It’s a Screw-Propelled Vehicle (pick image for video).

This is: A (15 megawatt) Snowblower

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Should you find them useful during your Christmas celebrations this year, I have assembled a varied collection of 20 secular and sacred Christmas Carols (in audio & video formats, at YouTube) which, along with YouTube’s recommendations thereto, and EBD’s excellent selections this year and last, provide a good starting point for putting together an appropriate musical program.

Also, a quick reminder that my collection of 16 Christmas Carol Song Sheets (formatted for printing, with a PDF for broken browsers) is available at The Sagacious Iconoclast, should you be fortunate enough to be celebrating Christmas with others who like to carol and yet who may not know all the words. You can also find there a good selection of old movies, cooking shows, and other such videos, should you find any of them useful for your Christmas entertaining or relaxation.

Lastly, as I’ll likely be remotely located with respect to Internet connectivity over the weekend, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish y’all in advance a very Merry Christmas. All my best to Kate, and to you and yours;
in the words of Rowley Birkin (QC): Merry Christmas, To You.

SIXTΨ SγMBΦLS is a collection of (currently) 143 videos on a number of
physics topics, from cosmology to quantum mechanics, from the University of
Nottingham. Each video is typically five to ten minutes long, and features one
to a half-dozen professors discussing the topic at hand. The project is called
SIXTΨ SγMBΦLS because it started out based on discussions of sixty of the
mathematical symbols, variables, and constants used by physicists.

Notable participants include Amanda Bauer, Roger Bowley, Ed Copeland,
Laurence Eaves, Meghan Gray, Philip Moriarty, and a dozen other professors
and scientists at the University of Nottingham. I have collected all the available
links and presented them in a simple linear historic layout, for your ease of
access, at my new Sixty Symbols page.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the inaugural
publication of our new Some Stuff You Might Like feature at
The Sagacious Iconoclast. This week’s episode includes talks by
Scott Aaronson, Paul Bloom, Bernard Chazelle, David Deutsch,
Jim Gettys, Kevin Karsch &c, Andrew Lo, Nathan Myhrvold &c,
Franz Och &c, Steven Pinker, and Amit Sood, a documentary on
the Apollo Guidance Computer, and performances by Jethro Tull 
and Jackie Mason, with my apologies to pharisaical misologists,
and thanks to Kate for the invitation to drop by from time to time.

Oh hi folks, it’s me, Vitruvius. I was recently involved in a discussion in which some folks were attempting to distinguish between what they were calling “processed” cheese and other (presumably non-processed) cheese, without defining what they mean by “processed” cheese. As I think that’s a less than optimal approach, I’d like to take a moment to sketch out why that is so; perhaps increasing, in the process, your enjoyment of cheese forever.

In my new On the Matter of “Processed” Cheese essay, I list in point form something like the key steps and phases involved in producing what we call cheese, and it really is a beautiful thing.

What I’d like each of you who are so inclined to do is to decide, for yourself: at what step or phase does the product we are discussing in the essay become cheese, and at what step does it become “processed” cheese. I’ve put some of my annotations in for the record, but you are free to decide for yourself, of course.

I hope you like the essay; if you do, you’re welcome, if you don’t, I’m sorry to have bothered you.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week’s Distinguished Lecture, Documentary and Interview Symposium. Tonight, for your delectation, here is Tom Malzbender presenting his Google Tech Talk entitled Imaging the Antikythera Mechanism. Tom is a senior researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories; this talk is about the Polynomial Texture Mapping algorithm he has developed, and about its applications to computer graphics, archeology, geology, forensics, the Antikythera mechanism, &c.

PTM allows one to see more of an object’s surface texture detail, from a set of photographs (taken under changing light source location), than one can see from said photographs with the naked eye alone. Its applications range from the microscopic to the macroscopic, it’s a technique you can use at home, the software is freely available, and the mathematics isn’t even very difficult.

PTM algorithms can also be used to determine surface texture renderings from elevation maps. One can even use PTM to do smooth focus variation between a half-dozen images taken, in a fraction of a second, from a single position and with a single lighting situation, but across a range of focal lengths (if one has enough light plus film speed), a technology which one can imagine integrated into future digital cameras.

For the first time since confederation, the Liberal Party of Canada is neither Her Majesty’s Government nor Her Loyal Opposition. The Bloc Québécois have been nearly wiped out. The leaders of both those parties lost their seats. The New Democratic Party is for the first time Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, but with more than half the NDP seats in Quebec, and 77% of Quebec’s seats NDP, the NDP & Quebec are now stuck with each other.

Clearly it’s been an unusual election; that is also reflected in V_e: The Right Honourable Stephen Harper, Prime Minister and leader of Her Majesty’s Government, has achieved a majority of 167 seats with a V_e of 6.3, one point below (sic) his 2008 minority of 143 seats with a V_e of 7.3. The projected seat range for V_e = 6.3 was 136 to 164, but Mr. Harper bettered that by three, as shown by the large blue dot, so next time that boundary will have to move slightly.

The pollsters final results came in at ΣV_e/n = 4.81, ca. 1½ points below the final election value (but they would have been worse if not for the COMPAS result). They were ca. two points low in 2008, yet ca. two points high in 2004 and 2006. I have updated the images and text in my Vitruvius’s Experimental Election Predictor essay to reflect these excellent results.

So as the 2011 Election sets slowly in the west, this is Vitruvius, his
election predictor, and Don Ho saying: Thanks for hosting us, Kate.