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Archive: July 2020
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This morning it struck me suddenly, with great sadness, that This Is July and I Miss Le Tour. Every day in July since ... well ... maybe 2000 or so, I've gotten up early and watched it. Not only the great racing but the views of France, the voice of Phil Liggitt (sadly, Paul Sherwen is no longer with us), the whole experience of it. Weirdly, of the many changes in my life due to the pandemic, this might be the most emotional.
Vive Le Tour
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Stillwater ... the best band that never was.
Imagine my delight to find their full album! Indeed we have Fever Dog, Love Thing, Chance Upon You, my favorite Love Comes and Goes, Hour of Need, and of course, You Had to be There. Written by Nancy Wilson and Peter Frampton, and with Mike McCready of Pearl Jam on guitar (incendiary!) they were awesome. In fact you might even say they were Almost Famous...
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 Rocking in the USA...
 Second wave? Not even close. And you might ask yourself, how did I get here? We've stopped making sense. There are many people who want a disaster and are rooting for it. Including especially the mass media. 
I've noticed my friends fall into two groups: those who watch CNN and MSNBC and who think things are bad and getting worse, and those who get their news from the internet and who think CNN and MSNBC are the real problem.
Deja Vu all over again? Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Richard Nixon: "To a degree that no one could have anticipated even three or four years ago, the educated elite of the American middle class have come to detest their society, and their detestation is rapidly diffusing to youth in general."
Gerard Vanderleun: Heaven's Mailroom. "Thank you, Hashem, for giving me the ability to share this message and for giving me so many wonderful people with whom to share it."
 The safest source of energy will surprise you. Well, it didn't surprise me, but I love having the data.
Nerding out: Implementing Ctrl+F. This is interesting but misses another approach - creating an index tree. For one search it might not be the best, but for many many searches it is far more efficient.
 xkcd: Modified Bayes Theorem. P(C) is correlated to knowing you need P(C).
Kind of apropos: ESR on Defect Attractors. "A 'defect attractor' of a program, language, API, or any other kind of software construct is a feature which, while possibly not bad in itself, spawns defects in the design or code near it."
And I found this recursively cool: Microsoft scrambles to stop AI reporter from reporting on itself. I wonder if the AI reporter will find this story?
 Literally awesome: the SpaceX Crew Dragon docked at the International Space Station. It only looks like a movie. This picture taken by an astronaut on a space walk.
 c|net: SpaceX could send NASA to Jupiter's potentially habitable moon Europa. Excellent, where do I buy a ticket?
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Hi all ... I've done a poor job recently in my unofficial role of Economist filter, for which I apologize. Some fairly recent links:
 Technology Quarterly: An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in. Subhead: “steeper than expected”. A good collection of articles about real-world experiences with AI, including Brain Scan, about the potential and pitfalls of Medical AI.
 Special Report: The New World Disorder. Subhead: “global leadership is missing in action.” (The Economist would always rather have governments in charge, despite their market focus.) It’s a good survey of the dynamics in world politics, including the fading role of the UN.
Zoom and Gloom. “Can Zoom be trusted with users’ secrets?” Interesting survey including the back-story with a Chinese founder and development team.
From yields to maturity. “The Fed has been supporting markets. Now it must find ways to boost growth.” Well in my view supporting markets is exactly and only what the Fed should to do boost growth, but what do I know.
 The World If. “Scenarios for a warming world.” Their Editor’s Note: Each of these climate change articles is fiction, but grounded in historical fact and real science. Okayyy. They don't quite say the pandemic is good for the Earth, but they certainly hint at it; a sample musing: Peak Plane (“What if aviation doesn't recover from Covid-19”). For me the most prescient was The Road Not Taken, “what if nuclear power had taken off in the 1970s”.
 And finally from the most recent issue: Invisible Men, “how objectivity in journalism became a matter of opinion.” It is, dare I say, a reasonably objective survey of how the pendulum has swung over the years. We expect journalists to try to be objective, and are dismayed when they aren't, but it was not always so, and increasingly it isn't so anymore, either.
Cheers and happy reading
PS I share these links thinking they are publicly readable, please let me know if they are not, and I'll share the articles themselves instead.
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 Amid all the sheltering, I've been sailing! Yippee. The local clubs here in Southern California haven't exactly opened up - the clubhouses and bars are locked tight - but they have started running simple "practice" regattas. So much fun.
Literally unbelievable: Widespread Twitter Hack Reaches Bill Gates, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. I follow Elon and was almost taken in myself. Wow!
Experts agree: US should reopen schools. Much to the chagrin of some media.
Powerline: America's reporters and editors are liars. Yep, no surprise there.
Half of Americans have used Telehealth services during pandemic. Excellent. But what about all of you in the other half?
 National Geographic: The Atlas of Moons. Over 200 of your favorites, with all known data about each one. Definitely a bookmark to revisit.
Although I must say, the site is a tad over-engineered; it would have been better without all the background processing.
Mark your calendars: NASA's SpaceX Crew Dragon astronauts will return to Earth on Aug 2. Excellent.
Apropos: SpaceX wins NASA approval to launch astronauts on reused rockets.
Less certain: NASA chief says he's 'very confident' in a 2021 launch date for SLS. Did he read this: What you need to know about our SLS rocket's 'green run test'.
Inspector General: NASA's Orion is a program of lies. Sad.
But ... at least NASA is keeping the astrologers honest, so they've got that going for them.
 Here we have the Katmai National Park annual "bear cam", showing bears, salmon, and all sorts of other wildlife. I've visited three times and seen bears every time. Sooo cool.
On behalf of environmentalists, I apologize for the climate scare. Why thank you.
Related: A visual lesson in energy density. Green entropy barely shows up.
 Berci Mesko: I would love to go back to 2006 to show this image to someone and ask what they think is going on here.
Doc Searls: How long will radio last?
 And finally from John "Doom" Carmack: "Someone noticed that when you have hundreds / thousands of cores in a supercomputer, the individual utilization boxes in Task Manager start to look like pixels. People started making pictures by doing different amounts of work on specific processors."
It escalated quickly.
Onward ... smooth sailing!
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 And so we celebrated the 28th solar orbit of our marriage; where by "we" I mean Shirley and me, but also our kids Jordan, Alex, and Meg, and our grandkid Ori. A time of reminiscence. A lot has happened during those orbits, and a lot has changed, but also the song remains the same. The sound track was the Beach Boys, who were always nostalgic even when new.
Ottmar Liebert: Old Ideas. "Perhaps the desire to change or become something else is a genetic selection… because, if everyone wanted to change it might create too much societal upheaval. If no one wanted change society would become stagnant." Agree entirely.
And it's an old idea: viz Progress Ratchets.
 One of the joys of having blogged for 17 years now is checking to see what I was blogging about this time last year, and the year before that, and so on ... the old ideas spawn new ones. I was sad this year that there was no Tour, and now I'm sad that I'm not sad that the Tour has ended, as I usually am at the end of July. It's presently scheduled for Aug 29 - Sep 20, but that seems rather optimistic now and I'm betting it will not take place.
Some of the things which have been and shall be delayed by the pandemic will just take place as usual, but later, but some will be quite changed by the delay, including athletic events where the athletes trained for peaking at a given time. The effect on the Olympics of 202021 will be significant.
 The Visual Capitalist outdo themselves: map of Pangea with modern-day borders. You must most definitely click through and oogle.
Did you know? You can now boot a Win95 PC inside Minecraft and play Doom. Ah, but can you play Minecraft on it?
More Ottmar: "perhaps I should use the word timeless instead of old".
A new video blog to watch: The Reassembler. Great stuff; interesting, and narrated with great humor.
 So you can make square water. Or perhaps more accurately, square pools of water. You never know when that might come in handy.
Am I the only one who immediately thought of yelling SQUARE WATER! Yeah, I guess I was.
More old ideas: Scarlet, a previously unreleased 1974 Rolling Stones song that features Jimmy Page on guitar. Not bad and age hasn't hurt it one bit.
Ottmar again: "The idea of balancing two extremes is what makes a great piece of art, whether it is a painting or a piece of music…. or food. What are those extremes? They can be familiar and strange, comforting and arousing, sour and sweet. It’s all about the balance."
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