We took a long weekend for our anniversary, driving down to Taos, NM. It was a pleasant drive down, though we did run into some thunderstorms. We're staying at Casa Europa, an old adobe structure dating back to 1791 that was rebuilt as an inn in the 1970s. We stayed in the Spa Room and the hot tub and kiva were very nice. While there was a strong WiFi signal, Internet access was a bit spotty. After the thunderstorms Friday, the rest of the weekend was sunny and pleasant. We spent about four hours Saturday wandering around Taos Plaza. There seemed to be thousands of motorcycles in town for Memorial Day, many for the ceremonies at the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial at Angel Fire.

Sunday we drove up to Angel Fire looking for a trapper/trader reenactment we'd heard about. We didn't find it, but did visit the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial there. We drove south down the Rio Grande Canyon after lunch, stopping for a wine tasting at the Black Mesa Winery before returning to Casa Europa to exercise and clean up for dinner. I exchanged some SIGAPL email and posted the APL2007 announcement to the J General, NumPy Discussion, and SciPy User mailing lists.

Monday we visited some galleries, the Kit Carson Home, and the church in Ranchos de Taos. The drive home Tuesday was nice until we reached Denver where traffic was slowed to a crawl by severe thunder storms. We didn't see the flooding and hail that hit some parts of the city, but it was slow going.

We really enjoyed our visit to Taos and plan on repeat visits. Joe and Lisa at Casa Europa treated us very well. Of the many bed and breadfasts we've stayed at over the years, I think this is our favorite. Highly recommended.

Strong Women and Men Beat Arthritis by Miriam E. Nelson, Ph.D., Kristin R. Baker, Ph.D., and Ronenn Roubenoff, M.D., M.H.S., with Lawrence Lindner, M.A. is a book that everyone with arthritis should read. This New York Times best seller provides sound advice for managing arthritis. The primary focus is on strength training to stabilize and cushion the joints, but aerobics and stretching are also part of the recommended exercise program. Diet, medication, and surgery are also discussed.

NumPy 1.0.3 has been released. Improvements include:

• x/y follows Python standard on mixed-sign division
• iinfo added to provide information on integer data-types
• improvements to SwIG typemaps, numpy.distutils, and f2py
• improvements to separator handling in fromfile and fromstring
• many, many bug fixes

The Russian Parom space tug promises to lower the cost of space operations by providing versatile and efficient orbital transfer services, relieving other space systems of the need to incorporate this capability. Using mostly flight tested, off the shelf components and with a 15 year design life, the first Parom could be launched in 2009.

The election of Nicholas Sarkozy seems to offer hope for France after years of decline. His acceptance speech and cabinet appointments have been promising.

Motor Trend's has crowned the Porsche 911 GT3 the best handling car available in America with the Porsche Cayman in second. The large field of excellent candiates that they assembled is a reminder that we're in a golden age for the automobile. The BMW 335i was rated the best combination of real world handling and ride quality. The S2000 did well, but I think it's clearly time for an update. Come on Honda!

Earth has been on a warming trend for most of the last century. Planning for a Climate Changed World (see Part 1 and Part 2) assumes that this trend will continue, but will it? Some Russian scientists think that we're entering a period of global cooling.

Prehaps we should be investing in research to better understand climate change and preparing to mitigate the effects of either global warming or global cooling.

While we've yet to discover the Fountain of Youth, exercise is one thing that can mitigate the effects of aging. Much of the loss of function with age is the result of reduced activity. The use it or lose it adage becomes more true as we age. Finding an activity that you have the time and interest for is key to maintainging health and fitness. Weight training provides a lot of return for the time invested, so it's worth including in your fitness lifestyle.

In Lift Your Way to Youthful Fitness Jan and Terry Todd review research on the effects of resistance training on fitness of people of all ages and provide guidance for designing a strength training program to help you achieve your personal fitness goals. Whether you want to look better, feel better, do better at your favorite sport, or all the above, you'll find this book helpful.

IPython 0.8.1 is out. It includes usability improvements for Windows users and a new physical units module for everyone.

A friend of mine in the disc drive insustry laments the fact that the One Laptop Per Child XO uses flash memory rather than a hard disc for persistent storage. Yet even without disc drives in the laptops themselves, these machines will drive demand for hard discs. While mostly self-contained, the XO is designed to work with school servers of various sizes that will have disc drives. For disc drives to be attractive for an XO successor, they would need to be very small, very rugged, and very cheap. That's a tall order, but I think we can get there.

In The Math Instinct, Keith Devlin looks at mathematics in nature and how abstract math is related to it. Many animals are hard wired to perform various mathematical computations that help them survive. Only humans seem to have extended such natual ability to more general problem solving.

We used Mercurial to share code during last saturday's IPython1 Sprint and I've started using it for other projects. It's quite pleasant to work with and I can see why it's gaining a lot of converts.