doit, doit now!

And he does it so eloquently:

One of my daughters was in the workplace one day, and her particular workplace at that moment in time, there were a whole bunch of conservative, older men. And those guys were talking about gay marriage. They were talking about discussions going on across the country. And my daughter Kate, after listening for about 20 minutes, said to them: ‘You guys don’t understand. You’ve already lost. My generation doesn’t care.’ I think I learned something from my daughter that day, when she said that. And Ive talked with other people about it and that’s what I see, Senator McKinley. I see a bunch of people that merely want to profess their love for each other, and want state law to recognize that. Is that so wrong? I don’t think that’s so wrong. As a matter of fact, last Friday night, I hugged my wife. You know I’ve been married for 37 years. I hugged my wife. I felt like our love was just a little more meaningful last Friday night because thousands of other Iowa citizens could hug each other and have the state recognize their love for each other. No, Senator McKinley, I will not co-sponsor a leadership bill with you.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2s2R5qKhbo[/youtube]

Worth a watch. Nicely said.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1905879&dest=-1]

So in my last post I posted a letter my cousin wrote to me after I got married. As you might imagine after reading it, I was livid, and I weighed on whether or not to answer him. I decided I should. I am not one to take being called a sinner lightly, especially by another sinner, Mr. Glass House. My (long) response, after the jump:

Update 12/17/2008 02:25 AM: I have also decided to license of this letter (perhaps presumptorily) with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License. Details are at the bottom of the post.
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One of my cousins felt compelled to write me after I got married and tell me what his understanding of the Catholic Church’s position on gay marriage is. I found it considerably offensive even though it was couched in the language of “Christian love.” I took his name out to protect the not-so-innocent. His letter follows after the jump:

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Kevin pointed out that I hadn’t yet posted that I am getting married on my blog.

So I am posting it: I am getting married on October 4th, 2008, to Jonathan Scott Taylor, the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.

I love you, JT.

From BoingBoing:

There have been some rumors flying that Apple’s implementation of Time Machine is going to go hand-in-hand with an implementation of Sun’s ZFS in OSX 10.5 Leopard. I was just reading about ZFS on Wikipedia and came across a very interesting quote on the physical limits of computation. In reply to a question about filling up a theoretical ZFS filesystem without boiling the oceans, ZFS Project Leader Bonwick said:

Although we’d all like Moore’s Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 10⁵¹ operations per second on at most 10³¹ bits of information [see Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to computation." Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2¹²⁸ blocks = 2¹³⁷ bytes = 2¹⁴⁰ bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2¹⁴⁰ bits) / (10³¹ bits/kg) = 136 billion kg.

To operate at the 10³¹ bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc², the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2×10²⁸ J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4×10²¹ kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celsius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4×10⁶ J/kg * 1.4×10²¹ kg = 3.4×10²⁷ J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.”

Everyone seems to love this picture, so I figure I would post it. It’s Feynman doing the sit-back trick, which he knows is the cutest thing he can do and will invariably get him attention.

Get out of my tent! Originally uploaded by hodulik.

That’s right folks, it’s not “hih-muh-LAY-uh”! We were corrected several times by the natives.

I just got back from a trek into the Himalayas of Utteranchal via Haridwar and Rishikesh (where the Beatles went to visit the Maharishi). We took the train from Delhi up north and met up with our guide Rajinder at the lovely Camp Hammock.

We stayed overnight there and the following day made our way to Teva village which served as our base camp for the trek up to the 3500m peak of Nagtiba (variously Nagtibba, Nag Tiba, or Nag Tibba, take your pick). Teva sits in a moist deciduous forest, which is apparrently different than a temperate rain forest. All I know is that it was very, very wet, and very, very beautiful.

Anyway more later, but photosets are up on my Flickr page.

I recently launched the LungBlog, a daily compendium of all things lung-cancer related, for the lung cancer foundation on whose board I sit. Yes, I know that “The Bonnie J. Addario A Breath Away From The Cure Foundation” isn’t at all descriptive (I have yet to meet someone who knows what it is upon hearing it) but we are considering changing it to something simpler, easier to type, and MUCH better for search engine optimization, like, oh, I don’t know, THE LUNG CANCER FOUNDATION. In any event, take a look!