Snow's gonna snow...

Snow's gonna snow...  And that's just what the weatherman is telling us is about to happen: 2 to 4 inches of the fluffy white stuff in the next 36 hours or so.  I sense some snowplowing in my near-term future :)

Just read it...

Just read it...  You know that with a lead like this:

Let me tell you the worst thing about the climate change scam. It’s not the lies, not bullying, not the perversion of the scientific method, not the establishment cover-ups, not the needless scaremongering, not the wasted money, not the nannying overregulation, not the destroyed wildlife and ruined countryside, not the stymied economic growth — bad though all these things are. No one what really sticks in the craw is that the people making money out of it are the scum of the earth.

...you just have to read the whole thing!

I just love the premise of a hedge fund dedicated to making money from the failures of the warmists...

On Trump...

On Trump...  This is from a great piece by Megan McArdle:

But his endlessly convenient opinion shifts, on the very core issues his supporters care most about, ought also to signal that Donald Trump doesn’t care about you, either. He’s against outsourcing and immigration as long as that’s getting him votes. But if he can find a different coalition, he’ll happily abandon the current one in a flash. As he’ll need to, if he gets the nomination, and starts looking at the electoral math to take the general. Trump may set the land-speed record for a full 180, and his supporters will have little right to complain, given that his newfound attachment to conservative issues – including the ones he hammers most – is obviously weak and opportunistic.

It takes very little cynicism (I, for one, have more than the required minimum) to believe that her paragraph applies to nearly all politicians.

She's ok...

She's ok ... but it's hard to believe after watching this.  More here.  More on the skier (Angel Collinson).

There are many reasons why I'm uninterested in skiing.  The possibility of a tumble like this ... is now on that list :)

Winter sports in general, including the various kinds of skiing, are a really big deal around here.  Snowmobiling is probably the most popular, but snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, and downhill skiing all have lots of participation.  None of them have appeal to me, and only partly because it involves being outside in uncomfortably cold conditions. 

I love the scenic attractions of snowy and icy places – particularly streams and ponds.  They look just as beautiful to me when viewed from inside a toasty warm car, perhaps with a few short walks to explore particular things.  But hours on a noisy snowmobile, or puffing and panting on snowshoes or skis?  Along with the risk of falls, avalanches, and prolong exposure to the cold?  Not so much appeal for me :)

Huge breakthrough?

Huge breakthrough?  This story, about Google's AI software beating a human Go champion, is splattered all over the web.  Most of the stories use similar hyperbolic language, which I'm sure Google is quite happy to see.  Is it really a huge breakthrough?

I don't think so.  It's a laudable incremental advance in an area that computers (including artificial intelligence) are very good at: games with a constrained context and rules.  By “constrained context” I mean that in order to play the game of Go (or most other games), you don't need to know anything beyond the rules of the game.

That's very different, for example, than holding a conversation with someone.  In any randomly chosen human conversation, you'll find that in order to have that conversation the people involved must share an enormous amount of context.  For example, if we were talking politics, you'd have to know the names of the politicians involved, something about their beliefs and pronouncements, what offices they were running for, who the voters were ... I could go on for a long time like that.

It's not that I think Google's accomplishment is unimpressive – it's very impressive, in the same way that being the first to walk on the moon is impressive.  But ... it's less a fundamental advance and more an incremental improvement.  I'd be much more impressed if someone rolled out a computer that could talk with me in a natural way on even some limited topic.  As I've said before, I'm skeptical that such a thing will ever happen through digital computers as we know them today.  Want some evidence for my skepticism?  Spend a few minutes trying to ask some questions of Siri, Cortana, or Alexa (the voice enabled “digital assistants” from Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, respectively). Are they helpful?  Sometimes.  Are they amusing?  Most definitely.  Do they seem like a human assistant?  Hell, no.  Not even close.

So ... congratulations, Google!  But I'm still skeptical about the breadth of artificial intelligence's utility, and I still cringe when I hear people equate today's artificial intelligence with human intelligence.  Those two concepts – today, at least – aren't in the same category...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Yesterday afternoon we took a ride up to Hardware Ranch, looking for wildlife.  We saw about a bazillion deer – we joked that it was easier to say where there weren't any deer, and that's not too far off what we saw.  The most interesting deer we saw were climbing around a rock outcropping like you'd expect goats to be doing (they're in the crummy photo at right, which was blown up from a non-telephoto shot).

We also saw a moose browsing alongside Blacksmith Fork River.  After watching him for a little while, we realized that its left rear leg was badly injured.  It's still able to stumble around, but I'm pretty sure it couldn't run.  We're hoping it survives, but it looks pretty bad.

After the drive, we headed to Le Nonne for dinner.  Once again we had a delicious meal.  We shared a burrata appetizer (below, left) and then I had an entree of Alaskan Snow Crab ravioli (below, right).  Wonderful!  Debbie had bow-tie pasta with salmon, also wonderful.

The food was most enjoyable, but the service ... not so much.  We had a waiter who was obviously of the opinion that one cannot possibly be too pretentious.  One example: he noticed that I wasn't using the straw he'd placed on the table, so he asked “Will we be using our straw tonight?”  I was sore tempted to tell him where “we” could shove that straw.  But I was good; I didn't do that :)  That experience had us both talking (after we'd left the restaurant) about how nice it was to live in a pretension-free zone.  Well, nearly so, anyway.  People here are, in general, about as down-to-earth as they could be.  That general absence of pretension makes displays of it (as we experienced last night) stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.

We'll be going back to Le Nonne ... but most likely not as soon as we would if the staff were (a lot) less pretentious.  We've noted that a good fraction of Le Nonne's customers seem to be faculty and staff at Utah State University; the high levels of pretension may play better with that crowd :)

Paradise ponders photos...

Paradise ponders photos...  These are all courtesy of my neighbor Alan L., and the kid in the photos is his younger son Nikolas.  As always, you can click to embiggen.  Alan is the same guy who did the “Wil Can Fly” calendars.  He's a talented photographer!

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Yesterday a neighbor (Alan L.) asked if he and two of his boys could come over to use the woodworking tools in my shop to help them with their “pinewood derby” cars.  His younger boy (Nic) needed his for his scouts; the older boy (Zac) was doing it just for fun.  Both of them needed to cut the rectangular blocks that came with their kits into a slightly more curvy shape.  Nic had an ambitiously complex shape in mind; Zac wanted a simple wedge with a slight curve.

The right tool for both of them was a power coping saw.  I have the same model as the one pictured at right. 

Nic is about 11 years old, and has little experience with power tools (or tools in general, for that matter), so this is a good choice for its simplicity and relative safety, too.  We gave him a bit of instruction on the proper use of the saw, and let him practice on a piece of scrap wood.  He did fine during practice, and his “real” cuts on the block of pine that came with his kit were darned near perfect. 

Zac is a couple years older, and a lot more confident (though not necessarily justifiably :) than Nic.  His design was also much simpler, and he cut his block without any issues at all. 

I'm hoping Alan will share some photos with me; if he does I'll post them.  He is a photographer and web designer by trade, and his camera was clicking away like mad all evening :)

Oh, that quaint little notion called “the rule of law”...

Oh, that quaint little notion called “the rule of law”...  It's what keeps American citizens from being arbitrarily abused by the powerful ... or by mobs.  No matter who you are, the rule of law promises, the law will apply to you just as it does to any other citizen. 

We've never been a perfect example of the rule of law here.  Corruption is a big problem, though it's subtler and less widespread here than in many other places.  The rich and powerful can always find ways to use their money or their influence to help themselves or those they favor.  Nevertheless, it's generally true here that if someone breaks the law, they're going to be charged, prosecuted, and convicted by a jury. 

That last step – conviction by a jury – is subject to various kinds of manipulation, though.  Lawyers for defendants will try mightily to influence the jurors decision-making process, even if the conclusion desired doesn't follow the law.  There's even a name for this: jury nullification.  It's very controversial amongst legal academics, as it is an overt violation of the rule of law.  Jury nullification has a long history, many proponents, and some of its historical outcomes would be widely seen today as acceptable and even desirable.  And yet ... it's a clear violation of our vaunted rule of law.

Life is complicated :)

I don't have a clear position on the idea of jury nullification.  Both sides of the argument have compelling points, both pro and con.

Friend and former colleague Tim B. passed along an article detailing a current attempt at jury nullification (though the article doesn't mention that!).  Anyone who believes that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is about to bake the planet will most likely find this effort laudable.  Those of us who (like me) think that AGW is a gigantic fraud will likely find this to be a lamentable potential lapse in the rule of law.

I hate the idea that a mob of AGW supporters could stop completely legal development of energy resources.  But I'm not ready to condemn jury nullification...

More snow in Paradise...

More snow in Paradise...  Big, fluffy flakes and a lot of them.  The dogs were reveling in it once again, and came back inside with backs that were completely white with snow.  I'm guessing two inches more on the ground.  It's all due to end in a few hours, and after that we've got five days of sunshine in the forecast.  I'll be climbing on my tractor after daybreak to clear the driveway, which by this point has about 6" of new snow on it...

More social science...

More social science ... that can't be replicated.  This time it's the “power pose”, which, to be honest, looked like first class bullshit at first sight.  In fact, that TED talk was the last one I've watched – the straw that broke this proverbial camel's back...

Winter Paradise...

Winter Paradise...  Some photos from around our yard, none of them more than 50' from our house.  Click any thumbnail to embiggen:

What's that?

What's that?  Why it's a close-up image of some Martian sand, from the dark dunes Curiosity is currently exploring.

Staring at this raises all sorts of questions for me, mainly because that sand looks so very much like sand I might find here on Earth.  Here, we understand a lot about how such sands form.  All of the processes I know of involve water: the freezing ices of winter (expanding in cracks to break rocks up), the erosion of particles in flowing water, or the pounding waters of the sea (which break up rocks by pounding them).  How did this sand happen on Mars?  Is there some mechanism that involves only atmospheric gases that created them?  Or is this good evidence of the presence of water?

Star cluster R136...

Star cluster R136...  Via APOD, of course.  Click thumbnail at right to embiggen, or get the glorious full resolution image...

A couple of good ones...

A couple of good ones ... via my lovely bride:

Ed Yourdon, RIP...

Ed Yourdon, RIP...  For geeks of a certain age, Ed Yourdon is a name that conjures up memories of computer programming's first tentative steps toward engineering, rather than as a pure art.  His book Structured Design was a milestone.  It's largely forgotten now, as its essentials have been absorbed into the programming culture as well as into successor design “fads”.  For me that book was revelatory ... it truly introduced me to the idea that one could usefully think about patterns in the way one wrote code.

I had the chance to meet (and talk with) Ed on two occasions, both times at conferences.  Once was in the early '80s, when my then-employer sent me to a conference put on by Roger Oech; the other in the early '90s at Comdex.  At that first conference, I had lunch with him, and we share some memories of the early days of microcomputing.  Even then, both of us were surprised at how quickly microcomputers were ramping up – and neither of us had any clue that those days were but the beginning.

Ed's book sticks in my mind mostly for one thing it accomplished: teaching this young geek why the spaghetti code (the only kind I'd ever written to that point, with jumps sprinkled randomly throughout) was a bad idea, and how it could be better done.  I still remember the conflict I felt then, between the rigor and beauty of structured programming and the need for performance optimizations.  I really didn't understand, then, that the low performance microcomputers of the day would shortly be antiques, and that the cost of a few extra computer instructions would soon be zero for all practical purposes.  It seems downright silly today to assert that it might be necessary to write some unstructured code to get the performance we needed, but back then it was quite a normal thing.  It still happens today, but on increasingly rare occasions...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Woke up this morning to 35°F temperatures, gentle snowfall, and about 2" of new snow on the ground.  When I let the dogs out for their morning constitutional, they gamboled about the back yard with sheer joy.  There's something about that fluffy snow that they really like.  I had to go out in the yard (with my housecoat and boots :) to retrieve them; they didn't really want to come back inside.  All three of them had a nice coat of fresh snow on them that (of course!) they didn't want to get rid of until after they were back inside...

Will space junk start a war?

Will space junk start a war?  That's what these scientists are saying, but I suspect the hyperbole is aimed at getting some action on the subject.

I do remember reading a science fiction story in which the author postulated the end of civilization after a space junk cascade took out all the communications satellites, which many nations interpreted as an act of war by some enemy.  The result was a world war that reduced us all to Stone Age level.  Considering that I read the story in the '60s, that author seems ... prescient...

History-making astronomical plates...

History-making astronomical plates...  The photographic plate at right was made in 1943 by astronomer Walter Baade, showing the best view of the Andromeda Galaxy anyone had ever seen – and the first one that made it obvious that the “fuzzy spot” was actually an enormous collection of stars.  It's one of the plates chosen for this piece on the history of photographic astronomy...

Another irreproducible science report?

Another irreproducible science report?  Looks that way.  This one spawned a multi-billion dollar industry selling devices to stave off Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), which ... may not be real at all.

The social sciences are becoming indistinguishable from the JIR...