Fifth Watering

Last day – tomorrow we start the return to Greater Metropolitan Arab and I think we shall both be happy to do so. Even with decent quartering the premises pale.

Yesterday was a relatively quiet day. Other than a bitter wind and reduced temperatures the only excitement was avoiding being struck by automobiles. I have noted Nawth Alibam drivers becoming less courteous and more impulsive of late but here is the lees of Atlanta it gets up to suicidal. Never mind right of way or legal rules, just barge into any hole however small and transient.

I raided a Barnes and Noble yesterday – more below – but that was the substantive extent of my rambling. The chief work of the day was finishing up on a simple ordnance model that had suggested itself the other day. It’s not what the textbooks have but it is close enough to illustrate the physics involved.

As it stands the challenge today will be mental preparation for packing the motorcar tomorrow, accommodating all the stuff FD SCP snagged in her sewing course.

Hammer Day Mumblage

Another week of the Love-Hate relationship that is gym completed. Despite rain last night and a 3-4 degK reduction in temperature this morning (compared to yesterday) the atmosphere is heavy and oppressive. Even the screen door has swollen back up so that the hook catch is taunt. Happily the gym was void of educationalists and weight bouncers so I was able to enjoy the experience and actually pay attention to the podcast episodes, one of the Ubuntu UK podcast, which is 0.98 a time waster o irrelevant frippery, and an episode of Search Engine that telling dwelt on how those who should benefit from copyright, the originators, are not. Perhaps the RIAA needs to be added to the GWOT hit list?

One consequence of the rain last night was that Arab Electron Uncooperative went discontinuous enough to depower my desktop boxes so first thing after I got home from gym, sanitized and garbed, was to start the lengthy reboot process of scanning the hard drive. This is becoming a regular thing.
 
It does however occur that I should actually look at the positive side of this and be thankful. As with many people who have an OS that actually does what you want and not the opposite, I tend to not reboot as often as I should. So just this once,  am willing to concede that the positive side of Arab Electron Uncooperative’s incompetence is to force me to reboot more often than I would normally.

In the meantime, the search for an alternate distribution continues. I have scant interest in abandoning Linux – although I am considering an Android tablet since no one seems in a hurry to do a real Linux tablet – but Ubuntu, more likely Canonical, seems to have fallen on hard mental times with their infatuation with Unity. The very real possibility exists that they can no longer be trusted and some other group that understands the need for tools as opposed to appliances need be found to associate with. I will not say this is the death knell of Ubuntu; I am sure they will convert many Windows serfs to their appliance GUI but I still want to make use of something that doesn’t want to incarcerate my work methods. So be prepared for some tales of daring do and frustration with new distributions.

computers, information, corporations, lemmings, extinction

Hacking Mutation

Literacy may be defined as having a ‘new’ survival skill.

I noticed in Crunch Gear [Link] this morning that the new Barnes and Ignoble that the Nook Touch had been hacked to, among other things, run the Android Kindle app. The import of this was unstated although whether due to perception of obviousness, obliviousness, or just stercus journalism is unclear.

Just to belabor, since we can’t assign probabilities and compute an expected state, this means that you can have one eReader to handle both major commercial eBook formats. So you can get the merits of an eReader without the downs of a tablet to read both Amazing and B&N eBooks. This is like being able to play VCR and BetaMax tapes on one machine. It breaks the producer strangle hold.

And what emerges from this is that hacking is the ‘new’ literacy, at least if we view literacy as a survival skill. Originally, when civilization had just been invented, literacy was a definite survival skill. It assured those who had it of an advantage in staying alive and having offspring. And that was why it had to be suppressed to keep the property – slaves and women – subjugated.

Which undoubtedly explains why the politicians are against hacking even though it is as clearly the new survival skill in the digital period as auto mechanicing was in the Ford period. Regardless of whether a social engineering aristocrat or a corporate oligarch, new survival skills have to be reserved for the existing elite, or they will pass like dinosaurs cursing iridium.

Somehow that prospect doesn’t seem so bad. The nation was founded on political rejection and has since been polluted with too much of it.

Jefferson would love it. The modern equivalent of the independent farmer is the independent hacker.

computers, information, hacking, politics, lemmings

Constrained Motion

Returned just now from my Saturday morning erranding. Procured risen confections for FD SCP and the dowager parent from the Greater Metropolitan Arab emporium of constabulary delights. A crisp, almost cold morning and the drive outward was most delightful in the absence of other motorists and the pink and blue mottling of the sky that occurs when the light source is below the horizon. Ah, the majesties of Rayleigh scattering.

The expedition was saddened by having to diverge to the local petrol emporium to feed SCP transport number one. The price of petrol had risen significantly since my last filling, of order 0.08. I am in favor of democracy but not when it is a subterfuge of religionist adventurism.

While I was standing and almost shivering I noted a near collision between a Coca Cola semi and a member of the Greater Metropolitan Arab constabulary. The constable was undoubtedly on his way to whence I had come and did his best to drive under the semi that was making a pi over four right handed turn. (For the benefit of any bogs, this is what is sometimes called a left-hand-turn.) I was immediately struck by a domain division that is depicted in this graph:

This indicates that, relative to the speed limit, under normal circumstances motorcars operated by citizens normally occupy the portion of the phase space to the left while those operated by constables occupy the portion of the phase space to the right. The populations are not exclusive or exact but a mostly adequate approximation.

We also have to express our deep gratitude to the Greater Metropolitan Arab Electrical Autarky for providing us with a very restful evening. We would not have been able to sit in the dark and not use our computers or watch the audio-visual electromagnetic receiver without their kind assistance. I suppose this is one of the joys of living in the hinterland, especially in this state that is a third world (at best) country.

Now to see if there is anything in the tabs that excites comment.

humans, behavior, foodstuffs, government, utilities, lemmings

Thermal Nonsense

Gad! This is getting a bit stressful. I made my usual pilgrimage to Nawth Alibam’s Shining City on the Hill yesterday and had to skip one of my planned stops for foodstuffs. It was not an immediate requirement, which was good, inasmuch as the parking lot at the particular grocery store was completely full, at least to the point I did not see an available parking space so I motored on. Happily the nut quotient of the drivers was fairly low.

And now the heat content of the atmosphere is decreasing again. To be expected, I suppose, now that we are past solstice and officially (who makes it official? the weather beavers union? or do they have a cabal?) winter, but it was a bit unpleasant this morning going to gym. I fear I am not yet inured to the special situation when the temperature is right around the water-ice phase change point.

The primary expression of this is in the master entropy closet at Castellum SCP. On mornings when the air temperature is low enough for the heat pump to be ineffective but not so low as to kick in the resistive heating fully, the ablutitorium is chilly to downright cold, recognizing, of course, that such is an irrational, unphysical, humanistic characterization. For temperatures above this band, the heat pump keeps the facility nicely habitable; for temperatures below, the resistive heating auxiliary.

But when it comes to venturing outside there is a secondary instance in the form of determining the appropriate level of swaddling to be donned. This is especially difficult when going to gym since the wind may not have picked up yet and exercise clothes are less heat conserving than street clothes. Hence the discomfort this morning with resulting difficulty in being at ease with the exercise. It is thus perhaps fitting that the bulk of today’s attention went to Melvyn, Lord Bragg’s “In Our Time” episode on Daoism.

Happily, with shul desessioned the educationalists were in short supply as were the weight bouncers, probably because of the impending holidays.

But then I got here and discovered several downloads had failed, once more demonstrating the inability of the Yankee government to get computer stuff right, and I noted an article that claimed a gallup poll had found 0.4 of the sample population in Amerika to be creationist.[Link] Sadly, the lees of boggery will likely always be with us, indicating perhaps that they are self=perpetuating? Or perhaps, a better term would be self-creating? Yes, that does seem appropriate.

Anyway, as the time winds down for the social stupidity that the observation of winter solstice, Mithra, whatever has been appropriated by organized religion has become, the stress level increases. So be cool and truck on!

climate, wether, religion, society, humans, lemmings

ORF Wisdum 4

"Being right is almost never a matter of stochastic consensus; public acclaim is more often a matter of irrelevance than actuality"

Thieves, Liars, and Mad

The nature of politics in Alibam has reached new depths, a situation directly analogous to the oil leak in the Gulf, the connections are part and parcel of the situation. The sadness of the phenomena is that if one lives in Alibam, one cannot not be immersed in the moral, ethical, and intellectual equivalent of the oil mess, with its subsurface plumes of oil and dispersant, the nastiness in the tidal estuaries and the land-water boundary, the tyranny and torture visited upon environment biological and social. The direct analogs of these are automated phone calls that fail to recognize they are talking to an answering machine, lethal toadstools of political signage in private yards and the public verge, and visual advertisements of candidates that epitomize the concept of Ying and Yang.

The regard of this has departed the boundaries of Alibam, prompting the friends and colleagues of SCP, especially the Yankee who are used to a different form of dirty politics (redundant?) I have grown tired of explaining that ‘liberal’ is a term more negative than ‘pedophile’ in Alibam, and that any question of gun control or women’s rights so besmirched by social and mystical fanaticism that it cannot be uttered even in the dark of one’s thoughts. That Alibam is a state where democrats are republicans who are not rich, smart, or evil enough to obtain nomination and hence will appear to be a member of another political party as an opportunity for election. That republicans are the same as democrats were prior to the administration of Abraham Lincoln and the ‘recent unpleasantness.’

They have difficulty understanding a state and its society where education is at best suspect at at worst evil, that ignorance, superstition, and agriculture are at worst good and at best transcendent. And that this molds the nature of Alibam society and culture; that farmers and the superstitious and the ignorant are by nature negative in outlook, adverse to any change except the deepening of their own personal fates, leading commonly to asentiently conviction of their own rightness and superiority. Democracy in Alibam is not about democracy, but theft and prevarication.

The most amusing aspect to me, while being also the most fatiguing both intellectually and from responding to the questions of colleagues has been the corrosion commercials aimed at Mr. Byrne for allegedly being historically aware about religion and having some awareness of the validity of science, smears on his being educated which is the most dire and venial of holy Alibam political sins. But horribly dark beyond blackness in its evil, although the mere aspersion may be adequate to assure Mr. Byrne the nerd and geek votes.

Then, this morning I was offered up a link to this article, [Link] 

Imagine for a moment that a large proportion of Americans–let’s say half–rejected the “germ theory” of infectious disease. Maladies like swine flu, malaria and AIDS aren’t caused by micro-organisms, they claim, but by the displeasure of gods, whom they propitiate by praying, consulting shamans and sacrificing goats. Now, you’d surely find this a national disgrace, for those people would be utterly, unequivocally wrong. Although it’s called germ theory, the idea that infections are spread by small creatures is also a fact, supported by mountains of evidence. You don’t get malaria unless you carry a specific protozoan parasite. We know how it causes the disease, and we see that when you kill it with drugs, the disease goes away. How, we’d ask, could people ignore all this evidence in favor of baseless superstition?

Now substitute ‘evolution’ for ‘germ’ and you have the gist of the article.

The thesis is much more brilliant than the remainder of the article, mostly because it is written by an educated person for other educated persons, all of whom respect the value of education. Such will not work well in Alibam, where those who have education and hide it successfully become elected officials but must reject their education for gain, and those who have education and do not hide it are the untouchables, the unclean of the majority.

Even in a third world, almost failed state in the midst of the Yankee republic, one may find humor in watching those the gods destroy by driving mad in their adulation of ignorance and superstition. At least that seems the most probably explanation other than raw stochastic chaos.

Smiling Denial

Tuesday is science podcast day, and there were a couple of gems this morning.

First, from (I believe) the Guardian’s science podcast, the English government interviewed a group of manufacturing executives and found that they were consistently and in the majority, denialists of climate change. This isn’t very surprising, at least to American experience since the only climate change manufacturing concerns here in the Yankee republic admit to is in advertising products that are allegedly “green”.

But what the interviews do lend some illumination of is the behavior of the previous administration of the Yankee government. Perhaps this does reveal just how well the (modern) republican party does represent their corporate oligarch masters.

Second, and this one comes from public radio’s “The World”, it seems that people in the Yankee republic smile too much. This is based on a multinational survey. One of the findings of the survey is that the more tightly structured the society, the less people smile to those on different structural levels, lest they unduly encourage the “riffraff” or seem “uppity” to their superiors.

It seems that in such societies those who smile outside their “social level” are considered to be dangerously whacked on the negative side. In line with this one conclusion of the study was that most nationalities consider Americans to be simple and stupid. I am not at all sure this is such a bad thing. There are great advantages to making people think you are less capable than you really are.

The smiling thing has always been big in this country among Southrons and diplomats. Smiling is a good way of avoiding saying anything. I recall when I was growing up hearing mothers tell their daughters to keep their smiles open and their legs shut around boys. Since this was the period when counter-reproductive phamaceuticals were finally effective and available, there was considerably more adherence to the former than the latter.

Unfortunately, this smiling craze has spread to the rest of the Yankee republic, and instead of just Southron belles [1] being thought vacuous and inept above the neck,  the degree of the emptiness indicated by the length of the drawl, that condition has spred across the nation and indeed across genders although along the way the indication of vacuity has changed from the paucity of words to the paucity of ideas. I sometimes wonder if this facade is also responsible for the indiscriminate use of people’s given names without benefit of permission and request for forgiveness.

I used to attribute this to craven commercialism on the idea that these people mistakenly identified pleasantness with trust. If anything, it engenders the opposite, people who cannot speak politely are either arrogantly competent or imbicilically inept. The latter is the more common these days. So perhaps those furriners are right and the Yankee republic has become a naton of smiling lackwits?

[1]  Or at least what passes for belles in those days and this, not the daughters of people who own thousands of acres and hundreds of other people, but daughters of people whose ancestors were beneath the notice of those except when work was to be done or wars fought. Sad that we cannot come up with a better term for the nubile daughters of people who exerted thier right to determination.