Grout...

Grout...  The fellow who did the tile work in our remodeled master bathroom did a really nice job, but there was one imperfection that we didn't like: the grout, in certain places, hadn't been properly removed.  When grout is correctly used, all of it should be below the level of the surrounding tile or rock.  In the case of our bathroom, some of the right-angle joints (and especially the triple corners) had a “bead” of grout that was too high.  It's easy to see how this happened: when you apply grout, the last step is to clean off the excess with a sponge.  That works great on flat surfaces – but not so much on right angled joints.  You can see this on the photo above right (click to embiggen).

After a bit of research on the web, I headed down to my local Home Depot to get a grout brush.  I expected to be using this and my pocket knife to (laboriously) work that excess grout off.  However, when I arrived at Home Depot and started looking at the tile tools, a friendly fellow came over and asked me what I was trying to accomplish.  He told me about a special tool made for exactly my problem: a carbide-tipped scraper with a small triangular blade (see photos at right).  I headed home considerably better armed for the battle than I had expected.

With just a little practice I got the hang of that scraper.  It's important to wet down the grout and tile before you start – that keeps the dust from flying, and (more importantly) it helps prevent the scraper from “biting” into the rock, by lubricating it (same principle as shaving foam).  It's also important to be gentle and to use light pressure.  It's far better to make ten very light strokes than to try to remove it all with one muscular stroke, because that greatly reduces the chances of a catastrophic mistake (removing too much grout, or a chunk of rock).

The results are better than I had hoped for, and with far less work.  To go over the entire shower took me about 4 hours of work.  With just my pocket knife, that would have been more like 4 days.  Furthermore, this was easy work, with relatively little skill required (a vital element, when it's me doing the work!).

Bottom line: if you have an excess grout situation, get this tool!

Buh-bye, hard disks!

Buh-bye, hard disks!  A terabyte on a postage stamp, faster and more durable than flash memory, coming soon.

The first non-volatile RAM I ever worked with (back in '72) was made with magnetic “cores” – tiny toroids with wire strung through them.  These had a density of about 78 bits per cubic inch.  The first versions of these new memories will have densities of roughly 2 x 10¹⁵ bits per cubic inch – a density increase of about 3 x 10¹³ in just 55 years.  It seems unlikely that non-volatile RAM advances will keep up at that rate!  On the other hand, as recently as 20 years ago I would never have guessed that I'd live to see the density of flash memory today...

Good doggy!

Good doggy!

Seen in Los Angeles...

Seen in Los Angeles...  No normal human could ever figure this out...

The complete Feynman lectures...

The complete Feynman lectures ... are now online...

Crassula ovata...

Crassula ovata...  Via BPOD, of course...

Pretty much...

Pretty much...  Via my CCPOAA mom...

We can fix anything...

We can fix anything...  My CCPOAA mom sends along this ad, with the comment: “What every married man and suspicious wife need to know!”

Break up the NSA...

Break up the NSA ... and save the Internet.  Bruce Schneier, in Wired...

Your life, in graphics...

Your life, in graphics...  Via reader Simi L.  Ha!

Dangerous U.K. law...

Dangerous U.K. law...  We need to do our best to make certain this doesn't happen here.  The law in question requires U.K. citizens to decrypt files upon demand from the police – or face 2 to 5 years in jail.  This article has a good discussion of the law's problems.

The first objection you might think of is this: what happens if you forget the key (or password)?  Answer: you go to jail.  Yikes!  That's pretty bad!

But it gets much, much worse, as the article explains.  The police just have to think you have an encrypted file.  If you're not familiar with encryption, you might not realize just how problematic that is.  You see, an encrypted file (which can have any name at all) just looks like random data.  There's no test you can apply to it that will unambiguously show that it's an encrypted file.  So any file containing random data could be an encrypted file – and in the U.K., the police can demand that you decrypt it.  If the file happens to be just random data, and not an encrypted file, of course there's no way that you could possibly decrypt it!  If you can't convince the police that it's innocent random data, you could find yourself sharing a cell with a murderer for several years...

Barn: the backfilling marches on...

Barn: the backfilling marches on...  Another 30 or 40 yards of pit run got dumped today.  The builder is hoping that all the needed pit run will be there by tomorrow.  Today they started leveling and compacting the pit run, 3 or 4 inches below the top of the foam board – the right height to provide a base for the next layer of pea gravel.

Rough leveling

Fine leveling, and compactor

In other news, the painters finished up with everything they could do at this point. They have a couple hours of work left after the flooring folks have finished with the stairways, but everything else is done.  I thought I'd memorialize the appearance of the garage, which will surely never look this good again.  Ever.

Worthless scanners – the TSA's security theater...

Worthless scanners – the TSA's security theater...  Marine, reader, former colleague, and friend Larry E. links to this article and comments:

In my recent travels I've gone through these things and been wanded or searched after. Once, I looked back and saw the image, a silhouette style with a yellow mark where it found something. This is what the TSA goon was looking at when he wanded me. The indicator was on my mid-thigh. i.e. no pockets or anything. So I asked him if the thing just randomly places the marks. I don't think he found me amusing.

I don't believe they are any more effective than the failed "puffer" machines.

Frankly I'm offended and dismayed that we are deliberately dehumanized and treated as cattle as we shuffle belt and shoe-less through security lines with self-important goons shouting orders about whether the laptop goes in a separate bin or not.

I've also notice a lot more "homeland security - police" vehicles and personnel around. Their blue stripped "police" cars going up the freeway. commando outfitted homeland security "police" wandering the street fair. Homeland security "police" with automatic weapons boarding trains to walk around before they leave the station.

Why don't I feel safer?

Indeed...

The strange & curious tale of the last true hermit...

The strange & curious tale of the last true hermit...  A great read about Christopher Knight, the man who lived for 27 years in the Maine woods without any human contact...

Mother Nature whacks the environmentalists upside the head again...

Mother Nature whacks the environmentalists upside the head again...  Several decades ago, scientists told the world that CFCs were causing the ozone layer to be depleted, resulting in a worldwide band and billions of dollars being spent to replace them with inferior products.  About ten years ago, scientists noted that – unexpectedly – the ozone hole was still being formed in some years, despite the elimination of CFCs.  Now scientists “belatedly” have discovered that there's apparently a natural source of CFCs, and they're unsure about whether the ban on man-made CFCs accomplished anything at all.

The earth is such a complex, inter-connected system that it's hard to weasel out any hard fact about it.  In this case the scientists a few decades back assumed that CFCs in the atmosphere were from man-made sources, because they didn't know any mechanism for such a molecule to be produced naturally.  Oops.  Bad assumption.  Only after billions of dollars were spent on what was essentially an enormous experiment did they learn the truth.  We're still spending lots of money on this experiment, as cooling systems across the globe are now running with fluids that are substantially less efficient than CFCs, costing the planet a lot of extra energy consumption.

Almost certainly the ban on CFCs will not be lifted, just as the ban on DDT has not been, despite the shaky science that prompted it.  In this case, I'm not at all certain the CFC ban should be lifted – more confirmation would be needed to make me comfortable about reversing it.  However, it seems clear that the ban shouldn't have been imposed without a more convincing scientific case having been made...

Inferiority induction, part 2...

Inferiority induction, part 2...

Wow!

Wow!  This makes me feel unworthy to even look at a woodworking tool...

Vintage medical devices...

Vintage medical devices...  Like the “Domestic Enema Machine” at right, from the 1830s.  More here...

Ha!

Ha!  SMBC...

“You want a Caliphate? Fine. Then we’ll attach a fuse to the end of it and set that bitch on fire.”

“You want a Caliphate?  Fine.  Then we’ll attach a fuse to the end of it and set that bitch on fire.”  Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom has had enough of progressive and libertarian posturing, and is up for some action against ISIS and the other fundamentalist Islamic terrorists.  His conclusion:

So.  To all the preening liberals who may choose to point to this as evidence of bloodthirsty xenophobia or a thrill for war, I offer a preemptive response:  fuck you and the sophistry you’ll use to condemn me.  I hate war as much as anyone.  I’m just not stupid enough to think we can simply wish it away — particularly against an enemy who takes such joy in showing their trophies, be they the heads of children on pikes or the digital video recording of executions.  I don’t care why they do what they do.  I care that they’re made to stop.  By whatever means necessary.

That’s the real moral stand to take, unpopular amongst the finger-wagging nuanced crowd.  And no, I don’t care about them, either.

But go read the whole thing...

Mimetes cucullatus...

Mimetes cucullatus...  Via BPOD, of course...

Ward summer party...

Ward summer party...  Our friends Bruce and June N. invited me to tag along with them to their ward's summer party.

For my non-Mormon readers, a “ward” is a geographically organized congregation.  All the Mormons who live within a designated area are part of a ward; they don't choose which church they go to (other than by choosing where they live).  Generally there will be several wards associated with a given church (meetinghouse) – they each have a given time slot in the meetinghouse on Sundays.

Bruce and June are part of ward 4 in Paradise, Utah, the town we live just north of.  The ward party was a gathering of the ward members (and at least one guest – me!) at Little Bear Bottoms in Wellsville, just a few miles down the road from us.  With Debbie still down in Jamul until our remodeling is complete, I don't have much of a social life :) – so the evening out was rather nice for me.  I met dozens of people, none of whose name I will remember.  There was a lot of interesting and entertaining conversation.  There was food, much of it quite good – and conspicuously evil.

The main entertainment was a homemade water slide (down a hillside) that worked very well.  The kids were the dominant sliders, right down to tiny little toddlers.  One pair of little girls – I'm going to guess 6 or 7 years old – spent nearly the entire evening dashing madly up to the top of the hill, then sliding down back-to-back with huge smiles, and jumping up to do it all over again.  A few adults also went down, including one of my friends (June N.).  In the video above right, she's the one in back, with her friend Donna in the front.

Shortly after June took this ride, the storm you can see in the video hit us with gusts of wind and a little rain.  We fled :)  Shortly after they dropped me off at home, the lightning and thunder started in earnest, and then the skies opened up and it poured.  I'm loving the dramatic weather up here ... very different than Jamul!

Nancy Pelosi takes the ALS ice bucket challenge!

Nancy Pelosi takes the ALS ice bucket challenge!  Via friend, reader, and former colleague Simon M...

The elks have it...

The elks have it...  Via my CCPOAA mom:

Two rednecks are sitting on the front porch.

One says, "Did you know that elks have sex 10 to 15 times a night?"

"AW MAN!", says his friend, "and I just joined the VFW!"

Ha!

Barn: Backfill time...

Barn: Backfill time...  The concrete in the foundation is cured, so work has started again.  The next big step is backfilling soil that was dug out of the foundation trench, and adjusting the height of the soil on the interior (under the floor).  Both started today.  Before the interior is filled, the builder lined the outside with foam insulation, to keep heat (from the floor) from leaking through the foundation.  He also made a hole in the foundation to run the septic line through (there will be a toilet and sink in the barn).  The interior is being filled first with a layer of “pit run” – gravel the way it occurs naturally, with mixed sizes of rock in a matrix of soil.  This will be filled to 3" below the needed level, then the final 3" will be a layer of pea gravel.  Then comes a layer of foam insulation, topped by heating pipes, and finally the poured concrete floor.

Here are some photos from today's work:

Interior of foundation with blue foam insulation

Drilling a hole for the septic line

One load of "pit run" gravel

Rosetta is just 84 km (50 miles) from Comet 67P...

Rosetta is just 84 km (50 miles) from Comet 67P...  And getting closer every day!

Not following the narrative...

Not following the narrative...  Scientists link solar activity to climate change.  Wait, what?  Not man-made carbon dioxide?  Natural solar variability?  Oh, noz!  There goes the warmists main talking point!

“That’s what happens in totalitarian societies.”

“That’s what happens in totalitarian societies.”  That's a quote from Professor Alan Dershowitz – a notable progressive law professor – on the subject of Governor Rick Perry's indictment for abuse of power.  Dershowitz also compares the indictment to what happened in the old Soviet Union.

At this point there is a long list of progressives and Democrats who have condemned the indictment against Perry.  Even reliably progressive rags like the New York Times are, however mildly, critical of the indictment.  I'm beginning to think that the Texas Democrats (probably with DNC connivance) have inadvertently increased the (low) probability of Perry becoming the Republican presidential candidate in 2016, along with the (higher) probability of him becoming the vice presidential candidate...

“Because that's just the way it is in the Land of the Free.”

“Because that's just the way it is in the Land of the Free.”  Imagine that for some reason you owned a set of antique bagpipes that you played competitively.  These bagpipes, which you own legally, happen to have some components made of ivory.  What do you suppose you'd have to go through to take those bagpipes to (say) Canada and bring them back home?

Mark Steyn has the unbelievable details.  As I read his piece (and other articles I found on the incidents), I just wanted to crawl into a corner and cry – for the loss of the land of the free that America once was.  Now we're the land of the bureaucratic boot, smashing our faces into the dirt...

I'd bet on Amazon...

I'd bet on Amazon...  Hachette (an old-school publishing company) is in a pitched battle with Amazon for the hearts and minds of book authors.  Steve Cohen presents the case for authors to take Amazon's side in this fight, basically because book readership is in decline and Amazon is (much) more likely to foster the innovations needed to save the book concept.  I think he's gotten right to the heart of the matter.

Personally, I'm not sure that books (in the traditional sense of hundreds of pages of fixed text and images) have much chance of surviving the technological and cultural changes to the way we consume information (non-fiction) and entertainment (fiction).  I'm not even going to try to predict where things are going to go.  I can readily observe, though, how my own habits have changed.  I'm much less likely these days to buy a non-fiction book (though I still do buy quite a few) – there's so much fresh, high quality, curated information available on the web that many of my non-fiction needs and desires are satisfied with a few clicks, for free.  I haven't found any equivalent for book-length fiction, but ... there's so much other stuff that I read on the web that my daily reading time has been reduced.  I still buy a lot of fiction books, but probably less than half what I did just 10 years ago.  That doesn't mean I'm reading less, though – I think I'm actually reading more, in total.  It's just that a lot of it is on the web these days.

I'll also note that without any exceptions known to me, the people I know who are younger than about 40 years old read vastly fewer books than I do.

But if any organization had a chance to save the notion of books, it would be be Amazon – an organization with a proven record of innovation and disruption, and the biggest bookseller in the world.  Hachette is the equivalent of the buggy manufacturer's association back in the early 1900s...

A tale of two cities...

A tale of two cities...  Peking on the left, Los Angeles on the right.  Peking is more attractive in this video than I expected it to be.  Los Angeles is shown at night, from a distance – the only way that place would ever be attractive!

You'll want to watch these in full-screen mode...

California leads the way..

California leads the way ... to crazy jurisprudence.  The California Supreme Court has ruled that what you don't say is admissible as evidence unless a suspect explicitly invokes his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Speechless, I am.  And I hereby invoke my Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination for my speechlessness.

“Obama is signaling to absolute barbarians that they have relative free reign to overrun Iraq and the Kurds, slaughtering our one-time allies with impunity.”

“Obama is signaling to absolute barbarians that they have relative free reign to overrun Iraq and the Kurds, slaughtering our one-time allies with impunity.”  Jeff Goldstein, at Protein Wisdom.

Yep.

San Diego leads the way...

San Diego leads the way ... toward a thugocracy.  Really.

Police forces across the country are fighting, tooth and nail, the idea that they could be monitored and held accountable for their actions.  Mind you, this isn't all police forces – some have embraced the transparency and accountability afforded by body cams and dash cams.  In part, that's to defend their officers against fraudulent accusations.  But the police forces that have entrenched abusive mindsets – mainly, but not entirely, in big cities – are seriously threatened by the disclosures by personal and automobile video, and they're not going to buckle without a fight...

“But this criminalization of politics is really wrong...”

“But this criminalization of politics is really wrong...”  I agree with Ann Althouse (and, by extension, Rush Limbaugh). 

I'll extend it just a tad: the problem isn't just the Democratic Party – it's what American politics has evolved into.  We no longer have a “citizen government” in any real sense.  Instead, we have a permanent political class, feeling as entitled as any elite class – and subject to all the corruptions and dirty tricks that any entitled class feels, er. entitled to.

I like to fantasize that we the people could fix all this mess by electing ordinary citizens instead of our political “elite.”  Then I remember who the voters are, and what their track record is.  And then I start thinking about wine, or the nearest concrete wall to bang my head against...

Going to the temple...

Going to the temple...  I'm visiting the Mormon temple in Ogden, Utah today.  No, I haven't undergone a religious conversion.  Friends here (Bruce and June N.) invited me to go see the temple during its open house following major renovations.  Temples are normally open only to baptized members of the LDS church who have a “temple recommend” attesting to the worthiness of the individual.  I would not qualify on either count :)

I'm looking forward to seeing what a Mormon temple looks like, and learning a bit more about the function.  What I know (perhaps) now comes mainly from books by Mormons who have left the church and now speak critically of it.  Devout Mormons with temple recommends do not discuss what happens inside the temple, in particular the temple ordinances; knowing this, I don't ask questions about it of my Mormon friends.  But I'm hoping a bit more will leak out on this visit.

Wine tasting BS...

Wine tasting BS...  You've most likely already heard about the wine tasting study, over 10 years ago, that completely smashed any notion that wine tasting was an objective “science”.  This shook the pretentious world of oenophiles to its very roots, and it still hasn't recovered.  This was very satisfying to me, as I do like my red wine – but I've long thought the “experts” were full of something (and it wasn't wine).

But the BS exposure masked another interesting discovery revealed in that study.  It turns out that the perceived color can completely override perceived taste and smell.  In other words, our brains are more willing to believe what our eyes see than what our nose smells.  Much more here...

Look at that white big house!

Look at that white big house!  That “sounds” wrong, doesn't it?  It should be “big white house”.  But why does the order of the adjectives (“white” and “big”) matter to us?  I don't remember ever being taught rules about adjective order in school – and yet, we all “know” them.  What's up with that?  Our brains work in strange ways – read about it (and try to ignore the fact that it's on Slate)...

Hah!

Hah!  A friend and former colleague (Bow R.) used to joke when someone yawned in a meeting: “Hey, now, no brain cooling here!”  Now I read that scientists think they've finally cracked the riddle of why we (and just about every vertebrate) yawn.  Yup, you guessed it: to cool our brains.

Bow, you missed your calling!

Why they hate Israel...

Why they hate Israel...  An excellent piece by Mort Zuckerman.

London cabbie vs. Arab Muslim...

London cabbie vs. Arab Muslim...  Via reader and friend Simon M.:

A devout Arab Muslim entered a black cab in London. He curtly asked the cabbie to turn off the radio because as decreed by his religious teaching, he must not listen to music because in the time of the prophet there was no music, especially Western music which is the music of the infidel.

The cab driver politely switched off the radio, stopped the cab and opened the door.

The Arab Muslim asked him, "What are you doing?"

The cabbie answered, "In the time of the prophet there were no taxis, so piss off and wait for a camel.."

Intolerance is a completely appropriate response to intolerance.


Having ridden in quite a few London black cabs, I can tell you that this response is completely plausible.  Those cabbies don't take any guff from anyone...

An alternative to conventional education...

An alternative to conventional education...  I'll bet these kids turn into very interesting adults...

Marmot vs. camera...

Marmot vs. camera...

BUFF...

BUFF...  The venerable B-52 Stratofortress first flew in 1952, just a few months before I was born.  It's still in service today, and is expected to remain in service until at least the 2040s.

What's the BUFF?  I first heard the B-52 referred to as a BUFF while I was in the Navy, in the '70s.  At the time, the ship I was on (the USS Long Beach CGN-9) was on PIRAZ duty off the coast of Vietnam.  We were tracking numerous B-52s flying bombing missions over North Vietnam.  The radar trackers kept calling them BUFFs, which I didn't understand.  They told me: it was an acronym for Big Ugly Fat Fucker.  They should have gotten “noisy” in there somewhere, too – the engines on the B-52s were loud!

Washing machine unravelings...

Washing machine unravelings...  Our new washer is unlike any washing machine I've ever owned before.  It's a top loader with a glass door on top, so you can actually watch it working (it even has a light!).  It's very easy to use, especially as it has a built-in tank to hold detergent.  Normally you just throw clothes in and press “Start”; it does the rest.

When you look inside, the first thing you'll notice is that there is no “agitator” (the finned tower in the center).  Every other washer I've ever used had an agitator.  When you watch it work, the next thing you'll notice is that it doesn't fill up the tank with enough water to cover the clothes.  No agitator and not much water.  How the heck does the thing get clothes clean?

I confess to having watched several complete cycles (generally about an hour long) through the glass top, just so I could figure this out.  It had me sore puzzled.

While it doesn't have a standard agitator, it does have a round plate on the bottom of the tank that it can wiggle back and forth (clockwise and counter-clockwise).  That plate has rounded, gentle ridges and bumps on it.  And the tank itself can be wiggled back and forth in the same manner, independently of the agitator plate (my name for it).  Furthermore, the entire tank is relatively free to bobble in any direction.

When you start a load up, the washer appears to sense the weight of the clothing.  Then it uses that weight to judge how much water to use.  Once the wash cycle starts, some complicated motions begin – the agitator plate wiggles, with variable speeds and amounts of rotation.  The tank wiggles, also with variable speeds and amounts of rotation.  The result: no matter how you piled in the clothes, they all end up separated and rolled up into little balls at the bottom of the tank.  I have no idea how they came up with this, but it's actually kind of amazing to watch.  I've even deliberately interleaved the legs of pants, run a pant leg through a sleeve, etc.  It doesn't matter.  Each piece of clothing ends up as a separate ball of cloth on the bottom.

Once the load has been reduced to wet balls of cloth, the action starts to make more sense.  The motion of the agitator plate and the tank churn the clothes through the water on the bottom quite effectively.  All the while, water is being recirculated by a pump and poured over top of the clothes being washed.

The rinse works basically the same way, but with clean water, of course.  When the spinning starts, the self-balancing tank feature kicks in.

Awesome, this modern technology...

Seen in the wild...

Seen in the wild...  In the Logan, Utah Home Depot parking lot...

Business names that are a play on words seem to be a bit of a thing here.  It's a rare day when I don't see at least one of these.

For my readers who aren't all that familiar with the Mormon church: it's common to address Mormon men using “Brother” as an honorific, together with their last name.  So, for example, Joe Nelson might be addressed as “Brother Nelson”.

So I'd be willing to bet you that this lawn service was staffed by a group of Mormon men :)

From junk, beauty...

From junk, beauty...  By sculptor John Lopez, of South Dakota.  More photos of his sculpture here...

This is the kind of problem that creates oppressive regulatory regimes...

This is the kind of problem that creates oppressive regulatory regimes...  Whenever someone's freely made choice offends someone else's sense of what's right (whether moral, religious, or cultural doesn't matter), you'll hear cries for government regulation – which is really just a euphemism for controlling behavior by force.  That's where our laws on drugs, prostitution, and much more come from.

Libertarians generally claim to support the notion of everyone having the freedom to make whatever choices in life that they want to, so long as they don't harm anyone else in the process.  While I have significant disagreements with the Libertarian Party (especially in the realm of foreign policy), on this notion I am largely in agreement with them. 

In an article in The Week, Damon Linker (a self-identified libertarian) constructs a scenario that he admits tests the limits of his political philosophy.  Read it.  Then think about whether the libertarian ideal of free choice really works for you.

I don't have any children, but nonetheless I can easily empathize with the problem posed by Linker's scenario.  I can't be certain of this, but I think that if I did have a daughter, I'd still support her having the freedom to make such a choice.

The problem, of course, with government regulation of such matters is two-fold: first, you don't know who (or with what rules) the regulations will be made and enforced – or how well they will comport with your own sense of what's right.  Second, once there is a rule, there will be more – without end, as we can observe right now in our grotesquely over-regulated society...

This makes me very sad...

This makes me very sad ... not least because I have no idea what can be done about it.  It also makes me think that one of the central lessons of WWII has already been forgotten, a mere 80 years later...

Hi, there, olinguito!

Hi, there, olinguito!  Crowdsourcing information on this newly discovered species...

750,000 begonias...

750,000 begonias...  Holy carpet of blossoms, Batman!

Say what?

Say what?  A county district attorney is convicted of drunk driving, and serves time in jail.  The popular, long-serving governor of the state demands that she resign.  The governor threatened to veto future funding for the district attorney's office if she didn't step down – and after she still didn't resign, the governor did veto the district attorney's funding.

Told that way, I'm supportive of the governor: if you have a bad apple employee, you need to fire him or her.  He didn't have the authority to fire her, but he did have the authority to withhold funding for her office.

Or so he thought.

Governor Rick Perry has been indicted for abuse of power.  The district attorney (Rosemary Lehmberg) served her sentence and is still the Travis County district attorney.  I'm sure the fact that Perry is a conservative Republican and that Lehmberg is a progressive Democrat has nothing whatsoever to do with it.  Nah, it couldn't.

I am surprised, though, that the Democrats would really want to defend a drunk driving district attorney.  Her behavior when arrested was not exactly commendable.  Her behavior after conviction was even less so.  Those Texas progressives (now there's two words that don't seem compatible!) must really, really hate Governor Perry.

Perry is not my idea of a hero.  There are many areas of disagreement between he and I.  But I do like the way he tried to deal with this problem employee.  It doesn't seem right, or American, and most especially not Texan, for him to be punished for this.  In the days of yore, the Governor would have whipped out a pearl-handled six-shooter and dealt out some Texas justice.  Cutting off the district attorney's funding sounds like a suitably civilized version of that to me...

Update: Hot Air is all over this, with video of the district attorney's DUI stop and booking.

Estonia, please accept my apologies...

Estonia, please accept my apologies...  I'm so very sorry that Obama will visit you soon!

If this trial ever goes ahead, global warming is toast...

If this trial ever goes ahead, global warming is toast...  Delingpole, on Mann v. Steyn.  Delicious!

Drinking is healthy...

Drinking is healthy...  This article does a nice job of summarizing, in lay terms, the science results I've been reading about for several years.  The one-line summary: drinking alcohol in moderate amounts is good for you, significantly reducing heart disease and the likelihood of dementia, and likely conferring other health benefits as well.

This is another one of those interesting conflicts between science and progressive dogma.  Depending on whose poll you want to believe, something like 60% to 80% of all scientists (and higher percentages of biologists or other medical-related fields) self-identify as “progressive” or “liberal”.  For years progressive dogma has said that regular drinking is harmful.  Recent science says the opposite.  Time to break out the popcorn.

Meanwhile, I'll continue my moderate wine consumption.  My Mormon neighbors may disapprove, but I may outlive them :)

A bathroom emerges...

A bathroom emerges...  One of the remodeling projects in our new home in Paradise, Utah is the master bathroom.  The house originally had a master bathroom with two doors (one onto a hallway, the other into the master bedroom), an elephant-scale bathtub with jets, a gecko-sized shower, and a vanity about the right height for a hamster.  We knew we had to change all that :)

We wanted a bathroom that we'd really enjoy having.

Back in April we located a contractor who we liked, a fellow named Lane Straatman and his sidekick Pasquale.  We designed the floor plan we wanted, and the Lane and Pasquale team led the project.  Our floor plan called for a large shower (5' 6" square) with a walk-in ell entrance, one door, no tub, and relocation of the vanity and toilet.  Quite a few contractors – all selected and known by Lane – were involved: for painting, tile installation, electrical work, plumbing, cabinetry, granite top, mirrors, and vent installation.

It's not quite all finished yet, but it's getting very, very close.  I've started using the shower, as it is complete.  Next week I'll be receiving an adapter kit to allow the conventional drains I bought to be used in our sinks, which have no overflow.  Also next week the mirrors will be installed.  I need to install some wall-mounted things (towel racks, toilet paper dispenser, shelves, etc.).

And then it will be done.

Debbie and I spent a lot of time designing that shower.  We both love our showers, but especially me – most days I'm in there twice.  We had several objectives in the design: roomy, not slippery, walk-in, well-lit, lots of water, temperature controlled, and attractive.  Debbie picked the tile, granite, and sinks.  I found the plumbing fixtures, lighting, toilet, and humidity-activated quiet fan.  A small army of craftsmen built all the hard stuff.  The result: I think we met every one of those goals, based on my “shower tests” :)

Here are some photos of the not-quite-finished bathroom.  It's a challenge to photograph this small room, but I tried:

6" wall shower heads

Temperature and flow controls

12" ceiling "rain" shower head

Shower, from entrance

Right-hand vanity sink

Vanity, from bathroom door

Reverend Johnathan Gentry...

Reverend Johnathan Gentry...  My mom passes this along, with a note to watch the Reverend's body language when the hosts ask him about Obama's comments on events in Ferguson. Interesting. I wonder how (or if) the black community's perception of Obama has changed over the past few years?  The full six minute rant is here...

Flying pigs moment...

Flying pigs moment...  Hollering about the militarization of police forces in the U.S. has long been restricted to the ranks of libertarians, of both the kooky and the relatively normal varieties.  Generally speaking (though there are a few exceptions), this issue hasn't been of concern to mainstream politicians, or of the press.

The events in Ferguson over the past week may be changing that.  In evidence of that, I present Glenn Greenwald spouting forth like a libertarian – which he most definitely is not.

I think I see a whole flock of pigs flying over my house right now!

Murders, bad sex, and poison...

Murders, bad sex, and poison...  We're speaking of the cougars of Malibu, of course.  That's the furry variety of cougar, not the other...

Steyer's flop...

Steyer's flop...  Kimberley Strassel explores the abject failure of billionaire Tom Steyer's famous $100 million pledge to force the warmist agenda in this fall's elections.  It's a short read that will warm the cockles of any AGW skeptic's heart...

Yup, that's a recipe for disaster all right...

Yup, that's a recipe for disaster all right...  The GAO has issued its report on the botched Obamacare web site development.  Key sentence in the summary:

CMS incurred significant cost increases, schedule slips, and delayed system functionality for the FFM and data hub systems due primarily to changing requirements that were exacerbated by oversight gaps.

The full report is online here (PDF).

“Changing requirements” is a phrase that strikes fear into the heart of any software developer – though it's more the norm than the exception.  The keys to dealing with requirements change are (a) to have an effective filter that restricts requirements changes to those that are actually vital, and (b) to have a development methodology that will accommodate a reasonable level of requirements thrash.  Both of these are vastly more difficult than most people imagine, most especially for large projects with large teams.  The government is singularly poorly equipped to deal with this, as the government bureaucracy has incentives that lead them to thrash requirements at will, and to mandate instead of manage.  All of the above are exhibit here, on a grand scale.

Our tax dollars, hard at work.  Pardon me while I go exercise my lacrimal glands...

Tsunami...

Tsunami...  In 2004, an undersea tectonic shift caused tsunamis that struck beaches over a large range of the Indian Ocean and southern Pacific Ocean.  Over a quarter million people were killed.  With the widespread availability of video cameras, including those built into smart phones, there were dozens of people who were filming their vacation when the tsunami hit.  This is a collection of those clips, with the first of the eight parts at right.

This isn't for the faint of heart.  And I'm not sure I ever want to go near a beach again!

Gallopin' Gertie...

Gallopin' Gertie...  The Tacoma Narrows bridge failure in 1940 is famous amongst engineers, so much so that a photo of it almost always accompanies text on the consequences of bad engineering.  This collection of motion picture footage is the best I've ever seen of it. 

I had not previously known about the professor who risked his life in an attempt to save a dog (“Tubby”) in the only car abandoned on the bridge.  The professor got a bite on the hand for his trouble, with Tubby refusing to leave the car.  Tubby was the only casualty of the bridge's collapse...

Oopsie!

Oopsie!  Top 20 technological blunders of the 20th century.  It's a pretty good roundup.  It must have been challenging to whittle the list down to a mere 20 :)  Number 11 was completely new to me, which surprises me, since in those years I was avidly following the space program.  The omission of a hyphen in a program played a role in the failure, which is something I wouldn't have understood in 1962...

Curiosity...

Curiosity...  An excellent short documentary on my favorite robotic explorer, currently beavering away on the red planet...

Super-moon...

Super-moon...  Click to embiggen.  Via APOD, of course...

On-demand paper jamming...

On-demand paper jamming...  This cracked me up, and brought back memories of some particularly funny bugs I've run into myself.

My favorite one of these was a stepping motor driver I wrote.  I was annoyed by the noise that the head-positioning stepper in floppy drives made.  The noise was caused by the constant step-rate employed by the simple software drivers generally used.  I wrote one that accelerated and decelerated the stepper instead, and was virtually silent.  However, I had a strange “bug” in my driver.  When I first got it running, it would be quiet in the morning when I got to work – but by the afternoon, it was noisy again.  Not as bad as without my driver, but much noisier than in the morning.  How could my software behave differently in the afternoon than in the morning?

Eventually I figured out what was going on.  Our office was ten degrees or so warmer in the afternoons, and the components of the stepper drive expanded a bit.  This increased the rotational inertia in the system, which in turn reduced the acceleration the stepper could apply.  To make it work right, I had to adjust the speed of my driver non-linearly as the ambient temperature (which, fortunately, the floppy drive measured) varied... 

Humans need not apply...

Humans need not apply...  This short documentary does a good job of explaining how robots are developing.  I think it probably overstates the self-learning abilities being developed, but I stand ready to be proved wrong.  My own guess is that robots will (in the reasonably near term) eliminate a great many jobs that don't require particularly difficult skills, but not more highly skilled jobs.  I'd be very surprised, for example, if doctors were to find themselves on the unemployment lines.

The underlying premise of this little film is that jobs are being threatened, and that's bad.  I agree with the first part, but I'm not so sure that's a bad thing.  The centrality of jobs in our culture is an artifact of our culture, not necessarily a biological (or psychological) imperative.

Readers of science fiction will already be familiar with the many ideas about what happens to people who don't possess skills that robots can't do.  After reading many of these myself, I find the most plausible scenarios involve hordes of entertainment-seeking people with lesser skills, coddled and pampered by smaller hordes of robots.  Some people will find creative outlets, but many will pursue full time the same part-time leisure activities people pursue today, with TV at the head of the list.

I suspect that Mann is starting to understand something...

I suspect that Mann is starting to understand something...  When Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann decided to sue Mark Steyn, Mann was spitting on Superman's cape.  Not only is Steyn defending himself in a spectacularly aggressive way (unlike some others we won't mention) – but Steyn has also counter-sued, and looks to be bringing a world of hurt down on Mann's head.

Good.  Couldn't happen to a more deserving warmist!

Just shut it down!

Just shut it down!  NASA has far outlived its usefulness.  It's now turned into a pork machine, doling out multi-billion dollar useless projects to the home districts of powerful Congressmen.  The few useful things that it continues to fund (mainly the robotic explorers) would be better handled with competitive contracts.  Companies like SpaceX are already providing cheaper, better launch services.

Unionization is the last straw.  It's a bureaucratic weed.  Time for some bureaucratic Round-Up.

This makes me feel...

This makes me feel ... inferior...

Tide pool...

Tide pool...  In Puerto Peñasco, Mexico.  Click to embiggen.  Beautiful, no?  That's a technically challenging photo, with such a huge range of brightness...

Maggie...

Maggie...  Yesterday morning, as I was working out in my yard, I got quite a surprise: a beautiful Springer spaniel with unusual coloring showed up right in front of me.  She was a mixture of brown and black spots on a white background all over her face, and larger patches on the rest of her.  This dog – Maggie on her tag – came running straight through the thicket of roses that line the irrigation canal on the east side of our property.  She was thoroughly wet, apparently having just walked through the canal.  Lots of people in the area let their dogs and cats run loose, so I assumed this was one of my neighbors' dogs, though I hadn't seen her before.

I called to her, and she came right to me, very friendly.  Being dog-deprived up here (our dogs are still all in Jamul), I took the opportunity to enjoy some canine company.  We played together for a while, then I went back to work.  That's when I started to suspect something might be wrong, as my new friend just wouldn't leave my side.  She followed me all over the yard as I went about my work cutting down some pine seedlings that had gotten out of control in bad locations.  Something about her behavior made me think that she might be lost.  So I called her over to me again, and this time I looked at her tags.  That's when I found out her name was Maggie – and that her home address was a mile and a half away, east of the town of Paradise.  I took a closer look at her, and noticed that her pads were not very calloused – she wasn't accustomed to running around long distances – and her coat was mostly combed out and recently trimmed.  This wasn't a dog used to field and stream; she was a pampered pooch.

So I walked over to my truck, Maggie trailing closely behind.  I opened the passenger door, and Maggie jumped right in, looking happy and excited.  I got into the driver's side, and Maggie crawled over the console onto the seat beside me (rather a tight squeeze!), and wouldn't leave.  We drove off, crunched together, on a search for her house.

It took a while to find it, as the street she lived on isn't continuous.  After a bit of exploration, though, I figured out how to get onto the right piece of her street, and finally located her house: a big, beautiful home on a hilltop, in a large lot (20 acres or so), with a commanding view of all of southern Cache Valley.  The yard was beautifully landscaped in a style I associate with Arizona, with mostly plants that have low water needs.  I rang the doorbell, and the lady of the house (Jill) came out with a baby on her hip.  She gave me a funny look, probably because I was drenched with sweat (it was a hot and humid day), and wearing one of my goofy hats.  But when I told her that I had a friend in my truck, she immediately knew that one of their dogs must have gotten out of her kennel.  I opened my truck door, and a very happy Maggie hopped out to see her not-so-happy-with-her owner.  Maggie had dug under her kennel wall, as apparently some of her fellow dogs had done before.  However, Jill told me that they'd never had one wander so far away before – and certainly had never had one cross the highway before.  I'd be pretty unhappy if I knew one of my dogs had done such a thing, and that's exactly how Jill reacted.

I suspect those kennels will be be fixed soon.

Maggie made my day yesterday, both with her company and because I was able to get her safely back home, where she belongs...

Cat trees...

Cat trees...  For the cattery in our new home, we ordered a couple of cat trees from Furwood Forest, a maker in Georgia.  These cat trees are made using branches cut in local forests, with the usual elements of a cat tree worked into them.  Our two arrived yesterday, in perfect condition, packed very nicely.  One of them can be seen at right.  Furwood Forest's owner (Steve Hall) worked with Debbie to come up with designs that could be used even by some of our cats with physical challenges.  The result: attractive, functional cat trees that every one of our furry friends can use. 

The photo was taken in the room that will be our new cattery.  It's a large room (about 600 square feet) in the basement of our new home.  We've floored it with ceramic tile for easy cleaning.  The base will also be of the same tile, but we're waiting for the materials to come in for that.  We also have a cabinet being built just for the cattery, with a huge stainless steel sink, ample storage, and a pull-out cat food bin.  Despite being in the basement, the room is full of light from the seven casement windows around three sides.  Next year, we're going to build an outdoor enclosure that the cats will be able to get to, through a tunnel from the basement, through a casement window, and up to the enclosure.  This will give them outdoor access for three seasons of the year.  We should have some happy cats up here!

The Internet hits another milestone of sorts...

The Internet hits another milestone of sorts...  This is the fifth or sixth time in my own experience that a similar BGP size gate was hit.  It sure seems silly these days to have just 512k route entries pose a RAM limit.  The limit essentially comes from the conjunction of two things: (1) Cisco's dominance (now lessening) of the Internet backbone infrastructure, and (2) the insanely high prices that Cisco charges for RAM in their routers.  All of this is starting to change, though, with the advent of serious competition for ISP-scale IP routing infrastructure...

Yesterday turned out a little differently than planned...

Yesterday turned out a little differently than planned...  I had a list of projects to get to yesterday, a bunch of little jobs that I've just been letting go.  I got a few of them done in the morning, ate some lunch, and then heard a strange noise in my backyard – some serious metallic clattering with a poorly-executed rhythm to it.

Upon investigating, I saw that my neighbor to the north (Tim D.) had someone baling his hay, which had been mowed and raked in the previous few days.  Our weather forecast called for a storm to hit us yesterday afternoon, so I surmised that Tim was eager to get his hay off the field before the sky opened up.  The fellow running the baler would be done in a half hour or so.  Tim was driving his ATV, pulling a flat-bed wagon.  He'd pull up next to a couple of bales, hop off the ATV, pile the bales onto the wagon, then hop back onto his ATV and drive off to the next one.

Well, it was easy to see this was an inefficient operation – poor Tim spent more time getting on and off the ATV than he did moving hay.  Then I started thinking about the rest of the operation – that hay would have to be unloaded into his barn, where it's stacked high.  That would be tough to do as a single-man operation, too.

So I laced up my boots, pulled on a pair of gloves, and headed out to give him a hand.  Tim had some mild objections, said he's been doing this by himself for 3 or 4 million years ... but he didn't chase me off :).  The two of us, working together, had that wagon loaded with 30 bales of hay in about a quarter of the time it would have taken him by himself.  We drove it over to his barn and started unloading it, with each of us hoisting the bales halfway up his stack.  Much easier with two.

As we were unloading that first wagon load, Tim's granddaughter (Taylor) showed up.  She's 17 years old, and in great shape, and she went right to work with us.  Now we had three people – and when we went out to load up the second wagon load, it went faster still.  Taylor drove the ATV, and Tim and I stacked hay.  We took that load back to stack, and now with three people working, we each only had to hoist the bales a third of the way up.  That went much faster than the first wagon load.

When we finished that load, Taylor's dad (Tim's son-in-law) showed up.  At about the same time, Tim called our mutual neighbors (Maria S.) to see if they'd like some hay.  Tim's barn was completely full, and he had more hay than he needed to feed his horses over the winter.  Maria's family have some sheep, and are about to get a milch cow, so they were happy to get some free hay – and they said they'd come right over to help.  Next thing you know, we had 9 people loading the wagon: Tim, myself, Taylor, her dad, Maria, and Maria's four kids.  An army!  We loaded and unloaded that wagon onto Maria's haystack in just a few minutes, then loaded it and unloaded some more hay for Taylor's dad in another few minutes.

And then we were done.

It's been many, many years since I last loaded and unloaded hay – so I was sore and stiff last night (and still a bit stiff this morning).  But I haven't done anything quite so satisfying in quite a while.  I had the satisfaction of helping my cherished neighbor (Tim).  It did storm yesterday afternoon – if we hadn't picked up that hay, it would have blown over half the county, and then been soaked.  Tim wouldn't have been able to get it all up before the storm, working on his own.  There was more satisfaction in working together with people that I liked.  I know Tim and Taylor, but working with Maria's family was a new experience.  Her kids jumped right into the work, laughing and fussing with each other to see who could do the most difficult things the best.  I got to know all of them a lot better during the afternoon's work.

Best of all, though: when we'd finished, and I told Tim I was headed home, he came over, shook my hand, and said “Thanks for the help, my friend.”, with feeling evident in his tone.  That “…my friend.” means a lot to me.  We're fitting into this local community in a way that we never did in California.  These are my kind of people up here, and I'm really happy to find out that the feeling is mutual.

When I got home, I had a big pot of beef stew waiting for me.  Early this morning, I chopped up a nice beef round roast, a big white onion (from Tim's garden!), carrots, potatoes, a green pepper, and some mushrooms.  All of that went into my slow cooker, along with some cream of mushroom soup and a few spices.  That cooked for 9 hours.  Yum!  I'm really starting to like that slow cooker :)

This morning I have about half the jobs from yesterday still left to do.  And in an hour or so, my new brush mower should arrive.  Buh bye, weeds!

Slot machine science...

Slot machine science...  I've read bits and pieces of this before, but this article tells the whole story quite nicely.

The whole phenomenon of slot machines is one of those things (there are many :) that make me wonder whether I'm a member of the same species as most other people (shut up, mom).  I have never had even the tiniest desire to put money into a machine in return for the dubious pleasure of watching it work, and the small chance that I might win more than I spend.  Almost any other way of spending time or money seems more attractive to me.  I know quite a few people who do things that seem utterly crazy to me, such as drive for 10 hours to get to a casino, where they then spend two days shoveling money into a machine, and then come home with (usually substantially) less money than they departed with.  Some of them even delude themselves into believing that they're net winners of the long haul, when clearly they are not.

I just don't get the attraction.  I must be broken...

I want one of these videos of my own dogs...

I want one of these videos of my own dogs...

Riots and looting in Ferguson, Missouri...

Riots and looting in Ferguson, Missouri...  By now I'm sure you've heard about the police shooting of an unarmed black youth, and the resulting riots and looting of stores.  What you probably have not read, however, is that two stores in Ferguson emerged from the riots unscathed and unlooted.  Can you guess why?

Who you gonna believe?

Who you gonna believe – warmists or your lying instruments?

“...if you know what's best for you, you'll think twice before suggesting seven-year-old Aussie citizens waving around severed heads might be indicative of broader, er, assimilation issues within, ah, certain communities, or anything like that.”

“...if you know what's best for you, you'll think twice before suggesting seven-year-old Aussie citizens waving around severed heads might be indicative of broader, er, assimilation issues within, ah, certain communities, or anything like that.”  That's the inimitable Mark Steyn, reacting to the shocking photo at right.  If you haven't seen this before, the original unretouched photo was snapped by a proud dad, showing off his seven year old son as he lofts the head of decapitated Syrian soldier.  The kid was born and raised in Australia, but his dad took him to the Middle East to join ISIS.

The multicultural dogma of cultural equivalence is indefensible by any rational argument, and the photo above is a good piece of evidence for that.  Do you really thing a culture that celebrates children lofting decapitated heads is as worthy as, say, the culture of modern-day Scientologists?  Personally I have no difficulty ranking the two cultures – one of them would love to kill me, the other just wants my money.  The evidence against the notion of cultural equivalence has been strong and hard to argue with since the dawn of the human race, and yet the multi-cultis persist in their nonsense, and drag the rest of us along with them towards doom. 

I know!  Let's give the multi-cultis their own island, and they can do what they want.  There are a lot of multi-cultis, though, so we'll need a big island.  Got it!  Let's give 'em Australia – there are already plenty of multi-cultis there, so we won't have to transport quite so many...

Gender bias...

Gender bias...  Take a look at the chart at right (via Carpe Diem).  Of the ten most commonly conferred bachelor's degrees:

• 7 are predominantly conferred to women
• 1 is predominantly conferred to men
• 2 are conferred roughly equally to men and women

The one degree dominated by men is engineering, which comports with my own experience. 

Are these freely made choices by the student entering school?  Or are they determined by cultural context and expectations?  I suspect the former, though these days that's not a politically correct position to take...