And yet another flying pig moment...

And yet another flying pig moment...  Oh, yeah, those aerosols – those danged things really are making our models inaccurate, climate scientists say...

Flying pig moment...

Flying pig moment...  “Stop the war on drugs!” says Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil.  Now, I'm not an admirer of either of these men.  But I find it remarkable that such thoroughly conventional leaders are arguing against the war on drugs.  Could this thinking be going mainstream amongst their peers?  If so, what a positive change might be wrought!

Geek: Fourier transforms...

Geek: Fourier transforms...  This is hands-down the best introduction to Fourier transforms I've ever seen – and there's no math in it at all!  And even better, here's a wonderful interactive animation that brings harmonic summation to life in a way I've never seen before.  For some reason I haven't figured out, Fourier transforms are all over slashdot this morning.

I haven't had occasion to use Fourier transforms for years now, but early in my career they were an important part of two engineering projects I undertook.  One was a TTY-on-telephone decoder for the deaf, the other a radio-teletype decoder for ham radio.  These are both “frequency shift keying” (FSK) systems, and both subject to much noise and distortion (though of different kinds in the two cases).  In both the challenge turned out to be primarily one of tricky optimization, trying to compute the Fourier transform well enough to suit the need in near-realtime on the microcomputer hardware of the day.  That hardware typically didn't have multiply or divide (it had to be written in software), and that was the big challenge.  I recall those projects as being chock full of too-clever tricky hacks, things that would be much frowned on these days – but they worked, thanks to the underlying idea of a Fourier transform...

Geek: shell scripting style guide...

Geek: shell scripting style guide...  From Google, the first style guide for shell scripting that I've ever seen, or even heard of...

Continuous learning...

Continuous learning...  Dave Jilk has a great essay on how accelerating technological change necessitates continuous learning, and how that impacts folks as they age.  The essay is generalizing, and I'm sure Jilk would be the first to agree there are plenty of exceptions to what he's describing.  What he calls "continuous learning" is what I'd call "my hobby", and I'm going to declare myself an exception – one of quite a few that I know – to his rule about how older people handle technological change.  But in the more general case, what he writes rings very true...

Smaller asteroids are more dangerous...

Smaller asteroids are more dangerous...  Not because each causes more damage than a big one, but because there are so many of them – probably over a million.  Scientists studying the Chelyabinsk meteor of February 15 this year are discovering that these smaller asteroids can cause more damage (especially from their shock wave) than previously estimated.  Science Daily, Wall Street Journal.

Great balls of fire!

Great balls of fire!  I can't believe I missed this – several sightings of large meteors over Southern California skies last night.  My only consolation is that the peak of the Taurids should occur next week, and be even better than last night...

Sketches of soldiers...

Sketches of soldiers...  Elizabeth Black was a Red Cross volunteer in WWII, and she was also an accomplished artist.  She made over 1,000 sketches of soldiers like the one at right (of Fred Harper, who was killed in action shortly after the sketch was made).  These sketches were sent home to the soldier's loved ones, where many of them became priceless family treasures.  Story and more photos, more details.

In these days of ubiquitous cell phone cameras it may be hard to imagine how precious these sketches must have been to the soldiers' families.  My six years in the Navy during the '70s gave me a taste of it – long months at sea made snapshots of loved ones incredibly valuable to their owners.  Many a salty sailor possessed a prized collection of pictures of their loved ones – invariably worn and wrinkled from long hours of handling.  I'm sure the reverse was true as well. 

I've often reflected on how our modern communications capabilities have eased the burden of separation for our soldiers and sailors.  Nearly all of our troops have access (even if intermittently) to high speed Internet connections – which means they can regularly use email, texting, Skype, FaceTime, and so on to stay in touch with their families...

Quote of the Day...

Quote of the Day...  From Alex Tabbarok, writing at Marginal Revolution:

Did Obama spy on Mitt Romney? As recently as a few weeks ago if anyone had asked me that question I would have consigned them to a right (or left) wing loony bin. Today, the only loonies are those who think the question unreasonable.

That's a damned fine question, sir!

Oh, the hypocrisy!

Oh, the hypocrisy!   Today's Failure to Fire:

Remove the warning labels!

Remove the warning labels!  Tea through the nose again!  Could it really be that simple?  Oh, I hope so!

My mom sent me a collection of these things; I've saved the rest for use on slow days...

Statistics Done Wrong...

Statistics Done Wrong – the woefully complete guide.  With a title and subhead like that, how could I not like this web site?  I'm no statistics expert, not by a long shot – but I need to understand some statistics when I'm evaluating articles or papers on things like climate science, evolution, or medicine.  So my review is from the perspective of a consumer, not a practitioner.  I dove into four topics; I haven't yet read the whole thing.  Two of those topics were on facets I understand reasonably well, and I thought they were covered very well (and with light humor, too).  The other two of them were on facets new to me, and I learned some valuable things.  So I've bookmarked this as a resource...

The site is written by Alex Rienhart, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon in statistics.  From his web site:

If you’re a practicing scientist, you probably use statistics to analyze your data. From basic t tests and standard error calculations to Cox proportional hazards models and geospatial kriging systems, we rely on statistics to give answers to scientific problems.

This is unfortunate, because most of us don’t know how to do statistics.

Statistics Done Wrong is a guide to the most popular statistical errors and slip-ups committed by scientists every day, in the lab and in peer-reviewed journals. Many of the errors are prevalent in vast swathes of the published literature, casting doubt on the findings of thousands of papers. Statistics Done Wrong assumes no prior knowledge of statistics, so you can read it before your first statistics course or after thirty years of scientific practice.

ObamaCare is a disaster for Democrats...

ObamaCare is a disaster for Democrats...  Lots of people are thinking that, including myself and Peggy Noonan.  From her latest blog post:

Back to a sense of where we are. You know where we are? It’s as if it’s 1964 and the administration has just passed landmark civil rights legislation and the bill goes into effect, and everyone looks—only immediately it is apparent that it makes everyone’s life worse! It doesn’t help minority groups – it makes their lives harder and less free! And it does real, present and intimate damage to the majority.

It’s as if it’s 1937 and they launched Social Security, only rich coupon-clippers on Park Avenue immediately started getting small monthly checks, and 67-year-old dust bowlers in tarpaper shacks started getting monthly bills.

It’s the biggest governmental enterprise that hasn’t worked since the earliest beginnings of the U.S. rocket program, when they kept trying to send rockets into space and they kept falling, defeated and groaning, into the ground. Only the rockets were still unmanned, so those failures never hurt anybody!

ObamaCare is a practical, policy and political disaster, a parlay of poisonous P’s.

And it is unbelievable – simply unbelievable – that the administration is so proud, so childish, so ideological, so ignorant and so uncaring about the bill’s victims that they refuse to stop, delay, go back, redraw and ease the trauma. 

Contra my earlier post today, this is the hopeful element in McAuliffe's election yesterday.  He was expected to win by a much larger margin; instead, Cuccinelli came very close to beating him.  The politicos are reading this as a giant, flashing warning signs for Democrats in the 2014 election cycle.

And so it may be.  But I'm still shaken that an awful, slimy candidate like McAuliffe can actually win an election, and I'm afraid it portends more such awful outcomes.  Also, there's my other little problem: the opposition candidates are (for the most part – Tea Partiers and libertarian-leaners excepted) very hard to distinguish from their progressive Democrat opponents...

“Fuck these guys!”

“Fuck these guys!”   So says Brandon Downey, a member of the Google security team, on seeing the evidence that the NSA had been listening to Google's replication traffic.  Now his colleague Mike Hearn joins him in the sentiment:

I now join him in issuing a giant Fuck You to the people who made these slides. I am not American, I am a Brit, but it's no different - GCHQ turns out to be even worse than the NSA.

We designed this system to keep criminals out . There's no ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a balance as we've got between the need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason .

Unfortunately we live in a world where all too often, laws are for the little people. Nobody at GCHQ or the NSA will ever stand before a judge and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of the judicial process. In the absence of working law enforcement, we therefore do what internet engineers have always done - build more secure software. The traffic shown in the slides below is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it, ruined.

Thank you Edward Snowden. For me personally, this is the most interesting revelation all summer.

Yes, thank you Edward Snowden.  And...thank you Google security team...

McAuliffe wins, we all lose...

McAuliffe wins, we all lose...  By that, I mean that the simple fact that such an overtly unsavory and suspicious character could be elected – no matter who his opponents were – means that we're all at a higher risk of having an oppressive and tyrannical government shoved down our throats.  His election is as incomprehensible to me as Pelosi's serial wins with high margins.  I ask myself “How could such a thing be?”, but I have no answers.  Do you?

Can you figure out how he did it?

Can you figure out how he did it?  Before I played this video, I tried to figure out how he might have gotten that nail in there.  I came up with two methods, but both would be visible if you looked at the wood closely.  What he actually did is undetectable, and wicked clever!

I'm the President? No way!

I'm the President?  No way!

Obama, the man who claims to not know a thing about the terrorist threats in Benghazi before the U.S. consulate attack, nothing about the IRS’s harassment of conservative-leaning political groups, nothing about his signature healthcare overhaul leading to millions of people losing their jobs and current insurance plans, who knew nothing about Healthcare.gov being a completely dysfunctional embarrassment, who didn’t know about the Affordable Care Act causing Americans premiums to explode, who knew nothing about the National Security Agency’s ramped domestic spying, who knows nothing about the nearly 1,000 civilians who have been killed in his targeted drone strikes, who knew nothing of the NSA’s spying on close U.S. allies now has admitted to why he knows so little about the mammoth country he oversees —he didn’t know he was overseeing it!

Oh, if only!  Read the whole thing...

Maybe the young folks aren't quite as gullible as Obama assumed...

Maybe the young folks aren't quite as gullible as Obama assumed...   First we hear that ObamaCare premiums are significantly higher than our old healthcare premiums.  Now we hear this:

Insurers say the early buyers of health coverage on the nation's troubled new websites are older than expected so far, raising early concerns about the economics of the insurance marketplaces.

If the trend continues, an older, more expensive set of customers could drive up prices for everyone, the insurers say, by forcing them to spread their costs around. "We need a broad range of people to make this work, and we're not seeing that right now," said Heather Thiltgen of Medical Mutual of Ohio, the state's largest insurer by individual customers. "We're seeing the population skewing older."

On the one hand, I hate to hear about my premiums going up even more than I already thought they would.

But on the other hand, if the young folks aren't being taken in by the pile of bullshit that The One and his progressive acolytes are handing out ... well, that's actually kind of a good thing...

Image of the day...

Image of the day...

UTA Flight 772...

UTA Flight 772...  A French airliner flying over Africa in 1989 was bombed by Libyan-sponsored terrorists.  It came down, in pieces, into the Saharan Desert in Niger – one of the most remote and inhospitable places on the planet.  Including passengers and crew, 170 people died that day.  In 2008, families of the victims gathered at the crash site and built a memorial (ground-level view at right), using rocks trucked in from almost 50 miles away and incorporating pieces of the plane's wreckage.  The monument is so large that you can see it from space.   Google maps view.