So You Think You're a JavaScript Whiz?

Try this mind-bender!  What does this JavaScript expression do, if executed in a browser?

($=[$=[]][(__=!$+$)[_=-~-~-~$]+({}+$)[_/_]+($$=($_=!''+$)[_/_]+$_[+$])])()[__[_/_]+__[_+~$]+$_[_]+$$](_/_)

The answer can be found here, once you give up trying to figure it out...

New Memory Technology...

This sounds very promising: a new semiconductor technology for non-volatile memory with the speed of volatile RAM.  Unlike some other, more exotic methods proposed over the years, this one doesn't require any advances in fabrication technology...

Alternative to OS/X Terminal...

In alpha right now.  It has some interesting features...

Public Key Cryptography Invented Earlier than We Thought?

Ask anyone interested in cryptography about public-key cryptography, and the names of Diffie, Hellman, Murkle, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman will quickly arise.  They're the inventors of the concept of public-key cryptography as most of us know it.

Well, maybe not.  If this article is accurate, apparently the British government developed public-key cryptography independently and several years earlier than the six listed above.  The narrative sounds plausible to me, though of course I have no personal knowledge of any of it...

Wow!

Via APOD, this video of a spectacular meteor from 1992:

Morning Walk – Now with Coyotes!

Miki and Race are with Debbie in Arizona, getting ready to compete today.  So this morning I just had Mo'i and Lea to walk.  When I went into our living room to get ready to take them out, I noticed that our outside patio light, which has a motion sensor on it, was already turned on.  It takes a fairly large animal (dog sized) to make it turn on, so of course that got me to wondering what was out there.

Mo'i and Lea are our two oldest dogs, the least able to defend themselves.  So I walked out first by myself, with a flashlight, to see if anything was still hanging about the yard.  I shined the flashlight all around, and didn't see a thing.  Whatever it was that tripped the light seemed to have hightailed out of there.

So I went back inside, leashed Mo'i and Lea, and we went for our usual morning walk.  But when we got to the bottom of our driveway, I heard a couple of preliminary noises and then ... the unmistakable sound of a pack of coyotes howling.  And these were close!

I had the flashlight with me, but wasn't using it.  I fumbled for a moment and turned it on, aiming it at where the sound appeared to be coming from.  Just to the left of the beam, three pairs of glowing eyes – a kind of greenish orange color, moving up-and-down as they howled.  The three were about 150 feet (50 meters) away, alongside and outside the fence around our yard.  They didn't act aggressively in any way – but neither were they shy. 

We turned back toward the house, and the coyotes stopped howling.  Mo'i and Lea seemed completely oblivious to all of this, acting just as they normally do, and paying no attention whatsoever to the racket the coyotes were making.  What does this mean?  I'm guessing it means that having coyotes about is no news to them, as they smell them all the time.  But that's just a guess.

I hustled them both back inside, as I didn't hear the coyotes any more, and the glowing eyes had disappeared.  Most likely they were headed away, but just to be on the safe side, I got the oblivious dogs back inside. 

We see coyotes around our neighborhood on nearly a daily basis, so it's not particularly surprising that we saw them this morning.  The bits that are unusual is to see them quite so close to our house, and to hear them howling from so close by – and most especially, to actually see them howling.  We have a self-filling waterer in our back yard, and we have all sorts of wildlife that comes to it for water (especially at night), so my guess is that we have guest coyotes in our yard quite frequently, though we don't see them...

Just Fiddle Around With It...

Through both work and play, I've dabbled in several kinds of engineering: software, electrical, mechanical, thermal, concrete, and audio.  Probably a few more I'm forgetting at the moment, too.  One thread (of many) that runs through all of them: one of the best (and most enjoyable) ways to learn about something is to play with it.  By which I mean: to experiment, and actually try different approaches.  In other words, to just fiddle around with it.

With software in particular, this is generally pretty easy to do.  One can simply write little scraps of test code, run them, and observe the results.  But certain kinds of software are more difficult, because they are parts of more complex systems.  JavaScript running in a web browser is a great example of this more difficult soft of fiddling.  jsFiddle is an interesting attempt to erase that difficulty...

Commentary on Palin...

Suddenly there seems to be a lot of commentary on Sarah Palin.  Specifically, why the left hates her with such a passion.  Here are three takes on that (one of these via my brother Mark D.): one, two, and three.

One thing that occurred to me as I read these: “Sarah Derangement Syndrome®” is a pretty darned good diagnostic for unthinking progressivism.  That is, if you're trying to gauge how well informed someone is (politically), and whether they think of themselves as progressive, the answer to a single question (“What do you think about Sarah Palin?”) is probably all you need...

Repeal of ObamaCare...

A nice piece in the WSJ this morning.  The lead:

Democrats are deriding last night's House vote to repeal ObamaCare as "symbolic," and it was, but that is not the same as meaningless. The stunning political reality is that a new entitlement that was supposed to be a landmark of liberal governance has been repudiated by a majority of one chamber of Congress only 10 months after it passed. This sort of thing never happens.

More House Members—245 in total—voted to rescind the new entitlement than the 219 Democrats who voted to create it last March. That partisan majority narrowly prevailed over all 178 Republicans and some 38 Democrats. The three Democrats who favored repeal yesterday confirmed the bipartisan opposition to the kind of vast new social program that historically has been built on a national bipartisan consensus.

Republicans across the country campaigned on repeal last year, and yesterday's vote showed refreshing respect for the often invoked, rarely consulted American people. Meanwhile, six additional states have asked to join the momentous constitutional challenge to ObamaCare in Florida, bringing the total to 26, plus Virginia's separate suit. A majority of states resisting this mandate is another "symbolic" threshold.

More like this, please, Republicans...

Walks...

Last night, around 7 pm, I took the four dogs out for their evening walk.  It was magical outside – we were completely enveloped in a thick, dense fog – the kind that fills the air with tiny droplets so small you can't see them, but if you wave your hand through the air it gets wet.  Visibility was down to just a hundred feet or so.  You can see this on the chart at right as a “pulse” of high humidity a few hours ago.

The three field spaniels went on an ecstatic tour de odeur, madly sniffing at anything and everything, drinking in the enhanced odors of the evening.  Race chased pine cones both real and imaginary; he didn't even notice the fog.  The dogs fur quickly was covered in tiny little droplets, giving them a diamond-encrusted appearance in the dim light from our front porch.  There was a full moon high overhead, but the fog so dimmed and diffused the light that I could scarcely tell it was there.

This morning was a completely different story.  We got up a bit early, around 2 am.  Everything was damp outside, but the sky was completely clear and it was much warmer than last night.  On the chart above, you can see that an hour or so before our morning walk, the humidity dropped precipitously (from near 100% to under 10%) in the span of a few minutes, and the temperature jumped 10°F at the same time.  A beautiful full moon was high in the sky, and it was very bright outside.  No flashlight needed this morning!  Off to the west I could see the top of fog in the lower reaches of Lawson Valley, bright white in the moonlight.  Colors were easily visible all around us, even in the distance.  The stars were largely washed out by the moon, but this was more than compensated by the beautiful views of the moonlit landscape.

The dogs were excited, too, but by something completely different and unknowable.  They spent our entire morning walk – all four of them – being very quiet, staying close to me, and sniffing at a dozen or so particularly interesting spots.  It was hard to get them off those spots.  A couple of times the four dogs made a perfect "plus" sign, with all four noses smelling the same square inch of ground, 90° apart.  I'd sure like to know what they were smelling!  It had to be something really, really interesting to get Race's mind off pine cones. 

I'm looking forward to seeing that fog in the moonlight as I drive into work this morning...

Interesting AGW Development...

Months ago, Virginia's Attorney General (Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican) initiated an investigation of fraud targeting Dr. Michael Mann (the infamous “hockey stick” graph creator).  Dr. Mann is a professor at the University of Virginia, and Cuccinelli is investigating the misuse of public funds.

I've not commented on this before, because I wasn't sure in my own mind whether the investigation was justifiable (not being party to whatever evidence Cuccinelli had) and was quite possibly more of a witch hunt (Cuccinelli is an outspoke AGW skeptic) than of substance.

But today comes news that makes me wonder.  It seems that two state Senators (Democrats, both) have proposed legislation that would prevent Cuccinelli from continuing his investigation, by retroactively removing his authorization.

That smells like shenanigans to me.

And now I'm more inclined to believe that Cuccinelli had something real to investigate.  Otherwise why would there be retroactive butt-covering going on?

Get 'em, Cuccinelli!  String 'em up!

Storm on Saturn...

Photo by the intrepid robotic explorer Cassini, which is still collecting science every day as it whips around in the Saturnian system.  APOD featured this photo today...

AGW, Explained...

Via reader Aaron B., this very nicely done takedown of the typical poorly-informed, poorly-reasoning member of the public who believes in the pending AGW doom:

I Sure Miss This Guy...

It was easier then, to know who opposed us, and why...

The Chicago Way...

“The Chicago Way” is the moniker used to describe the ways of politics in Chicago.  The politics that Obama came out of.  This little story describes it very well:

There was an investigation of voter fraud in Chicago, and the investigators wrote to my friend’s grandmother, asking to interview her. This made her nervous. She was a widow and lived alone, and so she turned to her son who was away in college and asked that he return to be with her when the investigators came to see her.

And so he did. The investigator had a question or two to ask. It was 1947, and he wanted to know whether her husband had died in 1928 as the records seemed to indicate – and she acknowledged that sadly this was so. Then, the investigator posed his second question. “Why, then,” he asked, “had her husband continued voting with such admirable regularity in the two decades since his decease?”

My friend's grandmother reportedly paused then -- and for a long time. Then, if the story is true, she looked the investigator in the eye and posed a question of her own, which brought the interview to an abrupt end. “What is this all about?” she asked. “Why would anyone suppose that just because a man has died he has given up his interest in politics?”

MATLab Alternative?

This sure looks like an interesting alternative to MATLab.  Especially the free, open-source part!

Good Doggie!

Meet Chaser, a 6 year old border collie from Spartansburg, South Carolina.  Chaser is a typical border collie, busy and motivated.  Oh, and she knows over 1,000 words!

Pro-Business Rhetoric from ...Obama?

If you casually and credulously read Mr. Obama's words in todays Wall Street Journal, it sounds like he's advocating a pro-business review of federal regulations on the books.  A more careful parsing of the text, however, reveals that he's equally ready to make the regulations even more onerous to business.  And he can't help but get a partisan dig in, blaming the current recession on regulatory failure. 

I'd really like to believe that Mr. Obama was taking some lessons from November to heart, and was really going to do his best to ease regulations on businesses to help stoke our jobs engine.  The cynic in me says that this is just another crisis that he'll feel compelled to take advantage of.  Time will tell, and probably nothing else will.

Others are wondering similar things...

Man's Best Friend...

Via reader Jim M., this ode to man's best friend:

WOMEN

A real woman is a man's best friend.

She will never stand him up and never let him down.

She will reassure him when he feels insecure and comfort him after a bad day.

She will inspire him to do things he never thought he could do; to live without fear and forget regret.

She will enable him to express his deepest emotions and give in to his most intimate desires.

She will make sure he always feels as though he's the most handsome man in the room and will enable him to be the most confident, sexy, seductive and invincible...

No, wait...

Sorry.

I'm thinking of whiskey.  It's whiskey that does all that shit.

Never mind.

After Retirement...

Via reader Dave H., what wives can look forward to after their husbands retire.  I'm pretty sure this guy was a software engineer:

RETIRED HUSBAND

After I retired, my wife insisted that I accompany her on her trips to Target.

Unfortunately, like most men, I found shopping boring and preferred to get in and get out. Equally unfortunate, my wife is like most women - she loves to browse.

Yesterday my dear wife received the following letter from the local Target:

Dear Mrs. Harris,

Over the past six months, your husband has caused quite a commotion in our store. We cannot tolerate this behavior and have been forced to ban both of you from the store. Our complaints against your husband, Mr. Harris, are listed below and are documented by our video surveillance cameras:

1. June 15: He took 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in other people's carts when they weren't looking.

2. July 2: Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute intervals.

3. July 7: He made a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to the women's restroom.

4. July 19: Walked up to an employee and told her in an official voice, 'Code 3 in Housewares. Get on it right away'. This caused the employee to leave her assigned station and receive a reprimand from her Supervisor that in turn resulted with a union grievance, causing management to lose time and costing the company money.

5. August 4: Went to the Service Desk and tried to put a bag of M&Ms on layaway.

6. August 14: Moved a 'CAUTION - WET FLOOR' sign to a carpeted area.

7. August 15: Set up a tent in the camping department and told the children shoppers he'd invite them in if they would bring pillows and blankets from the bedding department to which twenty children obliged.

8. August 23: When a clerk asked if they could help him he began crying and screamed, 'Why can't you people just leave me alone?' EMTs were called.

9. September 4: Looked right into the security camera and used it as a mirror while he picked his nose.

10. September 10: While handling guns in the hunting department, he asked the clerk where the antidepressants were.

11. October 3: Darted around the store suspiciously while loudly humming the 'Mission Impossible' theme.

12. October 6: In the auto department, he practiced his 'Madonna look' by using different sizes of funnels.

13. October 18: Hid in a clothing rack and when people browsed through, yelled 'PICK ME! PICK ME!'

14. October 21: When an announcement came over the loud speaker, he assumed a fetal position and screamed 'OH NO! IT'S THOSE VOICES AGAIN!'

And last, but not least:

15. October 23: Went into a fitting room, shut the door, waited awhile, then yelled very loudly, 'Hey! There's no toilet paper in here.' One of the clerks passed out.