29/06: We are amused
… us latte-sippin’, hybrid-drivin’ granola eaters here, that is.
Now I know, speaking as a guy who actually does now own a hybrid (besides a smallish, standard, insanely fuel-efficient subcompact), and who pretty much always has driven cars you can pretty much squeeze into yer man-purse next to yer skinny latte and yer Birkenstocks and carry into the health food store with you enroute to your consciousness-raising session, my saying to the sort of folk who keenly feel this sort of pain that it really ain’t so bad is exactly no comfort to them…
But honest, it isn’t. Really.
And, full disclosure, yes, I can even agree it’s a little sad in its way, the lingering death of the overly heavy road monster. I did, parking the Prius next to someone’s FJ cruiser yesterday, briefly think to myself: yep, those do look like fun, all right… Where are the Jeep and its driver? Where is the horn that was blowing… All gone…
But ah well. What ‘re ya gonna do. The era, she is ending. Hand me my electric scooter and a tiny white helmet. Mebbe with little pink flowers on it, sorta like Steve Dallas’ new car has…
Now I know, speaking as a guy who actually does now own a hybrid (besides a smallish, standard, insanely fuel-efficient subcompact), and who pretty much always has driven cars you can pretty much squeeze into yer man-purse next to yer skinny latte and yer Birkenstocks and carry into the health food store with you enroute to your consciousness-raising session, my saying to the sort of folk who keenly feel this sort of pain that it really ain’t so bad is exactly no comfort to them…
But honest, it isn’t. Really.
And, full disclosure, yes, I can even agree it’s a little sad in its way, the lingering death of the overly heavy road monster. I did, parking the Prius next to someone’s FJ cruiser yesterday, briefly think to myself: yep, those do look like fun, all right… Where are the Jeep and its driver? Where is the horn that was blowing… All gone…
But ah well. What ‘re ya gonna do. The era, she is ending. Hand me my electric scooter and a tiny white helmet. Mebbe with little pink flowers on it, sorta like Steve Dallas’ new car has…
28/06: File under 'thorough'
A funny thing went by a week or so ago: yer basic overly self-important moron had his ass handed to him in fine style by a researcher whose work he’d sought to impugn. The moron in question is just some not-terribly-bright wanker who runs a website—I’m not gonna deign to refer to him or his part in the story much—he hasn’t earned such mention, y’ask me, and I’m not so much interested in that admittingly amusing re-enactment of Godzilla vs. Bambi as I am other aspects of the story. As the antics of such self-aggrandizing clowns so often are, let’s face it, they’re really just distracting from the more interesting story, here. You want the lulz, read PZ or Phil or Candid World; they’ve got the letter and the blow-by-blow.
But man I really do have to say about this—about the research of one Richard Lenski and his lab: damn, people. Twenty years? Twenty years of running the same experiment, patiently plating and plating and splitting and plating and plating and waiting and watching? And at 31,500 generations, paydirt: a phenotypic change in the lab, under experimental conditions? One which they could then investigate even further—with cool additional experiments—and see also PZ’s very succinct explanation of what else they did, and why, and the ramifications for contingency, the significance of drift, and so on.
It underscores two things. One thing, evolutionary biologists have been pointing out a long time: these things take time, and they’re complicated, and phenotypic change is probably only very rarely about an isolated mutation—neutral* drift opening up a new opportunity is almost certainly generally a much bigger part of the story. It’s an incredibly good illustration, really (and, come to think of it, this might be one of the reasons a certain pathetic hack took a shot at this experiment in particular: it’s such a mighty refutation of a certain standard and probably deliberate distortion regularly heard from his camp, in which evolutionary biology is conflated with saltationism). What better way to point out the reality than to have that kind of insane patience, and actually hang around long enough to see it happen in controlled conditions?
The second thing: damn, but some people are diligent, thorough, and, again, incredibly patient. Y’know, my current work has projects that run of necessity for many years—silicon can be like that, and sometimes, ya do get a bit fatigued as tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow starts to creep in its petty pace—but geez—did you say twenty years? Kinda puts things in perspective…
(Oh, and to fruitcakes looking for research to attack, a word of advice: if yer gonna pick on anyone, don’t go after someone who’s just spent two decades on his experiment. ‘Cos, y’know, he might just demonstrate that same incredibly methodical thoroughness on his reply to you… I mean, geez, I’d have thought maybe you coulda seen that coming…)
Anyway. Here’s to one patient, methodical, thorough, positively Sisyphean researcher, and to his coauthors, and to his team, and to the incredible work they just did. That’s positively inspiring, right there.
See also the paper itself (PDF).
But man I really do have to say about this—about the research of one Richard Lenski and his lab: damn, people. Twenty years? Twenty years of running the same experiment, patiently plating and plating and splitting and plating and plating and waiting and watching? And at 31,500 generations, paydirt: a phenotypic change in the lab, under experimental conditions? One which they could then investigate even further—with cool additional experiments—and see also PZ’s very succinct explanation of what else they did, and why, and the ramifications for contingency, the significance of drift, and so on.
It underscores two things. One thing, evolutionary biologists have been pointing out a long time: these things take time, and they’re complicated, and phenotypic change is probably only very rarely about an isolated mutation—neutral* drift opening up a new opportunity is almost certainly generally a much bigger part of the story. It’s an incredibly good illustration, really (and, come to think of it, this might be one of the reasons a certain pathetic hack took a shot at this experiment in particular: it’s such a mighty refutation of a certain standard and probably deliberate distortion regularly heard from his camp, in which evolutionary biology is conflated with saltationism). What better way to point out the reality than to have that kind of insane patience, and actually hang around long enough to see it happen in controlled conditions?
The second thing: damn, but some people are diligent, thorough, and, again, incredibly patient. Y’know, my current work has projects that run of necessity for many years—silicon can be like that, and sometimes, ya do get a bit fatigued as tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow starts to creep in its petty pace—but geez—did you say twenty years? Kinda puts things in perspective…
(Oh, and to fruitcakes looking for research to attack, a word of advice: if yer gonna pick on anyone, don’t go after someone who’s just spent two decades on his experiment. ‘Cos, y’know, he might just demonstrate that same incredibly methodical thoroughness on his reply to you… I mean, geez, I’d have thought maybe you coulda seen that coming…)
Anyway. Here’s to one patient, methodical, thorough, positively Sisyphean researcher, and to his coauthors, and to his team, and to the incredible work they just did. That’s positively inspiring, right there.
See also the paper itself (PDF).
*Tho’, for what it’s worth, like so many terms in this space, I’ve always found the term ‘neutral’ as applied to such drift asks for confusion. Insofar as yes: such change is ‘neutral’ in that natural selection has had no bearing on the original emergence of those particular genotypic changes, and that change had no phenotypic expression at the time of its emergence—but in a larger sense, and the longer view, those particular changes in the genome were anything but truly ‘neutral’—insofar as they opened up that very opportunity and thus made such a difference later… Anyway, it’s the term that’s used. Shorter than ‘having no impact upon phenotype in the generations in which it emerged’, I guess.
23/06: File under 'redundant'
(… tho’ only in present circumstances.)
23/06: Well, fuck
Okay, maybe I should worry. Since, increasingly, this sort of thing begins to seem only right to me, really.
I mean, hey, if people are gonna make it that easy…
But I wonder if it’s a slippery slope. As in: today I’m bilking the marketing drone for $600 for a few short strands of copper, tomorrow I’m starting a ridiculous pyramid scheme/cult, calling myself ‘the admiral’, prancing around on a yacht, railing against psychiatry, ‘n generally making an ass of myself…
I guess I should probably resist the tempation.
But geez… six hundred bucks, huh?
I mean, hey, if people are gonna make it that easy…
But I wonder if it’s a slippery slope. As in: today I’m bilking the marketing drone for $600 for a few short strands of copper, tomorrow I’m starting a ridiculous pyramid scheme/cult, calling myself ‘the admiral’, prancing around on a yacht, railing against psychiatry, ‘n generally making an ass of myself…
I guess I should probably resist the tempation.
But geez… six hundred bucks, huh?
Okay. Yes, the title’s probably a smidge unfair. I’m sure there must be reasons to visit Barrie, Ontario. Yet strangely, I almost never have. I think I may have been there once in my life, despite having lived a few decades pretty close to it, a few decades back. It’s just one of those directions I didn’t happen to head much.
But we do now know there are a few folk, at least, there, who seem a few bricks short of a full load. So I’m not in a hurry to get there now, either.
I mean, right. A school called the CAS in on a struggling single mom… on the advice of a psychic. There’s a smart move.
This fascinates me a bit. It’s a funny thing, but I’ve often noticed how a lotta folk who profess to believe certain rather unlikely and unsubstantiated things do seem to put it all in a slightly different category than the stuff they actually have saleable evidence for. That’s to say, yeah, they may swear up and down on the one hand they believe in leprechauns and invisible sky daddies, really, and who are you to gainsay me, mister skeptic, when you can’t technically disprove my (clearly, deliberately, non-negatable ‘n nebulous) claims…
But most of those making such dubious claims of special relationships with invisible beings do still seem to know, on some level, which is BS and which is real life. They don’t usually actually, say, invest money on what the voices in their heads say. Or do much else they probably know well enough they’re likely to regret later. A telling thing, really, when you think about it…
But geez, the entertainment that ensues when they do.
A word to the wise: if you’re actually dense enough to pay a psychic money, their advice shall please be kept in a separate file from your lawyer’s advice, same place where most of the at least intermittently sane file it. Which is next to the round file on the floor next to the desk, in case you’re having trouble finding the spot.
That is all.
(Via this guy via this guy.)
But we do now know there are a few folk, at least, there, who seem a few bricks short of a full load. So I’m not in a hurry to get there now, either.
I mean, right. A school called the CAS in on a struggling single mom… on the advice of a psychic. There’s a smart move.
This fascinates me a bit. It’s a funny thing, but I’ve often noticed how a lotta folk who profess to believe certain rather unlikely and unsubstantiated things do seem to put it all in a slightly different category than the stuff they actually have saleable evidence for. That’s to say, yeah, they may swear up and down on the one hand they believe in leprechauns and invisible sky daddies, really, and who are you to gainsay me, mister skeptic, when you can’t technically disprove my (clearly, deliberately, non-negatable ‘n nebulous) claims…
But most of those making such dubious claims of special relationships with invisible beings do still seem to know, on some level, which is BS and which is real life. They don’t usually actually, say, invest money on what the voices in their heads say. Or do much else they probably know well enough they’re likely to regret later. A telling thing, really, when you think about it…
But geez, the entertainment that ensues when they do.
A word to the wise: if you’re actually dense enough to pay a psychic money, their advice shall please be kept in a separate file from your lawyer’s advice, same place where most of the at least intermittently sane file it. Which is next to the round file on the floor next to the desk, in case you’re having trouble finding the spot.
That is all.
(Via this guy via this guy.)
19/06: Creeping electronica
Personal digital audio devices, methinks, are either a bit scary, or a bit liberating, depending on how you see it. Got to thinking this the other night, fiddling with an app on a PSP.
Yeah, about that, I got one a few months ago. It was pretty durn cheap for somethin’ with a screen that big and that pretty, and which does such gorgeous video. Nice little thing to have for plane rides, which I’ve been getting more of, of late. Got one used at a game store in Mass. while I was down there, haven’t looked back. It really is a nice little convenience—especially on those insanely cramped little planes (Hello? I’m six feet tall? A lot of us are. Hello? Who are these seats actually designed for, anyway?) where pulling out a laptop just isn’t on…
Seriously, from a hardware point of view, this thing’s pretty crazy for the price. 480 x 272 pixels, and if you’re doing the math in your head, that makes it a 16:9 widescreen. Does a very, very nice job on transferred DVD video (timeshifts from a TV are a cinch, and look an awful lot better than they actually do on a typical SD screen), so on, if you happen to have transcoding stuff around, which I do. And then you add the fact that it’s got a wireless LAN radio (b, not g, but still, fast enough for audio, anyway) onboard, and it starts becoming pretty cool what you can do with it. There’s a built-in browser, battery life is five to ten hours of audio or video… okay, I’ll stop. I know. I’m gadgeting out, here. And I just said a little while ago I’m not so much of a gadget guy. Not sure I can legitimately say that, now.
Anyway. You may or may not have heard there’s this simmering feud between Sony (who makes the thing) and a whole cadre of clever folk who’ve been doing RE work on the firmware, then releasing their own, opening it up for FOSS apps. They call it PSP homebrew, and while Sony hasn’t been exactly nasty with anyone for loading the stuff on their unit, they have been trying to make it a bit harder with recent firmware updates—tho’ there’s ways around. My point is: to get the thing actually to play just any .m3u stream I felt like (as opposed to the somewhat limited set you get with the built-in player), you have to go knocking on the homebrew people’s door. Sony’s ‘official’ stuff wasn’t working for me.
So I did. It’s none too involved for those of us who’ve done a bit of h/w work, here and there, messing with the EEPROM on a battery to talk the thing into booting into maintenance mode, then getting the custom firmware on there. Then, that accomplished, I can load this neat little FreeRadio app, which allows me a lovely degree of customization. Mess around with some html and javascript, and you’ve got your own little stream player, with your own streams, displaying things how you’d like, so on. Fun stuff. With a wireless hub in range, you’ve got a pocket internet radio player. It doesn’t do the commercial, closed-source streams (like Windows media and Realplayer), but for anyone listening to stuff sent via AAC or MP3 streams, it’s a good deal. And there’s one whole hell of a lot of those out there, now. It’s this scarily huge digital audio world, really.
But about that title. I had actually to mute the sound on one of the demo videos that shows you how to do the h/w hackery to load the custom firmware. The audio was this really gratingly awful stuff—hard to describe, really—some sorta weird calypso-flavoured dance stuff with a vocal that sounded like maybe it was done by Alvin and the Chipmunks. And, needless to say, some of the commenters on the video had already noted this. Sample comment: ‘Why do PSP fanboys all have such awful taste in music?’
Funny thing. The radio player itself was a thing of beauty, but the pages around it, I felt, called for some attention. So I spent a bit of time the other night doing that—cleaning up the scripting, making the interface a little prettier. In the course of doing that, I’m messing around with the Shoutcast stream playlist, putting new stuff on it…
Shoutcast is insanely loaded with Europop/dance/trance stuff. An endless troupe of crooning, honey-dripping Lotharios and Lothariettes whose unnaturally smooth voices may, in fact, actually be entirely digitally synthesized, laid over crazy busy electronica and mashes of synthbass, synthdrums, synth everything. I clicked on the category page on a whim, starting adding stuff, partly to test the scripting stuff, partly just exploring…
And realized a few hours of hackery and testing later that I’d probably listened to several hours of the stuff. It was a bit like… y’know that feeling you get when you’re working, not really paying attention to what you’re doing, and you eat a whole bag of potato chips—not that you’d ever do that? It was sorta the auditory equivalent. My brain is stuffed with empty calories, and with scary chemical compounds human beings really aren’t meant to ingest in any quantity, and now I feel slightly ill…
So I begin to fear there is something slightly dangerous about digital devices. Had this not been on headphones, or had this stuff not been available (obviously), I probably wouldn’t have done this to myself. On speakers, probably someone would have come by and said: ‘What in @#$% are you listening to?’. And I woulda shut it off. I mean, come now. This just ain’t right. But on headphones, you can release your inner tastelessness. And okay, maybe that’s a bit liberating, too—I mean, there is some craftsmanship to this stuff, sure. Or some of it. And I probably wouldn’t be listening to any of it any other way. And I guess it’s nice there’s gizmos and networks like this that allow you to explore it without, say, polluting the airspace around you unnecessarily.
Still, it’s a bit scary. Is it maybe like potato chips—somethin’ addictive there, and you might just keep eating the damned things even after you know you’re actually poisoning yourself? And maybe the guy who made that hardware video is somewhere near the endpoint of this process. He wasn’t paying attention, and trance/dance ate his brain…
So I may add a feature to my scripts, reflecting this concern, now that I think about it. A warning popup that comes up:
‘WARNING: Your net radio has detected you’ve been listening to trance for four hours straight. It’s shutting off, now. Unless you tune to something played on instruments containing actual moving parts in the next 15 seconds…’
‘14… 13… 12…’
Yeah, about that, I got one a few months ago. It was pretty durn cheap for somethin’ with a screen that big and that pretty, and which does such gorgeous video. Nice little thing to have for plane rides, which I’ve been getting more of, of late. Got one used at a game store in Mass. while I was down there, haven’t looked back. It really is a nice little convenience—especially on those insanely cramped little planes (Hello? I’m six feet tall? A lot of us are. Hello? Who are these seats actually designed for, anyway?) where pulling out a laptop just isn’t on…
Seriously, from a hardware point of view, this thing’s pretty crazy for the price. 480 x 272 pixels, and if you’re doing the math in your head, that makes it a 16:9 widescreen. Does a very, very nice job on transferred DVD video (timeshifts from a TV are a cinch, and look an awful lot better than they actually do on a typical SD screen), so on, if you happen to have transcoding stuff around, which I do. And then you add the fact that it’s got a wireless LAN radio (b, not g, but still, fast enough for audio, anyway) onboard, and it starts becoming pretty cool what you can do with it. There’s a built-in browser, battery life is five to ten hours of audio or video… okay, I’ll stop. I know. I’m gadgeting out, here. And I just said a little while ago I’m not so much of a gadget guy. Not sure I can legitimately say that, now.
Anyway. You may or may not have heard there’s this simmering feud between Sony (who makes the thing) and a whole cadre of clever folk who’ve been doing RE work on the firmware, then releasing their own, opening it up for FOSS apps. They call it PSP homebrew, and while Sony hasn’t been exactly nasty with anyone for loading the stuff on their unit, they have been trying to make it a bit harder with recent firmware updates—tho’ there’s ways around. My point is: to get the thing actually to play just any .m3u stream I felt like (as opposed to the somewhat limited set you get with the built-in player), you have to go knocking on the homebrew people’s door. Sony’s ‘official’ stuff wasn’t working for me.
So I did. It’s none too involved for those of us who’ve done a bit of h/w work, here and there, messing with the EEPROM on a battery to talk the thing into booting into maintenance mode, then getting the custom firmware on there. Then, that accomplished, I can load this neat little FreeRadio app, which allows me a lovely degree of customization. Mess around with some html and javascript, and you’ve got your own little stream player, with your own streams, displaying things how you’d like, so on. Fun stuff. With a wireless hub in range, you’ve got a pocket internet radio player. It doesn’t do the commercial, closed-source streams (like Windows media and Realplayer), but for anyone listening to stuff sent via AAC or MP3 streams, it’s a good deal. And there’s one whole hell of a lot of those out there, now. It’s this scarily huge digital audio world, really.
But about that title. I had actually to mute the sound on one of the demo videos that shows you how to do the h/w hackery to load the custom firmware. The audio was this really gratingly awful stuff—hard to describe, really—some sorta weird calypso-flavoured dance stuff with a vocal that sounded like maybe it was done by Alvin and the Chipmunks. And, needless to say, some of the commenters on the video had already noted this. Sample comment: ‘Why do PSP fanboys all have such awful taste in music?’
Funny thing. The radio player itself was a thing of beauty, but the pages around it, I felt, called for some attention. So I spent a bit of time the other night doing that—cleaning up the scripting, making the interface a little prettier. In the course of doing that, I’m messing around with the Shoutcast stream playlist, putting new stuff on it…
Shoutcast is insanely loaded with Europop/dance/trance stuff. An endless troupe of crooning, honey-dripping Lotharios and Lothariettes whose unnaturally smooth voices may, in fact, actually be entirely digitally synthesized, laid over crazy busy electronica and mashes of synthbass, synthdrums, synth everything. I clicked on the category page on a whim, starting adding stuff, partly to test the scripting stuff, partly just exploring…
And realized a few hours of hackery and testing later that I’d probably listened to several hours of the stuff. It was a bit like… y’know that feeling you get when you’re working, not really paying attention to what you’re doing, and you eat a whole bag of potato chips—not that you’d ever do that? It was sorta the auditory equivalent. My brain is stuffed with empty calories, and with scary chemical compounds human beings really aren’t meant to ingest in any quantity, and now I feel slightly ill…
So I begin to fear there is something slightly dangerous about digital devices. Had this not been on headphones, or had this stuff not been available (obviously), I probably wouldn’t have done this to myself. On speakers, probably someone would have come by and said: ‘What in @#$% are you listening to?’. And I woulda shut it off. I mean, come now. This just ain’t right. But on headphones, you can release your inner tastelessness. And okay, maybe that’s a bit liberating, too—I mean, there is some craftsmanship to this stuff, sure. Or some of it. And I probably wouldn’t be listening to any of it any other way. And I guess it’s nice there’s gizmos and networks like this that allow you to explore it without, say, polluting the airspace around you unnecessarily.
Still, it’s a bit scary. Is it maybe like potato chips—somethin’ addictive there, and you might just keep eating the damned things even after you know you’re actually poisoning yourself? And maybe the guy who made that hardware video is somewhere near the endpoint of this process. He wasn’t paying attention, and trance/dance ate his brain…
So I may add a feature to my scripts, reflecting this concern, now that I think about it. A warning popup that comes up:
‘WARNING: Your net radio has detected you’ve been listening to trance for four hours straight. It’s shutting off, now. Unless you tune to something played on instruments containing actual moving parts in the next 15 seconds…’
‘14… 13… 12…’
17/06: Ah! Kill it, lion Jesus!
Actually, all of these strike me as reasonably competent summaries.
17/06: Ye gods, it's full of rocks
If this is Tuesday, there must be like another half dozen exoplanets in the catalogue already.
And yes, there are. COROT’s got some new prospects, a team using microlensing announced the discovery of another superearth ‘round a truly small primary (too small even to do fusion) about a week ago, and today, another team announced they’ve discovered a system with no less than three superearths in close orbits.
Highlights: (a) the extrasolar catalogue now lists 303 subsolar bodies (counting the not-entirely planetary exotics; other counts that don’t count these shave some dozen off that number), (b) the team announcing that triple system figure from their survey around a third of sun-like stars should have terrestrial-ish bodies ‘round them, (c) that microlensing find could, hypothetically, have a lower atmosphere warm enough for life sorta as we know it, never mind its extremely dim primary, and (d) the general ongoing result is: as techniques and instruments improve, the teams keep finding stuff all over the damned place, at the new limits that have become possible. There seem to be an awful lot of rocks out there. Once you come up with somethin’ actually up to the task of finding a given type of body in a given situation, you can pretty much count on finding one there.
There’s so much stuff (again) all over on this, it’s hardly worth linking. But I will call out this Newsweek blog entry which makes the now sorta obligatory comment about the ramifications for the Drake equation…
I’m calling it out not ‘cos I entirely agree with the sentiment*, so much as to point out the combination of the venue and the conclusion. All of this really doth seem to be mainstreaming the search for extraterrestrial life as a reasonably sensible area of research. Sure, it’s in the blog, not on the newstand cover, but still.
And yes, there are. COROT’s got some new prospects, a team using microlensing announced the discovery of another superearth ‘round a truly small primary (too small even to do fusion) about a week ago, and today, another team announced they’ve discovered a system with no less than three superearths in close orbits.
Highlights: (a) the extrasolar catalogue now lists 303 subsolar bodies (counting the not-entirely planetary exotics; other counts that don’t count these shave some dozen off that number), (b) the team announcing that triple system figure from their survey around a third of sun-like stars should have terrestrial-ish bodies ‘round them, (c) that microlensing find could, hypothetically, have a lower atmosphere warm enough for life sorta as we know it, never mind its extremely dim primary, and (d) the general ongoing result is: as techniques and instruments improve, the teams keep finding stuff all over the damned place, at the new limits that have become possible. There seem to be an awful lot of rocks out there. Once you come up with somethin’ actually up to the task of finding a given type of body in a given situation, you can pretty much count on finding one there.
There’s so much stuff (again) all over on this, it’s hardly worth linking. But I will call out this Newsweek blog entry which makes the now sorta obligatory comment about the ramifications for the Drake equation…
I’m calling it out not ‘cos I entirely agree with the sentiment*, so much as to point out the combination of the venue and the conclusion. All of this really doth seem to be mainstreaming the search for extraterrestrial life as a reasonably sensible area of research. Sure, it’s in the blog, not on the newstand cover, but still.
*Oh, re that sentiment at the end: I only sorta agree. Were I writing the budgets, no, a manned Mars mission probably shouldn’t really be the first priority right now, sure, but there are some sensible enough research reasons for going to the Moon at least—long as it’s not just a flag and footprints thing. Put some decent telescopes up there on the far side, hook ‘em up for interferometry with the Earth-Moon orbital distance as the baseline, and now we’re talking resolution. Yes, I do happen to think Dubya’s pretty much the epitome of wankerdom—and yeah, a ‘plan’ with no actual funding behind it is pretty much just yer standard dumbass politicking—but let’s keep the issues clear, here. There is some sense to setting up a lunar program, and possibly even a manned one, and never mind who’s saying it and why.
17/06: Say what?
So, what yer saying is this long-standing and putatively bad habit of mine might actually be good for the heart, on average?
Huh.
Well, this won’t do…
(Switches to crystal meth.)
Huh.
Well, this won’t do…
(Switches to crystal meth.)
… if they really don’t know whether they believe in anything or not*.
Seriously, check ‘em out. And I’m told that page is getting edited sometime in the next few hours for their brand spankin’ new release, in prerelease this very day**.
(*Rejected title: ‘I don’t know about these guys…’)
(**Updated: looks like they actually just updated it this morning—my time, anyway.)
(Updated yet again—see also Holly’s hellbilly post.)
Seriously, check ‘em out. And I’m told that page is getting edited sometime in the next few hours for their brand spankin’ new release, in prerelease this very day**.
(*Rejected title: ‘I don’t know about these guys…’)
(**Updated: looks like they actually just updated it this morning—my time, anyway.)
(Updated yet again—see also Holly’s hellbilly post.)
07/06: Ritual rose blogging redux
The roses are doing so well I’m entertaining putting a few more in. Been hacking away (painfully*) at turning a little more of the north lawn into garden, what with the fact that, apparently, I’m better at keeping flowering plants and shrubs happy on that exposure than I am at keeping grass alive, anyway. Last little bit I did was some daisies my daughter took to, a few other prettyish blooming perennials, and a globe cedar. Next patch I recover as garden, methinks, gets more roses.
You just can’t have too many roses.
*Yeah. About that. Fun facts about my north lawn: go six inches down, and it’s all rock. It’s this irregular, soft, sedimentary junk, probably shattered limestone. You may have this image of gardening as this leisurely, low-stress activity. My life is not like that. You want to grow anything, you need to make room for soil into which roots will grow. So recovering a four by four plot is a several day affair, and involves a massive rock bar, much pounding apart and extracting of this junk. I might be slightly better off using a jackhammer than the rock bar. Anyway: does anyone out there need a wheelbarrow full of stone? I happen to have some available.
03/06: Be careful what you ask for
So a colleague of mine was in town for a bit last week—and while exiting a restaurant at which we’d stopped for lunch, we were discussing l’affaire Bernier.
We got to the subject of how close to perfect the whole thing was. It had almost everything: sex, documents of interest to intelligence organizations, bikers, hell, even allegations of a bug in a bedroom. What more do you need? asks said colleague.
Car chases, I suggest. It needs a car chase. Otherwise, it’s perfect.
Ah, I’m so behind the curve. Wasn’t even thinking. No, no, a car chase mighta had a certain quality, but damn, what this story really needs is a mafioso.
Erm… Yeah. Just like that.
Perfect.
We got to the subject of how close to perfect the whole thing was. It had almost everything: sex, documents of interest to intelligence organizations, bikers, hell, even allegations of a bug in a bedroom. What more do you need? asks said colleague.
Car chases, I suggest. It needs a car chase. Otherwise, it’s perfect.
Ah, I’m so behind the curve. Wasn’t even thinking. No, no, a car chase mighta had a certain quality, but damn, what this story really needs is a mafioso.
Erm… Yeah. Just like that.
Perfect.
01/06: Fun wit' bit-bashing
Been fiddling around with x86 assembler a bit lately.
I hadn’t been in this space for quite some time. It’s funny—what I do is pretty close to hardware, most of the time, but strangely I haven’t been playing with this particular set of mnemonics in many moons. Chalk it up to the many other programmable beasties in my strange little part of the world and the fact that when we’re using x86 variants, its mostly for modelling other, more exotic stuff.
But here we go—for various not really discloseable reasons, I’m back playing with that relatively small set o’ general purpose registers, explicitly bouncing stuff around between ‘em and back and forth from RAM. And I got to thinking, whenever I come home to this land, how strangely simple it all is.
Yep. That towering stack of software, from the browser on your desktop right now (odds are, anyway, ‘less you’re running an older Mac or a non x86 handheld or some SPARC beastie or somesuch), all the libraries it relies upon, through the compiler and linker that put it all together for you, the editors that arranged the source that made them happen, your OS, all that rot, it all pours, sooner or later, through those four (or now 12, on the 64 bit variants) general registers, and handful of associated special purpose registers ‘n flags.
So I figure a brief, incredibly geeky toast is now called for: this is what it’s all about (in a vast majority of machines now, anyway): AX, BX, CX, DX and family.
In praise of great (or, at least, now incredibly ubiquitously supported) hardware. To the general registers on x86. Making the wired world go ‘round since 1978.
I hadn’t been in this space for quite some time. It’s funny—what I do is pretty close to hardware, most of the time, but strangely I haven’t been playing with this particular set of mnemonics in many moons. Chalk it up to the many other programmable beasties in my strange little part of the world and the fact that when we’re using x86 variants, its mostly for modelling other, more exotic stuff.
But here we go—for various not really discloseable reasons, I’m back playing with that relatively small set o’ general purpose registers, explicitly bouncing stuff around between ‘em and back and forth from RAM. And I got to thinking, whenever I come home to this land, how strangely simple it all is.
Yep. That towering stack of software, from the browser on your desktop right now (odds are, anyway, ‘less you’re running an older Mac or a non x86 handheld or some SPARC beastie or somesuch), all the libraries it relies upon, through the compiler and linker that put it all together for you, the editors that arranged the source that made them happen, your OS, all that rot, it all pours, sooner or later, through those four (or now 12, on the 64 bit variants) general registers, and handful of associated special purpose registers ‘n flags.
So I figure a brief, incredibly geeky toast is now called for: this is what it’s all about (in a vast majority of machines now, anyway): AX, BX, CX, DX and family.
In praise of great (or, at least, now incredibly ubiquitously supported) hardware. To the general registers on x86. Making the wired world go ‘round since 1978.
