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Monday, May 20, 2002 |
Earth From Space
I just found NASA's Earth From Space site, a fantastic compendium of pictures of various parts of the planet taken from space. Much better than any such site I've seen before. Very highly recommended, but go when you have some time -- you'll spend a lot of it there.
This is a gorgeous picture of the section of North Central Washington state, where I grew up. Its focus is on Lake Chelan, the third deepest lake in the US. Read the caption of the picture. Brewster, Washington is where the Okanogan River flows into the Columbia. There's a very high resolution version here, but beware, it is a big file. (In this high resolution file, I can make out my high school, the family farm on Michel road, and the spot near the river where I lost my virginity.)
Another picture of Lake Chelan, from a different perspective, is here, and another beauty here.
10:49:27 PM Permalink
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Poker Nation
Last night I finished reading Andy Bellin's Poker Nation. A really fascinating book, and a sure antidote to the idea one might ever have of playing poker for anything more than a good time.
There are better poker books -- Herbert Yardley's The Education of a Poker Player is the all-time classic. I also like Anthony Holden's Big Deal. Holden, of course, is a much better writer. It's kind of disappointing that Bellin repeated what seemed like a lot of anecdotes that were in Holden. A big thing in Bellin's book that made it easier to follow and get into than most card books was the typeface: cards are shown in little squares, so that saves the author words. He just shows a picture of a six of clubs instead of writing "six of clubs."
It's interesting that, when played as a professional, poker is extremely boring. In a pot-limit game, you play by your rules of what hands to play and how to bet. You do it almost automatically.
A guy walks into a bar and notices three men and a dog playing poker. The dog is playing beautifully.
"That's a very smart dog," the man says.
"Not really," says one of the players. "Every time he gets a good hand he wags his tail."
7:22:39 PM Permalink
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Simple As PI
I bet everyone who has done more than one or two setups of home networks has had a bad experience. I thought it would be easy to do, after relatively few problems setting up my own. When my friend Mike asked me to help with his, I figured it wouldn't take me more than an hour or two. That was over a month ago, and his network still isn't working right. First, somehow, the USB capability of his machine had been turned off in the BIOS, which took me hours to figure out. Now both his machines are working, but after the wireless one has been online for a few minutes, the other one gets kicked off. I haven't been able to figure out what's going on, but if anyone knows of a "throw the machine off the network randomly after another comes on" setting, let me know (no, it's not an IP address conflict, the error messages usually say so). If millions of these things are selling each month, I wonder how many are actually working.
There was a piece, I think on Udell's page the other day, where he said something like "I've been doing this for 20 years." Me, too. I was thinking about this the other day when I ended up taking two hours to get PHP working right on one of my Windows machines.
I guess the conclusion is staring me in the face: I'm a bumbler, and it's a miracle I ever get anything working.
6:26:46 PM Permalink
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The Triumph of Right-Wing Ideology Over Our Constitution and Laws: A good report on John Ashcroft's first year as Attorney General. Remember that in the 2000 election in Missouri, John Ashcroft lost his Senate election, basically, to a dead man. The joke's on us, though, as like Obi-Wan Kenobi, he's more powerful now as AG than he would have been as Senator. He's a major disaster for the country, and his legacy will harm us for years to come.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were a watershed for the nation in many ways, and for John Ashcroft as well. Ashcroft's response to those attacks has been marked by a troubling willingness to amend our laws and Constitution by executive fiat and by a consistent disrespect for the role of the Congress and the courts in reviewing executive branch actions. He proposed legislation to grant extraordinary new powers to federal agencies and attempted to stifle congressional consideration of its impact. He then initiated or supported executive branch orders, without consulting Congress, that expanded executive branch powers even beyond those granted in the sweeping anti-terrorism legislation.
With the powers he was granted, and those he has asserted, Ashcroft has overseen, for example, the detention of more than 1,200 individuals, many for extended periods of time, while stubbornly resisting the release of significant information about detainees to the public or the Congress. Such actions have drawn criticism from across the political spectrum, and from former FBI officials with experience in fighting terrorists. A number of former officials, including William Webster, a Missouri Republican who led both the FBI and CIA under President Ronald Reagan, have suggested that Ashcroft's policies are not only endangering civil liberties but are also threatening effective law enforcement infiltration of terrorist organizations.
6:13:43 PM Permalink
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Have you read this before? A short summary from Scientific American on deja vu. The thing that struck me was this short part:
"Sigmund Freud, the developer of psychoanalysis, proposed that déjà vu happens when a person is spontaneously reminded of an unconscious fantasy. Because it is unconscious, the content of the fantasy is blocked from awareness, but the sense of familiarity leaks through and results in the déjà vu experience."
Read the rest of the piece to see how current thinking goes. The contrast between Freud's fantasies and biological/informational models is really striking. They don't depend on some unconscious voodoo that can't be studied or is so subjective and ephemeral to be useless. I'm reminded of something I read in Wired, I think, about how there wouldn't be any psychoanalysts in 50 years. We won't have the brain entirely figured out by then, but I hope we will be beyond the witch-doctor stage.
2:56:35 PM Permalink
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China plans Moon base for 2010. A mission to the Moon will follow manned space flights and a space station, says the head of China's Moon programme [New Scientist]
Now this is really exciting. From the point of view of an American, it's too bad that it's the Chinese, but it's really great that someone, at least, is making plans to return to the moon. A much, much better idea than the white elephant of a space station we're launching money up to.
1:46:51 PM Permalink
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Stephen Jay Gould, Biologist and Theorist on Evolution, Dies at 60. Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary theorist at Harvard University who helped to reinvigorate the field of paleontology, died today. He was 60 years old. By Carol Kaesuk Yoon. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
One day last week I was at Cody's in Berkeley, buying some books and magazines. In the checkout line ahead of me was a typical Telegraph Avenue sight: he had long hair, broken glasses, dressed pretty much in rags. He was buying a copy of Gould's newest book, the fat one on evolution. I said something to him about it (OK, maybe I should have known better), and we got to talking about Gould's religious views. For some reason he had Gould pegged as an atheist, but I said I wasn't so sure, and tried to talk about what Gould called "non-overlapping magisteria." Maybe I had (have) it wrong. This guy followed me out the store, and we talked for about two blocks on Telegraph. Actually, not suprisingly, he did most of the talking.
I've read almost all of Gould's books. The essays from Nature are the most readable and the best. I have been meaning to pick up the new big book on evolution, but it's so big I know I'll most likely never read it. He taught me a lot about science and about thinking, though I disagree with a lot of what he said, and know that he went off the deep end in his criticisms of Ediwn Wilson and some others in the sociobiology area. His appearance on the Simpson's was a great one, and he also appeared at the end of a Jack McDevitt science ficiton novel (in what was a very unsatisfying ending).
1:35:32 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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