And it looks not unlike a snowy mountain on earth. Millions, perhaps billions, of these impacted earth in the early solar system and donated that snow to our planet.
No humans necessary at the destination (cough, asteroid return). It seems to be enough for humans to build the robots and analyse the data sent back by the robots. How much would this mission have cost if humans went?
In other news, the on-site doctor at the scientific facility near me, where something north of 40% of the workforce has a Ph.D, has sent out two emails now encouraging us to get a flu shot because we wouldn't want the symptoms of the flu (which you might get) with the symptoms of Ebola (which you will not get). Sigh. Continually advancing the theme of people can be really smart, and amazing, and really kinda not.
I give it six months [1] before Amazon launches Amazon Purse [2]. Then Microsoft with Windows OLPv3.1 [3].
[1] one Friedman unit in warfare, but an eternity in internet time
[2] Pay and Wallet have been taken
[3] On Line Pay
Nurse who attended ebola patient gets on a commercial flight with a fever. CDC tells her it's okay. The hospital she worked for fails at even basic PPE measures, as does the county health department, who send unprotected LEOs and others to quarantined apartment. MSF doctor returning from attending ebola patients takes NYC subway and goes bowling. MIT CS graduate sends username and password in email.
These are the smart people. We are basically jumped-up savannah primates, instinct tops intelligence every time, and our brain makes up stories to justify the stupid things our bodies do after the fact.
The way evolution works is to make things just good enough to be better than the rest (it should be called survival-of-the-just-a-little-bit-fitter), but absolutely no more, because 2nd law of thermodynamics. It takes energy. So we are just exactly as smart as we need to be, and not even a little bit more.
Yep, still doomed.
I was literally just thinking I hadn’t had a flat in a long time. As I pulled away from the intersection, my tire was completely flat. One second full, the next empty.
There’s one in every car, you’ll see.
Like the local hardware stores (ahem, Berg Hardware Store – good riddance), the local bike shops are going to drive themselves out of business. They don’t even need online stores to do it, but that’ll help.
Steve’s $75 tune-up cost me a $300 wheel-rebuild. He ripped three spokes out of the rim overtightening them. Oh yeah, I bought another set of wheels to use during the two weeks it was going to take to get the parts in and get it rebuilt, so that’s another $350. At least Incycle threw in the tires.
Helen’s Arcadia wasted a week and two trips not tuning-up my bike. I called to see if it was ready after a week, they said yes, then when I got there, they told me they hadn’t had time to work on it. At least that only cost me a week on the bike and three hours going back and forth. Well, then another two trips someplace else getting it tuned up. But then I guess it was still cheaper than Steve’s.
Today, I went to Pasadena Cyclery to see if they had a bike seat, and the fellows behind the counter, who were doing nothing except popping bubble wrap from a new UPS box, got into an argument about who was going to have to help me. I walked out while they were hashing it out.
The guy at Incycle at least knocked off 15% for a three year old seat that might or might not fit… I get a week to try it.
I also bought some new tools to do the work on my bike myself. I used to do this all the time when I was student. It’s not difficult, just time-consuming. I’d rather pay someone else to do it. But given the last three experiences with letting someone else work on it, I’d be better off putting the drive time and money into doing it myself again.
He told them what he was going to do, and how he was going to do it.
Oh, wait, that’s the Babe calling his shot. Here’s SJ in 2007, calling his shot:
SJ took Alan Kay’s dictum seriously, unlike Microsoft, and Dell.
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
And ahem, Samsung. “Samsung Electronics forecasts 60% fall in quarterly profit”, if you don’t want to drill down. But you should read this, the next time someone starts talking about “market share.” And remember Dell, and Gateway, and IBM…
Google and Amazon are trying, but they have big mountains to climb.
The opposite can apply too – witness Nikon, Canon, Sony. Basically any camera or TV manufacturer. Good hardware, crappy software.
Interestingly enough, Kay also said this:
Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn’t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years.
Which is interesting, considering this.
What it says on the tin:
I work with a bunch of really computer literate smart guys. Advanced degrees from well-respected universities with TLAs for names, program FPGAs, get poached by Wall Street regularly. Literally computer rocket scientists.
Yet it is not uncommon for them to email me saying “Username xxxxx/password yyyyy doesn’t work anymore. Can you reset it?” And most of the time it isn’t a problem with the authentication, it’s something else.
So these brain surgeon computer scientists just sent their username and password in the clear over unsecure, unencrypted email. How do we expect your grandmother, or any J Random User to do better than these guys (and they’re all guys), who should have a pretty good understanding of computer security?
It’s hopeless.
I listened to Neil Young exactly once, Spotify. Once! Otherwise, I’ve only used Spotify to listen to new music incessantly, looking for the next Mountain Goats or Best Coast or National or or or anyone from this millenium. Anything new.
So why is it that every notification I get is about Neil Young or CSNY or some other 60s band? And it was new Neil Young! I just wanted to see if his new album matched up to some of his brilliant latter work (it didn’t).
I’m pretty sure there was Seinfeld episode about this… except it was Tivo. And sadly, that was in the 90s, 20 years and a previous millenium ago, and still, predicting human likes and needs seems not to have improved.
I bought two pairs of these bike gloves on Steap and Cheap in September 2007, $28, after my former Olympian bike racer friend convinced me it wasn’t sissy to ride with gloves:
“It’s not for padding,” she said. “It’s for the inevitable road rash. You want to be able to use your hands to change the bandages on the rest of you.” [1]
I ride my bike 10 miles per day, 9 days every two weeks, every day that it doesn’t rain or that I’m not sick or on vacation, so about 2000 miles per year. That’s 14000 miles on those gloves.
I would have changed them out about a year ago, but I stoner-stashed them in a box in the garage and only just found them yesterday! I was also too damn cheap to buy a new pair when I knew that I had a pair in the garage.
[1] Crashes are also the reason to shave your legs, but it took me a while longer to get around to that. I’m not racing anyone, so wind tunnel results don’t matter much to me.
The head of the CIA, a position that requires Senate approval, declines to answer questions from the Senate about his agency’s spying on the Senate.
Yet subpoenas will not be issued, contempt citations not issued, the sergeant-at-arms not called, U.S. Marshalls not sent to compel attendence at hearings.
Laws will not be passed, funding will not be cut to the agencies that refuse to allow oversight.
The CIA will continue to be incompetent in discerning the intentions of our enemies, e.g., gobsmacked by ISIL, but very competent in having blackmail information on members of Congress, which is all that matters.
In other news, the big plan is to arm Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. This should go well. About as well as training the Iraqi army, and arming them.
If you’re using CSS to write one of these way cool Medium-like pages that takes 10 seconds to load after you click on the URL while it’s doing all it’s CSS stuff, or makes you have to figure out how to scroll down, or disables the space key, or waits to load until I’ve scrolled down, you suck and you’re doing it wrong.
It’s the modern equivalent of the blink tag. It’s annoying for no reason, and it slows everything down, and it will get you an command-W quicker than you can load the page.
Phantom read
There’s phantom ring – you imagine that your phone is vibrating. There must be some name for the phenomenon of phantom read. You glance at the subject line of a complex technical email on your phone, and you think that you’ve read it. But you haven’t really.