I am continually annoyed (but not surprised) at how duplicitous the national press can be. When the Valerie Plame case started to come to light, they bellowed about how awful it was for anyone to leak sensitive information. They demanded an investigation. They wanted blood. Of course, nobody wanted to talk about how Plame wasn’t really an undercover agent or how she misused her post to send her husband on a research trip or how he flat out lied about his findings in the New York Times.

Then, when the press starts getting leaked information about the NSA monitoring program and the foreign prisons, they are happy to share classified information with the public. As a matter of fact, those writers were given Pulitzer prizes to reward them for leaking operational secrets that have surely compromised our intelligence gathering.

This Wall Street Journal editorial does a great job of laying out the embarrassing case of double standards. The writer nails it in the final paragraph:

As for some of our media colleagues, when they stop being honest chroniclers of events and start getting into bed with bureaucrats looking to take down elected political leaders, they shouldn’t be surprised if those leaders treat them like the partisans they have become.

The truth hurts.

Careful who you equate yourself with, people may not be able to tell the difference. This article sounds like a joke, but it’s not. The summary:

According to the Project, “Today only members of the species Homo sapiens are considered part of the community of equals. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan are our species’s closest relatives. They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals.”

Notice that the group argues that because our DNA is so similar, we should treat these animals as equals. How does that argument apply to a fetus? Doesn’t it have DNA exactly the same as a human? Shouldn’t we give a fetus human rights, too?

Oh, wait, that doesn’t fit the way they want the world to be.

I have to admit that I hate paying $3 a gallon for gas. What annoys me even more, though, is the presumption by so many (including the President!) that the price increase must be due to gouging. It seems to go unreported that the federal government is making much more on each gallon of gas than the oil companies are. Neil Cavuto of FoxNews pointed out the hypocrisy of Senator Schumer:

After all, oil companies’ profit works out to nine cents a gallon. Taxes total more like 40 cents a gallon.

But you don’t hear Schumer whining about the taxes. After all, that’s an easy source of revenue for a monotonous list of social programs whos failures are legendary. Better to keep funding them through taxes that are killing us, than demanding accountability due all of us.

Even more interesting was this graph which points out clearly that, if you adjust for inflation, gas prices are no worse than they have been for some decades. It’s the higher number that has everyone scared.

If you follow the money, you see that the high prices do more for the federal treasury than for big oil. It’s no surprise the politicians would rather deflect the obvious, though, and make you think it’s the oil companies’ fault. They wouldn’t want you to have any complaints about the federal cash flow.

Paul Thurrott is a fairly well known author in the Microsoft Windows community. He’s written quite a few books on various MS technologies in the past so he knows of which he speaks. That makes his recent article about Windows Vista all the more piercing in its analysis.

One of my favorite bits from the piece:

Since the euphoria of PDC 2003, Microsoft’s handling of Windows Vista has been abysmal. Promises have been made and forgotten, again and again. Features have come and gone. Heck, the entire project was literally restarted from scratch after it became obvious that the initial code base was a teetering, technological house of cards. Windows Vista, in other words, has been an utter disaster. And it’s not even out yet. What the heck went wrong?

And this one:

Shame on you, Microsoft. Shame on you, but not just for not doing better. We expect you to copy Apple, just as Apple (and Linux) in its turn copies you. But we do not and should not expect to be promised the world, only to be given a warmed over copy of Mac OS X Tiger in return. Windows Vista is a disappointment. There is no way to sugarcoat that very real truth.

Paul does need to keep up his work, though, so he tempers his anger by the end of the article. I think his insight is true, however. Especially the bit about Bill Gates being part of the problem. From all I’ve read and heard, he’s hardly the visionary and more just a ruthless nerd.

Some developers have been claiming that Vista will make OS X users leave the Mac. I would be shocked. Microsoft has never been able to grok that it’s not about the pretty colors and the size of your feature bulge. It’s about being smooth and natural to the user. Being so right that you don’t even think about what you’re doing anymore.

Microsoft reminds me of that guy at a party who is trying waay too hard. He’s convinced that he’s the hottest guy in the room, but in reality he’s a little loud, a little obnoxious, and kind of embarrassing to watch.

Drudge is reporting that Rolling Stone magazine is about to run a story calling President Bush the worst president in history. They apparently even got a historian to back up the charge.

This is either a sign of just how bad public education in this country has become or just another case of Bush Derangement Syndrome. The idea that George W. Bush is the worst president ever is laughable. While we can probably have thoughtful discussions about the worst Presidents of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, I believe it’s clear that Bush isn’t even the worst president of the last 50 years.

Is he worse than the stereotypical overspending good ol’ boy, Lyndon Johnson? I think not.
Is he worse than the paranoid control freak, Richard Nixon? Hardly.
Is he worse than the immoral, self-absorbed, compulsive liar, Bill Clinton? Ha!

Most of all, I think he’s light years ahead of the man I consider to be the worst president of the 20th century: Jimmy Carter. Double digit interest rates. Outrageous inflation. The source of the misery index. Carter wrung his hands and asked everyone to play nice while radical Islam set up shop in Iran. Inaction in 1979 and 1980 allowed these radicals to gain a foothold and a clear line can be drawn to the man who is today seeking nuclear weapons. The country was embarassed, weakened, and depressed as a result of four years of Carter. I don’t think they get any worse than that.

On the contrary, while Reagan has long been my clear favorite for best president ever, I think Bush is coming up quickly. The effects of a democratic Afghanistan and Iraq are bigger than most know and will have an effect on world events for decades to come.

Worst president? No. Lowest attempt to demonize the president? Unfortunately, it’s only one of many.

So I did the draft for our rotisserie league on Tuesday night. Not my best draft, but I think I did okay. You can catch the current standings in our league here. I manage the Zephyrs. As of this writing I’m in first place!

So, highlights: I have a high RBI team going with Mark Teixeira, Hank Blalock, and David Ortiz. I got some cheap role players in Jose Lopez, Dan Johnson, Nick Swisher, and Mark Kotsay. I should also have better luck in the ERA and WHIP categories this year with Felix Hernandez, Curt Schilling, and Mike Mussina. That’s always been a downfall for me, so I’m looking forward to some good pitching.

You can click on each team name in the standings to see who manages the team and what players they have. After seeing Alex Rodriguez go for 39 and Vladimir Guerrero for 41, I fell pretty good that none of my players were over 22. That should bode well for building a good, inexpensive team for next year, too.

I feel like I’m channeling Billy Beane.

UPDATE: After a little fiddling, I figured out how to make our league’s standings show up on the left hand side of the blog. Thanks to WordPress Widgets!

As an engineer and fan of science, there’s nothing more obnoxious than when fact is subverted for the sake of politics or influence. I’m convinced of the truth of a created universe with a designer. However, when things are discovered that may seem to refute that, I don’t choose to suppress it. I would rather the data come out so it can be freely analyzed. I believe that the truth is more powerful than any other argument I can make. In fact, suppressing the truth goes against what Christ taught:

“Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment.” Proverbs 12:19

“Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6

All that is to say that the actions described by the scientific community in this article by Richard Lindzen drive me mad. He sums up the problem about the global warming community well:

Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.

The fact that he teaches at MIT is only a bonus to this story.

While it can be shown that the average temperature of the globe has slowly increased, I have never been convinced that mankind is responsible for that increase. When the famous hockey-stick graph of global temperatures was promoted by the press, it seemed to be scientific proof that man is killing the planet.

That graph has now been rather thoroughly debunked as bad statistics. The idea stuck, though, and scientists everywhere are looking to prove that we’re the root of the problem. It’s proving to be a slippery goal, though, as they can’t seem to find the smoking gun.

There’s more evidence now that the earth itself and the plant life on the surface is spewing more greenhouse gasses into the air than humans are. And the argument that those gasses are the cause of the warming is still just a theory. This great article by Bob Carter in the Daily Telegraph is a clear summary of the state of knowledge that you probably haven’t heard.

The shock lede:

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

For seven years the average hasn’t moved? Have you heard that anywhere? All I hear is Al Gore waving his arms and telling us we’re doomed.

But, when I saw the graphs at the website for the Climate Research Unit the writer mentions, this observation is actually more significant to me:

[...]the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.

So, from WWI to WWII, the temperature was increasing rapidly. Then when the industrial output of the world ramped up during WWII, the averages flattened? How does that match up with the idea that it’s all our fault?

Those pushing the alarmism, though, wouldn’t do well to talk about these facts. It’s hard to be a scientist with an agenda when the facts don’t agree. I see this same kind of willful blindness in the creation/evolution debate, but that’s a whole other discussion.

No, I’m not nuts. Well, at least not in regards to that headline. This refers to the fact that baseball season has started and we get another year to cheer on the Mariners.

I have been involved with a fantasy baseball league for several years, now, so the beginning of the year is always exciting. We will be drafting our teams on April 11. I’ll give an update here when we’re done to let you know how I make out.

I actually think there’s some optimism for the M’s after two pretty bad years. The defense looks fantastic. Beltre and Sexson at the corners are solid defenders. Lopez has moved to second and actually looks like he’s feeling comfortable there. Betancourt at short is magic. You really have to watch him a while to understand just how good he is. And, he’s only 24.

In the outfield, Ichiro is still Ichiro. Ibañez is average as a defender, but he doesn’t leave a huge hole in left. Reed is turning into a heck of a center fielder. I heard that he trains with Darin Erstad in the offseason. It shows.

Finally, my new favorite player is Kenji Johjima. He’s our starting catcher and is here fresh from Japan. He has been hitting well, catching well, and thrown out a few baserunners already. Such fun.

The offense looks pretty decent with some pop in most of the lineup and some great contact hitters at the top and bottom of the order.

The pitching, as always, is the question mark. Moyer is always good for 15 or so wins. Piniero has the skill, but can be a head case. Washburn showed some good stuff and should eat up innings. Meche is another head case and Hernandez has amazing stuff, but he still has some lessons to learn. The bullpen is shaky at best after Soriano.

Bottom line: It’ll be a bumpy year, but I don’t think we’ll be at 90+ losses again. This team is better than that and it should show in the record. The really good news is that the team is young and shouldn’t change much for a couple of years. They have a chance to become very solid without a lot of churn.

Ever since Apple announced that it would being using Intel processors, geeks everywhere have been contemplating the possibilities of running Windows on an Apple-built machine.

Some folks just need to run a couple of Windows-only apps and don’t care about performance. Those folks were asking for a Windows-in-a-box kind of experience where a user could run the Windows OS in a single window. VirtualPC did this kind of thing for a while until the G5 processor broke assumptions in the underlying code.

Others wanted a snappier, more real experience and were asking for a dual-boot scenario. This would mean that each time you started your computer, you could choose whether to boot it up under MacOS or Windows. It also means that you’d have to reboot each time you wanted to change your OS. This promises to have better performance as there is no translation layer and the OS is running directly on the hardware. This is a popular request for folks doing higher performance work or for playing games.

As a cross-platform developer, I kind of need both. I need to be able to switch back and forth quickly (which seems to beg for the former solution), but I also need performance for compiling code and debugging (which seems to beg for the latter). So, I’m looking for the holy grail. I’d like a setup where I could run Windows-in-a-box, but that was high performing. I don’t know if and when that might come, but the concept of virtualization seems to be the ticket. This seems to have fewer issues with emulation and translation layers, but presents the possiblity of running multiple OSes as guests of a host OS.

Yesterday, Apple computer introduced Boot Camp. This is their first cut at addressing some of these issues. Their approach is the dual-boot one that requires you to reboot to each OS, but it does allow Windows to take full advantage of the great hardware they’ve packed in the new Intel Macs. Even better, it appears that they may have met the needs of those gamers who want it all in one machine. This PC World article provides reason for optimism. Especially the following passage:

Back in Windows, I got right down to business and installed a few games to put the graphics and sound support to the test. The quick and dirty verdict on performance? Most impressive. Doom 3 and Far Cry both ran smoothly with high-end graphics options turned on.

In both cases, I had to tweak visual settings manually, since the games automatically set themselves to very low settings. Far Cry, for example, autodetected very low settings, but it ran without a hitch when I bumped the resolution up to 1280 by 720, with all visual quality options set to “High.”

I’ll be in the market for a new Intel-based tower Mac this fall. I will be happy to set it up as a dual boot if it means being able to play some new games (Guild Wars, Unreal Tournament, etc.) on the sweet hardware Apple provides.

Welcome to a brave new world!