Author: shacker

Posted on

Did Humans Evolve?

New York Times:

In surveys conducted in 2005, people in the United States and 32 European countries were asked to respond … to this statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” The United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false and the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science. Only adults in Turkey expressed more doubts on evolution. In Iceland, 85 percent agreed with the statement. (Graph)

via Slashdot, Science Magazine is pointed about the reasons:

The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States.

Music: Baguette Quartette :: Reproche
Posted on

State of the Blogosphere

David Sifry (Technorati) has posted the latest numbers on the State of the Blogosphere. Staggering.

About 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second … As of July 2006, about 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day … Today the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.

At what point will it become unusual for someone not to have a blog?

Music: George Harrison :: Bangla Desh
Posted on

PV Bathroom Fan

So we’re thinking of installing ventilation fans in the bathrooms — the window just doesn’t cut it for steam nor stank. Electrician can cut a hole in the ceiling, but says we should hire a roofer to cut the roof hole. Does it take a Ph.D to cut a hole in a roof? We can’t get one person qualified/willing to cut both holes and wire it up?

If we want to be able to control the fan independent of the light, need to run wiring down through the wall – a tedious job, and Electrician Dude says it’ll take all day to do both. There’s got to be a better way. Gave Berkeley Solar a call (the guy I talked to was really helpful, BTW), to see if there might be a way to power the fan from a PV cell and switch it on from a pull-chain. You’d think a unit like this would be available pre-fab, but no dice. Will have to assemble a kit from scratch.

$35 – 300W inverter
$35 – charge coupler
$50 – motorcycle battery
$300 – 50W photovoltaic cell
$100 – consulting fee to work out the whole kit, make sure everything plays nicely together
$20 – mounting brackets, switches, etc.

In other words, no savings over paying Electrician Dude to wire the wall. Except that it would be a fun project and have some geek cred. But we’re talking about a circuit that runs, what, 30 minutes a day?

If any entrepreneur wants to put together a self-contained solar unit like this, with integrated fan, for a fraction of the cost, I’d think you’d find a sizable market.

Music: Mike Watt :: Pluckin’, Pedalin’ and Paddlin’
Posted on

Raccoon Family

Out on the back deck, heard some scurrying. “Damn raccoons,” I thought, watching a tail slip under the deck. Grabbed the hose and started squirting. Then heard one growling a low, plaintive growl. Peered over the side to find an adult raccoon facing off with me, totally defiant. Couldn’t believe it could be so ballsy, but gave it a good squirt. It ducked underneath, then emerged like a mother duck trailing four painfully adorable baby raccoons behind. She led them out through a hole in the fence and down the street and suddenly I felt guilty. I’m thinking “pest control” and she’s thinking “must protect my family.” As much as I don’t want a family of raccoons growing up below our feet, it was amazing how profoundly their cuteness affected me, as if they were somehow inherently innocent of vermin-hood.

What is it with this neighborhood? We live on a fairly busy street, just a few blocks from one of the East Bay’s main arteries, but we see deer all the time, strolling down the middle of the street like they own the place* (and we’re engaged in ongoing battle with their garden-consuming habits). The other night we heard a blood-curtling racket and came out to find a pair of adult owls mating (in plain view – shocking!) on the branch of a tree just a few feet above our heads. You’d think we lived in the middle of the 100-Acre Wood.

* OK, they do own the place, but still…

Music: The Carter Family :: On The Rock Where Moses Stood
Posted on

Pollywogs

When I was young, Dad used to tell the story of the first time he crossed the International Date Line with the Coast Guard, aboard the U.S.S. Chautauqua. Sailors who had never crossed before were called “pollywogs” and had to go through what amounts to a hazing ritual, though they didn’t call it that.

Pollywogs would have to climb through a bag of ship’s garbage, have their faces pushed into another man’s belly covered in used motor oil from the engine room, get sprayed with fire hoses while trying to retrieve their clothes, and become the slave of a “shellback” for a day (a shellback being a sailor who had crossed the IDL before). Officers were not exempt.

Dad and I recently had hours of old 8mm and Super8 family film digitized, and have been working on a DVD, preserving a bunch of family footage before the film completely rots. Amazingly, he had an 8mm camera on board with him during a 1957 crossing, and shot several minutes of footage. Decided this would be a good opportunity to experiment with YouTube, and loaded up the clip.


Pollywogs from Scot Hacker on Vimeo.

The military has cracked down on hazing rituals quite a bit over the decades; I wonder how much of this kind of thing still goes on.

Note: This clip was hosted on YouTube for more than a year, then was mysteriously removed from the service for “Terms of Service” violation. I was never informed about the removal, and all attempts to reach YouTube for an explanation went unanswered. Since there is positively no copyright violation involved in the clip, I have to assume that it was removed after complaints from one or more viewers. My suspicion is that complaints may have come from military personnel not wanting to see the Coast Guard shown in a bad light; but that’s conjecture. Let’s hope it has better luck on Vimeo.

Posted on

Extreme Telemarketing

Never thought I’d feel sympathy for a telemarketer, but get an earful of this. My heart goes out to the poor guy. Kind of. Despite the caller’s general craziness, she does raise a point with him that I’ve tried before in conversations with telemarketers: The practice violates the categorical imperative, from which all moral action derives (according to Kant, and I agree):

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law.

In other words, don’t do anything that you don’t think all other people should also be allowed to do in the same situation. In context, one should engage in telemarketing only if one believes that all marketers should be allowed to call people in their homes. Consider the massive amount of advertising around us at all times, and imagine that every advertiser pushed their product by calling people at home. Universalizing the practice of telemarketing to all practitioners would make the telephone utterly useless, since it would never stop ringing, much as e-mail spam has diminished the viability of e-mail (which is only rescued through the application of great piles of technology).

When faced with the categorical imperative (though of course the caller does not call it that :), the telemarketer starts to lie to cover his position, saying that marketers do call his home phone all day every day, and that he doesn’t mind a bit.

Unfortunately, the caller’s philosophically sound position is completely blown out of the water by absolutely insane levels of hysteria.

Music: Sylford Walker :: Deuteronomy
Posted on

Lieberman’s Server Dinks Out

After Lieberman’s campaign web site went down yesterday, there was some suggestion that it might have been hacked by the opposition. Not so fast… turns out Lieberman’s $12 million campaign was running its site off a common $15/month hosting plan at a generic provider. I can just see how it all unfolded: Campaign director asks a friend who knows “a web guy I like” to build a site for the campaign. Web dude sets it up where he sets up all of his clients, never thinks to ask Day 1 questions like “So how much traffic do we expect here?” And neither does a single soul in the entire campaign staff.

Not saying Birdhouse could handle that kind of traffic, but I would certainly have the sense to make sure a site reaching out to a population this large had a dedicated server. Or two. Twist: The Lamont campaign offered midway through the day to take over hosting for their opponent — a gracious gesture — but never heard back.

Also interesting is that the gross underestimation wasn’t discovered until election day — evidence of how many people wait until the very last minute to start scrabbling together a bit of voting information.

Music: Palace Brothers :: O Paul
Posted on

Shark Skin Ships

The U.S. Navy estimates that it spends around $50 million/year in additional fuel costs due to drag caused by bio-fouling — the attachment of algae, barnacles, and undersea flora to ships’ hulls. It’s a problem that has bedeviled sailors since boats were invented. I once made a pretty OK living doing underwater boat cleaning for local boat owners (high school days).

Funny thing: Whales get barnacles just like boats — but sharks don’t. A microscopic look at shark skin reveals a pattern of tiny rectangles arranged in geometric patterns, each topped with pointy bristles. The surface of a shark is very difficult for organisms to get a grip on. Since the organisms don’t have much time to live, they quickly move on, rather than wrestle with the texture.

Now researchers have found a way to replicate the texture of shark skin in great plastic sheets, which can be applied to ships’ hulls much like those big ads that cover entire buses. Not only do you get huge gains in fuel efficiency, but there’s a big enviro upside as well, as marine paint designed to minimize bio-fouling is full of copper, which sloughs off and sinks to the bottom of the sea. Everyone wins.

Go nature.

Music: The Fiery Furnaces :: Nevers
Posted on

Leopard Preview

At the risk of participating in the echo chamber, Apple unveiled a preview of OS X Leopard at WWDC today. Not attending this year, but looks like a fairly substantial release. Following on BeOS / X-Windows heels, Spaces finally gives the Mac a version of Workspaces. No mention yet on how many you can have, and little info on how they’re navigated, but it’s certainly an improvement over nothing at all (though I confess I stopped missing them sooner than I thought I would when switching from BeOS to OS X).

Very cool stuff on extending iChat for collaboration with desktop applications (though I can imagine some scary security issues here when a remote user convinces you that they’re your sysadmin “just need access for a few minutes” — wondering what the security model for this will be.

Time Machine uses built-in version control to let you rewind to previous versions of the file system, undelete long-gone images, etc. Nifty but not earth shaking. A feature probably growing out of awareness that most users are utilizing maybe 10 or 20% of today’s gi-normous hard drives. [Addendum: Turns out you need to have a 2nd hard drive installed to use Time Machine, a fact which will relegate the feature to use only by the hard-core, and perhaps some institutional implementations. Would like to see Apple offer a non-destructive partitioning scheme, so users could not only take advantage of Time Machine but also do all kinds of other things, like set up Boot Camp or other VM without starting from scratch.]

Since I like to imagine that someone is actually listening on the other end of the OS X Feedback form, I’m stoked to see the addition of a stationery feature to Mail.app — I wrote Apple about a year ago saying that stationery was the one killer feature in Eudora that no other mail client had seemed to grok (though I don’t care about fancy mail formatting, I always found the ability to craft boilerplate responses I could call up instantly an invaluable feature in Eudora). The macslash.org take on stationery is that they’re going to make it even easier to send “craptastic HTML email.” Which is probably true, as unfortunate side effects go.

Music: Tom Verlaine :: Wheel Broke
Posted on

Panamum

Miles: “Daddy, Panamum is the land of my dreams.”

Me: “Do you mean PanaMA?”

Miles: “No no no, PanaMUM. In Panamum the land smells like bananas.”

Me: “So where do all the bananas come from?”

Miles: “The bananas come from Egypt.”