Weather radar picture...

Weather radar picture...  We're right where the precipitation turns from rain to snow...

Soup good. Soup my friend...

Soup good.  Soup my friend...  Debbie made a really nice soup for supper yesterday, accompanied by some dinner rolls made from frozen dough.  The soup was outstanding: a cheesy broth, laden with mushrooms, sausage, and veggies.  The rolls were good – not the best we've ever had, but perfectly decent dinner rolls...

Dang it!

Dang it!  More snow in Paradise (the photo is out our back window just now).  The temperature outside is 35°F; it just might stick for a while...

Happy pi day!

Happy pi day!  More about it here, and the first 100 digits in base 2, in case you didn't know them:

11.00100 10000 11111 10110 10101 00010 00100 00101 10100 01100 00100 01101 00110 00100 11000 11001 10001 01000 10111 00000

Another typically interesting post...

Another typically interesting post ... by Eric S. Raymond, this one on the link between autism and genius.  In it he makes an observation that immediately resonated with me: that high achievement (actually, “genius-level capabilities” is how he puts it) are enabled or promoted by not caring about social conventions (or, as he puts it much more colorfully, “not giving a shit about monkey social rituals”).  His thesis is that autistic people get this for free – it comes with the territory – and other high achievers have to learn how to do it.  The (unstated by him) corollary is that social convention is an enormous impediment to achievement.

Fascinating observation, and it rings very true to me...

The Mediterranean Sea was created...

The current Mediterranean Sea was created ... about five million years ago, when the Atlantic Ocean breached the natural dam at what is today the Straight of Gibraltar.  I'd read in the past that it took several centuries to fill up the Mediterranean Sea to match the Atlantic Ocean's level.  Now there's a new report that says it was filled in as little as a few months, and at most two years.  To do that, water flowed at rates of up to 300 km/hr (190 mph) through a 200 km (125 mile) long channel.  That would have been a spectacular sight!

Prime surprise...

Prime surprise...  I ran across this interesting article about a surprising property of sequential prime numbers.  But even more interesting to me is this piece in the article, which seems obviously wrong to me:

If Alice tosses a coin until she sees a head followed by a tail, and Bob tosses a coin until he sees two heads in a row, then on average, Alice will require four tosses while Bob will require six tosses (try this at home!), even though head-tail and head-head have an equal chance of appearing after two coin tosses.

Have any of my readers ever heard of this?  Search as I might, I've found no reference to anything suggesting unequal probability of head-tail versus head-head.  At the moment I'm assuming that the article's author just misunderstood something she heard...

This guy keeps surprising me...

This guy keeps surprising me...  John Oliver with an outstanding (and still very funny) piece on the Apple encryption debate...

Rain in Paradise!

Rain in Paradise!  It's pouring as I write this, and the weather radar shows lots more headed our way.  The forecast has significant precipitation between last night and this coming Thursday, alternating between snow and rain.  All of this is with temperatures above freezing, so presumably the “snow” will be more like slush, melting shortly after hitting the ground.

We drove up to Porcupine Reservoir yesterday morning.  It's just a few miles from our home, and is the source for our irrigation water.  It's filling up nicely, up several feet over the past couple of days.  This rain will aid in that, reassuring all the local farmers.  It will also ensure a very green spring for us – and hopefully a bumper crop of wildflowers in the mountains...

Nodules on Mars...

Nodules on Mars...  Curiosity is investigating...