Tomorrow, our Senate will vote on H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which the House of Representatives recently approved. You can read Ron Paul’s observations about this bill here. Please urge Senators Hatch and Bennett to vote against it…

If our “limited government” Republican leadership passes this, they deserve to get kicked out of office.  That said, I shutter to think of the alternative.

Have you contacted your senators yet?

Wow. It’s a good thing there are no important issues that could be covered right now.  Of course, by important issues I mainly mean dead bombshells whose children’s potential fathers are squabbling over custody of the money, former baseball stars who may have used steroids (thank you congress for overseeing that), or even the transcendently wise tips on wearing sunscreen since (this just in) the sun is still hot.

To every thing turn, intern.
This your season. (Turn, intern!)
There’s an intern for every purpose under heaven.

An intern to type, an intern to clean,
an intern for food, an intern for drinks,
an intern for calls, an intern for blame,
Intern, the men’s room TP will soon need replacing.

I’m neither a computer scientist not a mathematician (and it probably shows), but I’m curious enough to poke around a bit. Lately I’ve been having fun with combinatorics.

One of the programs I often write as I’m learning a new programming language is a cryptogram maker. A cryptogram is basically it a word puzzle where each letter of a piece of text has been replaced by another letter according to a randomized substitution cipher. Here’s an example:

BEFORE: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.
AFTER : QGF JKHDY ZESRP WSV CKUIFN SOFE QGF BMXL NSTA.
LETTER : ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
CYPHER : MZDNFWTGHCYBUPSIJEAQKORVLX

Anyway, I’ve long known the total number of possible cypher keys (supposing that any letter can be replaced with itself), but I’ve spent several boring church meetings thinking about another simple combinatorics problem. Of course, it’s probably pretty basic to one who has studied combinatorics, but I’ll put it to you just the same.

The question was:

How do I process any given cypher key so that an ordered ’solution number’ can be derived from it (or vice versa) without iterating through the possible cyphers (or solutions).

After having the answer suddenly dawn on me the other night, I now put you to the test. And to make it only slightly more interesting, the first person to comment with the answers and an accurately described algorithm (complete with the basic math behind it) wins a whopping $5 cash prize mailable by me. Note that just writing a script to cycle through does not count because the whole point is not to iterate through all the cyphers. Also, I shrunk the alphabet to make it nicer on you. :)

Show your logic!  (Hint you can easily do the math on half a sheet of paper once you know the algorithm.)

So what did Cannon do?  He colluded with Leavitt to get the votes of Leavitt delegates, which by itself is fine; but in order to get the message to Leavitt supporters, Cannon and Leavitt broke party rules against signage in the conference center twice: the first time by having Leavitt volunteers march right through the convention holding giant Cannon signs, and second by hanging a large handwritten sign that said “Leavitt supports Cannon” at the top of the stadium.  Both acts received tremendous booing from the audience and calls from the Chairman to maintain order and cease the disruptive behavior.

It struck me to see how unprincipled and disparate the two losing major republican candidates really were.  But in the end they got their message across.  The final vote after Leavitt was eliminated was 59% for Chaffetz and 41% for Cannon, with Chaffetz lacking only 9 votes from the 60% required to win the republican nomination outright.

And so, the vote went to primaries, where money and name recognition generally give a major boost to incumbents.  Those primaries are today, and polling suggests that the nomination could go either way.  I’m going to vote for Chaffetz, and if you’re a registered Republican in Utah Congressional District 3, I hope you do too.

Although I didn’t agree with the whole thing, here are some gems from the Chaffetz speech (video):

I believe the best hope for our people, for our families, is to return to those core conservative principles of fiscal discipline, limited government, accountability, and a strong national defense.  We’ve abandoned those principles…  Republicans had the house, the senate, and the presidency, and quite frankly, we blew it.  We did not do the heavy lifting on the issues that matter most.

When Mr. Cannon took office, the budget was $1.5 trillion.  Today it’s $2.9 trillion.  That’s unacceptable, and we cannot sustain that.  We have a $9.3 trillion debt.  Last year alone we paid $429 billion of interest on that debt.  That cannot stand.

Mr. Cannon voted in favor of No Child Left Behind.  I want to repeal No Child Left Behind; there should be no Department of Education.

Here’s my favorite misleading statement from the Cannon campaign video:

[Chris Cannon]  has told the Federal Government to stay out of our schools.

Well, Cannon may have told the Federal Government to stay out of our schools, but that’s certainly not how he voted.  No Child Left Behind meddles with our schools in unprecedented ways.

If you want to do a last minute check on the issues, here is the Chaffetz platform.

Incidentally, you are also allowed to vote between Mark Walker and Richard Ellis for as the Republican nomination for State Treasurer.  See their campaign speeches here and here.

Get out and vote!

Here’s a letter from an organization my “leftest pig” friend no doubt admires.  It’s a letter with which I agree 100%.  In fact, this letter is so important that I’ll “waste my time” blogging about it just to make sure that you read it. Are you ready?  I’ve temporarily obfuscated the names of the (sometimes) innocent to keep my “right-wing nut” readers from jumping to conclusions and discrediting the content based solely on the author. Here goes:

Dear XXXX Supporter,

Despite the outrage coming from a broad coalition of concerned citizens, by tomorrow night the House of Representatives will vote on whether or not to gut the Constitution and give immunity to phone companies who broke the law and spied on Americans.

We have to act now. Even if you’ve emailed, called or visited your members of Congress about FISA, we need you to contact them again today.

Congress is moving so fast and so secretively that we only got a copy of this bill this morning. I can tell you it’s horrible. It contains vacuum cleaner style surveillance that sweeps up the phone calls and emails of Americans. And it’s blatantly unconstitutional.

The bottom line is that this is legislation that benefits a few of our country’s largest corporations while taking away basic rights from the rest of us. And it is unacceptable.

I’m going to spend the rest of the day on the phone calling Capitol Hill trying to stop this bill. I hope you will spend whatever time you can to make the voice of freedom heard in Congress — make calls, ask your friends and family to call — please do whatever you can.

Put Congress on notice that the American people don’t want a “compromise” that sells out our rights. Act now. We’re hearing the vote is tomorrow, so we could have less than 24 hours.

Believe me, no matter what happens, the XXXX will continue fighting this — if necessary, in the courts.

Thank you for all you have done through this fight. Your dedication has truly inspired me and all of us at the XXXX. Now, let’s hit the phones!

Thank you,
Caroline Fredrickson, Director
XXXX Washington Legislative Office

What is the name of the “leftist pig” organization with which this “right-wing nut” blogger nut so readily agrees?  Why it’s none other that the ACLU of course; and even though they refuse to defend my constitutional right to bear arms, the ACLU is dead right on this issue –and they’ve been dead right on a number of other issues as well.

So what’s my point?  Too often we turn our brains off when hearing an important message just because it’s delivered by someone we’ve already labeled as a leftist pig or a right-wing nut job.  “Liberals” do this to Bush all of the time.  “Conservatives” do it to the ACLU just as often.  It’s like we’ve been programmed to judge a message solely by the messenger, discrediting the content altogether; and no amount of good logic can compensate for our need to aways agree (or always disagree) with so-and-so.

If conservatives are are always pushing for limited government, why in the world do they want to give big government unlimited access to American citizens’ phone records?  And how is it that the supposed “big government” democrats are the ones fighting against this?  Seriously, think about it.  I think our desire to identify with and support our constituents while disagreeing with and thwarting our political rivals often times inhibits our ability to just use our noodle –and we’re all worse off for it.  (No, I don’t think my good friend is guilty of this sheepery; I just draw on his toungue-in-cheek question to prove a point.)

Anyway, this letter demonstrates an issue that both parties should be able to rally behind.  Government should not be allowed to spy on citizens willy-nilly.  If they suspect a citizen of terrorism and want to tap the wires, they should get a warrant.  These measures are there to protect citizens against a government that, if left unchecked, would in due time become tyranical.

In questions of power then let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

     –Thomas Jefferson (via Quoty)

Please do as the letter suggests and contact your representatives in congress. We don’t need big government to get any bigger.  Because the FISA bill would jeopardize our liberty, both sides of the aisle need to come together and oppose it.

As Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign officially came to a close, I was enthused to see his longer-term Campaign for Liberty initiative replace it.  It had upwards of 50,000 people sign up over the weekend, but membership growth has slowed somewhat since then.  Regardless, I’m glad to see a this more permanent fixture of liberty come into place; and I hope that it will be effective in promoting the principles of liberty, sound money, limited government, free markets, and non-interventionalism for years to come.

I think we have a long way to go, but I’m relieved to see people still rallying around this excellent cause.  I hope you’ll join us to help make America a safer place for liberty, prosperity, and peace.

Android Pacman looks good as well.

Dwight: Why am I being forced to come in tomorrow and pretend that a website made sales that I made?
Ryan: This is a temporary measure to increase the legitimacy of the site.
Stanley: I don’t like when my clients call me to help them use the website, I’m not seeing commissions on that.
Ryan: I hear you Stanley, that is a great observation. Problems like that will not happen when we launch Dunder Mifflin Infinity 2 point O.
Stanley: When will that be?
Ryan: TBD. Phyllis?
Phyllis: Did the police solve the problem with the…
Ryan: Yes, yes they did, yes they did.
Ryan: Yes, the social networking feature of the Dunder Mifflin Infinity website was infiltrated by sexual predators.
Dwight: I don’t understand why our website has to have social networking at all.
Jim: Yeah, I actually have to agree with Dwight on that one.
Ryan: It’s all about creating a one stop shop consumer experience, alright? You’re chatting with your friends, you’re talking about the latest music, about the election; all of it is happening in our virtual paper store.
Jim: And then an older gentleman asked you “Boxers or briefs?”
Creed: I don’t get the big fuss here, I like the site.
Kelly: If I’d have created a website with as many problems, I’d kill myself.
Ryan: Do you have a question Kelly?
Kelly: Yeah I have a lot of questions. Number one, how dare you?
Michael: [slow clapping] Ryan has done a very good job, and I am not applauding sarcastically. Think about it, a month ago nobody would go on this site because we were worried about getting molested, or losing our identity, having it stolen. But now, at a time TBD, all of the problems will be in the past. Ya done good kid, ya done good.
– Source: OfficeQuotes.net

I thought all this was pretty funny, but the ability to drop social features onto your website with little more than some pasting of JavaScript might just prove us all wrong.  :)

Example:

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