Saw Orion for the first time this season.  It’s my “ski constellation” because it’s most easily seen during the winter months. 

Around 11pm I went out to check the cloud cover and visibility in anticipation of the Leonid meteor shower.  Leo rises in the east (actually, everything rises in the east) and while looking that way I spotted my old friend Orion.

Most years I spot it first during early October, but this year it’s halfway through November before I saw it.  Not sure why this year was so late and am hoping it’s not because I spend less time looking at the stars – but I think it is.

Got up at 3am to go looking for Leonids.  Sky was perfectly clear and I stood there tired and cold for about 5min and spotted 2 Leonids.  I told the kids about it in the morning, and they asked why I didn’t wake them up – and I reminded them that there we’re only 2 in 5 min and that if it was more I would have got everyone up.

My daughter asked me what I wished for – and I admitted I totally forgot.  That gave me the idea that the next time there’s a meteor shower to wake them up for, I’ll remind them of all the wishes they get to make – which is a part of a meteor shower I never thought about until now.

Even though there’s no official link to anything from China, I like the Chinese Curse – it gives you a lot to think about:

• May you live in interesting times
• May you come to the attention of those in authority
• May you find what you are looking for

Earlier this week the White House unveiled an online system to submit questions to the President and vote on other people submitted questions.  My first reaction was very positive.  I liked the fact that I discovered this as a post in the stream on my FaceBook page.  I was eager to see what kind of technology they would be using for the system.  I have been impressed with the WhiteHouse.Gov web site team’s work ever since they switched it on at exactly 12:00pm on January 20th.

I navigated to the site and was pleased to see it was very responsive and handling what had to be an incredible number of users.  I would like to see their roll out plan and how they ensured it’s scalability.  I signed up for an account and submitted my question in about 5 min.  My question was, verbatim:

How will you prevent gaming of this system? I imagine there are special interests with the technology to get their agenda onto this system – submitting hundreds of votes for the questions they want to appear important etc

In a matter of hours my question received 10 negative votes and 7 positive votes. It didn’t come close to the 5k+ votes that the most popular questions received.

As it turns out, the people at NORML did exactly what I thought would be done.  They rallied their large following online to game the system, and all of the most popular questions in several categories were questions about the legalization of marijuana. 

So I’m a bit disappointed by the White House technology team – they should have seen something like this coming.  I don’t know if there’s an iron clad method to prevent this.  I don’t think it’s even so much a technology problem.  I am also not faulting NORML in this – as they did exactly what they were supposed to do.

The only idea I have that might help is less anonymity  in the system.  In this particular instance it might have prevented people from publicly stating their position on the marijuana issue – but more importantly, if you can tie the voting system to real people you can prevent the “multiple votes” problem, which I suspect was the case here.

There is some technology that might help as well, like the fully open online voting system called Helios.  It’s a system that uses pretty standard computer security techniques to enable people to submit votes secretly but still verify that their vote was used in the final tally.  I don’t propose that such a system be used to the point where every person who votes does the math to verify their vote was counted – but the existence of such a technique in the system would ensure that someone could audit the election, and anyone questioning the validity could do so. 

Helios doesn’t solve the “one vote per person” problem, but I believe it could be used in conjunction with some other system to do so.  What that other system will look like I have some ideas about – but it opens up privacy and indenty theft issues that mass media has convinced people are more important than things like participation in government.

Listening to the pseudo game show Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me on NHPR this morning, and heard the response to “What was in the traditional personal letter from the out going president to the incoming one – left in the President’s Desk in the Oval office?”

One contest responded it was a small card that read:

Cardinals 24 – Steelers 17

And next year you get to pick who wins

Got these from Will Wheaton’s blog (yes, the actor who was Wusly Crusher on Star Trek the Next Generation).

Fundamental Rule For Life: Don’t be a Dick

Fundamental Rule For Driving : Everyone on the road is an idiot, and they’re actively trying to kill you.

I particularly like the wording of the driving one – how it doesn’t say Everyone else – but just Everyone – meaning you, the driver, are also an idiot – something people tend to forget.

I just spun Man in Black (click for lyrics) by Johnny Cash.  It’s still playing as I type this and it struck me pretty hard: I’m pretty sure Johnny’s wearing a “Coat of White” cause I think we just made a few things right.

Interesting snopes story about a girl named Le-a, pronounced Ledasha.  The snopes article contains a reference to M@ – a signature I’ve been using since at least 1993.  I hope that means I get prior art or something – but it’s just a name.

I’m pretty sure the Usenet archives will have an association with my sun.soe.clarkson.edu email address and the signature “M@”

My vote is to spend the $700 billion to put an American on the surface of Mars.  I think Nasa’s budget right now is about $17 billion.  They probably couldn’t just scale their current programs up.  But with good management they should be able to select currently unfunded programs and unexplored technologies and make the achievement possible.  $700 billion might not establish a permanent colony on Mars – but probably could get a self-sustaining colony on the Moon as a stage in the program to land people on Mars.

• It creates jobs (I understand that, economically, creating jobs isn’t a good goal on it’s own)
• It creates investment in US companies
• It would generate a great deal of pride in our country
• We could earmark investment in the energy technologies necessary to the program- possibly solving a whole slew of problems we currently face

I believe that right now the earth is in great danger from several extinction level events, the most obvious a large asteroid and the most popular a global climate meltdown. 

If we, as a species, don’t make the investment to colonize another planet we are putting all of our eggs in one basket.  I can think of nothing more tragic then humans being the only intelligent life form in the universe (I don’t believe this, but it’s still a possibility) and being destroyed when we had the knowledge and power to survive and decided not to pursue it.

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

These are a few of my favorite things

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels

Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles

Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings

These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes

Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes

Silver white winters that melt into springs

These are a few of my favorite things

When the dog bites

When the bee stings

When I’m feeling sad

I simply remember my favorite things

And then I don’t feel so bad

Found one of my first best friends on FaceBook today.  I haven’t talked to him in about 25 years, since his family moved back to France.  By itself that’s a kewl story – but the interesting (i.e. bloggable) part is that his job is very similar to mine right now.  He’s working at a start-up, mostly at home, building a Flex based UI on a non-Microsoft platform and his team is using Scrum, and they are deploying some of it to the Amazon cloud – all things I’ve been doing.  25 years go by and we both end up doing a very similar thing – whatever made that happen must have been a factor in us becoming friends – or was us becoming friends the factor?

I very much regret that we weren’t in touch when I visited Paris in 1998, as it would have been awesome to have a local to show us around.