xkcd is Awesome Today...

Make sure you try dragging the lower image around...

Animated Optical Illusions...

I've posted something similar before, but this one is even better:

One Sentence...

This is awesome – everything you need to know about Obamacare, in a single sentence (and under two minutes)...

The All American, a B-17...

This particular B-17 survived a mid-air collision with a German fighter over the docks of Tunis.  Amazingly the pilot managed to land the badly-damaged aircraft, and not a single crew member was injured at all.

I'd never heard this story before.  Read all about it...

Puppy!

There's a new puppy at our house: Boomer, a five month old male Border Collie.  He's not ours, though – he belongs to an Australian couple (Brent and Francisca M.) from Queensland.  They asked Debbie to do “foundation training” on him, to get him ready for an agility competition career.  This was arranged by the breeder, the same one we got our Border Collie (Race) from.  We'll be keeping Boomer until next February; then he'll be making the long flight to Australia.

Boomer is recovering from surgery to repair an injury he got a few weeks ago.  He has some convalescing to do before he's ready for aggressive training.  That's clearly not his opinion, though – he's a ball of fire, ready to start playing with anything and everything right now.

He's getting along great with our four dogs, though our dogs are showing signs of a little jealousy over the attention Boomer is getting.  The cats are another story – Boomer thinks they are just the greatest toys evah!  We've got some training to do on that front :-)

It's fun having a puppy in the house again...

They Walk Amongst Us...

Long-time readers may recall my previous posts on the Unarians (search for “Unarius” in the search bar at upper right).  There hasn't been much news on them in recent years, but they just popped up again – this time because a “weird news” journalist was being profiled, and this was one of his favorite stories.  In that story is a great slide show (one photo below) of the Unarian Cadillac, which is intended to welcome the UFOs when they land.  In Lawson Valley, where I live.  Seriously, that's what these folks believe!

I drive by their property every once in a while (it's off Montiel Truck Trail), just to make sure the Bug Eyed Monsters haven't landed.  Nothing but coyotes so far...

Curiosity on the Move...

Curiosity is making tracks on Mars, heading for some rocks to explore even while still in the process of checking out all its science instruments.  The news continues to be all good for the nuclear-powered rover.  The volume of high quality imagery being sent back by Curiosity is stunning when compared to all the many other robotic exploration missions I've watched over the years.  This is primarily due to two factors: the amazing number of cameras Curiosity carries (it seems like they're everywhere!), and the high bandwidth it has (thanks to the orbiting relay stations around Mars) to send them back home.  A visit to the Curiosity site is part of my morning routine, just to catch up on the latest finds. 

Anyone as old as I remembers that not so long ago people were arguing over whether there were structures (like “canals”) on Mars.  It wasn't until the first “fly by” missions to Mars that that question was put to bed.  Much more recently, the very first (and very primitive) landers started setting down on Mars.  These returned tantalizing views in a few photos, and a little science data.  Fast forward to today, with Curiosity dashing about: the images are pouring in, they're of high quality (and many in color), and an array of varied science instruments is studying features down to the microscopic level.  What an amazing advance in a relatively short time!

We Really Need Some New Bozos on this Bus...

Sheesh...

Acoustic Levitation...

This was completely new to me.  I found a good explanation of how it works.  Watch it in action:

Of All the Possible 4 Digit PINs...

Which one is the most popular?  And which is the least (and therefore most secure)?

I guessed which one was most popular (“1234”), but not the least.  Most of all I was surprised by the shape of the curve of most popular to least popular PINs.  I was also intrigued to see the use of heat maps (like the one at right), a technique I first learned about in the '80s as one of the more effective quick tests of a random number generator.  Altogether a very nice analysis by Nick Berry at DataGenetics...

It's Easy If You Try...

From a collection of photoshopped images, this one caught my eye:

That's our freedom of speech you're playing with there, Obamawon.  Not that you care, particularly...

Solar Filament, Erupting...

An awesome image from APOD:

Science and Political Correctness...

In an article titled The Return of the Ugly, Racist Pseudoscientist with a Small Penis, scientist Satoshi Kanazawa relates his experiences when his scientific investigation ran headlong into political correctness.  It's a dismaying tale for anyone interested in advancing science, but not really surprising – scientists are, after all, as human as the rest of us.  As I read his article (which relates a story in psychology), I was thinking about climate science and how political correctness and financial rewards have distorted the field.  The impact of political correctness on science varies wildly according to the particualr field of science.  For example, political correctness has little impact on nuclear physics, mathematics, or inorganic chemistry – but a lot on anthropology, psychology, climatology.

The only defense I know against this sort of thing is to be a determined skeptic – don't believe anything without reproducible evidence to support it...

A Tale of Two Vasectomies...

I suspect most adult men wouldn't expect an email from their mother with a subject line like that.  In my family, it's well within the bounds of normality :-)  A great joke with an unexpected political twist:

A man goes into the hospital for a vasectomy. Before the procedure a very attractive nurse comes in and takes his vitals, then tells him to take all of his clothes off. When he is fully undressed she instructs him to lie down on the table.

The man obeys. The nurse then takes all of her clothes off and climbs on top and has her way with him.

Upon the completion of the act the man catches his breath and asks what that was all about. The nurse informs the patient that studies have shown that before a vasectomy if the man has an ejaculation, he will be more relaxed and that the vasectomy is easier for the surgeon to locate and sever, thereby making the surgery safer, more efficient and quicker.

The nurse then wheels the patient to the operating room. While they are going down the hall the patient looks through a window to the right and sees six men in a room masturbating. Curious, the man asks, "What are they doing in there?"

The nurse responds, "They are getting vasectomies too, but you have Blue Cross and they have Obamacare."

I sense support for Obamacare rapidly declining amongst men...

Some Travel Photos...

Debbie and I traveled to northern Idaho in the first week of September.  As is my want (:-), I took a few photos along the way.

First up: a bed and breakfast, just north of Grangeville, Idaho.  We stopped and talked with the proprietor and his wife for a while.  They clearly had some fun with this.  The “fire hydrant” at right is actually a functioning outhouse.  The beagle is a room you can rent – note the window just forward of his ear.  Cute.  There are several rooms like this.  We zoomed by, both of us exclaiming...then turned around to come back and check it out.  These are definitely “dog people”!

The main reason for our trip was to visit our property near Hope (which is on the north shore of Lake Pend Oreille).  We hadn't been there for over ten years, and it was high time for us to check up on it.

Our property is in a little “island” of private property inside a National Forest; we get to it from a National Forest gravel road.  Take that road a few miles further and you'll come to the Lunch Peak lookout, seen at left.  This looked much different than our memories of it, but we can't tell if that's because our memories are faulty or if the place has really changed.  Neither of us, for instance, remembered the lookout as being enclosed.  Nor did we remember it being locked and inaccessible.

On the way up and back from Lunch Peak, we stopped at a couple of places to pick huckleberries, which are prevalent in any open area.  They were just beginning to turn red for the fall color when we were there; this made it very easy to spot patches of huckleberries!  They were delicious – juicy, sweet, deep purple.  Yum!

My favorite aspect of our property is the water running through it.  As a denizen of the high desert, running water seems quite exotic – and large quantities of running water even more so.  There are three streams running through or alongside our property.  The photos below are all time exposures (20 seconds to 60 seconds) of the three.  As usual, click to enlarge.

One of the days we were there, we drove up to Bonner's Ferry (very close to Canada) to do a little sightseeing. Just south of Bonner's Ferry we ran across this barber shop, called “The Barber Ship”. You can just barely make out the sign in the photo at right.

The entire building is tilted at a rakish angle, as though the Barber Ship were cresting a wave.  However, the floor inside is level – which makes for an odd-looking room in which two of the walls appear to be dangerously tilted.  We found lots of humorous signs all over Idaho, but more in Bonner's Ferry than anywhere else.  We're not sure where this culture of commercial humor came from, but we sure enjoyed it.  We also had a great meal in Bonner's Ferry – so good we had to come back another day for a repeat.  The place was called Papa Byrd's Bistro, and it had spectacularly good soups, the best pizza I've had in years, and an equally spectacular sandwich.  If you're ever up in Bonner's Ferry, don't miss that joint!

The last day we were in Idaho, we made a big loop over into Washington state, back through the National Forest to Priest Lake (in Idaho), then back to Sandpoint.  Just west of Priest Lake, we ran across the Roosevelt Grove of ancient (and giant!) cedar.  If you suffer from arborphilia (as I do), it's a place you won't want to miss.  Trees that are thousands of years old and towering over your head, with the trunks to match.  They look healthy, too (our conifers in San Diego County are suffering from years of drought and the ravages of bark beetles, though on the whole our cedars look better than anything else).

In the parking lot for Roosevelt Grove, we came across a phenomenon we've seen before: butterflies apparently attracted to the minerals on the ground.  Usually we've seen this alongside mudpuddles or on damp earth; here it was on bone-dry soil.  Later in the day we saw even more of them, for miles on the shoulders of a gravel road.  Whatever the reason, we've found you can approach these butterflies quite easily – they appear to be lost in rapture or something, not paying much attention to the large, dangerous humans stalking them with a camera!

Our Beautiful Old Girl...

Just a moment ago, as I was working away in my office, I heard a soft snoring start up behind me.  I turned around in my chair to find Lea, our oldest dog, splayed out on the carpet, and I managed to snap the photo below without waking her. 

When I'm working at home I often find that she's parked herself close by me, seeming to take comfort or pleasure in my presence.  Some might say she's an unattractive dog – her weepy eyes build up dried mucus that we have to constantly clean, and her nose is similarly caked.  Her hair is all scraggly; she suffers from some unidentified disorder that has made her formerly luxurious, curly coat look more like a moth-eaten rug with a hormone problem.  We don't give her haircuts often because it stresses her out, and at her age, she doesn't need that.  She's otherwise actually quite healthy, and considering that she's about 16 years old (already much older than your average field spaniel attains), that's really saying something.

I think she's the most beautiful dog in the world.

Whenever I pay attention to her, she's ecstatically happy and her tail wags as fast as it can go (though that's not so fast these days).  She's always at the door to greet me when I come home, and mourns from the doorway when I leave.  She squeals with gratitude when I give her a treat (which I'm going to do right now - some warm milk).  I can do no wrong in her eyes.  She loves me no matter what mood I'm in, no matter what I'm doing. 

I make a point of spending some time with Lea every day, because I don't know how much longer she'll be with us.  She's given us more pleasure and love than we can possibly reciprocate, though we try.  She's my beautiful girl, and don't you say otherwise...

Amazin' Blaze...

Awesome!

Geek: Fast Inverse Square Root...

There's a well-known “hack” that approximates an inverse square root (i.e., 1/x^0.5, or x^-0.5) with just a few adds, subtracts, a shift, and a multiply – and the “magic” hex constant 0x5f3759df.  On hardware lacking single-cycle floating point operations, this is remarkably efficient compared with the conventional approach.  I've used it myself, about 10 years ago, to speed up calculations in a Monte Carlo bond valuation simulation.  It was one of the few algorithms I've ever used whose inner workings were a complete mystery to me.

But it's a mystery no more, thanks to a lovely blog post on Hummus and Magnets, by Christian Plesner Hansen.  This post also links to a nice Wikipedia article on the same subject. I'm left in awe of the inventor's cleverness – the insight that the floating point's bit pattern could be mathematically manipulated is a classic hacker's trick.  And now I have a new tool in my hacker kit, as I've discovered that the algorithm can be extended to cover any power between -1 and 1.  Awesome!

Steyn Takes the Obama Administration to the Woodshed...

The inimitable Mark Steyn weighs in on the debacle in the Middle East.  An excerpt:

But Hillary Clinton and Gen. Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the Secretary of State's weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs' telephone call to a private citizen, asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher's teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: that's not a spontaneous movie protest; that's an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower's response to it. Secretary Clinton and Gen. Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

But do go read the whole thing...

It's Wrong...

Via my lovely bride, something that has been much on my mind recently (as I contemplate the outrageous taxes we're about to have stolen from us by The One's administration and his sidekick, Governor Moonbeam):