Leucadendron discolor...

AKA the Piketberg conebush.  Known to me as “beautiful”.  From BPotD, of course...

This Is How a Society Commits Suicide...

Selected more or less at random from the new Washingon, D.C. regulations (PDF) covering (amongst other things) rat exterminators:

(i) A wildlife control services provider shall make every reasonable effort to preserve family units using humane eviction or displacement and reunion strategies and shall not knowingly abandon dependent young wildlife in a structure.
(j) Wildlife shall not be kept in captivity longer than 36 hours unless specifically
authorized by the Department or unless reunion attempts are being employed. In the case of attempted reunion, a wildlife control services provider may hold wildlife in captivity for up to 72 hours.
(k) Captured wildlife shall be transported in covered, secure containers in such a way as to:

      (1) Minimize stress to the animal and its exposure to the elements by covering
the trap or vehicle with appropriate material;
      (2) Ensure that the covering is of such material that the animal has an adequate
supply of air to prevent overheating; and
      (3) Minimize potential hazards to the general public.

(l) A wildlife control services provider shall not use sticky or glue traps to control any wildlife.

The city is now obligated to enforce these new regulations.  That means a small army of unionized inspectors and (given that we're talking about Washingon, D.C.) armed enforcement officers.  This, in a city where more than half the kids drop out of high school.  When the priorities of a society favor the rats over its own young, you know the end is near (for the society, not the rats)...

Laugh or Cry, Your Choice...

Also from Simon M., this little story about the evolution of mathematics education:

I purchased a burger at Burger King for $1.58. The counter girl took my $2 and I was digging for my change when I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies, while looking at the screen on her register. I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help. While he tried to explain the transaction to her, she stood there and cried.. Why do I tell you this? Because of the evolution in teaching math since the 1950s:

1. Teaching Math In 1950s (when I was in school)

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit ?

2. Teaching Math In 1960s

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?

3. Teaching Math In 1970s

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. Did he make a profit ?

4. Teaching Math In 1980s

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

5. Teaching Math In 1990s

A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes? (There are no wrong answers, and if you feel like crying, it's ok).

6. Teaching Math In 2011

Un hachero vende una carretada de maderapara $100. El costo de la producciones es $80. Cuanto dinero ha hecho?

ANSWER: His profit was $375,000 because his logging business is just a front for his marijuana farm.

I believe I've met the counter girl described in the first paragraph – I've had a very similar experience.

Israeli Security Development...

Reader Simon M. passed this along:

TEL AVIV, Israel The Israelis are developing an airport security device that eliminates the privacy concerns that come with full-body scanners. It's an armored booth you step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on your person.

Israel sees this as a win-win situation for everyone, with none of this crap about racial profiling. It will also eliminate the costs of long and expensive trials.

You're in the airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion. Shortly thereafter, an announcement: Attention to all standby passengers, El Al is proud to announce a seat available on flight 670 to London. Shalom!

AGW Proponent Loses a Bet...

In 2008, Dr. James Annan (a prominent anthropogenic global warming proponent) made a £100 (about $150) bet with Dr. David Whitehouse (a skeptic) that by the end of 2011 there will have been a new record for warming.

There was no new record set.  Dr. Whitehouse won...

“Typing” at 255 WPM...

Court reporters and close-captioners have been “typing” at the high rates of speech (up to 255 words per minute) for a long time.  They aren't really typing in the sense we normally mean it; instead they are recording the sounds of speech – the phonemes – using a special stenography machine (basically, a typewriter for phonemes).  Long ago stenographers developed a way of writing these sounds by hand.  In both cases, the end result is basically a list of sounds, which the stenographer must then manually convert to typed text (at normal typing speeds!).

In the late 1970s, several companies developed computer-based systems that sped this process up enormously by automating that last step of converting the list of sounds into typed text.  One of these companies (Xscribe) was based in San Diego, and about a million years ago, I worked for them as a hardware and software engineer.  It was a very interesting place to work at the time, as they were pushing the envelope on what you could do with a microcomputer.

Today there's very little trace remaining of Xscribe.  The company struggled on into the '90s, went public, but then seems to have disappeared.  Google the name and you can find people selling spare parts (apparently those systems are still being used!), but that's about it.  The domain name xscribe.com now shows the page for Stenograph Corporation, who was Xscribe's main competitor in the period I was there ('81 to '82).  I found conflicting news stories about possible acquisition of Xscribe by Stenograph or its parent company Quixote.  In any case, Xscribe appears to have failed in the end.

Now there's an open source program that does basically the same thing that Xscribe's (very expensive) hardware and software did.  It uses a $45 gaming keyboard as its input device, a normal PC, and the free open-source software package named Plover...

Crow – Sledding!

Check out this awesome crow (and read more about it):

The Ponder...

Via my mom (click to enlarge)...

First It Went Up...

...and now it's going to come down – but nobody really seems to know where...

TIOBE Index Time...

The annual index of programming langauge popularity (measured by lines of code produced) is out.  Java and C both still dominate, but are declining (as percentage share) slowly.  Objective-C (Apple's language of choice) is still climbing fast.  There are the usual surprises down in the mud (Ada, anyone?). 

After last year's index came out, a colleague who was aware of my gray beard and somewhat odd background asked me how many of the languages here I had programmed in.  I never went back and looked it up, but here's the answer for this year's list: I've used 9 of those languages enough to call myself “proficient” in them, and there are 5 more that I've done at least one project in.  There are several languages I've done a lot of programming in that aren't on this list at all: Forth (go ahead, laugh!) and a dozen or so assembly languages (most especially Z80)...

Taliban Body Desecration...

Reader Larry E. writes:

I don't think I've seen you comment on this yet.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/united-states-marine-corps-investigating-online-video-appears-show-marines-urinating-corpses-taliban-fighters-article-1.1004795

I realize the 24 hour news cycle likes to take things to extreme but I have a hard time worrying too much about the actions of these guys. While maybe unprofessional and stupid to video tape, this type of thing is hardly an unusual event. Anyone that has read the accounts of the war in the pacific, like "the old breed' will remember many similar accounts and really, much, much worse. De-humanizing the enemy is part of the process. Absolutely no one in the chain of command or those PR types commenting could possibly be surprised. They are just covering themselves and the foolishness of the situation.

These are not police officers. This is not your favorite city. You don't get a group of people to rush through a hail of bullets and mortar fire to kill a bunch of other people without a change in the normal thought processes. Most of their training is about effectively killing other people. Putting them into an environment where they are under constant threat from everyone around them and giving them a long list of rules before they can engage the enemy is asking for trouble and it is unfair to put our military in those positions. Does anyone seriously think they don't get some satisfaction when they do manage to kill some of the enemy?

CoyoteBlog has a recent post along very similar lines (so short I'm reposting the whole thing, hoping Warren won't mind):

There are a lot of ways to parse this story about the alleged video of soldiers urinating on corpses in Afghanistan. It seems ugly, but desecration of corpses has a long history in Afghan conflicts (often consisting of cutting off male-only body parts). And it’s bizarre to see people more upset about peeing on corpses than with corpsifying them in the first place.

But at the end of the day this is what I think is broken about the Afghan conflict. You don’t send warriors into a brutal guerrilla war with no rules and simultaneously expect them to be goodwill ambassadors as well. Given that these are two activities whose Venn diagrams of skills and mindsets have so little overlap, the military does a pretty good job trying to do what its being asked, but over the long run it’s a losing game (somewhere in here there is an Ender’s Game reference about trying to meld empathy with killer instincts).

By the way, exactly what is our goal in Afghanistan, will someone remind me? We have been successful when __________________ ?

I haven't commented before because I have such mixed and confused feelings about it, and I'm not at all sure we know what actually happened.  Warren nails it when he says there are a lot of ways to parse this story.  Things that occurred to me as I read it:

• Is it even a true story, portraying an actual event?  Or is this an amateur and fictional production?
• Where's the outrage about the enemy's behavior?  Remember Daniel Pearl, anyone?
• So the men we have trained to be the world's most effective killers have, in fact, killed some of the enemy – but then we don't want them to celebrate this?  (very close to one of  Larry's comments)
• I don't like the possible consequences of this video being publicized.  It is exactly the sort of fodder that helps the enemy recruit new suicide bombers and fighters, and incites the locals to resistance against our troops.

In the end, I realized that my only negative reaction to this event (assuming it really did happen) is that I regret the consequences of it being public.  I share Larry's assumption that this sort of thing happens all the time in war; even a brief reading of wartime history (take your pick of wars – it doesn't matter at all which one you look at) will convince you that this is an inevitable consquence of asking one group of people to kill another.

So I'm left unsurprised that this sort of thing happened, convinced that this is far from the only time it has happened in Afghanistan (on both sides), but wishing it hadn't become a public property.  I'm also feeling sad for the American soldiers involved, because it seems likely that their commanders will be required to make an example of them...

Kitchen Music Synthesizer...

Three words I never imagined would fit together:

Albino Hummingbird...

My mom sent me several photos like the one at right, of an albino hummingbird seen near Staunton, Virginia, which is only about 50 miles from her home.

I had no idea that there was such a thing as an albino bird!

Nature's Friend magazine has a great photo collection of this little guy.

As always, click to enlarge...

Coding Motto?

Reader Dave H. gave that label to this poster:

All Records for Bit Storage Size Smashed...

Down to a mere 12 atoms.  That does actually seem like we're approach a limit of sorts – it's hard to imagine that we can figure out how to write data on the side of an electron.  But perhaps I shouldn't be so pessimistic...

The Wrong Diner...

Incomprehensible!

That's my reaction to the news that Haley Barbour pardoned 208 people, many of them the worst kinds of criminals.  I know enough about Barbour to know that he's no softie on crime, nor is he known to be anything other than an honest man.  I simply cannot comprehend what the hell he was thinking when he decided to pardon these people.  I'm thinking that something like a brain tumor is not completely out of line as an explanation.  I don't know if we'll ever actually get an explanation, but I'd sure like to know how a guy who seemed like such a rock-solid conservative went off the rails like that...

The courts have stopped the pardons, for now at least...

Man, Is Hardware Getting Cheap!

Tiny, powerful, but with low power requirements, we're starting to see some amazing hobbyist hardware appear.  These little computers are powerful enough to let you write applications in a high-level language, and most use Linux as their operating system (meaning you don't have to learn an entirely new environment because you move to new hardware).  For little one-off, just-for-fun kinds of projects a hobbyist might be interested in, these are practically perfect little vehicles.  You might well pay more for the power supply and the enclosure than you do for the computer!

Groundhog Day...

Via my mom:

In the coming New Year, 2012, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address will occur on the same day.

This is an ironic juxtaposition of events.

One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to an insignificant creature of little intelligence for prognostication.

The other involves a groundhog.

Top 10...

Oh, this will make you feel all warm and fuzzy about the billions of dollars spent on the TSA, and (if you're a traveller) the inconvenience and indignity you put up with from them.  The TSA has compiled their “Top 10 Good Catches from 2011”.  Guess how many terrorists are on their list?  Zero.  Zip.  Nada.  The list includes gems like this:

Snakes, turtles, and birds were found at Miami (MIA) and Los Angeles (LAX). I’m just happy there weren’t any lions, tigers, and bears…

That's just great.  All those billions and all that irritation, and that's on their top 10 list?  Sheesh...

Tip of the hat to Bruce Schneier, who posted this on his excellent blog...