A few years ago, as I was walking through the produce section of the local Kroger chain store, they started Locomotive Breath. Played it in its entirety while I was shopping. Made me feel very old.
My theory is Thune told him, "I have the votes to exempt continuing resolutions from the filibuster. But I'm going to let the government shut down because the Dems wouldn't allow an up-or-down vote, then come back next week and the Republicans will fix it by themselves."
What do you do with your printer? I'm in another spurt of downsizing, and as I haven't built any odd little wood gadgets for years now, will be getting rid of the bench-top power tools. I can't imagine not having some sort of tool though, and have been thinking about a printer. They've gotten a lot cheaper than the last time I looked, and seem to be of much higher quality.
When I got all the tools out, I discovered that I only had one safety interlock key for three tools. Spent a lot of time looking online and couldn't find replacements (the tools are well cared for, but old). Then changed tactics, found a CAD file for the part in ten minutes, and spent another five putting in an order at my public library. They're cheap, but slow, so I don't know when the new keys will be done.
How much faster and easier would things proceed (have proceeded) on Bakersfield to Merced if the State of California owned the rail corridor properties used by UP and BNSF that already connected Bakersfield to Merced and leased them to the railroads? If 65 years ago when the feds were the muscle behind the interstate highway property acquisition -- property now owned by the states, not the feds, by the way -- they had included rail and built a public transportation corridor? If California had electrified the corridor 40 years ago as part of cleaning up the Central Valley air?
One of the reasons, at least in the American West, is that 150 years ago we gave the desirable routes for right-of-way to private rail companies and allowed them to maintain control, without even extracting requirements of good behavior, through innumerable mergers/acquisitions and multiple bankruptcies.
To pick an example I know... RTD's commuter rail system was always intended to have Denver-to-Boulder and Boulder-to-Longmont lines. There's an almost-never-used BNSF loop that is ideally positioned. It's almost never used because it's old (as in laid out in the 1890s old). Contemporary freight has to crawl on it because there are too many curves that are substandard. RTD offered to fix the curves, double-track where necessary, and upgrade all the crossings in exchange for usage and priority for commuter trains. BNSF's counteroffer was, "You pay for all the upgrades, you also give us $8B upfront, freight gets priority no matter what we do to the commuter schedule, and then we can talk about the annual lease amount." Because neither the state nor local governments can force BNSF to do anything, we have no commuter trains to Boulder and a right-of-way that is slowly disintegrating through neglect.
Post-WWII Europe had the sense to have the government own the rights-of-way and any private rail companies had to lease usage. When France wants to extend high-speed rail, they tell the freight companies how things are going to work.
It seems to me that "certain ways" is doing a lot of work there. I was surprised that Douthat brought up the Notre Dame repairs. As I recall, all of the cathedrals in France are owned by the government, maintained by the government, the Notre Dame repairs were paid for by the government (although contributions were accepted). The Church is allowed to lease space for services.
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 :^)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “On Jethro Tull”
A few years ago, as I was walking through the produce section of the local Kroger chain store, they started Locomotive Breath. Played it in its entirety while I was shopping. Made me feel very old.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/10/25”
My theory is Thune told him, "I have the votes to exempt continuing resolutions from the filibuster. But I'm going to let the government shut down because the Dems wouldn't allow an up-or-down vote, then come back next week and the Republicans will fix it by themselves."
On “Weekend Plans Post: Ice Cream Theory”
What do you do with your printer? I'm in another spurt of downsizing, and as I haven't built any odd little wood gadgets for years now, will be getting rid of the bench-top power tools. I can't imagine not having some sort of tool though, and have been thinking about a printer. They've gotten a lot cheaper than the last time I looked, and seem to be of much higher quality.
When I got all the tools out, I discovered that I only had one safety interlock key for three tools. Spent a lot of time looking online and couldn't find replacements (the tools are well cared for, but old). Then changed tactics, found a CAD file for the part in ten minutes, and spent another five putting in an order at my public library. They're cheap, but slow, so I don't know when the new keys will be done.
On “Of Amtrak, AI, and Arguing About Trains on the Interwebs”
How much faster and easier would things proceed (have proceeded) on Bakersfield to Merced if the State of California owned the rail corridor properties used by UP and BNSF that already connected Bakersfield to Merced and leased them to the railroads? If 65 years ago when the feds were the muscle behind the interstate highway property acquisition -- property now owned by the states, not the feds, by the way -- they had included rail and built a public transportation corridor? If California had electrified the corridor 40 years ago as part of cleaning up the Central Valley air?
"
One of the reasons, at least in the American West, is that 150 years ago we gave the desirable routes for right-of-way to private rail companies and allowed them to maintain control, without even extracting requirements of good behavior, through innumerable mergers/acquisitions and multiple bankruptcies.
To pick an example I know... RTD's commuter rail system was always intended to have Denver-to-Boulder and Boulder-to-Longmont lines. There's an almost-never-used BNSF loop that is ideally positioned. It's almost never used because it's old (as in laid out in the 1890s old). Contemporary freight has to crawl on it because there are too many curves that are substandard. RTD offered to fix the curves, double-track where necessary, and upgrade all the crossings in exchange for usage and priority for commuter trains. BNSF's counteroffer was, "You pay for all the upgrades, you also give us $8B upfront, freight gets priority no matter what we do to the commuter schedule, and then we can talk about the annual lease amount." Because neither the state nor local governments can force BNSF to do anything, we have no commuter trains to Boulder and a right-of-way that is slowly disintegrating through neglect.
Post-WWII Europe had the sense to have the government own the rights-of-way and any private rail companies had to lease usage. When France wants to extend high-speed rail, they tell the freight companies how things are going to work.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/3/2025”
It seems to me that "certain ways" is doing a lot of work there. I was surprised that Douthat brought up the Notre Dame repairs. As I recall, all of the cathedrals in France are owned by the government, maintained by the government, the Notre Dame repairs were paid for by the government (although contributions were accepted). The Church is allowed to lease space for services.
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 :^)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.