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WEEK 50 2004

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Saturday 11 December 2004

Saturday - a bit busy today and tomorrow. Here is a belated Friday Cat Blogging picture:

riley upon being awoken
Riley, looking somewhat cross at being woken for a picture

Friday 10 December 2004

Friday - down consulting and working with some people. Not a lot to say about that, except that MSI motherboards have some issues.

A little more fun with Doorways. I know, I know, but I've been busy and and relating ancient books to current events is easier than coming up with original material. Jonathan Hoag's unpleasant profession has it's benefits. Onwards.

So, at one point in the book the protagonist, Fred, is convinced to jump through a  machines that reverses everything on the  molecular level. ( It seems that the machines first prototypes actually reversed things on the atomic level...which turns you into antimatter). Not wanting to be turned inside-out (another unpleasant possible reversal), he carefully picks the correct entrance to the machine and passes through.

He is indeed reversed, and while unharmed the entire world is reversed to him. Letters and sentences, the direction of car travel in the street, and so on. And food tastes odd. He stops into a bar for a drink and gets a shot of bourbon.

It had a rich smoky taste, unlike anything I had ever had out of a bottle bearing that label. Or any other label, for that matter.

The some recollections from Organic Chem I and II were suddenly with me. All of my amino acids, with the exception of glycine, had been left-handed, accounting for the handedness of my protein helices. Ditto for the nucleotides, giving that twisting to the coils of nucleic acid. But that was before my reversal. I thought madly about stereoisomers and nutrition. It seemed that the body sometimes accepted substances of one handedness and rejected the reversed version of the same thing. Then, in other cases, it would accept both, though digestion would take longer in the one case than the other.

Life imitates art. A few years ago a company brought forth a sugar substitute, consisting of reversed stuff. The idea was that it would taste like sugar but not be metabolized like sugar. Apparently it worked, but the results were, well, gassy. A lot of flatulence... Maybe they should have tried bourbon.

Though a bunch of flatulent drunks isn't that attractive of an image.

Thursday 9 December  2004

Thursday - working away. Had a dentist appointment in the morning. Made some progress on the primary coding endeavor, which is cool.

The company buying the IBM laptop division is Lenovo, apparently a mainland China company. Which raises an interesting question - if one returns a laptop for service overseas, what are the odds that a Chinese intelligence agency is going to copy the hard drive contents? If it's a laptop containing technical or programmatic information, from a government agency, or a government contractor, or even a university - probably near certain. But whether it be a senior executive or just a school kid's computer -  the odds of it having credit card numbers or passwords  that could be of great use to any intelligence agency running agents in the laptop's originating company would seem to be very high.

Let alone personal information that might be used for that old favorite, blackmail.

Note that this isn't "evil red menace" type supposition. The history of the various communist east block intelligence agencies is full of activity of this type. In fact one could make a good argument that American intelligence agencies could do the same for laptops sent here from abroad. In fact, they may well be. They should. It would be good sensible tradecraft, and as far as I know the US has no particular legal obligation to respect other countries data. But, given the CIA's  apparent ineptness, I suspect they don't.

I should point out that, to my knowledge, some goverment agencies that 'surplus' old equipment do indeed try to 'wipe' disks. But stuff sent for repair? I just don't know.


A friend came in today, so that we can tomorrow go over a paper we are presenting at the  43rd AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibition.

Wednesday 8 December 2004

Wednesday - Doorways in the Sand  also had a bit of plot ( spoiler alert ) dealing with an alien being that insinuated itself into the interstices and bloodstream of a human. Sound familiar? I have talked in this blog about the book that hooked me on science fiction long ago, Hal Clement's 'Needle'. I even have a picture of that cover.

A little bit of election stuff, and a mystery. Someone started a web site, "Sorry", to allow people to apologize to the world for electing George Bush President; said apology to be accomplished by people in a picture holding a sign with an apology on it. Which in turned spawned a "We're not Sorry" web site, and a "Apology Accepted" website and, probably, an "Apology not Accepted" site.

But it seems that aside from the general assinity of apologizing for the results of a democratic election, there was a little problem with pranksters. People who were only pretending to be sorry. That is, a photoshopped Cheney holding a sign, or Osama Bin Laden, or secret messages in the capitalized characters of the sign, and so on.

Then, there are those pictures that are really hard to decide about. Is this for real? [via Jim Treacher] ( Go ahead, click, you'll thank yourself later.)

I just can't decide - one day I think "yes", the next "no way". Short of hiring a private detective to hunt down the perpetrator I suppose I'll never know.

Tuesday 7 December 2004
Tuesday - my inbox was filled with emails this morning, complaining that there was no picture of the cover of 1976's  Doorways in the Sand at Amazon.com. So I reproduce the Science Fiction Book Club cover below:

Cover of book: doorways in the sand
Yes, that's my carpet underneath. 'Desert Rose' they call that color...

It wasn't that great a book, but it was interesting in the way that Zelazny played with time, jumping about and then backtracking to explain the predicament the protagonist (Cassidy) would find himself in at the beginning of each chapters.

Beaten, bound and staked out to die in the Australian outback Cassidy recalls another school advisor:

I reflected upon the words of my onetime adviser, Doctor Merimee: "You are a living example of the absurdity of things."

Needless to say, his specialty was the novel, French, mid-twentieth century. Yet, yet do those lens-distored eyes touch like spikes to the extremities of my condition. Despite his departure from the university long ago under the cloud of a scandal involving a girl, a dwarf and a donkey - or perhaps because of this - Merimee has, over the years, come to occupy something of an oracular position in my private cosmos, and his words often return to me in contexts other than that of the preregistration interview.

A girl, a dwarf and an donkey. Why didn't I ever get an adviser like that?

And why "Needless to say" ?



In other news...not much happening. Grey and overcast, but not much rain.

I was watching 'Mythbusters' on teevee the other night ( no link as the page doesn't come up right for me), and finally realized: the much abused show mannequin is known as "Buster" because they are the Mythbusters. Geez I'm slow.

I see they've added some more cast and crew - including women - to the show. I'm not sure it makes it better, but possibly the syndication and number of episodes requires more help. There were a couple of moderately interesting episodes recently; one where they tried to fool a radar gun (and lidar) and another where they tried to replicate Archimedes setting of a greek trireme afire with mirrors. They "busted" both as myths, but I'm not sure I can agree with their conclusions.

Sure, the dorky methods - disco balls and holding up a bundle of keys didn't work for the radar gun. But even a modest amount  of research would have let Jamie and Adam realize that they needed some sort of "iron ball" paint, and that the interior of the vehicle - and particularly the light sockets, grill, and engine fan must be masked to provide some degree of stealth. And the detection was, as far as I know, simply of speed - there was no info presented as to whether the 'radar cross section' of the old Cadillac had been reduced.

As for the trireme - they managed to raise it's temperature to 200F+, but not ignite it. That just means they didn't have enough mirrors! Remember, Archimede's would have had the entire inner harbor walls of Syracuse to line with mirrors. And they (Uh, the present day Mythbusters, not the ancient Syracusan's)  apparently sunk the trireme a couple of times before getting it to float correctly, so it was damp.

Monday 6 December 2004

Monday - I see that IBM is selling off its personal computer unit. Too bad. Their laptops were about the best made. I doubt that the buyer will keep up the design excellence and build quality control.

"Quest for the Spear" was on last night, a made for teevee TNT movie.

promo pic for the librarian movie

The hero-to-be, Flynn Carsen - a nerdy perpetual student, has been graduated against his will by one Dr. Harris. He turns to the great books, Aristotle, Jung, for consolation, but, as he tells his mother, they don't speak to him any more. Her reply:

"Speak to you? If the voices tell you to light fires - don't listen. Or if they tell you to hurt small animals."

My favorite line in the movie:

"Well, well, Dr. Harris. I always knew he was evil - he gave me an A-"



But the theme of the perpetual student seemed familiar. Then I remembered Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand, published in the 1970's. The hero is the perpetual student, Fred Cassidy, and the book opens with an advisor, Dr. Wexroth, trying to graduate Fred, much against Fred's will:

"This year we've got you on a mandatory graduation," he said, "under the departmental rule."

"But you haven't even seen my preregistration card."

"It doesn't matter. I've had every choice you could make, every possible combination of courses you might select to retain your full-time status worked out by one of the computer people. I had all of these matched up with your rather extensive record, and each instance I've come up with a way of getting rid of you. No matter what you select, you are going to complete a departmental major in something."

"Sounds as if you've been pretty thorough."

"I have."

"Mind if I ask why you are so eager to get rid of me?"

"Not at all," he replied, "The fact of the matter is, you are a drone."

"A drone?"

"A drone. You don't do anything but hang around."

"What's wrong with that?"

Sunday 5 December 2004

Sunday - It did indeed rain a bit overnight, so it's good that I got those leaves up. It was also raining this morning, not a downpour but more of a drizzle. The weather reports come from Los Angeles, and the San Gabriel mountains between lancaster and the LA basin mean that the forecasts are often in error. Well, we can stand a little bit of moisture.

It does upset the cats. There must be more smells in the air - they wander around meowing pitifully, constantly demanding to be let in and out.

I'm trying to watch football, but it is Fox Sports. They have possibly the worst commentary I have ever heard. I actually have the sound OFF. Which means that I lose track of the game as they cut away to the TWO HOURS of commercials every couple of minutes, and since I've no audible alert as to when the game has resumed I miss a lot of the game. I wonder if their advertisers realize just how bad it has gotten - that people are turning off the game they are paying big bucks to advertise in?


Picture of the Week

hyperx screen shot on monitor

Photo Notes: A screen shot of the NASATV coverage of the Hyper-X flight of a couple weeks ago. I thought it might be an IADS view, but it may just be a LabView application. (And you may be wondering - why the PowerPuff Girls stickers? Heh. It's just a loaner monitor.)

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