I was recently fortunate enough to get a review copy of Cory Doctorow’s new book, <a href="Little Brother“>”Little Brother”. I’ve never read Doctorow before, but the book
was edited by Patrick Neilsen Hayden, who I think is the best editor in
the business, and Patrick says that this book is one of the best things
he’s ever worked on. In his words, it’s “one of the books that, should I happen to be run down by a beer truck next tuesday, I’d most like to be remembered for having helped into print”. So when Patrick posted on his blog that he had review copies available, I jumped at the chance.

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Like the rest of the skeptical blogosphere, I’ve been watching the
uproar around Ben Stein’s new movie with a lot of amusement, but also with
a lot of disgust. There’s one thing that I feel compelled to comment on that
I think has, for some reason, not been addressed nearly enough.

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I know better than to attempt to write an april fools day post that really
tries to fool anyone. I’m not a good enough writer to carry that kind of thing off
in a genuinely amusing way. On the other hand, I love april fools day pranks, and
I generally like the silly mood of the day. So I thought I’d write some posts in
the spirit of silliness.

As someone working in engineering, one of my favorite rules is Murphy’s Law. The thing about Murphy’s law is that odds are, what you just thought when I said “Murphy’s Law” is not, in fact, Murphy’s Law. Odds are, you think that Murphy’s law says “If anything can go wrong, it will”. That’s not what it says – Murphy’s law is almost always stated wrong!

The real Murphy’s law: If there’s more than one way to do something,
and one way will result in disaster, then someone will do it that way.

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Here at ScienceBlogs, we have a back-channel where the bloggers can get together and chat. In one of our threads, I was telling a story about work, and an interesting question came up. What’s the collective noun for a bunch of geeks?

Collective nouns are cool and funny. Some of them are straightforward: a herd of cows, a pack of wolves. Some are goofy: a wake of vultures, a destruction of cats (that’s north american wildcats), an ostentation of peacocks. And there are some fascinating ones: a parliament of ravens, an exaltation of larks.

I don’t know of any good collective noun for a bunch of geeks. But I think we need one! So what should it be? Fire away in the comments.

There’s been some talk among the sciencebloggers about the idea of intellectual property, and Bora over at “A Blog Around the Clock” asked me to convert
my thoughts into a post. It’s a serious topic, which is worth giving some deep consideration, and it’s
something that I’ve given a lot of thought to. Back when I was at IBM, I worked on some projects that were
internal and confidential, and also spent several years working on open-source. I’ve got two software
patents to my name. I didn’t do any of that lightly; I spent a lot of time thinking through the morality
of what I was doing, and I’ve been careful to stick with what I think is right.

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I’ve now uploaded nearly all of the Yellowstone pictures. There are two additional
photo albums on Picasa: one for the Mammoth Hot Springs area, and one for the Yellowstone canyon. Here are the links:

Yellowstone Vacation, Mammoth Hot Springs area

Yellowstone Vacation, Canyon Area

I’m back from vacation! There was no network access in Yellowstone, and virtually no cellphone service.
Anyway, a bunch of people asked me to post photos. I’ve got three sets of photographs, for the three main areas of the park that I visited: the Geyser area, the Terrace area, and the Canyon area.
The first (and largest) batch – the Geyser area – is uploaded into an album on Picasa.
The album still needs a lot of work – many things are out of order, mislabeled, etc; but the photos are there, and some of them are amazing! (No credit to me – I’m a mediocre photographer at best, using a crappy camera, but when the subject of the photos is sufficiently magnificent, even a crappy photographer can take a beautiful photo.)
Just click on the album cover below, and enjoy. Feel free to comment.

Yellowstone Vacation, Geyser Area

This post is quite thoroughly off-topic for this blog. But as someone who is openly religious and who
has written a number of posts that criticize Christian institutions, I get a fair bit of mail from cretins
who make demands that I speak up to defend their pathetic insistence that all religious people
must support discrimination. In the hopes that I can get these jackasses to leave me alone by
demonstrating that I’m so far beyond the pale that pestering me is a waste of time, I present this
post.

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I got hit by a mutant meme; I don’t remember who tagged me. I’m not terribly into these
meme things, but I don’t pass up excuses to post recipes. So below the fold are four recipes that I’ve created: seared duck breast with ancho chile sauce; saffron fish stew; smoked salmon hash; and
spicy collard greens.

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So that 8-facts thing is going around, and I got tagged. I’ve stalled long enough that everyone I read was already tagged, and I’m sure you’ve all seen it by now, so I’m not going to waste time repeating the rules or tagging anyone else.
1. One of my favorite things to do is cook. In fact, during grad school, when
I was particularly frustrated with my (then) advisor, I considered dropping out
of grad school and opening a restaurant.
2. It took three advisors for my to do my PhD. I started grad school with an offer
to work with one professor who did network protocol specification; by the end of my
first year, I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to keep working on that. I switched
to work with a theoretician on a strange computer architecture problem. He was a
total lunatic, and he really wasn’t interested in what I was working on – it was
work that he really wanted someone to do, but he didn’t really want to spend his time
thinking about it. Thank goodness, right around the time I became totally fed up,
the department hired a new faculty member, Lori Pollock, and within days of her
accepting the job, I was in her office asking her to be my advisor. I spend the next
four years working with her, and I still think she’s amazing. Best advisor ever!
(And I don’t even think she reads my blog!)
3. I can’t read maps. Not at all. They’re utterly meaningless to me. I’m a bit
learning disabled – I’ve got what’s called a perceptive impairment. One of the
problems that that’s caused me is the total inability to read maps, or catch balls.
4. I’m a musical instrument nut. I’ve got about 30 different tinwhistles, including
at least one in every key, two top-grade hand-made D whistles, and two giant low-D
whistles, two wooden flutes, 3 bamboo flutes, a magnificent selmer signature B-flat
clarinet, an old no-name A clarinet, 3 different antique albert clarinets,
a bluegrass banjo, and 2 Irish tenor banjos.
5. The first time I ever saw a real computer was in 6th grade. A classmate’s parent
brought it in to show my class. I was fascinated *instantly* by the idea of this thing
that I could teach to do math.
6. I like to build model airplanes out of paper. Not folded flying airplanes, but
very accurate, detailed scale models. For example, I’ve got a model of SpaceShipOne
which is about 5 inches long, made entirely of paper, down to the open landing gear
covers and struts.
7. I’m a huge fan of sculptor [Alexander Calder][calder]. Calder is best known for his
wonderful mobiles. The way that I discovered Calder was… the cover of my grad school
algorithms textbook. (My office mates and I just bought a replica of a Calder piece
to decorate our space.)
8. My wife and I got engaged one month to the day after we started dating. We didn’t
tell anyone except a few close friends for quite a while, because we didn’t think
her parents would accept it that quickly. We’d been friends for quite a while before
we started dating, but I’d never even considered asking her out, because she was
seeing someone else. Then she broke up with her ex-boyfriend, and showed up on my
doorstep the next morning, and pretty much never left.
[calder]: http://www.calder.org/