The Times has a special feature about On the Origin of Species, including annotations from various Scientists commenting on favorite passages. The first annotation is by the famous primatologist Frans de Waal, who comments one of the passages that struck my interest when I read the book earlier this year:

I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny

Darwin, in the course of his opus, did not merely lay out the voluminous evidence for natural selection, he also frequently dropped hints of further research to come: for instance, the topic of cooperation. As de Waal notes, we're generally taught to think of Darwinism as survival of the strongest individual competitors. Look at so-called "social Darwinism," and you'll see something that Darwin would likely have hated. Because he clearly believed that cooperation and education (an extension of "leaving progeny") were key components of the general competition between traits (evolution) in a population — that evolution is more than just my biceps are bigger than yours, my brain case has more volume than yours, etc.

So asked a new friend (well, something close to this anyway). In a nutshell: it means striving to build unity in our midst, and acting on a path of service that starts "at home" but continues into the whole community, not just the Bahá'ís.

"global temporary tables are visible to all sessions," says the MSDN documentation. I have occasionally wondered when this would be helpful. This week I finally found a use, albeit limited: I want a quick-and-dirty process that will e-mail a CSV file to me every day for a week. I wouldn't do this for a full on production system (without dwelling on it, it just strikes me as too error prone and inelegant), but for some testing I want to do over the course of a week, it makes sense.

I run a query that populates a temp table, and I want to e-mail the contents of the query using sp_send_dbmail. Again, the documentation tells something important: "Note that the query is executed in a separate session, so local variables in the script calling sp_send_dbmail are not available to the query." This applies not just to a table variable, but also a local temp table (e.g. #temp). But a global temp table (e.g. ##temp) is a different story: works just fine. So there you go, quick and dirty way to e-mail yourself some query results when you don't want to just pass the raw query directly to the send command.

Save Darfur Coalition just called me. And thanked me for being so pleasant on the phone. How sad. Its not like it was a cold call — I've supported them in the past and thus have a reasonable expectation that they'll try to contact me in the future. Why are they calling? Because apparently the conditions in Darfur are deteriorating. Do I believe the woman on the phone? Well, the Times reports that Violence Said to Be Rising in Sudan’s Darfur Region (2010-08-05). At this point Sudan is as much a powder-keg as ever, with secession of the south likely next year, renewed civil war equally likely. The Save Darfur Coalition< is helping spread awareness of, and global pressure on, the Sudanese government's grave abuses (killings, rapes, and other human rights violations). My money will not do much to stop the situation. But public pressure does make a difference, and I'll provide a small amount to help keep that pressure steady.

Meanwhile, Pakistan is also calling, though not literally. The flooding has been absolutely terrible, and relief agencies expect that hunger and isolation will be extreme in the coming months. Time to step up and show the love again for Pakistan (dead link removed; SF 2025 removed). Unicef, World Food Programm, International Committee of the Red Cross, Oxfam, etc. — let's all give one of them a cold call, only to give rather than receive.

I've done my alloted time now: taught a Bahá'í children's class at a St. Paul public housing community center two weeks running, with around 10 children each time. None of whom are Bahá'ís, and neither are their parents. We learned about service and truthfulness. Well, I learned, and I hope they did too. And they taught me about karma. Perhaps I'll go back and help out some more.

A Pew Forum poll a few years ago included the following analysis: "Finally, while an overwhelming percentage of Christians (79%) say they believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, far fewer see Christ's return as imminent. Overall just 20% of all Christians expect Christ to return to earth in their lifetime; even among those who say that the Bible is the literal word of God, just 37% expect Christ to return to earth in their lifetime."

I've been a recycling fool since I was in elementary school, when my best friend and I would walk around house construction sites and collect all of the aluminum cans (we weren't the least bit bothered if there were workers actually there, though typically we were out on Saturdays and that wasn't an issue). For years now I've been meaning to send my old floppy disks to Green Disk, and tonight we finally boxed them up for shipping tomorrow: floppy and zip disks, DSL modems, an ancient dubbed-from-broadcast Spaceballs on VHS (and a few other VHS).

The coup de grâce: Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. I had to open the liner notes and read/semi-sing the, shall we just leave it at trite, lyrics to Never Say Goodbye. But I was forced to give up half way through. That was about the last audio cassette tape. I think I still have The Cure's Faith/Carnage Visors, and REM's Carnival of Sorts, because those were rather rare even in their time.

Next on the recycling list: my old soccer, debate, and science competition trophies (about a dozen).

Stephen's first law of diagnosing problems in production: try to replicate in test. (Assumptions: you have a test environment, you use it regularly, and it is reasonably close to production). Sometimes you just can't replicate the problem — for instance, it might be due to an oddity in a customer data file that you're not allowed to run outside of production. In those cases, see if you can use a proxy. For instance, try copying the file and masking the sensitive data, then running it in the test environment (of course, the masking process might cover up the error that is causing all the problems).

Production needs to stay clean, and as developers we need to keep our hands out of it as much as possible. This is particularly true in a highly secure environment with strong separation of duties, wherein you might have to drag a sys admin into the picture just to get to obscure log files, for instance. Replicate the issue, solve it, document it, and make sure everyone else in the company is able to share in the lessons learned.

I've just uploaded some statistics for the Mississippi River Twin Cities Landbird Monitoring Project. Go into an individual species and you can see a color-coded table of results, histogram showing species presence over time, and a Google maps display with the count of birds at each exact point count location within the various sites monitored. Interestingly, Gold Finchs are the most common bird across these parks. Its definitely fun to pour through this data. Later in the summer, data from previous years will be loaded into the site as well. Check out the Great-Crested Flycatcher — at 8 of 9 sites, they showed up all at the same time (week of 5/9). I can't wait to compare that to previous years' migration results.

This morning at Battle Creek West, where we saw an adult Barred Owl drying itself after a bath two weeks ago, we found two fledged babies. They were adorable. If human babies looked like this, we might have a few already. Someone else's great photo (dead link removed; SF 2025).

Also seen, in another part of the park: small milkweed plant with a monarch egg and 2nd molt monarch caterpillar, and flying nearby was an adult monarch. Seeing three stages of monarch within a minute was quite gratifying. Next time we're out there (two weeks) we'll have to check in on their progress. (T. is now associated with the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project.)