Danny's Weblog

2007 Jan 11 [ Thu ]

Some good atheist one-liners

In the midst of a Slashdot discussion on something else: science.slashdot.org [http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/09/2330251]

I found the following good atheist one-liners; especially good when you encounter Jesuits, who are actually taught that they can make a nonsensical argument if it brings people closer to Christ:

Yes, atheism is a religion in exactly the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.

Of all the thousands of gods out there, we only disagree about the existence of one of them!

Name exactly ONE article of faith of atheism – or is not believing that there is an invisible rhinoceros in my living room an "article of faith"?

2007 Jan 05 [ Fri ]

Test page for quotes bug

This is just a test page – ignore

This is a quote at the font pf the para

This is a quote: in the middle of the para

Here are some paras entirely in a single pair of quotes:

This is para 1

This is para 2

This is para 3

This is not in quotes.

2007 Jan 02 [ Tue ]

khmer440.com has deleted my account twice

I've often read the postings on the khmer440 website because they do have some people posting who have interesting things to say.

However, not only is the signal-to-noise ratio lower than Usenet pre-spam, but also many of the posts are extremely aggressive, such as the posts by "hanky" and others in the following thread: www.khmer440.com [http://www.khmer440.com/chat_forum/viewtopic.php?t=3951&highlight=]

When I announced my phonetic font for Khmer PKD I decided to post about it on khmer440, but the only responses were foolish: www.khmer440.com [http://www.khmer440.com/chat_forum/viewtopic.php?t=2454]

User "Doctor Seuss" apparently speaks Khmer, but he reads a word transcribed in PKD and displayed using a normal font as "jOG" and complains that it should be "jong". He clearly does not understand *anything* about phonetic alphabets. Or does he? Isn't he just picking on an error which is not in fact an error in order to be irritating?

Well, I decided there were a lot of nasty and/or stupid people on k440.

For a long time I didn't post much. But one thing was bothering me about the way my posts were displayed. khmer440 uses what appears to be stock phpbb software, although they may have hand-rolled a few things. In particular, it displays a "slogan" next to the user's name in each post which is chosen by the admin, not by the user, based on number of posts. For reasons best known to himself, the admin decided to give low posters like me the slogan "I've got nothing better to do". (Wouldn't that slogan fit *high* posters better?)

Well, this rankled with me, so I grumbled about it, and got flamed. As I read the responses (some of which I think have since been deleted), I started to wonder what exactly was going on at k440. It occurred to me that it was like "Fight Club", the movie in which callow guys inexplicably gather to beat each other to pulp. I started to make a post about this and inadvertently posted a threatening quote from one of those pugnacious pugilists on "Fight Club" without giving it an attribution.

And then it hit me: k440 is actually *run by* trolls. It is the only site like it I know where the admins actually support the trolls and delete their victims. The only trolls they do react against are those that flame k440 and their buddies.

So I logged off and went to bed ("don't feed the trolls"). The next time I tried to log in my password didn't work. It transpired my account had been disabled by the admin: no warning, no private msgs, no previous warnings, not informed by email, not a thing. When I checked the thread I had been called a troll myself – for *one post*.

Here's the thread (until they lock it or delete more msgs I suppose): www.khmer440.com [http://www.khmer440.com/chat_forum/viewtopic.php?t=3536]

When I posted *one* more msg with a new account the new account was disabled a few days later (since yesterday) and both dannyw and dannyw2 were deleted (so my posts now are shown as "guest"). Again, no warnings or notification, and this time the Admin didn't even mention it.

It's really a pity that the most active expat forum for Cambodia is run by trolls. I would start a competing bb but I'm afraid it would be attacked by the trolls who live under k440.

2005 Oct 31 [ Mon ]

A researcher has same idea as me about sleep paralysis

Back in June I made various speculations about the phenomenon of sleep paralysis: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Cambodia/Miscellaneous/nightcrusher01.html]

One of them was that there could be some sort of link with the experiences of those who remember being abducted by aliens. Now the Guardian reports that a researcher has suggested the same thing: education.guardian.co.uk [http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,9830,1600781,00.html]

The account in the Guardian lacks the wit and insight of my own posting of course. In particular, the researchers seem to leadenly concentrate on pathology, mentioning that the abductees "already had an interest in the paranormal" as if that were enough to make you fantasize a transdimensional rectal probe.

2005 Oct 18 [ Tue ]

When oil runs out, we'll have alternative energy but not plastics

As I have grumbled before, essentially none of the new inventions I expected to see before I died have happened yet. No flying cars; not even a gas-turbine car, let alone nuclear-powered.

The other day I was looking at some small gadget, perhaps a ballpoint, and musing that one thing that actually has improved in the last fifty years is plastics. "There's a great future in plastics." A lot of plastic parts used to scuff, or get brittle, or haze over, or never quite matched up, or peeled off... These days, if you don't buy things made in Vietnam, the plastic is usually very satisfactory. (Although my mother bought melamine plates fifty years ago that still looked good ten years ago, and they're impossible to find now: I guess the manufacturers realized that they make more money if plates break and chip within three years of purchase.)

Then it occurred to me that if oil really *is* running out (ie, if the theory the oil companies have struggled to force on the scientific community about oil deposits being extremely rare is not disproven), we do have a wide range of alternative *energy* sources, but not of high-quality *hydrocarbons* which could fit into current manufacturing processes.

2005 Aug 19 [ Fri ]

Boingboing.net, and a friend wants you to read her novel

Years ago I had a girlfriend who was a good guitarist and songwriter. I was happy that i could honestly tell her that I liked her stuff – in fact I still have several of her songs on CD that I listened to as recently as last month. Despite this, it was always nervewracking when she wanted me to listen to a new song. What could I say if I didn't like it? I know nothing about music – I couldn't say "it'll be great if you just add a key change in the break!!" or something – but sap that I am I find it difficult to actually dissemble, especially to somebody I care about.

At the time a point occurred to me which I tried and failed to express to her. It probably sounded specious. What I tried to say was that out of all the sf books in the store, I reject 50% on the cover, and of the remainder I reject more than 90% on a cursory flip through. Of those that I actually buy (which depends on how much money I have at the time of course) the majority – probably 70% – were not worth reading. Of those that I enjoyed at all, probably only one in ten were the actual reason why I read sf. So what does all that add up to? Out of *published* sf I feel enthusiastic about perhaps one in 2000 books.

And I don't think I'm out of the ordinary. A successful hardback sells perhaps 100,000 copies in the US with a regular reading population of perhaps 2 million. Are the remainder fainting with eagerness to buy the book as soon as they save up enough recyclable cans, or did they just go "enh" when they read the review?

So if somebody *writes* such a novel – which is going to be *very very successful* – what is the likelihood that his or her s.o. is going to honestly like it? Especially in the absence of the marketing hype – and indeed illuminating reviews – which surround published works.

Surely music is the same way. I love Joni Mitchell, but how many of her songs do I *really* like? "The last Time I Saw Richard", yep, "Down to You", yep, "People's Parties", yep, and several more... out of *how many* songs? She's one of the greatest singer/songwriters ever. If my girfriend is just really, really good, how many songs would I like?

One of the fundamental strengths of the internet is "disintermediation". You can find an audience for almost anything (this site gets several hits *per day*!) and you don't *have* to do mass old-style advertising to find an audience – they find you.

So a site like boingboing.net [http://boingboing.net/] can be very successful by appealing to a tiny minority. What I want to address however is their practice of including rather long extracts of the site operator's and his friends' sf. When I started reading boingboing, I was eager to check them out, but everything I have looked at has been lame, lame, lame. OTOH, my analysis above suggests that I would probably have the same reaction to most *successful, published* sf. So the point I'm making is that there is something wrong with boingboing's strategy here. The internet/web works as a filter drawing people to *exactly what they like*, but by splashing these stories boingboing is *actively turning people off*.

I've certainly considered removing the political (paranoid) stories from this site, for that very reason. I didn't bother because I never planned to make money from it. But Cory (Mr Boingboing) is definitely planning to make a ton of dough from boingboing. My advice – and he may well titter that it comes from someone whose site gets one millionth as many hits as his – is this: don't put sappy-sounding text splurges in-line on your page, any more than you want to add a cheesy .midi file.

2005 Aug 08 [ Mon ]

Science fiction story "E for Effort" by T. L. Sherred

This story was first published in 1947 and made an immediate impact. It has been listed as one of the ten best sf stories of all time. The author published no other stories for six years, and only four in all over his life: www.sfoha.org [http://www.sfoha.org/catalog/sp.html]

I had been trying to remember the title for months, but had been unable to find a search term for it that worked. Eventually I saw "A for Effort" somewhere, and it rang a bell.

Spoiler alert

An inventor creates a viewer which allows him to peek at any location on Earth. He uses it to make documentary movies. However, his invention can also be used to explore time. He makes movies which record the conversations of world leaders and show exactly how and why wars got started. He makes movies which show Jesus Christ and Buddha.

As I reread my bald recounting of the plot, it seems like nothing out of the ordinary. But Sherred was simply a very good writer. His story manages to make you actually feel what it might be like to know that you finally have a chance to uncover the truth behind all the lies you've ever been told: that perhaps justice will finally be done.

This made the ending, in which governments which have fallen across the world are simply replaced by an even nastier government which seizes the machine and destroys all copies of the films, tremendously powerful.

I wonder what the Pol Pot commission in Cambodia will ever achieve. We have no miraculous viewer which would tell us who was really guilty, and if there were it would be promptly destroyed.

Attended meeting of local bloggers

Last night I went to a bar on Sisowath and met some local bloggers. Although they were stunned by my eloquent exposition of the proofs that George W. Bush is the Antichrist, some of them indeed edging away from me in their eagerness to spread the word, a few of them managed to chat.

I've added some of their blogs to my links page: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/nolist/links01.html]

One of them had an interesting theory. He said that Hun Sen tolerates condemnation in the English-language press because that's all that foreign donors ever look at: they get the impression that there's freedom of the press, when actually *Khmer-language* media is controlled rigidly.

Bill agreed with me that it doesn't make much sense to sign up for hosting physically inside Cambodia. If your users happened to be going into the same ISP as operates your server, they might get slightly better performance, but in general everybody has to communicate via a government-controlled central router, and after that they might as well go to the US. Oh, and he said it's 50 USD/year to get a .kh domain name. Whoo. What a ripoff.

2005 Jul 09 [ Sat ]

Massive cheating in US public schools

...by the teachers and principals.

The "No Child Left Behind" program mandated many controls on school performance, but many schools are systematically cheating to get around them, and the educational administrations are turning a blind eye: www.reason.com [http://www.reason.com/0506/fe.ls.how.shtml]

My local newspaper lists area schools that have met No Child Left Behind goals and are compliant with federal law. The article will tell you that every subgroup, from low-income children and Hispanics to special education children, is proficient in reading and in math. It will not say that in California, in order for yearly progress for each subgroup to be considered adequate, only 13 percent of the children in each group must be proficient.

2005 Jul 04 [ Mon ]

The "One Campaign to Make Poverty History"

For those who were unaware of it, this is a massive public-relations effort to make people think it's a good idea to wipe the debts of third-world nations off the books of Western governments.

The reports of this in the media have been uniformly respectful, but John Pilger supplies an appropriate dose of left-oriented iconoclasm: prisonplanet.com [http://prisonplanet.com/Pages/Jul05/030705Bono.html]

I have at least as low an opinion of this media extravaganza for boneheads as Pilger does, but my analysis is more right-wing (I did not see any of my arguments below in the page referred to above.)

Pilger proceeds from the assumption that Western countries have some sort of obligation to help African countries. I don't think that, or any variation of that.

However, it seems to me that even if you *do* want to give money to African (or other) nations, would you really want to forgive debt as the "One Campaign" demands?

Let's remember how all this debt was built up. Western administrations saw that their electorates would support aid to underdeveloped nations, so they had money to play with. International finance companies then "developed" deals with the donee nations where Western companies were given export guarantees from their governments. These little-remarked agreements meant that if the donee governments were to default, the companies would be paid by the Western governments (ie their taxpayers).

Needless to say, the finance companies, the Western contractors, and untold layers of middlemen made billions out of this trade, which was *by definition* a dangerous deal because it *required* the export guarantees. I've never seen a statistic for the proportion of these deals which ended up covered by the guarantees.

The real beneficiaries of the proportion of the expenditure which was not swallowed by the manufacturers and middlemen were not the people of these nations but their utterly corrupt ruling classes. Ridiculous projects were half-built and left to rust. (It was often *preferable* that the deals never produce any revenue, along the lines of the situation in "Springtime for Hitler".)

I'm not referring to the general problem of charity here – the issue of whether goods provided without payment actually benefit the donee at all. (For instance, if food aid is sent in an emergency, that means local dealers who *do* have food do not make windfall profits. That *ensures* that local dealers *do not* maintain stocks for an emergency...) I'm referring to outright fraud, criminal fraud, operated more in the City of London than on the continent of Africa.

As long as Western countries maintain that debt on their books, the plutocrats who made billions every year from these utterly corrupt deals have at the backs of their minds the idea that they might be called to account. How much safer they would feel if these debts could be wiped away (at the taxpayer's expense).

And how wonderful if a hundred nations across the globe no longer had to make debt payments. Then they could apply for *new* loans!

It's conceivable that some of those involved were just naive. I was once chatting at a party in Boston about the AK47, and saying it was handy for home defense. A young man, somewhat well-fed, piped up and said he had several at his house on Cape Cod. I asked him how he could afford them, and he said he worked for an international bank. He said he had been involved in a deal in Malaysia, and said he liked the Malaysians because they had the same sexual interests as him. I pressed him for how he knew, and he said that when he had gone there on a business trip they had supplied him with a woman who was well-trained in his preferences. I thought he was joking and made some remark about the Malaysian government's incentive to quietly investigate his preferences before discreetly fulfilling them, but he became affronted and I did not go on.

I imagine most of the stars who associated themselves with this criminal fraud-conspiracy are too boneheaded to know what they are associating themselves with. I am fairly certain however that Bob Geldof *does* know.

2005 Jun 02 [ Thu ]

What do ads in photo magazines really mean?

When you look at the ads in photo magazines, you get the impression from these full-page glossy ads that these are real, large, established companies. You get a different impression when you call up to place an order and you hear a TV and a crying child in the background, and talk to someone who sounds like a grumpy grandpa dealing with the phone for his unmarried-mother daughter while he really wants to watch Mannix.

This guy has taken the trouble to track down and take pictures of the registered addresses for all the photo stores in Brooklyn: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~donwiss/pictures/BrooklynStores/]

While browsing through this catalog of fleapits it occurred to me maybe there is a simple reason for the epidemic of "call!" entries in the ads, where the price is supposed to be. It wasn't some sort of magical special deal with the camera manufacturers where they weren't *allowed* to list prices: these companies are so picayune they can only afford to design *one ad*, and they have to keep re-running it.

2005 Apr 17 [ Sun ]

Execution by injection far from paniless

New Scientist article: www.newscientist.com [http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7269]

I was basically in favor of the death penalty until they did that study – I think it was in Michigan – of DNA evidence on *convicted* prisoners. About 50% of them – the *already convicted* prisoners – were found *not* to match the DNA evidence.

Now, a capital trial attracts a *lot* more effort and "due process" than most other trials. So what can we conclude about the standard of competence/good faith for *all other* trials?

Or other aspects of the process, such as the execution itself? There is no feedback on whether the process met its goals at all – assuming the executee doesn't survive! The article link posted above makes the excellent point that when you use muscle relaxant – a standard element of the process – you make it impossible to easily detect whether the pain has been suppressed by the anesthetic. And we're talking about a *lot* of sodium thiopental here – some resale value perhaps?

Doctors for decades ignored patient reports that they had been awake and in enormous pain during surgery. Why would prison authorities go out of their way to establish whether an executee had been treated humanely?

2005 Mar 25 [ Fri ]

Death by starvation hardly "mercy killing"?

I am in favor of mercy killing, and I certainly wouldn't want to be maintained alive if I had severe injuries. I've seen old people with dementia, and I wouldn't want to live that kind of "life" either.

On the other hand, I've never seen why the medical profession wimps out and kills people only by withdrawing life support. They *know* that's going to kill the patient eventually, but presumably it makes the *doctor* feel better if he doesn't positively stick the hypo in, or whatever. (I remember an old sf show about a totalitarian state in which dissidents were routinely killed by lethal injection, and the prisoner asks why the doctor bothered to wipe disinfectant on his arm before the injection; the doctor does not reply, but we realize he does it to help himself to still feel like a doctor.)

If I had to be executed, I'd prefer the Thai style (although I think I read they're transitioning to lethal injection): bound to a post and machine-gunned in the back. Of course, the legendary Thai incompetence could screw that up too. I remember a cartoon in Khai Hua Ror about it: the executioner is clearly inexperienced and is trembling as he approaches the (mounted, pre-aimed) gun. The prisoner drily remarks "It's my first time too, actually." But the pre-aiming should cut out the problem with most executions with a firearm, ie that the shooter cannot bear to watch the prisoner and closes his eyes when he fires. Ouch!

But I think almost anything practical would be better than lengthy starvation. Someone agrees with me: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/march2005/240305dehydrationdeath.htm]

A big Indian guy with a pillow would be a lot better than the hypocrisy and lack of moral fibre of the current situation.

2005 Mar 06 [ Sun ]

Site has selection of funny quotes from irc/IM chat

www.bash.org [http://www.bash.org/?top]

You have to have some techy training to understand a lot of the jokes because they depend on recognizing the kind of mistakes that bonehead newbies make (but of course we were all that way at one time).

The following quotes are a little more x-rated than I usually run but I think they're worth it.

#262353 +(4403)- [X]

<MooseOnDaLoose> Hey Mike

<goatboy> what?

<MooseOnDaLoose> Pussy.

<goatboy> er?

<MooseOnDaLoose> Pussy.

<goatboy> and?

<MooseOnDaLoose> Pussy.

<goatboy> ...

<MooseOnDaLoose> Pussy.

<goatboy> i dont get it

<MooseOnDaLoose> AND YOU NEVER WILL.

<goatboy> bastard

Here's another quote that you don't meed tech background to understand:

#15641 +(3554)- [X]

<superwoman> I had a boyfriend once that made me suck him off while I had a mouthful of beer.

<GrandCow> HAHAHAHA that was me bitch!

<superwoman> DANNY?!?!?!

<GrandCow> MOM?!?!?!?!

2005 Feb 12 [ Sat ]

The difference between me and the New York Times

In the course of a Slashdot thread on blogging: slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/articles/05/02/11/2049220.shtml] a poster made the following comment:

Big Media (NYTimes, etc) long term are in no better shape than record or film companies. They claim to be the arbiters of intellectual property but in reality we see that once you eliminate manufacturing and distribution costs, they are no better or no different than a guy in his basement. These firms were not in fact media firms but manufacturers and distributors.

There was a lot of discussion of this "disintermediation" thing a few years ago, but I guess it died down a lot after the dotcoms bombed. I think a lot of things that were blue-sky then are actually starting to happen.

After all, exactly *why* do we respect the NYT? Is it really because we or anybody else has actually been able to *evaluate* their journalistic standards? In fact, haven't there been cases where the NYT has simply lied about its own practices? Really, what they have is money and power.

On the other hand, if you're reading this *at* the New York Times, I don't mean it! Please keep printing my letters.

2005 Jan 30 [ Sun ]

How to handle to-do lists without a PDA

A few years ago I used a PDA religiously for all note-taking. It was doable but after a while I got tired of nagging problems with data entry and started doing updates on the computer. I'm still doing that – I guess – but I'm three months behind!

What I'm currently using is a little plastic wallet made by using a pair of scissors to cut up a plastic letter-size folder. You can fit it, with ten or twenty 3x5 cards inside, in most breast pockets (though it often pokes geekily above the top of the pocket).

I thought I had the idea myself – and still have not found anything similar available for sale in Phnom Penh, but it turns out it's one of the ideas discussed on the blog "43folders": www.43folders.com [http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/introducing_the.html]

Here's another bunch of ideas: blog.fastcompany.com [http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2003/12/12/where_do_you_get_your_ideas_from_ii.html] www.innovationtools.com [http://www.innovationtools.com/Articles/ArticleDetails.asp?a=113]

2004 Nov 23 [ Tue ]

The "Deer Hunter" in Birchwood Wisconsin -- or "First Blood"?

Several papers carried the story of a multiple shooting incident in Birchwood Wisconsin, in which apparently some hunters on private property encountered a Hmong (for people with little familiarity with SE Asia I should point out that the Hmong are a people who used to live across the borders of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, and who were enlisted as allies by the US in the Vietnam War era), and after some sort of altercation five people wound up shot dead and others wounded, but the Hmong was picked up later by police. www.canoe.ca [http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/EdmontonSun/News/2004/11/23/726855.html]

From the brief info available, it's hard to know what happened, but it reminds me a lot of "First Blood". If you were armed in the woods, and two guys pointed rifles at you, what would you do? The Hmong was reported to be too young to have actually been in combat during the Vietnam war, but the date he came to the US was not stated. Hmong have been coming to the US in small numbers almost continuously, via Cambodia and Thailand. Conceivably he may have been used to confrontations in which you would rather die than be taken prisoner.

On the other hand, he was reportedly armed with an SKS. I'm not even sure that's a legal hunting weapon in Wisconsin: while it is not a true assault rifle, because it has an integral 10-round magazine loaded from a stripper clip, and has no selective-fire full-auto option, I suspect it was handier than a bolt-action rifle or pump-action shotgun when he needed it. On the other other hand, if you don't carry a scary-looking firearm like the SKS, maybe things don't escalate as fast.

Anyway, I always feel sympathy for the Hmong. Like the Kurds, their loyalty and commitment have been cruelly abused by US policy.

2004 Sep 26 [ Sun ]

Speculation about asteroid impact measures

A recent Slashdot discussion about the announcement of a close approach: science.slashdot.org [http://science.slashdot.org/science/04/09/25/1932215.shtml]

(Incidentally, the name "Toutatis" of this asteroid sounds like something Captain Haddock would say to a bunch of "bibliomanes".)

Several posters rightly point out that using a nuclear bomb to blow up an incoming asteroid doesn't help because all but very small fragments will go straight through the atmosphere with insignificant ablation, and even if you pulverise it to *dust* the dust *still* has the same incoming velocity and kinetic energy, so now all the energy is converted into raising the temperature of the atmosphere, probably to several hundred degrees – a suboptimal outcome.

Another point occurs to me howeevr. Surely it might be possible to arrange that the detonation of the antiasteroid device splits the incoming object into multiple parts all of which are *slowly moving apart from each other*. If you hit the asteroid a few days or weeks before the collision, don't you have time for the fragments to have spread out by multiples of the size of the planet? So that the cross-section of the incoming object "matrix" is very sparse?

I'm too lazy to do the calculation of the amount of energy required to provide say one m/s on a respectable-size asteroid. Also, it may well be that it is just impractical to design a system which will reliably transfer the energy of a nuclear device into kinetic energy rather than simple heating, when we can't even predict the structure of the incoming object. Also, perhaps the system is a tough sell: "Whaddya mean, there's a *probability* of still getting hit??"

Still, I'd like to see the point addressed.

It also occurs to me that when you create the "matrix", it doesn't just go away. It is very unlikely that an incoming object on a *random* course will intersect with the planet; it is far more likely that the object is coming in on the plane of the ecliptic from *behind* the planet (as the planet orbits around the sun), so that it has the maximum time to be captured by the planet's gravity well. The object fragments would *not* be given escape velocity from their own center of gravity (hmmm – well, maybe they might, but like I said I'm too lazy to do the math), so they would basically continue to hang around Earth's orbit, with an extremely high chance of intersecting again.

So humans might save the Earth from annihilation in 2036, but then realize that unless they maintain space capability continuously for the next 40,000 years (in order to deal with each incoming fragment), the Earth would be pulverized every two or three years. Hmmm.

2004 Sep 24 [ Fri ]

The maikimo.net weblog

maikimo.net [http://maikimo.net/weblog/]

I happened across this guy when I was looking for info on port forwarding (I was considering setting it up to see if I could get around some sort of browser block on my local machine). He seems generally clueful about such technical stuff, and he is nearly as anti-Bush as I am.

He is also a committed Christian.

A lot of people who are used to voting Democrat seem to think that Christians are per se committed Republican voters. Libertarians often think the same way. But it turns out there is a surprisingly wide coalition of people who are against war and lies and hatred. (Kerry, of course, says he would have fought the war much more successfully... riiight.)

I also quite like his site layout, as well as his cheerful admission of problems:

IE layout wonkage

Oh, bother. Somewhere along the line I've broken my main page layout in Win IE6. It's fine in Gecko-based browsers like Firefox and in Safari. I almost never use Windows or IE any more, and had forgotten until today to fire 'em up for a layout check.

(Hmph – in order to paste that in I had to fix his non-ASCII apostrophes – I would be more censorious if my own site hadn't had that problem till recently.)

2004 Sep 03 [ Fri ]

Using your cellphone on an aircraft

I've heard apparently insightful ideas on both points of view on this: that cell phones can interfere with navigation and hit multiple towers; or that Flight 93 allowed several hijack victims to have long conversations, so evidently they work fine.

Here's a Slashdot discussion which goes over some old ground, now that a gizmo has been proposed to allow people to use their own cellphones after all: science.slashdot.org [http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/03/004233]

Reading it, it occurred to me that my own theory – that Flight 93 had been shot down by some hapless National Guard airman who hadn't been informed by the Illuminati to let the plane continue – could be wrong.

Perhaps all those people *trying to use their cellphones* made the plane dive into the ground.

The shoot-down theory: www.mirror.co.uk [http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12192317&method=full&siteid=50143]

2004 Jul 27 [ Tue ]

Links to pool theory guides

I have been looking for a simple introductory book on pool, but can't find one. They don't seem to have them in Thailand, even in Thai. It really bugs me when I'm watching pool on TV and the commentators say "well now all he has to do is a simple stun shot!" and by golly I've tried to do a stun a hundred times and succeeded only by chance.

I've occasionally tried to find good basic instructional sites, but they tend to be a little fragmented and aimed above my (primeval slime) level. This site for instance is very good, but he concentrates on where the *cue* ball goes after the hit, when I can't even be sure how to get the *object* ball to go where I want. www.engr.colostate.edu [http://www.engr.colostate.edu/~dga/pool/]

One of his pages might be interesting even to someone with little interest in pool: he analyzes several movies about pool games, and it turns out that the shots in, for example, "The Hustler" are actually real and you can try most of them yourself: www.engr.colostate.edu [http://www.engr.colostate.edu/%7Edga/pool/bd_articles/aug04.pdf]

The following link for snooker (real snooker, not 8-ball, which Thais call snooker... when I was asking Thai shop assistants about books I absent-mindedly called it "pool" a couple of times creating even more incomprehension than usual) instruction is more like my level: www.snookergames.co.uk [http://www.snookergames.co.uk/tuition.html]

Funny article about pool physics which stops just as it is getting good: www.billiardworld.com [http://www.billiardworld.com/physics.html]

The same guy has an article which *does* get to the issue: of how to do a stop/draw shot. I wonder if I can figure this out? www.billiardworld.com [http://www.billiardworld.com/draw.html]

Frequently-asked questions for pool/billiards: www.faqs.org [http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sports/billiards/faq/]

Some interesting links, eg "easy pool tutor": www.knowledgehound.com [http://www.knowledgehound.com/topics/pool.htm]

2004 Jul 22 [ Thu ]

"Multiverse theory" from Propagandamatrix.com

Propagandamatrix usually has paranoid stories about politics, eg: www.whatreallyhappened.com [http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/goldstein.html] which suggests that Osama bin Laden's real name is Emmanuel Goldstein.

Occasionally however it goes over the edge into the kind of all-encompassing dread which makes life worth living. For instance, here's a story about the multiverse theory, which suggests that not only is this not the main universe, it's probably not even a real universe but only a simulation: www.propagandamatrix.com [http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/july2004/220704multiversetheory.htm]

It includes a link to a nice little site which has a lot of links to the background to this concept: www.simulation-argument.com [http://www.simulation-argument.com/]

A few of my postings on similar themes:

www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Miscellaneous/flyingcar01.html]

www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Miscellaneous/altworlds02.html]

www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Miscellaneous/narnia01.html]

www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Miscellaneous/altworlds01.html]

2004 Jul 17 [ Sat ]

How to get a mechanical or electronic design fabricated

Over the last ten years most small PCB – printed-circuit-board – manufacturers have moved to the web: using their design software, you can create a design, upload it and get a fully fabbed board including plated-through holes and gold pads in a few days.

Now there's the "eMachineShop" system which can do the same thing for mechanical parts. You can design a part in their 3D software, specify a finish and whatnot, and it just shows up. Of course, you have to pay them the big bucks.

Article by Bill Machrone in PC Magazine: www.pcmag.com [http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1621252,00.asp]

There may be a few naive people out there who need to be reminded that if you design a part using software that only works with one supplier, you would need to redesign (and re-debug) that part to shift to a different supplier.

Slashdot discussion: slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/articles/04/07/16/2030222.shtml]

Sample quote (I wrote the warning above *before* reading this, I promise):

About Pad2Pad... (Score:5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 16, @08:35PM (#9723121)

I work in the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) industry, and I've looked at the Pad2pad website before. The problem with them is this - they give you software to create a board in, but it only outputs in their proprietary format. That means your design can only be fabricated by pad2pad, not by anyone else. So, once you've designed in their software, you are locked into ordering boards from them. You cannot order them anywhere else unless you re-design it in another software package.

There are older DOS freeware PCB layout packages called easytrax and autotrax available from Protel [www.protel.com [http://www.protel.com/]] as well as a free 30 day demo of their latest. There is also a Linux PCB layout package available. [bach.ece.jhu.edu [http://bach.ece.jhu.edu/~haceaton/pcb/]] These packages output gerber data, which is the industry standard data format for circuit boards. It is also an open format (rumor has it /. people like that sort of thing). This means that you can send your design to any PCB shop in the world, and they can read it as easily as you can work with a *.bmp.

You can even send your gerber data to pad2pad, and they can make your board from that, though they would prefer if you used their software. After all, if you don't, you'll be able to get the boards make somewhere else if you don't like their service.

And that would be so unfashionable - doncha know proprietary lock-in is all the rage these days?

2004 Jul 12 [ Mon ]

Modafinil (Provigil) -- a drug for wakefulness without a high

This sounds like it could really help me. I've always been wary of recreational drugs – I can't really even deal with the effects of caffeine. But with Modafinil (trade name Provigil, by Cephalon) the stories say specifically that there is no euphoria. (On the other hand, there *does* seem to be a craving. Both cocaine and heroin were initially reported as being free of addictive effects.)

www.washingtonpost.com [http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A61282-2002Jun16&notFound=true]

slate.msn.com [http://slate.msn.com/id/2079113/]

Funnily enough both the journalists who wrote the stories above based their story on taking Modafinil while *writing* the story. Hmmm.

One great application is already obvious: the trip from the US to Asia. DC to Bangkok has taken me about 30 hours from the airport to the hotel room. It would be great if I could feel confident of feeling alert the whole time, especially if there is no crash (fatigue-induced I mean!) at the far end. Also, it might make some slack available for foulups. I could imagine a 2025 flight being cancelled with another one available at 0655 or 2025 tomorrow: tired already, I would probably not try to struggle with my luggage, find a hotel, get a meal, try to sleep and get back to the airport at 0655, but with Modafinil I might be able to hang out in the coffee bar all night. So I could save a day as well as hotel and taxi charges.

2004 Jul 11 [ Sun ]

NASA had scheme for saucer-shaped craft -- in 1999

In a Slashdot discussion on using lasers to beam energy to lifting bodies in order to accelerate reaction mass, one poster gave a link to this NASA page:

science.nasa.gov [http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/prop16apr99_1.htm]

My goal has been to cut the cost of getting to space by a factor of 1,000 using a system that is completely green," [Prof. Leik Myrabo] explained of his passion for the past three decades. Since 1972, he has been building on an idea developed by Arthur Kantrowitz to use lasers to launch satellites. Myrabo introduced a variation using the atmosphere as the propellant heated by a laser. At higher altitude and at 5.5 times the speed of sound, as the air thins, the craft would use a small supply of on board hydrogen, still heated by the remote laser beam.

This seems quite interesting but sadly dates back to 1999. I found a website apparently set up to attract investors, but their "Breaking News" section has this as the most recent story:

December 2000

A laser named CORA, powerful enough to launch LTI's prototypes to the edge of space, is being shipped to White Sands Missile Range. LTI is planning to test a future set of lightcraft on CORA to set new altitude records beyond 1000 feet!

Oh well. Myrabo is still attending conferences: www.space-access.org [http://www.space-access.org/updates/sa04schd.html]

There were a few more hits in Google that *seemed* to have more recent dates, but the material actually dates back to 2000.

2004 Jul 03 [ Sat ]

My suspicions about Joan Bakewell interview

Joan Bakewell is a famous and senior manager at the BBC. Yesterday I saw an interview with her ("Hard Talk") on BBC World.

One of the reasons she is famous is because of her affair with Harold Pinter (the playwright) (while she was married to someone else).

At one point the interviewer was making the point that things have improved a lot for women since she started her career; for instance it used to be BBC policy to prevent both husband and wife working at the BBC. Bakewell responded that she believed it was still the case that the policy was to prevent them working in the same department, based on "a history of unfortunate incidents".

The funny thing was that there was a very obvious cut at that point and the interview was on a completely different topic. I'm pretty sure Bakewell and the interviewer exchanged hearty chortles over their inside knowledge of several such "incidents", and then, wiping the tears of laughter from their eyes, concurred that that's never going on the air.

2004 Jun 27 [ Sun ]

O tempora, o mores -- Larry King and CNN promos

I suppose I could put "o tempora o mores" as a heading for 99% of my posts... anyway what I'm grouching about here is a promo that has been running fifty million times on CNN for its various feature newsclowns. What is striking about the promo is how incredibly weak the message is in most cases. I took the time to note down the statement intoned by Larry King (their celebrity interviewer):

A great interview is when the subject responds to the questions asked

Does this mean anything at all? What on earth did King, or the gamma who selected it for the blurb, think it means?

I searched for the line because I wanted to look at the text of the entire blurb, but all I could find was this: examinedlife.typepad.com [http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/05/department_of_f.html] which is definitely unimpressed also.

I have heard a theory about jingles that they are *deliberately* written with musical flaws because if the jingle is too smooth it is too easy to tune out. Well, CNN certainly made me pay attentin to their promo – it led me to conclude that King or CNN's marketing department is cretinous.

2004 Jun 26 [ Sat ]

Detecting collusion in pool championships -- my theory of games

One of the few games I enjoy watching on TV is pool (even though the color bandwidth, at least as it arrives at my TV, is too low to accurately display the color of the balls, except in closeup).

Having watched an embarrassingly large number of games, my ever-paranoid mind found a new issue to worry about. I started to notice that when a higher-ranked player plays a lower-ranked player, he *usually* loses several racks at the start of the game. After he's about 3 racks down, he starts playing much better. It's truly unusual for the better player to edge out the lesser player at a consistent rate through the game.

This first became obvious to me with Efren "The Magician" Reyes. I guess I was most suspicious about him because, as his nickname suggests, he can when necessary come up with *astonishing* shots; indeed he does so once or twice on most of the games I've seen him play. I started to think "hey waitaminute. If he can do that sometimes, how can he possibly play so badly at other times?" And then I started noticing that the "other times" were always the *beginning* of the game.

My theory is that the organizers of the championships collude with the players and say "the punters don't want to see the top guys just rolling over the weaker guys every time. Here's your 'handicap' so that the games are more fun to watch".

Now that theory assumes that there is some *definition* of what makes a game fun to watch. And that's a really interesting question. When I think about it, I don't really *know* what's fun about watching (or even playing) a game. It does indeed seem to me however that a relatively well-matched game is more fun to watch.

(Another issue that affects viewer enjoyment, but not relevant to collusion, is how expert *either* player is. I was watching a snooker game on Thai TV recently and neither player was up to the standard I'm used to. It didn't help that I couldn't understand the Thai commentary, but really the basic play was so much less competent that I couldn't detect what shot the players had *intended* in many cases. In particular, they frequently just slammed the cueball with no apparent plan at all other than "let's see what happens" and I found that *particularly* tedious.)

Now of course I'm too lazy to actually do the work to *prove* my assertion about collusion. It's interesting to think that the normal stats for games only record the *final* score, so even if I somehow tracked down the stats for umpteen games they would not be analyzable for this issue.

However what *could* be done is this: one could analyze the overall stats for each player to determine a ranking (this would not be trivial because his ranking can legitimately shoft with time) and then examine the final scores for each player as a function of the ranking of his opponent. My guess is that for lower-ranked players there would be a clear relationship – ie, without a "handicap", they would score better against lower-ranked opponents – whereas for the top-ranked players like Reyes, the relationship would be much flatter: ie for most opponents he would win by a reltively constant number, and only against truly comparable opponents would there be a strong relationship to their ranking.

I suppose it's conceivable that there could be another explanation, asuming the effect I describe is discernible in the stats: maybe Reyes just doesn't try very hard against an opponent he isn't afraid of. I wonder if one could ask players whether they feel that way.

2004 Jun 08 [ Tue ]

Plots that only work in a movie

I'm using the term "plot" to refer to both the story of a book or movie, and a conspiracy.

One of my cable channels has been interminably rerunning a movie about a father who sees an angel who orders him to kill people around the neighborhood, and who drags his two young sons into the murders.

Now if someone just *told* you he'd seen an angel, there wouldn't be much question, right? You'd blurt out "You're a nutter!" and run off.

But in a movie, *maybe it's a real angel" – so the suspense side of the plot works, at least for a while. (I've never bothered to watch the movie for more than a few minutes, now and then.)

Another example was a TV movie I saw way back, around 1970. It was set in an Italian resort hotel. An Englishman was vacationing there with his wife and daughter, and since at the beginning of the movie he informs the puzzled hotel staff that his wife has been called away and now he is alone with his daughter, the father starts to feel more and more sexually attracted to the daughter and winds up in bed with her.

Even in 1970s England this was a pretty racy plot, so I was hardly surprised that the woman playing the daughter looked distinctly too old for the role. I suppose there are all sorts of restrictions on the type of storyline a minor actor can even be involved with, even if the dirty deed is never shown explicitly.

I was extremely impressed when the denoument turned out to be that *there was no daughter*. The husband and the wife were role-playing for the sake of a forbidden turn-on. The hotel staff were puzzled and disapproving not because of actual incest but because they had been dragged into a kinky farce! Again, this plot only worked *because it was inside a TV movie*. In reality, any onlooker would have known that the female was not fourteen years old.

Dragging my train of thought back to conspiracies, I suppose the relevance is that many conspiracy cover stories only work if the onlooker can be brought to view them not as reality, his own experience of what's possible and plausible can be used, but as some sort of fictional world where anything's possible. Maybe in that world, towelheads can collapse the twin towers.

By which I don't mean there was not real bravery that day. It was clear from the first reports that almost everything the firemen did was wrong, but they didn't know that at the time, and I wouldn't have either.

My T-shirt idea:

NYFD
Forever in our hearts
they climb those stairs
to save us

2004 Jun 03 [ Thu ]

What are those damn slogans they print on T-shirts *good for*?

It has always irritated me that some people wear clothes with commercial slogans on them: usually T-shirts, but sometimes dresses or bags. I find advertising in all forms intrusive, and they add to it for everyone who encounters them.

I recently thought about those who wear *meaningless* slogans. For instance, most of us have heard that English slogans are worn by people who do not *understand* English, and the slogans are often fractured, bizarre or meaningless.

Graffiti artists love to find a *blank* wall to put their graffiti on because it makes their slogan stand out. People who present *meaningless* messages are like the building operators who paint their walls in a random pattern to discourage graffiti artists: they create a sort of "white noise" for the eye, like those gadgets you can buy to mask noise so that you can sleep.

Of course, people who buy these meaningless T-shirts are probably just stupid.

Credit cards from US banks are much less secure than those from elsewhere

Slashdot discussion: slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/02/1919217]

Relatively free of conspiract theories, it has postings from more than one Polish resident whose bank offers far better security than almost any bank in the USA. Poland. Yeesh.

It reminds me of complaints about English plumbing: sewer pipes on the outside, no hot/cold mixer taps, etc. The reason is simple: England got plumbing codes *first*, when a lot of problems hadn't been figured out. Mixer valves, under various error conditions, can siphon contaminated water back into the supply, for instance. I don't know the details, but you probably need to hold various specs in the pipework as well as providing a mixer tap that meets USA specs. At any rate, UK plumbing codes were not updated for a long, long time – out of caution as well as inertia. (For all I know, you *still* can't install a mixer tap in the UK.)

2004 Jun 01 [ Tue ]

The diary of a porn publisher

This guy blogs and does a porn website:

www.sexxxxpics.com [http://www.sexxxxpics.com/blog/]

This guy blogs about Iraq in almost a diametrically opposite way to me (he thinks that it's OK to torture captives, which I only do under certain cuircumstances) but it's still readable and interesting. There are some photos on his site so most people will enjoy it a lot more than mine, although they seem a little tame.

Irritatingly, I didn't see any *technical* stuff about his site. Maybe he doesn't really run one: he just gets paid for links from his blog! ...Oh, I see: this is the link to the porn site: sexxxxpics.com [http://sexxxxpics.com/index.shtml]

If it might worry you, it seems to be mainly hetero S/M.

He seems a little technically clueless generally. He needed a tech to come in and install his new computer for him. Also, his old computer keeps rebooting, which he should be aware sounds like that recent worm, or virus, or whatever it was.

Also, he was spending *days* copying files from his old computer. Why doesn't he just hook up the drive to his new computer? (Because that one doesn't work either.)

2004 May 30 [ Sun ]

The password to launch US ICBMs was "0000000"

Link to Slashdot story: slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/29/2242203]

You might not believe it... anyway there's a lot of good stuff about passwords.

2004 May 29 [ Sat ]

Where is my beautiful flying car?

Another site makes the point that this timeline has not been optimized for turning out like it was supposed to: www.davidszondy.com [http://www.davidszondy.com/future/futurepast.htm]

It's heavy on graphics, but the text is good.

Slashdot discussion of the site: slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/28/1737239]

2004 May 24 [ Mon ]

"Brooklyn Project" by William Tenn

This is a short sf story which I read about forty years ago and still remember. It's referred to in the following Slashdot discussion about the upcoming movie of Ray Bradury's "Sound of Thunder" (as they are both time travel stories).

I don't want to spoil the story for anyone who hasn't read it (the Slashdot mention gives away the ending). I just want to make the point that I haven't seen a single reference to that story since I read it (despite hanging out at sf conventions occasionally) and it gives me a good feeling to know that someone else values and remembers it. (I recently considered Googling for it but decided that the search terms I could remember would be too generic).

Slashdot discussion: slashdot.org [http://slashdot.org/articles/04/05/24/0220236.shtml]

Ranma 1/2 -- a very strange Japanese anime

I have avoided getting into anime, ever since I saw some at sf conventions way back in the seventies and found it both incomprehensible and turgid. I still feel that way about Dragonball-Z.

But today I happened to run across an anime which was incomprehensible *yet fascinating*. (I have the excuse that it was broadcast in Japanese.)

It's the story of Saotome:

Meet Saotome Ranma, a sixteen year old martial artist with a very unusual life. Being cursed by the Jusenkyou springs, he becomes a cute busty red-headed girl when splashed with cold water. It doesn't help at all that some of his rivals, Kunou for example, are in love with his female side.

That's excerpted from here: www.aaanime.net [http://www.aaanime.net/ranma/]

It vaguely reminds me of an episode of Xena Warrior Princess, which was set in the present: all the characters had been reincarnated in *each other's* bodies, largely with gender reversal. It was not insanely great (the way the makers of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" might have achieved) but it was strangely affecting, referring as it does to the whole concept of accidence. How might we have developed in another body, or another country?

I just saw in the paper that David Reimer, whose circumcision surgery was so botched that his penis was removed and he was raised as a girl, committed suicide on 2004-05-04. His case of course was absolutely appalling and we can hardly imagine being in such a terrible position, but we are all expected to play a role, and in a game, which we did not choose. seattletimes.nwsource.com [http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001927590_reimer13.html]

2004 May 22 [ Sat ]

More confirmation that credit-card companies don't care about fraud

I've noticed before that credit-card companies have an oddly supine reaction when I call them up breathlessly excited about some problem.

Slashdot discussion confirming why this is: ask.slashdot.org [http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/04/05/21/0135204.shtml]

Phlogivity -- or an inverse theory of gravity

I have a vague recollection that an alternative theory of gravity is that mass does not actually attract, but actually *shields* a universal *repulsive* force. (Currently dark matter, and dark energy, are invoked to explain the fact that the galaxies are moving apart and *accelerating*.)

I made a *very tiny* attempt to find this theory on the net but couldn't. I think it's related to the Mach hypothesis. "Phlogivity" is a name I just made up, from the mediaeval "phlogiston" theory of combustion. (Phlogiston is the heat and light given off by burning: it has negative mass, which is why the products of combustion weigh more than they did before. For a long time the phlogiston theory matched results quite well.)

Actually, I can't visualize the effect clearly enough to see whether it would really produce equivalent results, especially at a short displacement from irregular objects.

Unfortunately any experiment to *test* the hypothesis would involve a mass detector at a short distance away from an irregularly shaped mass. I vaguely envision a rotor with four arms. On two, radially opposite, arms, there are smooth, I guess cylindrical weights. On the other two arms there are weights with the same mass *but which have some sort of hole in them* such that as the rotor rotates a gravitiational sensor placed next to the circumference of the weights is briefly *unshielded* by the weight (mass).

We could then record an AC signal from the detector which should on the normal theory of gravity match for the two pairs of arms, but on the shielding "phlogivity" theory will show a blip as the hole passes next to the sensor.

As I say, as I can't really do the math on the geometry suggested by the phlogivity theory, I can't really choose a design for the hole (or slit) which would differentiate the results between the theories. However, I think it would be quite easy to *experiment* with different configurations.

You could easily null out vibration by using four identical masses, etc.

2004 May 18 [ Tue ]

Another option for "disposable" credit cards

I have posted before that American Express has an option for this. www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Miscellaneous/creditcards1.html]

Now I see from a Slashdot discussion that MBNA has something similar – maybe better:

www.mbna.com [http://www.mbna.com/creditcards/]

yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/05/18/0128201.shtml]

2004 May 17 [ Mon ]

Another thought about the pyramids

Watching a breathless fluff show on Discovery today I heard the announcer call one of the Pyramids mankind's oldest stone building. It occurred to me that probably what it is is the oldest *surviving* stone building. It survives because it was so badly overdesigned. There were probably *plenty* of previous, and subsequent, stone buildings that were sensibly designed for a limited period... like 500 years!

The program also suggested that the earliest pyramids were more prone to deterioration because their sides had an excessive slope, but I noticed that South American pyramids were far steeper. Oh well: they've only had to survive about a half or a third as long.

2004 May 14 [ Fri ]

An interesting experiment to demonstrate the existence of parallel worlds

Slashdot discussion: science.slashdot.org [http://science.slashdot.org/science/04/05/14/0324256.shtml?tid=133&tid=134&tid=186]

Using just a LED pointer one can carry out an experiment which, according to the physicist David Deutsch, demonstrates the existence of parallel worlds as the simplest explanation for the results.

I particularly liked the following joke comment:

You bastards! (Score:5, Funny) by Merovign (557032) on Friday May 14, @03:47AM (#9148722) science.slashdot.org [http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=107550&cid=9148722] (www.merovign.com [http://www.merovign.com/)]

I tried this, and everything changed! I'm fat! My beautiful wife is gone! My beautiful aircar is gone! All of my stuff is crammed into this stupid apartment!

I can't even find a link to the nearest spaceport on Google!

How do I get back home?!?!?!?!?!

A few years ago I thought I was the only guy in the world who wondered where his aircar had gone.

I guess before that, people wondered why they never moored dirigibles to the Empire State building.

Btw, I think "My Beautiful Wife" is a reference to a pop song by David Byrne (Talking Heads). Lyrics (title: Once in a Lifetime): www.thismustbetheplace.net [http://www.thismustbetheplace.net/talking-heads-albums-remain-in-light-lyrics.asp]

It is probably also an ironic reference to the inability of Slashdot readers to get laid, at least in this universe.

Incidentally, there was a long time in the sixties and seventies when I thought this timeline was becoming dangerously unlikely and we would start to notice various milieu infringement effects. However, the current political situation does not seem unlikely at all. It is perfectly straightforward: it just happens to be very very bad.

2004 May 12 [ Wed ]

Some links about my aliens/anaesthesia posting

A couple of days ago I made a posting speculating that some cases where a subject has a kidnapped-by-space-aliens memory could be a result of anaesthesia mixups.

It occurred to me that I had not provided any links to the occurrence of surgery where the anaesthetist immobilizes the patient while providing zero pain relief: 129.67.60.7 [http://129.67.60.7/Uploads/DynamicText/pandit.pdf]

Also: www.institute-shot.com [http://www.institute-shot.com/anesthesia_and_surgery.htm] which has some interesting studies and speculation on peculiar memory effects due to anaesthesia.

In finding these links, I ran across something I hadn't known before: doctors *deliberately* carried out surgery on infants without anaesthesia, until the sixties. They had some kind of superstition that infants felt no pain (probably as a result of the necessity to have a pretext for the Jewish practice of circumcision, which is otherwise – or if you think about it for a minute – barbaric). Apparently pain relief was finally authorized in 1999. www.cirp.org [http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/chamberlain/]

Circumcision pain: www.cirp.org [http://www.cirp.org/library/pain/]

Ludicrous pomposity and blockheadedness in British medical profession: www.johnpowell.net [http://www.johnpowell.net/pages/sixties.htm]

2004 May 09 [ Sun ]

A boring explanation for the "kidnapped by space aliens" thing

The whole "recovered memory" field has become unpopular over the last few years, for several reasons. One reason was that people realized that children could easily be induced to remember nonexistent abuse (or anything else). Another reason was that when child-abuse scandals were finally investigated properly, the strong pressures and incentives for the prosecution became clear.

On the other hand, an interesting scientific point also became clear: there was no plausible scientific reality to *forgetting* memories which are interesting enough to remember later.

I wondered about this with UFO abduction stories, although of course space aliens might be able to do anything they like to one's mind (so why don't they do a less half-assed job?).

I had always thought about the similarity of the "anal probe" stories to an *ordinary hospital environment*. Very often when you're in a hospital bed, you're semiconscious and full of tranquillizers: you might have any number of distortions of perception. If they involve Barney the dinosaur turning into your gym teacher, you can't sell the story to the Enquirer. But doctors and nurses who look three feet tall and stick things up your bottom every two hours are a college fund.

But for the "anal probe" stuff, the hospital idea doesn't explain *forgetting and then remembering*.

Recently another idea occurred to me which could tie everything together. When an anaesthetist prepares you for surgery, he gives you not just one drug, but a mixture. Each drug has different effects; you can't use just one, even though they have somewhat similar effects, because you'd need a (more usually) lethal dosage. In particular, you get a soporific, such as morphine, in combination with curare, which is a paralyzing agent.

Curare seems strange, but the argument is that your body's autonomic response – ie, even if you were totally unconscious throughout – would cause muscle reactions during surgery – a very bad idea. Enough morphine to still such reactions without using any curare would certainly stop your heart – another suboptimal outcome.

The problem is that there have been a number of documented cases where by some mixup the patient has received only the paralyzing agent and not the soporific! It's incredibly awful – you suffer all the pain of the surgery and you can't move a muscle to let them know! They may detect higher pulse rate or something but it doesn't cross their minds that you're suffering. (It's hard enough to convince your doctor of that when you can yell right at him in his office.)

The medical profession's initial response was of course to hush it up. In all published cases, the victims had to overcome a barrage of bland denials, and only succeeded in their lawsuits because they happened to retain information about the other events during the surgery.

More recently, I have the impression – my paranoid suspicion only – that anaesthetists have started adding drugs with the same mode of action as the "date rape drug" Rohypnol to the cocktail. So even if you suffer ghastly unbearable pain during the surgery, you can't remember it the next day and sue.

Well, back to anal probes. My guess is that the weird cocktail of drugs, many of which have powerful and under-investigated effects on the memory, is what causes the otherwise-implausible "recovered memory" effects. And it might well cause the memory to become disconnected from the actual occurrence of the events which are being (mis-)remembered.

2004 Apr 23 [ Fri ]

Voight-Kampff test administered to SF candidates

The "Wave Magazine" had the excellent idea of administering the same test used in "Blade Runner" to San Francisco mayoral candidates.

www.thewavemag.com [http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=24031]

The responses are amazingly like the ones in the movie; the interviewer was quick enough to adapt his own responses to match the movie detective, too. (Perhaps they cheated a little.)

It reminds me that a large part of the original *book*, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", dealt with not the difficulty of identifying androids, but the difficulty of *real* humans proving that they *are* real. A few weeks ago I made the point to some guy in Phnom Penh that his accent no longer sounded like that of someone born in England (he'd actually moved with his family to France as a teenager) and after denying it more and more heatedly he started offering to fight me. Perhaps I shouldn't hang out at Vietnamese shophouses where the proprietor, on greeting me, says "now one of the requirements here is you have to like to drink". Oh well, I guess *I* failed the empathy test.

2004 Apr 21 [ Wed ]

Hasbro releases downloadable PDFs of their "Monopoly" money

www.hasbro.com [http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly/pl/page.treasurechest/dn/default.cfm]

I got this from a link at: boingboing.net [http://boingboing.net/]

It seems very cool that Hasbro is making this stuff available. One reason I followed the link from boingboing was that I wondered if Hasbro would have an *explanation* but if so it's not on that page.

For some reason the page printed out at some sort of miniature size, ten bills per page. You'd need to resize it somehow to get the bills the "standard" size (or did they downsize the dimensions of the bills on a recommendation from Arthur Andersen?). The quality of the graphic seems excellent, certainly good enough to make up fake bills for your next sex party.

I have been planning for months to make available some flashcards with Khmer characters and/or phrases, but keep running into little difficulties. Last night, for instance, it turns out that Open Office *does* trap some of the "US-International" keycodes, eg ctrl-alt-A. Also, several pieces of software have no option for trimming the top and bottom leading (you have to print Khmer characters at 36 points to make the diacritics semi-legible, but this usually means huge amounts of white space). These problems don't seem to *me* to amount to something I should exploit to assert copyright ownership on the material (if and when I publish it), but maybe I'm wrong.

2004 Apr 08 [ Thu ]

The madness of crowds and flocking theory

It's frequently been remarked that people in crowds seem to become willing to do things they would never do singly: beat a policeman to death, hold up cigarette lighters while singing off-key, etc.

This corresponds to an observation I made before: when a decision is extremely complex but obviously important, people default to doing what the people they can see are doing.

One example of that was in the Monty Python sketch where Hitler and the other leaders of the Nazi party have somehow found refuge in