The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Krugman: Exxon-Mobil is "enemy of the planet"

Economist Paul Krugman (sub.req.) in today's New York Times lays out exactly how Exxon-Mobil has tried to undermine climate research since the mid-1980s:

The people and institutions Exxon Mobil supports aren't actually engaged in climate research. They're the real-world equivalents of the Academy of Tobacco Studies in the movie "Thank You for Smoking," whose purpose is to fail to find evidence of harmful effects.
But the fake research works for its sponsors, partly because it gets picked up by right-wing pundits, but mainly because it plays perfectly into the he-said-she-said conventions of "balanced" journalism. A 2003 study, by Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, of reporting on global warming in major newspapers found that a majority of reports gave the skeptics—a few dozen people, many if not most receiving direct or indirect financial support from Exxon Mobil—roughly the same amount of attention as the scientific consensus, supported by thousands of independent researchers.

I still haven't forgiven Exxon for the Exxon Valdez disaster (and neither have the sea otters, who are still affected). This is just one more nail.

More camera fun

More fooling around with the Canon 20D Anne got me. I love that I can finally do available-light photos in almost all conditions, since the sensor can go up to ISO 3200.

Anne: new job, great gift

Anne got a new job (details to follow), and to celebrate, she showed up in New Hampshire yesterday with a Canon 20D, the camera I've wanted since...well, since before I met her. What a great wife.

Now I can take photos like this, with actual control over the exposure, aperture, and focus:

Terror alert: Pamphleteers

TPM Muckraker reported today that the Dept. of Homeland Security has a new warning about radical animal-rights groups:

Such radical extremist groups may use several tactics—each devastating in its own way—including:
- "organizing protests"
- "flyer distribution"
- "inundating computers with e-mails"
- "tying up phone lines to prevent legitimate calls"
- "sending continuous faxes in order to drain the ink supply from company fax machines"

I particularly like the fourth item, since several Republicans have been convicted recently of doing just that in New Hampshire during the 2002 election.

Religious nuttiness for the holiday

The Chicago Tribune carried two Assoicated Press stories about religious fanatacism this morning. First, Christians were attacked at Mass in Egypt yesterday. When American Christians, who currently run the government, claim to be "persecuted," perhaps they should reflect on the Egyptian situation.

The second story, from Manila, Philippines, tells of Catholics voluntarily getting nailed to crosses to show their devotion. In a concession to the fact that we no longer live in ancient Roman times, the 10 cm (4 in.) nails pounded through their hands and feet—in one man's case, for the 20th time—were "soaked in alcohol to prevent infection."

Happy Easter!

Give us a push

My cousin sent this one to me ages ago:

This bloke's in bed with his missus when there's a rat-a-tat-tat on the door.

He rolls over and looks at his clock, and it's half three in the morning. Sod that for a game of soldiers, he thinks, and rolls over.

Then, a louder knock follows. "Aren't you going to answer that?" says his wife so he drags himself out of bed, and goes downstairs. He opens the door and this bloke is stood outside.

"Eh mate" says the stranger, "Can you give us a push?"

"No, piss off, it's half three. I was in bed," says the man and shuts the door.

He goes back up to bed and tells his wife what happened and she says "Dave, you are a bastard. Remember that night we broke down in the pouring rain on the way to pick the kids up from the babysitter and you had to knock on that man's house to get us started again? What would have happened if he'd told us to piss off?"

So he gets out of bed again, gets dressed, and goes downstairs. He opens the door, and not being able to see the stranger anywhere he shouts: "Eh mate, do you still want a push??" and he hears a voice cry out "Yeah please mate."

So, still being unable to see the stranger he shouts: "Where are you?" and he replies: "I'm over here on the swings."

Cool toy from ThinkGeek

I had to stop myself from snapping up this USB GPS device:

This small GPS gadget can easily be placed in a car, boat, land speeder, or just about any moving object and will record its own time, date, location, speed, direction and altitude. The recorded information can then be downloaded to your computer through the USB port and optionally integrated with Google Earth or Mapquest. This feature allows you to "playback" the location points of the TrackStick and see a visual mapped history of its travels.
Containing 1MB of memory it can store up to 4000 records allowing for months of travel. When the TrackStick is not moving, memory is not used. The record interval is adjustable to anything between 1 and 15 minutes (this is used to save memory and will not extend the battery life). It’s so small you can hide it for covert applications. There are no special software applications to buy and the raw data can be exported in RTF, XLS, HTML, or Google Earth KML formats.

It's $250 from ThinkGeek. Maybe I'll get it for myself as a bonus if I beat my revenue projection this month.

Update, 6 June 2006 5:36p CT (22:36 UTC): Bruce Schneier has picked up on the security ramifications of this device.

Joel Spolsky's 12 rules to better software

My project manager sent around this link to Joel Spolsky's rules for software management:

I've come up with my own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team. The great part about it is that it takes about 3 minutes. The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. You don't have to figure out lines-of-code-per-day or average-bugs-per-inflection-point.

I totally agree with Spolsky's list. I have never been on a project that scored better than 7 until now (which scores 9, IMO, but we're moving toward 11), and only one, ever, has answered "yes" to #8 (quiet working conditions).