Weather radar picture...

Weather radar picture...  We're right where the precipitation turns from rain to snow...

Soup good. Soup my friend...

Soup good.  Soup my friend...  Debbie made a really nice soup for supper yesterday, accompanied by some dinner rolls made from frozen dough.  The soup was outstanding: a cheesy broth, laden with mushrooms, sausage, and veggies.  The rolls were good – not the best we've ever had, but perfectly decent dinner rolls...

Dang it!

Dang it!  More snow in Paradise (the photo is out our back window just now).  The temperature outside is 35°F; it just might stick for a while...

Happy pi day!

Happy pi day!  More about it here, and the first 100 digits in base 2, in case you didn't know them:

11.00100 10000 11111 10110 10101 00010 00100 00101 10100 01100 00100 01101 00110 00100 11000 11001 10001 01000 10111 00000

Another typically interesting post...

Another typically interesting post ... by Eric S. Raymond, this one on the link between autism and genius.  In it he makes an observation that immediately resonated with me: that high achievement (actually, “genius-level capabilities” is how he puts it) are enabled or promoted by not caring about social conventions (or, as he puts it much more colorfully, “not giving a shit about monkey social rituals”).  His thesis is that autistic people get this for free – it comes with the territory – and other high achievers have to learn how to do it.  The (unstated by him) corollary is that social convention is an enormous impediment to achievement.

Fascinating observation, and it rings very true to me...

The Mediterranean Sea was created...

The current Mediterranean Sea was created ... about five million years ago, when the Atlantic Ocean breached the natural dam at what is today the Straight of Gibraltar.  I'd read in the past that it took several centuries to fill up the Mediterranean Sea to match the Atlantic Ocean's level.  Now there's a new report that says it was filled in as little as a few months, and at most two years.  To do that, water flowed at rates of up to 300 km/hr (190 mph) through a 200 km (125 mile) long channel.  That would have been a spectacular sight!

Prime surprise...

Prime surprise...  I ran across this interesting article about a surprising property of sequential prime numbers.  But even more interesting to me is this piece in the article, which seems obviously wrong to me:

If Alice tosses a coin until she sees a head followed by a tail, and Bob tosses a coin until he sees two heads in a row, then on average, Alice will require four tosses while Bob will require six tosses (try this at home!), even though head-tail and head-head have an equal chance of appearing after two coin tosses.

Have any of my readers ever heard of this?  Search as I might, I've found no reference to anything suggesting unequal probability of head-tail versus head-head.  At the moment I'm assuming that the article's author just misunderstood something she heard...

This guy keeps surprising me...

This guy keeps surprising me...  John Oliver with an outstanding (and still very funny) piece on the Apple encryption debate...

Rain in Paradise!

Rain in Paradise!  It's pouring as I write this, and the weather radar shows lots more headed our way.  The forecast has significant precipitation between last night and this coming Thursday, alternating between snow and rain.  All of this is with temperatures above freezing, so presumably the “snow” will be more like slush, melting shortly after hitting the ground.

We drove up to Porcupine Reservoir yesterday morning.  It's just a few miles from our home, and is the source for our irrigation water.  It's filling up nicely, up several feet over the past couple of days.  This rain will aid in that, reassuring all the local farmers.  It will also ensure a very green spring for us – and hopefully a bumper crop of wildflowers in the mountains...

Nodules on Mars...

Nodules on Mars...  Curiosity is investigating...

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 :)