Local Hero...

I have not heard of Sgt. Kristopher Kane of El Cajon before I read this story about his actions:

On the morning of Nov. 10 that year, Kane and his platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, were in Fallujah to retake the city from insurgents. While his platoon was resting overnight in a guarded building, the building next door was attacked.

Soon his platoon was in a fierce battle, according to military documents and an account in a Marine Corps newsletter.

Kane protected his fellow Marines from gunfire, including some already wounded. When the grenades Kane threw failed to stop the insurgents, his lieutenant, Dustin Shumney, sent in a bulldozer to take down a portion of the house.

The house fell down around Kane, the rubble crushing his right leg. He continued to fight despite the injury. He was sent to hospitals in Germany and then San Diego before spending a month recuperating at his father's house.

Kane is being honored in a way I haven't seen before:

Kane was decorated for his actions with a Silver Star, the U.S. military's third-highest honor for valor. And his picture is on a downtown El Cajon billboard – part of the year-old Hometown Marines program, which honors military heroes in the towns they are from.

The billboard, unveiled last month, is one of fewer than a dozen nationwide and the first in San Diego County. It can be seen on eastbound East Main Street near the Prescott Promenade.

I am really glad to see this sort of program in place, to give these warriors the recognition they so greatly deserve…

Kudos to Liz Neely and the San Diego Union-Tribune for such positive coverage of this story.

Hiring A Programmer...

Here's an excellent guide to hiring a programmer, full of advice that resonates strongly with my own experience. Here's #2 of 6 indicators, as a sample:

#2 : Self-teaching and love of learning

Programming is the ultimate moving target. Not a year goes by without some new technology robbing an old, established standard blind and changing half the development universe. This is not to say that all good programmers pick up these changes and ride the bleeding edge. However, there’s a class of programmers that will never, ever pick up a new technology unless forced to, because they don’t like learning new stuff. These programmers will typically have learnt programming at university, and expect to get by on whatever skills they picked up there, plus whatever courses their company is willing to send them on.

If you’re thinking of hiring someone as a programmer, and he ever utters the words “I can work with that, just send me on a training course for a week and I’ll be good at it”, don’t hire that guy. A good programmer doesn’t need a training course to learn a new technology. In fact, the great programmer will be the one talking your ear off about a new technology that you haven’t even heard of, explaining to you why you must use it in your business, even if none of your staff knows how to use it. Even if it’s a technology he doesn’t know how to use yet.

Now go read the whole thing!

Giving Thanks...

Some Jamulians found a way to thank some of the firefighters who traveled here from other states to help us this past October:

Grateful to the firefighters who helped protect their community, the couple wanted to give something back. And, as luck would have it, they planned to visit the Pacific Northwest.

They came last month, bearing gifts for the seven agencies that sent firefighters to Southern California. Each received a box of snacks and souvenirs from Jamul and the nearby border town of Tecate, Baja California.

Waller and Weber also wanted to deliver a personal touch. So they brought oversize thank-you cards signed by community members.

To get the signatures, they set up a table at a fundraiser for people who lost their homes. By day's end, 172 people had signed the cards.

"The most poignant signatures were from those who lost their homes," Waller said. "There were six families who still wanted to thank the firefighters, and they had lost everything."

Go read the whole thing. Very nice, Cris and Mike. Very nice indeed…

2007 Darwin Awards...

The Darwin Awards are given each year to

“…salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it…”.

This year's awards were just announced. It's “don't miss” reading – but be darned sure you're sitting down and don't have any liquid in your mouth when you go there...

Moral Relativism...

Neo-Neocon has a fascinating post up today on moral relativism. The lead:

Moral relativism is the idea that there is no absolute good and evil, but that all customs and practices of mankind must be evaluated in terms of their function in the society where they are found. Any attempt to make moral judgments about other cultures merely reflects our own cultural prejudices.

Some tolerance, doubt, and perspective is good. But this is the notion of tolerance taken to its ultimate—and ultimately, absurd and destructive—conclusion. Not only does it handicap our ability to make moral judgments within our own culture by weakening our convictions, but it handicaps our ability to see true evil as well as our ability to fight against it, and paradoxically can lead to the triumph of a very intolerant society.

As always, her post is insightful and full of interesting notions and perspective…

Double Standard...

If you're not familiar with the issue, this story is going to seem really odd: Ms. magazine refuses to run the ad at right. You'd think the magazine would find an ad bragging about the success of women in a culture or country a very comfortable addition to its pages – which are, after all, mostly devoted to advocacy of women's issues.

You would be wrong, though. You see, these aren't the right kind of women. These women are (gasp!) Israeli – and the liberal narrative to which Ms. magazine tightly adheres says that Israel (and Israelis) are evil! Never mind the rather obvious fact that Israeli society is one of the least gender-biased in the world, living side-by-side with the Muslim Palestinians, whose society is one of the most gender-biased. The standard liberal narrative says that those Palestinians are to be admired, and the Israelis to be loathed … and Ms. magazine sticks to the playbook.

The American Jewish Congress (who tried to place this ad) has issued a press release telling the whole sad story. Do go read the whole thing, as it's an interesting piece of commentary. Here's the lead:

NEW YORK, Jan. 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Ms. Magazine has long been in the forefront of the fight for equal rights and equal opportunities for women. Apparently that is not the case if the women happen to be Israeli.

The magazine has turned down an AJCongress advertisement that did nothing more controversial than call attention to the fact that women currently occupy three of the most significant positions of power in Israeli public life. The proposed ad included a text that merely said, "This is Israel," under photographs of President of the Supreme Court Dorit Beinish, Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni and Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik.

"What other conclusion can we reach," asked Richard Gordon, President of AJCongress, "except that the publishers − and if the publishers are right, a significant number of Ms. Magazine readers − are so hostile to Israel that they do not even want to see an ad that says something positive about Israel?"

When Director of AJCongress' Commission for Women's Empowerment Harriet Kurlander tried to place the ad, she was told that publishing the ad "will set off a firestorm" and that "there are very strong opinions" on the subject − the subject presumably being whether or not one can say anything positive about Israel. Ms. Magazine publisher Eleanor Smeal failed to respond to a signed-for certified letter with a copy of the ad as well as numerous calls by Mr. Gordon over a period of weeks.

A Ms. Magazine representative, Susie Gilligan, whom the Ms. Magazine masthead lists under the publisher's office, told Ms. Kurlander that the magazine "would love to have an ad from you on women's empowerment, or reproductive freedom, but not on this." Ms. Gilligan failed to elaborate what "this" is.

"The only conclusion that one can reach from this behavior is that Ms. Magazine feels that an ad highlighting the accomplishments of three incredibly talented and dedicated women would offend their readership. Since there is nothing about the ad itself that is offensive, it is obviously the nationality of the women pictured that the management of Ms. fears their readership would find objectionable. For a publication that holds itself out to be in the forefront of the Women's Movement, this is nothing short of disgusting and despicable," stated Mr. Gordon.

The feminist movement and its mouthpieces are capable of some amazing mental juggling. This is one example; others include their fawning over Bill Clinton and their deafening silence on the miserable plight of women in fundamentalist Muslim societies. The latter reached its nadir when fashion magazines featured the burka in laudatory articles. This seemingly inexplicable hypocrisy is actually a marvelously clear window into the true motives of many of the most influential leaders of the feminist movement – what drives them isn't feminism at all (notwithstanding their words), but rather liberalism – in a particularly arrogant and obnoxious form.

The publishers and editors of Ms. magazine ought to be ashamed of themselves. I imagine that instead they're feeling rather smug and proud. Despicable.

Double Einstein Ring...

The Hubble telescope has discovered something most unlikely: a double Einstein ring. A single Einstein ring is caused by a pair of galaxies in the same line of sight from Earth, with the gravity of the nearer one causing the light from the further one to bend, much like an ordinary lens – and the result is that the further galaxy looks like a ring to us. This effect is known as “gravitational lensing”. The photo's story:

The double ring captured here is caused by three galaxies all in the same line of sight from Earth (an improbable event all by itself). Gravitational lensing makes a ring from each of the two further galaxies.
Image of gravitational lens system SDSSJ0946+1006 as photographed by Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The gravitational field of an elliptical galaxy warps the light of two galaxies exactly behind it. The massive foreground galaxy is almost perfectly aligned in the sky with two background galaxies at different distances. The foreground galaxy is 3 billion light-years away, the inner ring and outer ring are comprised of multiple images of two galaxies at a distance of 6 and approximately 11 billion light-years. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and R. Gavazzi and T. Treu of University of California, Santa Barbara)

Solid science delivered by the amazing Hubble telescope, yet another in the amazing series of accomplishments of NASA's largely unheralded robotic space exploration program...

A Free Lunch...

Of sorts, anyway. The Wall Street Journal has opened up a large part of its web site to everybody, for free. This is a direct consquence of Rupert Murdoch's recent acquisition of Dow Jones (the owner of the Wall Street Journal) and his personal vision of the future of the news business. The lead of their announcement:

Everyone knows that Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction" is roiling the newspaper world, and today we'd like to announce something on the creative side. We're rolling out a new destination for the Journal editorial page offering free access to all of our editorials and op-eds, video interviews and commentary. It's as close as we'll get to conceding there is such a thing as a free lunch.

Since 2000, we've operated in a dual world on the Web. The majority of our daily editorial offerings have remained behind a paid subscription wall at wsj.com/opinion, while our free site, OpinionJournal.com, offered select stories plus a few Web-only features. As of today, those two sites will merge and become a single free site for all Journal opinion, both in the U.S. and overseas editions, book reviews and leisure and arts.

You can access their editorial page at this link. In my opinion, it's one of the best sources of English-language informed commentary and political perspective in the world.

Puzzler...

Well, 11 of 14 people got last week's puzzler right – you can build an entire computer using nothing more than two-input NAND gates (and actually, you can build one from two-input NOR gates as well). The fact that so many of my readers knew this answer certifies my audience as being mostly comprised of fairly extreme geeks...

This week's puzzler is back to history – science history...

What was the last name of the scientist who (in the early 1900s) was notoriously associated with the notion that acquired characteristics of an organism could be inherited? This scientist's views persuaded the leader of a major country, and caused Darwinian inheritance to be officially banned there for many years.

No fair googling!

Be Afraid: PCTs...

From the anti-market liberal minds that control the California Assembly comes this nanny-state gem of a proposal:

What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a "programmable communicating thermostat" or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes' central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a "non-removable " FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During "price events" those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During "emergency events" the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.

In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course.

Some further research I did shows that these proposed changes would apply even to homes running “off-grid” (on their own electricity, from solar or otherwise). If this actually makes it into the building codes, the part of California where I live (the chaparral of San Diego County) could be rendered practically uninhabitable in the summertime – temperatures here routinely cross 100°F, and we commonly exceed 105°F.

This proposal is the direct consequence of the anti-market politics in Sacremento. Our government insists on regulating the electrical market, and on impeding the construction of new generating capacity. The result is very predictable: artificially low electricity prices have encouraged greater consumption – and the lack of new generating capacity means that the demand now exceed the supply. The nanny-state solution: enforced restrictions, in the form of PCTs, rolling blackouts, and other such draconian “solutions”. The market, if they just left it alone, would take care of this very nicely: increased consumption would encourage new generating capacity, and if demand exceeded supply prices would rise until that stopped. That's how markets work – if they're left alone by the flippin' government.

I'm getting really, really tired of the government telling me how to live my life and how to spend my money…

Dumbing Down California...

Some wags would say it isn't possible to dumb down California any more than it already is. And others (including myself) would argue that the surest way to stop any useful neural activity in a young American is to send them off to college. Nonetheless, I find this quite disturbing (WSJ$):

The world gets more competitive every day, so why would California's education elites want to dumb down their public university admissions standards? The answer is to serve the modern liberal piety known as "diversity" while potentially thwarting the will of the voters.

The University of California Board of Admissions is proposing to lower to 2.8 from 3.0 the minimum grade point average for admission to a UC school. That 3.0 GPA standard has been in place for 40 years. Students would also no longer be required to take the SAT exams that test for knowledge of specific subjects, such as history and science.

UC Board of Admissions Chairman Mark Rashid says that, under this new system of "comprehensive review," the schools "can make a better and more fair determination of academic merit by looking at all the students' achievements." And it is true that test scores and grades do not take full account of the special talents of certain students. But the current system already leaves slots for students with specific skills, so if you think this change is about admitting more linebackers or piccolo players, you don't understand modern academic politics.

This is just one more example of how American liberals are chipping away at what has made America the world's greatest democracy. Personally I can't fathom it, but somehow merit and responsibility have become anathema to American liberals, and symbol is everything. In this case, the symbol of a college degree – even if rendered worthless by being dumbed down – is more important to them than any actual accomplishment.

And they don't mind defying American voters to impose their ideology. As the WSJ article later points out, this action is clearly an attempt to circumvent the voters of California, who overwhelmingly approved Proposition 209, restoring academic merit as the admission standard to the UC system.

Hillary is right: it's time for a change. But not the change she has in mind. We need to throw all the entrenched politicians out, and start over with a new bunch. It's hard to imagine how the new ones could be any worse than those we have now…

Technical Note...

As previously noted, my web server (which hosts the Lawson Valley Weather page and the Lyons Peak Camera sites, amongst many others) is down. I had a chance to troubleshoot it yesterday, and the prognosis is grim: the computer the web server runs on is as dead as the proverbial doornail.

So I have a choice: I can either buy and configure a new computer (a pain in the patoot and expensive), or I can use a hosting service (easier, but expensive and with limitations on capabilities), or I can use a new-fangled approach called “HaaS” (Hardware as a Service). I've been reading a lot recently about one particular Haas (Amazon Web Services), and I've decided to go that route. The cost will be about the same as my current DSL cost, and I won't have to purchase, maintain, or configure any hardware.

That's the good news. The bad news is that I have a lot of things to learn about, and some code to write, and all in my none-too-abundant spare time – so this project is going to take a while, probably a couple of months. And those web sites will be down in the meantime…

You Decide...

I hope Warren at Climate Skeptic will forgive me for stealing his entire post:

The chart below is from the Cryosphere Today and shows the sea ice anomaly for the short period of time (since 1979) we have been able to observe it by satellite. The chart is large so you need to click the thumbnail below to really see it:

OK, now looking at the anomaly in red, what do you see:

1. A trend in sea ice consistent with a 100+ year warming trend?
2. A sea ice extent that is remarkably stable except for an anomaly over the last three years which now appears to be returning to normal?

The media can only see #1. I may be crazy, but it sure looks like #2 to me.

The question of whether Warren is crazy is, of course, completely separate from this question. But on this one, I agree with him completely…

More Guns, Less Crime...

One of the more consistent liberal memes is the idea that gun control will lead to more crimes. The consistent conservative/libertarian response has been that if guns are illegal, only the criminals will have guns. The preponderance of the evidence favors the conservative/libertarian position: in every jurisdiction where ordinary citizens are free (or relatively free) to carry concealed weapons, crime rates – including death and injury by gunfire – are lower than otherwise.

Michigan's experience now joins that evidence:

Six years after new rules made it much easier to get a license to carry concealed weapons, the number of Michiganders legally packing heat has increased more than six-fold.

But dire predictions about increased violence and bloodshed have largely gone unfulfilled, according to law enforcement officials and, to the extent they can be measured, crime statistics.

The incidence of violent crime in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and accidents, also has declined.

San Diego County Sheriff Bill Kolendar has made it nearly impossible for ordinary citizens to get concealed carry permits. A new sheriff will be elected this year – let's make certain that the sheriff we elect commits to start issuing concealed carry permits again in San Diego County, with only reasonable restrictions.

The criminals in San Diego County need to understand that the people around them are carrying weapons…

Misreporting...

Several of my readers have recently sent me a link to a very interesting report (American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics) by the Congressional Research Service (CRS). These CRS reports are not usually available to the public (that's a whole 'nother story!), but the Federation of American Scientists makes a large number of them available on a section of its web site, without permission (and hurrah for them!).

The chart at above right is drawn from the report; it compares casualties from various conflicts the U.S. has fought in since 1900. This chart shows clearly just how low the casualties from the war on terror have been, as compared to every other previous conflict – something you never would have guessed if you are too young to have lived through any of them, hadn't read much history, and believed what the lamestream media told you over the past four years.

Table after table in this report put the lie to many of the allegations and insinuations of the lamestream media's reporting on the war on terror – the idea that minorities are disproportionately represented in the casualties, the notion that casualty rates were unreasonably high, the smear that our volunteer forces are stupid and uneducated, and the lie that America's poor are bearing the brunt of the war's casualties. Read the report. Think about what the lamestream media has been feeding you. Then cancel your newspaper subscriptions, your magazine subscriptions, and stop watching the boob tube – for they are lying to you every single day, by commission or omission…

Wet Chaparral...

At right is a graph showing the rainfall in Lawson Valley over the past few days. The storm total of 5.85" (about 15 cm) is still hard for us to believe – it's been five or six years since we've seen anything like that here.

Yesterday as I drove to work, I was delighted to see that Lawson Creek was flowing, and flowing strongly, with muddy water because of all the new sediment eroded by the heavy rain. On the way home, the water was still flowing strongly (though abated slightly), but now almost clear. Our creeks are all intermittent, drying up every summer. But the past few years have been very dry, and even in our rainy season the creeks have hardly flowed at all. I hope this is a portent of a very wet year, as we surely could use it...

The rains lasted for about 50 hours, with an average rate of just over a tenth inch per hour. That's actually quite intense for this area, though it might not sound like it to someone from another part of the world. Debbie and I once experienced a rain storm that averaged two inches per hour for six hours (in Hilo, Hawai'i) – now that was an intense rain storm!

Random Notes...

No, I have not disappeared from the face of the earth – I've just been busy!

The current rain storm has brought us sustained gentle rain, exactly what we've been needing so badly. I just checked my rain gauge – we're at 3.27 inches for storm total so far, and the forecast still calls for another 30 hours or so of possible rain. Wahoo!

Yes, I know that my web sites for Lawson Valley weather and the Lyons Peak cameras are down (along with several others). They're all on a server located at a friend's house some 30 miles away, and I need to physically go there to see what's wrong. No ETA for getting it fixed, as I don't know what's wrong...

And to all those people who want to know what I thought of the results from the Iowa caucuses (cauci?): I think they're irrelevant, and mostly what they did for me was to illustrate for the umpteenth time the many reasons I don't like any of the candidates. Except maybe Thompson; the more I hear from him, the more I find to like (though I've still got major reservations about him, too – most especially his support of McCain-Feingold). A pox on the whole lot!

I once read about a proposed system of voting that would give each voter the choice of either voting for the voter's favorite candidate, or against the voter's least favorite candidate. The result for each candidate would be the sum of all the for votes, minus the sum of all the against votes. The candidate with the highest score would be the winner. If that system were actually in place in the U.S., this year I'd definitely be choosing an against vote – no matter which Democratic candidate wins the primary, I'd be more worried about that candidate winning than I would be passionate about the Republican candidate (whether it was McCain, Guiliani, or Romney).

The only time I'd be in a bit of a quandary would be if somehow Huckabee or Paul got the Republican nod – but if that happened, I might be thinking about emigration. For example, suppose it turned out to be Ron Paul vs. Barack Obama? Just entertaining that thought for a moment make my head feel like exploding!

Puzzler...

Last week's puzzler asked this: at about what altitude is the air pressure half that of sea level? The answer is 18,000 feet, which almost half of the respondents got right (5 of 12), as you can see at right.

Something you may not know is that the air pressure declines exponentially as the altitude increases. For about every 18,000 feet of altitude gain, the air pressure halves – so at 36,000 feet the air pressure is about 1/4 that at sea level, at 54,000 feet it's about 1/8 of sea level, and so on.

This week's puzzler is about the early history of a technology that is ubiquitous today: the digital computer. It is entirely possible to build a digital computer from a single logic component. Before integrated circuits made all sorts of logic components cheap and easy, there were some advantages (especially for maintenance) in having a computer built from such a simple set of components. One of the small computers I worked on in the Navy was made this way. What is one of the logic components from which you can build an entire computer?

Quote of the Day...

From Coyote Blog:

First and foremost, the state of California demonstrates itself to be just as financially incompetent as any condo-flipping doctor who now finds himself stuck with a bunch of mortgages he can't pay.

He's talking about this list of figures, showing how much money the state of California has spent annually, in 2007 dollars, per citizen:

1990-1991: $2,755
1995-1996: $2,470
2000-2001: $3,558
2005-2006: $3,416
2007-2008: $3,767

Just since 1990, state spending has increased by some 37% – a huge expansion of state government, and the financial engine behind “Nannifornia”. Schwarzenegger – who campaigned as a fiscal conservative – is trying to break all records for raising state expenditures. He's on the verge of succeeding in this effort.

Maybe Jamul should secede...

Needless Complexity...

One of the many challenges in software development is avoiding complexity that serves no good purpose. As a particular program matures, and more programmers work on it, the almost inescapable tendency is for more and more of this needless complexity to be introduced. This happens for lots of reasons – new programmers working on code that they don't understand well (and therefore don't realize that there are simple ways to do things), programmers thinking in complex ways about problems that are actually simple, programmers not thinking a design through, etc. There are some patterns: sophisticated programmers with heads full of academic knowledge about algorithms and systems analysis will often make complexity mountains out of complexity molehills; their deep understanding somehow leads them to ignore (or miss) opportunities for simplification. Mind you, I'm as vulnerable to these things as the next programmer – I'm observing here a phenomenon that is almost universal in my own experience. However, the “strength” of the tendency varies radically from individual to individual – some engineers have a real talent for finding simple solutions; others have a real talent for finding complexity even in areas where most engineers see the simple solution.

I just read an interesting essay on this very subject, by Ryan Tomayko. It's called Insects and Entropy, and here's a sample (but do go read the whole thing!):

Right before the class ended the dumb kid asked Jon to take a look at his insect. Jon had to fight the urge to laugh out loud when he saw that the entire insect was a mere 25 lines of code that barely made it through the compiler and with some lines having no chance of even being executed. The dumb kid had not even configured his insect's basic set of traits but had left them at the professor provided defaults.

Looking more closely, Jon found that the insect was programmed to do the same thing every time it had a turn to move:

1. Rotate 90 degrees.
2. Attack.

Turn and then attack. That's it? Jon asked, to which the dumb kid replied, Do you think I'll pass?

Jon tried to give the dumb kid some ideas on making his insect more advanced but the dumb kid wasn't interested. Jon decided that the dumb kid would most assuredly not pass.

The next day the competition was on. The professor loaded up the simulation program and everyone hooked their insects into the system. The dumb kid was late and then couldn't figure out how to get his insect loaded up. Jon helped him out while mumbling something about futility...