The Kudzu Files

Unix Geek Humor

It's been a long day. But this is funny. At least if you're a Unix geek.

h/t to Dave.

Saturday Morning Walking

My Saturday morning walks are usually less hurried that my weekday walks, and often longer. This morning I decided to take my camera along and see if anything inspired me. I took a different route, past one of the few remaining undeveloped pieces of land in my small 'burb. I had noticed this fence before, it seems out of place in a town that seems to consist of endless new developments featuring French Provincial or Tuscan architecture, but there it was alongside a small subdivision:

I had this picture in mind when I saw took this picture. The connection between the two is mainly in my mind, although both do consist of leaves, and small branch, and a tree trunk. Beyond that... it's mainly creativity theft from Loren.

A little further along was the undeveloped property. I decided to slip around the gate and wander through it, and found a small pond with this patient fisherman (I have no quarrel with them when they're not in my goldfish pond!)"

These berries look like serviceberry, but the leaves are different. More investigation to follow...

The last picture I took before the camera batteries failed was this goldenrod. When I noticed the gold against the blue of the morning sky, I had to take the shot. But because of the batteries I only got one chance.

Interview With Clyde Tombaugh

A Kudzufiles exclusive - you won't see this anywhere else. Following the news that Pluto had been demoted, I interviewed Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of the ninth planet, which we now know he didn't discover.

KF: Mr. Tombaugh, I'm sure you've heard by now that the International Astronomical Union has decided that Pluto, which you discovered in 1930, is not a planet after all, but is just a "dwarf planet". How does that make you feel?

CT: Well, I'm sure they had their reasons. I'm sure they gave the matter very serious deliberation, before deciding they way they did.

KF: Would you have preferred that instead of removing Pluto's status as a planet, the IAU had instead decided to add Ceres, Charon, and 2003UB₃₁₃ as planets?

CT: Well, Ceres is only half the size of Pluto; I'm not sure it should have been inlcuded. And Charon revolves around Pluto, how could it be a planet? 2003UB₃₁₃, that's what messed up the whole thing. Pluto was fine, sitting out past Neptune, most of the time anyway, not bothering anybody. It gave a sense of closure, the period at the end of the solar system. Now what? We're supposed to see Neptune as the last stop on the solar trolley? It just doesn't seem proper. I found Pluto because calculations showed that Neptune was being influenced by something further out!

KF: But astronomers now say that those calculations were in error, because the mass of Neptune was incorrect. Voyager 2 showed us that. Using the correct mass for Neptune, there are no orbital disturbances.

CT: They can say that. But if it was an error, how did I find an orbiting object right where it should have been? What are the chances that it was just coincidentally where it was? Percival Lowell was a pretty smart man, and he nailed it's position.

KF: Well, he expected it to be much bigger.

CT: Bigger, schmigger, It was there, man!

KF: Your wife Patricia said today that if you were still alive, you would understand and accept what they did.

CT: Patricia didn't sit up all those nights looking at photographic plates! DO YOU KNOW HOW COLD IT CAN BE IN FLAGSTAFF IN FEBRUARY, AT NIGHT??

KF: She said "Clyde would have said, 'Science is a progressive thing and if you're going to be a scientist and put your neck out, you're apt to have it bitten upon'"

CT: Back and forth, back and forth, over and over. None of these little jerks were there. What the hell do they know? Most of them never even look through a telescope, just sit in front of computers in nice warm rooms. Pluto was mine!

KF: You seem upset by all this.

CT: Well how would Newton feel if somebody just decided gravity didn't exist? This was what I was known for. Nobody cares about asteroids, and that's basically what they're saying Pluto is. I found fourteen asteroids, does anybody remember me for that? No! Pluto. Pluto was what I did. Now what will they say on Wikipedia? That Clyde Tombaugh discovered fifteen asteroids? Did I mention it was cold? Back and forth, over and over?

KF: Do you have any final thoughts?

CT: Damn that 2003UB₃₁₃.

Terror In Florida Waters

You know when you're at the beach in Florida, to watch out for sharks. In the Everglades, in some lakes and ponds, you know to watch out for alligators. When you're on the Suwanee River, did you know to watch out for leaping sturgeon? The National Geographic reports that sturgeon are jumping out of the water, and in some cases colliding with boats and jet skis, in some cases injuring people. It sounds funny, until you realize that an adult sturgeon can be 8 feet long (maybe even bigger!), weigh 200 pounds, and leap 6 feet out of the water. And they have these armor plates along their back. But at least we know the incidents are accidental:

"These are random collisions … there is no parallel to an attack," said Jerry Krummrich, a freshwater fishery biologist with the Florida Wildlife Commission in Lake City."

And Alan Huff, a research administrator with the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute , said "We do know that they're not doing anything to intentionally harm boaters, they're one of the more mellow, placid fish out there. They just like to jump."

OK, how do they know this? Do they somehow communicate with the fish? I mean, how do they know this isn't some Gaia-inspired retaliation for caviar? Sure they're primitive fish, but they may have long memories.

So let's recap - in a river in Florida, giant armored fish are hurling themselves at boats and boaters. I got attacked by an enraged blue jay once, I would have to say this sounds much, much worse.

Flying Spaghetti Monster Caught On Film!

No doubt emboldened by the defeat of the Loony Wing of the Kansas Board Of Education, the Flying Spaghetti Monster was photographed in broad daylight recently:

(via Boing Boing)

Hummus

Here's a good recipe:

2 cans garbanzo beans, drained

1/2 cup Tahini

Juice of 2 lemons

1/2 teaspoon cumin

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 garlic cloves, pureed

Olive oil and paprika to taste

Mix all ingredients in a food processor.  Chill before serving.  I like to spread it on thinbread, cucumber clices, carrots, melba toast.

a tale of two people

This is a story of two people, two men whose paths have crossed mine.  One is my junior high school band director, in 1968.  After junior high, I rarely saw him until about 10 years ago, when he showed up at my older daughter's high school giving private trumpet lessons.  My daughter took lessons from him, and so we, for a time, renewed our contact.  Since then, I've occasionally seen him, but lost touch a couple of years ago.  A chance encounter with one of my old friends (and the finest sax player I ever knew) brought me news of my former band director, so I got his email address and contacted him.  This past Saturday afternoon, he showed up at my house, and we spent a great hour or so reliving the 9th grade band at Whitten Junior High.  I found out that was his first job out of college (he seemed so old at the time!), so we're not really that far apart in age, about 10 years.  He's one of those people who can carry on a conversation and make you feel great being on the receiving end.  Even though it had been nearly 40 years since we'd been teacher and student, he made me feel like the relationship had been constant. 

The other man is a former governor of Mississippi, who has no reason to know me other than that our paths have crossed several times in the past.  The first was a chance encounter on a Friday night in Walmart, when I looked up and saw the Governor of Mississippi, all alone, buying socks.  I greeted him, told him I liked the job he was doing.  A couple of years ago, I saw him at another local store, then at a Parade Of Homes tour;  the most recent was last week at a local restaurant.  Each time he's seen me, he shows instant recognition, greets me like we're good friends, seems genuinely pleased to see me.  He doesn't really know who I am, couldn't pull my name out if his life depended on it.  But his manner is so polished that I feel like he knows who I am.  It's that gift of a good politician, I suppose.

So what's my point?  That two people, one who knew me years ago (and has kept up through other people through the years, I discovered), and one who doesn't know me but acts like he does, make me feel the same way.  They make me feel included and valued.  It comes from two completely gifts, and I don't have either.  I wish I did.  Not many people do, and it's a good thing for the world that some have it.  It makes the world better for the rest of us, and helps balance out the grouchy old men.  Like me.

Another Quiet Passing

When I first encountered the internet, Usenet groups was what I encountered. My earliest Usenet posts date back to 1988, but that was really on the old Usenet network itself. But in 1992, I began using the internet, and found Usenet groups more easily available. In those days, Usenet was informative, helpful, fun. It stayed that way until sometime around 1998, when the World Wide Web thing began supplanting Usenet as a source of information, and also when many Usenet groups seemed to begin going downhill as the signal-to-ratio decreased, in some cases to static. But Usenet was still interesting at times, and thanks to Deja News, and later Google Groups, it was easy to hit from a web browser. Like this:

But last week, I noticed something was missing from the Google page:

"Groups" was gone, replaced by "Videos", Google's attempt to move in on Youtube I guess. Now to get to Groups, you have to click on "More":

Now, many people may not even notice, and most of those who do will probably say "doesn't matter to me". That's OK. I just wanted to be on record as saying I'll miss it.

Things I Discovered On The Interweb

As a means of communication, email is not such a great thing. Less than 6 in 10 email recipients correctly understand the meaning of the email they receive. Or the typical email user misunderstands over 40% of their received emails. Or something like that. Somewhere in there, anyway. That's what these people say. The reason is that it's difficult, through email, to build a "buffer of positive regard", an "interpersonal resonance of emotional expression". I think it's that context thing again. Without ancillary communication methods like body language, facial expressions, and tone, , we have problems embracing the context of the message. maybe if we used more icons, or animated gifs, stuff like that, we could include some digital context accessories.

I also discovered that the 21st century is making us miserable. Really. It's true because David Wong says so. Sadly, he makes some good points. Technology, the internet, iPods (or in my case, the Sandisk Sansa), let you build a wall to keep unwanted people at bay. Sort of. As I noted above, email lets us communicate without communicating. Blogs do the same thing, although Kudzu Files communicates with so few people that I think the damage has to be slight. We can build these elaborate characters around ourselves, depending on the relative anonymity of the internet to preserve only the most well-crafted parts of our persona. Which, of course, makes us utterly miserable. Also, we can use all this technology to indulge ourselves in the looniest of alternate realities and conspiracy theories. And we can listen to Coast To Coast AM and hear the looniest of our fellow loonies talk about their favorite delusions. (Did you know there is a hole in the Earth in Montana or Idaho somewhere, where the aliens fly in to and out of their secret underground base?) The only comfort I can find in all this is knowing that if you're reading this, then you're similarly entrapped by 21st century technology and are as miserable as me.

Late Stormy Afternoon

Thunder and lightning rolled all evening just south of us, but never actually moved over us.

In Which I Once Again Embark On A Ranger Rant

It's been 5 months since my last rant, I feel due for another one. What triggered this one? Well, Mark, for one, although he couldn't have anticipated it. Just an innocent post on a mailing list. But what really did it was this:

Ford Future Products Update, on autoweek.com.

Ford has already announced that the Ranger is dead after next year. Or at least, they're shutting down the only plant that makes them, in St. Paul. Maybe they'll start a Ranger cottage industry in western North Dakota. But I think not. So, no Ranger after 2007, apparently. So let's look at the Ford Future Products Update to see what's coming.

2007 - the Edge crossover; a re-engineered, re-styled Expedition. Wow! That gets what, 15 mpg? And a re-designed SportTrac.

2008 - a "reskinned" Focus. "Reskinned"? That sounds brutal. The Five Hundred "freshened". Didn't they just introduce that? How much freshening does a brand new model need? The next-generation Escape. I bet the gas mileage goes down. The Freestyle freshened. (sigh). The F250 and F350 redesigned.

2009 - The Fusion, the Crown Vic, the Explorer all get freshened. Changing out the pine scent for French vanilla? And the F150 gets re-engineered.

2010 - a new small sedan of some sort, maybe. A new cross-over of some sort, maybe. The Five Hundred gets French vanilla. The Mustang gets restyled. The way Ford thinks, they'll probably give us the Mustang II II.

WHERE THE HECK IS THE RANGER??????? Hey Ford, ever think that maybe the reason F150 sales are falling by bazillions of percent is because at $3.00+ a gallon for gas, maybe people don't want to drive these as much? Imagine if there was a smaller pickup truck, that got 29-30 miles per gallon, and maybe didn't need to tow 10,000 pounds - OK, so you give up that 2% of the market. What if you said "Hey, here's a truck that will haul what 98% of you haul, and gets the best gas mileage of any truck on the market"? Oh wait, you had that, and you killed it off. Never mind.

NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!!!!! MARS IS NOT COMING THIS SUMMER!!!

Got this in an email? Chris was the first of many who sent this to me.

The Red Planet is about to be spectacular!

This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the Last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.

The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in
the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification

Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye . Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m.

By the end of August when the two planets are closest, Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30a.m. That's pretty
convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history. So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow
progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month. Share this with your children and grandchildren.

NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN

There's only one problem. IT'S FRIGGIN' WRONG!!! For starters, the close approach it talks about happened in 2003. That part, at least, is accurate. It was the closest approach in 60,000 years. THREE FREAKING YEARS AGO!!!!! It did not, and will not, appear as large as the full moon. It was a very bright red star at that time (and again last summer when it had another close approach). But it was still 69 million kilometers away. If Mars appeared in our skies as large as the full moon, it would be the last thing we ever saw - the resulting gravitational effect of a body that large so close to the earth (one million kilometers or so) would first raise tides to unimaginable heights, and then gradually begin tearing the earth apart. Life as we know it would have ceased before that happened, and it would have been an unpleasant end. Very unpleasant.

The "as big as the full moon" was a misunderstanding of the original information - through a telescope at 75 power, Mars did appear about the same size as looking at the moon without a telescope. That's it. No huge red planet lurking in our skies like a deranged mutant Campbell's Tomato Soup blimp. In fact, this graphic shows the positions of Earth and Mars relative to the Sun now:

Not that Earth is on one side of the Sun, while Mars is way way way on the other side. Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun. Mars is about 160 million miles from the Sun. Allowing for the fact that they're not on exact opposite side, Earth and Mars are still about 250 million miles apart. That's a bunch more than 35 million! A bunch more!! So stop sending these freaking emails!!

Organic By The Gallon

Is organic milk available anywhere in gallon containers? Here, you can only find it in half-gallons. I've even gone by the local organic grocery to ask, and they say they can't get it in gallons. I found this article at gourmetretailer.com saying Whole Foods stores would stop carrying Horizon gallons in favor of their own brand. I don't know where Whole Foods stores are, but judging by the fact that it quotes a story in the Rocky Mountain News, I don't think any are close to Mississippi. And they're not carrying Horizon gallons anymore, anyway. So that does me no good. I'm not ready to pay $4 for a half-gallon of organic milk, when I'm paying $3 for a gallon of the chemical, antibiotic infested regular milk. But I'd maybe pay $5 for a gallon of organic. That would seem doable to me. If only...