We are also … Unhindered by Talent

photo credit: PieterMusterd
As most anyone who’s flown much in the last few years can attest, the existing TSA airport security system frequently borders on the ludicrous. I know I’m more comfortable in the air knowing that 7-year-old John Anderson (of Minneapolis) is on the national Terrorist Watch List, and his parents have to “check in at the ticket counter so an airline official can see that he’s a child”.

If you’re looking for an opportunity to be even further depressed on this issue, I definitely recommend the ACLU’s short “national security quiz”. It’s really nice to know that “The U.S. government can seize your laptop, cell phone or PDA as you enter the U.S. and download all your private information—all without a warrant or probable cause” ’cause we are the Home of the Free and the Beacon for Democracy or some such. It’s also reassuring to learn that there are over 1 million people on the national Terrorist Watch List (which is then reduced to little more than a massive fishing expedition), and that includes a number of high profile dead people.

‘Cause dead people are so scary when they fly…

Man, oh, man, what a boondoggle. Absolutely enormous amounts of money and energy being expended, little of which actually does anything to make us more secure.

Another proud resume item for Our Fearless Leader. And another reason to be grateful that his fiasco of a presidency will end soon.

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

When I edit, I tend to scribble a lot, even when it’s my own stuff (or the writing of people I really like). Last January, for example, I took a set of photos after scribbling all over a paper that Riccardo and I were working on for GECCO. This paper went on to win the Best Paper award in the genetic programming track at GECCO last month, so I’d like to think that all this editing had some value :-).

I posted the full set over in my events account, and I plan on using some of them to show my students that I’m not just being mean to them — I’m mean to everyone, myself included!

This showed up here now because a publisher contacted me about using it in a college writing textbook. I figured I’d clean it up and post the full size version.

photo credit: maessive

First, let’s set the stage:

• I really don’t like the traditional suburban lawn. Tons of chemical, energy, and effort to create and maintain a biologically unstable mono culture so that I can … putt … or something. So, so silly.
• I’m also a big non-fan of petrol powered lawnmowers. They’re noisy, smelly, polluting beasts that beat the crap out of the grass, ripping it instead of actually cutting it.

As a consequence we’ve explored a bunch of alternatives, but none have really worked terribly well. We really liked the idea of reel mowers, but our experience with several of them makes it clear that our lawn is way too uneven and bumpy for a reel mower. Sigh.

What would be perfect would be a solar powered Roomba-like robot mower. WeatherGirl correctly pointed out that this is frequently known as a “goat”; sadly, the city classifies goats as livestock rather than lawn tools, and we aren’t allowed keep livestock in town. Damn.

So, anyone have any ideas for an interesting alternative to buying a stinky petrol powered monster?

Thanks in advance!

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent
In catching up on a bunch of old podcasts (I’m as behind there as I am on posting here), I ran across a very interesting Science Talk podcast from July 30 featuring “an interview with IEEE Spectrum editor in chief, Glenn Zorpette, talks about high-tech attempts to battle improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq as well as the state of reconstruction of Iraq’s electricity grid”. There’s lots of cool geeky stuff about blowing things up, and the high-tech ways people are developing to stop them. Perhaps the most interesting (and significant) bit, though, is at the end, where “journalist John Horgan talks about the possibility of eliminating war”. His position is that war isn’t an inevitable consequence of human nature, and that we might be able to construct a world where we’re much less likely to want to blow each other up. Two key points he mentioned were:

• Democracies are very unlikely to attack other democracies. So more democracies for the win?
• Countries that educate girls and women tend to greatly reduce the risk of conflict.

On a vaguely related point, a SciAm 60 Second Science podcast from way back in late May looks (briefly) at some of the significant problems that researchers are having getting women, especially older women, involved in medical trials.

Women were also more likely than men to say that they’re too old or not healthy enough [to participate in a trial] … But women over 65 are one of the fasted growing segments of the population. … our ability to improve care, develop new treatments and find cures depends on research and educating aging women about their role in medical breakthroughs.

Damn - women are apparently important! Treating half the population like dirt is not only ethically dodgy - it has negative practical consequences as well!

Who’d'a’thunk?

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

Backups are good.

Everybody says so.

Really, Really Good.

So you’d think the University of Minnesota would be working to provide a reasonable on-line, off-site backup system for its folks. Unfortunately, their pricing structure seems to be from another planet where storage is, like, well, really … uh … expensive!

To quote from the relevant web page:

OIT-UDMS Backup pricing (as of 2/2008)

Storage used Cost per month
  <128GB $25
  128GB – 256GB $50
  256GB – 384GB $75

To calculate the cost of backup service, simply round up the amount of data you need backed-up to the nearest increment of 128GB and use the formula of $25/128GB/month multiplied by the retention period (30 day backup is 4X the primary data). Backup data can be held for up to 90 days. Incremental backups are run daily and that data is retained for 2 weeks. Full backups are run weekly and those backups are held for one month.

We have the additional options of 2 weeks, 30 days and 60 days if your requirements for retention are shorter.

Yup, that’s right. $25 a month for 128Gb of storage. I can buy 500 Gb hard drives for under $100, so I could buy 3 drives (1.5 Tb of storage) a year for he cost of their backup system. Mozy.com will backup an unlimited amount of data for $5/month for home users; not sure what their enterprise pricing is like, but I kind of doubt that they’re going to jump to the U’s pricing.

Bet the U doesn’t get a lot of takers at these prices. Bet their staff aren’t backing up nearly as much as they’d like, either. Hmmmm … a relationship worth exploring?

So, after a long and tiring flight, which was 45 minutes late, urgh; and after several days of re-adjusting and getting used to everything, I finally feel at home again, and it’s great to be back. So far my contribution to Morris has been to hang out with some friends, and see some fireworks, but I hope to go to the parade for Prairie Pioneer Days and eat lots of bad food and watch some entertainment, yay! Nothing much seems to have changed, which can both be taken as a bad and good thing, but I tend to think that it’s a good thing, because it means it’ll be easier to come back to then if everyone turned green and sprouted antennae…..or something like that.

Just hypothetically speaking of course about the whole alien thing of course, it’s not like I could’ve invented some alien making ray or something.

Saw The Incredible Hulk the other day, and was amused and content for 114 minutes, but not exactly thrilled. It was a way for Marvel to make more money and prepare for their Avengers movie, and so at this point I’m sure anyone who has already seen both Iron Man and Hulk are committed to see the Captain America film and the Wonder Woman film, and at this point you’re either desperate for films, or a need, or nice medium between the two (a place I like to think I occupy, and therefore drag my parents into inhabiting), so I’m just also going to throw the new G.I. Joe film in there for good measure. Christopher Eccleston is in it, so that must mean it’s at least a C+, maybe even B just for that. Sure that may be seen as setting a lot of store on him, but if you have seen the First Season of Doctor Who
you know what I’m talking about, and if you haven’t, then you must go and watch it, like, right now. No kidding, open a new tab right now and order the DVD off of Amazon or Netflix or something. I am just about to pass out right now from a long day, so you might as well do that, later!

Green. So this was 2/3rds a good movie. Edward Norton kept me interested at the beginning. When the hulks went mano a mano I fell asleep, the ultimate sign that all is not well with a movie. Sigh.

Current temperature: here 57F/14C, there 11C/52F

For our last trip in the UK we took my mum up to Castle of Park, a Landmark Trust property in Glenluce, Scotland. How cool is that, spending four nights in a castle? It was a great place to spend time and I highly recommend a visit if you have the chance. We used the time to recover from the three weeks of activity in Spain and took it easy. We made two trips of note. For the first we walked a mile up the road to Glenluce Abbey which was beautifully cared for and the steward in charge was a mine of interesting information. For the second we drove to the Mull of Galloway, the southern most point in Scotland where I got my sea/standing on the edge of a cliff fix. My brother was able to join us for a couple of nights so it was quite a family get together.

The trip home was relatively uneventful though the plane transfer in Chicago raised the old heart rate a little more than I liked. Our airline, BMI, had scheduled less than two hours to do immigration, customs and the terminal change. To make matters worse we left Manchester late as one of the crew got sick. Fortuitously for us everything went super smoothly and we arrived at our departure gate with 5 minutes to spare. Phew!

The kicker for this trip was that I got a pretty serious case of jet lag, something I’ve never had problems with before. My sleep patterns have been hugely disturbed and my brain has had a seriously hard time functioning properly. Things seem to be more on an even keel now though.

Current temperature: here 59F/15C, there 10C/50F

When I fly to conferences I tend to take the low cost carrier, whatever that happens to be. Much of the cost is coming out of my pocket, and I’m cheap (’cause the conferences never are). For GECCO [1], AirTran was the winner, with a price a hair under $200 round trip, which was quite a lot less than I was expecting to pay for the flight. One little tidbit I didn’t really appreciate until several weeks after I booked the flight was that AirTran flies out of the Hubert H. Humphrey (HHH) terminal of the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) airport, and I’m currently adrift in the empty, echoing terminus of HHH with a handful of fellow travelers.

For those unfamiliar with MSP, the vast majority of flights use the Lindbergh terminal, and I suspect many people pass through MSP with nary a clue that the Humphrey terminal exists. I think I’ve only flown through HHH once before, on a Sun Country flight to a conference several years ago, and I’d pretty much forgotten what it was like over here.

I knew I’d have a couple of hours to kill at the airport between the arrival of my shuttle from Morris and my departure, and I figured I’d grab some lunch and try to continue revising our GECCO talks. This, however, failed to take into account my departure from the Humphrey terminal instead of Lindbergh. The Lindbergh terminal is a nice airport, with lots of restaurants (some of which are pretty decent) and even a passable book store or two. HHH is a small terminal (10 gates) servicing a ragtag group of low cost and limited traffic airlines.

It’s like a ghost town, but with airplanes.

There was almost no one here when I arrived. Only one of the dozen or so AirTran desks was open, there were no customers in sight, and I was able to just walk right up. Security also only had one queue open, but there were only four or five of us going through at the time, so it was again “Step right up and off you go”. The waiting areas were almost completely empty when I got here, and now (probably 30-40 minutes away from boarding) have a smattering of folks.

All this is most definitely to the good, especially when compared to some of the chaotic and stressful check-ins and security checks we’ve had in some of our recent flights.

The downside is that there are pretty much zip in the way of services or staff. There are a whopping two coffee/sandwich shops in the whole terminal, one on either side of security, and one bar/restaurant. After that we’re down to a magazine rack and a few vending machines. And the coffee shop inside of security didn’t have anyone at the till when I first came through.

Arguably less good, and certainly weird. No one’s going to mistake it for Heathrow or O’Hare, I promise you.

The real bummer, of course, is that there’s no free wifi here (or at the Lindbergh terminal). $4.95 for an hour, or $7.95 for the day.

Wonderful. Almost as wonderful as the fine $3 sandwich that cost me $7 for when the coffee shop finally opened up.

I’m looking forward to not flying for quite a while (perhaps as much as a year!) after I return from this trip. It’s nice being other places, but getting there isn’t always loads of fun, and it tends to suck environmentally.

¹ GECCO = Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, one of the two or three big international “mega” conferences in evolutionary computation. To be honest GECCO is much bigger and more circus-like than would be my preference. I’m much happier at smaller gigs like EuroGP, but that’s during the school year, and at an awkward time, and a lot more expensive to get to, so I’ve attended a lot more GECCOs than EuroGPs :-(.

Hmmm… Applying vaunted American know-how to find new solutions to the problem of energy independence? What an odd, odd thought, especially when McCain supports a tiny, slow band-aid that … well … won’t really help at all.

We were in Fargo a few days ago buying a car. We sold our one and only car when we went abroad, and are currently on borrowed wheels. There was serious discussion of not even getting a car, or perhaps leasing a car for the winter months while going without a petrol powered vehicle in the summer when we can bike around town. In the end, though, we decided to go ahead and buy a shiny blue Honda Fit. (This is the second time we’ve bought the exact same car as my sister a year or two after she bought hers. We’re not very original, I’m afraid. That, and my sister rocks!)

The Honda dealer said that the demand for Civics, hybrids, and Fits has been really high, and they’ve had periods where they haven’t had any Civics to show people, including used ones! (And this is North Dakota, where I suspect trucks have long out-numbered compacts.) Given that most people won’t keep a car for all of the 7 years it will be before we see any of the off-shore oil from McCain’s proposal, Obama’s plan seems to be much more in touch with the mood of the populace.

What I’d really like is for the U.S. people (and government) to realize that there’s real value in basic scientific research, and understand that kind of research is going to have to be an important part of any solution to the current energy and climate problems.

While in Fargo we also bought Sub-Evil a new bike, and will probably buy a new bike for WeatherGirl in the next week or two. This, combined with the fact that mine is getting a substantial tune-up at the moment, means we’ll all be on two spiffy wheels as much as possible, at least when the weather allows.

photo credit: Leucippus

Cory Q of Monkey River Town suckered WeatherGirl and I into forming a fantasy team for the Tour de France. We’ve never done something like this before, and had to do it in a hurry, so I’m guessing that we will not be stellar performers :-). Still, it was a lot of fun sifting through the participants putting our team together, and will make it even more interesting to watch the stages. Now we’ll actually care who comes in 11th in a sprint!

Our team…

• Magnus Backstedt
• Fabian Cancellara
• Sandy Casar
• Sylvain Chavanel
• Juan Antonio Flecha
• Oscar Freire
• José Ivan Gutierrez
• Kim Kirchen
• Oscar Pereiro
• Yaroslav Popovych
• Riccardo Ricco
• Carlos Sastre
• Christian Vandevelde
• Jens Voigt
• Haimar Zubeldia

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The mighty Tour de France started yesterday. We’ve been recording it, but haven’t actually seen any of it yet (unpacking, etc.). Soon, though, there will be many hours of bike racing in our lives!

Thanks to “Summa for Strings” for this amazing photo!

I really like this photo because it’s so wonderfully misleading. Any guesses as to what it is? Hint: It’s right here on good old Terra Firma.

Click on the photo (or follow this link) to learn what it really is…

photo credit: hradcanska
As we were car-less in the UK last year, we would rent wheels at various times when we needed to move all three of us and lots of stuff over what passes for long distances on the small island. Our last rental, for our last week between Spain and our return back to the U.S., was from Enterprise. When we dropped the car off at the airport their desk was closed, so I just plopped the keys in their little return safe.

Today I got an e-mail with the receipt. As an attachment. In “.MDI” format. Whatever the hell that is.

I was pretty sure we were going to find out that this was a M$ format before I’d even bothered looking, as it’s almost always people that have been sucked irretrievably into the M$ vortex that blithely send out files in annoying proprietary formats without considering the possibility that not everyone has sunk loads o’ dosh and a major organ into M$ software. I was right. It turns out that it’s Microsoft Document Imaging format, which apparently scans physical documents and converts them into TIFFs. But instead of then using the open, nigh on universally supported TIFF, they wrap (I’m guessing) that in their own goofy MDI format so people like me can’t open the documents.

Charmed. I’m sure.

Nothing I tried (and I tried quite a lot of things) would open this MDI file up, so I (nicely) wrote back and asked if he could re-send the file in an open format, like plain text or PDF. A model of restraint, I was. Really.

They promptly sent a second message with a new attachment in “.doc”. Good on the promptly. Less winning on the “.doc”, since that’s clearly not an open format. Happily, however, NeoOffice was able to open it up, sparing me a second round of e-mails with this nice person.

And what, after all this fun, did this remarkable M$ Word document contain?

A single, small image.

The image looks like a scan of a small bit of a spreadsheet. A small bit. No names (theirs or ours), dates, or any other standard “invoice” information. Just 10 lines of text, four of which are labels, four of which are actual entries (the rental amount, VAT, etc.), with the rest being sub-totals and totals.

In other words, a ton of machinery to obfuscate a quite small bit of information.

I just hate it when that happens…

Just finished upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1, and the dashboard is quite different. Not sure yet whether it’s better or worse, but definitely different. I like some of the nifty Ajax stuff that’s been added in the last few updates - these (good) web apps just get spiffier and spiffier!

Several people have asked about “culture shock” upon returning home, and for me at least there really hasn’t been much (I’ll let WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil speak for themselves). One thing that has been really amazing, though, is the peace and quiet here.

The photo above is from a few years ago, but it’s representative of what it’s been like being back. The roads (and sky) are wide and quiet, and peddling my bike down a big empty street seems kind of otherworldly after a year in a much more crowded part of the world:

The other huge difference is the damn mosquitoes. Didn’t really miss them while we were gone, and wasn’t too thrilled to see them again (in vast quantities) upon our return.

Oh, and burritos are much better in Minnesota than in the UK (and much better in Texas than Minnesota). Really. Much better.

Just stumbled across Wordle, a neat tag cloud/text visualization tool, and am having way too much fun.

Some of my most common Flickr tags (click on the cloud to see it bigger on Wordle’s site):

The contents of the front page of my blog as of 3 July 2008:

I like how the latter captures our time in Spain quite nicely, and I really like how Wordle can intermingle the ascenders and descenders. Wordle can grind pretty hard on your CPU, but there are lots of neat options to play with and some very fun results to be had. w00t!

We’re back in Morris, Minnesota, sleeping in our own beds for the first time in 10 months!

We arrived late Tuesday after a long, but generally uneventful trip. (Well, uneventful if we ignore a bit of a rush transferring in Chicago that contributed to WeatherGirl leaving her iPods on the plane there. But still, generally uneventful.) Jess Larson was super generous and drove us and our sixty zillions Tons O’ Crap (TM) back to Morris, and for this we are incredibly grateful.

We were thrilled to find that the house was in wonderful shape, and are very grateful to Rebecca and Joe (our renters) for taking such good care of our home while we were away.

All the major utilities have been restored, including Internet and DirecTV, so the family is unlikely to revolt :-). Sub-Evil has been catching up with his friends as much as he can, but many are out of town so it’s a process that will dribble on for a while. Now we plow into the unpacking of suitcases and boxes (both the ones we left behind 10 months ago and the ones we shipped last week) and the restoration of the flotsam of our lives. (We defrosted and cleaned the chest freezer since it was nearly empty, and today I shoveled all the mature compost out of the composter so we could start filling it up again.)

It was a great year abroad, and it’s nice to be home again.

Last night we went on an very nice night-time (started at 9:30pm) guided walking tour of Cordoba. Our two hours of walking through the old part of the city included two bits where an actor appeared in the dress of local figures: first the 20th century painter Julio Romero de Torres, then and the 12th century Jewish philosopher Moshe ben Maimon or Moses Maimonides. "de Torres" appeared in Plaza del Potro, which was many centuries where horses were traded ("potro" = "colt"), and which apparently features in Don Quixote. This history and the name are commemorated by a statue of a colt above a fountain in the plaza, which cast this cool shadow on the wall of the building that houses the Museo de Julio Romero de Torres.

Tomorrow we take the train back up to Madrid, and then fly back to the UK, where we have a week with WeatherGirl’s mum before heading back to the U.S.! We’re happy, tired, excited, and sad all rolled up into one.

Ciao!

We’re headed towards the end of our time in Spain and enjoying the slower pace of our trip as we finish off here in Cordoba. We began our visit here with a meeting with friends of friends and a little tapas that even I could eat. The conversation was both enjoyable and enlightening as we received recommendations on where to dine and what to visit.

Cordoba has been another great place to wander through the old town. A little like Toledo in many ways but flatter and hotter. I’ve been quite surprised that there seem to be a lot fewer tourists here compared to both Toledo and Granada.

The highlight of our time in town has been visiting the Mezquita. Originally a mosque, after the reconquest they built a cathedral right on top of it. Inside it is an amazing mixture of Christian and Islamic elements. It quite takes your breath away.

Another beautiful space here is the Synagogue which was much simpler than the two in Toledo, (We have now seen all the the synagogues that remain from before the expulsion of the Jewish population from Spain in 1492.)

Julio Romero de Torres was an artist who came originally from Cordoba and there is a museum here in his honour. Much of his painting features Spanish women of a particular look and Cordoba always seems to put in an appearance somewhere in his pieces.

We took a night tour of the city which was a pleasant experience as by 9.30pm much of the heat of the day has gone. The tour took us to several parts of town that we had not visited outside the wall of the old city. Our guide did a sterling job as she coped with two different groups at the same time, the Italian speakers and the English speakers. The tour ended with free tapas which was very enjoyable.

Tomorrow we head back to the UK and further travels to the north and a stay in a Scottish castle.

Current temperature: Cordoba 32C/89F, mum’s place 14C/57F, our place 72F/22C