September 30, 2003
MATTRACKS Rubber Track Conversion Systems
I just saw some astounding demos of this wheel replacement system on the History Channel's "Tactical to Practical": MATTRACKS Rubber Track Conversion Systems. Great gear!
The "Heinlein Prize" for space commercialization?
Just heard about this: "The Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize for Accomplishments in Commercial Space Activities":
The Heinlein Prize is a cash award of $500,000 to an individual or individuals for practical accomplishments in the field of commercial space activities.
I'm not sure if this is newsworthy or not. I can't find on their site what they mean by "practical accomplishments," and after a bit of searching in the obvious places, I still can't find out where they get their funding. But it's interesting, nonetheless.
I suggest the Heinlein Prize people be as specific in their mission as the people at the X Prize Foundation.
For those of us who fog: Visorgogs
I thought I was being clever over the last half year by avoiding buying the "cheap" laboratory safety visors from the campus bookstore. Today I gave in and bought a pair of "visorgogs" made by "Jones and Company" in East Providence, Rhode Island. $7. You see, until now, if I wanted to avoid completely fogging my goggles within minutes in the lab, I'd have to switch to a pair of expensive shooting glasses for relief. Yesterday was the last straw for me. Sitting at a bench in front of an analytical balance, I simply couldn't see anything. I asked around among the other students for a pair I could borrow, and was handed one of the "cheap" school pair... and wore it for 10 minutes with no fogging whatsoever. Yeah, my other goggles were actual goggles (the big problem, it turns out), supposedly vented, but the vents on these visorgogs actually worked for me.
I recommended them. By the way, I really did consider doing with my problem goggles what I usually do with a scuba mask - spread saliva in them as antifog - but there's no way I could have done that in the non-aquatic environment of the lab and gotten away with it. If I'd tried, there's no way the girls in my class would ever ask me for help ever again...
By the way, it seems that visorgogs are very popular amongst "ice bikers." Why am I surprised that such a hobby exists?
September 29, 2003
Quote of the Day
Libertarians tend to put more stock in "reason" than it warrants. Reason is - as best I can define it - the application of logic to a problem.
Preference, however, is not necessarily a problem, and therefore does not require a process of reason to "solve" for.
Thomas L. Knapp
Posted today on the smith2004-discuss mailing list
September 28, 2003
Sometimes it really pays off not to give up
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled on a small box of 4mm DAT tapes I'd used to backup an Irix (Silicon Graphics' version of UNIX) workstation 9 years ago. I'd forgotten about them. I had trouble trying to read them using an old SCSI Python DAT drive I set up in one of my Red Hat Linux boxes, but I was determined to give it a try anyway.
I joined the Red Hat general support mailing list and solicited opinions on the matter from other listmembers. I received no public reply, and only one private reply from a kind gentleman who offered to read my tapes for me on his personal Irix workstation (an offer I turned down with gratitude for his concern).
Everything I'd read to date seemed to indicate I was wasting my time trying to recover the tapes' contents, citing issues of byte order, block size determination, and related matters. I couldn't accept the general consensus, so I dug into the problem further. You see, before I was a college student, I was a software engineer. Before I was a software engineer, I worked in technical support. So, I am constitutionally unable to let go of what many would insist is a really difficult problem.
My bulldogging paid off: I recovered the files, and here's how I did it. I am, as always, available on a part-time basis to do this work for others: I could use the tuition money right about now...
Voltaire's Candide & the Plucked Chicken
I should have done this years ago, but I've only just now gotten around to reading Voltaire's Candide. I finished it in a few hours. It's pretty short: the actual text of the story embedded in the Daniel Gordon translation I have is 79 pages, surrounded by commentary and historiography. I'm going back through my marked-up copy of the text and looking into some of the parts I found most interesting. Near the end of Chapter 3 is this little gem:
A man who had never been baptized, a good Anabaptist named Jacques, saw the cruel and ignominious treatment inflicted on one of his fellows, a two-legged creature without feathers and with a soul [emphasis mine].
Does anyone else find this as funny as I do? One of my longstanding interests is philosophy, so I immediately recognized the reference. Here's one short account of the dispute between Plato and Diogenes on the nature of man:
Plato once defined man as a "featherless biped". When the philosopher Diogenes heard about Plato's definition, he presented his rival with a plucked chicken. "Here," he then declared, "is Plato's man!" [Plato then added "having broad nails" to his original definition.]
Priceless.
Quote of the Day
It is doubtful whether a man ever brings his faculties to bear with their full force on a subject until he writes upon it.
Cicero
September 27, 2003
Quote of the Day
We live in an age of fabulous technology - and crappy politics. Just like the Italian Renaissance, only with color TV.
L. Neil Smith
27 September 2003
September 26, 2003
"Whale Flatulence Captured in Photo"
Here's a term I would never, ever have thought up on my own: "fecal plume."
Quote of the Day
"Samizdata.net often makes references to the importance of the 'meta-context' in explaining and determining events around us. A question to consider: What would happen if the mainstream media were somehow forced to refer to Saddam's old regime by its own official title, which is The Arab National Socialist Party or Arab NAZI Party? What a thought…"
September 25, 2003
Macintosh Supercomputer Clusters?
This is something I'd never expected to hear, as much of a MacOS X fan as I am:
The Virginia Tech Mac supercomputer should be fully functional and in use by January 2004. It will be used for research into nanoscale electronics, quantum chemistry, computational chemistry, aerodynamics, molecular statics, computational acoustics and the molecular modeling of proteins.
I attended a small party (about 20 people) of mostly extropians up in Santa Cruz last weekend. It was interesting to hear several large scale systems administrators discuss their newly found preference for MacOS in the data center. These were former NetBSD/OpenBSD/FreeBSD diehards, and some Linuxheads.
Quote of the Day (thanks Steve)
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
Robert A. Heinlein
September 24, 2003
Quote of the Day
We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest of heads.
Voltaire
September 23, 2003
Quote of the Day
I have six honest serving men,
They taught me all I know;
Their names are 'what' and 'why' and 'when'
and 'who' and 'where' and 'how'.
Rudyard Kipling
September 22, 2003
Quote of the Day
Just one other note: it took years from the time AIDS was identified until there was a sequenced HIV genome. It took days from the time SARS was identified until there was a sequenced genome for the coronavirus at fault. Many people have become jaded by this sort of shift -- but I haven't. I have friends who grasped the implications of the curves years ago but have become jaded waiting for the future, without realizing "hey, wait a minute, it has all been happening!"
Perry Metzger
21 September 2003
September 21, 2003
Michelob Ultra: an "Atkins Beer"?
At yesterday's party I tried the "low carbohydrate" beer Michelob Ultra: 2.6 grams carbs and 95 calories per 12 ounce bottle. I have to agree with a number of the critics, and with Monty Python: it's "...like sex in a canoe: fucking close to water." It's an interesting start though, I just hope someone comes out with a much tastier beer addressed to the same market signals.
XEphem: The Serious Interactive Astronomical Software Ephemeris
Yesterday I attended a barbeque party of extropian friends up at a buddy's dome house in the Santa Cruz mountains. Well after midnight, those of us still hanging around took our binoculars and did some stargazing, successfully finding M-31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) from memory, and Uranus using a copy of the software ephemeris XEphem from Clear Sky Institute, which I very highly recommend.
Quote of the Day
The case against agriculture's being a natural cultural advance began to gather momentum with the surprising discovery that hunting and gathering isn't such a bad way to make a living. The !Kung San, Richard Lee found in the 196os, work just a few hours a day - hunting, digging roots, harvesting mongongo trees - and then it's Miller time. In 1972, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (a former cultural evolutionist turned skeptic of cultural evolutionism) dubbed hunter-gatherers "the original affluent society" on grounds that "all the people's material wants are easily satisfied."
And the problem isn't just that primitive agriculture may have been a regression in terms of sheer efficiency. The more populous villages that farming ushered in would presumably foment disease; and the low-protein, high-starch content of some staple crops might be unhealthy. Studying the bones of early farmers, some archaeologists have concluded that they had shorter lives, and more rotten teeth, than hunter-gatherers.
Robert Wright
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
pp66-67
September 20, 2003
Brian Wilson goes off the air in San Francisco
The local Libertarian Party's listserv is misconfigured in respect of its outgoing timestamps, so I only last night saw this:
Subject: libertarian talk show host update
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 08:46:26 -0700
The San Francisco Bay area just lost another libertarian radio talk show host.LP of Maryland member Brian Wilson no longer does lost the 7pm to 9pm weekday time slot on KSFO in San Francisco.
However, we do have a consolation prize.
Larry Elder (on tape delay)
Sat 10pm- Sun 1am
Sun 10pm- Mon 1am
I had written here about Brian Wilson about 10 months ago, when I started this blog. I'll miss him. Now there's practically no reason to listen to KSFO 560 AM anymore, as most of the remaining crew are blithering neocons. There are no libertarians left there, with the exception of Larry Elder on the weekends... which is ironic considering that Larry Elder and Neil Boortz - both libertarians - had a great start on newly re-launched competitor KNEW 910 AM with their own shows in the afternoon... and both were booted, leaving neocons in their places too.
Showing the Big Portabella?
Fox News occasionally runs a short commentary segment by American comedian Dennis Miller. While working just now, I heard Miller comment that the U.S. should occasionally test a nuke in the desert for demonstration purposes, calling it "showing the Big Portabella".
That's pretty vivid imagery... can't quite get it out of my head, so I guess I have to write it out.
Quote of the Day
The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind... In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Leda Cosmides & John Tooby
Evolutionary Psychology Primer
September 19, 2003
"My other blog" back online
As long as I'm in the process of bringing this blog back online, I might as well bring my other blog back online, this time with a slightly changed name: Asia Pacific: Notes of an Asian Culture Afficionado. I'm a longtime student of Asian languages and culture, and that's where I put most of my writings which have more to do with those subjects, except in those cases such as today's Quote of the Day which entail elements relating to human freedom.
Quote of the Day
"It is essentially accidental that the Shang developed a logographic script rather than a phonetic script like most of those that became dominant elsewhere in Eurasia. This accident, however, had momentous consequences for the way Chinese civilization developed. It shaped the nature of the elite: the difficulty of mastering this script made those expert in it an elite possessed of rare but essential skills. Because the Chinese logographic script did not change to reflect differences in pronunciation, the literate elite easily identified with others whose writings they could read, including predecessors who lived many centuries earlier and contemporaries whose spoken languages they could not comprehend. Just as crucially this script also affected the processes of cultural expansion and assimilation. People on the fringes of Chinese culture who learned to read Chinese for pragmatic reasons of advancing or defending their interests were more effectively drawn into Chinese culture than they would have been if China had had a phonetic script. Reading and writing for them could not be easily detached from the body of Chinese texts imbued with Chinese values, making it difficult for them to use their literacy to articulate the vision of a local population defined in opposition to China."
The Cambridge Illustrated History of China by Patricia Buckley Ebrey, p28
September 18, 2003
Obligatory Pussy Shot (or: "Separated at Birth?")
"I am 25 pounds of stray cat. I am whining outside your front door. I am the descendant of generations of kung fu master. You will feed me now."
Hunters with satellites... I want one too
A very good friend of mine in Nevada, who works for a satellite imaging company, pointed out this provision of the Nevada Administrative Code:
"...a person shall not, for the purpose of hunting, locate or observe, or assist a person in locating or observing, any big game mammal in a management unit described in NAC 504.210 during the period beginning 48 hours before a big game hunting season opens until the close of the season in that management unit with the use of ...a satellite or any other device that orbits the earth and is equipped to produce images..."
He and I are both wondering if anyone has been prosecuted under this law...
Aw geez... thanks for the welcome back
I expect a transient jump in my website stats after a friend in London surprises me with a big welcome back to the blogosphere.
New visitors: feed me! Buy those Amazon books I link to on this site. Pays the bills. Oh, yeah: welcome! Join in, comment, have fun, the usual stuff.
Remember this word: resveratrol
Thanks to L. Neil Smith for pointing out this article today on a possible life extending chemical found in northern red wines: resveratrol.
Quote of the Day
The FDA, among numerous other feral agencies, need to be eliminated and their personnel shipped to the deep south to pick cotton and goobers.
Frank Ney
September 17, 2003
Quick note about a useful melatonin dosage
For those of you considering using melatonin to regulate sleep, do not buy those bottles with tablet sizes larger than 1 mg (milligram). Some time back, I bought a bottle of 3 mg tablets. Anytime (which was only occasionally) I took a tablet from that bottle, I felt slightly groggy the following day. Adjusting my dose back down to 1 mg fixed that problem perfectly. Everyone I've spoken with about this phenomenon - among those who occasionally use melatonin - has noticed the same set of effects: 1 mg seems to work well for small, average, and large (I'm a hair over 200 lbs) people. If 3 mg makes me feel groggy, who is that size tablet sold for anyway? If 1 mg doesn't do it for you, it's easy to ratchet up with another 1 mg tablet.
Quote of the Day
"Bad as they seem, experiencing withdrawal symptoms is really good news. The withdrawal process is usually completed within three days, and afterward you should feel better than ever—unless, of course, you re-addict yourself. If you cannot stay the course and progress through withdrawal, do it gradually by consuming progressively smaller amounts of an addictive food until you get to zero. The more severe your withdrawal symptoms, the more you stand to gain from abandoning the food that is causing them. A food that demands to be eaten daily is often a key to a disordered metabolism."
How to Do Atkins: What You Can Expect the First Week on Induction
September 16, 2003
Another thing I've discovered about kittens
If you have kittens and you receive a parcel which has been packed with styrofoam peanuts, close the box immediately. Enough said.
RINOs Closing Ranks in California
The Get-A-Republican-As-Governor-At-Any-Cost crowd in the California gubernatorial recall effort are exerting more pressure on the field to "get behind Arnold", which means attempting to shame conservative Republican candidate Tom McClintock into dropping out of the race. Only a few voices are urging Arnold to drop out and throw his support behind McClintock. Fox News personality and talk radio High Church Republicrat Sean Hannity, who initially supported McClintock, seems to have been bought off by the Arnold crowd, since he's now reversed himself and is berating McClintock for not dropping out of the race. So much for holding dear his "conservative" principles.
I'm an admirer of McClintock now. I'm a libertarian and disagree with him on the abortion issue - I'm all for a woman's right to choose - but I understand that as Governor, he would have no say in the matter. We do both agree that there should be no government funding of the practice, which suits me fine. Where we do almost completely agree is on matters in which he as governor does indeed have some say. For example:
“I'll spend the rest of my first day as Governor to personally de-fund every state agency that duplicates local or federal jurisdictions, or overlaps other state agencies or that is performing functions that the private sector could and should do anyway.”
He says this consistently in radio and television interviews, usually crediting the libertarian Reason Foundation for many of his policy ideas. He's an A+ supporter of the human right to keep and bear arms, and is not afraid to say so, time and again, on radio and TV. The Gun Owners of America endorses him, noting "...Senator McClintock has a perfect voting record on Second Amendment issues..."
I am a libertarian. I am not, however, a Libertarian Party loyalist. If a candidate espouses libertarian ideals, and has a shot at winning, I'll support him. McClintock seems to be The Man in this race.
Quote of the day
The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right—and thus a machine for convincing its owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.
Robert Wright
The Moral Animal, p280
September 15, 2003
Large Scale Analysis of Neural Structures, by Ralph Merkle
I was going through some of my personal papers. I found an original copy of my buddy Dr. Ralph Merkle's seminal 1989 Xerox PARC paper "Large Scale Analysis of Neural Structures". I'm not surprised to find that Ralph has put it online. Check it out.
Quote of the Day
A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Notes (1874)
September 14, 2003
Quote of the Day
"...only at Katsura [Detached Palace] does there exist that overwhelming freedom of intellect which does not subordinate any element of the structure or the garden to some rigid system. At Nikko, as in many architectural attractions of the world, the effect is gained by quantity - about in the same way that an army of two hundred thousand is larger than one of twenty thousand. At Katsura, on the contrary, each element remains a free individual, much like a member of a good society in which harmony arises from the absence of coercion so that everyone may express himself according to his individual nature. Thus the Katsura Palace is a completely isolated miracle in the civilized world."
Bruno Taut, in a speech given 1936 to the Society for International Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka Shinkoukai) in Tokyo
as quoted in Japanese Culture by Paul Varley, 4th edition, 2000, pp325-326
September 13, 2003
Quote of the Day
If you carry a gun, people call you paranoid. That's ridiculous. If I have a gun, what in the hell do I have to be paranoid about?
Clint Smith
Director, Thunder Ranch
September 12, 2003
Johnny Cash Has Left the Building
Johnny Cash died today at the age of 71. I was never a great fan, not being able to connect fully with his somewhat tragic sense of life, but I really admired his musicality. I met the man briefly, some time around 1973. My stepfather was a country DJ at the time, and we were living in Memphis, where I spent most of my childhood. My dad took me backstage at a Grand Ole Opry show which was taking place in Memphis, on the road from its home in Nashville. I vividly remember being introduced to Grandpa Jones who, despite his avuncular public demeanor, was a cold SOB, refusing this 7 year old boy the pleasure of holding his banjo while his dad snapped a photo. Awkward moment, that.
Johnny Cash, who looked 20 feet tall to me, was by contrast a surprisely warm, friendly giant, who surprised me further by handing me his guitar unasked, when it came my turn for my dad to pester him for a photo together. I tell you, these may seem trivial things, but to a 7 year old boy they mean the world.
And yes, he was wearing black. I remembered this later when, emulating him and Marty Robbins, I found myself imitating their sartorial habits for a memorable span of my adulthood. He will be missed.
Quote of the Day
Assemblers will take years to emerge, but their emergence seems almost inevitable: Though the path to assemblers has many steps, each step will bring the next in reach, and each will bring immediate rewards. The first steps have already been taken, under the names of "genetic engineering" and "biotechnology." Other paths to assemblers seem possible. Barring worldwide destruction or worldwide controls, the technology race will continue whether we wish it or not. And as advances in computer-aided design speed the development of molecular tools, the advance toward assemblers will quicken.
To have any hope of understanding our future, we must understand the consequences of assemblers, disassemblers, and nanocomputers. They promise to bring changes as profound as the industrial revolution, antibiotics, and nuclear weapons all rolled up in one massive breakthrough.
K. Eric Drexler
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
September 11, 2003
Quote of the day
"It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man. This means that when men are born from heaven they are all equal. There is no innate distinction between high and low. It means that men can freely and independently use the myriad things of the world to satisfy their daily needs through the labors of their own bodies and minds, and that, as long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others, may pass their days in happiness."
Fukuzawa Yukichi
Gakamon no Susume (An Encouragement of Learning), 1876
as quoted in Japanese Culture by Paul Varley, 4th edition, 2000, p243
Survival Arts Is Back!
OK, I couldn't stand being away so long, so I'm back. I've moved everything to a new ISP, upgrading Moveable Type and migrating the blog's database schema & data to the new provider.
It's a long story, but I can say in brief that having taken care of long-standing housekeeping issues, I'm back for good.
