Best wife ever! Makes me breakfast in bed!
Also: Presents! I can has (running) watch! I don’t wear a watch, but have been running some lately and needed one to know how much I am running when not on treadmill. Running watch lets me do that. The radio link to the atomic clock in Ft. Collins, CO was a bit unexpected though. I haven’t gotten a new watch since high school, is that common now-a-days?
Thanks to carneggy I have now seen a series of videos that all the people in my game need to watch.
Apparently National Geographic is doing a series on Stonehenge. Of course they needed to interview Stonehenge expert Nigel (yes from Spinal Tap) for the show. These five videos are those interviews. Most critical line: “Of course Stonehenge was originally amplifiers.”
The detritus of the “Faster, Cheaper, Better” (pick any two) Nasa methodology was picked up and modified for the Phoenix mission. Because of that this was a fairly risky mission. However it appears that NASA managed to land a powered legged lander on Mars for the first time since the 70s. It appears that everything worked as expected, the legs are on the ground, the solar arrays are deployed, and pictures are coming back home. I’m only sad no rover. At least there are still two running about elsewhere on the planet.
I don’t normally link the viral videos from YouTube, but this one just kills me. Weezer gathered up all the “stars” from last year’s virals on YouTube, and stitched them all together into this hilarious video.
I don’t know why, but I just went to the energy star web site to try out their “save money with a new fridge” feature. I’m always interested in eeking the most dollar value for using less energy over time (e.g. CFLs and that sort of thing, high up front cost, but lower lifetime cost) and was wondering how my fridge did. Apparently by switching to an energy star fridge I will save up to $25 over five years.
Hmm. Looking back through the energy star records, my fridge missed the rating by a smidge and then was slightly upgraded in 07 to meet the new standard. That had to have been a good deal when they bought it. Much cheaper because it wasn’t energy star, but actually has the same efficiency as an actual energy star fridge. That is pretty awesome. Sort of maximizes two of my interests: long term and short term price management.
Unless there is a major technological breakthrough airline tickets will continue to become more and more expensive until only the super rich are able to afford to fly. The problem is that while it is reasonably straightforward to build a car that runs on electricity, it is generally of lower performance and to build a jet you need maximal performance, thus you need highly refined oil. The Financial Times looks at the problem in the short term:
British Airways last week reported record profits for the year to March and the first 10 per cent operating profit margin in its history.
And yet it also warned that $125 oil could wipe away the entire operating profit this year, without further cost-saving, fare increases and cuts in capital spending.
$135? How about $150? Or $200? British Airways is one of the most financially sound airlines around. The US airlines have all be scrimping on upgrades for years and thus have less fuel efficient jets. Expect US airline travel to become more unpleasant as oil prices continue to rise. I’ve already gotten an email from my airline this summer, letting me know that they changed my flight because they canceled the one I was on. I just hope they are still around long enough for me to make all my flights this summer.
I’ve always thought gas was underpriced in this country (making it harder for public transportation projects to fight for funding, etc.). I’ve also found the “we’ll it’s cheaper than starbucks!” argument pretty lacking as well though. Value can’t be compared on a straight gallon by gallon basis. But as gas gets more and more expensive I suppose we will see more and more of those comparisons. I like this one a bit more I think because it really shows a range of consumer products, from the necessary (milk @ $3/gal) to the useful (paint @$25/gal) to the luxury (nail polish @ $5760/gal). I’m not sure what it says about how we value things in society, but it does give some perspective.
I appear to be on a gun ownership kick lately. In any case it appears that in the most anti gun city in the country, city council members own guns. Not only that, but since the laws they passed on gun ownership are impossibly difficult to comply with, when they screw it up they change the laws so that they can keep their guns.
The only thing that surprises me about this is that anyone is surprised.
Saw the movie, then read the book. They were both very good, although I like the book better. Main differences: the movie portrays the family as the reason the boy ran off, but the book places the blame squarely on his shoulders. The book was actually very careful to present a number of possibilities of what was going through his head, but to steer clear of judging him. It actually breaks the fourth wall regularly, describing the author discussing the boy’s motivations and reasoning. Another difference is that the movie says that he mistook a poisonous plant for an edible one. Krakauer suggests however that the seeds of an edible plant were in fact poisonous, though not described as such in any current books. (He even went so far as to collect some and send them off to a lab for spectra-analysis, which showed that they were alkaloids.) All in all I came away from the book thinking that the kid was less ill prepared than I thought initially. Having said that, the book did drive home the fact that no matter how separated we may feel from those around us, we are always connected.
Another thing I got from the book is that living off the land is REALLY hard. At one point some Alaskans are saying that the boy would have had to be stupid to die in the woods given that the Inuit have lived off the land there for years. The author then points out that Inuit have also been known to starve to death over the years. Paraphrased: “The life of a hunter is a hard one, always on the move, always afraid that the next encounter will be missed and the food supply will dwindle.” Given my obsession with Peak Oil however I do now have the urge to go hunting and get good at it, before I have to be good at it. (Turns out the killing part is the easy part, turning the dead animal into meat that will last until you can eat it is much harder. Takes practice among other things, and is location dependent. Smoking is good in the south in the summer, and simply slicing into thin strips and drying is better in more alpine climes.)
And finally, I have a friend who likes to say if he doesn’t know what something is he puts it in his mouth to find out. Turns out this is not always the best idea.
Oh yeah, and always carry a map. The irony of the whole story is that he wanted to go “off the edge of the map” but he was never more than 6 miles from a cabin that possibly had supplies he could have used, and 16 miles from a road. There is no more off the map.
Mike posted a link to a rant about computer languages. I was just recently having this argument about whether to use SQL queries or do the work inline in the high level language (Java in my case). The conclusion was pretty much, “when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” One quote from the rant matches perfectly:
But what we wound up with was a bunch of entry-level programmers all around the world who know one language, whichever one it is, and they don’t want to switch. Switching languages: the second one is your hardest. Because the first one was hard, and you think the second one’s going to be that bad, and that you wasted the entire investment you put into learning the first one.
So, by and large, programmers – you know, the rank-and-file – they pretty much pick a language and they stay with it for their entire career.
Admittedly SQL v Java isn’t really a language issue, but I have seen this problem over and over again. One of my first clients was willing to blow two months of time for the entire dev team to have them switch from VB6 to C#, and the team wasn’t willing. They really did have that block of thinking that learning a new language was hard, not realizing that the vast majority of the skill-set transfers over.
From the ground to your car has a number of steps. Drilling, shipping (or flowing through pipelines), and refining. The drilling and shipping is normally done by the big oil companies who are making a pretty good profit right about now. Prices go up profit margins go up and all that. Of course as oil gets harder to get out of the ground, the price of drilling goes up, but over all the oil companies are doing ok. I am always trying to figure out why gas is so cheap though. If $20/barrel oil = $1/gal gas, you would think that $100/barrel would be $5 gas (modulo additives and sunk costs, like the refineries themselves).
Turns out the refineries are sort of taking some of that cost. I assume this is a what the market will bear situation, but it is interesting to note that independent refineries in the US are tanking in the stock market. Turns out their profit margin is way down. They rely on a heavy difference between the cost of oil and the cost of gasoline (the “crack” price) in order to maintain good cash flow to do maintenance and general operations on existing refineries. Not only that, but they also rely on that extra cash to make efficiency improvements. Unfortunately that crack price has dropped to record lows. One of the reasons that gas prices aren’t $5 yet is that the independent refineries are taking it on the chin. Unfortunately this also means that newer more modern and efficient refineries are not being built. As we learn to wean ourselves from oil we also need to be learning how to use what remains with the utmost efficiency. Right now it looks like the refining process may be one of the bottlenecks there.
On the plus side, they finally finished sequencing Trichoderma reesei and most Americans think that the world is running out of oil. Wow. I really didn’t expect that result at all.
Well, that’s one way to prepare for the coming oil apocalypse. I would highly recommend getting your FOID card however, before stocking up on weapons.
Also, if you are going to go all road warrior, you might want to pick something a little more wieldy than the 80 pound M2HB. When the world is out of gas, you have to carry your own guns.
I’ve been more interested in Lebanon than Iraq lately for my Middle East news, and things there appear to be coming to a head. There has been quite a bit of back and forth between the democratically elected government and the local thug-in-law, Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hizbullah. Just like an unwanted relative, you just can’t uninvite him from the party. First come the pleas for sympathy and the threats. Problem is, he already followed through on his threats yesterday with the strikes after the government fired his supporter from the post of airport security when it was discovered he was allowing Hizbullah to surveil the airport undetected. Then the text messaging starts. (And the introspection about texting during a war.) Then the advice from the survivors of the previous war. (”Don’t try to leave until you know where the snipers are.”)
I pray for them, but I am afraid that if the Lebanese backers of Hizbullah don’t see the moral bankruptcy in their leaders yet, even instigating violence against their own people won’t let them see it. I have to say though, it puts our political disagreements here in the US into context. Clinton’s paramilitary force isn’t threatening the dissolution of the Army if Obama doesn’t withdraw from the presidential race.
To figure out how they got there, the Daily Star has a good Op-Ed which serves as an excellent backgrounder.
Some people say that Apple is a bad company because it doesn’t provide enough backwards compatibility. Let’s think about that for a minute. 68000 -> PPC chipset transition. Invisible emulation mode provided. OS 6-9 -> OS X transition. Visible OS mode provided. Me running a program I built for an operating system that hasn’t been sold for 10 years by double clicking the app Icon? Priceless.
Too awesome. Unfortunately I do not believe that OS X 10.5 will run OS 9 and even if it did, I have to believe that it doesn’t emulate the 68000 chipset. Of course the main reason they dropped that was the PPC -> Intel transition. *sigh* Maybe I won’t upgrade quite yet. I still love my G5.
I’ve been a big fan of Obama for president for a while now. There are some pretty specific reasons for me. First he is local and I have seen him work across the aisle in Springfield, which is certainly a better example than anyone else in Washington right now. Of course given that poisonous atmosphere he might not be able to continue in that vein. Then there are the policies. Sure he has done his share of pandering (highway bill anyone?) but generally his votes are fairly well defended based on the effect on the country. More importantly he seems to actually think about the implications of his votes, beyond just who stands to make money off of it. His vocal stance against the gas tax holiday is a good example. Guess what people, supply and demand has set a price. That price will stay there even if we cut the taxes. Those funds will just go to the oil companies rather than the federal government.
Which brings me to another of his issues, energy policy. While he isn’t a peak oil doomer like me, he does have a cohesive energy policy that fits squarely with my belief structure. And the best thing about it is that he doesn’t lay claim to knowing the answer. That allows funding to go to alternative promising programs that we can’t even think of yet, instead of pumping all the development cash into turning corn into gas.
And while we are on the subject of gas, lets talk about being elitist. Clinton claims that he is being elitist by not backing the gas tax holiday. Is it elitist to assume that the average american can understand that basic economics says they aren’t going to get anything from a tax holiday, or is is being elitist to assume that the average American’s vote can be bought with a promise that will never come true, because they won’t realize it won’t help until it is too late? I know which one insults me.
And finally, lets talk personal connections and experience. Obama - Wright, worst case scenario? Embarrassment. Clinton - McDougals, McCain - Keating, worst cast scenario? Jail. Maybe a lack of experience is a good thing. I have a conservative neighbor with a lot of pro gun bumper-stickers, and possibly my favorite bumper sticker ever: “All politicians should serve two terms: one in office and one in jail.” I’m starting to believe that. Blago. Stroger.
Update: Apparently the ads in Indy are making me pissy.
No matter how this turns out, one thing is certain: there will be a lot more lawsuits. Unless the Supreme Court finds some clever way to close the lid on this pandora’s box quickly, I have a hard time imagining many of the losers in the affected cases bringing new claims. Hopefully there are limits on previously decided cases being reopened, the courts are already overburdened the way it is.
Unfortunately do you know math has become popular enough that a few spammers are getting through. I don’t really understand why they would do this, since even if you get through, I vet first time posters before the post goes through. In any case, I just discovered reCAPTCHA, and am trying that out. It should be pretty straightforward, but just in case people are having trouble: there are two words, one should be clear and one fuzzy. You only need to get the clear one correct, don’t worry about the fuzzy one.
This also helps digitize old books which I find very exciting.
As more comes out about the lost presidential emails, it is worthwhile looking a the system decisions that got us here in the first place. It is interesting to note, that when the email retention laws went into effect during Clinton’s term, they were able to build an automatic, tamper resistant archiving scheme in under a year.
It is also interesting that when the Bush administration decided to upgrade the system, the archiving system became manual and lost the tamper resistance. The advantage of mismanaging every single aspect of your presidency is that when stuff like this comes up, we have to assume poor planning, rather than more nefarious causes. Nixon was an amateur.
Believe it or not, my dad sent this to me. Being a mercenary programmer for hire, I feel like this sometimes. On the other hand, every day I bill out is an honest day’s work.
Powered by WordPress