Interesting Stuff

There is a fantastic tech talk about how to teach computer science to kids. Too often, they see the name and think it’s about programming, and are consequently turned off to the subject. This kiwi teaches CS without using a computer, but has all sorts of fun, hands-on activities for kids to do as they learn about sorting and compression algorithms, error-correcting codes, DFAs, and other parts of CS. If you ever need to inspire kids, this video is definitely worth a watch!

Speaking of videos to watch, check out this Dove commercial. I’ve gotta give them props for that.

On a newsier topic, Bush has begun to admit that the war in Iraq is going poorly and is starting to accept the parallels between this war and Vietnam. Might this be the beginning of someone in the Republican party taking a look at reality and then accepting responsibility for what they’ve screwed up? Not likely, but a man can dream, can’t he?

By the way, please, please register to vote (and then actually vote) in the elections on November 7. In California, you need to register (which can be done at your local DMV) by October 23 (this coming Monday). As John Stewart once quipped, “this country is run by extremists because moderates have shit to do.” However, voting doesn’t take up much of your time, and can help shape which direction the country will go, even if it’s still being run by extremists. No matter which parties/candidates you support, please vote. and please take 10 minutes and read up on the parties/candidates you plan to vote for, and make sure that they really do represent your interests; too often people are elected by an ignorant population that doesn’t realize what it’s doing. You want to vote for the communist party? That’s fine, so long as you know what they stand for and agree with it. You wanna vote for someone because the politicians tell you to? that’s not so good.

So learn about your favourite party, and then vote for them!

Google Video also has a Tech Talk on it about the history of copyright law, which was fascinating. He isn’t great about handling the questions at the end, but the talk itself is pretty good.

A summary of the talk →

Google periodically has visitors who come in and give talks on various subjects (a lot like the Nelson Series, but without a yearly theme, though most of them are CS-ey in some way). I have just found out that many of these are subsequently posted to Google Video so other people can see them, too. They’re pretty great, if ever you have a yen for intellectual discourse.

In particular, I’m quite impressed with Chris Spurgeon’s talk about great achievements in map-making and navigation.

First off, quite possibly the first science fiction movie was Le voyage dans la lune, a silent film made in 1902 based off stories by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne (the French narration can be found here). It has some surprisingly good special effects, and is well worth the 14 minutes it takes to watch.

Also, it appears that Microsoft is actually going to require that all kernel-space drivers be certified in Windows Vista, which I think is going to be fantastic. They are permanently moving graphics stuff into user space, so I don’t anticipate many drivers needing certification. I expect that this will make the Windows kernel much more stable and secure, to the point that the BSoD might be a thing of the past in a few years. The Slashdotters are naturally wanking about OSS issues, but I think this is actually a pretty great change. The worrying part is that they could very well put copyright enforcement stuff in there, which no one would be able to change, even for legitimate reasons. Yes, that would be a poor design decision from a stability/security standpoint, but Microsoft hasn’t had the greatest record with that stuff in the past. Here’s hoping that the execution goes as well as the planning!

This past Thursday, I got to hear John W. Dean, former White House Counsel to Richard Nixon, speak at the library. He was the first insider in the Watergate conspiracy to stand up and speak out against what is happening. Since then, he has become very disillusioned with the Republican party, and the Bush administration in particular. He writes weekly columns for FindLaw, and has recently written 2 books, Worse Than Watergate, and Conservatives Without Conscience.

His talk was absolutely incredible. A summary of his talk, in particular his analysis of the modern Republican party →

I’ve never really thought impressions were that funny, but Frank Caliendo (as seen in this movie) is absolutely fantastic.

Also, remember the Portal trailer I posted recently? I’ve now played its precursor, Narbacular Drop. It’s the same game idea, but with crappier graphics and a slightly buggy engine. You can even create your own levels! There are some people out there who have made incredibly complex levels, which are pretty cool.

So… it turns out I’m still on Gentoo because I am less motivated to back my stuff up than I had expected. At this point, though, it’s almost done: I need to back up my wiki database, my GPG private key (and I should probably do my public keyring, just to make it simple to restore), and my OTR key. Does anyone know how to access your private OTR key? I have no idea how hard it will be to find that thing.

This evening, I went to Movie Night on the Santa Monica Pier and saw An Inconvenient Truth with some coworkers. One of the producers of the movie was there at the beginning, and was a raving, extremist, hippie liberal. This made me very skeptical of the movie, but they actually did an incredibly good job portraying things and making their point (though Gore kinda goes off on tangents—the election, his son’s car accident, his sister’s smoking, etc). I’m now inclined to go pore over The Skeptical Environmentalist and see what parts (if any) differ between the two. Gore makes a very compelling case. He addressed the parts where I expected to disagree with him very well, and presented some well-displayed scientific data to back up his points. The whole thing was a bit like a slideshow, but nothing at all like a Powerpoint. If you have to make a slideshow (and there are some excellent reasons to not do so), try to make one like Gore’s; his presentation was fantastic. If you haven’t seen this movie, please consider doing so.

On the way back from the movie, I ran into Jed and Steph. They seem to be doing quite well: they have an apartment on 6th street (a fantastic location!), and both seem to be enjoying their jobs. I hope to see them more soon.

With any luck, 24 hours from now I will be running Xubuntu. In the meantime, I’m backing stuff up like crazy… For those of you who weren’t reading this back in the day, my first switch (from Windows XP to Gentoo Linux) happened over the course of these few entries).

I really liked Gentoo’s system of package installation/management (called Portage). I liked the feeling of having the most up-to-date software on my machine, and the knowledge that it was specially compiled for my system. I hated how every once in a while, an upgrade would break something really important (sound, flash, screensavers, SQL, etc). I hated the fact that I had to know every system inside and out just to get it to work. I never fully got printing, samba, videos in Firefox, or several other things to work simply because I didn’t have the time/effort I needed to learn about how to configure them properly.

With the exception of the second sentence above (the one about being on the bleeding edge of software with custom compiles), I believe that Xubuntu will be able to better satisfy my computing wants. Here’s hoping!

Also, thanks to macdaddyfrosh for telling me about Xubuntu; I doubt I would have found it otherwise.

My frisbee claims it is 175 grams, but it certainly doesn’t feel like the regulation weight. Consequently, I wanted to weigh it. The problem? I don’t have a scale. However, I have a bathtub, a whiteboard marker, a large bowl, and a bottle that claims to hold 237 ml. I fill the bathtub partway, and put the bowl in it. I fill up the bottle and pour it into the bowl, and then mark on the bowl where the level of the bathtub water is. I empty the bowl, put the frisbee in it, and mark the height of the water on the bowl again. I take the frisbee out of the bowl, and mark the height of the bathtub water on the bowl when it’s empty. I then take the bowl out of the water and measure the distances between the 3 marks. The distance from the bottom mark to the top mark should denote a volume of 237 ml. The distance from the bottom mark to the middle mark should indicate the volume of water whose weight equals that of the frisbee. After a little algebra, I decided that my frisbee weighs roughly 200 +/- 50 grams. I guess it may very well be labelled correctly.