The White House recently complained:

In his gloomy Washington Post commentary today on yesterday’s ceremony transferring ownership of the Space Shuttle Discovery from NASA to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, Charles Krauthammer urged readers to think of that transfer as the funeral for U.S. leadership in space. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States remains far and away the world leader in space technology and exploration.

In its first twenty years, the U.S. space program went from Mercury to the Shuttle. In its next thirty years, the U.S. space program went from the Shuttle to…the Shuttle.

Now, with the orbiters packed off to museums, the U.S. is no longer able to send human beings into space. NASA has no credible plan to reacquire that ability.

That certainly sounds like an abdication of leadership.

This morning, the local news reported that a nursing-home patient had gone missing: he told the front desk he was going for a smoke, walked out the front door…and never came back.

Initial reports were carefully vague as to the suspected cause: dementia? foul play? suicide? All seemed equally plausible.

The truth proved less dramatic: the missing fella turned up today, alive & well at a relative’s house in Terre Haute. He just decided it was time to go.

I can sympathize. I’ve had jobs where I said to the cow-orkers, “See you tomorrow,” despite my fervent wish that it would not be so.

There’s a rather frustrating disagreement between developers of personal-finance software – Microsoft Money, Quicken and iBank – and the investment company that manages my 401(k) account, over the otherwise mundane question of how to…multiply two numbers together. An example:

My 401(k) statement tells me that I bought 0.431 shares of fund X at $126.22/share, for a total of $54.46. That’s nice – share prices are going up, my 401(k) balance is at an all-time high, etc., etc. The crashes of 2001 and 2008 are distant (but still unpleasant) memories.

However: every means I have of doing arithmetic – calculator, spreadsheet, pencil & paper, personal-finance application, etc., – stubbornly informs me that 0.431 × 126.22 = 54.40, not 54.46. To get the right total, I have to fudge the share price to 126.3753.

Why is that? Why does Snooty Financial Megacorp present as correct & accurate a set of numbers that any junior-high student could see is bogus? Or does the Megacorp simply have no one on payroll who is capable of junior-high math?

That would certainly explain the events of 2008, wouldn’t it?

This morning, I was catching up with Google Reader: Jamie Zawinski had written an interesting piece, Why I use Safari instead of Firefox. In it, he said:

Anyone who truly understands UI design realizes that every preference option is an admission of defeat: it’s there because you couldn’t just get it right the first time.

I thought that was memorable, and decided to quote it on Twitter:

…and a curious thing happened: it picked up twelve retweets, three favorites & one (rather snarky) reply. That’s more attention than any of my 6,637 previous posts had received.

Now I worry that all those people think either that I said the clever thing I was quoting, or that I want them to think that I said it. Sorry, it was Jamie Zawinski who said it, not me.

It made me wish for a web service, something between the Kindle’s book-highlighting function and Pinterest’s page-grab function. I want to save pithy quotes from around the internet, and make them available for people to read, but with proper source attribution so people don’t think I’m plagiarizing.

I wonder if such a thing exists….

And everybody’s vacation is nearly over: tomorrow, it’s back to school and/or work for all four of us. Jake & Sam aren’t too happy about that, but I’m looking forward to getting back on a regular schedule.

I like regular schedules. Perhaps this means I’m getting old, and my tolerance for change is diminishing.

Today’s project: tidy up & de-clutter my half of the quilting room / office, with an eye toward moving my desk somewhere it won’t be in the way quite so much.

This morning, Jake & I got the lawn mower ready for another season of yard work. We replaced the spark plug, air filter and blade; changed the oil; and scraped off all of last year’s grass from the blade housing.

I let Jake do most of the work. I think he enjoyed it: a little work-with-your-hands, a little time with Papa.

This year, he gets to help mow the lawn. (I expect his interest in this will wane rapidly.)

News items about bank robberies always seem to mention that the robber “…handed the teller a note demanding money.”

But that phrase might also describe a regular withdrawal: what is a withdrawal slip, if not a “note demanding money”?