The primary cause of this joy was the announcement by the Yankee government, via the news media in my instance, of changes to the shule lunch regime. I came to reflect on the government’s, and social engineer’s, perversion of resistance is met with greater punishment rather than any type of kritik. The new regime is supposed to be healthier with more whole grains, vegetables (including catchup?) and less fat and sodium.

This despite test data from pilot shules that indicates the students will just not eat what they don’t like and thus instead of eating “healthy”, eat less, presumably making matters worse at home but on the ledger of government – good, parents – bad, a profit. (I regret I can’t find this reference. Mea Culpa.) There is even counter information on the obesity war front, a study [Link] indicating that shule junk food is NOT a substantive factor in causing obesity. Unfortunately, like the War on Drugs and the Global War on Terror, (and Vietnam,) any body is that of the enemy.

Sadly, the shule lunch program has always been a playground of social engineers and religionists. If the Yankee government can receive any credit for its heavy handed ways it is for relieving shule children of the confusion and stress of being subjected to one religionist doctrine at shule and (probably) another at home. This was not without some benefit, at least for the nerds. I recall in elementary shule being subjected to prayers at both the start of class and at lunch time. The former were standardized with variations but the latter were often delivered by one of the do-gooders and their deviations from our parents’ formulae gave the attentive, perceptive, and cognitive – nerds, in short – something to muse on over lunch.

The food at lunch was also a matter of social engineering. The elementary shule I attended was an old mill shule and had a long tradition of educating (training?) of grubby children fated to follow their grubby parents into wage servitude in the cotton mills. They were generally unprepared and under-responsive to the influx of children parented by ‘rocket scientists’. The best tried and did their best in the face of chronically inadequate budgets and college educated parents demanding what they considered minimum standards 10 dB above the shule’s previous best. The lunch room was not part of the best.

Children and parents alike uttered complaints about food that was unpalatable and unhealthy to thirty and forty years veterans of ladle and steam table. The requirement to clean one’s adult sized tray was confronted as criminal, making enforcement all the more strict. Criticize a bigot and you create a martinet. The lunch room prayers were abandoned after a Yankee army Judge Advocate General type descended on a faculty meeting and talked about criminal sanctions and what it was like to run a shule under martial law. Disgruntled, the do-gooders abandoned the practice entirely rather than dilute their rants.

The effect on the food was nil, largely due to the juju of the great god Budget. As a result, a class split occurred. The mill kids pretty much continued to eat the prepared food, but the rocket kids began to mostly eat brought lunches. There was a great contrast between green institutional plastic trays and colorful lunch boxes, with a few brown paper bags offering contrast. The ‘eat it all’ rule still held but brought lunches tended to have everything wrapped and even the girls had pockets in those days. And all in obedience to parental guidance that some of the food was to be saved for afternoon recess, or while waiting for bus after shule.

So I am glad now that all I have to do when I eat lunch is contend with the instructions form physicians, and FD SCP, and the battle to find foodstuffs across several grocery stores. Preparation is a joy compared to those days of childhood because now, at least, the only do-gooder that bothers me is my own conscience. But I know, deep down, that the kids are still stressed and strained at lunch in shule, and no wonder they eat too much or too little.

One of the strengths of homo sapiens is that we always teach our children the wrong things by intent and the right things by error.

I personally find the idea encouraging, probably being at least as naive and set for disappointment as my colleague, that an era when all advertisements, regardless of source, will be viewed as their opposite will signal a new ear of human kritik. But I doubt it.

Yesterday I ran into a very good example of the basis of this cynicism. I got pointed to an article [Link] about Ubuntu advertisements. I viewed two of the four, my gorge was rising too high to go further, and seldom have I seen such a collection of misdirection and outright overt inaccuracy. Canonical, it seems, is no different from Megahard when it comes to misdirecting, entrapping propaganda.

I started off chuckling at the claim that Ubuntu is the largest subscribed of the Linux distributions. Since the introduction of Unity, Ubuntu is solidly on the road to middle of the pack. Last release it got whalloped by MINT, which is rather like saying Megahard got whalloped by BASIC.

But then other inaccurate claims were made, all apparently intended to alienate the nerd basis and attract bog neubs. What kind of business model is this? The only thing that makes sense is that Canonical thinks the neubs will pay for hand holding whule the nerd basis is moderately costly to maintain. Of course something in excess of half the production comes from the basis so one still has the impression of Canonical slicing off extremities with a dull piece of paper.

I also liked the claim that Ubuntu works with all the user’s devices. Really? I had to buy specific MP3 players to work with Ubuntu; my phones do not work with Ubuntu, nor does half the hardware in the house, including FD SCP’s sewing machines.

And yes, I am still using Ubuntu, but not Unity. This box is running Gnome 2 and I am in no hurry to blow that GUI away.

But I now have an anecdote of confirmation that no organization can be trusted. Period. And any of their advertisements.

And, no, I am not going to quit brushing my teeth – I trust my dentists if not their professional organization’s advertisements – or going to gym – the Yankee government was already suspect – because the refereed research papers support it.

Distrust and verify.

The experiment has very little to do with oil, or automobiles, or anything obvious from the name. It is all about the charge on an electron. And I need to mention that this is all happening back at the turn of the last century, back in Tom Swift time, which is appropriate because this effort is almost a classic Greek hero story.

The basic postulate was that the electron has a fixed charge and this experiment was intended to measure that charge. What Millikan set up was a can with a simple capacitor – two plates – and a perfume sprayer full of light oil and a charged screen to put charge on the drops. There was a hole in the can to which a telescope was attached (although we might as well call it a rich field microscope) that could see the space between the capacitor plates.

The prescription was to find a drop that had the right size and a charge on it, then watch it fall a measured distance (angle) with the capacitor grounded, then charge the capacitor and watch the drop rise throgh the same distance, note the times, and then repeat until the drop got lost. And you repeat this a whole lot of times.

The basic idea is that the drop has some number of electrons on its surface and therefore its rise time would be determined by that number of charges. So you can do a combinatorics analysis to figure out the charge on a single electron.

The work is very tedious, and needs be done in a cold environment to minimize the giggling of the droplets. I had to do this experiment as a sophomore in undergraduate schule about this time of year. I recall the room the apparatus was in had its heat turned off and the window open. It was very straining to use the equipment and about twenty hours of observation were expended after a couple of hours of learning procedure. Getting droplets to take charge and finding them is a strange skill that I am not sure I want to claim. Anyway, that was basically all the slack time I had that week which was all we had to do the experiment in since the next week we had another experiment to do. I did have a lab partner and we took turns looking and recording, about a half hour per shift. Recording was boring while observing hurt – eye and muscle strain.

I suppose today a video camera would be attacked to the telescope and the muscle strain eliminated and the recording could be automated so that the experiment could be done by an individual. Since no real teamwork was involved this would not be a bad thing.

But I still have a great deal of respect for Robert Millikan doing this experiment.

I’m not sure how this is an anniversary thing but it is the right time of year for me to have a memory storm.

Thus fortified, I now may confront the week in. Starting is an article [Link] by an editor of Nature (the journal) entitled “Nine ways scientists demonstrate they don’t understand journalism”. I read the piece and it is clear, as I have come to expect from British journalism, but misconceived. I will offer that the list is not just things misunderstood but rather unacceptable and unconscionable. Since it is a list I cannot resist the urge to cherry pick and make like a bridge (i.e., pontificate – I said it was a rough night.)

• The standard structure of news stories doesn’t work for science – the lack of understanding here is why anyone should be wedded to a format that is inappropriate, or who would try to use it inappropriately. The former is humorous given the slavish acceptance of the formats demanded by different journals. The latter is an indictment of journalism that they would abuse confidence and information just to fill inches.
• Change my colourful quote at once! – The humor here is that any nerd would think of anything they say as colourful!
• You can’t cover my work. I forbid it – This one comes closest to hitting sound. But it dependson who owns the intellectual property. Anyway, unless it’s a condition of employment you can always refuse to talk to the journalist.

My experience with journalists is one of the reasons I am cynical. It is not so much that they don’t know but that they aren’t willing to put in the effort to know. I recognize this is in the nature of the work but it is also why they are being extinguished.

Next, we have an article [Link] that indicates a recent meteorite strike in Morrocco did originate on the planet Mars. I have to give some kudos to this journalist. These articles crop up about once a year and leave the nerds among humanity asking how did the matter escape the gravitational field? This fellow, the first I have seen, answers the question.

Mars got hit by something massive and fast and kicked out all sorts of gibble. Millyuns of years ago.

And finally, we have an article [Link] from Scientific American. Starts off by saying that people don’t trust atheists. Curiously, it doesn’t answer the obvious questions: do atheists distrust atheists; and do atheists distrust religionists? The World Wonders.

But then they go on to advance that the distrust arises from some innate human need to feel like we are being supervised. Some of the data supposedly indicate an interchangeability between government and deity, which is intriguing when one thinks about all the propaganda abut rulers being deities, or at least the chosen of deity.

The other intriguing question is whether the distrust extends to those who do not believe in a personal deity? Or do they get a free ride?

The rain has ceased, for now and the waters are receding, slowly and squelchingly. The stench of flooded sewers is abating as the wind freshens after dawn with the renewed insolation.

Which do we want: internet or Hollywood?

I vote Internet. Hollywood hasn’t done anything worth while in years. Just another corporate leech.

The starting is is an article [Link] about an Ubuntu tablet. A year ago I would have thought this a wonderful idea and snapped one up even if I had to ante up a half kilobuck. Why? Because then I would have a tablet I knew I could do stuff with. Now, given the way that wannabe master Mark and his pseudo-church instrumentality have vertically copulated Ubuntu, I could not find a pole long enough, and light enough for me to touch the thing.

I have had discussion with my colleagues, most with similar bents and creaks to myself, who own tablets what they do with. I find that they largely use them as an alternative to a smart phone. (Many are like I and in denial over the cost of rate plans from pirate cell providers – or is that redundant?) This actually makes them more attractive but not compelling. I prefer my phone to do little more than let me talk – an occasional text in tornado season when the service is flattened is about all.

But an Ubuntu tablet. Shuttleworth needs to quit recycling his body fluids.

Next, more engagingly, news [Link] of a simulation of the early universe by boffins in Nippon. The cherry here is that the simulation indicates that normal stochastic fluctuation can collapse the nine spatial dimensions into three nerds and six bogs; that is, three robust dimensions and six empty, vapid dimensions. This raises question of why there are so many bogs today?

Next, an article [Link] in the Economist on fragmenting bullets. Underwhelming. What is amusing and entertaining is the demonstration of how little journalists, at least this one, understand Clausewitz. Usually the Economist does a better job. Hopefully this is just an off day for the fellow.

They do rather make up for it in a nice article [Link] on differential equations. Gotta get a copy of the real paper but if it’s half as interesting as the journalist wrangles, it redeems the rag.

I did, but got masticated in the derriere. The new KVM switch uses a keyboard sequence to switch boxes and I was unable to get it to talk to my keyboard. Any of my keyboards. So then I had to reverse the whole process. And I managed to misinsert the moose and squirrel connections so that both boxes went into input device paranoia. And I was trying to be quiet to not disturb FD SCP’s slumber.

Anyway, back to where I was last night with only minor fraying of my nerves and other hardware.

Anyway^2, on to the necessities of the day.

As a word of caution, you can intimidate and frighten politicians, but mostly all you can do is frustrate and madden civil servants. Yes, you can frighten them but mostly only from within. The two strongest scares you can use with civil servants is RIF and pension reform, the latter being an euphemism for vertical copulation. Also, bear in mind that civil servants don’t really mind if you abuse the politicians so long as the civil servants don’t get stupid work taskings as a result. Pray also remember that justicers like the Hooverites carry firearms, and while they aren’t very lethal, those folks are quite proficient in their use. Not as good as on the television programs but good enough.

Anyway, knowing how politicians and their slimy corporate masters work this is not done. They are going to keep being fluid and looking for a way to enslave the ‘net. I noticed last evening that they have already suborned the journalists who call the whole thing excessive. Not unexpected, after all the journalists have been in the pockets of business from the get go.

On a more enjoyable azimuth, I got a link to an article [Link] on open source counterparts to advertised corporate overlord software clients. Another reason they want to throttle the ‘net – so that those who build better software can be divided and enslaved. But I was reminded of what is missing in Linux. Now most Linux software is better than Winders software in that it is easier to use and easier to use well.

My experience with Winders users is they either use lots of software, none of it at all well, or they use software well but only a small number of clients. This follows from most Winders software being hard to learn to use and often hard to remember how to use. The whole thing is not helped by software training companies who string things along over too many courses with minuscule information density so that your brain dies in the wait between first fact and second fact, and the absence of manuals.

I did learn several years ago that the client-human interface on Winders software, at least the kind produced by big companies, is designed by experts in how not to be human friendly. Linux software, on the other hand, is designed by coders, with some help from real psychology nerds, so the interface is at least logical. This almost always proves to be adequate and efficient in use. Usually you can teach yourself half of what a Linux client can do just by thinking about what the program should do and exploring the command tree. I find the only time I have to download the manual is when what I want to do is more than three branches down the tree.

But there are warts on the face of Linux. Despite claims to the contrary there is no adequate WYSIWIG LaTeX GUI. Lyx is impressive but just flat not enough. I should comment that there is only one Winders client that satisfies this criterion and it won’t run right under WINE because the manufacturers don’t do the graphics right.

Next, I am informed from the campus of the Boneyard that when you exercise your muscles produce stem cells. [Link] This is evidently a big piece of why “when you exercise you live longer” although I have to admit to being embarrassed to repeat that statement. It is meant stochastically – statistically, if you will – but that distinction isn’t drawn. Strictly, to make the statement, you would have to know when someone was going to discorporate, then after they had exercised redetermine that date and if the difference was positive, you could make the statement. Instead, it’s all about mean values.

Which means that there is a probability that if you exercise you’ll discorporate sooner.

Nice rainy day, flooding is predicted and all the climate change denialists are looking forlorn, as they should be. So the interesting question is what can we find to achieve the same effect on the intelligent design fanatics?

[1]  The reason you don’t supplement to the really good student level is that you want to make the really good students, who you hope will become subject majors, to go to library and read beyond the textbook.