PSV considered harmful

"My motor control ISR's use lookup tables in PSV, most of my PID or FIR control interrupts use coefficients in PSV for the DSP to save RAM..."

https://www.microchip.com/forums/m241389.aspx

Aside from the acronymorrhea, it's really an interesting discussion. One poster insists certain practices are "not safe", while others say they're perfectly fine. Both have valid points.

Many things are not safe if you do not take appropriate precautions. Nested interrupts really can cause problems on non-atomic operations. But that doesn't mean you don't use nested interrupts, it just means you disable them for the duration of any non-atomic operations.

Simon Tatham, speaking of the hoops he went through to implement coroutines in C, said "Any coding standard which insists on syntactic clarity at the expense of algorithmic clarity should be rewritten." Obviously that's not 100% realistic. But neither is assuming you can meet an arbitrary syntactic coding standard 100% of the time. The balance lies in knowing when to break what rules.

The GOP candidate field (part 3)

This is the third part of my series on the candidates for the Republican nomination for the 2012 US Presidential election. Parts one and two are also available. I never finished the analysis, due to time constraints, and talking about Paul and Romney now would just be redundant. I post this now for completeness.

• Jimmy McMillan founded the Rent Is Too Damn High Party. You can view his website, but there's no well-labeled positions page. The Wikipedia article lists some of McMillan's stated positions. I've got to wonder how he expects to fix rents across the entire country. (Fix, as in to make a standard value, not as in to correct.) That doesn't make economic sense to me. I admire him for taking the stand he has to defend the poor. I'm just not sure about how he'd do as President.  

• Rick Santorum has a short politifact record. He's listed as having made some moderate factual errors, but nothing that throws up giant red flags for me. His campaign page issues section is almost non-existent. As such, it's really difficult to say much about him one way or the other. I do take issue with some of his positions during his time in the Senate. He supported bills seemingly intending to turn the national weather service into a tax-funded arm of other private weather services. His positions on homosexuality and evolution are, at the least, not thoroughly considered. His position on contraception is pretty bizarre, to the point that I almost think it has to be a misstatement. Overall, he sounds like a generic neocon religious-right candidate, of the sort that twists facts to fit their preconceived notions of what America should be. I'm about 90% confident of that description. Based on these sources, he's harder to condemn than some candidates, but neither is he at all praiseworthy.

• Stewart Greenleaf is a PA state senator, who declared relatively recently. He has no campaign page as far as I've seen. You can see some of his state-level issue positions here, and voting records here. Overall, a relatively difficult candidate to judge. I'm inclined towards him because his position statements are very detailed, and seem, at an overview, to be sensible. That's more than I can say about a lot of candidates.

• Buddy Roemer is well known for being the sitting governor that came in third in the Louisiana top-two primary in '91, resulting in a runoff between the uber-corrupt Edwin Edwards and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. (Unfortunately, Louisianna still uses that screwed-up anti-democratic system...) So he's historically interesting to me, and I rather wonder what his thoughts would be on fixing our broken voting systems. Too bad he doesn't seem to say!
His issue page is longer than some. He's clear that he wants to raise retirement benefit ages, which is good. He seems to have some grasp of the fact that our lack of jobs is caused in large part by free trade with countries that have lower standards. He says he'd eliminate Obamacare while maintaining insurance coverage of pre-existing conditions. Unfortunately, he fails to address how eliminating the individual mandate while still mandating coverage of pre-existing conditions would completely destroy the entire concept of insurance.

Roemer's vision of the Department of Education is one of a body that measures, but does not mandate. He believes in some viable ideas for baking reform. He's clearly opposed to a national sales tax, though his flat-tax plan is still financial nonsense. He talks about cutting government spending by about 30%, but also about increasing military spending, so it's not really clear where this extra money is going to come from, especially with lower tax rates on everyone

In short, Buddy Roemer has some good ideas that go beyond the usual talking points. (A few of them were my ideas in my congressional campagin, so they must be good!) The details of how they'd actually work are sometimes so vague as to be nearly useless, but at least he has some understanding of the problems. He also takes no donations above $100, so he's at least marginally less likely to have been bought out.

 

Solar Turbine

Caterpillar has a division called Solar Turbines.

This division has nothing to do with solar-powered turbine generators. Or solar-anything-else. At all.

Perhaps they are named after a man named Sol?

Or perhaps they are so-named because their primary field of operation is entirely within the solar system?

Of course, Wikipedia has ruined my fun, revealing that it's because... San Diego is so sunny!

Of course!