Listen Up, Obama!

Awesome Morning Sky...

I took the dogs out for their morning walk about about 3:30 am.  The sky was very dark and clear, and moonless.  Even before my eyes accommodated to the darkness I could see bright stars on black sky, so I knew it was going to be good.

We walked slowly down the driveway, the dogs all behaving normally.  Got down to the gate and I looked up for the first time – what an eyeful!  The Milky Way was spectacular, a nearly due-north to due-south band across the celestial “bowl” – bright and full of texture.  There were even a few places where I thought I saw some color.  The stars were so numerous and so steady that some of the constellations I know well were difficult to pick out of the “clutter”.  The relative humidity is sitting at around 40%, so it's not dryness that's making the sky so clear – I'm assuming its the absence of pollution, probably because the wind is from the east (where our desert is) this morning.

The dogs, as usual, couldn't care less about this morning's awesome skies.  Race gamboled after his precious pine cones (lots of green ones on the trees for later this year!), and the three brown dogs were fully engaged in slurping up every trace of smell that might lie on the ground.  All four looked very happy; tails wagging, energetic bounding from one adventure to the next.  They love their morning walks...

Japanese Maple...

National Geographic's Photo of the Month:

Speechless...

...that's me, after viewing this:

Satire in Music, Presidential Leaks Edition...

Unusually well done:

Two More Race Runs...

...from this weekend's competition, here and here (sorry, not embeddable).

She Nailed It...

...quite literally.  The art below is made with nails...

Quote of the Day...

George Orwell, who must have time-traveled to 2012, gone back in disgust, and said this:

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

Nancy Pelosi...

There are many things Nancy Pelosi doesn't have control over these days.  Amongst them, apparently, is her daughter.  Via my mom:

Pollination...

Via Simon M.:

Race Is Competing Again This Weekend...

Debbie and Race are competing down at NTC this weekend.  Yesterday's runs are here and here (I can't embed these videos).  He's still green – screwed up the weave poles on both runs and dropped a jump pole.  Debbie is still working out how to handle a nuclear-powered rocket ship.  The important point: he's completing the courses in half the nominal time...

I Was Feeling So Hopeful About November...

...and then I watched this:

To Climb a Wall...

...you need the right gear:

Memorable Words...Some of Them, Anyway...

Via reader Doug S.:

Watching the Odometer...

Are you one of those people who watchs your car's odometer roll over from 9,999 to 10,000, etc.?  If so, you'll enjoy this letter to the London Times (June 17, 1978):

Sir,

It is not only dates that make nice patterns of numbers. Some years ago I was bringing a Destroyer home from the Far East and was required to report my position twice a day.

One evening, I saw that we would be passing close to where the Greenwich Meridian cuts the Equator so arranged to arrive there dead on midnight. Once there I altered course to due North and stopped engines so my position signal read:

At 0000 my position Latitude 00°00′N, Longitude 00°00′E. Course 000°. Speed 0.

I had considered saying I was Nowhere but thought (probably correctly) that Their Lordships would not be amused.

Yours faithfully,

Claud Dicken

The green arrow on the map at right shows the point Mr. Dicken took his destroyer to...

Who Benefits from the Recent Avalanche of Security Breaches?

In recent months there has been a veritable avalanche of security leaks – deliberate leaks of classified information from various places in the federal government.  These leaks, one fears, have shut down valuable sources of intelligence information – and in a few cases, may have put lives at risk (or worse).

The Obama administration recently appointed to special prosecutors to track down and squash these leaks.  Nobody seems to expect these prosecutors to actually accomplish anything; almost universally the body politic sees these as a sop to the ignorant masses and a way for Obama to be seen as taking command of the situation.

Why would this be seen so universally as a charade?  Peggy Noonan puts her finger on it exactly.  Anybody looking at the situation, including the pajama-clad blogging masses, can see one fact plain as day: the beneficiary of these leaks is, without exception, Barack Obama.  Faced with such a clear pattern, you don't have to be very cynical to suspect political, self-serving shenanigans are at work – or to believe that the appointment of the special prosecutors is a cynical charade designed to appease an ignorant public.  Also, unfortunately, one can be forgiven for suspecting that the charade will work...

Why Governments Fail...

A private business whose product is rejected by consumer generally has but two choices: fix the product or go out of business.  A government, on the other hand, generally finds it easier to tell the consumer to STFU.

Rope.
Tree.
Politician.
Some assembly required.

Top Ten Hacked LinkedIn Passwords...

You've probably heard that millions of LinkedIn password hashes were hacked recently.  Investigators and hackers went right to work on cracking those hashes, and the results are starting to come in.  In particular, the most common hashes have been cracked, and here are the top ten in order, starting with the most common:

link, 1234, work, god, job, 12345, angel, the, ilove, sex

Not exactly a creative bunch!  Several of those I might have guessed within a few minutes.  Probably within a few hours I'd have guessed them all.  I can imagine that many people wouldn't feel particularly concerned about the security of their LinkedIn account – it's not like a bank account or something.  But still – with passwords that weak, there's really not much reason to have a password at all!  And it wouldn't take much effort to do much better...

Crotalus ruber...

Crotalus ruber

Otherwise known as the red diamond rattlesnake, the most common species where we live (in the mountains of San Diego County).  I had a slightly unusual experience involving Crotalus ruber yesterday.  The photo at right is not mine, but it looks very much like the rattlesnakes we see most often here.

Rattlesnakes are quite common out here in the summertime.  They need fairly warm weather in order to be active (a consequence of being cold-blooded animals).  From roughly May through October it's not at all unusual for us to find rattlesnakes in our yard.  During the warmest months (July through September) they're most common.  We know they're not particularly dangerous to us, but they certainly are to the two cats we have that live in an outdoor cattery, and to our four dogs.  We keep our dogs vaccinated against the rattlesnake toxin, which mainly buys us time to get a dog (if bitten) to a veterinarian for treatment.  We've never had one of our dogs bitten.

Debbie and I have gotten pretty good at spotting rattlesnakes (they don't always make their signature noise!) and at removing them as a threat to our animals.  Our approaches, though, are completely different: Debbie uses a sharpened hoe to chop them into pieces; I capture them with a snake-stick and relocate them to Cleveland National Forest.  This reflects our different understandings of rattlesnakes: Debbie perceives them as evil incarnate, I see them as an important part of our ecosystem (but not in my yard!).

But back to yesterday...  I was working from home, and around 11 am I wandered out to our living room to watch the orioles feed for a minute.  I heard what sounded sort of like a continuous rattlesnake rattle, but it didn't sound quite right (had an odd sort of warbling going on), and it never stopped (normally the rattling is frequently broken by periods of silence).  From inside the living room, all I could tell about the location was that it was somewhere in the direction of our outdoor cattery.

I ran outside, grabbed the snake-stick from its hanger, and got a five-gallon covered pail.  Then I (carefully!) went out to the cattery.  The first thing I saw was Koa and Kama (the two outdoor kitties) standing right in the middle of their cattery, wide-eyed and carefully watching something to the south side.  They were fine.  I walked around to the south side of the cattery, looking for the rattlesnake – which was still making that odd-sounding rattle.  Usually the rattling lets me locate the snake immediately, but this time I was having trouble – the rattling didn't seem to come from a definite place.  Suddenly the sound changed: it sounded like what we usually hear, and it was coming from a definite location.  WTF?  I spotted the rattlesnake, curled up just outside the cattery.  But then the sound changed again.  By this time I was a little closer, and I figured out what was going on – there were two rattlesnakes there! 

One of them (the one that had been silent) was only about 4 feet away from me.  Their coloring makes them very hard to spot in our soil, and this one was no exception.  It was also curled up just outside the cattery, near the southeast corner.  I picked it up with the snake-stick, at which point it uncurled and I could see that it was a fairly large adult, just under 3 feet long.  After depositing him (not happy at all!) into the pail, I went back and got the other one.  It was bigger – close to 4 feet long – and much thicker.  Into the pail with it!  I closed the lid and tied it down well (wouldn't want it to come open in the truck!), then we took a trip together to a nearby stretch of Cleveland National Forest with no homes anywhere nearby.  There I let them go, and they slithered off in opposite directions, still rattling away like mad.

Two rattlesnakes in the same place at the same time.  That's a first for me...

Nigel Farage...

I could listen to this U.K. politician all day.  Until, that is, I remember that we, tragically, have no politicians quite like him.



Odd factoid: Nigel's last name is the same as the name of a horticultural variety of Ilex opaca (American holly) that my father used to grow and sell on the nursery that I grew up on...