Don't Tell Me that My City is Dying!

What a great music video, and set to one of my favorite songs (Don McLean's American Pie)!  This is Grand Rapids' response to a Newsweek article calling it a “dying city”.  As my longtime readers know, I don't much care for any city – but I sure do like the spirit of these folks!  To read the whole backstory, go here and click on “Show more”.  Meanwhile, just watch, listen, and enjoy!

Fujifilm FinePix X100...

When Debbie and I first planned our imminent vacation (back in December), I decided that this time I was going to bring along a point-and-shoot camera.  This thought came from two things: the desire for a decent camera small enough for me to carry everywhere on the trip, and the evolution of digital cameras to the point where a great camera could be made in a very small form factor.

So I did my research, not having kept up all that much with camera development.  I settled on a camera that was due for release in March, but had been extensively previewed and reviewed: the Fujifilm FinePix X100.  It looked like everything I wanted: high-quality, well-constructed, small, and simple – but capable of some very fancy photography when I wanted it.  I placed my pre-order, happy to wait until March.  That would give me plenty of time to get familiar with it before our vacation.

Then came the earthquake.  Amongst the more trivial of its effects was the delay of shipments on my camera.  Until yesterday, I still had no idea when it might show up.  Just a few days ago, Debbie and I discussed an alternative plan: I'd buy a readily available, less expensive point-and-shoot camera for the trip, and she'd use it for her dog shows afterwards. 

But yesterday afternoon I got a very nice email: my camera was being shipped, and should arrive on June 8 (next Wednesday).  They couldn't have timed this much more closely – I'll have the camera for just two weeks before leaving on vacation! 

I've got some practicing to do...

Chaparral Morning...

Debbie and I slept in a bit this morning; I didn't get outside with the dogs until dawn brightened the eastern sky.  The valley was gorgeous – wisps of mist here and there, as the evening humidity hit its peak. 

The normal summer cycle out here in the high desert chaparral is for high humidity at night (often 100%) and extremely low humidity (usually under 5%) during the day.  The transitions, both at night and in the morning, are extremely fast, driven by the sun's power disappearing at night and reappearing in the morning.  One result: it's common for us to see these beautiful morning mist and fog effects.

Our yard is full of things to see, hear, and smell.  The palo verde tree in our front yard is erupting into bloom.  Wildflowers, especially monkeyflowers, are out all over the place.  Because of our winter rains, all the native plants are showing very strong new growth.  I see manzanitas with as much as 5 inches of new growth, a very large amount for them.  The mosses on the rocks are still tinged with green, leftover from the rain last week.  That won't last long, though – another few days and they'll look like black paint on the rocks. 

The pines we recently trimmed look very different than they did.  Now the lowest branches are 20 feet or more high, and there are elegant trunks in plain sight.  The biggest impact, though, is that the hillside formerly hidden behind the pine branches is now fully exposed to view – a lovely vista of Mother Nature's art, with rocks that a sculptor would envy, a half-dozen mature manzanitas shamelessly displaying their red trunks, deep green ceanothus bushes, and splashes of wildflowers here and there.  The dominant wildflowers are the pale orange monkeyflowers, in perhaps a dozen bunches covering a total of about 100 square feet.  Lovely things, they are.

And then there's the early morning smells, one of my favorite things about the chaparral.  In the morning there's usually a gentle downhill breeze, with cool, moist air drifting down to the valleys.  Many of the chaparral plants – but most especially the sages – have sharp and distinct smells.  In the main, these are pleasant and attractive smells.  They are at their absolute best on these early mornings, being carried to my nose by the wafting air, and enhanced by the high humidity.  This morning they were superb.

As usual, the three brown dogs were fully absorbed in the odiferous universe.  They never saw the covey of quail running away, about 50 feet to our west.  Nor did they see the baby rabbit hopping frantically up the hill from us.  Racer, focused on a pine cone he captured, completely ignored the smells.  He saw both the quail and the rabbit, and went on full alert very briefly – just long enough to decide that the pine cone was more fun.

Debbie's “down the hill” in Bonita today, competing with Miki and Racer in an agility meet.  Just talked with her on the phone; she saw lots of wildlife today on the drive out of our valley.  She also had news that seems more important to us now that we're soon going to drive several thousand miles: the price of gasoline at the Steele Canyon 7/11 has now dropped to below $4 a gallon ($3.99, to be precise).  It's been a while since we've seen that...

Whatever Happened to the Successors of...

...the minstrel poets of my youth (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Joan Baez, etc., etc.)?

I'm sitting here in 2011 listening to Joni Mitchell's Clouds, an album I first listened to over 40 years ago, in the late '60s.  So far as I'm aware, there's nothing like that sort of poetic music, with meaningful and thought-provoking lyrics, being produced today.  Am I just unaware of it?  Or is it really that much out of fashion today?

Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on every one
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions that I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

...

My parents thought of Joni Mitchell as radical, and would not let me play her albums in our house. I had a record player (with a tube amplifier and electrodynamic speakers!) set up in an old chicken shack that we converted to an electronic workshop for me. There I could play all that radical music, like Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, and (gasp) Three Dog Night!

Steyn on Weiner...

Classic Mark Steyn piece.  A sample:

It's the political class doing all this relentless "work for the American people" that's turned this country into the brokest nation in the history of the planet, killed the American Dream and left the American people headed for a future poised somewhere between the Weimar Republic and Mad Max. So, if it's a choice between politicians getting back to work for the American people or Tweeting their privates round the planet, I say, Tweet on, MacDuff. Tough on our young college ladies. But, as Queen Victoria advised her daughter on her wedding night, lie back and think of England. Download and think of America.

The Ugly American...

Via my mom, this revised version of an oldie-but-goodie:

The train was quite crowded and a U. S. Marine walked the entire length looking for a seat.

There seemed to be one next to a well-dressed French woman, but when he got there, he saw it was taken by the woman's poodle.

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

The French woman 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 available 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, tossed it out the train window and sat down.

The woman shrieked, "Someone defend me! Put this American in his place!"

An English gentleman sitting nearby spoke up. "Sir, you Americans 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 the window."

The Traffic Stop...

Via my mom (who has some idea what to do with a .357 revolver):

The Arizona Department of Safety Officer pulled over pick-up truck owner Mike Murphy for a weapons check because of an NRA bumper sticker.

When the officer approached the vehicle, the man behind the wheel handed the officer his driver's license, insurance card and concealed carry permit. The officer took all the documents, looked them over and said, "Mr. Murphy, I see you have a CCP. Do you have any weapons with you?"

The driver replied, "Yes I do. I have a 357 handgun in a hip holster, a .45 in the glove box and a .22 derringer in my boot."

The officer looked at Mike and asked, "Anything else?"

"Yes. I have a Mossberg 500 12 gauge and an AR-15 in the trunk."

The officer asked if the man was driving to or from a shooting range and the man said he wasn't, so the officer bent over and looked into the driver's face and said "Mr. Murphy, you're carrying quite a few guns. May I ask what you are afraid of?"

Mike locked eyes with the officer and calmly answered, "Not a fucking thing!!!"

There are many unafraid people in the hills of East San Diego...

President's Day...

Via my mom:

I was eating lunch on the 20th of February with my 10-year-old grandson and I asked him, "What day is tomorrow?"
He said "It's President's Day!"

He is a smart kid.

I asked "What does President's Day mean?"
I was waiting for something about Washington or Lincoln ... etc.

He replied, "President's Day is when President Obama steps out of the White House, and if he sees his shadow we have one more year of unemployment."

You know, it really hurts when coffee spurts out your nose...

Obama, Fish, and the Debt Ceiling...

Here's the conclusion of Peggy Noonan's piece in the WSJ today:

Barack Obama is different, not a political practitioner, really, but something else, and not a warm-blooded animal but a cool, chill character, a fish who sits deep in the tank and stares, stilly, at the other fish.

He doesn't know how to confuse his foes with "outreach," with phone calls, jokes, affection. He doesn't leave them saying, as Reagan did, "I just can't help it, I like the guy." And because he can't confuse them or reach them they more readily coalesce around their own explanation of him: socialist, destroyer.

This isn't good, and has had an impact on the president's contacts with Republicans. And it's added an edge to an emerging campaign theme among them. Two years ago I wrote of Clare Booth Luce's observation that all presidents have a sentence: "He fought to hold the union together and end slavery." "He brought American through economic collapse and a world war." You didn't have to be told it was Lincoln, or FDR. I said that Mr. Obama didn't understand his sentence. But Republicans now think they know it.

Four words: He made it worse.

Obama inherited financial collapse, deficits and debt. He inherited a broken political culture. These things weren't his fault. But through his decisions, he made them all worse.

A “stilly” fish. Ouch...

Oh, Noz! We're Running Out of Hydrocarbon Fuels!

Uh, not so much...

I've been talking about this for years on this blog, and so have many other people.  But when the facts even percolate up to a liberal bastion like Slate, then you know the facts have won the day...

The SSDs are Coming...

...and it looks like they're going to be great!

Il Silenzio...

Via my mom:

Home Prices...

Down again.  Below is the latest update of the Case-Shiller index.  It's good news if you're buying a house, bad news if you're selling...

Budgets and Debt Ceiling...

The Washington Post has a couple of primers on the current budget plans before Congress and the history of the debt ceiling.  If you don't know this stuff, go study.

All Your Rubik's Cubes are Belong to Us...

Some Memorial Day Music...

Thank You...

CP/M in Your Browser...

When I think about things like this, it seems to me that we have nearly arrived at the point where a conventional desktop is unnecessary.  That's Google's thesis with their ChromeBook, and I'm beginning to think they might actually be right...

JavaScript Tool Summary...

A nice compendium...

What's the Chance...

...that the breath you just took had some molecules of air that were part of Julius Caesar's last breath?

Answer here.

A Trip to the Mountains...

When we left this morning it was overcast and raining, so I didn't bother taking my camera.  That was a bad mistake on my part, as Cuyamaca and Laguna mountains were in bloom – flowers everywhere we went!  Bright red penstemmon were perhaps the most common flower we saw, and far more of them than we can recall ever seeing before in our mountains.

We started out by stopping for breakfast at the Descanso Junction Restaurant, where we both had a meal large enough to fuel us for the entire day.  After that, we headed north on Boulder Creek Road.  The creek was running higher than we've seen it before, and clear.  The ford's lower edge is shown at left – if you're familiar with the road, then you know that's much higher than normal.

We stopped there for perhaps 20 minutes, and I took a walk along the north side of the stream, upstream.  It was still drizzling, and the plants along the stream were wet, so I was soaked from my hips down.  I saw quite a few nice things along the way (below), and I came back smelling strongly of plant I walked through – not sage, but with a similar smell.

Then we drove on up to where the short cut to Eagle Peak Road branches from Boulder Creek Road, and took the shortcut.  This turned out to be a beautiful drive, full of wildflowers (especially monkeyflowers and a variety of cheerful, bright yellow wildflowers).  The streams all along the road were flowing higher than we've ever seen them.

Once we hit Eagle Peak Road, we headed north and saw something we never expected: a waterfall with water!  This is a fairly tall waterfall, 50 feet or more high.  There's a rough turnout where you can park and walk south along the bluffs for a great view.  The water was pouring over this falls, and in one spot the swiftly falling water was turned 90° to shoot out straight horizontally.  It's a most pleasant spot for a little sightseeing.

Then we kept on back up to Boulder Creek Road (where we bought some honey at a roadside honeybox), over the hump on Engineer Road to Cuyamaca Lake, then down the Sunrise Highway to the turn on to Pine Creek Road, down Noble canyon.  Along the way we had spectacular displays of many different wildflowers, most especially penstemmon, lupine, snow-on-the-mountain, and fireweed.  We also saw redbuds about to bloom – lots of them, right where we thought they'd all be permanently killed by the 2007 fires.  The wind had kicked up, gusting to 50 or 60 mph, and clouds were scudding by at this speed just over our heads.  This made for really interesting and fast-changing lighting effects that we greatly enjoyed. 

Here's our remaining crummy cell-camera photos...

Post Office's Last Gasps...

The U.S. Post Office's travails were entirely predictable – in fact, they were predicted, by a great many people including me.  The reasons are many, and most are easy enough to understand.  The simple fact that the Post Office has a half million union workers is almost enough to understand the entire problem.  If you're interested in the details, here's a great primer.  It focuses on the looming financial crisis, but along the way gives a very accessible description of the myriad ways in which the Post Office is in trouble.

The linked article talks mostly about various “fixes” for the Post Office.  The most important reform, however, isn't discussed: removing the U.S. Post Office's government-granted monopoly on first class mail delivery.  A dose of competition would result in great delivery of services that people were actually willing to pay for – and an end to the subsidization of the things people don't want (such as junk mail).

The challenge is that a half-million member union is a potent political force.  Their ability to make political donations means they can (effectively) buy off the politicians who might consider removing their monopoly.  So the reform I advocate isn't particularly likely to be implemented.  But I can dream, can't I?

Rain and Changing Plans...

It's the end of May, and we're getting more rain – most unexpected out here in the high desert chaparral.  We've only had a few tenths of an inch (about 5 mm), but that's enough to thoroughly wet down our yard and trees.  We were planning to burn our brush pile today, and to work more on trimming our pine trees.  The rain put the kabosh on those plans!

So we're switching to our backup plan: breakfast at Descanso Junction Restaurant, and a drive in the mountains.  Race and Miki will keep us company.  Woo hoo!

Bobcat on a Cactus...

With an amazing backstory.  Via reader Jim M.

Thank You, Team 6...

Unknown source, via reader Jim M.:

Thanking Obama for killing Bin Laden is like going into McDonalds and thanking Ronald McDonald for the hamburger. It's the guy cooking the burger that should get the credit, not the clown.

Tunny Machine Back in Action!

If you're a technology history junkie like me, you probably know about the Tunny machines.  They were an important part of the Bletchly Park efforts that decoded Nazi messages.

The British National Museum of Computing has recently finished building a complete, working replica of a Tunny machine.  In the course of doing so, they've now documented exactly how it was built (this documentation didn't exist before they started their work).

This is something I would really like to see.  Next time I'm over in England, I've got to make a point of seeing this museum (I've never been there)...

Lunokhod I Lives Again!

Well, sort of.

This Soviet achievement in 1969 was completely overshadowed by the American achievement of putting astronauts on the moon.  The Soviet moon rover was, however, quite a technical feat in its own right.

Clearly, though, the Soviets needed a dose of design talent.  Lunokhod's “washtub look” would have made Stalin quite happy.

While Lunokhod's electronics failed a long time ago, the device itself was recently located by imagery satellites in lunar orbit, and a scientist has now succeeded in bouncing light off the retro-reflectors mounted on Lunokhod's back.  With its location now precisely known, Lunokhod's retro-reflectors have now become an important part of a modern science effort.  Not bad for a 42 year old piece of space junk!

Geek Humor...

If you're a developer, this is very funny stuff: how to write unmaintainable code.  A sample:

Recycle Your Variables

Wherever scope rules permit, reuse existing unrelated variable names. Similarly, use the same temporary variable for two unrelated purposes (purporting to save stack slots). For a fiendish variant, morph the variable, for example, assign a value to a variable at the top of a very long method, and then somewhere in the middle, change the meaning of the variable in a subtle way, such as converting it from a 0-based coordinate to a 1-based coordinate. Be certain not to document this change in meaning.

2012 Is Going to be an Interesting Election Year!

Sign outside Clovis, New Mexico:

Forth...

Here's a discussion about Forth, a programming language blast-from-the-past for me.  There was, in the late '70s, a period of time when Forth was the only high-level langauge for microcomputers that actually worked reasonably well for real-world projects.  I used it fairly extensively on Z80s, and a bit less on several different Intel single-chip solutions.  I liked it a lot - it was very light-wieght, lent itself very well to a serial terminal development environment, and let me build up a library of “stuff” that I could use as tools in different environments.  Turbo Pascal was the first practicable alternative I found to Forth, and that wasn't useful in embedded systems.  Forth and assembler were the only languages I ever used in that world...

62% Top Marginal Tax Rate?

This is so depressing...

Sad...

Spirit abandoned...

Aging Geek...

Debbie and I are very tired and sore this morning, after spending the weekend working on our pine trees.  We've got about two-thirds of the work done now, and the part that we've finished looks great.  There's a large pile of pine brush in our front yard, ready for burning next weekend.  We burned yesterday, but because we can only burn from 8:15 am to 10:00 am, we couldn't get all that much done.  The pile grows larger.

Meanwhile, we exercised – hard – virtually every muscle in our aging bodies.  We're paying for it this morning!  Oh, the aches and pains!  Sure will feel good when this goes away...

Amazing Gymnast...

My mom sent this video to me, with a forwarded note that this was the granddaughter of Nadia Comanecci, the amazing Olympic gymnast.  Nadia, who won her Olympic gold medal in 1976 at the age of 14, has one child (a five year old daughter) at this writing.  This is actually a video of Boyanka Angelova, an accomplished gymnast who is completely unrelated to Nadia.  But who cares?  It's amazing, and beautiful!

UNIX Tools...

An interesting collection...

I Gotta Get Me...

...one of these.

Human Stupidity...

An excellent essay.  Here's one fragment, titled “The Power of Stupidity”

It is not difficult to understand how social, political and institutional power enhances the damaging potential of a stupid person. But one still has to explain and understand what essentially it is that makes a stupid person dangerous to other people - in other words what constitutes the power of stupidity.

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behaviour. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit's actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit's actions, his nasty manoeuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy. Because the stupid person's actions do not conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that:

a) one is generally caught by surprise by the attack; b) even when one becomes aware of the attack, one cannot organize a rational defense, because the attack itself lacks any rational structure.

The fact that the activity and movements of a stupid creature are absolutely erratic and irrational not only makes defense problematic but it also makes any counter-attack extremely difficult - like trying to shoot at an object which is capable of the most improbable and unimaginable movements. This is what both Dickens and Schiller had in mind when the former stated that "with stupidity and sound digestion man may front much" and the latter wrote that "against stupidity the very Gods fight in vain."

As I said: excellent!

This is How to Make a Public Service Commercial...

Our Galaxy...

Reader Paul H. sends this along, I suspect thinking that I might have missed APOD because of our user conference.  This time APOD has more than just a pretty picture – it links to this interactive sky survey, which is sort of like having an excellent pair of binoculars and a perfectly clear sky, from the comfort of your chair...

Americans vs. French...

Peggy Noonan, totally resonating with me:

America was immediately sympathetic to the underdog. The impulse of every media organization, from tabloid to broadsheet to cable to network, was to side with the powerless one in the equation. The cops, the hotel's managers, the District Attorney's office—everyone in authority gave equal weight and respect to the word of the maid. Only in America (and not always in America) would they have taken the testimony of the immigrant woman from Africa and dragged the powerful man out of his first-class seat in the jet at JFK.

In France, the exact opposite. There, from the moment the story broke, DSK was the victim, not the villain. It was a setup, a trap, a conspiracy. He has a weakness for women. No, he loves them too much. Hairy-chested poseur and Sarkozy foreign-policy adviser Bernard-Henri Levy sneeringly referred to "the chambermaid," brayed about DSK's high standing, and called him "a friend to women." Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, sniffily asked why "the supposed victim was treated as worthy and beyond suspicion."

Why wouldn't she be treated as worthy, buddy? One is tempted to ask if it's the black part, the woman part or the immigrant part.

As David Rieff wrote in The New Republic, to French intellectuals, DSK deserves special treatment because he is a valuable person. "The French elites' consensus seems to be that it is somehow Strauss-Kahn himself and not the 32-year-old maid who is the true victim of this drama."

Americans totally went for the little guy. The French went for the power.

Much more, on different topics, in her whole piece...

Rumors of My Demise...

...are slightly premature.  I wasn't amongst the departed, I was just busy. 

For the past three days, I've been part of the team at my company putting on the Knowledge11 User Conference.  It was a fantastic experience, but exhausting.  My own participation is typical; over 100 of our employees were there.  I gave two presentations on my own, one presentation as one of a group of presenters, and was a moderator in two roundtable discussions.  All of these were well-attended, and very intense experiences.  I learned a lot, and hopefully so did the customers who attended.

But the best part of the experience, by far, was the one-on-one meetings I had with customers.  The roughly dozen pre-arranged time slots were all booked before the convention even began, but we managed to put together about two dozen more meetings ad hoc.  All told, I had 38 organized meetings with customers, and probably half that again that “just happened” in the hallways (and in one case, the restroom!).  Even after a night of sleep, my head is still spinning with all the things that I learned, and ideas that I got from our customers.

Part of me wishes that these events happened more than annually, and part of me is glad I have a whole year to rest up for the next one.  Except...I don't.  We have a second event happening later this year in Europe.  Woo hoo!

Carl Sagan's Words of Wisdom...

Via Paul H.



Science's “Great Communicator” is much missed in these parts...

Seriously Geeky...

What if you wanted to run Linux right in your web browser?  How would you do it?

Well, of course what you would do is to write a JavaScript emulation of an x86 processor and its peripherals, then port Linux to that.  Or at least that's what Fabrice Bellard did, just for fun.  Be sure to check out the technical notes.

Awesome, dude!

Map of the Universe...

Extra gigantic sized!

I Need One of These!

Very clever – and beautiful – demonstration of the relationship between a pendulum's length and it's oscillation period...

Quote of the Day...

By Bert Prelutsky in the Los Angeles Times:

Frankly, I don't know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I'm not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we're number one. There's no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on 'Macbeth'. The four of them are like jackasses who happen to possess the gift of blab. You don't know if you should condemn them for their stupidity or simply marvel at their ability to form words.

Wish I'd written that!

Audio Illusion...

Known as the “McGurk Effect”, this is simply awesome.  I must have watched this 10 times and I can still hardly believe it.  Via reader Simon M.:

Replace the Monkeys...

Political advice worth considering, via my mom:

If you start with a cage containing five monkeys and inside the cage, hang a banana on a string from the top and then you place a set of stairs under the banana, before long a monkey will go to the stairs and climb toward the banana.

As soon as he touches the stairs, you spray all the other monkeys with cold water. After a while another monkey makes an attempt with same result ... all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put the cold water away.

Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and attempts to climb the stairs. To his shock, all of the other monkeys beat the crap out of him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys, replacing it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment... with enthusiasm.

Then, replace a third original monkey with a new one, followed by a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him up have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs. Neither do they know why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

Finally, having replaced all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys will have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, none of the monkeys will try to climb the stairway for the banana.

Why, you ask? Because in their minds... that is the way it has always been!

This, my friends, is how Congress operates... and is why, from time to time, all of the monkeys need to be REPLACED AT THE SAME TIME IN 2012.

Shadow Government Statistics...

Here's a fascinating site whose objective is to undo all the obfuscation the U.S. government has applied to its financial statistics.  Key indicators (such as the unemployment rate), when they move in a politically unsavory direction, tend to be “reformulated” to paint a rosier picture.  One side effect of this is that it's almost impossible for us to compare statistics today to past statistics.  This site computes today's statistics the same way they used to be computed, to give us a consistent picture.  For example, if the unemployment rate were computed today the same way it was in 1990, it would be about 16%, not the 9% being reported today...

Another Climate Scientist Turns Skeptic...

An excerpt from an article by David Evans:

Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.

This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.

At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.

Now go read the whole thing!

Tenerife...

Beautiful.  Just beautiful.  Via APOD...

Optical Illusion of the Year...

The colors on the dots below are changing the entire time the video is playing, but when the wheel starts jogging, they appear to stop.  Awesome!

The Correct Way to Arrest a Terrorist...

I want those cops on my side!

Won't Be Long Now...

The Decorah eagles are close to fledging.  All three of the chicks made it this far...

Newspaper Front Pages...

If you've ever been curious what newspapers in some faraway place look like, this site is for you.  They have hundreds of newspaper front pages, daily.  There's a world map, and you just drag it around until you see the place you want, click, and voila: today's front page shows up.  Cool!

360° Helicopter Cockpit...

Fascinating.  Via reader Dr. Simi L...

Sombrero Galaxy...

AKA M104, and home of a large black hole.  When I was a kid, the best photos of M104 came from places like the Palomar telescope, and they were fuzzy, grainy, black-and-white images with a tiny fraction of the detail of this one.  I remember poring over those early images, fascinated, and wishing I could see something like that from a backyard telescope.  Now look what we can see, from our comfortable chairs!  From APOD, of course...

Human Regeneration?

As Glenn Reynolds would say, faster please...

Kissinger, Now and Then...

I just finished reading this adaptation from Henry Kissinger's upcoming book, On China.  I have several independent reactions to it, but to understand them, you'll need a bit of context. 

Kissinger has had a huge and quite direct impact on my life.  I was in the U.S. Navy from '71 through '77, which includes the tail end of the Vietnam War, Nixon's famous visit to China, and Nixon's ignomious resignation.  The photo at right is from '76, and that visage is how I remember him.  Kissinger played an important role in all three of these events, but to me personally the most important role of his was in the “peace negotiations” with the North Vietnamese.

Probably more than any other event in my youth, this awakened my interest in politics and history.  Contemporaneously, very little was publicized about the inner workings of those negotiations; it took decades for it all to leak out.  My image of Kissinger is of an extremely bright, motivated, and sincere man – but capable of arrogance and ruthlessness even on large issues that affect millions of people.  His advocacy of Realpolitik I found profoundly un-American.  He frightened me when he was in power.

One reaction I had to reading the adaptation is that it reads a bit like an insider's historical account, and even if only for that reason I will read the book.  I don't know enough about modern China to assess his thoughts about it. 

Another reaction I had is a superficial one: to his contemporaneous photograph.  I haven't seen a photo of him for quite some time, so I was surprised and shocked by how much he has aged.  In the '70s, he was often seen with a beautiful woman on his arm, generally much younger than he.  His most famous quote (“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”) seemed quite consistent with his public persona.  He's now nearly 90 years old, so I really shouldn't have been surprised by the photo.  But I was.

The last reaction I had was to be a bit surprised at myself, mainly for not having thought about Dr. Henry Kissinger for quite a long time.  In the '70s and '80s, he and Zbigniew Brzezinski were frequent targets of my reading and thinking.  Other than as historical figures (!), neither has been top-of-mind for many years. 

Power and influence are fleeting things, usually...

A Recipe for Happiness...

Start with a stale crust of Dudley's Rosemary & Olive Oil bread.  Rip it into small pieces.  Warm a few tablespoons of milk in the microwave and soak the bread chunks in it.  Sprinkle a little shredded Parmesan cheese on it.  Stir in a tablespoon of melted butter.  Finely dice a slice of ham and mix it in.


Then put the bowl down on the floor for your old girl dog friend (in my case, Lea, our 15 year old field spaniel).  I guarantee you'll be a happier person after you watch your dog's delight and grunts of sheer doggie ecstasy.


It's so easy to make a dog happy...

Router Blues...

Recently the router (a 10 year old Cisco 806) that connected us to the Intertubes started having intermittent problems.  The symptoms were really quite annoying: it would work just fine for some period between 30 seconds and a week, then suddenly conk out completely.  To “fix” it, we had to power it down, wait a minute or so, then power it back up.

That annoyance has been removed.  I've replaced the venerable Cisco 806 with a Buffalo Technology model WZR-HP-G300NH (at right, click to enlarge), flashed with DD-WRT (open source router software).  This single $80 router replaces not only my malfunctioning Cisco 806, but also a separate Cisco wireless router.

So what was it like to replace that Cisco 806? 

Installing the Cisco in the first place is something I remember well.  I was already reasonably familiar with the arcane Cisco IOS configuration files before I started that job.  Even so, to set up the 806 I had to learn a few new things.  It ended up consuming an entire weekend, and involved many failed attempts before I finally got us up and running on the Intertubes.  For months afterwards, I tweaked one thing and another until I finally got it all working.

Now contrast the more recent experience of bringing up the Buffalo Technology router.  There were just two steps.  First, I downloaded the latest DD-WRT version and flashed the router with it.  Elapsed time: about 10 minutes.  Then I used the built-in web pages to explore and configure the router.  Elapsed time: about 10 minutes.  Then I plugged it into power and the network, and … it all worked on the first try.  I've not had to do any tweaking at all.

Awesome job, DD-WRT folks.  Just awesome.  And much appreciated...

Jamul Casino Update...

Lakes Entertainment is out with their latest financial report, and it's more of the same.  The Jamul Casino Project is showing no signs of progress (hooray!).  The company's stock price seems to be stuck in the doldrums, and their business overall looks much less than exciting.  As a Jamul Casino Project opponent, I can say that it looks quite hopeful that both the project and its sponsor are grinding their way, slowly, into oblivion.

Let's hope there's no rescue in the works...

Coolness...

The weather for the past week, and the forecast for the coming week, are both much cooler than the norms for this time of year.  Out here in Lawson Valley, we've been (and are forecast to be) seeing highs in the 60s and 70s (°F, of course).  The strange weather of our winter seems to be continuing.

The coolness sure is a nice change from the usual summer blast-furnace.  Debbie and I are hoping that this continues through the entire summer, though that seems a bit much to ask for...

Back On the Air!

Google's Blogger blogging platform (which this blog runs on) had some kind of disaster a couple days ago.  Some of my favorite blogs have been down (such as Althouse, whose blog is back up, but is missing 20,000+ posts!), and I've been unable to post from Thursday morning until this morning.  But we're back now!

It's Time...

Reader Dave H. passes this along, and says: “When this happens, it's time to retire while you still have your dignity...”

Dave, I think if things reach this point, it may well be too late to hope for any dignity!

Elephants and the Marula Tree...

Via my mom...

Ceding Existential Decisions...

This is the sort of thing that makes me so uncomfortable about the notion of doctors or courts deciding when someone who is sick or injured should die...

Man, This Looks Like FUN!

I wanna go!

A Lovely Story About My Mother...

My mom passed this along to me, and I can only assume she wanted me to share it with y'all...

One day long, long ago, there lived a beautiful woman who did not whine, nag, bitch or drink (that would be me).

But that was a long time ago and it was just that one day.

THE END.

Of All the People Who Have Ever Lived...

...how many are alive today?

Answer: about 1 in 8.

Meaninful Adjacencies...

The New Yorker has an interesting short article on how the names of the dead will be arranged at the 9/11 memorial (due to open on 9/11/11).  It's a solution to a problem that I'd not thought of: when you have several places to display names, which names go in which place, and what order do they go in?  I'd most likely have opted for a simple alphabetical order, but as the article points out, this is actually less than ideal.

The solution turns out to be mathematically challenging, and computers were used to figure out the final ordering.  The guiding principle used is “meaningful adjacencies”, meaning that names found next to one another are connected in some way (organizational affiliation, relationships, families, etc.).  Fascinating stuff.

Ideas in the Shower...

For years I've noted something that was to me quite mysterious: I would find solutions to difficult problems (either design or debugging) while taking a shower.  Having observed this, I have, on more than a few occasions, taken a shower for the specific purpose of coming up with an idea to solve a problem – and it has worked.  I've never had a satisfactory explanation of why this might be so, however.

This morning I read a blog post that purports to explain the phenomenon (which many others have also noted).  Some of the links from this post are also interesting.  Essentially the notion is that while you're taking a shower, you're not getting a lot of input from other sources, so your subconcious can surface things its thinking about.  I'm not sure about the science behind this, but it is the first plausible explanation I've heard yet.  The blog post is actually about a product that lets you take notes in the shower, so you won't forget your ideas.  That's never been an issue for me – when I come up with an idea in the shower, it's generally for something I've been working on for hours or even days.  There's zero chance that I'm going to forget a solution for a problem like that!

A Fine Day...

Debbie and I had a wonderful day yesterday.  First we worked ourselves into a stupor, cutting and burning brush in our front yard.  I estimate that we cut, carried, and burned between a ton and a ton-and-a-half of pine limbs.  The fire was awesomely hot, to the point where it was painful to get within 6 feet or so of it.  We started around 7 am, and by the time we wrapped it up at around 3 pm we had almost completely cleared the yard; just a few logs remain.  All this to trim up just the first third or so of our pine trees!

After we got done working, we showered and headed for Descanso Junction Restaurant.  There we met up with my cousin Mike D. and his significant other Diane.  They're from Colorado, and they're taking a grand driving tour of the west.  We caught them as they were headed to San Diego for a couple days of sight-seeing.  Though we've corresponded quite a bit in recent years, I haven't seen Mike since I was a kid, close to 50 years ago.  He's 11 years older than I am, so his memories of that event are better than mine.  We had a grand old time, swapping stories and feasting. 

Mike and I both chose the same dish: meatloaf and mashed potatoes with green beans, preceded by a seafood chowder.  Debbie got one of her all-time favorites, the fried chicken.  Diane, the light eater amongst us, got a club sandwich – the look of dismay on her face when she saw the (monster) size of it was priceless.  Mike, on the other hand, nearly jumped for joy when he saw the gigantic slab of meatloaf that didn't quite fit on his plate!  He finished his entire plate off, then eyeballed Diane's remaining half-sandwich.  I suspect that sandwich didn't make it to the refrigerator last night...

We took our separate paths upon leaving the restaurant, but not before we made plans for Mike and Diane to join us for a day of four-wheeling when we're out in Ouray next month.  We're going to take them to Yankee Boy Basin for some wildflowers...

Rain!

We had 0.16" (3mm) of rain last night.  That's not much in the grand scheme of things, but considering that it's mid-May in the high desert it's pretty remarkable.  This year's weather continues to be far off the norms of the past 8 or 9 years.  Let's hope the summer continues to be cool – and wet!

Stallman on SaaS...

Richard Stallman (EFF) is a great example of a very smart person who is blinded by their own prejudices.  Here he's slamming Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for one issue, while completely ignoring (indeed, not even mentioning!) it's many benefits.

No solution to any problem is 100% perfect.  Every choice is an exercise in balancing out the pros and cons.  Every time I buy a new vehicle I'm reminded of this – there are a bewildering variety of choices available, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Imagine how arbitrarily limited your choices would be if (for example) you refused to consider vehicles that came with floor mats as standard equipment.  That's roughly what Stallman is advocating here.

SaaS is just one way to buy software.  It's got a suite of advantages that I (and many others) think are compelling, and a few disadvantages, many of which can be mitigated or minimized.  Refusing to consider SaaS for the reasons suggested by Stallman is just silly...

Autocorrecting Phones...

Suddenly my simple ancient cell phone has much more appeal...

Chicken Pasta Soup...

It's a chilly morning out here in the sticks; mid-60s in the house and I'm sitting at the computer working.  Yesterday I stopped by the Bravo Cafe near Jamul and picked up a quart of Manolli's lemony chicken pasta soup.  Just now I reheated it and slurped it down.  It's a lovely soup, with a light, slightly creamy broth that's quite lemony.  Plenty of chicken and tiny rice-like pasta, and some vegetables.  Just one of the many reasons why we love the food at Bravo!

But aside from the great (and plentiful!) food, the people there are what really makes the place.  Yesterday Milton and Esmeralda (two of Manolli and Rosio's kids) made up my order of soup and iced mocha (for Debbie), while Manolli churned out sandwiches and other goodies.  This family is a fixture in the Jamul area – hard-working immigrant Americans full of good cheer and good will.  Jamul would be a different – and lesser – place without them.

It just occurred to me to look them up on Yelp, and I'm delighted to see that every review up there is a solid five stars!

Note From My Mom...

I received this note from my mom a few days ago.  Before you read it, you should know that I am her oldest child (of four).

If you are supposed to learn from your mistakes, why do some people have more than one child?

Now ... how exactly should I interpret that?

Food!

If you're a dog lover, you're going to laugh until your sides hurt.  If you're not a dog lover, why are you reading my blog?

Animations...

This page has a collection of the coolest animated GIFs I've ever seen...

No Adults in the Room...

As I was saying the other day, there don't appear to be any adults in the room, up in our California legislature.  Consider this, from SB 432:

6714. (a) The standards board shall, no later than September 1, 2012, adopt an occupational safety and health standard for lodging establishment housekeeping. The standard shall apply to all hotels, motels, and other lodging establishments in California. The standard shall require all of the following:
(1) The use of a fitted sheet, instead of a flat sheet, as the bottom sheet on all beds within the lodging establishment. For the purpose of this section, a "fitted sheet" means a bed sheet containing elastic or similar material sewn into each of the four corners that allows the sheet to stay in place over the mattress.

Yup, you read it right. Let's mandate fitted sheets in hotel rooms, instead of something important, like, say, getting spending under control.

    Rope.
    Tree.
    Legislators.
    Some assembly required.

Hummers...

Like you've never seen them:

Morning Walk...

It was a gorgeous high desert morning this morning: 55°F, a light breeze, very dry, and desert scents filling the air.  The dogs all did their usual thing.  I walked on this moonless night with no flashlight – the stars and a bright Milky Way made just enough light for me to avoid any obstacles.  I could just barely make out Race as he zoomed around, happy, with his pine cone.  The three field spaniels were moving inkspots; couldn't see any details, but I could tell where they were.

Overhead, the sky was just glorious.  No moon, no planets – just stars.  The Milky Way arced high overhead, from just east of north to the southeast.  It was clear and bright enough that even with just a few minutes of accommodation I could see structure in it.  Beautiful, just plain beautiful...

As I walked and soaked in the night, I was thinking about the potential indirect consequences of Osama bin Laden's killing.  It occurred to me that if bin Laden had been living in that compound for years, there were probably interesting records there, and possibly even computers.  After coming back in and reading the news, I see that the Seals indeed captured a large amount of potential intelligence sources, including computers.  The consequences for al Qaeda may extend far beyond the death of their leader.  Let's hope that's so!

 

Euler's Identity...

For the geeks, a decoded crop circle:

After transcribing the binary digits, I translated each byte (8 bits) into its corresponding ASCII character with this handy online converter, starting from the direction of the windmill, and working clockwise around the circle and out from the centre. (If you're having trouble following this, see the animation linked at the bottom of the article).

The result was this:

e^(hi)pi)1=0

It looked like some kind of equation, and when I looked it up, Google asked if I meant: e^(i)pi)1=0, for which the top result was Euler's identity: eiπ+1=0. This has been called "the most beautiful theorem in mathematics". No surprise that it should turn up in a crop circle then!

Jupiter's Great Red Spot...

As you've never seen it before, in this photomosaic made of images from Voyager I.  From APOD, of course.

Supernova Remnant...

Man alive – I sure wouldn't want to be in the neighborhood when that thing exploded!  From APOD, of course.

The Best Case...

...for the Obama Presidency is a Jimmy Carter rerun.  Glenn Reynolds (aka the Instapundit) makes a persuasive, if depressing, case for the way we'll view Obama's presidency after he's gone...

Children in Sacremento...

I'm speaking of our legislators, of course.  The Democrats, petulant that they can't get the Republicans to vote for increased taxes, threaten to cut expenses: in the Repulican's districts!

Are there any adults in the room up there?

Wartime Golf Rules...

For a golf course in Richmond, England.  This down is just east of London, and it happens to be where my company has its London offices.  These rules were instituted during World War II, while England was regularly being attacked by German planes and missiles...

It's very hard to imagine this happening today, isn't it?

Flight Data Recorder Found...

Air France Flight 447 went down off the coast of Brazil almost two years ago.  Yesterday robotic submersibles found and recovered the memory unit from its flight data recorder.  Investigators are very hopeful that with this data they will be able to reconstruct exactly what caused the accident.  To date there is one main suspect (iced over pitot tubes) and several other possibilities.  We wish them good fortune in their search...

They Got Him!

Osama bin Laden is dead.  Killed by U.S. Navy Seals at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan (look for the “A” on the map) – which is over 100 km from the Afghanistan border, and even further from the mountainous border area where he was rumored to be staying.

I'm sure more details will emerge about the operation.  Several helicopters and a couple dozen U.S. personnel were involved.  No U.S. personnel were injured or killed.  Our forces “took custody” of bin Laden's body, then buried it at sea (apparently to stay within the Islamic custom of burying a body within 24 hours of death).

Here's the only thing that really matters: the mastermind of 9/11 is dead.  Woot!

Top 6 of Top 10 Lists (for Programmers)...

Nice.

Meyer's Good Advice...

Via Maggie's Farm:

A short time ago, Iran's Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged the Muslim World to boycott anything and everything that originates with the Jewish people.

In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:

"Any Muslim who has Syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has Syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew.
If a Muslim suspects that he has Gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be using the method of a Jew named Neissner.

"A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube.

Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil.

If a Muslim has Diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew. If one has a headache, he must shun Pyramidon and Antypyrin, due to the Jews, Spiro and Ellege.

Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of Chloral Hydrate.

Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew.

Should a Muslim child get Diphtheria, he must refrain from the "Schick" reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.

"Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram.

They should continue to die or remain crippled by Infantile Paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas Salk.

"Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of Tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this killing disease.

Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel, and of many other world renowned Jewish scientists and medical experts.

"In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain afflicted with Syphilis, Gonorrhea, Heart Disease, Headaches, Typhus, Diabetes, Mental Disorders, Polio, Convulsions and Tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott."

Bullet Trains...

Warren Meyer (of CoyoteBlog) has an excellent piece in Forbes on the stupidity of high speed rail...

Uncle Jack...

Just watch it.  Via reader Dr. Simi L.:

The Wish...

Your morning political humor, via my mom:

I met a fairy today that said she would grant me one wish. "I want to live forever," I said.

"Sorry," said the fairy, "I'm not allowed to grant wishes like that!"

"Fine," I said, "then I want to die after Congress gets their heads out of their asses!"

"You crafty bastard," said the fairy.