snousle

Well, Eagle in Exile was fun, but kind of overwhelming. I was not quite in the groove. Saw several people but didn't get a chance to talk to some of them as it got crowded very suddenly and I had to leave. I did, however, run into several local friends, as well as a hot biker I'd spent some time with at Sturgis a few years ago, and that was fun.

Had dinner with a friend at a Persian restaurant in Belmont, Shalizaar, that was really excellent. I was particularly excited by their little basket of fresh herbs, cheese, and walnuts that comes with every dinner. Their flatbread could use some work, but everything else was great.

Today, I spent the day helping Ted get things together in his house. His back surgery went very well but his heart remains a problem, and he's still too weak to do most housework type things. So I've been on my knees pretty much the whole day. (Scrubbing! Get your minds out of the gutter!) Unfortunately his garage is overflowing with tools and equipment brought down from Sonora, and getting it sorted out is a nearly impossible task at this point. If you know someone who wants to buy essentially a whole mechanics and light-bodywork shop, they can get a great deal on this.

I've been feeling kind of blah for a while but getting this place tidied up has been very motivating. It feels kind of good to have worked hard all day for a change. I need this sort of thing more often.

We finally got the loan I gave him secured against the house, by recording a notarized deed of trust at the county office. He won't have to pay it back himself, but if his heirs want to sell the house they have to pay it back with interest at the time of sale. At least, that's the theory; we had his lawyer draw it up so hopefully it's done right. The loan made it possible for him to move in here, and assuming the house doesn't go underwater, it's a minor moneymaker that I hope I won't have to collect on for a good while.

Back home tomorrow, I guess. I was thinking of running up to Sacramento where the aforementioned buddy from Sturgis is taking some sort of training course, but I don't think it's really going to work this time. Got some business in Santa Rosa, and I genuinely want to get home.

Going to be at Eagle in Exile at the Del Rio tomorrow. Hope to see some of you there.

If you're up for a possibly-wet hike in the woods, I'm arranging a walking tour of Hendy Woods on Sunday, Nov. 11, guided by the Navarro watershed coordinator. I'm providing a picnic. We'll be meeting at the day use area at 10:30, tour at 11, lunch at 12:30. Rain or shine! You'll have to pay a registration fee to park. Let me know if you want to come along.

(It's really quite nice - one of my favorite things there is an enormous redwood that nearly fell, but didn't, and is leaning against another tree. When they're all straight up, they're impressive enough, but having one leaning 20 degrees over your head is downright terrifying.)

I'll probably be in Vancouver before the end of the year. Not sure if it will be during the holidays or not.

Got some nice yellow tomatoes on our way back home from the coast. Mashing, straining, and slowly reducing their juice till it's thick makes a really, really good sauce. If you avoid adding anything to discolor it, the color stays nice and bright. It's extremely sweet, much more so than the equivalent red sauce, and looks real good on a plate of spaghetti.

Been thinking about the use of subtle contrasts in foods. I had a soup a while back that really rocked my world - it was a smooth, fairly thick veloute made with slow-cooked onions, just barely stirred into chicken broth, in about a 50-50 mix. The difference in viscosity between the two components made for a remarkable sensation on the palate.

I got the same thing from eating yoghurt with ice cream. Specifically, it was some vanilla ice cream, topped with granola, then Greek yoghurt, and a drizzle of honey on top.

I am crazy for "Greek Gods" yoghurt. It's a standard thing in our fridge. One of the memories that sticks out from my travels was the incredible yoghurt they had in Greece, which I ate every day for breakfast. That was back in '92 or thereabouts. I pined for decades for this product, and would simulate it by straining yoghurt in a colander in order to thicken it up. That was OK for savory dishes, but not so much for sweets and fruits. Now, Greek Gods has brought us a pretty good version of that yoghurt, and it's available in the supermarket most of the time. It probably has about ten million calories per serving but I cannot say no to it. A frustrating thing, though - they'll often have fruit yoghurt, or low fat yoghurt, or this yoghurt or that yoghurt - but no REGULAR ORDINARY PLAIN yoghurt. That drives me nuts. Fortunately we have a very responsive supermarket and they take my carping about this very seriously, so it only rarely happens nowadays.

An interesting article about the rise of lactose tolerance:

The rise of civilization coincided with a strange twist in our evolutionary history. We became, in the coinage of one paleoanthropologist, “mampires” who feed on the fluids of other animals.

Rather perverted, was it not? You might even call it "against nature". This is why we humans develop such distinctive and unusual obsessions: every now and then, they change the world.

I'm noticing a certain theme in politics lately - that if the existence of a complaint is evidence of a problem, the a lack of a complaint means the problem doesn't exist.

( More under the heading of 'Why I'm A Liberal' )

Jobs going begging in Willits and Ukiah Valley

(Excerpt from Ukiah Daily Journal)

With unemployment still over 9 percent in Mendocino County, some employers are saying they are still having trouble filling the jobs they have available.

"What's coming into the work force is (an attitude that) we should feel privileged that they show up," said General Manager Kristine McKee of Microphor, a manufacturer in Willits that offers a variety of jobs, from assembly line work to welding to engineering and customer service, among others.

"We can't hire fast enough," she said.

She currently has six jobs she's trying to fill in assembly, customer service and welding, according to McKee. The company does most of its hiring through a Santa Rosa temporary agency, mostly because Mendocino County, she said, "is not an employer-friendly location."

McKee is not alone among local employers who think that is mostly because of the lack of willingness among the available work force to show up and commit.

"We have a work force that doesn't want to work Monday through Friday," McKee said.

Joined a group of friends from the ranch at McNab Ridge winery, just down the hill from us, to participate in a wine blending contest.

albear_garni came along, as well as his partner, Dave, who did the actual blending while we all argued about what to put in.

I felt like I was off to a slow start - on our first pass through the six different single-grape bottles provided, they all tasted the same. But quickly they began to differentiate themselves. It was amazing how slightly different blends ended up tasting very different indeed.

My suggestion of 70% pinotage with 30% of one of the zinfandels went over well at the table, and after a lot of discussion we agreed it was the best, but only by a hair. I had thought we had hit a magic combination there, but somewhat to my surprise it did not place at all in the contest. Apparently they got quite a few pinotage based entries, as they were real easy to like. I had thought that wine would be a bit like pizza - the typical person would try to put in too many different things, and the result would be a muddle. Indeed, it was surprising how just 10% of the wrong grape totally wrecked the blend. I mean it was all drinkable, but adding the wrong thing usually made the combination quite inferior to a more restrained approach.

Much to my surprise, the blends that did place well tended to have 4 or so different varietals, and included very small percentages of some of them. This is not so unlike Bordeaux, which sometimes has as little as 2% of things like petit verdot. I'll know for next year!

The guy that grows the pinotage, by the way, lives here on the ranch and is a real good looking daddybear with a gray amish style beard. I hope he takes our suggestion and joins us at the Friday get-together sometime.

Anyway, I don't want to have ANY red wine for a good long while now. My palate is exhausted!

Just saw The Graduate for the first time. Why is it that films from fifty years ago are totally brilliant, where every current release I've seen in the past ten years just plain sucks?

I love the sparse, simple style of that era, with its abundance of silence and lots of room for introspection. Most of today's films not only lack originality, they offer no room for the viewer. Every little crevice must be filled, controlled, and focus-grouped into oblivion. It's so boring. What went wrong?

It must be the lack of cigarettes.

I know a lot of you don't care for Sullivan, but he has written a really excellent essay that summarizes exactly what I think about inequality in the US:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/10/extreme-inequality-threatens-americas-portfolio.html

The Rauch link is also very worth reading in full. I realize that I'm not nearly as lefty as many of you reading this, and less right wing than a few, but his middle of the road approach strikes me as being pretty much on the mark.

There has been a whole lot of tongue flapping about "socialism", and the Republicans have defined it down to the point of meaningless. But there is such a thing as real socialism, and it involves the state appropriating private property - such as corporations - and directly controlling the means of production. And this would be a real disaster. Ironically, the chronic abuse of the term leaves us with no way to actually discuss this scenario, which is a shame, because it's not outside the realm of possibility.

I'm not much of a history student, but it seems to me that actual socialism is rarely (never?) the product of creeping liberalism. It has been, instead, a perfectly understandable reaction to runaway capitalism and the injustices it generates. At a certain point, the rich assume complete dominance over everyone else, the lives of the poor become completely intolerable, and the only reasonable response is to destroy the system that allowed that to happen. At such times, revolution becomes the only escape from an untenable and unsustainable situation. As a number of people have pointed out, "Marx was wrong about communism, but he was right about capitalism."

The candidate that would bring us closer this unhappy occasion is not Obama, it's Romney. If you care about the future of freedom in the US, the issue of inequality MUST be addressed. Because if its not resolved gracefully, it will be resolved violently, and it will be ugly.

Another item in the "What Not To Wear When You're Arrested Fashion Show":

Not sure how much the regular news has covered the recent arctic sea-ice minimum, but this has stood out as a particularly interesting development in relation to the scenarios forecast in climate models.

In 2006, a review of sea-ice forecasts from several different climate models pointed out that abrupt reductions in sea ice cover are a common feature of those models. The most pessimistic forecast suggested that minimum ice extent might drop below 4 million square km. sometime late in this decade.

The current sea-ice minimum is 0.75M km2 lower than last year, which certainly edges the decrease into the "abrupt decline" category, but does so sooner than ANY model had predicted. The expected consequence of this loss of sea ice is less stability in the polar air mass, which results in greater variability in the weather, including more severe winter storms and longer droughts. It is this increase at the extremes, not the change in average temperature per se, that has the greatest impact on human affairs.

There is a decent chance - maybe 1 in 3 - that the sea ice will bounce back for a few years. But given that the current low is so much lower than the previous record, one would have to conclude that the models have, in this respect at least, been too conservative. It seems likely that this is going to be the "rubber meets the road" moment, when climate change goes from something that can only be measured with scientific instruments and statistical analysis, to something with direct, observable effects on everyday life. If you had asked me last year, I would have expected this to happen around 2030 or later. My current outlook is less sanguine.

An amusing take on how this is likely to unfold can be found here.

I'm a real map freak - as a kid, I would sit for hours looking at various maps, especially topo and hydrographic maps.

The Apple map thing was pretty exciting at first, since seems that the rendering engine is a lot more sophisticated than what Google is using, and I love the new typography and how it smoothly transitions from one scale to another. The font they use takes me right back to elementary school, back in the days when Canada was pink - cuz we're all socialists, dontcha know - and Burma, Ceylon, and Zaire were still known by their proper colonial names.

But the errors! Holy smokes. First one I found was in trying to get to the Pittsburgh airport - fortunately Scotty recognized that it was routing us into the cargo portal, which is several miles from the passenger area. That must be real interesting, having thousands of people showing up there unawares.

If you type in "Dulles Airport", doesn't even know where it is. I mean, this is one of the most important airports in the country. WTF?

I wonder how Steve Jobs would have handled this? It's like he was the only person there with any common sense. It will be interesting to see if they ever recover from this blunder, it sure is a big one. I have no idea how you go about correcting a map like that, the fixes must number in the hundreds of thousands. Glad it's not my project, I'd be having a nervous breakdown right about now.

Whew, get to stay home for a while. What a luxury.

I thought that work with my current client might be coming to an end, but I just got a note to the effect that they want to keep things going briskly into the spring. Fine by me, I was thinking of maybe taking full time work elsewhere, but I'm not sure I'm ready for that just now. Still lots to do in other realms. Maybe I'll get to see Florida in the winter after all.

Pot harvest season looks like it might be interesting, possibly seeing federal action on state-legal farms, possibly a lot of crime. I have no real data here, just rumours. There has been suspicious traffic on the ranch already. For what it's worth, we now have it all on camera. And needless to say we prefer to have it all be very boring.

The locals are generally well armed and trigger happy. Anyone trying to steal pot from this area has a real good chance of getting their head blown off. They still try though.

Went to the dentist today and am enjoying having moss-free teeth. Lots of strange vibes in town, lots of scruffy young men with nothing to do. Obviously related to trim season but I'm not sure just how it plays out for these kids.

There is a group known as "Mandocino" that is having a barbecue this Sunday. Never heard of them before but it sounds promising. Supposedly they have a "Facebook" page, but I have no knowledge of such things. Is that one of those art books, which is cut in the shape of a face? Never mind. I shall be checking it out.

So sleepy... Very hungry, too. Got together with the guys in town and we all had okonomiyaki. Say that three times real fast and you'd be our waitress. Still hungry afterwards, and it was a lot!

Coincidentally, the funeral for the cop in Obamas motorcade is happening right here in Jupiter. My clients had to end their meetings early because they closed the road for the procession and they would have gotten stuck in the parking lot. Hundreds, maybe thousands of motorcycle officers.

bullneck would have been in hog heaven.

For Furr - this is an example of how you write a little C# program to filter an ISO table of contents. There is an "express" version of Visual Studio you can download for free that will run this.

This is kind of interesting because C# has been a rapidly evolving language that has incorporated some very far-out concepts, such as declarative query processing. It packs it all into a tight, rational system that remains coherent and easy to use. The C-derivative languages have traditionally been austere, long-winded, and cranky, but that has changed quite a bit since I was a computer science student. Aside from the grace and simplicity that C# has acquired in itself, Visual Studio provides the coding equivalent of a Japanese toilet - it practically blow-dries your ass for you. It's also as solid as a rock. I have spent half my life inside IDEs like this, and it's so nice to have something get easier with time.

Yes, I know there are about twenty ways this could be better, it was just something off the top of my head. Free BJ for anyone who can spot the bug, this was just a quickie thing so I'm not actually going to fix it. :-P

( code )

Done with the Badger packing. For some reason, the sense of dread that has been hovering over catering has lifted, and I feel enthusiastic about working on the kits and figuring things out. The result is a beautiful packing system that is completely logical and wastes no space.

Today, grocery shopping. There will be a little of that tomorrow as well as we head down to Modesto. I'll be traveling with Chris Ursich, who some of you have met. Tomorrow night we'll be at Ted's new place, and Wednesday morning we head for the hills.

Wednesday dinner is breaded pork chops with wild mushroom gravy, a surprisingly easy dish that bikers go crazy for. Be there or starve!

John headed off today for Finland, where he is attending a conference. After chaining himself to the computer for three years plowing through old research, it turns out he has identified a new type of plasma that has interesting behaviors at low energies, and it's relevant to not just AMS but also tokamak fusion research. It occurs in a number of situations, but they're definitely "niche" systems, so there has been a fair bit of data collected about it but not much theory to tie it together. Perfect grist for the armchair scientist to chew on.

So now that he's schmoozled with the friendly AMS crowd he's going to introduce the theory to a more hostile plasma physics audience. The predictive power of his model of this plasma model has been quite surprising, and he's used it to tie up a lot of loose ends in other people's work.

We will now be apart for 4 weeks, as in order to save airport trips, Bill is dropping me off for my W. Virginia trip the same day as John returns.

I'm looking forward to a supremely relaxing Badger. The cooking should be pretty easy, the nights long and care-free. No phone, no Internet. No showers for a few days. Cold nights, hot bikers. Whiskey. Pork chops. GRAVY. Just think about it.

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Just picked up a really good book of essays on human sexuality that is very worth reading for anyone who doesn't fit the mold, and also for those that do.

(The reason, by the way, is to remove other men's semen from a woman's vagina. This fact is perhaps the most compelling reason to believe that human beings evolved in a world of almost unimaginable promiscuity. Surprisingly, the reviews aren't full of Christian apoplexy; maybe the abstinence-only crowd just rolls over and gives up when presented with data like this?)

It also has a very lucid, spot-on-accurate article about zoophilia that FINALLY says out loud what has long been obvious to those in the know - that it is not just a mental defect or opportunistic vice, but a full blown sexual orientation. Not many academic writers seem ready to come out and just say this, despite the mountains of documentation now supporting the notion. The author admits his initial discomfort over the issue, but concludes with the confession that he finds himself "a bit jealous" of zoophiles. LOL, yeah, I'd say he gets it.

Another interesting essay examines men and women who have lost their sexual inhibition through brain damage, like our crazy redneck neighbor up the hill. (Gods, I wish he was attracted to men.) Nothing in here is going to be new to people who have spent time studying the philosophy of consciousness and free will, but he does use this as a useful window into many of the standard questions in the field. Many people are befuddled by this subject, but IMHO the metaphysical questions were settled long ago, and it's just misconceptions and hangups that leave people confused. He lays out the landscape rather well, and makes what I think is an obvious case for materialism seem fresh and interesting again. (Gosh, adding sex spices things up, who woulda thunkit?)

Anyway: just read it, I can't think of a single person I wouldn't recommend this to.

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code example

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