 |
|||
|
2008 August 30-31 |
I've joined LinkedIn, the professional networking site. I'm not making any attempt to put my whole life's story on it — I just want friends and colleagues to be able to locate me. I'm not even trying to get a titanic-sized "network," but if you're on LinkedIn and you know me, by all means send me an invitation to connect. The purpose is to enable academic and professional people with similar interests, who know each other personally, to stay connected. My "network" is not equated with my set of friends — plenty of friends will never be in it, and on the other hand, people will be in it whom I don't know especially well. So I think it's useful. I just don't plan to live my whole life there. Short notes New culture of thrift: Just three years ago, the desire to stay out of debt was practically a quirk of reactionary Christians. Today even Business Week is running articles on how to save money (not how to show off your Rolex) and CNBC has a daily (and rather frenzied and repetitious) TV show on personal finance. I'm in favor of thrift, but isn't there an element of needless panic in this? Tom Kneitel, ex-K2AES, SK: One of the most colorful characters in the ham, CB, and shortwave radio hobby has died. (More detailed obituary here.) Thought not at all a role model for me, he was a source of entertainment and information. In Electronics Illustrated in the 1960s, he wrote a column that was (as Jeff Duntemann remarked) surprisingly like a blog. Even more blog-like was Tom McCahill's column in Mechanix Illustrated — does anybody out there remember it? Kneitel may have been consciously modeling his column on McCahill's, since the two magazines had the same publisher, and McCahill came first. The sky is not your billboard: Someone in downtown Athens, Ga., insists on decorating the night sky with searchlights to advertise some kind of show. If I do any astrophotography from home this weekend, it will have to be in the extreme southern sky, away from the lights. Am I the only one who would rather see stars than searchlights? They go on for hours, not just for a short time as people are arriving for a show. [Addendum:] Pete Albrecht sums it up: "Would I go to a show because it has searchlights?" Update, Aug. 30 It's not downtown Athens. It turns out to be The Omni Club, a fitness center that, curiously, still had the searchlights running at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday night, outside a closed and unattended, secluded building — maybe they're trying to attract burglars. I'm e-mailing them about that hazard, as well as objecting to the way they are intruding into the scenery (namely the sky) on their neighbors' private property. We'll see what happens. Recommended book: If you're looking for a good biography of C. S. Lewis (author of The Chronicles of Narnia and many greater works, among them Mere Christianity), let me recommend one: Jack, by George Sayer. I've been something of a student of Lewis's work for decades, and this biography is both the most complete (as regards important facts) and the most accurate. The author knew Lewis well and had no particular axe to grind when writing it. At the same time, he was well aware of Lewis's human failings and does not try to paint Lewis as perfect. The book was written at the right time — the 1980s — when there had been enough time for information to come to light and be assembled and discussed, but enough people who knew Lewis and his environment personally were still alive. Jack does a good job of disposing of puzzles and inaccuracies in other biographies. The one to avoid is the hastily-written one by A. N. Wilson, who apparently felt it necessary to invent some sex scandals that don't square with verifiable facts. But the Wilson biography has one advantage — you can buy secondhand copies of it for 25 cents. 
|
|
|
|
2008 August 29 |
Miscellany Changing from Norton 360 to Kaspersky: I changed another computer from Norton Antivirus to Kaspersky Internet Security last night. Recommendation: Don't even try to uninstall Norton from the control panel; it gets stuck. Instead, download and run the Norton Removal Tool. The good news: Kaspersky 2009 installs quickly and efficiently and doesn't seem to need any settings changed in order to make it behave reasonably. [Update:] Well, maybe a few. I've had to tell it that COVINGTON2 is a local-area network, not a public one. And I'm apparently going to have to tell it about a few pieces of software that automatically check for updates on line, including Notepad++. Economy: This is not a recession, folks. During the supposedly dreadful second quarter, the GDP grew at an annualized rate of 3.3%. Unemployment continued to be low. What's coming? Inflation, whether the Fed believes it or not. (And why is this article about Mr. Lockhart illustrated with a picture of Mr. Bernanke?) As you can tell, I'm too busy to write much. Expect one more Notebook entry before August is over.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 27-28 |
An odd moment in U.S. monetary history One day in 1935, people outside a U.S. Treasury warehouse found $10,000 bills on the street. They looked like this. They were cancelled gold certificates, no longer worth anything as money, but needed for recordkeeping, and someone had tossed them out the window to save them from a fire.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 26 |
Lizardry We haven't had a lizard picture lately. This adolescent Anolis carolinensis (American chameleon), perhaps born this past spring, hammed it up for my camera a couple of days ago. Cloudy, cooler weather brings lizards out of hiding as they seek sunlight and heat.
Hang up and live Clark Howard has introduced to our language the useful phrase cell-phone driver, denoting someone whose attention is 3/4 on the cell phone and 1/4 on the car he or she is driving. There are also cell-phone pedestrians. One of them almost walked right into our momentarily-stopped car as we were driving through a parking lot the other day. When I honked the horn, she gave me the look as if I had rudely interrupted an important phone call. In a few more years, natural selection will have eliminated these.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 25 |
Hint: Wrap your C# program in a try-catch block Handy hint for the day: Wrap your whole C# program in a try-catch block. Then you can give a meaningful error message if there's any unhandled exception, instead of just Vista's annoying message, "Program has stopped working..." If you use Visual Studio, the main program is always called Program.cs and you rarely look at it. It generally contains the line: Application.Run(new Form1); Replace that line with the following:
try Then you'll get error messages that are at least somewhat informative. If you know about C# exception handling, you can immediately devise more sophisticated ways to do this. And now you have a solution to the vexing problem, What if a program was compiled with Visual Studio 2008 and therefore (by default) requires .NET 3.5, but only .NET 3.0 is installed on the computer? After all, .NET 3.5 has not yet been distributed with Windows Update. In that situation, you get something like this:
and of course you could have your program recognize this particular message, intercept it, and write something more useful. Get your .NET and Visual Studio updates Whether or not you already have .NET Framework 3.5, you need .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1, which you can get here. The updated version will install by itself or over the previous one. If you have Visual Studio 2008, don't bother. A more arduous task awaits you instead. The 200-megabyte update here needs to be installed and will take about an hour. The .NET 3.5 SP1 update is included.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 24 |
Why can't mailreaders just do this? Here's a kind of error message I'd like to see, but I've never seen it:
(I made up this example by writing a small program.) A good mailreader might also include a checkbox, "Do not warn about this combination again," for dealing with recurrent e-mail from people like me who always use a different server for outgoing than for incoming mail. Why does no one implement this? Instead, there are all sorts of "anti-phishing filters" that try to be foolproof and end up being foolish. All I really want is for information that I can interpret to be brought to my attention at the right time. It's like having gauges on a car dashboard instead of just idiot lights. An interesting old optics book On the Internet Text Archive you can view and download a full PDF file of J. Traill Taylor's The Optics of Photography and Photographic Lenses (1904). Although not something the modern photographer needs to absorb page-by-page, this book contains some remarkably clear explanations of optical principles. For example, here is how an aperture stop, placed in front of a lens, converts spherical aberration (bad) into flatness of field (good):
The chapter on anastigmatic lenses, written by P. F. Everitt, tells us about the state of the art 100 years ago, and especially the inventions of Paul Rudolph of Zeiss. His employer allowed Dr. Rudolph to invent and patent a lot of lens designs that had too many air gaps to work well with 19th-century uncoated glass, and he proceeded to lay the foundations of the twentieth century. Here's a design that should look familiar:
("Crown" and "flint" are two kinds of glass.) You can still buy this lens (the Planar) from Zeiss, but you probably already own a close imitation of it made by Nikon, Canon, Pentax, or someone else — it is the basis of nearly every 50-mm "normal" lens made since the 1960s.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 23 |
Cyclone Tropical Storm Fay is dumping lots of rain on Valdosta, but northern Georgia is only getting wind and drizzle. This striking satellite image is from NEXRAD.
Least friendly web page I've seen lately
At times like these I'm glad I went to Yale.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 22 |
University of Georgia budget cuts [Updated.] Although things are still up in the air, the University of Georgia has been told to prepare for substantial mid-year budget cuts because the current economic downturn was not predicted at the time the budget was passed. ("Predicted" might not be the right word — it was already going on at the time.) Zero-based balanced budgeting, required of the Georgia state government, leads to a government that fluctuates in size with the ups and downs of the business cycle. Somehow, our leaders need to find a way to smooth out the variation. This, incidentally, is why I'm not in favor of a constitutional amendment forbidding federal budget deficits, although I am against deficits. Sometimes you just can't predict the government's income. Back to the University. The parts of the University's income coming from student fees and from gifts and endowments are under control. Only the state portion is fluctuating — fluctuating enough to take away 6% to 10% or more of the budget. What students don't realize is that their tuition and fees, expensive though they are, don't come anywhere near paying the full cost of their education. That's why state universities are cheaper than Harvard — they're state-subsidized. A 6% to 10% loss is a severe squeeze, especially since (for now) faculty salaries are fixed by contract, and many other expenses are also unchangeable or even rising. For now, we are leaving positions open when they come open; I gave up some non-contractual summer salary in July and August that I would normally have had; we're not buying materials and supplies; and we've cut off virtually all travel. That means faculty members (including me) won't be presenting their research at conferences this year — and when you stop going to conferences, you quickly stop being internationally known. Fortunately, we can stand in for each other to some extent, and an alumna who lives in San Francisco is going to help me out by presenting some of my work at a convention there in January. But I'll just be a name on a poster; nobody will get to meet me. There has never been a better time to give to the University of Georgia. Donations are fully tax-deductible and can be routed to support particular departments and research programs. One good friend in the computer industry has already volunteered to help out the Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Others are welcome! Bailing out Fannie and Freddie Foreigners must wonder: (1) why our government-sponsored mortgage companies are called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; (2) whether they're really government-sponsored; (3) why on earth we have them. The first answer is easy. "Fannie Mae" and "Freddie Mac" are comical pronunciations of FNMA and FHMC that stuck. The second answer is dangerously ambiguous. Supposedly, Fannie and Freddie are investor-owned. But they were set up by the government, and there's an implicit expectation, now becoming explicit, that the federal government will bail them out if they ever run out of money. And the third answer is really unclear. Why does our government need to help people buy houses? Because buying houses is "the American dream" or "the cornerstone of the whole economy"? Or because a special-interest group somehow persuaded the government to help it get even richer than it already was? As I've noted, excessive home ownership has trapped lots of people in bad investments recently, as well as making it harder for people to move out of declining areas (such as the de-industrializing Northeast) and seek a better life elsewhere. Back to the bailout. I hope Doug Downing won't mind if I share his sage observation, which is actually fairly obvious:
A variation on Russell's Paradox Cathy quotes the following sentence from her art history textbook's preface: "We are conscious that nowhere in the book do we mention the British Museum's collection of coins." Which of course is just as false as the inscription, "This page intentionally left blank," on pages in IBM manuals.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 21 |
Jupiter with the 5-inch
This isn't bad for a 5-inch telescope with Jupiter low in the sky. It's the best 1500 frames out of a 2250-frame video, taken with a ToUCam Pro and aligned and processed with RegiStax and Photoshop. Preparing for inflation Inflation is coming. Arguably, it's already here, although the people at the Fed are skeptical — or else they feel pressure to keep interest rates low, regardless. I've been prognosticating inflation, at least hesitantly, since 2005, and with confidence since early this year. How should people prepare for inflation? The most important single move is to lock in fixed interest rates on debts but keep the interest rates on savings variable. The reason is that inflation makes interest rates go up. It also makes fixed-dollar loan payments become progressively easier. Also, buy Series I savings bonds (currently paying 4.8%, inflation-indexed) and/or Treasury inflation-protected securities (which pay about 1.5% above the inflation rate, whatever it may be). While eliminating debt is always beneficial, inflation does not create any special pressure to "get debt-free." Deflation would do that, and we haven't had deflationary cycles since modern monetary policy came into effect in the 1930s.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 20 |
If Gmail users can't receive your file attachments... If you attach files to e-mail, and send them to Gmail users, and on the receiving end, they're just text gibberish, then the problem is that Gmail doesn't accept UUENCODE. UUENCODE is an older way of encoding binary files as text. A newer method is called MIME and is the only one Gmail accepts. You should be able to tell your mailer which one to use. For instance, in Windows (Vista) Mail, go to Tools, Options, Send, and look at Mail Sending Format:
Under both Plain Text Settings and HTML Settings, some form of MIME encoding should be checked (rather than UUENCODE).
There are three alternatives, None, Quoted Printable, and Base64, and I haven't explored the significance of the choice.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 19 |
Please note a correction to the August 12 entry about the demolition of a fraternity house. Microsoft Word 2007 file format revealed Unlike earlier versions, Microsoft Office 2007 uses a new XML-based file format that anyone can write software to read. But the files don't look like XML if you open them with a text editor. What gives? The secret is that (for example) a Word .docx file is really a ZIP file. To prove it, make a copy and change its extension from .docx to .zip like this:
Now Windows will treat the ZIP file as a compressed folder, and you can open it:
Within it is another folder named word. Open that...
Now look at document.xml, which contains the text (but not the footnotes, endnotes, or page headings):
Some of the codes are fairly cryptic, but you can see that every paragraph is a w:p, and within it, every block of type in a uniform style is a w:r structure. It should be easy to write software to extract the text, with or without XML-reading tools. Even the ability to open ZIP files is built into .NET Framework. Quackware? I got an alarmed message yesterday from a friend who is new to Windows. He ran a "registry cleanup" utility that I had never heard of, and it reported that it had fixed hundreds of things wrong with his registry. He continued to work for a few minutes, ran it again, and it reported about a dozen new registry problems. However, he wasn't having any trouble with Windows. He wrote to me for advice. My answer: Why do you trust a utility program that you just downloaded more than you trust the makers of the operating system? Maybe the maker of the software just has a difference of opinion with Microsoft about what constitutes an "error." There certainly is "memory-increasing" quackware, which throws away cached data and gloats about how much RAM it has freed up, when in fact it would have been better to leave the cached data in it. Maybe some of this "registry cleanup" software is doing equally dubious things. And remember — if it deletes something that shouldn't be deleted, Windows will stop working. There is a place for registry-cleaning utilities to remove (for example) the detritus of software that didn't uninstall correctly. But I would only let it delete things if I understood what was getting deleted. Wedding site demolished; marriage endures Thanks to Melody's father, Jim Mauldin, here is a picture of all that's left of the over-130-year-old sanctuary of the First Baptist Church of Winder, Georgia, where Melody and I got married on July 25, 1982. 
It's sad to see the old building go. But the marriage is just fine, thank you. Addendum: I should add that the church is also very much alive, in a newer, larger building on a different site.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 18 |
Short notes Between jobs: As this is written (August 17), I'm literally between jobs. My summer in industry is over — the last deliverables were burned to CD last night — and the University starts up tomorrow. It's been a summer of very hard work; it's going to be a fall semester of very hard work. Today is the day in between. The University is threatened by severe, sudden budget cuts due to a downturn in state tax revenues. The comments section in the online Atlanta newspaper is distressing — it attracts lots of (pretend) unsophisticates who rail against lazy, overpaid state employees without being able to actually point out any. I have two thoughts: (1) If the University's funding gets cut, it should admit fewer freshmen, or maybe go a semester without admitting any at all, rather than cut back its commitments to students who are already here. (This would also send a message to the legislature and the people of Georgia — if you scale down our university, it gets smaller.) This won't happen, of course, because funding is automatically proportional to number of students. (2) Are the budget cuts really due to the economy or are they due to lack of proper planning on the part of the state government? If you were a magazine publisher, would you object to this? The website mygazines.com, hosted overseas, lets people upload and share scans of magazines. (I haven't looked at it myself yet.) Clearly, this is a copyright violation. "But on the other hand not so fast," as Teddy Roosevelt would say. The advertisements in the magazines get distributed along with the text, enlarging their audience, and that's what magazines make their money from. If I were running a magazine and somebody else wanted to distribute it for me, free of charge, I'd probably let them, subject only to the condition that they leave the ads in. Remote Desktop for Linux: If you want a Windows Remote Desktop client for Linux, try rdesktop. If you want a server (so your Windows users can remote into the Linux system), try xrdp. I haven't tried either one yet.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 17 |
"You'll have to provide administrator I had two folders on my desktop that I couldn't move or delete. Any attempt to do so would give a UAC pop-up box with the message: You'll need to provide administrator permission to move to this folder and when I said yes, the operation nonetheless failed. It looked like a problem with file permissions or ownership, but I got nowhere trying to solve it along those lines. People advised me to temporarily disable UAC, which would be one work-around, but I decided I'd rather find out what had really gone wrong. I tried to delete the folders and was told that a file was in use. A clue! The folders certainly shouldn't be in use — in fact, one of them was empty and had no files in it. But now I knew what to look for. I started up Process Explorer and did a handle search for the name of the folder (or rather for a distinctive part of its name). Result: Each of the afflicted folders contained, or used to contain, the .exe file of a .NET console application. (Not many people develop console applications in .NET, but I was testing a subroutine library.) And each of the folders was being kept open by conime.exe, apparently the Console Input Method Editor, from when I had run the program several days earlier. I used Process Explorer to kill conime.exe, and all is well. Except that I think we've proven conime.exe has an error in it (holding the folders open) and Vista has an error in it (displaying entirely the wrong error message). A more heavy-handed solution would have been to reboot.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 16 |
Short notes Is it August Fool's Day, or are there ape-men in the woods near me? The supposed discoverers of a Bigfoot specimen do not have much credibility. From the comments to CNN's Sci-Tech Blog I got the phrase "August Fool's Day" and also the astute observation that if this corpse might be human, then the discoverers need to hand it over to the police immediately. And BFRO points out that the only correct thing to do with a major scientific find like this is to turn it over to qualified investigators right away. I expect the Bigfoot corpse to disappear (allegedly stolen, or something) before it can be examined scientifically. [Aug. 20:] It was a hoax. The "corpse" turned out to be a frozen rubber gorilla costume. Clayton County (Ga.) has reportedly fired a police officer who was involved. There may yet be an undiscovered North American ape — some rare animals have eluded discovery for centuries — but rumors and press conferences don't constitute proof. In other news, there's a proposal before Congress to cap payday-lenders' interest rates at 36% (ouch!), and, strange to say, that's enough to put them out of business — their normal interest rates are much higher!
|
|
|
|
2008 August 14-15 |
A realization about how I work I've been programming all summer, and it has led to a realization: I work like an artist. A day of programming can easily be five hours of pacing around strategizing, followed by three hours of coding. Piet Hein said that there are two mysteries about artists: how they make the things they make so beautiful, and what they are doing with their energy and time. I certainly have a hard time accounting for my energy and time. Yet the work gets done. Often, during the pacing around and strategizing, I don't quite know what I'm doing; I may even seem to be doing other things, so long as they don't demand my full attention; and all I know is that at the beginning I don't know how I'm going to do a project, and at the end I do. Progress happens at odd moments; for example, over lunch yesterday (Aug. 12), I may have looked a bit blank, and a large set of object-oriented data structures and methods popped into my head. I think I understand why Cambridge (for instance) is so full of Fellows' Gardens to walk in. That's where the creative thinking gets done. Melody, Cathy, and Sharon tell me this is what it's like to be an artist. It certainly explains why consulting by the hour, when I do it, is so stressful. I much prefer consulting by percentage effort, which is how I've spent the summer. But working like an artist has its disadvantages too: I'm never off duty. I never get to "clock out" unless a project is actually finished. Meade in decline? My telescope is a classic Meade LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain. Meade pioneered computerized telescopes and, more recently, an aspherized ("coma-free") Schmidt-Cassegrain design. And now they're threatened with stock market delisting. That doesn't sound good. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the news tip.)
|
|
|
|
2008 August 13 |
Bright-sky astrophotography To further test out my new "piggy-front autoguider bracket" (follow that link to see new pictures of it), which puts the piggy-back autoguider in front of the telescope instead of on its back or under its belly, I decided to photograph the star cluster M11 in bright moonlight, with only second-magnitude stars visible. Not too bad...
This is a small part of a larger picture. Canon 300-mm lens at f/6.3, EOS 20Da camera, stack of three 4-minute exposures, dark-frame corrected. Not half bad. This is comparable to what could be done in the middle of a big city on a moonless night. Jupiter and Ganymede A bit later, using the 8-inch telescope, I video-recorded Jupiter and stacked the best 100 out of more than 2000 frames. You can see the satellite Ganymede about to pass in front of the planet.
Cause for concern There is a troubling news report out of Marlborough, Massachusetts. Scientific hobbies appear to have been declared illegal there. A retired chemist, Victor Deeb, who had a small laboratory in his home, has had a lot of his possessions confiscated even though, reportedly, no hazard was found and initial reports did not even allege any violation of the law. Details here and here. According to one local official, this gentleman's offense was doing things that are "not a customary home occupation," namely doing "scientific research and development" in his house. Does that mean that in Marlborough, Massachusetts, my computer and my telescope would be illegal because I do "scientific research and development" with them? Maybe in Marlborough, you can't do anything in your house unless it's in a Martha Stewart book. Granted, zoning laws often are very clumsily written. But as far as I know, zoning laws don't trump the Bill of Rights. They are enforceable only as regards things that affect the neighbors. (By the way, Mr. Deeb was not running a business; commercial zoning doesn't enter into it.) The town of Marlborough is coming out looking snobbish and anti-intellectual. We used to think that science education, including self-training and home experimentation, was important for America's future. Not any more. Apparently, nowadays it is much more important to be "customary." Click here for a related entry from 2006. See also a number of updates to recent entries. Most of the added material is in red type.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 12 |
Defunct fraternity houses [Updated August 18.] The frat houses that you see below are reportedly being torn down; I took these pictures about two weeks ago. They are on the west side of Lumpkin Street just north of Wray Street, and the one with square columns is the more northerly one. I say this because local historians notoriously give locations by saying things like, "where the Piggly Wiggly is now," which leaves you scratching your head if you're reading it 40 years later and the Piggly Wiggly is long gone. CORRECTION: Only the second house shown below, the Kappa Alpha house, is being torn down at present. Either I misread an earlier news release or it was incorrect. The better-looking of the two buildings is still standing as of August 18 and appears to be in use. Note: These buildings are not as historic as they look. They date from the 1930s and are said to be falling apart on the inside. Because General Sherman didn't burn our town, Athens (unlike Atlanta) has plenty of pre-1860 buildings; these are not them. The buildings do look dignified, and I'll miss them, but the University says they are beyond economic repair.
As you might guess, I do not have a high opinion of fraternities and sororities. They contribute essentially nothing to the academic mission of the University. (Fraternities are not the same as honor societies such as Phi Beta Kappa, which are highly academic.) And, in southern universities, fraternities seem to be the last bastion of racism. The University has relocated one of these two to a historically black neighborhood, which will be interesting, given its penchant for displaying enormous Confederate flags. More fundamentally, while I see nothing wrong with social organizations, I think the borders of a group of friends should always be fuzzy. Fraternities and sororities have formal mechanisms for voting people in and out — for telling people, "You are not our friend." Fundamentally, it is a system for looking down on others for no good reason, and I don't think that is a good thing to do. I'm aware some fraternities and sororities have avoided these failings, or claim to have done so. But I don't think the (occasional) good outweighs the (regular, highly institutionalized) bad.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 11 |
Cleaning out the inbox I'm about to get really busy, so today I'm going to clear the backlog of things I've been meaning to write about. Please bear with me in the coming semi-hiatus, and please understand that although I thank people for things they have sent recently, this is not a magazine and I do not normally publish material sent to me by others. Instead, put it on your own web page and send me a link. Highly recommended Manhattan hotel: Upper Yorkville Suites. Cathy has just come back from a museum trip and says this place is excellent. Stupid web tricks: Read this. A webmaster set up pages with links which, when clicked, would delete files. When search engines started trying to index those links (by clicking on them to see where they go), he then complained bitterly that people were "hacking in and deleting files." There are free versions of the Microsoft Visual Studio suite (one programming language at a time), and they produce perfectly normal, unrestricted EXEs and DLLs, though not MSIs (setup files). Details here. Automotive spray paint is better: A couple of days ago I described an autoguider gadget with a metal plate. The steel plate needed painting, and I used Dupli-Color automotive spray paint (preceded by primer and followed by a clear overcoat). I've used Dupli-Color before, and it's tougher than general-purpose spray paint and also, I think, more heavily pigmented. The price is a little higher, too — no surprise. And they don't have all the colors of the rainbow, but they do have a lot of colors that are very appropriate for machinery. Highly recommended. Have you heard those radio ads for people that say they'll eliminate your credit-card debt? Here's what they do. Basically, they negotiate an unofficial bankruptcy — they convince the creditors to settle because you'll never be able to pay in full. And this ruins your credit rating. Pete Albrecht opines (and gives me permission to quote him), regarding the state of the airline industry: "If you have the plane crammed like a sardine can and you still claim to be losing money, i.e. you'd lose LESS money if you didn't operate the plane at all, you're doing something wrong. Time for some executive firings..." My own opinion is that airfares are too low. The airlines are so focused on selling every seat that they're not bringing in enough income to keep up the desired level of service! This is related to my opinion that, for a long time, University of Georgia parking permits were too cheap and didn't bring in enough money to pay for building much-needed decks. In recent years, the price went up and the supply improved. The coming impoverished elite: A while back I wrote about the coming problem of excessive student-loan debt. After the real-estate debacle, student loans seem to be the last bastion of irresponsible overlending. Well, now I see a trend coming: the highly-educated poor. That is, I think that in 20 years, it will be common for people with four years of college or less — skilled workers, store managers, etc. — to have more money than people in professions that require more education. The reason? If you borrow $250,000 for college, it's a potentially lifelong burden, and you owe the money whether or not you have the superstar salary that you thought you were going to get. The burden is especially regrettable if you could have had nearly the same education for a tenth of the price by going to a mid-size state university instead of a "big name." Back in the 1970s, Kingman Brewster gave a speech warning Yale freshmen against "grim pre-professionalism," meaning the view that Yale is just an expensive trade school that guarantees you a high income as a laywer or doctor or executive. I think the warning is even more appropriate today. The ruins of WMGA A while back I wrote about the sad end of radio station WMGA, Moultrie, Georgia. Now, architect Richard Sasser has sent me a few pictures of the ruins (as of May 2005; there's been even more decline since). Here they are. I don't remember the red brick; maybe my memory was playing tricks, or maybe it was added after the 1960s.
Airplane traced... Also, a while back I wrote about a vintage Southern Airways DC-3. Gordon Synder saw and photographed a DC-3 in Fremont, Ohio, recently, and traced its tail number, N85SA, to my Notebook entry. Is it still flying?
[Plenty more pictures of this plane are on the Web; Google "N85SA" to find them.] Things my daughters have overheard lately "I don't have OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder]. I have CDO, which is the same thing, but with the letters in alphabetical order as they ought to be." (Girl describing the male-female ratio at Georgia Tech:) "The odds are good but the goods are odd." "I am not a vegetarian. I am a humanitarian."
|
|
|
|
2008 August 10 |
[Uploaded early. Read tomorrow's news today! Or at least today's news tomorrow!] Corona Australis by moonlight Here's the first picture taken with the aid of the gadget I described yesterday. It was taken in a clear but moonlit sky at my home in Athens, Georgia, so it's not a very good picture, but it proves the equipment works.
In the upper right you see the globular cluster NGC 6723, and close to the middle of the picture, a bright double star, TY Coronae Australis and SAO 210828, which is surrounded by faint nebulosity. Just to the lower left of the double star, and almost too small to see, is a pair of stars that includes a small comet-shaped nebula surrounding the faint star R Coronae Australis. The lower left part of the picture shows a dark nebula (gas cloud) obscuring the stars beyond it. I hope to photograph all of this from Deerlick under much better conditions. This is a stack of three 4-minute exposures at ISO 400, minus three dark frames, using a Canon 300-mm f/4 lens at f/5.6 and a Canon EOS 20Da camera, with processing with MaxIm DL, Photoshop, and Neat Image. Self-management I've been reading Harvard Business School's book on Managing Yourself, which includes Drucker's famous essay on the topic, as well as a few other papers. Gleanings:
How I manage research Inspired by the Harvard book, I'm going to give my graduate research assistants a memo explaining, inter alia, my management style. Here, for your contemplation, is a draft of that part of it. Research is different from taking a course. In research, the teacher does not have an answer key; we’re trying to find out things nobody ever knew before. And the passing grade is not 70%; we are aiming to get things right. I want steady progress, not all-nighters just before a deadline. I do not manage by creating artificial deadline crises. In my opinion, you shouldn’t trust anyone who does. Silicon Valley has more than its share of totally inept managers. Accuracy is much more important to me than ego. If I make a mistake, I want people to tell me. I'll expect the whole team to develop the same attitude. I am a reader and writer more than a talker. I do my best thinking with my mouth closed, at the keyboard. E-mail is important to me; so is documentation writing. When I give you things to read, I expect you to read them and really take them in, not just skim them. If you come to a word you don’t understand, look it up. If you discover a gap in your knowledge, fill it. While at Yale, I was puzzled by people who could only think with their mouths open. I'm not one of them. Thinking with my mouth closed, and then coming back to talk about the conclusions, is a big part of how I operate. Another of my distinctive traits is moving fast by not hurrying. The more energy you expend on "hurry," the less you're devoting to the real task.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 9 |
It's a steel... ...or at least a bargain. For less than $20 I've increased the amount of sky I can photograph. Increasingly I use my 8-inch telescope merely as a tracking platform to carry a camera. For a good picture of the setup, click here, except that the camera bracket on top of the telescope is now a Losmandy dovetail plate. Well, as you can see, the piggyback autoguider (described more fully here; scroll down) hangs below the telescope and will bump into the mount if the telescope is aimed too far south. To fix that, I've provided myself with an alternative, the contraption you see below. The autoguider can be supported in front of the telescope, which has its metal lens cap on just in case I drop something. The plate is an 8×2×5/16-inch piece of steel with two holes in it, 1 inch from each end, big enough to accommodate 1/4-20 bolts. It mounts in an existing hole in the Losmandy dovetail plate. If you make yourself one, you'll probably want it slightly shorter, maybe 6 1/2 inches, and maybe use 3/8-inch aluminum instead of steel. [Dimensions corrected.] [Better pictures substituted August 12, showing the steel bar after painting blue.]
I'm taking a picture with it right now and will show it to you tomorrow.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 8 |
Short notes Happy 08/08/08! For once it doesn't matter in what order you write the date. My main service to humanity today seems to have been this discussion. (Read several successive messages, and skip the ones that are actually about telecommunications.) I've actually gotten fan mail about this from people who were energetic enough to dig up my e-mail address, which is not in the newsgroup itself. Thanks for your kind words!
|
|
|
|
2008 August 7 |
Downing on poverty Doug Downing recently gave a paper, "Consequences of Misunderstanding Poverty," at the Western Economic Association. Here, with his permission, are some choice excerpts from it. Sometimes there is a flow of wealth from the poor to the rich, but in that case it is crucial to understand the policy that causes this. For example, the 2008 U.S. farm bill extends programs to keep U.S. agricultural prices high, while providing greater subsidies to richer farmers ... This effect is exacerbated by corn ethanol subsidies which divert part of the U.S. corn crop away from food use. ... However, U.S. subsidies and import restrictions lower the world price for some commodities, making it harder for small farmers in poor countries to survive. World poverty has fallen more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years. Are low-wage jobs the cause of poverty, or are they a symptom of poverty? Understanding that question is crucial to correctly diagnosing poverty. The key question to ask about sweatshops is, are the workers forcibly compelled to work there? If they are, then the solution is to end the dictatorial regime that allows that kind of coercion. On the other hand, if workers choose to work at the sweatshops voluntarily, we need to confront the grim implication: they don't have any better alternative. The solution is to promote policies that make sure workers have more alternatives. Then sweatshops will fade away because the owners will not be able to find any workers willing to work under those conditions. [Karl] Marx provided perceptive analysis of the powerlessness of the industrial workers of his days, but ironically the result of the revolutions staged in his name was that the workers ended up with even less power as citizens of totalitarian states. The reality of global poverty is very complicated, with several different factors responsible for the problem. The best way to reduce poverty will be to establish policies to reduce the traps that prevent people from participating in the market economy. These are not the opinions of some amateur politician; they are established facts, or at least well-supported theories, which he could mention in a room full of economists without further argument. Doug was trying to refute various Christian groups that have made sweeping statements about how big business and free markets are the cause of poverty, and that the cure for poverty is to reduce freedom. Church leaders are notoriously ignorant of economics. A related point, which all economists understand and few non-economists grasp, is that a subsidy is almost always a total waste of money — it just makes the economy less efficient. (Cf. the U.S. farm bill.) If you pay people to do something that isn't cost-effective on its own, then you're wasting your resources and making them waste theirs!
|
|
|
|
2008 August 6 |
Athens' long-lost town spring Here is the long-lost spring I was telling you about. It's a block east of the University of Georgia's old campus, on Spring Street. As I understand it, this railroad track was covered with dirt and grass and has just been dug up. Part of it perpetually wet and turns out to be the spring that led settlers to place the campus where it is.
The CompUSA lizard Now for a historic site of another sort. The CompUSA store in Duluth, Ga., has just closed. It was one of our regular destinations ten or fifteen years ago, and Cathy and Sharon were amused by a feature of its concrete pavement. Right about where the arrow is...
...there is something that looks remarkably like the imprint of a large lizard. We used to joke that somebody dropped an iguana on the wet cement.
Short notes I've made it onto Stephen Ramsden's web page. But don't go there to look at me — look at his narrow-band photos of the surface and atmosphere of the sun. Modern skyscraper architecture was eerily prefigured by the medieval Arab city of Shibam. Take a look. You may not realize that ZIP is built into Windows Vista. Here's how to create ZIP files. Basically, right-click and choose "Send to compressed folder." Need a piece of metal? Try Complete Sheet Metal in Tucker, Georgia. They were very helpful to me the other day with a very small job that I'm sure they didn't make money on. Soon, you'll get to see what I'm building.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 5 |
Drinking from the firehose of information Our week of intensive work on the Dictionary is over, and now I'm excessively busy with everything else. Bear with me as I post things in this Notebook. Some of you know of specific things I'm going to mention, and please don't worry if I don't get around to all of them today. Atlanta ramble After taking Doug to the airport on August 4, I spent the day rambling around Atlanta, mainly visiting people and places where I've done business for many years. Showcase Photo is thriving and has a sign saying, "Film processing still available here." This is the serious photographer's supplier in Atlanta — mainly digital photography nowadays. I bought Canon's new book about color management, which looks extremely helpful. I was also bemused to see that Kodak is still making Dektol paper developer even though they no longer make any paper that it develops. Fortunately, Kodak is putting expiration dates on darkroom chemicals nowadays, so you won't get stuck with something that's been on the shelf for ten years. Camera Bug is prospering, although it's almost totally hidden from view around the end of a shopping center. (Go look at their telescopes and vintage cameras! And note that they repair telescopes and clean camera sensors.) And Austin Electronics has relocated to a small, but browseable, warehouse in Snellville. Goodbye PC Card (PCMCIA), hello ExpressCard Our new Toshiba laptops had what we thought were PC Card (PCMCIA) slots on the left side. I put in my PC Card CompactFlash reader (for CompactFlash memory cards) and it didn't make a connection. Turns out it's an ExpressCard slot, which is the same width (at the wide end) but has a smaller connector. So I had to go and get two of these, one for me and one for Melody:
(Click on the picture.) Pleasant surprises: (1) It's fast, apparently much faster than USB or PC Card CF readers. (2) The CF card can be inserted and removed without removing the reader from the computer. This laptop has a built-in reader for the smaller types of camera memory cards (SD, MMC, etc.) but not for CompactFlash, which professional-grade DSLRs still use because there are versions of it with enormous capacity.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 3-4 |
Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae Doug and I got out to Deerlick for a brief astronomy session in between thunderstorms on August 1. The fruit of our labors is this excellent picture of the Lagoon and Trifid Nebulae.
Canon 20Da, Canon 300-mm f/4 lens, piggybacked on an 8-inch telescope; stack of 8 4-minute exposures corrected with 8 flat fields and 13 dark frames. By combining a relatively large number of exposures, I was able to get a smooth, grain-free picture. Field of Nu Scorpii Also from Deerlick, with a similar technique but fewer exposures, and more contrast enhancement afterward: This picture of the field of the star Nu Scorpii and some surrounding faint nebulae.
A MaxIm DL/MaxDSLR "Gotcha" I process my pictures with MaxIm DL (click here for details of how I do it). If there are both flat fields and dark frames involved, and the flats are short exposures not comparable in length to the darks, then the configuration of checkboxes in "Set Calibration" needs to be as follows:
Note the boxes that are unchecked. By default all the boxes are checked, and you get dark frames subtracted from flats that don't need them — which causes noise to be reintroduced. What's more, with all the boxes checked, I was getting even stranger results — sometimes an all-black image. There may have been a misclassified file somewhere in my input.
|
|
|
|
2008 August 1-2 |
New month, not many notes It's August, and we're still hard at work on the Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms, so please bear with us for a few more days. Then the Daily Notebook will resume in full. Today I only have a few short notes. Good idea of the day from the business world: Credit scoring that takes note of whether people bounce checks. Also, whether they pay their rent on time. This is good for two reasons: it enables you to build up a good credit score without borrowing money, and it's a good measure of whether you're competent with a checkbook. Why didn't they think of that before? Want a powerful computer? See Jim Mischel's notes on how to build a 4-core PC for about $1,500. I may do it. In a very few years, 16-core computers are going to be very common and we'll finally be in the era of parallel computing that was predicted in the 1980s. Have you mastered multithreaded programming yet? Speaking of multiple cores, I wonder why nobody uses multiple tiny, cheap microcontrollers in control applications. Many tasks split cleanly into a timer, which has to keep time accurately, and a decision-maker, which handles unexpected events. With careful interrupt-driven programming, you can combine the two on one chip. But why? Can't you afford two 50-cent microcontrollers instead of one $2 one? And the software is vastly simpler that way, too.
|
|
|
Entries are most often uploaded around 0000 UT on the date given, which is the previous evening in the United States. When I'm busy, entries are generally shorter and are uploaded as much as a whole day in advance. |
