Some backpacking trips go exactly as planned.

Others do not.

This one did not go as planned, but in the end it was wonderful, in that "well, nobody was seriously hurt, after all!" way that mis-adventures sometimes happily are.

To get to the headwaters of the South Fork of the Salmon River, you need to be prepared to do a bit of driving:

1. Make your way from wherever you may be to the quirky little town of Weaverville
2. Head north from Weaverville, where you might decide to spend the night at the lovely little Bonanza King Resort if you wish
3. The next morning, drive up the 20+ mile dirt road to the very end, where you'll find Big Flat Trailhead. This road will take you 75 minutes to drive. Honest.

From the Big Flat Trailhead, ready your pack, and don't forget to make sure you secure your car carefully so that it's completely boring to any California Black Bear who might wander through the campground (this is not uncommon, since the habitat of the California Black Bear is nearly a 100% overlap with the areas of California where there are campgrounds).

Once you're safely out of your car and ready, the rest is easy: walk south.

The canyon which forms the watershed which holds the headwaters of the South Fork of the Salmon River is a spectacularly beautiful mountain canyon. From the trailhead to the end of the canyon is a gentle, peaceful, 6-mile hike which starts at about 5,000 feet of elevation and climbs slowly and steadily to around 5,800 feet near the south end of the canyon.

Most hikers who enter the Trinity Alps Wilderness from this trailhead area actually headed out of the canyon, to one of a variety of destinations: southwest to the Caribou or Sapphire Lakes, south to Deer Creek, south-southeast to Ward and Horseshoe Lakes, or southeast to Bullard's Basin and the mining ghost town of Dorleska.

Instead, we decided to stay in the Salmon River headwaters canyon itself.

Well, I should be a bit more honest.

Originally, we were contemplating going to Ward Lake. But, after more studyand reading, I realized that this particular destination was going to be beyond our capabilities for a one day hike:

Total Length (round-trip): 12 miles
Elevation Gain: 2,549’ to the saddle, then -460’ down to the lake
Difficulty: Moderate-to-Strenuous

High above the densely forested moraine, just beginning to emerge against the cloudless blue, rose a massive fortress, a sheer vertical wall of gray rock, toward which our trail zig-zagged.

Uhm, yeah.

That wasn't going to work.

So instead we decided not to take the Kidd Creek trail to Ward Lake, and proceeded south, remaining in the main canyon of the South Fork of the Salmon.

Which is beautiful and delightful, and we made quite good time, until at about 3:00 PM we found ourselves at the far south end of the canyon, confronted by canyon walls on all three sides (east, south, west).

I had (sort of) a plan for this, for I had spotted on the map that the true headwaters of the Salmon River was found at Salmon Lake, a mere three quarters of a mile from where we stood.

And a mere 1,300 vertical feet above our 5,800 foot elevation at the time.

There is no trail to Salmon Lake, but we were standing on the shore of the Salmon River, looking up its course as it descended the narrow and steep canyon above us, and it seemed, tantalizingly, close.

So, with our minds probably clouded from the fatigue of the first 5.5 miles that we'd already hiked, we decided to try to go off-trail and bush-whack our way up the river canyon to the lake.

I estimate that we made it about one tenth of the way to the lake over the next 30 minutes, climbing slowly and stubbornly through dense manzanita fields that clung to scree slopes of sharp fractured shale that shifted unexpectedly and continuously underneath our feet.

And then the lightning clapped, and the thunder boomed, and the rain began.

And, at last, we came to our senses.

After we realized that our plan was hopeless, and we re-grouped back at the trail, we were soaked from the rain and a bit dispirited, even more so when we realized that the mid-slope ridgeline we were on held no decent campsites of any sort.

Worse, several of us had fallen during the bushwhacking on the wet shale, and so twisted ankles and bloodied shins were widespread.

As we sat, resting and recovering, watching a pair of trees on the opposite side of the canyon smouldering from lightning strikes, we cast our eyes below us, and realized that the canyon floor below us was beautiful, had a reliable source of water, and was almost certain to contain some spots where we could make camp.

So back down we headed, retracing our steps about a half mile down the trail until we were back to the canyon floor, then hiking another half mile or so south until we indeed found a spectacularly beautiful location to stay: not too far from water, but not too close either, with just enough trees for shelter, but just few enough to give us glorious views of the canyon ridges above.

Completely exhausted from more than 9 miles of walking with full packs, we just managed to set up camp and prepare dinner before it was fully dark and the stars were out.

Yet the next few days passed blissfully: each day dawned with blue skies and mile weather and we found many nearby areas for lovely day hikes, including an enjoyable long walk up the trail to the pass on the border of Trinity and Siskiyou counties, where we unexpectedly found a beautiful high mountain meadow, with hawks soaring and calling overhead and chipmunks and rabbits and quail busily occupying themselves amongst the meadow grasses.

Quite reliably, it thundered and lightninged and rained every afternoon, and once even delivered a dramatic 15-minute hailstorm, but after surviving our disastrous first day's hike, it all seemed like icing on an unexpectedly tasty celebration cake.

So if you ever find yourself wanting to go backpacking in the headwaters canyon of the South Fork of the Salmon River in the Trinity Alps wilderness, let me offer these simple suggestions:

• Yes, Ward Lake is a long haul, and that ridgeline ascent is as miserable as you fear.
• But Salmon Lake is even harder. You'd need to be a mountain goat to get there.
• And, if you spot a lake on the map, even if it looks "close" to the trail, but when you go and search the Internet and you can't find EVEN A SINGLE PICTURE of anyone who's actually made it to the lake's shore, stop and recognize what that means: You Ain't Gonna Get to Salmon Lake
• So just be happy exploring the beautiful Salmon River canyon instead.

That's what I have to say about that. Enjoy the pictures!

I hope you can find a few minutes to read this wonderful article by Aditya Shetty: More Than a Brand Name and a Tech Stack: What I Learned During My Engineering Internship at Salesforce.

Aditya sat at the next desk to mine during his summer at Salesforce, and I really enjoyed getting to know him during a brief summer that went by very fast.

He's already a very good software engineer; I think he will be a great one, assuming that's what he decides to do.

• What do scientists think about the biological claims made in the anti-diversity document written by a Google employee in August 2017? – Quora

  Cut out and keep for future use.

  (tags: sexismmisogynybiasdiscriminationgooglebiologywomengendersexvia:klyda)

I've been trying to put my finger on why Iain Pears's Arcadia is such an engrossing and entertaining book.

For one thing, it's a book that you can enjoy in many different ways:

• Like Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog, it's a delightful piece of time travel fiction.

• Like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, it's a collection of multiple stories, involving the "same" characters in wildly different settings, inter-twined and juxtaposed.

• Like C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, and George Orwell's Animal Farm, it's a rumination on current events, by way of a complex fantasy allegory describing how characters work out their problems in a completely different world with completely different rules.

• And, oh, yeah, like George Orwell's 1984, it's a dystopian novel about the dangers of science, technology, and authoritarian social structures.

Uhm, that's a lot of pretty wonderful books to compare Arcadia to.

Yet I don't feel it's unfair to put Arcadia in the midst of such a discussion; Pears is a superb writer and pulls off these various technical exploits with flair and ease.

But I'd like to suggest that Arcadia's main interest lies in a slightly different direction, something suggested less by the above comparisons but more by Yuvah Noah Harari's Sapiens.

Harari, as you will recall if you've read Sapiens, advances the premise that what makes Homo Sapiens unique is that we are creatures who can envision, imagine, and communicate about things that don't (yet?) exist. That is: Sapiens can invent fiction; Sapiens can tell stories.

I think Pears is fascinated by that most basic of questions that faces writers of fiction: can a story actually change the world?

Early on, we are introduced to our protagonist, Henry Lytten, who has had a number of careers in the past, but now entertains himself by working on his book, a passion he's had since his youth, when he used to read "tales of knights and fair maidens, of gods and goddesses, of quests and adventures."

Regularly, he meets with his friends in the pub; they are all storytellers, and they discuss their efforts. This week, it is Lytten's turn:

"Very well, gentlemen, if you could put your drinks down and pay attention, then I will explain."

"About time."

"In brief..."

"Surely not?"

"In brief, I am creating the world."

He stopped and looked around. The others seemed unimpressed. "No goblins?" one asked hopefully.

Lytten sniffed. "No goblins," he said. "This is serious. I want to construct a society that works. With beliefs, laws, superstitions, customs. With an economy and politics. An entire sociology of the fantastic."

But: creating the world? Constructing a society? How does this actually work, in practice?

Later, Pears tries to explain this in more detail.

I spent many years reading -- really reading, I mean, in libraries at a wooden desk, or curled up on a settee with a little light, holding the book in my hands, turning the pages, glass of brandy, warm fire, all of that. Anyway, I was reading La Cousine Bette by Balzac (which I also recommend) and was struck by how convincing were both the characters and the situations he described. I wondered whether Balzac had taken them from personal observation and simply amended real people and circumstance to serve his purpose.

Then it dawned on me in a moment of such excitement I can remember it perfectly well to this day. Of course he had done that; he had transferred reality into his imagination. But -- and this was my great insight -- he must, at the same time, have transferred his imagination into reality. Clearly, in an infinite universe every possibility must exist, including Balzac's. Imagining Cousin Bette called her into being, although only potentially. The universe is merely a quantity of information; imagining a fictional character does not add to that quantity -- it cannot do so by definition -- but does reorganize it slightly. The Bette-ish universe has no material existence, but the initial idea in Balzac's brandy-soaked brain then spreads outwards: not only to those who read his books, but also, by implication, backwards and forwards. Imagining Cousin Bette also creates, in potential, her ancestors and descendants, friends, enemies, acquaintances, her thoughts and actions and those of everybody else in her universe.

This is as marvelous and compelling a vision of the power of the imagination as I could ever want.

Of course, Pears knows that it isn't, certainly, as simple as that.

Not many people, I suppose, have even the remotest chance of seeing their literary creation in the flesh. Henry is convinced that Shakespeare knew his Rosalind personally in some guise, but that is quite rare. I am sure Dickens would have jumped at the chance of some time in the pub with Mr. Pickwick. No doubt Jane Austen would have got on like a house on fire with Mr. Darcy, and what about Bram Stoker spending an evening chatting away to Count Dracula over a cup of cocoa.

Things move on, and there is some folderol about time travel, and the multiple universes hypothesis, and other notions of that sort, but really, Pears is after something simpler.

Something more fundamentally human.

Something more fundamentally powerful.

Something more fundamentally literary:

"Nothing could happen, because there was no cause of anything happening. Similarly, without effects, there could be no causes. That was to ensure it could have no past or future."

"She got it wrong?"

"No. That girl messed it up, and you don't seem to have helped just now either."

"Rosie? How?"

"She walked into it. You say hello, they say hello back, which they otherwise would not have done. Cause and effect, you see. Anyone who says hello must be real. They must have parents, grandparents, all the way back. That girl started this frozen experiment moving and developing, and that is causing it to join up to the past and future. When I arrived, the effects had already spread back that far. it is now clear the shock waves have spread very much further."

You say hello, they say hello back; anyone who says hello must be real.

What a beautiful sentiment.

What a marvelous illustration of the magnificence and wonder and joy of communication, of imagination, and of storytelling.

Arcadia is a book you can enjoy on many levels.

I certainly did.

Start by reading the memo itself.

You may find it hard to read. I confess I skimmed a few parts, but I carefully read the "Suggestions" section at the end.

Then, here are some links you can chase.

• From a logical point of view …
• So, about this Googler’s manifesto.
• The Google Memo: Four Scientists Respond
• Intolerable
• Susan Wojcicki’s Response
• The Ideological Echo Chamber of the Beach
• The Fallacy of Biological Determinism
• Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences
• What the Google gender ‘manifesto’ really says about Silicon Valley

Lots to think about here.

• Hyperscan

  a high-performance multiple regex matching library. It follows the regular expression syntax of the commonly-used libpcre library, yet functions as a standalone library with its own API written in C. Hyperscan uses hybrid automata techniques to allow simultaneous matching of large numbers (up to tens of thousands) of regular expressions, as well as matching of regular expressions across streams of data. Hyperscan is typically used in a DPI library stack. Hyperscan began in 2008, and evolved from a commercial closed-source product 2009-2015. First developed at Sensory Networks Incorporated, and later acquired and released as open source software by Intel in October 2015.  Hyperscan is under a 3-clause BSD license. We welcome outside contributors.

  This is really impressive — state of the art in parallel regexp matching has improved quite a lot since I was last looking at it. (via Tony Finch)

  (tags: via:fanfregexpsregular-expressionstextmatchingpattern-matchingintelopen-sourcebsdcdpiscanningsensory-networks)

• consistent hashing with bounded loads

  ‘an algorithm that combined consistent hashing with an upper limit on any one server’s load, relative to the average load of the whole pool.’ Lovely blog post from Vimeo’s eng blog on a new variation on consistent hashing — incorporating a concept of overload-avoidance — and adding it to HAProxy and using it in production in Vimeo. All sounds pretty nifty! (via Toby DiPasquale)

  (tags: via:codeslingeralgorithmsnetworkingperformancehaproxyconsistent-hashingload-balancinglbsvimeooverloadload)

• AWS Lambda Deployment using Terraform – Build ACL – Medium

  Fairly persuasive that production usage of Lambda is much easier if you go full Terraform to manage and deploy.

  A complete picture of what it takes to deploy your Lambda function to production with the same diligence you apply to any other codebase using Terraform. […] There are many cases where frameworks such as SAM or Serverless are not enough. You need more than that for a highly integrated Lambda function. In such cases, it’s easier to simply use Terraform.

  (tags: infrastructureawslambdaserverlessopsterraformsam)

• GitHub – jorgebastida/awslogs: AWS CloudWatch logs for Humans™

  This feature alone is a bit of a killer app:

  $ awslogs get /var/log/syslog ip-10-1.* –start=’2h ago’ | grep ERROR

  Nice.

  (tags: cliloggingawscloudwatchlogsawslogsec2)

A handy feature was silently added to Apache Cassandra’s nodetool just over a year ago. The feature added was the -j (jobs) option. This little gem controls the number of compaction threads to use when running either a scrub, cleanup, or upgradesstables. The option was added to nodetool via CASSANDRA-11179 to version 3.5. It has been back ported to Apache Cassandra versions 2.1.14, 2.2.6, and 3.5.

If unspecified, nodetool will use 2 compaction threads. When this value is set to 0 all available compaction threads are used to perform the operation. Note that the total number of available compaction threads is controlled by the concurrent_compactors property in the cassandra.yaml configuration file. Examples of how it can be used are as follows.

$ nodetool scrub -j 3
$ nodetool cleanup -j 1
$ nodetool upgradesstables -j 1 

The option is most useful in situations where disk space is scarce and a limited number of threads for the operation need to be used to avoid disk exhaustion.

I was starting to get interested in Fallout 4, which seems like a fairly interesting game.

But, I just got Windows 10 Creators Update installed.

Which, you might think, would be a good thing!

Unfortunately, it seems to have been the kiss of death for Fallout 4.

This is not the first bad experience I've had with the Fallout games. Fallout New Vegas was totally unplayable on my machine, as well.

When will I learn?

• Computer says no: Irish vet fails oral English test needed to stay in Australia

  An Irish veterinarian with degrees in history and politics has been unable to convince a machine she can speak English well enough to stay in Australia. Louise Kennedy is a native English speaker, has excellent grammar and a broad vocabulary. She holds two university degrees – both obtained in English – and has been working in Australia as an equine vet on a skilled worker visa for the past two years. But she is now scrambling for other visa options after a computer-based English test – scored by a machine – essentially handed her a fail in terms of convincing immigration officers she can fluently speak her own language.

  This is idiotic. Computer-based voice recognition is in no way reliable enough for this kind of job. It’s automated Kafkaesque bureaucracy — “computer says no”. Shame on Oz (via James Kelleher)

  (tags: via:etienneshrdlukafkaesquebureaucracycomputer-says-novoice-recognitionaustraliaimmigrationenglishvoicetesting)

• Godwin repeals Godwin’s Law

  ‘By All Means, Compare These Shitheads to the Nazis’

  (tags: mike-godwinnazisshitheadsfunnygodwins-lawinternet)

• Sattolo’s algorithm

  produces a randomized permutation of a list, with exactly one cycle (which guarantees that we will reach every element of the list even though we’re traversing it in random order)

  (tags: algorithmslistspermutationrandomrandomizationcycles)

• Working with multiple AWS accounts at Ticketea

  AWS STS/multiple account best practice described

  (tags: stsawsauthzopsticketeadev)

• A general purpose counting filter

  This paper introduces a new AMQ data structure, a Counting Quotient Filter, which addresses all of these shortcomings and performs extremely well in both time and space: CQF performs in-memory inserts and queries up to an order of magnitude faster than the original quotient filter structure from which it takes its inspiration, several times faster than a Bloom filter, and similarly to a cuckoo filter. The CQF structure is comparable or more space efficient than all of them too. Moreover, CQF does all of this while supporting counting, outperforming all of the other forms in both dimensions even though they do not. In short, CQF is a big deal!

  (tags: cqfcounting-quotient-filtersdata-structuresvia:acolyercodingapproximatebloom-filters)

Over more than three decades, Tony Hillerman wrote a series of absolutely wonderful detective novels set on the Navajo Indian Reservation and featuring detectives Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee.

Recently, I learned that, after Hillerman's death, his daughter, Anne Hillerman, has begun publishing her own novels featuring Leaphorn, Chee, and the other major characters developed by her father, such as Officer Bernadette Manuelito.

So far, she has published three books, the first of which is Spider Woman's Daughter.

If you loved Tony Hillerman's books, I think you will find Anne Hillerman's books lovely, as well. Not only is she a fine writer, she brings an obvious love of her father's choices of setting, of character(s), and of the Navajo people and their culture.

I'm looking forward to reading the other books that she has written, and I hope she continues writing many more.

• Allen curve – Wikipedia

  During the late 1970s, [Professor Thomas J.] Allen undertook a project to determine how the distance between engineers’ offices affects the frequency of technical communication between them. The result of that research, produced what is now known as the Allen Curve, revealed that there is a strong negative correlation between physical distance and the frequency of communication between work stations. The finding also revealed the critical distance of 50 meters for weekly technical communication. With the fast advancement of internet and sharp drop of telecommunication cost, some wonder the observation of Allen Curve in today’s corporate environment. In his recently co-authored book, Allen examined this question and the same still holds true. He says[2] “For example, rather than finding that the probability of telephone communication increases with distance, as face-to-face probability decays, our data show a decay in the use of all communication media with distance (following a “near-field” rise).” [p. 58]

  Apparently a few years back in Google, some staff mined the promotion data, and were able to show a Allen-like curve that proved a strong correlation between distance from Jeff Dean’s desk, and time to getting promoted.

  (tags: jeff-deangooglehistoryallen-curveworkcommunicationdistanceofficesworkplaceteleworkingremote-work)

• Arq Backs Up To B2!

  Arq backup for OSX now supports B2 (as well as S3) as a storage backend. “it’s a super-cheap option ($.005/GB per month) for storing your backups.” (that is less than half the price of $0.0125/GB for S3’s Infrequent Access class)

  (tags: s3storageb2backblazebackupsarqmacosxops)

• After Charlottesville, I Asked My Dad About Selma

  Dad told me that he didn’t think I was going to have to go through what he went through, but now he can see that he was wrong. “This fight is a never-ending fight,” he said. “There’s no end to it. I think after the ‘60s, the whole black revolution, Martin Luther King, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael and all the rest of the people, after that happened, people went to sleep,” he said. “They thought, ‘this is over.’”

  (tags: selmacharlottesvilleracismnazisamericaracehistorycivil-rights1960s)

• Fsq.io

  Foursquare’s open source repo, where they extract reusable components for open sourcing — I like the approach of using a separate top level module path for OSS bits

  (tags: open-sourceossfoursquarelibrariesmaintainancecodinggitmonorepos)

• GTK+ switches build from Autotools to Meson

  ‘The main change is that now GTK+ takes about ? of the time to build compared to the Autotools build, with likely bigger wins on older/less powerful hardware; the Visual Studio support on Windows should be at least a couple of orders of magnitude easier (shout out to Fan Chun-wei for having spent so, so many hours ensuring that we could even build on Windows with Visual Studio and MSVC); and maintaining the build system should be equally easier for everyone on any platform we currently support.’ Looking at http://mesonbuild.com/ it appears to be Python-based and AL2-licensed open source. On the downside, though, the Meson file is basically a Python script, which is something I’m really not fond of :( more details at http://taint.org/2011/02/18/001527a.html .

  (tags: mesonbuildcodingdevautotoolsgtk+python)

• Matt Haughey ???????? on Twitter: “high quality LED light tape for bikes and wheels is ridiculously cheap these days”

  good thread on fitting out a bike with crazy LED light tape; see also EL string. Apparently it’ll run off a 4.5V (3xAAA) battery pack nowadays which makes it pretty viable!

  (tags: bikescyclingsafetyled-lightsel-tapeled-tapehacksvia:mathowie)

• M00N

  a beautifully-glitched photo of the moon by Giacomo Carmagnola; more on his art at http://www.bleaq.com/2015/giacomo-carmagnola . (Via Archillect)

  (tags: via:archillectartgiacomo-carmagnolaglitch-artmoonglitchimages)

• How to shop on AliExpress

  From the aptly-named Aliholic.com. Thanks, Elliot — the last thing I needed was something to feed my addiction to cheap tat from China!

  (tags: chinaaliexpressdealextremegearbestgadgetsbuyingtataliholicstuff)

• TIL you shouldn’t use conditioner if you get nuked

  If you shower carefully with soap and shampoo, Karam says [Andrew Karam, radiation expert], the radioactive dust should wash right out. But hair conditioner has particular compounds called cationic surfactants and polymers. If radioactive particles have drifted underneath damaged scales of hair protein, these compounds can pull those scales down to create a smooth strand of hair. “That can trap particles of contamination inside of the scale,” Karam says. These conditioner compounds are also oily and have a positive charge on one end that will make them stick to negatively charged sections of a strand of hair, says Perry Romanowski, a cosmetics chemist who has developed personal hygiene formulas and now hosts “The Beauty Brains” podcast on cosmetics chemistry. “Unlike shampoo, conditioners are meant to stay behind on your hair,” Romanowski says. If the conditioner comes into contact with radioactive material, these sticky, oily compounds can gum radioactive dust into your hair, he says.

  (tags: factoidsconditionersurfactantsnuclear-bombsfallouthairbizarretilvia:boingboing)

Wow.

Have you already watched the Vice News Tonight mini-documentary on the events in Charlottesville?

It's really powerful, really disturbing, really hard to watch. I don't know a lot about Vice News Tonight, but apparently it's an independent journalism effort receiving funding (and air time) from HBO. This is the first and only Vice News Tonight documentary I've ever watched.

I was really moved by the Vice News Tonight reportage, and by the work of correspondent Elle Reeve, about whom I knew nothing before seeing that report. She did some very fine reporting, I think.

I'm paying particular attention to this issue all of a sudden because my daughter now (since 1 month ago) lives in Richmond, Virginia, just one mile from Monument Avenue, the probable next locus of confrontation.

I haven't ever visited Richmond, but hope to do so one day, now that my daughter lives there.

In the meantime, I'm paying a lot more attention to events in Virginia that I did before.

As are we all.

• NASA’s Sound Suppression Water System

  If you’ve ever watched a rocket launch, you’ve probably noticed the billowing clouds around the launch pad during lift-off. What you’re seeing is not actually the rocket’s exhaust but the result of a launch pad and vehicle protection system known in NASA parlance as the Sound Suppression Water System. Exhaust gases from a rocket typically exit at a pressure higher than the ambient atmosphere, which generates shock waves and lots of turbulent mixing between the exhaust and the air. Put differently, launch ignition is incredibly loud, loud enough to cause structural damage to the launchpad and, via reflection, the vehicle and its contents. To mitigate this problem, launch operators use a massive water injection system that pours about 3.5 times as much water as rocket propellant per second. This significantly reduces the noise levels on the launchpad and vehicle and also helps protect the infrastructure from heat damage.

  (tags: waterrocketslaunchnasaspacesound-suppressionsoundscience)

• The White Lies of Craft Culture – Eater

  Besides field laborers, [Southern US] planter and urban communities both depended on proficient carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, stable hands, seamstresses, and cooks; the America of the 1700s and 1800s was literally crafted by people of color. Part of this hidden history includes the revelation that six slaves were critical to the operation of George Washington’s distillery, and that the eponymous Jack Daniel learned to make whiskey from an enslaved black man named Nathan “Nearest” Green. As Clay Risen reported for the New York Times last year, contrary to the predominant narrative that views whiskey as an ever “lily-white affair,” black men were the minds and hands behind American whiskey production. “In the same way that white cookbook authors often appropriated recipes from their black cooks, white distillery owners took credit for the whiskey,” he writes. Described as “the best whiskey maker that I know of” by his master, Dan Call, Green taught young Jack Daniel how to run a whiskey still. When Daniel later opened his own distillery, he hired two of Green’s sons. The popular image of moonshine is a product of the white cultural monopoly on all things ‘country’ Over time, that legacy was forgotten, creating a gap in knowledge about American distilling traditions — while English, German, Scottish, and Irish influences exist, that combination alone cannot explain the entirely of American distilling. As bourbon historian Michael Veach suggests, slave culture pieces together an otherwise puzzling intellectual history.

  (tags: historycraft-beercraft-culturefooddrinkwhiskeydistillingblack-historyjack-danielsnathan-nearest-green)

• Meet the Espresso Tonic, Iced Coffee’s Bubbly New Cousin

  Bit late on this one but YUM

  To make the drink, Box Kite baristas simply load a glass with ice, fill it about three quarters of the way with chilled tonic, and then top it off with an espresso shot — typically from roasters like Madcap (MI) and Ritual (SF). Often, baristas pull the espresso shot directly on top of the tonic and ice mixture, forgoing the process of first pulling it into a cup and then pouring the espresso from cup to glass.

  (tags: tonic-waterrecipesespressocoffeedrinkscocktails)

Those of you in the “Java EE” may have already seen the announcement from Oracle that was posted yesterday concerning the future of Java EE. This is potentially very exciting news, particularly for the various Apache projects that implement some of the Java EE specs. Since Apache CXF implements a couple of the specs (JAX-WS and JAX-RS), I’m looking forward to seeing where Oracle goes with this.

For those that don’t know, several years ago, I spent a LOT of time and effort reviewing contracts, the TCK licenses, sending emails and proposals back and forth with Oracle’s VP’s and Legal folks in an attempt to allow Apache to license some of the TCK’s (Technology Compatibility Kit) that the Apache projects needed. In order to claim 100% compliance with the spec, the projects need to have access to the TCK to run the tests. Unfortunately, Apache and Oracle were never able to agree on terms that would allow the projects to have access AND be able to act as an Apache project. Thus, we were not able to get the TCK’s. Most of the projects were able to move on and continue doing what they needed to do, but without the TCK’s, that “claim of compliance” that they would like is missing.

I’m hoping that with the effort to open up the Java EE spec process, they will also start providing access to the TCK’s with an Open Source license that is compatible with the Apache License and Apache projects.

Professor Norbert Blum of University of Bonn has published a paper seeking to show P != NP: A Solution of the P versus NP Problem

I have no ability to critique the paper, though I did skim through parts of it. Complexity theory has progressed tremendously since I studied it as an undergraduate in the early 1980's.

But here are a few links, for those who are interested:

• The P-versus-NP page
• On Norbert Blum’s claimed proof that P does not equal NP
• On the Edge of Eclipses and P=NP
• StackExchange discussion page
• user 'vloodin's comment
• The Gap Between Monotone and NonMonotone Circuit Complexity is Exponential

We’re delighted to introduce cassandra-reaper.io, the dedicated site for the open source Reaper project! Since we adopted Reaper from the incredible folks at Spotify, we’ve added a significant number of features, expanded the supported versions past 2.0, added support for incremental repair, and added a Cassandra backend to simplify operations.

The road ahead is looking promising. We’re working to improve the Cassandra backend even further, leveraging Cassandra’s multi-dc features to enable multi-dc repair as well as fault tolerance for Reaper itself. We’ve tested this work internally as The Last Pickle as well as received community feedback. In addition to the site, we’ve also set up a Gitter based chat to keep development out in the open as well as help foster the community.

Over time we’re looking to expand the functionality of Reaper past handling just repairs. We would love for the Reaper WebUI to be the easiest way to perform all administrative tasks to a Cassandra cluster.

• Cycling to work: major new study suggests health benefits are staggering

  We found that cycling to work was associated with a 41% lower risk of dying overall compared to commuting by car or public transport. Cycle commuters had a 52% lower risk of dying from heart disease and a 40% lower risk of dying from cancer. They also had 46% lower risk of developing heart disease and a 45% lower risk of developing cancer at all.

  (tags: cyclingtransporthealthmedicinesciencecommutinglifestatistics)