Recently in Personal Category

In my copious spare time these last few weeks, I gave a Tech Talk to some local users' groups in Google's Ann Arbor office, "Test Driven Development in Python: A Quick-start Approach". I was deeply impressed at the quality of technical folk I met there, some of whom had actually written some of the programming frameworks I use at Google. I took some pics of the audience from the speaker's POV, my first use of an iPhone for such an application.

Winston Tsang was kind enough to have taken some of his own photos of the event; I particularly like this one:

Time to pop my head back up into the blogosphere. I've got a few moments to mention what many of my friends have known for a while: I've moved to New York City for school, as an undergraduate (junior) transfer student in biochemistry at Columbia University, pre-med. These last few months have been among the busiest of my life to date... scratch that, these have indeed been the busiest.

I bit the bullet and did the Facebook thing: it was damned near useless to me before, now it's indispensable. Having spent far too much time there, I'm turning my attention back here. More later, stay tuned...

Once again:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Robert A. Heinlein
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

I like this one:

The same U.S. Federal Government that expects us to "trust" them with personal data extracted by threat of prosecution - the "American Community Survey" - recently announced the theft of sensitive personal data of 26.5 million of us former military who've been discharged since 1976. My friend Dave alerted me to the story a few weeks ago, and yesterday I received a letter from the Department of Veteran Affairs cautioning me to carefully scrutinize activity on bank accounts and credit cards. Way to go, FedGov... you unaccountable fuckups.

Dear Veteran: The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has recently learned that an employee took home electronic data from the VA, which he was not authorized to do and was in violation of established policies. The employee’s home was burglarized and this data was stolen. The data contained identifying information including names, social security numbers, and dates of birth for up to 26.5 million veterans and some spouses, as well as some disability ratings. As a result of this incident, information identifiable with you was potentially exposed to others. It is important to note that the affected data did not include any of VA’s electronic health records or any financial information.

I'm not used to sitting back seat in a small plane. Tonight I did sit backseat, during someone else's instrument training (missed approaches, VOR/RNAV/GPS approaches, etc.) and found I learned an incredible amount about instrument flying that is sometimes hard to absorb when you are in the hot seat (as I usually am).

I took the opportunity in the back seat to watch the plane's altimeter over the PIC's shoulder as I correllated it with altitude readings I was taking with the SU-1 barometer modification on my Yaesu VX-5R handheld HT. At 4000 and 5000 feet altitudes in the San Francisco Bay area, over 2 hours of flying with reported surface barometric pressures of between 29.94 and 29.98 inches of mercury, without calibration, I was getting agreement ranging from 0 to 200 feet. It'll be interesting to see how much better the agreement is after I RTFM and do a pre-flight calibration.

There's nothing like hauling your ass out of bed, making the trip to the airport or marina, and just getting out:

I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way.

John Paul Jones

The Dissident Frogman has incorporated my Japanese translations of his popular "Support Denmark" banners into his multilingual contributions archive page.

My thanks to knowledgeable friends Mariko and Garth for their thorough critiques of my pre-final draft. Thanks also for feedback on the issue of translating the original phrase "the legacy of the West", which was problematic, by these people on the honyaku mailing list: Richard Thieme, Peter Durfee, Benjamin Barrett, J.C. Helary, and James Sparks.

Don't ask me why I was using this term in conversation - many of my conversations would be surprising if one dropped into the middle of them - but my interlocutor just now heard "Pure Evil" when what I'd actually said was "Prairie Vole." Heh.

I'm going through a year's worth of iPhoto archives and found this, taken in organic chemistry lab by my friend Jenny... me in Maximum Nerd mode:

I took a break from studying this evening and visited a number of local stores to buy Danish food and booze products. Here's what I came back with, minus duplicates (I had to buy more than one of the tins of ginger cookies):

From Trader Joe's:

• Rosenborg Danish Blue cheese
  
• Silver Goat Organic Feta cheese
  
• "The Queen's Cookies" Ginger Spice Cookies (made in Denmark for Trader Joe's)
  

From Whole Foods:

• Denmark's Finest Havarti cheese
  
• Denmark's Finest Havarti cheese with dill
  
• Rosenborg Danish Blue cheese
  
• Blue Danish Castello Triple Cream cheese
  
• Fontina Danish Cheese
  

From Safeway:

• Denmark's Finest Fontina cheese
  
• Denmark's Finest Blue cheese
  
• Primo Taglio Havarti with Dill cheese
  

Especially notable and tasty are the ginger spice cookies made under contract in Denmark for Trader Joe's:

I encourage all of my readers to participate in this Danish buycott.

I've been too busy to blog the last few weeks: heavy school load and lots of travel. Your guess where I was last weekend:

Four weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a Halloween party in Manhattan. I wasn't prepared with a costume, unless you count my normal get-up below as, um, "Visiting Silicon Valley Guy." On the left is Perry Metzger who is, ahem, a eusocialist insect:

Two days ago, I bought a copy of "Mathematica 5.2 For Students" from the campus bookstore for $150 after tax. This is the same software that sells for around $2000 after tax to non-students. It's a fantastic package, and I'm happy I bought it. However, yesterday, after having already installed a copy on my home's dual G5, I tried to install a copy on my PowerBook. Wolfram's licencing scheme doesn't allow that: I could either buy their $100/year "Premium Support" contract, which would allow me to run other copies on other nodes, or buy another copy. If I'd paid full boat for the original copy, that might have made sense, but at the student discount, it made more sense to actually buy another package entirely. FYI for science and engineering students.

First day of school after summer break; school is on the quarter system. This morning's class was the first day for me of 4th quarter calculus (vector calculus with applications, partial derivatives, and multiple integrals) taught by the reputedly toughest math instructor on campus... which is why I chose him. I found out that not only are all the quizzes given without notice: so are the exams! No kidding. This is going to be fun to watch. I'm taking the guy seriously about the Importance of Being Earnest about our study habits, and am wondering how many of the rest of us will be doing the same.

A gift from my training partner last night, and proof that padded training weapons are a good idea for some types of waza:

I'm rested now and recovered from last weekend's attendance at the 4-day tactical shotgun course at Front Sight Firearms Training Institute near Las Vegas, Nevada. I surprised myself by making Distinguished Graduate, so I'm now qualified to come back to attend the 4 Day Advanced Tactical Shotgun course. On the second day of training, Greg Carroll snapped this pic of me after the two of us had done our respective runs through the outdoor canyon "clean the hostage takers out" simulator exercise:

The (visible) firearm is my Benelli M1 Super 90, with a nylon tactical sling and a GG&G M3 Tactical Illuminator mounting rail in the 2 o'clock position on the foreend, not the 10 o'clock position GG&G recommends on their website (experience in a previous course having shown me that, as a right-handed longgunner, the 10 o'clock position allows the light to bump on.)

I'd last done a tactical shotgun course about 4 years ago, and so I was quite interested to see how training doctrine had changed in respect of that weapon at Front Sight. The men in the evolution I attended - those 13 in the class who were there for the full 4 days - were all at least previous attendees at another weapon systems class (e.g. defensive handgun, practical rifle) so the class was run at a slightly accelerated pace befitting the audience. Attendees were about evenly divided between cops, active duty military (a Marine heading back to Iraq soon) and private citizens, all of whom were treated exactly the same by the instructional staff, the excellent Chuck Burnett and John Pierson.

One difference I noticed was the much heavier emphasis on incorporating movement, keeping the fight dynamic, and training that way to the limited extent allowed in the "square range environment." I was particularly pleased that, after the Monday (4th day) afternoon skills test, and the "load and go" indoor tactical simulator, I was allowed to do several rounds of 2-man team shooting on the move, with my new friend David L. Loads of fun, and I was pleased to find that a walking skill I'd been cultivating the last few years, walking fast with very short tank-tread heel/toe action to keep the hips and shoulders on level planes, allowed me to get good hits moving both forward and backward, without muzzle bob.

I'm at a level of membership at Front Sight that allows me to take any firearms course free for the rest of my life, much like some golf club memberships. So, I get to take these courses again and again, which allows me not only to revisit, revive, and refine my skills, but also to work out equipment issues. I've discovered I really don't like the Lyman TacStar SideSaddle mounted on the left side of the receiver: it catches on my clothing, when loaded it dampens recoil (and hence reliability) on this recoil-operated weapon, and with the standard provided cross-receiver screw, was coming loose even though I'd installed it properly and Lock-Tited it. I guess a couple of thousand rounds will do that to the Lock-Tite. That, and I'm leery of over-tightening that screw for fear of impeding bolt travel. Oh, and there's the issue of potentially "egging out" the screw holes on the aluminum receiver. My friend David assures me that, should I care to keep the SideSaddle, I can send the weapon to a gunsmith who specializes in Class 3 firearms with aluminum receivers, experienced in setting up weapons to resist receiver failure, but I'm going to switch to keeping my slug rounds on a belt carrier anyway.

Nor am I going to solve the "problem" of having extra ammo by changing out the tube magazine from a 5 to an 8 round capacity. This is my home invasion repellant device... if I can't solve The Problem with what's available in that weapon, then I'm in a very serious situation indeed. I'm more and more preferring lighter, more maneuverable weapons the more I train, with as few bells and whistles as I can get away with. I've heard more than one long arms instructor over the years comment on how students will arrive at a course with their all-singing, all-dancing Space Gun rigs, everything mounted everywhere, only to find themselves quickly shedding equipment after the first day... especially when training in the 105 F degree desert heat. Heh.

Recommendation: check out Estate Cartridge's low-recoil 12-gauge 9-pellet 00 SWAT loads. I've used this buckshot at a previous shotgun course, and had made the decision to attend this most recent course with too little lead time to order more of the same for this class. So, I had a mere few dozen of them to use at various times during this course, instead using a mix of Winchester and Federal buckshot for most exercises. No comparison. At half the price of Federal, the Estate-branded cartridges gave outstandingly tight and nicely distributed (e.g. no annular "donuts of death") patterns, turning heads on the firing line and eliciting a number of "what are you shooting, man?" enquiries.

I had the pleasure of remaking the acquaintance of at least one old friend, who was taking a course on an adjacent range. Additionally, I was happy to have a couple of libertarian friends, longtime (but previously untrained) gunowners, take the full 4 Day Defensive Handgun course on the same weekend. Both men, Alan and Chris, came away from the experience very much more competent than when they arrived.

An interesting blog article about the use of dendrimers in targetted drug delivery systems, sent me by Tom Burroughes in London.

University of Michigan scientists have created the nanotechnology equivalent of a Trojan horse to smuggle a powerful chemotherapeutic drug inside tumor cells – increasing the drug's cancer-killing activity and reducing its toxic side effects.

Previous studies in cell cultures have suggested that attaching anticancer drugs to nanoparticles for targeted delivery to tumor cells could increase the therapeutic response. Now, U-M scientists have shown that this nanotechnology-based treatment is effective in living animals.

Seen in an elevator in the office building where my friend Serin works:

In the heart of Beijing is the huge, well-stocked Wangfujing Bookstore. If you need maps, there are thousands of them available on the first (ground) floor, just inside the main doors. English-language books can be found on the 3rd floor. Here's a pic I snapped with my Treo 650 cameraphone:

I just got back from a meeting of an organization of which I'm a member, and was talking with a Polish acquaintance at the potluck which followed. We were discussing the until-recent history of Russian occupation of his country, and he told me that some Poles he knew had during that time advocated "Layered Communism":

"Layer of Communists, layer of sand, layer of Communists, layer of sand..."

Not only did I indulge myself with scorpions in Beijing last week, I also had snake meat and silkworm pupae. I've eaten plenty of snake, and this one was undistinguished (they're usually pretty rubbery), but the silkworm was new to me: a soft, pulpy interior in a paper-thin skin. I didn't have more snake later, but I did follow up with another silkworm grub skewer a while later.

Beware, beware of Baijiu! Within my first two hours in Beijing, I was taken out for kebabs and beer by my friend Serin. We met this affable guy, Ken, who'd enquired "Naguoren? (where ya from?)" and offered me one of his sealed shot glasses of baijiu. This was an 80-proof (40%) standard formula. After two shots, he brought out a bottle whose name translates from Chinese simply as "56 Percent." We shared that bottle. Apparently, I pulled out my Sony CyberShot to Capture the Moment:

I tried red eye reduction in iPhoto in an attempt to clear up my eyes in this photo, but apparently, the red-eye in this case is not a camera artifact.

I paid dearly the next morning for this act of intercultural male booze bonding, comparable only to an episode I experienced after boot camp, half a lifetime ago, when I swore, "I'll never drink that again."

One afternoon last week I rented an electric boat and plied around the north lake in Beihai Park. After returning the craft to the boathouse, I came across this guy doing taijiquan near the shore, practicing a jian form:

When he'd finished several iterations of the same form, he walked over to the bench where a couple of older women had been watching intently. He then started pushing the tip of the jian into the bench near them! What the hell?

Ah... it was a collapsing practice piece, neatly converting into an 8-inch assembly, which he then slipped into the carry pouch his wife held out for him. Neat! I wanted one of those jian then and there, but didn't have time left in the trip to shop for one. Rest assured it's on my shopping list for my next Beijing visit.

A little walking-around food (or "little food that was recently walking around") in Beijing's Wangfujing: Yanjing beer and scorpions. These little buggers are actually very good indeed. I've had scorpion once before, a different variety with a thicker, blacker thorax, in Thailand, also spiced, and also very good.

Last night, before leaving Beijing, my friend Serin and I had a late night snack at a small neighborhood shop specializing in kebabs and Hui specialties. It was pretty chilly outside, so we ordered some comfort food, such as this mutton bone soup, with the shafts cracked to expose the marrow, straws provided for convenience:

I'm a big believer in getting out of town on spring break:

Speaking of good martial arts training, which I just mentioned I undertook last weekend with Don Angier (and the weekend before with great teachers from my own art), I just stumbled across this Jan 2005 article by Peter Boylan, "The Costs of Training with the Best" author of "Angry White Pyjamas: A Scrawny Oxford Poet Takes Lessons From The Tokyo Riot Police" (which I've read and recommend).

Boylan has some good points to make, and some sad observations to share.

I mentioned here a couple of years ago that I attended a seminar given by Don Angier of Yanagi Ryu Aiki Jiu Jitsu. I missed last year's event in northern Californa, but I managed to make this year's event last weekend. I attended both days (as did another Bujinkan practicioner), and met one other Bujinkan student during the Sunday session at Aikido of Diablo Valley.

As has always been the case with Don's seminars, I enjoyed it immensely. Both days were Yanagi-style taijutsu training, no weapons this time (e.g. the jojutsu we did in April 2003.)

The first day, we did 3-man training involving breaking from 2-attacker both-arm wrist grabs (morote in aikido parlance). The second day, we did 2-man Yanagi "kiri dori" with reversals. Both days ended with recap training.

As usual, the training was incredibly useful: the principles of Angier's art are shared with our own, with an interestingly different emphasis on how to convey them. I didn't attend with the intent of "learning their art" - that really only happens with core Yanagi students, in their dojo environment, as is the case with us and our art - but what I do expect, as I've experienced in previous years' training with the Yanagi folks, is that I'll be able to see aspects of our own art from an outside perspective.

One solid claim I can make for training with these guys is that I'm forced to re-examine all the "unclean" (or sloppy) elements in my own movement.

Really, I can't recommend highly enough that Bujinkan students take the time to attend a seminar by this incredible 73 year old practicioner of a rare Japanese family art.

I should also add that the people I trained with, mostly aikidoka, were very good training partners, and incredibly welcoming, which made the experience all the more rewarding.

On a mailing list I frequent, list owner Mike Lorrey took an unfair swipe at an old friend of mine, libertarian science fiction novelist L. Neil Smith. I forward the message in its entirety, and Neil took the time to respond to Mike in an essay released today, "Under False Colors."

Mike has quickly responded by taking the argument to his own blog, in a post counter-titled "Under Honest Colors."

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well", I said, "there aren't any". He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind". I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing -- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.

Richard Feynman
"Cargo Cult Science"

I am really, really enjoying my biology class, a concentrated term of cell & molecular biology. Students in this program spend about four times as much time in lab, learning industrially useful techniques, as do students in comparable programs in the University of California system. In the last three weeks, I've had hands-on time doing protein electrophoresis, conjugation (bacterial DNA transfer), and DNA electrophoresis. Here's an image of our team's first DNA gel:

The DNA is from purified coliphage Lambda virus, 48,502 Kb (kilobases) in length. Lane 1 is pure, uncut DNA. Lane 2 is DNA restricted (cut) by Eco RI enzyme, Lane 3 restricted by Hind III, and Lane 4 by both (the restriction sites are different, resulting in more, smaller DNA fragments.)

Lanes 5 through 7 are subsamples taken from 2 through 4, subjected slowly and thoroughly to the action of the enzyme DNA ligase, resulting in outrageously long, randomly recombinant strands.

The gel is purified agarose treated with ethidium bromide. The image above is a high-contrast Polaroid of the gel UV-transilluminated to fluoresce in the visible spectrum (reddish orange, here shown in black and white).

This stuff is outrageously fun.

My Bujinkan teacher Dale Seago mentioned this a few days ago:

Some VERY good pages on Japanese armor which give a clearer understanding of why armored fighting methods are the way they are; also sections on historic Japanese clothing & accessories, the design and layout of Japanese estates during the Heian period, etc.

For those with a bent toward Humphreyesque "cultural detective work", there's an essay on "Rape as the First Act of Romance in Heian Japan" which makes it pretty clear that the feudal Japanese viewed some things quite differently from the way we do in our society today... (Whaddaya mean I should wait 'til the 3rd date?!?)

People who will not take the trouble to raise children should not have them.

Robert A. Heinlein
Podkayne of Mars

Today after work I headed up for Thursday night Bujinkan training (the weekly outdoor session, which I'd been missing until recently due to school), and had a great time tonight. Before heading to San Francisco, I did a quick search for late night coffee shops with free wireless internet access, located within a reasonable drive of the training park, and found the Samovar Tea Lounge in the Castro/Mission district.

I'm sitting there right now, having "Russian High Tea" way too late in the day. Service includes all-you-can drink high-octane self-serve tea from - you guessed it - a samovar: "dilute to taste" is the operative term. This place is genuinely cool, and I highly recommend it.

About the "just because I can" thing: an acquaintance of mine, Marc Stiegler, once wrote in one of his novels that it's vitally important to maintain a childlike sense of wonder about the world. Here I am, sitting in a friendly place, an oasis of light in the darkness, warmth against the wind, music from the walls, and good food I would never have thought of making myself, talking to people in other cities on a 4-pound device that I use to bring me money... life is a good thing.

Monica, you can take my blog off the "Missing in Action" list on your blogroll: I'm out of school for three weeks, concentrating on work but taking a few minutes a day to blog.

Speaking of school, the last few weeks of organic chemistry were split between the standard track material (in this case reactions of alkynes) and a series of lectures on NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) in depth. When I return to school, our department's new NMR machines will be in place, so this preparation is essential to actually using these machines productively. I'm really looking forward to adding NMR to my toolkit.

To those of you with cats: have you ever noticed how they immediately establish themselves atop piles of freshly laundered clothing?

We finally started into dissections in biology lab tonight. My own specimen was this rather stout, well-endowed female Ascaris lumbricoides, an intestinal parasite of humans:

I'd suspected that although our college's brand-new science center was state of the art in facilities, our gear would be knackered, so I brought my own gear (probes, pins, scalpels, various forceps, etc.) just in case. I was correct in my assessment: all the school-supplied gear was thrashed. One other guy in the lab, an Air Force PJ (USAF Pararescue) who's med-school bound, brought his own gear too; it was interesting to compare kits.

Since this specimen was pseudocoelomate in its body plan, there was no mesentary tissue to complicate the incision process. I was able to do really well with a #15T surgical blade: small enough, with a fine tip for starting an incision, but a sufficiently curved blade belly to continue incisions without nicking the viscera.

One gets the impression after laying this open and spreading its innards with a blunt probe that it is all uterus, wrapped in oviduct... two strands of Top Ramen cloaked in angel hair pasta. This thing is even more dedicated to reproduction than it is to feeding. Brrrrrr.

Lucy:

I seemed to have been the only person this morning other than my instructor to have paid attention to the warning on the bottle of crotyl chloride, "Danger: lacrymating agent!"

It was also amazing to see the number of people dispensing silver nitrate without gloves... low toxicity risk, but high chance of Rorschach tattoos on one's hands (hint: silver nitrate is photosensitive.)

Thanks to those of you who've sent email wondering if I've dropped off the face of the earth. I haven't (dropped off anywhere, that is.) It's my first week back at school (organic chemistry, calculus, and biology) and I've also been busy with work and visitors from out of town. I expect I'll be blogging again semiregularly in the next couple of weeks.

For the time being, also, this blog's comment facility is still malfunctioning. It's been a low priority, given my recent time crunch, to track down the root cause. My apologies for that; I will fix it sometime in the near future.

Damn: 2 years of running this blog using MovableType with no problems, then 2 users in the last 2 days tell me they're seeing this when they try to post comments here:

"Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

You are not allowed to post comments.

Please correct the error in the form below, then press POST to post your comment."

I very rarely block users from commenting here, and certainly wouldn't have blocked the two of you who've told me in private email. I apologize for whatever is causing this problem for you, and ask your indulgence while I try to troubleshoot the problem. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend to this until later tonight; thanks for your patience!

A few days ago, I finished reading Henry Petroski's "The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are," a breezy exposition on the origins of things most people take for granted, usually considered not worth wondering about. In a similar vein, and coincidentally well-timed, Curt Howland forwarded me yesterday a pointer to an essay lauding one artifact in particular, "In Praise of the Oh-So-Dependable Cardboard Box," by Russell Roberts.

I'm reminded of an essay I read in the summer of 1990, a copy of which was given me by its author, Phil Salin, at a house party in Palo Alto, before leaving for my 1st work assignment in Europe. The essay, "The Ecology of Decisions, or 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Kitchens,'" opened my eyes to what Petroski often refers to as the "artifactual intelligence" encoded in the seemingly mundane, the things we don't consider.

Phil's work, by the way, is maintained on the web by friends who deeply care about him: he succumbed to stomach cancer sometime around 1993, and is presently in cryostasis at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. I didn't have the chance to personally thank Phil for his strong influence on my thinking, but I hope to have that chance someday.

By the title, I mean I didn't expect that my friend Andy would be taking a picture of me at this moment:

It was pretty dark in the shade of the shooting stall, in stark contrast with the sunny range, and no fill flash was used. I managed to extract a bit more information using the GIMP.

Firearm was a full-frame H&K USP in .45ACP, firing on a "hostage rescue" metal silhouette at 15 meters. Hard shot, wouldn't want to have to do that for a living. I would never seek to be in such a horrifying predicament, and certainly wouldn't want to have to use a pistol, at relative long range, unsupported, to try pulling it off. Still, one should always train for the unthinkable.

I mentioned yesterday that Google's Gmail service had given me 6 invitations (they'd originally given me 2) yesterday, and that I was giving them away. I got 3 takers within minutes, leaving 3.

This morning, I notice that I had not 3, but 6, invitations left. I immediately gave away two more.

The thing is, several other people I know have Gmail accounts, but I've been told by some of them that they've only ever been given a grand total of 2 invitations, with no replenishment. I'm not sure why I keep getting more... I wonder what rules Google's automation uses to determine whom to replenish with invitations? I'm guessing that it may be a side effect of the fact that I receive mail from a very busy mailing list to that account. Invitations may be granted in proportion to use. Anyone have insight to share?

By the way - to pre-empt the inevitable request from someone I've never heard from previously - I should add the caveat that I'm only giving these invitations to realspace friends or those of my online acquaintances with whom I'm friendly.

Monica White has really gotten the Firefly bug: today, her extended recommendation of the series, "The Ascendance of Firefly,' was published on the Objectivist culture site The Atlasphere. It's particularly interesting to see how a Joss Whedon fan site has reacted to Monica's just-release piece. See also Monica's short announcement of the piece on her own blog, and the interesting speed with which some Whedon fans have engaged her in some image-correcting commentary. I love the Web.

I'm answering email just now, with a local Mandarin-language cable TV channel playing in the background (2 years of Mandarin in college, gotta keep it up... besides, I admit to a silly fascination with "Pawnshop No. 8"), when I see an advert for my dentist - a part-time semiretiree who's also a professor at a local dental college - and glanced a white guy with black hair leaning back in The Chair. What the hell? Wonder if that was me... don't remember consenting to filming. I did spend an inordinate number of visits recently getting my dentition reconstructed from the effects of "overlarge crown placement... aiyah!" from a few years ago.

This reminds me... every dentist I've ever had - American, English, Filipino, Persian, Japanese, Taiwanese - seems to have been drilled in The Dark Art of Attempting Dialogue With a Patient Pinned Helpless with Cheek Retractors.

One of the kittens (well, year-old cats) just discovered how to push out the screen on Peggy's second-floor office window! I'm sitting here, wrapped up in my writing, and Peggy comes downstairs asking, "Where's Lucy?" and commenting that her office window's screen was now down on the side carport. We both immediately grabbed one each of the many head-banger Maglite flashlights ("torches" to my UK and Aussie friend-readers) we have sitting in various rooms around the house and ran outside to the back yard. We found her quickly, shivering under a stash of gardening supplies. She was uninjured, but apparently had been outside for a couple of hours, and was a bit dusty.

We brought her in and in a fit of guilt fed her most of a bag of cat treats. Her brother Selmak, uncharacteristically, hissed at her: I'm guessing that's his way of saying, "Goddamn, you smell funky girl!"

I'm imagining that a Chihuahua, given a similar fall, would not have gotten off uninjured, the way she did.

I'll be looking for bird carcasses in the morning. I'm hoping the yard will be littered with them. If you're going to go through an unscheduled skydive, there should at least be good hunting on the ground after the event.

A half year ago, I was invited to join the Orkut social networking service by my old friend Perry Metzger. A half year later, I've decided that it's an evolutionary dead end: for a service "affiliated with Google," it's unusually clunky, feature-poor, primitive, and dreadfully unreliable. I've made a few good friends through it, however, and am glad of the experience, which has been useful and informative.

Interestingly, in the last couple of weeks I've gotten email from a few people I know through Orkut, inviting me to the Multiply network, an Orkut competitor which seems vastly superior in its execution. I'd ignored those invitations, being busy with other things, but tonight I took my friend Shannon Kaplan up on her invitation, and am impressed at the sophistication of the interface. I'm not convinced I need all their features - I already have my own self-administered blog, for example - but for the general public, it seems at first approximation to be an incredibly well-integrated suite.

So, if you receive an email entitled "Russell Whitaker invites you to keep in touch on Multiply," don't automatically assume to be spam. Multiply has an interesting feature - apparently driven by Orkut user dissatisfaction - with which Orkut users can export their entire network of contacts over to Multiply in order to generate invitations to the rival service. Better I should use it now, before Orkut programs logic to block that data export.

Of course, if Orkut's programmers had been sufficiently on the ball to quickly develop such program logic, they'd also have been sufficiently agile to develop new features demanded by their users... such as forum threading up to 1990 newsreader standards, perhaps?

I've had my head buried in a particularly frustrating programming problem, which had kept me up a couple of nights running (one of those in the fog of food poisoning), and I think I may have broken through a problem I was trying to run to ground. So, I'm treating myself to a couple of hours' blogging, before returning to work. Apologies that postings have been so thin of late.

While I'm enthusing about food, I should point out that Julia Child would have been 92 years old today. She died yesterday, however. My maternal grandmother was born 3 months after Child's birth date; I plan to visit her in a few weeks, I'm reminded. I'm also reminded that the women in my family live a long time, though not nearly long enough, my standard being centuries, but that's of purely tangential interest here.

The modern crop of food divas and divos (the humorless Martha Stewarts and the gimicky "Bam!" Emerils) owe a debt of gratitude to Child, an eccentric of the first order (anyone else remember the Dan Ackroyd parodies?) She was a woman with a very interesting personal history (reminding me of Martha Raye, "actress and denture wearer," the only civilian buried at the U.S. Special Forces cemetary at Fort Bragg), which includes having been an OSS officer during WWII.

Child is quoted as having said in an AP interview in 1989:

"What's dangerous and discouraging about this era is that people really are afraid of their food... sitting down to dinner is a trap, not something to enjoy. People should take their food more seriously. Learn what you can eat and enjoy it thoroughly."

Sounds like someone who lived her life fully. Too bad she couldn't have stuck around a few more centuries to enjoy it even more thoroughly.

By the way, Child's original TV set kitchen is preserved at the Smithsonian.

About three weeks ago, I wrote that my friend Monica White had indirectly informed me (through her blogroll) of the existence of the Quent Cordair Fine Art Gallery in Burlingame, California, about a mile from San Francisco International Airport.

Well, on Saturday - on a whim - I suggested to Peggy that we head up to the gallery for the short remainder of the afternoon. We arrived about two hours before closing... and left about an hour after closing.

I'd called ahead to confirm that the gallery was, as indicated on their website, indeed open for the afternoon. When we arrived, a friendly lady greeted us and, upon hearing my voice, recognized me from my call-ahead. When I mentioned my name, she remarked that it sounded familiar, and that she'd actually - somehow - come across my blog recently and had even recommended that a friend of hers named "Carter" (whose contact I welcome) contact me about gun-related issues! I was happily astounded. I quickly found out that this friendly - and sharp - lady is Linda Zimmerman, the director of the gallery.

Linda spent the better part of three hours talking with me about the purpose of the gallery, the only one of its kind in the world, specializing strictly in high-quality painting and sculpture of the Romantic Realist variety (see Ayn Rand's "Romantic Manifesto" for an in-depth introduction to the genre.) I was deeply impressed at the operation, the selection, and the director. The storefront has had 8 years of profitable operation, but its recent years of online operation alone keep it sufficiently profitable that it can continue in business, without diluting its collection with low-quality pieces which would otherwise meet "school of art" requirements or with technically high-quality pieces which are outside those stated requirements.

The gallery itself has on display about one-third its total collection, the other two-thirds of which is in storage, but pieces of which can be viewed by the seriously interested. The walls are arrayed with paintings, as would be expected, and a number of bronzes are also on display. Linda encourages a healthy, tactile approach to the sculptures: touch them. At one point in our long, animated chat, she took my right hand and placed it on the hip of this statue, "Gratitude" by Danielle Anjou:

This is a lovely piece, and was strangely reminincent of the 1987 Boris Vallejo cover art for the Robert A. Heinlein novel "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," itself a triumphalist riff on Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus." I love it, probably as much as Monica White loves Bill Mack's alto-relief sculpture "Forever," which was not on display the day I visited... but which I hope Monica can eventually acquire.

Linda and I talked each other's ears off, happily, while Peggy enjoyed one of the overstuffed leather couches near the front of the gallery. We talked about the business of art, and the multifarious ways the gallery has connected Romantic Realist artists, including the recently immigrated Chinese master Han Wu Shen, with deeply appreciative customers, including passionate-but-temporarily-impecunious college students who've arranged payment plans for their "must have" pieces. We talked about a great many other things, with most of the conversation led by Linda cheerily educating me in the business of her gallery, and with me responding with semi-articulate "Wows!" and "Cool!"

I do plan to spend quite a bit more time in the gallery, and may even hold a party of friends there in the near future. Yes, I did say "party"... anyone interested? It would be a great excuse to gather a few dozen of my closest friends and acquaintances in a fantastic setting near the near San Francisco. This is a very real possibility, since Linda did say that the gallery encourages people to hold their parties there. I'm thinking sometime in September, when my good friend Tom Burroughes is in town visiting from London with his girlfriend: first a morning sailing on the Bay (Tom's a qualified yachtsman), then shooting at the range, then a catered affair that night - after cleaning up - at the Quent Cordair Fine Art gallery... sounds like good living to me.

Last weekend, walking the very walkable streets of San Francisco with Peggy, I couldn't resist this shot of One Maritime Plaza (formerly known the Alcoa Building):

Yet another reason I keep a very small digital camera in my pocket whenever I leave the house. Hmm... I'm wondering if my good friend and New Yorker Perry Metzger does the same? I'd certainly love to see the occasional building or street shot from New York City on his blog.

On our dojo mailing list today, sometimes-training-buddy (and all around good guy) Irishman Stephen Ewart forwards this excellent essay, "Fighting," written by the U.K's Peter King, a superb Bujinkan practicioner and teacher with whom my friend Monica White has the privilege of training in London. An excerpt:

Hatsumi Sensei criticised martial artists who act like they are dangerous animals. He said that man has been able to use his intelligence to be able to kill dangerous animals in the world. Such people will be defeated – in a way that they had not expected, because they were outwitted by brain and not muscle. When Takamatsu Sensei was in China he was known as the Mongolian Tiger because of his martial prowess. However on his return to Japan, a friend said that he was more like a Japanese cat. Takamatsu Sensei was happy to agree. He said that, in China, it was necessary for him to be fierce like a tiger, but that now that he was back in Japan it was not. He added that women like cats and would often stroke them. Although said in humour, it illustrates the need to be hard only when needed, and then be able to return to gentleness.

This is not to say that I believe all religious people are readily capable of murder. Rather, I claim that once you structure your life around ideas that you are not permitted to test, but which you accept as beyond testing (that is, on "faith"), you've abandoned your most important survival tool, namely reason.

Introduce a bad axiom into a mathematical formal system, you can prove anything. Similarly, if you abandon reason for "faith", you lose your only tool with which to distinguish the truth. This could leave you helpless to escape the idea that "God" demands that you kill, and from there it is a short step to shooting abortion doctors or flying planes into skyscrapers.

Perry Metzger

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon in my math classes over the last couple of years, which has become more pronounced as the subject matter becomes (to some people) more difficult: the Desperate Calculator Jockey. This is the guy who never studies, is too lazy to do his homework, but somehow manages to struggle his way from one class to the next. He can usually be seen furiously punching formulae into a top-of-the-line TI-89 or its near-equivalent, expecting some magical insight into the problem from the resulting graph. While this approach may actually work in some instances, such as with a simple "differentiate this function" problem, the approach is an utter - and deserved - failure when the student is confronted with the dreaded applications problem (the so-called "word problem.")

Oh, my... this is where thinking skills are really tested, and where numerical prosthesis is nearly worthless. I love these problems: exercises in aircraft fuel vs range optimization, predictions of least-time photon transit through a non-vacuum medium (Snell's Law, an application of the Brachistochrone curve), calculations of marginal cost & maximization of profit, how to make the largest rectangular horse corral with a fixed length of expensive fencing... the good stuff. The Calculator Jockeys rarely know where to start decomposing a problem to its tractable constituents, instead, as usual, attempting to invoke an answer from the aether by keypunch.

I can pretty much tell from looking around a room who's faking it and who's getting it: those who are actually learning the calculus are learning with their pencils, which are constantly moving on paper. The fakers, on the other hand, are constantly pushing buttons. The joke's on the latter group: with the exception of actual symbolic manipulation packages such as Wolfram's Mathematica, hand calculators - to date - depend entirely on methods such as linear approximation. This means that the calculator jockey can actually get the wrong answer for a derivative of a function at a point on a curve, since the curve may not actually be differentiable at that point, but the linear approximation around that point of a secant line connecting points on either side of the original point may exist. Suckers.

The concept of luck is also an insult to those who have truly earned what they have. It's an easy way for others to write off hard work and perseverance as merely a kiss on the forehead from the fates.

You see, I find it invariably true that 'luck' strikes those that are well prepared to receive its bounty. By preparedness I mean that they have educated themselves, unerringly pointed themselves in the direction of choice and put themselves forward again and again as a person who desires the chosen end result. I'm as unsurprised by these kinds of people being struck by ‘luck’ as I am by the tallest grounded antenna being struck by lightning.

Monica White

I found this place, off the beaten path in San Francisco's Chinatown, on a visit several weeks ago with a friend: Hang Ah Team Room, which apparently has been a feature there since around 1920. The food is fantastic, service is friendly and personal, and the prices are half what I expectecd them to be, an opinion shared elsewhere in this SJ Mercury News article: "Eating Cheap in SF."

It just occurred to me now, playing with my cats, that successful cat toys (durability aside) are a lot like the lures of fly fisherman: certain shapes, colors, and noises work better than others... and the lure or toy is simply dead to the fish or cat unless you can play it properly. When you have the action down pat, both fish and cats go bugnutty.

My old friend Perry Metzger gave in today and finally started a blog. Now to convince him to add a comment mechanism...

Has anyone else here noticed just how remarkably easy it is to destroy cat toys?

We find that the sexual instinct, when disappointed and unappeased, frequently seeks and finds a substitute in religion.

Baron Richard von Kraft-Ebing

In case anyone's wondering, I've been extremely busy this week. Early tomorrow morning, I have a difficult organic chemistry exam. After that, I have some breathing room... email and blog posts to follow.

"Feelings" of a supreme being prove nothing since feelings are biochemical states. Feelings no more prove god's existence than seeing pink elephants when withdrawing from alcohol prove theirs. Science demands external evidence that is reproducible. This is how the West has risen from the swamp of mysticism and ignorance to antibiotics, computers, space travel, the internal combustion engine, etc.

Mysticism starts out as an apparently harmless, individual subjective experience. It ends up with a whip in its hand and an explosives belt around its waist, tyrannizing everyone who doesn't share that private experience.

Jim Mark

I refuse to allow anyone or anything to bring me to my knees. If there is a god I will find a way to free myself of him.

The best mythology I have ever heard on gods is from the Klingons of Star Trek. The Klingons had gods, but they killed them when they realized that they were more trouble than they were worth.

Philip Welch (on Orkut)

Today's the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. I'm reminded that a couple of weeks ago, a couple of friends of mine and I went shooting at a rifle range in northern California, taking a number of weapons including an M1 Garand rifle which probably saw action in WWII. Here, my friend Andy Chen, a brand new shooter (and 18 y/o college classmate), fires my other friend's Garand:

This was Andy's first time out shooting... and on steel reactive targets set out at 100 meters - after having been briefed on safety and weapon operation - he kept up with us two trained, experienced shooters, at least on the sandbag rests. He's spent his high school years reading military history, and knows an incredible amount of factual data on weapons history. He's also used to playing first-person shooter games - in which I've never been interested, thinking them useless for training - causing me to start to re-think my opinions of twitch games.

An older gentleman at an adjacent shooting stall took some time to discuss the Garand with Andy, pointing out that he had ordered his own Garand (which he was also shooting) from the U.S. federal government's Civilian Marksmanship Program, which I've heard about over the years, though I'd bought my own past two Garands from commercial sources.

I'm encouraging Andy to join a local CMP-affiliated club and shoot a match this summer, so that he can be eligible to buy at least a "rack grade" rifle for as low as $350... shipped Fedex directly to his door (yes, they do that)! I don't see Garands selling at gun shows for less than around $800 nowadays. Here's a very detailed and interesting account, with photos, of the experiences of two CMP participants in the purchase and shooting of their own CMP Garands.

It's especially worth noting, for California residents, that a Garand is "Kalifornia legal", making it an excellent rifle to keep locked in the trunk of one's car... just in case. Also note that a number of companies (such as Smith Enterprises) do "tanker conversions" to shorten the overall length, and one can convert the weapon to .308 caliber.

Peggy and I just returned from a rather good upscale Chinese restaurant. The paper in my fortune cookie (not Chinese cuisine, by the way) says:

Truth is a torch that gleams through the fog without dispelling it.

This is my favorite Atheist quote:

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

That sums it up as good as anything, really. Atheism is merely a position regarding the existence of gods-there is no context outside of that. The beliefs we do generally share, we share with every other sane person on earth. And we are less rare than you think - most Atheists don't make their presence known, because there is no reason to. We don't advertise.

Dwayne Stephenson

I had the pleasure of first meeting Barbara Branden very briefly at the November 1987 Future of Freedom Conference (FoFCon) in Culver City, California, but didn't engage her in conversation, since she was on her way to a talk at that convention centered around "The Passion of Ayn Rand," her biography of novelist Ayn Rand, with whom she had been associated professionally and personally for a number of decades. Her book had been published the year before, and I'd bought my own copy as soon as it hit the bookstores (this was the pre-Amazon era).

At the end of March this year, a few weeks ago, I finally got the chance to chat with Barbara in a comfortable venue where she was wasn't being shuttled around to talks, in the course of other business: her apartment in southern California. What a lovely, intelligent, funny and benevolent lady she is! I must once again thank my friend Glenn Cripe, who had business to conduct with her that afternoon, for allowing me to tag along with his crew, and of course to Barbara for her warm hospitality... and for autographing that book I bought 18 years ago.

One of the benefits of being myself - being open about my passions and not worrying overmuch about getting along with everyone - is that occasionally, someone I've never heard from introduces himself or herself and extends a hand in friendship, knowing who I am and what I stand for.

This happened again today, this time from somewhere I'd least expected: India, in the form of an articulate fellow named Yazad Jal, a thoroughgoing and studious anarchocapitalist, who'd taken note of me from a couple of running battles I'd been having with a few people on the Atheists community on Orkut.

After taking a quick look at Yazad's Orkut profile, and seeing immediately that he didn't seem like a flake (believe me, I've met a couple of crazies in the last year), I checked out Yazad's blog. I'm impressed: he's a very solid, intelligent, articulate and funny individual who's been writing fairly regularly for a couple of years, and has some interesting things to say about the political and economic problems of India. Visit his blog and make friends. If you're a fellow Orkuteer, introduce yourself to him and make friends there.

What he said: Have you ever thought about what Jesus could do for you?

What I said: Not much, really. Religion isn't my thing.

What I was thinking: If your god really is omnipotent and omniscient as your people claim, then he's directly responsible for my mother's stroke and the fact that my sister has been deaf since she was about three. If the Lord, or Jesus, or one of their henchmen ever happens to appeareth before me, I just hope that I remember, among the pyrotechnic light show that should accompany any such apparition, to kick God square in the nuts as a "thank you" for services rendered. [Note: If anybody is offended by this, then remember that God in his omnipotence is entirely responsible for my having said what I've just said - this was all God's will.]

Rory Blyth

I just found this amusing thread on Sword Forum International; scroll down to see why.

Warren reminds me of the Utilikilt (I'd known about it long before my kilting Tuesday night):

This here is a kilt for tough guys. In fact all of their kilts look cool and tough.

A company named AmeriKilt makes something similar.

Skimming through the headers on mail in my Bayesian spam filter program "Suspect mail" folder, I see this little gem:

Subject: Impress your Friends with a Rolex

A few days ago, my Bujinkan teacher Dale Seago announced on our dojo mailing list that some kilts he owned, including one he'd recently ordered, no longer fit him due to the continued success of Atkins on his waistline. He said he'd like to give the new one away to anyone who'd claim it. I'm a pretty fit guy, but I'm naturally broader-beamed than Dale, and the size he mentioned was exactly my size, so I spoke up for it. Last night in training, I received it:

These are modeled on the traditionally-constructed, khaki canvas kilts issued to the Black Watch during World War I. And for $99, you can't beat 'em.

Y'know, there was a time when proper clothing was outlawed, from August 1747 to July 1782. For Russell and the rest, here is a translation from the Gaelic of part of a proclamation that was issued upon repeal of the prohibition:

"Listen Men. This is bringing before all the Sons of the Gael, the King and Parliament of Britain have forever abolished the act against the Highland Dress; which came down to the Clans from the beginning of the world to the year 1746. This must bring great joy to every Highland Heart. You are no longer bound down to the unmanly dress of the Lowlander. This is declaring to every Man, young and old, simple and gentle, that they may after this put on and wear the Truis, the Little Kilt, the Coat, and the Striped Hose, as also the Belted Plaid, without fear of the Law of the Realm or the spite of the enemies."

I hadn't mentioned that the sense of "F-R-E-E-D-O-M-M-M!!!" (Dale's words, channelling William Wallace) which I got after trying on the kilt - and then returning to the bathroom to correct it, having put it on backwards - was fantastic! Yep, it's a man's garment. So, I wore it for the entire training session, leaving my gi trousers in my training bag. And for some reason, I just felt more bellicose, a feeling my training partners got to enjoy. Heh.

Thanks Dale!

[A bit of context: this quote refers to an amusing incident where a religious cultist in a forum I frequent blew up when he was called out on an issue of "quantum mysticism" he couldn't support. - Russell]

I think [a particular theist twit] actually did good job of defining by example an important concept in quantum mechanics: the uncertainty principle.

He obviously has some beliefs, and we could either know the position or the energy of his beliefs, but not both.

He chose to show us the energy.

Dan McCoy

An old friend of mine, Redvelvet (who doesn't keep in contact as well as she should!) sent me email last week announcing that she would be displaying some of her most recent products, including scented candles, at a San Francisco house cum ad hoc art gallery. So, my g/f and I headed up to the City for some good and outrageously low priced dim sum in the Sunset district, then motored over to the neighborhood where she was working.. where we spent half an hour scrounging for parking.

We found the funky house where she was working, first encountering "artists" of the type one usually finds in the Haight district, then found Christina, who'd been given a corner slot on a semi-indoor/semi-outdoor veranda. I introduced her to my g/f, and exchanged "how've ya been doin'?" gossip for a while. Turns out she had a bellydancing accident a couple of months ago - she's not explained to me yet what that means - and decided to start a cool little business while she's looking for work in the field she's re-trained for recently, digital circuit layout (her first degree is in theoretical mathematics).

I was stunned at the dozens of fantastic candles she had on display. I and everyone who stopped by to snap up candles noted that these types of candles usually cost a multiple - 2 to 4 times - what she was charging. So, I'm telling you, my friends, about this (though I get no cut of her sales at all) because I like Christina and I think these candles sell themselves... see for yourself.

...choose your friends more carefully, be ruthless with your time and seek out the best people you can find. As you improve yourself, you'll find that better and better people will naturally gravitate towards you. I think you'll be surprised at just how much excellence is out there.

Monica White

Today I bought a crate of 4 pounds of juicy red "California Giant" strawberries grown in Watsonville, California, some of which are the size of tennis balls... for U.S. $4.50 or so. I love markets.

I have an inch-high stack of business cards and handwritten personal notes to transcribe from this weekend's proceedings. Whoa.

Last night, I returned from 3 days of dawn-to-midnight immersion in the wonderful intensity of the 2004 Foresight Senior Associates Gathering just in time to meet a friend for 4 hours' study for our respective chemistry exams this morning. Catching up with email, I just noticed that my friend Alan Weiss has surprised me with a donation toward the upkeep of this site. So, thank you, Alan! I really appreciate the action and the sentiment behind it (which I'll keep private between us for now, but which brought a smile to my face.)

I crashed late last night, and woke early this morning, and am ready to do it all again today: the Foresight SAG continues.

I'm at the Foresight SAG today through Sunday, so postings will be light.

I was lead to believe that fidelity was about genital exclusivity. It took a long time to realize that infidelity is about lying and not abiding by (or re-negotiating) interpersonal contracts.

It's been a long journey. Now I know that I can never again promise exclusivity (even if I in fact have only one partner). I cannot trust myself to live up to that promise and therefore cannot expect any future partner to trust such a promise.

What I can promise is total honesty. I want a partner with whom I can share my feelings, my attractions, my crushes. Most of these never get acted out anyway.

If a woman wants genital exclusivity, all she has to do is keep me sexually exhausted. :-)

Richard Birney-Smith

I'm given to understand that as of today, it's been an integer number of years since the parturitions of my buddies Michael Reed and L. Neil Smith. In other words, happy birthday guys! Keep surviving!

The objectives of bullies are Power, Control, Domination, Subjugation. They get a kick out of seeing you react. It doesn't matter how you react, the fact they've successful provoked a reaction is, to the bully, a sign that their attempt at control have been successful. After that, it's a question of wearing you down. The more your try to explain, negotiate, conciliate, etc the more gratification they obtain from your increasingly desperate attempts to communicate with them. Understand that it is not possible to communicate in a mature adult manner with a disordered individual who's emotionally retarded.

The Number One rule for dealing with this type of behaviour is: don't respond and don't engage. This is not as easy to do as it sounds. It's a natural response to want to defend yourself, and to put the person right. However, never argue with a serial bully; it's not a mature adult discussion, but like dealing with a child or immature teenager; whilst the serial bully may be an adult on the outside, on the inside they are like a child who's never grown up - and probably never will.

Unattributed

Peggy is off on a trip to Napa with her brothers, my g/f is doing a marathon study weekend prepping for her upcoming cardiovascular system exam, and I'm more than caught up on my studies, so today - after I come back from the gym - I'll be catching up on weeks of backlogged email, list mail, and blog postings. Be back in about 3 hours...

...especially when it involves bad things happening perilously close to me.

There's a phenomenon well known in its universality among martial artists, pilots, and laboratory investigators (and many others, though these are categories to which I can personally claim memberhip): beginners can be dangerous!

For fledgling pilots, safety comes first in collision avoidance and minimal aptitude in takeoff and landing (especially landing). Student pilots at this point truly have to be watched carefully.

For martial artists, dealing with beginners means being aware that the beginner is often not aware of how easy it is to hurt your training partner, and hence how important it is to learn how to train properly so that you don't get hurt "when it's your turn to lose" in practice. Genuinely dangerous!

Today, I had a reminder of how easily late-first-year chemistry students can be genuinely dangerous too. I'm a stickler for thorough preparation for lab investigation, which includes adequately understanding any reaction schema involved in the labwork. Today's labwork involved the generation of noticable volumes of chlorine and nitrogen dioxide gasses, the latter of which was to be generated by heating of reagents including concentrated nitric acid under a fume hood.

Well, today a couple of giggly Chinese girls (otherwise sharp but who are treating chemistry as a checklist item, a waypoint on the way to medical school) who didn't fully understand the reaction schema, were heating the nitric acid solutions at their bench! Before any of us had time to react, they'd already generated a visible cloud of white, toxic smoke. The hell of it was, they simply stood rooted where they were standing, looking embarassed. They were not embarassed that they stood a risk of death or injury, but that they'd been caught not having prepped their lab notebooks with the proper procedure! A couple of other students managed to shake them from their (not yet literal) mortification and pull them away from the danger, while my instructor and I started hitting the buttons on the emergency fume hood evacuation systems, hoping we could clear the cloud quickly and safely by drawing it across the room into the hood system (and upwards from there into the Great Dilution of the atmosphere... note that our lab building is gratifyingly free of pigeon poop for a very good reason.)

Later, I did what the instructor later noted was probably more effective and shocking coming from a fellow student rather than from him: I dressed down the girls in front of everyone else, telling them they must come into the lab prepared next time, rather than faking their way through an experiment. Funny thing was, just a few minutes before the incident I'd commented to my instructor that many of my classmates didn't seem to have any grasp of the difference between real laboratory science and ritual magic.

Oh, and several minutes later I witnessed another girl come up to the instructor asking if the open centrifuge tubes she was holding - which were continuously generating chlorine gas as a side reaction - were hazardous! Argh!

At least our labwork on Thursday of last week went without incident. You see, there was a reaction on that day which required careful control of pH in one of the test solutions containing thiocyanate ions (SCN-). We needed to maintain a particular weakly acidic environment in order to favor a certain desired product. You see, a more acidic pH would have tilted the reaction strongly to the production of HCN, hydrogen cyanide gas...

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!

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.

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

...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...

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.

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...

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

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?

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.

No blog maintence and no mailing lists for me for 4 days. I'm back! I've had a wonderful time these last few days. More later: time to go enjoy the beautiful Bay Area weather. I feel good.

The most detestable wickedness, and the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.

Thomas Paine

I should have done this on the weekend... apologies for not having done so earlier: I'd like to warmly thank Bob Tipton, a reader of this blog and, I've found out, an investor in Project Ceres, the funders of L. Neil Smith's next science fiction novel, for having donated into the "Amazon Honor System" payment account for the upkeep of this blog. This was very generous of him, and I truly appreciate it.

One down, two to go: just finished my chemistry final exam half an hour ago, now time to relax and prepare myself with rest and food before my discrete mathematics exam tonight. I don't believe in cramming: I prefer to clear my mind before an exam, using the store of knowledge I've built up over the school term... that way, I know what I know when I take the test. Cramming doesn't really work, neurologically, though some people never seem to understand that observation.

It was almost funny the number of classmates who nearly physically jumped me on campus during the last half-hour before the exam, asking me questions they should have been asking the teacher weeks ago, e.g. "What does entropy have to do with Gibbs free energy?" or "What is a 'colligative property'?" or "What's the 'steric factor' in the rate constant?"

The best I could do is assure the questioners that they'd do fine, and to stop worrying: they'd be better prepared by meditating to clear their heads than to try to understand material they should have already mastered. I didn't have the heart to say, "Dude, you're so screwed!"

To hate is sometimes necessary as is to love or to be indifferent.

No, I haven't turned into a psychobabbling Counsellor Troi, I'm simply stating that a psychologically healthy human constantly judges things according to his value system.

From choosing one ice-cream flavour over another to choosing one job or lover or mode of dress from an array of options - we are constantly making choices.

So far, my examples have been of choices where the person strives to choose the item of highest value, the thing that will aid their life the most. These things we say are 'better' or 'excellent' and our reactions are to 'like', to 'prefer' and to 'love' them.

Conversely, there are things that harm us as humans. Things like dictatorial governments, religions with tenets stating that infidels should be killed or laws in democratic governments that encroach on civil liberties. Any intelligent human being with a valid moral system will avoid these as much as possible, will choose not to live in a society with these kinds of negatives or will fight them if they see them springing up in their own society. These things are 'worse', 'harmful' and 'evil' - these are the things that we 'hate'.

So, I do hate Christianity - when it infiltrates government, when it is thrust at me, when I am forced in some way to use its false tenets to interact with reality. When it's simply a false belief system held by certain members of society, I really couldn't care less - although it's rather an enjoyable target for humor.

Monica White

This is reprinted with the permission of Monica White from a thread today in the "Antichrists" community on Orkut:

Or not compromising in general....

ie: couple of days ago in Dublin we did the cheesy city tour and visited the Guinness factory.

Paid something of the order of 20 euros each to go on the official Guinness factory tour. Cost didn't matter, though, as I am a bit of a factory addict (love process & systematization etc). So here I was, grinning and ready to see machines go 'whoosh' and produce beer.

Nope, we stepped into what I can only call a first-year marketing student's wet dream. Not in the factory - in some sort of fitted out multimedia shell. It was supposed to be 'self-guided'....pah!....different sizes and styles of arrows haphazardly pasted to the floor, almost no lighting, displays of barley, hops etc in clear glass tubes (that you couldn't see due to lack of lighting) with attached.....speakers. Yep, so that you could LISTEN to someone pouring said grain onto microphone. Yawn.

I could go on - and I did - to the manager. Needless to say that I demanded my money back and their general no refund policy wasn't going to cut it with someone who had received NO value at all for the admission fee.

I wrote two solid pages of complaint - I gave them a full analysis of the problems with the tour as well as ways to improve it and metrics that could be implemented to ensure quality. In essence, I did something that I usually charge for.

Funnily enough, the manager realised that I was serious after a while and confessed that they were redoing the tour.

I've long ago learnt to argue my case as a consumer, probably because I'm usually the demon on the other side of the fence haranguing people into giving excellent value.

If I were asked to teach anyone one easy to implement lifeskill that would make them happy in the long term it would be to ask for a refund when they're not happy rather than compromise on what they want.

For religious friends, I have a basic rule. You don’t mention your religion around me, I leave it alone. You bring God(s) into our friendship, and I will not hesitate to shred a hole in your beliefs. If you try to feed my some hippy bull-shit about “respecting everyone’s beliefs,” you have five minutes to get as far away from me as humanly possible. I will make no promises regarding your safety after those five minutes have passed. I’ll stay friends with the religious, but not with the patronizing religious. Hell, if it’s simply an informative conversation, I’ll often sit and quietly listen for entertainment value.

Diane Duncan

I took this shot two hours ago. These are the digital and tape audio recorders of a number of students in our chemistry lecture section:

Look familiar? Anyone else remember that running sight gag from the 1985 Val Kilmer flick "Real Genius"? As one writer describes the scene (yay Google, saved a bit of typing on my part):

Do you remember the scene in the movie "Real Genius" that showed students at the beginning of a university semester sitting in a large lecture room listening to the professor? As the semester wore on, one-by-one each student left a tape recorder on their seat. The scene ended with the professor's recorder pontificating to a room full of other recorders.

I found a screenshot of that scene, which looks amazingly like our chem lecture hall, down to the same phenolic resin desktop:

Whoa. Life converges on art. Fortunately, ours is a very dynamic professor... most of the students are simply trying to capture his superb lectures for replay later. As a matter of fact, on most days the professor records his own lectures with studio-quality equipment for posting on his personal website. If only more of the good ones did that, we'd have more "Feynman Lectures on Physics" preserved for posterity.

Today in lab, a couple of people broke the "no food or drinks in lab" rule. My prof - whose lab desk is next to my lab bench - and I reacted not by stating the obvious, but by saying, "Hey! Let's measure the pH of those drinks!" Why not? We all had $600 Accumet pH meters in front of us. So, we measured the pH of the following solutions:

• Gatorade X-Factor: pH 3.089
• Arizona Iced Tea brand Green Tea w/ Ginseng & Honey: pH 3.424

That's pretty interesting, since at first approximation, I'd expected any Gatorade solution to be isotonic, at a physiologic pH of ~7.42 or so. Not so, but given that the ingredients label lists citric acid and its conjugate base sodium citrate (a buffer solution), no big surprise: it's almost exactly the pH of a 0.100 M solution of acetic acid (a weak acid, with a Ka of 1.737 x 10^-5). The Arizona Iced Tea also has citric acid in its ingredient list, but no conjugate base listed (though it undoubtedly exists in solution).

I just got back from the gym. I just don't get people who think it matters what they wear when they're grunting and sweating under a set of weights... especially women who put on makeup before a workout! Yuck... weird.

I just gave away a couple of truckloads of junk and not-so-junk using the incredible Craigslist. Hundreds of emails in the last few days! My choice of people and time to haul the stuff away, all at my convenience. Glad the service uses an anonymizer and post cancellation logic, so I don't keep getting those "do you still have <FOO> to give away???!!??" messages.

I'm still getting email from people, though, weird and puzzling stuff like this for a rusty old bike that departed my presence yesterday; this just in:

will this bike fit a 5'1" 300 pound teenager? ...are the tires flat or do they need to be replaced due to puncture?

Egad... I don't know what to say. Is she actually looking to place such a creature on a bicycle and not have the tires blow out anyway, no matter their present condition?

I just now spoke to smith2004-discuss list buddy Rocky Frisco, who's laid up in hospital dealing with some issues consequent to an appendectomy. He sounds good (from what I can tell), and on the mend: no more surgical procedures, just careful postop inpatient monitoring... should be out by the end of the week.

He'll have a lot of list mail and personal mail to weed through! But considering the problems he could be having, these are happy problems.

I have the TV playing in the background in "white noise" mode while I'm working. Just now, that populist windbag Bill O'Reilly had on as a guest an actress on whom I had a crush in my pre-teens (late 70's): Adrienne Barbeau. She's pushing 60, and she still looks hot. Genetics, money, and healthy living, I suppose. I've been happy in the last couple of years to see that Farrah Fawcett and Bo Derek are also still American Foxes. Yes, when I was 11 I had one of those "Farah swimsuit" posters.

This is one of those "don't get me started" moments, but I'm compelled to comment with fascinated horror at the number of fellow students who will follow the letter of a laboratory procedure but not understand in the least what is happening on the bench in front of them. I can't believe the number of students who don't understand that if they're assaying for a peak absorbance, and you don't find it in the range suggested by the lab manual, you keep measuring until and after peak until you find that crucial number. I think the term "laboratory investigation" should be stressed over "laboratory procedure." The former is science; the latter is sleepwalking.

...Valentine's is a stupid holiday - another sign of these emotionally incontinent times... like there is any attraction in 'let's all be romantic on cue, with pink and ribbons and roses'. Geez.

Adriana Cronin

As the regular reader may notice, I've changed this blog's front page a bit. I stumbled upon a picture of myself I like much better than the "guy with an Uzi" photo, which I've scanned and added above. I've also added curmedgeonly text in the sidebar emphasizing that "this is a personal blog, deal with it."

Oh, and I ripped out some affiliate logos. I've decided that affiliate programs don't generate their own income (doh!) without taking over your site... with the happy exception of Amazon Marketplace.

I've discovered that a standard metal Slinky is not only a great tutoring tool for explaining concepts of physics such as both transverse and longitudinal wave motion, harmonics, and spring constants, but also for concepts of chemistry, namely chemical equilibrium. For those of you familiar with LeChatelier's Principle and reaction coordinate diagrams, do this: hold the ends of a metal Slinky in your hands at the same level. The activation energy for some fundamental step is represented by the high PE peak of the curve at the top. Reactants are in your left hand, products in your right. With you hands even, the enthalpy of reaction (delta H) is 0, and the Slinky oscillates around top dead center, representing an equally product-or-reactant favored reaction step. Drop your right hand, increasing negative enthalpy of reaction, and the Slinky drops quickly into the product side. Drop the left hand instead, increasing positive enthalpy of reaction, and the reaction moves toward reactants. Very cool: it's fun to watch the light of understanding in the eyes of your audience.

Yesterday I received a notification from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation telling me that my $250 dues paid on my suspension membership in tax year 2003 are up to 90% deductible, given their 501(c)3 status. Nice surprise!

I shocked a classmate in one of my math classes when, in response to a question about how to graph a polynomial on his super-duper TI-89 graphing calculator, I told him I didn't know... and I'd never gotten around to learning how to graph on my older TI-85. I'd never been interested in learning how to plug the numbers in to generate the graph, because I actually bothered learning how to use Descarte's Law and synthetic division to find the real zeroes of a polynomial, and DeMoivre's Theorem to generate the complex zeroes (the circular intercepts on a polar coordinate graph) of a polynomial.

People who have to rely on calculators to do their thinking have no business driving them. I did learn to do graphing on my TI-85 later, of course, because it's a useful thing to know, but only to confirm one's work using the appropriate problem solving methods.

I have a few pet peeves, one of which is shopping cart thieves. I think this particular crime pushes one of my outrage button because it's an everyday occurrance, out in the open, that many people witness and almost no one does anything about. That type of thing rankles me. So, when I was driving through Cupertino (which like many American towns has a well-known problem with this type of thing) a few days ago, and saw this guy crossing the street across from Long's Drugs with the latter's property, I had to do something.

He was on the corner, and I was stopped at the light waiting to turn. I opened my window and told him he should return the cart. He was startled, and blurted out that he was moving the empty cart to a "collection center" a block away! Nonsense, and I told him so. He was visibly shaken, and turned around to return the cart to the nearby store. I pulled into the parking lot nearby to watch, and saw him making motions to resume his theft (thinking me absent), at which point I pulled up nearby and took some photos with the tiny digicam (a Sony CyberShotU) that I keep in my pocket whenever I leave the house. It's in this photo where I've informed him that I have pictures of him, and he's objecting that since I don't work for the store, I have no say in the matter.

He eventually returned the cart and did a bum-swagger off the lot. In the meantime, I parked my car and walked into the store seeking the manager, who was happily surprised, and requested that I use the store's memorycard-to-film converter to leave him copies of the photos I'd made. I took the Memory Stick from my camera, stuck it in the front of a neat little kiosk with a surprisingly idiotproof user interface, and within minutes we had a set of hardcopies for myself and for the store management, to be posted on what I assume is the "deadbeats bulletin board" where many retail operations post photos of bad check passers and other BOLO (Be On the Look Out) notices.

Yet another reason there are certain things I carry with me regularly.

Ward Griffiths: "To me gods and governments are eternally intertwined and neither deserve respect."

L. Neil Smith: "Yes, to me, atheism and anarchism have always been essentially the same position. The very concept of gods or governments is an insult to the human spirit."

I have one more entry to write after this one, an actual writeup of my impressions of the event, but as promised earlier today, I'm putting up the rest of the (useable) pics from my tiny Sony CyberShotU digicam, after a bit of cropping, enhancement, and redeye reduction:

In the foreground are Alan Weiss ("WINBEAR2" on the Fox Firefly Forum) and a nice lady whose name I've forgotten (apologies!) Alan is a libertarian friend of mine from the smith2004-discuss list, visiting from Austin for the week on business, and the mystery lady is a Democrat activist... proof that disparate fans can booze together and have fun! Old friend Dr. Kurth Reynolds ("yes, I actually am a rocket scientist!") is lurking in the background over her shoulder.

I'm still waiting for permissions to post some more of the pics from last night's Firefly shindig. In the meantime, while I'm waiting, I'll post one of the pics from the set which Fred Moulton handed me on a CD when we met at the event:

That's Anton Sherwood on the left, who was also in attendance at last night's Firefly shindig. I think he's dressed as "The Man with One Brown Shoe." Me, I'm dressed as myself. Really. Or, at least an aspect of myself. And yes, the blades are real. Party was at the home of Romana Machado Reynolds and Dr. Kurth Reynolds, Halloween 2003. Romana has always held cool parties.

I have about half a dozen or so photos I took at last night's Firefly MicroMiniShindig. I have to identify some people and get some people's permissions to post before I put them all up. Here's one for starters, though:

From left to right: Kim ("EARTH2KIM" on the Prospero Firefly Forum), me, and Mark Quon ("Genghis Khan").

From "cats on grass" to "cat with brass":

There's nothing a kitten doesn't find interesting. I'd just laid out 15 expended .50 BMG cases for photographing before putting them in the cleaning tumbler, for before-and-after pictures. Not a minute had passed before the kids jumped on them and started batting them around.

I'm no longer looking for a copy of the Steyr Scout Owner's Manual in PDF form: I have it now, thanks to private mail from Claudio in Zaire, and Mikael Häggström in Sweden on the Yahoo! Groups ScoutRifles mailing list (who posted it into their "Files" section for other seekers). Thanks to both of you, and also to Bill St. Clair and Steve Pegram.

My friend Franklin sent me a pointer to AlaskaJobFinder a few weeks ago. Looks like a great way to find summer/seasonal work in Alaska:

AlaskaJobFinder.com is the leading website for finding jobs in Alaska. We specialize in the Alaska fishing industry, featuring such jobs as deckhand jobs, cannery jobs, onshore and offshore processing jobs, and aquaculture jobs. We cover employment on sport fishing charter boats as well Alaska fishing industry support jobs.

I was rummaging around a couple of boxes trying to find my Steyr Scout's owner's manual when I ran across this photo, which I popped into my Epson flatbed scanner:

That's me about 7 years ago hanging out with my good friend in Arizona. I like this picture.

10 years and 8.5 hours ago, at 4:30 AM PST, I was awakened from my sleep at a friend's house in West Hills, part of southern California's San Fernando Valley, by what would be quickly called "The Northridge Earthquake," which was centered a few short miles from where I'd been sleeping. For the following days, my buddies and I holed up at my friend's parents' relatively undamaged house... armed and comfortable.

You won't hear about it much - if at all - in official histories of the event, but there were humvees with soldiers (whom I've always assumed were Guardsmen) patrolling some parts of LA and the Valley.

My discrete mathematics professor is a very, very bright lady with a PhD in graph theory, and an Englishwoman. I was startled tonight when we were discussing techniques of mathematical proof when she pronounced "corollary" as "coROLLary", quickly. It's not that she pronounced it differently from American standard, it's that after having spent several years in London, some years back, I have no recollection of ever having heard an Englishman say "corollary". That's what startled me.

[This is an entry I originally published March 4, 2003 on my other blog. I no longer maintain that blog, so I've decided to move most of the substantial articles to this blog to consolidate the materials - Russell]

"If a foreign businessman in Japan wants to hire a Japanese salesman or manager, he should find out if the prospect has konjo, which means "fighting spirit". By the same token, a foreigner who is negotiating with the Japanese has his work cut out for him if his Japanese counterpart is a konjo ga aru otoko (man with fighting spirit). Such men are noted for never letting adversity get them down, never giving up no matter what the odds. In fact, the more resistance they meet, the harder they fight."

Boye De Mente
Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business

This seems like a good follow-on to my earlier post on Kaitakusha Seishin (Pioneering Spirit).

[This is an entry I originally published February 23, 2003 on my other blog. I no longer maintain that blog, so I've decided to move most of the substantial articles to this blog to consolidate the materials - Russell]

Thanks to my Japanese professor for bringing up a great hyougen (expression) in the course of discussing the differences between the terms hattatsu and kaihatsu:

That's Kaitakusha Seishin: Pioneering Spirit.

[This is a book recommendation I originally published April 10, 2003 on my other blog. I no longer maintain that blog, so I've decided to move most of the substantial articles to this blog to consolidate the materials - Russell]

I'd meant several weeks ago to post this recommendation of "The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary", but am only now getting around to doing it. I can claim a good excuse for not having done so, however: for those weeks, I've been busy heavily using this dictionary in Japanese classes.

You can check out the detailed recommendations of the book on Amazon.com; I won't echo them here. I will say, however, that I wish I'd had something like this - because there is nothing else like this available from another source - when I started studying Japanese 10 years ago. This book is truly useful... and an outstanding example of the publisher's art. Everyone to whom I've shown this book, including native Japanese speakers with whom I do regular language exchange, has expressed admiration and astonishment.

I have a goal in the medium-term future: take and pass the 1-kyu level Nihongo Nouryoku Shiken (the Japan Foundation's Japanese Language Proficiency Test). Every step along the way, I plan to have this dictionary at hand. Assuming the book survives the journey, I'll keep it in my bag for a long time thereafter.

We all have our preferences, and that's a great thing, but speaking only for myself, I really need a little pussy in my life:

Yes, it's "cats on grass": even obligate carnivores need a little salad every now and then... think of it as "digestive shotgun wadding" for the little fellows. I'm given to understand from ethologist Desmond Morris that the big cats indulge in this behavior too.

On the left is 9-month-old Lucy (full name "Dr. Samantha Carter", which confuses the vet's office still) and on the right is her brother Selmak... Peggy is a Stargate SG-1 fanatic (well, so am I): she named them. Selmak has the interesting characteristic of managing to shut his eyes every single time the camera's flash lights off! I know of one human friend of mine who does exactly the same thing, my old extropian buddy Perry Metzger.

By the way, I did this on a whim, remembering Michael Reed's comment about our being "ailurophiles"; I have no intention of being branded a kittyblogger.

If you want to get something done, you've got to do it yourself. To that end, I've taken it upon myself to hold the first San Francisco Bay Area / Silicon Valley Firefly MicroMiniShindig next Monday night in Mountain View, California. Details:

Day: Monday 19 January 2004
Time: From 8pm onward

Place:
Mountain View Tied House Cafe & Brewery
(in the big biergarten out back)
954 Villa Street, Mountain View, California 94041
Ph: (650) 965-2739

Other details can be found here. If you're attending, you should RSVP. If you're wondering what all this Firefly business is, read up on it here.

I mentioned this in detail on a mailing list where friend L. Neil Smith was praising garlic. I chipped in with a recommendation for Chunky Garlic Hot Pepper Sauce in "The Pepper Plant" line of sauces by Blossom Valley Foods (800-541-4355) in Gilroy, California ("Garlic Capital of the World"). You can buy this fantastic sauce - with which I often drown the Chorizo Scramble I sometimes have at a local eatery - online at Yahoo, and at various San Francisco Bay Area locations. Magnificent stuff.

I mentioned a few days ago that Sciscoop's Ricky Roberson had written on interesting piece reflecting on my earlier report of a day at the range with an Armalite AR-50. He asked some very general, open-ended questions about the motivational psychology of shooters. I just now noticed that a couple of days ago, someone named Dirk Koenig posted a long and spot-on followup comment, "An interest in Long-Range Shooting", with which I completely agree. An excerpt:

Ultimately, you're attempting to apply scientific repeatability to an endeavor which relies on human sensory input (or a small weather station) to determine nearly all of the factors, none of which are necessarily constant from shot to shot. (or from muzzle to target, for that matter) This is to say nothing of the skill of the shooter, which has to improve alongside the equipment which can get the bullet to a target farther and farther away and where being half a millimeter off in aim will cause a miss at 400 meters, provided all your estimates about wind direction and speed were right in the first place.

In reviewing all this, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. But, like the sound of a golf ball draining into the hole after travelling 20 feet on the green, there are few sounds that warm a long-range shooters heart more than the muted CLANK of a round hitting a steel target that's a long way off...

About a year ago, I recommended Victor Koman's "Kings of the High Frontier" to my readership. I just re-read this by Ricky Roberson in his memorium of Kerry Pearson:

I learned about a few other things besides Firefly from him on his [Kerry's] website, such as some insights into political anarchy as a philosophy that I don't personally agree with but still have to acknowledge more than a few grains of truth in...

Reports from credible sources indicate that Kerry Pearson AKA "Lux Lucre" is dead, most likely from complications due to diabetes, at the age of 41. Kerry had been a sometimes-prolific poster on the Yahoo Groups mailing list for friends of L. Neil Smith. The Prospero Firefly forum is, as our friend Alan Weiss notes, "alight with the news of his passing."

I was not close to Lux, but I remember him as a kind, clever, creative man. He was kind enough to answer some questions for me on the Firefly forum when I joined a few weeks ago. I'll miss him.

Ricky Roberson of SciScoop has also written a memorium.

Another interesting little piece arrived a couple of days ago from Netflix, a documentary produced a couple of years ago in Silicon Valley, "Revolution OS". It's worth the watch, especially if you're one of the many like me Who Were There When It Happened (in my case, I was working at Netscape when the big Mozilla code release happened... even attended the big bash in the City). I was delighted to see my friend Christine Peterson given the credit she deserved for having invented the term "open source", and was also delighted to see a short bit with another old friend, Terry Egan, at a documented SVLUG Installfest.

Am I the only one who thinks that the "MSN Butterfly" commercials are really, really creepy?

I know I'll be accused of TMI (Too Much Information) for saying so, but on a cold day like today, I really do miss the heated toilet seat of my old Tokyo apartment.

Speaking of cold weather, I'm glad I'm not in Portland this week: it's socked in with snow and ice. Brrrrr!

I just finished writing about Washington State's nasty little taxman, because I'm still a bit incensed about an incident that happened about an hour ago. I was leaving my local Target with some school supplies when, outside the exit, I heard a man exclaim "you should go back to your own country to smoke those cigarettes!" as he was entering the store. I turned, and in one glance took in the object of his offense, a mixed-sex group of four moderately well-dressed young Asian people, whose style looked suspiciously familiar, happily chatting while indeed smoking cigarettes outside the door.

The dogwhistle who insulted these people apparently didn't have the cojones to stand still and talk to these people directly, instead choosing to continue into the store to harangue the first pasty-faced store clerk he could snag, yelling at her that "there's a 100-foot rule in California!" and such. I walked in and loudly told the guy that what he had done was incredibly uncivil, and he should immediately apologize to the smokers who were bothering no one. He blurted the "100 foot rule" nonsense off to me, at which point I told him that I thought that was a typically cowardly modern Californian thing to say. He raised his voice, simply choosing to yell "smoker!" at me, to which I replied, "No, actually, I'm a non-smoker... you're a fascist non-smoker!"

The guy - a Jerry Garcia lookalike without the Jerry Garcia mellow edge - actually replied, "I'll beat your ass!" I only made him more angry - but interestingly, caused him to back away - when I laughed with a surprised smile and said, "Yeah, sure you will... are you actually threatening me?" I then turned and walked in the direction of the Asians, who apparently had been utterly oblivious to our exchange, enjoying their smokes and continuing to mind their own business. I turned to one of the women in the group and alerted her that they might be accosted soon by submissive store clerks or the hairy madman, and immediately determined they were Japanese.

It was at that point that I switched to their language (yes, I do speak it) and informed them without fear of evesdropping, "You see that large, angry, hairy man waving his arms at that small storewoman through those doors there? Well, he's an intolerant local guy, and crazy to boot, so watch out for him: he seems to have a problem with your smoking." They all laughed heartily and thanked me for the warning, and I walked off to my car with a smile on my face.

A little over a week ago I was sitting in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon, checking my email, when I discovered that Ricky Roberson (whom I'd misattributed earlier as "Ricky James") of SciScoop had written a rather lengthy post on his site entitled "The Toy That's Not For Christmas" expressing his fascination with my ownership of an Armalite AR-50 single-shot .50BMG. I'd mentioned my discovery of his blog a few days before, and he was apparently returning the favor, in spades.

Ricky expresses his apparently sincere and heartfelt belief that if guns are going to exist, then he'd rather be in the group who has access to guns:

...I do unfortunately see the need to kill humans upon occasion - preferably a selected few key enemies instead of massive indiscriminate "shock and awe." An Armalite AR-50 is the best tool out there as far as I'm concerned for accomplishing this grisly task, and if this fearsome rifle is going to exist, I want to be in the group of people who have access to this technology instead of belonging to the group that doesn't.

While I essentially agree with this sentiment, I should point out a few things. First, I don't think the AR-50 is the best tool for that "grisly task". There are better tools for sniper and countersniper work nowadays, e.g. the 300 Winchester Magnum, or the 300 Lapua. Both these and related types are in increasingly common use nowadays by people whose paid jobs require their use as tools. A 700 grain .50 caliber bullet, for long range antipersonnel work, is fast becoming an outmoded approach. The guns are heavy, the ammo bulky, and the ballistics, while impressive, aren't nearly as optimal as the new breed of .30 caliber wonderguns (two of which I just mentioned).

On Saturday, I went for a haircut, re-visiting a budget haircutter for a cleanup before the new school term started today. I'd been there once before, and had left with a good cut - and the stylist was a cute Vietnamese sweetie - so I knew I'd be in good hands with the same person.

The salon is new, and has an ongoing half-off sale on simple cuts like I favor. The lobby was crammed with people lined up to have themselves placed on the waitlist... which entailed a young lady taking name, address, and telephone number from each person! I noticed that everyone was giving their info away completely, without questioning the use of the information. When I walked up, I pleasantly smiled and said, "I'm not going to give you my actual personal information, but if you can't process me into the waitlist without some information, I'll happily supply you false information, because I want the haircut."

The clerk seemed a bit startled, but collected herself and said, "No problem, we don't share this information with anyone." I told her I believed her, but informed her that in the event the shop were sold, the new owners would be under no such obligation. She responded that she'd not heard that before, and told me she'd be happy to enter dummy information into the system.

I did give her my cellphone number, so that she could call me when the stylist was ready for me, since the expected wait was just long enough to relax with a book and a sandwich at Quizno's next door. She took the number on a separate sticky note that she offered to destroy when I left.

Some time later, after I'd left happy with my $7 haircut - and a tentative golf date with my stylist (I am a free man) - I took a look at the cash receipt I'd been given upon leaving. I notice they tried their best to dummy up data for the required fields in their database, because the receipt was stamped:

No, Japanese is not the language of the infinite. Japanese is not even vague. The people of Nissan and Sony and Toyota did not get where they are today by wafting incense back and forth. The Japanese speak and write to each other like other literate peoples do. If Japanese is "unique," that is because it possesses vocabulary and grammatical constuctions and idioms that occur in no other language - but of course that is what makes all languages unique.

Jay Rubin
Gone Fishin': New Angles on Perennial Problems (Power Japanese), pp15-16

Michael Reed observes that we're both "ailurophiles". Had to look that one up.

I'd promised Michael Reed I'd send him and/or post for him the additional photos from our meeting, taken by our (rather cute) waitress at Sungari. There were two photos. I'm posting the least worst. Michael looks presentable in both, but in this, the least worst, she pushed the button on my Sony CybershotU and, thinking the shot had been taken, moved the camera as the CCD activated:

The other photo, while slightly more clear, caught me in the middle of an utterance instructing the waitress in the use of the camera... so I look like I'm sucking on a lemon. That photo I'm sending privately to Michael, since I'm pretty sure he's an archival completist like myself.

A few days ago, I mentioned that I was visiting Portland, Oregon, and was updating my blog from my hotel room. One of my readers, Michael Reed, offered to buy me lunch in downtown Portland. Right before I left, we did meet up, and spent over two hours exchanging interesting bits of information, ranging from restaurants to books to DVDs - he'd bought Firefly based on my blog entry earlier, which was gratifying - to insights on concealed carry in Oregon and other states. Michael gave me a great deal follow up on, and I'll be posting some of his recommendations soon.

Speaking of recommendations, I would be remiss not to mention that the place we had lunch was Sungari, a Szechwan restaurant in Portland's Yamhill district. I had the Rainbow Scallops, which were huge, succulent, and wonderfully spicy. Thanks for lunch, Michael!

I just got back today from an enjoyable and enlightening trip to Oregon from California. I'm about to run off to a New Year's party now, so I'll make this short. While I really enjoyed the fact that there's no retail sales tax in Oregon, they do have an annoying law prohibiting the self-service dispensing of gasoline at filling stations. On my last fueling stop before leaving the state, I engaged the angry old man in charge of fills in a discussion about the issue. He bluntly admitted that it's a makework scheme for people like himself who've lost their jobs in the timber industry.

My Bujinkan teacher Dale Seago asked me to take some pictures of his new custom dirk last night. This is the first pic I snapped as he was about to place it on the tartan plaid backdrop on the dojo mat on the floor between us. I thought this captured one aspect of Dale so well that I have to share it (the spots on the pic are from the camera lens.)

A couple of weekends ago, I finally took out my Armalite AR-50 .50 BMG for a spin. I've owned it for quite a while, but I hadn't gotten around to shooting it: I wasn't yet convinced until recently that I wouldn't break the scope I was hoping to mount on it, a Leupold Vari-X III mil-dot model with a Premier Reticle (3.5-10 x 40mm). Once I was convinced, I mounted the scope and took it out for a bit of fun, using some surplus South African ammo I'd ordered a couple of years ago. No intention of serious zeroing, but I figured it would be fun to get at least a rough zero at the longest range I could manage.

The range was only about 300 meters deep, so for fun I set up to shoot at a vertical paper target, figuring I'd try to adjust for about one foot over point of aim. My first shot, with the elevation and windage on the scope set to "0", resulted in a hit right over the target... 4 feet over. It didn't take me long to get the hits down to roughly where I wanted them. Like I said, this was simply a set of warmup shots (also remembering that the first few shots through a new barrel will change point of impact.)

One of the things that amazed me about this weapon is how light the recoil was... and how loud it was! Both aspects make perfect sense given the combination of the weight of the weapon (37lb/16.8kg) and a well-designed muzzle brake (the size of a Coke can.) The muzzle brake, in the course of doing its recoil reduction job, introduces a lot of noise to either side and back of the muzzle. You do not want to be within 10-15 feet on either side of the weapon when it lights off! Interestingly, in the shooter's position behind the gun, it's much more bearable... but less so 6 feet behind the shooter. Interesting acoustics.

I plan to take this lovely piece back out to the range in the next few weeks, under more controlled conditions. I'll write about it at length, and may even have someone do a video of the firing sequence, so you all can see and hear it in action. This thing is fun!

I'm on break between school terms, and am catching up on some entertainment. Friends on the smith2004-discuss list had been raving about a short-lived 2002 Fox television series called "Firefly," which had been cancelled due to poor ratings.

I'd actually tried to catch the first episode as it aired in the U.S. last year. I tuned in only to find that some sports event had pre-empted the airing. I tuned away in disgust. It turns out that Fox wasn't airing the pilot ("Serenity") that night; instead, they were airing "The Train Job", which was written hastily over the space of a weekend at Fox's whim... the pilot, which set up the world, the characters, and the arc of the plot, didn't air for weeks later. As a matter of fact, of the 14 episodes that were produced, 10 were aired, and most of those out of sequence.

Fox did nothing to promote the show, and placed it in a suicide slot. The show was pre-empted several more times by sports events. It died a year ago to the protests of a fanatical viewer base spread across continents. In the last year news of the series has spread by word of mouth - the way I found out about it - and seems to have created a larger fan base in its absence.

Less than 2 weeks ago, Amazon.com released the entire, properly sequenced set of Firefly episodes on DVD. As of this writing, the DVD set ranks 17th in sales, with 261 reviews and an average 5-star rating!

Firefly: The Complete Series is also available for rental from Netflix.com. Several weeks ago, I added it to my Netflix rental queue - they allow pre-release reservations - and as soon as it was available to be rented, it was shipped to me. My loved one and I spent several evenings this last week watching the entire set. We are completely enamoured of this series, and now we're wondering how we're going to follow up with anything nearly as good.

The Concorde SST was finally retired by British Airways today, after years of running at a loss. As much of an Anglo-French boondoggle as it turned out to be, I've always been a bit fond of the plane: the idea of a supersonic transport has always been, um, sound; someone will do it right someday.

Years ago when I lived in London, I had the occasional pleasure of seeing a Concorde crossing over London on its way to or from Heathrow Airport, in climb or descent configuration, far enough away from the airport that its spindly landing gear were retracted and its nosecone was pulled up in its sleek inline (unbent) cruise configuration.

I even got to visit one of the birds, and step inside, ten years ago this autumn. I was part of a small group of people who toured catering operations for British Airways at Heathrow (long story) with a side trip to the Concorde hangar. I have a ton of pics from that trip, and even a couple of cool ones of myself in the Captain's seat in the narrow cockpit of the one plane we were allowed to enter. If I have time soon, I'll dig those out and scan a few to this site.

I really wish that BA would cave in to Richard Branson's attempts to buy a Concorde off its hands: a Virgin Atlantic Concorde might actually make money, as well as keep alive a fabulous piece of aviation history.

This is just simply embarrassing. In the spirit of Chinese Communist Party Self Criticism, this being the day the Soviets - er, the Chinese - launch their first cosmonaut into space on a 40 year old Soyuz design, I'll criticize this blunder of mine:

About a week ago, I mentioned a scuba diving trip I made to Monterey, California. If you look closely at the picture in that article, you'll see attached to the left side (my left side, as pictured) on the BCD (bouyancy control device [vest]) a Cold Steel Recon Tanto in its Kydex/Concealex sheath. Well, I was so knackered from the surf zone re-entry that I didn't immediately clean off my gear with fresh water and dry it. I did that the next day, forgetting completely that I'd clipped several caribiners (which survived unharmed) and one nice high carbon steel tanto (which suffered) to my technical BCD.

If you look closely at the snapshot above, you'll see rust spots on the exposed cutting edge of the blade. I took that photo as a record, before I cleaned up the edge. It took me an hour of careful work, but I was able to stone out and hone the rust spots. If you ever have anything like this happen to your blades, fix it thoroughly: one oxide spot will catalyze a larger oxide surface. I can say, however, that I'm really pleased at how the rest of the knife held up: flawlessly. The black epoxy powder coat finish protects the body of the blade extremely well.

I'm still going to try to dive this knife again, but next time I will 1.) pre-treat the entire blade surface with oil and 2.) immediately clean and dry the blade as soon as I doff my diving gear. Also, I'll use the same Nonox rust cleaner/preventative I use on my swords as an additional level of prevention in the cleanup.

As for Christianity's alleged concern with truth, Christian faith is to free inquiry what the Mafia is to free enterprise. Christianity may be represented as a competitor in the realm of ideas to be considered on the basis of its merits, but this is mere disguise. Like the Mafia, if Christianity fails to defeat its competition by legitimate means (which is a forgone conclusion), it resorts to strong-arm tactics. Have faith or be damned -- this biblical doctrine alone is enough to exclude Christianity from the domain of reason.

George H. Smith
Atheism: The Case Against God, p169

I spent the weekend with friends in Monterey Bay, California scuba spearfishing. More on this later, but I figured I'd put up this picture right away. This was taken on Saturday when suiting up before a surf entry into the Bay from Del Monte Beach:

My good friend Franklin (AKA "The Big C.I.G.A.R.") is the one without his hood on. I'm the sweaty one on the right with all gear ready for entry (diving 34.9 percent enriched air/Nitrox, by the way). I could not wait to hit the 57 Fahrenheit degree water... I was boiling! More on this trip later.

Hunting is not simple. It is the only absolute rediscovery mechanism available to human beings; the mind-body fusion of all meditative, spiritual experiences is derived form its pasturage... the hunt is a universe of emotion that overwhelms, scatters all notions of other preoccupations and delivers the persona complete. Hunting is a love affair; turbulent, glaring, and all possessing... hunting is an immersion; a drowning in connectedness... hunting knows why the senses were made! Hunting is a cataclysm of inward progress. We hunt for spiritual reserve...to understand the world (and for)... the knowledge of self.

Shane Mahoney

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

It is one of the Christian delusions that Christianity brought charity into the world. It did no such thing. There were plenty of agencies for taking care of the poor and helpless long before Christianity was heard of, and even before Judaism. Both Christianity and Judaism have converted charity into a sort of pious racket. The alms-giver, in return for a trifling expenditure on this earth, will be rewarded with an infinity of bliss post-mortem. This purely selfish note is struck with great clarity by Judaism, and only less clearly by Christianity. It appears also in the other religions of the East. Thus religion has not really promoted charity, but debased it.

H. L. Mencken

One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. ...[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.

H. L. Mencken

Just had a nasty thought (one of many), trapped watching commercials on the Fox News Channel while eating lunch. A Keebler cracker commercial was airing, with the usual annoying, cloying Keebler Elf motif.

The thought was this: I am certain that someday soon, these commercials will have a 10-15 second urgently and legally worded postamble to the effect of "no, elves don't exist, there is no Magic Oven, don't believe everything you see on TV" because sure as hell some loser is going to try suing the Kellogg Company for all the money in Battle Creek, Michigan because of their eventual disillusionment & resultant psychological distress.

Stupider things have happened. I'll bet something like this happens.

Then again, maybe they should be sued for this "Elfin facts" claptrap I see scrolling in my browser's status bar courtesy of the page's embedded Javascript:

• "The Hollow Tree grows in the Sylvan Glen"
• "Elves enjoy work more than play"
• "Elves bake using the magic oven"
• "The Hollow Tree doesn't lose its leaves in the winter"
• "The elves rely on natural energy sources like wind or water instead of electricity"

Excuse me while I dig an airsickness sack out of my flight bag...

"...and I'm a selfdefenseaholic."

A few days ago, I discovered the Self-Defense Forums, and have been reccommending that high-quality site to a number of people. My teacher Dale Seago has been doing a lot of posting there, including this introductory piece with lots of great photos of Scottish dirks.

I'm testing out a new scanner (an Epson 1260 Photo) which I've obtained to help bring a bit more order to my archives: I'm digitizing as much of my archives as I can manage. I hate paper, but I have too much of it.

I found a 12-13 year old pamphlet from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, entitled "Why Cryonics Can Work". I'm a member of the organization, and before I moved to Europe for a few years in the early 90's, I was pretty active as a weekend volunteer. Here's a bit of that history, the front of the aforementioned brochure:

I believe this is one of those "what I did on my spring vacation" types of photos: to the best of my recollection, this happened in the spring of 1991 when I was back in the States for a couple of weeks from London. Instead of taking it easy - which I have a hard time doing anyway - I heard that Alcor was in need of, um, warm bodies to help move a cold one from storage in an old style dewar to one of the recently manufactured Bigfoot units. The guy in the sleeping bag was the first man successfully frozen and maintained continuously since 1967.

From left: Dr. Michael Perry, Mike Darwin and (back to camera) me. I believe, from the hair, that the 4th person may be Steve Bridge. Notice the heavy gloves and my care in reaching around the body: the sleeping bag was saturated with liquid nitrogen. Cold.

I'm not the first to say this, but Federal and state elections in America really should be April 15 or 16.

Never wash cat bedding with human clothing. Never.

Now that I'm mostly recovered from this weekend's training - though still moving slowly - I'll mention this weekend's training I attended in Concord, California, conducted by Soke Don Angier of Yanagi Ryu Aiki Jiujitsu at Aikido of Diablo Valley, graciously hosted by Rick Rowell and Shari Dyer (who provided the photo below).

Mr. Angier is the only American soke of a Japanese family martial art, Yanagi Ryu Aiki Jiujitsu, an offshoot of the Daito Ryu tradition. He'll be turning 70 this year, and has been doing his art since 1958. He has an interesting story to tell, recounted in the article "'So Sorry! Jiu-jitsu Please, Not Judo!' My Career in Yanagi-ryu Aiki Jujutsu", originally printed in the May 2001 edition of Aikido Journal, and reprinted by the Journal of Combative Sport (an interesting venue, since Yanagi Ryu, like the Bujinkan arts I study, utterly lacks sporting elements).

My American teacher in the Bujinkan, Dale Seago, some years ago strongly recommended that his students take advantage of the fact that Mr. Angier was visiting San Francisco for a weekend seminar on the principles of his art. A number of us did indeed take Dale up on his recommendation, and a small core group of us make a point of training with Mr. Angier on the roughly yearly schedule he visits the San Francisco Bay area.

Don Angier teaches these 2-day seminars with a very small number of very specific techniques, which are vehicles for the important lessons: the principles behind martially effective movement, e.g. commutative locking, finding the opponent's weak lines, taking advantage of hardwired mammalian and reptilian visual responses to misdirection, etc. All physics, all anatomy & physiology.

As is usual at these events, we had a larger (18-20 people) group training the first day, and a small group of about half that size training the second day. Mr. Angier and his direct students Jeremy and Mort (great guys) circulated the room giving intensely minutely specific directions for correcting our movements.

The attendees were predominantly aikidoists, with a much smaller number of Bujinkan students. The purpose of the training was not to make us practicioners of Mr. Angier's art, but rather to take home the lessons of his training to our own arts and our own movement. I can't recommend his training highly enough. At $70 for the weekend, too, it was practically given away free. Train with him, if you have the opportunity.

I've recently heard Fox News reporters calling found weapons caches "arsenals". Guys, an "arsenal" is a place where weapons are manufactured (and sometimes designed); an "armory" is a place where weapons are simply stored.

While I'm ranting, I also noticed that one of Fox's talking head retired military analysts actually misused the term "decimate" to mean "annihilate". This is a somewhat understandable mistake, had it been committed by someone not schooled in the arts of war, but rather shocking on the part of a professional officer.

To those who don't understand my quibble, see this definition of "decimate". I disagree with this guy, by the way: I'm aware that words do change meanings over time, but "decimate" still retains the distinction of "to reduce (in force)". And yes, I'm aware of the arguments of Pinker against "language mavens" in his superb The Language Instinct and related works - I actually agree with most of them - but I'm annoyed at the degradation of language where caused by several generations of horrible government schooling.

(Bitch mode off)

Just saw footage of U.S. troops fighting alongside Kurds in northern Iraq. Looked a lot like northern Nevada mountain country, complete with snow-covered peaks! I wonder if they've got something like mule deer out there too... hmmm... I wonder if hunting is good out there.

Speaking of which, I've heard quite a bit about Iraqis being a hunter culture, and gun ownership being a common thing. I'm not thrilled to hear that British forces have been making a big deal of bringing their own special brand of domestic gun control to the population in Iraq. I sincerely hope the Iraqi people have stashed away all those Kalashnikovs they've supposedly been issued.

Don't take this to mean I'm anything resembling sympathetic to the Iraqis' maddog dictator. I'm simply concerned that we recognize the individual rights of Iraqi people. Innocent Iraqis have the right to own and keep weapons too.

This one hits me personally: American Airlines flight AA128 held at SJC (I refuse to call it "Norman Mineta International"): possible SARS cases onboard.

Fox News is showing a live feed from the tarmac. What they don't mention is that this is the only daily flight from Tokyo's Narita airport to San Jose (I know it well, personally, from too many trips), and the most inconvenient: passengers disembark onto the tarmac, walk into an immigration area, pass that area, pick up their luggage, pass through Customs, give back their luggage to a baggage transport, and travel by bus to the main terminal... where they wait for their luggage again at another baggage carousel! This SARS incident adds another potentially dangerous element to an an otherwise simply annoying travel gauntlet.

Apparently this flight originated in Hong Kong on its way to Narita outbound for San Jose. Fox News reports that the tourist industry in Hong Kong has all but shut down. I've spent a total of a couple of months in the last 3 years in Hong Kong, and really worry for my family there. I wish them health and safety.

Thanks to Michael Duey for sending me this digipic he captured at a recent training event with Bujinkan shihan Bill Atkins.

I've cropped the face of my victim training partner per request of He Who Must Not Be Named (AKA "Robert"), who's tangled in my training kyoketsu shoge ("ring & dagger"), a most amusing weapon system.

Dr. Ken Lunde of Adobe Systems (author of CJKV Information Processing) surprised me a few days ago by sending me a large gift box of O'Reilly & Associates books, including half a dozen titles I'd actually queued in my "buy when I find my next job" list I carry in my Sony Clie:

Essential Blogging
Java Swing, Second Edition
Programming Jakarta Struts
Java Performance Tuning
NetBeans: The Definitive Guide
JDBC Pocket Reference

I can't adequately express how much I appreciate this gift. I'd mentioned in an earlier post that I'm retooling for a new career (I'm in school again, and looking for work), and these books are exactly the types of mindfeed I need right now. Again, thanks!

School has consumed me the last few months, since the dot.com bust interrupted several years of I/S programming career arc. I've been spending some time evaluating my work future, trying to determine the best ways to combine at least a couple of my passions into a revised career path.

One of those passions is biology, ranging from Darwinian evolutionary theory, physical anthropology, and evolutionary psychology (AKA the oft-misunderstood "sociobiology"), to Dawkinsian "selfish gene" theory, to Drexlerian nanomedicine.

As both an experienced information processing guy, and a biology watcher, I've been looking into the field of bioinformatics for clues in that search. I just now ran across a transcript of a talk given at an O'Reilly conference by Lincoln Stein, "Bioinformatics: Gone in 2012", in which he gives bioinformatics "10 years to live".