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Archive for April, 2007

Maybe there isn’t one simple thing to blame, after all.

April 21, 2007 7 comments

Cho’s rampage has been blamed on 47 things so far, and there’s one I hadn’t thought of.  John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts has the first interesting and possibly useful analysis I’ve seen: Cho, autism, bullying, and honor, about the combination of neurological, social, and cultural forces that may have led to his murderous flame-out.

Makes sense that something this rare could be a convergence of factors, a perfect storm. 

(List of 47 things from ***Dave)

Categories: News, observations

Microsoft is dead

April 18, 2007 19 comments

Paul Graham, the venture-capitalist who wrote Hackers & Painters, founded ViaWeb, and took a major part in the rise of Yahoo!, is one of my favorite essayists.  And he proposes that Microsoft is dead.  They’d better read this essay carefully unless they want to wind up as a negative example in business classes.

Categories: Geeky, Software

Sleazy sales words

April 17, 2007 2 comments

Just before dropping the flyer from a local HVAC company into the trash, I spotted their…

IRONCLAD GUARANTEE:  We are confident that if your system is over 10 years old, you may significantly reduce your heating and cooling energy consumption – possibly as much as 25%**

There is no way you can lose.  If these premium air conditioners and matching furnaces were not among the best on the market, I could’t afford to make such a promise.

**Individual results may vary.

What promise? I lost track after the third or fourth conditional qualifier there.  Well, with an ironclad guarantee like that, how could I lose?  :lol:

Categories: Advertising, business

Rebellion against tragedy

April 16, 2007 14 comments

An awful thing has happened, as someone went on a rampage at West Virginia University, killing at least 31 people and injuring 10 more.  Someone with a mental problem has opened up a social and psychic singularity, a black hole of grief and anguish that will consume several thousand people for years to come.  Many will never emerge from its dark influence.

There’s nothing novel about it; we’ve all been here before and it comes in all sizes.  There’s Oklahoma City, 9/11, the DC sniper, the Amish school killings, the guy who put acid on playground equipment yesterday (I wonder if he was counting on continuing news coverage?)  And now this.  And, we shouldn’t forget the world is full of children who grow up in places where tragedies on this scale are pretty much boilerplate in their daily news.

Whenever there is a mass tragedy, there is a wave of sympathy followed by a much larger wave of speculation as to how such a thing can be prevented.  Legislators will be grandstanding in front of cameras and microphones, pretending that they know the cause and the solution. TV and radio pundits will go on long after we will all wish they’d just shut up.  It will be blamed on lack of gun control, too much gun control, on godlessness, or on religion gone haywire.  The finger will point at television, video games, rock music, “goth”, food additives, schools, parents, drugs, alcohol.  The solution will be the opposite of all those things, no matter how incompatible they are, plus more guards, more surveillance cameras, tougher laws, and above all, prayer.  Lots and lots of prayer, especially in the schools.

So let me just say, you can’t draw very reliable conclusions from statistical outliers.  The guy who did this isn’t a needle in a haystack, but a needle in a Kansan vista.  There isn’t much to be learned from this atrocity as far as public policy goes.  No system can filter out such a rare individual without clogging entirely with the many ordinary people it catches in the same filter.  Extremely rare events are difficult to plan for.  Simple answers won’t do.

I doubt very much that any system will prevent such events.  Even mentally ill people are creative, and they’ll find loopholes.  In the end we will end up living with the risk, and also with the laws reflexively sprung into existence afterward. 

I suggest two things.  First,  just listen and think for a year or two.  Try to let the event gain some context. Whatever we throw together overnight is likely to do as much harm as good.  Second, I suggest kindness.  Just random acts of kindness, small words of encouragement to others at unexpected times for no reason at all.  It won’t prevent events like this from happening.  But it will shine a light against the darkness.  Kindness is our most powerful rebellion against tragedy.

Categories: observations

3 Tom Lehrer songs (video)

April 14, 2007 4 comments

For those of us who remember Tom Lehrer, a little silly entertainment for a Saturday afternoon.

(My favorite among these three is The Elements sung to a Gilbert & Sullivan tune but The Masochism Tango and We all go together when we go set to Star Wars clips, are also delighful)

Which are your favorite Tom Lehrer songs of all time?  (scroll down from that link for a list)  I might go with Poisoning Pigeons In The Park or Werhner Von Braun but there are so many, so wonderful…

Categories: Humor, observations

The logic of play (ravens)

April 13, 2007 5 comments

In the April ‘07 Scientific American, Bernd Heinrich and Thomas Bugnyar (great name, Thomas) describe how young ravens snatch food from large predators…

“Food bonanzas are not only provided by carnivores, they are often quickly consumed by them.  It pays the attending ravens to get an early start in the feeding cycle, preferably next to the carnivores while they are still eating.  To do that, the birds need to be able to predict the predator’s behavior, such as whether or when the animal might attack, how far it can jump, and how it may be distracted.  Some of that knowledge needs to be in place before the raven is distracted by feeding, because in that context practice could be deadly.

Check: “Watch out for that wolf while you’re stuffing your beak with his kill!”

Indeed, the birds acquire practice more safely early in their lives.  Juvenile birds, when undistracted by feeding, routinely “test” the reactions of large animals such as wolves nd other carnivores by interacting with them, usually by landing nearby and then nipping them from the rear…

OK, that just sounds freaking hilarious.

It is unlikely that such behavior is tactically deliberate.  More likely it is a form of “play”, defined… as a behavior that has no immediately discernable function but that commonly has an ultimate function, one that is not consciously intended but that proves useful anyway.

Remember playing “kick the can”?  “Keep-away”?  and of course “Hide and go seek”?  Neurologically speaking, there’s probably a lot going on there.

Even youngsters recognize that nipping carnivores is dangerous (they display fear when they do it), and thus they must be wired to engage in such activity because the risky play ultimately aids survival – presumably by giving them experience in gauging how much they can get away with around their carnivore companions.  By such provocation, they soon learn which animals to trust and the distances required for safety.  Conversely, their nearly constant presence around the carnivores accustomes the larger animals to the birds, and they gradually learn to ignore them.  But getting along with dangerous carnivores is only a means to the end of getting access to a rich supply of food. 
Scientific American, April 2007 pg. 64-71, “Just how smart are ravens” by Bernd Heinrich and Thomas Bugnyar

Wonder how well video games stack up against kids’ play in the non-cyber world, and if some kids naturally learn better in an artificial environment than others.  (Wish I had a cartoon here of crows playing video games)

 

Categories: Nature, observations

The logic of play (station)

April 12, 2007 5 comments

I’ve never had much use for video games personally but the development of powerful personal computers we now enjoy was driven by various entertainments.  (After all, you can run spreadsheets just fine on a 486) Now the game machines have become so powerful that SONY is thinking about marketing their collective computational might to research institutions: “Sony mulls Playstation 3 supercomputing grid

Neato. You hit pause, your Playstation could help solve protein-folding problems while you eat dinner. I’m still not likely to play video games, though. 

Categories: Geeky

What’s your desk look like

April 11, 2007 4 comments

For some reason Pete wants to know what our desks look like:P  
Here’s mine:

If you want to try this meme, drop a link to your post in the comments!

Categories: Blogging, Geeky

Slightly different Linux plan

April 11, 2007 8 comments

I’ve tried to work with Linux a couple other times, but made a mistake in how I went about it.  Trouble is, I would put it on a separate laptop or in a dual-boot partition on my main laptop, so I still had the Windows option.  Well hell, I’m only human.  It’s just too easy to do the familiar thing and use Windows, which gets the immediate task done but doesn’t expand my skills any.

One reason it’s worth the effort to try is that Linux can be a real problem-solver for certain purposes.  And, we use Linux on at least three of our servers and our network administrator might like to take a trip somewhere or stay home with the flu once in a while.  So it would be nice if I weren’t a complete dolt around penguins.  (I don’t usually say Windows/Mac/Linux is “better” or “best” but they are variously suited to different purposes.)

This time I blew away the Windows partition on my main laptop, installing SUSE 10.x. So it’s sink or swim. There are friendlier “distros” of Linux, such as Ubuntu and – I can’t remember the other do-gooder distro – but I chose SUSE because it’s from Novell, a company that seems really serious about getting work done, and because that’s what we use on our three servers.  This is one of the annoying things about Linux; once you’ve tried one distro, well, you’ve tried one distro.

Early impressions: installation was geek-easy but not user-easy.  Some things aren’t working yet, like the SD chip reader so no pictures on the blog until I get that working.  The wireless set up perfectly on the first try – easy if you have the right chipset, damn near impossible if you don’t.  This laptop has an Intel ProSet wireless chipset.  (You can use an NDIS envelope to run Windows drivers on other chipsets, but this solution displeases me esthetically).  The oversize mouse pointer is beautiful – better than even Windows’ and much better than Mac, which was clunky and pixilated.  The video drivers seem of above-average quality.  I already managed to crash the file manager but it just restarted without a hiccup and the system went on running – very nice.  And it comes with a tremendous array of software, most of which has goofy names.  I spent an hour editing photos with “Gimp” last night and it is very comparable to Photoshop 6, maybe a bit easier to use (and runs considerably faster).  But why the hell did they name it “Gimp?”  And of course it comes with OpenOffice, which I do prefer to Microsoft Office because of its cleaner design. 

UPDATE: I’ve got the suspend-to-memory configured so when I close the lid, it goes to sleep.  Couldn’t get the SD chip reader working – Webs sez it’s a chip issue so I picked up a tiny Lexar USB chip reader for eighteen bucks that works fine.  Slightly less convenient but now I can upload pictures again using “gnomeFTP”.  The center IBM pointer button scrolls after some configuring.  The wireless works great but I have to remind it to connect (which it does easily) when waking up the computer.  So far SUSE is a lot less slick than Windows out-of-the-box, but looks like it can configure up very well.  We’ll see if I go back to Windows after using it for a month.

Categories: Geeky, Software

Bush lost the war

April 10, 2007 14 comments

The real purpose of “the surge”, it occurs to me, may be to facilitate blaming defeat on liberals.  After all, we wouldn’t want people to wake up to the reality that the war was already lost much earlier than that:

if you are a blogger, this is your chance to express the truth that Bush—and no one else—is responsible for loosing the Iraq war. He lost it when he invaded Iraq without a viable exit strategy. He lost it when he invaded Iraq without enough troops to handle the invasion’s aftermath. He lost it when he disbanded the Iraqi military, thus setting tens of thousands of armed men loose without jobs or income, and nothing better to do than form an opposition. He lost it when he failed to rebuild Iraq in a timely fashion. He lost it when he failed to provide the troops to secure Iraq’s borders. He lost it when… You get the picture.
Paul at Cafe Philos: Bush Lost The War

Not sure I agree that it was only Bush, though.  Plenty of room on that leaky rowboat for Rummy, and Rove, and other parties to be named.  But certainly Bush lost the war.  Pass it on.

Categories: defense, Politics