Isotropic

The always controversial (well, sometimes, anyway) Jeff Atwood has stirred up his readers again with Are You Creating Micromanagement Zombies? — basically, build teams of good people and trust them — but it’s his use of the quiz from Kathy Sierra’s BrainDeath by Micromanagement: The Zombie Function that irked a number of readers.

Both posts are quite interesting, but Sierra’s paraphrase of a quote from Dune caught my eye: “Be careful of every order you give. Once you give an order on a particular topic, you are responsible for always giving orders on that topic.”; which is complementary to the point I wanted to make in Technical Solutions to Social Problems: “What that leads to, however, is our sense of social responsibility being replaced with the attitude that anything not explicitly banned and technologically barricaded is perfectly all right…”

image: Zombies NightoftheLivingDead, Wikimedia Commons

“The International Year of Astronomy 2009 is a global effort initiated by the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery.” –(about)

In case you need to ramp up on the wonders of the universe, check out the beautiful images at ItvNews’s Best 50 Astronomy Pictures of Year 2008.

Of course, you probably need a daily fix, right? So the next place to go (and the source of many of ITV’s images) is NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

image: Galaxies Collide in NGC 3256, NASA

The tag cloud was getting bloated, so I’ve cut the count back to the default (45) and have set up a separate Tag Cloud page that displays all the tags.

“[I]t’s bad to become dependent on technology as a crutch for social problems.” – from a sidebar in Version Control with Subversion.

This is a classic issue, which I’ve usually heard phrased as the reprimand “you’re looking for a technical solution to a social problem”. I’ve sometimes used it with another of my favorite maxims: “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” — by the way, I’m mildly surprised that no one has said that about this blog.

Just moments prior I’d seen a TV news spot of an actress crouching between two cars in a parking garage while being surrounded by paparazzi who were crawling over the cars like squirming maggots trying to get close ups of her distress — I guess because she was an actress, “she was asking for it”. I’ve often thought how nice it would be to have a small EMP device or intense infrared source that would disable or blind any cameras in a 25-foot radius. So much for technical solutions.

We’re moving more and more to technical solutions because they’re “easy” (not really) and to avoid being held responsible for decisions (which nowadays may not be irrational, given our litigious society). What that leads to, however, is our sense of social responsibility being replaced with the attitude that anything not explicitly banned and technologically barricaded is perfectly all right and beyond moral judgement. Hmmph. Crotchety mumble. Get off my lawn.

A little more context, if you didn’t follow the links:

In the invisible [costs] category, consider the culture you’re creating. Most of the time, while certain users shouldn’t be committing changes to certain parts of the repository, that social contract doesn’t need to be technologically enforced. Teams can sometimes spontaneously collaborate with each other; someone may want to help someone else out by committing to an area she doesn’t normally work on. By preventing this sort of thing at the server level, you’re setting up barriers to unexpected collaboration. You’re also creating a bunch of rules that need to be maintained as projects develop, new users are added, and so on. It’s a bunch of extra work to maintain.

Remember that this is a version control system! Even if somebody accidentally commits a change to something she shouldn’t, it’s easy to undo the change. And if a user commits to the wrong place with deliberate malice, it’s a social problem anyway, and that the problem needs to be dealt with outside Subversion.

“DIY BIO: clone at home but kill them later” (Sandra Porter) … I just love that title. Flashbacks to John Varley.

Cloning the gene for green fluorescent protein is fun. Lots of fun. Cloners have put the GFP gene into rabbits, plants, cats, fish, and worms, and made mutants that code for proteins in every color of the fluorescent rainbow. Teachers like GFP so much that every year, high school students throughout the U.S. clone GFP in biology class.

Now, some people, who call themselves DIY biologists, have started cloning GFP for fun in their kitchens. Other people find this alarming.

One of my favorite snippits: “I’m not comfortable with people engineering E. coli in their kitchens”.

image: E coli at 10000x, original.jpg, Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to 2009. Looks like it’s gonna be an interesting year.

Today will be a whole second longer than any other this year. This is also the longest year since 1992, the most recent previous leap year which also included a leap second. Leap seconds are used to keep standard time within 0.9 seconds of apparent solar time, due to the Earth’s changing rotational speed.

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service determines when leap seconds are needed, and announces them in bulletins such as this one. The leap seconds are applied globally at 00:00:00 UTC, so, in my case, there will be an extra second between 5 and 6 pm CST (the extra second is 17:59:60). By the way, this explains why the tm_sec field in the POSIX tm struct has the range 0-60 instead of the “expected” 0-59.

We’ve come a long way from when just glancing at the sun and guestimating the hour was sufficient for more than casual use. While you might think that knowing the time would be simple today, in fact it is an extremely complex process to determine the time. Furthermore, you have to specify which time you’re talking about. The Time Service Department of the USNO offers a brief list of time systems, such as Atomic, Universal, Coordinated Universal, Dynamical, Geocentric Coordinate, Barycentric Coordinate, and Sidereal.

The various time systems in use run at various rates, some are non-uniform, and some are even adjusted for relativistic time dilation (due to both velocity and gravity differences). Furthermore, some differ by many seconds. For example, UTC is (after today’s leap second) 34 seconds ahead of TAI, while the GPS clocks are “only” 19 seconds ahead. A down-to-earth (sorry) example of relativistic adjustments occurs in the clocks on board GPS satellites.

Fortunately, civil standard time is simply derived from UTC. Usually only specialists are concerned with the other systems — consumer products (such as GPS units or computer systems) typically display standard time, regardless of the time system used by the underlying system. Let’s not get into time zones, leap years and all the various calendar and holiday systems that abound.

It’s always good to have the correct time on your computer. However, it’s becoming a necessity because security mechanisms depend more and more on the hosts on a network (including PCs) being synchronized with each other. The Network Time Protocol has been in use for years to keep computer clocks correct and synchronized, but PCs have lagged behind — the Windows Time Service is sadly lacking, rarely achieving more than a couple seconds accuracy. I strongly urge you to get a reliable NTP client for your PC. For years I’ve used Thinking Man Software’s Dimension 4, but a Google search will turn up several other NTP clients for Windows.

image: S Sepp, Wooden Hourglass 3, Wikimedia Commons

Q. Do I have a right to exist?
A. Does 8?

From comment #22 on Scott Aaronson’s What can first-order logic do for your self-esteem?.

“The year in crackpottery, and what it costs us.” (Coturnix, ScienceBlogs) links to several additional sites about bad science, among them “7 (Stupid) People Who Sued the Scientific Method” (McKinney, Cracked.com). McKinney humorously summarizes each case and then states what victory would imply.

At #4, for example, a number of scientists and Nobel Prize winners were sued when they disputed someone’s claim that water remembers any medicine ever dissolved in it, no matter how much it may be diluted, and furthermore, that this information can be digitized and sent over the phone. The implication, according to McKinney, is that the universal medicine is tapwater … or at most a phone call away.

This is old news, but I need to rant a bit.

You’d think that downloading a file from a web site would be a simple process, but noooo, our friends at Microsoft have to make it a major effort — you have to seriously want to get that file.

Microsoft’s PowerShell looked like it might be useful for creating some administrative scripts for work, so I jumped to the download page. Since I was working from my typical workspace, I’d opened the site with Firefox (on Linux), which of course is unacceptable to Microsoft because the want to make sure you’re using genuine MS software just to download the file:

This download is available to customers running genuine Microsoft Windows. Please click the Continue button to begin Windows validation.

I should have remembered how anal they are about that. I switched over to my VM running XP, opened IE, and pasted in the link. Hmm, blank page. So I jump to the top of the download area and search for PowerShell, go to the download page, and click on the Continue button to “validate” my system.

It’s been a while since I’ve downloaded anything from MS, so I was surprised to get yet another page with a set of validation steps. To validate, I have to click yet another Continue button

• to download and run GenuineCheck.exe
• which will give me a “validation code”
• which I then have to paste into a field on the new validation page

Arrrgh! I flash on the The Daily WTF’s wooden table meme.

You know it wasn’t that simple. I endure the download, click the “Run” button … and get told that the program is an old version and is no longer supported, and I should download the latest from MS. WTF? — after all, I just finished downloading it from MS.

Generally it’s a sign of stupidity to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results, but after all, this is Windows, which has a built-in results randomizer … so I click “Continue” again … and immediately GenuineCheck runs (wheee!) and gives me a code to paste into the Step 2 field. Now I’m taken to another page where I can finally click a “Download” button and get the PowerShell installer.

Well, now I’ve got PowerShell. I eagerly (snicker) peruse the documentation. Among other things, it won’t run scripts by default (security, ya know). Great. I can either disable security, or download the .NET Framework SDK to get a certificate generator / signing utility. Even then, I can’t conveniently put scripts on other machines unless I 1) go through convolutions to install my cert on those machines, or 2) buy a cert from a “trusted third party”.

Ok, no big deal. I’ve about decided it’s not worth the effort, since I can accomplish the few things I want to do without resorting to PS — I just wanted to play with a new (to me) toy.

After glancing at the command structure, PS looks like a bastardization of bash (particularly when you consider all the included “unix” aliases, and the pseudo-drives that map into the environment (ENV:), the registry (HKLM:), and other namespaces), DCL (the regularized verb-object pattern), and a few other shells and scripting languages thrown in, with some funky syntax to glue it all together … but passing “objects” is kinda cool.

Although not directly apropos, I’m reminded of a couple aphorisms: 1) operating systems evolve to re-implement Unix, poorly; and 2) programming languages evolve to re-implement Lisp, poorly.