A ruddy trail was forming in our front lawn from people walking from curb to front porch, so Amy and I went yesterday to load up a cart full of flagstone. Took a couple of hours to lay it out, then started digging a slight depression for each stone, to make it flush with the earth so we can still mow. Didn’t quite finish, but made good progress. Also transplanted a lemon tree we saved from a weak and dying sapling a couple of years ago, which has been living in a pot all along, into a permanent home in the front yard. We hope the tree and the path will find mutual feng shui. Today tried my hand at making buffalo wings for the first time. They came out very well, but did not hold a candle to Roger’s short ribs.
God Detector
Yo, God! sells a mechanical God Detector which helps people to determine God’s immanence without relying on ambiguous signs such as the presence of Jesus’ face on a tortilla, or finding a turnip shaped like a cross. As this seemed like a potentially useful device, I was about to order one, when suddenly I realized the device has a fatal design problem. I’ve written the following question to the manufacturer, which I am hoping will soon be answered in their FAQ.
Dear Yo God! : The dial on your device has two extremes: Yes and No. On one of your pages you say that the detector can’t prove that God does not exist. So why is the default position of the dial “No?” Should the detector not register agnostic (i.e. flat, or in the middle) until it detects either God’s presence or, conversely, her absence? I guess this is really a user interface question: Why does the default reading imply God’s positive absence rather than simply the lack of any detection?
Update: I have received a carefully worded response from the manufacturer of the God Detector on this matter. Read More for details.
Continue reading “God Detector”
Tastes Like (Mutant) Chicken
The crooks were trying to smuggle American-grown chicken into Ukraine territory, which is all well and good except it’s very illegal, given how the U.S. genetically modifies billions of its chickens and injects them with hormones and chemicals and toxins and feeds them ground-up chicken parts mixed with chicken feces and saws off their beaks and packs them by the tens of thousands into tiny nauseating disease-ridden cages in massive “Matrix”-like hellhole factory farms and treats them worse than you treat a skin boil. Ukraine refuses to take this crap. U.S. officials insist our factory-farmed chicken is safe to eat. Ukrainian officials look at U.S. officials like they are childish Neanderthal idiots who must take the Ukrainian officials to be simpletons and fools.
See also: Dick Cheney Kills Birds Dead
Music: Syd Barrett :: Wined and Dined
Tagged
So much for lovely, safe, pacific El Cerrito. Received this on the phonecam from Amy while at work today – our garage has been tagged with graffiti, right in the middle of boring suburbia. And not very impressive graffiti at that. They at least could have taken the time to leave us some artwork. Well, it’s better than machine gun fire and people getting beaten up on your sidewalk. Nowadays the most disruption we get is from kids going door-to-door selling chocolate bars for little league. At least this provides a little excitement.
Music: Orchestre Murphy :: Hilversum
Virtual Lab
Between semesters we format the student FireWire drives for the new students to use. I get a stack of them and re-initialize partitions (faster than deleting 20,000 files and emptying trash on each). Usually there’s someone who hasn’t yet backed up and needs me to save something. Working quickly, I got through the stack of drives until I got to the “marked for save” drive and found… the wrong data. Double-check that email… Sure enough I had marked the wrong drive for saving, and had just re-initialized the wrong drive. Ulp.
Spent the rest of the evening and this morning trying Tech Tool Pro, Norton Utilities, and Disk Warrior. None of them were able to find data on the reinitialized partition. Then mneptok came to the rescue with a URL he dropped into my phone (amazing!) — BinaryBiz’ Virtual Lab. Took an hour to scan the 80GB drive, but it found everything that had been there before the wipe. And the angels up above sang hallelujah.
Interesting licensing method – you can scan any volume for free, but then have to purchase a quota-per-GB you want to save. We’re buying a 5GB quota for $120. One use is all you get. Sounds pricey, but not when compared to what you can pay for professional data rescuing services.
Update: A few days later we lost power in our home office. When power came back, my 120GB MP3 drive wouldn’t mount. DiskWarrior was able to rebuild and restore the master directory, and I got my music back. Lesson: Journaling may make drives come up faster after a power outage, but it won’t protect from all types of damage.
Music: George Harrison :: Isn’t It A Pity
The Tyranny of Copyright
I have not seen a better single article summarizing Copy Left and the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig and tribe, the deep doo-doo in which the whole concept of public domain finds itself today, Thomas Jefferson’s original thinking on copyright in the Constitution, contemporary “permission culture,” etc. than Robert S. Boynton’s The Tyranny of Copyright for the NY Times. Print it out. Pass it on.
Music: King Crimson :: Vrooom
Nuks
At 16 months, it was no longer sufficient for Miles to walk around with a pacifier in his mouth. Soon he started carrying around a spare Nuk. He can count them, one two (not with words, but by pushing them onto your face in sequence). Then he discovered that he could have one in his mouth and one in each hand, for a total of three. Miles fetishizes his Nuks. He gazes into them as though they had soothsaying powers, and presses them onto misc objects to see how the silicon will react. He wants to share his Nuks with stuffed animals and house guests. Yesterday he was being a fussy eater, so we lined them up on the dinner table for him to admire. It worked. I think that for him it was like reading the newspaper while eating.
The booty post turned out to be a fluke — he never said “booty” again, so it was probably a coincidence. But lately he’s been working really really hard on saying “apple” (he gets as far as “app-puh”) which is funny since he doesn’t even like apples. We think his first actual word was “nope,” which we were lucky enough to capture on tape.
Music: Birdsongs of the Mesozoic :: The Rite of Spring
Email Suppression
I did not realize when I got into the small-time web/mail hosting business that the majority of my energy would be consumed in spam combat. Realized this morning that running a mail server is not so much about enabling the flow of email as it about suppressing it. Well, that’s not quite true, but the vast majority of effort does goes into keeping mail out rather than letting it in. AOL is now experimenting with methods of altering DNS databases to prevent spoofing.
In 12 hours, I’ve suppressed more than 750 instances of MyDoom with a crude set of rules… and another 250 got through. It’s and endless battle.
Music: Tim Buckley :: Strange Feelin’
1% Pays 34%?
A common right-wing rejoinder to the leftist claim that the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes is that “The top 1% of earners in this country pay 34% of all taxes.” I’ve heard Rush pull this one out on a liberal caller, and I recently saw a TV show purporting to uncover “10 Popular Myths” use the same stat to convince people that the wealthy pay too much tax.
But doesn’t the statistic make a logic error by comparing the size of a group in population terms (1%) with the proportion of taxes they pay? Shouldn’t we instead compare the size of the group’s wealth with the proportion of their taxes?
According to taxfoundation.org, the top 25% of all earners earn 65% of the nation’s income. And the top 1%? They hold around 21% of all the wealth.
Of course, our system of terraced tax brackets does mean that wealthy people do pay more per dollar on their income taxes — they hold 21% of the wealth but pay 34% of the taxes. Whether they should pay more per dollar or not is a separate question — one that cuts to quick of any socialist vs. libertarian debate (and don’t forget that the wealthy also have access to any number of tax shelters that your average wage earner does not).
The point is that the statistic gets thrown around with an unspoken implication: That the top 1% should pay 1% of the taxes. If Rush and co. want to make this form of argument, they should be arguing that those controlling 21% of the wealth are paying 34% of the taxes. But that argument wouldn’t have nearly the same impact.
One also often hears the accompanying argument that the threshold for entry into the 1% club is not high — you “only” have to make around $300,000 to join the 1% club. While true, this stat ignores the fact that many of the top earners are actually wealthy beyond almost anyone’s dreams. “In 1999, 268 of the [top] 400 [earners] qualified as billionaires.”
Music: Spacemen 3 :: Lord Can You Hear Me?
Orkut — Too Much Too Soon
Just days after Google beta-released its new social networking service Orkut, I started receiving invitations to join from long-lost friends… the vast majority of them from the BeOS realm. It’s like LiveJournal all over again. Today, orkut.com turns people away — “too busy, we have much to learn, come back when we’re fully cooked…” A victim of their own success before they’ve even launched.
If Google can do for social networking and blogging what they’ve done for search, and once their web services APIs become available to developers, they’re going to become the unstoppable internet platform.
birdhouse customer John Battelle’s Searchblog chronicles the rise of “the internet platform” at google and elsewhere. His thoughts on Orkut’s launch are here.
Music: Charlie Parker :: Now’s the Time