Progress notes

Goose is enrolled temporarily in the Deerfield Community School (although we're still awaiting some documentation).  We were able to get her into the same class as Jason, since both we and the school agreed it was a good thing for her to be in a class where there was one person she already knew.  She came home with a big pile of welcome cards and pictures.  It seems to be going well so far, and she actually said going to school was more fun than sitting around playing computer games.  (However, when sent upstairs to bed last night, she instead sat up for two hours watching cartoons on the TV in the room, which made her hard to get up this morning.  So I guess it wasn't enough fun to completely satisfy her TV craving.  Naturally, when the rest of us came upstairs to go to bed, she complained that she couldn't sleep with the lights on, as though being still awake wasn't her own fault....)

In other news, I have an onsite interview at Neartek tomorrow morning for a build/release engineer position, and a phone interview with Tufts University on Friday for a senior Unix sysadmin slot.

Purely apropos of nothing

A discussion of the fact that tax day does not, contrary to some recent quotes, fall upon the Ides of April (which is today, the 13th, not the 15th) led to a back-of-the envelope calculation that a 64-bit integer field would be sufficient to calculate and uniquely identify any point in time since the estimated time of the Big Bang to millisecond precision.  It was a simple step from there to calculate that approximately 84 bits wuold be required to do the same to cesium-beam atomic-clock resolution, and only slightly more complex to determine that with 140 bits to play with, one could enumerate time from the Big Bang to approximately six times the current estimated age of the Universe to quantum-time resolution (though, for obvious technical reasons, not with quantum-time precision).

Practical application of this calculation is left as an exercise for the reader.

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Minor edit:  The first site I referred to had an error in their derivation of the Planck distance; they substituted Planck's constant for Dirac's, which is probably why they were two orders of magnitude off.  Enumeration of the life of the universe to date with quantum-time resolution should actually require around 144 bits.

Once again, something rotten in the District of Columbia

Republicans in the House are pushing to permanently kill the estate tax.  How are they planning to make up the budget shortfall?  Apparently by refusing to fund veterans' care.  (blackthornglade reports that they're also helping trim the veterans' healthcare budgets by "reclassifying" thousands of veterans, including those disabled from injuries received fighting in America's wars, as "reservists" ineligible for VA benefits.)

Now it may be just me, but it shouldn't matter worth a damn if you're a reservist.  If you're called up by your country to go off to fight in a war that means little or nothing to you personally, and you come home from it wounded or disabled, your country had bloody well better be willing to cover your associated medical bills -- and if anyone in your government looks the other way and says "That's not our problem", they should rapidly cease to be members of the government.  In fact, I venture to suggest they should find themselves drafted as privates on the front line of that same war.

It's bad enough to vote to send people off to do a job that you're unwilling to do yourself because it's too dirty or too dangerous.  It's worse to do so when you basically have to lie to come up with a rationalization for that job that anyone will believe.  But to then cheat your troops out of medical care, when they come home wounded or maimed, is nothing short of reprehensible.

Tell me again why we allow these swine to remain in office....?