Simon's Journal

In-tree-ging

2012-01-24T17:50:00.000+13:00

An unexpected letter appears in my inbox from a Russian woman wanting to get to know me.
At first it looked like all the other scam dating emails I get, and, as usual, I set out to see what I could learn.

It had a bunch of the usual red-flags - a very attractive woman is interested in me, she thinks I'm nice and wants to get to know me. She mentions my profile on a dating site (remember back then?) as how she knows me - but those sites don't normally let you email people privately so that's a bit odd. Does not say anything about what it was about the profile that interested her and the email handle did not match the name.

OTOH: googling the text of the email got zero hits ... scams usually produce millions.

There were photos with it so hey: I can use google photo search to see if the photos appeared anywhere else and sure enough one of the did. It appeared on a Russian dating site - but it looked a lot less scammy than I was expecting so I used g+ contacts to help figure out the site.

Seems the handle is a reasonable pseudonym for a woman online and the site is a genuine social media site ... looks like a kind of facebook for the romantically inclined. The posts on her public page were all poetry, but that is not so unusual either and a lady has to be cautious.

On the strength of this I wrote back asking for information, and got a reply - a bit slower than I'm used to - which managed to confirm what I'd already figured out. She also sounded a bit freaked out that I found her other profile ... I still don't know any more about her or what she finds so interesting about me though. I was half expecting this to turn out to be the dating site trying to lure me back, so I was surprised, but heartened, that her reply was not an immediate solicitation, "come and sign in to a premium account to talk some more..." sort of thing. That would have been depressing. Look what these scams are doing to the dating scheme!

I actually quite like Russian women. I've replied to the reply and provided links to my other profiles ... we'll see what we can see.

The trouble with this sort of contact is that the positive possibilities are strongly limited by distance while the negative ones are not.

So, Natalya, if you read this, .............. um?
Call me?

Movies

2012-01-16T12:01:00.000+13:00

Movie Weekend ...

The Assassin Next Door : this is an Israeli movie in Hebrew, Russian, and English - I switched the subtitles on. It's like La Femme Nikita only much grungier. A relentless pace even if the ending was a little predictable, overall I liked it: it was the best of this bunch.

Season of the Witch: tedious and dull with no moments of credible tension and a total waste of a strong cast. It had the usual supernatural villain who can melt iron by touching it and knock over large bookcases by thought alone and yet seems to forget these abilities when in combat with the hero. Pathetic. The ending looked like the setup for a TV series.

Deadland: if anything, even more tedious - I actually started nodding off during this. The villains randomly kill anyone except the hero, who they keep trapping. Unsubtle foreshadowing leads to a clumsy "twist". I was glad when it ended.

Thinner: A morbid, rather than scary, horror: I liked it. It had hokey dialog, holey logic, and bad makeup. Classic. By the end you are chuckling at the psychology. Though it starts out with a cliche'd tale of a gypsey curse, the plot avoids heading down the usual paths. Joe Montegna (Criminal Minds) is good value as a mob boss.

Well two duds and no greatness. The recommend on that list is The Assassin Next Door by a long way.
I'm starting to run out of titles at the local video store that I haven't seen.

FTL - um - Light

2012-01-08T19:50:00.000+13:00

Sounds like a contradiction - light being faster than itself. However, by FTL I mean "Faster Than the speed of Light in a vacuum".

Recently my attention has been drawn to some reports of light pulses in an optical fibre travelling FTL. They tend to be quite sensational - making much of the great but unspecified implications for communication. I thought I'd check it out.

There are a bunch of papers about this, like this one. So it's real! Next I had to actually read them, and find people in the field to help me understand them - one of the advantages of having a scientific community. Gradually understanding dawns and, as suspected, it's a trick.

I was shown a nice animation that illustrates the effect quite well.

When the articles say "FTL light pulse" what we imagine is that someone points a torch (or something) down a fiber, turns it on, turns it off. The middle of the pulse (the "group velocity") is FTL. But that's not quite what is going on here.

If you watch the animation, nothing at all physical is going FTL ... the individual photons are all STL. Light moving Slower Than Light is not a problem, lightspeed in a medium is less than in a vacuum, it's how optical fibers work. What happens is that each of the colors travel at a different STL speed, and so they interfere with each other. The colors still add up to white light, but the brightest part of the beam (not pulse) changes position quickly - FTL. Those are the big wiggles in the animation. It is the bright bump in the beam that the authors of the papers are calling the "superluminal pulse" and the sensational articles are "forgetting" that this pulse is just part of an overall beam.

And the great consequences for communication?

The superluminal pulses cannot be used for FTL communication. The other effects, slowing down the long-wavelength colors and all that, those are the bits with the potential use. Greatly slowing light pulses would be useful in making optical computers for example. Light is just too darn fast.

Internet Access as a Human Right?

2012-01-07T17:37:00.000+13:00

Access to information is already a right - this is not controversial.

Literacy is required for that in the modern age so literacy education is also a right ... we all have the right to be able to read and right and to exercise these skills... comes under the concepts of freedom of speech and expression.

However, nobody is out campaigning that access to clay tablets and styli should be a right - they are "tools for writing". This is because clay tablets are not very important to modern written expression ... we'd place more emphasis on access to paper and ink (the 1765 Stamp Act, USA, comes to mind).

In the 21st century, the internet is emerging as a major means of access to all kinds of information - easily as important as paper in the late 1700's. The primacy of the internet in many countries now means that, if not now, then in the near future, access to the internet will become essential to the exercise of existing rights . This is the basis for the claim that internet access should be (formally recognized as) a right in law as well ... meaning that it should be protected in law as a way to protect existing rights into the future.

This is hard to fit on a banner - so the slogan is that "the internet should be a right".

The phenominon of the internet pretty much embodies article 19 of the UN UDOHR which includes the freedom to ... receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Access to the internet is already an International Human Right.

There are legal implications for this or any country whose powers want to be able to restrict internet access without due process.

Even those who have moral reservations about the rights status of the internet, if they care about due process, and access to information, want to support this idea.

House Pest

2012-01-04T15:05:00.000+13:00

I have a house pest.
Well - I have a mother visiting - supposed to be just for xmas, I think she's worried about me, but it starts to grate after a while. I thought maybe after the New Year she'd go by herself.

She's been cleaning. Last time she cleaned it cost me $300 ... but I let her because I can't stop it and she feels better for doing it. After a while it sort of grates - like when she wants to set new rules for my house. It is my house, she is a guest in it. She does not like it, she does not have to visit.

It's not terrible - she makes up for it by buying in extra food for example ... and the house is clean. This is nice. A little of this is nice. I appreciate it I do. Really.

But how do you throw your mother out?

Why an iPad is not a "need".

2011-12-27T12:39:00.001+13:00

Short while ago my attention was drawn to an online bit purporting to be 4 reasons you don't really need an iPad. It was a waffley bit with bogus reasons like "maybe you can't afford one"? Awwww ... poor people who cannot afford something - obviously they don't need it then.

I have ridiculed the arguments in another discussion - however, it occurred to me to that I could do better. Actually, it should be trivial - the position includes the word "really" which tends to be self-defining ... it becomes a "no real Scotsman..." argument if you're not careful. The non-trivial reasons should avoid this - even if most of them revolve around the different ways of saying that an iPad is not a need. Lets see if I can find four...

The real reasons you don't really need an iPad (tablet PC) -

#1. Economics:
An iPad is not a need. It is a want.
There's no really about it. In economics, a need is something you have to have, something you can't do without. A good example is food. If you don't eat, you won't survive for long. Many people have gone days without eating, but they eventually ate a lot of food. You might not need a whole lot of food, but you do need to eat.

A want is something you would like to have. It is not absolutely necessary, but it my be a good thing to have. Though there are many people who will insist they cannot live without their iPad, it is physically possible to do without one for many years and you don't eventually go through a lot of them just to make up for the iStarvation.

#2. Psychology
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation. Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, all of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans.

In this hierarchy - an iPad does not even register. Lets go through them one at a time to check:

It is not Physiological - you can live without it though some people would benefit from it's removal there is no-one who would benefit from having one inserted... however satisfying it may be for the rest of us.

It is not a safety need. It will not, for example, act to protect you from gunfire or to cushion a fall.

If you find your iPad fulfilling a love/belonging need you are a sad individual indeed. Admittedly it is more acceptable to take your iPad to dinner than an inflatable partner... I have been told... but Maslow was referring to healthy psychology, not delusions.

Although Apple spend a lot of money trying to make it an Esteem/Self-respect need, it is not. You may feel like a worthwhile human being once owning one but the feeling soon fades when you realize the way to self-worth is to be worthy in yourself.

In terms of Self Actualization - there is a faint, distant, possibility it could provide for a problem-solving need. This is where it gets a bit tricky - how closely defined does a problem have to get before a tablet PC becomes the solution-provider?

I thought I'd have to write a long section on this but it seems someone else has already done it for me:
http://www.brainmates.com.au/brainrants/what-customer-problem-does-the-ipad-solve
... nuff said.

#3. Anti-Tech
And none of us needs that.
Apple has gone a long way with the "less is more" philosophy - convincing so many people that less is actually more. Many years of advances in computer technology has yielded a computer many thousands of times more powerful than the kind of thing we used to use to predict the weather or explore the fabric of space and time. And it is a glorified clipboard.

#4. Encourages antisocial behavior
You heard.
Apple and the tablets are part of an economic model that brought us Digital Restrictions Management, Defective by Design, and the Amazon Swindle.

Is this really the direction we need computers to develop in?

android I hear from the back someplace?
This is about owning your own computer - it is about demanding that your tech works for you and not some other person. I'm sure everyone reading this has seen the arguments.

I'm not going to insist that absolutely no proprietary software should exist at all. But I will also acknowledge that locking down the tech and removing transparency is, where not outright antisocial, encourages antisocial software to persist. In turn, this encourages antisocial legislation like SOPA ... I know Apple et al came out against SOPA (eventually) but that is like a decrying oppressive dictatorships while selling them arms.

Conclusion:
It is quite easy to come out with four non-trivial reasons you don't need an iPad - even to generalize to tablet PCs. Of course, none of these arguments/reasons are complete. That would take too long. So, naturally, they are full of holes.

It's just that I want people to notice what happens to an article when even a small amount of actual research goes into it. Then. maybe, we'll see more interesting shares ... oh hope of hopes.

Movie Sunday

2011-12-18T18:01:00.000+13:00

Xmas movies are bit of a pain so I rented some of my own.

Source Code
It's Ohhh-kay I guess. I've just seem films like it. Wet ending. Sort-of 12 monkeys meets Groundhog Day, with all the good bits removed. And what is this with Hollywood script-writers and daddy-issues?

Disappearances
Now this is better - starts out as a bit of a father-son-in-crime antiheroes thriller, but rapidly turns into a psychological commentary. The opening commentary on Paradise Lost (the poem) sums up the movie - it's about better days lost. All the sorts of losses as you grow up, except in the film they happen over a few days as a metaphor. The solid, steady, tone carries the difficult subject well. AFAICT it's not enough like much else to be worth the comment.

Dead Snow
Really great schlock-horror out of Norway - very film-studentish because it is done by film students (started on a film camp). Its Norwegian, with subtitles and a Norwegian metal track apparently called "Eat that Shit". There's some English spoken, including a surprising impersonation of Arnold Schwartzenegger.
It's a zombie movie with Nazis, entrails, and bad humor. What can I say.

The Ward
John Carpenter standard - and as expected of a J Carpenter film. A bunch of girls in a mental hospital are being killed one by one and have to figure out what is happening. I worked out the twist quite early because I watch way too many movies - there have been a bunch like it, you know, serial killer, experimental therapies and so on. Think Identity and Shutter Island.

That has seen me through two days, six burgers, and 1.5L of coke.
Just as well because it has been raining.

2011-12-15T14:05:00.000+13:00

I had a look at overseas teaching positions - initially thinking of Australia but all the searches there turned up jobs in the UK. Hey: I can get a British passport!

The jobs turn out to be worth from 35000 pounds - good grief! So I talked to an agent there and she tells me that I need to have two people give me testimonials from classroom teaching in the last two years. They are quite happy if it is two from the same lesson even if it the only lesson ever and suggested I volunteer at a school just to get them.

That sounds promising.

Of course it means that I have to wait until next year and either (a) find a school that will do this, or (b) go do a section via teachers college. There is always option (c): finding two people to lie through their teeth for me :)

Hoooo - getting baad!

2011-12-05T22:01:00.001+13:00

Bloke came around from Mercury Energy today: I've been neglecting my power bill.
It's my fault. Fortunately I had a receipt for my last payment which they didn't have on record so the power stays on and I'm a flagged customer.

There is no point arguing with the guy who comes around, it's not his fault. Time for me to wake up.

One of the things I had a look at was if I can save on my power bill by switching supplier. I'll stil have to pay the ME bill of course, but whatsmynumber.com says I can save $38 a month by switching. On my income that is probably a good idea. I checked with Consumer Powerswitch.

If I use my last bill, CP estimates 13210kW.hr annual useage, and changing to Contact Energy will save me $400 a year. The closest competitor is Energy Online, saving $380 a year. Woot!

I decided to check again using the midwinter bill. My use then is about double what it was last month and CP says different. They estimate 11014kW.hr annual consumption saving $300pa from Contact or E-Online (about $6 difference between them.)

But the difference makes me wonder about their model.

Looking at my bill, my use is basically flat from November to February, and makes a triangle peaking in July. So, for eight months I'm averaging the difference between peak and trough use - which puts my actual yearly use at about 8000kW.hr, closer to the second one.

I'm expecting higher than that this coming year since I'll get a housemate - but then housemate will, hopefully, pay half the costs.

#ElectionNZ

2011-11-27T18:54:00.000+13:00

Still recovering from a very boring election night. Blogosphere seems very ho-hum about the reslts... all the expected comments.

We got the expected big National majority, and the usual suspects crying out for an overhaul of MMP on the grounds of these results. They do that each time ... this time it seems that National should be able to govern by themselves since their majority is so large but are forced to toady to the ultra-right for a measly seat. Yeah right.

People, MMP allows for a nuanced view of election results. The message to National is, surely, "Keep doing what you are doing, with a few small tweaks."

The biggest message of this years elections seems to be underreported though: voter turnout os very low (for NZ). Not-voting is, itself, a vote. The message that lots of uncast votes sends is that it wasn't worth voting. Its not hard to vote - it takes less than a minute on a weekend and you can't move for polling stations. Some countries you have to slip through gunmen and risk reprisals to cast a vote. These places have an excuse for a low turnout. But here? "Whence the apathy?" - the party strategists have to ask themselves (or, better, other people). Surely this can only mean that none of the choices were attractive?

I'd like to see National grow a pair and form a government with the Greens. Sure they'll have to lose some policies, but they'll also lose the tail-wagging-the-god look of dealing with Act, scupper any possibility of effective opposition, and look like they are listening to voters.

The economy will start to look up over the next three years provided nobody fiddles with it much. All they have to do then is not stuff up (which is the best anyone is saying about their performance so far) and they'll get a third term in 2014. That's got to be worth acceding to Green's actually quite modest core policies which can be spun as "what the public wants" anyway.

Still, I doubt it will happen.

Toastmasters #3

2011-11-15T00:05:00.000+13:00

Speech #3 from the CC manual today - went OK I guess.

I turned the stuff on radioactive water into a 5-7 min presentation and went over-time by almost 2mins. Too much detail. However, I got positive reviews and I didn't need my notes.

Not too bad - since the last three days I've been unbelievably itchy all over, no rash, no lumps, no redness or swelling or anything. It's been madness. Hot showers and cold sea soothes it for a while. Anti-histamines reduce the symptoms to a prickly burning sensation like a sunburn or a fever. I'm not feverish and I have not been burned.

Googling produces worrying possibilities ... thyroid to leukemia eek! But I could have just got hyper-sensitive after an insect bite and the mozzies have been active and the symptoms showed up in the morning after sleeping with the doors open.

Anyway, this has made me too distracted to write the speech - so it was mostly impromptu.

NZ Radioactive Drinking Water

2011-11-13T14:56:00.000+13:00

People watching the Texas radioactive water thing may be interested in this [doc format - need better source]... there's probably a more up to date one but this is illustrative. Here's an excerpt concerning the NZ standard for radiation in water:

Dose conversion factors linking concentrations in water to resulting radiation dose, recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP 1996) were used in deriving the MAV concentrations. This approach is consistent with that of other organisations such as the World Health Organisation (2004). The MAVs are deliberately conservative. If the natural radionuclides radium-226 and radium-228 were present in drinking-water at the MAV level (worst case scenario), the annual radiation dose would still be less than 5 percent of the total annual natural dose.

It's set up in reference to international standards - the ICRP reference is worth looking at. So what are the limits?
The MAVs for radiological determinands are:

alpha: 0.10 becquerel per litre, excluding radon-222
beta: 0.50 becquerel per litre, excluding potassium-40
radon-222: 100 becquerel per litre.

Are these big?
Well, 1Bq is one nuclear disintegration a second. The equivalent USEPA standard for beta concentration is about 0.2Bq (using 5pCu) so their standard is actually tougher than ours. But ... is it big - the authors go on to point out:

In the radiological context, the MAV is intended to indicate a level above which the radioactive content of the water should be investigated further and an assessment of all relevant radiological issues undertaken. Radiation protection issues are often complex and many factors would have to be taken into account before a water supply could be classified as unacceptable even though a radiological MAV might have been exceeded.

The DWSNZ therefore emphasise that further assessment by the National Radiation Laboratory of the Ministry of Health is required in such cases. The MAV is thus more of a guideline than necessarily an absolute maximum. It is also intended to be clear however, that at levels below the MAV, there is no need for further assessment.
... in other words - we have adopted a safety limit of 20% of what we'd get anyway just walking around and the US prefers 10% as a safety margin.
Exceeding the margin just means that further investigation is needed.

But how about danger levels?

Here's an old paper - (also see the links to the dial-painter studies in that paper)... the dial-painter studies suggest tumors do not appear below 3.7 million Bq - we could be skeptical about this by 6 whole orders of magnitude and still be pretty safe.

What has been interesting to me about this trawl through data sources is the difference between what the US government provides it's population and what the NZ government does. The US official sources are all calm and reassuring language with a lack of much that can be checked - it takes quite a bit of hunting to reach the level where you can find out anything verifiable and I usually had to go to non-government sources. On the NZ trawl there seemed to be more interest in actually informing the public to the point that I could reach verifiable data much more quickly.

It's only a subjective impression, but it would seem that the US public's general feeling that the government is not telling them something has some foundation. OK It is certainly true - no government (or anybody) tells you everything. However: if you want to look trustworthy you should include checkable facts in your information bits ... how would someone reading the document check what you are saying?
___________________________________
ICRP (1996). Age-dependent Doses to Members of the Public from Intake of Radionuclides: Part 5 Compilation of Ingestion and Inhalation Dose Coefficients. Publication 72, International Commission on Radiological Protection. Pergamon Press.

WHO (2004). Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality 2004 (3rd Ed.). Geneva: World Health Organisation.

2011-11-05T18:32:00.002+13:00

I heard an interesting observation ... the US foreign policy is being informed by fundamentalist Christian millenialism. Basically, (i.e. in the case of Isreal) the argument goes, fundies want Jews in control of Jerusalem because the Bible says this has to happen before the End of the World. They _want_ the EotW because that way they get to go to heaven.

I doubt this is literally the case: nobody sat around a table and said "Look here, we gotta get more Yids in Jerusalem if any of us want to go to Heaven." However, I have personally experienced the power of a Bible-lead culture to screw with your values even if you are not Christian. If you want to create a Jewish homeland by ignoring the concerns of the locals, there were probably more easily suppressed peoples than the Palestinians right?

Also I'm quite sure that most Christians will realize that they can also get into Heaven by just, you know, leading a good life. Still ... it gives pause: what other aspects of US culture could plausibly laid at the feet of the fundies?

---------------------------------------------
Aside: if you consider yourself a US fundamentalist Christian and you are offended by this - take heart: obviously I don't mean _you_! I'm quite sure you know who I'm talking about.

I have a phone.

2011-10-19T18:13:00.001+13:00

My phone is small, cheap, and works well -- as a phone. For instance; I can use it to make and receive phone calls.

It has a camera in it.

This was unavoidable at the time -- it's not a very good camera as these things go. It does not, for example, have hardware zoom, or the ability to adjust exposure time, take time-lapse images, or any of those things. To me, that's kinda like pointing out that it doesn't do the ironing. It is a camera in my phone. It takes OK photographs.

I also have a camera.

Occasionally I like to take photos that are not just OK. Not often but it happens. My camera has these hardware things that my phone lacks due to being, you know, not a camera. This, in no way, reflects negatively on my phone.

I do not feel the need to take really good photos, so my camera is about middling as these things go. Someone may point out that my camera cannot send the photo to another phone or to my email account. That's all right - it has a USB port and I can use that to send the picture to my mini tablet - which is what I use for mobile computery things like image processing and networking. I can do this with any computer. If I am not carrying my USB cable, the camera has large storage which is removable and almost everyone has a card reader. Besides, if I have to wait a bit before sharing my latest cute-kitten pic I find I annoy fewer people.

If I really really need this functionality, I can actually buy a camera that has a phone (or some other network device) in it. The phone in these things is not at all useful for making phone calls: that's OK, nobody cares, because the camera is awesome and you can send your photos where you like right away.

Between them my camera and phone cost less than, say, picking a device completely at random, an iPhone.

I occasionally see people discussing (to push a definition of the word "discuss" somewhat) the various comparative merits of different cameras that are in those phones that come with cameras. These multiuse appliances all seem to their owners, or the owners of a competing brand appliance, (or wannabes - it's hard to keep track) to these people to be somehow deficient in one or some or all of their functions. If by some miracle the sweet perfect appliance has been manufactured, it mysteriously failed to sell and has been discontinued.

This message is for you.

Here lies the path to happiness:

You want to take a photo, use a camera.
You want to make a phone-call, use a phone.

G+ Work and WOF

2011-10-10T15:35:00.000+13:00

In reverse order:

WOF woes continue - my car has a fluid leak - power steering. I have to keep topping it up but this means I don't have a WOF. I need a new cooling tube. Maybe we can build one but right now looking for an authorized part.

I've bitten the bullet and presented myself to the local service station - pump-hand here I come. The thing is, though I have a lot of applications out for teaching positions, nothing is going to show up before March. I want something on the Island that will be enjoyable and the service station is just down the road and it's relaxed. I'm hugely overqualified and the boss there looks enthusiastic.

Still active with google plus. If you want to see what sort of thing I get up to over there, have a look at this formatted summary.

Relaax

2011-10-05T17:56:00.000+13:00

It's all about the sunshine today - and a bit of maintain the car.

WoF: Failed - but only on one tyre. It seems that directional mags are going out of fashion or something so I have to order-in the replacement. Ho hum - pass wof tomorrow.

But since I'm out and about and it's such a gloriously sunny day, I took the top off and went for a cruise. It's an expensive passtime these days, and I'll count the cost tomorrow. Today I went the length of the Island, visited Man of War bay, which was at high tide so it was nice. Enjoyed the breeze and the scenery and read a bit of my SF novel (Greg Bear - Legacy: it's OK). Headed back.

Snapper and chips at Onetangi Beach - a bit windy - wash the car - and back home. Sun still on the deck so drag a chair from the lounge-suite outside for coffee and tim-tams and more reading. Decadence. Smeagol joined me - he's changed color: his head and shoulders are still black but the rest of him has gone rusty. He'll probably go black again towards midsummer.

He's been off his food last few days, and he's lost a lot of weight. I gave him some beef mince - which he nommed up (but only if it has a bit of dirt on it). He does not normally get red meat - after he finished, he whipped his tail, leaped vertical off all four feet, spun around and tore off into the bush.

I've changed the music (see sidebar). Also sampled Gin Wigmore's single "Black Rose", online.

There's a stack of mail wating for me ... tomorrow. By carefully ignoring things that actually need to be done I get to call today a win. Bananas and ice-cream time, then a bath.

Cheers.

The Solar System in Perspective

2011-10-04T15:52:00.000+13:00

If the diameter of the sun is our unit for length, the orbits come out something like this (someone check my math):

distance	diameter	planet
0	1.000	Sun
39	0.004	Mercury
72	0.009	Venus
100	0.009	Earth
153	0.005	Mars
520	0.102	Jupiter
956	0.086 (0.179)	Saturn (rings)
1919	0.037	Neptune
3008	0.036	Uranus

This means, if you wanted to build a scale model of the Solar System with Sun as a 1m diameter beach ball in the middle of your lounge, Mercury would be a 4mm speck 39m away! Jupiter would look good as a 10cm striped ball half a click away while the Oort cloud, at the outer reaches, is at 5000km... which would put the final touches of your model about an eighth (45deg) of the way around the Earth from your lounge.

I'm bringing this up because of a movie circulating the internets that appears to show a planet-sized comet impacting the Sun and spraying the solar system with gobs of Sun-stuff. Hopefully these figures will give a wee bit of perspective. Space is big, really big!

Wikipedia on CMEs

Radioactive Drinking Water - erk!

2011-10-02T01:28:00.002+13:00

(Texas, USA)
People talking about radiation contamination need to be more careful - misuse of the terms makes it difficult to reality check the stories. I saw this with Fukushima reporting and it is in a lot of news and blog reports on the Texas water scare too.

Lets be clear: the water is contaminated with radium, which is a metal, probably in the form of radium-chloride, which is radioactive in the sense that it emits ionizing radiation. It is not "contaminated by radiation". The water there has always been contaminated like this.

Not all radiation is a problem and radium is not one of the worst - though it is very radioactive. It is a 5-6MeV alpha emmitter. Alpha particles have a large mass and charge so they don't go fast and don't penetrate all that much - seldom getting through your skin. 1g of radium has an activity of 1Cu (1 Curie)- the tanks and pipes test to 15-20pCu/l (1 picoCurie is 1x10^-12 or 0.000000000001 Curies). Doesn't sound like a lot? It's 3-4 times the Federal EPA safety limit... but is that a lot? We'll see.

Pipes become radioactive because of radium in calcium deposits that build up over time... y'know: lime buildup and that sort of thing? The water does not become radioactive from passing through radioactive pipes but by dissolving some of the radium and carrying it along.

The big probem is when you get it in your body. There it replaces calcium (weakening bones and teeth) and accumulates. Radium decay products are also poisonous, and radioactive. On top of which, you have the radiation damage. Alphas are very damaging inside the body - outside they don't much get through you skin. This is why the presence of dissolved radium salts in drinking water is very serious.

The regions effected have been radioactive basically for ever. The radium comes from Uranium-rich rocks and dirt deposited there when the Earth was younger. It got picked up when the EPA standard changed and officials decided to do a re-check: it seems it got tougher. So how are we supposed to figure out what this means?

In 1944 the, the Manhatten Project set the human tolerance dose at one 1μg (total) ingested... or 1μCu of activity. After that you had to stop working with radioactive stuff. That's smaller than a speck of dust so if you walked into a cloud of radium dust and breathed in you are basically dead meat, but the Texans are drinking it, not inhaling it. In much much smaller doses. So it will take a bit longer to build up in their bodies. How long?

To ingest that much in Texas, you need to drink 50,000l of water from the most contaminated sites. If you drink the popular 2l a day it would take around 70 years to get this high (assuming steady consumption and 100% of the radium is retained.)

Of course, things have changed a bit since the Manhatten Project. We understand more about radiation now. It's more dangerous than they thought. From the above you can see why the EPA safe doses are what they are: there is no way, at those levels, of getting a health-threatening dose in your lifetime. Even if we halve the tolerance level, you still have 35 years to build it up. You can also see why the EPA and State people have not exactly been clamoring to tell everyone.

Has anyone done a review of health effects from such long exposure? I can't tell. The few papers I've read (see the links on this page) haven't told me. But it's been like this for generations. The lime buildup could be more recent, but we are still talking geological time! This translates to at least decades of exposure at best. So you'd expect the leukemia and cancer rates in the area to be high, and the overall health to be low. May even have been going on long enough for insurance companies to notice.

My impression is that, bloggers screaming "cover-up" notwithstanding, the various US health-folk are in the process of checking. Wat with the general background of paranoia in the US, I imagine Texans will be buying a lot more bottled water from now on.

ACTA Update

2011-09-30T22:35:00.000+13:00

Seems the USA push to extend their own broken laws on The Rest of the World has reached a critical step. Also seems NZ will be a signatory. Remains to be seen how well the treaty will be honored or the extent to which it obligates us to alter our laws to suit large US-based manufacturers.

One of the concerns - iirc - was that generic medicines may become illegal as "counterfeit" products. Looks like it's gone from the final version of acta but the interest in this is very big and it is now in TPPA. Block it there are it will show up someplace else unless NZ makes a firm statement that no such provision will pass or, if passed "on the sly", will not be enforceable.

And in other liberty news, NZ FOSS folks brace themselves for the rollout of MSs secure boot process, which has the potential to remove your ability to replace the pre-installed operating system. There is another way to securely boot your computer - replace windows. There is no reason to hand over control of your computer to MS just to secure yourself from flaws in MS software ... especially since it won't work.

On the upside - maybe we can get a beef-up to our anti-competition laws, say, set the fines to a percentage of a company's net worth, then milk Microsoft Corporation to fund our national debt. Just a thought.

FTL Neutrinos ... oh dear oh dear...

2011-09-25T00:38:00.000+12:00

I was brought up short by a news thing about neutrinos apparently measured faster than light. The comments in that link are sad sad sad. But to be fair, it's a poorly understood part of science.

My favorite description of relativity vis a vis FTL, with the problems this poses. Basically, special relativity manages to be internally consistent as long as nothing goes faster than light (in a vacuum) or if it does, it is restricted in how it does so. Of course, special relativity could be wrong.

In quantum mechanics, the things we are pleased to think of as the Laws of Physics are more like "firm guidelines" which are only obeyed on average. This means that the speed of light is approximate and energy violations occur all the time. There are still restrictions on how this can happen though, so that the physics does not contradict itself.

An example is the FTL information transfer apparent in Quantum Entanglement experiments (used to be called "teleportation"). In these experiments, an observation made in one place affects the results of an observation in another place in such a way that it cannot be turned into a kind of FTL radio.

An easier example would be the spot of light cast from (say) a laser pointer onto a surface. If you move the pointer through an angle A, the spot moves RA where R is the distance to the surface. Make R big enough and even quite slow movements of the pointer results in FTL movement of the spot.

But these are neutrinos... weakly interacting particles with a very small mass (<16eV/c^2) so we need to be more careful about what we actually say is happening.

The researchers set up an experiment to test the quantum oscillation of mu and tau neutrinos (mu and tau neutrinos can be set up to change between each other cyclically) from a well configured source. This sort of thing involves setting up a source of mu neutrinos with a known set of statistics, firing them off at a target, and counting how many mu and tau neutrinos get detected (compensating for the sensitivity of the detector and the background of detection events) to see how the result compares with the theoretically projected counts.

Presumably they got fewer tau and more mu than expected, which could be interpreted as a higher than expected speed (or a slower than expected oscillation). If you have reason to discount the oscillation rate as a cause, then you can use the data to compute what sort of speed must have been achieved ... they did this and reported that the anomalous neutrinos arrived at the detector 60ns sooner than light would have traversed the same distance in a vacuum. The uncertainty in the calculation was 10ns - so the result is highly significant, statistically.

At this stage, the findings have been made public so the scientific community can check them, maybe repeat the experiments. This was the right thing to do. It shows scientific humility to put your findings up to scrutiny like this ... someone could find an embarrassing mistake.

I stress: I don't know for sure that this is the method they used. I am going by how such experiments are _usually_ done. Maybe someone was sitting on the detector with a stop-watch, but it's unlikely.

One of the big problems is that there have been plenty of opportunities to see something like this before now. For example, the neutrinos from SP1987A arrived about 3 hours ahead of the light-pulse from over 187000ly away. This difference is consistent with the light having to traverse the surrounding stellar material first. If the above figures are treated as correct, then they should have been of the order of months early, even taking into account the uncertainty in the distance.

There have been many neutrino experiments, and many experiments looking specifically for this sort of thing using other particles.

One of the ways that has been considered for FTL concerns the way QM represents particles as waves. In _wave mechanics_, a particle is represented by a wave-packet - the square of the part of the wave-packet inside the detector is the probability of the particle being detected. In wave-mechanics, it is these wave-packets that move around.

A typical wave packet used in an experiment is Gaussian (normal distribution). Relativity means that the speed of the peak of the packet (the group velocity) cannot be faster than light. But, with this kind of packet, different parts of it travel at different speeds. In particular, the leading parts are faster and the trailing parts are slower. So it is technically possible to set up a situation where some distant part of the leading edge is moving faster than light. Thus, there is a small, but non-zero, chance that the particle gets detected well ahead of when the peak would have arrived at the detector. This would detect as FTL.

To my knowledge, this has not been seen.

It could be something like this, with the particular care taken in these experiments being the reason nobody saw it before now. However, this is highly unlikely. A fluctuation in the background mu neutrinos would also produce this sort of result, much like you can get a freak wave when you are out rock-fishing. This is why it is very important to repeat these experiments.

I can't believe something so simple could be so effective!

2011-09-09T16:38:00.000+12:00

(or: late night infomercial rubbish)

The title is the catchphrase from a certain infomercial for a certain shoe insert, you know the one. Another notable comment: "Could it be that it creates a force field that ..." Answer: no. It cannot possibly be because that's not what "force field" means.

What they do is show you loads of people doing something called a "balance test" where subjects are easily shifted off balance unless they are wearing the special inserts. Here is what it looks like:

... this is an old con exploiting misconceptions about how well we balance, as well as a bit of basic physics. In general, humans are unstable - particularly with their feet together - which is why toy soldiers need a wide base to stand up. We balance by shifting our weight and generally moving about.

Look carefully at the video again: the subject is in an unstable, but sustainable, position. In the first test the seller pushes down and a bit away from his body, thus directing the force away from his feet, pulling him over. In the second, she pushes down and towards his body, basically directing the force down to his feet and improving his stability. Nothing to do with the inserts.

This method has been used to sell a wide variety of junk. It is so effective it works in even less stable stances like, standing on one leg. Here's how it generally works:

Skeptics have been facing this sort of thing for a while now. While the basic testing method (double blind) shows up the fallacy, it is generally not very convincing if you don't know how it works. You just can't believe such a simple con can be so effective!

This is because, if you have experienced the test, it is very convincing. We are just not used to doubting our own experiences, and it is unpleasant to do so. On top of this, skeptics deliberately avoid using methods which encourage the willing suspension of disbelief. Skeptics want you to question everything, the advertiser does not. So the skeptic will always appear the less believable of the two.

DELL Facebook Scam

2011-09-07T14:20:00.001+12:00

Recieved a facebook message like this?
"I received a Dell XPS 1530 laptop today for nothing! I think they are only sending out a limited supply of promo laptops in each area, its actually very nice :) I got it from here [redacted]"

It's a scam.

In the original version you had to fill out a lot of different surveys, handing over personal information, enticed by the prospect of a fine DELL laptop. The newer version (same url) has only one survey with three bullshit questions and Apple products (Macbook Air, iPad, iPhone the usual). How likely is it that DELL would offer Apple products in a promo?

The next stage is verification - where you must give them your cell-phone number. They text you a pin, enter the pin for your prize. Ha ha ha: the pin will never work. But there is fine-print at the bottom of the screen:

"Summary terms: You must be the account holder or have permission from the account holder. This is an auto renewing subscription service that will continue until cancelled anytime by texting STOP to 2012. Available to users over 13 for $7 per week + $3.50 join charged on your wireless account or deducted from your prepaid balance for mBill Content Club @ 2 messages per week. Supported carriers: Telecom, Vodafone. For prizeKing support: text HELP to 2012, email or call 0800 630 114. Std msg/data rates apply. Your phone must have text messaging capability. Call for your money back within first 30 days of service if you are not satisfied. By signing up for this service and entering your personal PIN Code delivered to the cell phone number supplied by you on this website, you acknowledge that you are agreeing to the full Terms of Use. Click here for full Terms & Conditions. For Privacy Policy Click here."

So you will find yourself sent two txts a week for $7 off your bill - basically for visiting the page.
AFAIK: this sort of sign-up is illegal in NZ.

The links go to a domain which whois says does not exist! It's actually a javascript thingy that takes you to more content on the same page. Considering that billing through a cell-phone requires cooperation from the phone company, it is probably possible to cut of their revenue. You see this, complain to your phone co.

You can also report them to Internal Affairs.

Note the person whose name is on the message is a victim too - treat them nice: they got a virus.

Verified IDs Old News

2011-09-06T15:42:00.002+12:00

The National Identity Workshop - these folks:
... have been presented as context for g+ names policy re: #nymwars et al.

People who want to see the problems with the underlying concept need look no further than the long-running national ID card debates...

eg.Bruce Schneier:

Real ID: Costs and Benifits (2007)

A National ID Card Wouldn't Make Us Safer(2004!)

... this is not new and the issues are well known.

EPIC overview(2007)

This is just in the USA! It seems this is a debate that just keeps going round and round - only the context changes.

Not so say that ID cards are not useful. They are. It's just that a universal, ubiquitous ID system cannot make us more secure. Even if it was perfect. People and organisations implementing any kind of ID verification need to be very clear about what it can and cannot do.

ID verification of some users seems like it would be useful for g+ ... and some people would use it. Enforced for everyone? The harm outweigs the good. Besides - google stands to gain more by allowing a graduated verification system.

She Says

2011-08-30T14:29:00.002+12:00

(another blues song)

My baby she threw me out on my ear
This story I tell you is sad
I turn round and say, "What you do that for?"
She tells me I've been bad

My baby says she loves me (My baby says she loves me)
My baby says she loves me (My baby says she loves me)
My baby says she loves me, but I been bad.

She says there's been all these women
She counts them one two three
But you knows they only for practice
They don't mean nothin to me

My baby says she loves me (My baby says she loves me)
My baby says she loves me (My baby says she loves me)
My baby knows she loves me, but I been bad.

She says that all my thinkin
Is driving her insane
My logic is ruining her awesome
Like pouring her lovin down the drain

My baby says she loves me (My baby says she loves me)
My baby says she loves me (My baby says she loves me)
My baby feels she loves me, but I been bad.

She said she would always love me
She said shed love me long
But you know she wouldn't even wait
For me to finish this stupid song

My baby says she loves me (My baby says she loves me)
My baby says she loves me (My baby says she loves me)
You know my baby loves me, but I been bad.

Well I guess I'm not the perfect man
I guess that's plain to see
But whose that guy whose been hangin around you?
Who the fuck is he?

My baby says she loves me (My baby says she loves me)
My baby says she loves me (My baby says she loves me)
My baby claims she loves me, but she been bad.

More Nymwars

2011-08-29T15:42:00.001+12:00

The debate over real names in google+ continues. It's been going on long enough now for some actual information to emerge.

Tod Vierling has been collecting stats on the whole shebang. His results are updated fairly often, and if you think he's missed something, there is even a submission form. So far the overwhelming number of unique commentators are in favor of allowing pseudonyms in google+ and the majority of those use their real names themselves - thus: googles targeted audience would prefer a network where pseudonyms are allowed.

Eric Schmidt, (Google Exec. Chair.) has been recorded pointing out that;

G+ was built primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they're going to build future products that leverage that information

... and anyone who doesn't like that should get out.

This pretty much echos what I've been saying all allong: google does not want robust discussion or political activism on their network. They want a sort of boardroom etiquette, the sort of polite conversation you get at political fundraisers.

It gets worse: if you are a teenager wanting to avoid bullying (or pedophiles), or a woman who is not OK about sexual harassment online, they don't want you either. (Though they probably hope that the real names policy will discourage this behavior there is no evidence that it can.) Chris Bridges has a good summary

Basically this is the foot-gun approach to marketing. By denying pseudonyms, google are throwing away information (when people choose their own name, the name they choose tells you something about the person), and restricting the marketplace available to their customers (advertisers).

However, these revelations suggest a way forward: I submit that an identity verification scheme is a great addition to a social network. Eric is right when he says there are good uses for this and people who will want it and benefit from it. It is just should not be the basis for the network.

In addition to previous suggestions: allow people to use a pseudonym for their profile name, different pseudonyms for different circles, and keep a private "real name" between themselves and google, I'd suggest simply tagging profiles with a verification rating (those who are well behaved - the bad people get banned normally) something like:

not reviewed: we have not checked this profile, so cannot say anything about it
under review: looking into it (see below
unconfirmed: profiles where the person is well behaved but we have not received satisfactory paperwork
confirmed: pseudonymous profile, there is a real person behind it
verified: this is a real person and, yes, this is their real name

may want to be able to mark profiles as removed or banned (keep their comments, or replace removed comments with some placeholder, so evidence remains to remind people and serve as a bad example).
allows for possible additional ratings such as google partner (gave us money) for commercial profiles.

Further: when a profile comes under review, it is handled like a bug report - a link to a review page, from the profile, which has a description of the problem and an opportunity for feedback. This will allow the development of some sort of due process without constitutionalizing the network.

I maintain that the above satisfied just about everyone's concerns and makes google+ a head-and-shoulders improvement on the other social networking offerings out there.

Rice Pudding

2011-08-11T02:25:00.002+12:00

Recipe: Rice Pudding in the Microwave (mostly).

This is my personal favorite method to make a quite nice pudding... by cheating.

You need butter, flour, milk, sugar and rice. None of the quantities will be exact... but roughly 50g, 1tblsp, 250ml, 1tblsp, and 1 cup respectively. It's the amount most cookbooks say would serve four - but if you try that you'll need ice-cream too.

Boil up the rice. It needs to be slightly overcooked so it's sticky but not gluggy. This is the longest part - the bit that makes it into a pudding only takes about five minutes. So if you do the rice normally, you can let it stand during the next bit, then drain, it should work out OK.

What we're gonna do is make a thick, sweet, white sauce and mix it in.

Using a microwave safe jug, I use a 2l pyrex jug, melt about 50g of butter. Needs to be completely liquid. Usually takes about 20-30secs. Stir in a tablespoon of flour. Any flour will work, I like to use self-raising flour: it makes things more fluffy. A rounded tablespoon is usually enough. The mixture should be wet but not runny.

Heat a cup of milk. That's a metric cup - 250ml. The milk should not boil, just warm. 30-40secs should be enough. The idea is that it shouldn't make the butter/flour mix go solid when you mix it in. If the milk gets a skin on top, it's too hot.

Gradually stir the milk into the jug. It won't mix evenly so don't worry.

Nuke for 2mins, then stir. A wire whisk is brilliant for this.

At this point you want a glossy, plasticky look. About the consistency of toothpaste.

Often it comes out too thick, that means too much flour. That's OK, just add more milk, a dribble at a time, and stir it in, until you get the right consistency. If it is too thin, don't worry right now, just go on with the next step. So you should err on the side of too runny.

Sometimes the mix has seperated. In this case, it will be liquid on top and almost solid under that. You'll need to break up the solid part and mix it in - squashing where needed. It can help if you interrupt the nukeage halfway to give it an extra stir. This isn't as bad as the lumps you get in gravey, they usually blend in. Even if they don't, the next nuke will get-em.

Stir in the sugar. It's a pudding so it has to be sweet. I use fine brown sugar for this.

Add flavouring if you want. Baileys is good, a dash of vanilla, caramel or butterscotch works well. This is usually needed since the regular method of making rice pudding in the oven lightly burns (caramelizes) the lactose in the milk, turning it into... caramel.

Now, if you added a mashed banana at this stage, you could portion it out and chill it overnight, and you'd have banana pudding. Add half a cup of your favorite cheese and you have a simple pasta topping (leave off the sugar). But this is rice pudding so drain that rice and stir it in.

Nuke for another 2mins and stir. If it wasn't too runny though, only go for another minute. You only need to cook in the flavor.

This time it should be a good consistency, holding it's shape when moulded. As before, if it is too thick, slowly add more milk. If too runny you have a problem: add flour, a level table-spoon at a time, stir it in, and re-nuke for a minute, until it's right or too thick.

You can keep it warming in the oven until it is needed. Portion up, garnish and serve.

Restaurants use an ice-cream scoop or some sort of mould. A 1-cup measuring cup works well. Then it can be served on a plate, and it looks good. People have been known to pour over a thin sauce like a glaze - caramel, chocolate, or a fruit sauce works well. Some pour a shot of brandy over it and set it on fire!

This is a very versatile and forgiving recipe, and, best of all, you can't burn it.

Updates

2011-08-09T00:54:00.000+12:00

Managed to not stuff up on the speech, so I won. But not only won, managed to ace it! Now I represent the club at the regional competition on the 13th of September at the Telecom Conference Center. There I will be up against some very experienced speakers from the Auckland region.

And in the inbox - I have an audition tomorrow. The role is called "Underpants guy" - ooh, er...

Toastmasters - Humorous Speech Contest

2011-08-08T03:25:00.000+12:00

... it's tonight: 5-7mins. Here's the draft:

I have a confession to make: I am a scientist.

Before you judge: it isn't my fault! I tried hard not to become a scientist!

I joined fringe religious cults.
I saluted the sun in the morning and danced naked in the moonlight. I partook of esoteric tantric rites - sometimes with company.

I studied mystic crystal vibrations and alternative herbal medicines ... and that is the problem right there people: it's a slippery slope.

It starts with the crystals and the herbs and it morphs grotesquely into geology, chemistry, botany and biology. All sciences!

Seeking the middle path I studied perpetual motion and tried to get my over-unity engine supressed by the government but it was no good. There was a last-ditch scrabble with pseudosciences, cold fusion, and flogistron but it was all over. The physics sucked me in! Dragging me down to the depraved depths of rational thought, critical analysis and skepticism! I must face the facts: I have become a science geek.

For goodness sake: I have just spent the last three days working out the logistics of building a nucear power plant in my back yard! I need help! (Some of the bits are heavy.)

But I refuse to give it up! Though I am occasionally wrong... all right: frequently wrong ... I am addicted! It is a drug!

It is the lot of the scientist to be wrong. A lot. This is probably why women are under-represented. They just don't have the knack.
We have this big prize for the scientists who are the most wrong in each field. It's the Nobel Prize.

Alfred Nobel worked out how to stabilise nitroglycerine. He figured this would be the end of warfare since the explosive was so powerful noone would dare to use it. This is an example of the special kind of wrong that scientists aspire to. He didn't get the Nobel Prize because, unlike politicians, when scientists invent an honor they do not automatically award it to themselves.

Rutherford split the atom. He was a physicist, worked his whole life in physics. His major contributions were all to physics and he published in physics journals. So, naturally, he got the Nobel Prize for chemistry. He figured that the energy released in a nuclear disintegration was too small to ever have any practical use. This showed what a genius he was because this statement was so wrong that the opposite of it is also wrong - demonstrated by Oppenheimer, who also got the prize.

The Nobel prize committee is usually stacked with women, and men being advised by women. It seems that even though women are bad at being wrong, they know it when they see it. Which leads to the question: if a man is wrong in the woods and there is no woman to hear him, how will he know?

So please please please don't judge me too harshly - thank you.

Fission Man?

2011-08-03T18:45:00.001+12:00

This just in:

Swedish police have detained a 31-year-old man in Ängelholm in western Sweden who was discovered after he sought advice from authorities on the legality of building a nuclear reactor in a domestic kitchen.

Yeah right!

The man, who explained that his interest in nuclear physics was awakened as a teenager, ordered some radioactive material from overseas and acquired more by taking apart a domestic fire alarm.

Smoke detectors use americium 241, in the form of americium oxide - a typical smoke detector contains of the order of a milligram of the stuff. The critical mass for Am241 is 60-80kgs. Nice try.

It sounds like he was just piling fissionables up and hoping something would happen.

You could presumably make a sub-critical reactor with Am241, if you had an energetic particle source... say a big van-der-graaf generator and you use the proton stream. Not done the math. You can use Am242 to make a kind of battery.

He felt he wouldn't have been able to use it as a power source because:

To get it to generate electricity you would need a turbine and a generator and that is very difficult to build yourself.

... actually, those are the easy bits. It would fail to be a power source because it couldn't possibly have worked. The police let him go.

This guy was just building a box with some cool metal in it. But he reminds me of this guy building a cruise missile in his back yard. Again, over-sensationalized: a better description would be "a model jet aircraft". It would also have kept him out of trouble but he was trying to make a point.

Bottom line: you can bud all kinds of things if you are prepared to stretch a point.

Pseudonyms update

2011-08-01T03:32:00.003+12:00

+Bradley Horowitz talks about the whole pseudonym thing.
Still can't get past the thing that Google does not want google+ to be the sort of place where people are anonymous or known by silly names. Like it detracts from the tone of the place I guess.

I can see how having people called "God" about can do that. However, not all pseudonyms are silly. Obvious pseudonyms are better (more honest) than plausible ones - which is what the policy basically asks for.

By restricting to real names, Google+ could never become a force for social and political change as we have seen with facebook for fear that some extremest opponent may track you down. Could never become a place for robust mature conversation. Just the sort of polite non-discussions you get at office parties or political fundraisers. Is that really the idea?

I maintain that the no-fake-names policy will keep good people away while doing nothing to discourage the bad ones.

Since other fields can be used to store and display aliases - why not do it the other way around: allow the profile name to be anything non-silly, and put the real names in other fields?

This could even be expanded to allow different identities in different circles - eg. someone could be Benny to family, Benjamin to "business colleagues", and Mr Hill to "current students". (And Honey-buns to lovers.)

Wouldn't you love this?

Spring coming

2011-07-29T18:52:00.000+12:00

There will be one more cold snap, then a big wet to fill my tanks, and then it will be warm... yay! As evidence, the sun has touched my deck:

Woot!

Just in time, I am in urgent need of spring cleaning inside and out - and so is the house. This is also the time of year I get all sad and moody; due to clear up after September. Meantime I have a humorous speech contest to prepare for. I'm the only competitor so I guess I'll win, if I can keep from going over time and so getting myself disqualified. Hopefully this will keep me occupied.

O Muse

2011-07-26T17:01:00.001+12:00

The other day I was writing and I noticed a stray punctuation mark in the text. No matter what I tried it would not delete. Not to be daunted, I set about working the mark into the text. But I went further, I poured my creative soul into the project so that, not only did the offending punctuation sit invisibly in the prose, it was central to the whole meaning of the passage. The result was a masterpiece of mans fight against the tyranny of Fate. I saved and exited, satisfied and sleepy, only to discover that it was just a bit of dirt on the screen.

Software Freedom Day 2011

2011-07-25T12:42:00.000+12:00

Software Freedom Day is Saturday 17 Sept. Registrations have just opened:

This is with a great pleasure (and small delay) that we are announcing registration opening for SFD 2011! In fact some of you have already started to create you wiki pages and participated in the soft opening and registration testing that we started 2 days ago. Most bugs should have been cleared out of the way and I remain available for any problem you may encounter through email or on IRC (#SFD on freenode).

Indeed I have: I've constructed a Waiheke Island Software Liberation Front page on the wiki, registered it, and sent off for goodies. Calling all Waihekeans: support software freedom! In particular am looking for people to help with:

Information kiosk at Ostend Market
Sausage Sizzle at Woolies
Ask-a-geek day at the Library
Installfest - neet venu and bandwidth

More information as it comes in. I'm using the wiki as a point of contact. I am also on Google+ and facebook if folk want to do the social media route.

. Cheers and Happy Hacking.

Monday Movies

2011-07-25T09:27:00.000+12:00

Haven't done a movie review in a while - just watched:

The losers:
This is the A-Team update that didn't quite make it. Nice for explosions in the afternoon with a few brews but have something good to follow it with. The only actually good scene, the one where a hero "shoots" two rent-a-cops with his fingers, was used in the ads/trailers. All the other half-way good scenes are like that too and the context does not make them any better.

Lost Boys 2:
Not a sequel to the classic, but a re-imagining. The corniness was part of the charm of the original and some corniness remains here, punctuating matter-of-fact ultraviolence. eg. Telling his sister she's becoming a vampire: "OK, This is one of those 'good news' - 'bad news' situations." and on learning the bad news "Oh my God, you can't imagine how gross it is to constantly want to eat people: I'm a vegetarian!" But, there had to be a "but", I missed Cameron's studied approach to the thrill-seeking. These vamps are extreme-sports nuts, and the stunts should be breathtaking, but the suspenseful approach of the original to this (bridge hanging scene) emphasized the psychology. Here it is just lost. They also needed a twist. On the plus-side, Edgar Frog is done much better and making them all surfers ties the drama up nicely. Worth the watch. Set up the sequel in the extras - where we learn the other Frog brother is a vampire. I guess I'll be seeing it.

Wall Street: Money never sleeps:
Competent and slick with a tacked-on ending. Standard Hollywood with some nice lessons about bubbles and banking. Overall too light and charming for the talent brought to bear. Feels a little rushed. Shame. The result is that LB2 actually came out better.

Knight and Day:
Well, it's Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz ... what do you want? It's a light fluffy odd-couple spy movie with charm and silliness. Basically Tom plays the good agent who everyone thinks is rogue being hunted by his ex-partner, the actual rogue everyone thinks is good. Cam is the ditzy blonde with hidden talents and a big smile who he uses to get a package through customs. The package is a magic battery which will solve all the worlds energy needs ... which the bad guy wants to steal and sell. Interestingly, it seems our heroes are helping suppress the invention. Apart from that it's routine: another "have another beer" movie - maybe a white wine.

Except - for the beginning: in place of the usual "copyright theft is a crime" message is a speal about how "this DVD contains a digital file which lets you watch the movie on your computer, phone or mobile device". When I heard that I thought, "yeah right!" But it goes on, "After watching this movie be sure to put the disk in your computer and copy the file - just follow the instructions on the screen." And then the menu starts while I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Turns out that there is an encrypted file on the DVD you can only play with iTunes. There's the other shoe. Still, nice try eh?

"Pseudonyms Forbidden" Google+

2011-07-23T16:14:00.006+12:00

Privacy is about control - control over information. For the most part, Google+ hands control to the user - the person the information is about. The privacy settings are conservative by default, and the principle information flow tool, the circles, helps you keep your different online and private selves separate.

However, Google wants to control the means by which you control your information.

In social media, you would normally use a range of online identities across several accounts to control your information. At least, the net-savvy do this. How many of us have an email account to use when registering for services .. to catch the spam? We control information flow, in part, by our pseudonyms. Of course, criminals hide behind pseudonyms and people with an axe to grind can create a fake facebook (say) account in your name as a way to smear your name. Also, using a pseudonym yourself can make it difficult for people who know you in one social group to find you in another... that's your trade-off.

In this environment, Google+, by policy, does not allow pseudonyms (handles, avatar names, nicks, whatever) as the main identity of the account. As you can imagine, this is the cause of some concern. There is even a petition.

There are lots of legitimate reasons someone may want to use a fake name for their account. The various articles and blog posts on this topic list them. The whole concept of pseudonymity is complex, here's an academic overview of the issues and concerns (as opposed to a bunch of bloggers with their backs up).

Using an obviously fake name is all that is being banned, in practice. If you really really need a fake name, make one up that sounds plausible. An obvious fake name advertises it's fakeness and so is more honest, so this policy discourages honesty. Note, user +John Smith will probably want to be more easily separated from all the other John Smith's out there: so a fake name can help people find you.

Without repeating the details from other blogs (above), it looks to me that the concerns of the users and those of Google can be addressed quite simply:

Allow pseudonyms in the profile name.
Encourage users to add their real name (however defined) under also known as.

This way, users can control which of their circles can see that part of their identity: adding to their control rather than removing from it.

Why not do this? Well I can only think of one reason: Google wants to know who you are. This is not about crime, spam, or finding people; this is about control.

Me Headroom

2011-07-23T05:20:00.000+12:00

I've been experimenting with a live video mixer called WebCam Studio - made for linux, free software tool similar to Camtwist for the Mac, only better. Still very much beta, but very useable.

I don't have a green screen so I just set all the black to transparent, wore black, and switched the lights out. Still needs tweaking.

Thanks to:
WebCam Studio http://www.ws4gl.org/ ... for the tools, and
Daverham - for the home made max headroom background
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-18mrRtlAg8

Dedication and Prayer

2011-07-16T17:29:00.001+12:00

I have spoken before about prayer in council meetings. The issue with the Wanganui District Councl is before the Human Rights Tribunal, mediation failed, so it is going for a ruling. A ruling is what they need anyway.

It will be interesting to see what happens. For instance, it would be hypocritical for parliament (via BORA) to rule prayers in council inappropriate since parliament starts with a prayer and the parliamentary oath includes the words "so help me God". Considering current interest in examining the parliamentary oath, thanks so very much Hone, a ruling against the council could have far-reaching constitutional impact.

It has stuck me, however, that the prayer at the start of the meeting serves a purpose. As irrational as it sounds, a short prayer or meditation has the effect of focusing the group, drawing their attention to business at hand and so on. So, while we would want to do without the religious part, we probably do not want to get rid of it completely.

Toastmasters clubs also have structured meetings. A common element in these meeting is the Dedication. Clearly this originated as a prayer to start things off but over the years it has become a short reading from literature or philosophy with no clear religious bias. members take turns coming up with the dedication.

Perhaps various District and City Councils around the country can take a leaf from the Toastmasters in this? It appears to satisfy all concerns apart from the rabidly fundamentalist.

Google+

2011-07-14T17:10:00.000+12:00

I have joined the Google+ thing. Still getting used to it, but early indications are that it is pretty awesome. I'm thinking, could use global circles to allow strangers to meet up and I'm a wee bit concerned about the videochat plugin including a patents pending notice. Main bonus is the feeling of being in control - privacy and all that. Still - early days.

If you are also on there - stick me in the appropriate group and I'll return the favour.

Burqa Burks

2011-07-06T13:27:00.000+12:00

Listening to all the talk about Muslim dress, I wonder if Muslim women need to march down main street New Zealand in the full burqa? Like the slutwalk only... not.

When someone is totally covered up, we westerners have a tendency to feel a bit nervous around them, after all ... they could be hiding anything! We don't actually think that but it is behind the feeling that manifests as turning our heads away and pretending it's not happening.

The burqa is the whole thing, the big dress, the head-scarf, and the face veil, all together. The full dress is not actually Koranic and here are indications that the practice predates Islam - much as many Christian traditions have pagan origins. We tend to feel that this is oppressive to women and get puzzled when the women in question don't welcome being "liberated". As with any human activity, it's complicated.

It is difficult, however, to imagine a woman being an effective or persuasive orator all covered up like that - the audience needs to see the face to gauge the emotional content properly or to get any subtexts. Facial cues are so important that we draw little face pictures when we use text. This could keep women from having an important role in public life. It's an encounter suit - designed to separate the woman from her surroundings ... are the wearers are a kind of Vorlon?

I had this debate with a Muslim cleric (in training) some years ago. He maintained the I dressed "my" women like prostitutes... I countered that he dressed "his" women like lepers. It's easy to lose the point which is this: clothing is a form of communication: a social signal like a birds plumage. When I wear a business suit, I am sending a message which is quite different to when I wear t-shirt and jeans. When I want to be taken seriously I'll trim my beard and wear shoes. That's what the slutwalks were really about - not some ill-defined "right to wear what you want". When a woman dresses in a revealing way she also sends a message, maybe saying she is sexually available but this does not mean she is available to just anybody - interested: you have to pass muster too. It certainly does not mean "rape me please"! She's probably just indicating she's in a fun, playful, mood - enjoy.

Revealing dress can be a status symbol - as in the health-fad subculture of Venice Beach, Florida - all those posing-pouched body-builders and bikini skaters ... they are saying "look at me, I am wealthy enough to be able to maintain this body". Men don't mind having a scantily clad woman on their arm - it shows that they are the kind of guy who can score that kind of woman. In more macho terms he is displaying his power - other men may look on in envy but they do not try anything because... whatever.

There is a lot of scope for crossed signals here.

Think about it the other way around: when would a woman cover up - I mean really cover everything? Well, pretty much whenever she has some deformity or disease that cannot be hidden in makeup. Or maybe she's carrying something under that cloth... smuggling vibe. We cannot even begin to guess her mood - no face contact. When we hide our faces it usually means we are embarrassed or deliberately snubbing people: how rude!

So is it any wonder, then, that people acclimated to western dress signals are intimidated when confronted by a burqa?

All better

2011-07-02T00:34:00.000+12:00

It took this long to recover properly ...

Meantime lots seem to be happening.

Getting a bit exasperated at the news coming out of CHCH - it would be nice if all those folk, especially the professional media, reporting on the government offer to buy out homes would actually do some, you know, journalism, instead of just parroting the handout. Whats needed now is an appeals process, so people who can show their land+house is sound can get the demolition order repealed. Meantime, those who want a get-out-quick option can take it. There's no hurry to roll the dozers in right?

The main thing for those who want to stay to think about: can you get insurance now?

This leaves all those with reparable houses in the red zone. There is this strange feeling that insurance companies are supposed to just pay out whatever claim is made. These are businesses and you have a contract. If you insure something, you pay premiums based on the risk of that something happening. If you don't have insurance against the government deciding to bulldoze your house you don't get a payout for it. It sucks, but had you taken that insurance you'd have had to pay the premiums. Are those who want a full payout prepared to back-pay the premiums?

Bottom line: this is a disaster. There are no good solutions. That is what "disaster" means.

Sick sick sick

2011-06-19T16:19:00.000+12:00

I've just survived three days with a cold. Vicious head cold. Starting with the characteristic sore throat with a sanity destroying headache to follow - which meant I could not go outside - light too bright. I was medicating my throat with Jamesons (cuts the phlegm) which works pretty well but it also meant I couldn't take a sleeping pill and so suffered through the night.

I was sick enough at this stage to actually worry the cat.

Next day I was unable to hold anything down (and it wasn't the whiskey). I was chewing ice all day and munching down the coldrex like lollies. Smeagol stayed out of my way. Most of the time I couldn't see! Passed out at about 2am this morning and woke up stuck to the pillow (don't ask) about midday.

I really didn't want to get up - I could feel this huge mass in my chest and the second I moved it would have to come up. Bladder will not be ignored for long - and we cut to a commercial break.

An object moving at a constant velocity does not mean that all parts have the same velocity. If it is jelly for example. All parts at the same velocity is most of the definition of a rigid object. However, and rigid object moving about a fixed point, like a water butte, is not moving at a constant velocity - even if it maintains a constant speed. This is because it's direction is changing. So take that VW! Back to our scheduled programming.

I stumbled into the kitchen, feeling like I'd been stepped on. Sucking ice against the razor-slit throat and set about opening the house up for some fresh air.

Aside: the sucking ice bit was a trick I learned from lots of stays in hospital. If you are very delicate, try it. Ice blocks are also good but I didn't have any. Same if you have a very sick child. Basically it lets you stay hydrated and you can add stuff like honey to the water first so you can take in some nutrition too. This sort of thing is vital for shortening the duration of an illness.

For all the aches and pains, my fever had broken and the symptoms lacked that chainsawed edge that tells you the virus is still resident. Good news.

This is the point of recovery where it is essential to remove all signs of illness from your surroundings. If you are lucky enough to have someone else to look after you this will happen by itself. I live alone, so it took a while. Aired the whole place out. Ran the bath.

This afternoon I am an and out of a Lush(TM) bath. This has loosened things up nicely ... color not too good (a bit green) but I can hold stuff down. Afternoon tea is a creamy leak and potato soup... bland carbs. I'll leave it a bit before eating anything else.

This has been murder on my asthma - first time using the inhalers since last year. I hate being dependent on drugs. Apart from the tightness in my chest I'm feeling all hollowed out. It'll be bath-TV-bath-TV all evening - put B5 on back-to-back if the TV fails me (likely - it's Sunday) - and just try to survive. I may yet be desperate enough for a zopiclone - which is a kind of sleeping tablet whose active ingredient is mixed with stuff to make the experience as unpleasant as possible so I don't get addicted the bastards. Can I get a valium - oh no!

HBCLUG Update

2011-06-17T22:02:00.000+12:00

I've accessed the HBCLUG website and updated it to reflect recent events - namely that I am no longer running it. Annoying as things were just picking up. I'm still getting "can I join up" requests which I pass on to one of the others still there who I still have an email address for.

2011-06-15T15:27:00.000+12:00

From the inbox:

Warmest Greetings;

I am Yusuf Mohammed,The Personal Assistant on financial matters to the Former President Mubarak of Egypt who is facing trail presently in my Country Egypt.I want you to see this as an opportunity for us to establish a very good relationship,I made away with the sum of $148 million and escaped from my country Egypt before the arrest of my Boss since this funds were in my Custody.
I am presently in Nigeria and have deposited the money which came along with in a security company in Ghana before arriving Nigeria to take a shelter, but the Security Company advised me to lodge the money with Zenith Bank here in Nigeria due to money laundry restrictions they have in Ghana. Please I want you to reply me now so I can give you more information's as we go into Partnership and how I want this funds to be invested in your country before I can finally come over with my family hence i want you to keep this transaction to yourself In the event you are not interested, I sincerely ask that you disregard this email and tell no one about it as i am seriously in need of you to be of help to me now. I hope you can be trusted in this regard. Yours truly, Yusuf Mohammed.

Oh come on: they are called Nigerian scams for a reason! If you want me to fall for this at least don't be based in Nigeria. It has got to the point that the genuine money launderers cannot do business from there.

I like the way Mobarak is used here though. An interesting wrincle here is that googling the text comes up zip. Unusual. It's only when you google the themes that you find the others. Basically, all the news and general gossip about Egypt has washed out the scam reports. Do I need to go through the red flags?

Yusuf Mohammed is a popular enough name - in fact he's a Nigerian footballer. The Nigeria connection is odd but no red flag.
"Personal Assistant on financial matters": how is this a real title? I'd buy: "personal accountant" or "personal financial adviser"... but I'd expect him to give his title in his own language and translate it.
Bad grammar: though its getting quite good.
The sum is given in dollars - possible - but you'd think if he smuggled money out on his person it would be in a more available currency, or converted so something more portable. Anyway - isn't Mubarak's money supposed to be in Swiss bank accounts or something?
"I am presently in Nigeria" - puh-lease!
There is also no mention of how he came to pick me as the person to help out with this: surely someone in a position to smuggle like this also has international contact who will, like, know them personally?

There are a bunch of variations on this theme - where there is strife and tragedy, some scammer is trying to exploit it.

1st Waiheke Toastmasters today

2011-06-13T22:20:00.000+12:00

Went to Toastmasters meeting tonight ... got roped into table-topics: "what was you weirdest moment?" For goodness sake - me? I am the weird thing that happens to other people: how do I pick.

Curiously I was the worst dressed person present.

I deliberately tried to dress a bit down because it never pays to outdress someone you want to impress and there may have been a few there ... but this is Waiheke, pretty informal anyway, so it was tricky to work out the level. One worthy managed to appear in almost-academic-dress (it was a jacket+hood style) - the colors corresponded to MPhil too.

It looks like I'll be joining - that will put their membership up to 20 people. That's a special number for reasons I'm not too clear on. Hopefully that will be a regular social thing for me - gets me away from the computer.

Here's a Subtle One ...

2011-06-07T21:06:00.000+12:00

Dear Webmaster,
I recently came across hbclinux.net.nz through search and I really like it. I was wondering if you would like to exchange links with me?
You may be aware that exchanging links would be mutually beneficial and also very helpful in increasing traffic or visitors for both yours and my websites. If you are interested in exchanging links, please feel free to contact me at your earliest convenience and I will send you more details.
Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Best regards,
Sandy

Yeah, I have some questions:
1. If you really visited my site, why didn't you use the feedback link there to contact me?
2. If you really visited my site, how come you have made no reference anything on it in you email?
3. If you really visited my site, then how come you don't know my name?
4. If exchanging links is to be beneficial, our sites need to be complimentary in some way ... yet you have provided no clue as to what your site is about. How come? The address is for firstkart.com, which is a gokarting site - how would you introduce a link to a linux site to readers of kart-racing stuff?
5. Why did you use a standard "canned" email typically used by scam artists?

That's right, this is a scam email. If you respond, the scammer will know that your email is active and will then add you to a spammers mailing list. As usual, googling the text of the email shows many thousands just like it.

If you want to link to someone from your site - just do it: this is the internet. It is polite to tell the owner of the linked page that you've done this, and they may link back to you in turn, but you don't have to.

When you want to communicate with a stranger online, you have to take steps to make sure you do not look like a scammer. Do not send generic emails, like above, that could apply to anyone or be from anyone. You like someone's website: tell them why.

Of Church and State

2011-06-04T21:18:00.000+12:00

Emerson. Anne Marie, Prayer controversy: Clive Solomon walks out of meeting (Wanganui Cronicle May 31 2011)

In a nutshell: Wanganui District Councellors insist on having their opening prayers while actually in session. Micheal Laws insists that the council does not have to respect human rights (well OK: he claims that the Human Rights Tribunal has no jurisdiction over them.) Another councellor walks out over the events.

WDC is not the only councel, or even the only governing body, to hold prayers or some kind of religious ceremony as part of it's procedings. There are growing murmers about raising theocracy, religious discrimination and so on. So what is the actual status of church re state in New Zealand?

In a nutshell: there is no formal separation in law. In practise, governing bodies walk a tightrope of public opinion on this issue and so try to keep a neutral approach to religion.

The USA, by comparison, has a formal separation of church and state written into their bill of rights - called the "establishment clause".

New Zealand has a Bill of Rights, called "NZBORA".

s3b extends the act to cover "by any person or body in the performance of any public function, power, or duty conferred or imposed on that person or body by or pursuant to law." That would be District Councils - the duties are conferred or imposed by the Local Government Acts (1974 and 2002). So Mr Laws, with all due respect, pththththt!

In fact, the LGA (both of them) require that councils carry out their duties in accordance with all other acts - which would include NZBORA. So, unless there is a statute someplace which says that Councls must have a wee prayer to start session, then said prayer must be carried out according to the principles in the Bill of Rights.

Four sections are important here:
13, Freedom of religion; 15, manifestation of religion; 19, freedom from discrimination; and 20, rights of minorities.

So - each councellor individually has the right to have and practise their religions in private or in public (within the rest of the law - if your religion requires human sacrifice you dont get to claim a human rights violation when you get arrested for murder). The trouble comes when they act as members of a governing body ... when they hold a particular religious ceremony as part of being the folk in charge, they are making a statement, not of personal faith, but of what the geverning body values.

The bosses opinions tend to take on a coersive air, wether intended or not. When the boss asks other to join him in a totally voluntary prayer meeting, what would you do? You'd feel pressure right? When this is a government, any creed seen to be favored by that government looks like an endorcement of that creed at the expence of others. See the potential for claiming discrimination? It's not unlike the boss asking you to sit on his/her lap while giving you instructions ... totally voluntary of course.

Especially discrimination against minorities. Section 20 is a logical result of s19 - but by explicitly protecting minorities the act wans that "majority rules" is not a mandate to ride roughshod over the minority.

But this could be stretching the definition of "discrimination" somewhat, especially as we tend to tolerate Maori spiritual ceremonies at special civic events. Whatever, it seems WDC is treading a bit of a thin line here: there is clearly a case to answer before the HRT.

We may be prepared to put up with a bit of religious observance in out councils since, if we dont like it, we can vote them out. Think: do we really want to be governed by a bunch of people who openly claim to put some religious view ahead of their duties as councillors? That technically contravenes s10 of the LGA defining the purpose of the council ...

It turns out there is similar legislation - the Education act. This act and associated case law explicitly prevents public schools from teaching religion during school hours on the grounds that this is not what the schools are set up for. The discrimination argument has long been held to apply to schools with regard to religious teaching, prayers in school and so forth. This would appear to be nicely analogous to the local government situation - as schools may teach religion on school property, they must do so outside statutary school hours; so the coucil may hold a religious observance on council property so long it is not part of the statutary council session. This also allows the usual Maori ceremonies at dedications and opening and so on since these are not actual council business (that has already concluded - the ceremony marks this.)

It is easy to argue that a separation of church and state is essential if we are to be a free participating democracy. Perhaps it is time New Zealand had a formal establishment clause in our Bill of Rights?

Cannon Balls

2011-06-03T22:05:00.001+12:00

A cannon ball is shot out of a cannon and travels some distance before it hits the ground, at the same time a cannon ball is dropped out of the sky the same distance off the ground.
Which Cannon ball will hit the ground first?

I keep seeing this puzzle with a discussion that peters out without result. The distances involved varies, I've seen as low as 4 miles and as high as 10.

Now - a ball dropped and a ball fired horizontally from the same height will both hit the ground at the same time ... but note that they travel different distances. In this puzzle the balls travel the same distance. There is an ambiguity though: is the distance traveled by the fired ball the horizontal distance or the length of it's trajectory. Almost everyone thinks it is the former but I suspect the latter is meant.

Treated as normal ballistics, I can make the fired ball hit first by pointing the cannon directly down. The cannon and the dropped ball start at the same height in this case. I can make the fired ball come last by putting the cannon on the ground and firing directly upwards... the ball reaches a maximum height then falls to the ground, so the dropped ball starts at twice this height in order to travel the same distance. The fired ball then takes 1.4 times longer to hit the ground.

So much for normal ballistics. There are three wrinkles though:
1. air resistance may be significant. The dropped ball may reach it's terminal velocity (for a shot-put this is about 80m/s) before it hits ... over the distances involved, the dropped ball may be delayed enough that it always hits second.

2. gravity depends on height - so the dropped ball will, in general, encounter less initial acceleration. This may make it lag enough to come second.

3. the 10mi distance is suggestive - that is the top of the atmosphere (well, of the really dense part of it). At height, the atmosphere is thinned out, allowing a greater speed to be built up falling ... does the puzzle mean for us to realize that it takes place inside the dense part of the atmosphere and thus air-resistance is important or that the dropped ball starts out high enough to have a consistent advantage? I'm betting on the former.

Without actually doing the math, it looks like these wrinkles slightly favor the shot ball hitting first.

Speed Crackdown crock

2011-06-03T21:42:00.000+12:00

QB weekend, and onwards, speed tolerances will drop - we are told this is in a bid to reduce road deaths.

So far the only effective way to reduce road deaths has been to increase the petrol price (people don't drive as much.) Fact is that speeding, by itself, is not a significant contribution to the road toll. Driving too fast for the conditions, even if within the speed limit, is pretty major though. The cures for that are (a) driver education and (b) experience. Sadly not things that look good in the news - particularly, these things are out of police control.

If speeding were really such a big deal, we can fix it in one go by mandating governors on all cars - set everyone's top speed to 105kmph so there are no excuses and make it an offence to bypass them. Transgressors will be easy to spot and it could be on the WOF check too.

Driver education is expensive. Getting the police to make a big noise about a crackdown may make unthinking drivers nervous enough to be more generally cautious. However, I expect there will not be a zero road toll any time soon.

Slow News Night

2011-05-21T19:06:00.000+12:00

3 News reports: "The World is still here."

Must be a slow news night.

I've been invited to number of rapture parties, however none are handy to Waiheke :( ... if I get raptured later tonight I'll see if I can get God to drop me off at one, you know, on the way. After all, no hurry aye?

Nah worries mate.

2011-05-21T17:53:00.002+12:00

I Just saw something on a local Network news program, which we all know are Highly Reputable Sources. It was about this Rapture thingy. They had this Christian Expert guy saying that it is a Sin to Predict the End of the World so if anyone does then the "Lord" will say, "Nope. Not gonna end it today."

I Say as a Discordian, it is my Duty to wake up every morning and say, "What a Splendid day, Too bad the World's going to end tomorrow." Then of course God will Say, "Nope. Not gonna end it today." Then, Goddess will whisper in my Ear, "That's a good Lad, isn't Sinning Fun?"

Of course, I can only save the World for so long, I figure, barring Accidental, or Malicious death I got another 50 or 60 years on me until the World will end without my Constant Predictions.

This leads me to wonder, After I'm gone would they refer to me as Simon the Great for saving the World everyday, or Simon the Paranoid for thinking the world would end everyday? The Christians already call me Simon the Sinner so I guess that's out for post Death titles, although it does have a Snazzy ring to it. ;)

Happy Rapture, by the Way, the World's ending tomorrow, Party at my House! 6 am Sharp!

Unregulated Ads

2011-05-20T17:01:00.000+12:00

Watching Stratos today, I see an ad for a plug-in device to control rats, mice, cockroaches, even spiders. But but: these things do not work. See:

Sonic Deterrents in Animal Damage Control: A Review of Device Tests and Effectiveness

Mary Bomford and Peter H. O'Brien

Wildlife Society Bulletin
Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1990), pp. 411-422

... this is a meta-study, covering a wide variety of other studies in the general field of sonic pest control. I thought than maybe it would work for a while, then the pests just get used to the extra noise. But no: seems they don't work at all. But don't take Mary and Pete's word for it - google "ultrasonic pest control" in google-scholar and see. Most are tests for individual products, and as such are not all that useful (they only show those exact products don't work, doesn't mean the others are the same.) But look anyway. Some animals, like rats, have a bit of a response to ultrasound, but cockroaches and other bugs just don't care.

I thought of making a complaint to the advertising standards people ... but that would probably not help since Stratos was showing an overseas feed and, I'm guessing, an NZ authority is not able to affect an overseas ad.

Possibly we need more of these, the New Zealanders will learn not to trust the ads we do allow.

This leaves the problem of genuine anecdotes - "I plugged it in and away they want" stories. Trawl through the regular internet to find those (not one came from actual research). These are either too vague to tell, told by people employed by the company selling the device, or, refer to pests who are likely to go away after a while, or become inconspicuous for periods, anyway. Besides, if you discover you are infested with some pest, you don't just use one intervention - you'd also make sure you clean up after yourself better, lay poison etc. This sort of ambiguity is why anecdotes do not make good evidence.

OTOH: get a bunch of cockroaches in a tank, play the noise at them, watch what they do. Nothing different? Doesn't work. Simple.

Scam Profiles in Facebook

2011-05-18T18:51:00.000+12:00

Arrrgh! I really should not have let on that I was single ... I have had two friend requests from sexy-looking women. I mean really hot! After scraping my tongue off the keyboard (drying it off) and putting my eyes back in my head, I thought I'd check their profiles first.

I'm glad I did - they were both new profiles with one photo only and no viewable info except for a link. In one case the link was to a dating site and the other held a link to a degree-scam site. Now technically I will not always be able to see much of someone's profile - they may be privacy conscious - but anyone who wants friends is unlikely to have a profile like that!

I also see a bunch of poor deluded guys have friended them already. I have reported the sites - one for representing a business as a person and the other for being a nonexistent person - we'll see what happens.

Scam profiles in Be2

2011-05-14T22:37:00.000+12:00

I wrote earlier about internet dating sites being basically scams ... The site Be2 allows communication without paying, though all the photos are blurred out. I've been getting mail like this:

Dear Simon9994, I have been looking at your profile. It seems like we could have lots in common. Can you tell me a bit more about yourself?
All the best, cttt

... and ...

Dear Simon9994, I just answered a few questions about my lifestyle in my profile. If you have already answered these questions, you can see an instant comparison.Why don’t you take a look now and send me a private message to tell me if we have a similar lifestyle?Have a look here [link deleted] to see the information I added to my profile.
I look forward to finding out what we have in common! regardssinglemum1972

These are both classic scam emails ... notice how there is no indication in the messages to show these people have actually read my profile or are even interested in me personally. These are wholly generic and actually quite bland. To top it off, cttt's blurred photo is blonde while her profile says "black hair".

This is actually pretty insulting, I wonder how far these people will go.

In the news

2011-05-14T18:25:00.001+12:00

Drawing my attention as I sit by the computer:

Magnetic Boy: a Serbian kid has extra sticky skin. Not sure why this is news, I've been sticking stuff to myself for a while. There are claims that he is somehow magnetic - but that makes no sense since some of the stuff that sticks to him is non-ferrous like porcelain plates ... just try a magnet on a dinner plate.

Decapitation in a supermarket: all the news reports focus on what happened after the attack - what about just before or during? This was a supermarket: where were the shoppers? Did everyone just stand there while her head was hacked off?

Hone Harawira says Maori's are treated like dogs here: Well I suppose he's right in the sence that, like dogs, Maoris have a special protections in law here. The country of comparison, Australia, offers no such status - in fact, Maoris who have not nationalized will have restricted rights compared with full Australians. Is he suggesting that NZ should get rid of the special laws concerning Maoris so they will have the standing they have in Australia? Somehow I doubt it. I wonder how long it will take for one of his opponents to point this out?

Ideas for Chistchurch rebuilding expo: a bit of a marketing thing isn't it? Nice for morale perhaps and gives the appearance that something is being done, but the reality is that CHCH will continue to look like a disaster-zone for a long time to come. There's a long-term real-estate opportunity there though.

Perhaps we can rebuild CHCH along secular lines? There is public money going into this after all ... should the NZ government implicitly support a narrow range of religions this way? The churches are not just architecture, they are meeting places and symbols for people whose ideology precludes freedom of religion (just read your bible). On the other hand, perhaps part of the rebuilding should reflect the multicultural nature of NZ as a whole (since, as a whole, NZ is funding it)? That way CHCH would become a sort-of multicultural capitol for NZ.

North Africa: it is just not possible to sort out the conflicting reports coming out of places like Libya. Maybe NATO did mistakenly hit a religious meeting? OTOH: it sounds an awful like those sleazy defences: "My client was walking along the street, minding his own business, travelling from his Church where he spent the morning in prayer on his way to help homeless orphans, when the police brutally decended upon him, without warning, for no discernable reason, emotionally scarring onlookers ..."

Blogspot outage

2011-05-14T16:05:00.001+12:00

Wow - blogspot has been down - on and off - for three days or so. Apparently they messed up an upgrade and it took this long to fix. One of the effects was that older posts got lost for a while ... I don't think readers would have noticed but I have been unable to post here and I've had stuff to say.

OK - thinks seem to be working, I'll marshall my thoughts and ...

RSI Blues

2011-05-13T01:47:00.000+12:00

I woke up this mornin, couldn't move my arm
I woke up this mornin, couldnta move my arm
It was a mass of searing pain baby
I got them old "I used the computer too much" blues.

Yeah I was up all nigh bloggin, postin and modellin too
You know about that babe: didn't even stop to watch you tube
Now my mouse hand is all cramped up baby
My nerves are all shot and fused

And I got that old RSI blues.

Verify Your Backups

2011-05-13T01:23:00.000+12:00

Friday 13 is international backups day ... as well as being sacred to the Goddess Frigga (or Frig, if you watched "The Almighty Johnsons").

So verify your backups.

Mother's day treat for Mum

2011-05-09T18:11:00.001+12:00

Found this "documentary":
http://movies.cnnbcvideo.com/index.php?nid=1304875352_1948&referred_by=1304875248_6069&p=moveon

... way to go Mum!

Online Dating sites

2011-05-09T05:18:00.000+12:00

The various social network sites I subscribe to have realized that I am single, and started advertising dating sites like match.com at me. However, I have a hard time being able to tell the difference between these and scam sites.

The usual business model for social sites is to provide a functional service gratis, sell you special services, but mostly just sell advertising space. You'd think dating sites would be great for this ... after all, users are motivated to provide loads of detailed demographics in the name of finding a compatible partner. But this is not so. Instead, non-functional services are provided, you are constantly nagged to pay for functional services, and your are constantly tempted with too-good-to-be-true looking prospective dates as motivation.

Now it is possible that a 25yo hottie really wants to meet me, but (see photo) how likely is this... really?

The sites outlaw anything in your profile which could be construed as an attempt to bypass payment to meet people.

match.com shows you pictures and lets you "wink" at people ... sometimes they wink back: so far all I've got back is "no thanks". People have wink"ed at me to, and, though I have winked back, nobody has expressed further interest... most of them do not look like genuine people.

be2 is even more restrictive - you need premium access to see photos or have any contact with other members. Good greif.

But if you are careful, you can provide hints in your profile to direct genuine date-hunters to some place, like a blog, where they can contact you and still leave you protected. (That's how they justify not letting you publish contact details: it's for your protection.)

Hopefully, someone actually keen will see the hints I have left and find their way here ... hope springs eternal ... and post a message to one of these posts. Then I'll know they are real and something can happen.

It is possible that some people will think I cannot be serious if I am not prepared to pay for full access to talk to them ... but really, I probably would pay for full access if I was confident that the people I am seeing are actually real. Apart from that, I would rather have the money to make a better impression on the first date. I live on Waiheke Island after all ... this is a resort. I can show the right someone a very good time.

Obviously the proper thing to do is actually get offline and out into meat-space ... meet people, physically, join clubs, that sort of thing.

delSol Back

2011-05-07T02:24:00.000+12:00

I got my beastie back from the shop ... still waiting parts. Each time I have to do without, I rent or borrow a car .. this time it was a Mazda .. 1.5L something, fairly nice... all electric, cleaner than I normally keep my car, but I have a better stereo :)

I found the mazda felt "tighter" to drive, a bit heavy, but agile on Waiheke's roads. Better hill-climbing. I got used ot it's handling... then when I got back to the delSol I rediscovered why I like it so much. Compared with the mazda I had an extra few horses under the hood and the car felt light and loose on the road (what I normally think of as "normal" performance these days). Once more an exciting drive.

Sometimes I wish for more of a workhorse... but really I wouldn't want a regular car any more.

Dibs!

2011-05-07T02:08:00.001+12:00

This car is mine - hands off :)
http://www.autotrader.co.nz/used-cars-for-sale/porsche-boxster/741926

... I've been thinking of what I'd eventually replace the delSol with ... I like it and would prefer to keep maintaining it, maybe redo it later, but who am I kidding: I'm no gearhead. AST some point I'll be able to afford a real car for what the delSol costs to maintain thus: I looked up what second-hand Porsches go for (no way I can afford a new one ... though if any fans want to shout me one? No? Oh well...)

Off Top-Gear I thought: Porsche 911 ... the fwd is a good idea for Nz in general and Waiheke in particular ... and it seems a 10yo carrera will come in at about 40k these days ... however, I can get an ultra-lux upgrade to a Boxter (rwd only :( ) from 30k ... looks like the right choice.

The link above goes to a really nice, leather interior, sports upgrade, Boxter S-series. It is everything the delSol is only German ... which puts it into a whole different orbit. Looks a litte low for my drive though ... so now I just have to come up with 34k + change.

Watching AlJazeera

2011-05-06T13:31:00.000+12:00

Wow - so thats what a news service looks like - I'd almost forgotten: even the BBC has turned into a magazine show.

But really - how long does it take to say that bin Laden is dead?

Smeagol Update

2011-05-06T13:29:00.000+12:00

Smeagol is back at the vets having the wire removed from his jaw. He should be all better now ... with only his teeth to clean up. His appetite is way up, he's chasing the chooks, and cuddling at night ...though that last probably means it's cold.

Home Broadband up and running

2011-05-06T13:27:00.000+12:00

Just got ynet to install radio broadband ... I'll get the bill later (yikes). Meantime, car is sick - it has been losing power through the central locking shorting out (gah!) About $200 to fix - here we go - looks like it is big-bill month.

Mini-Simon make things go boom!

2011-05-03T15:50:00.000+12:00

I started Early - 1983 - building rockets. This is what you can get up to if you have the keys to the dangerous chemical store at High School. There is, now, a law against the particular mixture we used. Goos stuff...

Back from the dead?

2011-04-29T15:09:00.000+12:00

I've been spending the week watching back-to-back horror films and it got me thinking:

What gets to come back from the dead?
Nothing good that's for sure. It's what: a Zombie, Vampire, werewolf, mummy ... ? Nothing good. And if you see something freshly ressurected what do you do? Everyone knows the answer: you shoot it through the head, with a silver bullet, stake it through the heart, and set it on fire. Lets face it: Jesus dosn't stand a chance.

Emagine:

"SON, IT'S TIME."
"No Dad please no, You know what they do to people back from the dead!"
"LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE: LAST TIME THEY CRUCIFIED YOU."
"That's a bright side?"
"WELL ALL RIGHT, I SUPPOSE WE CAN WAIT."

So we're not going to get the final trump any time soon.

On the other hand the Antichrist is careful to get born the normal way. Clever. Is Satan smarter than God?

Anyway - I'm quite dissappointed about the lack of Zombie outbreaks in the Bible. This has got to be a major oversight on the part of the authors. People do come back from the dead all right, they just don't lurch around biting people (but see). At least, this did not get reported... hmmmm... I smell a cover-up! (Or is it the brains?)

Lazarus (John 11:41-44) lurched out of his tomb, and Jesus had the burial stuff taken off him, and everyone says how miraculous it all was. Then the story sort of dries up. ... perhaps a Roman soldier had to pilum him through the head to stop him. That wouldn't exactly support the Bibles main thesis at this point (God Good, Romans Bad) but it would certainly have made a big impression on the people watching.

But the situation is more Pet Sematary than Night of the Living Dead. Lazarus' body came back, but who (or what) was inside it? There's evedience for this: Jesus was known to be able to command demonic possession like a pro. Consider the followng testimony that didn't make it into the Bible:

There I was, innocently going about my lawful business as a pig hearder, when what happens? Jesus happens is what happens! What does he do? I'll tell you: he only goes and takes the demons out of this girl and all right by me too, nothing against curing demonic possession have I. But then he goes and, without so much as a by your leave, stuffs the demons into my pigs! I mean: the nerve! And my pigs go right barmy and all of them, every single one of them, run right off a cliff poof! Deprived me of my livelyhood he did.

(Mark 5:13 etc.) Cue lawsuit.
So here we have eye-witness testimony showing that Jesus could, and did, transfer demons from one host to another.

Of course we can only expect this sort of stuff considering Jesus' dad. If Jesus lived in modern New Zealand, CIFS would have taken custody.

"So Mr Yahweh, is it true that you sent you only Son into the World knowing all the while that he would be tortured to death? Are you aware that this is a criminal offence in NZ?"

"NO PRISON CAN HOLD ME!"

Well, actually, God declines to talk for fear of self incrimination.

Yet another scam recieved...

2011-04-21T16:07:00.001+12:00

blogpost

Dr Goddy Jenkins from winner@shell.com has sent me an email saying I have won something from shell and I can claim my prize if I supply some details. Oh goody. Hang on...

It is possible because I have taken part in a number of promotions but ... "Dr"? Is it likely that an MD or PhD will be in a PR job emailing competition winners? Still, it could be his name ... that can happen right?

Looking closer:

You have been declared the winner of GBP 350,000.00 (Three Hundred and Fifty Thousand British Pound Sterlings) .This is a concluded selection conducted over the internet with our automated email selection machine.This Lottery is promoted and sponsored by Shell International Petroleum Company Limited (United Kingdom) as part of their social responsibility to alleviate poverty.We hereby congratulate you on this huge prize monies.You are required to contact Mr. Alan Yates for immediate verification and disbursement of your Prize winnings with the following contact details below:

The sum won is in pounds stirling ... I have only been involved with Shell NZ, so the prize should be in NZ dollars. But there's an answer to that ... seems to be some sort of email lottery and the aim is to "alleviate poverty". So I don't need to enter to win - that's nice of them. However, there are registered charities in the UK which will reward Shell for their contributions, if they want to just hand out large sums of money to help the needy, surely this path is more in keeping with the corporate mentality. Then there's the "huge prize moneys"? Would Shell hire someone with such poor English grammar? Finally, the name to contact, Mr Alan Yates, is different from the name in the from field. He is described as a "fiduciary agent", a claims agent: lotteries never use claim agents. Though a corporation might, one as large as Shell is quite capable of handling the matter in-house: I'd expect a letter from their lawyers. In fact, once that thaught crosses my mind I realise that a company like Shell would not contact me through email: this is way out of character.

The body of the email provides winning numbers and so on as well as someplace to go claim my prize. Then I am told I'll need to submit these things to get the prize: surely they have that information already? They want more information than that - they want all my phone numbers, and contact details as well.

What's more, they want me to keep my winnings a secret - huh? Lotteries are keen to publish you as a winner, just look at the terms on a Lotto (NZ) ticket.

Long before now the email gets junked as a scam. But look it up and you find I am not the frst, nor will I be the last. This is an example of a 419 scam where marks are asked for some sort of fee, and personal details, in order to claim a lottery or other prize.

This is what 419scam.org has to say about this particular example:

This email uses a separate reply address that is different from the sender address. Spammers use this to get replies even when the original spam sending accounts have been shut down. Also, sometimes the sender addresses are legitimate looking but fake and only the reply address is actually an email account controlled by the scammers.
This email message is a fake lottery scam. Consider the following facts about real lotteries:
They don't notify winners by email.
You can't win without first buying a lottery ticket.
They don't randomly select email addresses to award prizes to.
They don't tell you to call a mobile phone number.
They don't tell you to keep your winnings secret.
They will never ask a winner to pay any fees to receive a prize!
This email lists mobile phone numbers. Use of such numbers is typical for scams because they allow criminals to conceal their true location. They can receive calls in an Internet cafe from where they send you emails, while pretending to be in some office.

re2dux updated

2011-04-16T11:08:00.000+12:00

http://www.box.net/shared/1zunz8ixoe

(click on the image for a bigger one)

I have added specular and glows to almost all the ships in the re2dux collection... the pic shows a fre de Lance with purple and milky-white hull lights. I have put separate greyscale textures to map out the glows so users can redo them to suit. If you have a nice looking version different from mine, tell me about it. If I like it I'll use it.

Right to Silence at risk

2011-04-16T10:50:00.000+12:00

I've written about this before. The right to silence is more properly thought of as a requirement on the part of the police to find evidence and make their case without the accused assistance. The police cannot legally compel you to incriminate yourself... with the corrollery that you cannot be legally compelled to exonerate yourself either.

This means that it is just a logical result of normal "assumption of innocence".

There has been a lot of discussion of this in relation to corruption and child abuse. eg. in the Herald. Police complain that their investigations would go much more smoothly but for the silence of witnesses. Well yes, I imagine their job would be easier if people would just confess the second they saw a blue hat. It would be easier if we all stayed home, sat around the dining table, with our hands out in front of us. I don't see any of that happening any time soon.

The implication is that witnesses are trying to protect the accused. But we should bear in mind that these witnesses are being expected to relate events to which they may be accomplice. Especially under new laws - witnessing child abuse and doing nothing will be a crime, and so you have even more incentive to remain silent.

Did the police offer immunity from prosecution? This would satisfy the normal interpretation of the right as the "privilege against self-incrimination" outlined above. One suspects not.

Where you have lots of suspected witnesses, you can interview them separately and offer immunity to the one who first spills the beans... setting up a prisoner's dilemma.

The right to silence is one of the older legal rights on the books, predating the Heralds misleading mafia references. True, it was established in a time when most people were much less educated than today. However, regular folk are as unfamiliar with authority, police powers, the law, and so on, as their Elizabethan counterparts. Most people cannot afford a lawyer and talk unwisely to the police.

The protection is still needed.

Somewhat stunned...

2011-04-16T10:30:00.000+12:00

I see the anti-filesharing bill snook in by pretending to be earthquake relief ... I think that's my biggest gripe about this: MPs should not be able to push a bill through by pretending it is something else. A lot of us weren't watching because we were told the seesion was to help those CHCH needy people and who would oppose anything that is for disaster relief?

Its not a huge disaster... at least you are innocent until proven guilty. Did I say "proven"? Oh dear - I meant "until big corporate interests take you to a tribunal". I want to see what sort of evidence-based decision making the copyright tribunal uses. Since the main complaint is that corporate interests find actually proving their cases too much trouble and this is supposed to be better (for them) I'm not hopeful.

More worrying is the ignorance in our political leaders. As voters, we need to insist that MPs we elect actually understand a bit about the single most influential media form of the 21st century - the internet. C'mon people.

For example:

the computer system called Skynet that ruled the world, is like the internet today.... Johnathan Young

No John, it isn't. Terminator's Skynet was self-aware and operated without human intervention. It tries to wipe out human beings by sending armed robots to kill them. By comparison, the internet facilitates normal human communication and socializing ... part of normal human socializing is sharing stuff we like with our friends.

It is really important to remember that file sharing is an illegal activity.... Katrina Shanks

No Kat, sharing files is quite legal, and a normal social activity. It is copyright infringement that is against the law. The bill was supposed to make it easier to enforce existing copyright laws. The main complaint is from corporate interests (publishers, producers and the like) who find it is too expensive to take internet users to court and too hard to prove they've done anything wrong when they do. Even then, a win is not guaranteed ... so they want something cheaper and that requires less (preferably no) proof.

Basically, if this is such a good law, why sneak it in? There was extensive and robust public debate over the last one... OK it was ignored, but it was done. I'm with boing boing on this:

Using the tragedy in Christchurch as a means to advance the corporate agenda of offshore entertainment giants is shameful, to say the least

Birthday Survived

2011-04-14T16:45:00.000+12:00

I did manage to get a date for my birthday, but she phoned to say she didn't want to after all :( still ...

so I spent a long weekend just me and a big stack of DVDs.

The surprise of the bunch was "Dog Soldiers". It was odd ... from the cover it looks like another "sexy women become maneating werewolves once a month and nobody notices the difference" gut it is actually much more studied than it looks. Its your basix "gulf war syndrome is actually the early stages of lycanthropy" stuff. There were a couple of vietnam vets as aging werewolf hunters and a couple of wolf factions. Lots of teasing early on. The screenplay was quite bright, trying for tarantino-esque wierd philosophy, and the camera-work excellent.... it needed a more experienced cast. The direction was relentlessly single-paced, so the same atmosphere prevailed for combat scenes as for weekend sports: it's all part of what marines do. This should have given the story a scence of inevitability but the pace was a tad too slow for that and it tended to drag. Dog Soldiers was better than I expected but worse than it should have been given the material.

I tried the Red Crab (restaurant) in Oneroa: turned out to be excellent. Prices are normal, but the servings are large and everything is well made. Though the dining area looks formal, this is Waiheke: I got seated in tee-shirt and jeans, no footwear, no problems.

I had the ginger duck, tender and light: just what I was looking for. I took my Mum and she had the snapper - which turned out to be one of the larger snappers: easily enough for two or three people with appitites. That was listed as mildly spicey but it was enough to water my eyes so be warned to expect Tai judgement on these things.

Meantime, I have been reassembling my Cosmic Encounters game, and working on expanding the Oolite re2dux collection.

I emerge at last, blinking, into the sunlight ... whats left of it. Its a bit like hibernating and waking up in a post apocalyptic wonderlant.

News Caution: Koran Burning Protests

2011-04-05T16:38:00.001+12:00

We have been hearing in the news how Afganis are so outraged at a Florida bigot's public burning of the Quran that they are rioting, shooting people, burning stuff and so on.

My bullshit detector went off big time over this one. Let me spell it out: there is no way these protests are about some nobody minister being stupid! N O W A Y. This has got to be about something else which the Florida idiocy is, at worst, a trigger event.

To start with, the target of the protests are not anyway remotely connected with the event. Muslim protests are never so poorly targeted. Add that the people on the ground have quite limited internet access and we have reason to suspect other reasons being important. But all the so-called news services are all reading the same script at us ... I had to hunt hard for some alternative commentary.

It looks like someone wrote a press release and the news agencies have been reading it verbatim. Facts are thin on the ground, even Al Jazeera seem to be having trouble figuring out what to report but at least they remain measured and calm.

It does look like some sort of power-play is involved. If, as the linked article suggests, this is a Taliban power-bid, then it has backfired: the immediate result is that the UN are staying longer. The Taliban would have been better advised to wait a bit.

It also does not explain the uniform scripted message the media are handing us. "Muslims are violently insane." is what we are being force fed (with a side order of "we must respect religions") but "the Taliban are sneaky" would work better, yet that is not what we are hearing. We'll have to wait a bit, with skeptical caps firmly in place, for when the other shoe drops. Meantime: do not believe what the news are telling you.

Kiwibank security message

2011-04-05T16:19:00.000+12:00

I have just got an email claiming to be from the Fraud Prevention Unit Legal Advisor for Kiwibank.

You have 1 new security message.
Click on the link below to solve the problem.

The link looks genuine but I don't have a kiwibank account, so why would I get a security alert from them?
Hovering over the link shows that the destination is something to do with bricklaying ... you have to remember that a link can show any words it likes, it doesn't mean anything. In fact, hovering over the link can sometimes activate it ... so it is safer to just look at the source code instead.

This is a common type of scam. Kiwibank know about it. Basically, no bank will ask you to update your security details via a website. S, any message that does so is a scam. Easy.

I notice that there is yet another half-hearted attempt to raise awareness of scams in NZ. Sadly the emphasis is still on the "if it seems to good to be true it probably is" message. The trouble is that these scams are designed to look like they are part of normal life ... they generally don't seem to good to be true, just a bit surprising.

Instead, the campaign needs to emphasize critical thought ... this is harder to do in the short term but pays dividends in the long run. Are there any red flags? Does the message pass a basic bullshit test? We also should be teaching students how out electronic services actually work at a nuts-and-bolts level ... that way redirected links wouldn't fool anyone.

Real solutions are always hard - suck it up.

Birthday Month!

2011-04-04T12:28:00.000+12:00

Cool ... it's on the 8th and I want an HRV system :) Mind you, if random women will come up to me and give me a kiss that would be nice too :D

On the home front - the cat is doing nicely - he's missed his vets appointment so I'll have to set another one. I hope we can remove the wire from his jaw this time.

Today I am off to an audition for a V ad. I'm up at 5pm so we'll see how that goes. This morning I got a txt asking if I am up for a $5000 ad job, but it was dated last month ... aaaargh! I hate it when this happens. I really really really have to get internet at home. So far the acting thing is the only proper job stuff that works - except it is not really a proper job. I don't know if that is good or bad but seeing as I've never actually had a proper job, not really, ever, I'd don't have anything to compare with.

Which reminds me, last quarter's acting income is in ($750 for those who want to know what a 2-bit TV ad actor makes in three months) so I have to give the paperwork to Income Support.

More for Oolite

2011-03-29T15:08:00.000+13:00

The prerelease oolite destroyer is now available from re2dux.
This ship is based on the anaconda (look at the "wing" shape ... but bears the same relation as the griff boa does to the boa: not much. It started out as a navy anaconda but it is so different I've upgraded it. This means the destroyer model I'm also working on will turn into a frigate.

Now to work out how to smooth the dome, pipes, and tubes, without resorting to shaders.

The Oolite link (left) won't work today... apparently Giles (site maintainer) forgot to pay for hosting. Nice to see I'm not the only one :)

MS Innovates on the "foot-gun"...

2011-03-27T17:22:00.000+13:00

From the WTF files:

Microsoft seems to be trying to get its own personal unfair competition laws passed state by state, so it can sue US companies who get parts from overseas companies who used pirated Microsoft software anywhere in their business. The laws allow Microsoft to block the US company from selling the finished product in the state and compel them to pay damages for what the overseas supplier did.
--- Groklaw (March 24)

If this law is passed:

The upshot of is that if you are a US company wanting to import anything, you'd better make sure your supplier is not using any MS product anywhere in their business process, since that exposes you to litigation.

Corollary: If you want to export to the US, you better make sure you make a point of not using MS products.

On balance, this is a good law for the FOSS community. Why? Well: if your supplier uses Apple products (say) you cannot be sure they are not using MS software. In fact, they probably are. OTOH: if they have a published commitment to software freedom, they are very unlikely to have any proprietary software of stack they are not telling you about. They are also likely to be open about their software practices. That's how it works -- once you adopt an ethical stance, it permeates your whole business structure.

SCO did not invent the foot-gun, but they did popularise it's deployment. MS seems to have come up with a subtle innovation on the concept. Maybe they'll patent it?

Ring wimps out ...

2011-03-27T17:05:00.000+13:00

... no surprises there then.

You'll recall that I wondered out loud what excuses Ring will offer for his "prediction" failing yet again. It seems he is using the "it was only a suggestion" excuse.

So, according to Ring, his statements were supposed to be taken with a grain of salt anyway. In fairness, he did stop short of making any definite claims but he did take pains to make them appear to have more weight than they did. Even the excuses rank his predictions with weather forecasts -- yet they have less validity even than those.

People speaking for him point out that he is altruistic in his forecasts. He has not been paid for them or anything. But this is not true -- he has been making these pseudo-predictions as a way to get publicity for his book. Don't let him fool you, this is pure opportunistic self promotion.

It is very common for people with psudoscientific, paranormal or just plain junk claims to have self-promotion as a motive... look at Deb Webber.

Name supression in the courts: again!

2011-03-27T16:46:00.000+13:00

A lawyer facing a drink-driving charge has been able to keep her identity secret --- and is fighting to keep her record clear. So reports Edward Grey for the New Zealand Herald (Fri, March 22, 2011): front page news.

The story concerns name suppression. I've written about this before.

In this case the defendant has interim name suppression, presumably citing possible damage to her career given media interest. This is largely fair enough, since she has not been convicted of a crime and may not be as she is seeking discharge without conviction. If she is not convicted then she should not be penalised, that seems reasonable. It would be silly to release the name and then suppress it after a not-guilty verdict. The whole idea is to prevent the kind of trial by public opinion that Ed's article attempts.

Was the name suppression granted too easily? In this case the defendant wants to be discharged without conviction. Presumably she will be arguing that the result of a conviction would go far beyond the statutory sentence. She will need to convince the Judge that this is a one-time offence. She is very sorry and it will not happen again. Maybe, maybe not. This is the decision before the court and the case is still being argued -- to have a chance at all, the concerns of police and any victims (we don't know if there are any) will need to be addressed.

Anyone may attempt to argue for a discharge without conviction. Not just lawyers. It is actually easier to get for people close to the poverty line than rich or highly qualified people since a conviction could be argued to have a larger relative effect on their ability to find work, and so avoid a life of crime. Our defendant may not be able to continue to practise as a lawyer if convicted but she will hardly be unable to support herself... the prosecution can argue, "she's smart: she'll bounce back. There are other jobs: it's not the end of the World." This is an argument not available to the defence for a minimum-wage, high-school dropout, checkout operator.

Ed makes a big deal of how nobody connected with the case will comment on it. Well doh! It's a matter before the court: commenting would be prejudicial. Judges tend to object to council airing their differences through the media, especially when there is name suppression. It sort-of defeats the whole purpose.

There is also a non-publication order. The idea here is usually to avoid publication of details which may defeat the name suppression, or could result in injury to third parties. You don't want people not on trial to get punished. The very nature of non-publication and name suppression means that the details leading to the ruling will also need to be suppressed, since that may also identify you. It is due to concerns such as these that the Privacy Act so often trumps the Freedom of the Press.

But it is hardly onerous - Ed was able to report the details of public interest (that there is a trial involving a lawyer accused of a drink-driving offense and that details are suppressed to protect third parties etc etc) - do we really need to know the defendants name as well? What for? Everybody who knows the defendant knows who it is anyway which only leaves future employment where you want to know the applicant is not a drunk. This is where the argument (above) that this is a one time thing comes in.

However, secrecy leads to distrust. There has been a growing feeling that some people have been abusing the protections name suppression offers. Perhaps people accused and/or convicted of trust related offences should have more public exposure? Maybe they deserve it? There are moves to make name suppression and such things tougher to get.

"Being famous is not a good enough reason to be granted name suppression." Say's Simon Power, describing a proposed law change.

Denied name suppression, how long would it take a clever defense lawyer to use the consequences to argue down the sentence? The above defendant would be more likely to get a discharge without conviction because she could argue that the result of her name being released in connection with the charge, even without conviction, outweighs the punishment demanded by statute if convicted. Surely we would prefer the courts to be able to throw the book at her should she deserve it?

Fact is: nobody is granted name suppression just for being famous. The whole point is to avoid the situation where the consequences of appearing before the court (never mind subsequent conviction) could lead to an injustice. The effect of appearing before a court is different for different people, the law needs to take this into account. For instance, were I to appear on a drink-driving charge, I would have much lighter consequences than a major public figure would. The conviction would barely affect my own public or work life beyond the statuary punishment, but it could destroy someone else. Yet the both of us are supposed to be treated equally under the law. Simon Powers wants "one set of rules ... for everyone" but he has missed the point. The point concerns justice: pedantic, hard-assed rules just won't give us that. The rule needs to be flexible enough that the same law applies equally to everyone.

In general, there is a balance to be struck if there is to be public confidence in the justice system. Justice must be seen to be done. Too much secrecy is as bad for the system as too little. The Criminal Justice Procedure Bill threatens to swing the balance too far the other way.

Still no quake:

2011-03-22T15:01:00.000+13:00

Seems there was a 5.2 quake (aftershock) on the 20th - just as Ken Ring predicted!

Well, not really. There have been lots of aftershocks that strong and more since the big quake ... predicting one is a bit like predicting that water is wet.

This is what I was talking about before: even if there was a big quake exactly at the time Ken predicts, he still needs to be right a lot more often than he has been to be taken seriously.

Hah: "my" cat ...

2011-03-22T14:53:00.002+13:00

More earthquake looniness

2011-03-20T18:14:00.000+13:00

Seems no sooner do I blog on the moon and earthquakes I see some "moonman" is using the tragedy is CHCH for self promotion. The scammers name is Ken Ring. Oddly TV3 has reported that his claims have been "rubbished by scientists and sceptics". This just shows how much rubbish TV3 journalism is. In fact, these claims have been disproved. Notice the difference? "Rubbishing" implies the ideas may have merit and makes Ken look like an oppressed genius rather than a shameless crook.

How do I know? The original "prediction" was for

Potential earthquake time for the planet between 15th-25th, especially 18th for Christchurch, +/- about 3 days," Ring tweeted on February 14.

So he allows any time from the 12th (two days before the statement) to the 28th, for some place in the whole World - nice to hedge your bets. The CHCH example is disengenious because he already had reports of continuing aftershocks when he made the statement - it's a no brainer to "predict" more earthquakes within months of one that has just happened. Note, he allows a whole week for the prediction to come true.

Add to this that he predicts an earthquake someplace for a bit over a third of the dates in the calendar, and we are not surprised that he gets them "right" sometimes. We'd expect him to get it right about a third of the time by chance alone.

I've written about this in relation to coin tosses and it is the same here - the few positive results are not nearly enough to discount chance as the reason, even if we don't take into account all the misses, even if these were the only predictions made.

Now, Ken is a mathematitian. He knows all this. Yet he still peddles this tripe. Draw your own conclusions.

Anyway - Ken has predicted a big one for today. So anything in the next three days will count as a hit. Even if there was one, Ken's performance is still no better than chance so it means nothing. Still, it's brave of him, opportunists like him dont normally stick their kneck out so I wonder what excuse he has planned.

PMM Scam detected...

2011-03-20T16:47:00.000+13:00

Facebook ads have thrown up a perpetual motion machine for my perusal. It is a direct scam and the proposed machine is not even original: it was designed by J. Naudin. It involves a bunch of magnets rotating to present their poles to solenoids, but it is not clear why Naudin thinks this will actually turn. As it stands, it will work as an inefficient generator.

Such machines are easy to test - give it a twirl and it slows down: but the inventor claims that it slows down more slowly because, if he could only reduce the friction enough, it would keep turning forever while generating useful energy.

To test, therefore, spin it up, put it under load, time how long it takes to come to rest. Replace the magnets with inert iron bars (keeping the weight, load and geometry but removing the magnetism) and repeat. I expect that the non-magnetic (2nd) version will stay spinning for longer. Why? Because the magnetic poles moving past the solenoids puts an additional drag on the motion ... that is what is generating the electricity, and it is why you have to drive electric generators somehow to keep them going.

For more on the mystery of the perpetuum mobile and why it ain't so, please see this faq.

A rainy day in the life...

2011-03-19T15:23:00.000+13:00

Went out without the roof on, on a cloudy day. That's asking for trouble. Naturally it rained, but I can still stay dry-ish if my speed is above 40kmph. There is a bit of spatter from the drops hitting the roll-bar, but mostly the rain ends up missing the open top. Anyway, it's fun. Honest.

So naturally again I get stuck behind a tourist in a hummer doing all of 35! Baseball cap keeps the rain off my glasses though. I'll have to do something about figuring how to manually stow my roof or rig a rag-top or something. I know a guy with the same problem and he just holds an umbrella... amusing the police no end.

The problem: I drive a 92 Honda del Sol SiR (JDM) - the version with the electrically retracting roof. Only the retraction system is broken. So, on fine days I just leave the roof at home. That's what all these posts about trunks and tilt motors are all about.

Once I got home, Smeagol was uncharacteristically affectionate - wet cat smooching me, remind me why I have a cat again? Basically he just wants me to dry him instead of licking himself all over like normal - oh, and switch the heater on please.

Since I'm stuck inside with the cat and rented DVDs, I decided to bake some cookies - mega chocolate chip with some shredded coconut for a change. This worked - Smeagol enjoyed half a cookie and some warm milk.

Repeat after me: "Humans are the dominant species. Humans are the dominant species."...

Supermoons and silliness

2011-03-16T14:47:00.004+13:00

I didn't actually hear about this one. The idea is that the full moon which is also at it's closest point can destabilize the crust, making earthquakes more likely. There was one March 11. There was a bunch of people trying to link the Sim-City:Japan disasters to it. There is a good overview here.

The comments to the link are the most depressing... consider:

I'm not a scientist, but it is obvious that this writer has NOT done her homework with the few statistics that I do know, and as a lay person on the matter that creates a huge red flag to the general quality of this article. -- Zack

... apart from the disputed statistic actually not being claimed, the bit that was wrong about the statistic (that the Indonesian earthquake+tsunami was the most devastating recorded) was not important to its use in the article. This is by no means a "huge" red flag.

do we know enough about how the universe affects our planet. as our planet comes into alignment with the center of the milky way is this what is affecting us here -- barb

... some leading questions. "Do we know enough"... for what? Barb does not say. We do know enough to know that the full moon did not cause the Japan quake. The second question about alignment with the center of the milky way? We are always "in alignment" - but no, Barb is thinking about the 2012 doomsday prophesy. It seems that the Earth's axial tilt will hit its maximum sometime in 2012... some people are incorrectly calling this an "alignment" sounds mad? It is. Basically she is asking if this event is a precursor to the 2012 End of the World. So the answer is: "no".

An astronomer I know told me that the difference between the astronomers and the astrologers can be summed up by saying that the "scientific" astronomers don't think patterns in the sky are significant. He used the term "coincidental." Well, just because we don't understand it, it doesn't mean the pattern's not significant. -- philomedia

... that summary is like saying that Hamlet is about this guy who never gets around to killing his uncle and ends up killed himself. Anyway, the conclusion is based on a false premise: that "we" do not understand the patterns in the sky. We do: the constellations are made-up pictures ... we understand this sort of thing very well and it has a special name: fiction.

The new moon and full moon are having control on earth quakes and tsunamis . Definitely the increase of tides during the full moon and new moon making thrusts on the tectonic plates and shaking them resulting tremors, earth quakes and tsunamis .

Due to global warming , there is an increase in sea level as well the sea water quantum also been increased , thereby earth dynamics might have deviated due to quantum increase of water body to an extend, causing all these troubles. May be the nature is executing some correction steps to balance it self . We may expect some after effects during super moon too.

-- jayaveeriah

This is a good example of pseudoscience ... it tries very hard to sound scientific without actually coming within a megaparsec of anything sciencey. Notice the frequent use of "quantum"? Makes it sound a bit like quantum mechanics doesn't it? The description of the moons effects is almost pornographic! Lets see:

The tides do affect the Earth - well done - but they do not "shake" the tectonic plates. Shaking the plates does not result in tremors, shaking plates is what tremors are. It is hard to know what he means by "sea water quantum" - just google the term for a range of uses. It sounds like he means "quantity". The dynamics (type of motion) may have changed due to an increase in the amount of liquid water around, however, this would make the Earth a bit more stable (mass redistributed from the poles to the equator - wide objects have a smoother spin) not less like would give you earthquakes. It may seem like it but "Global Warming" is not a magic phrase that lends credence to anything it is attached to. "Wingardiam levioso."

However, jayaveeriah does not want to give up the "supermoon = disaster" thing: this quake may not have been the supermoon but the moon could still bring something else. (At time of writing: nope.) The article actually debunks this as well by charting historical supermoons with reference to the lack of natural disaster clusters in those times.

Chris tries his hand at science, takes a long waffley time to say that there is no way to predict earthquakes, and ends:

Sure, a full moon could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. There has to be that proverbial straw. But this moon is only that, a straw. It's not a sack of sand. -- chris

...well, no it can't be. The really small stress from tides in the crust can be a contributing factor to an earthquake but it is not the last thing on the load as implied by the proverb. We may say " what with everything else, if the moon were not a supermoon at that time then the quake would not have happened" and we may even be right (though how would you tell?) but we could equally say that without that last millimeter's subduction it would not have happened either: which is "the last straw"? Neither: they both contribute. "The last straw" is actually a "single cause" fallacy.

"Not a sack of sand." is right though: the tide's effect is so small that the phase of the moon has no predictive value for earthquakes. Now somebody is going to ask me about the full moon and psychology...

Sim City Japan

2011-03-15T12:32:00.000+13:00

... accidentally, the Real World seems to be taking instructions from some kids Sim City game.... what: Earthquake, Tsunami and a Nuclear Meltdown? What's next: Godzilla? Good thing they just got their Urban Rescue team back from Christchurch aye?

This keeps up we'll be on-track for our November date with the End of the World. The neat thing about being wrong about doomsday prediction denial is that you don't have to feel foolish: you are dead. It's being wrong about atheism as well that spoils your afterlife... ho hum.

Del Sol lead

2011-03-15T12:18:00.000+13:00

I need manuals and wiring diagrams for my del Sol ... I have a lead: the UK delSol Owners Club has a collection of manuals for the taking. The server is a bit slow so don't dispair.

Meantime, there is a bloke in the US who has offered me 400 USD (540 NZD) for my transtop system and he'll throw in the USDM trunk-rack and hinges. I'd like to take it, but just found out that NZ Post freight to the USA will cost about 700 NZD so I'll lose. I'm looking for cheaper surface freight - its a small package (half a cubic meter, 90kg) so I'm tentatively hopeful... weight-sensitive usually means air-freight.

Of course I'll have to cost out dismounting and packaging.

I am being recognised... erm

2011-03-11T16:31:00.000+13:00

I have been in a TV commercial for Just Juice ... I didn't embed it here because its a commercial dammit and they are not paying me to. (Note - features me almost naked so only watch if you do not value your eyesight).

I am getting recognized on the street ... it's weird.

They had me splashing in that pool for two hours - we emptied it many many times. The set was shared with the woman on the pogo stick who is a much better actor than me and had a hotter job. Which is fair enough - she's also hotter than me. The goofy ecstatic look in the closeup was one of the first shots and they hated it on the day. Just goes to show ;)

There were quite a lot of people on the set - I tried to chat up the ad-agents (I mean - aaaargh! Dude!) but didn't get anywhere. Crashed and burned. OTOH: I got them to hand out samples of their product to people who stopped to watch so I must have made some sort of impression. Yeah - I'll just keep telling myself that.

Artemis says "Hurray for doom!"

2011-03-11T16:18:00.000+13:00

For the record I do actually change that music thing every now and again... it's just been left on Auralei for a while now. I should really change it but I do really like Artemis. The track Only Begun is actually responsible for me giving my marriage one more chance when things were at their blackest way back. And this is the only artist I've played/shared who has actually popped in to say thanks.

I know, I'll keep an Artemis player and vary the other one?

Hmmm... maybe I can talk Artemis into coming to NZ? Play Waiheke on the vineyard circuit? Oooh: my whole body tingles just thinking about it. We can play a doomsday concert on top of Mt Rangitoto.

More doom to come!

2011-03-07T15:05:00.000+13:00

Considering the political and geological activity around now, it should come as no surprise that some people have been predicting the end of the world quite soon.

May 21, 2011 - a new popular day for the return of Christ, putting the end of the World in October 21. September and November are also popular. However, being very close to 2012, 2011 has not attracted many doomsday prophesies.

Regular readers know I am a fan of these and celebrate each doomsday as it slinks sheepishly by.

Early job results

2011-03-06T16:48:00.000+13:00

Job ads seem to have some effect - the linux one has got no hits at all bit I didn't really expect any. DSE are offering a software bundle at NZ$220 at a saving of a hundred or so but I can offer the same functionality for NZ$0 ($50 if I install) for a couple-hundred dollar saving so I really need to get the message out there somehow.

I have got a nibble on the tutoring thing though - I'll see them on Tuesday. The home-help folks have got back to me so I have a form to fill out and return. That would be 30hrs a week chasing a 4yo autistic boy around ...

OTOH: Waiheke High School have yet to respond to my offer of volunteer labor. Time to try other schools.

China too?!

2011-03-06T16:40:00.000+13:00

I did not expect the North Africa uprisings to spread to China too! OK there is always a lot of unrest in China, but they have been pretty good at keeping a lid on it and the country has been doing quite well.

Dictatorships generally follow the sacrificial-king model, though not normally deliberately. The king is tolerated as long as peoples lives are generally undisturbed and times are good (-ish). However, when things get very bad people the king gets the chop. Sure enough, soon after the king gets it, things get better. In general economies go up and down all by themselves, though some dramatic positive action like a change in management can stimulate things early. Because of this, the king in the fireing line tends to try to hang on just a bit longer because fortunes will change ... any ... time ... now ...

Of course, he also needs time to transfer a chunk of the kingdom's treasury into a secret Swiss Bank account for... um... safekeeping. Dictators should just write a golden-handshake clause into their laws and agree to go quietly into exile should people decide that republicanism is really the way to go after all. Strangely they never do this. Even more strangely they tend to feel that all those people who chase them out of office with pitch-forks and torches actually love them really and want them to come back at the first sign of trouble.

Food time again

2011-03-03T12:35:00.000+13:00

I have requests for more food posts ... here goes:

Meatballs

Yeah I know but suspend judgement for a bit. I do this a bit differently.

Normally you'd mix your ground meat, seasoning, a bit of flour, then roll into balls ... this makes small hard round meatballs you can add to stuff OK. Only they are boring.

Here's what I do. I use the supermarket highest quality beef or lamb mince (I live alone so the extra cost is nothing over the quantity I buy). This comes fairy packed on a tray.

Chop two onions (I chop one and slice the other for rings) and fry till brown and floppy. Remove from pan. I fry them without oil in a non-stick pan, then add 1tbsp of canola oil though I prefer olive.

Up-end the tray of mince into the pan in one flat lump: don't break it or anything. While it is frying, chop it down the middle lengthways, then across the width four-five times to make cube-oid shapes. Move the pieces as little as possible, just let them sit and fry.

What you are thinking of here is frying a steak. When you can see that the bottom is brown, gently as possible (you don't want them to break apart) turn them over. Keep turning, gently, until the top and bottom are steak-brown (almost burned) but the middle is a little bit pink. At this point you will find you can pick them up with tongs or a fork without them falling apart - cool aye? Made this way, they are soft in the middle and slightly caramelized on the outside - nice to bite into but you still want a decent sauce.

As chef, you should sacrifice one to taste - just before you think its ready. This is to see if you really need to cook it some more. When you've done a few of these, you'll be able to judge when the sauce should be added (you want to add the sauce before the surface is too sealed up to soak up the flavour.)

The sauce I tend to improvise on the spot. I use crushed and chopped tomatoes, and chopped sun-dried tomatoes, as a base. Season with rosemary and a tbsp of honey. If I'm feeling lazy I just use tinned tomatoes. I add directly to the pan with the meat still in it and simmer without bothering too much about mixing (just scoop and turn). Make up the liquid volume with red wine. The uncooked sauce should be fairly sloppy and fill the pan three-quarter-way up the meatballs. But you are going to reduce it until it is sticky.

Add the onions back before you are done and gently press them through the sauce. Make sure everything is heated through. Serve on a bed of spaghetti.

Tobacco Tree Pain

2011-03-03T12:16:00.000+13:00

We hateses 'baccy trees we does precious, nassty trees !

I mean really!

I just spent two days cutting out three trees and they are nasty things. I had originally tried to use an axe and a saw but the saw would get wedged tight and the axe boucned off the heartwood if I didn't hit it exactly right. So I used a chainsaw - it was amazing: the saw would get stuck if I tried to go all the way through in one go and then I needed a hatchet to cut it free without breaking the chain. It would sink in easily enough, until it hit the heart, and then it would just sit there smoking and I had to use slicing motions - just stroking the saw through the cuts, to make headway. If I tried to press down, the saw would stall and the sap would glue the blade in position. And would the trees fall nicely? Not a hope! They would all, every one, twist as the fell - if I didn't watch it this would flick the saw out of my grip or belt me a huge bruise someplace. Nasty.

Not only that but cutting the things down is only the start of my problems. They are hydras: each stump sprouts a half-dozen new blanches below the cut. If you cut at ground level (harder than it sounds because these trees don't grow in convenient places) then each severed root grows a whole new tree! So I have to cut a big X in each stump and pour kerosene over it.

Every part of the tree is nasty and the drawback to chainsawing is the sawdust it throws everywhere. I had a face protector and a mask and I still got sick ... nausia, dizziness, shaking, I probably swallowed a bit. I had small hives all over my exposed arms. I must have pulled something too, because my whole right arm was paralyzed this morning.

I used to think of them as annoying before, now I hate the buggers.

Curiously, some US gardeners deliberately cultivate it ... well, it is easy to grow, but it is not in the slightest bit decorative, it destroys other plants, and is very poisonous.

Superstition and Disaster

2011-03-01T14:52:00.000+13:00

It has taken a commendably long time for extraneous influences to make themselves felt in Canterbury. But they have shown up - and I am not talking about burial rights.

The first person to mention God in connection with the quake, at least on TV, was Barak Obama. Some Americans mentioned they felt "blessed" to be alive. This just shows you how superstitious that country is. Nobody seems to be wondering about God's attitude to those who were killed though ... what: were they not Christian enough? Perhaps they were very good people indeed: good enough to be promoted to Heavenly existence right away?

The CHCH Cathedral professional superstitious person (you know the one: dressed in black, white dog-collar) actually did not mention God at all when he spoke to the press, appealing instead to basic human values. Thats very secular of him, and provides a marked contrast to the US. Interestingly, this Anglican cathedral is being blessed in a pagan ceremony (to "lift the tapu"). I don't see how Maori superstitions are any more valid than anyone elses. Presumably some Church bigwig will also be spreading incense around. But, on that note, they are no less valid that each other either. If you are going to have a religious ceremony you could do worse than one almost nobody actually believes in.

Psychics have already been claiming to have predicted the quake or, at least, the last one. The noise from the lunatic fringe is quite small at the moment but I expect things will pick up.

Job Hunting

2011-03-01T14:39:00.000+13:00

Well ... all the comments on the CHCH thing and none for the pedophile. I supposed that just goes to show ... not show anything just general showness.

I am job hunting for the next few months - the govt has spoken and hath said "thou shalt find work for even if thou doest not thou shall have thine benefit cut off anyway." Well, it's not like I havn't been trying. To that end, I have taken another look at my resources: the goal is not so much to find work but to remove myself from state subsidy. We all know the money is needed someplace else! Since I own my house outright ... pending final settlement ... I have no rent. This means that I don't actually need a high income to maintain my standard of living.

So I have a three bedroom house to myself: so I can let one of the rooms ... accommodation will be at a premium soon. Anyone want to live on Waiheke? I was thinking something like $120 + expenses ... utilities seem to be stabilizing under $150 a month for just me.

I have a whole bunch of skills that I can teach to others, so I shall be advertising locally as a tutor for secondary and tertiary students, and start my gnu/linux course up again. The Gulf News ran an ad for a support person for an autistic 4yo boy ... that sounds familiar, so I got them to send me their application pack.

My main qualifications are for secondary teaching - I am MSc/PGDipEd. I've been applying to schools, but not getting anywhere. Trying to address this I have written to the Principal of Waiheke High volunteering to help out as well as offering professional relieving. That should give me a foot in the door.

What else can I think of: well Albany Sen College is a gnu/linux shop ... I'll have to see about offering to volunteer there too.

Ethics of Transplants

2011-02-22T17:01:00.004+13:00

This has come up recently:

Should a convicted sex offender be accepted as an organ doner?

Just off the top of my head ...

The morality of the donor can impact the medical risk to the recipient ... someone convicted of sex offences could pose a higher risk of disease. This risk would need to be balanced against the need for the organ. We should realise that there are restriction on all srts of biological material donated by the public, for instance, you cannot donate blood if you have visited some countries. It is not always proactical to screen people who are seen to be high risk to the extent needed to be assured that the risk is justified.

In this case we are assured that the offending in question was non-contact and of a manner which does not lend itself to the conclusion that the donor was engaged in risky activity.

The situation of the donor refects the freedom of the choice they are making to donate. A prisoner of the state may feel, whatever the actual situation, that they are compelled to make the offer. By definition, a prisoner is not free. Even if we can determine that a particular prisoner is makig a free and informed choice, accepting the offer may lead to a situation where other prisoners feel pressured to follow suit.

The organisation performing the operation is also at risk.
The operation harvesting the organ is, itself, risky - as is follow up treatment for the donor. If anything went wrong, the surgeon etc are vulnerable to the accusation that they were less careful than they would otherwise have been.

But thats just me: have a look at this.

Nondirected donation raises different ethical concerns. The radical altruism that motivates a person to make a potentially life-threatening sacrifice for a stranger calls for careful scrutiny. One recent case involved a man who seemed pathologically obsessed with giving away everything, from his money to his organs, saying that doing so was "as much a necessity as food, water, and air."[3] After donating one kidney to a stranger, he wondered how he might give away all his other organs in a dramatic suicide. Other psychologically suspect motivations need to be ruled out as well. Is the person trying to compensate for depression or low self-esteem, seeking media attention, or harboring hopes of becoming involved in the life of the recipient? Transplantation teams have an obligation to assess potential donors in all these dimensions and prohibit donations that arouse serious concern.[1]

The references are:
[1] Abecassis M, Adams M, Adams P, et al. Consensus statement on the live organ donor. JAMA 2000;284:2919-2926.

[3] Parker I. The gift: Zell Kravinsky gave away millions: but somehow it wasn't enough. The New Yorker. August 2, 2004:54-63.

John Campbell was asking the wrong questions.

Statistics!

2011-02-22T16:22:00.000+13:00

Say someone flips a coin and it keeps coming up heads ... how long before you will have to concede that they are using a double-headed coin? It seems most of us will give up after about five or so ... you'd certainly want to grab the coin of that person and take a closer look.

But how reasonable is this? If you only have the run of heads to go on, don't you have to give the person the benefit of the doubt? What if there's money riding on it? You life? Your immortal soul?

I decided to work it out.

This is actually related to the other stuff about religion: we commonly hear that Atheists cannot be sure of the nonexistence of God since we don't know everything. Or variations on that theme. Just because we have disproved a whole bunch of stuff as having to do with God does not mean that God is not true right? Can you really gain proof from negative results?

This is also related to the problem of induction. At stake is the long-term viability of scientific investigation. Science assumes that induction via falsifiability can be used to discover general rules about the way the Universe works. To put it in a theist context: God rarely intervenes in human affairs.

Christchurch hit again?

2011-02-22T15:53:00.000+13:00

It seems God has it in for the cathedral city.

I just finished watching scenes of rescues from an office block that has four floors but no supporting walls - layer cake - a woman who stepped out for lunch just before the quake tells the camera that there were about 200 people in there ... I though "meat sandwich" and decided to get the digest version on the main news tonight. I am just in the wrong space for this.

The coverage was interesting on technical merit - mostly because we got to see people fronting the news who would not normally be there. They actually did a good job considering the strain ... you could tell what it was doing to the reporters when the impromptu anchor on TV3 reported "fatalities" as "injuries" three times before it sank in ... and she was replaced right after. The woman on the spot (Rebecca Wright?) was holding up very well though the strain showed in her voice.

This is a real disaster Brucie - none of this Cyclone stuff we get out of Ozzie.

I wonder if Christchurch Cathedral is insured against acts of God?

Christianity Questions #18, and a conclusion - sort of.

2011-02-03T14:48:00.000+13:00

Many non–Christians are offended by the "exclusiveness" of Christianity. Can anything be said in response?

A) Christianity is "universal" in the sense that Jesus invites all people everywhere to receive the gift of eternal life made possible by the death on the cross.

.. Jesus has never been recorded making that invitation - correct me if I'm wrong but I understand that the doctrine of the crucifixion postdates Christ by a long way. However, the story of Jesus healing Canaanites, Romans and tax collectors, and his comments about this, indicate that he did intend his teachings to include everyone. So it is an exclusive club that everyone can join... Schaeffers strongest point here and the best response. Unfortunately he undermines his arguments in the follow up... mistaking the conclusion for the start (common with theists).

B) Since many basic tenets of different religions are contradictory, someone has to be wrong.

... isn't it the Christian perspective that everyone is wrong except for me? Even within Christianity there is conflict over which Christians have got it right. Other positions include "everyone is wrong" and "all religions have some merit - vis: everyone is right to some extent, wrong to some extent, and meaningless to some extent."

C) Exclusivity seem unavoidable. Who wants to board a commercial airplane on which the pilot is not exclusively committed to a safe landing? "Doesn’t the pluralist believe exclusively that several religions provide acceptable paths to God?" The exclusion of exclusivity is also exclusive.

... this is a mistake: he thinks that exclusivity is the exclusion of anything however trivial. In fact, it is the exclusion of all else besides some small group considered privileged. Thus you can exclude exclucivity without being exclusive. However, we can include exclusivity and still find it offencive - Schaeffer needs to be less impressed with himself... but then, so do I.

Aside: there is more to a pilots job than landing the plane ... so I would not want him to be exclusive to that one task.

D) Christianity’s uniqueness arises not from the narrow–mindedness of individual Christians, but from the extraordinary claims of Jesus Christ, attested by those who were eyewitnesses of His life, death, and resurrection

Its uniqueness arises from the assertion that only Christianity is correct - everything else is common to a wide variety of different religions. Only Christians can get into Heaven. If Heaven was a nightclub we'd say it was an exclusive nightclub. His best answer so far is the one at the start. After all there are websites which are like this: you can only post if you are a member but anyone can join... what's the problem?

Conclusion:

While there are many other questions that intelligent people ask about God, these are some of the principal ones that could become intellectual roadblocks to those who are truly seeking to know the truth about God. As you can see from the answers I have put forth, I do not believe that any of these are sufficient to keep a reasonable person from pursuing a personal relationship with God.

I'm going to have to agree with this statement, such deliberately misrepresented and poorly phrased questions should not trouble an intellegent persona at all - though a thoughtful person will wonder why these answers should be at all pursuasive.

All about the Weather and the Best Time to Avoid Dying

2011-02-03T14:29:00.000+13:00

Watched the Cyclone Yasi coverage coming out of Oz ... and couldn't help laughing at the antics of journalists. After all the buid-up, Yasi crossed over mostly unpopulated areas, and the commentators are faced with having to talk excitedly about how there's a few power cuts, leaves on the roads, the odd tree blown over and so on. There are parts of Waiheke that look worse normally.

They go around asking the usual journo-stupid questions ... "Aw we had a bit of a blow yep." In responce to "What was it like last night?" In the buildup there were lots of journalists telling us excidely how they are going to hide out in hotel bathrooms and ballrooms where the hotel service seems to have improved - kitchen open all night and so on ... will this deprivation never stop?

It's all in marked contrast to the war coverage we've seen, where journalists make a big deal of the (very real) risks they were taking to get us the news. Similar with the regime-change demonstrations coming out of the middle east. I guess we'll have to wait for the footage from storm chasers and similar nutters, bless-em, who drive out into these things to get something actually exciting to sell to the networks. Probably it's already uploaded to YouTube.

I like this one - look at how big NZ is in this satellite shot! Anyway - it seems the storm was much weaker than expected when it hit - if I got this right it was expected to be cat5 but manages cat3 ... which would be 100x weaker.

Right after the news was Dr Oz: Best time to avoid dying?

I wouldn't normally watch this show - I an ad for it early on and put it in the burn before viewing basket. Still, catchy title.

At a guess, I'd say: "Probably while you are still alive", but I could be mistaken ....

Dr Oz presents the #1 cause of death in a bathroom scene. At first sight you'd say the woman (dummy - I hope) on the floor has slipped and fallen only she's wearing ug-boots, not generally good for sliding. Then we remember that the #1 killer in the US is heart disease and Oz points ut that when someone says "I fell in the bathroom" he thinks "heart attack".

"Fall in bathroom = heart attack."
Heart attacks 3x more likely to occur in the morning.
BP higher in the am. Looks like you shouldn't get out of bed.

... suggestion: he advises 5 medications before you go to bed. Good grief!

Aspirin, Magnesium, Calcium, BP & colesterol meds, and floss your teeth too.
The first three were shown in branded bottles - with the brand turned to the camera. That's called a product placement - which means the show got paid to do that. The general gist is that before bed is the time to take preventative action ... even so, the one ad-lib in that section had him point out that you are best to take medicines throughout the day so you keep the blood concentration up.

There's actually a bunch of surveys being used here - against a vinear of "biorythms" - the trouble is that they do not show causation. For example - best time for a flu shot is 11am because there is the lowest report of pain at that time. But we don't know what reason for this. Maybe the patient is looking forward to lunch ... so the advise should be to promise yourself a treat after vaccinations, then the time doesn't matter.

Its also not quantitative - how much pain is reported in each time-slot? If the respondents rated pain levels out of 10 (there is a whole feild studying pain which has ways to handle the subjectivity involved) and the pain rating only dropped one point at 11, this would not be compelling. OTOH: if it dropped 9 points, then Dr Oz would be on to something.

The food-times (when to cheat on your diet to minimize the effect) the audience all got right - but I noticed they were almost all overweight. So it's not really all that effective - it's this qualitative thing again: how much effect does this have? Clearly not enough, in relation to how much (there it is again) they were eating.

Curiously, the best time for medical procedures and so on is supposed to be in the morning - when, according to the the first item (bathroom, above) you are most likely to get a heart attack. But not first-thing, nope, give the surgeons a chance to practice on another patient first. Presumably someone who has not watched the show.

Mondays to do chores and housework because your analytical mind is slowest then. But some housework needs analytical thinking surely? Anyway, who feels like doing chores on Mondays? And why Mondays anyway: is a seven-day week built in? Perhaps it is a rhythm enforced by the 5-day working week? Perhaps the answer is to have a seven-day working week, but a shorter working day so you can get up late in the morning (reducing heart attacks as well).

Time to have a fight with your SO - 8am - high seritonen level ... but also high BP anyway: this is not panning out. The idea is that the fight is most likely to be fair. But this is not what you want - you want to win. Later - best time to exercize is 7am ... more heart stresses. Best time to vaccuum is at 4pm - due to minimising allergies as vaccuuming stirs up pollen and dust. Pardon? Then he gives away a vaccuum cleaner which he touts as capable of trapping the dust and other allergins. This reveals the usual conflict US shows have between actually telling the truth and pandering to the sponsor.

Best time to have sex?

Sex is like a massage chair - sounds like the start of a woody allen joke. Best tie is in the morning ... with all this stuff, our mornings will be very crowded. Personally I usually find sex in the morning to be intensely irritating. I'm just too groggy.

So we take our pills just before bed, next day at 7am we're having sex - then we are havig a fight at 8. Breakfast is bacon and eggs (or nachos - according to the show). But you have to have your mammogram at 9 - before your coffee ... which must be at 9:15 - if the appointment is on time.

And so it goes.