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Archive: February 2023
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Wow, a busy January, 42 posts. But then looking at history, I've typically posted a lot in January - a little less in February - and then sort of settled in at a lower rate. July is sparse and August has been the worst month, September is bad too (even excepting the obligatory "never forget" posts on 9/11), and October, meh. Then my activity has picked up again in November and December. Maybe I'm a cold weather blogger?
Thanks to those of you who have said they're glad I'm blogging again - I'm glad you're still out there, reading!
Update on comments - no light at the end of the tunnel. My experiments have confirmed that to use Twitter for comments I'll need an application Id so I can use their API. I've applied to be a developer, but with everything going on there who knows. Other options include Mastodon, which has a straightforward API, but that would require you-all to sign up for a Mastodon account to make comments. (You would be able to view them without one.) That's my Plan B ... stay tuned.
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wisdom can sometimes be found in the most unexpected places
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 I read somewhere that the third weekend of January is the most depressing day of the year. I guess the Holiday buzz is over, the weather is crummy, and now we're on to the new year which no longer feels that new. My own vote is for February 1. Because in addition to all of that, you also say, whoa, where did January go? YMMV :)
I am so glad I've discovered Zwift. At least I've been able to ride every day. I am such a wimp, could not imagine going "out there" in the cold and [especially] the wind. Today I rode around London. It did rain, but only on my monitor!
Rediscovering old posts: as the memory turns, from Jan 2008. Re the teeter-totter between running out of physical and logical memory. Back then, 14 years ago, I wrote: "it is unimaginable that 2^64 wouldn't be a big enough address space for everything." Still true. But memory management is definitely still a thing, especially if you have a GPU to worry about too. 
Eric Sink continues his series on .NET AOT development: "A gotcha with object handles". Yep, garbage collection is so much easier than explicit deallocation...
 Feb 2014: the wheel paradox. So what's going on here? I don't think I ever figured this out, back then, or if I did I never posted about it. But now it seems evident that the inner wheel must be "slipping"; clearly the inner circumference is less. This is kind of like exceeding the speed of light by sweeping the moon with a laser pointer.
 How excellent is this? This is the longest straight, land-to-land line you can sail. From Eastern Canada to Western Canada, about 35,400 km. Be sure to click through and watch the movie, and marvel as you pass Africa going "straight down" before reaching Australia.
 Perhaps apropos: You'll Soon Be Able to Sail - Yes, Sail - on the Orient Express. Looks excellent - maybe we can sail straight from Canada to Canada :)
PS did not know about Afar magazine, now I do!
Not surprising: Twitter now wants to become a payments platform. Definitely Elon Musk's M.O., a good potential revenue stream. And I'm sure the example of WeChat is inspiration.
 Nice overview by Ars Technica: The generative AI revolution has begun—how did we get here? Of course CUDA is mentioned! :) Definitely a Netscape moment!
Cool: Tech startup Paradigm lands $203M to get more patients into clinical research, accelerate drug trials. I worked with some of the people at Deep Lens, a company Paradigm recently acquired. They used AI to identify candidates for clinical trials, a pretty useful application.
 Wired: The spaceport at the edge of the world. "A tiny Scottish village is betting its future on rocket launches. But the plan may threaten the fragile landscape—and a tenacious billionaire’s ambitions." Okayyy.
A great and interesting overview: Johnson & Johnson’s Bankruptcy Didn’t Work. Basically, faced with huge possible product liability, J&J filed for bankruptcy even though they were hugely profitable.
 Interesting voting demographics. As you look at these maps, it is good to remember that only 10 states elect our President.
Scott Adams: I’ve had more great days in my sixties than the rest of my life combined. Did not predict that. Not sure it's true for me, but it's not obviously not true.
 ESA is no longer planning to send astronauts to China’s Tiangong space station. "For the moment we have neither the budgetary nor the political, let’s say, green light or intention to engage in a second space station; that is participating on the Chinese space station."
John Gruber: Meanwhile, Over in Androidtown. "Whilst we iOS users celebrate the recent releases of Thomas Ricouard's Ice Cubes, Tapbots's Ivory, and Tusker, and look forward to the imminent release of other new Mastodon clients like Shihab Mehboob's Mammoth, over on Mastodon I asked what the best clients for Android are. Long story short: crickets chirping." A general rumination on the difference between the design ethos of IOS and Android.
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 It's groundhog day, again, which means of course that we re-watched Groundhog Day, which seems to get better or at least no worse every year.
Today's big news was ... Twitter have announced their API will no longer be free! This seems like an incredibly short-sided decision, maybe it will be modified, like free for non-commercial use, or something...
So that makes my Comment problem simpler; I will use Mastodon for comments. Stay tuned.
Miguel Icaza: PSA: you have until Feb 9 to run the free programs to transport your social graph to Mastodon. Well not quite, you can stay on Twitter forever, but many of the free "bots" you follow will leave.
Little Green Footballs: This is the end, my only friend, then end. Um, no.
 Steven Wolfram: the Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. An epic post, and it's 3 of 3, with 1 and 2 not yet posted.
Really fascinating though to see the history of entropy, as various scientists grappled with what it actually was, even as it showed up in their equations.
[Update: Part 2 is up.] [Update II: Part 1 is up.]
 Scott Loftesness: Ode to a Queen. Pretty amazing.
Twitchy: WHOA: #GoogleLeaks tells #TwitterFiles to hold its beer with bombshell-filled thread. Not surprising. And actually Google would be far more influential than Twitter, definitely more so than Facebook.
 OMG, wow. Candide Thovex - "pretty tight". I'll say. Whenever I see something like this I wonder, was there practice involved? How does one prepare for a "failure is not an option" run like this?
Here's an interesting question: Are you playing Elden Ring, or are you just an academic? "If you've ever felt like life is an uphill battle, plagued with new and terrible enemies at every turn, you're either playing Elden Ring… or you're in higher education." It's not clear you can tell :)
 Aww ... A baby pangolin is born at the Prague Zoo. It does resemble a living spruce cone...
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Okay, we have comments! Via Mastodon. It's not a perfect setup, but let's try it.
Here's how it works: When I post to my blog, a link gets posted on Mastodon. (Mastodon is a Twitter-like service which enables "microblogging"; people post short snippets of information or pictures or videos - or links - and then other people can Reply or Share.)
 Every post on my blog will have a link to its corresponding Mastodon post, like this:
 If the post has comments, the count will be shown, like this:
[Update: if two numbers, the first is #comments, the second is #replies]
Clicking "Comments?" takes you to Mastodon, which will looks something like this:
Any comments people have posted will be shown as well. You can Reply, Boost, Favorite the post, or Share it. And you can Reply to replies - whole comment threads can be spawned.
To view the post and comments on Mastodon you do not have to sign up. Everything is public. However to post replies you do have to sign up. This is a simple process, you do it once, and there you are.
One difference between Mastodon and Twitter is that Mastodon uses multiple service providers. Kind of like with email, you choose which one you want. I've choosen one called Universeodon, you can use that one or any other. They all interoperate. But you do have to be signed on to one of them to post Comments.
Okay! Let's see how this goes, a grand experiment. One crummy thing of which I am aware is that dlvr.it, the service I use for relaying links to blog posts, is not instant. I might post something and it will be some time - could be an hour or two - before it's relayed to Mastodon, and before you can post Comments. If you don't see the Comments link right away please be patient!
[Update 4/1/24: this experiment is over; it worked, but nobody ever used it. Mastodon was not the answer. Onward.]
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 Well, it's the morning after (I enabled comments via Mastodon), and while nothing appears broken, no comments have yet been posted; the crickets are lightly chirping. Par for the course, I guess; you-all have more interesting things to do than read about my comments and probably, haven't even noticed yet. Staying tuned ...
Saw this great George Carlin quote this morning, from Dave Winer.
Couple of thoughts about comments:
- Yes, need an instant-relay-to-Mastodon, so new posts show up right away. On the list.
- Would be nice if the original post (here on my blog) showed whether there were any comments, and even nicer if it remembered the last time you visited (already does this) and showed whether there were any new comments. On the list.
- What would I do if someone posted a "horrible" comment? Slash, irrelevant comment. I'm relying on Mastodon to filter, and presumably they would do if it were henious in some obvious way (porn for example, or bad language). But what if one slips through? The commenter "owns" their comment, should I leave it?
- Final thought: personal attacks, either on me or on another commenter, are out of bounds*. So yeah, gardening.
* of course nothing at all keeps someone from linking to me and posting anything they want, nothing I can do. This is the great thing and the hard thing about the Internet.
Your comments on all this are most welcome :)
[Update 2/5/23: actual comments have been posted, yay, and have figured out a way to show #comments for each post, yay]
Meanwhile I am off to visit my boat! - a nice day, first in a while ... yay.
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 One of the cooler pieces of software out there is Virtual Box, now from Oracle. (I say "now", but Sun bought Innotek and then Oracle bought Sun in 2010 ... so not that recently.) It is free, yay, and let's you run just about any operating system under just about any other one. For example, I have an Intel PC running Win 10, and using Virtual Box I have Windows XP, Win 11, Win Server 2008R (long story there), Red Hat Linux (Fedora), Ubuntu 20.02 LT, Ubuntu 22.10, ... and (!) OS X Catalina, and OS X Big Sur.
They all run pretty well, and while the performance isn't "native", it's certainly good enough to do real work. And it sure makes testing easy - you can have different combinations of these running at the same time, and they can all talk to each other and behave as separate machines.
So that's nice ... and tonight I bit the bullet and upgraded Virtual Box to v7.06. Which meant a whole round of booting each guest operating system and checking for problems, and upgrading the "guest software" which Virtual Box installs to run seamlessly (e.g., display and network drivers). After a big round of "doing stuff", all is well. Kind of amazing but all of this software is free. The biggest problem is actually the oldest system, Win XP, which needs to have license keys etc. (I had an old MSDN license so I have legit license keys.) The newer stuff is just download and use and free. Incredible.
Oh, and so why did I do this? Well ... I made a change to the CSS on my blog, and wanted to check the appearance in various browsers on various platforms :)
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 Making a filter pass...
Beautiful day outside - yay - even went to the harbor and checked on my little boat, but did not got sailing, sigh, and my plans for sailing tomorrow are iffy too. Stay tuned. Anyway it felt today like the corner has been turned on winter, whatever Punxatawny Phil might have said...
Oh, and we saw 80 for Brady tonight; cute, worth a watch. Poignant considering he just retired, but still ... cute.
 Russell Beattie: My job search. "Despite making an effort, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) still absolutely hate my resume in either PDF or DOCX form. I've tried to reformat the damn thing a few times - making it simpler and re-arranging job title and employer, etc. but the systems are just random as hell and make a total hash of it." I've been looking for a new job too, and have worried about this; very few recruiters see your resume "native", and it's hard to know how it looks after the great ATS filter. Good luck, Russell!
The painting is DALL-E: "Impressionist painting of someone looking for a job." But really, they'd be behind a keyboard :)
 Wow. Astronomers Just Discovered 12 New Moons Orbiting Jupiter. That makes 92, [perhaps temporarily] beating out Saturn's 83. "Nine of the twelve new satellites are found in the far-off moon clusters that orbit Jupiter retrogradely, or in the opposite direction of the inner moons." Suggesting they are captured asteroids...
 The OK computer. A nice reminiscence of the Lisa, on its 40th (!) anniversary. I never used a Lisa, but I had a Xerox 850 - with a mouse! - and I so remember the first Macintosh. I still have my old Mac SE, Hen3ry; I should boot him to celebrate :)
 The next de-extinction target: The dodo. "The dodo was a large (up to 1 meter tall), flightless bird that evolved on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. As European sailors reached the islands, it quickly became a source of food for them and the invasive species that accompanied them. It went extinct within a century of the first descriptions reaching Europe." Well, cool, and good luck with that! (And you did watch Jurassic Park, right?)
 heh.
 Virgin Orbit: Facts about the novel air-launch provider. "In the increasingly competitive commercial spaceflight sector, Virgin Orbit is known for its horizontal air-launch system in which an expendable two-stage LauncherOne rocket is carried to around 35,000 ft by a modified Boeing 747-400... Virgin Orbit says this mobile launch method allows for faster mission preparation compared to more conventional ground launches." Rooting for them, but seems hard.
 Visual Capitalist: the rise and fall of music formats. Supercool. Interesting how there was a big drop after CDs peaked at the turn of the century, but now streaming has risen even higher. Would be interesting to know whether a larger percentage of the revenue is now going to artists, and also, a Pareto of how many are getting how much (are the stars getting richer?)
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 This morning I was poking around on my blog and reread this post from April 2003, about my [then] new Sharp DVD Recorder. I liked it.
Of course, recording DVDs and indeed DVDs in general were transitional technology. I don't know if I knew it at the time - probably, I would have guessed, yes - but looking back we can see there was this window of time in which DVDs were a thing, and a smaller sub-window which featured recordable DVDs. I haven't had this device for many years, and indeed, haven't had a way to play DVDs for many years. (Well, I *might* have a portable DVD drive somewhere which I can hook to a computer, and *might* be able to play video DVDs on it. Might.)
Thinking about all this makes me a little sad. First there was all the hard work put into creating and playing DVDs. I mean, there were lasers involved, "burning" optical discs, and everything. Hard to do, super hard to do reliably, and extremely hard to get the cost down to where ordinary people could buy one. Many people worked hard to figure it all out. Then there was my hard work in figuring out what to buy, buying it, hooking it up, using it, accumulating a library of DVDs (yes, I had hundreds both pre-recorded and me-recorded), and all of this. And now it's all ... gone. Useless. On the scrap heap of old tech, a big heap.
I still have many of those movies - ripped the DVDs with Handbrake into MP4s and stored them on a server - of course, do not still have the old Lakers vs Kings game that seemed so important at the time. Actually this library of MP4s is also obsolete; just about any movie in there can be rented and streamed for a small amount, so why keep them all. But I do have them. Maybe storage on hard disks and the MP4 format are technologies which will last a bit longer? Will I be able to play those movies in 20 years?
It's interesting to look around and think about all the tech which surrounds us, and try to figure out what is the lifetime. My phone ... huh, don't know, maybe 10 years? What could I do with it in 10 years? Probably cell tech will have moved on, and it could no longer connect to networks, but will it connect to WiFi? Probably. Could it surf the Internet? Pick up email? And my computer ... probably even a bit less than my phone, but similar. It will be able to run new versions of Windows up to a point. Likely could connect to WiFi. Likely could surf the Internet, and with new versions of Chrome or Firefox pick up content.
 I have a friend in Santa Barbara who has an old wooden sailboat, over 100 years old. He's faithfully restored and maintained it, and competes in races against my boat which is 8 years old. It's not quite as fast, but you know what not uncompetitive either. There's some old technology which lasted!
As I look around my house - the furniture, art, clocks, stuff like that will last a long time. Indeed much of it is already old, some of it older than me. Appliances, somewhat more dated, but still useable, many after 20+ years. Cars, could likely be driven for many years, even the electric one - assuming the Tesla charge port is supported somewhere! The house itself will last a long time. And my beautiful oak tree has been around for hundreds of years.
It's the consumer electronics which will not last. TVs, game machines, computers, tablets, phones. And yet those are the things that take up all of my time!
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Writing about old tech and tech lifetimes made me want to revisit some of the oldest tech I have, my Mac SE "Hen3ry", from 1987. I pulled the little guy out (heavy!) and managed to find a power cord (solid standard) and his mouse (so great, and after all these years not significantly improved-upon), and beep! and poof! he booted right up. Delightful.
Reactions:
- Wow, that fan noise!
- A tiny screen, with low resolution, but eminently readable.
- Okay I'm going to say it, so pretty. I love the old look and feel of GUIs, with all the affordances.
- Snappy. No I am not kidding. Click and poof it happens. Don't know how we slowed everything down so much.
- Worst part: he's useless without a way to connect to a network. I had an Applebus modem, I think 4800 baud, long gone. And then I had a SCSI-to-ethernet adapter thingie, don't know when / how I lost it. Also gone.
- Best part: I left him running for a bit, and After Dark popped up Flying Toasters!
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 Interesting how many of you emailed me about "old technology" which you still have/love, following up on my report on Hen3ry. So cool. I'm pretty much a relentless eBay-er; if I buy a new thing, I sell the old thing, so that it can be useful as much as to make money from it. But there are some things which just seem like I want to keep.
At right, my iPod collection: the original (scroll-wheel!), the first "iPod Touch", with a screen, and an iPod mini, which was my cycling companion for many years. I can still use the latter two, but the original was a Firewire device, and sadly, I no longer have any way to connect it. A project for someday.
I remember the iPod Touch so well; it was able to connect via WiFi, and I wrote a rudimentary digital slide viewer for it, which ran in a early version of Safari. You will recall, this was before the Apple App store and the explosion of apps for IOS (in fact, it was before IOS was a public thing). Those were the days. (2008!)
 Apropos, from John Gruber: Connor Oliver's favorite computer: an old mac. "This Mac has no form of notification system built in, it never begs for your attention and its applications never try to distract you from what you are doing, begging you to look at them instead. If I get distracted while using this Mac the fault lies squarely on me, not the computer and not the programs running on it." I think he nails the key benefit; the lack of things asking for your attention.
Harkens back strongly to my three-hour rule. ("It takes three hours to get anything 'done'.")
 This is quite sad: LeighWolf reports "the damage done to the credibility of AI by ChatGPT engineers building in political bias is irreparable". Whether you agree with ChatGPT or not, I'm sure you'd agree it would be better if it weren't biased.
 Big news: Microsoft adds ChatGPT AI technology to Bing Search engine. Well of course they did. And I have to say, there is nothing better they could have done which would make me want to switch from Google to Bing. I can't wait to try it.
It's interesting to think about how this will work. ChatGPT is inherently interactive, although for many purposes a single query is enough. Most people interact with search engines via the input line at the top of their web browser. You could certainly type a ChatGPT query there. But to make it interactive, what will they do? Show the chat in the search results? Can't wait to try it!
PS thought: will this be Edge-only? There is nothing better they could do which would make me want to switch from Chrome to Edge...
Apropos: Joanna Stern interviews Satya Nadalla (CEO of Microsoft) about Open AI's improvements to Bing and Edge.
 And of course - of course! - Google rolls out new AI search features. Where by "rolls out" they mean, talks about; "Bard" is still in private beta.
Shelly Palmer: Begun, the AI Wars Have. What a time to be alive...
WSJ: Artificial Intelligence is transforming healthcare - but is this a good thing? Yes!
 Scott ("Dilbert" Adams wonders, Is this true? Where "this" is: no global warming for 8 years and 5 months, per NASA satellite data. Only eight years, but still.
Bloomberg: Wind Turbines Taller Than the Statue of Liberty Are Falling Over. Some? All? Many? "The problems have added hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for the three largest Western turbine makers, GE, Vestas Wind Systems and Siemens Energy’s Siemens Gamesa unit."
And: Sea level is stable around the world. Another thing I did not know. And another "fact" which could engender incredible debate. Don't you wish these things could be debated by scientists instead of politicians?
Meanwhile: Harvard Medical School adds climate change to its curriculum. Because of course.
 Loved this from the comments:
Interesting: Hertz doubles down on electrification following record earnings, stock surges 7%. It's not clear whether this is because car rentals have recovered from Covid, or people like renting EVs, or both. Maybe because it eliminates the weird "do you want to pay for gas now" issue?
 From Elon Musk. I feel like you could substitute "possible" for "easy".
Time Magazine's Beef with Elon Musk. Yeah, well. Also, Time still exists?
 My favorite story of this day: For years, there'd been a square in the periodic table that scientists struggled to fill. An 'unlikely scientist' helped fill it. The story of Clarice Phelps ... and Tennessine.
 Related: Where the elements came from. Can you find Tennessine?
(It's a trick question; this table goes up to element 103, and Tennessine is 117... it would be under AT, element 85... Astatine.)
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 I came across a useful concept the other day: "nut picking".
Scott ("Dilbert") Adams tweeted: "The public needs to agree on an insulting label for the practice of acting as if the craziest people in any group represent the group... Maybe 'nut-picking'?"
Everyone does this - me too - it's a form of ad homonym attack, wherein you attack a whole group based on any one of its members. It might be all Republicans, all Democrats, all people who support X, all people who believe X, etc. All bloggers! If any one of them does something crazy, you can "nut pick" to smear the whole group. The mainstream media are especially good at this.
Note, just because you're nut picking doesn't mean you're wrong ... it just means you aren't using a logical way to show you're right. If you can demonstrate that the picked nut is typical - representative of the group - then your argument is valid.
Now that I'm familiar with the concept, I'm going to look for it and hopefully discredit the practice as often as possible!
(BTW, Eichhorn means squirrel in German; I should be especially good at picking up nut-picking :)
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 Checking in ... let's see what's happening!
This is Kylo. Sleeping in odd positions is his specialty.
It is increasingly borne in upon me that I'm posting too much. Sorry. I shall attempt to tighten the filter granularity! I can tell this from reviewing my flight each day; in former years I was less verbose, more interesting. Noted.
 MedCity ask: With Livongo, did Zane Burke sell a lemon to Teladoc’s Jason Gorevic? My own answer is No, Livongo was not a Lemon, at all, and the strategic fit was great. But the price was not great, both companies were public high-flyers at the time of the deal, and the consequent need to realize projected synergies led to unnatural decision-making. I believe he would do it again, but would execute the "merger" quite differently.
So what do you think, did Putin invade Ukraine to prevent it from joining NATO? Seems plausible. And if so, it worked.
 Mapped: the most innovative countries in the world!
Guess who's [still] #1?
 Literally awesome: James Webb Telescope’s Incredibly Deep View of the Universe. (Click to enbiggen amazingly.) When you think that each of those galaxies has millions of stars...
Hmmm... Wired thinks Mastodon bump is now a slump. Maybe, but it's too early to tell. Wired love to stake out contra positions which support their world view.
Doc Searles: Is Mastodon a commons?
Clive Thompson: How I use RSS to 'rewild' my attention. And he includes Twitter and Mastodon in "RSS"...
 Um, congratulations? LeBron James breaks NBA's all-time scoring record, surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. LeBron is and has been amazing, but Kareem is one of my all time favorites ... the sky hook was literally unstoppable. What people forget about Kareen is he played on teams with many different scorers; LeBron was mostly the main scorer on his team all through.
 Reason TV: these five technologies will change the world by 2050. To save you watching (V;DW!), here are the five: 1) Micromobility (sure), 2) Delivery Drones (okay), 3) Language AI (absolutely), 4) Lab-grown meat (what?), 5) Health wearables (yes!).
I think related: Oracle reorganizes AI, data business units as healthcare becomes CTO's primary focus.
Already a long pooost... I think I'll stop here :)
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It was time - I have updated "about me", the very first page I posted, 20 years ago. I wish I'd kept a history of all the changes (maybe the Wayback machine has?)
 The picture at left has served as "my picture" for the last nine years, me in my first Tesla. Nickname: "Ole, driven".
 The picture at right is me, now; from last summer at the J/70 World Championship sailing regatta, hosted by the Royal Monaco Yacht Club. (We finished 28th, yay). Nickname: "Ole, Monaco YC".
There have been some other changes too; the main one is I'm no longer working for Teladoc and am looking for a new job.
But most things about me haven't changed; living in the same place, married to the same person (!), same kids, etc. I still like coding, still like using technology to improve people's lives, and still like sailing and cycling. Reading old posts does not seem I've changed that much; maybe I have lived a bit longer and experienced a few things in the meantime :)
Onward!
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 An early morning Super post before the Super Bowl ... and so yes, I am rooting for the Chiefs! Not because I'm a huge fan or even a fan at all, but one must choose, and many of my friends are Eagles people, and so it will be more fun this way :)
 Of course, for many the Super commercials will be more interesting than the Super game. You can warm up by viewing Gizmodo's take on the best Super Bowl commercials of all time. A list headed, inevitably, by Apple's iconic 1984 commercial.
It's interesting to think about, what made this so great? The girl? The setup - individual vs group? Would this commercial be as popular today, or even - gasp - politically correct enough to run? Or was it the product - Macintosh - which despite not being mentioned in the commercial at all, was widely known to be cool and new and amazing.
Well I am off to ride - need to finish the Tour de Zwift before the big game :)
Enjoy the game!
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 So, was it good for you? The game - close, closely fought, interesting - and the ads - meh, none really stood out for me - and the halftime show - okay, at least not offensive (!), but not amazing either. The best part as usual was the food - thanks, Shirley! - and the company ...
Things which stood out for me from the game: the Chief's decision not to go on 4th and 3, and then missed the field goal (how often do kickers hit a goal post, and how hard would that be to do if you tried?), the Eagle's fumble for a Chief's touchdown, the Chief's offside when the Eagles were at 4th and goal. All in the first half. And the Chief's made better halftime adjustments, and played better in the 2nd half. For me the bogus holding call at the end of the game was bad, but indecisive; it led to a Chief's field goal but they were already in range anyway. At best the call ran off some clock which the Eagles could have used at the end. The Eagle's kickoff non-return and final non-play seemed disorganized; okay they didn't have much time, but they could have done more.
A minor thread was the bad field. C'mon, they can't get that right? (They tried...)
 In my house the biggest takeaway from the ads was, wow, Alicia Silverstone looks great. And also, Adam Driver, because, well, Adam Driver. Many big stars but no creative breakthroughs. No chances taken.
My sense of the Rihanna halftime was people wanted it to be better than it was. For me, at best it wasn't terrible. But compared to other amazing halftimes I can remember (Lady Gaga!) it didn't measure up. Even last years' with Eminem, Dr Dre, and Snoop Dog was more interesting. Bring back Katy Perry and Left Shark!
 "Everybody" seems to think this article by Td Chiang: ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web, is insightful. For me, not so much. It's interesting because of why it's wrong. ChatGPT is amazing because it is interactive, it understands natural language, and plays back information in human-friendly form. It's a breakthrough in man-machine communication. The fact that it summarizes information instead of bring back the exact primary sources, well, so what. 99% of Google's hits on a search do the same thing.
My quiet prediction is that ChatGPT and its kin are the next step forward in user interfaces; from command lines (imperative-verb oriented) to graphical user interfaces (much easier to use, but still imperative-verb oriented) to [now] interactive chat (intent oriented). Slowly and then quickly functional software applications are going to have an intent-oriented UIs.
TechCrunch: hands-on with the new Bing. I've tried it too. Doesn't feel quite ChatGPT-like, does it?
Cult of Mac: Siri desperately needs some ChatGPT-like smarts. Yep. As a constant Alexa user I'm constantly reminded how much better it is than Siri. I don't have an Android phone but friends tell me Hey Google is way better, too.
Argh: Toy Story 5 Gets Greenlight Despite Near Perfect Toy Story 4 Ending. Disney are floundering.
 Love this: Even a Brain-Eating Amoeba Can't Hide From This Cutting-Edge Diagnosis Tech. "Metagenomics is the future of medical diagnostics, said Eric Topol, director of Scripps Research Translational Institute, La Jolla, Calif." Lots of unstructured data - perfect for AI analysis.
 How Artificial Intelligence Is Driving Changes in Radiology. At the risk of a bad pun, this is a no-brainer. Much of medical diagnosis is rare-event detection, perfect for AI screens.
 Another case: Deep multi-magnification similarity learning helps histopathological diagnosis. In this regard (pattern recognition) Pathology is even harder (larger images, more data) and more important (more diagnoses made) than Radiology.
Affirm are laying people off - not news - and shutting down their crypto operations - news. I think 2023 will be the year the crypto emperor's lack of clothes are revealed.
Whew, another loong filter post. Is there so much going on? I need to dial the filter back, again!
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ROFL, literally
(tell me you haven't had this thought yourself :)
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There are two kinds of jewelry stores. In one kind, you walk by the window, they have a bunch of beautiful jewelry. Watches. Necklaces. Rings. Earrings. Even maybe personal items like mirrors and makeup cases. They are amazing. You are dazzled. You will go into the store because you see something that catches your eye.
The second kind of store is more selective. The window has a small number of items. They are spaced apart. They are amazing. You are intrigued. You will go into the store because you think there might be something else great that they didn't have in the window.
Correspondingly, there are two kinds of blogs. I think I am blogging about too much stuff, all over the place. I am hoping you see something that catches your eye, but you might have to travel past a lot of other stuff to find it. I need to have one or two items in the window, carefully selected. Maybe you'll follow because you think there might be something else great coming.
Well there is another dimension to blogs - some are linkers, where the blogger mostly relays you to things others have posted, and acts like a filter, and some are thinkers, where the blogger mostly posts things they've thought, maybe in reaction to things others have posted. I do both. Might want to do less of the former, and more of the latter. Stay tuned!
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 Here's another concept for you to - er - disregard completely: Chesterton's Fence. The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. Per Wikipedia, the principle originated in G. K. Chesterton's 1929 book The Thing:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
It's a useful principle, in many, many areas. In my own field of software design, I see this so often; it's tempting to rewrite old software entirely, routing around all the weird little kludges that have accumulated. Sometimes this makes sense. But each of those kludges is there for a reason, and not understanding those reasons is dangerous.
Oh, and an interesting note; if you Google "Chesterton's Fence", many of the hits will be articles telling you this principle is wrong. Since this principle goes back to 1929, they should explain why it was right then, before explaining why it is wrong now :)
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 I have a new phrase-I-dislike-a-lot: "dropped". As in, "the latest episode of Poker Face just dropped". Do not like. At all. Please put it in the same ungrammatical trash pile as "literally", "same difference", "my bad", and "sick". ("Utilize" remains in a class of its own.)
The latest episode of Poker Face has been released, and it's great :)
 This, I love. CeramicSpeed drivetrain, driven. It's not real yet and may never be, but still seems like it should be. Chains and Derailleur shifting seems so dated.
 Another coolness: the Rantoge clock. A kickstarter, saw an ad for it on Facebook. Not considering the kit itself, but thinking about whether something like this might be attempted with 3D printing. The general concept of displaying "LED-like numbers by pivoting segments seems transferrable, even if the mechanism must differ.
 MSN: 'Impossible' new ring system discovered at the edge of the solar system, and scientists are baffled. I love impossible things in space :) and also love Quaoar, a small "planet" half the size of Pluto which orbits the sun outside Neptune's orbit. Clearly a good starbase for aliens.
 More ring things: Saturn’s Rings Are Acting Strange – Hubble Captures Mysterious “Spokes”. Less likely to be an alien starbase effect, more likely gravitational turbulence. The Quaoarians are investigating :)
Not sure what to make of this: code with swearing is better code. I'm a huge believer in code comments - have sometimes been accused of over-commenting, which I don't think is a thing, but I've never ever sworn in them.
 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: What I Think About LeBron Breaking My NBA Scoring Record. Pure class.
Russell Beattie: How I saved Super Bowl 50 for Amazon. A great story, and rings SO true. I especially like the lag between realizing there's a problem and pushing out a fix for it.
No word on whether he swore in his code comments...
 Jean-Louis Gassee: The Musk Method And Twitter. An interesting read and take. I think we need some time to pass before we evaluate Elon's impact on Twitter; all of his successes were failures at a given point in time.
Stopping now. It's time for this post to "go gold". Another phrase-I-dislike-a-lot ... the correct term is "ship". Going gold is after you have shipped 500,000 copies! :)
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 Happy Valentine's Day! Hope it was nice for you?
We celebrated with a wonderful little dinner at home - going out doesn't seem like the thing anymore, compared to staying in.
Meanwhile, it's all happening...
 WSJ: New York vs Florida, by the numbers. "As recently as 2013 the two states had similar populations, but so many people have moved to the Sunshine State that it’s now roughly 2.6 million people larger." Not noted, but relevant: New Yorkers do not vote for President, while Floridians have the largest vote.
 So, will Hogwarts Legacy run on your laptop? The game is attracting a lot of interest; apparently it's a great game, but some critics have felt criticizing author J.K.Rowling's personal beliefs was more important than the game itself. A symbol of our times, in which virtual signaling often trumps reality. For myself, I always enjoyed the Harry Potter books and while I'm not a gamer, look forward to giving the game a try...
Imagine an America with steep billionaire taxes - and without Amazon, Pixar, SpaceX, and Tesla. It's easy if you try? Too easy, and I shudder at the thought.
The key to this is realizing that value creation is not a zero sum game. Big winners do not imply big or even any losers.
 Techcrunch thinks Google is losing control. Hmmm. I think the AI jury is still out, and there's many quarters to be played. How long ago would we have counted Microsoft out of the cloud race?
I think it *is* true that Google's incredibly profitable ad/search monopoly has enabled bad habits in new product development. Maybe this will be a time of focus for them.
Excellent: Becker's: Co-chair of the telehealth caucus on the future of virtual care. "U.S. Rep. David Schweikert, co-chair of the Congressional Telehealth Caucus, said after the passing of the telehealth extensions granted by the Omnibus Appropriations bill, he expects Congress to redefine the definition of telehealth to include wearables." AI and wearables are two huge tech trends affecting healthcare.
 You're going to need a bigger chart: Visual Capitalist: 33 problems with the media in one chart. It's fun to pick on them - and these are real problems - but what can be done? I think the key is that the smartest people don't become journalists, so journalists are not the smartest people. We need to make it a more attractive field for smarter people. Which means changes to the business models...
(Of course, some of the smartest people are blogging :) ... and Tweeting!)
Robert Scoble thinks Siri will need a radical rewrite, and that it's getting it as something he calls "AI Mesh". Hmmm. Watching with interest.
Miguel de Icaza tweets Helium is nothing but hot air. I've avoided paying attention to it; apparently it is a network of IoT routers which mine crypto. Okayyy. $365M has been raised and "regular folks" have paid $250M in, so far total revenue is $6.5K/month. Too early or too late?
 Liron Shapira: this tweet could not exist about blockchain technology.
My view: Blockchain is cool tech separate from the new asset classes. I've yet to see a compelling application. And I've yet to see an application which couldn't also be done without blockchain.
 Scott Adams: Robots read UFO news. Heh.
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A handy guide, from Wired:
(click to enlarge)
At first the idea of linking all the Marvel superheros together was cool - and in a few cases, it happened in comics before it happened in movies - but now I think they're just stretching to make for extended marketing opportunities. How many do you recognize?
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 So, an update on the great comments experiment.
As of today, I've made 16 posts since enabling comments via Mastodon, which comprised about 80 distinct items, and had one count it one comment posted, a comments about comments, in a thread with five [public] responses.
Chirp, chirp.
Interestingly, during that time I've received about 15 emails from various of you, leading to several interesting conversations, all of which were of course private.
I'm not abandoning comments yet - easier to do nothing than to fold the tent - but doesn't exactly seem like a winner so far :)
I am wondering - and your comments on this are eagerly solicited - maybe comments *here*, inline with blog posts, would be more compelling than comments over on Mastodon. Only one click removed, but still, and the friction of signing up for a new service; don't expect that many of you are already on Mastodon, despite being [relatively] early adopters.
Anyway, it's an experiment ... onward!
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 So the other night, I'm sleeping peacefully, and suddenly ... "beep". What was that? Hmm, probably nothing. Or I dreamt it. I'm drowsing and then again ... "beep". What? Oh, crap, it's a smoke detector. And of course there's no fire, just a low battery.
At right: the culprit.
I'll be the 10 millionth person to note how bad the UX is on these things. This particular detector is wired into the 110V house power, which was not interrupted, but it has a battery backup, and after I don't know five years the battery ran low, and so it beeps.
First problem, it beeps once a minute. So you can't easily find it. Why not beep like every 2 seconds? This particular smoke detector was located within five feet of four other ones - I kid you not - and it was not easy to figure out which one needed a battery.
Second problem, a red LED blinks too, but only once a minute! Why not just turn it on?
Third problem, after replacing the battery, it still beeps. I'm not kidding took about three beeps for it to relax and realize the battery was no longer a problem. Which I only figured out after changing the battery three times.
Fourth problem, there is a reset button. It's actually a rocker button with two sides; one side is "reset", the other side is "test". In the middle of the night who can tell the difference; I accidentally pushed "test", which caused all the wired smoke detectors in the house to sound an alarm. Yeah. The test was "successful".
Fifth problem, after investigation, I actually have four count 'em four different types of smoke detectors fire sensors! There are the wired ones like the one which beeped, but also heat detectors, CO2 detectors, and an entirely separate set of smoke detectors which are battery powered [only] and which communicate via RF with the house alarm system. WTF?
Anyway the battery is installed, the smoke detector is happy. And all is well until the next time when I'm awakened... "beep".
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 Welcome back! Time for a filter pass...
Dave Winer: ChatGPT clearly has a place. As a sidekick for coding...
 Can't disagree.
An oldie but goodie: The Oatmeal: Believe. I wonder if ChatGPT and it's brethren can digest this yet?
John Battelle: As AI moves in, let's not forget why we like people. "My first take on Amazon Go is this: F*cking A, do we really want eggplants and cuts of meat reduced to parameterized choices spit onto algorithmized shelves?"
Elon Musk: What we need is TruthGPT.
 Steven Wolfram: What is ChatGPT doing ... and why does it work? A long explanation, but the best I've read. Two takeaways: as with all AI models, the training data is critical, and the randomization leads to unexpected results. This is the good and the bad of them.
 A reminder from Jamie Zawinsky. We are now closer to the Y2038 "bug" than we are to Y2K. In which the *nix systems' internal 32-bit time rolls over to zero.
 Oh my: The Maserati GranTurismo Is An Unexpected Shock Of Lightning. Wow, might be my next car :)
I've mentally flirted with the Lucid Air but while their hardware is amazing their software is well behind Tesla. With the Maser ... who cares :)
Apropos: Tesla has fully overtaken BMW for US luxury crown. Who woulda thought? At first slower, then faster, then wow it happened.
Also this: Tesla recalls 362,758 vehicles over FSD software safety concerns. Alternative headline: Tesla pushes software update to 362,758 vehicles to improve safety. Sheesh.
 Leonardo da Vinci's surprisingly accurate experiments with gravity. The recognition that gravity's effect is an acceleration seems profound.
No! WSJ: To increase equity, school districts eliminate honors classes. Unbelievable. Will they also eliminate basketball teams?
Don Surber: Fetterman Nation. I link, you read, but quite a bit of this is beyond parody.
Finally - and you knew I couldn't make a filter pass without crypto - a look at Bitcoin's five maintainers. In the long run the project structure of Bitcoin might end up being more interesting than the tech.
 Charlie Munger: sometimes I call it crypto crap.
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 Yay, went sailing today! Was beautiful out, shorts and no shirt, singlehanded Mojito to a 4th place finish. Any day on the water is better than any other day, and today was a much needed dose of Vitamin D.
At right: SBYC in recovery mode; still not operational but on the mend after January's storms... the harbor entrance was passable but silted and several competitors went aground. My strategy was to follow bigger boats in and out :)
Fortune: The 'great resignation' is now the 'great regret'. "80% of job hoppers wish they hadn't quit their old roles, with Gen Z the most regretful." I wonder if their old roles would seem better if they were in them, or if this is a "grass is greener" phenomenon?
 We've been watching Poker Face on Peacock (it's great!) and hence, have been exposed to Peacock's ads; they're not so great, but this Range Rover one climbing up a giant spillway in Iceland is amazing. What a setting!
Bonus observation: YouTube could not be any cruftier. There has to be an opportunity for a video sharing site which likes users.
 Seen on Facebook: How come this isn't a problem for terraforming Mars? Re: the [lack of] magnetic field which repels solar wind. The video is supercool; check it out.
Bonus observation: Facebook videos could not be any harder to link. There has to be an opportunity for a video sharing site which likes users.
 Philip Greenspun: Winter in Death Valley. "It was a great trip and one of the few times in recent memory that I was in a U.S. National Park and not jammed into a Manhattan-style crowd." As always, Philip is great at spotting life's contradictions.
 Review: the Candela electric boat. Looks awesome!
Bonus observation: CNET videos are ad-laden and the player is terrible. There has to be an opportunity...
Pair this with my recent "New York vs Florida" link to a WSJ article: Crime in Florida at a 50-year low. Meanwhile, in New York...
 And a great long read about one of my favorite US cities: The astonishing transformation of Austin. "Austin is the fastest-growing major metro area in America, having expanded by a third in the past ten years. It is already the eleventh-largest city... It was never known as a home for billionaires and celebrities, but in the past few years notable refugees from Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and New York have stampeded into town."
Not to mention - it's a nice place to sail. My little Mojito spent five years sailing there before she came out West.
Seems like once every other issue or so the New Yorker publishes something that reminds me why I read it :)
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 Well guess what? We have a "blizzard watch" here ... maybe Al Gore is visiting LA. Brrr! Looks like more Zwifting ahead for me, and probably, no sailing this weekend :(
Following up on my recent note about "old technology", I was able to find a firewire charger and get my little classic iPod to power up. Yay. Love that scroll wheel, so smooth, so click-y. Unfortunately I don't have a computer which can load songs into it, that would require a computer firewire adapter. Firewire is sufficiently different from serial ports that you can't have a USB-to-firewire dongle. I think it would require a full-on desktop PC with an old PCI bus, and then an adapter. So be it.
 Are you excited about the Academy Awards? Do you even know when they are? Or what they were? My family used to make a big deal out of watching them - the red carpet was the big draw - but doesn't seem like anyone cares anymore. Jimmy Failla: The Oscars went from world's biggest party to world's biggest group therapy session.
BTW, I am a red person in a blue family, so it's not the liberal bias that's turned them off, it's the specter of genetic lottery winners lecturing us.
 Well is that special: ChatGPT alters response on benefits of fossil fuels, now refuses to answer over climate concerns. Apparently we can't handle the truth. Let's ask it about nuclear power?
Meanwhile: Microsoft Trying To Rein In Bing Chat After AI-Powered Bot Called AP Reporter Ugly, A Liar, And Hitler. Wow. This whole thing is like bad science fiction movie about AI!
 I keep reading about Vivek Ramaswamy. No idea who he is or what he's done, but people I respect say I should pay attention to him. And what he says makes sense.
Oh: turns out he is running for President. Huh.
 Hmmm... that's funny: Astrophysicists Discover a Mysterious Perfect Explosion in Space - "It Makes No Sense". Yet.
 Also funny: James Webb telescope captures ancient galaxies that theoretically shouldn't exist. "It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question." But are they really galaxies?
 The Lucid Air Touring, reviewed. I've fallen in and out of love with Lucids; love the range and technology, and after I saw one loved the interior, but owners report many software problems and the Electrify America chargers don't appear to deliver anywhere near the promised charging rates. I think I'll stay with my Model S for a while longer...
Jean-Louis Glassee takes a look at Intel. Oh yeah, them. Seems like the ARM architecture is winning, they have an uphill battle on their hands...
John Battelle: Is Google Truly F*cked? His answer: "The company is clearly at its peak in terms of its core search market, and it’s deeply vulnerable to a shift in consumer behavior, should one actually materialize. And yes, it’s frustratingly hemmed into a classic innovator’s dilemma." The Intel example shows it's possible to lose a massive leadership position over time.
 Study Finds Zero Loss of Antarctica Sea Ice – But BBC Spins as "New Record Low". This is so confusing to me; either there is a massive loss of sea ice, or there isn't; how can this be controversial? What is easy to spot is the difference between the content of the study and the content of the BBC's reporting...
My own admittedly confused and not-fully-informed view: there is some loss of sea ice, not catastrophic, and it's due to many factors, not all of them anthropocentric.
 This sounds like science fiction: Sci-fi becomes real as renowned magazine closes submissions due to AI writers. Heh, I love it.
BTW: TeleHealth Odyssey was written without any use of AI :)
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It is not warm here. Brrr.
 Microsoft Research have released BioGPT: "a large language model trained on biomedical research literature. The model achieves better-than-human performance on answering questions from the biomedical literature, as evaluated on PubMedQA." Now this seems like a perfect use of this tech; hopefully with no politically correct guardrails...
 James Pethokoukis: In defense of ‘cornucopianism’ and a more populous planet. "It’s no easy task to select just one wrong-headed assertion among so many in the Scientific American essay 'Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement'." Things are getting better in general, and worse in specific...
 This is pretty cool: Pentagon releases pilot’s Chinese spy balloon selfie. Well it's not really a selfie - that would require a picture taken from the balloon itself - but still, cool.
 Excellent read: The Great Dumpling Drama Of Glendale, California. This is more about malls and mall culture than dumplings. BTW those dumplings are excellent and we voyage all the way into LA to get them at the Beverly Hills mall...
 Yes, please: stop doing threads. Yes, we know where the 140 character limit came from, and it's cute and all, but there must be a way to do longer-form articles ... like blogging!
Matt Webb is Tinkering with hyperlinks. "Hyperlinks should look different if it’s busy at the other end. Like: maybe they should be noisy, or glow, or have a yellow halo that gets bigger and bigger." What a great idea :)
 Liron Shapira: one weird trick to sanity-check any startup idea. It is: describe a specific customer use case. Seems pretty straightforward and yet, many startups address a [perceived] general need without addressing an [actual] specific one.
 Love this: 20 Mechanical Principles Combined in a Useless Lego Machine. It's not useless, because it's a useful demonstration.
 Well: California is racing to electrify trucks. Can the industry keep up? As always, the tension between "clean" and "economic". Economic will always win, but clean and economic is even better.
Note: "economic" includes government subsidies.
 via Elon Musk: Mouse bait.
 Dave Winer: the devolution of the web. This hits pretty close to home.
Well, off into the weekend. Stay warm, everyone!
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 Brrr, continued...
Every winter I say "wow, it's cold and rainy this winter". This time it really is cold and rainy, and even blizzard-y. Went sailing today on my little Westlake and was fully bundled as if in a cross-ocean race, and was still cold. But of course, any day on the water is better than any other day, regardless :)
Slashdot: As cold front hits America, half a million lose power. Takeaway one, Slashdot still exists. And two, they are now weather reporters?
The pic at right reminds me - of course - of Missing Person's Walking in LA, a full-on classic. They were great.
 Wow, the new historical American Girl doll is from the 90s. She probably listens to Missing Persons, too. (NB: Walking in LA dates from 1982...)
And to Tom Petty, "she was an American Girl..." (NB: from 1976!)
 Excellent: century-old Harley-Davidson sells for record-breaking $935K. Can you imagine driving up to the Rockstore in that?
Realization: 1923 was "a century ago". Post-WWI!
Well. The recovery of ~120,000 stolen ether by Jump and Oasis demonstrates the centralization of DeFi enabled by multisig-controlled upgradable smart contracts. I don't understand the details here, but my takeaway is that Web3 isn't decentralized at all. I also love that the "smart contracts" are "upgradeable". Imagine buying a house, then a year later someone changes the purchase contract. Nope.
 Amazing this made it onto TV: Woody Harrelson hosted SNL and used his monologue to criticize Big Parma's response to Covid.
WSJ: US Department of Energy concludes Covid originated from a Wuhan lab leak. Well, duh. But amazing that the Biden administration admits this, and that WSJ publishes it.
Question: Why is the US DOE responsible for this?
Observation: Can't wait for the CDC to conclude the same thing. Can't wait, because they will never admit it.
 David Sacks: Why would Fauci do this? Where "this" was publishing a 2012 paper describing the lab leak risk, and then advocating for "gain of function" research. (Advocating == funding!)
 Literally awesome: Armand Duplantis breaks pole vault record. Watch it. Humans are awesome.
I always wonder, how do people practice to learn how to pole vault? Seems like you'd have a lot of flying off at weird angles and great heights before you learned to control it (!)
 Tim Bray celebrates 20 years of his ongoing blog. As he should. Tim is mostly a thinker rather than a linker, and a good one. Onward to the next 20!
I, too, have a home-grown weird blogging mechanism, and I, too, blog about it from time to time. It's fun to have this level of control.
Sad to see this: Dilbert, cancelled. I urge you to read through the posts before jumping on the bandwagon.
Well onward into the week! Stay warm, everyone. I for one am ready for Spring...
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 So, are you warming up for the Iditarod?
The epic 1,000 mile sled dog race from Anchorage to Nome starts this Saturday. Longtime readers know, I'm a fan, and I will be posting some updates.
In 2023 we have the "Southern Route", which is slightly longer than the "Northern Route" used last year, and which actually passes through the ghost town of Iditarod. The race ping pongs routes because of the wear and tear of the race on the trails and native villages along the way. There are 26 checkpoints.
It will take the leading teams about eight 1/2 days to finish (last year's winner Brent Sass finished in 8d 14h 38m 32s). The last teams could take five days longer, or more.
This year there are 33 competing teams, a small contingent compared to recent history (last year there were 49, a more typical number). Each team comprises one human musher and 14 dogs. (Used to be 16, but was reduced a few years ago.) Each team starts 2 min apart in Anchorage on Sat, the "ceremonial start", and then starts again 2 min apart on Sun, the "restart" in Wasilla. The times are leveled in the mandatory 24 hour rest stop, to be taken at any checkpoint along the way. Teams must also take an 8 hour rest at any checkpoint along the Yukon River, and an 8 hour rest at the penultimate checkpoint in White Mountain.
When to rest and how much is a key factor in the racing. Over time the teams have evolved to shorter run and rest times, now averaging about 4 hours on and 4 hours off. The teams travel faster in the cold and dark - snow is harder and faster - and slower in the warm and light. But of course you can get lost out there too...
 I often like to root for a woman musher - humans and dogs of both genders compete equally in dogsled racing - going back to my initial introduction to the Iditarod by longtime champion DeeDee Jonrowe, who I met when she gave a motivational speech as a cancer survivor to my company Aperio.
This year I'm rooting for Mille Porsild, a Danish musher who now lives in Alaska. She was the 2020 rookie of the year and won an award in 2021 for best dog care. She finished 14th in 2020, 5th in 2021, and 15th last year. And she just finished 2nd in the Yukon Quest 450, a perfect warmup! She's not a favorite to win, but a good outsider pick. Go Mille!
This picture of Mille and team was taken during the Yukon race. She has a Facebook and posts pics and videos during her races, so that will be extra cool. Stay tuned.
Mushers are not allowed to receive information electronically outside of checkpoints, but they are allowed to send and receive in a checkpoint, so these days mushers often take pics and videos en route and then post when they reach a checkpoint. Yay, WiFi.
 At right a pic of Nikko, Mille's leader; she is a veteran and will be responsible for finding the trails and setting the pace.
The teams are all in last minute prep now, distributing food and supplies to checkpoints, watching the weather, and planning strategy.
I have a bit of work to do also; I have to resurrect my Iditarod Tracker, which is a great way to follow the racing. Stay tuned for that!
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 Back in 2015 I noted So is the new Well. As a bit of voice noise by way of introduction to saying something. Courtesy of Shirley, I can now note, Hmm is the new So.
Hmm be it :)
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