Author: Khürt Williams

A human who works in information security and enjoys photography, Formula 1 and craft ale.

Spring 2017

The Tuesday Photo Challenge is a weekly theme-based challenge for photographers of all kinds to share both new and old photography. #fpj-photo-challenge

The Tuesday Photo Challenge is a weekly theme-based challenge for photographers of all kinds to share both new and old photography. This week's theme is spring.

This past week we had some low temperatures and strong winds. The kind of weather that makes me wish I live somewhere warm, tropical. The snow from the last week's snowstorm was still piled high and showed no signs of melting. The ploughs had created great mountains of black ice over seven feet in height in some places. I imagine that some kids might look at those and think, “Can I use my sledge on that?”.

Spring in New Jersey doesn’t really start until mid-April. It’s too early for this post. I had fully expected that I would be posting these photos from past springs to have something …

Princeton, Monument, Spring
The mall at Princeton Battlefield Monument
princeton, spring
The mall at Princeton Battlefield Monument

I was concerned that I would not find the typical signs of spring for this area. Where would I find spring plants such as skunk cabbage, Rue anemone, Jack in the Pulpit, and the aptly named Spring Beauty? The oak has barely started to produce buds. However, the cedar and Juniper are in full form. Achoo!!

lichen, spring, sourland mountain
A patch of lichen showing both gametophytes (the low, leaf-like forms) and sporophytes (the tall, stalk-like forms)
jack in the pulpit, spring, sourland mountain
Jack in the Pulpit, Sourland Mountain Range

In early March, after the sun sets, male woodcocks perform an in-flight song and dance routine for their audience of female birds on the ground. I would tell you how wonderful it was to experience this first hand, but the Sourland Conservancy woodcock bird walk was cancelled due to the storm. To make matters worse, the snow storm grounded the birds and many were starving unable to get food through the ice and snow.

Round-lobed Hepatica (Hepatica americana)
Round-lobed Hepatica (Hepatica americana) · 25 April 2015 · Nikon D5100 · 90 mm f/2.8

The ornate and mottled leaves are visible year-round. The furry-stemmed flowers arise in the earliest spring; fur on the stems and new leaves protects against April cold fronts and they are pollinated by solitary bees. The seeds are dispersed by forest ants.

butterfly, spring, sourland mountain
Spring Azure Butterfly, Sourland Mountain Range

In late February, we had some hot weather, and my spring garden bloomed. The crocus pushed themselves out, and I worried that my spring garden would be bare.

spring, crocus, flower

But I got some surprises on Friday. Thursday and Friday were much warmer days with daytime temperatures between 6ºC and 15ºC. Enough of the snow melted to expose these flowers. They had been sitting under the snow, preserved, for two weeks.

Reading List - organized violence, human rights, autonomous vehicles

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Human rights and the West.

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.Ismael Lagardienne

Undocumented workers in New Jersey:

They commit no crime by simply being here without “proper papers”; they are like jaywalkers who walked across the borderOpinion: Complex Truths Versus Simple Thinking About the Undocumented

Will autonomous vehicles save lives or kill us all?

The problem with a long-tailed phenomenon is that the longer we looked at it, the less we understood what to expect. The more we sampled, the bigger the average turned out to be. Why should we think that stopping at 1 billion samples will be enough?

To see these numbers in more vivid terms, imagine that we are considering using some new technology that appears to be quite beneficial. The technology is being considered to combat some problem that kills about 36,000 people per year. (This is the number of traffic-related deaths in the United States in 2012.) We cannot calculate exactly how many people will die once the new technology is introduced, but we can perform some simulations and see how they come out. Suppose that each number sampled above corresponds to the number of people who will die in one year with the technology in place (in one run of the simulation). The big question here is: Should the new technology be introduced?

According to the sampling above, most of the time, we would get well below 100 deaths per year with the new technology, which would be phenomenally better than the current 36,000. In fact, the simulations show that 99.9 percent of the time, we would get well below 10,000 deaths. So that looks terrific. Unfortunately, the simulations also show us that there is a one-in-a-thousand chance of getting 1 million deaths, which would be indescribably horrible. And if that were not all, there also appears to be a one-in-a-million chance of wiping out all of humanity. Not so good after all!Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real AI