Reagan's 100th...

Today is the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth.

Oh, how I long for him today...

Peggy Noonan (who worked for Reagan) has a beautiful piece in the WSJ today.  A teaser paragraph:

His most underestimated political achievement? In the spring of 1981 the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization called an illegal strike. It was early in Reagan's presidency. He'd been a union president. He didn't want to come across as an antiunion Republican. And Patco had been one of the few unions to support him in 1980. But the strike was illegal. He would not accept it. He gave them a grace period, two days, to come back. If they didn't, they'd be fired. They didn't believe him. Most didn't come back. So he fired them. It broke the union. Federal workers got the system back up. The Soviet Union, and others, were watching. They thought: This guy means business. It had deeply positive implications for U.S. foreign policy. But here's the thing: Reagan didn't know that would happen, didn't know the bounty he'd reap. He was just trying to do what was right.

He just wanted to do what was right.

I'll forgive a lot in a President, if I have that. Just that...

Now This Just Pisses Me Off!

The gist of the story:

• The local government, advised by engineers, does something that some local citizens don't like.
  


• The local citizens do their homework, put together a counter-argument, back it up with the same kind of work the city's engineers did, and submit it.
  


• An engineer working for the local government reads their submission and is surprised at the quality of it.  Then he notes that the work wasn't signed by a licensed engineer – so he files a complaint against the citizens for practicing engineering without a license (?!?!).

As one of my favorite bloggers used to say, before he was hounded off the Internet:

Rope.

Tree.

Bureaucrats and their minions.

Some assembly required.

NGC 3621...

As seen by the La Silla Observatory, in Chile.  Ole!

The Man Who Isn't There...

Via Frankie T.  I've seen some of these photos before, but never with any explanation.  The lead from the article accompanying the photos:

You might say that Liu Bolin likes to blend in.

But the Chinese artist does more than just wear camouflage pants and stand next to a bush. With the help of some assistants, Bolin paints himself, head to toe and unassumingly just stands there--in grocery stores, next to piles of coal, on staircases, you name it. And, unless you look really closely, you'll miss him entirely--which is pretty much the point.

My first thought on seeing these: it gives you a good idea what Harry Potter's cloak might do if such a thing could actually be made...

Flags of Every Country...

Brought to life in a beautiful roll-over map with pop-up images of the flags and information on their origin.  Somebody put a lot of work into this...

Bite Me...

The Daily Caller is running this image front and center, with no real explanation (either there or in the article it points to) of its origin.  I just thought it was an interesting graphic...

Technological Lock-In...

Neal Stephenson (yes, that Neal Stephenson) with an excellent piece on rockets as an example of technological lock-in.  It includes a fascinating analysis of how rockets came to be as they are, along with some informed speculation about why alternatives to rockets haven't been developed.

It's nice to see some new writing by Neal Stephenson; it's been a while since I've had that pleasure...

Resupply...

FOB Waza K'wah gets resupplied by the only means available: air drop.  This photo shows fuel being dropped.  Our guys are fighting out in one of the more nether regions of the world.  Click to enlarge.  More here...

Color Vision...

The most accessible explanation of human color vision and perception I've seen.  Even so, it doesn't shy from the mysteries that most texts avoid...

Code Cracking...

Where the code is on lottery tickets.  A Canadian statistician figured out how to pick winning tickets in a “scratcher” lottery – without scratching.  It's a fascinating read...

All the Volcano Webcams in the World!

On one page...

Gigapixel Art Reproductions...

Courtesy of Google and museums around the world...

Strange Morning Walk...

It's cold and windy – the winds are gusting up to about 25 MPH (40 kph) and the temperature is around 40°F (5°C).  The sky is crystal-clear and moonless; bright stars all around.  The Big Dipper (Ursa major) is nearly straight overhead, which always looks odd to me.

The three field spaniels were, as usual, noses-down, sniffing like mad.  They appeared to not even notice the howling wind.  Racer, the border collie, was very spooked by it all.  The noises all around us (gates crashing, branches swishing, brush rolling across the yard) all caught his attention and greatly distracted him from his pine cones.  He spent most of our walk with his hackles full up, growling, yipping, and generally acting aggressively toward all the noises.  If I was a noise, I'd have been intimidated.  The brown dogs...not so much.

Doing Their Bit...

...to help the folks in Egypt.  Good for Google!

Holy Byte Code!

Java hangs when running a simple program to convert a string to a double:

class runhang {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Test:");
        double d = Double.parseDouble("2.2250738585072012e-308");
        System.out.println("Value: " + d);
    }
}

It gets even worse: there's a similar compiler hang.

Just when you thought it was safe to assume the java.lang package was free of bugs...

ObamaCare Ruling...

My hero of the week: Judge Roger Vinson.  The WSJ has a good piece on his ruling this morning.  The lead:

'If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.'

Federal Judge Roger Vinson opens his decision declaring ObamaCare unconstitutional with that citation from Federalist No. 51, written by James Madison in 1788. His exhaustive and erudite opinion is an important moment for American liberty, and yesterday may well stand as the moment the political branches were obliged to return to the government of limited and enumerated powers that the framers envisioned.

As Judge Vinson took pains to emphasize, the case is not really about health care at all, or the wisdom—we would argue the destructiveness—of the newest entitlement. Rather, the Florida case goes to the core of the architecture of the American system, and whether there are any remaining limits on federal control. Judge Vinson's 78-page ruling in favor of 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business, among others, is by far the best legal vindication to date of Constitutional principles that form the outer boundaries of federal power.

Go read the whole thing.

Wet Morning Walk...

We got a little rain yesterday afternoon and last night – enough to thoroughly wet down our valley, but not enough to produce any runoff.  My weather station is down at the moment, so I don't have a measurement.  My best guess is about a quarter inch.

The dogs always like these wet morning walks, as they can smell so much better under these conditions.  I suspect that every blade of grass and every grain of sand has an odiferous story to tell them.  The three field spaniels certainly acted that way – they wanted to spend an hour or so at each interesting repository of smells, which was about every half inch. 

Race, on the other hand, just wanted pine cones.  He appeared to take pleasure in the fact that they were cold and wet, crunching them with a bit more delight than usual (and that's saying something!).

No stars or moonlight this morning; it was completely overcast...

Seven Years of Opportunity...

APOD has a celebratory post up today – celebrating seven years on Mars by the amazing Opportunity explorer.  Designed for a mission of 90 days, it is still in nearly perfect condition seven years later.  It has now logged over 15 miles (27 km) of roving over the Martian surface, far more than its designers ever dreamed of.  It's also had its share of good luck: unexpectedly common dust devils have cleaned the accumulated dust off its solar panels on several occasions.  Without these lovely dust storms, Opportunity's solar panels would long ago have been blocked.

Opportunity's sibling rover Spirit is also still operational, but it has suffered more component failures (especially its wheels) and is now stuck in one place.  Nevertheless, it's still doing yeoman science work every day.

Click on the image below to see it greatly magnified, or see it on APOD...

An Unserious Speech...

Peggy Noonan on Obama's State of the Union Speech - her lead:

It is a strange and confounding thing about this White House that the moment you finally think they have their act together—the moment they get in the groove and start to demonstrate that they do have some understanding of our country—they take the very next opportunity to prove anew that they do not have their act together, and are not in the groove. It's almost magical.

The State of the Union speech was not centrist, as it should have been, but merely mushy, and barely relevant. It wasted a perfectly good analogy—America is in a Sputnik moment—by following it with narrow, redundant and essentially meaningless initiatives. Rhetorically the speech lay there like a lox, as if the document itself knew it was dishonest, felt embarrassed, and wanted to curl up quietly in a corner of the podium and hide. But the president insisted on reading it.

What she said.

Read the whole thing...

Mac Software Recommendations...

Quite a few things on this list that are new to me, and sound interesting...