Small Fire in Jamul...

Yesterday afternoon, according to news reports, a car rolled over near the junction of Honey Springs Road and State 94 (a few miles south of Jamul town).  The cameras on Lyons Peak caught this, taking one frame of the movie below every 60 seconds.  CAL FIRE was all over this, and had it out within a few hours.  It was contained to about 20 acres.  News reports said that 150 men, a dozen or so pieces of equipment, and several aircraft were involved.  Great work, all!



Not Much of a Head...

Via my mom:

Color Movie of Japanese Surrender in WWII...

Best Political Ad Evah!

Assuming you're a fan of Young Frankenstein...




You can contribute to Mattie Fein here.  I'm inclined to support any politician with the absence of pomposity and sense of humor that she's demonstrating...

An Old Sea Story...

Via my mom:

There's an old sea story about a ship's Captain who inspected his sailors, and afterward told the first mate that his men smelled bad.

The Captain suggested perhaps it would help if the sailors would change underwear occasionally.

The first mate responded, "Aye, aye sir, I'll see to it immediately!"

The first mate went straight to the sailors berth deck and announced, "The Captain thinks you guys smell bad and wants you to change your underwear." He continued, "Pittman, you change with Jones, McCarthy, you change with Witkowski, and Brown, you change with Schultz."

THE MORAL OF THE STORY:

Someone may come along and promise"Change", but don't count on things smelling any better.

Get Your Free Web Fonts...

...right here.

Couldn't Have Happened...

...to a more deserving guy:

Add Jesse Jackson’s ride to prominent vehicles being stripped in Detroit.

Following the embarrassing news that Mayor Dave Bing’s GMC Yukon was hijacked by criminals this week, Detroit’s Channel 7 reports that the Reverend’s Caddy Escalade SUV was stolen and stripped of its wheels while he was in town last weekend with the UAW’s militant President Bob King leading the “Jobs, Justice, and Peace” march promoting government-funded green jobs.

Read that again: Jackson’s Caddy SUV was stripped while he was in town promoting green jobs.

Add Jesse to the Al Gore-Tom Friedman-Barack Obama School of Environmental Hypocrisy. While preaching to Americans that they need to cram their families into hybrid Priuses to go shopping for compact fluorescent light bulbs to save the planet, they themselves continue to live large.

“We need an economy that creates employment that can't be shipped overseas,” the Green Rev wrote for CNN about the march. “Home-grown American labor will be installing windmills and solar panels. A green economy is not an abstract concept.”

Well, its certainly abstract to Jesse, but I digress.

“Even now, the only sector of the economy that has seen job growth during the recession is the green job sector. Time is of the essence.”

Actually, time long ago passed Detroit by because Jesse’ favored government mpg mandates and UAW wages stripped the Big Three’s ability to compete against non-union transplants. These jobs were real – unlike the artificial, government subsidized green jobs he shakes down the feds for today.

Real jobs produced big, profitable SUVs like the one Jesse prefers to ride in. His SUV has been stripped by thugs – a fitting metaphor for what Jesse and his pals have done to the auto industry for the last 35 years.

Cowboy Fire: Update (Looking Good)...

As of the latest CDF report, the Cowboy Fire is 62% contained, and just over 800 acres in size.  The map at right (click to enlarge) shows satellite thermal imaging data, giving a more precise location than I was able to do yesterday.  One interesting point for those of us living out here: the area that burned hasn't burned over in over thirty years.

The black shaded areas had fire within the past 48 hours, the orange within the past 24; these data are from MODIS satellites.  The red dot is from a different satellite, showing the presence of fire within the past 12 hours.  MODIS has a spatial resolution of about 1 kilometer, so those overlapping circles are far from precise – really all they can do is show you approximately where the fire was.  In particular, it does NOT mean that the entire shaded area burned, or that nothing out side the shaded areas burned...

Roof Update: Almost Done!

Look at that!  Our house has a nice, red roof – and it's all done except for a couple of little details, plus the gutters.  Chris and his boys have done a really nice job on our new roof.  We've especially appreciated the straightforward communications – they tell us what they're going to do, when they're going to do it, and then they do what they told us.  If this seems like a little thing to appreciate, then I'll bet you don't have very much experience with contractors!

Cowboy Fire!

Dang it, another fire.  CAL FIRE is calling this one the “Cowboy” fire; at last report it was around 200 acres, out between Potrero and Campo in a remote area (map of approximate location, NOT its size).  No people or structures are threatened, and it doesn't appear to be any danger to us as it's quite far away (about 16 miles).  As I was driving home tonight, Debbie called me saying that she could see smoke out toward Barrett Lake (east of our house).  So I drove out that way before I came home, which is where I snapped these two photos at around 3 pm, from Lyons Valley Road just west of Lake Barrett. 

There are lots of news reports, as usual with these things they full of conflicting information.  What I could see for myself, though, was very comforting: a small cloud of fire-fighting aircraft swarmed around the fire.  As I drove home, a gigantic helicopter, painted bright red and black, flew right over Lawson Valley headed for the fire site.  It looked like some kind of bizarre insect, angry and rarin' for a fight. 

There is every reason for folks out our way to feel safe – the winds that would make a fire dangerous are not present, nor are they forecast.  Let's hope nothing too odd happens with our weather – and let's all keep our fingers crossed that the firefighters and the folks of East County out near the communities of Potrero, Campo, and Lake Morena – and their property – all stay safe...

Lint for JavaScript...

Courtesy of Google...

Google Code University...

Go learn...

The Cannibal...

Via my cousin Mike D.:

A cannibal was walking through the jungle and came upon a restaurant operated by a fellow cannibal. Feeling somewhat hungry, he sat down and looked over the menu....

    Tourist:                                   $5.00
    Broiled  Missionary:                      $10.00
    Fried  Explorer:                          $15.00
    Baked Democrat or Grilled Republican:    $100.00

The cannibal called the waiter over and asked,"Why such a high price for the Politicians?"

The cook replied, "Have you ever tried to clean one? They're so full of shit, it takes all morning!"

Sounds right to me!

Awesome Dilbert...

That “Oh, right.” is just perfect...

Black Ribbon Project...

Many doctors believe Obamacare will ruin the world's best healthcare system – ours.  And they're taking action, with the Black Ribbon Project.  There's an excellent piece about it in today's WSJ.

I Can See November from My House...

The Iowa Electronic Markets (where real people bet real money on all sorts of things, including politics) has options for sale to bet on the outcome of the November 2010 mid-terms.  The chart at right shows the price for three different options contracts.  The higher the price, the more likely the market thinks that outcome is; the lower the price, the less likely.

What makes this market particularly interesting is two things: first, there's real money on it; second, its track record of prediction is quite good (especially compared to the talking heads and print pundits).  What this chart shows is that the players in the Iowa Electronic Markets think that it's pretty much a slam dunk (80/20) that the Republicans are going to get control of the House.  That's a huge margin as these political things go.

On the other hand, the chart at left shows very similar odds for the Democrats to retain control of the Senate.  The odds have improved over the most recent few days, but only by a little. 

I'm going to be watching this graph as November approaches – and hoping that the lines cross beforehand.  It's not that I'm particularly enamored of the Republicans – to me, the current crop of Republican Senators is only marginally more attractive than the Democratic variety.  Rather, I'm greatly enamored of total gridlock – if the Republicans somehow managed to control both the House and the Senate for the last two years of Obama's term, then Obama's agenda will be greatly impeded.  That's the attractive outcome for me!

Solid-State Memory Breakthrough...

If this new technology proves commercializable (and it sure looks like it will be), then the demise of rotating magnetic media (i.e., hard disks) will be much hastened.  The fact that it can be layered to make “3D” memory means that devices using this technology can have absolutely awesome volumetric densities.

In other words, you can pack a whole bunch of information into an incredibly tiny space.  Today's commercial memory technologies are all “2D”, meaning that they depend on a bits stored in a sheet (hard disks, CDs, DVDs, and Flash Memory are all like this).  There are definite limits to how closely together the sheets can be packed.  The new technology allows bits to be stored in layers that are extremely thin and placed directly atop one another.  By arranging thousands or millions of layers, one can make a cube or brick of practically solid memory – with each bit occupying a cube just a few nanometers on a side.

Just a little back-of-the-napkin math will show what I mean.  Imagine that the “bit cubes” were 100 nanometers on a side (that's 100 billionths of a meter) – far larger than the bits in the lab.  Then imagine we built a cube of these that was 2 centimeters (about three quarters of an inch) on a side.  That cube would hold about 1,000 terabytes – or the same as 1,000 of the largest hard disks one can buy today!

Aging Gracefully...and with Humor!

Science Map...

Better quality version.

I Do Not Like This Uncle Sam...

Via my mom:

I do not like this Uncle Sam,
I do not like his health care scam.
I do not like these dirty crooks,
or how they lie and cook the books.
I do not like when Congress steals,
I do not like their secret deals.
I do not like this speaker Nan ,
I do not like this 'YES, WE CAN'.
I do not like this spending spree---
I'm smart, I know that nothing's free.
I do not like your smug replies,
when I complain about your lies.
I do not like this kind of hope.
I do not like it. nope, nope, nope!

Go green - recycle Congress in 2010!