Curiosity looks back...

Curiosity looks back ... at the plains it has climbed up from, as it winds its way up Mt. Sharp on Mars.  Note: this is a black & white photo because it was taken by one of the navigation cameras, not the mast cameras...

A good summary of the Ukrainian situation...

A good summary of the Ukrainian situation...  If that's something you're not well-informed about, this will give you a quick course.  There are three general conflicts that I'm worried about these days.  If I arbitrarily pick 10 as the magnitude of my concern, I'd rate these as:

10.  Russia's play for territory in Eastern Europe (including Ukraine and the Baltics).

4.  Iran's play for power in the Middle East, and in particular its threats against Israel and the U.S.

2.  Militant Islamic fundamentalists.

I can't help but note that my ratings are almost exactly the inverse of press coverage (and the closely correlated general American awareness) in the U.S...

A few of these...

A few of these ... (F/A-18E Super Hornets) buzzing around Iranian shores might have been a good influence on the Iranian negotiations.  Or an alternative to those negotiations...

New Horizons made the Pluto flyby...

New Horizons made the Pluto flyby ... and it looks like the craft was in great shape.  Up-to-the-minute NASA news here.  The photo at right is the last one taken before the flyby.  Flyby photos due later today.  You go, little robot!

Iran deal quick take...

Iran deal quick take...  Iran: celebrating.  Obama: putting lipstick on the pig.  Congress: WTF?  Arabia: fearful.  Israel: “An historic mistake.”

Doesn't sound too good to me.  In particular, when Obama says “every path to a nuclear weapon has been cut off”, all my natural skepticism cuts in.  My brain translates that to “Iran’s gonna get a nuke, we just don’t know whether its next month, or next year.”

Will our Congress approve it?  I'd like to think there will be a substantive debate, and if the deal is as I fear it is, then they'd reject it.  Given the political context, though, I don't think that's too likely.  Approval isn't quite a certainty, but it's darned close to it.  The only thing I can think of that might derail approval is a mighty roar from the American public – and what is far more likely is a mighty yawn...

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  This is from Tony Thomas, at The Quadrant in a piece titled: “It’s Official: Warmists Are Mad”:

“As environment reporters go, Richardson, is about average, i.e. dumb as a box of rocks.”

That certainly matches my own experience!

Apple earns 92% of all operating income from smartphones...

Apple earns 92% of all operating income from smartphones...  That's despite the fact that they make less than 20% of them (there are about 1,000 companies making smartphones).  Samsung, the next biggest smartphone maker, earned 15% of the total operating income from smartphones.  The reason Apple and Samsung combined earn more than 100% is because so many makers actually lose money, offsetting the profit from Apple and Samsung.  Click the first link to see the story.

If you're a high-tech business, it's totally normal to focus on market share (and market share trend).  Sub-20% share doesn't sound so dominant.  However, in any business, capturing 92% of the operating profit in the entire category is ... victory...

If you depend on the news...

If you depend on the news ... for information about the Middle East, it's really hard to figure out what's going on in Palestine.  There are any number of history and current events books that tell the tale, but I don't know many people who read them.  Here's a review of another such book, and the review itself contains quite a bit of information.  The book (Catch the Jew!) sounds good; I've ordered it.

It must be a sensible one...

It must be a sensible one...  The new Greek bailout deal, I mean.  I haven't read any of the details, though.  So why do I think it must be sensible?  Because Paul Krugman hates it.  Probably the Greek Parliament will reject it...

Dog ramps in Paradise...

Dog ramps in Paradise...  At right is the ramp, installed over the stairs outside our back door.  I put the final (top side) paint on it this morning, and then installed it late this afternoon.  Actually installing it was a bit anticlimactic – it all just worked.  I'd adjusted the adjustable feet to my calculated height before moving it out of the shed – and that turned out to be perfect.

We made a test run, and Mo'i went down it directly, no prompting.  It was clearly much easier for him to navigate the ramp than the stairs.  Going back up was less obvious to him, but once I guided him up the beginning of it he easily ambled up the rest of it.  Again, the ramp was much easier for him than trying to get up the stairs.

I'll count that as a dog ramp success!

Track record of drugs decriminalization (or re-legalization)...

Track record of drugs decriminalization (or re-legalization)...  Friend, reader, and former colleague Simon M. passes this article along.  It discusses the experiences of Portugal after 14 years of drug decriminalization.  Bottom line: it was a big win for Portugal, and none of the outcomes feared by many (jump in drugs use, drug tourists, health issues, etc.) occurred.  In fact, Portugal's record on all these issues has improved.  The same is also true for the other countries that have decriminalized (or re-legalized) psychoactive drugs.

One aspect of the criminalization of drugs fascinates me for some reason.  It's this: many Americans – I'd guess north of 75% – don't realize that until 1914 all drugs were legal in the U.S.  In 1914, the Harrison Act was enacted, which banned the distribution of opiates and coca products.  Before that, Americans were completely free to produce, distribute, sell, and consume absolutely any drug at all.  Most Americans think that drugs have “always” been regulated.  Somehow the country survived, without any notable drugs-induced disasters...

Instant dwarf identification...

Instant dwarf identification...  Via my pistol-packing mama:

The seven dwarfs always left early each morning to go to work in the mine.
As always, Snow White stayed home doing her domestic chores.

As lunchtime approached, she would prepare their lunches and take them to the mine.

One day as she arrived at the mine with the lunches, she saw that there had been a terrible cave-in.

Tearfully, and fearing the worst, Snow White began calling out, hoping against hope that the dwarfs had somehow
survived. 'Hello. Hello!' she shouted. 'Can anyone hear me? Hello!'

For a long while, there was no answer. Losing hope, Snow White again shouted, 'Hello! Is anyone down there?'

Just as she was about to give up all hope, she heard a faint voice from deep within the mine, “VOTE FOR HILLARY IN 2016 .”

Snow White fell to her knees and prayed,  Oh, thank you, God! At least Dopey is still alive!

Snow White had no trouble identifying that particular dwarf!

Online compendium...

Online compendium ... of robotic space probes.  Interesting stuff!

What is Curiosity looking at?

What is Curiosity looking at?  A circular orb being obscured by an irregularly shaped object.  I'll speculate that we're seeing a Martian moon (most likely Phobos) transiting the sun.  This has happened several times in the past.

Well, this is discouraging...

Well, this is discouraging...  Pope Francis is getting strident in his socialism (and consequent anti-capitalism).  So here we have a major religious leader condemning the ideas that have done the most good for mankind.  Lovely.  I have no idea how much impact his views will have.  One can only hope they're minimal.  The first thing that came to mind, though, is that his views might sway American voters to first anoint Bernie Sanders the winner in the Democratic primary, then in the presidential election.  Oy!

Last look at the weird regular “spots” on Pluto...

Last look at the weird regular “spots” on Pluto...  The timing of New Horizons' flyby of Pluto on Tuesday dictates that the bizzaro-land regular geometric spots will be on the opposite side of the planet during the flyby.  The photo at right is the last one that New Horizons will see showing those spots.

This is going to keep the planetary geologists busy for a while :)

Those spots remind me of regular geometric patterns I've seen in Alaska and northern Canada, where they're caused by frost upheaval in the tundra soils.  I'm not saying that's the cause on Pluto, just that they remind me of it.  For one thing, the scale on Pluto is vastly different.  The spots on Pluto are 300 miles or so across; the tundra patterns I've seen are 5 to 10 feet across!

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  Yesterday a pleasant fellow (Scott) showed up from UIC, the folks in Salt Lake City from whom I bought my air compressor (I got there from Amazon).  The manufacturer (Chicago Pneumatic) has a program which, for $350 for certification by a technician, extends my warranty on the important bits from one year to five years.  Considering the price of that air compressor, that's a serious bargain, so I signed up for it.  Having run a business before, it's easy to see what's almost certainly going on here.  The manufacturer is fully prepared to offer the five year warranty, but tying it to the technician's visit guarantees some revenue for their dealer, and provides a (hopefully positive) introduction between the dealer and the customer.  The manufacturer wins by having a nominally reduced purchase price.  Everybody wins!  My favorite kind of capitalist deal :)

Anyway, Scott showed up and started his routine.  It was obvious, watching him, that he was verifying that my installation was correct.  When he got done with that part, he asked me who had done the installation.  I told him that I'd done it myself, fully expecting that he was going to tell me what I'd screwed up.  Instead, he shook my hand and said that he never sees the installation made correctly – that normally on these visits he ends up redoing part of the installation.  Well, how about that!  But on reflection, that's actually kind of scary, as that thing wasn't really challenging to install – I just had to connect it to both 240V and 120V power.  Is that really so unusual to get right?  Yikes!

Anyway, Scott spent the extra time he had going over all the settings and adjustments, and educating me on the care and feeding of the compressor.  I'd have been happy to pay $350 just for that, without the warranty extension – he was great!  After that, we actually lit off my new compressor.  It works great, and is vastly quieter than the piston type compressors I'm used to.  It was quite impressive to watch that thing putting out 15 cfm at 150 psi.  I'm not going to have any problems with running air tools!

Later in the day I wandered up to Logan, to Standard Plumbing, and investigated the availability of Type K (thick wall) copper pipe, 1" diameter.  They can order it with a two week lead time, and the price was acceptable, so I put 340' of it on order.  Once it comes in, I'm going to be sweating a lot of pipe together, to get that compressed air plumbed all over the shop and garage, with a couple of outside outlets as well (for tire inflation, power grease gun, and general cleanup).

Yesterday I also bought the parts for a doggy ramp, for Mo'i.  He's having trouble getting up and down the stairs to our back yard, and he's taken a couple of tumbles now that worry us.  Today I built the ramp, which you can see bottom side up in the photos below.  I chose the color based on what dogs see best, because we don't want Mo'i falling off the ramp!  The top side is just two 2x12s side-by-side.  I'll be painting them tomorrow with non-skid paint, the same color.  It's actually the same can of paint, to which I'll be adding the additive shown at right.  It looks like fine-grained sand.  While I was looking at it, at Home Depot, another customer came up and told me he's used it twice, and it worked great.  We'll put it to the dog test here shortly!

An explanation for solar cycle variability?

An explanation for solar cycle variability?  Maybe.  If these scientists are right, we've got a mini-Ice Age coming in just 15 years.  If I'm reading this article correctly, these scientists are claiming to have discovered that the sun's magnetic dynamo is driven by two roughly 11 year long cycles – but that these cycles have a small difference in frequency.  Because of this small frequency difference, periodically the cycles will be out-of-phase, and in-phase.  In the 2030s, they say, they will be 180° out of phase, and the sun's activity will fall to a low we haven't seen since the Maunder minimum in the mid-1600s.

I have no idea whether these scientists are onto something here.  In particular, I don't know whether there's any physical mechanism that would explain having two separate magnetic dynamo effects with two very close frequencies.  However, one thing I am sure of: the result of having two such mechanisms with very close frequencies really would be as described here.  That's a mechanism familiar to any electrical engineer, and that mechanism has a name: heterodyning.  That mechanism is used in just about every tunable radio receiver, and in many other devices (including audio) as well.  So if these scientists are right about the two underlying mechanisms, I have no doubt at all that the rest of their claim is correct.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.  I'm very curious, in particular, how the climate alarmists will react to this – for it suggests a major benefit is to be had by deliberately increasing greenhouse gases...

A retired person's perspective...

A retired person's perspective...  Via my lovely bride:

1. I'm not saying let's go kill all the stupid people. I'm just saying let's remove all the warning labels and let the problem work itself out.
2. I changed my car horn to gunshot sounds. People move out of the way much faster now.
3. You can tell a lot about a woman's mood just by her hands. If they are holding a gun, she's probably mad.
4. Gone are the days when girls cooked like their mothers. Now they drink like their fathers.
5. You know that tingly little feeling you get when you really like someone you've just met? That's common sense leaving your body.
6. I don't like making plans for the day. Because then the word "premeditated" gets thrown around in the courtroom.
7. I didn't make it to the gym today. That makes 1,500 days in a row.
8. I decided to change calling the bathroom the John and renamed it the Jim. I feel so much better saying I went to the Jim this morning.
9. Dear paranoid people who check behind shower curtains for murderers: If you find one, what's your plan?
10. Everyone has a right to be stupid. Politicians just abuse the privilege.

Pluto!

Pluto!  New Horizons returned a new photo.  Via APOD, of course.  Next Tuesday is the big day: New Horizon's flyby of Pluto...

Mark Steyn...

Mark Steyn ... is at the top of his form in this piece.  He has an uncanny ability to make me cry, then laugh through my tears.  An excerpt:

Hillary, by contrast, is in trouble not because she's a sleazy, corrupt, cronyist, money-laundering, Saud-kissing liar. Democrats have a strong stomach and boundless tolerance for all of that and wouldn't care were it not for the fact that she's a dud and a bore. A "Hillary rally" is a contradiction in terms: the thin, vetted crowd leave more demoralized and depressed than when they went in. To vote for Bernie is to be part of a romance, as it was with Obama. To vote for Hillary is to validate the Clintons' indestructible sense of their own indispensability - and nothing else. Hillary is a wooden charmless stiff who supposedly has enough money to be carefully managed across the finish line. But that requires Democratic electors to agree to be managed, too, and the Sanders surge is a strong sign that, while they're relaxed about voting for an unprincipled arrogant phony marinated in ever more malodorous and toxic corruption, they draw the line at such a tedious and charisma-free specimen thereof.

So Bernie is a real danger to her. He will be nimbler, more fun and more human in the debates. And he enthuses the young in a way Hillary doesn't. He could win Iowa, and I know he could win New Hampshire, too, where he will ensure that, instead of going off to destabilize the Republican primary, Granite State "independents" vote in the Democrat poll and play hell with Hillary's ability to manage turnout models. If Mrs Clinton's two down by South Carolina, Berniephobes will be begging any alternative (starting with Crazy Joe) to jump in the race.

His conclusion made me laugh ... and then I spent a few minutes thinking over his premise:

Step back and let's be bipartisan about what Rove calls the "disruptiveness" factor: Be honest, which would you prefer and which is a bleaker comment on the political health of the republic - Bernie vs the Donald? Or Hillary vs Jeb?

I think he's right: bring on Sanders vs. Trump, please!!!

There's ever so much more, including (of course!) an equally acerbic take on The Donald.  Do go read the whole thing!

Last evening's walk in Paradise...

Last evening's walk in Paradise...  My two companions and I did our usual mile-each-way walk to the east of our house.  This photo is from the road that runs north/south, near the end of our walk.  The dogs have had all the frenetic energy walked out of them, and now they're just ambling companionably along. 

They looked like this all the way home, except for one moment of excitement when a striped skunk burst out of the tall grass on our right, just 5 or 6 feet in front of us.  The skunk immediately turned toward us and started the stamping-feet behavior that precedes a skunk-squirt.  I hauled the dogs back right quickly :)  They, of course, picked this moment to get all brave; they were bouncing up-and-down at the end of the leash, trying their best to chase the skunk.  Neither of them has ever been skunked, so they have no idea what would be in store for them.  With these two, though, I'm not sure how much difference that would have made.

I'm really enjoying watching the changes along our walk; some from the passage of time, others from changes in lighting.  It never seems to look like the same walk twice.  On this walk, lighting was the big change from the previous day.  The photos below are my attempt to capture that.  I was most successful with the middle photo...

Independence Day Parade...

Independence Day Parade...  This collection of photos (not mine) are from the Independence Day Parade in the town of Hyrum, less than four miles north of our house.  I drove by the parade on an errand as it was breaking up, and saw some of the floats driving off.  Next year, assuming Debbie isn't broken, we're going to go watch it.

It looks very old-timey, doesn't it?  There are moments when it feels like we not only moved geographically, but culturally and chronologically as well.  Viewing these photos was one of these moments...

Messier 43...

Messier 43...  Via APOD, of course.  Click to embiggen.  They're on a roll this week!

Geek: the simplest things...

Geek: the simplest things ... can be so complicated sometimes.  What could be simpler than a String?  BTW, Dr. Kabutz's email newsletter is an excellent resource for anyone interested in Java's performance or its nether regions.  You can subscribe for free.  I've never taken one of his courses, but I'll bet they're pretty darned good...

Holy cheap (solid-state) bits, Batman!

Holy cheap (solid-state) bits, Batman!  Just read this piece about a new line of cheap SSD drives from Toshiba.  Looked them up on Amazon, and sure enough: they're selling for just 37¢ per gigabyte.  That's kind of mind-boggling for an ancient and venerable geek like me, who bought his first brand-new hard drive at the price of $240,000 per gigabyte (that was for a Quantum 10MB disk at $2,400).

The volume difference is kind of amazing, too.  The Toshiba SSD packs 980GB into 3.28 cubic inches.  Those Quantum 10MB disk were 440 cubic inches each, and I'd have needed 98,000 of them to equal that Toshiba disk's capacity.  That would be a total of 43,120,000 cubic inches, or roughly 25,000 cubic feet – a cube 30' on each side solidly packed with disk drives.  You'd have to have a specially reinforced floor to hold that weight, and I don't even want to think about the power bill.  Those old hard disks failed quite often, so I suspect I'd have to employ a couple of people just to replace the failed units.

Then there's the performance aspect.  The Toshiba SSDs are just stupid fast by comparison with those ancient Quantum disks – which were just stupid fast by comparison to the 8" floppy disks we used to use before the Quantum disks arrived.  And the Toshiba SSDs aren't even fast SSDs!

Here's the real kicker, though.  I'm ancient and venerable enough to remember my own reaction upon seeing those Quantum disk drives for the first time.  It was approximately the same as my reaction to these Toshiba SSDs :)  How can that be?  Well, consider this.  The first storage device that I ever encountered, during my U.S. Navy training in the early '70s, was a “high speed” mercury acoustic delay line memory system. I also worked on magnetostrictive delay line memories, described in the same article.  If I remember correctly, the mercury delay machine had 512 18-bit wide words.  That machine was the size of a couple of large refrigerators, and it weighed perhaps three tons.  By comparison to that machine, those Quantum hard disks were just as amazing then as the Toshiba SSDs are today...

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  Spotted in the Ricochet Daily Shot:

“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”

Isaac Asimov

Awesome :) 

When I was a young lad, lo these many years ago, Asimov was one of my favorite authors.  I first ran into him with his science fiction, but a high school librarian mentioned to me one day that he also wrote a lot of non-fiction (which the library had).  That started me on a binge reading of his books on science, math, and technology – a fantastically accessible body of work that played a major role in developing my interest in those topics.  His books were perfect for someone like me who found the classroom too slow and basic, but who didn't have the background at the time for college texts.

Perfect pictures...

Perfect pictures...  Bored Panda has a collection...

A cheerful morning in Paradise...

A cheerful morning in Paradise...  How can you help but smile when you see a sunflower in bloom, like this one that we saw on our walk this morning (at right)?  These sunflowers are common around here.  I don't know if they're natives, escapees, invaders, or something else – but they show up mostly at the edges of cultivated fields.  They're a bird magnet for any seed eaters.  A few weeks from now, these things will be covered by goldfinches and house finches, and probably magpies, too.

On the way up the hill this morning, we had nearly perfect lighting for photography: a perfectly diffusive layer of clouds giving us even omnidirectional lighting.  No shadows, and everything lit up.  That's how I got this photo of a sea of alfalfa.  This field was cut just two weeks ago.  Since then it's been irrigated twice and rained on twice, and there were about 10 sunny days.  That is apparently the recipe for luxurious 2' tall alfalfa!  There are going to be some happy moo cows at Clausen's dairy later this year (the Clausens lease this field for hay).

While looking at one of the sunflowers along the road, I spotted this yellow jacket (wasp) at right.  Look closely at it and you'll see that its wings have been clipped.  I've seen this before when a bird attempts to eat the wasp before it realizes what its grabbed.  I didn't see it happen to this one, but that would be my best guess.  It's doomed, I'm sure – I can't imagine that it could grow those wings back out (if that even happens!) before it starves...

Morning in Paradise...

Morning in Paradise...  Very early this morning – at about 12:30 AM – we were awakened by the loud crashing of thunder all around us.  For the next 45 minutes or so we were treated to a sudden fierce rain squall.  In the morning, when there was enough light to read the rain gauge, I saw that we got 0.6" of rain in that short amount of time.  Pouring, it was...

The forecast shows a decent chance of rain later today, too.  It's a wet July in Paradise!

We took our morning walk just a bit later than usual.  The sun rose over the Wasatch Mountains just as we got to the highest point of our walk.  In the first photo below you can see my loooong shadow reaching to the west as I look downhill toward our house.  The second photo is looking north, the third south, from the track that runs north/south through a farmer's field.  You can see the remnants of that storm cell receding to the north, over the city of Logan.  The third photo is looking south on that same road.  It's clear in that direction, except that if you enlarge the photo, you'll see some clouds hugging one of the smaller peaks.  Such ground-hugging clouds are a common occurrence around here, for some reason I don't know but would like to understand.  The last photo is looking west, and I've drawn a red arrow in there pointing to our just-visible shed.  Our house is hidden behind the trees just to the left of the shed.

As we walked back toward home, we saw an ATV putt-putting up the hill toward us.  It was my neighbor Tim D., together with his two dogs (Lewie and Lexie), coming up to visit with us.  The two of us stood chatting with the valley laid out in morning splendor all around us. 

I love living here!

Greeks apologize with huge horse...

Greeks apologize with huge horse...  I laughed out loud when I read this, sent along by friend, reader, and former colleague Doug W.  Then I wondered how many Americans would actually get the joke.  Especially Americans under, say, 35 years old...

If, perchance, you don't get the joke ... then read this...

Opportunity: the movie...

Opportunity: the movie...  We mean the Opportunity rover on Mars, of course...

How does the TSA decide if someone might be a terrorist?

How does the TSA decide if someone might be a terrorist?  These are taken directly from the TSA's internal guidelines...

Pluto or bust!

Pluto or bust!  At right is the latest photo from the New Horizons robotic space probe.  It's by far the best image of Pluto ever obtained.  Via APOD, of course.  More details here and here.

Next Tuesday (7/14) is the big day – the day that New Horizons passes close by (less than 8,000 miles) Pluto.  Go, go, go!

Back from the endodontist...

Back from the endodontist ... and I got to keep my tooth.  At right is an X-ray (click to embiggen) of my tooth after the root canal was finished.  The three long, whitish “tentacles” heading up and to the left are the root canals that were drilled, filed, disinfected, filled, sealed, and capped.  This is an upper molar on the right side of my mouth.  The dentist (Dr. Justin Thornton) used a modern digital X-ray system to take this and two others.  The output is a standard jpg file, so it was easy for them to share it with me.

Just like my other medical and dental experiences here, this one was all positive.  As usual, my appointment started right on time.  The staff, from Marlane (the receptionist), the assistant, and Dr. Thornton himself, were all friendly, warm, and caring.  I particularly noted that awkward or uncomfortable positions (like head keeled very far backward) were asked of me only when actually needed.  It may seem obvious, but ... this is the first time that's ever happened to me during a dental procedure. 

Dr. Thornton was impressively efficient – whenever he had to wait for something (such as for the numbing injections to take effect), he went to another room to work on another patient.  The last third or so of the job he did on me was actually kind of fun for me to watch, as he and his assistant conducted what looked like a choreographed high-speed ballet-of-the-hands.  Things were happening so fast and furiously that I totally lost track of what was going on.  Tools and materials were flying back and forth over my face at breakneck speed.

My bottom line: if you need an endodontist, I recommend Dr. Thornton.  He and his staff were great!

There is the possibility now...

There is the possibility now ... that the 2016 presidential race will be Trump v. Sanders.  In which case the four or five non-U.S. governments that aren't already laughing at the U.S. will convulse with hysterical, uncontrollable laughter along with all the other non-U.S. governments.

Me, I'd write-in Mickey Mouse on my ballot.  Not as a joke, mind you, but rather as a serious vote for a better alternative.

I'm hoping that I'll wake up soon from the nightmare that allowed me to believe Trump v. Sanders was an actual possibility...

Unpredictable blogging alert...

Unpredictable blogging alert...  Unpredictable?  What means he?  I mean that I'm going in to have a tooth worked on this morning, and I'm not sure what sort of condition I'll be in afterwards.  Hopefully I'll have a functioning brain and no pain, but those things are not, unfortunately, guaranteed (I asked)... 

Evening in Paradise...

Evening in Paradise...  Our new routine in the evening is to let Mo'i out into “his” backyard for him to amble at his own pace, while Miki, Race, and I take off for a somewhat brisker – and much longer – walk to the east.  We walked just over a mile each way tonight.  Walking away from home, uphill, the dogs wanted to go fast as hell.  Coming home, downhill, they were content with a much more leisurely pace.  That's of course exactly backwards from what I'd like to do.  Not that they would care.  Just look at these completely unrepentant faces!

Quotes on the Internet...

Quotes on the Internet...  Via reader Simi L.  Hah!

On the other hand...

On the other hand ... we're now at 0.95" for this storm, with still more to come.  The forecast was for 0.4", so the weatherman was only off by 100% or so...

Any twinge of hopefulness I was feeling today...

Any twinge of hopefulness I was feeling today ... was completely destroyed by reading this story.

Some commenters said that the judge (a judge!) didn't get the big picture.  I don't think the judge (a judge!) gets any part of the picture, big or little.

The average IQ is 100 (because definition).  I'm fairly certain that at least one of our dogs (Miki) has above human-average IQ.  That's not a good message about humanity, even though Miki is a pretty darned smart little dog.

His latest demonstration of high IQ?  A few days ago I walked upstairs in our house, while the dogs were all kept in the kitchen by a doggie gate.  Or so I thought – but as I sat down in my office chair, I discovered Miki, tail wagging furiously with happiness.  He curled up by my feet and stayed there for an hour or so.  Then I went back downstairs with him, and discovered that the gate was closed.  The gate is too tall for him to jump over.  How the heck did he get out of the kitchen?

A couple of days (and escapes) later, I caught him in the act.  The clever little guy figured out that he could jump onto a kitchen chair, walk across the kitchen table, jump over to a little table we have near the gate, and then leap over the gate.  That first chair is a good 10' from the gate.  Somehow he figured all this out.  I've employed people who wouldn't have been able to do that :)

Many scientists are waking up to the fraud that is Big Climate Change...

Many scientists are waking up to the fraud that is Big Climate Change...  Here's one more...

Is there any hope?

Is there any hope?  Maybe not.  Just FYI: silver is going for about $15 an ounce on the spot market today...

Kozinski on the criminal justice system in the U.S.

Kozinski on the criminal justice system in the U.S.  Awesome!

Dione, moon of Saturn...

Dione, moon of Saturn...  Via APOD, of course.  Taken by the Cassini robotic space probe.  The big dimly lit orb is Saturn itself, and in the upper right you can make out Enceladus.  The “diagonal line” are Saturn's rings, seen edge-on.

Morning in Paradise...

Morning in Paradise...  We woke a little late for us – around 5:30 am.  I got up and let Mo'i out into our back yard, which he has taken a real liking to.  He now treats it as “his”, as opposed to being some strange new place.  He wanders about, sniffing all the things he can neither see nor hear.  He's have some trouble with the two steps down from the back door, though.  I think I'll have to build him a ramp soon.

Miki, Race, and I took our usual walk up the dirt road to our east.  We went a bit further than we ever could with Mo'i, about a quarter mile past the abandoned quarry.  That last stretch is almost level, just a track between two fields (barley to the west, alfalfa to the east).  This morning the sky was particularly interesting looking.  Over us were a few scattered clouds, but in all directions around us were storm cells, like those in the photos at right.  The first one is looking north, the second west.  That storm cell in the second photo was headed right for us, and about a half hour after I snapped that photo, it started raining on us – just as our neighbor (Tim D.) and I were laying a string of his hand line, to irrigate his alfalfa.  Thunder and lightning played all around us, but especially up in the mountains – both east and west of us.  It was by far the most dramatic irrigation pipe carrying I've ever done :)

So far we've received 0.7" from this storm – more than forecast, and very welcome.  The radar shows a nice storm cell headed straight for us, too, so we're likely to see more!

I had an appointment this morning Hyrum Tire for routine service on my Tundra pickup.  Despite their business name, that place is far more than a tire store – they do all sorts of maintenance on cars, trucks, and small engines (mowers, weed whackers, etc.).  I walked in, they grabbed my keys and went right to work.  Just forty minutes later, they told me I was all finished.  They did all the usual things, plus checked my timing chain (because I've got 120,000 miles on the original, and Toyota recommends changing at 100,000).  Like Dave in Jamul (our favorite mechanic there), these guys said “Don’t change it; yours is doing fine.”  They even filled my windshield washer.  Total charge: $45.32.  I love living here!  In California my coffee might have cost that much...

It's raining as I write, and it's in the 50s outside.  My shed will be nice and cool – so I think I'll go do the heavy moving work I've been putting off for a few weeks now :)  Just before I started writing this post, I took a nice photo of Jahar, our Savannah cat that is Debbie's constant companion.  With the cool temperatures of the past few days, he's spending his time all cuddled up with her.  If you know Debbie, then you know she's not objecting to this :)

New backups in Paradise...

New backups in Paradise...  Well, that was totally painless!  The hardest part of bringing up our new backup RAID was ... unpacking it.  The damned hard disks were swathed in plastic that my (sharp!) pocket knife had a heck of a time cutting.  Other than that, all I did was plug in cables and disks, and OS X led me through the rest of the setup.  I'm making a backup right now.  What a piece of cake!

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  It was so beautiful here this morning that I just couldn't stand to work inside, despite the fact that all my higher priority projects are there.  Instead, I decided to fix our lawnmower (a riding “zero-turn” type).  The last time I mowed, I noted a rather awful problem: the left side of the mowed swath was cut about an inch and a half lower than the right side.  This gave our lawn a distinctly odd look :) 

Without even looking, I figured that the mechanism that raises and lowers the deck must have gotten out of whack.  So I used a floor jack to raise each end of the mower and put it up on jack stands to make it easy to see and reach the deck-adjusting mechanism.  I also figured it would a good moment to pull off the blades and sharpen them.

Well, a careful inspection of the deck-adjusting mechanism showed no problems at all!  Everything was intact, all the fasteners were present, nothing was bent.  Even the lubrication was up to snuff.  Puzzling over this unexpected finding, I leaned against the mower – and noticed that the left front tire was soft.  Soft, as in completely flat.  The right front tire was perfectly inflated.  Dang!  Well, at least I knew what the problem was now.  So I pulled the tire off (easy, since the mower was up on jack stands) and ran it up to Hyrum Tire to be repaired.  Then I came back home, pulled off and sharpened the blades,  reinstalled them, and added grease at every zerc fitting.  This was much easier with the mower on jack stands – that's how I'll be handling that chore from now on!

That left me with a couple hours to kill while waiting for the tire to get fixed.  It was still cool and beautiful outside, so I decided to do some pruning.  Several of our blue spruces had taken a hit when I sprayed the lawn with 2,4-D.  From the symptoms, it looks like new growth at a particular stage was killed or damaged.  This made some of the lower branches look very odd, with light brown tips where it should be blue or green.  Also there were two beautiful blue spruces along the canal that had an upstart hawthorn growing up through their branches. 

So I trimmed up 4 blue spruces, getting rid of those brown ends, and in two cases trimming them away from the driveway a foot or so.  Then I really made that hawthorn's day a miserable one.  It had 17 trunks (I counted them!) ranging from 1" to 4" in diameter.  The hawthorn wood is ridiculously easy to saw, so I had them all cut in a matter of a couple minutes.  Getting them out of the blue spruces without damaging the spruces turned out to be the challenging bit – the hawthorn branches were practically tied in knots around the blue spruce branches.  It took a bunch of precision cutting, but I finally did get it all out.  I only lost one small blue spruce branch in the process.  I thought removing that hawthorn would leave a big hole between the two blue spruces, but in fact it did not – there were still blue spruce branches growing inside the hawthorn (which is why it was so hard to disentangle them).  Instead it just looks like a less-dense patch in the blue spruces.  If you weren't looking for it, you probably wouldn't even notice.  Great!

After finishing up the pruning and carrying all the brush to the brush pile, I helped Debbie wash her hair and take a bath (of sorts).  This is quite an operation when you can't put any weight on one leg, can't stand up unassisted, and must spend most of the time sitting on a roll-around chair.  We're getting good at this, with all the practice.  It makes Debbie feel much better, but still, I'm sure she's really looking forward to being able to take a shower again.

Then I ran up to Hyrum Tire, picked up my fixed tire (it had an inch-and-a-half long thorn in it – almost certainly from a hawthorn!), and put my mower back together.  A little test run in an obscure corner of the yard proved that the problem was fixed.  Yay! 

For the hour or so preceding this happy resurrection of my mower, there were thunderstorms rumbling in the distance.  A couple times we got sprinkled on a little bit.  Just as I was putting the mower away, it started to rain a little more seriously – and we were getting almost continuous thunder overhead, sounding very close.  I couldn't see any lightning, so it must have been cloud-to-cloud lightning above the dense layer of clouds that was dumping water on me.

Now I'm about to put together a new backup disk.  The 3TB backup disk we've had for three years died a couple days ago, so I ordered the parts for a replacement.  This time, to choose the disks I used the drive reliability data gathered by BackBlaze to select HGST 4TB drives (HGST Megascale 4000.B).  The enclosure I selected is a RocketStor 5212, with a Thunderbolt interface, good reviews, and compatibility with OS/X software RAID.  This will become the Time Machine backup disk for our OS/X server and Debbie's iMac.  Hopefully this will be as easy as my past experiences with similar devices!

Are medical screening tests valuable?

Are medical screening tests valuable?  The answer isn't always as clear as you might think.  Study the chart for breast cancer screening (mammograms) below to see one example of this (more details here).  Some kinds of screening (example: colonoscopy) themselves pose a risk, and though that risk is generally quite small so are the positive detections.  Mammograms involve exposure to high-energy radiation, which is a known risk for causing cancer.  All kinds of screening have a false-positive problem – and these false positives put the patient through a lot of stress and additional testing, which also has risks. 

This stuff is hard.  Some kinds of medical screening absolutely make sense.  Some of them absolutely do not make sense.  Most of them are a lot less clear...

I can scarcely believe...

I can scarcely believe ... that I can do this in my browser!  A realtime, interactive, 3D display of all tracked objects in orbit around Earth.  Holy JavaScript, Batman!

Evening walk in Paradise...

Evening walk in Paradise...  Just Miki, Race, and I tonight.  I let Mo'i wander about in our back yard at his own pace, stopping when he needs to.  The three of us marched at a quick pace a little over a mile (with 300' elevation gain) to an abandoned quarry, and back.  Normally on these walks, paced by Mo'i, my muscles don't even notice it.  Tonight I can feel a little burn in my quads and calves.  It's a good thing!  Or at least that's what I'm told...

The photos below are from that walk.  The first one is looking to the southeast from right near that quarry.  In the foreground is the corner garden I took photos of earlier.  In the background is the home of the gardener, about 3/4 mile away.  That family owns a couple thousand acres of prime hay fields in this area, and they plunked their home right down in the middle of it.  I haven't met them yet, but I can tell they're probably my kind of people :)  The second photo is a panorama looking due west.  I was trying to capture the 22 visible strings of irrigation lines all running right now.  Most of the alfalfa fields have now had their first cutting, so sunshine and water are the farmer's primary objectives.  They want a nice growth burst for the second cutting – and this year, they're getting it in spades.  The last photo is take slightly north of west, showing part of what's in that panorama – but bigger.  You can't see all 22 strings in that photo, but you can pick out 17 if you try really hard.  There's a lot of water being squirted around right now!  Click to embiggen.

One of my readers had the gall to email, complaining that he couldn't understand the diagram I published earlier.  He wanted a photo.  Ok, here's your photo (at right).  I took this photo before I had the brilliant idea of taping the wires together in the correct orientation; at this point I was orienting them by hand, very tediously.

I finished wiring up the air compressor today, both the 240 volt circuit and the 120 volt circuit.  I also capped off the output so we can test the pressure tank when the technicians go through the startup testing (hopefully later this week).

I have an appointment for this Thursday to have my tooth root-rootered, or possibly yanked if it's damaged beyond repair.  If they do yank it, it will be the first tooth (not counting my deliberately removed wisdom teeth) that I've ever actually lost.  I'm hoping that's not required...

Another set of neighbors (Gary and Elaine S.) came by today to see Debbie.  This community is kind of amazing this way.  We just barely know Gary and Elaine.  They live on the other side of the highway from us and probably because of that we don't have much contact with them.  Our previous contacts with them have mostly been waving and saying “hi”.  Today they came over and stayed with Debbie for an hour, and Elaine promised to come by a few times a week – and to bring us a dinner tomorrow night.  They came by because they'd heard from another neighbor (Tim D.) that Debbie was ailing, and that was all the nudging it took for them to take the initiative to see if we needed any help.  They behaved exactly the way you'd expect a good friend to behave.  What a place we landed it!

Asphodelus aestivus...

Asphodelus aestivus...  Common name: summer asphodel.  The bee ain't bad, either!  Via BPOD, of course...

Morning in Paradise, in the shadow of the mountain edition...

Morning in Paradise, in the shadow of the mountain edition...  Took the two younger dogs (Miki and Race) out for our morning perambulation.  Mo'i isn't feeling too well after pooping all over the kitchen; he's resting up for his next adventure.

I took the first photo below as we were walking to the east, away from home.  The sun is just below that minor peak in shadow.  The sky is lit up brightly because technically it's after dawn.  The official dawn starts when the sun peeks above the theoretical horizon – where the horizon would be if there were no mountains.  This almost never occurs in the real world on land, but on the sea it happens all the time.

The second photo was taken about 10 minutes later, as we were headed downhill and west, toward home.  The sun is at our back, but we're deep in the shadow of that silhouetted peak.  To the right of the dirt road you can (barely) make out the alfalfa field that was mowed 11 days ago.  It's now around 15" high, so that alfalfa is growing at just over 1" per day.  In the distance you can see the Wellsville Mountains all lit up, and below them the nearby foothills – they're about a mile and a half from where I was standing.  They're all lit up as well, and you can see very nicely how all the fields with their different kinds of grass, forage, or grain have changed in appearance from the similar photo I took about a month ago.  Many of the fields have been mowed now, and a few have even been plowed and replanted.

The rainstorm yesterday delivered 0.55" of rain, according to my rain gauge.  That's a bit more that forecast, and very welcome.  We have three more days with roughly a 50% chance of rain in the forecast, so we might get even more.  That sound you hear is all the local farmers cheering.  Except, of course, for those who just mowed their fields.  They've now got soppy windrows that will have to dry for several days before they can bale...

Floating point follies...

Floating point follies...  I ran across this blog post in my morning reading, and as I was reading it I thought “Jeez — this is like a litany of all the floating point problems I’ve seen programmers stumble into!”  Two memorable occasions:

1. While working at a firm that provided hedge fund IT infrastructure as a service, I worked with a team implementing an algorithmic trading server.  This was implementing a relatively simple algorithm called “pairs trading”.  Part of the calculation involved raising a pair of fixed numbers to a series of powers, looking for a particular relationship between the results.  The powers were 1.00 to 1.99, in increments of 0.01.  The programmer's initial approach was to calculate the two fixed numbers raised to the 0.01 power, then accumulate as he iterated through the increments.  The programmer did this in the belief that he'd speed up the calculation by avoiding the power computation (which wasn't actually true on the server the code executed on, though it was true on his laptop).  However, much to his surprise and consternation there was a considerable error in his computation by the time he got to the end.  He sought my help on this, and we changed a few lines of code to eliminate the accumulated additions by doing the power raising for each iteration, and the error disappeared (of course).  I was tempted to tell the programmer that the problem was caused by his choice of Visual Basic as the programming language, but that didn't seem fair :)
2. While working at a different electronic trading firm, we had a problem wherein the cost we computed for a trade didn't match what NASDAQ computed and charged us.  Usually the difference was a few cents and we just ignored it, but one day a trader bought a huge number of shares of a very low cost stock, and the difference was over $100 – enough for my boss to tell me “Go figure that out, damn it!”  When I dug into our calculations, I could find no errors, so I called my peer at NASDAQ, a pleasant fellow named Gary.  He told me he'd run into this a few times before, but had never figured it out.  He sent me the block of code that did the calculations on his end.  Our code was Java; theirs was C++, but in both cases the code used the underlying x86 machine's floating point processor.  After staring at the two pieces of code side-by-side for a while, I realized that we were doing a particular multiplication with the operands in a different order.  We were multiplying shares x price, and they were multiplying price x shares.  When I swapped the order of our multiplication, the difference suddenly disappeared.  I called Gary back and told him what the problem was, and he told me I was crazy – multiplication was associative and that was that!  An hour or so later he called me back and said he'd duplicated my results.  That was one very disillusioned programmer!  After that, he and I had several phone calls (at his request) so I could educate him a bit about floating point numbers.  Despite having a very responsible position on staff in a large exchange, he knew next to nothing about them – most especially about the sorts of things outlined in the blog post linked above.
   

Bullwinkle...

Bullwinkle...  Our neighbors have named the moose who visited us a couple days ago.  Here's a photo Alan L. took with an actual camera, showing Bullwinkle in our alfalfa/grass field:

To the voters of America...

To the voters of America...