Paradise ponders... Yesterday Debbie made us a new dish. She's on a roll with these things! This time it was a pasta dish, spaghetti tossed with lemon, parsley, asparagus, mushrooms, bacon, cheese, a little cream, and a little olive oil. It was great!
The snow is starting to melt all over the valley. Patches of our yard and our fields are now snow-free. Mud season is upon us shortly :)
One of our neighbor has three bright kids, 11, 13, and 14 years old, who are all very interested in math and programming. I'm going to start tutoring them next Saturday, and they seem to be pretty excited about this. If that enthusiasm is maintained, this could be an interesting experience for both of us. If not ... I'm prepared to call it off, though their mom (Maria) will be very disappointed if I do...
This morning we put together a kit, a DVD rack. Debbie just finished organizing them all onto the new shelves, and she's quite pleased with the result. I got a good laugh from one piece of that kit: a black marker pen packaged with a slip of paper explaining that it was for touching up scratches, etc. It said that the furniture industry called this “deluxing”, and that this was a deluxing pen that we should save. I figured that was some PR fluff on their part, but I Googled it – and it really is a furniture industry term!
Thursday, February 25, 2016
This is exactly...
This is exactly ... what many of my Estonian friends are afraid of:
If push ever came to shove, we would sell the Estonians to Vladimir Putin for 30 counterfeit rubles and a mess of beet soup. And we would throw in the rest of the Baltic states for good measure.Read the whole (excellent) piece...
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Is there a skier...
Claire Berlinski...
Claire Berlinski ... seems to share my sense of doom. Read the comment threads...
Quote of the day...
Quote of the day... This time from Nick Gillespie, writing at Reason:
It's easy to be cynical about this (and to be frankly terrified of a Trump presidency), but Trump is the least cynical politician in the 2016 race.That “least cynical politician” is a fascinating measure, isn't it?
An igniting match...
Farming is a dangerous occupation...
Farming is a dangerous occupation ... much more so than most urban folks realize. Yesterday evening that fact struck us here: a young man was killed in an accident at Rosehill Dairy, just 3 miles north of us (and the source of the milk we drink every day)...
The reign of Moore's Law...
The reign of Moore's Law ... may be about to end. Or not; the end of Moore's Law has been predicted a few hundred times before, too :)
But suppose for a moment that it does end, that we really have reached the end of IC density increases. The linked article talks about other things that will almost certainly be explored to keep improving computers. One possibility I personally find intriguing: it may become more important again – like it was up until roughly 1990 – for programmers to know how to write efficient programs.
At the moment, the need for algorithmic efficiency has been nearly wiped out by the rapidly growing power of computers. The exceptions are relatively few and far between. When I started programming back in the '70s, the exact opposite was true – nearly every program needed to be written in a very efficient way, as the constraints of computer speed and limited memory were quite severe.
Maybe the pendulum will start to swing back the other way again...
But suppose for a moment that it does end, that we really have reached the end of IC density increases. The linked article talks about other things that will almost certainly be explored to keep improving computers. One possibility I personally find intriguing: it may become more important again – like it was up until roughly 1990 – for programmers to know how to write efficient programs.
At the moment, the need for algorithmic efficiency has been nearly wiped out by the rapidly growing power of computers. The exceptions are relatively few and far between. When I started programming back in the '70s, the exact opposite was true – nearly every program needed to be written in a very efficient way, as the constraints of computer speed and limited memory were quite severe.
Maybe the pendulum will start to swing back the other way again...
Things I'd never heard of, part 9,442...
Things I'd never heard of, part 9,442... There's a thing called an “escape room”, and they're all over the world. There's even several near us. They're a big, profitable business.
The ones near us charge around $20 for the privilege of being locked in a room with a dozen or so strangers. You have 90 minutes to collectively try to solve the puzzles and riddles in the room that will allow you to escape. If you fail in that amount of time, they just let you out. That's it – that's the entire “entertainment”.
I'm afraid this is (yet another) one of those things that I will never understand. Why on earth would I pay $20 for something like that, when (for example) $20 worth of gas will take me to a wonderful place in nature, or when $20 each will buy Debbie and I a great meal at a local restaurant, or when $20 will buy me several great books, or when I can learn anything I want to learn for free on the Internet. I just don't get it...
The ones near us charge around $20 for the privilege of being locked in a room with a dozen or so strangers. You have 90 minutes to collectively try to solve the puzzles and riddles in the room that will allow you to escape. If you fail in that amount of time, they just let you out. That's it – that's the entire “entertainment”.
I'm afraid this is (yet another) one of those things that I will never understand. Why on earth would I pay $20 for something like that, when (for example) $20 worth of gas will take me to a wonderful place in nature, or when $20 each will buy Debbie and I a great meal at a local restaurant, or when $20 will buy me several great books, or when I can learn anything I want to learn for free on the Internet. I just don't get it...
It's 2016...
It's 2016 ... and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) just now approved a rear-view mirror that uses cameras. And they only approved it because it was a combined mirror/camera.
Let's get one thing out of the way right at the start: cameras and video screens readily available for at least the last ten years are unequivocally superior to a plain glass mirror. They have wider fields of view, they're unaffected by the placement of windows or interior obstructions, they see better in both low and high light situations. In addition to those safety considerations, they eliminate the safety problem (to pedestrians) and aerodynamic problems of external mirrors. They're better in every way.
But car companies are not allowed to build them into cars. Not allowed.
You can add one to your own car if you'd like, though. No problem with that.
Even if you believed (which I do not) that a government bureaucracy should be regulating something like a rear-view mirror ... it's still unconscionable that the NHTSA is taking so long to approve these things. If anything, they should have mandated rear (and side) view cameras years ago. It's as though some government agency required the use of vacuum tubes in radios, or vinyl records for your music.
Man, I really loathe big government. It blocks progress in so many stupid and costly ways...
Let's get one thing out of the way right at the start: cameras and video screens readily available for at least the last ten years are unequivocally superior to a plain glass mirror. They have wider fields of view, they're unaffected by the placement of windows or interior obstructions, they see better in both low and high light situations. In addition to those safety considerations, they eliminate the safety problem (to pedestrians) and aerodynamic problems of external mirrors. They're better in every way.
But car companies are not allowed to build them into cars. Not allowed.
You can add one to your own car if you'd like, though. No problem with that.
Even if you believed (which I do not) that a government bureaucracy should be regulating something like a rear-view mirror ... it's still unconscionable that the NHTSA is taking so long to approve these things. If anything, they should have mandated rear (and side) view cameras years ago. It's as though some government agency required the use of vacuum tubes in radios, or vinyl records for your music.
Man, I really loathe big government. It blocks progress in so many stupid and costly ways...
Another taxpayer-funded boondoggle...
Another taxpayer-funded boondoggle ... that's biased towards progressives. No surprise, really: the National Endowment for the Arts spends (in recent years) around $150 million of taxpayer money annually. Some of this goes to art with a political message, and that message is overwhelmingly progressive – definitely not conservative and not libertarian.
Outrageous? Yes. Should we fix it? Yes. How? By ending taxpayer subsidies of art! I don't really care that the art has a progressive bias. What I care about is that I'm helping pay for it! Nobody asked me if I wanted to do that, but if they did, the answer would be loud and clear: no! That would be true even if the art being subsidized had a message near and dear to me, because I don't believe that even one taxpayer dollar should go to something that certainly isn't an essential communal service...
Outrageous? Yes. Should we fix it? Yes. How? By ending taxpayer subsidies of art! I don't really care that the art has a progressive bias. What I care about is that I'm helping pay for it! Nobody asked me if I wanted to do that, but if they did, the answer would be loud and clear: no! That would be true even if the art being subsidized had a message near and dear to me, because I don't believe that even one taxpayer dollar should go to something that certainly isn't an essential communal service...
What it's like to be an introvert...
Ever since I discovered what an introvert really is, and that I was one, I've been fascinated by the impacts of introversion vs. extroversion. I was in a profession (engineering) where introverts have a distinct intellectual advantage, and yet the management of engineering organizations is dominated by extroverts – a situation that's bound to cause friction (and it does!).
Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the movement toward “open offices” (cubicles) for engineering teams – something only an extrovert could love, and that's guaranteed to lower an introvert's productivity. Extroverts were positive that open offices would improve the productivity of engineering teams, but ... not so much (as engineering teams are, generally, dominated by introverts). What's most interesting to me about this is how the extrovert proponents of open offices just don't get it. It is – I think perhaps literally – beyond their ken.
My last employer was a great example of this. The founder is a brilliant engineer and a flaming extrovert, and he was certain that having engineers work together in shared spaces was one of the keys to engineering creativity and productivity. Nothing I (or anyone else) could say would dissuade him from this. I'm not sure he still holds this belief, though, as it must be true that the results are discouraging for him...
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Curiosity, near and far...
Curiosity, near and far... A couple of photos from today's dump of raw photos taken by Curiosity. At left, a view into the distance – and at right, an extreme closeup of an interesting rock...
Things I didn't know...
Things I didn't know... I use IntelliJ IDEA, from Jetbrains, as my Java and JavaScript development environment. I've been using it for years, since (I think) 2003. I started using it at the recommendation of a friend, and immediately liked it better than its main competitors (all of which I was familiar with). Later, when I worked for ServiceNow for seven years, I used their standard IDE, which was Eclipse – but still used IntelliJ IDEA for my personal projects. Since I retired, I've switched back to only IntelliJ IDEA.
During all that time I've thought of IntelliJ IDEA as a sort of edge product, one of those things that a few borderline nut cases like, while everyone else uses the perfectly good (and free!) Eclipse. I had no idea that IntelliJ IDEA, along with Jetbrains other products, have been gobbling the IDE space up. I'm very glad to hear it, though – their products are first rate, the community is great, and they just keep making it better all the time (as the linked article points out).
Endorsed!
I had the chance to meet some of the Jetbrains folks a few years ago. Their development center (or at least, one of them) is in St. Petersburg, Russia, and their offices were near by those of a company I worked for at the time. When I wrote and told them I'd be in town, they invited me down to their offices for a visit. I had a grand time talking with some of their developers. Since it was Russia, of course we also had vodka and chocolate :)
During all that time I've thought of IntelliJ IDEA as a sort of edge product, one of those things that a few borderline nut cases like, while everyone else uses the perfectly good (and free!) Eclipse. I had no idea that IntelliJ IDEA, along with Jetbrains other products, have been gobbling the IDE space up. I'm very glad to hear it, though – their products are first rate, the community is great, and they just keep making it better all the time (as the linked article points out).
Endorsed!
I had the chance to meet some of the Jetbrains folks a few years ago. Their development center (or at least, one of them) is in St. Petersburg, Russia, and their offices were near by those of a company I worked for at the time. When I wrote and told them I'd be in town, they invited me down to their offices for a visit. I had a grand time talking with some of their developers. Since it was Russia, of course we also had vodka and chocolate :)
Zipf's Law holds...
Zipf's Law holds... Zipf's Law is one of those observed mathematical relationships that is surprising because it's so simple – and because there's no mechanism to explain it. I first ran into it when studying cryptography in the Navy, back in the '70s. Basically, Zipf's law says that in any given text, the most common word will appear twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common, and so on. If you're trying to decrypt the bad guy's messages, and the bad guys used an old-fashioned cipher or code, knowing the way that words (and letters) are distributed can help. That's much less true with modern ciphers, though.
Anyway, I remember thinking at the time that Zipf's Law was too simple to be for real. I imagined that it was an artifact of military messages, because of the strange, passive voice filled, stilted, and acronym-stuffed prose the military favored. Turns out that's not the case – in a recent test against the entire text held by the Gutenberg Project, Zipf's Law largely still holds. How bizarre!
Anyway, I remember thinking at the time that Zipf's Law was too simple to be for real. I imagined that it was an artifact of military messages, because of the strange, passive voice filled, stilted, and acronym-stuffed prose the military favored. Turns out that's not the case – in a recent test against the entire text held by the Gutenberg Project, Zipf's Law largely still holds. How bizarre!
Collectivization...
Collectivization... Friend, former colleague, and fellow retiree Doug W. passed along this quote:
When I was first reading about current events (late '60s, early '70s), the word “collective” had very negative connotations for any Americans who didn't identify as Communist. These days one doesn't hear the word very often, but we are collectivizing, steadily. Our healthcare system is heading quickly toward a “single payer” system – and that fits the definition of a collective perfectly. The discussion about “minimum income” – which in some countries is very close to becoming the law of the land (I'm looking at you, Finland and Switzerland!) – is a move toward collectivization. For me, at least, calling single-payer healthcare collectivized healthcare makes it sound much worse, and more threatening. I wonder if that's true for younger people, those who likely have no idea what a collectivized Soviet farm was like?
It's been almost ten years since Buckley died, and proponents of liberty still have no intellectual support to replace him. We sure could use a new Buckley right about now. Can you imagine what his quips on The Donald, The Hillary, and The Bern might be like?
Back in the 1930s we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.It's been a long time since I last saw that, and pondered on it. There is much truth there, condensed into a very small number of words.
– William F. Buckley, Jr.
When I was first reading about current events (late '60s, early '70s), the word “collective” had very negative connotations for any Americans who didn't identify as Communist. These days one doesn't hear the word very often, but we are collectivizing, steadily. Our healthcare system is heading quickly toward a “single payer” system – and that fits the definition of a collective perfectly. The discussion about “minimum income” – which in some countries is very close to becoming the law of the land (I'm looking at you, Finland and Switzerland!) – is a move toward collectivization. For me, at least, calling single-payer healthcare collectivized healthcare makes it sound much worse, and more threatening. I wonder if that's true for younger people, those who likely have no idea what a collectivized Soviet farm was like?
It's been almost ten years since Buckley died, and proponents of liberty still have no intellectual support to replace him. We sure could use a new Buckley right about now. Can you imagine what his quips on The Donald, The Hillary, and The Bern might be like?
Fish and chips excellence...
Fish and chips excellence... We needed to go to Ogden yesterday. If you're not familiar with Ogden, it's a fair-sized city about 30 miles north of Salt Lake City, and about 30 miles south of us. As we were there in the early afternoon, we decided to try a restaurant we'd not been to before. We used Yelp to pick it: the best-rated place in Ogden that was open on Monday (most restaurants here close Sundays and Mondays). The place we chose is called Sea Bears Ogden Fish House. All we knew when we walked in is that Yelpers liked the place. We had no idea what a treat we were in for!
The inside is clean and homey, with inviting decor and low lighting. We were greeted by the male half of the couple who owns the place, fully outfitted in traditional Scottish costume, including a kilt. Within a few minutes of conversation we discovered that his whole family works there, they're politically very compatible with us, and his wife (the cook and waitress) usually is packing heat (open carry), though she wasn't yesterday – and if you don't like that, they'll gladly tell you about some other places you can get a good meal. Their sons also work there, though we didn't see them and I don't know what they do.
We ordered cod (they also have halibut, albeit at a higher price), and I asked for sweet potato fries instead of traditional chips. I also ordered a crab cake (at $3 I could hardly resist!), and raspberry lemonade. When our orders arrived, they also had cole slaw, which I didn't even realize was included.
How was it, you ask? The fish was top notch, one of the five or six best I've ever had (and that includes memorable fish-and-chip experiences in England, Scotland, and Singapore). Next time I'm going to try the halibut. The sweet potato fries were excellent, not oily at all. The cole slaw was superb – the perfect blend of sweet and sour, and made with fresh Napa cabbage and carrots that had the dressing applied just before it was served. The crab cake was ok; nowhere near the best I've had, but certainly edible (and $3!). The lemonade was real, made right there with fresh lemons and raspberries – awesome!
After polishing off that treat, we joked with the owner that we'd love to have him open a branch in Logan. To our surprise, he reacted by telling us it was already something they were considering. It turns out that he and his wife grew up in Logan, and that they're doing well in Ogden and are looking to expand. Holy cow! So we've been enlisted to keep our eyes open for an opportunity – especially a disused restaurant that they might be able to lease complete with a kitchen.
Oh, that would be great if they were to open up here! As things are now, though, they've just added one more reason for us to venture out of Cache Valley now and again...
The inside is clean and homey, with inviting decor and low lighting. We were greeted by the male half of the couple who owns the place, fully outfitted in traditional Scottish costume, including a kilt. Within a few minutes of conversation we discovered that his whole family works there, they're politically very compatible with us, and his wife (the cook and waitress) usually is packing heat (open carry), though she wasn't yesterday – and if you don't like that, they'll gladly tell you about some other places you can get a good meal. Their sons also work there, though we didn't see them and I don't know what they do.
We ordered cod (they also have halibut, albeit at a higher price), and I asked for sweet potato fries instead of traditional chips. I also ordered a crab cake (at $3 I could hardly resist!), and raspberry lemonade. When our orders arrived, they also had cole slaw, which I didn't even realize was included.
How was it, you ask? The fish was top notch, one of the five or six best I've ever had (and that includes memorable fish-and-chip experiences in England, Scotland, and Singapore). Next time I'm going to try the halibut. The sweet potato fries were excellent, not oily at all. The cole slaw was superb – the perfect blend of sweet and sour, and made with fresh Napa cabbage and carrots that had the dressing applied just before it was served. The crab cake was ok; nowhere near the best I've had, but certainly edible (and $3!). The lemonade was real, made right there with fresh lemons and raspberries – awesome!
After polishing off that treat, we joked with the owner that we'd love to have him open a branch in Logan. To our surprise, he reacted by telling us it was already something they were considering. It turns out that he and his wife grew up in Logan, and that they're doing well in Ogden and are looking to expand. Holy cow! So we've been enlisted to keep our eyes open for an opportunity – especially a disused restaurant that they might be able to lease complete with a kitchen.
Oh, that would be great if they were to open up here! As things are now, though, they've just added one more reason for us to venture out of Cache Valley now and again...
Monday, February 22, 2016
Fun with numbers...
Fun with numbers... I just finished writing some software (for the blog server I'm creating) that figures out whether it makes more sense to send a larger image already on the server, or a smaller image made by scaling the larger image down. Part of doing that required making an estimate of how much computer time it would take to scale down the larger image. That turns out to be (roughly) proportional to how many pixels on the larger image have to be inspected to create a pixel on the scaled-down image, multiplied by the number of pixels in the scaled-down image. Got that? :)
Well, calculating the number of pixels that needed to be inspected turned out to be an interesting problem in geometry and algebra. It boiled down to this formula:
Where:
t is the number of pixels in the target (scaled down) image
x is the floor of the ratio of source (big image) to target pixel width
y is the same ratio minus x
It took me a while to derive that formula, but to my great satisfaction it did a pretty good job at estimating the time. In my tests it was particularly good with PNG files, and within 20% or so on JPG – way better than I actually need for my purposes.
I don't often get to play with numbers like this for the sorts of software I write. When I get the chance, it's fun! Especially when it works :)
Well, calculating the number of pixels that needed to be inspected turned out to be an interesting problem in geometry and algebra. It boiled down to this formula:
t is the number of pixels in the target (scaled down) image
x is the floor of the ratio of source (big image) to target pixel width
y is the same ratio minus x
It took me a while to derive that formula, but to my great satisfaction it did a pretty good job at estimating the time. In my tests it was particularly good with PNG files, and within 20% or so on JPG – way better than I actually need for my purposes.
I don't often get to play with numbers like this for the sorts of software I write. When I get the chance, it's fun! Especially when it works :)
Curiosity is looking at weird rocks...
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