Sunday, November 3, 2013

Confession of a Marine wife...

Confession of a Marine wife...  Via my lovely bride:
I sat, as did millions of other Americans, and watched as the government underwent a peaceful transition of power a few short years ago.

At first, I felt a swell of pride and patriotism while Barack Obama took his Oath of Office.

However, all that pride quickly vanished as I later watched 21 Marines, in full dress uniform with rifles, fire a 21-gun salute to the President.

It was then that I realized how far America’s military had deteriorated.

Every one of them missed the bastard.

Awww...

Awww...  My mom sent me a collection of photos like this.  I'm saving the rest for a day when I'm feeling grumpier than usual...


What happens when you die?

What happens when you die?  Father Guido Sarducci explains.  Via my mom...

And from the comments:
...and then you find yourself 35 cents short.

Canyon of fire...

Canyon of fire...  You'll want to view this one full screen.  The notes posted with it:
A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion. The 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun's atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion. Visualizers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. combined two days of satellite data to create a short movie of this gigantic event on the sun.

In reality, the sun is not made of fire, but of something called plasma: particles so hot that their electrons have boiled off, creating a charged gas that is interwoven with magnetic fields.

These images were captured on Sept. 29-30, 2013, by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which constantly observes the sun in a variety of wavelengths.

Different wavelengths help capture different aspect of events in the corona. The red images shown in the movie help highlight plasma at temperatures of 90,000° F and are good for observing filaments as they form and erupt. The yellow images, showing temperatures at 1,000,000° F, are useful for observing material coursing along the sun's magnetic field lines, seen in the movie as an arcade of loops across the area of the eruption. The browner images at the beginning of the movie show material at temperatures of 1,800,000° F, and it is here where the canyon of fire imagery is most obvious.

By comparing this with the other colors, one sees that the two swirling ribbons moving farther away from each other are, in fact, the footprints of the giant magnetic field loops, which are growing and expanding as the filament pulls them upward.

You can almost hear the AGW papers disintegrating...

You can almost hear the AGW papers disintegrating...  Steve McIntyre, with his impertinent insistence on using real data and sound analysis, must be really irritating to the AGW crowd of the Mann and Hansen species.  Their dependency on dodgy models and even dodgier, cherry-picked data to build those models on makes them highly vulnerable to Steve's ability to wield common sense, logic, and math.  And Steve is at it again...

Your morning palate cleanser...

Your morning palate cleanser...  You're welcome.

It's the stupid, stupid!

It's the stupid, stupid!  The new progressive meme about Obama's big lie (if you like your policy, you can keep it): he had to lie, 'cause we're too stupid to understand the truth.

Government is Magic...

Government is Magic...  Daniel Greenfield has a great piece up on his blog Sultan Knish.  His lede:
Our technocracy is detached from competence. It's not the technocracy of engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.

These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn't fix a toaster.

The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.
Speaking as an engineer with at least a modicum of competency, this rings very true to me.  They (the administration) seem to think that every problem is easy – all they have to do is sprinkle a little magic techno-dust on it, and it's solved...

Lois Lerner's cushy deal...

Lois Lerner's cushy deal...  Wizbang has the scoop, and it ain't purty...

The One's administration is infuriating in their arrogance and disregard for the law.  There needs to be a comeuppance, but there isn't one anywhere in sight...

Holding on to the Memories...

Holding on to the Memories...  Dave Carter, writing at Ricochet, has a piece that moved me to tears this morning – mainly because of its resonance with respect to my own father.  Dave's father is far away and failing, like mine – and also like me, Dave has a collection of memories that he will cherish forever.  But he writes (much) more movingly than I can...

The music of ancient Greece, recreated...

The music of ancient Greece, recreated...  I listened to it, and I don't think it's likely to hit the charts anytime soon – but I'm not sure if that's because of the music or the artist :)

Geek: To HTML, “chucknorris” is a color...

Geek: To HTML, “chucknorris” is a color...  When I first saw this headline, I thought it was a joke.  But the joke's on me: for some reason the HTML standards body thought it was a good idea to allow anything in the color specification field.  I can't imagine why they thought this was a good idea, and if you read the linked thread you'll see how much confusion reigns over this.

Of course, it's easy to avoid the confusion (and likely compatibility issues): just don't use this “feature”.  That's certainly what I will do :)

BTW, the link goes to StackOverflow, one of the geekly treasures of the web.  If you think of yourself as a geek, and you're intimately familiar with StackOverflow ... then you should seriously consider a career change...

Yup, that pretty much sums it up!

Yup, that pretty much sums it up!



Is there anyone he hasn't pissed off?

Is there anyone he hasn't pissed off?  The One is doing a remarkably complete job of alienating all our friends and allies around the world.  This morning I read about how he's managed to get on the wrong side of both sides in Egypt – something I wouldn't have guessed was even possible.  Also, the situation in Venezuela has deteriorated to the point where their government is seizing U.S.-owned oil platforms, and we're doing nothing about it.  In just the past couple of months, The One and his administration have managed to wreck or make worse the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Venezuela, France, Germany, and Russia.  He seems to be working hard to do the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a couple things I read last week were early warnings about trouble brewing in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Which got me to my morning ponder: is there, in fact, any country that has a better relationship with the U.S. today than they did when Obama was elected.  I cannot for the life of me think of one.  Not even one...

A new snail species...

A new snail species...  Found 800 meters (~2,500 feet) deep in a Croatian cave system.  The parallel evolution of many unrelated species to colorless forms is an interesting piece of evidence for the theory of evolution.  In those cave environments, there is no light at all – and so no evolutionary value to color.  Since it takes energy (and food) to produce the color, organisms that don't produce less color in that environment have a small evolutionary advantage.  Over time and many generations, you end up with organisms with little or no color (and no eyes, for similar reasons)...

Hardware Geek: Programmable capacitor...

Hardware Geek: Programmable capacitor...  Are you a hardware hacker?  If so, I'm sure there have been times when you needed a capacitor with some particular value that you didn't have on hand – and had to put your project on the shelf until you obtained it.  I've spent some time with a calculator in the components aisle at the local electronics store, desperately trying series/parallel combinations of capacitors they happened to have in stock to come up with the value I needed.

I never thought of making a “programmable” capacitor, but now that I see it, the idea seems obvious.  This Kickstarter project is just 32 capacitors that can be individually switched in or out of a parallel combination.  The sum of the “on” capacitors is the value of the programmable capacitor.  The board has values down to 0.1pf, which I suspect is swamped by the parasitic capacitance on the board (and wiring), but never mind that – for the higher values, I can think of many times when this would have been a very handy beast to have around!  I've made my $29 pledge...

Geek: Leslie Lamport has placed all his papers online...

Geek: Leslie Lamport has placed all his papers online.  It's a veritable treasure trove of computer science stuff, dating back to the late '50s.  Leslie Lamport is probably best known for his work on LaTex, but for me he stands out for his research on networking.  I cherished not only the actual content of his papers, but his sense of humor that bubbled out through most of them (example).  I've never met him, but I suspect I'd enjoy such an encounter...