Wonderfully Evocative Photo...

Here's a great example of the artistry a great photographer can add.  It isn't all about the film, lens, and camera.  The simplicity and lack of distractions inherent the in the black & white medium greatly adds to the impact of this photo.  From Shorpy..

A Parable...

From Edsger Dijkstra, circa 1973 (don't miss Dijkstra's comment at the end!):

Years ago a railway company was erected and one of its directors -- probably the commercial bloke -- discovered that the initial investments could be reduced significantly if only fifty percent of the cars would be equipped with a toilet, and, therefore, so was decided.

Shortly after the company had started its operations, however, complaints about the toilets came pouring in. An investigation was carried out and revealed that the obvious thing had happened: despite its youth the company was already suffering from internal communication problems, for the director's decision on the toilets had not been transmitted to the shunting yard, where all cars were treated as equivalent, and, as a result, sometimes trains were composed with hardly any toilets at all.

In order to solve the problem, a bit of information was associated with each car, telling whether it was a car with or without a toilet, and the shunting yard was instructed to compose trains with the numbers of cars of both types as equal as possible. It was a complication for the shunting yard, but, once it had been solved, the people responsible for the shunting procedures were quite proud that they could manage it.

When the new shunting procedures had been made effective, however, complaints about the toilets continued. A new investigation was carried out and then it transpired that, although in each train about half the cars had indeed toilets, sometimes trains were composed with nearly all toilets in one half of the train. In order to remedy the situation, new instructions were issued, prescribing that cars with and cars without toilets should alternate. This was a move severe complication for the shunting people, but after some initial grumbling, eventually they managed.

Complaints, however, continued and the reason turned out to be that, as the cars with toilets had their toilet at one of their ends, the distance between two successive toilets in the train could still be nearly three car lengths, and for mothers with children in urgent need -- and perhaps even luggage piled up in the corridors -- this still could lead to disasters. As a result, the cars with toilets got another bit of information attached to them, making them into directed objects, and the new instructions were, that in each train the cars with toilets should have the same orientation. This time, the new instructions for the shunting yard were received with less than enthusiasm, for the number of turntables was hardly sufficient; to be quite fair to the shunting people we must even admit that according to all reasonable standards, the number of turntables was insufficient, and it was only by virtue of the most cunning ingenuity, that they could just manage.

With all toilets equally spaced along the train the company felt confident that now everything was alright, but passengers continued to complain: although no passenger was more than a car length away from the nearest toilet, passengers (in urgent need) did not know in which direction to start their stumbling itinerary along the corridor! To solve this problem, arrows saying "TOILET" were fixed in all corridors, thereby also making the other half of the cars into directed objects that should be properly oriented by the shunting procedure.

When the new instruction reached the shunting yard, they created an atmosphere ranging from despair to revolt: it just couldn't be done! At that critical moment a man whose name has been forgotten and shall never be traced, made the following observation. When each car with a toilet was coupled, from now until eternity, at its toileted end with a car without a toilet, from then onwards the shunting yard, instead of dealing with N directed cars of two types, could deal with N/2 identical units that, to all intents and purposes, could be regarded as symmetrical. And this observation solved all shunting problems at the modest price of, firstly sticking to trains with an even number of cars only -- the few additional cars needed for that could be paid out of the initial savings effected by the commercial bloke! -- and, secondly, slightly cheating with regard to the equal spacing of the toilets. But, after all, who cares about the last three feet?

Although at the time that this story took place, mankind was not blessed yet with automatic computers, our anonymous man who found this solution deserves to be called the world's first competent programmer.


I have told the above story to different audiences. Programmers, as a rule, are delighted by it, and managers, invariably, get more and more annoyed as the story progresses; true mathematicians, however, fail to see the point.

The Sound of a 56k Modem Connecting...

If you're of a certain age (translation: if you're an old fart like me) and you used computers in the '80s and '90s, then the sound of a 56k modem connecting (generally to your dial-up ISP) is one that's probably burned into your little grey cells.  While those noises are familiar, most likely you have no idea what they all meant.  Here's a nice explanation, complete with graphic...digital archaeology :)

Best Fonts for Programming?

Anonymous Pro wins the vote...

Euphorbia punicea

Common name “Jamaican poinsettia”.  From BPOD, of course...

Awesome...

Proclaims my mom, about this:

Americas More Civilized Than We'd Thought...

Not now, but a long time ago – in the period before 1492...

Over the past ten years or so, scientists have made a number of discoveries about the broader extent and higher population than previously believed in “pre-historic” Americas.  Many of these discoveries have been in South America, particularly in Amazonia.  Here's one that is in the United States, giving strong evidence for a civilization there about 3,200 years ago that was capable of mustering thousands of workers to build a large earthworks.

It fascinates me that the evidence of human activity is so difficult to find and interpret, just a few thousand years after the fact.  I wonder what people a few thousand years from now will think about, say, the human occupation of Southern California?  Our artifacts look so permanent – especially on the time scale of a single human life – but clearly they are not...

The Spread of Religions...

I've long been surprised just how ignorant most people (from anywhere) are about religions – especially about religions other than their own (or the one most familiar to them).  Prominent amongst the topics of ignorance: any sense of the historical context of religions.  So...I predict that this infographic will have many surprises for people:

Cats vs. Birds...

The birds are losing, more dramatically than anyone knew.  It's mostly feral cats causing the problem:

America’s cats, including housecats that adventure outdoors and feral cats, kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds in a year, says Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., who led the team that performed the analysis. Previous estimates of bird kills have varied, he says, but “500 million is a number that has been thrown around a lot.”

For wild mammals, the annual toll lies between 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion, Marra and his colleagues report along with the bird numbers January 29 in Nature Communications. The majority of these doomed mammals and birds fall into the jaws of cats that live outdoors full-time with or without food supplements from people.

“The results are remarkable, not only for the big number, but also for the proportion of deaths from feral cats,” says Gary M. Langham, chief scientist for the National Audubon Society. The study assigns 952 million to 3.1 billion bird deaths a year to these wild cats. “These numbers really elevate this threat to a new level.” 

Felines are land sharks...

Potential Downfall of American Society...

Summary: A student's grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.

Isolated for Forty Years...

A Russian family, afraid of what the Soviets would do to them because of their religion, lives in Siberia cut off from the rest of the world (their cabin is at right) for over 40 years.

Amazing!

Transparency...

Back in the early '80s I worked for a company with what seemed to me a radical policy with respect to employee compensation: everyone's compensation was posted so that all could see.  This had all sorts of repercussions, most of them, I have to say, quite good.  Everybody knew exactly where they stood; there was no worrying about whether you'd negotiated the right salary for yourself.  It made questions about compensation very easy to raise.  Most of all, it made it impossible for the company to sustain any sort of compensation that didn't match the merit. 

I suspect this particular company maintained this unusual level of transparency because there were several relatives and close friends of the founder employed there.  By being completely transparent about compensation, many potentially destructive rumors were quashed.

This morning I read that there's a detectable trend toward such transparency, and more...

Oh, Yeah, I'd Say I Was Fine, Too!

Via Jim M.:

A Wisconsin farmer named Olie (Olav) had a car accident. He was hit by a truck owned by the Eversweet Company, a Harley Westover Company.

In court, the Eversweet Company's hot-shot attorney questioned him thus:

'Didn't you say to the state trooper at the scene of the accident, 'I'm fine?"

Olie responded: 'vell, I'lla tell you vat happened dere. I'd yust loaded my fav'rit cow, Bessie, into da... '

'I didn't ask for any details', the lawyer interrupted. 'Just answer the question. Did you not say, at the scene of the accident, 'I'm fine!'?'

Olie said, 'vell, I'd yust got Bessie into da trailer and I vas drivin' down da road.... '

The lawyer interrupted again and said, 'Your Honor, I am trying to establish the fact that, at the scene of the accident, this man told the police on the scene that he was fine. Now several weeks after the accident, he is trying to sue my client. I believe he is a fraud. Please tell him to simply answer the question.

By this time, the Judge was fairly interested in Olie’s answer and said to the attorney: 'I'd like to hear what he has to say about his favorite cow, Bessie'.

Olie said: 'Tank you' and proceeded. 'vell as I vas saying, I had yust loaded Bessie, my fav'rit cow, into de trailer and was drivin' her down de road vin dis huge Eversweet truck and trailer came tundering tru a stop sign and hit my trailer right in da side by golly. I was trown into one ditch and Bessie was trown into da udder ditch.

By yimminy yahosaphat I vas hurt, purty durn bad, and didn't vant to move. An even vurse dan dat, I could hear old Bessie a moanin' and a groanin'. I knew she vas in terrible pain yust by her groans.

Shortly after da accident, a policeman on a motorbike turned up. He could hear Bessie a moanin' and a groanin' too, so he vent over to her. After he looked at her, and saw her condition, he took out his gun and shot her right between the eyes.

Den da policeman came across de road, gun still in hand, looked at me, and said, 'How are you feelin'?'

'Now wot da fock vud you say?'

Take That!

There are petty thieves in almost every workplace.  They drive their fellow workers crazy by stealing drinks and food that belong to others, usually from the refrigerator.

Whoever posted the sign at right has secured revenge for all of us :)

Cisco Sells Off Linksys...to Belkin???

Cisco appears to have completely given up on its various forays into consumer electronics, selling off the profitable Linksys line to Belkin.  I have no idea whether those forays actually made good business sense, but what is clear is that Cisco has been punished by investors for having done so.  The Flip video fiasco actually impacted us personally – we owned one of those things.  This sale won't impact us directly, but it saddens me.  Linksys is a solid brand, with good-to-great products at very fair prices.  Belkin is a schlocky brand, known (quite justifiably, in my own experience) for iffy products and high prices.  I suppose its possible that Belkin could leverage this acquisition to push their own reputation uphill, but somehow I suspect that the opposite is more likely.  I fully expect to see “Linksys” slapped onto Belkin's existing networking products – the electronics equivalent of lipstick on a pig...

Women in Combat...

Some interesting thoughts from a female veteran, and this post has links to three other excellent articles, all thought-provoking.

If politics weren't part of the mix, I'd say there was a chance (albeit a small chance) that the military could figure out how to do this right.  Throw politics into it, though, and I think it becomes impossible.  And of course politics is in the mix, inevitably so, as Congress controls the military's purse strings...

Photos from 2012...

A collection of beautiful and fascinating photos taken in 2012, like the photo below of Mt. Rainier (in Washington State) casting a shadow up onto the cloud bottoms...

That's It, the Internet is Finished!

I Miss Estonia...

It's been eight years or so since I last visited this little country.  I ran across this beautiful photo taken yesterday near Suurupi, Estonia, and it reminded me of my own delighted treks through the forests and backcountry of Estonia...

Drama...

Another in a series of similar ads.  Each of these makes me wonder how I'd react were I to witness this...