Writings

Tuesday night was the first night of the Mid Hudson Astronomy Association in their new digs, the Coykendall Auditorium at SUNY, New Paltz.  I really like the venue.  The lighting and environment is much better than the library.  With 34 people in attendance last night, we had a quite good turn out.

The lecture itself was given by Cathy Law about teaching Astronomy to middle and high school kids.  In an hour we got about 5 weeks worth of material thrown at us (some of it was skipped over), but all of it was quite good.  I especially appreciated the use of Monty Python and the Universe song to end us off.  Cathy was an incredibly compelling speaker, and her students are definitely lucky to have her.

The thing that made me think the most was her comment that one of her biggest challenges in class is being more entertaining than a cell phone, though, ironically, I was on my cellphone at the time verifying the statement I'd just made on the modal lock of Mercury.

I've gotten asked a few times since I took up Astronomy whether or not I believed in UFOs.  While I may have had a wishy washy negative in the past, after getting into amateur astronomy that became a definitive no.

Once you get a telescope and start observing, you come to realize a number of things.  First off, there are many people like you looking up into the sky on every clear night.  In the united states that number is in the 10s, if not 100s of thousands.  After a couple weeks of observing you get a pretty good sense of the sky, and can quickly identify not only the major bits of natural structure out there, but the major man made pieces that show up from time to time.  You can tell the difference between a high flying plane, a satellite, the space station, and the occasional iridium flare.  After a year you have a mental map in your head about what should be up on any given night, including the planets that move around.

This understanding of the structure of the sky actually gives you a very good filter for anything that would be out of the ordinary.  There are people that are scanning every night for that unusual, which is how they find new comets, asteroids, and even super nova with backyard scopes.  In addition there are groups that by eye are measuring light fluctuations in variable stars, the most skilled members can measure to within 1/10 of a magnitude.  There are tens thousands of people expert in finding the extra ordinary looking for it every night, and they are find it, but it's not space ships.

The #1 object in the sky that is misidentified as a UFO is Venus, a planet.  It's bright (often the 2nd brightest thing in the sky besides the moon), and it's not in the same place every night, and if it's at the horizon it can look like it's popping in an out of existence due to the same reason you get the wavy lines above pavement on a hot day.

But the real root cause for this misidentification is a lack of understanding of the environment.  Knowing very little about the sky, people just fill it in with hopes and dreams.  The same effect makes people fill in their lack of understanding on plate tectonics to attribute it to government energy weapons, or pacts with the devil, depending on their inclinations.  Or their lack of understanding of quantum mechanics to decide the earth is 6000 years old, or thousands of other things that people mistakenly think quantum physics means.  It is a common recurring pattern with pseudo science.  You can see it all over the place once you realize it's there.

Which is a shame.  There is incredible splendor in the universe, both in the skies, on the ground, and in the microscopic, that there really is no need to fill the skies with UFOs to make them wondrous.

Sounding "Truthy" doesn't make it True.

The Burlington Freepress is a Gannett site (like our own Poughkeepsie Journal), so this link will probably be useless in a week.  However, right now there is a 4 page article on the EC Fiber project, to bring Fiber to the home for 22 rural towns.  My father gets the photo and quoted a few times in the article.

RYAN MERCER, Free Press

Jim Dague, a Granville road commissioner and the town’s liaison to the East Central Vermont Community Fiber Network, or EC Fiber, is waiting along with 21 other rural Vermont communities to hear whether the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utility Service will award a $69 million stimulus loan to the high-speed Internet project.

The article itself is largely an attack piece against the project, citing a failed venture in 2004 in New Hampshire, and quoting another company that is competing for the stimulus money.  It is curious how the troops get rallied by the telcos any time a municipality wants to build out their own network.  Having watched, and participated in, the brain drain of central Vermont due to lack of modern infrastructure, I'm very much hoping EC fiber gets the stimulus funds and succeeds.

Via the NY Outdoors Blog:

The Hudson River Valley Greenway has announced the availability of an interactive Water Trail map 🔗💀 on the newly updated and re‐designed Hudson River Greenway Water Trail website. The redesigned website features a map of the water trail using Google Map, as well as information pages for water trail users and current and potential site owners, a page on currently designated sites, location and use of kayak storage racks, water trail grants, and a chronicle of this year’s Great Champlain‐Hudson Paddle.

The Hudson River Greenway Water Trail is a small boat trail along portions of the lower Hudson River and is a component of the Hudson River Greenway Trail System. The Water Trail contains access points (launches), campsites and day use sites (attractions) along 256 miles of the Hudson River and Champlain Canal. The trail begins in Whitehall, Washington County and in Hadley, Saratoga County and ends at Battery Park in Manhattan. Mark Castiglione, Acting Executive Director of the Hudson River Valley Greenway, stated, “The interactive map includes a comprehensive list of public access launch sites along the 256‐mile Hudson River Greenway Water Trail. The map provides paddling enthusiasts ready information about Water Trail sites and is a tool they can use to help plan their river adventures.

Visit hudsongreenway.ny.gov for more information about the Greenway and its programs.

This makes it a heck of a lot easier to figure out where the launch point for canoes and kayaks are, as they are often not marked all that well.  Kudos to all the folks at the Hudson River Greenway for making this happen.

Want to get a geek roiled up?  Tell them you develop code in proportional fonts.  The comments on that article are a text book example of irrational geek argument try to get the higher ground.

Remember, there is one wholely optimal way to develop code, just like there is only one best editor, and only one best programming language.  Your decision of best would in no way be defined by the preferences of the skilled people you looked up to when you first learned this whole software development thing.

For the record, I prefer Arial.

I read about this in the local paper this week, and it's pretty inspiring.  Irvin Miller is a local retired IBMer that has decided to throw his efforts in a big way into getting more children interested in science.  He's created the Math and Physics Exploritorium which will open in February here in LaGrange.  I can't wait to go check it out.

We didn't quite intend to do 9 miles, the last half in a snow storm, when we started out today, but sometimes that's how it goes.  This is especially true when "Horse Trail" apparently means poorly marked washed out river bed.  MyTracks on my HTC Hero make a nice gps track of our adventures.

We also heard something when we were backtracking our horse trail miss, some sort of screaming animal being taken by a predator, probably a rabbit, if I had to make a guess.  No idea on the predator.

The big local news around Poughkeepsie recently has been the deer culling at Vassar college.  Vassar has a 550 acre wilderness area, with an estimated 100 deer population.  For friends in Vermont, or more rural areas, white tail deer around here are a problem.  As the area has suburbanized over the last few decades, and there aren't many hunters or huntable areas any more to keep them in check, the deer population has gone through the roof.  At this point they are completely scouring the undergrowth, so the replacement trees that should be growing up, aren't.  That also devastates the habitat for a lot of other animal and bird species in the area.  The deer population is so out of check with any sustainable natural levels, that they will eat anything that you plant, regardless of whether it's a natural part of their diet or not.  Deer collisions on the roads are a real threat.  I see the smashed remains of a deer somewhere on my way to work on a weekly basis.

Vassar decided the best way to approach this was with a culling.  They contracted a set of professional hunters to come in and take 85 deer out of the 550 acre lot.  They obtained the state permits to do this, as it is done after night via spotting.  The first night out they took 44 deer in 3 hours with 3 people.  On the second night they took 20, and judged that it was probably sufficient for now.  The meat from the kills is going to local food banks, providing an estimated 12000 to 15000 meals to local residents.

As one might imagine, a small group of locals has decided to protest this.  Saying "there must be more humane" ways to deal with the problem, never of course with any suggestion on what that might be.  I don't think these folks understand what humane is.  A quick kill shot for a deer is very humane compared to the ways these deer normally die, like being mauled by a car, or starving to death in a bad winter.  We are fortunate enough that the entire population here has not yet been infected with wasting disease, which ripped through equally populated areas of the mid west, but if the population stays where it is, it will.

A big part of the problem is that people have so disconnected themselves from their food supply, that they don't realize death is part of it.  It's what brings your chicken and your beef to your table, and probably not in a very humane way.  We aren't talking about wiping out a species here, we are talking about returning this area of land to something closer to the kind of balance it needs to stay healthy and support a wide range of species.  If we hadn't first wiped out the large predators (wolves and mountain lions), and then developed the surrounding land so densely that the replacement predators (human hunters) were also displaced, this sort of land management wouldn't be needed.  But we did, so it is.

Fortunately Vassar seems to be taking this in stride, and I applaud them for that.  The analyzed a complex situation and made a pretty good call on what would be most effective, safest for the surrounding residents, and be most humane to the deer in question, and with the added effect of over 12 thousand meals going to local citizens that are in need.

If you give presentations with powerpoint or openoffice slides at any regularity, it is well worth investing in a presentation remote so you don't need to keep coming back to your computer to flip slides.  It lets you walk around more normally, not having to worry about getting back to the podium/desk/table for the transition.  That level of free wandering on behalf of the speaker makes the entire presentation feel much smoother.

Previously I had a targus remote that I got online.  It, like all other presentation remotes I've seen, has a usb dongle which advertises itself as a usb keyboard.  The remote triggers page up/page down, and maybe some mouse functions.  This means it works on any computer, any modern operating system, with no additional software.  While the targus was sufficient, it had been slowly dying over the last couple of years.  It failed for me at Ohio Linux Fest, and when, even after new batteries, it failed before my Git talk, I figured enough was enough.  I scoured amazon reviews, and decided to give the Logitech R400 a shot.  It arrived last night.

Holy crap, this thing is amazing.  First, and most importantly, the thing fits perfectly in your hand.  It has that same kind of ergonomics of the Tivo remote, where your hand is perfectly relaxed holding it.  It's weight is enough to know it's there and solid, and whatever surface material they used for it just feels touchable.  The buttons are in the perfect places so that I realize pretty quickly that 5 minutes into my next presentation I won't even know I'm using it any more.  Whoever did the ergonomic design on the R400... bravo!

The remote is pretty simple, which is good.  Page up / Page down, F5 (which is play presentation in open office and power point), and a screen blank function which works inside of a fullscreen open office presentation, though I have no idea what key it actually is.  There is also an integrated red laser pointer, of pretty reasonable power.  The other notable facts of the remote are the usb dongle fits inside the remote itself, so there are not 2 pieces to get seperated and lost, and there is an off switch.  As this thing is going to live bouncing around in my backpack, so I always have it with me, having an off switch to ensure that accidental bounces don't hit keys and drain battery is good.  It also has a nice neoprene case, which makes that less of a worry.

I'm really happy about this presentation remote, and can't wait for my next group presentation to give it a proper work out.

P.S. For another $40 you can "upgrade" to the R800 which has a green laser and a countdown time.  That's more than I need, but people love the green laser pointers.