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I was glad to see this. Takei also has a great TED talk on the internment of Japanese in America in World War II that we're going to show our kids some time in the near future.

I admit that at times I'm easily entertained. One regular amusement of mine are the lines spouted out by the fortune application whose output can be seen on the bottom of each soylentnews page. The quips and quotes often get a chuckle or smile from me. Some have struck me enough that I've copied them down for reference. Here are a few of those that I've thought entertaining enough to write down:

A candidate is a person who gets money from the rich and votes from the poor to protect them from each other.

#if _FP_W_TYPE_SIZE < 32 #error "Here's a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer." #endif -- linux/arch/sparc64/double.h

To hell with the Prime Directive;
Let's KILL something!

And my personal favorite:

Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill.

If you have them, share your favorites below.

Submitted July 36, Rejected July 26

      ScienceDaily reports on results from MIT's CSAIL and the Weizmann Institute:

3-D movies immerse us in new worlds and allow us to see places and things that we otherwise couldn't. But behind every 3-D experience is something that is uniformly despised: those goofy glasses.

In a new paper, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science have demonstrated a display that lets you watch 3-D films in a movie theater without extra eyewear.

Dubbed "Cinema 3D," the prototype uses a special array of lenses and mirrors to enable viewers to watch a 3-D movie from any seat in a theater.

"Existing approaches to glasses-free 3-D require screens whose resolution requirements are so enormous that they are completely impractical," says MIT professor Wojciech Matusik, one of the co-authors on a related paper. "This is the first technical approach that allows for glasses-free 3D on a large scale."

While the researchers caution that the system isn't currently market-ready, they are optimistic that future versions could push the technology to a place where theaters would be able to offer glasses-free alternatives for 3-D movies.

Tonight was the final night of the Republican National Convention in the US. Vox attempts to answer the question: "How did the Party of Lincoln become the Party of Trump.

The Republican Party has nominated Donald J. Trump for president of the United States. This is a remarkable turn of events, and it only gets more remarkable when you think back to how the party began its existence: fighting against the expansion of slavery. But over the past century and a half, the party of Abraham Lincoln has changed dramatically. It went from a party that was racially progressive for its times, to one that gets little support from nonwhite voters. It went from a Northern-only party, to one that dominates the South. Here's how it happened.

In the opinion of your humble correspondent, this is probably the most coherent and concise explanation that I've seen. Read the text and/or watch the video.

"It’s what happens when weaponised insincerity is applied to structured ignorance."

https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/im-with-the-banned-8d1b6e0b2932

Today is my birthday. It's also my wife's birthday. Yes, we have share a birthday.

You might be thinking, "Oh, that's pretty neat!". It's not that great. When it's your birthday, you want to be treated even a little special. Maybe have dinner prepared for you, or something like that. Well, when it's both of your birthdays, it becomes just like every other day. After work (yes, I'm working on my birthday), I have to go to the store to pick up dinner. I'll have to help prepare it, and help clean up after. It's not that big of a deal. I don't really like celebrating birthdays anyways.

My wife is still preggers. Her belly is showing now, and it's pretty exiting. The morning sickness is over, but she still feels pretty tired at the end of the day. She goes to be early, and doesn't really have much energy anymore. Sometimes I feel bad because I wish I could take some of the burden off her. The frequent headaches and tiredness must be pretty tiring. I've been trying to help out more around the house and do what I can.

The girl that I talked about in my last entry is gone. I really liked her -- she was smart and sexy -- but I did end up scaring her off pretty much right after the last entry. I wanted (and still do want) a serious secondary relationship. She had just come out of a long term relationship, and so just wanted something more casual. Anyways, she decided that we were looking for different things (and we were, but I would have taken whatever she could offer). Since that girl, I kinda gave up. A pregnant wife complicates things a bit. Catching an STD at this point in the game could result in serious consequences for the baby, and adequate protection and testing to reduce that chance is a lot to ask of a new partner that you just met. That, combined with not really knowing what I will be able to offer once the baby is born, has left me in a position where I don't really feel all that comfortable dating.

I miss it though. I certainly don't miss the rejection, but I definitely miss those fleeting moments of excitement. I love cuddling, and I just don't feel like I get enough cuddles from my wife -- she's just too tired at the end of the day (no, 'cuddles' isn't code for sex. I just want someone to nuzzle into me). It's also summer and I really like getting out to the mountains. My wife doesn't have the energy to do anything strenuous, and so it's been a little frustrating because when we go out, I just want to go, but she can't keep up. Maybe I should just look for a female hiking partner... I don't know...

Don't get me wrong -- my wife is amazing. I have never met anyone more compatible, and there is no one on this planet that I love more. I really want to be clear - I love her to death and she is the most amazing woman I have ever met. I really don't know what this open relationship will look like after the baby is born. I hope I still have the time to date. Maybe the baby is exactly what I need in my life. Who knows?

Overall, things are good. I'm excited for my baby. My wife and I are great and I'm another year older - the big 33.

NVIDIA Announces “NVIDIA Titan X” Video Card: $1200, Available August 2nd

Move Over GTX 1080, There’s A New Titan X In Town

Meaningless for anybody who doesn't want the general compute features. It's $200 more expensive than its predecessor, probably to avoid cannibalizing sales of more expensive Pascal GPUs intended for businesses.

"It's much easier to scare a monkey than it is to calm it down."

The billion-dollar RNC question: What is Peter Thiel doing there?

Fun for everyone.

So, audioguy (one of our sysadminy types) was checking the firewall logs and apparently one of the speedbumps we put in for bots got tripped by an L-3 Communications Holdings address. Not to be confused with Level 3 Communications, L-3 is the sneaky spy corp born of the Lockheed Martin merger. So, yes, we're officially being actively (as opposed to the passive scraping the NSA does to everyone's traffic) electronically surveiled.

Mind you, since they're tripping our firewall, they're not going to be seeing much unless they throttle back how many connections they use at once. They really should make use of the API for bot stuff. It's still firewalled but there are bits in it that can get you much more info at once and save us both the overhead of inefficient scraping.