There Once Was...

Via Amy L.:

There once was a pervert named Weiner
Who had a perverted demeanor
Forced from the Hill
For acting like Bill
Now Congress is one weiner leaner

Beautiful Chaparral Morning...

The dogs and I were out for a walk at 3:15 am.  A two-thirds moon hung in the clear southern sky, brightly lighting everything around us – no flashlight needed this morning.  The moonlight washed out most of the stars, but a bright planet was low in the northeast, and I could make out most of Ursa major (the Big Dipper).  Won't be long now before I start seeing Orion in the morning...

The dogs behaved normally until we were about halfway down our driveway.  Just as I detected a funny scent, all four dogs went on full alert and started straining at the leash, trying to pull me down the hill (and damned near succeeding!).  They had spotted a skunk, smack in the middle of our driveway, about 20 feet away.  The skunk looked mildly perturbed, held his ground for a minute, then slowly ambled down the hill toward our gate.  As soon as he left our yard, the dogs all acted like someone had flipped a switch – they went straight back to their normal behavior, as though the skunk had never existed.  Dogs surely do live in the moment...

This Friday Debbie and I leave on a vacation to the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado.  We're just about fully prepared; all we have to do is pack and take off.  We have broadband Internet access at all the places we're staying, so with any luck at all I'll be able to post daily, including photographs...

Father's Day Quote...

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

Mark Twain

Wonder how much he's learned in the next 38 years? Happy Father's Day, dad...

Awesome...

Yes!

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”?