The other day, David Letterman had a segment called The Ten Most Hated Christmas Songs. They were well known Christmas tunes with twisted lyrics. All of them were funny, but two I found especially memorable. The first said,
“Joy to the world, George Bush is done.”
The second one was really creepy:
“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,
“Nineteen-twenty-nine…”
Indeed.
No, it’s not the name of a heavy metal group or a German curse word, just an appropriate way to describe the cats in our house, now six in number, given that we have a guest cat again. Poppy is back with us for a month.
Poppy in August
CNN has a report about health care workers’ right to refuse to provide services, or information about services such as abortion, if it goes against their conscience. Not unreasonable, but it is also not unreasonable for patients to expect services according to their own beliefs, not the health care workers’.
Yet there seems to be a simple solution: health care workers should be obliged to disclose to patients their beliefs and the fact that they may be withholding specific information as a result of those beliefs. Health care workers may have a right to refuse to provide services or advice that they consider unethical, but patients also have a right to know that they are not receiving objective advice.
Sad news today: at the age of 76, Majel Roddenberry, aka. Nurse Christine Chapel from Star Trek and Lwaxana Troi from Star Trek: TNG, has passed away today. My she rest in peace.
Her husband, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, passed away over 17 years ago, on October 24, 1991. That date is memorable to me for another reason: it was on the morning of that day that I became a wizard of Richard Bartle’s classic multiplayer computer game, MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), aka British Legends, a game that I have ported to modern 32-bit platforms nearly a decade later and that I have been hosting ever since.
… two days and several scraped fingers later (after I also lost, no doubt, many braincells to aggravation, not to mention hours of useful operating time of my heart muscle measured by a number considerably greater than the 48 or so that have elapsed since I first discovered that my computer is in trouble) I am finally back in business. All because of a bleeping 10 cent capacitor. But before I complain too loud, I quickly remind myself that during these 48 hours or so, tens if not hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of people around the world were killed, died of starvation, lost their most loved ones, lost their freedom, lost their possessions, you name it… and I am complaining because I had to replace a stupid motherboard and bring my computer back to life?
No, I am not complaining. Still, the last two days were a time I could have done without.
That’s all it took. One faulty capacitor, worth about 10 cents, to put my computer out of commission for nearly two days.
The capacitor in question sits on the motherboard and, judging by its placement, it regulates power to the main I/O chip (which explains why, among other things, the failing motherboard had trouble accessing disks.)
Other than this, my experience qualifies as a comedy of errors. After replacing the motherboard with an identical model, the system didn’t boot; it turned out that I inserted the processor incorrectly, bending (but fortunately, not breaking!) some of its pins. Then I found out that the BIOS of the replacement motherboard, which I purchased second-hand, was password locked. After I reset the BIOS, the system didn’t boot at all, it turned out it needed a PCI graphics card to come back to life. Then, the operating system didn’t boot… it turned out that the partition table and boot sector was damaged on the hard drives. Meanwhile, the floppy drive in this machine died, just when I needed it to boot from a Windows XP CD (extra drivers needed for the RAID controller in my computer come on a floppy.)
But now, the system is rebuilding the RAID mirror, and when that’s done, I’ll reconnect everything and try to resume where I left off two nights ago. Groan.
Oh, but I forgot: I also need to upgrade this motherboard’s BIOS, to ensure that it recognizes the dual-core CPU (which it presently doesn’t).
Which reminds me, I’ve been using this motherboard for years, and it’s been working well (apart from a failing chip fan and now, this failing capacitor.) But when I tried to install VISTA on a test machine with the same motherboard, VISTA didn’t work in its “enhanced” AERO mode… or, it did, but only recognizing one CPU core. According to ATI, it’s NVIDIA’s fault, as their AGP implementation is not fully multiprocessor compatible and VISTA has problems with that. But, I ask naively… how come XP worked so well on this motherboard for years? AERO may be pretty, but it’s still just bits that are being moved between motherboard and graphics card, is it not?
What a bloody joyful day. My main computer is dead this morning. It now even fails to boot. Annoyingly, I don’t have any external SATA enclosures that would allow me to hook one of its drives up to another computer to check for signs of trouble, verify data integrity, and last but not least, make a backup (my last backup is a few days old.) So it’s a trip to the nearest computer store. And once I’m done, my main computer will still be dead, it’s just that I’ll no longer need to worry about what was stored on it (except for the numerous applications, configuration settings, etc…) This is NOT going to be a fun day. Miserable outside, too.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but there is something magically beautiful in vintage 1960s high tech. Take JPL’s Space Flight Operations Center, for instance.
JPL Space Flight Operations Center
Sure, wall-size LCD or plasma screens are nowadays a dime a dozen, and as to the computing equipment in that room, hey, my watch probably has more transistors. Still… there is something awe-inspiring in this picture that is just not there when you walk into a Best Buy.
Here is a place where some serious mischief took place nearly half a century ago:
Craters in Nevada
Must be a nice place to visit. Or, if not that, then perhaps this fine Arizona museum next time I drive across the United States.
Ottawa U. and Carleton U. are running shuttle services to help students get to exams. OC Transpo’s union leaders are now suggesting that they will attempt to picket these services, too. In other words, they’re now openly declaring the citizens of Ottawa their enemy, as opposed to the bus company. What next, blocking private cars, too? Locking citizens in their homes, lest they compete with the bus service by trying to walk to work?
The more they do this, the less sympathetic I feel towards the strikers, and the more I hope that the city will have the guts to stand firm and wait until the union runs out of money and stamina.
Yes, they are nice. I spent several hours (!) today on the phone with Microsoft, and they really tried to help. In the end, my issue with installing KB958624 remains unresolved but they acknowledged the problem, suggested meaningful ways to deal with it, and promised that it will be researched and that I will be notified.
More importantly, they listened to my comments concerning Activation. This young, very polite engineer from India with impeccable English listened intently and took notes, appreciating my basic concern: Activation (and copy protection in general) will not stop piracy, but it alienates a company’s best friends, namely its paying customers.
So, OC Transpo is going on strike. Yes, I support the principle of collective bargaining. But I don’t support a bunch of selfish unionists who think they can hold a whole city hostage by taking things to the bring and beyond. The strike doesn’t bother me personally… if anything, I am looking forward to quieter mornings. But the fact that they do this just weeks before Christmas and during a snowstorm speaks volumes. And it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who suffer. If there was justice, a student missing an exam or a single mother of three who is unable to go to work tomorrow morning would spit in the face of every OC Transpo employee who voted for the strike.
No wonder I didn’t like communism, I guess.
Microsoft is really pissing me off these days. While necessary, their updates suck.
I’m restarting a VISTA machine about the seventeenth time already, because if I try to install all available updates, all of them fail with an undocumented error, even though I can install them one-by-one.
I’ve installed several updates on an XP laptop, and four of them failed; I tried again, then they succeeded. No apparent reason for the difference.
I’ve installed a bunch of updates on another XP machine, but a few were left out. I installed those, too (Root Certificates and Office 2007 Help updates.) Windows didn’t ask for a restart, but the browser went half-dead afterwards anyhow, so I had to restart.
Meanwhile, I’ve just restarted that VISTA machine again.
You’d think that after all these years, Microsoft would be better at this. But they aren’t. One of these days, they’re going to release a patch that will shut down three hundred million computers around the world and cause more economic damage than the current recession. Then, they’ll call it “behavior by design” and charge us more for support.
Update: I’ve narrowed down the problem to a single update, KB958624. It fails to complete installation after reboot, and upon this failure, the system reverts other updates as well. I have attempted to contact Microsoft about this using their Web based e-mail form; I dutifully completed all the requisite fields, only to be informed after I clicked the last Continue that the requested page is not available. Congratulations, Microsoft, for a professional job well done.
The prevailing phenomenological theory of modified gravity is MOND, which stands for Modified Newtonian Dynamics. What baffles me is how MOND managed to acquire this status in the first place.
MOND is based on the ad-hoc postulate that the gravitational acceleration of a body in the presence of a weak gravitational field differs from that predicted by Newton. If we denote the Newtonian acceleration with a, MOND basically says that the real acceleration will be a‘ = μ(a/a0)a, where μ(x) is a function such that μ(x) = 1 if x >> 1, and μ(x) = x if μ(x) << 1. Perhaps the simplest example is μ(x) = x/(1+x).
OK, so here is the question that I’d like to ask: Exactly how is this different from the kinds of crank explanations I receive occasionally from strangers writing about the Pioneer anomaly? MOND is no more than an ad-hoc empirical formula that works for galaxies (duh, it was designed to do that) but doesn’t work anywhere else, and all the while it violates such basic principles as energy or momentum conservation. How could the physics community ever take something like MOND seriously?
I was slacking off this morning (it’s a Saturday, after all) and I decided to watch a DVD that has been lying around my desk for months. It’s an award-winning Hungarian movie, KONTROLL. No, it has nothing to do with Maxwell Smart’s CONTROL, fighting the evil agents of KAOS. KONTROLL, a movie about the lives of ticket inspectors, train conductors, a serial killer, and other strange characters, is set in its entirety in the Budapest subway system. A subway system that becomes a world by itself, with no daylight, no sunshine, and no contact with the outside world other than through the anonymous masses of subway passengers. I read wonderful things about this movie (it has won a respectable number of international awards) and all I can say is that its reputation is well deserved. Wow! I was in the second grade when the first modern subway line opened in Budapest (the city has a single underground line that is much older, built in 1896, but the first line of the new modern subway system was opened in 1970) and the subway has been part of my daily life until I left Hungary in 1986. Still, I don’t think that after watching this movie I’ll ever be able to look at those subways quite the same way as before.
It happened yesterday, but it took me a while to digest the news.
Our Prime Minister, gravely concerned about democracy, decided to shut down Parliament.
But wait. Canada is a parliamentary democracy. The government is not elected directly by the people, but chosen by members of the House of Parliament, and answers to that Parliament. These members of Parliament represent the people who elected them. If the majority of them no longer has confidence in the government, the government no longer has legitimacy. To pretend otherwise, to suggest that the shutting down or Parliament was done in order to protect democracy, is no different from that famous Vietnam-era explanation about destroying the village in order to save it.
Also, is it not the same excuse used by many despots around the world who tear down their countries’ democratic institutions in order to maintain their grip on power?
Of course I don’t think that Harper can be compared to, say, a Lukasenko. Nor do I believe that Canada’s democratic system of government is in danger of collapsing. But, doing what he did yesterday, Harper clearly demonstrated his contempt towards the very democracy that he professes to defend by this deeply undemocratic act. I hope the opposition will be able to maintain their resolve and unity and will get rid of Harper as soon as Parliament resumes, on January 26.
I am not necessarily a fan of the US system of government, but this incident underlines why, at least in one respect, it is superior to ours. In the US, the President is not elected by the legislature, but directly (well, technically indirectly, through the electorial system, but that is another issue) by the people. Nor can the legislature remove the President except under very special circumstances, if it is clearly proven that the President abused his office or committed a crime.
Perhaps the next time we consider constitutional reform here in Canada, we should consider the idea of a head of government that is elected directly by the people and does not require the confidence of the legislature to function.
For an intelligent mammalian species with a total of ten appendages on the ends of those limbs that they do not use for perambulation, the number 10 and its various integral powers have special significance. The square of 10, that is, 100, is no exception. Unfortunately, this is also the number of such intelligent mammals who have been, as of today, killed in a place called Afghanistan, while wearing the military uniform of an even larger group of intelligent mammals who collectively call themselves Canada.
The number is alarming, but so is the trend.
Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, by quarter.
I went for a walk tonight, and I walked all the way up to Sussex street. As I was getting near Sussex, I began to hear the faint hum of a generator. Sure enough, it belonged to a news media van, as I suspected. There were several of them parked near the entrance of Rideau Hall, waiting like vultures for any announcement that might come from the Governor General concerning the fate of Harper’s government.
I don’t like Harper, but I don’t really dislike him either. He likes cats, and that speaks well of him. However, what he has been doing yesterday and today is despicable. By bashing the separatists, he’s doing no favor to the country he professes to serve, and while it may be a smart tactical decision, it spells strategic disaster for the Conservatives in Quebec.
Why is it that conservatives around the world are resorting to such negative tactics? There was Palin in the US presidential campaign. There is Harper. I am also watching the politics of Hungary, where calling the Prime Minister a traitor or worse is commonplace among the followers of his political opponents. Even when I agree with them otherwise, I find such tactics revolting.
It appears that the heavens have a sense of humor after all… why else would they be smiling like that?
Smiling Moon
The usual rule is, things are bound to get worse before they get better. The situation with travel security is no exception. Never mind not being able to take a pair of nail scissors or a bottle of water on board an airplane… Greyhound Canada began to implement airport-style security at bus terminals. This is insane, people! Gruesome as that beheading incident was a few months ago, do you really want to live in a society of people who are officially so afraid of one another, they are not willing to travel together unless none of them carries a corkscrew or a knitting needle?
This is just plain stupid. Dumb. Idiotic. I hope the extra expense will drive Greyhound Canada into bankruptcy.