A new observation technique has revealed small rocky planets around many red dwarf stars, which are the most plentiful type of star in the galaxy. The article calls them “earth-like” but it’s not clear whether this just means that they are small and rocky or whether it further implies that they are located in the Goldilocks zone. The nearest is practically next door: only 13 light-years away.

We’ve been working out of a temporary office for the last few months while the Bellevue Place contractors build out the permanent office upstairs. We moved in last Friday and today everyone is busy running power and network cables and setting up their desks. There’s a guy with a paintbrush finishing up some trim work, there are boxes all over the floor, and nobody has pulled the protective plastic film off the fancy stainless-steel wall panels yet…

It’s an open-plan office, and all the developers sit in one long room with south-facing windows. We picked out where we wanted to sit today, and I grabbed a desk with a westward view: I may have to spend my days in Bellevue now, but I can look up any time and see the Space Needle peeking over the top of Capitol Hill. The window frames my home neighborhood almost perfectly.

Now it’s time to figure out how the new coffee maker works.

“Long Live the Kings” is a short film about motorcycling, a five minute piece of beauty: gorgeous, shot on film, evocative, so full of joy that it brought the tears up a bit. The imagery is a little bit larger than life, but that’s part of what makes motorcycling fun – out on a bike in the wide open world, nothing but you and your machine and the wind and sun, you feel larger than life, and that’s part of what I like about it. Still, you have to stay grounded, because it’s dangerous, too, and you need to keep your wits about you… the trip doesn’t end til you reach home.

I want to quote the whole narration, because it’s all true; but really, just go watch it.

Amazon Profits Fall 45 Percent, Still the Most Amazing Company in the World:

Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers. The shareholders put up the equity, and instead of owning a claim on a steady stream of fat profits, they get a claim on a mighty engine of consumer surplus.

Engadget has a list of all (or nearly all?) of the commercially-available 3D printers, with prices and notes on unique features.

I have a hard time mustering as much enthusiasm for 3D printers as the technology seems to deserve; I just don’t use plastic parts in my projects unless there’s no other material that will do the job. Maybe it’s a function of growing up in the early ’80s, but “plastic” suggests “cheap, disposable, trivial, wasteful”, and when I am trying to make something I care about I always prefer to use wood or metal or glass. People are excited about 3D printers, though, and that excitement seems to be drawing a broader world of hobbyist-level CNC tools along in its wake, so I’m glad to see the field developing even if I will likely never buy a 3D printer myself.

Random guy at the bar has a lot of questions about my netbook. How much RAM? What kind of processor? Why Ubuntu? Do I work in software? What am I going to do now that netbooks are dead? He thinks I look like Bill Pullman. He asks leading questions of the woman to his left, trying to get her to back this up, and eventually sort of cajoles her into agreeing with him. It’s clear she’s just trying to be polite.

I pitch some questions back at him, friendly-like, the usual getting-to-know-you thing; it’s hardly a new game, after all. “No no”, he laughs, as though this next bit is funny, “this conversation is a one-way street.” He’s serious about it, too: he won’t even tell me his name. How does he know all the right questions to ask about my computer? Does he work in the industry, too? Where’s he from? He won’t say – he offers nothing. He just keeps on smiling and asking questions.

It’s suddenly creepy. What? Really? How far off the wall do you have to be to say something like “this conversation is a one-way street” and actually mean it? How do you get to be late-forties or early-fifties or however old he is and not understand how making conversation works? Really, random dude, you can just ask whatever you want, and tell me nothing, and that’s okay with you?

I grinned even wider, dawdled around for a few more minutes, fed him a few of what Huck Finn might have called “stretchers”, settled my tab, and left. I don’t know what his game was but I don’t want to play it.

A 2 1/8″ square, quad-core 1.7GHz ARM Cortex-A9 computer including Ethernet, USB, and micro-HDMI, with a micro-SD card for storage. Runs Android or Ubuntu. $89.

The MPU-9150 is a single chip, 4mm square, which includes a three-axis accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass. Not so very long ago it was hard to find a three-axis gyro at all, much less one that came integrated with other sensors. This has happened in five years’ time, I think? It seems plausible that we might be able to buy a single chip incorporating processor, storage, radio, and sensors within another decade.

Riding home from work, west across the I-90 floating bridge, the lights of the houses sloping down toward the lake echoed the yellow-hued glow reflecting off the clouds over the city.

The color, I noticed: remember this yellow, because it’s not going to last. In thirty years’ time, Leschi and Mt. Baker will look pretty much the same, but the hue of their lights will have shifted. All of those incandescent bulbs are going to burn out, all of those sodium vapor streetlights will go – and the lights that replace them will be crisp white LEDs.

The kids of that generation will probably just assume that night skies always look weird in old pictures because the old people who took them had to deal with those hilariously antique cameras back then and they just couldn’t get the color right.

It wasn’t a particularly great year, but it wasn’t bad, either.

I have some challenges to deal with in 2013, but I have the resources I need to tackle them.

I have what I think will turn out to be a very good job. It will never make me a rock star, but it’s interesting work with smart, talented people, and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot. It’s a good place to be.

ALTSpace is running smoothly. It isn’t exactly what I had hoped for, but in some ways it’s better. It’s a great shared workshop: in 2013 I hope to make it a good community gathering place, too.

I don’t really know where I want my life to go. I knew exactly what I wanted when I left Real Software in 2008, but that dream is dead and I’m not sure where the pieces went. I know what I want to do in 2013, more or less, but beyond that I have no idea. I’ll spend some time thinking about this over the next couple of months.

We have done no Christmas-season decorating here at the House of Saxman and it feels a little weird that the Big Holiday itself is just a couple days away. Still, yesterday was the burner-triangle neighborhood Christmas Crawl, and we’re driving down to California tomorrow, so holiday-time it must be.

My unusually large immediate family have all rented a cabin together up near Lake Tahoe. We’ll be piling in for three days with all of our significant others. Since many of us now have second families to celebrate with, the big family gathering is rolled back a day late.

We’re all chipping in one dish or another for the various meals. I just finished stemming and stuffing five and a half pounds of mushrooms – one batch with crab and green onion, the other with spinach and herbs. Such an amazing pile of food! It’d keep Ava and me satisfied for a week, but it’s just one side dish for one dinner for the whole group.

Well, I’ve done this drive more times than I can remember, so I’m sure it’ll go by quickly. I probably won’t post much until New Year’s, so… hope you’re all having a good holiday yourselves, and I’ll see you in 2013.

Mumford & Sons – White Blank Page

Chills. The ache in his throat, the climbing roar of the mixed voices…

My social life has been a bit thin of late. To some degree I think this is just the usual thing that happens to people in the full swing of adulthood – my friends are mostly all paired up now and a surprising number are having kids. That’s been going on for years but it seems to have become more the norm than the exception, and perhaps the critical mass necessary to sustain a lively communal culture has been lost as people dig in to their more private family activities.

But I have also developed an increasing suspicion that blame for the apparent social silence can be laid at the feet of Facebook. I suspect that it has reached its own critical mass, where people are now so used to using it, and so used to finding all or nearly all of their friends there, that they have to some degree forgotten that there are people Facebook cannot reach. Perhaps us non-Facebookers are now such a small minority that one really can get away with forgetting to keep us in the loop.

How can you measure the number of parties or dinners or random let’s-go-to-the-arboretum-for-a-picnic events that you haven’t been invited to? How do I know whether they’re not happening, or they’re happening, and I’m not being invited because I’m not on facebook, or they’re happening, and I’m not being invited because nobody likes me anymore? Do I need to find new friends, or do I just need to poke the ones I already have and remind them to tell me what’s going on?

Ava learned today that one of her best friends is getting married in a few weeks and had neglected to invite her. Why? Because they sent the invitations out on Facebook, and Ava doesn’t have an account. Yes, yes, there was apparently a postscript offering to send out paper invitations to anyone who wanted one, but… you still had to be on Facebook to notice it. All the planning, all the messages, all the conversation has apparently been happening on Facebook. Ava didn’t know it was going on, so she didn’t ask about it, and everyone else was so used to everyone being on Facebook that they didn’t notice she wasn’t on the list.

I don’t like this. One company should not own the infrastructure for our social lives – especially not a company as greedy, intrusive, and all-around antidemocratic as Facebook. But who’s going to stop them now? Replacing Facebook with G+ would be just as bad, really: the problem is not Facebook itself, but the fact that we’ve lost the old, open, interactive web as everyone has piled into Facebook’s walled garden. Everyone used to complain about evite, but at least you could see an evite invitation when someone mailed it to you! With Facebook, you can either join up and sign your life story over to Mark Zuckerberg, or you get nothing. This is not okay.

It’s hard to imagine a way to solve this problem. When will we reach the point that not having a facebook account makes you an unreachable crank? Imagine how we’d feel about someone under the age of 40 with no cell phone in 2012 – when will society at large feel that way about people with no facebook account? Have we already reached that point? I certainly hope not, but the trends I see are curving toward that future and not away from it.

So cold this morning. I rode in wearing a fleece jacket under my thinsulate-lined leather bike jacket and I still felt the cold air trickling in any time I didn’t hold my chest just right so the collar line was pressed against my neck. Wow.

The pair of Headway cells I ordered showed up yesterday, and test-fitting them in the electric motorcycle frame shows that the layout will work pretty much exactly as I hoped. Some time in another couple of months I’ll make a bracket which will place the motor right about where the old gas engine’s transmission used to sit, then I’ll fill the rest of the engine bay with stacks of these batteries.

Maybe I’ll spend a couple of hours working on the polartec lining for my ski jacket tomorrow. It’d be nice to have my ski gear all set and ready for whenever I get a chance to hit the slopes.

The Samsung Chromebook is a full-sized, ARM-based laptop with 2GB RAM and 16GB flash storage, which costs only $249. A cheap, power-efficient netbook with a big screen? Cool! Now if only there were some way to run a normal operating system on it…

I got Ubuntu installed on my ARM Chromebook tonight. Here’s a messy brain dump of what I did. The system was already in devmode when I started (see http://goo.gl/TSZxs for info on how to achieve that). I also already had a tarball of an Ubuntu filesystem, created with the “rootstock” tool. [edit: you can use the distributed ubuntu-core tarball directly from ubuntu as well, and then install additional packages on top]

Get an SD card, insert it in a reader on your Ubuntu PC…

This sounds like fun – I have a Raspberry Pi sitting on my desk at home doing all of nothing:

Do you like Unix? Do you really like Unix? Well, what if I told you there’s a little-known operating system out there that’s more Unix than even Unix is. Cool, right?

Well it is true! Plan 9 occupies an interesting niche in the open source operating system world. It is a full-fledged descendant of Unix, but not in the way that most systems out there are. It took the bones and beating heart of Unix and then built a brand-new cybernetic exoskeleton around it, with lasers, and heat vision… oh wait. You want to boot this bad-boy up, right? Well, okay, we’ll do that. But what hardware shall we run it on? Hey, you got a Raspberry Pi? Well then, read on!

I’m not sure why it sounds more reasonable to install Plan 9 on a tiny cheap computer than to put it on a full size computer where one could actually have some elbow room for one’s experimentation, but there’s something indisputably cool about the thought.

The other thing I hate about Android: I can’t send mail, and it won’t tell me why. I haven’t sent a single email with my phone since I got it last Christmas. (Another way this fancy Galaxy Nexus is actually worse at being a communication device than the old, supposedly obsolete Blackberry it replaced.) I don’t remember the exact error message, but it was two words, along the lines of “connection failed”, containing zero useful information. After discovering FOTAKill earlier today – resulting in hour after hour of beautiful, calm, serene not-being-pesteredness – I thought I might take another crack at the email thing.

Yeah. I poked around until I found where “outgoing settings” lived, set all the switches and turned all the knobs, then sent a test email. No error message. Yay, I thought, it’s finally working! That wasn’t so bad.

Twenty minutes later I got a little concerned. That’s a long time for email to spend in transit. I sent another message. An hour later, still nothing had come through. I sent a couple more messages, to various different email addresses.

Yeah, no. They’re all sitting in the outbox, not going anywhere. No error message, no nothing, they’re just not sending, and the Android system either can’t or won’t tell me why. There’s a little spinny widget thing in the bottom bar that looks like it might be trying to tell me that the phone is working on something or other, but nothing happens when I click it, and it never stops spinning.

Oh, well. Progress, eh? Does Google even test this app, or do they just assume everyone is going to use gmail?

Google has apparently produced a new version of Android. My phone is now bugging me to install it. A notification pops up: “there’s a new version, would you like to install it now, or later, or get more info”? “Later”, I click, because I’m not sure I want it, and I sure don’t want to deal with it right now.

This process repeats EVERY HALF AN HOUR.

Who on earth thought this was a good idea, and how can I get them fired?

Now trying to find out how to completely disable all upgrade checks, for ever, because I’ve seen more of them in one day than I should ever have to deal with in the entire life of a phone.

OK, more information: you apparently solve this problem by installing an app which is inscrutably named “FOTAKill”. This is that sort of app which gets temporary download links in forums, so the best thing is to just search for “FOTAKill.apk” and browse the endless list of discussion board links until you find one that works. Download, install, and…. that’s it. If you’re curious about what it actually does, the source code is available, but all I learned from looking at it is that Android isn’t like any other operating system I’ve ever used.

a Businessweek article claims that airport security is killing us:

There is lethal collateral damage associated with all this spending on airline security—namely, the inconvenience of air travel is pushing more people onto the roads. Compare the dangers of air travel to those of driving. To make flying as dangerous as using a car, a four-plane disaster on the scale of 9/11 would have to occur every month, according to analysis published in the American Scientist. Researchers at Cornell University suggest that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month—which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of 9/11 than died from being on the planes that terrible day. They also suggest that enhanced domestic baggage screening alone reduced passenger volume by about 5 percent in the five years after 9/11, and the substitution of driving for flying by those seeking to avoid security hassles over that period resulted in more than 100 road fatalities.

It’s certainly true for me: since 2001, I always choose to drive rather than fly if I have any way to make my schedule accommodate the extra time. I’m going down to California for a Christmas visit and you can bet I’ll be taking the car.

It’s a Friday night. Nobody, so far as I can tell, is doing anything, anywhere. What the hell? I don’t want to just sit around and write code all evening, after sitting around writing code all day, and pretty much all week, but there doesn’t seem to be much else to do. Hrmph.

Well yeah! Marriage equality looks set to pass in Washington, Maryland, and Maine, and the state-constitution-amendment banning it is failing in Minnesota. For the first time in the USA, marriage equality is being supported by popular vote and not just by court action. At long last the tide has turned and the current is flowing in a positive direction. So glad.

Overheard at work: “Our data model is 95% irrelevant under a foo-only paradigm”.

I sent a copy of my Bejeweled clone to the guy who developed the Gamby. He liked it and now it’s one of the standard example games. Whee.

The downside of the motorcycle commute is that car drivers, who generally don’t see you, frequently pull incredibly dangerous maneuvers which it is up to you to avoid. Today’s incident happened a block after I pulled off the freeway coming home. A car in the left lane abruptly cut across my lane, aiming for the gas station to my right. The streets were slick, so I couldn’t just grab the brake – I pulled the throttle instead and aimed for the gutter. I almost made it, but the car’s right front fender hit my muffler as I went by. It made a real bang, but I stayed upright, and it so happens that my muffler was already scraped there from the crash I had a year ago.

It only just occurred to me that I was probably supposed to stop and talk to the driver – it was a collision, after all! But I simply didn’t think of it; I was too focused on surviving, and then it just didn’t seem to matter. Huh.

Well, anyway. This sort of thing happens at least once a month, though usually there’s no actual contact between vehicles. It’s just part of the life. At least the bike gives you the speed and maneuverability you need to make up for its lack of visibility.

The only thing that really worried me about this job with Mylo was the fact that I’d be commuting across the lake again. When I was working for Microsoft, the grueling trek across 520 was a great way to ruin any day. Doing it on a motorcycle gave me just enough of an advantage to make it bearable, most of the time, but it was still pretty bad; on days I had to drive a car, it was so frustrating that – well, I don’t even want to talk about that, really. It was not a good part of my life.

I felt good the day I freed myself from that job and went roaring west down 520 for the last time. The sun was shining and the traffic clear, and I swore I’d never ever ever do it again, no matter how much money anyone offered me – money simply can’t buy back all the time I spent feeling frustrated and unhappy on that godforsaken highway.

Four years later, here I am again, working for a company on the Eastside, but this time I’m crossing via I-90 and not SR-520. The commute is actually longer this way – 12 miles instead of 10, and it was 10.5 to Microsoft – but so far it’s not half so unpleasant. The morning ride eastward is a breeze. 90 gets a little congested right at the beginning, but it only slows to 45 mph or so, and the nearly-empty HOV lane across Mercer Island gets me going up to 85 mph, or faster if I want. Whoo!! Going to work is actually fun!

There’s always a back-up on the ramp from 90 to 405, since 405 is always thoroughly clogged, but the bike makes it easy to squeak in at the last minute and then pop back out a couple hundred yards later. A quick triple lane change on 405 gets me into the HOV lane, then I’m back up to 60 mph for two miles, where a special HOV-only offramp dumps me onto NE 4th just a couple of blocks from the office. It is fully sweet and I really cannot complain.

The ride home is much worse, and I haven’t found a satisfactory route yet. There’s only two miles of 405 between the on-ramp from NE 8th and the intersection with I-90, but traffic crawls along so slowly that my speedometer doesn’t even register it as motion. After the mile of misery, there’s a mile of HOV lane leading to the I-90 offramp, but that’s slim consolation after sitting in the rain barely moving for 15-20 minutes…. The solution might be to skip 405 altogether and go straight down Bellevue Way to the I-90 on-ramp. It has stoplights and a low speed limit, but at least it moves.

I-90 westbound is great until the HOV lane peters out halfway across Mercer Island, dumping me back in with the rest of the traffic for the last 2 miles. This seems to be obnoxious but acceptable at around 5 pm, but it was fully terrible yesterday when I left around 6. Tonight I’ll try cheating my way past it by taking the HOV-only exit at 80th Ave, then re-entering via surface streets at the Mercer Way on-ramp.

We’ll see how I feel about this whole business after a few more months of rain, but for now I feel like I can handle it.

I observe that people at Mylo feel free to work from home – there are only two other people in the office today, and one only showed up midafternoon. I should be able to take a break from the commute any time it starts to feel oppressive.

postscript: Bellevue Way is no improvement: it clogs up at the intersection with 112th Ave, and the on-ramp to I-90 is metered, with no HOV bypass. Using Mercer Island surface streets to skip past the tunnel works great though.

On the “Do you want to be a programmer at fifty?” thing is an interesting entry in the discussion that seems to be sprawling over the tech-blog-o-sphere, but what really caught my attention was this:

James went on to identify two kinds of programming

Type A “work(ing) out the solutions to difficult problems. That takes careful thought, but it’s the same kind of thought a novelist uses to organize a story or to write dialog that rings true. That kind of problem-solving is satisfying, even fun.”

Type B “what most programming is about – trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don’t fully understand and don’t have time to understand… skimming great oceans of APIs that you could spend years studying and learning, but the market will have moved on by then … reading between the lines of documentation and guessing at how edge cases are handled and whether or not your assumptions will still hold true two months or two years from now.. the constant evolutionary changes that occur in the language definition, the compiler, the libraries, the application framework, and the underlying operating system, that all snowball together and keep you in maintenance mode instead of making real improvements.”

I hardly know what to say about this but I think it helps explain why I had such an unsatisfying time at Google: it was almost all type-B work, which to my way of thinking isn’t really programming at all. It’s just…. API-twiddling. Meaningless, brainless, unsatisfying. Who cares if it works, if you don’t know why, if you don’t understand what you built?

I’m sort of startled and disturbed that this would be considered “most programming” – that sounds like a terrible world to live in.

This is my first day at Mylo, a two-month-old startup which is going to do something with digital photography workflow management. After this afternoon’s all-hands meeting I’ve learned I’m not supposed to say more than that in public, but the pitch that got me on board was significantly more interesting.

The ride in to Bellevue this morning was about as pleasant as a commute ever gets: I even touched 85 mph at one point as I crossed Mercer Island. This at 9 AM, even! Perhaps I just got lucky today, but it could get a lot worse and still be a pretty reasonable trip.

This new Macbook with the Retina display is nice. I have sharper-than-average vision and have always been able to make out individual pixels, even with anti-aliasing, but with this screen the text might as well be perfectly smooth. It feels unreal, like it’s not actually a computer screen but some faked-out Hollywood movie prop.

Mountain Lion, though – ugh. It took almost two hours to track down and turn off all the annoying iOS-derived frippery and make it act something like a reasonable desktop machine. (Check out Lion Tweaks if you are interested in doing the same.) Seriously, people, if I wanted to use iOS, I’d be using an iPad. And I don’t, so I’m not, so please stop shoving that stuff down my throat, ok?

Oh, well, there’s nothing to be done about it. I don’t love the Mac OS anymore, but at least it doesn’t suck any worse than anything else. Apple just stopped caring about people like me after their consumer electronics business took off, and the tail has obviously been wagging the dog for some time now.

There is no electric vehicle charger in this building’s parking lot but there are chargers in the two adjacent complexes, and it’s possible they may install one here too. I think my electric motorcycle project is going to move back on the “active” list as soon as I’ve finished the chandelier.

Bellevue is a strange place. The building height distribution is bizarrely bimodal: there are the old one- and two-story suburban buildings, the background level of the whole area, and then there are the twenty-plus story highrises stacked up among them; there is almost nothing in between. I would guess that there are a total of maybe three buildings greater than two but fewer than twenty stories tall in all of Bellevue.

It’s obvious that someone is trying to build a city here from scratch, that the density has not developed organically as a function of demand. I wonder if this is a little bit like people must have felt in Dubai, as a mile of skyscrapers erupted in the center of what had been a sleepy little desert town? There’s no reason for there to be a city here, except that some rich dude decided he wanted to build one, and now you have sprawled-out suburban mall style buildings laying across the street from towering glass-and-steel highrises. It makes no sense, and yet here it all is.

I have two projects right now; everything else is in cold-storage.

Most of my creative energy is going to the chandelier project. It is both complex and ambitious, so I’m running into a lot of obstacles; nothing is going as smoothly as I’d hoped it might. A month in, all I have to show for my effort is one test board, which sort of blinks but doesn’t really work yet, and a stack of sandblasted glass cylinders. Oh, well: part of the point was to stretch my skills, and I’m certainly doing that. This is a whole new level of electronics complexity, and there’s a lot of straight-up fabrication work, too.

I bought a drill press today: a 12-speed, heavy-duty, floor-standing drill press with a 3/4 horsepower motor. It’s a big old tank of a machine, likely as old as I am. I then built a jig out of plywood, ABS pipe, and a bucket. The goal is to bore a hole into the end of each of seven glass vases, which I can then use to hang them (upside down) and which will provide airflow to cool the electronics inside.

Once set up, I added a small fountain pump and a lot of water, for cooling. As I drill out the end of the glass, the fountain keeps fresh water circulating over the cutting area, and if I drill slowly enough the glass stays cool and doesn’t crack. It’s a slow process, but I hope I can have half of the cylinders done by the end of the day tomorrow.

The other project is my ongoing development of the Radian language. I don’t really talk about it here, because it has its own blog, but I’m still working hard and am increasingly pushing it up into “useful tool” territory. Recent work has focused on the string library, and I’m currently deep in Unicode territory building the uppercase, lowercase, and case-insensitive transformations.

I’m increasingly thinking about the human end of this problem: I’m now in the zone where advanced curious users could probably make something of the tool. In addition to all of its internal data management, it can read and write files and manipulate text – that’s a good start. Somehow I need to find the people who want this thing, and then I need to have a good experience ready when I manage to pique their curiosity: documentation, examples, a good installer. I think I need to decide what point I’m going to call “good enough”, in terms of basic built-in features, and when I reach it I should redirect my efforts toward documentation and recruitment.

I can stand to spend some time doing optimization work, anyway: there’s a lot of room for intelligence in the Radian semantic model which I have taken almost no time to exploit.

This is just the way things go sometimes, isn’t it?

Grrr.

One critical precondition for successful urban cycling systems: get rid of the helmet laws.

“Pushing helmets really kills cycling and bike-sharing in particular because it promotes a sense of danger that just isn’t justified — in fact, cycling has many health benefits,” says Piet de Jong, a professor in the department of applied finance and actuarial studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. He studied the issue with mathematical modeling, and concludes that the benefits may outweigh the risks by 20 to 1.

He adds: “Statistically, if we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities.”

I maintain that helmets are for extreme sports, activities where you are likely to injure yourself. If bicycling around a city is really that dangerous, there’s something deeply wrong with the city’s infrastructure – and if it’s not that dangerous, why require people to wear helmets?

I’ve never worn a bicycle helmet. I haven’t really ridden a bicycle since the helmet-law craze kicked in, either. Repealing the local helmet laws would go a long way to making me think of a bicycle as a normal mode of transportation, a machine I could use to run errands and visit my friends, instead of just a piece of equipment for an extreme sport I don’t happen to enjoy.

Of course I’m not talking about high speed cycling for sport, here – if you’re flying along at two-lane country roads at 30 mph a helmet might well be worthwhile. I’m just talking about the sort of “maybe I’ll take a bike to the store instead of driving” trips that would make us all healthier and less oil-dependent. We should be promoting that kind of thing instead of scaring people off by telling them it’s so dangerous they need a helmet so they won’t die.

Simtec Electronics offers a USB device called the Entropy Key: a PN-junction-breakdown based hardware random number generator.They’ve done what appears to be a solid job engineering this thing, with multiple independent entropy streams used to crosscheck the actual randomness of the output.

(Useful for SSH session keys and key-pair generation: basically it’s for secure cryptography.)