Sad...

Spirit abandoned...

Aging Geek...

Debbie and I are very tired and sore this morning, after spending the weekend working on our pine trees.  We've got about two-thirds of the work done now, and the part that we've finished looks great.  There's a large pile of pine brush in our front yard, ready for burning next weekend.  We burned yesterday, but because we can only burn from 8:15 am to 10:00 am, we couldn't get all that much done.  The pile grows larger.

Meanwhile, we exercised – hard – virtually every muscle in our aging bodies.  We're paying for it this morning!  Oh, the aches and pains!  Sure will feel good when this goes away...

Amazing Gymnast...

My mom sent this video to me, with a forwarded note that this was the granddaughter of Nadia Comanecci, the amazing Olympic gymnast.  Nadia, who won her Olympic gold medal in 1976 at the age of 14, has one child (a five year old daughter) at this writing.  This is actually a video of Boyanka Angelova, an accomplished gymnast who is completely unrelated to Nadia.  But who cares?  It's amazing, and beautiful!

UNIX Tools...

An interesting collection...

I Gotta Get Me...

...one of these.

Human Stupidity...

An excellent essay.  Here's one fragment, titled “The Power of Stupidity”

It is not difficult to understand how social, political and institutional power enhances the damaging potential of a stupid person. But one still has to explain and understand what essentially it is that makes a stupid person dangerous to other people - in other words what constitutes the power of stupidity.

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behaviour. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit's actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit's actions, his nasty manoeuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy. Because the stupid person's actions do not conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that:

a) one is generally caught by surprise by the attack; b) even when one becomes aware of the attack, one cannot organize a rational defense, because the attack itself lacks any rational structure.

The fact that the activity and movements of a stupid creature are absolutely erratic and irrational not only makes defense problematic but it also makes any counter-attack extremely difficult - like trying to shoot at an object which is capable of the most improbable and unimaginable movements. This is what both Dickens and Schiller had in mind when the former stated that "with stupidity and sound digestion man may front much" and the latter wrote that "against stupidity the very Gods fight in vain."

As I said: excellent!

This is How to Make a Public Service Commercial...

Our Galaxy...

Reader Paul H. sends this along, I suspect thinking that I might have missed APOD because of our user conference.  This time APOD has more than just a pretty picture – it links to this interactive sky survey, which is sort of like having an excellent pair of binoculars and a perfectly clear sky, from the comfort of your chair...

Americans vs. French...

Peggy Noonan, totally resonating with me:

America was immediately sympathetic to the underdog. The impulse of every media organization, from tabloid to broadsheet to cable to network, was to side with the powerless one in the equation. The cops, the hotel's managers, the District Attorney's office—everyone in authority gave equal weight and respect to the word of the maid. Only in America (and not always in America) would they have taken the testimony of the immigrant woman from Africa and dragged the powerful man out of his first-class seat in the jet at JFK.

In France, the exact opposite. There, from the moment the story broke, DSK was the victim, not the villain. It was a setup, a trap, a conspiracy. He has a weakness for women. No, he loves them too much. Hairy-chested poseur and Sarkozy foreign-policy adviser Bernard-Henri Levy sneeringly referred to "the chambermaid," brayed about DSK's high standing, and called him "a friend to women." Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, sniffily asked why "the supposed victim was treated as worthy and beyond suspicion."

Why wouldn't she be treated as worthy, buddy? One is tempted to ask if it's the black part, the woman part or the immigrant part.

As David Rieff wrote in The New Republic, to French intellectuals, DSK deserves special treatment because he is a valuable person. "The French elites' consensus seems to be that it is somehow Strauss-Kahn himself and not the 32-year-old maid who is the true victim of this drama."

Americans totally went for the little guy. The French went for the power.

Much more, on different topics, in her whole piece...

Rumors of My Demise...

...are slightly premature.  I wasn't amongst the departed, I was just busy. 

For the past three days, I've been part of the team at my company putting on the Knowledge11 User Conference.  It was a fantastic experience, but exhausting.  My own participation is typical; over 100 of our employees were there.  I gave two presentations on my own, one presentation as one of a group of presenters, and was a moderator in two roundtable discussions.  All of these were well-attended, and very intense experiences.  I learned a lot, and hopefully so did the customers who attended.

But the best part of the experience, by far, was the one-on-one meetings I had with customers.  The roughly dozen pre-arranged time slots were all booked before the convention even began, but we managed to put together about two dozen more meetings ad hoc.  All told, I had 38 organized meetings with customers, and probably half that again that “just happened” in the hallways (and in one case, the restroom!).  Even after a night of sleep, my head is still spinning with all the things that I learned, and ideas that I got from our customers.

Part of me wishes that these events happened more than annually, and part of me is glad I have a whole year to rest up for the next one.  Except...I don't.  We have a second event happening later this year in Europe.  Woo hoo!

Carl Sagan's Words of Wisdom...

Via Paul H.



Science's “Great Communicator” is much missed in these parts...

Seriously Geeky...

What if you wanted to run Linux right in your web browser?  How would you do it?

Well, of course what you would do is to write a JavaScript emulation of an x86 processor and its peripherals, then port Linux to that.  Or at least that's what Fabrice Bellard did, just for fun.  Be sure to check out the technical notes.

Awesome, dude!

Map of the Universe...

Extra gigantic sized!

I Need One of These!

Very clever – and beautiful – demonstration of the relationship between a pendulum's length and it's oscillation period...

Quote of the Day...

By Bert Prelutsky in the Los Angeles Times:

Frankly, I don't know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I'm not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we're number one. There's no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on 'Macbeth'. The four of them are like jackasses who happen to possess the gift of blab. You don't know if you should condemn them for their stupidity or simply marvel at their ability to form words.

Wish I'd written that!

Audio Illusion...

Known as the “McGurk Effect”, this is simply awesome.  I must have watched this 10 times and I can still hardly believe it.  Via reader Simon M.:

Replace the Monkeys...

Political advice worth considering, via my mom:

If you start with a cage containing five monkeys and inside the cage, hang a banana on a string from the top and then you place a set of stairs under the banana, before long a monkey will go to the stairs and climb toward the banana.

As soon as he touches the stairs, you spray all the other monkeys with cold water. After a while another monkey makes an attempt with same result ... all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put the cold water away.

Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and attempts to climb the stairs. To his shock, all of the other monkeys beat the crap out of him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys, replacing it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment... with enthusiasm.

Then, replace a third original monkey with a new one, followed by a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him up have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs. Neither do they know why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

Finally, having replaced all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys will have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, none of the monkeys will try to climb the stairway for the banana.

Why, you ask? Because in their minds... that is the way it has always been!

This, my friends, is how Congress operates... and is why, from time to time, all of the monkeys need to be REPLACED AT THE SAME TIME IN 2012.

Shadow Government Statistics...

Here's a fascinating site whose objective is to undo all the obfuscation the U.S. government has applied to its financial statistics.  Key indicators (such as the unemployment rate), when they move in a politically unsavory direction, tend to be “reformulated” to paint a rosier picture.  One side effect of this is that it's almost impossible for us to compare statistics today to past statistics.  This site computes today's statistics the same way they used to be computed, to give us a consistent picture.  For example, if the unemployment rate were computed today the same way it was in 1990, it would be about 16%, not the 9% being reported today...

Another Climate Scientist Turns Skeptic...

An excerpt from an article by David Evans:

Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.

This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.

At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

Now go read the whole thing!

Tenerife...

Beautiful.  Just beautiful.  Via APOD...