MatthewMaynard.net

Rank and organization: Master Sergeant (then Sfc.) U.S. Army, Company A, 72d Tank Battalion. Place and date: Vicinity of Agok, Korea, 31 August and 1 September 1950. Entered service at: Dwight, Nebr. Born: 23 November 1919, Dwight, Nebr. G.O. No.: 38, 4 June 1951. Citation: M/Sgt. Kouma, a tank commander in Company A, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy. His unit was engaged in supporting infantry elements on the Naktong River front. Near midnight on 31 August, a hostile force estimated at 500 crossed the river and launched a fierce attack against the infantry positions, inflicting heavy casualties. A withdrawal was ordered and his armored unit was given the mission of covering the movement until a secondary position could be established. The enemy assault overran 2 tanks, destroyed 1 and forced another to withdraw. Suddenly M/Sgt. Kouma discovered that his tank was the only obstacle in the path of the hostile onslaught. Holding his ground, he gave fire orders to his crew and remained in position throughout the night, fighting off repeated enemy attacks. During 1 fierce assault, the enemy surrounded his tank and he leaped from the armored turret, exposing himself to a hail of hostile fire, manned the .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the rear deck, and delivered pointblank fire into the fanatical foe. His machine gun emptied, he fired his pistol and threw grenades to keep the enemy from his tank. After more than 9 hours of constant combat and close-in fighting, he withdrew his vehicle to friendly lines. During the withdrawal through 8 miles of hostile territory, M/Sgt. Kouma continued to inflict casualties upon the enemy and exhausted his ammunition in destroying 3 hostile machine gun positions. During this action, M/Sgt. Kouma killed an estimated 250 enemy soldiers. His magnificent stand allowed the infantry sufficient time to reestablish defensive positions. Rejoining his company, although suffering intensely from his wounds, he attempted to resupply his tank and return to the battle area. While being evacuated for medical treatment, his courage was again displayed when he requested to return to the front. M/Sgt. Kouma’s superb leadership, heroism, and intense devotion to duty reflect the highest credit on himself and uphold the esteemed traditions of the U.S. Army.

Useful, succinct, and appropriate. I linked to this once before, but it bears repeating.

Another one for the No Longer Free file.

If the law is too complex for bureaucrats to understand, don’t expect any of us common folk to follow it. But also don’t expect the government to not enforce it, either.

Snooki: the product endorsement assassin.

Some might look at this graphic and say that Apple is the market innovator. I look at it and say that Apple is the Pied Piper leading everyone off the cliff of uniformity. Steve Jobs hates diversity.

A tool to help you fix your Search Engine ranking.

A world of difference with a difference of just one character.

Not ‘shopped, but it is overgrown.

Select the correct answer: this is why I (a) don’t try to patent code that I write, (b) don’t trust the government to fairly assign patents, (c) am not sure patents are a good idea in the first place, or (d) all of the above. For those not in the computer business, what the patent describes is known to programmers as a linked list, and has existed since programming languages could address memory – circa the beginning of computer time.

I’m not an Apple fan, by any stretch. When I heard that Steve Jobs was resigning as Apple’s CEO, it was only a surprise as to the timing, not the event. I feel sorry for him in his health condition, and hope he recovers.

This NRO article reminds us that this giant of Cupertino was once a mockery in the computer industry:

Jobs failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley, maybe better than anyone in corporate America. By that I mean Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails.

It goes on to remind us of the Apple I and II, Lisa, and NeXT, before reminding us that the successes of late – all the i-fill-in-the-blanks – “were made possible by failure after failure after failure and the lessons learned from those failures.”

But what were those lessons learned?

1. Have a vision. Remember the Apple video from 1988? I don’t think they could have had that vision in 1988 without Steve’s early influence on the company.
2. Figure out a path from here to wherever your vision is. If there are obstacles in the way, be they technical or otherwise, figure out ways to overcome them when you get to them.
3. Make visible progress towards the vision with each iteration. The iPad wasn’t built in a day, but the technologies behind it – icons, menus, gestures, touch sensitivity – were all developed one at a time.

I’m sure there are other lessons, but it’s late, and I’m getting tired. Feel free to continue the discussion in the comments.

I bet you could get some volunteers to clean up after this dog.

If the Supercongress can’t find reason to cut immigrant goat herder regulations, then there’s no hope for those idiots.

It is said that the guy who preceded Lincoln at Gettysburg took two hours to deliver his speech, which Lincoln followed with a two minute address. I think Joe Biden’s a descendant of that guy.

Two tweets by Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News: A woman named Sarah Atkinson is in USA Today saying something like “in California, we stir our coffee with a 5.8 #earthquake”… (cont)
To which my Sarah responded, “Wow, you must be really lazy.”

So we had an earthquake today, the first I’ve ever been through. It was the largest seen in the area since 1875, which they guesstimate was a 4.8. This one clocked in at 5.8, and the
aftershock I felt was a 4.2. There were two others, but I didn’t feel them, since they were close to the epicenter and only 2x magnitude.

The event was somewhat surreal for me, so much so that it took me almost as long to realize a quake was going on as it took to transpire. My thoughts were something like what’s that?/is that an earthquake?/the windows are shaking like one/holy crap/should I get under my desk or just get out/let’s go outside after which about 40 seconds had passed, and only about ten seconds more or so were left in the afternoon surprise.

The strangest thing was the feeling of force being applied to my environment without any immediately observable cause. I think that as I headed for the door I looked out the window, just to make sure it wasn’t a passing bus or truck, and of course there wasn’t one.

Son #1, of course, handled it like a champ, tolerating the quake in the middle of his diaper change in the same way he tolerates all other diaper-related events – that is, he didn’t. But at least he stopped crying after he was bundled up again. That’s my boy.

coffee is the enemy right now. There. I said it. Shoot me for treason against my college-aged self.

Actually, it’s not that bad. He sleeps mostly through the night (I know that will change soon) but he seems to have developed a semi-regular feeding schedule. He’s also developed a regular peeing schedule, timed around when we’re cradling him, trying to change him, or expecting visitors. Quite the fast learner, that boy.

The adoption donation fund is still open, and donations must be postmarked by Thursday. If you wish to contribute, we thank you, and donation details can be found here.

… and start taking data – stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Baby care seems to be all about data – how many ounces did he eat, when, and of what formula type? How was his poo, in color and consistency? How many did he have? Did he pee at the same time? How often is he peeing?

You get the idea, but unless you’ve done it before, it’s difficult to imagine the scope. Consider an experiment in which nothing was automated, where you had to collect all data by hand, and you get an idea of what it’s like.

Of course, under these sleep-deprived conditions, you forget anything, so you have to write down everything. Fortunately the data points are from a finite set (quantities of food, pee, poo, and sleep) and we’ve found that as long as we scribble down what we did and at what time, we can figure out the rest when we’re more coherent.

Now if only I could remember where I put the note I left for myself on when I could sleep, I could getwagffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

On this day in history,
Born:
1587 – Virginia Dare, granddaughter of governor John White of the Colony of Roanoke, becomes the first English child born in the Americas.
1774 – Meriwether Lewis, American explorer (d. 1809)
1934 – Roberto Clemente, Puerto Rican baseball player and humanitarian (d. 1972)
1786 – Davy Crockett, American frontiersman and soldier (d. 1836)
1896 – Leslie Groves, American military engineer (d. 1970)
1911 – Mikhail Botvinnik, Russian chess player (d. 1995)
1929 – Francis Gary Powers, American U-2 pilot (d. 1977)
1933 – Eugene F. Kranz, American NASA executive
1959 – David Koresh, American cult leader (d. 1993)

Died:
1227 – Genghis Khan, Khagan of Mongol Empire
1503 – Pope Alexander VI (b. 1431)
2004 – Elmer Bernstein, American composer (b. 1922)
1983 – Ira Gershwin, American lyricist (b. 1896)
1987 – Rudolf Hess, Nazi deputy (b. 1894)

Events:
1590 – John White, the governor of the Colony of Roanoke, returns from a supply trip to England and finds his settlement deserted.
1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Globe Tavern – Union forces try to cut a vital Confederate supply-line into Petersburg, Virginia, by attacking the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad.
1868 – French astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen discovers helium.
1877 – Asaph Hall discovers Martian moon Phobos.
1862 – American Civil War: Major General J.E.B. Stuart is assigned command of all the cavalry of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
1863 – American Civil War: In Charleston, South Carolina, Union batteries and ships bombard Confederate-held Fort Sumter.
1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Gainesville – Confederate forces defeat Union troops near Gainesville, Florida.
1943 – The U.S. Eighth Air Force suffers the loss of 60 bombers on the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission.
1943 – World War II: The U.S. Seventh Army under General George S. Patton arrives in Messina, Italy, followed several hours later by the British 8th Army under Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery, thus completing the Allied conquest of Sicily.

And Maynard son #1 was born, 2011.

(Editor’s note, 8-18: I was in a stupor when I wrote this last night, and when I went to Wikipedia to get the events of the day, I clicked on August 18th instead of the 17th. Sorry, son. I’ve corrected it, as you can see.)

Way back in 2003, my good friend Jeremy Gilby took a look at “Dark Matter” and called shenanigans. Now, some guy named Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic (I’ll just call him DraSH) has figured out a way to explain the universe without Dark Matter or Dark Energy.

It only took them eight years, but I’m not that impressed. If a guy with a BS in Astronomy & Physics can do it, then the utility of a post-graduate degree in Astrophysics is greatly oversold.