Late, but better than never. - 6 February 2007

Turned in project description. Now awaiting to see what judgment is passed on it. Other stuff to follow. This page brought to you by the concept of big scary projects. Paper is sitting in the final stages, thank Prime.

Iran continues to build a nuclear programme. Will Bush continue to threaten to destroy it if it should go on-line?

Chemicals in large quantities could be doing more harm than good. This reasoning is true even of things that are supposedly good for you, like antioxidants. Thus, the healthy lifestyle first, then, if absolutely necessary, the supplements and medicines. It will likely cause less problems throughout life.

There was significant flak over a commercial aired during the football game on Sunday for being homophobic.Americablog has a representative example of the complaint against the Mars company’s Snickers ad. Not only did people take offense to the content, the bonus content which had the reactions of several NFL players, all negative, as well as alternate endings, did not cast a positive light on gay men. And for that, well, the heat is on, I guess. Mattel, on the other hand, is threatening to sue an artist who is going to make Barbie into a lesbian. Didn’t I link to something like this before?

Steve Jobs, today on the Apple website, said he supports the idea of selling totally non-DRM music, but that the record companies require DRM if he wants to sell their stuff. Because the music companies are still worried about widespread piracy of their materials, (Piracy, I note, that is still likely taking place, and would probably continue to take place, even if DRM was stripped off music) they insist on locking down their material. Jobs knows what Eric Flint knows about free copies and book sales, namely that offering free copies often increases book sales. If you know it’s a good product, you’re more likely to buy it than if you have to guess. And samples in the music case, much like in the book case, can’t be snippets - they’ve got to be chapters or whole songs, if not entire books or albums. Know it’s good? Then people will buy it. So why don’t the media industries adopt this idea? Whay don’t they let it go, rather than threatening to release movies two weeks later in another country because people videotape it in the theaters?

Four years later, the soldiers continue to give effort for the people in the country. Reading pieces like this makes me want to bring creative minds and hearts like Captain Kelley home, so that they can put their talents to uses other than killing people.

The Washington Times makes a note that foreign countries that have promised aid to Iraq are a bit slow about meeting their commitments. Perhaps they’re waiting for a time where their money will go to use rather then ending up building something that is destroyed the next week.

Another reminder that thinking monolithically of people is a bad idea - a California county clerk is going to start issuing "Certificates of Inequality" to homosexual couples as a protest against California's gay-marriage ban. What makes her special? She’s an evangelical Christian. People can’t be treated monolithically, because they rarely ever move all in unison. Oh, and in case you missed the memo, everyone whom you can hold a conversation with is articulate, so applying it as a compliment had better mean that you think they’re more articulate than everybody, rather than just as a surprise of them belonging to a certain racial group. Additionally, in my personal opinion, officers who believe that the Iraq war is illegal should be permitted to say so, rather than court-martialed for it. But that’s my opinion.

After reading this plan to survive on $12,000 a year, my complaints about my debts and worries get taken down a peg. Because I know I’m not fiscally responsible enough to do what she’s planning on doing. It’s scary... and I wonder what will happen in that year to try and wreck her plans.

A student gets busted for child porn when he turns in the wrong disc for his final. That’s a pretty bad thing to show to your prof. However, a substitute teacher who showed students porn, possibly accidentally, is facing up to forty years in prison. Yeah. Forty years for something that could have been the result of pop-ups or adware. The tech guru says this was a fluke in the filtering software, of course, because we all know that filtering software works perfectly almost all the time. If it was an accident that found a blip in the firewall, then the sub doesn’t deserve the roasting. Still, I don’t think that substitute teachers are going to deliberately expose the students to pornography (unless for health, sex-ed, or artistic purposes, and even then, it would probably take more red tape than it was worth). Forty years... geez! Is that another sterling example of mandatory minimum sentences, by any chance?

Neatorama puts up the 11 most important philosophical quotations, in its opinion. Many I’ve heard, some I’ve thought some about. Maybe when there are a few cycles of downtime, you will, too. Speaking of downtime, off we go to bedland. Here’s hoping to survive class.

The Stranger Stuff - 7 February 2007

fMRI being used as the next lie detector? Well, anything to get the truth, some will say. But I wonder how many people would willingly be subjected to an MRI to see if they were lying. I’d say that MRI technology needs to be a bit more comfortable and less claustrophobic (unless it already is) before it can be successfully used as a lie detector.

Technology continues to make games like chess and draughts difficult for humans to win. A lot of it is because these games have a finite amount of moves. So computers can look forward even more than humans can, and they don’t forget. Games with extraordinarily large move possibilities, like Go, have frustrated brute-force attempts. That doesn’t stop enterprising programmers, though. Programs that guess and make probability decisions based on playing large amounts of random games are making progress on Go. Perhaps the first human-like AI will derive its ancestry from Go players, rather than chess players.

Being a liberal is tough these days. As the blogger digby notes, members of the the conservative movement claims that terrorism happens because the liberals are in league with the terrorists, and others claim terrorism happens because the terrorists hate liberals and what they espouse. Sometimes one, sometimes the other, more often than not both tend to be used. There’s no room to have a liberal position, it would seem, without being accused of being the cause of terrorism. Someone will probably find a way of linking a letter bomb explosion in London with liberals.

Actually, perhaps an example will do some work here. CNN recently put forth on one of their panel programmes, Paula Zhan Now, a segment about atheism and discrimination against atheists. There were no atheists on the panel, and the panelists were unkind to atheists. Nakedjourneyman on a MySpace blog provides analysis and highlights of the panelists attitude. (The comments fly fast and furious, much like discussion of the issue) Mike Dunford, on ScienceBlogs, has called for a boycott of CNN's advertisers until CNN apologizes and runs a broadcast that actually includes atheists. One of the panelists, Debbie Schlussel, after receiving correspondence from those incensed, disagreeing, and of a different opinion than her comments posted a response where she claims that atheists are “future Muslim extremists”, with the further claim that atheists followed a sheeplike belief in a “higher power”, apparently attributed to a singular unnamed atheist blog, in giving their opinions on the CNN program. This is definitely the first type of example - atheists are in league with the terrorists and actively helping them. For the second kind of argument, i can point at Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, predicting doom and destruction and more terror from fanatics for the United States because the country permits things like atheism, homosexuality, and abortions. So the obvious solution, apparently, is just to get rid of all the non-Christians, so there aren’t any sympathizers and there isn’t any of that icky non-Christian thought or behavior for God to be displeased at. Then we’re safe and secure, wrapped in the cocoon of God’s all-knowing love. Right up and through the point where his chosen Decider on Earth does his very best to try and wage a crusade against all things non-Christian.

If liberals are so evil, then naturally they will have evil animal minions. Make sure you know what you’re going up against, and what you can recruit to help you out. Or, if you’re going techno-power, you can just recruit a botnet to perform a DDoS on the root DNS servers. Depending on how many of them there are, you might end up slowing something down. Maybe even taking it down. If you do, though, realize that all the WoW players, porn surfers, bloggers, and the collective membership of MySpace will hunt you down and reduce you to your component quarks. It might be better to begin a cascade of debris in orbit that will damage or destroy key communication satellites instead. There will still be several angry mobs, including sport watchers, but they might not find you as quickly.

Going from evil tech to good tech, for those on Windows who yearn for some of the Macintosh’s abilities, perhaps RocketDock will help things. I haven’t tested it myself, so if you’ve used it, let us know what you think of it. Plus, I find it interesting - in the beginning, there was a lot being made to make other OS look, feel, and act somewhat like Windows. Admittedly, I use some of those things myself for Linux, because I’m used to the way Windows handles things. Now, it seems that a lot of things are aiming to emulate Mac OS X for other operating system. (also happening here on Linux, from what is rumored. There’s already themes out, I’m sure, that do look and feel.) Functionality is the big thing, since it seems pretty easy these days to skin one way or another. I wonder whether there’s someone plotting and aiming to try and combine the best bits of operating systems into an uberpowerful OS.

Ozzy Osbourne’s going back on tour. That’s not the big news, though. Ozzfest tickets will be free. That’s big news. I suspect there will have to be a cap on attendance, but now I wonder just how people are going to get tickets. A giant lottery for each tour city?

New York’s considering forcing people to pay more attention to their surroundings by making it a fine to cross the street while distracted by electronics, after three people since September were killed when they stepped out in front of vehicles. Pay attention, even when you’re bumping along to the latest from P. Diddy.

In perhaps one of the best examples of “A fool and his money are soon parted”, a gent gave $32,000 U.S. to a psychic to bless, and came back the next day to find the money and the psychic gone. This is no shock or surprise to most of us. What’s even better is that the psychic claimed that she could change people’s luck. She came through with it, but what is a person who has $32,000 to burn on this doing searching for more luck?

If that first example wasn’t good enough, read the tale of woe of a speculator who bought PS3s expecting huge jumps in price as demand spiked on supply. Of course, we know how that turned out. The PS3 tanked because of the system price, while Wiis continue to fly off the shelf. Even the speculator bought the Wii to play. Which brings us to a corollary - don’t buy gaming systems you don’t intend to play.

Health is always changing as science continues to try and figure out what keeps us healthy. I could have sworn that this had been widely disseminated before, but boosting your good (HDL) cholesterol along with cutting out bad (LDL) cholesterol is good for you. Doing both is apparently best for plaque removal in the blood system. All of this seems familiar, but scientific studies generally help advance the position more. In other health, now that binge eating is being placed up with the eating disorders that we’re more familiar with, advice begins to appear. Here's an example, from ABC News, advising those who may binge on how they can try to bring it under control. I have no idea how much advice we’re going to see is going to be scientifically backed, folklore, and faith-based stuff. I just think we’re going to see more of it.

Something somewhat more depressing for the menfolk, when given a choice between new clothes and sex, a lot of women will take the clothes. Women surveyed would give up sex for longer than a year to get a good set of clothes for them, and continued to have more confidence in their clothes for things like spotting winners at first glance and feeling sexy when in the company of either. That can’t be encouraging to many men, and less so to those with lower self-confidence (“She chose the jeans over me!”).

I want to keep an eye on Ted Haggard for a little while from here. After the scandal surfaced about his involvement with male prostitutes, his dismissal from prominent positions, he checked into therapy. Now, he claims he's totally heterosexual, and that all of his homosexual behavior was just "acting out". The advisory board suggested that he move away from the town and go into secular work, now that he’s cured. Doesn’t sound very forgiving to me to send him out and tell him to get into secular work. It’s not a cover-up, at least. But I still want to keep an eye on this particular one for a bit, just to see if there’s a relapse somewhere.

Anyway, going to bed so that lab tomorrow means I get full bang for my buck. And then I hopefully come back and finish this particular Rails assignment (while squirreling a copy away for use when the code will come back for my project).