31 Jul 2006
Families Challenging Religious Influence in Delaware Schools

Maybe the folks backing the school board so vociferously need to heed the words of the founder of their movement in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 7:

15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

After her family moved to this small town 30 years ago, Mona Dobrich grew up as the only Jew in school. Mrs. Dobrich, 39, married a local man, bought the house behind her parents’ home and brought up her two children as Jews.

(link) [New York Times]

12:39 /Asatru | 2 comments | permanent link

Worst Ever Security Flaw in Diebold Voting Machine

Until and unless these machines are open sourced - and I mean hardware and software - they should not be used. Period.

The folks at Open Voting Foundation got their hands on a Diebold AccuVote TS touchscreen voting machine. They took it apart (pictures here), and found the most serious security flaw ever discovered in this machine. A single switch is all that is required to cause the machine to boot an unverified external flash instead of the builtin verified EEPROM.

(link) [Slashdot]

12:08 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

China clash as church demolished

Ah, yes! The virtues of the free market - with total social control. This nation definitely deserves to be our most favored trading partner. In fact, our current Administration admires them so much they're trying to emulate them!

Protesters and police clash in eastern China over the demolition of an unauthorised church, reports say.

(link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

06:08 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

30 Jul 2006
Paul Thurrott's WGA Woes Solved

Well, it seems the giggles may have been premature! But it led me to an interesting thought...

How does a software company know you're running a pirated copy?

Well, they compare the keys that you enter during setup/installation to a set of master keys in a database, right? And presumably the first registration with a particular key "wins", and is considered legitimate.

My question is what prevents this process from becoming "he said, she said"? When taking a single copy pirate to court, how do software companies prove, legally, that the registration of a particular key has happened before without compromising the original keyholder's identity?

In Microsoft's case they could demand presentation of physical credentials - the packaging with the key and holographic seal, for example. But what about downloaded software, with no physical credentials? How could that be proven?

I suppose they could demand a receipt, but, well, could someone randomly drive by my house, claim ownership of the canoe I have in my back yard (purchased 10 years ago in a different state) and have a court enforce a demand to see a receipt? That seems a bit extreme, but maybe that really is how it works...

If there are any techies or legal eagles out there who know, by all means enlighten me!

Last week Slashdot ran an article regarding the trouble Paul Thurrott had with WGA. It turns out that after talking to Microsoft, he was actually running a pirated version of Windows, legitimately purchased from an online vendor. Paul admits that 'the truth is, I just made a mistake. If we learn something from that mistake, fantastic, but I wasn't trying to set up a life lesson for anyone, let alone myself.'

(link) [Slashdot]

07:53 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Dakotas at 'epicenter' of U.S. drought

I can sure sympathize with these folks, but right here, right now, we're almost literally awash in excess moisture. Too bad we don't have a way to get it 800 miles west...

AP - Fields of wheat, durum and barley in the Dakotas this dry summer will never end up as pasta, bread or beer. What is left of the stifled crops has been salvaged to feed livestock struggling on pastures where hot winds blow clouds of dirt from dried-out ponds.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

07:33 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

29 Jul 2006
Lactivists: Where is it OK to breastfeed?

This is a classic cultural Catch-22: breasts are perceived as sexual because that's the only context in which breasts are displayed. Why aren't they displayed in other contexts? Because they're seen as sexual! Apparently even by breastfeeding women!

Although I daresay that it would take a pretty serious pervert to get aroused by this magazine cover. For a good survey of our collective hangups on mammary glands, see The Book of the Breast by Robert Anton Wilson.

"I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine," one person wrote. "I immediately turned the magazine face down," wrote another. "Gross," said a third.

(link) [CNN.com]

12:09 /Politics | 2 comments | permanent link

The New Age: So Big and Healthy Nowadays That Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You

Now this is an interesting article: we're bigger than our ancestors, and we live longer, but why?

I wonder what the results of such a survey on an earlier, more agrarian period. Lot's of the men in this study were immigrants from the crowded cities of the time, right as the industrial revolution got into full swing, and farming was changing, too, from subsistence to cash cropping. I doubt if we have enough records to examine such a era, but it would be fascinating to see the variations.

It is one of the most striking shifts in human existence - a change from small, sickly people to humans who are so robust that their ancestors seem almost unrecognizable.

(link) [New York Times]

11:49 /Home | 2 comments | permanent link

JavaScript opens doors to browser-based attacks

Hmmm... maybe I've been a bit overly optimistic.

Malicious JavaScript embedded in a Web site can let a miscreant map a home or corporate network and attack connected devices.

(link) [CNET News.com]

07:06 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Mel Gibson arrested for DUI

Wonder if he'd been drinking Purple Passions?

Oscar-winning actor and director Mel Gibson was arrested Friday in Malibu, California, and charged with driving under the influence, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office.

(link) [CNN.com]

07:03 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Has Orwell's '1984' Come 22 Years Later?

We're like the frog that being boiled slowly - we won't even notice we're on the menu until we've already been cooked! Reminds me of a bumper sticker I spotted recently "It is as bad and you think, and they are out to get you!" ...

And to answer the rhetorical question posed by Slashdot - it can get a lot worse. And it will, long before it get's any better.

This weekend my mother bought a grille lighter, something like this butane lighter. The self-scanner at Kroger's locked itself up and paged a clerk, who had to enter our drivers license numbers into her kiosk before we could continue. Last week my girlfriend bought four peaches. An alert came up stating that peaches were a restricted item and she had to identify herself before being able to purchase such a decidedly high quantity of the dangerous fruit. My video games spy on me, reporting the applications I run, the websites I visit, the accounts of the people I IM. My ISP is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles, the companies I trust to free information are my enemies, the people looking out for me are being watched. As if that weren't enough, my own computer spies on me daily, my bank has been compromised, my phone is tapped--has been for years--and my phone company is A-OK with it. What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs? The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier. The big question now is: how much worse can it get?

(link) [Slashdot]

06:58 /Politics | 2 comments | permanent link

Iranian leader bans usage of foreign words

I wonder if they're going to replace the word "Sharia" with it's Persian equivalent? How about "halal" or "haram"? Oh, wait: those words are "sacred", they're Arabic from the Koran!

The problem here isn't a foreign name for "elastic loaves", it's a lack of elasticity in thinking on the part of the leadership. I wonder if there's a Persian word for "insane, saber-rattling loudmouth"?

AP - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered government and cultural bodies to use modified Persian words to replace foreign words that have crept into the language, such as "pizzas" which will now be known as "elastic loaves," state media reported Saturday.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

06:46 /Politics | 7 comments | permanent link

28 Jul 2006
Deja Vu Recreated in a Lab Setting

I'm sure I've read this somewhere before ...

BBC News is reporting that scientists may have found a way to study deja vu, that uneasy feeling you have seen something before. Using hypnosis, scientists claim to be able to incorrectly trigger the portion of the brain responsible for recognition of something familiar. From the article: "Two key processes are thought to occur when someone recognizes a familiar object or scene. First, the brain searches through memory traces to see if the contents of that scene have been observed before. If they have, a separate part of the brain then identifies the scene or object as being familiar. In deja vu, this second process may occur by mistake, so that a feeling of familiarity is triggered by a novel object or scene."

(link) [Slashdot]

06:17 /Humor | 2 comments | permanent link

27 Jul 2006
Grandkids Are Here

And Grandpa has things to do that are a lot more fun than blogging...

15:22 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

26 Jul 2006
Germans set up an apartheid-like society in Britain

Here's a prime example of a "researcher" pulling modern political prejudices into "science". Why, I had no idea that the (heathen) Anglo-Saxon conquerors of Britain were channeling P.W. Botha! Maybe I'm getting too thin-skinned in my dotage, but I think this comes from the same strain of academic political correctness that paints modern heathens, and indeed, white people in general, as racists - never mind that the "victims" here were white, too! And it's bad science, to boot! You'd think they could at least get that part right.

First off, Britain was not settled by "Germans" - the "invaders" were Angles, Saxons and Jutes, mostly from what we would not call the Low Countries. There were "Germanic" in language and religion, but "German" as a nation or an ethnic identity didn't exist for nearly another thousand years.

Secondly, "apartheid" is a modern political structure characterized by a caste-like stratification of society based on race. This was, of course, most associated with South Africa, where "blacks", "coloreds" (mixed race and South Asians) and "whites" were treated differently by law. The Anglo-Saxon law codes had nothing to do with "race" whatsoever (as a "Welshman" (Celt) was physically indistinguishable from an Anglo-Saxon) and everything to do with social class. The author comes close to admitting this:

In this society, people lived together in a servant-master relationship in a system akin to the apartheid system more recently found in South Africa.

Apartheid was not a "servant-master" system: it was a legal caste system that went into extraordinary detail to keep the various peoples from mingling in any way, much less interbreeding. I dare the author here to show me an ancient law code that forbade an Anglo-Saxon from marrying a Welshman. Their own research proves this: if there was no interbreeding, how did Anglo-Saxon Y-chromosomes become so allegedly prevalent?

We don't need to drag 20th century African politics into this, as there's a commonly known name for this ancient system: it's called "feudalism". Since the Anglo-Saxons were the "winning" invaders, they more likely had higher social status than the natives ("Welsh"), hence the higher weregelds. The only table of weregilds that I can find is here: note that the weregild for a "Welsh with five hides (of land)" is equal to that of a "Landless Thegn (Anglo-Saxon nobleman)". The weregild for a "King's Welsh Horseman" was actually higher than that for a Anglo-Saxon ceorl! This was based on class as well as language and nativity: it was a pre-feudal system of conquest law, very typical throughout the world in this period. But it was not racially based.

But leaving all this aside, there's the question of the science itself: the authors did a statistical survey with computer simulations to reach their conclusions:

Statistical analysis carried out by Dr Thomas and colleagues in previous studies suggested that the English gene pool was made of between 50 and 100 per cent Anglo-Saxon Y-chromosomes.

However, actual measurement of the Y-chromosomes of modern Brits done in 2003 paint a somewhat different picture:

A new genetic survey of Y chromosomes throughout the British Isles has revealed a very different story. The Celtic inhabitants of Britain were real survivors. Nowhere were they entirely replaced by the invaders and they survive in high proportions, often 50 percent or more, throughout the British Isles, according to a study by Dr. Cristian Capelli, Dr. David B. Goldstein and others at University College London.

Apparently, this new study did a computer enhanced statistical analysis on one part (the Y chromosome part - the original also studied mitochondrial DNA passed by the female) of the old ones and came out with a radically different conclusion. Given the deep understanding of politics and history shown by the authors of this new study, methinks that conclusion might have been a bit pre-determined. I find it like the glass that contains 50% of it's capacity being described as "half full" by one party and "half empty" by another. What was it Mark Twain said about this? He was quoting Disraeli, I think: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics!".

I think I'll put my money on real science and an understanding of history, as opposed to the kind of rabid (and very modern) political correctness that this Study in Stupidity represents.

An apartheid-like system existed in early Anglo-Saxon Britain, which wiped out a majority of original British genes in favor of German ones, according to research led by UCL (University College London).

(link) [EurekAlert! - Breaking News]

11:13 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link

Creamy, Healthier Ice Cream? What’s the Catch?

Ya know, there's something seriously wrong with folks that think this is a good thing:

Almost all commercial ice creams contain industrial ingredients that mimic the luxurious effects of butterfat and egg yolks: some are natural, like carrageenan, extracted from algae plentiful in the Irish Sea; others are synthetic, like mono- and diglycerides.

They want a creamy texture but they don't want to use cream. They want a rich flavor, but they don't want to use eggs. Some of the motivation for this travesty has to do with the "low fat = must be good for you" myth, but a lot of it has to do with the bottom line. But the latest in ice cream technology is a real mind-bender: genetically engineered protein from fish, grown by yeast, to stop ice crystals from forming:

The other new method for making supercreamy ice cream was caught up last month in the global debate over genetically modified foods. In June, Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate, applied to Britain’s Food Standards Agency for permission to use a new ingredient in its frozen desserts — a protein cloned from the blood of an eel-like Arctic Ocean fish, the ocean pout.

In Britain, where labeling of GM food is mandated, this has already come to be called "vaneela" ... but in the US, well, was there something fishy about your last ice cream cone? You'd never know - labeling is not required.

But the statement that really gets me here is from H. Douglas Goff, professor of dairy sciences at the University of Guelph in Ontario:

“The ice creams produced with the new methods are simply better than any ice creams have ever been,” Professor Goff said. "Quite definitely better in texture, and much better tasting."

I just don't believe that. I've (unwittingly) tried a product made with this (Breyers Light Double Churned Ice Cream Bars) and I thought they sucked. So I'd like to issue a personal invitation to Professor Goff to stop by the farm on a warm summer day. We'll run over to Kevyn's if he's still milking Cherry (or out to the barn if we have a cow in milk) and get a gallon or two of fresh milk. Then we'll hit the hen house for some fresh eggs, pull out the ice cream maker, some kosher rock salt, a bit of vanilla and some ice and crank away for an hour or so.

And if he can tell me with a straight face that his "vaneela" ice cream tastes better, I'll become a believer in better living through playing god genetic engineering.

For those who crave ice cream as voluptuous as butter and as virtuous as broccoli, there is fresh hope in the freezer case.

(link) [New York Times]

09:17 /Agriculture | 3 comments | permanent link