Silicon Valley Redneck

More rumbles

That's two aftershocks today that were big enough for me to feel here.  A 3.7 at 1555, and a barely-perceptible earlier one, which I suppose must have been the 2.2 at 1241.

The 3.7 was almost enough to make me duck into the hallway (where the bookcases aren't). The lights flickered a moment later, too.

OK, if you didn't like the title...

...of that last post, then you should definitely not click here.

Harvest-season cornography

Happy Samhain, all!

I actually brought in the corn a few weeks ago, but didn't get around to a cornographic post until just now.

The thing about keeping seed corn from one year to the next - especially having started with random varieties - is that you never know what you'll get.

OK, now that was an earthquake.

The earlier thing must have been a premonition.  I must be (as my friend Michelle would have it) psychotic!  I should get a job with the Psychotic Fiends Network!

Anyway: 2005ish, definite big rumble, things start sounding unsafe.  I get away from my desk (and bookcases) and stand in the hallway while a box of clutter falls onto my keyboard, and, thence, to the floor.

Looks like nothing was actually damaged here, the power's still on, and life resumes normality.

Turn on the little magic talking box, and there's much chatter.  Stuff fell off shelves in grocery stores in SJ.

Local intensity here in Sunnyvale was comparable to the '89 biggie, but it sounds like the big picture is much smaller than that one.

Mmmm... earthquake?

Either there's just (about 1437) been a bit of an earthquake, or I had too many beers with my business lunch.

Unless "too many" includes zero, I'm leaning toward the earthquake hypothesis.

Update (1446): huh.  The USGS map just updated, and there's nothing recent and big enough and close enough for me to have felt it.  In fact, there's nothing at all close to that time, aside from a far-away 2.2 a few minutes later.  Maybe zero beers is too many.

Grandly nonsensical statement spotting

Slashdot links to this piece at Wired about the purported superiority of vinyl over CDs.

Grand nonsense:

Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound.

Yeah, right.  As Is Generally Known*, it's simply not possible to record constant-amplitude noise on vinyl.  The medium, like, totally forces the recording engineer to leave the dynamic range intact.

*Remember, kids, any time you see this phrase, what follows is a Big Lie.

Now, there's a stupid question for ya.

Reading an article at the NYT... and there's a sidebar plug for another article, entitled "What is the body's role in Diabetes?"

Er.

As opposed to what, exactly?  Last I heard, diabetes wasn't considered a spiritual ailment, except by some cephalopod-obsessed loon who appears to have difficulty counting.  So it's all in the body, innit?

Another test with answers that don't fit

So here's this "how liberal or conservative are you" test over at Blogthings (via that other Eric).

I didn't get very far.

Question #2:

Immigration policies

• Should be less strict. Immigrants enhance this country.
• Should be more strict. Too many people enter illegally.

Hmmm.  How about, Both and Neither?

I'm in favor of improved border security, and deporting illegals who are caught committing crimes.  (I'm not in favor of drastic measures to check the status of workers, and there are some illegals who probably ought to be allowed to stay - e.g., the ones who just have minor technical problems with their paperwork.  Zero tolerance is often bad policy.)

I'm also in favor of making legal immigration easier.  Look at all the hoops legal immigrants have to jump through to get a student visa, never mind permanent resident status.

So: I favor making legal immigration easier, and illegal immigration more difficult.  This is contrary to political trends, which favor making life more difficult for the ones who are easy to catch, and easier for the ones who make a lot of noise.

It's programming language time again!

I'll have a more-or-less-serious programming language post eventually, based on current activities.

For now, though I'll just note that I stumbled across an updated version of the "How to shoot yourself in the foot" list that's been making the rounds since Usenet was the hot new thing.

Curious.

During an idle moment (whilst awaiting word back from a client), I idly pointed Google Maps at Russia.

All the city names are in Cyrillic characters, with no transliteration (nor English names, where different) provided.

Chinese cities are labeled in Chinese, with transliterations.

Japanese city names are in Japanese, with no subtitles.

South Korea has no cities at all.  (Neither does North Korea, but They're Not On The Net.)  I can see them in the satellite view, but they're unmapped.

The various Lands of Right-to-Left Squiggles all have their cities labeled in the Roman alphabet, only, except for Israel, which has no cities.

Greece gets Greek city names, sans subtitles.  Thailand, likewise, except of course in Thai.

Fascinatingly inconsistent.

Gee.

Just fetched in the print edition of the morning Murky.  (Yeah, I'm getting a late start on the day.)

Front page: Mercedes is getting ready to unleash the Smart Fortwo on Silicon Valley.  Gosh, an itty-bitty two-seater!

Highway gas mileage is forecast as better than 40 MPG.

For a freakin' two-seat sub-clown car?

My 2002 Prius gets 45-53 MPG (sustained) on the freeway, depending on the gasoline, wind conditions, and how much of a hurry I'm in.  Seats four comfortably, five for short trips, and has a decent trunk.  The newer model is supposed to do even better.

The Insight is a dinky two-seater, but those supposedly get around 75 MPG.

I'm just not impressed with freaky small cars that exhibit worse fuel economy than my useful-sized sedan.

I wonder if we'll ever hear the rest of the story.

On my way to a client site yesterday afternoon, I heard a report on the radio of a Fremont neighborhood being locked down as police searched for explosives.

This morning, I find stories on line.  E.g., here, here, and here.

Not very informative, are they?

Police in San Jose stopped somebody, apparently for a traffic violation, and just happened to spot something in the vehicle that looked bombish; this led to a search of a residence in Fremont, which led to something being found and blown up.

So... are we talking terrorist cell here?  Or a semi-harmless hobbyist?  Or a complete misunderstanding, mayhap?

For all I know, the guy who was stopped might have had in the back seat of his car a liquid-fuel rocket engine he planned to install on a hang-glider, and the cops panicked, searched his home, and blew up an inert training round for a WWII bazooka.  (If this were Boston, I'd suggest they'd blown up an animated LED sign.)

Or he could have been a terrorist.  The news stories just tell us that SOMETHING EXCITING IS HAPPENING!!!... and then, afterward, that SOMETHING EXCITING HAPPENED!!!, but, somehow, never much actual detail.

Update, 27 Oct, AM: OK, there's a followup of sorts in the dead-tree morning Murky and on line.  Names are named.

There's a claim that there were actual explosive devices, but somehow it's not at all clear that there were explosives involved, other than those brought by the bomb squad.  Also, it sounds like the evidence was destroyed by the bomb squad, which seems a bit unhelpful.

The brother of the purported mad bomber claims that the Evil Thing In His Car was a gadget for turning household appliances on and off by cellphone.  OK, so if that's what it really is, and it's spotted by, say, a cop who's a military reservist fresh back from Iraq, I can see how a homebrew electronic gadget involving a cellphone would set off the "IED trigger" alarm, but, really, if it doesn't have that all-important 155mm shell hooked up to it, how is it an explosive device?

What's really going on here?  Were there any real bombs?  Why can't we get some competent reporting on stories like this?

Update, 30 Oct: More detail here.  Police are claiming actual explosives, of a sort.  Also sounds like the accused is one of those guys who are always getting in trouble.  Time to revisit the Police Squad episode entitled "The Guilty Alibi."

Now there's a silly question

Browsing randomly through the videos at Maniac World, I came across this one.

The accompanying snippet of text contains this question:

What the heck is a hyrax and why is this baboon afraid of it?

Well, duh!  While a hyrax may look, to the ignorant, like a sort of short-eared rabbit, it's technically an elephant.  Every baboon knows this.  Since elephants are much larger than baboons, the baboon is simply afraid the hyrax will trample him.

How to build your own Kaputnik

Slashdot links to an article over at Auntie Beeb entitled "How to build your own Sputnik."

The example they give features a baby monitor and a wireless router as radio transmitters, a mercury thermometer as instrumentation, and a cooling fan.

Er.

Yer basic mercury thermometer kinda lacks electrical connections, and I don't see a provision for pointing a webcam at it, so what good is it?

In order for the fan to do any good, the biscuit tin will have to be full of air.  Which means it needs to remain sealed, holding a fair bit of pressure.  I'm guessing biscuit tins mostly aren't designed for significant pressure differential, and it'll bulge when the outside pressure drops... unless it's sealed with reduced pressure inside... in which case it'll likely implode on the pad.

Also, if the biscuit tin is sealed, there's the small detail of how the radio signals are going to get out.  Hull penetrations for the aerials aren't addressed, but they'd have to be there, and they'd have to be sealed.

Picking up the signals from baby monitors and wireless routers at orbital distances is another issue entirely.  I have trouble getting a wireless-router signal to reach a couple of hundred feet, never mind 130 miles or so.  I suppose you could pick up such signals, with a big enough dish, aimed accurately enough, in a quiet enough neighborhood.  (There's a bit of a difference between a 1-Watt narrowband signal, as from Sputnik 1, and a 1-Watt broadband-modulated signal, as from a wireless router.)

(Apologies to Dave Berg for taking the name of Roger Kaputnik in vain.)

Stupid accounting tricks

My parents are off on their annual month-long vacation, and left me to check their mail and deal with the bills.

I just opened their Nordstrom bill.  Three pages to tell them that their balance is $.00, and they need to pay this $.00 by October 28th.  Oh, and one of those pages is used, in its entirety, to detail that there has been no account activity during this billing period, and their interest rate has been reduced.  (Not that they'd be paying interest in the first place, what with paying in full every month and all.)

You'd think invoice-printing software these days would be clever enough to recognize a zero balance and print the one-page version: "No activity.  No balance.  Nothing due.  Nothing to see here; move along."

Update: a few hours later, I've finally gotten the accurséd return-envelope perfume off my hands.

Silly random spam phrase

Some spam still gets past my filter.  Some of it is short messages with. e.g., one sentence of advertising and one random phrase.

The random phrase in the last one that got through last night is this:

You would probably find it as difficult to approach the President of the United States as the King of England

Well... not really.  Right at the moment, the President is much easier to approach than the King.  The President, at least, has tangible existence and a definite location.

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Those amazing folks up there in the Great White North have a cunning plan: tax legal, paid-for music downloads to help compensate artists for piracy.

This has got to rank right up there with Arnie's plan to make health care more affordable by taxing doctors and hospitals.

Well, if you buy certain DVDs, and watch them on legal players, you're forced to wait through an obnoxious "don't pirate movies" ad.  If you pirate those movies off Bittorrent, of course, you're not subjected to this.  I think the same logic is at work.

Another tinfoil failure

I had this idea about five years ago.  Maybe more.

That works out to... hmmm... the usual just about a year before somebody else formed a company to do it.

I gotta start patenting my bright ideas!

Quote of the day

Airlines, it seems, don't like cockroaches on a plane.

Well, yeah. Especially Atomic Mutant Cockroaches.

Yes, Pinky and the Brain have sent their minions to create an indestructible strain of nukeroaches as part of a complex plot to take over the world.  Or something.

(Story via Slashdot.)

Surprise!

Airport security screeners are reportedly missing the majority of fake bombs carried by undercover security testers.

Well, gee.  Do the fake bombs look like what security types seem to be looking for?  Do they have blinking lights all over them?  Great big digital clocks counting down?  Animated Mooninites?  Whirling gears?  Do they make distinctive beeping noises that get faster & higher-pitched as the clock counts down?

We need to make the terrorists read the same manual (or watch the same movies) as the security screeners!  Terrorist bombs should look like bowling balls with sputtering fuses, and should tick loudly.  Doesn't everyone know that?  Didn't the terrorists get the memo?