April 2004 Archives

It's 4 weeks into my fourth quarter of general chemistry, and I'm deep into a weeks-long laboratory assignment involving identification of unknown cations in mystery solutions... a forensics exercise involving minute amounts of reagent, fiddly and frustrating, but necessary. It'a also a transition to the full-blown organic chemistry sequence, which I'm eagerly anticipating.

In the midst of my frustration, my chemistry professor, whose labtime desk sits next to my workbench, handed me my previous quarter's graded final exam, the taking of which marked the completion of the most difficult course in the general chemistry sequence.

I made a perfect score on that exam.

I feel really, really good right now. Really good. I've been given permission to copy that exam before I return it to my professor... and it's going right into the folder of recommendations and other papers I can show to schools and employers in the near future. Woohoo!

When Monica and I spent some time in Malaysia it was an interesting experience.

We were in the capital, KL. Something to know about Malaysia is that it is the most Westernised Muslim country. As an example, people from the fully fundamental places that want to experience 'Western Decadance' will be allowed to go there by their government because it is not a secular country under the surface.

Most of my recollections about it were negative. I was there with a Chinese friend. Something to note is that Malaysia has three predominant cultures - Malay, Indian and Chinese - in that order of population. Wealth and power, however, goes in the opposite direction with the 3-5% of Chinese owning most of the country.

There's a major reason for this. The Chinese people (on the whole of course) work damn hard, and the Malays don't - they don't need to. There are laws saying that there must be X% of Bumis (the local name for Muslim Malays) working in every business and other such crap.

I also tried to put an ad in the local paper but couldn't because it needed to go to a government office to be "checked" before being printed - they had true government censorship.

As to the people, I'd never seen so many women covered up before. In Australia there are many Muslim women around so you can get used to it even if you don't like it. Seeing this many in a place that for all other appearances was Western (ie: in the malls with Nike stores or in the KFCs) was weird. (Incidentally the fashion was to wear a dark dress with a white head scarf... when you look down the mall over their heads at them (I'm tall and they are generally short), and when they cluster, they look like lots of little bowling pins ready for a big bowling ball :)

We grilled (nicely of course, just in case) a taxi driver as to why they don't eat pork, even though there were good historical reasons for desert dwellers not to eat pork due to trichinosis, but no longer. And also why women have to be wrapped up.

His answer was that pork has things in it that are like cancer. If you eat it even once you will die, not right away, but you will have long term problems.

As to the women, historically it's just to protect their beautiful faces from harsh winds and sand storms, and now it's just a fashion - nothing more.

Yeah... right. that's why I saw many beautiful Chinese women in short skirts and business jackets, or thousands of beautiful Indian women in saris or other dresses but NEVER in three weeks saw a single Malay woman uncovered.

Matthew White

...the same mindless bimbettes who ask:

"Do I look fat in these jeans?"

Won't ask:

"Do you think that my opinion is justified in this instance?"

Or:

"Do you think I've read enough to proffer an educated guess on the topic?"

I guess their ass means more to them than their assumptions.

Monica White

If you're an American guy, it's likely you've heard this from women of your acquaintance: "I feel fat: I really need to lose some weight!" This is usually said by "skinny-fat" women who don't need to lose weight per se, but who might actually benefit from a weight gain associated with resistance training done at aerobic pace.

I've been so tempted to trip up the complainant on a number of occasions by responding, "No, you look fine, I'd fuck you even in your present condition." Should be good for either a slap or a roll in the hay.

IMHO firefighters are the only true heroes in this country. They sustain a far higher risk of injury and death than any cop or military person, they frequently do it as volunteers, and they don't get nice fancy medals like purple hearts or congressional medals of honor for the lives and property they save.

That being said, private fire fighting is how the practice started, and non-profit private organizations is how I think it should be run. The ONLY advantage that public fire departments have is that their very expensive equipment can be purchased with borrowing at much lower rates of interest because the government has the power to tax.

Mike Lorrey

[Occasional blog contributor and fulltime friend Tom Burroughes returns to us with his own endorsement of the Firefly series - Russell]

I have watched a lot of science fiction in my time, and although many films and television shows have hit great heights of drama and special effects wizardry, such as Babylon 5, very few have ever really engaged me emotionally and in humorous ways to the extent achieved by the Firefly series, now available in Britain on a DVD format.

I bought the whole set last week and it is one of the best investments I have made in a long time. I think it is a notch above B5 (high praise indeed), and I love the way it weaves in the culture of the old West with the format of a science fiction adventure. The cast are excellent, particularly the lead actor playing the ship's captain, who has a sense of humour so dry it sounds like Clint Eastwood at his best. The women are great -- frequently more than a match for the men, and ahem, very easy on the eye indeed.

The core of Firefly, as Russell has already noted, is its unmistakably libertarian sense. These adventurers, smugglers and desperadoes are up against a totalitarian world government; they are unabashed traders and entrepreneurs, fun-lovers, individualists, not to mention serious partygoers when required. Think of a series containing elements of Robert A. Heinlein, L. Neil Smith and Eastwood's finest Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and you will get what I mean. Oh, and throw in some superb country backing music for good measure.

I find it very distressing that as yet, Joss Whedon's creation has only made it to one full series. Back here in Britain, where our domestic TV drama is a swamp of tragic soap opera crud and the occasional historical re-reun, Firefly is like a shot of brandy to a half-drowned man. What a great series. More, more!

Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.

George Bernard Shaw

They'll [Christians] start a moral debate, and just as you begin to win it, they'll start to sputter, and then get creepily calm. Then they'll give you a patronizing smile and say “Well, you can't understand how I'm right because you don't believe in anything higher than yourself.” They'll bring it in as their final trump card into any issue, and you can't argue with it because they'll put their fingers in their ears and hum. If you bring up contradictions, then they'll say: “Well that's not my faith!” and you try to get them to explain their faith and they start to, but when you point out a single contradiction, they'll pretend they never said it. Or, they'll pretend they have “Powers” that you cannot possibly understand. And that you are not morally worthy of learning them, as you are a *snort* atheist.

Diane Duncan

My Dad used to tell stories about air-baggers back in the 1920's; these were people who strapped bags full of hydrogen to harnesses they wore, setting the contents to near-neutral buoyancy. He described their activities as jumps that could take them 50 feet in the air or higher, with the main danger being getting caught in trees and electrical wires.

Rocky Frisco

I'll be attending all 3 days of the 14-16 May 2004 Foresight Senior Associates Gathering in Palo Alto, California. I very highly recommend this event to anyone interested in molecular nanotechnology. If you're not intimately familiar with nanotechnology, but want to learn, I enthusiastically recommend the 8-hour "Fundamentals of Nanotechnology" tutorial session on Friday: I'll be attending myself to dust off and deepen my own understanding.

Mark Miller informs me via Orkut that K. Eric Drexler now has a personal nanotechnology website, e-drexler.com.

There is a central myth about British science and economic growth, and it goes like this: science breeds wealth, Britain is in economic decline, therefore Britain has not done enough science. Actually, it is easy to show that a key cause of Britain's economic decline has been that the government has funded too much science...

Post-war British science policy illustrates the folly of wasting money on research. The government decided, as it surveyed the ruins of war-torn Europe in 1945, that the future lay in computers, nuclear power and jet aircraft, so successive administrations poured money into these projects--to vast technical success. The world's first commercial mainframe computer was British, sold by Ferrranti in 1951; the world's first commercial jet aircraft was British, the Comet, in service in 1952; the first nuclear power station was British, Calder Hall, commissioned in 1956; and the world's first and only supersonic commercial jet aircraft was Anglo-French, Concorde, in service in 1976.

Yet these technical advances crippled us economically, because they were so uncommercial. The nuclear generation of electricity, for example, had lost 2.1 billion pounds by 1975 (2.1 billion pounds was a lot then); Concord had lost us, alone, 2.3 billion pounds by 1976; the Comet crashed and America now dominates computers. Had these vast sums of money not been wasted on research, we would now be a significantly richer country.

Terence Kealey
Wasting Billions, the Scientific Way
The Sunday Times, October 13, 1996

I do not know what you mean when you say you do not agree with me on the VN war. Are you referring to opinions expressed by Oscar of GLORY ROAD? If so, be assured that my fictional characters speak for themselves, not for me--and, in any case, that book was written six years ago. My private opinion of the situation in 1968 I have never expressed publicly.

Robert A. Heinlein in a personal communication (letter)

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?

Mark Twain (1835-1910) in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A few days ago, in my physical anthropology class, our instructor told us that Carolus Linnaeus' original taxa included Primates (us and our proximate cousins), Secundates (other mammals), and Tertiates (all other animals)! I can't find independent verification of this (I Googled hard for it)... anyone heard of this and can supply references?

I was helping one of my chemistry classmates study after class this morning. Our topic of conversation was electrochemistry. My classmate's confusion was over the terminology used in voltaic cells, e.g. oxidation, reduction, cathode, anode, cation, anion, etc. It occurred to me in the course of discussion that her confusion was due to the use of the term "reduction", which simply means "a reduction in oxidation state by electron donation"; it's a useful numerical indication of that state, not of the physical configuration of the element being "reduced". I'd long ago internalized the actual meaning, so it had slipped me that to a very bright but non-native speaker of English, "reduction" would seem to indicate a physical reduction of some dimension of the affected chemical species!

I had one of those "aha" moments and drew her a diagram of what actually happens with an example species being reduced, in this case a bare proton (a hydrogen ion, H+): H+ has an oxidation state of +1, which can be reduced by an electron donor to 0. The atomic diameter of the ion is as small as a species can get, effectively equal to the proton's diameter; the addition of an electron ("reduction") drastically increases, in a relative sense, the effective atomic diameter of the neutral hydrogen (disregarding the issue of likelihood of a monatomic non-ionic hydrogen), which is "a bigger dimension", not "a reduced dimension".

Chemistry - and most of science - is full of such interesting and sometimes annoying little ambiguities which are the legacy of discovery and provisional definition. Don't even get me started on all the different symbols used to denote "energy"...

On Fox News right now, Bush is talking to a crowd assembled at the Hershey factory in Pennsylvania. I wonder... did he have to travel the Hershey Highway to make his speaking engagement?

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.

Hippocrates, in "Law"

This is 4 years old, and I'm not even ten percent the way through, but it would be interesting to have more eyeballs on this idea: "The Wall Street Performer Protocol: Using Software Completion Bonds To Fund Open Source Software Development" by Chris Rasch.

The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.

Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter, English surgeon (1872-1939)

Penn & Teller are back for another season of the excellent BULLSHIT! debunking series on Showtime. Set your PVRs: there's an episode tonight.

Wiley Clapp has an article on the BAR [Browning Automatic Rifle] in the current Shooting Illustrated. He sums it up thus:

"The BAR is like a blind date that is a little overweight and not very pretty, but redeems herself with enthusiasm and skill in the activities of the late evening."

Steve Pegram

Aaron reminds me that today is the 2nd annual BAG (Buy A Gun) Day!

Current feminism is the idea that men are the evil to be dealt with through the medium of a lawsuit or a mallet. I guess that's the kneejerk reaction of undateable women when they hear guff about not being the 'logical' sex.

...considering the fact that women have comparatively (to human history) recently come into the workforce, you can't expect half of all boards & CEOs to suddenly be wearing skirts. The lead time for someone to study the right subjects in school to get into the right university course to get into a good company to work their way up the career ladder can be over 30 years. It'll take time.

Monica White

...if you have cats: jalapeno. Cats go nuts over this plant. Peggy brought one home a few days ago, and within a couple of days it was completely eaten down to the stems by our kittens.

As I write this, Selmak (the sibling male) is destroying a succulent of some type 4 feet from my face...

Just peeled off yesterday's entry on my Sports Illustrated desk calendar to reveal the lovely Jessica White. Nice!

The concept of porn invading our homes all by itself is simply the right-wing equivalent of the left-wing nonsense of guns (ahem) pulling their own triggers.

Dave Aronson

After a 2nd major round of revision on my 2003 tax paperwork (the 1st preparer was, well, not entirely prepared for me), I've managed to squeeze several hundred dollars more deductions from a pile of receipts and am re-submitting to another preparer tomorrow. I can relax now, a bit.

I do wish that presidential election days - for that matter, all election days - were fixed to the 16th of April.

Though we have many words with Latin roots, English is Germanic in origin. Romance-language speaking peoples conquered England from time to time, and injected our language with a few of those words. As a result the less common “Latin” words spoken by our conquerors were treated as superior to our native language because they were often used by the upper class. The big problem was that these words and sometimes even entire systems of grammar were not used by the majority of people and muddied communication exceedingly when they were used. In my experience, the use of Latin words in the place of simple Anglo-Saxon mono-syllables that mean precisely the same thing usually goes hand in hand with intellectual pretension. Language is a way of bridging the gap between people, so you can probably understand why it bothers me when people do this.

Diane Duncan

Anton asks this medical question, to which my answer is: "yes."

I'd post it as a comment on his blog, but he's using primitive blogging software that's not set up for it.

One of my regular gym workout times coincides with the CNN news show "Lou Dobbs Tonight", which is usually playing on one of the overhead TVs in the aerobics machine areas where I warm up. The show is broadcast with closed captioning, so I can usually follow it if I care. Last night's show, apparently, was a continuation on the "Exporting America" theme that Dobbs seems to be so passionate about. One of the guests was Walter Wriston, chairman emeritus of Citibank (which they acknowledged), but who is also in my recollection the author of "The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World".

Wriston was giving Dobbs a run for his money, effectively skewering Dobbs' anti-offshoring populist arguments ("American jobs are being shipped offshore! This is bad!"), pointing out that the principle of comparative advantage is as true now as it was in the 19th century (see Ricardo). After the segment with Wriston, Dobbs had a roundtable of business journalists, including Steve Forbes, with whom he was particularly nasty. He really has a hard-on about "shipping jobs overseas". In a weird sort of way, he seems the lefty mirror-image of Bill O'Reilly, the nasty little populist of the religious right on Fox News. Both of them seem to be shilling for each of the major Boot On Your Neck political parties.

I know the offshoring issue is a hot button issue with Dobbs, because a week or so ago I saw him try to skewer Marc Andreesen on the same issue. Marc also acquitted himself well. Dobbs hates that.

pacifist monotheistic zealots
My taxi driver yesterday was a zealous muslim. Upon finding out I'm jewish, he spent the entire drive to the airport ranting about religion, citing the Bible, Torah, and Koran. On the plus side, his angle was all about how the christians/jews/muslims are brothers following slightly different interpretations of the word of the one true god. While he was clear about how his way is the right way, he was also clear on the importance of peace and brotherhood and how any terrorist (whether bin Laden, Bush, or Sharon) is acting contrary to god's will.

It was still creepy and weird, but at least he was creepily condemning violence instead of creepily advocating hate.

Patri Friedman

My friend Dave sent me a pointer to an updated version of the "Have Geiger Counter, will travel" site maintained by Elena, the Ukrainian biker (see my original post of 2 days ago).

To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it, he [Douglas Adams] mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle.

Richard Dawkins, in "Lament for Douglas" (17 September 2001)

Last night in the dojo I was stuck. Truly, brain-locked stuck. I was the proverbial soup sandwich. It was one of the most frustrating experiences of the last several years for me. We all (those of us who strive, at least) have these occasional tests of resolve, the desire to push on. However, as I was telling myself on the ride alone home last night, I was very happy I kept going: even a bad night training is better than not having trained at all. Must keep going...

Curt Howland passed on to me this chilling travelogue of Chernobyl from a Ukrainian motorcyclist named Elena.

I always go for rides alone, because I do not want anyone to raise dust in front of me. I have never had problems with the dosimeter guys, who man the checkpoints. They are experts, and if they find radiation on you vehicle, they give it a chemical shower, and this eat ya bike. I don't count those couple of times when "experts" tried to invent an excuse to give me a shower, because those had a lot more to do with physical biology than biological physics...

I'm a software developer by trade, and one of my pet peeves is clients who expect me to be on-call in case they have a bug, or (more likely) forget how to use their software. I stand by the rule taught to me by a long-time developer: "There are NO software emergencies." His point being, trying to slap a bug fix onto an application under pressure is almost certainly going to cause more problems than the bug you originally introduced when you were developing at a measured pace. The cure for this type of issue is testing and training, not 24/7 availability.

Bob Tipton

Apologies for Bob Tipton for not having gotten back to him in email, but I'd like to take the time to announce here that he's launched an interesting new blog, "Serenity: A diary of our family's experience in moving to the country." Included is a review of handgun training at Storm Mountain and other interesting material. Oh, and he does post photos; I'm a sucker for eyecandy, so I like that.

The thinking physician identifies AOIs [areas of ignorance] daily.

Professor Elliot Wolfe, MD
Stanford University Medical Center, 5 April 2004

Bad habit, I know, but I often have TV playing in the background as I study. Tonight's white noise is the execrable Lucasian fantasy "Star Wars: Episode II", which I saw first-run to give homage to Yoda (who rocks!). After something my girlfriend told me a couple of weeks ago, I can't help but think "Queen Amygdala" when I hear "Amidala".

Of course, the Lincolnian "Grand Army of the Republic" irony is not lost on me, the only other reason (besides Yoda!) for catching the flick. Why, oh why with Lucas' budget - and Ewan McGregor - did the acting suck ass in this flick?

Certainly it is a great unhappiness to be poor, but it is an even greater unhappiness to be surrounded by people as poor as oneself. Lacking wealth oneself, one must wish wealth for others: an indigent has infinitely greater possibilities for earning his living and becoming well-off if he lives among a rich population, than if he is surrounded by poor people lilke himself. And note here that the hope of the poor is not founded upon the charity of the rich, but upon the interest of the rich. It is in his own interest that the rich man supplies the poor man with land to cultivate, tools, fertilizer, and seeds, and with food on which to live until the harvest.

Jean-Baptiste Say

Stephen Turnbull writes... on the Free Software Business mailing list, "If you have a job because somebody else is prohibited from offering the product at a lower cost, you're not on salary, you're on welfare."

Further, I would say that if your job depends on subsidies or tariffs, you're not working for a living, you're begging for one.

Russell Nelson

Just found out today that CBS has cancelled their law drama "Century City" after only 3 weeks' run of 4 episodes. That's too bad. The show, employing a mix of inspired and insipid storyline, dealt with issues extropians have been mooting for over 15 years. The show had promise, if the two episodes I saw were any indication of promise. I do share Virginia Postrel's opinion of the series:

Real lawyers in the future would take for granted legal, cultural, and technological developments that strike us as strange. It's the background, not the cutting-edge issues, that makes the present feel different from the past. A 1978 show about 2004 might have featured a plotline on cloning. It wouldn't have routinely shown 40-year-old new parents of twins or business people walking down the street talking to no one, with wires hanging out of their ears. It wouldn't have Starbucks, or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, or rock-and-roll megachurches.

It was an interesting try.

Seen in a restaurant loo last night:

The textures of life that so fascinate dynamists are full of such historical surprises. Consider a strange fact about doughnut shops in California: More than 80 percent are owned by Cambodian immigrants. Doughnuts are not a Cambodian food; indeed, Cambodians don't even like them that much. But when Ted Ngoy fled to southern California in the 1970s and got a job in a doughnut store, he realized the possibilities. Here was a niche that matched his skills (or lack thereof) and had potential to grow. The business required hard work but little start-up capital and little English. Ngoy soon owned several doughnut shops. He hired and trained many other refugees, who then started their own stores, hiring and training still more immigrants. Over time, the community developed special expertise and suppliers, making it much easier for a Cambodian immigrant to California to get started in the doughnut business than in other ventures. By 1995, Cambodians ran almost 2,500 of the doughnut stores in California. They also expanded the market, giving Los Angeles one doughnut shop for every 7,000 residents—ten times the concentration in Phoenix.

The doughnut story is surprising, but not a random accident. It represents a complex order of selection and feedback: A perceptive entrepreneur discovers an opportunity. His knowledge spreads through communal networks, which develop specialized product, labor, and capital sources. More and more Cambodians learn how to make doughnuts, and how to make them well. Competition among shops improves doughnut quality, and the mere presence of so many stores reminds potential buyers of their product, leading to more sales. This legacy, an example of what economists call "path dependence," does not keep non-Cambodians from owning doughnut stores or block Cambodian immigrants from other businesses. It was not predetermined, nor does it guarantee any particular future. But it makes some choices more likely than others.

Virginia Postrel
The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, pp49-50

Terry Egan passes on the stunning news, written up by Ricky James, that the Firefly DVD series has been officially issued to the viewing libraries of all U.S. Navy ships.

Navy Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) recently signed a commercial sponsorship agreement with FireflyFans.net, a fan-based organization for the television series "Firefly," that will provide 250 DVD box sets of 13 "Firefly" episodes in support of the Navy's afloat library program.

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who do nothing about them.

Albert Einstein

I've noticed a changed pattern in my movie viewing habits, attributable to having taken up with Netflix in the last year or so. For starters, I no longer do Blockbuster (which is not at all surprising, given they're head-to-head competitors). Also, I see fewer 1st-run movies, itself also not surprising.

No, what surprises me is that I no longer feel compelled to finish a movie I've started, if it truly sucks. I've rarely in the course of my lifetime walked out of a movie theater, feeling compelled (against reason, usually) that I should get "all the value" from my $10 admission price. Nowadays, most of my movie viewing is from Netflix, on a fixed monthly all-you-can-view plan, so if something I've ordered sucks, such as Daredevil, I can simply switch off the DVD player, eject the DVD, and move on to the next. Quite liberating.

Last night's Firefly MicroMiniShindig was a more intimate gathering than the previous one in January, with 13 attending. We got a late start on the TV viewing part of the night, since I'd forgotten the DVD player's remote, so I ran home nearby to pick it up. Of course, that gave the rest time to enjoy the excellent food (the elkburger was a popular pick last night) and chat before my return. We had exactly the right amount of time to air "The Train Job" and "Bushwhacked", finishing just as the Tied House was being closed.

Unfortunately, in all my rushing around doing hostly things, I didn't get around to taking any photos for posting here. Maybe next time... if there is a next time. My original reasons for hosting these types of events included spreading freedom memes so nicely packaged in the series, as well as doing my little bit to increase the possibility that the series might get picked up again by a television network. Well, in the interval since the previous MicroMiniShindig, something like the latter has indeed happened: the Firefly movie has recently been greenlighted. So, we've won, at least to that extent. If I do hold one of these things again, it will only be as the result of at least 30 people agreeing to actually appear at a particular time and place. If you're one of those interested people, let me know, otherwise this Shindig thing is happy history.

If you're interested in this series, I strongly recommend you buy the 4-DVD box set and watch it for yourself.

When the Governor-General requested that the Miao be prevented from having weapons, and that Chinese merchants be forbidden to trade with them in such items as lead, saltpeter, and sulfur, I did not grant his request. It was not only that the Miao depend for their livelihood on the game they could kill by hunting with crossbow and fouling piece -- it was also that effective control of them had to depend on the sensitivity of the local officials. Besides which, of course, there was the question of how you can get the common people to hand over their weapons to the government officials at all -- as I pointed out to the Board of Works vice-president Muhelun when he presented his crazy scheme of disarming the people of Shantung province.

K'ang-hsi, Emperor of China from 1661 to 1722, quoted from page 35 of
"Emperor of China: Self-portrait of K'ang-hsi", compiled by Johnathan D. Spence, 1974