From my other blogworld, a lovely image from Mars via Larry Crumpler, with commentary.
Comment Spammers Back
Sigh.
The comment spammers are back already. It seems as though I’ll have to try something a little more industrial in strength.
a murder of crows
Clarke in his own words
After all the talk about Richard Clarke based largely on the political positioning associated with his arguments, it’s useful to read his underlying argument about the U.S. response to terrorism in his own words.
Climate and National Security
My story on climate change and national security ran in this morning’s paper. It gave me a chance to take a stab at explaining the idea of “no regrets” policies – climate change responses that are robust to the endless and apparently unsettleable argument in our political arena over the nature and causes of climate change:
One governmental response, favored by many, is to reduce the risk of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But another response, the Sandia group found, could be policies aimed at reducing the vulnerability of societies around the world to climate change.
That could have the advantage of helping regardless of whether the change is natural or human-caused. It could also include policies that would help in the absence of any climate change at all? sometimes called “no regrets” policies.
Helping poor, arid nations ensure adequate water supplies, for example, could help them respond to drought, whether it was natural or a response to greenhouse warming. But it could also help even if there isn’t a drought.
Spring
It’s that magic time of year when the garden offers new surprises every day. Today it was one of our tulips, a little gem on the mound in the back yard.
The wisteria is starting to leaf out, and the first iris – a lovely little white thing – is blooming in the front yard.
Lissa got the irrigation system in our back yard running this afternoon, and most of the work is done on the front irrigation. I’ve been pretty diligent about weeding every day during my vacation, so that’s largely under control.
It cooled off nicely as the sun went down, so Lissa and I took a long walk down through the neighborhood to Central, past the high-end folks waiting for a table at Scalo to Flying Star, which is low-rent enough for us without being unapproachably hip. I had shrimp pasta with corn and poblano chiles. L had a patty melt, minus the cheese, which I think is an odd concept (what exactly is left to melt?) but she seemed to thoroughly enjoy.
I feel unbelievably relaxed, like I can really sleep now. And so to bed.
Dumping a DocPtr
It was one of those annoying little things that I figured out how to do once, but couldn’t remember how when it came up this morning on the libxml mailing list: how to dump a document from its native DocPtr structure into a regular old char buffer.
So when Lucas Brasilino pointed out the answer I jotted down a working example and added it to the libxml2 examples (not there at the moment, should show up when the web site syncs).
See, I’m on vacation.
The Panda’s Thumb
My friend Dave Thomas and a number of other contributors have set up The Panda’s Thumb, a blog “dedicated to explaining the theory of evolution, critiquing the claims of the anti-evolution movement, and defending the integrity of science and science education in America and around the world.”
Check it out.
My Comment Spam Hack
Elise.com has a thorough discussion of techniques for fighting comment spam. What seems to be the most widely used is Jay Allen’s mt-blacklist. But since that would have required an MT upgrade, I opted to first try this simple hack. It is based on the assumption that there is brainless automation on the other end of line.
Step 1
Rename the “mt-comments.cgi” script in your mt directory.
Step 2
Find all references to “mt-comments.cgi” in all of your templates and rename them to match the new name you gave the file.
Step 3
When people send you email saying they tried to post a comment and got a “couldn’t find mt-comments.cgi” error message, go back and find the templates you missed.
Update March 30, 2004: This didn’t work. After five days, two different spammers, including one of my old regulars, were back.
Children – a Luxury?
Aaron yesterday suggested children may be an expensive luxury. Dude, there’s good science backed up by badass mathematical analysis to support that suggestion.
One of the puzzles of demography has long been that as societies get richer, they tend to have lower birth rates. This seems evolutionarily counter-intuitive. As you get richer, you ought to be able to support more offspring. But it turns out that as we get richer, we end up needing to shower the younguns with more stuff, so as we get richer it gets paradoxically more expensive to add offspring. So as societies industrialize, their birth rates go down. The math involves allometric scaling laws that also match energy flow-body size patterns in critters. Turns out that the economics here can also be modelled as energy flow through the societal system.