I had another dream, I had another life
Nathaniel 
Quadrocopters are cool. Quadrocopters and some really good physics students? That’s ridiculously cool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pp89tTDxXuI
I’m wondering what kind of fun and nefarious purposes you can put a swarm of quadrocopters this agile to.
I’ve never met Tucker, but I worked with his mom, Page, at my first real job. She was always amazingly kind not only to me, but also to my kids. Sometimes my wife would swing by with my two little ones, and we’d say hello to my coworkers and especially Page. They loved her so much that even after I moved on to other things we still came back sometimes to see my old friends, and especially Page.
I always knew that Page’s son, Tucker, had cystic fibrosis. It’s been a big part–and a painful part–of Page’s life. Since I never met him, I always pictured him as a little kid, but he’s actually 24 now. He looks really happy and healthy in a lot of the photos up at his IndieGoGo crowdfunding project, but he just got home from a 42-day hospital stay and he needs expensive medications to be able to keep fighting to stay with his family.
Years ago, children with CF commonly did not live to start kindergarten. These days, the average life expectancy has risen to 37 years, but it’s still “very difficult to manage” (read more on Wikipedia). There is currently no cure for CF, just a battery of drugs and a lifetime struggle to live with the disease.
The campaigns has already reached the initial goal, but that doesn’t mean they have everything they need. Sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo only collect the contributions if the campaign hits the goal, so you have to set it lower than you’d like to try and make sure you hit it. With copays of $1,400 a month and long battles with insurance and Medicaid ahead, Tucker still needs help. There are 66 hours left to donate, and someone has pledged to match the next $1,000 dollar-for-dollar. There are a lot of good causes out there, but this isn’t a cause. It’s my friend’s son. Please, give if you can.
It’s an interactive map that lets you zoom all the way from the sun and our solar system out to the Milky Way, including a view of 100,000 real nearby stars (there are 200 – 400 billion in the entire Milky Way). You can zoom and scroll around to get an idea of what our little interstellar neighborhood is like.
I viewed it in Chrome (which is what it’s designed for), and I hear it works in Firefox (that’s where I first heard about it) but I don’t know about IE.
Today has been a very stressful and very busy day. So this video helped. I hope it helps you too.
The music totally makes it, right? And look: someone made an image. I need this on a t-shirt, stat!
P.S. YouTube poster says the cat was fine, so that keeps the humor-level high. :-D
I’m not sure if the packages were actually designed to be able to do this, but it’s still pretty neat.
There’s a lo of talk about budgets, deficits, and debts. I don’t think this picture provides anything like a conclusive political point, but it does give some idea of the scale of “entitlement” spending, which for Greg Mankiw means “stuff the government has to give you if you prove you’re eligible”.
Environmentalism is not a topic I’ve tackled here at Difficult Run, and it’s not something I write about a whole lot. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care, however. I just recognize that it’s way outside my area of expertise. I’m at once incredibly skeptical of most environmentalism that comes from a politically liberal mindset because I find it ideologically blind and totally impractical. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t care. I just don’t know what to do.
The person I respect the most on this issue is Chris Fields-Johnson. Chris is a PhD student in crop soil & soil environmental science at Virginia Tech and is the founder of The Piedmont Earthworks. Chris knows his stuff, and he has spent years studying and honing his skills so that his passion is matched by his depth of expertise. When I want to talk about environmental policy without the politics and with someone who knows what they are talking about, I talk to Chris.
Today he posted a fascinating and informative environmentalism piece discussing the environmental history of the southeast (especially Virginia) from the arrival of early European settlers to this day. The short version (although you should read the full article), is that a combination of beaver hunters and tobacco growers eviscerated the diverse ecosystems, and only the advent of widespread planting of loblolly pine prevented the total desertification of the region.
However, as Chris writes, the loblolly pines are not valuable enough as pulpwood to justify continued investment in the land, and so the degradation continues. Chris asks the question: what next? He suggests homesteading, as he is currently doing, to use the loblolly pines as a basis from which to begin reclaiming the original biodiversity of the region.
I’d like to hear more details about Chris’s suggestion, so I left a comment there. I’m turning comments off on this post so that if you have questions, you can ask them there as well.
A week or two ago there was a spate of stories about big-name US newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times getting hacked by the Chinese. I thought it was pretty noteworthy, and I was going to put up a note when I got distracted by other things.
Then it all went to Hell.
It’s been an open secret for quite some time that the Chinese military are behind an onslaught of cyber attacks on US soil, but outside of tech security circles you probably didn’t hear very much about it. This all changed when US cyber security firm Mandiant issued a scathing report linking the attacks (perpetrated by a group known as “APT1”) with a specific unit within China’s People’s Liberation Army: unit 61398.
Mandiant’s report, summarized via Slashdot, specified that:
“Since 2006, Mandiant has observed APT1 compromise 141 companies spanning 20 major industries,” the report continues. “APT1 has a well-defined attack methodology, honed over years and designed to steal large volumes of valuable intellectual property.” APT1 has the ability to access victim networks for an average of 356 days, stealing terabytes of compressed data during that period.
Sound ominous? It should. So what’s the point of all this hacking?
I’ve heard wildly divergent perspectives on Joanna Brooks memoir The Book of Mormon Girl, including one convert who lives on the East Coast and is convinced that Joanna actually grew up in a cult, not vanilla Mormonism. I haven’t read the book yet, but I have been impressed by Joanna’s reasonable and kind tone in blog posts and interviews.
This review from award-winning playwright Mahonri Stewart makes me even more curious to read the book.
Anne and I consider ourselves devout Mormons. We connect deeply with and believe in Mormon scripture and theology… Despite that heartfelt and abiding faith, however, there have been times when we have felt like we were foreigners in our own religion… It is here that works like Joanna Brooks’ The Book of Mormon Girl have given me and my wife hope.
I know that I don’t agree with everything that Joanna believes, and so I probably won’t agree with every word in the book. And that, actually, is part of why I want to read the book.
DR commenter and fellow Mormon blogger WalkerW wrote an excellent piece about the importance of listening for the sacred in “profane” music.
Suffering, as I noted in my last post, is an intrinsic part of reality. We are expected to mourn with those who mourn. Confronting suffering, pain, and sin head-on is the life of Christian. If our example is Jesus Christ, a man who “loved people in great misery who were taken from Him and did not understand Him” and was then “beaten and executed for espionage and treason,”[3] how then can we as disciples not look misery in the face? We can shy away from music that is filled with angst, despair, and sadness. We can look at it as “unworthy.” But we might miss out on something beautiful. As philosopher Roger Scruton noted, “Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in anunlimited variety of ways…[I]t speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend.”
There are lots of great songs in that post. Song full of loss and longing. Here is just one.