Posts

It looks like a couple of Senators aren’t ready to give up on the Hubble Space Telescope just yet.

I’ve been meaning to post something about the bombings today in Spain, but I honestly don’t know what to say. My heart goes out to everyone affected. I read that the bombings were not suicide bombings, I hope the Spanish government tracks down the bombers and the people who sent them.

The ugly (or wonderful, depending upon your perspective) truth: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. These days I think back on applications I worked on just two or three years ago and marvel at how crappy the code I wrote was. I hope that ten years from now, I’m still scoffing at code I wrote not long before, as it’s an indicator of improvement. Update: Bruce Eckel’s post on generics in Java is a concrete illustration of why it’s better to know many programming languages. Oddly, I was just talking about generics with someone this morning, and thought of them mainly as a way to create type-safe collections. It’s interesting to see that their real use lies elsewhere. ...

My current job involves reviewing code other people wrote, finding potential security holes, and producing reports describing those holes. I therefore find this post from Ed Felten somewhat disspirting. In it he describes a study that found that once a software product is released, security holes are found at a certain rate and that rate doesn’t seem to fall regardless of how many flaws are found. That sounds counterintuitive, but the numbers bear it out. What that says to me is that it’s impossible to overvalue simplicity. It seems like no matter how much work they do on Sendmail, Postfix will always be the more secure option. Even then, Postfix has its own problems. ...

I have a good friend named Reece Rondon in Houston who was appointed late last year as the judge in a state district court by Texas governor Rick Perry. The catch was that he’d have to defend his appointment in an election this year, and he’d have to win a contested primary and the general election to keep his job. Unfortunately, last night he was beaten by his opponent in the Republican primary. That’s a real shame because Reece is a good man and was certainly a good judge. He really enjoyed the being a judge part of the job, and it seemed like he was less into the being a politician part of the job. Anyway, the fact that he was defeated in the primary really has me wondering about about how these sorts of elections work. Obviously, Reece’s ability to serve as a judge was not the issue in the election. His court is a civil court, and I can’t imagine that more than a small handful of the people who voted will ever have any reason to even think about what kind of a job the judge in that court is doing. So the voters must be basing their votes on some other kind of criteria, and I can’t imagine it boils down to anything more than name recognition. The Houston Chronicle endorsed Reece in the primary, but he said that his opponent outspent him. What does that boil down to? His opponent having more yard signs than he did? Needless to say, one of the main things I thought about was how I vote in those sorts of races, and honestly, I can’t say that I’m ever an informed voter when it comes to most of the questions on the ballot. That leads me to wonder whether it makes more sense to make state judges appointed just as federal judges are. Voters may recognize a judge’s name if they get busted for driving while intoxicated or make some other career damaging mistake, but if a judge does their job well, then chances are their name will never even appear in the paper. It’s not as though we have debates in these races, and in fact, I don’t believe the newspaper even interviewed the candidates. What’s the point in having an election when that’s the case? Maybe my friend’s opponent will do a great job, and deserves to have won, but I really doubt whether the vast majority of people who voted for her (or Reece) are qualified to assess whether that’s the case. ...

Mark Schmitt’s description of the lengths companies are going to to avoid hiring new permanent employees jibes with my recent experience.

When talking about global warming today, I mentioned fuel efficiency. Good news arrived today – Ford is going to license Toyota’s hybrid powertrain for use in its own hybrid vehicles. It should enable Ford to get to market faster with its hybrids, and should begin to make hybrids cheaper all the way around as volume goes up on parts that are shared between the two companies.

Washington Monthly has not only picked up Kevin Drum to run the show for their new weblog, Political Animal, but also Phil Carter of Intel Dump. It’s great news for those guys, for sure. I, of course, already read both of their sites.

Don’t even think about reading this without reading this.

Global warming has been a thorny issue for me for quite some time. The problem has been that while I believed that the earth is warming and that humans played a part in it, I never understood the mechanism by which it operates, and my conviction has been limited by the resistance to acknowledging it by many people. Because I didn’t understand it myself, it was hard for me to talk about global warming with a lot of confidence. That was before I read the article, The Case of the Missing Carbon in the February National Geographic. I really wish the whole article were posted online because it provides the most concise and sensible explanation of how global warming actually works that I’ve read anywhere. In fact, I think that after reading it I could explain global warming to anybody in one paragraph in a way that they could understand, and I’m going to give it a shot, just for practice. The first thing to understand is that the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere dictates how much heat the atmosphere can store. The more carbon, methane, and other greenhouse gases are in the air, the hotter it is. Various natural processes release carbon into the atmosphere and leech carbon out of the atmosphere. For example, when the leaves that fall from the trees decay, they release the carbon stored in them into the atmosphere. In fact, the vast majority of carbon that’s released into the atmosphere gets there due to basic natural processes that are beyond our control. The main methods by which carbon is removed from the atmosphere are photosynthesis and absorption by the ocean. If more carbon is released into the atmosphere than these natural processes can soak up, then the overall level of greenhouse gases rises and thus the atmosphere is able to store more heat, leading to global warming. Throughout history, natural processes have led to a lot of carbon being stored rather than being released into the atmosphere, specifically in the form of fossil fuels. Rather than decaying, much organic matter has been trapped within the earth, and converted into oil, gas, and coal. Human beings have been taking this stuff out of storage and burning it, and the natural processes that absorb carbon have not been able to keep up with this increase carbon release due to the burning of fossil fuels and so the overall level of atmospheric carbon has risen, thus giving way to global warming. When combined with the empirical evidence we do have, the anecdotal evidence I’ve read about (mainly coming from northern latitudes), a basic understanding of how the process actually works leads me to believe that there’s not much room for doubt of global warming and our part in the process. As of breakfast this morning, global warming has suddenly become a much bigger political issue for me. One thing that’s obvious is that no Bush administration is going to do anything about it. They’re exploiting the fact that scientists are basically humble to repeatedly send it back for “further study.” It seems to me that one of the most obvious steps we can take is burning less carbon. Coal is the worst offender in this regard, and I kind of wonder whether nuclear power looks better in light of global warming. Nuclear waste is a huge problem, but it seems to me that global warming is a larger long term problem. Another simple step we can take that Republicans have resisted is raising fuel economy requirements for cars. The only reason not to do so is love of large cars and love of oil companies. The reasons for doing so are myriad. Lowering carbon emissions is a huge reason to do so, but there’s also the advantage of lowering our dependence on oil imports, and the fact that Americans will save money on fuel and die less frequently in car accidents. One interesting part of the article that’s less easy to summarize is the experiments that scientists have done to figure out which natural processes are doing the most to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and how we can boost the environment’s ability to absorb more carbon. One interesting factoid was that old growth forests are not great consumers of carbon. The best habitats for absorbing carbon are forests that are growing, like those in the eastern United States that are only a few decades old. It seems to me that these findings should cause us to think differently about forest management. Needless to say, global warming is much on my mind right now. Expect to see more about it in this space. ...