the frig blig

Sunday morning S and I went to market — the Ballard farmers’ market, that is. It couldn’t have been a prettier day, and I took this photo just for the halibut.

Last month Suzan and I drove to Silver Creek Falls State Park, and while hiking part of the northern loop trail looking at all the waterfalls, an archetypical northwest moment occurred: it started raining. I love watching raindrops falling on water, and when I realized I had a camera I captured these 17 seconds.

With the spectacular bankruptcy declaration of Lehman Brothers following on the heels of the feds buyout of Freddy & Fannie, I’m wondering if someone was to perform a detailed comparison of the effects of the subprime mortgage loan fallout vs the effects of 9/11/01, which one affects more lives, jobs and dollars?

Apple got free publicity today by announcing their newly updated line of iPods…but the one feature I’ve been waiting for is not in the new package. Mainly, I want an MP3 player which includes bluetooth so I can use the new wireless headsets to bop around listening to my tunes. So far, these headsets can only be used with cellphones. Since my music collection is rather vast, there’s no way it will fit into the paltry 4G in my phone. (And it might not be easy to play .flac and .ogg files on my N95, either.)

So I’m sticking with my bulky, clunky old iHP-140 until some smart manufacturer introduces a music player with both bluetooth support and serious storage capacity.

Yesterday’s Wired Science posted an article by Alexis Madrigal titled Biologists on the verge of creating new forms of life. It discusses how a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models called ‘protocells’ that ‘can almost be called life’.

Quick, somebody author a Wikipedia entry for ‘protocells’!

Walking home from dinner through the alley last night we came upon this bee doing his job in this sunflower. I can’t believe how well the photo turned out (full size is even more impressive).

Teachers in the Harrold school district in Texas are to be allowed to carry concealed firearms when the new school term opens this month. — BBC News

If I was a student in Harrold I’d sure as hell want to pack my own heat to defend myself against the bastards and even the odds. It’s your right according to the second amendment to the U.S. constitution… oh right, you’re not a citizen until you’re 21 in this country…dang!

A historic sign of the times occurred this afternoon when computer go program MoGo defeated Korean go professional Myungwan Kim 8P at the 2008 U.S. Go Congress in Portland OR. The computer played with a 9-stone handicap and won by 1.5 stones.

MoGo was written by French programmer Sylvain Gelly and ran on a borrowed European supercomputer with 800 CPUs. MoGo is available for download at Gelly’s home page.

With the current pace of technology I now expect to see computers defeating human professionals playing even games in my lifetime…a vision both exciting and depressing.

I just installed MoGo on my laptop and played it a quick game, and I’m impressed, it played some moves so good it was spooky…but MoGo’s yose sucks. OTOH I made MoGo play white…if I gave it 9 stones and more thinking time it would probably give this 8k a run for his money. I’ll try it, but not tonight.

Hanging loose at the beach in Yachats, in the zone.

The muffler in my auto blew on the way down to Oregon. The Corvallis repair shop I had it replaced in had these muffler sculpture dudes out front.