Parbuckling

The enormous project to right and remove the remains of the Costa Concordia is now well underway.

There's some nice reporting on the NPR site:

• Costa Concordia Salvage Operation To Begin Monday

  "The old nautical term for the operation is called parbuckling. Over a 10- to 12-hour period, the ship — now slumped on its side on a sloping reef — will be slowly rotated as dozens of pulleys will pull it upright.

  "The big unknown is the condition of the side of the ship lying on the jagged reef, which juts into the hull by some 30 feet. But the engineers in charge are confident that the operation will be successful — so confident that there's no Plan B.

• How To Watch As The Costa Concordia Is (Hopefully) Righted .

The main website for the project is just loaded with information, diagrams, and details:

The parbuckling will be performed using strand jacks which will be tightening several cables attached to the top of the caissons and to the platforms, which will be pulled seawards, while the cables attached to the starboard turrets will be used for balancing.

This is a very delicate phase, during which the forces involved have to be offset carefully to rotate the wreck without deforming the hull.

The Guardian has a great blog with lots of updates, and lots of pictures: Costa Concordia: cruise ship lifting will be completed on Tuesday – live updates.

The white and black arrows on the photographs below show how far the Costa Concordia has been lifted. The black arrow shows the position of an upper deck before the salvage operation began, the white as it is in progress. The brown residue on the side of the vessel shows where it was submerged.

The BBC also has lots of great information: LIVE: Attempt to pull the Costa Concordia upright

The Washington Post has a dramatic slideshow.

And the Titan Salvage website has lots of information, too.

Overall, it seems like the project is going well.

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A Wyoming reading list

We're contemplating a trip to Yellowstone, so, as is my way, I've been getting myself ready.

Thus, a brief Northwest Wyoming Reading List:

• Top Trails Yellowstone & Grand Tetons: Must-do Hikes for Everyone

  With trips from Mammoth Hot Springs to Old Faithful, from the Absarokas to the Gallatin Range, and from Jackson Hole to the Teton Crest Trail, Top Trails Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks has all visitors need to enjoy the ultimate in natural and geothermal wonders

  We're not really expecting to do any epic hikes during our trip, but we do want to get out of the car and into the woods. So this book, from Wilderness Press, is a nice compromise. We have to be careful picking the hikes, because in their desire to be encylopedic the authors include trails spanning the range from half-mile nature walks suitable for taking your 4-year-old to 30 mile 3-night backpacking adventures.

  So obviously they aren't actually "Must-do Hikes for Everyone" (darn cover editors).

  But the book is nicely organized and the trails are clearly described, and I'm sufficiently experienced with reading trail guides to believe I can select appropriately.

• A Field Guide to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks

  More than 1.200 color photographs with concise descriptions reveal the richness of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. This is the definitive field identification guide to the region's rocks, minerals, geysers, waterfalls, mushrooms, trees. wildflowers, insects, amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds, mammals, tracks and scat, and the night sky. Includes 75 natural features with locator maps and 650 species.

  This. Book. Is. Simply. Gorgeous.

  Since the top draw of a trip to Yellowstone is to experience the top ten of North American wildlife viewing (according to Bryan):

  1. Grizzly Bear
  2. Bison
  3. Gray Wolf
  4. Black Bear
  5. Bald Eagle, Golden Eagle, Osprey, Great Horned Owl
  6. Moose, Elk, Antelope
  7. Gray Fox, Red Fox, Coyote
  8. Big Horned Sheep
  9. Mountain Lion
  10. Badger, Wolverine
  , an accessible field guide is most desirable.

  I love the fact that this field guide includes sections on geysers, on mushrooms, on "trails and scat", and on constellations of the night sky.

• Yellowstone National Park, WY (Ti - National Parks).

  Grand Teton National Park - Trails Illustrated Map.

  The National Geographic Trails Illustrated maps are simply the best maps you can get. They are accurate, they are gorgeous, they are sturdily-built, and they are designed from the viewpoint of the nature enthusiast. You'll think it's nuts to spend $10 on a map, but you won't regret it.

• Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region

  A unique anthology of prose and poetry from the volcanic and otherworldly splendor of the Yellowstone region. Powerful, engrossing, and controversial works by prominent authors and fresh talents. Moved by the natural wonders unique to their part of the world, these writers from Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming come together in a "Ring of Fire" around the world's first national park.

  As with any anthology, you will find yourself picking and choosing as you read this book, but overall I've really enjoyed it. The stories and essays are over the place, but among the ones that stuck out as I read:

  • Return to Wyoming, by Geoffrey O'Gara. Driving mostly at night to try to spare his failing car, O'Gara is struck by how, each time his car chooses to overheat, it turns out to be at a location that he remembers from his childhood.
  • The Firebabe, by Susan Sweetnam. Moving to a new small town, Sweetnam finds herself joining the volunteer fire department. Initially intimidated by the skill of the veterans, Sweetnam experiences the thrill of learning how to be a firefighter herself.
  • On Spread Creek, by C.L. Rawlins. Working as a guide at a dude ranch, Rawlins experiences simultaneously the joy of exposing city folk to the mountains as well as the sadness of realizing that what the guests think to be a series of mountain meadows is actually the result of years of clear cutting and strip mining by the lumber and mining industries.
  • Coming Off Lee Creek, by Louise Wagenknecht. Wagenknecht, a Forest Service ranger, describes her transfer from Northern California to Wyoming with a great story about the interactions between government officials and ranchers, highlighting the struggles she went through as a woman to be accepted as one of the guys in the rugged Wyoming mountains.

  There's much more, but overall I was really pleasantly surprised by Ring of Fire, which much exceeded my expectations.

• Mountain Time: A Yellowstone Memoir

  Schullery's book is now 30 years old, and the Yellowstone he writes about it still older, for he wrote the majority of the book while working as a park ranger, park historian, and environmental specialist in Yellowstone from 1972-1977.

  Still, this is a marvelous book. Schullery is a gifted writer, and he obviously loves the Yellowstone area. The book is structured as a series of independent essays, but they are sequenced and arranged nicely and each one is a joy to read.

  A little taste of Schullery's light and charming style can be seen in the chapter about elk, "Elk Watch":

  Antlers are occasionally a hazard in the realm of human/elk cohabitation. The residents of Mammoth, like those of any other community, like to decorate their houses at Christmas; many string lights on their walls and shrubbery. One of the local bull elk got himself tangled in a string of lights, probably while feeding on the shrubbery, and for several days afterward paraded around with his antlers festooned with lights as if he was looking for an electrical outlet.

  It's all great: sometimes heart-breaking, sometimes hilarious, Schullery's book sweeps you along, and you'll barely notice the pages fly by.

• Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park (Crown Journeys)

  This is the lightest of the books I chose to read, both in heft and in style. Cahill, a well-known journalist and author of several entertaining travel books, presents just what he claims to present: the book is a series of descriptions of various hikes that Cahill took in Yellowstone.

  Whether you love this book or hate it will depend primarily on how you feel about Cahill's light-hearted, almost tongue-in-cheek style. It works very well for me, but I can see that others might find it infuriating or condescending.

  Here's a bit of a sample, to help you understand what I mean:

  The map suggested that a great many of the falls on and around the Bechler region faced generally south, which meant the sun would shine directly on them at least part of the day. And that meant that every day in which there was sun, there'd be a rainbow or two or three as well. You could count on them: I thought of the Bechler as the River of Reliable Rainbows.

  Over the next several days we moved up the Bechler and courageously endured the sight of many waterfalls generating many rainbows. Colonnade Falls, for instance, just off the trail, is a two-step affair, with a 35-foot plunge above, a pool, and a 67-foot fall below. The lower fall was enfolded in curving basalt wall. The gray rock had formed itself into consecutive columns more in the Doric tradition than the Corinthian. It had a certain wild nobility, Yellowstone's own Parthenon, with falls and a fountain.

• Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone

  I haven't read Hawks Rest yet, but I'm very much looking forward to it. Here's a bit from the publisher's blurb:

  Beginning with his hundred-mile hike to reach the Lower 48's most remote place, Ferguson gives us a fascinating, personal account of three months living alone in the wilderness - a summer spent monitoring grizzly bears and wolf packs in Hawks Rest, the heart of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Through his encounters with park rangers, wildlife biologists, outfitters, and intrepid visitors, Ferguson weaves a poignant story of a land under siege. Opinionated first-hand accounts illuminate the dream and the difficulty of preserving the Yellowstone wilderness - America's first national park and a touchstone of all things wild. Ferguson's previous writings on nature have been well received. Publishers Weekly wrote about The Sylvan Path: "In prose as inviting and uplifting as a walk in the woods, naturalist Ferguson shares his lifelong passion...with a sense of discovery, humor, and deep reverence for his subject, [he] reclaims the natural world for himself, and for the reader as well."

  So stay tuned; I'll let you know about this one.

• National Geographic Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks Road Guide: The Essential Guide for Motorists

  I don't remember why I thought this would be worth getting. It wasn't. I'll keep it, though; maybe it will seem better when I'm there.

And, to occupy the long hours of travel, something new to try: three audiobooks:

• Bring Up the Bodies: A Novel, by Hilary Mantel, read by Simon Vance.

  I just adored Wolf Hall, and this is Mantel's sequel. Says the author:

  The action of Bring Up The Bodies occupies only nine months, and within that nine months it concentrates on the three weeks in which Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn, is arrested, tried and executed for treason. So it is a shorter, more concentrated read. There are no diversions once the plot against Anne begins to accelerate, and the tension builds as her death approaches.

  It's quite possible to read Bring Up The Bodies without reading Wolf Hall. It makes sense in its own terms. But I think a reader will get a deeper experience by starting with the first book and seeing the characters evolve.

  Well, I read Wolf Hall, but my wife didn't; we'll see how our reactions to Bring Up The Bodies differ.

• Explosive Eighteen: A Stephanie Plum Novel, by Janet Evanovich, read by Lorelei King.

  Before Stephanie can even step foot off Flight 127 Hawaii to Newark, she’s knee deep in trouble. Her dream vacation turned into a nightmare, and she’s flying back to New Jersey solo. Worse still, her seatmate never returned to the plane after the L.A. layover. Now he’s dead -- and a ragtag collection of thugs and psychos, not to mention the FBI, are all looking for a photograph he was supposed to be carrying.

• Flush, by Carl Hiaasen, read by Michael Welch.

  You know it's going to be a rough summer when you spend Father's Day visiting your dad in the local lockup.

  Noah's dad is sure that the owner of the Coral Queen casino boat is flushing raw sewage into the harbor -- which has made taking a dip at the local beach like swimming in a toilet. He can't prove it though, and so he decides that sinking the boat will make an effective statement. Right. The boat is pumped out and back in business within days and Noah's dad is stuck in the clink.

  Amazon didn't exactly make it clear when I ordered this that it was a Young Adult book ("#48 in Books : Mystery, Thriller & Suspense : Thrillers")

  But I just love Carl Hiaasen.

So there you go: a Northwest Wyoming reading list.

Did I miss any favorites of yours? Let me know!

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Rim fire winding down

I hadn't been over to Inciweb's Rim Fire status page in a while, so I dropped in to see how the progress goes.

This is the long, slow, quiet part of the firefighting work: the part they call "mopping up", though there isn't a mop to be found.

After all these weeks, the fire remains only 80% contained, and there are still more than 2,000 firefighters working on it.

Conditions in the fire area remain complex:

Damage assessments of destroyed or damaged structures, infrastructure, and developments interior of the containment lines continues as interior fire activity subsides. The pockets of unburned fuel within the perimeter of the fire area continue to consume.

Small contingents of employees from Hetch Hetchy Power and Water have been allowed back into Mather.

Anyone traveling on roads within the fire area should use extreme caution. Fire personnel and equipment continue to work in the area. Hazards include smoke weakened trees (that may fall) and hot burning stump holes. If you must drive through the fire area please do not stop, leave the roadway, or enter the burned area on foot.

The dry language of the bureaucrat conceals an agony of effort.

The remaining direct fire-fighting activity is hard because it is in truly remote areas:

Continued fire spread to the northwest into the Yosemite Wilderness north of Hetch Hetchy is expected. Pockets of vegetation will continue to burn within the containment lines.

That terrain north of Hetch Hetchy is as rugged and remote as it gets in the lower 48 states; I suspect they'll have to just let that section of the fire burn itself out, possibly going until the first rains of the fall arrive in mid-October.

Meanwhile, before any of the damaged areas can be re-opened, including America's most beautiful mountain pass, Tioga Road, a lot of work must still be done:

Fire suppression repair has been completed on 30 miles of dozer lines, 2 miles of hand line, 36 miles of chipping (along roads), and 10 miles of roads.

It's a long, slow process, but the last 2 weeks have gone according to plan.

I doubt I will live to see the rebirth of this forest, but I have my memories of it, and I'll look forward to visiting it in the years to come, to see the healing start.

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Yo, bro

Once again the "brogrammer" issue comes to the fore: The Brogrammer Effect: Women Are a Small (And Shrinking) Share of Computer Workers.

According to a Census report out this week, women today still make up a frustratingly small 26 percent of workers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs. But whereas their presence has at least grown or held steady in most of these fields, it's been on a 20-plus-year decline in computer workers, such as developers, programmers, and security analysts.

I've been in the computing industry for 30 years, so I guess I'm at least somewhat willing to comment.

It's not as though there are no women in the industry at all. When I first started out, one of the first programmers who I found truly inspirational and motivational was a woman. And at my first job after college, my boss, my boss's boss, and my boss's boss's boss were all female.

During the years, the pattern has continued. I've met some superb programmers, both male and female. And I've had some great bosses (and some awful ones), both male and female.

At my current day job, we have multiple female executives, as well as a number of female managers and engineers. We've also sponsored events, such as the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners. My officemate is headed to Minneapolis next week for this year's Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

But if I'm honest, my experiences over those 30 years pretty much mirror the statistics from the Census report.

Which is not a good thing.

I guess I'm not really sure if it's the "brogrammer" thing or not. The engineers I've had the pleasure of working with are a long ways from these stereotyped clods, though certainly from time to time I've seen the occasional clunker. Of course, I've never been close to an experience like this: To my daughter's high school programming teacher.

Sadly, you only get one chance to make a first impression, and you, sir, created a horrible one for girls in computer programming.

Did you not see her enthusiasm turn into a dark cloud during the semester? Did you not notice when she quit laughing with and helping her classmates, and instead quickly finished her assignments and buried her nose in a book? What exactly were you doing when you were supposed to be supervising the class and teaching our future programmers?

I worry about the lack of women in computing, but, then again, I worry about the lack of people in computing, in general.

And more than either of those issues, I worry about the problems of unemployment and underemployment of our youth.

• The Idled Young Americans

  Over the last 12 years, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest.

• Young Adults Make Up Nearly Half Of America’s Unemployed Workforce

  College graduates, as recent Labor Department data showed, are increasingly working in low-wage jobs, largely because they have made up a majority of jobs added since the recession ended. One of every four Americans is projected to be working in a low-wage job in a decade.

• Better jobs reports don't help this lost generation of unemployed young adults

  these young people who can't find jobs now are likely to be scarred by the experience for their entire careers. They will have lower wages for life, according to several economic studies. That will cause social problems in addition to economic ones as these young people delay "life steps" such as purchasing a house, or even retiring, since they have not been able to build up as much in savings.

So, yes, save us from the Brogrammers.

And yes, let's try to figure out ways to address the skewed gender makeup in the computing industry.

But most of all, let's figure out a way to get the next generation involved, so that our children, and our children's children, can enjoy the wonderful world we've lived in.

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Legends from flyover country

Yahoo: The terrifying Mexican football legend of Columbus, Ohio

While the USA players celebrated their own qualification with their most putrid of domestic beers, the Mexican players were left to ponder what they must do to end Columbus, Ohio's reign of terror. But it may not be satisfied until Mexico's national team is reduced to the lowest depths of non-existent irrelevance that the USA's team once occupied. A place where the only sound that can be heard is the faint whisper of "Columbus, Ohio..."

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Beethoven and Jonathan Biss

I'm really enjoying the latest Coursera class that I'm taking: Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas.

This course takes an inside-out look at the 32 piano sonatas from the point of view of a performer. Each lecture will focus on one sonata and an aspect of Beethoven’s music exemplified by it. (These might include: the relationship between Beethoven the pianist and Beethoven the composer; the critical role improvisation plays in his highly structured music; his mixing of extremely refined music with rougher elements; and the often surprising ways in which the events of his life influenced his compositional process and the character of the music he was writing.) The course will feature some analysis and historical background, but its perspective is that of a player, not a musicologist. Its main aim is to explore and demystify the work of the performer, even while embracing the eternal mystery of Beethoven’s music itself.

The course is led by Jonathan Biss, who teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (and who was born in Bloomington Indiana, which is where my parents lived when I was born).

So far, I've finished the first two weeks of lectures:

• In week 1, Biss provides a quick overview of 150 years of the development of music, from Bach to Mozart to Haydn to Beethoven, helping us understand Beethoven's place in music history and why that is relevant to both studying and listening to Beethoven's compositions. Biss also gives us just enough music theory so that we can comprehend what a sonata is, how it differs from other forms, and what that means for the music of a sonata.
• In week 2, Biss leads us deeply into Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 4, Opus 7, the work that Biss chose to represent the early period of Beethoven's piano sonatas. Alternating between describing the work and playing selections from it, Biss deconstructs and analyzes the sonata in detail.

Biss is just a delightful speaker. He is engaging and clear, and best of all his tremendous love for and respect of the music shines through, and is just so infectious. When you listen to Biss describe how a piece of music affects him, and why it affects him, you instantly grasp what he's talking about.

The course materials on Coursera include a class wiki, with lots of background material and pointers to further resources for study.

I'm not a professional musician, and never really studied music except at the most elementary level, but I've always enjoyed music, and I know that studying music helps me to appreciate it as a listener.

So I'm really looking forward to more opportunities to learn from Jonathan Biss, and to a greater appreciation and enjoyment of music.

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Shelter

I meant to post this as part of my article on Watership Down, but then totally forgot: Shelter

In Shelter you experience the wild as a mother badger sheltering her cubs from harm. On their journey they get stalked by a bird of prey, encounter perils of the night, river rapids crossings, big forest fires and the looming threat of death by starvation.

Food is to be found, but is there enough for everyone? You will learn that the cubs need food not just to survive, but to enable them overcome the varying challenges they will face as they make their way through the world.

Are you ready for a truly different adventure, something that might evoke feelings you've never felt in a game before? In the wild, all living creatures are put to the test. The question in the end is who will survive to live another day?

Has anyone played it?

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When very meets extreme

In the database world, this is a time of conferences.

Two weeks ago, there was VLDB 2013: the 39th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases.

This week, it's XLDB 2013: the 7th Extremely Large Databases Conference.

VLDB, of course, is the grand old conference in this part of the computing world, and the technical program reflects that. The list of speakers, and the program committee, represent pretty much a Who's Who of the database research community world wide. It's hard to find an area of database research, or a database research team, that isn't represented at VLDB, and the always-excellent papers are a treat to pore over.

XLDB is a younger upstart, but has quickly become a very exciting conference. As their home page outlines,

XLDB attempts to tackle challenges related to extreme scale data sets. Main activities include identifying trends, commonalities and roadblocks related to managing and analyzing extreme scale data sets, and facilitating development and growth of appropriate technologies including (but not limited to) databases.

XLDB is rather unabashedly commercial, and this year's conference was no exception, with talks by teams at Google, Facebook, eBay, Oracle, Target, Chevron, and Netflix, among others.

I think it's great to see both conferences doing well, and I'm sure I'm going to be studying the various research that was announced at these events for months.

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Rediscovering Watership Down

As a child, I was a precocious and voracious reader. In my early teens, ravenous and impatient, I raced through Richard Adams's Watership Down. Now, forty years later, I felt a strong desire to return to it, and so I did.

But this time, with less time remaining to me, I took more time, and enjoyed a summer of rediscovering Watership Down.

It turned out that I remembered almost nothing. Of course, I remembered brave Hazel, Prince of the Rabbits. And I remembered that I had identified strongly with Fiver, the introverted, moody, unathletic young rabbit who had visions of the future.

There are many more rabbits in Watership Down, of course: Bigwig, who is powerful and fearless; Dandelion, with his marvelous stories; Blackberry, fast and clever; Silver, the faithful lieutenant; Pipkin, the tiny rabbit with an enormous heart; Speedwell, the adventurous scout; and Holly, the wise old veteran who shares his wisdom with the youngsters.

This seems so cliched when summarized thus, and it's fair to attribute to Watership Down a certain amount of "me too". Following in the footsteps of such ground-breaking work as The Wind in the Willows or A. A. Milne's tales of the Hundred Acre Wood, Adams clearly was climbing on the shoulders of the giants that went before him.

But Adams brings a fresh spirit and a very graceful style to his epic tale, and his love of his characters carries him past cliche into a work that truly deserves to be considered in the same class.

Surely what most readers remember about Watership Down is the way that it immerses you in the world of the rabbit. "The holes and tunnels of an old warren become smooth, reassuring and comfortable with use," writes Adams, describing what it's like to be a rabbit away from home on a wet morning, sheltering in a dank hole instead:

Bigwig, with all his usual brisk energy, set to work. Hazel, however, returned and sat pensive at the lip of the hole, looking out at the silent, rippling veils of rain that drifted across and across the little valley between the two copses. Closer, before his nose, every blade of grass, every bracken frond was bent, dripping and glistening. The smell of last year's oak leaves filled the air. It had turned chilly. Across the field the bloom of the cherry tree under which they had sat that morning hung sodden and spoiled. While Hazel gazed, the wind slowly veered around into the west, as Cowslip had said it would, and brought the rain driving into the mouth of the hole. He backed down and rejoined the others. The patterning and whispering of the rain sounded softly but distinctly outside. The fields and woods were shut in under it, emptied and subdued. The insect life of the leaves and grass was stilled. The thrush should have been singing, but Hazel could hear no thrush. He and his companions were a muddy handful of scratchers, crouching in a narrow, drafty pit in lonely country.

Others may remember the clever and fascinating fables and legends re-told by the rabbits as their oral history, tales of the great rabbit prince El-ahrairah and his sometime companion Rabscuttle. Just reading the titles of the stories will give you a hint at the delights they hold:

• The Story of the Blessing of El-ahrairah

  "All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed."

• The Story of the King's Lettuce
• The Story of the Trial of El-ahrairah
• The Story of El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inle
• The Story of Rowsby Woof and the Fairy Wogdog

Still others will prefer to read Watership Down as being a story with a greater purpose. Adams goes out of his way, in his introduction, to state that

I want to emphasize that Watership Down was never intended to be some sort of allegory or parable. It is simply the story about rabbits made up and told in the car.

But whether this is false modesty, or whether it is more a description of what he "intended" than what actually became, it is clear that Watership Down is, in fact, far more than "simply the story about rabbits".

Firstly, there is the topic of gender identity. Nearly every character in the book is a rabbit, and nearly ever rabbit is male; there are female rabbits in the story, but rarely are they even given names, and no female rabbit plays any significant role until very late in the book, when several of the male rabbits choose mates and settle down to raise families. Moreover, in some sort of bizarre throwback, the otherwise modern-thinking rabbits think nothing of organizing and executing raiding parties to kidnap females from other tribes for their own purposes. Worse, at times the roles of the females are described in the most demeaning sort of way:

Buck rabbits on their own seldom or never go in for serious digging. This is the natural job of a doe making a home for her litter

Trying bringing this sort of attitude up in any second grade classroom nowadays and you'll be hooted out of school.

Secondly, there are of course the social issues raised by the book. In the large, Watership Down is a story of the clashes of various sorts of social organization, from democratic to authoritarian to socialist to libertarian. Almost every animal in the book has an opinion about the right way to organize things, and the central crisis of the book involves an epic battle to overthrow the cruel dictator who has imprisoned his rabbits with both physical bullying and psychological manipulation. Adams skillfully describes the subtle and effective techniques that the tyrant uses to cement his power:

Woundwort was no mere bully. He knew how to encourage other rabbits and to fill them with a spirit of emulation. It was not long before his officers were asking to be allowed to lead patrols. Woundwort would give them tasks -- to search for hlessil in a certain direction or to find out whether a particular ditch or barn contained rats which could later be attacked in force and driven out.

...

The patrols were the training grounds of cunning trackers, swift runners and fierce fighters, and the casualties -- although there might be as many as five or six in a bad month -- suited Woundwort's purpose, for numbers needed keeping down and there were always fresh vacancies in the Owsla, which the younger bucks did their best to be good enough to fill. To feel that rabbits were competing to risk their lives at his orders gratified Woundwort, although he believed -- and so did his Council and his Owsla -- that he was giving the warren peace and security at a price which was modest enough.

A more true description of the rise of a warlord I have rarely read.

And there are religious discussions, too, as for example when Fiver and Hazel get into a discussion about whether there is life after death:

"Well, there's another place -- another country, isn't there? We go there when we sleep; at other times, too; and when we die. El-ahrairah comes and goes between the two as he wants, I suppose, but I could never quite make that out, from the tales. Some rabbits will tell you it's all easy there, compared with the waking dangers that they understand. But I think that only shows they don't know much about it. It's a wild place, and very unsafe. And where are we really -- there or here?"

"Our bodies stay here -- that's good enough for me. You'd better go and talk to that Silverweed fellow -- he might know more."

Still, in the end, I think that Watership Down remains for me the same book that it was forty years ago when I first spend time between its covers: a stirring and action-packed tale of derring-do and adventure, of exploration and escapades and thrills and chills, and of great battles to sing of around the hearth:

Along the western horizon the lower clouds formed a single purple mass, against which distant trees stood out minute and sharp. The upper edges rose into the light, a far land of wild mountains. Copper-colored, weightless and motionless, they suggested a glassy fragility like that of frost. Surely, when the thunder struck them again they would vibrate, tremble and shatter, till warm shards, sharp as icicles, fell flashing down from the ruins. Racing through the ocher light, Bigwig was impelled by a frenzy of tension and energy. He did not feel the wound in his shoulder. The storm was his own. The storm would defeat Efrafa.

What's not to like about that? The world can still use some fine books about youngsters who set out to make a better world and, along with a few scrapes, mis-steps, and false starts, persevere and succeed in the end.

I'm glad I returned to Watership Down. I know not if I shall return to it again; I suppose only time will tell.

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Big Bro

Your must-read article of the month is on the Pro Publica website: Revealed: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security

the N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable.”

And be sure to read their Editor's Note:

There are those who, in good faith, believe that we should leave the balance between civil liberty and security entirely to our elected leaders, and to those they place in positions of executive responsibility. Again, we do not agree. The American system, as we understand it, is premised on the idea -- championed by such men as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- that government run amok poses the greatest potential threat to the people’s liberty, and that an informed citizenry is the necessary check on this threat.

Well done, Pro Publica.

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Starting today, the games count

In honor of the occasion:

The Autumn Wind is a pirate,
Blustering in from sea,
With a rollocking song, he sweeps along,
Swaggering boisterously.


His face is weather beaten.
He wears a hooded sash,
With a silver hat about his head,
And a bristling black mustache.


He growls as he storms the country,
A villain big and bold.
And the trees all shake and quiver and quake,
As he robs them of their gold.


The Autumn Wind is a raider,
Pillaging just for fun.
He'll knock you 'round and upside down,
And laugh when he's conquered and won.

Or, if you prefer, watch it! (and don't forget to turn those speakers up LOUD).

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Palette Choice in Inciweb Rim Fire mapping

The mapping addicts at Wired have been doing some great work with the Rim Fire mapping data from Inciweb, trying to understand how to make it most understandable.

• Last week, in Yosemite Fire’s Destruction Mapped in Beautiful, Frightening Color, the team highlighted one of the Inciweb-provided maps and how it used color to help explain the movement of the fire from day to day:

  The progression of the Rim fire into Yosemite National Park has been strong, steady, and scary, fueled by extra-arid conditions after an exceptionally dry winter in California. This map shows the growth particularly well, with each color representing the area burned each day.

• This week, the team returns to the analysis, studying how the choice of color palette affects the experience of the map: The Color of Fire: How Palette Choice Impacts Maps of Yosemite’s Rim Fire

  The Inciweb map grew incrementally and is being used to follow the fire on specific days, so using vastly different bright colors that easily stand out from each other was probably a conscious decision. But Simmon’s map gives people like us who are not on the front lines a much better grasp of the life of this fire.

• Meanwhile, "since I've got you on the phone," don't miss this superb reporting over at the Santa Barbara Independent: On the Safety of Firefighters: Real Time Danger During the Jesusita Blaze and Human Lives vs. Expensive Homes.

  Over the past several years, there has been a noticeable shift in attitude regarding the dangers in which we place wildland firefighters. In 2008, the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (fseee.org) initiated a lawsuit designed to push for wildland firefighting reform. “Firefighters should not be asked to defend a home that is indefensible,” said former FSEEE field director Bob Dale. “No home is worth a firefighter’s life.”

  As is the case in Santa Barbara, the primary concern is not the backcountry wildland fires like the 240,000-acre Zaca Fire in 2007 that burns for two months but consumes no houses. It is the homes that have been built in the past 20-30 years along the base of the Santa Ynez Mountains that worry firefighters. This is the point at which the wildland meets an encroaching urban community. What is different here is that you are asking Forest Service employees trained to fight wildland fires to respond to the urban interface and you are asking city firefighters trained in defending structures to do so in a wildland environment.

The Rim Fire effort appears to have gone quite well over the last week. Once the controversial decision to conduct "burnout operations" in America's premier National Park was approved and acted upon, the last week has gone mostly as the incident team predicted it would, and so far as I know has been essentially casualty free, so kudos to the team for that great result.

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Reactions

The bridge is dead, long live the bridge!

• New Bay Bridge span opens

  The first "recognized" driver, guided into the number one lane by Caltrans, was Christen Gray, of San Leandro. As she tried to explain her excitement over being among the first over the new span, her passenger, Anthony Thomas, blurted out, "It's shiny!"

• New Bay Bridge Opening Completes Decades-Long Dream

  “The story is ending well but the road to get here was far too long and far too winding,” said Metropolitan Transportation Commission executive director Steve Heminger, who has been involved in the $6.4 billion project to build the new span almost from the beginning because he was its project manager.

• S.F. Bay Bridge re-opens with new 'quakeproof' span

  Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco, cut a chain with a blow torch to mark the opening Monday afternoon after leading those who had gathered around the bridge's toll plaza in a countdown to the reopening. The old eastern span will eventually be demolished.

  "I hope this is more than just connecting two land masses," he said. "I hope that the progress that's being represented at this moment is for a generation to dream big dreams and to do big things."

• Spirit of victory prevails at opening of new Bay Bridge

  "We have overcome what at times seemed insurmountable," said CEO Michael Flowers of American Bridge Company, the lead contractor on the project, at the opening event at the Bridge Yard building, formerly a Caltrans warehouse. "The finish line is in sight."

  The new structure replaces an original span that cost $77 million and was built with the world's deepest marine foundation in just 3 1/2 years. Both were built during tough economic times: the Great Depression and the Great Recession.

• Bay Bridge opens as drivers compete for 'first' trips across new eastern span

  State Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) said legislators "will review and learn from our mistakes" to ensure that similar delays and cost overruns do not happen on other large infrastructure projects in the state.

• New Bay Bridge Opens Ahead of Schedule

  "It was incredible, man," Nhua Rodriguez told NBC Bay Area. "Nice, clear, no traffic. Very good, man."

  Omar Hassan also liked his ride: "I thought it was excellent. Spectacular. I was blown away."

• New Bay Bridge, same old traffic

  Traffic across the bridge is typical of a weekday, the California Highway Patrol reported Tuesday morning. Cars were bumper to bumper at the toll plaza early and the speed across the bridge was about 40 mph, the CHP said.

Who said "History is written by the victors"? It's interesting to see the different slants that people give: some see the decades of failures and cost overruns; some see the triumph that the new bridge was built at all.

Some want to remember, some want to forget.

For now, there is a new bridge, and: "It's shiny!"

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Rim Fire updates

I've been spending a lot of time at the superb Inciweb site recently. Why aren't all government web sites like this? Inciweb is just a superb site, with detailed, accurate, exact information, clear descriptions, no fluff.

Of course, the reason I've been on Inciweb is due to the Rim Fire.

I'm sure this isn't the first time you've heard of the Rim Fire, though if you're not from this part of the world you've probably heard it called the "Yosemite Fire". If you're just getting caught up on the Rim Fire, let's start with a few highlights from today's Fact Sheet:

• Day 16
• Acreage: 222,777 Square miles: 348.1
• Largest wildfire in the United States to date in 2013
• Acreage in Yosemite National Park: 60,214
• Proportion of the fire burning in Yosemite National Park: 27 percent
• Proportion of Yosemite National Park within the fire perimeter: 7.9 percent

The commitment to fighting this fire has been mammoth; at this point, I believe that every aerial asset that CalFire possesses has been involved in the effort.

So far, the major human-related loss to the fire has been the legendary Berkeley Family Camp, which was a complete loss:

Very bad news tonight for the thousands of East Bay families who are fans of Berkeley Tuolumne Family Camp. It burned down today, according to John Miller, spokesman for the US Forest Service. Owned and operated by the City of Berkeley, the beautiful and popular camp along the Tuolumne River near Yosemite National Park has been around since 1922. But today, it fell victim to the massive Rim Fire

My colleague in the cubicle to the left of me has been taking his family to Berkeley Family Camp for 7 years.

My colleague in the cubicle to the right of me has been taking her family to Berkeley Family Camp for 11 years.

They're still wearing their Family Camp tie-dye T-shirts to work on Fridays, but it's with a much different emotion now.

Thank goodness that that just-as-legendary Camp Mather was saved:

According to Camp Mather officials, the San Francisco Fire Department, National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service and Recreation and Park Department have all had a hand in keeping the core of Camp Mather safe from the fire.

Even though the containment is now 60%, as this morning's status update reminds us, the situation remains critical:

Fire activity continues to be active in the south and southeast with moderate rates of spread and torching. Today winds will be coming from the south southwest with up to 20mph gusts. Fire activity has been slow and moderate in the north end of the fire. Today’s fire weather is extreme. Very active fire and extensive spotting continues to hamper suppression efforts and pose risks to firefighters.

One reason that this fire has a very personal interest to me is that, just exactly a year ago, I was backpacking right in the middle of this fire. It is very emotional to look at my pictures from last year and imagine how much that part of the world has changed in just the last 16 days.

The best map of the fire, I think, is this one. The black line represents the control line. See if you can find Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. Note that the south shore of the reservoir is listed as a containment line. Even though the fire is so active that it's leapt over 300 feet at a time to spot and initiate new outbreaks, there's no way that it can go directly across the reservoir.

That is why the burnouts from Hetch Hetchy south to Harden Lake were so critical, and why that was the line that the firefighters fought like crazy to secure. (It's the straight vertical north-south line at the rightmost edge of the fire.) Without that line, the fire would just race up the Tuolumne canyon (known as "the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne"), and they probably couldn't stop it again until it reached Tuolumne Meadows, at which point most of the park would have burned.

The moment of decision came on Thursday night, August 29th, when, after days of waiting for a break in the almost non-stop winds, there came an afternoon of calm, and a forecast of a cool and (relatively) humid evening. That night, as Inciweb dryly puts it:

Firefighters began burning operations south of Hetch Hetchy and along Old Yosemite Road. ... Night crews will continue with burning operations as long as weather conditions allow

So when you go back and read the hourly reports of the fire on Inciweb (or elsewhere) and wonder why there is so much discussion of tiny little Harden lake, well, it wasn't really about Harden Lake, it was about trying to save Yosemite National Park from experiencing what happened to Yellowstone in 1988.

in the summer of 1988, Yellowstone caught fire. The fires, which began in June, continued to burn until November, when winter snows extinguished the last blazes. Over the course of that summer and fall, more than 25,000 firefighters were brought in from around the country.

In the end, the flames scorched about 1.2 million acres across the greater Yellowstone area.

Now, the Rim Fire is still nothing like 1988; as Bill Gabbert reminds us:

On the worst single day, “Black Saturday” on August 20, 1988, tremendous winds pushed fire across more than 150,000 acres.

That's nearly the entire Rim Fire acreage, on a single day.

But if you're trying to understand the Rim Fire, and struggling with the dry and terse information on Inciweb, accurate and exact though it may be, may I recommend that you spend some time with the marvelous document prepared five years ago by the Yellowstone staff for the 20th anniversary of the fires: The Yellowstone Fires of 1988

Since 1988, fires have continued to burn in Yellowstone—more than 85,000 acres as of 2007. According to historic records, that’s to be expected. However, the average number of lightning started fires has been increasing each year since the 1990s. The majority of scientists believe this increase is due, in part, to climate change. They say that, generally, the western United States will experience increasingly intense fires—fires similar to those of 1988.

Humans have a complicated arrangement with our world. What we do matters, and it's often hard to detangle cause from effect.

But Yosemite National Park is perhaps the most beautiful spot on our beautiful planet, and I wish those five thousand hard-working firefighters the very best of luck (and safety) over the next several weeks.

And thank you for cutting that line down to Harden Lake.

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Attacking chess

Here's how the game should be played!

White is Nicky Korba, still developing as a 16 year old.

Black is Siddharth Banik, only 13 years old.

Gotta love the last 5 moves of the game!

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Understanding Computation: a very short review

One of the books on my Summer Reading List for 2013 was Tom Stuart's Understanding Computation

As computer books go, Stuart's book is rather unusual.

Many computer books are tediously practical: Learn XXX in 21 Days; Advanced Programming With The YYY Platform; ZZZ Technology In Depth.

Snore.

Some computer books are insightful and educational, but hard to approach: filled with dense academic prose, written to be used as textbooks in a classroom setting, short on motivation and examples. In my day, for example, we learned from The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms, which is as great a computer textbook as was ever written, but is certainly not the sort of book you approach lightly.

Stuart's book fits into neither category. In a relatively short, lively, friendly-yet-rigorous 300 pages, Stuart manages to educate the reader on a surpisingly broad range of core theoretical concepts:

• By page 20, we're discussing the concepts of syntax and semantics and learning about how to use Small-Step Operational Semantics to describe the behavior of a programming language implementation for an abstract machine.
• By page 50, we've moved on to Denotational Semantics, and we're learning to implement a language parser
• By page 60, we're studying Deterministic Finite Automata, and by page 70 we're comparing them to Nondeterministic Finite Automata
• By page 100, we've learned to build machines that recognize Regular Expressions, and we're introducing the concept of the Pushdown Stack into our abstract machine.

Understanding Computation continues at the same pace throughout the book, covering

• Nondeterministic Pushdown Automata
• Parsing, Lexical Analysis, and Syntactic Analysis
• Turing Machines
• Lambda Calculus
• Partial Recursive Functions
• Tag Systems
• Self-referential statements
• Programs that can refer to themselves
• Decidability
• The Halting Problem
• Incompleteness and Uncomputability

Whew! All this, in a friendly, clear, lively, 300 page book!

The sections on the Lambda Calculus were particularly rewarding for me, as this is an area that I somehow never picked up in my studies, and although I've tried from time to time to comprehend it, this was the first time I really felt like I got a true understanding of what was going on, and why it has the power that it does.

This is not to say that Understanding Computation is easy. You have to be willing to read Stuart's writing carefully, and you have to stop and think about what he's saying.

But all the way through, Understanding Computation is fun to read, not heavy or dull. For example, here's Stuart talking about the practice of programming:

Programmers tend to be practical, pragmatic creatures. We often learn a new programming language by reading documentation, following tutorials, studying existing programs, and tinkering with simple programs of our own, without giving much thought to what those programs mean. Sometimes the learning process feels a lot like trial and error: we try to understand a piece of a language by looking at examples and documentation, then we try to write something in it, then everything blows up and we have to go back and try again until we manage to assemble something that mostly works. As computers and the systems they support become increasingly complex, it's tempting to think of programs as opaque incantations that represent only themselves and work only by chance.

But computer programming isn't really about programs, it's about ideas. A program is a frozen representation of an idea, a snapshot of a structure that once existed in a programmer's imagination. Programs are only worth writing because they have meaning. So what connects code to its meaning, and how can we be more concrete about the meaning of a program than saying "it just does whatever it does"? In this chapter, we're going to look at a few techniques for nailing down the meaning of computer programs and see how to bring those dead snapshots to life.

"Everything blows up and we have to go back and try again": how perfect of a description is that?!

Some programmers are just programmers: for them, programming is a job, and they are doing it to make a living. To be an industrial programmer, you don't necessarily need to Think Deep Thoughts. You acquire a certain level of competence with the widely-used technologies of the moment; you join a team; you take on certain projects; you crank out code.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with being an industrial programmer, but this book is not really for that person.

There's another sort of programmer who isn't just interested in what, but also in why, and how. Some programmers don't approach programming just as a mechanical process, but are more introspective. They think about alternatives; they wonder whether one approach is somehow better than another; they look for ways to refine and elevate practice to art. This is the person who wants to be able to explain (to themselves and to others) not just that their program works, but why it works. This is the sort of programmer that frets about abstractions, that looks for common concepts and opportunities to reuse and extend solutions that were built earlier, that speculates not just about the solution to the problem at hand, but about the solution to the problem not yet encountered.

Stuart's book will appeal to that person, to that programmer who's neither just a practical engineer nor an abstract theoretician, but is rather somewhere in between, a little bit of both, and looking always for the opportunity to combine the two approaches and demonstrate that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Does that describe you? Well, if so, give Understanding Computation a try; you might well enjoy it!

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Stuff I'm reading, end-of-August edition

Already planning that Labor Day barbeque? Surely you'll need something to read, or at least some paper to provide the kindling when you stack up the briquets in your chimney starter...

• It's finally here! 24 years after the Loma Prieta earthquake: 2013 Closure Fact Sheet

  This Labor Day weekend, the Bay Bridge will be closed to take the original East Span out of service and to open the new East Span to traffic. Work will be done at the Oakland Touchdown and the Yerba Buena Island Transition Structure to connect the new bridge to the existing Toll Plaza and Yerba Buena Island, respectively. Crews will also perform essential construction activities, including paving, striping and erecting barrier rail. Throughout the closure, maintenance will work on the West Span, replacing lighting fixtures, cleaning and painting the cable, and repairing finger joints.

  Meanwhile, Bay Bridge Celebration

  Due to the late notice regarding the opening, the planned public celebration has been postponed to a future date.

  Although, of course, it wasn't actually due to "late notice regarding the opening" at all.

• Predator drone now part of battle against Rim Fire near Yosemite

  While unmanned aircraft have mapped past fires, use of the Predator will be the longest sustained mission by a drone in California to broadcast information to firefighters in real time.

  The plane, the size of a small Cessna, will remain over the burn zone for up to 22 hours at a time, allowing fire commanders to monitor fire activity, determine the fire's direction of movement, the extent of containment and confirm new fires ignited by lightning or flying embers.

  The drone is being flown by the 163rd Wing of the California National Guard at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside and is operating from Victorville Airport, both in Southern California. It generally flew over unpopulated areas on its 300-mile flight to the Rim Fire. Outside the fire area, it will be escorted by a manned aircraft.

  Officials were careful to point out the images are being used only to aid in the effort to contain the fire.

• Nasdaq Blames a Surge of Data for Trading Halt

  the company highlighted more than 20 attempts by Arca, one of the exchanges run by NYSE Euronext to connect and then disconnect to the system that provides prices for recent trades in Nasdaq stocks. Those were accompanied by what Nasdaq described as a stream of quotes for inaccurate symbols from Arca, which Nasdaq’s system was forced to reject.

  As is often the case, Nanex has some much more interesting information about the incident: Nanex ~ 22-Aug-2013 ~ Quote Burst Loops

  A Theory

  ARCA's connection to the SIP breaks, so it retries, connects for a short period of time, which then breaks, another connection, which breaks, over and over in quick succession. Each connection reducing the total number of available connections (temporarily - for a few minutes), so that eventually any new connection fails. If Nasdaq is monitoring the health of the SIP via polling TCP, it won't be able to connect either (all connections are exhausted) and will think the SIP is down. But they probably see the SIP is still sending quotes from the outbound side (which, by the way, uses UDP/multicast). The engineers get the back-up SIP ready, but the back-up SIP doesn't know where the production SIP (the one not accepting connections) left off, because they can't connect to it either. The back-up SIP starts making requests to each of the 12 or so exchanges for the last 50 or so minutes of quotes (probably from the last known feed positions recorded before connections were exhausted).

  The back-up SIP request 50 minutes from EDGE, and transmits those, then requests and transmits 50 minutes from BATS, and so on. Sound familiar? It should, because that is exactly the pattern we see in the data.

• Why don't DBMS's support ASSERTION

  So, why isn't ASSERTION supported by the vast majority of relational database packages? Is it soley a performance issue or is there something intrinsically hard about it?

• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

  So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.

• The Business of Protection

  You should know this about offensive line coaches: they are large, demanding men with Falstaffian appetites, jutting jaws, and no governors on their speech engines. They eat titanic portions. They cram their lips full of dip in film study like they are loading a mortar. They drink bottled water like parched camels, and in their leisure time would consider a suitcase of beer to be a personal carry-on item for them, and them alone. They are terrifyingly disciplined in the moment, and nap like large breed dogs when allowed.

• The money is in the Bitcoin protocol

  Hopefully it is clear from the features of the Bitcoin protocol and system that crypto-currency is just one use case. Just as the BitTorrent protocol can be used in multiple ways for peer-to-peer data transfer, so can the Bitcoin protocol open up new and different possibilities.

• How Moral Revolutions Happen (They Had A Nightmare)

  It’s hard to be egalitarian and admit that an inegalitarian impulse makes the moral world go round, in practice, always. (It’s easier for egalitarians to want equality, after all. They get to wear it as a badge of achievement. My believies!) Whatever equality we get is going to have to arise out of a process that seems to run contrary to that. That seems true.

• You won't find this in your phone: A 4GHz 12-core Power8 for badass boxes

  Judging from the Power8, it looks like IBM is content to keep in the same clock speed range as the Power7+ chips - around 4GHz, give or take a little. It'll also move PCI-Express 3 controllers into the chip package to keep those hungry little Power8 cores fed; these controllers will offer a coherent memory protocol to external accelerators as well as a new cache hierarchy that goes all the way out to the L4 cache.

  As expected, IBM is also goosing the number of processor threads per core with Power8, doubling it up to eight per core. IBM has been vague about how many cores it might squeeze onto a die with the 22-nanometer shrink, and it could have probably done as many as sixteen cores if it had not added so much eDRAM L3 cache memory with the Power7+ and then boosted it even further with the Power8.

  On the workloads that Big Blue is targeting with its Power Systems iron, having more cache and cores running at near peak utilisation is more important than having lots of cores on a die. Just as is the case for mainframes, at the prices that IBM has to charge for Power Systems servers, the chip has to be architected to run at close to full-tilt-boogie in a sustained manner.

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The Perforce Distributed Service

My latest article is up on the Perforce corporate blog: The Distributed Perforce Service

Answering "yes" to any of these questions means you would realize benefits from a Distributed Perforce installation. And if you answered "yes" to multiple questions, the benefits could be substantial!

Check it out; let me know what you think!

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Messi and Neymar

Great article in Slate about this season's pairing of Lionel Messi of Argentina, the greatest footballer I've ever seen play, and up-and-coming Brazilian superstar Neymar da Silva Santos, the most exiting new footballer of the last several years: Messi and Neymar: Will the world’s greatest player and Barcelona’s new prodigy play well together?.

Messi is adored not only for his brilliance and his results, but also for his dedication and focus:

Messi plays the kind of football that only other masters can fully appreciate. It's not simply that he's technically brilliant, with bullish strength packed into a compact frame and instant, insectlike reactions. Perfection in possession is just the beginning. Messi is also the best player in the world during the 98 percent of the game when he doesn't have the ball.

That doesn't mean he runs a lot. His central role at Barcelona allows him to stay close to the box, so he rarely has to dart more than 20 meters at a time. While others chase, Messi lurks, saving his energy for the decisive moments.

No such moment ever catches him off guard. He's in a sustained flow state that nothing can disturb (except, perhaps, a teammate hesitating a little too long over a pass). In that trance he thinks too fast for his opponents to keep up. He doesn't respond to provocation, and he doesn't play to the crowd.

And, of course, the very best thing about Messi, as Slate points out: Leo Messi Never Dives.

Neymar, meanwhile, is the best football player in Brazil, which is of course the best country at football in the world.

At 21, Neymar has already scored 161 goals for Santos, Brazil, and now Barcelona. It's a phenomenal number: twice as many as Romario had scored at the same age, and three times as many as the 21-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo.

Neymar, the prodigy, is also ahead of where Messi was at 21. He has played with successful teams, winning his state championship, his continental championship, and most recently the Confederations Cup with Brazil. He was named best individual player at that tournament, adding to a hoard of individual awards: top scorer in Brazil, Brazilian player of the year, twice South American player of the year, FIFA's Puskás Award for the best goal scored anywhere in the world in 2011, a finalist for that same award in 2012.

I've only been lucky enough to watch Neymar play a handful of times, most recently in the 2013 Confederations Cup, the warm-up tournament for next year's World Cup.

In the games I've seen, Neymar's play has been astonishing. Not only is he markedly faster than the other players on the field (no simple matter in a sport populated by the fastest runners on the earth), but his balance, agility, and power while on the ball are remarkable. Just watch as he leaves the best professional footballers on the planet lying on the ground, contorted and collapsed in disarray from trying to stop him.

Stop, start, weave, bob, SLAM!

What will it be like to have these two on the field together? Will they be able to play together? Or, as Slate wonders, will they clash and fail to mesh?

I know I'll be watching and waiting to see!

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Feed the feedly

I see that Feedly is now starting to (gently?) beg for money from its users.

There is a relatively polite request on my feedly screen asking for $45/year to become a "Feedly Pro" user.

Well, I can't say I'm surprised.

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Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes: A very short review

I just lost an entire weekend to Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes.

If you've played games like Civilization V, Heroes of Might and Magic, Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Strategic Conquest, etc., then you know what sort of game Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is.

And, if you have played any of those games, and liked them, you're going to love this game.

Firstly, it's beautiful, and lots of fun just to look at.

Secondly, it's hard, which you know is very important for this sort of game. The computer plays very well, and the game does not make it easy on you.

Admittedly, I'm just getting started, and just learning the game, but even on the easy "beginner's" level, I probably lost a dozen games this weekend.

I'll have more to say about the game, I'm sure, after I've lost a few dozen more games, and a few hundred more hours, to it.

But now, back to fighting that Darkling War Rider army that's on my city-front...

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What's on my reading list

It's another beautiful Bay Area summer afternoon, by which I mean that it's 2:00 PM and the sun has finally come out. At least, the next 5 hours will be beautiful. In the meantime, here's some of the things I'm reading this weekend:

• Moving forward

  There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time. My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our transformation to a devices and services company focused on empowering customers in the activities they value most. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction.

• Meet the Town That's Being Swallowed by a Sinkhole

  What happened in Bayou Corne, as near as anyone can tell, is that one of the salt caverns Texas Brine hollowed out—a mine dubbed Oxy3—collapsed. The sinkhole initially spanned about an acre. Today it covers more than 24 acres and is an estimated 750 feet deep. It subsists on a diet of swamp life and cypress trees, which it occasionally swallows whole. It celebrated its first birthday recently, and like most one-year-olds, it is both growing and prone to uncontrollable burps, in which a noxious brew of crude oil and rotten debris bubbles to the surface. But the biggest danger is invisible; the collapse unlocked tens of millions of cubic feet of explosive gases, which have seeped into the aquifer and wafted up to the community. The town blames the regulators. The regulators blame Texas Brine. Texas Brine blames some other company, or maybe the regulators, or maybe just God.

• The Cost Of Creating A New Drug Now $5 Billion, Pushing Big Pharma To Change

  A 2012 article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery says the number of drugs invented per billion dollars of R&D invested has been cut in half every nine years for half a century. Reversing this merciless trend has caught the attention of the U.S. government. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, in 2011 started a new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences to remove the roadblocks that keep new drugs from reaching patients.

• What Is Medium?

  All this built the idea that Medium was something more than yet another blogging platform. It was a place to be seen. Pieces that might have run on The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or Wired would pop up on Medium, and I'd be like, "Dang. How'd that happen?"

• What Medium Is

  rich guys buy “credible” publications in order to have big platforms for their ideas.

  But, even though I like what Hughes seems to represent, and he’s seemed to have a thoughtful touch in how he’s running TNR, I’m pretty sure I’d forgotten the magazine existed by the time he bought it. I have no doubt there is a small but significant audience to whom the brand is really important, but cultural credibility is no longer based entirely on having an august old name atop of some writing.

  By contrast, Medium is a free-for-all, with the most perversely obtuse branding for a platform since Google named its nearly-chromeless browser Chrome. There’s some amount of crap on the site, for which it’s justifiably earning criticism, but there are also paid pieces which will undoubtedly start to meet or exceed the quality of the average TNR article.

• The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines, Second edition

  It's such a far ranging book that it's impossible to characterize simply. It covers an amazing diversity of topics, from an introduction to warehouse-scale computing; workloads and software infrastructure; hardware; datacenter architecture; energy and power efficiency; cost structures; how to deal with failures and repairs; and it closes with a discussion of key challenges, which include rapidly changing workloads, building responsive large scale systems, energy proportionality of non-CPU components, overcoming the end of Dennard scaling, and Amdahl's cruel law.

• Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Play It

  In Of Dice and Men, David Ewalt recounts the development of Dungeons & Dragons from the game’s roots on the battlefields of ancient Europe, through the hysteria that linked it to satanic rituals and teen suicides, to its apotheosis as father of the modern video-game industry. As he chronicles the surprising history of the game’s origins (a history largely unknown even to hardcore players) and examines D&D’s profound impact, Ewalt weaves laser-sharp subculture analysis with his own present-day gaming experiences. An enticing blend of history, journalism, narrative, and memoir, Of Dice and Men sheds light on America’s most popular (and widely misunderstood) form of collaborative entertainment.

• The Pentagon as Silicon Valley’s Incubator

  Though Silicon Valley sees itself as an industry far removed from the Beltway, the two power centers have had a longstanding symbiotic relationship. And some say the cozy personal connections of ex-intelligence operatives to the military could invite abuse, like the divulging of private information to former colleagues in the agencies.

  “They have enormous opportunities to cash in on their Washington experience, sometimes in ways that fund further innovation and other times in ways that might be very troubling to many people,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “Both sides like to maintain a myth of distant relations. The ties have been in place for a long time.”

• John Carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering

  I talked a lot last year about the work that we’ve done with sta­tic analy­sis and try­ing to run all of our code through sta­tic analy­sis and get it to run squeaky clean through all of these things and it turns up hun­dreds and hun­dreds, even thou­sands of issues. Now its great when you wind up with some­thing that says, now clearly this is a bug, you made a mis­take here, this is a bug, and you can point that out to every­one. And every­one will agree, okay, I won’t do that next time. But the prob­lem is that the best of inten­tions really don’t mat­ter. If some­thing can syn­tac­ti­cally be entered incor­rectly, it even­tu­ally will be. And that’s one of the rea­sons why I’ve got­ten very big on the sta­tic analy­sis.

• 100x faster Postgres performance by changing 1 line

  Postgres is reading Table C using a Bitmap Heap Scan. When the number of keys to check stays small, it can efficiently use the index to build the bitmap in memory. If the bitmap gets too large, the query optimizer changes the way it looks up data. In our case it has a large number of keys to check so it uses the more approximative way to retrieve the candidate rows and checks each row individually for a match on x_key and tags. All this “loading in memory” and “checking individual row” takes time (the Recheck Cond in the plan).

• what does "Bitmap Heap Scan" phase do?

  A plain indexscan fetches one tuple-pointer at a time from the index, and immediately visits that tuple in the table. A bitmap scan fetches all the tuple-pointers from the index in one go, sorts them using an in-memory "bitmap" data structure, and then visits the table tuples in physical tuple-location order.

• I will not do your tech interview.

  As I informally observed the track record of those pipelines in hiring great people, I began to realize that the only real predictor of great hires was if the candidate already knew someone on the team.

• Cultivating Hybrids: 4 Key Data Architectures for Scaling Infinitely

  When a transaction happens on an in-memory data grid (IMDG), it is distributed across nodes with micro-second based latency. Of course, not all businesses require this type of performance, but thousands of simultaneous transactions per second basically mandate it. With processing via functions, procedures, or queries, each member gets a request, partial results are sent back, and they are combined. This scatter gather or MapReduce type of approach is the same model Hadoop uses, but it is in real-time with memory-level latency. Different from in-memory databases that have the entire data set replicated across each member in a cluster, IMDGs distribute parts of the data across members. The system is responsible for tracking itself and knowing where each piece of data is, making the location transparent to clients. Part of the approach to architecting and managing IMDGs is optimizing the data’s distribution and replication. For example, strongly correlated data is colocated on a peer to remove network hops within a single query. The system also distributes functions, procedures, and queries transparently to nodes hosting specific shards of data. There is still a limit here, there must be a financially reasonable way to store the entire data set in memory—petabytes can draw a limit.

• Engineers Unplugged Series 3 Episode 9 – Overlay Networking

  While attending Cisco Live USA this year, Amy Lewis put me in the head lock and refused to let me go until I agreed to appear in a video for the current series of Engineers Unplugged.

• Chesscademy: A fun and free way to learn chess!

Well, that should keep me busy for a few hours...

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The surveillance state, redux

Stuff that attracted my attention in the last couple days:

• NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds

  “We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.

• The view from 30 years ago: The Silent Power of the NSA

  In a nation whose Constitution demands an open Government operating according to precise rules of fairness, the N.S.A. remains an unexamined entity. With the increasing computerization of society, the conflicts it presents become more important.

• How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut

  Palantir lives the realities of its customers: the NSA, the FBI and the CIA–an early investor through its In-Q-Tel venture fund–along with an alphabet soup of other U.S. counterterrorism and military agencies. In the last five years Palantir has become the go-to company for mining massive data sets for intelligence and law enforcement applications, with a slick software interface and coders who parachute into clients’ headquarters to customize its programs.

• EFF Victory Results in Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding NSA Surveillance Unconstitutional

  Issued in October 2011, the secret court's opinion found that surveillance conducted by the NSA under the FISA Amendments Act was unconstitutional and violated "the spirit of" federal law.

• Bradley Manning and the Two Americas

  If you see America as a place within borders, a bureaucratic and imperial government that acts on behalf of its 350 million people, if you see America as its edifices, its mandarins, the careful and massive institutions that have built our cities and vast physical culture, the harsh treatment of Manning for defying that institution makes sense, even if it was, at times, brutal.

  But if you see America as an idea, and a revolutionary one in its day, that not only could a person decide her fate but that the body of people could act together as a great leader might lead — and that this is a better way to be — Manning didn’t betray that America.

• And, of course: The Sharing Network

  Introducing a brand new way to share everything: learn more.

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Groklaw shutting down?

Is this a hoax: Forced Exposure.

It sounds authentic.

The loss of Groklaw would be significant; it's one of the very best sites on the net.

Numerous web sites are carrying the news.

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Making sense of Bloomberg

We're nearing the end of The Twelve Years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, latest holder of the job many people call the most practically important political job in the world. There are certainly political jobs with greater fame and glory, but in terms of day-to-day impact, being the mayor of the most important city on the planet has an immense effect on the lives of the people of the world.

So, as these final few months draw to a close, people are trying to Make Sense Of It All.

Here's a roundup:

• In a massive special edition, the New York Times features a number of articles on The Bloomberg Years. A simply gorgeous interactive map walks you through the geography of the changes to the city over the years of his term. And in The Impossible Mayor of the Possible, Jim Dwyer runs down some of the mayor's accomplishments:

  Elected to lead a city that was the grieving, wounded site of an atrocity, he will depart as mayor of a city where artists have been able to decorate a mighty park with thousands of sheets of saffron, for no reason other than the simple joy of it; where engineers figured out how to turn sewage gas into electricity; where people are safer from violent crime than at any time in modern history.

• In Vanity Fair, former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords salutes Bloomberg for his work on gun control and violence: Michael Bloomberg

  When he might have focused on his own legacy and a post-mayoralty more about Bermuda than about background checks, he has instead chosen to work in partnership with gun owners like me and my husband, Mark, with sheriffs and police chiefs, and with veterans and moms and Americans from all over this country to protect our Second Amendment rights and keep our communities safer.

• The New Yorker discusses another controversial Bloomberg initiate: "stop-and-frisk": Ruling on Stop-And-Frisk, Remembering Trayvon Martin

  Over the past decade, the New York City Police Department has conducted roughly 4.4 million searches, overwhelmingly of black and Hispanic young men. In eighty-eight per cent of those stops, no subsequent ticket was issued. While Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have called the practice integral to the city’s decreasing crime rates, crime has continued to fall even as stops have been curtailed. To critics, the policy amounts to officially sanctioned profiling of the city’s black and brown residents—and, on Monday, Judge Shira Scheindlin, in a major ruling in a federal lawsuit challenging the program, agreed.

• In Forbes, Caleb Melby notes that Bloomberg has had many a controversial notion: Before The Ban On Sugary Drinks: 7 Other Controversial Mayor Bloomberg Initiatives
  • 1. Calorie Counting At Restaurants
  • 2. Trans-Fats Banned
  • 3. Bullying Salt
  • 4. Smoking Limits
  • 5. Hybrid Taxi Fleet
  • 6. Limiting Liquor Access
  • 7. Money For Laid Off Financiers
• The New York Daily News notes that the various candidates to replace Bloomberg are eager to discuss which of his accomplishments they'd overturn: Foes on life after Mike: From bike lanes to smoking bans, what they’ll keep and what they’ll dump

  But not everything will remain the way Bloomberg leaves it on Dec. 31. The candidates are split on the future of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactic, and some say they would convert Bloomberg’s open-office City Hall bullpen back into standard offices with walls.

  Not everyone is sold on letter grades for restaurants, and some say they would drop the appeal to a court decision that has so far blocked Bloomberg’s effort to ban large sugary drinks.

• The website New York International, naturally, focuses on issues beyond the city limits: Mayor Michael Bloomberg: An International Retrospective

  For internationals, the mayor’s office has supported more open business investment, spearheaded reform of the immigration system, and made a point to remind people that NYC is a city built by immigrants for immigrants. Bloomberg’s legacy in NYC is almost certain not to stop simply because he leaves City Hall, and his ongoing business interests and political clout are sure to make him a voice to listen to. Overall, internationals in NYC have done well under Bloomberg, and can only hope the next incumbent continues the mayor’s efforts to make this a truly global city.

• New York Magazine's Chris Smith, who has published dozens of major articles on Bloomberg, recalls the mayor's work during Hurricane Sandy and gives him credit for actually trying to make a difference: The Mayor in the Eye, and The Mayor and His Money

  When the history of the Bloomberg administration is written, the question to be answered won’t be whether he was out of touch with the little guy. It’ll be whether Bloomberg was hampered by the grandiosity of his thinking. There is a numbing gigantism to the mayor’s vision of the city, to all those gargantuan development plans he’s pursuing across all five boroughs.

• In The Brooklyn Rail, John Surico analyzes the mayor's labor legacy: Mike’s Labor Legacy

  Remarkably, after eight years of stalemate with the Giuliani administration, few complained. The unions gave in to City Hall, and their paychecks, at last, increased. Through back-and-forth mediation, the businessman had settled a lengthy bargaining war between city government and its workforce.

  But the peace didn’t last. The mayor’s second term would become a succession of labor breakdowns; between 2006 and 2010, contracts for the major public sector unions began to expire. In response, the unions would begin to distance themselves from the mayor. Perhaps Bloomberg, a leader originally presumed to be more labor-tolerant than Giuliani, was not so different from his predecessor after all.

• In Salon, David Sirota investigates Bloomberg's human rights efforts: Bloomberg’s no “Freedom Mayor”

  As mayor of the Big Apple, Bloomberg is a national political figure — and his positions supporting dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, backing gay marriage and defending the right of an Islamic center to be built in Lower Manhattan are certainly of national interest, laudable and pro-freedom. However, two of those three positions (Ai Weiwei and gay marriage) are hardly politically courageous in a socially progressive city like New York. More important, citing these three isolated examples to declare Bloomberg “The Freedom Mayor” who represents a “full-throated defense of liberty” is a propagandistic whitewashing of his larger anti-freedom record

I'm sure there's more to be written, and I'm sure I've missed some of the better work so far.

But one thing is for sure: after 12 years leading New York City, Michael Bloomberg has certainly had an interesting career, and seen the city through, as they say, "interesting times".

Hopefully whoever comes next will be worthy of the next steps in the path.

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Games

My wife mentioned to me that I've not been gaming much recently.

It's true.

Although it hasn't been quite this long: Oldest Gaming Tokens Found in Turkey.

Found in a burial at Başur Höyük, a 820- by 492-foot mound near Siirt in southeast Turkey, the elaborate pieces consist of 49 small stones sculpted in different shapes and painted in green, red, blue, black and white.

All I can say is, those would make great meeples for my Agricola games!

I've not been watching much sports on T.V., though that will probably soon change. For one thing, the N.F.L. season begins in a few weeks, so there will be plenty of 49ers games to watch, as well as a few Raiders games to watch (and more to listen to on the radio).

For another thing, the U.S. Men's National Team is rocking, and the fans are nearing delerious ecstasy, producing articles like The Great Strike Hope: Is Jozy Altidore the first great goal scorer in U.S. soccer history?

it was Altidore's first strike that signaled something different was afoot. With the United States down a goal in the 59th minute, winger Fabian Johnson dinked a shallow pass into the box for Altidore to run onto. Well-marked by a defender, Altidore settled the ball with his right boot and, with his left, instantly whipped the ball across the goal and into the net.

All U.S. soccer fans (14 of us, counting me) are now waiting eagerly for the September 6th and September 10th matches with Costa Rica and Mexico, hoping to see the U.S. cement their World Cup bid for Brazil.

Meanwhile, in soccer with a bit more money behind it, NBC Sports has announced the schedule and format for their bold move to cover the English Premier League: WATCH: Premier League TV Schedule for opening weekend

Excitement levels are through the roof across the world as the 2013-14 PL season promises to be the most exciting in the league’s history.

And you can watch every single second of every single game live via NBC Sports Group platforms.

It's exciting, but note that those times are Eastern Time, so I'll need to be particularly motivated to catch , say, that Fulham v. Arsenal match in order to arrange to have the tube on at 4:45 A.M. Saturday morning my time.

Meanwhile, in news of another World Cup, Dana Mackenzie updates his results for his entry in the Prediction Contest in the FIDE World Chess Cup 2013. Go go Hikaru Nakamura!!

Back to gaming more close to home. It's been 9 months since we picked up any new board games. We loved Ora et Labora, but Trajan didn't seem to have much staying power. My mother-in-law will be here in a few months for a moderate-length stay, so it's time to start planning.

Here are 5 games on my list; knowing that I like games such as Puerto Rico, Agricola, Ora et Labora, and Caylus, what do you think about these:

• Castles of Burgundy

  The game is set in the Burgundy region of High Medieval France. Each player takes on the role of an aristocrat, originally controlling a small princedom. While playing they aim to build settlements and powerful castles, practice trade along the river, exploit silver mines, and use the knowledge of travellers.

• Terra Mystica

  Terra Mystica is a game with very little luck that rewards strategic planning. Each player governs one of the 14 groups. With subtlety and craft, the player must attempt to rule as great an area as possible and to develop that group's skills. There are also four religious cults in which you can progress. To do all that, each group has special skills and abilities.

• Mage Knight

  The Mage Knight board game puts you in control of one of four powerful Mage Knights as you explore (and conquer) a corner of the Mage Knight universe under the control of the Atlantean Empire. Build your army, fill your deck with powerful spells and actions, explore caves and dungeons, and eventually conquer powerful cities controlled by this once-great faction! In competitive scenarios, opposing players may be powerful allies, but only one will be able to claim the land as their own. In coöperative scenarios, the players win or lose as a group. Solo rules are also included.

  Combining elements of RPGs, deckbuilding, and traditional board games the Mage Knight board game captures the rich history of the Mage Knight universe in a self-contained gaming experience.

• Troyes

  In Troyes, recreate four centuries of history of this famous city of the Champagne region of France. Each player manages their segment of the population (represented by a horde of dice) and their hand of cards, which represent the three primary domains of the city: religious, military, and civil. Players can also offer cash to their opponents' populace in order to get a little moonlighting out of them—anything for more fame!

• Lords of Waterdeep

  In Lords of Waterdeep, a strategy board game for 2-5 players, you take on the role of one of the masked Lords of Waterdeep, secret rulers of the city. Through your agents, you recruit adventurers to go on quests on your behalf, earning rewards and increasing your influence over the city. Expand the city by purchasing new buildings that open up new actions on the board, and hinder – or help – the other lords by playing Intrigue cards to enact your carefully laid plans.

I'm thinking that both Castles of Burgundy and Terra Mystica look good. Any opinions?

And, as long as I'm casting about for ideas, I have to confess that Dragon's Dogma just didn't quite grab me. The pawns are fascinating, but I don't quite grasp what's going on with them. I don't think it's a bad game, it just didn't work for me.

Unfortunately, so many of the new games are online MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and Dragon's Crown.

I looked a little bit at Tales of Xillia.

I've also been looking quite a bit at Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch.

It would be nice to get a game that my grand-daughter and I would enjoy playing together, and either of these looks possible.

I'm leaning toward Ni No Kuni. What do you think, Ni No Kuni or Tales of Xillia?

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