Headline of the day...

Headline of the day...

Meerkat expert cleared of assaulting monkey trainer in love spat over llama-keeper

I'm not quite sure how one could top that one!

On the other hand...

On the other hand ... this one from my pistol-packing mama I understand completely!

An old priest lay dying in a hospital. He had served the people of the nation’s capital for many years.

He motioned for the nurse to come near.

“Yes father?” said the nurse.

“I would really like to see Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama before I die” whispered the priest.

“I will see what I can do” said the nurse.

The nurse sent the request to Washington and waited for a response.

Soon an answer came back; Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would be delighted to visit the priest.

As they were driven to the hospital Hillary commented to Obama “I don’t know why this old priest wants to see us, but it certainly will help our images and may even help my election prospects”.

Obama agreed it was a good thing.

When they arrived at the priest’s room the priest took Hillary’s hand in his right hand and Obama’s hand in his left hand.  There was silence and a look of serenity on the old priest’s face.

Finally Obama spoke “Father of all people you could have chosen, why did you chose us to be with you at this time when your end is so near?”

The old priest slowly replied “I have always tried to pattern my life and behavior after our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

“Amen” said Hillary.

“Amen” said Obama.

The old priest continued “Jesus Christ our savior died between two lying thieving bastards and I would like to do the same.”

My mom sends me things...

My mom sends me things ... and I'm not always sure how to interpret them.  Like this one, for example:

Mama taught her well! You've got to love this little girl. What a woman she'll make.

A teacher asked her class, "What do you want out of life?" A little girl in the back row raised her hand and said, "All I want out of life is four little animals, just like my Mom always says".

The teacher asked, "Really and what four little animals would that be?"The little girl said, "A mink on my back, a jaguar in the garage, a tiger in the bed and a jackass to pay for all of it.

The teacher got a coughing fit and had to leave the room.

Northern Pluto...

Northern Pluto...  This is just awesome – a composite photo of Pluto, made from dozens of photos taken by the New Horizons robotic explorer during it's fly-by of Pluto last July.  The photos are still being downloaded from the spacecraft; the last of them won't be received until later this year.  Via APOD, of course.  Magnificent full resolution version (3477 × 2143 pixels) here...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  We had a late lunch yesterday at one of our favorite haunts: Jack's Wood-fired Oven.  The soup and pizza, were (as usual) delicious.  They had a new dessert, and after hearing it described we decided to try it.  They call it “zeppoti”, and so far as I can tell that's a name they made up.  No matter – it's great!  They take a bit of pizza dough, stretch it, slather on some Nutella, fold it over, bake it, sprinkle it with a little powdered sugar, and voila!  Zeppoti, which we disappeared quite quickly!  How could it be bad if it has Nutella on it?

Then we had an extra surprise: when I went to pay for the meal, the waitress brought us a check for $5 (the price of the dessert).  When I called her on the mistake, she said that our meal had already been paid for!  On walking into the restaurant, we were greeted by Lawrence W., the fellow who sold me my tractor nearly two years ago.  Turns out he bought our lunch and never said a word to us about it.  I've no idea why he did this, but it sure was a pleasant surprise!

Afterwards we went out to Hardware Ranch on our usual wildlife hunting excursion.  We saw plenty of deer and elk, but no moose.  On the dammed pond upstream from the Hyrum power station we saw three smallish swans feeding.  Beautiful birds, they were...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Yesterday Debbie made us a new dish.  She's on a roll with these things!  This time it was a pasta dish, spaghetti tossed with lemon, parsley, asparagus, mushrooms, bacon, cheese, a little cream, and a little olive oil.  It was great!

The snow is starting to melt all over the valley.  Patches of our yard and our fields are now snow-free.  Mud season is upon us shortly :)

One of our neighbor has three bright kids, 11, 13, and 14 years old, who are all very interested in math and programming.  I'm going to start tutoring them next Saturday, and they seem to be pretty excited about this.  If that enthusiasm is maintained, this could be an interesting experience for both of us.  If not ... I'm prepared to call it off, though their mom (Maria) will be very disappointed if I do...

This morning we put together a kit, a DVD rack.  Debbie just finished organizing them all onto the new shelves, and she's quite pleased with the result.  I got a good laugh from one piece of that kit: a black marker pen packaged with a slip of paper explaining that it was for touching up scratches, etc.  It said that the furniture industry called this “deluxing”, and that this was a deluxing pen that we should save.  I figured that was some PR fluff on their part, but I Googled it – and it really is a furniture industry term!

This is exactly...

This is exactly ... what many of my Estonian friends are afraid of:

If push ever came to shove, we would sell the Estonians to Vladimir Putin for 30 counterfeit rubles and a mess of beet soup. And we would throw in the rest of the Baltic states for good measure.

Read the whole (excellent) piece...

Is there a skier...

Is there a skier ... who can tell me if this video is for real?  Because it seems impossible (in the violating-laws-of-physics sense) to me...

Claire Berlinski...

Claire Berlinski ... seems to share my sense of doom.  Read the comment threads...

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  This time from Nick Gillespie, writing at Reason:

It's easy to be cynical about this (and to be frankly terrified of a Trump presidency), but Trump is the least cynical politician in the 2016 race.

That “least cynical politician” is a fascinating measure, isn't it?

An igniting match...

An igniting match ... in super-slow-motion closeup.  You'll want to full-screen this one...

Farming is a dangerous occupation...

Farming is a dangerous occupation ... much more so than most urban folks realize.  Yesterday evening that fact struck us here: a young man was killed in an accident at Rosehill Dairy, just 3 miles north of us (and the source of the milk we drink every day)...

Rosetta's final days...

Rosetta's final days ... should be utterly fascinating.  I can hardly wait!

The reign of Moore's Law...

The reign of Moore's Law ... may be about to end.  Or not; the end of Moore's Law has been predicted a few hundred times before, too :)

But suppose for a moment that it does end, that we really have reached the end of IC density increases.  The linked article talks about other things that will almost certainly be explored to keep improving computers.  One possibility I personally find intriguing: it may become more important again – like it was up until roughly 1990 – for programmers to know how to write efficient programs.

At the moment, the need for algorithmic efficiency has been nearly wiped out by the rapidly growing power of computers.  The exceptions are relatively few and far between.  When I started programming back in the '70s, the exact opposite was true – nearly every program needed to be written in a very efficient way, as the constraints of computer speed and limited memory were quite severe.

Maybe the pendulum will start to swing back the other way again...

Things I'd never heard of, part 9,442...

Things I'd never heard of, part 9,442...  There's a thing called an “escape room”, and they're all over the world.  There's even several near us.  They're a big, profitable business. 

The ones near us charge around $20 for the privilege of being locked in a room with a dozen or so strangers.  You have 90 minutes to collectively try to solve the puzzles and riddles in the room that will allow you to escape.  If you fail in that amount of time, they just let you out.  That's it – that's the entire “entertainment”.

I'm afraid this is (yet another) one of those things that I will never understand.  Why on earth would I pay $20 for something like that, when (for example) $20 worth of gas will take me to a wonderful place in nature, or when $20 each will buy Debbie and I a great meal at a local restaurant, or when $20 will buy me several great books, or when I can learn anything I want to learn for free on the Internet.  I just don't get it...

It's 2016...

It's 2016 ... and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) just now approved a rear-view mirror that uses cameras.  And they only approved it because it was a combined mirror/camera.

Let's get one thing out of the way right at the start: cameras and video screens readily available for at least the last ten years are unequivocally superior to a plain glass mirror.  They have wider fields of view, they're unaffected by the placement of windows or interior obstructions, they see better in both low and high light situations.  In addition to those safety considerations, they eliminate the safety problem (to pedestrians) and aerodynamic problems of external mirrors.  They're better in every way.

But car companies are not allowed to build them into cars.  Not allowed.

You can add one to your own car if you'd like, though.  No problem with that.

Even if you believed (which I do not) that a government bureaucracy should be regulating something like a rear-view mirror ... it's still unconscionable that the NHTSA is taking so long to approve these things.  If anything, they should have mandated rear (and side) view cameras years ago.  It's as though some government agency required the use of vacuum tubes in radios, or vinyl records for your music.

Man, I really loathe big government.  It blocks progress in so many stupid and costly ways...

Another taxpayer-funded boondoggle...

Another taxpayer-funded boondoggle ... that's biased towards progressives.  No surprise, really: the National Endowment for the Arts spends (in recent years) around $150 million of taxpayer money annually.  Some of this goes to art with a political message, and that message is overwhelmingly progressive – definitely not conservative and not libertarian.

Outrageous?  Yes.  Should we fix it?  Yes.  How?  By ending taxpayer subsidies of art!  I don't really care that the art has a progressive bias.  What I care about is that I'm helping pay for it!  Nobody asked me if I wanted to do that, but if they did, the answer would be loud and clear: no!  That would be true even if the art being subsidized had a message near and dear to me, because I don't believe that even one taxpayer dollar should go to something that certainly isn't an essential communal service...

What it's like to be an introvert...

What it's like to be an introvert...  Here's another site exploring what it's like to be an introvert, this time with some nifty drawings (like the one at right).

Ever since I discovered what an introvert really is, and that I was one, I've been fascinated by the impacts of introversion vs. extroversion.  I was in a profession (engineering) where introverts have a distinct intellectual advantage, and yet the management of engineering organizations is dominated by extroverts – a situation that's bound to cause friction (and it does!).

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the movement toward “open offices” (cubicles) for engineering teams – something only an extrovert could love, and that's guaranteed to lower an introvert's productivity.  Extroverts were positive that open offices would improve the productivity of engineering teams, but ... not so much (as engineering teams are, generally, dominated by introverts).  What's most interesting to me about this is how the extrovert proponents of open offices just don't get it.  It is – I think perhaps literally – beyond their ken.

My last employer was a great example of this.  The founder is a brilliant engineer and a flaming extrovert, and he was certain that having engineers work together in shared spaces was one of the keys to engineering creativity and productivity.  Nothing I (or anyone else) could say would dissuade him from this.  I'm not sure he still holds this belief, though, as it must be true that the results are discouraging for him...

Curiosity, near and far...

Curiosity, near and far...  A couple of photos from today's dump of raw photos taken by Curiosity.  At left, a view into the distance – and at right, an extreme closeup of an interesting rock...

Things I didn't know...

Things I didn't know...  I use IntelliJ IDEA, from Jetbrains, as my Java and JavaScript development environment.  I've been using it for years, since (I think) 2003.  I started using it at the recommendation of a friend, and immediately liked it better than its main competitors (all of which I was familiar with).  Later, when I worked for ServiceNow for seven years, I used their standard IDE, which was Eclipse – but still used IntelliJ IDEA for my personal projects.  Since I retired, I've switched back to only IntelliJ IDEA.   

During all that time I've thought of IntelliJ IDEA as a sort of edge product, one of those things that a few borderline nut cases like, while everyone else uses the perfectly good (and free!) Eclipse.  I had no idea that IntelliJ IDEA, along with Jetbrains other products, have been gobbling the IDE space up.  I'm very glad to hear it, though – their products are first rate, the community is great, and they just keep making it better all the time (as the linked article points out).

Endorsed!

I had the chance to meet some of the Jetbrains folks a few years ago.  Their development center (or at least, one of them) is in St. Petersburg, Russia, and their offices were near by those of a company I worked for at the time.  When I wrote and told them I'd be in town, they invited me down to their offices for a visit.  I had a grand time talking with some of their developers.  Since it was Russia, of course we also had vodka and chocolate :)