Took an extended break from blogging (but not from blog-reading and occasional commenting) to close a real-estate deal.

I think I got a great deal: nice building, nice yard, lot that backs up to a river, minimal repair.

But the act of preparing the deal, going through with it, and then preparing the house for habitation drained most of my energy.

In the bigger picture, I get to transition from renter to owner. I also get to re-consider the possibility of getting a pet.

A large number of changes will be compressed into the next few months. Hopefully, things will be better at the end.

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In honor of the holiday, I would like to post a link to a song by the Kiein 4-Group, titled Finite Simple Group (of Order 2).

Video available here, video and lyrics also available here.

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Apropos of recent events, I am reminded of a story about a king, a party, and a prophet.

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Computer modeling is a phrase that seems to always draw respect.

This level of respect has always been puzzling to me. I have done a little computer modeling (in my time at a Tech University), and I learned early on that the "Computer" part is the last part of the process of Computer Modeling.

I also learned that the biggest weakness of Computer Modeling is in the model.
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Some time ago, a commenter asked my opinion (as a programmer) on the evolving mess that is known as ClimateGate.

My first thought was that the problem was not primarily an issue with bad programming (though there are questions about that), but an issue with the Data and the Model.

[NOTE: many of my links are to other bloggers who were skeptical about the causes and consequences of planet-wide rise in temperature before the Climategate story was broken. The discussion below should lead to its conclusion without any assumptions about what is causing the globe to warm, how much warming has occurred, and whether it can be expected to continue into the foreseeable future.]
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A little more than a month ago, I finished filling out the paperwork to purchase a rifle from the Civilian Marksmanship Program.

(Said program is a nearly-century-old effort to promote marksmanship among the non-military population of the United States. Membership in an approved club is required, as is the passing of a basic marksmanship course...but I digress.)

This week, the rifle arrived. (Much earlier than I had expected.) Pictures inside the "More" link.
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After more than a month off, I return with some Christmas cheer.

During the War Between the States, a prominent poet was saddened by several pieces of bad news in his family. At least one of the pieces of bad news was the wounding of his son in battle.

He expressed his thoughts in poetry, which ran from hope to despair and back to hope.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
'There is no peace on earth,' I said;
'For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!'

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
'God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!'

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Some blogger tells us that the country is in the very best of hands. Specifically, the website designed to show how well the Recovery effort is working shows many jobs created in apparently-fictional Congressional Districts. Among the fictional districts in New Hampshire is district number "00".

The site also shows $1,471,518 going to New Hampshire’s 6th congressional district, $1,033,809 to the 4th congressional district and $124,774 to the 27th congressional district. In fact, New Hampshire only has two congressional districts; inviting confusion about where the money listed for the 00, 4th, 6th and 27th districts is going.

When I see this data, I see a different problem. Whoever designed and wrote the recovery.gov website left several gaping holes in the software logic on the input end, and in the logic on the storing/validation system. There are also possibly problems in the display system used to show the data to the general public.

Specifically, they should have checked that the inputs made sense relative to the data that was expected. There are ways to make sure that when a wide variety of people enter data into a system, the entries are checked against a range of expected values.

As an example: most websites that handle online-order-forms have an entry for putting an address in. If that entry is for an address in the U.S., there is a state-code to fill out. It is good programming practice to make sure that every state-code put in is a code for a state that exists. Often, the web-site provides a drop-down menu with selections, to make it harder for someone to enter "AK" when they want to ship to Arkansas, or to mistakenly enter "AM" for Alabama.

The problem of having people enter data for Cogressional districts in which Recovery-jobs have been created is similar. Each state has a specific number of Congressional districts. It is absurdly easy (from a software perspective) to turn this input form into a pair of drop-down boxes. Thus, the entry would not be left blank (likely the cause of district "00"). Also, it would be harder for the person entering the data to put a State Congressional District into a box labelled Federal Congressional District. (This might be the cause of districts 4, 6, and 27 in New Hampshire...)

Not only is the management of the Recovery program suspect, but their programming team (and the management team doing the oversight) published some really sloppy work. The website looks nice, but behaves like a first draft ready for testing, not a finished product.

UPDATE: after a careful perusal of each State's data as shown in Recovery.gov, I found that all states except Nebraska and Nevada have some Recovery money spent in Congressional District 00.  Ten of the states (Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Tennessee) have 0 jobs saved/created in that row at some non-zero cost. Two states (Montana and New Hampshire), as well as the District of Columbia, have more than 1500 jobs listed in District 00. Most of the remaining states have fewer than 10 jobs listed in District 00, but a few have more than 100.

It looks like "00" is a default value, and a few states had almost all number of entries done without a specific Congressional District specified. Most of the states had a few remainders that resulted in this default value.

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This weekend, deer-hunting season opened in my area.

It's an almost-holiday in local culture; a day in which those interested in hunting travel long distances, set up camp, and rise early to spend all day in a hunting-blind, waiting for the moment when a white-tailed deer will come into sight.

It is (in my experience) a combination of boredom, immersion in the natural world, rare moments of excitement, and tales of the one that got away.

In five years of hunting experience, I have yet to bring in a white-tail deer.

If I had a doe permit the first time I went hunting, I would have harvested a doe within an hour of sunrise that first day. Since then, I've rarely seen a deer in a situation where I could get an easy shot. (At least once, I cursed myself for setting up a bow-stand at a spot that made it impossible for me to shoot to the right...only to discover that several deer regularly used the trail that ran 20 feet to my right.)

The days off of work that I took to go hunting have been rewarding. Most of the reward was in the relaxation, and the time spent away from everyday cares and worries.

One of these times, I'll come back with a deer as well.

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Twenty years ago (when I was still in my childhood), a wall was torn down.

'Twas no ordinary wall.

The Berlin Wall was a symbol of a much larger set of defenses, barricades, officially-closed borders, and armies meant to keep people in the Communist-controlled portions of Eastern Europe.

I only vaguely remember the history leading up to that event. There were rumblings of trouble in various parts of the Warsaw Pact; border crossings suddenly opened and then closed again, protests not quashed by State Police, etc.

A series of events led to a dramatic opening of the Wall, and large numbers of East Berliners meeting West Berliners on top of the once-impregnable Wall.

In my vague recollection, there was never any good explanation for why the Wall was brought down, and why the Warsaw Pact dissolved into a group of new, non-Communist states.

It seemed the kind of deus ex machina event one would expect in a poorly-written movies. Some unknown, unseen, hard-to-explicate set of forces outside the Main Story resulted in the end of the Evil Empire.

It is reminiscent of another tale of a wall falling down, the kind of tale that I learned as a child.

The two tales are similar in at least one way: the ordinary observer to either event would not have expected the Wall to fall as rapidly as it did.

(Perhaps, in the case of the Berlin Wall, it became apparent that the Main Story being told to the public wasn't the Main Story of what was happening...)

Many things have changed in the world since that time.

Hopefully, the story will still be told many generations hence: people will remember that the Communist world, which promised freedom and wealth, had delivered fear of the Secret Police and crushing poverty. Also, it had to build a wall to keep its own "liberated" people from leaving.

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I recently stumbled onto a heated discussion on another blog. That discussion prompted some thoughts of my own.

The dramatis personae were Morgan Freeberg, Rick, and Sonja. Morgan is a blogger I read sporadically; I'm fairly familiar with his work. The other two are new to me. Rick appears to generally agree with Morgan, Sonja appears to generally not agree with either of them.

Morgan first came to my attention in a link from some other blog; he is distinctive in his respect for a nearly-forgotten ancient librarian in Alexandria. Sonja is unknown to me, but I recognize that she took an idea from Tolkien when she named her blog.

What piqued my interest was a comment by Sonja after she declared the original discussion closed. She said something about previewing comments, and deleting comments that didn't follow the rules of Logic.
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After reading the adventures of SDB in updating a machine to Windows Vista 2.0 7, I am reflecting on my own computer troubles.

I'm running a distribution of Linux known as Gentoo. It's has a well-justified reputation for being challenging. Most of the challenge is in the beginning setup; a little of the challenge is in the maintenance.

Yet I am surprised at the effort required to bring the generic Windows install into compliance with what this particular user wants. The initial install was easy, customizing it for the user is hard.
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And today's lesson in self-defense is always be aware of your surroundings.

An additional lesson is that improvised weapons can be used to excellent effect.

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In my continuing reading of Thomas Sowell's The Housing Boom and Bust, I find his statistics about racial disparity in mortgage approval a little...familiar.

It reminds me of the time that Sowell noted a formerly-oppressed minority which now has the highest median income of any ethnic group in the United States. And when he noted another minority who typically outscore the generic "White" on college-entrance exams.

This time around, he noted that when government agencies compiled data on mortgage acceptance/denial by racial groups, one distinct minority was more likely to be approved than generic "Whites", and less likely to purchase a home with sub-prime loans than the generic "White".

The minority in question
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This week, I spent some time reading The Housing Boom and Bust, by Thomas Sowell.

The ideas in the first three chapters book cover ground that ought to be familiar. Sowell traces the history of three decades of interactions between local governments, house builders, the federal government, Government-Sponsored Enterprises, regulatory agencies, and home-buyers.

Along the way, he details the wide swaths of America in which housing was affordable, and the communities in which it was not. He also points out that expensive housing almost always correlates with local government interventions in the real estate market.

Several forces are outlined which led to the explosion of new forms of mortgages, especially variable-rates mortgages.

Sowell also details how the analysts who work in Wall Street had no experience measuring the default rates of non-standard mortgages, and used the wrong tools to measure the future worth of securities based on mortgages which were not 30-year-fixed-rate mortgages.

However, the book gets really interesting in the middle, when Sowell turns to the myths and mis-characterizations that surround the housing market.
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This day has been set aside to celebration of a brave man who made a big mistake.

Christopher Columbus was Italian, sailing under charter from the Spanish crown, seeking a better route to the wealthy trading ports of East Asia.

His main claim was that the historical understanding of the size of the Earth was oversized (by a factor of 1.6!), and that it was possible to pack enough provisions to sail from the Canary Island to the coast of Asia by traveling West.

This mistake led Columbus to find the Bahamas where he expected to find parts of Asia. In this, he began the first sustained, recorded contact between Europeans the the Americas.

It seems strange that the first Europeans to set foot on any part of the Americas came here by making a mistake. It was a big, bold mistake. It was action by a man who was convinced that he was right; convinced even until he died that he had landed in East Asia by traveling West.

Given the vast expanse of the Atlantic (and the larger expanse of the Pacific), there is reason to wonder how much time would have passed before anyone else sailed from Europe to either North or South America. It is generally held that some Vikings landed in North America, but left little record of their doings. It is possible that a large Chinese expedition braved the Pacific several centuries after the Vikings, visiting what is now Central and South America.

However, we must credit one brave Italian and his mistake about the size of the earth (and the breadth of the Eurasian landmass) for putting the history of America down its path to the present.

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I really like Honda's small inline-4 engines and the motorcycles built around them. Not to be too unfair, my experience with Yamaha's V-Max platform has also been good.

The FTC might have an opinion about what I just mentioned, but I'll just let that thought slide for a moment.

(Idea shamelessly stolen from several prominent bloggers. A serious critique of the problem that caused this post is available here.)

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I went bow-hunting over the weekend.

The location was 4 hours of driving away, so I made it a 3-day weekend. Some of the pleasure of the weekend involved getting to know the farmer couple who are unofficial managers of the property. Other parts of the weekend involved getting the equipment together, remembering how whitetail deer behave, and rising early in the morning to be on-site when the sun rose.

The most memorable moment of the weekend was Saturday morning, before dawn. I had just spent 20 minutes driving to the hunting location, and another five minutes of slow driving over rutted two-tracks. I turn the lights and engine off on my vehicle. The darkness is almost absolute, the silence is almost deafening.

The location is a small stretch of woods off a quiet dirt road 5 miles from a small township. I have stopped the vehicle at a location that is at least 500 yards from the hunting stand.

My eyes adjust to the pre-dawn light, the sky is slowly brightening. The area is not totally silent; a combination of breeze, distant traffic, and the occasional drip of water from leaves fill the background. I know that if I make too much noise, I can drive the deer off the property. I also know that if I dally too long, I may miss the early-morning deer movement after dawn.

One thing that hunting provides is immersion. I cannot hunt successfully if I don't immerse myself in the location. Even if I do, the chances may not be good.

Moments like the quiet and darkness after the vehicle is shut off serve as a good beginning to immersion. They are a reminder that the world of hunting is separate from the noise and life of the city or town.

It was a good way to start a day of hunting.

(The hunt went moderately well, though I didn't get any shots off, let alone bring in any deer. I did learn to navigate the property in the dark. I also noted that my tree-stand was on the wrong side of a regular deer-run. I saw deer come down that run twice, but I would have had to twist my upper-body by 180° to aim the bow in that direction. Next time, I'll have a better vantage-point.  I was thrilled to see more than one deer in-range.)

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In my first exploration of the Arts & Humanities tribe, I noted how I thought that the A&H tribe misunderstood some interactions between humans.

That was not the first place that I questioned the A&H tribal mentality.

Some time into my studies of history and culture, I learned that cultures change and develop over time. The moral codes by which people in a culture are judged have a fairly stable basis, but some details change wildly.

The alteration which strikes closest to home for Americans is related to the fact that chattel slavery is no longer practiced. This is a pattern of behavior which waxed and waned greatly in the time between the Roman Empire and the growth of the American colonies. Indeed, references to chattel slavery (and moral prescriptions about who can be enslaved, how they can be treated, and how such slaves can be released) are found littered throughout Hebrew and Christian Scripture.

Another alteration is seen in Nathaniel Hawthorne's <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>. Behavior which was public shame then is now seen as of little import.

I don't have a firm conclusion to come to on this subject; I do note that I rarely met anyone (inside the A&H tribe or without) who had a rigorous method for determining which cultural changes were praiseworthy, which cultural changes were damnable, and which were indifferent.

Some cultural critics did have such methods; typically they had a source of authority that I would call religious. Such sources of authority must have an element taken on faith, or contain assumptions taken before the argument began. (From Marx's assumption of the evil of the bourgeoisie to Ayn Rand's assumption that all humanity could pursue their own interests with pure rationality, thinkers and writers have assumed important elements of their social vision.)

I do have my own methods for dissecting such questions. However, I note that among the A&H tribe in general, I usually met the assumption that any thought pattern that was current was praiseworthy.

That seems to make sense in the cultural environment, but it became baffling as I pursued my studies deeper. When they studied philosophers past and present, did they as first whether the philosophy was true, or whether it was current?

When various social causes in the modern world vied for the attention of people with influence, do they ask whether the pursuit of those goals will result in a more harmonious society, or assume that it will because the goal looks elegant and desirable?

These questions are vexing.

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On a lighter note...Roberta tells a tale of a broken key and her trials and travails in getting it replaced at a Local Big Box Hardware Store.

Strangely, I have never seen that level of ineptitude at the key-counter of a hardware store. However, I have seen several instances of the Broken Key syndrome.

Both OEM keys for my previous car (Bess, as discussed in her last days) broke at some point. The replacements were happily provided by local hardware stores at that time. Amusingly, they all had a policy that if the key would not work in the car, that it would be refunded or replaced. Roberta claims that she was promised the opposite...

I have yet to break a house-key, but I did ensure that I have two extra keys for my Jeep.

Strangely, I have been unable to find a hardware store able to produce extra keys for motorcycles. The key-type is different than most house-keys or most car-keys. And it is uncommon-enough that neither the local Ace nor the local Lowe's have the right blanks.

That's a good reason to find a locksmith, or head to the local motorcycle shop, for an extra.

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