Interesting Stuff

So… it just occurred to me that I should put some national news up here again. At the moment, I’m reading through an article about the job crunch in America. Despite what our current administration is saying, the economy is still in a recession. People are still losing their jobs, and the few new jobs that have been created pay significantly less than the old ones. This makes me worried, because in 2 short years, I will be out of here, and looking for employment (or grad school, if things continue like this). This appears to be particularly grim, as it appears as though Bush will win again.

I wish I could find it again, but I can’t, so I will describe an article I read in the Star Tribune over the summer. This guy took data about every election since the Republican party last reinvented itself (as I recall, this was in the 1940’s), and correlated the party in power with every conceivable economic factor – GDP, unemployment, average income, tariff rates, stock markets, jobs created, inflation rates, national debt increases, governmental spending, you name it. With perfect correlation, every indicator he looked at was better for the democrats than the republicans. He even tried letting the first year an administration was in power count for the previous administration (because the first year, you’re still feeling the effects of the previous group). However, this did not change the correlation at all. Either way, Democrats were better for the economy across the board. If you want a job in the next few years, vote democrat! For that matter, if you don’t want more of your civil liberties and “unalienable” rights violated, vote democrat. Granted, Kerry is a pretty bad candidate. However, Bush is quite possibly the worst president this country has ever had. This must not be allowed to continue!

So here’s an odd problem – the power button on my monitor is broken. At the moment, this is ok because it’s on and it displays things just fine; but I can’t turn it off. This will be a problem at the end of the year, however, because once I unplug it, I doubt it will turn back on without some tinkering. Well, it can’t be that hard to replace a switch. I guess the hard part will be making sure that the whole thing is grounded before I start (to a first approximation, CRTs are 45,000-volt power supplies that can store these huge charges for months at a time – learn about lifters). So… yeah. not a problem yet, but it will be eventually, and in the meantime, it’s weird. The monitor is about 10 years old, and it’s lasted pretty well (we got it with our Windows 3.1 machine), so I can’t really complain. and it will be fun to fix, once I get around to it.

In national news, electronic voting seems to have been thrust upon us. I think the article gives a fairly good treatment of the topic – electronic voting machines are going to be used all over the US in this election, and it is too late to change them for this election, despite numerous security problems and outcry from what seems like most of the educated populace. I fear this is only going to muddy up what I consider the most important election of the past 50 years. Well, we’ll see how bad things get.

On a happier note, California is going to vote on giving $3 billion to stem cell research. Unfortunately, I am not a registered voter in California (I am in Minnesota instead), so I can’t cast a ballot here. However, I really hope this goes through. I really don’t see how anyone who is informed on the issue could possibly be against stem cell research. Even assuming that pro-life people have a leg to stand on in the abortion issue (which I contest), that barely applies at all to stem cells. Blastocysts, which are where embryonic stem cells come from, are blobs of goo small enough that you can’t see them with the naked eye. They resemble algae much more closely than they resemble people. Cutting them up does cause them to lose the ability to become a person (though they need to be implanted in a surrogate mother before that could happen anyway, so it’s not like they are going to be people if left to their own devices). However, they have huge potential to help actual people. They are potential cures to Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, amputations, blindness, psoriasis, and a slew of other diseases and disabilities.

As an anecdote about the potential of stem cells, there is a man in Germany who lost his lower jaw to cancer 9 years ago. Over the summer, doctors made a scaffold for a new jaw, and covered it with stem cells, bone marrow, and various chemicals to facilitate growing. This was surgically placed on the man’s shoulder, where it grew for two months. Then, it was taken off of his shoulder and attached to his head. He now has a new, working jaw, and can speak better and even chew soft things. Admittedly, they used adult stem cells (which, unlike embryonic stem cells, do not come from embryos). However, embryonic stem cells show even more promise than this, because the same line of cells can make any kind of tissue (adult stem cells, in contrast, can only make a few kinds of tissue, and are not nearly as resilient). The story about the German guy can be found on New Scientist.

Well, that’s about it for now. Much is going on in the world right now, and we should all try to stay informed. I’m tired, so I’m now going to bed. Good night!

Guess who’s back… back again… Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…

I hate that stupid song. But it is nice to be in Claremont again. It’s great to see people again, to have the ambiance that can only come from a nerd school, to have the 95-degree weather. Kenny and Amanda (my new suitemates) are already moved in too, and Robert (my new roommate) comes tomorrow morning. I’ve just about gotten all of the stuff I stored in my room back to its rightful owners. It’s shaping up to be a pretty great year (though I have yet to start classes, mind you).

On Saturday, we went to the State Fair with the Kaemmerers. I hate to say it, because I love the fair, but this year it didn’t seem so great. There wasn’t anything spectacular in the Technology building (last year there were segways you could rent), there wasn’t anything particularly exciting in the Fine Arts building (though there were some very neat photographs and sculptures), I didn’t know anyone who had submitted anything for judging. Don’t get me wrong, I had a good time. It just seems like there is nothing to really remember this fair by, since it was pretty much the same stuff again. Well, it was still fun. The only memorable thing is that I watched Carol get pickpocketed, though by the time I had my suspicions verified, the guy was nowhere to be seen. Dad, Carol, and I were talking, and this guy sort of walks into Carol, apologises, and walks on. However, as he apologised, he patted her side several times, which I thought was a bit weird. I felt rather stupid asking her if she still had her money, but she didn’t! The guy made off with $14, and luckily Carol wasn’t carrying her ID or credit cards or anything. This was loose cash in a front pocket of some fairly tight jeans. It was fascinating to watch this happen, in a morbid way (well, morbid is probably the wrong word, as death was not involved. It was still a bit unsettling). I hate to say it, but this guy was wonderful at this and had pickpocketing down to an artform.

Most people wouldn’t call this odd, but for the rest of the day I kept checking that I still had my wallet. It’s weird – I know my chances of being pickpocketed are pretty slim and they did not change when I saw this guy, but all of a sudden, it could happen to me and I had to watch out. I guess this is how my mom (and many other people as well) feels after the latest media scare, be it West Nile Virus or terrorists or anything else. And as illogical as I knew it to be, it still felt right to continuously check on my wallet. Huh.

Lets see… not much else is going on around here yet – we’re still unpacking and moving in. Classes start on Tuesday. Tonight was the frosh talent show, and it was pretty good this year. There was a mix of real talent, funny stunts, and absolute crap. and lots of napkin balls, of course. As Kenny said, it looks like we have a good crop of frosh this year.

Oh! Here’s some wonderful news in the world of voting – actually two bits of wonderful news. The first is that Florida’s e-voting machines must now have a paper trail. After all of the problems that e-voting (the American way; Indian e-voting machines are fine), it looks like someone with at least a little power is trying to correct this. In previous touch-screen voting elections, counties have registered over 100% voter turnout, negative votes for certian candidates, and a different number of votes cast than people who used the voting machine (to name a few problems that have actually occurred in Florida with these machines). Another problem that was recently revealed is that Florida lost the voting information from the 2002 Senate vote due to a computer crash, so there is no way to check it now. Much of the tech/nerd/online community is adamantly against Diebold’s touchscreen voting system because it uses proprietary software that cannot be checked for fairness/accuracy/security, and gives no voter-verifiable paper trail to show that the votes cast were recorded properly. I think that when the tech community unites against a new technology (or rather, a certain manifestation of it; there’s nothing wrong with the concept of e-voting), people should pay attention and think twice before embracing it. In India, the e-voting machines use open source software so anyone can make sure that the machines really do count votes correctly. They are more secure, and have fewer ways to be tampered with (Diebold’s machines can be rigged given 10 minutes alone with one, say in the morning while it is being set up), and most importantly, they have a paper trail. The paper trail is the only way to make sure that all the votes were really counted correctly. I can’t understand why Diebold won’t embrace these ideas.

The other wonderful piece of news is that international observers will be monitoring the presidential election for fairness. The Republicans barred the US from having the UN monitor the election (which personally seems like suspicious behavior), but now OSCE will be stepping up to do it. Sadly, I think that we really, really need this. This Slashdot comment summed it up quite nicely. I wish this sort of thing wasnt’ happening. I wish people would wake up and see all of the horrible things in the world. I wish there was something I could do about at least part of it. I just feel so powerless when I read about these sorts of things, and then remember that roughly half the country supports the people who are doing these things. *sigh* Well, at least this election is hopefully going to go better than the last one. Baby steps…

Well, I’m tired and Robert is coming in the morning. Good night!

Lets see… what have I been meaning to put up here…

On Tuesday, in honor of my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary, my family got to take a hot air balloon ride! It was amazing. The balloon was surprisingly sturdy, and I never once felt unsafe. We went up about 4,000 feet, though at one point we were mere inches above the St Croix River (a river separating Minnesota from Wisconsin). It was absolutely amazing. Next time you see me, ask to see the pictures. I even got to hold open the envelope while it was being inflated! The whole contraption is pretty neat – the envelope is teflon, and the burners use propane. There are two of them – use one to move about normally, but use both if you really have to rise fast. There were all sorts of sensors to help the driver – temperature probes at various points on the envelope, altitude gauges. Although the driver had these flaps that could rotate the balloon so that he could always face the direction he wanted, there is no steering mechanism. Consequently, there was a chase truck that followed us, ready to pack up the balloon and bring us back to the starting point at the end. The truck and the balloonist were in constant contact using their walkie-talkies, though they picked up many other signals as well (my favorite: “Manager to register 3 please, manager to register 3”). We landed in Wisconsin, about 15 miles from where we started. We bumped down in an empty field, though the weeds were so tall that we had to be pushed by the truck’s crew to a nearby yard (we floated a foot off the ground as they pushed). There, we all got out and they folded the envelope back up. Because our only way to control the balloon is the burners to make it go up, we had very little control over whose yard we landed in, and the chase truck had to get there a few minutes before and ask permission to use the yard. I think that would be a pretty neat surprise – “Hi. Would you mind if we landed our balloon in your yard? It’ll be here about… now.” Looking at the whole thing, it really can’t be that hard to build one. Maybe after I retire… maybe not. I’ve been meaning to build a lifter for a while now, and haven’t even started on the power supply (a lifter is a really crappy ion drive). Still, one of these days…

Before today, I had not heard about the Allais effect, which is a pretty neat, though puzzling thing. I’d like to summarize it by saying that during solar eclipses, gravity becomes slightly stronger, but it also works on torsional pendula, so I don’t quite know how to describe it. The Economist also mentions one of my favorite unexplained phenomena, the Pioneer Effect (space probes Pioneer 10 and 11 are heading in opposite directions from Earth, and both are experiencing an acceleration towards the Sun that is unaccounted for). Just for a little more background on MOND (the MOdified Newtonian Dynamics thery), the idea behind it is to take all the data we have, and say “this is how the universe behaves.” Very pragmatic, but not very fulfilling because there is little to no math to make calculations easier. Indeed, it cannot really predict anything, though it explains all unusual phenomena we have already observed.

In world news, communist rebels are threatening to blockade Kathmandu. The Nepalese government has agreed to talk to them again, though I can’t forsee anything different happening – the communists have been trying to overthrow the monarchy for 8 years, and nearly 10,000 people have died in the conflict so far. The more I learn about the world, the less civilized it seems. On the other hand, this makes things like Iraq, where a mere 900 Americans have died, seem much less significant.

On a happier note, last week there was a deer in our backyard eating from the birdfeeder (less than 15 feet from the house)! It was scared away by a fox, which I saw again several days later at Cornelia Elementary School. However, the deer came back and ate from the birdfeeder some more. It was pretty neat. There was also a flock of several hundred grackles that came through our yard. It was surreal, in a Hitchcockesque way – the entire yard was covered in birds (for those not familiar with them, grackles are black birds slightly smaller than crows with dark green heads). Around our neighbor’s birdfeeder, there were so many grackles you couldn’t see the ground – it was just one big black mass of feathers! I went to get my camera, but they had flown on before I could get a good shot. In California, we get some pretty neat wildlife too – about once a week, I see a hummingbird, and there are about 15 rabbits that live around my dorm and the soccer field. Lizards are a common occurrence, and though I haven’t looked for them yet I am told that around dusk I can find tarantulas and scorpions in the botanical gardens near campus.

I’ve been working a bit at Temporary VIP Suites (the place where my mom works; they find temporary housing for people moving between cities), which is OK. The hours are perfect – I come in when I feel like it and work for as long as I want, with no warning at all. The people are pretty great, but the work itself is kinda crappy. Mostly, I’m stuck in the back room by myself going through the archives. No one has emptied the archives since the company was started in 1995, and I’m supposed to throw out the old, unimportant parts. I feel honored that they trust me with such an important job (I’ve gone through tax returns, documentation on fired employees, bank accounts, and mortgage applications, among other things), but it gets a bit boring. For half the time, the radio is my only companion, and the other half there is someone else there, but doing something unrelated, like packing the truck for an appartment cleaning. And it’s a huge task – I’ve spent roughly 40 hours on this, and I’m about half done (as I said, no one has cleaned out the archives in 9 years). I’ve filled 3 dumpsters of recycling (the small dumpsters that take the place of trash cans, not those huge industrial sized ones). Still, the pay is pretty good, and I do, on occasion, get other things to do. I code bills, pick up lunch, run errands. When I worked there in January, I was out cleaning apartments, so I guess this is a step up from that.

That’s about it for now. Sorry this was so long – when I get back to school I’ll update more often so entries will be shorter.

Over the summer, I don’t have my own computer, so I’m not nearly as good at checking my email or updating this thing. And I haven’t been on IM in weeks. If you really need to get in touch with me… good luck. I’ll get back to you eventually… probably… I hope. :-P

Jeff (my best friend) spent the weekend in town. He’s been working at Rockwell Collins this summer, except for a month that he spent in Transylvania. And he’s now in Texas working for NASA (I’m so jealous!). We spent the weekend looking at pictures of Hungary and Romania, which were really really neat. Transylvania really is a creepy old place with castles and fog everywhere. It was wonderful to see him. We were going to go down to St. Olaf and visit Michael (our other best friend), but he was really busy this weekend. Hopefully I’ll get to head down there next week. We’ll see.

It’s looking like Bridge Etc (the “real” Claremont bridge club) will be having games on campus this coming year! Their lease on their building is almost up, and they’re looking for a new place to play. I talked to Dean Chris (in charge of Student Activities) about it, and he seemed responsive. Well, we’ll see how it all turns out.

At this point it’s probably old news, but the California Supreme Court has nullified the 4,000 gay marriages that took place in San Fransisco. However, their reason for doing so is that no mayor or any other elected official should have the power to rule any law unconstitutional, because if everyone did that, there would be no laws in effect. They said that the right way to challenge the constitutionality of such a law is to have a couple apply for a marriage liscense, get denied, and challenge the denial in court (this has since happened). One of my professors at school was married to his partner in SF, so when school starts back up, I’ll have to go talk to him and see what he’s doing about this all. Well, eventually this will get done properly, and I for one am fairly confident that (at least in California) the law will be ruled unconstitutional, and gay marriages will be allowed. We shall see.

Well, I have to go. I’d like to write more in here soon, but doubt I’ll be able to. At this point, count on sporadic updates for a while.

So, I haven’t updated in a while, but at least I have a good reason! I’ve been meaning to switch to Linux (specifically Knoppix, but if things continue this way, I’ll install Gentoo) for a while, and I finally decided to do it. Mac has helped me a lot with this, and I’m sure he’ll help me a lot more with it soon. The plan was this: shrink the Windows partition on my hard drive, and add a Linux partition so I can dual boot. Well, Partition Magic had a major error shrinking the original partition, even though I had enough space to do it. None of the Windows recovery CDs worked, but we eventually got some recovery floppies for Partition Magic itself. These managed to tell us what the problem was, and the fact that it cannot be fixed. We booted up Knoppix (which worked fine, because it runs from a CD), and managed to get read permissions on the now-corrupted hard drive. This was enough to back up a lot of things to CD. I had backed up the really important stuff before (like airline reservations), but this allowed me to save my entire music collection, most of my movies, and various other things that I can do without, but not easily replace. Then we reformatted the hard drive. That was a little sad, but it’s done now, and I think it’ll be good for me to redo everything, because anyone who has worked on my computer knows that my system of directories is haphazard at best. I made a 20GB partition for Windows (I’m really only going to use it for games and ShareScan), and the rest went to Linux. Because we reformatted the hard drive, I had also lost the backup copy of Windows that came with the computer (HP has this great idea where they don’t give you the boot disks, and instead charge you extra to recover your system for you, when you could do it yourself). So Mac used a Windows XP CD that he had. We put in the serial code, and it installs and boots fine. I go to start the many, many security updates (4 more security problems were discovered in IE yesterday alone!). I get to the updates, and they claim that my serial code is not valid! ARGH! The part that bugs me is that my main reason for switching now is that things were starting to go really, really wrong with Windows. For example, I couldn’t use my POP3 client to check my school email any more, and I couldn’t open webpages in new windows any more either. Things were going really wrong (the last time I’d seen this, within 2 months our copy of Windows 95b was corrupted). And now I can’t even reinstall!

So I try to put Knoppix on the other partition. First, I read several tutorials online, all of which turn out to either be out of date, or for the German-only version of Knoppix, or other things like that. I finally find the tutorial for my system, and start that. Knoppix claims I haven’t partitioned my hard drive yet! and when it tries, it says that it only has read permissions on the hard drive, and can’t reformat it, even with root privs (this is supposed to happen, Knoppix is given read-only privs to stop you from screwing up whatever OS you’re currently running). I finally manage to get Knoppix to try to install, and it can’t. It gives this really cryptic error message, and quits. This whole thing is so frustrating. I know that once I get both OSes installed with the proper software and updates, I shouldn’t have to do this ever again (at least, not until I buy a new computer). Nonetheless, this is very frustrating. Well, I’ll go bug Mac and Michael some more, and hopefully they’ll be able to help. In the meantime, I’m writing this from the computer lab in the LAC.

On a brighter note, today the Senate stopped the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage (if you don’t want to get a free account with the New York Times, go to BugMeNot). I’m quite glad this has happened. To the best of my knowledge (please correct me if I’m wrong), no proposed amendment has ever tried to take the rights away from a small subset of the American people (some have taken rights away, like Prohibition, the 18th Amendment, which took the right to drink away, but that was from everyone, not a select demographic). While I am not gay, I’m rather pro gay rights. While he didn’t mention homosexuals in his poem, I’m reminded of Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came”:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out-
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out-
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out-
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me-
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

If we let the religious right oppress homosexuals, what will stop them from oppressing atheists, or Muslims, or women (sadly, there are still a few nut-cases in power who think women should not have the right to vote). Though I guess part of my mentality comes from going to Mudd – according to the Princeton Review, we are the 11th most homosexual-friendly campus in the country (I’m too lazy to find the link to this statistic, but if you really want, I’m sure you can find it). I have several friends who are openly gay, and one professor who got married in San Fransisco to his partner (husband? I’ve always heard gay couples referred to as partners, but I don’t see why they’re not pairs of husbands and wives). Anyway, I think this is just wonderful.

Lets see… I’ve been playing a fair amount of ultimate frisbee lately. Now that Carrie’s back, and people read my summer-l about how West Nile Virus really isn’t that deadly (It isn’t! The media like to hype things like this, because it boosts ratings. If you want a copy of my email, write to me, and I’ll send it when I get my computer back up), we actually have enough people to play games (last week, we just played catch). It’s a lot of fun, and hopefully it’ll build up my endurance before soccer starts in the fall.

Well, I should get going, but hopefully I’ll have my computer up and running soon, and then I’ll post more.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040308&c=1&s=kennedy
Fucking Bush Administration. I’ve been following this for a while, but this article is a pretty good way to sum it all up (in a lengthy, not-so-summed-up sort of way). The Bush Administration has basically been saying “if the facts don’t agree with us, change the facts.” This is rather obvious with the situation in Iraq, the economy, and the US environmental policy (did you know that it is now legal to deposit mercury in landfills?). However, many people don’t seem to know that the administration has also been outright lying about science. Please, read this article, and spread the word to others! Most people don’t know that this is going on because they trust their government to tell them the truth (which, up until recently, has been a great thing to do. I hope I can trust it again soon).

It seems like every week, I read something new about how the current government is completely screwing up this country. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled a few weeks ago that it is legal for law enforcement to demand to see your ID, even if you are not suspected of any crime, and arrest you if you do not comply. The pertinent article is here. This sort of thing has happened before, but only in countries like the USSR, Hussein’s Iraq, and Nazi Germany.

It just makes me sick. When I graduate, if I can find a job outside the US, I will almost certainly take it. Everyone – whether or not you agree with me, learn what is going on in this country, and then vote in the upcoming election!! Don’t vote for someone because your parents (or neighbors, or government) say you should. Learn what is going on, learn who is doing what about it, and make up your own mind.