Be careful what you wish for

I wonder the people currently clambering for Rumsfeld’s head would feel if his replacement were, say, Karl Rove? The president’s brain will soon have some time on his hands to explore other opportunities. Just a thought. But seriously, if you believe that Rummy’s not cutting it, and it’s really hard to argue that he is, … Continue reading “Be careful what you wish for”

I wonder the people currently clambering for Rumsfeld’s head would feel if his replacement were, say, Karl Rove? The president’s brain will soon have some time on his hands to explore other opportunities.

Just a thought.

But seriously, if you believe that Rummy’s not cutting it, and it’s really hard to argue that he is, what reason do you have to believe that a replacement would be any better? The same guy who appointed Rummy, etc, would be making the selection, after all.

So is the call for Rummy’s head actually a vote of confidence in the President? Apparently.

Bad theology

My principle objection to the so-called “Intelligent Design” movement is the damage it does to science, but religious people like the Rev. George Coyne have correctly pointed out that it’s damaging religion as well: Coyne said the subculture of fundamentalist Christianity that insists on the literal truth of the Bible “is a plague in our … Continue reading “Bad theology”

My principle objection to the so-called “Intelligent Design” movement is the damage it does to science, but religious people like the Rev. George Coyne have correctly pointed out that it’s damaging religion as well:

Coyne said the subculture of fundamentalist Christianity that insists on the literal truth of the Bible “is a plague in our midst,” obscuring the deeper marvel of creation.

“The intelligent design movement belittles God,” he told reporters before the event. “It makes God a designer, an engineer. The God of religious faith is a god of love. He did not design me.”

Coyne stressed that on matters of religion and faith, science is “absolutely neutral.” Other speakers echoed that, saying that science and religion operate in separate realms. Where religion is based in faith and concerned with the creation or moral meaning of life, science concerns itself with seeking testable, verifiable explanations for the processes of the natural world.

You have to wonder about the impulse to pick fights you know you can’t win, the apparently central thesis of fundamentalism. All the better to play the victim, I suppose.

On the science front, the discovery of Tiktaalik roseae supplies another missing link between fish and land animals:

Scientists have discovered fossils of a 375-million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land.

In two reports today in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Neil H. Shubin of the University of Chicago say they have uncovered several well-preserved skeletons of the fossil fish in sediments of former streambeds in the Canadian Arctic, 600 miles from the North Pole.

The skeletons have the fins, scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, the scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but has changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals — and is thus a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.

Tiktaalik sounds like my Sailfin Blenny, Bubba, who perches on rocks resting on his pectoral (front) fins and acts more like a dog than a fish.

Sailfin Blenny

Apple goes Windows

This had to happen: Turning a decades-long rivalry on its head, Apple Computer introduced software today that it says will easily allow users to install Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system on Apple’s newest computers. The software, Boot Camp, is available as a free download on Apple’s Web site and will be part of the next … Continue reading “Apple goes Windows”

This had to happen:

Turning a decades-long rivalry on its head, Apple Computer introduced software today that it says will easily allow users to install Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system on Apple’s newest computers.

The software, Boot Camp, is available as a free download on Apple’s Web site and will be part of the next version of Apple’s operating system, Leopard. It works on Apple’s three lines of computer that run on Intel chips — the Mac mini, the iMac and the MacBook Pro.

I told you so (and so did John Dvorak).

So what’s happening here? Easy, Apple has realized they’re now an MP3 company and not a computer company. So it makes no sense to spend as much as they do on OS development for their computers when they have low-cost alternatives. One way they could go is to Linux, but it’s got so many warts it’s not worth the bother, so the default choice is Windows. Now what happens if Apple packages all their software for Windows, but it just works better on their hardware than anybody else’s? They sell a bunch of hardware, and they sell a bunch of software, so everybody’s happy, including Microsoft and Intel.

What’s the hang-up? It’s interesting to note that Media Center won’t run on the Apple hardware. That should be a gigantic clue to what comes next.

An interesting case

Via Notes in Samsara we learn of the interesting case of Eric Pianka, the University of Texas biology professor who’s been the target of death threats since being awarded the Distinguished Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. Pianka is out there, to be sure. He believes that burgeoning human populations are a threat not … Continue reading “An interesting case”

Via Notes in Samsara we learn of the interesting case of Eric Pianka, the University of Texas biology professor who’s been the target of death threats since being awarded the Distinguished Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. Pianka is out there, to be sure. He believes that burgeoning human populations are a threat not only to humans but to the rest of the planetary ecosystem as well:

There is a great urgency to basic ecological research simply because the worldwide press of humanity is rapidly driving other species extinct and destroying the very systems that ecologists seek to understand. No natural community remains pristine. Unfortunately, many will disappear without even being adequately described, let alone remotely understood. As existing species go extinct and even entire ecosystems disappear, we lose forever the very opportunity to study them. Knowledge of their evolutionary history and adaptations vanishes with them: we are thus losing access to biological information itself. Indeed, “destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read” (Rolston, 1985). Just as ecologists are finally beginning to learn to read this “unread” and rapidly disappearing book of life, they are encountering governmental and public hostility and having a difficult time attracting support. This is simply pitiful. And time is quickly running out.

He forecasts that population growth will ultimately hit a wall and we’ll experience a massive die-off triggered by some sort of disease epidemic. This isn’t a completely idiotic notion, of course, as natural populations do undergo die-off when they grow too large for the carrying capacity of their ecological niches.

But something truly disgraceful has taken place around Pianka, a smear campaign orchestrated by jealous creationists to distort his predictions and malign his character. The person at the center of the storm is an electronics writer and extreme creationist, Forrest M. Mims, the self-styled “citizen scientist.”

Just as “citizen journalists” are often agenda-driven extremists, the citizen scientist Mims is a crazed creationist on a jihad against “evolutionists”, that rat-pack of immoral satanists who’ve wrecked our culture by sowing disrespect for believers in the Easter Bunny and all of his works.

Mumsie hopes Pianka will sue, and I have to agree with the sentiment. The arguments that creationists put up against biology always rely on distortion and willful ignorance, and that sort of thing has be curtailed.

Pianka’s theories don’t satisfy me because humans have the capacity to moderate population growth, and there’s plenty of evidence that we’re doing so, but that’s no excuse to call him a terrorist and to spread lies about him.

Forrest Mims is a liar and a scoundrel, and he should be held accountable for the damage he’s done to Pianka’s reputation.

More at The Austringer.

Linux: A tale of woe

I’ve been using Linux on my desktop at work for years, and during that time I’ve maintained a doggy slow Linux box at home mainly for remote work on the desktop. So when I did my latest hardware upgrade of the home computer, I decided to switch over from Windows 2000 to Fedora Core Linux, … Continue reading “Linux: A tale of woe”

I’ve been using Linux on my desktop at work for years, and during that time I’ve maintained a doggy slow Linux box at home mainly for remote work on the desktop. So when I did my latest hardware upgrade of the home computer, I decided to switch over from Windows 2000 to Fedora Core Linux, thinking it would simplify things and all that. I also wanted to roll a home HDTV recorder/server using MythTV and some of the other open source stuff. So my plan was to build up a nice machine that I could use for software development, web stuff, and TV hooked into my home network and attached through the Internet to the company.

It turns out it wasn’t so easy.

The hardware I selected is all the latest and greatest stuff: ASUS A8N-VM/CSM motherboard, with an on-board nVidia video adapter with DVI out, S/PDIF out, Gig Ethernet, lots of USB, dual channel DDR, AMD’s 64 bit processor, and Serial ATA-II; a 300 GB Maxtor drive with Serial ATA-II, a DVD-RAM burner (that can handle all the other formats as well) . Windows XP installed on my system without incident, connected to Microsoft and downloaded updates. It runs great.

Linux was another story. I started with Fedora Core 4, the latest “stable” version and by most accounts a flawed distribution. Never mind that Fedora ripped out all the video stuff out of fear of the FCC, you can add it in later. The trouble with Fedora Core 4 is that it didn’t know what to do with my hardware. Sure, it was able to run its install program Anaconda from the CDs that I burned. But Anaconda didn’t recognize my disk drive, and actually told me my hardware was defective. Now I can understand that some software may not support some hardware, but the current Linux recovery tools can see SATA-II drives attached to nVidia controllers and format and partition them; just try Gnu parted or QtParted. Apparently you can trick the installer into using current technology with the “device” command, but this isn’t immediately obvious.

So rather than screw around with all that (there are multiple problems with FC4 and nVidia), I decided to jump right into Fedora Core 5, currently in the final testing phase and reasonably stable. It turns out that was probably a good move, as the standard set of CDs for Test 3 (4.92) installed on my system without incident and booted up.

But that’s when the fun starts. It turns out that the Ethernet won’t work if you’ve run Windows on it previously and haven’t done a cold start (disconnecting the power cord from the wall.) And it turns out you don’t get a mouse cursor in X – from your login screen and beyond – and it turns out that your keyboard and network will die within minutes of startup. These issues are all well known, as is the failure of Kudzu (the new hardware scanner) and some other nice things, but the Fedora people are heads-down to release the first “Release Candidate” on Monday.

I already know it won’t run on any system with an ATI or NVidia chipset, however. One of the developers introduced a new bug after testing closed that causes these drivers not to load, and he plans to roll out a fix a few days after the release on Monday. This points to a couple of problems with the Open Source way of doing things:

1. A programmer shouldn’t be allowed to check code into the project that hasn’t been tested. And code that hasn’t been tested shouldn’t be distributed to mirrors all over the world. This is the “adult supervision” problem.

2. Open Source doesn’t interact well with advanced hardware. The vendors are reluctant to share detailed specs with open source developers because such specs are cookbooks to copy shops that want to clone the hardware. Today the competition is between ATI and nVidia, and a few years ago it was between 3Com and Intel. So these guys release enough information for the Open Source people to write drivers that perform OK but not great, and they release their own binary drivers that run fast and don’t disclose the tricks they did in the hardware to boost performance. That’s reasonable.

This is the way it has to be, and it’s perfectly consistent with “free as in speech, not as in beer.” You don’t get free hardware with Linux, you just get free sofware. Sorry.

So all of this tells me that my new computer isn’t going to be running Linux anytime soon, and I’ll probably have to stick with Windows, relegating Linux to the last generation of hardware as before.

Can Linux ever catch up with Windows or is it doomed to be the red-headed stepchild of software engineering? My guess is that there’s a structual flaw in the Open Source model, and I’ve just hit it.

UPDATE: OK, it wasn’t really all that hard. I went back to Fedora Core 4 since Core 5 isn’t there yet. You have to invoke the installer using “linux noprobe” so that you can tell it what driver to use to find the SATA-II drive (sata_nv). After it installs, you then have to edit the GRUB bootloader to add “noapic” to the OS command line, and you can cement that into /boot/grub/grub.conf so you don’t have to do it each time you boot.

Synchronizing the nVidia drivers with the kernel version is a trick, so more on that later.

I said FC5 ain’t there yet, and this is why:

A note for users of ati-fglrx and nvidia-glx: Due to a bug in the FC5 release kernel users of non-GPLed kernel modules will have to wait for an errata kernel; that should happen soon. BTW, the driver packages got renamed; they are now xorg-x11-drv-fglr and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia.

The official Fedora web site is silent on this problem, much to their shame.

Burning Man brings Internet to New Orleans

Maybe those Burning Man people aren’t completely worthless after all: Now the group, known as Burners Without Borders, is using new Kyocera mobile hot-spot technology to create a wide-area-network in an area with little, if any, Internet access. Their shoestring network, based on $250 routers and $150 wireless cards, could prove to be a model … Continue reading “Burning Man brings Internet to New Orleans”

Maybe those Burning Man people aren’t completely worthless after all:

Now the group, known as Burners Without Borders, is using new Kyocera mobile hot-spot technology to create a wide-area-network in an area with little, if any, Internet access. Their shoestring network, based on $250 routers and $150 wireless cards, could prove to be a model for other volunteer groups in disaster areas.

The credit goes to Kyocera, and it’s a very cool little deal they’ve got.

Buy Danish

Here’s a nice web page devoted to Danish stuff that you can buy to defy the hate-mongers’ boycott. My personal preferences are and

Here’s a nice web page devoted to Danish stuff that you can buy to defy the hate-mongers’ boycott. My personal preferences are and

Total Bummer

The US Curling team lost a critical medal-round match to the evil Canadians today: The U.S. skip couldn’t lead the United States to the Olympic gold medal game, losing to Canada 11-5 in the men’s curling semifinals Wednesday night. Canada clinched at least a silver medal and forced the Americans to play Britain in the … Continue reading “Total Bummer”

The US Curling team lost a critical medal-round match to the evil Canadians today:

The U.S. skip couldn’t lead the United States to the Olympic gold medal game, losing to Canada 11-5 in the men’s curling semifinals Wednesday night.

Canada clinched at least a silver medal and forced the Americans to play Britain in the consolation game for third place. That would be the first Olympic curling medal – men’s or women’s – for the United States.

This is a total bummer because the critical end was won by the Canucks after Rojeski violated the Hog Line. That’s the kind of thing you’d expect from Bode Miller if he was a curler, but for Shawn it was a big surprise.

I have to go get drunk now.

Double-standard jurisprudence

Cathy Young and Jeff Goldstein have been discussing a peculiar case of false rape allegations for a few days, and now we have the official response from the feminist establishment. It’s not pretty. It seems to me that the trouble with rape laws in America today is that the pendulum has swung too far in … Continue reading “Double-standard jurisprudence”

Cathy Young and Jeff Goldstein have been discussing a peculiar case of false rape allegations for a few days, and now we have the official response from the feminist establishment. It’s not pretty.

It seems to me that the trouble with rape laws in America today is that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of easy convictions. This was accomplished by expanding the definition of rape toward the “informed consent” standard and limiting evidence that can be introduced in court with rape shield laws. So we have a fundamentally different dynamic in rape cases than in all other criminal prosecutions.

How to remedy that situation – to put the pendulum on dead center – is a hard problem, but it’s not something that we’re going to make much progress on until those who advocated our out-of-balance condition stop pouting and throwing tantrums.

It is certainly the case that women in Islamic Republics don’t have the rights they should, but the nexus between their condition of that of the middle-class American white women who make false allegations of rape after a bad date is non-existent.

Olympic Literacy

In order to fully appreciate Olympic half-pipe, you got to know the lingo, so go check out the glossary for such terms as these: McTwist An inverted aerial where the you perform a 540 degree rotation and a flip. When done in the halfpipe, you approach the halfpipe wall riding forward, becomes airborne, do a … Continue reading “Olympic Literacy”

In order to fully appreciate Olympic half-pipe, you got to know the lingo, so go check out the glossary for such terms as these:

McTwist
An inverted aerial where the you perform a 540 degree rotation and a flip. When done in the halfpipe, you approach the halfpipe wall riding forward, becomes airborne, do a backside 540 degree rotation while performing a front flip, and land riding forward. When done off a straight jump it’s called a Misty flip.

and this:

Fakie
Riding backwards. Also called riding switch.

There’s no choking in snowboarding.