Beauty Before Common Sense...

Here's an example of the weighty matters our U.S. Congressman choose to spend their time on:

Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner, a 43-year-old bachelor, has proposed legislation giving international beauties their own U.S. visa category, rather than have them compete with computer analysts and scientists for the non-immigrant H-1B visa for skilled professionals.

Congressman Anthony Weiner (D), at your service.

Rope.
Tree.
Congressman.
Some assembly required.

Boumediene, Part II...

Beldar is dead on target:

The Supreme Court ruled today that terrorists who are citizens of foreign countries, who have never set foot within the United States, and who have systematically forfeited all the protections of the organized laws of warfare that would entitle them to be treated as prisoners of war, are, when captured on foreign battlefields by the U.S. military, nevertheless entitled to access to the federal court system of the United States — in most essential respects, exactly as if they were lawful, taxpaying citizens born here, raised here, and arrested here by the domestic police for alleged crimes committed here.

If Osama bin Laden, wearing no uniform, surrounded by children as human shields, and in mid-stroke while he's sawing the head off a captured American nurse, is captured by American soldiers tomorrow in Pakistan or Afghanistan, then his rights to use the federal writ of habeas corpus to guarantee him the protections afforded by the United States Constitution will be, so far as I can determine, indistinguishable from my own if I were arrested at my home by the Houston Police Department on a warrant for overdue parking tickets.

The Supreme Court has so ordered notwithstanding the fact that the people's lawful representatives — through statutes passed by their Congress, and signed into law by their president — had otherwise decreed. Instead, five members of the Supreme Court have set themselves up above the rest of the people and government of the United States of America, and they have proclaimed that even acting together, the Congress and president lack the constitutional power to make other provisions for these foreign barbarians and monsters captured on foreign battlefields while trying to destroy America and everything related to it.

He concludes with this:

This decision is a disgrace and a travesty. It's awful law and even more disastrous policy. It's the single worst decision of the United States Supreme Court in my lifetime, and quite arguably its worst in American history. It can't be sugar-coated. It can't be minimized. In all probability, it can only be thoroughly undone by a constitutional amendment, or by a pronounced change in the membership of the Court that will deprive the liberal wing of a crucial fifth vote in such cases and open the possibility of this decision being overruled.

...

Our enemies will never defeat us. We have the power to defeat ourselves, however, and today's decision by the Supreme Court is a terrible, tragic step toward such a defeat. What will you do in November? Will you help accelerate these judicial power-grabs? Or will you help reverse them?

His point is exactly in line with my own feelings on the matter: Boumediene looks a lot like a European-style societal suicide. The decision is a horrifying example of one of the few real consequences of electing a liberal President: they get to appoint the Supreme Court justices.

Read the whole thing.

HMS Ontario ... Found!

The HMS Ontario was a British frigate operating on the Great Lakes in the Revolutionary War. It never saw action, but on October 17, 1780 it sank in a gale on Lake Ontario, and all on board were lost (a crew of 40 Canadians, about 60 Redcoats, and 30 or so American prisoners of war). A few pieces of wreckage were recovered, and a few bodies – but for more than 200 years there hasn't been any trace of it.

Archaeologists, scientists, and shipwreck enthusiasts have been searching for the HMS Ontario's grave ever since it sank. Until just a few days ago, none of them have had any success. Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville, two well-known shipwreck enthusiasts, have found the HMS Ontario – in remarkably good condition, fully intact and upright in about 500 feet of water.

Here's an article about their find, another here, and this site has some photos of the actual shipwreck. Hats off to these two intrepid amateurs – what a find!

The Amazing HiRISE...

I've written several times about the HiRISE camera system on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter robotic explorer that's orbiting Mars. The photo at right (click to enlarge) is one that it took recently. There are thousands of photos like this on the HiRISE web site, available for all to peruse. I have spent hours just staring at the amazingly detailed views of Mars – a destination that seemed so exotic and impossible when I was a kid, and now our robotic emissaries are exploring it almost routinely.

In this one photo you can see fantastical terracing (through wind erosion, I presume), sand dunes on the bottoms of the old craters, and a small, fresh crater (bluish gray in the lower left) with ejecta splashed on the surrounding terrain. Strange bumps and valleys dot the landscape. In a few places you can see tracks from falling boulders or perhaps landslides. The terrain on Mars is much more varied than I'd have guessed – if you look at a few dozen HiRISE photos, you'll see what I mean – there's little commonality from one area to another...

The photo at right is also by HiRISE, but of a very different kind than it usually takes. First, the “look angle” is very oblique – normally HiRISE looks almost straight down at the surface. The purpose for this oblique look is also unusual: the researchers were trying to capture the Phoenix Lander while it was still in the atmosphere, under its parachute, headed for its landing – and they succeeded! Click to enlarge the photo to see what I mean...

Sunrise Over Lawson Valley...

Summertime each year brings us a special treat – beautiful sunrises that fill our windows. This is what we saw just before 5 AM this morning...

The reason summertime is different is that our windows face north, and in the summer, the sun rises far more to the north than in the rest of the year, when it rises mostly in the east. We have no windows in our house facing east, and there are trees and mountains between us and the easter morning skies – so Mother Nature doesn't give us a morning show until the summer.

I was outside just before sunrise this morning, working away on whacking down the weeds. This time of year, it's mainly mustard (with a few filary left to irritate me). I expected to be limited in my “outside time” by the heat – the forecast calls for near 90° heat today. But while it was still cool outside, something else drove me indoors: deer flies. Big, biting flies that we only get sporadically on very quiet days. I finally gave up when I was getting bitten at the rate of about once per 30 seconds; I just couldn't stand it anymore!

The photo at right (click on either one to enlarge them) was taken perhaps five minutes after the photo above, zoomed in to show the detail within the cloud. The early morning's near-horizontal rays greatly accentuate the texture within the clouds...

An aside on the photography: since my main computer is now a Mac, I was faced with a dilemma – should I purchase a second copy of PhotoShop for the Mac (hundreds of dollars), or should I try to use one of the open source photo editors (free)? This is a question that's unfortunately much more difficult than just the price: I have spent over a decade using PhotoShop, and I've become reasonably compentent with it. Photo editors, perhaps especially PhotoShop, have a well-deserved reputation for being difficult and counter-intuitive to use. Spending a lot of time learning a new application was not an attractive thought, so this was not a decision I took lightly. In the end, I decided to try the most famous of the open source photo editors: The Gimp. Short result: I'm glad I did – it's a perfectly usable photo editor, and (for me, at least) remarkably easy to learn how to use. It's missing some features I used in PhotoShop, but this is more than compensated for by some features it has that PhotoShop doesn't, and the fact that it is free.

This marks a milestone for me: PhotoShop was the last significant piece of commercial software (other than the operating system itself) that was part of my normal working set of software. I now use free open source software for nearly everything I do. There's really only one piece of commercial software that I have yet to find a good substitute for: Visio. But my use of Visio doesn't justify buying it, so I make do with functionally inferior open source subtitutes (most recently Open Office's “Draw”).

As for the operating system... If my choices today were limited to Windows Vista and Linux, I'd pick Linux. However, happily for me there is another choice: the Mac's OS/X, and that's now my operating system of choice (for a workstation or laptop, that is)...

Free Speech Forecast...

England is a few years ahead of the U.S. in the multi-cultural movement. Here's a peek at what we're likely to be dealing with a few years from now:

In February this year, Christian evangelists Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham were doing what Christian evangelists do: handing out Bible extracts. They were stopped by a representative of the law, threatened with arrest if they carried on preaching in “a Muslim area,” and warned that they might get beaten up if they came back.

Where did this incident take place? Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Pakistan, where Christian preaching is forbidden and apostates persecuted? No, this “Muslim area” was in Alum Rock, Birmingham, England. That’s right — England, cradle of free speech; England, a country with an established, if enfeebled, Church, and where seventy-five percent of citizens (at the 2001 census) describe themselves as Christian. The man who stopped the evangelists, calling their preaching a “hate crime,” was Naeem Naguthney, a police community support officer (PCSO), and a Muslim. Granted, a PCSO is not a full police officer, and has only limited powers of law enforcement. But which law was he enforcing? It looks suspiciously like Sharia.

I'm no fan of Christian evangelists – I run them off my property at every opportunity, as I would a Muslim or Jewish or Hindu proselytizer. But I am a big fan of free speech in public places, and that's what this is all about. We see it starting to happen here in the U.S. already, especially on college campuses, where a “right to not be offended” is being invented...

Boumediene...

The best short analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court's Boumediene decision I've seen is by Scott Johnson at Power Line. There's no reasonable way to excerpt it – you'll just have to go read the whole (short) thing...

Geekly Humor...

Here's a very entertaining (in a geeky sort of way) collection of 101 quotes related to computers and programming. A few samples:

I've noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS.
Larry DeLuca

Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the 'most reliable Windows ever.' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.'
Dave Barry

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.
Henry Petroski

It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.
Alan Cooper

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'.
Edward Tufte

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
Eric Raymond

First, solve the problem. Then, write the code.
John Johnson

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.
Jon Ribbens

If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.
Robert Sewell

If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
Edsger W. Dijkstra

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
Martin Golding

A Simulating Q & A...

Here's some pointed commentary on Bush's lame “stimulus package”:

This year, taxpayers will receive an Economic Stimulus Payment. This is a very exciting new program that I will explain using the Q and A format:

Q. What is an Economic Stimulus Payment?
A. It is money that the federal government will send to taxpayers.

Q. Where will the government get this money?
A. From taxpayers.

Q. So the government is giving me back my own money?
A. Only a smidgen.

Q. What is the purpose of this payment?
A. The plan is that you will use the money to purchase a high-definition
TV set, thus stimulating the economy.

Q. But isn't that stimulating the economy of China and Japan?
A. Shut up.

Tip o' the hat to Simi L...

Phoenix Update...

Phoenix – the little lander that could – is working away on the surface of Mars. A few days ago it scooped up some Martian dirt and tried to deliver it to one of the instruments on board, but ran into an unexpected problem: the dirt was very “clumpy” and refused to enter the pencil-lead sized container for the instrument's sample. The soil just sat on top of a screen intended to keep large particles out of the instrument.

The photo at right (click to enlarge) shows the clumpy dirt in the scoop. It looks to me almost like damp soil, though in the thin and dry Martian atmosphere this can't be the real explanation. The project scientists are trying to figure out what the actual source of the clumpiness is. The photo shows a test of a different way of delivering the dirt to the instrument: they tried vibrating the scoop (using a motorized rasp that's attached to the back of it) to see if that would help the soil more gracefully exit the scoop. Looks like this worked.

Meanwhile, the initial sample of soil delivered a few days ago decided to drop through the screen and into the intrument, to the delight of the project science team. They're not sure exactly why this happened – it could be all the vibrating that they've been doing, or it could be simply that the soil's characteristics changed after a few days in the sun. Whatever the reason, the team now has a sample in the instrument, and they have begun analyzing it. This is one of the key experiments on the lander, so I'm sure there are big sighs of relief being heard right about now...

The photo at right shows the two trenches that Phoenix has dug so far: “Dodo” on the left, and “Baby Bear” on the right (click to enlarge). Both trenches show whitish areas that are likely either ice or salts of some kind – with any luck at all, the sample currently being analyzed will give us a clue which it is.

So far the Phoenix lander has had zero technology problems – a very impressive achievement for NASA. For about the same price as delivering a pizza to the International Space Station...

Drill! Drill! Drill!

That's the title of Daniel Henninger's latest column in the WSJ. Here's his lead:

Charles de Gaulle once wrote off the nation of Brazil in six words: "Brazil is not a serious country." How much time is left before someone says the same of the United States?

One thing Brazil and the U.S. have in common is the price of oil: It is priced in dollars, and everyone in the world now knows what the price is. Another commonality is that each country has vast oil reserves in waters off their coastlines.

Here we may draw a line in the waves between the serious and the unserious.

Brazil discovered only yesterday (November) that billions of barrels of oil sit in difficult water beneath a swath of the Santos Basin, 180 miles offshore from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. The U.S. has known for decades that at least 8.5 billion proven barrels of oil sit off its Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts, with the Interior Department estimating 86 billion barrels of undiscovered oil resources.

When Brazil made this find last November, did its legislature announce that, for fear of oil spills hitting Rio's beaches or altering the climate, it would forgo exploiting these fields?

Of course it didn't. Guilherme Estrella, director of exploration and production for the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, said, "It's an extraordinary position for Brazil to be in." Indeed it is.

At this point in time, is there another country on the face of the earth that would possess the oil and gas reserves held by the United States and refuse to exploit them? Only technical incompetence, as in Mexico, would hold anyone back.

But not us. We won't drill.

Read the whole thing.

Great Newspaper Headlines...

Take a look over here for a great collection of newspaper headlines, all with photos to prove their authenticity. Here are a few more samples:

Volunteers search for old Civil War planes
Meeting on open meetings is closed
Federal Agents Raid Gun Shop, Find Weapons

Drill Here, Drill Now...

Newt Gingrich is working hard to get oil drilling opened up in America's gigantic oil reserves, and sooner rather than later. His starting point is a petition campaign – please sign up.

Now, dammit!

And then pass that link along to everyone you know – let's send an overwhelmingly obvious message to our elected morons Senators and Representatives. They tend not to understand anything that's even slightly subtle...

Pandering Ponders...

This morning's news brings two more stories about political pandering to the public's apparent belief that high oil prices are caused by the evil big oil companies: first there's Harry Reid (D) and Richard Durbin (D) wanting to tax alleged “windfall profits” at the oil companies, and then there's Maria Cantwell (D) and Chucky Schumer (D) who'd like to make U.S. commodity futures markets uncompetitive (compared with, for example, Dubai's markets).

I wonder first whether the American electorate is actually as stupid as these politicians would have us believe. For instance, do Americans really believe that a profit of between 6% and 8% is outrageously high? There are many examples of big companies that make far higher profits than that – Microsoft, for example. The oil companies are actually making very modest profits (by any rational perspective) on very large revenues, which means that the profit expressed in dollars is very large. And the attack on the commodities future markets (which are all about price discovery and speculation, which – contrary to some assertions – is most certainly not a dirty word!) is a classic case of shoot-the-messenger. The speculators are no more responsible for the high prices than I am responsible for Ted Kennedy's brain tumor.

The actual cause of our current high oil prices is obvious to anyone with even the most basic understanding of capitalism and free markets. Hopefully that includes most Americans over the age of 6 or 7. The cause is that demand exceeds supply. The answer is equally obvious (and it's the same answer for every such price rise, no matter what the product is): increase the supply. And the oil companies have been patiently explaining to Congress, for the past 40 years, precisely how the supply could be increased: remove the regulations that forbid the oil companies from exploring and drilling – regulations that Congress themselves imposed.

If a windfall tax is enacted, the results are very easy to predict. Investors in oil companies will move their money to other, more profitable ventures (like Microsoft). Oil companies will have to find more expensive sources of capital. This will make exploration and drilling less attractive, and the oil companies will do less of it. We will buy more foriegn oil. Supply will be reduced further, and prices will go up. Not down, you flippin' (mostly D) idiots in Congress – but up.

If the commodity markets here are over-regulated and thereby made more expensive, the commodity traders will instantly move to other markets. The exchanges in places like Dubai, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur will be beside themselves with glee, laughing all the way to the bank. They'll be laughing because we handed them all the highly profitable trading business for no reason at all, a totally senseless and moronic self-inflicted wound that will kill a large American business (commodities exchanges) and do absolutely nothing to help oil prices.

The rest of the world no longer looks to America for economic leadership. They look to us for economic entertainment.

Rope.
Tree.
Stupid politician (but then I repeat myself).
Some assembly required...


Updated:

John Hinderaker (at Power Line) agrees with me – and has a brilliant idea.

We're Back!

It was a great business trip, and a very nice visit with my folks. Also a reminder (as if I needed any!) of one of the 10,458 reasons why I don't live in New Jersey anymore: temperatures in the high 90s, with 100% relative humidity. In other words, thick hot air and lots of sweat. Everywhere. The airport on Sunday was just awful – hordes of miserable, cranky people, and none of them looking their best...

Phoenix is Trenching...

The Phoenix lander on Mars has begun its primary science mission. One element of that mission includes digging a trench into the Martian soil, looking for water ice or other evidence of past water. Just an inch or so down, it has uncovered a bright white layer – most likely either water ice or salts deposited by evaporating water (clearly visible in the photo at right). Further investigations will determine which it is. In either case, it's what the scientists sent Phoenix to Mars to find, so they are elated with this early success.

You go, little lander!

Hubris and Humility...

Here are a couple of clips from Senator Obama's victory speech:

... I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations...

Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless … this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal … this was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

If Americans can elect a President this full of himself and this empty of substance ... then we deserve every consequence.

Isn't the proclamation of your own “profound humility” profoundly unhumble (not to mention unbecoming)?

And surely his hubris in making such a forthright declaration that he will heal the planet and stop the oceans from rising reaches a new high-water mark for any politician's hubris ... an accomplishment of sorts that is really quite remarkable.

Our choice on the upcoming election is not what we'd hope for. It's not a difficult choice between the best of two candidates. It is instead a difficult choice of which one is worse (so you can vote for the other one).

Sigh...

Election Results...

After reading quickly through the California and San Diego election results, here's some quick reactions:

• Propositions 98 and 99: big disappointment, though I can't say it's a surprise. The developers and cities put on a big, slick, and persuasive advertising campaign that bet on the public not even bothering to read the analysis on the ballot pamphlet – and they won their bet handily.
• San Diego mayor: Sanders wins, no runoff. The best of an unimpressive field won.
• San Diego city attorney: Aguirre and Goldsmith are headed for a runoff, and Goldmith had a very strong showing. My bet would be that many of the challengers not making the runoff will throw their support to Goldsmith; the incumbent (Aguirre) has made a lot of enemies. Peters and Maienschein – two of the city council members closely associated with the city's pension fund disaster – both had very weak showings. This is a welcome gust of sanity from the voters.
• San Diego city council seats: these surprised me in a positive way. One reformer (Carl DeMaio) won outright, three other reformers are headed for runoffs with strong showings. We just might endup up throwing the bums off the council (meaning: the candidates supported by the city employees unions might lose, or at least enough of them so that the unions lose their strangehold on the council). Good.
• Duncan D. Hunter wins the Republican nomination to succeed his dad. Excellent.

Light Blogging Alert!

I'm on the road to visit a large customer, in a place that I didn't think I'd ever visit voluntarily: West Orange, New Jersey. On Thursday evening, I'm driving down to south Jersey to visit with my folks. Between now and then, expect light blogging, as I will be very busy...

Dog Found!

I got this email from Amber and Lyndsay at Steele Canyon Veternarian Clinic:

We found a dog over Memorial Day weekend on Hillside in Jamul. It is a female poodle mix. Please call Steele Canyon Vet Clinic at 619-669-7274.

If you know anyone who's missing a dog, please let them know about this post...