31 Mar 2007
I'm Getting Used to This

and that's a bad thing: we took mom to the hospital again last Thursday night. No bullshit about "thingys" this time - it was a heart attack. They kept her overnight and released her yesterday afternoon. There's nothing to be done surgically - all they can suggest is to adjust her drug regimen. And mom's started talking about seeing her departed friends and relative soon - she's tired of this, and I don't blame her.

07:38 /Home | 1 comment | permanent link

29 Mar 2007
Smokers make poorer workers

Oh boy - another one! I need to start wearing a shirt that says "Kick Me - I Smoke!", as smokers seem to be the group du jour for kicking. Be that as it may be, let's look at this "study"...

I'm not going to pick on their numbers, nor am I going to claim they were ax grinding, although both could certainly be suggested. Rather, this study offers a perfect opportunity to demonstrate a principle of statistics that most folks blithely ignore.

I guarantee you that I could conduct a similar study in any major American city and reach the following "conclusions" from my numbers: Blacks perform worse at work than non-blacks. Blacks are also more likely to have a less than honourable discharge, to be demoted, to desert, and to earn less than their non-black colleagues. It would be a legitimate, random sample study, too, and I wouldn't fudge the data. My numbers would "prove" my conclusion.

But of course, the implications of the conclusion that blacks are lesser human beings would be laughably wrong. Why? Because I would've violated the prime directive of statistical science:

Correlation does not equal causation.

Do you think anybody'd publish my study? And if they did, would it be taken seriously? Or would I be attacked as a bigoted fool?

Why would they so easily pick up on the flaws of my "conclusive proof" and yet miss it so readily in this instance? Who's really grinding that political ax: the researchers or the media who report their results? Or both?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Smokers perform worse at work than non-smokers, finds a study of US navy female service members published in Tobacco Control. Smokers were also more likely to have a less than honourable discharge, to be demoted, to desert, and to earn less than their non-smoking colleagues, the study showed.

(link) [EurekAlert]

06:43 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link

Students Sue Anti-Cheating Service

I was wondering when this was going to happen. You can't constantly tell kids not to make archives of music and movies because they're "intellectual property" and not expect at least some of them to pick up on the fact that they hold the same rights to their term papers as the RIAA does to it's albums.

This suit should be a slam dunk for the plaintiffs.

Two McLean High School students have launched a court challenge against a California company hired by their school to catch cheaters, claiming the anti-plagiarism service violates copyright laws.

(link) [Washington Post]

via Overlawyered

06:12 /Copywrongs | 2 comments | permanent link

28 Mar 2007
Maternal beef diet could impact sperm counts, UR study suggests

Here's another Study in Stupidity - even though I believe that it's conclusions were probably correct, there's simply no way these folks can make such a sweeping claim after a study involving 387 men! This is analogous to me observing some 300 geeky engineers working in my building, and concluding that Battlestar Galactia must be the most popular show on television...

Additionally, they used data gathered from recollections of diet stretching back over 50 years! And a good deal of that time was before hormones were introduced into cattle feed!

I don't know why the media swallowed bullshit like this whole, but they do, day in and day out. This was all over the place, BBC, NYT, CNN and no one asked anything about the obvious issues I've raised here. Not one media outlet questioned the validity of claiming results for a population of 300 million plus based on a sample of 1/2,000,000. Unbelievable.

A mother's high beef consumption while pregnant was associated with lower sperm counts in her son, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Rochester.

(link) [EurekAlert! - Breaking News]

06:44 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

27 Mar 2007
Mormons miffed over coffee-swilling angel image

Maybe the Pope should trademark the cross and sue Lutherans. Maybe I should trademark Thor's Hammer and sue the local carpenter's union!

For a coffee shop, T-shirts of a Mormon angel with java flowing into his trumpet are selling well. But they don't have the blessing of religious leaders...The church informed Beazer that the angel's image is a registered trademark.

(link) [CNN.com]

19:03 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Footnote to a Sad Life

I've said nary a word about Anna Nicole Smith, and for good reason: I've never really wanted to deliver a "celebrity screed", and that's what would've come out. "Pathetic" is the only category she ever fit in my mind, and that's as politely as I can say it.

Which makes this piece from the Trib all the more poignant. And that's a word I never thought I'd use in connection with Anna Nicole Smith.

Death strips away the artifice we paint on to make our lives a little prettier than they actually were. In coldly answering the question, "How did this person die?" it delivers a grim little object lesson in the way a life actually went.

(link) [Chicago Tribune]

18:46 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

26 Mar 2007
SCOTUS Case May End Sale Prices

If I own something, I can sell it for any price I so choose. If you try to "sell" me something with the resale price fixed, that is not a sale at all - you're merely leasing me the item. And further, for this scheme to be logical, I would be obligated to place the burden of a fixed resale price on my customer, forbidding him for selling the item for less than he paid for it.

The recension of this rule would eliminate the only part of anti-trust law that actually supports property rights. Go figure.

If you own a mom & pop store and can't get rid of some of your inventory, you can always clear out some shelf space by holding a sale. If the Supreme Court sides with business interests in a case they heard today, however, such sales may no longer be possible. Since 1911, it has been illegal for manufacturers to force retailers into setting a price floor for products — individual retailers get to decide how much they sell their products for. But today the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case seeking to overturn this longstanding rule. Should the Court do so, it would drive up consumer prices across the board. This case is particularly salient in the era of Internet shopping: consumers are now easily able to shop around to multiple retailers to find the best price. The Court could wipe out this advantage. From the article: "Should the Court abandon the... rule against minimum resale price maintenance... it would send a signal that the Roberts Court will continue to narrow the application of the antitrust laws and that the Court may disregard settled precedent and Congressional will in other areas of the law as well."

(link) [Slashdot]

21:09 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link

24 Mar 2007
What a Week Redux

Shortly after completing yesterday morning's post I let the dogs out for their morning constitutionals. Cubby immediately took off towards the far eastern edge of the main pasture, never mind that it was mostly underwater from the (usual) torrential spring rains we'd been having. Peering through the gloom (thanks to Mitch it was still pitch black) I spotted our other Horned Dorset ewe away from the flock - and with a small white spot beside her. Curly Sue had lambed in the middle of the thunderous rainstorm, right by the already flooded creek!

So I got the dogs back in, and took off with a flashlight to see what was going on. Two lambs were down and underwater: I picked one up briefly and found no sign of life at all, but when I stopped and grabbed the second I felt a faint twitch - still alive!

I wiped his head as best I could with my sleeve, pinched off his nostrils and blew hard into his mouth and pressed his chest. Water came gushing out - Curly Sue was going nuts, trying to butt me, but I did it again. And again. And finally got a breath back! And a very, very weak bleat!

Cradling the lamb I headed for the barn, Curly Sue behind me, still trying her damnedest to kill me. I got into the side stall, ran a could of yearling heifers out, waited for Curly Sue to come in with me and latched the gate. She was much relieved when I put her baby down.

I gave Curly's teats a quick squeeze while she was vigorously licking the little bugger and made sure she was in milk. She was, so I placed the little guy on a teat and made sure he got his first meal.

I laid some fresh straw, got a water bucket and a couple of flakes of hay for the Curly, and retrieved the carcass of the other lamb. By the time I finished the rest of the morning chores it was nearly 8, and I was covered in mud and blood and afterbirth. Another shower, and I made it to work by 9.

This morning, after almost all the water had receded from the pasture, I found another dead lamb - Curly had birthed triplets! But she dropped this little guy completely underwater, he never had a chance.

From now on, when people ask the question "Which is dumber, a sheep or a chicken?" I'll have an answer based on experience. I've never seen a chicken lay an egg underwater.

Ah, life on the farm. How romantic!

23:12 /Home | 4 comments | permanent link

Molester and his parents indicted in boy's death

These people are monsters - nothing short of the death penalty would serve them properly. But one paragraph in this sordid tale struck a chord: how did this murderous clan come to be ensconced in their trailer park abode?

Ironically, the Edenfields moved into the trailer park where Christopher lived last year because of a Georgia law intended to keep child molesters away from children. Sheriffs' deputies told George Edenfield in September that he had to leave his home near downtown Brunswick because it was too close to a playground. Georgia law prohibits registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools and other places that draw children.

I've blogged about these laws before. Now we see the real effect - these insane regulations do nothing to prevent child molesters from preying on the innocent, they merely shuffle the deck, and place these perverts in new communities that have no idea there are now monsters in their midst.

A convicted child molester and his parents were indicted Wednesday on charges they molested and then murdered a 6-year-old neighbor boy, whose body was found last week in a trash bag dumped by a roadside.

(link) [CNN.com]

15:08 /Politics | 2 comments | permanent link

Lambs

Here's the photo of the lambs I promised last week (born 3/13/07).

Dorset/Blackie lambs born 3/13/07

08:59 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Sex in the 1700s

The more things change ...

Prostitutes, perversions and public scandals -- the stuff of the 21st century tabloids was familiar to readers three centuries earlier, according to new research from the University of Leeds.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

07:48 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

23 Mar 2007
What a week ...

It's been a long time time since I've been through the travails of a "release week", and I've never been through one like this one. I've shipped a lot of code in my time, but this week, well, this was special. The code was supposed to ship a week ago - we finally "burned gold" last night at 5:30.

As if the pressure of shipping code wasn't enough, I discovered last Monday that my little red S10 has a burned out a clutch. And, oh, by the way, the water pump picked the same time to go kaput. That'll set me back about a grand, an expense that I'm certainly not prepared for - and won't be prepared for for a couple of weeks. So I borrowed my mom's car and have been driving that back and forth to work. A major pain - still haven't figured out how to deliver 70 dozen eggs from the back of a 1989 Dodge K-car.

At the Tuesday status meting another bombshell fell. The lead developer at my work is leaving, effective a week from today. Which puts me in the rather uniques position of being the senior PC software engineer for the division - having been there a little over 3 months. Supervising a codebase in excess of a million lines. Whew! Most of in written using MFC and Visual Studio, two technologies that I cordially despise. Joy.

On the plus side, that means we'll be transiting to some rational, maintainable technology, like Delphi, C++ Builder or C# (if corporate insists on staying with M$).

Wednesday we ran into the show stopper bug from Hel (of course) - it was a dependency issue with machines that had installed IE7, and I literally worked 20 straight hours to resolve it. But resolve it I did.

When I got home last night at about 6:30, I discovered the goats were out, and about a mile away south. A huge hole in the back fence - the little bastards will have to spend today in the barn, until I can get out to fix it tonight. Assuming it stops raining.

And tomorrow, my eldest daughter is moving in with me, planning on staying until July, when she finally get some professional license issues resolved and can move to Chicago. She'll have the spare room, and I'm really looking forward to it, but it'll be stressful, no doubt.

There's a lot of things I'd like to blog about - I've been saving clips all week - and maybe I'll get to some in a few minutes. Or over the weekend. Or maybe I'll just sleep in until next Friday.

18:21 /Home | 2 comments | permanent link

19 Mar 2007
Supreme Court to hear student free-speech case

The school (and the Administration) seem to be of the opinion that "you can say anything you want, as long as we agree with it!". And I don't think that's what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they penned that pesky First Amendment.

Reuters - The U.S. Supreme Court considers on Monday its first major dispute on student free-speech rights in nearly 20 years, a case about the power of school authorities to censor what they viewed as a pro-drug message at a school-sponsored event.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

05:08 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

18 Mar 2007
Archive.org Sued By Colorado Woman

Bullshit! If she really didn't want her material archived, it would've taken less than 30 seconds to create a file that would've prevented it. This gal intentionally had no robots.txt file and instead posted her refusal to be spidered on her main page in HTML. Any Court that has a brain will see through this transparent attempt to collect $$$ from Google and other search engines - she just started off with the smallest of the lot to try and get some legal traction.

It won't work.

The Internet Archive is being sued by a Colorado woman for spidering her site. Suzanne Shell posted a notice on her site saying she wasn't allowing it to be crawled. When it was, she sued for civil theft, breach of contract, and violations of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations act and the Colorado Organized Crime Control Act. A court ruling last month granted the Internet Archive's motion to dismiss the charges, except for the breach of contract claim. If Shell prevails on that count, sites like Google will have to get online publishers to 'opt in' before they can be crawled, radically changing the nature of Web search.

(link) [Slashdot]

08:34 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

16 Mar 2007
Church remembers its model member -- a turkey

This needs no pithy comment ...

A church was planning a Sunday moment of silence for what the pastor called a model member of his congregation: a wild turkey.

(link) [CNN]

06:38 /Asatru | 1 comment | permanent link