We're a 21st Century Couple...

...or something.

A few minutes ago, I'm in my home office, door closed, Christmas music playing loudly, and foot heater going full blast.  Debbie is about 10 feet away, in our bedroom, doing her physical therapy exercises and watching a movie on her iPad.  She spots one of our cats (Maka Lea, our little physiologically challenged fellow) stuck in the bedroom.  He wants to get into our livingroom, but he can't jump over our dog gate.  Debbie can't easily get him there in her current state.  She wants to get my attention.  How does she do it?

She emails me.

Our Moon?!?!

Did some kid run amok on the moon with a set of different colored paints?  What is this?

This particular image shows the thickness of the lunar crust around the entire surface of the moon.  The data to create this image came from NASA's GRAIL satellites, delightfully named Ebb and Flow, which measure the gravitational field of the moon with unprecedented resolution and precision.  The crustal thickness map is just one of many results from the mission.  More here and here...

Earth at Night...

NASA has posted some beautiful composite photos and movies made by the Earth Observatory satellite, showing the night sky of Earth.  It took me several tries to download the movie; I suspect the site is overloaded as this has gotten wide distribution.  As usual, you can use the brightness of any given area as a proxy for human wealth – check out North Korea, Yemen, and Mali to see what impoverished areas look like.

Corruption Perceptions...

Transparency International has released their Corruption Perceptions Index for 2012, complete with a lovely interactive infographic (snapshot below).  There really aren't any surprises for the bad guys: North Korea, Afghanistan, Somalia, Venezuela, etc.  The good guys list is surprising mainly for which countries are not on the list: U.S., Britain, Germany, and Japan.

Is This What Obama Is Hiding?

The terrorists who killed our ambassador to Libya and three others were using weapons provided by the U.S.

I don't have the words...

Stock Market Manipulation...

One of the many things I learned while working in the electronic stock trading industry was just how common – and easy – stock market manipulation is.  Some forms of manipulation are illegal, and some are actually completely legal.  One of the illegal forms of manipulation is the practice of making trades solely for the purpose of raising a company's apparent market capitalization (“market cap”).

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent and detailed analysis of how this works, complete with real world examples.  This particular form of market manipulation leverages one of the odd customs of the fund management world: the determination of a fund's value by using the closing price of the stocks it holds.  The closing price is simply the price of the last trade of any given trading day.  For stocks that trade thinly (that is, not many trades during any given day), it's not hard to arrange for your trade to be the last trade of the day – all you need is the cooperation of someone who holds the stock and is willing to sell it to you for an above-market price – and for you to buy it at that price. This needn't even involve much money, as a trade of even a single share will still set the closing price.

This particular market manipulation could be eliminated quite simply, by changing the basis for fund valuation from closing price to a weighted average price.  I've seen this proposed on several occasions, but I have no idea why this hasn't happened...

Curiosity Is On the Move!

Curiosity is all finished at Rocknest, and is on the move on the floor of Gale Crater on Mars.  At right is a view of the way forward, from Curiosity's navigation camera...

How To Live With an Introvert...

A clever cartoon, and accurate according to my own experience as an introvert...

Driftwood Horses...

These look like something my brother Scott might make...though he's more attached to sea serpents!

Invalid Update...

Both Debbie and Mo'i are doing fine.  Debbie is pushing to get more range of motion (especially flexion).  She's up and about much more now than even just a week ago.  Being stuck in the house is driving her crazy (I know, short drive :-).  Mo'i is likewise doing fine.  His behavior is completely back to normal.  He's loving his 4 or 5 times a day chicken-and-rice diet :-)...

State Business Tax Climate...

All 50 states, ranked by the impact of all state taxes on business...

Wedding Surprise...

...but a good surprise!

Tax Burden Changes...

The New York Times has an interesting article (with graphs) about how the total tax burden has changed over the years for people in different income ranges.  It suffers from one very significant flaw, the same flaw that nearly every analysis from the progressive side shares: it completely ignores the way that tax deductions, exemptions, and credits have changed over the years.  Include those, and this picture changes dramatically.  Leave them out, as the NYT did, and you make a solid-looking argument for raising taxes on higher-income folks.

This article has already been cited over 1,000 times in the online media.  You can be sure it will be the foundational reference for the argument to raise taxes.

Doom.  I smell doom...

Is LEGO the Best Company in the World?

These folks certainly think so:


Backstory...

Fishing With Hand Grenades...

Now here are a couple of candidates for a Darwin award!  Via reader Simi L.:

A Distribution...

Nick Berry, writing at DataGenetics, has another in his fine series of data analyses “just for fun”.  This time he looked at the number of images with names like IMG_0001, IMG_0002, etc.  This particular series of file names is commonly created by digital cameras and smart phones.

What he found is in the graph at right: a classic logarithmically decaying curve, with a few glitches on it.  With some thought, you might be unsurprised by the log decay.  Most people wouldn't worry about the glitches – who knows what would cause them?  Not Nick Berry – with some help from a reader, he figured them all out...

Mo'i Update...

We called Animal ER this morning to check on how Mo'i was doing, and we got some good news: Mo'i was ready to come home!  I jumped in our trusty old LandCruiser and zoomed up there right away.

Shortly after arriving, the vet tech brought Mo'i out to see me.  Oh, man, he looked good!  Alert, happy to see me, tail wagging, giving me his customary “hug”.  If I didn't know better, I wouldn't have known he'd just had a fairly major surgical procedure.  The photo at upper right is Mo'i after returning home (in his “Elizabethan collar” so he doesn't chew his staples out)...

The post-operative care is simple in his case: no strenuous activity for a week or so, bland diet (boiled chicken and rice) and small frequent meals for a few days, and a couple of drugs.  Nothing hard at all.  In ten days or so, we'll get his staples out. 

The folks at the Animal ER said that Mo'i was a great patient.  We hear this about him almost everywhere we've ever taken him .– he's friendly, extroverted, and almost impossible to provoke into an angry response.  He takes needle pokes with equinamity, and gobbles nasty-tasting pills like they were doggie treats.  Vets and vet techs all love him.

We drove home via the grocery store, to get Mo'i a nice pile of chicken thighs to boil up and mix with rice.  Once home, he took a little walk, had a small meal, and drank (oddly, he didn't want water, so I mixed a little chicken-flavored “Gatorade for dogs” for him, and he loved that).  Then we took a look at his wound (above left), which looks fine.

The fine folks at Animal ER were happy to make a CD with Mo'i's X-rays for me to take home.  Below are the two X-rays showing his gastric volvutus so clearly that even I can tell that something is wrong.  Note how the bloated stomach pushed other organs around – that must have been epically painful for the poor guy...

A Most British Observation...

I think I've posted this before, but I couldn't find it so...here it goes again (maybe).  Via my cousin Mike D.:

The train was quite crowded, so a U. S. Marine walked the entire length looking for a seat, but the only seat left was taken by a well dressed, middle-aged, French woman's poodle.

The war-weary Marine asked, 'Ma'am, may I have that seat?'

The French woman just sniffed and said to no one in particular 'Americans are so rude. My little Fifi is using that seat.'

The Marine walked the entire train again, but the only seat left was under that dog. 'Please, ma'am. May I sit down? I'm very tired.'

She snorted, 'Not only are you Americans rude, you are also arrogant!'

This time the Marine didn't say a word; he just picked up the little dog, threw it out of the train window, and sat down.

The woman shrieked, 'Someone must defend my honour! This American should be put in his place!'

An English gentleman sitting nearby spoke up, 'Sir, you Americans often seem to have a penchant for doing the wrong thing. You hold the fork in the wrong hand. You drive your cars on the wrong side of the road. And now, sir, you seem to have thrown the wrong bitch out of the window.'

Makers vs. Takers, 1 of 5,292,003...

Via my mom:

A union boss walks into a bar next door to the factory and is about to order a drink to celebrate Obama’s victory when he sees a guy close by wearing a Romney for President button with two beers in front of him. He doesn't have to be an Einstein to know that this guy is a Republican. So, he shouts over to the bartender so loudly that everyone can hear, "Drinks for everyone in here, bartender, but not for the Republican."

Soon after the drinks have been handed out, the Republican gives him a big smile, waves at him, then says, "Thank you!" in an equally loud voice. This infuriates the union boss.

So the union boss once again loudly orders drinks for everyone except the Republican. As before, this does not seem to bother the Republican. He continues to smile, and again yells, "Thank you!"

So just to make his point one more time, the union boss once again loudly orders drinks for everyone except the Republican. But, as before, this does not seem to bother the Republican. He continues to smile, and again yells, "Thank you!"

Frustrated, the union boss asks the bartender, "What the heck is the matter with that Republican? I've ordered three rounds of drinks for everyone in the bar but him, and all the silly joker does is smile and thank me. Is he nuts?"

"Nope," replies the bartender. "He owns the place."

War on Business...

This is just disgusting, and un-American.  The nanny state is alive and well...