I am … unhindered by talent

w00t! There’s a group pushing for a presidential science debate focused on the many scientific issues that face us nationally and worldwide. Their call:

Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.

I’m all signed up, and definitely encourage others to visit ScienceDebate2008.com and do the same. I seriously doubt there is a single major issue these days that doesn’t have a significant technological or scientific component. Yet there’s precious little discussion of science in our political dialogue, and candidates regularly display an ignorance of science that is at best extremely worrying.

To be honest, I have doubts about this happening, at least right away, but we’ve got to start demanding this sort of accountability on science and technology. Every journey begins with a single step web site…

Oh, and they really need a badge that people like me can include in posts and sidebars and such. Anyone want to make one?

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Technology publishing magnate Tom O’Reilly apparently gets loads of questions and comments from confused fans of Bill O’Reilly. Awfully nice of him to share some of their more charming idiosyncratic behaviors!

clipped from radar.oreilly.com

Meanwhile, we get some real humdingers showing how out of touch with reality some of the O’Reilly Factor fans are.

I have read in The Onion newpaper, that Bush has cut off diplomatic relations with Congress. I found this to be unbelievable and I thought it would be illegal! Can you check it out and see if it is true? How can you run a government and not talk to the Congress??

Not only can Bill O’Reilly’s fans not distinguish between a technology publisher and a right wing pundit, they can’t tell that the Onion is a satire! Or else they are just trying to yank his chain. (But someone smart enough to do that would know that oreilly.com is not theoreillyfactor.com.)

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I just stumbled across this cool essay on refactoring by Steve Yegge. I don’t agree with everything (there’s a comment near the bottom that I agree with a lot), but there’s some very cool stuff here about the “real” meaning of refactoring, and the importance (or lack thereof) of automated refactoring tools.

One of my reluctances about moving to something like Ruby in my classes (and, to be fair, my programming) is that I just love Fowler’s book (which I have read multiple times - I’ve taught a refactoring course three times now) and have found it and Eclipse’s refactoring menu to be life changing experiences. I move and rename things all the time now, and having those tools absolutely makes it easier.

That said, though, Yegge’s right that I often become so enamored of the trees of automated refactorings that I lose sight of the forest of simly trying to write clean code, and thinking carefully and sensibly about changing the code that’s already written. Clearly many people haven’t read Fowler’s splendid book, and for them refactoring is limited to what is, in fairness, the tiny (if wonderful) little world bounded by the automated tools in Eclipse or IDEA. That’s sad. And sometimes my course structures (especially in Software Design and Development) arguably encourages that. Which is far worse.

So back up, take a deep breath, and go (re)read Fowler’s book. I know I’ll have to rethink my concerns about the lack of refactoring tools in Ruby. I don’t think they’ll go away completely, but I’m sure they’ll be different, and probably lessened.

Then get back to work…

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Back in Morris, it was pretty rare to run across another wireless network at the house. Every now and then you’d catch the edge of what was probably a base station somewhere else in the neighborhood, but usually we were the only visible network.

It’s just a wee bit different here in Colchester. Sitting here in the apartment I can see almost 15 different networks, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are quite a few other “invisible” networks in the neighborhood.

Obviously designing tools to handle increasingly dense network environments is going to be a good career path for some time to come, as the sort of density we’re seeing here is going to more and more the norm. Coming up with innovative solutions to these challenges is also going to be the kind of thing that’s going to require some substantial computer science (and/or appropriate engineering) background (vs. web programming or a two year tech degree).

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I recently discovered (sadly, I don’t remember how) WalkScore.com, where you can enter your (or any) address and have a “walkability” score calculated for your neighborhood. They use Google Maps to find out how far it is to a long list of important services and amenities (grocery stores, libraries, schools, coffee shops, and the like), and you get points based on how close you are. There are some issues (and they’re very up front about them) with using straight line distance as a proxy for walkability, but it’s not a bad approximation and a good start. There’s also no way they can take into account your preferences for things like schools and restaurants; you’d get points for living next door to a McDonald’s, for example, even if you’d prefer to go a little farther to the nifty local burrito joint.

Our house here in Morris scores a 54 out of a 100, which is probably about as good as you’ll get outside of a dense urban area (the Sears Tower in Chicago scores a whopping 94, for example). Personally, I think Morris is about as walkable/bikable a place as one is likely to ever find: Flat, reasonably compact, and with good roads and (mostly) sidewalks. It’s clear that Google Maps is confused about some of the businesses here in Morris as some of their distances are broken and they don’t know that we have a coffee shop a few blocks away (they list one nearly 25 miles distant!).

In total, it’s a cool idea, and I wish that it was available in the UK as we’re preparing to spend a year in Colchester without a car, and it would be nice to have a similar service while we look at houses and flats.

For amusement check out the scores of Bill Gates’s home and Shrub’s ranch in Crawford. Real environmentalists, these guys :-).

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Our fearless leader has apparently nominated someone (James Holsinger) to the post of Surgeon General who is sadly confused about basic issues of science, logic, and argument from evidence. Not good for the nation’s chief doctor, although hardly surprising from Our Friends at the White House. From ABC News:

“You have to wonder given the quality of some of the nominations that have gone forward recently, whether the selection group in the White House has gone on vacation,” Gergen [former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton] said. “There has been a growing criticism the administration favoring ideology over competence, and this nomination smacks of that.”

Greg Laden nicely takes apart the “naturalist fallacy” in Holsinger’s argument, and I definitely recommend heading over to read that. The short version is that Holsinger’s fallen into something like “the parts don’t fit, ergo homosexuality is unnatural and wrong“. What’s “natural” and what’s “right”, though, have little or nothing to do with each other. My eyeglasses are clearly unnatural, as was my life-saving appendectomy, but I’m hardly returning either of those. Similarly, it’s “natural” (at least we’re genetically predisposed) for men to be physically larger and stronger than women (on average), but that clearly doesn’t provide any justification for physical abuse and intimidation of women by men, or adults beating children just ’cause they’re bigger.

I’m off to write my Senators and express my unhappiness with yet another Shrub appointee…

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Faves, faves, faves…, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

More really cool photos from the many fine people contributing on Flickr! I appear to have a thing for orange and animals at the moment?

1. June 2, 2. peacefest8, 3. this is home now, 4. Backstage, 5. Water Taxi, 6. The man on the world holding a crane, 7. Blessed are the Peacemakers, 8. In the garden, 9. I love Butterfinger Crisps, 10. Blue Moon 3, 11. Hanging gardens, lingering smoke, 12. Crane, 13. Manduca sexta, 14. lace graffiti, 15. Sad eyes, 16. Rhino, 17. Untitled, 18. Xining :: Cooking Up a Storm, 19. Waiting To Photograph A Train, 20. Reflecting, 21. Devil’s Den Falls, 22. more dead fish, 23. i, 24. Oyonnax revisited, 25. Welcome to the fun, 26. Untitled, 27. A supernova?, 28. Black Widow Spider (0749a), 29. ties, 30. sur les toits de lausanne, 31. More from inside., 32. Cloud Movements, 33. Night is falling, 34. the flight home, 35. Untitled, 36. ladder to heaven

Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

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I am absoluuuutely stuffed, having just consumed way too much of what was by far the tastiest Mexican food that I’ve purchased in Morris, Minnesota. Jose’s Mexican Burritos opened for business this morning at 10:30am, and I headed over around 1:30pm to check it out.

Nummmmmmyyyyyyyyy…

I got a medium burrito (for less than $4) and a taco (for $1.40). I really didn’t need them both (either would have filled me), but I sure enjoyed them both. Fresh ingredients prepared on the spot (I had to wait a few extra minutes as they finished a new batch of fried rice), and it was waaay tasty :-).

I’m certainly hoping that they do well; apparently they had quite a long line at mid-day, which is a good sign. When the U kicks back into gear in the fall, these folks are going to stay open until 2am which is way cool.

Support independent restaurants - go eat burritos!

(I didn’t think to photograph the meal, but the image above [from C-Monster] isn’t a bad likeness.)

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Turns out that while you do need to watch (all) the carnivores, the herbivores (esp. in numbers) deserve some respect as well!

Picked this up from Greg Laden, who seems to be concerned that it’s a fake although I’m not sure why.

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A family tragedy, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Sunday night I was walking home around 10pm, and discovered a big tree limb had come down about a block from our house. Amazingly I could see, there in the pitch dark, that there was a full clutch of eggs lying cushioned and (apparently) unbroken amongst the shattered wood.

There had clearly been a large hollow space in the limb, which had probably been the weak spot where the limb gave in the high winds. A winged couple had set up house and home there, building a nest and laying at least seven or eight eggs. The hollow was also full of soft sawdust and such, presumably the product of the many critters that had made their homes there and contributed to the hollowing of the limb.

In the drop (which must have been at least 30-40 feet), the eggs came out of their nest, but were sufficiently cushioned that they remained largely intact. In the dark, in fact, they looked undamaged, although if you look at the large version of the pictures it’s clear that many were cracked. There was also one broken wide open on the sidewalk (although I suspect that might have been the work of an animal), and I saw another broken in the grass the next morning.

Suspecting that animals would scatter the scene overnight, I ran home, grabbed my camera, and went back to take some photos. Most were pretty awful - framing and focus in the nearly pitch dark isn’t my forte - but several provide a reasonable document of it all. It’s not exactly George Shiras, but it’ll do :-).

Here we have the clutch as I found them. I’ll try to post a few more later. Many of them are detail shots (since I like detail shots :->), but there’s also a shot or two with a little more context.

Note: I’m pretty sure this came down in the same storm that ripped off a big part of PeeZed’s old willow.

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