCal file of the men's basketball schedule on the website? Neither did I until this evening becasue, you see, I am only a bandwgaon fan. My friend RyDub has been a fan since the days when he used to drink too much Mt. Dew and he won an Arizona jersey during some march madness competition. He is your audience. He pays your salary and I can tell you he is not happy. Do you want to know about his dedication? You can read about it here. Please call up your tech nerds and get this iCal file on the web ASAP because he can't even synchronize his smartphone to our schedule without it. What the fuck man? We have got to do better. I know you are about maximizing profits, but who profits from us not having an iCal schedule file on our website. I trust you to correct this issue because, well, even the Fighting Illini have an iCal file on their website and while the Uof I is a much better school than ours, their football team sucks. Like sucks hard.

Thanks,
Sawsheezle

Sawsheezle is just a bandwagon fan

Sawsheezle has been keeping me up to date this year on the Arizona football team with info on when and what channel each game has been on. Well, the Arizona football team got blown out of the water tonight. He stopped watching the game before halftime but I decided to keep sending him updates. He thanked me and told me he appreciated the support. I was taken aback by this. Did he think I was only watching these games because he had asked me to? Did he think I wasn't actually a fan? For shame. I have been an Arizona fan for longer than he had. Here's my story...

Back in 1996-97, Mt Dew ran a contest during March Madness where underneath each cap was a team name (It may have been a Pepsi thing but I don't remember. I know my cap was from a Mt Dew bottle.). I can't remember when they started the contest. It must've been during the regular season because how could they print all the caps and get them out after the teams have been decided? Anyway, you kept the cap all the way through the tournament and depending on how far your team made it, you got a chance at certain prizes. Underneath my cap was the word ARIZONA. Now I was 11-12 so I did not know a lot about college basketball except for what my dad watched. I kept the cap even though I remember my dad saying that he didn't think they'd even make the tournament. Still, he helped me find out their schedule and we followed them through the tourny. They won their first game and I thought "Cool." Then they won their second, third, and even the fourth. They were in the final four! Holy crap! Now here's this team I've never even cared or heard about making it to the final four. They won the semifinals and were on to the championship game. Imagine my excitement when they won the championship game. I was pumped as all hell. We mailed my cap in and waited. Then one day I get a package in the mail. Damn, what could this be? I didn't win any of the big prizes but I did win an official NCAA 1997 march madness jersey. I wore that thing all the time. I even had a pen explode in the bottom corner and tried to get it out but it didn't work. Who cares, I still wore that fucker. Unfortunately I don't own it anymore but I've always followed Arizona ever since. I've also always loved their "A" logo. I will admit though, I didn't start paying attention to their football team until Sawsheezle started going there, so he did beat me there. Anyway, that's my story.