saturn return to sender

Certainty and truth lie on opposite ends of a spectrum. Think about it.

Now, is that a certainty or a truth?

I’ve always wanted to visit New Orleans … after tomorrow it may never be the same.

Wikipedia, where someone has already updated the article on New Orleans to mention Katrina, notes that “A major hurricane could create a lake in the central city as much as 30 feet deep, which could take months to pump dry.”

Meanwhile, yikes:

“The real issue - that I don’t think the nation is paying attention to - is that through the city of New Orleans, through the Gulf of Mexico, we probably deal with almost a third of the nation’s domestic oil that is produced. And that will most likely be shut down,” Mr. Nagin said.

This is going to hurt.

Ack! Who’d have thought I’d personally need a code version management system? I have the version of juniper running viennateng.com, and a version I’ve improved with new features, but I’ve been scared to try to move a live website over to the new version. Meanwhile, I’ve made a few bug-fixes to the live version on vt.com, forgetting that I had the newer version sitting elsewhere. Dumb! Guess I’ll have to diff files by hand.

(A while back I decided on the name “juniper” for my homemade php-based website rendering/templating package. Someday — yes, “someday” — I’d like to package it up neatly and document it and so on. Maybe even make a user-friendly front-end. Currently a website running on it must be written by hand using xml, but there’s no reason it couldn’t have a pretty GUI …)

jovian

The key to Craven’s cool world is converting the ocean’s thermal energy. The first step: Sink a pipe at least 3,000 feet deep and start pumping up seawater. The end result: an environmentally sustainable, virtually inexhaustible supply of electricity, freshwater for drinking and irrigation, even air-conditioning.

Wow. Very cool. (Ha! Oh I kill myself, I really do.)

So I’m TA-ing an undergrad design class. This is the first time I’ve ever taught much of anything. It is sobering to have 17 students looking at you as if you have the gameplan all worked out. And sadly, I’m far from expert on the things being taught so far, at least from a technical standpoint. And technical expertise would probably be more useful to them than my philosophical yadda-yadda. I suppose can be a cheerleader if nothing else …

I learned the word polymath from that article.