China Can Haz Aircraft Carrier?

That's the Varyag, a Soviet-era Aircraft Carrier acquired by the Chinese. It is China's only aircraft cariier so far, though, predictably because they are more difficult to make than toothbrushes and silly-bands. From the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

The acquisition of an aircraft carrier is driven in part by China’s desire for international prestige. The United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, Spain, Italy, India, Brazil, and Thailand operate a total of 21 active-service aircraft carriers (the United States alone operates 11). An aircraft carrier is widely viewed by Chinese as a symbol of national power and prestige. PLA officers often remind foreigners that China is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council without a carrier. At the same time, however, the procurement of the carrier is a consequence of an improved continental threat environment that has imposed constraints on China’s ability to develop sea power.

Yeah, they don't sound too worried. And yet, China having zero aircraft carriers when we had eleven was an infinity-to-one ratio, and now it's just down to eleven-to-one, which isn't nearly as good, so perhaps we should be. Read the rest of the article here, as it is an interesting look at China's current military capabilities (just successfully tested a stealth fighter and an ASAT weapon, for example, which puts them around 20 years behind us, or so).

Their Stuff Is Shit And Your Shit Is Stuff

Watch as Stuart poons Megyn Kelly, Foxnews Anchorwoman who only likes entitlements when they apply to her...

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The First Step Is Admitting You Have A Problem

These are a sampling of quotations from college students across the country and world after they were asked to give up the Internets for just one day. Ohhhh boy. We need to have a little talk, young people. You guys didn't live throught the crack epidemic, which sounded quite a bit like this. Obviously I can't complain too much, though, because if people didn't waste huge amounts of time on the Interwebz then sites like this would not exist.

Two Amazon Users Engage In Algorithmic Death Struggle

Think college textbook prices are too high? Me too. Examine:

It seemed tiresome to restate the story for you, so let's let Max Read do it:

A few weeks ago, UC Berkeley evolutionary biologist and blogger Michael Eisen was looking to pick up a copy of Lawrence's book ("classic work in developmental biology," he raves). The book's out of print, but Amazon gave Eisen an option: Either one of the 15 used copies, starting at $35.54, or one of two new copies, the cheapest of which is $1,730,045.91 (plus, as Eisen points out, four dollars for shipping).

The other copy, meanwhile, cost $2,198,177.95. What was happening? Were we watching the rise of a Peter Lawrence bubble? Many of us would likely have blamed "the evil eye" and lit an extra stick of incense. But Eisen, a science-minded fellow, tracked the slowly-increasing price of the two new copies of The Making of Fly, and noticed a pattern. He even made a chart! (Scientists! They are just the best.)

Once a day [bookseller number one] profnath set their price to be 0.9983 times [bookseller number two] bordeebook's price. The prices would remain close for several hours, until bordeebook "noticed" profnath's change and elevated their price to 1.270589 times profnath's higher price. The pattern continued perfectly for the next week.

As it happened, profnath and bordeebook were both using pricing algorithms to determine the optimum prices for their books. Profnath's algorithm was designed to have the lowest price possible—but only by a small amount, hence 0.9983—while bordeebook's was designed to set the highest price—presumably, Eisen writes, because they don't actually have a copy of the book and would need to buy one elsewhere to deliver it to a customer. Profnath and bordeebook had become locked in an algorithmic death-struggle, that eventually led the book to be priced at $23,698,655.93, shipping not included.

SHIPPING NOT INCLUDED??? Ha. So, take that, algorithm utilizers! Math fails again!