Three thoughts...

Three thoughts...  Not in any particular order:

1. I wish we had more reporters like Megyn Kelly.  If we did, I might even watch television news on occasion.  
2. The response to this incident by both the Trump campaign and his lapdog media Breitbart is disgusting.  This isn't the first time we've seen this sort of thing in the U.S., but it's scary every time we do.  
3. Andrew Breitbart must be rolling in his grave at the actions of organization now using his name.

I hear knocking.  What could it be?  Why, it's the doom, at the front door...

A note on doing taxes...

A note on doing taxes...  One of the less delightful parts of doing taxes for me has been, in years past, having to find all the #&*^@$%#! receipts (especially for charitable contributions and tax payments).  That's because all I'd have would be a shoe-box full of slips of paper, in totally unorganized form.  What a pain!

This year it was a breeze – because all I had to do was to type a few key words into DevonThink (the software that organizes the scans I now make of all my receipts) and in well under a second it found each and every receipt I was looking for.  It's almost unbelievable how big a difference it is for me between now and then, and at negligible cost in terms of my effort.  It's way easier than a manual filing system, which takes considerable effort throughout the year.  This is more like a shoe-box with a magical “find it!” capability.

I can't believe I didn't do this five years ago, when it first started to look practicable.  Dang it!

Bumper snicker of the day...

Bumper snicker of the day...  Via my lovely bride:

Want more evidence...

Want more evidence ... that our government is completely out of control?  I'm not sure why anyone would need that at this point, but just in case: the FDA is cracking down on using manure on farms.  Yes, really.

Several historians have suggested that human societies really need to be tossed out periodically, and rebuilt from the ground up.  Sometimes I'm not sure that's actually enough, and that maybe my dad had the right idea: use a few nukes to glass things over, then wait a few million years for the soil to reform.  Maybe the radiation will induce a few beneficial mutations, too...

Jaguar in action...

Jaguar in action... 

What he said!

What he said!  This guy says, eloquently, what I've been feeling about modern art for many years now...

Paradise tutoring...

Paradise tutoring...  Well, I'm down to two kids (from three): Sarah had to drop out because she's already got too heavy a load.  Her mom listed all that she's got, and I have to agree – that slip of a girl has way too much on her plate.  So now I've got Nicholas (11 years old, 4th grade, budding robotics engineer) and Abby (around 13 years old, I think in 7th grade, budding scientist). 

Both of them did fairly well on their homework.  The concept of tens-complement arithmetic had escaped them, and decimal-to-binary conversions as well, so we worked on them for a while.  Then I gave them a concentrated hour on twos-complement arithmetic and the basic binary operators (inversion, addition, AND, OR, and XOR).  Their homework has some hard problems on it; it will be interesting to see how they do :)

Each time Abby got the idea about how something worked, you could see her light right up – she gets joy from understanding.  That's why I called her a budding scientist :)

I sent them home with a printout of a very simple HTML page (source code) that will serve as our first playground for messing about with code.  I'm going to start them with JavaScript, with Chrome's developer tools (which are excellent!) as their IDE...

Paradise kids...

Paradise kids ... are refusing to admit that winter is over.  They want to sled!  These are my neighbor's kids plus a couple they're babysitting.  The building in the background is our shed.  The “mountains” (their term:) that they're sledding on are made from the dirt we dug out of the field to make the shed's foundation.

The kids played on the “mountains” for about four hours.  One of the little blonde girls came over to the house later, and her face was ... not clean.  I'd have given a lot to see her mom's face when she went home :)

Captain Kangaroo, of course!

Captain Kangaroo, of course!  Via my pistol-packing, lobster-eating mama...

A wife's love...

A wife's love...  Via my brother Scott.

A very old man lay dying in his bed. In death's doorway, he suddenly smelled the aroma of his favorite chocolate chip cookie wafting up the stairs. He gathered his remaining strength and lifted himself from the bed. Leaning against the wall, he slowly made his way out of the bedroom, and with even greater effort forced himself down the stairs, gripping the railing with both hands.

With labored breath, he leaned against the door frame, gazing into the kitchen. Were it not for death's agony, he would have thought himself already in heaven.

There, spread out on newspapers on the kitchen table were literally hundreds of his favorite chocolate chip cookies.

Was it heaven? Or was it one final act of heroic love from his devoted wife, seeing to it that he left this world a happy man?

Mustering one great final effort, he threw himself toward the table. The aged and withered hand, shaking, made its way to a cookie at the edge of the table, when he was suddenly smacked with a spatula by his wife. "Stay out of those," she said. "They're for the funeral."

It's all too easy for me to imagine that happening here, in my house :)

Way back in the '60s...

Way back in the '60s ... when I was just starting my electronics career, I built a theremin using vacuum tubes.  I didn't design it myself; just built it from a schematic I found somewhere.  It worked fine, but sounded so awful to me that I disassembled it and used the parts for something else. 

Never did it occur to me that one could make a theremin with a dead badger.  Not once.  But it did occur to this fellow.  That should worry us, I think...

Andrew Klavan...

Andrew Klavan: I'm angry, so I'm voting for Donald Trump!  Is this really why Trump has so much support?  Angry low-information, low-cogitation voters?  That's it?

I don't know whether I hope that's true or false...

Mercury (the planet) is really weird...

Mercury (the planet) is really weird...  The trove of data collected by the MESSENGER robotic explorer didn't help make it less so, either.

Spam of the day...

Spam of the day...  Every few weeks I go through my spam folder, just to make sure that no important email got accidentally misclassified as junk.  GMail's filters are remarkably good; it's rare for me to find a false positive like that.

Sometimes the subject lines of the spam are enough to entice me to open it, just to see what it said.  Here's one I opened today.  I'm still laughing as I copy this over.  The number of people who are tricked by this sort of thing has to be vanishingly small – but when the cost of sending email is (literally) zero, that doesn't matter...

Subject: 2016 Compensation Payment

UNITED NATIONS OFFICE OF INTERNATIONAL OVERSIGHT SERVICES
Internal Audit, Monitoring, Consulting and Investigations Division

From: Mrs. Carman Lapointe

Good day to you, my name is Mrs. Carman Lapointe Young the United Nations Under-Secretary I was sent to Nigeria last week by the United Nation and is to officially informed you that your name is among the scam victims that will be compensated this 2016 with the total sum of $5.5Million approved by United Nations and other stake holders and this is the reason why the united nation sent me to Nigeria to make sure people like you receive there fund from here in Nigeria without any hitch, and I have a mandate with UN stake holders who approved your fund to make sure you receive your approve compensation fund before I go back to NEW YORK to summit my report, and I am contacting you now because your fund is ready for you to make the claim

Note the United Nation have ordered the appointed paying bank to program your fund in form of ATM Card and they have successfully program and activate your ATM Card so as am talking to you now your ATM Card is ready for use, Again I want you to know that you are only require to come down here in Nigeria to sign and pick up your Card without paying any cent but if you cant come down here in Nigeria to sign and pick up your ATM Card then you will have to pay Delivery fee of $250 and bank will hand over your Card to DHL and they will deliver it to your address within 48hours so I want you to tell me if you want to come down here to pick up your Card or you prefer to send the $250 so that DHL will deliver your Card to your address?

Note for easy communication contact me via this email (mrs.young112@gmail.com) or phone +234-7061268585, Thanks for your understanding, I wait to hear from you soon as you receive this email from me

Mrs. Carman Lapointe
United Nations Under-Secretary
General for Internal Oversight

I just love the part where “if you cant come down here in Nigeria” then for a mere $250 DHL will deliver your ATM card (loaded with $5.5 million!) right to your home address.  What a deal!

Oh my gosh...

Oh my gosh...  If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that almost two years ago we ordered a Tesla Model X (their 4WD SUV).  The photo at right is what ours should look like.  We did so knowing that the delivery date was uncertain, so I'm not finding any fault with Tesla on this score.  For all that time, until early this afternoon, we had absolutely no clue when our Model X might actually be delivered.  All we had to go on were (a) our order number, which is in the 12 thousands, and (b) the news reports that told us when the first ones rolled off and what the production rate was. 

That changed today.  We got an email from Tesla that gave us a delivery time of “mid 2016” – still not very precise.  But that's the most we've ever had :)  There's also a little line that says if we'd care to change the interior configuration to include an extra row of seats, then we could get it as early as April or May.  Well, the configuration we chose already has too many seats for us, so we certainly didn't want to add even more.  Of course we chose the configuration that would be made dead last :)  So we're stuck with “mid 2016”.  But hey ... that's only a few months away.  The probability that I'll live long enough to actually see and drive our Model X is increasing.  Yay!

Paradise, on foot again...

Paradise, on foot again...  It's March 11th – my brother Mark's birthday, and the first day we were able to go for a nice walk this spring.  Debbie and I, together with two very excited dogs (Miki and Race) walked for two miles along dirt roads near our house.  This is a real first for Debbie: first time she's walked this far in well over a year, because of the knee injuries she's suffered.  She had no problems at all on this walk – hooray!  We did the two miles (which includes about 400' of elevation change each way) in roughly 75 minutes.  That's about 20 minutes more than the typical walk I did alone last year along the same path, and about 30 minutes more than our record (set when we were actually trying to go fast, instead of our normal leisurely gawking pace).  It's still wintry here, as you can see from my photos below, but it was oh-so-nice to be outside again.  The temperature was around 60°F, about as nice as one could possibly ask for.  The two lower photos are panoramas, each covering about 200°..

Curiosity is looking at nodules on Mars...

Curiosity is looking at nodules on Mars...  Here are a couple of photos, one of the area, one of a nodule...

A solar eclipse...

A solar eclipse ... as seen from space.  This photo (via APOD, of course) was taken by a high-orbit satellite (Deep Space Climate Observatory).  The dark spot in the upper left of the Earth's surface is the fuzzy shadow of the moon.  In the center of that shadow, people were experiencing a total eclipse of the sun.  In the fuzzy edges, a partial eclipse.  Click on the thumbnail to embiggen.

Home defense...

Home defense...  Via my pistol-packing, lobster-eating mama...

A liberal acquaintance in California asked me what I thought he might need in order to defend his home and family from home invasion, and the like.

I suggested a 9mm, a couple of clips, and a box of shells.

A few days later he sent me this picture and asked me how to make it all work. He voted for Obama … twice.

Yeah.  I know.

A history of English...

A history of English ... in just five words.  Interesting piece.  Here's a sample, with one of the five words:

“Tea”

Tea was first imported into Britain early in the 17th century, becoming very popular by the 1650s; London diarist Samuel Pepys recorded drinking his first cup in 1660.

By the 18th century it had become a symbol of fashionable society and a staple of the coffee house culture; Dr. Johnson was a self-confessed “hardened and shameless tea-drinker.”

The word “tea” derives from the Mandarin Chinese word chá, via the Min dialect form te. The Mandarin word is also the origin of the informal char, as in a nice cup of char. A love of tea is so ingrained in British life that the phrase “cup of tea” has come to stand for anything viewed positively. We express dislike by saying: “it’s not my cup of tea,” we comfort the bereaved with “tea and sympathy,” and gloss over any social faux pas with the phrase “more tea, vicar?”