bohnsack.com

These days, people seem enamored with the verb "vet".

v. vet·ted, vet·ting, vets
v. tr.

1. To subject to veterinary evaluation, examination, medication, or surgery.
2. To subject to thorough examination or evaluation: vet a manuscript.

Most dictionaries have the first definition of this word dealing with veterinary medicine or veterans of war, but this doesn't stop the Business 2.0 or Fast Company crowds from thinking themselves clever for coining a word to be used in place of
the perfectly fine "evaluate", "examine", or even just "look at" or "read".

This "vet" virus is spreading out of control. From the September issue of the IEEE Spectrum:

Venture capitalists won't push you to write a technical development plan -- they have neither the time nor the staff to vet it in depth, ...

Vet this. Vet that. Oh, wait a minute, that hasn't been vetted yet. We'll have to wait until it gets vetted. Enough! I hereby proclaim that the use of "vet" in place of the infinitely more suitable "evaluate" to be lame beyond comprehension and worthy of my contempt.

That is all.

Oh.. except that I finished reading Redemption Ark the other day. It's highly recommended, if you're into hard-science space-opera and you've read the previous Reynolds books. The series contains one of the best explanations of the Fermi paradox that I've heard. I can't decide if I would want to be a Conjoiner or an Ultra if I were to live in the Reynolds Universe. The Conjoiner's advanced technology has it's appeal, but I'm leaning towards life as an Ultra, if only to ride aboard light huggers with names like Gnostic Ascension, Melancholia of Departure, and Nostalgia for Infinity.

Update - I've recanted on vet - if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, etc.

Although I remain generally optimistic, as I read this and this, the future begins to look a place that's not quite so shiny. I urge baby boomers to enjoy their government-sponsored pensions and free medical benefits while they can, 'cause that stuff ain't gonna last long. Unless we develop a nanotech-powered cornucopia device, strong AI that can build one for us, or some other science fiction craziness in the next ten years, I don't see how the status quo can be maintained.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Here's another version of the Greenspan story.

Lat Sunday there were many wild flowers in bloom at Quemado Lake and the Plains near the VLA were alive with wild sunflowers:

Good times...

I was in Austin for a few days. The humidity was brutal.

The highlight of the trip was the opening slide of Wednesday's presentation. It was dated "02004".

A canoe or a kayak would be very nice on Quemado Lake.

There'll be more words and photographs from Sunday's travels later this week.

vi, especially as it's evolved into vim, is king among editors.

vi is pronounced as vee-eye. Each of the two letters is pronounced separately. Some people think that vi is pronounced as vi or vie. They are wrong.

Inspired by The Long Now Foundation, I shall henceforth to use 5 digits to specify the year:

• In the year 00985, the Viking Eirikr Thorvaldsson (Eric the Red) founded a colony in Greenland.
• Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in 01450.
• Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 01492.
• The Protestant Reformation began in Germany, when 31-year-old Martin Luther posted his 95 theses at Wittenberg Cathedral on October 31st, 01517.
• Don Juan de Onate became the first Governor-General of New Mexico and
  established his capital in 01598 at San Juan Pueblo, 25 miles north of Santa Fe.
• The Mayflower docked at Plymouth Rock in the year 01620.
• My maternal grandfather was born in 01899.
• I was born in 01974.
• 01976 was the bicentennial of the United States of America.
• Today is August 21st, 02004.
• 03004 is a thousand years from now.
• In 7,995 years, the year will be 09999.
• In 7,996 years, the year will be 10000.
• In 10,000 years, the year will be 12004.

And as a smartass friend of mine says:

• Prince wants to party like it's 01999.

I'm still working on getting all the dates on this website to have the extra digit.

Update Sunday 8/22 02004

Or... I could just start using the TAI64 format

Integers 2^63 and larger are reserved for future extensions. Under many cosmological theories, the integers under 2^63 are adequate to cover the entire expected lifetime of the universe; in this case no extensions will be necessary.

20D preview at dpreview
20D preview at The Luminous Landscape
20D preview at imaging resource

Google went public today at $85/share.

Max Lyons has a new gallery of Colorado and Utah photo mosiacs that's amazing. I'm working on the skills needed to do similar things with New Mexico landscapes. My goal is to do something that will become a tack-sharp print greater than 5 feet wide @ 300 pixels per inch by year's end.

Polar Penny has a fascinating blog of her experiences moving to and living in Iqaluit on Canada's Baffin Island. I've been pretty far north, but never so far as Iqaluit.

Having a lot of interest in the North, it was very cool to run across her blog. Unfortunately, Penny's employer fired her for her blogging. See the MetaFilter discussion.

Booo.

Update on Tue 8/10
Iqaluit isn't actually all that farther north than Dubawnt Lake (where I've been):

Iqaluit, Nunavat - 63.8 ° N / 68.5 ° W
Dubawnt Lake, Nunavat - 63.2 ° N / 101.8 ° W

For a few thousand dollars, you too can be an arctic explorer. I'd like to go back, but maybe not so far up. Perhaps to Kasba or a canoe trip from Kasba.

These lectures on the Long Now, including talks by Brian Eno, George Dyson, Bruce Sterling and more will be interesting to listen to, once their webserver recovers from the MetaFiltering.

The sound in Eno's talk get way better after a little bit. Beef will be happy to hear the reference to his favorite musician.

Although it's probably some kind of a New Mexico sin, I find no salsa superior to Riba Foods' Arriba! Chipotle Red Salsa. Some may be prevented form experiencing this product's glory by a reluctance to be associated with the natural foods isle Beatniks or the extra cost of this "premium" brand. Not me. I'd suffer anything for Arriba's smoky Chipotle goodness.

While considering removing much of this website's personal content and doing some new stuff anonymously, I found an amazing thing. It seems that many bloggers who have their own domain name (foobar.com) also have a lot of information about themselves in a publicly accessible database. I knew, of course, that this was possible and that the database existed, but I was very surprised about some of the things I found, after only a few queries.

As an example, the following command returns a ton of stuff about me:

unix-prompt$ whois bohnsack.com

Some of it's no longer valid, because I've moved a number of times, but it would still be bad news, if I was trying to keep my identity a secret.

If you don't have easy access to a Unix command line to try this for yourself, you might find a web interface to whois, like this one, convenient.

As I was researching how I could go about creating suitable contact information for my new anonymous domain name, I thought I'd check out what other people used for contact info. Imagine my surprise, when I used this tool to find the full names, street addresses, and phone numbers of people who seem to desire anonymity.

This isn't a mistake I'm going to make going forward.

In other and sadly related news, my neighbor came over tonight to tell be that he thought he saw someone stealing mail out of my mailbox this afternoon. I know stealing mail is a federal offense, and I think it's a felony, but can I hope that the responsible party, if caught, gets the chair?

The chair for the theft of a small check from my mailbox written out to the local power company? I say yes!

I thought about setting up a webcam motion detector and trying to catch the bastard in the act, but Linux sucks so much that figured writing this and then hitting the sack to read about inertia dampening fields on spaceships in the 24th century for a few hours would be more worthwhile.