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...