Would the Hitler mustache look good if there weren't any emotional baggage associated with it?

[URL="http://www.abc17news.com/news/public-defenders-office-assigns-governor-criminal-case/41043748"]Public defender's office assigns governor criminal case[/URL]
Governor Nixon (attorney Missouri Bar Number 29603) after he defunded the state's indigent defense system is assigned as to represent a client that can not afford representation.
[QUOTE]"Given the extraordinary circumstances that compel me to entertain any and all avenues of relief, it strikes me that I should begin with the one attorney in the state who not only created this problem, but is in a unique position to address it," Barrett wrote.[/QUOTE]
h/t Lisa “LJ” Cohen on Google+

PDF: [url]http://www.publicdefender.mo.gov/Newsfeed/Delegation_of_Representation.PDF[/url]

[QUOTE=only_human;439303][URL="http://www.abc17news.com/news/public-defenders-office-assigns-governor-criminal-case/41043748"]Public defender's office assigns governor criminal case[/URL]
Governor Nixon (attorney Missouri Bar Number 29603) after he defunded the state's indigent defense system is assigned as to represent a client that can not afford representation.

h/t Lisa “LJ” Cohen on Google+

PDF: [URL]http://www.publicdefender.mo.gov/Newsfeed/Delegation_of_Representation.PDF[/URL][/QUOTE]
Well, at least there is a bit of poetic justice in Missouri, even if the legal kind is in short supply.

Bear hitches ride on garbage truck
 

[URL="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/04/bear-hitches-ride-on-garbage-truck-for-five-miles-in-new-mexico"]A bear has hitched a ride[/URL] on top of a garbage truck in the American state of New Mexico, travelling at least five miles on the vehicle before it was able to make its escape up a tree.

[url]https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2015098713/fidget-cube-a-vinyl-desk-toy/[/url]
I 'm not one who fidget but well, some of you might.

[url]http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/09/new-programming-language-delivers.html[/url] admittedly it's more of an extension and probably wouldn't be necessarily helpful here but it's cool to me at least. the link at the top of the first article leads to another with a little more information [url]http://news.mit.edu/2016/faster-parallel-computing-big-data-0913[/url]

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie 'laughed about Bridgegate'
 

[URL]http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37498031[/URL]
The dry drollery of the British press knocks me for a loop twice in one day. First it was the former-nuns-get-married story: "[URL="http://mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=443745&postcount=1638"]Kicking the Habit[/URL]", over at the Guardian, and now THIS from the Beeb.

[QUOTE]At an event in Trenton, New Jersey later on Tuesday, the governor again denied any knowledge.

"I had no knowledge prior to or during" the closures, he said. "There's been no evidence ever put forward that I did.

Mr Wildstein's testimony follows last month's revelations that former Christie ally Christina Renna allegedly texted her colleague, Peter Sheridan, about the governor's knowledge of the plot.

"He just flat out lied about senior staff and [former campaign manager Bill Stepien] not being involved," she allegedly texted, referring to comments Mr Christie made during a news conference that year.

Republicans are probably thanking their lucky stars - as much as they can these days - that [U]Donald Trump didn't go with what was reportedly his [B]gut instinct[/B][/U] and pick Chris Christie to be his vice-presidential running mate.
[/QUOTE]
ROFLMAO!

[URL="https://www.yahoo.com/news/algorithm-solves-cake-cutting-problem-223127214.html"]Algorithm solves cake-cutting problem that has haunted mathematicians[/URL]

[QUOTE]We’ve all been there before: moving into a new apartment with housemates and trying to figure out who owes what each month. It’s easy enough if everyone gets the same identical room, but inevitably there is one person who gets the slightly larger bed, or the nice view with no road noise, or the ceiling that doesn’t leak, or the en-suite bathroom.

The same is true of a variety of other division tasks: from dividing up leftover pizza — does one slice of meat feast equal two slices of cheese? — to more serious examples like divorce settlements.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=science_man_88;444543][URL="https://www.yahoo.com/news/algorithm-solves-cake-cutting-problem-223127214.html"]Algorithm solves cake-cutting problem that has haunted mathematicians[/URL][/QUOTE]

And the darker side of algorithms...

[url=https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/crash-how-computers-are-setting-us-up-disaster]Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster[/url] | The Guardian

Lots of good stuff re. the "what could go wrong" aspects of the ever-incresing reliance on "the algorithm" in planes, automobiles and sundry aspects of daily life. My favorite part came at the end:
[quote]In the mid-1980s, a Dutch traffic engineer named Hans Monderman was sent to the village of Oudehaske. Two children had been killed by cars, and Monderman’s radar gun showed right away that drivers were going too fast through the village. He pondered the traditional solutions – traffic lights, speed bumps, additional signs pestering drivers to slow down. They were expensive and often ineffective. Control measures such as traffic lights and speed bumps frustrated drivers, who would often speed dangerously between one measure and another.

And so Monderman tried something revolutionary. He suggested that the road through Oudehaske be made to look more like what it was: a road through a village. First, the existing traffic signs were removed. (Signs always irritated Monderman: driving through his home country of the Netherlands with the writer Tom Vanderbilt, he once railed against their patronising redundancy. “Do you really think that no one would perceive there is a bridge over there?” he would ask, waving at a sign that stood next to a bridge, notifying people of the bridge.) The signs might ostensibly be asking drivers to slow down. However, argued Monderman, because signs are the universal language of roads everywhere, on a deeper level the effect of their presence is simply to reassure drivers that they were on a road – a road like any other road, where cars rule. Monderman wanted to remind them that they were also in a village, where children might play.

So, next, he replaced the asphalt with red brick paving, and the raised kerb with a flush pavement and gently curved guttering. Where once drivers had, figuratively speaking, sped through the village on autopilot – not really attending to what they were doing – now they were faced with a messy situation and had to engage their brains. It was hard to know quite what to do or where to drive – or which space belonged to the cars and which to the village children. As Tom Vanderbilt describes Monderman’s strategy in his book Traffic, “Rather than clarity and segregation, he had created confusion and ambiguity.”

Perplexed, drivers took the cautious way forward: they drove so slowly through Oudehaske that Monderman could no longer capture their speed on his radar gun. By forcing drivers to confront the possibility of small errors, the chance of them making larger ones was greatly reduced.

Monderman, who died in 2008, was the most famous of a small group of traffic planners around the world who have been pushing against the trend towards an ever-tidier strategy for making traffic flow smoothly and safely. The usual approach is to give drivers the clearest possible guidance as to what they should do and where they should go: traffic lights, bus lanes, cycle lanes, left- and right-filtering traffic signals, railings to confine pedestrians, and of course signs attached to every available surface, forbidding or permitting different manoeuvres.

Laweiplein in the Dutch town of Drachten was a typical such junction, and accidents were common. Frustrated by waiting in jams, drivers would sometimes try to beat the traffic lights by blasting across the junction at speed – or they would be impatiently watching the lights, rather than watching for other road users. (In urban environments, about half of all accidents happen at traffic lights.) With a shopping centre on one side of the junction and a theatre on the other, pedestrians often got in the way, too.

Monderman wove his messy magic and created the “squareabout”. He threw away all the explicit efforts at control. In their place, he built a square with fountains, a small grassy roundabout in one corner, pinch points where cyclists and pedestrians might try to cross the flow of traffic, and very little signposting of any kind. It looks much like a pedestrianisation scheme – except that the square has as many cars crossing it as ever, approaching from all four directions. Pedestrians and cyclists must cross the traffic as before, but now they have no traffic lights to protect them. It sounds dangerous – and surveys show that locals think it is dangerous. It is certainly unnerving to watch the squareabout in operation – drivers, cyclists and pedestrians weave in and out of one another in an apparently chaotic fashion.

Yet the squareabout works. Traffic glides through slowly but rarely stops moving for long. The number of cars passing through the junction has risen, yet congestion has fallen. And the squareabout is safer than the traffic-light crossroads that preceded it, with half as many accidents as before. It is precisely because the squareabout feels so hazardous that it is safer. Drivers never quite know what is going on or where the next cyclist is coming from, and as a result they drive slowly and with the constant expectation of trouble. And while the squareabout feels risky, it does not feel threatening; at the gentle speeds that have become the custom, drivers, cyclists and pedestrians have time to make eye contact and to read one another as human beings, rather than as threats or obstacles. When showing visiting journalists the squareabout, Monderman’s party trick was to close his eyes and walk backwards into the traffic. The cars would just flow around him without so much as a honk on the horn.

In Monderman’s artfully ambiguous squareabout, drivers are never given the opportunity to glaze over and switch to the automatic driving mode that can be so familiar. The chaos of the square forces them to pay attention, work things out for themselves and look out for each other. The square is a mess of confusion. That is why it works.[/quote]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;444885]Lots of good stuff re. the "what could go wrong" aspects of the ever-incresing reliance on "the algorithm" in planes, automobiles and sundry aspects of daily life. My favorite part came at the end:[/QUOTE]

OK. So, just to be clear, you are reflecting on science_man_88 for your sanity.

Is that correct?

[QUOTE=ewmayer;444885]My favorite part came at the end:[/QUOTE]Reminds me of the problem that was faced in Taiwan a while back. There was a curved transfer ramp. People were driving too fast, accidents ensued. Signs did not help. So the single lane was narrowed and chevrons were painted (thermoplasticed) in the lane. Drivers perceived that they were driving fast and slowed down. Accidents dropped.

I get to "play in traffic" about once a month. We cone off the kerb lane that we are working in. Many drivers don't "slow for the cone zone". Sometimes I will put cones in the centre turn lane. It makes the area for the cars to appear narrow. I never actual reduce the width of the lane, but drivers feel constricted and don't want to hit the cones with their precious cars. It is very effective.