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Staying warm while skiing
After years of being cold on the slopes, I think that I’ve finally gotten the gear to keep myself warm. Through a high of 4 degrees Fahrenheit a few days ago and 16 degree snow with 20+ MPH winds today. I’m sure someone will find this information useful.
I wear a helmet, so hats are out of the question. Instead, I have an Icebreaker Quantum balaclava; in addition to being quite warm, it stays so even when wetted with snow or breath. As for tops, I wear an Under Armour ColdGear mock turtleneck with an Icebreaker Bodyfit 260 TechTop over top of that. I think this combination of a tight-fitting synthetic base layer with very warm merino wool atop is the best way to go. When the weather is very cold, such as the aforementioned bitter or windy days, I wear a Descente Podium vest. I top this all with a Spyder Rival insulated jacket.
My hands have always been a very difficult part, but was the final piece that I solved this year. I’m wearing a pair of Manzella Silkwieght Windstopper gloves, which are just thin, polyester pieces, inside a set of Black Diamond Mercury Mitts which are absolutely wonderful. The mitts are roomy enough that my hands with those liners fit easily, allowing me to quickly pop them out to take pictures, use my phone, or deal with my gear. Polyester for the liners is good because it shed snow when I do pull my hands out of the mitts. The my outer handwear also has insulation that is easily removable, making overnight drying a snap.
On bottom, I wear a single pair of Smartwool socks and a couple of pairs of polyester long underwear. I should really get some wool long underwear, because it’s certainly better than polypropylene. Generally, though, I’m doing enough with my legs that I don’t have that much problem.
Note on brands: I mention all the brands of things I wear because it makes clear exactly what I’m talking about. Generally, the style of the item is what is important. For example, Smartwool makes tops very similar to the Icebreaker one I mention. I know that North Face makes tops much like the Under Armour ones that I like. As for vests, I very much like the North Face & Mountain Hardwear ones that I have, in addition to the Descente.
Wages at American auto makers are too high
Harley Shaiken had a piece on Marketplace yesterday arguing that high labor costs, the sticking point for Senate Republicans concerning last week’s bailout, are not a prime reason for the US auto maker’s downfall. I don’t feel the need to break apart Shaiken’s short argument, because he sums it up well in the final sentence, “A superior product, high productivity and high wages pave the road to a healthy economy and a decent society.” We can all agree that workers in Detroit have high wages and the indigenous car manufacturers even have good productivity; but a superior product? Not a chance.
The prime reason that Asian cars sell so well in the United States is because they have a superior product at nearly every price point when compared to the US companies. Often features are not what makes domestic cars pale compared to their Korean & Japanese counterparts; usually a general air of cheapness, from bad switchgear and low-grade plastic to unsorted suspension American cars are made to a much tighter budget. The reason? High labor costs at the plants of domestic auto makers, an average of $78 vs. $45 for non-union plants, force those car makers to make up for these costs elsewhere. The only way to compensate for such a large disparity in costs is for the US manufacturers to cut back on the amount of money put into their product, hence the low-quality cars.
Very old Parkour
This video clip from a 1977 film Gizmo! shows a 1930s newsreel clip of a man doing Parkour moves, well before such a thing had a name or community. It’s incredible to see exactly the same movements being performed 75 years before I had ever imaged doing them. About 20 seconds in he does a wall-run top-out in the exact same fashion I’ve seen numerous people do on the high box at Primal. Neat.
Discussed previously on the APK Forums here.
Voting Systems
On the eve of the election, I am thinking about voting systems better than that which is currently employed in United States general elections.
Among single-winner voting systems, the most common is instant-runoff voting and the simplest, making it the most reasonable choice as a replacement for the single-vote system that we currently use. In an instant-runoff election, you fill out a ballot showing the order of preference for the candidates available. When votes are tallied, your number one candidate is used to tally votes; if that candidate did not achieve a majority, then he is eliminated from the election and your second choice is taken. This continues until a candidate has achieved a majority, thereby winning the election.
IRV allows for voters to cast a ballot for a candidate whom they truly believe in without feeling that they are throwing their vote away. This solves the Ralph Nader problem from the 2000 election. Nader was the prime choice for many Americans but his status as a third-party candidate meant that he had no chance of winning the election. Many who might have wanted to vote for Nader instead voted for one of the two major-party candidates, because their vote would otherwise be wasted. The few who did vote for Nader, were then blamed for Al Gore’s loss of the election, since they most likely would have voted for the Democratic candidate were it not for the Green Party’s presence. Instant-runoff voting keeps third-party candidates from “stealing” votes from the major parties and makes third-parties viable, since voters can feel confident in voting for such candidates.
Another area of voting that is lacking in the United States is the security and integrity of the voting system. There are endless reports of electronic voting machines losing votes, miscounting votes or being tampered with. Creating a system that is both secure and verifiable while at the same time anonymous is not a trivial task but there is a group of people who deal with such odd logic puzzles: cryptographers. After the fiasco of electronic voting machines in the 2004 election, many people spent time thinking about methods for secure, verifiable voting. One of those was Ron Rivest, the R in RSA, who came up with the ThreeBallot voting protocol.
The entire protocol is detailed in Rivest’s paper, but the gist of the system is that the voter fills out three ballots which are identical, save for a unique number identifying each. Through some cryptographic logic magic, the ballots are marked such that any single ballot of the triplet does not divulge whom the voter cast their ballot for; because the ballot is unique, however, the voter is given a copy of one of the three to take home. This receipt can later be checked against the ballots that are published so that the voter can verify that their choice was indeed counted. Again, this publishing doesn’t divulge information about whom they voted for, despite the fact that all of the information of the election is published, allowing anyone to perform a recount.
See also: Punchscan End-to-end auditable voting systems
A Good Day for Rum
The passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (H.R. 1424) was a good thing for rum lovers:
SEC. 308. INCREASE IN LIMIT ON COVER OVER OF RUM EXCISE TAX TO PUERTO RICO AND THE VIRGIN ISLANDS.
(a) In General.–Paragraph (1) of section 7652(f) is amended by striking “January 1, 2008” and inserting “January 1, 2010”.
(b) Effective Date.–The amendment made by this section shall apply to distilled spirits brought into the United States after December 31, 2007.
This change extends the limit on taxation of rum from Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands to a maximum of $13.50 per gallon. Figuring that out was not an easy process, requiring looking from the bill’s amendments, to to the original text thereof, and finally to the internal revenue code being referenced.
References
*Ammendments to HR1424 - Division C, Title 3, Sec. 308, Page S10368
*26USC §7652f
Word Frequency in the Vice Presidential Debate
It’s always interesting to see what keywords debaters drop to get their points across. To analyze tonight’s debate between Biden & Palin, I grabbed a transcript from CNN that was posted shortly after. The transcript listed each speaker’s name (Biden, Ifill or Palin), followed by their first sentence in that statement, with subsequent statements on new lines. To make it easily grepable, wrote a quick Perl script to join each speaker’s full passages into a single line, beginning with their name. With that done, it’s trivial to search for words the candidates spoke. The transcript is here.
First up, “change” and “hope”, adages of the Obama campaign that McCain and Palin have picked up in recent weeks:
* Biden (change|hope): 17
* Palin (change|hope): 25
Which presidential candidate got more mentions?
* Biden (John|McCain): 72
* Biden (Barack|Obama): 45
* Palin (John|McCain): 42
* Palin (Barack|Obama): 24
Palin’s state makes a lot of energy and high prices are on the mind of voters:
* Biden (energy): 9
* Palin (energy): 29
Both talked a lot about the war:
* Biden (war|iraq|afghanistan): 51
* Palin (war|iraq|afghanistan): 58
Palin cares about her family:
* Biden (family|child): 8
* Palin (family|child): 15
Biden said “clean coal” a couple of times to Palin’s one; they both mentioned “coal” in general more than that:
* Biden (coal): 7
* Palin (coal): 2
The economy was a talking point:
* Biden (economy): 4
* Palin (economy): 13
Only one of the candidates knows about deregulation of Wall Street in recent years:
* Biden (deregulation): 7
* Palin (deregulation): 0
Wall Street or Main Street?
* Biden (wall street): 3
* Biden (main street): 1
* Palin (wall street): 5
* Palin (main street): 2
Any suggestions?
See also:
edit: added link from Karl; added IBM links
Old Techno Album Reviews: Dune - Expedicion
Best known for their eponymous debut album, Dune is a mid-90’s techno outfit whose music incorporates many of the styles endemic to House and Dance at the time. Expedicion is a good exploration of the style, featuring lots of fast beats throughout, a bit singing vocals and even some good-old meaningless talking throughout some tracks. The entire album is also sprinkled with radio recordings including the classic NASA piece, “we’re go for auto-sequence start” on the opening track Rising.
The album opens with my favorite track, Million Miles from Home which incorporates some speedy 808 beats, broken by slow and emotive sections and all with a melodic vocal loop. The track In My Dreams has a very IDM/drum and bass style to it and is topped off by vocals that are a bit more odd, but appropriate. In The Air, which is split into two disparate tracks, lends a somewhat trancey feel with it’s lower tempo and slower progression. The balance of the album, including Hand in Hand, Rainbow to the Stars and Around the World are almost Happy Hardcore anthems, save for their just-a-bit-too-slow tempos.
Splitting MP3s in Perl
I listen to some podcasts daily that have annoying messages in them that never change. With a bit of research, I came across the MP3::Splitter module on CPAN which has somewhat confusing documentation but provides a method mp3split() that pulls specified pieces of a file. You provide mp3split() with the input MP3 filename, options as a hash and then any number of arrays that specify which portions of the MP3 to copy into new files. The easiest syntax for specifying a portion is to pass the start position and the length of the desired chunk, both in seconds. From the command line, I did this:
perl -MMP3::Splitter -e "mp3split('foo.mp3', {}, [20,25], [95,600], [950,INF])"
which creates three new MP3 files, 01foo.mp3, 02foo.mp3 and 03_foo.mp3. These can then be joined to create a new MP3:
cat 01_foo.mp3 > new.mp3 cat 02_foo.mp3 >> new.mp3 cat 03_foo.mp3 >> new.mp3
Which will leave you with new.mp3 that is a concatenation of the three pieces. Using cat to join them means the resulting file will probably have some artifacts at the join points but that’s not a problem for my use. If it is, you can use something like mp3join to properly join the files.
Code Golf: Saving Time
After a new challenge, Saving Time was posted a few weeks ago, I’m finally getting to another round of Code Golf. As usual, my preferred language is Perl; don’t read below if you don’t want hints!
My first draft grabs the hour and minutes using capturing in a regex, then turns them both into positions on a twelve hour clockface. The clock location is passed to the function symbol which, through use of some nasty nested ternaries, what should be printed at the passed position on the clock face. (470 characters):
<> =~ /(\d+):(\d+)/;
$H = $1 % 12;
$M = ($2 - ($2 % 5)) / 5;
$;=' ';
$z = $;x8 . symbol(0) . $/;
$z .= $;x4 . symbol(11) . $;x7 . symbol(1) . $/.$/;
$z .= $; . symbol(10) . $;x13 . symbol(2) . $/.$/;
$z .= symbol(9) . $;x15 . symbol(3) . $/.$/;
$z .= $; . symbol(8) . $;x13 . symbol(4) . $/.$/;
$z .= $;x4 . symbol(7) . $;x7 . symbol(5) . $/;
$z .= $;x8 . symbol(6);
print $z;
sub symbol {
$_ = shift;
$H==$_ ? ($H==$M ? 'x' : 'h') : ($M==$_ ? 'm' : 'o');
}
Perl provides the automatic variables $` and $' (aka $PREMATCH and $POSTMATCH with use English) which are, unsurprisingly, the portions of a scalar before and after what your regex matched. I simplified the input regex by simply matching the colon and grabbing the hours & minutes from $` and $'. shorten subroutine name (398 characters):
<> =~ /:/;
$H = $` % 12;
$M = int $'/5;
$;=' ';
$z = $;x8 . sy(0) . $/;
$z .= $;x4 . sy(11) . $;x7 . sy(1) . $/.$/;
$z .= $; . sy(10) . $;x13 . sy(2) . $/.$/;
$z .= sy(9) . $;x15 . sy(3) . $/.$/;
$z .= $; . sy(8) . $;x13 . sy(4) . $/.$/;
$z .= $;x4 . sy(7) . $;x7 . sy(5) . $/;
$z .= $;x8 . sy(6);
print $z;
sub sy {
$_ = shift;
$H==$_ ? ($H==$M ? 'x' : 'h') : ($M==$_ ? 'm' : 'o');
}
I spun off the drawing of most lines into a single function, which takes the number of preceding spaces, the leftmost hour mark on the line, the number of interstitial spaces and the final hour mark on the line (380 characters):
<> =~ /:/;
$H = $` % 12;
$M = int $'/5;
$;=' ';
$z = $;x8 . sy(0) . $/;
$z .= li(4,11,7,1) . $/;
$z .= li(1,10,13,2) . $/;
$z .= li(0,9,15,3) . $/;
$z .= li(1,8,13,4) . $/;
$z .= li(4,7,7,5);
$z .= $;x8 . sy(6);
print $z;
sub li {
$;x$_[0] . sy($_[1]) . $;x$_[2] . sy($_[3]) . $/;
}
sub sy {
$_ = shift;
$H==$_ ? ($H==$M ? 'x' : 'h') : ($M==$_ ? 'm' : 'o');
}
Before getting totally mucked up (311 characters):
<> =~ /:/;
$H = $` % 12;
$M = int $'/5;
print ' 'x8 . sy(0) . $/ . li(4,11,7,1) . $/ . li(1,10,13,2) . $/ . li(0,9,15,3) . $/ . li(1,8,13,4) . $/ . li(4,7,7,5) . ' 'x8 . sy(6);
sub li {' 'x$_[0] . sy($_[1]) . ' 'x$_[2] . sy($_[3]) . $/;}
sub sy {$_ = shift; $H==$_ ? $H==$M ? 'x' : 'h' : $M==$_ ? 'm' : 'o';}
My final effort which is 244 characters when concatenated onto a single line:
<>=~/:/;
$H=$`%12;
$M=int $'/5;
sub li{' 'x$_[0].sy($_[1]).' 'x$_[2].sy($_[3]).$/}
sub sy{$_=shift;$H==$_?$H==$M?'x':'h':$M==$_?'m':'o'}
print ' 'x8 .sy(0).$/.li(4,11,7,1).$/.li(1,10,13,2).$/.li(0,9,15,3).$/.li(1,8,13,4).$/.li(4,7,7,5).' 'x8 .sy(6)
United States Federal Lands
I gave this post a vague title because the control of federal lands, such as National Parks, National Memorials and National Forests, is a surprisingly complicated issue. Tracts controlled by the federal government arise from disparate processes and are controlled by a number of different agencies including the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and the United States Forest Service.
Agencies
National Park Service
The most well-known federal land management agency is the National Park Service, housed under the Department of the Interior. The NPS was created in 1916 to organize management of the fledgling system of parks that began with the designation of Yellowstone National Park in 1862.
Bureau of Land Management
Originally created in 1812 as the General Land Office under the Department of the Treasury the Bureau of Land Management became part of the Department of the Interior after merging with the United States Grazing Service. Unlike the National Park Service, the BLM does not exist as an agency purely to protect the lands that it controls; the BLM issues permits for grazing, logging and mineral collection on many of the lands that they control.
U.S. Forest Service
The United States Forest Service is responsible for the management of National Grasslands and National Forests, controlling access to grazing, logging and mineral collection on lands under their control in addition to allowing recreation on these lands.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is the caretaker of the country’s National Wildlife Refuges and National Fish Hatcheries.
Lands
National Park
Beginning with the creation of Yellowstone in 1862 by congress National Parks are areas created by the legislative branch as natural preserves for recreational use by citizens of the country. National Parks do not allow for logging, mineral extraction or any other exploitation of the land. These lands are generally the most visited areas controlled by the federal government, receive the most funding for improvements to support visitors to the park and the most legislative attention. National Parks are all manage under the National Park Service.
National Monument
As a DC native, the term National Monument evokes thoughts of man made symbol commemorating a person or event. In terms of U.S. public lands, however, a national monument is a tract set aside by executive order without the approval of Congress. The land for a national monument may be that which the federal government already controls or something that is given to the government by an individual or state. The presidential power to create such lands was granted by the Antiquities Act of 1906 signed by Theodore Roosevelt and first used to protect Devil’s Tower in Northeastern Wyoming. The intent of the act is to allow the president to afford protection to natural resources of the United States more quickly than an act of Congress is capable. National monuments are intended to be less expansive than national parks, generally protecting a single natural feature. Management of national monuments falls to either the National Park Service or the Bureau of Land Management.
National Memorial
Now this is what should make me think of the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials in Washington. National Memorials are protected areas established by the legislative branch to commemorate a historic person or event. Though most National Memorials are administered by the National Park Service, some, such as the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial are overseen by another organization and considered an affiliated area of the NPS.
National Wilderness Area
A National Wilderness Area is defined within land that is already under federal control by the Wilderness Act of 1964 as an area in which commercial activities are forbidden and human activity is limited to non-motorized recreation and non-invasive activities such as scientific study. NWAs exist under the cooperative purview of all four land management agencies, the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
National Forest and Grassland
Managed by the Forest Service, a division of the Department of Agriculture, National Forests are unlike their protected brethren in that commercial exploitation of their resources is allowed with permits given for grazing, logging and mineral extraction. Lands administered by the Forest Service my also be licensed for commercial recreation such as ski resorts. National Forests are created by executive order as granted by the Land Revision Act of 1891 and National Grasslands by the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act.
National Recreation Area
Until 1963, National Recreation Areas were created by executive order but a change in policy means that all Areas designated thereafter are by legislative action. National Recreation Areas can be managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management or the U.S. Forest Service. NRAs are usually created to encourage water sports on lakes created by the damming of rivers.
National Wildlife Refuge
Originally defined by the National Wildlife Refuge System Administration Act of 1966 a National Wildlife Refuges exist, unsurprisingly, as habitats for specific or groups of species. They are created by congressional legislation and administrated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
National Seashore
Usually controlled by the National Park Service, National Seashores are protected areas that are similar to both NRA’s and National Parks. Most of the areas contained within a National Seashore is available for recreation, often including vehicular offroading trails.
National Historical Park
National Historical Parks or National Historic Sites are historically significant structures or areas governed by the National Park Service. These areas were at one time declared by the Secretary of the Interior, but in modern times by acts of congress.
Parkway
Parkways are roads controlled by the National Park Service and are often scenic roads through federally controlled lands, such as Blue Ridge and Rock Creek parkways. Others, such as a significant portion of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, are not maintained by the NPS but state and local agencies instead.