Gray Watson's Blog -- November 2004

Blogging is a useful way for me to record my thoughts and digital travels every so often. Hope you enjoy my digital stream of consciousness.

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November 30, 2004

Tom Ridge, Homeland Security director, resigns. No big surprise. I like the picture from the AP which looks like Ridge and his staff is celebrating. Woo hoo! I'm outta here!
Mr. Ridge, who described his decision in an afternoon news conference as "very difficult," had long been reported to be planning his exit from the Bush administration for personal reasons, so his departure did not come as a surprise.
Back online after thanksgiving vacation. Due to a bill paying disaster, my connection has been down for 24 hours. What a huge ball o' spooge. Painful. Once Verizon disconnected the line they did something physical to it so to get DSL again I have to reorder it and endure a week of downtime. You KNOW that if I had a Verizon DSL connection that would not be the case.
Yow! An intense Thanksgiving prayer by William Burroughs.
...
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American dream, To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.
...
I was also looking for a quote about homosexuality from Billy Graham. This is an interesting page. The point of the author is to renounce Graham but it just makes me respect him more. It lists him as being a politician instead of a Christian but I see it as taking christian doctrine into context. When asked about his opinions also homosexuality he said:
Yes, well I think that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin, but the Bible also teaches that pride is a sin, jealously is a sin, and hate is a sin, evil thoughts are a sin, and so I don't think that homosexuality should be chosen as the overwhelming sin that we are doing today.
Found an interesting site yesterday about religious tolerance and what the bible says about homosexuality. Interesting. Basically there is something in the bible everyone to interpret as they will. Sounds like the Koran.
Conservative and liberal Christians interpret the Bible in very different ways. This leads to two distinct and contradictory sets of beliefs within Christianity on just about every conceivable topic. Homosexuality is no exception.
We have been unable to change the beliefs or actions of any of these hundreds of people on even one point related to homosexuality. Their views appear to be fixed. It is doubtful that much progress towards compromise on homosexual rights can be made by means of dialogue. We don't expect that the attached essays will change the beliefs of many visitors to this web site. However, the essays may help people understand opinions that are not their own.
Looks like Microsoft is starting to attack open source on Intellectual Property grounds. I find it extremely depressing that they are using IP to attack something that IP was designed to protect -- the open sharing of ideas.
Microsoft Corp's chief executive [Steve Ballmer], appearing at the Asian Government Leaders' Forum in Singapore, said Linux violates more than 228 patents. "Someday... somebody will come and look for money owing to the rights for that intellectual property," Ballmer said in response to questioning.
Interesting analysis of the USL and UC Berkeley's lawsuit over the intellectual property with the Unix operating system.
Now we know why SCO keeps telling us the case is "just a contract" case, why it has a penchant for suing only those who are, or were, their licensees, and why it sued IBM instead of Red Hat. USL preserves its rights against licensees under the license agreements. I see no expanded rights against third parties who are not licensees, just the preexisting right to try to sue them, with the same likely outcome that USL experienced when it tried to sue the University and BSDi, using the same lame copyright claims that the judge back then found so unconvincing. The University agrees it won't stand in USL's way if they sue third parties.
Cool looking small SQL implementation in C libraries.
SQLite is a small C library that implements a self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine. Features include: Transactions are atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable (ACID) even after system crashes and power failures. Zero-configuration - no setup or administration needed. Implements most of SQL92. (Features not supported) A complete database is stored in a single disk file...

November 24, 2004

Excellent article about a project funded by the DOE out in Arizona are using solar powered Stirling engines to generate power for the grid. They rival photovoltaics with a 30% efficient rating and are already AC so don't have conversion loss. Each unit can produce up to 25 kilowatts. They run on a compressed hydrogen gas system where the only replacement part is a single seal.
By the end of 2005, they plan to have six dishes connected into a miniature power station capable of supplying enough 480-volt three-phase electricity to power about 40 homes (150 kW). The next step, in 2006, is a 40-dish power plant that will transform the combined output of the farm from 480 to 13,000 V, for distribution of industrial-level power to an existing substation. From 2007 to 2010, the program proposes mass-producing dishes to create a 20,000-dish farm supplying 230,000 V of long-haul power from its own substation directly connected to the grid.
Here's the page at Sandia National Laboratories about the project. Paneltec is making the curved solar collection panels.
Interesting information about recording audio on your macintosh. Expensive equipment but a lot of good information.
Looks like some sound file which is being distributed my Microsquat on Windows XP was produced by a hacked sound utility. Whoops.
Members of a former software cracking group have discovered that audio files created with one of its cracked programs are distributed with each copy of the Windows XP operating system, possibly exposing Microsoft to a large-scale copyright infringement lawsuit.

November 23, 2004

I just can't imagine this reality of the details of the fight in Fallujah. This was copied from the New York Times article.
The 150 marines with whom I traveled, Company B of the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, had it as tough as any unit in the fight. They moved through the city almost entirely on foot, into the heart of the resistance, rarely protected by tanks or troop carriers, working their way through Falluja's narrow streets with 75-pound packs on their backs. In eight days of fighting, Company B took 36 casualties, including 6 dead, meaning that one in four of the company was either wounded or killed in little more than a week. The sounds, sights and feel of the battle were as old as war itself, and as new as the Pentagon's latest weapons systems. The eerie pop from the cannon of the AC-130 gunship, prowling above the city, firing at guerrillas who were often only steps away from Americans on the ground. The weird buzz of the Dragon Eye pilotless airplane, hovering over the battlefield as its video cameras beamed real-time images back to the base.
I'd heard about this but never seen details about how laser printers encode their serial number on printed pages as little yellow dots.
Peter Crean, a senior research fellow at Xerox, says his company's laser printers, copiers and multifunction workstations, such as its WorkCentre Pro series, put the "serial number of each machine coded in little yellow dots" in every printout. The millimeter-sized dots appear about every inch on a page, nestled within the printed words and margins. "It's a trail back to you, like a license plate," Crean says. The dots' minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light--say, from a keychain laser flashlight--on your page and use a magnifier.
Tuhogt taht I'd psot my own emaxlpe of the alibtiy of the hmuan mnid to udnrenastd mpisllseed wdors. As lnog as the fsirt and lsat lreetts are crcoret, the rset wlil be hlaednd bauecse the mnid deos not raed the iniddivaul ltteers. Vrey cool. Can't find the original source for that information. Here's some cool projects in speech perception.
A friend recently installed the Dovecot Secure IMAP server. Looks interesting. I'm still running emacs-mh because of the various hacks I have in place.

November 22, 2004

Interesting piece about the radical Israeli factions.
The process was led by religious cranks. Their declared aim, as they said then and never tire of repeating, is to drive all the Arabs out of the country that God promised us. And the land God promised us, as one of them reminded us on TV the other day, is not the "Palestine" of the British mandate, but the Promised Land - including Jordan, Lebanon and parts of Syria and Sinai. Quoting the Bible, another one declared that we have come to this country not only to inherit, but also to disinherit the others, to drive them out and take their place.
Just had a wierd problem with X11 forwarding over new ssh v3.9 clients. When you try to select text in emacs, you get a X protocol error
BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) on protocol request 38
We needed to add 'ForwardX11Trusted yes' parameter to the config file for specific local hosts.
Cool story about former janitor Gene Morlacci who left $2.3 million to the University of Great Falls school scholarship fund. [ I can't find a link to this full story. A shame because I find it inspirational. ]
"He was a fellow who felt that if you didn't need it, you shouldn't buy it," said Joe Marra, his former attorney. "Gene," as he was known, wanted to help others obtain the formal education he never had, Marra added.
A friend at work and I were talking about incremental backups on our Macintoshes. Because old Mac applications have resource forks and newer applications have wierd permission hacks, you can't use rsync, tar, and other standard Unix tools. Here are some links that we found about this:
- Fugu is a neat Scp version for Mac OSX
- Deja Vu might work, or not
- RsyncX and Psync would work but they only allow you to sync between Macintoshes.
- Nice collection of backup tools
- HFS Pax utility looks like a possibility

November 20, 2004

Looks like with every copy of the Tiger Mac OS X operating system, you'll get Apple's grid computing client/server Xgrid. This allows developers to design computationally distributed systems across multiple Macintoshes with ease. Very cool!
Xgrid turns a group of Macs into a supercomputer, so they can work on problems greater than each individually could solve. You can let Xgrid operate in screensaver mode, so whenever you aren't working, your Mac can crunch away at some data set. Or if you have a group of Macs dedicated to the task, Xgrid makes it easy to set up a cluster that works around the clock, every day of the year.

November 19, 2004

Looks like another case of mad cow's disease has been found.
The officials released few details and refused to say where the possibly diseased animal was found. They said it would be four to seven days before more could be confirmed, a delay that livestock industry representatives said would cause turmoil in the beef market.
I know that intellectual property is a key part of general innovation but this sort of IP company that doesn't make anything scares the crap out of me. Aside from being leaches, how is this sort of company helping society? Helping business? They don't make anything but are a tax.
Myhrvold and Jung won't exactly say. But they charge that Silicon Valley companies have stolen other people's inventions for too long while slashing their own R&D budgets. Referring to Intellectual Ventures' portfolio of patents as his own, he says, "If giant corporations are making billions of dollars off my ideas, I want something for it, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that."
Notice that this lawyer calls them "his" ideas.
Man, our corporate attorney really pissed me off today. I made the unfortunate decision to send him an email to the patent that I invented and refer to it as "mine" (gasp). He got all uppity and said, from his high horse, that it was not mine -- that it was the company's. Uh, yeah. I understand IP law. But I designed and implemented it, I helped write and review the patent application, and I am listed as an "inventor" with my company listed as the "assignee". So so sorry Mr. Lawyer Sir to consider it to be at least some degree mine. Won't happen again.
By the way, if I've not said so before, if you use MS Windows, you should switch to the Firefox browser. It is free, better, faster, much more secure, more compliant, excellent web browser. Can't say enough about it. IE is a secure nightmare and MS is not investing a lot of time in its continued development. 100s of open software programmers continue to improve Firefox and it's companions Thunderbid email client and the integrated Mozilla browser that I use. Under the Macintosh, Safari is pretty good but under Windows, you can't go wrong with Firefox or Thunderbird.
I've been playing around with socks proxies over the last couple of days. I've got my AIM client at work tunneling back to home, for example. They allow you to route all of your browser connections over a secure connection. I means that you can make a secure shell connection between two systems and route all of your traffic from your browser across the secure link. Very cool.

November 18, 2004

Fun with your brain: While sitting in a chair, lift your right foot off the floor and start making clockwise circles. Then, keeping your right foot circling, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Notice what happens to your right foot.

November 17, 2004

NASA's X-43A aircraft set a speed record today. It hit mach 9.7 or about 6,500 mph using it's scramjet which engages at mach 4 and burned for 4 seconds. Not sure what it's going to be used for though. The whole project cost $230 million -- ~10 times more than Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne. Wonder what Burt could do with $230 million?
Cool secure TCP/IP layer service. It provides privacy and safety in web browsing, circumvention of local censorship filtering, and protects socially sensitive communication. I've got my own client up but to be a server you need at least 1mbit both ways.
Tor helps to reduce the traffic analysis risk by distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination. To make private connections in Tor, a client incrementally builds a path or circuit of encrypted connections through servers on the network, extending it one step at a time so that each server in the circuit only learns which server extended to it and which server it has been asked to extend to. The client negotiates a separate set of encryption keys for each step along the circuit.

November 16, 2004

Just thought of this link which I found a couple of months back and want to archive. It's a collection of very sobering sea stories about people falling overboard. It's about time in the water as well as exhaustion. Even treading water it takes a lot of energy and often when a boat comes to pick up a person in the water, both the overboard person and the crew on the boat can't pull them out. The page is basically an ad for the Life Sling brand which makes it easier for a boat to circle a man overboard (i.e. not run them over), pull them to the side of the boat, and hoist them out of the water.

November 15, 2004

So I didn't realize that the state IQ to vote record was a hoax. I didn't like the sound of it or the implications because it smacks of the exactly sort of elitism which motivates Democratic party opponents. Mailing it around for smug satisfaction is only furthering their cause.
A number of news publications (including the staid Economist) were taken in by the hoax some mistakenly citing the information as having come from the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, or even IQ and the Wealth of States and published portions of the chart, and discussed it as if it were valid.
Just found mention of this lawsuit from Karl Rove against Dick Thornburgh back in 1994. Turns out that Rove ran a direct mail company and sued Thornburgh personally after his failed Senate campaign to recoup fees. Ugly.
Back when Richard Thornburgh ran for the U.S. Senate, and lost, Thornburgh left behind an unpaid bill of almost $170,000 owed to Karl Rove & Co. for services in conducting a direct mail campaign. It is clear that the authorized campaign committeethe "Thornburgh for Senate Committee"had hired Rove & Co. and that it was liable. Unfortunately, the committee was broke.
Wow. Scientists have implanted a tiny chip in the brain of a quadriplegic who is now able to interface with his computer. Here's the Braingate site at Cyberkenetics.
Since the insertion of the tiny device in June, the 25-year-old has been able to check email and play computer games simply using thoughts. He can also turn lights on and off and control a television, all while talking and moving his head.
Interesting position article from the Guardian in the UK which describes Bush's administration as Puritanism of the rich.
So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the US this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush's government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity.
A peak inside of the world of convicted millionaire spammer Jeremy Jaynes. I have a solution for this guy which would save them the court costs.
In a typical month, prosecutors said during the trial, Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders - thus making money on perhaps only one of every 30,000 e-mails that he sent out. But he earned $40 a pop, and the undertaking was so vast that Jaynes could pull in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead, McGuire said.
Article that claims that the White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of liberal and disloyal officers.
The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda.

November 14, 2004

Just gave money to fund the legitimate recount effort is underway in Ohio.
Common Cause of Ohio and the Alliance for Democracy, a progressive coalition, Thursday announced they were launching a recount campaign for Ohio. Columbus, Ohio attorney Cliff Arnebeck, who represents both groups, said both the Green Party and Libertarian Party presidential candidates would seek a recount if the $110,000 filing fee could be raised.
Just gave money also to Bev Harris and Black Box Voting who are making Freedom of Information Act requests to reveal voting details in Ohio.
Black Box Voting has launched a fraud audit into Florida. Three investigators (Bev Harris, Andy Stephenson, and Kathleen Wynne) are in Florida right now. We will initiate hand counts on selected counties that have not fully complied with our Nov. 2 Freedom of Information request by Monday (Diebold counties) or Tuesday (other counties).
Pentagon is building a separate "internet for war" which would cost 100s of billions of dollars.
This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds."
Very cool youth project making solar panels in a Kenya slum.
Many of the young people working on the solar project have never had a job, or seen anyone in their families have a job. The average wage in Kibera is $1 a day but a small solar panel which takes just a matter of minutes to put together can sell for around $5.

November 12, 2004

Michael Moore's comments right after the election entitled 17 reasons not to slit your wrists.
#1. It is against the law for George W. Bush to run for president again. #2. Bush's victory was the NARROWEST win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.
I'm always looking up and reading about 1-wire networks. I have a weather station and a number of temperature gauges that I need to wire up in my house.
Dallas Semiconductor/Maxim provides a technology called 1-Wire, that uses a single wire (plus ground) to accomplish both communication and power transmission. A single bus master can feed multiple slaves over a single twisted-pair cable. An important aspect of this technology is that every slave has a globally unique digital address. This article discusses the protocol and introduces a variety of applications.
Pretty funny pictures of Americans saying sorry to the world for last week's election results.
So I just signed this petition to have the Congress look into the 2004 election voting irregularities. I must say that I'm torn and almost didn't sign it. I doubt that it will make much difference and I think that crying over spilt milk is pretty much worthless.
A Petition to immediately and without delay open a joint investigation into potential wrongdoing in the Presidential Election of 2004, specifically to investigate the potential of voting machine manipulation or purposeful malfunction, especially electronic voting machines manufactured and supplied by Diebold, Inc.; Electronic Systems & Software; Sequoia Voting Systems, and others...
Cool article about the dreaded "L word" entitled Think Again The Word 'Liberal'.
But if by a Liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a Liberal, then I'm proud to say I'm a Liberal.
New MSN search is out. The last one died in hours. We'll see how long this one survives. I see a couple of problems with weird redirect link and bizarre results counting. But a number of my pages look pretty well represented.
Here's a taste of what our fighting men and women over in Fallujah, Iraq are dealing with right now. May their gods protect and preserve them. Reminds me a lot of Black Hawk Down, the Ridley Scott movie about soldiers fighting in the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. Required viewing for any politician who sends our soldiers into battle.
Just found this interesting piece about software engineers in my old mail queue.
Assume that your customers don't know what they want. Design it yourself, based on your understanding of the domain. If you need to spend some time learning about the domain or if you need a domain expert to help you, that's fine, but the design of the software is your job. If you do your domain homework and create a good UI, the customer will be pleased.
This is very scary. Looks like Microsoft is gearing up for a intellectual property fight against open software. Bring it on assholes. Bring it on.
Signing this license frees developers from being sued for IP infringements by Microsoft, but prevents you from working on GPL software.

November 11, 2004

A perfect example of disgusting tax policy. People have been writing off the huge SUVs as a business expense under a loophole made to help farmers purchase transportation vehicles.
Not only was the federal government encouraging the use of gas guzzlers through tax policy, it was losing tax revenue at the same time. If tax breaks for SUVs were eliminated, said Taxpayers for Common Sense, the government could collect $1.3 billion more in revenue over a 10-year period.
Here's another scary article from Texas. They are rewriting the text books to remove all mentioned of contraceptives and define marriage as between a man and woman.
Only one of the four approved books even mentions contraceptives. The altered lessons teach students how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases in many ways -- including "getting plenty of rest" -- but not by using condoms. One actually suggests using latex gloves to avoid contact with blood but says nothing about using latex . . . you get the idea. Ironically, the state curriculum for health education still mandates that students ``analyze the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of barrier protection and other contraceptive methods.'' But the books have expunged the information they're required to learn.
Cool programmable LED name badge from thinkgeek. US$35. I just bought one from the Eyeblasters manufacturer's site because they didn't have blue at Thinkgeek.
Good article about how the left needs to get off its ass and start funding media outlets for their message.
The way to counter disinformation from the Right is NOT to put out propaganda from the Left. Good journalism that is both reliable and interesting will be the key and professional journalists are the ones who can best provide credible information by maintaining high standards for accuracy.

November 10, 2004

Here's a completely "in-the-box" analysis of why the Democrats lost from the "advisors". They should all be taken out back and shot. Damn snake oil salesmen.
James Carville, a Democrat who was an informal adviser to Mr. Kerry's campaign, told reporters that President Bush achieved a "monumental political achievement" in winning despite polls that showed deep concern about the direction of the country and unhappiness with his job performance. "If this is an election that we couldn't win . . ." Mr. Carville said, his voice trailing off, as he sat next to Mr. Shrum and Mr. Greenberg. "The purpose of a political party is to win elections, and we're not doing that.
The political party's job is not to "win elections" but to lead the country in the right direction. He's literally correct but so far in the box that his head's up his ass. I'll refer again to this article about Democratic Values. Right on.
Attorney General John Ashcroft resigns. Good riddance.
The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." Yeah whatever John. We'll see when the next one happens. Unfortunately, the Constitution was laid waste along the way.
Interesting article about how the KH-9 spy satellite was removed from a planned Smithsonian exhibit.
A map of the Dulles Annex exhibits was also published in Air & Space Magazine, and it too had the KH-9 off in the corner. So now that the space hangar is finally open, some people may wonder why there is no KH-9 to be seen anywhere in the facility.
We were watching the best of Tom Hanks the other night on Saturday Night Live. I was surprised to see Ralph Nader doing a cameo in a skit getting kicked out of the "5-Timers" club. Ro and I always try to catch SNL. Everyone talks about how it was funny a couple of years back but not now. I think it always has its good moments and bad moments. People don't remember the skits with Eddie Murphy and Bill Murray that flopped but they were there. I always get a couple of chuckles and usually get a LOL moment or three.

November 9, 2004

Interesting article about Earth Architecture and Ceramics: the Sandbag Construction System. This guy is using mile-long sandbags locked together with barbed wire to build modern houses using local natural building materials.
Superadobe uses four-point barbed wire (or a similar element) between sandbag layers, allowing one to develop the tensile and shear capabilities that have not been previously achievable. The barbed wire element increases the friction factor between the bags and creates tensile resistance in a wall or structural element. It is an important aspect of Superadobe to provide for the transfer of shear stresses from one sandbag to another by using the barbed wire as an interface between the bags, overcoming problems of low shear capability in the earthen fill. The in creased capacity of the sandbags, achieved by using barbed wire, creates the capability of designing higher walls and curved surfaces, such as bearing walls, arches, domes and vaults.
Good article for the religiously inclined explaining that Kerry lost the election and that we need to keep pushing Progressive faith.
A progressive and prophetic vision of faith and politics - was not running in this election. John Kerry was, and he lost. Kerry did not strongly champion the poor as a religious issue and "moral value," or make the war in Iraq a clearly religious matter.
A number of nations are squabbling over where to build ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
ITER aims to lay the groundwork for using nuclear fusion as an inexhaustible and clean source of energy. It plans to create the technology that allows a fusion reactor to produce at least five times as much energy as is put in. ITER would take 10 years and cost about $5 billion.
The US is doing little to nothing to further fusion research. We're the leader on energy consumption but god help us all if we become the leader in clean energy production. Oh, no no no.
Russian scientist keeps 400 grams of weapons grade of plutonium-238 in his garage. He found it in a trash dump after a military depot had been looted. That's nice.
Well it's the first sign that the legal system is finally trying the spammers since a jury finds 2 guilty of felony spam.
The jury recommended that Jaynes spend nine years in prison and that DeGroot pay $7,500 in fines for violating Virginia's anti-spam law. A third defendant, Richard Rutkowski, 30, also of the Raleigh area, was acquitted of three felony counts.
Pass the word. Do not use the "anonymous" web browser system bangotango.com. it is a law enforcement/intelligence sting which harvests unwary user addresses and information.
Wow! Cool graph showing the red and blue counties 2004. They also have one that alternates between 2000 and 2004 data. More maps dealing with the 2004 election. Here's another red/blue/purple map.
Just put up a copy of Osama's latest speech. In general I frown on reproduction of terrorist messages because we are only helping their cause, but this is a good read. I have no idea how true it is of course but it's interesting to contemplate what drives a terrorist to kill innocents. We're not talking about reducing their responsibility for their actions -- just understanding the enemy.
The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorized and displaced... In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors. And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
Interesting summary of Kerry's war service from, of all things, the Snopes Urban Legends pages.
Cool article about a bunch of streaking students who call themselves the Hamilton College varsity streaking team. I've always said that we need more streakers.
As eager as the team was to test its mettle at other schools, some of the roughly two dozen members admit that they went the route of intercollegiate sports only because streaking at Hamilton had grown stale. Alex Klivecka, a junior majoring in religious studies, said that even when he ran in a mask, people on the school's paths were greeting him by name.
Wow is William Saletan right on with this article about Democratic Values -- How to start winning the red states.
Some of you are dismayed by the emergence of a huge voting bloc of churchgoers. Stop viewing this as a threat, and start viewing it as an opportunity. Socially conservative blue-collar workers don't believe in the free market. They believe in the work ethic. Bush wins their votes by equating the free market with the work ethic. Show them where the free market betrays the work ethic, and they'll vote for the party of the work ethic -- you -- against the party of the free market.
Cool article about a low-cost, low maintenance, wave-powered desalination unit.
When the waves lift and then lower the buoy, a piston connected to the bottom of the buoy drives a pump at the seas floor. The pressure created by the piston is strong enough to drive the sea water through a reverse osmosis filter, which removes salt and impurities from the water, and then to send the fresh water through a pipe to the shoreline.

November 8, 2004

Lot of scary articles starting to come out with evidence that some vote hacking may have been done on 11/2. I don't know what to think about it yet.
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
Interesting collection of world statistics on a variety of subjects. Mortality, wealth, taxes, birth rates, etc..
One of my friends is a super-enthusiastic diver and has been coveting this High-Intensity Discharge (HID) flashlight. It costs US$650 retail and can only be used underwater because of the heat output. I'm really surprised that high intensity LED flashlights haven't been put out given the wasted heat.
Just took the political compass test. I scored a Economic -3.88 (Left/Right) and a Social -5.49 (Libertarian/Authoritarian) which puts me near Ghandi and Ralph Nader. Surprised me a bit but the more I think of it, the more I seems correct. I'm certainly more Libertarian than Authoritarian and more Left than Right socially. Here are where the 2004 Presidential candidates stood according to the authors. Both Bush and Kerry are completely opposite me on the political spectrum. Bush is more authoritarian than any other.
Great piece about how the United States was not founded on the Christian religion.
Most of our influential Founding Fathers, although they respected the rights of other religionists, held to deism and Freemasonry beliefs rather than to Christianity.
According to White House political adviser Karl Rove Bush is serious about a Constitutional ban on gay marriage. So much for state's rights. So much for not touching the constitution. So much for "conservative values". Looks like more authoritarian actions from a man of "faith". "But a national ban on same-sex marriage is the only way to make sure "activist judges" don't redefine marriage." I don't know what he's talking about. The Massachusetts court said that the current ban on gay marriage goes against the state constitution. If the legislature wants to chance the constitution, then fine but it's up to the state of Massachusetts, not some fools in DC to make that decision.
Wow, the Pittsburgh Steelers completely dominated the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday.
Instead of having a letdown after stopping the New England Patriots' winning streak at 21 games last Sunday, the Steelers (7-1) pounded the Eagles (7-1), becoming the first N.F.L. team to defeat consecutive undefeated teams who had played at least six games.
Here's a picture of Burt Rutan and Paul Allen from Scaled Composites receiving the US$10m X-Prize check from Peter Diamandis. Scaled's SpaceShipOne flew two times in 6 days into space (100km) with the weight of 3 people to win the X-Prize back on 9/29 and 10/4.
So here's some more good news. Looks like the referendums touted by the press as "gay marriage bans" went further than that. "In state after state -- most prominently in Ohio (which Bush barely won) and in Michigan (which he nearly did) -- these referendums went far beyond the question of who gets to be formally married. They also banned legal and other conventions incidental to marriage, which are central to the evolving institutions of civil unions and domestic partnerships."

November 5, 2004

Heard a good joke while working on the Kerry campaign up in Salem, NH.
- What's the difference between Iraq and Vietnam?
- George W Bush had a plan to get out of Vietnam.
Transcript of Jon Stewart on Crossfire.
Stewart: It's not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. And I will tell you why I know it.
Carlson: You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you're accusing us of partisan hackery?
Stewart: Absolutely.
Carlson: You've got to be kidding me. He comes on and you...
Stewart: You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls."
Cool hardware hack called TV B-Gone which turns off 90% of all consumer televisions within 17 seconds. Here's the Wired.com article about it entitled Inventor Rejoices as TVs Go Dark.
Very cool optical illusion page done completely in gifs. Shows how easy it is to overload the brain's image processing centers.
Rumor has it that the NY Times was ready to run a story about the Bush bulge and then dropped it days before the election.
The Times' bulge story is the latest example of possible self-censorship by major news media during the election campaign. In September, CBS's 60 Minutes decided to delay until after the election an investigative segment that questioned the Bush administration's use of forged Niger uranium documents in making its case for the Iraq war, saying that "it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election.
The American Conservative rails against Bush and the neo-conservatives in their 11/8 cover story. But they hate Kerry even more.
[The Iraq] war, we warned, on a country that did not attack us, did not threaten us, did not want war with us, and had no role in 9/11, would be a tragedy and a disaster. Invade and we inherit our own West Bank of 23 million Iraqis, unite Islam against us, and incite imams from Morocco to Malaysia to preach jihad against America. So we wrote, again and again.
Another side sign of the state of our police state.
More than three months after the Supreme Court declared that hundreds of detainees at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. courts, none has appeared in a courtroom.

November 4, 2004

Wow. Very cool page about facial expression deconstruction and the information encoded in our faces.
Ekman and Friesen ultimately assembled all these combinations and the rules for reading and interpreting them into the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS, and wrote them up in a five-hundred-page binder... Researchers have employed the system to study everything from schizophrenia to heart disease; it has even been put to use by computer animators at Pixar ("Toy Story"), and at DreamWorks ("Shrek").
Good Op-Ed article from the Times about the Day the Enlightenment Went Out.
Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.
Another Op-Ed from the Times entitled Two Nations Under God.
The election results reaffirmed that. Despite an utterly incompetent war performance in Iraq and a stagnant economy, Mr. Bush held onto the same basic core of states that he won four years ago - as if nothing had happened. It seemed as if people were not voting on his performance. It seemed as if they were voting for what team they were on.
Here's a transcript of Bush's first press conference.
I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style. That's what happened in the -- after the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I've earned capital in this election -- and I'm going to spend it for what I told the people I'd spend it on, which is -- you've heard the agenda: Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror.
Wrote out a letter to the editor to the NY Times regarding their Two Nations Under God article.
It is easy to point to a niche voting-block like the "Religious Right" and say that they made the difference. However, consider that Bill Clinton, the pro choice/gay-rights Democrat would have wiped the floor with Bush had he been available. 59 million citizens elected Bush -- a relatively small percentage of whom are zealots. If Kerry won Ohio, the papers would talk about how Moveon.org chose the President.
Funny/sad new map of the United States.
Finally finished my piece entitled Democrats Suck. We do indeed.
So I'm over it. The heartbreak. The sorrow. Bush didn't steal the election this time, Kerry and the Democrats lost it. The Republicans got more seats in the House, won more of the Senate, and if, as expected, a couple of Supreme Court justices retire, Bush will help lean the court to the right for possibly decades. What a slam dunk.

November 3, 2004

I went to bed last night with a heavy heart and awoke this morning with the arrival of the boy into our bed with the full knowledge that chances are the results were in. Ro looked online and announced that they were waiting on Ohio with all reports showing that Bush had won. What a feeling. Total devastation. Alternating between numbness and fury. What a waste of good, dedicated, kind people.
Around 1pm I decided to head up to Salem to clean up the office and get things put away. Ed and other folks where there when I arrived. It's so very strange to put your life on hold for 15 days working somewhere and then tear it all down in a couple of hours. I pulled down wall coverings, vacuumed, cut out wires and pulled extension cords out of the ceiling, pulled signs off of the wood sticks, cleaned up the staging area, etc, etc.. We basically filled two medium sized dumpsters. Finally around 1700 I called it a done job, shook hands all around, and headed home.

November 2, 2004

Drove home with a car full of computers at the end of the day. Nancy had asked me to to put all of the hardware in a locked office so I figured I'd start putting the 5 that I brought up into my car. The crowd dwindled either because they saw the writing on the wall or they were exhausted. Driving home I almost fell asleep a couple of times. Very bad.
The big day. After helping "cut" the walk lists and doing maps most of the night, I finally got to bed around 0500 leaving some of the other guys still working. I was awaken at 0630 by the office because the Internet connection went down. When I arrived the office was in a state of panic and the rumor flying around was that a Bush supporter down the road had cut our line. We got on the phone with Comcast and while I tried the carrot routine, Nancy the office manager used the stick. One of them worked because a tech was there very fast and got our connection up again. In the meantime we had broken down 1/2 of our computers which were running over to an office in town to setup there in case it was down for good. We had to call them back.
In the morning I didn't like the amount of paper we had left so I asked someone to take a collection and go buy a case of paper. I had paid for the last one. I figured that the couple of hundred people in the area would love to donate a couple bucks to pay for the $32 case. Nancy vetoed this with Brian asking me if we had learned from previous mistakes that had wasted 1000s of sheets. Sigh.
At some point we were waiting desperately for copies of maps and I convinced Brian to allow us to use the fast copier hidden in one of the offices which was $0.35/page. Outrageous but of critical importance.
All in all I was disgusted with the lack of automation in the office. We needed a volunteer database and faster phone database systems. The door-to-door work would have to be coordinated with paper but better map integration is definitely a must for next time.

November 1, 2004

24 hours and counting. I'm writing this in retrospect since I had 0 time to do it live. Pedal is to the metal. Overnight Ed and I completely rewired most of the computers in the office. We created a computer area and I reloaded most of the systems with Windows 98 which worked really well. Some driver issues but otherwise good. I left at 0500 and got in around 0730.
Loads of people have been coming in over the past weekend and today. A couple of male flight attendants were helping out and they completely organized the visibility folks. It required understanding the sites, assigning volunteers, and checking on them in the field. Went really well. By the time they were done they were pros.

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