House of the rising Moonglum

OK, all you google experts. I have almost finished putting the composition date on all my classical music. I have a couple of thoughts. First, it is shockingly hard to find the composition dates for some music. It is pretty much in Wikipedia or it doesn’t exist online. I have managed to google my way through most of it though. (And there are a bunch of russian composers in there from the late 1800’s. Issues Mike?) In any case, there is one guy who I just can’t for the life of me find a complete list for. That is Pachelbel. I have the cannon, the arrival of the queen of sheeba, and the concerto in g. Please find for me concerto grosso op. 6, concerto RV 253 “La Tempesta Di Mare”, and Ciacone – Chaconne.

Please show your work.

One of my favorite things about doing the bills is getting the ComEd environmental impact statements. I am a firm believer in nuclear power, and Illinois is one of the most nuclear states in the union thanks to ComEd. This week we have hit a new high, 82% of our power is coming from nuclear. Oh yeah baby. And if you wonder at my happiness, well, the remainder is almost always made up for by coal. No matter ho much it is, it is coal. It may be a poor tradeoff, but radioactive waste seems easier to deal with than polluted air.

Now if we could only get around to sticking more effort into modern nuclear fission plants (there are much safer designs around now which could replace more risky older designs we currently use) and ITER, we might actually be able to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels to some degree.

Insert long political rant here that I just really don’t have the energy for right now.

*sigh* what’s the point of a blog, if you don’t stick the long political rants in?

I just finished reading this article that, I think, I got from Mike. It is freaking hilarious. He goes on for pages about technological addictions. Things that “how did we ever live without”, even though they didn’t exist last year. The other item he spends a long time on is how those devices set patterns in our live. One particular peeve that I share is Power Point, “Start putting what you want to communicate in PowerPoint slides, and everything you want to say is ordered into half a dozen bullet items.” And finally he gets to the meat of the article, which is, intellisense rots your mind. Probably only useful for programmers, but:

For example, for many years programmers have debated whether it’s best to code in a top-down manner, where you basically start with the overall structure of the program and then eventually code the more detailed routines at the bottom; or, alternatively, the bottom-up approach, where you start with the low-level functions and then proceed upwards. Some languages, such as classical Pascal, basically impose a bottom-up approach, but other languages do not. Well, the debate is now over. In order to get IntelliSense to work correctly, bottom-up programming is best.

Powerful stuff there. It has trained me, and I haven’t even considered that I was doing that. I can’t even imagine going the other way again. Ugh. Methinks I need to go back to LISP for a while.

Those patterns get set up in your life. They aren’t necessarily bad, but it is nice to at least see them happening, and deciding that you want to be conditioned in that manner. I like the way my cell phone has conditioned me. I don’t like the idea of my IDE conditioning me to think about how to solve problems. I leave you with another gem…

Everyone agrees that one of the most important elements of writing self-documenting code is giving your variables and objects meaningful names. If Visual Studio really wanted you to write good code, every time you dragged a control onto your form, an annoying dialog would pop up saying “Type in a meaningful name for this control.” But Visual Studio is not interested in having you write good code. It wants you to write code fast.

and one more, on programming C in notepad with gnu C, “It’s just me and the code, and for awhile, I feel like a real programmer again.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hand picked president of Iran noted that Israel “must be wiped out from the map of the world“. Now, I’m not sure that they deserve to get kicked out of the UN for that, I mean if saying that you needed do drive Israel into the sea was grounds for getting kicked out there would have been plenty of countries that would have been kicked out. But c’mon guys, even the Palestinians are past the utterly destroy stage now.

Some people wonder why I like the curds so much. It is mostly because I like an underdog. But I think that comes from being a US nationalist, “[W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” The main portion of the Kurds live in Iraq, Iran and Turkey. None of these countries would be happy to see a large chunk of their country leave. The Kurds in Iraq have had the US as inconsistent allies for a decade or more now and have used that to improve their own lot in life. The Kurds in Turkey have had the gradual improvement that comes from Turkey trying to enter the EU. But when I read that they are fined for using the letters of their alphabet that don’t belong to the Turkish alphabet, I have to believe that the same Object evinces a design to reduce them.

Hopefully their lot will improve, but while I continue to read articles like that I will continue to have sympathy for them.

So it looks like the constitution is going to pass, which I have generally considered a good thing. It enshrines a certain amount of protections for individual regions which is actually good for the Sunnis, though they probably don’t think so right now, and there are a number of other key items in there that are pretty good. I’m always a little leery of not enshrining the separation of Church and State, but this is a different part of the world, and I figured that as long as the rest of the document was clear enough, they could have some room to maneuver there. That was until I read an article from the (very popular in Iraq) al-Sabah (الصباح) newspaper. ّWell I can’t very well read that, however Salam Pax translated some of it. Of course he puts his own colorful margin notes in, but these are many of the same points I worry about when I hear of religion and government mixing. (I worry about this here as well at there.) But it was eye opening to see those same arguments coming from a mainstream Iraqi newspaper before the vote on the constitution. Well it looks like it will pass, I only hope that they are able to find a path that leads them to an effective and fair government.

There is no better way to keep a brutal regime in power than to find a common enemy to rally behind to fight it. Galtieri did it in the Falklands. Bush did it in Iraq (which is shocking because there was a real enemy in Afghanistan.) So it’s only fair that Ahmadinejad gets to do it against Israel. They must be feeling pretty powerful right now with their near successful takeover of the government in Iraq. “[The rest of the world] is free to say but their words lack any credit.” Heh, who do they think they are, the US?

Was there a bioweapons attack on Washington DC on September 24th of this year? A recent salon article asks a number of experts and tracks the case around the country, but comes to no definitive conclusion. Some possibilities, natural occurrence from a dead animal, test of the Bio Watch system, or a botched terror attack. Quote from the article:

Unknown to the crowd, biological-weapons sensors, scattered for miles across Washington by the Department of Homeland Security, were quietly doing their work. The machines are designed to detect killer pathogens. Sometime between 10 a.m. on Sept. 24 and 10 a.m. on Sept. 25, six of those machines sucked in trace amounts of deadly bacteria called Francisella tularensis. The government fears it is one of six biological weapons most likely to be used against the United States.

It was an alarming reading. The biological-weapons detection system in Washington had never set off any alarms before. There are more than 150 sensors spread across 30 of the most populated cities in America. But this was the first time that six sensors in any one place had detected a toxin at the same time. The sensors are also located miles from one another, suggesting that the pathogen was airborne and probably not limited to a local environmental source.

William Stanhope, associate director for special projects at the St. Louis University School of Public Health’s Institute for Biosecurity, has been closely following scattered government and news reports about the incident. He’s convinced it was a botched terrorist attack. “I think we were lucky and the terrorists were not good,” he says. “I am stunned that this has not been more of a story.”

This blog is now brought to you in 2.5GB MADNESS! Yes that is right, the paltry 500MB that it was before, is no more. No more will you have to wait for the disk to page out the old and in with the new when you are running word, excel, safari, fire, iTunes, iCal, Address Book, Password Wallet, OmniGraffle, Emacs, and two web servers. On two concurrently running accounts. (Well, either all that or Eclipse)

BUT NO LONGER!!!! No longer do we need to wait those pesky extra ten seconds that takes away our “snappy”! Now we can use Eclipse! We might even be able to run another program at the same time! Actually everything seems faster, not just eclipse. Startup looked to be about half the time. Eclipse startup went from 45-60 secs to about 5-10. Oh yeah baby. Not only that, but it is so fast that the code help popups are even useful now.

I have a whole new computer. Why didn’t I do this ages ago?

(Full stats for those interested: 2×1.8GHz PPCG5, 2.5 GB DDR SDRAM, Journaled Maxtor 6Y250M0 (thats the bottleneck now), GeForce FX 5200)

I don’t normally get a kick out of the conventional wisdom in Newsweek, but they do research their stuff pretty well. This week? “President Bush is down in the polls. Among blacks he has a 2% approval rating. That’s below Jefferson Davis.” Heh.

Another good one from my sister. This time it is an interesting article looking at how far women have come. In particular it talks about the fact that women no longer feel the need to support women in positions of power they disagree with, just because they are women.

The thing I like about the article though is the insight into how bush surrounds himself with women who “manage” him. Nothing like a little self reassessment. *grin*

So someone rounded up a whole bunch of Clinton comments on UFOs (note that if he really made 26 comments on UFOs that means about 3 a year, which really isn’t that many given that a bunch were just about Independence Day) but someone grabbed a whole bunch of them and put them into a nice conspiracy web site. Some of the quotes are better than others, but the filler is junk. At least the quotes are well cited.

There is another site that had a much longer speech by clinton, but he expurgated it pretty well, so it sounds like Clinton is admitting that there were aliens. He links the complete article at the bottom, but I’m not a member of FinanceAsia.com, so I guess I’ll never know the truth.

From my sister. Click on the “What do they want?” link. Go back and forward. See all the weight watchers recipe cards from 1974. Die laughing. Thank my sister.

The first thing I thought when I heard that there was a massive earthquake in Kashmir was, “oh man, that is going to be really hard to get to.” Both the tsunami and Katrina were on the coasts and made it easier to get relief to where it was needed. (Yes there were problems with transportation for Katrina, but we didn’t need to go across thousands of miles of mountain to get there. My second thought was “We have a LOT of helicopters in the area, thata could be extremely helpful for the Pakistanis.” Fortunately it looks like we mare actually sending some elements of our military force from Afghanistan to help out. This makes me so happy, it is totally the right thing to do. I wish that we were doing more, but every bit helps. It also will hopefully do some good for our woeful image in Pakistan right now. Who knows, perhaps sending all our airborne assets to help out in Pakistan might not be a bad idea from a military perspective either. (In addition to the obviously correct moral perspective.)

Do you live in Illinois? Yes? Do you listen to Obama’s podcast? No?

Well you should. It is very interesting to listen to him talk. He is an idealist it is true, but he is willing to work to make things happen. It is also interesting to listen just to hear what votes are currently going on in the senate. So, how do you listen to a podcast? If you have iTunes it is super easy. (If you have the latest version, 5 on the mac.) Just go to his aggregator (this link should open itunes) and click subscribe or just download a specific episode. He also has links for Odeo and regular RSS newsreaders.

OKOK, stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

My church [1] was recently privileged to have the Rev. MeLinda Morton come and speak on intolerance (pdf) at the Air Force academy. I meant to do a big post about this before because it is a fairly important issue that is more prevalent than just the Air Force Academy, though given her talk it is clear that Colorado Springs does lend itself towards evangelism. The problem isn’t so much that there are more Evangelicals taking positions as chaplains than before, but rather that they see the military as a mission field, a ripe recruiting ground. Unfortunately chaplains need to serve the needs of all soldiers, not just “the saved ones”. This of course leads to the question of why there aren’t more Catholic priests or main line protestants in the chaplaincy. Well for Catholics, they are having a general shortage nationwide, so a lack in the chaplaincy is easy to describe. For the mainline protestants it is a little bit harder. Mostly it stems what the people who would be directing young seminarians into the military were doing when they were forming their opinions (oh about 30 years ago). Which is to say watching everything fall apart at the end of the Vietnam war. This probably led many of them to have strong opinions about service to the country, the validity of war, and the military in its entirety.

So, one of the things that I think Rev. Morton is trying to do is convince Lutherans of the validity and purpose of the chaplaincy. One example she gives is the theological interest in working with so many different religions. In particular the excitement that comes from having to work with the individual needs of the many different soldiers. But also the excitement from working with many different chaplains. So, one night she is doing the rounds with a Catholic priest when they come upon a distressed soldier. He complains that he wants to leave, that the service isn’t for him, etc, etc, but that the other Chaplain (an Evangelical, who tend to believe in preordainment in one form or another) told him that it was “God’s plan” that he be in the military. So our good (U of C educated!) Lutheran minister is getting ready for the long haul, thinking up arguments and thought experiments for the young soldier about epistemology and the nature of God, when the Catholic priest breaks out with, “Son. God don’t work that way.” Sometimes having the absolutists with you can really help out. The problem is when they lose sight of why they are there in the first place. In any case, she was an astonishingly interesting person to talk to, and to gain a little insight into how the military works.

[1] It took me forever to find this link. I ended up using the name and address and it was only on the third page. Anything we should do to improve our hits?

Sweet! A cool looking new consumer robotics conference. Lots of names I don’t recognize there, but that’s what I get for being out of it for so long. Still, sponsored by iRobot, so it should have an emphasis on “stuff that works” which makes me happy.

Oh no! I love my Treo. Let me just get that out of the way. Part of the reason that I love it is that the Palm OS really integrates well with a phone type device. It is simple to use, does what I need it to when I need it to. Access to the important apps: calendar, passwords, address book, and mail are trivial. The mail program works well and as expected. The phone integration is incredible. SMS messaging is awesome. The little sprint addons can be annoying, but each service provider has their little quirks. But now it looks like the Treo is going to be moving away from the palm OS (and moving to Windows Mobile.) I would find that pretty depressing for a number of reasons.

First is that I find their phone integration to be clunky at best. I don’t know how many of those issues are application/integration based and how many are OS based, so perhaps Palm doing it would be better than other vendors, but I am still thinking that this is going to be bad in the long run. It really comes down to ease of use, and what I am using my phone for. Do I really need windows media player on a device that only has 32 Megs of memory?

Second, I worry about mac integration. Sure, Palm gave up on mac support a while ago, however thanks to Mark/Space and recent innovations in sync in Mac OS X, everything syncs up quite nicely. I am sure that he will come up with a working solution of the newer models of Windows Mobile as well, however the integration has been there for a long time for the palm, and the windows syncing is much much newer. It just seems like being required to rely on a third party vendor to hook your phone to your computer is lame.

Oh well, at least my current phone is pretty new, so I should be able to look forward to years of use before I have to give it up. And by then Mark/Space will probably have a good version of his Windows Mobile sync app, and the fact of the matter is, since I no longer use Palm Desktop, everything syncs with the standard Mac apps anyway, so the upgrade path should be trivial.

I guess when it comes down to it I just always morn the loss of diversity.