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New assignment set tomorrow, new material, new requirements. Likely work to be done over the break among other things. So the small amount of freedom enjoyed these last few days will disappear, at least for a bit.
Went to the bank to do some business today, but it turns out that the computer systems were nonfunctional, and thus, I could not do what I wanted to. Tomorrow, I guess, I’ll have to wander out and try again. Beyond that, though, it’s been a fairly uneventful day. Well, there was the bit where I was cooking dinner and it turns out that chickpeas really only needed about a minute in the microwave - I gave them at least that minute and then had to clean up all the exploded bits. Beyond that, there was much inabilty to obtain Terra-Level spells in Disgaea, as well. I wonder what I’m missing out on that the last, most powerful stuff, isn’t appearing. Maybe it requires a higher level than what I was thinking of.
Anyway, onward with linkies. A hormone secreted during pregnancy may be useful in combating multiple sclerosis. Prolactin, which appeard in elevated levels during pregnancy, may allow for myelin to regenerate itself fast enough and in sufficient quantities to delay or defeat the effects of MS. I must say, it seems every day there’s a new possibility for curing or slowing this or that affliction. Science does some wonderful things. Although the results are very, very preliminary, New Jersey scientists believe they may have found a way of detecting biological risk factors for autism. An inability to metabolize certain types of fatty acids may be contributing to autism spectrum disorders. If this turns out to be true, treating people with the right kinds of acids, or a way to get the body to metabolize those acids, could result in reduction or possibly elimination of autism-spectrum disorders. Keep your eyes and ears peeled.
New Jersey begins offering civil unions to homosexuals. Which won’t be recognized outside any state that gives civil unions or marriages. And no, nothing set on fire or exploded, and the baby Jesus did not cry. That I heard, anyway.
A story of excellent customer service - Nintendo Wii on the fritz, customer calls in, service center helpful, ready for RMA, finds out customer is local, invites customer down to the center and repairs it in person - thirty minutes later, Wii replaced, all data transferred, warranty clock reset. Nintendo, for this generation of consoles, is wiping the floor with competitors at the moment, in price, games, playability, and customer service. It’s no wonder they’ve sold so many units.
Worried about your math exams? That anxiety is probably impairing your mental math functioning. I wonder if that expands to other exams, too? And if it does, maybe tests should be set up so that they move in graduated difficulty up the scale? Let’s use softball questions to start with, to build confidence and test the basics, then slowly ramping up the difficulty and complexity for the later questions to show that students really do know what they’re doing, rather than being paralyzed by test anxiety.
In New Orleans, even while rebuilding, music is an essential part of the city. Since a lot of schools are yet to be reopened and rebuilt, many of the marching bands have not yet reformed. Since it’s Mardi Gras today, the lack of bands is a problem for the parades, as well as the city. The krewes (is that the official spelling?) and the parades need their noisemakers. It wouldn’t be Mardi Gras without the New Orleans parties and parades. Those who are giving things up for Lent, good fortitude. Here’s a miracle to bless you with - a baby who was born at 21 weeks has survived and will go home, thanks to four months of serious neonatal care. I wonder how much that actually costs, and who’s going to be paying for it. Even so, that this baby survived says that she beat a pretty stacked deck against her.
In international affairs, Tony Blair will be talking to the House of Commons on the forces in Iraq. It’s a possibility that there will be troop withdrawals from Iraq for one of the U.S.‘s staunchest allies in the conflict. Make it whatever you like, whether it’s a sign of progress or a sign that Britain is bringing their troops home from an unwinnable situation. Iran, on the other hand, is holding large-scale war games exercises. Getting ready for a possible United States incursion, I’d say. The U.S. will be holding anti-terrorism exercises on Guam, simulating a maritime terrorist attack. Also possibly getting ready for an incursion into Iran. Russia strongly suggests that the countries the U.S. is looking at to deploy missiles in should reconsider, lest they become targets of Russian missiles.
More anecdotes from the troops - here’s a vignette where one of the natives of Afghanistan is surprised by what America permits, and in turn likely surprises the soldiers by what Afghanistan restricts.
In domestic matters, when it comes to raising political monies, apparently the GOP is none too picky about who it solicits. TPMuckraker spots a head of an organization designated a terrorist group as one of those who donated a sum of money to the National Republican Congressional Committee's Buisness Advisory Council. The BAC itself works in almost the same manner as a good telemarketing scheme, as another of its members indicted for terrorist financing, Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari, found out. So, now that there are people who are accused of terrorist financing, I wonder what the law can do to the NRCC if one of them should be convicted... and what repercussions that might have for parent and associated organizations. Actually, from the comments on the second article, it’s a wonder that someone isn’t investigating them on their practices, since this seems to be a widespread solicitation. But if we follow the flowchart of What Would G.W.Bush Do?, then it’s obvious why nothing’s happening... it’s not on the chart. Before we leave politics, here’s an opinion by Cal Thomas, complete with unflattering picture of the Speaker of the House, Ms. Pelosi, as he accuses members of changing their positions on the war for political gain. As I said yesterday, it is apparently not permitted in politics to change your mind on any issue at all - once opinion is given, it must be adhered to, regardless of what happens afterward. Thomas says that the House nonbinding resolution is like saying you love someone and then a week later saying you don’t, and adds in accounts from soldiers that feel such a nonbinding resolution is hurting troop morale and is nothing short of cowardice. So there you go - a nice package of just what the Republicans said would happen if the resolution passed. Everything according to script. (Not to say that the Dems don’t have their own script and are trying to follow it just as closely. It just seems a bit... convenient for me that words like “cowardice” would be slung about so freely. I don’t know - might be the opinion of the troops. Might not be.)
An ambitious resource - OSx86 intends on providing information on how to run Mac OS X on a non-Apple hardware, Intel x86 architecture. That said, it’s not necessarily going to work on everyone for every purpose. For help and advanced queries, try the forum at InsanelyMac. If I’m reading this rightly, and there is a guide on how to do it, it could be quite possible to have OS X, one or two Microsoft-type OS, and a Linux-type OS running in relative harmony with each other, all on an x86 platform. Which would definitely be the best of all worlds, or great for those who want to be able to test on all platforms themselves. Looks a bit daunting to me, though. I’d probably want to try it on a spare, reasonably compatible machine from scratch. That way, if problems develop, there’s a working machine still there to troubleshoot with. I admit, though, doing something like this would probably just be a way for me to say that I’ve done it. I’d still only use one OS primarily, and boot to the others when I had to work on something specific to them. (Say, Rails applications, because a certain very nice text-editing program is only for OS X.) I do want to try doing this, to be honest, just to see if I can hack it together. Maybe when I’ve got a job and some spare cash I can use to build a Frankenbox, I’ll give this a run.
In other techie stuff, here's some instructions on how to get YouTube material onto DVD. The quality’s not going to be good at all, but if you’re okay with that, then here’s one way of going about it. Going from screen to electronic paper, Polymer Vision has a rollable sheet of e-paper that has 4GB of onboard memory and a ten-day battery life. Now, I wouldn’t mind having a sheet like that around to read documents with - it would allow me to get away from the monitor for my reading. I could even take it places to do stuff while I was away. I like it, I like it, and I hope that it becomes affordable for everyone, gets color, and possibly video and sound possibilities soon, and maybe, just maybe, can take additional memory inserts, so that the books, documents, and possibly video or other content isn’t limited just to the onboard memory? (Not that this will probably ever supplant iPod, video iPod and all the cousins to it for watching material, but you never know.)
Going even higher-tech, the Telegraph says we could have Marvin (H2G2) style robots with emotions within the next ten years. The challenge is already being worked on by some groups, who ant to produce AI capable of acting at a 2 to 5 year-old's level, and in developing new ways of computing to take advantage of learning as well as computing. Of course, when all is said and done, the question still remains of designing and building the right robot for the right job - which could mean that while the robots can think and converse and understand humans, they may never actually look like us, because the tasks for which they were constructed are better served by something other than the human form.
The BBC tells us that a third of people who are size 12 think they're overweight, as do two-thirds of size 14 women. So whatever it is that we’re trying to tell people about healthy bodies, and real women, it’s not working completely. Whether that means we need more of it, or some real role models that show that being bigger is okay and acceptable in high-profile things like movies, or something else, we really need people to be comfortable with their physiques, and to engage in things like weight loss or muscle building for biologically sound reasons, rather than shifting-goalpost reasons like “well, if I lose two more dress sizes, then I’ll be attractive!” (Even though I’m already a size two). Also, are those sizes U.S. sizes or U.K. sizes? I can’t tell. If they’re U.K. sizes, translations, please?
Who is/was it that used to give autographs on the condition that the person receiving hers gave her their autograph in return? Well, a slightly different twist on this is Paul Schmelzer's project to get celebrities to sign his name, not their own. Does the autograph count anything if the name isn’t recognized? Or does it still carry the awesome power knowing that Yoko Ono signed his name. At some point, people might ask, “Well, how do we know it’s her?” (Some documentation can probably be produced on that point. It’s an interesting concept - maybe the signatures by celebrities will make a celebrity out of him. And at that point, he will probably be deluged with requests to sign other people’s names.
Apparently, the new fashion among some teenagers is to beat on the homeless in their area, sometimes resulting the death of their victims. I have no idea what might count as the “incompetence” for which to measure “malice” against in this particular scenario. Boredom? Curiosity? What drives someone to thrash another, generally defenseless, person that badly. Is it some twisted way of proving superiority?
If you feel like everyone around you is getting married, and there’s no time in your calendar for anything else, maybe you can follow the lead of an Argentinian couple and take out an ad in the local paper asking not to be invited to quite so many weddings. Hopefully, the people around them understand why they’re doing it and are okay with it.
This falls down to the bottom, because I can’t find a good place for it any higher up - it’s a letter to the editor of the Gleaner, a newspaper in Henderson, Kentucky, responding to an earlier letter claiming the need for G-d to return to a full place in American lives(which itself appears to have been a reaction to a complaint about a church distributing bears to the needy that had the name of the church on them) and saying Christians are not being persecuted - if anything, they're privileged. Well, having been a dominant religion, through persuasion, force, and hooks in the governmental system, I’d have to agree that Christianity isn’t going anywhere any time soon. And so the question as to who’s actually losing the culture wars continues. One of these days, we’re going to find that someone actually did lose it, and those will be interesting times, indeed.
Went to the bank to do some business today, but it turns out that the computer systems were nonfunctional, and thus, I could not do what I wanted to. Tomorrow, I guess, I’ll have to wander out and try again. Beyond that, though, it’s been a fairly uneventful day. Well, there was the bit where I was cooking dinner and it turns out that chickpeas really only needed about a minute in the microwave - I gave them at least that minute and then had to clean up all the exploded bits. Beyond that, there was much inabilty to obtain Terra-Level spells in Disgaea, as well. I wonder what I’m missing out on that the last, most powerful stuff, isn’t appearing. Maybe it requires a higher level than what I was thinking of.
Anyway, onward with linkies. A hormone secreted during pregnancy may be useful in combating multiple sclerosis. Prolactin, which appeard in elevated levels during pregnancy, may allow for myelin to regenerate itself fast enough and in sufficient quantities to delay or defeat the effects of MS. I must say, it seems every day there’s a new possibility for curing or slowing this or that affliction. Science does some wonderful things. Although the results are very, very preliminary, New Jersey scientists believe they may have found a way of detecting biological risk factors for autism. An inability to metabolize certain types of fatty acids may be contributing to autism spectrum disorders. If this turns out to be true, treating people with the right kinds of acids, or a way to get the body to metabolize those acids, could result in reduction or possibly elimination of autism-spectrum disorders. Keep your eyes and ears peeled.
New Jersey begins offering civil unions to homosexuals. Which won’t be recognized outside any state that gives civil unions or marriages. And no, nothing set on fire or exploded, and the baby Jesus did not cry. That I heard, anyway.
A story of excellent customer service - Nintendo Wii on the fritz, customer calls in, service center helpful, ready for RMA, finds out customer is local, invites customer down to the center and repairs it in person - thirty minutes later, Wii replaced, all data transferred, warranty clock reset. Nintendo, for this generation of consoles, is wiping the floor with competitors at the moment, in price, games, playability, and customer service. It’s no wonder they’ve sold so many units.
Worried about your math exams? That anxiety is probably impairing your mental math functioning. I wonder if that expands to other exams, too? And if it does, maybe tests should be set up so that they move in graduated difficulty up the scale? Let’s use softball questions to start with, to build confidence and test the basics, then slowly ramping up the difficulty and complexity for the later questions to show that students really do know what they’re doing, rather than being paralyzed by test anxiety.
In New Orleans, even while rebuilding, music is an essential part of the city. Since a lot of schools are yet to be reopened and rebuilt, many of the marching bands have not yet reformed. Since it’s Mardi Gras today, the lack of bands is a problem for the parades, as well as the city. The krewes (is that the official spelling?) and the parades need their noisemakers. It wouldn’t be Mardi Gras without the New Orleans parties and parades. Those who are giving things up for Lent, good fortitude. Here’s a miracle to bless you with - a baby who was born at 21 weeks has survived and will go home, thanks to four months of serious neonatal care. I wonder how much that actually costs, and who’s going to be paying for it. Even so, that this baby survived says that she beat a pretty stacked deck against her.
In international affairs, Tony Blair will be talking to the House of Commons on the forces in Iraq. It’s a possibility that there will be troop withdrawals from Iraq for one of the U.S.‘s staunchest allies in the conflict. Make it whatever you like, whether it’s a sign of progress or a sign that Britain is bringing their troops home from an unwinnable situation. Iran, on the other hand, is holding large-scale war games exercises. Getting ready for a possible United States incursion, I’d say. The U.S. will be holding anti-terrorism exercises on Guam, simulating a maritime terrorist attack. Also possibly getting ready for an incursion into Iran. Russia strongly suggests that the countries the U.S. is looking at to deploy missiles in should reconsider, lest they become targets of Russian missiles.
More anecdotes from the troops - here’s a vignette where one of the natives of Afghanistan is surprised by what America permits, and in turn likely surprises the soldiers by what Afghanistan restricts.
In domestic matters, when it comes to raising political monies, apparently the GOP is none too picky about who it solicits. TPMuckraker spots a head of an organization designated a terrorist group as one of those who donated a sum of money to the National Republican Congressional Committee's Buisness Advisory Council. The BAC itself works in almost the same manner as a good telemarketing scheme, as another of its members indicted for terrorist financing, Abdul Tawala Ibn Ali Alishtari, found out. So, now that there are people who are accused of terrorist financing, I wonder what the law can do to the NRCC if one of them should be convicted... and what repercussions that might have for parent and associated organizations. Actually, from the comments on the second article, it’s a wonder that someone isn’t investigating them on their practices, since this seems to be a widespread solicitation. But if we follow the flowchart of What Would G.W.Bush Do?, then it’s obvious why nothing’s happening... it’s not on the chart. Before we leave politics, here’s an opinion by Cal Thomas, complete with unflattering picture of the Speaker of the House, Ms. Pelosi, as he accuses members of changing their positions on the war for political gain. As I said yesterday, it is apparently not permitted in politics to change your mind on any issue at all - once opinion is given, it must be adhered to, regardless of what happens afterward. Thomas says that the House nonbinding resolution is like saying you love someone and then a week later saying you don’t, and adds in accounts from soldiers that feel such a nonbinding resolution is hurting troop morale and is nothing short of cowardice. So there you go - a nice package of just what the Republicans said would happen if the resolution passed. Everything according to script. (Not to say that the Dems don’t have their own script and are trying to follow it just as closely. It just seems a bit... convenient for me that words like “cowardice” would be slung about so freely. I don’t know - might be the opinion of the troops. Might not be.)
An ambitious resource - OSx86 intends on providing information on how to run Mac OS X on a non-Apple hardware, Intel x86 architecture. That said, it’s not necessarily going to work on everyone for every purpose. For help and advanced queries, try the forum at InsanelyMac. If I’m reading this rightly, and there is a guide on how to do it, it could be quite possible to have OS X, one or two Microsoft-type OS, and a Linux-type OS running in relative harmony with each other, all on an x86 platform. Which would definitely be the best of all worlds, or great for those who want to be able to test on all platforms themselves. Looks a bit daunting to me, though. I’d probably want to try it on a spare, reasonably compatible machine from scratch. That way, if problems develop, there’s a working machine still there to troubleshoot with. I admit, though, doing something like this would probably just be a way for me to say that I’ve done it. I’d still only use one OS primarily, and boot to the others when I had to work on something specific to them. (Say, Rails applications, because a certain very nice text-editing program is only for OS X.) I do want to try doing this, to be honest, just to see if I can hack it together. Maybe when I’ve got a job and some spare cash I can use to build a Frankenbox, I’ll give this a run.
In other techie stuff, here's some instructions on how to get YouTube material onto DVD. The quality’s not going to be good at all, but if you’re okay with that, then here’s one way of going about it. Going from screen to electronic paper, Polymer Vision has a rollable sheet of e-paper that has 4GB of onboard memory and a ten-day battery life. Now, I wouldn’t mind having a sheet like that around to read documents with - it would allow me to get away from the monitor for my reading. I could even take it places to do stuff while I was away. I like it, I like it, and I hope that it becomes affordable for everyone, gets color, and possibly video and sound possibilities soon, and maybe, just maybe, can take additional memory inserts, so that the books, documents, and possibly video or other content isn’t limited just to the onboard memory? (Not that this will probably ever supplant iPod, video iPod and all the cousins to it for watching material, but you never know.)
Going even higher-tech, the Telegraph says we could have Marvin (H2G2) style robots with emotions within the next ten years. The challenge is already being worked on by some groups, who ant to produce AI capable of acting at a 2 to 5 year-old's level, and in developing new ways of computing to take advantage of learning as well as computing. Of course, when all is said and done, the question still remains of designing and building the right robot for the right job - which could mean that while the robots can think and converse and understand humans, they may never actually look like us, because the tasks for which they were constructed are better served by something other than the human form.
The BBC tells us that a third of people who are size 12 think they're overweight, as do two-thirds of size 14 women. So whatever it is that we’re trying to tell people about healthy bodies, and real women, it’s not working completely. Whether that means we need more of it, or some real role models that show that being bigger is okay and acceptable in high-profile things like movies, or something else, we really need people to be comfortable with their physiques, and to engage in things like weight loss or muscle building for biologically sound reasons, rather than shifting-goalpost reasons like “well, if I lose two more dress sizes, then I’ll be attractive!” (Even though I’m already a size two). Also, are those sizes U.S. sizes or U.K. sizes? I can’t tell. If they’re U.K. sizes, translations, please?
Who is/was it that used to give autographs on the condition that the person receiving hers gave her their autograph in return? Well, a slightly different twist on this is Paul Schmelzer's project to get celebrities to sign his name, not their own. Does the autograph count anything if the name isn’t recognized? Or does it still carry the awesome power knowing that Yoko Ono signed his name. At some point, people might ask, “Well, how do we know it’s her?” (Some documentation can probably be produced on that point. It’s an interesting concept - maybe the signatures by celebrities will make a celebrity out of him. And at that point, he will probably be deluged with requests to sign other people’s names.
Apparently, the new fashion among some teenagers is to beat on the homeless in their area, sometimes resulting the death of their victims. I have no idea what might count as the “incompetence” for which to measure “malice” against in this particular scenario. Boredom? Curiosity? What drives someone to thrash another, generally defenseless, person that badly. Is it some twisted way of proving superiority?
If you feel like everyone around you is getting married, and there’s no time in your calendar for anything else, maybe you can follow the lead of an Argentinian couple and take out an ad in the local paper asking not to be invited to quite so many weddings. Hopefully, the people around them understand why they’re doing it and are okay with it.
This falls down to the bottom, because I can’t find a good place for it any higher up - it’s a letter to the editor of the Gleaner, a newspaper in Henderson, Kentucky, responding to an earlier letter claiming the need for G-d to return to a full place in American lives(which itself appears to have been a reaction to a complaint about a church distributing bears to the needy that had the name of the church on them) and saying Christians are not being persecuted - if anything, they're privileged. Well, having been a dominant religion, through persuasion, force, and hooks in the governmental system, I’d have to agree that Christianity isn’t going anywhere any time soon. And so the question as to who’s actually losing the culture wars continues. One of these days, we’re going to find that someone actually did lose it, and those will be interesting times, indeed.
