Smash the Municipality!

en_ki @ 2008-05-05T06:53:00

2008-05-05T10:55:01Z

The Notes of Japanese Soldier in USSR is the brief illustrated diary of a Japanese airman captured by the Soviet Army at the end of World War II.

en_ki @ 2008-05-02T06:49:00

2008-05-02T10:56:23Z

Going to the CBC thing circa 5 PM. 19 beers aren't going to drink themselves. Will bring any ex-cow-orkers who aren't afraid to go to Cambridge. If you want to sync up, call me (see top sticky post in my journal).

In other news, my new fake zip code of choice is 17927.

A List Of Unrelated Items

2008-05-02T00:11:28Z

(after reddragdiva)

Start at Gravity Trumps Sunlight and work your way back to Errol Morris, a picture with and without cannonballs, and the progress of the inquisitive mind.
There's no parody like self-parody at "Conservapedia: The Trustworthy Encyclopedia"
a very good meal is to fry up some chopped up Tofurky Italian fauxsage with chopped garlic and whole snow peas and stab it with a fork until it goes away

(rather poorly after, it seems). Also (contrasting the first two links, I wonder), is there a correlation between SDO and IQ?

en_ki @ 2008-04-28T14:07:00

2008-04-28T18:15:12Z

OK, I think I got this from one of you today, but I don't see it on my flist, so maybe it was greader grist. (Update: I blame elfs. Transhumanist smut peddler.) Anyway, Clay Shirky says television is the gin of the masses, and the cognitive surplus (good term!) it's been eating up is starting to be used for other things and is going to kick the ass of the world, finally, RSN.

This makes perfect sense to me. I watch at most one hour of TV per week: House (BTW: tonight, my place, starting 7 PM) is the hub of a roughly weekly social gathering that lasts 3-5 hours. I don't have the patience for commercials: LJ and iGoogle are much more efficient at feeding my insatiable hunger for stimulus, and they have social and educational elements TV doesn't.

And in turn, my life is vastly improved when I steal even 10% of my cognitive surplus from these more-or-less passive reading activities. Over the last 3-4 weeks, that much stolen time got me a better job. If that less-stressful job lets me ease up on the NADD a little bit and spend more time on school and exercise and hobbies, all indications are that I will have a vast improvement in health, intellectual satisfaction, and employability.

Don't kill your TV, just strangle it to the point of near-unconsciousness and have a party with your friends around its twitching remnant.

...and it comes up 4.

2008-04-28T17:43:54Z

So I cast the die on Thursday in more ways than one, and I wasn't going to admit it until I saw how it came out.

What I told you was that I had declined the offer of a raise and promotion at my current job in favor of the Institute. What I didn't tell you was that I had then called the Institute and asked them to raise their offer.

This—declining offer A and then pushing back on offer B—is dumb. Don't do this. It turned out OK for me, but it would have been safer and probably more lucrative to hold my options open and give less information to my opponents¹. The reason I didn't: I have a certain amount of cowardice that I have historically only been able to overcome by a somewhat forced overconfidence. It isn't pretty.

Anyway, after letting me sweat over the weekend, they offered a small salary bump and I accepted. Is a month and a half's rent per year for the rest of my working life worth three days of stress? Well, when you put it that way, of course it is. But it was pretty stressful and I had to exercise a certain amount of rationality to convince myself to do it. (This was, in fact, the first time I have ever asked for more money from any employer, not counting the time I told that part-time dude that I wanted to quit and go back to part-time but couldn't unless he raised my rate.)

I start the new job a week from today. Although I will admit to not having searched as widely as I could, it seems to be a Pareto optimum among realizable jobs for me at this stage. I can imagine Tufts jobs that would beat it, but my applications for Medford-campus jobs did not generate responses—I suspect because they're a Solaris shop and I don't have a solid Solaris bullet on my resume.

What's going to be hard is asking again next year. It's hard to calibrate expectations, since I don't have access to the salary database and local geek society tends to keep salaries confidential.

¹Doesn't it suck that, before you get to cooperate like both parties want to, you have to play a zero-sum game for stakes that are way higher for you than for them?

I only use GMail for the ads

2008-04-27T20:17:48Z

You've Been Left Behind(.com) is an internet service that will send an email to your loved ones if you are taken up in the Rapture. For a mere $40 annual subscription, you will have the reassurance of knowing that you can send a note telling people about Jesús so that they will have one last chance to repent after you have been spirited bodily up to Heaven for having selected the correct faith in time.

One thing I'm not clear on is whether they have developed a Rapture detector (an extremely pious comatose person lying on a scale? or perhaps they use the pietoelectric effect?) or whether they have an atheist standing by in order to trigger the email, which seems like a fairly idolatrous faith in the power of contract law considering that the other party will presumably have vanished. I guess at $40/year you're not buying a lot in the way of redundancy, so if too many of the sysadmins, HVAC technicians, and power plant operators who keep the internet running also happen to be Christians of the correct flavor, even this service might not help your wicked heathen friends and relatives.

The internet allows people to look at other people's butts even when the people involved are not married, so it's probably best not to trust it for messages of such fundamental significance. If I were in the market for this sort of thing, I think I would hold out for the upcoming technological revolution that will be sparked by current promising research in Intelligent Design.

en_ki @ 2008-04-26T10:16:00

2008-04-26T14:38:13Z

Best Chick Tract Evar. A powerful metaphor for Chickian Christianity, it proceeds as follows:

While we, humanity, ("John") were in the cramped and scary jungle of Eden, we were bitten by a... bug? Snake, I guess. The bite infected us with sin, which is like Ebola, but fortunately we caught the non-contagious strain of sin, and all the people other than "John" (aliens?) are not at risk. Doctor #1 (God) expels us from Eden for treatment, putting us on a plane (DC-8?) to America (Earth?) for treatment (life?).

In the hospital, our mother offers Doctor #2 (also God) $3000 to treat us so we can take care of her in her old age. After liquidating his substantial portfolio, Doctor #2 flies to Switzerland (R'lyeh?) and spends "six figures" (1-7 shares of BRK.A) to buy the only possible medicine on his own dime—apparently the episode in which Beelzebub, our health insurer's actuary, denies care was removed because of space constraints. On his way back from Switzerland, Dr. God and his son Jesús are driving too fast down the highway and get into a car accident, and Jesús (Jesus) is killed, while God is saved by the airbag.

Meanwhile, hospital janitor Marcus Junius Brutus has hinted vaguely that Dr. God is not to be trusted. We feel like we've gotten over the ebola, so we trick God into bringing the medicine close so we can smash it and laugh at him. What jerks we are! God is very sad as we turn into a bubbling mass of ick. Good thing it's not contagious, or the aliens would be pretty sick too.

Also cut for space constraints: the part where Jesús shambles back from the dead to tell us to take the medicine and give him brains. In his absence, it seems pretty reasonable to scheme to trick a doctor who is bringing you medicine into letting you destroy it. After all, you feel pretty good, right? and that really suspicious-looking janitor hinted that the doctor might not be very good. In conclusion, Heaven is a land of contrasts.

en_ki @ 2008-04-23T10:21:00

2008-04-23T14:24:22Z

The Weekly Dig is my local alternative alternative newsweekly¹ of choice.

Well, was.

Doing an entire issue of a print magazine in lolcat is called JUMPING THE MOTHERFUCKING SHARK, people. It is JUMPING A MOTHERFUCKING TANK FULL OF MOTHERFUCKING SHARKS WITH MOTHERFRICKING LASER BEAMS ON THEIR HEADS. Go back and UNJUMP THAT SHARK, because I have to read something. Maybe I will wrap all the way around and start picking up the Wall Street Journal. Or the FT: I like pink.

¹(as opposed to the Phoenix, which is the local mainstream alternative newsweekly)

en_ki @ 2008-04-21T15:01:00

2008-04-21T19:07:37Z

No doubt you have flown over the central US now and then, and there you have seen the characteristic circular patterns of fields watered by central pivot irrigation.

Generally, these circular patterns are arranged in rectangular arrays of squares, like eggs packed in a carton. Arranging the irrigation systems this way gets you π/4, or 78.5%, of the wet area (and presumably the crop yield) you would get if you irrigated the whole square (which presumably requires more hardware and labor out of proportion to the change in yield). On the other hand, if you were to pack the circles in a hexagonal pattern (as often seen in mosaics), you would get an improvement in yield of 15% "for free".

One assumes most farmers are neither idiots nor disinterested in profit.

View Poll: Why do farmers pack circular fields in squares, not hexagons?

en_ki @ 2008-04-20T09:01:00

2008-04-20T13:18:37Z

GENERAL FRED: Have the doctors made any progress on finding an epiphenomenal cure?

SCIENTIST: They've tried every placebo in the book. No dice. Everything they do has an effect.

GENERAL FRED: Have you brought in a homeopath?

SCIENTIST: I tried, sir! I couldn't find any!

GENERAL FRED: Excellent. And the Taoists?

SCIENTIST: They refuse to do anything!

GENERAL FRED: Then we may yet be saved.
—Eliezer Yudkowsky

(Context: epiphenomenal zombies.)

Also, apparently Daniel Dennett teaches at Tufts, so I can walk over there when lecture season starts and find out why he gets to ride up on a white motorcycle.

Huh.

2008-04-18T17:27:25Z

Update: Dear Google,

I am flattered and humbled by my evidently high pagerank and freshness rating, but getting my own post as the top hit for search terms relevant to my question 10 minutes after I posted it does not actually help me. Perhaps I will come to appreciate it if the Lazyweb provides some answers. Over to you, Lazyweb.

The Linode I use to run a domain for my friends costs $30/mo. An equivalent storage + bandwidth setup on Amazon S3 would cost < $2/mo~~, while the equivalent computing usage level (73% avg CPU!) on Amazon EC2 would seem to be about $55/mo.~~

Allegedly the CPU usage on Linode is not due to a spambot having taken over my Linux box but rather to rngd, which feeds the random-number-generator entropy pool from the (simulated? multiplexed? not sure how this works on a Linode VM) hardware random number generator. I asked the Linode support people about this and their position was "it's normal". ~~But if that went away, my EC2 cost would probably be around $5 rather than $55, so I want to figure out if I should expect that on an EC2 box.~~

The RNG-related functionality on the Linode that I am committed to providing is:

* ssh access
* SSL access to Squirrelmail
* (presumably trivial) incidental usage, like maybe password salts every now and then?

On and off (consistently on since I recently had evidence of active snooping), I have used "ssh -D" to proxy my personal web browsing via that machine, but the rngd issue had been around long before that and that is optional functionality.

I'm curious if anybody else has been using EC2 in a similar way, what you're actually paying for CPU, and whether rngd has been a problem.

Update: Ah, I'm misunderstanding EC2. It seems that CPU usage isn't pro-rated; it's just hours the machine is up. So EC2 is not a win for general-purpose service hosting yet, and I probably want to just focus on moving to special-purpose hosting.

en_ki @ 2008-04-15T21:07:00

2008-04-16T01:16:27Z

A number of my friends are either in the medical professions or at least exploring that option, and I imagine many of the rest of you are interested as well.

vvalkyri points us to turnberryknkn in a particularly poignant post on the importance of the first few minutes after cardiac arrest. If you don't know CPR, learn it already. I did, it's not hard, and even stale knowledge is better than none.

Every one of his posts I have so far looked at has been an absurdly engaging read. Start anywhere: as all righteous web pages (but few blogs) do, his posts link to each other in relevant contexts.

...and he's very good about linking to other posts of interest, like this one on abortion and the man with no spine, which found its way to me previously I'm not sure how, but presumably the same way.

Tired of your cell phone contract?

2008-04-15T21:31:11Z

So apparently last July we saw the first documented instance of sense ever being shown in a ruling about contract law since the invention of the EULA: Douglas v. US District Court ex rel Talk America.

Remember those contracts you signed (or "signed" by "being told about a link to it") that said the other party can change the terms whenever they want and all they have to do is put a notice on their web site?

(Oh, you don't, because you don't sign those contracts? It must be nice living without a cell phone or any software or web sites. Please send me an application packet for your monastery.)

Yeah, those terms are invalid. So if they've ever changed the contract terms on you, you may be able to cancel just because.

Ninth Circuit 4 life, yo.

en_ki @ 2008-04-15T06:55:00

2008-04-15T10:56:44Z

J: Speak 'What' again! Thou cur, cry 'What' again!
I dare thee utter 'What' again but once!
I dare thee twice and spit upon thy name!
Now, paint for me a portraiture in words,
If thou hast any in thy head but 'What',
Of Marsellus Wallace!

The post and this thread are to be recommended.

Safe Homes Initiative

2008-04-13T17:41:23Z

What is the name of the national group that is advocating "voluntary" searches of every urban home for guns and drugs?

I saw the proposal in our local news in Boston, and then I heard from miss_manners that it was happening in DC, and then from merle_ that it is happening in East Palo Alto, CA. That makes me think it's happening in many cities across America all at once, but the fact that it is being done nationally is being kept quiet. The term "Safe Homes Initiative" is used to describe it, but the only prominent Google hits for that name are referring to individual city projects.

In every city, it's being presented as a novel idea in response to that city's particular recent rash of murders, not a nationwide initiative being advocated by a single group. It really bothers me that the large organization that must necessarily be pushing this is behind the scenes rather than in the open and accountable, and that a false rationale is being put forth to justify it.

(I do also advocate resisting "voluntary" searches on general principle. Police acting in their official capacity are not your friends: they are agents of the state. Many of them are good people and they can be very helpful at times, but when they are in your house looking for contraband, they are not there to help you.)

Dangerous New Development in Tibet Protests; Experts Predict Skinned Knees

2008-04-08T12:49:14Z

As reported by Cryptome China: (they're doing referrer blocking, so copy and paste this URL: http://www.cryptome.cn/torch-protests/pict5.jpg )

The practice began in Puerto Rico as the latest step in the perpetual arms race between cops and crooks, after police forces worldwide were shocked to find themselves defenseless against a rash of skate ninjas.

Expect to see skate police in your neighborhood soon: trials in Boston are expected to begin this summer, focusing on Dorchester and Beacon Hill, with a sister project on the Tufts University Medford campus intended to address the growing fratboy-stabbing menace.

black hole of knowledge

2008-04-07T20:13:43Z

Anyone who has had occasion to think about code-switching in programming languages, please braindump below.

en_ki @ 2008-04-05T20:54:00

2008-04-06T00:57:02Z

Never ask Google if a given hypothetical web site exists. The answer will always be "yes", and soon enough the universe is going to fill up, mark my words.

Just as you would expect, CubeLube.com sells special lubricant for use with your Rubik's Cube.

Dear internet,

2008-04-02T12:09:17Z

Rickrolling was boring before yesterday. Now it's really boring. Give it up.

—en_ki

P.S. OK, elfs has one that still has 20 seconds of funny in it.

en_ki @ 2008-03-30T10:59:00

2008-03-30T14:59:17Z

View Poll: You know how, if you see the same word a little too often, it starts to look a little weird, like maybe it's a little misspelled or something? (revised)

tracked electro-liches save livessssss

2008-03-29T05:14:47Z

Breaking news!

2008-03-28T23:05:00Z

"Any society that socializes risks while it privatizes rewards is earning every Love Canal it gets."
—Eric Zeusse in Love Canal: The Truth Seeps Out (Reason, February 1981) (via miss_manners)

Discuss.

en_ki @ 2008-03-27T19:35:00

2008-03-27T23:36:59Z

Via Bruce Schneier, SF writers on Homeland Security. Niven and Pournelle FTL. And not the good kind of FTL.

Meanwhile, in Canada, giant digging machines are dancing. Immigration to Canada is open to skilled workers with 4+ years of experience and/or fluency in French at the low, low price of $950, or 1327 of our Amercian pesos. This is because Canadian citizens are too busy dancing and smoking weed to work in offices.

distributed LJ

2008-03-26T03:17:08Z

Pursuant to various misgivings people have expressed about random for-profit companies owning our relationships with our friends and selling them on every so often:

elsejournal is a community for developing an LJ-like tool that is distributed across multiple hosts. If you're interested in helping, join the community and comment on this post with a Google account email address to be added to the project on Google Code.

"Rough consensus": we're looking to get something that is quite close to LJ, probably based on the actual LJ codebase, but gracefully sticks myLJ to yourLJ via OpenID.

"Running code": if I squint, I think I can see a keyboard and screen in front of you. Our svn repository has a copy of the LJ head code. Please get hacking. Kthxbye.

en_ki @ 2008-03-25T07:46:00

2008-03-25T11:49:36Z

pregnant transman FTW