Snow on the roof ...

Snow on the roof ... and sunshine means icicles!  We've got them all around the house.  The biggest one is around 5' long, but I couldn't get close enough to it to take a photo.  This four-footer is right next to our front door, so I got it instead :)  Click to embiggen...

Decadence in Paradise...

Decadence in Paradise...  So it's lunchtime, and we're hungry.  We have no particular plans for a meal.  What to do?

We started with some Crumb Brothers black pepper Parmesan bread, lightly toasted.  Slathered it with Duke's mayonnaise.  Sliced some Utah non-hydroponic hothouse Beefsteak tomatoes, slapped them onto the bread.  Cooked up some Dailey's fresh applewood-smoked bacon, chopped it up, sprinkled it on top of the tomatoes, thickly.  Chased that down with a big glass of ice-cold Rosehill Dairy Creamline milk.

I don't know how it gets any better than that!

What is this “Superbowl” thing I keep reading about?

What is this “Superbowl” thing I keep reading about?  :)

What on earth is this?

What on earth is this?  Well, it's not on Earth – it's on Mars, recently imaged by the Curiosity rover.  What do you suppose made those oddly-shaped bumps?  I'm guessing viscous lava eroded after cooling...

Why bad science papers live on...

Why bad science papers live on...  Good science isn't as friction-free as we'd like it to be.  This explains why so many thoroughly debunked climate science papers (as well as from other branches of science) have never been retracted...

Don't be too impressed ...

Don't be too impressed ... with that fancy safe you bought.  Most of the safes sold to consumers (all of them selling for under $1,500 or so) are pretty much useless as a deterrent to theft.  “Mr. Locksmith” demonstrates how easy it is to open one particular model (a popular Sentry electronic safe) in the video at right.  They're not much better at fire protection, either.  The old school hole-in-the-ground is better for both, if a tad less convenient :)

A while back I read an interview with a successful home burglar (here successful means he didn't get caught).  He told the interviewer that when he saw a safe in a home he just smiled – because he knew that (a) the homeowner had stuff valuable enough to need protection, and (b) within minutes he'd have that safe open.  When he was asked what the best way to protect valuables from someone like himself was, he said the best protection was adequate insurance.  Second best: creative hiding.  All the usual methods of hiding he knew very well, even details like what the fake hollowed out books looked like.  But someone who hid their valuables in a unique way that they invented – that would likely work, as he wouldn't spend the time to search for it.

Road train...

Road train...  A somewhat different (and, I suspect, much less expensive) alternative to convoys of autonomous trucks – and this alternative is already in use!  These “road trains” are in Australia, but there are plenty of places in the western U.S. where I would think they would be just as useful – but I never heard of them being even considered here.  I wonder why?

Just got back...

Just got back ... from another trip up to Hardware Ranch, on a wildlife quest.  We saw quite a few deer, a dipper, a kingfisher, two golden eagles, and five gorgeous bull elk right near the mouth of the canyon, just east of Hyrum.  They were up on a knoll, lying down and surveying their dominions (and in their minds, I'm sure, their subjects).  One of them had a spectacular set of antlers, 12 points with a spread of 5 to 6 feet.  We also saw several beaver dams (just below Hardware Ranch itself) that were snow covered, but there were little muddy gullies carved through that snow – where the beavers travel from one of their ponds to another.

Unfortunately for our enjoyment (we like to drive very slowly and gawk), there were bazillions of cars on the road today.  Weekends are always busier, but today was particularly so.  Oh, well...

Words I did not know...

Words I did not know ... but which greatly amuse me: Thermaggedon.  People who believe that global warming will cause the world to end are Thermaggedonists.  Oh, most excellent!

Paradise panorama...

Paradise panorama...  I took the panorama below this morning, from the field just south of our home.  The house in the distance on the left is due south from where I was standing, and our flagpole on the right side is ENE from where I was standing.  The mountains in the distance are the Wellsville Mountains, a sub-range of the Wasatch Mountains (where the two ranges join, just south of us, is the southern end of Cache Valley).  Our home is just barely visible through the pines just right of center.

This is the sort of thing...

This is the sort of thing ... that a real geek does for fun.  After reading this, I just wish I'd thought of the problem first :)

Think about this for a moment before you go read that post.  Consider the numbers 24 and 50, written in Roman numerals:

24: XXIV
50: L

Fifty is, of course, a much larger number than twenty-four in the usual way we think about numbers' “sizes”.  But notice that twenty-four is wider (on the screen) than fifty when written in Roman numerals.  That's the observation that provoked the puzzle in the linked article.

Now go read it :)

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  On Thursday afternoon, we made a mess of roasted fresh veggies (and, in my case, a couple of Trader Joe's chicken sausages).  My pig bowl is in the photo at right, but in my defense, Debbie's was about the same size :)

What's in that lovely looking thing?  Well, there are Brussels sprouts, asparagus, carrots, turnips, parsnips, and Shiitake mushrooms.  All of those, after chopping, we threw into a big plastic bag along with a little olive oil, roasted garlic salt, and fresh ground pepper.  Shake, spread on a foil-lined cookie sheet, and roast at 350°F until the veggies are done.  How long it takes is mainly a function of how big the chunks are; ours took about an hour.

Deeeeeelicious!

Oh, and the glass full of milk is, of course, our wonderful Rosehill Dairy Creamline milk.  My brother Scott is now a fellow lacaholic...

Speaking of that milk...  Debbie and I are going to try making our own mozzarella cheese (using that milk!) this afternoon.  We got us a little cheese-making kit after reading how easy it is.  We'll see if that was just cheese propaganda, or if it's true :)  We're going to have the cheese on toasted black pepper Parmesan bread (from Crumb Brothers), with some more of those roasted veggies...

Yesterday we visited a property in south Hyrum, close to our home, on behalf of our friend Kevin P.  He and his wife, after visiting us, decided that they'd like to live up here someday as well.  They've had a sort of background search for a place ever since they visited, and this property popped up in the search.  Mainly I've got it here because I used that occasion to take the first panoramic photo I've made with in iPhone 6:

That photo encompasses about 220° of the view from where I was standing.  I'm pretty impressed with the job the camera did of stitching all that together, automatically.  The only thing I did to this photo was to color-correct it (I've noticed the iPhone takes distinctly bluish photos in snow scenes).  Otherwise, it's just like it was straight out of the camera.

A couple of years ago, a married couple bought the vacant lot right next to my mom's house, near Charlottesville, Virginia.  We've never met them in person, but right after they bought it they managed to start being obnoxious, via letters demanding all sorts of compensation for all sorts of offenses, both imagined and real.  We accommodated where it was the right thing to do, and refused where it wasn't, and they remained steadfastly obnoxious.  My mom has (rightly) been dreading the day they moved into the house they were planning to build there.  Well, a few days ago a realtor posted a sign by the front of that lot – it was for sale.  I contacted that realtor, found out that the asking price was basically a fire sale price (the obnoxious couple needed the money to fund construction on another property they bought), so I put an offer in on it, at a very attractive (to me) price.  They accepted.  Now I have to figure out what to do with two acres of Virginia forest, with one edge along a pond...

Geek: there's a lot of truth...

Geek: there's a lot of truth ... in this short article about the dangers of abstracted, de-duplicated software design.  I've been involved in debates about this exact topic at two different companies, and was surprised the first time (and amused the second) when it quickly evolved into two fairly well-defined camps: what I'll call the pragmatists vs. the theorists.  Basically the pragmatists were saying

“Your lovely design, while laudable and compliant with all the right texts, doesn’t actually work well in the real world!”, 

while the theorists were all

“You heathen!  How dare you advocate violating software design law number umpty-squatch?” 

Since in both cases I was the arbiter, I ruled for the pragmatists.  The first time this happened, I actually had two engineers quit, they were so upset.  We were better off for that.  The second time, I talked with the leaders of the theorist camp before I announced my decision generally, and several of them threatened to quit if I did so.  When I told them I was ok with that, they backed down, and by the time I announced it more generally, they had somehow accommodated themselves to my decision.  One of them told me, long afterward, that he had waited for months for the evils that would inevitably result from my decision to manifest – and when they never did, he realized that he might accidentally have learned something valuable :)

In nearly all my experiences in which the theorists had their way, the results were horrible.  The example of that that comes most readily to mind was at the now-defunct Stac Electronics, where a cabal of fervent object-oriented design devotees managed to take the leadership of a major development project.  Hundreds of pages of beautiful diagrams, thousands of man-hours of meetings, and innumerable design documents later – we had a beautiful but all-but-immutable design ... that didn't even come close to (a) meeting our functional requirements, and (b) meeting our performance requirements.  Disaster.  The leadership of that team lost their jobs, and the company lost over a year of time-to-market.  I was part of the team that came in to clean up the mess, but the dot-comm bubble smacked us around long before we were able to finish that.  Very sad, for all concerned.  Big lesson to me. 

Theorists belong in academia or solitary confinement.  Pragmatic engineers ... they're the ticket!

Chang'e 3 / Yutu photos released...

Chang'e 3 / Yutu photos released...  Chang'e 3 is the Chinese robotic lunar lander that successfully touched down on the moon in December 2013.  Yutu is the lunar rover that deployed from Chang'e 3 and was able to do some science work (and take photos!) before it broke down.  The Chinese space agency just released a trove of photos, including the one at right (glorious full resolution version).

I still marvel that our understanding of the moon went from the fuzzy photos and wild speculation of my youth to the the close, high resolution photos and detailed knowledge of today.  I remember well how serious scientists in the mid-'60s warned NASA that the Apollo lunar landers were likely to be swallowed up by the miles-thick powdery dust that likely blanketed the moon's surface.  Not so much :)

If your data doesn't support your hypothesis...

If your data doesn't support your hypothesis ... in most of science, you change your hypothesis.  Not the global warmists, though!  Steve McIntyre explains, with yet another example of the warmists blatantly cherry-picking the data that supports their preconceived notions.

It would be amusing to see real scientist – say, a physicist – closely examine the way the global warmists use their data...

The Canary Islands...

The Canary Islands...  I flew through there once, on a business trip, but it sure didn't look like this!  More info on the photo...

Our sun...

Our sun ... as you've never seen it before!  You'll want to full-screen this one.  From the video comments:

It’s always shining, always ablaze with light and energy that drive weather, biology and more. In addition to keeping life alive on Earth, the sun also sends out a constant flow of particles called the solar wind, and it occasionally erupts with giant clouds of solar material, called coronal mass ejections, or explosions of X-rays called solar flares. These events can rattle our space environment out to the very edges of our solar system. In space, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, keeps an eye on our nearest star 24/7. SDO captures images of the sun in 10 different wavelengths, each of which helps highlight a different temperature of solar material. In this video, we experience SDO images of the sun in unprecedented detail. Presented in ultra-high definition, the video presents the dance of the ultra-hot material on our life-giving star in extraordinary detail, offering an intimate view of the grand forces of the solar system.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

A planetarium on your computer screen...

A planetarium on your computer screen...  Free, too.  The Celestia program is pretty cool, even after just a few minutes of playing with it.  It's sort of a Google Earth for the rest of the universe...

Squirrels vs. houses of worship...

Squirrels vs. houses of worship...  One team clearly has a superior strategy:

There were four churches and a synagogue in a small town: a Presbyterian church, a Baptist church, a Methodist church, a Roman Catholic church and a Jewish synagogue. Each church and the synagogue had a problem with squirrels.

The Presbyterians called a meeting to decide what to do about their squirrels. After much prayer and consideration they determined the squirrels were predestined to be there and they shouldn’t interfere with God’s divine will.

At the Baptist church, the squirrels had taken an interest in the baptistery. The deacons met and decided to put a water slide on the baptistery and let the squirrels drown themselves. The squirrels liked the slide, but, unfortunately, they knew instinctively how to swim, so twice as many squirrels showed up the following week.

The Methodists decided that they were not in a position to harm any of God’s creatures. So, they humanely trapped their squirrels and set them free near the Baptist church. Two weeks later the squirrels were back when the Baptists took down the water slide.

But the Roman Catholics came up with a very creative strategy. They baptized all the squirrels and consecrated them as members of the church. Now they only see them on Christmas and Easter.

Not much was heard from the Jewish synagogue, however. They took one squirrel and circumcised him; they haven’t seen another squirrel since…

Via my pistol-packing mama and my cousin Mike...

All those billions of dollars...

All those billions of dollars ... and disastrous incompetence.  Can you imagine any private company surviving with similarly bad performance?  The TSA costs us over $7 billion a year – every year since 2002 – and it accomplishes ... utterly nothing.  Zero terrorists captured or identified.  Zero terrorists stopped.  Zero terrorist weapons captured.  But millions upon millions of travelers inconvenienced and delayed.

From a political perspective, the TSA accomplishes two things:

1.  It pacifies low-information voters, making them believe they're being protected.  The vast majority, unfortunately, do not understand the TSA's profound uselessness.

2.  It employs hundreds of thousands of people on the government payroll – and they can be counted on to vote for Big Government, just as other large groups of public sector union members do.  Also, their union can be counted on to contribute major sums to the Democratic Party and its candidates, thus guaranteeing continued support from them.

Sheesh.  If the voters won't stop nonsense like this, what hope is there?  The doom, I feel it approaching...