A computer program is like a memo. Often, a vague memo.
You are the boss. You want a pile of files to be put away. You could do it yourself, but instead you instruct someone else to do it. There are a lot of them and they are all mixed up. So you write a memo to an employee that says “put the files away” and sis-bam-boom you’re all set.
Or are you? Continue reading Practical Binary Analysis: Book Review
3001: The Fnial Odyssey (Space Odyssey Book 4) by Arthur Clarke in Kindle form for $1.99 if you are not from Australia. Restrictions may apply.
First, let me disabuse you of the notion that “JavaScript” and “Java” are totally unrelated to each other other than having the word “Java” in both. That is a bit of revisionist history that serves no real purpose. On the other hand, JavaScript is not a scripty version of Java by any means. The two are different languages, developed independently, for very different purposes. The overlap or connection stems in part from the fact that early thinking about getting a language to program stuff inside browsers was happening when Java was emerging, and Java would be likely considered the default language to use for such a think, if a full blow real life language would ever be considered for this task. JavaScript have elements that look like Java, and was created by Brendan Eich to use instead of Java and it was, at the time, called Mocha, which is a coffee drink and Java is coffee and they drank a lot of coffee so….)
Continue reading Learning And Using JavaScript Eloquently
Fossils, Finches and Fuegians: Charles Darwin’s Adventures and Discoveries on the Beagle (Text Only) is a biographical account of Darwin during the voyage. The Kindle version lacks the pictures, but if you have Alan Moorehead’s Darwin and the Beagle then you probably have all those pictures. I’m not sure if this is a worthy addition to the average person’s library, but if you have all the Darwin books and don’t have this one, this is a chance to fix that for a mere two bucks.
Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century is available on Kindle for 1.99. It is audible enabled.
I just upgraded this site to WordPress 5.01. (I waited out 5.o.) I am now faced with an editor that is not text based and does not give me access to my HTML codes. Instead, it uses this thing called “blocks.”
I just finished inserting that graphic of the unhappy Wall Street stockbroker guy (to the right) and if you look at the caption, you’ll see that there is a link in the caption. That was actually difficult to do in the older version of WordPress, so I like that.
I wonder what other kinds of blocks there are? Let’s see.
There are (see above) headings. Those are blocks.
It is said that a quote can be put in a block. It is a block quote.
There is a plugin that allows you to go back to the old style of editor. I’ll probably install that to see how it works, but this “Gutenberg” editor, as it is called, seems cool. I’m a very text-oriented writer, but this is not bad. We’ll see.
Next task, if I can get it to work: Make comments editable for you, dear readers, a commonly requested feature.
… and refreshes … and refreshes … and refreshes.
I speak, of course, of the non-existent hiatus in global temperature increase vigorously but incorrectly pointed to by deniers of global warming. What happened was this. We had a really warm year, owing to an El Nino, in the late 1990s. Then, things settled down a bit, and due to normal variation of the Earth’s climate system, that year was followed by a series of years in which the global surface temperature continued to increase, but very slowly. Meanwhile, of course, the Earth’s ocean temperature was steadily increasing, no pause or hiatus there. Then, after a few years, the Earth’s surface temperature warmed very rapidly. The period between that El Nino year, and the rapid return of temperatures rising, is where climate science deniers shoehorn their hiatus. Continue reading The Pause that Refreshes
Michael Mann, author of The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy
I recently completed a Twitter based poll to rank the 35 or so potential Democratic Party candidates for president. Since who was paired with whom had a lot to do with determining the exact percentages, I chose to divide the results, most of which were triads of candidates in a single poll, into three tiers. The bottom tier includes the candidates who came in third in a given three way comparison. You can vote for them in the latest of my Twitter Polls. Continue reading Democratic Candidates for President: Round Two, The Bottom Tier
Discounted on Kindle: The Chess Queen Enigma: A Stoker & Holmes Novel
In light of the Kevin Hart backlash. Or maybe the Joy Reed controversy. I do not refer here to the metaphysical roots of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I refer, rather, to all those Irish white guys in America, whose ancestors were used as target practice by Tammany Hall Toughs in 19th century New York, who are now just fine, and from this position above a repressed and exploited past, say really bone-headed things like “All Lives Matter, #!” They climbed the ladder, and the first thing they did was pull it up so the next group could not. And I refer to all the other ladder pullers out there. You know who you are. Or, maybe, you don’t, and that could be a problem.
Continue reading Can we talk about ladder pulling for a minute?
There was an accusation made in 2014 about an early 1980s rape by Tyson, but that never went anywhere and as far as I know was never proven. When that accusation resurfaced recently, a pysics professor, Katelyn Allers, came forward to relate a 2009 story of unwanted touching ad an AAS meeting. The incident was not viewed as especially traumatic by Professor Allers, but it was seen as inappropriate at the time. Ashley Watson, while working as an assistant to Tyson, relates “red flag” moments, attempts at persuasion to have sex, during her time working for him, and talks about misogynistic comments. Those allegations are all summarized in a report that came out yesterday in Buzzfeed News, but was initially summarized on a blog at not-my-favoriate-blog-site, Patheos.
And now, according to the Buzzfeed report, Fox Broadcasting and National Geographic, the producers of the Cosmos reboot hosted by Tyson, are investigating these incidents.
The statement by the producers of Cosmos: Continue reading Neil DeGrasse Tyson Investigated For Sexual Misconduct #MeToo (Updated)
You’ve heard about the “scientific method.” If your memory is excellent, and you took a lot of science classes in American schools, you learned two of them, because life science textbooks and physical science textbooks teach somewhat different concepts called “scientific method.” If you study the history of science, even at a superficial level, or do actual science, you will find that the “scientific method” you learned in high school, the very same “scientific method” people who either love or hate science, but are not scientists, and talk a lot about science, incessantly refer to, is not what scientists actually do. Neither the procedures for developing a study nor the inferential process of advancing understanding follow this method, or at least, not very often. Doing science is much more haphazard and opportunistic, nuanced and visceral, much less clean and predictable. Like the famous physicist once said, “The scientific method; that is what I fall back on when I can’t think of anything else do to.”
But there is one thing that is found common to most scientific endeavors, and without this thing science would not progress very quickly or very far: Continue reading Thwarting another attack on climate science, Michael Mann releases his own emails
Acadia Greene is a curious cartoon girl who runs around observing the natural world and conducting scientific investigations, in two recently released and very well done books by Katie Coppens, with illustrations by Holly Hatam: Continue reading Investigate Science: Acadia Files
This is something to pay close attention to.
From John Mashey’s article on DeSmogBlog, out just this morning: Continue reading Who Is David Schnare, and why should science supporters know about him?
Smithsonian Exploration Station: World Atlas