And if yours doesn't, you should get one
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They're not expensive. And they're indispensible for situations like the one that greeted me this morning. We have a little mini spray thing for cleaning out poopy diapers that attaches inline between the toilet supply and the toilet. Sometime in the middle of the night, its hose decided to spring a leak. When we noticed it this morning, the bathroom was flooded as well as the carpet in the hallway and parts of both the office and Uma's room. My shop vac must have sucked up 10 gallons or more of water. This isn't the first time it's saved us, either; I can remember a morning a few months ago when I was under the kitchen sink with an uncapped hot water supply blasting in my face. If you have a house, get a shop vac.
I've been finding it hard to find a clear dividing line between personal freedom and economic freedom. It makes me wonder whether the future perspective will think of state-run companies as being like state-sponsored churches and communism like a theocracy. Or maybe I should just go to bed.
"Echo Park" and "The Closers" by Michael Connelly: More Harry Bosch detective stories.
"Glasshouse" by Charles Stross: Stross uses an artificial world to poke fun at the present day, but he needs to work on his first person perspective; it's too clunky.
"The Colour of Magic" by Terry Pratchett: I like fantasy fiction, but the authors take themselves so seriously. Not Pratchett. Imagine "The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy," but applied to fantasy fiction.
"Syrup" by Max(x?) Barry: A funny parody of the soft drink industry. It's more like his latest, "Company," than it is like his second book, "Jennifer Government." Maybe a little too much. If you just read this one, it's good, but if you read them all, you'll hope that he tries something a little different with his next one.
"Stamping Butterflies" by Jon Courtenay Grimwood: It's all right, but I'm getting kind of tired of obscurely related plot parallel plotlines shift in different times and cryptic slow reveals.
"The Jennifer Morgue" by Charles Stross: the sequel to "The Atrocity Archives," and I think Stross's sweet spot (along with "Singularity Sky"). He's clever and comic, but not over-the-top (though he gets a little too close). It probably helps that the main character is almost his alter ego (I assume).
"Debugging" by David Agans: a 10-page pamphlet expanded to book length without adding anything of note. The inclusion of numerous mostly boring "war stories" and lots of short intended-to-be-funny-but-not-quite asides tells me Agans's publisher kept telling him to write more words.
The "Piracy" button on that theater feedback device is a bad idea. Among the reasons is that it won't work. That's because the theater owners will learn to ignore piracy reports. It practically never happens. Bad picture? It happens from time to time. Ditto for bad sound. "Other disturbance," like obnoxious people talking or a baby crying? That happens practically every time. But someone using a camcorder? I've never seen it.
There are something like 35,000 movie theater screens in the United States (source). Each one shows about 5 movies per day. That's 175,000 showings per day, or 1,225,000 per week. How many of those have someone pointing a camcorder at the screen? A dozen? Maybe? Think about how many movie patrons are teenaged boys. How many fire alarms in schools are a result of fire, and how many are a result of some kid being a punk? If you give people this button to report something that most people aren't going to see even once in their lives (do the match), you're going to end up with a huge false positive rate. It's going to be so high that that the aggregate cost of sending someone into the theater to look around will greatly exceed any possible reward. They might as well have not have the button at all
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I'm sure they know this, and its inclusion is there to placate the studios, or something like that
On the other hand, while I can certainly admire the iPhone, I don't think I'd want to buy a computer that prevented me from running my own code. The phone companies won't let you, of course, because they want you to pay through the nose for slow, buggy stuff from them. So I'll go iPhone-less.
According to the CIA World Factbook, the median age in the United States is 36.6 years old. That's scarily near. In 8 years, I'll be older than half of America. Yipe. I'm already older than half of the world (listed under "World" after "West Bank," rather than at the top as you'd expected).
I knew that the ratio between successive items in the Fibonacci sequence converged on the golden ratio φ, but I only recently discovered that it doesn't matter where you start (including wild starting points, too); if it follows the Fibonacci form, you'll always get to φ:
I just saw the deserts episode of "Planet Earth." Wow. Maybe I've just forgotten what nature documentaries are like, but it was really great. My friend tells me it's even better in HD, which I'm too cheap for. I highly recommend watching. There were so many "holy crap" moments.
The Alamo Drafthouse, a local theater chain, sponsored a contest to come up with unnecessary sequels. I haven't seen any of the trailers, but just the posters are good. My favorites are the ones for "Se7en," "Cast Away" (either one; they're basically the same), "Street Fighter," one of the "Apollo 13" ones, and the sequel to "A Clockword Orange." The one for "United 93" is obvious, but it required big ones. Too bad there's no poster yet.
Sometimes I type without looking at either the screen or the keyboard. I never internalized orienting my fingers based on the pips often found on the F and J keys, so sometimes my hands end up being off by one. Tjat cam ;ead tp cpmoca; resi;ts sp,eto,es. I should just write a thing that detects when that's happening and automatically corrects it. How many semicolons do I really need in one sentence?
A very, very, very dedicated entymologist has devised a pain scale for insect stings. Now there's an objective reference for how much pain you feel. Too bad scorpions and spiders aren't on there; I'd like to know exactly how much it would have hurt had I gotten up close to that giant spider I saw crossing the road the other day (from my car! from 30 feet away! it was huge!).
A trip into Wikipedia brought me to the brown recluse spider, considered one most dangerous due to the potency of its venom. In discussing a number of bite treatments, the article noted, "None of these treatments have been subjected to controlled, randomized trials to conclusively show benefit." Indeed. I imagine it would be hard to find volunteers.
Reading about how engagement rings are silly, I noticed one of the embedded links was to a 2 sentence sidebar. Hang on a second... How come the sidebar isn't, you know, on the side? Wasn't Slate launched as a "web magazine?"
James Hornfischer's "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors" is something I would have eaten whole as a 13-year old, when I went through a phase where I read all the WWII books in our community library. It's a detailed recounting of part of the last great naval battle in the greatest naval war in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The book focuses on one of its smaller consitutuent actions, the Battle of Samar, where a Japanese force nearly destroyed the defenders of the beachhead occupied by Douglas MacArthur's invasion force.
The Imperial Japanese Navy bet everything on stopping the US invasion of the Philippines in late 1944, as its success would enable the US to cut off Japanese access to conquests in Southeast Asia, including the essential petroleum resources of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). The title derives from the fact that this was the last battle in which "ships of the line" were significant1, ushering in the age of the aircraft carrier, as well as the importance of destroyers, a.k.a., "tin cans," in halting the Japanese offensive.
Admiral William Halsey allowed himself and the Third Fleet to be decoyed by the few remaining Japanese aircraft carriers, enabling another force of battleships and cruisers to slip past and attack the elements of the Seventh Fleet covering the landing. This force included the largest battleships ever built, the Musashi and Yamato. Task Force Taffy 3, the primary target, was composed of destroyers and "escort carriers," small aircraft carriers converted from merchant ships. In spite of being outgunned, in a battle that saw an aircraft carrier being sunk by gunfire and the first Kamikaze attack, the American forces managed to defeat the Japanese and force them to retreat, at great cost to themselves. Halsey's diversion was successful in destroying the remaining Japanese aircraft carriers, in spite of the great risk to the landing. The Japanese Navy was not destroyed, but it never was a threat again, and thus the book was closed on the once mighty Japanese Imperial Navy, less than three years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Hornfischer's history is a highly readable narration of the battles. His style is easy and light, with effective description of the broader situation as well as the finer details that convey the horror of the war. His research included many interviews with American survivors, and his thoroughness is apparent. He tends a little to the melodramatic and poetic, but I expect some readers would view that as a virtue rather than an annoyance. His only real flaw is a tendency to include names and backgrounds of individuals who end up playing no great part of the action; there are hundreds of names to keep track of, and it would have been easier to remember the key players if so many bit players hadn't been cluttering up the narrative. I would have liked to have read some accounts from the Japanese perspective, but Hornifischer primarily uses Japanese sources to corroborate or fill in gaps in American sources. His aim is not to provide the authoritative history, but instead to tell a particular story. At this, he is successful.
1 Strictly speaking, that's an assertion rather than a fact, as there have been no significant naval battles since then.
After my scare last month with almost losing a few years of photos, I set up Jungle Disk to back up my important files over the Interweb. Jungle Disk uses Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) to store arbitrary amounts of data at multiple geographically separate data centers1. It's a lot more reliable than anything I could piece together myself, and it's trivially easy to set up. Of course, uploading 20-odd gigs over my simple Road Runner connection means I'm not going to have a full backup completed until, oh, next Wednesday, but after that...
1 I wish I could work on something that cool at my job.
Are confirmation numbers really confirmations, or are they just record keys? That is to say, how does a confirmation prove that I paid my gas bill other than to uniquely identify my payment record? If their database farts and my payment record gets lost, is my confirmation number worthless? My guess is yes. What they really need to do is cryptographically sign a receipt at the time of payment that I can hang onto. It won't prove that I paid, but it can prove that they said I did, which is good enough for me. I suspect most people haven't thought about what a confirmation number really means, otherwise they'd realize that it probably doesn't confirm much of anything.
Bruce Schneier has a fine essay attempting to bring some sanity to way politicians and the media freak out about so-called terrorist plots that are not really any threat at all.
Before you watch this video, be warned that it will ruin the end of "Once Upon a Time in the West." I don't like Arcade Fire's new album as much as I like "Funeral," but "My Body Is A Cage" is a great song, and making it the soundtrack of this scene is pure genius.
This essay from the American Enterprise Institute isn't the first time I've heard the collapse of oil prices in the 1980s being the real reason for the collapse of the USSR, but it's certainly the most thorough. It was written by a former cabinet minister under Yeltsin, which gives it some added weight. I think it's especially noteworthy because one might assume that the AEI would be interested in burnishing the legend of Ronald Reagan.
I recently read "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger," by Marc Levinson. Sounds kind of boring, huh? You might be surprised. While it certainly drags in places, it's a pretty interesting story. This is a book intended for a popular audience, and it generally hits the mark. There could have been less information about various political and regulatory developments, but much of that was essential for demonstrating both the resistance and then the transformation wrought by the shipping container.
50 years ago, if you wanted to send 50 bags of coffee across the ocean, someone would walk each back one by one onto a freighter and find somewhere to stick it. The process was unbelievably inefficient. Goods would take more time to be loaded and unloaded than they actually spent on the ocean in transit. Then there were the union rules and interstate and international commerce rules, which might be enough to turn anyone into a laissez-faire capitalist. For instance, if the longshoremen received a palletized shipment for transport, they would unpack the pallet on the dock, repack the same shipment onto the same pallet, and only then load it, billing the shipper for the extra time. The Interstate Commerce Commission in the United States had books of rules about how much truckers, railroads, and cargo ships could charge for each commodity, and which routes they could take; a trucker couldn't take an alternate, shorter route from Nashville to Atlanta unless his company had the rights to that route, and he had to drive the truck back empty if they only had cargo rights in one direction. Needless to say, all of this had a crippling impact on efficiency, and thus a huge increase in costs.
The container was by no means a non-obvious invention. Various attempts had been made over a period of decades to rationalize freight, but ran into various obstacles due to (lack of) scale, political consideration, union resistance, or technological problems. Only in the late 1950s did the various factors come together with the drive and vision of one Malcom McLean, who wasn't even in the marine shipping business. Over the course of just a couple of decades, the container completely transformed the shipping business, with growth to match that of any high tech startup. The changes rippled throughout the world economy as land-based shipping and manufacturers adapted. That a computer assembly plant in Tennessee can put together Korean RAM, Taiwanese motherboards, German CPUs, and Japanese displays delivered yesterday to fulfill a $300 order today owes everything to the revolution of the shipping container. It ranks with the automobile or the telephone in its transformative effect on society, but unlike those other inventions, its impact was hidden from the public eye. Until now.
I saw a pair of these birds in my neighbor's yard this morning:
I also made a
larger collage of several images
that's too heavy to post on the front page. They're clearly some kind of wading bird; unfortunately, I wasn't able to get any shots of them in flight; they have impressive wingspans. I'd guess they were about 18 inches tall standing fully upright. I'm not sure how clearly you can see some of the details; they have a reddish orange rim around their eyes and a thin white crest. I've never seen them before, so I'm guessing they're non-local migrants.
John and I figured out that the unknown birds I saw yesterday are juvenile Yellow-crowned Night Herons. We initially thought it might be a Green Heron (which isn't very green). Austin is squarely in their range, while we're at the periphery of the Yellow-crowned Night Heron's range, but it seems like a pretty solid match. Maybe that's why they looked lost.
Iusedthewisdomofcrowds to help with the identification. I kind of feel obligated to get a Flickr account and upload my pictures now.
When I was a young lad, I made sport of killing the houseflies that gathered in our garage. I became quite good at it, to the point of using rubber bands to kill them from 5 or more feet away. There were three key pieces of information that allowed me to achieve such prowess as a hunter of flies:
Flies can see well in all directions except behind them,
It is possible to get close to a fly if you move slowly,
Most importantly, in order to get into the air from a surface, a fly will jump a few inches.
My standard technique for killing a housefly standing on a table then became to sneak up behind them slowly, position my hands to either side, and suddenly clap them together a couple of inches above. The fly would see my hands coming and jump into the air to fly away, just in time to get squashed. Eventually, I got sick of cleaning fly guts off my hands and learned to cup my palms; that way, most of the time I wouldn't smack the fly directly so much as stun it with the pressure wave from clapping (so I assume). Then I could pick it up with a paper towel and squish it cleanly.
We've had a lot of flies in our house lately. These flies are a little less cooperative; they tend not to land where I can get them. As a result, I've had to try to get them in the air. The most important thing when stalking prey is to never take your eyes off it. Close off the exits to make it harder for them to get away. That's because you'll probably miss on most attempts, and they're easy to lose sight of. Finally, rather than clapping at a moving target, I try to swat them out of the air using a rolled up newspaper or sometimes just my hand. Now, flies are rather light, so that's not usually enough to kill one. The trick is to hit the fly so it goes zooming into a wall or the floor. You'll hear a satisfying "thwock" when you do it right. Then you just pick the fly up and dispose of it. Be aware that the fly might just be stunned, so it may right itself and fly away. Then you have to do it again. This time, it'll probably be easier.
Let's suppose I was out late last night stealing cars, and my boss mentions I look tired. Suppose I make the following statements:
Antihistamines make me sleepy.
I am allergic to cats.
My neighbor has a cat.
My neighbor is out of town for a while.
I do not make the explicitly false statements "I am watching my neighbor's cat" and "I took an antihistamine." Did I lie?
What matters with a lie isn't the exact phrase used, but rather what a reasonable person would infer, and (to a lesser extent) what the speaker's intent was. People frequently use half-truths like the above to intentionally give a misleading impression without making any single false statement. However, it's not just about the statements in isolation, but their collective effect that makes it a lie. A lie isn't about truth or falsehood; otherwise we'd call a mistaken statement a lie. What makes a lie is the intentional attempt to deceive.
I wanted to like Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan," I really did. He just didn't write a good book. The premise is great, that our world increasingly dominated by rare events of great impact, which models based on bell curves just can't cope with. His thesis is that we focus far too much on the frequent, normal case when it's just not that important. As a trader, his strategy was to put most of his portfolio in very safe investments while investing a small part of it in a basket of risky investments highly levered to unpredictable, non-linear phenomena. An interesting insight he makes is that risky investments may be less risky than the so-called safe investments because their risks are out in the open. In other words, all companies have risk, but the risks to the safe ones are just harder to see
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The book's core idea is well worth exploring, but Taleb spends far too much time blasting the ignorance and closed-mindedness of the establishment, and far too little time supporting his argument with hard data. To be sure, innate in the ideas of "The Black Swan" is that data can only refute a hypothesis, rather than confirming one, but he can and does use that fact to attack the standard models of randomness. He just doesn't do it with any kind of rigor. Strictly speaking, you only need one data point to disprove a model, but if you want to convince people, you should do so with a heavy dose of evidence. As such, the book gets tedious when you realize there's no there there. It's all assertion. Sometimes that's all you can do, but don't waste your readers' time with your own grudges.
1 an instance of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
Shepard Smith, Fox News anchor, went to a Chicago Fox affiliate to help them improve their local news operation:
His tips for improving the show included adding more music, bigger graphics and a faster pace... "I'm not here to talk to you about journalism," one witness recalled him saying. "I'm here to talk to you about good TV."
Woot. I'm a potential victim of identity theft. IBM lost tape backups holding employment information, including Social Security numbers. Mind you, I haven't been an IBM employee for 8 years, and even then it was as a summer intern. *sigh*.
Uma's been learning about things that are Mommy's or Daddy's or her own. She'll point at one of her toys and say, "Uma's!" I feel vaguely uneasy about teaching possessiveness, like I'm raising some little materialist. I feel a little like I'm teaching her something bad.
You've no doubt seen that phrase on sticks of gum, or bottles of water sold in a flat pack, or any number of individually packaged items sold in larger packages. It's kind of a curious phrase. The intent is clear: they don't want people to buy the product at the bulk rate and then turn it around and sell off the individual items. That would undercut the retailers who already sell the same product packaged (and labelled) for individual retail sale. The reason it's phrased that way is simple: they can't tell you not to break it up and sell the items singly. Once you buy it, it's your property, and you can do whatever you want with it. The best they can do is the rather limp suggestion I quote above. It's probably not targeted at you so much as it's targeted at the retailers themselves.
I like seeing pictures of famous people when they were a lot younger than now. Matthew Perry and Christina Applegate in 1988, for instance. He looks kind of Kyle MacLachlan to me in that shot.
Daniel says I was wrong. The statement is about complying with regulations regarding the listing of ingredients, nutritional information, etc. Here's some corroboration. So now we all know.
According to the LA Times, a publicist said of her difficulty obtaining an iPhone for Cher, "Doesn't winning Oscars, Grammys and Emmys entitle her to move to the front of the line?" No comment necessary, I think.
