Introversion...

The longer I spend amongst my fellow workers who are extroverts (as so many are), the more I realize that the way they “process their world” is profoundly different than the way I do.  This piece touches on some of this in a way that resonates with me.  One tiny item that jumped out at me: I am very easily startled, to the point where it's a great source of amusement to others...

The Next Big Thing...

The company I get paid to play work for is doing very well...

And Bugs Are All That You Can See...

For the programmers amongst my readers (via Aleck L.):

Sonar Has Come a Long, Long Way...

The image at right, of a sunken Russian submarine, was made entirely with sonar data.  Thirty five years ago, when I was in the Navy, we'd be lucky if we could detect the submarine at all.  Now it looks like we could inspect their latest repairs!

Awesome Optical Illusion...

That is not a blue spiral, but rather concentric blue circles...

Why We're Skeptical of the IPCC...

Steve McIntyre does what he does best: analyzes temperature data and follows the ClimateGate email trail to expose in detail the games that were played.  With our money, too...

Tea Parties...

Of all people, the usually mindlessly progressive Juan Williams has a surprisingly level-headed piece on Tea Parties in the WSJ...

Flowers...

Poignant story of Olga Grushin's reactions to the news of the recent bombings in Russia.  She's living in America, but her parents live very near the site of the bombings...

Kinda Scary...

The video below shows a robot, a “copy” of a flesh-and-blood human.  While it's not a perfect replica, it's far better than the animatronic devices I saw in Disneyland as a kid...

Rocking and Rolling: Update...

We've not felt any aftershocks at our home, but as you can see from the map at right there have been a great many of them (all much smaller than the magnitude 7.2 initial quake).

Check back with the USGS site for updates...

Rocking and Rolling...

We just felt a strong earthquake – lots of sideways motion, subsonic rumbling, and of quite long duration (about 45 seconds at a guess).  The USGS initial automated report puts it at magnitude 6.9, about 20 miles south of the Mexican border.  That's roughly 60 or 70 miles from our house...

The report is preliminary and these often get revised.  USGS map at right and info below; click to enlarge...

A Movie I'd Watch...

I haven't watched a movie for months, but here's one I think I might enjoy.  When it comes out on DVD, I'm gonna get it:

A Pox on Us All...

Public sector employees, that is.  Reason has a nice piece on the problem, with video.

I was at our local post office the other day, picking up a package, and overheard a conversation between two patrons waiting in the agonizingly slow line.  The conversation started off by noting the injustice of low-skill Post Office jobs commanding top-tier salaries and benefits, paid for by taxes on private-sector workers like the two people talking.  I was cheered by this common-sense observation. 

But then the conversation veered into a direction Obama would be delighted with: the two started wondering out loud how they could go about getting one of these cushy jobs, too. 

This is the road Europe has traveled, and the results ain't pretty... 

Spike!

For the past few months, the Google unemployment index has been bouncing around the same high level.  This week it spiked upwards to set a new high (click graph to enlarge).

This index measures frequency of unemployment related Google searches, so it's an indirect measure – more a measure of interest in unemployment, rather than of unemployment itself.  But why should even that have peaked last week?

In an odd coincidence, my good friend and neighbor lost his job just over a week ago when his company filed for bankruptcy.  Maybe the spike is due to his queries?

Bumper Snickers...

Some excellent bumper snickers, via my mom.  More at the “Read more...” below...

ClimateGate: Roundup...

Once again, the European press makes the U.S. press look like incompetent lapdogs for the progressives.  I just finished reading Der Spiegel's 8 part series on ClimateGate and the subsequent impact to climatology (English version).  Considering it's in the mainstream media, it's a notably level-headed, detailed, and broad review of the whole topic.  Recommended.

Steve McIntyre follows the email trail to document Phil Jones' rather overt misbehavior.  In doing so, he shows the British Parliamentary Committee what an actual investigation looks like, as opposed to the whitewash exercise they committed...

Journo-Politico Violence...

What you learn here may save your life...

Or induce spasms of laughter.  Or incline you to reverence of Iowahawk's satiric genius.  Or something...

Navy vs. Pirates...

Navy 1, pirates 0 (click to enlarge).

May it ever be so (and more like this, please)...

Human Stupidity...

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.  Humor or practical philosophy?  You decide...

The IPv6 Debacle...

Non-geeks, look aside.  This post can only cause you pain.

The Internet that most people know runs on the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4 for short).  Decades ago the Internet gurus realized that the 32-bit addresses in IPv4 meant that we'd run out of IP addresses relatively quickly (there are only 2^32, or about 4 billion, IP addresses available in IPv4).  IPv4 has some other problems as well, but the lack of address space was the biggie.

So along came Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6 for short).  IPv6 solved the address space problem by moving to 128 bit addresses (enough to give every molecule in the universe it's own IP address).  It introduces many other changes as well, but the address space expansion is the biggie. 

But there's one little niggling problem: nearly all the software written for every computer is incompatible with IPv6.  Almost everything will have to be revised or rewritten, and the fixes are not trivial.  Oops.

Around the same time (mid 1990s) that the IPv6 forces were trying to convince the whole world to rewrite all their software, technologies called Network Address Translation and Port Address Translation (NAT and PAT for short) started to become popular.  Very popular.  These technologies let enterprises (and homeowners) have multiple computers or other devices on their local area networks using “private” IP addresses. 

These are a bit like the street addresses we see in cities: Boston has a 100 Broadway, and so does New York and a bazillion other cities and towns.  But this doesn't cause confusion, because we know that 100 Broadway in Boston is in Boston, not New York.  Similarly I can have a computer with an IP address of 10.0.0.1 in my home (my “town”), and you can have one with the same IP address in your home.  NAT and PAT are what make this possible.

So with NAT and PAT, much of the driving force behind moving to IPv6 is removed.  We no longer need that gigantic address space.  Meanwhile, software writers are still creating new software packages that are incompatible with IPv6.  In fact, very few programmers have ever created an IPv6-compliant program – they don't even know how!  So IPv6 has become a “nice to have” instead of a “must have” – and since it's such a costly thing to move to IPv6, that means we'll likely never do it.

Here's a much more technical dive into the IPv4 vs. IPv6 struggle...