Unemployment Index...

According to Google's Unemployment Index, things are looking better recently.  The numbers (twiddled, as reported by the government) are still pretty grim, so I have no idea why.  Click to enlarge the graph below.

2010 Reader's Choice Awards...

...for open source software.

A vim Tutorial...

Looks pretty good, for all you newbie geeks out there...

Drugs Harmfulness...

There are some surprises in this study.  I know nothing about the researchers, how they were funded, or what other biases they might have.  What they've attempted to do is to quantify the harm done by various commonly-used drugs (including alcohol and tobacco).  They've attempted to separately measure harm to the using individual and harm to society.

The chart at right (click to enlarge) shows the various drugs ranked by harm to the user (most harmful first).  Alcohol tops the rankings both by harm to users and to society. 

First question that occurs to me: is the overall “harm score” normalized to per capita, or is it an aggregate score?  If the latter, then alcohol's position at the top is hardly surprising.  If the former, then these results are certainly surprising to me!

This study's results support the position of many drug legalization advocates (including me): the drugs prohibited today aren't any more harmful than the perfectly legal alcohol and tobacco.  The illegal drugs have been demonized, much as alcohol was before Prohibition...

Morning Walk...

The air was beautiful this morning, cool and relatively dry.  We woke an hour or so early, and the dogs and I were on our morning walk at 2:20 am.  I'm glad I went early, because I got to see some unusual sights...

For starters, the waning moon was just barely visible above the mountains to our northeast.  It's only about a third lit now, and it was further dimmed by being close to the horizon.  As a consequence, the Milky Way was still visible stretching overhead.  Jupiter was just above the southwestern hills, and my old friend Orion was high in the sky.  The Big Dipper is fully visible, too.  An altogether glorious sky this morning...

Yesterday Debbie and I attacked the dried brush in our main yard.  We cleared a bit over an acre, with me whacking away with a steel-bladed brush-cutter, and Debbie rolling up the cut brush into a few big piles.  As soon as we can get a burn permit, we're going to do our bit to contribute a little more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere...

The dogs found another spot visited by a night-time beastie.  It was hard to persuade the three field spaniels that they should leave; they wanted to inhale that beastie's scent indefinitely.  Meanwhile, Race was madly running about all over the area we cleared yesterday – he was loving the unobstructed running space...

I would have enjoyed a longer walk this morning, but work beckons...