When I was a lad, my Grandparents Cain's house in rural Iowa was horribly drafty and had a coal-fired furnace. The room where I was assigned to sleep was on the second floor. When we were there in the winter, I slept burrowed under a pile of quilts and blankets with just the tip of my nose out. In the morning most of me was still warm, but the tip of my nose seemed frozen. When it was time to get up, the dog and I both wanted to sit on the warmest vent on the first floor. We reached an uneasy truce after I agreed to wrap both of us in a blanket.
The furnace had to be loaded in the morning. I lived for the day when I would be big enough the grown-ups would send me to basement to do the shoveling. When that day arrived, I found out just how much work shoveling coal is, and while the rest of the house may be cold, the space where you're doing the shoveling gets quite hot very quickly.
Random question that comes to mind... Is the administrative markup the same for all departments? The only time I did work at a university on a federal grant it was through the Navy, and was an applied math problem. I can understand that the markup is high if the work requires a Level 3 biosafety lab that has to be maintained even when there are no grants. Less so for the blackboard where I did my particular work.
In best animated feature, your upset alert choice Flow won. It's an indie film done in Latvia. Interesting from a technology perspective, it was rendered using the free and open-source tool Blender.
Most of the original names used for cuts of steak in the US go back to NYC butchers and/or restaurants before 1850. Legend has it that the t-bone cut itself originated with the Medici family in Florence.
The best cheap t-bone I ever had was in a dive in Austin, TX while I was in grad school 1976-78. It was down close to the lake/river, somewhere west of Congress Ave, you had to pick your way around the winos to get in. The only thing they served was t-bone, baked potato, green beans, iced tea. You stood in a short buffet line to get your potato and beans, then paid, then told them whether you wanted rare, medium, or well-done. They would pull an appropriate steak off the grill. Seating was long rows of picnic tables. Undoubtedly one of those places that disappeared long ago.
The WHO makes a recommendation, which the FDA sometimes changes. The WHO can't approve drugs/vaccines for use in the US. All of the manufacturers must seek a supplement to their FDA license to cover each years combination of virus types. The descriptions of the process don't consider the possibility that the FDA won't approve a virus combination.
You're probably right on the stupid and/or mundane, though.
A new flu formula might require approval. Presumably last year's formula is still approved, and the manufacturers could run off a new batch. It probably wouldn't be as good as the guesses about which variants are likely to be common in 2025-26, but it wouldn't be without value entirely.
It would be interesting to see the some group of blue states "approve" a vaccine and see if the manufacturers are willing to take a chance.
I hadn't bought a new bike for more than 25 years, and the current pair no longer fit my needs. I'm no longer willing to bounce through the kind of places the mountain bike was for, nor ride as fast as I used the road bike for. So this week I bought a new bike to meet my old-man needs. Since this year's second false spring has extended into the weekend, and the city/county have opened a new section of the Cache la Poudre River trail, I'm going riding this afternoon. Once the county pours the last quarter mile (soon!), the paved-in-some-fashion trail will extend for 40 miles, starting from where the river comes out of the canyon at the base of the foothills.
February was the clean up and document the software I've written/maintained for this site. March's project is cleaning up my old cartogram software and the bulk data sets that feed into it. Not all of the data is actually stable, since we're still futzing around with the borders of a few US House districts. No politics, so no actual discussion of those borders.
The answer to the lecturer's question is that Kenya has extensive undeveloped mineral wealth, including rare earths. When the time comes that Kenya needs assistance developing those, China will be able to ask, "Who has given you a helping hand before? Sure hasn't been those *ssholes at Rio Tinto, has it?"
One of the unpleasant things about late-stage capitalism. A big company can offer the people that own a small company money in amounts that simply can't be ignored. Then do whatever they want with the small company they now own. In the mid-1990s Microsoft was notorious in certain circles for buying up little companies with interesting video compression schemes. Not so they could incorporate the ideas, but so that the ideas weren't used in products competing with MS's own.
What does Ukraine get in exchange for signing over half of proceeds from some part of their mineral resources? Security? Weapons? No cease-fire negotiations that don't include Ukraine and the EU?
The House passed their version of a joint budget resolution. The Senate already passed something different. Reconciliation requires that the two chambers agree on a resolution. The next step is presumably a conference committee that attempts to iron out the differences, and then both chambers have to approve. Although it is possible, as you say, that the Senate Republicans will cave. Once there's an agreed-upon resolution, both chambers start writing an actual budget.
All of this is FY2026 stuff. I suspect Johnson got the last few votes he needed by pointing out that this isn't the budget, there's lots of time to resolve things for FY2026, but they need to settle this temporarily so they can start figuring out how to avoid a FY2025 mid-March shutdown.
The federal government owns 6.8 million square feet of building space in Colorado. It also leases another 4.1 million square feet. Here in Fort Collins, the feds own about 50,000 ft2 and lease almost 850,000 ft2. The leases are almost all buildings on the Colorado State University campuses.
They're going to make your life miserable. The Simonyi Survey Telescope is due to come online this year. The primary mirror is 8.4 meters, the camera is 3.2 gigapixels, and one of the main missions is looking for near-Earth rocks like YR4. They expect to find lots of them.
This sounds like something I said many years ago, when I was asked what I would do with a billion-ops-per-second processor.
Never, ever write in a compiled language again. Everything I write will run on an interpreter that many smart people have worked on so I don't have memory leaks, or buffer overflows, or naked error messages like "Seg fault, core dumped".
The funnier thing is that back in the mid-1970s I did a bunch of work in APL, where the interpreter avoided memory leaks, and buffer overflows, and any sort of run-time fault put me in a full symbolic debugger.
There might be one week a year where I don't get anything done.
During the course of my technical career, there were numerous weeks where an accurate answer to that question would be along the lines of, "I thought about ways to transform your question into something that might be solvable. None of them look at all promising." That did, in a couple of the worst cases, go on for months.
I don't know if Musk ever bothered learning about the math that makes the Falcon 9 booster "make it to the landing zone" possible. My understanding is that there was a long period where the handful of people involved got nowhere. Then someone put together a new dissertation by someone at Stanford, restructured the guidance problem, and came up with a solution.
Clearly his script kiddies don't think along those lines, or they never would have fired a bunch of critical people from NNSA.
Re the first footnote... Justice Sotomayor has regularly remarked in public that the primary reason for the rapid drop in SCOTUS's public approval polling is the number of precedents the conservative block is overturning. I figure the Impoundment Control Act is toast.
That was my thought. For example, the President can say that Massachusetts v. EPA was wrongly decided, that carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, so the EPA can't regulate carbon dioxide.
This is the usual behavior. At least implicit in Michael's video -- I don't remember if he goes through the details or not -- the typical scenario is for the probability to steadily increase to around 5%, then fairly abruptly go to something near zero. Wake me up when we go past 5%, because then things might be going to get interesting :^)
Most state legislatures have some really dumb bills introduced every session. This one is more interesting than many because it actually passed a committee vote. Also too, it banned mRNA for vaccines against infectious diseases, but allowed the tech for use against cancer or to correct gene-based problems.
The Supreme Court has announced it expects to release one or more opinions on Friday, Feb 21. As is customary, they did not give any indication about which cases.
And if that happens, it opens the possibility that the conflict expands to NATO countries which in turn forces us to decide whether mutual defense is real or a bluff.
Some days, I'm inclined to the position that the EU has 5x the population of Russia and 10x the GDP, so why does the EU need us for military assistance at all? (Note that the EU treaties include mutual military defense. If NATO were dissolved today, France and Germany and Poland and Italy would still have a mutual defense agreement.) My answer on some of those days is they regard the US nuclear umbrella, the US military-industrial manufacturing complex, and the US Navy's ability to keep the Atlantic open for a massive one-way military logistics flow, as a public good. Trump's position is fundamentally that they are not a public good, and the EU ought to be paying a bunch for those services.
Technically, so long as Ukraine claims sovereignty over the Donbas (or Crimea), but doesn't control those areas, Ukraine is not eligible for NATO membership. Basically, you can't join if you're already in a situation where you could make an Article V claim. No one should be surprised the treaty was written that way.
When I was working for the state legislature, Presidents Day was an official holiday. One session, on the Friday before, one of the committee members said to me on the way out of the building, "Anything special planned for the Monday off, Mike?" To which I replied, "Y'all didn't cancel any of the committee meetings for Tuesday, so I'll be here all day Monday getting everything ready for them. But since the office will be officially closed, I can wear jeans."
If we have enough time, maybe we can have it hit the moon and throw it out of orbit...
Run the relative masses, the velocities, the kinetic energy, the moon's elasticity, etc. Maybe we get some interesting meteor showers. Maybe not. Lunar escape velocity is 2.4 km/sec.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Snug as a Bug in a Rug. Until…”
When I was a lad, my Grandparents Cain's house in rural Iowa was horribly drafty and had a coal-fired furnace. The room where I was assigned to sleep was on the second floor. When we were there in the winter, I slept burrowed under a pile of quilts and blankets with just the tip of my nose out. In the morning most of me was still warm, but the tip of my nose seemed frozen. When it was time to get up, the dog and I both wanted to sit on the warmest vent on the first floor. We reached an uneasy truce after I agreed to wrap both of us in a blanket.
The furnace had to be loaded in the morning. I lived for the day when I would be big enough the grown-ups would send me to basement to do the shoveling. When that day arrived, I found out just how much work shoveling coal is, and while the rest of the house may be cold, the space where you're doing the shoveling gets quite hot very quickly.
On “Congress and Changes to the Indirect Cost Rate for NIH Grants”
Random question that comes to mind... Is the administrative markup the same for all departments? The only time I did work at a university on a federal grant it was through the Navy, and was an applied math problem. I can understand that the markup is high if the work requires a Level 3 biosafety lab that has to be maintained even when there are no grants. Less so for the blackboard where I did my particular work.
On “97th Oscars Projections: And The Oscar Goes To…”
In best animated feature, your upset alert choice Flow won. It's an indie film done in Latvia. Interesting from a technology perspective, it was rendered using the free and open-source tool Blender.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
Most of the original names used for cuts of steak in the US go back to NYC butchers and/or restaurants before 1850. Legend has it that the t-bone cut itself originated with the Medici family in Florence.
The best cheap t-bone I ever had was in a dive in Austin, TX while I was in grad school 1976-78. It was down close to the lake/river, somewhere west of Congress Ave, you had to pick your way around the winos to get in. The only thing they served was t-bone, baked potato, green beans, iced tea. You stood in a short buffet line to get your potato and beans, then paid, then told them whether you wanted rare, medium, or well-done. They would pull an appropriate steak off the grill. Seating was long rows of picnic tables. Undoubtedly one of those places that disappeared long ago.
"
The WHO makes a recommendation, which the FDA sometimes changes. The WHO can't approve drugs/vaccines for use in the US. All of the manufacturers must seek a supplement to their FDA license to cover each years combination of virus types. The descriptions of the process don't consider the possibility that the FDA won't approve a virus combination.
You're probably right on the stupid and/or mundane, though.
"
A new flu formula might require approval. Presumably last year's formula is still approved, and the manufacturers could run off a new batch. It probably wouldn't be as good as the guesses about which variants are likely to be common in 2025-26, but it wouldn't be without value entirely.
It would be interesting to see the some group of blue states "approve" a vaccine and see if the manufacturers are willing to take a chance.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Psych”
I hadn't bought a new bike for more than 25 years, and the current pair no longer fit my needs. I'm no longer willing to bounce through the kind of places the mountain bike was for, nor ride as fast as I used the road bike for. So this week I bought a new bike to meet my old-man needs. Since this year's second false spring has extended into the weekend, and the city/county have opened a new section of the Cache la Poudre River trail, I'm going riding this afternoon. Once the county pours the last quarter mile (soon!), the paved-in-some-fashion trail will extend for 40 miles, starting from where the river comes out of the canyon at the base of the foothills.
February was the clean up and document the software I've written/maintained for this site. March's project is cleaning up my old cartogram software and the bulk data sets that feed into it. Not all of the data is actually stable, since we're still futzing around with the borders of a few US House districts. No politics, so no actual discussion of those borders.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/24/2025”
The answer to the lecturer's question is that Kenya has extensive undeveloped mineral wealth, including rare earths. When the time comes that Kenya needs assistance developing those, China will be able to ask, "Who has given you a helping hand before? Sure hasn't been those *ssholes at Rio Tinto, has it?"
"
One of the unpleasant things about late-stage capitalism. A big company can offer the people that own a small company money in amounts that simply can't be ignored. Then do whatever they want with the small company they now own. In the mid-1990s Microsoft was notorious in certain circles for buying up little companies with interesting video compression schemes. Not so they could incorporate the ideas, but so that the ideas weren't used in products competing with MS's own.
"
What does Ukraine get in exchange for signing over half of proceeds from some part of their mineral resources? Security? Weapons? No cease-fire negotiations that don't include Ukraine and the EU?
"
The House passed their version of a joint budget resolution. The Senate already passed something different. Reconciliation requires that the two chambers agree on a resolution. The next step is presumably a conference committee that attempts to iron out the differences, and then both chambers have to approve. Although it is possible, as you say, that the Senate Republicans will cave. Once there's an agreed-upon resolution, both chambers start writing an actual budget.
All of this is FY2026 stuff. I suspect Johnson got the last few votes he needed by pointing out that this isn't the budget, there's lots of time to resolve things for FY2026, but they need to settle this temporarily so they can start figuring out how to avoid a FY2025 mid-March shutdown.
"
The federal government owns 6.8 million square feet of building space in Colorado. It also leases another 4.1 million square feet. Here in Fort Collins, the feds own about 50,000 ft2 and lease almost 850,000 ft2. The leases are almost all buildings on the Colorado State University campuses.
On “Thursday Throughput: Doomsday Rock Edition”
They're going to make your life miserable. The Simonyi Survey Telescope is due to come online this year. The primary mirror is 8.4 meters, the camera is 3.2 gigapixels, and one of the main missions is looking for near-Earth rocks like YR4. They expect to find lots of them.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
This sounds like something I said many years ago, when I was asked what I would do with a billion-ops-per-second processor.
Never, ever write in a compiled language again. Everything I write will run on an interpreter that many smart people have worked on so I don't have memory leaks, or buffer overflows, or naked error messages like "Seg fault, core dumped".
The funnier thing is that back in the mid-1970s I did a bunch of work in APL, where the interpreter avoided memory leaks, and buffer overflows, and any sort of run-time fault put me in a full symbolic debugger.
On “Thursday Throughput: Doomsday Rock Edition”
The new numbers from JPL based on the latest observations have the probability of an impact in 2032 at 1.7e-5. That is, 0.0017%. One in 59,000.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
There might be one week a year where I don't get anything done.
During the course of my technical career, there were numerous weeks where an accurate answer to that question would be along the lines of, "I thought about ways to transform your question into something that might be solvable. None of them look at all promising." That did, in a couple of the worst cases, go on for months.
I don't know if Musk ever bothered learning about the math that makes the Falcon 9 booster "make it to the landing zone" possible. My understanding is that there was a long period where the handful of people involved got nowhere. Then someone put together a new dissertation by someone at Stanford, restructured the guidance problem, and came up with a solution.
Clearly his script kiddies don't think along those lines, or they never would have fired a bunch of critical people from NNSA.
On “Musk vs Gore”
Re the first footnote... Justice Sotomayor has regularly remarked in public that the primary reason for the rapid drop in SCOTUS's public approval polling is the number of precedents the conservative block is overturning. I figure the Impoundment Control Act is toast.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
That was my thought. For example, the President can say that Massachusetts v. EPA was wrongly decided, that carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, so the EPA can't regulate carbon dioxide.
On “Thursday Throughput: Doomsday Rock Edition”
This is the usual behavior. At least implicit in Michael's video -- I don't remember if he goes through the details or not -- the typical scenario is for the probability to steadily increase to around 5%, then fairly abruptly go to something near zero. Wake me up when we go past 5%, because then things might be going to get interesting :^)
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/17/2025”
Most state legislatures have some really dumb bills introduced every session. This one is more interesting than many because it actually passed a committee vote. Also too, it banned mRNA for vaccines against infectious diseases, but allowed the tech for use against cancer or to correct gene-based problems.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025”
The Supreme Court has announced it expects to release one or more opinions on Friday, Feb 21. As is customary, they did not give any indication about which cases.
On “Beware: Promises Being Kept”
And if that happens, it opens the possibility that the conflict expands to NATO countries which in turn forces us to decide whether mutual defense is real or a bluff.
Some days, I'm inclined to the position that the EU has 5x the population of Russia and 10x the GDP, so why does the EU need us for military assistance at all? (Note that the EU treaties include mutual military defense. If NATO were dissolved today, France and Germany and Poland and Italy would still have a mutual defense agreement.) My answer on some of those days is they regard the US nuclear umbrella, the US military-industrial manufacturing complex, and the US Navy's ability to keep the Atlantic open for a massive one-way military logistics flow, as a public good. Trump's position is fundamentally that they are not a public good, and the EU ought to be paying a bunch for those services.
"
Technically, so long as Ukraine claims sovereignty over the Donbas (or Crimea), but doesn't control those areas, Ukraine is not eligible for NATO membership. Basically, you can't join if you're already in a situation where you could make an Article V claim. No one should be surprised the treaty was written that way.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Tootsie Roll Pop Indian”
When I was working for the state legislature, Presidents Day was an official holiday. One session, on the Friday before, one of the committee members said to me on the way out of the building, "Anything special planned for the Monday off, Mike?" To which I replied, "Y'all didn't cancel any of the committee meetings for Tuesday, so I'll be here all day Monday getting everything ready for them. But since the office will be officially closed, I can wear jeans."
On “Thursday Throughput: Doomsday Rock Edition”
If we have enough time, maybe we can have it hit the moon and throw it out of orbit...
Run the relative masses, the velocities, the kinetic energy, the moon's elasticity, etc. Maybe we get some interesting meteor showers. Maybe not. Lunar escape velocity is 2.4 km/sec.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.