Show, don’t tell, they say.

Seen here.

Too smart

“We are partially blocked in China and other places and we were in Iran as well,” he said. “The most productive way to fight that is not by trying to engage China and other governments whose very being is against what we are about.” — Evan Williams, Twitter CEO — Twitter working to thwart censorship

We need men who understand that in the government, but those men are too smart to enter politics.

Tonight’s full moon is a blue moon, if you define that as the second full moon in a calendar month. Notice the qualifier, “if you define that as…” Like anything involving the calendar and time-keeping, this is complicated. A blue moon on new year’s eve happens every 19 years, within a couple of hours, according to the Metonic cycle.

“Blue moon,” other than the moon looking blue in color, was first written in 1821.(Oxford English Dictionary 2ed, 1989) It then meant ‘a long time.’ As a name for a particular moon, like ‘harvest moon’ or ‘first full moon of spring,’ it’s probably not much older than 1937, when it appeared in the Farmer’s Almanac.

The definition used today is from 1943. The author of an article in Sky and Telescope misunderstood the Farmer’s Almanac, thinking it had defined a blue moon as the second full moon in a calendar month. That’s the definition of ‘blue moon’ used today.

The 1937 Farmer’s Almanac attributes ‘blue moon’ to monks is olden times, but I think the writer made that up.

Can a wind-driven vehicle travel down-wind faster than the wind? Doc says yes.

At least that’s what I think today. “The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab creates insight into how computing products — from websites to mobile phone software — can be designed to change what people believe and what they do.” Right. What could possibly go wrong?

• The headline, with my emphasis, is
  

  Bagged salad safety: Rising threat of food-borne illness lurks in convenient packages of leafy greens. Leafy greens are the riskiest food regulated by the FDA, researchers for nonprofit center say.

  That’s contradicted by the second paragraph of the article, “Though beef and poultry are a more frequent source of food-related outbreaks than produce, the number of outbreaks tied to lettuce, spinach and other leafy greens, whether fresh-cut or whole, has been rising over the last two decades, according to the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest.”

• Judge expunges Mel Gibson’s drunk-driving conviction Never mind.
• Opting Out of Medicare? “The response of the Obama Administration to this lawsuit is revealing about its principles, as opposed to its rhetoric.”
• Placebos work better than they used to, but for some things see a doctor: What To Do If You Get Sick: 2009 H1N1 and Seasonal Flu

Carbon-free sugar

• Video appears in paper magazines – ad-blocking glasses soon to follow, I hope.
• Even after more than 1250773200 seconds, “Unix is the best screwdriver ever built.” — 40 years of Unix
• Snorkel rice could feed millions. The snorkels grow out of the internodes.

The (otherwise very good) cell phone company has been badgering us for weeks about some kind of voice mail thing. The big upgrade is coming! Visit that one place before the deadline and follow the incomprehensible instructions! They’ve sent text messages; there was a self-destructing voice mail; the postman brought an actual paper letter to the house.

At last came the great day. I made a half-hearted attempt to follow the instructions in the letter. I failed somehow, and didn’t peruse it. This afternoon I got a text message. My upgrade has been canceled until further notice.

Well, it wasn’t my idea, and they weren’t paying me to do it, so that’s fine, except for the part about further notice. What next? Will they send a telegram? Or a “lank unkempt elderly gentleman with a megaphone?”^* Get Ready! Two o’clock and two hours to go! Dial star blah blah! Personally I’m hoping for the Goodyear Blimp.

^*The Get-ready Man, from My life and Hard Times, by James Thurber

• So You Want to Buy an American Car? Well, buying American is complicated. Here’s my proposed rule: Any sufficiently complex product is made everywhere.
• Changing the summit of math education? It’s a good idea. Instead of trying to teach everyone calculus, let’s try to teach everyone statistics. The traditional math sequence has come to be more about filtering than teaching. It’s a good system for identifying and training engineers, not so good at producing educated citizens.

• Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2009 Results are out.
• Scientists see no dietary benefit to replacing corn syrup with sugar, but I still think it’s creepy how it’s in everything. At least I know what sugar is. Besides, it would just be wrong spread lardand high-fructose corn syrup on your sody crackers.
• Like he says, Wolfram|Alpha is creeping into my workday. Lately I’ve used it at about once every day. It does more than you might think.
• Epic fail, then onward to health care and climate change!

Christians protest ‘Dante’s Inferno’ while giant luminous squids over-fly Paris! President Obama to save or create 600,000 jobs!

• At the store the other day I scanned the shelves for prunes. It took a few extra seconds, my eyes first passing over the “dried plums.” The next marketing frontier is lard. It may be poised for a comeback, like eggs years ago. Remember eggs? “Poison! A heart attack in a shell! Oh, no, they’re okay; never mind.” So lard could return to respectability, except for its name, “Lard“; that disgusts even me. “Bacon butter” is worse. I can’t imagine what the marketeers will come up with, but American ingenuity will triumph.
• Does Wolfram|Alpha make the graphing calculator obsolete? Considering how easy it was to type in 0.125x^2-2y^2=1, we can hope so. — Wolfram|Alpha and the shrinking future of the graphing calculator
• Now we’re paying lobbyists to lobby us? At Government Motors, the adventure begins.
• Obama reaches out to the Muslim world? Words fail me.

Why?

It’s a really bad idea for NASA to go back to pounds and feet. Metric road signs would be a nuisance here in the US, and I don’t want to have to figure out what a kilo of apples is. But out in space, like on the International Space Station, everyone needs to use the same units.

As soon as I read the words solar-powered attic fan I knew it was a good idea.

A nice little theorem. More here.

…including a set of magical “hex” keys

In the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, a Turkish border guard saw some Latin letters on the side of a shipping case. “What does that say?” he asked the importer. “This machine makes 1500 revolutions per minute,” the importer replied. “Well then you’re not bringing it in here,” said the guard.

That was a hundred and fifty years ago. Today, a judge issued a search warrant partly because the suspect used one of those new-fangled command prompts.

Hopefully it’s okay to have a Torx screw driver. I mean, nobody should have to have one, but the man who goes to jail should be the inventor of the wretched things, not me.

Does the Earth go around the Sun because it’s constrained by the law of gravity? Not exactly.

“The Solar System is a deduction, and doubtless a true deduction; but the point is that it is a very vast and far-reaching deduction and therefore [Man] forgets that it is a deduction at all and treats it as a first principle. He might discover that the whole calculation is a mis-calculation; and the sun and stars and street-lamps would look exactly the same. But he has forgotten that it is a calculation, and is almost ready to contradict the sun if it does not fit into the solar system.” — The Everlasting Man, by G.K. Chesterton

“I kind of went overboard with it. But you have to admit, it’s pretty amazing, right?” One Man, One Long List, No More Web Ads

Right. Thanks, Rick752.

Extreme Sheep LED Art – Better than crop circles. h/t

My wife went downtown and got our land-line telephone disconnected the other day. The person behind her in line did the same thing, so it looks like tough times for the phone company. But since we have cell phones like everyone else, it was hard to see the point. This morning I checked, and there was no dial tone.

The monthly bills were small, for both the local telco and the long distance provider, but it saves a few dollars. Three calls out of four were wrong numbers, people asking for money, or someone I didn’t want to talk to; no reason to pay for that. A benefit I hadn’t thought about is the simplification of having two fewer vendors to deal with every month.

There’s no longer any need for the answering machine or the two telephones, so I unplugged those. They’ll go in the box with the modems, and I’ll use a few pennies less electricity. Though maybe that will be offset by the need to more frequently recharge the cell phone. Still, I could recharge it at work, make The Man pay for it. That would go well with my strategy of taking in bottles of water, putting them in the freezer in the morning, and then taking the ice home at night. But I digress.

There’s no more need to maintain the indoor wiring. More accurately, there’s no more need to put off maintaining it – and hey, procrastination wins again!

Could I make the phone company take away their wire from the curb to the house? I don’t bear them any ill will; they were as non-bad as a phone company can be; way less annoying than the cable company. Still, it might be satisfying to say, “Hey, you guys left a bunch of wire and stuff when you disconnected my phone. When are you coming to pick that up?”

UPDATE: It’s icing on the cake that I’ll no longer be paying ten bucks in taxes and fees every month.

or at least the mute button

…the only alternative is to understand everything that’s going on, and then neutralize it as much as possible, turn off as many buttons as you can, and frustrate them as much as you can. I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me. Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it. The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I’m resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button. — Marshall McLuhan

I have a faucet that does the same thing.

The other day I bought some LED light bulbs to replace the incandescents in a light fixture. The light was on most of the day and evening until I went to bed. When I got up this morning, the bulbs were glowing faintly – one brighter than the other four. I removed one of the bulbs and it and the others continued to glow. It doesn’t look like phosphorescence; they seem to be on, but at low power.

It’s not a problem in this particular application, but it would be in others. When I turn a light off, it should go dark. If they can’t make that happen, the manufacturer should market it as a feature – “New, Afterglow® technology!” – and charge a dollar more.

UPDATE: Less than three months later, 2 of the 6 that I bought have stopped working. Whether because they’re junk or because my old house’s wiring is bad I don’t know. But it’s something I’ll have to take into account. They also had a depressing blue tinge, and were far dimmer than the package claimed – almost unusable. I’ve put the rest in some little-used fixtures. I’m going back to incandescents for now.

“This outcome was not anticipated at the outset.” Words to live by, from Google & the Future of Books. “If Google makes available, at a reasonable price, the combined holdings of all the major US libraries, who would not applaud?” Well, I’ll tell you who:

Why you can’t find a library book in your search engine. Mostly because Worldcat is evil, according to the Guardian. Of course they don’t come right out and say it. I can’t help thinking, if you could type in the title and Google told you the nearest library, the Guardian would think that was evil.

UPDATE: As Doc Rampage notes in the comments, The Guardian added at the top of their article a paragraph where they completely climb down, saying they “misrepresented a new record use policy, etc.” It’s to The Guardian’s credit that they admitted their mistake, and did so prominently.

Meanwhile, you can still use interlibrary loan to borrow almost any book in the world for free.^* Or you can buy any book in the world on line and have it delivered to your house. Or go to the bookstore, sit in the comfy chair, and read a chapter a day. Or sit in the library and read. Granted, you have to leave at closing time.

^*Unless you live outside the city limits. Then, since you aren’t already taxed for the library like the rest of us, you have to pay for a library card to borrow books. Oh, the injustice!

The sestina is a verse form made of different permutations of some words about a subject. This, S_{|{e,s,t,i,n,a}|}, takes its subject from the form in which it’s written. Not surprisingly the author teaches math and does some research, when he isn’t writing poems. Not the kind of thing I’d find if I were idly surfing, so it’s nice that Michael Lugo chose to post it on his weblog.