This has to be from California...

This has to be from California...  Via my pistol-packing Macified mama:

A man was in his front yard mowing grass when his attractive blonde female neighbor came out of the house and went straight to the mailbox. She opened it then slammed it shut and stormed back in the house..

A little later she came out of her house again went to the mail box and again, opened it, slammed it shut again. Angrily, back into the house she went.

As the man was getting ready to edge the lawn, here she came out again, marched to the mail box, opened it and then slammed it closed harder than ever.

Puzzled by her actions the man asked her, 'Is something wrong?'

To which she replied, 'There certainly is! My stupid computer keeps saying, 'YOU'VE GOT MAIL!'

Veggies in Paradise...

Veggies in Paradise...  A couple days ago our neighbor Tim D. brought over a grocery bag full of treats from his garden: beets, sweet corn, and green peppers.  Debbie ate the corn, and I ate the beets, in an orgy of veggie consumption.  I ate not only the beets themselves, but also the greens – all were young and tender, and oh my they were good.  Debbie made yummy noises the entire time she was consuming four ears of corn.  She had them all down her gullet within about three minutes.  The green peppers contributed to a nice scramble Debbie made for our breakfast, and we still have some left.

I didn't think to take a photo of these until after we ate them :)

It's so nice to live in a part of the world that can grow good veggies!

Wisdumb...

Wisdumb...  Via reader Simi L...

American heroes in France...

American heroes in France...  As usual, all the early reports were wrong.  It wasn't two U.S. Marines who stopped a terrorist on the train, it was three Americans: one civilian, one Air Force, and one National Guardsman; all mutual friends.  Heroes, though, whatever their occupation.  France has, quite understandably, gone all gaga over them – media there is featuring wall-to-wall coverage.  At right is an interview with the father of Anthony Sadler, one of the three.  It's beautiful, just beautiful.  The father's reaction is exquisitely genuine and unaffected, and you can see his mixture of pride, wonder, and relief shining through...

A night at the sleep lab...

A night at the sleep lab...  I spent last night at the sleep lab, inside the main hospital in Logan.  I didn't get a whole lot of sleep there, though.

I arrived at 8 pm dressed in my pajamas, as the instructions asked.  I had to buy a pair of pajamas for this purpose – I can't remember ever sleeping in pajamas before, so even just wearing them was strange.  Walking through the hospital parking lot in pajamas and slippers was also kind of weird.  I got lots of smiles on the way in; one couple asked me if I had just escaped from somewhere :)

Once in the sleep lab, Sage (the sleep technician) showed me into my own little room, like a miniature hotel room – a bed, closet, and private bathroom.  Then she started wiring me up.  This happened in two stages, and involved lots of wires.  She put electrodes all over my head and face, so that they could monitor eye movement, eyelids opening and closing, teeth grinding, mouth position, and brain activity.  Then there were electrodes on my chest for monitoring heart, and two straps around my chest to monitor breathing.  She strapped a microphone to my Adam's apple to record snoring.  Then she stuck an air flow and temperature sensor up my nose.  Finally there were more electrodes on my legs to monitor their movement.  In addition there was an infrared video camera filming my whole night, and a microphone recording any noise in the room.  By the time she was done, at 10:30, I was quite a sight (about like the fellow at right)!  All those wires led into a shoebox-sized junction box that contained a data concentrator; that was in turn connected to a data recorder that had a network interface.  All this stuff allowed Sage to sit in her monitoring room and see a great deal of information about me, all in real time.  All this was being recorded as well.

For the first part of the night, until 1 am, Sage collected data on my sleep.  I was able to go to sleep fairly quickly, and slept well until she had all the data she needed and woke me up for the second part.

That second part involved fitting a CPAP machine to me, and experimenting with different pressures to find the setting that would work best for me.  This is a special CPAP with the ability to have its pressure set remotely by Sage.  For this to work, I had to be asleep – and with this machine strapped to my face, making noises and shoving air into me, that wasn't happening.  I wasn't able to sleep more than 5 minutes for the rest of the night.  Sage was able to collect a small amount of data, but she's pretty sure she did not get enough for the doctor to set a pressure.  That means ... I'm almost certainly going to be told to go back for another night at the sleep lab.  This next visit will be all night with the CPAP machine, most likely on some kind of sleep medication so they can be sure to get their data.  Lovely.  Can't say I'm looking forward to that!

Also, after the not-so-pleasant experience last night with the CPAP machine I'm wondering whether the cure is worse than the problem.  That will be a topic for discussion with my doctor!

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  Today was Debbie's third physical therapy session, and it's clear she's made big progress.  She used crutches for the first time today, and even walked a bit on a single crutch.  The therapist thinks she's only got two real issues at the moment, both of them perfectly normal for her situation.  The first is that the bones in her joint are still reporting pain when she puts weight on her injured knee.  He says those nerves need to be retrained to understand that putting weight on them is ok.  The second issue is that her quad muscle needs to be built back up; the weeks on “no weight bearing” caused it to atrophy quite a bit.  That's just exercise, and the exercise bicycle and practicing walking are the main routes to success there.

I'm headed up to the hospital in Logan tonight for a sleep study.  My doctor thinks I likely have sleep apnea, but they're going to do some tests tonight to prove that.  Somehow I'm supposed to sleep with electrodes on my head and my chest, a sensor mask over my mouth and nose, and sensors strapped to two fingers.  That ought to be interesting!

Morning in Paradise...

Morning in Paradise...  Miki (already less resplendent), Race, and I took our usual morning walk, but it was harder than usual.  The air this morning is notably worse than yesterday; the smoke is now thick enough to feel raw on the throat, and it made my eyes water.  When we started out on our walk, the sun was over the Wasatch Mountains, but was a red ball so dim I could look directly at it.  By the time we were done with our walk, it was a bit brighter, but the day still looked like a heavily overcast day.  In the last photo you can't really see the Wellsville Mountains (west of us) at all, whereas normally they are so clearly visible you don't realize they're 15 to 20 miles away.  It will be nice indeed when this smoke clears off...

Wisdumb...

Wisdumb...  Via reader Simi L...

Why we should legalize murder for hire...

Why we should legalize murder for hire...  Excellent piece, but ... you have to read it to the very end to understand why I said that.  Via friend, former colleague, and dogged reader Doug W...

Ladybug takeoff...

Ladybug takeoff...  I never knew their wings folded up like this!

Seen in an ad...

Seen in an ad...  This appears in a free classified ad hosted by a local news web site.  The news site is trying to provide a useful service to its audience, but this kind of leech is taking advantage of it.  What makes me most sad about this is that ads for ludicrous, obviously fraudulent products like this must occasionally work – there's no other reason why anyone would bother to place them.  Most likely the person they do work with is the kind of person you'd least like to be victim to it: the elderly or weak of mind.  I've redacted the contact information, as I don't want to give this despicable parasite any additional exposure...

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Why should you be skeptical of climate models?

Why should you be skeptical of climate models?  One reason might be that a simple model (so simple you can do the math on a calculator or slide rule!) does a better job of predicting temperatures than any of the IPCC models...

Geek: evil code commit...

Geek: evil code commit ... to make before you leave your job.  This assumes, of course, that you're willing to burn a lot of bridges, with geekly napalm.

The closest thing I've ever seen to this was a “code bomb” that an angry employee committed about a week before he left.  This was at an electronic stock trading company, and the code bomb added a random number of shares to an order, intermittently (a few times a day).  So, for instance, a trader might place an order to sell 1,000 shares of IBM, and it would be turned into an order to sell (say) 1,400 shares instead.  Fortunately we caught this during testing, before the software ever got released to a real trader.  That one could have been bad.  We just fixed it and moved on; the company never took any action against the ex-employee.  I don't think we ever even told him that we'd found his bomb...

Turkish is an interesting language in the first place...

Turkish is an interesting language in the first place ... with all sorts of unusual features.  I just ran across another reason why it's interesting: it has a whistled form for communications over long distances.  I've known several Turkish people over the years, and none of them ever mentioned this to me.  I only discovered it when reading a science news story about how the right hemisphere of the brain gets involved in this...

Superconductivity at -70°C!

Superconductivity at -70°C!  I was all excited when I saw that headline – that's a far higher temperature than previously found.  Then I saw this little detail: the superconductivity occurs only at 1.5 million atmospheres of pressure.  Sheesh.  I won't be doing that at home anytime soon!

And another nice day in Paradise...

And another nice day in Paradise...  Race, (the resplendent) Miki, and I did our usual walk this morning, but the experience was anything but usual.  The haze we noted yesterday was far worse today.  Mountains more than about 4 miles away were completely invisible.  The air smelled like a wet campfire at some distance.  Though the sky was cloudless, the sun was dim and the lighting diffuse.  The wildlife all seemed subdued; few birds were in evidence.  Wildlife, in general, react strongly to fires.  This probably smells like a possible fire approaching to all the animals and birds...

After our walk, I poked around for a few hours moving and setting up sprinklers.  I've now finished putting quick-disconnects on all my hoses and sprinklers, which makes the job of setting them out much less tedious (no screwing and unscrewing hoses).

Then it was time for Debbie's second physical therapy appointment, and like the first, it went very well.  Observable progress was in evidence, and if you watch her it's clear she's gaining confidence and strength.  She'll be on her feet soon!

As a treat, we took ourselves out to Jack's Wood-Fired Pizza.  Of all the restaurants we've sampled in the area, this one holds the strongest claim to being exceptional – not just “for the area”, but in an absolute sense.  We had a truly enjoyable meal: mushroom soup (a lovely soup with a light broth and a touch of cheese), pizzas (we each had our own tiny pizza), and lemon cake with fresh berries for dessert.  Scrumptious!

After we got home I had a brief respite until the UPS man drove up.  He dropped off several packages, amongst them Debbie's new recumbent exercise bicycle.  Naturally it was a kit, with a dozen or so major parts and a nice collection of hardware.  Thankfully the directions were crystal clear, all the parts were there, and they even included all the necessary tools.  Two hours later, I finally got it all put together and working.  It's a nice piece of gear, and at least right now looks like a good value for the money...

A nice day in Paradise...

A nice day in Paradise...  Miki, Race, and I started off with our usual walk.  The skies were notably hazy.  We've read that the haze is actually diffuse smoke from the wildfires currently burning in northern California, eastern Oregon, and northern Nevada.  The only wildfires in Utah right now are small and south of us, which is not upwind.  This haze may continue for some time, as the fires are in no danger of being controlled.  I'm not real happy about the haze, but it beats the heck out of being in actual danger from the fires, as we used to be in southern California...

The major event on our walk from the dogs' perspective was a weasel running across the road about 50' in front of us.  Race, especially, went on full “Get the animal!” alert, straining at the leash so hard that I had trouble keeping control.  He was so disappointed when I didn't let him off-leash to go chase the weasel!

Some photos:

A little later we loaded up all three dogs and headed for the groomer in downtown Logan.  There we dropped off the two field spaniels for a (much needed) haircut, and continued on with Race.  We headed out to Bear Lake, where we had a nice meal at the Cafe Sabor.  I had a burrito that was big enough to house a dog or two; all I could do was to eat the meat out of it.  Debbie had a chipotle chicken salad that she completely demolished.  We got into a conversation with our waiter, who told us about a spectacular wildflower site: the shores of Lake Bloomington.  That small lake is over 9,000 feet high, and is in the bottom of a north-facing glacial bowl.  It's a 20 mile four-wheel trip, followed by a two mile hike – just the sort of day trip we love.  Gotta check it out next year!

After that we headed out on a clockwise circumnavigation of the lake.  We were actually a bit disappointed.  Partly this was because of the haze obstructing what would have been gorgeous views of the lake's famously blue water (the color is due to tiny suspended particles of limestone).  Mostly, though, it was due to the fact that nearly all the lake's shores are built up with resorts – and this time of year, those resorts are crowded.  Also the state parks with their beaches and boat rentals were also crowded.  This was less true on the eastern shore, but still the scene was much different today than it was in the late winter when we last passed this way.  The few stretches of lakeside with farms were pretty, but one can't help thinking that they will soon be developed as well.  Indeed, on a couple of the farms we passed there were “Coming soon!” billboards advertising the imminent availability of lots on big meadows that were even then being mowed for hay.  It made us sad.

There was one moment of sheer joy on the eastern shore, though.  Not so much for us, but for Race.  We let him out on a boat ramp, and as I took him (on leash) down toward the water, he started whimpering in anticipation.  When I let him off leash, he raced down to the water and leaped in.  He started playing with the wavelets, batting at them with his front paws and biting any that had the impertinence to show some white water near him.  We let him play for ten minutes or so, and he came back one very happy dog.  Also very wet :)

As we came around the southwestern quadrant of the lake, we decided to try a four-wheel road back toward Hardware Ranch (close to our home).  We didn't have any maps, but we had a general sense of the direction we needed to go (southwest), so we just headed that way.  That route was much more to our taste than the lake route.  We saw one deer early on, but (to Debbie's disappointment) no other wildlife – unless you count steers and sheep, which we saw plenty of :)  To my surprise, there was good signage on these mountain roads – much better than we're used to in a National Forest.  We ran into signs pointing to Hardware Ranch early in the trip, and just followed them.  It was interesting for us to see this back country for the first time.  The variability was greater than we expected, with patches of meadows, aspen forest, conifer forest, mixed forest, pinyon/juniper/sage territory, streams, cliffs, and narrow canyons.  It really wasn't what we expected at all.

After emerging onto paved roads at Hardware Ranch, we zoomed up to retrieve our two field spaniels, now almost unrecognizable in their resplendence.  That won't last long :) 

“A Disgrace to the Profession”

“A Disgrace to the Profession”  That's the title of Mark Steyn's latest book, which I read yesterday.  I bought it without high expectations, despite being a big fan of Mark's works – mainly I hoped in a small way to support him in his legal defense (he's being sued for defamation by Michael Mann).  I already knew, from reading some reviews and Mark's own description, that the book's premise was a collection of quotes by other people (not Mark) about Michael Mann and his (in)famous “hockey stick” graph.  So my expectation was for a lightly annotated collection of quotes – amusing and entertaining, but perhaps not particularly enlightening.

The reality is much different.

First of all, Mark's additions to the quotes aren't just brief annotations.  They are entertaining, witty expositions of the context for each of his featured quotes.  He describes the person he's quoting and the situation in which the quote was made.  Often the featured quote is buttressed by additional quotes, from the same person or others.  Each chapter (generally just a few pages at most) is devoted to a single quote, and each could stand alone but is more powerful as a component of the collection.

This book, it turns out, is a wonderful primer for anyone who wonders why anthropogenic global warming (AGW) skeptics are skeptical of the hockey stick.  It's an equally useful primer for anyone who thinks “the science is settled”.  An impressive array of what I'll call real scientists beautifully articulate why they are unimpressed with Dr. Mann's “science”.

I thought of myself as fairly well-read on the subject of AGW.  I've probably read 25 or so books on the subject, and I've plowed through hundreds of emails from the ClimateGate dump.  I participated in some of the data analyses.  I've read countless articles in the media.  Nevertheless, Mark's new book was full of surprises for me.

Most of all, this book is an absolutely devastating summary critique of Michael Mann, both personally and professionally – as well as the premier product of his scientific research, the infamous “hockey stick”.  Anyone who cares to investigate Mann's scientific perfidy for themselves will find this volume to be the perfect starting point for their investigation.  Each chapter provides a lead (sometimes several!) to credible, authoritative critics of Mann's work.

I wonder how Dr. Mann perceives this book?  Surely it must give him a taste – a bitter, foul taste – of what he's up against in a fight with Mark Steyn.  That's not a battle I'd be eager to fight, that's for sure :)

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  Yesterday started out with a big step for Debbie: her first physical therapy after breaking her knee's “knuckle” in early June.  Seems like forever!  But there she was yesterday morning, hobbling into the physical therapy room at the clinic in Millville.  Wess, the therapist, was quite impressed with the extension (straightening) and flexion (bending) that Debbie demonstrated.  He pronounced it far better than he was expecting, and predicted that within 6 to 8 weeks she'd be walking normally again, including stairs.  He started her out on a set of exercises, emphasizing a stationary bicycle.  We're going to get one (on order already, actually) so she can do this as often as possible, as Wess told us it was one of the best possible exercises to get her quads back into shape.  From my perspective, it was really good to see her start to do some of the things that she's been unable to for almost three months now...

In the early afternoon I took Debbie up to get her hair and nails done.  I dropped her off and ran a couple errands myself, then came back and waited for her.  “Waited” is the important word in that sentence.  It took four and a half hours for the crew to finish working on her.  I've never watched this process before, and I'd prefer never to watch it again.  The intermediate steps are ... somewhat disturbing.  At one point her head looked like something out of a cheap science fiction horror movie, with layers of tin foil, foul-smelling liquid drizzling, and a distinct vapor trail following her anywhere she went.  I spent the time reading a book I'd just received.  The book was excellent (I've nearly finished it) and will be the subject of another post.

Today we'll be gone most of the day, on a sight-seeing and recreational eating trip.  We'll be circumnavigating Bear Lake (30 miles or so northeast of Logan) and eating along its shores.  While we're out enjoying ourselves, two of our dogs (Mo'i and Miki, field spaniels extraordinaire) will be in the torture chamber, having their hair cut.  We expect them to forgive us in the early evening, right around their supper time :)

Televangelist expose...

Televangelist expose ... by John Oliver.  Both hilarious and thought-provoking.  My favorite line:

Praise be to the IRS, that most permissive of agencies!

Humor is a surprisingly effective way to pillory a travesty.  We could use some more of this...