Two minutes of kitten...

Two minutes of kitten...  This is little Konani (that appears to be the name that he's stuck with), on one of his “outings” to our office.  He's still in isolation for a few more days, until we're positive he doesn't have any disease that we don't want to expose our cattery cats to...

Dogs discovering snow...

Dogs discovering snow...  Via my lovely Valentine...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Our downstairs heater (we have a separate one for the second floor) is giving us trouble.  It keeps shutting down, with its indicator light showing a code 31.  We're not alone in this; the number of hits on a search are staggering.  The house got down to 60°F overnight; a little uncomfortable but certainly not an emergency.  I tried all the obvious things from the troubleshooting tips I found online, but got nowhere.  Tomorrow we'll have our heating guy out here, and he's great – one way or the other, we'll get it fixed.

We civilized people sure do like our creature comforts :)

Take a gander at the photo of Mo'i, at right.  Can you guess what our weather is like?

Our forecast says 1 to 3 inches of that white stuff today, but with above-freezing temperatures.  We'll see what that really turns out to be.  Meanwhile, at left is the current radar picture (as of 7:35 am).

Yesterday Debbie made us a wonderful midday meal: her signature baked Ora King salmon in dilled mayonnaise, accompanied by roast vegetables (Brussels sprouts, parsnips, and carrots).  You can see the veggies at left in the “before” photo, and the completed dinner on the right.  Sorry y'all weren't here to share with us!

Yesterday evening, just before it got dark, I caught the scene at right.  From our perspective on the valley floor, the sun had set, behind the Wellsville Mountains.  But the peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to our east were still in sunshine, albeit disappearing fast.  I managed to catch this about 90 seconds before the last light on the peaks was gone...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says ... that Obamacare costs will rise by 60% over the next decade.  In other words, the Obamacare skeptics were right all along when they predicted that Obamacare would increase the cost of healthcare, not decrease it as Obama and his mincing minions promised.  No surprise to anyone who's been paying even the least bit of attention to the debate – and especially not a surprise to anyone paying their own insurance costs!

Get some Kleenex...

Get some Kleenex ... and watch this...

Do you like persimmons?

Do you like persimmons?  If you do, try Trader Joe's unsweetened, unsulfured dried California persimmons.  They are hands-down the best I've ever had.  They actually taste like persimmons!

Nic Lewis...

Nic Lewis ... writing at Climate Audit, demolishes another Thermageddonist paper...

Music video in weightlessness...

Music video in weightlessness...  Pretty darned cool!  This was done inside an aircraft flying a parabolic arc.  I'm amazed how long they can keep that up!

I have a dream!

I have a dream!  Via my pistol-packing, woodpecker-sighting mama...

Why do people go to emergency rooms?

Why do people go to emergency rooms?  Man, there were a lot of surprises in here for me, starting with #1...

Sawed off in Paradise...

Sawed off in Paradise...  For about three hours this morning, we were cut off from the Internet  (“sawed off” in IT lingo).  Quite a bit of my morning routine revolves around the Internet (mainly email, Twitter, and news), so this was quite ... unsettling ... for me :)

The views outside our windows were quite beautiful this morning.  At right is the view to the north, toward our friend and neighbor Tim D.  I particularly liked the way the mountains looked, filtered through the haze.  Not ten minutes after I took this photo, that fog bank you can see in the background came down and engulfed us.  Now we're living in a sea of gray, with visibility down to under 100'.

Now I'm going to go catch up on things, as we have the Internet back.  Yay!

Oh, yes...

Oh, yes...  A thousand times yes!

A rimey morning in Paradise...

A rimey morning in Paradise...  It's cold this morning, but it's also foggy.  That combination means that rime is forming on any surface that's below freezing.  Since it was well below freezing (air temperature) last night, that means just about everything is covered with rime, some so thickly that it looks almost like it snowed.  Some photos from around our yard:

Like all the photos I've taken in the past few months, these were taken with an unmodified iPhone 6s Plus using the built-in camera app.  As usual, the only processing I've done is color-correction (for white balance) – for some reason, my iPhone wants to make outdoor shots have a bluish cast...

Paradise Porcupine ponders...

Paradise Porcupine ponders...  That's Porcupine Reservoir, which we took a short drive up to last night.  We'd heard from a fellow wildlife gawker that the road up to the reservoir had been plowed, and that there were elk to be seen up there.  Well, we got to the reservoir, but no further than the north edge of the dam – and that road had not been plowed.  Furthermore, we saw just one cow elk on the entire trip.

On the other hand, we saw quite a few deer, and a bald eagle soaring overhead.  And lots of beautiful winter scenery:

Sneezes...

Sneezes...  More than you ever wanted to know, or (especially) see...

They're counting on you being stupid...

They're counting on you being stupid...  The American political parties, I mean.  There's a form of corruption that is, so far as I'm aware, uniquely American.  The two major organized political parties in the U.S. (the Democrats and the Republicans, if you've just emerged from under a rock) both have a vested interest in not letting you (the American voter) select the candidates that you want in the Presidential primaries.  They have two main methods of taking this power away from you:

1. The power of the “Party Purse”.
2. Superdelegates.

The parties have other tools as well, some of which you can read about here.  If you do, you will likely emerge disillusioned about the state of democracy in the U.S.  Short version: your vote isn't as important as you think it is, despite the parties' attempts to convince you otherwise.

The “Party Purse” is easy enough to understand.  The two parties collect a lot of money through campaign contributions.  This money gets spent in various ways.  Some of it promotes the party in a way that is not specific to any candidate.  Most of it is eventually spent in support of a single candidate, though the means may be slightly subtle.  For instance, if the Republican party were to spend money on ads promoting one particular point of view on, say, immigration – that will be seen as supporting some candidates and not others.

The superdelegate system, on the other hand, is something the parties (especially the Democratic Party) would rather you didn't know about.  Certainly they don't go around bragging about it, and the media says remarkably little about it.  However, consider this: in the primary election just held in New Hampshire, Sanders took 60% of the vote, and Hillary less than 40%.  So Sanders should have 50% more delegates than Hillary, right?  Wrong.  Hillary has the same number as Sanders, because of superdelegates – party insiders – choosing her, despite the votes of New Hampshire party members.  The theory is, you see, that the superdelegates know better than the voters.  That's American democracy in action, folks.

What's the answer for the corruptions of the American two-party system?  Every once in a great while, a new political party emerges – when the voters have had enough, and want better.  That last happened with the emergence of the Republican party in the 1850s, and their first big success with the election of Abraham Lincoln.  It's been too long now – 160 years! – and the corruptions of incumbent power have long been a problem.  It's long past time for us to have another ballot box revolution, though I don't see one anywhere in the predictable future.

Maybe we need the equivalent of term limits for political parties :)

Things we have never seen before...

Things we have never seen before...   The image at right is a screenshot I captured from APOD at 2:55 am this morning.  They're teasing us!  But I think it's also a tell – an announcement of failure from LIGO could hardly be construed as “exciting”, but success certainly would.  On this flimsy premise, I'm assuming that LIGO is going to announce that they have conclusively observed gravitational waves.

For those of you who aren't followers of physics and cosmology discoveries :)...  This is a big deal, confirmation of a theory that originated with Einstein that has stood unproven for decades, despite many, many previous attempts to do so.  Physicists have spent their entire career trying – and failing – to actually observe gravitational waves...

First page!

First page!  I had a bit of a milestone here today, in my current programming efforts.  I'm calling it “first page”, which is a bit like the “first light” that astronomers talk about when they first look through a new telescope.  In my case, it's the first page served up by the blog server software that I'm writing.  The screenshot at right preserves it for posterity, or something :)

I got hung up today on a silly, stupid problem that took me an inordinately long time to track down.  It came on a piece of Java code like this:

Integer x = test() ? 0 : null;

When that code executed, and the function test() returned false, it generated a NullPointerException.  Can you guess what the problem was?  It turns out to be the zero!  Apparently the type of the result of a conditional expression is determined by the first operand after the "?".  In this case, that's an int – so when test() returned false the program ended up trying to assign null to an int, and of course that isn't going to work all that well.  I'm a little surprised that the result was a NullPointerException instead of some more illuminating exception, but whatever.  All I had to do to fix the problem was to change the zero to either new Integer(0) or (Integer) 0.  After that change, all was well.  I'm not the first to run into this problem, of course.

I'm very glad to have that stupid little bug behind me!

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  We had a lovely excursion up to Hardware Ranch late yesterday afternoon, after a great lunch at Jack's.  We both had their Teres Major pizza, which is made from a beef cut (teres major) I'd never heard of before.  Debbie had peppadew peppers with hers, and I had roasted red peppers.  Yum!

Our excursion was a memorable outing for several reasons, but most especially because we had four moose sightings – by far the most moose we've ever seen on one day!  One of them was an injured bull that we've spotted a couple times before, quite close to where we saw him yesterday.  His left rear leg (or foot, we're not sure) has something wrong with it; you can see him avoiding putting any weight on it.  Despite the crippling injury, he seems to be getting enough to eat, and otherwise he looks like he's in good shape.  We were only 40' or so from him, so we had a great viewing.  The other three moose were partway up the side of the mountain to the south of Blacksmith Fork River.  I've never seen moose foraging so far from water before; a couple of them were at least a quarter mile up that mountain.  All three of them were munching away on the already-struggling deciduous bushes that grow on those steep slopes, probably some sort of scrub oak.

Another memorable sighting was an American Dipper, like the one at right (not my photo), doing his little bobbing thing in the creek not 30' from our parked truck.  He didn't seem to mind the fact that there was ice all along the edges of the creek, or that the water was 32.0001°F (at most!).

We also saw about 12 bazillion deer, littering the canyon's bottoms and sides.  It was really kind of crazy how many deer there were.  Then there were the elk – about 10 bazillion of them.  Most of the elk were in the fenced enclosure up at Hardware Ranch, but we also saw some outside the enclosures, ranging the hills.  Once again we saw the group of bull elk on the hills just outside of Hyrum, right at the mouth of Blacksmith Fork Canyon.  Awesome!

Why would you vote Democrat?

Why would you vote Democrat?  An oldie-but-goodie, via my lovely bride.  It's fake, of course, but still entertaining (if you're not a Democrat :):

Ten reasons to vote Democrat by Letterman

#10. I vote Democrat because I love the fact that I can now marry whatever I want. I've decided to marry my German Shepherd.

#9. I vote Democrat because I believe oil companies' profits of 4% on a gallon of gas are obscene, but the government taxing the same gallon at 15% isn't.

#8. I vote Democrat because I believe the government will do a better job of spending the money I earn than I would.

#7. I vote Democrat because Freedom of Speech is fine as long as nobody is offended by it.

#6. I vote Democrat because I'm way too irresponsible to own a gun, and I know that my local police are all I need to protect me from murderers and thieves. I am also thankful that we have a 911 service that gets police to your home in order to identify your body after a home invasion.

#5. I vote Democrat because I'm not concerned about millions of babies being aborted so long as we keep all death row inmates alive and comfy.

#4. I vote Democrat because I think illegal aliens have a right to free health care, education, and Social Security benefits, and we should take away Social Security from those who paid into it.

#3. I vote Democrat because I believe that businesses should not be allowed to make profits for themselves. They need to break even and give the rest away to the government for redistribution as the Democrat Party sees fit.

#2. I vote Democrat because I believe liberal judges need to rewrite the Constitution every few days to suit fringe kooks who would never get their agendas past the voters.

#1 reason I vote Democrat is because I think it's better to pay $billions$ for oil to people who hate us, but not drill our own because it might upset some endangered beetle, gopher, or fish here in America. We don't care about the beetles, gophers, or fish in those other countries.

Remember when Nancy Pelosi said, "We have to pass Obamacare, to find out what's in it."  A physician called into a radio show and said: "That's the definition of a stool sample."

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits"… Albert Einstein