Bush or Death?

I think I've caught on to the signature of the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign.

gmail explosion

Three invites last night, and now five more today

Sounds good, I think, aside from the capacity problems gmail seems to be having today.

Ever heard an indie-rock band with a classical violin do Pachelbel's Canon? Me neither. Zox can hook you up. [die puny humans]

That's one cool song.

Great Reagan Memory

Scroll to the bottom.

Impeach Bush

If even a small part of what Seymour Hersh says is true, then we are truly truly fucked.

I think it is about time we started seriously, seriously discussing impeachment.

umm

The Jobs Grunt giving presentations at the Apple Store Soho just waxed poetic about the new 2.5 gigabyte G5s....

oops.

yet another post about gmail first impressions

Now that I've made the plunge and switched entirely to gmail, I am googling daily for external interfaces to gmail.

http://www.email2pop.com now offers a pop3/smtp interface to gmail. This sounds useful, but I would really like to see something that will work on unix. I envision a nice imap interface proxy that could run as a daemon on my system. The biggest irritant so far is the lack of notifications when I get a new email.

Gtray is a windows program that at least notifies you when you've received new mail.

Another reason for imap support is offline archiving. There are many clients that can cache an imap server's mailboxes. Offline storage and searching are a powerful feature that gmail doesn't have yet. There must be a way...

Jon Postel, a remembrance of sorts

On Farber's IP list today:

From:   dave_@_farber.net

Subject: [IP] [spam] letter from Jon Postel

Date: June 10, 2004 8:56:39 AM EDT

To:   ip_@_v2.listbox.com

Reply-To:   dave_@_farber.net







Begin forwarded message:



From: Peter Bachman 

Date: June 10, 2004 3:00:56 AM EDT

To: dave_@_farber.net

Subject: [spam] letter from Jon Postel





Dave,



Got an email addressed from Jon Postel today. Of course it was an infected

W32.Netsky.D Worm that had scanned through someone's hard drive for email

addresses, and not an message from the great beyond being channeled through

a DSL connection.



Still it's a self-generated ironic comment by the network, on the sad state of

email within the network. The great computational expense generated by

sending spam out into the network is obviously wasted on trying to sell

Viagra; that much bandwidth and computing power is evolving into something

else; perhaps a very primitive early form of network intelligence that's

linking up bits of information in odd, but somewhat predictable ways.



Now if the "random spam monkeys" can type up and send me an unpublished mss

from William_Shakespeare@stratford-upon-avon.co.uk I can make money fast.

I'll be waiting near the trash bin of my bayseian filters looking for

submissions.



Cheers,



Peter Bachman



peterb_@_cequs.com



Can a machine think?



"You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you will tell me

precisely what it is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a

machine which will do just that"  J. von Neumann 1948 Princeton, NJ





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Jon Postel, in the parental sense, truly the father of the internet, died in 1998. I'm not quite sure what to make of this event. Suffice it to say that it is strangely moving.

Missed Marketing Opportunities

BUT WHERE ARE THE FREMEN MOTIFS?

Fuckers

I had finally gotten to the point where my disgust at Apple had reached the point that I told myself I wasn't going to buy any more Apple Products.

And then they introduce this. As somebody who just bought a mini wireless router, that has an external power supply for $70, the question is, "Is device worth $129?"

Had I not already spent the money, yes.

Fuckers.

I am not to blame for putting forward, in the course of my work on

science, any general rule derived from a previous conclusion. [The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci]

Senator, the facts speak for themselves.

Moving on

Saved was excellent. A dash of The Opposite of Sex and Election, and mucho bearable triteness.

The week has been ridiculously long. Find place, help Yulia & Jeanne move, move myself, clean old place... yeesh.

Do check out the moblog on the right. If you have a camera phone, it's a good place to put your pics easily. (Especially if you can take advantage of your phone provider's free data. ;)

Potter tickets were bought months ago. The evening seems to be planned out.

Now if I can just figure out a scheme to have reliable internet here that isn't hare brained.

Medium Lobster is the new homestarrunner.

Where else will you find in rapid succession, an interview with "An Enormous Pumpkin" and Jesus.

OS X is Pissing Me Off

50Gbs dedicated to OS X. 1Gb Ram. 1Ghz Processor.

I am running Safari, Mail, Shiira, iTerm, iChat, Addressbook, NetNewsWire, Word, Activity Monitor, and TextEdit, System Preferences, and of course Finder.

It is true that I only have 2 or 3 gigs free on my OS X boot partition, and I understand that this will inevitably lead to the "Your hard disk has no more space available for application memory" message.

But it shouldn't.

Ok. I'm going to stop complaining now and start deleting MP3s.

Sigh.
-=-=

ok. rebooted. The system is feeling much better.

Using OS X is dealing with a relationship.

The first cat's name was meowsulah

Work, pick up check, look at apartment, look at apartment, pack(?).

The Enterprise finale was outlandish yet fun. Were the Alien Nazis necessary to create a cliffhanger?

I'm torn over whether to pack or see Saved or The Day After Tomorrow.

Also consider: Meow + Adam = Madame

Stevens Post Mortem

Rob put up these pictures he took of the Stevens aftermath.

fasterer

I've started playing around with this Japanese web browser (though the interface works in Ennglish) called Shiira. Umm, Japanese as opposed to American I suppose. It appears to be using the Apple WebKit that underlies Safari, but seems to feel buttloads faster. Dare I say fasterer. Ah. I just found the english web page for the project.

Yippee-ki-yay

satmandu may explode without warning

M EXPLOSIVE

Username:

Also, the man who won, then lost the 2000 us presidential election is speaking @ NYU tomorrow afternoon, and will be calling for seven resignations. Yawn.

Hell, I'm still going. It IS sponsored my moveon.

I looked at an apartment last night. Right next to a White Castle, a Kitchen Fried Chicken, and a McDonalds Express.

Three thoughts.
1) Was that feeling in my stomach love?
2) Is fast food on the road to gentrification?
3) Will I regret having sliders for breakfast?

WW Cheney D

So if you haven't heard, there's talk of reinstating the draft next year, as of March 31st, 2005, and making national service mandatory for young people, ages 18-26.

I just realized that as of the end of March 2004, I'm not going to be "eligible" anyways.

A Diet of One

The Pistons/Pacers series is turning out to be an exciting one. I haven't watched the pistons in years, but they seem to be doing quite well for a change, having made the Eastern Conference Finals.


I have decided to switch to linux for a while - for the first time in months. Despite the prettiness of the OS X user interface, is is extremely slow. The OS X WindowServer process tends to just sit and hog the CPU.

Having booted into debian, I was able to apt-get update to the newest 2.6.6 kernel, which seems to solve most of the problems that I had previously with getting X working properly WITH HIGHMEM enabled (which lets me use more than 768 Mb of ram on my system.) The issues I'm still having are getting sound working properly - I'm still having issues getting different programs to access the sound card at the same time (it suddenly feels like using windows 95 in 1996). We really need a proper multimedia framework in linux. That may be the number one showstopper to linux adoption. The system also seems to be starting by default in a mode where it sits at the lower power setting, 667 Mhz, inste3ad of 1Ghz. Even though my broadcom based 802.11g card, supported from inside OS X, isn't supported in linux, my prism based PCMCIA card works just fine. Otherwise, my system is working excellently. Openoffice finds the cups shared printer on the network seamlessly, and the machine sleeps and wakes up perfectly. I've found a RSS reader that seems to work ok, though not as well as NetNewsWire does.

The other minor irritations are from services I've come to expect from the OS after using OS X. Built in Spell Check in any application and the system keychain come to mind. KDE Apps, as far as I know have this functionality, but sound in KDE is even more broken than it is in gnome, and besides, gnome does look pretty.

Back to the apartment search.

Oh, and this is my favorite quote from the NYT today, in an article on how Kerry should appeal to white males:

"My proposal is that the Kerry campaign run a 30-second ad which is nothing but John Kerry sitting on a couch and eating pretzels without involving paramedics at all," Mr. Katz said. "Guys can't help but be impressed by that, if he can get to the bottom of a bag of pretzels without someone having to call an ambulance."

nuclear redux

Slashdot's carrying a story referencing the debunking of Elena's motorcycle rides through the Chernobyl area. Curiously enough, the thread with the debunking seems to be fixated on the revelation that Elena is married. This prompts the quip on slashdot: So, the lesson to be learned from this is that hot single science chicks with motorcycles and coolness to bike through radioactive deadzones on their own don't really exist except in the dreams of the slashdot collective mind.


The veracity of Elena's story aside, it is interesting to think about the downstream effects of the chernobyl disaster. The Vanderbilt study seems to indicate that the effects of the radiation release have been largely exaggerated. The primary statistically relevant effects over time are an increase in Thyroid cancer in those who were young children at the time of the incident. Children born six months after the incident report no ill effects traced to Chernobyl. Furthermore, it was found that the early high dose fatalities were primary linked to skin lesions covering greater than 50% of the body's surface, and also some quantity due to radiation induced altered functionality of the intestines. This would seem to indicate that some of the most vulnerable cell types are skin tissue and intestinal tissue, understandable due to the large rate of cell division (referred to with the term mitotic index). One possible therapy may be to treat high radiation dose survivors with drugs with strong antimitotic properties, that however do not induce apoptosis or more dangerous mitotic abnormailities, across the board (or more specifically in skin and intestinal tissue). The argument would be that tissue is able to repair damage from radiation, but it must be given time to do so. Rapidly dividing cells may not have the opportunity to do enough repair, and thus have too many unrecoverable errors. A preliminary google and scirus search indicate that much research is being done on such compounds, albeit with strong cytotoxicity. Perhaps drugs that have been abandoned for cancer research because of their low cytotoxicity should also be targeted at radiation exposure survivors.

If indeed, Chernobyl is a worst case scenario of a nuclear accident, from the most dangerous/unstable type of nuclear power plant, then we may have even less to worry about than previously thought. The epidemiological effects are better understood.

This thought comes to mind. If radiation exposure is understood and treatable in a public health context, and systems are in place to deal with such exposure, does that make nuclear theater weapons more humane?

For fun, google the phrases "theatre weapons" and "theater weapons".