The New Moonbeam...

Our very own Governor Moonbeam (Jerry Brown) vetoed the wacky (but typical, unfortunately) state budget his Democratic compadres passed. I have to give him credit for honoring his pledge to veto any budget that included accounting “tricks” and more debt. The budget sent to him contained plenty of both, and he vetoed it. Kudos!

Now let's see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together on a budget that includes some serious spending cuts. So far we have an impasse: the Democrats are refusing to substantially cut spending, and the Republicans are refusing to increase taxes...

Another Ticket...

Via reader Dave H.:

Another Presidential Ticket

Rumor has it that Anthony Weiner is going to run for president.
He has chosen attorney general Eric Holder as his running mate.
Get your Weiner-Holder bumper stickers early, before they are all gone.

The Platform...

I miss Reagan's style and humor...

A Simple Plan...

From my mom:

Brilliant in its simplicity...

A. Back off and let those men who want to marry men, marry men.
B. Allow those women who want to marry women, marry women.
C. Allow those folks who want to abort their babies, abort their babies.
D. In three generations, there will be no Democrats.

Damn - I love it when a plan comes together.

Is a New Ice Age on the Way?

Short answer: nobody really knows.

The news of some scientists predicting the possibility of a new “little Ice Age” broke a few days ago.  I didn't post anything right away, as I wanted to read up on both the original story and reactions to it.  Here's my summary, after reading a lot of articles:

• All the report really says is that what's being observed today looks an awful lot like what little we know about the beginning of the Maunder Minimum.
  
  
• The authors of the report then speculate about the possibility that this indicates we're about to enter such a period.
  
  
• It would take several years of consistently low sunspot counts before we could really say with any certainty that this was happening.
  
  
• The pro-AGW crowd is quite predictably reacting negatively to this potential destruction of their world view.  I'd expect nothing else.  But just because they're predictable doesn't mean they're wrong.

Debbie and I own property in Southern California and in Northern Idaho.  If we really did enter a new little Ice Age, I wonder what that would do to property values?  Idaho surely would become less attractive.  Southern California I'm not so sure about – it probably depends to a large extent about what reduced temperatures would do to rainfall...

Life Expectancy in the U.S...

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has a fascinating interactive map that shows the changes in life expectancy over time.  At right I took a screenshot of the most recent data (green is good, red is bad).  I'm fascinated by how much regional difference there is even in a country as homogenous as the U.S.

If you visit their map page, play with the sliders at the bottom to select the period of time you're interested in...

Mercury, via MESSENGER...

MESSENGER has now spent more than one Mercury year (88 Earth days) in orbit, doing solid science.  Recently it made an adjustment to its orbit, bringing its closest approach to just 200 km high.  Some recent imagery is at right (click to enlarge), in false color, via APOD.  By all reports, MESSENGER is doing exactly what its science team had hoped it would do, and all of its systems are (in NASA-speak) “nominal”.

Long-time readers would be disappointed if I didn't include here my usual rant about the effectiveness (and glory!) of unmanned space exploration, as compared to the utter waste and uselessness of the current and proposed manned space program...

Libyan Rebels and Their Weapons...

The Libyan rebels aren't (at least to my knowledge) being supplied by anyone with a regular supply of weaponry and ammunition.  They're up against a relatively well-equipped regular Libyan Army and Air Force.  What do you do in such a situation?  You improvise, and improvise they have – like the homemade armored car at right...

Moon's Motion...

A very nice time-lapse video showing (in particular) how much the moon “wobbles” due to our changing perspective of it:

ORM: the Anti-Pattern?

Interesting post about the pros and cons of ORM (Object-Relational Mapping).  I have lots of experience using both ORM frameworks and roll-your-own flavor, and just one experience using a key-value store.  I've never tried a hybrid approach, but my one experience with a key-value store got me thinking that way...

Introversion...

One of the best collections of facts about introverts I've seen, all in clear layman's terms.  This resonates very strongly with me, each and every point...

Playing With the New Camera...

The photo below is of the entrance to the building where I work.  The subject matter isn't particularly interesting, but the context is: I took this photo at about 4:30 am, long before sunrise, with no flash.  There was no moon.  The only lighting is the landscape lighting.  This is possible because the camera's sensitivity can be set as high as ISO 6400 (this photo was taken at ISO 5000, lens wide open, shutter speed 1/60th). 

Awesome.

Force-Feed State Machines...

Generally my peers think I'm pretty weird (and that's an objective of mine!).  There are a few things about my development likes and dislikes that stand out to them, and are a frequent source of odd looks and sadly shaking heads as my peers ponder my deteriorating mental condition.  One of these is my attraction to regular expressions.  Another is my fondness for finite state machines.

Here's someone who shares my appreciation of the latter, so much that he recommends forcing developers to use them!

Myself, I wouldn't go that far.  For me, a developer's understanding of, and use of, state machines is more an interesting metric of their ability to make software that works reliably in the real world, as that's one of the things that state machines are very good at...

Cool Couette...

Awesome demonstration of laminar flow.  Unless you already know about Couette cells, you probably won't know why this is cool until the very end of the video...

I Take Some Comfort In This...

Older developers are better, at least by some measures...

Oh, How I Want to Build One of These...

...only much bigger, of course.  Perhaps with 16 bit registers and 32 bit accumulators!





How can you not love a place called “Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories”?

Hard Disk Cost...

To myself and a few of my friends, the chart at right brings back a lot of memories.  We used to work for Stac (where the Stacker disk compression utility was developed).  In the early '90s, we noted the steep decline in the cost per megabyte of disk storage, and wondered what that meant to the future of disk compression.  We concluded that disk cost was trending toward free (quite rapidly!), and that when disks were free, the value of disk compression would approach zero.  Then we thought about the implications of “free” disk space, and what sort of software might leverage it.  We came up with the notion of backing up to disk (instead of the then-pervasive tape backup), and the idea of compressing the data from many computers through what is today called “de-duplication”.   Unfortunately for us, and for many reasons, we never figured out how to turn that idea into a lucrative business.

Here's something that looks very much like an updated version of the chart we created back in the early '90s:

Matt Komorowski is the fellow who put this data together.  He also calculated the regression equation (at right).  He pointed me to another trove of data on historical disk storage costs. 

Reading through all this stuff was a real trip down memory lane for me...

Cassini Mission...

A nice video summary of one of my favorite robotic space explorers:

CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

Fire in Lawson Valley...

...and way too close to home!  But there were several pieces of good news in this experience...

Our neighbors Jim and Michelle B. called me around 3:15 pm with the news that there was a fire directly across the valley from us.  At right (click to enlarge) you can see the scene from our front yard.  The mountain in the distance is Viejas Mountain; the fire is almost due north of us.  The wind was blowing toward the northeast, away from us and up onto a small peak that's in Cleveland National Forest.  The reddish color is from the retardant dropped just before I snapped this photo, by the tanker plan exiting stage left.

Forty-five minutes later, the fire appeared to be out, with just smoldering embers remaining.  As I write this, the command plane is still circling but there's no other aerial activity.  At the peak of the battle, there were at least two helicopters and two tanker planes fighting the fire, a ground crew on the scene, and a command plane circling overhead.  It was a very impressive demonstration of our firefighting capability, and a far cry from what we saw four years ago.  As you might imagine, we find this quite comforting.  Loveland Reservoir has more water in it than it has had for years, and it's right over that ridge that sits in front of Viejas Mountain.  The helicopters and planes were cycling back and forth between the reservoir and the fire quite quickly.  Another comforting factor!

The black bordered area on the map below shows my best estimate of where the fire was located.

Palo Verde Tree...

... in our front yard.