Double Holiday Recovery

This Memorial Weekend was a heavy one because one of my nieces got married. It is a hard drive just going up the California 5 Freeway on a good day, but on crowded days it is frustrating and dangerous. When you add in doing last second shopping for wedding presents, shoes that match hideous shades of green that wedding planners picked, all kinds of hair sprays, lipstick and other stuff women have to worry about -- being male, I was not having a nice day. I only spent about $60 on a shirt and tie for the occasion versus the minimum $1000 that my wife and daughter burned through.

Weddings cost ridiculous amounts of money. I was married twice. The first time I was age 21 and I don't remember how much it cost, but since her parents didn't like me and my parents weren't even involved, it probably wasn't much. That was a good thing because that marriage had a bad ending, to my enduring regret.

The second time I got married, about age 28, I think we spent $100. $50 for the wedding and $50 for the slot machines -- it was in the Lake Tahoe area. If you divide the 29 years we've been married into that $100, it comes out to about $3.50 per year. That was a pretty good cost-benefit ratio.

But the cost of those two weddings together wouldn't have even paid for a single flower garland for one of the bride's maids in this wedding. Altogether I think it cost somewhere in the $40-$50 thousand range, partly because the groom's parents and friends were flown in from Brazil and partly due to the incredible amounts of food, flowers, musicians, and the sheer number of guests. Several hundred. Between the groom's Brazilians and the bride's Pacific Islanders, there were a huge bunch of guests.

I think the best part of the whole thing for me lasted about 20 minutes, which was the time that my granddaughter, age 20 months, danced in the middle of the dance floor as if she was a ballerina doing the bunny hop. It was wonderful, but she was already tuckered out from the whole day. So after her grand debut she grew very weary and I had to take her to her great-grandma's house for a nice bottle of milk and a crib to conk out in.

Since I don't drink, and I'm not all that much of a social butterfly, it was a relief to leave the wedding party and stand guard with my little granddaughter. I used the time while she slept working on my laptop to design some software while everyone else got rip-roaring drunk, sick, obnoxious and goofy. The next day I was the only one that didn't have a hang over.

Then there was a lot of gabbing and visiting and eventually the long drive back down the 5 Freeway home, where sheer exhaustion took over. I was barely able to take out the trash cans before we hit the sheets for about 10 hours. These holidays really take a lot out of us. And I don't know how many more of those weddings I can handle.

Mary Jane Doesn't Cause Cancer Like Tobacco -- Scientific American

I wasn't really surprised by this, but the government hates stories like this, especially if they come from reputable establishments.

Other studies have found that cannabis receptors occur in ALL vertebrates, and thus the nervous system mechanisms involved were around BEFORE the Marijuana plant evolved. This is very similar to the fact that animal opiate receptors also predate the opium plant. I suppose the plants just chemically stumbled on a way to keep animals from eating too many of them, or perhaps to be eaten by more animals so the seeds would be scattered further.

The evolution of biochemical mechanisms from RNA/DNA made it possible for both offense and defense of any chemical produced by sequenced recombination. A small change in the molecular shape of various proteins could have far reaching effects on more than just a single organism -- on all dependent organisms too. It is always just a few molecules of difference in genes that snuff out otherwise perfect adaptations.

If something is ever perfectly adapted to a certain set of conditions, then any change in the environment will be suboptimal, and possibly even bad enough to kill it. If instead something consists of many parts assembled from a immense junk pile of molecules, it will always be imperfectly adapted, but since there might be a random chance that another partial solution can be met by something else within the junk pile, it is less able to be killed off by small changes in the environment.

Plants and all other living things have been effected by the presence of humans. Before the invention of farming -- before we started purposely growing a small selection of plants in huge populations -- it was doubtful that the behavior of any other single animal species could have such major disturbances in the overall number and form of plant species. Certainly not since the era of huge plant eating dinosaurs. Perhaps elephants and vast herds of animals shape the landscape in powerful ways, but humans have far more effect.

The plants that do survive all the normal biological factors plus those caused by human selection are either the very hardiest of weeds or are the subset of plants that meet some arbitrary human need or whim. Breeds of dogs survive because they are the product of human choices, not because they are superior to wolves. Mary Jane and Opium poppies will probably always exist because animal brains have those funny little receptors -- especially human brains.

Things took millions of years to evolve this way. Still, using pot or opium and then doing science is probably not a smart thing. At least wait until you've driven all the way home.

Cloud Landers

Today, like yesterday, is a sunny day. Normally each morning greets the Cloud Landers with the same clouds that they enjoyed the evening before, which were the same ones that hung there the previous morning, and for a good month or so before that.

A sunny day like this brings out those pale skinned Sun worshippers who, in their anxiety to kneel before their deity, forget to apply sunscreen 45. Soon, after the good warmth of the glorious Sun has bathed them for just a few precious minutes, the evil twin of Light, UV-Satan, begins killing their lily white skin cells like jelly fish flung upon the salty flats of Death Valley.

But ignorant or just too glorified to care, the lily white worshippers stay in the brightness of the Sun's Light for a good part of the day. UV-Satan laughs his evil laugh and pours his poison over the witless flock.

As the evening comes, and the bright red faces glow, and the lily white shadows of their sunglasses are developed like Polaroid photographs, UV-Satan laughs again as the sting of his poison makes those once gloriously frolicking Cloud Landers to cry out in anguish and sacrifice a million aloe plants with which to anoint themselves.

Thereupon the Cloud Landers swear with hands upon Bibles to never again stand naked before the deity of the Sun without applying Sunscreen 45 to ward off the evil spirit of UV-Satan. Never again, they say, as they have said many times before. Never again.

New Tricks of Light

Light can travel faster than light! Time is getting more and more untimely. I will not link to the NYT article, however, because it bugs people to join their NY Times club just to read some article. The jist of the article had to do with light waveforms in a special optical fiber that seemed to bounce back out before the signal entered the fiber.

Since the light itself was slowed down to something like 40 mph, rather than its usual 490 million mph, there was some question whether time wasn't bent in some way that precluded measuring things accurately, in my opinion. Still, there was an effect that wasn't expected and part of the waveform input to the fiber was momentarily subtracted by the reflected waveform (something that happens to waveforms a lot) in that funny timeframe.

Shoveling crap out of the home wireless network.

Today I set up an encrypted wireless network in the house, and that turned out to be quite a chore.

We already had an unprotected but working home network. This update was because of the addition of another node, "Thunk", my resurrected Thinkpad for whom I used an old USB wireless-B from the junk box. I decided to cook the whole hog and protect the network with passwords and encryption codes, as well as change the name from the stupid default of "linksys" and to change the default channel from 6.

I did all this because just by looking at the available network connections list I could see all the neighbor's wireless networks, some protected, some not, most using the defaults right out of the box - including channel 6 - just like we did for so many years.

My desktop uses a direct Ethernet cable from the router instead of Wireless, so I never bothered with the network until Thunk of Junk came along. But once I get intrigued with something, I can't stop until I've nailed it.

I'm the honest type, and never messed with any of those possible connections, and hopefully so were the other members in my family. It is unlikely that we would because our in-house signal strength was better anyway.

This became harder than it should have been, because every computer is a different brand, from a different era, with different Wireless hardware. But now the network is kosher.

I was so busy doing this all day I got very hungry. After this blog posted correctly, I was completely done and went to eat something - content that it would be just a teensy bit harder for snoops and hackers to grab our signals. I'll bet that is really just a pipe dream.

Privacy Does Not Exist

There once was a time when people lived in caves or shelters made from whatever materials they could find. That was a primitive time, with little clothing, with no privacy. Even the act of finding privacy might get you killed, since the tribal setting provided some degree of safety in numbers. If you were out of sight of the tribe, you might be in the sight of man eaters.

Then, for several thousand years, people lived in huts within tribal villages, or in mud or stone walled houses, or in palaces made of stone. Within those walls, out of sight and hearing of others, privacy of some sort could be achieved.

Of course there were eavesdroppers and snoops, spies and gossipers, but this was not total. Young lovers, adulterers, murderers and thieves, could all find a way to consummate their love or connive in privacy.

Then the telegraphs and telephones were invented, and soon thereafter they could be tapped by anyone with a coil of wire and equipment to read the signals. Just about any phone operator who connected the wires between individual callers could listen in on "juicy" conversations between naive phone users.

Today, with all our technology and social complexity, privacy is a thing of the past. This blog is out there for all to see, and though I do not throw my name out for anyone but a few friends or family, it is available for the spooks and hackers who sneak and peek and pry and snoop and find out who posts what from where.

For the most part I don't really care. I'm not trying to hide anything so much as I'm trying to avoid targeted ads in my email, and to feel free to write whatever I want without madmen hunting me down in spiteful revenge.

I knew that privacy was a problem before Internet was a household word. There were networks for decades before that and they afforded anyone with an ounce of technical expertise the opportunity to read all the non-technical people's email, and to find out who was going to get fired or get promoted before it happened.

Of course this has now evolved into an enormous interconnected "office" where all those emails are sniffed by governments, companies or just plain assholes that drive down the street until they find an unprotected family wireless network.

If you work for a corporation, which has no inherent morality, you have pretty much given up any right to privacy, whether within the company network, or from any information about you that has been gathered by doctors, lawyers, businesses or whoever.

Of course this is "for our own good" when governments do it. Yeah, right. I think everyone should read "The Prince" by Machiavelli before they believe that.

Robots that think like humans

Link to Article in ZDNET

Here is an article about attempts to make machines think like humans. Lots of people try this. Maybe someday someone will be successful. At least modern hardware devices are fast enough these days to give it a good try.

I wonder though, even if someone is successful, will its intelligence be so human-like that it would seem immoral to let it get blown up digging in mine fields or fetching bombs?

There was also a news article about the Korean android that had many human characteristics, though it seemed to be rather limited mentally, and could not really perform many general purpose tasks.

Also, EveR as she was called, was modeled after a woman. Is that a clue as to the intended development path for future versions?

Throw Away Computers

Somebody at my wife's work threw away an old laptop computer. Her company has an IT department, and when something is not worth their bother they discard it. It had something wrong with its BIOS memory battery and was a bit short on memory and disk. For about $200 I maxed out its memory and disk and replaced the battery. The hardware works fine.

It was still rather slow, like incredibly slow compared with my high end desktop, but I spent some time fussing with the OS -- Windows 98 -- and trying to speed it up somewhat. I removed every unnecessary program, driver, network setting, database client, etcetera. It was still as slow as taffy in winter.

I tried updating the OS with every possible update MS had, but there was nothing but trouble during all those attempts. It would crash during the updates and screw things up terribly. Finally I tracked things into the Virus Scan software -- which was rather ancient -- so just for grins I disabled it.

Suddenly the old clunker was running nearly as fast as a newer laptop with Windows XP. The virus software had been using all the available memory and processing time the thing had. I was able to download all the correct updates and better virus stuff and now the thing runs like a top. I am using it to write this blog entry.

Not everybody has the experience I have with computers, nor the patience. I wouldn't expect everyone to have the same luck. But for $200 I have a really good IBM ThinkPad that runs Firefox and all my various homegrown software development tools just dandy.

What else are corporations throwing away?