PETA...

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is an organization that bills itself an “animal rights” organization.  Their mission statement:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is the largest animal rights organization in the world, with more than 3 million members and supporters.

PETA focuses its attention on the four areas in which the largest numbers of animals suffer the most intensely for the longest periods of time: on factory farms, in the clothing trade, in laboratories, and in the entertainment industry. We also work on a variety of other issues, including the cruel killing of beavers, birds, and other "pests" as well as cruelty to domesticated animals.

PETA works through public education, cruelty investigations, research, animal rescue, legislation, special events, celebrity involvement, and protest campaigns.

So you'd think that when PETA takes animals for adoption (which they do, regularly), they'd have a good record for adoption or no-kill shelters, right?  Wrong:

The organization, which claims to be dedicated to the cause of animal rights, can’t explain why its adoption rate is only 2.5 percent for dogs.

In 2011, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) behaved in a regrettably consistent manner: iteuthanized the overwhelming majority (PDF) of dogs and cats that it accepted into its shelters. Out of 760 dogs impounded, they killed 713, arranged for 19 to be adopted, and farmed out 36 to other shelters (not necessarily “no kill” ones). As for cats, they impounded 1,211, euthanized 1,198, transferred eight, and found homes for a grand total of five. PETA also took in 58 other companion animals — including rabbits. It killed 54 of them.

I've written about this before. It is still just as astonishing to me as the first time I heard this. It's diabolical – PETA has constructed an organization that actually does the opposite of what donors would expect it to do...

Day by Day on Gun Control...

Oh, exactly right, Chris!  Exactly right...

Penn & Teller on Gun Control...

Bullshit!, they say...

Is This for Real?

Simon M. passes this along, saying “If I'd read this on April 1st I'd have thought it was a joke.”  Here's the start of the piece:

Harvard University geoengineer and environmental scientist David Keith has a "plan B" in case of an environmental emergency.

Keith's unusual proposal is this: Force reflective particles into the Earth's upper atmosphere -- the stratosphere -- to reverse global warming.

"One approach is to disperse particulates at high altitude to reduce the effective solar flux entering the atmosphere," Keith and his fellow researchers report in the Nature Climate Change journal and Environmental Research Letters.

I'm guessing Simon would be very surprised to learn that many such schemes have been proposed, generally followed by a round of raspberries from the warmist crowd.  It seems that even if one accepts the notion of runaway global warming, proposing to fix it by engineering a solution is automatically bad – even if said solution is vastly easier and cheaper than the solutions being proposed by the warmists (e.g, carbon taxes, huge reductions in carbonaceous fuel use, etc.).  Several scientists who have proposed engineered global warming fixes have reported being harassed, having their funding threatened (and, in at least one case, actually withdrawn), and so on.  It's Mann's way or the highway, it seems...

The Bagpiper...

Via reader Jim M.:

As a bagpiper, I play many gigs. Recently I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends, so the service was to be at a pauper's cemetery in the back country.

As I was not familiar with the backwoods, I got lost and, being a typical man, I didn't stop for directions. I finally arrived an hour late and saw the funeral guy had evidently gone and the hearse was nowhere in sight. There were only the diggers and crew left and they were eating lunch.

I felt badly and apologized to the men for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down and the vault lid was already in place. I didn't know what else to do, so I started to play. The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around.

I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family and friends. I played like I've never played before for this homeless man. And as I played 'Amazing Grace,' the workers began to weep. They wept, I wept, we all wept together.

When I finished I packed up my bagpipes and started for my car. Though my head hung low, my heart was full. As I opened the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, "I never seen nothin' like that before and I've been putting in septic tanks for twenty years."

Science Breakthroughs...

It's that time of year again – time for the inevitable “Best of the Year” lists.  Here's our first one: best science breakthroughs of the year.

Blog Update...

Sorry about the light blogging, friends.  We've been a tad busy :)

First, on Christmas Eve, Debbie had her “two month” surgery followup – and the news was almost entirely good.  The joint is healing nicely, and the surgeon expects to release her for weight-bearing in four weeks.  Her flexion was good – good enough for him to accuse her of “showing off”!  The only thing her surgeon didn't like was her extension – it was not quite as good as on the last followup, mainly because she was so focused on the flexion.  Debbie left that followup in good cheer, a marked turnaround from last time...

Yesterday we watched the old version of A Christmas Carol (the 1951 version starring Alastair Sim); it's a Christmas tradition for us.  At the same time, I roasted a 22 lb. turkey, and for dinner we had a simple repast of fresh-roasted turkey, homemade gravy over rice, and peas.  Delicious!  The turkey came out surprisingly well (considering that I cooked it, instead of Debbie), and the gravy was terrific.  Yum!  Then later in the day, our friend and neighbor Jimmy brought down two dinner plates for us from their Christmas dinner – we're looking forward to devouring them today.  He also brought down some pieces of Michelle's awesome lemon cake, sprinkled with fresh berries – I'm afraid none of that survived past this morning.  Yum!

This morning I dismembered the turkey, producing a full gallon container of tender turkey meat and a lovely skeleton which is simmering on the stove as I write.  It will become the base for turkey variant of the traditional Mexican soup Caldo Tlalpeño.  We're not using any of the recipes at the linked page; I just wanted to give you an idea what this soup is like –most of you probably never heard of it.  We discovered it at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Chula Vista years ago, and have loved it ever since.  The cilantro and lime are vital components – if you choose to try this soup, don't forget them!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Saturn's Hexagon...

Here's a nice discussion of the strange gaseous hexagon at the north pole of Saturn, as imaged by the awesome Cassini probe...

Scary...

These days when we have a candidate for a position at work, it's pretty much routine to a search on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as just a general web search.  Reasonably often something quite, er, compromising will show up – anything from diatribes about their current employer to NSFW photos.  You have to wonder what on earth was going on in the candidate's mind when they put that sort of stuff out there for public scrutiny.

This is a very logical extrapolation of what might be possible with such info:

Good Point...

Just Awful...

These really bad puns are courtesy of reader Simi L., who says “These are so bad I just had to send them...”

• The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.
• I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.
• She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.
• A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.
• No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.
• A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.
• A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.
• Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
• A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.
• Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
• Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
• Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: 'You stay here; I'll go on a head.'
• I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
• A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: 'Keep off the Grass.'
• The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.
• The man who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.
• A backward poet writes inverse.
• In a democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes.
• When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.
• If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you'd be in Seine.

I thought some of those were actually pretty good :)

Ramanujan...

Today is the 125th anniversary of the birth of Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Some 20 years ago, an Indian colleague and friend told me about Ramanujan, whom I'd never heard of.  He recommended The Man Who Knew Infinity, and I will likewise recommend that book to you.  It's an amazing story of a man whose mathematical talents approached magic...

What Does Randomness Look Like?

Excellent article exploring (and explaining) something that is counter-intuitive to almost everyone: truly random data doesn't look random (well, at least not to most people).

Something the article doesn't touch on, but is closely related: people are very good at visually identifying certain kinds of non-random data, by picking graphical patterns out of images similar to the ones shown in the article...

Real World Code Sucks...

Dave Mandl writes (intro):

There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance in most people who’ve moved from the academic study of computer science to a job as a real-world software developer. The conflict lies in the fact that, whereas nearly every sample program in every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually no software out in the wild is, and this is rarely acknowledged.

To be precise: a tremendous amount of source code written for real applications is not merely less perfect than the simple examples seen in school — it’s outright terrible by any number of measures.

Due to bad design, sloppy or opaque coding practices, non-scalability, and layers of ugly “temporary” patches, it’s often difficult to maintain, harder still to modify or upgrade, painful or impossible for a new person joining the dev team to understand, or (a different kind of problem) slow and inefficient. In short, a mess.

His experience matches my own, at least for any body of code that wasn't written by a single individual (that's nearly everything these days, as software keeps getting bigger and more complex).

But for the most part, it works anyway – which some might consider to be an inexplicable miracle...

A Gun Control Roundup...

Courtesy of the incomparable Rachel Lucas.  Read it, and send the links to your favorite believers in the efficacy of gun control...

Inspiration...

Wow:

A Measured Response the Sandy Hook Shootings...

Excerpt from Mark Steyn's piece:

It would not be imprudent to expect that an ever-broker America, with more divorce, fewer fathers, the abolition of almost all social restraints and a revoltingly desensitized culture, will produce more young men who fall through the cracks. But, in the face of murder as extraordinarily wicked as that of Newtown, we should know enough to pause before reaching for our usual tired tropes. So I will save my own personal theories, no doubt as ignorant and irrelevant as everybody else's, until after Christmas – except to note that the media's stampede for meaning in massacre this past week overlooks the obvious: that the central meaning of these acts is that they are without meaning. Herod and the Pennsylvania Indians murdered children in pursuit of crude political goals; the infanticidal maniac of Sandy Hook was merely conscripting grade-school extras for a hollow act of public suicide. Like most mass shootings, his was an exercise in hyper-narcissism – 19th century technology in the service of a very contemporary sensibility.

Read the whole thing...

An Opinion on Gun Control...

Best piece on gun control I've read in a while...

Icon/Graphic Sources...

A couple of good sources for free or cheap icons and graphic elements: here and here...

Big Science: Perverse Incentives...

This post in Nature is about the biological sciences, but it's just as applicable to climate science.  The old saw “Follow the money!” leads you to bad science – corrupted science – in both cases.

Systems of incentives are really, really hard to get right.  Just ask any manager if you'd like to understand the how and why of that.  I was a manager for more years than I care to think about, and putting the right incentives in place for those employees who weren't self-motivated (that would be most of them!) was always an enormous challenge.  The failures were much more numerous than the successes.

I've often noted to myself how easy it is to motivate our dogs.  Just give them a tiny hint that a dog treat is in the offing, and they're instantly prepared to do absolutely anything that they know now to do.  That leads directliy to a desire: for a box of “developer treats” that would work the same way on the developers working for me.  Never did find those damned treats...