Zipf's Law holds...

Zipf's Law holds...  Zipf's Law is one of those observed mathematical relationships that is surprising because it's so simple – and because there's no mechanism to explain it.  I first ran into it when studying cryptography in the Navy, back in the '70s.  Basically, Zipf's law says that in any given text, the most common word will appear twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common, and so on.  If you're trying to decrypt the bad guy's messages, and the bad guys used an old-fashioned cipher or code, knowing the way that words (and letters) are distributed can help.  That's much less true with modern ciphers, though.

Anyway, I remember thinking at the time that Zipf's Law was too simple to be for real.  I imagined that it was an artifact of military messages, because of the strange, passive voice filled, stilted, and acronym-stuffed prose the military favored.  Turns out that's not the case – in a recent test against the entire text held by the Gutenberg Project, Zipf's Law largely still holds.  How bizarre!

Collectivization...

Collectivization...  Friend, former colleague, and fellow retiree Doug W. passed along this quote:

Back in the 1930s we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.

  – William F. Buckley, Jr.

It's been a long time since I last saw that, and pondered on it. There is much truth there, condensed into a very small number of words.

When I was first reading about current events (late '60s, early '70s), the word “collective” had very negative connotations for any Americans who didn't identify as Communist.  These days one doesn't hear the word very often, but we are collectivizing, steadily.  Our healthcare system is heading quickly toward a “single payer” system – and that fits the definition of a collective perfectly.  The discussion about “minimum income” – which in some countries is very close to becoming the law of the land (I'm looking at you, Finland and Switzerland!) – is a move toward collectivization.  For me, at least, calling single-payer healthcare collectivized healthcare makes it sound much worse, and more threatening.  I wonder if that's true for younger people, those who likely have no idea what a collectivized Soviet farm was like?

It's been almost ten years since Buckley died, and proponents of liberty still have no intellectual support to replace him.  We sure could use a new Buckley right about now.  Can you imagine what his quips on The Donald, The Hillary, and The Bern might be like?

Fish and chips excellence...

Fish and chips excellence...  We needed to go to Ogden yesterday.  If you're not familiar with Ogden, it's a fair-sized city about 30 miles north of Salt Lake City, and about 30 miles south of us.  As we were there in the early afternoon, we decided to try a restaurant we'd not been to before.  We used Yelp to pick it: the best-rated place in Ogden that was open on Monday (most restaurants here close Sundays and Mondays).  The place we chose is called Sea Bears Ogden Fish House.  All we knew when we walked in is that Yelpers liked the place.  We had no idea what a treat we were in for!

The inside is clean and homey, with inviting decor and low lighting.  We were greeted by the male half of the couple who owns the place, fully outfitted in traditional Scottish costume, including a kilt.  Within a few minutes of conversation we discovered that his whole family works there, they're politically very compatible with us, and his wife (the cook and waitress) usually is packing heat (open carry), though she wasn't yesterday – and if you don't like that, they'll gladly tell you about some other places you can get a good meal.  Their sons also work there, though we didn't see them and I don't know what they do.

We ordered cod (they also have halibut, albeit at a higher price), and I asked for sweet potato fries instead of traditional chips.  I also ordered a crab cake (at $3 I could hardly resist!), and raspberry lemonade.  When our orders arrived, they also had cole slaw, which I didn't even realize was included.

How was it, you ask?  The fish was top notch, one of the five or six best I've ever had (and that includes memorable fish-and-chip experiences in England, Scotland, and Singapore).  Next time I'm going to try the halibut. The sweet potato fries were excellent, not oily at all.  The cole slaw was superb – the perfect blend of sweet and sour, and made with fresh Napa cabbage and carrots that had the dressing applied just before it was served.  The crab cake was ok; nowhere near the best I've had, but certainly edible (and $3!).  The lemonade was real, made right there with fresh lemons and raspberries – awesome!

After polishing off that treat, we joked with the owner that we'd love to have him open a branch in Logan.  To our surprise, he reacted by telling us it was already something they were considering.  It turns out that he and his wife grew up in Logan, and that they're doing well in Ogden and are looking to expand.  Holy cow!  So we've been enlisted to keep our eyes open for an opportunity – especially a disused restaurant that they might be able to lease complete with a kitchen.

Oh, that would be great if they were to open up here!  As things are now, though, they've just added one more reason for us to venture out of Cache Valley now and again...

Fun with numbers...

Fun with numbers...  I just finished writing some software (for the blog server I'm creating) that figures out whether it makes more sense to send a larger image already on the server, or a smaller image made by scaling the larger image down.  Part of doing that required making an estimate of how much computer time it would take to scale down the larger image.  That turns out to be (roughly) proportional to how many pixels on the larger image have to be inspected to create a pixel on the scaled-down image, multiplied by the number of pixels in the scaled-down image.  Got that?  :)

Well, calculating the number of pixels that needed to be inspected turned out to be an interesting problem in geometry and algebra.  It boiled down to this formula:

Where:

   t  is the number of pixels in the target (scaled down) image
   x  is the floor of the ratio of source (big image) to target pixel width
   y  is the same ratio minus x

It took me a while to derive that formula, but to my great satisfaction it did a pretty good job at estimating the time.  In my tests it was particularly good with PNG files, and within 20% or so on JPG – way better than I actually need for my purposes.

I don't often get to play with numbers like this for the sorts of software I write.  When I get the chance, it's fun!  Especially when it works :)

Curiosity is looking at weird rocks...

Curiosity is looking at weird rocks ... on Mars, like the ones at right.  Look closely and you can see some bizarre thin layers, with edges exposed and curling upward (look at the left bottom, or top middle).  What the heck do you suppose those might be?

What a world we live in (part 63,992)...

What a world we live in (part 63,992)...  For the past few months, I've been playing Scrabble with a new partner, a friend of my sister whom I've never actually met.  She's a computer science and math professor, and we play our Scrabble games over the Internet.  Her name is Jo, and we've played well over 100 games at this point.  I'm ahead in our little competition, but I am in awe of her.  Why?  Well, for starters, English is not her first language.  Jo is Polish.  She grew up in the Soviet Union, lived through its collapse, and somewhere along the line picked enough English to be a respectable Scrabble competitor.  If you know the game, then you know that's pretty amazing!  Then there's Jo's sheer determination -- she keeps right on playing even after getting whipped badly several times in a row.

Yup.  I am in awe...

Update: Jo has corrected me – she did not grow up in the Soviet Union, but rather in Poland.  While we in the West didn't differentiate very much between the actual Soviet Union and its satellite countries, in fact they actually were different questions.  To the citizens of those countries, that's a big distinction!

The “Jersey Way”...

The “Jersey Way”...  Via my pistol-packing, proud New Jerseyan mom:

The Jersey Way

Three contractors are bidding to fix a broken fence at the White House in D.C. – one from New Jersey, another from Tennessee and the third from Florida. They go with a White House official to examine the fence.

How it works:

The Florida contractor, Jonathan, takes out a tape measure and does some measuring, then works some figures with a pencil. "Well", he says, "I figure the job will run about $900: $400 for materials, $400 for my crew and $100 profit for me."

Cletus, the Tennessee contractor also does some measuring and figuring, then says, "I can do the job for $700: $300 for materials, $300 for my crew and $100 profit for me.

Vito from Jersey doesn't measure or figure, but leans over to the White House official and whispers, "$2,700".

The official, incredulous, says, "You didn't even measure like the other guys! How did you come up with such a high figure?"

The New Jersey contractor whispers back, "$1000 for me, $1000 for you, and we hire the guy from Tennessee to fix the fence."

"Done!" replies the government official.

The Jersey Way, indeed. The bad news is that contractors from the other 49 states have also figured this out...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Chicken and dumpling soup is a good thing :)  So is chocolate cake!  It's a tea-and-chocolate-cake kind of morning, too.  Although after the political results yesterday, something a little stronger (like 100% ethanol) might be in order...

We ended up getting about 2" of snow, and now we've got another 1 to 3" in the forecast for tomorrow (Monday).  Sigh.

Oh, well.  It's a chance to get some more work done on my blog software, and perhaps to watch a movie with my honey...

Just yesterday...

Just yesterday ... we were delighted by a weather forecast for ten whole days of no precipitation and above-freezing temperatures.  This morning we got up ... and it's snowing.  Forecast still said no precipitation.  An hour later, there's about two inches of snow on the ground – and suddenly the forecast says 100% chance of snow, about an inch.  Now it's three hours later, and the forecast says 1 - 3 inches.

I'm beginning to think the weather folks here are just making this stuff up, then looking out the window to see what happened...

Nine years old...

Eleven years old ... this blog is, today.  It's our “bloggiversary”!  Eleven years and 12,781 posts (including this one).  I didn't set out to write such a huge amount of stuff, but somehow it happened.  That's about 3.2 posts per day for that entire period!

There's a chocolate cake in the oven right now, and later today we're making chicken and dumplings.  Somehow this seems very appropriate :)

I find it strangely satisfying...

I find it strangely satisfying ... to find that I still can do some challenging programming.  I've been working for about 50 days now, part time, on some blogging software.  This is a blog server with some specialized features that pander to my own desires, and also that can run several blogs ('cause one blog can't possibly be enough, can it?).

Today I just finished the first user interface component (a sign-in screen).  To make that work, a lot of server infrastructure had to work correctly.  And it did!  For those of you who aren't programmers, user interfaces are fiddly, picky things – and in addition, web user interfaces (which is what I'm doing) are full of quirks and bizarreness.  It's challenging even for the experts, and I am not expert on user interfaces.  So it's very satisfying to prove to myself that I can still do this, even with my vacuum tube nurtured ancient technology brain...

One of these fine days – at least a couple months off yet – I will be hosting all of my blogs on my new self-written server, running from a virtual machine in Amazon's cloud!

Troubling...

Troubling ... this sort of thing is.  But what could be done about it?  Other than shining light on the issue (as Claire Berlinski does in the post linked there), this is a sort of corruption that stays hidden.  You might suspect someone of benefiting from dishonest writings, but how could you possibly know?  And even if you did, what could you do about it?  So far as I know, there's nothing illegal about it...

When I think about...

When I think about ... how political outcomes might be manipulated, these days I consider this the most dangerous – far more so than voting machine manipulation, outright corruption, and so on.  Why?  Because (a) the capability already exists, and (b) it's detectable only through a massive effort, and who would fund that?

I'd be surprised if this isn't already happening.  Not necessarily with Google, but with any influential web site.  It's definitely already happening on sites where it's obvious there's political bias (consider NPR, the New York Times, HotAir, Fox News, etc.).  Where it's dangerous is where you don't think there's bias...

Tim Cook is right on this one...

Tim Cook is right on this one...  We really, really don't want the government to be able to get access to our devices.  Smartphone owners, for the most part, have no idea how much information is on their phones.  The phones know where you've been, what calls or messages you've received and sent, possibly intimate photos and video, and (depending on the apps installed) may also know every key you've pressed, every web site you've visited, and even may record your conversations!  It's no surprise that the government would like to have access to that.  There's also no doubt that having access will help them convict guilt people.  The problems start arising when you consider how it could be used to help convict innocent people (as every new law enforcement technology has done), and how it will be misused and abused.

I read an example not long ago of such misuse, but I couldn't find the article.  The gist of it was this: a woman was murdered in a brothel, in Mexico.  The woman was a famous celebrity of some sort, and there was enormous pressure to find the murderer.  The police started examining the smart phones of anyone they arrested, looking at the GPS records in the phone to see if they'd been at the right place, at the right time to have committed the murder.  A few weeks after the murder, they stopped a businessman for speeding – and after examining his phone, determined that he'd driven by the brothel at the right time. That evidence was presented to the jury, and he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.  What the jury was not told was that he had driven by at 70 MPH!  The story I read was of his appeal, and of the fight this man is going through to have that latter bit of information presented to the appeal jury.  That's the sort of thing one can look forward to if the government has easy access to the trove of information in smart phones...

The New York Times, of all places, has a reasonably balanced overview of the issue.  There's much more, all over the web, ranging over the entire spectrum of possible responses...

Fire in Paradise...

Fire in Paradise...  In our furnace, that is.  Our newly repaired furnace!

The experience reminds us once again of why we love living here.  We had two new furnaces installed in May 2014 to replace the aged ones that came with the house.  The fellow who advised me and did the work – Ryan Osborn, owner of Leading Edge Heating and Air Conditioning (435-994-0666) – recommended a Carrier model and installed them.  He did a great job, cleaning up some shoddy work done on the original furnaces – plus he helped me repair an irrigation riser that I knocked off with my lawn mower (the first of several, alas).

Now fast forward to last week, nearly two years after he installed them.  We had a problem with the downstairs furnace, so I gave him a call.  He instantly accepted responsibility and promised (and delivered) quick action.  Four visits later, plus a trip for his sidekick Joe down to Ogden to pick up parts, they had the problem (which was a weird one, naturally) diagnosed, with the parts covered under warranty.  Today he's going to preemptively order (and later install) the same parts for our other (identical) furnace.  I'm currently trying to figure out how to pay them something for their time, but so far he's not letting me.

This is so different than our normal experience in California – and yet here it's so normal that it is the expectation.  Honesty and hard work are the norm here, and it's still hard for us to get used to that after 40 years in the very different culture of California...

Amazing...

Amazing ... plus, pretty girls, for the double win!

Interesting piece...

Interesting piece ... by a scientist (physicist) and writer named Tom Hartsfield.  He takes no sides in the AGW “wars”, but looks at climate science and is appalled by what he sees.  The perspective he outlines in this article is very close to what Freeman Dyson observes, and that appears to be the source of Dyson's AGW skepticism...

I can identify with this!

I can identify with this!  I have always hated neckties.  Jeans and buttoned, loose-neck, short-sleeve cotton shirts, that's my “uniform”  these days...

Canada has a national treasure...

Canada has a national treasure ... named Steve McIntyre.  There should be a way to honor this man for his sober, level-headed analyses of the data that allegedly supports AGW.  He's done it again – no surprise there – and his article is yet another example of why he's been such a mainstay for the AGW skeptics.

I couldn't help but smile at his understated-but-still-devastating conclusion, starting with this paragraph:

The RCS technique used in the LW2005 MXD chronology eliminated high medieval values as a tautology of their method, not as a property of the data.  The Icefields data provides equal (or greater) justification for MXD RCS chronologies with elevated medieval values.

“…a tautology of their method...” indeed.  Translated into language I might use, this says: “The LW2005 MXD chronology is bullshit!” – but he says it much more politely (and with better support) than I ever could.  Do read the whole thing, and carefully – it's yet another Steve McIntyre masterpiece...

A map...

A map ... of Pluto's geology.  What a time we live in!  Pluto was just a smudge on a photographic plate when I was a kid, and now we have a map of its macro geologic features.  There's an article and a high resolution version...