Messages from the Ether

Over capacity

And in case you think it's just you that's seeing these messages, High Scalability has an essay asking the question whether Twitter's solution should be to throttle users' tweets-per-day. Not crazy considering the quality of service they're now providing. Here comes some real competition...

Why

Dear MetroFi User,

It is with regret that we notify you of our intentions to discontinue offering the MetroFi FREE and MetroFi Premium services in Portland. We are in the process of negotiating with a 3rd party network operator to keep the network in place, and during this time your services will not be affected. As soon as we know the outcome of these negotiations, we will provide you with further information.

Thank you,

The MetroFi Team

I told you wifi access in Portland sucked. (But, again, the city as a whole was awesome.)

Google maps and traffic

Google maps added some nifty new stuff to its traffic view. Icons with popup infomation and traffic predictions by DOW and TOD. See the resulting niftiness:

Now you can see your commute go into the red for the day of the week of your choice!

See also Wikipedia, maps

More Expelled fallout

I hoped it would die a lonely death. It's not. Dawkins wrote a letter to a Jew who was convinced by the movie that Atheists are evil. I am (sadly) not making this up. Dawkins reply is detailed and reasonsed. On the original letter-writer's unfortunate phrasing:

While, as for the Lutherans, Martin Luther himself wrote a book called On the Jews and their Lies from which Hitler quoted. And Luther publicly said that "All Jews should be driven from Germany." By the way, do you hear an echo of those words in your own letter to Michael Shermer, "We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States." Don't you feel just a twinge of shame at those truly horrible words of yours? Don't you feel that, as a Jew, you should feel especially regretful that you used those words?

On that jackass, Ben Stein:

Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and wantonly perpetrated the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely and sincerely believed it, although other actions by them, which you can read about all over the Internet, persuade me that they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception. You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the gall to make a whole film like that without checking their facts first. Perhaps even you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong, in which case I urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail -- something that Ben Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed to do.

A Jewish person had asked me this weekend about Obama's anti-semitism. I (also sadly) didn't have an immediate answer because I honestly don't know any of the source material that made them think that. More research needed. I do, however, know how to shut down the lies being passed around about atheism and/or evolution.

HP UMPC 2133

Pretty sexy new mini-laptop coming up from HP. I'm seeing predicted prices from $500-$650 and up, but it has an 8.5-inch, 1366x766 screen (vs. the Eee's 7-inches) and built-in Bluetooth (vs. none). Plus, anodized aluminum case (vs. plastic). Pics stolen:

Corn

Good for Time et al. for finally saying what every expert had been for a while: ethanol is not the answer (and not even "an" answer) to alternative energy. On the other hand, people have known this for years (see, for example, the second comment in this RealClimate thread from almost three years ago), so the media once again sucks on science coverage: parroting political opinion over scientific concensus and correcting only after the meme had already penetrated the masses. Sigh.

Anti

Sci-fi is divided into stories of a future and an anti-future of societal control (think the optimistic Star Trek compared with the pessimistic 1984 or THX-1138) and stories of a future and anti-future of robotics (think pro-android Ghost in the Shell and uber-anti-android Terminator). In the cross-section of the two is Battlestar Galactica. I think these conflicts express the conflicted obsession of geeks. Technology is cool, but technology can also be a fucking hardcore bitch.

Water

More "common sense" jackassery with the recent science news that you don't really need eight glasses of water a day. Many comments throughout the internets are along the lines of: of course you don't need that much, prescriptive rules of how to live ignore that you should primarily listen to what your body says.

Ahh, it's nice to know that those with high cholesterol can eat whatever they want since that's proof of what their body wants. No medical issues there. And the morbidly obese, they got that way by listening to their bodies and purposefully overeating. And diabetics certainly don't need to change their diet or take insulin.

This is another example of people who don't understand science and feel that it's followed to the detriment of common sense. Social history is filled with forgotten common sense (in it's less kind form called superstition) that until examined by facts was more common than sense. What we're calling common sense is intuition based on quick pattern matching. Sometimes the patterns are right for the right reasons, sometimes right for the wrong reasons, and sometimes we end up with fear of witches based on eccentric behavior, adherence to slavery based on racial prejudice, or the somewhat more innocuous belief in astrology and mysticism.

This rant is makin' me thirsty.

Wikipedia, maps

When did Wikipedia put coordinates and maps into its articles? The Lorraine Motel has a drop-down, Ajaxy map at the top right of the page. Clicking the coordinates goes to a page with external links to tens of external maps. Clicking the tiny globe opens a map of the location in the current page with credits as "WikiMiniAtlas." Map is draggable (in this day how could it not be?) and locations are links to their Wikipedia entry. Just. Wow.

ObservatoryNet

A few months ago, I had this genius idea to set up telescopes out in the country somewhere, hook them up to the internets, and write software to schedule viewing time. The hardware to control telescopes and record imagery is available and relatively inexpensive. Users could log into a web site, find a free block of time, and request images or video. Neat.

Alas, as proof that every neat idea has already been done, the recent issue of Wired lists four sites that already provide this service. Three of them free. I haven't messed with any of them yet, but it's a pretty cool concept (he says, sortof complimenting himself too).

Voodoo.NET

So one of our critical applications had some serious downtime a couple of days this week because of a faulty switch. Working from home yesterday, I wasn't able to attend the meeting where all of the details of the bonk were given to the company-as-a-whole, but I did hear--and I am not making this up--that the big whig giving the speech emotionally credited his wife's prayers as a key element of the solution. Ignoring logic and, well, good judgement in problem solving, I have to question for the 1000th time how a tech company gets so diluted with the faithful. Can I start missing deadlines on the basis of prayers not being answered? I don't want to diminish the anguish of a stressful situation, but crediting the hardware and software techs that actually used their skills to find the faulty hardware seems to me a more appropriate and finite direction of any gratitude than the carcass of a slaughtered goat or a few notched bones thrown in the dirt.

No harm done I guess (beyond insulting those who did the work) but geesh, join the 21st century will ya?

(photo courtesy of our friends at 4chan)

New Asus

And now they promise a version with a 9-inch screen. I'm not so much interested in it (400 euros = 600 dollars), but I know the price of my 701 is going to drop. Still, you can't second-guess tech purchases: everything goes out of date...

More Asus

Huh. I'm in good company. Apparently Stephen Fry likes him some Asus EEE [ via Boing Boing > Guardian.co.uk ]. I still can't get Opera installed though!

More leak

The Intelligence Daily points out that Bank Julius Baer's attempted strong-arming of Wikileaks could serve to scuttle their $1 billion dollar IPO. The media attention on the court order to remove the wikileaks.com hostname from DNS servers, and the befuddlement over the unconstitutionality and technical impotence of such actions, makes BJB appear more shady than solid. Oh, that and the fact that they're laundering money for weathy clients...

Of equal interest, The Register outlines the impregnable wall that Wikileaks' creators (also the parents of The Pirate Bay) have constructed with the help of their ISP, PRQ. The data is encrypted, the server locations are undisclosed, the server logs are destroyed, and PRQ's lawyers are ready to handle empty threats of take-down. The Register is calling it bullet proof hosting, but we're all thinking data haven. As many others have said: this information will never disappear.

Speechless

A major Italian university has agreed with many of its academic and student protesters and barred the Pope from speaking at the opening of the academic year. Their protest stems from when Ratzinger had, 18 years ago, defended the church's prosecution of Galileo. He invoked, and I am not making this up, postmodern philosopher of epistemology Paul Feyerabend in his support of Galileo's Renaissance incarceration. Who knew that the Pope could be a fan of the iconoclastic approach of postmodern writers. Oddly enough, the Pope is crying censorship.

Would Christians allow an atheist to christen their new church? How useful would that be? Stephen Jay Gould would refuse to debate creationists arguing simply that they had nothing to bring to the table. He suffered/suffers accusations of censorship. Is it really so odd for science to refuse to spend time with kooks, no matter how organized? There are many flat-earthers out there. The Pope insists that science is subordinate to faith. This is, obviously, stupid and what I'd expect from an intellect base enough to equate atheism with evil.

Many scientists are theists. Despite the protesters' statement that Knowledge needs neither fathers nor priests, there's no reason for such religious posturing--from either fear or arrogance.

Nano

Two great energy stories from the world of nano: first, the much-touted production of cheap solar panels. Such advances were suggested earlier in the year when nano structures that are almost completely non-reflective were created. People need to shut up about biofuels and start treating wind and solar with the respect they deserve. Second, nanowires have been created that can be used in li-ion batteries to increase their operating time tenfold.

Oob

Just heard on the current Talk of the Nation/Science Friday: out of body experience can be induced and directed into a virtual reality avatar. This is discussed in the new book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own. Neat.

The vast wasteland

The New Yorker article "Life Lessons" (only partial content online) from the 5 June 2006 issue examines how soap operas are used in South American and Asian societies to introduce egalitarian and health concepts to the broad viewership. My only experience with telenovelas is with the wonderful-yet-Americanized Ugly Betty and clips of that evil Bruno from La Madrastra (copious examples of ridiculousness have been uploaded) that Joel McHale would show on The Soup. These may contain some social conscience, but it's lost to me through the scumbling of melodrama or meta-melodrama (camp) that can be both lovable and laughable.

What Ms. Rosin pointed out was that in places where local custom makes advances difficult, the telenovela acts as an entertaining PSA (as long is it doesn't get too preachy). An example: the day after an adult literacy campaign was included in a storyline on the Mexican telenovela "Ven Conmigo," more than twelve thousand people caused a traffic jam in front of the country's literacy headquarters, lasting past midnight. Another: in the year that "Accompaname" aired, with stories containing many conflicts that were resolved through family-planning, over-the-counter contraceptive sales went up 23%. Hard science it's not but with the fanatical following of these shows in all-countries-but-the-US it's not unlikely. This is the put[ting] the people's airwaves to the service of the people and the cause of freedom concept that Newton Minow spoke of.

Survival of the fittest does not mean what you think it means

People will often throw out the non-Darwin phrase survival of the fittest in order to indict modern social tolerance. The logic goes: we accommodate the disabled both great and small, they are free to reproduce, therefore their flawed traits are spread through the gene pool when they should be removed.

The "should be removed" part is where the greatest flaw lies. Darwin's idea of natural selection was not purposeful or directed to an end point. Whatever traits are best for the current environment will be the the ones selected. Humans have survived and currently survive through varying environments, each different one requires different and possibly discrete characteristics. Discussions in a recent /. article--stating that mutations, and therefore diversity, have increased in the last 10,000 years--reemphasize this point. A poster early on posits the fumbling we-coddle-the-weak-so-we've-killed-evolution argument and quickly gets smacked down. There's hope.

The sad birth of Pleo

Ugabe promised this at $200:

They delivered this at $350:

Sad.

Progression/regression

Over the past 10 years, a strong majority of the world's most accomplished scientists have said that global warming is occurring, that man is most likely the cause, and that the changes are likely to be destructive. Make that "highly likely." The argument against has moved from "it's not happening" to "it is happening, but it's part of the natural cycle" to "it's not part of the natural cycle but it's not caused by humans" to "it's caused by humans but it may be beneficial." A small contingent just doesn't give a shit what happens.

Science has always had a strongly skeptical opinion on the value of prayer to heal (or do anything else for that matter). The argument in support of prayer has moved from "prayer works" to "prayer works only if you believe" to "prayer works only if you believe and are not 'testing' god" to "prayer works only if you believe and are not 'testing' god, but it is only meant to give peace of mind." In effect: we'll act like it's testable, but it's not.

See also the mushroom cloud from Iraq and subsequent repositionings of the intent.

These examples could be compared with the similar state-of-mind (to paint with a wiiide brush) of those who say that science is religion (i.e. people follow its many mistakes blindly and unquestioningly). Ignoring the oddity of a religious person slighting religion in order to attack science, this position ignores the fact that most of everyday life is deferring intimate understanding to the credentialed experts. I can't rebuild an engine, but I also don't declare as mindless sycophants those that believe it can be done because a mechanic told them it could. And what of the religion of grammar? Those who blindly believe that English verbs must have tense are simply kowtowing to a cabal of lit-fascists who Think They Know Everything.

My favorite example is when we listen to legal reporters (no, not talk show blowhards) dissect court decisions. Though these people are decidedly not credentialed, they take the time to read the briefs, understand their rarefied language, and interview legal scholars on historical relevance. My faith in their summation is not blind, but neither does it need to be.

We trust the process of science to self-correct. Self-correction includes accepting and refuting your previous statements, not redefining your previous statements to make them look like they were never wrong.

Sweet

Digging through old New Yorkers for reading while I stairmaster. Last article was "The Search for Sweet" by Burkhard Bilger in the 22 May 2006 issue (abstract available online). Much of note.

One item that seemed important was the scientists' amazement when three of the five taste receptors were pinpointed. One didn't expect them to be found until the year 3000. People too often point out the over-ambition of futurists (one of my favorite recent finds, Paleo-Future, digs up artefacts of such pop and science predictions). Seldom are the over-cautious expectations examined. Others' hubris is more entertaining and self-satisfying than humility.

Another scary/interesting fact: Senomyx laboratories has a patent on the use of the sweet receptor, one of the three discovered 1000 years ahead of time. The remaining two are pending by the same company.

Configuring ZoneAlarm and ShoutCAST

ZoneAlarm doesn't play well with SHOUTcast. The only way around getting these two to work together is to configure ZoneAlarm in "Program Control" > Main > "Program Control" and select Med[ium] (High is the default). This may not be the best security choice for your setup, but it will allow clients to get in to your SHOUTcast server.

I had recently had a couple of minor crashes and lost my ZoneAlarm settings, so I had to re-learn this configuration. All the while kicking myself for not having it stored in my brain from years ago. The following links made me realize that few others have solved (and published) this: RANDOM: Shoutcast and Zone Alarm, WINAMP.COM | Forums - cannot see your station (diffrent), IORSN - SHOUTcast Network Configuration - Test 1.

Water and sun

Two tough questions came up in the breakroom on Friday:

1. What percent of the water sent out from reservoirs is returned and reused via water treatment plants?
2. What percent of the energy it takes to create a solar panel is returned by that solar panel?

Either of these would probably be worth a book-full of research just to get close to the truth. I, however, have only a bored hour-or-so of surfing to offer.

On the first question, I had guessed that 60-70% of water was recycled. A coworker was much more optimistic at 95-98%. The only usable link I could find was for Australian treatment plants where the recycled water use of six cities in 2001-2002 averaged ~5%. Yipes. Not a lot to go on, but still not good numbers. The question is probably more complex: recycled water is maybe never used for drinking, and so it's uses are limited.

On the second question, the website green econometrics got completely on my shit list. Here's the deal: they had the only useful page I could find, unfortunately it discussed the consumer's economic cost for using solar compared to coal, oil, and gas. In that regard, solar costs more per KWH because you have to pay more for solar panels that produce the equivalent energy. E.g. solar costs $0.38/KWH, where coal costs $0.006/KWH, oil $0.05/KWH, and gas $0.03/KWH.

The problem is that this doesn't tell us society's energy cost to produce a KWH of each. The fuel to produce and maintain digging equipment could be greater than the fuel to produce and maintain solar panel factories. Or it could be less. So, I posted a quick comment with my question in the section below the article with the friendly imperative: "Leave a comment." Within an hour, my comment was deleted. So much for the dynamism of web 2.0 sites.

I'll still pick around for the answer. My search fu could be a little weak, so maybe I missed an obvious article or encyclopedia entry. Until then, item 2 remains a mystery...

Warning

Arctic sea ice loss more dramatic than scientific models (and, need I say, much more dramatic than what the deniers say), also discussed on Reddit. Al Gore's NPP has pushed the story out of any mainstream outlets (as far as I could tell, and to put an optimistic spin on its absence). The author puts it better than I could: The "skeptics" implied there are only two possibilities: either the scientific consensus is right, or global warming is not as bad as the scientists think.

I will again point to RealClimate and its tireless contributors, along with the New Scientist article "Climate change: A guide for the perplexed." Good Q&A.

Deniers have moved primary arguments from "it's not happening" to "it'll cost too much" (trying to forget that they were dead wrong on the previous argument). Soon, realizing they were dead wrong again, they'll be moving to "it's too late." At that point, I'm sure they'll crow over their prescient wisdom.

My brother's rootkit woes

My brother's wife's laptop had started redirecting IE to http://hp-desktop.aol.com/. Changing the Home Page to anything else failed in all attempts and failed insidiously when he manually changed through the registry: within a second, the old value was returned. I was at first puzzled as to why a rootkit would redirect to an apparently innocuous site but realized that redirecting to a spammy site would be too obvious.

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror had recently detailed his unfunny exploits with cleaning up a spyware infestation and his assessment of the state of Windows security re rootkits. Both, along with their discussion threads, are valuable reading. His three dictums on security:

1. Stop Running As Administrator
2. Traditional Anti-Virus Doesn't Work Any More
3. The Mainstreaming of Virtual Machine Sandboxes

WRT rootkits, the standard recommendation is always RootkitRevealer from Sysinternals. It's a raw interface that merely points to possible problems and offers no recommendations, but it comes from a reputable source. Google should be enough to find follow-up info anyway. An Information Week article recommended the freeware tool RootKit-Unhooker. Despite its oddly inconsistent CamelCase, it looks like a good tool.

On the infected laptop, RootkitRevealer revealed one item of suspicion: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Window\CurrentVersion\MSSYCLM\Start. A search on "MSSYCLM" brought up the thread "Topic: ACEWSUWMB.EXE" at Sysinternals. It could be a false positive, but it could also be owned by the Winhound adware/malware.

He's still deciding whether to try to remove, re-image, or (god forbid) ignore.

Genius idea

Encrypted sound. Add a module to your cell phone that encrypts the audio as it leaves the earpiece. Pair this with a hearing aid that decrypts the audio so that anyone able to listen in would only hear gibberish. This would also work across the wire but would require some asymmetric stuff.

Phones really need to be open source.

Smaller

The god-of-the-gaps for global warming denialists just got smaller: 'No Sun link' to climate change. The original article, No solar hiding place for greenhouse sceptics, is behind a paywall at Nature.

Apache on Windows, connection error

Connections start failing with the error:

Add the following directives to httpd.conf:

Found at My Digital Life. The Apache documentation on Win32DisableAccesptEx elaborates some on the error and solution.

IIS

IIS has been giving me untold grief the past two weeks. It just stops serving files for no apparent reason. This time I mean it: I'm moving to Apache.

Framing

Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney are giving a talk in a scant few locales around the US titled "Speaking Science." It deals primarily with Nisbet's favorite subject: how science is represented and mis-represented in the public sphere (and how to fix that). Josh Rosenau has the lowdown and points to a YouTube video of the talk for those of us in backwater burgs. He also sums up the issue at hand:

In policy debates, the public tends not to have the background to assess scientific arguments, and can choose not to expend the effort needed to become educated on complex topics. I do this with particle physics, you may do this for art history or sports.

This is similar to the there-are-only-two-sides approach to politics that media watchdogs have been deriding for years. The public accepts a crippled version of issues simply because of time constraints (I don't care to research sports either). Nisbet regularly covers topics on science and the public in his blog Framing Science.

Intelligent chemistry

A not-so-subtle, yet succinct, assessment of evolution denialists.

Button button, again

A riddle (in the form of a cipher-cipher). And the sad story of Wikipedia banning the numbers.

Button button

During the last few days there's been some exciting follow-up to net hero arnezami's discovery of the AACS processing key in February this year. Users of the world mass posted those pesky numbers in an attempt--looking to be successful--to DDoS the lawyer tools who've been sending out take-down notices. And our hats should be off to Digg users who first saw all of their posts w/ the numbers get killed until they pummeled Digg with messages so fast that the front page filled up. Kevin Rose and the gang eventually acquiesced. The best idea came from a /. user who suggested that popular search engine queries should be published, inadvertently releasing the numbers into the wild for good.

Oh, and for what it's worth: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

Pizza

Fuckin' geeks.

French climate science

Claude Allegre recants his belief in anthropogenic climate change and conservatives rejoice. It is, however, their distinct type of rejoicing without any research whatsoever. RealClimate has what should become a much-linked examination of and rebuttal to Allegre's assertions.

Science aside, Allegre's nonsense arguments were particularly annoying:

... the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters.

Huh? So we're supposed to do something without organizing? OK.

Take *that*!

Found on Digg:

3 billion years old spheres that don't look made by nature!

Once in a while, and more times than some "scholars" wish, "out of place objects" come to the daylight to defy all preconceptions of History.

I love it.

Science blogs, non-science, and a book

The ScienceBlogs web site is an aggregation of 57 blogs that focus primarily on science. Their rss feed is a little busy but always a good source of new info. I subscribed sometime in the past year, and it has become a primary blog distraction.

One recent post from Evolving Thoughts--regarding a definition of science--is a good example of the casually thoughtful content that's available (though occationally the science does get a little too hot and heavy for the person on the street).

Also referenced from that article is the book The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006. This is an area where self-publishing is ideal. There have been some phenomenal posts on the ScienceBlogs that deserve to be in dead-tree format.

Recent server oddities

About a week ago, the Perl.exe processes (for MovableType) started multiplying and taking over the CPU. As fast as I would chop off one head, two would spring up etc. I spent ~10 minutes trying to reboot with little memory or CPU available, and had to eventually do a hard reboot.

Today at work, my wiki stopped responding and I couldn't VNC or ping. Luckily, Lisa was at home and saw that DirectUpdate (which refreshes my dynamic IP) had crashed. After some short tinkering, we rebooted. Then after I got home, ZoneAlarm's TrueVector process stopped "on its own," and I just happened to see ZA's warning dialog. After I restarted it, the Perl.exe's attacked me again. This time, I used ZA's stop button and eventually eliminated the 40-or-so offending processes.

The Perl-thing is spammers trying to post morecommentsthanmyservercanhandle, so that may explain the other instabilities on my low-memory machine. We'll see.

Answers to global warming skeptics

Previously, I had voiced a desire to create a politics wiki that would definitively address flawed arguments that get repeated (torture works, Hussein linked to al Qaeda, etc.). I have great faith in wikis and feel that domain-specific wikis would (and do) provide unique and useful resources. Coby Beck, over at A Few Things Ill Considered, has put together an index to his "How to Talk to a Sceptic Guide" on global warming. Best of all, he plans on porting it to a wiki.

I'd just listened to a man-on-the-street comment on NPR concerning upcoming elections. The commenter said that after 15 credit hours of classes and a full-time job, he doesn't have that much time to research candidates. Just as Byzantine rules of Senate policy or state politics can be difficult to research, the depths of the science involved in global warming research will go beyond whatever you might remember from your 4 year degree. Add to that the haze of lies and non-truths that seem to bubble up in the media more quickly than complex truths: collectively vetted aggregations of available information fills a dire need.

Converting between wikis

WikiMatrix [ via Lifehacker's article "Set up your personal Wikipedia" ] is a nice site that lists around 50 wiki packages. It provides detailed fact sheets on all of them, along with a wizard that helps you choose between the different packages and ultimately compare their differences. Just comparing the differences in markup is useful to appreciate a lack of standards.

There really needs to be default utilities in every wiki that can export to and import from HTML. That would retain 90+% of the content and make wikis a reliable option for data storage. People complain about lock-in with Microsoft Office; this is exactly the same if somewhat more obscure. Basic support should consist of: internal and external links, categories (tags), and images. Wikipedia lists some simple tools for converting to a Wikipedia article from various formats including HTML, but none support complete site import. Another failing of a lack of standards. And there're also several tools for converting blocks of wiki text to HTML--one written in Ruby.

New project!

Some additional links:

• WikiAPI - The generic Java Wiki API - Java classes for managing wikis. Supports MediaWiki and TWiki.
• WikiConverter - Converts HTML to 13 wiki formats. Discussed in a thread on WikiMatrix where a like mind pointed out that Using HTML as an intermediate format seems to me as the most sensible way to manually export/import content from one wiki to another.

Timeline

An open-source, JavaScript-based timeline utility [ via Digg -> Lifehacker ]. You create XML files containing the timeline events and the js library renders them in a scrollable timeline. The XML schema is basic. This would be an easy way to create that life gantt chart I had wanted. Go see the examples and prepare to be amazed. Here's my work history from my resume.

Goo goo goo

Troublemakers have again instigated a grey goo attack against Second Life [ via BoingBoing ]. Second Life apparently has rich enough tools for artifact construction to permit unconstrained replication. A previous occurrence of grey goo was actually pink goo let loose accidentally by a noob. Cute. It looks like the current problem is much less benign; follow the SL blog posts beginning early Sunday. Any server developers will read with unpleasant recognition the rapidfire up-down-up-down-up-down announcements, although the presence of self-replicating particle objects are probably not so common.

Watched South Park's "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode on YouTube (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, while they last). The joke is that, at some point, the act of playing the game becomes more important than the experience of being in the game. If that makes sense.

Representational art in the Byzantine era, and similarly drama in the pre-Renaissance, was restricted (or at least looked on with suspicion) because Christian philosophers felt that the ersatz reality seduced us away from God's reality. Our susceptible minds would be enthralled by the stories and accept experience through them instead of through reality.

When I read a novel I'm immersed in the reality of that novel, and yet the experience is as static as watching television or maybe even playing piano. I'm passively--disregarding the active choice of art object and time--experiencing that which someone else had created. Maybe these virtual worlds are the next logical step in the art consumer experience, but with the addition of consumer interaction. And maybe the fears of art replacing sacred fidelity have changed to those of it replacing social integrity.

Genius idea

An inexpensive observatory available from the internet. Users would buy a block of time and program the coordinates to observe. The results would be available either streaming live or as a video to download.

It would be implemented with a bank of computers hooked to basic telescopes with electronic eyepieces. Each computer would be configured with its latitude and longitude and so be able to register its time zone and appropriate sky charts with a central server.

Of interest to high schools and amateur astronomers who live in light polluted areas or simply do not have an observatory available.

It's supposed to be good for you

Don't be taken in by the idiot rantings of James Robbins over at The National Review. Check out the ScienceBlogs' various responses here (Page 3.14, The Island of Doubt, The Questionable Authority) and here (The Loom) and here (Cognitive Daily). Hooray for Global Warming indeed...

Perelman

Not to over-romanticize the notion, but this is sad.

His friends are said to have stated that he currently finds mathematics a painful topic to discuss; some even say that he has abandoned mathematics entirely. According to a recent interview, Perelman is currently jobless, living with his mother in St Petersburg, and subsisting on her modest pension.

I very much enjoyed the story of Andrew Wiles proving Fermat's theorem and am about to dive into Perelman's story in the August 28th New Yorker. I respect the passionate scientist, I think, more than the passionate artist.

Yo

Monkeys

This too is demoralizing.

Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US, says Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who conducted the survey with his colleagues. "The US is the only country in which [the teaching of evolution] has been politicised," he says. "Republicans have clearly adopted this as one of their wedge issues. In most of the world, this is a non-issue."

I've recently had direct contact with otherwise educated individuals (hey, I'm in the tech industry) who doubt some of the most basic tenets of modern science without ever having made the effort to study them. Does the free information that's been made available on the internet devalue knowledge in some way?

The National Review web site has a web virus

I followed the link Why Ann Coulter doesn't write on the National Review anymore - "emoting rather than thinking" - a letter from the NRO editor (in case you missed it) from Reddit.com. First, Opera tried to download exp.wmf:

Then, AntiVir Guard reported this:

C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\ADMINISTRATOR\APPLICATION DATA\OPERA\OPERA\PROFILE\CACHE4\OPR00O0A.PHP

Contains signature of the VBS script virus VBS/Drop.Inor.EB

I could only dismiss the Opera dialog by clicking the X, and everytime I tried to switch tabs the tab with National Review would be forced into view again. I just hope Opera and AntiVir blocked everything... Hey! It's another reason to avoid conservative web sites!

A history of THAAD

The recent test of the THAAD missile system is being called a success. How successful has it been in the up to now?

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the first 11 tests (from 21 April 1995 to 2 August 1999) had three successes and eight failures (37.5% success). When considering only the intercept attempts, there were two successes and 6 failures (33.3% success). Other sites confirm. Notably, it was the last two intercept tests that were successful. The tests were resumed in late 2005 after Lockheed Martin began production. All three tests were successful, with only the last two being intercept tests.

The news is oddly quiet about these successes--and what with Iran and North Korea getting all surly, it's very odd. Even Fox News is silent at a moment when they would usually be crowing. Am I missing something? When the Pentagon is pushing a deceitful campaign to send text messages to the troops in Iraq (with no plan to actually send them to the troops in Iraq), you'd think that any chance at actual good publicity would be a sure-thing. They make me suspicious of even their accomplishments. How frustrating...

Ripping video from YouTube

Information taken shamelessly from Methodshop.com and VideoHelp.com. The process is a little slow but effective when you have a video that you would rather burn to CD to watch on the television. Like the unaired pilot for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

1. Load the page for the YouTube video you want to rip.
2. Allow it to buffer completely. The player bar fills with a darker gray as the video is downloaded.
3. The buffer will be a file with an FLV extension in your browser's cache directory. Probably somewhat large.
4. Download and install the Riva FLV Encoder.
5. Set the Input Video to the full path of the FLV file. Set the Output Directory and Ouput Video to the path and name of a new file with an AVI or MPG extension.
6. Click FLV Encode and wait...

Truth, again

The WSJ has another op-ed on global warming. In contrast to the one of 26 July which attempted to discredit an AP article, this one lists its author: Richard S. Lindzen. Many quotes from the first are regurgitated in the second (actually, the first is quoting the second as if their publish dates were reversed). I had posted the original AP and WSJ articles next to each other along with inlined links and references to other sites debating the validity of the WSJ article. I can only assume that they'll be publishing the same op-ed--or some form of it--every few weeks until An Inconvenient Truth has finished its run of theaters.

Truth

The AP has published a story that top climate scientists are giving Al Gore's documentary on global warming, five stars for accuracy. I wasn't surprized by this since the scientists over at RealClimate had already discussed it at length and given it (approximately) four-out-of-five stars. But now a Senate committe has come out debunking the AP report (originally from the WSJ). Last time I checked the Senate was suppressing science, so I'm not so sure how valid this information is. Wikipedia has wisely locked the article for the movie from anonymous editing and almost certain flame wars.

Many of the claims in the WSJ article are weak at best, as RealClimate quickly points out. Think Progress has also joined the fun of wading through the wreckage. To facilitate research, I've copied the two articles and Wikipediaed the links:

CO2 and you

On Ebert and Roeper's TV review of An Inconvenient Truth, Ebert criticized the media's reporting on the controversy of global warming where there is none. Roeper countered that the controversy is over whether it is caused by humans and that the movie should have admitted to that. He needs to read RealClimate's article explaining the correlation.

RealClimate on An Inconvenient Truth

Eric Steig over at RealClimate has posted a review of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth [ via Digg ]. Steig gives a very positive review of the science in the movie. For the few criticisms and controversies, he links to prior discussions on RealClimate that examined those issues. Good information; RealClimate is an invaluable and open forum for scientists and non. Another Digg commenter posted a link to JunkScience's negative review of the movie. It has, notably, no open comments, but since knowledge wants to be free the thread at the RealClimate review begins to address those assertions at comments #72 and #73. Much more to read later.

The phrase junk science has been adopted by certain for-hire and astroturf groups who spread misinformation under the pay of corporations. Their site may be different, but that association is distracting. Add the lack of a forum (suggesting they don't care to open their assertions to debate) and lack of authorship (cf. RealClimate's articles) and the JunkScience site begins to appear uncomfortably opaque. The facts asserted are the important issue, but JunkScience.com certainly doesn't get any points for openness.

My car 2009

New German concept car. It's a little future-y looking, but it offers 157 miles per gallon of gasoline or 1.5 l per 100km. Is there anything those Germans can't do?

Net neutrality

Now that net neutrality has been smacked down, I'm beginning to worry. I really didn't think it would lose. The same telecom corporations that said that Internet companies (Google, Amazon, et al.) were getting a free ride by not paying some extra tariff for Internet bandwidth, above and beyond what they're paying their ISPs, have bought Congress. Such restrictions, designed to promote only what benefits telecom companies, could starve innovation and freeze the Internet into a state that always and only benefits those companies. Change would only appear in the context of which telecom company had the greatest power.

In this era of media congomerates, can anyone really expect an invisible hand to protect companies competing with those conglomerates from being throttled and firewalled out of existence?

Maps updates

I was reading the article on Werner Herzog in the recent New Yorker (very interesting life). At one point, the author tells of how Herzog heard a friend of his in Paris was sick, so he walked there from Munich. I'm not sure what prompted me to do this, but I decided to try to map the route on Google Maps. It worked (838 km). It also includes the little overview window at the bottom right that first showed up maybe a week ago. Oh, and there're satellite shots too, presumably all from Google Earth. Nice features.

Pleo

I saw this a week ago and can't wait to get one in the fall (available October 15, 2006):

I'm not responsible enough to take care of a dog, and have been hearing horror stories recently of ill-mannered ones at that, so this could be the perfect substitute.

Happy Pi day!

We were all a-buzz about Pi Day here at work. Interesting trivia heard on The Leonard Lopate Show:

• Buffon's Needle describes the emergence of Pi from a test using lined paper and a "needle" the length of the distance between the ruled lines. The Wikipedia entry points to a Flash animation of it (although after 600 iteration, it had not yet stabilized on two decimal places).
• The original Hebrew text of 1 Kings 7:23 from the Bible presents an odd numerological spelling of the word "circumference" that (combined with some creative maths) can be used to calculate Pi to four decimal places. Who knew the Hebrew god was l337?

Happy Pi Day.

Posted by sstrader at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)

Selection

Study from the University of Chicago suggests that humans are still evolving. One argument I've heard often is that we're no longer evolving because we've taken the "danger" out living. To put it unkindly (but generally repeating the argument): the sick, crippled, and those with mental problems are now integrated into society and not "weeded out" by nature. This conceit is more common that I'd expect. The problem with it is that it emphasizes the phrase "survival of the fittest" (not Darwin's) over the theory's emphasis on species' interactions with their environment. I don't think that evolution can be described as a simple clearing out of the lame; that overly simplifies the role of environment and the concept of biological fitness.

Treo 700w

Overall, I'm very happy with the Treo. Except for a few rare instances, you can navigate everywhere one-handed without having to use the stylus. (For example, you can't navigate in and out of the IE address box without actually reloading the address, and you lose focus completely when you shut down applications on the task manager screen--Option+OK. Very minor.) I'm moving from a Windows PDA with a larger screen, but I haven't noticed the difference and getting a smaller phone is worth it. I've hit the memory limits a few times--thus the need to shut down applications--which doesn't bode well for more extensive future use, but we'll see.

EVDO is transparently fast, but companies need to start producing better and more accessible PDA content. I'm using MapQuest's PDA maps, but I had to guess the URL because their main page actually sent me to the wrong location for mobile maps. I'm also using Agilemobile's Agile Messenger IM client for MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, and ICQ. There were a few hiccups on the software upgrade and it has some UI inconsistencies, but is otherwise good for a free IM client. And I'm still amazed at how good Georgia Navigator is for a state-run Web site.

The camera takes decent pictures in good light. It's about what you'd expect with a phone/camera and useful for that. I'll probably be taking a lot of pictures of wine labels when we go out so I can write them down later. Wine geek.

Overall, there's nice integration of PDA and phone features in a unit that feels comfortable. I'll be using this for a while. (If I don't lose it at a bar somewhere--at which point I'll kill myself.)

More and more robots

In July of last year, I read Marshall Brain's "Robotic Nation" essay with some interest. BoingBoing just posted about the new Taco Bell/KFC robots taking jobs from honest, hardworking Americans. Damn dirty robots! "Robotic Nation" is, like all futurism, a crap shoot of emphasizing some facts and ignoring others, but it's still a good read.

Changing screen orientation on my Dell Inspiron

I was quickly hitting Ctrl+Left-Arrow to go back in my browser history and somehow changed my Dell Inspiron 6000 screen to portrait mode (everything's sideways). The mouse still, of course, responded in the same way--expecting that you had some sort of tilt-and-swivel setup--so up was left and right was down. Sort of. No key combination returned me to landscape, so I did a quick--yet cumbersome--search. Nothing. I eventually discovered that will get it back to normal, here they are:

1. Select the desktop
2. Shift-F10
3. Graphic options
4. Graphic properties...
5. Rotation tab
6. Normal

Tada! I'm an idiot, 'cause I still don't know what I did to swap the orientation.

Quick update

An odd social artifact of making edits in Wikipedia: it promotes further edits. People are probably monitoring any recent changes and updating those as it strikes them. There are also ways to monitor specific entries, but for most I think that the presence of a recent edit is what's promting the attention. It's a nice, unexpected benefit.

America, idiot

Pharyngula discusses at length an article from Esquire called Greetings from Idiot America [ subscription, free version here ]. A quote from the article:

On August 21, a newspaper account of the "intelligent design" movement contained this remarkable sentence: "They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive."

A "politically savvy challenge to evolution" is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. ...

It's a detailed redefinition of the anti-intellectualism that I rant against, and that they point out was deftly covered by Richard Hofstadter in his book from 1963 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. People have moved from hating expertise to believing that intuition is on equal footing with it. Intuition in the thought process is valuable in order to arrive at unique solutions; it's meaningless--or at least only personally relevant--if not subsequently vetted by knowledge and expertise.

And since I feel like I bitch too much, I'll quote the end of the Pharyngula article:

You would be surprised at how much email is sent to me telling me to stop being so derisive, that harsh language and ridicule turn people off and repel the very ones we're trying to persuade. My reply is like the one above; by refusing to ridicule the ridiculous, by watering down every criticism into a mannered circumlocution, we have created an environment where idiots thrive unchallenged. We have a twit for a president because so many people made apologies for his ludicrous lack of qualifications—we need more people unabashedly pointing out fools.

Virus with SunTrust's Web site?

When I access the SunTrust online banking Web site, I get a virus warning.

• I am using a clean installation of Opera 8.51, build 7712
• My antivirus software is AntiVir Guard for Windows XP, version 6

The error specifies the HTML cache file that contains the error and gives the following message:

Contains signature of the PHISH/CitiBkfraud.G virus

This doesn't happen from other browsers, and the cache file and contained script appears harmless. There is virtually no information on this virus online.

Stardust

The Planetary Society has a collection of beautiful yet bare images of Stardust hitting the Wild 2 comet. I picked N2075WE02 as my wallpaper. It just returned from its ~ seven year trip. It's chilling to think of the distance from Earth and that we had something out there actually recording a moment in time. It reminded me of the movie someone had created back in July of the images from the Deep Impact satellite.

Science blogs

A couple of my favorite science blogs are now under the umbrella of, naturally, ScienceBlogs [via Scott Spiegelberg]. The site is very clean and attractive. It provides high-level categories and a search of the 11 contributing blogs. It also has an RSS feed, but it's not an aggregate feed. That seems sensible for the blogs involved.

Beyond the cross-blog search there's not much added benefit, but it does act somewhat as a web ring: providing qualified referals.

Brilliant

One of the most beautiful computing experiences (geek) I ever had was using my Newton. I had a 120 and eventually moved on to the 130--backlit! I was mocked relentlessly because of its size, but it didn't matter because the OS was. absolutely. perfect. Everytime I use my PDA, I miss the 130. The Newton Museum is selling off its entire collection on eBay [ via BoingBoing ]

Global Warming Skeptic Bingo

GWSB [ via /. ]

IM to phones

How-To use AOL Instant Messenger to send a Text Message to a phone. I found this after text messaging Lisa and wishing I could do it from Trillian. It works using my AIM account (see additional comments after the article). Only slightly useful but neat.

Glitch

Technology has not been treating me well. First, my keen laptop starts inexplicably shutting down whenever the battery is plugged in. I ordered a new battery that fixed it but only for a day. After an hour on the line with Dell, I get a case # to ship it in under warrenty. X (<- fingers crossed). Before that, the old crappy laptop that's hooked up to the stereo acting as our jukebox went wonky. After endless, lengthy reboots, I finally figured out that the wireless card was bad. I have a backup, but it's still got somethin' wrong. I'm too tired of working on it, so it'll have to wait a few days. Then, last night the power flickered (very rare here) and reboot all of my machines. After an hour of (1) disk scanning, (2) defragmenting, and (3) resetting most of the Zone Alarm settings that got lost, I went to bed. In the morning, I found out that I didn't reset Zone Alarm completely and the Web stuff was still down.

Please nothing else.

Blogdex is back

In the past few days, Blogdex popped back online--around a month after it first disappeared. And, of course, BlogsNow is still up.

Today's reading list

• The Man Who Sold the War [ via Rolling Stone ]

The CIA paid the Rendon Group more than $23 million dollars to help bring down Saddam Hussein through propaganda and media manipulation. That propaganda, fed to Judith Miller among others, once reported was used by the administration to bolster support for the war. In one breath John Rendon criticises the media for reporting unflattering and incorrect information about the war, in the next he boasts of feeding incorrect information to that same media. Jackass.

It reminds me of the essay "Astroturf: How Manufactured 'Grassroots' Movements are Subverting Democracy" from The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003. In it, Jason Stella outlines how propaganda--lies--from the Kuwaiti government was used to push lawmakers to vote for the first Iraq war.

• Crisis in Cosmology [ via In Defense of Marxism ]

First, I find out that string theory is in question, now the big bang too? My head is spinning. All of those problems that still exist with the theory could eventually bring it down--and in the process describe a universe that is at least 70 billion years old instead of 13! This is big. At the center of the dispute is plasma cosmology.

The article is, however, absolutely dispicable in the way it presents modifications that occured in the big bang theory. At several points, scientific adjustments are presented as some sort of weasling out on the part of the scientists. Look: theories are meant to adjust as new facts are presented. That's what science is. If the theory eventually falls apart--which the big bang may-or-may-not--then the theory that best represents the new facts will replace it. Too much sensationalist science reporting. Jackasses.

This, oddly, makes me wish Brian Greene had a blog. I wonder what the discussions are in the physicist and cosmologist circles...

And, bravo to Eric Lerner for his vigilance in keeping the Wikipedia entry on plasma cosmology unmolested by rabid graduate students. New science is new science and it needs to be presented with fact and not ridiculed with emotion.

• TiddlyWiki

Self-contained wiki based on JavaScript contained within the HTML pages. Basically, you can save your entire, functioning wiki to a single HTML file. Client-side scripting at its best. Now I have to think about porting my development wiki, and maybe even my blog, to this.

String theory's sad demise?

I can't keep up with modern physics as much as I'd like, so I was kinda shocked when I heard string theory outed as the emperor's new whatever last Friday on Talk of the Nation's Science Friday (not yesterday, but a week before). On it, Lawrence M. Krauss was talking about his latest book Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond (from Amazon's comment, apparently everyone listened to that show). I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe when it first came out and loved it--nice overview of string theory and everything leading up to it. Etc. Everyone's either read it or read of it, so that hardly needs to be repeated (his second one was a little more dense and needs a second reading). Now, Lawrence Krauss seems to be tearing down string theory by using the same concerns that we've read about: it lacks provability or disprovability with our current understanding. While these have always been issues to be resolved Krauss is saying that it's been too long and that they can never be resolved.

Definitely a book to-be-read. Hello wishlist. Several of his other books look familiar too.

Anyway, it got me digging through and old chart I made of the standard model in order to organize the basics in my head:

Balance of power, part 3

(Continued from part 1 and part 2.)

/. continuing the debate of Internet governance (I still like the title "War to Liberate the Internet") triggered from a WSJ article. A few good entries: AC provides a little more schooling on the whole issue. Later, daveschroeder pulls the ownership card but gets smacked down nicely here and here.

Internally inconsistent

Two items found next to each other in a side banner on Daily Kos:

This seems like a system about to have catastrophic breakdown.

(work here (or here (or here)))

Virtual machine reader on the cheap, yo. With a handful of virtual machines for download, including a browser appliance that can be used as the ultimate firewall. [ via /. and not yet tested ]

Science and the single professor

When the ID trial began, I had some concern based on the reporting. Several articles trotted out the ID redefinition of "theory" without once presenting the scientific meaning. Shame on them. Maybe the media is evil!?! But, no matter how many kneecaps you'd like to break, a good debate can sometimes reveal truths. Attorney Eric Rothschild gets the money quote by cornering Behe into admitting that not only is his definition of theory equal to NAS's definition of a mere hypothesis, but that astrology would fit into his definition. Egads.

Balance of power, part 2

More nationalist chicanery as the War to Liberate the Internet has begun. /. seems firmly in the camp that the UN is more corrupt than the US, so let's just keep the status quo. And, oh yeah, we invented it, motherfucker! Although one poster asked the question Would you say that nobody should have the right to control their own zoning laws except Iraq because the first known zoning laws were invented by the Babylonians? Indeed.

One odd argument against UN control is that law enforcement restrictions and monitoring could be inserted into protocols. Re-read that sentence again. People are worried that countries other than The United Patriot Act States of America will abuse surveillance powers w/r/t the Internet. Others repeat the shibboleth "oilforfood" as if they US government never had any management debacles that shifted money to the wealthy and unscrupulous. Again, nationalism can be so forgetful.

Having read the range of arguments that are out there, I still support international governance (but that's just how I lean anyway). Although many are rightfully ringing the warning bells for what could happen, the root servers have that odd mix of total knowledge and limited power. China already firewalls their citizens' access and gets Yahoo! to assist in imprisoning dissidents without even having a root server on their soil. Can UN control change that? News.com suggests Bush's squeamishness with the proposed .xxx TLD and the UN's penchant for proportional dues based on GNP are what we have to fear. The Guardian ends menacingly and vaguely with the line The internet will never be the same again, after stating that there are many unanswered questions.

Finally, this pithy assessment from Three Wise Fellows on /.:

Search and Google

After bitching about Google, and then continuing my internal dialog out loud last night against the sounding board of non-techie neighbors of my brother, and then re-reviewing the validity of my statements this morning, I found Google Watch's assessment of Google's long-term cookie (which expires in 2038, an absurdly long life for a cookie, but not that unusual. unfortunately). GW was reviewed in Salon back in 2002. As an alternative to Google, GW points towards the unpleasantly named Clusty, which got only honorable mention in secondary categories of this year's Search Engine Watch Awards. Oddly, the one feature that impressed me with Clusty (still don't like that name), the clustering of results under semi-descriptive headings, is declared as not all that special compared to directory results. Doesn't that miss the point that they have filled one of the feature gaps between directories and search engines?

Balance of power

Two related issues: GoogleNet and the International Internet. We live in interesting times.

Radio

Review: Recording Web Radio, TiVo Style. I'm a visionary! A poor, lazy visionary.

Freedom costs a buck 'o five

Several discussions with Mason this weekend about the ultimate hopelessness of freedom of information. Even as fact becomes more fully and precisely available, its access is limited by means (most of the population will still get information by fallible word-of-mouth or 5-minu