Lea...

Lea...  We just heard from our vet with the biopsy results, and it's all bad.  Damn.  She told us it's a “hot” (meaning aggressive) melanoma, the worst case.  We need more diagnostics to figure what our options are, so she goes back on Monday for lung X-rays and biopsy on her lymph nodes.  If the melanoma has already spread out of her mouth, there are no good treatment options.  If it's still contained to her mouth, radiation therapy is a possibility – but even that depends on how much further the melanoma has spread.  There's a good chance that our best option is palliative care, and that only while it still makes sense.

We've got some tough choices ahead for our old girl...

This is one bad-ass beetle!

This is one bad-ass beetle!  I thought I was being put on at first – I'd never heard of a “Bombardier Beetle” before, and it sounded like something Hollywood invented.  But Wikipedia says they're real (and we all know that Wikipedia never lies!), and according to this blog, the animated GIF at right is also for real.

And they're in California!  This paper about their spray mechanism mentions that they captured some of their study subjects in California.

Further googling shows that creationists have fixed on these guys as supposed examples of something that couldn't possibly have evolved.

So...holy smokin' beetle, Batman!

Disney's “Let It Go” in 25 languages...

Disney's “Let It Go” in 25 languages... The world is getting smaller every day...

My readers of a certain age may remember a phenomenon called “pen pals” – surely dead and gone in these days of email, texts, FaceTime, and Skype.  I had several pen pals as a kid, arranged through a service advertising in the back of a magazine.  I remember one in Thailand, and another in France, and I remember well how exotic both of those locales seemed.  Now they're just another place, just a little further away than places in the U.S.

According to Wikipedia, pen pals are still alive and well, though perhaps a little retro.  They also mention the Flat Stanley project, which I've participated in twice.  That's really a lot different than a pen pal, though...

Soft tyranny...

Soft tyranny...  Dan Mitchell has come up with an objective way to measure the “soft tyranny” of individual U.S. states.  It's summarized in the resulting chart at right (click to embiggen).  California is #49.  Yikes!

I loved the first comment, from “Ned”:

Please don’t publish this data again.

I’m from Massachusetts and I don’t want our legislators to know they are not the worst!

Ukraine protests...

Ukraine protests...  Things are getting pretty crazy over there.  Somebody clever has started turning fireworks into weapons.

The nominal cause of this latest outbreak of protests was the Ukrainian president's (Viktor Yanukovych) refusal to sign a cooperation pact with the European Union, couple with signing a cooperation pact with Russia.  I suspect the root cause is actually much deeper: the population grew up under the Soviet Union's thugocracy, and they don't want to move back to that (which is the general direction Putin's Russia is moving).  Much more coverage here...

Supernova in M82...

Supernova in M82...  Via APOD, of course.  Glorious full resolution version.

Geek: is Julia the right girl for the cowboy coder?

Geek: is Julia the right girl for the cowboy coder?  Evan Miller thinks so:

The problem with most programming languages is they're designed by language geeks, who tend to worry about things that I don't much care for. Safety, type systems, homoiconicity, and so forth. I'm sure these things are great, but when I'm messing around with a new project for fun, my two concerns are 1) making it work and 2) making it fast. For me, code is like a car. It's a means to an end. The "expressiveness" of a piece of code is about as important to me as the "expressiveness" of a catalytic converter.

This approach to programming is often (derisively) called cowboy coding. I don't think a cowboy is quite the right image, because a cowboy must take frequent breaks due to the physical limitations of his horse. A better aspirational image is an obsessed scientist who spends weeks in the laboratory and emerges, bleary-eyed, exhausted, and wan, with an ingenious new contraption that possibly causes a fire on first use.

While I have a keen interest in programming languages, I do share Evan's view of languages being primarily a tool to get something done.  I've never looked at Julia, but after reading Evan's post I think I'll add it to my list of retirement projects...

Repeat after me: correlation is not causation...

Repeat after me: correlation is not causation...  Just the other day, researchers from Princeton announced the imminent demise of Facebook, based on metadata gleaned from Google.  Today, Mike Develin (a data scientist from Facebook) used the same technique to “prove” that Princeton University is about to run out of students, and we're all about to run out of air.  Well played, Mike :)

Ok, That One has lost another admirer...

Ok, That One has lost another admirer...  Peggy Noonan comes full circle with her column this week.  Her conclusion:

You know when we will know America is starting to come back? When some day the sergeant at arms bellows: "Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States" and the camera shows a bubble of suits and one person emerges from the pack and walks into the chamber and you're watching at home and you find yourself—against everything you know, against all the accumulated knowledge of the past—interested. It'll take you aback when you realize you're interested in what he'll say! And the members won't just be enacting, they'll be leaning forward to hear.

And the president will speak, and what he says will be pertinent to the problems of the United States of America. And thoughtful. And he'll offer ideas, and you'll think: "Hey, that sounds right."

That is when you'll know America just might come back.

Until then, as John Dickerson just put it: Barack Obama, Inaction Figure.

Zzzzzzz. 

Ouch!

Fore-edge paintings...

Fore-edge paintings...  More here.  Way back in the '60s, I briefly had a job assembling electronic coffee pots for airlines.  One of my co-workers there brought in a paperback erotic novel, and it had one of these paintings on its edge (well, in its case, more likely a print).  You can probably imagine what sort of image it was :)  I'm pretty sure that was a newly-published book, so these things were made at least up to the '60s.  I've never seen one since...