Ensign Rod index

Years ago, i wrote a seven part set of very short related stories. Part zero was rejected. The publisher wanted action, not set up. Part one was published to a collection of these stories. Later, this collection was dropped from the Internet. The goal was about 1,000 characters per story. My goal was to get as much plot as i could in that short space. I hadn't yet read any of Kathy's helpful Slash the Word Count hints. https://kathysteinemann.com/Musings/word-count-main/ 
Please enjoy Ensign Rod, the micro-story.

https://predelusional.blogspot.com/2008/06/rod-part-zero-of-six.html
https://predelusional.blogspot.com/2008/06/rod-part-one-of-six-battle.html
https://predelusional.blogspot.com/2008/06/rod-part-two-of-six-adrift.html
https://predelusional.blogspot.com/2008/06/rod-part-three-of-six-winders.html
https://predelusional.blogspot.com/2008/06/rod-part-four-of-six-historian.html
https://predelusional.blogspot.com/2008/06/rod-part-five-of-six-its-tie.html
https://predelusional.blogspot.com/2008/06/rod-part-six-of-six-coffee.html

The golang tutorials

 I started learning Google's computer language "go" (also called golang, likely due to how easy it is to search for "go" in Google) about three years ago. I run Linux, so I downloaded "go" and started the tutorials. I think i got pretty far into it because i wrote a couple of the benchmarks i've written in other languages: c, fortran, perl, java, guile (scheme), php. These are the matrix multiply and the prime number sieve. It took a while, but i found the "go" sources on my system. They even work.

However, i had upgraded my Linux operating system to Linux Mint 19 (Mint is derived from Ubuntu, which is derived from Debian). I needed "go" again, so i installed it from the repository. Really easy. I got go version 1.10. The current version is 1.16.

I started the tutorials again, thinking i'd breeze through them, just as a refresher. However, bits from the tutorial stopped working pretty quickly. I did a bunch of Google searches. Frankly, it was frustrating. Eventually, concentrating on this one problem all day, i stumbled across something that suggested that the command "go mod tidy" was introduced in go version 1.14. I told the Linux package manager to remove go, downloaded the version 1.16 tarball and installed it.

That's what i get for trying to learn a new fast changing language. Hopefully, i'll use it often enough that i won't have to go through the tutorial again. At least my benchmarks still work.

JOKER

One of the things i'd like to find out from a movie review is if i'll like the movie, but if at all possible, without learning the entire plot with nuances. And that's what is attempted here with Joker.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7286456/

Let me be clear. There's a pandemic, so i'm not saying you should go out and see this. I'm also not saying you should rent it or stream it. Be safe. But read on to see if you're wasting your time/money.

The 2019 movie, Joker, is an origin story for the (primarily) DC's Batman villain - The Joker. As a comics fan, i'm generally disappointed in movies that do origin stories. As a classic example, Marvel Comic's Spider-Man suffers no less than three quick origin movies, two which are minor changes from the original comics origin, and the third which resets Spider-Man's character who should be about 60 years old now to some time in high school, with no rhyme or reason. That Marvel's characters generally age adds realism to their characters. That Marvel sometimes loses control and by default allows a rehash of the same story repeatedly is disappointing.

The Batman character's story has changed dramatically in various iterations. The 60's TV Batman played by Adam West is a campy show that doesn't take itself too seriously, whereas the Dark Knight gets "why so serious?", from the villain, The Joker. Is this the same Joker as in this 2019 movie? Maybe. That the Dark Knight is so different suggests an excuse for the Batman Begins origin. Fortunately, that movie also has what the new Batman ends up doing, facing a villain, character growth, and so on. Not bad.

You'll like Joker if realism is your thing. And yet, it's easy to imagine that a Joker story could venture into horror, with attendant paranormal activity. But there's none of that here. Joker's insanity is based on real mental conditions. The only horror sort of activity is that it's not at all clear what he's going to do next. In fact, it's not always clear if what has been shown is what the character actually did or what the character imagined. The plot is so good, script is so good, the acting is so good, the photography is so good, the situations are so good, that the result may be a little too close to home for many. Maybe you know someone with a similar diagnosis.

It turns out that i liked it. Here's what i liked about it. With an origin with this kind of depth and realism, it should be easier to write additional excellent stories. It should be easy to add incidents to the base origin that are compatible with the existing story, and hints of these can be added to ongoing encounters with the hero or heros. The hero learns about the character and takes it into account, allowing the hero to be more heroic, and, for example, not simply a guy who spends his nights beating up people with his bare hands. The hero has goals. The villain has goals. They both need to have some complexity if your going to have very many stories with them.

Resume

I've never rejected anyone on the basis of their resume.

First, especially my early resumes were retyped by the agency, and all sorts of typos were introduced, especially in acronyms. I'd be in an interview, and they'd ask me what one of these means. I've never seen this resume. Often, when i'd told them stories about what the resume was supposed to say and what the job was really about, they made me an offer.

Second, only about one in three candidates actually show up for their interviews. After about ten who actually show up, we get someone who's English is so bad, we can't tell if they know what they're doing or not, even after talking for an hour. I'm thinking (optimistically) that this is someone i could train. We get together and decide that this would, in  fact, be someone we'd have to talk to from time to time, and a rejection is made.

We finally get a competent candidate who accepts our offer. They show up and start working, but they go out to lunch and never return. I'm starting to think that the job wasn't so hot either.

Popups

I've been looking for stuff on the Internet. Gasp. Using a search engine. I'm going to many, many sites i don't usually go to. A ton of them have this annoying and pointless behavior. As the page is loading, i start reading it. I get about two sentences, tops into it. At that point, the entire content of the page is blocked by a popup. Is it an ad? Not exactly. It's a "click here to subscribe to our email list" or some equivalent. But two sentences into their content is not nearly enough for me to decide if it's at all interesting. So this is pointless. By the time i finish reading the content, i should have a better view on it. If i don't get there, the answer is likely "no" anyway. So, why not have a form, not in a popup, but at the bottom of the page, on the page itself? That's the right time. I won't have to dismiss it if i don't want to sign up. Don't get me wrong. I like spam. At least, i like spam if it's the kind of spam i like.

Steven Pinker and the Ivy League School

I nearly didn't read this article, because i haven't read Deresiewicz’s article. And, Deresiewicz’s article doesn't sound like a good use of time. I also haven't seen the movie Love Story, probably for the same reason that i haven't watched Titanic, despite owning a copy (not entirely my fault). But i may have to watch Love Story, since the wiki plot synopsis doesn't seem to have enlightened me enough. I'm likely missing details of the plot.

But, it's a good article. I'm glad i read it. And, it matches my experience working for four Universities, which includes Harvard, two state schools, and a selective university (i have additional experience at another selective university and a state school, and they match prior experience, more or less). Yes, i admit, i don't really want to spend time reading an article that doesn't support my biases.

I could have applied to go to Harvard. I considered MIT enough to order a course catalog. But they didn't look like a good deal, in fact, they seemed to offer less than the state school, and in ways consistent with this article. It seemed obvious, but in retrospect i spent great gobs of time on it. At the time, MIT was considered a great graduate school.

The "teach you how to think" line was in vogue where i went to school. No one seemed to have any idea how to do it, or measure the effectiveness of any ideas that might come up. That seems to be changing. But in any case, they did, for the most part, make an attempt to teach stuff one might need. And above all, they came up with a way to get the students to demonstrate competence. This last bit is important. Most schools don't do this (I'm not aware of another that does). And yet, it's why i went to school.

I love this: "Perhaps I am emblematic of everything that is wrong with elite American education, but I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul." Not many would have the courage to say something like that. But the emperor doesn't have any clothes. And it turns out that courage is something that is important for both student and teacher to have. Perhaps it should be taught. In any case, it should be easier than teaching "building a self".

His list of stuff students should learn is very good. Perhaps it should start in middle school, dumbing down nothing, and including the bits under "a liberal education". And the goals should be introduced even earlier. The idea that i'd ever "appreciate that people who disagree with me are not stupid or evil" is going to be hard to swallow. I've seen people who are obviously evil who act like they're stupid. While i try not to go off the deep end on conspiracy theories, Watergate really did happen. And, i think, the goal is in conflict with knowing how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, etc.

At the end of the article there is a conclusion. Should Harvard adopt merit based admissions? Perhaps they could do it as a pilot project. Perhaps they've already got pilot project statistics, and they could go with the results. Perhaps they could look to see if someone else has already done this experiment, and go with the results. In summary, these ideas are Run an experiment, look at data you already have, and learn from others. As these are skills that Harvard should be teaching their students, perhaps they could simply turn these ideas into student projects, then evaluate the projects and use the results.

Management and The Art of War

In Sun Tzu's The Art Of War, one of the lessons is that a good strategy involves teaching your staff good tactics, then using the good tactics to advantage. So, today's Harvard B school management, with its emphasis on how much money is made each quarter, and stupid slogans totally misses the point. Following this plan dooms your business to slow death. Toyota seems to have noticed this. Toyota replaces robots with humans. this problem is not confined to the automotive industry.

Readers of this blog may have noticed that there is a bias towards education. So, let's say that you're a leader of a major organization, involving multiple technologies. How do you educate your staff? You could simply hire college graduates. But the pool of graduates is getting smaller. College costs too much except for those lucky enough to be born into wealth. The middle class is becoming part of the poor. It's not enough. And besides, college doesn't teach people how to make your business work. They still need to learn that on the job. Who do they learn it from? Well, they need to learn it from people already doing the job. But doing this means that your business will tend to simply learn how the business operates, not how it should operate. You can get some more input from contractors. After all, these people very likely have worked for your competition. And even if they aren’t currently as good as you are, they have something to teach you, even if it is by obvious bad example. Contractors are currently treated as second class staff. This is not the way to build a smoothly working organization. It’s a way to alienate part of your staff. It was my opinion that engineers should spend at least some of their time on the factory floor figuring out how to make things work easier, faster and safer. And by engineers, i mean everyone who could learn something for the organization.

In order to create strategy that incorporates good tactics, management must learn all the best tactics. But even if the CEO is already an engineer, that doesn't mean (s)he knows all kinds of engineering, or computer science, or networking, or communications security, or telephony, or building design, or logistics, or finances, or marketing and so on. How does one do it? Well, IMO, the CEO should have depth in at least something, but likely many such things. But also, the CEO should have a skills team covering all bases that can provide advice. And the CEO has to know the language of all the skill team members so that the advice can be evaluated. I'm not saying that the CEO should micromanage the whole system. I'm saying that the CEO should be able to build and tune strategy that allows the whole company to work efficiently. One of the things that management of larger companies currently does is build fiefdoms or silos that insulate groups from different disciplines making communication and cooperation between groups slow, difficult, unresponsive and otherwise dysfunctional. These structures build in inflexibility, and one hears "that's not the way we've always done things" (a phrase that is nearly always something that is demonstrably a lie).

Edmunds on fuel economy

Edmunds has done a fairly complete set of tests of fuel economy in a sort of Myth Busters way. They mostly match my own results.

I use cruise control aggressively, if i have it. That is, i use if even if it only marginally makes sense. That's because it gives me 4% to 5% fuel economy at the same speed. And, it generally reduces my workload.

I consistently get 17% better fuel economy for going 62 MPH rather than 70 MPH. Why 70? Michigan's highest speed limit is 70. I try very hard to not speed. Why 62 MPH? My speedometer also shows KPH, so there's a handy reference - 100 KPH. Naturally, Edmunds gets a higher percent improvement. Often overlooked is that driving slower is safer. We tend to increase our risk to some threshold. I try to minimize my risk unless there's some corresponding benefit. Usually there isn't.

Drafting: I've tried drafting manually. I found that drafting a truck fairly got me worse fuel economy than driving at the same speed. And, driving at the same speed with cruise control is better yet. Drafting is risky, and pointless, so i don't do it. This test was done on a cross country trip, covering about 400 miles each. Wind and terrain were similar. My guess is this. Constant speed changes, through brakes or engine drag, kill fuel economy. Engine drag is the same as the brakes.

Roof luggage. I lost between 5% and 10% for putting roof luggage on my car. Cruise control was used at the same speed on the same course for thousands of miles. My luggage carrier at least looks fairly aerodynamically efficient. The way i look at it is that you put roof luggage up there if you need it. I'd love to be able to drag a trailer. It would be better than driving a pickup and paying the cost all the time.

A/C. I've not done this test. I'm not into noise, so i don't drive with the windows open on the highway. I've read articles about just this topic. The answer seems to depend on the details; such has speed, the kind of car, and so on. It's not a huge difference anyway.

Tire pressure. I underinflated the tires on my car. It did not change my fuel economy in any measureable way. I overinflated my tires, and again, no change. But i view it as a safety issue. For at least one of my historic cars over inflation leads to over steering.

Manual transmissions. I've heard otherwise, but my tests show that manual transmissions save you at least 5% in fuel economy over automatics. I'm not a gear head who likes to shift gears. What i'd like is a series hybrid. That is, and electric transmission. With no differential, we'd get an additional 7% to 15%. With no engine drag, we might get another 20%. There shouldn't have to be any gears, so there's smooth acceleration always. It should last longer than hydromechanical automatic transmissions. It should have redundancy that will get you home even if a wheel can't be powered. It should be cheaper to replace if it does fail.

My conclusions match too. The main issue is psychological. I used to have an hour commute to work. Driving faster could save me, at most, about five minutes. But since there were traffic slowdowns, it was impossible to measure five minutes. Psychologically, it's difficult to let everyone pass you. This is the biggest hurdle. But i can use the cruise control much more often at 62 MPH than at even 65 MPH. Everyone else has to pass me. I have the right of way. It's worth something.

Edmunds fuel economy tests

technology

I have a land line for a phone. I often get messages on my answering machine where the automated message machine gets the complete message onto my answering machine. Today i got "Press 2". That's an entire message. I also got "Press star now to repeat this message". These were different voices, so presumably, different senders. Total fail.

For a list of the ways that technology has failed to improve our lives, please press 1.

Caffeine: last part with any luck

Last May, my left shoulder started hurting really bad. I recognized the symptoms. I had them in 2001, though in my right shoulder. Back then, i noticed that it didn't hurt quite so much on Sunday, especially Sunday afternoon. What did i know about Sunday? Well, that's when i'd get a headache from caffeine withdrawal if i'd had too much that week.

I never acquired the taste for coffee, but i can drink Mt. Dew in the morning. Mt. Dew is also an acquired taste, especially in the morning. It's not as vile as beer in the morning, though pretty close. I'd get withdrawal headaches on Sunday because i don't drink soda at home, just at work. So, the obvious experiment was to switch to Sprite, which has no caffeine. After two weeks, there were two things that were obvious. First, there was a clear connection. My shoulder pain had backed off considerably. I still had restricted motion. But it wasn't getting worse.

The second observation was unexpected. It turns out that i don't really like Sprite. So, i switched to water, and i ended up consuming about a half-gallon every day. A side effect of this switch was that i lost 37 pounds (17 kg). That's because water has about 700 fewer calories than Sprite or Mt. Dew in the quantities i consume. This lost weight wasn't hard to find. I don't remember, maybe it was under the bed.

In any case, this started in February 2001. Just in case i wasn't convinced, in March 2001, i went on a job interview. They offered me a cup of coffee. Again, i don't drink coffee. But on interviews, i seem to lose about 50 IQ points. It's amazing i ever get hired. It was one of those small Styrofoam cups. I drank it. My shoulder hurt like hell for four days. I still reach for things with my left hand, even though now that's the shoulder that hurts. The pain held pretty steady until the month of October. Then the pain ramped down to zero, and my restricted motion became unrestricted. But fast forward to now. This is month nine. Every day, my left shoulder's pain noticeably decreases and the range of motion increases. I fully expect to be totally cured by month’s end. That is, if i don't fall off the wagon. It really hurts to fall off the wagon.

Engines Under Ursus, SciFi podcast review

I've been listening to Engines Under Ursus, by Marin Brady. I've just finished the 26 episodes i had downloaded. There are at least two more. But my ancient 32 bit computer died, more or less. That's another story. This more modern machine i'm using is in a sort of zombie mode, booted from thumb drive, while it gets a brain transplant. Apparently, Marin has written a bunch of short stories. He says he wrote Engines, sent it to Tor, and got something unintelligible back. I don't usually write reviews before i've finished them, but this is an exception. If Tor rejected this piece, it's a mistake on their part.

I've heard Scott Sigler's audio for Ancestor, Infection (now called Infected), Earth Core, and The Rookie. I mention this for two reasons. First, i've had ear buds in my ears for about ten years now. And second, to compare experiences. Scott has great stories, uses voices for the parts, has some quirky reading. I couldn't get over how he'd mispronounce words sometimes. Easy words. He wrote the book, and the words are used right, but...

Martin Brady has some sort of accent. Maybe it's Irish. Whatever. He has multiple voices, and many don't have an Irish accent. They're quite consistent. While many actors, including voice actors, over act, Martin has a more subdued underacting style. It's not a monotone. I can only call it deliberate. And he takes the performance an extra step. He adds pod-safe music to each episode. The music is typically at the end of the episode. Frankly, i wasn't much interested in it. That is, until episode 19. I no longer have two hours of driving commute per day. So it's more unusual now to drive while listening. But for episode 19, i was. And i listened to the music because i didn't want to fiddle with the mp3 player. Holy shit. I practically had a nose bleed, it was so good. I don't even get nose bleeds. And there are lines and bits from the song that are in the episode. So now, i need to go back and listen to everything. So, while Scott moved the field forward by using audio books to get the word out (and it seems to be at least part of what's really working for him), Martin has added a dimension to audio story telling. The audio version is going to be, in my opinion, better than the printed version. I've had to go back and listen to the song, uhm, repeatedly. Apparently, Rockbox (open source firmware for my Sansa and other mp3 players) has a feature called "bookmarks". I figured out how to use them, and it has let me conveniently play this piece at will. I really hope Martin has high quality wav files so that his finished product can be released in higher quality mp3s, OGG, or FLACC files eventually. The piece deserves it. I'd buy it.

What about the story? Well, at first, i had no idea what to make of it. I mean for at least ten or fifteen episodes. For some books, at this point i'd stall, and either drop it, or pick it up later, often years later. But this was different. It was something like the movie Brazil (my favorite movie, BTW). Engines seems to be going somewhere. But in Brazil, even after watching the movie several times, and reading the screen play, i still have no idea where it's going, or for that matter, what happened. There's an unpredictability in Engines that i like. When i finished episode 26, i noticed that episodes 24 and 26 were on my player. Rockbox has a feature where you can delete a track before you've finished listening to it, if you're near the end. I must have listened to episode 25 out of order. I think it was in the low 20's. I recall wondering what Martin was up to. Martin wasn't up to anything. Sometimes authors move stuff around. But here, i did it, and it didn't matter as much as you'd expect. The story isn't over, but it's looking like a real winner.

Ursus is a planet other than Earth. There are aliens. Humans are aliens elsewhere. There are androids, and lots of tech stuff. It's not hard science fiction. But the science rules broken wouldn't completely change the story if they weren't, at least not so far. The story is about the story. I'd say more, but at this point, you should have all you need to decide if you want to read it. I wouldn't have written this review if i didn't like it.

What's your biggest weakness?

Interviewer: What is your biggest weakness?
Candidate: I'm too honest.
Interviewer: I don't think that's a weakness.
Candidate: I don't care what you think.

For the most part, i don't like most interview questions. Interview quizzes are terrible. A good question i heard in an interview was this:

What are your favorite tools?

This question draws out anecdotes and situations. The tools show diversity of activity, passion for the job, and can be genuinely informative. It can start a conversation. You don't really want a monologue. It can get you close to what should really happen in an interview. If the interviewer isn't competent, then the interviewer can't tell if the candidate is competent. The best interviews happen between two competent people. At the end of the interview, interviewers must ask themself this question: "Would I like to hang out with this person." Studies show that many companies have pockets of really good employees.
I said that i don't like most interview questions. I come away thinking, "How could they be so stupid?" (And, "do i really want to work there?") But for a long time, i wondered what the interviewer should ask. I give them (and myself) a bit of a break now.

It takes about two weeks to come up with a really good extemporaneous comment. -- Mark Twain

Sam was a pretty smart dude. If it took him two weeks, then we all deserve a break.

Passwords

I recommend making up a sentence. Start from a movie or book. Summarize an idea. Then maybe substitute a number for a letter. o, q => 0, i, l =>1, 4 => #, or whatever. Let's say you want to make up an 8 character password. You saw the first movie Thor. An original quote is this:

"Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor."

That's 14 words. Maybe "The worthy holding this hammer have the power of Thor". That's 10. Maybe "The power of Thor to the worthy". That's 7. But you heard it in the first movie. So add a 1. It's 1, so jam it in at the beginning. 1tpotttw. Of course, don't use this example. Use "The Password Of Thor To The Worthy One" instead.

So, you have to change passwords every month. And you can't remember which of your passwords is current. You could write "Thor" on a Post It note, and put it on your monitor. You can keep a running list of all your recent passwords on your monitor, in case you failed to change one of them. You've seen other movies, right?

lastpass.com

I'm not a troglodyte. I've used a password manager. Can you say "Single point of failure"? Many companies have password length restrictions, adding together the restrictions of numerous operating systems.

I wrote a password generator once. It tried hard to make up memorable passwords. They weren't that memorable. And, it turned out that it used the date/time to the second as a random number seed. What could go wrong? Well, if one can guess when a password might have been generated to within a year, that's only about 31,536,000 passwords to check. That's nothing for a computer.

Fire or Ice

The question was When is the end of the world?

Robert Frost had it right.

In five billion years or so, the Sun will grow into a Red Giant. Its diameter will be about the size of the Earth's orbit. Earth either is engulfed and vaporized, or raises a tide behind itself on the Sun, which removes orbital energy from the Earth, causing it to spiral into the sun, where it is engulfed and vaporized.

However, we're here. We already understand physics enough to know how to move the Earth's orbit out from the Sun. Essentially we steal orbital energy from Jupiter using big asteroid flybys of both planets. At this point, it's an engineering project. A big engineering project that takes millions of years. However, it's feasible, and would be worth doing. After the Sun's Red Giant phase, it shrinks to about the size of the Earth, and though it's really hot, its much smaller size means that it emits less total energy. We reverse the process, and move the Earth into a much smaller orbit for maximum comfort. Eventually the Sun cools. The Earth freezes. But it's ten billion years later, at least.

Robert Frost's Fire and Ice poem says it might happen either way. In his The Road Not Taken poem, he says "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood". The way that the Earth ends is our choice. Fire or Ice. Which do you want?

A moving experience

When i was in high school, one of my class mates said that he'd only been out of town once. That's when he was born. And that's because the town has no hospital. At the time, the idea that moving is anathema was a new idea. I didn't understand it. But it's much more common than my own history. I've moved 17 times since college. In fact, you can trace the movement of humans out of Africa and out the coast of India by using DNA. You call it movement, or migration. But it is really expansion. The descendants of people who moved out of Africa maybe fifty or seventy thousand years ago are still there. You sample their DNA to find out how long ago it was. How many generations stayed where they were for that long? Then we have a story like this:

A moving experience.

Something odd

What if we discovered something odd by accident. If boys between the ages of 9 and 13 are starved (not to death, just reduced food intake), then not only do they do better, but so do their children (if any) and their grandchildren (if any).... In fact, three generations have one quarter the chance of death by heart attack. And, what if we had a single payer health system (like Austrailia), so that effectively, everyone pays for health issues, not just the victim. And, let's say that heart attacks are painful to have, and incredibly expensive to treat. Wouldn't it make sense to starve boys between the ages of 9 and 13? Wouldn't it be the ethical imperitive? How would one go about explaining it to Americans?

Is there anything to this? Here's the podcast.Radiolab

Movies

I read this bit about ants and immediately thought of how people pick movies.

Movies are a great example. People see the trailers, and either watch or not. The first people who see the real movie talk about it. But movie promoters talk up a movie if the first week went well. But the first week's box office has to do with people who went because they liked the trailer. There's no information about the actual movie. And critics are no help. They either think their job is to criticize it, tell you if they liked it, or just tell you everything that could possibly be of interest in it. Their job is really to tell you enough about the movie so you can decide if you might like it or not, but not give so much away to ruin it. It's not an easy job, and few have succeeded. So we go to movies we don't like. In fact, one time, i went to the theater and watched the wrong movie. It turned out to be the better choice. And that's what i think about when we're talking about ants. Remember, there are way more ants than uncles.

Google Reader Goes Away

As you may know, Google Reader is set to disappear on July 1st. I (finally) transferred my subscriptions. It took longer than i expected, and transferred less than i'd hoped. Reader says you can export your date via Takeout. You get to save your stuff to your local hard disk. I downloaded everything, which gives you a .zip archive. I unzipped the zip (there's an unzip command line in Linux, but it's probably easy on any platform).

Historically, i ran Sage in Firefox as a reader. When Google Reader came around, I switched to it so that I could continue where i left off on multiple machines. With Google Reader gone, i've switched back. The directions found by searching the Internet yielded lots of false leads. What works is to bring up Firefox and Sage, in the options menu (on the left), import OPML, browse to the .xml file in the stuff you downloaded and unzipped. What you get is the subscriptions. It didn't have the stuff that's marked as read/unread, however.

Sage has changed since I last used it. It looks better. But it's still a basically simple blog reader. Since I really mainly use one machine, i think i'm going to like it better than Google Reader. For one, it either seemed impossible, or was impossible to mark something as unread that i might have started but didn't finish, or simply wanted to reread.

Sage shows the articles in the browser, just like they'd appear on the original blog. That's because you're looking at the original blog. Google Reader reformatted stuff. This was OK sometimes, but not always. And though you could click to see it in the original form, you had to do that in order to see if you were missing anything. Why not always look at the original? And, some blogs would make a big deal of how their work was copyrighted, and prohibited derivative work. Google Reader was clearly making a derivative work. And, this could hurt the original blog. That's because Google Reader didn't do any advertising for the original author - though they did do some for themselves.

How far can the Sun be seen?

How far away from the Sun can you just barely see the Sun (using Wikipedia)? The Sun is magnitude -26.74 (from Wikipedia). The dimmest stars one can see with the naked eye are approximately magnitude 6. The Sun would have to be |-26.74 - (6)| = 32.76 magnitudes dimmer. The formula for magnitudes is x^5 = 100, x = 100^(1/5), where x is the multiplier to get from one magnitude to the next. The factor dimmer that Sun must be is x^32.76=12,705,741,052,085 (more or less). Light gets dimmer with the square of the distance. Since the Sun is at one AU (x^32.76)^(1/2)=3,564,511 AU is the distance where you can just barely see the Sun. How far is that? 1 AU = 149,597,870,700 meters, exactly. 3,564,511 AU * 149,597,870,700 m/AU = 533,243,305,691,677,319 meters. 1 light-year = 9460730472580800 metres (exactly). 533,243,305,691,677,319 m / 9.4607×10^15 m/LY = 56.363861885414590497131460401964 light years. (OK, so that's more digits than we need). If you were 56.364 Light Years away, you'd be just barely able to see the Sun.

Garnet

Never saw the web magazine The Shallot before. Of particular note is the announcement of a new programming language: Garnet. This is the very first pure non-functional language. Garnet is related to Ruby, only not really.