Silicon Valley Redneck

This seems... odd.

I spotted a suspicious, but attributed, statistic in this article, so I clicked through and found, indeed, this assertion:

CDC estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.

Huh.  if something happens to 1/6 of the U.S. population per year, you'd figure that, statistically speaking, it's happen to me every several years, right?

I never seem to come down with foodborne diseases.  Like, at all.  (The report doesn't seem to be including ill effects from, e.g., sugar overdoses.)

Am I particularly resistant, or is a substantial portion of the population doing something horribly wrong?  Eating raw chicken, say, or salad?  Not washing their hands like their mothers taught them?

(I also question the meaning of "48 million people" getting sick; is it actually 48 million people, or 48 million incidents, with some people being counted repeatedly because they get sick multiple times per year?  Since it appears to be a statistical extrapolation, I rather suspect the latter.  There's a big difference between "48 million people got sick last year" and "half a million people got sick 96 times each last year".)

Aw, it's all cloudy.

No chance of seeing the Super Blood Three Wolf Moon from here.

(Or whatever it's called.  Probably just as well it's hidden, anyway.  The cats wouldn't like it if I suddenly acquired wolf powers.)

Hmph.

Pondering things for later in the year....

When I start setting up shop, post-relocation, I'll want some manner of CNC machine tools.  Not necessarily a Tormach 1100-series right away; maybe some sort of benchtop CNC mill would make sense for fixturing and such, and I can worry about a proper mid-sized machining center later on.

Which points to maybe using LinuxCNC.  Which pretty much requires a computer with an actual LPT port, if we're playing stepper-driver.  How hard is it to find such things nowadays?

So I check Newegg.  The search functions don't allow filtering by availability of LPT ports.  Foo.

Not to panic, though; looking at embedded motherboard/CPU combos, the cheapest ones from ASROC - sorry, ASRock - have LPT headers.  Just have to round up the dagnab internal cable to bring it out to a DB-25.

I hope there's enough hobby CNCery going on to keep LPT ports alive on the low-end PCs for some time yet.  (Mind you, I might eventually create a motion-control-and-motor-driver board that communicates over USB or possibly Ethernet, with a big FIFO and internal timing so the PC doesn't have to worry about such details.  I never like to entrust timing to a PC.  Sub-millisecond timing belongs on a dedicated MCU; sub-microsecond timing belongs on an FPGA.)

Close, but...

Getting to the point where it'd be mighty handy to be able to confirm that my implementation of [protocol] in behavioral Verilog is in fact correct.  I only have the transmit side so far, but if I knew that was right, I could use it to test the receive side.

I could, obviously, capture the bit string on an oscilloscope (a DSO with a deep buffer comes in useful), or the baby logic analyzer built into the mixed-signal scope, or, hmmm.

I've got an impulse purchase here: a $10-ish, 8-channel USB "logic analyzer" pod, which is supported by Sigrok.  Which has various protocol decoders available!  Not, as it turns out, including the protocol in question.

Oh, well.  At least I have a handy way of grabbing a bit-stream into my computer for examination.  I suppose I could even write a protocol decoder for Sigrok, but I think that involves working in bloody Python.

And ToasterCo should be coming up with a lab PC with a [protocol] interface board and [customer]'s test software installed, Real Soon Now.  I'll be needing that soon enough, for testing my (eventual) implementation of the higher-level communication.

Thoughts on border security

Really, there's no need for that stupid upgraded border fence.  Look at all the proposed alternatives!

First off, instead of trying to stop intruders at the border, we can beef up verification for employment eligibility.  You know, that thing where when you apply for a job you have to present a little piece of cardboard with your name typed on it, bearing the words "NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION".  Because if the MS-13 gang members can't get honest jobs without showing their little pieces of cardboard, they'll totally stay home.

And then, being as how we're informed that something like half of the cross-border drug smuggling happens at official ports of entry, clearly we need to improve security at the ports of entry.  If we do that, there's no need to secure the vast stretches in between the ports of entry.

(Image via Wikimedia.)

Finally, we need to consider equipping everyone lawfully present in the country with a tracking collar, so that their presence and movements may be accounted for.  Anyone caught without such a collar can then be presumed to be unlawfully present, and summarily executed.

I'll just note here that only the first two have been officially put forth by actual politicians.  The third, though, is surely coming soon to a dystopia near you.

Surprise!

Someone tried the identical-twins test on various palm DNA readers.  (Via.)

Curiously enough, service-to-service agreement on regions of origin were not very good.

Even more interestingly, none of them did all that well at twin-to-twin agreement.

The first should be no surprise, really.  There's plenty of marketing hype to lead the unwary into believing that the genomancers can tell them exactly where their great-grandparents got on the boat, but, given the amount of migration and interbreeding that have gone on since our species emerged, hype is mostly what it is.  Sure, you can often tell at a glance a Swede from a Slav from a Spaniard, but trying to get much more specific than that, or to interpret ancestry in terms of modern national borders, is going to be largely speculation and showmanship.

It gets even more interesting if your ancestors moved around a lot, e.g., fled Basel in 1349, escaped from Würzburg in 1819, fled Odessa in 1883, and ended up in New York.

(Incidentally, looking just now at a photo of my great-grandfather who definitely came from Sweden: if I didn't know better, I'd think him a Serb.)

The second result, though, indicates that the tests themselves, and not just the interpretations, are suspect.  Has anyone tried submitting the same person's DNA multiple times under different names?

So, that Gillette thing.

No, not the outbreak of Gillette's Jaundice in France.  The dang-fool new advertising strategy centered around alienating the core customer demographic.

I wasn't buying any of their products lately anyway.  I've switched back and forth, over the years, between an electric face buzzer of one sort or another and a manual face scraper of some description.  (Currently, it's mostly the buzzer, for logistical reasons, sometimes using the scraper, dry, for cleanup.)

For a while I was using one of the Gillette multi-blade products, and Gillette shaving-cream-in-a-can.  But those blades are dang expensive, and a few years back I switched to a good handle plus basic double-edged blades, and (except when in a hurry) soap and a brush for DIY lather.

Some of the blades I tried (from an international sampler) were of various Gillette brands, from the factory in Leningrad.  Y'know how Lenin had a beard?  Yeah, if I were stuck with those blades, I'd grow a beard too.  Fortunately, there are other options.

And, for foam-in-a-can, the Wally-World store brand is just as good, and a bunch cheaper.  (This isn't always the case; some of their store-brand products are not so good.  But it's hard to mess up basic unscented shaving cream.)

So no point declaring a boycott;  I dropped Gillette long ago.

iSpork

Well... not exactly an iSpork... but...

Another totally bonkers product concept: a phone case with built-in fork and spoon.

Er.  The video doesn't seem to indicate what's supposed to happen to these "non-disposable" utensils after use.  Clip them back into their storage positions on the case and put the phone back in your pocket, food residue and all?

For that matter, do you really want to use eating utensils that have been riding around in your pocket all day?

Fact-checking: we've heard of it!

Insty linked to this here article at NewsWeak about someone supposedly being treated for alcohol poisoning, or maybe methanol poisoning, with massive doses of Beer!

Which, um.  Starts out not sounding right, and gets worse from there.

There are two types of alcohol—ethanol and methanol—both of which produce similar effects and are toxic to the body to some degree.

Er, no.  There are eleventy zillion different alcohols.  Chances are you have 2-propanol, for example, somewhere in your home.  Methanol, ethanol, and 2-propanol are the common household ones, but countless others exist.

However, methanol—whose chemical structure varies slightly from its close relative—is not processed as well by the liver and thus can be far more dangerous when it is consumed in relatively large quantities.

That's... not the way I remember it.

Methanol—which can be fatal in far smaller doses than ethanol

Again, not the way I remember it.  What do the respective MSDSes say?

Methanol MSDS:

Oral, mouse: LD50 = 7300 mg/kg;
Oral, rabbit: LD50 = 14200 mg/kg;
Oral, rat: LD50 = 5600 mg/kg;

Ethanol MSDS:

Oral, mouse: LD50 = 3450 mg/kg;
Oral, rabbit: LD50 = 6300 mg/kg;
Oral, rat: LD50 = 7060 mg/kg;

So, seems to be species-dependent, but for two out of three species characterized, ethanol is substantially more lethal than methanol.  The OSHA exposure limits are lower for methanol, but that's possibly because of the true horror of methanol.  See, the thing about methanol is that it damages the optic nerve, and it doesn't take a heck of a lot to cause permanent blindness.  Which is a whole bunch of no fun, and not at all a good thing to have happening in the workplace.

But it does seem that ethanol is sometimes used to treat methanol poisoning, so the article's premise isn't totally out to lunch.  Most of the explanation is, though.

Beer: it's not just a spaceship propellant anymore!

Hah!

Ever the deceiver, Ted Cruz has made a video purporting to tell how to grow a beard.  Pay him no heed!

One does not simply grow a beard.  One acquires a beard as a result of a freak transporter accident.

OK, so technically one already has the beard in an alternative universe, and it's the observer who has the freak transporter accident.

Logic rethink

Back to my quarter-baked implementation of [protocol], as needed by ToasterCo's customer.

I'm reminded that coding up serial-protocol implementations in Verilog tends to get sticky if one insists that the bit clock is the One True Clock.  (There are various reasons for this, at least one having to do with the presence of multiple state machines that I know aren't trying to mess with the same register at the same time but the compiler can't necessarily figure that out.)

Maybe I'll resort to using a high-frequency clock.  I'll have one available that's synchronous with the effective bit clock anyway, and using maybe a 4X-or-so clock ought to simplify matters considerably.

(Note that I'm trying for a decent level of clarity in the code, because I'm going to have to debug it and then, very likely, come back and maintain it some years hence.  Going to a 4X clock will limit future uses of this code to maybe 50 Mbits/s or possibly even less, but, given that the immediate application is well below 1 Mbit/s and projected future uses don't really need to run much faster than 10 Mbits/s any time soon, that's no big deal.  My current and future sanity, and the project schedule, count for more than notional efficiency in implementation.  Besides, I can always come back later and do it more efficiently.)

Update:  A re-rethink leads to possible solutions to the various issues, at least on the transmit side.  Now I need to try hooking the module up and seeing if it compiles (and then if it works, etc.).

Bad examples

Noted here, in an article on the opposition to Frankenfoods and such:

There are a number of topics—climate change, evolution, gun safety regulations—where the opposition to scientific findings is largely cultural.

Two of these things are not like the other.

Evolution is a well-established near-as-you-get-to-a-fact, which various imperfect but useful theories attempt to explain.  It's central to the modern understanding of biology.

Climate change is a political slogan which is utterly useless as a scientific concept.  (Note that the fearmongers always offer the same drastic actions to combat "climate change", regardless of the manner in which the climate is purported to be changing.)

Gun safety regulations is a purely political slogan, masking an agenda of total disarmament of the peasantry.  The specific measures being proposed at any given moment are grounded in aggressive ignorance of relevant facts, and promoted through blatant dishonesty about what is proposed and what will be affected.  Note that dang near 100% of the actual subject-matter experts here are on the side opposing what the author no doubt considers to be "scientific findings".

Afterthought:  I should note here that those who loudly proclaim their belief in evolution generally neither understand it nor accept its implications; for them, the word is merely a slogan marking membership in the International Community of Smart People™.

Further afterthought:  Really, there are plenty of examples of magical beliefs in the public square.  Command economics, for one: if only we had the right King, he could simply wave his magic sceptre and create prosperity for all!  And the ever-popular: the Government can mandate that cryptosystems be broken only for the bad guys and by court order, without compromising everyone else's security.

In which I agree with David French

I, too, noticed this bit in the WaPo interview with Bobby-Frank McLopez:

Does this still work? . . . Can an empire like ours with military presence in over 170 countries around the globe, with trading relationships . . . and security agreements in every continent, can it still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago?

French goes into some detail, here, about how we're not actually following those principles.

My thought, on seeing Bobby-Frank's blathering:  So, should we totally abandon our principles in order to be a more successful empire?  Or should we keep the principles, maybe heed Kipling's warning (not to mention Washington's), and not try to be a dang empire?

I'd go with restore the principles, lose the empire, and lose the bloated central government.

When I skimmed through the interview yesterday, the above-quoted paragraph was the only thing that stuck in my mind... other than a general impression that he's a "man" with no principles, no knowledge, no understanding, and, er, why are we listening to him, again?

Chestnuts steaming on a smoothtop electric range....

Yeah, well.  Shortly before Thanksgiving, I noticed bags of chestnuts at Trader Joe's, so I bought one, put it on the kitchen counter, and forgot about it.

Yesterday evening, my father tried roasting a few of them, to see if they were still OK.  They hadn't rotted, but, on the other hand, they came out fantastically hard and crunchy.  Like, they could be ground up to make chestnut flour, maybe, but trying to chew one up would be a challenge.

So now he's removed the shells from the last of the roasted ones, and is trying to steam them back to edibility.  We shall see how that goes.

I suppose if the steam trick doesn't work, the unroasted ones could maybe be planted, but how many chestnut trees do we need, anyway?

The fast food crock, again.

No, not the Crocs' fast food, AKA Zeeba.  Variations on this claim, which cropped up again yesterday in connection with the Orange Man's Horrible Fast Food Feast:

In large parts of the country, Evil Fast Food is the cheapest, and sometimes the only, option for eats.

Dude.  Maybe you should have taken Home Ec instead of Activism?

For one thing, fast food ain't so cheap nowadays.  Not around here, at least.  I don't know how much prices vary within a chain, but my last Taco Bell lunch cost close to ten bucks.  Yes, some of that was local taxes, and if the prices are set locally rather than nationally, they're probably driven up locally by the insane local cost of everything.  But even elsewhere, fast food is a significant drain on the budget.

For another, well, see above about Home Ec.  Learn to cook, and to shop, and by these I don't mean trendy cuisine and Whole Foods.  Learn Modern Peasant cooking, starting with rice and legumes (from the local EthnoMart, not an upscale store nor even Safeway; it's amazing how overpriced the little bags of lentils and little jars of spices are at mainstream supermarkets).  You can also find decent ingredients, and even prepared foods, pretty cheap at Walmart — yes, they have a grocery department there, not that you'd ever deign to check it out.

Assuming your time is worth less than minimum wage, you can save a bundle by fixing your own meals instead of going to McDonald's.  Any college student should know this; I certainly did, by the time I went off to college.  Alternatively, you could just eat food pellets (the 50-pound sack of Purina Bachelor Chow may be a joke, but Jerry Pournelle is reputed to have lived on monkey chow while in grad school).

"Forget it, Jake. It's the phone company."

So my father's e-mail is @att.net, and has been for many years... came with the U-Verse service, or maybe predates it.  Mail hosting seems to involve some weird hodgepodge of Yahoo and Prodigy and probably other dead on-line services.

Shortly after the beginning of the year, it Stopped Working.  As in, Thunderbird could no longer communicate with the POP server, getting cryptic error messages.

Well, it's still broken, so I've been investigating.

Looks like the old configuration is no longer valid, and hasn't been, really, for some great long time.  But it had been working.

The new configuration doesn't work either, and gets login errors (that take a long time to pop up, and sometimes suggest that it's the server that's at fault).

A lot of people seem to have had this sort of problem, on and off, over the last couple of years.

So I try logging on to att.net via the web.  I get:

For your security, your AT&T Access ID has a temporary protection lock.
To unlock it, reset your password.
(FL001)

Er... what?  Is the "temporary protection lock" what's been causing the trouble all along, or is it the result of my fiddling with configurations and having lots of login attempts?

Is it somehow related to a change someone reported, whereby Thunderbird was no longer considered a trusted client?

Anyway: I click on "reset your password", and get a redirect popup, which... entirely fails to accomplish the redirect.  It just sits there for-bloody-ever.  OK, so how about "I forgot my password"?  Same redirect popup, but this time it actually redirects.

And... I get "Send me a temporary password" and "Mail to current billing address".  Great.

I guess he should be able to check his e-mail again sometime next week.

Update:  Oh, this just gets more and more wonderful....

Joy got ahold of AT&T tech support and managed to get a password reset.  So now the e-mail is working again.  And!

There's an e-mail dated January 4th, and just now received, informing my father that his AT&T access ID has been temporarily locked.  Looks exactly like one of those scam e-mails that you're supposed to discard unread and definitely unclicked.  And, of course, since it was sent to his AT&T e-mail address, he couldn't get the dagnab message.

Brilliant.  Like, straight-out-of-Dilbert-grade brilliant.  In fact, I think I saw this gag in a Dilbert strip once, didn't I?  Wasn't exactly new, even back then.

What time is it, Eccles?

The famous Bluebottle question, and its answer, somehow came to my attention again within the past week.

And, naturally, the silliness rattled around in my brain looking for something to connect with.

Not that I'm about to do it right now... maybe a few months hence, life permitting... but with the new advances in flexible display technology, it should be possible to construct an Eccles Clock that would actually keep time!

(Yes, I mean something having the form of a piece of paper with the time written on it, and the time updating at regular intervals.  Maybe even in written-out form, e.g., "TEN MINUTES TO SEVEN".  We're not up to animatronic paper yet, but rapidly approaching it.)

Mind the terminology

Headline at Townhall:

Progressives Are Determined To Make Conservatives Out of Perfectly Fine Liberals

Er.

Thing is... today's mainstream American "conservatives" are in fact classical liberals.

Get past the hate'n'fear being pushed by the Progressives, go read National Review or similar, compare the "conservative" values on display with what liberals have historically espoused, and you won't see much difference.

(And by "historically", I mean "back in the days when judging people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character was not yet considered racist".)

And now for something mundanely different.

Out grocery shopping yesterday, I was inspired to buy about a pound and a half of chuck roast, cheap.

Comes this afternoon: whaddya do with chuck roast, anyway?  Apparently pot roast is what.  Been a long time since pot roast, and I've never tried cooking it.  So I look at some recipes, and proceed to ignore most of the details.

I'm not a fan of potatoes, so this'll maybe end up as paleo pot roast.  (But I'm not making it with real pot.)

Put the big enameled-cast-iron pot thingy on the stove, and set it heating up (also set oven at Fahrenheit; the various recipes didn't even vaguely agree on the number, so I just used the default of 350).  Slosh in some olive oil,  put some salt on the meat, and sear the meat for a while on both sides.

Chop up a large sweet onion and toss that in.  Then chop up a couple of leeks and add those.  Then most of a pound of baby carrots.  Some bay leaves.  A fair bit of smoked sweet paprika, since I have it.  A box of beef broth.  Stir, get it all simmering, remember that there are mushrooms that need using up, toss those in, stir again, and transfer to the oven.

About two and a half hours later, it seems to be ready to serve.  Needs salt, though.

With a bit of salt?  Fairly tasty.  Have to do that again sometime.

(And I still need to figure out what's on the menu for next Sunday, when there's a small family gathering.  Maybe see if Whole Foods has any of those small turkeys I noticed just ahead of some earlier occasion.)

Things that should be simple never are.

New ToasterCo project requires, among other things, some information in the version stamp that's not easily generated (in the required forms) by a Makefile nor a shell script.  Some needs to come from the filesystem (basically, stat on a couple of files), and some from the Subversion metadata (which I've historically handled with svnversion plus various invocations of svn propget plus a bit of sed.

Well, no problem.  I'll just code up a little Ruby script to extract everything needed and format it into a C source file with global variables initialized to the extracted / calculated values.  There's a Ruby client library for Subversion, right?

Argh!

Yes, there is.  Right there in apt-get land.  What isn't there is documentation.  I find some guy's proposal to improve the library.  I find something asserting that the library no longer exists.  (Neither of these, by the way, is visibly date-stamped.)  I find various references to using the library (referring, in some cases, to an entirely different one with a similar name).  But I don't seem to be finding any-dang-thing explaining what the Ruby classes and methods are.

Yes, there's some example code.  Well, test code.  Which was intended to test the library, not to illustrate the usage thereof.

Oh, well.  If all else fails, I can use svnversion and svn propget.  But it'd be really nice to have the whole thing integrated.