Blogging the Imagination

We Talk the Talk, But We Can't Walk

2012-01-27T09:36:00.002-05:00

No surprise here: Press Freedom Index 2011/2012

Reporters Without Borders ranks the US, which loves to talk about its freedom, as 47th in the world. Woohoo! We're 47! Wait a second, though. Last year, we were 20. What happened?

Something to do with the number of journalists arrested while covering Occupy Wall Street protests. Shame on them. Shame on me, for being so unpatriotic about this.

Thought for the day

2012-01-12T11:27:00.000-05:00

Courtesty of Boing-Boing:

“Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.”

― Robert Anton Wilson

Morning Morgantown

2012-01-10T08:40:00.003-05:00

For the past few mornings, the rising sun has created an unusual effect by selectively lighting a single building on the downtown WVU campus. Too bad that it chose Knapp Hall out of all the buildings.

The doors of perception have been bolted shut

2012-01-06T09:38:00.002-05:00

A news release on EurekaAlert.org, The biology of politics: Liberals roll with the good, conservatives confront the bad, finds some interesting differences between the perceptions of liberals and conservatives. It also leaves me puzzled.

Take this statement:

In a series of experiments, researchers closely monitored physiological reactions and eye movements of study participants when shown combinations of both pleasant and unpleasant images. Conservatives reacted more strongly to, fixated more quickly on, and looked longer at the unpleasant images; liberals had stronger reactions to and looked longer at the pleasant images compared with conservatives.

I'm trying to reconcile this with my own screwy history. I'm essentially a "glass is half-empty" type of personality, so by that criterion, I should be a conservative. In fact I was, but a number of years ago, I got totally fed up with what "true" conservatives had done to the Republican party, and I switched my allegiance to the Democrats. The way things are now, I doubt that I would ever vote for any Republican ever again.

Then comes what I assume is a new hypothesis:

UNL political scientist and co-author John Hibbing said the results might mean that those on the right are more attuned and attentive to aversive elements in life and are more naturally inclined to confront them. From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes sense, he said.

The results also are consistent with conservatives' support of policies to protect society from perceived external threats (support for increased defense spending or opposition to immigration) and internal ones as well (support for traditional values and being tough on crime), Hibbing said.

How does this notion of conservatives confronting a threat square with their head-in-the-sand approach to climate change? Or evolution?

From my point of view, I see the flat out denial of overwhelming scientific evidence as a major threat to our future existence and our standing as a scientific power. American conservatives' support for their policies is more akin to a fundamentalist Taliban approach.

I'm glad, at least, that the researchers used a term like "perceived external threats" to categorize conservative belief. Perhaps they need to study the basis for a conservative's perception. Their blue sky is not the same color as my blue sky.

Photo Du Jour

2011-12-14T09:23:00.003-05:00

Christmas Cooter

Playing with the an old Canon "nifty fifty" (Model 1) that I bought at a local consignment place for $24. Shooting wide open at f/1.8, it has a very shallow depth of field, resulting in a lovely bokeh from the Christmas lights in the background.

In case you haven't figured it out, Cooter is the cat's name.

Chicken Soup for Thinkers

2011-12-07T08:31:00.002-05:00

Here's a link to bookmark and enjoy: a list of 51 nominated blog postings for Scientific American's Open Lab Anthology for 2011.

Some of the authors are familiar to me:

Maggie Koerth-Baker of Boing-Boing
Carl Zimmer of The Loom
PZ Myers of Pharyngula
Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics

Resolution: read (or attempt) all of these posts.

Earth's All-Night Diner

2011-12-02T11:27:00.002-05:00

A headline in a recent New Scientist article caught my eye: Let's build a beacon to tell aliens who we were.

It made me think of this Gahan Wilson cartoon from my youth (a long time ago):

Google images comes through again for me.

Fleur du Jour

2011-11-14T08:30:00.003-05:00

Now here I thought that it was getting too late in the season for flowers...

This is a tiny flower, about the size of the nail on my pinkie. It's blooming now, as I write this, inside of a large pot on my front porch. The "real" flowers in the pot are all dead, and my wife claims this is a weed. At least she didn't plant it. Since it is in a pot, maybe it hitched a ride in the potting soil or with the geraniums that were planted in it.

The kind folks at the WVU Greenhouse have identified it as Lobelia erinus or one of its hybrids.

This photo marks a bit of an improvement in my technique. I used an Orbis light ring to provide the extra light that I needed to get more depth-of-field than I've been able to get in normal lighting situations -- particularly on a November evening.

Fleur du Jour

2011-11-10T12:47:00.003-05:00

It's getting a little nippy for flower pictures, so I thought I'd post something relatively recent (and appropriate).

Meet the Frost-weed aster (Aster pilosus), shot below the Morgantown Lock & Dam about a month ago.

Perchance to Dream

2011-11-03T08:39:00.002-04:00

Mediterranean diet and exercise can reduce sleep apnea symptoms

Eating a Mediterranean diet combined with physical activity can help to improve some of the symptoms of sleep apnoea, according to new research.
The study, which is published online in the European Respiratory Journal, looked at the impact a Mediterranean diet can have on obese people with sleep apnoea, compared to those on a prudent diet.
Obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS) causes frequent pauses of breathing to occur during sleep, which disrupts a person's normal sleeping pattern. It is one of the most prevalent sleep-related breathing disorders with approximately 2-4% of the adult population experiencing the condition. This percentage increases up to 20-40% with obesity, and weight loss is often an essential part of the recommended treatment plan.
The researchers, from the University of Crete in Greece, examined 40 obese patients suffering from OSAS. Twenty patients were given a prudent diet to follow, while the other 20 followed a Mediterranean diet*. Both groups were also encouraged to increase their physical activity, mainly involving walking for at least 30 minutes each day.
In both groups, the patients also received continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy which involves wearing a mask that generates an air stream, keeping the upper airway open during sleep.
The researchers monitored the patients during a sleep study, known as polysomnography. This involved monitoring several markers for OSAS, including electrical activity in the brain, eye movements and snoring. The patients were examined at the start of the study and again 6 months later.
The results showed that people following the Mediterranean diet had a reduced number of disturbances, known as apnoeas, during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep, which usually accounts for approximately 25% of total sleep during the night.
The findings also revealed that people following the Mediterranean diet also showed a greater adherence to the calorie restricted diet, an increase in physical activity and a greater decrease in abdominal fat.

Red meat (servings/wk) 3
Poultry (servings/wk) 3
Fish (servings/wk) 3, 1 of which is fatty fish
Dairy products, low fat (servings/d) 2
Fruit (servings/d) 4
Vegetables (servings/d) 5
Legumes (servings/wk) > 3
Potatoes (servings/wk) > 5
Non-refined cereals (servings/d) 6
Red wine (glasses/d) 1-2
Daily use of olive oil moderate

Today's Stupid

2011-11-01T09:39:00.002-04:00

Attacks on federal air pollution regulations dangerous to Americans' health

Efforts by some in Congress to dismantle clean air laws are a threat to public health, experts warn in a "Current Issues" article published online today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

New Scientist Science in America: Decline and Fall

Less than 2 per cent of its 535 members (of congress) have professional backgrounds in science. In contrast, there are 222 lawyers, whom one suspects largely avoided science classes in college. Lawyers are trained to win arguments, and as any trial lawyer will tell you, that means using facts selectively for the purposes of winning, not to establish the truth. No wonder ideology and rhetoric have come to dominate policy discussion, often bearing little relationship to factual reality.

I'm one of a kind (there are a million more like me)

2011-10-28T09:59:00.004-04:00

On this BBC News World article,
7 billion people and you: What's your number? you can enter your date of birth and the web app will tell you where you fall (numerically) in the scheme of mankind.

When I was born, I was the 2,705,110,781st person in the world (living at that time).

That number -- 2,705,110,781 -- looked to possibly be a prime number. I was (not really) surprised to find there's an Excel function -- GCD -- which returns the greatest common divisor of the operand. It turns out that 2,705,110,781 can only be divided by one and 2,705,110,781, making it a prime number.

I'm not (quite) silly enough to think there's any cosmic significance with my 2,705,110,781st position in the population. After all, the web app didn't ask me what time I was born, or any of a number of other limiting factors.

Mystery flower identified

2011-10-26T13:18:00.004-04:00

On my bike ride on August 18, I came across a small but pretty little flower growing along the trail above the Hildebrand lock & dam. Until today, it was labeled in my files as "tiny flower."
Today, thanks to the help of Donna Ford-Werntz, herbarium curator at WVU, we now have a name.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Willowleaf lettuce (Lactuca saligna).

Unfortunately -- I say this without sincerity -- this is a non-native species, originally from Eurasia.

A Bridge not too far (away)

2011-10-25T12:35:00.003-04:00

Sunday drive took me to Grantsville, Md., site of this single-span arch on the old National Road. There's a guy fly fishing underneath to give you a sense of scale.

Beer is good for you

2011-10-25T08:36:00.003-04:00

High fluid intake appears to reduce bladder cancer risk

BOSTON — Drinking plenty of fluids may provide men with some protection against bladder cancer, according to a study presented at the 10th AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held Oct. 22-25, 2011.

Facebook wall for earth's seven billionth person

2011-10-25T08:32:00.000-04:00

You're on your own, kid. -- Ron Paul

Wait a second. Sorry, but you're just the 6,999,999,999th person. -- Joseph Kony, Lord's Resistance Army.

I'll want to see your birth certificate. -- Orly Taitz

My Dear Friend,
My name is Mr. Johnson Emmanuel, I am a senior partner (Attorney) in the firm of Emmanuel Consults Inc: Private Investigators, Security Consultants and Financial Managers. We are conducting a standard process investigation/Recommendation on behalf of African Development Bank (ADB), The African Continental Banking Conglomerate....

A Tale of Two States

2011-05-10T09:06:00.003-04:00

It was the worst of times.

Granted, these aren't coming from the same state legislatures -- yet -- but they are brought to you by the same folks.

PIERRE, S.D. — The South Dakota Senate voted Wednesday to require women to wait 72 hours before they can have abortions and to submit to counseling about why they shouldn't go through with the procedures.

And this...

Florida Gov. Rick Scott is expected to sign a bill that will make the state the first in the nation to prohibit doctors from asking patients if they own guns. The bill is aimed particularly at pediatricians, who routinely ask new parents if they have guns at home and if they're stored safely.

How do Republicans reconcile these two ideas without appearing insane?

The Climate of Status Quo

2011-04-20T08:55:00.004-04:00

Science writer Chris Mooney had a good article in Mother Jones yesterday. Titled The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science -- How our brains fool us on climate, creationism, and the vaccine-autism link, it looks at some of the factors that are involved with how certain people trust or distrust facts with which they are in disagreement.

According to some classic research, our attitudes can be based upon our classifications as "individualists" or "communitarians" in combination with either "hierarchical" or "egalitarian" outlooks. Conservative Republicans are typically "indiviualist-hierarchical" while liberal Democrats would be "communitarian-egalitarian."

Dan Kahan, the author of the study, sums it up nicely:

Conservatives are more likely to embrace climate science if it comes to them via a business or religious leader, who can set the issue in the context of different values than those from which environmentalists or scientists often argue. Doing so is, effectively, to signal a détente in what Kahan has called a "culture war of fact." In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

On a tangential note, I see that today's Rapture Index is the highest ever: 184. This is because category #38, Wild Weather, has been recently elevated. I think it's funny that the keeper of these categories sees no irony between category

43 Climate: Record cold temps put the freeze on global warming hype.

and categories #38 and #45:

38 Wild Weather: The US is hit by a historic tornado Outbreak.
45 Floods: Heavy flooding in South America and Europe.

What values would give these facts a fighting chance?

I Feel Fine

2011-04-06T09:49:00.002-04:00

I had an amusing thought: what if the Rapture has already occurred? Everything is the same as it ever was -- nobody is missing. Nobody qualified. Not that it should come as any surprise.

According to the Rapture Ready web site, today's rapture index is 183, which on their scale translates to "fasten your seatbelts!" Scan the "Comments on Active Categories" section:

04 Unemployment: Unemployment tops 10 percent.
05 Inflation: Several commodities are at multi-year highs.
06 Interest Rates: The yield on bond prices has reached a 9 month high.
07 The Economy: The debt crisis in Europe is spreading around the world.
08 Oil Supply/Price: The price of oil climbs higher.
09 Debt and Trade: The mortgage bailout will add $1.2 trillion to the Federal debt.
10 Financial unrest: The U.S. dollar is down sharply, and gold is at a new high.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? The Republicans are trying to bring on the apocalypse! They think that Obama is the Antichrist, and maybe this will finally expose him.

Some other wonks on the net are trying to rain on everyone's parade. They offer a list of years throughout the ages where the end of the world ^(TM) was forecast. Mark your calendar for May 21^st.

Silly prognosticators! The Rapture has already occurred. The only things missing are a couple of socks, some pets in my neighborhood, and a hitherto undiscovered tribe in the Amazon. I hope they like harp music.

Endless Tweaking

2011-02-09T12:24:00.003-05:00

Not being able to leave well enough alone (see previous post), I realized that the criticism about lack of shadows was valid. My hesitation to act on that criticism was partly because I was sick and tired of endlessly tweaking that work. The other reason was that I just didn't have the knowledge and experience with lighting effects in PhotoShop.

So, I rested and I learned (a little). Results are more pleasing:

Notice a couple of new eggs?

Putting my eggs into one basket

2011-02-07T08:30:00.003-05:00

In a previous posting, I described how I made a basket using some simple tools in Adobe Illustrator. Here's the same basket loaded up:

This final composition was done in PhotoShop. Each of the eggs, as well as the basket, table cloth and candles, is an Illustrator drawing. If I try to put all of that together in Illustrator, I quickly run out of memory.

A person who I rely upon for PhotoShop advice offered the criticism that shadows were noticeably missing from this piece. Each egg should have a shadow..., etc.

Damn! No, wait. My picture is just well-lit. That's it.

Illustrator Basketmaking 101

2011-02-04T15:43:00.006-05:00

The Distort and Transform tool in Adobe Illustrator can really do some cool effects. This basket that I recently did was easy and involved just a few tools and techniques.

Here's how I did this.

I started with a small swatch that I made of short lines in various stroke weights and shades of brown/tan. I turned this into a pattern brush.

Once I had the pattern brush, I used the circle tool to create an oval that matches the lip of the basket. I applied the brush to the oval and tweaked the stroke some more until I was happy with the look.

The rest of the bowl was really simple: I used the Transform tool and started with an arbitrary 29 repetitions. I then tweaked the horizontal scale control down into the minus category (the Preview feature is really handy here). Then I tweaked the Move Vertical a bit into the minus category, watching the preview until I stopped seeing white space between the rings. Expand the Object, and that was all there is to the bowl of the basket. I added some extra body to the basket by copying the bowl layer, pasting it over the top of the original and shifting it horizontally and vertically several keyboard clicks. This worked to fill in the occasional blank space between coils.

The lip of the bowl was created from a fresh circle that I visually matched up with the top ring. Once again, I applied the pattern brush to that. To get that the cool windings, I used the Zig-Zag tool in the Distort and Transform tool set. You can see the dialog box for that below:

Like always, I turned Preview on, so I can see what I'm rendering. By setting Points to Smooth, I got a coiling effect instead of the basic zig-zag. Then I just pumped up the Ridges per segment slider until I got some tight coils. Voila!

Finally, the handle is the top half of a circle arc with the same wood brush applied. After thickening it up a little, I put another circle arc over that and applied the actual zig-zag transform to that.

Now I'm ready to put some Easter eggs in this basket!

Where's the Beef?!!

2011-01-27T13:58:00.004-05:00

Somebody at work turned me on to this guy's blog page, Words From The Mountains. If you clicked on that link -- why didn't you? -- you'd see the July 22, 2010, entry titled "The Ghost of Woodburn Hall." It tells the story of a prank from more than a century ago, when some agricultural students led a cow up into Woodburn's bell tower.

Cows being -- well -- dumb, this one managed the climb up several flights, but it seemed unable to walk back down. Consequently, it was removed in much the same way that the dead horse in Animal House had to be removed from the dean's office, albeit before the days of chainsaws. Thus was born the legend of the Woodburn Hall Cow, whose ghost is still mooing in the night.

Now the reason for the story about the unfortunate cow is because I had done a vector drawing of Woodburn Hall, based upon a night-time Christmas lights photograph that I had taken. I was able to catch the night-time look of the building, but I was hesitant to attempt the lighting effect.

Something about my showing this Illustrator drawing to a coworker caused him to remark that my picture needed a cow, whereupon he told me of the legend. Lest you think that I keep strange company, this person is a director-level at the University.

It's funny how an idea grows.

Stitching in Illustrator

2011-01-26T09:19:00.005-05:00

Still on the subject of Ukrainian rushnyky, I thought I'd take on one of my mother's pillow embroideries (left).

She does these patterns free-style, with no design in mind when she starts. My interpretation used a single, uniform cross-stitch, whereas my mother's original features a variety of stitching styles.

I flipped the central portion and made it into a repeating brush pattern (right). It's funny how the eyedropper tool in Illustrator interpreted the orange-gold color -- it came across more bronze in Illustrator.

Illustrator stitches

2011-01-22T12:52:00.009-05:00

Some time ago, I showed off a few faux cross-stitch patterns of traditional Ukrainian "Rushnyky," literally towels.

I doubt I could claim credit for applying the techniqe of using a cross-stitch "X" pattern to build an elaborate design in Adobe Illustrator, but I came up with the idea on my own and developed it through experimentation.

Here's an inset portion, showing a two-color stitch pattern:Once you have a few patterns, you can start to replicate them and lay them out into a larger work. Here is a completed rushnyk from a design I copied:

There's a really cool trick you can do in Illustrator, where you can take something you've designed and make it into a pattern brush. The pattern brush can then be applied to a vector shape like a line, rectangle or circle. The basic square of this pattern lends itself particularly to a rectangle, because you can designate a specific design to be a corner piece in your brush pattern.

To do this, I first stripped away the outer zig-zag border. Here's what the replicated squares would look like in a corner pattern:Once the pattern brush is complete, you can begin applying it. Here is a circle within a square with the rushnyk brush pattern applied:

Note that you can change the stroke. The circle is one-half the stroke of the square. The only problem with creating these elaborate designs is that you can run out of memory when you try something large based upon an elaborate design.

GOP's not-so-secret agenda

2011-01-21T08:09:00.003-05:00

I read this morning that with health care reform now "repealed," the GOP congress is going after climate change. Just like health care, the GOP sees any attempt to regulate greenhouse gasses as being job-killing.

According to Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., "We will be active and aggressive using every tool in the toolbox to protect American jobs and our economy by rolling back the job-destroying (greenhouse gas) regulations." (I suppose the Republicans' filibuster against the auto industry bailout last year was also done out of concern for jobs.)

It just so happens that I've obtained a hither-to unknown wikileaks release on the GOP's agenda for this year:

repeal health care reform
rewrite the Clean Air Act
repeal the 14th amendment
repeal the 13th amendment (arguably a symbolic gesture)
prohibit the teaching of evolution
declare war against Poseidon

Saving the Weasels

2011-01-19T08:03:00.003-05:00

The GOP-controlled congress is living up to its promise of trying to roll back health care reform. HR 2 has been given the odd name of Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act. The words Repealing and Killing have negative connotations, however. If the GOP would take my advice -- they won't -- they should name the bill positively, say Save the Weasels Act.

Make no mistake about it -- since the current health care reform law has made it illegal to cancel an insurance policy because of a pre-existing condition, Insurance Policy Processing Clerks have been having a tough go of it. Many of these weasels, whose job it is to cancel insurance policies, have been out of work. You'd think that the GOP would have extended jobless benefits to these, their brethren. But they are looking at the big picture. If they help the insurance companies recover their enviable ability to cancel policies, then the weasels will have their jobs back. Brilliant!

Besides, weasels don't contribute much in the way of campaign donations.

Crap Continues

2010-09-24T11:16:00.002-04:00

John Raese's latest pitch for becoming the next senator from West Virginia is an attack against his opponent, Governor Joe Manchin (D).

Obsessing against health care reform (i.e., "Obama Care"), the ad claims that the reform is going to result in $400 billion in Medicare cuts for seniors.

According to FactCheck.Org, however,

The claim that Obama and Congress are cutting seniors’ Medicare benefits to pay for the health care overhaul is outright false, though that doesn’t keep it from being repeated ad infinitum.

The article even goes on to cite AARP's Myths vs. Facts:

Myth: Health care reform will hurt Medicare.

Fact: None of the health care reform proposals being considered by Congress would cut Medicare benefits or increase your out-of-pocket costs for Medicare services.
Fact: Health care reform will lower prescription drug costs for people in the Medicare Part D coverage gap or "doughnut hole" so they can get better afford the drugs they need.
Fact: Health care reform will protect seniors' access to their doctors and reduce the cost of preventive services so patients stay healthier.
Fact: Health care reform will reduce costly, preventable hospital readmissions, saving patients and Medicare money.
Fact: Rather than weaken Medicare, health care reform will strengthen the financial status of the Medicare program.

Is This All They Have?

2010-09-16T08:14:00.012-04:00

The death of Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) has left it up to the 2010 mid-term election to decide upon his successor. While it's sad that Byrd remained in office until he died of old age, you have to say that the man had class. Unfortunately, class is something sorely lacking in one of the contenders for his seat.

Morgantown millionaire John Raese is once again running for U.S. Senate on the Republican ticket.

His platform is simple: he's not going to be a rubber stamp for Barack Obama, which is another way of saying that he will be a rubber stamp for the "Party of No." He wants to go to Washington to stop deficit spending. That's something that pretty much every Republican says they'll do, but what they actually do is an entirely different story. He wants to repeal health care reform. Is this because of a public outcry, or is it because large employers may be subject to fines if they don't provide health insurance for their workers? And he wants states to be able to protect themselves. Protect us from what?

You hardly have to read between the lines of Raese's biography to see what kind of person he is. Yes, he's a "businessman," but he inherited these businesses from his parents. He has a B.S. degree in education from WVU, but I doubt he has ever set foot in any classroom. His record of public service is virtually non-existent, unless you count a brief stint as W.Va. Republican Party chairman. So can you believe him when he says that he wants to work for you?

These are the credentials of someone who thinks he can fill Robert Byrd's shoes.

Non-Overlapping Visions

2010-05-20T12:56:00.003-04:00

In my wandering about the web the other day, I came across the term "non-overlapping magisteria," which I had not read before. Yes, I don't get out often enough. A quick highlight and right-click of the term took me to the Google, where definitions abound.

According to Wikipedia, non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA, for short) is a term espoused by Stephen Jay Gould:

The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).

I've offered Gould's direct interpretation here -- the actual Wikipedia definition is a bit abstruse to me.

More succinctly, science and religion occupy two irreconcilable realms of human experience.

Now, back to Google. Just a line or two down from the Wikipedia entry is a Conservapedia entry. Conservapedia, if you don't know, "is a clean and concise resource for those seeking the truth. We do not allow liberal bias to deceive and distort here."

So, to avoid deception and distortion, Conservapedia has this to say about NOMA:

The idea of Non-overlapping Magisteria proposes to separate science from religion, with each to govern independently in their respective domains. Science gets the what and why, while religion gets meaning and value. (See also fact-value distinction.) The idea is opposed by those who see God as the Author of science (see Creationism).

It is an apologetic put forward by liberal evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould. [1] Gould described NOMA as "a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution to ... the supposed conflict between science and religion."

Magisterium is defined as "a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution" and the NOMA principle is "the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty)."

This theory is demonstrably faulty because it is obvious that the intelligent design of the universe would leave behind perceptible evidence allowing the existence of God to be inferred without reference to faith. (My emphasis) Furthermore the NOMA principle would directly contradict Biblical evidence of miracles which if observable by scientists would be demonstrably true.

To embrace NOMA would be to consign the entirety of scripture to metaphor and storytelling (me again: and your point is?).

Now here I was thinking that Wikipedia was being abstruse. I'm trying to parse the fourth paragraph: This theory is demonstrably faulty. I.e., this theory is wrong; here's why... "because it is obvious." Question: What's obvious? Answer: That God has left behind perceptible evidence of his/her existence. This evidence is apparently so obvious that we are not going to explain what that is. Ah, but wait: this evidence -- if observable by scientists -- makes it demonstrably true. So we only need to transport a scientist to biblical times. If we could, ipso facto, this would be observable. Air-tight logic.

And you laugh at me for believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster! (alternately)

A Bug in Heaven

2010-05-08T23:09:00.006-04:00

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake - Augeries of Innocence

After seeing someone else's macro picture of a Lilly of the Valley flower stalk, I was inspired to duplicate the feat. I have an increased admiration for the photographer now, because I've learned how hard it is to find just the right stalk and just the right angle.

The difficulty, you see, is in being able to get a whole row of those little white blooms to stay within focus -- difficult to do when the row is low to the ground and in an arc.

To make the following shot, I turned the center rod of my tripod mount around upside-down and suspended the camera low to the ground. It was breezy and it was still difficult to focus because the camera was so low to the ground.

What's interesting in this picture, however, is if you zoom in on the top-right flower you can see an insect inside. I'm not sure this time if it's an ant like the one on the Periwinkle. It looks smaller, and the sharpness is just not good enough.

It's an amazing world out there, right under our noses.

Natural adaptation?

2010-04-23T08:18:00.003-04:00

Yesterday evening, I was trying to get a decent macro photograph of one of the lovely blue periwinkle flowers by the side of my house. I was dissatisfied with the results, however. The ground level and angle was difficult for my tripod, so I tried hand-holding the camera.

Although none of the periwinkle pictures were noteworthy, I discovered an interesting thing on the computer screen that I had completely missed at the time of shooting. In the center of the periwinkle bloom was a little red ant.

What's interesting is that if you look closely, you'll see that the ant is facing away from the camera (shy thing). However, there are what look to be two dark eye spots on the abdomen.

I cannot help but wonder whether this might be a natural adaptation to fool a potential predator into thinking that the foraging ant is facing towards it, rather than blithely away.

Wild wild life

2010-04-08T09:20:00.005-04:00

Want to save your endangered wildlife? Here's the cause for you: endangered species condoms.

Through a network of more than 5,000 volunteers, the Center for Biological Diversity is distributing 350,000 free Endangered Species Condoms in all 50 states to highlight how unsustainable human population growth is driving species extinct at a cataclysmic rate.

Be sure to check out "The Condom Packages" on this link. There are sample packages with various mottos:

Polar Bear: Wrap with Care... Save the polar bear

Snail Darter: Hump smarter... Save the snail darter

Spotted Owl: Wear a condom now... save the spotted owl

American Burying Beetle (for that special someone): Cover your tweedle... save the burying beetle

Not to be outdone, here are my suggested entries:

There is a niche to be filled here. The web page also has a U.S. map link, where you can click to see the location of volunteer distributors. West Virginia has only 1 to 10. Apparently a good man is hard to find.... or is that vice versa?

New hominin

2010-03-25T10:06:00.003-04:00

Today's scientific buzz is about the discovery in Siberia of a finger bone found in a cave. Based upon DNA analysis, scientists have determined that the human-like creature, living between 30,000 and 48,000 years ago, was distinct from both Neanderthals and modern humans.

From the finger, scientists were able to reconstruct the appearance of this human-like creature:

Putting a byte back into hard drives

2010-03-11T09:42:00.003-05:00

A good article in Ars Technica: Why new hard disks might not be much fun for XP users explains a lot about the technology behind hard drives and how that is changing. It also includes a second partition devoted to explaining how manufacturers are trying to overcome the current 2TB partition limit.

I never really considered that digital data is actually encoded as an analog signal. Magnetic data on a hard drive is supposed to be 1s and 0s, but magnetism can be unreliable at the microscopic level of a hard drive platter. Those 1s and 0s have to be stored in larger groups, so that if a few individual bits flip, the end result will still be mostly 1s or mostly 0s. Error checking is introduced into each section of data, and that overhead means that only about 81% of a disk can consist of your data -- the rest is error checking. New drive technology is striving for 4% overhead, so that you'll get to use 96% of the disk drive.

And Windows XP won't support the new drive format.

The carpenter is a tool

2010-03-08T09:25:00.004-05:00

So, I got a decent tripod and a nice set of Cokin filters for my digital SLR. Now all I have to do is to figure out how to take decent pictures.

Last Friday, I shot this panorama from the building where I work.

Raw, f/5.6, ISO 400, using a polarizer and a graduated filter. Compared to my earlier panorama attempts -- hand-held camera and no filters -- this picture sucks. The sky is noticeably grainy at 100% resolution, and you can see obvious vertical bands where the photos were stitched to create the panorama.

What caused these problems? I'm inclined to think it's the filters, because they're the major difference from previous attempts. As a matter of fact, I quickly discovered that the filters were wreaking havoc with my camera's autofocus -- unlike all previous attempts, I had to disable autofocus and shoot this with manual focus.

This is a classic example of how better equipment does not assure better photographs. :-(

THE filter set for cameras

2010-02-22T09:18:00.002-05:00

I've recently plunged into the world of digital SLR cameras, albeit on the cheap end. As a sign that I haven't been keeping up with photography trends and technology, I've only recently become aware of Cokin filters.

The concept behind Cokin filters is brilliant: instead of investing in screw -on filters for all of your different sized lenses, you can invest in a filter holder system that adapts itself to different lens sizes.

I discovered, too, that it's often possible to acquire nice Cokin sets on eBay. Although the Cokin filters on eBay are predominantly the larger professional "P" series, one can occasionally get the amateur "A" series on the cheap. I saw a couple of such set go for the starting bid when I jumped into the fray. I, too, got my set on just the first opening bid.

I got the adapter/holder for my 58mm lens size, plus a very nice assortment of filters:

Close-up +1
Close-up +2
Close-up +3
Polarizing
Gradual G2 (two of them for stacking)
Gradual Y1
Gradual T2
Gradual M1
Parallel B
Warm (81 B)
Star 8
Fog 2
Blue (80 A)

With just a few exceptions, most of these filters cannot merely be replaced by PhotoShop effects. All of the gradual filters, for instance, are very useful for toning down strong light, such as from a bright sky, so that a landscape can be better exposed. I think I'll have a lot of fun using the close-up lenses with macro photography. Those, alone, are worth the cost of the entire package.

Early Misdeeds Evident

2010-01-25T12:32:00.003-05:00

A January 20 Scientific American piece titled Endangered Species: Humans Might Have Faced Extinction 1 Million Years Ago says that the early human species -- including Homo erectus, H. ergaster and archaic H. sapiens -- were down to about 18,500 breeding individuals.

According to genetic evidence the early human population faced a major setback about one million years ago. It is thought that the diminished genetic diversity one million years ago suggests human ancestors experienced a catastrophic event at that time as devastating as a purported supervolcano thought to have nearly annihilated humans 70,000 years ago.

According to Pat Robertson this was another act of god:

Something happened a long time ago in ~~Haiti~~ Africa, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the ~~French~~ Homo erectus. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the ~~French~~ Homo erectus. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal. Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

Windows 7 and Canon Utilities

2010-01-05T08:21:00.002-05:00

After my modest success with installing Windows 7 on my home computer, I spent my Monday morning at work installing Windows 7 there. Because I sometimes use my Canon camera at work, I brought in the software CD for EOS utilities.

When I tried installing the software, however, I encountered a dialog that said "Installation program of EOS utility requires administrator privileges." The problem was that I am the admin on this machine! I don't know what that difference is between my home and work environments that would cause this to happen. I tried the "run as administrator" command, and I tried compatibility modes.

When I googled the error message, I got one hit: http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?p=9162655. The solution, which worked, by the way, is a doozy. Get a load of this:

When you receive the error , DON'T click the "OK" button.
Navigate to the following path: "C:\Users\admin-user\AppData\Local\Temp\".
Inside this directory, you should see a directory named something like "CanonUPW_000". Copy this whole directory to another location.
Then click "OK" on the installation program error on the screen (which removes the directory you just copied).
Open the directory that you copied in the last step and navigate to the following location: ".\CanonUPW_000\INST\INSTALL\COMMON". You should find an "Install.exe" file in this directory.
Open the properties of this "Install.exe" file, then select the "Compatibility" tab.
Select the "Change settings for all users" button and select the "Run this program in compatibility mode for "Windows XP (Service Pack 3).
Under the "Privilege Level" section, select the "Run this program as an administrator", then click OK twice.
Execute the "Install.exe" file. The installation should start and finish successfully.

Great googly moogly!

Trying to Live with Windows 7

2009-12-29T23:34:00.004-05:00

With time off for the holidays, I decided that it was time to nuke my now-seedy Windows Vista PC at home and replace the operating system with Windows 7 Ultimate.

Of course, one of the main reasons that Vista had gone to seed was my trying to "upgrade" to Windows 7. That went through a lot of motions, but it ended up freezing up my PC and leaving me to back off to Vista. Every day after that was a pointed reminder of why it's usually better to just reformat and install fresh.

I took the chicken's way out for the fresh format, pulling my "working" Vista multi-boot system disk and putting in a new Western Digital (1 TB) Caviar. The old system disk was a small (70 GB) and very fast (10k rpm) WD Raptor, which has been in continuous use since early 2004. Best not push my luck with that old Raptor.

Windows 7 installation was uneventful and fairly fast. The fun began when I tried to piece Humpty Dumpty back together again. Here's a short list of issues that I had:

Try as I might, I could not acquire a networked HP LaserJet printer that was connected to another machine.
My old NTI Backup Now! version 4.5 software was incompatible with Windows 7.
Although my multi-boot system drive was swapped out, the Ubuntu Linux operating system resided safely on another drive. I just had blown away the GRUB master boot record, which I needed to rebuild.
I was afraid that I'd have issues with my old Hauppauge WinTV card and software.

The HP LaserJet 2600N
After configuring and sharing my new OS on my local network neighborhood, other PCs could see me and connect to me; however, I could see the other PCs but not connect to them. Expedient solution was to make my PC the host for network printing. That, too, started out poorly, as test prints just sat in my print queue without printing. Long story short: other users had reported that I should turn off "Enable bidirectional support" in my printer port settings. That and updated drivers solved problem #1.

NTI Backup Now!
Before I upgraded, Windows 7 warned me that my version 4.5 of NTI Backup Now! would be incompatible. An upgrade to the 5.x version was fairly inexpensive, but I forgot one thing: when I went to a new disk drive, I left behind my old NTI Backup program. The 5.x license was an upgrade version, which required that the previous version be installed. I could NOT install the 4.x version under Windows 7. Oops. Fortunately, I found that I had an electronic version for the NTI suite on another drive. For whatever reason, that version was able to at least install an attenuated version of the old NTI Backup long enough for me to then install the upgrade version.

Multi-boot Manager
I was using the built-in Windows boot manager, via BCDEdit, to boot into my Ubuntu Linux partition. After upgrading, I needed to re-create the master boot record entry that would launch Ubuntu. I got in a little over my head when I found that I did not know how to use the Ubuntu Live disk to write a new GRUB entry on my C drive. Most fortunately, I had the foresight to backup the original NST_grub.mbr file. When I put that file back onto the right spot of the new C drive, I was able to convince BCDEdit to configure it back into the multi-boot environment. Hurrah!

Hauppauge WinTV
The Hauppauge started giving me grief back when I first started with Vista, so I wasn't hopeful about Windows 7. After loading up my old drivers, however, I was able to get the WinTV tuner working. Color balance was loopy, though. Every time I fired up the TV, Windows would warn me that the color scheme as changed back to Windows Basic. This means that I always have to go in to Hauppauge preferences and tweak the color balance. Ok. For whatever reason, I could not get the remote control to work, but that was hit or miss (mostly miss) under Vista. I thought that finding and putting in new drivers would help, but that just screwed things so bad that I had to uninstall all of the new drivers and fall back to the old ones.

Lessons Learned

When you run into installation problems with old software, always check the net for new drivers. That solved most of the minor problems. When you have old hardware/software combos like my vintage Hauppauge card, don't expect miracles. Learn to live with it, or plan to upgrade it. I'd love to figure out what's wrong with my Windows Network Neighborhood setup, but at least everyone can print.

It's nice having a fast, clean OS running again.

I can has a Cheeseburger?!

2009-11-18T13:25:00.006-05:00

Hand it to Big Blue.... They now have a supercomputer that simulates a cat's cerebral cortex, albeit one hundred times slower than a real life hairball. Suprisingly -- to this cat owner at least -- the IBM machine has 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of memory. Seems an awful lot for a SIM Pussy.

Previous attempts by IBM have simulated 40 percent of a mouse's brain in 2006. They managed a rat's full brain in 2007. Unlike Renfield, they've apparently skipped past the flies and spiders.

So, what's it like having a computer that simulates one billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses?

It's hard to wake up after it goes into hibernation mode.
Wireless mice keep disappearing
You have a computer that can lick its own I/O ports.
You have to program it in LOLSpeak.
It REALLY hogs your bed.

Genetic link to lousy drivers

2009-10-30T08:39:00.003-04:00

Astounding scientific discovery from the University of California at Irvine: bad driving may have a genetic basis.

According to a recent study by Dr. Steven Cramer, an associate professor of neurology, and the leader of the study, people with a certain gene variant perform more than 20% worse on a driving test than people without that gene.

People with the variant have a smaller portion of their brain stimulated when performing a complex task like driving.

I'd like to see some research explaining why these same people are drawn to driving in Subarus.

I plink, therefore I am

2009-10-26T10:15:00.003-04:00

A news item released today, Music makes you smarter, says that regular music practice can improve cognitive skills.

There is growing evidence that musicians have structurally and functionally different brains compared with non-musicians. In particular, the areas of the brain used to process music are larger or more active in musicians. Even just starting to learn a musical instrument can changes the neurophysiology of the brain.

“My brain? That´s my second favorite organ.”

-- Woody Allen

Ihagee in a box of junk

2009-10-25T13:19:00.006-04:00

Over the course of too many years, a little black case, which once belonged to the father-in-law I never met, has followed us about. Inside it were the remaining dreck of his photography hobby: unexposed rolls of Kodak film from 1957, a movie camera lens, and an assorted collection of Ihagee filters and unidentified components.
I've since had a photographer buddy explain to me that the Ihagee brand has a long history and a devoted following. The company was founded in Dresden, Germany, between the World Wars.
One of the boxed components contains what I think is a film holder for a large format camera. Unique among the other assorted boxes, however, the reflex finder box sported an interesting company logo.
Rather than photographing it, however, I decided to try to reproduce it in Adobe Illustrator. This hardly does it justice, as some jpeg artifacts are marring the outside edge of the circle. I also think that I could have done a better job of centering the artwork.
It will be curious to see if there's a market for this kind of stuff on eBay. Hope springs eternal.

Going the Egg-stra Mile in Illustrator

2009-10-09T14:59:00.004-04:00

In additions to creating Illustrator design patterns for virtual "rushnyky," I had also dabbled with pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs). When you look at the picture of some of the eggs that I have done below, perhaps "dabble" is a bit of an understatement. But I'm okay with that.

At first, I started out completely in the dark, developing my technique as a went along. I was a shameless cheat, creating symbol sets from GIF and JPEG files of patterns that I had found on the web. Soon, however, I found images of actual pysanky that I admired and tried to imitate. This forced me into learning a variety of new design techniques.

In addition to practicing and learning Adobe Illustrator, I learned more about the symbolism behind authentic pysanka designs.

If anyone has Illustrator and wants to try their hand at creating an egg, I found an excellent tutorial, Create and color an eco easter egg in Adobe Illustrator, that will give you an impressive start.

Re-discovering Adobe Illustrator

2009-10-08T08:16:00.009-04:00

I had worked a little bit with Adobe Illustrator years ago, in another job. Recently, I've had a chance to get into it again as part of the CS4 collection. A couple of things really made it click for me. One was access to the wonderful on-line training at Lynda.com. The other was an interest in the colorful, geometric Ukrainian folk art that one typically sees on Ukrainian Easter eggs (pysanky) and embroidery. The typical venue for embroidery is the rushnyk, which is a kind of ritual towel.

I've had a lot of fun learning to duplicate some of my favorite patterns into Illustrator. After learning to create and transform geometric shapes, I challenged myself to duplicate the actual look of the stitching.

Here is an example of my most elaborate work to date. This is a jpeg of a greatly reduced image. A single pair of the diamond patterns in Illustrator is about 800 points high. Once I create the core of the pattern, I convert it into a "brush" in Illustrator, after which I can apply the brush to any line or arc.

Since these brushes only repeat along on axis, I cannot make decent rectangles. I can, however, make some pretty cool circles.

I've found that because I'm building these patterns out of imitation cross-stitches (each is a colored "X"), the overall colors are somewhat pale. This example, for instance, is composed of black, red, green, yellow, violet, blue, and organge. Pretty hard to tell from this distance.

When I tried to render a complex pattern such as this into Photoshop, I frequently run out of system memory.

Right: a previous attempt at creating pseudo-cross-stitch.

Playing the Race Card(inal)

2009-10-07T15:16:00.002-04:00

A couple of days ago, according to the Associated Press, Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson of Ghana said that in light of President Barack Obama's election, there is no reason why the next pope couldn't be black.

Assuming that Cardinal Turkson was speaking of his own chances at becomming pope, my main concern is going to be over the validity of his baptismal certificate.

Does it have a raised seal?
Is it signed?
Does it have any creases?
What proof will we have that it's an authentic baptismal certificate?

Would any of that even matter? You can go out on the net and download your own template for a baptism certificate.

After all, it's one thing for a black man to be president of the United States. It's another thing altogether to have one as the spiritual leader of the Catholic world. Look what happened when we had a Polish pope.

I see brilliant people

2009-06-10T12:59:00.003-04:00

Just catching up with old news. In this case, it's a TED presentation, Talks Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense, which was posted in March of this year. It's an absolutely brilliant synthesis of technologies: computer, telephone, user interface, etc.

In a nutshell, it's a demonstration of a device that lets individuals pull up and display data on just about anything, from just about anywhere.

Gay rights are apparently not for the faint

2009-06-05T12:57:00.002-04:00

An interesting bit of research appeared in the June 3, 2009, ChronicleOnline from Cornell University. It says that there's a correlation between a person's susceptibility to being more easily disgusted and political conservatism.

Assistant professor of psychology at Cornell, David Pizarro, surveyed people with two indexes: the Disgust Sensitivity Scale, and a political ideology scale.

Here are a few cherry-picked highlights from the article:

Participants who rated higher in disgust sensitivity were more likely to oppose gay marriage and abortion, issues that are related to notions of morality or purity. The researchers also found a weak correlation between disgust sensitivity and support for tax cuts, but no link between disgust sensitivity and the other issues...
Conservatives have argued that there is inherent wisdom in repugnance; that feeling disgusted about something -- gay sex between consenting adults, for example -- is cause enough to judge it wrong or immoral, even lacking a concrete reason. Liberals tend to disagree, and are more likely to base judgments on whether an action or a thing causes actual harm....
The research speaks to a need for caution when forming moral judgments, Pizarro added. "Disgust really is about protecting yourself from disease; it didn't really evolve for the purpose of human morality," he said. "It clearly has become central to morality, but because of its origins in contamination and avoidance, we should be wary about its influences."

I'm not sure how to draw my own conclusions. I'm not particularly disturbed by animal blood and guts (human is a very different story), but I am very wary of the gun control agenda. Certain scenes in Brokeback Mountain really give me the willies (no pun intended), but I strongly feel that homosexuals should have equal rights under the law.

Do these contradictions make me a conservative liberal or a liberal conservative?

Rx with Blemishes

2009-05-27T09:17:00.003-04:00

After doing a bit of research, I thought I'd plop down $10 of my hard-earned money on what is the most expensive iPhone applet that I've so far purchased: MotionPHR for the iPhone. This applet is billed as providing "a secure record of you and your families (sic) health."

At this point, I'm not into using all of the program's existing bells & whistles. I was interested in two things: pharmaceutical and immunology records. In the day since I've begun to noodle with this program, I can only address my observations about the pharmaceutical side of things.

In an earlier post, I talked about how Google Health makes use of pull-downs and hyperlinks when you add medications to your profile. Perhaps that spoiled me, because I was really disappointed when I discovered that I had to manually type everything into the MotionPHR applet. Forget pull-downs and forget spell checking. To its credit, MotionPHR does let you record the Rx number of a prescription, which is something that Google Health didn't do. However, back to manual data entry: I had a bunch of prescriptions to key in, and I though that it was stupidly inefficient of the program to not make use of the first instance of the pharmacy name to allow for speedier entry on subsequent prescriptions. I mean, most people use a single pharmacy for their various prescriptions, so why should they have to type the same name and phone number each time?

And the phone number is dumb, too. One of my reasons for putting that prescription info in there in the first place was so that I could call my pharmacy's automated voice mail system for refills. MotionPHR does not link the phone number field to the iPhone!

Another feature in the medications portion of the applet lets you record and increment the number of refills. Missing, however, is a calendar entry for when the prescription expires.

If you have a Google account (and who doesn't?) MotionPHR uses 64-bit encryption to back your medical data into a Google Docs account. It's only for archival storage, but it is a handy feature. MotionPHR's Blogspot site mentions that a future incarnation of the applet will soon let users be able to "sync their Personal Health data with Google Health and their iPhone." This could be a good thing,^tm in that one might be able to use Google Health and a real keyboard for entering their prescription information. Or, as MountainLaurel commented on my earlier Google Health posting, it could also be a bad thing.

Google Health

2009-05-21T12:27:00.002-04:00

Google has a new toy in their box: Google Health, which allows you to store and manage your health information in a central location. If you want to know more about it, read About Google Health.

One of the impressive looking features lets you import medical records. There's a page of links to providers of internet-based health records. If you know who has your records, you can set up an account with them and ask them to transfer your records to Google. They're supposed to be your records, after all. The problem for me is that I haven't a clue as to which provider may have my records. I guess my doctor might know.

Another potentially neat feature lets you add your medications to your profile. There are easy-to-use pull-downs for generic and brand name drugs, as well as appropriate selectors for dosage and frequency. All of this is conveniently hyperlinked to drug information sites. While it looks like an encouraging start, however, I'm already disappointed in what it doesn't do. There's a Prescription column that I cannot enter data into or edit. This is where I would hope to be able to put in my pharmacy's prescription number, expiration dates and related information.

Google Health is like a boat-load of lawyers sinking into the ocean: a good start. It's still flawed in the type of information that I would like to be able to put into it, but I'm willing to give it a tentative one thumb up.

Why I Have the Blues

2009-03-02T09:16:00.002-05:00

After three years of research, an Austrian chemist has announced that it's a type of body hair that is responsible for trapping lint and drawing it into a navel.

A March 1 article in Telegraph.co.uk, Revealed: The secrets of belly button fluff, reports that "the scaly structure of the hair enhances the 'abrasion of minuscule fibres from the shirt' and directs the lint towards the belly button."

Doctor Georg Steinhauser goes on to say that hair scales "act like a kind of barbed hooks" (Velcro?)

Shaving one's belly hair will result in a fluff-free navel, and a belly button ring seems to also be effective at sweeping away fibers before they have a chance to lodge.

An earlier Australian study determined that the "typical" carrier of navel fluff is "a slightly overweight middle-aged male with a hairy abdomen."

I'm going to see if I can have my belly button declared as a national breeding ground and sanctuary.

Collective Cluelessness

2009-02-13T11:12:00.003-05:00

This information comes from a research study, so it must be true.

Brenda M. Trofanenko, a professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that teaching history by rote is a pedagogical method guaranteed to get students to tune out and adds to our collective civic and historical cluelessness.

“We need to start thinking differently about our students’ abilities,” she said. “They can think critically and engage in historical inquiry if they’re actually given the opportunity. Instead, we make them learn facts and test them on their ability to regurgitate them at the end of the week. I think that’s really insulting to them.”

It's interesting that the hypothesis blames accountability measures of the No Child Left Behind law. If it can't be quantified, it can't be measured. So the easy way to quantify knowledge of history is to rely upon memorization of dates. It's so much harder to grade an essay.

She's Gonna Blow!

2009-01-30T13:16:00.004-05:00

According the the Associated Press, Alaska's Mount Redoubt is about to blow its top.

On Nov. 5, geologists noted changed emissions and minor melting near the Redoubt summit and raised the threat level from green to yellow. It jumped to orange — the stage just before eruption — on Sunday in response to a sharp increase in earthquake activity below the volcano.

Interestingly, Alaska's Volcano Observatory website is so swamped right now that it's posting this message:

Due to very high load on our web server, we can only support a very limited website. We are working to remedy the situation as quickly as possible. Thanks!

If you're as curious about the scheme behind the treat levels, there is a nice explanation on Wikipedia. Realizing that information on Wikipedia can be somewhat fleeting, let me provide the warning scheme here:

Code	Description
GREEN	Volcano is in its normal "dormant" state or, after a change from a higher level: Volcanic activity considered to have ceased, and volcano reverted to its normal, non-eruptive state.
YELLOW	Volcano is exhibiting signs of elevated unrest above known background levels. or, after a change from a higher level: Volcanic activity has decreased significantly but continues to be closely monitored for possible renewed increase.
ORANGE	Volcano is exhibiting heightened unrest with increased likelihood of eruption, or, Volcanic eruption underway with no or minor ash emission (specify ash-plume height if possible).
RED	Eruption is forecast to be imminent with significant emission of ash into the atmosphere likely. or, Eruption is underway with significant emission of ash into the atmosphere (specify ash-plume height if possible).
BROWN	Cataclysmic eruption is in progress. or, OMG!

A naturalist looks at FSTDT

2009-01-28T10:55:00.005-05:00

I was an amateur naturalist as a kid, looking under rocks and logs to find what surprises lurked there. Perhaps my surfing the internet has become an extension of this exploratory urge. The analogy of looking under rocks is not greatly extended when I talk about the site Fundies Say the Darnest Things! This site is

An archive of the most hilarious, bizarre, ignorant, bigoted, and terrifying quotes from fundies all over the internet!

If I may continue to extend my analogy further, this site is a user-submitted collection of some extraordinarily ignorant statements, along with links to the rocks under which their authors congregate.

The Latest Comments section is kept pretty much up-to-date. Even as I write these words, new submissions are being added. The gist of those I'm seeing right now indicate that wingnuts continue to stew about the current president. Take this gem:

January 20, 2009 is the day the United States of America died. We have ushered in an era that will approach Sodom and Gomorrah standards.
Frostie7, RR [Comments (18)] [2009-Jan-28]

This is typical in many ways. Note the RR hyperlink. RR stands for Rapture Ready. If you're at all curious as to what constitutes the 30% of the Republican "base," check out these links and read some of the comments.

Perhaps you've read about fundamentalists; maybe you've even seen one. If you want to read them in their natural habitats without getting out of the car, check out some of their online discussions. For now, it seems, the fundamentalists have crawled back under their rocks. But they ain't happy.

A New Face of War

2009-01-23T10:04:00.003-05:00

StrategyPage, an web site devoted to what is going on militarily in the world, offers us a glimpse of what "cybergeddon" might be like. Their definition of cybergeddon is "a massive attack via the Internet that would cripple the economy, government and military."

In their January 22 article, Waiting For Cybergeddon, they describe three types of cyber war:

Limited stealth operations (LSO), as Chinese, Russian, and others, use Cyber War techniques to support espionage efforts.
Cyber War only (CWO), which is the open use of a full range of Cyber War weapons.
Cyber War in support of a conventional war.

To date, our experiences have been fairly limited. The one version of a CWO they cited was when Russia nearly shut down Estonia's national internet structure over the Estonian's removal of a Word War II statue. In this case, Estonia tried to invoke the NATO mutual-defense pact. NATA cyber war experts were actually dispatched to Estonia, but then the attacks stopped.

The sobering news is that the United States is said to be the most exposed to cyber war attack, because we use the internet more than any other country (what about South Korea?). According to the article, the so-called "good news" is that a major attack risks becoming the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, which led to an enraged response.

Oh, brave new world!

Yes, We Should

2009-01-21T08:58:00.003-05:00

Excerpt from Obama's inaugural address:

"For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do."

And on technology:

"Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age. Let's set high standards for our schools and give them the resources they need to succeed. Let's recruit a new army of teachers, and give them better pay and more support in exchange for more accountability. Let's make college more affordable, and let's invest in scientific research, and let's lay down broadband lines through the heart of inner cities and rural towns all across America."

-- Barack Obama, Springfield, IL
February 10 ,2007

Woman blames Dell (and not herself) for missing online classes

2009-01-16T08:25:00.008-05:00

WKOWTV.com from Madison, Wisonsin, had a story about a college-aged woman who blames Dell for missing online classes.

Abbie Schubert said she was talked into buying the Dell computer with the Ubuntu Linux OS, being told that "Ubuntu was great, college students loved it, (and) it was compatible with everything" that she needed.

Unfortunately, Abbie apparently knew very little about both computers and about getting technical support. She couldn't load her Verizon high-speed internet CD, so she couldn't access the internet. And she could not install Microsoft Word, which she claimed was a requirement for her Madison Area Technical College (MATC) online classes. Consequently, she said that she had to drop out of MATC's fall and spring semesters.

This story is so wrong in so many ways. First of all, I find it amazing that a college-aged person could be so clueless about computers. Is she Amish or something? As the story progresses, you learn that Verizon did indeed have support for Linux, and they dispatched a tech support person to help her get connected.

And MATC has reported said that it would accept any of her class work, regardless of what software she had installed. This comes as no big surprise to me, as my work in supporting online learning systems has shown that (unless you're working in a Microsoft Office-specific course) assignments are usually expected to be in the universally acceptable RTF format.

How is it that Schubert was so clueless about taking an online course. I looked at MATC's site, and was not surprised to find this verbiage about online learning:

Do I have access to the computer technology and a connection to the Internet?
Do I have basic computing skills?
Three credit classes may require 12 to 15 hours per week. Do I have the time to take class online?
Can I motivate myself to go to the virtual classroom at least five days a week?
Am I comfortable with my reading, writing and typing skills?
Am I easily frustrated by technology?

Perhaps she was suffering from delusions of adequacy when she read this. Or perhaps, more likely, she didn't read this at all.

Finally, I was not surprised but nonetheless saddened to read in the followup article that the poor girl was being verbally abused by legions of intolerant Ubuntu zealots. That's sad, because more good could have come if they'd offered their help and advice. As it stands, however, the story might have a happy ending, because Verizon and the school have both offered to help.

That's not surprising, however. I'll bet all Ms. Schubert had to do was ask someone.

Postscript: my respect for MACT's web site just plummeted. Check out the Technical Requirements page for their online courses. I'd like to see Internet Explorer 5.0 pass the Blackboard Browser Check! "Last Modified: January 30, 2007" indeed!

Farewell to the King

2009-01-08T09:07:00.005-05:00

A February 2009 VanityFair piece, Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House, by Cullen Murphy and Todd S. Purdum, ought to become required reading for future historians.

If you were to distill the gist from books such as Fiasco, Hubris, and The Republican War on Science, you would have the damningly concise chronology of the last, disastrous, eight years. This chronology is built upon the testimony of witnesses to these events:

White House communications director Dan Bartlett
German foreign minister Joschka Fischer
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and chief of staff to Colin Powell
chief White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke
Canadian foreign minister Bill Graham
David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives

...the list goes on and on.

As if I needed further evidence, this article hammers home the incredibly malevolent effect that Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have had upon this country.

Your own reading of this account will doubtlessly leave you with your own conclusions. The authors chose to end their piece with a quote from Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign, Matthew Dowd:

"You know, the headline in his presidency will be missed opportunity. That is the headline, ultimately. It’s missed opportunity, missed opportunity."

For me, however, it was encapsulated by the words of David Kuo, who was one of administration's disillusioned faith-based players. Now understanding how the evangelicals had been manipulated, Kuo speaks about Karl Rove's master plan of a "permanent Republican majority:"

It’s kind of like the Tower of Babel. At a certain point in time, God smites hubris. You knew that right around the time people started saying there’s going to be a permanent Republican majority—that God kinda goes, No, I really don’t think so.

Thank god.

Lessons from a Mouse

2009-01-07T21:41:00.003-05:00

For weeks, I have been plagued by mouse problems with my computer. Whenever I used the mouse to highlight and select text, the text that I had selected would often deselect itself. I couldn't just pick a sentence or a phrase and select it for operation. It didn't matter what web browser or text editor I was using.

I had reached my limit today and began Googling for a solution. Since I'm running Vista, and I have an Logitech bluetooth cordless mouse, I tried various permutations around those words.

It was surprising that I had found so many potential hits. A great many of them seemed to revolve around specific issues with Microsoft Word, but Word was not really the issue for me, although text selection with Word was just as bad as any other application.

Following some ideas that I'd gotten from a few applicable postings, I:

installed new mouse drivers, specifically for Logitech. My old driver was an out-of-the-box Microsoft driver;
experimented with enabling and disabling the Vista Aero theme in the mouse styles;
replaced the batteries in the wireless mouse;
swapped mice.

It was only when I had swapped back to an old cord-based laser mouse that I was able to perform text selection normally.

There are some lessons here. The first thing that I learned is that some search word choices turn out to be irrelevant: this wasn't a Vista problem. The biggest lesson was in my reluctance to consider this to be a hardware problem.

Interestingly, I had given up on using a different Logitech cordless mouse within the past year because of pointing problems that I was having. It was another Logitech bluetooth mouse (I just found it, sitting on a shelf).

I think I'm through with Logitech cordless mice. They've always ended up giving me grief, especially with regard to battery life and my not being able to easily tell when crappy performance was the direct result of dying batteries. Now that mouse balls are more or less a thing of the past, it seems that the failure point of a mouse might be in that wireless connectivity. I'm going back to a chord -- and I don't think it's going to be a Logitech this time.

No big whoop

2008-11-12T08:52:00.002-05:00

I installed Vista on my home desktop about a month ago.
Some random observations...

While searching for drivers for my CHAINTECH AV-710 soundcard, I acquired a trojan within the first 10 minutes of operation.
It took several tries acquiring and installing the drivers for my somewhat dated Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 personal video recorder card. Tip: get the hcwclear.exe program.
My institutionally supported copy of Symantec crippled my computer every time it tried to run a system scan. Only recourse was to disable that feature.
I couldn't implement the Aero feature of Vista until I shut down the security camera software on my Logitech WiLife. Once Aero was enabled, the WiLife monitor worked ok.
Aero is incompatible with the recording function of my Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250. The WinTV program crashes every time.

I know there's more, but this is all I can remember at the moment.
Vista? It's no big whoop.

My mess says that I'm liberal

2008-10-16T08:21:00.002-04:00

Apparently, even long before my politics had swung to the liberal, my lifestyle was screaming it for me.

According to a ScientificAmerican article online, Political Science: What Being Neat or Messy Says about Political Leanings, some researchers think that they can tell someone's politial affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms.

I'm not sure about the metrics behind this study, but a casual stroll around cubesville belies this theory.

Secret of my success

2008-10-14T13:32:00.002-04:00

A first-of-its-kind study at UCLA finds that computer-savvy middle-aged adults who search the internet are actually stimulating and improving their brain function.

"Our most striking finding was that Internet searching appears to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that is not activated during reading — but only in those with prior Internet experience," said Small, who is also the director of UCLA's Memory and Aging Research Center.

In fact, researchers found that during Web searching, volunteers with prior experience registered a twofold increase in brain activation when compared with those with little Internet experience. The tiniest measurable unit of brain activity registered by the fMRI is called a voxel. Scientists discovered that during Internet searching, those with prior experience sparked 21,782 voxels, compared with only 8,646 voxels for those with less experience.

Compared with simple reading, the Internet's wealth of choices requires that people make decisions about what to click on in order to pursue more information, an activity that engages important cognitive circuits in the brain.

Take that, whippersnappers.

A Real Commander In Chief?

2008-10-09T09:02:00.002-04:00

An essay that I had read, which compares the respective transition team efforts between Obama and McCain, got me to thinking about just how different those two people could be.

In synopsis, "Obama has organized an elaborate well-staffed network to prepare for his possible ascension to the White House, while Sen. John McCain has all but put off such work until after the election." Further,

The Arizona Senator has instructed his team to not spend time on the transition effort, according to the source, both out of a desire to have complete focus on winning the election as well as a superstitious belief that the campaign shouldn't put the cart before the horse.

I think it's a little bit ironic that McCain, the self-styled "military expert," is looking only at the battle but does not have any plans for long-term occupation. Perhaps this explains why McCain had graduated fifth from the bottom — 894th out of a class of 899 — from the naval academy.

Draw your own parallels.

Open Letter to the American People

2008-09-29T08:32:00.003-04:00

Text of Open Letter to the American People (PDF), published on September 25, 2008.

This year's presidential election is among the most significant in our nation's history. The country urgently needs a visionary leader who can ensure the future of our traditional strengths in science and technology and who can harness those strengths to address many of our greatest problems: energy, disease, climate change,
security, and economic competitiveness.

We are convinced that Senator Barack Obama is such a leader, and we urge you to join us in supporting him.

During the administration of George W. Bush, vital parts of our country's scientific enterprise have been
damaged by stagnant or declining federal support. The government's scientific advisory process has been distorted by political considerations. As a result, our once dominant position in the scientific world has been shaken and our prosperity has been placed at risk. We have lost time critical for the development of new
ways to provide energy, treat disease, reverse climate change, strengthen our security, and improve our economy.

We have watched Senator Obama's approach to these issues with admiration. We especially applaud his emphasis during the campaign on the power of science and technology to enhance our nation's competitiveness. In particular, we support the measures he plans to take – through new initiatives in education and training, expanded research funding, an unbiased process for obtaining scientific advice, and an appropriate balance of basic and applied research – to meet the nation's and the world's most urgent needs.

Senator Obama understands that Presidential leadership and federal investments in science and technology are crucial elements in successful governance of the world's leading country. We hope you will join us as we work together to ensure his election in November.

The letter is signed by 61 Nobel Prize recipients.

Scientific explanation for Red States

2008-09-18T08:06:00.002-04:00

The Voice of Bad Science, an article by Ben Rothke, says what I've believed all along -- that Americans are dumber than a sack of hair.

... Americans are woefully uneducated in the rudiments of basic science. This ignorance makes these types of consumers prey for supplement companies. The fact that tens of millions of American’s believe in government conspiracies, Bigfoot and Roswell are dubious signs. Lawrence Krauss writes in “Stop the Flying Saucer, I Want to Get Off” that “mountains of statistics suggest that the public is far more susceptible to scientific nonsense than political nonsense. More than half of Americans are unaware that the earth orbits the sun and takes a year to do it”.

Although the article is ostensibly about radio advertising, I can't help but draw parallels to why there are so many John McCain supporters or why there are so many dittoheads.

Virtual telescope yields virtual image

2008-09-04T09:26:00.003-04:00

A scientific consortium has managed to zoom in on the super-massive black hole, Sagittarius A* , which is at the center of our galaxy.

The astronomers linked together radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California to create a virtual telescope more than 2,800 miles across that is capable of seeing details more than 1,000 times finer than the Hubble Space Telescope.

According to the article in e! Science News, the 2,800-mile angular resolution has the ability to actually see the event horizon of the black hole -- the point where nothing, even light, can escape.

I was somewhat disappointed that there weren't any pictures of the event horizon, so I've posted my own close-up image.

One Candidate on Science and Technology

2008-09-02T08:53:00.002-04:00

Back on January 10, I had mentioned Sciencedebate 2008, which hoped to get the presidential candidate to weigh in on science and technology issues.

So far, only Barack Obama has stepped up to the plate. John McCain, however, is said that he intends to respond.

Scientists and Engineers for America has more on this issue.

Why they're hot

2008-08-12T12:57:00.003-04:00

A EurekaAlert.org piece, New research reveals why chili peppers are hot, offers an interesting evolutionary explanation as to why chili peppers are hot.

Conventional thought says that the fruit of a plant is tasty so that animals will eat and disperse the seeds. Chili peppers are sort of an exception to this rule. The current theory, which is based upon research on wild chili plants in Bolivia, indicates that the capsaicin in a chili evolved to protect the seeds from Fusarium infections. Fusarium, a fungus that invades fruits through wounds, is a leading cause of seed mortality.

At higher elevations, where moisture is high and Fusarium fungus is rampant, the scientists found that 100 percent of the plants produced hot chilies. In the drier lowlands, where fungus is less of a problem, only 40 percent of the plants produced fiery fruits. The remainder spent more resources developing thick seed coats, which protect against the devastating ant populations common to lower areas.

Capsaicin in chilies, one of the first plants domesticated in the New World, may have been used to protect human food from microbial attack long before refrigeration or artificial preservatives were available. So habanero peppers must be nature's super preservative.

Does Word 2008 Suck?

2008-08-01T08:59:00.004-04:00

I've been using the new Microsoft Office 2008 Suite for well over a year, and I've been of several minds about it. My first reaction was one of dislike -- the new interface just didn't do it for me. Although I've since adjusted to it, I still thrash around looking for some commands. Styles, which I thought I knew pretty well, also threw me for a loop in the new version.

After producing some documents in Word 2008, however, I grew to like some of the improvements, such as the improved way of working with header and footers.

Recently, however, I was helping a student with his 670-page Master's thesis, which was produced in Word 2003. I couldn't open (or thought I couldn't) his file in Word 2008. My next-cube-neighbor couldn't either, but he could open it using Office 2008 on his Mac laptop. So, he created a 2008-combatible (i.e., docx) file for me, and I got the same results. It really turned out that the file could load -- it just took 17 minutes to actually open!

In an experiment, I used VMware to open another XP session within my current one. I have Office 2003 installed under that session. Despite all of the inherent disadvantages of running Office under a virtual machine, Word 2003 was able to open it almost instantly.

Making a long story short, I think that Word 2008 had a real problem with the styles that the student was using. Most of his styles were variations of the normal tag, and I've read on Woody's that this type of "direct formatting in very large documents usually causes corruption."

Apparently this corruption only flummoxes Word 2008.

Dispatch from the Taliban Nation

2008-07-28T12:21:00.003-04:00

In a bit of belated reading, I came across a March 6, 2008, item from gallup.com. Do Muslims Want Democracy and Theocracy? is an excerpt from the book Who Speaks for Islam?

The book is the product of a mammoth six-year study in which the Gallup Organization conducted tens of thousands of hour-long, face-to-face interviews with residents of more than 35 predominantly Muslim nations — urban and rural, young and old, men and women, educated and illiterate. It asks the questions everyone is curious about: Why is the Muslim world so anti-American? Who are the extremists? Is democracy something Muslims really want? What do Muslim women want? The answers to these and other pertinent, provocative questions are provided not by experts, extremists, or talking heads, but by empirical evidence — the voices of a billion Muslims.

So, when asked about democracy, most Muslims want a democracy, but one based upon Sharia, which is a code of law based on the Koran.

In only a few countries, such as Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, do the majority want Sharia to be the only source of legislation.

Interestingly, a 2006 Gallup Poll in the US finds that a majority of Americans want the Bible as a source of legislation.

Forty-six percent of Americans say that the Bible should be "a" source, and 9% believe it should be the "only" source of legislation.
Perhaps even more surprising, 42% of Americans want religious leaders to have a direct role in writing a constitution, while 55% want them to play no role at all. These numbers are almost identical to those in Iran.

Welcome to the Taliban Nation. Leave your sandals at the door.

Life in strange places

2008-07-27T12:02:00.003-04:00

In Cosmos, The Science of Everything, Lauren Monaghan's article, Silent Spring, tells a strange tale of mutating fungi found in Ukraine's Chernobyl number four reactor.

Back in 1999, scientists had sent a robot inside to survey the reactor. The robot returned with samples of a particularly black fungi, indicating an abundance of the biological pigment melanin.

Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York, thought that the presence of the melanin might be significant. Melanin is typically associated with 'protective' properties. Melanin in skin, for example, absorbs and safely transforms different electromagnetic wavelengths, such as DNA-damaging ultraviolet light.

In an experiment scientist analyzed three different types of fungi, including Cladosporium sphaerospermum, the species abundant in and around Chernobyl. Using ionizing radiation from the radioactive isotope, cesium-137, they exposed the fungi to radiation doses similar to those inside the damaged reactor.

Melanin-containing fungi exposed to the radiation – even when deliberately starved of nutrients – grew significantly larger and up to 2.5 times faster than fungi without melanin and those not exposed to radiation.

Even though the melanin-containing fungus was starved of typical fungus nutrients, it prospered. Although still a tentative hypothesis, the evidence indicates that the melanin might be converting radiation into nutrients for the fungus, somewhat like how chlorophyll converts sunlight into energy for a higher plant. If true, this is astounding.

This is like the discovery of chemosynthesis around hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean. In the deep, dark ocean, a bacteria was found to metabolize hydrogen sulfide given off by the vents. A relatively diverse ecosystem (organisms such as shrimp, crabs, tube worms) was found to exist entirely upon the bacteria.

If it could happen there, perhaps it is possible that life could similarly evolve around a food chain fueled by radiation.

Worms are playing a new tune

2008-07-18T12:09:00.002-04:00

An InfoWorld article today, New worm transcodes MP3s to try to infect PCs, reports on the appearance of a nasty little worm.

The worm, designated by Kaspersky as "Worm.Win32.GetCodec.a," takes advantage of Microsoft's Advanced Systems Format filetype for audio and video streams. If you play an infected file in that format, it prompts you to download a codec. Instead of the codec, however, you're downloading and installing a Trojan horse, which installs a proxy program that allows hackers to route other traffic through your PC.

Once it takes off, the worm will look for other MP3 files on your system,transcode them to Microsoft's WMA format, wrap them in an ASF container and then add links to more copies of the worm.

Kaspersky says:

Unlike earlier Trojans, which used the WMA format only to mask their presence on the system (i.e., the infected objects were not music files), this worm infects audio files. According to Kaspersky Lab virus analysts, this is the first such case. The likelihood of a successful attack is increased because most users trust their audio files and do not associate them with possible infections. It should be noted that the file on the counterfeit web page is digitally signed by Inter Technologies and is identified by www.usertrust.com, the resource that issued the digital signature, as trusted.

As Dr. Raymond Stantz would say, "This is a really nasty one!"

Moo On Over Greenhouse Gasses

2008-07-15T08:27:00.005-04:00

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam,
and I'll give you a whole lot of gas.

PHYSORG.com reports on a study by scientists at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology in Argentina. By attaching plastic balloons to the backs of cows and running collection tubes from their stomachs, scientists were surprised to find that a standard cow produces between 800 to 1,000 liters of "emissions" (mostly methane) each day.

Why do this?

Well, if you must know, methane is 23 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

The misguided scientists are now studying how changes in a cow's diet can reduce the amount of methane. It seems to me that capturing and using the methane as an alternative fuel would make a whole lot more sense. I'm studying this myself, and I'll give you an update on my findings.... as soon as I can get my feet back on the ground.

Musical Monday - Putin on the Ritz

2008-07-14T08:32:00.005-04:00

A well-done musical parody, featuring Bush and Putin (my two favorite sub-humans).
Some little pop-up ads appear at the bottom of the play screen -- you can X out of them.

(A tip of the hat to Marta for sharing this with me.)

A Sure Thing?

2008-07-11T14:43:00.002-04:00

I remember having to do a history paper back when I was in the fourth grade. The title of my paper was Phoenicia, Land of the Arts. I illustrated it in an old-fashioned cut 'n paste style, with illustrations from old National Geographic magazines. In an inspired burst of creativity, I made the title page and headers out of assorted fonts and letters that I also clipped from magazines -- the colorful ransom letter effect worked well with my subject matter. It was a well-deserved "A," IMHO.

Some time later, when I had another paper to do, I used the same ransom note technique on the title page. I don't remember the paper topic or the grade, but I remember that it didn't go over that well a second time. Maybe if it had been another teacher...

The point (you're surprised that I have one?) of this anecdote is that it has a certain similarity to recent political activity. In the last presidential election, a lot of political hay was made of John Kerry's flip-flopping.

I Actually Did Vote for the $87 Billion, Before I voted Against It

Well, hey, it worked in 2004. Let's try it again. So John McCain supporters are making ham-fisted attempts at painting opponent Barack Obama as a flip-flopper on Iraq troop withdrawal (or anything else that might work, for that matter). I guess that this tiresome recycling of the "tried-and-true" is second nature for a conservative.

While we are at it, perhaps Obama has a Dukakis/Willie Horton-style spectre that we can raise.

Really, I'm only kidding.

Academic Freedom is Just Another Word

2008-07-10T09:59:00.004-04:00

A July 9 New Scientist article, New legal threat to teaching evolution in the US, warns that "Intelligent Design" is once again worming its way back into education. Although Intelligent Design received a legal trouncing in Dover, Pennsylvania, back in 2005, the folks behind it have been hard at work putting new lipstick on that pig.

On the heels of Ben Stein's 2008 movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the new wedge issue has become academic freedom. But this isn't the academic freedom that grants academics the ability to do research and publish, it is the freedom to legislate that high school teachers must teach "the controversy" and "critical thinking skills."

Yes, I can see where one's belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible goes hand-in-hand with the exercise of one's critical thinking skills.

It's sobering to hear (actually, it makes me want to do a double) that the governor of Louisiana, who is a strong supporter of this bold new interpretation of academic freedom, is on the short list as a potential vice presidential nominee for John McCain. Praise the Lord and pass the snakes!

Left Behind -- and loving it

2008-06-11T11:10:00.004-04:00

A fool and their $40 are soon parted -- the $40 will get left behind.

You've got to love this concept: a web site, http://www.youvebeenleftbehind.com, has been established for the purpose of getting one last message to the lost (at a time when they might just be willing to hear it for the first and last time).

Programmed and run by Christians, for Christians, this site will store your message to the unsaved and automatically release it to them six days after the rapture. The rapture will have officially occurred when three of the web site's five-member team fails to log in over a three-day period. A "deadman's switch," if you will. Another three days are given to failsafe any false triggering of the system.

For a modest $40 per year fee, God-fearing Christians can store up to 250 MB of documents and have a message sent to up to 62 individual email addresses.

The "Why" is simple. After the rapture, the Christians who have left the rest of us behind will have one last chance to bring us to Christ and snatch us from the flames.

Hitting 'em where it hurts

2008-04-09T12:09:00.002-04:00

The real reason why Australia has recently ended its ten-year opposition to the Kyoto Protocol: Climate change to impact beer.

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND — The price of beer is likely to rise in coming decades because climate change will hamper the production of a key grain needed for the brew — especially in Australia, a scientist warned Tuesday.

Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.

2008-03-27T08:14:00.003-04:00

The March 26 NewScientist online article, Beer bellies may double the risk of dementia, fires a deadly round in the senseless War on Beer. ™

The article states that fat build-ups around the waist during middle age may cause dementia decades later. That's just friggin' wonderful. On the one hand, beer consumption is linked to decreased cancers and on the other hand you'll be too out of it to know you're healthy. Can it suck any more than this? <--- (rhetorical question)

Researchers next need to study the impact that the molecules released by body fat have on the brain. If Whitmer's hypothesis proves right, the conclusions could be disturbing – those beer bellies may be silently damaging the brain, long before old age sets in.

Game over man... Game over!

Of Scientists, Beer, and Statistics

2008-03-26T09:40:00.004-04:00

A March 18 New York Times Science section article, For Scientists, a Beer Test Shows Results as a Litmus Test, by Carol Kaesuk Yoon, says that the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher.

The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

Oh dear, you might think. This study is rock-solid. The author of the study is Dr. Tomas Grim, an ornithologist at Palacky University in the Czech Republic. Grim's study, however, only looked at fellow ornithologists in the Czech Republic.

Some scientists suggest that biologists in the Czech Republic could prove to be an anomaly, given that the country has a special relationship to beer, boasting the highest rate of beer consumption on earth.
More important, as Dr. Grim pointed out, the study documents a correlation between beer drinking and scientific performance without explaining why they are correlated. That leaves open the possibility that it is not beer drinking that causes poor scientific performance, but just the opposite.
Or, as Dr. Mike Webster, an ornithologist and a beer enthusiast at Washington State University in Pullman, said, maybe “those with poor publication records are drowning their sorrows.”

All of this provides a classic example of how one must be careful to draw conclusions from any correlation.

Interestingly, the online article also had a sidebar link to an older (Dec. 14, 2004) article, which extolled the virtues of beer-drinking among geologists. Perhaps the poncy Czech bird-watchers are truly an anomaly.

Windows XP Users are Revolting

2008-03-25T15:23:00.003-04:00

An interesting article in Computer Word, titled Windows XP: Going, going ... gone? talks about the twilight days of Windows XP.

One of the things that makes it interesting is that it speaks of "an incipient consumer rebellion." In the short history of computing, consumers couldn't get their updates fast enough. The product life-cycle was born, and Microsoft wallowed in profits. And Bill Gates said "It is good."

But then something happened. Windows Vista, with its demand for high-end hardware, and the difficult support for legacy hardware and applications, left consumers wanting... to stick with Windows XP.

Normally, when a new Microsoft OS makes it into production, the old OS would hit the dust bins after a couple of years. Interestingly, however, after consumer versions of Vista went on sale in January 2007, four months later companies like Dell were once again selling the majority of their machines with XP. This consumer rebellion subsequently prompted Microsoft to revise its product life cycle, and extend the freshness date of Windows XP a little longer.

Ah, but that Windows Genuine Advantage that you so willingly undertook to protect yourself from running pirated software is now going to bite you. Somewhere in that license agreement that you failed to read is a clause that says that there is a limit to the number of times you can activate your XP license on new hardware. Gotcha, sucker. This is a slight variation on the carrot & stick approach -- if you don't go after that juicy expensive carrot that's being dangled in front of you, then you get jammed from behind by the stick.

Health News I Can Use

2008-03-20T08:20:00.004-04:00

I would normally be skeptical of a news report from a conservative, Republican-leaning publisher like NewsMax.com. However, sometimes a news item just feels right, and one must trust that it is legitimate. Such is the case with the March 18 story, Beer Fights Cancer, by Sylvia Booth Hubbard.

According to unnamed researchers at an undisclosed location, the chemical compound xanthohumol, which occurs naturally in hops, has been shown to be toxic to several kinds of human cancer, including prostate, ovarian, breast, and colon. It is said that beers that contain the most hops, such as ale, stout, and porter -- the darker the beer, the better -- provide the most benefits.

Quite frankly, I'm not about to wait for hop-based herbal supplements to hit the local markets. I'm going to renew my prophylactic treatments right after work tonight -- the natural way, as god intended.

Spamalot

2008-03-18T08:47:00.004-04:00

Pity the poor spammer who's trying to ply his trade to an increasingly jaded audience. Maybe it's time that they took a tip from pharmaceutical companies and began combining their products. Is the market ready for a Hoodia-Viagra combo drug? If you're going to lose all that weight, you may as well plan on doing something, right?

Dear Sir:
I have been requested by the Nigerian National Viagra Manufacturing Company to contact you for assistance in resolving a matter. The Nigerian National Viagra Manufacturing Company has recently concluded a large number of contracts for production facilities in the sub-Sahara region, where we've merged with the leading national Hoodia grower. The contracts have immediately produced moneys equalling US $40,000,000. The Nigerian National Viagra Manufacturing Company is desirous of selling our product in other parts of the world, however, because of certain regulations of the Nigerian Government, it is unable to move these funds to another region.
Your assistance is requested as a non-Nigerian citizen to assist the Nigerian National Viagra Manufacturing Company, and also the Central Bank of Nigeria, in moving this product out of Nigeria. If the funds can be transferred to your name, in your United States account, then you can forward the funds as directed by the Nigerian National Viagra Manufacturing Company. In exchange for your accomodating services, the Nigerian National Viagra Manufacturing Company would agree to allow you to retain 10%, or US $4 million of this amount (payment to be made in the form of our new combination drug, Hoodia Love).
However, to be a legitimate transferee of these moneys according to Nigerian law, you must presently be a depositor of at least US $100,000 in a Nigerian bank which is regulated by the Central Bank of Nigeria...

High up on the Mountain

2008-03-05T09:00:00.005-05:00

An item cited on Yahoo! News, Moses was high on drugs: Israeli researcher, has an Israeli space cadet/professor of cognitive psychology saying that he's been there and done that himself -- talk to God, that is.

Benny Shanon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says that Moses was probably high when he saw the "burning bush." Citing his own experiences with South American psychotropics, Shanon thinks that Moses might have been drinking a concoction based on bark of the acacia tree, which is frequently mentioned in the Bible. It's also an ingredient in Fresca and Barq's Root Beer. Of course, smoking Acacia bark is also thought to keep demons and ghosts away, so God was not likely in his/her Holy Ghost incarnation. One variety of the plant is also good for treating premature ejaculation. Moses did have a thing with his staff, didn't he?

The Devil is in the Minutia

2008-02-26T13:01:00.006-05:00

To see the devil in a grain of sand,
and to see heaven in a wildflower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour.
Apologies to William Blake

According to a recent survey of Americans' attitudes about nanotechnology, only 29.5 percent think that nanotechnology is morally acceptable. This amazing factoid is written up on ScienceDaily.com.

The godless European nations,

United Kingdom: 54.1 percent
Germany: 62.7 percent
France: 72.1 percent

are much more enlightened, it seems.

In presenting his paper to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of life sciences communication, went on to say that Americans' concern about nanotechnology is not a matter of ignorance. The respondents are said to be well-informed about nanotechnology and its potential benefits.

"They still oppose it," he says. "They are rejecting it based on religious beliefs."

God help us.

A Night at the Firefox

2008-02-15T14:25:00.002-05:00

(re: the weird title -- sorry, I don't use the Opera browser)

Or a short history of clicking

Appologies for the weirdness of titles, but it's Friday afternoon and I'm feeling puckish.

I subscribe to Daily Rotation, a site that tracks feeds from a host of technolgy sites on the web. It's user-customizable, and one of my monitoring choices is del.icio.us hotlist. That site in turn pointed me to a piece on CollegeDegree.com titled 60+ Killer Open Courseware Collections for Web Designers. Are you still with me? Good stuff there, which led me to looking around a bit more, when I noticed another one of their feature pieces, 99 Resources to Research & Mine the Invisible Web. More good stuff here, all worthy of a bookmark.

At this point, web page wanderlust kicked into gear, and I tried their link for Top 25 Strangest College Courses. What's amusing about this list is that it featured two items from Alfred University, my old Elmer Mater:

Tightwaddery, or The good life on a dollar a day: Alfred University's demonstratively anti-capitalist course attempts to debunk contemporary culture's popular myth: "Spend money and you’ll be happy." According to the official class description, "On a theoretical level, we will consider how living frugally benefits your mind, your body, your relationships, your community, and the environment. On a practical level, we will examine personal spending habits [and] sharpen bargain-hunting rip-off-detecting, and haggling skills." While they're at it, maybe they can help drive down gas prices?
Maple Syrup: The Real Thing: Alfred University makes this list twice with its now famous course, Maple Syrup: The Real Thing. The course description reads, "the method of producing maple syrup is one of the things in our society that has endured even in today's culture of constant change," which is why it deserves an entire semester of attention and dissection. Students mustn't worry though, as the course comes with a neat disclaimer: "No prior experience expected."

Wow! When I was there in the early part of the 70s, Alfred used to feature a mini-semester during the month of January, when more sensible people took extended winter breaks. These "Allenterms," as they were called, were required for two of your four (or more) years. My two Allenterms were

a study of Lichens - running around in the dead of winter to collect and classify one of nature's strange and misunderstood life forms. "It's an algae. It's a fungus. No, it's both in one!"
"Tolkein and the Medieval Fantasy" - a reading of J.R.R. Tolkein's seminal fantasy trilogy.

Ah, such a stroll down memory lane.

Yeah, it's a sign all right

2008-02-07T08:38:00.000-05:00

Reality can be strange.

I'm still on as an adjunct with my old employer, Fairmont State College, so I continue to get faculty announcements. Yesterday's made me do a double-take:

Subject: Deaf GLBT

Hello Everyone,

Our department, Disability Office and the Gay-Straight Alliance organization are very excited to invite you to attend a presentation by Ray Luczak on “The Deaf GLBT Community: Then and Now.”

The link to the information: http://www.fairmontstate.edu/images/userImages/tchiba/Page_4345/rayluczak.

I suspect that this is a very small niche market for a small state university. No doubt, they could hold their meetings in a tiny room -- say a closet.

Yeah, it's a sign, all right - "Going out of business."
Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) in Ghostbusters.

Today's financial news

2008-02-01T10:30:00.000-05:00

Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion

Stubbonrness is in the Genes

2008-01-28T08:59:00.000-05:00

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig think they may have found a genetic basis for "stubbornness." A single genetic mutation, called the A1 mutation, is apparently found in approximately one-third of the the population.

The biochemical theory behind this mutation is that it reduces the amount of dopamine receptors in the brain. Dopamine plays a key role in the learning process, the feeling of pleasure, and in motivation and reward. "Motivation and reward" in this case is interpreted as "learning to repeat behaviors that maximize rewards."

The scientists tested a group of 26 men, asking them to select one of two symbols. Each selection was followed by positive (smiley face) or negative (frowny face) feedback. Brain imaging, which was being conducted while the men took the test, showed that the group of men carrying the A1 mutation had diminished neurological activity in the posterior medial frontal cortex, an area of the brain involved in monitoring errors.

As a casual observer of obvious phenomenon, I cannot help but wonder if the A1 mutation has a similarity to one of the more famously documented X-linked mutations -- hemophilia. Without another un-mutated X chromosome as a buffer against stupidity, the male gets the full brunt of the A1 mutation.

Compare the chart on the left with the family tree of George Walker Bush. It could explain how a profound case of diminished neurological activity could manifest itself itself in our current president, yet be relatively benign in his brother, Jeb Bush.

GW's mother, Barbara, is doubtlessly a carrier. Her mother, Pauline Robinson, died when her father's car slammed into a stone while while he was supposedly trying to stop a cup of coffee from sliding about (she was a passenger in the car, and not in front of the stone wall). While this isn't the legendary mushroom cloud for stubbornness, it could be construed as a smoking gun for diminished neurological activity.

I'll need to further investigate this matter.

Bright Lights, Big Sneezes

2008-01-17T12:45:00.000-05:00

I've read about the photic sneeze reflex before -- it is something that I am very familiar with. Now Scientific American has weighed in with their article, Looking at the Sun Can Trigger a Sneeze. They're telling me that I have my wiring crossed:

A sneeze is usually triggered by an irritation in the nose, which is sensed by the trigeminal nerve, a cranial nerve responsible for facial sensation and motor control. This nerve is in close proximity to the optic nerve, which senses, for example, a sudden flood of light entering the retina. As the optic nerve fires to signal the brain to constrict the pupils, the theory goes, some of the electrical signal is sensed by the trigeminal nerve and mistaken by the brain as an irritant in the nose. Hence, a sneeze.

I believe this. The effect of sunlight does feel like an irritation in my nose. According to the article, 10 to 35 percent of the population are photic sneezers. It is said to be an autosomal-dominant trait that can be inherited from either parent.

The article hints that it's an embarrassing trait. Perhaps. It's also terrifying at times. Imagine being in fast, heavy traffic and having a violent, seven-sneeze fit. :-(

Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst syndrome, or, ACHOO!

Subordinate science and reason to faith

2008-01-17T08:17:00.000-05:00

Nobody wants the Inquisition!

Pope Benedict XVI, a.k.a. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is not a wanted man in Italy.

Sixty-seven professors and researchers at Rome's La Sapienza university's physics department, as well as (free) radical students, joined in the call for the pope to stay away on Thursday, the start of the university's academic year. They fault the intellectual, conservative and tradition-minded pope for a series of positions he has taken that they say "subordinate science and reason to faith."

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi condemned the professors and students for "intolerance" towards the pontiff, who has said that Galileo had it coming: "The concrete consequences of the turning point Galileo represents... a very direct path that leads from Galileo to the atomic bomb."

“Once the relativity of movement is taken for granted, an ancient human and Christian system of reference has no right to interference in astronomic calculations and their heliocentric simplification; however, it has the right to remain faithful to its method of preserving the earth in relation to human dignity, and to order the world with regard to what will happen and what has happened in the world.”

I'm not sure how this bit of enlightenment jibes with the words of papal legate Arnaud-Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, who learnedly counseled “Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own.”

The Vinyl Solution

2008-01-14T13:40:00.000-05:00

I was amazed to read a Time.com article, Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back, by Kristina Dell. It says that LP record albums are making a bit of a comeback, with one company,Warner Music Group, showing a 30% increase in LP sales last year.

The article cites three primary reasons: sound quality, extra material, and socializing.

Sound quality -- LPs generally exhibit a warmer, more nuanced sound than CDs and digital downloads. MP3 files tend to produce tinnier notes, especially if compressed into a lower-resolution format that pares down the sonic information. "Most things sound better on vinyl, even with the crackles and pops and hisses," says MacRunnel, the young Missouri record collector.

Album extras -- Large album covers with imaginative graphics, pullout photos (some even have full-size posters tucked in the sleeve) and liner notes are a big draw for young fans. "Alternative rock used to have 16-page booklets and album sleeves, but with iTunes there isn't anything collectible to show I own a piece of this artist," says Dreese of Newbury Comics. In a nod to modern technology, albums known as picture discs come with an image of the band or artist printed on the vinyl. "People who are used to CDs see the artwork and the colored vinyl, and they think it's really cool," says Jordan Yates, 15, a Nashville-based vinyl enthusiast. Some LP releases even come with bonus tracks not on the CD version, giving customers added value.

Social experience -- Crowding around a record player to listen to a new album with friends, discussing the foldout photos, even getting up to flip over a record makes vinyl a more socially interactive way to enjoy music. "As far as a communal experience, like with family and friends, it feels better to listen to vinyl," says Jason Bini, 24, a recent graduate of Fordham University. "It's definitely more social."

The sound quality issue is a bit odd. A pristine record may sound wonderful, but the majority of goods you'll get used are going to be damaged goods -- dirty, scratchy records.

Now maybe it's my imagination, but I do think there's something to the "superior" sound argument on a clean record. I've been running my LPs through a stereo pre-amp to my PC's soundcard and then processing the files with some software. With the record noise removed, the raw files do have a richer, warmer sound to them.

The FBI's Prodigious Ineptitude & Other Snarks

2008-01-11T12:59:00.000-05:00

If I were snark hunting, I think I might have stumbled upon the national breeding ground and sanctuary.

Its location is in an Ars Technical piece, Unpaid bills lead phone companies to hang up on FBI wiretaps, by Ryan Paul.

According to a recent report by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), it seems that telephone companies have terminated FBI wiretaps and FBI surveillance lines because of chronically unpaid bills.

The OIG summary says that "late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence including an instance where delivery of intercept information required by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) order was halted due to untimely payment."

The FBI says that this did not significantly affect any of the cases. No doubt they were what the intelligence community calls "slam-dunks."

Here's a particularly fetching snark:

During the recent controversy over whether or not the phone companies should be granted retroactive immunity for their involvement in potentially illegal government surveillance, the Bush administration insisted that phone companies should not be punished for their patriotic cooperation in antiterrorism activities. Apparently that patriotism only lasts as long as the government can afford to foot the bill.

Ah, but don't stop here, dear reader. There be snark signs the likes of which god has not seen throughout this article.

Hoping They Will Take Debate

2008-01-10T08:26:00.000-05:00

"As you watched the scores of U.S. Presidential debates, did you ever wonder why there has been no debate devoted to policy surrounding what may be the most important social issue of our time: Science and Technology?"

Well, the folks at Sciencedebate2008 did, and they're trying to do something about it. Here are the topics they'd like to see addressed:

The Environment

Climate Change
Conservation and Species Loss
The Future of The Oceans
Fresh Water: Drought, Pollution, Ownership
Population Growth and Its Effect on Environment
Renewable Energy Research

Health and Medicine

Global Diseases and Pandemics
Stem Cell Research
Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria
Drug Patents, Generic Drugs
The Genome
Bioethics

Science and Technology Policy

Scientific Innovation and Economic Growth
Improving Science Education
Space Exploration
Preserving Scientific Integrity in Government
Energy Policy

Signatories for this project compose an impressive selection of laureates; government leaders; organization leaders; college and university presidents, deans and directors; leading scientists; and other thought leaders.

What will come of all of this? Will we really see such a debate? Ah, hope springs eternal. Realistically, however, I figure there would be a better probability we'll see an ecclesiastical debate.

Wanted, Dead and (Alive)

2008-01-09T09:06:00.000-05:00

Chinese inspectors: "Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking mice on this motherfucking plane!"

On a United Airlines flight to Beijing, Chinese inspectors found "Eight mice, dead and (alive), ... hidden in pillows."

The report prompted an "emergency team" to rush to the aircraft, Xinhua said, to "put rat poison and mouse traps at every possible corner on the aircraft, including the cockpit."

I suppose biological control in the form of rodent-eating snakes will be out of the question.

Perhaps one of the reasons that I'm amused by all of this is because someone has just pointed me to a site that has frame grabs of a Chinese version of a recent Star Wars film. Sub-titles are in Engrish. One cannot convey in a few words the inscrutable humor of Darth Vader saying "Do Not Want!" when he is actually shouting, "Nooooooooooooo..."

They have had it with these motherfu**ng lithium batteries

2008-01-04T08:05:00.000-05:00

With the safety and inconvenience of air travelers in mind, the Transportation Safety Administration kicked off the new year with a ban on spare lithium batteries on a plane. Could this be another movie spin-off for Samuel L. Jackson? I just can picture his character, Neville Flynn, saying "Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking lithium batteries on this motherfucking plane!"

The good news is that if you want to try to blow up the plane with your installed laptop battery, you're good to go.

BTW: It won't be long before the batteries come rolling in. Be sure to check eBay regularly for battery bargain madness.

Dearth of High Fidelity

2008-01-03T09:26:00.000-05:00

Robert Levine's Rolling Stone magazine online article, The Death of High Fidelity, is another good example of how music quality is diminishing in the age of MP3s. Citing This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession:

Human brains have evolved to pay particular attention to loud noises, so compressed sounds initially seem more exciting. But the effect doesn't last. "The excitement in music comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness," Levitin says. "If you hold one of those constant, it can seem monotonous." After a few minutes, research shows, constant loudness grows fatiguing to the brain. Though few listeners realize this consciously, many feel an urge to skip to another song.

It's sad to read that "newly re-mastered" music, such as Led Zeppelin's recent "Mothership" collection has been subjected to this form of audio compression. Not everything "new" is better. Here we're getting margarine for the ears.

When Everyone is a Criminal

2008-01-02T10:02:00.000-05:00

According to a December 30 article in washingtonpost.com, record industry goon squads are now going after people who make single, personal-use copies of music that they have legally purchased on CD. The case is against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who had a collection of approximately 2,000 music files on his personal computer.

As the article says, some of the legal grounds are murky. Court rulings in the past have "found no violation of copyright laws in the use of VCRs and other devices to time-shift TV programs," i.e., making personal copies for the purpose of making portable a legally obtained recording. Musically speaking, this practice goes way back to recording audio cassette backups of LP records. By these criteria, everyone is a pirate. Arrgh!^(TM)

Recording industry shills smugly point out that "there are consequences for breaking the law" -- even if that law was written by and paid for by the recording industry itself. There is a long history of stupid, immoral laws being on the books. If ever there were a situation to warrant jury nullification, this would certainly be one of them.

Update 1/3/08: Cnet's News.com reports that this story might be bogus. Washington Post, however, is sticking to the story.

When You're (a) 64

2007-12-10T14:10:00.000-05:00

Has it really been 25 years since the Commodore 64 has been introduced? A CNN.com Technology article, Commodore 64 still loved after all these years, says it's so. I'm one of the 17 million owners of one.

Most of my memories of the 64 are pleasant -- playing around with Basic and Assembler, starting my record collection database, going online at 300 baud, and watching my hair grow while waiting for a program to load off of the disk drive.

"Computer nostalgia is something that runs pretty deep these days. The memories that people have of this machine are incredible," McCracken (Harry McCracken, vice president and editor in chief of PC World -- no relation to Phill) said.

Twenty-five years ago computers were an individual experience; today they are just a commodity, he said.

"I don't think there are many computers today that we use that people will be talking about fondly 25 years from now."

Sadly, I think he's right.