Saturday, March 9, 2013
The Phony Recovery...
Whenever a politician tells you that our economy is recovering, remember this graph. We won't have a real recovery until the employment-population ratio gets back up above 61% or so. Any politician who tells you otherwise is lying. Or as Mark Twain would say, they're opening their mouth (as the only thing likely to emerge is a lie)...
Chinese Junk Takes Out Russian Satellite...
Space junk, that is – not a ship. This prognosis pretty much sums it up:
It is not immediately clear whether the satellite is merely wounded or completely incapacitated.Oops...
Cows Are the Answer!?!
Via Watts Up With That, this awesome TED talk by Dr. Allan Savory. He shows how people on five continents have reversed desertification by increasing grazing – contra decades of “scientific” grasslands management...
His big insight was realizing the role that wild herds of grazing animals played in the ecology of natural grasslands. Their mechanical reduction (trampling) of grass provides mulch, fertilizer, and water – perfect conditions for the next generation of grass even during a dry season.
Awesome!
His big insight was realizing the role that wild herds of grazing animals played in the ecology of natural grasslands. Their mechanical reduction (trampling) of grass provides mulch, fertilizer, and water – perfect conditions for the next generation of grass even during a dry season.
Awesome!
Quote of the Day...
From Mark Steyn's current piece on the drone debate:
The guys with drones are losing to the guys with fertilizer — because they mean it, and we don’t.If the fertilizer reference escapes you, Mr. Steyn is referring to the Taliban's homemade bombs, which use ammonia-based fertilizers mixed with oil as their explosive...
Flying Pig Moment, Legal Department...
The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court, justifiably notorious for its progressive-leaning rulings, must have missed its meds: they've just ruled that agents at border crossings cannot search digital devices (such as phones, laptops, etc.) for no reason at all. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been asserting its right to do just that, leading many organizations to counsel that travelers not carry these devices with them. DHS has also cited, numerous times, that the mere existence of an encrypted file is suspicious – a plainly absurd assertion in this day and age.
Someone please hide those meds! This kind of Ninth Circuit I could learn to admire!
Someone please hide those meds! This kind of Ninth Circuit I could learn to admire!
Best Debugging Story Evah?
Well, a candidate, maybe. Awesome? You betcha. It involves Forth, TTL, microcode, and an oven. What could possibly go wrong? :)
(Many) More Solutions to the Three-Body Problem...
When I first read the title of this article, I thought it was referring to a different (though related) problem: computing the course of a satellite (one body) through a two-body system (such as the Earth and the Moon). When I was a kid first learning about space travel, this was a notoriously unsolved problem. Instead of the usual sort of mathematical solution to this problem, navigators at NASA resorted to finite state models to solve the problem. Later on (in the '70s, if memory serves me right), mathematicians did develop equations that solved that particular three-body problem, but systems with more bodies (like Jupiter and Saturn) remained challenging, and were still normally solved with finite state modeling.
But this article is about a different sort of three-body problem – stable orbits of three-body systems. Similar, and still interesting, though...
But this article is about a different sort of three-body problem – stable orbits of three-body systems. Similar, and still interesting, though...
Dark Corners of “C”
A presentation on some quirks of the C programming language. Very nicely done...
Of Course They Did...
As we explained a few days ago, of course the bureaucrats are going to first cut the services the public wants...