(False?) Crocus, up close and personal...

(False?) Crocus, up close and personal...  The left-hand photo below shows a close-up of the flower's petal, complete with bugs so small I couldn't see them with my naked eye.  The entire flower was heavily populated with a variety of tiny bugs, all of similar size.  As I carried the flower inside, I had no idea it was a insect urban area!  The other two photos show views of the stamens.  The right-hand photo was taken at 60x magnification, and you can just make out the tiny yellow pollen grains...

“This has been a mind-changing experience for me...”

“This has been a mind-changing experience for me...”  Easy prediction: Debbie will love this video :)  Via friend, reader, and former colleague Simon M...

Invisible ink...

Invisible ink...  A history...

Don't mess with old ladies!

Don't mess with old ladies!  Via my mom:

A mature lady gets pulls over for speeding...

Older Woman: Is there a problem, Officer?

Traffic Cop: Yes ma'am, I'm afraid you were speeding.

Older Woman: Oh, I see.

Traffic Cop: Can I see your license please?

Older Woman: Well, I would give it to you but I don't have one.

Traffic Cop: Don't have one?

Older Woman: No. I lost it 4 years ago for drunk driving.

Traffic Cop: I see...Can I see your vehicle registration papers please.

Older Woman: I can't do that.

Traffic Cop: Why not?

Older Woman: I stole this car.

Traffic Cop: Stole it?

Older Woman: Yes, and I killed and hacked up the owner.

Traffic Cop: You what!?

Older Woman: His body parts are in plastic bags in the trunk if you want to see.

The traffic cop looks at the woman and slowly backs away to his car while calling for back up. Within minutes 5 police cars circle the car. A senior officer slowly approaches the car, clasping his half drawn gun.

Officer 2: Ma'am, could you step out of your vehicle please! The woman steps out of her vehicle.

Older woman: Is there a problem sir?

Officer 2: My colleague here tells me that you have stolen this car and murdered the owner.

Older Woman: Murdered the owner? Are you serious?!

Officer 2: Yes, could you please open the trunk of your car, please. The woman opens the trunk, revealing nothing but an empty trunk.

Officer 2: Is this your car, ma'am?

Older Woman: Yes, here are the registration papers. The traffic cop is quite stunned.

Officer 2: My colleague claims that you do not have a driving license. The woman digs into her handbag and pulls out a clutch purse and hands it to the officer. The officer examines the license quizzically.

Officer 2: Thank you ma'am, but I am puzzled, as I was told by my officer here that you didn't have a license, that you stole this car, and that you murdered and hacked up the owner!

Older Woman: Bet the lying bastard told you I was speeding, too!

When your pet discovers it's going to the vet...

When your pet discovers it's going to the vet...  My mom sent me a collection of these; the one at right is my favorite.  That expression is exactly what Miki (one of our field spaniels) has when we park outside the vet's office...

Photosynthesis 2.0?

Photosynthesis 2.0?  Scientists appear to be on the verge of figuring out a way to boost crop plants' photosynthetic efficiency by 25% or more.  Should they?  It's a tough call, with good arguments both pro and con...

Traveler captures train/truck collision...

Traveler captures train/truck collision...  You'll want to watch this full-screen.

Nobody was hurt, which is amazing, as I'm sure you'll agree after you watch this.  The “smoke” the narrating woman refers to is actually evaporating liquid argon – harmless unless it displaced all the oxygen where you were breathing, which is very unlikely outdoors...

Edgar Allan Poe's mysterious death...

Edgar Allan Poe's mysterious death...  I hadn't realized it was quite this mysterious!

Doubts about object-oriented programming (OOP)...

Doubts about object-oriented programming (OOP)...  I read a long article by Lawrence Krubner this morning.  I have no idea who Lawrence is, but I found his article quite fascinating, and some of his points resonated strongly with me.

My perspective on OOP is a little different than Lawrence's, and in fact probably a little different than the vast majority of today's programmers.  This difference in perspective comes about mainly from my age (I'm 62) and the fact that I never had any formal education in computer science or programming – I'm entirely self-taught.

The age matters because I started programming (in '73) before OOP was adopted by the programming community.  In fact, its predecessor (“structured programming”) was just then being introduced.  The most common form of program architecture then was what we'd call “spaghetti code” today – horrifying, hard to understand, and even harder to maintain.  Furthermore, I learned to program in assembly languages, which (back then, at least) contained absolutely no support for even structured programming, much less OOP.  So I've experienced three “normal” regimes in my career: spaghetti code, structured programming, and OOP.  I've written code in well over 100 programming languages, and production code in at least 50.  I've also played around with functional programming, though much less extensively.  I've written quite a bit in Forth (a language that's hard to categorize) and one large project in Prolog (which also doesn't fit easily into a category).

The lack of education matters because I have very little exposure to the theory of programming languages, or architectures for that matter.  What little I have learned is entirely from real world experience (maintaining existing software and creating new software), and not at all from anyone's idea of what the “right” way to do something is.  I've read quite a few books about the theory of programming, but always after the fact, in an effort to understand something new that I've run across.  In many, many conversations with other software engineers this difference in my education manifested itself – generally because my conversational partner would say something that sounded like utter gobbledegook to me, and I'd have to have them explain it to me in language that I could understand.  My most intense experience like that occurred in the '90s, in the course of conversations with two particular engineers: Julia and Mike.  They spouted OOP jargon I'd never heard before at a prodigious rate, and I had to do a lot of reading and parsing of their utterances to have a prayer of understanding what they were saying.

So my perspective is different than most.  So is my conclusion about programming theory.

I don't think it matters.  Or, to say it another way, I don't think it is substantially easier or more likely that understandable, maintainable code will be written as spaghetti code, structured programming, or OOP.  The vast majority of programmers will write opaque, unmaintainable crap no matter what programming model they're using.

I say this with some confidence, after more than 40 years of working with quite a few substantial bodies of code.  There isn't a single one of them that I can point to as particularly understandable or maintainable.  There are no significant differences in the spaghetti code, structured code, or OOP.  It's all equally bad.

That's not to say that I've never, ever seen good code.  I have.  I like to think that I've produced some of it.  But that good code is always in relatively small chunks – a few thousand lines at a time, at most.  Most of the large bodies of code I've worked with have a few pieces like this, like polished jewels stuck in a cow flop.

So I think Lawrence is right: OOP is crap.  But so are the alternatives :)  I think the only thing that matters is how good the programmer is, and whether he or she did the work with craftsman-like care...

“...the lamp of the West still shines brightly in Asia.”

“...the lamp of the West still shines brightly in Asia.”  That's the concluding phrase of Bret Stephens' excellent piece in today's Wall Street Journal about the current struggle in Hong Kong.  He speaks directly to one of my pet peeves: the overwhelmingly admiring tones used by America's pundits and lamestream media when speaking of mainland China...

Barn: all trussed up and nowhere to go!

Barn: all trussed up and nowhere to go!  All the trusses on the sides of the barn are up, and they've started on the fascia and the boards that keep the trusses from twisting.  I'm amazed how quickly they could put all those trusses up.  It was a three man team for most of the day (four briefly), and they worked together like a choreographed dance team.  They may get to the center set of trusses as early as tomorrow.  Once those are up, it's going to look like a barn!

Some praiseworthy customer service...

Some praiseworthy customer service...  Last week I installed a lighted magnifying mirror for Debbie, in our new bathroom.  All went well until I got to the very last step: attaching the mirror to to the mounting bracket.  There should have been three teensy little machine screws to attach it, but there were only two.  Worse: the screws were an oddball metric size, and were finished to match the mirror – there's no way I'd find one in a hardware store.

Dang.

So I made the dreaded call to Zadro's customer service number.  If Zadro's was a Utah company, I wouldn't be dreading it – as getting good service here is almost a certainty.  But Zadro's is in Huntington Beach, California – so there was no telling what I'd run into.  Hence the dread.

But as you can guess from the intro, I was in for a pleasant surprise.  First, a nice young lady took my report, then said she'd get a replacement right out to me.  She took my address and promised it would go out right away.  That was this past Friday.  In this morning's mail was an envelope from Zadro's, and in it was the promised part.  The right part, too!  Five minutes later, the mirror installation was complete.  It's a very nice mirror

Kudos, Zadro's, for a fine example of the right way to do customer service...

Fun with microscopes...

Fun with microscopes...  I've long wanted a decent low-powered microscope, the kind with stereo eyepieces, a camera port, and 2x to 100x power.  I started watching out for a good deal on one, and just last week one popped up on Amazon: an AmScope trinocular model, with powers from 3.5x to 120x – almost exactly what I wanted, and at a great price.  So I got it.

Just now I was playing around with the camera option, and for your delectation I have three photos for you.  The first two are of a fly zapped by our high-voltage, thunderclap-producing fly zapper.  When I first picked this guy up, there was still a little smoke swirling up from it, and various parts are missing.  But ... he's not moving any more :)  The last photo is a sliver of oak flooring trimmed off when the flooring guys were installing our floor.  The characteristic oak pores (this is end on) look like craters on the moon...

Barn: the trusses begin...

Barn: the trusses begin...  The builders arrived bright and early this morning, and went right to work on the trusses that go on either side of our barn.  One guy put up hangers (left photo below) for the inside end of the trusses (the end closest to me when I made the right photo below, showing theses trusses).

Teak shower bench...

Teak shower bench ... with a dumb design flaw.  But it's fixed now!

We were originally planning to have a granite shower seat in one corner of our new shower.  However, after doing some reading on the challenges with granite – and its annoying habit of freezing your tushy off if you sit on it – I decided against that.  But we still wanted a seat in our shower.  I remembered a visit we once made to Ventana, on California's Big Sur coast, and how much we liked the shower there.  It was all rock, with a teak bench – so I started looking and found the one above.  Except for one little problem, I love that bench.

You can see the problem in the left-hand photo below.  The cross-members that hold the seat on exactly match two of the rows of square holes (you can see one of these: the second row of holes from the top) – and when I take a shower, they fill up with water.  That water then just sits there for hours, until it soaks into the wood.  That's not good for the long-term condition of the bench.

Upon investigating, I discovered that the edge of the cross-member, on the outside edge (top in the photos) extended just 1/10" or less past the edge of the hole.  That gave me an opportunity to drill some nearly hidden short holes at a 45° angle to provide a drain.  This proved to be very easy to do (right hand photo below), and in short order I had the problem fixed.  Yay!

Commute times...

Commute times ... by zip code, on an interactive map.  This map is full of surprises for me, but I think I figured out that most of the surprises are bedroom communities with a long commute to where the jobs are...

When I first listened to this video...

When I first listened to this video ... I thought it must be a hoax.  No way could a human vocal tract do this!  But then I did a little research, and there is considerable material out there on the phenomenon of polyphonic singing (look toward the bottom of this article, or these search results).

Speechless, I am...

Top 10 giving states...

Top 10 giving states...  This is charity as a percentage of income:

Here are the top 10 most generous states:

1. Utah: 6.6 percent giving rate
2. Mississippi: 5.0 percent
3. Alabama: 4.8 percent
4. Tennessee: 4.5 percent
5. Georgia: 4.2 percent
6. South Carolina: 4.1 percent
7. Idaho: 4.0 percent
8. Oklahoma: 3.9 percent
9. Arkansas: 3.9 percent
10. North Carolina: 3.6 percent

The original article I spotted this in doesn't mention it, but there's also a strong correlation between generosity in charity and which presidential candidate the state voted for in 2012.  Follow the first link to see that.  I'll bet you can guess how this works out :)

Some pithy posters...

Some pithy posters...  Via reader Jim M.:

Interesting political development...

Interesting political development...  In the race for the Kansas senate, an independent (Greg Orman) is substantially leading the incumbent (Pat Roberts).  Roberts is Republican in a state that hasn't elected a Democrat for senator for a long, long time – and the conventional wisdom was that he was a shoe-in for this election cycle.

What I find interesting about this is that Orman appears to be genuinely independent: a politician without any party affiliation, affection, or even influence.  He's got his own views on a wide variety of topics, and they don't fit well with either party's platform.  He's a wealthy businessman, and self-funding (so doesn't need any party money).  His positions are more in conflict with my own than in agreement, but he does appear to be more interested in solving problems than in any particular ideology. 

This strikes me as much closer to the Founding Father's ideas about “citizen government” than the party system we have today.  I'm not sure what a Senate full of a diverse group of truly independent thinkers would be like, but I'm pretty sure I'd like it better than the current mess.

But then, I guess that's a pretty low bar, isn't it?

Curiosity aids learning...

Curiosity aids learning...  At first I thought this article was just confirming the obvious: that curiosity motivates people to learn.  Well, duh!  But they're actually showing something more: that learning while curious leads to greater retention.  There's some speculation about why that should be, but it's just speculation based on blood flow observed in various sections of the brain.  That's a widely used technique, but nobody is really sure that's any more accurate or informative than phrenology...

Cabinets work ever so much better...

Cabinets work ever so much better ... when the drawers and doors have handles!  We had our island cabinet (at right) refinished to match our kitchen color scheme.  The original cabinet was cherry, or possibly maple stained cherry color: a bright red that clashed with both the kitchen as we bought it, and the kitchen as we remodeled it :)  As if that wasn't bad enough, the drawer pulls and cabinet knobs were horrible, cheap things that were different than all the other cabinet hardware in the kitchen.

So I located a source for “basket” handles that match the rest of our kitchen cabinet hardware.  These aren't the handles we'd have chosen, but they're ok – and for now it's simpler to match them than to try to replace them.  Naturally the holes for the new hardware didn't match the holes for the old hardware – so when the cabinet was refinished, we had them fill in the old holes for us, with plastic wood.

For a few weeks now, I've had a box full of cabinet handles that needed to be installed.  Today was a good day for it :)

The doors were easy for me to decide where to mount the handles: I just matched what the rest of the cabinets did.  For the drawers, it's a little more complicated.  I discovered (with a little googling) that there are three schools of thought about how high to mount drawer pulls:

1. Find the shortest (height-wise) drawer and center its pull – then mount all the rest of the pulls the same distance down from the top of the drawer.
2. Mount each drawer's pull vertically in the center of the drawer.
3. Mount each drawer's pull about one third of the drawer's height from the top.

Who knew that mounting a damned handle could be so complicated?  I looked at pictures of all three styles, and they all looked fine to me.  Then it occurred to me to see what our cabinet maker did, in our bathroom vanity and in the cattery.  He chose method number 1, so I copied him :)

To reduce the chance of making an ugly mistake (by drilling a hole in the wrong place), I built a couple of simple jigs (photo at right).  The left hand one is for the drawer pulls, the right hand one for the door handles.  Each jig has two holes in it, in exactly the right place for the screws that hold the handles on.  All I had to do for each drawer and door was to mark where the center of the handle would be; the jig did all the rest.  I just clamped the jig into position for each drawer and door, drilled the two holes, and installed the handle.  Eleven jig positionings, twenty two holes, and twenty two screws later, it's all done – and without any embarrassing mistakes :)

We are flagpole-ready!

We are flagpole-ready!  Now we just need the flagpole!!  This little project got delayed by the 2.5" of rain we had earlier in the week.  The rain hit while the concrete was curing (that's actually good!) and I had large piles of the excavated soil next to the concrete.  The rain turned the soil into glop that formed itself all around the underlying grass – and then turned into something approaching the hardness of concrete when it dried out.  It took me about eight hours of hard work with a garden rake to break up all that hardened clay and get it up and out of there.  That'll learn me – if I ever do something like this again, I'm putting a piece of plastic under the dirt pile!

You can see some roughly laid sod around the concrete.  I'm not concerned with that, because in the spring I'm going to do something that my brother Scott thought up: plant red, white, and blue clematis around the concrete and train it up a to-be-designed arbor.  That will not only add some nice color to the otherwise plain green grass, it will also hide the concrete – and the lights I'm planning to put there (to illuminate the flag at night)...

Blooming right now...

Blooming right now ... in our front yard.  I think they're very confused crocuses (croci?); my mom thinks there some kind of fake crocus.  Whatever they are, they're a welcome spot of color this time of year!

Workforce participation down...

Workforce participation down...  In an article primarily about other things, I ran across the graph at right (click to embiggen).  It's a graph of “workforce participation” for men, from 1948 through today.  Workforce participation is one of those rare, raw, unadjusted numbers provided by the government – it's simply the percentage of all men who are employed (whether full- or part-time).  There are no adjustments, as there are with the unemployment numbers, for things like people who have given up looking for a job.

Elsewhere I have read that the workforce participation rate is highly correlated with growth in GDP.  This makes intuitive sense, as you'd expect that if more people are working, they'd produce more.  The converse must also be true: if there are less people working, then they'd produce less – and the GDP growth rate would be slower.

I entered the workforce in the late '60s, when the workforce participation rate for men was around 78%.  Today it's around 65%.  Given that there are about 158 million men in the U.S. today, the difference between 78% and 65% is about 21 million men.  If the workforce participation rate was still 78% today, there would be about 21 million more men working.  That's an astonishingly large number.

Why has the workforce participation rate gone down?  I can think of several contributing factors, but I really have no idea about their relative size:

• More women are in the workforce today (proportionally), and surely some of them have displaced men.
• The rise of the welfare state has reduced the incentive (and need) to be employed.
• More men (proportionally) are going to college, and are therefore entering the workforce later.
• Men are living longer after retirement, when they are not part of the workforce.
• Possibly there is some measurement error, with older data not including illegal or migratory immigrants.

“…it’s going to do more harm than good...”

“…it’s going to do more harm than good...”  A medical student takes on the uber-quack Dr. Oz...

Bardabunga Volcano...

Bardabunga Volcano...

My mom sends me things...

My mom sends me things...  Most recently this one, with the comment “This observation should have been made eons ago!”

Thought from the Greatest Living Scottish Thinker – Billy Connolly:

“If women are so bloody perfect at multitasking, how come they can't have a headache and sex at the same time?”

My mom's ancestors were Scots...

Utah isn't much different ...

Utah isn't much different ... especially near the Idaho border where I live.  Sent along by friend, former colleague, and Idaho mogul-of-everything Doug S., who says:

Sure it's a juvenile internet meme. But I can say in talking with an Ada County (Boise) Deputy friend of mine, there are 'registered' 9 guns for every individual in the State of Idaho and >26% of the population have a CCW (Concealed carry) permits ... of course no measure of us that actually carry...

Which all equates to us here dealing with bike thefts and kids breaking into unlocked cars ... Oh the humanity... Now if only we could get rid of those troublesome plastic bags...  Heh!

Anyone who owns a border collie ...

Anyone who owns a border collie ... will look at this video and say “Of course!  What else would you expect?”

Then and now...

Then and now...  Here's a very cool site forwarded to me by Jim and Cathy J.  The site shows photographs from WWII that you can fade into photographs of the same exact place as it appears today.  There are no directions on it, but here's how to use it:

When you first go to the site, you'll see a WWII photograph of Weymouth harbor, in England.  You can scroll up and down to see more photos.  If you click on any photo, it will fade gradually into a photo of the same spot, taken recently.  Clicking again will put it back to WWII.  You can also point to any photo, click and hold down, then "swipe" from left-to-right to fade into the modern photo, or right-to-left to fade into the WWII photo.  Very nicely done!

Odd bump on a Mars rock...

Odd bump on a Mars rock...  I spotted this in the latest download of Curiosity photos.  It appears to have been brushed off (with Curiosity's handy-dandy rotating rock brush).  I've no idea what it is, and I don't see any commentary on the Curiosity site about it yet...

3D model of Comet 67P...

3D model of Comet 67P...  This model was inferred from the images taken by the Rosetta robotic explorer.  Click to embiggen...

You don't want to meet this guy in a dark alley...

You don't want to meet this guy in a dark alley ... 'cause he beats the living crap out of anything that comes along.  It's a steamer duck, and you should be very afraid...

Ten recipes that even I can't screw up...

Ten recipes that even I can't screw up...  So promises Megan McArdle, the world's tallest female econoblogger, who also happens to be a culinary geekette.  Some of these recipes look pretty darned good...

The President...

The President...  No, I don't mean Obama – I mean the giant sequoia in the photo at right (click to embiggen).  That tree is 247 feet high, and is part of a grove.  There is no place one can stand to take a photo like this, so the National Geographic folks took hundreds of photos of different pieces of the tree, then picked 127 of them to stitch together to show what you see here.  Note the tiny little person at the bottom – that will give you a sense of just how big this monster tree is...

Barn: delays and trusses arrived...

Barn: delays and trusses arrived...  This week has seen little work done on the barn, mainly because of rain and mud.  Over the past weekend and into the early week, we had intermittent rain and overcast days (so no drying out).  The storm total was well over 2 inches of rain, and the fields are gloppy muddy.  Yesterday (Friday) was the first entire day that we had sunshine, clear skies, and low humidity, so the drying process could begin.  Hopefully by Monday conditions will be good again.

The builders did get some work done this week: they sheathed the last wall on the second floor, and did some layout work in anticipation of the arrival of the factory-built trusses.  These trusses were engineered for this building, and built in a factory near Salt Lake City.  Yesterday afternoon the truck with our piles of trusses arrived – but unloading that truck proved much more challenging than we expected.

The challenge came from the combination of mud and subtle topology.  The access road through our property to the barn is very slightly lower in elevation (about 8") in a spot near the paved road.  In the middle photo below, you can see the truss delivery truck sitting in exactly this spot.  Between where I stood to take that photo, and the spot where the truck is, there is a very gentle slope – nearly imperceptible to the eye.  In that low spot, naturally, the rainwater collected into a nice big mud-puddle.  And the surface of the road was nice and muddy – and as slick as ice.  When the truck backed in off the paved road, it got stuck in that low spot – if it tried to go forward or backward, it could only move a few feet before its tires started spinning futilely.  Our builder saved the day by using his loader to scoop up about a cubic yard of gravel (from a pile scavenged from our driveway) and scattering it under the wheels of the truck.  With that assistance, the truck was able to back in to deliver our trusses (last photo), and zipped right back out to the paved road.  The driver looked quite relieved at this bit of success :)

The weather has also kept me from working outside.  My flagpole base still needs a bit of work, restoring the soil and turf around the giant concrete cube I now have in my back yard.  I've been working mostly indoors, putting up the last of the fixtures in our bathroom (meaning that I spent a lot of time drilling holes through porcelain tiles).  The paving crew and the roofers were both delayed, most likely at least through the middle of next week.  Our flagpole didn't arrive on time, though I don't know if that's because of the weather or for some other reason.  And the rock for our fireplace was also delayed, as their production was delayed by the rain...

“That's not 'armed', that's 'dressed', you island-dwelling herbivore!”

“That's not 'armed', that's 'dressed', you island-dwelling herbivore!”  So says Tam, upon discovering that the tiny Spyderco knife at right is what the recent White House intruder (who is from Texas) was “armed” with.  It's a fine rant...

Interesting political ad...

Interesting political ad...  The speaker is Elbert Guillory, a state Senator from Louisiana.  Guillory is a Republican today, but has been a Democrat in the past.  The ad's message, basically, is “Don’t vote for Mary Landrieu, because she hasn’t kept her promise to help blacks in Louisiana.” 

What makes this most interesting is that it soberly makes a point that many conservatives have made: Democrats (like Mary Landrieu) take black votes for granted, because no matter how poorly the Democrats perform, blacks overwhelmingly vote for them.  Guillory urges black voters to reconsider that reflexive support for Democrats.

Landrieu is currently lagging behind her Republican challenger in the polls.  Black voters could make or break her, so this ad is well-targeted.  It will be interesting to see if the ad appears to make any difference in the choices black voters make...

Travel bans and involuntary travelers' quarantines...

Travel bans and involuntary travelers' quarantines...  Given the news and fear of Ebola recently, it's entirely predictable that there would be a rash of support for what seems like an “easy fix”, or at least, as sensible precaution: outright bans of travel to and from the three countries with significant Ebola outbreaks, and authority for the CDC to involuntarily quarantine travelers they suspect might be carriers.  Articles like this one abound.

There are significant problems with these approaches though, starting with the fact that they are completely ineffective.  “What?”, say ye – how can a ban on travel from, say, Liberia be ineffective? 

Let's start with this little inconvenient fact: there is no direct air travel between Liberia and the United States.  Anyone who wants to travel from Liberia to the United States must change planes (and usually airlines).  Most frequently this change occurs in Europe (it was Brussels for Thomas Duncan), but it could also happen in South Africa, India, or a number of other countries.  When a passenger arrives in the United States from (say) London, we don't know whether his travels originated in England, Germany, Russia, Liberia, Australia, or Japan.  You can't tell, and there are no records, unless that traveler happened to use the same airline for all the legs of his trip – and you can't even tell that.  The only travel ban that would actually work would be to close our borders to all travelers other than those explicitly tested for Ebola and found clear.  Can you imagine the impact such a total travel ban would have on the country?

Well, then, ok – how about the involuntary quarantine bit?  Surely that would help?  Consider this: Thomas Duncan was asymptomatic when he entered the U.S.  He would not have been quarantined unless it was by accident.  Then consider this: the vast majority of people quarantined under such a regime would be false positives – that is, they would be quarantined because (say) they had a high temperature, but the vast majority would have a high temperature for some reason other than Ebola.  They might have a cold, or the flu, or any one of hundreds of other illnesses – but not Ebola.  The situation would be different if there was some quick test for Ebola that could be administered at the airport – but there is no such quick test.  Millions of airline passengers would be greatly inconvenienced, and very few actual Ebola patients would be detected.  Is that a good idea?  I think not.  It smacks of security theater.

Expending effort and attention to ineffective policies like this is a waste of time and money that could be much better spent on efforts that actually work – like those currently taking place in Texas to contain the potential outbreak resulting from Thomas Duncan's unfortunate choice to travel here knowing that he'd had contact with an Ebola victim...

I want this in my front yard!

I want this in my front yard!

“What does it say about a great nation when its most reliable truth tellers are desperate people?”

“What does it say about a great nation when its most reliable truth tellers are desperate people?” Peggy Noonan explores something that's been bothering me for several years now.  I've been thinking of it as the arrogance of the bureaucrats – they no longer seem to think that they work for us (the citizens of the United States), but rather that they suffer our presence when they have to.  The smug mug of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen (at right) is the absolute epitome of this phenomenon.  Peggy has a slightly different angle:

We're all used to a certain amount of doublespeak and bureaucratese in government hearings. That's as old as forever. But in the past year of listening to testimony from government officials, there is something different about the boredom and indifference with which government testifiers skirt, dodge and withhold the truth. They don't seem furtive or defensive; they are not in the least afraid. They speak always with a certain carefulness — they are lawyered up — but they have no evident fear of looking evasive. They really don't care what you think of them. They're running the show and if you don't like it, too bad.

And all this is a new bureaucratic style on the national level. During Watergate those hauled in and grilled by Congress were nervous. In Iran-Contra, Ollie North was in turn stoic, defiant and unafraid to make an appeal to the public. But commissioners and department heads now—they really think they're in charge. They don't bother to fake anxiety about public opinion. They care only about personal legal exposure. They do not fear public wrath.

All this became apparent in the past year's IRS hearings, and was pronounced in Tuesday's Secret Service hearings.

Julia Pierson, the director, did not seem at all preoccupied with what you thought of her. She was impassive, generally unresponsive and unforthcoming. She didn't bother to show spirit or fiery commitment. She was the lifeless expression of consultant-guided anti-truth.

No question was answered straight and simple. Everything was convoluted and involved extraneous data, so that listeners couldn't follow the answer and by the end couldn't remember the question. I am certain government witnesses do this deliberately — the rounded words, long sentences that collapse, the bureaucratic drone — so reporters will fall asleep and fail to file. An hour in Tuesday I expected the TV camera to slowly slide toward the ceiling, with the screen covered in a cameraman's drool...

Read the whole thing...

Time for a climate change change!

Time for a climate change change!  If you're a climatologist, and your grant money depends on continued fear of global warming, then the now 18 year long “hiatus” in actual, measurable warning poses a bit of a grant application challenge for you.  If there's no actual global warming, the money is going to dry up.  What to do?  Why, you change the problem, of course!

Out: measuring temperature to monitor global warming.  In: measuring anything else that's still changing in a way that can be cast as scary as a proxy for the non-existent global warming!

Things I never expected to read...

Things I never expected to read...   I came across a link to a Facebook post by Chris Cox, the Chief Product Officer at Facebook.  The post, which greatly surprised me, begins like this:

I want to apologize to the affected community of drag queens, drag kings, transgender, and extensive community of our friends, neighbors, and members of the LGBT community for the hardship that we've put you through in dealing with your Facebook accounts over the past few weeks. 

That's an official statement from a top-level executive of one of the world's most valuable companies.  My surprise probably reflects nothing so much as my age.  The world sure has changed a lot in this man's lifetime...

CP/M source code released...

CP/M source code released...  I cut my systems programming (such as it was) teeth on CP/M, back in the '70s.  In the late '70s I actually published a highly configurable CP/M BIOS as a freebie.  You could say it was open source before anyone was calling it that.  I also worked with CP/M's publisher (Digital Research, founded by Gary Kildall) on the multi-user sequel (MP/M), which was pretty much a flop in the market, though quite interesting technically.

To geeks of a certain age...

To geeks of a certain age ... the photo at right will bring back memories of the early days of microcomputers (the '70s and early '80s).  Ah, those amber monochrome monitors, with their low resolution, pincushion distortion, ozone smell, phosphor burnout, and character mode only! 

Except this isn't a photo of an ancient monitor.  It's a screenshot from an app that emulates such a monitor.

One hardly knows what to say.  Except, of course, that some people have way too much time on their hands...

ObamaCare's anti-innovation effect...

ObamaCare's anti-innovation effect...  I've written about this several times, especially during the run-up to ObamaCare's approval.  Now we're starting to see it actually happen, and this is awful news for the future of medicine...

How do we feel that something is wet?

How do we feel that something is wet?  I always assumed that our skin had sensors of some sort that directly felt it, but that turns out to be wrong.  Instead, we infer wetness from a variety of other sensors – and experience...

It's the HMS Erebus!

It's the HMS Erebus!  I think it would be wonderful if they raised it...

ISIS is caused by...

ISIS is caused by ... climate change!  In a just world, this professor would be unemployed about 10 minutes after he said something like this.  In our real world, he'll probably be promoted...

McIntyre is hitting a little harder recently...

McIntyre is hitting a little harder recently ... and in the process, he's providing fodder for Mark Steyn in his legal battle against Dr. FraudPants...  See here, here, and here for some recent examples of this unfair fight: McIntyre vs. The Mann.  If he wasn't such a putz, I'd almost feel sorry for Mann, as McIntyre is disproportionately armed, intellect-wise...

75 beautiful photos...

75 beautiful photos...  At right is one example.  There's really no theme to the entries in this collection, other than that they're gorgeous...

Motivating frost...

Motivating frost...  There's a chore I've been putting off for weeks that last night's frost motivated me to do this morning: getting the heater in our “water shed” going.  The water shed is a small building (about 300 square feet) whose main purpose is to house our water pump and pressure tank.  This pump pulls from an underground cistern just a few feet outside the water shed, and pushes into a 200 gallon pressure tank.  The pressure tank and associated plumbing is all above ground, and therefore is susceptible to freezing.  That's why there's a heater in there. 

The heater is an old-fashioned standing pilot light model.  The former owners were in the habit of shutting off the gas supply for the heater every spring.  This saved them $5/month for the separate meter on the water shed.  Then every fall they'd get the gas turned back on and relight the pilot.  We bought the place after they'd shut off the gas already, so I had it turned back on last month.  This morning I downloaded the manual for the heater and went out to light it off.  That turned out to be more challenging than I expected, as the little sliding door that looks like a port to light the pilot is no such thing!  Instead, as I discovered the hard way (it's not covered in the manual), you have to take off the bottom of the heater (many little sheet metal screws) to get to it.  Even then it's a challenge to get a lighter up to the pilot.  I finally managed to get it lit, and cycled the thermostat a few times to make sure it was all working correctly.  Hopefully this will keep the pressure tank from freezing over the winter!

Frosty morning!

Frosty morning!  When the sun came up and I could see my yard, what do you suppose I saw?  A thick coating of white frost!  Oh my!!

Ten paradoxes...

Ten paradoxes...  Well, they're not really all paradoxes, but they are all interesting things to scratch your brain with...

Congratulations, MOM!

Congratulations, MOM!  India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) returns its first photos of the entire disc of Mars.  Very impressive for the first try of the Indian Space Resource Organization (ISRO), and on a shoestring budget to boot!

Weather, and road trip...

Weather, and road trip...  Our forecast for today had a “chance of rain” – and we won the lottery.  So far today my rain gauge is showing two tenths of an inch, and there's a line of intense squalls bearing down on us – maybe ten minutes away – as I write this.  The rain was enough to put the kibosh on both the driveway paving work and the barn building work.  Dang!

On the other hand, another craftsman showed up today.  This was in response to my reporting a problem with our shower grout on Friday.  The fellow who did the tile work showed up, took one look at the problem I reported, and immediately went to work to repair it – no push back, no guff, no debate: just “Yup, that sure does need to be fixed!” 

I've had enough experience with this sort of thing up here in Paradise now that I've come to expect that workers of all types will unhesitatingly take responsibility for any problem that arises.  I've recently seen this with the two guys (Terry and Jerry) who did the grading work on our driveway here.  The care that they took to get the slopes correctly is way beyond what I'd expect.  One of them even drove out here after he saw a rain squall pass over Paradise, so he could see how the rain water drained off the road base – that's better even than their instrumentation.  A few decades of experience in California led me not to expect this kind of care in contracted work, and it's taking a while to undo that.

This morning I took a trip up to Blackfoot, Idaho, to see the vendor of reclaimed wood there.  These are the same folks (Trestlewood) that supplied our mantel, and we're so happy with it that we decided to get another piece of reclaimed wood from them.  This piece will fit up against our kitchen's ceiling, and the lights for the island will hang from it.  I went up there this morning to walk around their (enormous) yard full of wood to choose a piece.  I found an oddly-shaped hand-hewn piece of wood that I just loved.  The folks at Trestlewood aren't sure what the species is, but they suspect it's a species of birch, or possibly even a lighter-than-usual cherry.  Whatever it is, it's a (very) hard wood, and the chunk we're getting is about 6' long, 2' wide, and 8" thick.  I'm guessing it weighs about 140 pounds, but it's wet at the moment; it will lighten up a bit after it's dried and finished.  The ax and adze marks left on it are quite pronounced; this piece was used as a timber and was never finished in any way.  As with our mantle, the folks at Trestlewood are going to do the finishing for us.  I can hardly wait to see the result!

Corn mazes are very popular up here in Utah...

Corn mazes are very popular up here in Utah...  But I haven't seen one like this :)  Via my brother Mark...

Bitcoin mining by hand ...

Bitcoin mining by hand ... isn't very practical :)  But it's interesting, in a geeky way...

Lasers and jello ...

Lasers and jello ... and a good geekly puzzle!

We are slowly winning the war against cancer...

We are slowly winning the war against cancer...  Oh, faster, please!

Strange rocks on Mars...

Strange rocks on Mars...  Including the very round rock in the colored photo at right.  Photos were taken by Curiosity, via APOD, of course...

Self-assembly with micro-fluidics...

Self-assembly with micro-fluidics...  I have a longstanding interest in fluidics, but this article is about something new to me: chemical reactions in a moving fluid...

McIntyre vs. Mann...

McIntyre vs. Mann...  It's not a fair match...

I happily pay the $99...

I happily pay the $99...  Because it works, and it's usable! But I also use a lot of free open source software, too. There isn't a single piece of software left on my computers made by Microsoft, though...

Heating up in Hong Kong...

Heating up in Hong Kong...  Pro-capitalist protesters are edging into open confrontation and closer to violent confrontation against mainland Chinese manipulation of the political process.  This is a real challenge for the Chinese government – they're walking a tightrope here.  On the one hand, they've got the goose that lays the golden eggs (almost literally!) in Hong Kong, but on the other hand, the democratic and pro-business government is a direct threat (by example) to their top-down, socialist-leaning thugocracy on the mainland. 

Will the mainland government cave, and allow Hong Kong to keep its free elections?  Will they come down hard against a drift toward democracy, like they did at Tienanmen Square?  Or will they find some middle road?  I haven't a clue...

Twenty years ago today ...

Twenty years ago today ... the RORO (roll on, roll off) ferry MS Estonia sank in the Baltic sea, claiming 852 lives.  Most of the victims were Estonian or Scandinavian, many were children.  This occurred as I was just starting to get to know the country of Estonia, its people, and its culture.  I visited the country just a couple of weeks after the sinking, and the shock and grief were evident everywhere I went.  Estonia is a very small country, and it seemed like everyone knew someone who had been on that ferry...

This morning I ran across a transcript of the inter-ship communications starting with the first report of trouble on the MS Estonia and continuing through the rescue efforts.  Reading it (there's an English translation) brought lots of memories flooding back...

The closest piece of Estonian land to the site of the sinking is the northernmost point of land on Hiiumaa (an island off Estonia's west coast), a little spit called Tahkuna (see map at left).  Just northwest of the lighthouse there (the Tahkuna Tuletorn), the grieving Estonians built a simple, but hauntingly beautiful monument to the children who died.  It's a bell in a simple tower, and the bell is adorned with the faces of children (my photo of it at upper right).

I first visited the monument entirely by accident, while exploring the beautiful island of Hiiumaa.  I first visited the lighthouse – a popular tourist attraction – and then wandered toward the beach where I spotted the monument.  Until that moment, I had no idea that I was on the piece of Estonia closest to the site of the sinking.

I've visited that monument five times over the years, most recently in 2003.  Even though it is in quite a remote place, fairly difficult to reach, there are usually people there.  On my second visit, an older couple in traditional Estonian knit sweaters sat on a log, looking to the northwest, (toward where the ferry sank), weeping.  Later they rang the bell on the monument and left.  The memory of that couple still affects me deeply, many years later.  Other pieces of art have been installed there in more recent years, and there's a traditional Estonian maze there now, too (rocks arranged on sand).

I'd like to return to that place some day, and show it to Debbie...

The bottle of wine...

The bottle of wine...  My CCPOAAGGM (card-carrying, pissed-off, angry-American great-grandmother) mom sends me things.  In an email this morning, she said “For all of us who are married, were married, wish you were married, or wish you weren't married, this is something to smile about the next time you see a bottle of wine”

Sally was driving home from one of her business trips in Northern Arizona when she saw an elderly Navajo woman walking on the side of the road.

As the trip was a long and quiet one, she stopped the car and asked the Navajo woman if she would like a ride.

With a silent nod of thanks, the woman got into the car.

Resuming the journey, Sally tried in vain to make a bit of small talk with the Navajo woman. The old woman just sat silently, looking intently at everything she saw, studying every little detail, until she noticed a brown bag on the seat next to Sally.

'What in bag?' asked the old woman.

Sally looked down at the brown bag and said, 'It's a bottle of wine. I got it for my husband.'

The Navajo woman was silent for another moment or two. Then speaking with the quiet wisdom of an elder, she said: 'Good trade...'

Speaking as a husband who might be traded for, doesn't a single bottle of wine seem a little cheap?  Surely it should have been at least a six pack!

The saluting boy on Omaha Beach...

The saluting boy on Omaha Beach...  Reader Simi L. passes along this mini-documentary about a young boy honoring the soldiers who landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

I visited this beach myself some 20 years ago.  I was struck by the friendliness toward Americans of the locals (a marked contrast to the rest of France).  Of all the things I saw there, the cemeteries had the most impact on me...

The Middle East is a hard-to-understand muddle...

The Middle East is a hard-to-understand muddle...  Reader Jim M. passes along this attempt at clarification:

Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain. We support the Iraqi government in the fight against Islamic State. We don't like IS, but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like. We don't like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him.

We don't like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government in the fight against IS. So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, whom we want to lose, but we don't want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win.

If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less. And all this started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren't actually there until we went in to drive them out. Do you understand now?

That certainly ought to set you straight!

Dogly joy...

Dogly joy...  Our border collie (Race) would go absolutely bonkers if we got him in a fountain like this :)

Ramirez on Eric Holder's resignation...

Ramirez on Eric Holder's resignation...

The Shirky Principle...

The Shirky Principle...  I had never heard this before:

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

That's a wonderful distillation of a characteristic of institutions.  In this post, the author uses unions as an example of this principle in action.  The first one that came to my mind, though, was political parties, and individual politicians.  The Shirky Principle is basically their organizing principle...

Z80 mystery solved!

Z80 mystery solved!  Many moons ago, long before my beard turned gray and my hair fell out, I made extensive use of Z80 microcomputers in systems I designed.  I probably built 25 or 30 different systems using that part, so I got to be very familiar with it.  The pinout of the Z80 DIP had one striking oddity: the eight data pins were out-of-order, as if the chip makers had scrambled them.  This was in marked contrast to the sixteen address pins, where were in a nice, neat, orderly sequence that wrapped around the top of the package.  Why would this be?  Why not have all the data pins in order?

Well, now we know!  It took almost 40 years to figure it out...

This sounds very hopeful...

This sounds very hopeful...  The so-called “super bugs” scare me.  I had a brush with one of their predecessors about 20 years ago – a drug-resistant staph infection that was only cured by me wearing an IV pump that kept my system flooded with a three-component cocktail of antibiotics.  Some of today's super bugs would shrug that therapy off.  So the promise of a flexible approach that will work not only on existing super bugs, but also new ones that might crop up, sounds pretty darned good.  As the Instapundit would say: “Faster, please!”

The stupid, it burns!

The stupid, it burns!  National Review's Katherine Timpf interviews protestors at the Flood Wall Street climate march...

Abandoned cats in Aleppo...

Abandoned cats in Aleppo...  That's in Syria, if you've not been following events in the Middle East.

With all the horrors over there affecting people, we rarely think of the pets those people had – but in some ways, their situation is even more dire than their former owner's.  The “cat man of Aleppo” is trying to help some of the cats abandoned in the beleaguered city...

Actual weather!

Actual weather!  Rain, lightning, and thunder echoing off the local mountains.  As I write this, it's pouring outside – a big cell is passing overhead.  All around me I see lightning flashes, and several times a minute a rolling thunderous crash shakes the house.  Weather!

Barn: three walls up, one to go...

Barn: three walls up, one to go...  The builders are zipping right along...

Flagpole: concrete poured!

Flagpole: concrete poured!  Now in two or three days, I'll see if I can get the form off :)