Catching up on my magazines. Interesting one pager in IEEE Spectrum. Was surprised that cars are about the same as airplanes, energy wise on a per person, per mile basis. Also surprised that modern high speed trains beat both by 10x.
Fast Trains Are Energy Efficient (And Fast)
Cars and planes make sense for short and long distances, but for intercity travel, they don’t even come close to fast trains
A sad week for New Orleans. First the loss of Leah Chase, now Dr. John. I saw him live in the early 1990s at First Avenue, Prince’s club. Going Back to New Orleans is one of my favorite albums, and his post-Katrina album The City That Care Forgot is an an underappreciated classic. The definitive artistic statement on Hurricane Katrina and it’s aftermath. The man had a colorful life. Going to have to pick up his biography, Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Night Tripper. His obit from Nola.com:
Dr. John, a true New Orleans music legend, dies at age 77
I’m always liked the idea of Wafer Scale Integration (WSI). Looks like some people are having another go at it using GPUs. From the Next Platform. A few months old (catching up on some reading today)
GIVING WAFERSCALE PROCESSORS ANOTHER SHOT
Just stuff from the last week. My son’s high school graduation, my new shoe rack, bees across the street and cats in bowls.
I never could figure out Uber. I always said they were just running an illegal taxi business. It is probably worse than I thought. A longish article, but worth a read. From American Affairs Journal:
Uber’s Path of Destruction
Yesterday my daughter’s iPhone Gmail started acting up. Then my wife’s iPad. I figured it was an Apple thing. Then my Linux box started acting funny. Lots of IMAP retries. Turned out it was a Google outage. Seems to be network congestion on the east coast. I predict we will be seeing more of this in the future as these systems get larger and more complex.
Leah Chase was an old friend of the family. My dad was a photographer and took pictures in both black and white schools during segregation. He would take his black clients to Dooky Chase for lunch. I suppose he was one of the only white people who frequented the place in those days.
In later years I would go there with my father for lunch. Mrs. Chase would always come out and chat. I remember going there once in the mid-1990s with my new digital camera (an early Kodak 600) and taking her picture. Like everyone at the time (digital cameras were brand new) she was fascinated to see the picture immediately on the LCD display on the back of the camera.
I mentioned that I would post it to the internet (I had a personal web site at the time). She drew the line at this. “Nah Ah. I don’t want to be on the internet. Somebody told me I was on the internet and I told them to take me off!”. I should have realized that like many of the old institutions in New Orleans, change came only very gradually to Dooky Chase.
My first job was documenting (not even writing) COBOL. My most recent job was an attempt attempting to modernize the software of a large bank. Nobody ever mentioned COBOL. An article from Texas Public Radio.
How COBOL Still Powers The Global Economy At 60 Years Old
By PAUL FLAHIVE • MAY 23, 2019
A good (but long) article on modern US / UK conservatives. The focus is UK politics and the motivation is clearly Brexit madness, but the asides that compare the UK and the US are good reading. Always fun to get the view of an outsider looking in.
‘A zombie party’: the deepening crisis of conservatism
Thee traditional right is clinging on to power – but its ideas are dead in the water.
The quote that is the source of the title:
In the UK, Conservative party membership has been dwindling for decades. At its peak, in the early 50s, it was 2.8 million. Last year, it was 124,000 and the party received twice as much money from dead members, through wills, as from the living. Katy Balls, political correspondent of the usually pro-Tory Spectator magazine, describedthe Tories last year as “a zombie party”.
A subject near and dear to my heart. About a decade ago I went to vote here in Texas. Had my voter registration card, had been in the same house for a decade and had been voting from this same location just as long. Oddly my name wasn’t on the rolls. Even odder, my wife, in pretty much the exact same situation, was still registered.
I refused to go away and perhaps held up the line a bit. Eventually someone brought over a judge, with an unlikely German accent. I told him the facts, and he said (maybe a bit dramatically): let this man vote! I believe my ballot was only provisional, though.
My wife suspected shenanigans. She had recently given our first, small, political donation to a local candidate who had helped out our neighborhood with a road construction issue. Yes, the candidate happened to be a Democrat.
I was pissed and tried to find out what had happened. I wrote all of my Representatives. Only Lloyd Doggett replied. I eventually learned that there were “problems” with the company contracted to management voter rolls. Yeah, right. I still want someone to go to jail for this, but I couldn’t get any traction. I’m suppose I could have hired a lawyer or called the local TV station. Today I would. I see little has changed here in Texas. It seems to have gotten worse. I suppose someone has been held to account in some way, but I think another hatchet man did his job and took his fall. Anyone wanna bet he ends up in a cushy job with political connections?
Texas secretary of state resigns after leading botched voter purge that questioned the citizenship of almost 100,000 people
Steven A. Guccione 