Doing business in California is loads of fun.  Where by “loads of fun” I mean “like having your balls crushed in a red-hot vise, while rabid monkeys pull out your hair and you're forced to watch Wolf Blitzer on CNN”.  Warren Meyers (of CoyoteBlog) runs a business that manages campgrounds for federal, state, and local parks across the country.  He's got a depressing post about what it's like to do business in California, and he closes with this postscript:

California's regulatory environment has caused a real shift in the culture as well. At one location that we are closing this year, a local attorney has regular dinner meetings with groups of our employees to brainstorm among the group to see if they can come up with something to sue us over.

There's a reason California businesses are fleeing to other states.  Actually, a whole bunch of reasons...

If you took all the water in the world, and somehow put it into a giant cube, how big would that cube be?  And then what if you just took potable water?  Inquiring minds want to know...

Part II: Rope. Tree. Bureaucrat. Some assembly required.  This one starts out sounding really good.  You've seen, I'm sure, the news reports about all the awful flooding in Colorado.  A local firm in that area happens to manufacture surveillance drones – so they volunteer to supply equipment and people to help emergency crews figure out how they can best apply their equipment and capabilities.  You know, for delivering aid, rescuing stranded citizens, that sort of thing.  All was going well, local emergency services folks were very happy to have the assistance.  Until, that is, a FEMA bureaucrat comes along and tells them to ground the drones or be arrested.  Seriously.

WTF is wrong with these people?  On what planet would this be a good decision, with good outcomes?  Why, on Planet Bureaucrat, of course, where such a decision will lead to promotions, bonuses, commendations, or some combination thereof...

Rope. Tree. Bureaucrat. Some assembly required.  This is what happens when you have a bureaucracy that doesn't understand that it works for you.  Here's a summary version, and the money quote:

1. Brad Heath of USA Today files a Freedom of Information Act request for some information.
2. Brian Fallon, with the U.S. Department of Justice, responds by saying he has the information Brad asked for, but won't give it to him.
3. Brad asks again, politely but firmly.
4. Brian says he's “done negotiating”, and will give the information to another reporter after Brad publishes – and he'll explain to the other reporter why Brad was off-base.
5. Brad says “your call” and “I'm not negotiating”.
6. Brian then says:

You are not actually open-minded to the idea of not writing the story. You are running it regardless.  I have information that undercuts your premise, and would provide it if I thought you were able to be convinced that your story is off base. Instead, I think that to provide it to you would just allow you to cover your bases, and factor it into a story you still plan to write. So I prefer to hold onto the information and use it after the fact, with a different outlet that is more objective about whether an OPR inquiry was appropriate.

The entire email thread is here, so you can see for yourself what a twit this pathetic, small-minded bureaucrat is.  He actually seems to believe that he has the power to withhold information based on his personal approval of what Brad was theoretically going to write.  Feels more like North Korea than North America...

Just upgraded to IOS 7 on my iPhone, and the first few things I tried are substantial improvements.  The camera app is much improved, and ridiculously easy to use.  The multi-tasking display works just the way I'd like it to work – shows me a scene from each running program, and all I have to do to close that program is throw it off the top of my screen.  Nice, very nice, Apple.

But now, as always, I have to go learn how to use all these new whiz-bangs.  If the rest of the improvements are as simple as the first two I tried, that shouldn't take very long at all...

Stunning, they are, this awesome collection of landscape photographs by Yiming Hu.  A meadow at Mount Rainier is shown at right; lots more on the site.  What a talent he has!  Via my mom...

I could have really used this a few years ago: a non-technical explanation of what the hell the Fed is doing with $85 billion a month.  It's not quite as scary as it sounds at first.  Not quite.

It's called “perspective”.  And Megan McArdle delivers it elegantly, tailored especially for the oh-so-entitled millennials who need this message the most...

Journalist's guide to firearm identification.  Allegedly this is a joke, but I'm not so sure...

Night of the green knives.  That's the wonderful James Delingpole's turn of phrase to describe Tony Abbott's swift dismantling of the Australian Climate Commission and sundry other nonsensical (and expensive) panders to the warmists.  Abbott, you may remember, is the newly elected conservative (well, by down under standards) Prime Minister of Australia.  As Delingpole says: he's showing us all the way...

Obamacare is a way to force young people to pay for medical care for old people.  I know that, and you may know that.  Obama certainly knows that.  But will the young people figure it out?  An organization called Generation Opportunity wants to help that process along, and to that end they've released the two ads at right.  Creepy?  Check.  Persuasive?  I'm not so sure...

Well, that sure didn't take long:  The Russian/U.S. “deal” to avoid a strike on Syria is already turning into a joke...

The ambitious U.S.-Russian deal to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons, hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough just days ago, hit its first delay Wednesday with indications that the Syrian government will not submit an inventory of its toxic stockpiles and facilities to international inspectors by this weekend's deadline.

The State Department signaled that it would not insist that Syrian President Bashar Assad produce the list Saturday, the end of a seven-day period spelled out in the framework deal that Washington and Moscow announced last weekend in Geneva.

Read the whole piece here.  The Middle East is a bad enough mess without Pooty-Poot and The One inserting themselves into the middle of the muddle...

Because he knows what's good for you, little man...  This morning The One made it abundantly clear that if Congress had the temerity to send him a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government that included defunding Obamacare, he would veto it.  This, he says, would result in a catastrophic “shutdown” of the federal government.   Senator Ted Cruz (a Republican who supports defunding Obamacare) responded by tweeting:

“Why is President Obama threatening to shut down govt to shove Obamacare down Americans' throats?”

Heh.  Nice political ju-jitsu, that is...

A trend that is not a trend.  Warren Meyer (aka CoyoteBlog) has a nice take-down of a Rolling Stone article on the intersection wilderness wildfire management, global warming, and politics.  This is one of an excellent series he's started, describing “trends” noted in the media that are actually not trends at all.  Often they're just isolated facts that an author twists into a trend; sometimes they're a trend – but in the opposite direction stated.  My takeaway: be careful about believing anything you read in the mainstream media.  But that's old advice, isn't it?

Science, music, detection – what more could you ask in a story?  I've seen reference before to controversy about what tempo (speed) Beethoven's works should be played at.  The problem arises from his original tempo notes; they seem just crazy to most conductors.  One intriguing possibility is that his metronome was broken – and now researchers think they know the answer.  Original paper (PDF) here...

What is that?  It's an aerial photograph of a tree farm.  I grew up on a nursery (which included some tree farming) in New Jersey, but it wasn't this sort of high-productivity farming...

Computers at Harvard in the early 1900s: all women.  The original meaning of the word “computer” was a person who computes; that meaning goes back as far as 1646 (according to the OED).  In the late 1800s, devices like slide rules (a topic I know a bit about) were occasionally called “computers”.  But it wasn't until the 1940s that the term was used for an electronic machine that computed...

This is what the Internet is for!  Baby panda photos...

Great source code comments: StackOverflow has a collection.

Fool or knave?  It doesn't really matter...  Sometimes you really can't make this stuff up.  Here's Obama, in a speech to the Business Roundtable:

Now, this debt ceiling — I just want to remind people in case you haven’t been keeping up — raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy.  All it does is it says you got to pay the bills that you’ve already racked up, Congress.  It’s a basic function of making sure that the full faith and credit of the United States is preserved.

I must be one of the slow ones.  Here I was, all along, thinking that when the debt ceiling gets raised, we'll incur more debt.  My slow thinking goes like this: “If they raise the debt ceiling, well then of course they're going to use that ability to borrow more!”  And there's some evidence to support such slow thinking: that's exactly what's happened over 100 times before.

So what is Obama on about?  He's referring to a long-time legislative practice: Congress authorizes expenditures, then later says “Oh, gee, I guess we have to actually, like, pay for this!”  When they don't have the cash available (and they never do), they authorize the Treasury to borrow the money (by selling Treasury bonds).  So Obama is saying – to a bunch of business executives, who most assuredly know better – that the two acts are totally disconnected.  That's a great piece of legerdemain for the progressives: they get to pretend that spending is totally disconnected from borrowing.  They may actually be stupid enough to believe it, but I strongly suspect that they (including Obama) really are knowingly trying to hoodwink us...

Technology mostly advances in little steps like this: new temperature sensor with much greater stability under long-term exposure to high temperatures.

A nice collection of photos taken through a microscope, like these butterfly eggs on a raspberry plant.

Fox News is reporting that the IPCC report was released yesterday, and that it says:

...finds the threat of man-made global warming to be not only greatly exaggerated but so small as to be “embedded within the background variability of the natural climate system” and not dangerous.

If that's accurate, it's quite a walk-back from their earlier reports. I haven't yet found any other analysis, nor can I find the report online – both a bit odd, as I'd think this would be big news in the climatology world...

The Concordia is upright and floating, now just waiting for calm seas before towing into the port where it will be dismantled for scrap...

Bruce Schneier notes this great article on the NSA revelations by Yochai Benkler, writing at The Guardian.  A sample:

What did we actually know about what we got in exchange for undermining internet security, technology markets, internet social capital, and the American constitutional order? The intelligence establishment grew by billions of dollars; thousands of employees; and power within the executive. And we the people? Not so much. Court documents released this week show that after its first three years of operation, the best the intelligence establishment could show the judge overseeing the program was that it had led to opening "three new preliminary investigations". This showing, noted Judge Walton in his opinion, "does not seem very significant".

If this was the best the intelligence community could put on the table when it faced the risk of judicial sanction, we can assume that all the hand-waving without hard, observable, testable facts is magician's patter, aimed to protect the fruits of a decade's worth of bureaucratic expansionism. Claims that secrecy prevents the priesthood from presenting such testable proof appeal to a doctrine of occult infallibility that we cannot afford to accept.

History doesn't give us very many examples of powerful bureaucracies being successfully reined in.  Let's hope we can make an exception of the NSA...