Category Archives: Musings

• From the “I get e-mail” department:
  

  Good Afternoon Paul-

  GIS technology is playing an important role to help improve the wine industry by taking the guesswork out of where to plant vineyards for peak production.

  The wine industry’s reliance of GIS technology has increased the need for GIS professionals. A typical vineyard worker or winemaker often has three to 20 actual jobs, one of which may be executing GIS tasks.

  As more organizations around the world use geographic information systems, earning a bachelor’s degree online in GIS will prepare students to enter and/or move up in this rapidly growing field.

  American Sentinel University’s accredited associate and bachelor’s online degrees in GIS are designed to position students for success in this important field.

• Apparently squirrels cause 17% of the damage to fiber-optic cables nationwide.
• Looks like LinkedIn is raiding its users’ privacy too, just like Facebook. Here’s how to turn the feature off.
• It’s been 9 months since the Lync 2010 launch. Microsoft has still not released any public details about their Lync clients for iOS (although I understand that select customers are being briefed under NDA). This is ridiculous, as third parties are starting to release their own clients.
• Tony has a good summary of the preparation for our final (for now) Exchange Maestro workshop.
• Not a surprise: “The kind of risk-seeking behavior that motivates certain people to fly personal aircraft may also make them effective corporate leaders, according to a new study co-authored by professors from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Oregon.”

• I’m really identifying with Walter White during the first part of Breaking Bad‘s third season. Well, except for the part about cooking meth, that is.
• It’s kind of amazing how many in-cockpit technologies pilots now have access to. 15 years ago, you could only get in-cockpit weather if your airplane was big enough to accomodate an (expensive) radar. Now we have
  terrain and traffic avoidance, satellite weather, GPS, synthetic vision.. all packaged in beautiful glass. it’s a great time to be a pilot. (Oh, and this.)
• This is an eye-opening reminder of one of the benefits we enjoy here in the US– not everyone has the luxury of sprawl.
• Think you have a good vocabulary? Prove it. (The results are fascinating.)
• Remember the International Earth Rotation Service? They’re baaaaaack.
• I’m a bit disappointed in this year’s Year’s Best Science Fiction. Perhaps the second half will be better than the first.

• As a private pilot in the US, you can get an instrument flight rating that allows you to fly in all sorts of undesirable weather. This rating is an outgrowth of techniques developed starting in the 1930s. I didn’t know this, but most other countries don’t have a private IFR rating at all; if you want to fly in bad weather, you need a pan-European air transport pilot (ATP) rating, which is very expensive. Thus France’s announcement that they would provide one is kind of a big deal, especially since IFR-rated US pilots can get an endorsement allowing them to fly IFR in France. That means I have until next summer to get rated because…
• Next summer I want to take the boys to Normandy for the anniversary of D-Day. My friend Ron, an Army Ranger who served a mission in Switzerland and is fluent in French, took his sons this summer and has had some remarkable stories to tell. Gotta go before we run out of veterans. Being able to tour the area by air would be the icing on the cake, so to speak.
• And speaking of cake: ordering groceries directly from your phone? It’s like the future… a tasty, tasty future.
• And speaking of future: I found my jetpack. It’s water-powered, but still, I’d love to try this out.
• And speaking of trying things out: did you know that Amazon has a site called SmallParts.com that bills itself as “the hardware store for researchers and developers”? Happy shopping!

• Apparently Bellefonte #1, a never-finished nuclear plant in northern Alabama, may be rising from the dead. I’ve seen it often while driving the road between Huntsville and Atlanta; hard to imagine that TVA will make worthwhile out of this zombie. (The Union of Concerned Scientists doesn’t think much of their proposal.)
• As many of my friends in Redmond are discovering today, it doesn’t matter how much redundancy you have inside your buildings if you have single points of failure outside the building.
• I love summer, not least because it brings tons of books by my favorite authors. On tap: new books from Clancy, Silva, and a bunch of others that I’m too lazy to look up at the moment. Bonus: it’s also time for the latest Year’s Best Science Fiction.
• Do you know the story behind the Polaroid SX-70 instant camera? My dad had one of these and it was an amazing piece of equipment. Check it out.
• Lots of people are just now catching on to what Microsoft has been pushing for a while: the death of the phone number. You don’t have to know Amazon’s IP address to use their service; why should you have to know my phone number to call me?
• If you are at all interested in the mobile device market, you should be reading this. His free analysis is so good I can only imagine what his paid stuff is like.
• “In a newly published study, three University of Oklahoma researchers report there is a higher rate of accidental deaths among whites (but not nonwhites) in the American South and West — regions where a “culture of honor” makes backing down from a challenge problematic for many males.” Well, duh. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that none of those three researchers is actually from the American South or West or they’d’ve known this already.

Might as well just kill me now:

Scientists writing online in the journal Neurology analyzed the diets of more than 21,000 people nationwide. They found that people in eight stroke belt states — North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana — ate a three-ounce serving of fish an average of twice a week, roughly the same as people elsewhere. But they were 32 percent more likely to have that fish fried. Nationally, African-Americans ate more fish meals than whites, and twice as much fried fish.

The NYT storyalso contains this fascinating quote from the study’s author, Dr. Fadi Nahab of Emory University:

“The No. 1 thing [that leads to changes in stroke risk] is diet,” he said. “And yet when we look at dietary differences in and out of the stroke belt, it’s hard to find any other than this one.”

I’d suggest that Dr. Nahab must not have been in the South all that long if this is the primary dietary difference he’s identified between Southerners and those living in other parts of the country.

More seriously, the Emory press release says that people in the stroke belt eat “an average of 0.68 servings of fried fish per week, compared to 0.64 in the stroke buckle and 0.62 in the rest of the country.” For non-fried fish, the press release says that stroke belt residents averaged “1.45 servings per week, compared to 1.52 servings in the stroke buckle and 1.63 servings in the rest of the country.” Those are awfully small differences, so I’m not quite ready to stop eating fried catfish just yet (not that you can get it in the Bay Area anyway.)

I’m not seeing the nuances of the Arizona bill correctly reported very much, and I fear that this is distorting the debate.

The new state law (full text here) has two salient points. First, it criminalizes being in the state if you’re in violation of US immigration law. It’s a fair argument to say that if the federal government were enforcing our existing immigration laws that the situation in Arizona today would be very different, but that’s a topic for another post.

Second, the new law requires (sort of) that law enforcement officers who are already in “lawful contact” with someone to make a “reasonable attempt” to verify the person’s immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in violation of state or federal immigration law. There are exemptions, of course, and word has already gone out that some law enforcement agencies won’t enforce the new law anyway. This is not, of course, the same thing as giving the polizei power to detain and interrogate every brown person in the state.

In fact, it seems remarkably similar to a number of other laws that we more or less accept as a matter of course. One example: various state bans on driving while using cell phones, while not wearing seat belts, etc. In many states, the police cannot stop you solely because you have a phone clamped to your ear or because your seat belt is off. However, if they have another legitimate cause to stop you, you can be cited for the “real” offense as well as for the secondary one. It seems as though the Arizona law is much closer to these laws than to an open invitation to scrutinize every non-Caucasian they see.

I don’t see the Arizona law as much different than the existing and well-understood case law that defines when the police may ask someone to present ID. Can a random cop ask you for ID when you’re just walking down the street, minding your own business? Generally not. Can they require you to present ID as part of other types of interaction? Sure.

Rather than label Arizonans as Nazis, or call for a worldwide boycott, or whatever, I’d really like to see the people who are complaining about the law propose some workable alternatives… other than "ignore the problem and hope it goes away."