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One of the perks of living in this era is easy access to unprecedented high-resolution celestial imagery.  If you're not visiting NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), regularly, if not daily, then you're really missing out on an epically privileged perspective.  Ditto for the EO's Image of the Day (IOTD).

It's ironic that of all of the wickedly cool pictures I've seen there, I'm inclined to post about them because of something as prosaic as a picture of Ireland.

But NASA's Aqua satellite recently (20101011) happened to catch Ireland .. au naturel, as they say.  I.e. without any cloud cover whatsoever.  It's a gorgeous picture of the island (geoporn?), and for some reason it just struck me as a neat example of how technology can capture the unpredictable intersection between mundane and inspiring.

[sigh] Here's another open letter to the NHL.  I'd rather not make a habit of this, but they keep screwing up with such regularity, and on such an egregious scale, that I am compelled to howl at the moon.

Dear NHL,

I'm writing to log my complaint about YET ANOTHER wrong-headed, inconsistent, capricious ruling by the league's disciplinary board.

I am disgusted and disappointed that Zdeno Chara received no fine, no penalty, and no further disciplinary action for his hit on Max Pacioretty on March 8, 2011.

The hit was intentional, period.  It was not an 'accidental injury'.  Chara knew precisely what he was doing, and chose to do it when he did, where he did, and in the manner he did, resulting in an extremely dangerous act that produced a life-threatening injury.

This is just another example of the league giving players a free pass to disavow themselves of the consequences of the conscious choices they make on the ice.

Chara doesn't have to be a 'dirty' player for this incident to merit a lengthy suspension.  Chara made an extraordinarily poor decision during the course of play, and he absolutely must be held accountable for it.  It doesn't matter whether or not he intended to severely injure the other player.  He's still responsible.  In society, if we convict someone of manslaughter, we don't just let them go free - they're still held responsible for the consequences of their choices and actions.  And we punish them for those actions as a way of compelling that person (and everyone else) to be more attentive to similar circumstances in the future.

The league continues to embarrass itself and to erode the value of its product, and in so doing to alienate fans such as myself who love the sport but find themselves increasingly at odds with a league that continues to not only condone but encourage (through the absence of discipline) bad (if not borderline criminal) behavior, unprofessionalism and poor sportsmanship.

(Note: I selected 'NHL Consumer Product Marketing' in the feedback form because you don't offer anything that looks more appropriate for feedback regarding overall league stewardship, and I figure if any one cares that decisions are being made that tangibly undermine the commercial value of the league, it'll be the marketing department.)

(Note also: I am neither a Bruins fan nor a Canadiens fan.  I'm a hockey fan, at least for now.)

The following is an open letter to the NHL.

Dear NHL,

Please note that I'm neither a Penguins fan nor an Islanders fan.  I'm a hockey fan.  But I'm not sure I can continue to support the NHL after the way it completely and utterly failed, in every conceivable way, during and after the game between the Penguins and Islanders on February 11, 2011.

I literally cannot find words strong enough to convey just how badly the NHL conducted itself.  And that includes everyone: players, coaches, officials, and not least of all the league's disciplinarian.

The officials acted as though they'd never done a professional game before.  It was a farce, like some Pro Wrestling event, where the refs play their clownish role and allow themselves to be distracted while someone gets hit over the head with a folding chair.

The players earn the majority of the disdain.  Matt Martin didn't fight Talbot, he sucker punched him in a blatant attempt to injure him severely.  The fact that he did it on frozen water doesn't redefine his actions; it doesn't magically turn felony aggravated assault into 'sport'.  Trevor Gillies... wow, where do I start?  He exhibited classic criminal psychopathic behavior.  And there was absolutely nothing professional or athletic about Michael Haley's contributions.

And just so this doesn't sound completely lop-sided in favor of the Penguins... Even if they actually held the moral high ground in this episode, any team who keeps perennial hooligans like Rupp and Cooke on the roster is complicit in the league's problems.  But make no mistake, it is indeed the Islanders whose heads should be hanging lowest in shame.

The worst part, though, and the thing that has me brushing up against my threshold of tolerance for the league's failings, is the abject mockery of discipline and sportsmanship administered in the aftermath by Colin Campbell.  I reject all the usual platitudes that excuse Campbell's inconsistency and spinelessness.  Please change the title of his job, because whatever it is he's doing, it sure isn't disciplining.

How, in the holy name of all sportsdom, does Matt Martin earn merely a 4 game suspension?  He assaulted another person without provocation, completely outside the bounds of the sport.  His actions were totally inexcusable and warrant no less than a suspension through the end of the season.  Yeah, you read that right: the entire rest of the season.  And that's being kind.  Honestly the number that popped into my head was '50 games'.  Consider this: what if he was just slightly better at his goonery and connected the sucker punch that he threw?  What if Talbot's career was ended?  What if his ability to function as a normal human being was ruined?

In short, what if Martin is Bertuzzi and Talbot is Moore?  That thought should spook you.  It should make you pucker up and fear for the very existence of the league.  How many of those kinds of reprehensible episodes do you think the league can absorb?  Well, unless you want to find out, you'd better stop tolerating them.

I know what you're thinking though: "Oh, this wasn't as bad as a that.  You're comparing apples to oranges."

Am I?  You tell me what the difference is between the two, that justifies giving Martin an impotent little slap on the wrist.  Especially when Bertuzzi actually got off easy.  Every time he steps on the ice in an NHL game it's a huge neon sign proclaiming the league's disregard for both sportsmanship and the safety of its ONE AND ONLY asset: the players.  Bertuzzi should have never been allowed to earn another dollar doing anything affiliated with the NHL, or frankly with hockey at any level.  Being a professional athlete is a privilege.  Privileges can be lost.  It won't make them destitute.  They'll just have to go do something else for a living, like every other person on the planet.

So a 4 game suspension for Martin is just a joke.  It's absurd.  It's insulting.  But worst of all, it's a crystal clear message of condonation.  There is absolutely no place for what Martin did, and there should be absolutely no tolerance for it.  A 4 game suspension says, "This is marginally unacceptable behavior, please don't do it too often."  The message should have been, "This is totally unacceptable, under every conceivable circumstance, and you've just lost the privilege of participating in the NHL, for a very long time."

And please explain how Haley escapes from his oafish antics untarnished?  What, I guess anyone can just stroll down and fight goalies now, is that it?  Well if I'm a coach I know what I'm doing the next time I play my division rival: exactly what Capuano and Snow did, yank up some no-talent, ham-fisted, throwaway thug from the minors and sic him on the opposing goalie.  Playoffs, here we come!  Sadly, you instead lob a rote 10 game suspension at Godard, ironically the stiffest penalty of the entire affair!  I guess when Campbell can just look up something in the book and say, "Hey, it's not my decision.. it's the rule!" then he finally discovers the guts to act the part of stern guardian to the league's high morals.

I have a 2 year old son who will very soon be starting his (hopefully) life-long love affair with sports.  I'd been imagining him on the ice soon.  But the utterly loathsome behavior that was on display, and the irresponsibly soft reaction from the league, has me seriously questioning whether I want my son to play hockey.  The NHL is steward to the sport's reputation, and that reputation just moved a lot closer to the kind of thing that I would prefer to completely exclude from my life, and that of my family and friends, and any decent human being.

Obama's 2011 budget included a revamp of NASA's objectives.  Namely, aborting the Constellation program, and prioritizing core research into scientific and mission-enabling technologies.

Apparently, some (and I stress some, not all) astronauts have gotten their panties in a twist over this.

Here's my response to them:  Get over it.  And get over yourselves.

Armstrong, along with astronauts James Lovell and Eugene Cernan, called the proposal “devastating”...

Yeah, devastating to their egos, maybe.  News flash:  NASA doesn't exist just so we can lob meatsacks through the exosphere.  Manned space travel is sexy, sure, but contrary to popular cultural aggrandizement, it's not an end unto itself.  The mere existence of astronauts, that is, being able to say "humans physically go to space", is not self-justifying.  Sorry, Neil.  Emotional side effects notwithstanding, it accomplishes nothing.  More to the point, manned space travel has proven to be so error-prone and so expensive (and, arguably, so fruitless) that the long-standing single-minded obsession with it has become the Moby Dick of our collective efforts in space.

Pursuing manned space flight comes at such a high cost that it can only be done to the almost complete exclusion of all other space-related endeavors.  And that alone is the reason not to do it.  There are simply too many other legitimately valuable, achievable, cost-effective, and pertinent things we can be doing instead.

The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.

Really?  It'll take longer and cost more than we think?  Guess what, Einsteins, that's precisely why Constellation got the ax, since it was already obviously well on its way to being a classically bloated space program.  That little maxim you just spouted about the unpredictability of developing manned space transport technology, as embodied by its predictable difficulty, is why we need to get OUT from under that burden for awhile, rather than heap more of it onto ourselves.

It appears that we will have wasted our current ten plus billion dollar investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded.

Yes, sure, call it 'wasted' if you like.  Even so, I'd rather waste 10 billion than 50 billion.  Stubbornly holding course for its own sake is called throwing good money after bad.  A more formal name for it is 'Loss Aversion', 'Irrational Escalation of Commitment', or the 'Sunk Cost Fallacy'.  Whatever you call it, it's a thoroughly proven way to make a bad situation worse.

For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.

Oh No!!!   What will the neighbors think?

Surely we don't measure ourselves, nationally, globally, spiritually, or even anthropologically, by the capacity to put a handful of ourselves into the vacuum surrounding our little spinning rock.  Please tell me we don't.

Even worse, still, is the insinuation in their argument that investment in manned space flight is for the purpose of underpining the reputation of the United States as ... what, the Big Man Around Town?  Are we still comparing penis size with the Russians?  I thought we'd mostly matured out of that adolescent puffery.  Guess not.  Apparently we need big rocket ships so that there's no confusion in anyone's mind just who's running the show down here.

That particular concept is what's called "Conspicuous Consumption" in sociology.  And it's basically just the human economic equivalent of biology's ornamental sexual dimorphism.  Are we really nothing more than nature's most obnoxious bowerbird?  (Sadly, evidence convincingly suggests precisely that.)

Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity. America must decide if it wishes to remain a leader in space.

I'd much prefer that we choose to be a leader ON the Earth.  Again, this 'mediocrity' scare tactic is only according to the people-in -space yardstick.  And frankly I think there are far more valuable metrics against which we should judge ourselves.  The bitter truth is that by those measurements we're already mediocre.  Our education levels continue to embarassingly backpedal.  Our physical health is among the lowest of any industrialized nation.  I shouldn't need to even point out the dire state of our financial health.  We have a well-deserved reputation as the most environmentally hypocritical country on the planet, as we point fingers and make haughty speeches on one hand, while clinging tooth and nail to our totally unsustainable and hyper-consumptive lifestyle (which, by the way, we're also busily trying to shove down the throat of every as-yet-unsubjugated culture left on the Earth).

So, no, I don't think we need to be wasting our time, energy, resources, and opportunities irrationally prolonging our long and glorious tradition as the planet's reigning Buck Rogers.

For the record, I wanted to archive the letter that I sent to my Maryland representatives in the US Congress regarding the EESA (Emergency Economic Stabilization Act) of 2008, which I consider (then and now) to be a resoundingly bad idea.

Here it is in its entirety:

Dear <congress person>,

I would just like to register my severe disappointment that you voted in favor of the HR 1424 amendment (EESA) on Oct 1, 2008, and in so doing recklessly disregarded the long term sustainability of the US economy.

The seeds of this fundamental dysfunction of the global monetary system were not sown overnight, and any solution to it will not be found in the spasmodic and woefully impertinent flailings of a panic-riddled congress.

Furthermore, EESA is not merely impotent to the current problem, which would be shameful enough.  In the long term it may very well be the equivalent of pouring water on an oil fire.

I find it tragically disconcerting that the Senate would choose to completely ignore the consensus opinion of not only this nation's best economists, but those of other countries as well, many of whom have first-hand experience characterizing the behavior of lending crises, and all of whom implore the pursuit of alternative solutions.

Instead, the Senate has stayed true to form and chosen to grasp at the most convenient bauble simply for the sake of appearing to do something, anything, as urgently as possible, sacrificing all pretense of informed evaluation and objective judgement.

Your complicity in this debacle of reason, foresight, and leadership is duly noted.

I particularly liked the phrase 'impertinent flailings of a panic-riddled congress'.  Remember, the key to politicians isn't to make them your friends, it's to make them fear for their jobs.  Plus, I figure there's probably only a 1% chance someone actually read it anyway.  At best it got registered on a tally in the 'against' column for their feedback tracker.  And it made me feel incrementally better to have written it.

[update - in the extended body of this post I've included the text from a blog post that did a great job summarizing why the EESA is a terrible idea.

Comments following the US Airways flight 1549 crash into the Hudson river provided today's Moment of Marvelous Mirth:

Ben: So why are some people standing in 12 inches of water, while others are being rescued in a raft?

ellen: because they're in first class. ;)

It's ok to laugh because noone died in the crash (at least, as of reports immediately following).

Of course, a hilarious irony would be if the crash was caused by someone on the plane twittering away during takeoff, screwing up the plane's electronics systems like they keep trying to scare us about.  But no, that wouldn't happen because the threat of plane crashes from onboard cellular use is bunk.

Note that I still think twitter does little but masquerade aggrandized minutia as discourse.

Here's an awesome chart from the brains at LLNL which demonstrates in glaring fashion just why the 'Foreign Oil Problem' and 'Electricity Generation' are two separate issues.  See that tiny little sliver of a line going from 'Petroleum' to 'Electricity Generation'?  That represents the amount of oil used in the generation of domestic electricity.  Imagine, if you will, that we instantaneously installed a massive national infrastructure of electricity generation powered exclusively by all kinds of clever technologies, and that we suddenly got 100% of our electricity from something besides oil (either domestic or foreign).  That tiny sliver of green going from 'Petroleum' is the only reduction in oil use that we'd see as a result of that effort.

When corporations and politicians talk about our foreign oil dependency and our electricity generation in the same breath, they're purposefully trying to confuse the issue.  They are shills for the oil industry, which is desperate to do anything to keep you from realizing that the problem is transportation.  Cars, trucks, cars, planes, cars, and especially cars.

If you want to talk about electricity generation and environmental responsibility, the problem revolves around coal.  Period.   Coal is the electricity demon in the closet.  The chart tells you that plainly as well.

But perhaps the most interesting story the chart has to tell is the grey block labeled 'Lost Energy' at the right hand side.  Imagine what would happen if we actually focused on that problem!  It's a tragic and shameful indictment that our entire civilization operates at well under 50% efficiency.

I think I'm finally ready to kick this website into gear.  After a ton of development and configuration effort, I've got the foundation of features that I considered prerequisites for resuming content creation.  I.e. I wasn't going to bother adding anything new until I had the basic functionality in place.  Having already realized that I'd ended up at a dead-end with my old set of CMS tools, I just didn't have the stomach to keep digging the hole deeper with more content that I'd have to ultimately manually migrate.  As it is, it'll probably take me at least a week to pull over the majority of the old content.

So you'll notice a steady stream of old content showing up as I migrate all of the stuff from the legacy website over to the new system.  It's a little odd seeing posts from 2000, but that's when it all started!

I'm really looking forward to finally having a website work for me, instead of vice versa.  I'm not quite there yet, but there's already enough extremely cool capabilities in place with the new site that it at least feels like a completely different ball game, even if I've still got a lot of work to do.  I've essentially had my creative orifice plugged up tight with a cork for over a year now.  You can imagine the unpleasantness in that situation.

At any rate, I'm anxious to get back into the habit of regular posting/blogging/prognosticating/grognarding, etc..  Or whatever it is the kids do these days.

... those who backup their data, and those who have never had a harddrive fail.

My server had a harddrive crap out right on schedule -- namely its annual schedule. Initially, it appeared that I'd irretrievably lost some news posts, but after a month of letting the failed drive sit on my desk collecting dust and angering me with its very presence, I tried to read from it and succeeded. Moral of the story: if something doesn't work, just feel really sorry for yourself and get pissy about it for awhile, and then retry precisely the same thing that didn't work the first time. That's a free life lesson for you kids.

As much fun as it's been having the server fail catastrophically on a semi-regular basis, I've decided to put an end to this little ritual. It seems that my frugal policy of using really old harddrives from the scrap pile was in fact not prudent. As with all things technical, the solution was to throw money at the problem. So I purchased a few shiny new harddrives. Four of them now sit comfortably in a full tower case, arranged as a raid-5 array. Three others now each reside in separate machines, each of which is going to mirror the entire website, along with most of the contents of the raid array. Over the next few weeks I'll be ironing out the details of how to configure things so that any of the three servers can assume responsibility for the network with little effort on my part.

As has historically been the case, I decided to horribly complicate the recovery process by insisting on migrating to an entirely new linux distro, with new tools and services that I'd never used before. This time around, it's gentoo and EVMS. Also, I'm now sufficiently annoyed by the site code, and the lack of a real DB that I'm going to finally switch to a real CMS. I'll try a few, and if nothing fits I'll probably bite the bullet and go homebrew, though I'd honestly rather not. I've got better things to do than implement my own CMS. But so help me I'll do it!

Anyway, that's why I've been awol for the last few months. The dust has started to settle though, and I've got some reviews to crank out, and a whole lot of industry angst to vent, so stay tuned!

Thanks to my good friend Dan, who was gracious enough to let me co-loc my server in his apartment and exploit his broadband connection, my domain has had its DNS citizenship restored.

Unfortunately, I'm still relegated to the dial-up backwaters of the internet, so I'll probably batch updates to the site and commit changes to it on a ~weekly basis. This situation will probably also force me to finally setup VNC, so I can manage the server more directly from home. Since I'm also maintaining my own local mirror on my dial-up proxy server, this situation has provided a decent backup situation, which is always a good thing.

First - read my post from a few months ago, regarding iTunes. Then, go read this article.

Basically, I had lauded iTunes as the long-awaited escape from the record sales model, which it unarguably is. I had also stressed that my angst at the music industry was not assuaged just because I could finally buy a song I liked for a buck instead of $15. The Register article drives homes the point that iTunes is basically performing CPR on the 'pigopolists', as it so aptly describes the major record labels. I had hoped that Apple was at least operating a viable business for online music distribution, even though I knew that it was essentially a money I.V. for the labels. My initial reaction to iTunes was relief that I could finally purchase music, having eschewed CD sales entirely, and feeling that at least I was finally getting what I wanted as a customer. I still believe that's true, that a fine grain sales model is infinitely superior to the traditional records sales model, now that a distribution system exists that can support it (i.e. the internet). However, what iTunes doesn't provide, and what no sales model can provide so long as the money flows primarily to the labels, is what I want as an individual in an army of individuals at war with global Corporatism. I want the money to go to the artists. That's as much of a reason why I never bought CDs as the fact that I didn't like paying $15 for one song I liked. In my initial rejoicing at finally being able to enjoy some music again, as a consumer, I ignored my unabated frustration with the industry.

Well, now that some of the post-O glow has worn off, and after thinking some more and reading commentary such as the Register article, that frustration has taken center stage again. Put simply, because iTunes doesn't fix the root of the problem, and in fact does even worse than not fixing - it actually perpetuates the problem by throwing a lifeline to the labels, I will not be using iTunes anymore. I am back on the wagon, so to speak, abstaining from funding the exploitative, amoral, litigious, anachronistic cabal of music industry companies attempting to herd us like cattle and extort us for our own culture. Screw 'em. Vote with your dollar, the only vote that counts in America.

Download Apple's iTunes. Buy songs you like for $0.99. If Apple leaves no other mark on the universe (and I'm not saying they won't), they will have forcefully punted the music industry into the digital age. The industry has been too busy kicking, screaming, wailing, bitching, moaning, lying, cheating, and exploiting to recognize the obvious: hundreds of millions of people will spend money on music. Digital music. Music they can download. Songs they like.

Now, some will argue that I'm being premature. The RIAA is still in full-throttle tantrum mode, to be sure. This has been, is, and will continue to be the opposite of a "smooth" transition. But the writing isn't just on the wall. It's installed on my PC. I'm listening to it right now. Others will argue that it was napster, and the P2P threat in general that crotch-kicked the music industry into the digital age. I'll grant napster its catalyst role, but I believe that it's Apple's common sense offering that will prove the engine of change. The P2P war has been raging for the last several years, with no end in sight. A certain percentage of the population had reconciled themselves to illegitimately possessing music, and the RIAA had sworn to eliminate it.

The rest of us were watching from the sidelines.

Not that anyone but me noticed, but the grotto was offline for close to 3 weeks. Catastrophe was what it was. Yessir. Hard drive died. That took my server offline. Then, my old friend, the viewsonic p815, died. That was a real kick in the teeth. Tragic, really. But all's well that end's well.

The website is officially launched, although in hindsight I should have refrained from smashing a bottle of champagne against my monitor. If something looks goofy on your browser, drop me a line and let me know.