Porcupine reservoir trip...

Porcupine reservoir trip...  We took a jaunt up there this evening to see what the fall color and wildlife were like.   There were lots of people there, mostly to see the second Kokanee running.  There wasn't much in the way of fall color, and the only wildlife we saw was a solitary hawk.

Oh, well...

The more data comes back...

The more data comes back ... from New Horizons, the weirder a place Pluto seems to be.  What the heck is this photo showing us???  More here...

Sometimes it's really amazing...

Sometimes it's really amazing ... how long a software bug can exist before someone finds and fixes it.  Google, in this case...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Yesterday afternoon, as planned, we headed out to Blacksmith Fork canyon to gawk at fall color and wildlife.  The color was great again, though it's starting to fade already at the higher altitudes.  This time most of the really good color was right on the canyon bottom.  We didn't see all that much wildlife, perhaps because the canyon was so full of people.  Partly that was because it was a weekend, and partly its because there was still quite a large fire crew mopping up from a Friday afternoon fire that burned a few acres just north of the road.  We suspect a cigarette started it, or perhaps some sparks.  In any case, the fire had burned across sparse fuel, uphill and downwind from the road.  The damage, compared with chaparral fires, was trivial – the burned area will be green again in spring.  The crew was surprisingly large for the size of the fire; clearly they have fire-fighting resources here.  There were roughly 50 men, 20 vehicles of various sorts, plus a helicopter – far more assets than would have been deployed on the mopping-up phase of a fire like this in southern California.  I'm curious what assets were here when they were actually fighting it!

We did have one interesting wildlife spotting: a pair of northern harriers (female in the photo above right, not mine, alas).  What first caught our attention was that they were perching on the ground – very odd behavior for a hawk.  My first theory was that they were migrants, and ordinarily lived on the tundra where there were no trees.  Wrong theory – these raptors are just crazy and like to perch where they're very vulnerable, on the ground.  They're incredibly agile flyers for their size, hunting near the ground and performing aerial stunts every few seconds.  This was one of the easiest-to-identify raptors I've ever run into, mostly thanks to that distinctive white band on its tail...

This morning we slept in very late for us, and we didn't go for our walk until the sun was well up and it was fairly warm.  The dogs didn't care, but I was sweating :)  The fields are starting to look like fall, so the little bit of color on the ground (at right) really caught my eye.  I've no idea what it is, and it was the only one I saw in a half-mile of marching across the dry hay field.

This is awesome...

This is awesome: The Brain of a Social Justice Warrior (SJW), or Progressive.

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  In The Onion, reporting on the pope's visit to Philadelphia:

After concluding his prepared remarks, the pope reportedly led the congregation in a prayer for God to rain cleansing fire and brimstone over the city and then salt the smoldering Earth so that no wickedness could ever again arise in its place.

This is from an article titled “Horrified Pope Calls Philadelphia Humanity’s Greatest Sin Against God”.  Ha!

For my readers who don't already know this: I grew up alarmingly close to Philadelphia, so I know it well.  Except for the Franklin Institute, soft pretzels with mustard, and Philly steak sandwiches, it has no redeeming value that I know of.

Greatest regex trick ever?

Greatest regex trick ever?  Well, maybe.  It's a pretty darned good one, anyway.  I used regexes extensively in my last job (with ServiceNow), in both Java and JavaScript.  I used variations on this trick several times, often together with another favorite “trick” of mine: using functions for the replacement value (both Java and JavaScript support this)...

No sign of Bucky (updated)...

No sign of Bucky (updated)...  Shortly after making the post below, the boys (Miki and Race) and I went out for our walk.  As we walked over the irrigation canal bridge in our driveway, we heard splashing just south of us.  Sure enough, there was Bucky, hopping down into the canal for a drink, then back up to get away from us.  He's fine!

We haven't seen him - the injured buck in our front yard - for several days now.  We're hoping he's ok, but ... Cache County is a dangerous place for a buck in hunting season...

Scientists didn't really know what to expect...

Scientists didn't really know what to expect ... when New Horizons took a close look at Pluto.  Nevertheless, the data coming back are a big surprise – and planetary scientists, so far at least, are quite mystified by what they're seeing.  Mother Nature is full of surprises here on Earth.  It seems a bit arrogant to assume that she wouldn't be full of surprises elsewhere!

Good food is really hard to beet!

Good food is really hard to beet!  Our neighbor Tim D. came over a couple days ago with a bag full of fresh vegetables from his garden.  Among those vegetables were a nice bunch of beets.  Debbie doesn't really like beets, but I love them, so these were all mine.  This afternoon I cleaned them up, plopped them in a saucepan, and boiled them until they were nicely done.  For the last 10 minutes or so, I threw in a couple nice sausages.  After draining them, I roughly cut up the beets, threw some lovely butter at them, and chowed down.  What a great lunch!

Next up: a zip-lock bag full of fresh corn, cut off the ear.  This was delivered to us yesterday by a gaggle of four little girls (ages about 6 through 10), the daughters of our neighbor Nikki L. and her sister, who brought the corn over and then demanded to see all our animals :)  Debbie was happy to accommodate them, and while I was busy digging holes they were down in our cattery playing with the seven cats down there...

The smell of new-mown hay in Paradise...

The smell of new-mown hay in Paradise...  And right in our front yard, too!  I forgot to mention this earlier, but yesterday afternoon while Debbie and I were out gawking at the fall color, Scott N. (the fellow that leases our field to grow alfalfa in) came and mowed our field.  The photo at right is looking almost due west from the south edge of our front yard.  The smell from that drying alfalfa is heavenly right at the moment...

Hill of Crosses...

Hill of Crosses...  I ran across this article about a famous “Hill of Crosses” in Lithuania, and it reminded me of a similar hill (though not nearly as fancy) my Estonian friends introduced me to in 1993, on the island of Hiiumaa (photo of that one at right)...

WWII colorized photo collection...

WWII colorized photo collection...  The one at right is just one of 50.  Even for someone well-versed in the history (and probably even more so for someone who actually lived through it!), it's hard to believe this happened just 80 years ago...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Yesterday I dug five more big holes (4' square, 30" deep) where our paper birches will be planted next Tuesday.  I did most of the digging with my little Kubota B26 backhoe, then cleaned up each hole with a shovel.  As I was doing this work, my thoughts wandered to memories of my dad.  He dug a lot of holes in his lifetime, to plant shrubs and trees.  So far as I know, he always dug them entirely by hand, with nothing more than a simple shovel.  I suspect he'd have scoffed at my backhoe.  He loved the physical exertion of digging holes; it was therapeutic for him.  When he was worried or tense, his habit was to go out and do something relatively mindless and physically difficult – and more often than not, that meant digging holes.  You might not think there was much skill to digging a hole, but if you'd ever watched him, you'd know that wasn't true.  If he was digging in good, loamy, rock-free soil, his actions looked like they were choreographed.  His shovel took precisely sized, perfectly placed bites out of the soil.  With a single economical motion, the shovel would be emptied into exactly the right place – without the tiniest bit of an extra joule being expended.  My efforts as a child, and perhaps even more so as an adult, were lame and pathetic by comparison.  He'd have enjoyed digging holes in Paradise, and I'll bet that only a shovel would be involved...

When I finished digging holes, we hopped into our truck and headed up Blacksmith Fork Canyon to gawk at the fall color, and hopefully to see some wildlife.  On the way out, as I was hungry, we stopped at McDonald's so I could try the “McRib” sandwich.  The only reason I wanted to try it was that several people I know rave about it – and I don't know anyone who raves about a McDonald's hamburger.  So I got my McRib, and I ate it, but ... I'm never going to get another one.  The meat was bland, so bland I couldn't even tell it was pork.  Mystery meat.  The barbecue sauce was more sugar than anything else – disgustingly sweet, slightly chemically tasting, without the slightest bit of interesting quality at all.  Blegh!

Fortunately the fall color in the canyon more than made up for the bad taste in my mouth.  Some photos below, all iPhone and none of them do it justice:

We're going back again on Saturday evening, even though it's the weekend (lots more of those pesky people!) when more color should have migrated to lower altitudes.

We did see some wildlife as well, particularly three does with single fawns.  Two of those fawns were still very young, obviously late births.  They were weaned, but still had spots and alarmingly little fat for the season.  They need to fatten up fast, or move down to where there's food all winter, or they'll be at risk.

This morning we made our first visit to the “new” Crumb Brothers, which opened this past Saturday.   We got there at 7 am, when they open their doors.  We both had croque madame (with Emmental cheese), with a biscotti for “dessert”.  We found out that our favorite bread (sunflower seed) will be baked fresh every Wednesday and Friday, available at 11 am.  We'll be back for that!

After we returned, with me in a croque madame coma, the boys (Miki and Race) and I headed out for our morning walk.  I managed to find yet another route variation, which pleased the dogs.  They get visibly more excited whenever we turn in a new direction.  Somehow they know all the places we've ever been before, and when we're going somewhere new.  The Clawson dairy folks mowed two big alfalfa fields a few days ago, and the windrows are still down drying.  This morning there were hawks perched all around those fields, with more hawks hunting for voles in low swoops, often no more than a couple feet from the ground.  We saw several of them make catches, and several others eating catches they'd already made.  Happy hawks, not-so-happy voles.  I'm ok with that :)

Some photos of our walk:

My pistol-packing, Macified mama...

My pistol-packing, Macified mama ... has some zinnias!

Farm machinery...

Farm machinery ... is a modern technological marvel, under-appreciated by just about everyone who is not a farmer.  Non-farmers I know keep getting surprised by farmer's adoption and innovation in high-tech equipment, but for the farmer's it's a straight-forward business proposition.  This tulip harvesting machine is completely new to me, but it's a great example.  Try to wrap your brain around the previously manual alternatives!

This chart nicely summarizes...

This chart nicely summarizes ... one of the best arguments against anthropogenic global warming: that temperatures are not, in fact, at alarming levels (or headed there).  Click the chart to embiggen; go here for the supporting article.  The chart covers the entire span of human civilization, and it's obvious at a glance that we're not in a particularly warm period right now (at right on the graph) – in fact, quite the reverse.

If you're wondering why the temperatures are reading negative °C, it's because (a) that's the temperature of the ice core drilled from Greenland ice sheets, and (b) scientists use Celsius temperature scales.  Just for your reference, in °F that right-hand scale would read from -19°F to -27°F.

There's debate about how good a proxy Greenland ice sheets are for global temperatures (in other words, how well they correlate).  There's no debate, though, on whether the ice cores from those sheets are a better proxy than tree rings: they are, most certainly.

Happy dogs!

Happy dogs!

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  Professor Eben Moglen, of Columbia University's law school:

Proprietary software is an unsafe building material. You can’t inspect it.

Mr. Moglen is a proponent of open source software, and the argument he so eloquently makes is that the secret nature of proprietary software makes it impossible for either individuals or government agencies to inspect it.

I'm also a proponent of open source software, but I don't think that Mr. Moglen's argument is entirely supportable, nor is it as simple as he makes it out to be.

Consider, for example, his assertion that “you can’t inspect” proprietary software.  That's clearly not true – a government inspection agency (merely writing that sends shivers down my spine!) could be given access to proprietary code by appropriate legislation.  I think that would be a disastrous addition of friction to the software development process, and I am not proposing that.  I'm merely pointing out a flaw in Mr. Moglen's argument.  Slightly more subtly, it's already true today that if someone files suit against a company alleging that their software caused injury or damage, the plaintiffs will be able to get at the source code through the legal discovery process (that happened in the infamous Toyota acceleration case, for example).  I'm not sure that's any better than the government agency approach, but it again belies Mr. Moglen's assertion (even if it is an after-the-fact inspection).  But if his argument is really that it would be better, from some cosmic perspective, to have the source code available to one and all for safety and reliability inspections, well then I completely agree.  In fact, that's one of the big reasons why I'm a proponent of open source software in the first place.

But there's another element that Mr. Moglen basically ignores, and that is the protection of the proprietary software developer's economic interest in that software that was developed.  Modern software is often so complex that reverse-engineering it is prohibitively expensive.  The firmware in an automobile is a great example of this – the object code (the stuff the computer itself understands, the result of compiling the source code) may be dozens or even hundreds of megabytes in size.  Reverse-engineering a chunk of code that big would cost millions of dollars and take years.  The source code is therefore a valuable economic asset to the manufacturer.  It is not shipped with every car, and competitors have no legal way to steal it.  Open source software, however, is by its very nature “open” – anyone at all, including one's competitors, and freely look at it.  If a car manufacturer were to develop key algorithms that made its cars run better, then making those algorithms available to its competitors – for free – is not a particularly smart business move.  It would be like a restaurant famous for its unique dishes giving away the recipes for them to all the other restaurants.  Not going to happen.

I don't have any magical answers here.  It's a genuinely tough problem, balancing the considerations of safety, reliability, and the very real economic interest of the manufacturers.  If we were to simply legislate that all manufacturers using software or firmware had to make that open source, it's hard to imagine the manufacturers would continue investing the millions of dollars they currently spend every year to develop the wonderful new features we all love.  Would Apple have developed iTunes if they then had to give the code to their competitors?  I think not!  Would a car manufacturer invest in firmware that gave its engines better fuel efficiency if they then had to give it to their competitors?  Why on earth would they?  There's no gain to them.

Hard questions, and nobody has perfect answers for them.  Those perfect answers probably don't exist...

Got $46M burning a hole in your pocket?

Got $46M burning a hole in your pocket?  There's a beautiful piece of land available if you do, at the bargain price of just $3,600 an acre.

It's one of the last big pieces of wild America left on the market...