Well, we kinda knew he was a good liar, didn't we?

Well, we kinda knew he was a good liar, didn't we?  Yesterday Charles Ferguson announced that he was canceling the Hilary Clinton documentary he was working on for CNN.  He's got an interesting explanation about why he did so up on Huffington Post.  This bit jumped out at me, about Bill Clinton:

He paused and then became even more soulful, thoughtful, passionate, and articulate. And then he proceeded to tell me the most amazing lies I've heard in quite a while.

The other thing that's clear, as if it wasn't already: Hilary is running in 2016, or at least that's definitely her plan now.  All the denials and obfuscations are just more bullshit from an accomplished bullshit artiste...

Why I don't trust government data...

Why I don't trust government data...  It's just too damned tempting for politicians and bureaucrats to screw with the data to make it say what they want it to say.  The “unemployment rate”, which I've discussed often before, is a prime example.  It's to the incumbent government's advantage to have the unemployment rate look lower than it really is, so they redefine the meaning of “unemployment” to exclude so-called “discouraged workers” – and presto! the unemployment rate is cut nearly in half.  Of course, credit for this instantly is attributed to those same bureaucrats.  Of course.

Now Forbes has a report on another such data redefinition, that smacks strongly of the same sort of thing.  This time the government wants to redefine the meaning of “cancer” – and, you guessed it, the result will be a lower rate of cancer.  Why, it's like magic!

“The latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence.”

“The latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence.”  So says MIT climatologist (and former IPCC Lead Author) Dr. Richard Lindzen (his complete statement at the link).  Steve McIntyre weighs in on the IPCC's broken promise to address the observed hiatus in global warming.  Jo Nova takes on the IPCC's use of ocean heat to explain away the yawning discrepancies between their earlier predictions and that pesky reality thing...

I haven't yet read the IPCC report just released.  Others who have read it (like those above) seem to think it far more propaganda and entrenched bureaucratic butt-covering than anything resembling genuine science results...

Who says The One doesn't know how to create jobs?

Who says The One doesn't know how to create jobs?  He's started an entirely new industry!  Some folks I know in high tech businesses are darned excited about this, as the jobs being created may well be in places like the Bahamas, or islands in the South Pacific...

So sad, and so unnecessary...

So sad, and so unnecessary...  Mary O'Grady writes in today's Wall Street Journal about the price Columbia has paid, and continues to pay, for the U.S. “War on Drugs”:

The case of Colombia is especially tragic, and President Juan Manuel Santos is seeking a different course. In an interview with Journal editors in New York last week, he said that "Colombia probably has been the country that has incurred the highest cost in this war on drugs. We have lost our best leaders, our best judges, our best policemen, our best journalists." It has been "a lot of blood, the cost of this war on drugs."

The stunning ineffectiveness and utter futility of the War on Drugs is evident to anyone who looks at its history with clear eyes.  It is tragically expensive in both blood and treasure, has ruined hundreds of thousands of lives, and has delivered no benefits. 

It's been primarily supported by U.S. conservatives (of both major parties), but has the top-down “nanny-state” credentials and all the awful consequences one normally associates with a socialist or progressive program.  Libertarians have long been opposed to the War on Drugs, along with some Democrats. 

I suspect that the Republicans could make some political hay by radically changing their position on drugs.  Wiping out the War on Drugs would be a great start.  Legalization coupled with sane treatment options (as we have for alcohol abuse) would be even better...

Platforms matter...

Platforms matter.  To our military, a “platform” or (weapons platform) is anything that carries weapons to battle.  We have lots of them, and for the most part they are superior (sometimes vastly so) than any platform produced by anyone else on the planet.

However, as al Qaeda has amply demonstrated, while platforms do matter, they are not the only thing that does...

“Maybe one day President Obama will figure it out.”

“Maybe one day President Obama will figure it out.”  So says John Bolton (aka “The Mustache”), in the concluding line of his piece on how Iran's President Rouhani is playing The One.

I'm not holding my breath...

X-47B in underway carrier operations...

X-47B in underway carrier operations, including take-offs, touch-'n-gos, and arrested landings.  Carrier landings are particularly challenging, especially in high performance jets.  I recall reading, not so very long ago, a confident prediction by a Navy flier that there would never be a machine that could do it.  Now I'm reading that X-47B is demonstrably better than human pilots, getting the first wire most of the time.

As I watched this video, it occurred to me that there are many parallels between the robotic spacecraft and these new robotic combat machines.  Both are dramatically less expensive than their manned equivalents.  Both are more capable in important ways than their manned equivalents.  Both are far safer (for people, anyway) than their manned equivalents.  And, interestingly, both have detractors who prefer the manned equivalents for their beauty, their romance, and their glory.

The robots are going to win this battle, I'm sure.  It's just a question of when...

Special forces shortage...

Special forces shortage...  This isn't a new problem, but it isn't getting fixed very fast – our Special Forces have been a key part of the War on Terror, leading our military commanders to demand more and more of them.  Because we don't have enough of them, the Special Forces “operators” are being overworked – so much so that many of them are leaving before retirement (much more at the link).  It's a challenge:

Trying to recruit replacements is a solution that does not work well. The U.S. Army's effort to recruit another 2,300 operators (as members of the Special Forces are called) was a hard slog. Qualified candidates are out there, but it's hard to convince them to endure the additional effort, stress, and danger to become a Special Forces operator (or a SEAL, Ranger, Pararescue Jumper). Even with higher pay ($10,000 or more additional a year) and high reenlistment bonuses (adding about $10,000 more a year), it's hard to find the men who can meet the high standards and are willing to put up with the large amount of time spent overseas.

Recruiting and training more operators is a time consuming process, as it takes about three years to get a Special Forces recruit up to a basic level of competence. It takes another few years in the field before such men are ready for anything serious. At least half of those recruited are lost (quit, wash out) before they reach their full capability. Recruiting to expand the number of operators began right after September 11, 2001. Soon, SOCOM was told to increase its strength by 43 percent, and do it by 2013.

Casualties are less of an issue than you might think for such dangerous work. SOCOM casualties are actually lower than in infantry or marine units. While SOCOM operators comprise about ten percent of all combat troops, they have only suffered six percent of the combat deaths and four percent of the wounded. The big issue has always been overwork. Combat operations wear troops out. Elite men like SOCOM operators can handle more stress than your average infantryman, but they have their limits as well. Moreover, most Special Forces operators are married and have families. Being away from the wife and kids for extended periods often causes more stress. Keep the operators out there for too long at a time and you'll lose them to resignations, retirement or, rarely, combat fatigue. It's not just the equipment that is being worn out.

Stinging insects, as art.

Stinging insects, as art.  USGS biologist Sam Droege takes some beautiful photographs of bees and wasps in pursuit of science.  To get this incredible depth-of-field, Droege uses the same technique the the Curiosity rover uses: he takes several photographs at different focus points, then “merges” them together to get these amazing results.

Looking at these photos gave me an idea for a microscope enhancement – one that would do this merge in near real-time, so you could look at specimens in near-realtime and get the same depth of field.  If someone hasn't already done this, I'll bet they will soon...

Classic insults and ripostes...

Classic insults and ripostes, via Maggie's Farm.  I've seen most of these before, but I like the collection...

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease."
Disraeli: "That depends, sir, on whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."

Walter Kerr: "He had delusions of adequacy."

Winston Churchill: "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."

Clarence Darrow: "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."

William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway): "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

Moses Hadas: "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."

Mark Twain: "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."

Oscar Wilde: "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."

George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill: "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one."
Winston Churchill, in response: "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one."

Stephen Bishop: "I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here."

John Bright: "He is a self-made man and worships his creator."

Irvin S. Cobb: "I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."

Samuel Johnson: "He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others."

Paul Keating: "He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."

Charles, Count Talleyrand: "In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."

Forrest Tucker:"He loves nature, in spite of what it did to him."

Mark Twain: "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"

Mae West: "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."

Oscar Wilde: “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."

Andrew Lang: "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts ... for support, rather than illumination."

Billy Wilder: "He has Van Gogh's ear for Music."

Groucho Marx: "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."

This succinctly presents my expectations...

This succinctly presents my expectations on the ObamaCare launch tomorrow...

Do not kill, don't have anger, respect any form of life.

Do not kill, don't have anger, respect any form of life.  That's the credo of the Jains, an Indian religious sect.  Sounds like my kind of people.  Members of that faith helped hundreds of people during the recent al Qaeda siege at Nairobi, providing much-needed assistance that the government didn't.

Hey, wait a minute – you can't do that!  That's not the socialist progressive way!  We'll have none of that self-reliance here, buddy – you wait for the government to show up, like a proper citizen subject!

Enquiring minds want to know...

Enquiring minds want to know...

Oh, my aching head.

Oh, my aching head.  That's climatologist Judith Curry, after skimming the just-released IPCC report.  She's another great source of information, if you're skeptical of anthropogenic global warming.  She has the same sort of calm and grounded approach that Megan McArdle has, though in Curry's case her writings (at least the writings I'm aware of) are limited to climatology...

I'm hoping this was intended as satire.

I'm hoping this was intended as satire.  But I'm not sure, as it's written by Bill Maher.  A sample:

It wasn't that long ago that pundits were calling California a failed state and saying it was ungovernable. But in 2010, when other states were busy electing whatever Tea Partier claimed to hate government the most, we elected a guy who actually liked it, Jerry Brown.

Since then, everything Republicans say can't or won't work -- gun control, immigration reform, high-speed rail -- California is making work. And everything conservatives claim will unravel the fabric of our society -- universal healthcare, higher taxes on the rich, gay marriage, medical marijuana -- has only made California stronger. And all we had to do to accomplish that was vote out every single Republican. Without a Republican governor and without a legislature being cock-blocked by Republicans, a $27 billion deficit was turned into a surplus, continuing the proud American tradition of Republicans blowing a huge hole in the budget and then Democrats coming in and cleaning it up.

How was Governor Moonbeam able to do this? It's amazing, really. We did something economists call cutting spending AND raising taxes. I know, it sounds like some crazy science fiction story, but you see, here in California, we're not just gluten-free and soy-free and peanut-free, we're Tea Party free! Virginia could do it, too, but they're too busy forcing ultrasounds on women who want abortions. Texas could, but they don't because they're too busy putting Jesus in the science textbooks. Meanwhile their state is so broke they want to replace paved roads with gravel. I thought we had this road-paving thing licked in the 1930s, but not in Texas. But hey, in Dallas you can carry a rifle into a Chuck E. Cheese, cause that's freedom. Which is great, but it wasn't so great when that unregulated fertilizer plant in Waco blew up. In California, when things blow up, it's because we're making a Jason Statham movie.

Whether he's being serious or satirical, we're getting outta here...

It's come to this: Obama draws a red line...

It's come to this: Obama draws a red line, the people laugh.  In most walks of life, the Peter Principle applies quite well.  As The One demonstrates, though, in politics it's possible to be “promoted” far more than just one level above your competence...

More evidence for water on Mars.

More evidence for water on Mars.  The Curiosity rover returned the images used to make the beautiful composite at right (high res version).  This rock would look right at home on Earth: it's the kind of rock formed in streambeds here.  Its presence on Mars strongly suggests that water once flowed freely there.  From the NASA/JPL image description:

Reddish dust coats much of the surface visible in this mosaic, but the patch of rock also offers some bare patches where sand and pebble grains can be seen. Pebbles here are mostly gray, with some white in them. Some grains are somewhat translucent, and some are shiny.

Researchers interpret the sand and pebbles in the rock as material that was deposited by flowing water, then later buried and cemented into rock. Curiosity's science team is studying the textures and composition of the conglomerate rock at Darwin to understand its relationship to streambed conglomerate rock found closer to Curiosity's landing site.

Note they used a 1909 penny for scale – there's got to be a story behind that!

Anybody can be deluded.

Anybody can be deluded.  On the surface, this article is about just how close we are to achieving power-producing nuclear fusion.  If you've been reading about this stuff for a while (in my case, since the '70s), you can't help but notice a pattern: for over 40 years now, fusion power is always just around the corner.  It's the unicorn-under-the-rainbow of big science: untold billions of dollars after we started, we aren't perceptibly closer to actually achieving something useful.

Personally, I wish they were shoveling this sort of brainpower and money at something that I'll speculate is far more achievable: storage of electrical energy.  This is the solution to the “battery problem” I've posted about many times before...

California leads the way...

California leads the way, in healthcare plans wiped out by ObamaCare.  It ain't easy being a minority (the tax-paying Californian, I mean)...

Oh, the unions love ObamaCare!

Oh, the unions love ObamaCare!  Not.  And note that this is the SEIU, too – the notorious supplier of the Obama campaign's thugs...

Multipath TCP.

Multipath TCP.  I've been checking in on the multipath TCP project every once in a while over the past few years, as it promised to solve two problems I've run into: using multiple slow channels (like 56k modems) in parallel for increased performance, and transparently maintaining TCP connections across access point hand-offs (as occur in WiFi and cell phones).  I've been hoping that on some fine day it would be supported in mainstream products.  I just discovered that Apple's iOS 7, released just last week, includes it.  That's the first large-scale deployment of multipath TCP.  Woo hoo!  Now I'm hoping it appears in OS X in the next version or two...

Regex 101.

Regex 101.  Longtime readers know that I'm a big fan of regular expressions (“regex” for short) for text processing.  I use them a lot in my programming, sometimes to my former colleagues' chagrin :)  There are a lot of web sites designed to help people create and debug regular expressions.  I just ran across one that's new to me: Regex101.  It's better than anything I've seen yet, though, sadly, it doesn't support my favorite regex flavor: Java.

UTF-8: the most beautiful hack.

UTF-8: the most beautiful hack.  If you're an ancient enough programmer (and I am more than ancient enough!), you probably remember – and not fondly – the horribly bad old days of incompatible character encodings and the notoriously evil “code pages”. 

Unicode came along and cleaned up part of this problem, but it wasn't until UTF-8 (the standard 8 bit encoding of Unicode) implementations became common (starting in late '93) that developers started coalescing on it as a truly universal character encoding.  Now it's ubiquitous, having won the war much like TCP/IP did in networking. 

In the video at right, Tom Scott explains the origins of UTF-8 (some of which I'd inferred, but never heard before) in an engaging short presentation, which I found in this post with even more of the story., and here's an email with even more details.

Conventional wisdom on ObamaCare not quite right.

Conventional wisdom on ObamaCare not quite right.  Megan McArdle has a list of things to know, in which she debunks cherished beliefs on both sides of the ObamaCare debate.  One example:

People with pre-existing conditions will be able to buy insurance in the private market for the first time. I used to believe that I was uninsurable in the private market, because I have a (fairly boring) autoimmune disease. My colleague Virginia Postrel, a breast cancer survivor who buys insurance in the private market, set me straight. Since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act passed in 1996, people with pre-existing conditions can still be covered as long as they maintain health coverage. It’s only if your coverage lapses that you run into trouble.

Obviously, not everyone maintains coverage -- when you’ve lost a job, health insurance is often one of the first things that gets cut, and some people never had coverage in the first place. But it isn’t true that no one with pre-existing conditions could get health insurance before Obamacare came along and fixed everything.

This is, by the way, one more reason to be skeptical of predictions that we’re about to unlock a massive untapped well of entrepreneurship.

Ms. McArdle is a national treasure – a calm and grounded voice of sanity on a wide range of topics...

Obama wouldn't lie to us, would he?

Obama wouldn't lie to us, would he?  Oh, yes he would!  Cassandra at Villainous Company displays some actual, like, facts about previous government shutdowns.  It's not quite the “unprecedented” thing that The One proclaims it to be...

Wine, oh, wine...

Wine, oh, wine...  Via my lovely bride...

Before the web...

Before the web...  There may be a few of my readers old enough to actually remember the world before the advent of the web (more formally, the World-Wide Web).  Back in those ancient times, if you wanted information about anything at all, you went first to reference books that you owned (or had access to), and then to a library.  For really obscure or specialized information, you might even have to visit a special library.  Libraries had thousands upon thousands of books, magazines, and newspapers you could look through, and often you could even borrow them.

In the years when I was first learning about electronic hardware engineering and software engineering, I spent a lot of time in libraries, searching for obscure bits of information or texts that I could actually understand.  There a vital skill that users of these libraries had to master: using the card catalogs (pictured at right).  The card catalogs were a sort of primitive “Google” for the library.  Each card contained a title, an author, a subject, or (in the case of a few particularly good libraries) keywords as the card's title.  The body of the card gave you some more information about the referenced book, including, vitally, where to find it on the library shelves.  The cards were stored by the thousands in the card catalog drawers.  Anybody could walk up to them and rifle through the cards to find a book.  Anybody could mess up the card order, too, which in some libraries was a major problem.

If you're of a certain age, this was how you learned to retrieve information: navigating the primitive, error-prone, often out-of-date card catalogs.  The alternative was to read (and remember!) every book in the library, so by comparison the card catalogs were wonderful tools, laboriously and lovingly maintained by the librarians.

When the web first appeared, some of the first efforts to “index” the web functionally duplicated these card catalogs with curated index pages.  The original Yahoo! page was famously like this, and that was how I first found things on the web, way back in '95.  But soon “live indexes” appeared that actually indexed every single word on every single page of the web, and these were so clearly superior to the curated indexes that within just a few years those curated indexes disappeared (I couldn't even find one on Yahoo! any more!).  Then Google came along and totally dominated the live index world, which they still do to this day.

It would be hard to overstated the degree to which the advent of the web and live indexes have changed the world.  In my profession (whether electronic hardware or software), they've directly enabled a huge increase in engineering productivity.  Much of this productivity increase comes from one very simple sounding thing: the ability to look up technical information it just seconds.  On a single productive engineering day, I might make a hundred or more such searches, with results in seconds.  Before about the late '90s, each of those searches would have entailed finding a reference book and searching through its index or table of contents – or worse, a trip to the library.  Often practicality dictated reinventing something, or all too often, making do with something inferior, simply because getting the information was too hard.  Today the ability to do online searches is a key part of an engineer's workflow – to the point where, if forced to work offline, we are effectively crippled by the inability to access information.  I keep copies of things critical to me on my laptop (for example, the current JDK's javadocs), but these are a very poor substitute for the web.

Tip of the hat to reader, friend, former colleague, and Idaho real estate mogul Doug S. for this trip down memory lane, provoked by that image.  Doug is busy preparing for the zombie apocalypse, setting up a farm to grow his own food...

The effect of compulsion is to strip the virtue out of a transaction...

The effect of compulsion is to strip the virtue out of a transaction  – said in the context of ObamaCare.  There are more nuggets of wisdom – and a couple of wonderfully illustrative stories – in this video reader Simi L. passes along.  It shows Dinesh D'Souza and Michael Shermer in an appearance last year at the Socratic Club of Oregon State University.  D'Souza, in particular, is on his game.  Kudos to both of them for daring to criticize ObamaCare in front of one of the most progressive audiences in America...

Imagine you are a CIA spy.

Imagine you are a CIA spy.  You want to put a listening device outside an apartment window high above the street in a Soviet-era Eastern European capital.  How would you do it?

According to this story, the real CIA would have done it by hiding a tiny listening device in a small, nondescript, hollowed-out piece of slate, then used a trained raven to place it on the ledge outside that window.  It's probably hard for younger folks to even imagine a world where such a method would seem sane – but back then, quadricopters, actual working robots, drones, etc. were just science fiction fantasies.  The tiny listening device would have been a marvel all by itself (back then, just the microphone would have been the size of a soda bottle)...

Can you guess what this is?

Can you guess what this is?  All is revealed here.  It involves paint, wave phenomena, James Brown, and Pink Floyd...

What does this graph say to you?

What does this graph say to you?  Take a good, hard look at the graph at right, taken from this paper.  What's your takeaway?  Mine is this: “Eisenhower is my hero.”  He's the only postwar president who kept federal spending relatively steady.  The numbers make it clear: post-Eisenhower, both major political parties have consistently supported ever-growing government spending.  There's not even a whiff of responsible governance there.  Or of sanity – stare at the right-hand side of that graph and it's clear this trend is accelerating.

The drums of doom – or revolution? – beat ever closer...

I got here through this article at Reason, wherein Nick Gillespie takes both political parties to the woodshed for their unserious approach to managing our money...

How doctors see ObamaCare...

How doctors see ObamaCare...  Dr. Paul Hsieh is an MD and outspoken critic of ObamaCare.  He's just finished publishing a four part must-read series on the impact ObamaCare will have on our healthcare.  You can find parts one, two, three, and four at the links.  Together they provide an illuminating look at how an insider to our current healthcare system views ObamaCare.  Hint: it ain't purty...

And no, I have no idea how to pronounce his name...

I've had several conversations about ObamaCare with doctors my wife and I have had contact with over the past couple of years.  There's an interesting pattern I find there: the doctors tend to be staunch progressives politically, but to oppose ObamaCare as a disaster in the making.  I expected the former, but certainly not the latter.  Their reasons for opposing ObamaCare aren't the same, though.  Some worry about the top-down decision making, others worry about the impact on their income, and others worry innovation and science efforts withering.  Sounds just lovely, doesn't it?

She's a class act, that gal...

She's a class act, that gal...  In her low key manner, Laura Bush has been actively supporting Afghan women for over 10 years now.  The project continued without pause even after her husband left office.  Like her husband's African HIV project and Wounded Warrior support, Laura's Afghan women's project gets high marks for effectiveness – in marked contrast to so many other American U.N. humanitarian aid projects.  And just like her husband, it's clear that she does this not for personal recognition (which neither gets much of), but to simply do good in the world by leveraging her name and contacts.  The Wall Street Journal has a video interview with her (unembeddable) about her current efforts, and there's a lot up on YouTube (like the piece at right).

California has big water problems.

California has big water problems, as do a number of other western states.  There's a tension between population centers (especially San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego), farmers, environmentalists, and big project loving politicians.  Teensy little fish are pitted against $10 billion in annual crop value.  Decades of policy ambiguity has led to entrenched interests with billions of dollars at stake.  The infrastructure supporting all this is old and crumbling.  Ten years of drought is stressing the entire system. 

What's the answer?  Nobody really knows.  Our personal answer: get the hell out of here – the water situation is just one more thing pressing on an state that seems to be run by people with little skulls that are only partially occupied by gray matter.

Speaking of which, the state's political pundits have decided that Jerry Brown is a shoe-in for another term as governor.  They're also certain that the Democratic super-majority in the state legislature will hold.  As I read those pronouncements, I heard the drums of doom in the background.  They're getting closer... 

Obama's bin Laden raid narrative a big fat lie?

Obama's bin Laden raid narrative a big fat lie?  People of a certain age will remember Seymour Hersch – the reporter (back when they actually did some reporting) who broke the story of the My Lai Massacre in 1969.  He's got quite a rant in The Guardian today, being cranky on a wide range of subjects.  One thing leapt out at me:

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" – or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

I've heard doubts about the truthfulness of the Obamanoid's narrative on the bin Laden raid, but most of them seemed like partisan wisecracks or were simply not credible.  However, Hersch (at least at one time) is definitely a credible source.  The article doesn't say what he bases that assertion on, but if he's got evidence of Obamanoid perfidy, I sure hope it sees the sunlight and is published...

Now this is my kind of bureaucrat!

Now this is my kind of bureaucrat!  Mike Marsh wants to shut down his very own federal bureaucracy, calling it a “human boondoggle.”  Awesome!

IPCC report not going over well.

IPCC report not going over well.  Anthony Watts has (as usual) a great summary of reaction from all around the world, at Watts Up With That?

Dogs, howling, but at what?

Dogs, howling, but at what?  A little while ago, Debbie left to go “down the hill” for some groceries and to pick up some kittens we're fostering.  About five minutes after she left, our three dogs who can still hear (Race, Miki, and Lea) started a weird, mournful howling session.  This seems to happen mostly shortly after Debbie leaves, so it's plausible that they really are mourning her absence.  The sound they make is incredible – unsynchronized, inharmonious, but clearly feeding from each other's noise.  I've never been able to capture this on video (or even just audio), but I'd sure love to...

Andromeda galaxy on the rocks.

Andromeda galaxy on the rocks.  APOD has a beautiful composite photo that captures nearby rocks and the distant Andromeda Galaxy in perfect focus on the same image.  Modern digital cameras and amazing image editing software make such images practical – in some cases even easy –  today.  When I started my photographic hobby back in the '60s, such things were very, very close to impossible...

Searched for decades, maybe they found him...or maybe not.  The FBI searched for a Soviet mole for decades...

“The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things...”  Richard Feynman, one of my heroes, on rubber bands.  The man was absolutely marvelous at explaining complicated ideas in a simple manner...

Don't bother expanding this one; it's very low resolution...

Information wants to be free!  And if we paid for it, it damned sure ought to be.  We (U.S. taxpayers, that is) paid for NASA's Curiosity rover, tootling around up on Mars, and the science derived from that should be freely available – but it's not.  Michael Eisen takes a stand for the cause...

Seen on a progressive web site, one that I refuse to link to.

“The One” is turning into “That One”...

Security is harder than you think.  Researchers describe a technique they developed to decipher keystrokes by recording motion detected by a nearby off-the-shelf smartphone's built-in accelerometers.  If you're a programmer, that linked paper is fascinating.  The main takeaway for me is this: there are many ways for information to “leak” out of a computer system, and a determined and clever bad guy could take advantage of them.

Many years ago, when I was in the U.S. Navy, there was a program called TEMPEST that I just discovered is still in place.  The idea behind TEMPEST was to shield all the wiring and cabinets of electronic equipment that carried classified information, to prevent an adversary from exploiting the “emanations” of such equipment.  The Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) that I worked on used a teletype machine for human interaction and logging, and this machine was enclosed in a TEMPEST cabinet.  A friend and I noticed, however, that when we had an oscilloscope nearby it, we could still see the waveforms caused by the high voltage transitions on its serial data line.  While we didn't try to exploit it, it was obvious that it could be done.  After reading this paper, it's equally obvious that the sounds it made could have been exploited, too – they were loud and quite different from character-to-character...

Want to know about the just-released IPCC report?  Go read Anthony Watts, at Watts Up With That?  He's hands-down the best source...

“Percussive maintenance”, aka “thump the damned thing until it works!”

A small president on the world stage.  Peggy Noonan...

Pararistolochia praevenosa, via Botany Photo of the Day...

U.S. Marines lead the way.  My mom, she sends me things:

A crusty old Marine Sergeant Major found himself at a gala event hosted by a local liberal arts college. There was no shortage of extremely young idealistic liberal ladies in attendance, one of whom approached the Sergeant Major for conversation.

"Excuse me, Sergeant Major, but you seem to be a very serious man. Is something bothering you?"

"Negative, ma'am. Just serious by nature."

The young lady looked at his awards and decorations and said, "It looks like you have seen a lot of action."

"Yes, ma'am, a lot of action."

The young lady, tiring of trying to start up a conversation, said, "You know, you should lighten up a little. Relax and enjoy yourself."

The Sergeant Major just stared at her in his serious manner. Finally the young lady said, "You know, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but when was the last time you had sex?"

"1955, ma'am."

"Well, there you are. No wonder you're so serious. You really need to chill out and relax! I mean, no sex since 1955! Come with me."  She took his hand and led him to a private room where she proceeded to "relax" him several times.

Afterwards, panting for breath, she leaned against his grizzled bare chest and said, "Wow, you sure didn't forget much since 1955."

The Sergeant Major said in his serious voice, after glancing at his watch, "I hope not; it's only 2130 now."

Democrats and unions behaved badly?  Quelle surprise!  Detroit's mess was even worse than we thought – the idiots were giving pension money away...

Let market forces work their magic, dammit!  Megan McArdle has a fascinating post up about the potential consequences of a robotic anesthesiology machine.  This machine handles routine anesthesiology at a fraction of the cost of a human anesthesiologist, and (so far) with similar or better outcomes.  But it's not the machine itself that's so interesting, but rather one of the potential consequences of it.  Says Megan:

...[one] possibility is that this procedure will dramatically control costs, at a slightly elevated risk of patient death. And that’s a tough one. Are we willing to pay billions every year to prevent a handful of deaths?

This is a key management decision in any top-down managed healthcare system, like ObamaCare or the British National Health Service.  The main way they have to control costs is by limiting what sort of services they'll pay for.  It's very easy to imagine that under ObamaCare, human anesthesiologists won't be covered for certain kinds of procedures, but the robotic anesthesiology machine would – even if the use of that machine killed (say) 10 people a year who would have survived with a human anesthesiologist.  If that decision saved $10 billion a year, the bureaucrats in charge would likely have no problem deciding that $1 billion per life “saved” was simply too expensive.  That, by the way, is exactly what Sarah Palin meant by her appellation “death panel” for these bureaucratic committees making these decisions.

What Megan misses, though, is the central moral problem with this sort of top-down decision.  It assumes that some authority knows better than any individual what is best for them.  I don't want some central authority making decisions like that – I want to make those decisions for myself.  If I was faced with this specific decision about anesthesiology, I'd inform myself about the extra cost for the human anesthesiologist, the extra risks for the robotic version, and then I'd make up my own mind. 

I've actually already had something very close to this happen to me, though the outcome was distorted a bit by our current crazy system of health “insurance”.  Some years ago my dentist informed me that I needed to have my wisdom teeth removed.  This would be done by an oral surgeon, who informed me that I'd be under anesthesia for the procedure.  Now I knew that there was a small risk of irreversible brain damage (usually minor) during general anesthesia, but not under local anesthesia – so I asked if the local was a possibility.  The surprised surgeon (who had never had anyone ask him this before) said that yes, it was – but that he'd have to get a different and more expensive anesthesiologist to do it.  This was arranged without any additional expense to me, as my company's insurance plan covered the costs either way.  The surgeon told me afterwards that the local cost about $1,100 more than the general.  If that extra cost had been passed along to me, I most likely would have made the same decision – though I'm certain I'd have thought more about it :)

Anyway, my main point here is that the robotic anesthesiology decision really should be made by the patient – and the cost difference really should be borne by the patient as well.  Different patients would make different decisions – and that market would provide two very positive incentives: (1) for the human anesthesiologists to reduce their cost, and (2) for the robotic anesthesiology machines to improve their performance.  This sort of distributed decision making is the essence of “market forces”, and everybody wins when it is freely employed.  The top-down decision-making inherent in systems like ObamaCare destroys those key incentives while forcing some bureaucrat's decision down our throats...

5,000 footsteps, 492 trails – dinosaur tracks on what is now a vertical rock wall, in Bolivia...

Man, I've got to get me one of these!  Video taken by a remote-controlled quadracopter over Niagara Falls.  Make sure you expand it to full screen.  Awesome...

You really can't make this stuff up.  Progressives in Minnesota confiscate trash cans and replace them with one quart models.  For Mother Earth and the children, of course.  Seriously.

America leads the way in the solitary confinement of children.  No other country even comes close.  Most of these kids are in jail for drugs or drug-related crimes.  Legalize drugs and they wouldn't be there at all...

Another in Reason's outstanding video series.  Watch this and let me know if you still thing the war on drugs is worth the price we're paying...

After 10 months, the IRS still has his $35,000 – but hasn't even filed any charges.  How have we Americans managed to let such a tyrannical bureaucracy take root?

Sometimes I think some good old-fashioned bureaucrat shaming might do some good.  Anybody up for bringing back the stockade, one with fat cat bureaucrat-sized holes?  Maybe tar-and-feathers, specially formulated with “renewable” tar made from algae?  Or perhaps a scarlet letter (“B” for bureaucrat) tattoo facility?

I'm one of the most creative guys in the world, if there's any truth to this account...

“Ma, ma, where's my pa?”  As any reader of U.S. history knows, sex scandals amongst politicians are nothing new. A particularly famous case became an issue in Democrat Grover Cleveland's campaign for president in 1884.  More is known now than was public contemporaneously, and it doesn't make Cleveland look good.

This scandal played a small role in my early interest in history.  In our U.S. history textbook in sixth grade, there was a brief mention of a scandal that dogged the Cleveland presidential campaign – but no other details.  I was already a frequent library user at that point (though mostly as a source for the science fiction I avidly read), so I went there to see if I could find out some more. 

Within a short time I found several pages on the scandal – and I was well and truly shocked.  My previous exposure to U.S. Presidents was all through the lens of fawning historians, whether on the legendary Washington and Lincoln, or on the Presidents I grew up with: Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy.  Lyndon Johnson had recently become President, after the assassination of Kennedy in 1963.  Reading about the Cleveland scandal was the first time it became clear to me that Presidents were people, too – not the flat, whitewashed figures of then-current textbooks.  This realization that historical figures were interesting, three-dimensional people became one of the reasons I started reading history...

Switch to SSL on your web servers for free, including a free certificate with a recognizable root authority.  The only catch is that its free only for personal use; commercial sites must pay.  The certificate vendor is StartSSL, and there's a nice tutorial on exactly how to do it...

An Estonian startup – AdCash, founded by a French guy, taking advantage of the business-friendly, tech-friendly environment around Tallinn, Estonia.  Another guy I know founded a startup (n.able) that has most of its development facilities in Tallinn, and people I know are part of several other startups there as well. 

It's places like this who are going to eat our (the U.S.'s) lunch on technology innovation when the progressives get done demolishing California.  They've already started...

How many people are in space right now?  A web site that wastes your time by showing you how many people we're wasting our money on by putting them into space.  This is a seriously boring web site...

U.S. geography puzzle: find two points inside the United States such that (1) both points are in the same state, and (2) the straight line segment (shortest great circle) connecting them crosses the largest number of distinct states.

It turns out that there are quite a few such lines that traverse four states (like the Missouri example at right), but only two that traverse five (and one of them uses Washington D.C. as a “state”).  Using the programming language “R”, a programmer going by “ATodd” automated the search, and then wrote an interesting article describing how he did it...

CNN, where they report the progressive narrative instead of the facts.  CNN recently interviewed Iranian President Rouhani, and reported (amongst other things) that he said “whatever criminality they [the Nazis] committed against the Jews, we condemn.”  But Rouhani never said any thing close to that. 

Usually CNN gets away with this kind of cleverly slanted reporting, which we see especially frequently from the Middle East. This time, they got caught – by, of all things, the Iranian house news agency, FARS.  Then today the Wall Street Journal weighed in, confirming the FARS accusations in every respect.

I haven't watched or read CNN for many years now, ever since their accommodation of Saddam Hussein became public knowledge.  I don't trust them to report the truth.  It seems my mistrust is still valid today...

ObamaCare: just leave it alone, it will die all by itself.  So says Daniel Henninger, writing in today's Wall Street Journal.  He wants Republicans to just leave ObamaCare alone, while pushing the alternatives that will be needed after ObamaCare inevitably implodes.  Key passage:

Medicaid is the worst medicine in the United States. It grinds on. Doctors in droves are withdrawing from Medicare. No matter. It all lives on.

An established political idea is like a vampire. Facts, opinions, votes, garlic: Nothing can make it die.

But there is one thing that can kill an established political idea. It will die if the public that embraced it abandons it.

Six months ago, that didn't seem likely. Now it does.

The public's dislike of ObamaCare isn't growing with every new poll for reasons of philosophical attachment to notions of liberty and choice. Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe.

Big labor unions and smaller franchise restaurant owners want out. UPS dropped coverage for employed spouses. Corporations such as Walgreens and IBM are transferring employees or retirees into private insurance exchanges. Because of ObamaCare, the Cleveland Clinic has announced early retirements for staff and possible layoffs. The federal government this week made public its estimate of premium costs for the federal health-care exchanges. It is a morass, revealing the law's underappreciated operational complexity.

But ObamaCare's Achilles' heel is technology. The software glitches are going to drive people insane.

Creating really large software for institutions is hard. Creating big software that can communicate across unrelated institutions is unimaginably hard. ObamaCare's software has to communicate—accurately—across a mind-boggling array of institutions: HHS, the IRS, Medicare, the state-run exchanges, and a whole galaxy of private insurers' and employers' software systems. 

My emphasis above.  My most recent employment experience was developing exactly the type of large-scale software system Henninger is talking about.  In my case, the system reconciled the needs of several hundred major corporations, all with different internal systems and processes – very much like the ObamaCare situation.  I can attest to the complexity and difficulty of getting such systems to work at all, much less to work accurately.

Until the last few days, I hadn't thought much about the IT aspects of ObamaCare – even though I have quite a bit of personal experience with the slow-motion disasters that poorly implemented IT projects can produce.  Yesterday I read Megan McArdle's excellent piece on Bloomberg, and that started me thinking along exactly those lines that Henninger is.  Her point about the crazy-short time frame for the project is particularly well-taken.  My own experience with government “requirements creep” (software engineer lingo for constant incremental changes to the definition of what they're supposed to build – the direct cause of failure for many a project) backs up Megan's assertion that this should have been a 5 to 8 year project, not a 10 month project.

I'm feeling more hopeful about ObamaCare's demise this morning than I have in months.  I think McArdle and Henninger are onto something with the IT issue, and that Henninger is quite likely right that leaving the Democrats to own ObamaCare alone will just end up making them fiddle it to death.  The opposition – which Henninger assumes is Republican, and I'd like to see more Tea Party or libertarian – needs to have a strategy in place to clean up after that ObamaCare debacle.  They need to present an attractive alternative to an electorate thoroughly pissed off by ObamaCare and its spectacular IT failure.

Now if we could just keep the politicians meddling with the requirements (that sounds easy!) and the competent software engineers out of it (that might be hard, if they throw enough money at the problem), this likelihood will become the reality...

Seventy-seven solar companies.  That's how many have gone bankrupt, were acquired in a fire sale, or just went out of business since 2009.  Many of these got federal subsidies or loans, some of them hundreds of millions of dollars.  What an incredible, epic fail!  You'd think this would be at the front and center of our national conversation on energy, but instead it seems to be largely unknown or forgotten...

Not every college student or teacher is taking their progressive indoctrination lying down.  Jason Morgan is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  He's also a teaching assistant, a post which requires him to attend certain trainings.  At the first of these, he was called a racist – and was told that the next one taught something called “genderqueerism” that conflicts with his religious beliefs.  So he wrote an open letter to the graduate school's director and a number of news outlets. 

The letter is awesome.

Is a law the right way to approach this?  The last few years I was working and hiring software engineers, I routinely checked social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to find out a bit more about a candidate.  A significant fraction of the younger candidates would have things publicly posted on social media that seemed quite inappropriate in a business setting.  These ranged from rants about former employers, to personal comments about other people, to nude, raunchy, or even incriminating photos and videos of themselves and others. 

I think there are two interesting questions here. 

First, is this phenomenon actually a problem?  Such behavior certainly can affect a person's future employment and personal life.  If you were an employer, would you knowingly hire a young woman who bragged on Facebook about offering (and having) sex with former boss to avoid being laid off?  Or a young man who posted a video of himself sniffing a line of cocaine?  Or another young man who had tweeted vile anti-Semitic rants about his former co-workers?  All of these are actual candidates I interviewed, and I hired none of them – because I saw these social media postings, and decided that they showed me enough about the candidate for me to say no.  Is that actually a bad thing?  In another case, I had a woman in her late 20s apply who had posted several photos of herself on Facebook, topless at a beach in Brazil.  Those photos didn't indicate anything dangerous or unsavory about her, so I let her go through our normal hiring process.  We didn't end up hiring her, but those photos weren't the reason – we just didn't think her skills matched our needs.  So while some might consider those photos inappropriate, they didn't affect her chances on being hired by my company.  So what is the problem?  It seems to me that these postings are just another source of information about a candidate for an employer, one that – just like every other source – must be used carefully and cautiously to help make a hiring decision.

The second question is whether a new law is the right way to deal with this, if you believe it is a problem.  California (of course!) just passed such a law.  I haven't read the law myself, but if the linked story is accurate the law requires social media sites to let people know they can erase information (including posts, photos, etc.), and it requires them to provide a way to do so.  That's about the least-objectionable way they could have tried to handle it, and while I'm a little uncomfortable with any law about this, I don't have a strong objection to it.  I can imagine much worse laws, though – just imagine what Bloomy might do with this...

But then, I'm not inclined to think there's a problem here in the first place...

I just bought a hard-cover book - the first one in about three years.  Mind you, I get lots of books (Amazon loves me :), but for several years now they have been almost exclusively eBooks...

So why now?  I just read about an interesting book: 100 Diagrams That Changed the World, and it's not available as an eBook.  Most of the time when that happens, I just wait for the eBook to come out, and it generally does fairly quickly.  But this one – full of diagrams like the 4004 block diagram at right – will likely never be out on eBook.  So I broke down and bought a “real” book.  It feels weird...

It's the batteries, stupid – but this is still pretty cool: a new record for solar cell efficiency, at 44.7%  This is a specialized cell, designed for use in a system that concentrates sunlight with lenses or mirrors.  The record-setting measurement was made at a concentration of 297 suns.

But until we have a reliable, cost-effective way to store power for nights and cloudy days, photovoltaic systems are going to be relegated to marginal uses.  Several of my neighbors have gone off-grid with photovoltaic systems, but their experiences are uniformly bad: very high costs and disappointingly low reliability, both primarily functions of their battery systems...

Crony capitalism at work: the political clout of traditional car dealers is keeping Tesla from selling it's cars directly to Texas consumers.  The source of that clout?  Cash.

We're stuck with this sort of crap unless we miraculously acquire a lot more voters who care, and who inform themselves.  None of this is secret, or even hard to discover – not the fact of the cash donations, not the recipients of the cash, and not the votes of the recipients. Despite this, the bought-and-paid-for “representatives” keep getting re-elected.

Like a wise man once said: democracy is the worst form of government ever devised, except for all the others...

The women look different in different countries.  Well, the men, too, but who cares about them?  A web site called FaceResearch.org published a collection of “averaged” faces of women from dozens of different countries.  The one for Turkish women, at right, is just an example.

Back in the '90s and '00s, I traveled quite frequently to Europe, most especially the Baltics, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe (including Russia).  After a few years experience, I noticed that I could fairly reliably tell what area someone hailed from – especially women – just from their facial appearance.  What makes this especially interesting for me is that I have a lot of trouble recognizing (and remembering) individuals by their face, but the patterns of heritage aren't difficult for me at all.  Our human ability to swiftly detect subtle differences in faces, while variable, is really quite amazing...

Earthquake in Pakistan creates a new island.  Seismologists suspect it's just a “mud volcano” – a temporary formation caused by jets of mud and gravel spurting from underwater fissures.  More photos here...

California, leading again...  Modoc County joined Siskiyou County in voting to secede from the state. 

A three-fer!  James Taranto, in Best of the Web Today (his regular Wall Street Journal column), has a three-fer in today's column:

• he takes a nice swipe at the upcoming IPCC report and warmists in general
• catches Senator Ted Cruz in an outstanding “humble brag” 
• catches a funny backhanded compliment by G.W. Bush to Obama

Uh oh - this doesn't quite fit their narrative: Josh Bernstein, writing in the Examiner, has a piece pointing out a fact that that nanny-statists would really rather you didn't know:

Since 1950, almost every single public shooting in the United States in which more than three people have been killed have taken place in what are commonly known as “gun free” zones.

My home – and the conservative-leaning rural community we live in – is most definitely not a gun-free zone... 

Slow motion video compilation...

“Internet of Things” - the components are starting to appear...

A visual explanation of ABS: (anti-lock braking system), via reader Simi L...

The One's Prayer:  Via my lovely bride...

Obama Is the shepherd I did not want.
He leadeth me beside the still factories.
He restoreth my faith in the Republican party.
He guideth me in the path of unemployment,
For his party's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the bread line,
I shall fear no hunger, for his bailouts are with me.
He has anointed my income with taxes,
My expenses runneth over.
Surely, poverty and hard living will follow me all the days
Of my life, And I will live in a mortgaged home forever.

Well, except for that bit about the Republican Party...

They're best buddies...  One of the black kittens we're fostering, along with Jahar, our Savannah cat.  They spend a lot of their day together...

Hey, I know – let's get a drink!  Four (formerly) feral kittens that we rescued earlier this year, all jostling for the best position at our bubbling pet fountain.  We're keeping one of them, but the other three are up for adoption.  If you would like a darling little black cat, or if you know someone who does, leave us a comment.  Or you can go see the kittens yourself in the adoption center at the Steele Canyon Veterinary Clinic, right behind the 7-11.  The kittens are there Monday through Friday...

The world's largest waterwheel: the Laxey Wheel, located on the Isle of Man.  It's just a tourist attraction now, but it was originally constructed to drive pumps that drained nearby mines.  Many more photos here...

Reminder for Jamulians: Yuki Sushi is closing forever, and this coming Sunday (September 29th) is the last day Jenny can keep it open.  She's not being allowed to renew her lease, and her current lease expires at the end of the month.  After 10 years in Rancho San Diego, she's an icon for all the local sushi lovers.  We talked with her today, along with her daughter Lena – she's very sad about the end of this part of her life, but cheered a little bit by the thought of taking a vacation.  A nice, long vacation...

All hail GMail!  I've been using GMail on a web browser for five or six years now.  A few weeks ago, GMail was upgraded with a bunch of new features.  Most of them I thought were great, but one I absolutely hated – to the point where I started looking at alternatives for GMail.  But this morning I discovered an easy work-around that has restored my GMail happiness.  If you're a GMail user too, you may find this useful...

The problem is with the new “Compose” window.  When you click on the COMPOSE button, you get a small window with highly compressed menus.  Amongst numerous related annoyances, one stands out for me: it takes two clicks to use the formatting menu.  If you can remember the keycodes (like CTRL-I for italics), they still work ok.  But if you want to italicize some text you've highlighted with your mouse, then welcome to the world of two-click menus.

The work-around I just discovered is simple: just hold the SHIFT key down when you click on the COMPOSE button.  When you do this, you'll get a larger (and adjustable sized) window that pops over your inbox – and the formatting menu is there at the bottom in all its one-click glory.  Hallelujah!

It's not fair! That word – “fair” – is a far more complex word than I'd ever imagined.  The OED's definition alone runs to five pages.  Used in the context of economics and politics, it's even more complicated.  Plus, you can't translate it into any foreign language!  Who knew?

“I'm Geena Davis, and this is how I arch.”

“He had all the charm of a skin rash...”  Says Dave Carter, writing at Ricochet, about Ed Schultz, whom Dave calls “MSNBC's resident maniac”.  There's ever so much more goodness in his post...

Deny all health care access to Obamacare non-believers!  So thundered Stephanie Handler, a development assistant (whatever that is!) at the University of California (of course), San Francisco (double of course!).  Later she apparently thought better of her tweet and deleted it.  Now her account has also been suspended.  At right is a screenshot of her tweet before all that.

So sweet and caring, those lefties are...

I wonder if my dad knew about this place?  My dad had a lifelong interest in the plant world before being stricken with Alzheimer's last year.  He would have been fascinated with the bizarro-world plants (like the Adenium obesum at right) on Socotra Island in the Indian Ocean...

Your morning smile...   Via my sister, Holly D.  I love that first one!

My mom sends me stuff.  Sometimes they're funny:

Researchers for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority found over 200 dead crows near greater Boston recently, and there was concern that they may have died from Avian Flu. A Bird Pathologist examined the remains of all the crows, and, to everyone's relief, confirmed the problem was definitely NOT Avian Flu. The cause of death appeared to be vehicular impacts.

However, during the detailed analysis it was noted that varying colors of paints appeared on the bird's beaks and claws. By analyzing these paint residues it was determined that 98% of the crows had been killed by impact with trucks, while only 2% were killed by an impact with a car.

MTA then hired an Ornithological Behaviorist to determine if there was a cause for the disproportionate percentages of truck kills versus car kills.

The Ornithological Behaviorist very quickly concluded the cause: when crows eat road kill, they always have a look-out crow in a nearby tree to warn of impending danger. They discovered that while all the lookout crows could shout "Cah", not a single one could shout "Truck."

And sometimes it's a good thing she lives 2,500 miles away, where I can't throw something at her!

When you've lost the comedians...  A nice collection of recent spiels from various TV comedians, via my lovely bride:

President Obama was in Russia last week. I couldn’t swear to it, but I think he was seeking asylum.

The United States has no choice but to attack Syria because Dictator Bashar al-Assad is killing his own people with chemical weapons. Before, he was just killing them with bullets.  But if America cared about shooting people, we'd be invading Chicago.

Syria's President Assad referred to President Obama as weak. Obama is so angry he plans to ask Congress for permission to come up with a good comeback.

I guess we're getting ready to attack Syria. But if we win, in the semifinals we face Iran.

If President Obama really wants to hurt the Syrian government, don’t send cruise missiles. He should send over some of his economic advisers.

President Obama is asking Congress to support a military strike in Syria. If they approve, it will be the first time Congress has officially declared war since Obamacare.

Java - overflow and compare vs. subtract: integer overflow is a challenge in many modern programming languages, including Java.  For many programmers, the silent overflow is unexpected, and often unanticipated.  It's also frustrating, because the underlying computer hardware “knows” about the overflow, but there's no way in the programming language to detect it without some ugly (and slow) code.

Overflow can cause some very subtle bugs.  One that I've run into several times over the years is in a comparison, like that used to implement the java.lang.Comparable interface.  You might see something like this:

@Override
public int compareTo( T obj ) {
    return intField - obj.intField;
}

That looks innocent enough, but it will fail – silently! – if an overflow or underflow occurs in that subtraction.  This will occur, for example, if intField contained 2,000,000,000 and obj.intField contained -2,000,000,000.  That comparison would return a negative number, which of course would be incorrect.

The traditional way of handling overflow in Java (and many other languages) is to “upcast” to a larger precision integer to do the comparison.  The implementation above could be revised to this:

@Override
public int compareTo( T obj ) {
        long c = (long) intField - (long) obj.intField;
        return (c == 0) ? 0 : (c > 0) ? 1 : -1;
}

This upcasts the int arguments to long, subtracts as long (thus avoiding the overflow), then turns the result into one of three int values (-1, 0, 1).  It has one unarguable advantage: it works correctly with all int values.

However, I just discovered something that has somehow eluded me in over ten years of Java development (and may well be true in other programming languages, too): the relational comparison operators (<, >, <=, and >=) are apparently not implemented with a subtraction – instead, they appear to have access to the underlying hardware's knowledge of overflow and underflow.  That means that we can implement the comparison method in a much cleaner way:

@Override
public int compareTo( T obj ) {
    return (intField == obj.intField) ? 0 : (intField > obj.intField) ? 1 : -1;
}

This also has the advantage of returning a pure signum function result (the second example did as well).