Soviet History, a Little Differently...

Six minutes of pure fun for anyone who enjoys Tetris or is a history buff:

No Powa! New England Rap...

Via Frankie T., a colleague whose sister (Nora W.) lives in Northboro, Massachussets (about 25 miles west of Boston).  Her area was hard hit by hurricane Irene, and her rap song tells the story:

We got no powa
We got no showa

We got no stove or oven too
We got no cable
I'm not stable
What the hell am I gonna do?

It's very dark out
There is no light
I'm gonna shout
I'm gonna fight
gonna blow like dynamite

Dear national grid
This here ain't right
I bet you have lots of powa on tonite

This really sucks,
What the f#&$ck!!!!!!!!

The Microsoft Way...

Much of the software engineering world mercilessly mocks Microsoft for their many violations of all that is good and right.  Here's yet another example of what makes them so eminently mockable...

Morning...

The sky was beautifully clear and moonless.  The dogs did their usual things; the brown dogs smelling everything, the border collie consumed with pine cone play.  Orion was well up over the horizon in the east, and the Milky Way brilliant straight overhead.  Dogs across the valley were howling; probably coyotes or perhaps a mountain lion within their ken.  The temperature was down a bit from the past week; there was a refreshing coolness that we haven't felt for a while.  It was a very pleasant walk.

Last night we brought little Jahar (our new Savannah Cat kitten) home from the breeder.  This is a traumatic transistion for the little fellow – coming from a home with dozens of fellow Savannah Cats (and mom, of course) and going to a strange place where he's all alone (as we have him in isolation for a while).  We brought him into our bedroom in a carrier, which we plopped on the bed.  Door closed to exclude the rest of the menagerie, we opened the carrier door.  Jahar blinked, laid down, and stayed quiet and still – and still in his carrier.  This went on for a couple of hours, but finally he got to the point where he decided that being in the crook of Debbie's arm wasn't so bad.  He ended up spending the night on the bed with us, mostly right between us, always quiet and still.  But around midnight Debbie got up and showed where all the vital things were (water, food, and litter box) and Jahar did a bit of tentative exploring.  There was a pitiful kitten cry every once in a while, but he did all right.  Then back to sleep for all of us...

Good News for Jamul...

Jamul is in a hot zone.  Not for temperatures, but for real estate prices:

A standout was Jamul, where the median price for a single-family resale home shot up 15.2 percent, rising from $375,000 last year to $432,000 this year, based on about the same number of sales during both time periods.

Sounds good to me!

Jet Man...

This guy is just crazy:

Libyan Revolutionary War of 2011...

Austin Bay summarizes the Libyan War of 2011:

Overlearning the Game?

Some interesting thoughts on software patents (and some other things)...

The Terrorists Have Won...

Otherwise known as an airport security fail...

Congress, Explained...

Via my mom:

The English language has some wonderfully anthropomorphic collective nouns for the various groups of animals.

We are all familiar with a Herd of cows, a Flock of chickens, a School of fish and a Gaggle of geese.

However, less widely known is a Pride of lions, a Murder of crows (as well as their cousins the rooks and ravens), an Exaltation of doves and, presumably because they look so wise, a Parliament of owls.

Now consider a group of Baboons. They are the loudest, most dangerous, most obnoxious, most viciously aggressive and least intelligent of all primates. And what is the proper collective noun for a group of baboons? Believe it or not ... a Congress!

I guess that pretty much explains the things that come out of Washington!

Debt Ceiling Logic...

Via reader Jim M.:

If you can answer this correctly, you can answer the question on what action to take on raising the Federal debt ceiling.

You come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup and you have sewage up to your ceilings.  What do you do, raise the ceilings, or pump out the crap?

Badass of the Week...

...and my hero of the moment!

Stupidest C Bug Ever?

Can you spot the bug in this code fragment?

if (code == 200) {     // Downloading whole file

    /* Write new file (plus allow reading once we finish) */

    // FIXME Win32 native version fails here because Microsoft's version of tmpfile() creates the file in C:\

    g = fname ? fopen(fname, "w+") : tmpfile();

}

Explanation here...


AES Vulnerability...

Not bad enough to get worried about – yet – but something to keep an eye on...

Crazy Russians...

Apparently they want to build a tunnel across the Bering Straits, something like 64 miles long.  It would carry trains, electricity, and communications.  I can't figure out if it's serious or just grandstanding on someone's part.  Or maybe a little too much vodka...

Earthquake!

My folks live about 7 miles from the epicenter of yesterday's earthquake in Virginia.  They're fine, and their house is fine.  But they didn't like it very much!

There's a detailed USGS report, location maps, a science article, and realtime maps (where the picture at right came from).  In this morning's news, I read of some damage in Culpepper and in Washington, D.C., but all-in-all it looks pretty minor.

I sense a new-found level of respect from my East Coast colleagues, especially when it dawns on them that the Virginia quake was quite small compared to some we've had out here...

Do You Miss Him Yet?

George Bush had many faults, but this is a great illustration of an aspect of him that I greatly admire.  And I miss it, badly. One cannot doubt his sincerity and his caring.  One cannot imagine either in Obama.  Via my mom...

Those Who Do No Remember the Past...

Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.  So said George Santayana once upon a time, and the man had a good point.

In 1934, when FDR was proposing enormous spending programs as the cure for the Great Depression, the Chicago Tribune ran the editorial cartoon at right (click to enlarge).  The parallels with the Obama administration (who considers FDR a hero) are obvious.

The editorial position of the Chicago Tribune today isn't quite so clear.  Obama is a hometown boy, and they've been quite supportive of him, and defensive of his failures.

I've made the comparison between Obama's initiatives and FDR's on quite a few occasions.  By far the most common reaction I get is complete ignorance of FDR's progressive agenda – cue the Santayana quote.  Those few who actually knew about FDR have had basically evenly split reactions, between those who idolize FDR and believe that his spending programs were the reason for the end of the Great Depression, and those who loathe FDR and believe that his spending programs extended the Great Depression.

So it appears that sometimes one can remember the past and still be doomed to repeat it!

Via my mom...

Cat & Owl...

Certainly not what I expected!

Libya...

Things are looking very grim for Gaddafi right now.  The news stories are short on details and confirmation, but it sure looks like Gaddafi's fall (and possibly his demise) is imminent.

But then what?  I've read everything I can find on the rebels, and I've found precious little that gives me confidence that post-Gaddafi Libya will be stable, peaceful, or free of radical Islamists.  It is completely within the realm of possibility that Libya could end up even worse than it was under Gaddafi.  That's still possible in Egypt, too – and in fact, recent events seem to indicate we're headed that way.

I'm hoping for the best, but wondering what our “smart power” administration will do if the worst happens.  At least 2012 isn't all that far away...

Your Visual System...

The human visual system is far more amazing that most people realize.  We can't even come close with modern digital cameras and video processing.  For example: how many megapixels do our eyes have?  The question isn't entirely answerable, but at a rough approximation: 576 megapixels.  My new camera has 12 megapixels.

Much, much more here, by Dr. Roger Clark...

Douglas Crockford JavaScript Talks...

They're all online...

It's Going to be a Long Election Season...

... for the Democrats:




Via reader Simi L.

If PHP Were British...

Quite funny, in a geeky sort of way...and most especially if you know PHP...

5,000 Posts...

The previous post was my 5,000th on this blog, over the course of almost six years of continuous blogging.  Hard to believe I've been doing it for that long, and even harder to believe I actually wrote 5,000 posts!

Can You Imagine?

Can you imagine how much skill and practice went into acquiring this ability?


For this young man's sake, I just hope he can somehow use this in whatever career he's aiming for – if not directly, then at least as practice becoming expert...

Iowa Passion...

A new Sarah Palin video release, excellent as always.




If she's not planning to run for President, then why is she making these videos?

Soft as Pudding...

From a film review by Kyle Smith of the New York Post:

Young adults born in the 1980s and early 1990s leaped out of nicotine- and alcohol-free wombs to be deemed geniuses every time they passed a test, awarded trophies every time they caught a ball and tucked into comfy car seats on the victory ride over to their favorite sushi palace.

They took groovy public-service internships at an age when their grandfathers were sweating on assembly lines or being shot at by Nazis, lived with their parents until they were 28, then proceeded directly to their shrinks for marathon weeping sessions every time they messed up a project at work. They're as soft as pudding, and they know it. The Greatest Generation didn't need triathlons or X-treme skateboarding; every Friday night was a thrill ride after manual labor and eight Schlitzes.

Matches my experience in the city, but not so much out in the country, or on the farms that remain. Just read recently that the Marines and Army have a far higher proportion of farmers than one finds in the general population, reinforcing this notion...

Mimicking Nature Win!

A 13 year old kid discovered something interesting about solar cells, by observing trees.  Both are ways to collect the sun's power.  He observed that the collectors on trees (the leaves) are distributed in many small pieces, and not all are pointed the same way.  Solar cell arrays, generally speaking, are single rectangular arrays pointed in one direction.  By splitting up the solar cells and aiming them in many different directions, he discovered that the average power output was higher than a single array pointed in one direction.  Cool!

He did leave out a few important details, though.  For starters, many conventional solar arrays are mounted on systems that keep them pointed toward the sun.  That technique produces more power than splitting the array up into pieces.  But I think the biggest piece he left out is that many trees (especially temperate and arctic trees) have mechanisms to aim their leaves toward the sun.  This mechanism isn't perfect, but it does greatly improve the efficiency of the collectors.

His idea is still cool, though...

I suspect the results would have been much different had they been seeking the support of those with low GPAs – which is, basically, what our politicians are doing with respect to taxes...

The Final Step...

A parable for our times, via reader Jim M.:

It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then - just to loosen up and be a part of the crowd.

Inevitably, though, one thought led to another and soon I was more than just a social thinker.

I began to think alone -- "to relax," I told myself -- but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.

I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't help myself.

I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau, Muir, Confucius, Camus and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly that we are doing here?"

One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job."

This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!" "But Honey, surely it's not that serious." "It is serious," she said, her lower lip aquiver.

"You think as much as college professors and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"

"That's a fallacious syllogism," I said impatiently.

She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama.

"I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some John Locke. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors.

They didn't open. The library was closed.

To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night.

Leaning on the unfeeling glass and whimpering for Emerson, a poster caught my eye, "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked.

You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinkers Anonymous poster.

This is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.

I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.

I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

Today I took the final step... I joined the Democratic Party.

Winning the Future...

Obama's re-election campaign has adopted the slogan Winning the Future.

The acronym for that is WTF.

Excellent.

Donating to a Political Campaign = Treason?

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert):

I would go so far as to say that donating to a politician or political party in this environment is as close as an ordinary citizen can come to treason. Political contributions broke the government, and a government that stays broken will doom the country. Political donations made perfect sense when the system was working. That time has passed. It's time to try something different. We can start with Howard Schultz idea to stop donating to politicians.

Read the whole thing...

Anniversary Gift...

The little fellow at right – not yet named – is a Savannah Cat.  Debbie picked him out of a litter yesterday afternoon.  He's not quite old enough yet to come home with us, but in about ten days he will be.

Savannahs are a cross between a serval and a domestic cat (i.e., an ordinary house cat), and has some characteristics of both.  This little guy is an F4B, and will grow up to weigh up to 20 pounds.

Debbie seems quite excited about her anniversary gift!

Anniversary...

Thirty years ago today, Debbie and I were married.  It just doesn't seem possible that so much time has gone by, but I'm pretty sure the calendar isn't lying to me...

Barack's Bullshit Bingo...

Via Simi L., a political game that anyone can play:

This will make it easier to listen to Obama. Try it the next time you hear the President speak. It will keep you awake!

Rules for Bullshit Bingo:

1. Before Barack Obama's next televised speech, print your "Bullshit Bingo" card.
2. Check off the appropriate block when you hear one of those words/phrases.
3. When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, stand up and shout "BULLSHIT!"

Obama, Pay Your $%#&*@*$ Bills!

Via Jim M.  Warning: f-bombs galore.




The optics sure have changed since '08...

Black Fawn...

Via my mom.  I've never even heard of such a thing before!

Meteor...from the ISS...

Via Paul H., an astronaut on board the ISS captured this image of a Perseid meteor.

Warning: ASI Hastings...

In years past, we have done business with ASI Hastings on several occasions – the installation of our heater and air conditioner, and two major repairs.  We were pleased with that work, with the people they sent out here, and with the price.  Pleased enough that I recommended them to my readers, friends, and neighbors.

Today we had them out to repair our air conditioner, and it will most likely be the last time we ever call ASI Hastings again.

My wife called them this morning and asked for them to repair our air conditioner, which had just completely failed.  There are two major issues I have with what they did.

First, the prices for the repair items are just insanely high – hundreds of dollars for a contactor (relay) and startup capacitor.

Second, they sold my wife something we didn't ask for at all – an air cleaner to take dust and odors out of the air.  We asked for a repair, not some things we neither needed nor wanted.

I'm done with them.  Anybody got a good recommendation for a local (to Jamul, preferably) air conditioning repair firm?

Post Office Nears Collapse...

The Post Office's horrific “business” problems have actually made it to the news recently, so I thought it would be a good time to post this excellent primer on the Post Office's travails.  It's longish, but well worth reading if you'd like to understand this institution's problems – and why crazy people like me have long advocated ceasing all subsidies to the Post Office, and eliminating all special privileges of the Post Office.

As the article makes clear, the subsidies are not all direct and their removal will be politically challenging to accomplish.  Even more politically challenging: the huge union membership of the Post Office's work force.  The privileges granted to the Post Office are unknown to most people. The most important of these is that the Post Office currently enjoys an absolute monopoly on carrying first class mail, and on the right to deliver mail to a mailbox.  These privileges exist only to prevent carriers like Federal Express and UPS from competing with the Post Office.

It's time for this beast to die...

JavaScript Prototypes...

Yehuda Katz is on a roll, with a nice post about JavaScript prototypes...

VJ Day in Hawaii...

Hard Core Geek: Forth in Your Browser...

It was only a matter of time...

A Story to Make Liberals Squirm...

...and me smile, of course.  Here's a fellow who's figured out how to make money on the backs of the poor while making their lives better at the same time.  Everybody wins, as opposed to charitable doles, where everybody loses...

Starry, Starry Night...

And moonlit, too.  I was out walking the dogs at about 3:15 this morning.  The moon was high in the southern sky, full and bright.  It washed out most of the stars in the sky (especially near the moon), but in the northeast I could see almost all of Orion, rising from behind Gaskill Peak.

The dogs, of course, didn't care about all this beauty in the sky.  The three brown dogs were (as usual) doing the important work of smelling every possible scent deposited during the night.  Race, the border collie, had himself a stick.  He went through an endless cycle of dropping the stick, backing up and watching it intently for as along as he could stand it (maybe 10 seconds), then pouncing on the stick and victoriously dancing around with it.

The stick made an interesting sound when it struck the pavement – something close to the metallic ringing of a bell, but a muted and distinctly wooden.  It's not the mushy, soft sound one usually hears when a stick drops, though.  Once, years ago, struck by this sound, I did a bit of investigation.  I discovered that hardwood is more likely to make this curious sound than a softer wood.  Also, it turns out that the drier the wood is, the clearer this almost-ringing is.  So when I picked up Race's stick this morning, I wasn't surprised to discover that it was a piece of manzanita wood (very hard wood indeed) and very light (meaning it's very dry)...

Rick Perry Ad...

I don't really know much about Rick Perry, and I'm certainly not ready to sign on as a Perry supporter.  I've read a few things about him that bother me, but I haven't verified them yet.

Here's his first ad.  If this was the only thing I had heard about him, I'd be hollering my throat raw, jumping up and down with delight:



But it's not the only thing I've heard about him, so for the moment I'm just observing with interest...

JavaScript Function Invocation...

A nice article by Yehuda Katz on a subject many JavaScript programmers don't really understand...

Public Data Visualizer...

Here's a fascinating tool from Google that lets you visualize quite a few different sets of publicly-available data.  At right is a snapshot of fertility rates for some countries I picked, along with the world as a whole.  Note how the world's fertility rate is falling inexorably toward the “replacement rate” of 2.1 (the point at which the population stops growing).

When you click onto the tool, click on the box that says “Fertility Rate” to change what data set you're looking at.  Pick the countries you'd like to see on the check-box list at the left...

Art of Assembly Language - Online...

Here...

Open Office and Your Brain...

When I work at my company's offices, I work in an “open office” environment.  This is an area (a room with just three sides) about 30' by 15', with nine people working in it on tables.  Each of us has a fairly small area, perhaps 30" wide by 24" deep.  It works well for some things, especially when multiple people are collaborating on the same thing.  I find it nearly impossible to concentrate on programming while there, however – there are innumerable interruptions and distractions that keep me from the kind of deep, sustained focus in which I am most productive. 

Here's someone else with similar observations.

I observe, though, that some people seem to be almost immune to problems I encounter.  This immunity is definitely more prevalent amongst younger people.  I don't know whether it's actually age-related, cultural, or training.  My cure is to work from home as much as possible – there I actually stand a chance of sustained focus for hours at a stretch.  I balance this with days at the office, where I can be available to teach and help others (and I can get help from others).  If the balance was to be determined purely by my own personal productivity, I'd probably work from home 80% to 90% of the time.  But that is not the case; some of the value I supply to my employer depends on my being available for other people, and it's a challenge to figure out where the right balance is when including that factor...

Opportunity on Spirit Point...

The plucky little Martian explorer Opportunity has arrived at Spirit Point, named after it's sibling spacecraft now presumed dead on the other side of Mars.  Spirit Point overlooks Endeavour Crater, where Opportunity will likely be working for years.

If you've forgotten all about Spirit and Opportunity, here's a reminder: they landed on Mars in 2003, and were designed to be operational for just 3 months.  Spirit lasted 7 years (it died last fall) and Opportunity is still going strong 8 years later.  Much of the credit for this unexpected longevity is due to the design team, but some of it is just plain luck: it turns out that the dust devils that frequently whisk across the Martian surface keep the explorers' solar panels relatively free of dust.  Prior to the actual mission, engineers were expecting the red Martian dust to slowly accumulate on the solar panels.  This would slowly reduce their power output until finally the explorers would run out of juice.  The entire team was surprised – very pleasantly! – that the unpredictable dust devils have been coming along frequently enough to blow the panels clean well before the explorers ran out of juice...

The Debt Pool...

Another of the entries in the Powerline blog contest:

Bobcat Babies!

Don and Jan Maxted (I think from Deerhorn Valley, in rural Jamul) have a bobcat family living near them.  Don got this beautiful photo.

We've missed our bobcats, whose local population was decimated when the 2007 fires killed many of them and their prey.  I sure hope this is an omen of their return!  We sure have plenty of varmints out here for them to eat...

More Obscure Linux Commands...

Several of these look interesting, but especially mytop...

Jamul Casino Update...

The latest Lakes Entertainment report is out, and it's more of the same sad story.  They're slowly writing off their investment as time goes by with no progress.

Hooray for no progress!

Is Obama Smart?

Bret Stephens has a piece in today's WSJ titled Is Obama Smart?  Here's his conclusion:

Then there's his habit of never trimming his sails, much less tacking to the prevailing wind. When Bill Clinton got hammered on health care, he reverted to centrist course and passed welfare reform. When it looked like the Iraq war was going to be lost, George Bush fired Don Rumsfeld and ordered the surge.

Mr. Obama, by contrast, appears to consider himself immune from error. Perhaps this explains why he has now doubled down on Heckuva Job Geithner. It also explains his insulting and politically inept habit of suggesting—whether the issue is health care, or Arab-Israeli peace, or change we can believe in at some point in God's good time—that the fault always lies in the failure of his audiences to listen attentively. It doesn't. In politics, a failure of communication is always the fault of the communicator.

Much of the media has spent the past decade obsessing about the malapropisms of George W. Bush, the ignorance of Sarah Palin, and perhaps soon the stupidity of Rick Perry. Nothing is so typical of middling minds than to harp on the intellectual deficiencies of the slightly less smart and considerably more successful.

But it takes actual smarts to understand that glibness and self-belief are not sufficient proof of genuine intelligence. Stupid is as stupid does, said the great philosopher Forrest Gump. The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does.

This is very reminiscent of the whole Jimmy Carter experience. The “elites” at the time raved about him as the smartest president ever – the same unlikely label many have been putting on the office's current occupant...

Congresscritters...

From my cousin Mike D.:

Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz is 72 years old. Today, if Dorothy were to encounter men with:

   no brains,
   no hearts,
   and no courage...

she wouldn't be in Oz - she'd be in Congress.

Zing!

A Fitting Symbol...

Via reader Doug S., this gem: the logo for the Smithsonian Institution's new blog, “Department of Innovation”.  Note that the Smithsonian Institution is government-sponsored (and funded).

Look at that logo carefully.  The three gears are arranged such that they can't possibly move in any direction.

Is that a perfect symbol for our federal government or what???

The Demise of the Low Level Programmer...

Andy Firth writes:

Over the last decade I’ve been involved in the hiring process at many studios and in more recent years I’ve noticed a pattern. Knowledge of what is generally considered “low-level” programming is waning. Many programmers know enough to get through a C# or C++ test, but don’t understand something as basic (and important) as the behavior of memory or god forbid a cache. They don’t seem to grasp that one must understand the native environment you’re working in before going ahead and writing a program to run within it. The intricacies of floating point vs fixed point math are completely lost on them as the term “fixed point” brings about a blank stare; floating point numbers are best right?. I once mentioned bit shifting to an experienced engineer of 10 years and was devastated by the complete lack of basic understanding.

He's echoing my thoughts, recorded here in quite a few posts...

Estonia vs. America...

As long-time blog readers know, I have visited little Estonia many times.  When I first visited in 1992, it was an economic wreck – only in its first year as an ex-Soviet satellite nation, and struggling with basic concepts of capitalism.  Over the years that I visited there (last time in 2004), the country adopted an enlightened tax policy, established the firm rule of law, and enacted legislation that created a very business-friendly environment.  Somehow, miraculously, they've also had a series of leaders that were not only not disastrous, but in some cases were downright visionary.

So it's interesting to look at how they fared in the recession of 2008:

In the midst of a world embroiled in economic turmoil, a few nations have managed to do surprisingly well—among them, Estonia. After near economic collapse during the 2008–2009 financial crisis, the country has managed to successfully bounce back with substantial GDP growth, a vibrant trade environment, and a notable budget surplus.

I'm not surprised, actually.

Here's a bet for you: Estonia will be amongst the first to opt out of the European Union.  The looming disaster there is going to look very ominous to one of the few high-performance economies in the EU – and given their tiny size, it's easy to predict that they'll be asked to shoulder a completely disproportionate share of the EU's miseries...

Humming Hummers...

The little fellow at right is a male black-chinned hummingbird.  I managed to catch him at the right angle to see the bright purple iridescent band around his neck (at most angles, it looks black).  This is a very common hummingbird around here.  It's slightly smaller than the other three species we see, and vastly more aggressive.

Many of the individual male black-chinned hummers have another interesting habit: they eat from our feeders without ever landing on them.  You can see this behavior at left.  This is the same individual shown hovering above right – but note that from this slightly different angle you can not see the purple band.  Sometimes they'll hover in the same position as at left for 45 seconds, apparently guzzling the whole time.  It's avian mid-air refueling!  Only very rarely do we see any of the other species exhibiting this behavior...

An Accidental Sunflower...

Out near our bird feeders we have a small sunflower plant, currently sporting about a dozen blooms.  Almost certainly it sprouted from the “sterilized” sunflower seed we buy as bird food.  We haven't pulled it for two reasons: we enjoy the cheerful flowers, and the birds use it for both perching and food.  We've seen about eight species on it, but primarily hummingbirds and house finches...

Oh, Happy Dogs!

How do you get four bad dogs to sit still for a moment?  You train them.  In particular, you teach them that they have to sit still, until called, if they want to get their afternoon meal.  And trust me, they really want their afternoon meal!  Left-to-right (click to enlarge), meet Race, Mo'i, Miki, and Lea.  All sitting oh-so-nicely until Debbie puts their food down and calls them, one at a time.

What happens after that?  Well, if you look at this picture (at left) closely you can pick up some distinct differences in their behavior.  This photo was taken at 1/100th of a second.  Note that Race (upper right hand corner) is blurred – that's because he eats as though his life depends on getting his kibble into his stomach as quickly as possible.  He attacks his food like a rabid badger.  But Miki (lower left) actually eats even faster than Race – but he's much more methodical and efficient about it, like a furry vacuum cleaner, slurping up the food.  Then he takes his time licking his bowl until it gleams like a freshly-detailed car.  Mo'i (lower right) attacks his food with vigor, but with much thought.  Stuff goes everywhere while he's eating, so some bits of kibble pass through his mouth multiple times.  From his perspective, that's probably a good thing.  Finally there's Lea (upper left).  She eats her food at about 1/3 the speed of the others.  She pauses frequently to growl preemptively at her fellow munchers, and we think that's her main pleasure in eating.  Eventually, after everybody else wanders away, she'll finish her meal.  We have no doubt that she has regrets when the meal is finished – not because the food is gone, but because the opportunity to growl at the others has ended...

An Old Lady's Problem...

Via my mom:

When I went to lunch today, I noticed an old lady sitting on a park bench sobbing her eyes out. I stopped and asked her what was wrong. She said, 'I have a 22 year old husband at home. He makes love to me every morning and then gets up and makes me pancakes, sausage, fresh fruit and freshly ground coffee.' I said, 'Well, then why are you crying?'

She said, 'He makes me homemade soup for lunch and my favorite brownies and then makes love to me for half the afternoon. I said, 'Well, why are you crying?'

She said, 'For dinner he makes me a gourmet meal with wine and my favorite dessert and then makes love to me until 2:00 a.m.' I said,'Well, why in the world would you be crying?'

She said, 'I can't remember where I live!'

My mom says: “I want one of those!”

All at Once...

Attack all viri in one fell swoop?  If they can make this work, it will most definitely change the world...

The Great Orator?

Peggy Noonan does a takedown of Obama's oratorical self-image.  The conclusion:

The president has been obsessing on Ronald Reagan the past few months, referring to him in private and attempting to use him to buttress his position in public. They say Republicans can't get over Reagan, but really it's Democrats who aren't over him, and who draw the wrong lessons from his success. Reagan himself never bragged about his ability to convince the American people. He'd never point a finger and say: "I'll go to the people and grind you to dust." He thought speaking was a big part of leadership, but only part, and in his farewell address he went out of his way to say he never thought of himself as a great communicator. He thought he simply communicated great things—essentially, the vision of the founders as applied to current circumstances.

Democrats were sure Reagan was wrong, so they explained his success to themselves by believing that it all came down to some kind of magical formula involving his inexplicably powerful speeches. They misdefined his powers and saddled themselves with an unrealistic faith in the power of speaking.

But speeches aren't magic. A speech is only as good as the ideas it advances. Reagan had good ideas. Obama does not.

The debt ceiling crisis revealed Mr. Obama's speeches as rhetorical kryptonite. It is the substance that repels the listener.

Zing!  That's gotta hurt...

A Moment With My Dog...

Yesterday I worked from home (something I do on most Wednesdays).  Early in the afternoon, I felt like a cup of tea.  I put the pot on to boil, and while I waited, I played with the dogs.  Race (our youngest, a border collie) was being unusually affectionate.  Normally he's a non-stop player – wants me to throw a toy, wrassle with him, or some other kind of active play.  But yesterday he acted more like one of our field spaniels, wanting some attention.

So I sat down on the floor and gave him a hug.  He gazed at me with adoring eyes, tongue dangling as usual, and leaning into me.  While I was enjoying this moment of communion with my dog, I noted a feeling of dampness on my leg, near my ankle.  Then I heard something like the distant tinkling of water being poured.  So I looked down at my leg, and...my dog was pissing on me.

Not just a drip or two, either.  Nope.  A full-on, let-it-all-out, completely engaged piss.  Directly onto my leg.  Still with the adoring look in his eyes as he gazed happily into my face.

WTF?

None of our dogs have ever done anything like this to me before.  Debbie's theory is that for whatever reason, he had to go really, really badly.  I'm not so sure myself...

A Google search on “my dog pissed on me” yielded over 15 million hits.  Clearly I'm not the first one this has happened to!

Ya Think?

A Gift for Your Liberal Friends...

You can buy them here.

Icons for Anything?

I tried searching for five things that I thought would be unlikely (like a tractor) – and in all five cases, there were multiple icons in the database.

These come from The Noun Project.  Here's their mission statement:

The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way.

The contributors to this project sure put a lot of work into it!

All the icons are free, by the way.

My Work Here is Done...

Via my mom:

Ouch...

9,800 Feet Down...

Imagine being almost two miles under the Earth's surface.  A group of geologists recently visited the bottom of the world's deepest mine (copper/zinc), in Ontario, Canada.  They came back with photos and an interesting article...

Where's Your Budget, Mr. President?

Paul Ryan, in today's WSJ, asks the question.  A sample:

There is a better way—structural reforms that empower patients with greater choices and increase the role of competition in the health-care marketplace. The budget passed by the House of Representatives in April, "The Path to Prosperity," outlined the beginnings of such an approach by repealing the president's health-care law and proposing reforms that would make Medicare and Medicaid stronger and solvent for current and future generations.

In other words, we've put our cards on the table: According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), our plan puts the federal budget on the path to balance without resorting to job-destroying tax hikes. It will eliminate the shadow of debt that is discouraging job creation while advancing pro-growth tax reforms to get the economy moving again.

By contrast, the president and his party's leaders have refused to submit specific, credible budget plans that tackle health-care costs while restoring economic growth. Unwilling to reconsider their failed bureaucratic approaches to health and retirement security, the Democrats can only propose tax increases, and lots of them.

We need more Paul Ryans in Congress...

The Horrible Mess from the BP Oil Spill...

I'm sure you remember all the screaming and hollering from just about everybody, a year or so ago, when the BP oil well was spewing millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.  It seemed like the ultimate environmental disaster.  Numerous scientists were predicting things like 20 years of tainted, inedible fish and shellfish from the Gulf, or even the complete collapse of the Gulf's food chain and hundreds of years to recover.

But then a funny thing happened.  They lost the oil. That is, the scientists couldn't find the giant blob of oil that should have been left just a few weeks after the well was finally capped.  At first the assumption was that they really had simply lost it – couldn't find it with their instruments.  After all, the Gulf is a biggish place.  Then we heard that the oil must have fallen to the bottom and slithered to the lowest places in the Gulf, the hardest ones to explore.  But when they looked, it wasn't there.  In fact, wherever they looked, there was no oil.  The Gulf's recovery from the oil spill is already nearly complete, just one year later. 

What happened? 

I've been waiting for the first reports to come in from scientists who got past their embarrassment and actually figured it out.  Here's the first I've seen, and it says, basically, the microbes ate the oil.  Much, much faster than anyone predicted.

Mother Nature is an awesome lady...

The Debt-Ceiling Deal...

According to Bill McGurn (the lead):

When it comes to Murphy's Law—the idea that anything that can go wrong, will—we Irish have our corollary: Murphy was an optimist.

Even from this sunny perspective, it's hard to look at the debt-ceiling compromise and see it as anything but a conservative victory. It's not just that Speaker of the House John Boehner succeeded in imposing some conditions in exchange for an increase in the debt ceiling. It's that the deal has Democrats, including the president, essentially signing on to the Republican framework for defining the Beltway's budget problem: spending that is too high rather than taxes that are too low.

Dawn at Vesta...

The Dawn spacecraft has been inserted into orbit around the asteroid Vesta, and this is the first (of many!) science photos to be returned (as usual, click to enlarge).  Dawn is the first spacecraft to be completely reliant on a super-efficient ion propulsion system (instead of a chemical rocket) – not so long ago, these could only be found in science fiction.  You could fairly call this mission a proof of the system's viability...

National Creditworthiness...

Thomson-Reuters has an interesting (and, to me, surprising) infographic:

As usual, click to enlarge.  Lots of countries rated on here surprised me, in both directions. 

Standards...

Scott Adams nails it again – most hardware or software engineers will instantly recognize the uncomfortable truths he captures in three succinct frames:

 

Excellent, Mr. Adams...

I Don't Thought So!

That Green Thing...

Via my lovely wife:

In the line at the store, the cashier told an older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.

The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day."

The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment."

She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.

But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana.

In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us.

When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.

Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she's right; we didn't have the green thing back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water.

We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn't have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service.

We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Too Much Truth to This...

Via my mom:

Laugh or cry – you decide...

Congressional Reform...

Our friend Vera S. passed this along:

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

This is one of many variations of Constitutional Amendments running around, all the result of the current anger the public (including me!) feels toward their Senators and Representatives.  Some elements of this proposal I'd happily support; others (like 6) are more problematic – there are good reasons why the founding fathers decided that Congressmen needed protection from some law enforcement.

But... 

I think that such attempts to mandate the behavior of Congresscritters are largely missing the point.  Basically these are an attempt to get back to the “citizen government” that we like to believe is what our founding fathers intended.  But the truth is that we've drifted toward our current situation because of the Congresscritters we've elected, not because of the lack of any laws to control them.  The solution is actually simple, and does not require a Constitutional Amendment: we just have to elect the right people.  The Tea Party's successes in the debt-ceiling debate demonstrate quite graphically the power of the vote.  It's remarkable what they've achieved, despite being a tiny minority.

Imagine what they could achieve if they had the majority!

The 545...

My mom sent me an email containing a column by Charlie Reese, along with a poem and a list of taxes.  While the column was indeed written by Reese, it wasn't something published recently (as the email implied) – it was published in 1995 (and actually written 10 years before that!).  The rest of the email was a mashup someone decided to do.

The Reese column is a famous one, and worth reading if you've never seen it.  What I find most interesting about it is that its observations (like those of Mark Twain or H. L. Mencken) are just as pertinent today as when they were written.  Here's the conclusion of Reese's famous column:

We have annual deficits and a huge federal debt because that's what majorities in Congress and presidents in the White House wanted. We have troops in various Third World rat holes because Congress and the president want them there.

Don't be conned. Don't let them escape responsibility. We simply have to sort through 260 million people until we find 545 who will act responsibly.

Go read the whole thing.

Tea Party Anthem?

The music isn't quite to my taste, but the lyrics are: