Meyer 1, climatologists 0.  Warren Meyer, the blogger behind CoyoteBlog, has long been a skeptic of anthropogenic global warming.  Six years ago, he came up with an incredibly simple model that fit observed data.  He didn't really intend it to be a predictive model – but at right, there's the model updated with the last six years of observed data.  The fit is actually pretty good – and it's far better than the IPCC models.  But it sure does make you wonder what the IPCC's “bottoms-up” models are good for, when a simple regression has better results...

“There weren't enough good guys with guns.”  Talking about the Navy Yard shootings, which occurred in a government-mandated gun-free zone.  As many have said before, gun-free zones make it awfully easy for the bad guys to decide where to attack...

I'm actually starting to worry about her mental health.  Pelosi on Republicans:

I call them legislative arsonists.  They’re there to burn down what we should be building up in terms of investments and education and scientific research, and all that it is that makes our country great and competitive.

What will Mother Nature think of next?  Scientists discover a moth that can jam bats' sonar.  That's an awesome moth!

What killed Blackberry?  The funny little Blackberry was, just a few years ago, the standard office worker's accessory.  So why did the iPhone and Android devices wipe out the Blackberry so easily?  It's actually very simple: Blackberry devices were purchased by companies, and iPhones and Androids were (at least at first) purchased by individuals.  Corporate IT departments are learning how to integrate individually owned devices into corporate IT systems, and this has forced enormous changes into all sorts of things.  ServiceNow, a company I used to work for, leverages this new “bring your own device” by being web-based and fostering iPhone and Android apps; many other IT vendors are doing the same thing.  Larger corporate IT shops are producing internal iPhone and Android apps that only work within their corporate networks.  All of this is a huge change from the way Blackberry worked, and it accelerates the broader trend in corporate IT environments from more-or-less homogenous worlds to unabashedly heterogeneous worlds.  At the executive level within these companies, it's very clear that the heterogeneous world is a big win.  The stodgier IT community isn't so sure – but, like the buggy-whip makers, they won't be around for too much longer...

There are some parallels that could be drawn between this phenomenon and the immigration issue :)

Why do I doubt his sincerity?  Iran's President Rouhani says that Iran is ready to talk with the U.S. about their nuclear development program.  A careful parsing of his words shows that it's full of classic weasel-wording.  And even a casual glance at his speeches for an Iranian audience shows that he says much different things to them (this is an outrageously under-reported facet of Arab and Persian Middle East politics).  But somehow I suspect that the progressives will jump all over this speech as a “signal” of Rouhani's moderation.  In the end, we'll spend much effort and money pursuing another progressive pipe-dream...

Is this really so surprising?  A new study examines the characteristics of successful scientists.  One discovery: successful scientists tend to have published earlier, and in larger quantity.  The study's authors seem to conclude that earlier and more publication leads to scientific success.  I'm suspicious that they've confused correlation with causation, and that what's really going on is that the same talent and drive that make a successful scientist also tend to make them publish earlier and more...

Why do most poor people not use banks?  Short answer: customer service.  Lisa Servon, writing in The Atlantic Cities, has a fascinating piece on this phenomenon that's full of surprises...

Tiny ray tracing program, fits on the back of a business card – but generates the image at right.  Fabian Sanglard reverse-engineered it, and Andrew Kensler (the original programmer) comments on it.

Awesome geeks!

A sober voice on immigration and assimilation.  Political historian and commentator Michael Barone, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has an excellent piece that lends a sober perspective on the perceptions and realities of immigration and assimilation over U.S. history.  Long-time readers will know that I'm an ardent supporter of much more open immigration into the U.S. – with the condition that we get the assimilation part right, and not duplicate the errors so visible in Europe.  Over the course of U.S. history, as Barone relates, we have a track record of doing exactly that...

Who knew? Smart cables...  The new “Lightning” interconnection cable introduced by Apple last year includes an integrated circuit that allows the devices connected by the cable to verify its authenticity.  With IOS7, the newest release of the Apple's operating system for mobile devices, unauthorized cables now won't work.  The speculation is that Apple is responding to reports of electrical shocks caused by after-market cables, but it could be as simple as Apple wanting to hang onto their cable profits.  The most surprising thing to me is that integrated circuits combined with robotic assembly has now made it cost effective to embed some reasonably smart circuitry into a simple cable...

It shouldn't be possible.  At least, not with our current understanding of earthquake mechanisms.  “It” is a magnitude 8.3 earthquake that occurred 378 miles under the earth's surface.  What this really means is there's something interesting about plate tectonics that geologists haven't figured out yet...

Unreplicable studies...  Especially in certain branches of science there has been a rash of scientific studies that were published, but whose results could not be duplicated.  Sometimes these studies aren't discovered to be unreplicable for many years.  It used to be that such problems occurred mainly in the “soft” sciences, like psychology and anthropology, where the scientists involved may have had little mathematical training, and where opinion and fact are difficult to discern.  More recently there's been an increasing number of unreplicable studies in “hard” (or at least, harder) sciences like climatology and medicine.  The common thread seems to be money: when it's possible to obtain grant money by outright fraud or less overt “shading” of study results, you'll see some people doing that.  The more that such tactics work, the more pervasive the practice becomes.  The antidotes are the pure sunshine of exposure and greater care with the money...

Today is the fall equinox, and APOD is celebrating with this lovely photo of the analemma formed by the sun's position at the same time on the different days of the year.  This photo was taken at 9 am on many different days of the year, so each white “dot” shows the sun's position at 9 am on that date.

Sweet Lorraine...  A few weeks ago, I posted about this 96 year old songwriter entering a contest with the lyrics, and assisted on the music by a musician.  Now that song has made the Billboard Top 10 (video report)...

What happens when you challenge a handicapped kid, instead of coddling her?  Short answer: good things, inspiring things.  Meet Charlotte Brown...

Some people are still recovering from WWII...  Seven decades ago, a young soldier, about to be deployed to Europe to fight in WWII, wrote a letter to a newborn daughter he had never met.  A few days later he died in battle.  That letter was never delivered – but it was recently found and is now on the way to that daughter, along with her father's Purple Heart and some other memorabilia.  I can't even begin to imagine...

“We can compare shiv marks next time we meet, my friend.”  That's Sarah Palin, shouting out in support of Ted Cruz's efforts to defund Obamacare...

A sticky mess!  A German company got caught in a complex scheme to illegally import Chinese honey into the U.S.  The story is full of intriguing details about the honey business that I would never have guessed...

A pleasant evening in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.  Late yesterday afternoon, Debbie and I drove up to one of our favorite wildlife watching spots: Stonewall Mine Road (see the “A” pin on the map at right) in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.  We timed it perfectly, arriving there just 20 minutes or so ahead of sunset.  We saw about 25 deer, many of them quite close to the road and easy to view.  There was one particularly handsome stag, an intriguingly colored doe (dark gray toward her front, reddish-brown toward her rear), and a stunningly beautiful yearling, with a treacle-sweet face that could adorn a poster.  Oddly, we didn't see a single turkey (usually they're the dominant form of animal life here).  There was a falcon atop a small pine in one of the meadows, and several beautiful panoramas of autumnal high-altitude chaparral, dominated by the browns and pinks of dried seeds.  It was a lovely way to end our day...

Also cheering us: the presence of about ten car-loads of people doing exactly what we were doing – driving slowly along, stopping frequently, to watch the wildlife.  Most of the time we run into some annoying obliviot or two who seem to have no objective other than to drive that road as fast as they can go.  None of that this time; just a lot of nice people enjoying the same thing we were.  One couple coming the other way stopped alongside us to talk for a moment.  In a few minutes of conversation, we learned that they had just celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary, and have been visiting Stonewall Mine Road for a lot longer than we have.  We're hoping that we can reach their age (late 80s or early 90s) and still enjoy things like this...

Side note: for years now, there has been a small sign at the Stonewall Mine parking lot letting you know that you have to pay for the privilege of parking there and exploring the mine.  The current price for this privilege is $8.  It still infuriates me, after many years of this regime, to know the government wants to charge me for visiting something that (allegedly) belongs to us (the people of California, not the damned legislators in Sacramento)...

“You've been to the chaparral!”  The smells of the chaparral have long been one of my favorite aspects of living in the middle of it.  Some summer mornings, the scents are glorious, wafting down from the hills above us. 

Apparently I'm not the only person who enjoys this part of the chaparral.  The two guys in this video are at least as crazy as I am, and they love it to...

California, bringing on the doom as fast as it can.  Take a look at the thought processes of some selected USC students, as exemplified by the obliviots being interviewed in this video.  The interviewer asks just one or two questions of each.  First she wants to know if the student believes that Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize he received in 2008.  If the student replies affirmatively, she then asks “Why?”

These students are not just ignorant (a forgivable and repairable fault).  They give every appearance of being incapable of rational thought.  In a few cases, I'm not even certain they are of the same species I am.

I hear the doom approaching...

Shake, rattle, and roll!  At 1:10:43 pm yesterday, there was a magnitude 3.8 earthquake just north of Borrego Springs (at the blue dot on the map at right).  We felt nothing.  That's about 47 miles from our home, and the seismic waves from it got to our house about 12 seconds later (as you can see on the seismograph at right, from the USGS seismometer in our home).

Curiosity's new autonomous driving capability, described in a short NASA/JPL video report...

Guess what I got today?  My mom sends me things:

I wanted to let you all know that earlier today I received my “Fiscal Cliff Survival Pack” from the White House.

It contained:

• A parachute
• An 'Obama Hope & Change' bumper sticker
• A 'Bush's Fault' yard sign
• A 'Blame Boehner' poster
• A 'Tax the Rich' banner
• An application for unemployment
• An application for food stamps
• A prayer rug
• A letter assigning my debt to my grandchildren
• And if that was not enough, there was a coupon for a machine that blows smoke up my ass..

Everything was made in "China" and all directions were in Spanish.

Keep an eye out. Yours should be arriving soon.

They just don't understand windows...  About an hour ago, Debbie and I both heard a loud “boom”.  We both thought it was something like a small propane gas explosion, so we carefully looked at everything that uses gas in the house (heater, water heater, dryer, stove).  Nada.  Then just a few minutes ago, Debbie spotted a dead juvenile California quail, lying on the ground just outside our laundry room window.  It must have been what made that noise, by flying into that window.  I went out, made certain it was actually gone (its neck was obviously broken), and then buried it.

We hate these window strikes, which are distressingly common on our south-facing windows.  The fact that it was one of our more beautiful local birds just made it that much worse...

Update: an anonymous commenter pointed me to this Science News article about scientists studying the problem of window strikes.  I just read this a couple days ago (in the paper version), and had no idea it was online...

Cheating traders and c.  Here's a fascinating story straight out of the world of electronic trading (stocks, bonds, options) that I used to work in.  The starting point is the suspicion that certain traders in Chicago had knowledge of the recent Fed's decision to not start tapering down their monthly “quantitative easing” (aka wantonly spending our money).  The proof comes from c: the standard symbol for the speed of light.  The Chicago traders were making trades obviously based on knowledge of the Fed's decision before they should have known about it.  We're talking about milliseconds (thousandths of a second) here, but in the world of electronic trading, that can be worth billions of dollars.  The Fed's decision was published in Washington, D.C., and that information should have taken about 7 milliseconds to get to Chicago.  But the Chicago traders were acting on that information just 2 milliseconds after publication.  Light doesn't travel that quickly – so the inescapable conclusion is that (a) the Chicago traders knew about the Fed's decision ahead of time, and (b) they acted on it in a way designed to hide their prior knowledge (by waiting until the publication time to act on it).  But they forgot to include the speed of light in their calculations...

Dinosaur feathers in amber.  Scientists looking for unambiguous evidence that at least some dinosaurs had feathers found exactly what they were looking for.  They found other interesting things, too.

For most of my life scientists thought that dinosaurs and birds had very different lineages.  The discovery that birds actually are dinosaurs that survived the extinction events is relatively recent, and turns all our notions of what dinosaurs looked like – and probably how the behaved, how smart they were, and much more – completely upside-down.  The hard work and series of discoveries that went into that new understanding is a truly marvelous example of good science.  Those scientists didn't figure this out by building computer models that magically showed birds were dinosaurs.  It was good old-fashioned scientific observation, theory formation, and confirmation – repeatably – that got them there.

Climate scientists: please take note.

He's a putz.  That's my takeaway from Peggy Noonan's interview with Howard Schultz (CEO of Starbucks), talking about his recent decision to ask Starbucks' patrons to refrain from bring guns into his stores...

The Obamacare “exemption” for Congress, explained in the Wall Street Journal.  The comments are just as interesting as the article.  It's ironic that Congress panics (and cuts themselves a special deal) at the effect Obamacare has on their own staffs, but seems to have trouble understanding why it's a problem for business.

Not that anybody will listen to me, but I think the only solution to this mess is the following five-step plan:

1. Repeal Obamacare in its entirety.  Further effective reform isn't possible so long as Obamacare is in force.
2. Stop allowing businesses to deduct the cost of health insurance as an expense.  Most businesses will then drop insurance benefits like a hot potato, replacing them with compensating salary increases.  They'll do this because the salary increases are predictable and controllable, unlike the insurance premiums.  The most important effect of this will be to expose the actual cost of healthcare to consumers, who can then make informed choices about their healthcare purchases – just like they do now for cars, houses, etc.
3. Get rid of all health insurance mandates, federal, state, and local.  This will allow the return of “real” insurance policies that cover just unpredictable major medical expenses.  The most important consequence of this will be that consumers will start considering the cost benefit tradeoffs in all their ordinary medical expenditures – and medical providers will start competing on cost.  We'll all win, just as we have with other services exposed to market forces.
4. Remove any regulation that prevents or impedes health insurance from being sold in all states.  This will enlarge the insurance pools that drive insurance premiums, and in a direction that favors consumers.
5. Provide a system of subsidies for the poor who genuinely can't afford basic medical care, major medical insurance, or both.  We can have a good old-fashioned political argument about how much these subsidies are, and who gets them – but at least we'll all understand that we're talking about a welfare program.

But like I said, nobody is listening to me :)

California leads the way... in vile politicos.  First there's this series of tweets, from Allan Brauer (at right), who is the communications chair for the Democratic Party of Sacremento, California to Amanda Carpenter, an aide to Republican Senator Ted Cruz:

May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases.

Busy blocking the tapeworms that have slithered out of hellspawn @amandacarpenter's asshole. How's your day so far?

I'm being attacked on Twitter for wishing one of Ted Cruz's pubic lice to experience the pain her boss is inflicting on Americans.

Well, I guess we all know how he feels about civil intercourse.

Now mind you, I fully support Brauer's right to say these things, vile as they are.  This is America, and the First Amendment is still in force (for now, anyway).  But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be consequences for this speech.  Given his position as communications chair (!) in the Democratic Party, of course what he said will be interpreted as (at the very least) being condoned by the Democratic Party – something you'd think they'd not appreciate.  The appropriate thing for them to do would be to fire his sorry ass, posthaste.  So far, at least, that isn't happening.  Instead, the company he works for is saying “Case closed, because he's apologized.”

But I'm actually more disturbed by this response from Democratic Party spokesman Tenoch Flores:

The problem with this kind of rhetoric is that it lets fringe characters—those who are actively trying to shut down the government—like Ted Cruz, off the hook. It’s never acceptable to wish physical harm against political opponents, regardless of how objectionable their policy priorities are.

Really, Tenoch?  That's the problem with what Bauer said?  Not the crudeness, the vulgarity, the incivility?  They're not a problem at all?

Many have said this before, but it's worth keeping in mind: when politics works the way it is illustrated above – and there's a lot of this sort of low dealing – the only people who even consider running for public office are those that are so motivated by the power (or perks of corruption) that they're willing to overlook the nastiness.  I can think of quite a few people I've met in my life who would make far better elected officials than the ones we have.  I can't think of a single one who would even consider running...

Let's hope the systems today are more reliable... because I have no doubt the bureaucrats today are at least as bad.  In early 1961, an accident came disturbingly close to detonating a 4 megaton H-bomb over North Carolina.  The key finding was that a short circuit in just one safety device (a completely plausible possibility in the accident scenario) would have caused the bomb to detonate.  This was disclosed in a newly released document, which contradicts all prior public statements by the Air Force and Department of Defense – and confirms contemporaneous speculation.  I remember reading this speculation in the late '60s.  The Guardian (a U.K. newspaper) obtained the document under the Freedom of Information Act.

“Don't mess with our drones!”  That's the message the U.S. Air Force sent Iran earlier this year...

Confused by all the crazy things you're hearing about the continuing resolution?  Try reading this.  It helped me understand, in particular, what Ted Cruz is trying to do...

The world just isn't simple, no matter how badly we want it to be...  Megan McArdle has an interesting piece on the decline of labor income and free trade.  My takeaway: free trade may be the worst thing that ever happened to the value of work, except for all the other approaches to trade...

Oort clouds and evolution, oh my! Robert Zimmerman writes on his blog about a new paper in pre-print that links mass extinctions events on Earth with the Solar System's movement through the Milky Way galaxy's “arms” (the red path on their diagram at right shows the Solar System's path through the black arms of the galaxy).  The gist of their notion is that by moving through the relatively dense star population in the galaxy's arms, the Oort cloud of proto-comets is disturbed – and more of them come raining down into the inner Solar System.  Some of those strike the Earth, causing all sorts of havoc – and accelerating the rate of evolution.  Thinking about other things I've read recently, such a high rate of comet impact might also have “seeded” the early Earth with chemicals that aided life's development.  

Fly like an eagle...  You'll want full screen mode for this one...

In the geeky argument department: There has been a big (if obscure) debate about leap-seconds for several years now.  Most people don't even know about leap-seconds, but they are actually a pretty simple idea: they compensate for variations in the length of the day, which is unsteadily and very slowly getting longer.  The lengthening is mainly the result of tidal forces on the Earth's oceans, and to a lesser extent, its molten core.  If these changes were precisely predictable, there wouldn't be any debate – we'd simply make rules (like the rules for leap-years) and everybody's clocks would take those rules into account.  But these variations are not predictable, so there's no way to bake any rules into the clocks – and that's the basis for the debate.  Basically, some people think that leap-seconds are worth all the trouble they cause in high-tech systems, and some people think they're not.  The two camps have been trying to reconcile their differences for almost 10 years now, and recently they decided to kick the can down the road for another two years.

The planned Jamul Casino is facing a challenge: The Jamul Action Committee (JAC) and the Jamul Community Church have jointly sued the U.S. Department of the Interior, the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC), and six officials in a suit filed in Sacramento today.  The named officials are:

• Tracie Stevens, NIGC Chairwoman
• Sally Jewell, Interior Department Secretary
• Kevin Washburn, assistant secretary of Indian Affairs
• Paula Hart, director of the Office of Indian Gaming
• Amy Dutschke, regional director, Bureau of Indian Affairs
• John Rydzik, chief, Division of Environmental, Cultural Resources Management and Safety of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The key bits:

The plaintiffs - a nonprofit citizen group and Christian church - challenged a gaming commission finding that the Jamul Indian Village (JIV) had "Indian lands" qualified for gambling under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA).
...

Though the IRA trusts cover recognized Indian tribes under federal jurisdiction, Supreme Court precedent limits inclusion "to federally recognized tribes that were in existence when the IRA was enacted in 1934," according to the complaint.

Federal recognition of the Jamul Indian Village allegedly came after 1980.

The parcel, the plaintiffs claim, is not a reservation as defined in federal law.

"The defendants have no authority to create a reservation or Indian lands on non-public domain lands within the exterior boundaries of the state of California," the complaint states. "The parcel is not public domain land and is subject to state jurisdiction. The state has not ceded jurisdiction to the JIV or the United States. The defendants' attempt to exempt and remove the parcel from state jurisdiction by characterizing it as a reservation or Indian lands eligible for gambling in the ILD is an abuse of discretion and is arbitrary, capricious and contrary to the law."

Opponents also say that exceptions under the IGRA do not apply to the parcel.

"The defendants' determination in the ILD that the parcel is a reservation, or Indian lands eligible for gaming under IGRA, is not supported by the record," according to the complaint.

More on the news report and at the JAC site linked above...

The man.  The myth.  The legend.  Here's one passage from the enviable obituary for William Freddie McCullough:

Freddie adored the ladies. And they adored him. There isn't enough space here to list all of the women from Freddie's past. There isn't enough space in the Bloomingdale phone book. A few of the more colorful ones were Momma Margie, Crazy Pam, Big Tittie Wanda, Spacy Stacy and Sweet Melissa (he explained that nickname had nothing to do with her attitude). He attracted more women than a shoe sale at Macy's.

I'd like to have known Mr. McCullogh – he sounds like quite the character!

Breathtakingly stupid, or just unabashedly partisan?  Maybe both.  But does it really matter what motivates the moonbat?  Here are a couple of her statements from this recent interview:

On Obama: “He has been … open, practically apolitical, certainly nonpartisan, in terms of welcoming every idea and solution.”  Really, Nancy?  Really?  Is this something that you actually believe?  If so, then I worry that there's actually no gray matter in your skull (though that would be consistent with other observations).

On Republican scorn for Obama:  “You know why it is. He’s brilliant, … he thinks in a strategic way in how to get something done … and he’s completely eloquent. That’s a package that they don’t like.”  Riiiight, Nancy.  You got it in one.  That's the reason, all right.  By the way, could I have some of whatever you're drinking?

Here's what does matter: the citizens of California keep re-electing Pelosi.  That tells you all you need to know about California's future.  And why we're moving out of this crazy state...

California, bringing on the doom...  Steven Greenhut, writing at Reason, on why it will take radical measures to save California from the recklessness of its officials.  That's the same conclusion we reached some time ago, and the reason why we're leaving the Golden State.  Say, isn't gold supposed to be free of tarnish?  Doesn't seem to be working on this state...

A thought to ponder...  Consider this:

“...the world thinks we are a great military power. They know all about the missiles and tanks and satellites, they've seen our soldiers. They know our might. The world is no longer certain we are a great nation, which is a different problem”

Indeed, that is quite a different problem.  Go read the rest of Peggy Noonan's excellent piece in today's Wall Street Journal.  It's quite nice to have the old Peggy Noonan back, the one without Obama stars in her eyes...

The perma-bear is worried about phosphates.  And a host of other commodities...

Well how about that!  I'm not the only proponent of shutting down the manned space program in favor of increased robotic space exploration...

Domino liver transplant – the liver removed from a patient receiving a heart/liver transplant became the new liver for another patient.  The primary motivation for this was the rules regarding allocation of donor organs.  The second patient wouldn't have lived long enough to have received a liver under those rules.

Some day, when you're in need of brain pain and heart ache, read up on the debate over how donor organs are allocated.  The main problem is that there are fewer organs donated than are needed. 

Usually the debate is framed as a problem in deciding who will live and who will die.  Today in the U.S. we use a complicated formula that attempts to make a judgment about which recipient will get the most use from the donor organ.  Thus, all other things being equal, a 20 year old recipient will be get a donor organ before the 70 year old, and a healthy 60 year old recipient would come before a 60 year old with leukemia.  There is an attempt to keep money out of the equation, but this doesn't really work, as if one has enough money organs are available in other countries.

Occasionally you'll see it framed as a problem in getting more organs for donation.  There are many proposed ways of doing this, ranging from high-tech “organ farms” to making donation obligatory to “harvesting” organs from prisoners on death row.  All of these approaches have ethical and moral concerns, some more so than others.  In some countries organs are so readily available that there is suspicion that harvesting from prisoners (perhaps not even awaiting a death sentence) is already taking place.

I don't have any conclusions about this, though I do have a sneaking suspicion that by keeping the free market completely out of it we are, in this case, actually killing people.  Just one example will suffice to make my point.  Suppose one of your loved ones faced death within a few months unless they got a heart transplant.  Further suppose that an ideal donor was killed in a car accident – but the victim had never authorized donation, and his surviving family didn't want to donate the heart.  Today, that would be the end of it – that heart wouldn't be used, and your loved one would die. 

Now imagine just one change to the (quite common) scenario I just described: suppose you could afford to pay $10,000 for that heart, you made the offer to the victim's family, and they accepted it.  They get $10,000, and your loved one lives.  Is that so bad?  Under today's rules, that's illegal.  Should it be?  I think not...but I absolutely agree that making such “purchases” legal would greatly increase the possibility of dodgy dealings.  In this case, though, I think the cure is worse than the disease...

Manicules and pilcrows and octothorpes, oh my!  A fun article on the history of punctuation and text layout, by Keith Houston writing in The New Yorker.  After reading the article, I decided to buy Keith's book – it sounds like just the kind of thing to entertain me on some rainy day...

More on IOS7, in this nice overview of the new features.  I only had trouble with one new feature: accessing Control Center by swiping up from the bottom of any screen.  I finally figured out that it was my OtterBox that was causing my problem, and the workaround was simply to be careful how I position my finger (getting it as close to the bottom edge of the screen as possible) before swiping.

I see from my reading that lots of people don't like the new “flat” appearance.  Personally I find it much easier to read and use, though not as “pretty” as the old appearance.  I care much more about the former than the latter...

The problem.  Forwarded by my mom, who lives much closer to the center of the problem than I do:

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Montana when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni® suit, Gucci® shoes, RayBan® sunglasses and YSL® tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

"Sure, why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell® notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3® cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page onthe Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.  The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop® and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.  Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot® that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL® database through an ODBC connected Excel® spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry® and, after a few minutes, receives a response.  Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet® printer, turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says Bud.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.  Then Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government", says Bud.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?”

"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about how working people make a living - or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep. Now give me back my dog. 

What makes this so funny is that it's completely plausible – but what makes this so sad is that it's completely plausible...

Doing business in California is loads of fun.  Where by “loads of fun” I mean “like having your balls crushed in a red-hot vise, while rabid monkeys pull out your hair and you're forced to watch Wolf Blitzer on CNN”.  Warren Meyers (of CoyoteBlog) runs a business that manages campgrounds for federal, state, and local parks across the country.  He's got a depressing post about what it's like to do business in California, and he closes with this postscript:

California's regulatory environment has caused a real shift in the culture as well. At one location that we are closing this year, a local attorney has regular dinner meetings with groups of our employees to brainstorm among the group to see if they can come up with something to sue us over.

There's a reason California businesses are fleeing to other states.  Actually, a whole bunch of reasons...

If you took all the water in the world, and somehow put it into a giant cube, how big would that cube be?  And then what if you just took potable water?  Inquiring minds want to know...

Part II: Rope. Tree. Bureaucrat. Some assembly required.  This one starts out sounding really good.  You've seen, I'm sure, the news reports about all the awful flooding in Colorado.  A local firm in that area happens to manufacture surveillance drones – so they volunteer to supply equipment and people to help emergency crews figure out how they can best apply their equipment and capabilities.  You know, for delivering aid, rescuing stranded citizens, that sort of thing.  All was going well, local emergency services folks were very happy to have the assistance.  Until, that is, a FEMA bureaucrat comes along and tells them to ground the drones or be arrested.  Seriously.

WTF is wrong with these people?  On what planet would this be a good decision, with good outcomes?  Why, on Planet Bureaucrat, of course, where such a decision will lead to promotions, bonuses, commendations, or some combination thereof...

Rope. Tree. Bureaucrat. Some assembly required.  This is what happens when you have a bureaucracy that doesn't understand that it works for you.  Here's a summary version, and the money quote:

1. Brad Heath of USA Today files a Freedom of Information Act request for some information.
2. Brian Fallon, with the U.S. Department of Justice, responds by saying he has the information Brad asked for, but won't give it to him.
3. Brad asks again, politely but firmly.
4. Brian says he's “done negotiating”, and will give the information to another reporter after Brad publishes – and he'll explain to the other reporter why Brad was off-base.
5. Brad says “your call” and “I'm not negotiating”.
6. Brian then says:

You are not actually open-minded to the idea of not writing the story. You are running it regardless.  I have information that undercuts your premise, and would provide it if I thought you were able to be convinced that your story is off base. Instead, I think that to provide it to you would just allow you to cover your bases, and factor it into a story you still plan to write. So I prefer to hold onto the information and use it after the fact, with a different outlet that is more objective about whether an OPR inquiry was appropriate.

The entire email thread is here, so you can see for yourself what a twit this pathetic, small-minded bureaucrat is.  He actually seems to believe that he has the power to withhold information based on his personal approval of what Brad was theoretically going to write.  Feels more like North Korea than North America...

Just upgraded to IOS 7 on my iPhone, and the first few things I tried are substantial improvements.  The camera app is much improved, and ridiculously easy to use.  The multi-tasking display works just the way I'd like it to work – shows me a scene from each running program, and all I have to do to close that program is throw it off the top of my screen.  Nice, very nice, Apple.

But now, as always, I have to go learn how to use all these new whiz-bangs.  If the rest of the improvements are as simple as the first two I tried, that shouldn't take very long at all...

Stunning, they are, this awesome collection of landscape photographs by Yiming Hu.  A meadow at Mount Rainier is shown at right; lots more on the site.  What a talent he has!  Via my mom...

I could have really used this a few years ago: a non-technical explanation of what the hell the Fed is doing with $85 billion a month.  It's not quite as scary as it sounds at first.  Not quite.

It's called “perspective”.  And Megan McArdle delivers it elegantly, tailored especially for the oh-so-entitled millennials who need this message the most...

Journalist's guide to firearm identification.  Allegedly this is a joke, but I'm not so sure...

Night of the green knives.  That's the wonderful James Delingpole's turn of phrase to describe Tony Abbott's swift dismantling of the Australian Climate Commission and sundry other nonsensical (and expensive) panders to the warmists.  Abbott, you may remember, is the newly elected conservative (well, by down under standards) Prime Minister of Australia.  As Delingpole says: he's showing us all the way...

Obamacare is a way to force young people to pay for medical care for old people.  I know that, and you may know that.  Obama certainly knows that.  But will the young people figure it out?  An organization called Generation Opportunity wants to help that process along, and to that end they've released the two ads at right.  Creepy?  Check.  Persuasive?  I'm not so sure...

Well, that sure didn't take long:  The Russian/U.S. “deal” to avoid a strike on Syria is already turning into a joke...

The ambitious U.S.-Russian deal to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons, hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough just days ago, hit its first delay Wednesday with indications that the Syrian government will not submit an inventory of its toxic stockpiles and facilities to international inspectors by this weekend's deadline.

The State Department signaled that it would not insist that Syrian President Bashar Assad produce the list Saturday, the end of a seven-day period spelled out in the framework deal that Washington and Moscow announced last weekend in Geneva.

Read the whole piece here.  The Middle East is a bad enough mess without Pooty-Poot and The One inserting themselves into the middle of the muddle...

Because he knows what's good for you, little man...  This morning The One made it abundantly clear that if Congress had the temerity to send him a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government that included defunding Obamacare, he would veto it.  This, he says, would result in a catastrophic “shutdown” of the federal government.   Senator Ted Cruz (a Republican who supports defunding Obamacare) responded by tweeting:

“Why is President Obama threatening to shut down govt to shove Obamacare down Americans' throats?”

Heh.  Nice political ju-jitsu, that is...

A trend that is not a trend.  Warren Meyer (aka CoyoteBlog) has a nice take-down of a Rolling Stone article on the intersection wilderness wildfire management, global warming, and politics.  This is one of an excellent series he's started, describing “trends” noted in the media that are actually not trends at all.  Often they're just isolated facts that an author twists into a trend; sometimes they're a trend – but in the opposite direction stated.  My takeaway: be careful about believing anything you read in the mainstream media.  But that's old advice, isn't it?

Science, music, detection – what more could you ask in a story?  I've seen reference before to controversy about what tempo (speed) Beethoven's works should be played at.  The problem arises from his original tempo notes; they seem just crazy to most conductors.  One intriguing possibility is that his metronome was broken – and now researchers think they know the answer.  Original paper (PDF) here...

What is that?  It's an aerial photograph of a tree farm.  I grew up on a nursery (which included some tree farming) in New Jersey, but it wasn't this sort of high-productivity farming...

Computers at Harvard in the early 1900s: all women.  The original meaning of the word “computer” was a person who computes; that meaning goes back as far as 1646 (according to the OED).  In the late 1800s, devices like slide rules (a topic I know a bit about) were occasionally called “computers”.  But it wasn't until the 1940s that the term was used for an electronic machine that computed...

This is what the Internet is for!  Baby panda photos...

Great source code comments: StackOverflow has a collection.

Fool or knave?  It doesn't really matter...  Sometimes you really can't make this stuff up.  Here's Obama, in a speech to the Business Roundtable:

Now, this debt ceiling — I just want to remind people in case you haven’t been keeping up — raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy.  All it does is it says you got to pay the bills that you’ve already racked up, Congress.  It’s a basic function of making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved.

I must be one of the slow ones.  Here I was, all along, thinking that when the debt ceiling gets raised, we'll incur more debt.  My slow thinking goes like this: “If they raise the debt ceiling, well then of course they're going to use that ability to borrow more!”  And there's some evidence to support such slow thinking: that's exactly what's happened over 100 times before.

So what is Obama on about?  He's referring to a long-time legislative practice: Congress authorizes expenditures, then later says “Oh, gee, I guess we have to actually, like, pay for this!”  When they don't have the cash available (and they never do), they authorize the Treasury to borrow the money (by selling Treasury bonds).  So Obama is saying – to a bunch of business executives, who most assuredly know better – that the two acts are totally disconnected.  That's a great piece of legerdemain for the progressives: they get to pretend that spending is totally disconnected from borrowing.  They may actually be stupid enough to believe it, but I strongly suspect that they (including Obama) really are knowingly trying to hoodwink us...

Technology mostly advances in little steps like this: new temperature sensor with much greater stability under long-term exposure to high temperatures.

A nice collection of photos taken through a microscope, like these butterfly eggs on a raspberry plant.

Fox News is reporting that the IPCC report was released yesterday, and that it says:

...finds the threat of man-made global warming to be not only greatly exaggerated but so small as to be “embedded within the background variability of the natural climate system” and not dangerous.

If that's accurate, it's quite a walk-back from their earlier reports. I haven't yet found any other analysis, nor can I find the report online – both a bit odd, as I'd think this would be big news in the climatology world...

The Concordia is upright and floating, now just waiting for calm seas before towing into the port where it will be dismantled for scrap...

Bruce Schneier notes this great article on the NSA revelations by Yochai Benkler, writing at The Guardian.  A sample:

What did we actually know about what we got in exchange for undermining internet security, technology markets, internet social capital, and the American constitutional order? The intelligence establishment grew by billions of dollars; thousands of employees; and power within the executive. And we the people? Not so much. Court documents released this week show that after its first three years of operation, the best the intelligence establishment could show the judge overseeing the program was that it had led to opening "three new preliminary investigations". This showing, noted Judge Walton in his opinion, "does not seem very significant".

If this was the best the intelligence community could put on the table when it faced the risk of judicial sanction, we can assume that all the hand-waving without hard, observable, testable facts is magician's patter, aimed to protect the fruits of a decade's worth of bureaucratic expansionism. Claims that secrecy prevents the priesthood from presenting such testable proof appeal to a doctrine of occult infallibility that we cannot afford to accept.

History doesn't give us very many examples of powerful bureaucracies being successfully reined in.  Let's hope we can make an exception of the NSA...

The power of make-up.  Via my lovely bride...

This is not how science is supposed to work...

Would you be surprised if every faucet in your house, and your shower, suddenly started spouting beer instead of water?  I sure would be!  But if someone wants to pull this prank on me, please make make it a nice Cabernet, ok?

Doesn't this just seem wrong?  Fed announces that they're going to continue to spend $85 billion each month on the “stimulus” plan.  Wall Street reacts with joy.  They're addicted to the corporate welfare...

Swiftboating those who question Benghazi.  Neo-neocon at her finest.

What?  The Navy Yard shooter wasn't a right-wing nut case?  Didn't use an assault rifle?  Drove a Prius?  Liked Obama?  You mean CNN didn't get all that right???

If I were an Oregon resident, I'd be most seriously displeased.  The Oregon state government awarded a $9.9 million contract to a PR firm to publicize its Obamacare healthcare exchange.  Some $2.3 million of it is being used on this ad.  The ad is completely content-free...

“Like walking down the street with a five year old.”  Jon Stewart rips the lamestream media for their error-filled Navy Yard coverage.

Bohemian Rhapsody.  A capella.  Physics.  String theory.  Awesome.

Starbucks: please don't bring your weapons into our stores.  Listen to their CEO here.  I think reaction will fall into two camps: Some people will simply stop going to Starbucks (that would be me, except I never go there anyway!).  Others will think they're being soft, because they're not outright banning guns.

After listening to the video of Starbucks' CEO (Howard Schultz), I think Starbucks shareholders should have another concern: this guy doesn't think his sole responsibility is to increase his company's share price – he thinks Starbucks has other social responsibilities as well.  If I were a Starbucks shareholder, I'd be looking to sell right about now – and wishing I'd done it yesterday...

I've never been to a Whole Foods store.  Friend and reader Simon M. sent me to this article, warning me to put down my drink first.  He's right.  After reading this post (hint: Kelly MacLean really doesn't like Whole foods!), it's a lot less likely that I'll ever go to one.  Sample:

I move on to the next aisle and ask the nearest Whole Foods clerk for help. He's wearing a visor inside and as if that weren't douchey enough, it has one word on it in all caps. Yup, NAMASTE. I ask him where I can find whole wheat bread. He chuckles at me "Oh, we keep the poison in aisle 7." Based solely on the attitudes of people sporting namaste paraphernalia today, I'd think it was Sanskrit for "go fuck yourself."

Namaste is a new word for me (the image at right shows the gesture). 

Another focus-merge image from Mars, taken by the Curiosity rover.  I'm jealous of the fantastic depth-of-field on these macro photos!

More about Migaloo the white whale.

And everyone who lives in California laughs out loud: “...some of the most marginal habitat in the state: a vacant lot in downtown Bakersfield...”  Spotted in a news story about newly discovered species of legless lizards – it just gets better and better!

Sounds like a Paul Simon song: Diamonds on the Skin of Their Teeth.  Scientists ponder the usefulness of nano-diamonds to promote bone growth or in dental implants...

The Pleiades are my companion each morning this time of year, when I walk the dogs before dawn.  But I can't see them quite like this.  High resolution version here, via APOD, of course...

Maureen is not happy with The One.  It's very entertaining for those of us who never fell under his spell to watch the formerly enchanted awaken from their trance.  Maureen is discovering that The One isn't the fervent progressive she thought she was supporting...

How to buy 1.2 million air miles for about $3,000.  Lots of chocolate pudding is involved.

Faster, please.  Researchers at UC San Diego have come up with a quick, relatively simple test for the mechanism of new antibiotics being investigated.  This has the potential to open the floodgates for the discovery of new antibiotics to counter the drug-resistant bacterial strains that have arisen.  I've been infected with one of these (after a surgery in the mid-'90s), but luckily a “cocktail” of several antibiotics was able to knock it down.  These days, thousands of people each year are dying because no cocktail exists that can knock the resistant strains out.  We need new antibiotics that use a different mechanism, and this new test should help researchers find them...

It's just a gesture.  Joseph Naso was sentenced to death yesterday, but he almost certainly he won't be executed.  He will just join the 725 other inmates on California's death row, where some have been for decades. 

I'd like to see the end of the death penalty, as I don't believe it's been justly applied.  Even one mistake is far too many, and there have been far more than one.  But I am not for leniency, not at all – I'd like to see incarceration be treated as punishment, not as rehabilitation.  Let Joseph Naso crush rocks until he can't crush any more, and let's have a C-Span-like channel that shows people what his life is like.  I'd also like to drastically reduce the number and kinds of crimes for which incarceration is the punishment – I'd especially like to get rid of the “morality” crimes, like drug use...

Transporter, demonstrated.  This would be fun to see in person, even if just for the audience reaction...

Where the good jobs are – and why.  Economist Enrico Moretti, writing in the Wall Street Journal.  A friend works for a company in the midst of relocating to downtown San Francisco, a move that puzzled me.  Now I know a plausible reason...

An apt portrayal, via friend and reader Simon M.

California leads the world – in failed progressive policy examples...

Unicorns and rainbows and flowers, oh my!  On wait but why, an interesting piece titled Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy.  Lots of this rings true to me, and matches experiences I've had managing such folks over the past 20 years.  Note: wait but why is headed to North Korea!

Feminism – is there anything it can't do?  According to some, there's an epidemic of clinical depression in the U.S.   Is feminism the cause of it?