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I often notice small objects in my path. I’ve found innumerable lighters, pens, toys, coins, a few bills, and tools that way. This little creation was lying in the gym parking lot today:
The picture above shows the side that was facing the pavement. I put it first because it reminds me of a cartoon-y looking hadrosaur.
The picture below is how it was laying on the pavement when I found it.
Of course I left it in the parking lot where I found it. After all, I wouldn’t want to be arrested for carrying an illegal hadrosaur.
I’m sure it’s a roachclip that fell out of someone’s pocket, regardless of what it’s TRUE original use was.
My sister, who’s a more hands-on sorta mechanogeek than I, says it looks like it might have been a ground wire for something like a voltmeter or other electrical doodad.
All I know is it makes me want to smoke a fat doobie right NOW!
Iraq Veterans Against The War visited our campus today with a display of boots and shoes. Lined up in neat rows like tombstones, decorated with a name and in some cases a photo or a medal, each pair of boots belonged to an Illinois soldier who didn’t make it home. There were also circles of shoes, from Iraqi civilians of all ages. Veterans were on hand to reflect on the war.
What could I say that is not said by a little pair of fuzzy booties that belonged to a child? Or by a pair of boots that belonged to a soldier, decorated with his high school graduation picture? It is bad enough when there is an arguable purpose to it all, but this war is for nothing. It is a personal vendetta of our codpiece-in-chief.
Mark Twain said; “History does not repeat itself. But it rhymes.”
I’ll update this post with pictures tomorrow. F-Spot is proving rather unintuitive and Gimp is overkill so I’ll do it on a Windoze machine using XnView. Pictures below the fold...
I always appreciate seeing people move under their own power, however they do it. One student at the College Of Business even carries a skateboard around. Wouldn’t it be fun to see corporate executives riding to work on skateboards, rollerblades, bicycles? We have muscles, folks; let’s use ‘em!
I bought a new laptop, which arrived last Wednesday. It’s a Dell Vostro 1400; the specs are: Intel Core II duo 1.4ghz, 2gb ram, 120gb hd, and a 9-cell long-life battery. This machine was quite a deal, or so I thought. The next day, Dell sent me an email saying something like “You’ve expressed interest in our Vostro line of computers. We’re running a sale for [$100 less than I paid for the same computer].” Grrr… From what I read online, Dell wouldn’t have been receptive to giving me a rebate, so I decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
Oh well. The thing has a nice screen, very long battery life, and seems to work just fine. I installed WinEDT to edit LaTeX files (a mathematical typesetting markup language), and it had a number of neat features lacking in TeXShop (the Mac equivalent). It sucked in a variety of other ways, notably that the computer slowed down if I didn’t reboot periodically. This sort of poor performance is new to me--I’ve been exclusively using OS X since July of 2002. I wanted to install Linux, though Webs05 advised that I wait until the new version of Ubuntu comes out. Never one to follow advice, I decided to try the release candidate for Hardy Heron.
The install went fine, but WiFi didn’t work. Several hours later, I decided that since all the advice I saw online related to Gutsy Gibbon, I should try installing that. After much more Google searching, I discovered the solution, something which I should have found much sooner. (I didn’t think to check in Windows what chipset is actually in my computer; the Dell documentation was just plain wrong on that point.) Admittedly, I was stupid in various ways, but I doubt that the “average user” would have been able to fix this. On the other hand, the average user probably couldn’t fix a similar problem under Windows, even if the solution would have been easier to find. There was also a problem with the sound, whose solution I found quickly, but it involved editing a config file by hand.
First impressions of Ubuntu: much faster than Windows XP on identical hardware. Install (modulo the driver problem) was much faster and simpler than installing Windows (at least as I remember it). Installing programs is actually quite a bit easier than installing them on either a Mac or Windows. Ubuntu has a neat utility to automatically find supported programs, and download/install them at the click of a button.
I installed TeX/LaTeX, and two integrated LaTeX editors: Kile and TeXMaker. Both were substantially better than anything I’d seen on either Windows or Mac, Kile being the better of the two. It includes a number of features which made me slap my forehead and go “Why doesn’t everyone else do that?”, including templates for common document types, and pulldown menus to find uncommonly-used symbols. Given that LaTeX is my most commonly used non-web application, I think Linux and I will get along just fine.
The video player that comes with Ubuntu is very good, and it actually successfully found codecs online automagically for the video file I wanted to play. Realplayer and Quicktime almost never succeed at that (I still haven’t gotten the AC3 codec working on my Mac).
I had previously used RedHat Linux in the late nineties, and things have gotten a lot better since then. I only had to edit one config file, it found networks automatically, drivers actually existed for all the hardware I wanted to use, I didn’t have to recompile the kernel, there was no obnoxious “screen calibration” thing, etc. After it was installed, I think it’s probably about as easy to use at Windows XP.
The only cons I’ve seen so far are the difficulties in setting up drivers, and that the computer takes a long time to hibernate. Also, that if anyone finds out that I use Linux, then I’ll be branded as some sort of uberl33t jerk that everyone loves to hate.
Civic Boosterism (CB) is a pernicious disease that afflicts city councils and mayors in mid-sized cities. Call it “Chicago Envy” if you like. In its early stages it’s fairly harmless or even beneficial; hanging potted plants from signposts downtown, commissioning artists to do murals on the side of buildings, and promoting rehabilitation of 1800’s buildings.
Late-stage CB is another matter. The victims begin to suffer delusions of grandeur and they hear voices… of highly-paid consultants. “Growth!” whispers the consultant. “If you’re not growing, you’re dying!” (Precisely the philosophy of a cancer cell, as Edward Abbey famously observed.)
“Oh no”, thinks the council person or mayor. “I don’t want to die! But the consultant says; “For just a medium-sized wad of taxpayer’s money, I can save you. I can tell you how to grow...”
Paul at Cafe Philos put the atheist “A” letter on his sidebar in solidarity with nontheists. Not because he’s a nontheist particularly; the question of god’s ontological existence is not of interest to him one way or the other. But he wanted to make a statement, particularly in support of one Nicole Smalkowski, a teen girl in Oklahoma facing prejudice and bullying.
Which inspires me to go find the atheist “A” and put it on my sidebar as well - it’s now next to my “Religion & humanism” links. Because my other inspiration is Pope “Ratzinger” Benedict XVI visiting our country, offering some inspiring thoughts about the child-molesting priests. He assures us that…
“we will absolutely exclude paedophiles from the sacred ministry”
Oh, yeah… heh… What were we thinking? Those kid-raping, trust-betraying phonies are so out of our frock club!
He laid part of the blame for the crisis, of which he feels “deeply ashamed”, on a breakdown in US values.
Um, exqueeze me? It’s a breakdown in OUR values?!!!
I will pause at this moment to allow the Catholics in the audience to put on hearing protection. On second thought, don’t. It’s probably considered disrespectful to address the pope this way, but public piety will only buy you just so much immunity from criticism. I’ll phrase it as a blockquote to set it off from the rest of the post:
Pope Ratz, you stinking sack of corruption! How DARE you come to OUR country and tell us that our values are breaking down? Kiddie porn is illegal in this country. We prosecute child molesters in this country, and send them to prison! And once they’re in prison, even our criminals hate them!
But not you, oh no, before you were Pope, you wrote a memo calling on bishops to hide evidence, to transfer offenders, and to protect the good name of the church. YOU let the infection grow, and deepen. YOU moved the enablers beyond the reach of law enforcement.
You, your “holiness”, OBSTRUCTED JUSTICE! Don’t come to our country dressed in your finery and lecture us about morals. You are precisely this: a “whitewashed sepulchre, full of dead men’s bones.”
A friend emailed MrsDoF from Florida (land of mammoth hurricanes) to see if we were OK. Central Illinois had an Earthquake a few hours ago - a 5.4. That’s enough to rattle windows, wake a few people up but most buildings are up to the challenge. The quake was felt as far away as Wisconsin and Ohio. But I must have been snoozing because I didn’t know about it. Lucas is down in Urbana, a little closer to the epicenter; maybe he’ll give us a report.
Our region has had one real smack-down of a quake, though, in 1812. (Actually two big quakes followed by one staggeringly enormous one) Estimated at an 8.0 on the Richter scale, it cracked sidewalks in Washington, DC and rang church bells in Boston. Around here it changed the course of the Mississippi and even toppled resilient buildings like log cabins.
I can’t remember exactly how the Richter scale works and right now instead of geeking out over it I have to rush off to work. But the New Madrid quake of 1812 was several thousand times as powerful as today’s quake. If the same quake happened today…
Anyone notice the quake? Or been through another quake? Tell us about it!
Notes & Updates:
Maria at Green Gabro geeks out on mid-continental quakes. Remember the great African rift zone? Apparently six hundred million years ago, we almost wound up with one of those.
Ben Stein’s docuflunkary Expelled starts Saturday. Reviews I’ve seen so far focus on its clumsy scripting and propagandistic imagery, its intellectual dishonesty, and its outright total misunderstanding of what evolutionary theory is or is not. The implication is that it will be naturally de-selected by the marketplace.
It would be nice if the movie fell to quick oblivion, but that isn’t going to happen. It really doesn’t matter if it’s bad or good. There’s serious money behind it, and a very popular religious meme. Millions of people have a religious/political reason to see the movie, whatever its merits. And it will live on in DVD performances in church basements everywhere.
The movie pits bad-boy rebel Ben Stein against “Big Science” to ask the question “But how did life begin in the first place?” But Stein never catches on that abiogenesis is a separate question from evolutionary theory. Instead the movie keeps trying to clumsily pack “Darwinism” and Nazis into the same box.
At least the TV ad shows Richard Dawkins saying; “God is about as unlikely as faries, angels, hobgoblins etcetera.”
Ralph Nader visited our campus on 14 April, and I’d never heard him speak. Here are my notes from his speech. They’re in fragmentary, sound-bite form because I take notes on index cards. This is the easiest way for me to share those notes with my friends.
CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Well, OK, Turing test may be a bit strong for what is essentially really hard OCR, but passing a good CAPTCHA shows at least some proficiency with pattern recognition. Now that the GMAIL and HotMail CAPTCHA’s have beencracked*, CAPTCHA’s will presumably become harder still. Eventually, you might get a brief reading comprehension test, or more probably be told to identify a picture. What happens when spammers crack these? Eventually, computers may become distinguishable from humans in automated tests. Of course that’s a long way from passing a true Turing test, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some advances in AI are made by malware developers.
* Of course, the spammers haven’t really “cracked” these in the sense of being able to do them well every time. They only need to succeed a significant minority of the time for their goals.
“Half-Hearted Fanatic” offers Monique Davis: God’s Gift To Atheism. Given her vitriolic rant, how is that possible? The answer is a dramatic story involving black neighborhoods and skateboards…
Tom Lehrer was a musical satirist (and Harvard Mathematician) who considerably corrupted brightened up my younger years. Here’s an example from when US foreign policy was very different from the way it is now…
Some other titles include Smut, The Old Dope Peddler, I Got It From Agnes, and The Masochism Tango. In the words of a 1959 New York Times review, “Mr. Lehrer’s muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.” There’s a bunch more of these videos on YouTube. And you can get CD’s on Amazon. (Hat tip to En Tequila Es Veridad, who posted Lehrer’s educational song, Poisoning Pigeons In The Park).
So the used [duplexer base for my ancient Laserjet 4+ printer] arrived in what I think might be the biggest box I’ve ever received. It barely fit through the door. In order to find a place to put it, I had to rearrange my network hardware, and move my DVD player around. Hooked everything back up, and it all worked perfectly. Check. Then I put the printer on the bottom shelf of the TV table, and configured it to work on the network. The hardest part of this process was remembering the admin password on the router. After I got that working, I followed the instructions in the service manual: took the back door off the printer, set the printer on top of the duplexer, and everything just snapped into place. Then I tried duplex printing, and *everything worked perfectly the first time.* Past this point, the only difficulty was getting Milly’s laptop to work with it. The internet eventually told me how to configure a printer which just has an IP address instead of being a shared printer (something which is so counterintuitive, I can’t imagine how anyone figured it out in the first place). The only remaining issue is to figure out how to make Milly’s computer *not* duplex when she wants it to.
Ok, here’s the thing: I ripped up all the infrastructure in my apartment, moved it around, installed a 15-year old piece of equipment bought on eBay, and it all worked fine. On the first try. With no complications. I’m scared. There must be some karmic balance in my near future, presumably involving something bursting into flames…
Less than an hour later, my internet connection wasn’t working. It was a bizarre intermittent problem, where suddenly the connection would stop working for one computer but not the other one. To make matters weirder, the computer whose internet connection didn’t work could still access the router just fine. Resetting the router seemed to fix it, but only for a few hours, and whenever I tried to configure the security settings, it would stop working altogether. I think I’ve finally solved the problem, which was caused (as are so many obnoxious intermittent problems) by the router overheating. You see, I put the RCA-to-coax converter box on top of the router, which caused it to become extremely hot. The router has been working properly for about 7 hours now, so hopefully my karmic balance has been restored.
If you have an old Laserjet, I highly recommend getting a duplexer base for it (they may only be available for some models). They’re fairly cheap on eBay, and double-sided printing is pretty awesome.
When “egghead” Adlai Stevenson was running for president, one of his supporters gushed; “Sir, every thinking person in America will be voting for you!” Stevenson replied; “Thank you, maam, but it won’t be enough. We need a majority.”
There’s an urban legend that Dwight Eisenhower was shocked to learn that fully half of US school children are of below-average intelligence. He wanted immediate action to correct the situation.
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” he said.
“And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” he added.
FOX News about had a giant spontaneous newsgasm over that one. They spent the whole afternoon (and will probably spend the next several days) calling Obama an elitist. John ‘flip-flopper’ McCain said that Obama was “out of touch with average Americans.” (Excuse me, isn’t ‘average’ pretty much an analogue of ‘typical’ as in “typical American?” Just asking.)
And surely the funniest comment of the day was made by Hillary Clinton, who said voters did not “need a president who looks down on them.” Sorry, I should have warned you to turn down the gain on your irony meter there.
Remember when Reagan described the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire” and everybody freaked out, but Andy Rooney (no fan of Reagan’s) said; “Would anybody care to argue that the Soviet Union is NOT an evil empire?”
Well, would anybody care to argue that a lot of rural American voters are NOT bitter about the sustained loss of their good jobs? Or that some of them aren’t clinging to their guns as if Armageddon were right around the corner? Or that many voters aren’t trying to elect a right-wing mega-church version of Jesus Christ into the White House? Anybody at all? Bueller?
OK, so Obama was telling the truth. No wonder FOX news is so upset.
I’ve heard Obama tell automakers to quit whining and get competitive. He’s told school kids that it’s nice they graduated 8th grade and all, but tomorrow’s another school day and they better study even harder. I’ve heard him keep a level head debating an absolute whackjob, Alan Keyes. He told white Americans not to expect patriotic hymns from older blacks, but then he turned around and told the black community not to expect white Americans to be happy about affirmative action. That’s a person with some serious knuckles.
Lots of people seem to vote on “Hey! He didn’t suck up to me enough!” or “He didn’t promise me enough!” or “He said something that could be interpreted as not complimentary to my demographic group!” Well tough. You know the biggest demographic group that needs to get a frakking clue? Americans. And the clue we need to get is, that we’re not the world’s savior; we’ve got a log in our own eye. We’ve lost the moral high ground, the esteem of many of our allies, the value of the dollar, and any chance of a head start on climate change. It’s time to stop whining and start fixing.
We have been getting some serious tonnage of water in our county. Luckily, McLean county drains well, but that’s not so lucky for our neighbors downstream. The ground is saturated, lakes are full (and I wish we could send that water to Alabama! They really need it.)
Robert E. Criss, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, says MidWesterners have not learned “the lesson of geologic reality”. He says levees that support an unrealistic expectation of security when building on flood plains. I bet he doesn’t get invited to many urban developer Christmas parties but someday people will ask; “Why didn’t we listen to him?!”
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Ralph Nader visited our campus on 14 April, and I’d never heard him speak. Here are my notes from his speech. They’re in fragmentary, sound-bite form because I take notes on index cards. This is the easiest way for me to share those notes with my friends. 
