Full text of the Energy Bill (sans the tax provisions, which oughta be released later today) is here.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Here’s something I wrote elsewhere which I want to shout as loudly as I can. Cherry-Picking the Science (scroll down to what is right now the third item, sorry, no permalinks to this blog so in a few days it’ll be off the bottom):
Reading the sometimes vociferous debate over the last couple weeks about global climate change in the comment sections of David Appell’s excellent blog has reminded me of the journalistic minefield presented by these sort of debates.
There are a number of topics like this – the evolotion/creation debate comes to mind, as well as the debate over the risks of low-dose radiation exposure and the safety of genetically modified foods. In each of these cases, there is a relatively well established scientific consensus about a particular view (a clearly unassailable consensus in the case of evolution). But in any interesting scientific debate, there are outliers – serious scientists who disagree with the consensus, or who pick at the questions that the consensus view cannot answer.
It is the same in relativity theory or quantum mechanics, too, those niggling little outliers swimming against the stream. But in relativity and quantum mechanics, there is no political question linked to the outcome of the scientific debate. And that’s where the cherry-picking comes in.
GNOME and the Free Desktop
Churning through unread bits of the week’s mail (“chewing”, as Michael Meeks so charmingly puts it), I finally this morning got to Luis’ answers to questions of GNOME board candidates. He said a bunch of stuff I would echo, especially this:
Q: What do you see as current threats to the future of a complete Free Software desktop? And what would you like the GNOME Foundation to be doing to address these issues?
A: Data, data, data. If all the good data is in some format we can’t read in a Free operating system (IE-specific Javascript, DVDs,1337-new-Office ‘features’, stored on unreadable or otherwise unusable devices) then we’re going to lose. Period….
Past this, the Free Software war is won, IMHO- we have a Free kernel and we have a high quality and now pretty usable Free userspace. As long as we can continue to run said kernel on new hardware, and open data that we get from others so that we can benefit from (or at least not be savaged by) network effects, the rest is details. Big details, butdetails that we are sure to win.
Yo, Luis! This is one of the main reasons that part of what little free software time I have right now is spent on libxml, which I see as a key piece of infrastructure enabling free data exchange.
More Game Theory
More on the game theory in the Energy Bill, this from the Washington Post:
Negotiators sprinkled in dozens of sweeteners sought by states and congressional districts, ranging from nearly $1 billion in shoreline restoration projects to tax credits for a company that produces fuel by compressing turkey carcasses.
Looking Lke an Idiot
So I showed my continuing ignorance of how Washington, D.C., works this week in grand fashion pronouncing to anyone who would listen (poor sops) that there wouldn’t be an energy bill. There is. Still unclear whether it can pass the senate, but I clearly was wrong.
I’ve been looking at it as a hideously complex game theory problem, Here’s a great example, from today’s New York Times story:
Lobbyists and lawmakers said the key to passage might be the Democratic leader, Senator Tom Daschle, who has pushed the ethanol plan to benefit corn growers in his home state, South Dakota, and across the Midwest. If Mr. Daschle supports the measure, they say, the threat of a filibuster will fade.
There are so many interests pro and con to be balanced here that the game theoretical alliances and defections may very well be intrinsically too complex to grasp.
Watch and learn.
Corn
This was pretty much irresistable – a pair of papers in today’s Science about the evolution of maize, from the wild teosinte to the grain we know and love today:
Call it “the tortilla gene.” It is a little piece of corn DNA that may have improved the way corn starch sticks together.
If scientists’ hypothesis about it is correct, it would have allowed early Americans thousands of years ago to mash up corn kernels to make the first tortillas.
With a handful of similarly useful changes, early Americans turned a wild Mexican grass called teosinte into the highest yielding grain crop in the world and changed human culture on this continent.Nurtured by early Native American farmers, the genes turned the bushy teosinte grass into the cornstalks we know today, and the rock-hard teosinte seeds into the tender kernels that grace modern cobs.
(If you’re at university or somewhere that has a subscription, the full papers are here.)
Dihydrogen Monoxide
This is serious:
What is known about these cancers is that Dihydrogen Monoxide is found in detectable and biologically significant levels in virtually all tumors and other cancerous and pre-cancerous growths.
Cancer research has made significant advances in the detection and treatment of many forms of cancers. With each new advancement, the role DHMO plays in the cause of cancer is likely to be better understood.
libxml kudos
Fabulous note this afternoon to the libxml mailing list:
The reason for this email is to really congratulate the people that wrote
this software. I am on AIX (IBM rs6000). I needed no help at all beyond
the supplied documentation and web site. Everything works as
documented. The interfaces are easy to understand and implement.My background is 20+ years ‘C’ programming experience and almost no xml
experience. One of the easiest packages to integrate I have ever found —
even for the xml ignorant. The code is very readable and well structured
and written, making anything not completely documented in text easy to find
in the source.
Seeking Trekkies
So I’m looking for a Trekkie who can tell me whether it’s true that the Enterprise never used its transporter when the ship was in warp drive. This is for a newspaper story, email me at work. (I know, this is a weird request. It’s a weird story. But I definitely don’t want to get it wrong and risk the the certain wrath of a thousand Trekkies.)
Fedora
Had a bit of an adventure today installing the new Fedora. It rather conflicted with my old bastardized installation in unpleasant ways, so the only solution seemed to be to blow away the entire Linux partition and start from scratch. Just as well, as it needed cleaning out anyway and I have good backups. This took time, and there was a moment (a looong moment) of upleasantness when the old Lilo was gone but the new Lilo was not there to replace it, and I was blessed with a large beige paperweight. But it worked OK in the end.
The method to my madness was/is to settle on a stable installation for my working environment and stop all this “I’m a hacker” upgrade stuff. Repeat after me. Stable working environment. Stable working environment. I’m going to move all the gonzo GNOME 2.5 stuff to an entirely separate userspace so that I’m not tempted. Well, maybe I’ll just cheat a little and keep up-to-date on the latest libxml stuff, but that’s it. I swear. I don’t wanna be a hacker.