Rover here records ambient noise and plays it back later. It's neutrally buoyant, but doesn't have engines, so this video is fairly staged.

Anonymity on the internet makes possible a special kind of creativity.

A court ruled there are no FAA regulations about drones, which means anyone can run drones in the US.

What Snowden said to the European Parliament.

Privacy Advocates Want To Halt Facebook Acquisition of WhatsApp.

Given the U SAP AT RIOT Act, no company can be trusted to keep any secrets about you from Big Brother. The only protection is not to give a company any data about you. Nonetheless, this merger could increase the total effect of surveillance, and blocking it could be a good thing to do.

The US 2014 trade agenda aims to distract attention from the harm done by existing free exploitation treaties by pretending new ones will do some sort of good.

Ban GMO foods, or require labeling? It turns out that the effect is almost the same.

I am not necessarily opposed to all GMOs foods, but each one requires careful testing and we can't trust a company to test its own product honestly. Meanwhile, for the sake of farmers' rights, we cannot allow the genes be patented.

We also cannot allow a GMO which is likely to contaminate other farms with the artificial genes. The likelihood of such contamination depends on the species of plant.

US media have led the public to believe the Keystone XL pipeline would mean lots of jobs.

Ignoring the protests against the pipeline has surely helped mislead.

Even a million jobs wouldn't justify the damage that the pipeline will do in the long term. We could create a million jobs installing renewable energy systems.

A fossil fuel project in Australia was fined a mere $1500 for contaminating an aquifer with uranium.

Staying at an "all-inclusive" resort hotel means less money for the local people in the place you are visiting.

A study in St Louis found that offering gratis contraception and abortion did not encourage women to have risky sex.

US women can't afford sterilization.

I updated scrape-sxsw.pl to function in 2014. It scrapes the SXSW web site, intersect it against highly-rated tracks in iTunes, and generate an iCal calendar. It has worked out pretty well for me for the last couple of years.

Previously, previously.

So, here you are in your starship, happily settling into orbit around an Earthlike world you intend to survey for colonization. You start mapping, and are immediately presented with a small but vexing question: which rotational pole should you designate as ‘North’?

There are a surprisingly large number of ways one could answer this question. I shall wander through them in this essay, which is really about the linguistic and emotive significance of compass-direction words as humans use them. Then I shall suggest a pragmatic resolution.

First and most obviously, there’s magnetic north. Our assumption ‘the planet is Earthlike’ entails a nice strong magnetic field to keep local carbon-based lifeforms from getting constantly mutated into B-movie monsters by incoming charged particles. Magnetic north is probably going to be much closer to one pole than the other; we could call that ‘North’.

Then there’s spin-axis north. This is the assignment that makes north relate to the planet’s rotation the same way it does on Earth – that is, it implies the sun setting in the west rather than the east. Not necessarily the same as magnetic north; I don’t know of any reason to think planetary magnetic fields have a preferred relationship to the spin axis.

Next, galactic north. Earth’s orbital plane is inclined about 26% from the rotational plane of the Milky Way, which defines the Galaxy’s spin-axis directions; these have been labeled ‘Galactic North” and “Galactic South” in accordance with the Earth rotational poles they most closely match. On our new planet we could flip this around and define planetary North so it matches Galactic North.

Finally there’s habitability north. This one is fuzzier. More than 3/4ths of earth’s population lives in places where north is colder and south is warmer. We might want to choose ‘North’ to preserve that relationship, which is embedded pretty deeply in the language and folklore of most of Earth’s cultures. Thus, ‘North’ should be the hemisphere with the most habitable land. (Or, if you’re taking a shorter-term view, the hemisphere in which you drop your first settlement. But let’s ignore that complication for now.)

If all four criteria coincide, happiness. But how likely is that? They’re probably distributed randomly with respect to each other, which means we’ll probably get perfect agreement on only one in every sixteen exoplanets.

But not all these criteria are equally important. Magnetic North really only matters to geophysicists and compass-makers. Galactic North is probably interesting only to stargazers.

I think we have a clear winner if spin-axis north coincides with habitability north. This choice will preserve continuity of language pretty well. If they’re opposite, and galactic north coincides with magnetic north, that’s a tiebreaker. If the tiebreakers don’t settle it, I’d go with spin-axis north.

But reasonable people could differ on this. Discuss; maybe we could submit a proposal to the IAU.

Three weeks ago the CDK project migrated from Ant to Maven as the primary build tool. That means that my workflow for making and, importantly, reviewing patches is completely turned upside down. Well, that happens.

My patch reviewing workflow looks like:

1. run the test suite and capture the number of JUnit Errors and Fails
2. apply the patch and check if things still compile
3. run the test suite and capture the number of JUnit Errors and Fails
4. compare the number of Errors and Fails before and after
5. check if JavaDoc is in order
6. check if there is new unit testsing where appropriate
7. check for new PMD issues

Scott Eric Kaufman:

"God, why did you create so many fucking idiots?"

Given that I also write for The Onion, I feel I should point out that this article is not from The Onion. But if we were better people -- did less of that awful sinning against the Lord and stuff -- we could live in a world where it would be.

(Also, the movie looks like a giant stinky turd.)

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

That is the title of a paper attempting to explain (away) the 17-year nothing that happened while CAGW models were predicting warming driven by increasing CO2. CO2 increased. Measured GAT did not.

Here’s the money quote: “The most recent climate model simulations used in the AR5 indicate that the warming stagnation since 1998 is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level.”

That is an establishment climatologist’s cautious scientist-speak for “The IPCC’s anthropogenic-global-warming models are fatally broken. Kaput. Busted.”

I told you so. I told you so. I told you so!

I even predicted it would happen this year, yesterday on my Ask Me Anything on Slashdot. This wasn’t actually brave of me: the Economist noticed that the GAT trend was about to fall to worse than 5% fit to the IPCC models six months ago.

Here is my next prediction – and remember, I have been consistently right about these. The next phase of the comedy will feature increasingly frantic attempts to bolt epicycles onto the models. These epicycles will have names like “ENSO”, “standing wave” and “Atlantic Oscillation”.

All these attempts will fail, both predictively and retrodictively. It’s junk science all the way down.