Today I rediscovered for the billionth time that coding to music is WAY better than coding to silence.  Sigh.

(Bowie of course - on the always awesome Slacker :)

I am -> <- very close to abandoning Facebook entirely.  I am SO very tired of my politically minded friends hammering away at me with their views.  I don't care if you're left or right or green or blue, I'd much rather see pictures of your cat and hear about your latest epiphany regarding plant dusting than hear about your politics. 

NY Times races to the bottom on immigration. 

See what I did there? :)

After watching the Martian and watching SpaceX land their booster rocket, you are probably pretty excited about what NASA are doing, right?  Well then you need to know about the Space Launch System, "the world's most powerful rocket".  "Another consideration for using these engines for future spaceflight was that 16 of them already existed from the shuttle program. Using a high-performance engine that already existed gave us a considerable boost in developing its next rocket for space exploration."  Riight.  Meanwhile NASA delays Orion's first manned flight until 2023.  Do not hold your breath.  Instead, root for SpaceX and Blue Origin! 

NASA's next mission will be the InSight Mission to Mars.  Cool right?  Yeah, except it has just been delayed two years, because of a problem with a French seismological instrument.  Sigh.  What would JFK say?

Kurt Schlichter: 'The Martian' was our world just 50 years ago.  "'The Martian' is superficially about space travel, but it is really about time travel. The plot may focus on characters leaving Earth to explore the red planet, but the strange world the movie depicts is really our own world just over 50 years ago. The can-do, optimistic liberalism it depicts is utterly alien to today’s sobby, whiny, excuse-laden version."  I think history will record the Apollo program as an incredible aberation, in which a government program actually worked. 

In the meantime, marvel at the space-beauty of Cassini's final close-up of Saturn's moon Dione.  Okay!  (click to enbiggen) 

Seth Godin: After you've done your best work ... you really have no choice but to do it again.  I was afraid of that. 

Brad Feld: The Confidence / Competence ratio.  "Over a long period of time, I’ve come to realize that a balance between confidence and competence is very appealing to me. I’m attracted to people who know what they know and know what they don’t know."  Same.  He goes on to define cluefulness as confidence divided by competence.  Heh. 

Two kinds of people.  Yep. 

One of the more interesting announcements at CES last week was GM's Bolt.  Wired precelebrates:  How GM beat Tesla to the first true mass-market electric car.  Um, Telsa has been shipping electric cars for five years.  GM has yet to ship their first.  (I don't count the Volt, which can only go 40 miles as an electric car.)  Stay tuned on this one... 

Steven Wolfram untangles the tale of Ada Lovelace.  In many ways she apparently anticipated the work of Turning and others.  Steven has a great blog; he doesn't post often, but when he does, its usually a deep and interesting article, like this one... 

Another great blogger is Jamie Zawinsky, aka jwz; here, he exercises vague caution...  (And the sign said, you got to have a membership card to go inside.) 

Edward Snowden solves the Fermi Paradox:  Maybe we haven't discovered intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, because their communications encryption is indistinguishable from cosmic background radiation.  Heh. 

Related: now @Snowden.  And verified!

And finally: 3D-printed car armor.  Why of course!  (And people ask me why I have a 3D printer :)