Awesome Doodles...

Do you like the drawing at right?

Artist Sarah Esteje did it, and more like it.   With a BIC pen.  Yes, just a BIC pen...

Awesome!

The Donkey Whisperer...

Roger Wiliams is a Republican running for Congress, from Texas.  His platform is, essentially, “fight Obama”.  Other than that, I know almost nothing about him.

Roger is currently running the ad below.  To understand the humor in this ad, you need to know that the donkey is the symbol of the Democratic party (as the elephant is the symbol of the Republican party).  With that in mind, enjoy The Donkey Whisperer.



Oh, it's going to be a fun campaign season!

More WWII Color Photos...

From the London Daily Mail.  Interesting how these are emerging after all these years...

One Angry Conservative...

Andrew Breitbart, railing at the “Occupy CPAC” protesters this past weekend:


Seems to me that we could use a few more angry political observers...

Quote of the Day...

First time I've heard this line, from a song by Felix Leclerc:

“The best way to kill a man is to pay him for doing nothing.”

I found it in this video:

New York Taxis...

Collect GPS data from 10,000 taxi rides in New York City, over the course of 24 hours.  Then turn them into a movie, and here's what you get:

California Cuts All State Library Funding...

There was a time, not so very long ago, when this announcement would have greatly upset me.  Starting in my teens and up to 10 or so years ago, I made extensive use of libraries – school libraries, municipal libraries, specialized libraries, military libraries, and university libraries.  This funding cut primarily affects the municipal (and associated regional) libraries.

Before the advent of the Internet, municipal libraries were the only access many people had to much fiction and nearly all reference material.  This was certainly true for me.  Today, that is no longer true – a vast amount of fiction (most especially through open source outfits like Project Gutenberg), and the reference material (especially technical and scientific) is superior and more timely than what any library could provide.  It's still true today (though I suspect for not much longer) that some libraries can still provide more depth in reference material – but this depth is found mainly in university and specialized libraries.

The last time I visited a municipal library was about 8 years ago.  I was, frankly, appalled by what I found.  The publicly available collections were dominated by pop music CDs, recent movie DVDs, and popular paperback books (including quite a number of bodice-rippers, soft pornography, and other such trash).  And animals.  You want to play with a bunny rabbit?  Check it out of our library.  The reference collection was smaller than my collection at home.  The hardback fiction collection was heavily slanted toward books written in the past ten years.  It was very sad...

I went to the library seeking detailed information on earthquake faults in San Diego County; a librarian advised me to go to the UCSD library (which I did), as it would take months for them to borrow the books I was after – if it could be done at all.

So I'm not worried by this funding cut.  In fact, I think it is probably a good thing.  Considering how our municipal libraries are wasting the funding they do get, I think I'd be happiest if they didn't get any at all.

I can hardly believe I'm saying that, being the bookworm that I am, but there it is...

Iron Giant Comes Back to Life...

The Atlantic has a great article on Alcoa's 50,000 ton forging press, recently refurbished. 

I was fascinated to read that in the '50s, the U.S. ordered the construction of massive forges (the Heavy Press Program), basically out of fear that the Soviet Union had an industrial advantage over us.  U.S. taxpayers funded 10 of these monsters, of which this 50,000 ton press was one.  I'd never heard about this program before!

Politics can be Ugly...

Under pressure from the Obama administration, St. Paul withdrew from a case they believed they could win at the U.S. Supreme Court.  Today's Wall Street Journal has an article about it.  The case is most likely too complex to be useful in the campaign, but it's quite telling to anyone paying attention.  The WSJ's conclusion:

St. Paul released a statement Friday saying it "likely would have won" at the Supreme Court but that "such a result could completely eliminate 'disparate impact' civil rights enforcement, including under the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. This would undercut important and necessary civil rights cases throughout the nation. The risk of such an unfortunate outcome is the primary reason the city has asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the petition."

To sum up: St. Paul has spent taxpayer money for almost a decade fighting a case to force slumlords to provide the poor—including minorities—with better housing. But just as it was on the cusp of what it claims would have been a victory at the Supreme Court, the city withdrew its appeal under pressure from the Obama Administration and liberals who feared they might lose a weapon of dubious legality that they want to use to tell banks how and to whom to lend.

It's enough to recall the old joke that liberals love the poor in theory—it's the actual poor they have a problem with.

The Real Deal...

Since returning from my travels last week, I've been fighting off some evil rhinovirus.  I've got all the usual symptoms of a really bad cold, including (most especially) being thoroughly congested.

Being as ancient as I am, this is far from the first time I've had such a cold.  In the past I've used decongestants with great success.  But this time they weren't doing a thing.  My lovely bride suggested that I do a little research yesterday into decongestants, and then she'd pop down to the drug store and get me some of whatever works best.

My starting point was the medication I had been taking.  It's active ingredient was phenylephrine, which I quickly discovered was rather notoriously ineffective compared to the traditional decongestant pseudoephidrine.  So why would they have switched to a less-effective ingredient?  Because many states have passed laws banning or restricting the sale of over-the-counter pseudoephridrine – because the drug lords discovered an easy way to make methamphetamines by using pseudoephidrine.  These criminals go buy huge quantities of cold medicine and convert it to methamphetamines.

Yet another way the drug wars are impacting my life!  This problem only exists because methamphetamines are illegal...

In California, sales of pseudoephidrine are controlled – an individual can buy small quantities only.  That means that you can't just go pull it off the shelf like any other cold medication – you have to ask the pharmacist for it.  My lovely bride did just that, and also picked me up a couple boxes of those wonderful tissues with lotions embedded, so your nose doesn't get rubbed raw.

Last night I took the first round of pseudoephidrine.  Result: in less than a half hour, I could breath easily through my nose for the first time in several days.  Ah, what a relief!  And those tissues...sheer heaven on my nose...

There was one downside for me, though: my personal reaction to pseudoephidrine is that it keeps me wide awake.  I got not a wink of sleep last night.  But I feel much, much better this morning – not least because I can once again breathe freely...

Rick Perry on the Keystone XL Pipeline Decision...

Rick Perry has a column in today's Wall Street Journal.  An excerpt:

It seems unimaginable, yet President Obama refused Trans-Canada's request to run its pipeline across the border from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. This extensive pipeline holds the potential of moving up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day—including oil produced in North Dakota and Montana—to refineries here in Texas. Translated into job numbers, that's up to 20,000 direct jobs and estimates of up to hundreds of thousands of indirect jobs created by this $7 billion project.

Keystone would have provided a shot in the arm for our nation's uncertain economy, and it could have provided economic opportunity for tens of thousands of families, stretching from here in Texas all the way to the Canadian border.
Hoping to appease environmental radicals, President Obama said no, claiming he didn't have time to adequately consider the pipeline.

This is despite the fact the original request was made in September 2008, and Keystone was the subject of dozens of meetings on multiple levels of his own administration, as well as exhaustive environmental impact reviews. Certainly, three-and-half years is more than enough time to make a decision.

His reasoning becomes even more laughable when you put it up against his massive, ill-conceived so-called stimulus bill, which he muscled through Congress and signed within the first month of his presidency.

It seems to me that this decision by Obama should provide excellent fodder for the campaign this fall...

Lessons from Greece...

Recent events in Greece sound like an implausible Hollywood plot: citizens riot because the government is reducing their welfare.  That's not how they see it, of course – but it is an accurate description of what's happening there now...

For over a decade, the Greeks have been living well beyond their income.  The government has been borrowing easy money (mainly from other EU members) and using it to fund an amazing panoply of benefits for their citizens.  Naturally, the citizens supported these politicians raining money down upon them.  In that ten years, the Greeks have become quite thoroughly addicted to these benefits, to the point where they appear to have completely taken leave of their senses.  Despite the rather simple math involved (you can't continue to spend $5,000 a month if you only make $3,000 a month!), the Greeks riot to keep up the party.  Their unemployment rate is 21% (why work, with such great unemployment benefits?) and over 40% of the entire workforce works for the government.  It's a thoroughly socialist state.

There are many parallels in the U.S., though thankfully not (yet) so extreme.  Our Social Security system is completely broken and indefensible from any rational perspective, yet it still has overwhelming public support.  The biggest fear I have about Obamacare is that once the benefits kick in (starting next year!), it will prove politically impossible to repeal it – that's very much what's happening Greece right now.

Our elections this fall are, I think, our last good chance to steer the U.S. away from the disastrous course that most of Europe is on.  By this I mean that it's still politically possible at this point to execute a “course correction”.  In four more years, if Obama wins reelection, that will be vastly more difficult to pull off...

Awesome!

As I watched this, I felt the presence of backhoe greatness.  Never in my wildest imagination could I do this with my backhoe...

Disturbing Obama Propaganda...

Watch first:



One of the few teachers I can remember from my elementary school was Mrs. Dalrymple (how quaint the “Mrs.” sounds these days!) in the fourth grade.  This would have been the second year of John F. Kennedy's administration, I believe.  She had us watch a documentary about Kennedy's WWII service on patrol boat.  This was not the commercial movie PT-109, but a typical low-budget black-and-white docudrama of the day.  Think Victory at Sea and you'll get the idea.

Anyway, this documentary portrayed Kennedy as an impossibly capable hero.  By the time the film was over, I was ready to believe that Kennedy could have towed a disabled aircraft carrier by taking the anchor chain in his mouth and swimming with his feet only.  While badly burned, and under simultaneous attack by submarines and dive bombers.  And with a broken back.  It was every bit as bad as this Obama film, but with lesser production values.

I wasn't disturbed at the time – that film was easily the most interesting and exciting thing that ever happened in Mrs. Dalrymple's class, other than her occasionally catching me reading a library book.

But it disturbs me today to think back upon it.  My perception of Kennedy as a perfect hero didn't change until I started reading history in earnest, in the '70s.  Then it changed very quickly :-)  Most people don't ever read history, so I suspect such propaganda has a real and lasting impact...

This Could Be Our House...

But this time, it wasn't.  Kitten attempts linguaectomy:

Sarah Palin at CPAC...

My favorite moment comes just after 9:45, and another at 10:50.  There's a lot of red meat in here, and the audience ate it up...

Headline of the Week...

The Wall Street Journal wins the coveted JamulBlog Headline of the Week™ award for this one:

Immaculate Contraception

The column is excellent.  My favorite line:

If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, odds are you're a rational person.

Heh!  Read the whole thing.

Prompted by this kerfuffle, Paul Rahe (a man of formidable intellect) lays into the American Catholic hierarchy in this post on Ricochet.  He places the blame for the current situation squarely on the American Catholic's loss of their moral compass.  It's a delight to see such a mind intellectually stomping all over the field, and even more of a delight to see someone placing all this in a historical context dating all the way back to the Magna Carta.  Don't miss his post!

Late-breaking news: the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is blasting Obama's plan as a non-solution.  The flap continues...

Scafetta vs. HadCRUT...

There's a new icon in the right sidebar, labeled “Scafetta v. HadCRUT”.  This is courtesy of Anthony at Watts Up With That; if you click on the icon you'll go to his reference page.

The icon shows competing climate forecasts.  In bright green, the IPCC “consensus” forecast.  The black line shows Scafetta's forecast based on solar models.  The red line (and blue recent extension) shows the actual measured temperature.  Anthony promises to update this monthly.

The evidence so far is convincing to me: nobody knows how to forecast climate!  But the IPCC folks are off by the proverbial country mile; Scafetta is at least in the general area...

Don't Panic!

This is still JamulBlog.  I'm still SlightlyLoony.  Just making a few changes in the appearance, that's all...

Root Cause...

I stumbled across this post quite by accident.  It articulates very clearly something I learned about the hard way, in a past job.  I was responsible for the operations of our datacenter, and in particular for the availability (meaning the percentage of the time everything was running correctly).  One of the routine exercises we went through was called “root cause analysis” – an absolutely standard methodology for identifying the cause of an outage.  Once the cause was identified, the idea was that you'd take action to prevent it ever happening again, thus incrementally improving your availability metrics over time.

Nice theory.  It even worked, sometimes.  But many times it did not.  Here's one relatively simple real-life example to illustrate how this theory could break down:

We had a planned change to the configuration of one of the applications we developed.  The change consisted of adding two words to one line of a configuration file, which would be automatically re-read by our application.  We had tested the change on a lab instance of the application.  Our technician opened the file in his favorite editor, made the change, and saved the file.  About two minutes later, our application crashed (taking down a stock trading application with hundreds of users).

We restarted our application, and everything was fine.  Then we went into full root cause analysis mode, as this failure was kind of scary.  I'll spare you all the details, but eventually we figured it out: the technician had saved the file, but left it open in his editor – and his editor literally kept the file open.  Our application tried to re-read it and got a “file in use” error and promptly exited.

The root cause analysis exercise pointed the finger of blame at the technician, for leaving the configuration file open.  The mitigation my team recommended was (a) training the technicians to not do that, and (b) always making such changes with two-man teams, one to watch the other and verify that the editor was closed.

I was not at all happy with this outcome.  Leaving the file open only caused an error because our application was stupid enough to behave that way.  And our technician was only able to cause this error because we were too lazy to automate this sort of configuration change.  To me, there were several “causes”, all contributing:
- the technician's error
- our lame software crashing on a config file open error
- our failure to automate the task

The article linked above discusses the failings of root cause analysis in a clear and easy to understand way.  I particularly liked this observation:

Finding the root cause of a failure is like finding a root cause of a success.

In a single sentence, that's exactly the problem I found with root cause analysis.  In the end, we still used root cause analysis as a tool for analyzing our outages, but the mitigations we chose were not those that you'd expect to get with root cause analysis.  I wish I'd read this article back then, as I think it would have provoked me to go think out a different approach...