Last night I attended a Front Range Pythoneers meeting for the first time since Spring. There wasn't a formal presentation, but there was a lot of interesting talk as well as the usual pizza and beer.

One of the guys demoed Earthscape on his iPhone, an Internet service that his company introduced a few weeks ago. Earthscape is geolocation based application that allows users to upload photos from their phones to the Earthscape server which stores them in a geographic database. The application on the phone tags the photo with time and location and can display a spinning globe showing locations of recently uploaded photos. It's a really slick geolocation application.

Thanks to our colleagues at bivio for hosting this months meeting.

I did my duty and voted today, though I didn't like the choices. On a brighter note, my new kettlebells arrived today from Dragon Door. I put them to good use working off some frustration about the state of our political system.

Musculoskeletal Tissue Regeneration presents the state of the art in biological materials and methods for repairing damaged bone and muscle. It's of interest to me because I'd like to postpone or avoid replacing my knees with bionic devices. While not light reading, it is clear and comprehensive.

I just got back from a road trip to San Francisco to visit the Stone Clinic for an evaluation of my knees. Bad news is that the right knee is toast, beyond 2008 technology for biologic joint repair. Good news is that the left knee is a good candidate for a meniscus transplant. I need to think about where to go from here.

On the way there, I stopped to train at the Murray Institute for Lifelong Fitness, aka Dan John's garage gym. I got a good workout, some technique pointers, and advice for training with my knee issues. Dan suggested that I work on my gait and forward head posture to mitigate the effects of arthritis. To that end he had me doing kettlebell and ring work: farmer walks, swings, presses, reverse rows, lawn mowers, and pull-ups. We finished with some 56# weight for distance throws.

Dan's "rings" are simple 5" lengths of 1" PVC tubing with rope threaded through them. They are cheap and effective and I think I have suitable material around the house to make my own.

It was a good trip. The weather was great and I had the top down most of the way. I really enjoy driving across the great American West. I find it relaxing and invigorating. Traffic from the eastern side of Sacramento to San Francisco was heavy on the way out Sunday afternoon, and took me longer than I expected. I planned on two nights in San Francisco, but after experiencing Sunday's traffic I decided to start back Monday afternoon following my visit at the Stone Clinic. I threw a kettlebell in the trunk before leaving home so I wouldn't have to rely on hotel fitness centers.

Congratulations to Armadillo Aerospace for winning the Level One Lunar Lancer Challenge. John Carmack has a full report.

Bucky paper looks like ordinary paper but is made with carbon nanotubes. It potentially has up to 500 times the strength of steel at one tenth the weight, has good thermal conductivity, and can be an electrical conductor or semiconductor. Initial uses will likely exploit it's light weight and conductive properties in applications like electromagnetic interference shielding for aircraft and lightweight electrodes for batteries and capacitors, but we could eventually see paper airplanes, cars, and motorcycles made from the stuff.

Nassim Taleb has an essay exploring the limits of statistics over at Edge. It's about the contribution to the meltdown of the financial system by bankers and regulators putting too much faith in statistical models of risk. He emphasizes the importance of knowing what we don't know, and planning accordingly.

Taleb constructs a map which divides decision making into for quadrants in a two dimensional space. One axis divides randomness into two categories and the second divides outcomes into simple and complex.

He calls the first type of randomness Mediocristan and can be described by well defined mathematically with a strong tendency toward a particular value such as the Gaussian (or normal) distribution and exponential distribution. The second type of randomness, which he calls Extremistan, is less amenable to static analysis and may be described by such things as power law (or fractal) distributions and are likely to be sensitive to initial conditions and detailed history. The first type of randomness is dominated by typical values, while the second is dominated by extreme values.

The first quadrant describes games of chance and is a predictable type of randomness that provides the livelihood for casino operators. The third quadrant represents real world domains such as quality control where statistics is generally useful, though some inconvenient "outliers" may have to be ignored. The second quadrant doesn't seem to have much real applicability, though there may be some examples in decision theory literature. The forth quadrant is where statistics breaks down and we get into trouble when we rely upon it. Evolution, politics, economics, wars, etc. lie in the last quadrant.

The fourth quadrant is were we most want to assess risk, but are least able to predict it. As Will Rogers said: "It ain't what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know that ain't so."

I've been playing with Google Spreadsheets. Putting my Highland Games results in a Google spreadsheet is pretty easy and seems like a good way to share data. I'm still waiting for results from the Long's Peak games.

Free piston engines could potentially be used to build generators for hybrid vehicles that rival the efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells while begin multi-fuel capable. Drawbacks are immaturity, more noise than conventional internal combustion engines, and difficulty in controlling the free floating piston.

Greg Pfister is looking for killer apps for the wave of multi-core processors that is beginning to appear. I think the embedded computing space could soak up a lot of multi-core processors and a couple of start-ups are betting on it.

Intellasys is sampling a 40 core version of its SEAforth processor and Xmos has begun shipping chips based upon it's XCore processor and XC programming language. The SEAforth architecture is close to the simplest possible multi-core design. It's a mesh of stack machines programmed in a dialect of Forth. The XCore is a reincarnation of the Transputer microprocessor and Occam programming language. Both implement a CSP processing model.

It'll be interesting to see if either of these is a commercial success. SEAforth is simpler and offers more MIPS per buck and per watt, but the XCore has more RAM and looks like it would be easier to program.

A hydrogel will soon be used to assist in articular cartilage repair. It promises to make micro-fracture techniques more effective.

I competed in the RMSA Fall Fling Highland Games yesterday. I'm happy with my performance, improving in several events. My knees have continued to get better and I've had fun. The Highland Games atmosphere is competitive, but friendly.

I finally turned a caber, so I'm beginning to feel like a real heavy events athlete. Now, if I can just get the spinning down for the weight for distance events.

Jerry Pournelle's Exile -- and Glory was originally published in the 1970's as two books, a collection of short stories set starting about 2020 and a novel set in about 2050, all in the same "universe". It's interesting to see how well the projections of one of the premier hard science fiction writers fit the way things are playing out today. Computers have advance more, and space travel less, than he imagined. Highly recommended for aficiados of hard sci-fi.

SpaceX had a successful launch of their Falcon 1 launch vehicle today. It is the first privately developed orbital launch vehicle. Congratulations to the SpaceX team. Ad Astra!

We took a little excursion to Wyoming. The highlight of the trip was Wyoming Highway 130 through the Snowy Mountains. Very nice scenery and we saw our first Moose in the wild and had lunch at the Snowy Mountain Lodge.

Practical Programming for Strength Training by Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore blends the limited research published on this subject with their years of experience as competitors and coaches. They point out that most anything works for untrained individuals, but some things work better than others. They cover the changes required take an athlete from novice, to intermediate, to advanced, and for the few, elite performance. This is a great resource for coaches and athletes who are developing their own lifting programs.

IPython version 0.9.1 is out. This fixes some Python 2.4 compatibility issues in 0.9.0 which is the real news. IPython 0.9 merges the IPython1 parallel computing work with the main IPython 0.8 branch. IPython is like the nice, friendly Python shell on steroids. It's a very productive working environment for Python programmers. The parallel programming features will become huge as multicore processors proliferate.

We're 7 years into a long war. Don't Tread On Me is a video commemorative. Think about it.

Researchers at Dartmouth have engineered a bacterium that produces cellulosic ethanol more efficiently than previous methods. Producing fuel from waste paper, corn cobs, and such rather than corn would take some of the pressure off of food and fuel prices.

I competed in the Longs Peak Highland Games today. They're larger and better known than the other games that I've entered, with athletes from as far away as Ontario, Canada. I did reasonably well, with a personal best in the 16# hammer. I still haven't turned a caber, but I'm getting better control over the beast, so with a little more practice, I should be there.