I guess things have really improved in London since they installed those cameras and outlawed cricket balls and such.
Of course, since it’s unlawful to arm oneself in Britain, this can’t actually have happened — right?
A resident, who did not want to be named, said that some of the gang had armed themselves with 3ft wooden sticks from a skip.
D’oh!
I imagine that most of you have heard of Angel Raich’s predicament, but on the off-chance that you haven’t:
As if we didn’t have enough evidence already that the federal government is out for its own interests and doesn’t give a shit about the rest of us….
Lately, I’ve been posting about risk in sports. First, I brought up the notion that lifting weights is not free of risk; yesterday, I alluded to the fact that baseball isn’t perfectly safe either. Well, yeah: life isn’t safe. You have to deal with risk somehow, because you can’t avoid it.
Serendipitously, Lucky over on The Great Motorcycle Pizza Tour posted this gem today:
He’s writing about motorcycling, but he could be writing about anything. I take his point to be: “You shouldn’t avoid something just because you might get hurt. Don’t let a little temporary fear deny you something you really enjoy.” If we keep doing that:
Eventually, we end up with a society where everyone is afraid even though nothing bad has ever happened to them.
We are, of course, already heading down that path — all it takes is a trip to the airport, or a look at the newspaper, to see that we’re desperately afraid of things that might happen.
Well, “we” as a society may be paralyzed by the fear of what-ifs, but “we” as individuals need not be. Just about everything worth doing incurs some risk. (I’m not quite sure about bridge, but I wouldn’t rule it out.) Identify the risks, mitigate them when possible, but don’t let them stop you from doing things you enjoy. And if someone asks you: “Aren’t you afraid you’ll hurt yourself?” — smack them. They’re treating you like a child to justify their own insecurities.
Well, it looks like the CBC’s health reporters have caught up with what T-Nation was saying last summer:
To wit:
The chemicals have been implicated in reproductive problems in men such as low sperm counts and low testosterone levels, and subtle changes in the reproductive organs of baby boys.
[...]
The researchers wanted to test the idea that phthalates may be linked to obesity, since low testosterone levels appear to cause abdominal obesity and pre-diabetes in men.
It’s interesting: I’ve read that abdominal fat leads to high estrogen levels, and that high (xeno)estrogen levels increase abdominal fat. Looks like we haven’t quite figured out the causation/correlation relationship here.
What has the New York City Council done? Why, they’ve banned aluminum baseball bats! It’s a public safety issue, don’t you know, and it’s being done to protect the precious little children.
The perceptive reader will already have noted that I’m not quite Anglophilic enough to spell it “aluminium”.
If I squint, I can sort-of see the barest scrape of logic in this decision. After all, a baseball bat would make a pretty good weapon, and the Big Apple isn’t exactly a model of peaceful coexistance among citizens. Perhaps aluminum baseball bats are the “assault weapons” of the diamond-dwelling community, with their detachable magazines lack of legitimate sporting use. (After all, Major League Baseball doesn’t use aluminum bats, does it?) Get them off the streets! Stop bat violence! Embrace bat control!
Er, no. NYC hasn’t gone so far as to ban sports equipment as deadly weapons. (We can leave that sort of hysterical fear-mongering to the Brits.) Instead, they’ve banned aluminum bats because… they’re too damn effective!
The use of aluminum bats, which were first introduced in the early 1970’s, has been debated for years both from a competitive standpoint and increasingly for safety reasons. Critics of the bats say balls fly off them faster, giving pitchers less time to react.
(For the record: that was the New York Times that mispluralized “1970s”, not me. Bastards.)
What’s next: banning 45lb Olympic plates because they’re too heavy?
Sports are dangerous. You can minimize the risk, if you’re willing to accept it, but you can’t legislate it away.
I hope you all had a good pi day. Mine was excellent; I’ve recovered sufficiently from various illnesses and injuries to get in some good workouts.
Anyway, to mark the occasion, I present:
Totalrecoil writes an excellent Canadian-libertarian blog, right here on WordPress, and is doing spectacularly well lately.
So let’s suppose you’re a developer working on triangle meshes. You’ve read my first article on vertex-face lists (and, inexplicably, nothing else), and now you’re running into problems with connectivity. Perhaps you want to apply a subdivision operator to your mesh, but you can’t easily figure out which vertices are neighbours, or where the edges are. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to add basic connectivity information to a vertex-face list: keep track of each vertex’s neighbours, its one-ring.
Looking at our little diagram here, the vertex v has a one-ring of {a, b, c, d, e, f}. Generally it’s easiest to work with one-rings in some sort of order — counterclockwise is preferred, because that’s how trig functions work — but you don’t necessarily need that kind of complexity.
Adding one-rings to your vertices is pretty simple. Obviously, you’ll need a container in each vertex to store one-ring indices:
typedef struct {
float x, y, z;
size_t n_nbrs;
size_t* one_ring;
} vertex;
Next, every time you add a face to the mesh, you update the one-rings of its vertices. For example, when you add face vab, you add a and b to v’s one-ring, v and b to a’s one-ring, and v and a to b’s one-ring.
Keeping around a one-ring list for each vertex lets you walk from vertex to vertex (and, implicitly, from edge to edge) on a mesh, which is most of what you need to do for subdivision. However, it doesn’t let you walk from face to face without some extra book-keeping.
