It turns out that Massachusetts has a sizeable GIS repository, appropriately named MassGIS. So I grabbed a couple map sets and used QGIS to make my own map. It doesn’t provide an “Export as PNG” option, so I panned around, saving them as images, and then used Windows Live Photo Gallery to assemble them as a ‘panorama.’ (I was going to use Photoshop, but there was no need!)

I let QGIS color the map based on county, though with the data MassGIS provides, I could have just as easily done it based on the population, number of schools, number of police officers, number of lakes, or a lot of other variables. At 4431×2893 pixels, it’s “only” 2.26 MB as a PNG. Since all I really did was stitch a couple GIS datasets together and check a few options in QGIS, I’m releasing this map into the public domain. Enjoy!

A giant map of Massachusetts towns

Did you know that it was initially the “Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008,” and was introducedon March 9, 2007?

The name was later updated, to the “A bill to provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase and insure certain types of troubled assets for the purposes of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy and financial system and protecting taxpayers, to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide incentives for energy production and conservation, to extend certain expiring provisions, to provide individual income tax relief, and for other purposes.”

That’s the title. Someone failed literature class, I think.

The interviewer seemed to try to trick her into admitting that socialism was flawed. And her answer (paraphrased) is the subject of this blog post:

“Of course it’s imperfect. While I believe socialism is perfect in theory, it’s very hard to put that theory into motion accurately. So we’re continually fine-tuning our implementation of it.”

While I’m sure it’s debateable whether socialism is a sound theory or not, the reasoning struck me as interesting. And it so accurately applies to a few other topics.

• School vouchers. I used to be a gung-ho fan of them. What’s better than bringing the power–if not the magic–of the free market to the school system? But in practice, it seems that, time and time again, school voucher programs have led to the good students getting out of failing schools, leaving the failing schools, and most of the students, even worse off. So vouchers are a great idea, in theory. But at least so far, the implementations of it seem to work about as well as Cuban Socialism.
• Tasers for cops. They’re meant as a non-lethal alternative, after most other means of force have been exhausted. As a conflict escalates, the police are justified in using more and more force to try to stop it. And tasers are supposed to come right before “baton to the skull” or “strangulation” on that scale of force. In that case, they’re quire effective, saving lives and preventing permanent injury. In practice, they’re consistently misused.
• Content filters in schools and libraries. It’s far too easy to bump into porn when you’re not looking for it. Ensuring that young children doing research don’t accidentally end up at hard-core porn sites is a good thing. In practice, content filters seem to block myriad legitimate sites and get in the way of legitimate research.

I’m sure the concept applies to ten thousand other things, too, but these are off the top of my head. But I think “a perfect idea–in theory” is a pretty useful concept to have in mind in describing ideas.

Does this really make a big difference? You see a huge rise in access times when it happens on disk, but in RAM? Or will the applications require a contiguous allocation and thus just not use it at all? (And, for bonus points, why has no one written a ‘memory defragmenter’ if such a thing exists? Given that my needs are for managing small chunks of memory, there’s no reason, actually, that it couldn’t simply reconstitute the 16MB cache in a wholly separate, contiguous chunk of RAM?

Suffice it to say, Shaheen’s got my vote. From his page at OnTheIssues, here are some of the reasons I can’t bring myself to give Sununu my vote. The text is copied-and-pasted from that page, but any links are my own doing, as are any bracketed comments. Emphasis is mine: bold to highlight things I think are exceptionally important, italics to highlight things that might be unclear (like ‘double negative’ bills: voting NO on disallowing something).

• Voted NO on $100M to reduce teen pregnancy by education & contraceptives. (Mar 2005)
• Voted YES on recommending Constitutional ban on flag desecration. (Jun 2006)
• Rated 13% by the ACLU, indicating an anti-civil rights voting record. (Dec 2002)
• Rated 33% by the HRC, indicating a mixed record on gay rights. (Dec 2006)
• Voted NO on repealing tax subsidy for companies which move US jobs offshore. (Mar 2005)
• Voted NO on reinstating $1.15 billion funding for the COPS Program. (Mar 2007)
• Voted YES on prohibiting needle exchange & medical marijuana in DC. (Oct 1999) [While I don't understand the opposition to medical marijuana, I'll let that go. But needle exchanges have been extremely good at preventing the spread of disease.]
• Voted NO on shifting $11B from corporate tax loopholes to education. (Mar 2005)
• Voted YES on allowing school prayer during the War on Terror. (Nov 2001) [I actually don't know much about this: "allowing school prayer" is a pet peeve of mine, because allowing kids to pray is Constitutionally required, but allowing public schools to hold prayer sessions is Constitutionally prohibited. I'm assuming it was the latter, since there's no reason to pass a law  to "allow" kids to say a prayer on their own: it'd be like passing a law saying that freedom of speech is allowed.]
• Supports requiring schools to allow prayer. (Jan 2001) [Ibid]
• Rated 27% by the NEA, indicating anti-public education votes. (Dec 2003)
• Voted NO on making oil-producing and exporting cartels illegal. (Jun 2007)
• Voted NO on disallowing an oil leasing program in Alaska’s ANWR. (Nov 2005)
• Voted NO on $3.1B for emergency oil assistance for hurricane-hit areas. (Oct 2005)
• Voted NO on banning drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (Mar 2005)
• Voted NO on raising CAFE standards; incentives for alternative fuels. (Aug 2001)
• Rated 100% by the Christian Coalition: a pro-family voting record. (Dec 2003)
• Voted NO on granting the District of Columbia a seat in Congress. (Sep 2007)
• Voted YES on allowing some lobbyist gifts to Congress. (Mar 2006)
• Voted NO on establishing the Senate Office of Public Integrity. (Mar 2006)
• Voted NO on requiring FISA court warrant to monitor US-to-foreign calls. (Feb 2008)
• Voted NO on implementing the 9/11 Commission report. (Mar 2007)
• Voted NO on restricting business with entities linked to terrorism. (Jul 2005)
• Voted NO on restricting employer interference in union organizing. (Jun 2007)
• Rated 0% by the AFL-CIO, indicating an anti-union voting record. (Dec 2003) [I'm not the biggest advocate of unions out there, but Sununu seems a little too anti-union.]
• Voted NO on investigating contract awards in Iraq & Afghanistan. (Nov 2005)

There’s probably more, too, but I thought this was sufficient grounds to cast my vote for Shaheen.

Sarah Palin has been lambasting Obama’s ties to domestic terrorists. Obama and Bill Ayers “worked with a non-profit group trying to raise funds for a school improvement project and a charitable foundation” in the 90’s. Ayers was formerly involved in the Weatherman. (Actually, he was a cofounder.)

Referring to Ayers, Obama has called him, “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.” And a decade ago they worked together on a school-improvement charity. Associating with terrorists? Just like his lobbying to teach sex-ed to kindergartners, which actually amounted to a plan to teach kindergartners about avoiding sexual predators.

Please, McCain, we’re not that dumb. Your repeated lies not only confirm the Democrats’ cries that McCain would just be a third Bush term, but they also make you look weak. Is there nothing truthful you can use to your advantage? Please, let’s stick with honesty this election.

The leaves pictured at left seem to be those of the American Chestnut. It turns out that the American Chestnut is fairly rare. It’s apparently common for them to grow to about ten feet, until the trunk is an inch or two in diameter. And then…

Chestnut Blight strikes. (See photo on right.) It seems that the fungus was accidentally introduced to America in 1904 on Asian Chestnut trees, which were mostly resistant to the blight. American Chestnuts were not, and are not. They were pretty much totally wiped out. The trees aren’t affected until they’re somewhat large, but pretty routinely die before they’re able to drop seeds. As I understand it, there are viruses that attack the blight’s fungus, which can slow the blight enough for the tree to recover. The virus is chyphonectria parasitica. As I understand it, it is also common to inject trees with weakened strains of the blight, allowing them to recover. (Somewhat like a flu shot?)

Over time the blight will cause multiple ‘cankers’ in the tree, and create reddish-orange spores. And inevitably, the American Chestnut dies. New growth from the base is common, sometimes growing five to ten feet tall, but almost never mature enough to reproduce.

So I’ve become somewhat obsessive about this, trying to figure out what can be done to stop the blight to allow these trees to grow. Given that it’s a problem confounding lots of arborists, I have a hunch that the first idea that popped into my mind (spraying bleach on the blighted areas) may be less than ideal.

But I thought I’d share today’s trivial pursuit and useless knowledge with you.

Watching Governor Palin last night, after previously watching John McCain, I realized how true this is.

• Obama voted against funding the war in Iraq. So did John McCain! As I’ve seen it, there were multiple bills at one point. One had a timeline, which John McCain voted against. One didn’t, which Obama voted against. But John McCain and Sarah Palin keep harping on this, because it sounds awful. But John McCain did the same thing.
• Obama wants to raise taxes. On those making over $250,000 a year, sure. But a cornerstone of Obama’s plan is that he’s not going to raise taxes on anyone making less, coupled with tax cuts for the middle class. He describes it in great detail on his site. As part of a middle-class family making under $250,000 a year, we will do better under Obama’s plan than under John McCain’s. But it’s been said so often that Obama wants to raise taxes that it sounds true. It’s not.
• Obama voted to raise taxes on those making $40,000 or more. No, that wasn’t a vote on taxes. And John McCain voted the same way. It was a vote on budget appropriations, not taxes.
• Obama wants to surrender in Iraq. Obama has proposed the same thing that the Iraqi government and George Bush have proposed! A phased withdrawal so we can shift our focus to Afghanistan. (You know, the place with Osama bin Laden.)
• Obama voted 97 times to raise taxes. And care to guess how many times McCain voted to raise taxes? We’re in a war that’s already cost us more than half a trillion dollars, and there’s a proposed $700 billion bailout proposal on the table. When spending increases, you have to raise taxes. Biden put the number of times McCain has voted to raise taxes as many times higher than Obama’s…

It just drives me crazy to see all of these mistruths repeated over and over again. There really ought to be a rule that you have to tell the truth in debates, and that you have to actually answer the questions asked.