Checking In...

Well, we had a fantastic event at Knowledge12 earlier this week.  As always, I had a chance to meet and talk with many customers, partners, and colleagues – learned a lot, and hopefully helped a few people.  I presented at one lab (on “field normalization”) and helped with four others.  These were all really great labs – we got lots of positive feedback and enthusiasm from the attendees.  I was overwhelmed with the size and polish of the event – it no longer feels like amateur hour; instead, it looks like something put on by Microsoft or Oracle.  Totally awesome!

Right after the event, I hopped on an airplane for the U.K., where I'll be meeting with a bunch of our customers this coming week to talk about our Discovery and Runbook products.  I arrived early Saturday morning, which means I had the weekend to decompress a little after Knowledge12.  If you know me at all, you know that my idea of decompression normally involves walking and nature.  I'm staying in Twickenham, which is just a few minutes by train from Kew Gardens, and that's where I've spent the bulk of the past two days.  I brought my Fujifilm X100 over with me, and I took over 600 photos in the gardens.  The rock gardens, alpine house, rhododendrons, azaleas, bluebells, and Paulownia collections were my favorite parts – though the entire gardens are so beautiful that it's hard to choose.  Just a few of my favorites below...

Rock garden

Note the peacock!

Geese are everywhere!

Jade vine

Who Could Have Seen This Coming?

Well, actually, just about everyone.  A few months ago, when our very own Governor Moonbeam (aka Jerry Brown) introduced his budget, every analyst with an above room temperature IQ (on both sides of the aisle!) immediately denounced it as a complete fiction.  Well, to be fair, a few did praise it – as a piece of performance art.

So this latest news about the deficit “rising” to $16 billion isn't really much of a surprise.

But, Governor Moonbeam, it does call for a public facepalm...

Not Quite Out of Oil Yet...

The GAO reports that recoverable oil reserves in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming are “about equal to the entire world's proven reserves”.

Too bad we can't go after it.

Oh, well.  November is less than six months away...

WWII P-40 Found in Egyptian Desert...

Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk

This Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk was lost during 1942, and the pilot was never seen again.  The crashed craft is in surprisingly good shape.  There's no sign of the pilot; the best theory is that he tried to walk out and died somewhere in the rather forbidding desert surrounding the site – which is over 200 miles from the nearest town...

Encouraging...

The graph at right shows Rasmussen's daily presidential tracking poll of Obama vs. Romney.  It's encouraging, but it's still a long way to the election...

And to answer a couple of emails I've received: yes, it's true that I'm not real excited about a President Romney.  But it is simultaneously true that I'd vote for a rotten fish carcass if that were the only alternative to Obama.  And I like Romney a whole lot more than that fish...

Dancing Dog...

Knowledge12...

My company (ServiceNow) has an annual U.S. users conference, called “Knowledge”.  This year's conference is “Knowledge12”, and will be held in New Orleans, starting this coming Sunday.  I'll be attending this one, as I have the preceding four.  This year I'm presenting one lab (“Field Normalization”) and I'm helping on a second (“Discovery”) – but the most important reason I'm going is to meet and talk with our customers and prospective customers.  The Knowledge conferences are a wonderful opportunity for those of us who work for ServiceNow to meet our customers face-to-face.

Back in '08 we held the first Knowledge conference in our small (but beloved) Solana Beach office.  For the lunches, we rented tables and ate out in our parking lot.  I don't know the precise attendance figures, but my memory say that something like 40 or 50 people showed up.  Our “presentations” and “labs” were, for the most part, in tiny conference rooms with just a few people packed in.  I remember speaking to a group of perhaps a half dozen people about our Discovery product.

Every year the Knowledge conference has grown bigger and better.  This year is no exception.  There are many ways in which this Knowledge12 (or “K12” in our internal shorthand) has grown, but a couple stand out to me. 

First, we have many customers presenting their successes with our products this year.  In fact, I believe it's true that our customers dominate the presentor's list.  That feels like a significant milestone to me – enough customers have been using our products long enough to have made major achievements with it, and to be interested in sharing their experiences with their peers. 

The second standout item is really a silly little thing, but one that really stuck in my brain.  A few weeks ago, we (in engineering) had a meeting with our IT folks to help them understand the bandwidth requirements for the conference.  Until that meeting, it hadn't occurred to me that bandwidth might be an issue.  The IT folks, though, did the math: well over 2,000 people crammed into a single facility, and every last one of them was going to be using at least one (and often several) WiFi-equipped devices.  Furthermore, our demonstrations, presentations, and labs were all going to be completely dependent on quality Internet access – after all, we're a SaaS company, and our products are all out in the big old Internet cloud.  The bottom line was that we were going to need a lot of Internet bandwidth, and in particular, a lot more than the conference facility had readily available.  The IT folks had to scramble to find alternatives, and they didn't have a whole lot of time to do it in.  In a few days we'll know if the IT team pulled it off!

One consequence of Knowledge12 is that my blogging will be quite spotty between Sunday and Thursday this coming week.  I'm taking my camera, so hopefully I'll be able to post a few photos of the conference...

Opportunity Rises...

We're talking about the Opportunity on Mars, the pluckly little rover that just keeps on going and going.  It's been “asleep” for the Martian winter, and yesterday finally got enough power to motor up and roll around a bit.  All systems are working just fine.  Over the next few weeks, Opportunity will get more and more sunshine on its solar panels, and will do increasing amounts of exploration work around the Endeavour crater where it's currently located.

In a few months, barring some mishap, Opportunity will be joined on the Martian surface by a new rover, this one named Curiousity.  This new rover is much bigger, longer-lived, and more capable than Opportunity – but for those of us who have been avidly following the adventures of Opportunity (and it's lost sibling, Spirit), Curiousity will be hard put to match its predecessors...

Homecoming...

Fired for Doing Her Job...

We're talking about Naomi Schaefer Riley, a journalist who dared to make uncomfortable (and most definitely not politically correct!) observations about the value of Black Studies.  Of course, in modern America, that meant she had to be fired.

If you project political correctness forward, at some point it forces all thought to cease.  The “thought death” of America.  

Three perspectives from today's WSJ, from Naomi herself, from the editors, and from James Taranto.

Thought Experiment...

Imagine the planet Earth.  Now imagine all the water on the planet – the oceans, rivers, lakes, snow, ice, groundwater, water in plants and animals, water vapor in the atmosphere – every last molecule of good old H2O.  Now imagine all that water gathered into a sphere.  How big would that sphere be?  Got it pictured, mentally?

Click here for the answer.  I was off by about 50%...

Remember...

Remembering World War II; very nicely done...

Computer Science Blogs...

A very nice list of CS-related blogs.  At least half of these were new to me...

Quote of the Day...

Spoken by Dilbert in today's strip:

Do whatever makes you feel less absurd.

Awesome!

Which Sort?

Which sort of human flesh should you eat?  In medieval Europe, that was an important question...

Dinosaur Farts Caused Global Warming...

...around 150 million years ago...

Oh, Great...

Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

Time Lapse Canaries...

The Canary Islands, that is.  At night.  Beautiful!

El Cielo de Canarias 2012 / The Light of Stars from Daniel López on Vimeo.

CIA Thwarts Terrorist...

Now there's perhaps one of my very favorite word pairs: “thwarts” and “terrorist”!

There's not a lot of detail available, other than the most important: terrorist fail.

I'm Not Allergic...

So far as I'm aware, I'm not allergic to anything (unless you count liberals).  I grew up on a farm...

Sparse Fourier Transform, or sFFT...

Many years ago I had a consulting gig that required me to analyze the sound made by ball bearings in (very expensive) rotating machinery.  After a bit of research, it became obvious that an algorithm known as the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) was the way to go.  On the processors of the day (in the '70s), computing the FFT was a lengthy process – one run of the final firmware I wrote could take almost an hour. 

Recently four researchers at MIT came up with a much, much faster way to compute FFTs when the signal has structure of some kind.  That was certainly true of the signal I was analyzing!  With just a software change, that piece of gear I built could have been much faster.  Dang!

Backup for GMail...

If you're comfortable at the command line, and you have a gmail account, here's something that might interest you: an open source tool (written in Python) that will backup your gmail account to your local computer, and let you restore those messages to any gmail account.  I'm trying it right now (my backup is going to take a while!).

I actually have exactly this program on my list of “Maybe I should write this!” projects.  I'll probably get rid of it now :-)

Before and After...

Before and after the Soviet Union, that is.  Der Spiegel has a slide show of before-and-after photos of East Germany.  These could just as well have been taken in Estonia of 1991 vs. Estonia today...

Rachel on Greece...

My girl Rachel Lucas is back blogging (at last!) from her new home in Italy.  Here she makes some observations about recent events in Greece:

“Europe’s voters don’t know they’re committing suicide — or don’t care.”

Post title is about yesterday’s French and Greek national elections and is a quote from Arthur Herman at NRO. I can’t figure out which it is, either, even though I live in Europe. My main impression is more along the lines of, they know they’re being accused of committing economic suicide, but they just don’t believe it and don’t see it that way. It’s not really ignorance or lack of giving a shit, it’s denial.

Which is exactly what I think is also happening in America, a few years behind schedule but right on pace to catch up.

Anyway, this is all I’ve been reading about all day so here is my depressing Monday post that is really just a collection of links and quotes. You’re welcome.

Making the “Soft Sciences” More Accountable...

What a great idea!  I wish them every success, and I hope this gets replicated for other sciences where reproducability hasn't been traditionally required...

The Government Dependency Index...

The Heritage Foundation has taken a stab at measuring the degree to which Americans are dependant on government assistance.  Even better, they've computed this index over time, from 1962 to 2010 (the most recent year for which they have data).

The general idea is to provide an objective metric that reflects the totality of government-provided assistance of all types.  There's an old saying in the business world: “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it!” – this represents the first attempt at an objective measure of something I (and many others) would dearly love to manage.

My first reaction to seeing this chart was this: that the index has increased by at least a factor of 15 within my lifetime.  That factor is assuredly substantially higher, actually – because this chart leaves off the first decade of my life, and the most recent two years.  Ouch!  And no wonder the government's meddling seems all-pervasive to me when compared with our government when I was a youth.

My second reaction was this: how did the Heritage Foundation put this together?  Fortunately for all of us, their methodology and supporting data is readily available on their web site.  The article announcing this index is chock full of interesting (though often quite depressing) compilations of information.

I would love to somehow require everyone to read and comprehend this article before voting in November...

The Hindenburg...

I suspect that some of my younger colleagues have never even heard of the Hindenburg.  Having grown up in New Jersey (site of the disaster), and having learned about it just 25 years or so after it happened, it's something I've long been interested in.

Here's an article about a still-living member of the ground crew on that fateful day, and his recollections of the event.  One thing that caught my eye: he lives very close to my parents, in Charlottesville, Virginia...

Bram Cohen is Whining...

...but I think he's got some reason to be pissed off, and you can read why in his post TCP Sucks.  If you don't know of Bram, he's the inventor of BitTorrent, and he knows a thing or two about moving data over a wire.  But he's most definitely not part of the academic and industry “good old boys” network that controls digital communications standards...

Paycheck Fairness Act...

Being against something named the .“Paycheck Fairness Act” sounds like being against motherhood and apple pie, doesn't it?  Of course, that's the entire reason for the name in the first place.

This is such an obvious recipe for disaster that one hardly knows where to start.  It's really a way of imposing the sorts of controls over compensation normally associated with unions on the rest of society – the productive part of society.  The assumption underlying this act is that women are being paid less than men today for the same work.  I don't doubt that there's some of this going on, but I also don't doubt that in certain workplaces and in certain professions, men are being paid less than women.  The part of this that's very difficult to measure is the “same work” bit.  In my own profession (software engineering), women are quite rare still.  I don't know the exact numbers, but by my firsthand experience it's well under 10%.  My profession's male skew is exactly the sort of thing that laws like this deal with stupidly.  The assumption will be that the skew is prima facie evidence of underlying bias – and that pay differentials are the underlying reason.

Bottom line: if this law passes, eventually I will most likely be asked to take a pay cut.  Because I am a male.  Not because I'm incompetent, not because I've done something wrong.  Just because of my genes.

We are roaring headlong down the road to cultural self-destruction.  Remember that when you vote this November...

Granny vs. Mercedes Jerk...

Granny wins!  Via my mom:

Taxmageddon...

If the current tax laws aren't changed before this coming January 1, we face “Taxmageddon”, including the likely loss of 30% or so of the stock market's value.  Such a thing is not in the interest of either major political party, so my bet is that the laws will be changed in time to avoid this.  Given the current state of political polarization, the most likely scenario is a “kick the can down the road” sort of fix – one that lasts a year or so, well past the upcoming election.  That's exactly how we ended up in the current position, thanks to our incredibly disfunctional government and its perverse political incentives...

You Can Stick a Fork in France, Greece...and Maybe Everywhere Else, Too...

Oh, this does not bode well.  France and Greece both elected people with strong socialist leanings, who (quite explicitly) advocate solving their fiscal problems by taxing the rich.  That isn't going to work, as any rational analysis will show.  But that didn't stop the entitlement-sotted voters of either country. 

That's bad for France and Greece.  Unfortunately, the effects of their low voter IQ won't stay within their borders – our markets are poised to open lower on the news, the trade impacts will be keenly felt, and – worst of all – the probability of sovereign debt default just jumped dramatically higher...

These are the sorts of things that happened in the runup to past European wars.  Let us hope that's not the case this time...

Inspirational Moment...

This video appears to be a promotional for an outfit called DDP Yoga, and that outfit is the subject of some criticism on the intertubes.  Whether this man's results were due to DDP Yoga, however, is irrelevant to the inspiring story:

McIntyre Got Some of His FOI Information...

...and it's obvious that East Anglia and its cabal of warmists were diddling the data to get the notorious “hockey stick”.  Mr. McIntyre was right all along.  When the rest of his FOI data is forthcoming, I suspect we'll see this in even more detail.  Steve McIntyre's detailed analysis is online, of course, 'cause that's how the dude rolls.  Unlike the “professional scientists” who treat him with such contempt...

Bertrand Russell's Ten Commandments...

Bertrand Russell is probably best known as a philospher and mathematician, but he was many other things as well.  In his autobiography, he has a section he calls A Liberal Decalogue – essentially, a set of ten commandments for teachers.  As I read them, it occurred to me that they were an equally valuable guide for scientists (who are, after all, teachers of a rather special kind).  Then it further occurred to me that they were a concise illustration of what's wrong with climate science today.  Cherish them:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
   
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
   
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
   
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
   
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
   
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
   
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
   
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
   
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
   
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
    

A little googling around the intertubes shows that I am far from the first person to make this connection. Late to the party, as usual!

Excellent XML and PERL Rants...

I've not run across Erik Naggum's web site before, but in searching for a coherent argument about the evils of XML I ran across his excellent rant on the topic (political components aside).  Then poking around, I found another excellent rant about the execrable programming language PERL.  A most satisfying find, I must say...

On C++

I try very hard to never be in a position that requires me to program in the C++ language again – I've had far more than my share of struggles with that blight upon the programming world.  So you can imagine my amusement in running across these quotes:

When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.

Steve Haflich in alt.lang.design, December 1994


Being really good at C++ is like being really good at using rocks to sharpen sticks.

Thant Tessman in comp.lang.scheme, December 1996


Of course SML does have its weaknesses, but by comparison, a discussion of C++'s strengths and flaws always sounds like an argument about whether one should face north or east when one is sacrificing one's goat to the rain god.

Thant Tessman in comp.lang.scheme, April 1997


As for C++ – well, it reminds me of the Soviet-era labor joke: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” C++ pretends to provide an object-oriented data model, C++ programmers pretend to respect it, and everyone pretends that the code will work. The actual data model of C++ is exactly that of C, a single two-dimensional array of bits, eight by four billion, and all the syntactic sugar of C++ fundamentally cannot mask the gaping holes in its object model left by the cast operator and unconstrained address arithmetic.

Guy L. Steele: Objects have not failed. OOPSLA 2002

Water Wings Won the Cold War...

Well, not directly.  But apparently the wily Mao used water wings (amongst other things) to humiliate Khrushchev during his state visit to China in 1958.  The fallout from this meeting changed the course of the Cold War by making the Sino-Soviet split permanent:

The results of the talks were felt almost immediately. Khrushchev ordered the removal of the USSR’s advisers, overruling aghast colleagues who suggested that they at least be allowed to see out their contracts. In retaliation, on Khrushchev’s next visit to Beijing, in 1959, Taubman relates, there was “no honor guard, no Chinese speeches, not even a microphone for the speech that Khrushchev insisted on giving, complete with accolades for Eisenhower that were sure to rile Mao.”

Suppose, just suppose, Mao had been welcoming to Khushchev in 1958.  How would our world be different today?

Life of Julia: Some Other Perspectives...

The Obama campaign's Life of Julia is starting to look more and more like one of those exploding Acme cigars.  Two people with slightly different views and predictions, here and here...

Fauxahontas...

That's Mark Steyn's styling in his take-down of Elizabeth Warren and Harvard University over the former's claiming to be Indian (as in “native American”) while employed at the latter.  Here's an excerpt:

So did the University of Texas, and the University of Pennsylvania. With the impertinent jackanapes of the press querying the bona fides of Harvard Lore School's first Native American female professor, the Warren campaign got to work and eventually turned up a great-great-great-grandmother designated as Cherokee in the online transcription of a marriage application of 1894.

Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have – hang on, let me get out my calculator – duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother's wedding license application. And now it's here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren's memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams From My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran'ma as Cherokee, but let's cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn't be black. She would if she could, but she couldn't. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind – "people who are like I am," 31/32nds white – and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America's melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

Just in case you're having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite-Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich's Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it's the other way round. Progress!

Do go read the whole thing...

Obama's Escape Clause...

Michael Mukasey was the U.S. Attorney General in the last George W. Bush term.  In Monday's WSJ he had a column (which I just read this morning) laying into Obama for his unseemly grabbing of credit for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.  But he also revealed something else, even more despicable:  Obama had prepared a way to blame the military if there was any failure in this incredibly high-risk mission. Mukasey:

A recently disclosed memorandum from then-CIA Director Leon Panetta shows that the president's celebrated derring-do in authorizing the operation included a responsibility-escape clause: "The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven's hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out."

The contrasts here with the famously different leadership style of Eisenhower and Lincoln are obvious, and (I hope!) familiar to most.

Shame and embarrassment.  That's what I feel right now...

Unemployment Down and Up...

I've and others been railing about the government's extremely misleading “unemployment rate” numbers, which the lamestream media generally parrots without comment.  For April, this published number dropped slightly to 8.1%.  However, the actual number of people who are unemployed climbed substantially.  How can this be?  Why, through the magic of blatant statistics manipulation, of course.  Bruce McQuain has a nice explanation, and also raises a related point about older workers.

But a funny thing seems to be happening on the way to the November elections.  The lamestream media is belatedly paying attention to this manipulation.  A few newspapers and reporting organizations talking about this may not seem like a big deal, but...they haven't been doing so heretofore, and we're in the runup to the 2012 Presidential election.  Somehow I don't think this is a good omen for Obama.

Which is just fine with me, of course...

A Suggestion for the Obama Campaign...

The Obama campaign recently selected their official 2012 slogan: “Forward”.  We respectfully suggest this graphic to go along with their lovely new slogan:

GIMP 2.8 is Released!

GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program, the free open source image editing software) 2.8 is the long-awaited next major upgrade.  It (finally!) includes “single window” mode, which many people (including me) prefer over the current user interface.  It also includes many improvements to the underlying image manipulation algorithms, including some support for higher color depths (24/32 bits). 

Unfortunately for me, the Mac OS ports aren't yet released, so I haven't been able to actually try it...

Cats and Dolphins, Playing Together...

Via my mom: a cat and some dolphins, playing together (not embeddable, sorry)...

Manure Spreader for Sale...

Via reader Jim M.:

FIFTY YEAR OLD MANURE SPREADER - $1 (WASHINGTON, D.C.)

Fifty-year old manure spreader. Not sure of brand. Said to have been produced in Kenya. Used for a few years in Indonesia before being smuggled into the US via Hawaii. Of questionable origin. Does not appear to have ever been worked very hard. Apparently it was pampered by various owners over the years. It doesn't work very often, but when it does it can really spread the manure and sling it for amazing distances. I am hoping to retire this manure spreader this November.

But I really don't want it hanging around getting in the way. I would prefer a foreign buyer that is willing to relocate this manure spreader out of the country. I would be willing to trade this manure spreader for a nicely framed copy of the United States Constitution.

Location: White House, Washington, D.C.

More Evidence for Liquid Water on Mars...

And the evidence comes via the plucky Mars rover “Opportunity”, currently exploring the Endeavour Crater.  It's now eight years into it's 90 day mission...

The Life of Julia...

I just read an apt metaphor for the repeated mistakes of the Obama campaign, but I'm not sure who to attribute it to – it's been picked up by numerous sites with conflicting attribution.  The metaphor: the ACME exploding cigar.  Obama's campaign team keeps buying (and lighting) another of those cigars every few days.  Most recently we had their exposure of the Romney “dog on the roof” incident morphing into “Obama ate dogs” (boom!), and their pointing out that Romney's grandfather lived in a community known to include polygamists morphing into the disclosure that just about every male in Obama's lineage except Obama himself (so far as we know) actually was a polygamist (boom!).  As noted below, Obama's recent speeches taking personal credit for the Obama raid are looking like perhaps another ACME cigar.

And here's yet another.  Still up on Obama's campaign site is The Life of Julia.  It's an almost unbelievably blatant piece of propaganda supporting the entitlement mentality state.  The more I look at it, the angrier I get – and it's not just me.  This deserves to be another ACME cigar, and I see some buzz building on it, so maybe it will.

Another thing occurs to me as I look at The Life of Julia: it's a great illustration of the gulf between those with the entitlement mindset and those without it.  I'd be willing to bet you that a great many people read this and say to themselves “Yes, that's right!  That's how it should be!  I'm voting for that Obama guy, 'cause he gets it!”  Other people (like me!) read it and say “What the hell is wrong with these people?  Are they missing some essential gray matter or what?”  People in the first group, with that entitlement mindset, dominate Greece today – and are majorities in other European countries.  They don't yet dominate here in America.  Whether they're the majority here or not will be measured to some extent this coming November...

Obama Pissed Off the Wrong Guys...

Many Navy SEALs and other Special Forces “operators” are quite unhappy about the way that Obama is publicly taking credit (“spiking the football”) for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.  They're discomfited by the unseemly braggidocio, and they feel endangered by some of the public disclosures that have been made.  Now there's an ad (below) being aired expressing this anger, and some SEALs and “operators” are signing up to take their reaction to the public.

This is one group of people I wouldn't think the Obama campaign managers would want to have agitating against them.  But they've gone and pissed them off royally, and it's shaping up like Kerry's “SWIFT boating” all over again...

Jon Will Turns 40 Today...

...and his father, famous columnist George Will, wrote a beautiful column about him today...

The Unforgettable Cab Ride...

Not my cab ride – this one.  Bring a box of kleenex with you...

One Supermoon, Coming Up!

On Saturday, the day after tomorrow – and you can see it...

Transit of Venus...

Just a month from now (June 5 or 6, depending on where you are), the planet Venus will move across the face of the sun (as seen from Earth).  Astronomers call these events “transits”.  This is the last transit of Venus over the sun for over 100 years, so if you want to see one, this would be the time to do it.  More information here and here.

Well, Whaddya Know...

An actual news story about how the government's labor statistics are distorted...

Modern Memory Architectures...

Here's a well-done, accessible tutorial on modern computer memory architectures.  The great majority of programmers today have no idea of the complexity of today's computer memory (RAM, I'm talking about) systems.  When you get to virtual memory systems and the subtle effects of various multi-processor schemes, it's an even larger majority...

It's Not News, Now...

Remember over the last few years how the warmists were crying “Doom!  Doom!  We're all doomed!” because (they said) the Arctic ice caps were at historically low coverage levels and headed down fast.  According to them, our only salvation was to radically cut fossil fuel consumption immediately, and to start spending trillions upon trillions of dollars promoting “renewable” energy use worldwide.  Hundreds upon hundreds of news stories pushed this story into our faces from every direction.

Oops.

The ice caps are back to normal total coverage.  They've made this swing from low coverage to average coverage to high coverage a few times before.  A few thousand times, that is.

After all that doom being forecast the past few years, you'd think that the near-miraculous, totally unexpected recovery of the ice cap coverage would be really big news, something to be splattered all over the news like the original forecasts of doom!, right?  Well, don't hold your breath.  So far, this news is only being reported in a few science blogs, on the NOAA straight data sites, and (of course) by the global warming skeptics.  Nobody else cares.  Doesn't fit the narrative, you know.  Only doom! does that...

How Politicians Learn...

“Politicians” and “learn” – seems a little unnatural to see those words together in a sentence, doesn't it?

Here, one hopeful politician (nicknamed “The Sledge”) explains how his competitors learn...

California, Disintegrating...

Warren Meyer of CoyoteBlog observes from Arizona...

A Bigger Increment This Time...

I've lost count of how many times, over the years, that I've migrated my development environment to a new machine.  My very first development environment (I'm using the term very loosely to describe that environment!) was in a Univac 1230B “mainframe”, back in 1971, over forty years ago.  My latest one is in a 17" Macbook Pro laptop.

Generally speaking, the migration puts me into an environment that's incrementally better than the last one.  The size of that increment varies, but it's usually not all that large.  The last time I can remember the increment being large was way back in the late '70s, when I migrated from a floppy disk based system to one that had a hard drive.  That made a huge difference in how my development environment worked.

This past weekend I migrated my development environment from a three year old Macbook Pro to a brand new one.  You wouldn't think that would make a huge difference, but it did – but other factors were at work.  The biggest other factor was moving from a hard disk to a solid state disk (SSD), a 512 GB model.  In addition to that, my new Macbook has a 750 GB conventional hard disk, 16 GB of RAM, and a 2.4 GHz quad core processor.  My old Macbook took about 50 seconds from powerup to a functional desktop; my new one is well under 10 seconds.  My old Macbook used to run out of usable memory (resulting in thrash and the notorious spinning disk of death) many times a day, especially when running Firefox or VMWare Fusion; my new Macbook handles these with ease. My old Macbook took several minutes to search for arbitrary strings through our entire code base; my new Macbook does this in under a second.  I could go on, but you get the idea: this migration was quite a large incremental jump in performance and general usability of my development environment.

Where is this all heading?

Tape is the new trash.
Hard disks are the new tape.
SSDs are the new hard disks.
Cheap RAM and ridiculously fast processors are enablers, both for crappy software and for entirely new possibilities (like useful VMs in a laptop)...

Memories: a Consumer Durable...

This little article caught my eye: an economist (Garett Jones) notes that that people make decisions about their vacations in much the same way that they make decisions about durable goods (things like cars and refrigerators).  But here's the part that really resonated with me: if your memories are a durable good, then you should “buy” as many of them as you can when you're young – because then you've got your whole life to enjoy them.

I never have actually thought about my memories as a consumer durable :-)  However, I certainly have treated them in the way Mr. Jones recommends, and I've taken some heat for this over my life.  Debbie and I have (very) freely spent on our vacations, our animals, and other cherished experiences – even when we couldn't really afford to do so.  I've never regretted doing that (though I've often been criticized for it), and the main reason why – is precisely the memories Mr. Jones speaks of.  We've had a great many adventures in our lives, and the memories of them (and of course the broadening experiences) are priceless to us.

As I write this, I can't help but enumerate some in my mind.  The ones that jump out: walking on the rim of an active (and erupting!) volcano in Hawai'i, skydiving, scuba diving in the Philippines, our many companion animals over the years, two weeks on a motorcycle in the back country of Australia, four wheeling in the San Juan Mountains, touring through the Baltic islands of Estonia, four wheeling on Mauna Kea in Hawai'i with my parents and (separately) my mother-in-law, and exploring Costa Rica (especially Mt. Arenal and Monte Verde).  Some of these adventures were almost 40 years ago – and Mr. Jones point about the time value of them is spot on...

Real Heroes...

...generally don't brag about their feats.

And they certainly don't use them to belittle someone else.

Obama, the most unseemly president...

A Good Excuse...

...for drinking an extra glass of red wine...

The Voice of Wisdom...

Via my mom (whom I suspect is unlikely to vote for Obama):

Helene...

One of the Saturnian moons that's in a Lagrange point.  Imaged by Cassini, and brought to us by APOD, of course...

The Debt Ceiling...

Via my mom (whom I believe knows how she's voting in November):

THE DEBT CEILING

Democrats don't understand THE DEBT CEILING

Republicans don't understand THE DEBT CEILING

Liberals don't understand THE DEBT CEILING

NO ONE understands THE DEBT CEILING

SO - Allow me to explain...

Let's say you come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup in your neighborhood. Your home has sewage all the way up to your ceilings. What do you think you should do? Raise the ceilings or pump out the shit?

Your choice is coming in November. Don't miss the opportunity.

Cats and Dogs...

Via old friend and colleage Cliff F.:

Greatest Sentence Ever?

Bill Whittle has a candidate, and he makes his case.  It involves intellectuals running amok, Obama team mocking, skewering of warmists, and Whittle wit on full display.  Via reader Doug S.:

New Logo...

The company I work for has a new logo, effective today:

Can You Guess What This Is?

It's a table of the numbers from 1 to 100, with the prime factors for each.  Seriously!

Awesome math geekiosity.  Sondra Eklund rocks!

We're Back...

...sort of.  This has been a weekend to remember. 

On Friday evening, I started transferring my “stuff” from my old Macbook Pro laptop to my new Macbook Pro laptop.  My laptop is full of all the sorts of tools and daemons a developer needs, and this makes the transfer more complex.  Added to that, my old laptop's operating system was two versions older than that of my new laptop, and that indroduced other difficulties.  Even worse, my user's UID on my old laptop was different than my user's UID on the new laptop, and I didn't realize that until I was half done.  Oh, and did I mention that my old laptop had a half a terabyte of data on it?  Bottom line: while I'm using my new laptop right now, many things are still not working on it.  I've got some work to do today!

But it's not that I spent all weekend working on my computer.  I should be so lucky!  Nope, this was the weekend of the “great burn” – Debbie and I were committed to burning the rest of the giant burn pile that's been sitting in our front yard ever since we trimmed up our pines last year.  And we did it, with just a half hour to spare before the 3 pm deadline (the time at which we had to put out the burn pile, per our burn permit).  We even raked up all the innumerable twigs scattered about the yard, and burned them as well.  The big logs – a couple cubic yards worth – that we thought were going to be a disposal problem turned out to be no problem at all.  Our neighbors Wayne and Marissa were happy to take the pine logs, as they have a big open fireplace in which they'll burn just fine.  It was quite a nice feeling of accomplishment to get that intimidating task done...

Then last night, after finishing the burning, I repaired Debbie's “Easy-Up” – a kind of portable folding canopy.  There's a complex-looking mechanism that forms and expandable framework, involving many hollow metal bars with pivots at each end and the middle.  Two of the end pivots had worked loose and fallen out.  I manufactured replacements by getting one inch long 10-24 stainless steel bolts and jam nuts, then using a Dremel tool to grind a cavity in a molded plastic piece of just the right size and shape to hold the jam nut.  I felt like a dentist with his drill, making this teensy little cavity in my big plastic “tooth”.  In the end, the thing was better than new, as the original design didn't use jam nuts and the bolts could easily come undone.

Now this morning as I sit here typing this post, I'm sore all over – my muscles aren't used to this kind of workout!  I'm almost 60, and this morning I actually feel like I'm that old (most of the time I don't feel that way at all)...

It Takes One to Know One...

Via my mom:

Having already downed a few power drinks, she turns around, faces him, looks him straight in the eye and says, “Listen here good looking, I screw anybody, anytime, anywhere, your place, my place, in the car, front door, back door, on the ground, standing up, sitting down, naked or with clothes on, it doesn't matter to me. I just love it.”

Eyes now wide with interest, he responds, “No kidding. I'm a Congressman too. What district are you from?”

A Blooming Time-Lapse Show...

Via my mom:

A Bush League President...

That's Peggy Noonan's pun of a title for her latest column up at the WSJ...

Theodore Roosevelt Dodged the Bullet ... Sort Of...

This is a story I've read before, though in a much drier form.  It's a great example of the grit for which Roosevelt was justly famous...

The Most Expensive Single-Byte Mistake?

Poul Henning-Kamp makes a good case for it being the UNIX/C style NUL-terminated string...

Two Skinny Lawyers...

An interesting comparison of Presidents Lincoln and Obama.  Via my mom:

For all of you who have made disparaging remarks about President
Obama, please read the following...

I'm sure most of us have read the so-called comparison of Lincoln and
Kennedy, but did you ever consider the relationship between Lincoln and Obama?

You might be surprised...

Parallels of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Hussein Obama:

1. Lincoln placed his hand on the Bible for his inauguration. Obama
used the same Bible.

2. Lincoln came from Illinois. Obama comes from Illinois.

3. Lincoln served in the Illinois Legislature. Obama served in the
Illinois Legislature.

4. Lincoln had very little experience before becoming President.
Obama had very little experience before becoming President.

5. Lincoln rode the train from Philadelphia to Washington for his
inauguration. Obama rode the train from Philadelphia to Washington
for his inauguration.

6. Lincoln was a skinny lawyer. Obama is a skinny lawyer.

7. Lincoln was a Republican. Obama is a skinny lawyer.

8. Lincoln was in the United States military. Obama is a skinny
lawyer.

9. Lincoln believed in everyone carrying their own weight. Obama is a
skinny lawyer.

10. Lincoln did not waste taxpayers' money on personal enjoyments.
Obama is a skinny lawyer.

11. Lincoln was highly respected. Obama is a skinny lawyer.

12. Lincoln was born in the United States. Obama is a skinny lawyer.

13. Lincoln was honest, so honest he was called Honest Abe. Obama is
a skinny lawyer.

14. Lincoln saved the United States. Obama is a skinny lawyer .

Amazing, isn't it?

Holy Herds of Cows, Batman!

Say Good Bye to the Family Farm...

The Obama administration is preparing to promulgate and enforce new rules that would prohibit children from doing many of the kinds of work that kids on family farms have been doing from time immemorial.  Depending on the specific kind of work, the age requirement is either 16 or 18. 

Under these new rules, many of the kinds of things that I did as a “child” on our family farm would now be prohibited.  For instance, I couldn't have used a mower, or a sprayer, or a tractor until I was 16.

The country I was born into – the country of hope and promise in the Eisenhower era – is disappearing before my eyes.

I sure hope we change course in November...

TSA Leads the Way...

Here's yet another story of TSA's security theater run amok, this one involving a four year old little girl.  The little girl's mother wrote this:

My daughter is very shaken up about this, and has been waking up with nightmares. What should have been a very minor, routine security check was turned into a horrific ordeal. All of this could easily have been prevented if the TSO involved had used a little bit of compassion and a smidgen of common sense. There is no reason for any child to go through this. And while I completely understand the necessity of tight airport security, I fail to see how harassing a small child will provide safety for anyone.

The little girl is having nightmares about her experience. The TSA insists their people acted appropriately:

TSA has recently implemented modified screening procedures of children 12 and under that will further reduce the need for a physical pat-down for children. These new screening procedures include permitting multiple passes through the metal detector and advanced imaging technology to clear any alarms as well as the greater use of explosives trace detection. These changes in protocol will ultimately reduce – though not eliminate – pat downs of children. In this case, however, the child had completed screening but had contact with another member of her family had not completed the screening process.

I'm reminded once again of the Harry Potter books in which Dolores Umbridge exhibits all the bureaucratic bullying behaviors that we see routinely in the TSA.  If there were a real Dolores Umbridge, there's little doubt that she would be applying for work in the TSA. 

As someone who travels fairly often through our airports, that's not a particularly comforting thought...

You Know...

Via my lovely bride:

An elderly lady was walking on the golf course on the island of Martha's Vineyard. She slipped and fell.

Obama who was behind her by chance, helped her to get up promptly. She thanked him and he answered, “It was a pleasure to help you, ma'am. Don't you recognize me? I am your president. Are you going to vote for me in the next election?”

The elderly woman laughed and replied: “You know, I fell on my ass – not on my head!”

Psalm 2012...

Via my mom:

Psalm 2012

Obama is the shepherd I did not want.
He leadeth me beside all the still factories and banks.

He restoreth my faith in the Republican party.
He guideth me in the path of unemployment for his party's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the bread line,
I shall fear no hunger, for all his bailouts are with me.

He has Anointed my income with taxes,
My expenses runneth over.

Surely, poverty and hard living will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will live in a mortgaged home forever.

I'm glad … I am an American,
I am glad … that I am free!

But I wish … I was a dog,
And Obama … was a tree!

Say It Ain't So!

The Cutty Sark is storied Clipper ship, built in 1869.  She's a piece of history that you can touch, as she's been carefully preserved (though not without some ups and downs) all these years.

But in a tragic story of Hollywood-meets-history, the Cutty Sark is about to become a joke.  A bad joke:

In her years of cutting ribbons, Her Majesty has had to smile politely at many brave new mistakes. But few can compete with this clucking, Grade A, Bernard Matthews–class turkey. One of Britain's most precious maritime treasures now looks like it has run aground in a giant greenhouse.

Read the details here. I thought the English had more sense than this...

Flight From California...

Debbie and I will likely be amongst the droves of people leaving California – once the most coveted destination state of all.  This article does a good job of summarizing why so many have left California, and why so many more – like us – are considering doing so...

Awesome People...

Two videos showing incredible feats.  There are only a few in here that I would even consider...

Please Tell Me This Is A Hoax!

Not Your Ordinary Politician...

Found on the Intertubes...

No commentary required:

Profit is a Good Thing?

An educational video on the power of profit, with Professor Walter Williams presenting.  Perfect for the “progressive” ninnies you might know who are attracted to profit about as much as we're attracted to a steaming pile of vomit...

Global Warming in Oz...

The Australians are getting increasingly skeptical about global warming for some reason.  It might have something to do with the utterly failed predictions of the warmists.  For example, in 2005 they predicted that the reservoirs supply Sydney's water might be dry within two years.  The actuality?  Sydney's reservoirs are now at record levels, with more than two and a half times the water they had in 2005, and without enough remaining capacity to contain floods like they've experienced over the past three years.

Oops...

Steyn on the Secret Service Scandal...

As always, Mr. Steyn delivers a slightly different perspective with his trademark wit:

Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Eliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.

Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.

All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes, or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on their head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of $126 billion. The feds’ half a billion to Solyndra would have been a mere $18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.

Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope . . . and Change! Red lights, not red ink.

Go read the whole thing...

A Window into the Entitlement Mindset...

If you'd like to peer into the mind of those who feel entitled, you'd be hard-pressed to find something better than this video of New York Times union members whining about proposed changes to their pension plan.  They're better than the rest of us, you see.  They're entitled to their defined benefit pensions, and business realities be damned.  These are the people who are trying to kill this country.  That's not, of course, how they would word it – but it certainly is how I would...

“If I Wanted America to Fail”...

This is an awesome piece, with a devastating punch line right at the end.  It would be wonderful if every American watched this just before heading to the polls this November:

Incarceration Rates...

I read an article the other day that mentioned an interesting factoid: the U.S. has a higher incarceration rate than any other country in the world.  I'd seen this before, but hadn't checked into it.  So yesterday, just poking around a bit, I did a little research and came up with this list of incarceration rates by country.

I find this simple list quite sobering.  The U.S. incarcerates (jails or imprisons) 730 people out of every 100,000; a rate of 0.73%.  By itself, that number doesn't really convey very much.  But consider this: Finland – a very modern society – incarcerates just 59 per 100,000 – twelve times fewer than the U.S., and Japan incarcerates even fewer.  Or this, from the other side of the spectrum: the repressive despots of Burma incarcerate just 120 per 100,000 – a sixth the U.S. rate.

Amongst the other countries with high incarceration rates (though none are particularly close to us): Russia, Rwanda, and Belarus.

I know that drug-related incarcerations account for a high fraction of our inmates: between half and two-thirds, depending on who's doing the estimating.  But our incarceration rate is so high that even if you removed two-thirds of them, we'd still be in the top 15% of all countries.

I don't really know what this means, other than that there's something about our society that is in fact quite different than the other countries we think of as our peers.  My long time readers will know that I favor legalization of drugs (I know, I'm a radical – but I have trouble seeing any actual value in the “war on drugs”).  But even with the effects of drug-related crime removed, there's still a very large difference that comes from other causes.  What those are, I haven't a clue.  It's clearly not as simple as our freedom to buy firearms, because other countries with liberal firearms laws have low incarceration rates.  Most likely there isn't any simple explanation. 

A look at U.S. incarceration rates over time (the graph at right) shows that our incarceration rates have been quite high at least since 1925.  With the onset of the war on drugs, the rates increased very quickly.

I'd like to learn more about the causes of our high incarceration rates, so I've started a search for reliable sources of information.  Drop me a line if you know of any, please...

A Clever Twist on the Prisoner's Dilemma...

There's a game show on British TV that's based on the Prisoner's Dilemma.  They've modified it very slightly, by allowing the two contestants to talk briefly with one another before they make their choice.  Here you can see one contestant make a very clever move to greatly enhance the chances of a good outcome...

A History of English, in 10 Minutes (more or less)...

Quite a Sunday...

Yesterday our burn permit and the weather finally came together – and we made a great start at taking care of our (giant) brush pile (the result of our pine trimming project of last summer).  We burned more than half of it yesterday, using our little Kubota tractor to move piles of brush to near the burn site, and then the chainsaw and muscles to get the brush onto the pile.  The wood is very dry, so it burned hot and nearly smokeless, giving off huge amounts of heat.  By early afternoon, we could do no more – time to put the fire out, and clean ourselves up.

Then we went out to dinner at Descanso Junction, and had ourselves a fine meal.  They've recently added a new entree to their menu: pork “steaks”, wrapped in bacon, and topped with gorganzola crumbles.  Last night they served that up with homemade chicken noodle soup and sauteed baby spinach.  Oh, my.  That was so good...

After dinner we decided to head up to the Stonewall Mine Road in Cuyamaca State Park.  It's a short drive from Descanso, and we'd seen large numbers of deer there recently.  The deer population has been greatly depressed ever since the 2007 fires, but they're finally coming back in numbers.  Last night's viewing was the best we've ever had in the park.  We spent a delighted hour watching a herd of more than 30 animals grazing in the large meadow just south of Stonewall Mine.  There is more genetic variation in that herd than we're used to seeing; we suspect that the deer have been brought in from various other places to re-establish the herd.  There were very few deer around last year, so it's hard to imagine how the herd could have grown so fast over the winter without outside help.  Toward the end of our time there, the entire herd was within a couple hundred feet of the road.  We drove very slowly right through the herd, deer on both sides of us, some within 50 feet of the car.  They don't seem to be scared of the cars, but they're very skittish when people are walking.

A very satisfying Sunday for us: a hard day's work, followed by a spectacular dinner, followed by a beautiful evening of wildlife watching.  Woo hoo!