Several of you have heard my recurring rant on stock photography on news sites. Take a look at the photo in this article. Be sure to read the caption. Those are the best sheep costumes I have ever seen!
Argentina criminals ‘evade capture by dressing up as sheep’
(Via Boing Boing.)
This is one of the more perplexing things that has happened to me while booking a hotel room. And developers wonder why people just click through bizarre-looking security warnings…
Fail!
Texas passed an amendment in 2005 with the intent of banning gay-marriage. But they may have banned more than they intended.
The amendment contains the text:
This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.
Logically, it seems like “marriage” is a member of the set of legal statuses “identical or similar to marriage”. Of course, there’s no telling how a judge would interpret the idea of something being “identical or similar” to itself.
Reason’s Matt Welch points out what I consider the single biggest bang-for-the-buck health-care reform opportunity in his blog on Whole Foods CEO John Makey’s proposal:
“As someone who h-a-t-e-s the health care system, I’ve never understood why de-linking insurance from employment isn’t a central part of every serious crack at reform, given that a preponderance of analysts on all sides of the debate agree that the post-war linkage of health benefits to the workplace is one of the system’s Original Sins.”
Hit & Run > The Whole Foods Plan for Health Care Reform – Reason Magazine
I recently received shipping notice for an in-warranty replacement of a UPS for my house. Check out the tracking number:
Order summary:
Line Quantity Product Description Carrier Tracking # Shipped Date 4 1 BR1300LCD APC BACK-UPS RS 1300VA LCD 120V FedEx 7.69766E+14 5/7/2008
Yes, Freud, sometimes digits really are just digits.
In anticipation of an upcoming trip to Costa Rica, I dusted off my online membership for RosettaStone Spanish I. As usual when this happens, I have to start over at the beginning. This time I noticed something that I had not noticed before.
One of the very basic noun constructs is “Un Elefante“. So, how often have you run across un elefante in a Spanish speaking country?
OK, I admit that I can no longer count the times I’ve been waiting for a green light, see the opposing traffic slow and stop, have my light turn green and then see a car whizz past me through the light that just turned red. It’s stupid and dangerous (not to mention definitely a moving violation).
Some cities have begun using automated Red Light Cameras. Some of them have notable misconfigurations enhancing the ideas that it is merely all about revenue rather than safety. There are other devices besides only red-light monitors, and I just have to wonder if there are better ways.
I wonder if Disney will consider Hamas’ use of Mickey Mouse as an act of war? They should know better than to mess with the mouse! Now we’re going to have to save the world for democracycontent-owners.
This really isn’t funny [snicker]. No, really.
[giggle]
[okay, the strike-through font humor doesn't translate to RSS...]
The US Copyright Royalty board has approved a per-performance royalty regime for internet streaming. Per-performance means they pay royalties for every _listener_ for each song they play, retroactive to 2006. This puts a far greater burden on internet streaming radio than on conventional radio. In many (most?) cases, the new royalty requirements are greater than the revenue of the stations.
I am a big fan of Radio Paradise. I’ve listened to them for years, and contributed several times. They have posted an essay on the subject.
Of course, there is an easy fix for this. Move offshore. And laugh while our copyright regime completely collapses under its own greed and idiocy.
It’s hard to imagine that _no_ one at SoundExchange and the RIAA gets this.
Sometimes I just don’t get the apple(computer) universe.
I loved my PPC laptop – almost anything I tried that was anywhere close to a mainstream use just worked. I could wave my hands at the machine and mutter vaguely and the result I wanted just happened.
I waited for awhile after the Intel macs came out so they could work out the “first run” bugs. I got a very nice Intel laptop just before the new year. It compiles things much faster, and for the most part runs the apps I need to run more effectively, BUT:
This thing is _far_ less stable than my PPC version and I find myself losing 10s of minutes a day (sometimes up to 6 of those) to getting it to do what I want to do.
- The wireless card and driver quality is _far_ below what I’d become used to. Connection management intrudes on my life daily now.
- It randomly (usually after being up for a day or more) refuses to sleep. I’d gotten so used to this “just working” that I got out of the habit of looking. My new laptop’s already had a really hot ride in my bag.
- I use a bonjour connection to a printer in the office. On the PPC version this was really stable. On this box, 1 time out of 3 that I try to print, it doesn’t “Just work”. (The most frustrating version of failure involves it deciding to use a different driver than it did last time – resulting in pages of “that’s not my printer language” showing up on the printer.
I’m watching my friends and coworkers (many of whom have new intel macbooks or macbook pros) going through similar pain, and I am alarmed at how quickly the “wave the chicken at windows” behaviors are becoming ingrained. The nice thing about OS/X (up to now) is that you didn’t have to have chickens – you could look at logs and figure out what was going wrong and _FIX_ it in the very rare situation when things didn’t “just work”. Those same logs are very silent on the above problems.
I’ve been moving my family and my lifestyle machines (I have a mac pro now too, and I _really_ like it when I’m not trying to print to freeBSD CUPS ipp queues). I am beginning to dread the probability of a new stream of family support issues that I can’t address without giving hours over to it. In particular, my boasts of the last couple of years about how living on a mac really lowers your frustration-with-the-machine pain are ringing hollow in their ears.
Apple – you are letting me down.
How did this happen?
I recently ordered an item from a company here in the Dallas area — Carrollton, to be precise. It’s just under 14 miles from their warehouse to my front door. On the 22nd, they gave me notice that the package had been made available to FedEx for delivery.
Past deliveries from this company have taken one day. I seem to recall them being UPS as well, but that might not be completely accurate.
This time around, though, it would appear that FedEx has collectively gotten into some powerful nose candy. After three days of no package, I decided to check with FedEx’s online tracking system:
Here’s where I need your help. Pull out a map of the US or a Globe. Now, starting from Carrollton Texas, draw a line to Dallas, Texas. On your map, how close does this line come to San Diego? When I run through this excercise, my answer is “about 1,300 miles.” Did you get something similar? The reason I ask is: that’s about 100 times further away than the box started in the first place. That’s a very counterintuitive direction to take my package.
FedEx claims that their ground service may take up to seven days — however, I always figured this was a statement of “we’ll get it there as soon as practical, which might be as long as seven days,” not “your package is entitled to a seven day tour of the United States, and we would be remiss were we to not grant it this vacation.”
On the plus side, it might have taken some nice vacation pictures for me. We’ll just have to wait — another four days — and see.
After decades of the Wright Amendment crippling Love Field in Dallas, it appears that an end may finally be in sight. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s plea for the involved parties to come up with a local solution instead of dragging the fight into the US Senate seems to have finally yielded fruit: last Thursday (June 15th), American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Dallas, Fort Worth, and the DFW Airport signed an agreement that represents a truce among the parties. Admittedly, this is just the first step in what will be a very long process (it needs to be okayed by Dallas and Fort Worth as well as the DFW Airport board, and then needs to pass through US Congress before December), but it is rather promising.
The good news is that, if everything goes well, the Wright Amendment is going away.
The bad news is that Southwest will still largely suffer under the same restrictions for another 8 years. Apparently, American Airlines, being unused to any sensible competition in the Dallas area, needs that long to plan a strategy that allows them to compete with an airline that can afford to charge about half as much.
Examining the finer details of the agreement: Southwest is immediately allowed to ticket connecting flights to non-Wright amendment states. In other words, you can now fly from DAL to SJC on a single ticket and check your luggage all the way through; but you’ll have to stop in an allowed destination (like El Paso) on the way.
Also, the City of Dallas will be forced, at taxpayers’ expense, to demolish 12 of the 32 gates at Love Field. Of the remaining 20 gates, Southwest will be allowed to use only 16. And if Southwest chooses to fly out of any airport other than Love in the DFW area, they lose those gates as well.
The important thing here is that American Airlines’ insistent and unattractive plea for the federal government to continue to save it from honest competition has failed. Within 8 years, there is significant promise that the cost of flights from Dallas will drop from 48% above the national average to something more in line with it. And really, that’s good news for everyone — at least, everyone who hasn’t been profiting from ridiculous, government-protected price gouging for the past 30 years.
I received a thoughtful letter from a large accounting firm informing me that they had been counting the acquired beans of a former employer of mine and that my personal data (name, home address and SSN), which had been lying around on one of their employee’s laptops minding its own business, had been liberated by a kind soul who had released it from its imprisonment, namely the trunk of the employee’s locked car.
Graciously, the accounting firm and former employer had partnered with the holy trinity of credit agencies to provide me, free of charge, a service that would let me know exactly when the triumvirate started libeling me and my credit rating. All I needed to do was provide my personal information and the super-secret promotional code on an easy-to-complete web form.
After I had provided my becoming-less-personal-by-the-minute data and the code, I hit the Submit button. A terse message appeared, stating that my humble request for an account could not be processed and that I should email their customer support group (whose domain name didn’t match the website with which I had been interacting). I did so. A coldly automated reply (from yet another domain), which labeled my supplication as spam, said that I would be helped in the order in which my email was received.
I contacted my former employer’s amazing efficient HR department. Together, a cheerful HR rep and I embarked on a journey of exploration through divers call centers that supposedly supported these credit bureaus. The first support person, who wished to be known only as “Joel”, insisted that I provide my full name, mother’s maiden name, SSN, phone number, and email address just so he could do a database lookup. He was able to locate my information in “another department’s database” but could not grant me access to it since he worked in “a different department”. He provided another 1-800 number to which he could _not_ transfer us and told us to call them directly. At that number, “Jay” was better at verifying my personal data without demanding that I give all of it to him first. However, he was also unable to help and gave us yet another 1-800 number that we had to call directly. After I provided “Eileen” with my “personal” data, she was less helpful, insisting that I must have created an account, but it wasn’t in the database yet, and that I should try again in two hours. The HR rep said that she would escalate the situation internally and with the accounting firm and call me back.
An hour later, the HR rep had managed to find a rare beast – an expert who was local to this continent and was willing to provide his full name and direct phone number. Huzzah! Mayhap he could clear whatever database/web glitch had foiled my previous attempts to initiate this valuable fraud protection service. I would be able to complete the account creation process! Hope glimmered.
And then faded. He wanted to “walk through the web form” with me and speculated that I had given myself the “wrong” username, since they had 4 million users, you know, and I probably picked a username that already existed. Or perhaps I had filled out some other field incorrectly. That was probably it. I couldn’t possibly know my own address, mother’s maiden name, or SSN. And if I did, surely I must have mistyped it. And their databases, with their complete and accurate dossiers on me, would know and reject my pathetic attempts to authenticate myself.
Wearied, I asked them just to snail mail any appropriate forms. I would interact with their broken web forms and databases no more.
Six hours later, Customer Care responded to my original electronic entreaty with yet another 1-800 number.
At least six more people on the planet (three of whom were using call center pseudonyms) have my personal information, and I have not yet enabled this wonderful fraud monitoring system to “protect” myself from inappropriate appropriation of my data.
I am drunk off my ass, so I must post something.
On the other hand, I have very little to say.
So I’m gonna tell you about fats.
In fact, I’m going to tell you how I lost 20 pounds without even really trying. I would think it’s just a fluke, except that when I saw Jonathan in Paris, he had lost 30 pounds by doing almost exactly the same thing.
There are two fundamental principles: (1) Saturated fats are bad, and (2) refined carbohydrates are bad.
Let’s examine this for a second.
Staurated fats have a proven impact on blood syrum levels of cholesterol, which we all know is bad for you. I’m really not sure if this has anything to do with the weight loss, but my own personal cholestersol level is far more within spec than it was before. I’d love to add rigorous exercise to my regiment to suppliment this, but my current schedule doesn’t really allow this.
Here’s what I suspect is the more important part, though: I’ve stopped eating refined grains. No more white bread. No more white rice. No more refined sugar. And the coolest part is that I’m not hungry between meals anymore. Ass far as my research has led me to beleive, one of the key problems is that the consumption of refined carbs — grains or sugars — leads to a spike in blood sugar levels. WOO HOO!!! However, your body responds by releasing huge amounts of insulin. This takes the sugars out of your blood stream, and then hangs around, removes all the ATP from you system, and makes you continue to feel hungry. So, you eat again — even though you’ve had well more than enough calories for the day. The end result? You consume craploads more calories than you need, and you’re on a blood sugar roller-coaster that makes you crabby near meal-times.
There’s no magic bullet here. The basic axiom that you need to expend more calories than you consume still applies. However, by making yourself not as hungry all the time, eating less becomes a far more tractible problem.
I leave you with a very nic recipe that I constructed with the aid of a CIA textbook and some guidance from a professional chef friend of mine: I’ts a risotto-like dish made from steel-cut oats. And it’s very simple.
1 cup steel cut (“Irish”) oats
4 cups vegetable or chicken bouliion
1 medium onion, finely minced
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup dry white wine (e.g. dry sherry)
In a medium sauce pan, heat the oil over medium. Add the onion and saute until translucent. Add the oats and stir until the oats begin to brown. Add 1/3rd of the boulion. Simmer until the liquid is mostly gone. Add another 1/3rd of the boulion, and do the same. Add the final 1/3rd of the boulion. Finally, when the last batch of boulion is reduced, add the wine and simmer down to a pasty texture. Adjust salt if necessary.
You can use this as a base for any sort of risotto-like dishes. Some good additions include fresh tomatoes, organo, basil, thyme, lemon juice, or anything similar that strikes your fancy.
Bon apetit, and enjoy the fiber. You’ll feel much beter.
Next time around, I’ll give you a more serious treatment of why polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated fats are pretty much good for you, and why you shouldn’t try to limit yourself to low-fat options as much as low-saturated-fat options. In the meanwhile, add ground flaxseed to everything you cook, and stop buying white flour. You really can use whole wheat soft white flour anywhere white flower works, with the possible minor exception of angel food cakes. But we’ll explore that later.
In the meantime, I’m still quite drunk and must get some sleep. Hug someone for me, and be nice to your pets. Eat well. Be happy. And, for the love of God, spend some time outside this weekend (unless you’re being battered by a hurricaine). Come by and see our new office if you haven’t already. I’d love to meet up for lunch sometime next week.
And don’t worry. I’ve had over two liters of water. I’ll feel fine in the morning.
So – wikipedia has, arguably, been above critical mass for accruing real, useful, content for some time.
You can still stumble across such wonders as this (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummingbirds) as
of the time of this post (check the history of the page if it’s gone):
The Bee Hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae) is, at 1.8 grams, the smallest bird in the world. A typical North American hummingbird, the Ruby-throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) weighs approximately 3 grams and has a length of 7.6 cm (3 in).
This is a kind of bird that runs around and hums to people in love. They are native to South America and Zimbabwe. These birds lay eggs in chinese soup.
It’s not clear to me that the resource pool (amount of work) from people who want wikipedia to be a serious
resource is currently, or will be, larger than pool that wants to make lame.
I just had a rather startling experience.
I’ll spare you the long backhistory about why I decided to recently gather copies of all my medical information together (short story: I’m unimpressed with every doctor I can find in the area, and find myself having to double-guess them a lot — I’ve even pointed out rather dangerous interactions between drugs prescribed to me by the same doctor at the same time).
The information that I was having a hard time finding was from the doctor I had when I first moved to Dallas. The problem was that I couldn’t remember his name or really any other information about him. I knew his office was on a particular street, but couldn’t narrow it down to less than about a 15-mile segment. Recently, when I found myself in a position to drive approximately that distance, I decided to take that particular street to see if I could pick out any familiar landmarks. It certainly wasn’t the best route to take, but it was better than driving the street without getting anywhere useful. I finally spotted something that looked familiar, and pulled into a parking lot. After poking around quite a bit, I found an office with a name that looked familiar.
I walked in and spoke to the receptionist. I mentioned that I was a patient there “around 1994 to 1997,” and asked if it was possible to get a copy of my medical records. She took my name and a phone number (I gave her my cell phone number) and promised to get back to me.
Several days later, I got a call back letting me know that I could come pick up a copy of my information. I did so, in person. Without ever presenting any identifying information. I was able to parlay a knowledge of (1) my name, and (2) the doctor I went to in a very rough period of time into three years of medical records.
Now, there’s nothing particularly sensitive in my personal medical records — but that’s neither here nor there. There are supposed to be stifling restrictions around what information is released to whom, to the point that I was a little worried that I might not be able to get them to release my own information to me.
And here’s the zinger: the documents handed over to me include my social security number, along with mailing addresses and phone numbers for my previous two residences. It includes my driver’s license number and date of birth. My current home address is a simple matter of public record.
I just stole my own identity. And even if someone could somehow trace the breach to that particular doctor’s office, all they could provide is a description of me (keeping in mind that the long hair could just be a wig) and a phone number (keeping in mind that it might trace back to a stolen cell phone or a prepaid VoIP account).
The lessons here should be obvious, but I can’t seem to figure out practical ways to apply them. Stop seeing doctors? Tempting, but not practical. Plus, this information was nine years old. Bottom line: you can’t trust anyone to safeguard your information, and you’ve almost certainly let the cat out of the bag one way or another. I guess the take-home here is: always assume that enough information to impersonate you has been carved into every public bathroom stall in America, and maintain a commensurate level of vigilance.
I am profoundly disturbed by the fact that I initially followed both links within seconds of each other. I suspect that, rather than differences of faith and ideology, it is really little things like this that inspire people of different religions and cultures to war upon each other.
Last night, as I was trying to get to sleep, I had a series of thoughts that brought me to a troublesome gap in my understanding of human vision1. My problem? I couldn’t figure out how we see purple.
See, growing up, we were always taught that the spectral colors, starting from the longest wavelength, were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. If you ever asked the teacher what violet was, they’d say “it’s just another name for purple.” Indigo? “It’s kind of a puplish-blue. It’s named after a type of flower.” Thus, we are taught that the rainbow, and therefore the spectrum of colored light visible to humans, looks like this:
| ~400 nm | ~650 nm | |||||||
| This Is Wrong | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
There is plenty of confusion to go around here, so let’s start with the basics.
Average human eyes have four types of receptors — rods and three kinds of cones.
The rods operate well in low-light, are far denser than cones, respond more slowly than cones, and help distinguish contrast and detail.
The cones require strong light, pick up colors, and help process motion more quickly. These cones each have a broad range of sensitivity. The short-wave ones, s-cones (often erroneously called “blue cones”) are most receptive around 420 nm. The medium-wave ones, m-cones (“green cones”), 534 nm; Long-wave cones, l-cones (“red cones” ), 564 nm. In reality, 420 nm appears violet to humans, while 564 nm is really more of a yellowish-green (and not anything like red at all).
The responsivness of the l-cones is insignificant below 450 nm and above 700 nm; m-cones range from about 440 nm to 675 nm, and s-cones, from somewhere shorter than 400 nm to about 520 nm.
All that is sent to your brain (in terms of distinguing colors) is relative values from these three cones. So, consider a single, pure light wave with a wavelength of 570 nm. People with normal eyes will perceive this as yellow (because it stimulates both the m-cones and l-cones in the right ratio). Two simultaneous waves of light at, say, 510 nm (green) and 590 nm (red) in the right ratio will produce the same reaction from the cones — meaning it will appear to be the identical shade of yellow.
So, here’s where I got caught up: if purple (which at the time I thought was the same as violet) can be simulated as a mix of red and blue, how does violet — at the low end of the spectrum — stimulate the l-cones?
The answer is that apparently, it doesn’t. And the key to that answer is this: purple and violet are very different colors. Physiologically, violet results from stimulation of the s-cones without stimulating the m-cones. (Perceiving blue requires stimulation of the m-cones to some degree). Purple requires at least two wavelengths, so that the s-cones and l-cones are both stimulated without having too much stimulation of the m-cones. I’m going to have to grab a prism and play around with a few things to be fully comfortable with my understanding, but I think I have a functioning model again.
But here’s where things get odd.
The lowest wavelength that your screen can display is this:
| |
||||||||
| Here is Blue | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Exactly how that blue is produced (and its exact color) depends on whether you’re using a CRT or an LCD screen, and a wide variety of other factors. It’ll probably be around 460 nm, though. That’s right around what people like to call “blue.” Anyway, the fact is that your screen simply mixes Red, Green, and Blue together to make the colors that it can produce. And the blue that we see above is still stimulating your m-cones, or it would appear violet to you.
So, as far as I can tell, modern televisions, computer monitors, scanners — even digital cameras — simply ignore indigo and violet. There’s no way to record them, and no way to display them. Taking a digital picture of a violet flower or a bird with violet markings will produce an image that substitutes blue — probably dark blue — for violet.
A key example of this shortcoming is shown by any attempt to electronically render Yves Klein’s trademark “International Klein Blue,” which contains a lot of indigo and/or violet in it. In person, Klein’s art making use of this patented color is absolutely breathtaking, even if it’s just something simple like a sea sponge dipped in paint. Stunning. Unforgettable. Seeing a work like this in person is absolutely shocking:
On your computer screen, it’s pretty unremarkable, isn’t it? To understand what you’re missing — and what’s wrong with stopping the spectrum at blue — make it a point to seek out some of Klein’s work the next time you’re near a modern art museum.
So, this raises an interesting question: why do all consumer electronics use only red, green, and blue? Consider that, if cameras and monitors instead used a red/green/violet color scale, we would be able to have the same range of color reproduction that we do currently, plus the visible colors from 400 nm to 460 nm. In practice, most people just don’t take much note of violet, and simply don’t miss it. But wouldn’t it still make more sense to be able to reproduce it when it is present?
I mean, doesn’t your monitor suddenly feel strangely defective now that you realize that there are colors you can see but which it completely lacks the ability to render?
You may recall my Vonage rant a while back. I sent them mail to clarify the situation at that time, but didn’t hear back. (In the interim, I’ve settled on Delta Three’s iconnecthere service).
Almost two months after I sent my query to Vonage Customer Service asking about the activation, shipping, and termination charges, I finally got two responses. Taken together, they fall into the “heart is in the right place, but head is up their ass” category. Compare:
Dear Adam, Thank you for contacting customer care. Please forgive the delay in responding. As regards your email, no in the case of a retail activation you would not pay an activation fee. Although a termination fee is applied to all canceled lines, if you call us and explain the situation most agents will waive the fee and refund the charge. Thank you, Nik Drumm customer care agent second shift
Then, 11 hours later:
Dear Sir/Madam Thank you for contacting Customer Service. I am sorry for any delay in responding. In response to your email. If you purchase the adapter from a retail location, there would be no activation fee, disconnect fee, or shipping fee. Thank you for choosing Vonage and I do hope that I have answered your questions. Do not hesitate to contact us if you need further assistance. Tanisha Customer Service Representative
So… there is a termination fee? There isn’t one? What? Do these guys even know what they’re doing? I appreciate the snappy seven-week turn-around time on customer care, but the responses don’t give me much confidence.
You may recall the problems I had downloading the Fedora Core 3 ISO image a while back. Well, I did finally get a good copy downloaded and installed. I did a bit of analysis on the downloaded images, and determined that there had been a couple of four-byte changes. This was something of a mystery, but nothing notable.
I was mentioning this to Rohan just now, and he twigged on the “four bytes” part of this. In particular, he wanted to know what the bytes had been changed from and to.
In the non-corrupt image, there is a byte pattern of “D1 1E 21 0D” starting at (decimal) position 634,912,768 and at decimal position 11,875,12,320.
In my first download (which was paused and resumed over several days), that set of bytes at 11,875,12,320 was inexplicably “C0 A8 00 6C.”
In my second download, both sets were “C0 A8 00 6C.”
In the third download (several days later), the image was uncorrupted.
Rohan’s specific question was: “So, do those look like reasonable IP addresses?”
Let’s see… C0 A8 00 6C… 192.168.0.108.
Oh. My. God.
Let’s check something about the bytes that it replaced… they’re 209.30.33.13.
SBC Internet Services - Southwest SBCIS-SBIS-20930 (NET-209-30-0-0-1)
209.30.0.0 - 209.30.255.255
PPPoX Pool bras2.rcsntx SBC209030032000031209 (NET-209-30-32-0-1)
209.30.32.0 - 209.30.47.255
Yep. That’s my ISP.
My NAT saw its external IP address in the incoming data, and decided to change it to the internal IP address of my machine to “fix” things.
I’m using a different NAT now.